Elon has almost no credibility left for what he says.

It's basically just a website at the moment with bunch of 3D renders which you too could get done from a web shop.

Tesla has nothing new to offer and competition is catching up, EV adoption slowing down and such.

If I had, I would gradually drop Tesla stock because it's going to go downhill if not rock bottom from here.

> It's basically just a website at the moment with bunch of 3D renders which you too could get done from a web shop.

They had 2 dozen vehicles with no steering wheels taking attendees around the venue. The bar was staffed by Optimus robots. “Basically a website”?

> They had 2 dozen vehicles with no steering wheels taking attendees around the venue.

To quote a participant[0]:

> After over 10 years of Full Self-Driving development, @Tesla is limited to a 20-30 acre geofenced 5mph ride on a preprogrammed, premapped and heavily rehearsed route with no traffic and no pedestrians.

[0] https://x.com/realdanodowd/status/1844605093368512799

There are countless videos on youtube of people recording their experience with FSD's open beta. It is probably 90% of the way there, if not more. Anyone who thinks Tesla won't get there first is peak delusional. Hate on Elon as much as you want, but Tesla are top-tier engineering.

Real funny seeing a bunch of web devs on HN talk shit about Tesla's engineers too lmao

Even if you'd be right about the 90%, I highly doubt they'll be first.

How long did it take to get to that 90% ? AFAIK they first mentioned FSD ~2016(Self-driving itself even earlier).

As the last 20% of work are often 80% of the effort we can estimate that those remaining 10 % take ~ 40% of the time. They've been at it for ~8 years , which gives an expected release of ~ 2029.

We'll see what Waymo and other competition has until then.

That 90% is about as good as a teenager taking his first practice drive with a parent (meaning an extreme road hazard).

> about as good as a teenager

a suicidal teenager

There are 90% and then there are 90% more.

A.K.A the Rule of Credibility: "The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety%E2%80%93ninety_rule

Followed by Hofstadter's law: "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter%27s_law

> Real funny seeing a bunch of web devs on HN talk shit about Tesla's engineers too lmao

It's not "talk shit about Tesla's engineers", it's just a very hard problem to solve. It's easy to get it "most of the time" but extremely difficult to finish it. It's obvious it will take decades, not years to get us there. Whereas Musk insists he will solve it "this year", every year from 2014.

I feel like there’s some software adage about the last 10% being the hardest. It certainly holds true from my experience - even if they are 90% of the way there, it’s not a linear path to 100%.

90% done, 90% left to go.

so the 90% is really meaningless in that case.. it's what we judge to be 90% which is erroneous.

I live in Los Angeles, and Tesla will not get here first because Waymo has already arrived.

I saw pedestrians walking in front of the cars in the live stream. The rest is true though. It reminded me of taking the classic car ride around an amusement park where the cars all follow each other on a track.

Tesla at a forward P/E of 80 is massively overvalued as a car company. You can get Mercedes or BMW at a P/E of 6, with a 9% yield. Sure, the EV market is still growing, but Tesla is not the only player. All brands now have EVs, there are both cheaper and more luxurious Chinese EVs, that's some massive competition.

The only reasons Tesla could be valued differently are FSD and Robotics, which Musk and Tesla-friendly analysts are heavily pushing. Since Musk has made massive loans against his Tesla stake you can expect that he will keep highlighting those narratives as well. A revaluation of the stock to sane levels would certainly cause him some financial difficulties.

Investors with security clearances know the full force of the U.S. government backs him (or at least did under Trump) https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiLeaks/comments/1fy10k1/comment/...

Anyone with eyes can see him cozying up to public funding/Uncle Sam

debatable given how much he's been cozying up to the Russians and Saudis

betcha in 10 years time we'll learn about all of the ITAR violations and other shady behavior

Young money comes from old money, yes

That's typical smoke screening when your'e working with the CIA as the link implies

Don't have to wait 10 years if you read the WikiLeaks above.

Wait is the “Wikileaks” here the Reddit post or is the “Wikileaks” the couple of links to public news sites?

Appears there is some miscommunication in the MAGA land https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/10/24267468/trump-were-goin...

>The only reasons Tesla could be valued differently are FSD and Robotics

Maybe a bit of that but investors are more buying into Musk's past track record with Tesla and SpaceX which has been pretty good really.

- I believe he can launch rockets into space and land them on their own footprint.

