Tesla says it lost “hundreds” of orders after New York Times controversy

http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/02/tesla-says-it-lost-hundreds-of-orders-after-new-york-times-controversy/

by protomyth • 13 years ago

89 114 13 years ago

tokenadult2• 13 years ago

I thought the reporting on the Q4 results that Tesla released last week [checks story] showed that some of those order cancellations preceded the publication of the New York Times story. Yep,

"Tesla expects to deliver 20,000 Model S cars this year. Right now, with its production line just getting into gear, it takes time for Tesla to fulfill its orders. As a result, there is a backlog of reservations.

"Tesla said 15,000 cars were reserved at the end of last year, below its expectation that it will deliver 20,000 cars this year. The company added 6,000 new reservations in the fourth quarter, which makes the 20,000 target look achievable.

"However, Tesla’s numbers suggest that a few thousand reservations were canceled in the fourth quarter. (Update: The Tesla spokeswoman Shanna Hendriks later said the company had 1,500 cancellations in the fourth quarter). Many customers were in line but pulled out when it became time to make a substantial down payment in cash."

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/teslas-earnings-indic...

Investors looking at basic customer appeal issues like that seem to think that Tesla Motors stock may not have as much upside as it appeared to have before the fourth quarter financial results were announced.

https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:TSLA

stephengillie2• 13 years ago

It's not immediately clear how much of the stock drop was caused by the Q4 numbers, and how much was caused by uncertainty from the NYT story. But while the NYT story can affect the stock price drop, it can not have any effect on the Q4 numbers.

I'm not sure from the article, but it sounds as though Tesla had 15,000 2013 orders by Q3 2012. Then, during Q4 2012, they added 6,000 orders for 2013, and had 1500 people unable to pay their 2013 down payment, which would leave their 2013 orders at 19,500. This is 500 cars short of Tesla's projected 20,000. If these 500 were all Roadsters, wouldn't the projected 2013 sales shortfall be around $5 million?

It's odd that they report so many people placing orders, then balking at the down payment. It's an odd item to be reporting, I don't know if other auto manufacturers report this. Maybe they should require the down payment at an earlier point in their checkout process, to remove these superfluous tire-kickers from the corporate statistics? It's got to be embarrassing to announce that ~8% of your customers decided to cancel at the last moment.

lawnchair_larry• 13 years ago

> It's got to be embarrassing to announce that ~8% of your customers decided to cancel at the last moment.

Isn't this normal in that business? People back out of car purchases all the time. Cold feet, financing falls through, better deal elsewhere, etc. I don't know what percentage is business as usual, but 8% doesn't seem high.

I do agree that it's an odd thing to report.

slantyyz• 13 years ago

>> It's an odd item to be reporting, I don't know if other auto manufacturers report this.

That's because it's the dealers who handle down payments for most auto manufacturers (in North America, at least). There's an arm's length relationship between the dealers and manufacturers. Tesla sells its own cars and would therefore have direct access to this data.

tlrobinson• 13 years ago

"It's got to be embarrassing to announce that ~8% of your customers decided to cancel at the last moment."

I could be wrong, but if those include people who just put down $5k to hold their spot in line years before the car was released, then 8% isn't surprising at all.

I know at least one person who decided not to go through with the purchase for reasons that have nothing to do with Tesla or the ability to pay the down payment.

mistercow2• 13 years ago

>I thought the reporting on the Q4 results that Tesla released last week [checks story] showed that some of those order cancellations preceded the publication of the New York Times story.

But in that article, they mention 1500 cancellations, while Musk is only attributing "a few hundred" to the NYT article. That makes it sound like he's compensating for the baseline cancellations they were having at the time.

revelation2• 13 years ago

Before the NYT story, Tesla slightly increased prices and made those with reservations either commit now or bite the increased prices afterwards. That certainly drove a lot of the cancellations.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

Interesting strategy.

Like tokenadult comments, some cancellations occurred before the NYT article.

In any sort of 'high dollar' purchase like this there is a certain percentage of buyers who, after time, get cold feet. There are also people who clearly speculated that having a spot in line with a reservation could be arbitraged for a quick gain.

People who run businesses are quite careful to distinguish between the 'sales funnel' and 'sale commitments' and 'booked sales.'

