Yesterday evening, Tesla reported first-quarter earnings for 2025, and they were abysmal: Profits dropped 71% from the same time last year.
Musk sounded bitter on the call with investors that followed, blaming the company’s misfortune on protesters who have raged at Tesla dealerships around the world over his role running DOGE and his ardent support of far-right politicians.
“The protests that you’ll see out there, they’re very organized. They’re paid for,” he said, without evidence.
This 100%. Tesla remains massively overvalued, and it’s on the basis that in the future the company will dominate with self drive cars. It’s vaporware on a scale never before seen.
Tesla has fundamentally flawed self-drive technology because someone stripped out essential tech to save money. Lidar is essential to self driving cars but some genius decided they knew better than their own engineers and the self drive industry as a whole and instead made their vehicles and tech camera only. That genius? Elon fucking Musk.
The guy’s an idiot. The company is an overpriced joke.
Luckily the party is probably on its way to being over. It’s not like Elon decreasing his public presence with the president will make sales suddenly rebound.
What everyone here is also missing is that it’s 71% profit loss with tax credits which means they saw this loss coming and scrambled to cash in some stuff so it didn’t look as bad. Without that, they would have reported a decent loss like they will next quarter.
And fundamentally how would they fix their current issue? They could distance from elon but that would be a slow burn. They can’t make new cars. Can’t discount their cars much. They can’t do much of anything except lose more money.
They can’t distance from Elon because his supposed genius is a key factor in why they’re so absurdly overvalued. If they dump him, they immediately get viewed as a car company. Car companies have P/E ratios of about 7, if they’re well run like Toyota. That would mean they’d lose 95% of their value.
If they don’t distance from Elon, then they have to deal with his personal brand constantly tarnishing their corporate brand. Somehow they have to convince themselves that people will get over Elon fast enough to get their sales back up. Even if he “gets out of politics”, whatever that means, I don’t see that happening. He has burned all his bridges, and there’s no going back.
Also, it’s absolutely ridiculous that they would have a high valuation because of self-driving cars. Tesla is the company in absolutely last place when it comes to developing self-driving car technology. They don’t even use LIDAR, so they can be fooled by a Bugs Bunny / Roadrunner trick.
Waymo is probably in first place in self-driving tech. They have actually been running a taxi service for years using self-driving cars. Cruise was probably in second place before they were shut down and absorbed into GM. So, you could maybe say GM is in second place. Zoox, Pony.ai, Motional, etc. are also all doing well. Tesla is probably dead last, and their very public failures are dragging the industry down. The fact that they called their tech “full self-driving” and that it was so bad prompted all the other companies to rename what they were doing so they weren’t associated with Tesla.
Eventually someone’s going to make a killing shorting Tesla. The only problem is that markets can remain irrational longer than most people can remain solvent. Who knows when this might finally end.
musk was originally the lightning rod for all of trumps failures for the last 2-3 months, now if hes going away trump will recieve all the attention, thats why he always have to make stupid gaffes to distract people.
“someone”
Psst… you know that Waymo is also looking into AI models that don’t use lidar? And it’s not just Tesla and Waymo now either, there’s some others as well.
https://waymo.com/research/emma
Thats not to say that it will be a success, but ya know, maybe it’s actually possible, and even Waymo seems to think it’s possible and worth researching. Thats a lot of people looking into something thats clearly “fundamentally flawed”
And found it wanting compared to systems that incorporate LiDAR
I was just looking through the linked PDF and I’ll actually retract what I said earlier about not finding it wanting, and them just listing limitations.
In the research paper linked it is more explicit
“Despite these promising results, EMMA is not without its limitations. In particular, it faces challenges for real-world deployment due to: (1) limitations in 3D spatial reasoning due to its inability to fuse camera inputs with LiDAR or radar, (2) the need for realistic and computationally expensive sensor simulation to power its closed-loop evaluation, and (3) the increased computational requirements relative to conventional models. We plan to better understand and address such challenges in future work.”
This is more clear that it’s not just listing limitations, but it also finds it not doing as well because of it.
That I’d call wanting.
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As I understand it, it is fundamentally possible, but at this point one of the worst bottle necks is the physical processing power required to analyze the video feed. Millisecond paced analysis of multiple aspects of multiple HD video feeds in real time by “AI” still takes some pretty heavy duty computational hardware at this point, which is impractical in a real world vehicle. It is prudent to do the research now though to be ready for the day when the hardware catches up. That said, I reckon that Waymo is in a much better position to do this research than than Tesla. Being under Google/Alphabet, they have access to the nearly 2 decades worth of Google Maps and Google’s machine vision training work, among other things, like not being a meme stock company headed by an emperor whose clothes are beginning to dissapear.
Some people are jumping on LLM hype to try to shoehorn it into a hot technology? What a surprise!
Research is one thing, the production line is another.
It is fundamentally flawed because everyone that tries it ends up killing motorcyclists.
If they can kill motorcyclists faster than motorcyclists can kill themselves that is impressive.
I want you to seriously think for a moment if you would say that to someone who has lost a friend or a father, who was doing nothing wrong, to a preventable issue resulting from Elon Musk being a penny pinching cunt.
I’d not intentionally be a dick to someone who obviously has learned that lesson the hardest way.
I’d absolutely say that to someone random in the hopes that it saves someone’s friend or brother. If you’re riding a motorcycle without always having how dangerous they are near the front of your mind, you’re not long for this world.
Assisted driving is nowhere near the primary cause of motorcycle deaths. Phones are worse, by at least a couple orders of magnitude.
(And yeah, removing lidar was fucking stupid)