The author misses the difference between cashflow and profit entirely.
Selling a car today gives Tesla the full profits of that hardware production today. Running that car as a robotaxi means that Tesla eats the costs of the hardware today in exchange for a larger total profit collected over several years.
So operating a fleet gives the company access to more long-term profits at the cost of decreasing the bank balance today, where selling the cars lets the company fill the bank account right now at the cost of limiting long-term profitability.
Which makes more sense depends on the overall strategy and current financial position of the company.
Let’s consider the only major example of the alternative: Waymo. Waymo is expanding rather slowly, and I imagine there are several factors. Building the cars is capital intensive. Adding a new market requires some regulatory work, and it also requires acquiring and building a lot for the cars to park at and charge at. And hiring people to charge them. (The labor cost is a drop in the bucket — there is no reason to put serious effort into automating this.)
Perhaps Tesla wants to focus on its actual strength: building the cars. And perhaps they want to outsource the regulatory issues and the problems when all the cars get stuck in the same power outage, etc.
(I’m charitably assuming here that Tesla can actually build a viable robotaxi.)
The franchising itself isn’t the problem - it’s a valid way for a company to scale up a service.
The issue is that they’re rolling it out before Tesla’s self-driving software has been proven to be safe. And there are questions about whether a vehicle without a steering wheel or side mirrors is actually road-legal.
Additionally, I’m not sure what kind of checks Tesla is doing for the franchisees. Will they let them roll out a service anywhere they like, irrespective of whether FSD is optimized for those road conditions? Based on the way they’ve approached FSD with consumers, my guess would be yes.
One problem in your analogy, for McDonalds, the franchisee is the one who actually operates the business.
For the Cybercab, Tesla is the one operating it via "Full Self Driving", their app, and the Tesla rideshare network. As the owner, the only thing you do is own it, insure it, have a place to park it, and take on the risk of what happens if the vehicle registered to you is in an accident. Clearly, a pretty one-sided assignment of risk.
Companies have to convince potential franchisees that they will be successful. Usually, the franchiser needs to already be wildly successful and have a playbook of how the franchisee will also be successful and how the franchiser will protect them, often via regional exclusivity.
I don't know if Tesla has proven that their own fleet is successful.
The key thing here is liability. A McDonald’s franchisee is protected if the thing that makes someone sick was a result of bad food supplied by the McDonalds corporation. In the case of Tesla, irrespective of the self driving software the Tesla corporation provides, the “franchisee” is always the one liable.
Vertical and integration like that has been very commonly and often tried in lots of different industries. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. In the case of Tesla the work required to make a car and the work required to make a self-driving car are very similar. However, the work required to run a taxi company has very little to do with the labor required for use of the buffs. Thus, for Tesla and most car companies it is best to say I'm going to do what I do best and let someone else deal with that other hard part. It just loses too much focus to try and vertically
Taxis are a tiny niche in the transport market. They're certainly very profitable for the small number of people who run the companies, but they're a tiny niche and they will always be that way. There are too many advantages to owning your own personal automobile when you drive a lot. In turn, people who are driving their own automobile vehicle are the target of all car companies, taxies are an important niche but that is not enough to make a successful car company.
you could make this same argument about any business and any mechanism that raises outside capital to expand.
If McDonald’s restaurants were profitable, they wouldn’t sell franchises. Except it’s been an incredibly successful way to raise capital and expand, for both franchisees and McDonalds.
If company about to IPO were a great investment, they wouldn’t IPO. Except the stock market has been an incredible mechanism for company and capital growth.
Bitmain could produce and run all the bitcoin miners for themselves, but starting as a "startup" they need to raise funds to scale, hence selling to 3rd parties...
even to date after scaling to millions of units sold
The idea that you buy a cycbercab to make money for yourself seems like a side benefit. Why should anyone own cars anymore anyway? We will all just use Uber; Tesla and Waymo need Uber; they both benefit.
Opportunity cost is the standard, not profitability. Companies generally try to invest in their core competencies and outsource the rest. The Nvidia deal with Groq is an example. They spent $20B for Groq's inference technology while leaving their profitable cloud services business alone. Selling shovels instead of mining gold can be a rational choice even when gold mining is profitable. And the shovel companies do better when gold mines are profitable.
