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On Tuesday afternoon, after the stock market closed, Tesla held its annual meeting. Tesla CEO Elon Musk told the excited attendees that 2023 would finally see the Cybertruck go into production and that one example of the angular, stainless-steel truck would be his daily driver. He also confirmed some previously reported facts, such as a step to reduce silicon carbide power electronics in the drive units, and then gave a presentation on the company’s robotics program.
After the annual meeting, Musk sat down for an interview with CNBC’s David Faber. In the interview, Musk was questioned on a number of Tesla-related topics.
TV commercials for Tesla ads?
During Tesla’s annual meeting, in response to shareholders, Musk acknowledged that perhaps Tesla should engage in more official publicity.
“Maybe there’s a good logic to it if we’re simply saying, yeah, the information bias, say he has a Twitter account on my Twitter account or someone preaching to the converted person. And he doesn’t reach out to the people who aren’t already converted. I’m convinced, basically. So I think they probably have a good point. Well, I mean, I think it’s worth a try, and we’ll see how effective it is,” Musk said.
When pressed to explain what form Tesla ads might take — Faber speculated if he’d see Tesla ads played during NFL games — Musk admitted that there was no preconceived notion or strategy behind the decision, and the decision was made on stage.
But the Tesla CEO saw some wisdom in the announcement, pointing out that some people had the wrong expectation that Tesla cars are too expensive. Then on the topic of stats, Musk reiterated his claims that Teslas are the safest cars on the road.
“I think you know the stats speak for themselves,” he told CNBC, probably not referring to all of the federal safety investigations into Tesla driver assistance, nor the statistic that Tesla cars have been subject to more official safety recalls than any other make or model by some margin. (A Tesla Model Y is 15.6 times more likely to be recalled than the industry average.)
Musk checks orders daily
Musk told Faber that he checks the volume of new orders daily to see what mix of cars to build. Perhaps this explains the erratic series of price increases and decreases we have seen since the beginning of the year. “We’re basically adjusting our pricing to match demand. And obviously we did a significant price drop in the first quarter, but quickly, now in January it’s usually a tough time to buy cars. So there’s seasonality to buying cars in January. January is often Worst month, so there was a big drop in prices, and then recently, we increased prices.”
Despite this attention to detail, in the past few quarters, Tesla has consistently built thousands more cars than it can sell, ending the first quarter of 2023 with a surplus of about 9,000 expensive and unwanted Model S and X models, plus a similar number of cheaper cars. And the most expensive. Forms 3 and Y.
Break the laws of economics
Musk has said repeatedly that Tesla’s fate is tied to its driver-assistance features, and during the CNBC interview, he once again reiterated claims that Teslas will become so valuable, roaming the streets day and night making money — divided between Tesla and the car owner — as an autohub.
“Well, the utility of a car, usually a passenger car is 10, 10 hours a week, maybe 12. If you say someone is going to drive an hour and a half a day, on average, so maybe an hour commute a day and then the occasional long commute but it’s typical Being 10, 12 hours a week for a passenger car. And then you also have a lot of costs associated with parking. You need a garage or you have to buy a parking space or you have to get a parking ticket at the mall. There are a lot of costs associated with And now if you have an autonomous car, it can be like a self-driving Uber, I think the utility would be what would be much higher maybe, you know, and that again, there’s a lot of speculation,” he told Faber.
Although Musk said at the time that the terms and conditions for using Tesla as a robottaxi had been in place for some time — noting that this was only permitted through the official Tesla robotaxi network — Musk couldn’t tell Faber how many parts his company would order. Musk then went on to quote industry analysis by Ark Invest, which repeatedly publishes outlandish predictions about Tesla’s future share price.
Autopilot – very soon now (fr no cap)
When asked about a timeline for fully self-driving Tesla, Musk told Faber that it “looks like it’s going to happen this year.”
“We’re now at the point where a car can drive on highways and in cities where human distance is extremely scarce. So I mean, just — I was able to drive for days, just drop a navigation pin at random locations in the greater Austin area with no intrusions. And the same The thing is in San Francisco, which is a very difficult place to drive in. So I mean, you have bus lanes, one-way streets. You know, it’s a challenge for the homeless situation.”
However, Tesla has taken a very different tone when speaking with regulators than with journalists, telling the California Department of Motor Vehicles that despite the “full self-driving” name, Tesla does not consider the software to actually be capable of self-driving and this was not expected. made “significant improvements” to the system, which “will continue to be an SAE Level 2 Standard, an Advanced Driver Assistance feature”, which always requires the driver to maintain control and, significantly, responsibility.
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