Again consolidating replies to reduce thread churn
Can you think of an example where transport costs for suburbanites is dropped 90% and it didn't lead to a fundamental shift in transport dynamics?
The car created the suburbs.
Suddenly people could live "outside the city" in much lower density housing- but still work there.
But you've got multiple levels of density that will all be very different cases for RTs- discussed a bit further down after addressing your other remarks-
Or the fact that people in RT's get hours of their day back? This is fundamentally reducing the cost to live for the vast majority of the population - it's like the rise of no-frills airlines or the invention of the subway.
But NYC
has a subway already (in addition to TONS of cheap buses, plus less cheap taxis and ubers)
And yet
still also has ~2 million privately owned cars. In a city where traffic averages less than 5mph.
Pretty clearly people are very very attached to owning cars, even when it's a dumb option.
So handwaiving "Everyone will just stop having cars and use RTs" doesn't appear to fit any human behavior we've seen so far.
Certainly SOME folks will.
About the density cases I mention:
1) Dense urban cities (best case)- Places like NYC.... here you'll get almost immediate (once folks are confident in safety anyway) replacement of virtually all taxis and rideshares almost overnight. This is cash cow territory big time.
One RT runnning 24/7 replacing 3-5 uber cars running different shifts (or 1 taxi cab running 3 shifts) is a no brainer in that environment.
And it's easy to set up some urban supercharger locations with say one attendent that charges cars an cleans em out paid by Tesla
But again- some folks will still keep cars- because they do TODAY even when they've got cheap subways that are usually faster than cars. Certainly there's be plenty of 0 car households here- but there already are.
This is a cash cow for Tesla... and the best case for someone buying a bunch of RTs and just running them AS RTs all day every day.... but you're talking hundreds of thousands of RTs in the US there- not millions.
2) Suburbs- There'll probably be reasonable use here... because there'll likely be "enough" Tesla owners to provide reasonable available most of the time near enough to where most of these folks live or are coming from.
The charging/cleaning depot issue is a little harder (or more expensive) because of loss of density/sprawl.... but probably still doable at a slightly lower profit margin than dense cities.
But probably most folks that live here are
not getting rid of their cars.
Much more likely, as another poster mentioned- is many of these that are currently 2 or 3 car households might drop down to 1 car households. I suppose you might get a small % that go 0 car but not a ton.
That's not gonna lead to the 50% drop in new cars someone else suggested though- as those folks don't usually have 2-3
new cars- tends to be one newer and one older for most.
This is the best case for actual "regular" Tesla owners to let their cars run as R/Ts when they know they won't need them for hours.
3) Rural areas. Places where it's going to be a LOT less likely you can have an RT at your house in 5-10 minutes if you want one. Places where enough centralized cleaning/charging stations making economic sense will be tough too.
And where a lot of folks use vehicles for practical work/purposes an RT can't replace.
0 car households aren't coming in any numbers worth mentioning here. A tesla owner in such an area might choose to put his car on the network when they're not using it, but I expect demand would be relatively low outside of fri/sat nights when they'd do a ripping business driving folks to/from bars and such.
I just can't see how you think that provides a only moderate impact.
I hope I made a fair case for exactly that up above.
Impact will vary.
Pretty big in dense urban areas... moderate (but certainly significant depending on % of 2-3 car households it can drop 1)... and very scant in rural areas.
At the very least, econoboxes disappear for virtually everyone who doesn't need to store a lot of stuff in their vehicle. All the 2nd and 3rd household vehicles disappear where people are not using them to get to work. Parents stop buying dangerous vehicles for their kids.
I agree dropping 2-3 car households to 1 is significant... probably not 50% drop in new car sales significant though as you're not gonna get that impact everywhere.
As to econoboxes vanishing- now you get somewhat to the detailed financials.
The $2.50/mile cost ARK had? Probably someone struggling living in an apartment is gonna stick with a $5000 used Civic that he hopes to get another 50,000 miles out of.
Even at $1/mile cost to rider it might be a near thing for some econobox owners.
But I could absolutely see impact there being bigger or smaller based on where the real number comes out.
Thanks for the links- interesting stuff. Two notes from there.... one is it says about 10% of traffic in Seattle is rideshare cars just driving around waiting for a fare....(since, tying into the first link- there's no place for them to PARK and wait for one).... which suggests there's maybe a few too many of em.
Also suggests in such cities even robotaxis will need to keep moving when between fares- which kills that idea they'll just sit around not burning range between pickups.
Not an issue if Tesla sets up the urban charging/cleaning stations discussed- other than it means the notion they'll be running 12 hour shifts on a single charge seems even more an unrealistic fantasy.
