They peaked around 2021, and even after posting multiple quarters of disappointing results, the stock is still trading above 2021 levels. For almost any other company, slightly lowering guidance or missing estimates by a few percentage points simply tanks the stock. But for Tesla, no amount of Musk’s idiocy seems to be enough to seriously move it.
As long as the music is playing they will keep dancing. Musk is a master of DJing that party. We might wake up tomorrow and find that his house of cards has fallen apart, but we might wake up to learn they really have solved FSD. That ambiguity keeps the price from collapsing.
If elon builds a time machine and goes to the future to get FSD tech from 100 years from now and rolls it out to all teslas tomorrow, what will change? Will every car driver get rid of their cars and get a tesla? Will that suddenly justify the stupid valuation?
Realistically, I don't think the majority of drivers will care that much. Sure, their sales will go up, but I can't see it going up by that much.
FSD will never be "achieved" suddenly. The tech will incrementally improve every year, across all manufacturers until one day we are manual driving only 1% of the time with FSD doing the rest. Like AGI, there is no moat in FSD. This is the natural outcome of the trajectory that we are on right now, and nothing about tesla is making me believe they will offer anything that other OEMs can't.
No, I think the market is much more cynical than that. Tesla is a meme stock similar to bitcoin or GME. Investors are degenerate gamblers, hoping that it will continue to rise because that's what it does atm, and hoping they won't be the one left behind holding the bag when it crashes one day. It's little more than a voluntary ponzi scheme that most big investors openly buy into knowing full well what's at stake.
Being a really really hard problem is a moat. Many have tried and given up already: Uber, Cruise, etc.
BMW Personal Pilot, Merc Drive Pilot, and Honda Sensing Elite are Level 3 automation tech you can buy right now. Tesla is still at level 2!!
Whether Tesla is going to be the first to achieve true autonomy or not is a toss-up. And and regardless of who achieves it, the rest will be very very short on their heels.
That's why people keep giving Tesla money: because Musk has fooled so many people into believing he's this amazing engineer, who could, possibly, "solve" FSD overnight—and, moreover, has gotten them to buy into it so deeply that they have tied their identity into that belief, and so in order to continue to cling to it, they reject empirical evidence of both his lack of qualifications and his outright crimes.
But to be very clear I not only don't think they will but I don't think that they think they will, or they wouldn't be shifting focus to Optimus. I'm not invested in Tesla except for my exposure through index funds.
If anyone who is a fan of Tesla can get through this article without changing their mind. Well. Bless their heart.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/08/29/tesla-a...
Same for a rocket that's ridiculously large for orbital missions but can't go beyond orbit without 15 to 25 refueling flights of the same enormous rocket.
The reasons for both these failing are going to be manyfold and complex, but there are enough simple reasons that everyone should understand.
And it is insane that this warrants a 1.5 trillion USD valuation - for vaporware.
Besides what does FSD even mean? Austin is not Amsterdam.
I have no idea what institutional investors think, and they're probably the relevant group here.
From the way I've observed individuals discussing it, defending it, on HN… it pattern-matches to my understanding of what people these days call "main character syndrome", i.e. that the other companies are just a supporting cast to provide an interesting challenge for the only one that's not an NPC.
I appreciate when my vocabulary expands. I understood this by context and similarity to 'synonym'. I may have encountered it before (probably), but I didn't know it. Excellent use in a post.
Expands my horizons a bit. Hat tip.
There are clearly plenty of posters who, to all appearances, genuinely believe that he is the entirety of Tesla's R&D department.
I'm not holding my breath though.
Even if thay were true many people hate Elon now. Enough that they will pass on any technology he is the only purveyor of.
After he celebrated letting children starve (USAID) by dancing on stage with a chainsaw many people decided to never buy any Musk product for any reason. Now there are the Epstein ties.
Worse, many people who dont care about politics at all won't get involved, because Musk is an unstable drug user and its not wise to entangle yourself in his business affairs.
