Tesla used car price bubble pops, weighs on new car demand

Yeah - agree on this. In my anecdotal experience, Tesla owners typically are educated professionals who are well established in their career and/or finances. They're also 90% homeowners because of the charging logistics (charger in garage). Unsurprisingly, these people are also typically invested into politics.

Exactly. Your typical luxury EV buyer is not unplugged from politics.

The Chevy EV SUVs that are coming out next year seem very compelling in terms of price and range. We just replaced my wife's RAV4 with an EV, and we went with the ID.4. You'd probably be happy with that coming from an Escape, though it's still on the pricey side.

I think your second paragraph is imperative. The question was always what Teslas headstart in EVs would mean. Fundamentally it might just turn out the answer is "not very much".

There might be more to it, but it sure seems like not. There’s been a boom in EV demand every time gas has gone up, and it’s fallen off when prices drop. This used to happen with hybrids too, same cadence.

Neither of your examples (Ford not selling colorful cars, and your brother wanting you to get a car for macho reasons) seems to have anything to do with people choosing an automotive brand for political identity reasons.

"Truck or not truck" is plausibly a political identity matter, but "truck" is not a brand. Such people will like a truck from any truck company, if that truck is perceived to be big and manly enough.

>Ford said "They can have any color as long as it's black." His competitors capitalized on this mistake - people wanted colored cars. Since the 1920's colored cars are the norm.

This was founded in a technical decision. Paint technology at the time was not great and could deteriorate in short order if not properly applied. The colored paints had to be painstakingly applied in multiple coats over many days. Which required having enormous lots devoted to nothing but watching paint dry. Black paint was more forgiving and a quick application still looked reasonable, allowing units to be produced more quickly.

I bet their robot beats both, the roadster and cyber truck. Spandex costumes are cheaper and already available everywhere.

If Tesla were to only keep the hardcore customer base it would massively fail.

Their goal is to be the most popular brand. In that case, the hardcore user base becomes only a small percentage.

The parent comment said this is vastly overblown, because 'average people' don't know who Musk is.

If 'average people' won't buy a Tesla, then this line of reasoning is moot?

There are so many Teslas in Los Angeles it’s called the California Camry.

Your average Joe didn't know who Mike Lindell was until a couple of years ago either (even with his ads on news channels). Among a certain crowd, Musk is being hailed as a champion of free speech and a warrior against cancel culture. These are not Tesla drivers.

Everything Elon has done on Twitter over the past couple months. My mom is in the same situation; she was considering a Tesla but now won't be caught dead in one.

Surely there's no difference between people who have been dead for decades and someone who chooses every day to actively put himself in the spotlight by doing stuff ranging from stupid to awful.

Really sad fall from grace for Elon. Could've just kept working.

Sure, plenty of other carmakers have committed vile sins. But the Musk Twitter nonsense is very current, which makes it harder to stomach than Henry Ford's anti-semitism over 100 years ago.

And let's not pretend Elon is sticking up for "free speech." He's censoring folks who don't agree with him. That isn't free speech, unless you subscribe to fascist definitions of "free speech."

It's not just his politics.

He's running Twitter in a very erratic manner and demonstrating very poor judgement. It's completely reasonable not to trust someone like that with your family's safety.

How many decades ago are we talking about?

Is he promoting free speech? Last I heard he had deleted a load of journalists accounts, before that it was deleting parady accounts. What concrete thing has he done for free speech other than offer trump his account back?

He is banning people sometimes for policies he introduced after the fact, sometimes without policy violations at all. “Free speech” is just not a defendable position for his behavior, he does not subscribe or support free speech.

I mean, I think you’ll find that Henry Ford is dead.

In general, “past, extremely dead, person was awful; this excuses the current awful person” is _not_ a great argument. It also seems to be a fairly new invention; I’ve only really seen it in the last decade.

Not even going to address the free speech thing, except to say that you must be using a very 1984 “war is peace” sort of definition there…

> If I made my purchasing decisions according to the personal failings of the corporate executive teams of all of consumer and durable goods, I might as well live in a tent in the woods.

Elon Musk's involvement with the companies he is associated with is not the usual involvement that an executive team would have. His personal brand is intermingled with the products he sells and cars are a way of signaling social status whether we like it or not. There are certainly people for whom buying a new Tesla would decrease their social capital which could have negative impacts in other areas of their life (relevant to HN, social capital converts to actual capital in many cases by opening up business opportunities).

We're in a grace period right now when it comes to driving a Tesla, where people who already owned one can't really be blamed for supporting Musk, but the day has already arrived when buying a new one will signal poor taste and lack of social acumen to much of the white collar class.

Vulgarity is relative so if your crowd isn't this crowd, fine. But you can't blame people for wanting to avoid putting stigma on themselves when there are other EVs on the market nearly as good as Teslas which don't have the same toxicity.

