Hey Everyone,
Elon Musk, is not okay.
Coving AVs (“autonomous vehicles”) has been extremely disappointing over the last decade, but none more infuriating than Tesla’s FSD. These “AI bets” are also a warning for the future. Don’t trust the billionaire class.
Make no mistake, Tesla’s FSD story was a marketing ploy and likely one of the biggest frauds of our generation in high-tech consumer products. AVs or cars with autonomous vehicle driving capabilities was an “AI” dream much more difficult in reality to implement. I think the last 15 years of failed promises can attest to that.
Some AI stories take on a magnitude of their own over time. Tesla’s promises around full-self driving or FSD, is such a story. While full-autonomy would be level 5 ordinarily, Tesla’s “FSD” naming is controversial, because vehicles operating under FSD remain at Level 2 automation (with some features of Level 3) and are therefore not “fully self-driving” and require active driver supervision.
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Covering emerging tech across multiple publications, including in semiconductors, quantum computing and AI startups, has taught me a lot.
In case you are new to all of this and how the internet is full of misinformation in the news these days, a lot of hype is not factual. If technology news is mostly public relations (“PR”), as an industry its readership is in a stark decline because it’s not reporting in good faith. Elon Musk tries to criticize the mainstream media, but Tesla’s marketing around AI is probably the biggest fraud of the industry.
Elon Musk tries to criticize the mainstream media, but Tesla’s marketing around AI is probably the biggest fraud of the industry. It’s blatant false advertising.
Share this post if you tend to agree:
Tesla’s FSD costs have tripled since 2019, costing more than $15,000 in the United States. This pumped up, fraudulently, Tesla’s margins on selling vehicles, however Elon Musk’s promises did not come to fruition after many deadlines have passed.
In a recent April 5th Tweet on X, Elon Musk says full level 5 FSD is coming in August, 2024. Tesla’s stock so far in 2024 is down 33%. Now the “Robotaxi” promise is trending on X, and a lot of people don’t have good things to say about this.
Elon Musk has 180 million followers on X, but the narrative seems to be polluting the brand.
Elon Musk’s promises since 2016 haven’t come to fruition. Read it for yourself: Master Plan, Part Deux.
In 2024, we have to admit Baidu, Waymo and even others are well ahead of Tesla in autonomous driving and AV innovation.
Tesla keeps making unrealistic promises to its consumers and B2C base.
The graph below would indicate good things are coming? Right 🤔.
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Elon Musk’s Tweet for August 8th FSD “Robotaxi” on April 5th, 2024.
Read the comments.
I’ve asked the community what they think about this promise in this poll.
Elon Musk’s Friday Tweet
“What year?” one X user commented. That indeed is the problem with Elon Musk’s promises.
Back in 2016, Tesla CEO Elon Musk stunned the automotive world by announcing that, henceforth, all of his company’s vehicles would be shipped with the hardware necessary for “full self-driving.” I am indeed stunned eight years later that people even still buy Tesla vehicles given the track-record around FSD.
Cast your Vote: 🙋🏻♂️ (this poll has no “end date”)
Tesla and Apple get Outcompeted by China
Apple had to abandon its $7 Billion and 10 year investment in a smart car, dubbed Project Titan, and Tesla will now be under a new level of competition. It’s unrealistic to expect big things from Tesla given the macro environment.
Xiaomi releases electric car $4K cheaper than Tesla’s Model 3
Recently a consumer tech Chinese company, Xiaomi released its new vehicle.
Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun said the standard version of the SU7 will sell for 215,900 yuan ($30,408) in the country. China is producing EVs at a price to quality point that Western brands can no longer compete with in 2024. Lei claimed the standard version of the SU7 beat the Model 3 on more than 90% of its specifications.
Xiaomi is an innovative company, it’s not even a native EV player. It claims its SU7 would be the best sedan “under 500,000 yuan” ($69,328).
The Danger of Making “AI Promises” to Consumers
Tesla’s “Fall to Earth” is now a major tech (WSJ)story in 2024.
It highlights the dangers of making “AI promises” that you cannot keep.
It also demonstrates that Western “first-movers” don’t have a competitive moat against China for the most part in anything related to the “AI industry”.
So why do brands make “AI” promises at the scale of Tesla and its FSD failure? Becomes it’s so profitable to mislead consumers and shareholders. Elon Musk isn’t known for his integrity and ethics in business development. He might be among the most skilled scam artists of tech history. Elon Musk has gone from inspirational figure to con artist in a decade.
Now even VW is pulling out of China. Western brands are noticing they can’t “keep up” in China’s super-competitive EV market. That Chinese maker market is coming now to Europe, South America and SE Asia. Tariffs alone prevent them from dominating the American car market. The Americans lost the EV battle and Tesla’s decline might prove it.
