"If Tesla's self-driving can be realized, then it can be said that Tesla is a technology company, otherwise it is just an ordinary electric car company. ”
Text / Ba Jiuling
On July 10, 2018, a deep sea blue Model 3 was parked outside the Peace Hotel in Shanghai, and Li Qiang, then secretary of the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee, stepped into the main car, and the "commentator" Musk then sat in the co-pilot.
The largest foreign-funded manufacturing project in Shanghai's history, the $2 billion Tesla Gigafactory, has settled in Shanghai. This was followed by Tesla's "sunny days" in the past 6 years, and it was also the "spring" of the comprehensive rise of China's new energy vehicles.
Until April 2, 2024, winter is coming. According to Tesla's financial report for the first quarter of 2024, the actual delivery data of 387,000 vehicles fell 8% year-on-year, the largest shorter-than-expected data in history, while revenue fell by 9%, net profit fell by 55%, Tesla's global layoffs of 10%, and the departure of many core executives, everything seems to imply that Musk and Tesla are in the "darkest moment".
On the afternoon of April 28, the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing was clear and clear. Musk, who had just gotten off the private jet, was surrounded by the crowd and walked into the Imperial Garden, and did not forget to pat the landscape garden on the way, in front of the antique living room and elegant screen, Premier Li Qiang and Musk held talks again.
Based on comments and information from all sides, Musk's visit was "sudden", and the goal was to clear policy obstacles for the launch of "fully self-driving software" FSD in China.
FSD is an autonomous driving system developed by Tesla, and FSD V12 is the latest version, known as the "end-to-end AI autonomous driving system", which has the advantages of high flexibility, good adaptability, high ceiling, and can drive in a highly anthropomorphic state. Prior to this, FSD was not allowed to be used in China.
Whether it is a domestically produced Tesla or a Chinese new energy vehicle, its autonomous driving capability is stuck at L2 (partial autonomous driving), and the legalization of FSD in China may help Tesla take advantage of the data advantage of China's huge car owners to take the lead in achieving a higher level of autonomous driving in China.
On the same day, the Technology Department of the China Automobile Association also announced a batch of new energy vehicles that meet the four requirements of automotive data security (mainly detecting anonymization of face information outside the car, not collecting cockpit data by default, in-vehicle processing of cockpit data, and significant notification of personal information processing, etc.), and Tesla became the only foreign-funded enterprise that meets the compliance requirements.
Soon, on the website of the Ministry of Natural Resources, the news that Tesla will use the advanced driver assistance map provided by Baidu for the Chinese version of FSD was also successfully revealed, and everything hinted that Musk and Tesla were re-paving a golden strip in front of them.
As a result, Tesla's market value rose by 600 billion yuan overnight. Before this day, Tesla's stock price has fallen by a third since 2024, exceeding 1.8 trillion yuan.
We would like to ask: Is this a new signal for Tesla to reverse its decline? Is it still the same lively catfish that leads Chinese automakers to upgrade and innovate autonomous driving functions?
How valuable is it in the future? We connected a number of big players in the investment world to discuss Tesla's new changes.
At the end of 2018 and the beginning of 2019, Tesla's life and death have passed, because the mass production of Model 3 was realized at that time.
The future potential is mainly divided into two parts, one is the electric vehicle business, on the surface the market is fiercely competitive, but in fact, the largest market in the global car is in Europe and the United States. In the European and American markets, there are almost no electric vehicle companies that compete with Tesla.
Because of the lack of electric vehicle ecology in Europe and the United States, the transformation of traditional car companies is very slow, and it can almost be said that it has failed. Some time ago, the United States and Europe also postponed the country's electric vehicle transformation and development plan. However, it is difficult for Chinese car companies to enter the European and American markets, and for various reasons, it is unlikely that they will fully occupy the European and American markets in the next decade.
The other is autonomous driving, which is particularly remarkable that it has achieved a very big advantage in this purely visual route, and it can even be said that it has single-handedly changed the global technology landscape of autonomous driving, because the vast majority of autonomous driving in the world is basically taking the LiDAR route.
Of course, we can't say that the purely visual route will necessarily win. The pure visual route is similar to the human eye, and if the human eye can fully understand the surrounding environment and make the right decisions for autonomous driving, theoretically speaking, the pure visual route will also work.
But there is a certain gambling nature to this. Fortunately, in the last year or two, there has been tremendous progress in the field of visual intelligence – visual generation, and Sora is a prime example.
What is the role of visual intelligence for autonomous driving? The disadvantage of mainstream lidar routes is that they can be modeled, but they are not predictive enough. The value of visual intelligence is that as long as the video generated by the car is long enough and fast enough to be generated forward based on past data, for example, a one-minute video that takes ten seconds to generate means that those 50 seconds are predicted.