Oh- and that last link I'd especially encourage others to read..... It's exactly what I'm talking about. A car owner who knows it doesn't really make "sense" for them to still keep their car. But they're keeping it anyway. Nothing about RTs would really change any of the justifications they give for doing so either.
Comparing private car ownership v public transport is a little unfair because you are getting nowhere near the same quality of product.
YMMV I suppose- but I usually find taking the subway in NYC the superior product... it's faster and easier.
I think you'd be insane to privately own a car there... and yet a couple million people still do even if it's not the rational choice.
Humans aren't always that rational. If they were a lot more expensive cars would be corollas instead.
See that link from Steve M up above this reply where one such owner explains why they're not giving up their car even though it'd make sense for them to do so.
I think some of the RT predictions expects a lot more math and rational behavior than people generally exhibit.
But private car ownership vs taxi is much closer and the economics are probably not that different. When RT comes around you get close (or better if your free time is valuable) to the same product for a far cheaper price.
For an econobox owner, sure... but the guy who is paying $400 a month in NYC to park his Porsche? Naah... sitting in the back of any taxi isn't the same product at all.
You're also going to have some rich folks in those places who stick to having a live driver for prestige reasons (or because the driver does other stuff for them), but only so much you can do about them.
The FSD talk is getting out of hands, no one is saying it would 100% happen in Elon time. But not modeling TN is like not modeling App Store in 2008, you can find good reason to dismiss it, but you would be very wrong.
I guess the difference is in 2008 the App store actually existed. Neither the TN nor FSD (in the RT sense) exist yet.
And most of the nuts and bolts details were already known in 2008 (cost to be a developer, the share of $ Apple would take, etc).
So in 2008 you could start FROM 2008 and come up with some reasonable fact based predictions of what it might do to Apple revenue and by extension share price.
I believe it will come sooner or later, I don’t know how much impact it will be beside it’s going to be huge. It would also have deeper impact in city planning, how and where people live etc.
But that's exactly the point being made here.
I agree it'll come sooner or later. But I don't "know" how much impact it'll have.
Neither do the several folks insisting THEY somehow do.
The impact of a service that charges $2.50 a mile will be different from one that charges $1 a mile.
The impact of a service whose COST (to operate) is 10 cents a mile will be different from one that costs 50 cents a mile.
The impact of a service that comes next year when most folks are still driving garbage ICE vehicles will be different from one that comes 10 years from now when a much larger % of cars are EVs.
Thus it's much more challenging to include TN/RT in predictions of near/mid term Tesla revenue- and impact on SP- as compared to the much more real-product-real-numbers perspective one would've had in 2008 regarding the app store.
(If you want a good parallel THERE- Tesla has floated the idea of their own app store as the fleet grows... that's a lot easier to model... and really the only technical detail that would need "solving" is storage as some apps would be difficult/impossible to run off a USB2 storage device which is the best speed in any current Tesla for external storage).
more of someone trying to push an agenda. My finger is hovering over ignore button.
Then your sense does not match what's been said so far by most in the discussion. Heck most folks seem to agree in general on most parts of it-
RTs are coming at some point.
Tesla's got the best path to having them (in more than a few geofenced cities anyway) of anybody making/selling cars today.
They're going to be a cash cow for the company when they arrive.
Mostly seems just differences of opinion in degree and specific numbers on points 1 and 3- and to what degree one can or can not figure them into thoughts on future SP moves... it's only a select few that are on the "anyone who isn't 100% optimistic of a perfect flawless execution future ahead of schedule is a FUDster" train
First lemme say thank you VERY much for providing a source.
Reading it I do note it says "In the 10 cities analyzed"
Which is interesting because they're all fairly large cities... so 27 mph seems faster than expected.
The explanation offered of why those speeds have gone UP is given as:
Your source said:
The explanation for this increase in speed? This may be a result of the locations of expanded coverage areas – longer trips that involve more use of highways for example, increasing the overall trip speed
Which seems to confirm what I suggested earlier... as these services get out of dense urban city centers into suburbs- average speed increases (as does trip length).
I expect if they had data for less dense cities (or specifically for suburban areas) they'd see even more of an increase in speeds.
And I expect they're going to keep a healthy charge buffer to insure the RT can always get back to "home" or an attended station with say 10 or 20% left on the battery for safety.
Ideally whomever over at Tesla is doing any planning for the Tesla Network regarding need for adding attended charging stations has even more solid data on this to figure out where they're going to make the most sense to start building, and how many they're likely to need in any given area.