Unfortunately Tesla's great accomplishments do not lie in the car space, but in the getting investments space. In finance. Which means they will have the profitability right, exactly, guaranteed.
Take the Tesla metal casting advance (single-press casting, or as Tesla calls is "Gigacasting"): it is mostly the result of investment, more specifically all other carmakers deciding they weren't willing to risk it, no matter how many papers said the simulations were correct. Tesla risked it, it worked exactly like the (mostly German made) theory and simulations said it was going to work, and now everyone and their mother (ie. even non-car companies) are using it. Result: Tesla has a patent on it, that nobody has licensed since they were working on it decades before the first Tesla engineer thought of it. The idea was literally available in CAD software before Tesla started to work on it (not that I want to claim there wasn't a LOT of design + validation + testing + integrating + ... work left to be done)
This principle is generally true for all Elon Musk companies, and most of their accomplishments/vision. SpaceX is not even close to the first to land a rocket, for example (that was McDonnel-Douglas). Nor were they the second, or the fifth. Oh and only one of the companies that attempted it before SpaceX needed 2 tries, all others succeeded immediately, or the company died, some succeeded, and the company still died. SpaceX, by contrast, needed 7 crashes before succeeding for the first time (one of their rockets never tried to land on account of blowing up during ascent, I'm counting that one), and 17 tries before they first tried to move it to production.
I'm not to say integrating everything, massively expanding the scope/scale of these applications, getting the investments, and getting it commercially operating isn't a gigantic accomplishment, but it is not inventing it at all.
Elon Musk's constant talk about inventing and "work from first principles" ... is therefore kind of total bullshit. He has never done that, and neither have his businesses.
Amazon subcontracts their delivery services, so there are probably additional factors driving Teslas decision.
My guess is the insane liability a car accident can create. Trucking companies have had to pay out millions, even for accidents where they weren’t at fault.
A big part of Amazon's "Delivery Service Partner" program is that it creates many smaller work-forces rather than one big one, which prevents unionization. On the other hand, Amazon can probably afford accident insurance.
The fact that robot taxi's won't form a union makes this rather unlike Amazon DSP's. I suspect the article is correct. There simply aren't net profits here for operators.
I would bet that if self driving software was involved in any accident, it is the company who developed the software who will be paying, even if someone else owns the car.
As long as the first two letters in LLC hold up, lots of people would be willing to enter into a new market that appears to have a lot of potential upside and profit, with the downside limited to whatever they invested, or borrowed, to get it going.
Hertz infamously came out of bankruptcy guns-blazing and purchased 100k cars for $4.2 billion and helped drive Tesla's market cap above $1 trillion in 2021
By 2024 they had begun dumping the EVs and reported a $2Bn loss as a result.[0]
The HTZ stock price has fallen 90%.[1]
Somehow TSLA is still trading in the neighborhood of that 2021 peak. Currently trading at a PE ratio of over 300, despite declining revenues[2].
He's an effective conman for those with money that needs investing. His track record is objectively bad[0] and that doesn't matter as long as he can say the right thing at the right time to keep the stock high and his investors happy and believing that the breakthrough is just around the corner.
Many of his investors probably understand that they're holding a bunch of very expensive tulip bulbs but the opportunity to profit off of the greater fool is too great to ignore as long as they don't mistime the peak. With the amount of loose money sloshing around the global economy, he can probably continue riding this wave until some black swan event forces everyone to confront reality.
I think that's a pretty fair take on the situation overall. There is the potential of a merger between Tesla and SpaceX which might help him paper over the short-term issues Tesla is facing around deliveries, largely due to the public backlash around his political medling and DOGE.
Right, that's the point. It doesn't matter if he delivers on his promises as long as people believe he will eventually and the stock goes up. People have also made money investing in Ponzi schemes but they're still Ponzi schemes.
Not really, kind of like Uber doesn't buy its own cars. The CyberCab owner provides the capital and parking spot and some maintenance, while Tesla takes a cut, just like Uber does. I'd be happy to have my car earn money for me while I'm away at office or away on a business trip.
Uber doesn't buy its own cars because it isn't profitable given the depreciation and originally the higher risk of getting someone declared an employee. If they are choosing a car and losing money on it they are an entrepreneur. (Also Tesla doesn't want you to rent your car as that reduces their market so they want to sell another one in a fleet.)
