Maxamillion 🕊❤️🦾🔋

Tesla Driver from Bad Nauheim, Germany 🇩🇪 Model 3 Performance FSD December 2022. Cybertruck AWD FSD Reservation Holder. $TSLA Long 🤘🏼

[Gordon Ramsay @GordonRamsay]

An important #FathersDay message from me…WEAR A HELMET ! This week I had a bad accident while riding my bike in CT. I'm doing ok and I’m thankful for all the doctors, nurses and staff at @LMHospital who looked after me but most thankful for my helmet that saved my life. Be Safe

[Yishan @yishan]

Google’s Gemini issue is not really about woke/DEI, and everyone who is obsessing over it has failed to notice the much, MUCH bigger problem that it represents.

(1/n)

[Maxamillion 🕊❤️🦾🔋 @RocksTesla]

Hey @neuralink, @elonmusk, our son just had his 14th vp shunt surgery due to a dysfunction. Any chance that Neuralink will support measuring intracranial pressure for hc patients? This would benefit millions of children. 🙏🏼
So far there only seems to be https://t.co/SBK3kxD5Sc...

[Maxamillion 🕊❤️🦾🔋 @RocksTesla]

@Tesla_Optimus Amazing! Can it play the piano with these beautiful hands?

[Farzad 🇺🇸 🇮🇷 @farzyness]

Tesla’s Price Cuts are Unprecedented

I’ve been following the EV space semi-religiously… OK, very religiously, for over a decade. During that time, I’ve seen the public’s sentiment shift from having no idea that EVs were a thing, to having doubts that the technology would ever be a success, to an EV becoming the bestselling car in the world for the first half of 2023 - the Tesla Model Y.

During this time, many competitors have attempted to join in with varying degrees of success. You have legacy automakers like GM, Ford, VW, etc. entering the market by leaning on their decades of manufacturing expertise building gas cars. You also have newcomers like Lucid and Rivian using the same playbook as Tesla, deciding to start an EV company from scratch.

As more players have entered the fray, EV adoption has soared exponentially, going from 1% of all new car sales globally in 2017, to 13% in 2022. That's 13x in 5 years. And the growth isn’t stopping, with many experts thinking EVs will cross the 50% threshold in new cars sold sometime between 2028 and 2030.

Many signs are pointing to this being the case, especially as Tesla continues on its path to sell 20 million cars annually by 2030, and Chinese car companies continue their frantic pace of building EVs.

However, as competition heats up and more people consider an EV for their next purchase, Tesla is beginning to implement a strategy that has been in the works since the founding of the company.

Here’s the company’s mission statement which has largely remained the same since its founding: “Accelerating the World’s Transition to Sustainable Energy”. The key word here is accelerating.

Much has been made lately about Tesla’s decisions to dramatically cut pricing on their vehicles. At the start of the year Tesla dropped prices across its entire line up by as much as 20%. These cuts have continued, most recently with large cuts to its S and X vehicles, which are large luxury cars, by another 20%. This caused a lot of noise, many saying that this is proof that no one wants EVs, that it will cause Tesla to be unprofitable, and it’s a desperate attempt by the company to stay relevant.

We’ve now learned through the company’s quarterly earnings that yes - the company did take a hit on its profitability from price decreases, but it was nowhere near the amount some were calling for. Tesla has been able to stay quite profitable due to lowered costs as we exited COVID supply chain shocks, increased scale from its newly built Austin and Berlin factories, and extremely high demand for its bestselling high-margin product, the Model Y.

Here’s the thing though - if we re-read Tesla’s mission statement, it’s clear that this was Tesla’s plan all along. Remember the word “accelerate” from earlier? This is how the company is choosing to accelerate the transition.

We live in a time where interest rates are making it tougher for people to finance large purchases. Things like cars and homes have reached all-time-high unaffordability as monthly payments become tough to swallow for many, and it’s this precise environment that’s highlighting why Tesla’s strategy is so unique.

The usual car-maker playbook during times like these is to throttle production and focus on maximizing profit for every unit that’s sold. Because of higher interest rates, there’s going to be less demand for cars than usual, and ensuring production marries demand is important for shareholders to feel like the company isn’t losing more money than it should. This means that automakers are willing to forego units sold in preference for more profits per car.

