The boring part nobody's pricing

Everyone wants to argue about the cars. Vision versus lidar. Tesla versus Waymo. Whose robot drives better, whose stock re-rates first. I read those arguments all day.

Here’s the argument nobody is having: who washes the robot?

I’m serious. A robotaxi only earns while it’s on the road. Every hour it sits dirty, uncharged, or stuck waiting on a human is an hour the asset produces nothing. These machines convert uptime into money -- which means the boring layer underneath them (charging, cleaning, staging, the 2 a.m. hiccup) isn’t a detail. It’s the P&L.

So this week I went looking at how the industry plans to handle the boring part, and the answer is mostly: real estate. The incumbent playbook is the depot -- buy or lease a big site, build chargers, staff it, and march the fleet in and out every night. I’ve been modeling what that costs for a 500-car city: roughly $12 million of capital before the first paid ride, a year or more of permitting and buildout, something like $24,000 per car of overhead before anyone goes anywhere. The depot treats an autonomous car like a horse that needs a barn.

But these machines don’t need to sleep in one building, and Tesla’s own paperwork says so. Buried in their Robotaxi First Responder Guide -- the official document that teaches firefighters how to handle a driverless car -- the approved operating domain explicitly includes charging stations and car washes, and the cars route themselves to a charger before accepting their next ride. The choreography is already written into the software: the car shows up, gets plugged in and wiped down, and leaves. Twenty-two hours a day of earning, interrupted by pit stops. A race car pit stop, not an overnight bed-down.

Run the boring layer that way -- people stationed at chargers that already exist instead of buildings you have to construct -- and the upfront number drops from about $12 million to about the price of a nice food truck. Per car, from $24,000 of overhead to double digits. Same charge, same clean, same uptime. The only thing you deleted was the real estate.

That same first-responder guide contains one more sentence worth the whole document. Page 9: “All Robotaxi vehicles are owned and operated by Tesla at this time.” At this time. Safety documentation does not editorialize. That phrase is doing real work -- their own manual reads like a placeholder for the owners who come next. And the day that door opens, every new owner inherits the boring question on day one: who keeps my machine earning?

The cars themselves keep deleting line items too. This week, video made the rounds of a Cybercab driving itself off the line at Giga Texas and out the gate -- no delivery truck, no driver to shuttle it. The inventory commutes to work now.

So here’s the thought experiment. When owning these machines becomes possible for regular people -- and Tesla’s own documents treat that as a when -- the winners won’t be whoever owns the most cars. Owning is easy; it’s a wire transfer. The contest is cost per earning-hour, and that gets decided in the boring layer everyone skips past in the slide decks. Wall Street has started pricing the robots. Nobody has priced the pit stop.

-- Jonas

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Autonomy roundup -- what you may have missed

• Tesla’s first-responder manual quietly told you the fleet plan. The official Robotaxi First Responder Guide (v1.3) says the fleet is “owned and operated by Tesla at this time,” describes a Mission Control that “handles any charging and maintenance,” and approves the cars to operate at charging stations and car washes on their own. The ownership opening isn’t a rumor -- it’s in the safety docs. Source: tesla.com/firstresponders

• A Cybercab drove itself off the production line and out the factory gate this week. Self-delivering inventory: no transporter, no driver, the vehicle commutes from factory to fleet. Watch an ops line item disappear in 30 seconds. Source: x.com/N63S_/status/2065097905850265912

• You can now audit the robotaxi fleet counts yourself. The community-run Robotaxi Tracker added Texas DMV integration this week -- VIN-matched official registrations plus public complaint records for Tesla, Waymo and Zoox. Marketing says “ramp”; the registry says exactly how many. Source: robotaxitracker.com/texas-dmv

• The biggest driverless fleet on US highways carries Doritos, not people. PepsiCo went public this week with 41 fully driverless Gatik box trucks running middle-mile routes across Arizona, Texas and Arkansas -- no one in the cab since June 2025, after years of supervised testing, on routes chosen precisely because the operations are simple and repeatable. The quiet lesson: operational simplicity, not passenger glamour, is what makes autonomy profitable first. Source: freightwaves.com/news/pepsico-gatik-driverless-trucking-deployment

Reply and tell me where this breaks (or doesn’t) -- I read every one.

And if you want to run the boring-layer math yourself -- what charging, cleaning and uptime actually do to a machine’s earnings -- the modeler at remount.co/modeler lets you change every input.

You’re getting this because you signed up at remount.co. This is a thought experiment, not financial advice and not an offer of securities. Reply anytime or write hello@remount.co.