I think they are saying the financials aren't working. The cars are sitting on the lot and not selling.

Toyota is out here running ads "you should probably skip our electrics and buy a hybrid" so I'm not shocked they're having trouble selling.

Good EVs sell.

Cough. Tesla. Cough.

61% of EVs in the US are Teslas but everyone here hates Elon so head in the sand.

Legacy auto EVs are garbage. They ignored Tesla for almost 15 years, and then once Tesla was Goliath, surprise pikachu. The time to build battery factories was when Tesla was building battery factories circa 2014-2015. The fact that Tesla predicted selling 500k EVs a year was laughed at, and now they are approaching 2.3M/year total capacity of EVs alone (while still building 40GWh/year of stationary storage).

Good luck.

https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_attachments/g...

I rented a Model Y for a weekend, now that is garbage.

I went to a showroom I looked at Teslas. I could not find a single car with even panels gaps. The wipers don't work. The car doesn't have USS anymore and Tesla vision sucks. I could go on and on and on. I seriously considered one but just too many shortcomings.

For the price of Model Y, I can buy a Lexus ES300h(car is QC and build perfection) and drive that car for the next 15 years with oil changes once a year.

> I could not find a single car with even panels gaps.

I keep hearing this from people, especially my friends who work for other manufacturers. I personally couldn't care less.

Hell, if they sold it pre-scratched and pre-dented It'd be even better, would same me the paranoia of something happening to it.

I’m going to blow your mind right now. They sell pre-dented and pre-scratched cars! Have you ever heard of the used car market? And the prices reflect that!

Why would anyone pay new car prices for a damaged car? It has lower resale value.

Except there's massive difference between a car with an imperfect appearance, and once that's been driven before and e.g. no longer covered by warranty.

> Why would anyone pay new car prices for a damaged car? A) I didn't say it had to be the same price. Sell the car with a bumper blemish and give people a discount to account for the fact that you didn't have to reject parts.

B) People might buy it for the same reason that others gent bent out of shape about panel gaps; personal differences in what they value.

Why does everyone suddenly care about panel gaps?

It feels like the quip everyone uses without any meaningful value.

If they don't put the car together well for the parts you see, how well did they put it together for the parts you don't see?

Do panel gaps really matter? Probably not, but if I'm paying Tesla prices, maybe?

My two vehicles are 20 and 24 years old. Neither have panel gaps. If they were able to do that decades ago, why not now?

> Why does everyone suddenly care about panel gaps?

There's absolutely nothing sudden about people caring about panel gaps on new vehicles.

Cockeyed panel gaps are a tell-tale of a used/bodged vehicle, this has been the case my entire life. It's the last thing you want to see on what's supposedly a new vehicle, and it sticks out like a sore thumb.

People note frictions.

Because normally they are a given

It just illustrates what priorities Tesla sets. They are expensive cars yet their quality is low both in and outside. For example the interior lining of the doors is easily damaged, just moving a cardboard box against it rips it. This doesn't happen in my 11 year old BMW and it isn't even a top of the line model, just a bog standard 116d.

Or when talking about BMW, nobody know but they have some 3-layered paint that is much harder to scratch than typical paint of say VW or french cars. People like to bash premium cars but its exactly getting as much as you pay for

Your comment is now shadow banned. It is not visible on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38121199 when I am logged in, but visible when browsing in private.

Too late to edit. It was a glitch.

Same. The Model Y was completely uninspiring. I liked my old Chevy Bolt better.

It didn't help that the experience of renting from Hertz was terrible, but renting the Y seemed to confirm every terrible Tesla rumor and then some. It didn't drive well, the range was surprisingly bad(abused battery maybe?), the controls were confusing and distracting, and hell, even the acoustics of the interior were terrible(glass roof is dumb).

Everything I've seen on Tesla's controls make me want to run away. Unfortunately, most other auto manufacturers are copying many of these bad ideas because they're trying to cargo cult tesla's success so I probably in for a bad time when I need a new car regardless.

> I rented a Model Y for a weekend, now that is garbage

And yet it takes the #4 spot for most vehicle sales in 2023 in the US, and likely the #1 spot globally.

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/g43553191/bestselling-cars...

Tesla just steeply discounted the hell out of their cars. The minimum discount I can recall was $10k. Several cars were dropped by over $30k. They basically just fucked the resale value of all their existing customers. This was done out of desperation. EV demand fell off a cliff after the pandemic.

Good! This increases the available pool of buyers while putting more distress on legacy auto. Tesla can afford the margin compression. If they are less profitable, that’s fine, replacing combustion units is most important to pull forward the combustion supply chain death spiral.

> (yes, yes, I agree Elon is a monster, but he has also been effective)

How is the man that has actually made a huge difference in battery-powered cars and actually made them seem like a viable alternative to gas a 'monster'. And yet the dozens of environmentalist activists who have done nothing but make a fuss and complain seen as the good guys. This sort of praise of mediocrity and ineffectiveness is the root cause of so many issues today.

Musk has been extremely effective. Maybe that means there is something about his thinking and methods of action that we should seek to replicate instead of criticize.

