quote from Tesla latest earnings call, at 04 min..
"Because we're really moving into a future that is based on autonomy and so if you're interested in buying a Model S and X, now would be the time to order it, because we expect to wind down S and X production in next quarter and basically stop production of Model S and X next quarter. We'll obviously continue to support the Model S and X programs for as long as people have the vehicles, but we're gonna take the Model S and X production space in our Fremont factory and convert that into an Optimus factory, which will... with the long-term goal of having 1 million units a year of Optimus robots in the current S/X space in Fremont."
I genuinely don't understand, is the Optimus real? Isn’t there a like 10 to 1 ratio of Boston Robotics demos to Optimus demos? Has it ever been verified to actually do anything?
Boston Robotics robots are over there doing backflips and the only thing I’ve seen Optimus do is in extremely controlled environments.
I second this. Is there anyone who actually believes Optimus is going to be a success and has any sort of data to back that up?
I'm not in robotics, but I look at humanoid robots and, while incredible examples of engineering know-how, they seem to be a long way from useful in commercial applications. Am I jhust ignorant of their true value? Seems like all I ever see them doing is parkour.
Optimus could do really well if they had all the smartest robotics engineers working on it...
But it seems that ~80% of the smart people I know refuse to work for Musk on principle, and the remaining 20% prefer to work somewhere that pays well (Musk companies do not).
End result is he has a team of mediocre engineers working on it which is why their demos appear years behind some competitors like Boston dynamics and Unitree.
I think the same is happening to Tesla cars (not much innovation in the last few years).
Elon's hype level over Optimus practically off the charts. He has profit projections that have Optimus be effectively all of GDP in the future. Say what you want about Elon, but he does put his money where his mouth is and I believe he will try to manufacture robots. Also, the S and X models are old and their market segment is heavily saturated at this point so it makes sense for Tesla to exit those model lines.
Optimus is also a bit of a "squirrel!" for the market that he likes to talk about whenever sales figures at Tesla start flagging. Meme stocks only work as long as people still believe in infinite exponential growth.
> Also, the S and X models are old and their market segment is heavily saturated at this point so it makes sense for Tesla to exit those model lines.
Car companies typically invest in new models in the same segment in order to stay competitive with the other car companies.
Is there any evidence there is any kind of market a humanoid robot at all?
(Regardless, from what I've seen, the Chinese will own this segment too.)
Right. How many people actually want a remotely monitored robot collecting personal data, that will likely also require a hefty monthly subscription?
And he's talking about an eventual price point of $30K a robot. So a bit high for early adopter middle class folks who are just curious.
There is some value in producing a lot of solid hardware, but nowhere even close to Tesla's absurd valuation.
I think they are perfectly capable of writing software to drive the robot - if Musk doesn't stick his head in like he did with LIDAR/FSD and impose some stupid requirement that handicaps the product.
But the whole shtick with Optimus is that they aren't writing software. It's supposed to be all LLM training so when you buy your robot you can give it orders like "do the dishes", "clean the gutters", "dig a backyard pool for me", or "build me another Optimus" and you can go off to do whatever while it completes the task.
Elon thinks it would be too expensive to have to write code for every task you might ask one of these to do, they want it to be fully autonomous.
Their engineers aren't behind keyboards typing C++, they're wearing VR headsets and feeding the data to a LLM, although even that is probably too specific for Elon's long term plans. Obviously he doesn't want to have to have people repeat actions hundreds of times before the dumb robots figure it out. Especially for "simple" tasks like serving drinks at press events.
But how would we evaluate "perfectly capable" without evidence, there's just been no evidence they've done anything so far right? Am I missing something? I guess looking closer it was only announced four years ago. But it seems like it's only been smoke and mirrors so far.
And China is likely to do to Tesla robots what they’ve done to the cars. I assume the bans will be incoming, because the US can’t have millions of Chinese kung fu robots sitting about pouring tea, waiting for critical mass.
https://youtu.be/gfJTX1Y0ynM
Optimus is a longer horizon promise that allows Elon to keep kicking the "can of untold profits" down the road. Tesla car hype has fizzled, robotaxi is currently fizzling, so the new promise is optimus. Elon sells dreams and visions, not really products.
Tesla absolutely cannot keep it's valuation without a promise for it's delusional stock holders or actual massive revenue streams.
Accuracy.
> Elon sells dreams and visions, not really products.
Do you want me to pull out a list, or can you google it for yourself?
Sure, he also sells dreams and visions. Sure, all the dumb money is going to regret it once the smart money dumps on them.
Yet, claiming he doesn't really sell products (and or services, which he also does) is absolutely ridiculous.
I think that the point of the comment was not that he does not sell any products, but that he predominantly sells dreams & visions, if you use TSLA market cap as a guide. If you look strictly at the products he sells, the valuation of his company ought to be somewhere between 50% and 100% of Ford. By that analysis it seems like TSLA is about 97% hopes and dreams.
This it could be the real strategy. Because the more credible promises you make, the more valuable is your company. If sales of cars are spiraling down, then what promises remain there to keep valuation ?
The hype to fizzle cycle is shortened with each new dream and approaching zero, which is the true value of the company.
You are correct to be suspicious, but don't be impressed by backflips. Those are just for show. Doing "real work" is the test. As is doing real work for a compelling price.
So no parts when they are eventually needed!
Do manufacturers tend to pump out parts for old models after they are superseded by newer ones?
Yes, because they make money selling the parts, and there are warranty requirements that are hard to fulfill if you don't have parts.
