Mr. Ricky 🚀🚘🐶

Listening to people complain about the Tesla Robotaxi rollout reminds me of that scene in Idiocracy where President Camacho promises everyone that Not Sure (Ashok) is going to fix all the country's problems, and do it all in one week. It turns out that the economy is collapsing because people have been watering the crops with Gatorade instead of water. They switch back to water, but by the time the week is over Not Sure is fighting for his life roman gladiator style in a giant colosseum. Then people realize that the crops actually *are* growing with the water, and his life is saved just in time. I remember a time when the Tesla community was a powerful force in pushing back against naysayers. When a chorus of haters and short sellers said "Model 3 production is too slow. They will never reach 5,000 a week. They will never reach profitability" it was the Tesla community that pushed back and said they believed in the company. And sure enough the company did eventually scale up Model 3 and Y, did eventually hit profitability, and did eventually hit their targets even if they missed them a few times first. The Tesla community saw that because they understood the company in a way the naysayers didn't. Now, many of those some people have become the naysayers. I can't blame them completely. A lot of the people who understood EVs and the auto industry very well are left scratching their head trying to understand AI, autonomy, and robotaxis. You've got a bunch of options traders who are not AI experts but bought options that are expiring now, hoping Robotaxi would have scaled further. Just like the people in Idiocracy they have good reason to be upset — they're hungry, and the crops aren't growing. But just like the naysayers were wrong about Tesla being unable to scale the Model 3 & Y, today's naysayers couldn't be more wrong about Tesla being unable to scale Robotaxi. At this point they have hundreds of fully driverless cars registered in 6 cities. This is the first time this has ever been done with pure computer vision. How many announcements and signs of progress can you dismiss before you finally admit what is happening? This is not a linear thing. The first step in deploying Robotaxis is to put a few on the road and see how they work. And no, it's not just going to be perfect out of the box on the first day. There are going to be issues you couldn't forsee, unique problems in new areas, and improvements to be made. But once you can do 200 driverless cars safely, it doesn't take much more to scale to 1,000 and beyond. Just look at last week in Texas where we went from 100 to 175 cars registered in a 24 hour period. The number increased slowly, then all at once in one big jump. That is how exponential growth works. If you're looking at the initial growth and trying to extrapolate that out linearly, you're going to be way off. It feels like everyone is so focused on Elon not solving everything in one week like he promised that they're missing the fact that it is actually working. The crops actually are starting to grow. How are people not seeing the progress of FSD 14.3.6, FSD 14 lite, and all the new cities Robotaxi is entering? Remember when driving a car with pure vision, without LIDAR or Radar, was supposed to be impossible? That's the magic of Elon Musk. He takes what is supposed to be impossible — a reusable spaceship, generalized self-driving cars at scale — and makes what's supposed to be impossible feel like it's actually late. When he starts on a project, they say it can never be done. By the time he finishes, people are asking why they didn't finish it faster. Say what you will, but the Tesla team is absolutely executing right now. They are killing it. I can't be the only one that sees the signs. Everything I've seen tells me that they are going to scale this. As they add more training compute, as the data set grows larger, as the fleet crosses 10 million cars, as they ship FSD 15 and their AI5 and AI6 chips, the cars are just going to keep getting smarter and smarter. The capabilities of these autonomous vehicles are already starting to cross into the realm of superhuman, and they're not stopping there. If you want to point out every stumble, every missed deadline, every limitation in the current Robotaxi service, that's your prerogative. You have the right to say whatever you want. But I think that as we look back on this time, these people are going to look extremely dumb in hindsight. When autonomous vehicles blanket the globe, we'll ask how people didn't see it earlier as the service expanded into 7 markets. This company has nearly 10 million cars on the road. More than 12 billion FSD miles have been driven around the globe. And international expansion is just starting. This is the company that developed Cybercab to be as dead simple as possible. To not require any paint. They built a vehicle that can truly bring generalized autonomy to the masses around the world. I can't believe how many people are unable to see it. Based on everything I'm seeing, I've never had more conviction that this technology is going to change the world. AI is beginning to reach out of our computer and into the physical world, and Tesla has a central role to play in making that a reality.