There is a good choice of EVs from various manufacturers.
Tesla really makes charging about as seamless as can be. It integrates into the navigation system (the car will automatically add charging stops, pre-warm the battery, tell you how many spots are open, etc.), integrates the payment, etc.
I've rented a Tesla. The most annoying thing about it was the goofy unlock (tapping a key card at the right spot on the door pillar) but I'm very wary of renting any other EV and having to dick around with finding the right charge place, determining if it has the right connection, will it charge fast enough, can I just pay by card or do I need some stupid app, etc.
Other cars have all that, too, yeah. I got a 2025 Ioniq 5 and it does all that, and it's also not restricted to just one charging company's chargers. The payment integration stuff exists, but it requires support from the charging company obviously, and IMO that's kind of a mis-feature anyway, so I never bothered to set it up.
> can I just pay by card or do I need some stupid app
In my experience, almost all chargers just use a card. 100% of the ones I've used in regular gas stations on freeway exits just use a card. Once in a blue moon you run into a stupid app one, but it's usually an older charger that was installed in a city center in the early days of EV charging. The apps seem to be mostly disappearing, thank god. Ironically I'm pretty sure Tesla's chargers require a stupid app for non-Tesla cars, but I've never used one, so not certain.
> determining if it has the right connection
Yeah, the adapters are clunky. It's just gonna take time to phase out CCS. Hopefully that's a solved problem in 10 years as everyone switches over to NACS. I did use a native NACS non-Tesla charger with my native NACS non-Telsa car once on a recent road trip. The future is... almost here!
- Charging speeds that fall short of what's advertised
- A requirement to use an app for payment (even if no account setup is needed)
- Chargers that are out of service but not flagged as such in the system
Oh, I hadn't thought of it that way, but I bet you're right! I bet denser areas got chargers earlier, so they're stuck on the stupid-app-based model that was popular 5 years ago. Where I am in the upper midwest, the rollout has been happening only over the last couple years (e.g. several of the chargers I stopped at last month are not even on Google Maps streetview yet), so the chargers are in better shape and just have standard card readers now.
Cool story bro. How is this relevant to a discussion about Tesla?
I'm glad to know that my mental model wasn't completely off-base, and happy to see that the situation is improving overall
And the parent response was a great case study in de-escalation. 5 stars, would ride again (assuming sufficient battery!)
In Europe, Tesla use the European standard Type 2 (standardized as IEC 62196-2) charger. So that's not an issue either.
> correction: I thought Tesla still used their own charger in Europe.
The EV charger standard wars are over.
There are regions of Europe with less developed infrastructure, but the situation is identical for all car makers.
Tesla lead the market for quite a while, but lost their way trying to become a software company instead of perfecting manufacturing. They don't heave a lead anymore, and trust for their brand is tanking. Between tesla and a chineese EV, i trust both about equally now.
They were innovative and years ahead in technology. Their heatpump supermanafold is still ahead of the rest of the EV industry. While the rest of the western manufacturers struggle to even make basic software for their cars.
There is plenty to dislike about tesla, (asside from musk) like their spotty quality control and questionable infotainment cost cuts. But if they spent the last few years just perfecting and maturing as a manufacturer, they would be respectful leader in EVs now.
Instead we get Cybertruck (brilliant engineering whasted on a childish design) and an insistence being a software company which it isn't.
Chineese EVs had time to catch up, and now instead of a mature innovative and trustable western EV brand alternative, we got.... Tesla led by musk.
Parking and proximity LIDAR/sensors
3d camera view
CarPlay/Android Auto
Lack of tactile controls (even Tesla has admitted removing the stalk was a mistake)
The ability to exit your vehicle if there's a power system failure
etc
> 3d camera view
The illustrated overhead view is sufficient that I do not miss a 3D camera view.
>The ability to exit your vehicle if there's a power system failure
This is not true, at least in my 2024 Model Y.
Not having carplay/android auto sucks, but I haven’t missed it enough. And there are enough tactile controls, in my model at least, that it hasn’t been an issue.
All in all, I wouldn’t pay $60k for a Tesla, but sign me up @ $41k.
I personally don't really miss the fisher-price designed CarPlay (never tried Android auto). It's alright and often better than the car manufacturer infotainment, but it's also not very good. You can't even pinch to zoom the map for example.
Is it just me, or does that seem backwards? If I purchased something with a specific feature, or promised future feature, and 5 years later it's still nowhere to be seen, I don't want a coupon for "my next purchase", why would I buy from the same place after they already lied to me before? The only acceptable solution would be to get back the extra money spent for that feature.
You are smarter than the repeat Tesla buyer.
Here's a handy compilation of Musk's self driving broken promises https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
Waymo assumes liability for crashes. Tesla doesn't. That should tell you all you need to know.
You must be new here. Kidding aside, the only reason they would do anything would be if Tesla doesn't sufficiently kiss the king's ring, which they did to the tune of $250 million quite recently. More payments will likely be required, but it's a cost of doing "business" these days.
A "multi-billion-dollar iceberg" is literally referenced in the headline.
Like, yes, if Tesla pays back all HW2 and HW3 FSD buyers their purchase plus interest, they should be fine.
You too, as otherwise you surely would have at least skimmed the article before commenting :)
> As we recently reported, thousands of Tesla owners have now joined a class action lawsuit in Australia[1] over Tesla misleading customers with its self-driving promises.
> It adds to similar ongoing lawsuits in the US[2] and China[3] .
1 - https://electrek.co/2025/10/13/thousands-of-tesla-owners-joi...
2 - https://electrek.co/2025/08/19/tesla-loses-bid-to-kill-class...
3 - (https://electrek.co/2025/09/22/tesla-being-sued-china-over-n...)
