this sort of happened. the people who sold these battery materials for the 4680 thought they were making a B2B sale, and they still wound up making a B2C sale - that ended in disaster - in disguise.
It looks like this: https://www.amazon.com/JESSY-3-7-Volt-Rechargeable-Battery/d...
These cells aren't special, they're all off the shelf designs. The 4680 got some marketing spin, but really it was just a bigger form factor with a tweaked chemistry that apparently just didn't work out. And of course that means you can meta-spin the failure as "supply chain collapse", etc...
Obviously, no, you can't just buy a bunch of 21700 cells and stuff them in the car yourself, the balancing and calibration needs to happen in an integrated way and that repair (digging into a 400V DC battery!) is just way too dangerous for amateurs. But the batteries themselves are mature technology and kinda boring.
Distributors usually won't sell to regular consumers, but there are specialized retailers who base their reputation on selling quality goods, usually to the RC, flashlight, and vape market.
For years, we've been told a lot of things that have never come to fruition.
Just 6 months ago, we were told that Robotaxi would be available to half the US population by the end of the year.
https://electrek.co/2025/07/23/elon-musk-with-straight-face-...
Tesla isn't a robotics company it's a meme company (2027)
Yet again, there are no adults and the shallow fabric of society fails to conceal the greed boner under the sheets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SolarCity
Being in Australia, we have the benefit of getting US, EU, CN, and other vehicle brands, as well as solar and battery suppliers.
Tesla sells a lot of home batteries, but there are numerous other brands.
Tesla's cars are old now, the difference is the Hyundai, Kia, Geely, ZeekR, BYD, Polestar, Mini, Lexus, Porsche, BMW, Mercedes and other brands are cars that happen to be powered by batteries, not some magic carpet of future ideas.
Remember in 2016 when people would be on Mars by 2018?
Musk just took it way further. When Jobs missed with the RDF it was on stuff like the G4 Cube being "cool" enough to make up for its issues. He wasn't promising miracles.
I've recently been shopping for another electric SUV and to be told that to get charging stops on your long trip 'through an app on your phone' instead of built into the navigation is.... Wild
Edit: it needs to be said that I consider a car a solution to the A to B problem, and nothing more :) This was one of the premium German automakers by the way. On a ~$50k car....
Many like Polestars and Renaults are built on Android Automotive (different from Android Auto) and the built-in navigation is full Google Maps with direct access to the cars battery state and control systems.
Works perfectly on my Renault Megane E-Tech.
That's my expectation too.
> For some the quality of the data isn’t as high, but it will be there.
This is a real issue. You might be stranded with low quality suggestions. Chargers that don't work. The large number of accounts you need to have as every charger has their own etcetera
In a Tesla, you get what Tesla gives you.
I haven't bothered with any accounts in years for third-party chargers. Most just plug in and negotiate payment automatically. Others have credit card readers on them. I haven't personally encountered out of service chargers on my road trips in a few years.
I can charge at most of the major Tesla charging locations as well these days. Ironically, those require I hop on a proprietary app with another account to manage, so I often avoid them.
Do you mind sharing what EV you drive?
In an EV it's a necessity.
Makes sense.
Yes...
Wow.
I'd wager a large sum that you were told about a capability in the app, you _wrongly_ thought this meant it could _only_ be done in the app, and then you decided to take a very, very dumb stand.
Xiaomi? Huawei? Avatar? Or do you mean only the ones available in the US?
I've obviously not tested every car out there. But for years Tesla has been the only car that came close to the convenience of a gas powered car. Their charging infrastructure really allowed it to be a normal car when you live in populated areas.
Who knows where you live and what options you have? Who knows what you considered? Maybe that's why the question was asked?
> I've obviously not tested every car out there. But for years Tesla has been the only car that came close to the convenience of a gas powered car. Their charging infrastructure really allowed it to be a normal car when you live in populated areas.
Charging infra have nothing to do with their cars besides maybe the US. They are barely leading in anything anymore, especially in countries with heavy EV competition, like China. When I was in China this year, I saw Teslas everywhere, but most of them were a few years old. Most of the new cars were Chinese EV brands, and they seemed better on most metrics in the same segment, which included quality. They're losing market share in the EU and worldwide.
Yes looks pretty capable but they don’t go into software itself much. Looking at video you can see it’s pretty laggy at times.
Friends atto3 is somewhat capable but software quality just isn’t it. Other just got brand new sealion 7, hope I can test it soon, but some capability isn’t there either.
Lots of hi-res graphics, modern looking interfaces and flashy animations do not good software make.
Function > form.
Would be more convincing if my legacy car maker car didn’t do all these things you claim only a Tesla can.
great. I love that comment because software is the one element of a vehicle that we know it (vehicles) can do without from prior art.
personally I would prefer a vehicle that emphasizes safety, aesthetics, performance, handling, utility, comfort, or reliability.
another opinion : the cars with the best software are the ones where the user can't easily tell that the thing isn't analog.
I don't care if the infotainment system is laggy or temperamental about pairing with certain phones; what I care about is accurate system self diagnosis, reliable cold weather starting, consistent performance regardless of altitude or temperature, and sane thresholds that don't throw DTCs erroneously.
Those are the software elements in a car that matter to the car being a car rather than a glorified boombox on wheels; and Tesla doesn't score highly in any of those metrics over the length of their brand.
I'm asking this as a challenge; in a Tesla the biggest complaint I have actually is the half-baked music software. You can't set it to start playing USB music when you get in, and there's no button to resume it either. You have to use the voice command "switch to USB" to get it playing where it left off.
The car's performance, convenience, mechanical reliability, service center experience, documentation, all fantastic. I don't have stock in Tesla, I just really don't understand the criticisms. Are other cars really better? Should I take some test drives?
However, you asked what you can get for the price of a used Tesla…. :)
Tesla sales have plummeted in my part of the world, and they are a bad buy because their second hand price has plummeted too.
They are cheap because primarily the political views or Musk and secondarily they are no longer the only EV maker.
So you can buy a used one cheap… not necessarily a good thing.
Or if not living in a free country then BMW iX3 Neue Klasse or Mercedes CLA EV
the solution to that problem is a Prius
So I have a Zoe, tesla has much fancier software, the remote control on the phone for the tesla is great.
the Zoe has a chugging navigation system and no adaptive cruise control.
But it has buttons. Its cheap to run and is super easy to drive. Its also faster than most ICE cars.
More importantly its smaller than a model Y, and I don't look like a massive penis driving it.
Also the doors shut properly, the trim isnt hollow and its not falling apart.
The software is shite though.
But Musk often acts as if he does actually intend to be taken seriously. In the case of the current story, consider the marketing resources Tesla have poured into their previous "Battery Day" events and look at the press reaction; it's clear that at least some people believed that the claims stacked up.
A quick search of the hn archives for "4680" shows a similar picture. Yes, there were always some sceptical voices, but they were often shouted down as being from people motivated by an anti-Elon grudge. Nevertheless, the sentiment tended to be overwhelmingly positive with many posters actively reinforcing the hype.
Now, whether or not a self-selecting sample of hn posters can be seen as "reasonable bystanders" is certainly debatable - but it does seem that we're getting close to the point where Musk is going to have to start branding those who believe him as being exceptionally gullible in order to escape a charge of misleading advertising.
Now excuse me while I go check on where my 2016 full-self-driving Tesla car. It was supposed to pick me up 9 years ago, something must have happened.
Because you can cancel your reservation and get your deposited refunded. See terms at Tesla.com
This is a textbook sunk cost fallacy.
And if you don't think so, please give me $50k, I'll give you back $50.001 in 8 years, a dollar more! You'll come out ahead, right?
Mr Musk is a strange fellow indeed, but he's not guilty of all the vices and sins. Just plenty enough of them.
CEOs are constantly making claims and promises that are aspirational at best, their compensation isn't held until all promises are reached.
> Musk sold 19.5 million Tesla shares worth about $3.95 billion in November 2022
I mean sure it is his to sell, but how is that different?
My evidence is that in America people sue for these things left and right all the time. It's a popular pastime for lawyers to get a class action lawsuit for securities fraud together. But as far as I can tell, Musk / Tesla weren't convicted of these things in conjunction with the sale of Tesla stock to buy Twitter.
Maybe I'm misremembering but I seem to recall him (Tesla?) selling a bunch of doge and bitcoin after months of pumping despite some big drops between.
Tesla's profits have been positive since then, so this may no longer be the case, but still, that's a very iffy state of affairs.
So the statement does not necessarily be false to be a lie - if the intent is to deceive.
I think you have it backwards. The entire tech bro scene reeks of fraud schemes, and the most successful ones seem to be pulled into all kinds of government schemes as well.
The map precedes the territory
Musk also bought into Tesla.
So its not like he invented some kind of alien technology.
It was always about having good enough marketing to permit 10 years of R&D to make the car actually attractive.
The simple truth is that he made electric cars viable competitors to gas-powered cars. His genius is not that he invented them, it's that he profitably manufactured decently reliable cars for a price that lots of people found attractive.
You can try and dismiss it as "marketing," but things like the Gigapress and FSD/Autopilot are impressive technical achievements in their own right. Even more impressive is that he built up a new car company that didn't fold and has had the best selling car in the US for significant chunks of time.
I don't like the guy, I think that FSD is dangerous, and I will never buy a Tesla for as long as he's in charge, but it's crazy that so many people feel the need to discredit his achievements. Sure, he benefited from selling carbon credits and EV subsidies, but if it were such an easy thing to do why did it take so long for anyone else to sell a good EV?
Before he smoked that reefer, his space company was catching the largest booster ever made with metal chopsticks, all paid for by global satellite internet revenue.
His electric crossover/SUV was the best selling car in America.
Now that he’s gotten distracted by politics I dislike, he’s not doing any of that. Definitely no longer the world’s greatest builder.
/s
Huh? You think starlink is funding space-x? If they lost all government and private launch business tomorrow and had to rely on Stalink revenues to stay in business they wouldn’t last through next month.
> His electric crossover/SUV was the best selling car in America.
It was, and then he fried his brain and decided to support fascists across the globe and can’t understand why people no longer want to support him or his businesses.
He apparently watched handmaid’s tale and thought “man those Gilead guys are really onto something”.
He and Thiel claim South Africa’s current government is engaged in genocide against whites, but they have never criticized apartheid.
In the last year alone, around 2/3 of space X's revenue was directly tied to starlink launches.
> If they lost all government and private launch business tomorrow and had to rely on Stalink revenues to stay in business they wouldn’t last through next month.
That's kind of the problem.
It's really annoying that I'm defending him because I find him reprehensible, but the truth is that he's accomplished some crazy things.
I would argue: yes, to the extent that a leader gets to be described as having "accomplished" the work of the team.
It's not nothing, to be a visionary and charismatic leader!
But at the same time… when the reality distortion field seems to be in the process of transforming into a cult of personality, I think it's fair to ask if he'll ever again do something like a new SpaceX or a new Tesla, either as a maker or an investor.
I'm not sure when the cut-off between the two states, RDF and cult, would be. Not unreasonable to say it was when he libelled the cave diver, but there are other times it could've been.
It's been obvious since the submarine incident.
Using it nightly for a few months though? The effect on your brain looks like CTE.
