The robots come (episode 3) Visions plus artificial intelligence = Tesla

The robots come (episode 3)

Visions plus artificial intelligence = Tesla

Berlin, 10.7.2020

Visions ? Helmut Schmidt doesn’t have to think long: „If you have visions, you should see a doctor.“ Elon Musk was just 9 years old and had many a vision like intelligent boys. That’s why he was programming computer games. Later he developed the vision of paying on the internet and founded the internet payment service Paypal in 2000. When he retired in 2002 he collected 250 million dollars for his company shares. That was the starting capital for his next vision: the electric car. In 2003 he founded Tesla. No established car company took him seriously. In just one decade, he virtually overtook them all. A few figures make this clear: With a market capitalization of currently around 227 billion dollars, Tesla has a higher market capitalization than Toyota with 206 billion dollars. And where do the three German premium manufacturers BMW, Daimler and VW stand? Together they do not exceed 162 billion dollars.

Nevertheless, the stock market professionals are pulling their hair out. What’s wrong with the Tesla share price? It is soaring to ever more lofty heights. „This is not normal!“ warns some of them. Others are convinced, „These are the short traders. „They’re betting on falling prices to win back their money.“ So not buy? The problem is, if you don’t buy, you’ll get nothing if prices keep going up. „But the price is not fundamentally hedged,“ say the skeptics. Tesla, for example, has a higher market capitalization than Toyota. The Japanese sold 10.74 million vehicles last year, generating sales of 29.9 trillion yen. This is equivalent to a value of approximately 280 billion US dollars, whereas Tesla sold only around 367,000 vehicles in 2019. This, they believe, is where the overvaluation becomes clear. So:The prices will fall – they claim.

However, this forecast did not come true this week. Why not? Doesn’t the price of a share in the age of digitalisation no longer depend on fundamental data? Or are realistic visions the driving force?

Anyone who paid attention has not missed the next vision. This time it also came from Musk. On Thursday he announced: Tesla is „very close“ to level 5. That means no more and no less: You can put real robot cars on the road, vehicles that can operate without any human intervention. At the World AI Conference in Shanghai, according to Bloomberg, Musk said he was „confident that we will have the basic Level 5 functionality ready by 2020. Now Adam Jones of Morgan Stanley also thought the time had come when he announced that Tesla stock would no longer be measured by future car sales, but that the new revenue streams – namely robot car service – would also have to be taken into account.

The new study by Market Research Future on this market comes at just the right time. The researchers assume that this market segment will grow to 65.3 billion US dollars worldwide by 2027.

The researchers see the following as the most important driving factors for the growth of this market: 1. the growing demand for fuel-efficient and environmentally friendly vehicles, 2. the increasing scope for communication between vehicles and infrastructure,

3. the growing number of car-related services worldwide and the growing need for traffic control and improved road safety.

As early as 2021, according to Musk, Tesla will put fully autonomous cars on the road and gradually transform his company into a robotic taxi fleet. He is putting a lot of pressure on the competition. VW, Ford, Uber, and Waymo announced last week that the development of autonomous driving would progress more slowly.

The Chinese bicycle giant Didi Chuxing is already getting down to business. Last week he started a pilot service for self-propelled robot taxis in Shanghai.

A few days earlier, plans were announced according to which more than one million self-propelled vehicles are to be deployed via his platform by 2030.