Tesla co-founder and CTO JB Straubel stepping down
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Elon can be an asshat sometimes, and he oversells and is over-optimistic. But even if the short sellers are right and Tesla will go bankrupt (which, btw, does not equal failure in many ways), why are so many people excited about that?
Most tech giants of recent times have done things I would consider to have made the world a much worse place. Why is Tesla, which has done a lot for humanity and is a key advancement in tackling climate change, hated so much? Why not save your hate for companies damaging democracy or workers rights, which seem like more serious charges?
He's saying even if a self driving car is more dangerous than a human, a human driven car is still dangerous and we all accept that. So its not about whether the deaths were preventable. We accept human driven cars therefore we accept preventable death.
We're now forced to consider the fact that this is an argument about the fuzzy math of risk vs reward as we have crossed the threshold of preventable deaths long ago.
That has nothing to do with whether or not a new, potentially life threatening technology should be on the market.
When they went from saying « we’re aiming at self driving car in the future » to « our car are able to do it right now », leaving all kinds of ambiguity just for the sake of hyping the brand, they crossed the red line.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ESnyJ4b7m96OCjs3GSQ6...
Then they have "miles per death" numbers in the 150M-240M range, but the US average is less than 100M per death (typically stated as the inverse, deaths per 100M miles[1]), so according to your data they're apparently better than average, though collecting it through media reports this way is questionable anyway.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
I see a column for deaths attributed to autopilot, but it sums to 4 in the US, which is too small to be a good statistical sample even if we knew how many miles per death that was, but I don't see any data for miles driven on autopilot regardless.
https://medium.com/@MidwesternHedgi/teslas-driver-fatality-r...
I'm not sure if you noticed (I didn't the first time I saw that document), but there are multiple tabs and that's under the 'Resources' section.
That said, the data is obviously incomplete. Only Tesla really knows. While it's obviously a guess, I think the most damning evidence is that Tesla isn't releasing their own data to the contrary, because I think Elon Musk of all people would be ecstatic to shutup the haters such as myself.
FWIW, and this is completely anecdotal, I find Tesla drivers to be the most obnoxious on the road - which would lend credence to your argument that it attracts a certain kind of person and is not the car itself. That's ignoring the entire Autopilot X factor though, which is a whole separate conversation with even more missing data.
‾\_(ツ)_/‾
One thing I find annoying is that Tesla and Musk seem to always move the goal post to point where it suits them best. For me stuff like self-driving taxis and sattelite internet are prime examples. It looks, at least to me, like running away from rwality faster than it can catch up.
One last point regarding luxury cars and safety. Tesla is proud of being the top performer at the NCAP crash test. And all of a sudden that comparison is unfair just because the numbers aren't positive for Tesla?
Autopilot (and by extension Tesla) is also a lot more controversial than drunk driving, and by extension more interesting to discuss.
The question remains if we accept a death by software bug (i.e. human software developer error) in the same way we accept a death by human driving error.
The closest thing Hacker News has to consensus is "certainly not if it's Boeing, probably not if it's Uber but definitely if it's Tesla..."
But why are geeks against Tesla? Why is there so much hate for them on Hacker News on Twitter, from tech people working for big tech companies? That's my question.
I just wish they would be frank about what they can and cannot do.
EDIT: And by the way about that pathetic "climate change" argument. Right, they are now selling Fiat their CO2 certificates thus enabling them to do wonderful green washing.
I'll have to name companies to explain: Uber have undermined workers' rights in a systematic way, through the development of their concept of contract employees and the gig economy.
I have heard plenty of stories about SpaceX (not Tesla, but I'll assume similar stories exist) not treating their employees well. So yes, they've hurt workers rights too, so I accept your point. It's different kind of issue though, because it's particular to one company and not systemic, which is what I originally meant to say.
Disagree strongly about the climate change/greenwashing argument. I believe Tesla is a net positive in tackling climate change, which is what matters.
