Investors conclude that Tesla is a carmaker, not a tech firm | Hacker News Reader

Investors conclude that Tesla is a carmaker, not a tech firm

economist.com

193 pointsevo_9452 comments

I have a Tesla and I also hold a short position on TSLA. My Tesla is a great car. The best car that I've ever driven but I'm not sure if it has anything that other car manufacturers can't replicate. I think Apple can make an even better car than Tesla if they build the hardware and software like their phones and computers.

The idea that Autopilot has some magic sauce that nobody else can replicate is laughable.

> I think Apple can make an even better car than Tesla if they build the hardware and software like their phones and computers.

I'm not sure outsourcing manufacturing and focusing on design works in auto industry - but could be wrong.

"Outsourcing" is a very poor way to describe Apple's supply chain. They are deeply integrated. For example Apple owns most of the CNCs and similar equipment used. Having tight control over all logistics is core to Apple's strategy of huge global product launches.

Fisker is trying it and should have a car to market next year. They've been hitting all their targets.

They outsource their manufacturing to Magna Steyr.

like how they outsourced their chips, right? They only designed a square with a M1 stamped on it.

It does, Magna's whole business model is based around that.

Huh? The auto industry is famous for outsourcing to plants outside of the country and bring the final cars back in to the country. They are also famous for manufacturing the parts from all of the world, and then assembling them in another country. Apple's "Designed in Cupertino, assembled in ___" is the same thing.

You’re wrong. Auto manufacturers source parts from a huge variety of outside manufacturers. Auto manufacturers:

1) manage supply chain (hardest part) 2) spec parts (establish quality metrics, change small aspects of design) 3) come up with car concepts 4) assemble parts certain components (e.g. weld the frame, install all the premade parts)

They are not building or designing every component in a car - not even close.

I mean what do you expect - for them to build everything down to a screw in-house in order to do manufacturing ?

Final assembly, fit and finish - those are very important things on high end cars - and as Tesla demonstrated - not that easy to do even when you're flush with cash.

Apple outsources all of it's production - I'd be surprised if they can get premium car assembly from Foxconn model when Tesla is still having issues.

Final assembly, fit and finish aren't really the key part of what they're doing, though. There's no reason they can't outsource that too.

It’s not that they don’t build. They don’t even design a lot of the car components (incl. gear boxes, abs, traction control etc). They’re bough from OEM companies, who design and manufacture them.

> Final assembly, fit and finish - those are very important things on high end cars - and as Tesla demonstrated - not that easy to do even when you're flush with cash

Is it that hard though? The initial build problems came from ignoring industry experience about trying to automate final assembly — a step that very manufacture had tried and failed to do before.

No shame in trying it, maybe industrial robotic control have improved since then, but you usually don’t test such a thing in your assembly lines.

After Tesla ripped out the robots, I don’t know what their problem was beyond poor training and line management. Putting doors on straight — let alone with matching colors — for over a hundred years.

If it’s really hard to physically build a car, we’d see similar massive faults from Rivian and Lucid, but I’m unaware of any.

Even if that were true, you don't think Apple is capable of building out manufacturing capabilities?

Foxconn is designing an EV platform specifically for this.

https://www.foxconn.com/en-us/products-and-services/event-hi...

We'll see if it works out. Seeing as how they're Apple's biggest partner I'd be surprised if Apple one day doesn't design a car. EV's are simpler, eventually they'll all be fast and have 500 mile ranges. The platform won't matter, so what sells the car? Design.

Manga Steyr builds Jaguars, BMWs, Fiskers, and others under just this model.

The difference seems to be that Tesla was 5-10 years ahead on everything: Minimalistic interiors, modern infotainment, mobile app performance, and of course they lead the way in making electric cars viable by showing that they can both look good and blast off in record time. But you're right that other automakers see Tesla as a threat and are catching up; for example, the range and charging curve improvements on models like the EV6 / Ioniq 5 look great, assuming the charger work [in the cold].

> The difference seems to be that Tesla was 5-10 years ahead on everything...

This is pretty much the definition of a great tech product: it's ahead of anything else by N years. What makes a great technology company is that they manage to consistently maintain that lead with product after product.

We'll see if Tesla can maintain its lead. It's not looking good and it probably depends mostly on whether or not Elon Musk can regain his grip on reality.

Tesla has already lost its lead as far as the car itself. The Ioniq is an affordable car and better than Tesla Model 3/Y. Mercedes and BMW have better luxury models with EQS and i7, and the BMW i4 is more fun to drive than a Model 3. The Cadillac Lyriq costs what a Model Y does but compares favorably to the Model X. Tesla interiors feel cheap compared to other cars in their same class and they have notorious build quality issues.

They do have one major advantage, which is why I still drive a Model S, and that's the Supercharger network. It's a big deal for anyone who regularly drives a few hundred miles in their EV.

> Minimalistic interiors, modern infotainment, mobile app performance

None of that is why Tesla was ahead of everyone for so long.

It's because their cars have better range, and Tesla is still the range leader. They held four of the top six spots in 2022, and the number one is the Lucid Air (only 3k of them have actually been sold):

https://www.caranddriver.com/shopping-advice/g32634624/ev-lo...

Also, I just want to say I am categorically not an Elon or Tesla fanboi and I am rooting for other brands to meet and exceed their range performance.

Is it really that simple? Is there something about Tesla’s technology that enables longer ranges? Surely they just put in bigger batteries and charge more for the car, and competitors could also do that if it was really a primary competitive advantage of Teslas.

Many of the competitors are STILL building on an ICE chassis and stuff batteries where the center axle would have been etc. When enough of them finally switch to pure EV platforms things will quickly improve I guess. But designing a new chassis that behave as well as their previous premium models, is not something they do in 1 year so it makes sense there is some delay..

The competitors also charge much less quickly, so there's some optimization there that they lack. Like, on paper they can do 250 kW but you never get more than 100 when actually charging it etc

And they basically all did develop EV platforms, probably the main reason it took them as long to catch up as it did. But now that they have them, the benefits coming from those platforms are just enormous.

Like, on paper they can do 250 kW but you never get more than 100 when actually charging it etc

Yeah this is one area where there's a lot of deceptive marketing. For example the Kia EV6 specs list a max fast charging rate of 350 kW but what that actually means is that you need a 350 kW charging station to reach the car's actual max charging speed of 240 kW (or 180 kW, depending on the battery options).

Granted, that is still nice and fast, and the EV6 is a great car, but it's really frustrating how hard it is to compare charge speed from different manufacturers.

> For example the Kia EV6 specs list a max fast charging rate of 350 kW but what that actually means is that you need a 350 kW charging station to reach the car's actual max charging speed of 240 kW (or 180 kW, depending on the battery options).

Wow that is the scummiest thing

How is this deceptive? Anyone who has ever charged a phone is probably familiar with the concept that a higher wattage charger provides faster charging speeds - electric cars are no different. Higher power chargers charge faster is not some secret.

The car simply states the fastest DC connection it supports - 350kw. It works with any charger up to this wattage, just like my laptop charges from any USB-C source up to 100w - was I missold my laptop too because if I use a 50w charger it only charges at 50w?

EVs must charge from a huge range of different wattage chargers - I regularly switch between 7kw, 11kw, 50kw and 250 depending on the spec of the power source.

The power you get is determined entirely by the DC plug you use (and to some degree state of charge, but lets not complicate this further...) - the car has no bearing on this beyond supporting up to 350kw in this example. The car can't magically make a 50kw charger output 350kw, as nice as this might be.

The specs say: [1]

DC Fast Charge Time (10-80% @ 350 kW via Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment) Level 3 Charger: Approx. 18 min.

and

Drive Battery Energy: 77.4 kWh

The battery is 77.4 kWh. This implies the battery is charging at 180kW.

If it were taking in the full 350kW and losing 170kW as heat that would be one (inefficient and dangerous) thing, but it doesn't sound like it actually draws 350kW?

For comparison, they say 73min for charging at 50kW, which implies the battery is charging at 45kW. If we figure that same 10% loss, then to charge at 180kW it's probably drawing 200kW from the charger.

[1] https://www.kia.com/us/en/ev6/specs

[2] 70% * 77.4 kWh * (60min / 1h) / 18 min = 181 kW

As battery charges its pretty common to taper the charge rate to improve health of the battery. To my knowledge, no EV today will sit at 350kw for the full 10 to 80 percent even if it can draw this. You still get faster charge times as the full draw can usually happen at close to empty, but charge rate will taper as battery fills. 181kw average is still pretty great - there are many EVs on sale that still max draw at 50 (looking at you VW...).

If the peak current draw were 350kW then I'd agree the specs were fine.

I'd thought they were advertising a 10% to 80% charge because that's the period over which they can charge at max speed? Looking now, it seems like they start tapering at 50%, and it's peak draw is 235kW? https://www.arenaev.com/kia_ev6_crowned_the_best_charging_ev...

(I agree this is very good, but it's still wrong to quote 350kW if they never draw this much.)

"Anyone who has ever charged a phone is probably familiar with the concept that a higher wattage"

I assure you that my mother has no idea what a watt is.

> For example the Kia EV6 specs list a max fast charging rate of 350 kW but what that actually means is that you need a 350 kW charging station to reach the car's actual max charging speed of 240 kW

> it's really frustrating how hard it is to compare charge speed from different manufacturers

Is the discrepancy just the inefficiency (i.e. waste heat) of the charging circuitry and/or battery chemistry? And if so, do different EV battery+charger systems have significantly different efficiencies?

I would have expected that the consumer-facing spec is always the power taken from the grid, that there is always some inefficiency (you can draw less energy from the batteries than came out of the grid), and that the level of efficiency would be roughly similar across all cars.

If that were the case, it wouldn't be much of a problem to compare charging rates across cars. But perhaps one or more of my expectations are wrong.

Oh, and EVs presumably vary wildly in their "fuel economy" (miles per kilowatt-hour or whatever unit EV folks use), so even a "fair" comparison of charging rate presumably wouldn't paint the entire picture.

Is the discrepancy just the inefficiency (i.e. waste heat) of the charging circuitry and/or battery chemistry?