I may buy one if it works. It would pay for itself in about 3 years. Parking where I am at is about $50 a day. If this thing can drop me off and go make me money it is a no brainer.
Does the pay off calculation include the frequent interior cleaning any rental car will need to be kept in service 24/7? Both normal wear and tear and spills, vomit, blood, etc that users are motivated by fees to pretend they didn't do until the next user or two after them reports it.
It's an opinion piece, I'm at a loss as to how it could be "fake". Regardless, the owner of the site is still pissy about...something to do with Tesla, I've since forgotten. Doesn't make him wrong, but it's certainly a consideration when reading Electrek.
The author misses the difference between cashflow and profit entirely.
Selling a car today gives Tesla the full profits of that hardware production today. Running that car as a robotaxi means that Tesla eats the costs of the hardware today in exchange for a larger total profit collected over several years.
So operating a fleet gives the company access to more long-term profits at the cost of decreasing the bank balance today, where selling the cars lets the company fill the bank account right now at the cost of limiting long-term profitability.
Which makes more sense depends on the overall strategy and current financial position of the company.
I see this as liability shifting exercise first, scalability tool second, and Elon's desire to deliver on his 2016 promise third.
What an absurd lack of nuance.
Let’s consider the only major example of the alternative: Waymo. Waymo is expanding rather slowly, and I imagine there are several factors. Building the cars is capital intensive. Adding a new market requires some regulatory work, and it also requires acquiring and building a lot for the cars to park at and charge at. And hiring people to charge them. (The labor cost is a drop in the bucket — there is no reason to put serious effort into automating this.)
Perhaps Tesla wants to focus on its actual strength: building the cars. And perhaps they want to outsource the regulatory issues and the problems when all the cars get stuck in the same power outage, etc.
(I’m charitably assuming here that Tesla can actually build a viable robotaxi.)
The franchising itself isn’t the problem - it’s a valid way for a company to scale up a service.
The issue is that they’re rolling it out before Tesla’s self-driving software has been proven to be safe. And there are questions about whether a vehicle without a steering wheel or side mirrors is actually road-legal.
Additionally, I’m not sure what kind of checks Tesla is doing for the franchisees. Will they let them roll out a service anywhere they like, irrespective of whether FSD is optimized for those road conditions? Based on the way they’ve approached FSD with consumers, my guess would be yes.
If McDonald's was profitable, they wouldn't try to franchise it.
That's what this is. You take on operating costs and you understand your local market. They own the brand.
One problem in your analogy, for McDonalds, the franchisee is the one who actually operates the business.
For the Cybercab, Tesla is the one operating it via "Full Self Driving", their app, and the Tesla rideshare network. As the owner, the only thing you do is own it, insure it, have a place to park it, and take on the risk of what happens if the vehicle registered to you is in an accident. Clearly, a pretty one-sided assignment of risk.
Companies have to convince potential franchisees that they will be successful. Usually, the franchiser needs to already be wildly successful and have a playbook of how the franchisee will also be successful and how the franchiser will protect them, often via regional exclusivity.
I don't know if Tesla has proven that their own fleet is successful.
The key thing here is liability. A McDonald’s franchisee is protected if the thing that makes someone sick was a result of bad food supplied by the McDonalds corporation. In the case of Tesla, irrespective of the self driving software the Tesla corporation provides, the “franchisee” is always the one liable.
> In the case of Tesla, irrespective of the self driving software the Tesla corporation provides, the “franchisee” is always the one liable.
Precedent for this?
It's more than that, Tesla owns the brand, the manufacturing, and the software.
They are much more than McDonalds.
But indeed your comparison is an apt way to reply to this "article".
McDonald’s owns the brand, supply chain and real estate.
And the software, if the saga around the constantly-broken ice cream machines is any indication.
That brand: fascism
But sure, elon musk like trump is willing to outsource everything for branding.
Telsa is going for a certain rough aesthetic with both the Cybertruck and Cybercab branding.
Nothing will ever stop me from reminding people that sympathising with nazis is unacceptable in my book.
You can complain about that, but does Elon really need your help? Will he compensate you for it?
