BYD is continuing what Tesla started: getting cheaper while scaling up battery and car production.

The market is there for worse and much cheaper electric cars, just not mainly in US.

I think some of that demand is there in the US. My daily needs for a car would be satisfied with 100 mile range, allowing for a pretty generous buffer. I also sometimes need to drive beyond the range of an EV without wanting to think about recharging delays or possibly getting stranded.

I'd consider owning a very cheap small EV for my daily needs, but not at the prices they command today. Even something like a Nissan Leaf is far too expensive for that.

>I'd consider owning a very cheap small EV for my daily needs, but not at the prices they command today.

Is that due to EV prices or car prices in general? I guess it depends on where you are and what price you pay for electricity. But I also think a lot of people haven't internalized the price inflation of new and used cars in the last 4 years. A second generation Leaf with less that 25k miles can be had for less than $15,000, and it is should be eligible for a $4,000 used EV tax credit (if your income is under $150k):

https://www.carvana.com/vehicle/3348306?refSource=srp

I should probably sit down and do the math on elecricity vs. gas and the payback time, but for reference I am something of a bottom-feeder when it comes to cars. I have pretty good success with used ICE cars in the $4-6k range. I look for southern cars with no rust/salt damage. They are out there, but you won't find them on Carvana.

My current daily driver is a 20 year old Mercedes E class that I bought for $4k. It's a V8 and takes premium gas, but I average close to 20mpg and don't really drive enough miles for that to be a huge dealbreaker. With $4/gal gas I might burn $8/day with typical driving. That might be roughly 10 kWh in a Leaf? I don't know what the losses are in charging but if that's 20 kWh to recharge, that would be maybe $4/day? So I'd save maybe $80/month if I drive 20 days a month? That's all very wild guesstimating but seems like it would take 10 years to pay back the price difference, also considering that I could not really drive the Leaf on any longer trips at all.

Charging efficiency is ~85% efficient. As far as I can tell, when it comes to used cars in my area, $10k is the new $4k. No way would I buy a $4k car any more, and I'm in the market for a beater for a kid's car. $4,000 buys a 2003 Toyota Corolla with 250,000 miles and 9 previous owners and some moderate damage according to CarFax.

You have to look around but better cars are out there. I bought a '04 Mercedes E500 for $4k about 2 years ago. Had about 160k miles, no rust. Was it perfect, certainly not. Had some wear and tear but fundamentally was a solid car. I still see them in this price range today.

I totally get that someone might not want to deal with the unknowns and risks of a 20 year old car.

Good to know that the charging efficiency is better than I guessed. I'll have to run the numbers again next time I'm needing a car. EVs have an appeal, no doubt. But for me they have to make economic and practical sense.

German cars tend to be cheap because maintenance costs are crazy. The have more parts, and each part is more expensive.

You could easily get hit with a mechanic bill for greater than the value

40 miles is about 10kWh, yes, which would be 11.5kWh at the meter. I pay 7cents/kWh, so you're paying about 10X per mile as I am for fuel. I've driven old BMW's, and I had to budget about $3k/year for maintenance & repairs, I imagine your Merc is similar. So you're spending $400/month for your "cheap" car.

A 3 year old Tesla for 20K would likely save you a considerable amount of money.

I do my own maintenance and repair and don't spend anything close to that (not counting my time, but it's a hobby for me). Insurance and registration is also cheaper.

>should be eligible for a $4,000 used EV tax credit (if your income is under $150k):

This is only true if you do a joint file. If you're a single filer, it phases out once your income is above $75k, or $112k for heads of household.

Yes, thanks for the correction.

There are at least four other competing Chinese electric car companies. Let’s not forget them, the rest of the world won’t.

The cars are actually quite nice. I have no complaints. It’s possible that maintenance issues will emerge later, but that has already happened for Tesla. At this point we can’t claim they’re lower quality.

The US market is there for a cheap, nice electric car. Tariffs make it untenable.