- I believe he can revolutionize auto manufacturing and disrupt a 100 year old industry replacing fossil-fuel burning dinosaurs with clean electric vehicles that outperform them and that appeal to the general public

- I believe he can allow quadrapelegics to interact with the world in ways never thought possible

- I believe he can, to a great degree, restore free speech on social media even if it is messy and imperfect at times

- I believe that innovation is hard and just because he boldly claims he is going to Mars or make cars drive themselves - and hasn’t done it yet, is no reason to discount the possibility that he might actually pull it off one day

HE can do nothing of the sort because he is an idiot with very few real skills. Even his code in the pre-PayPal days was amateurish.

What he has done is throw money at people who can. But now he has started micromanaging things because he believes he knows best.

He is a total buffoon.

> HE can do nothing of the sort because he is an idiot with very few real skills.

Management is a real skill. Salesmanship is also a real skill. I may not approve of the showboating, but drumming up enthusiasm for a future that most consider to be fantasy, was a necessary (though not sufficient) part of building an electric car company in an era when most people thought hydrogen was the future and that "electric car" meant "a milk float" and, if they had memories of any real personal electric vehicle, those memories would have been of the failure of the Sinclair C5:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_float

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_C5

Pretty sure nobody except Toyota thought hydrogen was going to be a useful intermediate fuel: handling is ridiculously difficult compared to room-temperature liquids, energy density is ridiculously low.

It would have made more sense to sell Fischer-Tropsch synthesized carbon fuel from purpose-grown crops, at a mere 3x the current production price of fossil carbon fuels, using the existing infrastructure for distribution into existing vehicles.

I wonder if Honda and Toyota are still backing on a carbon neutral fuel replacement. They have been slow to electrify.

You’d prefer the rich just throw their money at political back room deals or speculative finance? At least he’s spending money to build cool things.

>> Even his code in pre-PayPal days was amateurish.

..Okay?

Calling Elon Musk an ’idiot’ in a non-ironic way tells us you’re not being objective and contributing to a rational discussion.

EDS is real.

Same old nonsense story.

> What he has done is throw money at people who can.

Funny then that countless other space and car startups had far more money and were far less successful. And many of those were far less micromanaged.

BlueOrigin for example literally got 100x as much money from its owner as SpaceX did.

> But now he has started micromanaging things because he believes he knows best.

This is just factually inaccurate, he has been micromanaging since the beginning. Literally everything ever said about him was that.

Look we get it, you don't like him as a person, but these statement just make you seem dumb and uninformed.

> Same old nonsense story.

Most of the passionate (embittered? salty? flavourless?) critiques of Elon always sound like a confession: His critics can't explain why he is successful, why his companies are successful, nor why he is wealthy. When they attempt an explanation, it's less an explanation and more a dismissal: luck, other people, teams, theft, subsidies, corruption, "the system is broken!", a technoaccelerationist cabal secretly pulling the levers of power.

But, fundamentally, the question whose answer eludes the majority of humans especially Elon's critics is: Why am I not as wealthy and relevant as Elon yet I'm obviously smarter and more ethical than he is? (Their implicit answer is that "life is unfair and doesn't reward the best people.")

Because if any of his critics actually had a meaningful critique that corresponds to reality, they would simply build better products and companies, become billionaires themselves and exemplify rather than pontificate about a better mode of billionaire behaviour and grandeur of vision.

I wonder if Musk fans realize that constantly deflecting all criticism with "you're just jealous, bro" says more about them than about the people they're limply trying to discredit.

> I wonder if Musk fans realize that constantly deflecting all criticism with "you're just jealous, bro" says more about them than about the people they're limply trying to discredit.

I wonder if the critics of Musk's "fans" realize that deflecting all criticism with "they're just Musk fans, bro" says more about their own anemic ability to imagine the legitimacy of another perspective, their utter lack of humility and complete poverty of intellectual honesty, than about the so-called fans they're flaccidly trying to discredit?

If you can't recognize his contributions I think you're too emotionally attached to the question.

Any day now a Tesla Semi truck will stop by to deliver my solar shingles. I can then use them to charge my Tesla robotaxi. My Robotaxi will ferry people around when I'm not using it and pay for itself in under 2 years. Then I can start saving for my ticket to Mars, where I'll be safe from the woke mind virus that is consuming everyone here on earth.

I don't think the argument is that everything he touches turns to gold. Transforming two industries and going from in debt to the planet's richest is an achievement in itself.

I do recognise his major contributions: Made electric cars commonplace sooner than I thought with the Model S, financed SpaceX's doubtlessly awesome progress, and... well that's pretty much it.

Thing is, the illusion is fading, his previously "inscrutable" politics are on his sleeve, and you can't just pretend he's not a complete liability for any company because of his irrational, and frankly childish, behaviour.

This is some grade A downplaying.

