> The Fremont factory lines that built those cars are converting to manufacture Optimus humanoid robots: one million units per year at $20,000 each, with public sales beginning in 2027.
Sure, why not? Seems just as likely as Tesla having 1 million robotaxis on the road by the end of 2026. =)
I don't understand the emphasis on humanoid form, especially the legs.
It seems like the focus should be on making the arms extremely capable and just use a wheeled base for some substantial number of use cases.
If there are use cases where wheels are too limiting, then a four legged base like Boston Dynamics dog seems like it would be simpler and possibly adequate for most uses.
Sorry, are all of those model 3 and Y vehicles robotaxis?
Or are you saying that because they produced 1.5 million non-robotaxi cars in 2025 that the estimate of producing 1 million robotaxis in the following year is pretty reasonable, because making them autonomous taxis is a minor feature bump...?
No, I'm saying that the original content is low-effort shitposting, and that Tesla has the ability to scale industrial production to over 1mm 'things' per year, as evidenced by production last year. I did the OP the mild courtesy of asking him to open up a useful conversation. For instance, "Is there going to be demand for 1mm robots, and if so, when?" Or "How much actual retooling is necessary in Fremont for this?" Both seem like useful and interesting things to talk about.
I think teslas issue is that they need the AI5 chip for robotaxi ops, the current chip just doesn’t cut it. So if they have batches end of 2026 and start optimizing the models, by mid 2027 volume production you might have robotaxis coming online at about 100k per month. Waymo currently has less than 10k cars on the road.
Lots of ifs here. If they can enable hardware 4 for robotaxi ops then they can have 3m+ cars ready to go. But I am skeptical of it. And given that Elon’s top priority is scaling chips and AI5, I think that is proof that he thinks it is likely necessary too.
So 1m robotaxis by end of 2026 is theoretically possible but I think unlikely, and it’s more likely in the 200k-1m by end of 2027. If they pull that off, they could still be largest by then if Waymo doesn’t rapidly scale. Fun times!
My understanding is superficial, so do knock it down, not it seems to me that tesla insists on vision-only hour self driving, which vastly increases the requirement for ML. Whereas Waymo has a lower sum technology requirement by using both lidar and vision, and have moved faster. So when you say "tesla needs the AI5 chip", i hear the rider "...to avoid a public volte face".
I suppose that bulky lidar modules are undesirable in premium consumer goods, but i don't see that downside for taxis.
Dynamics can make on the order of 25k robots a year though. Not enough to matter in a gdp sense. There is one US company that can scale this kind of manufacturing currently. So to my mind the question is : can Tesla ever get there on tech, and if so, can they be first to scale to a million units? You don’t need them to have the best robot now. Or ever really if they’re the first to scale.
And while Musk is very good in announcing stuff, delivering he is not. boring company? Robotaxis on masses?
Did you watch his keynote last week? Man he is ignorant. It would be a million times cheaper and easier to build a powerplant, fiber and energy lines in the dessert of USA and build their big data centers before building anything in space.
But no he talks about dyson sphere, space etc. like we need any of it today (perhaps in a 100 years) and it would be more cost effective than on earth.
That's exactly why we complain about the Rs in strawberry. We can get funny-stupid human interpretations all day long. What we can't get is cold facts, and isn't that what was promised by AI (at least, before ChatGPT was released in 2022)?
Unfortunately we fed this current iteration of AI with human behaviour (not only that: human behaviour on the Internet...)
> What we can't get is cold facts, and isn't that what was promised by AI (at least, before ChatGPT was released in 2022)?
Not that I know of. An entity dealing only in cold facts is not intelligent, it's a theorem prover- extremely narrow, rigid and incapable of interpretation and insight- basically of bridging the smallest gap of knowledge. That's exactly what intelligence isn't.
Thinking back to case-studies around the Therac-25 [0], I would like to pre-emptively highlight the differences between:
1. Technique X is unsafe.
2. Technique X is unsafe because too much can go wrong even with the best intentions.
3. Technique X is unsafe without strong QA and interlocking safety measures, and there's too much economic pressure for the manufacturer to cut corners.
The obvious problem with steer-by-wire is that in the traditional design, it's not uncommon to lose power assist but not the mechanical connection to the wheels, so you can still steer the car. To completely lose steering control you'd need significant mechanical damage.
If the whole thing goes through the computer then there are lots of new ways to fail. Steering wheel position sensor goes bad on the highway? Computer gets bad data. Control wires get disconnected or damaged? No data. Completely unrelated wires get shorted and fry the computer? No steering. Anything pops the wrong fuse? No power, no computer or steering motors.
Some of those can be mitigated with redundancy but you're still vulnerable to common causes. You have three position sensors and someone dumps their beverage down the steering column, are there any left and do you have any good way to determine which one(s)? The vehicle took some minor damage allowing water to get somewhere it's not intended to, any way to guarantee you're not about to lose both sides of a redundant electrical system the next time it goes through a puddle infused with conductive road salt?
Of course, a counterpoint is what's been happening in aviation. Autopilot became a thing. Autoland became a thing. And, to keep improving planes (first military planes, then commercial aircraft), it was much easier to drop the mechanical connection to the wings.
Autopilot started as a help to pilots, and evolved to something that is a necessity and pilot control inputs are "suggestions" or "goals", not inputs like turning the wheel on a bike. To be followed in what you might refer to as "the long term" from the perspective of controlling the aircraft, but in the short term, the computer is to fly the plane in a way IT thinks is reasonable. An extreme example would be to enforce the flight envelope. But today there exist autoland-only airports (as well as huge airports that go autoland-only if things are too hard for humans, like LHR)
Most of today's passenger aircraft cannot be flown if fly-by-wire is not operational. Most of today's aircraft actually used for passenger transport cannot land without fly-by-wire.
A number of military aircraft, and rocket planes and rockets, even the ones carrying humans, and more and more passenger planes cannot be flown by humans, not just because the mechanical force humans can generate cannot move the control surfaces (which "can be fixed" with hydraulics, if you don't mind serious caveats), but because the human brain is incapable of generating sufficient control inputs at a fast enough rate, or just can't keep stable flight going.
Hilariously, this also goes for hobby quadcopters. They are flown by algorithms. Humans can't do it. Not fast enough. Humans provide direction. Algorithms, even AI algorithms that aren't even guaranteed to succeed at all (in professional/military drones), actually fly the thing.
But, yes, you're entirely correct by saying "then there are lots of new ways to fail". It also works better, cheaper, faster, safer, more comfortable, ... if it doesn't fail.
And ... robotaxis are already far safer than even a good human driver. So whatever the problems ... they don't actually make things worse.
Also you should check out geohot's business. A lot of cars already are "fly-by-wire". Their solution? They now have 2 CAN buses instead of one. One for the critical stuff. Cylinder timings. Checking the oil levels. Turning the wheels. Actuating the brakes. That sort of stuff. A second CAN bus for your bluetooth music, and displays and what have you. I hear a certain new Mercedes now has like 7 buses. We are making things safer.
Planes are probably the most controled machines we have. Everything gets checked twice or more, everything gets tracked and there is a clear requirement to do it like this because, as you said, its not possible for humans to control a fighterjet or a big plane.
Cars are non of that and we have billions of them on the street.
Cars also became a lot more expensive due to their complexity which def creates problems for a lot of people who can't afford all of that. I'm really torn by this because I think its very good that my side mirror shows me if there is a car next to me but in our capitalistic economy, we are excluding a lot of people from affordable cars. Drive by wire needs to be cheaper and easier to fix/repair.
Btw. Waymos are slowly learning to drive on highways so I might agree that they drive saver than humans in certain controlled envs. For sure not in any environment.
But that is the "tradeoff" people are going for. What irritates me about Waymos is that they are not really cheaper than taxis and Uber. If we want people to become more mobile ... Waymo does not appear to be the answer.
And that was always the trade that was proposed. Sure, Waymo's (and Uber) will displace a LOT of taxi jobs, but they'll be way cheaper than taxis. Well ... they're not. And at that point, from an economic perspective, this is just taking things away for not much in return.
Once again people get a lot of possible choices and once again they choose for the more expensive one, putting more people out of business, out of a job, and as you say out of society. Now they're saying "yeah but this is good for autistic people and women, who can now travel by taxi without ever seeing anyone". How, exactly, does anyone think that's a good thing for society? Seriously?
Plus I'm a bit of the opinion, if Waymo is already breaking their own proposed social contract now ... imagine what they'll do in 10 years.
Safety is a great reason to not do something. Utility and enhanced safety are great reasons to override that reflex. A lot has happened since the Therac 25 incident in the medical world with AI, machine learning, robotic neuro surgery, all sorts of computer aided diagnostics, etc. This stuff undeniably saves lives. The incident did inspire some level of scrutiny of course. But compared to modern medical equipment, that machine is from the stone age.
Steer by wire (which the article highlights) is common on all modern airbus planes for decades. The first ones flew shortly after the Therac incident. Boeing has also started implementing that on their newer models. And of course most of the vtol planes/drones currently starting to operate and progress through certification programs also commonly use steer by wire. Several of these flew without pilots before their first manned test flights. These are computer controlled, pilot directed pretty much by default with that part being optional by design.
Beyond Tesla, there are now several other manufacturers implementing steer by wire in the car industry. Nio, Lexus, Toyota, Mercedes, and a few others each either already have cars on the road for this or are working on new ones. And while Tesla has received quite a bit of criticism on their FSD system, I don't think there have been a lot of incidents implicating the steer by wire in Cybertrucks. It seems to work and drivers seem to mostly like it once they get used to it. The car is controversial of course. But there's a lot of cool tech inside that is being copied across the industry now.
The implied warning "we should be careful with this stuff because Therac-25" is a bit of a cliche at this point. Yes, we need lots of checks and balances when using automation in safety critical systems. And that has been common for decades.
All analysis should also keep in mind the "who", no matter how logically separable it is.
