Musk might indeed be too eager to "throw a party."

At 11 AM Beijing time on October 11, amidst the anxious wait of tech enthusiasts worldwide, Musk arrived an hour late at the Warner Bros. studio in a Tesla Robotaxi.

Then, at the Tesla "We, Robot" event, which was billed as "one for the history books," Musk spoke for 20 minutes before calling on the robots to "dance and pour drinks" for everyone.

Looking back at the entire event, Musk showcased a total of four products: Cybercab (driverless car Robotaxi), Robovan (driverless minibus), the latest progress on FSD, and the Optimus robot.

Perhaps because Musk's transition from giving a speech to throwing a party was too swift. Investors who did not hear specific technical and commercialization details expressed their dissatisfaction with Musk's "pie in the sky" promises by causing Tesla's market value to drop by over 9% the next day.

Upon careful examination of Tesla's product design this time, we can still see Musk's ambition to achieve full self-driving capabilities. Relying on the accelerated iteration of the Robotaxi's intelligent driving capabilities, Tesla is hoping to break through the "pinch" of Baidu and Waymo as a car manufacturer.

However, since all the products demonstrated this time are still "forwards that can only be cashed in at least a year," Musk's layout might indeed have been announced a bit too early. Perhaps, Musk still has to wait a while to achieve the goal of full self-driving. But with the increasingly fierce competition in the car market, Tesla doesn't have much time left to maintain its technological leadership.

Musk's big party, the autonomous taxi arrives fashionably late.

Firstly, the Cybercab, Tesla has achieved a high level of product completion for the Robotaxi.

Specifically, there is no steering wheel or pedals inside the car, combined with a small space that can only accommodate two passengers, giving it a sense of being an "ultimate mode of transportation." Additionally, possibly for the convenience of operation and maintenance, and to reduce human involvement in the energy replenishment process of the Robotaxi, the Cybercab has no plugs and only supports wireless charging. In terms of autonomous driving technology, the Cybercab remains consistent with Tesla's products, still using a pure vision FSD solution.In the production and manufacturing sector, Tesla currently anticipates that the latest possible start of production might be in 2027. Users who wish to experience it early can try out autonomous driving taxis from existing models after Tesla plans to launch fully self-driving cars in Texas and California next year. Lastly, regarding costs, it is estimated that the operating cost of the Cybercab will be approximately $0.2 per mile (roughly equivalent to 0.90 RMB per kilometer). For purchasing a Cybercab, the current cost guidance is below $30,000.

Next up is the Robovan, which can essentially be understood as a larger version of the Cybercab, with an appearance somewhat resembling a common MPV. As for specific planned uses, Tesla believes that the Robovan can accommodate up to 20 people or transport goods. If used as a tourist minibus, the travel cost is roughly $0.05-0.1 per mile (approximately equivalent to 0.2-0.4 RMB per kilometer).

Regarding the latest developments in Full Self-Driving (FSD), Tesla did not disclose information about FSD v13 as expected by the outside world this time. Apart from Musk's belief that fully unsupervised FSD could be launched in Texas and California next year, the rest is just the "old tune" of Tesla's massive training data and the certainty that FSD will ultimately be safer than human driving.

Lastly, for the robot Optimus, Musk has given an expectation of a future cost of $20,000-30,000. Musk did not mention any other progress. Combining what was seen on-site, such as the Tesla robot dancing, greeting, and pouring wine, there was no significant difference compared to the demonstrations earlier this year. Perhaps this appearance was really just for the "atmosphere group" of the party.

Perhaps due to the overly brief demonstration content, all four products mentioned are currently "forwards that cannot be cashed within a year," and it may also be due to too many "vague" parts in Musk's speech at this conference.

In summary, investors are obviously not very satisfied with Tesla, as the company's market value fell by more than 9% at one point the day after the conference.

At the same time, many analysts are also worried that even if Tesla's Cybercab can solve a series of issues such as stainless steel shell production capacity, local regulation, and wireless charging station construction, and achieve mass production, Tesla's operating space may have already been swallowed up by other Robotaxi giants during the three-year wait. Even if considering Musk's "habit" of almost always delaying the delivery schedule, it is possible that the Robotaxi mentioned by Tesla since 2019 has really become "three years later and another three years."

Is Tesla's entry into the Robotaxi market really "forcing ducks to the shelf"?

Entering the Robotaxi market from the perspective of car manufacturers

Robotaxi has finally entered the stage of large-scale commercialization. In October this year, the global Robotaxi giants have simultaneously sounded the horn of expansion.Firstly, on October 4th, according to Reuters, Waymo announced that it would incorporate Hyundai Motor Company's vehicles from South Korea into its autonomous driving fleet. This collaboration signifies that Waymo, following partnerships with India's Tata Motors and China's Ji (Jikr), is once again expanding its global automotive manufacturer influence by introducing models through cooperation.

Subsequently, on October 9th, as reported by Nikkei News, Baidu is planning to extend its Apollo Go robotaxi service beyond the Chinese market. To accelerate the overseas deployment, Baidu has begun actively seeking partnerships with foreign car manufacturers, ride-hailing platforms, and other technology companies to jointly promote the implementation of Robotaxis.

Now, with Tesla's official entry into the market, the global Robotaxi industry is on the verge of forming a "tripartite" situation with Tesla, Waymo, and Baidu.

Among them, Baidu and Waymo are currently in similar situations. Both have begun operations and have preliminarily validated their business models. The move towards global expansion is essentially a commercial advancement from "pilot operation" to seeking economies of scale.