Perhaps if they had delivered a cheaper Tesla instead of a robotaxi that nobody asked for, won’t meet the needs of 90% of people wanting a taxi, and isn’t anywhere near ready to operate on public roads, the market would have expanded.

How about instead we offer you a $100k "truck" that can't do basic truck things, misses every single claimed feature, and has such poor basic engineering competency that it had at least one whistleblower?

Oh and it's stupid ugly as well.

My prediction is that Elon will be forced out of Tesla one way or another and then the company will quietly release a truck that will look vaguely like a Model S, but truck shaped and sized. It will be popular.

CAN Tesla still design cars? They haven't done so in like a decade.

Also Tesla cannot force Elon out, the stock would crater so bad. Also the board is 100% in his pocket, did you not see the nonsense with his "pay package"?

The main reason stock would crater so bad is that Elon is amazing salesman of shit he doesn't have and shit he has that doesn't work. His replacement would have to be just as savvy of a "salesman" to sell investor on "robotaxis" and other BS that leads to such an evaluation

That truck always reminds me of that Simpsons episode, where Homer designs a car.

I mean, it's not even like they have "delivered" a robotaxi, they have announced it and done a very controlled demo, but things they have announced in the past (like the new Roadster) have just not materialised, and their promise of full unsupervised self driving "next year" for the last seven or so years is now infamous...

Not to mention that even if you can afford a Tesla, my understanding is that the non-Tesla market has just gotten much better than it was over the last few years.

For a while, if you wanted a long range EV you could actually cross the country with, Tesla was it.

That's just not true anymore -- I'm coming up on year three with my non-Tesla, and it's been perfect, road trips and all.

Tesla still has its brand recognition and inertia in its favor, but it's tougher for them when you can get equally good if not better cars elsewhere.

May I ask what kind of car it is and where the road trips are from/to?

The last time I rented an EV in the SF Bay Area (a year or two ago, a Leaf), I had trouble even finding enough charging stations just to get around the area, like from SF to the South Bay and then to Santa Cruz. The few chargers I did find had several broken stations, multiple people waiting in line for the one working one, and it was very expensive. We wasted hours of time on that experience.

Has it gotten significantly better since then?

The public fast-charging situation is a lot better for anything that that has a CCS1 or Tesla/NACS port. Which is pretty much everything that isn't a Leaf. The 2011-2025 Leafs use the bulky CHAdeMO port for DC fast charging, which didn't catch on. The completely redesigned 2026 Leaf should be transitioning to NACS though.

https://www.motortrend.com/cars/nissan/leaf/2026/

...also, pretty much anything other than the Chevy Bolt will fast-charge at a rate at least 2-3 times faster than the Leaf and possible even faster than that (depending on model).

I am incredibly relieved to hear that the Leaf is finally getting a redesign.

I chatted with a poor fellow in a Leaf trying and failing to charge on the single sad broken CHAdeMO plug at a station, and was just thinking... yeah, Nissan sold you a bad car, I'm really really sorry.

VW ID.4, road tripping around the northeast (NJ/NY) and midwest (to/fro Michigan).

In your case, the Leaf is the single EV that should never be or have been sold or rented out since around 2020. It's ancient and is the last EV lacking support for the major fast charging plugs in north America, so I'm not surprised you had charging issues! I'm really sorry they gave you that car!

Ah, I didn't know the Leaf was particularly bad. Guess I was just unlucky / uninformed. Good to know! I'd love to get an EV someday.

Which one?

VW ID.4! Definitely not the best car in the segment, but the best car at the time for the price. It's really been a dream of a vehicle!

I'd argue inflation and high interest rates have a large impact too. When every day necessities (shelter, food, healthcare, education) are +30% at a minimum, there's not a lot leftover for fancy cars for most Americans.

Economic self strangulation induced via the wealth gap. Its going to be economically impossible to build anything but luxury shoes next.