Reminds me of "No, money down!" (https://imgflip.com/memetemplate/382750775/Simpsons-Lionel-H...)
There are, in fact, laws about this kind of thing
But of course, blaming the victim is much easier because it lets the person doing the blaming pretend they're morally and intellectually superior in some way.
You don't need any particularly deep due diligence to see that, in fact, not living under a rock is more than enough.
> There's multiple decades of fawning articles and reviews of Tesla to the point where the average person can't be blamed for assuming they're a reputable company.
There's multiple decades of articles highlighting, in various levels of detail, how exactly bad Tesla is and Teslas are. Checking for bad reviews and deciding how applicable they are to you in particular is part of rudimentary check
Sorry, but knowingly and deliberately buying a Tesla vehicle is entirely on the customer and they get in some sense even more than what they had ordered. Similarly, if you buy a ${brand-you-don't-like} you have no right to complain about ${common-problem}, because that's the state vehicles leave the factory.
From May 2025: https://cleantechnica.com/2025/05/05/us-consumers-dont-trust...
OP bought their Tesla in 2024, so customer sentiment was actually favourable to Tesla at that point.
In March 2024, brand loyalty was really high according to Experian: https://inspiramarketing.com/when-a-brand-becomes-its-own-wo...
In 2019, customer satisfaction was also high: https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-model-3-customers-say-...
In 2020, they had an NPS of 97: https://customergauge.com/benchmarks/companies/tesla_motors
> Sorry, but knowingly and deliberately buying a Tesla vehicle is entirely on the customer and they get in some sense even more than what they had ordered.
Clearly, the customers were not knowingly and deliberately buying bad cars because the evidence available to the average person told them the exact opposite thing.
EDIT: Strikethrough below, it was a result of a bad search but the principle above still stands.
Hell, even on Hacker News, the bad news only seems to have started appearing 3 years ago, and I know for a fact your average consumer isn't browsing tech sites to form their opinion for their next car purchase.
This is what google spews out when I type in "tesla major problems". The first result is Wiki entry "Criticism of Tesla, Inc.", where first section is literally "Fraud allegations".
All I had to do was look if there's negative feedback and it's not something mild what you would get replacing Telsa with e.g. Peugeot, but some really troublesome issues. If you don't agree that this is basic, rudimentary overview and instead argue that this is some deep research, well I don't believe we can agree on anything much at all. I invest more effort in picking a place to eat at than some people in buying their car.
Sorry, but there's no such thing as "bought it before Elon went crazy".
Financial fraud. This isn't something the average person is going to dig up on their own because they aren't going to start reading the FT and WSJ before they buy a car.
> This is what google spews out when I type in "tesla major problems".
Be honest: have you ever done this in literally any other context? In fact, don't bother because I know you haven't. Because nobody does this.
How do I know nobody does this? Because, as I evidenced above, Tesla's public reputation only started to decline in 2024/2025 when Musk started throwing Sieg Heils, sorry, "putting his heart out to the crowd" after Trump's inauguration.
> it's not something mild what you would get replacing Telsa with e.g. Peugeot, but some really troublesome issues
Thanks for giving me a point of comparison. Apparently, the electronic handbrake can fail on certain Peugeots: https://www.service4service.co.uk/news/peugeot/the-most-comm...
I did the same thing you did. Why is this important? Just to point out that, if you do your "due diligence," you can find major issues with any car make. Again, going back to the average consumer, you can't really tell the difference between reports of one car brand being shit vs any other.
Again, this is not to defend Tesla: this is to point out that it's really fucking difficult for an average consumer to know whether a trusted car brand is actually just taking them for a ride.
I asked if a person would feel dumb that they had been conned.
Isn't the answer going to be yes even if that con is very sophisticated?
Paying a lot of money for self-driving when self-driving literally doesn't exist isn't that sophisticated of a con! They are telling you it doesn't exist! I know it doesn't exist and am paying for the hope that it will one day exist.
I mean sure make a law against this or whatever. But at the end of the day it's my money and no law can stop me from making a regrettable decision.
a car is the largest purchase most people will make (after property)
people should do more due diligence on it than e.g. on a new phone purchase
I certainly looked into whether the company that built my house was prudent and known for not scamming people
but if you're not at least reading the wikipedia page on a car and its manufacturer company before buying it looking for common "issues", that's kinda your fault
Consumer protections are a very real thing in the EU, UK, Australia and elsewhere!
If you make promises about the features a product will deliver, then you are obligated to deliver those features.
If not, the consumer is entitled to a refund.
It seems fine to state one might get a free pony if it doesn't rain for 1000 days.
IANAL, but if it was "fine" that would still fall quite firmly under "gambling"
They can wrap as in many disclaimers as they want, if the law is clear that consumers had a presumption of delivery due to marketing promises which were unfulfilled they are on the hook for it.
It's why many American companies constantly complain about EU regulations, they empower consumers which is "bad for business™" since fraud becomes much harder to wrap in loopholes.
No, it doesn't seem fine at all. That's scam territory.
The other cars that also have OTA updates? (Rivian, Polestar, and more, plus quite a few that provide less-extensive OTA like Hyundai, VW, etc)
No I’d say it’s pretty clear
or something similar.
I can't imagine that they made it easy enough for someone to take them to court for non-delivery of FSD, which we knew wasn't going to be possible.
Still, comms that framed it like: "This software purchase upgrades your car with state-of-the-art autonomy capabilities from our AI team, as we approach full self-driving" would have been more honest, still exciting to consumers, and avoided over-promising.
Stonk is the product and is literally built on over-promising.
I thought it made a lot of sense to focus on a well functioning Level 2 System that they owned themselves. Make highway driving, start-stop traffic and such easy as possible. Make the car helpful and easy to use.
