Optimus could do really well if they had all the smartest robotics engineers working on it...

But it seems that ~80% of the smart people I know refuse to work for Musk on principle, and the remaining 20% prefer to work somewhere that pays well (Musk companies do not).

End result is he has a team of mediocre engineers working on it which is why their demos appear years behind some competitors like Boston dynamics and Unitree.

I think the same is happening to Tesla cars (not much innovation in the last few years).

Elon's hype level over Optimus practically off the charts. He has profit projections that have Optimus be effectively all of GDP in the future. Say what you want about Elon, but he does put his money where his mouth is and I believe he will try to manufacture robots. Also, the S and X models are old and their market segment is heavily saturated at this point so it makes sense for Tesla to exit those model lines.

Optimus is also a bit of a "squirrel!" for the market that he likes to talk about whenever sales figures at Tesla start flagging. Meme stocks only work as long as people still believe in infinite exponential growth.

Is there any evidence there is any kind of market a humanoid robot at all?

(Regardless, from what I've seen, the Chinese will own this segment too.)

There is some value in producing a lot of solid hardware, but nowhere even close to Tesla's absurd valuation.

I think they are perfectly capable of writing software to drive the robot - if Musk doesn't stick his head in like he did with LIDAR/FSD and impose some stupid requirement that handicaps the product.

Accuracy.

> Elon sells dreams and visions, not really products.

Do you want me to pull out a list, or can you google it for yourself?

Sure, he also sells dreams and visions. Sure, all the dumb money is going to regret it once the smart money dumps on them.

Yet, claiming he doesn't really sell products (and or services, which he also does) is absolutely ridiculous.

This it could be the real strategy. Because the more credible promises you make, the more valuable is your company. If sales of cars are spiraling down, then what promises remain there to keep valuation ?

The hype to fizzle cycle is shortened with each new dream and approaching zero, which is the true value of the company.

Yes, because they make money selling the parts, and there are warranty requirements that are hard to fulfill if you don't have parts.

Often after a decade or so, companies will sell the designs to dedicated parts makers. For example, Volvo has Volvo Classic Parts, and they even have a reman program, and will even 3D print parts not available. Mercedes has Mercedes Classic Parts. Chrysler has MOPAR, etc.

Here you can browse parts for a 1968 Mercedes SEL: https://classicparts.mbusa.com/c-280sel-223

If you are a business, the costs of designing the part has already been paid, if you can sell the design and get some royalty payments, why wouldn't you turn those old plans into cash?

And of course there is a huge industry of Chinese clones and other suppliers that will provide replacement parts that are not genuine.

Be prepared to pay, though :)

It’s still possible to order new and original parts for SAAB models, almost 20 years after they went under. The spare parts are made by a separate company which is still going.

IIRC, by law manufacturers are required to maintain parts and service for vehicles for a minimum of 10 years. Whether superseded, discontinued, whatever.

It depends. Lots of parts are shared by multiple models or even companies so it may be the case that nobody has made for example a new water pump specifically for your car for 10 years, but the design is the same as the 2025 something else so you can just use that one. There are also warehouses with older parts that can last for years. You can also pull replacements from junked cars that have not been crushed yet. In some cases third parties manufacture replacement parts when the supply runs out, but those replacements are often of poor quality and sometimes are only vaguely shaped correctly and require extra work to actually fit on your vehicle. Keeping old cars running is a challenge, especially if the car was obscure when it was new.

Yes. Auto manufacturers tend to have contracts with different tiered automotive suppliers that have heavy-hitting production lines for current vehicles, and also maintain a 'service' department where these style of products are produced. The tools for producing these parts have really good lifetimes, and you can take the tooling and put it into whatever mold machine you have written the program for, or set it up for another machine.

In my experience service departments are basically a large warehouse with a small set of assembly machines running at any given time where you are setting up time to produce some random part for a day or two and then change to something else, whereas the real production assembly lines are designed to produce as many of X part for the latest car as possible.

Several of the old mold machines where I worked that made parts for this service business ran DOS, with PCMCIA cards to load programs. I helped a process engineer get these PCMCIA cards working on his contraband laptop running win98 (obviously banned from the network) because we could never get them working with anything newer. This was in like 2021.