> Made electric cars commonplace sooner than I thought with the Model S

You mean financing and leading the largest EV maker in the world and fundamentally changing a 100 year old industry.

Car industry has been considered for a long time a incredibly hard place to get into for a startup. Most new companies happened when industrial powers rose and supported local companies.

There are decades of failed car companies. And at the same time as Tesla, there were other companies who promised EV revolutions and failed.

People point to the Model S, but the Model 3 was actually just as or more important. When the Model 3 showed profitability ever car company in the world massively increased their investment in EV, before that many companies were pretending and doing research. For years the story was EV can't be profitable below 50k and you can't build them at volume.

> financed SpaceX's doubtlessly awesome progress

If with 'finacned' you mean founded and lead the largest SpaceX company in the world that has revolutionized the whole space industry and is the biggest rocket company and the biggest sat company that can also fly people to space and build the biggest rocket in the history of humanity.

SpaceX Starlink literally fundamentally changed the largest war in Europe since WW2.

But I guess all he did is 'financed progress'. You got to be fucking kidding me.

> and you can't just pretend he's not a complete liability

Can you spell out in actual real terms what this means? SpaceX is going from success to success and has been for 25 years now. Tesla is still a large company doing pretty well. Both companies are much bigger and much more important and powerful then they were 4 years ago.

In the real world, customers don't care about 'childish' behavior. And claiming he is irrational when his companies mostly act rationally on net (no companies is perfect and never makes errors) also don't really work very well.

The only reason you consider him a liability is that he opposes far-left ideology and promotes free speech. If that makes you a liability then I want every business leader to become a liability.

At the very least, if you are going to impartially assess his business accomplishments, you should completely disregard his political views when making that assessment. Otherwise you're giving him a dishonest business leadership assessment as a ploy to punish him for his politics.

I don’t like the guy but he’s built companies that are implanting brain chips to give people vision and parapalegics the ability to interact in the world, has blanketed the globe in true high speed internet, have built spaceships that launch more frequently than any nation has ever done their own. And then there’s the EV thing which many see as key to fighting climate change. If he wasn’t so unlikable and part of this twitter debacle, the world would be praising each of these efforts.

He's a conduit between DARPA and good engineers, don't attribute it all to him. Someone else would fill his shoes if needed.

https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiLeaks/comments/1fy10k1/comment/...

Nobody else did, though.

That's the reason he was able to get this rich with SpaceX and not stall sooner — most of the other space companies were (and in the west, still are) busy scratching backs rather than developing successful products.

You honestly believe that DARPA would have given us the Tesla model Y?

It's possible that Tesla, which Musk didn't found, would have given us an EV by another name. Rivan also got us an electric truck before the cybertruck came out. Fisker's not doing so well though.

Possible sure - just as it is possible my next startup could be the next Tesla. In reality, when Elon joined Tesla they had nothing but early concept prototypes of a high-end sports car with the name Roadster. Elon took it from concept, to launch, to production. Then he did the same with the Model S/X/3, sold 5 million electric vehicles, made them so compelling that it completely disrupted the ICE vehicle market and sparked a gold rush of elecrification in the car industry resulting in a Trillion-dollar company.

It's possible "which Musk didn't found" is doing some heavy lifting in your statement above.

DARPA doesn't give us anything, it just runs with ideas and develops them enough to push to others to build and run.

ARPA gave us TCP/IP, but MS, Google, telcos, etc. gave us the modern internet and the tools to use it

Someone like Boeing. The administrative class has taken over and they have zero risk appetite. Nothing new will come of them.

Mostly I agree, modulo "he knows how to make teams to do XYZ", which I'm happy to count for the same reason I'm happy to blame him personally when those teams he's ordering around do something I don't like:

> I believe he can, to a great degree, restore free speech on social media even if it is messy and imperfect at times

I strongly disagree with this.

Even if I ignore the proxy of all the investors writing off their buy-out loans by 75%, even if I ignore that when people link me to random threads I can only see the specific one linked and not any reply because of an invisible paywall^w account-wall, even if I ignore that loading a random tweet now often takes 26 seconds or more (yes, I did just record my screen to get that number), even if I ignore that undesirable stories can be buried by an avalanche of alternative narratives and not just by censoring the truth…

There's still the problem of Musk intervening politically in ways that, although totally legal, are exactly the kind of thing he was complaining about before the takeover: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_suspensions

Yes and:

I'd like someone, eg Musk, to define "free speech". Start with some of those "first principles" he likes so much.

Then, per "theory vs reality" cliché, I'd like someone, eg Musk, to explain or demonstrate or larp or interpretative dance what "free speech" looks like in practice. Maybe even point to an existing example.

