Looking forward to seeing this company continue to thrive.
And why should Tesla get the credit for making green cars a thing? True credit belongs to Toyota for introducing the Prius 2 decades ago when gas was king and getting consumers to see alternative engines as viable options, and to California for its green vehicles incentives for making possible the financial structure that has kept Tesla alive.
Repeatedly fail to execute? They've successfully rolled out several wildly popular fully electric cars. They've succeeded in making electric cars cool.
> And why should Tesla get the credit for making green cars a thing? True credit belongs to Toyota for introducing the Prius 2 decades ago when gas was king and getting consumers to see alternative engines as viable options, and to California for its green vehicles incentives for making possible the financial structure that has kept Tesla alive.
Toyota succeeded on one side of the equation: Creating the first commercially successful eco-car. Tesla succeeded in making them cool, and appealing to people who like cars. You need both of these things if you want to actually replace gas-powered cars.
They had hundreds of cars stuck in port in Europe and China over paperwork errors. In the US, they had hundreds of cars stuck in holding lots because they failed to arrange for transportation to their final destinations, or because they failed to coordinate pickups with the buyers, or both. They have a billion-dollar-plus assembly line that sits unused because it doesn't work. There are hundreds of Teslas stuck in shop because Tesla can't manufacture the parts they need for those repairs (and there are no third-party parts suppliers to take the load). They've missed nearly every deadline they've set for themselves, not because the goals are unreachable but because they've overestimated their capabilities or underestimated the difficulty of the task or both. They've paid millions in fines to the SEC, and they're likely to pay millions more soon, all because they can't get their CEO to use Buffer or a similar app/process that would let them review his many inane tweets before review. Their are credible reports of on-the-job injuries swept under the table to avoid worker's comp claims.
Tesla in theory could, and should, be a wonderful company, but that's not the Tesla that actually exists today. And that theoretical Tesla probably won't exist as long as Musk remains in control.
Why is missing their self-imposed deadlines such a big deal to you, but the fact that they delivered later on, something that you gloss over entirely? Those were huge goals that they delivered on, that most critics said was near-impossible to do.
It wasn't that long ago that critics were calling Elon a fraud for offering an electric car for 35k, that it can never be done because the cost to build one cannot be under 35k, and that Elon was a car salesman scamming people for pre-order money. And now it's done, the 35k model 3 is delivered, and people are focused on what, missed deadlines they self-imposed in the past? Is that really the most important issue here?
No one said that Tesla could "never" offer a Model 3 for $35k. There was a lot of chatter about them not being able to do so on anywhere close to the timeline Tesla claimed they would, and some of that came from Tesla itself. As recently as 2018 Elon Musk said that offering the Model 3 for $35k would bankrupt the company due to the non-existent profit margins due to the unit economics.
And while we're on that subject: Tesla also announced that in order to build the Model 3 for $35k they would need to fire the entire sales team and switch to online orders only, and eliminate referrals. So it seems that even Tesla still doesn't think that they can offer a $35k Model 3 profitably based on their existing unit economics.
And now it's done, the 35k model 3 is delivered, and people are focused on what, missed deadlines they self-imposed in the past? Is that really the most important issue here?
For investors, a company that perpetually misses deadlines is a serious, real-world problem indicative of poor planning, leadership, and management. It's one thing to miss the occasional deadline by a few days or weeks. It's another thing to miss every deadline announced, by months each time. At some point, the "self-imposed" publicly announced deadlines are just fraudulent statements intended to induce investors to buy shares of the company. CEOs have been criminally prosecuted for that in the past...another former SV darling is being prosecuted for that right now...
Even now you are saying above, that it's extremely hard to build and sell Model 3 for 35k. Even now you are listing many reasons why Tesla can't do it based on unit economics.
But when Tesla actually does it? What if they actually deliver? Then suddenly the 35k Model 3 is not important to you anymore.
Suddenly it's all-important to focus on "missed deadlines" of a few months.
It seems to me, critics only focus on the 35k Model 3, when it can be used as a talking point to attack Tesla. When Tesla actually delivers on the 35k Model 3, critics then focus on "missed deadlines". Critics never really cared about the 35k Model 3, they only care about attacking Tesla.
