Cybercab and Cybervan are...something (bad).
It has been well over a (busy) week since Tesla's We, Robot event was held on the Warner Bros movie lot in Los Angeles. The idea of the title apart from being totally on-brand lame in a way only Musk and his companies seem to manage, was to educate us all on Tesla's pivot to robotics and AI.
Both of these things are current tech buzzwords, less so in automotive. Robotics has long been a part of the automotive world, taking over a lot of dangerous jobs and specifically precise ones. Legacy automakers long ago worked out where humans are better than robots (and where women are better than men, at least at Volvo in Gothenburg) and adjusted their production lines accordingly.
As far as I know almost no legacy automaker has a fully automated line the way Musk originally wanted for the Model 3 and Y. The infamous failure of these fully automated lines should have served as a warning to him but, as always, these things don't. I would admire his commitment if I didn't think he already knew it was all codswallop and/or a way to troll his workforce.
Before I go on, a disclaimer. It is entirely possible for a company CEO to be absolutely awful either as a person or at their job (or both) and for a company to still be a success. Tesla is a success. It has completely changed the game in a way few companies can or will achieve but desperately want.
I am not a Tesla fan but I get why people buy them and like them. And it's a company that continues to hold promise – on the battery and automotive front – but its capricious frontman continues to be a threat to the overall business.
Disclosure: I own a Tesla Powerwall 2 which I obtained privately. Not that Tesla would ever give me or anyone else one.
Tesla makes a lot of money for investors and is hideously, stupidly over-priced because of his capricious nature and total commitment to the con, often announcing products to juice the share price.
Some months ago, Reuters reported that Tesla had abandoned the US$25,000 Model 2 in favour of its pursuit of full self-driving cabs. Musk responded on Twitter (I do not care it is now called something else, I am not interested) by saying, "Reuters is lying again" but did not make any specific rebuttals, so yeah, that car is gone or at least postponed.
Not long after the We, Robot thing was touted to happen in early August but was bumped. Not even going to get into the dodginess of the original date, it's just too horrifying.
Full Self-Driving is a con
Musk has long peddled the idea of self-driving cars and more specifically self-driving taxis. Waymo is having some success with the idea but the reason they're not crashing into each other and other things is clear when you see one – the sensors and cameras and LIDAR gear are very prominent. Still not perfect, of course, but the accident rate seems okay if you're a bit cold-hearted about these things.
Musk said in 2019 that LIDAR is "a fool's errand." That doesn't make much logical sense and nor does the company's sudden but quiet LIDAR spend with Luminar in the past 12 months.
Since 2019 Tesla's expensive, beta-state Full Self-Driving (FSD) tech has heavily relied on cameras, dubbed Tesla Vision. Ultrasonic sensors were also considered surplus to requirements. Enough time on YouTube will show you how that goes. Even Tesla reasonable fanbois will tell you that Full Self-Driving -itself a misnomer - is not ready and requires a lot of supervision.
Musk goes on, without censure or meaningful legal repercussions, telling people about FSD but Tesla's corporate folks quietly tell everyone that the cars require supervision and intervention where needed.
The advantage of current Tesla product is that they have pedals and a steering wheel. That means a driver can take control is the dumb-arse FSD tech has come a cropper and tries to mow down some kids on scooters on the footpath.
There isn't always a thinking human behind those controls but to dismiss that as "typical Tesla driver" is to dismiss the evidence that a huge proportion of drivers are paying no attention to what they're doing no matter what they're driving.
This is all important to the We, Robot event.
Musk hates public transport
It's important to note that Musk is also dead against public transport. The Boring Company was specifically formed to create tunnels for Teslas to get them away from the traffic. So basically he's reinvented the metro train but for douchebags but also created:
- underground traffic
- a failure
- a way to part his fans' and their money with dumb merchandise stunts
He later admitted that it was just to run interference against California's High-Speed Rail project and any broader attempt to lure people from cars and into mass transit.
Adjunct to The Boring Company was Loop. Just read the idiotic benefits of it to truly drink in the searing dumbness of the idea. It's basically a metro without the actual benefits of a metro. Yeah, you're on your own in the Loop vehicle but that means a 1:1 ratio of vehicles to people, 2:1 at best. That's completely idiotic.
I love cars. I love driving. I do not like traffic and I do not enjoy driving in the city. Give me a train or tram any day for a run into the city. A bus if you must but they're awful, or at least they are in Sydney.
Tesla has never been a car company, really, it has always been a tech company and treated as such by Wall Street. Big Tech, if I may use that terrible phrase, does not care about you. You buy a product with ten working features, some of them requiring a subscription.
A year later, you have four working features because, in the name of shareholder value, some idiot fired the team responsible for the other six. But you still have to pay the subscription. Sucks to be you because one of those things is the thing you have come to rely on for a specific reason.
Modern Silicon Valley is entirely built on that. Netflix is not what it was. Streaming music is hot garbage because you have to own a patchwork of services to get all the music you like.
It's not new, though. Go back to the birth of the public internet with people like Netscape's Marc Andreessen and Sun's Jack Welch-worshipping Scott McNealy kicking around, this is just the end-game of that whole dot-com boom. That's just two names from an army of misanthropic tech "pioneers" who built their careers on the backs of hard-working engineers and people with real ideas.
Ring any bells? Musk bought into Tesla, made the actual founders footnotes in history and the condition of his buy-in was to be named a founder even though he wasn't. Those guys had great ideas and wanted to make EVs a reality.
Their naivety in their dealings with Musk are echoed time and again in the Valley with starry-eyed founders being shafted by rapacious growth-at-all-costs morons and the close relatives of the Private Equity Ponytails, the Venture Capitalists.
Must hates public transport and says extremely stupid things about it and his vision for its replacement.
This is all context for next week's second part where I talk about the event itself, how the products themselves are informed by Musk's – and to be fair, Silicon Valley's – total disregard for actual people.
Next week, I'll cover the glaring, stupendous and probably dangerous flaws in the We, Robot Cybercar concept.