It’s misplaced ire.
It doesn't matter if Tesla succeeds or fails. All car companies now have to meet fleet emissions targets and the way they're going to do it is by building electric cars, either battery electric or fuel cell or both.
Somewhere around 2013, he claimed Tesla would launch a "fully autonomous, L5" in 2 years, but it would take another 3 years of regulatory approval. Clearly a gross misrepresentation of facts.
I take his claims with a massive pinch of salt, while also appreciating that trait is somewhat necessary to solve the problems he's trying to solve.
Either a) he is lying, or b) the CEO of multiple companies worth a combined ~$100b is delusional to the point of being unable to recognize basic facts. Pick your poison.
Where did you read that? What is your source?
SO they should not use the cash that the government made accessible to them (because Fiat refuse to manufacture electric vehicles) and thus, not increase their EV production capacity?
This makes no sense. That's up to regulators to prevent Fiat from selling polluting cars, not to Tesla to refuse financial help that allow them to accelerate their growth.
Fiat's emissions already happened; they can't turn back time. Selling the credits to them will result in a net decrease in emissions (assuming they don't spend all the money on flamethrowers or something). If they didn't sell the credits, Fiat still put out exactly the same amount of emissions, and would be likely to do so in the future even with the fines.
If you've helped accelerate climate change, you're supposed to buy credits to offset the damage you've caused. If you've helped mitigate climate change, you're supposed to sell the credits, because the credits are there in the first place to incentivize mitigating climate change. This system obviously isn't sufficient to halt climate change all by itself, and maybe there are some other reasons it's a bad system, but it seems like the credit system is working exactly as it was supposed to. At the very least, I don't see what Tesla's doing wrong when it comes to that particular area.
Their quality issues may exist, but they aren't that bad. They're not. Every person you talk to has lemon stories about every car in existence.
Tesla does not have a monopoly on irrational exuberance in what a company will accomplish. You are commenting on ground zero of internet startups. Tesla actually built cars.
CO2 credit sales are part of a market that actually forces companies to pay for CO2. There is nothing bad about that.
Massive overvaluation: Again, you are commenting on ground zero of wannabe unicorn internet startups. Uber's app can be replicated by a team of 10 in a month. Tesla has a competitive advantage in battery tech, vertical integration, and design, and could displace Toyota in a couple decades.
Fans are insufferable: ok, true.
People on a deep subconscious level understand that they're not in an environment where they belong. They've been robbed of their humanity and turned in to half cog half husk of a person. They've don't and can't live an authentic life but rather a simulation. They're a shark in a tank. They understand that the scientist, the academic, and above all the technologist is responsible for this.
Large well known technology companies are therefore a good outlet of this disapproval. They're viewed as the enemy and the missteps they make that we consciously understand as negatives are amplified by our subconscious understanding that they're existentially damaging to us at their very core. People do hate the tech giants. Tesla though is largely unique in that it doesn't sell to the masses, at least not yet, so criticism aimed at it feels less hypocritical than that of a company whose products and services we use.
That's why SpaceX doesn't get criticised pretty much at all, normal tech giants get criticised a bit, and Tesla gets dogpiled.
For me personally the treatment of their workers, their anti-unionisation efforts, and their misleading advertisement of the autopilot, together with Musks extremely off-putting public behaviour. And no I don't want spaceX to fail.
>Why not save your hate for companies damaging democracy or workers rights, which seem like more serious charges?
I think many people, including myself at this point have similar opinions about Facebook et al. There are relatively few large tech companies left that I look at optimistically.
The whole Thai cave rescue really showed who Elon Musk is: an incorrigible sociopath who's shortcomings make it difficult to celebrate any success he has.
Saving children is not normal sociopath territory?
Like it or not, we live in a society in which words have social and occasionally legal ramifications. Elon Musk trying to ruin someone's life for bruising his ego isn't something society should shrug off and forgive simply because "people aren't perfect."