While we are on the subject, what proof do you have that a missed deadline is "intended to induce investors"? How do you know it's not just that technical difficulties?
While we are on the subject, which former SV darling are you talking about, that you are comparing Tesla to? I want to know why you think a company like Tesla, who delivered on successful projects many times and sold many cars, is somehow being compared to the company you mentioned.
Huh, I guess it must not be worth tens of billions of dollars to investors then.
Cars in holding lots mean this company will go under?
Just wanna draw attention again to the above quote from the comment at the top of this chain. Tesla's very public and always in the news. Of course we know about all the things you mentioned in your comment. That doesn't mean Tesla is a failure or needs to be razed to the ground. Work in any company big enough or that's in the public spotlight too long and you'll find exactly these kinds of issues running rampant. I'm not excusing the issues (they definitely need to be looked at and either fixed or learned from), but I do think it's important to look at the big picture instead of getting caught up in the weeds of relatively minor but overly publicized failures.
And Toyota didn't make an electric vehicle. They made a more efficient gas car.
They had lots of problems - they were slow to load and reload so the rate of fire was limited. They would misfire or not fire if it was raining. They were noisy so they were easy to locate. They were very inaccurate.
In all respects the longbow was a much superior technology, quiet, fast and refined.
why would anyone invest in rifles over longbows?
Is it better to do the right thing imperfectly, or the wrong thing perfectly?
Well, you've awkwardly expanded the wording to make this criticism work. People give Tesla credit for making _electric_ cars a thing.
Curious to see why you think credit goes to Toyota, instead of Tesla?
In other words, Tesla didn't actually make car manufacturers "wake up and go electric." They were going to go electric anyway because it was the obvious tech choice.
Tesla's accomplishment was to show that people were finally ready to buy green cars that looked like normal cars. (The first hybrids and EVs from Toyota and Nissan looked like normal cars, and sold horribly. Toyota and Nissan introduced the butt-ugly designs because green car buyers back in the day wanted distinctive cars to show off their greenliness.)
t neither of those 2 things (Toyota's Prius 2, and California's green car incentives) were successful in making car manufacturers wake up and go electric.
California's green car incentives and fuel efficiency requirements are what drove most car companies to invest in green car tech in the first place.
And as to the leaf, I think it was actually modeled after the Prius, and it sold well since there are 400,000 of them out there.
Car manufacturers never took green cars seriously and never felt the need to transition large amounts of their cars from gas to green. It was only when Tesla started making a splash that car companies took electric cars seriously.
Nissan Leaf owners find it cute that one would think that. And though a hybrid, I think Chevy can get a little credit on that one, too.
So maybe Nissan got a head start, but of all the electric vehicle manufacturers Tesla is the only one moving things forward at the moment with saleable vehicles, that much I'll give them credit for.
I think the eye brow around the criticism is people creating a straw man to knock down.
Tesla doesn't ask for credit and only seems to celebrate the successes which are big wins for all of us regardless of whether we buy their cars or not.
If the critique is that they miss production goals, then the defense is that hey are doing remarkably well for any company attempting to overcome these challenges.
If the critique is that _because_ they are missing production goals they don't deserve praise then well....they didn't ask for praise for it so folks can just keep it and move along.
And then they need to start all over with Model Y. What quality expectations are there?
(I know 2 dozen people with 3s purchased in the last 8 months and none of them have had any quality issues)
What's the population size of people who you know who purchased any car in the last 8 months?
FYI, Tesla doesn't really do "versions" like v2. They're always trying to improve "sw/hw issues, trim quality, gaps etc" over time. So those issues will get better over time without ever announcing a "v2".
And yes, I'm sure the first Model Ys will also have issues that should improve over time.
2. the good way is to build mass transit and radically change society, which is a political issue. tesla comes in a long tradition of sucking public funding into a private entity which cuts across that
3. additionally tesla propagandizes against the above
4. elon musk is a colossal dipshit
so that is mostly why I criticize them.
