Doesn't help. I know for a fact I won't buy one while he's still CEO.
But the delayed purchase has given me time to reflect.
I'm in a city and have simply moved beyond wanting a new car. I've embraced tuning and maintaining my current vehicle and using it very rarely. Lower insurance, more satisfaction.
I've just purchased (very cheaply) another classic car just fool around with and restore.
I'll bet my net carbon emissions and costs are an "order of magnitude" less than buying any damned Tesla. And I'm enjoying learning new skills and ... it becomes almost creating a new art piece.
So, I'll say, thanks Elon ... for ensuring you delayed my purchase enough for me to open my eyes to something better.
Also in a city and own a petrol car I don't drive much.
I have recently bought an e bike and they are great fun and pretty good for getting around. Fun facts.
- Lower CO2 emissions per mile than any other transport apparently including walking and pedal cycling - humans eating food to cycle emit more it seems. Not that it's necessarily more environmentally friendly as you have batteries to deal with but even so it's good.
- Probably the fastest way of getting around central London. On google maps bikes usually beat cars and tube and ebikes tend to go faster than regular ones.
I'm not sure how long it will last before been stolen but it cost me about the same as two tanks of gas for the car (second hand).
Now worries. I'd recommend checking the ebike version. On my regular bike I'd tend to arrive hot and sweaty but on an ebike you can turn up the assist for the last five mins say.
> I'll bet my net carbon emissions and costs are an "order of magnitude" less than buying any damned Tesla.
Ars did that analysis and concluded that "In two years, the EV will have caught up to the used car in terms of ecological footprint". After that, the EV is much better for the environment.
Interesting, but slightly different scenario. As said, I've mostly transitioned away from using cars completely. I keep a couple at home.
One to obsess over and restore. One if I absolutely need one.
No way any EV is catching up with that.
And as someone else said, the alternatives are compelling enough now for me not to have to choose Tesla should the time come. To me, the ioniq 5 looks better than any car Tesla ever produced. In the right colour combo, it's gorgeous. Anyway, that's moot at the moment ...
Environmentally conscious buyers buy the environmentally conscious car, but the most popular "car" in the US is the Ford F-150. What do you suppose you tweet to get them to buy a Cybertruck?
Cars like that are so much about image that I suspect you just can't; the Cybertruck is likely simply too stupid-looking for most F-150 buyers, no matter what the CEO says on Twitter.
Googling a bit the F-150 sells about 750,000 a year and "By the end of November 2023, there were approximately 2 million reservations for the Cybertruck" (estimate off Wikipedia).
Reservations are not the same as sales but there seem to be buyers out there who don't think it's too stupid looking.
If he made a steam powered car out of bronze and wood, I can't imagine him tweeting anything that would encourage sales, but I can easily imagine a variety of things he could tweet which could discourage sales — in my imagination, this would be things like "antiques are for losers".
The premise in both cases is that a) there is at least some demand for the thing and b) customers are paying attention to him.
If a) isn't true then it isn't possible to lose sales because there aren't any. This is the "any publicity is good publicity" scenario because your baseline sales are zero. If a) is true then it's about saying things your target customers approve, and then we're back to "target customers for trucks are typically not environmentally conscious libs, and like to see them criticized."
Which was the other problem with your analogy: If he's selling some steampunk thing then he'd be criticizing whatever the opposite of that is, not its expected customers. Then the risk is alienating some other customers for some other product, but in a politically polarized environment the only way to please everybody is to say nothing. And then nobody is paying attention to you and that doesn't drive sales either.
This is one of the few cases where I, a person who once dated a self-proclaimed "eat the rich" communist, think that Musk's politics is really useful.
Why? Lefty eco-conscious plant-based-diet types like me switching away from ICE cars is not sufficient to fix greenhouse emissions, and the only way to get everyone on board is for someone to make vehicles for the political tribe that wants to own and drive the exact sort of vehicle that people like me want kept off public roads, vehicles like Cybertruck.
So, if we're having a big fight left/right battle over "is Cybertruck bad" and that battles leads to all the Republicans in the USA buying one as a status symbol just to "own the libs", that's great, because now everyone is going electric.
The only problem is that there's absolutely nothing green about an 8,000 pound truck that will only last 10 years. It can't tow worth a shit, so it's absolutely not a truck for people that actually need trucks.
It's environmentally disastrous to manufacture, tears up roads, chews through tires, and gets abysmal mileage when compared to other electric vehicles.
It's just an emotional support truck for cyrpto bros.
> It's just an emotional support truck for cyrpto bros.
I was considering describing it as a "penis extension" in the original comment, but sure.
> It's environmentally disastrous to manufacture, tears up roads, chews through tires, and gets abysmal mileage when compared to other electric vehicles.
