The missing piece of the puzzle here is what is the overall percent increase of EVs in total car sales. (Not a gotcha. I have no idea). A smaller piece of a bigger pie isn’t necessarily terrible.
Just like Amazon.
I have no idea what is going to happen and my suspicion is that you’re largely correct about the robots but Tesla will be selling lots of cars for the foreseeable future.
Tesla sales seem to have maxed out at about 1.5-2 million cars a year. Out of about 90 million cars a year sold.
I don’t know the exact % that are EVs since there are different kinds of EVs (BEVs, PHEVs, EREVs, etc) and the figures differ on whether you only mean BEVs, or if you’re including PHEVs, etc.
However, the % of cars that are EVs keeps growing. However Tesla sales are flat at under 2 million. I don’t see Tesla magically selling 5 million cars anytime soon, even though the % of new cars sold that are EVs keeps going up.
I believe in 2020, about 3% of new car sales were BEVs, in 2025 it was about 15%. I think total EVs (including hybrids) was close to 25% of new car sales.
So I get the impression that Elon Musk is hyping Optimus, the bipedal humanoid robot being developed by Tesla, as the Next Big Thing, and a justification for the company’s ridiculous stock price. And yet, last week, dozens (or even over a hundred) humanoid robots competed in a half-marathon race in Beijing yesterday. So what’s so great about Optimus that makes it special? (And you could certainly ask the same question about Tesla’s automobiles when many other companies also have electric autos.)
Other than the self driving system, not much but that is a big thing for a lot of people. I’d love to drive a different EV if it had anything close. Almost anyone can use the charging network now so that’s gone away.
I have seen no evidence that Teslas bipedals are better than other ones other than maybe their ability to quickly scale.
By quickly scale, do you mean produce many robots quickly? If so, I think Chinese manufacturers can beat Tesla in that regard.
True.
Nothing is special about optimus. The field of bipedal robots is huge, and there isn’t any reason I can tell to believe Tesla will be the pioneer. When bipedal robots are ready for home use, people will have a dozen plus companies to pick from, which means companies will have to operate on razor thin margins to gain market share. The only time when a company can charge huge margins in a competitive market (from what I know) is when the item is a status symbol (iPhones, harley davidson, etc). But Tesla is not a status symbol, it is an anti-status symbol.
Also while some bipedal robots are already starting to be sold for home use, tesla’s robots are still controlled by a human. Here is a video of an optimus robot where you can see the human controller take off the VR headset and then the robot falls down.
Tesla is a scam, and after it is proven that Optimus can’t compete in the robotics field, Musk will move to the next project (internet satellites, space travel, etc) and claim he has the inside track on that potential multi trillion dollar industry to justify the high stock prices.