Study transportation needs of people and you will discover that mass transit only fulfill some parts of people's mobility needs.
Study: https://micromobility.io
This may have been a poor way to say it, but it is the truth.
We will not buy or consume our way out of climate change or negative externalities that affect the environment.
> 2. the good way is to build mass transit and radically change society, which is a political issue. tesla comes in a long tradition of sucking public funding into a private entity which cuts across that
Again, a poor choice of words for an otherwise good point: if we want to see a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, we need to move away from the idea of ubiquitous transportation via personal vehicles.
That is silly. You have something that causes climate change (coal, oil). It can be replaced by something that doesn't (electric cars, solar panels, nuclear power). Unless your plan is to stop having transportation and electricity, that means the solution requires us to buy things like electric vehicles, solar panels, nuclear reactors, etc.
> if we want to see a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, we need to move away from the idea of ubiquitous transportation via personal vehicles.
Mass transit requires density. You can't reduce emissions by running huge empty buses through low density areas.
The transit problem is a real estate problem. You don't need more trains and buses, you need higher density near the existing trains and buses. That allows you to run one every 15 minutes instead of every hour and still have it full, which is what it takes to make it a viable replacement for a private car, and that is what makes it cost effective and affordable.
But even that, which would reduce the number of private cars significantly, would never eliminate the need for them entirely. There are things (large farms, industrial facilities) that must or should be away from higher density areas, and the people who work there need some way to get there and back. And mass transit still doesn't work in those kinds of low density areas.
I disagree. While our consumption habits merit a lot of discussion, we literally have to buy and consume our way out of climate change.
We're not going to _stop_ buying and consuming, and we're not going to manage to reduce it enough to stop climate change without massive economic recession (read: massive human suffering).
You can argue such suffering is overall less than what we will suffer due to catastrophic climate change, but that is not at all obvious.
This is like hoping that we can dig ourselves out of a hole that we already dug ourselves into.
> We're not going to _stop_ buying and consuming, and we're not going to manage to reduce it enough to stop climate change without massive economic recession
If we aren't going to forgo consumption, personal transportation as the only mode of transportation and a market that refuses to properly account for negative externalities, I feel that we should at least be honest about the situation instead of pretending that continuing the status quo will fix climate change and environmental destruction.
Let's just be honest and say that we don't intend to change things, and embrace the fact that climate change might usher in destruction and human suffering on a large scale. That way we can at least address problems as they arise instead of believing in a fantasy where a solution will fall into our laps if we just buy the right cars.
Which is a good example, because that's literally how you get people out of a hole. You dig your self out -- you stop digging down, and start digging at a 45 degree angle upwards, so you and everyone behind you can safely walk out of that hole.
That's what we need people to be doing -- continue consuming, but sideways instead of downwards, so their consumption helps fix the problem.
> a market that refuses to properly account for negative externalities
Then you should be thrilled with what Tesla (and all EVs) are doing. They are eliminating some major externalities.
Other public transportation forms (like Buses and Trains) also have negative externalities that never accounted for. We don't shut them down, even though they have problems. We strive to improve them, just as we are doing for EVs.
For example, the buses in my hometown today get 5 miles per gallon on gasoline. I drive a Volt, it gets around 100 miles per gallon. (Since it's mostly powered by wind energy, not gasoline). Ignoring construction costs, there needs to be at least 20 people on any given bus, before that bus is more energy efficient than a modern PHEV / pure EV vehicle in terms of fuel spent.
In NYC, with the density they have, that's probably easily possible. In Michigan, we're nowhere near that density today, and none of us has the $200k-per-person cash necessary today to change that. But many people do have the $10k-per-person cash to replace gasoline cars with electric ones. That's a real impact people can actually make today.
If you do this in sand, you risk having the structure of the hole collapse around you, trapping you. Either way, we're both taking what is meant to be an idiom a bit too literally.
> That's what we need people to be doing -- continue consuming, but sideways instead of downwards, so their consumption helps fix the problem.
> Then you should be thrilled with what Tesla (and all EVs) are doing. They are eliminating some major externalities.