I'm not gonna link the articles, but there are photos of the mountains of defective parts and plenty of people complaining about how terrible the first cars produced that way were. Tesla persevered and now other car manufacturers are trying to duplicate their results.
Huh? Nearly all of his profit was government subsidies designed to push EV adoption. And now he’s trying to pull the ladder up behind him.
Tesla has not been profitable for the vast majority of its existence when it comes to selling a car for more money than it takes to produce.
The government subsidies were available to his competitors at the time. Its not like that gave him a competitive advantage. Everyone else was on the same playing field.
[I hate that im defending that guy]
Where is this claim coming from? I don't see that in the history of the automobile wiki [1], and given that the first early motorized carriages were a century before Ben Franklin flew a kite I have to assume they were electric vehicles.
Nissan might like a word about that.
Tesla was the first to take range seriously.
Tesla was founded in 2003, and licensed the power train developed above. Musk bought into the company in 2004. Tesla teamed up with Lotus in 2004. The first Tesla Roadster prototype was shown in 2006 and delivery of production cars began in 2008. By 2009 they had made 500 of them.
I don't like the man very much either, but exaggerating the state of Tesla before Musk was involved is silly. Before the Model S, Tesla was very small and it wouldn't have surprised anybody if it dried up and blew away in the wind.
You're trying to use weasel words to try to hide the fact that the Nissan Leaf, which was released in 2010 and elected world car of the year, was the world's most successful electric car and top-selling electric car until 2020.
That does not happen if 98% of anything doesn't like it.
Any claim involving "road trips" is a red herring because the Nissan Leaf was designed as a city car used in daily commutes, which means a daily driver for your 1h trips. This is by far the most popular use of a car in the world.
Why do you think it's design range was slightly over 300km? That roughly represents a ceiling of a round trip that takes 2 hours each direction.
For over a decade, the whole world has been buying Nissan Leafs more than any other electric car. How do you explain it?
Actually it does. Electric car sales were so anemic during that time claiming the title made it trivial to be supported by 2% of the population.
> Any claim involving "road trips" is a red herring because the Nissan Leaf was designed as a city car used in daily commutes, which means a daily driver for your 1h trips. This is by far the most popular use of a car in the world.
No it’s not. “Range anxiety” was a constant refrain for anything mentioning electric cars during the first 20 years of the century.
A “city car” isn’t a concept in the US. Only when you get into upper middle class where people can afford multiple cars per household is when you could sacrifice one car like this.
From my rural hometown, the drive to varying degrees of civilization (just big enough to have a small shopping center up to the state capital) is about 25 and 75 miles, respectively. Cities sized in between are around 40-50mi out. The drive to the nearest tiny town for groceries and such is about 2 miles.
I currently live in a suburb and everything one might need, including an international airport, is within a 30mi radius, with the majority of that being within a 5mi radius.
With that in mind and remembering that the bulk of the population lives in cities or their surrounding metro areas, "city cars" are viable for more people than they aren't. Sometimes they'd be better suited as secondary vehicles dedicated to errands, which at first glance might seem more expensive, but the dramatically better fuel economy of e.g. a tiny hybrid or even plain gas car quickly adds up, and in states with cheap electricity combined with scheduled charging at off-peak times, the scales are tilted even further if you have a plug-in hybrid or full EV. The up-front cost is higher, but you quickly make that back from not having to haul the big gas hungry SUV or truck around all over the place.
What are you talking about? The Nissan Leaf was the world's best-selling electric car until 2020, outselling all Tesla's until Tesla Model 3 surpassed it. Are you trying to claim with a straight face that electric cars weren't being used en masse until 2020?
> No it’s not. “Range anxiety” was a constant refrain for anything mentioning electric cars during the first 20 years of the century.
I don't think you are being serious. "Rage anxiety" was literally GM propaganda to throw FUD at electric cars.
https://www.jalopnik.com/how-gm-will-use-fear-to-sell-you-a-...
A business plan that the real Tesla founders actually came up with because they'd seen Silicon Valley homes with Porsches and Prius parked next to each other and thought they could combine those two things?
If you had said this in 2015, we would be nodding along
> What we clearly know is that using software development methodologies to building critical hardware is as a bad idea as it sounds.
This methodology is what provides high speed, low latency internet to the South Pole and every other spot on earth allowed by regulatory.
I mean they did a fine job there, but nothing to write home about IMHO.
And on the topic of reusability I can't really find much info besides that it is just partially reusable. Not sure what the point of it actually is. I guess what matters is the launch price?
The question I still have it, wasn't SpaceX supposed to get USA back on the moon? And I heard they got billions in subsidies but have nothing to show for it.
AFAICT, SpaceX are not the bottleneck holding this back. Or at least, not the only one.
And they do have something to show for it, just not a complete final version. Starship is not yet fully reusable, and I will not make any bet on if they even can make it so as this is not my domain, but if you skip the re-use it is already capable of yeeting up a massive payload to LEO, enough to do a lunar mission.
It’s a commercial launch company. Of course the price matters and it being so much cheaper than the trash from ULA, Russia, etc is why there has been an explosion in new space endeavors (see the bandwagon launches).
> Nothing special about them. NASA could have made their own but someone decided it needs to be outsourced.
“Anyone could have done it bro,” is such an ignorant response. Nobody did it and there was the entire launch industry to collect if they did.
Even if NASA could have, they were derelict of duty in enabling space utilization because they never did it.
> And I heard they got billions in subsidies but have nothing to show for it.
Should probably check stuff before you repeat it. SpaceX has not received billions in subsidies for going to the moon. It did win a contract to do it, which as the name implies has required deliverables.
Its a private startup. It may operate on a loss, leveraged by private equity and government contracts.
Everything else you mention becomes irrelevant. Until we know the costs and operational margins, there is no certainty if they are delivering what they promised.
Also it seems you conflate "making money" with being profitable - its not the same thing. A private company can easily "massage" the PNL sheet to present itself as at a break-even point, and some back-of-the-napkin calculation seems to point to it. Granted, I may be wrong, but the fact is we don't know for sure.
You also seem to not be aware that there are multiple internet satellite providers with south pole coverage, as well as other regions in the globe.
None of this is correct. You don’t get fidelity as an investor repeatedly publishing fraudulent documents.
Also, it’s not like spacex can hide costs. There is no other supply of money to cover operations.
> You also seem to not be aware that there are multiple internet satellite providers with south pole coverage, as well as other regions in the globe.
They are a joke. Completely different leagues of access. Coverage of the South Pole (not McMurdo) got effective continuous bandwidth around the throughput of dialup and periodic passes from a polar sat to upload scientific data.
GEO is absolutely terrible in terms of latency and cost. Starlink is currently the only good option for the entire ocean and any remote place on earth not reachable by fiber infra.
The only up and coming potential competitor is Amazon’s Kuiper/Leo. China is also experimenting here but it’s not clear that will be available to the world.
Claiming there are alternatives to Starlink is extremely ignorant. It only takes a brief glimpse of what it’s doing to both maritime and aviation to understand that it’s unique.
Did I say they were fraudulent? I'm merely stating that tag price means nothing, as they probably are "selling" it at a loss (btw the initial projected falcon price was 10 mil per launch, and the current tag price is ~60 mil, with no strong stats nor costs on reusability). The only way to know for sure is to have access to privileged info behind an NDA. Do you even know what you're talking about? Have you ever reviewed this kind of documents?
> They are a joke. Completely different leagues of access. Coverage of the South Pole (not McMurdo) got effective continuous bandwidth around the throughput of dialup and periodic passes from a polar sat to upload scientific data.
South pole coverage is relevant for like, 3 people. None of the data collected from/to there requires urgency; there is zero scientific advantage other than quality-of-life. Consider this, we receive scientific data from mars.
> GEO is absolutely terrible in terms of latency and cost. Starlink is currently the only good option for the entire ocean and any remote place on earth not reachable by fiber infra.
Remote places tend to have no coverage, because they have no subscribers. Not sure what you think a profitable business is, but you come off as really asinine. There is nothing inherently unique to starlink - except the fact that they're polluting LEO with their garbage. If its sustainable or not, time will tell.
I miss the morning delivery of milk to the doorstep. And the milk carts that used to deliver it
Battery tech was way off on price/performance needed for commuting, until around Tesla happened: https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
IIRC, similar issues with compact powerful electric motors, but I don't have a chart handy for that.
The question - is Musk lying on purpose, or is this more 90-90 rule where he made (obviously wrong) assumptions based on current progress?
(And I say that with conviction. https://hindenburgresearch.com/ are my heroes.)
The persistent short interest in Tesla shows at least that the critics are voicing their concerns in the market.
You and I might think that Tesla is overvalued, maybe. But if it's a bubble, at least it's not a fragile one that pops at the slightest pin prick like a few shorts.
As it stands, he can get a trillion dollar pay package if a something-trillion market cap target is hit.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/04/elon-musk-loses-...
I am an old man.
In my youth we called this lies. Or investor deception.
Some would even go as far as calling what he claims fraud but hey...
CEOs should have a reasonable grasp of what's possible for their team on a given short/medium timeline.
It won't be perfect but should be ballpark.
Elon and those like him make these statements with no reference to realistic project delivery timelines, business capacity or anything else - despite having all of that information readily available.
That's not a best guess, it's making shit up.
It's a bummer though that it's limited to Telsa. Would love to see a fuller one of his all bold statements about robotics, tunnel transportation, space travel, and AI.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-lists/elon-musk...
I don't agree with how they went about trying to cut government spending, but that's beside the point. When he wasn't in control and ultimately got stonewalled and removed as soon as he ran through the initial hype of the project, how is it his fault the claims failed? Do you disagree that the government has a similar amount of waste and spending that could be cut?
And regarding Elon's claims? Is he a toddler or a grown man? If I claim to control the tides and fail, is it not a failure or a lie on my part when I can't control them?
First with autopilot, then with boring's tunnels, then a $39k cybertruck, then ...
What's that saying about "fool me so many times I can't keep count" ?
Whatever angry feeling we may have towards Elon Musk, he's not the richest man on earth for nothing.
Lesson learned, till next time !
He engineers perceptions, finance, and govt funds, not technology. Every report and available evidence shows he is barely technologically astute, nevermind genius; the accomplishments of his teams are despite him not because of him.
Which is why a better description would be: The Greediest Man On Earth.
Both SpaceX and Tesla are accomplishments if you consider where their competitors are.
If not for crew dragon, the US would be begging Russia for seats to the ISS still. Is that your preferred outcome?
You're also ignoring the timeline issue. You want to talk about SLS and it's timeline? Or new Glen?
They're spending their own money, who are you to tell them not to.
As to space debris raining down, yes that is a problem.
CATL, BYD, and other Chinese manufacturers are absolutely killing it at Tesla's expense, Because their markets have actual, sharp-elbowed competition requiring actual innovation.
For SpaceX, who is landing rockets for reuse?
With all due respect, China at this point does seem to only get in when the early adoption is done. Then they just throw state money at the problem to catch up. They might be innovating now but they left the hard work to someone else
China started strategic planning on renewable energy in 1992. You're sorely mistaken if you think China intends to merely "catch up" - they are gunning to be the leader, and have the fundamental research to back the aspirations.
> For SpaceX, who is landing rockets for reuse?