And compared to ICE trucks? Because that's what matters.
Not being a truck person, I'll have to just assume you're correct about it only lasting 10 years or not being able to tow, despite these being surprising claims.
"... the only way to get everyone on board is for someone to make vehicles for the political tribe that wants to own and drive the exact sort of vehicle that people like me want kept off public roads ..."
I cautiously, tentatively agree with you.
However, the cybertruck is not the correct aesthetic for achieving this and is, therefore, a huge missed opportunity.
I think hybrids are a good thing. 90% of the (environmental) benefit for 10% of the battery requirement.
This also applies to putting PV on the cars themselves: 80% of the mean daily milage is still really useful, even though it really isn't going to be enough for everyone.
Musk's approach is a complete fail, tho. He pissed off his existing customer base (eco-lefties and centrists) and the right-fringe he courted didn't buy.
But honestly it's not about politics. Musk sounds and acts unstable. He is a splitting his time among 4 companies and pushing a vanity project (Cybertruck) that really no one wants (those 2M signups were for a 40k or 50k vehicle).
He's a horrible CEO and politics aside, his departure will be a sign that Tesla is ready to move forward.
The problem is that the Cybertruck appeals mostly to people with an Elon Musk fetish. It doesn't actually appeal to "Republicans", just to silicon valley Libertarian Party techno-optimist types with more disposable income than sense. There aren't enough of them to make a difference. It doesn't appeal to your average Republican F150 driver in Ohio.
In addition I think you are making a false equivalence here. As a German citizen, I can only emphasize that grouping people along the "Jew" line and drawing hateful conclusions from it is a path to a dark place. I don't care what other scenarios might also be problematic, I can say without a doubt, the sentiment he endorsed is anti-semitic!
This is not whataboutism - I am not saying it's not wrong because others do it too, or that it's not antisemitism. I am not presenting any opinion or judgment. I am trying to understand whether it's considered to be the same or different.
BTW my grandfather was in a Nazi concentration camp. I guess that says enough about what I think. But my opinion is not the matter here.
> I am trying to understand whether it's considered to be the same or different.
Why does it matter in this conversation?
If you want an ethical discussion about a mildly related topic, please find someone else to have it with. I'm not interested in having that discussion with you here.
Our countries weren't conquered by foreign powers who set up occupation governments with blasphemy laws against the ruling classes. Please leave your German brainwashing on these topics at home.
Yes, NATO nations have marked Russia as the clear and designated enemy. So, any statements that that support Russia or Russians are very bad and wrong and will be down-voted. All statements that criticize Russia or Russians are very good and correct and will be up-voted. You are a Pro-Putin-bot if you disagree with this.
I don't quite understand the robotaxi angle.
So in future, a person A's Tesla would go around autonomously and ferry around people. I am guessing the only reason Tesla shares would be up since they would take a cut from the earnings?
1. Won't Tesla need to get permission city by city to drive around autonomously ( like Waymo, Cruise )?
2. I am not well aware of US laws, but where I am from personal vehicles have different registration from commercial registration. Expectation is every Tesla owner does the leg work to upgrade their registration?
3. Who cleans up the car if a passenger has made it dirty ?
4. I would guess that most people want to go to work around the same time in the day and come home the same time as well, including the Tesla owner. Which leaves the Tesla to become a taxi only during the non-peak demand times ? Won't there be a supply-demand mismatch?
I could go on and on. Can't really fathom what potential did the market see to have their shares go up post-market. Anything I am missing?
I don’t get how personal cars can be rented out to reduce idle time and maximize utilization. By the same logic we should be making our homes ultrashort WeWork spaces while we travel or go to work. Cars are somewhat like an extension of our home. For some it’s a highly private space. If this analogy is true then they will never be rented like ultrashort cabs.
So the interesting thing that happened with AirBnB is not that people started renting out fractions of their home in large numbers, but the average house price went up so much that people simply cannot afford to have "spare" space.
I suspect the plan with cars is similar: subscription-only or on-demand vehicles.
And lot of people buy car to get utility at short notice. I don't think many people would like if their car was with empty battery at very end of what ever max range they set. And they were in hurry to get somewhere...
People literally do this, it's called Airbnb. I don't understand, this is supposed to be a tech news site and you guys are acting like you haven't heard of any of these massively successful peer 2 peer companies.
It seems that you don't like Tesla for other reasons, so you're bringing up easily dismissed business challenges that have already been solved.
Last time I went to an Airbnb that was actually the home of someone else was in 2016 or so. I assume most Airbnbs are apartments made explicitly for using them as Airbnb rentals. Same logic applies to Robo taxis. This won't happen. The "private space" argument is quite strong imho.
