Truly driverless cars require someone to accept liability (no driver, so no driver to accept liability), which is one reason robotaxis aren't happening any time soon. First the question must be answered: Who's going to be the bagholder? In a hypothetical Tesla Network, it's either Tesla or a third-party insurer.
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Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the Perpetual Investors' Roundtable
- Thread starter AudubonB
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Truly driverless cars require someone to accept liability (no driver, so no driver to accept liability), which is one reason robotaxis aren't happening any time soon. First the question must be answered: Who's going to be the bagholder? In a hypothetical Tesla Network, it's either Tesla or a third-party insurer.
Ouch.
Tesla can't afford the liability risk. But they could get reinsured by a third party insurer, probably -- they could afford that.
When it comes to something as lawsuit-heavy as driverless cars, it's a bet-the-company risk. Musk said he wouldn't do that any more!
Dammit, no service question yet! Someone please ask a service question. (I am not set up to do so.)
"More and more Tesla owners are finding it exceptionally difficult to communicate with Tesla service. Many people are waiting 5 hours on hold or caught in phone tree loops. People are getting hung up on; people are sending emails which get no response for weeks; people are finding online chat down or non-responsive. Several service centers, such as Henrietta, NY, can only be scheduled by phone, which seems to be impossible. Mobile Service doesn't even have any contact phone numbers. When we actually get our car seen by the service tech, things are usually OK -- but service communications are being rated as abysmal by everyone on the forums. Despite this, we hear that the overworked service staff is being cut further! People are actually choosing to buy inferior non-Tesla cars to avoid dealing with service hell. What are you doing to fix Tesla service hell, so that people can easily contact a human at their nearest service center to resolve problems?"
(PS -- I also private-messaged MP3Mike with this.)
And yet after he had said that, they came within weeks of breaking convenants in Q1. At best we can hope that he won't do it by choice anymore.
Fact Checking
Well-Known Member
I believe you misunderstood Elon's point: he was not talking about the "shared economy" alone - there's indeed quite a bit of overlap in people's driving patterns, both in time and location, so sharing cars doesn't scale, because usage is concentrated to around rush hour.
Elon was IMO talking about commercial AI taxis: those indeed have a weekly utility of 60-70 hours, up to the demand ceiling for taxi services, which is currently around 300k-500k units in the U.S. alone and millions globally.
It's also not unreasonable to believe that AI taxi services will crowd out not just human taxi services but some parts of public transportation as well, based on better than human taxi pricing and a more private, more trusted, more convenient mode of transportation.
The CoGs of commercial EV AI taxi services is roughly the half of human taxi services, so it's a plausible outcome IMO: human drivers are not competitive, like human welders are not competitive anymore with welding robots. AI taxi pricing of CoGs and 25% profit margins could increase the size of the AI taxi fleet to the 500k-1m units range in the U.S. alone, maybe more.
AI taxis might also crowd out some private car use during weekdays as well and reduce per family car ownership from ~2 to ~1 without hurting utility and convenience. AI taxis are also easier to share for passengers for commute, which should improve rush hour utilization rate from 1 passenger per car to say 2 per car. These are cultural shifts on the decadal time scale, slow but steady.
Should Tesla reach FSD first and maintain an advantage there for a couple of years (which is a big if - and I don't want to restart that fruitless discussion), then commercial AI taxi demand will claim much of Tesla's production capacity for years.
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Taxi/Uber drivers work long shifts, much longer than just rush hour. There is plenty of demand for transport outside rush hour. Demand would likely also increase if Robotaxis lower the cost significantly.
Fact Checking
Well-Known Member
Car rental services would be another obvious industry to be entered by AI taxis: there's no reason for a taxi service firm to limit their market to taxi services alone, once the 'human driver' is removed from the equation there's very little difference between a rental car and a taxi car: it's a car used by strangers.
The person renting the car could even drive it for an extra fee (the added insurance cost of a human driver), i.e. use it as a regular rental car, with the added convenience that an AI rental car can pick up the customer anywhere, and at the end of the rental period the AI rental car can just drive away.
Taxi services and car rental are tens of billions of dollars per year heavy markets in the U.S. alone.
I'd love updates on Tesla Solar (how's GF2 going?) and Tesla Energy, especially Powerpack and Megapack. This should be the year of TE but we never hear anything.
I think it is already quite clear that 2019 is NOT going to the year of TE. The gigafactory is not yet producing to capacity, solar roof just debuted a third iteration in extremely tiny volume, regular solar except for some token panels on newer supercharger locations seems to have stalled after initial construction on the gigafactory and there is no project that we know of in any stage of definite planning, funding, design or acquisition to follow the trail blazed by the South Australian mega battery. The best we can hope for is a healthy incremental increase in sales of powerwalls and packs, but from such a low volume that Tesla's bottomline will continue to be determined by what happens with the car side of business for the rest of 2019.
Fact Checking
Well-Known Member
Could someone here with a say.com account please adapt this question?
@neroden's question about "Service Communications Hell" would IMO be the most important question asked on the conference call, because if the countless first-hand testimonials by Tesla owner-shareholders about widespread abysmal Tesla communications practices continues, as Tesla service grows domestically and globally, it will quickly become an existential threat to Tesla.
