> (...)
> Tesla is just another car company making just another car.
Definitely false. Q2 revenue was 25% of Nissan's (which crossed my radar recently due to layoffs). That may be small, for some definition of small, but it's definitely not "small, unimportant". I won't comment on poorly run -- a qualitative assessment that does not lead to a definitive conclusion. I'd challenge with a comparison to a well run startup in the automotive space, but there is none to compare it with.
As for another car company making just another car, I don't understand how can you even write those words together. A Tesla may be a good car, a poor car, depending on who you ask. What it is definitely not is your average Volkswagen.
If I worked for a car company, I'd probably care, but I work for a tech company, so I don't.
> A Tesla may be a good car, a poor car, depending on who you ask. What it is definitely not is your average Volkswagen.
Okay, sure, it's twice that car a Volkswagen is, I trust you. But it's still a car.
Again, I think there is a significant faction of Tesla fans that don't see Tesla as a car company, and instead see it more like SpaceX. I don't.
I do, and I'd like to explain why. This is not about cars. The single most important challenge our generation faces is dealing with climate change. We absolutely need to curb CO2 emissions. We don't need to limit CO2 emissions, we need to cut them significantly.
There are two avenues for this goal. Either we cut energy consumption, significantly, or we switch energy sources away from fossil fuels.
I believe cutting energy consumption is impossible. It goes against a five thousand year trend of per-capita energy consumption growth, amplified by population growth. If you step back from the ecologist message a bit and look at the overarching trend, the picture is clear: Cutting global energy consumption is a no-go.
The other path is switching energy sources. We're advancing on that front. However, for renewable sources to have the needed impact, they must be applicable to transportation. Here, in this specific point, Tesla was and is key. It has already succeeded. The BMW CEO was fired because of lack of focus on EVs. It's a stark change from pre-Tesla, and it is a market change created by Tesla. Every automaker will go the EV route, and I'm completely convinced that, absent Tesla, they would sit on their hands for at least another decade.
The switch to EVs has more to do with Obama than Tesla. He pushed through many of the incentives that made Tesla possible.
I don't follow the logic. The impact of a jet flying back and forth pales in comparison to the impact of switching vehicles away from fossils. You're comparing the incomparable. Many orders of magnitude of difference separate the two.
There are always going to be critics who parrot idiotic points which you're having to refute, even among the "tech literate".
Would the car industry be as far along as it is today in EVs without Tesla? hard to say, I would say probably not. Toyota has been actively shunning EVs (hybrids don't count) and now still insisting on most of its energy into hydrogen fuel cells and BMW just kicked out its CEO for, among other things, stalling on EV development for so long.
Do I prefer being in a world where we have a Tesla? hell yes.
I know you don't mean to come off that way, but even your defense of Elon and such in this thread comes off as a combination of "ends justify the means" and sheer sycophantry.
Nobody likes that. It's not as bad as some, mind you. Reading Teslarati makes me feel like these people need a cult deprogrammer, stat.
Criticize Tesla for worker security conditions and hiring practices all you want. It is deserved and should be corrected. The jump from criticism to rooting for failure is the step I don't understand (1). I also do not understand the annoyance caused by praising the fact that Tesla did push the automotive market towards EVs.
(1) I have an explanation, but it's almost insulting to critics: Any kind of venture, more so any kind of _risky_ venture, will attract doomsayers. Once held, personal beliefs are hard to change, so people root for validation of their first evaluation. I'd love to see Tesla criticism justified differently, but that's how I read most hard line critics.
If you really really believe this, you need to take a long hard look at yourself and your comments again.
You literally defended him, for example:
"Every CEO is a salesman. Anyone who believes every word of a salesman is a fool. I'd not paint it as Trump-style, bona fide lying. It's just inflating promises, or being overly optimistic. Par for the course."
As for the rest:
Numerous people have tried to help you understand in this thread, and your response has not really been to try to understand their perspective, but instead tell them why they are wrong, and how it must be everyone else.
If you really want to understand, people have tried to help as best they can.
Maybe, rather than immediately react, take a while and process it?
Today I think the limp wristed response to the $420 fraud is a black stain on the justice system.
I'd still prefer Tesla succeed of course, and there's an undeniable impact it's had. But any warm and fuzzy feeling I once had is very much over.
Such a religion now.
And a bit less than 10% of Volkswagen or Toyota's.
