The claim is they think it’ll be larger than the core business of electric cars for Tesla eventually.
To that claim, meet Asimo by Honda.
Honda built Asimo in 2000 as less of a serious project to sell, but more of a hobby project for the company to position themselves as innovative.
Asimo was 4’3 and only 100 were built, being mainly used in some universities and Honda offices as a mascot.
Many people wondered why Honda never tried to sell Asimo commercially and the reason was they couldn’t find it viable.
Just to compare, the most successful home robotics company is iRobot, with 1.5 billion in 2021 sales, mainly found with Roomba and other products.
Which Roomba was introduced in 2002 and iRobot said they sold 14 million of them by 2016.
20 years into Roomba as a product with billions in sales, it still hasn’t gotten the tech to the level that it’s good enough for hotels, most office buildings and most homes to actually use.
And the reason is robotics is extremely hard.
Camera work
Safety issues
Machines having to factor in strength/pressure
This made it so even a product like the roomba is still not preferred to conventional vacuums with consumers and larger commercial projects are still far away.
That just creates an idea of how difficult it’ll be for a humanoid robot to exist, where doing something as simple as just grabbing a glass and not breaking it is a challenge.
This makes the question of why Tesla is hyping this?
BMW is releasing the iX Electric
Cadillac Lyriq will be the first electric Cadillac in the US market.
The Ford Lightning is coming out
The GMC electric Hummer
The Toyota bZ4X
Those cars are all coming soon and on top of that, Volkswagen in certain regions of Europe is outselling Tesla.
Tesla’s currently worth more than all other car companies globally combined, plus 400-500 billion.
Tesla needs something to present itself as innovative and new or else it’ll get a value crash when 2025 hits and they aren’t the largest US producer of electric cars.