But then Tesla started focusing on making complex navigation and remote summening a feature when tons of basic stuff didn't work very well yet. For example, automated parking, 360 view, detection of features like shadows and such. Why not focus specifically on the actual dangrous problem looking around blind corners and installing a sensor suit that can help humans with the problem.
Promsing Full Self Driving with existing hardware and selling that when they had not proven that it could work was idioitc and I always felt like it was a liability. They should have been sued over this a while ago.
Initially Tesla messaging was save, nice software, fun to drive and green, and it then became half baked software, don't drive it and risky.
When it came out that Musk said they should build a cheaper next generation car, because Self-Driving would collapse the car market by 80% I knew the company had completely lost its way.
"we're general motors, but better" is not the same as "we'll have self driving taxis that make money to our customers while they sleep".
Musk's 2018 Pay Package had a lot of market cap-based targets[0].
[0] https://www.equilar.com/elon-musk-2018-tesla-pay-package-ana...
For me, the biggest signal was when Tesla was suddenly all-in on BTC, and promised to build their own full node.
It made no sense.
> Tesla is using only internal & open source software & operates Bitcoin nodes directly. ...
1. Up to that sudden 180, Musk had been a cryptocurrency skeptic. What changed?
2. It had nothing to do with Tesla's mission, in-fact it seemed to go against it. At best it was a distraction when there were real problems to deal with.
3. When reality caught up, Tesla reversed course.
I am not stating some grand thing here, this is just my recollection of events.
After they had bought the bitcoin, adding it as a payment option was a way to add hype to increase its value. They quickly found out that it's too volatile for payments to be practical, and the hype cycle was ending anyway and they sold half of their reserve.
> ... A friend sent me part of a BTC a few years, but I don’t know where it is.
If they offered this for sale for $8k including the FSD license for older hw3 teslas that don't have FSD it might offset some of the cost to bring up the people who already paid the $8k on HW3.
These days he's moved on to predicting 10 years for AGI and is, I shit you not, citing his 15 year track record of making accurate predictions (timestamped link below if you want have a laugh).
Yeah that actually sounds about right!
Autopilot's first director, Sterling Anderson, was fired because he was not willing to go along with the scam.
You could tell Andrej was going along with what hiss boss said, but didn't believe it himself.
Even worse? Nah, the judgement of someone in their 20s should be assumed poor.
There's a funny but very crude saying in Slovakia, which where he's from so he might know it, lol. I cannot write it here for obvious reasons but it's related to letting people do things to you for money ...
As others have pointed out, there were a lot of incentives ($$$) for Krapathy to behave like that during his tenure at Tesla.
(I definitely like Karpathy 2.0 better though.)
To be fair, if I’m being paid $10 million/year, I’ll make any damn prediction my boss tells me to make
To be fair, it was a direct decision from Elon due to covid supply chain shortages of radar and ultrasonic sensors. Not from engineers (as is common at Elon companies)
But Andrej deserves some of the blame because he was too busy sucking on the $TSLA stock teat to say anything
But plenty willing to guess. Folks without domain expertise tend to average the experts' guesses without accounting for the condition of being willing to guess in the first place.
There's also just the reality that most of these experts have a lot of skin in the game, and there's lots of pressure in this world to a true believer, so I'm not going to buy into it too much.
I'm fairly sure what type of sentiment I'd prefer, at least it'd be half-assed then.
Yeah, easy and not very interesting.
I've not read any original quote from anyone saying that, either. Closest things I have seen were people doing a game of telephone with Altman's "thousands of days" ending up as that, and the 2027 paper which was predicated on the USA systematically deleting every obstacle rather than vibe-coding a tariff policy and having ICE mass-arrest people building relevant factories, and even then the authors indicated 2027 was on the optimistic side.
- AI CEOs, who require hype to be able to keep hemorrhaging money long enough to... hemorrhage more money
- The poor AI researchers the AI CEOs drag into public to lie in support of their narrative
- People who are not close to the tech, but who are influential in poltiics, finance, podcasts, etc who are wholly convinced by the grifters above - they did a little bit of poking around and saw some smart looking regurgitated boilerplate
- Grifter influencers, entrepreneurs, etc who don't care, they just want to push AI doom or vibe coding dreams for clicks, or sell some shitty AI solutions to companies eager to get in on the hype
The people you don't hear from are the AI researchers who know most of this is bullshit, but they aren't going to go on the record publicly expressing that they don't believe in the tech they're working on, because they like to be employed (and for absurd amounts of money)
It also doesn’t necessarily mean he was a yes man. Often in these situations people spell out their confidence levels plainly and directly to such execs and it just bounces off.
I’m also seeing below people suggesting he could have publicly voiced his concerns, but that probably wasn’t even a legal option for multiple reasons.
Tesla has shown time and time again to be hostile to its own customers in a variety of ways.
FTFA: "...thousands of Tesla owners have now joined a class action lawsuit in Australia over Tesla misleading customers with its self-driving promises. It adds to similar ongoing lawsuits in the US and China."
Lawsuits.
As in, you must file suit. The law alone is useless without consumers being proactive.
And all of this relies on Tesla customers going after Tesla. But people are poor, times are tough, ain't nobody got time for that.
And of the people that do got time for that, a lot of them bought Teslas because of the vision. Or something. Not sure if those people would sue.
Give me a boring ass 90s control layout with the electric drive train and I'm much more interested. Make the car kind of ugly too. On purpose. I don't need a GPU farm inside my car. I'm not running a robotic taxi company. I just want to go get some groceries.
I've worked on cars long enough to realize I don't want a chip using a leading edge semiconductor node in my vehicle somewhere. I live in a pretty nasty climate. A car sitting in a Texas parking lot in July will get to temperatures that the engineers probably didn't think possible. There's always something that starts to break once you cross into that 150F temperature level. I want semiconductors that were engineered to run in the basement of hell 24/7/365. 28nm and thicker sizes. I don't want 3nm gates in my car. There's no way these chips would last 10 years.
