Elon musk announced the other day that the pending Roadster EV will be the last “manually driven” new Tesla going forward, because “it’s going to make sense for our whole lineup to be different autonomous vehicles of different sizes.” In other words, Johnny Cabs – like in the old Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, Total Recall. 
Only – putatively – Johnny Cabs you own.
This begs an interesting question no one seems to be asking. Why would anyone buy a Johnny Cab? It would be something like buying liquor you’re not allowed to drink. Well, Elon has the answer, though he’s coy about it. The answer is he expects people to pay for the ride. He envisions a fleet of Tesla-badged Johnny Cabs that people pay Tesla to use each time they are taken for a ride. All of them controlled by Tesla.
Now, this probably sounds not-bad to some people. Specifically, the young and poor who can’t afford to own a car and also city people, for whom car ownership is both expensive and impractical. It’s a lot less expensive to just summon a ride when you need one and then be able to sit back and do something else while the car deals with the city traffic. It’s even better when there’s no one actually driving the thing, because that means no one has to be paid to drive the thing.
Tesla might even earn an honest dollar this way as there might be honest profit in it – as opposed to the Tesla grift thus far, which has relied upon artificially boosted stock valuation predicated on the government’s pushing (and subsidizing) of EVs as well as the “carbon credits” grift that Tesla used to suck the life blood from “legacy” car companies to finance its EV grift. It is not generally known but the truth is Tesla has never made a profit selling its EVs; it has made a profit by leveraging the regulatory apparat to its advantage. The distinction is important – assuming you don’t approve of making (that is, taking) money by leveraging the government to line your pockets at the expense of others.
The dead broke will likely prove receptive to renting rides from automated Tesla-badged Johnny Cabs – for the same reason that Payday lenders do banging business. A person who cannot afford the ever-rising cost of owning a vehicle – including the cost of insurance, which has become onerous in its own right and to a great extent because of all the $50k-plus EVs out there, which have increased everyone’s costs because of the potential and actual costs of repairing/replacing these $50k-plus EVs – can afford a $10 Johnny Cab ride.
Or so he thinks.
Tesla hopes he doesn’t think. More to the point, that he doesn’t add.
How many $10 Johnny Cab rides does it take to equal (to surpass) a monthly car payment? Well, if it’s two rides per day – to and from work, let’s say – that’s $20 per day or $100 per week, which comes to $400 per month. Add in a couple of rides over the weekend and the Johnny Cab costs about as much as it would cost to just buy a car. Of course, there is still the cost of insurance and also of maintenance, so maybe the Johnny Cab rides are still cheaper. But whether they are or aren’t is probably beside the point as regards Tesla’s target audience because it seems more manageable – in the moment – to tap the app and have it debit $10 from your account than to come up with the $400 at once every month, plus the insurance and the gas and all the rest.
Put another way, Tesla is relying upon the innumeracy as well as the desperate financial straits of the people it intends to milk. They are the same people who put things they can’t afford on credit cards with 30 percent interest – or get a Payday loan at similar interest, because their immediate need trumps their long-term interests.
As an aside, why is Musk so anti-driving?
More finely, why is he such a proponent of vehicles that drive themselves? Could it be because such cars put Elon Musk and the technocrats in the driver’s seat? This “autonomous” future they hawk is actually the antithesis of that – because there is nothing autonomous about being controlled and that is exactly what the case will be when you hail a Johnny Cab for a ride.
It is also likely the government will announce that cars that are driven by us cannot be driven anymore, since they are “unsafe” – because they cannot fuse with the Hive Mind, having minds (the driver’s) of their own.
. . .
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All of this technology Elon Musk is touting reminds me of how some 50 years ago, people thought we’d
be vacationing on Mars by the year 2000.
I think that there are still a lot of technological, economic, political, social, and geographic barriers to widespread adoption of Johnny Cabs and many other technologies, many of which are insurmountable. There just isn’t enough generating and transmitting capacity for the Elektrifikatsiya Musk and the Greens are pushing, for example, and a lot of people don’t live in cities, where all this stuff at least makes some sense.
So, Tesla will be going out of business then. Good!
Funny, when I read the headline about the last manually driven Tesla, I thought hmm, now that is interesting, a manual transmission in an electric car.