Sell less cars than usual, but make sure you are making a lot of money per car.

However, because of this short-sighted commitment to profitability, the door has been opened for a company to take market share in droves.

This is where Tesla comes in.

Instead of catering to short-sighted profitability, the company has decided to maximize production by lowering pricing so that their factories are running at 100% percent WHILE THEY ARE GROWING. In other words, Tesla is pricing their products so that they sell MORE next year, instead of ensuring they make as much profit as possible this year.

This means that there will be more Teslas on the road relative to everyone else. And we are already seeing this, given that the Model Y is the bestselling car in the world. There’s proof that this strategy is working when it comes to flooding the market with your product.

Tesla is accelerating the adoption of sustainable energy products by maximizing the number of people that can afford it.

It is important to highlight though, that there is still a large gap in awareness of affordability. Many people have no idea that there are EVs that are affordable to the masses, especially Teslas. I find myself having many discussions with random folks where they had no idea they could purchase a Tesla (or any EV) for well under $50k, and well under $40k with the Federal EV tax credit.

However, this is a problem Tesla could solve with some form of education and/or advertising. My gut tells me Tesla will choose to do this once they feel confident their production can keep up with the guaranteed increase in demand once this campaign is underway (if it’s needed).

It is important to note - you can advertise all you want until you are blue in the face, but if your product isn’t affordable during difficult economic times, then the effectiveness of the ads are much less than they could be.

However, and this is extremely important - the strategy that Tesla has chosen, to drop prices as quickly as possible, is necessary to fulfill its long-term profit motives.

It may be counter-intuitive to think this, but in the case of Tesla, its long-term aspirations are for all their cars to be capable of driving themselves.

This reads like science fiction, but I assure you that it’s not.

Tesla feels the Hardware equation for the car is already solved. The company has claimed the 8-camera system and the onboard computer in its cars is capable of making it significantly safer than a human, which will allow regulators to approve the car for Level 4 (and Level 5) autonomy. This basically means that the car is responsible for the driving and Tesla would be liable if anything were to go wrong. The burden is lifted from the human.

Teslas are already capable of driving themselves in many situations with the current FSD Beta software, but this system is currently limited to Level 2. This means that the driver is still responsible to monitor the system as it drives the car, but the key thing here is that all Tesla cars are collecting tons of driving data regardless of the system being on or off.

It is this data that will allow Tesla to fulfill this goal of offering Level 5 self-driving systems in its lineup.

The only missing piece here is software. Tesla needs to get the system to be good enough to achieve Level 5. And once it does, the company expects to rake in tens of billions of profits per year in the long term.

This is where the magic of price decreases come into play.

Tesla’s mission may be to accelerate the world to sustainable energy by selling tons of super-affordable EVs, but in reality, their mission statement for the car business should be “to cover the earth with data-gathering robots so that our AI-brain can teach itself how to drive in every corner of the world so that humans stop dying in car accidents”.

Let me explain a bit further.

For Tesla to solve the self-driving puzzle it needs a ridiculous amount of video data. Tesla has about 4 million cars on the road today collecting video through its 8-camera system. That data, which includes video, gets sent to Tesla’s mothership and is passed through a complex compute system. This system has undergone many changes over the years, and with the company’s latest version, it utilizes an advanced AI to teach itself how to drive. Pretty wild stuff.

But here’s the thing - without the video data, the car doesn’t learn how to drive itself.

For all of us who drive, we know we encounter a quasi-infinite amount of weird things on the road. Missing lane markings. Vandalized traffic signs. Broken traffic lights. Erratic drives. Chairs in the middle of a highway. Mattresses. You name it. Most of the world’s roads are a chaotic nightmare.

For Tesla’s self-driving system to operate on all of the world’s roads, it needs footage of these things happening so that it can learn how to handle every situation. There are companies other than Tesla that are taking a different approach to solve this by overfitting their cars with a ton of sensors, as well as mapping the areas where they drive in. Although successful in most situations, the smallest change to a given area can cause the system to malfunction, and it is incredibly expensive to scale as it requires a large amount of up-front costs and human labor to execute.

Instead, Tesla's approach is to build a system so smart that any changes to road conditions will be handled by its 8-camera system and its on-board computer. The onboard computer would be able to do this because it has code from Tesla’s self-driving AI, which has analyzed a ridiculous amount of video data collected from every Tesla on the road.