AIUI, the car can run its cooling/AC system to keep itself cool, even when powered off. I'd imagine that this is actually a bigger concern for the battery's health and safety, not the chips. You're not supposed to let a battery get that hot.
If you don't change the oil regularly, the car breaks down. If you leave old gas in the tank for a year, the car won't start. If you don't change the filters, the car eventually breaks down. If you don't change the belt after its admittedly long life, the car breaks down.
You swap all that for the need to keep the car's battery somewhat full to maintain a constant temperature in the battery bay. You don't do that, the car does it on its own. Just plug the car to recharge the battery somewhat frequently, dependent on your weather.
As the others have pointed out all the major manufactures know the problems here, and ensure there isn't a problem.
Exactly. The minimalist interior is super unappealing to me. I want something that's not all based on one screen. It's not just bad from a usability perspective but also seems risky if there are any issues with the screen (climate controls are very important for visibility certain times of the year)
I think I'd prefer not to have easier over-the-air updates. As we saw with Jeep recently, the chance of turning your car into a brick are non-zero with these updates.
> cheaper to build than a bunch of buttons and dials
Tesla's are already quite expensive, how much more would some buttons and dials add to the price?
I would absolutely go for a 2002 electric Acura Integra though...
I think they're caught flat footed because here we are a decade later and the consumer's opinion still matters.
Most people are traveling during rush hour - there isn't much opportunity to share cars with them, and where there is it means cars traveling empty from the city to the suburbs in the morning. (and the opposite at 5pm).
When you own your own car you can "leave your golf clubs in the trunk in case a chance to play a round happens in the middle of the day". You can run errands over lunch. You store other things in the car that you don't need everyday. None of these are a big deal (many people take transit and thus cannot do that), but it is enough that when the economics are not a clear win you will want to own a car.
The golf club problem is real, but I think we'll eventually find a way to solve it independently because the wastes associated with an ever growing percentage of the population owning a personal vehicle will eventually cross a tipping point.
Except that they would still spend most of their time parked. Almost nobody is driving at 3am - they will nearly all be parked every night. There are vastly more cars needed during rush hour than mid day, and then there is a smaller peak at lunch time. Most cars will still be parked 95% of the time as we don't need them that often.
> If instead they rarely parked we could have far fewer of them,
At the expense of putting even more of them on the road unoccupied going to their next pickup. Or a parking spot in a cheap area: pay less for parking is a motivation though I expect even self owned cars will do that. This is an environmental disaster - unless you have a 100% renewable power source.
> have better saturation of modern safety features into the vehicle pool (since they'd wear out at a more uniform rate), and have better incentive alignment re: maintenance
People whoes self image is wrapped up in a new car will not put up with older cars. People who want cheap will ask for older cars. As such I expect either the taxi will have different categories of costs, or more likely they will sell their used cars (with 30k miles) to someone else - if this actually develops, which again I mostly expect it won't (but it might in some areas where we will see these patterns).
> because the wastes associated with an ever growing percentage of the population owning a personal vehicle will eventually cross a tipping point.
If that is your concern you should be asking for good public transportation. In places where it is good a lot of people don't own cars. I wouldn't be surprised if you have never been to such a place (people who live in such places are rarely native English speakers, though is a common English second language for some) Still that is a much better focus on your efforts - we have the technology today, is scales much better than cars ever can, and is cheaper!
I will bet that none of the engineers on the automation team over the age of 35 thought that. Only the young & naive or non-technical people would have believed that.
https://images.ctfassets.net/20dhmw20vttc/3FXvexNHHbtaijk1Ur...
Worried about infotainment and AI processors? It doesn't even have a radio. See those things on the door cards by your knees? They interface with an advanced window regulator and associated torque-sensing motion control system that uses evaporative liquid cooling to prevent failure due to overheating.
You could buy three for the price of a Tesla.
Except you could actually buy a Tesla today, which is not something you can do for a Slate. Also they don't even have expected delivery dates or official pricing yet, so who knows when they will be available or what the actual price will be.
I would love for Slate to become a thing, but at this point it looks like vaporware.
Also, with the way these kinds of things have gone in the past:
- It's not certain that you'll ever be able to buy it. - If you can buy it, it'll probably be closer to $40k than $25k with no add-ons. - It's not certain that you'll ever actually be able to buy it with no add-ons. - Orders that include all of the most expensive add-ons will be heavily prioritized, so even if you can order it without add-ons, the queue could be months or years long. - The ones that you can actually get in a reasonable amount of time will be closer to $50k than $25k.
There were actually many companies which tried small basic "urban" electric vehicles. You never heard of them.
Customers will not care about the cars people on here want. Customers want highly integrated software. Law makers are also demanding increasing software complexity.
>A car sitting in a Texas parking lot in July will get to temperatures that the engineers probably didn't think possible.
Toyota, Ford and VW have proving grounds in Arizona, because engineers know that cars get very hot. This is part of standard vehicles testing.
It isn't hard to make crank cars, but it will cost you a million dollars (likely 10, but lets go with 1 million) to build all the needed jigs to make them, so if there are only 1000 people who buy crank windows that means the cost of cranks is $1000/car. You can skip the jigs, but now the cost to manually make the cranks is $400/car, meanwhile because everyone else wants electric windows the cost per car is about $100. Those costs are why an option-free car would have to cost more than a luxury model.
To build an EV you have to spend $10-$20k on the battery pack that goes into it. They're getting cheaper, but that is a gradual process.
So your Toyota Camry / Honda Accord EV competitor is going to need to be priced starting at $40k to have a chance of breaking even.