I put this less strongly since boeing contracted MBA cancer and yolo'd the 737-max, but that aside, the civil aviation engineering field controls risks to a fault. Commercial pilots are selected to follow checklists without deviation. I allow them the grace to implement steer-by-wire.
Ford kept selling Pintos with exploding fuel tanks, Toyota sold priuses with runaway acceleration defects, and depending on region maybe the worst twenty per cent of drivers ought to be operating nothing more dangerous than shirt buttons. No matter how good the plan is, those people shouldn't be anywhere near it.
Moreover, Technique X does not actually provide any significant value.
The whole steer-by-wire in CT happened because Musk wanted a yoke as the control system. And a yoke requires progressive steering which is impractical without steer-by-wire.
Vehicles include low-utility features for market positioning all the time.
Do buyers need a motorised hood ornament? A tiny vase built into the dashboard? A built-in champagne chiller? Gull wing doors? A spoiler and a 300-horsepower engine?
If it boosts sales by giving the vehicle a distinctive character, though, there's a place in the market for that tiny vase.
The motorized hood ornaments on Rolls Royce vehicles were a solution to the problem of people being injured by, or stealing the (Spirit of Ecstasy) ornaments.
> Today's Spirit of Ecstasy, from the 2003 Phantom model onward, stands at 3 inches (7.6 cm) and, for the safety of any person being accidentally hit, is mounted on a spring-loaded mechanism designed to retract instantly into the radiator shell if struck from any direction.
Presumably the motor runs once to extend it and then it locks into position (with some kind of mechanical catch that's calibrated to come loose if you hit anything), rather than being constantly running.
steer-by-wire makes safety nannies way easier, eg, the ones that jerk the wheel out of your hands when they decide you're too close to a line on the road.
But why do you think it would make it easier? Power-steering doesn't mean there are sensors build in or more precise ones.
Your reddit comment references autonomes vehicle and in that case it shouldn't matter if the car also moves a steering wheel no one is using while it moves the wheels which is a lot heavier.
And in case of your nanny, the main argument of your referenced paper are issues with the hands of the driver. In that case it could make it better for the driver, I might agree, but I would then question how the driver acts if the wheel is suddenly / temporarily not aligned with the wheel. I might also argue that in such a case were my thumb gets in the way, it might be an emergency and i wouldn't worry then?
> And a yoke requires progressive steering which is impractical without steer-by-wire.
But also look at Citroën's DIRAVI system, used on the CX, SM, and some XMs. There's no direct mechanical link between the steering wheel and the rack when the system is pressurised. When you turn the wheel a kind of dogbone link thing pushes a spool valve one way or the other allowing hydraulic fluid to push the rack along, which pushes the other end of the link back to shut the fluid off again.
So far, so similar to the Danfoss valve in a conventional power-assisted steering system, except that uses a rotary valve and a big torsion spring in the steering rack (that's why your steering wheel feels springy with the engine off).
But DIRAVI is fully powered with no mechanical link, so how do you get increasing resistance with increasing speed? Well, there's a governor on the gearbox that allows hydraulic fluid into a little cylinder that pushes a spring-loaded roller against a heart-shaped cam attached to the steering wheel shaft. This will try to spring back to the middle, and the faster you go the harder it springs back. At 70mph you can barely move the steering wheel, but it will flick a large heavy car from lane to lane with fingertip pressure.
You have to get used to this and for the first few miles you'll be zig-zagging down the road like you're tacking a dinghy, but after that you'll get used to just thinking about your right pinky finger being a gram heavier and going round a corner. I've driven some seriously high-end sports cars with legendary handling and performance and they feel pretty rough and tractory now ;-)
If the pressure fails of course then there's no powered steering (notice I say powered, not power-assisted), although in practice what tends to happen is that the "resistance" part goes first giving you very sensitive steering.
What happens once there's no pressure is that the steering wheel moves about 20° before you run the valve to its end and then the dogbone pushes directly on the drive gear for the rack. So the steering is very loose and wobbly but you can at least steer well enough to get it out of the parking space and into the workshop. You still have brakes for an hour or so if the pump belt breaks, and enough steering to get safely to the side of the road, or at least out of the fast lane.
In the 1960s they had a prototype Citroën DS controlled by a joystick using pretty much the same setup (hydraulic valve to push the rack around, heart-shaped cam to apply resistance). Apparently it was very comfortable and natural to drive but ultimately a bit to weird even for Citroën.
Not a scrap of electronics in it, unless you count the pressure switch and dashboard lightbulb.
I had the hydraulic pump belt break when I was about 30 or 40 miles from home, and of course I had a water pump belt and an alternator belt, but not the hydraulic pump belt.
The brake and regulator accumulators were both nice and new though so the "low brake pressure stop immediately" warning only came on about two or three miles from home (once there's no pressure at all, there's no brakes at all, but this is pretty difficult to achieve in practice) and I just had to cope with the twitchy steering through the difficult part - driving through town at 15-20mph in rush hour traffic anyway.
It would only be overengineered if it was not necessary, and once you drive one you'll realise that all cars should have it.
You can actually get pretty close with electric power steering but that's a lot more involved than a few dozen incredibly finely machined parts and a bunch of thin oil at 180 times atmospheric pressure.
This article is written with a little bit of a journalist’s misunderstanding of a topic.
They seem to have done research but have strung together unrelated subjects due to their lack of expertise in the subjects.
As a result it reads more like a summary or recap of vaguely related stories.
For example, Tesla’s pivot to robots has nothing to do with their advanced nature of their wiring harnesses, but it’s spoken in the same breath as if to imply that a Tesla Cybertruck (which is a Model Y with paneling literally glued on top) is more similar to a humanoid robot than a Mustang Mach-E.
In reality, what has happened is that the Model S and X have been discontinued and they’re the only products the Fremont, CA plant produces. Tesla has literally nothing else they can make in that plant. They either make Optimus robots or shut the plant down.
Optimus robot production is a face saving move. Tesla barely needs a fraction of that factory to build robots…it’s a much lower-volume and physically smaller product.
I should note that none of that has anything to do with Tesla being great at robotics and seeing it as a better business than automobiles. It has everything to do with competitors catching up and Tesla having insufficient development capability to iterate on those vehicles.
Who in the buyer demographic for a Model S wouldn’t take a Porsche Taycan, AUD A6 Sportback, or Lucid Air over that vehicle?
Who in the buyer demographic for the Model X won’t take a Kia EV9, Lucid Gravity, or Volvo EX-90?
Maybe if you aren’t paying attention to the car industry you’ll disagree with me but the problem here is the Model S and X are positively ancient with about zero dollars spent on keeping them updated and they’ve become completely irrelevant to the market as a result.
> Maybe if you aren’t paying attention to the car industry you’ll disagree with me but the problem here is the Model S and X are positively ancient with about zero dollars spent on keeping them updated and they’ve become completely irrelevant to the market as a result.
In practice they essentially got replaced with the Model 3 and Y, which didn't exist when the models being discontinued first came out.
It's because of the decline in battery prices. When the Model S came out, an electric car with that range had to be that price. Now it's overpriced for what it is so they'd either need to design one which is significantly more premium while still selling into an inherently lower volume market segment, or lower the price to reflect the current battery costs and then have it be too close to the Model 3.
What they really need to do is continue to move down, i.e. release a subcompact with less range than the Model 3 but on the cheap.
> Who in the buyer demographic for a Model S wouldn’t take a Porsche Taycan, AUD A6 Sportback, or Lucid Air over that vehicle?
I guess me, though I’d probably opt for the Y instead. I have a friend who drives a Taycan, one of the sportier variants with 4 wheel steering and blistering acceleration, and it’s nice, but it’s clear that they’re still crap at computers and interfaces, and I just really don’t want to go back to traditional car industry software interfaces and feature sets after our Tesla. I doubly don’t want to deal with a dealership ever again. Also, love their mobile service which comes to our garage and fixed a flat on two different occasions while I was working at home, super convenient. Roadside assistance was great when we got a flat in the middle of nowhere with no shops open anywhere nearby, they coordinated getting a tow truck out to us to tow it to a Costco like 40 miles away, gratis. Also, it’s just been a great car for us, extremely practical, great for long road trips, fun to drive, the autopilot works well and makes long drives much more pleasant, especially traffic. I don’t know why people confidently declare them to be bad cars - our experience hasn’t been flawless, but as a total package, it’s been the best car ownership experience I’ve had, including Acura, Toyota, Subaru, BMW, Nissans. I guess some combination of not liking Elon, and the issues from the scale-up period when they were making model 3s in tents, though those are long gone.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. You are not actually in the market for the class of vehicle the Model S or X competed with in the first place.
I'm not actually saying they are bad cars. What I am saying is that they now lack a buyer persona, which is why they're being discontinued.
When the S and X first came out, $90,000 was the price of entry for any electric car of that caliber. Anyone who wanted an electric car with that kind of range and charging network had just those two options.
But the reality is, the vast majority of people who want Teslas will choose the 3 or Y because, duh, obviously! You have to squint real hard at the door handles to even visibly tell the difference between the X and Y.
What I'm really getting at here is that the majority of buyers in the luxury segment, the kind of people blowing $90,000 plus on a vehicle, those are the people for which the S and X are not competitive. They don't give a shit about how good the software is on the iPad that was slapped on the Tesla dashboard. They probably just want CarPlay and Android Auto anyway. They are looking for hand stitched everything, paint to sample and semi-custom interior colors, and either overstated or understated luxury: they want to look like they belong at the country club (Range Rover, Volvo) or they want to look like they belong at the club (BMW, Porsche, Mercedes, Audi, etc).
For the Model S, it existed in a struggling segment of full-size sedans where you either have to be sporty as in driving enthusiast sporty or luxurious as in massaging seats. The Model S was a Toyota Crown with the leather package that went fast in a straight line.