For bonus credit:

- explain relationship between "free speech" and news feeds (algorithmic hate machines)

- explain operation of "free speech" multinationally

- explain how to balance "free speech" and moderation

- enumerate the tradeoffs of, downsides due to, and consequences of "free speech"

I really wonder if he is not focused enough

You’re a fool tricked by another fool who shouts loudly that they support free speech while they ban speech left and right.

For goodness sake, ElonJet was banned and you can’t even say the word “cisgender” on the platform. How delusional are you?

I prefer that to the CIA having a direct line to the top of the platform and free reign to use it for propaganda, yes.

Also Musk has banned mentions of his own transgender daughter, who now posts on Meta’s Threads app instead.

X is like a textbook case of why total autocracy isn’t actually good management practice. Musk has become the Henry VIII of social media.

ElonJet was a live geotracking site for private jets. You can post cisgender, it just comes with a warning.

Before, people were being banned for using "him" instead of "her" to describe biological males who self-identified as women. People were secretly de-amplified for criticizing the government policy of lockdowns. It was censorship on a whole different magnitude.

So your response is “it was worse in the past”?

Two wrongs don’t make a right. Either you’re a “free speech absolutist” or you’re just a lying charlatan. Elon is clearly the latter, the evidence is right in front of your eyes and you choose to make excuses.

ElonJet is posting publicly available information and isn’t banned on other platforms. Something coming with a warning is the same as restricting speech.

> Something coming with a warning is the same as restricting speech.

Placing a warning is generally not considered a restriction on free speech but rather a tool to inform or protect audiences.

In contrast, restricting free speech involves preventing someone from expressing their views or censoring content outright. Warnings are typically seen as a way to balance free expression with the responsibility to inform audiences.

> In contrast, restricting free speech involves preventing someone from expressing their views or censoring content outright.

You mean like suing people for saying true things, and encouraging the government to criminally investigate for people for saying the same? Because that is exactly what Musk has done in the past year.

I’m not saying anything about Musk.

I’m simply saying that it is false to claim that attaching a warning to something is restricting free speech.

Two good examples are the government warning on tobacco product or cancer-causing warnings in public spaces.

These are warnings and do not constitute restriction of free speech.

The warnings undoubtedly come with a derank in the Twitter algorithm, so it's very much not the same.

But if you want to get really technical then this isn't even about "free speech". A platform restricting speech has nothing to do with "free speech" as it is defined in the US constitution. That's all about governments creating laws that punish people for certain speech.

But hey, we're in a world where Elon spouts nonsense about being all about "free speech" so the world has lost that meaning anyway.

Free Speech means more than Free Speech under the law. It also refers to the permissiveness of private platforms.

So this is just yet more nonsense.

Yes, it was much worse in the past.

People are only being banned for impersonation and live geotracking. In the previous Twitter, you were banned, shadow-banned, de-amplified, etc, if you expressed views that the political left disagreed with.

You want to justify and downplay the latter my presenting Musk as equally villainous. It's disingenuous mental gymnastics to advance your censorious and authoritarian agenda. Getting Twitter back to being censored is what motivates the incessant attacks on Musk.

Let’s say you’re right. There is only one side claiming they are “free speech absolutists”. There is only one side demonstrably lying to you. It’s Elon Musk. You’re being duped by a billionaire and you’re too blind to see it.

I'd much rather X under Musk while he doesn't live up to his free speech absolutist claims than X under the establishment, where you must use left-wing gender pronoun conventions or be banned.

You're okay with the previous authoritarianism that was imposed that's why you'd prefer a return to the previous setup. If you believed in political neutrality and Free Speech, you would be hardly annoyed by Musk not being as committee to Free Speech as he claims, while he reverses what had been an overwhelming censorship program.

Ya, 3.5 out of 5 ain't bad.

US competition with Tesla isn’t even close and the only way anyone has able to get a functional charging network up and running was to piggyback off of Tesla. I know the Trump stuff is annoying, but there’s way too much criticism of Tesla out there that is our political emotion.

Trump is Tesla's only hope.

Elon knows Trump is a transactional person and as long as he supports Trump, he can get the necessary governmental treatment his companies need to survive (tax credits, Chinese EV tariffs, some sort of asinine Mars mission).

EV tariffs are going to happen throughout the entire west with or without Trump.

Western governments have discovered the Chinese plan to decimate western manufacturing by subsidizing it at over 10 X the rate required and seen in the west.

Vehicles matter because they are a means for war machine production.

He needs more than that. Both Mercedes and BMW are eating into high end Tesla sales.