Vertical and integration like that has been very commonly and often tried in lots of different industries. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. In the case of Tesla the work required to make a car and the work required to make a self-driving car are very similar. However, the work required to run a taxi company has very little to do with the labor required for use of the buffs. Thus, for Tesla and most car companies it is best to say I'm going to do what I do best and let someone else deal with that other hard part. It just loses too much focus to try and vertically
Taxis are a tiny niche in the transport market. They're certainly very profitable for the small number of people who run the companies, but they're a tiny niche and they will always be that way. There are too many advantages to owning your own personal automobile when you drive a lot. In turn, people who are driving their own automobile vehicle are the target of all car companies, taxies are an important niche but that is not enough to make a successful car company.
Bit of a weird world where we don't have self-driving cars but we did manage to automate the writing of articles lamenting that fact.
you could make this same argument about any business and any mechanism that raises outside capital to expand.
If McDonald’s restaurants were profitable, they wouldn’t sell franchises. Except it’s been an incredibly successful way to raise capital and expand, for both franchisees and McDonalds.
If company about to IPO were a great investment, they wouldn’t IPO. Except the stock market has been an incredible mechanism for company and capital growth.
Bitmain could produce and run all the bitcoin miners for themselves, but starting as a "startup" they need to raise funds to scale, hence selling to 3rd parties...
even to date after scaling to millions of units sold
It's a financial strategy, like DeRentas or Autonomy that lease cars to Uber drivers in Latam.
Essentially shift maintenance cost to the investors (all of it since in this case there are no drivers to share part of the cost).
If a Toyota Prius taxicab fleet were profitable, Toyota wouldn't sell you one.
The idea that you buy a cycbercab to make money for yourself seems like a side benefit. Why should anyone own cars anymore anyway? We will all just use Uber; Tesla and Waymo need Uber; they both benefit.
A self owned auto-uber that you can use all you want would actually be the first actually fully self driving car.
Opportunity cost is the standard, not profitability. Companies generally try to invest in their core competencies and outsource the rest. The Nvidia deal with Groq is an example. They spent $20B for Groq's inference technology while leaving their profitable cloud services business alone. Selling shovels instead of mining gold can be a rational choice even when gold mining is profitable. And the shovel companies do better when gold mines are profitable.
Unfortunately Tesla's great accomplishments do not lie in the car space, but in the getting investments space. In finance. Which means they will have the profitability right, exactly, guaranteed.
Take the Tesla metal casting advance (single-press casting, or as Tesla calls is "Gigacasting"): it is mostly the result of investment, more specifically all other carmakers deciding they weren't willing to risk it, no matter how many papers said the simulations were correct. Tesla risked it, it worked exactly like the (mostly German made) theory and simulations said it was going to work, and now everyone and their mother (ie. even non-car companies) are using it. Result: Tesla has a patent on it, that nobody has licensed since they were working on it decades before the first Tesla engineer thought of it. The idea was literally available in CAD software before Tesla started to work on it (not that I want to claim there wasn't a LOT of design + validation + testing + integrating + ... work left to be done)
This principle is generally true for all Elon Musk companies, and most of their accomplishments/vision. SpaceX is not even close to the first to land a rocket, for example (that was McDonnel-Douglas). Nor were they the second, or the fifth. Oh and only one of the companies that attempted it before SpaceX needed 2 tries, all others succeeded immediately, or the company died, some succeeded, and the company still died. SpaceX, by contrast, needed 7 crashes before succeeding for the first time (one of their rockets never tried to land on account of blowing up during ascent, I'm counting that one), and 17 tries before they first tried to move it to production.
I'm not to say integrating everything, massively expanding the scope/scale of these applications, getting the investments, and getting it commercially operating isn't a gigantic accomplishment, but it is not inventing it at all.
Elon Musk's constant talk about inventing and "work from first principles" ... is therefore kind of total bullshit. He has never done that, and neither have his businesses.
Amazon subcontracts their delivery services, so there are probably additional factors driving Teslas decision.
My guess is the insane liability a car accident can create. Trucking companies have had to pay out millions, even for accidents where they weren’t at fault.
A big part of Amazon's "Delivery Service Partner" program is that it creates many smaller work-forces rather than one big one, which prevents unionization. On the other hand, Amazon can probably afford accident insurance.
The fact that robot taxi's won't form a union makes this rather unlike Amazon DSP's. I suspect the article is correct. There simply aren't net profits here for operators.
I would bet that if self driving software was involved in any accident, it is the company who developed the software who will be paying, even if someone else owns the car.
