All that said, I think Tesla and the EV industry as a whole will need to do a lot to bring down their repair costs. It's insane that these cars are designed in such a way that even minor fender benders cost tens of thousands to repair. I actually think government should create liability limits for vehicles to incentivize car makers to make repairable cars. That is, if you're driving around with a Faberge egg as a hood ornament, and I ding it, I don't think I should be responsible for the outrageous repair charges - the recklessness was on your side, in my opinion, for putting such a fragile/expensive machine on public roads. Otherwise car makers have little incentive to improve the repairability of their cars.
This is effectively already a thing in most US insurance markets. TDI (Texas) requires $25k minimum coverage for property damage, so in general this is what everyone is going to have.
If your car is worth more than that and someone runs into you and totals it, you are ~fucked unless you have additional un[der]insured motorist coverage on your side. Suing someone for the difference is a 10/10 nightmare experience. Many people who are driving like ass also seem to have really bad financial situations. There is such a thing as being so poor that you are judgement proof.
The overall effect of this is that drivers of high value (i.e., luxury) vehicles typically take it upon themselves to ensure the safety of their property. They don't make it the problem of everyone else. If their Faberge egg of a lambo gets wrecked, they understand the other parties probably aren't going to be able to replace it. Certainly, follow through with everyone's insurer and wring every policy dry, but the rest is up to the presumably wealthy luxury vehicle owner.
If you are driving a luxury vehicle and cant handle the risk of an underinsured driver totaling it, you should question if you can actually afford the vehicle.
Anyway that lends some credence to your beliefs.
The cost comes from "Tesla approved body shops" - which have some sort of monopoly on doing body work.
That is, if you don't want to possibly have arguments with Tesla if something is wrong which they may try to attribute to the car being repaired in some back-alley kind of workshop...
To add, body shops apparently rather replace whole parts which could have straightened out by a skilled repair guy.. for much less, achieving the same thing and even keeping the original panels, welds etc...
Talking about repairability - i really have to give Tesla credit for making the whole of all maintenance manuals (same Tesla themselves have) available for free.
And the side panel in this case stretches the entire length of the car.
Twenty years ago I paid about $2000 - not inflation-adjusted, that figure - to put a new bumper on an Audi whose owner, looking back, no doubt had much better reason than I to leave our respective insurance companies out of the matter. At the time it was a shocking amount. These days, even the inflation-adjusted equivalent - nearly five grand! - seems like something a lot of car owners are happy, or at least willing, to swallow.
That's fundamentally impossible. Just look at car crash ratings and automotive deaths over the last decades.
These old rigid steel frames were damn easy to repair - but were deathtraps for people inside and outside, not to mention Cw values more similar to a brick wall than a F1 car. The reason modern cars are so crash-safe is because literally everything is a crumple zone, absorbing kinetic energy. You can't just heat up and bend affected parts any more, you got to replace them.
And on top of that, requirements on lower fuel usage mean that parts have to be aerodynamically optimized and as lightweight as possible, which means plastics and composite materials, hollowed out shapes and god knows what else. That's making parts more expensive to manufacture and replace as well.
It's not just Tesla, and it's not just the EV industry either. It's not even recent. My ten year old car has some scratches in a plastic body panel and minor bumper damage thanks to me backing into something. Stupid, I know, but that thin piece of formed plastic should not cost me €700 and the bent plastic bar should not be costing anywhere near €300 to order. The mechanic is expensive enough already. Luckily I don't care about a bit of visual damage, but it's still infuriating.
More and more cars are cheaply produced, with maintenance as an afterthought, and that leads to flimsy, difficult to replace, specialised components, often non-modular to save on production cost.
The cost for cheap manufacturing is blindly passed onto insurance and now a kid on a bike can bankrupt their family by accidentally hitting a Tesla. It's ridiculous. But it's hardly a Tesla-only problem, and it's been going on for years.
Well aside from the fact that if your vehicle wasn't incredibly reliable you'd never be willing to accept such an abysmal ability to repair it.
Germany's Volkswagen for example has its own insurance and banking arm. The bank got established in 1949, however I couldn't find out when they expanded in insurance.
Kinda makes sense - selling cars is a cut-throat business with ever tighter margins, the real money is to be made in financing/leasing, insurance and aftersales services.
Maybe I would know differently if I'd ever bought a car new off the lot, but I'm still driving the one I bought in 2019 and back then it still made sense to look at buying new as mostly a waste of money.
I've never looked into how truthful it is, but it smacks of idiotic/arrogant executive tropes so well I almost don't want to discover it's false
Looking over GMAC's history via Wikipedia, I find they did underwrite insurance for a time and that no other US insurance company originated within an automaker. That suggests to me Tesla's operating model here is indeed about as unusual in context as I originally - well, intuited, I suppose. I think that's interesting.
No other auto maker before them (to my knowledge) has built their own grid of gas stations, no auto maker went to the efforts that Tesla did to vertically integrate, no auto maker completely ignored the "classic" model of independent dealerships to sell and service their cars... it makes sense that they're about the first ones (at least in America) to change how the financial side works as well.
Lots of people have been "innovating finance" lately, too, not just Tesla. How has that been working out? I hear it's going great...But we were really talking about insurance in any case, the financialization of which has also I believe gone quite poorly well within living memory. Are you of age to recall the name "AIG?" 'I thought not...it's not a story the Sith would tell you.'