Those companies are faltering without software talent.

Tesla has the world's best autonomous vehicle offering by some way of measuring things. There are many ways to measure things, but at least in some "category" they are indeed leading: Level 2 systems for the US which you can privately buy.

Mercedes already has a level 3 available for purchase in California: https://www.mbusa.com/en/owners/manuals/drive-pilot

Yes which can not do a bunch of things that FSD can.

> with little to nothing to show for today

Although they didn't "show" it on the event, Tesla self-driving is steadily improving each month. It is now also available on the Cybertruck, and the miles per intervention metric is steadily improving. You can find many videos on YouTube. Note that this are real cars on the real road.

Maybe in the US. It still does nothing in Europe, which is disappointing because the company happily took my money in February 2019 on the promise that this feature is imminent.

I paid 7,500 euros for something that still doesn’t exist in any usable form. (I thought it would be good for my elderly parents who were the primary users of this car for a time.) It’s actively dangerous because it doesn’t even see speed limits correctly. The car will probably be at the end of its life before this feature ever ships.

Sure, it’s a lesson for me. But don’t underestimate how much goodwill Musk has burned with his customers. I’m never buying another vehicle from this company, no matter the price or features. His political activism is just the cherry on the top of his poop-cake of lies.

> I paid 7,500 euros for something that still doesn’t exist in any usable form.

And I thought people preordering games for 70€ were taking unnecessary risks. You guys took it to the whole new level.

For sure. It wasn’t my usual type of purchase, but more emotionally driven.

My dad, who is in his seventies and an early-adopter type, was really into Musk and FSD. I thought it would improve their quality of life to have access to this car, and I had recently found myself with the means to give back to my parents.

For a period, FSD was up to $15,000 USD... For heretofore still unshipped vaporware. And I say this as someone paying the $100/month for the current very very beta, sometimes absolutely terrifying form of it.

Where are the numbers?

The problem is Tesla and Musk have been lying about full self-driving for years: https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/

In 2016 Tesla said that "as of today, all Tesla vehicles produced in our factory – including Model 3 – will have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver." That was a lie: https://electrek.co/2024/08/24/tesla-deletes-its-blog-post-s...

Tesla even lies about things as dumb as Cybertruck quarter mile times:

https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/tesla-cybertruck-beast-vs...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5J3H8--CQRE

https://insideevs.com/news/699260/tesla-cybertruck-porsche-r...

Tesla never ran that quarter mile. And the worst thing about it was the Cybertruck's lead engineer trying to rationalize the lie:

https://x.com/wmorrill3/status/1746266437088645551

When your engineers lack commitment to basic honesty then you've got a sick company culture.

Lying is just too much a part of the culture at Tesla. Musk clearly doesn't value honesty or credibility.

I donno. I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Yes in your examples they were not completely honest. That’s true. But they have been innovating and shipping real products too which really work in the real world. If I have to choose between a company that does not innovate and never lies, and one that innovates but sometimes lies, then I think I rather have the lying innovator. At least as long as the lies come from a certain optimism and ambition. If the lies come from fear mongering then I’m not so interested.

Having said that, I agree fully that taking the full self driving money in the order of thousands of dollars and not delivering is highly problematic.

> Yes in your examples they were not completely honest.

They weren't honest. End of. No qualification or equivocation.

> At least as long as the lies come from a certain optimism and ambition

It amazes me the amount of mental gymnastics people will perform to defend fraud.

Also:

> “The autonomous vehicles, we’re going to stop from operating on American roads, remember this,” Trump said.

Well, apart from tax cuts for the rich he never followed through with anything he said and his voters will never hold him accountable for anything, ever, so you can safely ignore every thing he says.

Abortion is now illegal in dozens of states.

Wasn't that due to the supreme court deciding it wasn't up to the federal government?

Who nominates the justices to the US Supreme Court?

De jure or de facto?

One of the judges died in Obama's term, and senators explicitly declared they would not consider any nomination he made:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/history-stolen-suprem...

13 states

https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/abortion-access-tool...

What a legacy. He achieved so much.

“Can’t trust anything” is not the same as “can safely ignore everything”. There’s nothing safe about it.

Trump & Elon say they're going to build a missile "iron dome" in space, wonder how that will go, https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiLeaks/comments/1fy10k1/comment/...

Good. They don't work, and they wont work. We are a decade into the hype cycle on 'cars that have self' and the proponents are stuck pretending that their best case demo, which is always going to crash into stupid stuff that a human would easily understand (in it's highly tested and constrained route) has 'self' to preserve.