I could explain to a child how printing new money causes inflation, which we did twice since COVID.

How does the wealth gap cause inflation?

I don't claim to be an economist, but direct stimulus payments to Americans totaled about $2100 on average. The US economy is worth trillions annually. I'm sure the stimulus checks made a small bump on inflation in the short term, but they couldn't possibly drive sustained, systemic inflation. Unless you're talking about the broader fiscal packages for supporting businesses/unemployment benefits during COVID when you say "printing new money?"

Printing new money means spending money that doesn't (yet) exist.

If there is 1 trillion dollars in the possession of all humans and the government buyys a trillion dollars worth of good with new money, all previous money os jow worth half it's previous value.

It massively inflates asset prices which disproportionately benefit those who are already wealthy (they also have easier access to capital).

> I could explain to a child how printing new money causes inflation, which we did twice since COVID.

We've printed money a dozen times in the 30 years prior to 2022. Economists predicted that all of them would cause inflation. None of them did.

In 2022 we had money printing and a supply side squeeze. Insisting that the inflation was caused by the money printing rather than the supply side squeeze takes incredible chutzpah.

The money printing in response to COVID followed by the the infrastructure bill were at a scale not seen before and shouldn't be so easily dismissed in reference to previous deficit spending.

Germany (and others) printed at a lower rate. If it was a momentary phenomenon, they would have appreciated against the dollar and seen less inflation. Instead they depreciated against the dollar and saw more inflation.

Because they had a greater supply shock.

edit: monetary phenomenon. Autocorrect ugh.

I don't think so.

At least from my personal experiences I know of at least a dozen sales that 3 years ago they would have made hands now. People compromise and buy what are clearly worse cars to avoid the Tesla brand. A friend just brought an ioniq a few months ago, same friend who was salivating over our Tesla a few years ago and kept talking about buying one endlessly. Guess why they didn't buy one..

Heck. I'm one of those people. We were customers for life. But my wife who loves our Tesla won't agree to ever buy one again. So we're back to VW. Yay...

I wish they would get rid of Musk. It would be nice if Tesla was just a car company.

I feel the same about Starlink, sadly. And unlike Tesla there are no real alternatives.

Man, I wish Musk would just stay out of the limelight and enjoy his private life inventing new industries and taking the occasional Mars vacation or whatever. There was really no need to jump into the deep end the way he did.

I don't think Tesla can get rid of Musk.

If investors saw Tesla as just a car company the stock would collapse. Musk keeps making promises and breaking them, but it seems to pump the stock thus far.

> don't think Tesla can get rid of Musk

They can't and they shouldn't. Tesla has a solid business. It just looks like it may have capped out its growth prospects in the U.S. and Europe. (In vehicles.)

Tesla is certainly a solid memestock. It’s hard to say whether they have a solid business. If they dumped Musk, the stock would crash and they would have to install competent governance instead of continuously gaming the system. But that would be a better outcome for consumers.

They have a solid business. It's just not the world-changing fantastic future that Musk talks a big game about. That's fine. But "solid business" is not what has manufactured Tesla's ridiculous market cap.

If Tesla's valuation reflected its value as a regular car company like, say, Toyota, it would be vastly lower. Shareholders would lose oodles of money.

And it seems to US/European companies will ever be able to compete in China again. So what’s left?

> It would be nice if Tesla was just a car company.

What is Tesla?

If it was just a car company, it wouldn’t have the P/E ratio it does. It’s a technology company that makes cars (and self driving systems, AI, and robots).

davidw wasn't implying that it was a cause, just commenting.

1. The electric car market grew in 2024 in the US.

2. Tesla is one of the more affordable electric cars.

I want an EV and can afford a Tesla and I will never buy anything from Elon Musk as long as I live exactly because of his behavior.

>I think it's more simply that the market of people who want an EV and can afford a Tesla is now saturated.

Very likely, but I know of at least one person (me) who didn’t buy a Tesla due to what the parent comment brings up.