It was perhaps the most disappointing launch event in Tesla's history, or even in the history of the tech industry. The reason why I say this is not only because Musk was 53 minutes late to start, but also because the whole press conference was only 20 minutes, and the things released were basically fried cold rice.
At full risk, there are only two new products: CyberCab and RoboVan.
The CyberCab is a model with double doors that spread out like butterfly wings, and no steering wheel or footrests. Musk announced that the CyberCab is a special car for Tesla's future Robotaxi and will be mass-produced in 2026 at a cost of $30,000.
RoboVan, on the other hand, is a driverless bus that can carry up to 20 people.
Subsequently, the conference showed a more advanced humanoid robot, and also mentioned the vehicle wireless charging technology, of course, the vehicle wireless charging technology is still in the pipeline, and then the whole conference is over.
As for the latest progress of Tesla's self-driving FSD and end-to-end large model that the public wants to hear the most, there is not a word, everyone wants to hear how it is realized, and they don't want to hear what they want to achieve.
For readers who don't know what Tesla wants to achieve, please refer to "When we are shouting "far ahead" for the world, Tesla is transforming into a new species"
In short, this time Musk didn't even bother to draw the pie, and directly took out the things that were fast and rancid a few years ago to fool everyone. This also reflects from the side that Tesla's self-driving technology is not progressing as expected.
Since Musk has no new story to tell, this article will talk about Tesla's real predicament from the perspective of financial market valuation.
From the perspective of financial market valuation, the new energy vehicle industry and the traditional fuel vehicle industry, although they are both automotive industries, are two completely different valuation systems, and the new energy vehicle industry follows the valuation route of technology stocks, that is, AI.
The logic is that the imagination space is the first, the market dominance is the second, compared with the traditional valuation method of the automotive industry, the valuation of new energy vehicle stocks cannot be calculated by formulas, it is an art. But no matter what the art is, there are traces of the valuation method of new energy vehicles, that is, a valuation fulcrum and two basic judgments.
At present, the fulcrum of the valuation of new energy vehicles is Tesla, whose market value is the ceiling of other new energy vehicle companies and the center of the valuation system. Tesla's current market value of $762.784 billion should be said to give a lot of imagination to the new car-making forces.
But standing today, we have to admit that Tesla was too ahead of its time before 2020, but it has stagnated after 2020. Before 2020, Tesla was the object of all new energy vehicle companies, and Musk designed an epoch-making centralized electronic and electrical architecture, OTA, pure electric development platform, battery thermal management technology, silicon carbide chips, etc., which can be called "great".
You know, Tesla Model 3 was released in April 2016, and it is now 8 years old, and it is still Tesla's main sales model today.
Since model iteration is faltering, why is Tesla still the origin of the industry's valuation?
The answer is Tesla's imagination, which is far more than selling cars, but the capital market's expectations for Tesla's software ecosystem, specifically the end-to-end AI model FSD of the autonomous driving system, and the ecology based on it. If autonomous driving technology matures in the future, then the imagination of valuation will be completely opened. New energy vehicle companies, car sales revenue and software service revenue account for half of each, and the profit margin will become extremely broad.
To sum up, if you just sell cars, then the imagination of new energy vehicles in the capital market is limited, but if there is automatic driving technology with AI as the underlying logic, then the future will be limitless.
But the AI industry as a whole may be on the eve of a bubble bursting.
This is the famous "$600 billion in AI" problem, a proposition put forward by Sequoia, a well-known venture capital institution.
It believes that the imbalance between AI investment and income continues to worsen, with the revenue gap soaring from $200 billion to $600 billion. So, the AI bubble is approaching a tipping point, and how to deal with it next will be crucial.
What do you mean? At present, the AI industry needs too much investment, but too little money, and even the AI business itself has not made any money at all. For example, in the United States "gold rush" back then, the gold diggers all lost money, and only those who sold shovels, water, and jeans made money. Among all the hardware manufacturers, the most profitable is NVIDIA, but this situation obviously cannot be sustained for a long time.
First of all, the basic setting of AI computing power, the inventory of GPUs is growing, that is to say, the demand is saturated, but the supply is still increasing, such as Nvidia announced their B100 chip, which has a 2.5x increase in performance and only a 25% increase in cost, which is expected to lead to a final surge in demand for NVDA chips.
Second, the funding gap of AI companies is widening, but the ability to make money has stopped, and the star company in the AI industry, OpenAI, now has a revenue of $3.4 billion, but the funding gap is as high as $500 billion.
Obviously, this situation is not sustainable, and capital such as Sequoia and Goldman Sachs are also losing patience.
If we look at Tesla from this perspective, it will be clear at a glance that Tesla's current investment in AI is extremely huge, it is a full-stack self-development in the true sense, Tesla independently develops all hardware and software algorithms, that is, all computing chips, sensors, and cameras are developed by themselves, algorithms are also developed by themselves, maps are also their own, and data is also analyzed by themselves.
Despite Tesla's huge investment, its self-driving output is not proportional to it, with FSD's global orders increasing from 9.7% in the second quarter of 2018 to 45.7% in the second quarter of 2019, but falling rapidly to 7.4% in the third quarter of 2022, and only 2% remaining.
Why has FSD been slow to break through? Reference: "Instead of bothering about Robotaxi, Musk might as well find a way to sell FSD well" and "Surrounded by wolves: How many cards does Musk have left?" "First Principles" Is Killing Tesla
Obviously, the story can't be told, but the stock price has to be maintained, and R&D has to continue. It can be seen that after this almost rotten press conference, Tesla's market value will be severely challenged, and how Musk can sell FSD well and run through the Robotaxi path may be several times more difficult than breaking through the production capacity hell back then.