Here’s a great summary of where Tesla is today.
Elon’s magic! Unicorns everywhere!
George Noble, Fidelity Overseas Fund:
https://xcancel.com/gnoble79/status/2047416199122973107#m
https://georgenoble.substack.com/p/what-happens-when-you-value-tesla
This “vision” of Elon’s is about as likely to come true as his “There will be an Optimus robot in every household, doing all the work, so we won’t have to!”
It’s about as true as his “The Roadster and the Semi are both ready to go NOW!” (That was in 2017.)
Or in the same vein as his claim of “I’m in the top 10 Diablo players, sure…” (On Rogan’s show; soon proved to be utter BS.)
The few Tesla “robotaxis” operating in Austin run within a geofenced area (even though Elon said Tesla would not do geofencing), and have been documented to have multiple times the need for “potential critical incident intervention” than human drivers.
The guy should have been a politician – he’s among the best in the game of “How can you tell he’s lying? His lips are moving!”
Just in the last quarter Tesla received some $381 million in “regulatory credits”. Even so, and despite a top notch skill in cooking the books, it is about to have negative free cashflow again.
That’s why Elon’s moving to new grifts, this time in space. Like the “mission to Mars/Moon” or the “datacenters in orbit, running on free solar energy”.
Someone put forward a fitting description for him:
A grifter with a Dunning-Kruger effect.
It fits him to a T.
He’s the AI slop version of Steve Jobs, without a Wozniak.
“He envisions a fleet of Tesla-badged Johnny Cabs that people pay Tesla to use each time they are taken for a ride.”
I see what you did there, Eric. Bravo!
Own cars? That’s so “20th Century “, y’all…I don’t think Elon has earned an honest dollar, much like most of our elites…
“You vill own nothing.
Und be happy…”
WEF head Clown Klaus
Klaus let the cat out of the bag and little to early, perhaps? Or maybe (((they))) just love rubbing our noses in the fact that we can’t or won’t do anything to stop this….
YMMV….
Yes, you will own nothing, and (supposedly) be happy.
And, along those lines, numbered credit cards are going to be phased out. By 2030. That year again.
https://clark.com/credit-cards/credit-card-numbers-going-away/
Of course, biometrics will be used. Probably linked to your social credit score. Didn’t get your COVID booster? You won’t be able to buy anything.
People also do not have to recall the many times a week we hop into the car to make numerous stops at various places, change plans on the fly to go somewhere else, adjust schedules, take long drives to visit relatives etc.
How will the cabs idea possibly work with humans who have grown used to ease, tap to pay, microwave speed living. I’ll believe it when I see it.
It won’t. But that is no concern to those pushing this.
In fact, it’s a feature, not a bug.
The power co-op wants me to install a Tesla Powerwall. The reason is the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve")duck curve. Solar generation peaks from about 10:00 to 14:00, but demand lags production by about 2 hours. So they want me to store up that excess in a battery for them to use whenever they need it. They are selling the Powerwalls at a substantial discount (installation not included), and they pinky-swear promise they’ll leave enough juice to keep the house running for an hour or so if there’s an outage.
I could see this model being applied to self-driving vehicles. You get a deep discount off the purchase price. In exchange you agree to let Tesla “share” it with others when it is idle. Maybe they’ll even cut you in on the deal from time to time. It will sit in your garage, charging, then when someone schedules a trip, off it goes! Imagine! Getting income from your EV!
Of course there’s the whole liability problem. Holy Cross Electric says I have to have a million dollar insurance policy if I want to sell them power. It all MUST be installed by a certified electrician. And when the battery is done being a battery, I have to dispose of it. Not to mention the loss of space in my garage/yard. Who will be held responsible for damage, either caused by or to my vehicle when it’s out delivering white girls to the inner-city club? Who’s ready for Sunday morning cleanup? Because the times when the old ladies want to refill their ‘scrips at Walmart aren’t going to pay out as much as Saturday night excess.
Now maybe Elon just wants to run a transportation service, like Waymo. That makes everything a lot cleaner from a legal standpoint, but now you’ve got to have parking lots all over the place, manage inventory and do your own Sunday cleanup. Except that’s not the Silly-Con valley way. You want to have an extremely small group that excels at “scale.” Better to “nudge” your users into doing the dirty stuff yourself. Perhaps he can throw some AI robots at the problem.
