The mystery I can wrap my head around is how Tesla has avoided getting hammered despite being hit from a hundred different directions. What exactly is the market pricing in?
They peaked around 2021, and even after posting multiple quarters of disappointing results, the stock is still trading above 2021 levels. For almost any other company, slightly lowering guidance or missing estimates by a few percentage points simply tanks the stock. But for Tesla, no amount of Musk’s idiocy seems to be enough to seriously move it.
The market discounts future returns but it is unclear and shifting what proportion of those returns are from the operations of the company in the market it sells products in and what proportion comes from the operations of traders in financial markets. More plainly, traders discount returns from buybacks and dividends financed by the operations of the company and returns from selling their shares to "greater fools".
As long as the music is playing they will keep dancing. Musk is a master of DJing that party. We might wake up tomorrow and find that his house of cards has fallen apart, but we might wake up to learn they really have solved FSD. That ambiguity keeps the price from collapsing.
What is it about FSD that results in this valuation though?
If elon builds a time machine and goes to the future to get FSD tech from 100 years from now and rolls it out to all teslas tomorrow, what will change? Will every car driver get rid of their cars and get a tesla? Will that suddenly justify the stupid valuation?
Realistically, I don't think the majority of drivers will care that much. Sure, their sales will go up, but I can't see it going up by that much.
FSD will never be "achieved" suddenly. The tech will incrementally improve every year, across all manufacturers until one day we are manual driving only 1% of the time with FSD doing the rest. Like AGI, there is no moat in FSD. This is the natural outcome of the trajectory that we are on right now, and nothing about tesla is making me believe they will offer anything that other OEMs can't.
No, I think the market is much more cynical than that. Tesla is a meme stock similar to bitcoin or GME. Investors are degenerate gamblers, hoping that it will continue to rise because that's what it does atm, and hoping they won't be the one left behind holding the bag when it crashes one day. It's little more than a voluntary ponzi scheme that most big investors openly buy into knowing full well what's at stake.
>What is it about FSD that results in this valuation though?
Are you willing to accept the ugly answer? Because the point of FSD isn't what they pitch. The replacing human drivers to save lives yada yada... That ain't it. The point is creating a handful of leverage points through which the autonomy of the populace to move wherever they want can be controlled through. Once the tech is the majority driver, people can finally be properly managed as the little work units they are. That's the dark part of the valuation. The power aspect. The ones who own the means to locomote are the ultimate rent collectors. There's simply no arguing that can be done by a populace that can be prevented from showing up to any attempt at collective protest via geofencing. Or if they do show up, can be added to a comprehensive list for participating in disruptive activities.
Capabilities, ladies and gentlemen. We have to assess these things on the ground of what they enable. Delegating transport entirely to a third party necessarily creates a vulnerability of society to manipulation by the ones running the damn thing; and the ones running the damn thing want money, and security for themselves.
Exactly. It's meme stock. There's no rational explanation for this ridiculous valuation.
Tesla has been overvalued for a long time, and not by a bit either; they're worth more than the next several car makers put together, yet sell less cars than any of them. Their high valuation could still be considered defensible when they were the fastest growing car company in the world and the only one selling electric cars. But none of that is true; everybody is selling electric cars now, and BYD is selling more than Tesla, I think. And instead of growing, Tesla is now shrinking in many markets. Even their self driving is not the best.
The share price should have collapsed, yet it remains high. How? It makes no sense to me.
Because their stocks aren't memes, their investors are serious, nobody really GAF about self driving and fully autonomous driving isn't actually the "killer app" many think it is.
There are so, so, so many companies operating in this space right now. You list two that have given up. A quick google brings back at least a dozen operations that appear to be still ongoing.
BMW Personal Pilot, Merc Drive Pilot, and Honda Sensing Elite are Level 3 automation tech you can buy right now. Tesla is still at level 2!!
Whether Tesla is going to be the first to achieve true autonomy or not is a toss-up. And and regardless of who achieves it, the rest will be very very short on their heels.
> BMW Personal Pilot, Merc Drive Pilot, and Honda Sensing Elite are Level 3 automation tech you can buy right now. Tesla is still at level 2!!
You need to put about 10 asterisks on those. MB Drive Pilot has been discontinued due to "low demand and high cost", and those other 2 systems appear to have substantial restrictions. Meanwhile, FSD today "works" on pretty much any road or highway. I can easily see certain folks see that as far ahead of competitors, since it physically can do more in more places and operate in more conditions.
That can't/won't happen. Musk's wealth is primarily in SpaceX now and he has a much higher ownership stake in SpaceX than Tesla. As well as that, Tesla is public so he can't just do napkin math and decide to merge them. So the question is: Does Tesla buy SpaceX? Well no, Tesla can't afford it. Ok, well can SpaceX buy Tesla? Well no, SpaceX can't afford it either. So do they announce a merger? Well that doesn't make any sense because Tesla is valued like a meme stock so it would massively dilute Musk's ownership of the overall company. So the idea that they fuse might be driving up the stock, but by driving up the stock you're actually preventing it happening. If Tesla starts to trade at realistic multiples and comes down to lets say a 200Bn company, I'd expect SpaceX to snap it up at that valuation, but it'd be crazy to do it before then.
Even if they have FSD ready tomorrow the financials would not support this valuation.
Summing the sales figures in [0] we get 9M to 10M Teslas on the road. Let's say 10M and and let's say Tesla will keep selling 1.6M / year for the next 5 years [1]. This is 18M Teslas and let's assume all of them are converted into paying customers at $100 / month [2]. This works out to $21 B / year in income. $22 B / year in income cannot justify $1.5 T in market value.
[2] this is another huge assumption - I know 5 Teslas owners. They tried the $100 / month assisted driving (or whatever Tesla calls it these days). All said it was cool, but not worth it and did not sign up after the trial period. These are professionals who value their time (tech engineers and 1 banker)
There's zero chance that Musk will have suddenly "solved" FSD in a day, a week, or a year. He's not an engineer; he's a money man, and a grifter.
That's why people keep giving Tesla money: because Musk has fooled so many people into believing he's this amazing engineer, who could, possibly, "solve" FSD overnight—and, moreover, has gotten them to buy into it so deeply that they have tied their identity into that belief, and so in order to continue to cling to it, they reject empirical evidence of both his lack of qualifications and his outright crimes.
Well he certainly wouldn't but the engineers working for Tesla might, with a probability that is very low but greater than 0. It's much higher (but still low) in 1 year, 5 years, 10 years. Tomorrow is a metanym for the future.
But to be very clear I not only don't think they will but I don't think that they think they will, or they wouldn't be shifting focus to Optimus. I'm not invested in Tesla except for my exposure through
index funds.
If anyone who is a fan of Tesla can get through this article without changing their mind. Well. Bless their heart.
To be maximally reductive, FSD will never work because the sensor suite is deficient. There are other reasons but that one's enough.
Same for a rocket that's ridiculously large for orbital missions but can't go beyond orbit without 15 to 25 refueling flights of the same enormous rocket.
The reasons for both these failing are going to be manyfold and complex, but there are enough simple reasons that everyone should understand.
It would be actually fun to see where the limit is on echolocation with serious ML processing these days. Apparently people did quite well in 2022 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9655721/
> Do Tesla shareholders think the rest of the auto industry are in a coma?
I have no idea what institutional investors think, and they're probably the relevant group here.
From the way I've observed individuals discussing it, defending it, on HN… it pattern-matches to my understanding of what people these days call "main character syndrome", i.e. that the other companies are just a supporting cast to provide an interesting challenge for the only one that's not an NPC.
Or, they're stuck in a narrative that stopped making sense only gradually. Tesla solving self-driving ten years ago would have been a triumph. Solving it today, meh. They would be ahead of others by a couple of years, max.
I appreciate when my vocabulary expands. I understood this by context and similarity to 'synonym'. I may have encountered it before (probably), but I didn't know it. Excellent use in a post.
> he's this amazing engineer, who could, possibly, "solve" FSD overnight
Even if thay were true many people hate Elon now. Enough that they will pass on any technology he is the only purveyor of.
After he celebrated letting children starve (USAID) by dancing on stage with a chainsaw many people decided to never buy any Musk product for any reason. Now there are the Epstein ties.
Worse, many people who dont care about politics at all won't get involved, because Musk is an unstable drug user and its not wise to entangle yourself in his business affairs.
You really thought the poster meant that Elon Musk personally went and implemented FSD? Just for your information, Musk is also not personally assembling every Tesla vehicle.
Well if there are plenty of posters then it should be easy to give me 5 comments of different people where it's clear they believe Tesla R&D is a solo Elon Musk operation.
They don’t care because Musk is marketing Tesla not as a car company but as a technology company (building robots and self driving rental service). And why does he do that? Maybe because his car sales are down…
I always assumed “tech company” meant using technology to build a fundamentally better car from the ground up. I don't know at what point the bait-and-switch happened, it was suddenly about pursuing every stupid moonshot fantasy at the cost of making better cars.
I thought it was always a tech company focused around trying to import things from the future. Since before they ever had enough sales that sales could go down.
Actually the funny thing is that there is a mixing of meme stuff, Elon verse impacts (AI + self driving + Energy) etc. and under none of these circumstances is a 200+ PE justified.
The funny thing is after 6 years of effort apparently they have managed to get the dry coating process for batteries working and according to a few reputed sources have ingredients for entire battery chain available locally.
The thing is if this stock was underpriced and rational this would be such a positive news after 2-3 years of growth stall.
Instead they are trying to keep the hype up with endless goalpost changing and self driving possibly stuck perenially in edge case doom scenario with camera only decision
Batteries are boring, or at least the hype has a short shelf life. There are enough normies making progress on batteries that Elon hasn't got a credible argument that he is different and better.
Same for cheap Teslas. Some hype trains hit the buffers sooner than later.
I am so confused when I read things like this because my Tesla model 3 is effectively self driving for me for months now. Hundreds of miles without intervention. No other car I can buy can do this yet
That’s irresponsible at best give it doesn’t support full self driving. I never understood why end users are allowed to just beta test a car on public roads.
Is it responsible to let users do auto speed and auto lane on a high speed highway without other autopilot features ?
Rollout both technologies at scale , and try to guess with one will cause more harm giving th fact there will be users in both cars trying to put legs on a steering wheel :
A stupid tech that will not even try to do safe things
Or software that is let’s say 4x less safe vs avg human but still very capable of doing maneuvering without hitting obvious walls etc ?
Giving people more ways to shut themselves in the foot does not improve the safety.
I find the entire thing a kind of dark pattern as the system along with misleading marketing makes you lax over time just to catch you off guard.
You get used with the system to work correctly and then when you expect less it does the unthinkable and the whole world blames you for not supervising a beta software product on the road on day 300 with the same rigour you did on day one.
I can see a very direct correlation with LLM systems. Claude has been working great for me until one day when it git reset the entire repo and I’ve lost two days work because it couldn’t revert a file it corrupted . This happened because I just supervised it just like you would supervise a FSD car with “bypass” mode. Fortunately it didn’t kill anyone , just two days of work lost. If there was the risk of someone being killed I would never allow a bypass /fsd/supervise mode regardless of how unlikely this is to happen.
they have very good guardrails to prevent you that, unlike autolane etc.
Teslas has sensors , eye trackers etc is it possible to shoot yourself in the leg, sure. But not in any different way vs human doing irrational things in the car, make up, arguing , love etc.
Human-being is an irrational create that should not drive except for fun in isolated environment. Tesla or Waymo or anyone else.... It is good to remove human from the road, the faster the better.
>> It is good to remove human from the road, the faster the better.
I’m all for this but not to replace dumb people with dumb software. I think the FSD should be treated more like the airplane safety. We have the opportunity to do this right not just what’s the cheapest way we can get away with it.
well, if you don't read news that try to panic about everything new, that's +- exactly how people currently use FSD.
When I'm driving FSD If i want to drink, eat, etc, instead of doing weird one hand tricks every driver did, i just turn FSD and let it drive. When I'm tired , I'm doing the same. Again , attention control works really good, it doesn't let you sit on the phone etc. unlike many other cars with less advanced features. You can't be on FSD + Phone but you can easily be on the phone + lane control in other car.
Phone is by far the biggest real killer of people, and no body is trying to create a campaign against phone mounts, etc.
Based on the self driving trials in my Model Y, I find it terrifying that anyone trusts it to drive them around. It required multiple interventions in a single 10-minute drive last time I tried it.
I'm using FSD for 100% of my driving and only need to intervene maybe once a week. It's usually because the car is not confident of too slow, not because it's doing something dangerous. Two years ago it was very different where almost every trip I needed to intervene to avoid crash. The progress they have made is truly amazing.
This exact sentence (minus the specific version) is claimed every single week.
No, you do not "become scary good" every single week the past 10 years and yet still not be able to drive coast to coast all by itself (which Elon promised it would do a decade ago)
You are just human and bad at evaluating it. You might even be experiencing literal statistical noise.
I have not been proclaiming scary good every week for the last 10 years. In fact, I have cancelled my subscription at least two times, once on v13 and once on v14, with the reason ‘not good enough yet.’ I am telling you that for me personally it has crossed a threshold very recently.
It certainly wasn't in the past few weeks, but I've been hearing about how good it's gotten for years. Certainly not planning to pay to find out if it's true now, but I'll give it another try next free trial!
Make sure you are on AI4 hardware when you do. If you buy FSD on AI3 you’ll be limited to v13, which is is terrible. I have used both and they are in different leagues altogether.
You need only look at Tesla's attempts to compete with Waymo to see that you are just wrong. They tried to actually deploy fully autonomous Teslas, and it doesn't really work, it requires a human supervisor per car.
They are behind Waymo but they are getting there. They started giving fully autonomous drives since last month without safety driver in Austin. Tesla chose a harder camera-only approach but it's more scalable once it works.
Clearly at this point the camera-only thing is the ego of Musk getting in the way of the business, because any rational executive would have slapped a LIDAR there long ago.
> Mr Keegan said he was “pretty confident” that in “the next five to 10 years” driverless vehicles would “make a major contribution in terms of sustainable transport” on Dublin’s streets.
As always, people were overoptimistic back then, too. There are currently no driverless vehicles in Dublin at all, with none expected anytime soon unless you count the metro system (strictly speaking driverless, but clearly not what he was talking about).
Ask Musk why he refuses to provide details of accidents so we can make a judgment.
Tesla’s own Vehicle Safety Report claims that the average US driver experiences a minor collision every 229,000 miles, meaning the robotaxi fleet is crashing four times more often even by the company’s own benchmark.
I don't see how we could know the rate of US driver minor collisions like that. No way most people reporting 1-4mph "collisions" with things like this.
You don't have to know. You can fully remove the few "minor" accidents (that a self driving car shouldn't be doing ever anyway) and the Tesla still comes out worse than a statistical bucket that includes a staggering number of people who are currently driving drunk or high or reading a book
The car cannot be drunk or high. It can't be sleepy. It can't be distracted. It can't be worse at driving than any of the other cars. It can't get road rage. So why is it running into a stationary object at 17mph?
Worse, it's very very easy to take a human that crashes a lot and say "You actually shouldn't be on the road anymore" or at least their insurance becomes expensive. The system in all of these cars is identical. If one is hitting parked objects at 17mph, they would almost all do it.
Even on highways I've had to intervene maybe once every 50 miles as it will often miss exits for me. This is a 2025 Model 3 with the latest 14.2 update in a major US metro.
The data from their self driving pilots disagrees even if it works for you. Its simply not read to be a taxi that makes money by itself.
It might a nice feature for your car to have. But most people aren't paying for it, the conversion rate is very low.
So they are not making money from taxis and not making much money from software sales.
So does it matter that for you personally it drives you around sometimes?
Even if you price in a 4x increase in FSD buy conversion ratio, you can't explain the stock price.
And I say this as a former Tesla investor who assumed that conversion ratio would be better then it is. But for that reason (and many others) I couldn't justify the valuation and dropped the stock.
I am confused as to why you think no interventions in "hundreds of miles" is good enough. It has to be no interventions for hundreds of thousands of miles WITH THE CAR BEING EMPTY to be good enough.
Because if you get in an accident you personally not Tesla are liable. Soon as I’m not liable for an accident when the computer is driving I’d sell my other cars and put my family in pink PT Cruisers if those were the only cars offering that
Months where you’re still required to be paying attention. Meanwhile 2 years ago Mercedes-Benz Drive Pilot a level 3 system let you sit and watch a movie without paying attention to the road.
Personally that’s way more useful for me even if they didn’t let you turn it on at highway speeds.
They canceled it because of poor adoption rather than any technical issues.
