Elon Musk had an interview today with Ron Baron.
Here are some highlights:
* Elon confirms that Tesla will make a lower priced car. Based on previous statements, this will likely be a China designed $20k-35k smaller EV vehicle. This would likely also be a human driven and robotaxi platform
* Elon repeated his expectation that Robotaxi will make vehicles 5 times more valuable by driving five times more.
* Teslabot development will be successful and will replace human labor.
* Ron Baron notes that Tesla spends $7 billion to make each Gigafactory and they each produce $15 billion per year in vehicles when fully ramped.
* A fully and rapidly reusable rocket will be transformational and will enable humanity to become multiplanetary.
00:01 Intro and Elon’s age
01:17 Why Still working
04:40 Patents
06:15 Next Tesla Cars
06:45 Autonomy
08:45 Tesla Manufacturing
14:00 Elon Living in the Factory and Working when Rich
19:00 ELons Memory
19:40 Starship and the Moon
27:27 Motivation for being a multiplanetary species
31:10 Twitter
31:50 Twitter Price
33:30 Meta, Tick Tock, Twitter advantage
41:45 New work load with twitter, Twitter new management and twitter potential
47:35 Tesla Delivery Wave and Q3
49:25 Tesla Mining and Glencore
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
The implication here is that that erstwhile “kei-car” market overlaps the short to medium range robotaxi market. Nissan recently had to stop taking orders for their new kei-class EV because the demand was so overwhelming that deliveries were getting pushed out beyond a year, and this was for a japanese domestic market only EV. So for the right markets, the demand for kei-class cars exists, thus a potential “anchor” customer market to get the ball rolling for a compact car platform.
Of note, this is where brand value may apply. The chinese certainly were capable of low cost compact EV’s, but the lack of overseas brand platform means they are locked into a domestic market. Any small EV maker going global has the underlying problem of brand image (they either have none from being a new maker, or start with a negative image due to their manufacturing origin). Tesla, starting from higher up on the price hierarchy, can to some extent afford to dilute their brand image for a compact car, provided it has access to higher end features like FSD.
Getting blue and prioritized for 8$ is just pay to win.
Any major player will spend 8000 on their bot army, and then the sane people are drowned out.
Brian, you have been researching comment systems for years, isn’t there systems with poster reputation built in?
In my experience that always gets weaponized by some group, possibly consisting mostly of bots, doing organized downvoting.
Human driven are not robot axis platforms they are just cars. GM will drive millions every day in robo taxis before Tesla builds a cheaper EV.
A vehicle with easily removable plug and play driver controls that’s fully drive-by-wire is a universal product. It can suit markets for right or left hand controls or no-controls Robotaxi depending on the rules, regulations and market demand.
FSD is a driver assist system never intended to be autonomous, people are gullible and Elon feeds off of this ,like Hitler said, tell the big lie,no bigger lie than FSD,which Tesla does not even pretend to be autonomous to the California DMV.
GM’s Cruise is already driving people ,for pay in SF,GM spends a tremendous amount of money on this, which Tesla refuses to do.It is simply cheaper for Elon to repeat the same lie he’s told since 2016,it will work by next year.