As more and more cars get out there, there will be a more likely chance of 'knowing' someone who has one (within a degree or two of separation) and so a more durable 'consensus' of whether or not they are worth the expense will surface. I wouldn't panic as long as their book to bill ratio is > 1.0 but once they catch up, things will get interesting.

OGinparadise2• 13 years ago

If had to base a decision on Musk's behavior I, too, would have cancelled.

This also backfired on Musk, IMO, as more potential buyers learned about Tesla's weak points.

gutnor• 13 years ago

That is what I was thinking during this whole affair - if I buy a Tesla I sure hope I will not make the front page of a website like Reddit with a negative opinion of my car. ( I have posted in the past a humoristic picture of my broken down car on my way to an interview )

Tesla goes straight for the jugular, and considering I'm a nobody I don't know what they would do to my reputation online, because of my 5 min of unwanted fame.

gte910h• 13 years ago

Honestly, living in a warmer climate, all the retests, etc, made me completely unconcerned with Tesla range now.

Still too expensive for me for a depreciating asset, but I now think the S far less toy and far more reasonable car that's not so great for road trips, but CAN do it.

crazygringo• 13 years ago

> "And lots of people said that it does not matter if you're right or wrong, you do not battle the New York Times. To hell with that. I would rather tell the truth and suffer the consequences even if they are negative."

Well, only if it's good PR. Because if a CEO would rather tell the truth and suffer negative consequences because of it... they're not really qualified to be CEO then.

When you're running a company with investors' money, you'd better be more mature and intelligent about things than worrying about who's "right" and "suffer the consequences". Because you don't come across as professional, you risk coming across as unhinged.

hvs• 13 years ago

And, as you intimated, a CEO has a fiduciary responsibility to the board and stockholders. Doing something that you know is going to have negative consequences for your company could be seen as failing to do honor that responsibility.

_delirium• 13 years ago

The fiduciary duty is taken pretty broadly and with a long-term perspective, however; courts don't generally second-guess strategic decisions. For example, Musk could plausibly argue that the company's long-term reputation with its target audience depends on being seen as brusquely honest. A court is typically not going to get into trying to determine if that's true or not.

brousky• 13 years ago

> Well, only if it's good PR. Because if a CEO would rather tell the truth and suffer negative consequences because of it... they're not really qualified to be CEO then.

and herein lies the problem with Corporate America

sukuriant• 13 years ago

For telling the truth? You can paint the truth in a positive light; or say "yes, this is where we were weak, and this is how we're going to fix it. These are problems in the past, and this is how we fixed them, so you see we have a track record of improvement."

I'd buy that stock.

blhack• 13 years ago

People must be pretty on the fence about the car if all it took was one article to sway their opinion into not buying a car.

The NYT article did highlight a major problem with electric vehicles: when you get the batteries really cold, their reported charge can be non-reflective of their actual range.

I never leave my Jeep overnight and wake up to seeing the gas gauge report only half of what is actually in the tank. If this was a thing that was possible, Jeep would be back to their drawing boards figuring out how to fix it, not chiding a reporter for pointing it out.

I hope everybody following this read the NYT reporter's response: http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/that-tesla-data-w...

niggler2• 13 years ago

Musk has a convenient scapegoat here. The reality is that we haven't seen really cold weather in a long while here in the NYC metro area, and the NYT article revealed a major issue. Many people believed we wouldn't see such weather in the future, so that risk wasn't on their minds (and as mentioned ad nauseum elsewhere, tesla didn't mention this in any marketing material except for saying that you can leave the car unplugged at the airport). Now having seen cold weather, people are asking what happens, and Musk's response installs little confidence in the Layman's view

jpollock• 13 years ago

The amount in the tank is entirely different from the range it represents, which is also modified by environmental conditions such as altitude and temperature.

The difference between the two situations is the number of places that you can refill the tank. Diesel drivers (in the US), have similar concerns to the electric car driver.

Someone• 13 years ago

The number of places you can, the speed at which you can, the relative frequency at which you have to refill all work against electric cars at the moment.

Diesel, AFAIK, is better of in the sense that you can drive farther without refilling.

Also, for both petrol and diesel, customers can somewhat reliably estimate how far a tank will carry them. Part of that is experience, but for now, I have the impression that Tesla, with all its electronics, cannot even break even with 'normal' cars at that single measure.

They are working hard on refill speed and refill locations and I expect they are working hard on their battery control systems to improve remaining range estimates. I think they need all three to create a viable mass market product.

drbawb• 13 years ago

Their concerns may be similar, but EVs still have it far worse for range anxiety.

