That EV market share direction in the US, though .. really bad compared to non-petrostates (except Norway)
They don’t do a good job at the car company part. They make nice cars, but the company part has issues. Quick example… I was very happy to drive a model 3 for many years. But the constant changes in price of their new cars destroyed any resale value mine had. Every time Tesla was having a bad quarter, the value of my car dropped. That’s not the way to get me to buy another one.
There are certainly other areas where they could improve too. But my point being - they’ve never been all that good at what it takes to drive long term success in selling cars. It’s just too long of a time horizon for them.
Personally I'm with you. I love my car because its exactly enough car for my needs. I bought it new (in 2016) and I never want to sell it. I'd get so much less (or more to the point I can't buy a new car) for the same money I spent on it.
And even if you do keep cars indefinitely, it can still be an important consideration because it affects how things work out when you need to make an insurance claim. It means your car is both more likely to be declared a total loss and more likely to be worth less than what you still owe for it when it does get totaled.
But look at this from Tesla’s point of view. They want to sell as many cars as possible. If they sell me a car, that’s just one sale. However, every marketing book will tell you that it’s easier to sell to an existing customer.
If my car (an asset) has more resale value, I’m more likely to sell it to buy a new one. They should be trying to protect my resale value — if they want me as a repeat customer.
Or, what I’m leasing the car (reasonable for an EV and used to have better tax incentives)… if the end of lease value is low, I have to spend more on the depreciation over the lease. That makes my monthly payment higher. Instead, if the end of lease value is higher, I have a lower monthly payment and I’m more likely to buy the car.
Either way, Tesla was good at selling one car. They need to get better at selling the second or third one.
Remember, this is from the Tesla point of view... and it's a long time-horizon perspective. It's a much easier decision from the customer's point of view.
(And there are other ways for companies to incentivize sales with discounts and promotions that don't obviously impact the "value" of the car).
Speaking as someone who mostly drives 20 year old cars.
GM - $74.5B market cap (6.2M cars sold annually)
Ford - $50.2B (4.6M)
Volkswagen - $40B (9M)
BYD - $100B (4.6M)
Toyota - $256B (11.3M)
Hyundai - $57B (7.3M)
Tesla - $1.4T (1.6M)
The numbers simply don't add up.
2. compare growth opportunities, ie https://www.tesla.com/robotaxi - rollout is going well, and every cybercab produced nets what ? $25k/year? $75k/year? vs $5-8k once per car sold?
I don't know if robotaxi will take off, but if it does, it massively undercuts Waymo because the vehicles are just so much cheaper to make and are made in house.
Closest thing is like the Ioniq 9 but the cargo space really sucks.
For a polished product that ticks all the boxes, I would pay a premium for this.
*XPeng X9* - Seven seats, 800V charging, and a third row that folds into the floor. The long-range version has 382 miles WLTP range and charges 10–80% in approximately 12 minutes under ideal conditions.
*Li Auto MEGA* - Seven seats, 800V architecture, 441 miles CLTC range, and manufacturer-claimed charging that adds 311 miles of CLTC range in 10 minutes. Li Auto says its trunk holds four 28-inch suitcases with all seven seats occupied.
*Zeekr 009* - Seven-seat versions, up to 460 miles CLTC range, and 10–80% charging in as little as 10 minutes on the upgraded 900V model. Very luxurious, though some versions offer less rear cargo space.
*Denza D9 EV* - Seven seats, 115-kWh battery, up to 497 miles CLTC range, and BYD Flash Charging claims of 10–70% in five minutes using compatible ultra-high-power chargers.
China is years ahead of the West (EU/US) in terms of EVs.
They are running a fleet of taxis around the Bay Area. It's kind of scary because they aren't that safe, given the lack of LIDAR. But they are doing it anyway.
And also, they are driving fully autonomous in Texas and Florida.
So let me guess, fully unsupervised self driving is rolling out "next year" right?