A lot of parts are refurbished too. Transmissions, differentials for example.

Their subcontractors do.

For traditional vehicles, there's typically a large marketplace of first-party and third-party auto parts for vehicles going back several years. Depends on the make and model, but usually yes.

That said, Tesla is a very unusual automaker in most senses and I'm not sure what their aftermarket parts situation is.

They'll also keep making Model Y, the most sold car model in the world.

Thanks

Sure, but while the world waits for another super power to step up lives are being lost. The US could have announced a phase down with a hard pressure campaign to get the other countries to take over with no loss of life.

Instead these are just numbers in a statistic and opportunities for leverage in geopolitics instead of real lives with as much depth and meaning as your own.

So did the US reach an agreement with them first in order to avoid thousands of easily preventable deaths?

So softpower kept all these peole alive?

Ofc this is overly simplistic. There is hard power enabling soft power and there are alturistic extreme radical leftists actively seeking out and staffing such programs.

Also from that URL (with links):

> There is on-the-ground evidence of resulting impacts: Rising malnutrition mortality in northern Nigeria, Somalia, and in the Rohingya refugee camps on the Myanmar border and rising food insecurity in northeast Kenya, in part linked to the global collapse of therapeutic food supply chains. Spiking malaria deaths in northern Cameroon, again linked to breakdown in the global supply of antimalarials, and a risk of reversal in Lesotho’s fight against HIV, part of a broader health crisis across Africa.

"Spiking malaria deaths in northern Cameroon" links to an article[0] which states:

> BOGO, Cameroon, Oct 2 (Reuters) - Nine-month-old baby Mohamat burned with fever for three days before his family took him to the closest health centre in northern Cameroon, but it was too late. He died of malaria that day. Mohamat's death was part of a spike this year in malaria fatalities that local health officials attribute to foreign aid cuts by the United States. Before the cuts, Mohamat might have been diagnosed earlier by one of more than 2,000 U.S.-funded community health workers who would travel over rough dirt roads to reach the region's remotest villages. And at the health centre, he might have been treated with injectable artesunate, a life-saving drug for severe malaria paid for by U.S. funds that is now in short supply. But the centre had none to give out.

So the URL very directly identifies a dead individual, a country and a continent, while also mentioning other cases that we hopefully all can agree will also directly lead to deaths.

Do you take issue with this example? Or why are you stating that they're not "identifying a single dead individual, or country or even continent where these mass deaths are supposed to have occurred"?

[0]: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

By that reasoning you should be suspicious of the claim that cigarette smoking has caused any deaths from lung cancer, since no one has ever identified a single individual whose lung cancer could be proven to be from smoking.

“the total lives at risk from aid cuts to 1.6 million lives lost per year”

It’s a projection, a risk, and a rate, not a claim it has already happened to specific people.

Individual stories spotlighting lives lost in the wake of these cuts aren't hard to find. Do you want me to Google that for you?

I hope such egotistical zero sum thinking leads to the economic isolation of the US. 4chan Fun fact: You and only can make america great again, amirite. Who needs steady deficit funding when you have freedom.

> Do these people not come first?

Not to republicans who have repeatedly voted down measures to take care of people getting straight up cancer from abysmal practices during the middle east wars that they started.

Those same republicans also voted down support for the aid workers of 9/11 dealing with absurd health issues from all the dust.

Literal heros and innocent victims, but republicans don't want to spend pennies on them.

> Despite popular belief, it is not the job of the US Tax Payer to feed the impoverished world.

This is an overly simplified perspective. Work at this scale requires impressive logistics and commitments that are haphazardly "rug-pulled" can have catastrophic consequences, regardless of whose "job" it is.

When I was looking at being a bone marrow donor, they talk about this. The process for such donation is involved, including minor surgical procedures for the donor. But they talk about autonomy and consent, and one of the topics is this (paraphrasing): Do I have the right to change my mind about donation at any time?