With about 25% of their individual market caps.
If you are referring to the disconnect between revenue and market cap, it may point to a valuation error by the market. Or not. The market is clearly incorporating expected growth into the current value. Is the valuation correct? I have no idea. I'd not infer too much from this fact alone, though.
Here are some car startups. Rivian has received the most investment of the three from companies like Amazon and Ford.
Rivian: https://products.rivian.com/
Sono Motors: https://sonomotors.com/
Lightyear: https://lightyear.one/
Just like Nuclear can get away with being "better than coal" but in the face of plummeting wind, solar and storage costs its drawbacks get looked at with new eyes.
Or in some parallel dimension where deiselgate led to trillions being wasted on hydrogen fuel celled vehicles which never replaced ICE.
Besides, I was replying to a post that said Tesla was unimportant. Well, I personally doubt it, but yeah maybe what VW did -braking the law and harming the health of millions- was even more important.
Tesla didn't have any ground-breaking research on battery chemistry, or motor efficiency; they are among the first to packaged everything together after the underlying technology became mature enough, and managed to suck the air away from the other early competitors. If Tesla never existed, the car companies would still invest in electric vehicles.
Edit: I've just discovered that the founding of Tesla itself was inspired by the General Motors EV1 which was in production from 1996[1] and recalled in 2003.
This effect can be observed often in the case of low investment advances like mathematical breakthroughs, inventions that are limited to a bunch of papers, gadgets or Uber for X type, X as a service startups etc. But, it is evidently not true for hard problems, advances that require huge investments, bear enormous risks and uncertain payoff.
The people who go for the relatively low hanging fruits know this very well, evident in their rush to the market, patent or to publish in academic journals.
In contrast, the hard problems, like landing a man on the moon, measuring the higgs boson, retro propulsive landing of orbital rockets or, case in point, the development of long range BEVs would not have happened if someone would have had the ability and courage to go all in at enormous cost and risk. Progress is not automatic! It may appear though but in reality people are sometimes willing to pay enormous prices for lofty goals. Or they don't and progress simply does not happen.
In fact, these tasks are so hard, that none of the achievements mentioned above have been repeated so far, despite arguably ample time for copy cats. No one but NASA went to the moon, no second LHC was built, only SpaceX has landed orbital boosters and the 2012 Model S still has more range than any non Tesla BEV. Another evidence is that there are problems that we know are arguably solvable and desirable, yet we still haven't solved them, e.g. putting a man or women on Mars, switching to 100% renewable energies, fusion, making certain diseases extinct etc.
Which impact Tesla has had, if any, is impossible to measure. It's not even entirely clear that the impact was positive.
(Imagine that a large car company or well funded startup was contemplating a massive investment in BEVs to try and get a first mover advantage, but Tesla got there first, so they decided to invest in hybrids or a new range of SUVs instead. In this word, "but for" Tesla, BEVs might be even more widely adopted. Of course, we have no reason to think that's true, but then, we have no reason to think that, "but for" Tesla, nobody would have done anything with EVs for another 10 years either, and that doesn't stop people from wildly speculating...)
My feeling is that the overwhelming majority of Tesla critics do not hate Tesla, and do not want Tesla to fail. Rather, they see Tesla as a small, unimportant, poorly run company that gets far more press (positive and negative) than it deserves, and who respond by needling Tesla super-fans. The super fans, in turn, react by treating this as shocking, but it's not really. Tesla critics are treating Tesla like a normal company, and most companies are not particularly well-liked. Nobody cares if Amalgamated Widgets rises and falls except it's investors and competitors.
> Do they also want SpaceX to fail?
No. But also, Tesla critics, I believe, view SpaceX as a VERY different company. Tesla is just another car company making just another car. SpaceX is something else entirely.
If your mental model is "Tesla is like SpaceX", this probably feels weird to you, and the way Tesla gets covered in the press - as if it was merely a car company! - must be maddening. If your mental model is "Tesla is like Saab", this seems pretty obvious.
> Most tech giants of recent times have done things I would consider to have made the world a much worse place.
I would never dream of calling Tesla a "tech giant". It's a car company, it's not making very good cars, it's not making them very well, it's not making very many of them, and it's not making a lot of money off them. I am incredibly tired of hearing about Tesla. Even if it wins, the Tesla end-game is to be another big successful car company, and I don't care about big successful car companies.