This seems like a pretty hostile response to a well answered question. Weird.
> Miles Driven Autonomously
https://www.newsweek.com/doge-cuts-watchdogs-investigating-s...
> Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) reportedly cut 30 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) workers in February, disproportionately affecting regulators tasked with assessing self-driving vehicle risks, according to a Financial Times report.
Is there data to suggest they are unsafe in Austin - as in less safe than a human?
how does your brain work?
The implication seems to be that Tesla are lying about accidents. It seems like that would easily get caught out. Accidents tend to be things that happen in public.
Overall, I doubt that there's a problem. If there were substantial numbers of significant accidents occurring on public roads that weren't being reported, I think someone would be catching reporting errors. There are a lot of very interested parties watching autonomous vehicles. (competitors, media, etc.)
It’s not hard to be better then an average human generally, the issue is liability as when a driverless taxi hits or hurts someone you can’t just go “but we are safer then human drivers!”
So then where are all the horrible accidents if they're not safe?
Probably will get acquired by SpaceX to hide the poor financials
Cybertruck was a mistake but rest of the business is printing cash hand over fist.
A side effect of Trump's war with Iran is that every country which doesn't have sufficient domestic oil production, which is most countries especially in Europe, has accelerated their EV transition. Buyers are grabbing every EV they can get their hands on, and yes Tesla are the leader there.
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-electric-car-registratio...
"Tesla (TSLA.O), led the UK BEV market year-to-date, with registrations up 25.4% from a year earlier and a 9.53% market share South Korea's Kia (000270.KS), and China's BYD (002594.SZ), continued to compete for second place, with market shares of 6.9% and 6.8%, respectively"
The Kia model breakdown: https://www.kiapressoffice.com/releases/1975 (mostly Niro, now withdrawn, then EV6)
It's actually 4th in ev sales in Europe.... https://cleantechnica.com/2026/10/03/europe-ev-sales-report-...
And that's when ranked by manufacturer, which is only slightly less arbitrary than by model as auto groups just use it for market segmentation. If you rank them as groups (e.g. VW group), then Tesla isn't even in the top 5.
https://www.reuters.com/business/tesla-registrations-surge-a...
Huh? The cybercab with no steering wheel is only operating in Austin, in tiny premapped areas. There are 45 registered in Texas, and they have only been operating since September.
This isn’t Twitter, you’re generally expected to at least attempt to provide factual information here.
https://www.fox7austin.com/news/tesla-launches-cybercab-aust...
“Printing money hand over fist” is an interesting way to frame the dramatic drop in their margin on every vehicle sold.
About as many cybercabs driving around as Waymo, and this doesn't count the Model Y Robotaxis:
https://robotaxitracker.com/cameras?kind=cybercab&metric=veh...
~300 cybercabs in service in TX
Depends on the year. It and the RAV4 switch places now and then.
But that is over a baseline of 2-7 sightings.
There's a reason why we don't go all in on penny stocks when they go up 200% in value, you know.
Only when compared to their recent record lows... the broader trend is still downwards. This is disingenuous. They are losing ground to other manufacturers in Europe
Also the Teslas that Europe is buying are made in China not the US.
The countries where EVs are increasing the most are those that have access to Chinese EVs.
They are primarily from Germany. There are some imports from China but they are subject to tariffs.
Seems like your conclusions are wrong
Not so in Europe. In the Netherlands, the top 10 EVs sold in 2025 [1] has not a single Chinese car.
[1] https://www.anwb.nl/auto/kopen/nieuwe-auto/best-verkochte-ni...
They should just be the Toyota of EVs -- mass produce quality vehicles people want to drive -- instead he's trying to be Tony Stark and keep pumping it as a meme stock.
Tesla remains excellent at engineering and manufacturing. They need not seek the exotic.
He's a liability to that company, not an asset, at this point. And his name has become a brand liability.
If Musk left, the stock would crash. But the company would be profitable.