...but isn't the recourse that society has agreed-upon the very same lawsuit that is going on? Is this not adequate? Wouldn't it be more "woke" to fix the aforementioned avenue of recourse, if not?
Humans are emotional and social beings, and we do not (nor should we want to) live in a society in which the proceedings of law, when found to be appropriate to remedy some social offense, become the only permitted form of public expression relative to it.
It's perfectly reasonable to find Elon Musk to be an objectionable person in the public sphere, regardless of the legality of his actions. Those are two different axes, and human beings don't live on only one.
>Wouldn't it be more "woke" to fix the aforementioned avenue of recourse, if not?
I don't know what "woke," is supposed to imply. I'm assuming (from the typical context of such things) that it's supposed to be a glib disparagement of something related to identity politics, which seems odd and inappropriate.
What does the form of public expression hope to achieve if the recourse is adequate? Emotional release? Were it that it was you that was directly wronged, I could understand your subjectivity on the matter; however, being a third-party to whom there is no direct or indirect impact, it makes no sense.
In other words, using your statement, there is some assumed emotional or social end-goal of the behaviour is there not? Isn't that n+1 from the recourse already defined from society? The behaviour is designed to illicit something, is it not? Otherwise, why would you do it at all?
>It's perfectly reasonable to find Elon Musk to be an objectionable person in the public sphere, regardless of the legality of his actions.
The OC wasn't about whether it was unreasonable to find him objectionable but whether it was unreasonable to continue the "hate campaign" (apologies for a lack of better turn-of-phrase at the moment).
>I don't know what "woke," is supposed to imply. I'm assuming (from the typical context of such things) that it's supposed to be a glib disparagement of something related to identity politics, which seems odd and inappropriate.
Woke seems to be common parlance for people who have "woken-up" to some perceived injustice and are fighting the good fight, as it were.
An example of how it is apt and applicable is when Beto O'Rourke was continually forced to apologise[0]. In this case, we can draw the parallels by your statement:
>It's perfectly reasonable to find Elon Musk to be an objectionable person in the public sphere...
At what point would he no longer be objectionable and/or for the behaviour to stop? His death? That doesn't seem to matter in the case of lot of people previously hated throughout history, correct? So what overall, overaching purpose does it hope to achieve? When in the history of history has it achieved any appreciably good and desired outcomes?
Even if he profusely apologised, prostrated with guilt and remose today, wouldn't the behaviour still continue?
Society is not an algorithm whose purpose is to derive formal logical proofs of type "recourse" for any particular set of inputs. There is no n+1, nor is there necessarily an emotional or social end-goal.
>The behaviour is designed to illicit something, is it not? Otherwise, why would you do it at all?
Most people don't orchestrate their emotions in order to elicit a specific response. People find Elon Musk to be an asshole because he acts like an asshole, they find his behavior objectionable because they object to his behavior. There need be no more complexity to the matter than that.
>At what point would he no longer be objectionable and/or for the behaviour to stop? His death?
And now the slippery slope argument... I don't see anyone calling for Elon's death, do you?
>Even if he profusely apologised, prostrated with guilt and remose today, wouldn't the behaviour still continue?
Maybe. But then again, he could also eat an infant on live television and people would still defend him, so in the end it all seems to even out.
...I don't think that applies to Musk. This isn't the case of someone making an ill-considered tweet and getting eviscerated; this is about dozens and dozens of tweets, lawsuits, and interviews. Even so, if Musk took responsibility and said he was going to change, I'd certainly say we should give him every opportunity to do so. But to state the obvious, that hasn't happened.
But then, so do a lot of us. We just aren't in the media spotlight.
On the flip side, it's indicative that the company Musk is more closely running is experiencing high turnover at senior levels. While the one he's not as involved with isn't.
There are a lot of high profile CEOs and executives who have very stressful jobs, Musk isn't alone in this. The overwhelming majority of them manage to behave in completely sane, professional manner.
