Tesla’s Robotaxi Non-Event & GPT-6 Is Here!

**Travis Hoium** (0:02)
Tesla had an event last night, and we were not invited. Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing starts now.
Welcome to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. I'm Travis Hoium. Joined today by Lou Whiteman and Jon Quast. And guys, we previewed on the Wednesday show Tesla's event that they had last night about the Robotaxi. There was a lot of hype around this. Lou, not only were we not invited, I don't think anybody was invited.

**Lou Whiteman** (0:29)
No live stream, no nothing. Yeah, I'm confused here, okay? Because I get, I don't want to slam a company for doing a publicity event. Publicity events are very, very important. But if you want to do a publicity event, you should try to get publicity. You should do a live stream. You should just like, they hyped this for weeks. There was contests of like, if you take a ride in Austin, you can get to go and then night of the event, Elon Musk didn't even show up. No, no, didn't he show up? He barely had the energy to live tweet it. He did like one retweet or so.
I, why bother? I just, I don't understand. They basically announced that we are actually doing what we announced last year, and it'll start rolling up. You know, the whole, this could have been an email thing. This could have been a press release, guys.

**Travis Hoium** (1:21)
Jon, is there a more bullish way to look at this?

**Jon Quast** (1:25)
Well, I think that we're talking out of both sides of our mouth here saying there was hype for weeks and then yet it wasn't hyped on the time of the event. I mean, I think that they were playing this the way that they wanted to play it. This, is it even fair to call it a launch?
It really isn't. It's a slow rollout is what it is. And so I actually think it makes more sense to not overly hype this because we are not going out across the country in all cities with a fleet of hundreds of vehicles. If you do hype it too much, then you set the expectations too high and then there's disappointment by comparison.

**Travis Hoium** (2:01)
Isn't that what Elon's been doing for a decade or more though? I mean, this is the original Robotaxi. Yeah, the original Robotaxi event was in 2024 That was two years ago. They started talking about the Robotaxi, I believe in 2018 or 2019 Now, not in its current form, but the idea of the Robotaxi and having this fleet, we're almost a decade after that and other companies have much, much bigger fleets. It's just, we are at this point, and the reason that I wanted to bring this up on the show is we are at the point where autonomous vehicles are real.
And Tesla was supposed to have this huge first mover advantage. They were supposed to have a huge cost advantage. And once you have both of those things and you have this network effect, now no one can catch up. And it seems like they've kind of fumbled that. So Jon, are we at the point where they really got to put up, or Waymo is out there scaling their vehicles and they're cutting their costs dramatically. I think the hardware, the rumors were the hardware costs for autonomous vehicles. So basically on top of the vehicle itself, went from about $150,000 down to about $20,000. This is the way hardware works. It gets less expensive over time. So yes, they have more sensors.
But if the cost differential is very small and coming down, it seems like that advantage the Tesla should have is sort of evaporating in front of our eyes.

**Jon Quast** (3:28)
Yeah. I mean, this is why we all drive Nissan Leafs right now, right? I mean, because Tesla fumbled its first mover advantage, right? I mean, Nissan Leaf came out before Model S, and you could say that it had the first mover advantage, but Tesla is the one that won out in the end.
Listen, call it what you will, but Tesla understands one thing very well. It understands the psychology of the consumer, not necessarily that the best product wins or the first product wins. The most anticipated, the one with the best vibe is the one that wins a lot of times. It reminds me a little bit of the old, I'm a Mac, I'm a PC commercials, right? What was that actually telling us about the specifications of Apple MacBook or a Microsoft PC? Really nothing, but one was perceived as a little bit cooler, and I do think that there are people who, when the CyberCab is available a lot more, I think there's going to be a lot of people lining up for CyberCab because that is the one that they want to ride in over a Waymo.