Just Blue Origin. Commercial space is new and inherently has little competition; SpaceX is rightfully a pioneer. Traditional government space programs in Europe, the US, Russia or China were never cost sensitive on national security payloads, or prestige manned missions - maybe a bit on the science missions. China - like the US and few other countries with the research, industrial and GDP foundations - can go from zero to one in any field it chooses to prioritize[1], and has done so on a manned space station - which may be the only one in orbit come 2030.
1. Underestimating an adversary is one way to get nasty surprises. The US is currently playing catch-up on hypersonic glide weaponry.
It’s not hard to sell EVs when you’re losing money on each one.
$230B is the number thrown around, but those are the direct subsidies. When suppliers are subsidized it gets hard to account for all of it.
In particular, nothing that comes out of his mouth regarding AI makes any sense.
And still, people listen to him as if he was an expert. Go figure.
If my observation is correct, I guess what we're witnessing with Musk could be a case of hero worship – and in any narrative in which Musk is a hero, he's of course right.
His latest bullshit was about Tesla cameras and fog/rain/snow - on an investor call, no less - "Oh, we do photon counting directly from the sensor, so it's a non-issue".
No. 1, Tesla cameras are not capable of that - you need a special sensor, that's not useful for any real visual representation. And 2, even if you did, photon counting requires a closed "box" so to speak - you can't count photons in "open air".
And no-one calls it out.
https://thedriven.io/2023/06/22/tesla-to-start-building-its-...
The reality is they announced that as a pipe dream. Just like the FSD, Robotaxi, Optimus and 10 other projects that will never work - or more precisely, they will work but >10 years from now, and it won't be from Tesla but from a competitor.
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...
They only can test with a driver for now. Can you take a ride in this Robotaxi and film it, so we can all see ?
I'm always very curious about why people argue some obvious lies like that about Tesla. Invested ? Paid shills ? Just Musk distortion field ?
as someone that gets driven around by my car whenever it is on the road, i hate that people like you act like it doesn't exist.
This is similar to why one needs to keep an eye on todlers. 99% they are fine, but that 1% of time they will do something very dangerous.
If I had bet that purchasable Teslas wouldn't have level 3 or level 4 driving by 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 I would have won every single one of those bets.
FSD is improving, but they finally put "supervised" in the name for a reason. It's a feature-packed level 2. That doesn't meet the bar.
FSD is level 2. You have to be constantly on the lookout.
I don't know what to think anymore about this. He has continuously conned his way along and does it just long enough to jump to the next con.
Tesla is crashing and somehow people though giving him a huge pay package made sense. Cyber truck is flopping but now he's again living off government graft by having another company buy up the dead weight supply. Tesla is only around because of govt subsidy and now that that's dead he's turned to another govt spigot. While supposedly being opposed politically to what he's doing.
And time and time again people still make up excuses because they can't believe they were conned.
Probably the biggest sign AI is going to flop is him starting talking about it being right around the corner.
Little technical skills, no forecasting ability, we saw how much his "efficiency management" philosophy flopped when done in public via DOGE (vs behind the scenes in a private company) and yet people keep falling for it. As long as he can keep spitting out BS, people keep falling for it.
The really killer part is, I can't even be 100% certain that it's not me. I'm quite sure, and justify it solidly, but then, I would.
Maybe the smart people are the ones who can intuitively feel the stupidity of the masses and take advantage of that, whereas the dumb are the ones who are too cautious about houses of cards and unstable Ponzi schemes...
They mistakenly believe, like temporarily embarrassed millionaires/capitalists [1], that they are actually in the winning group.
But the stock keeps hitting new all time highs.
Luckily I don't bet, I would have taken a huge short position and lost a bunch of money on Tesla years ago because they were already over valued by any plausible revenue projection, and yet the stock went up and up.
But worth remembering, the South Sea Company was worth the equivalent of a few trillion dollars too.
In fact even if every single shareholder in Tesla knows that the price is unsustainable they can still hold out for a greater fool for years. To a large extent you are betting on what the crowd will do, not what the company will do.
They'd be utter idiots if they weren't. (And if they are utter idiots, you shouldn't expect them to behave rationally.)
Why have less money when you actually don't care what happens if you have more money? So long as the stock retains its value, you can do things like borrow against your holdings, leverage that into other investments etc.
https://americanliterature.com/author/hans-christian-anderse...
I always thought the story ended with the emperor and his entourage being embarassed after the child said he's naked... but no, it ends even more close to real human behavior. (Sorry for writing a clickbait sentence).
There’s only upside for shareholders.
Musk’s package is entirely performance-contingent and structured as 12 stock grants.
And the targets are very ambitious: valuation ($8.5 trillion) and operational goals (20M cars, 10M FSD, 1M robotaxis, $400B profit) over 10 years.
https://poole.ncsu.edu/thought-leadership/article/inside-the...
On the other side of the coin, they really don't have a choice; either they attempt to provide leverage (and using non-realistic goals is excellent to avoid actually having to pay it), or any major misshap with any of the other businesses that may have as collateral tesla stock (either directly or indirectly) would basically bankrupt the company. And the scenario where Elon would attempt to do a sort of firesale on purpose just to take revenge isnt far-fetched either;
IMO The only way forward for them is to keep him happy for now, while attempting to either do damage control or graceful exits.
Despite how much conning you believe Musk has done (I won't refute it), Tesla is a company that actually builds cars, and while the Cybertruck flopped and anyone could see that coming from a mile away, that doesn't really affect the Tesla bottom line. That Musk grifted the government into buying them doesn't really do anything besides saving Tesla some money.
I wouldn't buy Tesla shares, I still don't really see their crazy valuation, but I would buy a Tesla car, as they are ostensibly awesome. If you disregard all the lying Musk has done it's still an epic car with unrivaled self driving capabilities.
That he starts talking about something historically has been a sign that some part of it is going to be a reality. You can stand apart from the crazy people who worship the ground he walks on, and still appreciate that he accomplishes great things. Whether it's through conning and grifting, or hard work and keen insight, there are still an electric car company and a rocket company where there weren't before.
Just stop reacting to people believing or shouting things or grotesque behaviors, and just look at the actual reality. It'll do you a lot better than just believing everything Musk says is BS.
It's available! Everyone in the US can go to Austin and get a ride in a Tesla robotaxi!
https://electrek.co/2025/12/22/tesla-robotaxi-project-austin...
He's the perfect salesman for giving investors hope, and delivers some things but promises everything.
The hyperloop.. Colonizing mars by 2025 I think was one claim..
Good article here https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-lists/elon-musk...
I'm happy he's pushed space access but everything else, he's coming across as a bit of a confidence man.
His words are literally taken as Bible by a huge part of the global audience, that he is compelled to keep the earth hopeful.
Sometimes I wonder if Musk's astronomical pay package is an engineered rug pull on Tesla's investors. Imagine if they know the jig is up and intend to fleece stockholders one last time by leaving them holding the bag when the house of cards comes crumbling down.
Throwing ones hands up in the air and giving up, would be valid if it was actually hard. The example you have given just mixes up CEOs, Politicians and the Fed.
Being charitable, this is a question of whether someone can understand all these domains well enough to make out good from bad. Yes - people have. It takes time, effort and a desire to learn these things, but its done regularly.
This is the specific comment I was replying to.
It isn't about throwing ones hands in the air, its about realizing that CEOs are always going to embellish the present as much as possible and make claims of the future that are aspirational at best.
I raise both politicians and the Fed because they both do the exact same thing when it comes to making claims of the future that they don't know will happen but hope will push people today in a certain direction.
I wasn't claiming that all three groups are the same, only that they all fall afoul of the frustrating type of claimed the earlier comment took issue with.
The company L&F referenced in this article were supplying said cathode material.
ref https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-plans-four-new-batt...
It was only once he realized that he has been duped and those will never materialize that the coverage turned negative.
I won’t purchase or use anything Elon Musk does. Bad behavior and corroding society needs to be met with social disapproval.
Fred selling his stock also meant he was less inclined to be only pro-Tesla.
ChatGPT sums it up pretty well I think:
https://chatgpt.com/share/69552165-238c-8008-980b-4d0ff2e1b4...
Booo hooooo
Is it fraud if you worked for a startup that promised you options, and then refused to honor/issue those said options? After all, because those options never existed, you also "paid $0 for non-existent [options]"?
> Is it fraud if he paid $0 for non-existent roadsters?
How do you think readership gets monetised in the first place? The biggest way is ads, which includes referrals.
Do you dismiss paid ad placement the same way you dismiss referrals? If not, what makes it different?
> Referral credits are legal fictions
A promise for $100 of stuff isn't exactly the same as a promise for $100, but it's close. Debt is a "legal fiction" but that doesn't mean it's not legitimate, or that you can pretend it doesn't exist.
The contract
If your employer said they'd pay you half a million if you worked for them, and then you did and they didn't pay you, I doubt you'd be dismissing it so frivolously
it is literally a situation in which a business pays someone for doing a job (e.g. referring customers)
2. If it’s not hard work, then why didn’t Tesla go out and do it themselves instead of mooching off someone else to do it?
And when it's straight up facts easily verifiable from others sources, pretending that it's not based in reality is just sticking your fingers in your ears and screaming "la la la la" which is something that even very few 12 year olds do.
The word on the street is this is only 2 weeks out.
Right after fulfilling the roadster orders.
And right before the Dyson sphere that will power Grok AI is deployed.
I understand thinking it would be a terrible idea in many ways, but in this scenario I think the only thing an "eco-terrorist" accomplishes is getting more servers to stay on earth where they damage the ecosystem more.
It isn't something that I've looked into in depth, but it feels like a lot of the discussion isn't hitting the mark here.
> No, that is not a typo. $2.9 billion to roughly $7,400.
Ooft. That’s one hell of a write down. Imagine the person that had to do the calculation and report it back.
As in they literally expect to build one more Cybertruck battery and that's it. I'm guessing the excess stock in the Tesla factories covers spares for a few years already.
I wonder when the cancellation will be announced by Tesla? It's all but leaked at this point.
A '99% write down' is such an uncommon term that many people might not register it.
Tax reasons? Keep it on the book and write the loss off against other profit over coming years? No clue how it would work in practice but it sounds taxy.
Get rid of the touchscreen and the four-wheel-drive steering and the electrical flush door handles, the hatch thing in the back, smaller wheels, any other electronic features like 120v inverters, etc. solid rear axel would be nice but that would be a major redesign.
China has all sorts of demographic and debt problems no one is talking about:
https://open.substack.com/pub/crosscurrents28/p/chinas-broke...
Fewer new entrants? America has Tesla, Rivian, Lucid, et cetera in the EV native camp, and Waymo in the autonomous-native camp.
If we limit ourselves to export variants, Europe has Polestar. (And by this metric, China has dozens of new entrants in both fields.)
The problem is: they can’t make them cheap enough to compete with China in developing countries. I’m not sure if they even want to do that at this point, the margins there are so low. It’s easier to just rebadge a Chinese car as your own (Renault and GM already do that in SA).
Innovator's dilemma. It's not a coincidence that the two largest EV makers in the world are battery natives [1], and that they outproduce Nos. 3 (Geely), 4 (GM) and 5 (VW) combined.
