Sonnad: Tesla will not enter city-to-city transit market
Hayden Sonnad · #11 Tesloop · Mar 3, 2025 · at 16:46
Tesloop founder Hayden Sonnad defends his startup's platform risk on The Pitch against concerns that Tesla will replicate his service.
0:00 / 0:17exact quote · 17.9s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“We don't think Tesla's gonna try to do this himself. Elon Musk is not about creating city to city transit. Right now, one of his biggest focuses is automizing manufacturing, and there's a lot of focus on that from Tesla and the rest of his companies, that we don't think Tesla directly will come into our exact model.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Hayden Sonnad
Sonnad: Musk assured free lifetime Supercharging for Model S long-distance travel
“So I brought the idea up with Elon Musk at the shareholders meeting in 2015, and at that point he assured me that Tesla would pay for all of the fuel costs for long distance travel in the Model S forever.”
Sonnad: Tesloop exposes more people to Teslas than Tesla's marketing
“Well, how I see it, at least in the short run, we're really, we're doing Tesla a favor, because when you look at the numbers of Tesla's test drives, and how they're trying to get customers in their cars, we're actually introducing a lot more people into Tesla'…”
Sonnad: Tesla executives are aware of Tesloop's commercial Supercharger use
“As of right now, they haven't drawn that line, and we are, in somewhat collaborating with Tesla, they're aware of what's happening, they're aware we're using it for commercial use, and right now they haven't said anything about that, and there are a lot of peo…”
Sonnad: Long-distance electric transit can only use Teslas for four years
“The first is that for the next four years, this can only be done on Teslas. They have the only platform with big batteries and supercharging and nice cars that allows this model to happen.”
Sonnad: Uber cannot work with Tesla due to sensor data ownership
“And for strategic reasons, Uber can't really work with Tesla because then Tesla would have All of the information to their sensory data, and Uber would have none of that, so they'd be kind of losing all of the information about their cars.”
Sonnad: Tesla's autonomous rideshare restriction does not ban Tesloop
“I don't know the exact details, but that, that announcement wasn't fully true because it doesn't actually eliminate us from using their autonomous ride sharing. There's some weird clauses in there that actually do let us proceed with everything that we're doin…”