Ask HN: Why do so many people want to see Tesla fail?
Tesla articles have been blowing up this week, and with good reason. The only thing I'm wondering is why are there soooooo many people that want to see Tesla fail?
So they have a vested interest in amplifying all bad news about Tesla. At times as some have commented Elon has been his own worst enemy.
It's messy but he's inventing the future with Tesla and SpaceX. I've got a friend with a brand new Tesla. He took bets a while back on when the first fully self driving car would be available. This week he drove on our town's main artery, Grand River avenue, from Dusty's Cellar in Okemos to Biggby's Coffee in East Lansing. There are many signal lights, varying speeds with MSU students dashing out in front of you. He drove the entire 3.9 mile stretch with one finger on the steering wheel to prove a point.
I guarantee you without Elon Musk's efforts to save Tesla this future would have arrived many years later. If that doesn't get you excited likely nothing will.
Just sorry my Dad who first had his drivers license in 1930 didn't live to see it.
Sounds like Ken Lay at Enron. He continued to blame shorts and the media even after bankruptcy and criminal conviction.
Enron wanted to convince people they were a low-risk cleaner-energy (natural gas) company. In reality, they were a high-risk trading venture, whose losses in non-trading business were covered up by trading gains. When they stopped making money on trading, everything fell apart in a matter of weeks.
> He drove the entire 3.9 mile stretch with one finger on the steering wheel to prove a point.
That's a very short distance. It is odd that Tesla doesn't report testing miles to California's DMV like every other self-driving venture. Waymo is at about 1 driver takeover per 10,000 miles. Tesla is nowhere near that, probably more like 1 takeover every 5 miles.
Odder still is Elon declining to release data backing up his statement that driving with AP on is twice as safe as driving with it off [1]. In his words,
> "I think reporting the details just gives those who are opposed to Tesla that might data mine the situation and try to turn a positive into a negative, ... so we're going to keep reporting the numbers at a broad brushstroke level"
In other words, he won't release data backing up his statement about AP being twice as safe because he thinks some people will use that data to show his statement is wrong.
2 Questions:
1) Anyone know what Tesla is at for km/takeover?
2) Is Waymo still testing inside tightly limited zones? If so I kinda feel this is unfair to compare controlled zone vs nationwide wherever customers choose.
2) Waymo does testing on a lot of types of roads. They reported 1.26 million miles in CA last year [2]. It's not possible to apples-to-apples compare this to Tesla's numbers because Tesla does not share their data. Musk even turned down an analyst's request the other day for details backing up his claim of autopilot safety [3].
Tesla/Musk are being unreasonable when they claim stats show their system is 40% safer or 2x safer than normal driving because they are comparing to NHTSA stats which include all classes of cars (including motorcycles), all road types (whereas AP is mainly used on divided highways), and all weather conditions (nobody activates AP in the snow, I hope, and I doubt many do in rain).
[1] https://youtu.be/2BZHXh1nbWc?t=450
[2] https://medium.com/waymo/an-update-on-waymo-disengagements-i...
What about the Tesla though? What about electric cars or Solar?
I could not say why Musk has not been replaced, other than, he's been good for the stock and that is Wall Street and the board's focus. Travis kind of agreed to remove himself, didn't he? In this bull market, I expect Musk would need to do the same, and so far he still feels he's the best driver.
Personally I don't care about all that. He's not a great person. He's a bit obnoxious. But I think that from a purely technological standpoint, Tesla is having an important positive impact on civilization. So I want to see it succeed despite Musk (and despite his best attempts in recent months to bring it all crashing down).
- He was fortunate enough to be a founder of one of the dot-com boom's most successful companies, starting him out as an Insanely Rich Individual.
- He has a smart mind for business, when he uses it.
- He has a knack for envisioning products that aren't just incremental steps forward from what's out there, but multiple steps forward, and then unifying people smarter than him into implementing that vision (the "Steve Jobs effect").