Airbnb has long since turned into commercial renting. People short renting their actual home when they're not there is now a minimal part of their activity.
Airbnb isn't trying to revolutionize home ownership. They can have a successful business even if 99% of homeowners have no interest in renting out their place to strangers.
But when Musk talks about robotaxi, he doesn't describe it as a feature that some small percentage of Tesla owner will take advantage of and that Tesla will use to pull in some extra revenue. Instead, it's used as a justification to treat Tesla as a tech company rather than a car company, since robotaxi is going to completely change how society looks at transportation.
Even if Tesla successfully delivers robotaxi (a hard task in itself), there's no reason to assume it's going to cause the seismic shift that Musk seems to assume it will.
I feel stupid even responding to this. I'll take your comment on the assumption of good faith.
If the vehicles can generate revenue people will buy them looking to make money for themselves. Tesla makes money on the sale and the recurring ride hailing revenue. If 1% of consumer vehicles sold are autonomous robo-taxis that alone makes a significant bump in Tesla's bottom line.
Just did a quick search for ride sharing TAM ~100 billion. If Tesla can capture some of that at high margin (bc no driver). It's a lot of money.
> I am guessing the only reason Tesla shares would be up since they would take a cut from the earnings?
Tesla shares are actually up because the earnings call seemed to deprioritize the pie in the sky robotaxi plan in favor of shipping a cheaper car ala Model 2, much to the relief of every investor listening to the call.
If Tesla doesn't release a cheaper model they have no hope of competing in China, especially as BYD is completely relentless with both their pricing and their internal efficiencies (they are selling EVs for 10k USD and turning a ~20% profit according to last BYD earnings).
Technology wise Tesla still has a lead on non-battery components, especially in terms of simplified wiring harness/better vertical integration of electronic components and software but none of those are important if they can't translate into operational efficiency. My theory is they actually do translate very well but other fuckups Tesla has made means that on net they are still losing ground.
China is the world's biggest EV market by far, not just in terms of volume but also by $ amount. Tesla's very strong valuation for the last several years was based on their strong market position there (and the growth it implied) which has
now quickly eroded (and their future revenue potential with it).
Unless their market share numbers get back on track in China expect the stock to continue to decline.
China is less than 10% of the worldwide vehicle market (5M / 60M). The big difference there is that they are second only to Norway in the fraction of their vehicles that are electric (60%). Which means that about half of all electric cars are currently sold in China. There's little room for growth in China -- overall demand is flat, and EV share will probably top out at 90% or so.
It'll hurt if Tesla can't keep selling ~600,000 cars they sell in China in a year, but they almost certainly can't grow that number.
EV growth for all brands will come from increasing the share outside of China.
1. Yes some cities allow self driving cars and others don't. It's widely believed that as the technology proves itself, the patchwork regulation will be replaced with a national regulation.
2.Not true in the U.S. No special registration needed to drive an Uber.
3.Obviously the owner like with existing ride sharing networks.
4.Yes, existing ride sharing networks handle this with surge pricing.
There aren't a lot of problems. Ride sharing exists and some of them even operate autonomously, all be it with extreme geo fencing.
The point is just because there are times of day where it's more difficult to hail a taxi, doesn't mean taxis are an unviable business practice. It's likely most of these p2p vehicles will be owned by people who use them exclusively for ride hailing.
The cybertruck was their latest in "big promises and falling short in delivering". the price cuts clearly don't make up for it and Elon is losing more and more interest.
I watched some commentary on CNN about Tesla's Q1 today.
Popular opinion seems to be that doubling down on self driving will not "rescue" the stock because self driving cars are 5 to 10 years away.
To me, that seems not that far away. At current interest rates of 5%, that means the robotaxi business would be devalued by 28% if it manifests in 5 years and by 63% if it manifests in 10 years.
Given the size of the opportunity (2 billion cars on the road, so about 700 billion yearly manhours that can be automated), a devaluation of 28% or 63% seems to be not too much to make it unreasonable as an investment.
One robotaxi would add something like $5k per year to the bottom line. So every million robotaxis would add $5B. Give that a p/e ratio of 30, and it increases Tesla's market cap by $150B.
Can Tesla bring one million robotaxis to the market by 2029? Assuming the numbers above, that would increase their market cap by $150B. Or in today's dollars by $100B. Even if they never get beyond 1 million robotaxis.
If one assumes that from 2029 on, they add one million of these every year, today's value of that future business probably exceeds all of the current Tesla market cap.
