Lors d'un événement dédié à l'intelligence artificielle, Elon Musk a présenté le projet Tesla Bot. Il ne s'agit pas d'un véhicule, mais d'un robot ressemblant à un être humain.
Tesla is often cited as a disrupter of the auto industry.
But Tesla is less disruptive than a new company, Fisker Inc.
Fisker s asset-light model is closer to the true theory of disruptive innovation.
Nobody really saw this one coming. A year ago, Henrik Fisker was an admired auto-industry veteran, but with a failed startup behind him. Fisker Automotive s 2013 bankruptcy sent Fisker back to his roots in design for a spell, but it didn t discourage him from taking another crack at building a car company.
But Fisker Inc. was mainly concept vehicles and Henrik s one-man marketing machine until mid-2020. Up to that point, much of the electric-vehicle narrative revolved around Tesla, with the traditional car industry s frantic efforts to catch up to CEO Elon Musk forming the key subplot.
Britta Pedersen-Pool/Getty Images
Tesla s share price is well off its highs.
In February, Tesla added $1.5 billion in bitcoin to its holdings.
The controversial decision has been blamed for the stock slide but that s wrong.
What s a hundred billion here and there when you re one of the most valuable companies in the world?
For Tesla, it s notable: the electric carmaker s market capitalization had been surging toward a trillion bucks, but after dropping 13% in the past month, it s now hovering around $700 billion. That s still more than seven times General Motors market cap, but the downward trend did raise questions.
One of them was, Is this about bitcoin? Tesla added $1.5 billion in the cryptocurrency to its balance sheet a few weeks ago, just in time for bitcoin to spike in value and then plunge, as the defiantly unstable asset is wont to do. Tesla might have contributed marginally to the uptick, and the Tesla selloff which occurred in t
Business Insider
Tesla has avoided adding a finance arm to lend customers money to buy cars.
But Tesla could now become a bitcoin banking hub.
About 10 years ago, I joined a conference call with Elon Musk to talk about a new leasing program for Tesla s Model S sedan, which was then relatively new to the market. I asked the CEO when he thought the automaker might start its own bank.
He said that Tesla was happy with its established finance partners and wasn t planning to create the Bank of Elon anytime soon. Which made sense. Tesla was then producing a fraction of the half-million cars it did in 2020. Manufacturing vehicles was far more important than lending people money to buy them.
Tesla and Apple are engaged with self-driving, but both are behind the real leaders.
Tesla is pursuing a different technology from Waymo and Cruise.
Apple is testing tech, but racking up very few miles.
Every year, the California Department of Motor vehicles releases a Disengagement Report for companies that are authorized to operate and test self-driving vehicles on the state s roads. The report is controversial, mainly because it s effectively just raw data. But it can in some cases provide insight into how autonomous-mobility firms are progressing, as they push toward commercializing their technologies and services.
For example, General Motors standalone autonomy unit, Cruise, racked up over 770,000 self-driven miles in 2020, as the company noted in a Medium post last week. Cruise pointed out that disengagements that s when the autonomous system disconnects and a human safety driver has to take over declined to zero in the last three months of the year.