How do you get people to stomach $40k for a base Honda Accord but Electric? You add things that cost very little but make the car feel more premium. Power seats, big screens, LED interior lights, glass roof, a processor that can play video games, cameras and autonomy features, etc. don't cost that much in the big scheme of things. Some of them, like screens instead of physical controls, might even save money in production and assembly costs.
So you add ~$3k worth of "premium" features to the car, price it at $45k, and now the buyer feels like they are getting something worth the money.
People say there is a huge market for this, but I really doubt it. Yes, there is a market for old school, but it is a pretty small niche where investments in more expensive analog tech (compared to digital anyways) just isn't worth it.
Tesla stock (P/E over 250) is priced as if Telsa is the largest auto manufacturer, the biggest robotaxi company, the dominant robot producer and the leading AI service provider.
Meanhile; back in reality, none of this is even close to being true.
Logic simply cannot explain it --- so the fallback is a conspiracy of some sort. One that Wall Street must have a stake in.
... Wait, is your contention that every time the markets price something incorrectly, there must be a conspiracy? Tesla is a meme stock, one of hundreds, albeit the biggest. There's no need for a conspiracy; the markets are just actually not all that great at pricing, especially where there's significant retail involvement.
Nothing about the valuation makes any sense and it hasn't for years. Tesla is no longer a startup. Market performance history is readily available from which one should be able to make rational judgments.
Tesla only has about 10% of world wide *EV* sales. Yet it's market cap exceeds all major auto manufacturers *combined*.
As you point out, it's the scale and magnitude of the disconnect from reality maintained over a long period of time that puts Tesla in a league of it's own.
I don't think you have to go to conspiracy theories to explain it. The fact that Wall Street has always been highly suggestible, fad-driven, and has a strong herd mentality is sufficient. Combine that with sunk cost fallacies and this is exactly the sort of behavior I'd expect.
Sorry, fads and sunk cost fallacies can't explain why a majority of Wall Street "analysts" maintain a *buy* rating on a company with a PE of over 250 and a *declining* global market share --- while the companies eating Tesla's market share have a P/E of around 10.
We live in bizarre times. The older I get, the more I wonder why I try do things "properly" and honestly. I guess it's just a preference.
But as for Musk, I always thought something was absolutely not right with him. I thought of him as a pandering populist with feudalistic tendencies. And I lost what little credibility with him back in 2015/6 with him screaming from Twitter about the flooded cave rescuer was a pedophile.
I also remember him launching the first starlink SATs, without any permission. Flooded the LEO with thousands of space junk. I'm just waiting for a Kessler syndrome event.
And come to find out, he also defrauded customers on FSD on teslas.
Basically, stay as far away as you can from anything musk. It will come toppling down. And when it does, all the devices will come with it. (Think of when IoT companies shut down, and equipment is now landfill)
That will thankfully never happen. LEO is a range, and Star-link is near the bottom of that range. Their satellites have a 5 year lifetime, because that's when the fuel needed to re-adjust their orbit runs out, and atmospheric drag pulls them down. A Kessler syndrome event in that orbital plane would resolve itself within a decade at most.
> Pity that BYD is banned in this country
BYD makes unreliably good EV's for the price. From a consumer perceptive it's a big loss. But i understand why we restrict their import if we want to keep that industry around ourselves (In particular lithium battery production). There is some truth to china using it as a leverage. That being said... the approach Biden and especially Trump took to supposedly help the local industry is ... a bit crude.
HW3 owner. Car drives really good on FSD as for 5 years old car , it’s not even close to anything that was on the market , I still receive updates .
Any short trip or long trip when I’m lazy I simply turn it on, and it works perfect 99% of the time. Both highway and local roads.
When I’m in the gym and it’s raining or snowing , I press the button and car actually comes to me. It used to be broken now they fixed it. It recently also start to park itself after fsd route is over. How awesome is that for a 5 years old car ??
Why should I be upset ? Do I want free hardware ? Sure . Is $7k I paid a fair price ? Yeah . go check modern offering from any other company . They charge you comparable price for way less functionality. In the world where bmw tries to charge you every month for heated seats , I think it’s a fair price.
Oh yeah , I live in New York , I use fsd almost daily for 5+ years . In this very busy setup 0 accidents . Which is rare even for an experienced human driver.
You shouldn't. If you're happy, enjoy it and move on. Others being upset doesn't negate your right to be happy. Just as your experience doesn't negate someone being upset about feeling they were lied to.
> I live in New York , I use fsd almost daily for 5+ years . In this very busy setup 0 accidents . Which is rare even for an experienced human driver
FSD was sold as Waymo. Unsupervised. Tesla is unable to match that capability on its newest hardware so far.
Tesla knows the current FSD isn't fine; if it was, they wouldn't be upgrading the hardware to handle bigger models. So there's nothing surprising about expecting Tesla to deliver the same hardware to people who already paid them for the product they're still trying to deliver. If you're satisfied not receiving the full product you paid for, that's fine, of course. Heck, you're free to write Tesla a donation check. But Tesla should deliver the product (or a refund) to those who aren't.
Are you sure it's not a hardware or calibration issue? Disclaimer: I don't own a Tesla, but I'm just pointing out that it could also be a hardware issue.
Tesla originally had radar sensors in their earlier hardware models. This sensor not included in later hardware models and later software disabled the sensor inputs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot_hardware
> Starting in 2021, Tesla stopped installing the radar sensor in new vehicles, and the ADAS was updated to drop radar support. In 2022, Tesla announced it also would drop support for the ultrasonic sensors, moving the ADAS to an all-visual system. The most recent sensor and computer implementation is Hardware 4, which began shipping in January 2023.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaLounge/comments/179j7es/disabl...
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/tesla-wants-to-physi...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34153636
...