Maybe, but which part of the market? China imports are popular because they're good value at a much lower price point, even after tariffs.
Many EU makers have been late to, or totally absent from, the market for a car for the masses. I've always bought Asian cars and probably always will because they're just better value.
And in North America they failed to bring dealers to heal.
It's ok, it's only our children's future at risk.
I think short term focus is far too rewarded in Western companies. In fact that's pretty much the only oversight given to the CEOs. The next quarterly report is all that matters. Even if you wanted to do the right thing and focus on long term goals office politics will ensure that a single down quarter where you focused on long term investments will be punished by those looking to move up. Pump the numbers each and every quarter and don't bother about long term visions since those aren't important for your career, bonuses and golden parachute. The big shareholders too aren't worried about the long term either since shareholders are fluid. Pump this quarter and they can move their investments to the next company before the rot sets in.
The companies that do extremely well in the West are those with singular stable long term leadership where the leaders have authority (or simply majority ownership) to take risks. Berkshire Hathaway, Meta, Nvidia, Amazon, Musks companies, Apple (under Jobs when he was around), etc.
This is partly why Tesla stock price is ridiculous. The competition is the traditional car companies which are extremely poorly run while Tesla is seen as a company run by a singular individual with more authority to take on longer term projects than just the next quarters goal. I think the market isn't correctly taking into account the possible mental illness from Musk but none the less there is merit to the idea that a company with singular stable leadership will be more successful than those which have quarterly focus.
This can be seen in many many examples. I actually don't think SpaceX is particularly well run either but their competition are companies where the only thing that matters for their leadership is the next quarterly report. So it's a case of a poorly run company vs an extremely terribly run company (eg. Boeing). No wonder SpaceX is doing well when their competition is fucking Boeing. Likewise with Amazon vs Walmart, Apple under jobs vs Apple not under Jobs, etc.
China commonly avoids this trap with stakeholder rather than shareholder based governance. This is less than perfect but it's still a league better than the race to the next quarter that Western shareholder governed companies have been doing. Details from an academic point of view: https://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/2025/06/18/what-chinas-e...
In other words the Western incentives for leadership is pretty broken (except when the leadership has the stability to avoid worrying about these short term incentives). I have the opinion that it's likely to lead to the fall of the West in the long term. We can see China repeatedly winning in various fields, electric cars being a clear example. We can also see in the West whenever we have shareholder based governance the companies have poor long term outcomes.
Zero auto companies outside China, America and Europe have successfully pivoted to EVs. And even within China, it's basically Geely and Changan. All the others are new entrants.
> China commonly avoids this trap with stakeholder rather than shareholder based governance
GM's unions own a significant fraction of its shares. This is a stakeholder system. What you may be referring to is state ownership, not stakeholder-based governance.
That's who is sock-puppeting all these misanthropes.
US capitalism was fine with a few wealthy people driving around some novelty luxury cars with EV motors in them. China turned it into an actual mass market product.
It really isn't. BYD is progressively becoming ubiquitous here (large South America city)
Look at solar, an industry that has continual bankruptcies, yet is eating the world. New players grow, die, and get replaced all the time, in a continual churn of new technology.
That Tesla would die a death was not inevitable, merely a choice due to recent years of extremely poor leadership and terrible mismanagment. Even now, Tesla may pull out of the slump and recover! It's doubtful it will ever justify its share price, but it's likely that if it ever gets fairly priced as a company, it could be sold to a US auto major that is regretting it's failure to produce EVs for the international market, and wants to try to catch up. Maybe. That time might have passed too...
Teslas aren’t perfect, and they are definitely starting to get a bit dated, but the list you made has precisely zero “great EVs” imho.
1. The Lightning auto-resumes lane centering after a lane switch, Tesla requires manually restarting (along with the annoyances which accompany that, like re-enabling auto wipers every single time).
2. CarPlay. (Which presumably Tesla is finally going to bring us.) Responding to text messages while driving is easier and less fussy with CarPlay (plus, if you are used to how CarPlay works, you will forget that after you dictate a reply to a text message in the Tesla you need to hit the send button on the screen). iMessages to non-phone recipients works with CarPlay but not at all with Tesla.
3. The Ford app lets me set a one-off "charge to 100%" flag which automatically resets to the previous setting after that charge.
4. And even though it is so obvious that it is probably boring to point out at this point, the rain sensing wipers on the Lightning actually work. The Tesla dry wipes, or not at all even when it is pouring, and everything in between.
5. The Lightning has radar. Without a lead car my Tesla remains prone to phantom braking at overpasses on bright sunny days. I have not ever had phantom braking on my pickup.
6. Windows. No amount of recalibration makes my Tesla windows go up exactly into the right position to be sealed. And pushing the button again just makes them lower slightly. So you have to monkey with it a couple times to make the sound of wind next to your ear go silent. I've never had a car amongst the dozens I've owned that got this basic functionality wrong, but both of my Teslas have struggled with it.
7. Comfort. Ford does not vertically integrate production of the interior and seats, and it shows. Nor do they cut corners on insulation. Someone else in this thread said that interiors were an inexpensive way for incumbents to differentiate from Tesla but I disagree on one point -- I think good interior design is expensive, which is exactly why Tesla does basically nothing. So the road noise is excessive and the flat, thin, barely bolstered seats are uncomfortable if you don't have enough built-in padding on your butt. Ford just outsources, probably to someone like Recaro, who has infinitely more experience making seats that don't suck.
First the Bolt, and then the Lightning has convinced me that there is no special sauce. I have a pickup that drives like my Tesla, but is still a pickup with all of the upsides and still has a comfy normal interior without the quirks. Tesla won't get any more of my business, for example, until they bring back the stalks and put in an IR rain sensor. They may eventually do both of these (I think they may have already started caving on the stalks). But now that I know that there are other options at least as good, I'm more picky and less accepting of the persistent cost cutting.
Tesla has everyone else beat on charging infrastructure, that is true, but I don't need that except for about 0.5% of the miles I drive (and even there, Tesla's competitors exist and are fine on the routes I'd take).
I like that by default it is set to two-pedal drive, especially in case I end up having to use an ICE or hybrid car (or have other drivers use my Ioniq). I like that I have a key fob and there's a physical interaction I need to make to turn the car on. I like that it supports Android Auto.
I think the styling is much better. I haven't sat in a Tesla long enough to give a direct comparison but the Ioniq interior is in the top quarter of cars I've driven.
It's not all roses, there's been Ioniq drivers run into ICCU issues that you don't really see the equivalent of with Tesla, but if I run into that then I'll just take it as a warranty item.
Edit: I forgot about the turn signal stalks but that was a primary thing for me as well, I literally thought it was some kind of anti-Tesla meme at first that they didn't have normal turn signals, until I verified it for myself.
- L5 autonomous driving
- $35k Teslas
- Hyperloop
- Lunar trips to the moon on spacex
- Humans on Mars
But I guess if we just consider those delayed, then all good.
As has been pointed out, the Model 3 has been below $35k inflation adjusted many times. There's been a lot of inflation, you may have noticed. And if that's not good enough for you, they did actually sell a $35k model for a while, though I doubt they made money on it.
I don't recall Elon promising that he would build a hyperloop on any timeline. In fact I remember him saying that he wasn't going to work on it personally.
SpaceX is under contract with NASA to build the Moon lander. I don't know what else you want here.
Humans on Mars is still SpaceX's main objective and their actions are consistent with that. Nobody would have started the insanely ambitious Starship program just to launch things into Earth orbit or the Moon.
I won't go through all the things that Elon has promised and achieved late, but the list is long and impressive.
It isn't full autonomy. It isn't full self-driving.
In 2016 Tesla claimed that "as of today, all Tesla vehicles produced in our factory – including Model 3 – will have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver."
The blog entry is no longer on Tesla's website but the Internet Archive has it: https://web.archive.org/web/20240730071548/https://tesla.com...
There were supposed to be 1 million robotaxis on the road by 2020. That didn't happen either: https://www.thedrive.com/news/38129/elon-musk-promised-1-mil...
Tesla set their own benchmarks and timelines. Tesla failed to achieve them.
They find it easier to lie and have people make excuses for them than to actually execute.
Lying is part of the company culture at Tesla.
> It isn't full autonomy
They have a few robotaxis doing full autonomy, driving with no people in them, today in Austin. But I'm not even arguing that the promise is achieved yet, or that it happened on time. Just that it's "an incredibly impressive system" that is "by far the best available to purchase worldwide", and improving rapidly. All indisputably true.
As for the 2016 promise, Tesla has already committed to bearing any required hardware upgrade costs for people who actually purchased FSD.
> There were supposed to be 1 million robotaxis on the road by 2020
Again, there will be, but not on that timeline. Just late. As expected.
There is no strawman. These are Tesla's own claims and Telsa's own timelines. No one forced them into making these false claims.
> Of course Elon doesn't meet his timelines, everyone knows that.
The reality is he has lied to you constantly but you're still willing to make excuses for him.
If there's always a new excuse ready for Dear Leader then that's cult thinking.
He sets extremely ambitious goals and usually/often misses them, but the end result is that despite missing the ambitious goal, something amazing is delivered still much faster than anyone else could do it.
And that's just contemporary capitalism. Hundreds of millions starved in famines, and starving people got to watch as the food they themselves harvested was shipped to markets that would pay more for it. Millions were enslaved, and cultures, races and communities were wiped off the faces of continents in the name of profit.
But don't let facts get in the way of some good bullshit!
I'm no fan of Tesla, but this looks like the collapse of the contract with the supplier for the battery chemistry they've moved away from, aka "no [more] big deal."
2023 article confirming NMC chemistry: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1149/1945-7111/ad14d0
5/2025 article discussing change to LFP: https://roboticsbiz.com/teslas-4680-lfp-battery-explained-ch...
3/2025 article comparing BYD's LFP and Tesla's NMC/NCM: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266638642...
Cylindrical cells make sense for higher performance NMC and NCA chemistries, as they can be cooled more easily (coolant lines can run in the voids between cylindrical cells), and any single cell failure is less likely to cascade to other cells. Batteries with cylindrical cells were easier to repair, but nowadays cells are welded together instead of bolted, so that's no longer an advantage.
This is obviously untrue. Tons of other chemistries have used prismatic cells with good safety as well. You think Macbooks and iPhones use LFP or cylinder cells?
> Batteries with cylindrical cells were easier to repair,
It can be just as easy to repair a prismatic battery as a cylinder battery. It all comes down to the layout of the battery. And as you mentioned, how the battery is constructed, if the battery is structural, etc.
To use an analogy: If someone stores a gallon of gasoline in a single-walled plastic container, that's probably OK. But storing 1,000 gallons of gasoline without certain safety measures is unsafe. So it goes with battery capacities.
Or are you counting OEMs rather than actual vehicles?
https://phdenergy.com/beyond-teslas-4680-why-bmws-gen6-4695-...
GM, Hyundai, and Nissan all used pouch cells with higher energy density chemistries, and had recalls due to battery fire risks. Ford also recalled tens of thousands of their plug in hybrids due to battery fire risks, though they haven't found a solution yet beyond limiting the max charge of the battery. These batteries are also NMC pouch cells.
I'm sure it's physically possible to make safe, reliable pouch or prismatic cells using higher energy chemistries, but so far it has been risky for those who have tried.
