It's so odd to see Musk become a boogeyman for the political left. I'm hard pressed to name a single individual that's doing more to combat global warming than Musk is via fleet electrification.
He openly manipulates markets without facing consequences, busts union activities, pushes to production over worker safety, uses extremely misleading marketing contrary to public safety, avoided paying taxes for years while becoming the worlds richest person... and you find it odd that the political left doesn't deify him to the same degree as the tech bros?
They have produced 2 million cars thus far. They're so demand slammed that orders are for 9 months out. They just finished building Giga Berlin and Giga Austin which is going to 2x their production to more than 1 million cars / year within a couple years. They already have plans for a $25k/yr car in a couple years. And every single car manufacturer considered EV's a no-go until Tesla started shipping Model S's en masse. There is no modern EV push, no "all cars sold must be EV by 2040" in many developed countries, without Tesla.
Technically still correct even if the intent was to use the wider margins to enable growth. But more to the parent comment's point, Musk used tax credits intended to incentivize EV purchases by everyday users to inflate the prices for his cars in order to extract more value from buyers/governments.
Proven true by the fact that he had to cut pre-rebate prices after Tesla cleared the sales thresholds for the tax rebates.
Ergo, it is a factual statement to say that (1) Tesla sells a small number of (2) luxury electric cars to (3) wealthy people.
[edit] As for the government subsidies... [1]
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-list-government-su...
Tesla delivered 310k vehicles in Q1: https://tesla-cdn.thron.com/static/IOSHZZ_TSLA_Q1_2022_Updat...
310 is 14.4% of 2148, and it implies an annualised rate of 1240k per year. Tesla production and deliveries are growing exponentially, Toyota deliveries are shrinking. Last year in Q1 toyota delivered much less compared to 2020 and while this year it’s recovering it’s still delivering 170k less cars in Q1 2022 compared to Q1 2020. Tesla just opened two new factories and this can feasibly double its capacity by next year.
In an average year, Toyota ships between 8 and 10 million cars, and has for a long time.
Tesla's year over year percentage increase in cars shipped has been trending down, of course, as they grow with the exception of last year.
However, last year, Tesla shipped 935K cars. Since it's just Q1 of 2022 I don't think it makes sense to make any extrapolations as to how many they will actually deliver this year, so let's use that number. I think that's generous given, you know, everything.
So, Tesla ships 9%-ish as many cars as Toyota.
To get from 900K to 10M per year, an 11X increase, would take:
- 27% year over year growth for 10 years.
- 30% year over year growth for 9 years.
- 35% year over year growth for 8 years.
- 40% year over year growth for 7 years.
- 50% year over year growth for 6 years.
As deliveries increase and the market is saturated growth rates will drop.
And that's to get to the same deliveries as just Toyota today (a company valued at 250B), when Tesla is valued at the sum total of the market cap of every other automaker on the planet, plus a utility company, plus the battery arm of Panasonic, plus a solar panel manufacturer.
The global auto market delivered 67M cars last year, of which Tesla accounted for 0.9M, or 1.3%. For comparison Porsche delivered 0.3M last year. Same ball park.
Even if Tesla doubled their deliveries this year and next year, they'd still sell a fairly small number of expensive electric cars to rich people. And that's a big if since right now is just about the single hottest auto market in history, and their deliveries remained flat quarter over quarter.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/502208/tesla-quarterly-v...
A "small number of electric cars" isn't nonsense. Ford sold as many F-150s in 2021, than Tesla has sold in it's lifetime.
Why? Because the subsequent reduction of ozone-depleting emissions has done more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions than any other measure taken, I believe roughly commensurate with the reduction you'd get from switching all power plants to renewable energy.
I have no opinion on the following:
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Pretty easy to imagine when you consider he's pushing to re-open social media platforms to the kind of abuse that (they believe) had a hand in taking down a political candidate.
He positioned himself in favor of absolute deregulation of speech by human individuals, or depending on your view, a suppression of free speech for some corporate entities by compelling them to share disagreeable viewpoints.
However even if you disagree with that take, the fact is, FSD is unsafe. It's kinda fun, but it's tried to kill me a few times, and there's myriad YouTube videos of it trying to kill people.
[edit] Elon's vision of the future is hardly some eco-leftist utopia. It's a fairly right-wing personal property forward world where inequality continues to be perpetrated by making people own (very expensive) electric cars to get around, and socializing the cost of free parking onto the poor. He's not a left-wing icon.
He's not a villain either, he's just a great marketer.
From wiki:
> According to Musk, the company's goal is to enhance tunneling speed enough such that establishing a tunnel network is financially feasible.
No fan of Musk, but if a company can bring down the cost of tunneling so that it works well for single-occupant vehicles, that would be a huge deal for multi occupancy vehicles as well. This is a goal worthy of support, at least.
[1] Amusingly, I think the Las Vegas one the company built may be the first PRT system to not be automated. For a guy who keeps touting futurism, failing to achieve similar capabilities to antecedents from 50 years ago is pretty ironic.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/elon-musk-vegas-loop-traf...
Why not beta test whether adding one extra lane of freeway, but covering it with a roof, improves traffic? I'm betting it won't.
Research by Kent Hymel of California State University of Northridge found that adding one percent more road capacity produces the exact same increase in the amount of vehicle miles traveled.
[1] https://archive.curbed.com/2020/3/6/21166655/highway-traffic...
[edit] Hong Kong is a great example.
Further you don't need to own a car to go on trips, car shares solve that! Just rent a car for the weekend when you want to leave town, or take a train.