Which if anything looks worse for Tesla long term. If luxury car owners aren’t willing to pay 200$/month for self driving then trying to up charge people buying used model 3 and Y’s after canceling the S and X looks dubious. Which means that 100$/month subscription likely loses them money vs an 8k purchase.
Mercedes system was pretty useless because you could only use it in very limited conditions (specific freeways, only following another car). Nobody wants to pay $200/month to use it for 5% of their driving. Tesla FSD drives for you end-to-end.
Most people have a rather consistent commute, so the Mercedes was a more like a 0% or 80% kind of thing. The issue was adding more roads wasn’t going to help, the underlying benefit to attention free driving just wasn’t that valuable even to customers who could use the system regularly.
They are looking to reintroduce it with a much higher top of 81MPH which might help, but agin my issue isn’t with the particular system but the underlying assumption of how much people value attention free driving.
I agree with you. I personally dropped my stock when it was clear that the bull thesis had collapsed.
I had priced in, margin staying the same or going slowly down. FSD not working but achieving at least a decent amount of software sale conversion. Service to become a profit center. And most importantly, a profitable truck and 'Model 2' program to further push volume. Beyond that, just generally that electrification was ongoing and Tesla had a role to play.
I never considered Robi-Taxi or Human Robots.
All of these failed. Volume didn't continue to go up. Margin couldn't be substantiated. FSD didn't get much buys (not helped by absurdly increasing price). Truck program was a failure (and I don't think its because of the design). And 'Model 2' program was cancelled.
I profited a lot from this stock and I think there was time where the stock-price was reasonable (I don't buy the claim that it was always a pure meme stock). But every quarter it got worse and worse. I can't understand why its still so high either.
It’s Elon. It’s a meme stock. Fundamentals don’t matter. That his wealth is so wrapped up in the public valuation of Tesla I guess investors think he will do everything he can to keep th stock price up that is until SpaceX goes public the I think he won’t care because his wealth will come form that primarily.
I wonder if some of it is because of Musk, not despite him. Yes, his actions and statements in the last year have been terrible, but he also demonstrated he is very close to one of the most important power centers on the planet. That might be enough for some investors.
Wouldn’t this be a side effect of everyone buying only indexes funds or ETFs?
Me and other millions of people are investing in our pensions every month and buying ETF (S&P500 or global) and indirectly buying Tesla stocks even if we don’t want to.
The system would need a big shock to cause the ETFs to rebalance and reduce the proportion of Tesla stocks that are part of the index.
Musk, the perception of. As always. Popular media drilled in that geniuses behaving like idiots is on point. So other idiots with money still suspect him of being a genius and singlehandedly turning things around at some point before the cliff.
Long story short --- it's a cult --- there is no logical way to explain it.
Musk is the leader selling his own brand of fantasy that he makes up as he goes along. A lot (if not most) of what he says never comes to pass but people still cling to every prognostication as if it is gospel.
For over two decades, he was all about taking over the auto business with full self driving EVs. Obviously never happened. So now he is off to take over ride sharing and robots and AI and whatever else comes down the pike tomorrow.
At some point you have to wonder if there's some manipulation going on? Do 100s of bots buy and sell these stocks at specific times to keep the price up? Maybe there's an institutional investor or few who secretly back Elon and are part of a scheme?
A bit speculative reply but would appreciate if anybody links any such analysis'/investigations.
From my limited knowledge, I know people have been shorting Tesla based on fundamentals for a while now but haven't been successful.
The billionaire class loves their crypto nazis--they won't let Musk fall from grace. Given the Epstein files, the Panama papers, and what we know about the elite networks, you'd have to be a sucker not to believe that the stock market is manipulated to the core.
This is a quote from Tesla latest earnings call, at 04 min..
"Because we're really moving into a future that is based on autonomy and so if you're interested in buying a Model S and X, now would be the time to order it, because we expect to wind down S and X production in next quarter and basically stop production of Model S and X next quarter. We'll obviously continue to support the Model S and X programs for as long as people have the vehicles, but we're gonna take the Model S and X production space in our Fremont factory and convert that into an Optimus factory, which will... with the long-term goal of having 1 million units a year of Optimus robots in the current S/X space in Fremont."
This reads to me like someone saying “you can’t dump me, because I am preemptively dumping you.” It is a forced pivot to avoid having to admit failure.
China is absolutely crushing everyone mostly across the board in technology these days. It's comical today, but will just be embarrassing soon.
The only bit visually we see China a little behind is AI but I suspect they have much better closed/unreleased models, and the fab/chip space, but they'll close that gap in a short few years I'd expect.
This is amazing! I WISH somebody would take 15 seconds of this clip, add China flag in the bottom, then add scratching sounds of a vinyl disc and forward to this, with Felon Musk/American flag:
Real business people keep running production lines if they are profitable and build additional production lines for new businesses. Real business people do not shut down profitable lines because they are making a pivot, that is what failing startups do.
> but we're gonna take the Model S and X production space in our Fremont factory and convert that into an Optimus factory, which will... with the long-term goal of having 1 million units a year of Optimus robots in the current S/X space in Fremont."
I don't know how well that's going to work out for them. I saw these robots (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVX6vq0RSnY) on the Chinese New Year Gala, and they look way more dexterous than any Optimus video I've ever seen.
Optimus is not a leader in humanoids; but that china demo is not really all that impressive; They are lightweight, reduced scale, and not all that dynamic... No idea how adaptable the control would be either.
See how poorly the sword one moves compared to the others.
Optimus hand dexterity is interesting; and the handling capacity is targeting useful weights (10s of kilos).
Boston dynamics is the most interesting; targeting "fit human" manipulation, 50kg. Their adaptable movement and walking are the best ive seen demoed as well.
So long as they don't give them the capability to consume arbitrary biomass to fuel themselves, I think we're safe from a Faro Swarm situation for the foreseeable future...
That escalated quickly. No I meant that owning a Tesla, like Apple or Prada is a status symbol. Income status. So if maintainance costs a lot it will reinforce that.
by no mean calling this out is advocating for status signaling , I myself would never buy a Tesla for this very reason.
Can someone enlighten me WHO the customer to those million Optimus robots are?
I've been working in robotics for years now, I've talked with ex Optimus developers, FigureAI devs, some Japanese humanoid devs, researchers, talked to people in conferences and no one. Absolutely no one I've met take Optimus seriously. If a lab is considering buying a humanoid they'll go to China. Hell, even MIT professors that have been crucial to the development (Boston dynamics etc) seems to not put too much emphasis on Tesla.
But I've also been to industrial robotics conferences, mostly for customers and user focus and not developers and usually the perception is different in those circles.
The same customers as grok. In the future where humanoid robots see some level deployment, there might be some people that need their robot to make CSAM and say the n-word.
Federal US government & to some extent local law enforcement. They most likely won't be able to use them, but they will buy them and put them in a warehouse. Long tradition of US government doing this with tech, going back to SGI workstations in the 90s if not earlier.
I think those are just two of the models that aren't pushed particularly hard. As I understand it, Model 3 and Model Y are the major models in recent time?
I think S, X and Cybertruck are just 3% of 2025 deliveries?
The whole pivot to Optimus is insane. I can understand the market following Elon down all the other paths he randomly skips down but Optimus... Really?? The only way to explain it is it's not being taken seriously but Elon seems to be taking it very seriously...
It's especially strange considering the amount of work that Tesla (the company) put into becoming a car manufacturer which is certainly no easy feat. I'm sure some of the know-how, process, and tooling/supply lines could be transitioned to general purpose robot manufacturing - but why would you build these supply lines and factories just to screw it all up like this?
Judging by the news isn’t the pivot to creating autonomous driving systems for other manufacturers cars?
If I’m understanding correctly the pivot is to sell just the autonomous driving systems. This way it can be trained on more data. It’s a hard sell to do this while competing against the car makers whose business they are trying to court.
Selling actual cars was like Uber when they started with a black car service. Get into the luxury market then leverage that so get into the mass market.
Perhaps this is why Elon has been so adamant about not using LiDAR
Actually if you run the tape back Tesla spent over a decade on trivially preventable manufacturing fuckups by attempting to ignore a century of industry knowledge on the subject and just wing it silicon valley style. That they have infrastructure that is capable of performing manufacturing at some scale is not in question. That any of it is sufficiently optimized for sanity to be repurposed remains to be seen.
The Giga Press and battery factories (to some extent) seem pretty heavily tied to automobile manufacture. Regardless - there are many automobile production lines that found a second or third life producing down-market brands or moved to other countries because they still have some value.
I guess I'm just continuously baffled by the complete fuck-up that is/has-been Tesla motors.
The world has changed. Cars belong to a consumerism-driven, globalized economy. Humanoid robots and AI belong to a technofeudal, fascist-like state with a government-driven economy. The ruler relies on his elite. The elite relies on AI, humanoid robots, and drones to project the ruler’s power and maintain the status quo. The peasants are no longer needed. They are now seen only as a burden.
I think the only thing he can do now is have Tesla "acquire" SpaceX. He already had SpaceX "acquire" the AI thing, so that would roll all three up into a pubco where he can hide things about the business as needed (no fear of SEC problems).
I suspect it would be the other way around - SpaceX is gonna IPO in a few months at a similar valuation to Tesla right now, and once the Elon pump can go wild on the public, who knows how quickly SpaceX will go to the moon.
The average price of a new car in the US is now ~$50,000 and the average monthly payment is almost $800. All people want is an affordable car and it is clear that won’t happen any time soon. It isn’t strange at all that prisoners to this system are cheering on the Chinese disruption.
You're definitely not alone! I just took delivery of a new BYD Shark 6 on Monday. It's amazing and I paid $41k USD ($57,900 AUD) for it. Before that was available I was planning on punting on a used Hilux.
I'm charging my Shark right now and I couldn't be happier. I expect my fuel bill (it's a PHEV) to drop by 70-80% when compared to the 2010 Commodore wagon I was driving last week.
Thank you! I'm in WA, so in some respects if I'm not driving a landie or hilux my bogan creds are still somewhat lacking, but at least I'm looking down on Ranger drivers now lol.
When Tesla dropped the 'Model 2' car because 'the future would be all robo taxi' I dropped my remaining position in the stock. The idea that car sales would collapse by 50% because robo-taxi would happen just around the corner was crazy.
Good. Seems like the sales decline will reach the US eventually too. Even Toyota is coming out with compelling EV products this year.
Tesla came from nowhere, developed essentially one world-dominating product (lumping the 3 and Y together), then the CEO basically ruined everything.
Imagine Tesla with a "normal" CEO and marketing department. They would have a bunch of different trims and options for the 3/Y, a redesigned X, a functional truck, and a market cap of 400 billion!
Apple had been around 12 til 2019, now around 32 [1]. They were/are discounted for a long time but some kind of stocks had a price never based on fundamentals.
Tesla has a marketing department. It just refuses to talk to anyone except to talk at journalists...and journalists are so desperate to get quotes, they'll put up with it.
When Tesla started with the "no marketing department" nonsense, the press should have just stopped quoting them or covering them. Especially given that half the things Musk says are blatant lies.
One of the interesting things you start seeing and then can't stop seeing is "CEO says" journalism, where the whole article is about the CEO saying something and that's newsworthy and there's no real analysis of it or no looking at the track record of the CEO. Just stenography.
It's not limited to this one company, they'll do it with any company that's newsworthy or has a CEO who will generate clicks for their article.
> Tesla came from nowhere, developed essentially one world-dominating product (lumping the 3 and Y together), then the CEO basically ruined everything.
It seems strange to attribute only the fall -- and not the rise -- to the CEO
Does it though? The company had no market traction or product, more just an idea and some early engineering exploration in the nine months before he joined.
I’m staunchly anti-Elon, but anyone who’s not giving him his due or acknowledging his very real successes before pointing out what a knob is he is not arguing soundly.
Lets be real, the original founders drove the start up against the wall and Tesla was a complete disaster before Musk took over the company. Not to mention that they wouldn't even have gotten that far without Musk money and JD.
There exists a huge amount of Musk derangement syndrome these days.
Elon Musk is a great businessman and develops great products for general consumers. There is not much wrong with him other than his online persona... which most normal people can ignore. He's probably more normal than any other business leader.
What's weird is people lumping in some of Elon's actions with falls in Tesla sales as if he didn't:
1. Predict it
2. Gift the whole world the motivation to do it
I don't care about Elon Musk. He's a good businessman and a weird personality. But it doesn't take a genius to realise that he can't lead a winning product unchallenged, forever.
>Elon Musk is a great businessman and develops great products for general consumers.
The only thing he's great at is creating the illusion of genius.
He didn't found Tesla, despite his title. He's not an engineer at SpaceX, despite his title. He spent 44 billion on Twitter which is most certainly losing money hand over fist. The Boring Company is a flop. Tesla is famously anything but a car company because their cars are mediocre in every way except the battery range.
SpaceX is his only real success, but then again SpaceX only succeeded because of massive government funding, which Elon would happily decry as communism if the money went to anyone else.
He's not a genius and not a particularly good businessman. He's just a normie with Daddy's emerald mine money, who got lucky with a large severance package when he was fired from Paypal for being terrible, and now uses his wealth to create a cult of personality.
> Tesla is famously anything but a car company because their cars are mediocre in every way except the battery range
I can't say that I'm a big fan of this guy... But I can tell you this: I learned to drive only after moving to the U.S. recently, and when I had to choose my first car, I found Tesla to be the best among many I tried. It's just awesome, and I don't even use their FSD, the car itself is superb (at least the latest "3"). Minimalistic, no BS, drives well, quiet, comfortable. The same feeling I had with the first iPhone, compared to other phones.
Elon Musk is a fascist sympathizer who is currently being investigated in at least one European country for election interference, a known lier who has promised level 5 self driving by the end of the year every year since 2018 or so, landing people on Mars by next year since 2022, Tesla electric truck cheaper than rail, "today", in 2020, and many others.
I'm surprised people are forgetting that the person who predicted the coming wars against his personality was himself. He basically told everyone what was coming... then it came and people still fell for it.
Is it me or do the nay-sayers state that Elon is a grifter and added nothing to Tesla, but yet he ruined it? How can he both not create something and ruin it?
Also, Tesla isn't the only manufacturer (In the US) stopping electric cars, Porsche (IMO Taycan is the best electric model) is essentially stopping electric cars too, nothing to do with Elon.
Musk didn't found Tesla, he invested into it when it was small. Musk brought good marketing and gave the people who were declined at GM a platform. So far so good.
It was a success. He got more investment, built factories, became market leader. Built an industrial stack where there was none.
And gradually he got crazy. Dodgecoin, Nazi gestures, thinking he has to safe humanity because left radicaly are destroying it.
Instead of cutting down on costs, Tesla insisted it is the only electrical car and priced it as such. Not to mention the cybertruck disaster everybody saw from miiles away.
Meanwhile, the Chinese have the best electrics with the currently best industrial basis for production and cheap resources.
Musk has too much money, got lucky with an investment and started becoming complacent. The rest of the story writes itself.
I gotta give Musk credit. I continue to think his grift has reached the end of the road, and I'm always shocked at how credulously the market follows him onto the next grift while immediately forgetting the prior one.
The market is far more naive and credulous than I anticipated, and Musk seems to understand much better than I just how fucking moronic most market participants are.
No it's not, it's a car company. It may be moving to robots, but for companies to survive they require products and profits, neither of which seem to be real when it comes to Optimus. According to Musk commercial sales may begin in 2027 with wider consumer availability in 2028.
I don't know about you, but when I hear Elon Musk state that something will be real in 2 years I don't believe it at all. This is the exact same playbook with FSD, Mars, etc.
Poe's Law applies here. Especially on HN, especially with respect to Musk. There are a disturbing number of people here who have fully bought into his lies.
Are there any known examples of Musk cult members being successfully deprogrammed? I know there are a couple examples of hardcore MAGA people seeing the light.
It's not a car company anymore, it's an energy company... Ahem, I mean self-driving... Er, maybe robots? ... Okay, that not going so well? How about quantum? That's probably a thing, right?
Tesla seems basically priced based on hype, rather than anything relating to its actual business.
It's a cult. Really. This is a stock devoid of any connection to reality, fundamentals, products, anything. All that matters is that Musk is on the nameplate. Do not bet against the ability of people in a cult to remain irrational in the face of overwhelming evidence. Do not touch the cult.
With entities like BlackRock. There is always on which part of money they manage they are simple followers. Index funds simply follow indexes. They can not decide not to invest according to set out rules.
And when you get to active management, those managers might not either be that good. And it works as long as market keeps going up.
