I fail to see the trillions business that Musk and all the analysts parroting for robotaxis. It’s a stupid idea built on fantasies. Here’s my argument:
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Every single Tesla owner I know won’t lend out their cars. The lending out is the stupidest idea ever. Tesla will have to run their own fleet which will increase costs, maintenance etc.
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Percentage of people willing to take a robotaxi daily are low; like Uber.
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Costs are astronomical when you add up all your daily trips. I take approximately 8-10 trips a day, sometimes more on the weekends. For example: $7+per trip. Add up all your daily roundtrips: commute , school, activities , leisure, Home Depot, Starbucks, McDonald’s, mall, family visits, etc. $60-80 per day= $1500+ per month and that’s assuming every trip is $7. Why not just own a car at that price?
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At best; it’s will be an Uber like service with limited use cases: Traveling, airports, designated drivers etc.
Their car and energy businesses will be fine but the trillions robotaxi business has always been a fantasy.
Robotaxis will not be a trillion dollar business
byu/2CommaNoob inwallstreetbets
Posted by 2CommaNoob
49 Comments
Robotaxis won’t be a business
I’m not trusting a company ran by that moron to drive me around when I can pay a perfectly fine human to drive me, I’ll gladly pay $3 more for an Uber or Lyft rather than support that fuck
Anyone still believing the bullshit Elon spouts really is beyond help at this point. But there is still money to be made options trading
I just want a Persuadertron with my robotaxi.
Then short it
Go on I dare you, short Musk
How much is Waymo making with their service?
What are you doing on a daily basis that requires 8-10 daily car trips?
I’m genuinely curious, average joe like me has 2-3, you need 3 times that
If legit full self driving actually happens. This is how I see it working.
You pay a monthly subscription, instead of buying a car. You pay a few 100 gbp/usd. And you can just call a car to you whenever you need it.
This would crush the sales of new cars.
But I weirdly think the sales of smaller car companies that make combustion engine cars for the track will go up.
Buy the rumor, sell the news. You know how these algos work on meme stocks like TSLA.
since they have to firstly undercut the competition for the first few years to build a customer base, won’t turn a profit till around 5-10 years from now….
Adjusting for the value of the company 7 years in the future the estimated potential value of a truly self driving car company would be 300 billions to 500 billions, depends if it succeed or not.
That’s where WEF comes in. You won’t own your own car and won’t have a choice.
As cool as it would be to see it succeed, i doubt it will personally. Hope im wrong though
Waymo looks nice
The money is in freight shipping. Once the big rigs are autonomous, that’s when you’re too late and you missed the boat. There’s no money in Taxi’s, not in the United States anyways
I desperately want this to be real because there will absolutely be people who buy them thinking they’re going to get rich letting the car drive around at 3am unattended while they sleep and I can’t wait to laugh at them when they wake up in the morning to go to work and walk out to their car only to find their back seat stained with cum, smelling of piss or has a homeless drug addict sleeping in it.
ill just bike everywhere for free lol
You take 8-10 car trips a day? Where TF are you going? To work, home from work? Maybe out for dinner and back?
OP Starts the post with: I FAIL.
And that is the only correct statement OP made.
Your error in thinking is that you think the cost of a robotaxi ride will be the same as a Uber ride. 75% of a Uber ride goes to the driver. So your 1500$ could go down by probably 50% in 10-20 years, if not more as a robo taxi driver could cover the shift of 3 taxi drivers with one single car with no additional costs. And in 20-30 years your robo taxi costs will probably be cheaper than owning a car yourself.
Haha 8-10 trips a day. You’d definelty be better off having your own vehicle
It wont when they already got people to agree to buy the car and drive for below minimum wage while making the fucking car payments.
Ok ok hear me out……. 👐 Computers
you are wrong, wrote a deep dive on my recent newsletter: [https://thefinancialengineer.arjunlohan.com/p/odd-couple-waymo-uber-join-forces](https://thefinancialengineer.arjunlohan.com/p/odd-couple-waymo-uber-join-forces)
Oh you’re a genius!! Good thing you know better than us!
How much are Uber, Lyft, and yellow cab worth combined? 200b. That’s the TAM. If Elon captured all of this market, with 0 competition and no need for capital outlay, it would add 200b to the market cap for TSLA.
That puts Tesla, for me, overvalued by 500b or so if they had already achieved the above. Which they haven’t. And never will.
This is a very bad take. Regardless of what you think of tesla (robotaxi doesn’t have to be tesla anyway), robotaxi is genius.
1- You don’t need lending for a robotaxi business. Sure, that’s an idea that can be explored for people who want to make money out of their car, but you can have dedicated fleets of robotaxis, owned by the company.
2 – Robotaxi will be significantly cheaper than uber, because it doesn’t need a driver, and that’s where most of the cost is. Lower price = more users. Also, not everyone is ‘MURICAN. I don’t own a car. I work from home. I take an uber whenever I need to travel inside the city. I would love robotaxis and would take them all the time. As things stand now, it’s cheaper for me to uber than to own a car already.
3 – See point number 2. Cost per mile will be MUCH lower with a robotaxi.
4 – At best, it will be like a MUCH better, MUCH cheaper uber, which will allow it to be much less limited in terms of use cases. Maybe I won’t take an uber for a 100 mile trip now because it’s expensive, but if the cost per mile drops significantly, it becomes a viable and appealing option.
All in all, once you have self driving cars (and this WILL happen sooner or later) robotaxis are a given. It’s obvious. You just hate Musk (perfectly justified, he’s an idiot) and Tesla (less justified other than the musk factor, but sure). Robotaxi itself is a great idea and opportunity. Try removing tesla from the equation, think about it as Uber without drivers at 1/3 or 1/4 the cost. How about then?