The Model X is even more lost on demographics. It's an SUV with a bad 3rd row and wonky doors. More critically, it fails to hit any of the demographics you might want to hit: families don't want it because it doesn't have the minivan-like utility of vehicles like the Lucid Gravity, Kia EV9, or any of the gas competitors like the Telluride - or minivans themselves! For people who want a luxury SUV, it doesn't satisfy either type of club folk. You'll get a more refined build and luxurious experience in something like a Volvo EX-90. You'll stand out more in a BMW iX. And finally, the most successful segment of luxury SUV right now is the performance offroader: The Model X can't scratch the itch that the Rivian R1S, Sequoia TRD Pro, Ford Bronco Raptor, Lexus GX, Mercedes G Wagon, and a laundry list of other options I can't even think of right now because there are so many.
As a sidenote, when you describe mobile service to fix a flat tire and roadside assistance, you are literally describing AAA. This is not something Tesla invented. Roadside assistance is included with my car insurance. People who buy Porsches definitely get themselves a similarly good experience. These are not dealerships that are generally unpleasant, they aren't exactly your local Hyundai franchise.
Yeah fair points, I don’t really know the people you’re describing. My demographic wants a really good car, as comfortable and headache-free as possible, and would be happier if no one knew it was pricey. I was considering an X because of the supposedly better suspension, better ergonomics for kids/more passengers, and slightly better third row, but I think they’ve generally not focused on them enough in recent years, and the doors seem like a bit of a maintenance nightmare. So yeah, I guess it DQ’d itself a bit.
> As a sidenote, when you describe mobile service to fix a flat tire and roadside assistance, you are literally describing AAA.
Haha do they come to your garage for routine maintenance? If so, I need to have another look at them. My point was that it’s a packaged experience that adds up to be pretty delightful, with a minimum of work on my part.
> These are not dealerships that are generally unpleasant, they aren't exactly your local Hyundai franchise.
Last dealerships I have experience with are Mercedes and BMW, same shit, different veneer, arguably douchier salespeople.
While I agree that at home service a convenience perk and won’t deny you that, Tesla (and Rivian/Polestar/Lucid or any of those other smaller brands) are only doing that service at home because they have to, because there aren’t service networks in place and people won’t buy their cars if they have to drive multiple hours to find a service technician.
I think problem with coming to your house for routine maintenance is that a shop is a proper environment for service. They have things like car lifts and equipment that are not mobile. In that sense I’d rather my car just be a car that can be serviced by the dozens of mechanics and dealerships that are located within 5-10 miles of my house.
I would also point out that this mobile service setup is not convenient if you don’t own your own private garage with ample space to work in. If you park on the street, in a lot/public garage, or have a really tight condo garage you’re SOL then. Many condo and apartment rules don’t even allow you to do car maintenance in the place where you park.
What happens if your parking space is on an incline? Or when you’ve got weather like snow and rain, where being inside a proper shop versus out in a parking spot would not be ideal?
All of these variables are why a dedicated shop makes sense. Tesla would absolutely go that route and end if they sold as many vehicles as Toyota.
As far as dealer salespeople, you only interact with them, what, once every 10 years to buy a car? Or less if you’re financially frugal.
From what I can see doing some quick searches the EV9 sold 22,017 in 2024 just in the US, while Tesla's global deliveries of "other models" (S, X, and Cybertruck combined, which includes over 10,000 Cybertrucks) totaled 85,133. This, critically for this comparison, includes China.
The X is not competitive with proper 3-row SUVs as the 3rd row is not usable enough, and it was cannibalized by the Y which is not an upmarket luxury SUV as luxurious as EV SUVs that are in the Model X's price range.
Similar story goes for the Model S: they're discontinuing their upper luxury full-size sedan and no longer compete in that market at all.
Since Tesla doesn't split the numbers out it's hard to say but I would say anecdotally, seeing a Model S on the road is most common with older model years as most of those buyers clearly switched over to the Model 3 or Y instead.
The type of buyer who is actually looking for a $90,000 luxury vehicle, that's the type of person I am saying the X and S are not competitive with, which is why they're being discontinued.
Someone spending that much in 2016 on an S or X was getting a vehicle that was bleeding edge technology you couldn't get anywhere else.
Someone spending that much in 2026 will choose the extra luxury features, build quality, and brand prestige of something like a Porsche, Audi, BMW, Mercedes, or Lucid.
> From what I can see doing some quick searches the EV9 sold 22,017 in 2024 just in the US, while Tesla's global deliveries of "other models" (S, X, and Cybertruck combined, which includes over 10,000 Cybertrucks) totaled 85,133. This, critically for this comparison, includes China.
Cars in the US. As in the Taycan, A6 e-tron, and Air. Maybe the Air had more sales in '25.
> The type of buyer who is actually looking for a $90,000 luxury vehicle, that's the type of person I am saying the X and S are not competitive with
> Someone spending that much in 2026 will choose the extra luxury features, build quality, and brand prestige of something like a Porsche, Audi, BMW, Mercedes, or Lucid.
This is a silly internet trope that doesn't align with reality. Many factors go into a car purchase. ADAS, appearances, software, reliability, performance, efficiency, charging network, trends, etc. The affordability of a car doesn't inform the preferences of the buyer.
But yes in 2026 they don't really have a choice unless they buy used.
> Which is why they're being discontinued.
Or they're being discontinued because they no longer serve a purpose for Tesla.
You think Tesla is discontinuing the cars because they no longer serve a purpose to Tesla? Isn’t the purpose of the company to make money by selling products?
Can you think of any other successful cars that are being discontinued for a similar reason and aren’t being replaced with a new model? Doesn’t pass the smell test.
You said people buy because of trends…well, the trend is away from Tesla and toward other brands. I don’t see any “I bought this before Mary Barra went crazy” bumper stickers on Silverados.
As of the first 9 months of 2025 before tax incentive expired, GM sells about 1/3 of Tesla’s EV sales volume. They grew EV sales by 200% between 2022 and 2024. The #1 EV brand in Europe is Volkswagen. #1 in China is BYD. Reports indicate that the Shanghai Tesla factory is far below capacity and that Tesla has its largest unsold inventory ever.
You don’t have to agree with me on the current situation but we’ll be seeing how it all goes in a few short years
It's more plausible than what you're implying. Lucid, Rivian, and Tesla all have the same playbook. Sell luxury cars to fund a path towards an affordable platform.
Not all products need to continue to be made to be viewed as successful. S and X were low volume, high tech cars that paved the way to 3 and Y. The latter two have now consistently dominated US EV sales. By all accounts they were successful halo vehicles.
This idea makes sense conceptually, but in reality as we observe it, the companies that make low volume luxury products are often the most profitable carmakers in the industry.
BMW is the 2nd most profitable car company in the world and sells many mid/low volume vehicles like the 7 series.
This theory of yours also doesn’t do very well to explain the Cybertruck. Why would Tesla launch a $90k truck when their goal was supposedly to get out of low volume luxury vehicles and focus on high volume?
I don't think Tesla is a normal car company. If they actually wanted to compete with the luxury car makers they have the capital to do so. Even with the brand death, they could easily compete.
> This theory of yours also doesn’t do very well to explain the Cybertruck. Why would Tesla launch a $90k truck when their goal was supposedly to get out of low volume luxury vehicles and focus on high volume?
Well it's not my theory, it already happened. Tesla built a brand with S and X and dominated the EV market for a decade.
The Cybertruck is about as halo as you can get, so I have no idea why they made so many. That said I also can't believe people actually bought it. It outsold the f-150 lightning in 2024. If I were to guess, I'd say the Cybertruck is a product and victim of Musk's psychosis.
(I promise I’m not intending to reply endlessly and generally be annoying I just still find the discussion interesting)
I think they are way more like a normal car company than they publicly admit. I make the argument that they are entirely like a normal car company, just a vertically integrated one like Hyundai/Kia.
They’d really like to have more upside than a normal car company due to their software and AI and robotics, but until the day they start selling those things to other companies it’s all unrealized.
Why wouldn't they want to compete with luxury automakers? It's the more profitable market segment. Every mass market car company selling a similarly high unit volume as Tesla has a luxury marquee because it's simple to reuse/modify the same platform, chuck in some more leather, massaging seats, and sound isolation materials, and toss on a fancier badge and marketing campaign.
The Cybertruck is indeed a strange halo car, but it really should have been a truck with more mainstream appeal. Elon psychosis is indeed highly responsible for that truck's failure, along with an inability to deliver the ballpark promises regarding price and range.
As of 2025 before the discontinuation of the Lightning F-150, the Cybertruck actually did not outsell the Lightning despite Ford essentially selling down remaining inventory, while the Silverado EV/Sierra EV (the best EV truck on the market for actual truck usability, IMO) is picking up the most momentum. GM is already outselling the Cybertruck:
Cybertruck is also going to in the future have the “Chrysler PT Cruiser” problem where it’s just about impossible to iterate on the styling for a second generation. Arguably they’ve already run through the Chrysler PT Cruiser lifecycle where it was incredibly cool on release but became something of a joke by the end of its run. Unfortunately with an overstyled car like that it’s difficult to predict whether it’ll be a timeless classic or…a PT Cruiser.
Although I'm wrong about it being closely enough related to the Model Y's platform to really say "it's a Model Y," many of those stainless steel panels are absolutely secured with fasteners and glue.
“The question for your portfolio: who becomes the Corning, the Qualcomm, the TI of this stack?”
and it feels like a reading comprehension exercise, as the answer is right there in their article, even if they miss what the hard part about humanoid robotics is - hint, it’s not the actuators.
The answer is Nvidia. They’ve got the full stack, ready to license to everyone and anyone who wants to jump into autonomous vehicles or robotics - and as the article points out, they already are.
Building robots at that scale without any indication that the market wants it is weird. I wouldn’t want to say atupid because with musk there is no rational thought. However this is not cars where the concept exists and we know people spend 100k towards a car. We don’t know if people will even spend on a robot that doesn’t do shit. Figure is looking at 100-150k robot if built at scale, so u less they revised this estimate down drastically, what does a 20k robot do?
