I hope those quarterly profits, trucks, and SUVs are worth it when climate change hits its stride. Humans can be irrational, ignorant animals.
They're not rooting for internal combustion engines, they're rooting for electric cars and annoyed when the company (or Musk) flounders from self-inflicted damage. At least, that seems like most of the criticism here. No one is going to respond well to an advocate of a technology they want to succeed saying and doing stuff that actively harms the cause (prime examples: George Hotz with autonomous vehicles, RMS with basically everything that RMS has ever advocated, or Julian Assange allowing Wikileaks to become a tool of corrupt governments rather than a force against them).
It's great to give credit where credit is due, but even more important to hold people and companies accountable when they screw up, especially people and companies that you want to succeed.
But I only care because I was an unashamed fanboy earlier in life. Musk kept flipping the coin to bet the company, and succeeded against all odds. It was riveting to watch.
But once Tesla got large... nothing changed. He's still flipping. Model 3? Flip. Automated factory? Flip. Autonomous driving? Flip. 420? Flip. Solar City? Flip. Tesla is a single misstep away from bankruptcy, and it need not be.
I no longer see him as someone undeterred by the odds to achieve something great, but more like a narcissistic gambler. He's not taking risks to achieve a goal, the risks are the goal. His Twitter antics don't help.
The only thing that makes it ok is that competition is legitimately catching up now. Maybe not in the smart car arena, but we are seeing real electrified competition.
I don't give a fuck if people buy cars with a cute UI or not. I do care that we move to electrification. If Tesla dies, the latter will happen at a largely uninterrupted schedule with the state of the industry in 2019. I love the idea of legislation that moves that along faster. I'd happily take a tax hike to make it happen.
Tesla fans love to hate on the "shorts" as if the only possible motivation to criticize Tesla is profit based. To that strawman I've blatantly constructed I hypocritically reply: stop arguing against strawmen.
We are getting close though but need Tesla to keep the pressure on for a couple more years.
If Tesla (and Nissan) never existed, this entire timeline may have been offset by 5-10 years. I believe they deserve credit for lighting the fire, but by now it's self sustaining.
Ford sold one million F-150s last year. A F-150 every 29 seconds. That’s only one model.
Without going off on a tangent, large companies aren’t able to innovate like smaller companies can. They prefer to buy or partner with smaller company to build someone, Mazda developed the old Ford Ranger. Ford just invested $500m in Rivian.
There are strong arguments that Tesla is being ran very poorly by Musk (solar city acq, VW cash denied, SEC fines, etc.) despite the company being one of the champions for electric vehicles.
1) Stop making ridiculous promises about self-driving capabilities.
2) Stop giving out timelines that everyone knows aren't going to be hit for every single model.
3) Get production quality under control. Seriously, a stupid percentage of Model 3s are getting handed to customers with defects that would keep them from even making it out of the factory at any other OEM.
4) Get aftermarket logistics figured out so people aren't waiting months for their cars to get repaired.
5) Stop flip-flopping on sales models. Is Tesla selling via brick and mortar stores or not? Is it using low pressure guidance-oriented sales or calling up customers with pre-orders trying to pressure them into upgrading to a more expensive configuration? Is their pricing fixed or going to drop another $1,000 next month?
6) Stop treating employees like churnable garbage. I work in the auto industry and the number of ex-Tesla employees floating around who got burned out or sick of political bullshit in record time is astounding in comparison to every other OEM.
7) Stop treating driver safety as a suggestion. I mean that in the broad sense, not in the mechanical engineering sense. Ex. autopilot should never have been released in any capacity that allowed drivers to take a nap or read a book while the car happily plowed into a semi-truck or median.
Tesla basically creating a market for EAV is very cool, and no matter what, I think Musk deserves a place in the history books for it.
I love the autopilot feature, but the cars are still great without it. Tesla can be very successful and sell a lot of cars without any more self driving features.
* Battery-electric vehicles manufactured by other companies
* Plugin hybrid-electric vehicles manufactured by other companies
* Reducing automobile usage in general
* Developing energy-efficient processes to synthesize carbon-neutral liquid fuels using carbon-neutral energy sources
* Developing new and more efficient carbon-neutral energy sources and using them to synthesize carbon-neutral liquid fuels
* Developing the technology to trap or sequester carbon emissions
* Some combination of the above
So while it not be completely fair, at least Tesla is getting substantial financial contributions from the carbon producing ICE competitors.
Of course moving to electric vehicles is a necessary step towards getting off of the petrocarbons, but it isn't sufficient, production of electricity also has to move off of them.
The "just not fast enough" happens to be an important factor.
Also, Tesla is an easy target to make fun of, because of its narcistic, arrogant CEO that seems to think that he can outsmart everyone, when in fact his business is a total mess.
And yet we do not collect that tax, hence heavily subsidizing ICEs. This is credited by our children and grandchildren, who will end up with a massively changed (for the worse) planet.
Subsidies do not have to be in the form of cash: many come in the form of tax breaks and I would consider this to be one such case.
I like that Musk is narcissistic and arrogant in public. He doesn’t hide it like the execs at every automaker who was part of Dieselgate. Be an asshole, by all means, just deliver faster. (Credit to BYD and their electric bus fleet efforts, and China’s renewables push in general; I would be remiss if I made it sound like Musk alone was working towards these goals).
I do love someone who doesn’t cultivate an image. I think this is 100% who Musk has become, for better and worse, and I respect someone who is genuine about who they are, warts and all.