I'm not positive on the specifics but I believe it has more to do with the combination of supported voltages/amperages offered by different chargers. i.e. a "350 kW capable" charger in practice means it can do 800V charging, which other chargers of lower kW ratings typically can't do, and the EV6 requires 800V to reach its max charge speed but can't actually handle a high enough amperage to get to 350 kW.

Like I said though, I might be confused on some of the details there, but I'm fairly positive it's not just waste heat...dissipating 110kW of waste heat would require some pretty insane cooling hardware.

This is indeed a good point. A more relevant measure of charging speed would be something like "miles per hour at EPA rated efficiency", though even that gets messy since most cars don't charge at a linear speed. And I haven't seen any car manufacturers use this metric other than Tesla, who like to brag about their supercharger stations exceeding 1,000 MPH of charging speed (though only the newest stations can just barely do that, for very short durations, and only on certain car models). "Time from 20%-80% charge" would also be a better metric, due to non-linear charging speed curves, but I haven't seen that one used much either.

> A more relevant measure of charging speed would be something like "miles per hour at EPA rated efficiency", though even that gets messy since most cars don't charge at a linear speed.

Pretty much the only time charging speed even matters is the "road trip" mode, where you are driving further than a single battery charge in one day and you want to stop as little as possible. In that mode, all I really want to know is what my duty cycle will be, e.g. "every 5 hours of driving you'll need to stop to charge for 30 minutes."

If I'm not in road trip mode, then as long as I can Level 2 charge overnight and/or all day at work, I would barely care what the peak charge rate is. It would still be nice to have something quick for the rare pickle (and of course road trips), but it doesn't seem like that big of a deal. I guess it's so prominent in marketing because range anxiety is still so deep in our mindset?

> The competitors also charge much less quickly

Counterintuitively, it can be cheaper timewise (and money-wise) to spec and build a new factory than to re-tool one that was custom-built to manufacture cars with a large set of core assumptions about power plant and drive train.

It's not just the platform. Another hindrance is baseline expectations: if Tesla designs the exterior strictly form-follows-cda, it's the "Tesla style". If an ICE maker does the same they break brands identity. Same for interior minimalism. Same for configuration options. They are used to selling a product that is basically solved (consider how cheap you can get e.g. a Dacia) and filled whatever capacity in terms of mass, cost and complexity with extra bells and whistles. That their customers now expect, ICE or not. Or that they suspect their customers to still expect, that's perfectly sufficient to never dare going a bit leaner. But for a BEV the manufacturer mostly sells a battery (in terms of mass, in terms of cost, in terms of quality) and the entire rest needs to be lean. Lean in cost, lean in complexity, lean in physical characteristics like mass and cda like it wasn't really all that necessary with the ICE.

A trivial example (in unnecessary complexity, physical properties not really involved): on the German website, when you pretend to be ordering an Audi A6 you get twelve different sets of wheels to choose from at five price points. And that's before you add winter wheels to the mix. And tire options, and different approaches to the pressure gauge problem and theft preventing bolts. The Tesla S offers a choice between baseline and expensive an optional winter wheel. Now this isn't an example that directly relates to range, but it's organisational cruft. They need to have boatloads of people employed only for solving various aspects of their solution to the made-up problem of not enough wheel choice (all the way from design to spare parts logistics..) and that robs focus. Those people might actually have better careers than their peers dealing with batteries and they do compete for intraorganizational attention. It's all rooted in customer expectations built over decades of inventing car problems to solve better than the competition, after the ICE was basically done. New, BEV-specific lines can help (apparently the e-tron gets by with only eight sets of wheels at two price points, yay!), but they are far from being as much of a fresh start as that blank slate as Tesla has been.

This is a huge dealbreaker for me tbh. Tesla's competitors are mostly still using an electrified ICE platform, showing even now they're years behind. It's comparable to countries who were pioneers in broadband internet and who are now lacking in progress and falling behind, or like MS Internet explorer that totally stagnated and held back browser technology.

Can competitors source the raw metals required in sufficient quantities to put bigger batteries in their cars?

Yes. And if Tesla would move to block them from doing so, they would set themselves up for an anti-competition suite of epic proportions in all markets, from the US over the EU all the way to China.

> if Tesla would move to block them from doing so

Tesla is in no position to do so. They have a strong position in battery assembly, but zero direct presence in extraction or refining.

The problem of procurement is about access to Lithium and Nickel ores. Telsa has a joint partnership with a Nickel mine in New Caledonia and rights on mining Lithium in Nevada. GM, Ford don't and there is a global shortage, so I don't see them succeeding in battery production long term. If they source batteries from Panasonic, they're buying an inferior battery. If they source from Tesla, that's obviously positive for Tesla.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56288781

If you hold a de-facto monopoly on certain taw materials, you are legally obliged to share it with competitors.

Plus: Tesla's battery cells came for a very long time from Panasonic. So much for inferior tech.

not quite, if you bought it in the open market its 10~20% more $ than having a fixed longterm contract. and ICE carmakers usually have one OEM like samsung and Panasonic who have interest in getting best price for each cell . Tesla has inhouse cell production capacity and uses cells from all oems to get the best possible price / cell . This will give tesla a permanent 5% lead (outside of china) in cell pricing.

Tesla's range advantage exists primarily in advertising. In real world tests it ranges from barely higher to moderately lower to equivalent competitors.

As batteries were even more expensive years ago, Elon put energy efficiency above everything else, like putting in lighter seats than ICE car manufacturers and optimizing the thermal system (octovalve).

The ,,false advertising'' that others say come from the fact that when you drive fast it doesn't matter how energy efficient you are, so it works out only with low speeds.

They also have by far the best charging network. IMO Teslas have the best long range driving experience. This detail is important although not the only thing to consider. However, it looms large in how Americans think about their cars.

I say this as someone who owns an electric car by a different manufacturer.

> They also have by far the best charging network.

In the US.

And the US drives these crazy valuations.

Of course, the US and China are the biggest global markets accounting for need and purchasing power. Europe has 400M more people than the US, but not the need for cars like the countries mentioned.

Supercharger network is also much better than the other networks in Europe as well in the current state.

Yeah, but there it doesn't matter. You can take your €15k Dacia Spring there and use the Tesla chargers :-)

It's true, but the cost is much higher. Normally I see folks using another vendor nearby in the same parking lot as as the Supercharger as they can get a better rate. In the future I think the other vendors will catch up unless some EV bubble bursts.

They also have by far the best charging network

This isn't a defensible position though for Tesla. New charging networks are coming online at a furious rate. I'm not sure maintaining their own network makes sense unless everything becomes compatible and they use it as an additional revenue stream. But for them to compete when every other auto manufacturer is subsidizing shared networks is risky.

A pretty easy choice when the other charges don't work on some of the busiest travel days in the US: https://youtu.be/S4e8GfBzqSk

I think it's range per $, and I think tesla just about started loosing there last year.

Does tesla have better range because they have better batteries, or just bigger batteries?

I always thought their valuation was more tied to the Chinese market which the CCP has made hostile to anything but electric going forward.

I don’t know if people have heard, but China is one of the bigger market. Heh.

You mean the range that a major governmental agency declared to be false advertising just a few days ago?

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/03/south-korea-fines-tesla-for-...

> South Korea’s antitrust regulator said it would impose a 2.85 billion won ($2.2 million) fine on Tesla for failing to tell its customers about the shorter driving range of its electric vehicles in low temperatures.

As a Tesla owner: range and ambient air temperature are significantly correlated (i.e., your 300 miles of range plummets to ~120 when below freezing).

But, on a good, sunny, warm day, their range claims are correct.

I bet if Tesla were in Detroit instead of California, they'd remember that winter exists.

There's plenty of snowy winter weather within an hour or two drive of LA. I'm sure they test in the Angeles Mountains as much as every other car manufacturer I saw test up there when I lived in those mountains.

The place where Teslas form the largest fraction of the car population is Norway. They don't seem to have more problems with winter than any other car brand. I have driven my 2015 Mode S 70D at 1000 m altitude, -20°C, on numerous occasions with no problems at all.

My Model S is certainly better at handling the winter than a Nissan Leaf of the same vintage.

Most Norwegians in my experience are a lot happier wearing a woollen jumper or layers to cope with their weather, whereas many Americans are not happy unless their car is cranking to keep the interior at 72 while it's in single digits outside.

Heh, in my experience most Americans start complaining if the heat isn't cranked up to 80F in the dead of winter. But come summer, everybody wants the AC cranked down to 60F. T-shirts in the winter and stylish jackets in the summer, nobody dresses for the seasons.

Personally, I prefer an open window. Fresh air is almost always better than warm/cold stale air. But I think that'll kill a car's aerodynamics anyway, maybe worse for efficiency than running the heater/AC.

You can set your ac or heat to pull air in from outside. With the added benefit that most nice vehicles have an outside air filter to filter the fresh air first.

Hell, higher end vehicles will even auto-switch to recirc air based on outside air quality (particulate count). Surprised me the first time I saw it on my Jaguar.

My driving in the mountains in the winter was in shirtsleeves and bare feet. No trouble keeping the interior of the car warm. Also because it is electric I can sleep in it and be kept warm without the risk of being poisoned by exhaust fumes or kept awake by the noise. There was one occasion when I had to move my car to the other side of the car park because someone parked their ICE car next to mine and left it idling all night while they slept. As this was in an otherwise silent landscape it was pretty annoying.

And IIRC from a previous post, Tesla by far wins the "loses least range during shitcold temps".

Their new octovalve heat pump stuff makes a significant difference in cold weather. Anecdotally our Model Y (heat pump) is a bit more performant in the cold vs our 2018 Model 3 (not heat pump).

That's true with most batteries. It's foolish for car-markers to not include an air-temp variable when making range claims, I predict you will see all of them do that.

Battery longevity will also soon include depth-of-discharge and temp limits as well.

> But, on a good, sunny, warm day, their range claims are correct.

Just like FSD works, vaguely, on a good clear day (not too sunny, though, in case you blind the vision sensors!) on good roads.

Totally ready "this year".

That article states > Although we haven't tested each of the longest-range models under our own EV highway range testing procedure, we've provided the data where possible.