Tesla’s Declining Share of the Global EV Market
Currently, (as of March, 2024), Tesla holds a 19.9% share of the market, closely followed by BYD with 17.1%.
Source: Visual Capital.
Do you notice anything unusual about this list? There is only one American brand and four Chinese brands in the top ten in EV sales globally. Three German brands, but they are also on the decline. There are more Chinese brands on the fringes of the top 10 that could move up.
Tesla is not an AI Company.
The myth that Tesla is a technology or AI company has been very crucial in the false promise marketing around the brand. Elon Musk’s weird response to this failure in 2024 is to poach AI talent from his Tesla to his own x.AI company.
This is because x.AI plans to do a huge $3 Billion funding round that would value the AI startup at $18 Billion. This is all more or less breaking news.
The problem is AI frauds have a habit of big declines. Elon Musk may have to make his SpaceX company, valued at around $180 billion as of early 2024, go public with an IPO to raise the funds needed to support his X Corp empire.
FSD was Too Good to be True
No conversation about self-driving can ignore Tesla. AVs were an AI promise that was too good to be true. It’s led to a lot of carnage in Silicon Valley. Apple has let go 600+ jobs related to its failed Project Titan, that wasted ten years in development. Google’s Waymo cut more than 100 jobs a little over one year ago.
Tesla’s FSD was the entire narrative of how Tesla was more than a car company. At one point Tesla seemed years ahead of the competition, but that gap has narrowed quickly in recent years and shows no signs of remaining significant.
Elon Musk’s False Claims
Musk has spoken about the robotaxi project for years, and that it could represent a major new business for the carmaker as investors grow wary of the company during a period of slowing growth.
In 2015, Elon Musk told shareholders that Tesla’s cars would achieve “full autonomy” within three years.
In 2016, he said Tesla would able to send one of its cars on a cross-country drive without requiring any human intervention by the end of the following year.
Tesla still has yet to deliver a robotaxi, autonomous vehicle or technology that can turn its cars into “level 3” automated vehicles.
In a push for end-of-quarter sales, Musk recently mandated that all sales and service staff install and demo FSD for customers before handing over the keys.
The desperation at Tesla is very noticeable in 2024. But has its time run out?
How do Tech Frauds Usually Turn out?
For Tesla that repeatedly and often claimed to be an AI company, things don’t look so good recently.
Sales are dropping. It’s cutting prices, and FSD has not panned out. It’s not just late, it may never arrive.
The AI hype around FSD and the reality have bifurcated and it’s hard seeing how the stock can get new legs after all the promises have run out.
In investor speak, it’s a brutal reality:
The number of cars Tesla sold in the first quarter missed Wall Street’s expectations by such a wide margin that it’s worth wondering how much of the electric vehicle giant’s demand problem is baked into the lofty expectations for its revenue and earnings growth over the next few years.
Everyone who (once) wanted a Tesla, likely already has one. Cheaper vehicles from China are coming. It’s literally for Musk, the worst case scenario for the future of Tesla. One that I like many others had predicted.
Tesla is losing the AI Talent War
Tesla is also no longer the cool kid around in the AI talent war.
OpenAI have also poached a lot of their talent.
Tesla Cannot Compete Against Low Cost EV VEhicles made in China
Tesla knows it cannot compete in low-cost vehicles. According to Reuters, (also breaking news), Tesla has canceled the long-promised inexpensive car that investors have been counting on to drive its growth into a mass-market automaker, according to three sources familiar with the matter and company messages seen by Reuters.
This is a major blow to shareholders and Tesla fans. If you cannot beat them, don’t even try. Elon Musk has since disputed the Reuters story entirely on his X platform.
Tesla’s FSD Isn’t Safe
Safety remains the paramount metric for autonomous vehicle deployment, yet there has to be industry consensus on how to adequately measure a robotic or human driver’s safety.
Tesla’s FSD safety record isn’t good. The AI fraud on consumers put passengers in serious danger, according to multiple reports.
In retrospect and I don’t put this lightly, Elon Musk’s automatic driving technology seems to be roughly an order of magnitude more deadly than human drivers.
Buying a Tesla it turns out is a major health and safety risk. If you thought Level 3 was Level 5, think again!
Tesla has had a rough start to 2024 amid sluggish demand, but I think the AI fraud component of FSD is a major theme as well that’s leading to less EV demand in the United States. Lack of charging stations, lack of good faith in advertising.
What do the Levels Mean?
Level 1 (Driver Assistance)
This is the lowest level of automation. The vehicle features a single automated system for driver assistance, such as steering or accelerating (cruise control). Adaptive cruise control, where the vehicle can be kept at a safe distance behind the next car, qualifies as Level 1 because the human driver monitors the other aspects of driving such as steering and braking.