Well from this article I got the feeling the intended customer is industrial, not domestic. There's a lot of talk about how much a robot can lift versus hydraulic systems.
But I do also get the feeling that maybe Musk is just off his rocker and everyone else is copying what he does just in case he actually a genius
There are plenty of positions were you have normal humans doing only a handful of tasks.
Checkout youtube on some chinese factories building like rice cooker and co. They have like 10-50 stops were one person only does like 1-5 things. Putting tape on, screwing something together etc.
I can see it as the last niche were the real big specialised and for purpose build robots are just not economicly
Musk has a very spiky character sheet. He is, in some dimensions, extraordinarily stupid, and I believe his ego makes a lot of big decisions. But something that might fall into the genius category is this: building things speculatively, primarily for the capabilities that you anticipate developing along the way, the nature of which are not yet known. But this increases your odds of having capabilities in the future that others lack, which looks a lot like a venture capital oeuvre.
To condense that, i might use a phrase like "blind-buying future option space"
Whether Musk deserves that credit is a moot point. I haven't trusted a thing he's said for years, and studying him for revealed intent can't get past "clown on drugs" without violating occam's razor.
They’re meant to clean your house, do your dishes, do your laundry, some gardening probably mowing your lawn and weeding. The possibilities are endless. It would 100% be worth at least $50,000 if it could do those things even 85% of the time.
The industry has a lot more money and easier use cases.
A robot like Optimus will not be a household robot for years to come. Why? If it falls, it will crash into some kind of glas from doors to windows etc. If it falls it might crash a human or animal underneath it. It might trip on a toy or stairs and crash into a wall.
I would love to have one robot but 50k? Who buys something for 50k? A normal person has to save up for a car and they need a car, for a household robot you need a lot of income to justify 50k. You will buy a car, flat, kitchen, etc. before you will buy a 50k robot.
10k perhaps is more realistic but than it has to be good. Like if you are alone, I don't think you will recognize normal housework as such a bad thing that you will buy a robot for a small flat.
For families, the robot has to be very good and really save.
If you have a partner not working, you might not be able to afford a robot and that perosn has time anyway to do all of that.
I can imagine having a robot for elder people and some remote service using these robots to do stuff for them but 50k is costly.
I'm not bullish on household robots for the next 10 years at all. Now you have another problem though, if they become really good in an industry setting, guess who will lose their jobs? yeah exactly the people whou should be able to buy these.
>A robot like Optimus will not be a household robot for years to come. Why? If it falls, it will crash into some kind of glas from doors to windows etc. If it falls it might crash a human or animal underneath it. It might trip on a toy or stairs and crash into a wall.
Strong disagree here we have plenty of machinery that we use that could be very dangerous if it fails, but they just slap a disclaimer on it and that’s usually enough the same is going to be done here.
We literally pipe in flammable gases into kitchens, and then burn them there. These fail a lot all the time. Clogged heaters kill people because of carbon monoxide poisoning and electric coil heaters burn down apartments. Pressure cookers are basically controlled bombs. People have hundred pound pitbulls in their houses and even though we trust them they’re technically inherently unpredictable. There are a lot of dangerous things in our homes that we accept and build guard rails around a robot doesn’t seem that much crazier.
The stove is in one place, it produces heat, we train everyone that this is dangerous including our kids (firefighters showed me in 1th grade what an oil fire is).
We added stinky smell to gas.
Pressure cookers are only used by 1-2 people in the kitchen and not that regularly. But a friend of mine actually burned himself through the steam when he opened it up.
The pitbull things is dangerous. But they do'nt run through window and if they fall down stairs, they won't kill someone.
Look we will see how long it will take but i do not think we will see household robots soon. Im confident we will see them in the industry on mass before we see them in real households in relevant numbers.
There's zero chance I'll let a robot into my home to do my dishes when I know it'll be filming and audio recording 24/7 and sending that data directly back to Elon who will mine the feed and sell that data or use it against me every chance he gets. It's so much worse that the idiots who bug their own homes with "smart" assistants and ring cameras. You'd have to be crazy to let someone else's drone into your house.
Give me a similar device that I own and control, one without access to the internet, and I'll be happy to let a robot do my dishes, but otherwise such robots are strictly for fools (and sadly there are plenty of those).
An autonomous robot that I program, I update (or don't) as and when I see fit, and does not need to connect to the internet or to anything, for $20k that does dishes, or helps me lift things at the shop, and returning data to it's maker IF AND ONLY IF, AND WHEN, I CHOOSE (or dont)? Great - take my money!
An ambulatory machine with eyes, ears, touch sensors, continually watching, listening, observing, mapping, recording everything it encounters in my home and/or shop and sending all that data back to it's manufacturer "for improved user experience"? HELL, NO!
The latter, supplied by Musk, even if he's paying me $1 million per year to 'host' it? I'll buy the equipment to destroy it as soon as it comes onto my property.
I don't think there is any supplier I could even begin to trust when they require a connection. Can anyone here think of one?
The best selling car in the world in 2025 was the Tesla Model Y, with a little over 1 million sold. ~350k total vehicles have been sold in 2026 as of April.
No, it does not make the comparison unbiased, because other companies, like BYD, may sell in a month as much EV cars as Tesla sells in a quarter, but they are distributed over diverse models, so one Tesla model may indeed sell more than any other model, without this reflecting the EV market share.
E.g. for BYD the 2026 target is over 1.5 million exported EV cars, with more than that produced for the internal Chinese market. During 2025, BYD exported more than 1 million EV cars, besides the production for the Chinese market.
The whole story about Tesla until 2025 was that they had the #1 selling model across any category: BEVs, PHEVs, and ICEs included. So it’s absolutely correct to note when that model’s sales no longer exceed those of a PHEV or ICE model, and it’s always in the context of how competitors choose to segment their offerings.
The core truth is that the popularity of buying a new Tesla has slipped significantly relative to competitors.
Man come one not only is this the wrong analysis because Tesla only has one single model, they literaly build 50k cars which are not sold
50.000
My guess, they made them for pushing the Space X IPO. The same why he did this weird Keynote last week with this megafantasic dyson sphere and whatnot vision.
And I find it very weird tbh that it still even sells. Whenever you see a Tesla, its always the same car.
One million robots to be manufactured in a year - one million robots which will likely be obsolete within five years (if that, I wouldn't be surprised if they're dead on arrival).
I don't know the figures for Earth's resources and their sustainability, so this may be a naive take, but I'm always left with the impression that these organisations want to speedrun the depletion of the planet.
Humans are sapient; industrialists and politicians have intent. But the incentive structure is an evolved system, and that's what selects these people. The result is that humanity, collectively, is amoebic. We are probably doomed to expand until we have a population crash or until another species arises to keep us in check.
The next step is just selling tickets to that flight in advance as a preorder. One could call it roadster preorders because of the difficult road ahead
> The Fremont factory lines that built those cars are converting to manufacture Optimus humanoid robots: one million units per year at $20,000 each, with public sales beginning in 2027.
Sure, why not? Seems just as likely as Tesla having 1 million robotaxis on the road by the end of 2026. =)
I heard it will be 100 billion robotaxis on the road by the end of 2026!
I don't understand the emphasis on humanoid form, especially the legs.
It seems like the focus should be on making the arms extremely capable and just use a wheeled base for some substantial number of use cases.
If there are use cases where wheels are too limiting, then a four legged base like Boston Dynamics dog seems like it would be simpler and possibly adequate for most uses.
[flagged]
Sorry, are all of those model 3 and Y vehicles robotaxis?
Or are you saying that because they produced 1.5 million non-robotaxi cars in 2025 that the estimate of producing 1 million robotaxis in the following year is pretty reasonable, because making them autonomous taxis is a minor feature bump...?
No, I'm saying that the original content is low-effort shitposting, and that Tesla has the ability to scale industrial production to over 1mm 'things' per year, as evidenced by production last year. I did the OP the mild courtesy of asking him to open up a useful conversation. For instance, "Is there going to be demand for 1mm robots, and if so, when?" Or "How much actual retooling is necessary in Fremont for this?" Both seem like useful and interesting things to talk about.
I think teslas issue is that they need the AI5 chip for robotaxi ops, the current chip just doesn’t cut it. So if they have batches end of 2026 and start optimizing the models, by mid 2027 volume production you might have robotaxis coming online at about 100k per month. Waymo currently has less than 10k cars on the road.
Lots of ifs here. If they can enable hardware 4 for robotaxi ops then they can have 3m+ cars ready to go. But I am skeptical of it. And given that Elon’s top priority is scaling chips and AI5, I think that is proof that he thinks it is likely necessary too.
So 1m robotaxis by end of 2026 is theoretically possible but I think unlikely, and it’s more likely in the 200k-1m by end of 2027. If they pull that off, they could still be largest by then if Waymo doesn’t rapidly scale. Fun times!
My understanding is superficial, so do knock it down, not it seems to me that tesla insists on vision-only hour self driving, which vastly increases the requirement for ML. Whereas Waymo has a lower sum technology requirement by using both lidar and vision, and have moved faster. So when you say "tesla needs the AI5 chip", i hear the rider "...to avoid a public volte face".
I suppose that bulky lidar modules are undesirable in premium consumer goods, but i don't see that downside for taxis.
What am I missing?
He is saying all of this for his IPO.
Its still a hard problem and while he likes to move that fast, nothing around him wants to move that fast. No burocrazy at least.
Bosten dynamics has the better robot which doesn't overheat and can more and they plan to rollout commercially 2028.
Musks Robot overheated last year, we have not seen a single non staged real demonstration in public and he already wants to mass produce them.
This is just lying at this point and has very little to do how fast someone can scale something if its not ready to be scaled up.
Dynamics can make on the order of 25k robots a year though. Not enough to matter in a gdp sense. There is one US company that can scale this kind of manufacturing currently. So to my mind the question is : can Tesla ever get there on tech, and if so, can they be first to scale to a million units? You don’t need them to have the best robot now. Or ever really if they’re the first to scale.