Diesel drivers have the advantage of their fuel being quite portable once you've found a source. The energy input required to move a diesel truck 100mi. is still pretty portable if you get a ride, no tow required.

An EV has to be _moved_ to a charging source; it's very hard to bring energy to the EV in the quality/quantities required.

eksith7• 13 years ago

Except you're comparing apples to oranges.

Cold weather pilots never let their aircraft sit outside for too long if they intend to fly within the hour since the fuel starts to gel. They plug in to the hanger if a power source is available or keep the engines running (although that's rather expensive these days). That doesn't mean those aircraft are in any way inferior to their warm weather counterparts.

The system is fundamentally different. Different is not inferior. Different means it can't be treated the same way as a fossil fueled vehicle.

FYI... The batteries do have heaters to improve efficiency, however that too drains power so a glance at the manual (and some common sense) would have told him to leave it plugged in. A bit like having to run a diesel engine a bit to make sure the fuel won't turn to gel in the lines.

I'm not sure if deliberately sabotaged the test drive, but I do think there's some driver naivety (negligence?) at play.

corresation• 13 years ago

A car is not a jet aircraft, and comparing the two does absolutely nothing to help electric cars.

therandomguy• 13 years ago

He is comparing apples to oranges because the readers of NYT are orange buyers. All the NYT article says is that this is an apple... not orange.

walkon• 13 years ago

> Except you're comparing apples to oranges.

So a Tesla can fly, eh?

vacri8• 13 years ago

There is a huge difference though - when your engine is cold, an ICE still has as much fuel in the tank as last night, but an EV has 'lost fuel'. That's something new.

cafard• 13 years ago

Is a long drive in cold weather really the general use case for Tesla? It seems to me to be a commuting car for the well-off early adopter.

TylerE• 13 years ago

That's kind of the point. Tesla is pushing this as the "ready for general use" version. The Roadster was the early adopter special.

base698• 13 years ago

Given how many people in California go to Tahoe and Mammoth for a weekend, I think cold weather driving is a must. That would stop me from buying one.

DanBC2• 13 years ago

Wouldn't you want a bigger car for Tahoe, to fit the skis, snowboards, etc? (Also, Californian roads, snow chains, etc)

But, as for cold, Tesla apparently have lots of Scandinavian customers who live in very cold places and they seem to do okay. I have no idea how to say "My car died in the cold" in any of the Scandinavian languages, so I can't search for reviews.

Shivetya• 13 years ago

Well regardless of the facts of the NYT article the facts Tesla revealed don't make me want one. I read nearly every article I can on this car and similar. I want to know where the industry is going and what is working and what is not.

I think like motorcycles of yesterday electric vehicles need a reserve, something that does not register in range calculations. Something that lets you heat or cool the cabin, something that gets you by that oops moment, detour, or just bad luck. That and better software for representing range and to top that off, forcing the car's dynamics to always favor range and make people choose otherwise.

The current breed of cars favors the enthusiast, the problem is that they aren't the only ones with money to buy.

DanBC2• 13 years ago

> electric vehicles need a reserve, something that does not register in range calculations. Something that lets you heat or cool the cabin, something that gets you by that oops moment, detour, or just bad luck.

They do have a reserve. The reserve doesn't figure into range calculations. You can heat or cool the cabin. You can have an oops moment, you can have a detour.

What you can't do is allow the car to discharge, then give it much less charge than is needed for your journey, and then ignore the obvious warnings ("You want to drive over 60 miles. You only have enough charge for 30 miles. A good idea to keep charging.") and drive away knowing that you don't have enough energy to get to your destination.

cube135• 13 years ago

How does the loss of a few "hundred" orders translate to a net loss of $100 million? Assuming that all of the orders are the top-end Model S or Roadsters, a few hundred loss sales would translate to lost revenue in the low tens of millions of dollars.

lukevdp• 13 years ago

Maybe he thinks it will affect future sales as well

cube135• 13 years ago

Possible, but it seems really dangerous to make statements like that outside of normal disclosure routes. They're a publicly traded company, and the SEC really doesn't like that kind of stuff.

martythemaniak2• 13 years ago

A lot of people are of the opinion that Musk should not have called out the NYT and taken a much more laid-back line. But consider for a minute the Iraq war - years after the start many people still believe that Saddam was directly involved in 9/11. Once people form an impression, even if that impression is completely, utterly and factually wrong, it will persist for a long time.