The answer: while you always maintain the legal right to withdraw consent, at a certain point in the process, the recipients existing bone marrow is destroyed in preparation for your donation. At that point, there may be considered a moral obligation to continue the donation, as without your donation, the recipient will die, due to the destruction in preparation.

> How many billions have been sent to Africa?

Speaking for myself, I'd rather continue sending billions to Africa than contributing ~1.5% of Israel's GDP in foreign assistance to it.

> it is not the job of the US Tax Payer to feed the impoverished world.

Other countries would like to contribute (more), but the people that represent us taxpayers want to keep all the inluencing for your good selves.

You know Republicans keep cutting services to veterans right? While democrats pretty much always vote in favor of benefits for vets.

You choices aren't to either fund vets or fund aid. Your choices are to cut both or save both and I have a feeling you voted to cut both.

There's also a difference between winding down a charity program and abruptly pulling support overnight such that even if other entities or organizations wanted to take up the mantle, doing so would be 100x more difficult (or in some cases impossible)

When a comment starts with "Even ignoring Y, there's also Z" or "Setting aside Y, there's also Z", it shouldn't be read as downplaying Y. It's a way of introducing a secondary issue Z without first needing to write a 1000 word essay that gives due weight to issue Y and any other issues that are more important than Z.

This is useful to do when issue Y is widely known and well-explored elsewhere, but issue Z hasn't received as much attention. It my no means is an attempt to downplay the importance of Y, merely to create a space for conversation about a more niche issue Z.

It's disappointing to see so much attention put into replies attacking the OP for not giving adequate weight to Y, when the very premise of their comment was to create a space to discuss Z.

How is that good lawyer going to make the case that Tesla should somehow be liable for this? Tesla doesn't owe any duty to keep resale values up.

The curve is mostly flat for EVs because they started with such high efficiency to begin with. At their best, internal combustion engines are quite terrible so there has been more room to make improvements.

Even so, the vast, vast majority of cars in the past 100 years have had all of the technical innovation of a washing machine (and that might well be underselling the washing machine!).

> developments are excruciatingly slow

10% a year on average, something like that? ICEVs haven't had that kind of incremental improvement in a loooooong time.

> over 100 years there have been vast improvements in efficiency in ICEVs. In EVs, the curve is mostly flat.

This may be true, but my family's "daily" ICE vehicle costs us about $0.162/mile to run; our actual daily EV costs about $0.028/mile -- almost one sixth as much. It doesn't matter how much more improvements ICE vehicles achieve, they're not going to catch up to the "mostly flat" EV curve.

EVs are incredibly efficient. It's why aerodynamics matter so much and they all look so weird. The electricity from fossil sources they use is also efficiently generated at scale and in many states, mostly from renewables. It's equivalent to driving an ICE car that gets 200mpg in the absolute worst case.

Crucially the flat EV curve puts them mostly ahead of where ICEVs have been for their entire history.

If you compare a 2012 tesla model s 70D (the most efficient model tesla had then and arguably the gold standard) it had 33.4 kWh/100mi EPA, the 2025 LR is 27.2kWh/100m which is nearly 22.8% less and this while being larger.

What's even crazier is that a tesla 2008 tesla roadster had 28kWh/100mi EPA combined, which is more than today's model S.

Literally there isn't a single combustion car (not including hybrids) which comes anywhere close to this improvement.

Also I don't know about other countries, but I'd argue that in 20 years at least in Europe the fuel economy of diesel cars has gone worse due to emissions, I'm talking about real world usage, regardless of what this WLTP non-sense says.l

> No, over 100 years there have been vast improvements in efficiency in ICEVs. In EVs, the curve is mostly flat

Engine and battery performance are analogous.

> there have been vast improvements in efficiency in ICEVs. In EVs, the curve is mostly flat.

Uh yes, because it's really hard to improve the efficiency of something that is 4 to 5 times as efficient...

https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10963

Scales well enough for being a manufacturer with robust sales (let's ignore the daft share price a moment), and Tesla were ideally placed to capitalise on being the brand name in EVs until Elon decided to torch the brand equity, particularly with the demographics most likely to buy brand new EVs...

So have not heard of Volkswagen?