Robotaxis seem like a risky investment. Even if the tech gets nailed (and at the moment it struggles in urban environments), will legislators ever allow them? Most EU cities have legislation in place to curb traffic growth which robotaxis fly in the face of- its easy to see how "circling" instead of parking could create congestion. There seem to be too many problems related to liability. How do you replace all of the non-driving tasks of a taxi-driver? (cleaning, lifting bags, etc., helping with elderly/disabled people).
> How do you replace all of the non-driving tasks of a taxi-driver? (cleaning, lifting bags, etc., helping with elderly/disabled people).
This was my thought too when it was first discussed, but now he wants to use the same AI to power a humanoid robot, which (if it worked) would make this easy.
My guess is that the performance of AI necessary for humanoid robots will not be available in a fully independent form-factor for at least 5-10 years after level 5 full self driving… but that belief is due to the electrical power envelope, so a humanoid robot whose sole purpose is these kinds of non-driving taxi related tasks, that I can believe may come sooner.
Right, but SF actually seems to be back-pedalling on them. They seem to work better in Phoenix, but similar areas (car-centric urban sprawl) are a fairly limited market.
Also- if I am wrong and robot taxis become super successful- would that affect sales of Teslas to private customers?
Buying a car is going away just like buying CDs and DVDs went away. And running your own email server. Most people just want to get from A to B, not deal with the investment into and maintenance of a car.
Usage will continue to grow as it gets better. And it got a lot better over the last months.
And then there is Waymo which proves that with geo-fencing, high resolution maps, additional sensors and remote operators on standby, robotaxis are already possible today. Tesla could add some of these too, if it wants to accelerate meeting regulatory requirements.
> Tesla FSD is already being used for on a billion miles per year. Search for "Cumulative miles driven with FSD" [...] Usage will continue to grow as it gets better. And it got a lot better over the last months.
There is a big, hell a gigantic, difference between that and robotaxi. You need the car to be able to handle from start to finish, the entire trip, not parts of it, not even just 99% of it.
Also, the car cannot stop or be unable to deal with some situation and require help. If owners randomly have to go help their car miles away because the "taxi" got into a unknown situation, they're quickly going to get out of that deal.
And then you have all the regulatory and insurance issues. Is Tesla or the owner insuring the commercial part ? Are they required to get commercial license ? What happens if the car hit and kill someone during a robotaxi trip, who is responsable ?
Waymo has employees watching their cars and resolving issues when they come up. So in order for Tesla to do robotaxis like that, you will now need to pay Tesla do to the monitoring and issue resolving as well. And then of course you will need your own special business insurance without the bulk purchasing power of Waymo/Cruise. When your car gets into an accident, you don't get to replace it with one from Tesla's fleet like Waymo does, you are just SOL.
1: Tesla can use their own cars. They dont't need to base the service on the cars owned by individuals.
2: If they want to rent cars from individual owners, they can make the conditions as comfortable as needed. Monitoring and insurance for example would most likely handled by Tesla and not be paid by the individual owner. The owner would just get a fee for every hour Tesla uses their car.
It's an exponential decay in pricing. The marketing promise was a faster linear decay but that was unrealistic and was used to bolster investment capital. This affected confidence heavily.
> until EVs were clearly cheaper than gas/hybrids.
That's never going to happen, I'm not that good at physics but there must be some deep thermodynamically principle involved or similar to that. Something on the lines of what Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen [1] war writing about.
Never say never, there is a clear theoretical possibility that we might one day properly price in all externalities (such as cost of dealing with climate change and conflicts related to hydrocarbons) into the cost of goods and services. That said, those chances are unfortunately small.
It's already happened. The $10,000 (in China) BYD Seagull is superior IMO to any <$20,000 ICE vehicle.
You can lease a bZ4x for $169 a month. Many people can save more than $169 in fuel costs by switching to electric, making that bZ4x essentially "free after estimated fuel savings" to use the silly Tesla phrasing.
> That's never going to happen, I'm not that good at physics but there must be some deep thermodynamically principle involved or similar to that.
Eh? Not totally sure what you're getting at; do you believe that there's a fundamental law of physics that says that batteries can never fall in price below where they are now, or something?
Maybe not fundamental, but something similar to that, yes. I think that when coupled with economics (i.e., basically, price) there's nothing that can surpass carbon-based energy.
Carbon-based energy is basically condensed and stored solar power, i.e. some of the cheapest things there can be, taking into consideration that the "condensed and stored" part happens by default, the only money that we spend is in trying to get to those condensed and stored" resources and to transport them (oil wells, digging coal-mines etc)
I mean, even if that were the case, if batteries were free, electric cars would handily outdo internal combustion cars; car engines are _really_ inefficient compared to large gas turbines (absolute best case under 40%, realistically closer to 20%).
