Tesla held its quarterly report yesterday, and stated that six major products would be ready for action next year. This would suggest that Tesla has a truly historic year coming up for it, set to disrupt trucking, affordable EVs, sportscars, taxis, driving in general, and, oh, just all human work.
But we’ve heard all this before, and forgive us for saying that it seems slightly more likely that the boy is crying wolf.
In yesterday’s quarterly report and conference call, Tesla focused as usual not only on the past quarter’s financial results, but on an outlook for the future. Companies usually do this, giving guidance for the future quarter or year of sales, and potentially talking about when significant new products will be released.
Tesla put a lot of focus on these upcoming products, in both its call and its shareholder letter. It was also a topic that several shareholder questions were interested in, asking questions about these upcoming products.
And on the call, we heard six giant, world-changing products are coming “next year.”
Tesla’s world-changing year ahead
Those products are:
- Tesla Semi, an electric 18-wheeler truck, which the letter states is “on track to begin production by the end of 2025.”
- Tesla’s “affordable EV,” which Tesla has backed-down on, but reiterated yesterday that “more affordable models remain on track for start of production in the first half of 2025.”
- Tesla’s next-gen Roadster, a high-performing electric hypercar first unveiled in 2017, which CEO Elon Musk said would be “in production next year.”
- Unsupervised Full Self-Driving, the promised version of FSD which will allow a car to drive itself without input from a driver, which Musk said he would be “shocked if we cannot do it next year.”
- Extrapolating from that answer, Robotaxi, Tesla’s future purely-autonomous vehicle to be unveiled in October, which Musk said will be able to give its first rides “when [we can] do unsupervised full self-driving,” which we previously learned would happen next year.
- Tesla’s Optimus Robot, a humanoid robot that will be able to replace humans at any task a human can do, version 2 of which will go into production “toward the end of next year” (Musk separately predicted that Artificial General Intelligence, the ability of a single computer to be able to perform a variety of mental tasks as well as a human, is coming next year, and has also referred to Tesla FSD v12, which already exists, as “baby AGI“).
So that’s six products, all being released in the same year – most of them near the end of the same year. So, more likely within a few months’ span, rather than the whole year.
Those products will disrupt several major industries.
- Trucks move around 3/4 of the goods in the US, and Tesla says that the Semi can not only move them more cheaply but that Autopilot technology will make trucks safer and easier on drivers.
- A “more affordable EV” will make EVs more accessible to consumers, putting to bed one of the (not particularly true) criticisms that EVs are “too expensive.”
- Musk said the Roadster will “give a hard-core smack down to gasoline powered cars,” suggesting that it will beat all gas sportscars, and even redefine the word car (though he has also stated somewhat ridiculously that it will be able to fly for short periods – which is not what you want a sportscar to do; you want downforce, not upforce).
- Full self-driving would completely change the way people get around, and enable more work or leisure during time that was previously used for attending to transportation.
- Similarly, it would eliminate any number of driving-related jobs, like taxi driver, delivery driver, trucking and so on. “Driver” is one of the most common job titles in the entire US.
- AGI, however, would reshape all industries, as, by definition if AGI is achieved, now a robot would be able to drop in and take the place of a human at any job.
Quite a year for Tesla. World-changing in so many ways.
And that’s not all – Tesla is still working on various other projects, like ramping its 4680 dry cathode cells (where Tesla is targeting cost parity at… “the end of this year”), and expanding Supercharger access to other companies (planning to onboard more OEMs “by the end of the year” after some self-inflicted delays). But those aren’t quite as major new products like the ones above.
So, all those projects seem like a rather busy stint for Tesla, given that it has never really released multiple major products in the same year before. Probably going to take a lot of work, it might be nice to have a few extra hands around.
But will any of this happen?
So the question is: do we believe this?
Musk has previously predicted that if these things all happen, Tesla’s market cap could be $20-$30 trillion – mostly from AGI, but partially from FSD. Yesterday he upped that ante and stated that if a benign AGI is invented, there will be an “age of abundance” where “I’m not sure what money [would] even mean.”
But if we take a look at the history of Musk’s predictions, it seems unlikely that all of these things will happen next year.
The Semi and Roadster were both originally unveiled in 2017, with planned 2020 release dates.
The Semi was gradually pushed back, with the first customer getting trucks in late 2022, and virtually no other customers getting access to the truck since then until recently. But scarce few have been built, and volume production has still not started. That’s now supposed to start in 2025, but we’ll see.
The $25,000 Model 2 has been in Tesla’s plans for a long time, though recently Tesla has de-emphasized plans for it. However, Tesla still said yesterday that it plans a “more affordable EV,” though we have no new details on this.
The Roadster has also been continually delayed, though as recently as February Musk was still saying it would be unveiled (again) this year, seven years after it was unveiled. This is particularly egregious, given that Tesla originally asked for deposits of either $50k or $250k to secure one’s place in line. (If that money instead were invested into TSLA stock, it could be worth ~$2.9 million today – enough to buy quite a few 1,548hp Xiaomi SU7 Ultras, which are also coming out next year).