So it's quite possible it's a hardware issue in that Tesla disabled that hardware and no longer supports it.
Tesla has gained part of their stock valuation and customer base over the years by promising Level 5 FSD. As in, you can sleep while the car drives you to work, or the car can go make money for you as a Robotaxi on the Tesla Network when you aren't using it.
They haven't delivered those things which they have been promising to customers since 2016.
BYD's comparable offering is generally free/included in the car's price.
Separately, I can't believe we are still discussing a product called "Full Self Driving" that is not "full self driving." Paying big companies to lie to us is not a recipe for building a better world.
Ha ha, you're not really selling it for me.
That balances nothing
Are you saying that for every ~1.5h of driving there is a minute where the car could go full an hero on you?
I think this is the target market. Delusional people.
Tesla has shipped 8 million cars total. Maybe 70% of them (including mine) have the HW3 computer that the article claims won't do FSD. Of those, maybe 10% (I'm one) actually purchased the FSD product[1]. So figure like 500k cars actually affected.
If the cost to Tesla of a HW4 upgrade is less than $2000 (it's likely *much* less, this isn't particularly fancy hardware and it requires no sensor or other upgrades, it's just a board swap), then we're looking at "sub-billion" and not "multi-billion-dollar iceberg".
It's a $1.4T company. If everything falls out like Electrek[2] expects, it might rise to "Really very notable recall". Hardly a Titanic collision.
[1] As opposed to renting it, for which there would be no remedy. You can't sue for a rental product that you claim doesn't do what you wanted. If you didn't want it, why did you pay for it? At most you get the first month's fee refunded.
[2] Electrek has been expecting Tesla to fail for like seven years now.
Tesla is now a robotics company, and their car business is now a rounding error of their future potential. Their robotaxi business is also not really important either.
See Tesla will now be building fully autonomous robots. This will allow Elon Stark to lock on to multi-trillion dollar revenues that are just around the corner once they dial in these last few bolts of the Optimus bot. Forget everything about the cars and the taxi. Those are outdated and irrelvant. Fill you head with visions of Tesla bots being everywhere all the time doing everything for you. By the end of 2026 there will be 100 million Tesla bots sold. So the stock is grossly undervalued. Go buy the stock please god buy the stock how the fuck is tesla ever going to fill the boots of a $1.5T company with collapsing revenue and the veil of empty promises slipping off.
Someone people deserve to be hated. Elon is one of those people. From a business perspective and a human perspective.
From a business and politics perspective, he's a con man. He stole your money. Mine too, with DOGE.
I had a company Tesla (with "FSD") for a couple of years, and as much as a liked the car, I've been wondering when the European class action case will start...
I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. You should consult one.
It's a miracle product to me, and the comments here about Tesla (not the ones about the story, which are reasonable!) are just so far removed from my personal experience with the product.
People just want to raise their pitchforks at Elon/Telsa without actually evaluating the product.
If you can't trust it 100% for urban driving, then FSD provides almost no benefit over more basic adaptive cruise control, early collision detection and lane departure warnings, etc. You still have to sit there and focus on the ride. The idea that I can now sit in the backseat and catch a nap or do some work or whatever, is still sci-fi at this point.
Money
Someone•9h ago
While this might sound like a lot”
It would add up to a lot of money for Tesla, but for customers? Some of these people paid $15.000 years ago for something that hasn’t been delivered, and now, they would be able to get $10,000 ‘back’, only if they commit to spending way more again, in the hope to eventually get what they bought years ago, or, more likely, in the hope of eventually being able to subscribe to get the features they already paid for years ago.
CaptainOfCoit•9h ago
cjrp•8h ago
boringg•8h ago
LightBug1•8h ago
Why else would you put up with this nonsense?
If nothing else, Musk is a Svengali extraordinaire ...
cjrp•8h ago
boringg•8h ago
Would they buy them again? Probably not but thats because of politics.
chronci739•7h ago
That’s the article’s point.
Politics, FSD overpromises, Elon, whatever the reason.
Tesla deliveries are down and people aren’t coming back.
ToucanLoucan•7h ago
I can't fathom wanting a Tesla unless the politics are not merely a turn-off for you, but you want to support them directly.
boringg•4h ago
LaSombra•5h ago
What are these features that tie people to Teslas that the competition is unable to deliver on?
lotsofpulp•5h ago
1) sufficiently long track record of reliability (I might consider Ford and Rivian now)
2) free remote start and unlock
3) camera recordings - how is this not standard in all cars by now?
4) not having to buy via dealership (this is worth a lot to me). Bought a Tesla on my couch in 15 minutes and picking it up took 15 minutes. Dealerships take hours and hours, and try to upsell you.
5) $35k to $40k price point - if BYD were to come to America, I would drop Tesla in a heartbeat
boringg•4h ago
I don't think Ford is in the running.
FSD is pretty sweet especially compared to volvo's woefully poor autopilot efforts.
LightBug1•5h ago
shagmin•6h ago
CaptainOfCoit•7h ago
orochimaaru•8h ago
If the “fsd” wording is present in the purchase agreement, then Tesla owners have a class action lawsuit.
estearum•8h ago
If they said "$x gets you y", ran ads saying "$x gets you y", held press conferences saying "$x gets you y", then gave you an invoice showing you pay "$x for y", a backing contract saying "$x does not get you y" will not stand up in court.
So in addition to not being legally okay, it's obviously not "ethically questionable." Taking people's money and not delivering value you promised to them in exchange is bad.
altcognito•8h ago
bluGill•7h ago
bluGill•7h ago
When reading the above, think: the opposition lawyers have incentive to present the case that way. Judges rarely stop them. Juries tend to accept the above presentation. Of course the other side has lawyers that will try to pick apart that argument. It is anyone's guess what the jury (and thus court) will decide.
