Tesla's in Its Flop Era

https://www.theverge.com/24134781/tesla-q1-2024-earnings-sales-market-share-elon-musk

by rntn • 2 years ago

35 80 2 years ago

What prevents me from buying a new Tesla is really Musk himself. I love my M3, but not enough to want to line his pockets further with a new purchase. If I was to buy another, it'd be from a 3rd party, used.

(I get that even if I bought it used, I'd still be paying that $9 / mo for the connectivity, so it's still technically giving Tesla money. Can't always "win" it all.)

Also to pre-empt comments regarding wait till you hear about other CEOs who are bad / worse that you are funding - you're right; can't fight battles with everyone, have to pick and choose, and this is the one I choose.

zenbowman• 2 years ago

Beyond that, someone as emotionally brittle and allergic to criticism as he is will inevitably create a yes-men culture, which will destroy engineering discipline & lead to declining quality. No way around it.

The one thing you absolutely need to preserve engineering quality is the ability to take criticism.

tw042• 2 years ago

What are you talking about? Removing turn signal stalks and adding a yoke with no progressive steering is engineering at its absolute finest. Do you really think Elon would just surround himself with yes men that implement stupid ideas just because he thinks it "looks cool"?

bmitc2• 2 years ago

It isn't clear Tesla ever had quality. His management persona was in place day one and has very consistently made decisions that negatively affect quality, much less the real challenge of building a car company from scratch. Teslas have pretty consistently ranked low on quality rankings.

EcommerceFlow2• 2 years ago

I would love to hear exact reasonings behind this hatred of Musk. Not typical talking points, but actual detailed examples.

ortusdux• 2 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Views_of_Elon_Musk

theogravity9• 2 years ago

For me, things started going downhill when he called a diver a "pedo guy" during the cave rescue story. I get it was determined by the court to not fall under defamation, but it just left a sour taste.

He loves to overpromise and underdeliver. As someone who bought FSD on his 2018 M3, it's still not in a state where I feel it can be safely used outside of a highway. I guess it's an issue of credibility here.

Q-Anon promotions: https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-qanon-2024-election/

Great replacement theory: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/elon-musk-...

I don't agree with his thoughts on Ukraine / Crimea:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1576969255031296000

I'm sure I can conjure more examples where we disagree ideologically or from my POV he's just an asshole, but it's a waste of my time to find even more specific examples and get into a potential flame war over why to hate or not hate him.

The time required to find examples that don't seem like it's from a highly "biased" source is far greater than the person asking simply the question and will most likely not respond in kind.

This will be my only response to the topic and I will not respond any further.

Hope that helps.

cqqxo4zV46cp2• 2 years ago

In other words, you disagree with the reasons people don’t like him.

It’s one thing to disagree with someone, but to trivialise their reasoning as “talking points” is…actually probably what I’d expect. Never mind.

There’s no shortage of “detailed examples” carefully and dutifully enumerated online. Again, if you haven’t seen them yet, you simply don’t see them as problematic.

eptcyka• 2 years ago

In the car world, the abbreviation 'M3' usually refers to a BMW M3. not a Tesla Model 3.

madcadmium• 2 years ago

Yeah, I was really confused. This guy loves his BMW M3 but wants to ditch it for a Tesla?

dkjaudyeqooe2• 2 years ago

I think you're not alone. You're not just buying a car, you're buying into a brand. You'll be seen in it often, in public, it's not like some guilty pleasure you can indulge in the privacy of your home late at night.

Musk's behavior excites some, but much like Trump, who he approximates, he turns off a lot more, and arguably a proportionally greater percentage of his target market.

Musk could do himself (and his shareholders) a lot of favors right now by handing over running of Tesla to someone else, but it's unlikely his ego will allow him to do that.

marssaxman• 2 years ago

I'd still be paying that $9 / mo for the connectivity

What does this mean?

theogravity9• 2 years ago

https://www.tesla.com/support/connectivity

paxys• 2 years ago

Elon Musk isn't helping, sure, but this is really just a long-overdue market correction. Tesla was valued like a tech company, but now investors are realizing that it is, in fact, a car company. It never made sense to value it higher than every other auto manufacturer combined while it had a small fraction of the sales of a single one.

theogravity9• 2 years ago

I also wonder about how much tech the Chinese gov got out of the China Tesla factory to help build the Chinese EV competitors, which are also eating into their market share.

aurareturn5• 2 years ago

Stuff like this is why I think anti-China propaganda is so incredibly effective and strong.