FSD has been coming “at the end of next year” for a decade
But somehow, even more egregious is FSD, which Musk has continually promised “by the end of next year” for a decade now. This feature has been sold to owners with the promise that it would turn their vehicles into “appreciating assets” that could be used as a revenue-generating robotaxi for many years now. Tesla says that all cars produced since late 2016 have the hardware for Full Self-Driving (though it still charges some owners $1,000 for hardware they already paid for).
But since Tesla started selling FSD software, several cars that originally purchased the software are now getting old enough to need replacement despite never receiving a functional version of software that can drive itself.
This wouldn’t be so bad if Tesla did the right thing and allowed those owners to transfer a license for the undelivered software to any future vehicle they purchase, but when asked whether Tesla would do this reasonable and morally (and perhaps legally) correct move of allowing transfers until the software customers bought is actually delivered, Musk answered simply: “No.”
Given this history of delays and false advertising associated with FSD, it is also hard to believe that the Robotaxi product will be on time either. Especially considering that the Model 3 was originally designed and marketed as a vehicle that would be able to autonomously drive people around.
When the word “robotaxi” was first used, it was not in reference to a separate product, but in reference to Tesla’s regular consumer vehicles. People who bought those cars along with FSD were buying the potential of using their own personal vehicles as robotaxis. So the introduction of a separate product makes one wonder whether the promise of using a Model 3 as a robotaxi will be delivered – which would mean that the original “robotaxi” may not come ever, much less “next year.”
You really think AGI is coming next year?!
And finally, there’s Optimus and AGI. These are relatively new products as far as Tesla goes – Optimus wasn’t announced in 2017 or earlier like much of the above, but rather in 2021, as “Tesla Bot” at the time, the demo for which was just a guy in a bodysuit.
But things have moved on since then, and there are development versions of Optimus already sorting objects and carrying boxes at the Tesla factory, according to Tesla, though video shows that it does these things haltingly – impressive, but not yet humanlike.
But that is all a long way from “AGI.” There is significant question over whether AGI is even possible, and while there has been a lot of talk about AI this year, any given AI model is still only able to do one thing, reasonably well and quickly, though not generally to the level of an actual professional in that field (even for relatively banal tasks, like customer service).
There is also question whether Tesla will be the first or most successful at reaching this technology. There are other robotics companies that have been working much longer in the humanoid robot space, and have more capable robots. And there are other directly AI-focused companies that may be closer to AGI than Tesla (though none are close yet) – including Musk’s other AI startup that he’s funneling resources towards, and away from Tesla, which could certainly put a damper on Tesla’s AI prospects.
While Tesla hasn’t had as much time to delay Optimus, it has still managed some delays, including one that we just learned this week. But given the history of other delays, and the stretch involved in reaching for AGI on such a short timeline, we would not be surprised to see this one pushed back either. Even with Tesla’s high availability of manufacturing, engineering and capital resources available for these projects.
Is this optimism, or can we use another word?
So, either Tesla has an enormous year where all of these products which have continually been pushed back will finally release in one huge explosion of innovation, changing the world forever in so many different ways via one company, or… a man who is in an increasingly odd state of mind has turned his instinct for overpromising up to 11 and we’re well beyond the bounds of reality at this point.
Musk has repeatedly said – including on yesterday’s call – that his “predictions have been overly optimistic in the past.”
But I think that we’re well beyond optimism here. When this “over-optimism” has been recognized by the speaker himself, repeatedly, and by everyone the speaker is speaking to, such that the speaker is now well-known and famous for giving wildly incorrect predictions, can we really call them oopsie accidents anymore?
A lie is when a person makes a statement that is not true, and that they know is not true. Musk has stated repeatedly that products will come out at times that they did not come out. He has also acknowledged repeatedly that he gets these predictions wrong – so he knows that there is a consistent pattern of these predictions being false. And yet he keeps saying these things that are consistently false, that he and other reasonable people should know are false. That, to me, seems like a lie.
So, in so many words, I just don’t see this happening. Maybe one or even more than one of these products progresses close to release in the coming year, but I certainly won’t be holding my breath for all of them, or even a majority of them. Hopefully this statement spurs some of Tesla’s employees to prove me wrong, because these advancements could be genuinely good for the world (side note: yes, Tesla does have over 100k employees, most of whom don’t spend all their time drowning in the sea of disinformation that is twitter).
Finally, on yesterday’s call, Musk also answered a question about the Roadster by saying that he was concerned about the “Osborne effect,” a concept wherein when companies announce a new product, customers refuse to buy the old product while they wait for the hot new thing to come out.
This is a real phenomenon, and it makes sense that companies might want to avoid it.
But, Elon, perhaps consider that perpetually telling people that you’re going to disrupt literally every industry in the world by the end of next year is not the best way to keep from Osborning yourself.
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