Long-term Tesla investor Rob Greenlee describes a dangerous FSD failure in his 2022 Model 3 where the system suddenly disabled the parking brake, automatic hold, and cruise control on the freeway. He argues Tesla is pivoting from carmaker to robotics and AI platform, but questions whether current hardware can deliver the autonomous capabilities the company promises.
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Welcome back to another episode of Behind the Wheel and wanted to talk about Tesla in this episode and talk about how Tesla, in my view, I'm a long-term Tesla stockholder and investor that has been tracking the company for many, many years. I think I bought my shares in the company back in 2012.. And so, you know, this has been a long journey of faith in the Tesla brand, in the direction of electric vehicles. So when I first bought my Tesla stock and acquired it over the years, I, I really bought it from the perspective of the future of electric vehicles and where that was going. So, but I feel that there is a change happening with Tesla right now, and we are moving into an era where Tesla may seem like on the surface to be a car company, right? And a lot of people look at Tesla from that, that lens, but I'm increasingly feeling that That's not how I need to look at Tesla, look into the future. Well, and I know this isn't an uncommon thought process around Tesla for a lot of the long-term investors in the company, but Tesla is becoming increasingly a robotics and AI company, and that these cars that we have here, this is a 2022 Tesla Model 3 Long Range are really an extension of their robotics. And autonomy is really another type of robot, right? And increasingly getting integrated with Grok and, and having The AI abilities integrated into the Tesla kind of platform and Tesla's work with XAI and the integration of Groq into the Tesla ecosystem, I think, is just getting started. So as I think about Tesla and I think about, you know, robotics, The conversation shifts very quickly away from cars. Now granted, cars will still be— again, when I say still, will continue to be an important component of what the brand is, Tesla. So it's this interesting transition that we're going through around the perception of the Tesla brand as it attempts to compete. As Cathie Wood has said from ARK Invest, Tesla is the largest example of a bringing together of all of the major change trends that she's predicting for the future, and, and that the Tesla brand will probably wind up in, I don't know if it's a 5-year time window, probably exceeding NVIDIA in market cap as a stock. So, but I do think that it's realistic to think that that process of getting to that point is going to be an extremely bumpy process, right? If you're a shareholder in Tesla today, volatility is part of your life experience, right? Depending on how long you've held the Tesla stock and whether or not you were able to withstand the fluctuations that exist around that stock. And do you have a long-range or a long-term investment horizon? For what the potential of the company will turn out to be. And I think it's an interesting question about, well, what is that future as it looks like 5 years from now, right? With all the discussion of AI and, you know, the recent announcements with Grok 4 and, and now over the last couple days with the OpenAI, ChatGPT-5 and the revolution that's coming around that. Um, I did watch a video last night, uh, from OpenAI talking about the ChatGPT-5, and what I garnered from that was its emphasis on computer code. Right? Being able to create applications and that type of stuff and being a more of an agentic platform, but also at the same time really focus heavily on the medical industry. So you can see, I could see from the presentation that they gave about ChatGPT-5, the, the verticals that they're really focusing on. I didn't see a lot of discussion or presentation around the media element of ChatGPT-5. Now when I say media, I'm talking about like video and audio and graphics and those type of capabilities of ChatGPT-5, because I do think that there's probably a recognition at OpenAI that there's more kind of marketable scale opportunity for business and revenue around those two primary verticals of, of coding, building applications at scale rapidly, and the medical industry of coalescing medical information. So, and then I contrast what I'm seeing with OpenAI with what Groq 4 is bringing to the market and its emphasis around the, the intelligence that would put it at a PhD level of smarts and skills and those kind of things. But the emphasis on the medical industry and around coding wasn't as emphasized in, in the Grok 4 presentation that I saw with Elon. So it begs the question around, well, what is the priority of Grok 4? What is it being built to cater to? Obviously, OpenAI is openly appealing to the business side or the or the B2B side of, of the AI world, right? They see the medical industry as a scalable AI. They did mention OpenAI was going to be integrated more into government workflows. So you can see an angle there too. I didn't get that kind of leadership of thought around use cases. Okay. Okay. It actually just took over in an error in Full Self-Driving. You could see how disruptive that was. I had to capture control of the vehicle. And now, because I've been through it before, that the car has to be driven by me and there's no other option for that. Right. I would actually have to pull over and actually get out of the car. And I'll actually do that for you so you can actually see that. And I just don't know why there's an error happening in Full Self-Driving. You know, It's very disruptive. It happened on the freeway. It caused the car to, you know, because I have to take over very rapidly, and it causes a disruption to the flow of the vehicle driving down, going towards its destination. So I think it's very worrisome that the car is doing this. I'm contemplating taking the car to the service center and having them do an evaluation on the car to find out why it's, it's just randomly, and it says on the screen, parking brake functions disabled, automatic vehicle hold is disabled, cruise control is disabled. So I've lost a lot of the, the functions that the car has, um, around its basic functions. Now I'm still able to drive the car manually, and that's, that's, that's what I'm doing now, but it, it, it just doesn't build confidence. And that's what I was trying to communicate in the last couple of of videos here is that this thing, you know, it's turned out to be not— full self-driving has turned out to be not as reliable as I expect it to be, right? I mean, I don't really feel good about it just randomly while I'm driving down the freeway say, sorry, you know, Full self-driving, the capability of that is, has errored out. I think that there's a bug in the application. This car should continue to do what it's designed to do. I just don't understand why it's, why it's not. So, so anyway, I'm, I'm going to wrap up this, this video, and I appreciate you being here. Thank you so much for listening to my, my rant. Please subscribe to my channel. I, I'm gonna try and keep coming up with, um, new episodes. And if you're interested in this and the topics that I talk about, um, please give a, a like and a, a follow to my channel at @RobGreenlee. And that would be fantastic. So thank you so much for being here and and watching and listening. So thank you. Bye-bye.