No, but once Optimus is delivered in 2027, it will surely be able to drive your Tesla for you?
Optimus was still overheating last year.
And while Musk is very good in announcing stuff, delivering he is not. boring company? Robotaxis on masses?
Did you watch his keynote last week? Man he is ignorant. It would be a million times cheaper and easier to build a powerplant, fiber and energy lines in the dessert of USA and build their big data centers before building anything in space.
But no he talks about dyson sphere, space etc. like we need any of it today (perhaps in a 100 years) and it would be more cost effective than on earth.
He is a lunatec
Their robotaxis are not reliable but they stubbornly won’t add lidar. It’s a solved problem.
I read the title 2-3 times, and every time I swore it said "Robot cat ears". Wtf.
Yep, same here. Its the only reason I clicked on the article TBH
Literally same, saw “Robot cat ears”. Somehow I not only misread the words, but flipped the order as well, multiple times.
For those who need help recovering from the crushing self induced disappointment, here’s some brainwave controlled cat ears: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqSZg0oiYuM
I read it multiple times, read your comment and clicked on the article and I still got it wrong.
I saw Robot ear cats and couldn’t make sense of it. But clicking in the article and seeing the title in huge whatever sizes fonts made it click.
I think it’s the small font sizes in HN causing our brains to ‘fill in the blanks’.
Then you complain about the Rs in strawberry...
That's exactly why we complain about the Rs in strawberry. We can get funny-stupid human interpretations all day long. What we can't get is cold facts, and isn't that what was promised by AI (at least, before ChatGPT was released in 2022)?
Unfortunately we fed this current iteration of AI with human behaviour (not only that: human behaviour on the Internet...)
> What we can't get is cold facts, and isn't that what was promised by AI (at least, before ChatGPT was released in 2022)?
Not that I know of. An entity dealing only in cold facts is not intelligent, it's a theorem prover- extremely narrow, rigid and incapable of interpretation and insight- basically of bridging the smallest gap of knowledge. That's exactly what intelligence isn't.
“Robots eat cats” for me
Definitely read it that way at first too
I was disappointed there were no cat ears in the article...
Agreed I was going to buy a set of robotic cat ears for my partner.
> Steer-by-wire
Thinking back to case-studies around the Therac-25 [0], I would like to pre-emptively highlight the differences between:
1. Technique X is unsafe.
2. Technique X is unsafe because too much can go wrong even with the best intentions.
3. Technique X is unsafe without strong QA and interlocking safety measures, and there's too much economic pressure for the manufacturer to cut corners.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
The obvious problem with steer-by-wire is that in the traditional design, it's not uncommon to lose power assist but not the mechanical connection to the wheels, so you can still steer the car. To completely lose steering control you'd need significant mechanical damage.
If the whole thing goes through the computer then there are lots of new ways to fail. Steering wheel position sensor goes bad on the highway? Computer gets bad data. Control wires get disconnected or damaged? No data. Completely unrelated wires get shorted and fry the computer? No steering. Anything pops the wrong fuse? No power, no computer or steering motors.
Some of those can be mitigated with redundancy but you're still vulnerable to common causes. You have three position sensors and someone dumps their beverage down the steering column, are there any left and do you have any good way to determine which one(s)? The vehicle took some minor damage allowing water to get somewhere it's not intended to, any way to guarantee you're not about to lose both sides of a redundant electrical system the next time it goes through a puddle infused with conductive road salt?
Of course, a counterpoint is what's been happening in aviation. Autopilot became a thing. Autoland became a thing. And, to keep improving planes (first military planes, then commercial aircraft), it was much easier to drop the mechanical connection to the wings.
Autopilot started as a help to pilots, and evolved to something that is a necessity and pilot control inputs are "suggestions" or "goals", not inputs like turning the wheel on a bike. To be followed in what you might refer to as "the long term" from the perspective of controlling the aircraft, but in the short term, the computer is to fly the plane in a way IT thinks is reasonable. An extreme example would be to enforce the flight envelope. But today there exist autoland-only airports (as well as huge airports that go autoland-only if things are too hard for humans, like LHR)
Most of today's passenger aircraft cannot be flown if fly-by-wire is not operational. Most of today's aircraft actually used for passenger transport cannot land without fly-by-wire.
A number of military aircraft, and rocket planes and rockets, even the ones carrying humans, and more and more passenger planes cannot be flown by humans, not just because the mechanical force humans can generate cannot move the control surfaces (which "can be fixed" with hydraulics, if you don't mind serious caveats), but because the human brain is incapable of generating sufficient control inputs at a fast enough rate, or just can't keep stable flight going.
Hilariously, this also goes for hobby quadcopters. They are flown by algorithms. Humans can't do it. Not fast enough. Humans provide direction. Algorithms, even AI algorithms that aren't even guaranteed to succeed at all (in professional/military drones), actually fly the thing.
But, yes, you're entirely correct by saying "then there are lots of new ways to fail". It also works better, cheaper, faster, safer, more comfortable, ... if it doesn't fail.
And ... robotaxis are already far safer than even a good human driver. So whatever the problems ... they don't actually make things worse.
Also you should check out geohot's business. A lot of cars already are "fly-by-wire". Their solution? They now have 2 CAN buses instead of one. One for the critical stuff. Cylinder timings. Checking the oil levels. Turning the wheels. Actuating the brakes. That sort of stuff. A second CAN bus for your bluetooth music, and displays and what have you. I hear a certain new Mercedes now has like 7 buses. We are making things safer.
We can make this work. We will make this work.
Planes are probably the most controled machines we have. Everything gets checked twice or more, everything gets tracked and there is a clear requirement to do it like this because, as you said, its not possible for humans to control a fighterjet or a big plane.
Cars are non of that and we have billions of them on the street.
Cars also became a lot more expensive due to their complexity which def creates problems for a lot of people who can't afford all of that. I'm really torn by this because I think its very good that my side mirror shows me if there is a car next to me but in our capitalistic economy, we are excluding a lot of people from affordable cars. Drive by wire needs to be cheaper and easier to fix/repair.
Btw. Waymos are slowly learning to drive on highways so I might agree that they drive saver than humans in certain controlled envs. For sure not in any environment.
But that is the "tradeoff" people are going for. What irritates me about Waymos is that they are not really cheaper than taxis and Uber. If we want people to become more mobile ... Waymo does not appear to be the answer.
And that was always the trade that was proposed. Sure, Waymo's (and Uber) will displace a LOT of taxi jobs, but they'll be way cheaper than taxis. Well ... they're not. And at that point, from an economic perspective, this is just taking things away for not much in return.
Once again people get a lot of possible choices and once again they choose for the more expensive one, putting more people out of business, out of a job, and as you say out of society. Now they're saying "yeah but this is good for autistic people and women, who can now travel by taxi without ever seeing anyone". How, exactly, does anyone think that's a good thing for society? Seriously?
Plus I'm a bit of the opinion, if Waymo is already breaking their own proposed social contract now ... imagine what they'll do in 10 years.
Safety is a great reason to not do something. Utility and enhanced safety are great reasons to override that reflex. A lot has happened since the Therac 25 incident in the medical world with AI, machine learning, robotic neuro surgery, all sorts of computer aided diagnostics, etc. This stuff undeniably saves lives. The incident did inspire some level of scrutiny of course. But compared to modern medical equipment, that machine is from the stone age.
Steer by wire (which the article highlights) is common on all modern airbus planes for decades. The first ones flew shortly after the Therac incident. Boeing has also started implementing that on their newer models. And of course most of the vtol planes/drones currently starting to operate and progress through certification programs also commonly use steer by wire. Several of these flew without pilots before their first manned test flights. These are computer controlled, pilot directed pretty much by default with that part being optional by design.
Beyond Tesla, there are now several other manufacturers implementing steer by wire in the car industry. Nio, Lexus, Toyota, Mercedes, and a few others each either already have cars on the road for this or are working on new ones. And while Tesla has received quite a bit of criticism on their FSD system, I don't think there have been a lot of incidents implicating the steer by wire in Cybertrucks. It seems to work and drivers seem to mostly like it once they get used to it. The car is controversial of course. But there's a lot of cool tech inside that is being copied across the industry now.
The implied warning "we should be careful with this stuff because Therac-25" is a bit of a cliche at this point. Yes, we need lots of checks and balances when using automation in safety critical systems. And that has been common for decades.
All analysis should also keep in mind the "who", no matter how logically separable it is.
I put this less strongly since boeing contracted MBA cancer and yolo'd the 737-max, but that aside, the civil aviation engineering field controls risks to a fault. Commercial pilots are selected to follow checklists without deviation. I allow them the grace to implement steer-by-wire.
Ford kept selling Pintos with exploding fuel tanks, Toyota sold priuses with runaway acceleration defects, and depending on region maybe the worst twenty per cent of drivers ought to be operating nothing more dangerous than shirt buttons. No matter how good the plan is, those people shouldn't be anywhere near it.
Moreover, Technique X does not actually provide any significant value.
The whole steer-by-wire in CT happened because Musk wanted a yoke as the control system. And a yoke requires progressive steering which is impractical without steer-by-wire.
> does not actually provide any significant value
If that were true, it would not explain why other manufacturers are headed the same direction. The CT is not the only steer-by-wire vehicle.
Vehicles include low-utility features for market positioning all the time.
Do buyers need a motorised hood ornament? A tiny vase built into the dashboard? A built-in champagne chiller? Gull wing doors? A spoiler and a 300-horsepower engine?
If it boosts sales by giving the vehicle a distinctive character, though, there's a place in the market for that tiny vase.
The motorized hood ornaments on Rolls Royce vehicles were a solution to the problem of people being injured by, or stealing the (Spirit of Ecstasy) ornaments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_of_Ecstasy
How does it being motorized prevent injury?
> Today's Spirit of Ecstasy, from the 2003 Phantom model onward, stands at 3 inches (7.6 cm) and, for the safety of any person being accidentally hit, is mounted on a spring-loaded mechanism designed to retract instantly into the radiator shell if struck from any direction.