Those profits have also gone down; the only year they made lower-but-still-positive profit than 2025 ($3794m) was the first year since their founding in which they made any profit (which was 2020 and $721m).
Tesla's total profits over its entire existence ($37,883m [0]) is about as much as Musk has personally made by selling Tesla shares ($40bn ish [1]), but of that profit I can find $12.8bn can be attributed to government incentives[2] that have now largely or completely gone away.
Not sure what relevance Musk selling shares has to do with profit they've made. That seems completely irrelevant.
That being said, yeah, profits were down a bit but a lot of that was stock compensation and other things. In practical terms they went from a cash position of 36 billion to 44 billion.
They are in a phenomenal position financially as they have very little debt. By comparison GM made 2.7 billion and Stellantis lost 20 billion.
Tesla is in such a great cash position that Apple only has about 10 billion more than them in cash.
> Not sure what relevance Musk selling shares has to do with profit they've made. That seems completely irrelevant.
Selling shares for more than the company made in its entire existence, demonstrates the shares are overvalued.
> By comparison GM made 2.7 billion and Stellantis lost 20 billion.
2.7/3.7 = 0.73; GM's market cap is $77.67bn, using them as your framing of the problem gets you to a Tesla market cap of $106.40bn, not their actual ~$1.5T.
And Toyota made 40-45 billion USD profit for each of the last few years, i.e. more than Tesla in its lifetime, while having a market cap that's currently $316.8bn.
Telsa, market cap $1551bn, about 5x that of a company which makes more each year than it did in total, is overpriced. Especially given how harshly both Tesla's profits and sales are declining even in otherwise growing markets.
Telsa could shift the decimal point on its market cap one place and still be overpriced.
Given what they are as a business, they are not in "a phenomenal position financially", they are in an OK position for a normal boring traditional car company and a terrible one for a trillion-dollar market cap club company.
(Numbers from companiesmarketcap.com, in case anyone complains those are out of date).
No, they're not. The only thing they sell are cars and car-stuff. They have yet to sell those humanoid robots they show off. Hell, there's other car companies who also make humanoid robots, who have more than twice Tesla's revenue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyundai_Motor_Group
Even Tesla's subsidiary, Tesla Energy, which breaks out beyond "cars" is only about 10% of revenue of the car company, so even if you argue their ownership structure makes the group "more", it's still not "far more", but rather "rounding error".
Tesla's AI is just car AI, which other car manufacturers also have, and bluntly seem to be doing a bit better with it.
Even if they were "much more", a 90% drop in market cap would still see it priced like a high-growth tech firm, of the kind which people are independently worried may be in a bubble.
When the market prices this in, Tesla's share price will go down 90-99% on the international market. Perhaps not in USD though, depends how hard that goes weird.
My (2019) Tesla has been the most reliable car I've ever owned, but it sure seems like they're not interested in being a car company anymore.
Not having turn stalks and the drive selector, making me either pay for internet access or use bluetooth if I want to play spotify or youtube music (which I get for 'free' in cars with CarPlay or Android Auto), making the cybertruck way too big for a garage, discontinuing the model S and X...like are they even trying?
They used to have a third row option for the model Y, good for small kids or something, but then they got rid of that.
They were going to do the roadster, but didn't bother. They only have 6 paint colors, not even options for PTS. It's like they don't want to be a successful car company.
Take the reports with a grain of salt. Tesla does not mandate maintenance. The cars in the reports are the ones who left factory and get checked after 3 years of intensive use without any maintenance. Check the light alignment, check rust in the brakes and check the suspension and the inspection will be fine. Still cheaper than 400-600€ bi-yearly coolant refill from other manufacturers. Plus Tesla has published repair manual which is very strong advantage for me. I am poor and maintain my cars by myself. Maybe I like it too.
Teslas have too much play in bearings and steering column (from new) and unlike every other manufacture out there they refuse to follow the standards and says it is how it is supposed to be. This forces owners to pay to get a factory problem fixed with zero help from Tesla, otherwise their car will not pass inspections.
Also, it isn't normal for a 3-year-old car to risk dropping a wheel. You should read some more about this before you defend them.
EDIT: Here is a reddit thread about the problem (and an article in Norwegian):
>"Almost half of all Tesla Y fail mandatory tech inspection in Denmark and make headlines for it; similar numbers in Tesla-country Norway."
>"The most common issue remains slack in the wheel alignment and suspension, found in 22% of TMY's, as opposed to .1% of ID4's."
Mercedes does this yearly. It’s running gag from all the car influencers when they show the 800-1000€ service invoice of the EQS after first year. Imho it’s definitely a scam.
A big part Part of the reason tesla is considered less reliable is the number of recalls it gets, most of which are software related and fixed over the air.
In terms of maintenance, it is by far the lowest cost of ownership vehicle I've had, I'm in my 40s, not exactly new to owning cars.
The very first thing that Tesla was criticised for was terrible QA process. The quality was random and there were huge differences between factories. So I can totally believe there are plenty of Tesla made cars that made their owners happy. Of course few people can afford such gamble.
They don’t. Their market cap is higher than all the successful car companies combined. Becoming a successful car company would cost Elon half of his unrealized capital gains. It’s far better to be the company who is going to make us $30,000 robot slaves because that’s a bigger market and one he’ll own entirely.
The only question is what will be the next hype cycle when that succeeds about as well as the Cyber Truck.
Oh I was in no way saying I agree with any of that, just explaining how his mind seems (to me) to work.
He hyped electric cars to the point where someone in here in 2017 told me I was nuts to buy an ICE car because there wouldn’t be any gas stations left in five years. That’s why his share prices are out of proportion to reality.
Now that it turns out the EV market isn’t growing as fast as it seemed when it was all early adopters, and autonomous delivery isn’t ready and won’t be for at best a few years, he’s gotta hype the next thing.
As a software developer I only really started to understand how divorced from reality Elon is when he started talking about software development. That was a sinking feeling: "Oh he doesn't actually know something I don't know. He's just keeping the music playing, so he doesn't have to sit down on the chairs that don't exist. Fuck."
The only reason for a source code to be is for humans to read it, bun when the source code gets churned (by AI agents) in too large of a quantity for any human to realistically read and analyze, then what's the point of having a source code in the first place? Generating binary directly simply makes sense. Working with binary does, even when a human is involved, as long as there's an AI helper as well. The human simply can ask the AI assistant to explain whatever logical aspects behind the binary code and instruct the AI agent to modify the binary code directly, if necessary. That may be scary and not easy to accept. Going further with this idea, even the written text may become "too costly to work with" when there will be an AI agent to verbally or graphically serve the human with whatever informational aspect of a given text that could be of interest in a given situation.
LLMs are trained on source code, so that's what they can (barely) write. Decompiling is a -lossy- action which means that training directly on the output would have much less information and would be a nightmare if one (human or llm) needs to debug.
BYD is not, despite the press, really very big in Europe (though it is in a couple of individual countries, notably Spain). Europe-wide, Geely, the Chinese manufacturer that everyone forgets about, is actually bigger: https://eu-evs.com/marketShare/ALL/Groups/Bar/All-time-by-Qu...
Geely is also present in the US via Volvo and Polestar. They haven’t delivered an affordable entry level EV yet, but I’ve been impressed with the Polestars. I’d never buy one because a Chinese car running on Google software sounds like a nightmare, but they’ve been good when I rented them.
BYD has barely started exporting cars, a bit less than 1 million last year. The total European market is 11 million cars a year. The global market is 90 million units.
And BYD obviously is focusing on easier markets, where they don't have to fight against tariffs.
BYD have also built a fleet of 8 of their own car carriers with a million car per year capacity. As well as multiple factories in multiple countries/continents outside China, including one in California (commercial trucks and bus only)
Note that BYD doesn't just make BEVs. They're quite big in plug-in hybrids, which aren't in that data. They apparently sold 175k cars in Europe last year. A breakdown of BEV vs PHEV doesn't seem to be available, but 75k of those were one particular PHEV, so it's at most 100k BEVs.
Not saying that BYD is completely irrelevant, but the media overplays them. Presumably because BYD vs Tesla is an interesting narrative, even if the actual figures have both of those as small players in BEVs (at least for cars; BYD _is_ quite big in electric buses), with the real race being between VW AG and Stellantis. VW AG vs Stellantis is a painfully boring narrative.
The EU is a highly protected market, therefore the market share of foreign (to the EU) products cannot be used as a measure for the quality or affordability of such products.
I simply find it noteworthy how fast Chinese EVs are scaling up as a climate change mitigation. I don’t care who builds and sells them, just do so as quickly as possible.
I suspect BYD would do a lot better in Europe if the political class wasn´t afraid of the fallout from the European manufacturers (VW, Stellantis, and all their child brands) being seriously damaged or even wiped out by the competition.
That said, if relations between the EU and the US get much chillier, the EU may decide to make some sacrifices in order to have China in their camp. E.g. VW are arm-twisted into selling Škoda to BYD, with job preservation guarantees, and then BYD is badged Škoda and six months later all the old Škoda models are gone and its EVs all the way.
I suspect that, given people in EU are used to EU car prices, there's not going to be much willingness on the EU side to budge on cars (though the Chinese side may ask for it, of course, and should the EU get them there will be no going back given how much cheaper Chinese cars are).
If things get trade-war-y, American cars are way down the list of things the EU will care about finding substitutes for:
That graph is interesting because you can see direct patterns before 2020. The market was dominated by the Leaf, but during the pandemic the electric offerings of everybody arrived and we moved to a typical car market with the usual suspects being the most successful. Tesla got swamped by cheaper competitors. That and the Nazi stuff.
It's strange to me that some Americans will cheer on Chinese companies over Tesla, even overlooking those companies questionable labour practices. (I don't know if you're American)
Why? Tesla has huge quality problems (ranked by far the worst used cars in several countries incl. in Germany), an awful CEO, etc. BYD are better quality and cheaper which is insane.
Because politics bring out the highest emotions in people. We all have strong internal moral compasses and it is very difficult to violate or change them.
Because it’s completely different. The US subsidized American buyers of the cars. The Chinese government is subsidizing foreign buyers in order to help eat foreign marketshare
I do not consider removing redundant sensors like lidar or infrared from the comprehensive Tesla sensor network and pretending that cameras can do FSD perfectly a good example of engineerring.
Musk expects ~80% Of Tesla's value will be Optimus robots [1]. It can't be any other way given that he helped elect a President that's against electric cars, against regulation for limiting climate change, against collaborating with our European allies.
I expect that to go about as well as Facebook changing their name to Meta and putting all their eggs in the Metaverse/VR basket...
But at least Meta's legacy businesses (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) were still valuable enough to fall back on - whereas Tesla's seems to be tanking. Only their utility-scale fixed battery business seems to have much potential if they can't turn around their dwindling car business.
Gravity doesn't exist when you're in a K-hole. That's why we can become a extraterrestrial society in the next 5 years (repeat infinitely - in 5 years)
Very soon musk will merge Tesla with SpaceX and say he is going to have robots drive the cars to space. The stock will multiply 4 fold making him a multi- trillionaire
So, let's try to guess: is Tesla going to be dominating robots and autonomous driving, and worth $10T, or at some point this castle of cards will fall to the ground?
1. Tesla does not dominate robots or autonomous driving, it fades away
2. Tesla’s stock price exceeds $10T after it is shoe-horned into being a part of SpaceXAIBoringTesla
Musk is almost certainly too big to fail at this point. The cult of personality and SpaceX give him a lot of room for financial engineering, he doesn’t need Tesla.
if democrats win midterms and then 2028 elections, they will be able to come back in full force and retaliate at least against the most egregious of Trump supporters. Will Musk survive in that scenario?
SpaceX is making that majority (70%) of its revenue, and all of its profits from Starlink, and mostly from subscriptions.
98% of government money SpaceX receives is payment for services rendered, which they provide at a significantly lower cost than their competitors.
On the other hand, their competitors are routinely receiving actual handouts. For example, ULA used to receive a $1 billion annual "Launch Capability" stipend essentially just to keep their lights.
I'm not saying he's not providing services. Tesla shipped cars and chargers for its govt money too. But I'm also saying they wouldn't have been in business without it. Elon is one of the great scam artists of our age, and a huge part of that is reliant on the taxpayer (when not reliant on SV investors and feeble-brained stock market)
I think most brands are being hammered in the netherlands. The tax climate for eletric company leased cars is not good compared to extremely good just a couple of years ago.
There’s an old saying: if civil engineers built houses the way software people build software, the first woodpecker to appear would destroy the civilization. With Tesla, we build cars. That, as told in court documents, absolutely should continue accelerating while in cruise control despite the driver pressing the brakes. There’s a century of institutional knowledge on system safety built into most cars. And (looking at you, Pinto), the carmakers are not even especially good at it. As a former software engineer, I’d rather rely on some actual engineers rather than a bunch of tech bros led by a deranged sociopath.
Many have argued that Musk's shift to far-right politics is responsible for some of this decline -- and it certainly makes some sense -- but I wonder if the cause and effect are being conflated.
If Musk were aware that Tesla was going to lose this much ground due to factors beyond his own mismanagement, including the threat of Chinese imports and a widespread shift away from EVs due to a right-populist sentiment swing that was already under way, then maybe his goose-stepping and Trump-humping act was an attempt to sync up with a trend that he saw as inevitable.
That's about the most charitable spin I can put on it. Either way, Tesla now has to pitch electric cars to right-wing climate-change deniers, which is not a great strategy to adopt voluntarily or otherwise.
Well, I think a more charitable spin would be he really does see that robots taxis are just around the corner and it is entirely plausible that Tesla will be able to deliver them. After all, despite whatever flaws they have and they certainly have some, you can go out today and buy a production car that does essentially drive itself.
When I was growing up, that was absolutely science fucking fiction. You’re telling me I get in this car and touch a piece of glass and then it drives itself? Incredible. Maybe the future really could get here fast.
I think that’s a little more charitable. I have a Tesla, won’t buy another one because Elon sucks, wouldn’t touch the stock, I think he’s generally turned in to a con artist, &c.
> Either way, Tesla now has to pitch electric cars to right-wing climate-change deniers, which is not a great strategy to adopt voluntarily or otherwise.
What’s funny to me is that I legitimately think that the day-to-day experience owning an EV is significantly better than the day-to-day experience owning a gas car. They could have slowly ignited or not emphasized the environment and just focused on it as future tech and it may well work. Over the years owning one I’ve had many a curious person drive by the Supercharger in their car, often times a truck too, and ask about the ownership experience.
EVs by association got this hippie-dippie connotation but that’s because the Prius looks like it does, but the Model 3 is quite nice and I think the perception could be overcome by just making damn cool cars.
They didn't have to box themselves into "pitching electric cars to right-wing climate change deniers."
I've heard there are rumours there are least three or four countries outside the US. In several of them, EVs are selling like like hotcakes, or at least not with the current American militant hostility to the very concept.
I suspect they spent too long riding the horse they got here on though. Making an EV appealing to American premium buyers was a marketing coup. Selling it as a software-style "we'll continue iterating with OTA updates" was an interesting alternative to the model-year redesign when you're targeting an early-adopter audience used to regular software refreshes.
But now these things are a liability. Your product matrix is full of America-centric designs with iffy product-market fits in other markets (will a Model S or Cybertruck literally fit in some side streets of Europe or Asia?) You've failed to make a recognizable, exciting redesign of an existing model, so what you do have looks dated. You never really developed a reputation for quality or reliability. These are product problems that have nothing to do with politics. You could have addressed them and been a viable player elsewhere, even as the US continues to eat itself alive. (Of course, that might have involved not intentionally rubbing your brand all over a highly polarizing and toxic political scenario)
I was excited about Tesla back when they were a novelty. I can recall going to the mall with the Microsoft Store (remember those? They sold "bloatfree" PCs because it used to be the OEM who loaded them full of crapware instead of MS itself) to buy a Windows 8 tablet, and then looking across the aisle to see a Model S on display at the Tesla "not really a dealership" stall.
I bought like $2000 in shares back then, figuring one day, jokingly, they'd be worth enough to exchange for a new Tesla. It looks like I could probably get one now. But these days, I just want a BYD; they seem to be actually building a coherent product line and long-term vision.
I mean, there's no need to go all 4D chess here, really. Sometimes a crazy person who tweets about "woke mind viruses" at four in the morning is just a crazy person who tweets about "woke mind viruses" at four in the morning.
> Tesla now has to pitch electric cars to right-wing climate-change deniers, which is not a great strategy to adopt voluntarily or otherwise.
