Zaddy Daddy
Member
Sure, its very reasonable to say the conservative opinion is to ignore FSD until robotaxi is 99.9999% reliable and is operating across an entire nation with no steering wheel or safety driver. Thats very fair, and very true.
But as an investor, waiting for that to be a the case is like watching the iphone announcement, but waiting until ten million are sold before deciding to buy AAPL. Very conservative, and sensible, but not a way to make serious returns.
When I first bought Tesla stock, the company was losing money, had very few superchargers, and only 2 models of car (S/X, roadster was trivial). They were definitely not a conservative investment. But I thought the product was awesome, and more importantly their rate of improvement and growth was amazing.
When I am in the mood to be a conservative investor, I buy global equity ETFs, government bonds, and solid dividend stocks like pharma companies. TSLA is not a stock for the conservative of mind.
I think you went off a tangent here. We are talking about realistic estimates of what it will take for robotaxis. The conversation was thinking about robotaxi being enabled by the end of the year and waiting for the next version of hardware for it to be enabled.
Not "bro I'm aggressive in my investments so there!" which has nothing to do with it.
Waymo and LIDAR feels like Toyota with Hydrogen from where I'm sat. It seems they are both VERY VOCAL that those things are the solution, and it doesnt matter how much evidence mounts against them, they will not change.
This is an underappreciated plus point of Elon. He frequently admits he was flat wrong, and then immediately changes direction. Its happened a lot, and he gets a lot of flak for it, but its way better than going down the pit deeper and deeper refusing to accept that its not working.
This is really just flat wrong, and of course a terrible comparison to Toyota / Hydrogen. Spending resources on Hydrogen meant Toyota was not spending time and money on BEVs.
Waymo using LiDAR is not stopping it at all from developing the same sort of NNets Tesla is using. LiDAR is not stopping Waymo from doing exactly the same thing as Tesla, just with LiDAR too. Even if LiDAR doesn't provide much incremental accuracy value, the cost amortized out over many years might not be a big deal.
It's a red herring.