This is the extension of most business models now, the corporation gets all the reward while the contractor assumes all the risk. It was made obvious in 2008 when the mask of our quasi communist-capitalist system was torn off. Privatize profit, socialize losses. It’s good work if you’re an insider to get it.
They count on people not doing the math.
If people did they wouldn’t find any uber, amazon or pizza delivery drivers. You don’t make any money when you consider all the costs of it. Most people don’t.
Hey RK, is the power company going to provide you with a fireproof containment for that battery along with a paid-by-them insurance policy in case it manages to burn your house down anyway? Wouldn’t touch it with the proverbial ten foot pole otherwise.
Exactly. I sent a message to the board asking why they wanted the membership to take on the responsibility for storing power the co-op is going to use. I also pointed out they have access to plenty of land in the form of rights-of-way for their infrastructure. In other words, if you want batteries just build your own. Not only would it be safer, it would also be something that they have 100% control over, could actively monitor, etc. Put them in neighborhoods with high concentration of installed solar and I’ll bet they pay off in less than 18 months.
The response was “well, we can’t afford that, and it’s not as simple as you think.” Bullsh*t! They have the entire Green New Deal legislation behind them. If they want to put a new transformer in my back yard there’s nothing I can do about it. So why not add batteries to the substations? Even if they had to buy the land it’s not like substation-adjacent property with high tension lines already in place is worth billions.
The idea of “set it and forget it” for chemical batteries isn’t going to happen. They require routine checks (I used to work in telecom and twice a year we’d have a battery tech come by and test each one), someone paying attention to the systems and technicians ready to maintain them.
Did they shut off your power this week? Xcel was threatening to do that due to high winds being forecasted.
That is another case of shit rolling down hill. The utility that has a pretty sweetheart situation being usually a monopoly that can get almost any rate they want.
Yet the precedent is set of PG&E getting the shaft over wildfires. Their lack of maintenance of course probably had a lot to do with it but still the government will protect someone until they have to be thrown under the bus to protect someone higher in the food chain.
So now they can use a little bit of wind and the “risk” of wildfire to shut you off for an indefinite length of time. How convenient that just when they need a way to push distributed storage to compensate for the Colorado legislature’s diktats on grid-wildfire mitigation and “sustainable” electricity comes only from unreliable sources.
The utilities have a few engineers who see the writing on the wall. When the Craig plant finally goes off line so does reliable power for the western half of the state.
Heres a great deal. Sign up to be our battery bitch.
>Now maybe Elon just wants to run a transportation service, like Waymo
Win-win-win for eLoon.
The “end user”
A) Garages the vehicle, for free
B) Charges the vehicle, for free
C) Assumes all liability for any damage done by the vehicle, for free
eLoon rents it out, on a short term basis, and keeps most of the profit.
And we haven’t even talked about the data mining, which is probably a very rich vein indeed.
Just think…
You will be required to “log on” every time you get behind the wheel of what you thought was “your” car. The vehicle will track you relentlessly, build a “profile” of your activity, and sell that data to whoever wants to buy it.
A detailed dossier of your every coming and going will be available online, without your knowledge or consent, to whoever wants to pay for it. And you, dear driver, will be none the wiser. Unless, of course, you are willing to “license” your own data from those who have “mined” it.
The sad thing is, they will find plenty of suckers to do this. Hopefully you don’t have any neighbors that are close enough to you that their battery fire affects you.
These vehicles will be yours to pay for, but not yours to do as you wish with.
“why is Musk so anti-driving?”
Continuous revenue stream.
Part of the trend of selling to you ad infinitum.
So how much does it cost to ride 100 miles away to visit a sick relative, attend a wedding or funeral, visit an old buddy? If Uber is any indication, you might need to take out a loan to go more than the distance to work.
One of the reasons he says publicly is that he believes these cars will drastically reduce road deaths and injuries from accidents.
They always tout “safety” when tightening nooses around necks.
Of course it would lower your chance of dying in a car accident, when you are stuck at home…… Unless their crappy tech crashes into your house.
