On July 24th, U.S. stocks opened with Tesla's share price continuing the previous day's downward trend, plummeting by more than 9%.

During Tesla's second-quarter earnings call, CEO Elon Musk adopted a more cautious stance on autonomous driving, acknowledging that his past predictions for self-driving were "overly optimistic."

Tesla's share price has fallen for two consecutive days, reflecting the market's uncertainty about Tesla's growth prospects. In the short term, Tesla's electric vehicle profits are plummeting, and the potential of the autonomous driving and artificial intelligence that Musk has promised is still a long way from being realized, with both areas currently in a phase of heavy investment.

In an earnings statement, Tesla indicated that the company still faces regulatory and technical hurdles before offering driverless taxi services. However, Musk stated that he believes fully autonomous driving without regulation could be achieved by the end of this year, and it will definitely be achieved next year.

The Full Self-Driving (FSD) software that Musk has been promoting is currently under investigation by the U.S. federal government. Last month, an administrative judge in California rejected Tesla's opposition to a charge related to its autonomous driving technology. According to previous allegations by the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), Tesla may have exaggerated the capabilities of its autopilot features when selling electric vehicles, misleading consumers and potentially facing legal responsibility.

Advertisement

At the same time, Tesla's autonomous driving is also facing competition from Google. Google announced during its earnings call on July 23rd that it would invest an additional $5 billion in its autonomous driving division, Waymo, with the goal of continuing to build the world's leading autonomous driving technology company.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated that Waymo currently provides over 50,000 paid rides per week, offering driverless taxi services in San Francisco and Phoenix, and recently expanded to Los Angeles and Austin. Waymo is also preparing to launch a lucrative airport car service.

"Waymo's autonomous driving may not have as many fans as Tesla, but it is making solid progress, while Tesla has a great dream, yet its autonomous driving remains on Musk's lips," said the founder of a domestic autonomous driving company to First Financial Daily reporters.

He analyzed to First Financial Daily reporters that the most fundamental difference between Google Waymo and Tesla's autonomous driving is the difference in methodology: Google uses many high-level sensors such as lidar, focusing on performance in every detail to achieve true autonomy; Tesla adopts a pure vision solution, relying on the cost-effectiveness of cameras and the end-to-end large model algorithms for autonomous driving AI. "End-to-end is a methodology that Tesla has created in the past two years," he said.

Xiaopeng Motors founder and CEO He Xiaopeng expressed his approval of Tesla's end-to-end approach. He commented, "Recently, I've been talking with several L4 leaders about end-to-end, and they all believe that end-to-end is the best route for L2 or L3, but it is definitely not the preferred choice for L4. I truly believe that end-to-end plus large models will eventually reach L4."