On Tesla's side, although Musk only presented a "prototype" this time, and the specific timeline for implementation is still uncertain, stating that "Cybercab will start production in 2026, at the latest by 2027". However, Tesla's purpose for launching the Robotaxi this time is not an urgent layout similar to Baidu and Waymo. In Tesla's view, perhaps the ultimate winning logic of the Robotaxi race still needs to return to the automakers closest to the iteration of autonomous driving and car manufacturing.

Taking Musk's information from the "We, Robot" conference as a premise. From a technical perspective, Tesla's Robotaxi first proves that the "gradual" approach to autonomous driving can also achieve an L4 evolutionary path.

This means that to achieve Robotaxi, it is not necessarily required to have extensive investments like Baidu's vehicle-road-cloud collaboration, or Waymo's "tuned" algorithms and sensor designs for L4. Automakers with strong intelligent driving capabilities can fully rely on a universal intelligent driving development model (such as Tesla's end-to-end + pure vision), and by changing the corresponding supporting computing hardware (the AI5 platform that Cybercab is expected to carry is about 10 times the computing power of HW4.0), they can launch intelligent driving and Robotaxi products to the market.

In other words, according to Tesla's thinking, the Robotaxi business is essentially "another battlefield" for intelligent driving players to compete in sales. After all, if only operating revenue and expenditure balance is used to calculate the shipment of Robotaxis, Zhang Ning, Vice President of Pony.ai and head of the Robotaxi autonomous driving mobility business, gave the result to LightCone Intelligence, stating that "a single city would need to deploy a quantity of 500-1000 units".

In this process, on the one hand, automakers gain higher revenue through Robotaxis (operation or direct sale). On the other hand, the incremental driving data brought by Robotaxis will further accelerate the iteration of intelligent driving. The improvement of intelligent driving capabilities can also give automakers a more favorable bargaining position.

Although there are currently no automakers that do both intelligent driving and Robotaxis, we may be able to draw on the changes in Li Auto's sales structure this year to confirm the direct impact of the improvement of intelligent driving capabilities. "Starting from version 6.0 (upgrade), it has only been 1-2 months, and our AD Max share has exceeded 50%, with a growth of more than 10% per month." Lang Xianpeng, Vice President of Intelligent Driving R&D at Li Auto, introduced this to LightCone Intelligence in a communication meeting in August.In such a situation, it corresponds to Tesla's expectation of generating more revenue from FSD subscriptions, truly acting as a technology company and achieving a commercial closed loop for software (AI) revenue.

How long will Musk's "AI" pie take to draw?

Although Tesla derives 80% of its revenue (data from the 2023 financial report) from selling cars, Wall Street has long believed that half of Tesla's market value of nearly 5 trillion yuan comes from AI valuation.

This is because, when Tesla became the world's leader in new energy vehicles in 2020, it formed the dual attributes of the automotive industry (optional consumer goods, traditional value stocks) + FSD subscriptions (software sales, technology stocks) with its advanced centralized automotive EE architecture design and Musk's pursuit of autonomous driving. Under this model, the capital market uses the PS (price-to-sales) ratio to simply calculate the valuation of both attributes, forming a basic situation where Tesla's car sales are just the foundation, and the AI side "has a very high valuation leverage."

In simple terms, as long as car sales do not "collapse," the realization of Tesla's AI basically determines the direction of the company's market value.

The sharp drop in Tesla's market value after the "We, Robot" press conference this time reflects the capital market's dissatisfaction with Tesla not only failing to bring out new things, but even Musk himself is uncertain when Cybercab will be mass-produced.

Perhaps, the capital market's "punishment" for Tesla is still somewhat "merciful."

According to Musk's expectations, the prerequisite for Cybercab to be mass-produced is that Model 3 and Model Y will achieve unsupervised autonomous driving next year. Indeed, under the end-to-end intelligent driving development model, Tesla has achieved the overthrow and reconstruction of most automotive intelligent driving functions throughout the iteration of the entire FSD v12 version. The intelligence of FSD can even "take He Xiaopeng, the chairman of XPeng Motors, for a walk around the streets" when there is a bug (no destination set).

Considering the performance of the current version of FSD, combined with Musk's promise in 2016 that Tesla's cars will be able to drive alone from New York to Los Angeles "next year." Whether Tesla can really achieve unsupervised autonomous driving by 2025 still needs to be questioned. Perhaps, Tesla's goal of achieving dual growth in sales and FSD subscription revenue through Robotaxi is just another "plausible" story told by Musk to the market.

But after all, the "pie" that the market can "digest" is ultimately limited.Looking at the reality, in the Chinese market where smart cars are leading, Tesla's days of glory are long gone. In the field of automobile manufacturing, Tesla's global sales and automotive gross margin (excluding the impact of carbon credits) have long been surpassed by BYD. On the other side of the equation, in terms of intelligent driving capabilities, although Chinese intelligent driving players have not yet achieved a "fully end-to-end" level, Tesla does not have much advantage when compared to many Chinese manufacturers who are about to achieve a "door-to-door" intelligent driving experience by 2025.

Perhaps, following the "formulaic" plot design of "Elon Musk Biography", the goal of achieving full self-driving is still in the stage where Musk is "in a desperate situation and has been delayed many times". However, the window of opportunity for Tesla to regain its position as the world's top intelligent driving brand with full self-driving is obviously running out.