Generally when people are down on Tesla or Elon Musk, it's because they want them to succeed at displacing internal combustion engines.

They're not rooting for internal combustion engines, they're rooting for electric cars and annoyed when the company (or Musk) flounders from self-inflicted damage. At least, that seems like most of the criticism here. No one is going to respond well to an advocate of a technology they want to succeed saying and doing stuff that actively harms the cause (prime examples: George Hotz with autonomous vehicles, RMS with basically everything that RMS has ever advocated, or Julian Assange allowing Wikileaks to become a tool of corrupt governments rather than a force against them).

It's great to give credit where credit is due, but even more important to hold people and companies accountable when they screw up, especially people and companies that you want to succeed.

This is exactly right. I'm bearish on Tesla, and frequently criticise it.

But I only care because I was an unashamed fanboy earlier in life. Musk kept flipping the coin to bet the company, and succeeded against all odds. It was riveting to watch.

But once Tesla got large... nothing changed. He's still flipping. Model 3? Flip. Automated factory? Flip. Autonomous driving? Flip. 420? Flip. Solar City? Flip. Tesla is a single misstep away from bankruptcy, and it need not be.

I no longer see him as someone undeterred by the odds to achieve something great, but more like a narcissistic gambler. He's not taking risks to achieve a goal, the risks are the goal. His Twitter antics don't help.

The only thing that makes it ok is that competition is legitimately catching up now. Maybe not in the smart car arena, but we are seeing real electrified competition.

I don't give a fuck if people buy cars with a cute UI or not. I do care that we move to electrification. If Tesla dies, the latter will happen at a largely uninterrupted schedule with the state of the industry in 2019. I love the idea of legislation that moves that along faster. I'd happily take a tax hike to make it happen.

Tesla fans love to hate on the "shorts" as if the only possible motivation to criticize Tesla is profit based. To that strawman I've blatantly constructed I hypocritically reply: stop arguing against strawmen.

I agree with a lot of what you've said here but I don't think anyone is legitimately catching up. There are all kinds of announcements but no one else really building EVs in the US in volume: https://insideevs.com/news/343998/monthly-plug-in-ev-sales-s...

We are getting close though but need Tesla to keep the pressure on for a couple more years.

It's going to take time for the industry to ramp up volumes, but my sense is the commitment is there now. Many EU countries are banning new ICEs in just 11 years; that's not a lot of time to make a full transition. If Tesla went bankrupt tomorrow, I don't think the overall ramp would slow down much, and it'll ultimately end with production far higher than what Tesla alone can achieve.

If Tesla (and Nissan) never existed, this entire timeline may have been offset by 5-10 years. I believe they deserve credit for lighting the fire, but by now it's self sustaining.

The big ones are doing things at a scale Tesla can only dream of. It takes a lot of time to change production lines and the big ones don’t have much incentives to switch off ICE. The governments need to help us here.

Ford sold one million F-150s last year. A F-150 every 29 seconds. That’s only one model.

Without going off on a tangent, large companies aren’t able to innovate like smaller companies can. They prefer to buy or partner with smaller company to build someone, Mazda developed the old Ford Ranger. Ford just invested $500m in Rivian.

Exactly. Making Tesla criticism about criticizing alternative energy is a false equivocation.

There are strong arguments that Tesla is being ran very poorly by Musk (solar city acq, VW cash denied, SEC fines, etc.) despite the company being one of the champions for electric vehicles.

I fail to see what Tesla can do to be a more solid company, care to give hints ?

Short list...

1) Stop making ridiculous promises about self-driving capabilities.

2) Stop giving out timelines that everyone knows aren't going to be hit for every single model.

3) Get production quality under control. Seriously, a stupid percentage of Model 3s are getting handed to customers with defects that would keep them from even making it out of the factory at any other OEM.

4) Get aftermarket logistics figured out so people aren't waiting months for their cars to get repaired.

5) Stop flip-flopping on sales models. Is Tesla selling via brick and mortar stores or not? Is it using low pressure guidance-oriented sales or calling up customers with pre-orders trying to pressure them into upgrading to a more expensive configuration? Is their pricing fixed or going to drop another $1,000 next month?

6) Stop treating employees like churnable garbage. I work in the auto industry and the number of ex-Tesla employees floating around who got burned out or sick of political bullshit in record time is astounding in comparison to every other OEM.

7) Stop treating driver safety as a suggestion. I mean that in the broad sense, not in the mechanical engineering sense. Ex. autopilot should never have been released in any capacity that allowed drivers to take a nap or read a book while the car happily plowed into a semi-truck or median.

I’ve been most bothered by the exaggerated claims and projected deadlines for AP functionality and FSD. But not being able to raise money through presales, as well as banking on the premium image that leading in autonomy confers, would make Tesla even less solid of a company, at least financially.

Tesla basically creating a market for EAV is very cool, and no matter what, I think Musk deserves a place in the history books for it.

Give up on self driving cars for one thing.

No need to give up. Just acknowledge that is a hard problem whose success date is notably indeterminate. Then stubbornly refuse to talk about future features and only talk about one's already shipping today. If the future is going to arrive so soon, why bother to break in advance? Let everyone be amazed when it does arrive.

I love the autopilot feature, but the cars are still great without it. Tesla can be very successful and sell a lot of cars without any more self driving features.

I think that's one of the main problems I have toward Musk. He started with a strong 'hard science' stance on problems and all of a sudden he became just another salesman. If he just stated where they were .. I'd be less annoyed. But maybe it doesn't mesh well with PR

EVs are a false peak. So long as everyone is driving around in their own personal automobile, we're doing nothing to address autocentic development, with all it's accompanying sprawl, concrete, ashphalt, steel, and general hi-consumption culture that goes with it.