(Quaterly cost, full insurance)
Tesla Model 3: 3 338 kronor (70,3 percent increase since Q1 2024)
Tesla Model Y: 4 007 kronor (97,3 percent increase)
Kia EV6: 938 kronor (-4,7 percent)
Volvo EX40: 1 097 kronor (-9,8 percent)
https://web.archive.org/web/20250510192608/https://www.dn.se...
They speculate the reason is that relatively few companies insure Teslas. Maybe because they have their own insurance company, or maybe because the leasing company take on the risk. I don't know how this works exactly.
They say however that one reason is that 2nd hand prices are dropping rapidly and that gives some uncertainty how to put value on the car for replacement. Don't quite understand what they mean with that.
Not only is the stock not going down, it's doing well, up almost 5% year-over-year.
Which is really pretty standard for any tech company whose valuation doesn’t make sense. People are betting the future will be brighter and have more revenue from new products.
Toyota = safe, predictable, steady ship
Tesla = wildly profitable for many for years, but incredible unpredictable.
It seems many are still guessing it’s going to go up in the future.
It has met all the criteria for removal (there are 20-30 changes every year, even profitable companies get removed) but obviously won’t be until Musk angers Trump enough for them to have the political cover to do it. When that happens, look out below.
It’s annoying because I have a more optimistic view than most on the long term prospects of the company, but this stock behavior makes it hard to place such bets.
“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”
TSLA's value has never been correlated to the fundamentals of the business. So it continuing to do so isn't super surprising.
As long as there's a steady supply of unsavvy investors/future bag-holders willing to buy, it'll keep climbing.
That ended when Musk went on one of his earlier whimsical firing sprees and destroyed the charging team. Had he instead beefed it up, charging could become a money printing machine. Even with his sabotage of the charging teams, Tesla charging is better than other but it could have been so much more
Why would you want to be that, though? The only way to maintain that would be to run it at very low margins; it's hard to imagine a more commodity product and if you have high margins and significant revenue, people will just set up competitors with slightly lower margins.
Also note that the CEO has close ties with government, so some people might be betting on Federal contracts or some kind of bailout.
I have a hypothesis that the reason Musk went all-in on Trump was because Trump would keep BYD out of the North American market. There's been whispering for years about BYD building plants in NAFTA nations or perhaps even in the USA (like Toyota and Nissan did), and even with significantly higher costs BYD would probably annihilate Tesla. A higher-end US-market mid-priced BYD EV with 300+ miles of range that undercut the model S would be deadly.
If we had global free trade with no tariffs China would absolutely dominate this sector as well, at least for mainstream vehicles.
* some coefficient of meme-stockery (trading in expectation of other people's memetic interest in the stock, like GME) and
* some other coefficient of Tesla's long term vision (gigafactories, their distribution system, their place in the market for power delivery, &c).
Neither of these would be especially sensitive to Tesla's recent performance; Tesla only has to stay viable for both those payoffs to remain plausible.
(Interestingly, people _do_ do this to _some_ extent, though. Notably, Trump's joke of a social media company took a significant temporary hit on releasing bad financials, even though of course the financials are completely irrelevant to the valuation; it has revenue of less than a million per quarter and a market cap of over five billion.)
Not bad when you consider we were driving to the hospital at the time, and the accident prevented us from reaching the hospital as well as preventing us from calling on an ambulance.
3 'assists' that the car gave us:
1. Crumple zone is bigger;
2. Battery made our vehicle heavier;
3. (speculatively), the 'crumple parts', crumpled more and costed more -- leading to less (none) bodily injury.
They are among the safest cars on the road.
That doesn't sound like a good thing at all? Then again, I'm hardly surprised that the guy who tried to build an aluminum tank and sell it as a car would claim it is.
The car roof withstood the pressure, the press did not. It's supposed to happen the other way around.
I am certainly not authoritative. My vague recollection is that offset crashes Tesla didn't do quite as well at, so since then Tesla's ironclad safety rating has since waned
Though that needs a bit of salt for very heavy cars since they makes the occupants safer and everyone else less safe.
Still pretty good overall, but not ideal.
Main downside is the hostile behavior from the public, but it’s a small price to pay.
Might be possible to run over smaller cars without even noticing it, let alone pedestrians.
Not for the running over of others, of course. That wouldn’t be very nice.
There are still extremely few vehicles that have five stars in every single category and sub category in both the us and eu.
The cyber truck is the first Tesla vehicle that doesn’t.
On second thought maybe this loss ratio is based on buying parts at cost from the auto division and so there is still a loss there to Tesla who has to supply them from China or whereever.
notatoad•4h ago
and the data seems to back me up - tesla has the highest crash rate of any manufacturer: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebanker/2025/02/11/tesla-ag...
treetalker•4h ago
ljlolel•4h ago
jerlam•2h ago
According to the site below, white was the free color from 2020 - 2024, which was probably when the bulk of Teslas were sold, especially to places like Hertz who have been dumping them on the used car market.
https://www.findmyelectric.com/tesla-colors-model-s-3-x-y/#m...
tzs•12m ago
Every car I've considered buying has had several free colors and several colors that cost extra, so I just assumed everyone did that.
CharlesW•4h ago
pfannkuchen•3h ago
What you noticed could be a deeper correlation between driving ability or conscientiousness and who is more influenced by perceived social pressure to stop driving a type of car.
Most Tesla owners also have a gas car, so it’s not as if they need to purchase a new vehicle to change their driving habits.
Another explanation might be that the crazy driving was mostly from new owners before they got used to the acceleration, and with fewer new owners now the crazy driving has reduced.