Right now is a very crucial time for EVs and Tesla in particular when this popular impression is being formed. If nonsense like "Electric cars don't work in the cold" gains traction, it will be very bad for the industry. And if you think that quote sounds ridiculous, it is exactly the take-away a casual reader would have gotten from that NYT review. Remember, to this day a sizeable chunk of the population still believes Saddam was directly involved in 9/11.

So I say, Musk did the right thing - if you don't defend yourself, you might end up with nothing to defend.

lotso2• 13 years ago

>If nonsense like "Electric cars don't work in the cold" gains traction

Well, isn't that kind of true? Obviously, EVs work, but the cold weather has a large impact on batteries.

PotatoEngineer• 13 years ago

That's the point - it's "kind of" true. But the takeaway from that NYT article is "you'll get stranded," which is much more painful than the truth: "be careful in the cold."

eksith7• 13 years ago

Cold weather also has a large impact on diesel and aircraft fuel, yet somehow engines that utilise both fuels are still in use.

The lesson here is that EVs need to be treated differently to gasoline engines. Once those habits kick in, I'm sure we'll see a few in Siberia.

Misconceptions are quite harmful to progress.

gopalv• 13 years ago

The drop in capacity of electric batteries are well tested (in airplanes, for instance).

What came up was two other hidden factors which were usually ignored (at least by one person - me).

The heater systems for the gasoline cars run on parasitic heating, so does the power brake vacuum generation.

Both need to be artificially generated for EVs, which busts the "slow brake" traffic MPG gain myth that the hybrids perpetuated.

martythemaniak2• 13 years ago

A fair headline for that NYT review should have been "Like ICE cousins, EVs also affected by the cold". Obviously, a far more boring headline than "Stranded on The Electric Highway".

Everyone knows your gas consumption goes up during winter, so everyone just puts gas in more often. Everyone who lives in colder climates know to plug in the block heater otherwise your car won't be moving anywhere in the morning.

EVs have some great benefits, unfortunately they're not a silver buttlet and you still have to take care of them. You just take care of them in a different way than ICE cars.

OGinparadise2• 13 years ago

He accused the writer of fraud, of wanting to drain the battery by driving in circles for a whole 0.6 miles. Imagine, 0.6 miles (the reviewer said he was trying to find the gas station in the parking lot, a very plausible explanation)

Something like this would have done wonders, compared to the mess they created: "We are sorry that x writer had a bad...however we still believe that our car is ...... As always our engineers will keep working on improving the batteries even more and educating our users...

lmg6433• 13 years ago

I wonder if Elon Musk has ever worked in a service job before, like being a waiter in a restaurant. Try to imagine this exchange:

Customer: "Waiter, there's a fly in my soup."

Waiter: "But that's impossible, I've seen the recipe and fly is not an ingredient."

The biggest thing I've learned from serving customers is to approach complaints and challenges with the humility that hey, they just may be right. It is a mark of inexperience and immaturity to go on the offensive from the perspective of "stupid, bad customer, misunderstanding my product/service again."

(And I know that the reporter is not necessarily a customer, but as a reviewer, he represents their potential buying interests and should be treated as such.)

taligent4• 13 years ago

He wasn't trying to find a gas station. He was trying to find one of the Tesla superchargers. And as we can see from the video below they are very, very hard to find (that giant structure is NOT the charger).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3fO_OHpyYw

Musk deserves all that he gets. He overplayed his position.

nostromo• 13 years ago

Some research has suggested that refutations can actually strengthen the original myth.

For example, all of the coverage of on Iraq not having WMDs may have actually ended up strengthening associations between the two. Somehow the "not" gets lost for a portion of the population. (Similarly autism & vaccines, Obama & Kenya, and a million other myths.)

Here's an interesting paper about the phenomenon: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/j...

It's a long paper, but this picture shows a list of ways you can help prevent spreading the myth when you refute it: http://psi.sagepub.com/content/13/3/106/F1.large.jpg

davorak• 13 years ago

If I remember correctly the correct action is not to directly refute an incorrect claim but rather tell a story of your own with it's own details and twists.

SolarUpNote• 13 years ago

Don't think of an elephant.