Part of the trouble here is that was always the case. The best selling "car" in the US is the Ford F-series truck. Followed by the Chevy truck, two Japanese SUVs, the Stellantis truck, the GMC rebadge of the Chevy truck, a Chevy SUV and then the Tesla Model Y.
To get anywhere they were always going to have to appeal to the people who buy trucks.
And when everything is polarized and your product is tribe-coded, how do you do that?
I suspect the error here was buying Twitter and then aligning with the party expected to take power instead of buying Twitter and then using it to shift things in the direction of depolarization.
It also doesn't help that the Cybertruck looks weird and costs too much. I mean you can blame attitudes as you like but then there's the fact that the F-150 starts at ~$40k and the Cybertruck starts at ~$80k. They need the battery prices to come down more before people are going to buy something that needs as much battery as a truck.
Battery is not the issue. NMC li-ion batteries have fallen down to $100 per kWh on the _pack_ level (not cell). And LFPs are around $80.
CyberTruck battery is around 130kWh, so that's just $13k for the more pricey NMC chemistry. This is what makes the Ford fumble with the electric F-150 so comical.
Out of curiosity, I wanted to see if there are any Chinese brands selling batteries of this capacity. And there are plenty. You can buy a 200kWh, with a home delivery today. https://lithiumbattery.en.made-in-china.com/product/kEDRHjlV... Sure, it'll likely explode if you put it in a car. But it's only a matter of time before some enterprising Chinese company makes a compelling truck.
> NMC li-ion batteries have fallen down to $100 per kWh on the _pack_ level (not cell).
When the Cybertruck was released in 2023 it was $139, making it more like $18k. And that's just the battery, you still need to make the rest of the truck and pay all your other overhead before you get to the MSRP.
The problem is you can't sell a boring $40k truck for $60k, so instead they tried to make an "interesting" truck for $80k, but nobody wants that either. They should've just waited until they could make a boring electric truck for $40k.
> US automakers are sooooo screwed.
Ten years ago packs were $345/kWh and then electric cars have to be premium products. For under $100 they don't and then all it's going to take is for one company to start selling an electric car in the US that costs less than the equivalent gasoline car.
They'll figure it out when the demand shifts. It doesn't take that long to reconfigure factories, they do it every time they come out with a new model anyway.
> When the Cybertruck was released in 2023 it was $139, making it more like $18k. And that's just the battery, you still need to make the rest of the truck and pay all your other overhead before you get to the MSRP.
But the rest of the car is not actually that pricey. Motors and power electrics are now reasonably priced, especially if you're making an actual working truck that doesn't need to do 60 mph in 3 seconds. The frame and body are cheap. So a decent $40k truck is definitely possible now.
> They'll figure it out when the demand shifts. It doesn't take that long to reconfigure factories, they do it every time they come out with a new model anyway.
Nah. I figure that the US automakers instead decided to wall off the competition for as long as possible to wring out every last drop of profit. And then just dump the rotting husks (maybe to Chinese buyers). Perhaps with a bailout or five from the government.
> Motors and power electrics are now reasonably priced, especially if you're making an actual working truck that doesn't need to do 60 mph in 3 seconds.
If you're making an actual working truck, the motor and power electronics need to be more substantial because they have to handle being able to e.g. pull a loaded trailer up a steep grade.
> The frame and body are cheap.
The piece of metal is fairly cheap. Now fill every door with power electronics, add glass, add climate control, the thing's going to need tires, wheels, axles, brakes, something to make power brakes work without an engine to provide vacuum, steering, suspension, etc.
Most of the cost of a vehicle isn't the powertrain.
> So a decent $40k truck is definitely possible now.
It's not a question of if you can do $40k. It's a question of, does the electric powertrain and battery still cost more than the ICE power train, and therefore require you to cut something else in order to avoid charging more?
$30k trucks exist but people don't want a $30k truck for $40k.
> I figure that the US automakers instead decided to wall off the competition for as long as possible to wring out every last drop of profit.
The obvious problem with this is that they could keep out BYD and hypothetically kick out Nissan and VW etc., but what are Ford and GM supposed to do as the battery prices come down when Tesla just sets the prices of their existing lineup consistent with the falling battery costs, much less releases any new models?
As far as I know the hypothesis is that Elon knew before the election that he will be in trouble and tried to cozy up with Trump to cover his ass but it backfired hard.
After successfully teaching China how to build EVs and embracing fascism, I thought they moved on to AI/robotaxi/robots/(insert your preferred fantasy here)?
Amazing (not) how the sales data is represented LOL
I don't have any sweetspot for EVs anyway, but here the title and the comments are not even related to EVs! It's all "ahahaha TESLA/Elon sucks" LOL
Fine, but why pretend anything else - the "story" picked data like a cherrypicker - those that make the biggest number in negative. Anyone ever cared to look at the data? 2024 to 2026, or 2023 to 2026 whatever is greater (downwards)... what a joke of stats.
Many of the comments here resemble Reddit, disappointingly. I read HN due to market insights, analysis, interesting perspectives. I am sorry for digression.
There is a lot of anti-American sentiment on HN and Reddit. You may think it a bit ironic, but maybe the "YCombinator" part takes a back seat to "Hacker News".
What kind of analysis are you expecting? Someone explaining why Tesla’s stock price is justified despite the falling car sales? It can’t be explained because it’s a meme stock.
You are more than welcome to make your case in his favor, if you can. Maybe this is just this is just the sentiment of users on hackernews, why is that so hard to accept?
What market insight explains TSLA other than the same thing you'd hear on Reddit: that TSLA investors are a glassy-eyed, slack-jawed cult?
Are there any other explanations that can be steelmanned, just for the sake of an even-handed discussion? "We're going to build humanoid robots" just doesn't seem like enough. Neither does "We're going to build robotaxis", considering that other companies like Waymo are already well ahead of Tesla in that sector.
They have a current production capacity in the high hundreds of thousands, a software solution that has a reasonable chance of competing in the self driving market, and a worldwide distribution platform.
So the optimistic valuation is based on: Global ride share killer + Large car manufacturer + power infrastructure + Robotics.
Somehow the valuation is as though TSLA will succeeded early enough to entrench itself; if robotaxi wide rollout happens in the next six months, i would be happy to say TSLA is worth more than its current valuation. If it cant then at best 30% of current valuation.
I'll burn what little karma I have and say that for market insights and interesting perspectives, x.com is the best place (manual curation required). Beyond that you should be watching earnings calls each quarter for a range of companies in the market. Most of what is written here, in the press and on reddit is complete nonsense.
The mystery I can wrap my head around is how Tesla has avoided getting hammered despite being hit from a hundred different directions. What exactly is the market pricing in?
They peaked around 2021, and even after posting multiple quarters of disappointing results, the stock is still trading above 2021 levels. For almost any other company, slightly lowering guidance or missing estimates by a few percentage points simply tanks the stock. But for Tesla, no amount of Musk’s idiocy seems to be enough to seriously move it.
Tesla is the world’s largest meme stock. People stopped applying rational pricing models, and rationality in general, to it a lot time ago.
PE ratios will suddenly matter again when we get hit with the next recession.
yup, remember when musk was pushing doge coin? not much difference
That can't be whole story, though. They're still profitable.
If Tesla is worth a trillion dollars, is it a meme ?
If Tesla is a meme, is it worth a trillion dollars ?
This is the much better question :)
It's not though
Not a meme? Or not a trillion dollars?
The market discounts future returns but it is unclear and shifting what proportion of those returns are from the operations of the company in the market it sells products in and what proportion comes from the operations of traders in financial markets. More plainly, traders discount returns from buybacks and dividends financed by the operations of the company and returns from selling their shares to "greater fools".
As long as the music is playing they will keep dancing. Musk is a master of DJing that party. We might wake up tomorrow and find that his house of cards has fallen apart, but we might wake up to learn they really have solved FSD. That ambiguity keeps the price from collapsing.
What is it about FSD that results in this valuation though?
If elon builds a time machine and goes to the future to get FSD tech from 100 years from now and rolls it out to all teslas tomorrow, what will change? Will every car driver get rid of their cars and get a tesla? Will that suddenly justify the stupid valuation?
Realistically, I don't think the majority of drivers will care that much. Sure, their sales will go up, but I can't see it going up by that much.
FSD will never be "achieved" suddenly. The tech will incrementally improve every year, across all manufacturers until one day we are manual driving only 1% of the time with FSD doing the rest. Like AGI, there is no moat in FSD. This is the natural outcome of the trajectory that we are on right now, and nothing about tesla is making me believe they will offer anything that other OEMs can't.
No, I think the market is much more cynical than that. Tesla is a meme stock similar to bitcoin or GME. Investors are degenerate gamblers, hoping that it will continue to rise because that's what it does atm, and hoping they won't be the one left behind holding the bag when it crashes one day. It's little more than a voluntary ponzi scheme that most big investors openly buy into knowing full well what's at stake.
>What is it about FSD that results in this valuation though?
Are you willing to accept the ugly answer? Because the point of FSD isn't what they pitch. The replacing human drivers to save lives yada yada... That ain't it. The point is creating a handful of leverage points through which the autonomy of the populace to move wherever they want can be controlled through. Once the tech is the majority driver, people can finally be properly managed as the little work units they are. That's the dark part of the valuation. The power aspect. The ones who own the means to locomote are the ultimate rent collectors. There's simply no arguing that can be done by a populace that can be prevented from showing up to any attempt at collective protest via geofencing. Or if they do show up, can be added to a comprehensive list for participating in disruptive activities.
Capabilities, ladies and gentlemen. We have to assess these things on the ground of what they enable. Delegating transport entirely to a third party necessarily creates a vulnerability of society to manipulation by the ones running the damn thing; and the ones running the damn thing want money, and security for themselves.
Exactly. It's meme stock. There's no rational explanation for this ridiculous valuation.
Tesla has been overvalued for a long time, and not by a bit either; they're worth more than the next several car makers put together, yet sell less cars than any of them. Their high valuation could still be considered defensible when they were the fastest growing car company in the world and the only one selling electric cars. But none of that is true; everybody is selling electric cars now, and BYD is selling more than Tesla, I think. And instead of growing, Tesla is now shrinking in many markets. Even their self driving is not the best.
The share price should have collapsed, yet it remains high. How? It makes no sense to me.
> It makes no sense to me.
Honestly, that's the easy part. Cynical, degenerate gambling.
Why don't all the other automakers wise up and just start promising full self driving "next year" as well?
Because their stocks aren't memes, their investors are serious, nobody really GAF about self driving and fully autonomous driving isn't actually the "killer app" many think it is.
How killer would FSD have to be for it to count as the killer app?
I’d pay at least double for a car with FSD. More if the car’s longevity could be established. Is that killer enough? (Real question).
> there is no moat in FSD.
Being a really really hard problem is a moat. Many have tried and given up already: Uber, Cruise, etc.
There are so, so, so many companies operating in this space right now. You list two that have given up. A quick google brings back at least a dozen operations that appear to be still ongoing.
BMW Personal Pilot, Merc Drive Pilot, and Honda Sensing Elite are Level 3 automation tech you can buy right now. Tesla is still at level 2!!
Whether Tesla is going to be the first to achieve true autonomy or not is a toss-up. And and regardless of who achieves it, the rest will be very very short on their heels.
> BMW Personal Pilot, Merc Drive Pilot, and Honda Sensing Elite are Level 3 automation tech you can buy right now. Tesla is still at level 2!!
You need to put about 10 asterisks on those. MB Drive Pilot has been discontinued due to "low demand and high cost", and those other 2 systems appear to have substantial restrictions. Meanwhile, FSD today "works" on pretty much any road or highway. I can easily see certain folks see that as far ahead of competitors, since it physically can do more in more places and operate in more conditions.
Really it's just pricing in musk fusing all of his business under the tesla name.
That can't/won't happen. Musk's wealth is primarily in SpaceX now and he has a much higher ownership stake in SpaceX than Tesla. As well as that, Tesla is public so he can't just do napkin math and decide to merge them. So the question is: Does Tesla buy SpaceX? Well no, Tesla can't afford it. Ok, well can SpaceX buy Tesla? Well no, SpaceX can't afford it either. So do they announce a merger? Well that doesn't make any sense because Tesla is valued like a meme stock so it would massively dilute Musk's ownership of the overall company. So the idea that they fuse might be driving up the stock, but by driving up the stock you're actually preventing it happening. If Tesla starts to trade at realistic multiples and comes down to lets say a 200Bn company, I'd expect SpaceX to snap it up at that valuation, but it'd be crazy to do it before then.
Even if they have FSD ready tomorrow the financials would not support this valuation.
Summing the sales figures in [0] we get 9M to 10M Teslas on the road. Let's say 10M and and let's say Tesla will keep selling 1.6M / year for the next 5 years [1]. This is 18M Teslas and let's assume all of them are converted into paying customers at $100 / month [2]. This works out to $21 B / year in income. $22 B / year in income cannot justify $1.5 T in market value.
Good thing they are switching to robots :)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tesla,_Inc.#Timelin... [1] - this is a huge assumption. Teslas sales are declining because of Musk's image, lack of innovation and competition from China.
[2] this is another huge assumption - I know 5 Teslas owners. They tried the $100 / month assisted driving (or whatever Tesla calls it these days). All said it was cool, but not worth it and did not sign up after the trial period. These are professionals who value their time (tech engineers and 1 banker)
There's zero chance that Musk will have suddenly "solved" FSD in a day, a week, or a year. He's not an engineer; he's a money man, and a grifter.
That's why people keep giving Tesla money: because Musk has fooled so many people into believing he's this amazing engineer, who could, possibly, "solve" FSD overnight—and, moreover, has gotten them to buy into it so deeply that they have tied their identity into that belief, and so in order to continue to cling to it, they reject empirical evidence of both his lack of qualifications and his outright crimes.
Well he certainly wouldn't but the engineers working for Tesla might, with a probability that is very low but greater than 0. It's much higher (but still low) in 1 year, 5 years, 10 years. Tomorrow is a metanym for the future.
But to be very clear I not only don't think they will but I don't think that they think they will, or they wouldn't be shifting focus to Optimus. I'm not invested in Tesla except for my exposure through index funds.
If anyone who is a fan of Tesla can get through this article without changing their mind. Well. Bless their heart.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/08/29/tesla-a...
https://archive.ph/K4ckR
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45062614
To be maximally reductive, FSD will never work because the sensor suite is deficient. There are other reasons but that one's enough.
Same for a rocket that's ridiculously large for orbital missions but can't go beyond orbit without 15 to 25 refueling flights of the same enormous rocket.
The reasons for both these failing are going to be manyfold and complex, but there are enough simple reasons that everyone should understand.
Wait until they announce that Optimus is only going to have ears because "bats get by just fine"...
It would be actually fun to see where the limit is on echolocation with serious ML processing these days. Apparently people did quite well in 2022 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9655721/
> with a probability that is very low but greater than 0.
And it is insane that this warrants a 1.5 trillion USD valuation - for vaporware.
The question of whether they will solve FSD is not very relevant if everyone ends up solving it roughly at the same time.
Ha exactly. Do Tesla shareholders think the rest of the auto industry are in a coma?
Besides what does FSD even mean? Austin is not Amsterdam.
> Do Tesla shareholders think the rest of the auto industry are in a coma?
I have no idea what institutional investors think, and they're probably the relevant group here.
From the way I've observed individuals discussing it, defending it, on HN… it pattern-matches to my understanding of what people these days call "main character syndrome", i.e. that the other companies are just a supporting cast to provide an interesting challenge for the only one that's not an NPC.
Or, they're stuck in a narrative that stopped making sense only gradually. Tesla solving self-driving ten years ago would have been a triumph. Solving it today, meh. They would be ahead of others by a couple of years, max.
> metanym
I appreciate when my vocabulary expands. I understood this by context and similarity to 'synonym'. I may have encountered it before (probably), but I didn't know it. Excellent use in a post.
Expands my horizons a bit. Hat tip.
> he's this amazing engineer, who could, possibly, "solve" FSD overnight
Even if thay were true many people hate Elon now. Enough that they will pass on any technology he is the only purveyor of.
After he celebrated letting children starve (USAID) by dancing on stage with a chainsaw many people decided to never buy any Musk product for any reason. Now there are the Epstein ties.
Worse, many people who dont care about politics at all won't get involved, because Musk is an unstable drug user and its not wise to entangle yourself in his business affairs.
You really thought the poster meant that Elon Musk personally went and implemented FSD? Just for your information, Musk is also not personally assembling every Tesla vehicle.
Have you seen the way some people talk about Musk around here?
There are clearly plenty of posters who, to all appearances, genuinely believe that he is the entirety of Tesla's R&D department.