I don't think Tesla is as far ahead on range as everyone thinks. Highway miles are what matters and Tesla tends to be optimistic on their numbers.

https://insideevs.com/reviews/443791/ev-range-test-results/

And isn’t that battery innovation and IP that Panasonic owns?

Tesla Long Range (573km) and Mercedes EQS (566km) are basically on par. Here's a good overview by independent testers: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1k1DOw-NwvW8E8tQeXlac...

It might be on par in range, but it's far behind in terms of efficiency... and also much more expensive to boot. Also, comparing it against the Model 3 (which, I know, is not even the same league of 'luxury' as the EQS) it's even further behind in range/efficiency.

The only cars that get the 'A' rating on that spreadsheet are the two Model 3 cars (316 mile version, and 200ish mile one), the 62kWh Nissan Leaf (216mi), and a bunch of super low range cars where efficiency is easy, since weight is way lower.

Competitors are catching up, yes, but they're still pretty far behind in the efficiency game... which means that Tesla can produce quite a few more cars for the same amount of raw battery pack. Which drives better margins and more production capacity.

Worth noting that list is each model's top trims. The Model 3 Long Range is currently unavailable for purchase.

I wish the EPA would clamp down on manufacturer's range estimates, as those ranges are theoretical (perfect driving with no real acceleration, no climate control, etc). We need practical city/highway range like we get for ICE cars. My EV6 is rated at 310, but driving as conservatively as possible in Houston I get more like 285. On a road trip where it was mostly exposed freeway and cruise control, my range was closer to 220.

Should also probably disclose range in freezing temps as well (I'm in Houston so I don't consider that as much as others). The first manufacturer to solve that problem well would possibly be a better car than one with a larger theoretical range.

they are the leader in claimed range not realize range.

Real world tests show something different:

"Every Tesla we've tested has failed to hit its EPA range estimate"

https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/electric-car-range-and-cons...

I blame the EPA just because they've allowed two sets of EPA test suites to co-exist under the same marketing term.

> Minimalistic interiors

Is this something you see as a benefit? For me Tesla's overall aesthetic, including both their exterior looks and interior design, along with the absence of physical controls that go long with that represent their biggest downsides (outside of build quality).

The giant tablet screen that sticks out like a sore thumb is the opposite of minimalistic, or minimalistic in the worst way.

I wonder how long Tesla can get away with not offering CarPlay/Android Auto functionality. The lack of that basic, cheap, and frequently used feature disqualifies any car from consideration in my view.

I don’t love that I have to use the touch screen to open my glove box, and I certainly think there are a lot of UI issues (and the lack of integration with phones beyond regular bluetooth), but one thing I appreciate is that there aren’t any blinding dash lights. I can see a lot better at night in my Tesla as a consequence compared with any other vehicle I’ve driven.

I have not driven many cars, but I feel like there is usually a dial to adjust the brightness of dash lights. At least in Toyotas.

Hah, I had a Camry for 10 years and never knew it had such a dial!

You should read the instruction manual to the over $30k machinery you purchased. There's likely many features you didn't realize were there.

Joke’s on you. My Camry was only $25k new.

Congrats on being one of the 10,000, but given that my '81 VW Vanagon has adjustable dashlights, I'd not buy a modern car if it didn't have that feature. Rheostats aren't exactly cutting-edge technology (though I'm sure a modern car uses software to run the driver that sends commands down the CANBUS, which then...)

Relax. I didn’t say they don’t exist or that my Camry didn’t have it. I’m just saying I didn’t know it had it.

I have a dedicated glove box button in my Tesla S. It's one of the few dedicated buttons.

Most cars (all?) have the option to dim the dashboard backlight.

I find Saab's solution to be extremely elegant - on some, if not all models, there's a night mode button - what happens is that all non-essential instruments are simply dimmed to black (leaving only the speedo lit), until something happens which warrants your attention; the instrument in question will then come on.

Simultaneously, it dims all button backlights &c to just about off, so that you only get some assistance in locating the control you're after, not losing your night vision the moment you let your eyes stray from the road.

I had a Saab 93 estate (station wagon, for the benefit of non-UK residents) with this feature and loved it. I'd often use it and then also dial the brightness all the way down. Really helped to reduce visual fatigue when driving at night.

The Nissan Leaf lets you dim the dashboard lighting really far down. I’ve never had a problem with visibility at night.

People ooh and aah over the tacky gigantoscreen in Teslas, but it was really a hack to avoid having to design the usual litany of buttons and knobs that go onto a dash. Thankfully most other manufacturers haven't gone as totally screen-centric as Tesla (yet...)

Yup the "minimalism" in Teslas is just a hack to forego complex interior designs that they are holistically unable to reproduce in their "giga"factories. It helps to reduce complexity and weight if you just slap an iPad next to the steering wheel.

What's REALLY bad though is that other manufacturers rushed after Tesla and turned their brains off. Now we have a bunch of electric cars with crappy plastic interiors (light weight for range) and shitty tablets as user interface. Some are recognizing these horrifying mistakes that will cost lives but it will take years to recover because a lot of projects are too far ahead already to be changed or canceled.

I mainly speak from extensive experience with Volkswagen - the crappy capacitative touch buttons on the steering wheel will finally go. The new CEO Blume is not as blind as Herbert Diess - he doesn't view Tesla as the second coming of the iPhone, especially since Teslas continue to stagnate in quality and other manufacturers are quickly catching up.

Good luck outproducing Hyundai, Kia, Volkswagen, BMW, Audi... time was Teslas ally especially because Toyota kept insisting on Hydrogen cars for so long and VW fucked up software development so bad with CARIAD that Konrad Zuse is spinning in his grave ready to produce energy for all EVs sold.

I credit Tesla with 2 things:

- Opening the EV market and pushing other manufacturers to invest

- Great engineering regarding battery and range (in the past)

The list of issues is longer nowadays and I am not willing to forgive quite as much as in 2014 with great alternatives on the market.

Yeah it's ugly as shit. Their build quality didn't help any of that either.

Personally, I kind of like the Tesla exteriors with the exception of the nose of the 3.

The interiors though are pure trash. They look unfinished and designed by Rule of Cool, instead of practicality.

>> Minimalistic interiors

> Is this something you see as a benefit?

Yes. It's a distraction free operating environment. Tesla's aesthetic choices are semi-scandinavian/Ikea. Minimal doesn't have to be that style specifically. The early New Beetle did a passable job. The typical car is like MS Word with every ribbon open at once. A minimalist interior is focus mode.

The lack of tactile buttons increases distraction considerably.

I cannot activate most controls on a Tesla without taking my eyes off the road.

They also seemingly refuse to keep the GUI stable for more than three or four months at a time.

I agree. minimalistic design != "lack of tactile buttons"

Multi-touch capacitance with tuned solid state haptic feedback and fused OLED display technology with very thin tempered glass is a wonderful thing, especially considering how far it has gotten since 2007) but it has remained resounding and disappointingly flat.

While manufacturers are working with different display dimensions and gentle curves or even folds, I agree there is a need for topologically shaped glass to bring the tactile affordances of traditional buttons to software enhanced user interfaces. I'm not a display engineer but I suspect that different glass thicknesses result in poor visuals so we will have to wait for organic magneto-laser displays.

Most car buyers don't actually want minimalistic interiors.

Some people like black overstuffed couches. Some people like Danish modern.

Last time I went car shopping, I saw a digital speedometer which irritated me for some reason so I rejected that model from further consideration.

I take it you're not shopping for new cars then? the cheapest new car I'm aware of that has analog gauges is a porsche.

btw I have the same preference, just letting you know you are in for a disappointment.

You just haven't looked cheap enough. For example, the Fiat Panda [1] the Nissan leaf [2] and the Kymco VSR-125 [3] all have analog speedometers.

[1] https://www.topgear.com/car-reviews/fiat/panda [2] https://www.parkers.co.uk/nissan/leaf/review/interior/ [3] https://www.kymco.co.uk/scooters-and-motorcycles-range/125cc...

Seems to be a market difference? Of the three cheapest cars I could think of in my local market (Honda Civic, Kia Picanto, and Nissan Micra), only the Honda Civic has a digital speedometer.

Of course some do. The point is the vast majority do NOT want the interior of a Tesla.

They want everything in the same darn place that 99% of cars have it, with physical switches to be able to change things so you can just feel what you are doing without taking your eyes off the road.

Most people see the interior of a Tesla as a complete gimmick.

I trust HN's opinion on many things, but definitely not on their opinion of what the vast majority of people think is fashionable. HN is solidly "overstuffed black leather couch" in their fashion sense.

I would say the other way round. Hacker News feels like a Danish modern crowd. Personally I am all for minimalism but Teslas are plain ugly.

I consider myself to be minimalist/modern in my choices, and in my opinion the Tesla is a garbage nightmare that took all of the complexity away from physical buttons and just shoved into a hard to navigate touchscreen menu with poor visual placement. I guess that makes me an overstuffed black leather couch type in your opinion.

I think a lot of car manufacturers have gone the path of no physical switches and it's becoming irritating. You shouldn't have to navigate screens to adjust your hvac while driving.

VW admitted it was a mistake and will go back to physical buttons with next gen of their models.

This move gives me hope that by the time an EV is practical in my corner of the world it'll be less annoying, too : )

their sales indicate otherwise

No they don't. We have the small rich population that want a new fancy toy. I've seen it with everyone I know that has a Telsa. "Oh look how geeky I am, this is so neat I have a big screen!".

That is the insane minority.

I know you’re coming back in a few minutes to cite your sources. Excited to see the results of this survey!

I know it's personal preference but I think a good number of people don't know they will be fine without 15 buttons on the steering wheel or 10 different buttons for climate control. I haven't missed any of that moving to a Model 3.

Most of them would rather have buttons on their doors to control the things that have been controlled that way for generations, though. You shouldn't have to hunt through a menu to lock a door.

Why do you have to manually lock a car door? I’ve never pressed the lock/unlock icon on the screen in 4 years of driving my Model 3.

But by the way, you don’t have to hunt thru a menu for it, the lock status icon is pressable and it’s always on the home screen.

Lock and unlock is like start and stop buttons. Almost totally extraneous and easily inferred 99% of the time.

> Why do you have to manually lock a car door? I’ve never pressed the lock/unlock icon on the screen in 4 years of driving my Model 3.