It makes for an interesting argument why executive comp should be capped - so they can focus on the product as the product (to benefit consumers) instead of the stock as the product (to benefit execs especially in short term)
It's not every quarter, but it's steady and that spells absolute disaster for US car manufacturers:
https://www.coxautoinc.com/insights/q3-2026-ev-sales-report-...
US car companies have been protected and bailed out too many times and are now not only completely uncompetitive on the global market, but set up to be completely demolished as EVs take over.
Their bad leadership and overall inefficiency mean that either investors are going to pay a massive price, or US consumers are going to pay a massive price. If we keep on pushing up consumer costs by propping up bad manufacturers with protectionism and bail outs, the US's entire economy is drug down by that.
There needs to be some creative destruction, ruthless culling of the least efficient manufacturers, so that their best workers can go to the better manufacturers, if the US is ever going to be a top tier car manufacturer again.
I hadn't followed just how bad US manufacturers were failing at EVs the past two years, what with all the other disasters unfolding, thanks for the wake up call. Two years of wasted time, of the US falling even farther behind... such a massive fail and yet not the most massive.
Try two generations. I think it was obvious since the oil shocks that fossil fuels were not a good bedrock of the economy.
Solar panels are an even more remarkable example of compounding a thousand different 1% improvements.
But they aren't really. In terms of efficiency, a 2x increase is a lot yes but the thing that has finally made them really viable is simply the cost dropping like a rock.
I don't care if I have to buy 2x as many solar panels when they cost as much as a fence post.
That cost reduction was entirely investment into production capacity. None of that couldn't have been accomplished decades ago.
That's the saddest part. If we had been adults in the 70s, we could already be done the green revolution basically. We could have seriously prevented global warming.
But a bunch of idiots rejected that and instead voted for people who doubled down on fucking up the middle east and burning liquids.
PV entrepreneurs are the real heroes of the climate movement, IMHO. They figured out markets that would have enough demand to push forward with developing the tech. Germany's government is a major hero too, they pushed the tech forward so far at a crucial time. Then China took up the mantle.
Both supply and demand need to build together for the industry to grow. Government subsidies played a huge role in accelerating this, and will have paid for themselves so many times over. We're going to live in a world of super-cheap technology thanks to the modest tax-cut-based investments of governments the world over.
It does suck that so many powerful people were against the obvious-in-retrospect good idea of solar PV, but I'd love to focus on all the heroes that pushed through anyway and made it happen. They deserve a lot of thanks!
As you said, subsidies played a huge role. Look at the timeline when Germany and then Spain set up their subsidies and the following ramp up in PV production.
Sure, it was an idea at the right time, but the right time needed decades of political groundwork.
While the entrepreneurs deserve some credit, they generally got cash. The movements got massive backlash by conservatives and some got terrorism charges for protesting non-violently.
With the strangle hold that these industries have on getting the government to bail them out, we are in a really bad position on the national level when we let bad politics and weak management override good economic decision making.
The Big Three have not figured out how to make compelling EVs, without a doubt, but it's not the technology that's the problem, it's the leadership's product choices and failure of implementation.
Meaning that the entire industry will be pushed farther and farther behind in the race, only to be completely disrupted.
This will happen far slower than the transition from Palm to iOS-style phones, because the lifetime of cars is far longer than phones and are far larger investments, but the trend is inevitable. EVs are superior on so many different fronts that there's ~0 chance that gas and diesel engines persist except for a tiny fraction of future market share.
US manufacturers are trying to delay the transition as long as possible, which only ensures their own doom.
Koreans look competitive. It's interesting that the later the entrant to the market, the faster they are to adapt.
Your comment would be like if 85% of the market was EVs and you said that cars with manual transmission are still doing great, better than autos.
Wyoming‘s population of 600,000 people is less than one percent of total US population, for example.