This is a reductive and far-too-pessimistic take when Waymo is completing more than 14,000 driverless trips per DAY and has completed over 15 million miles of driverless trips.

That's not a "best case demo": it's a real system, working in real world environments, and even if they're "constrained" (and go ahead and look at the Phoenix service area and tell me how constrained it really is), they are functioning, now, today. There's one driving by my house as I type this. It's not mowing down children. It's not causing fatal accidents. Its incident rate is dramatically lower than human drivers, and its severe injury rate is lower still. We're a decade into the hype cycle because of how hard a problem this is to solve, and we're finally catching up with the right confluence of technologies at the right time (mostly around machine learning, machine vision, sensor fusion, LIDAR, reinforcement training, and computer power) to make it actually work.

I can understand if you live outside a Waymo market that you might still believe this is still fairy tale "won't work" stuff, but when you live in a market where you see dozens of them every single day, doing their thing _unremarkably_, it's... well, it feels quite a bit like the future.

Note that I'm speaking explicitly of Waymo here. Tesla FSD still terrifies me, vision-only seems like a horrible oversight, pun intended, and while it's meant to be non-constrained, it still has a very, very far way to go to close the gap with Waymo.

It wouldnt work even if you asserted a perfect record. The result is taking a robust fault (emergency) tolerant system and converting it into a fragile one without so much as a steering wheel.

Your Waymo will stop when you dont want to.

Just days after Musk appeared and spoke strongly in favour of him at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania [1]. These are interesting times and people make very strange bed follows.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/07/style/elon-musk-donald-tr...

Then again, can we trust a word the man is saying? It all feels like shallow pandering. Plus, it may be worth going through the entire event at the Detroit Economic Club [2] to check the quote more clearly as at least one source quotes him as referencing PRC car automation with that statement, while expressing some general personal scepticism of autonomous driving [3].

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km-gQhP5fnw

[3]: https://qz.com/donald-trump-self-driving-cars-avs-musk-tesla...

Trump and Elon being bedfellows isn't really all that strange, though.

Both rich, coddled manbabies with oversized egos and right wing views, making wild promises they can't keep. Both have a rabid cult that will rush to their defense, no matter what. It's a natural fit.

Elon is CyberTrump, to use his own parlance.

Reading any HN thread connected to Musk is so annoying because all the political obsessives come out and crapflood the thread with rants about "manbabies."

Reading HN threads ranting about “manbabies” when referring to arguably the single greatest innovator and entrepreneur of our time was not on my bingo card on a site purporting to promote innovation and entrepreneurship.

So, going back on topic, how is the robotaxi business going, that Musk promised you could start 2020? His success relies on delusional people believing his bs. No amount of real world facts will convince his followers he was wrong, as you just publicly displayed.

Reading anything connected to Musk is annoying because he crapfloods the internet being a manbaby.

Well its true. We can use other terms but they describe underlying fact of a brilliant but deeply troubled person with serious mental issues and sometimes infantile emotional reactions. Plus a horrible parent. The times when such successful persons were unanimously celebrated and their flaws were ignored are luckily over for good.

Call it what you like, this is reality that very few are happy about. Imagine if this guy would be more mentally and emotionally stable, how further he could actually get. And the respect he could actually achieve. Its a sad view, really.

The thing is, people's failures define them and their legacy 100x more than their successes. Nobody cares how loyal friend say Epstein was (ie to Trump), do we.

I would counter and say that Musk's flaws are what allow his greatness. You don't get someone that effective without serious tradeoffs.

Not many people could have created SpaceX. Even fewer could have made Tesla work. I don't know that anyone else could have done both.

Imagine if every time someone brought up something about Linux the thread was full of people doing psychoanalysis of Linus Torvalds instead of actually talking about the features of the new release. Imagine how useless those threads would be. Your post is an example of this with regards to Tesla.

The fault of that lies with Musk who has been trying endlessly to turn everything into a culture war.

Imagine what it was like just a couple of years ago when these threads would be flooded with "he's trying to save the world, what have you done?" type comments.

It'd be like criticizing Rudy Giuliani in 2002.

He is going to say exact opposite in a month and flip again and again until he does whatever random thing will ensure him random thing he wants in the moment.

More like Armageddon Musk https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiLeaks/comments/1fy10k1/comment/...

This basically explains all of Elon's seemingly contradictory behaviors.

What useful product did Enron ever build?

> What useful product did Enron ever build?

Electronic trading platform

Enron Online, launched in 1999, allowed buyers and sellers to trade energy-related commodities like natural gas, electricity, and broadband capacity.

Gas Bank

Enron's Gas Bank stabilized prices, making natural gas more attractive to investors and helping lenders finance new gas generators.