Conveniently accessible manual door lock/unlock mechanisms become non-negotiable the moment your software-based power-dependent interface becomes inoperable, especially if that's during some emergent crisis like say a giant lithium battery letting the smoke out.

This isn't just some hypothetical:

https://stealthoptional.com/news/tesla-driver-trapped-in-bur...

An emergency is a valid concern and I believe all cars, regardless of Tesla, that feature electronic (fancy) doors also feature physical escape latches. In the Model 3 you can pull up on a handle on the door to force the door open without the power required to first roll down the window to clear the weather seal this will also unlock the door as well.

From your own linked article:

> Juhta criticized the emergency protocol for Tesla’s electric cars, saying that it isn’t intuitive enough.

Which is kinda ironic to me considering anytime a new rider is in my car I make sure to tell them about pressing the small button to open the door because they seem to find that escape latch on their own and often think it's just a regular open door latch.

> Which is kinda ironic to me considering anytime a new rider is in my car I make sure to tell them about pressing the small button to open the door because they seem to find that escape latch on their own and often think it's just a regular open door latch.

Is it the same in the Model Y from the article as your Model 3?

It is, but the manual latch isn't on the door at all in the back seat, so passengers are unlikely to mix it up there.

Being ahead on everything doesn't help if the larger players can pick and choose improvements and learn from your mistakes and adapt.

It really doesn't help when the leadership of said car company is erratic and eroding the goodwill of the brand while people generally feel comfortable with more established carmakers. I feel pretty confident that major automakers are going to be around in 10 years. Buying a Tesla already feels like a bit of a gamble to me just because of its newness.

With an economy that's already slowing it could really hurt them when it's likely fewer people are buying cars and will be more cautious about it when they do. "Maybe I'll hold off another year and see how the new crop of cars compares with the Tesla."

I haven’t checked in a while, but last time I looked Tesla was supply constrained—they couldn’t make cars fast enough to meet demand, so (unless that has changed) they’re probably not too worried about hypothetical demand reduction.

Their global backlog of orders has gone from ~470k to ~74k over the last few months. There is no backlog of orders at all in the US or Canada and the backlog for the rest of the world is dropping quickly.

https://twitter.com/TroyTeslike/status/1609346097733828609?s... (This is the most recent data made public, the Patreon data goes through Dec 31 with the numbers quoted)

Just to add, I used the 'build a tesla' recently for Model Y and was quoted delivery time of about 30 days. Not sure if that's accurate, but doesn't sound too supply constrained compared to discussions with other automakers I've spoken to recently (6-12 months out in some cases). I backed out because I'm really concerned with build quality issues that seem to be worsening, and generally losing confidence daily this company will be around in 5 years.

I don't think this is true anymore, since they recently started rolling out discounts on vehicles, which is usually a sign of overstock / slowing demand [0]

[0] https://www.torquenews.com/14335/tesla-sweetens-deal-discoun...

They were 10 years ahead, 5 years ago. The market has realized that.

It's also starting to creep into the mainstream consciousness that EVs aren't a good long-term solution to our poor transportation system.

The answers to our woes are joint transportation and housing infrastructure. However those are anathema to the American character. I don't see it happening.

Tesla's only competition is Chinese EV makers, everyone else can't make enough cars, and none of them are profitable.

Tesla are 5-10 years ahead on profit, due to adopting cost savings such as no buttons, more miles per kwh, thus smaller batteries, casting most of the body in 2 or 3 pieces.

And then there's in house software creation, vs everyone else. Software makes their use of their motors more efficient.

That's before you have the problem with how to get rid of your non EV business.

Then you have battery tech, opening lithium refining facilities, owning more of the supply chain. Everyone else will be paying extra for batteries for decades.

> And then there's in house software creation, vs everyone else. Software makes their use of their motors more efficient.

You think automakers don't know about software? You do realize that what the ECU has to do to keep internal combustion engines running as efficiently as they do today is at least an order of magnitude more complex that electric motor management

> That's before you have the problem with how to get rid of your non EV business.

That's an asset, not a liability. Some places in the world are unlikely to have the infrastructure to support a conversion to EVs in the next decade or two. It doesn't mean we stop trying but having mature technology that you don't need to invest a lot in to support a niche use case is a good thing, not a bad thing.

> Then you have battery tech, opening lithium refining facilities, owning more of the supply chain. Everyone else will be paying extra for batteries for decades.

There's no reason to believe that Tesla's suppliers will remain exclusively theirs unless they've signed massive longterm deals that the public is unaware of.

You can listen to what the CEO's of the 'big 3' are saying. Tesla has vertically integrated. The big 3 spent the past 50 years doing the opposite. They use many of the same ODM/OEMs for things with small twists here and there. The companies that make those things for that supply chain are behind tesla. For creating a new market like tesla is in you probably want vertical integration again to iterate on it. It was one of the 2 key innovations Ford had early on (as they were not the first car company). But as years went on it made less sense to do that. Now it is making sense again to do it.

> You think automakers don't know about software?

Judging from my experience with cars' integrated sat-nav, speech recognition and bluetooth hands-free I would say most automakers do not consider good software to be a priority.

Yes, automakers outsourced all their software, someone else made the ECUs.

https://www.teslarati.com/volkswagen-herbert-diess-third-par...

Tesla will be Tesla's supplier https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-19/tesla-con...

It sounds like you're saying that Tesla has no competition if you ignore their competition. You can't be dismissive of Chinese EV makers, who are rapidly encroaching on western markets and are reshaping the motor industry. Here in Norway I'm noticing more and more Chinese EVs on the road and they are competing at all levels of the market, from "affordable" to high end. To add to those numbers, many originally Western marquees now have full or partial Chinese ownership.

Many Chinese companies are multifaceted or have co-ownership with suppliers. For example, look at a company like BYD, which appears to be out producing Tesla and has yet to fully enter many markets. They also build their own batteries. The Chinese motor industry is a formidable competitor.

Indeed, that's Tesla's only competition, BYD's numbers include hybrids though, and ASP is much lower.

>Minimalistic interiors, modern infotainment, mobile app performance,

Which are all gimmicks.

The vast majority of people don't want that from a car. I've been in Telsas plenty of time and absolutely hate it. Yeah it looks cool for a moment, but I would never want that.

I for one absolutely love it. It doesn’t just look cool, it’s maximally functional for all of my use cases.

Yeah, I totally love having to take my eyes off the road in order to press any button in the cockpit. Truly brilliant design!

Why are you pressing buttons in the “cockpit” while you’re supposed to be driving? </s>

The “cockpit” button-obsession on HN is really cute sometimes. As if most drivers with button-filled “cockpits” actually feel around for them while still looking at the road.

Everything timing critical for driving is either fully automated or on the wheel in a Tesla, by the way.

I don't think the obsession is "on HN", I think the obsession is made by literally every other car manufacturer in the world.

Can you control the AC fully automatically or on the wheel in a Tesla?

Which features do you have to take your eyes off the road to activate?

The infotainment system on Teslas is worse than a Nissan Sentra with CarPlay/Android Auto

If it would just integrate with airplay (and whatever the Android equivalent is) then Tesla wouldn’t need to support a one-off application for every streaming service.

You don't need a one-off application for every streaming service, those are there in case you want to use them without phone at all. Bluetooth audio is a thing, and you can stream whatever audio you want from your phone to your car audio using that.

Bluetooth audio is a poor substitute for a full UI.

> You don't need a one-off application for every streaming service, those are there in case you want to use them without phone at all

I agree. That's why it doesn't make sense that Tesla is approaching it as "bespoke or bust".

> Bluetooth audio is a thing, and you can stream whatever audio you want from your phone to your car audio using that.

Yes, but "streaming a single audio track (with low audio quality)" is pretty much all BlueTooth is fit for, and the problem is much larger than that--a luxury car should be able to stream higher quality audio and it should also be able to stream video (e.g., HBO, Paramount Plus, etc). Moreover, it should facilitate a media browsing experience through the touch screen. First of all, it's limited to audio--it doesn't help me stream HBO or Paramount or any other video service.

It’s illegal in most states to stream video on a console that the driver can see while they are driving.

Apple and I believe Google are very strict about which apps can be used for CarPlay/Android Auto. There would be major repercussions if they weren’t.

Of course. I’m not arguing for video while driving.

> First of all, it's limited to audio--it doesn't help me stream HBO or Paramount or any other video service.

Tesla has apps for a bunch of video streaming services. And for those it doesn't have, you can just use the built-in web browser. It works just fine (assuming you are in a parked mode, they won't work while you are driving for obvious safety reasons).

The built-in web browser is extremely slow and tedious to use (at least in my 2022 Model Y), but yes, it technically works.

> in making electric cars viable by showing that they can both look good and blast off in record time

I still don't get the 'look good' part, why do non-ICE cars always need to have a different look that what is already popular/proven in the market. The traditional automakers are still doing this today with their first big pushes in EV. If they don't sell they'll blame 'the market' for not wanting EV, but in reality it could be folks just aren't interested in the design / don't what to make the fashion statement.

Almost as if ICE car companies don’t want electric to sell. BMW was the worst of the lot. They’re doing better now.

I don't think that makes them conspiring or evil. Just pragmatic.

"We have tens of billions and tens of decades invested in 'perfecting' ICE. This is a huge upheaval" is an attitude I'd expect any of them to take (while still recognizing they need to see where the market is heading and planning for that).

And also, I get that it's subjective, but the Model Y does not look anything resembling "good" to me. It's like a weird futuristic Aztek. It's not attractive.

> The idea that Autopilot has some magic sauce that nobody else can replicate is laughable.

Apparently GM's Supercruise is better, and cheaper.

I got enhanced autopilot in my first Tesla. Except for changing lanes, things like summon and autopark are just toys. The auto lane chance is so glitchy I decided I was better off saving seven grand on my second Tesla.

But if Enhanced Autopilot was 1-2 grand, I'd have bought it without regrets.

>"I was better off saving seven grand"

Seven grand for a software update sounds like a ripoff. Especially just for lane change.

Wait until you learn that "Full Self Driving" is $15,000USD right now.