Well if there are plenty of posters then it should be easy to give me 5 comments of different people where it's clear they believe Tesla R&D is a solo Elon Musk operation.
I'm not holding my breath though.
They don’t care because Musk is marketing Tesla not as a car company but as a technology company (building robots and self driving rental service). And why does he do that? Maybe because his car sales are down…
I always assumed “tech company” meant using technology to build a fundamentally better car from the ground up. I don't know at what point the bait-and-switch happened, it was suddenly about pursuing every stupid moonshot fantasy at the cost of making better cars.
I thought it was always a tech company focused around trying to import things from the future. Since before they ever had enough sales that sales could go down.
No, it was a car company.
No it was a financial operation living off electric vehicle credit sales
Actually the funny thing is that there is a mixing of meme stuff, Elon verse impacts (AI + self driving + Energy) etc. and under none of these circumstances is a 200+ PE justified.
The funny thing is after 6 years of effort apparently they have managed to get the dry coating process for batteries working and according to a few reputed sources have ingredients for entire battery chain available locally.
The thing is if this stock was underpriced and rational this would be such a positive news after 2-3 years of growth stall.
Instead they are trying to keep the hype up with endless goalpost changing and self driving possibly stuck perenially in edge case doom scenario with camera only decision
Batteries are boring, or at least the hype has a short shelf life. There are enough normies making progress on batteries that Elon hasn't got a credible argument that he is different and better.
Same for cheap Teslas. Some hype trains hit the buffers sooner than later.
There's a lot of true believers who think Tesla+Musk will crack self driving and/or humanoid robots any day now.
I am so confused when I read things like this because my Tesla model 3 is effectively self driving for me for months now. Hundreds of miles without intervention. No other car I can buy can do this yet
That’s irresponsible at best give it doesn’t support full self driving. I never understood why end users are allowed to just beta test a car on public roads.
Is it responsible to let users do auto speed and auto lane on a high speed highway without other autopilot features ?
Rollout both technologies at scale , and try to guess with one will cause more harm giving th fact there will be users in both cars trying to put legs on a steering wheel :
A stupid tech that will not even try to do safe things
Or software that is let’s say 4x less safe vs avg human but still very capable of doing maneuvering without hitting obvious walls etc ?
Giving people more ways to shut themselves in the foot does not improve the safety. I find the entire thing a kind of dark pattern as the system along with misleading marketing makes you lax over time just to catch you off guard.
You get used with the system to work correctly and then when you expect less it does the unthinkable and the whole world blames you for not supervising a beta software product on the road on day 300 with the same rigour you did on day one.
I can see a very direct correlation with LLM systems. Claude has been working great for me until one day when it git reset the entire repo and I’ve lost two days work because it couldn’t revert a file it corrupted . This happened because I just supervised it just like you would supervise a FSD car with “bypass” mode. Fortunately it didn’t kill anyone , just two days of work lost. If there was the risk of someone being killed I would never allow a bypass /fsd/supervise mode regardless of how unlikely this is to happen.
they have very good guardrails to prevent you that, unlike autolane etc.
Teslas has sensors , eye trackers etc is it possible to shoot yourself in the leg, sure. But not in any different way vs human doing irrational things in the car, make up, arguing , love etc.
Human-being is an irrational create that should not drive except for fun in isolated environment. Tesla or Waymo or anyone else.... It is good to remove human from the road, the faster the better.
>> It is good to remove human from the road, the faster the better.
I’m all for this but not to replace dumb people with dumb software. I think the FSD should be treated more like the airplane safety. We have the opportunity to do this right not just what’s the cheapest way we can get away with it.
well, if you don't read news that try to panic about everything new, that's +- exactly how people currently use FSD.
When I'm driving FSD If i want to drink, eat, etc, instead of doing weird one hand tricks every driver did, i just turn FSD and let it drive. When I'm tired , I'm doing the same. Again , attention control works really good, it doesn't let you sit on the phone etc. unlike many other cars with less advanced features. You can't be on FSD + Phone but you can easily be on the phone + lane control in other car.
Phone is by far the biggest real killer of people, and no body is trying to create a campaign against phone mounts, etc.
The fact other cars are less safe doesn’t automatically make yours safe.
Legally Teslas are Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, while Waymos for example are Automated Driving Systems.
If you're driving a vehicle in the former category, you'll be on the hook for reckless driving if you aren't fully supervising the vehicle.
I'm pretty sure the original commenter was supervising the driving, though.
Except for their limited Robotaxi service. They have recently ditched their safety driver as well, so there is truly no one "driving" the car.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47051546
Well, I didn’t say that they did it well
Based on the self driving trials in my Model Y, I find it terrifying that anyone trusts it to drive them around. It required multiple interventions in a single 10-minute drive last time I tried it.
I'm using FSD for 100% of my driving and only need to intervene maybe once a week. It's usually because the car is not confident of too slow, not because it's doing something dangerous. Two years ago it was very different where almost every trip I needed to intervene to avoid crash. The progress they have made is truly amazing.
Would you use FSD with your children in the car? I sure as hell wouldn’t. Progress is not safety.
Yes I do in fact use FSD with my children in the car.
I pray for you and them. You need it
Oh well that's because you aren't using V18.58259a, I follow Elon's X and he said FSD is solved in that update. Clearly user error.
How long ago was that? I doubt it was the v14 software. The software has become scary good in the last few weeks, in my own subjective experience.
This exact sentence (minus the specific version) is claimed every single week.
No, you do not "become scary good" every single week the past 10 years and yet still not be able to drive coast to coast all by itself (which Elon promised it would do a decade ago)
You are just human and bad at evaluating it. You might even be experiencing literal statistical noise.
I have not been proclaiming scary good every week for the last 10 years. In fact, I have cancelled my subscription at least two times, once on v13 and once on v14, with the reason ‘not good enough yet.’ I am telling you that for me personally it has crossed a threshold very recently.
It certainly wasn't in the past few weeks, but I've been hearing about how good it's gotten for years. Certainly not planning to pay to find out if it's true now, but I'll give it another try next free trial!
Make sure you are on AI4 hardware when you do. If you buy FSD on AI3 you’ll be limited to v13, which is is terrible. I have used both and they are in different leagues altogether.
You need only look at Tesla's attempts to compete with Waymo to see that you are just wrong. They tried to actually deploy fully autonomous Teslas, and it doesn't really work, it requires a human supervisor per car.
They are behind Waymo but they are getting there. They started giving fully autonomous drives since last month without safety driver in Austin. Tesla chose a harder camera-only approach but it's more scalable once it works.
Waymo can go camera-only in the future too by training a camera-only model alongside their camera+lidar model.
They'll probably get there faster too because the decisions the camera+lidar model makes can be used to automatically evaluate the camera-only model.
Clearly at this point the camera-only thing is the ego of Musk getting in the way of the business, because any rational executive would have slapped a LIDAR there long ago.
Why is it more scalable? LIDAR is cheap now.
>more scalable
It's cheaper, that's all it is.
Which makes it easier to scale?
Which using a five-dollar word to describe a one-cent fact.
Scalability is usually about O(n²) vs O(n log n) or something, not a smaller constant that's significant but not a game changer.
Not if they have to have remote drivers ready to help out with the "autonomous" system.
...if it works.
Tesla have recently started introducing unsupervised cars cars as well.
Yes, they moved the "safety driver" into a chase car.
And the results speak for themselves.
https://www.gurufocus.com/news/8623960/tesla-tsla-robotaxi-c...
And seemingly only along one stretch of road? Like, this happened in Dublin in 2018: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/driverles... - going up and down a stretch of road is about as easy as it gets.
> Mr Keegan said he was “pretty confident” that in “the next five to 10 years” driverless vehicles would “make a major contribution in terms of sustainable transport” on Dublin’s streets.
As always, people were overoptimistic back then, too. There are currently no driverless vehicles in Dublin at all, with none expected anytime soon unless you count the metro system (strictly speaking driverless, but clearly not what he was talking about).
A bus crashing into a stationary Tesla counts as a crash for Tesla? What in the world is this metric?
Ask Musk why he refuses to provide details of accidents so we can make a judgment.
Tesla’s own Vehicle Safety Report claims that the average US driver experiences a minor collision every 229,000 miles, meaning the robotaxi fleet is crashing four times more often even by the company’s own benchmark.
https://www.automotiveworld.com/news/tesla-robotaxis-reporti...
I don't see how we could know the rate of US driver minor collisions like that. No way most people reporting 1-4mph "collisions" with things like this.
You don't have to know. You can fully remove the few "minor" accidents (that a self driving car shouldn't be doing ever anyway) and the Tesla still comes out worse than a statistical bucket that includes a staggering number of people who are currently driving drunk or high or reading a book
The car cannot be drunk or high. It can't be sleepy. It can't be distracted. It can't be worse at driving than any of the other cars. It can't get road rage. So why is it running into a stationary object at 17mph?
Worse, it's very very easy to take a human that crashes a lot and say "You actually shouldn't be on the road anymore" or at least their insurance becomes expensive. The system in all of these cars is identical. If one is hitting parked objects at 17mph, they would almost all do it.
You and I must not drive the same Tesla brand then because my Model Y is a terrifying experience when “self-driving” anywhere besides on highways.
I do wonder if folks who say Tesla’s FSD works well and safely are simply lacking a self-preservation instinct.
Even on highways I've had to intervene maybe once every 50 miles as it will often miss exits for me. This is a 2025 Model 3 with the latest 14.2 update in a major US metro.
Hundreds of miles is not an appropriate sample size for the technology's intended scale.
See this related article and discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47051546
"No other car I can buy can do this yet"
How many have you tested in your day to day life?
"dude trust me"
Can you watch a Netflix and have a beer while it's driving? No? Then it's not self driving.
The data from their self driving pilots disagrees even if it works for you. Its simply not read to be a taxi that makes money by itself.
It might a nice feature for your car to have. But most people aren't paying for it, the conversion rate is very low.
So they are not making money from taxis and not making much money from software sales.
So does it matter that for you personally it drives you around sometimes?
Even if you price in a 4x increase in FSD buy conversion ratio, you can't explain the stock price.
And I say this as a former Tesla investor who assumed that conversion ratio would be better then it is. But for that reason (and many others) I couldn't justify the valuation and dropped the stock.
I am confused as to why you think no interventions in "hundreds of miles" is good enough. It has to be no interventions for hundreds of thousands of miles WITH THE CAR BEING EMPTY to be good enough.
It's a very capable L2 system, it's just that it's been a very capable L2 system for a while now, and it still seems far away from reaching L4.
And of course, Musk's insistence that they don't need other sensor types like lidar or radar definitely looks like it's getting in the way.
Because if you get in an accident you personally not Tesla are liable. Soon as I’m not liable for an accident when the computer is driving I’d sell my other cars and put my family in pink PT Cruisers if those were the only cars offering that
Ask those who were killed while using FSD for their opinion on it before forming your own ;)
Months where you’re still required to be paying attention. Meanwhile 2 years ago Mercedes-Benz Drive Pilot a level 3 system let you sit and watch a movie without paying attention to the road.
Personally that’s way more useful for me even if they didn’t let you turn it on at highway speeds.
Actually Mercedes killed their Drive Pilot for now https://insideevs.com/news/784404/mercedes-level-3-drive-pil...
They canceled it because of poor adoption rather than any technical issues.
Which if anything looks worse for Tesla long term. If luxury car owners aren’t willing to pay 200$/month for self driving then trying to up charge people buying used model 3 and Y’s after canceling the S and X looks dubious. Which means that 100$/month subscription likely loses them money vs an 8k purchase.
Mercedes system was pretty useless because you could only use it in very limited conditions (specific freeways, only following another car). Nobody wants to pay $200/month to use it for 5% of their driving. Tesla FSD drives for you end-to-end.
Most people have a rather consistent commute, so the Mercedes was a more like a 0% or 80% kind of thing. The issue was adding more roads wasn’t going to help, the underlying benefit to attention free driving just wasn’t that valuable even to customers who could use the system regularly.
They are looking to reintroduce it with a much higher top of 81MPH which might help, but agin my issue isn’t with the particular system but the underlying assumption of how much people value attention free driving.
People need to stop with this. The MB system was level 3 on like 0.1% of roads only in 5% of cases when you actually where on that road.
That's kind of like saying 'look this algorithm is awesome' if we feed it all the data in the optimal order.
Meanwhile in China, the humanoid robots are doing Tai Chi and somersaults...
But Tesla doesn't do all this even more and better!
And there are also a lot of people claiming Tesla stock is being manipulated.
"true believers" yup this never changes .
I agree with you. I personally dropped my stock when it was clear that the bull thesis had collapsed.
I had priced in, margin staying the same or going slowly down. FSD not working but achieving at least a decent amount of software sale conversion. Service to become a profit center. And most importantly, a profitable truck and 'Model 2' program to further push volume. Beyond that, just generally that electrification was ongoing and Tesla had a role to play.
I never considered Robi-Taxi or Human Robots.
All of these failed. Volume didn't continue to go up. Margin couldn't be substantiated. FSD didn't get much buys (not helped by absurdly increasing price). Truck program was a failure (and I don't think its because of the design). And 'Model 2' program was cancelled.
I profited a lot from this stock and I think there was time where the stock-price was reasonable (I don't buy the claim that it was always a pure meme stock). But every quarter it got worse and worse. I can't understand why its still so high either.
It’s Elon. It’s a meme stock. Fundamentals don’t matter. That his wealth is so wrapped up in the public valuation of Tesla I guess investors think he will do everything he can to keep th stock price up that is until SpaceX goes public the I think he won’t care because his wealth will come form that primarily.
I guess the thesis is Musk is building the sci-fi future. Robots, cities on Mars etc.
It's impressive what marketing images can achieve - the future vision pumping the stock, the seig heil halving car sales.
I wonder if some of it is because of Musk, not despite him. Yes, his actions and statements in the last year have been terrible, but he also demonstrated he is very close to one of the most important power centers on the planet. That might be enough for some investors.
Wouldn’t this be a side effect of everyone buying only indexes funds or ETFs?
Me and other millions of people are investing in our pensions every month and buying ETF (S&P500 or global) and indirectly buying Tesla stocks even if we don’t want to.
The system would need a big shock to cause the ETFs to rebalance and reduce the proportion of Tesla stocks that are part of the index.
Haven't looked into this much myself, but throwing it out there: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/04/19/for-15-yea...
> What exactly is the market pricing in?
Musk, the perception of. As always. Popular media drilled in that geniuses behaving like idiots is on point. So other idiots with money still suspect him of being a genius and singlehandedly turning things around at some point before the cliff.
It's not a mystery, regardless of if it's dumb or not - the market is pricing in likely dominance in robotics, both cybercab and optimus.
Long story short --- it's a cult --- there is no logical way to explain it.
Musk is the leader selling his own brand of fantasy that he makes up as he goes along. A lot (if not most) of what he says never comes to pass but people still cling to every prognostication as if it is gospel.
For over two decades, he was all about taking over the auto business with full self driving EVs. Obviously never happened. So now he is off to take over ride sharing and robots and AI and whatever else comes down the pike tomorrow.
>What exactly is the market pricing in?
Elon Musk.
But that doesn't make any sense anymore either.
It does if you assume there is somebody dumber to buy your stock.
Its CEO is the most gifted person alive ..in pump and dump schemes.
The rational thing would be to short it, but Tesla value will remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
It really has tarnished the name of the genius inventor.
At some point you have to wonder if there's some manipulation going on? Do 100s of bots buy and sell these stocks at specific times to keep the price up? Maybe there's an institutional investor or few who secretly back Elon and are part of a scheme?
A bit speculative reply but would appreciate if anybody links any such analysis'/investigations.
From my limited knowledge, I know people have been shorting Tesla based on fundamentals for a while now but haven't been successful.
The billionaire class loves their crypto nazis--they won't let Musk fall from grace. Given the Epstein files, the Panama papers, and what we know about the elite networks, you'd have to be a sucker not to believe that the stock market is manipulated to the core.
I just ordered a 37,000AUD BYD, the "$25k (USD) car" that Elon used to promise was coming.
Seems like I'm not the only one with 2779 BYD EVs sold in the country in January compared to just 501 Teslas.[1]
[1] https://business.carsales.com.au/news-room/news/vfacts-janua...
This is a quote from Tesla latest earnings call, at 04 min..
"Because we're really moving into a future that is based on autonomy and so if you're interested in buying a Model S and X, now would be the time to order it, because we expect to wind down S and X production in next quarter and basically stop production of Model S and X next quarter. We'll obviously continue to support the Model S and X programs for as long as people have the vehicles, but we're gonna take the Model S and X production space in our Fremont factory and convert that into an Optimus factory, which will... with the long-term goal of having 1 million units a year of Optimus robots in the current S/X space in Fremont."