The funny thing is after 6 years of effort apparently they have managed to get the dry coating process for batteries working and according to a few reputed sources have ingredients for entire battery chain available locally.
The thing is if this stock was underpriced and rational this would be such a positive news after 2-3 years of growth stall.
Instead they are trying to keep the hype up with endless goalpost changing and self driving possibly stuck perenially in edge case doom scenario with camera only decision
Same for cheap Teslas. Some hype trains hit the buffers sooner than later.
Me and other millions of people are investing in our pensions every month and buying ETF (S&P500 or global) and indirectly buying Tesla stocks even if we don’t want to.
The system would need a big shock to cause the ETFs to rebalance and reduce the proportion of Tesla stocks that are part of the index.
Rollout both technologies at scale , and try to guess with one will cause more harm giving th fact there will be users in both cars trying to put legs on a steering wheel :
A stupid tech that will not even try to do safe things
Or software that is let’s say 4x less safe vs avg human but still very capable of doing maneuvering without hitting obvious walls etc ?
You get used with the system to work correctly and then when you expect less it does the unthinkable and the whole world blames you for not supervising a beta software product on the road on day 300 with the same rigour you did on day one.
I can see a very direct correlation with LLM systems. Claude has been working great for me until one day when it git reset the entire repo and I’ve lost two days work because it couldn’t revert a file it corrupted . This happened because I just supervised it just like you would supervise a FSD car with “bypass” mode. Fortunately it didn’t kill anyone , just two days of work lost. If there was the risk of someone being killed I would never allow a bypass /fsd/supervise mode regardless of how unlikely this is to happen.
Teslas has sensors , eye trackers etc is it possible to shoot yourself in the leg, sure. But not in any different way vs human doing irrational things in the car, make up, arguing , love etc.
Human-being is an irrational create that should not drive except for fun in isolated environment. Tesla or Waymo or anyone else.... It is good to remove human from the road, the faster the better.
I’m all for this but not to replace dumb people with dumb software. I think the FSD should be treated more like the airplane safety. We have the opportunity to do this right not just what’s the cheapest way we can get away with it.
When I'm driving FSD If i want to drink, eat, etc, instead of doing weird one hand tricks every driver did, i just turn FSD and let it drive. When I'm tired , I'm doing the same. Again , attention control works really good, it doesn't let you sit on the phone etc. unlike many other cars with less advanced features. You can't be on FSD + Phone but you can easily be on the phone + lane control in other car.
Phone is by far the biggest real killer of people, and no body is trying to create a campaign against phone mounts, etc.
If you're driving a vehicle in the former category, you'll be on the hook for reckless driving if you aren't fully supervising the vehicle.
I'm pretty sure the original commenter was supervising the driving, though.
No, you do not "become scary good" every single week the past 10 years and yet still not be able to drive coast to coast all by itself (which Elon promised it would do a decade ago)
You are just human and bad at evaluating it. You might even be experiencing literal statistical noise.
They'll probably get there faster too because the decisions the camera+lidar model makes can be used to automatically evaluate the camera-only model.
It's cheaper, that's all it is.
Scalability is usually about O(n²) vs O(n log n) or something, not a smaller constant that's significant but not a game changer.
And the results speak for themselves.
https://www.gurufocus.com/news/8623960/tesla-tsla-robotaxi-c...
> Mr Keegan said he was “pretty confident” that in “the next five to 10 years” driverless vehicles would “make a major contribution in terms of sustainable transport” on Dublin’s streets.
As always, people were overoptimistic back then, too. There are currently no driverless vehicles in Dublin at all, with none expected anytime soon unless you count the metro system (strictly speaking driverless, but clearly not what he was talking about).
Tesla’s own Vehicle Safety Report claims that the average US driver experiences a minor collision every 229,000 miles, meaning the robotaxi fleet is crashing four times more often even by the company’s own benchmark.
https://www.automotiveworld.com/news/tesla-robotaxis-reporti...
I do wonder if folks who say Tesla’s FSD works well and safely are simply lacking a self-preservation instinct.