Elon has many issues but a characterizing him as a “monster”? Sounds like an affirmation of someone whose heart isn’t really in what they are saying but they have to to toe the party line.

He’s a sorta autistic dude who sometimes talks to the public in a k-hole instead of going through a spokesperson like his peers.

As far as the cars go, I think most Americans can see that spending an extra $10k on an EV Chevy isn’t gonna keep the Saudis from draining Ghawar Field. I wonder how cheap BYD and VinFast can get their imports.

Americans can’t really point to other country’s emissions as an excuse though. They have by far the largest emissions per capita. And car ownership (where families frequently own multiple cars!) is a non-trivial portion of that. Individuals are admittedly not the best placed to fix this.

I've heard him described as "fascist curious".

It’s shorthand for “low empathy power hungry industrialist who is willing to destroy anyone who sleights him in the most minimal of ways, while dishing out abuse liberally to anyone who crosses his path” but that’s a mouthful. The dynamics are public in books about him, as well as Grimes tweeting at his recent biographer “Tell Elon I want to see my kid.” Partners, workers, anyone really who Elon feels he has power over gets the brunt of his dysfunctional emotional configuration.

https://www.google.com/search?q=elon+abussive

https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/10/04/making-sense-of-grime...

> Indeed, reports and Grimes’ since-deleted social media posts indicate that the situation has become rather ugly, with allegations that Musk is being a controlling bully. In posts last month on Musk’s X platform, Grimes alleged that he wasn’t allowing her to see one of their children and threatened to take him to court unless he let her see her son or responded to her lawyer. She said the situation was “utterly ripping my family apart.”

I’ll ask one of the folks tracking Elon facts publicly to aggregate all of the citations on the topic, so the next time I say “monster” a simple URL citation will do.

From what people that work at Tesla have told me, Elon is more of a chaos agent than someone actually solving problems.

chaos is what you need to cause a disruption. that's how big ideas come, and there's no one better than Elon at turning them into reality.

I love mine, but both mine and my wife's are probably $15k pricier than an equivalent ICE option. We'll likely not break even on gas savings during the period of our ownership. People like she and I, and I suspect you, are already bought in. Others however, especially those who aren't really swayed by the saved emissions, have to do the cost/benefit analysis for themselves.

Yeah, if there hadn't been unlimited supercharging it wouldn't have made as much sense, but I figure I'd have used 500gal a year (15km/30mpg). That's about $2500/yr so pay off time is about 6-8 years. If you're paying 20c/kWh then it's well over 10 years.

However, the other experience I've seen is the near lack of required paid maintenance. That could easily come out to another $10k over 8-10yr, which would shorten the payoff. Of course that would hurt the dealers for the major Autos, and drive up their pricing.

Yes, the maintenance is cheaper, but some automakers include maintenance for a period of time (I know the Toyotas I've owned included 2 years 24000 miles). I will say that $10k over 10 years seems expensive, though maintenance does tend to rise in time. Still, I'm guessing the cost is closer to $5k (assuming non-luxury brands)

I really liked my EV, but I had subsidized charging at work. We only have one ICE car now. Every so often I consider upgrading to an EV or hybrid, but why? I'd be spending quite a lot to save very little. Now, I'll admit, getting gas at someplace like Costco can be a pain, but I just can't justify an EV.

Also, my wife hated the EV. Sure, it was a Bolt so it wasn't that comfy, but she hated having to think about charging. She's fine dealing with gas. That right there kills it for us.

You’re only “saving” with an ICE because CO2 is not appropriately priced. And there are other reasons to ditch petrol, like, what about our children future? Limiting the discussion to price is a limited way of thinking.

No thanks. Those are problems for the world's rich to worry about. I have a budget and dependents to take care of. I'm not taking away from my dependents to change the time the earth becomes unlivable by 15 seconds.

It’s wild to me that people with kids don’t care about how the planet will be for their children and grandchildren. I don’t even have kids of my own and I’m willing to alter my lifestyle to give future generations a better shot at having the same access to resources I have.

I have five kids and I am not in the slightest worried about the planet. It will be here and we will adapt if needed. I am much more worried about the elites stamping out our God given freedom and subjugating us to be told what to do by "experts" because we are just ignorant and don't know what's best for ourselves. No thank you.

Money is a huge motivator. People will absolutely change their behavior to save money. It's also largely politically agnostic. Unless you're very wealthy, money impacts your life no matter how you feel about climate change or the environment.

You're correct, but at least in the US, few share that concern when there isn't financial incentive.

My wife shares similar environmental concerns with me, so I haven't had that issue, but I realize others don't have those same values. Of course, we also bought an EV that fits the style of car she's always had (small SUV - we got her an ID.4)

As for the fueling up, there's a huge gulf between those who own a home and those who don't in terms of EV experience - when you have a charger in your garage, you wake up every day with a "full tank".

If you drive 30k miles a year, yes. I drive 4k miles a year with a car that I bought second-hand 10 years ago for $8,000. EVs are not cheaper for that use case yet.