In this episode of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing, Motley Fool contributors Travis Hoium, Lou Whiteman, and Jon Quast discuss:
- Tesla’s “event.”
- ChatGPT-6.
- Adobe’s new CEO
- 10-year predictions.
- Retail’s health.
- Stocks on the radar.
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Travis Hoium: Tesla had an event last night, and we were not invited. Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing starts now. Welcome to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. I’m Travis Hoium. I’m joined today by Lou Whiteman and Jon Quast, and guys, we previewed on the Wednesday show Tesla’s event that they had last night about the robotaxi. There’s a lot of hype around this. Lou, not only were we not invited; I don’t think anybody was invited.
Lou Whiteman: No livestream, no nothing. I’m confused here because I don’t want to slam a company for doing a publicity event. Publicity events are very important. But if you want to do a publicity event, you should try to get publicity. You should do a livestream. They hyped this for weeks. There were contests like if you take a ride in Austin, you can get to go. Then night of the event, Elon Musk didn’t even show up. Not only, didn’t he show up, he barely had the energy to live-tweet it. He did like one retweet or so. Why bother? I don’t understand. They basically announced that we’re actually doing what we announced last year, and it’ll start rolling up. This could have been an email thing. This could have been a press release, guys.
Travis Hoium: Jon, is there a more bullish way to look at this?
Jon Quast: I think that we’re talking out of both sides of our mouth here saying there was hyped for weeks, and then yet it wasn’t hyped on the time of the event. I think that they were playing this the way they wanted to play it. Is it even fair to call it a launch? It really isn’t; it’s a slow rollout, is what it is. I actually think it makes more sense to not overly hype this because we are not going out across the country and all cities with a fleet of hundreds of vehicles. If you do hype it too much, then you set the expectations too high and then there’s disappointment.
Travis Hoium: Isn’t that Elon’s been doing for a decade or more, though? The original robotaxi event was in 2024. That was two years ago. They started talking about the robotaxi, I believe in 2018 or 2019, not in its current form, but the idea of the robotaxi and having this fleet. We’re almost a decade after that, and other companies have much bigger fleets. It’s just we are at this point, and the reason that I wanted to bring this up on the show is we are at the point where autonomous vehicles are real. Tesla was supposed to have this huge first-mover advantage. They were supposed to have a huge cost advantage, and once you have both of those things and you have this network effect, now no one can catch up, it seems like they’ve fumbled that.
Jon, are we at the point where they’ve really got to put up, or Waymo is out there scaling their vehicles, and they’re cutting their costs dramatically? The rumors were the hardware costs for autonomous vehicles, basically on top of the vehicle itself went from about $150,000 down to about $20,000. This is the way hardware works. It gets less expensive over time. Yes, they have more sensors. But if the cost differential is very small and coming down, it seems like that advantage that Tesla should have is evaporating in front of our eyes.
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