Here’s mine:
Interactive: Visualizing Median Income For All 3,000+ U.S. Counties - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/interactive-median-income-u... (blue is better, red is worse)
Seriously though, everywhere I've lived there have been at least some doctors, dentists, college professors, business owners and suchlike; even Mississippi has hospitals, or so I'm told.
If we expect Rural America to buy EVs, someone will have to force them to be affordable. Allow Chinese imports, or nationalize an automaker as they approach failure.
We should watch how poorly its going trying to have NYC own something as simple as a few grocery stores. If the government is stepping in to make things cheaper they're destroying competition in the entire industry. They either inadvertently end up owning the entire industry by driving out all privately owned companies, or they subsidize those private companies so they can compete with the state owned ones.
Mamdani has a ~70% approval rating, and a long list of wins, New York City is doing phenomenal. If you think it isn’t, well, you’re ignoring reality. That’s a choice. Do so at your own peril.
Mamdani's approval rating is beside my point. My point was simply that we have a current example of a government in the US attempting to nationalize (well its in a city but I don't know what that form of the term would be) a portion of an industry and it already ran aground. The publicly owned version can be run not for profit, meaning it beats a competition in price. Either the competition all leave or the state ends up having to subsidize their entire profit margin so they can compete.
People can approve of Mamdani and the city as a whole can be doing very well under his leadership. That doesn't change the outcome of the grocery store program of the topic.
I do agree though, time will tell if this fresh round of socialism fairs better than past attempts. History shows it fails miserably every time it is attempted, if the US were to make it work they would be the first.
The people who complain about socialism and communism are the ones looking for a right to exploit others under an economic system for their own economic gain, socialism and communism cram down what these exploiters would be able to achieve while achieving a more solid floor under the poorest and most disadvantaged. A tale as old as time.
Exploitation is always a challenge. As you said, those today often yelling for capitalism are actually wanting to exploit those not paying attention or small enough to he steamrolled. In socialism, its those at the top that end up exploiting the rest of the country.
Here's a table of states with median, top 20%, and top 5% figures: https://beforeview.com/income-percentile/state
Mississippi, the lowest one on the list, has a top 5% at over $200,000/year. That's ~150,000 people in households who can comfortably afford a nice new EV, in just one small, poor state.
The states defined by the Census Bureau as being in "the midwest" (a subset of "flyover states") contain about 70 million people. The top 5% would be 3.5 million people who can afford a nice new EV. And this is conservative: someone in the top 6% can probably afford one too, but I'm not counting them, and there's plenty of "flyover state" territory beyond the midwest.
California is big enough and rich enough to have a huge amount of market power. But it's not so big and rich that it makes 100+ million Americans in the middle of the country completely irrelevant and ignorable.
Cool, build rail and solar.
I'd say Koreans are probably the closest to the Chinese, but Japanese manufacturers have fallen behind. Toyota spent too much time with hydrogen. Nissan? Honda? Mazda? None of them have a solid lineup of electric vehicles.
I appreciate Toyota's hybrids, but that is not the future and every model year that they try to delay, they are missing out on developing the technology, experience, internal expertise, and platform refinement.
> It's a shame __________ didn't lean harder into EVs
Nissan seems to be scaling back their EV push in the US, though — but not in Europe, as far as I know.
Nissan is also making EVs for the Chinese market, which are not being exported anywhere else.
I'm not sure where they think the market for this exists in sustainable numbers.
It is genuinely insane how divorced SV is from actual people and reality.
And that SLS launched first isn't surprising it started to get 2 billion $ a year funding long before SpaceX had any money to invest in such projects.
And what matters for a rocket isn't 'first to orbit' that's only how idiots compare rockets. What matters is first 10 or even 100 flights.
And as for R&D, fine do R&D, but you still have to produce what actually sells. The simple fact is, hydrogen cars, either fuel cell or ICE are rounding errors. They have been rounding errors for decades and have made essentially no progress despite 50+ years of continuous government funding and R&D.