If it was real, and legally letting one sleep at the wheel someone might pay for it. As it is now - meh. They can have their soft and I'll keep my 15G

Wait what, SuperCruise better then AP? Any sources?

Well, that's highly subjective based on reviewer.

But, in general, Supercruise is hands-free and doesn't require jiggling the steering wheel every 30 seconds.

From what I understand, Supercruise is a lot more limited in where it'll work, compared to Autopilot.

But, EV market options are so limited that the differences really don't matter, unless that kind of functionality is top on your list. In my case, I bought a second Tesla because of the charging network, and because I needed a 3rd row.

Independent reviews indicate that GM SuperCruise is superior to Tesla AutoPilot in most areas, but Tesla does still have some features that GM lacks.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/21/test-driving-gm-ford-and-tes...

It's really a different approach that will yield different outcomes and experiences. Super Cruise works on "pre-mapped divided highways". That suggests it's more like hard coding most of the environment and working with HD-maps. While I don't know what Tesla Autopilot does, Tesla FSD is designed to drive with interpolation of the current input. It's a much harder problem for Tesla to solve but the results mean that it can deal with changes and unusual situations without something like massive case statements pre coding those exceptions.

This keeps coming up and I'm wondering what's Waymo's goal? Is it to be licensed self-driving product?

If that's the case and any manufacturer could just license Waymo's tech I'd think that relying on Telsa to win at autopilot is suspect.

GM’s Autonomous Cruise Program Facing NHTSA Investigation

https://www.autoweek.com/news/technology/a42268159/general-m...

Not sure what the general consensus on Tesla in Norway. Sure, they are great cars during the summer, but during the winter they severely lack the robustness of the traditional car manufacturers. One of them being able to open the car door!

Use the app to unlock the door

https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_cn/GUID-F907200...

It's hilarious that anyone would consider this an acceptable work around for such an idiotic design flaw.

It's fine for 99.9% of the time, and saves you energy. Also reduces noise when moving.

Yeah well that they omit a windshield wiper stalk is also idiotic and furthermore outright dangerous. I've done overtakes next to trailers some times in heavy rain where in a second I had to hit the wiper stalk to max. Relying on their camera-based AI to do that (yes they skip on the cost of the industry standard IR sensor for rain detection) is crazy. A german guy actually died a few years back because he was searching through the UI to find the control to set the wipers to max..

The charitable take on this is that it's an optimistic design that anticipates a future where an AI will deal with all these minor decisions. The cynical take is that it's a cost cutting measure so Tesla can sell cheaply-made cars at premium prices.

That's not charitable, that's deluded. There's nothing charitable about giving you an inferior product in the name of a hope that at some point in the future, other things will be done just as poorly.

I don't even get the AI/ML wipers. Like you say, IR (and I believe some, though a definite minority, even use electrical conductivity/resistance) auto wipers have been reliable[1] for nearly three decades now. Why do we need ML for wipers? Are we anticipating new types of rain that existing auto wipers won't recognize?

[1] To those about to say "they're not reliable", I'm yet to find one that can't be tweaked with the sensitivity controller. If anything the only flaw I have had is when my wiper _blades_ are near the end of their life and they leave a 'streak' of water droplets over the sensor, and increase the false positive.

My guess is that they already have the front-facing camera so someone suggested they can cut costs by removing the IR sensor and "just write some AI" for it. Likewise the stalk is a cost saving.

They also removed the ultrasonic parking sensors from October to use the cameras for it to save cost. Good luck for all who happen to back into stuff at night or into glass windows or something..

Love taking my gloves off to use an app in freezing weather.

Autopilot [FSD] is a boondoggle that is a distraction from their core mission. They have wasted time and resources on it, when by now they should have a cheaper mass market car and a full suite of commercial vehicles (small vans to large trucks).

Edit: yes meant FSD

I strongly disagree. Autopilot is what made them COOL and gave them their secret sauce. I used to be a major fan back in 2015 and that was an incredibly momentous initiative that cannot be understated. You can say this now with the benefit of hindsight but do not make the mistake of assuming it was all just a waste of money. Autopilot was a key driver in the hype and fanaticism that turned Tesla from a hip startup into the trendsetter for the entire industry.

"I strongly disagree. Autopilot is what made them COOL and gave them their secret sauce."

To dorks who believed the hype, yeah.

Wrong. Autopilot is a pretty standard smart cruise control, which many other carmakers have and have had for years. It works and it works well. You are thinking of FSD.

Tesla's naming continues to suck. It's very common to see people confuse Autopilot with Full Self Driving. I'm not sure this is to Tesla's benefit since every FSD snafu gets attributed to Autopilot as well in the mind of someone not following the company closely.

> The idea that Autopilot has some magic sauce that nobody else can replicate is laughable.

Openpilot by comma is very equivalent to autopilot (not FSD) and can be added on to a boring cheap car (depending on that car's compatibility) like a prius, corolla, or sonata, all for just about $2,000 dollars. Granted, it's a "dev-kit", requires a bit of research to install, but if you can pass the barrier it's really equivalent to autopilot and available to consumers at a price point that Tesla is not.

And if you don't want the latest and greatest (comma 3) you can get a used comma 2 or a comma knock-off "Mr One" for a few hundred dollars and still have an excellent experience for basic level 2 functionality (automated highway navigation, essentially)

Actually after having tested a couple of other cars, for instance the Renault Megane, the BMW i4 and the Mercedes EQE have better enhanced drive assistance than Tesla. For instance:

* when in full-auto on a single lane road, when there's an exit on the right the Tesla 3 almost always slightly swerve towards the exit before coming back in its lane. None of the Megane, the EQE or the BMW i4 do that.

* To overtake a slower vehicle, the Megane and i4 are better : simply push the left blinker, then the car switch lanes and accelerates BEFORE having entirely switched lane, like a human driver would do.

* The mapping and charge planning on the BMW and particularly the EQE/EQS are arguably slightly superior now to Tesla (though Tesla is still a bit easier). Renault is very close, and Kia/Hyundai isn't far behind either.

..and also the parking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsb2XBAIWyA

Wow that's a hell of a failure from Tesla. And the 3 others (Audi, BMW, Ford) just did fine.

> * To overtake a slower vehicle, the Megane and i4 are better : simply push the left blinker, then the car switch lanes and accelerates BEFORE having entirely switched lane, like a human driver would do.

Teslas do this in FSD mode.

My 2015 Seat did that too with cruise control enabled (well, minus sone stuff that is self-driving), but he did accelerate with cruise control enabled and auto-keep-distance).

No need to buy a $x FSD Tesla to get some extra.

My 2015 Model S does this, has done for a long time. No need for FSD, just Autosteer.

In Europe nobody ever buys FSD because the gimmicks are disabled for security reason (no remote summoning, no automatic parking). If that's the only feature that 7000€ buys...

> * when in full-auto on a single lane road, when there's an exit on the right the Tesla 3 almost always slightly swerve towards the exit before coming back in its lane. None of the Megane, the EQE or the BMW i4 do that.

A minor nuisance. Unless you happen to be at the ready attentively double-checking whatever the assistance is doing - then it must be infuriatingly annoying! Guess what you're supposed to be doing, all the time...

That's the point of assistance, it shouldn't need double checking by a human every time. It should just work.

Unfortunately, Autopilot currently exists in the liminal space where it should just work... Unless it doesn't, in which case it's allowed to kick out with no margin of notice time and the driver is immediately responsible for what happens next.

It's entirely possible that is an unsafe-at-any-speed configuration.

It's sketchy at best. Our newest car does emergency braking and that's it. And it's good at it, only engaging when there is a situation it feels (and is correct) about me not braking in time or hard enough. I shouldn't have to worry about it failing.

That’s the point of a Level 4 driver assistance system. Tesla’s Autopilot is 2 while Mercedes’ Drive Pilot is 3 in limited areas. Waymo is an example of a Level 4 system, albeit very limited in geographic area.

Someone tried to sell me a Tesla, and had me take it out on the highway to try Autopilot. The salesperson had the misfortune of suggesting I engage right when there was an exit coming up on the right.

It wasn't a great first user experience to have the car immediately drift right towards the guardrail crusher.

Any car behaving differently to a human driver is outright dangerous.

For example, motorcyclists depend on inferring behaviour more than the average driver. Someone swerving towards an exit is far more reliable an indicator of them taking it than a signal - many drivers don't bother using them.

Many bikers I know avoid Teslas like the plague, as they're deeply difficult to read at best, and lethal at worst.

Yowsa! Thanks for pointing this new hazard out! As someone who spends a fair amount of time on a bike in the city, I too depend on reading the body language of cars/drivers. You've given me something new and disturbing to think about...

> Any car behaving differently to a human driver is outright dangerous.

Any traffic participant (of any type) behaving sufficiently differently than the fat part of the bell curve for the situation (traffic, weather, location, vehicle type, time of day, etc) they are in is dangerous because they violate the expectations of all other road participants have for them. Other road participants need to be able to make reliable enough and accurate enough predictions of future state for things to work properly. This holds regardless of human or computer.

At least in the UK, this is why learner drivers have a clear sign on the back of the car ("L"), and people who have only just passed their test are encouraged to display a similar sign ("P").

THIS!

It is critical to be aware of the surrounding traffic, and recognizing the driving style — the wheel angle and the current balance/attitude of the cars — is critical to understanding what they'll do next.

Just one example a while ago in traffic on a highway, I slowed a bit and moved to the other side of my lane, barely thinking about it. Seconds later the car on my left suddenly drifted into my lane, right where we would have been and only feet off my front bumper. My wife exclaimed "How did you know that was going to happen?!?", and I said I'd just noticed in the corner of my vision an odd wiggle in their front wheel, like the driver's attention or direction was off.

Sussing out what a driver is doing with any intersection, regardless of their signals, is key. Are they actually setting up to turn or stop, or just going along ignorantly?

So far, I haven't yet noticed anything big from Teslas, but although I've done a lot less driving since COVID, I still have noticed that their road positions and attitudes are, ummm unique. But really good to know about this fake-move towards the exit lane — very helpful — Thanks!

> motorcyclists depend on inferring behaviour more than the average driver

And honestly it's less inference and more "I assume this person is going to try to kill me. How would they do so and how do I avoid that?"

