Tesla Australia admits its sales figures were wrong | Hacker News Reader

Tesla Australia admits its sales figures were wrong

drive.com.au

Where did the Cybertruck go? Late 2021 to late 2022 to now early 2023...the sheer volume of $100 deposits totaled $20MM, just 3 days after announcement.

Also, now that Tesla has had approx 14 years since its first sale, has anyone performed economic analysis of personal impact on environment vs maintainability of the vehicle? A few of my personal friends who bought their Tesla around 2015-2016 recently got rid of their vehicle for pennies on the dollar becuase they didn't want to pay $23-28k for a new battery installed. How is this better than paying $3-4k/year on gas and having significantly less maintenance expense over lifespan of the vehicle?

Tesla has done this before and it's an easy way to raise a lot of money quickly without doing any stock dilution or loans. The only thing that separates it from Fyre Fest who did the same trick to get money is so far Musk has eventually delivered.

Advocacy groups tend to be overly optimistic.

Recently there was a comparison photo in circulation among urban planning activists showing how the Place de Brouckère in Brussels, Belgium was renovated removing car traffic and putting more greenery, ostensibly making it a location more inviting for pedestrians.

Problem is, the most recent photo in that comparison was from 2019 or so and if you look at the 2021 photos then indeed the cars are gone, but the place is a concrete desert with just a few trees left.

EDIT: most recent photo was from 2019:

https://mobile.twitter.com/QAGreenways/status/14726871949889...

Straying off-topic with your example, there may be fewer trees in the square now (though I think it only seems that way because they're less mature and all the cars are gone). That's a valid criticism. However, I don't see how you can call the change "overly optimistic" unless you were a die-hard fan of driving an automobile through there. Especially when you take into account the accompanying change to Boulevard Anspach. It's not ostensibly more inviting for pedestrians, it's definitively so.

The overly optimistic part was in how the photos were timed and angled.

Here's the original pair of photos:

https://mobile.twitter.com/QAGreenways/status/14726871949889...

And for comparison a webcam overlooking the location:

https://www.worldcamera.net/en/webcams/europe/belgium/237-br...

That "best shot" is obviously from before the renovation. If you look at the current state(live), most of the trees are gone - there's one row and a few closer to the middle, but that's it.

Worst part is that there's a perfect explanation why this happened - greenery requires maintenance and is therefore expensive.

So, I realize Tesla (and its fans) are often guilty of over-hyping, but the lead should be "Tesla Australia" (a considerably smaller deal than if it were Tesla generally, or a larger market like US or China), and it seems more like some lower-level intern picked the wrong number off the spreadsheet to send to the government bureau functionary, than a case of over-hyping. This time.

Considering this is publicly available data where such inflation would be outed as incorrectly almost instantly (here within 24 hours) it seems to me their explanation where they accidentally added 2020 and 2021 sales together seems plausible.

I wonder if theres any legal/financial repercussions. I'm no expert but I would guess that an error of overreporting sales by 25% for a company this big in the US would surely upset the SEC?

"Tesla has been accused of inflating its sales figures in Australia after a report released by the electric-vehicle lobby group claimed 15,000 examples were sold locally last year "

The word "examples" here, is that what we'd call "Units" here in the US?

The negative bias of Tesla here on HN is ridiculous. Why is this in the top 20 stories on HN right now?

Because Tesla and Musk personally are serial over promisers and deliver late constantly, combined with a very vocal fanbase to oppose against it engenders a lot of sour feelings. The whole "Starship colonizes Mars" plan in particular is a massive pipe dream.

There's a typo in the title that's not in the article—‘were’ wrong, not ‘where’ wrong.

s/where/were/

When?

Always.

With 50% YoY growth, next year number will be close to 18000.

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