I assume Nadella and Pichai and Bezos all have a lot of work on their calendar, curiously enough they don't go on rants on twitter.
Elon Musk is not a nice guy that has temporary blowups. He's vindictive.
This 100%. People have already died as a result of the marketing and more people are going to die going forward because they insisted calling a pretty good lane assist feature "autopilot".
You see it in history: the victorians built a ridiculously over-engineered, insanely extensive rail network. It didn't make any money, but at the time, there wasn't really anything else to invest in with a reasonable return rate. So everybody went in on the one thing that had the possibility of a massive pay-off. Recognize the unicorn-logic here?
Tesla kind of takes all the decades of Toyota kicking ass, and gets the lesson completely wrong - the 'machine that builds the machine' is exactly what GM was doing. Toyota was good at building cars because they were far less automated than their american competitors.
Then it works because electric cars are a great idea, batteries are massively subsidized by the phone industry, and incumbent car makers don't really have relevant expertise (since they're really good at building internal combustion engines, and a lot of the other stuff is a secondary concern). Also, because Tesla has an enormous amount of investor cash.
So why does all this bother me? It's because of where the cash comes from. Tech companies don't really pay taxes, and they don't have (relative to revenue) employees. If you imagine how many jobs Microsoft Office has replaced, you get the picture. All this is fine in itself (minus the tax thing), but when the money just gets poured into these obvious money spouts, into a company that's pretty obviously only workable because it sits at the bottom of one of those money spouts, lead by a guy who's clearly not as smart as he thinks he is - well, it feels a bit like a great example of the waste and unfairness of the system itself.
I've been told in the past that the key factor in Toyota success is their relationship with their suppliers. A top notch supply chain with just in time processes bundled with reasonable proxy stocks?
Would love to read about their automation level compared to US or EU companies
https://www.thedrive.com/tech/26955/inside-toyotas-takaoka-2...
It's kind of a cliche at this point - but a good start is 'The Toyota Way', which talks about developing people. I'd also be interested if you can find an authoritative source. I just have a lot of news articles - a good overview is this one in industryweek (https://www.industryweek.com/operations/tesla-vs-tps-seeking...).
The basic principle is somewhat obvious - automation is efficient, but inflexible. That often leads to machines sitting idle, or the overproduction of unsaleable stock. So it's a kind of poison chalice - it looks like you'll reap huge profits, but if your car doesn't sell well, you're screwed. If you invest in people instead, you can react to changing economic conditions.
1) Tesla Had 3 Times as Many OSHA Violations as the 10 Largest US Plants Combined[1]
2) Elon Musk personally doxxing a market analyst who provided in-depth analysis of Tesla financials, by calling his boss and threatening to sue if he continued his side project of covering Tesla [2]
3) Committing blatant securities fraud by claiming he would sell Tesla to Saudi Arabian investors for $420 a share, and promising 'the short burn of the century' a few weeks before doing so.
4) Bailing out a failing Solar City run by Musk's family(cousins) with Tesla shareholder money on the promise of a product that turned out to be vaporware. [3] After the merger solar city sales are now approaching zero and it's becoming increasingly clear it was a bailout [4]. Multiple lawsuits are ongoing.
5) Claiming that Tesla cars bought today will appreciate in value to over $250,000, so it's actually an investment not a purchase.[5]. Generally making crazy statements about imminent "million robotaxis" while still not having a 'Summon' featured promised in a few weeks months ago because "parking lots are very hard"(recent tweet)
For me at least, the transition was a slow one - from "What they're doing is hard, but I hope they succeed" to "They're probably going to fail, but at least they have good intentions" to "If they don't fail, the precedent set is staggering to what you can get away with".
There's the famous James Comey saying of 'The Chickenshit Club' - prosecutors unwilling to take on corporations for fear that a loss or long case would damage their win ratio, leading to entities with a large legal team getting away with anything they want. Fundamentally the problem is consistently making statement that they know to be untrue under the guise of this being targets to be met. A generous person would of course call them "ambitious goal". But someone who has studied them closely would know it's an attempt to pump stock that has historically worked, but has recently started failing.