> the only money that we spend is in trying to get to those condensed and stored" resources and to transport them (oil wells, digging coal-mines etc)
That's a huge "the only"; we're already seeing solar beat gas on pricing in some cases.
That's the thing, I don't think that batteries will ever be free, or close to free.
> we're already seeing solar beat gas on pricing in some cases.
That's why I also added the condensed/storage part, which with carbon comes by default (or at low enough prices). Forests (including geological ones on which current carbon-energy is mostly based) are (were) world-wide solar farms which come with no costs, a human-made thing will never be able to compete with that, price-wise.
Seems like big investors also fall easily for the Sunken Cost fallacy. Instead of a fire sale as we'd expect they prefer to trust yet again Elon's words, the same person saying that FSD will become a reality in the next 3-6 months for the past 8 years...
My belief is that Elon himself is in a tight spot now, if Tesla's financials continue to falter he will lose the last bit of trust which will probably unwind it all, probably including ouster him as CEO. He keeps promising dreams (FSD and robotaxis, Cybertruck, etc.) and not delivering them, instead he's losing public trust and respect, at some point the chickens will come home to roost.
Stocks are horse betting at short term. Always have been. People will buy and sell short term based on triggers that cause the stock go up or down and that's enough to move the price in that direction. Sometimes that trigger is disconnected to reality.
> The stock market/US economy is now a confirmed meme/ponzi scheme.
I mean, I'm not sure how you can go from "the stocks of this one weird company behave irrationally" to "the US economy is a Ponzi scheme". Bubbles are basically as old as markets; meme stocks (which arguably Tesla is now an example of) are a somewhat newer concept, but are not a _big_ part of the market.
The existence of things like TSLA demonstrates that the markets aren't the sort of spherical-cow perfect efficient markets that, say, the weirder varieties of libertarians believe to exist, but everyone pretty much already knew that anyway.
My cynical take on them cancelling the model 2 in favor of robotaxis is that they've (temporarily?) given up on being a car company. They're hoping a new influx of capital after going all in on AI hype will keep them afloat.
Given that the Cybertruck is a laughing stock and growth/profits from China are in bad shape, they may actually be doing the right thing if the only goal is to stay in business for one more quarter.
How many investors are going to humour Elon on his robotaxi plan? He's made public statements about Tesla getting robotaxis out in 2020, if not even earlier.
They're not cancelling the model 2 - they're delaying next gen platform and introducing a new intermediate platform based on the 3/Y platform with some of the good stuff from next gen thrown in. They're doing this so they can start selling the model 2 in late 2024 (Elon time, adjust as you see fit). Next gen is now 2026 rather than 2025 (again, Elon time).
Someone set fire to a pylon and took the factory (and the important bit: local residents) out for a week or so. Apparently the motivation was protesting against deforestation and using groundwater in an area with drought problems already.
It seems pretty clear that they were far left activists trying to punish Tesla. They even published a manifesto on the most popular German leftist/anarchist web platform.
Specifically they complained that Tesla makes "SUVś[sic], killing machines and Monstertrucks".
The arson was about localised issues (as another comment mentioned, groundwater and local deforestation), so yeah, they could think about the bigger picture for environmental impact but instead they focused on the local one.
You can probably worry about big and small problems at the same time, it's not like because the world is burning that you will allow or ignore a company contaminating the groundwater you and your neighbours use.
Remember that robot Elon "unveiled" that turned out just to be a person in a robot costume?
He is saying[1] that this robot will be in production before the end of this year, and:
"Will be more valuable than everything else combined because if you have a sentient humanoid robot that is able to navigate reality and do tasks at request there is no meaningful limit to the size of the economy. So that's what's going to happen"
How does anybody take him seriously as this point?
> Remember that robot Elon "unveiled" that turned out just to be a person in a robot costume?
this characterization is laughably far from the truth. there was no attempt at deceit here, it was a "let's have fun with it" moment. there was no promise or suggestion that there was supposed to be a real robot.
Valid point, you're right that was more of a "let's have fun" than an actual reveal. However that doesn't change the fact that it's now an actual reveal.
On the earnings call he said the robot should be in production by the end of this year, and being sold by the end of next year. And implied it will:
- Be more valuable than everything else combined
- A sentient humanoid robot that is able to navigate reality and do tasks at request
- There is no meaningful limit to the size of the economy (whatever this means)
And finished up by saying "So that's what's going to happen"
I don't think I have Elon derangement syndrome, but I just can't take him seriously with how wildly inaccurate so many of his claims are.
What the actual quotes are, starting at 12:30 timestamp during investor questions segment:
"We are able to do simple factory tasks in the lab"
"We think we'll have Optimus in limited production in the factory doing useful tasks by the end of this year"
"We may be able to sell it externally by end of next year. These are just guesses"
For the first quote, they literally have a PR video on youtube showing this. Go see it for yourself.
