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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 a decade, he was going to take over the auto business with full self driving EVs. Never happened. So now he is off to take over ride sharing and robots and AI and whatever else he can dream up 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.
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 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.
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:
> 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.
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...
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 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
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 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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
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 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
And it is insane that this warrants a 1.5 trillion USD valuation - for vaporware.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
See this related article and discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47051546
How many have you tested in your day to day life?
Personally that’s way more useful for me even if they didn’t let you turn it on at highway speeds.
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.
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.
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 a decade, he was going to take over the auto business with full self driving EVs. Never happened. So now he is off to take over ride sharing and robots and AI and whatever else he can dream up tomorrow.
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.
Elon Musk.
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.
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...
"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."
I suspect this is a pivot to nowhere.
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 .
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.
https://old.reddit.com/r/robotics/comments/1ph3scw/tesla_opt...
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.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/robotics/comments/1ph3scw/tesla_opt...
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.
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.
I think S, X and Cybertruck are just 3% of 2025 deliveries?
Are there that many unemployed actors available?
Wikipedia notes about 300,000 people were laid off. Not a million.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_federal_mas...
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
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.
I guess I'm just continuously baffled by the complete fuck-up that is/has-been Tesla motors.
These cars are very long in the tooth so I suspect that the Fremont line has been a shitshow the entire time.
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.
(I kid, I also drive a byd, ATTO though rather than shark)
Many customers really only care about price and that it generally works and looks fine and have zero idea about the hidden costs.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/news/tesla-said-it-would-sta...
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!
And hence Musk will be the CEO.
Of course, with a P/E ratio of over 381
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/pe-rati...
That's SpaceX!
It seems strange to attribute only the fall -- and not the rise -- to the CEO
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.
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.
Turns out nazi salutes don't make one popular here in Europe.
Elon is a loser socially and that's about 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.
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.
Getting politics to get in the way of good engineering is a real shame.
Tesla seems basically priced based on hype, rather than anything relating to its actual business.
And possibly also the overt government corruption is priced in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme_stock
https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-cybercab-robotaxi-prod...
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.
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.
And BYD obviously is focusing on easier markets, where they don't have to fight against tariffs.
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)
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.
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 mean, they aren't common as Teslas, but there are more and more.
https://www.theautopian.com/elon-musk-doesnt-see-cars-as-a-p...
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.
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.
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.
You are being scammed.
Wow, what car is that? Even Porsche owners would say, "Damn, son, they're taking you to the cleaners."
Aren't turn stalks back now?
The only question is what will be the next hype cycle when that succeeds about as well as the Cyber Truck.
The Chinese are making humanoid robots too, and my bet is they'll be better and cheaper than Tesla's.
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.
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 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.
Isn’t it simpler to assume that he honestly holds the views he says he holds?
It doesn't mean I believe he's a hapless victim of larger trends. Just that I consider it possible.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tesla is an ugly car. And they didn't had a new model since at least 10 years.
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)?
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.