This reads to me like someone saying “you can’t dump me, because I am preemptively dumping you.” It is a forced pivot to avoid having to admit failure.
> It is a forced pivot to avoid having to admit failure.
It is also a neat way to reset Elon's Very Reliable Prediction Clock.
I look forward to hearing about how fully functional Optimus robots will be ready to ship "later this year" for the next 10 years.
I wonder if they'll be similarly "self-driving"
https://old.reddit.com/r/robotics/comments/1ph3scw/tesla_opt...
I thought this was the greatest product demo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R40IDdAkRZM
I struggle to imagine what the US version of this intimidating propaganda movie would look like. My mind renders only pictures of square dancing.
China is absolutely crushing everyone mostly across the board in technology these days. It's comical today, but will just be embarrassing soon.
The only bit visually we see China a little behind is AI but I suspect they have much better closed/unreleased models, and the fab/chip space, but they'll close that gap in a short few years I'd expect.
The US version is all boston dynamics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNorxwlZlFk&t=9s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeeiN9smjjY
Unitree is doing everything Boston Dynamics is doing and more without a physical safety barrier between the robots and the humans.
Perhaps but but it doesn't matter. They have better production capabilities and more experience with drone swarms.
This is amazing! I WISH somebody would take 15 seconds of this clip, add China flag in the bottom, then add scratching sounds of a vinyl disc and forward to this, with Felon Musk/American flag:
https://www.reddit.com/r/robotics/comments/1ph3scw/tesla_opt...
You’ve heard of a bridge to nowhere?
I suspect this is a pivot to nowhere.
Elon Musk's Meta VR moment is definitely Optimus.
Sounds a lot like Mars.
If he really almost got self driving what is the point to build non autonomous cars ?
Same with robotics .
They got billions in pocket to either release a few new models to save market or invest into RND to change the market .
Real business people keep running production lines if they are profitable and build additional production lines for new businesses. Real business people do not shut down profitable lines because they are making a pivot, that is what failing startups do.
> but we're gonna take the Model S and X production space in our Fremont factory and convert that into an Optimus factory, which will... with the long-term goal of having 1 million units a year of Optimus robots in the current S/X space in Fremont."
I don't know how well that's going to work out for them. I saw these robots (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVX6vq0RSnY) on the Chinese New Year Gala, and they look way more dexterous than any Optimus video I've ever seen.
Chinese dancing king fu Demos are same gimmick as elons robots pouring alcohol in the bar .the real barrier is real ai . Non of the parties gets it
Optimus is not a leader in humanoids; but that china demo is not really all that impressive; They are lightweight, reduced scale, and not all that dynamic... No idea how adaptable the control would be either.
See how poorly the sword one moves compared to the others.
Optimus hand dexterity is interesting; and the handling capacity is targeting useful weights (10s of kilos).
Boston dynamics is the most interesting; targeting "fit human" manipulation, 50kg. Their adaptable movement and walking are the best ive seen demoed as well.
Great. First ram goes through the roof, and now china has kung-fu robots. 2026 is going great.
They could add EATR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energetically_Autonomous_Tacti... ) technology to run it and then we have gone almost full horizon zero dawn.
So long as they don't give them the capability to consume arbitrary biomass to fuel themselves, I think we're safe from a Faro Swarm situation for the foreseeable future...
That was some serious vibe coding.
At least start with folding the laundry and helping the infirm. They went straight to martial arts.
Wonder what the maintenance picture for Tesla will be like from now on. Crazy expensive parts at the very least I would imagine.
If you go into a dealership to have your Tesla repaired, they give you a 3D-printed poop emoji to inform you that the parts are not available.
Can be turned into value, owning a Tesla is a symbol of status.
A symbol of being aggressively middle class?
About half the ubers I take are Teslas. So, for me it largely signals "ride share" these days.
A symbol of being a white nationalist racist?
That escalated quickly. No I meant that owning a Tesla, like Apple or Prada is a status symbol. Income status. So if maintainance costs a lot it will reinforce that.
by no mean calling this out is advocating for status signaling , I myself would never buy a Tesla for this very reason.
Can someone enlighten me WHO the customer to those million Optimus robots are?
I've been working in robotics for years now, I've talked with ex Optimus developers, FigureAI devs, some Japanese humanoid devs, researchers, talked to people in conferences and no one. Absolutely no one I've met take Optimus seriously. If a lab is considering buying a humanoid they'll go to China. Hell, even MIT professors that have been crucial to the development (Boston dynamics etc) seems to not put too much emphasis on Tesla.
But I've also been to industrial robotics conferences, mostly for customers and user focus and not developers and usually the perception is different in those circles.
So who are the optimistic customers for Optimus?
The same customers as grok. In the future where humanoid robots see some level deployment, there might be some people that need their robot to make CSAM and say the n-word.
Federal US government & to some extent local law enforcement. They most likely won't be able to use them, but they will buy them and put them in a warehouse. Long tradition of US government doing this with tech, going back to SGI workstations in the 90s if not earlier.
I think those are just two of the models that aren't pushed particularly hard. As I understand it, Model 3 and Model Y are the major models in recent time?
I think S, X and Cybertruck are just 3% of 2025 deliveries?
the fact that Tesla's newest model sold pitifully isn't exactly a mitigating factor.
> 1 million Optimus robots
Are there that many unemployed actors available?
No but thanks to Elon there are a million unemployed federal government workers.
> there are a million unemployed federal government workers
Wikipedia notes about 300,000 people were laid off. Not a million.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_federal_mas...
Thanks joke police!
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Plenty of Mocap actors.
I'm not sure what you're trying to tell me.
The whole pivot to Optimus is insane. I can understand the market following Elon down all the other paths he randomly skips down but Optimus... Really?? The only way to explain it is it's not being taken seriously but Elon seems to be taking it very seriously...
It's especially strange considering the amount of work that Tesla (the company) put into becoming a car manufacturer which is certainly no easy feat. I'm sure some of the know-how, process, and tooling/supply lines could be transitioned to general purpose robot manufacturing - but why would you build these supply lines and factories just to screw it all up like this?
Judging by the news isn’t the pivot to creating autonomous driving systems for other manufacturers cars?
If I’m understanding correctly the pivot is to sell just the autonomous driving systems. This way it can be trained on more data. It’s a hard sell to do this while competing against the car makers whose business they are trying to court.
Selling actual cars was like Uber when they started with a black car service. Get into the luxury market then leverage that so get into the mass market.
Perhaps this is why Elon has been so adamant about not using LiDAR
What does any of this have to do with Optimus? Driving a car by sticking a humanoid robot in the driver seat would be amusing but is a terrible idea.
Actually if you run the tape back Tesla spent over a decade on trivially preventable manufacturing fuckups by attempting to ignore a century of industry knowledge on the subject and just wing it silicon valley style. That they have infrastructure that is capable of performing manufacturing at some scale is not in question. That any of it is sufficiently optimized for sanity to be repurposed remains to be seen.
The Giga Press and battery factories (to some extent) seem pretty heavily tied to automobile manufacture. Regardless - there are many automobile production lines that found a second or third life producing down-market brands or moved to other countries because they still have some value.
I guess I'm just continuously baffled by the complete fuck-up that is/has-been Tesla motors.
There is a particular breed of bullshit artistry that appeals to popular imagination and investors. Buckminster Fuller comes to mind here.
Even a few short years ago the Model S Plaids were still getting derided for their horrible fit and finish. That's like, a decade into production.
These cars are very long in the tooth so I suspect that the Fremont line has been a shitshow the entire time.
Ai solved(ing) coding in 2026
Robots doing drunken panda moves FSD are insanely good using MacBook grade + and not even grass iPhone hardware
few other companies are doing large scale self driving large scale pilots
Cars are already heavily built using specialized robots today
Id say it’s equally stupid for any other car brand to invest money into something not autonomous or robotics.
The world has changed. Cars belong to a consumerism-driven, globalized economy. Humanoid robots and AI belong to a technofeudal, fascist-like state with a government-driven economy. The ruler relies on his elite. The elite relies on AI, humanoid robots, and drones to project the ruler’s power and maintain the status quo. The peasants are no longer needed. They are now seen only as a burden.
I think the only thing he can do now is have Tesla "acquire" SpaceX. He already had SpaceX "acquire" the AI thing, so that would roll all three up into a pubco where he can hide things about the business as needed (no fear of SEC problems).
I suspect it would be the other way around - SpaceX is gonna IPO in a few months at a similar valuation to Tesla right now, and once the Elon pump can go wild on the public, who knows how quickly SpaceX will go to the moon.
Is this because of his comp package, and the moonshot incentives it creates?
I bet Chinese robots will be cheaper lol.
The average price of a new car in the US is now ~$50,000 and the average monthly payment is almost $800. All people want is an affordable car and it is clear that won’t happen any time soon. It isn’t strange at all that prisoners to this system are cheering on the Chinese disruption.
You're definitely not alone! I just took delivery of a new BYD Shark 6 on Monday. It's amazing and I paid $41k USD ($57,900 AUD) for it. Before that was available I was planning on punting on a used Hilux.
I'm charging my Shark right now and I couldn't be happier. I expect my fuel bill (it's a PHEV) to drop by 70-80% when compared to the 2010 Commodore wagon I was driving last week.
Congrats on your upgrade from bogan to neuvo-bogan ;)
(I kid, I also drive a byd, ATTO though rather than shark)
Thank you! I'm in WA, so in some respects if I'm not driving a landie or hilux my bogan creds are still somewhat lacking, but at least I'm looking down on Ranger drivers now lol.
The apparently widespread enthusiasm for spyware on wheels (a category in which Tesla also competes) is sobering.
Many customers really only care about price and that it generally works and looks fine and have zero idea about the hidden costs.
The current model 3 is about $29k with inflation from 2017. They didn't quite hit the mark, but it's not like they're wildly off.
Saw lots of BYD in New Zealand recently. Probably more than I saw in Hong Kong.
When Tesla dropped the 'Model 2' car because 'the future would be all robo taxi' I dropped my remaining position in the stock. The idea that car sales would collapse by 50% because robo-taxi would happen just around the corner was crazy.
Did Musk actually ever promise a $25k car?
Repeatedly since at least 2020.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/news/tesla-said-it-would-sta...
https://cleantechnica.com/2024/01/25/25000-tesla-in-the-work...
Good. Seems like the sales decline will reach the US eventually too. Even Toyota is coming out with compelling EV products this year.
Tesla came from nowhere, developed essentially one world-dominating product (lumping the 3 and Y together), then the CEO basically ruined everything.
Imagine Tesla with a "normal" CEO and marketing department. They would have a bunch of different trims and options for the 3/Y, a redesigned X, a functional truck, and a market cap of 400 billion!
TSLA market cap is 1.29 trillion today.
Of course, with a P/E ratio of over 381
I'm aware, that part was sarcasm
NVIDIA P/E is 46
Apple had been around 12 til 2019, now around 32 [1]. They were/are discounted for a long time but some kind of stocks had a price never based on fundamentals.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/pe-rati...
At least Nvidia’s sales are up!
they are building stuff on the Moon, P/E should be 150k! building Moon stuff is cool
> they are building stuff on the Moon
That's SpaceX!
The AI company?
Someone else might say ISP (starlink)? But you always go by the parent company unless they have clear boundaries like conglomerates.
No, the social media company.
Tesla has a marketing department. It just refuses to talk to anyone except to talk at journalists...and journalists are so desperate to get quotes, they'll put up with it.
When Tesla started with the "no marketing department" nonsense, the press should have just stopped quoting them or covering them. Especially given that half the things Musk says are blatant lies.
One of the interesting things you start seeing and then can't stop seeing is "CEO says" journalism, where the whole article is about the CEO saying something and that's newsworthy and there's no real analysis of it or no looking at the track record of the CEO. Just stenography.
It's not limited to this one company, they'll do it with any company that's newsworthy or has a CEO who will generate clicks for their article.
> Tesla came from nowhere, developed essentially one world-dominating product (lumping the 3 and Y together), then the CEO basically ruined everything.
It seems strange to attribute only the fall -- and not the rise -- to the CEO
It seems strange to talk of attribution without talking about the founders.
Does it though? The company had no market traction or product, more just an idea and some early engineering exploration in the nine months before he joined.
I’m staunchly anti-Elon, but anyone who’s not giving him his due or acknowledging his very real successes before pointing out what a knob is he is not arguing soundly.
Lets be real, the original founders drove the start up against the wall and Tesla was a complete disaster before Musk took over the company. Not to mention that they wouldn't even have gotten that far without Musk money and JD.
There exists a huge amount of Musk derangement syndrome these days.
Elon Musk is a great businessman and develops great products for general consumers. There is not much wrong with him other than his online persona... which most normal people can ignore. He's probably more normal than any other business leader.
What's weird is people lumping in some of Elon's actions with falls in Tesla sales as if he didn't:
1. Predict it
2. Gift the whole world the motivation to do it
I don't care about Elon Musk. He's a good businessman and a weird personality. But it doesn't take a genius to realise that he can't lead a winning product unchallenged, forever.
>Elon Musk is a great businessman and develops great products for general consumers.
The only thing he's great at is creating the illusion of genius.
He didn't found Tesla, despite his title. He's not an engineer at SpaceX, despite his title. He spent 44 billion on Twitter which is most certainly losing money hand over fist. The Boring Company is a flop. Tesla is famously anything but a car company because their cars are mediocre in every way except the battery range.
SpaceX is his only real success, but then again SpaceX only succeeded because of massive government funding, which Elon would happily decry as communism if the money went to anyone else.
He's not a genius and not a particularly good businessman. He's just a normie with Daddy's emerald mine money, who got lucky with a large severance package when he was fired from Paypal for being terrible, and now uses his wealth to create a cult of personality.
> Tesla is famously anything but a car company because their cars are mediocre in every way except the battery range
I can't say that I'm a big fan of this guy... But I can tell you this: I learned to drive only after moving to the U.S. recently, and when I had to choose my first car, I found Tesla to be the best among many I tried. It's just awesome, and I don't even use their FSD, the car itself is superb (at least the latest "3"). Minimalistic, no BS, drives well, quiet, comfortable. The same feeling I had with the first iPhone, compared to other phones.
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Elon Musk is a fascist sympathizer who is currently being investigated in at least one European country for election interference, a known lier who has promised level 5 self driving by the end of the year every year since 2018 or so, landing people on Mars by next year since 2022, Tesla electric truck cheaper than rail, "today", in 2020, and many others.
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>There is not much wrong with him other than his online persona
What about his support of Trump, his direct involvement with the US government via Doge, and lying about widespread election fraud?
Shhhh we’re pretending that China wasn’t behind the massive propaganda campaign against Tesla to boost the popularity of their own BYD brand.
No, he's done that all by himself sorry.
Turns out nazi salutes don't make one popular here in Europe.
I find it highly unlikely that the Chinese drove him to donthe Nazi salute
I'm surprised people are forgetting that the person who predicted the coming wars against his personality was himself. He basically told everyone what was coming... then it came and people still fell for it.
Elon is a loser socially and that's about it.
DOGE and the nazi sale happened. That's not just problematic social media posting.
DOGE promised the world and delivered small wins. The normal politician does this and does not deliver a single win.
And people hate politicians
> market cap of 400 billion
And hence Musk will be the CEO.
>then the CEO basically ruined everything.
Is it me or do the nay-sayers state that Elon is a grifter and added nothing to Tesla, but yet he ruined it? How can he both not create something and ruin it?
Also, Tesla isn't the only manufacturer (In the US) stopping electric cars, Porsche (IMO Taycan is the best electric model) is essentially stopping electric cars too, nothing to do with Elon.
Just my observation.
Musk didn't found Tesla, he invested into it when it was small. Musk brought good marketing and gave the people who were declined at GM a platform. So far so good.
It was a success. He got more investment, built factories, became market leader. Built an industrial stack where there was none.
And gradually he got crazy. Dodgecoin, Nazi gestures, thinking he has to safe humanity because left radicaly are destroying it.
Instead of cutting down on costs, Tesla insisted it is the only electrical car and priced it as such. Not to mention the cybertruck disaster everybody saw from miiles away.
Meanwhile, the Chinese have the best electrics with the currently best industrial basis for production and cheap resources.
Musk has too much money, got lucky with an investment and started becoming complacent. The rest of the story writes itself.
Y all need to realize that Tesla is a humanoid android company now, and soon will dive into teleportation, immortality and invisibility.