I haven't ridden in years, but even in my car I'm allergic to being in someone's blind spot.

I 'd freak out for sure. How can you be cool with your car changing direction when it should not? And how can someone not pay attention? What will you do? Sleep? Read a book?

It tries to murder you from time to time too. This is at least a consistent glitch. I took a long road trip in a 3 with FSD and had I not been paying attention it would have sent me into a median once, and off to the ditch a second time.

Thanks, dad!

> The mapping and charge planning on the BMW and particularly the EQE/EQS are arguably slightly superior now to Tesla

Really? One of the main selling points for me is that the center screen in Teslas are actually usable, non-laggy POS like most cars these days.

It's not really surprising, the 3 big German automakers spent around 3 billion USD to buy (at least at the time) the best mapping product on the market.

I think everyone else just turns on CarPlay / Android Auto and forgets they have an infotainment system.

Aside from playing music and texts, I prefer the native functions in my Ford system, over the Android Auto.

Can you name a few? Ford's maps being better than GMaps would be very surprising.

I don't know what the general consensus is, but all I can say is that I prefer the Ford map. For one, it integrates chargers into route planning.

Which is great, except on a Tesla where you can't use them

Which can be a great way to save a few bucks in areas of the world that charge higher registration fees for vehicles that have built-in SatNavs. I've had no issues with Android Auto wrt navigation or music.

Ya, anyone have a video to back this up? For all of Tesla's woes, their mapping screen is above and beyond superior to any native GPS I've ever seen.

Tesla is far behind everyone else on navigation due to the simple fact that Teslas do not have Carplay. There's no Waze on Teslas, how can you drive without it?

But here's how the current Mercedes navigation looks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCgy3askMcM The AR stuff works really well and is arguably way ahead of anything Tesla offers.

Waze is not able to plan a route with all the charging stops you need. Waze is fairly bad in an EV.

Hard disagree on this one. I have both a 2021 Tesla Model Y and a 2021 Toyota Rav4 Hybrid. Overall, the Tesla system is much better than the Toyota Infotainment system. For example:

  * Tesla maps has a much better zoom/scroll feature (faster, more detail, smoother).   The Toyota map requires you to hit the "zoom" button and then click zoom-in/out

  * The calendar tool built into the Tesla allows me to easily navigate to the appointment location.

  * Tesla maps have way-point selection (set an additional stop between start and end) 

  * The Toyota Infotainment system does not appear to have a "night mode".  Thus, the display puts out a ton of light during night-time driving (even with the brightness level set to minimum)

  * Waze is way too "chatty" for my taste

Because of the above, I am forced to use Apple CarPlay in the Toyota because the default UI experience is so horrible. Overall, I like the Toyota (great gas mileage), but I much prefer to drive the Tesla.

None of what you listed is applicable to Android Auto/CarPlay, which is exactly what parent was saying. For Android Auto it is a $100 device to make the system wireless so you don't have to pull your phone out of your pocket.

Sorry, but the parent to my specific comment did not mention anything about Andriod Auto/Carplay. Their comment specifically said "Tesla is far behind everyone else on navigation due to the simple fact that Teslas do not have Carplay". I am pointing out this is definitely not true.

That's a deeply confusing interpretation. The correct reading is "Carplay brings better-than-Tesla navigation to any car."

Great, your Tesla has better infotainment than ... a Toyota.

> * Waze is way too "chatty" for my taste

You can adjust that.

I've used both Tesla and Honda's Carplay for ~2 years now. I really enjoy Carplay (and the phone integration is a huge plus), but a few things:

- re: waze - huh? Google Maps is just fine. The differences are such a personal preference that they are moot.

- The touch controls on Carplay are not great. Try pinching and zooming on Google Maps in Carplay and its awful. (note - I do think Tesla misses the boat on having more physical controls as they almost rely entirely on touch...which is unsafe and not great)

> But here's how the current Mercedes navigation looks

Looks awesome, but that appears to be on a €185k ICE car.

>- re: waze - huh? Google Maps is just fine. The differences are such a personal preference that they are moot.

Waze tells you where cameras and cops are, Google Maps usually does not.

>- The touch controls on Carplay are not great. Try pinching and zooming on Google Maps in Carplay and its awful. (note - I do think Tesla misses the boat on having more physical controls as they almost rely entirely on touch...which is unsafe and not great)

I don't think I've ever needed to do this, it always automatically positions the map correctly.

>Looks awesome, but that appears to be on a €185k ICE car.

Pretty sure the pricing starts at €94,540. They also have an EV at around the same price, but it's an all-around worse car.

> Waze tells you where cameras and cops are, Google Maps usually does not.

Cameras are only really relevant in Europe. We don't really have these in the US. I do get the cops angle - google maps doesn't really do this.

> I don't think I've ever needed to do this

Tesla uses google maps under the hood and its auto adjustments are incredible (as good as Waze). However, every once in an awhile you want to "look ahead" and the Carplay simply sucks for this feature.

> Pretty sure the pricing starts at €94,540

It literally says in the description:

PRICE OF THE MODEL IN THE VIDEO: 185.269 EUR

>Cameras are only really relevant in Europe. We don't really have these in the US. I do get the cops angle - google maps doesn't really do this.

Well yeah, in Europe we don't have cops on the roads. In the US you don't have cameras, but have cops everywhere. You still want Waze in either case, probably more so for the cops.

>PRICE OF THE MODEL IN THE VIDEO: 185.269 EUR

This has to be including local taxes, which in some EU countries can double the price of a car.

None of the infotainment systems on new EVs are particularly laggy anymore - BMW and Mercedes systems are quite good.

VW is the only one still shipping a piece of crock.

Mind if I show you my 2021 Toyota Rav4 Hybrid Infotainment system? Utter garbage. Slow, clunky, almost unusable.

> I have a Tesla and I also hold a short position on TSLA. My Tesla is a great car.

This shouldn't have to be a position that requires any kind of defense or explanation. There's nothing contradictory about believing that:

1) A company makes a great product 2) The quality of that product and its total addressable market justifies the company's value at $X 3) The market cap of that company is far, far higher than $X

> Apple can make an even better car than Tesla

Paying a premium for Apple smartphones hardware and software is a thing, paying same percentage premium for a car is a lot different, it's a lot more money.

I cringe when I see statements like that. Apple has ZERO EXPERIENCE with automotive design, automotive manufacture, automotive distribution, automotive marketing, and automotive evolution. In other words, Apple KNOWS NOTHING ABOUT ANY ASPECT of the automotive industry.

Whether Apple can make a car better than Tesla is a moot point - Tesla isn't able to make cars as well as the other global automakers. Their whole schtick was the EV drivetrain. That's what set them apart from everybody else. It was never build quality. Now that governments around the world are essentially mandating EV's the global automakers are now entering the market. They have the know-how and experience in all the other areas of automotive manufacture that Tesla does not.

Bottom line: Tesla has had to come up-to-speed with the entirety of automotive manufacture and still aren't there. The global automotive manufacturers only have to come up to speed with an EV drivetrain, a drivetrain they've been experimenting with for years. Want to bet money on who's most likely to win the market?

Apple would be fools to enter this market and their investors should howl if they were foolish enough to do so.

> Tesla isn't able to make cars as well as the other global automakers

can you please point to where you found this data?

> experience in all the other areas of automotive manufacture that Tesla does not

I believe Tesla is still overvalued, but in 2022 they made 1.3 million cars, so dismissing them as amateurs is simply nonsensical. In 2023, they are a major car manufacturer with tons of experience with the entire process by now.

Tesla's poor fit and finish has become legendary, certainly not up to snuff compared to other automakers at their price point. They're not even up to snuff compared to automakers making cars costing half as much.

Another aspect of being an automaker for which Tesla is woefully behind on is service and repair. They've gotten away with it during their first few years because their sales were low and were to enthusiasts. Now things are going to be different because they're selling into the general market at a price point where the customers expectations have been set by the likes of Lexus, Audi, Mercedes, etc. They're going to have an interesting time should they get into an accident and need repairs. It's not uncommon for Tesla customers to have to wait weeks or even months for repairs.

While 1.3 million cars is a decent amount, it pales to Toyota's 8 million cars - which they've been doing now for decades. That's a lot of experience Tesla doesn't have under their belt.

Does it pale when compared to GM, which sold 70000 EVs in all of 2022?

Which do you think is more important to the question of service and reliability - the fact that GM sold 6.5 million cars, trucks, and SUVs last year, which was a down year for them, or that they only sold 70,000 EV's?

GM has been dealing with global supply chains for decades.

GM has been dealing with auto unions for decades.

GM has been dealing with service centers for decades.

Who do you think can more quickly adapt to whom? GM to Tesla, or Tesla to GM?

I think many would happily pay it. Look at brands like Rolls Royce, Range Rover, or Maserati - I'd never pay that kind of premium for what they offer, but they still have a healthy market.

The real question is whether the high-end car market is large enough for Apple to bother with.

That's just it. I see it as follows. Back in the 2000s, the iPhone came out. Especially with the 3G, it was miles ahead of the competition, and it took Android manufacturers five years to catch up and overtake it.

I believe Tesla holds - or, held - a similar position. They had a head start in many areas, but they could not keep it up.

One big difference is quality; Apple phones have great build quality, always have - although they had issues with bending and holding the phone a certain way iirc. Nothing like that in recent years though. But Teslas are known for poor build quality, mainly in the bodywork - expensive construction methods, poor and inconsistent spacings, etc.

Tesla hasn't innovated in recent years. Their last 'big' one was announcing the semi, cybertruck and a new Roadster, but it went radio silent for all of those for years after the announcement until recently when they finally started delivering the first semis.

Apple on the other hand has consistently released a new phone every year since the iphone 1, and more models and innovation to boot.

Tesla had so much money but they don't seem to have invested it efficiently. They also failed to advance their self-driving much further, which seemed to be the USP they were pushing for for a while.

Its owner messing around with the stock price by announcing a privatization, then buying Twitter on what seemed like a whim was another big issue of course. He lost a lot of credibility over the years.

I think Tesla will pivot from a car manufacturer to a battery manufacturer, and that its long-term strategy is its Turbocharger network. Electric cars are here to stay, and whoever owns the charger network now will benefit for a long, long time - like the oil industry has for a hundred years on fuel.