And the US automakers tried prismatic cells before. Chevy Volt used them in 2012!
https://www.wardsauto.com/news/ford-terminates-ev-battery-su...
https://www.autoevolution.com/news/ford-recalls-f-150-lightn...
SK settled for $2B case that revealed they stole LG battery technology https://cleantechnica.com/2021/02/15/itc-sides-with-lg-chem-...
Circle packing = 90%
Blade battery packing = 100%
I personally fact checked articles about "Autopilot disengages milliseconds before collision" and the one related to Benavides v. Tesla case.
In the first case they jumped to conclusions. In the second case they "forgot" to mention any details that contradict their narrative: that there were two cases separated by years, that the police has received all the information they needed in the first case, that the driver was pressing the accelerator.
HN audience loves to undermine one of the only places actually objectively calling out the mega corps
Cyberteack is a flop. This battery has a parallel track and is used elsewhere so conclusions are just basesless .
He has been promising fully autonomous Teslas since at least 2015 and “level 5” self-driving within a couple of years, yet cars still require human oversight and true autonomy remains elusive.
He said Tesla robotaxis would be on the road by 2020 and then “next year” repeatedly, which never happened.
He promised an affordable $35,000 Model 3 and a cheap family EV, but those never materialized as advertised.
He unveiled the Cybertruck with specific features and price points that did not pan out, and several promised add-ons never appeared.
He set repeated production deadlines for the Tesla Roadster that kept slipping for years.
And his Mars colonization timelines are still nowhere near realistic.
The same cycle keeps repeating, with fans focusing on a few wins while ignoring a long list of missed commitments. At some point it stops being bold vision and starts looking like a confidence game.
We needed a car again. Sold ours a year ago and got by with Uber, rentals, taxis. Life changed a bit and we needed something more predictable. I was planning to buy something used and boring and didn’t really care what.
My wife asked, “What about an EV?” We can’t charge in our rental garage, but there’s a Tesla Supercharger literally across the street. Took a Tesla test drive mostly out of curiosity.
And… I drove maybe 1% of that drive. The rest was on full self driving (FSD).
Fast forward, I now own a Tesla, and about 99% of my driving is on FSD.
Important context: when we picked it up, it was still on v13. It immediately made an illegal turn and scared some pedestrians in a crosswalk. So yes, I get the concern and skepticism. I had it too.
Then v14.2 landed.
Whatever they changed in that release feels real. It’s not just incremental. It feels like a different system. Elon says “we finally cracked it” (and probably says that all the time), so take that with a grain of salt, but with my very small sample size… it kind of looks like they might have.
Two moments that really stuck with me:
While self-driving, the car clearly anticipated a bus making a massive wide turn into our lane and hung way back until the maneuver was complete. It saw that developing long before I did.
At ~70 mph, I was mid lane-change with my blinker on when a driver towing a large trailer decided to drift into the same lane without checking their blind spot. The Tesla instantly aborted the lane change and smoothly moved back, avoiding what would’ve been a nasty accident. No panic, no hard braking, no drama.
I know this probably sounds like shilling. I’m not interested in the politics and don’t want to defend any of that. But it genuinely feels like stepping into the future, and honestly a much safer way to drive.
I want Rivian, Waymo, whoever to nail this too. I hope they do. But right now, Tesla seems to actually have something that crossed a line from “demo” to “wow, this is real.”
I didn’t expect to come away thinking that. But here we are.
Admittedly, the road to a working version of FSD has been a bumpy one, with many overly optimistic timelines, but now it's finally here, and it is almost completely ignored.
You have a real obligation to learn how to drive. Your examples indicate neglect to take the safety of your family and others’ seriously
Agree with your take 100%.
https://www.consumerreports.org/-a2103632203/
If almost all of your driving is on highways then you could probably rely on ADAS for 99% of your driving with almost any other car brand as well
The actual facts of this reporting could just as likely be explained by vertical integration, very typical of Tesla, or of a supplier shift due to absurdly high tariffs.
No, that is not a typo. $2.9 billion to roughly $7,400."
https://electrek.co/2025/12/29/tesla-4680-battery-supply-cha...
The latter part of this is speculative. Tesla may have begun shipping dry cathodes but it isn't clear that they're capable of matching the former third-party volume. Tesla would absolutely need the additional 4680 volume if Cybertruck sales were meeting their original projections (as opposed to now when they are ~an order of magnitude lower).
We know from this that they do not need the same level of third-party 4680 capacity, and (call it speculative if you so desire) this is the most parsimonious explanation for the L&F write down.
How easily can the inputs be redirected by the source to more viable longterm contract sells?
How strongly will this push back on mining and minerals in related fields? E.g. palladium prices have collapsed, could this kind of thing move mining product pricing?
Tesla is absolutely fucked.
There are just too many places, even in California, where I have to limit my trip because of electric range.
I'm surprised no one has done the generator.
First thing I noticed on reveal day: it looks like a star ship from the the 1985 game, Elite.[0] It's a 3D model of a space ship for a computer that could barely keep up.[1] This design was a great starting point for a child's imagination, but even as a kid it was always assumed that this was the best we can do for now. The future would be far less disappointing. Verdict: this design isn't futuristic; it's nostalgic.
Looking down, I saw that its beautiful, shining, crystalline, space-going shuttlecraft aesthetic sits on matte, round, rubber wheels tied to the ground. It wants to fly, but it can't, and that is sad.
A few months later, I saw the unfortunate resemblance to industrial garbage receptacles usually kept out of site behind decorative enclosures. I realized that while designing one of those enclosures. Then the memes came.
I actually prefer a version I saw that was mounted on tracks for arctic environments.[2] It says, "I am a raw shard of ice carved from a massive glacier," and it pulls it off quite well.
[0] https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/File:EliteShipIdentificationCh... [1] https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/File:Elite_Animation.gif [2] https://s1.cdn.autoevolution.com/images/news/gallery/world-s...
I don't find the idea all that audacious. Several EV trucks were already in the works. The Cybertruck is unique in form, but certainly not in function. There's precedent for sloppily-made stainless steel wedge-shaped American cars [2] thought up by executives on too many drugs [1].
The execution? Whoever figured out how to get a stainless steel wedge on stilts through NHTSA testing deserves a raise. That's sorcery.
But I have seen Electrek being too negative about Tesla always. And never reporting anything positive as such.
I mean, not that it matters. Yes, you can "blame them", because if you're writing articles based on how you feel about the subject and not the facts, you're not a journalist or a news-writer, you're a propagandist.
X is owned by Musk and has their algorithm tuned to boost his posts. What makes you think he also isn't artificially boosting Tesla is the future vibe? X is a pure propaganda spigot right now.
Search terms that will help you on your journey include “DOGE”, “Kenya”, and “cholera”.
I’m sorry that the death of hundreds of thousands of people did not register in your world, but I feel like charges of “lunacy” are a bit rich coming from someone living in a soft bubble of ignorance.
In any case I'm more and more convinced that Tesla does not hold any significant advantage anymore over legacy automakers in EV space like Volkswagen group, which has 20+ electric models.
No new features, no HUD, no dashboard. They want 60k for cars which have nothing in them. Other companies have now ripped the software and the iPad, so they have nothing unique.
All they had to do was continue to improve the product. They didn’t even try.
1) Wasn't it always inevitable that, once tha large established car manufacturers really started to knuckle down to creating EVs, that Tesla's lead and 'moat' would mostly vanish? They still have some of the most efficient EVs available, and their UI/UX is still one of the best, but of course they'll face compeition, and of course their competitors will try to differentiate in all directions, and especially those that are superficially attractive (and less expensive to deliver) like interior design.
2) Back in his earlier, pre-crazy days, Musk suggested (something along the lines of) that Tesla's goal wasn't to be a huge successful car company, so much as to prove that EVs were viable as everyday cars, and drive a revolution in the car industry. By this measure, they've mostly succeeded.
---
Big picture, totally agree that Tesla seems to have lost its way over the past few years, which unsurprisingly correlates (to an outside observer) with Musk's apparent changes in judgement and behaviour, with its consequent impact on Tesla's image and desirability amongst consumers. The Cybertruck turns out to have been a huge misstep, and not having delivered a 'model 2' - i.e. a small mid-sized option - (maybe instead?) is a huge miss.
2025 model year, less than 20k miles.
I can get an iPad myself and a GPS myself that don’t have these problems.
They started without all the legacy and worries. Like existing suppliers, existing things, existing image. Fresh market, modern software development etc. brought them a proper market share.
Now the olds had to update themselves, which they did and now they are stuck with tesla.
But thats it. Tesla doesn't has that much innovation. Plenty of things did not materialize at all.
You are not wrong about Tesla's base models like the 3 and Y being light on traditional 60k car features, but the second part is much more debatable. With the exception of some Chinese car manufacturers, almost no Western car makers have managed to match Tesla's software stack.
I can't think of another car brand that makes its own silicon, ships OTA updates weekly, runs an in-house OS that isn't an outdated Android skin, and tightly integrates media, navigation, charging, and energy management all in the same platform. Most legacy automakers still rely on their old infotainment vendors, release update slowly (if at all!), and struggle with fragmented software architectures. Their driver assistance systems are improving very slowly, and they are behind Tesla even for basic features like lane-keep assist. And that's even before getting into self-driving ambitions, where no brand has been able to ship anything similar AFAIK.
Rivian and Lucid are closer philosophically and technically, but they're still quite tiny players compared to Tesla, and haven't proven they can execute at Tesla's volume and pricing.
There's currently no other DA other than Tesla's FSD available in the US that will work on city streets and highways.
Or, if you want to loosely define "work", Ernst Dickmanns had self driving in the 80s, and put in on the autobahn in the 90s. I'd rather define it more tightly as "statistically at least as safe to be in _and_ to be near, as a human driver".
Tesla claims to have achieved that, but I don't believe them. That's because the data they report 1) omits a fair bit of critical info, and 2) frequently changes definitions. Both serve to make comparisons difficult. If it was clearly safe, I think they'd put effort into making the comparison transparent.
Bear in mind that Musk has been claiming "Full Self-Driving" since at least 2016, and people involved have asserted that he wasn't wrong, he was lying.
* The ability to specify individual drop-off locations for FSD arrivals (curbside, parking lot, driveway, etc)
* Grok as a voice assistant for the infotainment system
* iOS live activity viewer for the Dog Mode camera feed
* Speed/steering/control statuses being overlaid on dashcam footage
* “Santa Mode” which revamps the UI with Christmas theming for the holiday season
* Automatic HOV lane routing based on vehicle occupancy status
* Vehicle alerts/chimes when exiting, if leaving your phone within the vehicle
* Location-based individual charge limits
* 3D visualizations of supercharger locations, synced with active availability/occupancy per stall
* The SpaceX docking simulator ported as an in-vehicle game, playable on the infotainment screen
These are all additions from just the most recent update, and I can confidently say this is the only vehicle I’ve had that consistently gets better and better in terms of its software features over the course of ownership. Each update takes anywhere from 20-45 minutes during which, unfortunately, you’re not able to utilize the vehicle at all.