And of course, Musk's insistence that they don't need other sensor types like lidar or radar definitely looks like it's getting in the way.
How many have you tested in your day to day life?
See this related article and discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47051546
It might a nice feature for your car to have. But most people aren't paying for it, the conversion rate is very low.
So they are not making money from taxis and not making much money from software sales.
So does it matter that for you personally it drives you around sometimes?
Even if you price in a 4x increase in FSD buy conversion ratio, you can't explain the stock price.
And I say this as a former Tesla investor who assumed that conversion ratio would be better then it is. But for that reason (and many others) I couldn't justify the valuation and dropped the stock.
Personally that’s way more useful for me even if they didn’t let you turn it on at highway speeds.
Which if anything looks worse for Tesla long term. If luxury car owners aren’t willing to pay 200$/month for self driving then trying to up charge people buying used model 3 and Y’s after canceling the S and X looks dubious. Which means that 100$/month subscription likely loses them money vs an 8k purchase.
They are looking to reintroduce it with a much higher top of 81MPH which might help, but agin my issue isn’t with the particular system but the underlying assumption of how much people value attention free driving.
That's kind of like saying 'look this algorithm is awesome' if we feed it all the data in the optimal order.
It's impressive what marketing images can achieve - the future vision pumping the stock, the seig heil halving car sales.
Musk is the leader selling his own brand of fantasy that he makes up as he goes along. A lot (if not most) of what he says never comes to pass but people still cling to every prognostication as if it is gospel.
For over two decades, he was all about taking over the auto business with full self driving EVs. Obviously never happened. So now he is off to take over ride sharing and robots and AI and whatever else comes down the pike tomorrow.
Musk, the perception of. As always. Popular media drilled in that geniuses behaving like idiots is on point. So other idiots with money still suspect him of being a genius and singlehandedly turning things around at some point before the cliff.
I had priced in, margin staying the same or going slowly down. FSD not working but achieving at least a decent amount of software sale conversion. Service to become a profit center. And most importantly, a profitable truck and 'Model 2' program to further push volume. Beyond that, just generally that electrification was ongoing and Tesla had a role to play.
I never considered Robi-Taxi or Human Robots.
All of these failed. Volume didn't continue to go up. Margin couldn't be substantiated. FSD didn't get much buys (not helped by absurdly increasing price). Truck program was a failure (and I don't think its because of the design). And 'Model 2' program was cancelled.
I profited a lot from this stock and I think there was time where the stock-price was reasonable (I don't buy the claim that it was always a pure meme stock). But every quarter it got worse and worse. I can't understand why its still so high either.
The rational thing would be to short it, but Tesla value will remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
It really has tarnished the name of the genius inventor.
A bit speculative reply but would appreciate if anybody links any such analysis'/investigations.
From my limited knowledge, I know people have been shorting Tesla based on fundamentals for a while now but haven't been successful.
Seems like I'm not the only one with 2779 BYD EVs sold in the country in January compared to just 501 Teslas.[1]
[1] https://business.carsales.com.au/news-room/news/vfacts-janua...
"Because we're really moving into a future that is based on autonomy and so if you're interested in buying a Model S and X, now would be the time to order it, because we expect to wind down S and X production in next quarter and basically stop production of Model S and X next quarter. We'll obviously continue to support the Model S and X programs for as long as people have the vehicles, but we're gonna take the Model S and X production space in our Fremont factory and convert that into an Optimus factory, which will... with the long-term goal of having 1 million units a year of Optimus robots in the current S/X space in Fremont."
I suspect this is a pivot to nowhere.
It is also a neat way to reset Elon's Very Reliable Prediction Clock.
I look forward to hearing about how fully functional Optimus robots will be ready to ship "later this year" for the next 10 years.
https://old.reddit.com/r/robotics/comments/1ph3scw/tesla_opt...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R40IDdAkRZM
I struggle to imagine what the US version of this intimidating propaganda movie would look like. My mind renders only pictures of square dancing.