> Its owner messing around with the stock price by announcing a privatization, then buying Twitter on what seemed like a whim was another big issue of course. He lost a lot of credibility over the years.

I think this counts for more than people realize. Similar with Facebook/Zuckerberg and Amazon/Bezos. The most effective founder CEO, in my opinion, for a large company is one that stays generally unknown to the public.

Tesla went from cool (I personally thought a Tesla was much more desirable than a traditional luxury car like a lambo) to kinda cringe, in large part because Elon Musk is broadcasting cringe on the daily to anybody who will listen.

How many people are listening, though? And how many who are care enough to change a car purchasing decision? I think the answer is probably very few. I never hear anyone bring it up IRL.

> > Especially with the 3G, it was miles ahead of the competition

Pocket PC was a thing and it was great.

We have come so far in human progress that nobody invents something that is ‘miles ahead’ of everyone else.

What people do is they manufacture a narrative which purports such claims and shove it down people’s throats.

That is even more true in a sector which is almost 200 years old such as automotive.

> I think Tesla will pivot from a car manufacturer to a battery manufacturer

Tesla buys their batteries, though. They could/should sell the motors perhaps?

I would think the most valuable part of tesla is the network of loading stations that the own. At least in the US. In Europe the EU is setting a standard which is good for competition, but maybe less good for innovation.

"carmaker" != "electric carmaker" , all other carmakers DO NOT make profitable EV's and require heavy subsidies to be in parity. Tesla has better margins because it is vertically integrated . Apple will NEVER make a car , cars require a totally different supply chain not as simple as moving a low mass objects like phones and PC's , ie cant move them multiple times across different continents. other car makers will have to make significant investments while having losses and being dependent on ICE to break even all the while EV's grow and the ICE mkt share reduces (less profits) . They will probably never catch tesla in building a tech platform "infotainment" , how long would it take for any other car maker to ship steam games and have 60 fps gaming on the car.

isn't tesla heavily subsidized via carbon credits?

We don't talk about Bruno.

"carbon credit" != "tax credit"

carbon credit: EU law fines ICE car makers for making cars. they inturn purchase carbon credits to have the right to keep polluting. further more tesla made 53 B$ in rev for 2021. 1.5B is not nothing but not > 5% of revenue for the year. ie bulk of it came from actually making and selling cars.

tax credit: the US federal govt had a tax credit program which was lobbied by GM in the 2010's that gave car buyers 7.5K as a tax write off . this was only eligible for less than 100k cars sold (tesla sold 405,300 in q4 2022) and was only useful if you made enough income where a tax writeoff made sense. 2023 new laws are in place with more rules which makes them almost useless (or only useful for those who lobbied for it).

Tesla earned 5.5 billion on 54 billion in sales in 2021. 1.5 billion of that was in air pollution credits Tesla sells to other carmakers, meaning they earned about a 8% margin on the car business. You could definitely argue that Tesla is only profitable because of government price supports.

they have grown production capacity yoy of >50% , 2021 was a heavy capex year. tesla makes > 30% margin on each car sold.

>how long would it take for any other car maker to ship steam games and have 60 fps gaming on the car.

I'm still young, but hearing about this kind of feature makes me feel like a luddite. I just don't get it. Is it so passengers can play while you're driving, or just to play while the car is charging/you're waiting somewhere?

Yeah, it's entertainment for passing the time while charging. Tesla has long had Hulu, Disney+, Netflix, etc. apps in their cars for this reason, along with a number of games.

It's pretty neat. It's really cool to go car camping and effectively have a portable mini-theater come with you.

Have you driven other cars in the same price range as your Tesla?

It appears so far that the good UI/UX Tesla offers is something other makers could replicate, but stubbornly refuse to.

Still... that doesn't mean the stock is infinitely valuable. Presumably the market will shake out and TSLA will end up with a valuation kinda high for a car company, but not in tech-company range.

What is laughable is thinking that Apple (or anyone else) can just walk into a multi-trillion dollar industry with zero prior experience and displace existing players. Heck they have even tried to build a car/self driving tech for many years now and constantly failed at it.

Didn’t they do that with cell phones?

They were already the market leader in computers and portable devices (iPod), plus "smartphone" was a very recent and underdeveloped sector to begin with (existing products were all focused on business use cases and no end consumer had one). Very different from cars.

Look at all their other efforts to enter areas with a dominant player. People were saying Spotify was doomed when Apple Music launched, yet it has barely has an impact (even though Apple had a massive amount of expertise and industry connections in music). Their social network (Ping) was an instant failure. Hopepod couldn't compete with Echo and Sonos. They tried multiple times to get into video gaming and went nowhere (Pippin, Arcade). iAd was dead in the water when it tried to compete with Google and Facebook. Same with Maps, MobileMe. Heck they are even having trouble with a wireless charging pad, and have basically conceded the market to Qi.

Dominance in one sector rarely extends to an unrelated one regardless of how many billions you throw at the problem.

>Heck they are even having trouble with a wireless charging pad, and have basically conceded the market to Qi.

Do you own any Magsafe devices? Their Magsafe implementation is like magic and its extremely practical. It (among many other things) has essentially locked me into iPhone ecosystem for good.

Magsafe (the iPhone one) = Qi + magnets. There is nothing "magic" about it. You can even get non-Apple branded wireless chargers that have replicated the functionality. The new Qi2 standard will also have this built-in (with help from Apple in fact). It is hardly some revolutionary new product area or source of revenue for the company.

Meanwhile AirPower was in announced in 2017 and has still failed to materialize.

Is it implemented as standard in any series of Android phones? As far as I have seen, it is standard on the entire iPhone line 12 and up(minus the old iphone 8 design used in SE). Thats three generations and it has spawned a whole ecosystem of products that utilize the functionality(my favorite being the magnetic car mount/charger). Its magic because they managed to implement it extremely well + make this ecosystem possible due to their decision of rolling it out nearly complete product wide which helps expand the third party ecosystem. As a user, I measure how magical something is by how much better it makes my life and let me tell you, this implementation has been amazing. It is the third Apple thing I have called "magical" in the last 5 years. The other two being the Airpods Pro(again amazing implementation) + the M series chips(the speed and snappiness has made me impressed with a new computer for the first time in a long time).

I once had a similar solution with the Nexus 5(the last Android phone I bought new before I tried an iPhone and subsequently never looked back). This phone had some sort of magnetic charging system that combined with a third party car mount. Unfortunately the implementation sucked as many times it would fail to begin charging and once in a while some freak accident would happen where it would charge but the phone would get scary burning hot and then overheat. When this happened, the stupid phone starts to throttle and nothing is responsive anymore, not even the damn ability to power down the phone. Real great having to correct this issue when im supposed to be driving the damn car. The Nexus5 was the poster child for all that was wrong with Android.

>Meanwhile AirPower was in announced in 2017 and has still failed to materialize.

Why would this matter to me? I'm pleased with the solutions Apple has already provided. If they can't deliver something then I'm not going to call that particular thing magical but the magsafe in the phones is shipping and it is in fact magical.

Jumping from computer to cell phones appears to me order of magnitude easier than jumping from computer to car buisness.

>I think Apple can make an even better car than Tesla if they build the hardware and software like their phones and computers.

OK but we don't even officially know if Apple is trying to make a car?

>The idea that Autopilot has some magic sauce that nobody else can replicate is laughable.

The idea that a very difficult, innovative software problem can't be just replicated by legacy auto manufacturers who lack software engineering expertise is not laughable at all. The legacy auto manufacturers will really have to prove themselves here and so far they have not.

This is true for so many "tech" darlings: Should Uber be priced like a tech company, or a cab company? Is Amazon a tech company or a retailer? Are ecommerce outlets like Warby Parker and Away tech companies, or just retailers with good CSS?

It continues to amaze me how investors seem bamboozled by the appearance of "tech company-ness", by businesses which are obviously in markets that don't support the high price to earnings of "tech companies"--valuations which are premised on strong network effects (present, to a degree, with Telsa, in the form of the charging network--but they will open that up to other carmakers, I guess?) and low unit costs (um, not for cars), and which fundamentally make no sense for things like retail (high unit costs, no network effects) or scooter rentals (high capital costs, high unit costs, limited network effects).

But investors--showing the wisdom of crowds, I guess--seem frequently unable to look past the shiny CSS and the fact that the founder/CEO wears a turtleneck and the headquarters office has a beer tap.

If their main business does not involve selling information technology to other people and companies, they're not a tech company.

> selling tech to other companies

By that measure, Apple and Google aren’t tech companies. (Apple sells devices to consumers. Google sells ads to companies.) They are. They just aren’t software companies.

Google isn't a tech company, it's an ad company. Apple is a tech company because they sell computers, which are information systems: Hardware counts. Chip manufacturers are also good examples of tech companies.

> Apple is a tech company because they sell computers, which are information systems

If we’re making that stretch, I fail to see how a modern car isn’t an information system as well.

What is and isn’t a tech company is context dependent. Economically, it describes a high gross margin business with negligible variable costs and vast scaling opportunity. By this definition, Tesla and Apple are not tech companies. The difference between them being Apple trades at 20x earnings while Tesla does 30+.

If you’re in the job market, on the other hand, this isn’t nearly as relevant as revenue per employee and thus pay per employee, together with culture and type of work. By those definitions, both Apple and Tesla are tech companies, albeit idiosyncratically in their own ways.

It contains information systems, but it is not an information system. It is a vehicle. Its purpose is to provide transportation.

> contains information systems, but it is not an information system. It is a vehicle. Its purpose is to provide transportation

By this measure, personal computers haven’t been tech since the 1980s. Virtually nobody wants an information system, whatever that means. They want to buy a function. That was OG Jobs.

Google also sells computers, though: https://store.google.com/product/pixelbook_go?hl=en-US

Amazon has AWS, Prime services and robots.

They’re not like the other companies listed.

Amazon is an everything company. A little tech, a little retail, a little ads,a little logistics, a little entertainment.

Amazon's AWS definitely should be treated as tech.

AWS, yes. Retail? Nah.