> The SpaceX docking simulator ported as an in-vehicle game, playable on the infotainment screen
Really? People want that? I know that Elon Musk would think that it would be great to play a video game about Elon Musk's companies, but are Tesla owners similarly afflicted?
Driving to tesla meetups, adding certain accessories for led light stuff, its (sry to say) just weird.
I get the basic idea of telling the internet about some issue and getting faster feedback than from the manufacturer, but I never had the feeling i needed any of this for my non Tesla EV.
And as i mentioned in my comment: I would hate all the regular updates. As long as everything works as expected, pls do not change anything.
To me it is like someone saying, "Honey, I'll be on the garage watching Football in my Tesla all afternoon." Yeah, you can do it, but is a car really where you want to do that? The second aspect is it is a game glorifying Elon's "genius". What is next, a FPS for your Tesla where you have a chainsaw and you run through federal buildings trying to get the highest body count?
If you look at your updates, the FSD one is clearly a beta thing now for so long, of course you need to update regularly if you still change that much. Btw. Musk said 2014 that FSD will allow you to sleep in your Car while driving in 2023. Soooo?
Something like Grok was also added OTA in my Ford car. So yes they can do it apparently too.
Everything else just feels like gimicks I wouldn't want to have. I drive my car i do not play with my car. My car is not a gimmick.
And you wonder why Tesla is heading the way of the dodo? Wasting the SW talent to deliver drek.
Because musk has been over promising and under delivering for years. What do you want to bet those updates still haven't put the "self driving" in FSD? Classic bait and switch. They give you a little thread of hope that one day your car will be better, and give you goofy infotainment features instead of autonomous driving.
VW (ID software 3/4/5), Mercedes (MBUX).
They don't update weekly (I don't think so, anyway), but I don't see how that would be inherently positive. They should be able to update weekly (e.g. security patches), sure, but car software should probably not be changing week-to-week for years on end.
That being said, since the US is basically a captive and stagnating market for EVs now, it seems most models from European makers are not available in the US anyway.
They are also forefront of ml simulation. 3D, weather pattern etc.
Tesla also had plenty of missshapes like Dojo or cybertruck and the sitll not finished FSD.
My Car OS from Ford Mustang Mach-e works completly fine. No clue why this is some advantage Tesla should have? BMW just launched their new Gen 6 incl. their new os.
All the advantages of that fully integrated 'platform' also just works in my car?
BMW is very good in lane keeping, Mercedes can drive more km in germany autonomes than BMW and BMW can drive more km than Tesla.
I of course focus on german brands because i'm from germany. But XPeng and others working on all of that too.
GP was talking about HUD and "new features" in the context of a $60k car. Presumably your desired "basic car" would cost considerably less.
* Wait 60 seconds to start using the GPS / nav to become responsive
* Unreliable backup camera (even after several software "fixes")
* No buttons or knobs for climate control
* No way to disable intrusive line detection that makes car vibrate when you get close to yellow and white lines
* Overzealous auto-dim of high beams (our 2023 Mazda CX-5 is significantly better with almost no false positives)
It's not all bad, and once the infotainment warms up, it's plenty responsive. It's certainly a luxury car though (as an admitted Mazda fan) you can get a lot of nice from a $30k Mazda.
To me, it looks desperate, and poorly executed. I was even waiting outside shake shack for my order, and the sales person approached me to offer me a test drive unsolicited. While I was waiting, I saw groups of people flicking them off and trolling them.
The irony to me - they have paid me $250,000 back for vehicles under lemon law instead of acknowledging and fixing a safety issue in the software, instead labeling it from “bug” to “characteristic”.
Now, they’re approaching me outside a shake shack begging me to accept a test drive, and i bet the issue is still not fixed. BMW driver assistance pro may be more limited but it is boring in the ways you want.
I was really intent on supporting Tesla, but they refused to work with me when I repeatedly raised the safety issue. They just repeatedly returned the car and said it was an expected characteristic for the car to turn left when I’m turning the wheel right.
I suspect they don’t wanna fix the false positive lane departure avoidance because they probably know they would be even more cases of accidental FSD engagement that do result in a collision where it needs to kick in. At the time I was reporting the issue they did not disclose the hidden disabled lane departure state, either.
Also bizarre to me that only Tesla/Rivian offer dash cam recordings as a standard feature. All the other cars seem to come with cameras, they just choose not to allow the video to be saved?
It becomes more and more clear that traditional automakers see software as just another lowest-cost component of the car. I understand VW actually started putting effort into their software, but I haven't heard good things about it. Maybe it'll get better.
My Ford Mustang Mach-e has great software. It works, is reliable, supports apple and android car.
BMW software stack does even more.
Where is this coming from? What are the features you are missing?
BMW can be remote controled also Mercedes and VW btw.
That’s precisely what I don’t want my car to support. Every other car’s software is essentially a CarPlay integration.
There are no other vehicles that can take you as easily to the grocery store as they can across the country.
Buying another brand for me at this point would be like picking up a part time job as a driver. No thank you lol. FSD is all the mote that they need.
I assume this post is a troll, 'no one is within a decade of Tesla' -- are you serious ? Have a look at Rivian, which is preparing to make the Cybertruck even more of a laughing stock.
It is totally absurd how far Tesla has fallen behind legacy auto makers, who are now starting up their own battery production and are very close to actually releasing a 25.000 Euro car in Europe.
While I'm an out and proud "Tesla hater" and freely admit my own bias. The defenders never actually seem to have any "look here's something good that [site] overlooked!" It's just whining about the site being anti-Tesla
Would it be less 'exaggeration' if the site only talked about Tesla "half" the time? (that is to say, just ignored Tesla rather than reported on issues)
When I comment on the articles or email their authors/editors about the inaccuracies they never respond, nor fix the article.
So yeah... Take anything on electrek.co with a grain of salt.
How can such an overcapacity be possible ? Is that a massive failure of market analysis ?
On the other hand, is the factory building the cybertruck easy to modify to build other, most successful models ? I hear there is demand for billions of autonomous robotaxis.
Partially. Turns out that the cost, size, impracticality, and look turn off most people who would buy an EV.
But then there is also the active brand sabotage by the CEO, whose state of mind the Cybertruck seems to originate from and embody.
nemomarx•1mo ago
toomuchtodo•1mo ago
SpaceX Buys over 1000 Cybertrucks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46405984 - December 2025
Last week: Elon Musk's SpaceX bought tens of millions worth of Cybertrucks Tesla can't sell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46317462 - December 2025 (6 comments)
Elon Musk's SpaceX and XAI Are Buying Tesla's Unsold Cybertrucks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45572152 - October 2025 (8 comments)
Tesla's European Sales Plunge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46391352 - December 2025 (3 comments)
Tesla US sales drop to nearly 4-year low in November - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46248803 - December 2025 (60 comments)
Tesla looks to reset strategy amid sluggish India sales - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46084554 - November 2025 (2 comments)
Tesla's European sales tumble nearly 50% in October - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46063634 - November 2025 (57 comments)
Tesla sees worst sales performance in China in years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45881302 - November 2025 (1 comment)
BYD Pulls Ahead of Tesla in UK, Closes Sales Gap in Germany - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45859618 - November 2025 (35 comments)
Tesla's German car sales more than halve in October as wider EV sales jump - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45827314 - November 2025 (135 comments)
[Flagged] Tesla sales in Germany have cratered from last year, data shows - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45826384 - November 2025 (28 comments)
Study: The Musk Partisan Effect on Tesla Sales - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45825382 - November 2025 (2 comments) ("Without the Musk partisan effect, Tesla sales between October 2022 and April 2025 would have been 67-83% higher, equivalent to 1-1.26 million more vehicles. Musk’s partisan activities also increased the sales of other automakers' electric and hybrid vehicles 17-22% because of substitution, and undermined California’s progress in meeting its zero-emissions vehicle target.")
Tesla Cybertruck sales are flatlining - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45573985 - October 2025 (17 comments)
Tesla Pivots to Robots as Investors Question Sales and Soaring Valuation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45228566 - September 2025 (3 comments)
coliveira•1mo ago
toomuchtodo•1mo ago
[1] https://www.thebignewsletter.com/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=thebignewsletter.com
[3] https://perfectunion.us/
[4] https://substack.perfectunion.us/
stocksinsmocks•1mo ago
I don’t even know what to call the kind of system we have.
coliveira•1mo ago
SoftTalker•1mo ago
toomuchtodo•1mo ago
> BYD announced in 2022 its plans to launch a fleet of car carriers to build what it calls a “maritime bridge” to support its global sales growth and supply chain. The company said it would invest about $687 million to develop a fleet of eight car carriers. The first of the vessels, BYD Explorer No. 1 was delivered in January 2024 followed by BYD Changzhou in December 2024, and BYD Hefei, which was the company’s first owned PCTC. Each of the first three vessels has a capacity of 7,000 units. [My note: current BYD vertical integration marine fleet capacity is ~30k units when including the Shenzhen vessel mentioned above, but does not include capacity through third party charters]
[1] China EV Exports Worldwide Rise 87% Year over Year to 199,836 in November [2025] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-29/china-ev-... | https://archive.today/Q80Zs - December 29, 2025
[2] Chinese EV Manufacturer BYD Takes Delivery of [World's] Largest Capacity Car Carrier - https://maritime-executive.com/article/chinese-ev-manufactur... - April 24th, 2025
(think in systems; US light vehicle TAM is ~18M units/year, global TAM is ~90M units/year; Tesla US sales will finalize at ~600k units for 2025)
SoftTalker•1mo ago
stefan_•1mo ago
SoftTalker•1mo ago
jordanb•1mo ago
magic_man•1mo ago
nxm•1mo ago
toomuchtodo•1mo ago
Musk can move money around SpaceX/Tesla/XAI/whatever the next story to investors is to prop up valuations and share prices, but can he win against China's clean tech export machine? Long term, I think not (China is a third of global manufacturing capacity as of this comment, and the world is their TAM). So he'll do the tech bro thing, giving talks, going to demo days, spending his wealth on pet projects, etc, while innovators innovate and point the firehose of these products at the world. Are you going to talk people out of his religion? Unlikely. The faithful will remain so, because that's how the human brain sometimes operates.
Ember Energy: China Cleantech Exports Data Explorer - https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e... (updated monthly) ("In 2024, China produced around 80% of the world’s solar PV modules and battery cells, and 70% of electric vehicles.")
US warns China overproducing EVs, batteries, semiconductors for global dominance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41909869 - October 2024
China's Batteries Are Now Cheap Enough to Power Huge Shifts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954508 - July 2024
China Already Makes as Many Batteries as the Entire World Wants - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40933773 - July 2024
(as of this comment, ~50% of light vehicle sales in China are NEVs [battery electric of plug in hybrid] while exporting ~6M units/year, more than total annual US light vehicle sales)
oblio•1mo ago
It doesn't mean that Tesla stock won't crash unless it actually delivers a Holy Grail. Which is supremely unlikely
swiftcoder•1mo ago
Just because stock is trading on memes, doesn't mean it can't keep doing so well past your solvency to short it...
bigyabai•1mo ago
> "Short it then"
I can smell your personal finance through the screen.
bdcravens•1mo ago
lawn•1mo ago
The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
Meaning you also need to get the timing just right otherwise you'll lose big, even if Tesla crashes and burns to zero just after.
elAhmo•1mo ago
SoftTalker•1mo ago
andsoitis•1mo ago
Struggling, not so much: '24/'25 revenue of just under $100B, with Q3'25 record profitability and deliveries yielding $1.5B net income. Strong liquidity and a current ratio of about 2, boosting short-term financial stability. Solid cash reserves and relatively low debt ratio.