Often after a decade or so, companies will sell the designs to dedicated parts makers. For example, Volvo has Volvo Classic Parts, and they even have a reman program, and will even 3D print parts not available. Mercedes has Mercedes Classic Parts. Chrysler has MOPAR, etc.
Here you can browse parts for a 1968 Mercedes SEL: https://classicparts.mbusa.com/c-280sel-223
If you are a business, the costs of designing the part has already been paid, if you can sell the design and get some royalty payments, why wouldn't you turn those old plans into cash?
And of course there is a huge industry of Chinese clones and other suppliers that will provide replacement parts that are not genuine.
Be prepared to pay, though :)
It’s still possible to order new and original parts for SAAB models, almost 20 years after they went under. The spare parts are made by a separate company which is still going.
IIRC, by law manufacturers are required to maintain parts and service for vehicles for a minimum of 10 years. Whether superseded, discontinued, whatever.
But what happens when Musk decides the law doesn't apply to him...
The law will adapt, same as it adapted for OpenAI/Anthropic when they started doing piracy to train their LLMs
Nvidia started funding piracy sites too; https://torrentfreak.com/nvidia-contacted-annas-archive-to-s...
If you are billionaire+ it's "legal", and if not at least financially worth it + almost never punishment on management.
If you are worth xx'000 you personally go to jail, you get into very big troubles, and get ruined.
No? The law is just the law. But until someone actually gets a judge to rule that what they did is illegal...
Buying a 30M USD mansion to the daughter of the judge is going to fix that.
In a banana republic.
Do you actually look at the current US landscape and think “the law is just the law” for the rich and poor alike?
Getting a judge to rule on something is also part of that “the law is just the law” and it’s obvious that judges are more willing to rule on cases for the poor and powerless than the rich and connected.
This is an urban legend. Safety defects have to be remedied by the manufacturer for a period of 10 years, but that remedy doesn't have to involve replacement parts.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/interpretations/timereplcepartpollak12...
I agree, looks like you are correct. It seems that it is just one of those things that manufacturers have agreed to do voluntarily, in the absence of a specific law. I imagine they have calculated that the loss of goodwill from abandoning a product quickly would outweigh the cost savings (especially since there is so much sharing of parts that keeping a few specialty components on hand is not going to move the needle much).
It’s not about goodwill. Selling parts is simply a good business. The margins at authorized dealers are crazy.
It depends. Lots of parts are shared by multiple models or even companies so it may be the case that nobody has made for example a new water pump specifically for your car for 10 years, but the design is the same as the 2025 something else so you can just use that one. There are also warehouses with older parts that can last for years. You can also pull replacements from junked cars that have not been crushed yet. In some cases third parties manufacture replacement parts when the supply runs out, but those replacements are often of poor quality and sometimes are only vaguely shaped correctly and require extra work to actually fit on your vehicle. Keeping old cars running is a challenge, especially if the car was obscure when it was new.
Yes. Auto manufacturers tend to have contracts with different tiered automotive suppliers that have heavy-hitting production lines for current vehicles, and also maintain a 'service' department where these style of products are produced. The tools for producing these parts have really good lifetimes, and you can take the tooling and put it into whatever mold machine you have written the program for, or set it up for another machine.
In my experience service departments are basically a large warehouse with a small set of assembly machines running at any given time where you are setting up time to produce some random part for a day or two and then change to something else, whereas the real production assembly lines are designed to produce as many of X part for the latest car as possible.
Several of the old mold machines where I worked that made parts for this service business ran DOS, with PCMCIA cards to load programs. I helped a process engineer get these PCMCIA cards working on his contraband laptop running win98 (obviously banned from the network) because we could never get them working with anything newer. This was in like 2021.
A lot of parts are refurbished too. Transmissions, differentials for example.
Their subcontractors do.
For traditional vehicles, there's typically a large marketplace of first-party and third-party auto parts for vehicles going back several years. Depends on the make and model, but usually yes.
That said, Tesla is a very unusual automaker in most senses and I'm not sure what their aftermarket parts situation is.
This is a concern for me not only for the Tesla but for the new Chinese manufacturers. When I've talked to owners of these cars (in other countries), the consensus seems to be "you use it for 5 years and then throw it away". Not because the car has poor build quality, but because there aren't local mechanics that can service it, it's impossible to find documentation such as torque specs and service procedures for anything but trivial stuff you'd find in an owner's manual, and it is very hard to find parts.
It seems like an incredible waste to throw away a car after 5 years.
A big part of what I look for in a car is a long lasting manufacturer that publishes to end users technical and repair information, including part numbers and procedures, together with a healthy third party part supplier ecosystem and independent repair infrastructure.
That doesn't mean that information needs to be available for free or that the parts themselves are cheap -- Volvo parts are not cheap -- but they are available and the information, engine specifications, repair manuals and workshop manuals are available.
If you don't have that, I'm not interested in buying the car. A car is far too expensive to treat as a disposable consumer good. I'm worried that more and more, manufacturers are locking down their systems, putting information behind paywalls where you can't make your own backup copy, and doing things like adding DRM to their parts to prevent indy shops from working on them.
Wait, wait, don't tell me, let me guess: "The robots will make their own replacement parts," stated Musk.
So Tesla abandons cars ? Keeps only the Cybertruck ?
No, they'll still be making the Model 3.
They'll also keep making Model Y, the most sold car model in the world.
They are going to have a hard time keeping it that way in 2026, since they were just barely ahead of both #2 and #3 (Toyota Corolla and Toyota RAV4), and as far as I know Toyota hasn't done anything to annoy a large fraction of the demographics that have bought the most of their cars in recent years.
* As claimed by Musk.
Thanks
Autonomy or robots? Because autonomy very much still includes (personal) transportation?