Level 2 (Partial Driving Automation)
This means advanced driver assistance systems or ADAS. The vehicle can control both steering and accelerating/decelerating. Here the automation falls short of self-driving because a human sits in the driver’s seat and can take control of the car at any time. Tesla Autopilot and Cadillac (General Motors) Super Cruise systems both qualify as Level 2.
Level 3 (Conditional Driving Automation)
The jump from Level 2 to Level 3 is substantial from a technological perspective, but subtle if not negligible from a human perspective.
Level 3 vehicles have “environmental detection” capabilities and can make informed decisions for themselves, such as accelerating past a slow-moving vehicle. But―they still require human override. The driver must remain alert and ready to take control if the system is unable to execute the task.
For all intents and purposes between 2016 and 2023, Tesla’s FSD never really got beyond Level 3 in any meaningful and consistent or safe way.
Tesla’s Historical AI Fraud in a Nutshell
Musk’s repeated claims that autonomous vehicles were just “a year” or so away, are now part of Tesla lore. Tesla’s narrative was not based on actual facts.
I am not clear how Elon Musk’s conduct on this doesn’t have career ending lawsuits, probes and costly regulation. Perhaps because the U.S. were so inept at developing EV technology, Tesla was seen as their best bet. Apparently rule of law doesn’t apply in all circumstances.
That’s not a picture of Silicon Valley and BigAuto that’s very reassuring. If the US can’t build stuff in AI, maybe that’s a problem?
There have been hundreds of crashes involving Tesla vehicles using FSD and Autopilot and dozens of deaths. Major recalls, Government investigations, but Tesla’s stock somehow remained a symbol of American greed in the early 2020s. The cult of Tesla has almost been a cult of personality story for the inflated stock.
To recap, 2024 is the year of the robot, the birth of Agentic AI, more powerful SLMs and an incredible open-source LLM ecosystem, but Tesla didn’t even get most important AI goal right after nearly a decade of work.
Tesla vehicles are not self-driving. Even other car manufactures have caught up to Tesla’s so-called AI technology in autonomy. Tesla doesn’t use Lidar because it’s too expensive and bulky for consumer cars. This itself was once very controversial. But given multi-year FSD’s failure, Tesla is a brand in stark decline.
It’s time to throw Elon Musk in the “AI dumpster bin” of Tech Billionaire bros who have committed gigantic fraud. This is like committing future sin on future descendants. I would be (more) upset if this had not been entirely predictable.
Tesla is a doomed brand and Elon Musk’s credibility has waned significantly in the Generative AI era.
If your basic tech doesn’t work, you should probably not a be a $500 bn. company.
“Our dedicated robo taxi products will have quasi-infinite demand. The way we are gonna manufacture the robo taxi is itself revolutionary. It will be by far the highest units per hour of any vehicle production ever.” – Elon Musk.
I’m very excited to witness the downfall of Elon Musk, because like Sam Altman of OpenAI, he’s been a pawn of the Billionaire class. Tesla’s story is a warning of the decline of America in technology. It’s actually a prelude to America’s lost manufacturing and inability to execute in AI.
Tesla pretending it was an AI or technology company was never going to last.
The future of the robotaxi is very much in doubt.
Tesla delivered 386,810 vehicles worldwide in the first quarter, down 8.5% from the same period a year earlier. A lot lower than expectations:
Is this a sign of things to come for Tesla’s decline? It was the company’s lowest quarterly sales since the third period of 2022.
I’d be happy to ride in a Waymo or Apollo Go vehicle, but as a passenger I’d be reluctant to even enter a Tesla vehicle with what we know today.
Car rental company Hertz got it right in early 2024, dumping Teslas which were a nightmare for their company. High repair costs, poor resale value and a shockingly high accident rate, became a major problem to the bottom line.
What is the bottom line for FSD of Tesla? It was a grand deception. Should Tesla’s robotaxi be banned? Delivery tallies are a rough proxy for sales and it feels like Tesla is a loser in 2024. Consider this a warning if you own the stock $TSLA.
Elon Musk’s conduct recently resembles that of an AI prophet whose cult has been found out to be fraudulent. Tough times.
Robotaxis are coming, Waymo and Baidu’s Apollo are entering and arriving at more cities. For all the Teslas already sold, we have to be realistic with how long it will take and how safe and trustworthy Robotaxis need to be for even limited real-world operation and pilots to move forwards. By the time Tesla’s Robotaxi dream arrives, if it ever does, Tesla as a company will likely be irrelevant. Do your due diligence on AI promises and claims that AI will change everything.
The Robotaxi Arrival Date Dilemma
The term “artificial intelligence”was coined in 1955, we have decades more to go until we can be proud of this technology. GM has invested about $8 billion in Cruise since 2016. Countless Billions have been lost on this R&D and “AI Dream”. Let’s not hype or rush the future, the idea of owning a car that would work for you as a robotaxi part-time was one of the craziest ideas ever marketed to consumers.
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