They're shifting externalities. Mining lithium and raw materials for cars are both environmentally devastating and happen in regions with little to no environmental regulation. Manufacturing is both energy intensive and puts out pollution. I'm sure you're familiar with the conclusion reached by several analyses in which a used vehicle with an ICE will result in less net CO2 output than buying a new electric vehicle.
Many places in the US and China, where Tesla's vehicles are popular, generate electricity from burning coal. We have not come up with a solution that solves the problem of supplying energy to meet the grid's baseline demand with renewable energy.
> In NYC, with the density they have, that's probably easily possible. In Michigan, we're nowhere near that density today, and none of us has the $200k-per-person cash necessary today to change that.
I agree, that is a problem. But again, consuming new electric vehicles instead of used ICE vehicles will dig us deeper into the proverbial CO2 hole.
As far as I can tell, these problems don't have such simple answers.
You may think it pedantic, but I think talking about "forgoing consumption" is absurd. It's literally impossible, and it's a fundamental truth to our existence. Thus, we shouldn't be anything less than blunt about it.
If you stop consuming, you die. We want sustainable consumption, not the end of consumption.
To avoid climate catastrophe we need to embrace a multitude of solutions. I understand the frustration at hearing Musk criticize public transit. It’s triggering. But we are going to need sustainable personal vehicles for a number of use cases, even if we move as many people as we can to mass transit in a decade.
[1] http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/demographic-and-ec...
Unfortunately, this is extremely difficult in the United States... we've spent 70+ years building our entire country around the personal vehicle. Save Boston, NYC, Philly, Baltimore, DC, Chicago, and perhaps SF, ALL of our cities require owning a car. Strategically Musk might actually be going the right way... by starting to get people to think about transit in a different way.
I disagree. Tesla's offering keeps ubiquitous personal transportation on life support at best, and neuters public transportation initiatives at worst.
Moreover, the usage is different. A person lives in the suburbs, they drive five miles through their suburb, then get on the interstate for 10 miles, then drive to an office park 5 miles off the interstate. If you get rid of the interstate, what are they supposed to do? Drive 5 miles to the train, take the train 10 miles and then walk 5 miles? Buy a second car to use for the other leg of the commute?
What you need is to relax the zoning/density restrictions in the city so that more people and businesses can afford to be there instead of in the suburbs. Then they can use the existing mass transit within the city, which unclogs the interstate for the people who can't, e.g. because one of their endpoints is outside the city for legitimate reasons or because they have to transport bulk material in addition to humans.
Getting more people into the city is also helpful, but that's a lot of change. A lot of people have become adapted to the pace of suburb life, including me. Getting me into the city is less about cost than about the stress of having so many people around all the time. A lot of people want that, but a lot of people will want to live in the big empty green space, and would pay the costs -- including externalities, if we were to price them in. Improving city mass transit is good, but ultimately I think we'll also have to cope with a lot of people who just want to disperse at the end of the day.
Sure. But you can do that already. There are already trains/subways/buses in cities and there is already Uber and Lyft, without any need to close interstates that still have other uses, like transporting bulk material. (Notice also that most interstate highways go between cities.)
Moreover, the original claim was that we should have more trains which would make it so we wouldn't need electric cars. But now we're back to at least needing electric cars for Uber and Lyft.
> A lot of people want that, but a lot of people will want to live in the big empty green space, and would pay the costs -- including externalities, if we were to price them in.
Which is fine. Let the people who prefer the suburbs to live there. You don't need 100% of people to live in the city, what you need is to make it so that all the people who want to live in the city can afford to do so.
And fortunately electric cars powered by solar/nuclear get rid of most of the "externalities" of that -- the only one really left is traffic congestion. Which can be solved not by making it more expensive to live in the suburbs but by making it less expensive to live in the city. Then more people do, even if none of them is you, and there is less congestion on the road because all the people who do prefer to live in the city can use its existing mass transit system.
> Moreover, the usage is different. What I am suggesting is in an effort to force/encourage different usage (que communist/fascist labels).
But in answer to your question. Take tram/bus, change to train, change to tram/bus. Pain in the arse. Yes. Maybe that is what is required to re organise around more sustainable communities?