For the second, this is a no-brainer. They already have robots in their factories doing useful tasks. It's not really a stretch that a humanoid form-factor robot could be doing the same.
For the third, he clearly said "may" and made it super clear this was a guess. He's also not saying it will be doing your dishes by end of next year, he said selling it externally. Which may be for external lab purposes or for other manufacturers.
"There is no meaningful limit to the size of the economy (whatever this means)"
I think it's pretty clear what it means - autonomous robots that can intelligently do human tasks are going to massively change how the economy works. And it's very, very likely that we will (at some point) get to here. He's not promising when that's going to be.
You're continuing to prove my point - people take the things he says and wildly misconstrue them and then act like he's literally Hitler. Don't get me wrong, Elon is an asshole and a transphobe and has some weird stick up his ass about immigration. But it's a pet peeve of mine for people to make up shit to be critical about while ignoring the real problems (like transphobia). It's also attacking the amazing talent and teams at Tesla/SpaceX for people to keep acting like it's a total shit show when it's really just Elon not shutting up sometimes
Thanks for spelling out your points, and I agree on some while disagreeing on others.
However, I in no way, nor ever would, say or act like he is literally Hitler. I’m not sure where you got such an extreme comparison from my comments about calling him out for unrealistic & hyperbolic statements.
I think at this point we can agree to disagree and see what the future holds for both Tesla and Elon
I didn't mean to accuse you of that, it was definitely some small hyperbole about mainstream opinions. I personally know people in life that would call Elon a Nazi without any irony or humor.
I hope the best for everyone, including Elon and the people around him
"Transphobia" in practice often just means rejecting the bizarre idea that men who say they are women somehow actually are women. Which is a good thing if you care about the rights of actual female women.
Musk seems to be dropping sensible but boring projects that would sell well globably (low cost compact car, semi-truck) in favour of magical technology that may or may not materialise, and if so may be legislated against outside the US (robotaxi, self-driving tech).
I think a major factor in Musk's decision making is how many headlines will be written about him. The press helped him get to where he is now. Not making the headlines because he does boring stuff probably makes him more anxious than a negative headline ever can.
It shall continue to fall and it will have little impact on anything. The only thing propping it up is a bunch of investment companies who have it in their "environmental" funds. The damage reduction on those will be from other investments rising as Tesla tanks. Fund managers and then funds will be shuffled around. The world will continue to spin.
This will result in some vapid marketing about price reductions and production increase and readjusting to market demands. Then a fat finger pointing at someone else. And some hype about battery technology. That will cause a temporary gain which can be used to sell more interest quickly and it'll tank again.
>The results, posted after markets closed Tuesday, sent shares up as much as 12% following the release as investors appeared to be more focused on Tesla’s forward-looking remarks about future products,
Luxury vehicles with limited market, Hertz dumping them due to ROI problems, asshole running PR, new product is a $70k MAGA hat / rusty coffin, geopolitical mess going on. Inevitable really.
I know a couple of "faithful" investors who put money on late last year who are still telling themselves it's only temporary.
Removing stalks and replacing them with turn signal controls to the same side of the steering wheel and arranging them in a reversed order did not help (many people think “Left” first, then only “Right” due to Western reading convention)
How are they arranged? Should Left be well on the left side? Like button being closer to side where action happens. Now I need to think about window switches too...
EV's grew 31% in 2023 and will likely do a similar amount in 2024. The issue is that the number of available vehicles grew more than 31%; expectations were for around 50% growth.
Lackluster demand for very expensive vehicles is down across the board, and Tesla has only been serving the higher-end market. A lot of manufacturers were banking on interest rates staying low but there was no way that could last forever - the average ICE last year cost more than the US median income, at a time when many other prices were also rising. Based on the people I know who’ve bought recently, an EV targeting Camry pricing and quality would sell a lot better than the massive bling-tanks they had sitting in stock.
The brand is the effectively the sum of what the company does though, and that includes building cars with a good finish. BMW, Merc, Audi, Lexus etc have strong brands because they're well known for make cars that are always well built. In the case of Tesla they could fix all the build problems and their brand would continue to suffer because they have a reputation for poor quality. That takes years to repair.
Pretty much. Japanese and Germans have built those strong brands on the build quality, fit and finish, ride quality, noise insulation, etc.
Tesla customers were willing to overlook that due to the focus on software and cutting edge tech at the expense of quality but people later realized quality also matters in a object you sit in and your life depends on it, since a car is more than an iPad.