I love good automation and tooling, but a company selling products that cost tens of thousands of dollars cannot afford to not have immediate, reliable, friendly and resolution oriented service staff accessible on call and via email for existing customers, with multi-layer protective mechanisms in place that ensure that no call is hung up on, no email is lost and no promise is forgotten about.
I'm not even sure Elon knows about this: I suspect he sees the app based service scheduling statistics which are good and improving, but I doubt he knows about the sorry state of the Tesla phone bank and email system. So shareholders absolutely must become a squeaky wheel that gets greased.
Does any model year of Tesla have colors so close together that a service center cannot differentiate them?
Of course he hasn't. He's more like off from 9pm-5am. Plus he often slept (or lived) at work, so no commute at all.
But that's not the point. There are cars on the road when it is not rush hour. Some percentage of those (in every major city) could be replaced by autonomous taxis.
And so the price for a ride into those areas will include the toll. There are also opportunities to split the fee between inbound and outbound. Or, if permitted under the rules, have taxis that stay in the zone vs out of the zone with a pedestrian transfer at the border.
Variations require inventory of both paint (if they are doing bodywork) but also of the replacement bumper covers and other replaceable body parts they are starting to do in house (more focus here on the 3 than the older lower volume S/X). The pearl may be easier to match to the prepainted repair parts.
Bumper Cover Replacement Cost and Color Match
Just three months ago, at the Q1 earnings call, Elon said that he expects “something in the order of 300%” growth in Tesla’s energy storage product business this year. Which inside information do you have to support your assertion that we can only hope for a ‘healthy incremental increase’? (what is that? 30%? 40%?).
I posed this same question a few weeks ago, inferring the same conclusion. However there has been discussion on TMC about Tesla setting up an auto insurance entity that could provide owners with reasonably priced policies by leveraging the very detailed driving data Tesla collects. I gather this is a work in progress. Wouldn't the owner of a robotaxi vehicle be the ultimate bag holder and be willing to accept that risk as long as they are appropriately insured? Even if Tesla buys or creates such an insurance company I wouldn't expect them to brand it as Tesla Insurance Company. There is a huge corporate law industry and one of their primary businesses is legally structuring arrangements to ensure that minimum legal liability sticks to the client company. So I think it should be possible to set this up in a way that sufficiently insulates Tesla.
Just out of curiosity, is there legal fine print in the purchase paperwork which makes it explicit that all driving data collected by the owners car belongs to Tesla?
Fact Checking
Well-Known Member
So if the AI taxi is registered with the Tesla Network I'd expect it to be an 'all in one' service, where the revenue sharing finances the commercial insurance. Even Uber, with an actual owner driving the car, offers insurance for the duration of the trip. (Uber drivers do have to insure their cars when there's no passenger in it though.)
There's no reason for owners to insure individually: they have no impact whatsoever what happens with an AI taxi, so why should they have to acquire insurance individually? The owners are no factor at all to risk levels.
It's not just nonsensical but also inefficient: if Tesla insures externally with one of the large re-insurance companies, they can insure all AI taxi owners as a group and reduce the per unit insurance underwriting costs significantly.
So Elon's answer that Tesla is going to insure cars in the Tesla Network while they are working for the Tesla Network is the only correct answer, the only open question is whether they'll re-insure or self-insure entirely. (They probably should as @neroden suggested.)
My guess is that Tesla will self-insure for damages up to a certain limit, and re-insure for tail risk liabilities above that. This would allow Tesla to leverage their considerable underwriting cost advantages via Tesla Insurance. As Tesla's capital reserves become bigger and bigger they can increase the re-insurance liability limit more and more, and above certain levels of capital reserves (above $100b and after the 10th Gigafactory) they'll be able to 100% self-insure.
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Mod: line in the sand here. There is, and has been, a thread about FSD and robotaxi service:
Market/Economic Impact of Tesla Robotaxi Network
Most of this discussion should already have been in that thread. The rest, like when it will be usable, shouldn't be here at all.
In any case, anything after this post in this thread will simply be deleted. I/we don't have bandwidth to move them.
--ggr
Market/Economic Impact of Tesla Robotaxi Network
Most of this discussion should already have been in that thread. The rest, like when it will be usable, shouldn't be here at all.
In any case, anything after this post in this thread will simply be deleted. I/we don't have bandwidth to move them.
--ggr
Fact Checking
Well-Known Member
There might be such language - which could easily be unenforceable in much of the EU.
But I don't think it matters: owners who want to buy Tesla Insurance will probably have to agree to data sharing explicitly - or if they opt out they'll probably either be rejected or face (much) higher fees.
Having an 7-8 camera recording of traffic accidents, and a GPS track of past driving behavior, is powerful evidence that lowers underwriting costs significantly.
In addition to that Tesla might also offer a 'dynamically priced' insurance policy that jacks up prices if their GPS tracking detects dangerous driving behavior such as speeding or various close calls prevented by the safety features, etc. - giving drivers a financial incentive to drive more conservatively.
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