Model 2 might seem like the sensible move, but it is also a capitulation to the idea that Tesla is just a “car company” and has to compete on price and is destined for the inevitable race to the bottom with the likes of byd in an increasingly commoditized market.

Cybercab is doubling down on the speculative fiction future that fuels stock valuations that are out of line with the rest of the industry.

You are right. However, I think I agree with the vision, too bad its Musk+Tesla. I do think in the end we won't each own a car.

It's so incredibly inefficient to have individually owned cars just rotting away on the side of the road and in car parks waiting for their owner.

It would be so much better for everyone if no one, except enthusiasts, would own a car. And you could just grab an "auto taxi" wherever you are within a few minutes instead. Perhaps someday...

I think Musk should be more bold in his vision here. What if instead of a cybercab that seats just two people, we could come up with an even bigger one that seats many people at once? And then maybe we could have it drive on a predictable, efficient route that covers multiple popular destinations, instead of just going from point A to point B. Has anyone considered building something like this?

They literally did this in the announcement for the cybercab. Look up the “Tesla Robovan”. It was clearly a proof of concept, but in theory it’s a good idea. Claimed to be able to seat 20 people.

I think puppable is referring to a traditional bus following a traditional bus route.

Driving labor is a significant cost for running a taxi fleet, so automating it allows taxis to become much cheaper to operate. Taxis can charge higher fares than buses because people overwhelmingly prefer “going from point A to point B” over walking to, waiting for, and riding on buses.

Buses are already cheap and removing the cost of the driver would offer only a marginal reduction in cost.

> It's so incredibly inefficient to have individually owned cars just rotting away on the side of the road and in car parks waiting for their owner.

I'm not seeing a ton of inefficiency in me buying a bottom-of-the-line car and driving it until it's no longer driveable?

part of the problem is wasted space and money in cities for parking (and, to a certain extent, gridlock). i do own an old, bottom of the line car which i drive rarely - mostly on weekends out of the city as i usually cylce or take public transport. so it often occupies a parking spot 24/7 for a week or longer. on-street parking takes away a lot of spaces that's urgently needed for bike lanes, bus/tram exclusive lanes, walking and green spaces.

there's a good option for car sharing in vienna (car2go), but that's mostly inner-city iirc, so not my use case.

i guess, car sharing wouldn't reduce grid lock but ride sharing would. i suspect, ride sharing would be more acceptable if it wasn't your own car.

Anecdote: my wife wanted to trade up from a 3 to a Y. We won't so long as Elon is involved.

I also have an "Occupy Mars" shirt. It was one thing to bandwagon onto some topical events by a CEO who was touting Tesla's 100/100 lgbt friendliness rating and progressing toward human exploration, then one seig heiling and throwing the whole government into disarray and betraying our allies.

Personally the "Occupy Mars" thing rubbed me the wrong way when it came out. The message seemed to be "don't worry about inequality or the rise of the oligarchy because it'll get humans to Mars."

I hope we can now all see that

1) it won't get us to mars but

2) it will bring us a total-recall like dystopia.

Relevant (Archive footage of Elon on Mars when someone in your district tweets something he doesn't like):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8lT-Sn-HqE

Also, Cybertruck has three competitors in the US. The F-150 is definitely better for truck stuff, and the R1T definitely wins for camping/off-roading/recreation. Unlike the Cybertruck, the bed-mounted MAGA flag is optional on those two.

Neither the competition or the antics are the cause.

The combination however has been highly toxic for Tesla, like Apple it had an initial lead and a high trust factor due to size, experience and perceived tech lead. This also allowed them to charge a premium compared to the other makers.

Elon single-handedly eroded most of the trust factor and now that people are looking at alternatives (and being happy), they'll notice that there isn't much of a reason to be paying the premium in 2025 (not like 5-10 years ago).

The biggest question now is if they can ever recapture the position they held even with Elon gone or if they're yet another BEV automaker, trust as the saying goes is hard to gain and easy to squander (And even if Elon is gone, some of the previous halo goes with him but the antipathy cannot be gotten over with him in the reins, catch-22).

I think it's pretty obvious that the antics are a bit part of it. It's a big part in how Musk is eroding the trust in Tesla, but more than that, a car is also an image, a feeling. A few years ago, Tesla was widely loved ajd many people hoped to buy one some day, including me. Now lots of people wouldn't want to be caught dead in one.

And the real big factor are his support for Trump and his weird and destructive antics these past few months. There was competition a year ago, buy it's only now that sales are really falling off a cliff.