I would especially add that there is not much of a shortcut around that, either, because a lot of that reputation is based on older vehicles holding up well, not being noisy, etc. People think Mercedes is a luxury brand because they’re thinking about how their grandparents had one that was still in good shape after years of use, not just the day they bought it.
Not coming from that kind of family background personally this was somewhat of a surprise to me when a friend first explained how they were expecting a vehicle to hold its value.
WTF. I was a kid out looking at cars with my dad. He was looking at Lincolns, saw one he otherwise liked, and noticed that the gap between the driver’s door and the back seat door was wider at the top than the bottom. The salesman tried to have the shop adjust the door so that it was aligned, but then it was misaligned in other ways (like the edge of the driver’s window was higher than the back seat’s window). He never looked at another Lincoln, ever. Choice quote: “I’d never be able to look at it without seeing that skewy door and it’d make me mad every time.”
Fit and finish are absolutely things that non-geeks care tremendously about.
Of course they do. The brand is the sum of all the design and engineering decisions and marketing over time.
I absolutely bought a Lexus because I perceived it as high quality - reliable, assembled properly, good finishes. Same for my BMW, though it’s almost certainly less reliable. My Honda truck, I expect reliable utility, not luxury.
Maybe we have different definitions, but I think they absolutely do, I would say things like insisting on Apple CarPlay, or the UX of the self-driving software, the vibrance of the RGB dash/door lighting (...) etc. is caring about finish.
Your car enthusiast might care to a different sort of extreme or niche (like wanting real leather not PU; or not wanting leather because the '66 never came with leather) but it's still caring about finish IMO, just different aspects.
Lot of people care about fit. And feeling. A car should at least look right that means gaps in different places look same and there is no obvious problem. After all they are paying tens of thousands for something, that is absolute minimum you can expect for that price.
9% drop in revenue leading to a 54% drop in income, this suggests the main factor for the income reduction is an increase in costs/loss moreso than the drop in revenue.
No. Their gross margin only fell by 0.2%, and operating expenses only increased by 151 million, neither of which explains more than a small fraction of what happened. The problem is simply that because they are so vertically integrated, they have high fixed costs, and so a relatively small drop in revenue means a huge loss in profit. Another 9% less revenue and they will be making a loss, unless they fire a lot of people.
Tesla failed at the monopoly grab that most VC funded tech companies depend on for their "valuation" and super-normal profits.
Cars have no network effect as the roads are open standard accessible to any vendor and Tesla never had any secret sauce that kept well funded competitors from competing.
Once the big traditional manufacturers started taking electric cars with diver assist features seriously they had the skill and money to match(and in some cases exceed) Tesla and that means Tesla will have to price
their cars competitively.
network effects and the broader value network are the big ones. without creating and then exploring that network, you're just a hot new product until someone else catches up.
put another way, it's not just making cars, it's making the ecosystem. every phone after the iphone was trying to be the iphone, for example.
for Tesla, it would have been something like getting charging stations everywhere, and getting the 3 price so low that they become ubiquitous. then the Hertz buy might have made sense, you'd see taxis everywhere switching (and they kind of did in some cities), and stronger adoption outside of tech-bro cities.
Could also just be reversion to the mean. COVID issues restricted the supply of new cars in general, resulting in higher prices/margins. Now that they're getting sorted out, prices return to normal and margins go back down.
> Models 3/Y are literally one of the cheapest EVs available in EU/US?
Er, no. Peugeot, Renault, Volkswagen etc. all make (way) cheaper models. Heck, even Volvo now has an EV (the EX30) that is ~EUR 8k cheaper than a Model y.
Not even mentioning the Asian brand like Hyundai etc.
Shh... I'll tell you a secret. For years and years a lot of the electric vehicles in lots of brands, weren't meant to be sold. The public were even advised by the car dealers not to buy them, and they were made so unattractive as possible.
In part because the carmakers were probably unsure about its long term performance with a totally new technology, but the main reason was other.
It just happens that the environmental emissions of a car maker fleet was calculated as the average of emissions from all their models in the current market.
Those tiny, squared EV that looked like toys were built with the only purpose to decrease the brand average value. Thus they could have models contaminating more in the upper categories. (Plus painting the brand in green for PR purposes).
All of this changed after Tesla started to show its claws and to be taken seriously.
All of this changed after Tesla started to show its claws and to be taken seriously
Absolutely Tesla is almost single handedly responsible for getting the EV market from where it was 10 years ago to where it is today. Without Tesla the EV market would almost certainly be years behind where it is right now. No argument from me on either point.
