No. of Recommendations: 1
Interestingly, the robotaxi will be Model Y's, not the cybercab we've seen. It will also be geofenced with a remote safety driver, similar to Waymo. Musk said Tesla will have millions of autonomous vehicles by late next year and have 99% market share. So apparently the geofencing and safety driver will soon not be needed.
Tesla released a video demonstrating the robotaxi. Which for now has a safety driver in the car.
https://x.com/Tesla_AI/status/1915080322862944336
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Rough numbers for 2027:
- 5MM Robotaxi/Cybercab produced.
- Each earn $100/day. (That's what a driver would make.) Call it 30K/year.
- 30K X 5MM = 150B/year gross/net/whatever you want to use.
- That's 150B/year for the life of the car. Call it 5 years or 750B in lifetime earnings for one year's production. About the same as their current market cap.
The other big news out of the Q1 call is that they hope to get production of the cab up to (or is it down to?) 12/minute or every 5 seconds per line. That's the 5MM right there ... from one line.
TSLA $283
No. of Recommendations: 3
- 30K X 5MM = 150B/year gross/net/whatever you want to use.
We can pencil those numbers out a little better, I think. Uber and Lyft combined make about $10 billion in profit/year. Perplexity tells me private cab companies make about $3 billion in profit. So that's roughly the amount of money on the table.
Now Tesla's robotaxis don't have drivers, so they'd get to keep that portion of the fare. BUT, there's no real reason to switch to Tesla instead of Uber unless it cheaper, so that advantage gets knocked down a bit.
One reason the Lyft/Uber model works is surge pricing. There is the normal every day rideshare volume. And then there are special events like concerts. Or rush hour, for example. Traditional cab companies maintain fleet sizes around the normal volume. They have to. Otherwise their fleets would be sitting idle most of the time. But the rideshare companies don't own their fleets, so they can jump in and fill that need.
If Tesla owned their own fleet (which they say they will do), they will have the same problem as the cab companies. They have to size for typical daily volume, not for abnormal peak volumes. So that knocks down a big percentage of potential fees that are currently being paid to Uber and Lyft. Uber/Lyft drivers also park at home for free, and do all the cleaning and maintence on their own time and own dime, and pay for their own fuel. Those are all be non-trivial costs that Tesla would have to pay for.
You can punch in your own assumptions, but that $13 billion is on very high end of profit potential.
There are some unrelated technical hurdles too. Every jurisdiction requires permits to pick up passengers curbside. Uber pushed the boundaries on that, and regulations in this regard have really been tightened up. Currently, Tesla has permits to pick up passengers in Austin. They have started the permit process in LA, and no other jurisdiction that I'm aware of. In Austin they are using geofencing and safety drivers. Presumably, to get permits in most jurisdictions, Tesla would have to demonstrate their fully autonomous robotaxi service is as safe as a human driver. To date Tesla has exactly zero data in that regard. They are not even beginning to collect those data. There is a lot of work that needs to be done between now and then, and not much time remaining.
The other big news out of the Q1 call is that they hope to get production of the cab up to (or is it down to?) 12/minute or every 5 seconds per line. That's the 5MM right there ... from one line.
That's an order of magnitude faster than today, so that would be an accomplishment. But keep in mind they are probably not constrained by speed. Musk reported that Austin Giga has capacity for 250,000 cybertrucks/year. But they can only sell 50,000, so that's a lot of unneeded capacity.
The cybercab is not currently legal in any jurisdiction. They don't need to build 5 million per year. They can't use that many.
No. of Recommendations: 0
sykesix,
We missed the first 10X. (Electric cars sound crazy.) You missed the next 10X. (Elon sounds crazy.) Now, you're going to miss the next 10X. (You have no balls.)
Good luck to you, madam.
CK