When blatant market manipulations, hazardous working conditions, highly questionable accounting practices, false marketing claims, doxxing critics and lies are allowed to succeed, laws don't really exist and companies operate within their bounds only because they don't want to take the 0.1% risk that they'll actually be punished in a way that threatens their continued operations.
If you believe in capitalism and regulated efficient markets, you will hope that a company that breaks the rules as often as Tesla doesn't go unpunished. But the SEC will never bring down a company who's stock is still high, as their primary goal is to protect shareholder value. To fully uncover the extent of their damage, they will have to fail first.
[1] - https://www.thedrive.com/news/26727/tesla-had-3-times-as-man...
[2] - https://www.marketwatch.com/story/elon-musk-allegedly-silenc...
[3] - https://mansionengineer.com/2018/08/10/elon-musk-tesla-and-t...
[4] - https://i.imgur.com/iQUJkbE.jpg
[5] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-16/musk-stan...
SpaceX - Love what they're doing.
Online fans of the two - insufferable cultists.
My feeling is that the overwhelming majority of Tesla critics do not hate Tesla, and do not want Tesla to fail. Rather, they see Tesla as a small, unimportant, poorly run company that gets far more press (positive and negative) than it deserves, and who respond by needling Tesla super-fans. The super fans, in turn, react by treating this as shocking, but it's not really. Tesla critics are treating Tesla like a normal company, and most companies are not particularly well-liked. Nobody cares if Amalgamated Widgets rises and falls except it's investors and competitors.
> Do they also want SpaceX to fail?
No. But also, Tesla critics, I believe, view SpaceX as a VERY different company. Tesla is just another car company making just another car. SpaceX is something else entirely.
If your mental model is "Tesla is like SpaceX", this probably feels weird to you, and the way Tesla gets covered in the press - as if it was merely a car company! - must be maddening. If your mental model is "Tesla is like Saab", this seems pretty obvious.
> Most tech giants of recent times have done things I would consider to have made the world a much worse place.
I would never dream of calling Tesla a "tech giant". It's a car company, it's not making very good cars, it's not making them very well, it's not making very many of them, and it's not making a lot of money off them. I am incredibly tired of hearing about Tesla. Even if it wins, the Tesla end-game is to be another big successful car company, and I don't care about big successful car companies.
Just like Nuclear can get away with being "better than coal" but in the face of plummeting wind, solar and storage costs its drawbacks get looked at with new eyes.
Or in some parallel dimension where deiselgate led to trillions being wasted on hydrogen fuel celled vehicles which never replaced ICE.
Besides, I was replying to a post that said Tesla was unimportant. Well, I personally doubt it, but yeah maybe what VW did -braking the law and harming the health of millions- was even more important.
Tesla didn't have any ground-breaking research on battery chemistry, or motor efficiency; they are among the first to packaged everything together after the underlying technology became mature enough, and managed to suck the air away from the other early competitors. If Tesla never existed, the car companies would still invest in electric vehicles.
Edit: I've just discovered that the founding of Tesla itself was inspired by the General Motors EV1 which was in production from 1996[1] and recalled in 2003.
Which impact Tesla has had, if any, is impossible to measure. It's not even entirely clear that the impact was positive.
(Imagine that a large car company or well funded startup was contemplating a massive investment in BEVs to try and get a first mover advantage, but Tesla got there first, so they decided to invest in hybrids or a new range of SUVs instead. In this word, "but for" Tesla, BEVs might be even more widely adopted. Of course, we have no reason to think that's true, but then, we have no reason to think that, "but for" Tesla, nobody would have done anything with EVs for another 10 years either, and that doesn't stop people from wildly speculating...)