It’s so weird. Tesla uses Chinese batteries because they’re simply better. Batteries are the most important part of a EV. China’s EV industry was already huge by the time Gigafactory Shanghai opened. Tesla China isn’t even a joint venture. It’s fully owned by Tesla.

But here, a user boldly and confidently claims that the CCP stole Tesla tech which allowed Chinese companies to dominate the EV industry. As if Tesla has some kind of secret tech that China stole in 2020 and within 1-2 years, Chinese EVs are now much better because of that secret.

People here seem to think so little of Chinese people. I wonder if they’ve ever stepped inside a Silicon Valley company before and find that most of them have a huge number of both Chinese Americans and Chinese foreigners in R&D. But I suppose people think that the Chinese in America are only smart because they’re under the supervision of Americans. Chinese in China must be dumb.

constantcrying2• 2 years ago

The Chinese have learned a lot from the west, sure, some through espionage, but most directly through the west teaching them. Many German companies have cooperated with Chinese ones or manufactured, even for decades.

China can compete because they have serious engineering talent which had a long time to learn and both government and private industry, which recognized a major trend and managed to capitalize on it. To be frank the "stealing of R&D" is pure cope by people who do not want to acknowledge that the Chinese can actually make competent cars.

jncfhnb• 2 years ago

The correction here is a side effect of drastically poor business results. Not mere perception differences.

itsoktocry2• 2 years ago

Not just a car company, but a company that isn't "growing exponentially" now that it's achieved some scale (ie no longer a miniscule base).

bmitc2• 2 years ago

It's also an interesting thing as a car company. Other existing car companies make dozens of models across regions and are able to rev them constantly, including entire refreshes. Tesla can barely manage the three models and a meme that they currently have, one of the models being over a decade old.

vondur• 2 years ago

I'd have to agree. The market for electric vehicles in the US seems to be saturated. If they can somehow add in a plug in hybrid, I could see them gaining sales. That won't happen though.

programmarchy3• 2 years ago

Musk's Tweet about FSD is pretty much spot on. Just being electric isn't enough of a market differentiator anymore. Too many copycats. Sacrificing a new model to focus on FSD is a great move. Many stockholders probably won't be able to stomach it, though.

Not quite betting the company, but going balls to the wall for autonomy is a blindingly obvious move.
Everything else is like variations on a horse carriage.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1780376546148327690

klyrs5• 2 years ago

Sacrificing a new model to focus on FSD is a great move.

Musk has been saying level 5 fsd is just around the corner for well over a decade, demonstrating a large and persistent disconnect between expectations and reality. That makes the reward/risk ratio of sacrificing a model to sink more into fsd rather questionable. The outcome isn't just not guaranteed, it isn't even known to be solvable with today's technology.

People will buy nice electric cars that aren't riddled with quality issues. Investing in QA (where Tesla has next to none) is a bog-standard, practically-guaranteed route to improving products. But that doesn't excite this "brilliant leader" so it's off the table.

This sacrifice isn't a "great move," it's another mark in Musk's record of bad gambles.

b7we5b7a2• 2 years ago

People will buy nice electric cars that aren't riddled with quality issues.

Anecdata: my father bought a VW ID.4 1 year after I got my M3 (2019). The MY wasn't available yet. VW ID.4 has been at the garage 3-4 times/year for various (mostly software) issues. Same with my mother's Peugeot e-208. My M3 got the latest software update the next day after an imperfect firmware update made autopilot sometimes unavailable, all done with the technicians via the Tesla app.

You can choose between amazing efficiency and software, and perhaps a 1mm-off panel on 1 out 1000 vehicles, or perfect esthetics but horrible software.

Teslas are still not perfect, and a stronger QA would definitely make for a better image, I agree. Still, Tesla has made a lot of progress, you don't find as many people complaining about QC/panel issues anymore on reddit. But competitors still have a ton of catching up to do.

FireBeyond4• 2 years ago

Musk has been saying level 5 fsd is just around the corner for well over a decade, demonstrating a large and persistent disconnect between expectations and reality.

You literally have Musk's Director of Engineering telling/"reassuring" the State of California that Musk's statements on FSD are "visionary, and not reflective of engineering reality".