Financial markets

Enron created financial markets for assets that were never previously traded on exchanges, such as natural gas, coal, and internet connections.

Power plants, lots of them. Then they hired Wall St MBAs who thought executive compensation should be based on how well they can pump the stock. Sounds a lot like Tesla come to think of it.

Tesla Cybertruck was announced as vapourware in 2019 and got limited production only in 2023. It was also delayed. Wonder whether it would have been also considered "bait and switch setup" according to your stance.

Look at the announced price and all the claimed features then. We were promised a bulletproof amphibious truck for (IIRC) $40k, and we got a truck whose warranty is void if you drive in the rain, costing $80k for the base model. Also it won't even stop .22LR bullets.

We were also promised micron panel gaps. the panel gaps on the cybertruck are both visible and visibly uneven.

It's really weird to see anyone even imply that the Cybertruck has vindicated Tesla.

> Also it won't even stop .22LR bullets.

Seriously? Is there proof of this?

The body panels are pretty thick, and they're made of an austenitic nitrogen steel -- a modified form of 316LN -- which should perform nearly as well as any "armor grade" steel alloy. (Against steel fragments, it likely performs poorly, but against lead handgun rounds it is likely even superior to the average high-hardness armor steel.) Just on the face of it, I'd expect the Cybertruck's body to stop any threat up to .44 Magnum.

Can someone explain the thought process here.

People sit in a Cybertruck. With their head visible through the glass. Non bullet-proof glass.

There are videos of people shooting holes in it with 9mm at least.

I've seen a few where it stopped 9mm.

e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQ5EyKMqGGI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOteg0J5teg

Do you have links to those videos where it fails?

Besides, 9mm and .22lr are very different things. .22lr is one of the very weakest ballistic threats. 9mm has much more mass, usually more velocity, and a much higher (~3x higher) average KE load.

Yeah of course I can't find it now, there was some lame Youtuber memelord that let his buddy shoot at it with a handgun and at least one bullet went through. But I also see that it can resist it, so IDK and retract my statement.

I do know the difference between the calibers though, having shot a few different weapons in different calibers (as a hobby & in the military)

In the case of the Cybertruck, it was never a question whether it is even possible to do such a thing, because they had all the technology, the only question was if they were stupid enough to build it.

Just as in the case of the "Hyperloop": in theory, it is perfectly possible, but anyone who got as far to build a few meters of it (or something resembling it) quickly realized the practicality problems, and what would happen if you scaled those problems to a few hundred kilometers...

On the other hand, autonomous driving is not a solved problem, not even in theory. One could argue that it would require some sort of a generic AI, which we don't have, and nobody knows if we will in the future. So selling anything based on that is simply fraud, in my opinion.

What do you mean by "stupid enough to build it?" It's the best-selling electric truck in terms of shipped units, by a large margin (approximately equal to every other EV truck manufacturer combined, including Ford's electric F-150).

Could you please cite sources on this? Just looking at Rivian [1] they delivered 37,396 units this year alone. Tesla doesn't officially publish numbers, but the Cybertruck recall from few weeks ago tells us around 27,185 total [2]. I know that the July sales were high, over 5172 units [3], but that's a single month. And just to put everything in perspective here: over 13 million trucks were sold in the States in July alone [4].

[1] https://electrek.co/2024/10/08/why-rivian-rivn-cutting-ev-pr... [2] https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/rcl/2024/RCLRPT-24V718-2751.PDF [3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/brookecrothers/2024/09/22/cyber... [4] https://press.spglobal.com/2024-07-24-S-P-Global-Mobility-Ju...

Here is one source from the Verge:

Tesla sold more Cybertrucks than almost all other EV trucks combined

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/18/24247985/tesla-cybertruck...

The Cybertruck was the best-selling $100,000+ vehicle in July

https://qz.com/tesla-cybertruck-is-selling-better-than-any-o...

"Tesla sold more Cybertrucks than almost all other EV trucks combined" - in July, you forgot to add

"The Cybertruck was the best-selling $100,000+ vehicle in July" - there you go

Rivian's delivery numbers include the R1T pickup, the R1S SUV, and their EDV delivery van for Amazon and other fleet customers. The R1T pickup is likely half or less of their total production number.

We don't know how profitable it is. They're already running out of folks willing to pay $100k and have begun offering the $80k version. Will that version be profitable to build? It takes more than unit sales to make a good business decision.

Even if it is profitable, it still needs to be weighed against the opportunity costs of using those resources to pursue a different strategy. Would the same resources in terms of designer, engineers, hours, and capital outlay on factory production lines have been more profitable if they were applied to a different vehicle?