The only bit visually we see China a little behind is AI but I suspect they have much better closed/unreleased models, and the fab/chip space, but they'll close that gap in a short few years I'd expect.
https://www.reddit.com/r/robotics/comments/1ph3scw/tesla_opt...
Same with robotics .
They got billions in pocket to either release a few new models to save market or invest into RND to change the market .
I don't know how well that's going to work out for them. I saw these robots (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVX6vq0RSnY) on the Chinese New Year Gala, and they look way more dexterous than any Optimus video I've ever seen.
See how poorly the sword one moves compared to the others.
Optimus hand dexterity is interesting; and the handling capacity is targeting useful weights (10s of kilos).
Boston dynamics is the most interesting; targeting "fit human" manipulation, 50kg. Their adaptable movement and walking are the best ive seen demoed as well.
by no mean calling this out is advocating for status signaling , I myself would never buy a Tesla for this very reason.
I've been working in robotics for years now, I've talked with ex Optimus developers, FigureAI devs, some Japanese humanoid devs, researchers, talked to people in conferences and no one. Absolutely no one I've met take Optimus seriously. If a lab is considering buying a humanoid they'll go to China. Hell, even MIT professors that have been crucial to the development (Boston dynamics etc) seems to not put too much emphasis on Tesla.
But I've also been to industrial robotics conferences, mostly for customers and user focus and not developers and usually the perception is different in those circles.
So who are the optimistic customers for Optimus?
I think S, X and Cybertruck are just 3% of 2025 deliveries?
If I’m understanding correctly the pivot is to sell just the autonomous driving systems. This way it can be trained on more data. It’s a hard sell to do this while competing against the car makers whose business they are trying to court.
Selling actual cars was like Uber when they started with a black car service. Get into the luxury market then leverage that so get into the mass market.
Perhaps this is why Elon has been so adamant about not using LiDAR
Robots doing drunken panda moves FSD are insanely good using MacBook grade + and not even grass iPhone hardware
few other companies are doing large scale self driving large scale pilots
Cars are already heavily built using specialized robots today
Id say it’s equally stupid for any other car brand to invest money into something not autonomous or robotics.
I guess I'm just continuously baffled by the complete fuck-up that is/has-been Tesla motors.
These cars are very long in the tooth so I suspect that the Fremont line has been a shitshow the entire time.
Are there that many unemployed actors available?
Wikipedia notes about 300,000 people were laid off. Not a million.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_federal_mas...
I'm charging my Shark right now and I couldn't be happier. I expect my fuel bill (it's a PHEV) to drop by 70-80% when compared to the 2010 Commodore wagon I was driving last week.
(I kid, I also drive a byd, ATTO though rather than shark)
Many customers really only care about price and that it generally works and looks fine and have zero idea about the hidden costs.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/news/tesla-said-it-would-sta...
The market is far more naive and credulous than I anticipated, and Musk seems to understand much better than I just how fucking moronic most market participants are.
Outnumbered and increasingly outspent.
Tesla came from nowhere, developed essentially one world-dominating product (lumping the 3 and Y together), then the CEO basically ruined everything.
Imagine Tesla with a "normal" CEO and marketing department. They would have a bunch of different trims and options for the 3/Y, a redesigned X, a functional truck, and a market cap of 400 billion!
Of course, with a P/E ratio of over 381
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/pe-rati...
And hence Musk will be the CEO.
When Tesla started with the "no marketing department" nonsense, the press should have just stopped quoting them or covering them. Especially given that half the things Musk says are blatant lies.
It's not limited to this one company, they'll do it with any company that's newsworthy or has a CEO who will generate clicks for their article.
It seems strange to attribute only the fall -- and not the rise -- to the CEO
Turns out nazi salutes don't make one popular here in Europe.
Elon is a loser socially and that's about it.
Elon Musk is a great businessman and develops great products for general consumers. There is not much wrong with him other than his online persona... which most normal people can ignore. He's probably more normal than any other business leader.
