Hacker News

Here in Austin, both Waymo and Zoox have already hit the streets with very little fanfare and no incidents I'm aware of. Not only is Musk's technology inferior, but even if it worked well, what would make his service any better than the two existing services?

He has made a serious mistake hyping "robotaxis" as the future of Tesla, because:

• He has direct competition that's already more successful than his service.
• Those competitors are funded by Google and Amazon, who have diverse revenue streams and could undercut Tesla until Tesla breaks.
• He has created impossibly high expectations from investors with a hard cutoff that's next week.
• He's looking to operate this service in cities, where 90% of people hate him personally.
• He's dependent on those cities to allow him to operate, and they'll revoke his permits the second there's an incident.
• Elon has demonstrated himself to be such an awful human being that his vehicles are likely to be subject to vandalism, dramatically increasing his costs.

I think Tesla is absolutely fucked as a company. If I had the money, I'd short Tesla stock like a motherfucker.