He apparently learned from Bill Gates that subscriptions is where you can really make money.
Like Microsoft 365? A colleague who uses MS Publisher for graphics is lamenting that it will dropped from Microsoft 365 in October, making all her old files useless.
Those with lifetime Office licenses won’t be inconvenienced. But in the corporate world, where cloud software rental is the norm, when Microsoft turns off the lights, the party’s over. Bill Gates doesn’t give a fig what you and I think.
A big problem with Using a Johnny Cab to do any amount of shopping is that you have to go home between stores. Most people aren’t going to want to drag the groceries with them into multiple stores when they go shopping. Depending on what you’re buying just shopping might mean six or more Johnny Cab rides in one day plus the transit time wasted .
Lets not forget those that go to tag sales, estate sales and whatnot, lots of stops but you might not buy much. A Sunday drive in the country will be prohibitively expensive also.
Another thing that gets me is they want autonomous vehicles at the same time they say we need UBI because no one will have jobs.
To paraphrase that line out of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: “The technocrats were the first with their backs against the wall when the revolution came”.
Don’t worry, you can pay a “wait fee” to prevent the car from driving off with your Christmas presents while you continue to shop
Hi Dan. I considered that but then you’re going to pay even more money. The savings aren’t there any way you slice it.
You’re thinking in olden times. They want you to use digital money so it won’t be possible to do small cash transactions like this, so garage sales can’t exist because who’s going to have a payment processor at home? If you have stuff you want to discard you’ll have to pay a company to resell it for you. If you’re even allowed to buy and sell things without authorization in the first place.
> who’s going to have a payment processor at home
Likely you will be allowed to “rent” one.
The payment processor rental company will log all of “your” customers and their relevant personal contact data.
Bought a widget at a garage sale?
Used a debit or credit card to pay for it?
Guess what. You are now installed in some corporate database (maybe more than one) without your knowledge or consent. Welcome to the panopticon, folks.
There’s a place for taxis. When traveling. As long as it’s cheaper and more convenient than a cab, or paying airport parking fees, it will be a success. Every time I’ve had to take a cab or Uber from/to the destination airport it’s been a game of “what time’s your flight?” and fingers crossed the guy will show up with enough time to get through security theatre. If Musk’s cars can get me to the airport when I want to get there, not when Taxi Mohamed or Corey Uber thinks I should get there, it will be a win.
The closest airpot to me is about an hour’s drive. Not going to get an Uber to drive me that far, so either friends or drive myself and pay for parking. Luckily Eagle County gets subsidized by Vail Resorts in the winter so they keep parking cheap for locals. But most airports charge huge bucks for parking, just because they have you over a barrel. If a Tesla Jonny Cab will get me to and from the airport for less than my car sitting for a week, that’s OK with me.
But that’s an exception. For day to day stuff, transportation as a service rarely make sense. If they did government wouldn’t need to funnel fuel taxes to run the bus service.
“A Sunday drive in the country will be prohibitively expensive also.”
Sunday RIDES don’t quite have the same appeal, do they?
‘thermal power plant efficiency’
Let’s not forget line loss or that the electrical grid can not possibly transmit enough power to charge vehicles and provide power for industry, business, residential and AI data centers even if there was sufficient electrical capacity (which there isn’t).
So the second-generation Tesla Roadster is coming out. The first-gen Roadster, released in 2008 after others did the development work, did enormous damage. It gave us the bogus MPGe metric, which excludes thermal power plant efficiency to triple the reported ‘mileage’ to values in the low 100s.
Remember the 100 mpg carburetor we read about in Popular Mechanics as wee lads? Elon made it come true! But unfortunately, it’s a fake achievement.
‘Tesla vehicles with the current Hardware 4 package, which started production in 2023, would achieve autonomy with a future update to the automaker’s optional Full-Self Driving software, Musk said.’ — Automotive News
Elon has been saying this for years bow. Tesla is being sued over such claims. But still he asserts that FSD will be good enough to only occasionally kill people. If the value placed on a human life is sufficiently low, then that’s an easily managed business expense. 🙂
> If the value placed on a human life is sufficiently low, then that’s an easily managed business expense. 🙂
Bravissimo! 🙂