What's weird is people lumping in some of Elon's actions with falls in Tesla sales as if he didn't:
1. Predict it
2. Gift the whole world the motivation to do it
I don't care about Elon Musk. He's a good businessman and a weird personality. But it doesn't take a genius to realise that he can't lead a winning product unchallenged, forever.
The only thing he's great at is creating the illusion of genius.
He didn't found Tesla, despite his title. He's not an engineer at SpaceX, despite his title. He spent 44 billion on Twitter which is most certainly losing money hand over fist. The Boring Company is a flop. Tesla is famously anything but a car company because their cars are mediocre in every way except the battery range.
SpaceX is his only real success, but then again SpaceX only succeeded because of massive government funding, which Elon would happily decry as communism if the money went to anyone else.
He's not a genius and not a particularly good businessman. He's just a normie with Daddy's emerald mine money, who got lucky with a large severance package when he was fired from Paypal for being terrible, and now uses his wealth to create a cult of personality.
I can't say that I'm a big fan of this guy... But I can tell you this: I learned to drive only after moving to the U.S. recently, and when I had to choose my first car, I found Tesla to be the best among many I tried. It's just awesome, and I don't even use their FSD, the car itself is superb (at least the latest "3"). Minimalistic, no BS, drives well, quiet, comfortable. The same feeling I had with the first iPhone, compared to other phones.
Is it me or do the nay-sayers state that Elon is a grifter and added nothing to Tesla, but yet he ruined it? How can he both not create something and ruin it?
Also, Tesla isn't the only manufacturer (In the US) stopping electric cars, Porsche (IMO Taycan is the best electric model) is essentially stopping electric cars too, nothing to do with Elon.
Just my observation.
It was a success. He got more investment, built factories, became market leader. Built an industrial stack where there was none.
And gradually he got crazy. Dodgecoin, Nazi gestures, thinking he has to safe humanity because left radicaly are destroying it.
Instead of cutting down on costs, Tesla insisted it is the only electrical car and priced it as such. Not to mention the cybertruck disaster everybody saw from miiles away.
Meanwhile, the Chinese have the best electrics with the currently best industrial basis for production and cheap resources.
Musk has too much money, got lucky with an investment and started becoming complacent. The rest of the story writes itself.
Tesla seems basically priced based on hype, rather than anything relating to its actual business.
And possibly also the overt government corruption is priced in.
And when you get to active management, those managers might not either be that good. And it works as long as market keeps going up.
Tesla's total profits over its entire existence ($37,883m [0]) is about as much as Musk has personally made by selling Tesla shares ($40bn ish [1]), but of that profit I can find $12.8bn can be attributed to government incentives[2] that have now largely or completely gone away.
[0] Net lifetime based on all the ups and downs of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla%2C_Inc.#Finances
[1] I assume some of this got rounded: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/elon-musk-te...
[2] Between US federal ($11.4bn for just zero-emission vehicles standards) and local state incentives (and more, I didn't fully sum everything): https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2025/e...
That being said, yeah, profits were down a bit but a lot of that was stock compensation and other things. In practical terms they went from a cash position of 36 billion to 44 billion.
They are in a phenomenal position financially as they have very little debt. By comparison GM made 2.7 billion and Stellantis lost 20 billion.
Tesla is in such a great cash position that Apple only has about 10 billion more than them in cash.
The future looks fantastic.
Selling shares for more than the company made in its entire existence, demonstrates the shares are overvalued.
> By comparison GM made 2.7 billion and Stellantis lost 20 billion.
2.7/3.7 = 0.73; GM's market cap is $77.67bn, using them as your framing of the problem gets you to a Tesla market cap of $106.40bn, not their actual ~$1.5T.
And Toyota made 40-45 billion USD profit for each of the last few years, i.e. more than Tesla in its lifetime, while having a market cap that's currently $316.8bn.
Telsa, market cap $1551bn, about 5x that of a company which makes more each year than it did in total, is overpriced. Especially given how harshly both Tesla's profits and sales are declining even in otherwise growing markets.
Telsa could shift the decimal point on its market cap one place and still be overpriced.
