If nine reasons weren’t enough, here are five more that I forgot about in my prior post. Again, I have no financial interest in Tesla at the time of this posting.
- Semi Tractor Trailer Trucks – Yes, they are producing trucks, in the video link you’ll see one with a full load going 500 miles in nine hours, and this was a year ago. In addition to this, their work in full self-driving and truck charging stations will eventually enable them to dominate this market.
- Data: Tesla receives real-time telemetry data from every vehicle if they have a charge. I checked on my Tesla this Friday, which is being delivered Monday, and the sales rep said sure, I can tell you where your car is. She said that GPS tracking is enabled from the moment it rolls off the factory floor; think, find my Tesla. Several mouse clicks later, she informed me that it was two states away and shared the exact city it was traveling through. Add all the traffic data and video footage to this, and it’s a wonder that Tesla has data centers big enough to digest it all. Then there’s the power data from home generation, charging centers, and home chargers, merged with weather and news data, and Tesla is sitting on a goldmine. I’ve read that Ford and others believe that Tesla’s data alone gives them an 18-month competitive advantage over all the other EVs companies.
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) – Here, Tesla is perhaps king of the hill. Their Full Self Drive version 12 is a fantastic bundle of AI code. The video footage on YouTube of it navigating a busy Costco parking lot on a Saturday morning is excellent. Any teenager can handle highway driving, but put them in a busy Costco on Saturday morning, and their knuckles become white as they turn the radio down to concentrate. I was shocked when the Tesla didn’t develop a case of road rage at some of the idiots pulling out of parking spaces without looking, even a police car backing up because he couldn’t get around someone [4:06]! This is only the very obvious tip of their AI iceberg; their code base extends well beyond self-driving.
- Chip Development – Developing a leading-edge chip for AI today is a $50-100 Million dollar expense. This is not something to take lightly. Tesla used NVIDIA chips but shifted a few years ago to designing and producing their own. While Ford and others have to buy GPUs or custom ASICs from third parties, often for $100s of dollars, Tesla’s unit cost for a much more custom-tailored and likely more powerful chips is a fraction of this. This is an area that will put a serious distance between Tesla and its car and Robo-Taxi competitors.
- Robotics – Tesla is all about deploying industrial robots, think big arms, on their factory floors, but they’ve also shown off humanoid robots doing a wide range of tasks. This includes what appears to be learning. If you have not seen their Optimus robot, you’re missing out. This thing is a humanoid bot that has been built to replace people on the factory floor. Just check out this video from two months ago, and you’ll see how close they’re getting. This is a substantial improvement from their video of ten months ago. Tesla will be rolling out factories in the future that are designed to accommodate these robots. They’re not spending all this R&D on cute YouTube show-n-tell videos.
- Cobranding and Technology Sharing Between Musk Companies. This is already happening with the Roadster. Elon mentioned at the end of last year that the Roadster would deliver sub one second zero to sixty thanks to technology they are “borrowing” from SpaceX. Imagine driving a mass-market consumer car with actual rocket technology. Jay Leno may be losing sleep over this one. Then there’s Neuralink. Sure its about helping people today, through their first human trials, who’ve lost mental and physical function. But a decade into the future, our thoughts will power robots and cars, brought to you by Tesla enhanced with Neuralink.
So this brings us to 15 reasons why Tesla is far more than a car company. It may be the next Apple, only time will tell.