They are not just doing R&D, they have literally spend marketing money demonizing EVs. They have encouraged and leaned in to all government lead efforts to delay the EV industry. They have lobbied for regressive legislation. To act as if 'all they do is some nice R&D' is pathetic.
Toyota has not done like Tesla and invested in infrastructure, like hydrogen fuel stations. Because they know this is delusional and will never happen. Their hope has always been that government is going to build all the infrastructure for them, and pay for their R&D. They have been grifting government R&D money for literal decades. Even while with just a fraction of that money the EV industry was established. They have been lobbying Japans government for decades and have used that to prevent more beneficial R&D and infrastructure investment.
And Toyota is barley even selling these 'diversified portfolios'. Go and actually try to buy a hydrogen ICE or hydrogen fuel cell cars. In literally 99.9% of the world you can't buy them.
Hydrogen is a pipe-dream propped up by government budgets and anybody that believed in its wide deployment in 2000 was a moron, anybody that still believes in it in 2027 is straight up delusional. So if anybody is divorced from reality its you.
While most others are wasting money on failed forays into the EV market, Toyota has quietly made their entire fleet (modulo trucks) hybrid.
At this point anyone can design a chassis to accommodate a skateboard battery and some drive motors. The only thing Toyota would need to wholeheartedly jump into EV is the supply chain and production capability for big battery packs. Admittedly this is a biggie, but don't discount the possibility that batteries are not at the end of their evolution and early entrants might get burned by some new chemistry or form factor.
the iphone is an outlier imho, and i dont think EV will replicate this.
The manufacturing capacity of batteries in china will continue to be a dominant force, and prevent competition in other countries from really setting up properly.
Not to mention the chinese EV giants have the R&D budget to be the ones to discover new chemistry.
China will have a critical mass of research, scientists, manufacturing, engineers, and the right government buy in to stay ahead because there's so much demand.
They are surviving because of massive scale but they are losing ground.
> The only thing Toyota would need to wholeheartedly jump into EV is the supply chain and production capability for big battery packs.
So the only thing they need is the hardest part of the supply chain. At Toyota scale building that supply-chain is fucking gigantic. It takes a decade to build that.
All the battery companies already have large multi-year of-take agreements. And they are not building massive new capacity without new demand.
> but don't discount the possibility that batteries are not at the end of their evolution and early entrants might get burned by some new chemistry or form factor.
We haven't seen new form factors in many decades.
As for chemistry, everybody is working on that. Toyota has burned billions and achieved nothing.
Yes new chemistry are constantly coming in, but the reality is, each new chemistry innovation needs a decade or so to scale. And it mostly builds on existing supply chains and suppliers.
Take a look at things like silicon additives, they have been talked about for a long time, and it has been increasing. And it will continue to increase, but its not a magical pill that makes all existing battery factories obsolete.
Battery companies sell their new state of the art batteries to their long term partners first. And those partners are the first to learn of new innovations.
Tesla is stuck with a cylindrical battery supply chain because they built that out. Basically their undoing since their cars are crappy enough where they need to compete on price alone. They give away their margin by buying 3p prismatics for their bottom end offerings. So being first can and does burn you badly.
Its absolutely possible that they did all miss the boat, but even the stats just in this thread point to a drop in EV sales and economic challenges with regards to price and demand. The Chinese keep prices low with very low labor costs and subsidies from a totalitarian government, our goal isn't and shouldn't be to compete with that on price.
Lower labour costs per hour can be balanced against lower cost of living for workers.
Industrial Policy Spending for China’s EV Sector (subsidies) have dropped from $13,800 USD per vehicle in 2018 to $4,700 USD in 2023 and are less today in 2026.
How do these subsidies compare to US subsidies to the fossil fuel oil and gas industry?
The oil industry is irrelevant here and feels more like a whataboutism deflection. We can debate the oil industry, based on your comment we'd likely agree on much of it, but that's a separate discussion.