I don't think that mentions it being motorized
The motor allows you to raise it after it has been retracted.
Then why is it spring-loaded?
> For the safety of any person being accidentally hit
(the spring handles the retraction)
But if a motor is needed to counter the retracting spring, doesn't that mean any impact must overcome the motor before the spring will engage?
Presumably the motor runs once to extend it and then it locks into position (with some kind of mechanical catch that's calibrated to come loose if you hit anything), rather than being constantly running.
What other manufacturers? There's Mercedes EQS and Geely. Both are trialing it in one model each as luxury gimmicks.
steer-by-wire makes safety nannies way easier, eg, the ones that jerk the wheel out of your hands when they decide you're too close to a line on the road.
I don't think thats true.
Its power steering already and cars use that to turn a wheel when you are not driving.
So why would that make it safer?
I didn't say safer, I said easier.
https://ddl.stanford.edu/publications/thesis/steer-wire-impl...
https://www.reddit.com/r/MVIS/comments/1qnkxpz/reason_for_ad...
Yeah sry but I meant easier.
But why do you think it would make it easier? Power-steering doesn't mean there are sensors build in or more precise ones.
Your reddit comment references autonomes vehicle and in that case it shouldn't matter if the car also moves a steering wheel no one is using while it moves the wheels which is a lot heavier.
And in case of your nanny, the main argument of your referenced paper are issues with the hands of the driver. In that case it could make it better for the driver, I might agree, but I would then question how the driver acts if the wheel is suddenly / temporarily not aligned with the wheel. I might also argue that in such a case were my thumb gets in the way, it might be an emergency and i wouldn't worry then?
Other models got the yoke but not the steer by wire.
Yes. And it was a disaster without progressive steering, they quietly switched back to the round wheel.
> And a yoke requires progressive steering which is impractical without steer-by-wire.
But also look at Citroën's DIRAVI system, used on the CX, SM, and some XMs. There's no direct mechanical link between the steering wheel and the rack when the system is pressurised. When you turn the wheel a kind of dogbone link thing pushes a spool valve one way or the other allowing hydraulic fluid to push the rack along, which pushes the other end of the link back to shut the fluid off again.
So far, so similar to the Danfoss valve in a conventional power-assisted steering system, except that uses a rotary valve and a big torsion spring in the steering rack (that's why your steering wheel feels springy with the engine off).
But DIRAVI is fully powered with no mechanical link, so how do you get increasing resistance with increasing speed? Well, there's a governor on the gearbox that allows hydraulic fluid into a little cylinder that pushes a spring-loaded roller against a heart-shaped cam attached to the steering wheel shaft. This will try to spring back to the middle, and the faster you go the harder it springs back. At 70mph you can barely move the steering wheel, but it will flick a large heavy car from lane to lane with fingertip pressure.
You have to get used to this and for the first few miles you'll be zig-zagging down the road like you're tacking a dinghy, but after that you'll get used to just thinking about your right pinky finger being a gram heavier and going round a corner. I've driven some seriously high-end sports cars with legendary handling and performance and they feel pretty rough and tractory now ;-)
If the pressure fails of course then there's no powered steering (notice I say powered, not power-assisted), although in practice what tends to happen is that the "resistance" part goes first giving you very sensitive steering.
What happens once there's no pressure is that the steering wheel moves about 20° before you run the valve to its end and then the dogbone pushes directly on the drive gear for the rack. So the steering is very loose and wobbly but you can at least steer well enough to get it out of the parking space and into the workshop. You still have brakes for an hour or so if the pump belt breaks, and enough steering to get safely to the side of the road, or at least out of the fast lane.
In the 1960s they had a prototype Citroën DS controlled by a joystick using pretty much the same setup (hydraulic valve to push the rack around, heart-shaped cam to apply resistance). Apparently it was very comfortable and natural to drive but ultimately a bit to weird even for Citroën.
Not a scrap of electronics in it, unless you count the pressure switch and dashboard lightbulb.
TIL! I love old Citroëns, but i never knew about that steering design.
Have you experienced that failure mode yourself? How alarming was it? Do you think it's a reasonable trade-off for the benefits?
I had the hydraulic pump belt break when I was about 30 or 40 miles from home, and of course I had a water pump belt and an alternator belt, but not the hydraulic pump belt.
The brake and regulator accumulators were both nice and new though so the "low brake pressure stop immediately" warning only came on about two or three miles from home (once there's no pressure at all, there's no brakes at all, but this is pretty difficult to achieve in practice) and I just had to cope with the twitchy steering through the difficult part - driving through town at 15-20mph in rush hour traffic anyway.
That is truly steampunk! Overengineered and crazy but cool!
It would only be overengineered if it was not necessary, and once you drive one you'll realise that all cars should have it.
You can actually get pretty close with electric power steering but that's a lot more involved than a few dozen incredibly finely machined parts and a bunch of thin oil at 180 times atmospheric pressure.
This article is written with a little bit of a journalist’s misunderstanding of a topic.
They seem to have done research but have strung together unrelated subjects due to their lack of expertise in the subjects.
As a result it reads more like a summary or recap of vaguely related stories.
For example, Tesla’s pivot to robots has nothing to do with their advanced nature of their wiring harnesses, but it’s spoken in the same breath as if to imply that a Tesla Cybertruck (which is a Model Y with paneling literally glued on top) is more similar to a humanoid robot than a Mustang Mach-E.
In reality, what has happened is that the Model S and X have been discontinued and they’re the only products the Fremont, CA plant produces. Tesla has literally nothing else they can make in that plant. They either make Optimus robots or shut the plant down.
Optimus robot production is a face saving move. Tesla barely needs a fraction of that factory to build robots…it’s a much lower-volume and physically smaller product.
I should note that none of that has anything to do with Tesla being great at robotics and seeing it as a better business than automobiles. It has everything to do with competitors catching up and Tesla having insufficient development capability to iterate on those vehicles.
Who in the buyer demographic for a Model S wouldn’t take a Porsche Taycan, AUD A6 Sportback, or Lucid Air over that vehicle?
Who in the buyer demographic for the Model X won’t take a Kia EV9, Lucid Gravity, or Volvo EX-90?
Maybe if you aren’t paying attention to the car industry you’ll disagree with me but the problem here is the Model S and X are positively ancient with about zero dollars spent on keeping them updated and they’ve become completely irrelevant to the market as a result.
> Maybe if you aren’t paying attention to the car industry you’ll disagree with me but the problem here is the Model S and X are positively ancient with about zero dollars spent on keeping them updated and they’ve become completely irrelevant to the market as a result.
In practice they essentially got replaced with the Model 3 and Y, which didn't exist when the models being discontinued first came out.
It's because of the decline in battery prices. When the Model S came out, an electric car with that range had to be that price. Now it's overpriced for what it is so they'd either need to design one which is significantly more premium while still selling into an inherently lower volume market segment, or lower the price to reflect the current battery costs and then have it be too close to the Model 3.
What they really need to do is continue to move down, i.e. release a subcompact with less range than the Model 3 but on the cheap.
Or build a truck people actually want.
> Who in the buyer demographic for a Model S wouldn’t take a Porsche Taycan, AUD A6 Sportback, or Lucid Air over that vehicle?
I guess me, though I’d probably opt for the Y instead. I have a friend who drives a Taycan, one of the sportier variants with 4 wheel steering and blistering acceleration, and it’s nice, but it’s clear that they’re still crap at computers and interfaces, and I just really don’t want to go back to traditional car industry software interfaces and feature sets after our Tesla. I doubly don’t want to deal with a dealership ever again. Also, love their mobile service which comes to our garage and fixed a flat on two different occasions while I was working at home, super convenient. Roadside assistance was great when we got a flat in the middle of nowhere with no shops open anywhere nearby, they coordinated getting a tow truck out to us to tow it to a Costco like 40 miles away, gratis. Also, it’s just been a great car for us, extremely practical, great for long road trips, fun to drive, the autopilot works well and makes long drives much more pleasant, especially traffic. I don’t know why people confidently declare them to be bad cars - our experience hasn’t been flawless, but as a total package, it’s been the best car ownership experience I’ve had, including Acura, Toyota, Subaru, BMW, Nissans. I guess some combination of not liking Elon, and the issues from the scale-up period when they were making model 3s in tents, though those are long gone.
> though I’d probably opt for the Y instead
This is exactly what I'm talking about. You are not actually in the market for the class of vehicle the Model S or X competed with in the first place.
I'm not actually saying they are bad cars. What I am saying is that they now lack a buyer persona, which is why they're being discontinued.
When the S and X first came out, $90,000 was the price of entry for any electric car of that caliber. Anyone who wanted an electric car with that kind of range and charging network had just those two options.
But the reality is, the vast majority of people who want Teslas will choose the 3 or Y because, duh, obviously! You have to squint real hard at the door handles to even visibly tell the difference between the X and Y.
What I'm really getting at here is that the majority of buyers in the luxury segment, the kind of people blowing $90,000 plus on a vehicle, those are the people for which the S and X are not competitive. They don't give a shit about how good the software is on the iPad that was slapped on the Tesla dashboard. They probably just want CarPlay and Android Auto anyway. They are looking for hand stitched everything, paint to sample and semi-custom interior colors, and either overstated or understated luxury: they want to look like they belong at the country club (Range Rover, Volvo) or they want to look like they belong at the club (BMW, Porsche, Mercedes, Audi, etc).
For the Model S, it existed in a struggling segment of full-size sedans where you either have to be sporty as in driving enthusiast sporty or luxurious as in massaging seats. The Model S was a Toyota Crown with the leather package that went fast in a straight line.