This effect can be observed often in the case of low investment advances like mathematical breakthroughs, inventions that are limited to a bunch of papers, gadgets or Uber for X type, X as a service startups etc. But, it is evidently not true for hard problems, advances that require huge investments, bear enormous risks and uncertain payoff.
The people who go for the relatively low hanging fruits know this very well, evident in their rush to the market, patent or to publish in academic journals.
In contrast, the hard problems, like landing a man on the moon, measuring the higgs boson, retro propulsive landing of orbital rockets or, case in point, the development of long range BEVs would not have happened if someone would have had the ability and courage to go all in at enormous cost and risk. Progress is not automatic! It may appear though but in reality people are sometimes willing to pay enormous prices for lofty goals. Or they don't and progress simply does not happen.
In fact, these tasks are so hard, that none of the achievements mentioned above have been repeated so far, despite arguably ample time for copy cats. No one but NASA went to the moon, no second LHC was built, only SpaceX has landed orbital boosters and the 2012 Model S still has more range than any non Tesla BEV. Another evidence is that there are problems that we know are arguably solvable and desirable, yet we still haven't solved them, e.g. putting a man or women on Mars, switching to 100% renewable energies, fusion, making certain diseases extinct etc.
> (...)
> Tesla is just another car company making just another car.
Definitely false. Q2 revenue was 25% of Nissan's (which crossed my radar recently due to layoffs). That may be small, for some definition of small, but it's definitely not "small, unimportant". I won't comment on poorly run -- a qualitative assessment that does not lead to a definitive conclusion. I'd challenge with a comparison to a well run startup in the automotive space, but there is none to compare it with.
As for another car company making just another car, I don't understand how can you even write those words together. A Tesla may be a good car, a poor car, depending on who you ask. What it is definitely not is your average Volkswagen.
And a bit less than 10% of Volkswagen or Toyota's.
With about 25% of their individual market caps.
If you are referring to the disconnect between revenue and market cap, it may point to a valuation error by the market. Or not. The market is clearly incorporating expected growth into the current value. Is the valuation correct? I have no idea. I'd not infer too much from this fact alone, though.
If I worked for a car company, I'd probably care, but I work for a tech company, so I don't.
> A Tesla may be a good car, a poor car, depending on who you ask. What it is definitely not is your average Volkswagen.
Okay, sure, it's twice that car a Volkswagen is, I trust you. But it's still a car.
Again, I think there is a significant faction of Tesla fans that don't see Tesla as a car company, and instead see it more like SpaceX. I don't.
I do, and I'd like to explain why. This is not about cars. The single most important challenge our generation faces is dealing with climate change. We absolutely need to curb CO2 emissions. We don't need to limit CO2 emissions, we need to cut them significantly.
There are two avenues for this goal. Either we cut energy consumption, significantly, or we switch energy sources away from fossil fuels.
I believe cutting energy consumption is impossible. It goes against a five thousand year trend of per-capita energy consumption growth, amplified by population growth. If you step back from the ecologist message a bit and look at the overarching trend, the picture is clear: Cutting global energy consumption is a no-go.
The other path is switching energy sources. We're advancing on that front. However, for renewable sources to have the needed impact, they must be applicable to transportation. Here, in this specific point, Tesla was and is key. It has already succeeded. The BMW CEO was fired because of lack of focus on EVs. It's a stark change from pre-Tesla, and it is a market change created by Tesla. Every automaker will go the EV route, and I'm completely convinced that, absent Tesla, they would sit on their hands for at least another decade.
The switch to EVs has more to do with Obama than Tesla. He pushed through many of the incentives that made Tesla possible.
I don't follow the logic. The impact of a jet flying back and forth pales in comparison to the impact of switching vehicles away from fossils. You're comparing the incomparable. Many orders of magnitude of difference separate the two.
There are always going to be critics who parrot idiotic points which you're having to refute, even among the "tech literate".