There are many different legal systems in the world. The above is a US perspective. I cannot comment on other countries, just know that each is different. Even if Tesla wins in court in the US, they can still lose a lot of money in other countries that work different.
JumpCrisscross•7h ago
Under U.S. federal law, perhaps.
That's where "Tesla’s current FSD expansion in international markets" gains salience. I doubt courts in "China and now Australia and New Zealand," or states with strong lemon laws [1], will let a manufacturer off the hook on a just-kidding clause.
[1] https://www.autosafety.org/in-new-lemonlaw-rankings-illinois...
mrtksn•8h ago
In recent years the leader of a cult in Turkey known for being filthy rich died and when cult split the new factions summoned the believers to re-do their inauguration ritual, which involves money collecting, since the old one expired within the death of the leader. And they went and did that, because although its not the members that are rich they still benefit from being in the community and the business connections.
Tesla has a similar thing, they are on a mission and many make money from being part of the community as they collect referrals, make content and sell accessories. Even if not doing any of that they ysually have Tesla shares and even if that’s not the case they want to keep the value of their vehicle high. Also in comes with the emotional baggage of having told everyone how their tesla drives autonomously etc.
IAmBroom•7h ago
stronglikedan•7h ago
how ironic
gipp•7h ago
mrtksn•7h ago
Most people just don’t want new troubles in their lives, its juts money long gone.
drcongo•7h ago
NickC25•7h ago
Sounds like fraud.
Why is Musk allowed to be worth half a trillion dollars again? The guy can't help himself but lie and make deliberately misleading half-truth (at best) statements in investor meetings and presentations. Textbook fraud.
An ethical steward of capital he is not. We've gone through 4+ US presidential administrations with him as the CEO, and not once has he been effectively taken to task let alone held accountable for his bullshit.
code_for_monkey•7h ago
lern_too_spel•4h ago
danans•7h ago
Perhaps you just answered your own question. But are you sure he's the only big tech CEO who does it, or does he just do it the best?
igor47•6h ago
danans•5h ago
You are reading the literal meaning right: everyone is doing it.
But you are reading the intent wrong, which is to point out the extent of fraud and deception in boardrooms and markets.
judahmeek•4h ago
danans•4h ago
immibis•7h ago
sporkxrocket•6h ago
JumpCrisscross•6h ago
Because he founded a company that turned into PayPal, single-handedly launched the Western EV revolution and single-handedly secured American access to space. He's been a fuckup for the last few years. But he's "allowed" to be worth a lot because if he were doing what he's doing elsewhere, he'd facilitate a multi-trillion dollar wealth transfer from America to that place.
suckler•6h ago
lotsofpulp•6h ago
These are also hard businesses, dealing with physics, chemistry, and regulations. Unlike SaaS businesses one spins up on cloud services. Which lends some more credence to not just being lucky.
Obviously, he has a reprehensible agenda, but there is clearly a case to be made about his ability to execute.
pas•2h ago
he is the ultimate right place right time person, managed to turn innovative historically doomed-to-fail ventures into very highly valued mature(ish) businesses.
it's unlikely that someone without his micromanagerial madness could have done these. (and of course in a better world he would have gotten help, employees wouldn't have been fired on a whim, and the market wouldn't reward liars. not to mention that ideally the market would price in the consequences of enriching someone with so loose morals.)
hbarka•6h ago
JumpCrisscross•6h ago
This strikes me as more of an indictment of money in politics.
Musk didn't need half a trillion dollars to influence the election and trash our government. He needed a few hundred million. We should be able to create a system where a man, even a very rich man, cannot rent the most powerful position in the history of humanity with a few hundred million dollars.
ceejayoz•6h ago
That was the argument against Massachusetts taxing millionaires. Instead, it made double even the optimistic estimates. https://www.wgbh.org/news/politics/2024-05-21/millionaires-t...
Turns out there's usually a good reason people settle in a place.
(And the US government gets a big say if you try to move a critical national security asset out of the country, too.)
JumpCrisscross•5h ago
ceejayoz•5h ago
s1artibartfast•3h ago
It would require substantial punitive taxes and penalties to prevent this accumulation. Would founders and investors still develop in the USA if their upside were curtailed? Would Musk Found spaceX if they were not allowed to profit from it?
Also, it is not as simple as taxing profits. Almost all of this value is simply equity in controlled companies. What is the mechanism here? If you are too successful, the government seizes your company? Dont you think that would be disruptive to investment and growth?
JumpCrisscross•3h ago
Yes. Unified consumer market. Incumbency. Deep and international access to risk capital.
China only has the first two. It's still got a thriving start-up ecosystem.
> Almost all of this value is simply equity in controlled companies. What is the mechanism here?
Selling equity. This is a theoretical question for e.g. a closely-held family business. It's not for a public or mature private company.
> the government seizes your company?
Guess who ushered in the administration that's embraced this option!
s1artibartfast•2h ago
Do you actually endorse confiscation of companies, or are you just taking a reactionary copy cat stance?
ceejayoz•3h ago
Start by banning or curtailing these techniques they utilize to borrow against that equity or put it in tax advantaged accounts. https://www.propublica.org/article/billionaires-tax-avoidanc...
And perhaps a 1-2% wealth tax.
JumpCrisscross•3h ago
After $100mm. (I guess if you want to get the evangelicals on board you could do $39 or $390mm.)
s1artibartfast•2h ago
ceejayoz•1h ago
s1artibartfast•20m ago
If we are just spitballing, I think we should charge Billionaires a nickel every time they tie their shoes, and a dime on Sunday.
One option that might actually work is following a more feudal model, where the POTUS/Trump executes or disappears any oligarch that accumulates more than X amount, as assessed by the executive.