IgorPartola• 13 years ago

Is it a general issue with how people process facts/myths or is there something more specific at work here? The myths you cited are held true by a certain sub-population and fueled by a certain "news" outlet. Moreover, the "news" outlet claims that it brings you the stories that others won't, in a way causing mistrust of other actual news networks. Therefore, once the seed of the myth is planted, it is very hard to refute it for anyone since they are now also a part of the myth.

For example: Obama said multiple times and with multiple supporting documents that he was born in the US, yet I still encounter people that say that those were all fakes, and that Obama, his staff, and the media are trying to cover up the real story. When they are pointed to these facts they point back saying it's a conspiracy. In this situation first you have to prove that the people talking are not conspiring to deceive the listener, which is much harder to do than just to disprove a myth itself once a trusted source is doing so.

Edit: In terms of this contravercy, I was left with the impression that NYT did not act in good faith and neither did Tesla. I do not believe we will ever know exactly what happened since the circumstances were very specific. However, this definitely left a sour taste. The impression that I got is that Tesla will fight any negative press, whether it is objective and impartial or not, and they will fight dirty. For a moment do s/Tesla/Ford/g in everything you have read about this story and then ask yourself if you would still buy a Ford after that.

cube135• 13 years ago

>So I say, Musk did the right thing - if you don't defend yourself, you might end up with nothing to defend.

Musk didn't defend the biggest issue: The drop in charge and reported range at the overnight stop. He glossed over it completely, instead focusing on the .6 mile "circle."

phaus8• 13 years ago

Wow. I live in one of the most conservative states in the country, and I've never heard anyone suggest that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with 9/11. If anyone did, I'm sure they would be immediately called out and ridiculed by pretty much everyone. That's not really what the controversy in Iraq was about, but I don't want to derail.

A better example might be the hysterical fear of nuclear power that our country developed after Chernobyl.

webXL• 13 years ago

Same here. Just because the Bush administration spent a few hours tracking down leads in Iraq in the aftermath of 9/11 doesn't mean there's more "Saddam did 9/11" belief than "Elvis is alive" belief. Yes, in retrospect it was a stupid war and put a nail in the coffin of my belief that military action was the one thing our government had a hold on, but stop spouting the straw-man lie that Iraq was payback for 9/11.

rdw2• 13 years ago

Personal experience doesn't really help with understanding something like this, so the fact that no one you know has said anything in support of this idea doesn't mean that it's not widely believed.

At the time of the war, as many as 70% (!) of Americans believed that Saddam was responsible for 9/11, and since then the number has slowly declined to the mid-20s (with a weird period where the number increased around 2007). For a falsehood that, as you say, is ridiculously unsupported.

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2003-09-06-po...

http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Poll_41_of_Americans_believe_S...

http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-501863_162-3253552.html

http://themoderatevoice.com/121921/ten-years-later-belief-in...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein_and_al-Qaeda_lin...

The ridiculousness degree to which the American public grasped onto this false belief eventually led to the meme that 20% of Americans will believe any old thing. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/24/one-in-five-america... And of course: http://www.theonion.com/articles/poll-1-in-5-americans-belie...

tokenadult2• 13 years ago

Oh great. So now you are arguing by analogy (an analogy other participants here have challenged for how you described the situation) to give a rationale for Musk's behavior. So let's see, rather than actually look at the issue of buying a Tesla Model S or not on the basis of how it performs in the climate where I live, or look at investing in Tesla Motors stock based on how it and other common stocks perform in the market, I should just refer to your analogy for my analysis? Well, what is the analogy? Is Elon Musk George W. Bush here, or is he Saddam Hussein?

jmpeax• 13 years ago

How embarrassing for NYT. My goofy cousin ran out of gas on the highway, maybe NYT can publish his story too.

drucken• 13 years ago

Head of Edmunds car review site reports that the Model S's on-board touchscreen failed:

https://twitter.com/edmunds_test/status/306067589589774336

The Twitter conversation is ... interesting!

BSOD in an electric car, what will Musk say this time?

kamaal• 13 years ago

Whoa!!!

The thread says that pressing both the steering buttons reboots the software(Read: The whole car).

This is purely WTF!

danso• 13 years ago

For someone who used the "we have the data and the data proves we're right" approach, something just feels off in what Musk is quoted as saying:

> "We did actually get a lot of cancellations as a result of The New York Times article. It probably affected us to the tune of tens of millions, to the order of $100 million, so it's not trivial,” Elon Musk, the chief executive, said on Monday.