We need an entrepreneur to do with the city what Elon did with the car. How on earth you would fund something of that scale, I’m not sure. And many country’s attempts at “cities of the future” have ended up as ghost towns. I’d love to see someone develop a new walkable, eco-friendly city from scratch somewhere in the U.S., but all odds are against that kind of thing.

I just don't get the obsession of some people with "walkable cities". What is reasonable walking time at -20 during snowstorm or at +30 at blazing sun? Multiply that with reasonable pedestrian speed and get outer diameter of the mystic "walkable city". The way I would define reasonable values that would be roughly 2-3km. That's a village, not even a town.

Within a 3 km radius you can access 28 square kilometres. Central Paris, a classic walkable city, has a density of 6,500 residents/square kilometre. That's more like a medium sized city you can have access to within 3km if you build for people instead of cars.

Sadly it's far from clear is shared autonomous taxis are going to be any better for sprawl, concrete, asphalt, steel, and general high consumption.

That!

Tesla is one way to reduce carbon emissions from automobiles. It is not the only way. There is also:

* Battery-electric vehicles manufactured by other companies

* Plugin hybrid-electric vehicles manufactured by other companies

* Reducing automobile usage in general

* Developing energy-efficient processes to synthesize carbon-neutral liquid fuels using carbon-neutral energy sources

* Developing new and more efficient carbon-neutral energy sources and using them to synthesize carbon-neutral liquid fuels

* Developing the technology to trap or sequester carbon emissions

* Some combination of the above

Tesla is actually working against the "reduce" in the short term. Facebook groups of Tesla owners frequently include words along the lines of: I like this car so much that I drive much more than I used to. Oops.

Jevon's paradox, somewhat.

I rarely see it broken out, but in various markets (not just the USA) Tesla is making money on selling carbon credits from other car companies that aren't meeting the carbon goals. I've seen mention of $100M CARB credits in 2014, mentions of Fiat Chrysler avoiding $billions in fines by paying Tesla for their credits. The Tesla earnings call mentioned the income, but not the broken out line item totals.

So while it not be completely fair, at least Tesla is getting substantial financial contributions from the carbon producing ICE competitors.

Yuh, electricity production totally doesn't overlap with the subsidies that petroleum drilling gets, not one little bit, not at all.

Of course moving to electric vehicles is a necessary step towards getting off of the petrocarbons, but it isn't sufficient, production of electricity also has to move off of them.

You’re being disingenuous. You want to argue drilling subsidies for fracking cheap natgas for power generation? I won’t argue against that. But it’s all going renewables on economics alone (renewables and batteries are already cheaper than natural gas and coal), just not fast enough. We need to get off of combustion vehicles and power generation as soon as possible, full stop.

I'm being sarcastic, not disingenuous.

The "just not fast enough" happens to be an important factor.

We are definitely living in different universes. ICEs do not get any subsidies, quite the opposite: in many countries, e.g. the whole EU gas is so heavily taxed that more than half of the retail price is tax.

Also, Tesla is an easy target to make fun of, because of its narcistic, arrogant CEO that seems to think that he can outsmart everyone, when in fact his business is a total mess.

Of course ICEs get subsidies. The subsidy is in the form of a carbon tax that we do not collect, even though we should. Every ICE produces emissions which will soon make most of our planet uninhabitable. There should be a carbon tax, so that we can offset this destruction: by building nuclear plants, or figuring out how to re-capture the carbon emitted into the atmosphere.

And yet we do not collect that tax, hence heavily subsidizing ICEs. This is credited by our children and grandchildren, who will end up with a massively changed (for the worse) planet.

You have a point about the negative externalities, but insisting on using the word "subsidy" for that concept is just going to confuse people. That isn't the accepted meaning of "subsidy", in casual conversation at least.

Hmm — how else would you call it? As I understand it, future generations are subsidizing the price of our fossil fuels and internal combustion engines, making ICEs artificially cheap by not considering their environmental impact.

Subsidies do not have to be in the form of cash: many come in the form of tax breaks and I would consider this to be one such case.

It is just confusing to use the same word to suggest explicit assistance (cash, tax breaks, etc) and "failure to penalize". I guess mathematically they both represent a reduction in cost when compared to an alternative scenario (no subsidy and some sort of tax/fee for the externality) but they are different mechanisms and so it makes sense for them to have different words to describe them if you want to communicate clearly.

It gets far worse when you consider the total cost of wars to protect the flow of oil.

There were still wars before oil was a thing.

EVs don't pay carbon taxes either (which they should).

You’re arguing for carbon taxes on electrical generation. Entirely agree. This would push coal and natural gas out of the electrical grid generation mix even faster, making EVs even cleaner.

The oil industry, at least in the US, receives huge tax breaks. This indirectly subsidized the ICEs that burn them.

Gas is about $3/gallon in the US. Ford is moving towards only making SUVs, pickup trucks, and the Mustang. Different countries, not different universes.

I like that Musk is narcissistic and arrogant in public. He doesn’t hide it like the execs at every automaker who was part of Dieselgate. Be an asshole, by all means, just deliver faster. (Credit to BYD and their electric bus fleet efforts, and China’s renewables push in general; I would be remiss if I made it sound like Musk alone was working towards these goals).

Do you also love it when Musk calls people pedos? What about when he lies about taking the company private on Twitter? This is the narcissism you enjoy?

I don’t love it, but I don’t care about it either. It’s noise. I’ve seen far better people take far worse actions. No one’s perfect. Stress is unpleasant and will cause you to lash out.

I do love someone who doesn’t cultivate an image. I think this is 100% who Musk has become, for better and worse, and I respect someone who is genuine about who they are, warts and all.