My actually preferred option is to simply get the money out of politics.
NickC25•2h ago
Yeah. No single individual needs that much money. especially in this day and age where politicians are cheap as fuck to buy and the markets will reward any and all regulatory capture in the name of increasing short-term value of stock....while not giving a damn about the long-term ramifications of how it perverts our entire economic system.
>100 Billion?
That would too. Let me ask you - if you had $99 billion USD, would you whine that you don't have $100 billion, or would you, y'know, go out and use the money to enjoy your life and take care of people?
I know which I'd do. Hint: I'd be extremely fucking happy with what I'd have and I'd do all I could to spread the wealth around as far as I could. I wouldn't whine, I'd be overjoyed that I'd have more wealth than all but approximately 30 people on the planet.
The only "work" I'd do at that point is to figure out which diseases could likely be eradicated with enough money, and figure out how to give enough money to get it done. Gates, for all his faults, did pretty much just that. His money kicked malaria's ass.
>Also, it is not as simple as taxing profits. Almost all of this value is simply equity in controlled companies. What is the mechanism here? If you are too successful, the government seizes your company? Dont you think that would be disruptive to investment and growth?
It most certainly is quite easy.
If you have over a certain number in net worth (say, $100 billion), you can't take out loans against your stock portfolio - you have to sell stock or assets. The loans-against-portfolio system was designed to help middle class individuals buy homes, not to help centibillionaires buy $500mm yachts. If you are the sole founder of a multi-trillion dollar organization, your business expenses should cover quite literally anything you could ever need.
The mechanism isn't the government taking away a company, and it's certainly not disruptive to investment nor growth. In fact, as a founder myself, I'd take it as a badge of honor if the government came in and said "hey bro you are now worth a hundred billion dollars, you've won capitalism, go enjoy time with your friends and family". My investors, who invested small amounts of capital at a valuation in the low single digit millions, would be thrilled at a 100 billion dollar exit. That's nearly a 100,000x multiple ROI. If you, say, as an investor, dropped $10,000 on an investment. It gave you a return, after a decade, of 100,000x, or a billion dollars. Your reaction to that would be to complain that the government is discouraging and disrupting growth?
s1artibartfast•2h ago
This is nonsense. It wasn't "designed" to help the middle class. Portfolios are clear collateral assets and a natural backstop that doesnt need a "designer". It will arise in any financial system that allows free contracting and doesnt explicitly prohibit it.
> In fact, as a founder myself, I'd take it as a badge of honor if the government came in and said "hey bro you are now worth a hundred billion dollars, you've won capitalism, go enjoy time with your friends and family...".
This is such a contrived example it isnt worth discussing. The realistic outcome is the government taking it and giving you nothing. We aren't discussing the government "buying" anything.
JumpCrisscross•3h ago
On a technical level, sure. On a practical level, he'd still be fabulously rich and powerful, and the comment you're responding to would be asking why he's allowed to be worth hundreds of billions of whatever.
The problem isn't that Musk was "allowed" to become wealthy. It's that a trivial fraction of that wealth let him corrupt not only himself, but also his government.
ben_w•4h ago
I think this is the critical point. It's kinda the foundation of why all extremely rich people are "allowed" to get so rich.
For the rest, not so much. Partly:
Much as I was impressed with him successfully turning the disaster that was Eberhard and Tarpenning's era into a viable business, I would not describe "noticing and fixing Eberhard and Tarpenning's mistakes" as "single-handedly" launching anything. The booster version is the opposite side of the same wrong coin as those who insist Musk was worthless because Eberhard and Tarpenning came first.
SpaceX similarly, for all I'm impressed by how he's used his charisma and vision and drive to get people organised, he's definitely not "single handed" on this.
But also, my understanding is that for valuations such as Tesla's share price, the "what it should be" is usually based on what they're likely to return in the next 20 years or so. Tesla's stock price is obviously disconnected from the business returns, at best speculation based on what Musk might be able to organise people to do eventually, and given he has been, as you say, "a fuckup for the last few years", the expected return for the Musk group should be lower, not higher.
NickC25•3h ago
No he didn't. He co-founded (with several other people) a company that merged with a company founded over a year before (that he had no involvement in) which eventually became PayPal. He didn't found jack shit on his own.
> single-handedly launched the Western EV revolution
Say what now? Are we talking about Tesla? You know Toyota had a working hybrid on the market in 2000, correct? The West was already well on its way to electric vehicles when Musk bought himself a board seat at Tesla.
>single-handedly secured American access to space.
Americans had not only already gone to space, but had landed on the moon over 2 years before Musk was born. Yes, you read that right - he was quite literally not even conceived when Americans had not only sent rockets into space, but literally went to and landed on a moon.
rapnie•6h ago
danaris•6h ago
Because the US abandoned a number of years ago the idea that the law should apply equally to everyone. At least since the Reagan years, and to an increasing degree recently, "Greed is Good" has become the economic motto, and net worth is treated as if it's synonymous with one's moral worth.
This is all part and parcel of the devaluation of ethics that has led to a corrupt president whose election has serious questions around it wantonly flouting the law and treating the country like his own personal playground.
ModernMech•5h ago
You answered your question! Capitalism does not optimize for ethical stewards, and has nothing at all to say about morality or ethics. If a scam is profitable, capitalism says "that's okay!". Doesn't matter if it's illegal, immoral, amoral, destroys the environment, or even decapitates people leaving their head bouncing down the highway.
That's why Elon Musk is allowed to be worth half a trillion dollars. The system optimized for it; fraud, deception, and lawbreaking is a competitive advantage under capitalism. Someone has to be worth the most, and under this system, that person is going to be whomever is the most eager to wield his considerable wealth and power to commit crimes and defraud people.
slowmovintarget•6h ago
smusamashah•5h ago