“I would say that refers more to the valuation of the company. It wasn't as though there were 1,000 cancellations just due to The New York Times article. There were probably a few hundred."

"Probably" a few hundred? Can't he be certain how many car orders have been canceled? And in what time period, and how long of time period, did these cancellations take place? And how does this rate compare to other periods in time? And if he's going to claim that the impact was non-trivial, then why leave so much fuzziness in the interpretation of how much was lost in direct car sales and how much through a loss of valuation?

The use of data, as it did in his rebuttal to the NYT, would help his case here. But in this interview he sounds like someone just throwing out rumors he heard from someone in the finance department.

mistercow2• 13 years ago

He knows how many were canceled. He doesn't know exactly how many were canceled because of the NYT article.

ZeroMinx• 13 years ago

Not all cancellations will have been because of the NYT piece, so no, he can't be certain how many car orders were cancelled because of it.

Also, there is probably a feeling that some would-be orders were not placed because of the article. Quite hard to quantify that.

stephengillie2• 13 years ago

Tesla currently only makes 2 cars: the Roadster, which sells for about $100,000, and the Model S, which sells for around $50,000.

To reach $100 million in canceled sales, 1000 Roadster orders or 2000 Model S orders would have to be cancelled.

If a few hundred meant 300 cancelled orders, then their losses would be limited to between $15-30 million.

So the 2 sentences reflect a disparity of at least 700 cars. I wonder if someone is trying to confuse the 1500 cancellations in Q4 with the cancellations caused by the NYT article. 1500 cancellations would represent around $100 million in cancelled sales, and this was announced at about the same time as the NYT article.

rsuttongee• 13 years ago

There's several different models and prices of the S:

http://www.teslamotors.com/models/options

There's also tons of up sell items and tesla is discounting all the listed prices by the $7500 tax credit you are entitled to for buying an EV.

jrochkind1• 13 years ago

“I would say that refers more to the valuation of the company. It wasn't as though there were 1,000 cancellations just due to The New York Times article. There were probably a few hundred."

Huh, he's talking about HIS OWN QUOTE about "hundreds of millions lost", he has to GUESS what he himself meant? He doesn't know _exactly_ what he meant when he said they were "affected" "to the tune of tens of millions, to the order of $100 million." He has to hazard a guess "I would say that refers mostly" about his own quote?

I guess he did say "probably" in the first place. Yes, he's just making shit up.

The more he goes, the less trustworthy he seems.

greggman• 13 years ago

He just needs to invest in this and outfit the next Tesla with Super Supercapacitors.

http://vimeo.com/51873011#

Charge your car faster than you can fill it with gas? Yes please ;-)

migrantgeek• 13 years ago

Instead of attacking the NYT, why not just let another paper do the same test with the same car?

There may be an issue with that particular car, the journalist could be bias or the battery may just not perform well in cold weather. It’s hard to tell without additional testing.

I don’t see why all the focus is on who said what. Just re-run the test a few times to try to repro. That’s what I’d do if someone had an issue with a piece of code I’d written.

confluence• 13 years ago

I'm a TSLA stockholder and the article and this entire brohaha don't particularly bother me. The Model S is the best luxury sedan on the market, orders are backed up for most of this year's capacity, and 100s of orders are coming in every month.

Furthermore, the factory they run to build the entire thing is just incredible (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvPosSzUGVI).

I used the recent 10% drop to significantly add to my TSLA position. Please - continue doubting TSLA, shorting it and selling the stock - you're doing me, and other TSLA investors a great favour.

I always hate it when prices on stocks I want go up - it means I can't buy anymore :(

robomartin• 13 years ago

I am not taking sides in terms of the Tesla vs. NYT issue.

I will say that anyone who cancels an order for a bleeding-edge car based on an article like this is a moron. You, more than likely, don't want such a person as a customer. They'll bitch and complain about anything and everything and be nothing but collective pains in the ass.

I've been in complex hardware manufacturing before and I can say that, almost without fail, the customers who would flip on you based on forum posts, hearsay or such articles/reviews are a total waste of your time. They were just looking for a reason not to buy and found it. Good riddance.

How can an article that is NOT the result of a rigorous scientific evaluation process be used for anything other than entertainment is beyond me. At best one could call it a potentially interesting "unverified data point" and move on.

Tesla says it lost “hundreds” of orders after New York Times controversy

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