I honestly don't think Tesla wil exist in a couple of years. Musk will have made the brand too toxic.

It's honestly mind-blowing watching people desperately reach for anything, anything to explain the brand's sudden fall, out of nowhere. Even calling Elon's actions "antics" serves to downplay it. This isn't "antics" and it wasn't an "odd gesture" or whatever euphemism his supporters keep trying to use to downplay what happened. The CEO did a Nazi salute on stage. It's on video, and it's very, very obvious.

But no, it's not that. Surely anything but that! It's definitely a vague, complex web of market dynamics that's the real cause of the brand's downfall.

I think they were facing a rough 5+ years because their products aren’t great. Want a three row SUV? Tesla makes one, but it doesn’t have a steering wheel.

They win on efficiency (miles / kwh), but that’s about it at this point. Other manufacturers have better interiors (knobs and build quality, car play / android auto), form factors, etc.

Either that, or Elon would have been a serious problem for the company. Since they’re happening at the same time, it’s going to be rough.

> The CEO did a Nazi salute on stage. It's on video, and it's very, very obvious.

I think the only people who care about this are people who care about politics in the first place or didn't already like Elon, which isn't everyone and probably not the majority.

Whilst Elon has some blame for Tesla's bad brand image, competition in Europe has made it so if you go Tesla your basically paying a premium for the brand and that's it, Tesla's in Europe iirc have self driving capability much less than the US.

Apparently a nazi salute is a funny joke in the US. Very much not so in Europe.

It doesn't seem to be going down very well in the US either.

One factor is that even if you think Musk was just mucking about or misunderstood, there is still the embarrassment of other people thinking your car choice endorses that.

Note that GP used "whilst" which is British English, and previous posts seem Euro-centric and talk about renaming "American football." So it sounds like this person is Europe's problem.

The post had a number of grammatical errors too, so if "whilst" we're at it, should we criticize all of European education? Please don't post low-effort negative nationalism. It's cheap and the subject (the richest person alive is apparently a nazi) is a serious matter.

In Europe it's absolutely a majority. Musk is widely despised now. And this used to be a big market for Tesla.

I live in a red state. My Trump voting friends here call Elon Trump's nazi boy and in a very derogatory way. A lot of people are assuming Nazi behavior is way more accepted by Trump voters than it actually is (or maybe we're a different kind of red here than in the deep south).

Deep South reporting in. On the exceedingly rare occasion that white supremacists gather in public down here they're outnumbered somewhere between 10-100:1 pretty consistently. I'm not saying racial attitudes aren't what they are down here, but nobody much has any time for the Klan around these parts.

> I think the only people who care about this are people who care about politics in the first place or didn't already like Elon, which isn't everyone and probably not the majority.

... You think the majority of people don't care about Nazi salutes? I mean, certainly if we're talking Europe, yeah, sorry, the majority of people do care about Nazi salutes.

I think, also, that the kind of sneering, what would you call it, implausible deniability maybe, thing the US far-right like to do where they do something outrageously and then smugly deny that they did it, works less well in Europe (I'm not sure why Americans are so tolerant of it, tbh).

I mean, it's particularly unfortunate for Tesla that Musk decided to go crazy in a very public way _right now_ (he's been like this forever, of course, but until recently you had to be Very Online to notice; it wasn't on the news every day); it's at a time when it is, in any case, facing increased pressure from competitors. There's some aspect of a combination of factors; likely neither on their own would produce such a large effect.

What electric alternatives do you recommend with decent self driving tech for stop and go work commute?

It's also worth noting the S and X haven't been available in Australia for years (and I assume some other countries), which is probably a limiting factor too.

3 and Y compose 95% of Tesla’s sales. Not offering S and X does not move the needle.

https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-fourth-quarter-2024...

Makes sense, just adding the data point though. They weren't a common car here before that either.

Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. You’re completely correct.

But that doesn't explain the massive drop in sales.

It really is a combination of better and cheaper Chinese EVs, Trump negatively impacting Australia e.g. tariffs, undermining security and Musk's antics e.g. Nazi salute etc.

Yes.

Electric cars are getting simpler. Lithium-iron-phosphate batteries are safer. BYD has an "E-axle" kit, where motor, axle, and differential are a single unit. That goes with a power electronics box and battery.[1] Talks CANbus to the controls. Plug everything together and put a body on top, and you have a car. Or a truck.