Happy to be wrong here, but my timeline would have expected US subsidies in those industries to begin somewhere around the 70s give or take a decade, as both industries consolidated heavily.
The company would not exist as it does today without such funding.
That's.. completely sensible? Don't we all want a world with lower carbon emissions?
Whether we want lower carbon emissions, whether carbon emissions is the only metric that matters, whether moving from ICE vehicles to EVs, etc are all interesting topics in their own right.
Xiaomi YU7 is $30k new, and much nicer than a Model Y. Never subsidized.
And they do have plenty of flaws to call out, though living in the US today I don't want to throw stones in a glass house...
That said — let's be realistic and dispassionate.
> There needs to be some creative destruction, ruthless culling of the least efficient manufacturers, so that their best workers can go to the better manufacturers, if the US is ever going to be a top tier car manufacturer again.
Inflicting job losses at that scale is not going to happen. US protectionism (a euphemism for ahem current federal initiatives) is alive and well. The legacy US auto makers have a huge domestic market and their survival is a primary motive for the US trade/tariff war. (Does the thoroughly corrupt administration face any comeuppance? That is a different discussion.)
The lack of EVs has not been a pivotal concern of voters. US voters want cheap fuel. Affordability was a fundamental concern for voters. The mid-term election result is not about loftier environmental goals.
> Their bad leadership and overall inefficiency
Yes, "an American vehicle" is known for grotesque size and high cost of maintenance. And now after two years of a despicable administration, "an American vehicle" is also a Trump-Miller-Hegseth-Bessent-Lutnick-Musk-*.arsehole symbol.
Even so, Tesla sales success is real, domestic and abroad. People who can afford them buy them.
I realize that some of it is just a cult of personality, and that part will be unusually sticky because of things like cognitive dissonance. But that can’t be all of it. My next best guess is a bunch of it is a whole bunch of institutional investors are privately thinking these companies are way too risky, but keep it to themselves because it’s not their money they’re putting on the line and taking a contrarian position would risk angering a presumably vocal subset of clients of unknown size. Which isn’t a great way to make yourself popular with your boss.
The biggest knock on him is that he says something will happen at a certain time and then it comes later. Even the sub-$30k EV. Cybercabs cost < $30k.
"We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead."
This is the richest man in the world being GLEEFUL abut destroying an organization that helps the poorest people in the world. Musk is basically Ebeneezer Scrooge.
In an interview when asked about it he insisted their was vast amounts of fraud in USAID.
Which you "prove" by linking to a story how $9 million was "diverted" (although the person responsible was caught and charged) out of a total of $12 billion.
That's 9 parts of 12 thousand or 0.075% that you are describing as "a lot".
So far all you have demonstrated is that US AID loses less aid money than CBH loses in grain to parrots each year.
If you think think that millions of tonnes of grain should be not transported because less than 1% is eaten by parrots then you're committed to starving millions of food.
There are others but I suspect there is no quantity or quality of examples that would change your mind.
Keep in mind that the fraud that is discovered and prosecuted is usually only a small fraction of what actually exists.
What makes you think this is the Trump administration lying about fraud versus them shining a light on actually fraudulent organization that you believe was doing a good job?
You tell me: what kind of Valid Evidence would convince you one way or the other?
"What makes you think this is the Trump administration lying about fraud"
Because they lie constantly about absolutely everything.
"what kind of Valid Evidence would convince you one way or the other?"
Evidence that comes from people not involved with destroying USAID.
(I literally just asked Gemini "how many deaths are verified to be caused directly by the sudden shutdown of usaid?" to find some articles I had read featuring actual journalists tracking deaths on the ground.)
I have read multiple other articles to the same effect from different publications. Aid got cut off instantly, people could not access medicine and food that they needed, and people died. Horribly.
Get out of your bubble before you destroy your soul.