And soon self drive will also work on Mars. Tesla and SpaceX are now joint at the hip.
Tesla cars can't even self drive properly on Earth.
Mind you, Mars doesn't have road signs so it's likely easier to pass as a threshold.
I gotta give Musk credit. I continue to think his grift has reached the end of the road, and I'm always shocked at how credulously the market follows him onto the next grift while immediately forgetting the prior one.
The market is far more naive and credulous than I anticipated, and Musk seems to understand much better than I just how fucking moronic most market participants are.
Since he's now being seen as a conservative, he is now adding into Christian elements to his grift. Expect to see him get even more mystical now
Yeah but what racists don't understand is that the golden age of white folks is over.
Outnumbered and increasingly outspent.
No it's not, it's a car company. It may be moving to robots, but for companies to survive they require products and profits, neither of which seem to be real when it comes to Optimus. According to Musk commercial sales may begin in 2027 with wider consumer availability in 2028. I don't know about you, but when I hear Elon Musk state that something will be real in 2 years I don't believe it at all. This is the exact same playbook with FSD, Mars, etc.
They are being sarcastic.
Poe's Law applies here. Especially on HN, especially with respect to Musk. There are a disturbing number of people here who have fully bought into his lies.
> teleportation, immortality and invisibility
> colonising Mars
Are there any known examples of Musk cult members being successfully deprogrammed? I know there are a couple examples of hardcore MAGA people seeing the light.
Given less than stellar sales how come TSLA stock is not far below all times high and 15% higher than a year ago? Investors still expect some miracle?
It's not a car company anymore, it's an energy company... Ahem, I mean self-driving... Er, maybe robots? ... Okay, that not going so well? How about quantum? That's probably a thing, right?
Tesla seems basically priced based on hype, rather than anything relating to its actual business.
Maybe someday they will do half the things Hyundai is doing right now.
The reason Tesla stock is still high is the same reason Bitcoin is worth anything.
...capital flight from totalitarian regimes?
Its a billionaire bubble making machine
The market can remain irrational longer than we can remain solvent.
And possibly also the overt government corruption is priced in.
It's a cult. Really. This is a stock devoid of any connection to reality, fundamentals, products, anything. All that matters is that Musk is on the nameplate. Do not bet against the ability of people in a cult to remain irrational in the face of overwhelming evidence. Do not touch the cult.
It's a bit more than just his name. It's the statements he makes, that turn out to not be true.
If it's a cult why BlackRock is heavily invested in TSLA? Should not be they more rational (e. g. look at P/E ratio and other financial stats).
With entities like BlackRock. There is always on which part of money they manage they are simple followers. Index funds simply follow indexes. They can not decide not to invest according to set out rules.
And when you get to active management, those managers might not either be that good. And it works as long as market keeps going up.
Maybe they think they can ride the cult and get out faster than the cultists when necessary?
God help us all if AI takes over the stock market and starts making rational decisions!
That happened already with the 2010 flash crash.
Still making fantastic profit every quarter. So there's really no issue.
Those profits have also gone down; the only year they made lower-but-still-positive profit than 2025 ($3794m) was the first year since their founding in which they made any profit (which was 2020 and $721m).
Tesla's total profits over its entire existence ($37,883m [0]) is about as much as Musk has personally made by selling Tesla shares ($40bn ish [1]), but of that profit I can find $12.8bn can be attributed to government incentives[2] that have now largely or completely gone away.
[0] Net lifetime based on all the ups and downs of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla%2C_Inc.#Finances
[1] I assume some of this got rounded: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/elon-musk-te...
[2] Between US federal ($11.4bn for just zero-emission vehicles standards) and local state incentives (and more, I didn't fully sum everything): https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2025/e...
Not sure what relevance Musk selling shares has to do with profit they've made. That seems completely irrelevant.
That being said, yeah, profits were down a bit but a lot of that was stock compensation and other things. In practical terms they went from a cash position of 36 billion to 44 billion.
They are in a phenomenal position financially as they have very little debt. By comparison GM made 2.7 billion and Stellantis lost 20 billion.
Tesla is in such a great cash position that Apple only has about 10 billion more than them in cash.
The future looks fantastic.
> Not sure what relevance Musk selling shares has to do with profit they've made. That seems completely irrelevant.
Selling shares for more than the company made in its entire existence, demonstrates the shares are overvalued.
> By comparison GM made 2.7 billion and Stellantis lost 20 billion.
2.7/3.7 = 0.73; GM's market cap is $77.67bn, using them as your framing of the problem gets you to a Tesla market cap of $106.40bn, not their actual ~$1.5T.
And Toyota made 40-45 billion USD profit for each of the last few years, i.e. more than Tesla in its lifetime, while having a market cap that's currently $316.8bn.
Telsa, market cap $1551bn, about 5x that of a company which makes more each year than it did in total, is overpriced. Especially given how harshly both Tesla's profits and sales are declining even in otherwise growing markets.
Telsa could shift the decimal point on its market cap one place and still be overpriced.
Given what they are as a business, they are not in "a phenomenal position financially", they are in an OK position for a normal boring traditional car company and a terrible one for a trillion-dollar market cap club company.
(Numbers from companiesmarketcap.com, in case anyone complains those are out of date).
Unfortunately you don’t understand what “overvalued” means. The price is what people are willing to pay.
Tesla is far more than a car company. Even someone who hates them can recognize that
> The price is what people are willing to pay.
Price != value.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
> Tesla is far more than a car company.
No, they're not. The only thing they sell are cars and car-stuff. They have yet to sell those humanoid robots they show off. Hell, there's other car companies who also make humanoid robots, who have more than twice Tesla's revenue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyundai_Motor_Group
Even Tesla's subsidiary, Tesla Energy, which breaks out beyond "cars" is only about 10% of revenue of the car company, so even if you argue their ownership structure makes the group "more", it's still not "far more", but rather "rounding error".
Tesla's AI is just car AI, which other car manufacturers also have, and bluntly seem to be doing a bit better with it.
Even if they were "much more", a 90% drop in market cap would still see it priced like a high-growth tech firm, of the kind which people are independently worried may be in a bubble.
When the market prices this in, Tesla's share price will go down 90-99% on the international market. Perhaps not in USD though, depends how hard that goes weird.
See also: meme stock
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme_stock
My (2019) Tesla has been the most reliable car I've ever owned, but it sure seems like they're not interested in being a car company anymore.
Not having turn stalks and the drive selector, making me either pay for internet access or use bluetooth if I want to play spotify or youtube music (which I get for 'free' in cars with CarPlay or Android Auto), making the cybertruck way too big for a garage, discontinuing the model S and X...like are they even trying?
They used to have a third row option for the model Y, good for small kids or something, but then they got rid of that.
They were going to do the roadster, but didn't bother. They only have 6 paint colors, not even options for PTS. It's like they don't want to be a successful car company.
That's an uncommon experience.
Tesla is a very strong leader for faults, breakage, and costly maintenance/repairs in the 3-5 year old segment.
See any European comprehensive car inspection statistics report.
Take the reports with a grain of salt. Tesla does not mandate maintenance. The cars in the reports are the ones who left factory and get checked after 3 years of intensive use without any maintenance. Check the light alignment, check rust in the brakes and check the suspension and the inspection will be fine. Still cheaper than 400-600€ bi-yearly coolant refill from other manufacturers. Plus Tesla has published repair manual which is very strong advantage for me. I am poor and maintain my cars by myself. Maybe I like it too.
Teslas have too much play in bearings and steering column (from new) and unlike every other manufacture out there they refuse to follow the standards and says it is how it is supposed to be. This forces owners to pay to get a factory problem fixed with zero help from Tesla, otherwise their car will not pass inspections.
Also, it isn't normal for a 3-year-old car to risk dropping a wheel. You should read some more about this before you defend them.
EDIT: Here is a reddit thread about the problem (and an article in Norwegian):
>"Almost half of all Tesla Y fail mandatory tech inspection in Denmark and make headlines for it; similar numbers in Tesla-country Norway."
>"The most common issue remains slack in the wheel alignment and suspension, found in 22% of TMY's, as opposed to .1% of ID4's."
https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/1qmbm81/a...
> Still cheaper than 400-600€ bi-yearly coolant refill.
You are being scammed.
Still cheaper than 400-600€ bi-yearly coolant refill from other manufacturers
Wow, what car is that? Even Porsche owners would say, "Damn, son, they're taking you to the cleaners."
Mercedes does this yearly. It’s running gag from all the car influencers when they show the 800-1000€ service invoice of the EQS after first year. Imho it’s definitely a scam.
>That's an uncommon experience.
A big part Part of the reason tesla is considered less reliable is the number of recalls it gets, most of which are software related and fixed over the air.
In terms of maintenance, it is by far the lowest cost of ownership vehicle I've had, I'm in my 40s, not exactly new to owning cars.
> That's an uncommon experience.
The very first thing that Tesla was criticised for was terrible QA process. The quality was random and there were huge differences between factories. So I can totally believe there are plenty of Tesla made cars that made their owners happy. Of course few people can afford such gamble.
2019 is far too new to make any pronouncements on reliability. Get back to us in 2035.
The car is still under warranty and they are talking about reliability. A good ol' Toyota will live longer than Tesla has been a company.
All EVs will naturally be more reliable than ICE cars because there are a lot less components that can break!
> Not having turn stalks
Aren't turn stalks back now?
Yes, they've gone back to the traditional physical turn stalk.
They don’t. Their market cap is higher than all the successful car companies combined. Becoming a successful car company would cost Elon half of his unrealized capital gains. It’s far better to be the company who is going to make us $30,000 robot slaves because that’s a bigger market and one he’ll own entirely.
The only question is what will be the next hype cycle when that succeeds about as well as the Cyber Truck.
> It’s far better to be the company who is going to make us $30,000 robot slaves because that’s a bigger market and one he’ll own entirely.
The Chinese are making humanoid robots too, and my bet is they'll be better and cheaper than Tesla's.
Oh I was in no way saying I agree with any of that, just explaining how his mind seems (to me) to work.
He hyped electric cars to the point where someone in here in 2017 told me I was nuts to buy an ICE car because there wouldn’t be any gas stations left in five years. That’s why his share prices are out of proportion to reality.
Now that it turns out the EV market isn’t growing as fast as it seemed when it was all early adopters, and autonomous delivery isn’t ready and won’t be for at best a few years, he’s gotta hype the next thing.
I watched his interview recently to save you time, and the suffer :
His Vision — Hate It, Laugh at It, or Love It:
AI has solved (or is solving) coding in 2026.
Robots are doing drunken panda moves, yet FSD is insanely good — running on MacBook-grade hardware.
A few other companies are running large-scale self-driving pilots.
Cars are already being heavily built using specialized robots today.
At this point, it’s stupid for any car brand to invest money into anything that isn’t autonomous driving or robotics.
As a software developer I only really started to understand how divorced from reality Elon is when he started talking about software development. That was a sinking feeling: "Oh he doesn't actually know something I don't know. He's just keeping the music playing, so he doesn't have to sit down on the chairs that don't exist. Fuck."
Just like watching the movie Hackers and hearing how he hacked the gibson or the 7 screens setup in swordfish : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1Ds9CeG-VY
Yeah I used to listen to interviews of him and think "Wow, what a visionary". Now it just sounds as cringe and unrealistic as that clip.
yeah the recent “LLMs will just make the binary directly” comment should be a massive signal that the guys clueless
The only reason for a source code to be is for humans to read it, bun when the source code gets churned (by AI agents) in too large of a quantity for any human to realistically read and analyze, then what's the point of having a source code in the first place? Generating binary directly simply makes sense. Working with binary does, even when a human is involved, as long as there's an AI helper as well. The human simply can ask the AI assistant to explain whatever logical aspects behind the binary code and instruct the AI agent to modify the binary code directly, if necessary. That may be scary and not easy to accept. Going further with this idea, even the written text may become "too costly to work with" when there will be an AI agent to verbally or graphically serve the human with whatever informational aspect of a given text that could be of interest in a given situation.
LLMs are trained on source code, so that's what they can (barely) write. Decompiling is a -lossy- action which means that training directly on the output would have much less information and would be a nightmare if one (human or llm) needs to debug.
Well, in more positive news (for Tesla), their first Cybercab rolled off the production lines.
https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-cybercab-robotaxi-prod...
BYD is a formidable competitor and a great product for less.
BYD is not, despite the press, really very big in Europe (though it is in a couple of individual countries, notably Spain). Europe-wide, Geely, the Chinese manufacturer that everyone forgets about, is actually bigger: https://eu-evs.com/marketShare/ALL/Groups/Bar/All-time-by-Qu...
Geely is also present in the US via Volvo and Polestar. They haven’t delivered an affordable entry level EV yet, but I’ve been impressed with the Polestars. I’d never buy one because a Chinese car running on Google software sounds like a nightmare, but they’ve been good when I rented them.
Polestar's recent vehicle launches have gone extremely poorly because the software is so buggy. Their service network is also non-existent in the US.
BYD has barely started exporting cars, a bit less than 1 million last year. The total European market is 11 million cars a year. The global market is 90 million units.
And BYD obviously is focusing on easier markets, where they don't have to fight against tariffs.
BYD have also built a fleet of 8 of their own car carriers with a million car per year capacity. As well as multiple factories in multiple countries/continents outside China, including one in California (commercial trucks and bus only)
The graph linked doesn’t have BYD sales, how curious
If you look at individual countries, they'll show up in some.
They're not common enough to qualify.
200% YoY growth in Europe. Surpassed Ford in global auto sales, selling only EVs. Largest private employer in China. EV printer go brrr.
BYD uses aggressive discounts in bid to make Germany its leading European market - https://www.autonews.com/byd/ane-byd-discounts-germany-sales... - February 17th, 2026
China's BYD Overtakes Ford in Global Sales for the First Time - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinas-byd-overtakes-ford-glo... - February 12th, 2026
BYD's European registrations surge 270% in 2025 while Tesla slips 27% - https://cnevpost.com/2026/01/27/byd-european-registrations-s... - Jan 27th, 2026
BYD Sold Nearly Three Times As Many Cars As Tesla In Europe - https://www.carscoops.com/2025/11/byd-sold-nearly-3-times-as... - November 26th, 2025
The size of BYD's factory - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42228138 - November 2024 (615 comments)
Note that BYD doesn't just make BEVs. They're quite big in plug-in hybrids, which aren't in that data. They apparently sold 175k cars in Europe last year. A breakdown of BEV vs PHEV doesn't seem to be available, but 75k of those were one particular PHEV, so it's at most 100k BEVs.
VW AG sold 750k BEVs in Europe last year: https://www.volkswagen-group.com/en/press-releases/volkswage... (see the PDF).
Not saying that BYD is completely irrelevant, but the media overplays them. Presumably because BYD vs Tesla is an interesting narrative, even if the actual figures have both of those as small players in BEVs (at least for cars; BYD _is_ quite big in electric buses), with the real race being between VW AG and Stellantis. VW AG vs Stellantis is a painfully boring narrative.
The EU is a highly protected market, therefore the market share of foreign (to the EU) products cannot be used as a measure for the quality or affordability of such products.
I simply find it noteworthy how fast Chinese EVs are scaling up as a climate change mitigation. I don’t care who builds and sells them, just do so as quickly as possible.
Oh, yeah, to be clear, BYD is doing amazingly well. Just not, particularly, in Europe. This seems to confuse the media.
I suspect BYD would do a lot better in Europe if the political class wasn´t afraid of the fallout from the European manufacturers (VW, Stellantis, and all their child brands) being seriously damaged or even wiped out by the competition.
That said, if relations between the EU and the US get much chillier, the EU may decide to make some sacrifices in order to have China in their camp. E.g. VW are arm-twisted into selling Škoda to BYD, with job preservation guarantees, and then BYD is badged Škoda and six months later all the old Škoda models are gone and its EVs all the way.
I suspect that, given people in EU are used to EU car prices, there's not going to be much willingness on the EU side to budge on cars (though the Chinese side may ask for it, of course, and should the EU get them there will be no going back given how much cheaper Chinese cars are).
If things get trade-war-y, American cars are way down the list of things the EU will care about finding substitutes for:
2024 US exports to EU were about $370bn: https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/europe-middle-east/europe...
Of which cars were $8.8bn: https://www.globalfleet.com/en/manufacturers/global/analysis...
That graph is interesting because you can see direct patterns before 2020. The market was dominated by the Leaf, but during the pandemic the electric offerings of everybody arrived and we moved to a typical car market with the usual suspects being the most successful. Tesla got swamped by cheaper competitors. That and the Nazi stuff.
I see lots of byds in Europe.