He didn't invent rockets that can land themselves. He had the idea, figured out the business plan, and funded it with his piles of money. That's not nothing, but it doesn't make him Our Lord and Savior. And even if it did, that doesn't give someone a free pass on being a jerk to others (he hasn't been that big of a jerk, as billionaires go, but the principle remains).
I'll call out Musk as an unstable and (when it comes to things like the boring company) an ignorant idiot, and I'm absolutely amazed at the cult of personality surrounding him, and I think you'd have to be a fool to invest into tesla given his behaviour and all the financials/news about the company.
But I WANT solar panels and electric cars to take off in a massive big way, and i'd LOVE tesla to be able to provide an affordable electric car.
I think its everyone saying 'people WANT tesla to fail' who are exposing more of this personality cult, because the rest of us can separate the objective facts around the company and its leadership from our personal feelings towards its products and industry.
Most of its supporters, especially its die hard supporters, are just people that love Musk.
He’s kind of an arrogant prick though, hence all the haters.
Now the hype has died down considerably and it seems a lot of people have lost faith in the idea... maybe they're losing faith in all of Musk's ventures...
Look at the inverse - Henry Ford wanted to pay people as much as possible, improve work conditions as much as possible, and work hours as short as possible. I'm sure people wanted him to succeed.
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/08/26/tesla-musk-hit-by-trife...
It's interesting to note that SpaceX, another Elon venture, seems to have much more goodwill. I attribute this to the fact that Elon has been much more humble about every rocket launch ("we'll be happy if the payload makes it to orbit, forget about that landing nonsense") as opposed to the extreme rhetoric around the cars ("it will drive itself!")
They rushed the reveal because they are probably trying to get some hype going in order to raise capital soon. But I really hope they are planning to design Y from ground up as a proper SUV, not just a slightly modified model 3.
Although I get that having as many similarities with model 3 as possible would make it cheaper for them to manufacture it as they would have lots of parts in common. But when I think of SUV, I imagine a much bigger car with higher seating, model Y is not an SUV in my mind and in minds of most people I know.
Tesla seems to inextricably tie the two together. That's too much innovation at once (ergo, more than double the risk). If he just focussed on making awesome electric cars (with auto-drive as an option), it would 1) make Tesla's job easier, 2) make their PR reps job easier, and 3) everyone is positive about green tech. Winning over the BMW/Merc fans with high performance electric cars seems like a better strategy for a car company than trying to push a fleet of average performing occasionally fumbling self driving cars on the streets - from the perspective of the short sellers.
So in the current scenario, everytime there is some news about how the auto-drive confused one thing for another and crashed into it, the short sellers are convinced that there will be more of a negative public feedback cycle which will bring Tesla, or at least its equity, down. So they short.
Source - I have shorted Tesla in the past after the auto drive crashed and killed a driver. I am also technical enough to be paranoid about trusting human lives to a not-100% reliable piece of tech at high speeds. I only trust our attitude of move-fast-and-break-things with things like websites, not things which could kill you.
I don't argue with hard-core haters or fanboys since most of them seem brainwashed.
Still, I haven't heard any good reason why someone should be against Tesla as a company.
There are probably some people that want that (including people who have a financial interest in it, like shorters or people with long positions in competing firms), but it's also very easy for people who have positive aspirations or expectations of Tesla to mistake (or sometimes, misrepresent dishonestly) reporting of negative facts or negative expectations with wanting to Tesla to fail.
You see a similar thing very much in other fields, too (the most common egregious example being political allies of the status quo regime in a nation accusing people who advance the view that the existing policy will fail for the nation of wanting the nation to fail.)
Pre-Musk, they had a decent model. Sell luxury EVs. Now, they can't make a profit and still call themselves a startup after 16 years. Meanwhile, Musk keeps promising more and delivering less.
With that said, his visions are sometimes too unrealistic like his vision of self driving cars. He really underestimates how hard that problem is. Saying he will have a self driving car before this year is over is borderline stupid and that pisses me off.