Buying a Tesla has a direct impact on Musk’s wealth and ability to lobby and spread his values, which are diametrically opposed to mine. I’ll spend my money elsewhere.

You're treating it like people who would judge you based on the car you drive make some kind of high-minded ethical choice, but they're in reality looking for a reason to get their peers to accept a smaller group of people that still includes them, because that makes them relatively speaking higher status. They can't just make things up because they couldn't coordinate around that, but with Elon acting like a lighthouse, they can invent a new norm and benefit from being the first to adopt it.

Are there any brands you pick or avoid because of their politics? Hobby Lobby, Amazon, etc?

I’m not obsessively political about my purchases, but I’m also not 100% amoral/apolitical. I’m curious if anyone really is.

If you’re going to make the “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” point, then why bother with an EV?

For the same price, you can get a nicer ICE.

That is why Elon’s actions are so weird. I agree with you that a chicken sandwich or paper towel executive can do whatever, but EVs are a status and signaling thing…

If only the world were made up of more free thinking people like you. Seems like these days everything has to fit into either a blue or red box. Ugh.

What are your thoughts on countries sanctioning Russia

This is their real problem long term.

Elon is a loud mouthed idiot, but the world is full of loud mouthed idiots.

What's lasting, however, is that reputation for making poorly built vehicles. Even today, people would rather buy Japanese, Korean, or German than to buy, say, a buick. All because the reputation for making poorly built vehicles was never shaken by some American auto makers. I think Tesla will suffer the same fate, because to date, they haven't even conceded that they may have an issue.

The styling looks really dated now too. Look at a Tesla next to one of the new Mercedes or BMW EV models. It's not good.

Hero vs. vilain real life storytelling is something we see too much of, and I'm always amazed that otherwise smart people partake in this without seeming to realize. Is it just me or hasn't everyone been taught that idolization (and it's reverse) is generally not good?

> yes, the CEO has an impact on things, but probably not as much as some people think.

Considering the fact that he is the CEO of at least 3 huge companies, and that he has the same 24 hours/day as the rest of us, many of which he spends shitposting on Twitter, it’s clear CEO is at best a part time job (at least the way Musk does it).

The guy expects his workers to put in 80 hours a week at their jobs. At best completely foregoing sleep, he can do the same for 2 of his CEO roles, meaning that one is going completely neglected according to his own standards.

Rational or not, it is a phenomenon. https://hbr.org/2016/06/is-it-safe-for-ceos-to-voice-strong-.... I think Musk being so outspoken only amplifies it one way or another.

I wonder how aligning with the conservative wing of global politics who are so aggressively against the climate change mitigation agenda shows he is "solidly for saving the planet".

Classical "works on my machine!".

I think many people base their entire impression of teslas based on these reports, which are at best incomplete truths/summaries.

Things that I can attest to (for HN folks who may be considering a Tesla):

1. Model Xs always have problems. The gull wing doors often have issues. It wouldn’t surprise me if this is bringing the rating of the entire brand down.

2. The first 6 months or so of production of any new model (not refreshed, just new) has been super sketchy. Tesla does not do this well. That said, they seem to clean it up relatively quickly, but imho it never should have happened in the first place.

3. Once they get past the initial production hiccups of a model, they seem to be very consistent. I had heard stories of Model Ys having build issues, so I accepted mine at the showroom rather than having it delivered. I had an 80-point or so build quality checklist that I told them I wanted to review. They said that they hadn’t seen build quality issues in “a long time” (this was in 2021, over a year after model y release), but they were fine with it. I found no issues. I think that this is fairly standard. Do they have Mercedes level of build quality? No. Do these flaws happen often enough that one should expect it in their new Tesla? Also no. I think that this is really overblown except for newly released models.

4. Regarding any sort of media/publication (perhaps not Consumer Reports, but I’m not sure), they know that they can get clicks/sales by bashing on Tesla, so I think that they often create sub-optimal testing conditions in order to guarantee a negative aspect of the review. As a simple example, I lost a lot of respect for top gear when they went on and on about how teslas aren’t good for race track driving due to the time a full charge lasts on a race track versus the time it takes to charge it to full. It was labored and disingenuous. Stock Teslas aren’t optimized for racing. Additionally, they could have charged up to 50-60% in a few minutes very easily. It really just took away from what could have been a much more interesting review if they had been more flexible (e.g., charging to a lower state of charge more often, like most owners do). All that said, there are some legitimate complaints to make, like some of the ones I mentioned above, but most of the click-bait pieces don’t really seem to hit the mark.

My suggestion to people is to take a test drive (at a minimum) before judging teslas. A lot of the negativity is overblown and/or misplaced, imho. The only way to know for sure is to see it for yourself.