Would the car industry be as far along as it is today in EVs without Tesla? hard to say, I would say probably not. Toyota has been actively shunning EVs (hybrids don't count) and now still insisting on most of its energy into hydrogen fuel cells and BMW just kicked out its CEO for, among other things, stalling on EV development for so long.
Do I prefer being in a world where we have a Tesla? hell yes.
I know you don't mean to come off that way, but even your defense of Elon and such in this thread comes off as a combination of "ends justify the means" and sheer sycophantry.
Nobody likes that. It's not as bad as some, mind you. Reading Teslarati makes me feel like these people need a cult deprogrammer, stat.
Criticize Tesla for worker security conditions and hiring practices all you want. It is deserved and should be corrected. The jump from criticism to rooting for failure is the step I don't understand (1). I also do not understand the annoyance caused by praising the fact that Tesla did push the automotive market towards EVs.
(1) I have an explanation, but it's almost insulting to critics: Any kind of venture, more so any kind of _risky_ venture, will attract doomsayers. Once held, personal beliefs are hard to change, so people root for validation of their first evaluation. I'd love to see Tesla criticism justified differently, but that's how I read most hard line critics.
Today I think the limp wristed response to the $420 fraud is a black stain on the justice system.
I'd still prefer Tesla succeed of course, and there's an undeniable impact it's had. But any warm and fuzzy feeling I once had is very much over.
If you really really believe this, you need to take a long hard look at yourself and your comments again.
You literally defended him, for example:
"Every CEO is a salesman. Anyone who believes every word of a salesman is a fool. I'd not paint it as Trump-style, bona fide lying. It's just inflating promises, or being overly optimistic. Par for the course."
As for the rest:
Numerous people have tried to help you understand in this thread, and your response has not really been to try to understand their perspective, but instead tell them why they are wrong, and how it must be everyone else.
If you really want to understand, people have tried to help as best they can.
Maybe, rather than immediately react, take a while and process it?
Such a religion now.
Here are some car startups. Rivian has received the most investment of the three from companies like Amazon and Ford.
Rivian: https://products.rivian.com/
Sono Motors: https://sonomotors.com/
Lightyear: https://lightyear.one/
Aside from the obvious fanboy vs anti-fanboy thing, all of the other players in these spheres tend to be huge companies and government contractors, who can afford large and aggressive marketing budgets. This will almost certainly include some sort of online forum monitoring and consensus building.
https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...
Tesla/Musk obviously fall into this trap with climate change.
Also the parallels in some attacks with what gets used for people like Al Gore makes me think that pointing out a problem that people have staked their political capital on being a hoax, provokes a certain reaction too.
2) Oil and big auto hate them. A small company made the technological offerings of car companies and are threatening oil to become obsolete? And the car companies have been whining about CAFE and the inability to make EVs for three decades now.
3) Stock speculators and shorters producing volatility and doing bets.
4) Americans are attached to cars, so all the "car guys" hate Teslas. ESPECIALLY since they smoke ICEs off the line. Go read jalopnik, Tesla is pursuing their two precious bastions of masculinity: the roar of an engine, and whether or not you actually drive a car yourself
I got some interesting insight. One trend I noticed in the replies is that answers are tending away from the goal of car driving being part of daily life and trying to make that electric. Those who did touch on this, were of the opinion that Tesla was not doing anything new or essential in that area.
Instead, most criticism was targeted towards the negatives of Tesla without regards to the positive. Tesla driving the advent of electric-powered personal transportation was barely touched upon.
Overall, I’m of the opinion that the technical advances Tesla has made, the influence on the market and public thinking, outweighs the negatives.
One explanation I came up with myself for the hatred is the overriding positive optimism of Musk. I do think that his marketing is partially bluster and partially the way he sees the world. The latter perhaps is what people hate. And nerds are somehow predisposed, understandably, to be sceptical. There’s a direct conflict there.
If you’ve spent years working for Facebook or others, then it would be hard to accept that a much better way of spending your time is possible. Easier to think all tech companies are bad, than the idea that you’ve made the wrong choice. Especially when earning well.
