Sure, glad to see someone here to actually have a nuanced debate and pay attention to other stuff than the person Elon Musk (which of course is interesting too, but it gets a bit boring to only read the negative about a guy who does positive stuff for the World too).
I'll just make it all in one long and quickly written post, as I'm both in a hurry and I don't see any big reason for a long debate on some of the points. I think we agree on some points, if not much of it, so thanks for taking the time.
Profit margins
Tesla, in general have one of the highest margins on their cars compared to other traditional manufacturers. 16% or how much it is these days is actually on the high end compared to many of the big ones who struggle to even profit. In the next couple of years German car-makers will really be struggling if not deemed too big to fail, as they haven't adjusted to climate goals. The chinese EV's mostly run with big losses too, which highlights how well Tesla has engineered their cars to effectivize costs and actually have a margin. Many of the legacy car makers don't even make a profit on the cars themselves, just on the service. In Tesla's there's practically no service to attend to.
On top of that you'll have revenue in the future from FSD software in Tesla, so I would look at it from a positive perspective from Tesla even though margits are getting lower (That was always natural and to be expected when a market gets more competitive). Picking Mercedes Benz as comparison is doable, and the numbers are probably true, but I think it's more fair to compare with the market as a whole. It's pretty clear a lot of car companies are struggling, and you have to look at the macro-economics too with Tesla doing all this in a high-interest environment where most are struggling. It's a fair point that Tesla only has few models though. A lot of investors have been screaming for more, and still are, but yet it's also a good thing when training the AI for FSD that you have to put out updates for 5 cars instead of 150 different ones (which you'll also have to maintain)
Level of autonomy:
Tesla's level of autonomy is Level 2 for a reason - you don't have to adjust for as many regulations if you call it Level 2 even though it's already performing better than someone like Mercedes pro-forma calling it Level 3 because it can do a certain set of things on a limited set of roads - in short, in a totally safe environment. In short Mercedes is not capable of really anything of note/use and not doing anything Tesla's not already doing better in the grand scale of things. It's easy to find comparisons out there between the two and deep dive into it if you look. I mostly never encount this argument anymore, mainly because it isn't really worthy of comparison. I' aint got a lot of time currently to find videos, but take a look mostly anywhere and you'll see a clear difference/reviews on why it's not better even though they - on paper - can call it level 3.
I obviously disagree about the Trump thing - You'd eventually get found out and have lots of injuries/death cases if you just approved a lvl 2 autonomy as lvl 4/5 without having the actual capabilities. I know a lot of people want to see Elon Musk as evil and all his interest as evil, but what evil stuff he will eventually do if Trump is elected is probably also highly exaggerated. I think it's a bit too simple to say he only goes into the trump relationship to do good for his own companies - he clearly thinks about civilization in big ways. In reality it's also pretty tough to tear everything apart in a system of regulation with regards to full self driving (where you'd also get a lot of public scrutiny if you did) and then after having done that, throw a car out on the road that isn't capable of level 5. That'd just give you a never ending amount of shit and devaluate your product, as people are not that dumb.
On the progress of FSD: It's really hard to find numbers out there on the progress of FSD and when / if it will be achieved. There's a term called "The march of 9's" which many think will be a problem and why it'll take many many years to achieve level 4 or 5, but in reality we just don't know. There's also the community Tesla FSD tracker where Tesla drivers report in with miles pr intervention, but numbers are really hard to take at face value, because every driver is different and have a different threshold for when you'd intervene. There's many fallacies in trusting those numbers, so for an investor like me who's critical, I also have a hard time telling if it's a year away or 5-10 years away. Only time can tell, but at least it seems like Tesla are confident/thinks they're getting closer, as the (probably supervised) Robotaxi network will be rolled out in California and Texas in 2025.
Like with Mercedes, you encounter a lot of these arguments that Tesla's competitor is doing waaay better currently, but when you observe it more close it's highly debatable whether that's the case. For instance Waymo seems to be the talk of town for some right now, but when when you take a closer look at why they have "no interventions" and drive driverless you'll find out they're highly monitored and supervised/teleoperated. Just recently it was revealed that Waymo can report lower numbers pr intervention because of the smart way they report. Basically a tele-operator constantly supervise a trip and taps a screen constantly of which road to take. If a car then crashes/does a critical intervention event, then it's not reported as a human error, because it wasn't the cars fault at the time as "the car" took that wrong turn. There's just so many numbers out there and biases, that everything needs great scepticism including Tesla.
Solar City
Yeah, solar roofs didn't really work out although they were a noble idea. One of the few mishaps. Glad to see the energy business and storage doing well now though.
Robots
They were partly tele-operated at the 10/10 even and what can you say? It's still a great feat and shows the amazing progress, but it is often belittled by arguments like "Technically some have been able to do this 30 years ago". Tesla put videos out there from time to time on the Optimus robot and the progress is just wild. Even if they only tele-operated a very sofisticated humanoid with great capabilities and motion, you'd be able to use it for defusing a bomb, doing remote/boring/hard/continuous work. But it seems to be way more than teleoperations with the videos they release and a lot of it is not teleoperations - there's just a lot of why's they'd do teleoperations at an event, also to meet regulations. The possibilities of a humanoid are endless if Tesla can achieve a great bot, and for many investors this is the big and most realistic perspective too as you don't need a "perfect" product for it to be viable business like you do with FSD. In FSD you have to reach level 5 to make a Robotaxi, but with robots you can benefit from a robot that's only 30-80% "complete". The humanoid just doesn't take much more progress to make it a really good business for manufacturing. Tesla's investing so much in robots and FSD right now, so the likelyhood of them solving FSD and being extremely good at doing Optimus are high imo.
Timehorizons
Yes, this is the big critique and ridicule of Elon Musk for many and a good way to round off this post to put some perspective of it all. It's totally fair to say "didn't you just promise this before?" but overall I'd say that on maybe 90% (if not more) of what Elon Musk sets out to do, it happens over time. Many just don't believe what will be the future, because they can't see it right now. So while people might ridicule him for not delivering what he set out to do maybe 2 years out in the future, when it happens in double the time, then it still happened. That's why it feels great for many people now to mock him and his ongoing innovations, but in the long run the products he puts out there will run laps on many things you thought was possible. At least that's my opinion after looking closely every day on what technologies Tesla's getting capable of mastering. I'm sure many will think these things they set out to do will never happen.
On that note, I'll end my post here and check back on this thread when a long time has passed. Both to see if Elon actually is this evil guy you all portray him to be if Trump is elected, and also to see the results of what Tesla and Elon Musk heavily invests in/works hard on currently. The World is changing more than ever with AI and it's completely unfair to judge it all as of now, when being in the middle of the hurricane and the development. It's a possibility that Elon Musk will be portrayed as an even more evil guy again over the next years as he takes on maybe the dirtiest job of the World - to help the american economy out from spiralling out of debt-control, cut government costs and create less regulations (which is the biggest stated purposes of why he has joined the Trump-campaign). Taking on gigantic tasks like that will automatically give you enemies, even if you do it all in reasonable manners like laying off people with 2 years notice as I've heard him say recently. I think he just doesn't give a shit how he's perceived anymore, so if his intentions are to make (what he perceives) to be a better state, I can understand why he goes into politics.
Like with everything else Elon-related, I'm sure it'll all have no nuances.
