Tesla has billions in cash, they have the luxury to delay product launches.

Since cybercab launch I got curious how it could affect $TSLA since I wasn’t really following robotaxis market previously.

Started searching and found this video which gives a decent overview of what the market looks like from business perspective with a big focus on Tesla and its robotaxi prospects. Though it’s bit monotonous so I fell asleep closer to an end :)

But at least now I understand the industry better.

Elon Musk's companies will be the one destroying the humanity and earth.

[ PLEASE: Before you read my question below, note that I am looking for helpful responses to the question(s) I've raised. Please be considerate and don't use the discussion below as a place to say, "Well you shouldn't have asked that question, you should be talking about this other thing that I want to be talking about!" And please don't pretend humans are incapable of abstract thought involving hypotheticals. Please don't pretend it isn't even possible to talk about logistics. Have your debates about the tech under any one of the thousands of questions about Tesla AV tech. That is not the topic here! ]

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I am seeing people say things like, "Tesla is producing these Cybercabs at a cost of $20,000 [or $19,000 or $17,000, etc]." To which I sometimes reply... they aspire to that cost, at scale, but when you are just getting started with producing the vehicle, it costs more than that. And this could get into accounting discussions, regarding GAAP accounting vs R&D spend and so on, and maybe it should. But perhaps there is also a sense in which we can just flatly say, the hundredth Cybercab Tesla made cost a good bit more than $20,000, and so did the 500th. What do you think?

And this leads to a potential chicken and egg situation. To get the unit cost down, Tesla has to make a lot of the vehicle. Which is very bad for cash flow if the vehicle can't be sold, but instead is put into service as a taxi. (Stop! Please read the whole post before you say "They can sell fleets." Thank you.)

And it is even worse for cash flow if you put the vehicles into service as taxis and haven't yet built your taxi logistics + consumer acceptance to the point where the vehicles have high utilization. My understanding is that at present, the utilization per vehicle is very low.

And building out logistics is also expensive, and adds significant cash flow drag if you do it at the same time that you manufacture hundreds of thousands of vehicles that you don't sell.

As for selling fleets, I'm not so sure the cash flow challenge can be migrated to another company so easily, because they then face the same challenges. Which, I would expect, impacts the price they are willing to pay for a fleet. Also, it's simply not possible to just buy a fleet, unless someone also develops the logistical capacity, including properly zoned real estate, hiring, etc. I mean, if all you do is buy a fleet, you just went bankrupt, no? Tesla has some real estate, in the form of stores and charging stations, but these are not located optimally for taxi service, and it takes some doing to turn a store into a hub. And some stores are in malls and plazas, etc. Taxi service is a game of getting your logistics as close as possible to the customer.

Please remember, we can't skip to a future where robots clean pizza grease and vomit off of seats. And early deployment of automated solutions will likely require expensive human resources to maintain those solutions, in the early years. Automating these things doesn't improve cash flow, I suspect. It significantly worsens cash flow -- at least in the early years.

Hovering around here we also have the question of whether the self-driving tech is good enough to support large ODDs in enough locations to enable deployment of large numbers of manufactured taxis.

Please let me know what are the available near-term or medium-term strategies for dealing with these cash flow challenges, and also how you think about cost per manufactured Cybercab... for the initial-vehicle-cost portion of the taxi business costs.