It's all estimates based on a model that projected what would happen, which has been circulated by numerous publications with inflammatory headlines. The goal is likely to create your exact reaction.
If you'd like to try it yourself, use a deep research skill modeled after Karpathy's approach tell it to fully investigate the claim. Assume all sources of journalism from any outlet have a political bias and draw conclusion only from verifiable primary source data.
Ignoring dozens if not hundreds of promises that never came. You can't wait forever.
Neuralink is still in clinical trials. So it hasn’t actually been delivered yet, and there’s no actual guarantee that it will be.
From a certain perspective, SpaceX’s launch business was an effort to create an airline in space. And that’s exactly what they did, profit margins and all.
Starlink is looking good right now, but its profits seem to be heavily propped up by crony capitalism, and their up-and-coming competition was just handed a gift beyond their wildest dreams courtesy of Elon Musk.
The AI bit, well… yeah.
Tesla has had some past greatness, but, as I mentioned above, all of their recent misfortune is wholly or partially the fault of its own CEO. Worse, many of the minds more directly behind past successes have left the company. Investment is about future prospects, not past glory.
Boring Company’s greatest commercial success thus far is the Las Vegas loop. That’s all that needs to be said about that.
Furthermore, what exactly are you getting at, anyway? If I just uncritically gave all my money to anyone who I think might have hired people who are better at mechanical engineering than I am, then I would have no money.
Speech Restoration - https://x.com/neuralink/status/2100342084011978896
Controlling a Power Wheelchair - https://x.com/neuralink/status/2080405463649100114
Playing Games - https://x.com/neuralink/status/2057943187746849002
Using a computer & drawing a signature - https://x.com/neuralink/status/2057222230807830948
Painting with a Robotic Arm - https://x.com/neuralink/status/2055351348728668340
What's that saying? "In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
But if Optimus ends up with a HW3 problem (current manufactured Optimus bots aren't autonomus yet because the software isn't finished) he'll have a pile of Cybertrucks and early-model Optimus units rotting in a field.
Personally, I just don't see it. If he merges Tesla and SpaceX it won't really be about cars or vehicle autonomy.
Their current stock valuation can't ride this uncertainty forever. At some point he has to have new products that work, no caveats.
Robotaxi is live in some markets. I've used it twice here in Houston. Works quite well.
If autopilot is basically the only thing Tesla has going for it then they’ve got a risky path ahead of them.
Unsupervised FSD is, yes.
> and “will competitors be able to replicate Tesla’s success?”.
I wouldn't bet on a big auto-maker, personally. But maybe they can outsource it. And...well, AI. Things are moving fast. But I think the moat can hold for a while.
Maybe a stock crash and total failure of Tesla will be the best thing that happens. The US government (assuming us citizens can somehow continue to claw it back) or some benevolent entity can buy the ML models for cheap and open source them. It's really their only truly valuable, resilient asset, IMO.
I loved how the Cybertruck looked but when I test-drove it, I realized it wasn't for me. Tesla can now do a Rivian R1 or Hyundai Palissade type design and do well. But they will prioritize the cab since they got it to the current scale pretty quickly and it will be a money printer for them.
Tech first companies like Waymo: yes, clearly.
OEM US automakers? Not a chance, not ever. They can’t do a simple infotainment system to save themselves. If they want to “auto” driving, they’re going to license it from some other company.
1. Turn into my subdivision sensibly. Always missed the filter lane. Signalled at the point of making the extremely late decision to turn. Much angst behind.
2. Ignore the yellow flashing warning lights above highway 99. Always jammed on the brakes. The warning lights were not stops, ever, just "please avoid this bit of road furniture".
3. Obey the speed limit on the same highway. Either set itself to 110kph (I wish) or 40kph seemingly at random and sometimes different speeds for the same sections. For reference, most of the 99 that I use is 90kph, varied down if there's an incident or fog. Repeated notifications to Tesla had no effect. Note this is separate from the +/- margin that you could set; the base limit that it used was incorrect. It could even show me a speed limit sign in the screen, parse the speed correctly (to show the sign traffic) but blithely assure me the limit was 110.