Given what they are as a business, they are not in "a phenomenal position financially", they are in an OK position for a normal boring traditional car company and a terrible one for a trillion-dollar market cap club company.
(Numbers from companiesmarketcap.com, in case anyone complains those are out of date).
His Vision — Hate It, Laugh at It, or Love It:
AI has solved (or is solving) coding in 2026.
Robots are doing drunken panda moves, yet FSD is insanely good — running on MacBook-grade hardware.
A few other companies are running large-scale self-driving pilots.
Cars are already being heavily built using specialized robots today.
At this point, it’s stupid for any car brand to invest money into anything that isn’t autonomous driving or robotics.
Getting politics to get in the way of good engineering is a real shame.
https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-cybercab-robotaxi-prod...
And BYD obviously is focusing on easier markets, where they don't have to fight against tariffs.
BYD uses aggressive discounts in bid to make Germany its leading European market - https://www.autonews.com/byd/ane-byd-discounts-germany-sales... - February 17th, 2026
China's BYD Overtakes Ford in Global Sales for the First Time - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinas-byd-overtakes-ford-glo... - February 12th, 2026
BYD's European registrations surge 270% in 2025 while Tesla slips 27% - https://cnevpost.com/2026/01/27/byd-european-registrations-s... - Jan 27th, 2026
BYD Sold Nearly Three Times As Many Cars As Tesla In Europe - https://www.carscoops.com/2025/11/byd-sold-nearly-3-times-as... - November 26th, 2025
The size of BYD's factory - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42228138 - November 2024 (615 comments)
VW AG sold 750k BEVs in Europe last year: https://www.volkswagen-group.com/en/press-releases/volkswage... (see the PDF).
Not saying that BYD is completely irrelevant, but the media overplays them. Presumably because BYD vs Tesla is an interesting narrative, even if the actual figures have both of those as small players in BEVs (at least for cars; BYD _is_ quite big in electric buses), with the real race being between VW AG and Stellantis. VW AG vs Stellantis is a painfully boring narrative.
That said, if relations between the EU and the US get much chillier, the EU may decide to make some sacrifices in order to have China in their camp. E.g. VW are arm-twisted into selling Škoda to BYD, with job preservation guarantees, and then BYD is badged Škoda and six months later all the old Škoda models are gone and its EVs all the way.
I mean, they aren't common as Teslas, but there are more and more.
So, like Tesla. Why is it that when it is a Chinese company it is basically Evil Communism, but when it is in the US it is fine?
https://www.theautopian.com/elon-musk-doesnt-see-cars-as-a-p...
Well one way to do that is destroy so much of Tesla that the Optimus division is 80% of the (much smaller) value that remains.
1. Tesla does not dominate robots or autonomous driving, it fades away 2. Tesla’s stock price exceeds $10T after it is shoe-horned into being a part of SpaceXAIBoringTesla
Musk is almost certainly too big to fail at this point. The cult of personality and SpaceX give him a lot of room for financial engineering, he doesn’t need Tesla.
Not having turn stalks and the drive selector, making me either pay for internet access or use bluetooth if I want to play spotify or youtube music (which I get for 'free' in cars with CarPlay or Android Auto), making the cybertruck way too big for a garage, discontinuing the model S and X...like are they even trying?
They used to have a third row option for the model Y, good for small kids or something, but then they got rid of that.
They were going to do the roadster, but didn't bother. They only have 6 paint colors, not even options for PTS. It's like they don't want to be a successful car company.
Tesla is a very strong leader for faults, breakage, and costly maintenance/repairs in the 3-5 year old segment.
See any European comprehensive car inspection statistics report.
The very first thing that Tesla was criticised for was terrible QA process. The quality was random and there were huge differences between factories. So I can totally believe there are plenty of Tesla made cars that made their owners happy. Of course few people can afford such gamble.
Also, it isn't normal for a 3-year-old car to risk dropping a wheel. You should read some more about this before you defend them.