I mean, they aren't common as Teslas, but there are more and more.
It's strange to me that some Americans will cheer on Chinese companies over Tesla, even overlooking those companies questionable labour practices. (I don't know if you're American)
More than half of Tesla's cars are built in China so you can hate them for both reasons.
Why? Tesla has huge quality problems (ranked by far the worst used cars in several countries incl. in Germany), an awful CEO, etc. BYD are better quality and cheaper which is insane.
Because distortions of the free market make us all poorer
Because politics bring out the highest emotions in people. We all have strong internal moral compasses and it is very difficult to violate or change them.
I'm not American (I'm Australian), but until Tesla divests from Elon Musk, chances are the next car I buy will be Chinese...
A lot of it is subsidized by the Chinese government and also, BYD's sales in January were down 33%
>subsidized
So, like Tesla. Why is it that when it is a Chinese company it is basically Evil Communism, but when it is in the US it is fine?
Because it’s completely different. The US subsidized American buyers of the cars. The Chinese government is subsidizing foreign buyers in order to help eat foreign marketshare
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Their cars today are much better than when sales were at their peak.
Getting politics to get in the way of good engineering is a real shame.
I do not consider removing redundant sensors like lidar or infrared from the comprehensive Tesla sensor network and pretending that cameras can do FSD perfectly a good example of engineerring.
Totally agree, let the guy do his nazi salute, who cares about politics?? Car go vroom!
The cars are much worse today when you compare them to the competition.
Musk expects ~80% Of Tesla's value will be Optimus robots [1]. It can't be any other way given that he helped elect a President that's against electric cars, against regulation for limiting climate change, against collaborating with our European allies.
https://www.theautopian.com/elon-musk-doesnt-see-cars-as-a-p...
I expect that to go about as well as Facebook changing their name to Meta and putting all their eggs in the Metaverse/VR basket...
But at least Meta's legacy businesses (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) were still valuable enough to fall back on - whereas Tesla's seems to be tanking. Only their utility-scale fixed battery business seems to have much potential if they can't turn around their dwindling car business.
> Musk expects ~80% Of Tesla's value will be Optimus robots [1].
Well one way to do that is destroy so much of Tesla that the Optimus division is 80% of the (much smaller) value that remains.
Some day Tesla stock will rediscover gravity...some day
Gravity doesn't exist when you're in a K-hole. That's why we can become a extraterrestrial society in the next 5 years (repeat infinitely - in 5 years)
Musk may let it fall for a bit of a discount before rolling it up, Katamari-style, into SpaceX, and preserving his ridiculous Tesla package.
Very soon musk will merge Tesla with SpaceX and say he is going to have robots drive the cars to space. The stock will multiply 4 fold making him a multi- trillionaire
So, let's try to guess: is Tesla going to be dominating robots and autonomous driving, and worth $10T, or at some point this castle of cards will fall to the ground?
My predictions:
1. Tesla does not dominate robots or autonomous driving, it fades away 2. Tesla’s stock price exceeds $10T after it is shoe-horned into being a part of SpaceXAIBoringTesla
Musk is almost certainly too big to fail at this point. The cult of personality and SpaceX give him a lot of room for financial engineering, he doesn’t need Tesla.
if democrats win midterms and then 2028 elections, they will be able to come back in full force and retaliate at least against the most egregious of Trump supporters. Will Musk survive in that scenario?
If King Arthur returns from Avalon should former British colonies be worried about Pax Brittanica?
Poor Elon. How's he gonna get to Mars^H^H^H^Hthe Moon now? Oh right, the same way he built Tesla: government handouts.
SpaceX is making that majority (70%) of its revenue, and all of its profits from Starlink, and mostly from subscriptions.
98% of government money SpaceX receives is payment for services rendered, which they provide at a significantly lower cost than their competitors.
On the other hand, their competitors are routinely receiving actual handouts. For example, ULA used to receive a $1 billion annual "Launch Capability" stipend essentially just to keep their lights.
I'm not saying he's not providing services. Tesla shipped cars and chargers for its govt money too. But I'm also saying they wouldn't have been in business without it. Elon is one of the great scam artists of our age, and a huge part of that is reliant on the taxpayer (when not reliant on SV investors and feeble-brained stock market)
Musks public meltdowns couldn't have come at a better time for his competitors.
I think most brands are being hammered in the netherlands. The tax climate for eletric company leased cars is not good compared to extremely good just a couple of years ago.
A few more nazi salutes by the CEO and those declines will approach 100%. But the optimus stormtroopers will make up the lost revenue no doubt.
Tesla (or Elon) decided to fight the labour union.. people do not like that much. So when there are alternatives people do that.
In Europe people aren't really aware of the labor politics, but doing a nazi salute has made Elon radioactive.
This is probably the least likely reason people stop buying Tesla.
They just don’t have any good cars now. They want top of the line money, for meh.
When they first came out they were revolutionary. But they don’t even have a speedometer, let alone a HUD. It’s embarrassing. They’re being so cheap.
Tesla is going pre-revenue.
There’s an old saying: if civil engineers built houses the way software people build software, the first woodpecker to appear would destroy the civilization. With Tesla, we build cars. That, as told in court documents, absolutely should continue accelerating while in cruise control despite the driver pressing the brakes. There’s a century of institutional knowledge on system safety built into most cars. And (looking at you, Pinto), the carmakers are not even especially good at it. As a former software engineer, I’d rather rely on some actual engineers rather than a bunch of tech bros led by a deranged sociopath.
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Many have argued that Musk's shift to far-right politics is responsible for some of this decline -- and it certainly makes some sense -- but I wonder if the cause and effect are being conflated.
If Musk were aware that Tesla was going to lose this much ground due to factors beyond his own mismanagement, including the threat of Chinese imports and a widespread shift away from EVs due to a right-populist sentiment swing that was already under way, then maybe his goose-stepping and Trump-humping act was an attempt to sync up with a trend that he saw as inevitable.
That's about the most charitable spin I can put on it. Either way, Tesla now has to pitch electric cars to right-wing climate-change deniers, which is not a great strategy to adopt voluntarily or otherwise.
That’s a rather tortured logical contortion.
Isn’t it simpler to assume that he honestly holds the views he says he holds?
Yes, which is why I said it was the most charitable spin I could think of.
It doesn't mean I believe he's a hapless victim of larger trends. Just that I consider it possible.
Well, I think a more charitable spin would be he really does see that robots taxis are just around the corner and it is entirely plausible that Tesla will be able to deliver them. After all, despite whatever flaws they have and they certainly have some, you can go out today and buy a production car that does essentially drive itself.
When I was growing up, that was absolutely science fucking fiction. You’re telling me I get in this car and touch a piece of glass and then it drives itself? Incredible. Maybe the future really could get here fast.
I think that’s a little more charitable. I have a Tesla, won’t buy another one because Elon sucks, wouldn’t touch the stock, I think he’s generally turned in to a con artist, &c.
> Either way, Tesla now has to pitch electric cars to right-wing climate-change deniers, which is not a great strategy to adopt voluntarily or otherwise.
What’s funny to me is that I legitimately think that the day-to-day experience owning an EV is significantly better than the day-to-day experience owning a gas car. They could have slowly ignited or not emphasized the environment and just focused on it as future tech and it may well work. Over the years owning one I’ve had many a curious person drive by the Supercharger in their car, often times a truck too, and ask about the ownership experience.
EVs by association got this hippie-dippie connotation but that’s because the Prius looks like it does, but the Model 3 is quite nice and I think the perception could be overcome by just making damn cool cars.
They didn't have to box themselves into "pitching electric cars to right-wing climate change deniers."
I've heard there are rumours there are least three or four countries outside the US. In several of them, EVs are selling like like hotcakes, or at least not with the current American militant hostility to the very concept.
I suspect they spent too long riding the horse they got here on though. Making an EV appealing to American premium buyers was a marketing coup. Selling it as a software-style "we'll continue iterating with OTA updates" was an interesting alternative to the model-year redesign when you're targeting an early-adopter audience used to regular software refreshes.
But now these things are a liability. Your product matrix is full of America-centric designs with iffy product-market fits in other markets (will a Model S or Cybertruck literally fit in some side streets of Europe or Asia?) You've failed to make a recognizable, exciting redesign of an existing model, so what you do have looks dated. You never really developed a reputation for quality or reliability. These are product problems that have nothing to do with politics. You could have addressed them and been a viable player elsewhere, even as the US continues to eat itself alive. (Of course, that might have involved not intentionally rubbing your brand all over a highly polarizing and toxic political scenario)
I was excited about Tesla back when they were a novelty. I can recall going to the mall with the Microsoft Store (remember those? They sold "bloatfree" PCs because it used to be the OEM who loaded them full of crapware instead of MS itself) to buy a Windows 8 tablet, and then looking across the aisle to see a Model S on display at the Tesla "not really a dealership" stall.
I bought like $2000 in shares back then, figuring one day, jokingly, they'd be worth enough to exchange for a new Tesla. It looks like I could probably get one now. But these days, I just want a BYD; they seem to be actually building a coherent product line and long-term vision.
I mean, there's no need to go all 4D chess here, really. Sometimes a crazy person who tweets about "woke mind viruses" at four in the morning is just a crazy person who tweets about "woke mind viruses" at four in the morning.
Why would you try to put a charitable spin on it? Musk is not a 5d chess playing super genius, quite the opposite.
(Shrug) At the end of the day, he ended up the richest guy in the world somehow.
> Tesla now has to pitch electric cars to right-wing climate-change deniers, which is not a great strategy to adopt voluntarily or otherwise.
Part of the trouble here is that was always the case. The best selling "car" in the US is the Ford F-series truck. Followed by the Chevy truck, two Japanese SUVs, the Stellantis truck, the GMC rebadge of the Chevy truck, a Chevy SUV and then the Tesla Model Y.
To get anywhere they were always going to have to appeal to the people who buy trucks.
And when everything is polarized and your product is tribe-coded, how do you do that?
I suspect the error here was buying Twitter and then aligning with the party expected to take power instead of buying Twitter and then using it to shift things in the direction of depolarization.
It also doesn't help that the Cybertruck looks weird and costs too much. I mean you can blame attitudes as you like but then there's the fact that the F-150 starts at ~$40k and the Cybertruck starts at ~$80k. They need the battery prices to come down more before people are going to buy something that needs as much battery as a truck.
Battery is not the issue. NMC li-ion batteries have fallen down to $100 per kWh on the _pack_ level (not cell). And LFPs are around $80.
CyberTruck battery is around 130kWh, so that's just $13k for the more pricey NMC chemistry. This is what makes the Ford fumble with the electric F-150 so comical.
Out of curiosity, I wanted to see if there are any Chinese brands selling batteries of this capacity. And there are plenty. You can buy a 200kWh, with a home delivery today. https://lithiumbattery.en.made-in-china.com/product/kEDRHjlV... Sure, it'll likely explode if you put it in a car. But it's only a matter of time before some enterprising Chinese company makes a compelling truck.
US automakers are sooooo screwed.
> NMC li-ion batteries have fallen down to $100 per kWh on the _pack_ level (not cell).
When the Cybertruck was released in 2023 it was $139, making it more like $18k. And that's just the battery, you still need to make the rest of the truck and pay all your other overhead before you get to the MSRP.
The problem is you can't sell a boring $40k truck for $60k, so instead they tried to make an "interesting" truck for $80k, but nobody wants that either. They should've just waited until they could make a boring electric truck for $40k.
> US automakers are sooooo screwed.
Ten years ago packs were $345/kWh and then electric cars have to be premium products. For under $100 they don't and then all it's going to take is for one company to start selling an electric car in the US that costs less than the equivalent gasoline car.
They'll figure it out when the demand shifts. It doesn't take that long to reconfigure factories, they do it every time they come out with a new model anyway.
> When the Cybertruck was released in 2023 it was $139, making it more like $18k. And that's just the battery, you still need to make the rest of the truck and pay all your other overhead before you get to the MSRP.
But the rest of the car is not actually that pricey. Motors and power electrics are now reasonably priced, especially if you're making an actual working truck that doesn't need to do 60 mph in 3 seconds. The frame and body are cheap. So a decent $40k truck is definitely possible now.
> They'll figure it out when the demand shifts. It doesn't take that long to reconfigure factories, they do it every time they come out with a new model anyway.
Nah. I figure that the US automakers instead decided to wall off the competition for as long as possible to wring out every last drop of profit. And then just dump the rotting husks (maybe to Chinese buyers). Perhaps with a bailout or five from the government.
> Motors and power electrics are now reasonably priced, especially if you're making an actual working truck that doesn't need to do 60 mph in 3 seconds.
If you're making an actual working truck, the motor and power electronics need to be more substantial because they have to handle being able to e.g. pull a loaded trailer up a steep grade.
> The frame and body are cheap.
The piece of metal is fairly cheap. Now fill every door with power electronics, add glass, add climate control, the thing's going to need tires, wheels, axles, brakes, something to make power brakes work without an engine to provide vacuum, steering, suspension, etc.
Most of the cost of a vehicle isn't the powertrain.
> So a decent $40k truck is definitely possible now.
It's not a question of if you can do $40k. It's a question of, does the electric powertrain and battery still cost more than the ICE power train, and therefore require you to cut something else in order to avoid charging more?
$30k trucks exist but people don't want a $30k truck for $40k.
> I figure that the US automakers instead decided to wall off the competition for as long as possible to wring out every last drop of profit.
The obvious problem with this is that they could keep out BYD and hypothetically kick out Nissan and VW etc., but what are Ford and GM supposed to do as the battery prices come down when Tesla just sets the prices of their existing lineup consistent with the falling battery costs, much less releases any new models?
As far as I know the hypothesis is that Elon knew before the election that he will be in trouble and tried to cozy up with Trump to cover his ass but it backfired hard.
> but I wonder if the cause and effect are being conflated.
Tesla is an ugly car. And they didn't had a new model since at least 10 years.
The Model S looked pretty sleek at one point in time. The Y, X, and that dumpster on wheels are all hideous.
Wait? Tesla still sells cars?
After successfully teaching China how to build EVs and embracing fascism, I thought they moved on to AI/robotaxi/robots/(insert your preferred fantasy here)?
Amazing (not) how the sales data is represented LOL I don't have any sweetspot for EVs anyway, but here the title and the comments are not even related to EVs! It's all "ahahaha TESLA/Elon sucks" LOL Fine, but why pretend anything else - the "story" picked data like a cherrypicker - those that make the biggest number in negative. Anyone ever cared to look at the data? 2024 to 2026, or 2023 to 2026 whatever is greater (downwards)... what a joke of stats.
Many of the comments here resemble Reddit, disappointingly. I read HN due to market insights, analysis, interesting perspectives. I am sorry for digression.
There is a lot of anti-American sentiment on HN and Reddit. You may think it a bit ironic, but maybe the "YCombinator" part takes a back seat to "Hacker News".
What kind of analysis are you expecting? Someone explaining why Tesla’s stock price is justified despite the falling car sales? It can’t be explained because it’s a meme stock.
+1 agreed. Everyone just seems to be an Elon hater (which is totally fine) but don't expect it from HN.
You are more than welcome to make your case in his favor, if you can. Maybe this is just this is just the sentiment of users on hackernews, why is that so hard to accept?
What market insight explains TSLA other than the same thing you'd hear on Reddit: that TSLA investors are a glassy-eyed, slack-jawed cult?
Are there any other explanations that can be steelmanned, just for the sake of an even-handed discussion? "We're going to build humanoid robots" just doesn't seem like enough. Neither does "We're going to build robotaxis", considering that other companies like Waymo are already well ahead of Tesla in that sector.
They have a current production capacity in the high hundreds of thousands, a software solution that has a reasonable chance of competing in the self driving market, and a worldwide distribution platform.
So the optimistic valuation is based on: Global ride share killer + Large car manufacturer + power infrastructure + Robotics.
Somehow the valuation is as though TSLA will succeeded early enough to entrench itself; if robotaxi wide rollout happens in the next six months, i would be happy to say TSLA is worth more than its current valuation. If it cant then at best 30% of current valuation.
> if robotaxi wide rollout happens in the next six months
No worries, in 6 months Elon will promise something else and we'll be asking the same question again
Roadster launch is supposed to be on April 1st... Hard to think of any response other than "once bitten, twice shy"
HN has been like that with anything Elon Musk related. You may have better luck with https://www.themotte.org/
I'll burn what little karma I have and say that for market insights and interesting perspectives, x.com is the best place (manual curation required). Beyond that you should be watching earnings calls each quarter for a range of companies in the market. Most of what is written here, in the press and on reddit is complete nonsense.