And this is where Tesla’s price cuts are so incredibly important.

By maximizing affordability to the masses, Tesla is maximizing the chance of having a Tesla roaming the world’s roads capturing super-important video data that is crucial in building a self-driving system that’s capable of handling any situation.

It is in Tesla’s best interest to flood the market with video-collecting robots (we can call them EVs for now) as quickly as possible so that it has an outsized advantage when they flip the switch on the self-driving software.

This is not well understood.

Imagine living in a world where you and your date can hop in your Tesla after having an awesome meal and having more than a few drinks, and the car takes you home in the safety, comfort, and privacy of your car without ever having to worry about being pulled over for drunk driving.

Now imagine living in a world where transportation becomes incredibly cheap because a) it’s way cheaper to run an EV vs a gas car and b) there’s no driver to pay. And because there’s no driver, the utility of the car multiplies since there’s no human that needs to rest and/or have a life.

Now take the profits that Tesla could generate from the above and compare them vs increasing their short-term profits by a few thousand bucks per car by limiting their production and/or running campaigns to maximize profit per car.

Also compare all of this to what every other automaker is doing.

Pretty different, right?

This is Tesla’s fundamental advantage as a company - it has built EVs that are loved by the masses, so much so that the best selling car in the world is its midsize SUV with limited to no advertising.

It just so happens that the most popular car in the world is also a video-gathering robot that’s teaching an AI how to drive.

The question shouldn’t be “what happens to Tesla as they keep dropping prices?” The question should be “what happens when Tesla has enough data to flip the switch for self-driving?”

[Maxamillion 🕊❤️🦾🔋 @RocksTesla]

@zfescht 👍🏻 Machen wir regelmäßig. Früh buchen ist günstiger.
https://t.co/m2jPLlqfWW Unterkunft mit Supercharger 10 min. vom Tunnel entfernt. So kann man spät ankommen und morgens einen frühen Zug nehmen. Wenn man früh genug zum Tunnel kommt, kann man meist kostenlos früher fahren.

[Maxamillion 🕊❤️🦾🔋 @RocksTesla]

@28delayslater @herbertong @lberkelman Whenever you come to Germany, please do stay with us 🥹

[Alex @alex_avoigt]

Das Handelsblatt hat mit dem verleumderischen Artikel über Teslas Autopilot, der für Millionen von Nutzern seit vielen Jahren einen durch Daten (siehe Safety Report) und Umfragen (siehe NPS) nachgewiesenen und belegten Sicherheitsgewinn bietet, ein Eigentor geschossen.

Es wurde nichts Neues berichtet, denn die genannten Punkte sind seit langem bekannt. Stattdessen wurden jahrelang zurückliegende und bereits widerlegte Inhalte erneut aufgeführt und Personen genannt, die aus persönlichen Motiven eine negative Meinung über Tesla vertreten, ohne einen sachlichen Beitrag hierzu zu leisten. Zusätzliche Probleme des Autopiloten wie vom Handelsblatt behauptet sind nicht genannt.

Die vom Handelsblatt auf allen Kanälen angekündigten Daten bieten keinerlei neue Erkenntnisse und zeigen weder ein Fehlverhalten noch eine Sicherheitslücke vom Tesla auf, sondern sind schlicht illegal entwendet. Jeder deutsche Autohersteller wird Daten haben die technische Probleme bei Fahrzeugen aufführen welche der Öffentlichkeit nicht bekannt sind. Auch an dieser Stelle enthält der Bericht keine Neuigkeiten.

Rechtlich haben die Vorwürfe des Handelsblatt keine Auswirkungen, da die Fahrer grundsätzlich für die Nutzung des SAE 2+ Fahrassistenzsystems verantwortlich sind und alle Tests des AP dessen korrekte Funktionsweise bestätigt haben (siehe u.a. EURO NCAP). Regelmässig erhält das Autopilot System deswegen auch in den USA, Europa und Asien die höchsten Sicherheitsbewertungen bei unabhängigen Tests. Wie daraus durch das Handelsblatt ein Problem entstanden sein soll erschliesst sich dem aufgeklärtem Leser nicht.