EVs from all manufacturers are getting much cheaper. Margins are decreasing. This is a big problem for Tesla, with their grossly inflated stock price. Musk liked to say that Tesla investors are not investing in a car company, they are betting on Tesla's technology. What technology? Tesla is way behind Waymo in self-driving. There are at least four other humanoid robots as good as Tesla's, none profitable. Tesla is nowhere in solid-state batteries.

Rivian is outselling all other US makers in electric pickup trucks. Rivian's truck is not weird, like the Cybertruck, and it seems to be a decent pickup truck, although overpriced. I see them being driven around, often being used to do truck things, not just car things.

Even in the US, with protectionism keeping BYD out, Tesla isn't doing that well any more.

[1] https://insideevs.com/news/738606/byd-ev-teardown-impresses-...

> But that doesn't explain the massive drop in sales.

New model y releasing in May.

This may not explain all of the drop off, but I’m certain this refreshed model explains some of it.

Thankfully, we only have a few months before this excuse runs dry.

Tesla has had the slowest and most minor refresh cycles of any car marker in my lifetime and it has had a minimal impact on sales. Not sure why a refreshed Y is suddenly going to result in a 70% increase in sales.

Especially when in the next few weeks Trump/Musk are expected to start a trade war with Australia.

> Tesla has had the slowest and minimal refresh cycles of any car marker in my lifetime and it has had a minimal impact on sales.

The thing is Tesla operates on a "continuous refresh" model, they constantly iterate on all aspects of their design.

The downside of this is it makes supply chains for spare parts an utter damn nightmare, which is why spare parts are so hard to come by.

The other downside is that us other drivers get to experience their beta testing in prod. Few things are as annoying as driving behind a Model Y where the adaptive high beams don't work properly, and getting flashed by every oncoming car for miles on end.

They did operate on a "continuous refresh" basis. However, it mostly stopped for almost 2 years now. Other than HW4 I don't think anything else is different between current models and their iterations 2 years ago.

Edit: mostly speaking about Model Y, as Model 3 had actual refresh recently.

Nobody in europe is buying Chinese evs? Teslas are hot garbage. Also the real car manufacturers have better alternatives now. Experience matters. The sales figures are from before he went full Nazi. Some Teslas are banned for safety reasons in UK and Europe. That's how shit they are. Anyway - who is going to want a car that will be set on fire or at the very least keyed down every side within a week of owning it? Insurance costs alone will make them prohibitive to buy. Musk isn't going to last long anyway. He's on a death spiral. Hope he dies screaming. Nazi scum. SELL $TSLA

It’s telling that Tesla’s largest market share loses are occurring in foreign markets where BYD is allowed to compete.

If the falls were actually caused by Musks antics you would expect the inverse, with a larger effect in the US and attenuated effects in countries less invested in US politics.

If you assumed all markets were equally annoyed with the antics you'd expect more of an impact where it's easy to switch to something else.

Other countries don’t care about US politics as much as Americans think they do.

Especially non-English speaking countries.

Elon is the world’s richest man, not just the states’, and he has been meddling in the politics of other nations such us Germany and the UK.

Musk promoted AfD and Reform and Meloni and various Irish far-right micro-parties, and presumably other European far-right parties, and did a Nazi salute on stage. And threatened Poland and Ukraine, and is part of a regime which is pushing a trade war with Europe. Like, I'm not sure why you think he's just a factor in US politics.

That might tie back to Elon’s antics. Tesla seems to be mostly leaderless since Elon decided that his mission was pushing right-wing populism instead of sustainable transportation and Mars.

> Elon’s antics certainly haven’t helped things

Doing Nazi salutes might drive sales in the US, but this is the understatement of the year.

Yeah; they’re going to nail the EV market for coal-rolling neo-nazis with “drill-baby-drill” bumper stickers.

The rest of the US? Not so much.

> Cybercab

Why do they always try to make a taxi out of it? I mean Waymo, now Cybercab. I would gladly pay a high premium for such a car to be able to work on my laptop on the way from my home to the office while in a car. I don't mind the whole taxi concept for some cases but just not sure about focusing or taking a meeting call from a taxi with strangers.

Why sell you a product once when they can milk you forever with a service?

Anecdote. My friend's wife wanted a Tesla but after explaining to her about Musk, they are now looking at alternatives.

It's not a "devil's bargain."

Tesla's most productive factory is in Shanghai, and Tesla was doing great in the Chinese market.

It's not China's fault that Musk chose to prioritize the development of the Cyber Truck over new mass-market cars, and it's not China's fault that he's going around giving Nazi salutes on stage.