TaylorAlexander2• 2 years ago

Why anyone would take what he says about FSD seriously, and with any shred of hope attached, is beyond me at this point. What he says here is logical, but he has so consistently failed to deliver I can’t fathom continuing to have faith in what he says about FSD.

FireBeyond4• 2 years ago

It literally went from being a solved problem in 2015 - "I view it as a solved problem. We know exactly what we need to do and we will be there in a few years” - to somehow getting un-solved along the way. In 2022, "Our focus now is just on working on solving this problem".

lupusreal• 2 years ago

Focusing on FSD is car company suicide. It's a focus on selling cars to people who don't like cars and would rather do without one entirely. You can sell some cars like this but ultimately it's a dead end, you soon sell one to everybody who wants one, nobody else does, and the market for your cars crashes.

programmarchy3• 2 years ago

This has been covered in the past. Some people may own their car but the robotaxi model folds into transportation infrastructure, like Uber. Cars sitting in parking lots and driveways 90% of the time is incredibly stupid and wasteful. Not to mention commercial transport. The market is enormous.

jerlam• 2 years ago

Stock is up almost 7% after hours. Someone is believing the robotaxi/autonomous driving narrative.

dkjaudyeqooe2• 2 years ago

So we get neither a cheap Model 2 nor actual FSD.

Just like how Trump creates some new sensation when he's in a tight spot, Musk creates some new vaporware. In this cases he's even resorting to recycling existing vaporware.

"Full Autonomy in 9 months! No this time I mean it!"

sigspec• 2 years ago

FSD just killed a guy today.

mdeeks• 2 years ago

Worth mentioning: I don't believe they have confirmed it was FSD yet. It just says Autopilot which can be the basic one which just keeps you in a lane.

In any case it's frightening that any version of it it wasn't capable of detecting a motorcycle in front of the car and stopping.

cqqxo4zV46cp2• 2 years ago

“Copycats” is a bit rich.

itsoktocry2• 2 years ago

When were they not focusing on FSD? It was promised like 5 years ago.

This is just a rationalization as to why the car company isn't growing, despite people claiming they'd own the entire market.

hackerlight• 2 years ago

I do wonder if he's doomed FSD/robotaxi by being stubborn about lidar. The self-driving problem is unlike most other ML problems due to its mission critical nature. Having 2 modalities that can be cross-checked will reduce edge case hallucations that cause crashes. Like, instead of probability p that you don't see the truck in the middle of the road, you reduce it to nearly p^2. This non-linear reduction in faults that comes with cross-checking modalities is not intuitive. I never bought Musk's justification: "Lidar is not how humans do it". Why would we intentionally handicap ourselves to the tools available to biological evolution?

Seeing how hard it's been for Cruise and Waymo, who use lidar, and only operate in a small area, I am not expecting a functioning Tesla robotaxi that regulators will allow on the road anytime soon.

matwood• 2 years ago

Sacrificing a new model to focus on FSD is a great move.

They are actually not doing that. TSLA said on the earnings call they are accelerating the completion of the cheaper Model 2 platform. That's what driving up the stock price AH.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-earnings-q1-175358835.h...

rzwitserloot• 2 years ago

Tesla was in a ridiculous bind.

Its market cap was about 4 to 5x higher than any other car company. That kind of difference is hard to justify based on tangibles such as 'well, their brand has more value' or 'well, they are just.. better at building cars than their competitors'. Sure, but, 5x with no way that other companies can catch up in the next 10 to 15 years?

Instead, it 'worked' by peddling itself as tech company that so happens to make cars.

The problem is, that veneer requires upkeep. Specifically, actually selling to the masses requires being competitive with them, but, lowering prices and acting like a car company would thus starts eating away at the idea that Tesla is a tech company and not a car company.

Screwed if you do, screwed if you don't. Because the car companies have 'caught up' and are now making all-electric sedans with tech integration. And the car industry is trying to squeeze out the all-electric sedan with cheaper hybrids. Tesla can no longer rely on 'sports brand uniqueness' (that market is no longer solely tesla's, and it is far too slow for tesla's current valuation).

I have no idea how to solve for that. I'm assuming tesla's stock is on its way to be ~25% of what it is now.

Zigurd• 2 years ago

This is why Elon will be lashed to the mast for the entire ride of TSLA down to auto industry comparables. Nobody will take the CEO job to be blamed for that inevitable further decline in stock price, no matter how well they could run that company.

Tesla's in Its Flop Era

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