The question is any of that relevant today? Tesla paved the way, but now the market is wide open and 'everybody' is jumping on. Does Tesla still have anything special to offer or will they just be another midsized 'luxury' car brand
You're just rewriting history to push a US-centric point of view. Zoe started selling in 2012, a bit after the model S. Despite a lacking charging infrastructure, it lead the EV segment in europe for years, including hybrids in 2016 and 2020. It is one of the most sold EV in Europe still (production ended recently), and the most sold in France.
I don't care what signal you want to send, i don't care if you were lied to or you are conscious you're doing it. Stop.
It's like the "We invented the first mouse" used by Apple stans to prop up their favorite brand against Microsoft: nice for the brand war argument (no one cares, really), but now most people actually believe that and it's almost a truth. If you are USian, well, maybe improving your country political discourse start with improving your own discourse on social media, and if you're not: why are you pushing a foreign country narrative?
Zoe was not the first electric Renault. Do you remember that 2010 monstrosity the Twizy?.
The early history of EV in European carmakers are plenty of WTF were they thinking?. Have you seen the Citroen Ami?. Later the brands gradually changed its mind, in part by the Renault success but mostly for Tesla. We could say many things about Tesla but at least they tried to build cars and not toasters from the start.
That’s an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary proof. I can’t imagine any brand spending tens of millions of dollars to make a car that they don’t want to sell. I’d also like to see evidence that fleet fuel economy is (mileage / number of unique car models) and not (mileage / number of cars sold).
Believe it or not, a lot of big companies spent serious money on green-washing its products. Those old EV were first half-baked versions. They were also a big liability for the brand in case of accident.
But the flagship for self-sabotage EVs, back in the 90s, was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1 : they were never even really sold, but leased, and almost all the few thousand produced were destroyed.
To be fair back ~8 or so years ago VW did have e-Golfs in dealer showrooms but the actual dealerships seemed really reluctant to sell them - my wife asked about one at the back of a showroom and basically had the salesman spend his time explaining why not to buy it even though it was rather more expensive than the car she ended up buying.
Things have totally changed though VW-group dealerships now really push electric cars and its the ICE cars that are stuck in the back.
I had heard similar histories, and this case is totally believable IMAO
Of course sellers can have their own reasons to sell you this and not that.
The maker tells their dealers how much cars of each model they must sell to keep the relationship as official dealer. If the seller is reluctant to sell a particular model you can expect that this model has not been assigned a high priority in the list of X cars that must be sold yearly to fill the objectives.
This certainly isn't true now though. No matter what the car makers want, they have to face the reality that in the relatively near future non EVs will be banned.
Right now VW is even protesting suggestions that the coming ICE ban should be overturned.
What? That is total nonsense. The ID.3 is much cheaper, even ignoring VW picking up the government subsidies. With the subsidies it costs about as much as an ID.5. Of course prices get much lower, with actual low end EVs which started to hit the market.
Many people in the comments claiming to be liberals who wont buy from Tesla due to Elon. What exactly do you dislike about him, and why is punishing Elon by boycotting Tesla worth slowing the transition to sustainable transportation?
The only Western automaker that can produce electric cars without losing massive amounts of money. Only Western automaker that produces EVs at scale. By far the leader in terms of technology and efficiency in the industry. Best range/dollar vehicles you can buy in north America.
A couple Chinese automakers like BYD and Xpeng might survive the next couple years, they did it by relentlessly copying Tesla.
This is a major problem on the scale of carbon induced global warming, deforestation, and other types of environmental pollution? Isn't the solution, presumably some new type of tire, likely to be applicable to all vehicle types? gas electric or otherwise.
Specifically, he's a huge narcissist surrounding himself with yes men to stroke his ego. Not a good environment for push back (resulting in obvious failures like the Cybertruck, Twitter-to-X rebranding, 'FSD is ready!', The Boring Company, etc.)
> why is punishing Elon by boycotting Tesla worth slowing the transition to sustainable transportation?
Even if we take the Elon factor out of the equation and just decide not to buy a Tesla for any other reason, it isn't 'slowing the transition to sustainable transportation' because I can buy a (much of the time) cheaper, better build quality, modern electric car from Rivian, Hyundai, BMW, Volkswagen, Audi, BYD, Volvo, Ford, Lucid, Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Fiat, GMC, Honda, Jaguar, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Polestar, Porsche, Ram, etc.
Why does it matter? He's not particularly more narcissistic than any other CEO. Steve Jobs? I'm generally not concerned about the specific personality type of the CEO or any other employee at a company when I buy a product.
Tesla is clearly the industry leader in terms of volume, technology, and efficiency. The market wouldn't exist without them. Most of those companies your listing can't/don't produce in volume because they have massive negative margin and range/dollar is inferior to Tesla. Only a few companies are in a place where they can make money on selling electric vehicles such as BYD and they did it through relentlessly copying Tesla.