EDIT: Here is a reddit thread about the problem (and an article in Norwegian):
>"Almost half of all Tesla Y fail mandatory tech inspection in Denmark and make headlines for it; similar numbers in Tesla-country Norway."
>"The most common issue remains slack in the wheel alignment and suspension, found in 22% of TMY's, as opposed to .1% of ID4's."
https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/1qmbm81/a...
You are being scammed.
Wow, what car is that? Even Porsche owners would say, "Damn, son, they're taking you to the cleaners."
The only question is what will be the next hype cycle when that succeeds about as well as the Cyber Truck.
The Chinese are making humanoid robots too, and my bet is they'll be better and cheaper than Tesla's.
He hyped electric cars to the point where someone in here in 2017 told me I was nuts to buy an ICE car because there wouldn’t be any gas stations left in five years. That’s why his share prices are out of proportion to reality.
Now that it turns out the EV market isn’t growing as fast as it seemed when it was all early adopters, and autonomous delivery isn’t ready and won’t be for at best a few years, he’s gotta hype the next thing.
98% of government money SpaceX receives is payment for services rendered, which they provide at a significantly lower cost than their competitors.
On the other hand, their competitors are routinely receiving actual handouts. For example, ULA used to receive a $1 billion annual "Launch Capability" stipend essentially just to keep their lights.
When they first came out they were revolutionary. But they don’t even have a speedometer, let alone a HUD. It’s embarrassing. They’re being so cheap.
If Musk were aware that Tesla was going to lose this much ground due to factors beyond his own mismanagement, including the threat of Chinese imports and a widespread shift away from EVs due to a right-populist sentiment swing that was already under way, then maybe his goose-stepping and Trump-humping act was an attempt to sync up with a trend that he saw as inevitable.
That's about the most charitable spin I can put on it. Either way, Tesla now has to pitch electric cars to right-wing climate-change deniers, which is not a great strategy to adopt voluntarily or otherwise.
Isn’t it simpler to assume that he honestly holds the views he says he holds?
It doesn't mean I believe he's a hapless victim of larger trends. Just that I consider it possible.
When I was growing up, that was absolutely science fucking fiction. You’re telling me I get in this car and touch a piece of glass and then it drives itself? Incredible. Maybe the future really could get here fast.
I think that’s a little more charitable. I have a Tesla, won’t buy another one because Elon sucks, wouldn’t touch the stock, I think he’s generally turned in to a con artist, &c.
> Either way, Tesla now has to pitch electric cars to right-wing climate-change deniers, which is not a great strategy to adopt voluntarily or otherwise.
What’s funny to me is that I legitimately think that the day-to-day experience owning an EV is significantly better than the day-to-day experience owning a gas car. They could have slowly ignited or not emphasized the environment and just focused on it as future tech and it may well work. Over the years owning one I’ve had many a curious person drive by the Supercharger in their car, often times a truck too, and ask about the ownership experience.
EVs by association got this hippie-dippie connotation but that’s because the Prius looks like it does, but the Model 3 is quite nice and I think the perception could be overcome by just making damn cool cars.
I've heard there are rumours there are least three or four countries outside the US. In several of them, EVs are selling like like hotcakes, or at least not with the current American militant hostility to the very concept.
I suspect they spent too long riding the horse they got here on though. Making an EV appealing to American premium buyers was a marketing coup. Selling it as a software-style "we'll continue iterating with OTA updates" was an interesting alternative to the model-year redesign when you're targeting an early-adopter audience used to regular software refreshes.
But now these things are a liability. Your product matrix is full of America-centric designs with iffy product-market fits in other markets (will a Model S or Cybertruck literally fit in some side streets of Europe or Asia?) You've failed to make a recognizable, exciting redesign of an existing model, so what you do have looks dated. You never really developed a reputation for quality or reliability. These are product problems that have nothing to do with politics. You could have addressed them and been a viable player elsewhere, even as the US continues to eat itself alive. (Of course, that might have involved not intentionally rubbing your brand all over a highly polarizing and toxic political scenario)
I was excited about Tesla back when they were a novelty. I can recall going to the mall with the Microsoft Store (remember those? They sold "bloatfree" PCs because it used to be the OEM who loaded them full of crapware instead of MS itself) to buy a Windows 8 tablet, and then looking across the aisle to see a Model S on display at the Tesla "not really a dealership" stall.