High stock price: far exceeds that of traditional auto makers even though Tesla's revenue is significantly lower. High valuation reflects investor expectations of growth and future tech upside. Exuberant? Probably. OTOH, Tesla has delivered better ROI for investors than the other automakers.
stingraycharles•1mo ago
andsoitis•1mo ago
It sounds like you're arguing that high valuation compared to fundamentals means buyers expect gains from future buyers paying more sounds like a Ponzi, but it isn't, it is speculation.
The comparison doesn't make sense. Some surface features of speculative markets can look Ponzi-like, but the underlying mechanics are very different.
A Ponzi-scheme returns to earlier participants directly from money contributed by later participants, with no real underlying business generating value. In a Ponzi-scheme, there is no real product (or it is irrelevant), the operator controls payouts, and investors are promised steady or guaranteed returns. None of that applies to Tesla stock.
Ponzi-schemes hide losses, smooth returns, collapse suddenly. Tesla stock is volatile, has had large drawdowns, and public reflects bad news, margin compression, demand shifts. Volatility is a sign of a market, not a Ponzi.
boroboro4•1mo ago
andsoitis•1mo ago
majormajor•1mo ago
This part is the smell.
"It's not a car company, it's a AI/Robot/whatever company." The valuation is supposedly justified by a future product that perpetually fails to materialize.
It's obviously not a classical Ponzi scheme in the mechanical sense where payouts are controlled by a central party. It has major Ponzi vibes though, with new money continuing to reward old money even though the fundamentals and products haven't done anything to justify that continued influx - only the hype has.
stingraycharles•1mo ago
The actual underlying product, the cars, don’t match the crazy valuation.
andsoitis•1mo ago
grim_io•1mo ago
Generating revenue and profit at the expense of the participants is literally the ponzi scheme.
lanstin•1mo ago
knuppar•1mo ago
If BYD was in the US I think we could check this box reeeeaaally quickly. It would make Tesla irrelevant.
andsoitis•1mo ago
Why? What's your logic?
vkou•1mo ago
array_key_first•1mo ago
There's a huge market opportunity here that all our manufacturers are missing, seemingly on purpose. BYD, and others, would absolutely sweep the competition.
overfeed•1mo ago
They have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to never make low-margin (read "cheap") cars. If someone is looking for a competitive automotive market, they won't find it in the US. The financial engineering is world-class though.
refurb•1mo ago
array_key_first•1mo ago
refurb•1mo ago
And sure some American cars are plastic and flimsy (particularly the low end models), but these are premium Chinese brands.
array_key_first•1mo ago
I disagree, again, pretty much all EVs handle like shit because they're very heavy and have a ton of torque. It doesn't help that most American cars are very large and particularly tall, which makes handling even worse. The reality is that a sedan will basically always handle better than an SUV, no matter what, even if it's a piece of shit sedan and a 100K Cadillac SUV. At least, on pavement.
> And sure some American cars are plastic and flimsy
No, like, all of them. You can't buy a Tesla with an interior that isn't mostly plastic. GM is still doing that bullshit where most of their components are binned from 20K shitboxes. There's SOME exceptions, but they're rare. And you'll find that what Xiaomi and some other's are doing is not plastic. They have leather interiors and stuff, this is all very easy to verify online. I'm not telling you anything that isn't trivial to find out.
AngryData•1mo ago
What does a 2025 US car have over a BYD vehicle? Questionable parts availability?
themaninthedark•1mo ago
You would have to be crazy to crash 3% of your economy.
On a related note, health insurance companies make up ~18%(this includes care, can't find that broken out).
Good luck getting nationalized health insurance, where are all those people going to work?
awesome_dude•1mo ago
I personally prefer a BYD, Musk has damaged his brand by being so political, but the BYD product is (IMO) superior.
Having said that BYD isnt without its issues (eg. over reporting of range)
elAhmo•1mo ago
Yeah, sure.
fsh•1mo ago
renewiltord•1mo ago
The big dog is BYD though. Twice as many as 2nd place Tesla.
foobarian•1mo ago
andsoitis•1mo ago
But it is stunning that legacy automakers are sticking to fossil fuels.
LunaSea•1mo ago
They also know that this means that the EU will push the target date for the end of fossi fuel cars.
riffraff•1mo ago
"But it's high margin", sure it is, but so is Ferrari, and their P/E is 30-40.
andsoitis•1mo ago
Indeed. Global 2024 data shows Tesla selling about 1.8M. EV's only by that group of automakers comes to around 1.5M. Toyota and Ford are hybrid-first, not EV. VW is the only legacy automaker that comes near Tesla's EV scale. Mercedes prioritizes margin over volume. Rivian is capacity-limited.
bagels•1mo ago
epistasis•1mo ago
This fully explains the market valuation, of course! Never mind a swarm of retail investors driven by a news media that covered Musk as if he were Tony Stark for years, this market cap is fully based on solid fundamental analysis of expected future revenue.
ModernMech•1mo ago
zdragnar•1mo ago
Tiktaalik•1mo ago
iknowstuff•1mo ago
apexalpha•1mo ago
iknowstuff•1mo ago
apexalpha•1mo ago
The people voting Afd et al. are NOT people buying EVs. The venn diagram of those groups is two circles.
delusional•1mo ago
Its not like this differs from the US. Neither white supremacists (the "alt right") nor mainstream republicans were buying his cars.
You should be open to the possibility that he isn't clueless, he might actually just be a racist authoritarian.
array_key_first•1mo ago
riffraff•1mo ago
literalAardvark•1mo ago
qaq•1mo ago
bhokbah•1mo ago
wtcactus•1mo ago
bhokbah•1mo ago
https://www.acea.auto/files/Press_release_car_registrations_...
verdverm•1mo ago
cyberax•1mo ago
The two most popular EVs in China are the Wuling Mini and the Geely Xingyuan. The first one costs $4500 for the base model, and the second one is $9800. And you can get a very decent EV for $15k with plenty of options.
In 2-3 years, these $5k and $10k cars will only get better, and they'll just slaughter all the competition in markets outside the US and Europe. Especially once used cars start appearing at a fraction of the cost.
Traditional auto manufacturers are dead. Full stop. They just haven't realized it yet. Tesla had a chance to compete in this market with Model 2 but Musk decided to blow their lead on a completely stillborn and gimmick-filled robotaxi.
andsoitis•1mo ago
Not sure whether you know, but Geely entered the automotive business in 1997 (founded in 1986).
The company has subsidiaries / joint ventures with automakers like Volvo, Polestar, Proton, Smart, Lotus, Renault, etc.
Lin Shufu, Geely’s founder and chairman bought just shy of 10% of Mercedes Benz in 2018, making him the second biggest individual shareholder in the German carmaker. The #1 spot is occupied by The Beijing Automotive Industry Holding Co. (BAIC), via its state-owned parent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geely
cyberax•1mo ago
Even Toyota is slowly waking up, with a reasonable bZ3X SUV for $15k (China only).
pretzellogician•1mo ago
AnimalMuppet•1mo ago
jedberg•1mo ago
mxschumacher•1mo ago
awesome_dude•1mo ago
How does that justify Tesla's valuation?
Is it based on the idea that the margin can be improved?
andsoitis•1mo ago
You got it reversed.
For Q3'2025, GM net income $1.3B on $48B revenue (down 0.3% YoY). Tesla, in contrast, generated $1.5B income on $28B revenue (up 12% YoY).
GM's income was down 56.6% while Tesla's was down 37%.
GM had higher operating income than Tesla, however. Explained by Tesla's more aggressive investment in R&D and AI.
awesome_dude•1mo ago
moogly•1mo ago
andsoitis•1mo ago
You're misreading. $100B annual revenue. 1.5B quarterly new income.
Q3 2025 was record revenue of $27B (up 12% YoY). Operating margin was 5.8% (down from 10.8 Q3 2024).
Why the lower profitability? Higher expenses for AI and R&D costs, lower EV prices (very strong competition), etc.
boplicity•1mo ago
Retric•1mo ago
They lost the massive US subsidy making EV’s appealing and are getting outcomes in China. Model E and Cybertruck have anemic and shrinking sales numbers etc.
hvb2•1mo ago
Retric•1mo ago
I sometimes forget that’s not the real name, which gets confusing.
cosmicgadget•1mo ago
Retric•1mo ago
Not quite failure in Sweden. Something about how the car is not quite bad enough to break the lease.
Thus explaining the joke in such excruciating detail as to kill any humor.
cosmicgadget•1mo ago
mxschumacher•1mo ago
Sales have been flat for 3 years and the delivery numbers in Europe are catastrophic
on a fully diluted basis, the market cap is above $1.6tn, so at a PE of 20, they'd have to generate something like $80bn in profit per year - hard to do in an industry that is as brutally competitive and low margin as passenger cars.
abirch•1mo ago
mxschumacher•1mo ago
eagleislandsong•1mo ago
Analemma_•1mo ago
abirch•1mo ago
It'd like me saying that Barry Bonds only won the home run records because he used steroids. It wasn't entirely the steroids but I'm sure they certainly didn't hurt.
delusional•1mo ago
Contemporary western capitalism would disagree. You can never subsidize technology cleanly, only an organization of people working with that technology. We would usually denounce that as "picking winners" in our system.
happosai•1mo ago
Of course, the salaries and working conditions are going up in China while west is eroding worker rights as fast as we can. One the factories will come back here simply because we'll end up cheaper. Don't buy solar made by Xinjiang forced labor, by solar panels made by illegal immigrant prison labor!
stevenhuang•1mo ago
abirch•1mo ago
----
It might be tempting when one has been asleep at the wheel to chalk up the rise of Chinese carmakers led by BYD to unfair subsidies, especially since leaders in Washington and Brussels have done so. No doubt, China is far from a free, fair and open market. The scale and pervasiveness of corporate subsidies at the federal and local level far exceed what other market-based economies offer.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-10-17/byd-s-...
----
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-10/china-s-c...
overfeed•1mo ago
EVs were subsidised in the west, e.g. in California (#4 "country" by GDP), Norway, and US tax incentives - which have gone away after the Trump anti-renewables Bill of 2025. MRSPs for EVs were slashed after September 2025 due to the loss of this subsidy, and 2 months later Ford cancelled it's electric F-150 program.
dzhiurgis•1mo ago
guru4consulting•1mo ago
andsoitis•1mo ago
Their profit growth has slowed (significant drops in profit YoY). Even revenue has dropped in some quarters.
Investors had very high growth expectations given their past rapid expansion, but investors now see only moderate growth.
Intense competition and pricing pressure.
China EV market is slowing. Overcapacity is emerging over the sector and govt subsidies are softening.
Finally, global macro and sentiment towards Chinese stocks is cautious.
andsoitis•1mo ago
We must live in parallel universes.
