I agree the market is pricing in a normal kind of expectation of “significant gains” but it’s not pricing in a major industry-changing “surprise” breakthrough announcement, which on the meta level should not be a surprise IMO, but rather the expectation. This company has ingredients in place for a massive upside. I admit I don’t know the facts here but I’m feeling pretty skeptical that BMW will have caught up to Tesla’s vehicles in 5 years or even shrunk the size of the lead, even given their currently much higher scale of car production capability.
Re autonomy, I heard on the Third Row Tesla podcast that driving a Tesla in the last couple months has noticeably better autonomy than ever and the fraction of time/situations when you can let the car drive smoothly for you without touching anything keeps increasing. They are also collecting a lot more data than Waymo, the highest quality kind of data you can get: real driving on real roads, and times when the driver disengaged autopilot.
Re BMW, I just don’t think that there’s that much of a lead on Tesla’s part. When I hear most consumers considering an electric car, BMW’s i3 is a very competitive alternative to the Model 3, and I’d bet that the gap is going to shrink, especially in the price realm. I also hear about others, so Tesla definitely doesn’t own the electric car space in consumer minds.
Re autonomy, the problem is that 95+% of the value comes from the switch to not having to pay attention to the road. Until you get there, the autonomy is just another feature, not something that is going to get everyone to buy a Tesla. Up to that point, more autonomy can actually be dangerous since consumers will pay less attention to the road even when the car can’t safely take over. I don’t think that Tesla is really getting closer to that point, since that will probably need to have a change in method rather than just marginal improvements.
It seems like all the competitor EVs today have two major downsides vs Tesla: Huge price increase for same battery range ($20k or more) which I guess supports your point that Tesla’s battery dominance is its main advantage, and the other EVs’ autonomy features are very lacking. I also suspect that their overall car OS / software platform is lacking the design and integration that Tesla has.
I think Tesla is pretty clearly making the best EVs right now but ya it’s hard to say how many years of lead they have and whether the lead is growing or shrinking.
Why are you convinced that Waymo is ahead of Tesla on autonomy?
From what I’ve heard online, Waymo has an approach to autonomy that seems more likely to lead to full autonomy than Tesla’s incremental improvement approach. Waymo is using a wider array of sensors than Tesla, and it seems likely that Tesla’s sensor array isn’t enough to handle full autonomy.
However, this is a weakly held belief since I only know things about it third hand, so on this specific issue I’m fairly neutral. That said, I think that everyone is far from the truly valuable autonomous car, so the value of the stock seems right (or too high) to me.
Specifically, Musk doesn’t think LiDAR will help, and Waymo and others use it heavily, and from what I know of how this stuff works, the more sensors the better, for now. (I wouldn’t be surprised if Musk turns out to be right in the long run, but also wouldn’t be surprised if Tesla starts quietly adding LiDAR.)
I agree the market is pricing in a normal kind of expectation of “significant gains” but it’s not pricing in a major industry-changing “surprise” breakthrough announcement, which on the meta level should not be a surprise IMO, but rather the expectation. This company has ingredients in place for a massive upside. I admit I don’t know the facts here but I’m feeling pretty skeptical that BMW will have caught up to Tesla’s vehicles in 5 years or even shrunk the size of the lead, even given their currently much higher scale of car production capability.
Re autonomy, I heard on the Third Row Tesla podcast that driving a Tesla in the last couple months has noticeably better autonomy than ever and the fraction of time/situations when you can let the car drive smoothly for you without touching anything keeps increasing. They are also collecting a lot more data than Waymo, the highest quality kind of data you can get: real driving on real roads, and times when the driver disengaged autopilot.
Re BMW, I just don’t think that there’s that much of a lead on Tesla’s part. When I hear most consumers considering an electric car, BMW’s i3 is a very competitive alternative to the Model 3, and I’d bet that the gap is going to shrink, especially in the price realm. I also hear about others, so Tesla definitely doesn’t own the electric car space in consumer minds.
Re autonomy, the problem is that 95+% of the value comes from the switch to not having to pay attention to the road. Until you get there, the autonomy is just another feature, not something that is going to get everyone to buy a Tesla. Up to that point, more autonomy can actually be dangerous since consumers will pay less attention to the road even when the car can’t safely take over. I don’t think that Tesla is really getting closer to that point, since that will probably need to have a change in method rather than just marginal improvements.
It seems like all the competitor EVs today have two major downsides vs Tesla: Huge price increase for same battery range ($20k or more) which I guess supports your point that Tesla’s battery dominance is its main advantage, and the other EVs’ autonomy features are very lacking. I also suspect that their overall car OS / software platform is lacking the design and integration that Tesla has.
I think Tesla is pretty clearly making the best EVs right now but ya it’s hard to say how many years of lead they have and whether the lead is growing or shrinking.
Why are you convinced that Waymo is ahead of Tesla on autonomy?
Waymo has legal permits for driving fully driverless while Tesla doesn’t. Waymo also invested a lot more years into building the tech then Tesla.
From what I’ve heard online, Waymo has an approach to autonomy that seems more likely to lead to full autonomy than Tesla’s incremental improvement approach. Waymo is using a wider array of sensors than Tesla, and it seems likely that Tesla’s sensor array isn’t enough to handle full autonomy.
However, this is a weakly held belief since I only know things about it third hand, so on this specific issue I’m fairly neutral. That said, I think that everyone is far from the truly valuable autonomous car, so the value of the stock seems right (or too high) to me.
Specifically, Musk doesn’t think LiDAR will help, and Waymo and others use it heavily, and from what I know of how this stuff works, the more sensors the better, for now. (I wouldn’t be surprised if Musk turns out to be right in the long run, but also wouldn’t be surprised if Tesla starts quietly adding LiDAR.)