Robo taxis will be a multi trillion dollar business. The only question is when, and what companies will win at it. We’re still very early, obviously.
Storage is the bigger play here. And charging.
Tesla should be putting more effort there
But Musk just fired the charging team. And leaned to storage team
I’d never loan out my car for some random ass person to ride in it. Not only that, id have to pay more for insurance and pay for FSD… I’m not seeing it
Such a US take. I don’t own a car since I don’t need one daily at all, which is quite common in countries with developed infrastructure. It is not made for people like you that don’t use other means of transportation and own a car.
I guess it depends on the price, but what we can assume is that it will be cheaper version of Uber. Does that sound like seomthing that could work? Yes it could definitely be huge.
There are several question marks regarding this tho:
Will Tesla be the first to succesfully implement this worldwide? We don’t know that.
When will it be out?
How will the laws worldwide work regarding this?
I mean, just assuming Tesla will be first out and that they will sucessfully implement this is such a huge speculation that I don’t know where to begin. Buying Tesla on this kind of speculation is insane.
1. It won’t matter if anyone is willing to lend out cars. If you have a working robo taxi it will be profitable for the company to build and run anyway.
2. People already ride Waymo every day. If there is a working robo taxi, the number of people willing to take it will rise fast.
3. Costs will not be astronomical. The main cost of trips now is paying the driver and paying for gas. If there is a working robo taxi EV these two costs will be basically eliminated. When there is no driver, the operational cost of the car is exactly the same when you own it or if a 3rd party owns it.
4. Since the operational cost will be the same as owning, it will open up many more possibilities.
‘Robotaxi’ = free cars.
Not sure I want my car to have strangers cum all over it and drive my family around.
People will definitely book it as a cheap hotel.
Yeah this has Metaverse written all over it.
Your arguments rest on a variety of assumptions that robotaxis arguably nullify.
Costs: removing a labour component massively changes theoretical costs.
Currently unaccounted for costs: driving your own vehicle isn’t without cost. You the driver are giving up time to drive the vehicle that could otherwise be used doing something else. (Reading that thing for work that you said you’d read but can’t between work-active commuting-childcare-errands.
Inflation forces productivity gain. Phase change automation forces human productivity gains. Productive humans will gladly dedicate time to that which keeps them productive if they don’t have to allocate it to otherwise unproductive tasks.
You take 8 to 10 trips a day?
I agree. Stupid business idea
I own a Tesla and don’t do Uber on the side. I would also never let my car be used in a robotaxi fleet. The extra money I could be making doesn’t offset the hassle of wear/tear and strangers using my car.
Oh. You’re very wrong.
Any parent with teens, anyone with an aging parent, anyone with mobility issues, anyone who wants the safest transport for their precious cargo… think of long-haul truck drivers who can only drive for certain hours at a time, or couriers and mail delivery… these would be able to run 24/7 without overtime pay, workers comp insurance, and on and on.
Game. Changer.
(Not a current investor in TSLA)
If you all were around during horse and buggy days we’d still be in horse and buggy days!
Totally agree, puts on TSLA for robotaxi. Who would want strangers to puke (at best) into your car for a couple bucks of profit?
You are legit just making the argument that YOU should buy a car. Robotaxis would cut out the labor cost of all those trips you just described. And, I would be willing to bet that Tesla is trying to own most of the cars, and just have rideshare owners at peak times.
This is like when people said music will always be on CDs. 💿 people want to physically hold their music. Or Airbnb is nuts, people won’t lend out their houses. Even if it seems unlikely everything evolves, or becomes obsolete . If they show a lower accident rate, what will that do for insurance companies?
OP – One thing you’re missing is where our world eventually needs us to go. As humans, we need to consume less. So many of us own cars that aren’t being used to their full capacity. Many cars sit parked much more often than they are driven. Eventually, this will change. My prediction is, overtime, many less people will own cars and most people will ‘get around’ by using ride services. This will greatly reduce the sheer number of cars we’ll need to produce.
We humans consume a lot. This will eventually change.
Yeah it will…. if it ever can get automated it will.
I’ve asked a few of my Tesla owning friends if they’d let their over priced golf carts be used to transport around strangers. Theyre all weird OCD people and said no – that there is my comprehensive analysis on why Tesla is going sub $80 soon
Amazing to think how many lives it will save if these robotaxis were lined up outside clubs at 3am
So here’s what you do:
Don’t invest in it if you don’t believe in it.
You’re welcome.
Robo taxis will win eventually. Not a Musk fanboy, and actually a gear head, but the writing is in the wall. Automated vehicles win because insurance will be astronomical for human drivers once the statistics favor the computers.
When that occurs, there’s your trillion dollars. I’m not smart enough to guess the tipping point, but I can’t imagine it’s more than 10-15 years out.
A few hundred USD /month for a car you don’t own will not fly for most consumers (maybe any).
If it’s like $40/month with up charges for express pick up or roomier rides, then I think it would be feasible.
For Robotaxi to work as Elon envisions
-all world’s public transport must be replaced by fleets of RT.
-the “owner” of a RT will have to take the costs of energy and maintenance.
Why stop there, with this logic, we don’t need cars and transport anymore. We’ll just ‘human centipede train’ or bounce on testicles to where we need to be!
1. They will. It’ll be in the terms of service.
2. It won’t be optional.
3. High costs mean high revenue.
4. If they replace airports it’ll be even higher revenue.