It's very possible. The Cybertruck is always going to be a limited demand vehicle. It may do well versus other EV pickups in the US market, but Tesla is a global company and the Cybertruck is not a global vehicle.

Yes, indeed that’s a bait and switch. There were changes in price, features, availability dates and so on.

Wasn't it also released at a significantly higher price than announced?

"""In 2019, Musk claimed that the Cybertruck would be available in late 2021, starting at $39,900. The date was later pushed to 2022, and eventually it was pushed to late 2023, with a starting price of $60,990.""" - according to the Wikipedia page.

I'd definitely count that as bait and switch from the price change alone.

Ah right, the price should have remained the same despite the highest worldwide monetary inflation rates in the last 40 years.

I can't imagine why would a company want to sell a product at a profit.

Could you give some numbers to back it up? Considering the loss due to inflation from 2019 [1] I would have expected the truck to get to around $49,200.

[1] https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/2019?amount=1

What numbers am I backing up?

Should the price have remained the same? Or was 2022 not the highest year for USD inflation in 40 years (see: your own source.)

Is a company only allowed to increase their prices at a rate pegged to monetary inflation?

Whats your point here? We said they broke their promise (bait and switch, because they knew it was not assured expectation for price and delivery).

You say they have the right to brake promises, which is true.

So we agree they made a promise, broke it and raised the price beyond inflation, likely due to screwing up the production cost targets. All of that after they took reservations.

So we agree but you don't like that we're judging them badly for it?

> Is a company only allowed to increase their prices at a rate pegged to monetary inflation?

If they want to avoid a reputation for dishonesty, yes.

50% increase in price point, 3 years delay. Inflation is only a small part of this. The delay is more telling than the price increase.

The cybertruck was promissed as a cheaper way to make cars, its more expensive tha n the others that suffered the same inflationary forces. Save that its a new product, if they trusted that scale was going to cheap it down more than they current methods they would take a loss at the start to make a larger profit later.

Gee, if only there was a comparable item to measure inflation against…

Tesla Model Y:

$39,000 in 2019, the same year the Cybertruck was announced - https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/tesla-unveils-mod...

$31,490 today - https://www.tesla.com/compare

So, a price cut then. From the same company, on the same time horizon.

--

Even on longer timelines, inflation isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Tesla Model S:

$57,400 in 2009 - https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-motors-sets-new-pri...

$68,490 today - https://www.tesla.com/compare

Thats a 19.32% price increase in one of Tesla's other cars over 15 years, compared to a 52.857% price increase of the Cybetruck in the 5 years between it being announced and today.

The cheapest Model Y right now is $44,990. You have to remove the "gas savings" and other subsidies that individuals may or may not qualify for to see this cash price.

So the announced price for the ~300mi, dual-motor version in 2019 was $49k.

Today that price is $79k. ($99k if you want the first-edition Foundation series which has been the only one delivered to customers so far).

CPI inflation calculation puts $49k in 2019 as $60k today. So inflation means the price should have gone up ~$10k, but it has actually gone up ~$30k.

Also in 2019, $69k was supposed to get you 500 miles of range. The highest range configuration of the truck they shipped is 340 miles, with potentially up to 470 miles if you fill half the bed with an additional $16k battery pack that is only installable/removable by a Tesla Service Center. Nobody has seen this pack demonstrated yet or how it will handle things like Supercharging. Having half the bed taken up to achieve the max range was definitely not part of the 2019 sales pitch.

The starting price of 60K is still just a promise at this point. What you can actually buy costs 100K.

Tesla previously announced that all of their cars had the hardware for Level 5 Self-Driving in 2016 and would be capable of driving fully autonomously within 2-3 years.

This isn't just a bait and switch, it's a new bait and switch to redirect from the existing one.

If Tesla wants to make a new announcement about autonomous vehicles now, 8 years after originally announcing that they were already shipping them, it should be that they are actually operating autonomous vehicles in the wild somewhere.

Not showing off a new car design that isn't needed for such a demonstration and that is coming 2-3 years from now.

A propos Chinese EV.

US is raising import tax on Chinese EV (from 10% up to 38.1%) in EU to help us combat the climat change better. /s

Like someone said before, he's lost all credibility. As someone who picked up FSD some years back, I'll prob never get a Tesla again based on some future promise.

The Tesla Robotaxi seems similar to the prototype car without steering wheel or brake pedals that Google announced (or demoed?) in 2014: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/28/technology/googles-next-p.... It seems likely that Waymo is 10 years ahead of Tesla in autonomous driving, and not 2 years.