I would be very surprised if the manufacturer would sell you one without you agreeing to indemnify them.
> I would be very surprised if the manufacturer would sell you one without you agreeing to indemnify them.
Why would anyone other than a fool agree to indemnify Tesla against liability for a vehicle whose driving behavior is controlled by Tesla?
There are a lot of fools out there. The real question is whether a clickwrap indemnification would hold up in coult; I suspect it wouldn't.
As long as the first two letters in LLC hold up, lots of people would be willing to enter into a new market that appears to have a lot of potential upside and profit, with the downside limited to whatever they invested, or borrowed, to get it going.
Bold assumption until there is legal precedent set.
Hertz infamously came out of bankruptcy guns-blazing and purchased 100k cars for $4.2 billion and helped drive Tesla's market cap above $1 trillion in 2021
By 2024 they had begun dumping the EVs and reported a $2Bn loss as a result.[0]
The HTZ stock price has fallen 90%.[1]
Somehow TSLA is still trading in the neighborhood of that 2021 peak. Currently trading at a PE ratio of over 300, despite declining revenues[2].
Really wish I understood the Elon Musk voodoo.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/14/hertz-makes-agile-decision-t...
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/HTZ/
[2] https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/tsla/revenue/
He's an effective conman for those with money that needs investing. His track record is objectively bad[0] and that doesn't matter as long as he can say the right thing at the right time to keep the stock high and his investors happy and believing that the breakthrough is just around the corner.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
Many of his investors probably understand that they're holding a bunch of very expensive tulip bulbs but the opportunity to profit off of the greater fool is too great to ignore as long as they don't mistime the peak. With the amount of loose money sloshing around the global economy, he can probably continue riding this wave until some black swan event forces everyone to confront reality.
I think that's a pretty fair take on the situation overall. There is the potential of a merger between Tesla and SpaceX which might help him paper over the short-term issues Tesla is facing around deliveries, largely due to the public backlash around his political medling and DOGE.
Plenty of people have gotten rich buying Tesla stock.
Right, that's the point. It doesn't matter if he delivers on his promises as long as people believe he will eventually and the stock goes up. People have also made money investing in Ponzi schemes but they're still Ponzi schemes.
Local owners can deal with local governments easier and with more finesse than a trillion dollar company.
Not really, kind of like Uber doesn't buy its own cars. The CyberCab owner provides the capital and parking spot and some maintenance, while Tesla takes a cut, just like Uber does. I'd be happy to have my car earn money for me while I'm away at office or away on a business trip.
This isn't making the point you think it is...
Uber doesn't buy the cars because it's not profitable.
They let the driver eat the depreciation, assume the capital risk, and deal with lemons and accidents.
No one drives Ubers thinking they're going to get rich, and I sure don't see companies buying up vehicle fleets to put into service on Uber.
Because it's a money losing proposition.
Why do you think Tesla is trying to also offload it onto suckers?
Uber doesn't buy its own cars because it isn't profitable given the depreciation and originally the higher risk of getting someone declared an employee. If they are choosing a car and losing money on it they are an entrepreneur. (Also Tesla doesn't want you to rent your car as that reduces their market so they want to sell another one in a fleet.)
I may buy one if it works. It would pay for itself in about 3 years. Parking where I am at is about $50 a day. If this thing can drop me off and go make me money it is a no brainer.
Skeptical it will work as advertised, though.
Does the pay off calculation include the frequent interior cleaning any rental car will need to be kept in service 24/7? Both normal wear and tear and spills, vomit, blood, etc that users are motivated by fees to pretend they didn't do until the next user or two after them reports it.
What if it gets damaged or a drunk customer vomits into it or otherwise soils it?
accountability sink
Dumb take but but I guess that journos gotta earn a living …
I bet his draft folder has a doc with the title “if US treasuries were profitable, US gov wouldn’t sell you one”
It’s a junk website. I know the word has bad connotations but literal fake news
It's an opinion piece, I'm at a loss as to how it could be "fake". Regardless, the owner of the site is still pissy about...something to do with Tesla, I've since forgotten. Doesn't make him wrong, but it's certainly a consideration when reading Electrek.
Low effort opinion piece, yes.
The reason Tesla won't sell me one is that I'm not buying anything from Musk.