The Model X is even more lost on demographics. It's an SUV with a bad 3rd row and wonky doors. More critically, it fails to hit any of the demographics you might want to hit: families don't want it because it doesn't have the minivan-like utility of vehicles like the Lucid Gravity, Kia EV9, or any of the gas competitors like the Telluride - or minivans themselves! For people who want a luxury SUV, it doesn't satisfy either type of club folk. You'll get a more refined build and luxurious experience in something like a Volvo EX-90. You'll stand out more in a BMW iX. And finally, the most successful segment of luxury SUV right now is the performance offroader: The Model X can't scratch the itch that the Rivian R1S, Sequoia TRD Pro, Ford Bronco Raptor, Lexus GX, Mercedes G Wagon, and a laundry list of other options I can't even think of right now because there are so many.
As a sidenote, when you describe mobile service to fix a flat tire and roadside assistance, you are literally describing AAA. This is not something Tesla invented. Roadside assistance is included with my car insurance. People who buy Porsches definitely get themselves a similarly good experience. These are not dealerships that are generally unpleasant, they aren't exactly your local Hyundai franchise.
Yeah fair points, I don’t really know the people you’re describing. My demographic wants a really good car, as comfortable and headache-free as possible, and would be happier if no one knew it was pricey. I was considering an X because of the supposedly better suspension, better ergonomics for kids/more passengers, and slightly better third row, but I think they’ve generally not focused on them enough in recent years, and the doors seem like a bit of a maintenance nightmare. So yeah, I guess it DQ’d itself a bit.
> As a sidenote, when you describe mobile service to fix a flat tire and roadside assistance, you are literally describing AAA.
Haha do they come to your garage for routine maintenance? If so, I need to have another look at them. My point was that it’s a packaged experience that adds up to be pretty delightful, with a minimum of work on my part.
> These are not dealerships that are generally unpleasant, they aren't exactly your local Hyundai franchise.
Last dealerships I have experience with are Mercedes and BMW, same shit, different veneer, arguably douchier salespeople.
While I agree that at home service a convenience perk and won’t deny you that, Tesla (and Rivian/Polestar/Lucid or any of those other smaller brands) are only doing that service at home because they have to, because there aren’t service networks in place and people won’t buy their cars if they have to drive multiple hours to find a service technician.
I think problem with coming to your house for routine maintenance is that a shop is a proper environment for service. They have things like car lifts and equipment that are not mobile. In that sense I’d rather my car just be a car that can be serviced by the dozens of mechanics and dealerships that are located within 5-10 miles of my house.
I would also point out that this mobile service setup is not convenient if you don’t own your own private garage with ample space to work in. If you park on the street, in a lot/public garage, or have a really tight condo garage you’re SOL then. Many condo and apartment rules don’t even allow you to do car maintenance in the place where you park.
What happens if your parking space is on an incline? Or when you’ve got weather like snow and rain, where being inside a proper shop versus out in a parking spot would not be ideal?
All of these variables are why a dedicated shop makes sense. Tesla would absolutely go that route and end if they sold as many vehicles as Toyota.
As far as dealer salespeople, you only interact with them, what, once every 10 years to buy a car? Or less if you’re financially frugal.
> Who in the buyer demographic for a Model S wouldn’t take a Porsche Taycan, AUD A6 Sportback, or Lucid Air over that vehicle?
> Who in the buyer demographic for the Model X won’t take a Kia EV9, Lucid Gravity, or Volvo EX-90?
The S and X are plenty competitive here for many buyers. Did any of those cars outsell the S in 2025 in the US? I would not trust a Kia or Volvo EV.
From what I can see doing some quick searches the EV9 sold 22,017 in 2024 just in the US, while Tesla's global deliveries of "other models" (S, X, and Cybertruck combined, which includes over 10,000 Cybertrucks) totaled 85,133. This, critically for this comparison, includes China.
The X is not competitive with proper 3-row SUVs as the 3rd row is not usable enough, and it was cannibalized by the Y which is not an upmarket luxury SUV as luxurious as EV SUVs that are in the Model X's price range.
Similar story goes for the Model S: they're discontinuing their upper luxury full-size sedan and no longer compete in that market at all.
Since Tesla doesn't split the numbers out it's hard to say but I would say anecdotally, seeing a Model S on the road is most common with older model years as most of those buyers clearly switched over to the Model 3 or Y instead.
The type of buyer who is actually looking for a $90,000 luxury vehicle, that's the type of person I am saying the X and S are not competitive with, which is why they're being discontinued.
Someone spending that much in 2016 on an S or X was getting a vehicle that was bleeding edge technology you couldn't get anywhere else.
Someone spending that much in 2026 will choose the extra luxury features, build quality, and brand prestige of something like a Porsche, Audi, BMW, Mercedes, or Lucid.
Sources:
https://insideevs.com/news/746147/kia-ev-sales-record-2024-u...
https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-fourth-quarter-2024...
> From what I can see doing some quick searches the EV9 sold 22,017 in 2024 just in the US, while Tesla's global deliveries of "other models" (S, X, and Cybertruck combined, which includes over 10,000 Cybertrucks) totaled 85,133. This, critically for this comparison, includes China.
Cars in the US. As in the Taycan, A6 e-tron, and Air. Maybe the Air had more sales in '25.
> The type of buyer who is actually looking for a $90,000 luxury vehicle, that's the type of person I am saying the X and S are not competitive with
> Someone spending that much in 2026 will choose the extra luxury features, build quality, and brand prestige of something like a Porsche, Audi, BMW, Mercedes, or Lucid.
This is a silly internet trope that doesn't align with reality. Many factors go into a car purchase. ADAS, appearances, software, reliability, performance, efficiency, charging network, trends, etc. The affordability of a car doesn't inform the preferences of the buyer.
But yes in 2026 they don't really have a choice unless they buy used.
> Which is why they're being discontinued.
Or they're being discontinued because they no longer serve a purpose for Tesla.
You think Tesla is discontinuing the cars because they no longer serve a purpose to Tesla? Isn’t the purpose of the company to make money by selling products?
Can you think of any other successful cars that are being discontinued for a similar reason and aren’t being replaced with a new model? Doesn’t pass the smell test.
You said people buy because of trends…well, the trend is away from Tesla and toward other brands. I don’t see any “I bought this before Mary Barra went crazy” bumper stickers on Silverados.
As of the first 9 months of 2025 before tax incentive expired, GM sells about 1/3 of Tesla’s EV sales volume. They grew EV sales by 200% between 2022 and 2024. The #1 EV brand in Europe is Volkswagen. #1 in China is BYD. Reports indicate that the Shanghai Tesla factory is far below capacity and that Tesla has its largest unsold inventory ever.
You don’t have to agree with me on the current situation but we’ll be seeing how it all goes in a few short years
It's more plausible than what you're implying. Lucid, Rivian, and Tesla all have the same playbook. Sell luxury cars to fund a path towards an affordable platform.
Not all products need to continue to be made to be viewed as successful. S and X were low volume, high tech cars that paved the way to 3 and Y. The latter two have now consistently dominated US EV sales. By all accounts they were successful halo vehicles.
This idea makes sense conceptually, but in reality as we observe it, the companies that make low volume luxury products are often the most profitable carmakers in the industry.
BMW is the 2nd most profitable car company in the world and sells many mid/low volume vehicles like the 7 series.
This theory of yours also doesn’t do very well to explain the Cybertruck. Why would Tesla launch a $90k truck when their goal was supposedly to get out of low volume luxury vehicles and focus on high volume?
I don't think Tesla is a normal car company. If they actually wanted to compete with the luxury car makers they have the capital to do so. Even with the brand death, they could easily compete.
https://companiesmarketcap.com/automakers/largest-automakers...
> This theory of yours also doesn’t do very well to explain the Cybertruck. Why would Tesla launch a $90k truck when their goal was supposedly to get out of low volume luxury vehicles and focus on high volume?
Well it's not my theory, it already happened. Tesla built a brand with S and X and dominated the EV market for a decade.
The Cybertruck is about as halo as you can get, so I have no idea why they made so many. That said I also can't believe people actually bought it. It outsold the f-150 lightning in 2024. If I were to guess, I'd say the Cybertruck is a product and victim of Musk's psychosis.
(I promise I’m not intending to reply endlessly and generally be annoying I just still find the discussion interesting)
I think they are way more like a normal car company than they publicly admit. I make the argument that they are entirely like a normal car company, just a vertically integrated one like Hyundai/Kia.
They’d really like to have more upside than a normal car company due to their software and AI and robotics, but until the day they start selling those things to other companies it’s all unrealized.
Why wouldn't they want to compete with luxury automakers? It's the more profitable market segment. Every mass market car company selling a similarly high unit volume as Tesla has a luxury marquee because it's simple to reuse/modify the same platform, chuck in some more leather, massaging seats, and sound isolation materials, and toss on a fancier badge and marketing campaign.
The Cybertruck is indeed a strange halo car, but it really should have been a truck with more mainstream appeal. Elon psychosis is indeed highly responsible for that truck's failure, along with an inability to deliver the ballpark promises regarding price and range.
As of 2025 before the discontinuation of the Lightning F-150, the Cybertruck actually did not outsell the Lightning despite Ford essentially selling down remaining inventory, while the Silverado EV/Sierra EV (the best EV truck on the market for actual truck usability, IMO) is picking up the most momentum. GM is already outselling the Cybertruck:
https://ev.com/news/chevy-silverado-ev-sales-nearly-double-a...
Cybertruck is also going to in the future have the “Chrysler PT Cruiser” problem where it’s just about impossible to iterate on the styling for a second generation. Arguably they’ve already run through the Chrysler PT Cruiser lifecycle where it was incredibly cool on release but became something of a joke by the end of its run. Unfortunately with an overstyled car like that it’s difficult to predict whether it’ll be a timeless classic or…a PT Cruiser.
> Tesla Cybertruck (which is a Model Y with paneling literally glued on top)
Doesn't seem true?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/business/tesla-cybertruck...
Although I'm wrong about it being closely enough related to the Model Y's platform to really say "it's a Model Y," many of those stainless steel panels are absolutely secured with fasteners and glue.