I have no axe to grind for Musk. He’s said enough things to lose my respect. I think being on Twitter is unhealthy for him and he’s crossed many lines. I also think Tesla is net positive, and I still think the hatred of this community is irrational. I think everyone feeling that way about Tesla should take time out and imagine trying to explain how a world without Tesla would have been better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla,_Inc.#cite_note-founders...
https://www.cnet.com/news/tesla-motors-founders-now-there-ar...
Not to understate the significance of Tesla losing Straubel, but TechCrunch's claim that Tesla is losing lots of "high-profile executives" seems like a little bit of a stretch. Steve McManus was a vice president in charge of "car interiors." It seems strange to place him on the same level of significance of their CTO.
Jason Mendez, director of manufacturing engineering
Will McColl, manager of equipment engineering
Jon McNeill, president of global sales and services
Eric Branderiz, chief accounting officer
Susan Repo, corporate treasurer and vice president of finance
Jim Keller, head of Autopilot hardware engineering
Georg Ell, director of Western Europe operations
Matthew Schwall, director of field performance engineering
Ganesh Srivats, vice president overseeing retail, delivery
Sarah O'Brien, vice president of communications
Gabrielle Toledano, chief people officer
Dave Morton, chief accounting officer
Liam O'Connor, vice president of global supply management
Antoin Abou-Haydar, senior director of production and quality
Justin McAnear, vice president of worldwide finance and operations
Phil Rothenberg, vice president in the legal department
Jeff Jones, head of global security
Dan Kim, senior director of global sales
Aaron Chew, director of investor relations
Todd Maron, general counsel
Charles Mwangi, senior director of engineering
Cindy Nicola, vice president of global recruiting
Dane Butswinkas, general counsel
Deepak Ahuja, CFO
Praveen Arichandran, director of growth
Karl Wagner, senior director of global security
Dave Arnold, senior director of global communications
Felicia Mayo, vice president of human resources and head of diversity
Peter Hochholdinger, vice president of production
Steve MacManus, vice president of interior & exterior engineering
https://www.thedrive.com/tech/29120/top-ota-expert-shows-how...
No, you claimed other car companies won't have over-the-air software updates which is false. You claimed Bosch controls automative software which is also false. Bosch also makes use of a lot of open source software:
- Mercedes EQC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JTew1D5Tk8
- Audi e-tron GT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvNw15W_EK8
- Honda e: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEKq8jmckz0
- Volkswagen ID.3: https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/14/vw-id-3-interior-reveale...
If you can't prove it then simply admit you don't know what you're talking about.
Yet everyone is leaving?
The janitor at Tesla quits and its a top story about a company in turmoil.
In that sense, BMW was way ahead of most other car companies. If they had continued to bring out other models based on their tech, they would have a sizable offering of electric cars. But unfortunately, they mostly stopped development and had the i3 dev team leaving.
You must not read a lot of news
I count two.
Jim Hackett: May 22, 2017 to present (CEO) Mark Fields: July 1, 2014 to May 22, 2017 (CEO)
But I'm not in the hardware biz so /shrug
Is this a typo or another think you crazy Americans do backwards, like "I can hardly wait"
"Its impossible to understate the importance of his role"
It was so good that no one can even try to badmouth it. (So it's a hyperbole of course.)
Just like people they don't care at all should be saying "I couldn't care less."
It annoys me, too!
I think "his role shouldn't be understated" would be the correct phrase given the context.
And if you don't think just short term, it's also the biggest financial opportunity, even if Tesla loses. All the knowledge, connections etc that you can build in that time will pay off in the end. There is not a single company in that size where losing for the company necessarily also means a loss for its ambitious talent.
Think about how America and the Arabs hired the biggest Nazi talent after second world war. Even losing and being clearly labelled as the devil is not enough to stop talent from being successful. Always keep fighting!