These already exist. But compared to an electric car they're less safe, slower, less comfortable, have less cargo capacity, etc. Their primary advantage is being less expensive. The reason they aren't already used more is some combination of not being able to meet the relevant safety standards and their cost advantage not overcoming their numerous disadvantages.
There is a reason hospital emergency rooms call motorcycles donor cycles. The fatality rate for that kind of transport is astoundingly high.
Get the big lumps of steel off the roads and you have far less issues at the ER.
It isn't. If you want to go 60MPH on an ebike, it's not just hitting a car at 60MPH that will kill you, it's hitting anything at 60MPH with nothing to protect you from it, including the ground.
The only way for something with no airbags, crumple zones or even seatbelts to be as safe as a car is to limit the top speed to about 20MPH, at which point the collective response will be "no" because you're tripling the length of everyone's commute.
Trams are LOUD and annoying.
I don't understand how people can simultaneously hold this belief and then act surprised when others criticize the "green movement" as just an excuse to control people.
Modern personal transportation is one of the ultimate expressions of individual freedom. We're making it cleaner, we're reducing externalities, and still environmentalists want to herd people onto busses and trains.
How about no?
Massive subsidies to the entire car industry, from cheap roads to cheap gas, are a form of nudging society towards certain behaviors.
Building reliable mass transit, proper safe isolated bike lanes, and removing subsidies that are in place, are another form of societal nudging.
As an example, wide city streets are a form of subsidy, the city loses money on those streets, a 4 lane road in a downtown region of a major metro is a huge lost opportunity cost! But a combination of political and societal factors came together to cause cities sacrifice buildings for for car lanes.
> Modern personal transportation is one of the ultimate expressions of individual freedom.
I personally enjoy driving, but when visiting cities with real mass transit (Tokyo, London, etc), I feel a lot more free to travel within the city. No being stuck in traffic, transit times are a lot more reliable than driving, no worrying about finding parking and then walking to my destination, and no worries about not being able to find parking at all!
And in cities with "almost there" mass transit, such as Boston, so long as you are on the transit lines, everything is incredibly nice.
Honestly I think Bostonians complain about their transit system too much, whenever I visit Boston I am very pleased with MBTA's service!
> We're making it cleaner, we're reducing externalities, and still environmentalists want to herd people onto busses and trains.
Individual transit has huge external costs. From giant parking lots everywhere, to the fact that it just doesn't scale[1]. Cities cannot grow beyond a certain size/density relying on individual transit. Self driving car's don't solve the density problem, while self driving taxis kind of solve the parking lot problem[2].
For that matter, an underground parking space in a condo in a metro area costs around $30k to build! Want two spaces for a family? That is $60k added to the purchase price. Housing that isn't incredibly expensive? Not going to happen if there is a $60k tax added to the price of every new housing unit in a city![3]
No one is arguing to build out mass transit in every single small town, but for the majority of the population that lives in metro areas, mass transit makes an enormous amount of sense.
[1]https://i.imgur.com/sCvRIEd.gif
[2]Parking lots have lower tax rates, being unimproved land, than land with proper building on them. This reduction in revenue, for land in the most valuable part of the city, has obvious large $ costs. Of course cities can get around this by special taxes for parking lots to discourage them, but without proper mass transit in place, people still need to drive into a cities dense downtown core, and fees just get passed along to citizens. It becomes more efficient to just build mass transit, and put in proper building rather than concrete flatlands! Mass transit is a large up-front cost with rather low on-going maintenance costs compared to road ways (unless you are NYC and manage to defer maintenance for several decades...), but the property taxes from the additional land that is freed up is an ongoing revenue source that will last for centuries. Unfortunately few politicians care about "well the city will be super vibrant for the rest of time".
[3]Obviously only applicable once a city grows beyond a certain size and starts building medium and high density housing.
We can do a lot to encourage people to live closer together by ending subsidies, removing zoning laws, etc. But in the end we still need farmers and other professions living spread out across the country. We can't achieve perfect urbanization. And given that electric cars are going to be a necessary part of getting to zero emissions.