These three things alone were taking the "F" out of the purchased product. I don't miss it, I didn't get good value out of it. Beta or no, it's a fundamentally flawed product which could never be implemented using the hardware in my car. It was the most direct lie Elon told to me personally.
For instance, how it detects pedestrians. Ive had instances where someone is looking to cross, the FSD either ignores them completely or it slows down a little, baits them into going forward, then resumes running them over. It detects car to car problems very well but doesn’t try to interpret pedestrian’s intent outside of the actual road.
You might be waiting a while, though... If it's not happening now, it's unlikely to ever happen.
The only people I've seen driving cybertrucks tend to be asian or older white guys that likely think Elon is great. Yes, this is a generalization, but an observation over thousands of miles between the Bay Area and Vancouver, BC.
I think Tesla is in for more hurt over the coming years, which I don't think is necessarily a bad thing in my opinion on how Musk has handled himself in the public arena with Tesla and Starlink.
It's crazy that Democrats were the pro EV party because of the environment, and half the reason liberals bought Teslas, but Elon's white supremacy overrode his business interests and he went all in with the fossil fuel party.
Oh yeah, he also made what - $500 billion dollars? - by aligning with corruption and cronyism.
edit - also, as I've become older, I find myself saying more and more that my dad was right. I guess he may have realized the same thing after he alienated his family. It turns out maybe there was some wisdom in the old emerald mine magnate papa (</s>) and any criticism of how workers are treated, or markets manipulated, or harm caused to millions - it is just woke haters.
Wow. Compare with 41% in France (in October), 37% in Germany, 60% in China.
People may actually start buying Teslas again if they're no longer associated with a fascist trillionaire. The number of "I bought this before Elon went crazy" bumper stickers is very high. The people who would buy an electric car are turned off by his association with the brand. He's more of an albatross on the brand than a hype machine.
That’s not true in general but the Cybertruck in particular is stupid expensive to manufacture. And then there’s the 4680 fiasco. I think it’s more of a personal political design than a realistic product.
Elon made this into something cool, but creating a whole model line for a single country is risky. Especially if that model is already in a small niche and has an incredibly controversial design.
I wish people would stop saying stood things like this and consider the structural and technical reasons why TSLA share values might be disconnected from the company's performance. (No one wants to do that because it might point to misbehavior by market participants.)
Hundreds of billions of dollars do not move because of "hype"; someone, somewhere is making a calculated decision.
Well, that is factual false. In Germany for example, the market share of chinese car vendors (EV or not) is 6.1%. And the market share of "pure" EVs is 37.0%, the one of plug-in-hybrides is 11.2%.
So there is no way that chinese vendors dominate the german car market. Not the whole one, not the EV submarket.
I think you US guys should stop declaring victory of china. It's entirely in your head and makes you non-competitive. For example, Germany as a export-import surplus since the 50s, every single year. While the USA has an export-import deficit since the 70s, again every single year. And because of your deficit you now collectively think "Oh, we are de-industrialized and China is leading worldwide, we can never compete". I can't say if the first thing is true. But the 2nd is false: China is not leading worldwide. Otherwise Germany could not have a surplus. And if the small Germany can compete, then so could you.
- The emissions credit market (where Tesla made most of its money) is dead due to lowered standards.
- Manufacturing costs haven't come down.
- EV sales share in the US is down to 6% (and falling every quarter).
- Chinese EVs are dominating every market outside the US.
- All the hyped moonshots (sub-$30K car, unsupervised autopilot, autonomous robots) are nowhere to be seen.
It's hard to see where Tesla goes from here as a company. The stock is surviving on Elon hype but has been stagnant for 5 years. The day he gets bored and decides to resign to focus on SpaceX full time the company is basically done.