Hyundai just paves the way, paves the way, wayMore cars than Tesla. Over the past three years, Hyundai sold about 7 million cars per year globally, while Tesla sold about 1.8 million cars per year over the same period.
What makes Tesla, not Hyundai, the darling of Wall Street is not the company’s current production, but the business narrative that drives investors to buy with the hope of an exit that will make them a fortune. Specifically, that narrative stems from Elon Musk’s promise of a self-driving car future in which, he claims, Tesla will crush Waymo. But perhaps more importantly, it comes from Musk’s claim that his Optimus line of robots are so powerful, they could eliminate poverty, become the “greatest product of all time” and generate “infinite” revenue.
But Tesla’s robot series has a lot to prove in a short time. Less than five years ago Elon Musk said he was unveiling a robot prototype, but it actually turned out to be a person in a lycra bodysuit, and the whole thing was kind of a weird, you-can’t-laugh-at-me-if-I’m-laughing-too-much fake joke.
Hyundai, by contrast, owns Boston Dynamics, a three-decade-old company that introduced creepy, quadrupedal and then bipedal robots that went viral and made people make “kill them with fire” jokes over and over again. Boston Dynamics has absolutely written the book on current robots.
So with that in mind, watch Zachary Jackowski, head of the Atlas program at Boston Dynamics, promote his robot, and keep in mind that he knows his competitor is Elon Musk:
He claims that although that thing floating around is just a research prototype, his company is “working hard on creating a real product version of Atlas” and that it is “the best and really the simplest robot we’ve ever made.” They claim that it will be water resistant and able to withstand temperatures as cold as minus 4 and as hot as 104 degrees Fahrenheit.
Jackowski claims Boston Dynamics and Hyundai are creating “the most complete dataset in the world to train humanoid skills in manufacturing,” and the car side of the company will soon “both use and build these things in a new robotics factory capable of producing 30,000 Atlas robots per year.”
Of course, this is all just hype. There’s no way to know what it’s meant to placate the purely uneasy investors and board members who are eager to cut labor costs, and what it’s meant to attract the attention of businesses who are thinking about becoming humanoid robot customers.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk will only get the full version of his famous trillion-dollar pay package if he deploys 1 million Optimus robots, so it’s pretty clear what’s motivating him. Nonetheless, they have pushed back the start date of the Optimus robots, which were supposed to be working in Tesla factories, to 2024, to 2025, and to be available for purchase by other companies in 2026. But Musk’s claims about applications for his robots continue to expand. Last November, he compared the Optimus robot to a “personal C-3PO/R2-D2.”
If you’re reading this, Tesla probably doesn’t make you feel warm and fuzzy inside, but neither should Hyundai. It’s a chaebol, which means it’s one of those giant, scandal-ridden companies with troublesome relationships with that country’s government. When it comes to creating armies of robots with the ability to crush the labor force and generate “infinite” revenue, the question isn’t whether you should support a company like Tesla or a company like Hyundai. Its Which company’s unique story do you find more believable?
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