From 2009 to 2022, China offered national purchase subsidies for EV buyers. Peak subsidies: ¥40,000–60,000 per vehicle (~$6k–9k). Combined with local subsidies, some buyers paid 30–40% less than market cost. These subsidies were phased down and formally ended in 2022, but the industry had already reached massive scale.
This policy alone created the world’s largest EV market.
Even after direct subsidies ended, China continues to provide: EV purchase tax exemptions (10% tax waived), extended through 2027.
China provides EV manufacturers with: Cheap or free land, Low-interest or state-directed loans, Preferential electricity pricing, Grants for factories, R&D, and tooling, State-backed battery supply chains.
China strategically subsidized battery production: CATL, BYD, and others received R&D grants, Guaranteed demand, Export financing.
China now controls ~75% of global lithium refining and ~80% of battery cell manufacturing.
This dramatically lowers EV costs versus foreign competitors.
No value judgement about subsidizing, but to say it is a myth that China has and continues to subsidize their EV industry is false.
vkou•1mo ago
They are also way cheaper and at comparable quality to western cars.
monero-xmr•1mo ago
azinman2•1mo ago
monero-xmr•1mo ago
AnIrishDuck•1mo ago
But I (clearly) must be wrong, sorry to disagree with the spokesman of America.
jfoster•1mo ago
lawn•1mo ago
On the contrary, Teslas remarkably high stock price means it's less likely to go up and a big correction is more likely.
FloorEgg•1mo ago
jillesvangurp•1mo ago
The way Toyota and Ford deal with this is reducing investments in EVs while at the same time meeting increased EV demand by heavily leaning on other companies to make them some EVs. Ford is working with VW and Renault in Europe. Toyota is working with big Chinese manufacturers in China. So is Ford. BMW has some success with their recent EV models but it is taking big hits with demand for their overall products in markets like the US and China.
The US is clearly lagging the EU and China when it comes to electrification. It's not at all clear that Tesla is doing much better. Their market share has tanked in markets where EVs do well (China, EU). However, it does have its own tech and still plenty of money. Where other manufacturers are leaning on outside suppliers, Tesla is pushing their own technology hard for just about everything. Including self driving cars and batteries. It's a different strategy at least and one that isn't dependent on the ICE market doing well or Chinese manufacturers doing all the technical heavy lifting.
Tesla's stock price is based on investor expectations on some of those bets working out eventually. Even if a lot of that stuff seems like it is struggling right now, it's too early to write all of it off as failed. The 4680 is still expected to be a big part of the semi's Tesla is expected to finally start mass producing in 2026. Self driving tests are still continuing and might eventually add up to something that works well enough. And it's also a relavant format for LFP based chemistries.
The problem for all of them have right now (especially Tesla) is that the Chinese are moving full steam ahead and are doing really well on technology and growth currently. Including things like self driving and of course batteries. The 4680 seems like it is old news when solid state is happening and new chemistries other than NMC are starting to dominate. And FSD while impressive has plenty of competition from other vendors at this point. Rivian has its own version. So do several Chinese vendors. And of course Waymo is actually moving lots of passengers autonomously at this point.
ulfw•1mo ago
paxys•1mo ago
mapontosevenths•1mo ago
67% of Americans have said they'll never consider buying a Tesla. 56% cite Musk as either the entire reason or part of the reason. [0]
Tesla IS Elon Musk. Without him they're nothing, with him they can't access 2/3rds of the market. Why would anyone invest in that?
[0] https://www.yahoo.com/news/two-thirds-of-americans-now-say-t...
vkou•1mo ago
Musk is a shit human, but to an investor, everything he touches turns to gold. Whether his companies make anything useful doesn't matter, what matters is that the stock price in his companies goes up, so people give him more money. This works until it doesn't.
iknowstuff•1mo ago
* don't believe the 67% will follow through with that after experiencing FSD
* don't need 67% of Americans to purchase the car. Robotaxi use is plenty.
* look beyond the American market and its pathetic 5% EV share.
mapontosevenths•1mo ago
Thanks for explaining the other side of it.
dzhiurgis•1mo ago
I’ve tried v13 few weeks ago, knowing it works so well. Still got shocked how good it is.
They’ll have to drop the price of it tho, but even then 10M cars * $100 per month is $12b of revenue per year.
mapontosevenths•1mo ago
I'm fairly certain every auto manufacturer and many non-auto manufacturers are working on it. I doubt they'll be able to patent anything truly important to the process, since others beat them to the market with most of it. Or am I missing something essential?
overfeed•1mo ago
It's not. Waymo could license a version of its stack using the Android model (specifies a minimum sensor suite OEMs have to qualify models on).
iknowstuff•1mo ago
rootusrootus•1mo ago
It's a race between how fast Waymo's COGS can decline and how fast Tesla's FSD can achieve actual self-driving. At this moment, given all the evidence available, my inclination is that Waymo is in a better spot.
iknowstuff•1mo ago
It’s a bit of a bet. It feels like Tesla is real close, and if they get there, Waymo has no way to compete with Tesla’s manufacturing prowess and vertical integration.
mapontosevenths•1mo ago
I feel like people will be willing to wait until next year for the Alphabet or Mercedes version, but maybe I'm overestimating the average person's attention span or underestimating how far behind the competition is.
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-documentary...
terminalshort•1mo ago
iknowstuff•1mo ago
iknowstuff•1mo ago
mapontosevenths•1mo ago
I can say though that when my brother bought his first Tesla he paid thousands of dollars for FSD, which was supposed to be released "any day now." It's been many years and as far as I can tell it's still not REALLY here (in the sense that most people would mean it).
I know that the plural of anecdote is not data, but... The Tesla that he bought originally all those years ago is actually gone now. He had one of the earlier versions of FSD enabled and passed out behind the wheel. Tesla, in their infinite wisdom, decided that if you let go of the wheel for too long they should just completely disable the self driving (at least in that version). So naturally when the driver became incapacitated it just disengaged self driving completely and let the vehicle drive straight into a tree as "punishment" for daring to let go of the wheel for too long. Nobody was hurt, but the vehicle was totaled. It could have been much worse though.
It's such an obvious design flaw. "Driverless 2000 pound missile hurtling down the highway at 55 mpg" is the one failure mode you would think they'd avoid at all costs, rather than using it as the safety fallback. When people talk about how great Tesla engineering is I just kind of shrug.
iknowstuff•1mo ago
mapontosevenths•1mo ago
When you say that it makes me wonder, because the tree was way off on the side of the road with narrow but deep ditch between the road and the tree. It drove through/over the ditch to hit the tree.
I wonder if "pulling over" is exactly what it was trying to do. Maybe it just missed that there was no place to pull over TO because it was foggy. So it drove straight into the ditch then bounced out of it into a tree on the other side of the ditch.
Either way, it's a second hand story with a sample size of 1. Doesn't prove anything, but it was enough to make me pretty nervous about FSD because the one sample happened to be close to me. I recognize that it's valueless to you or anyone else.
breve•1mo ago
Then why are Tesla's sales down globally?
nutjob2•1mo ago
You're not in a position to makes those claims. People think that if it works for them, it's great, which is nonsense of course.
himinlomax•1mo ago
Two things can happen:
The dream is a bust, and Tesla is worthless.
Or the dream pans out, and almost all other car companies are worth a lot less.
Unless you absolutely want to believe that either self driving is impossible, or Tesla is uniquely unable to achieve it, the valuation is not entirely unwarranted.
Put shortly, Tesla is not a car company, it's a bet on self-driving cars.
Animats•1mo ago
debo_•1mo ago
Scubabear68•1mo ago
They abandoned the hardware most promising to help enable self-driving.
neogodless•1mo ago
Tesla is not the only company to achieve self-driving, and all companies that achieve it share the market with them.
(Or the fourth option, it will take decades for self-driving to take even a significant market of "driving" as humans continue to want to own and drive cars rather than short-term rentals.)
kilna•1mo ago
The real question is if Tesla is uniquely ABLE to achieve it, above others in the market... including new startups or tech/auto-maker partnerships which may yet form.
Tesla has some supply chain innovation, but none of what they do can't be replicated... and Musk's slavish commitment to video as opposed to LIDAR is hobbling them.
hiddencost•1mo ago
So something isn't being priced correctly.
majormajor•1mo ago
It omits a lot of other scenarios that increase the actual risk of betting on Tesla...
Self-driving becomes a commodity and so there's no unique Tesla win.
Self-driving becomes something only Tesla controls but (in the fleet/rental model) doesn't bring back returns to justify this investment because of extremely high capital, maintenance, regulatory, or other costs.
Self-driving becomes something only Tesla controls but (in the personal-owner model) doesn't bring back returns to justify this investment because it doesn't motivate the entire world to splash out on new vehicles overnight and also doesn't override other existing biases/preferences.
Self-driving is won by someone else (maybe someone with less religious views about Lidar, say) and Tesla no longer can even sell that promise.
Those are just the ones that occur to me in a few minutes!
malshe•1mo ago
moogly•1mo ago
sidibe•1mo ago
1970-01-01•1mo ago
vinyl7•1mo ago
y0eswddl•1mo ago
Our so-called "gdp" is mostly rent and legal ponzi schemes
bgwalter•1mo ago
https://fortune.com/2025/03/20/howard-lutnick-pumps-tesla-st...
“If you want to learn something on this show tonight, buy Tesla,” Lutnick told Fox News host Jesse Watters.
In this economy we have a billionaire clan selling hot air and backing each other up. The main "achievements" of this administration are in pumping Bitcoin, "AI", cannabis sales and and online gambling.
y0eswddl•1mo ago
It's why the entire S&P 500 teeters on the back of 7 companies without any presently viable paths to profitability that would justify the current valuations.
It's why repeatedly lying for a decade+ made Elon so rich even though the business output and fundamentals never really matched the valuation.
Still doesn't - this valuation is mostly vestigial beliefs that AI would eliminate an entire workforce ("history often rhymes") of drivers and replace car ownership with subscription.
The majority of the performance in the market has little to do with actual material value being produced and everything to do with how much rent finance bros think they can extract from the stock.
chrsw•1mo ago
Tycho•1mo ago
Veedrac•1mo ago
Imagine an investor's experience with TSLA. From the beginning, they're flooded with news reports about 'fundamentals' this, 'fundamentals' that, about how Tesla would imminently collapse, how it's a scam, yada yada. Said investors _constantly_ see themselves being right and those skeptics wrong. Tesla is in fact disrupting an industry. They really are just continuing to scale. Marginal profitability keeps going up. Their cars keep getting better. FSD keeps getting better. The competition that people kept pointing at kept failing to materialize. None of this seems to change the skeptics' byline.
Tesla is actually in a materially worse position than it was a few years ago, by many metrics, but the stock price isn't set by 'fundamentals', it's set by the people setting demand for the stock. With TSLA, this is disproportionately going to be people who have learned to and gotten rich from ignoring the people loudly telling them why investing in Tesla is a bad idea.
A market will correct eventually, but corrections either require people to change their minds or run out of capital. Neither has happened yet, so the market can't correct.
rich_sasha•1mo ago
So these people are no longer shorting. Sane long-only people, likewise have been out for a long time. You're left with a clique of people who won't sell regardless, and when Elon promises to make ice cream with robotaxies, they'll buy a bit more stock.
When only irrational people trade something, the price and market for it are irrational too.
throw-12-16•1mo ago