Die Gerichte haben Tesla stets in allen Punkten bestätigt, dass der Autopilot bei den behandelten Unfällen keine Schuld trägt, sondern dass die Vorfälle durch das Verschulden des Fahrers verursacht wurden. Die Behauptungen des Handelsblatt sind durch Gerichte und die US Verkehrsaufsichtsbehörde NHTSA deshalb wiederholt rechtlich widerlegt.

Der Artikel des Handelsblattes enthält weder berichtenswerte noch neue Inhalte und begibt sich damit in den Bereich des spekulativen und verleumderischen Boulevardjournalismus, der den Ruf der Zeitung nachhaltig schädigt.

Es macht mich traurig zu sehen wie die gute Arbeit viele Journalisten und Redakteure des Hauses durch diesen Artikel der nichts weiter ausser Behauptungen, Meinungen und Vermutungen enthält unterminiert wird.

Das Handelsblatt sollte den Artikel zurückziehen um weiteren Schaden zu begrenzen.

[Maxamillion 🕊❤️🦾🔋 @RocksTesla]

@elonmusk @wholemars Yes! Sentry is awesome - but could you please auto-disable the music of Sentry when passengers are still in the car? 🙏🏼🙉

[Maxamillion 🕊❤️🦾🔋 @RocksTesla]

Hey @Tesla & @elonmusk, my autistic son had a severe fit today because sentry mode started when I left the car (my wife was also in the car & connected via app)… Can you please optionally turn off sentry if people are still in the car & doors are closed? #autism #hearing #safety

[Maxamillion 🕊❤️🦾🔋 @RocksTesla]

@ewokpelts @Tesla I guess “sketchy“ is a very flexible term. Let’s just say it was a part of town where you certainly do not feel comfortable being outside at 1.30 am… Road tripping to an AirBnB.

[Maxamillion 🕊❤️🦾🔋 @RocksTesla]

Hey @Tesla & @elonmusk, my autistic son had a severe fit today because sentry mode started when I left the car (my wife was also in the car & connected via app)… Can you please optionally turn off sentry if people are still in the car & doors are closed? #autism #hearing #safety

[Maxamillion 🕊❤️🦾🔋 @RocksTesla]

@BrianCBock @Tesla @elonmusk @wholemars Yes, it’s not about video recording or the car alarm. It’s about the music inside the car:

https://t.co/sxqUsKn7m6

[Maxamillion 🕊❤️🦾🔋 @RocksTesla]

@electricfuture5 @shortword @Tesla @elonmusk @wholemars Yes, but the bigger problem was the music inside the car:

https://t.co/sxqUsKn7m6

[Maxamillion 🕊❤️🦾🔋 @RocksTesla]

@AnthonyA134 @WizDayTrader @Tesla @elonmusk @wholemars It’s this one: https://t.co/sxqUsKn7m6

[Maxamillion 🕊❤️🦾🔋 @RocksTesla]

@AnthonyA134 @WizDayTrader @Tesla @elonmusk @wholemars Sentry plays incredibly loud music inside when a threat is recognised. It’s a good idea to get rid of burglars, but bad for anybody you don’t want to experience it.

[Maxamillion 🕊❤️🦾🔋 @RocksTesla]

@dafrogball @AndersSoderqvis @Tesla @elonmusk @wholemars In fact sentry will not trigger if the battery is low as well…
Either way, you are right: Chances of getting hurt in a @Tesla should be minimised as much as possible. That’s a key strength of the car and one of the reasons we got it. 🙏🏼

[Maxamillion 🕊❤️🦾🔋 @RocksTesla]

@OHsweetMommy @Tesla @elonmusk @wholemars Sure: https://t.co/tcCbMts4xM

[Maxamillion 🕊❤️🦾🔋 @RocksTesla]

@dc619305 @Tesla Ok. You win. How much for the stress management class?

[Maxamillion 🕊❤️🦾🔋 @RocksTesla]

Some answers to the heartwarming comments:
- I read the manual. Long time @Tesla owner here.
- My human error. Forgot camp mode. I was in a rush.
- Family had to stay in the car. Sketchy area.
- Not complaining, just asking for a simple fix for a potentially horrible situation.

[Maxamillion 🕊❤️🦾🔋 @RocksTesla]

@oleklenin @SylasNigel @Tesla @elonmusk @wholemars 2nd Key was in the car. App was connected, Bluetooth on.