Tesla's recently launched FSD V12 shows strong predictability, for example, when a traditional car with self-driving functions hits a car parked in front of it, the car will stop because the 3D environment is modeled and found to be blocking the front. If you have the ability to predict and find that the car will not move, then the car will move on its own and bypass it, so many people comment that the V12 is particularly like an old driver.
In addition to these two pieces, the business of electric vehicles is also expanding. The first round is called electrification, and now everyone is seeing it. The second round is called intelligence. The third round is servitization.
Then it has one of the biggest competitive focuses in the future, driverless taxis (Robotaxi), which are equivalent to Uber and Didi without drivers. Uber and Didi are big businesses, but they need drivers, and the cost of drivers is very high. In the future, if Uber and Didi have no drivers, the profits will rise all of a sudden, and this business will be very attractive.
By the way, a secret that is not a secret, the Tesla electric car you buy, there is fleet management software.
You won't need the software for a while, but once you decide to upgrade your car to a self-driving taxi that can be managed by Tesla, Tesla will be able to dispatch your car remotely.
Tesla's deliveries are declining, first of all, due to macro factors. All EV companies have the problem of sluggish demand. China's BYD delivery decline was even worse than Tesla's (Tesla regained the global electric car sales championship from BYD in Q1). In the United States, high interest rates have dampened demand for car purchases, while in China the overall economic downturn. In general, my feeling is that the industry factor is greater than the individual company factor.
Therefore, Tesla's performance this year is likely to not grow or even decline. Layoffs are also the right thing to do, so that the company can remain profitable in different industry cycles, and profitability is one of the criteria for S&P 500 selection.
As for Musk himself, he is still one of the richest people in the world, and his execution in other companies such as SpaceX is still very satisfactory. Now is definitely not his "darkest hour".
But I don't think we should underestimate the competitiveness of Chinese automakers. In response to Chinese competition, Tesla must continue to innovate, but the gap must be narrowed.
For example, at this point in time, Tesla is a car company. The advantage of its autonomous driving technology over its competitors is shrinking. Unless there is a qualitative leap in FSD, Tesla's autonomous driving will not form a crushing advantage over other electric vehicles.
In this sense, Tesla has stepped down from the altar. The number of investors who fantasize about another 10-fold increase in Tesla's stock has been drastically reduced.
I believe that sooner or later, autonomous driving in all aspects and in the true sense will be realized. Tesla, as the company with the most self-driving data, must be one of the final winners. Tesla has to be all in self-driving. You can't quench your thirst, but you have to.
It's not just the company's own problem, the bigger problem is that the penetration rate of the European and American electric car markets has reached the ceiling itself (the sales growth rate is already lower than that of hybrids), and it cannot continue to rise without continuous government subsidies (so we see that all car companies have transformed to hybrids and no longer improve purified vehicles), which is a problem of market demand, and Tesla can't solve it. Layoffs will not solve the problem of market demand.
The Chinese market is a very unique phenomenon in the world tram market and cannot be replicated. Tesla's production capacity is still of great significance to China (China's cost is much lower), but the significance of the market is no longer great, and Tesla can't compete with domestic competitors.
The logic of Tesla's previous high valuation was that the penetration rate of EVs in the European and American markets could continue to increase and gradually approach the proportion of China, and that autonomous driving and Robotaxi (self-driving taxis) could be launched on a large satellite, making the company a real AI company recognized around the world.
Now the first point has been completely falsified, and the second point continues to be postponed (Musk said that Robotaxi will be launched in August, the market has taken him as a joke, and no one in the industry now believes that L4/L5 autonomous driving will be realized in the short term, including Tesla itself is unwilling to take responsibility for the accident of self-driving, indicating that it does not have 100% trust in its own technology).
If the second point (referring to autonomous driving) can be fulfilled - choosing this path is a must, because the ceiling of the European and American electric car market has been reached, then it can be said that Tesla is a technology company, if it cannot be fulfilled for a long time, then it is just an ordinary electric car company.
Next, it can be seen whether his (referring to Musk) product can be made in August. The vast majority of people in the industry are skeptical about this, and other issues can be ignored for the time being until the Robotaxi with practical value is actually made.
From an electric vehicle perspective, Musk has succeeded. However, the valuation given by the market is to enter a lot of autonomous driving, but its autonomous driving obviously did not run out, so its valuation is definitely not right.
Musk's peak moment has passed, and Tesla will show its original form. After the resignation of CFO Zachary Kirkhorn last year, the next "second-in-command", Drew Baglino, Tesla's senior vice president of battery, motor and energy product engineering, has now left, and Musk will end up alone.
The author of this article | Limpo | Editor-in-Charge | He Mengfei
Editor-in-Chief | He Mengfei | Image source | VCG