I bought like $2000 in shares back then, figuring one day, jokingly, they'd be worth enough to exchange for a new Tesla. It looks like I could probably get one now. But these days, I just want a BYD; they seem to be actually building a coherent product line and long-term vision.
Part of the trouble here is that was always the case. The best selling "car" in the US is the Ford F-series truck. Followed by the Chevy truck, two Japanese SUVs, the Stellantis truck, the GMC rebadge of the Chevy truck, a Chevy SUV and then the Tesla Model Y.
To get anywhere they were always going to have to appeal to the people who buy trucks.
And when everything is polarized and your product is tribe-coded, how do you do that?
I suspect the error here was buying Twitter and then aligning with the party expected to take power instead of buying Twitter and then using it to shift things in the direction of depolarization.
It also doesn't help that the Cybertruck looks weird and costs too much. I mean you can blame attitudes as you like but then there's the fact that the F-150 starts at ~$40k and the Cybertruck starts at ~$80k. They need the battery prices to come down more before people are going to buy something that needs as much battery as a truck.
CyberTruck battery is around 130kWh, so that's just $13k for the more pricey NMC chemistry. This is what makes the Ford fumble with the electric F-150 so comical.
Out of curiosity, I wanted to see if there are any Chinese brands selling batteries of this capacity. And there are plenty. You can buy a 200kWh, with a home delivery today. https://lithiumbattery.en.made-in-china.com/product/kEDRHjlV... Sure, it'll likely explode if you put it in a car. But it's only a matter of time before some enterprising Chinese company makes a compelling truck.
US automakers are sooooo screwed.
When the Cybertruck was released in 2023 it was $139, making it more like $18k. And that's just the battery, you still need to make the rest of the truck and pay all your other overhead before you get to the MSRP.
The problem is you can't sell a boring $40k truck for $60k, so instead they tried to make an "interesting" truck for $80k, but nobody wants that either. They should've just waited until they could make a boring electric truck for $40k.
> US automakers are sooooo screwed.
Ten years ago packs were $345/kWh and then electric cars have to be premium products. For under $100 they don't and then all it's going to take is for one company to start selling an electric car in the US that costs less than the equivalent gasoline car.
They'll figure it out when the demand shifts. It doesn't take that long to reconfigure factories, they do it every time they come out with a new model anyway.
But the rest of the car is not actually that pricey. Motors and power electrics are now reasonably priced, especially if you're making an actual working truck that doesn't need to do 60 mph in 3 seconds. The frame and body are cheap. So a decent $40k truck is definitely possible now.
> They'll figure it out when the demand shifts. It doesn't take that long to reconfigure factories, they do it every time they come out with a new model anyway.
Nah. I figure that the US automakers instead decided to wall off the competition for as long as possible to wring out every last drop of profit. And then just dump the rotting husks (maybe to Chinese buyers). Perhaps with a bailout or five from the government.
Tesla is an ugly car. And they didn't had a new model since at least 10 years.
After successfully teaching China how to build EVs and embracing fascism, I thought they moved on to AI/robotaxi/robots/(insert your preferred fantasy here)?
Are there any other explanations that can be steelmanned, just for the sake of an even-handed discussion? "We're going to build humanoid robots" just doesn't seem like enough. Neither does "We're going to build robotaxis", considering that other companies like Waymo are already well ahead of Tesla in that sector.
So the optimistic valuation is based on: Global ride share killer + Large car manufacturer + power infrastructure + Robotics.
Somehow the valuation is as though TSLA will succeeded early enough to entrench itself; if robotaxi wide rollout happens in the next six months, i would be happy to say TSLA is worth more than its current valuation. If it cant then at best 30% of current valuation.
No worries, in 6 months Elon will promise something else and we'll be asking the same question again