The author also asks:
“The question for your portfolio: who becomes the Corning, the Qualcomm, the TI of this stack?”
and it feels like a reading comprehension exercise, as the answer is right there in their article, even if they miss what the hard part about humanoid robotics is - hint, it’s not the actuators.
The answer is Nvidia. They’ve got the full stack, ready to license to everyone and anyone who wants to jump into autonomous vehicles or robotics - and as the article points out, they already are.
Building robots at that scale without any indication that the market wants it is weird. I wouldn’t want to say atupid because with musk there is no rational thought. However this is not cars where the concept exists and we know people spend 100k towards a car. We don’t know if people will even spend on a robot that doesn’t do shit. Figure is looking at 100-150k robot if built at scale, so u less they revised this estimate down drastically, what does a 20k robot do?
Well from this article I got the feeling the intended customer is industrial, not domestic. There's a lot of talk about how much a robot can lift versus hydraulic systems.
But I do also get the feeling that maybe Musk is just off his rocker and everyone else is copying what he does just in case he actually a genius
What evidence is there than industrial customers want general purpose humanoid robots over specialist ones?
There are plenty of positions were you have normal humans doing only a handful of tasks.
Checkout youtube on some chinese factories building like rice cooker and co. They have like 10-50 stops were one person only does like 1-5 things. Putting tape on, screwing something together etc.
I can see it as the last niche were the real big specialised and for purpose build robots are just not economicly
Musk has a very spiky character sheet. He is, in some dimensions, extraordinarily stupid, and I believe his ego makes a lot of big decisions. But something that might fall into the genius category is this: building things speculatively, primarily for the capabilities that you anticipate developing along the way, the nature of which are not yet known. But this increases your odds of having capabilities in the future that others lack, which looks a lot like a venture capital oeuvre.
To condense that, i might use a phrase like "blind-buying future option space"
Whether Musk deserves that credit is a moot point. I haven't trusted a thing he's said for years, and studying him for revealed intent can't get past "clown on drugs" without violating occam's razor.
They’re meant to clean your house, do your dishes, do your laundry, some gardening probably mowing your lawn and weeding. The possibilities are endless. It would 100% be worth at least $50,000 if it could do those things even 85% of the time.
The industry has a lot more money and easier use cases.
A robot like Optimus will not be a household robot for years to come. Why? If it falls, it will crash into some kind of glas from doors to windows etc. If it falls it might crash a human or animal underneath it. It might trip on a toy or stairs and crash into a wall.
I would love to have one robot but 50k? Who buys something for 50k? A normal person has to save up for a car and they need a car, for a household robot you need a lot of income to justify 50k. You will buy a car, flat, kitchen, etc. before you will buy a 50k robot.
10k perhaps is more realistic but than it has to be good. Like if you are alone, I don't think you will recognize normal housework as such a bad thing that you will buy a robot for a small flat.
For families, the robot has to be very good and really save.
If you have a partner not working, you might not be able to afford a robot and that perosn has time anyway to do all of that.
I can imagine having a robot for elder people and some remote service using these robots to do stuff for them but 50k is costly.
I'm not bullish on household robots for the next 10 years at all. Now you have another problem though, if they become really good in an industry setting, guess who will lose their jobs? yeah exactly the people whou should be able to buy these.
>A robot like Optimus will not be a household robot for years to come. Why? If it falls, it will crash into some kind of glas from doors to windows etc. If it falls it might crash a human or animal underneath it. It might trip on a toy or stairs and crash into a wall.
Strong disagree here we have plenty of machinery that we use that could be very dangerous if it fails, but they just slap a disclaimer on it and that’s usually enough the same is going to be done here.
In a normal household? Like what?
I have nothing compared to a 60kg robot who is moving around in my flat. Even in my daily life the only thing i can come up with, is a car.
Nontheless, industry pays more, faster, has more generic basic use cases and higher incentive to buy.
We literally pipe in flammable gases into kitchens, and then burn them there. These fail a lot all the time. Clogged heaters kill people because of carbon monoxide poisoning and electric coil heaters burn down apartments. Pressure cookers are basically controlled bombs. People have hundred pound pitbulls in their houses and even though we trust them they’re technically inherently unpredictable. There are a lot of dangerous things in our homes that we accept and build guard rails around a robot doesn’t seem that much crazier.
The stove is in one place, it produces heat, we train everyone that this is dangerous including our kids (firefighters showed me in 1th grade what an oil fire is).
We added stinky smell to gas.
Pressure cookers are only used by 1-2 people in the kitchen and not that regularly. But a friend of mine actually burned himself through the steam when he opened it up.
The pitbull things is dangerous. But they do'nt run through window and if they fall down stairs, they won't kill someone.
Look we will see how long it will take but i do not think we will see household robots soon. Im confident we will see them in the industry on mass before we see them in real households in relevant numbers.
There's zero chance I'll let a robot into my home to do my dishes when I know it'll be filming and audio recording 24/7 and sending that data directly back to Elon who will mine the feed and sell that data or use it against me every chance he gets. It's so much worse that the idiots who bug their own homes with "smart" assistants and ring cameras. You'd have to be crazy to let someone else's drone into your house.
Give me a similar device that I own and control, one without access to the internet, and I'll be happy to let a robot do my dishes, but otherwise such robots are strictly for fools (and sadly there are plenty of those).
THIS!
An autonomous robot that I program, I update (or don't) as and when I see fit, and does not need to connect to the internet or to anything, for $20k that does dishes, or helps me lift things at the shop, and returning data to it's maker IF AND ONLY IF, AND WHEN, I CHOOSE (or dont)? Great - take my money!
An ambulatory machine with eyes, ears, touch sensors, continually watching, listening, observing, mapping, recording everything it encounters in my home and/or shop and sending all that data back to it's manufacturer "for improved user experience"? HELL, NO!
The latter, supplied by Musk, even if he's paying me $1 million per year to 'host' it? I'll buy the equipment to destroy it as soon as it comes onto my property.
I don't think there is any supplier I could even begin to trust when they require a connection. Can anyone here think of one?
Cars that nobody buys replaced by robots that nobody buys
The best selling car in the world in 2025 was the Tesla Model Y, with a little over 1 million sold. ~350k total vehicles have been sold in 2026 as of April.
https://www.focus2move.com/world-car-market/, https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-first-quarter-2026-...
Actually i think it was the RAV 4 and BYD sold more EVs than Tesla.
Tesla only selling 4 models makes for difficult comparisons with companies like Toyota that sell several cars in overlapping segments.
The limit to EVs makes it fine (if excl. PHEVs). If BYD/Toyota have more models that is fine for the comparison. That is the point.
No, it does not make the comparison unbiased, because other companies, like BYD, may sell in a month as much EV cars as Tesla sells in a quarter, but they are distributed over diverse models, so one Tesla model may indeed sell more than any other model, without this reflecting the EV market share.
E.g. for BYD the 2026 target is over 1.5 million exported EV cars, with more than that produced for the internal Chinese market. During 2025, BYD exported more than 1 million EV cars, besides the production for the Chinese market.
The whole story about Tesla until 2025 was that they had the #1 selling model across any category: BEVs, PHEVs, and ICEs included. So it’s absolutely correct to note when that model’s sales no longer exceed those of a PHEV or ICE model, and it’s always in the context of how competitors choose to segment their offerings.
The core truth is that the popularity of buying a new Tesla has slipped significantly relative to competitors.
Only 4 models and still slipped from #1.
> Tesla Model Y
This is the second paragraph of the article:
> Model S and Model X production is over. Roughly 600 vehicles remain in inventory worldwide. The Fremont factory lines that built those cars
That's the 'other models' section on your second link:
https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-first-quarter-2026-...
My point stands.
The Fremont plant doesn’t make Ys, only Xs and Ss. And no one is buying the latter two.
Yeah but the OP offhand comment is a political soundbite that is technically half true and half prediction but misleading.
why bother figuring if something is true or false if we can simply call it political
Man come one not only is this the wrong analysis because Tesla only has one single model, they literaly build 50k cars which are not sold
50.000
My guess, they made them for pushing the Space X IPO. The same why he did this weird Keynote last week with this megafantasic dyson sphere and whatnot vision.
And I find it very weird tbh that it still even sells. Whenever you see a Tesla, its always the same car.
Unbelievable. Really shows how much of a bubble the internet is - Elon was the internets most hated man in 2025 yet Tesla sold like hotcakes
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Who is this "nobody" that bought more than half a million Teslas last year?
Who bought half a million Model S and Model X?
What kind of weird question is that? Do you not count Ford's F-series trucks in their sales numbers? Guess they are not very popular, either.
Second paragraph on the article:
> Model S and Model X production is over. Roughly 600 vehicles remain in inventory worldwide. The Fremont factory lines that built those cars
So yeah, cars that nobody buys.
One million robots to be manufactured in a year - one million robots which will likely be obsolete within five years (if that, I wouldn't be surprised if they're dead on arrival).
I don't know the figures for Earth's resources and their sustainability, so this may be a naive take, but I'm always left with the impression that these organisations want to speedrun the depletion of the planet.
You're anthropomorphising humanity.
Humans are sapient; industrialists and politicians have intent. But the incentive structure is an evolved system, and that's what selects these people. The result is that humanity, collectively, is amoebic. We are probably doomed to expand until we have a population crash or until another species arises to keep us in check.
More customers for the related Space exploration company.
Assuming they don't starve to death before insert-space-company can get them to the next Goldilocks planet.
The next step is just selling tickets to that flight in advance as a preorder. One could call it roadster preorders because of the difficult road ahead
> Yesterday, Tesla confirmed that Model S and Model X production is over
Did the the 3 and the Y completely cannibalise sales of S and X, or what's going on here?
I somehow misread the title as "Robot cat ears" and was quite confused when scrolling through the article.
So, what will be the capabilities of those robots after leaving the production line? And not promised after..
Anyone knows?
Really looking forward to seeing Optimus and what the timeline actually will be.
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