Back when Tesla was making the Lotus-derived Roadster, most of us thought it was a fly-by-night company that would eventually sell out to a bigger company. That, after all, was the modus operandi for Elon Musk up to that point. But, surprising most of us, the company instead came out with its own car designs.
Hiccups, problems, and issues happened. Grandiose promises and disappointing delivery on them was part of it. But in the end, Tesla was more than most of us assumed it would be when it first began. So whatever one thinks of Musk or his company’s approach here, props should at least be given for far exceeding expectations in terms of survivability and accomplishment. And mostly, it should be noted, Tesla did all of this while making itself into an energy company instead of a carmaker. The cars, for Tesla, were the excuse to make battery factories and storage systems and charging networks.
All of that said, it’s now apparent that Tesla isn’t into cars anymore. During the latest earnings call, Musk announced that the Model S and X will cease production this year. And those production lines will be retooled to produce the Optimus robot. A robot which, so far, has yet to really prove it can actually do anything on its own.
If this sounds familiar, one might be tempted to recall the early days of the Cybertruck when it was introduced and promised, production slated for it, and then.. delays. More delays. And expectation scale-backs before, finally, showing up to market. And being way less than promised. Now sales for the truck are nearing zero faster than you can say “DOGE didn’t deliver.” But Elon & Co would lose a lot of face were they to give up on the Cybertruck this early. So it won’t be nixed like the other two models are.
Musk couched the production cease and robot start announcement – which would have been received with only middling enthusiasm from investors – with talk about robotaxis and AI. And a few mentions of the steadily-growing energy production and storage business that actually props up Tesla now. These nods to potentially tangible and real-world, realistic, near-term items helped shore up trust in what would otherwise have been a downer of a call.
It’s possible that the Optimus robot will, eventually, be something real and tangible and capable of delivering income for Tesla. But it’s more likely that it will become like the Semi: an experiment that pretends to be a commercial endeavor.
Meanwhile, Tesla has been divesting a lot of talent and money into something else: xAI / Grok, Elon’s artificial intelligence platform company. Tesla is gearing its work with xAI towards image recognition and machine learning in an effort to make Full Self-Driving a real thing. Even though FSD was supposed to be a real, fully-functioning thing years ago. Because, well, Elon and promises and all that.
For a long time, I’ve told people that while Tesla might make money as a carmaker, it’s really an energy company. Now it’s probably going to get away from cars almost entirely and instead become an energy company that makes robots with and without wheels. Which could be cool. Except other companies are also already doing that and they’re way ahead of Tesla in doing so.
So we’ll see how far this goes. In the end, though, Tesla will still be an energy company. But now with robots.
Originally published on the AaronOnAutos Substack.