Even back when I worked there in logistics, I wondered how much of AMZN share price comes from AWS and how much comes from retail. But then it is difficult, cash flow comes from retail, profits come from AWS. So Amazon might actually be both, and benefiting from it.

Definitely. I'm not claiming it's black and white or either/or, to be clear.

But, what are the characteristics investors should look at for "tech company P:E"? Presumably a non-linear profit curve driven by low unit costs, linear or increasing revenue per unit, and strong network effects. IOW, if you're building the next Microsoft, each unit of Windows sold costs you nothing, makes you the same revenue (and thus more profit) than the previous unit, and increases the appeal of Windows because "everyone is using it."

Retail businesses are just totally the opposite of that.

The network effects are limited. (I guess for marketplaces this isn't totally the case: if everyone is buying on Amazon, then more resellers want to become Amazon resellers. But then, for "platforms" like Uber, it seems the network effects are weaker than we might think; drivers and users both find it easy to drive for/hail on Uber, Lyft, etc, side-by-side.)

The unit costs are fixed.

As the retailer gets bigger, their growth naturally trends closer to overall economic growth. (If you sell software, and the software makes workers 10x more productive, you can expect to get a cut of that 10x in productivity. If you sell milk, your market is going to grow at the rate at which demand for milk grows.)

The real malefactors, in my mind, are people like Warby Parker, Away, Casper, etc--direct to consumer is fine and well and probably lowers costs a bit, but it's fundamentally similar to ordering from the Sears Catalog in the 19th century. But by some bizarre combination of hype and, I know I keep saying it, clever CSS, these jokers have convinced investors they're somehow different.

See https://www.economist.com/business/2021/09/09/direct-to-cons..., https://www.ft.com/content/616421f0-6946-485a-aca4-e9a2a522a..., etc.

Are retailer unit costs fixed? The larger they become, the better contracts they can negotiate with suppliers, the cheaper they can make their logistics and delivery network with economies of scale, and the less they have to spend on advertising.

I guess that's true. FWIW, because this chart only goes back ten years, it's not like there's some obvious trend with WalMart (as an example) where as revenue increased, margins went up: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/profit.... In fact, as revenue went up, margins went down-ish.

The comparison I would still draw is to pure software businesses where they:

a) Pay almost nothing per unit b) Increase in value the more users they have (due to more software for the platform, for example, and greater compatibility) c) Directly lead to significant productivity/efficiency gains in their customers, which they can then claim a piece of

If a retailer becomes a near-monopolist, short of monopoly pricing, they will generate margins that tend towards the average for retail (which are low!), and they will grow at close to the rate of economic growth.

In comparison, if a software company becomes a near-monopolist, even without monopoly pricing, their margins will increase and their utility will increase.

Walmart hit diminishing returns on scale efficiencies a long time before 2012-- their revenue has basically been tracking inflation for the last decade.

Amazon went from a tech company to a retail company (not including AWS). Back then e-commerce was nascent and everything Amazon did was R&D. Now their differentiator is scale and logistics. The website and related technologies are taken for granted even though we all know the complexity of it. But end of the day, it has been built and as much as it pains to admit it as an engineer, it’s “solved” - to the extent that it’s not make or break anymore.

Basically every aspect of Amazon's retail business is solved by now. Getting all of those indivodual pieces together, and working, at scale and continously is what sets Amazon apart from everyone else.

eCommerce stores? e.g.Shopify

Logistics? e.g. CargoWise

And it goes on.

I did my post, and then I saw yours. More examples, and excellent analyses!

And of course, there's the meta-question:

Why do investors price so highly these gambles over things that are already generating demonstrable value for real human beings?

Like, why do these cultural signifiers make them salivate to be parted from their funds given the track record of tech (20% fail in year 1, 1% become unicorns, 18% of first-time founders generate a company that can even tread water)?

Oh, that's the easy question, it is one of basic psychology. We like and trust people and environments that are similar to our own.

Presumably a combination of survivorship bias (we are most aware of the successful tech companies with asshole-founders-and-foosball-tables-in-the-lounges, and not all of the unsuccessful companies with the same) and fundamental attribution error (we think having an asshole-founder-and-foosball-tables is predictive of or causally related to being successful).

As someone who has beat the market (S&P500) for the past 17 years, I agree that there is a problem with people not understanding markets/technologies. But a bigger issue is that A LOT of people are looking for short term gains. Just look at crypto, even the most serious/nonscammy people in the space believe it will take many years to reach it's true potential, but if you look that the message boards and twitter, they are full of people talking about daily/monthly or even hourly gains.

These people don't actually care if PLTR hits 500B in revenue in 2035, they just want their stock price to go up 10x this year.

I think truth might be that markets are not as efficient as many would want everyone to believe. And then there is lot of effects that could affect the true efficiency, like index-funds and ESG scores.

Well, Keynsian Beauty Contest, then. As long as you play it better than the others, you win.

I don't do a lot of individual stock picking, because I can't be assed to look too closely at fundamentals and I don't think I have a good enough pulse on the public opinion that I can predict who Redditors will think is a sexy CEO next.

Can you blame them? This same market has stagnated wages for decades and so the only way to have a chance get ahead is to gamble.

Tesla, and even more Uber, were priced as if self driving cars are almost here. The idea that services like Uber without the drivers would make car ownership obsolete drove those valuations. Now that self driving cars are many decades away, instead of less than one decade away, is bring stock prices down. I always questions how fast we would see self driving cars, not because of the technology, but because of consumer demand. There was a survey a few years ago of how much more people would be willing to pay for cars that could drive themself, and the median answer was $0. This is because quite a few people gave a negative number, that is, they would pay extra for a car that could not drive itself.

> There was a survey a few years ago of how much more people would be willing to pay for cars that could drive themself, and the median answer was $0. This is because quite a few people gave a negative number, that is, they would pay extra for a car that could not drive itself.

I think there's an inherent distrust (which I share) of giving technology the power to end our lives with one bug. Trust in technology, in general, is pretty low right now, so that reflects back on perceived future technology where one bad steer or missed brake ruins your life. Although I happen to share this pessimism with the human aspect of driving as well, I've almost died before because I wasn't focused while driving (IRL nerd sniping basically), and I know it could happen again in the future no matter how much I want to be a safe driver.

The truth is, if full self driving cars actually happened, with safety statistics better than humans and with a low barrier to entry, you can bet that people would change their opinion real fast. Much like Americans who have a revelation after experiencing European or Asian public transit, the realization that they could have an extra hour per day that was previously spent staring at a road, would be a big motivator to change opinions on technology. Add in that three of your friends already use it daily and they're not dead yet, and you rode with them and it seemed like a safe driver.

>>with safety statistics better than humans

The problem is that will not be the expectation. It will need to be perfect or near perfect.

full self driving cars can drive a million of miles with no accident, but if on 1,000,001 miles there is a accident with a death it is all over the news, and people proclaiming the technology is terrible, unsafe and not ready. In that same 1,000,001 miles humans have caused far more damange and death but that is just "normal" so....

from a distance that's how people feel now. because self-driving isn't something anyone has access to, it's something that a few tesla buyers and a few tech companies (waymo, etc) have access to. So, from an average person's perspective, of course I don't want those rich/greedy assholes killing kids. The algorithms need to be perfect before they're allowed on the road

If every single car were upgraded to have full self driving tomorrow, with algorithms to perform lets just say 1% better than humans perform, I guarantee that acceptance would build overnight.

Well obviously. If a self driving car caused a fatal accident after just 1,000,001 miles it would be like 80x more dangerous than the average American human driver.

The reason we see summary dismissals of current autonomous vehicle technology is because even the best systems by Waymo and Cruise are literally orders of magnitude away from human-level. No discussion or societal cost-benefit is necessary when they are years away from reaching the bare minimum level worthy of analysis.

> The truth is, if full self driving cars actually happened, with safety statistics better than humans and with a low barrier to entry, you can bet that people would change their opinion real fast.

I think this is the wrong counter-argument against self-driving cars being viable.

If the median answer is $0 and there were a lot of negative answers then that means there's a lot of positive answers. Just sell the cars to those people!

Not everybody wants a self-driving car just like not everybody wants a big mac. Hell you probably need to pay some people to eat a big mac. But theres enough people that want a big mac that despite that fact it's a huge business.

Nonetheless, I would claim it's a lot more than half of people who would want self driving cars. How many daily commuters exist? I surmise atleast 90% of them would want self driving cars if it were a proven, familiar technology with a reasonable barrier to entry.

Of course, I'm just projecting a hypothetical technology that is both fairly cheap and extremely safe/effective. We can expect that future is far, far away

> Not everybody wants a self-driving car just like not everybody wants a big mac.

I don't think this will work, because self-driving cars will reveal drivers for what they are: impatient, reckless, anti-social maniacs. People want to speed, to swerve into the bike or parking lane to overtake a left-hand turner, to inch out into traffic to force themselves into a lane, to tailgate, etc, etc. You can't really have a system where x% of the cars are calmly and mechanically following the rules and manually-operated vehicles are taking advantage of that.

>The truth is, if full self driving cars actually happened, with safety statistics better than humans and with a low barrier to entry, you can bet that people would change their opinion real fast.

A lot of danger of motor vehicles is when motorist choose to be dangerous though. If self-driving cars force motorists to follow speed limits and other traffic control devices, that will limit their uptake by quite a bit I think

The average American will never be persuaded by statistics. Ross Perot tried that already.

It’s not statistics that will convince people it’s convenience. I just mentioned statistics because if the tech were convenient but actually killed people at 10X the rate of human driving, it could end up banned or something

It will be more like statistics convince some people, and then "my friend has one and he loves it, and I've ridden in it, so now I'm comfortable with it" will over time convince the rest.

It isn't the average American that needs to be convinced, it is the government car safety agencies (every government around the world with a such an agency, not just US). They have people who know how to read statistics. Once the statistics show significant improvements they will make anything else illegal. Of course significant is something that will be debated, and there will be a phase in time. In the end though, this isn't about the average person it is about the people with power.

> The idea that services like Uber without the drivers would make car ownership obsolete drove those valuations.

Did investors really believe that? I don't know a single person who believed that years ago when the pre-IPO valuations were going through the roof. I maybe knew a few people who believed it was possible one day but not anytime soon. It's wild to me that so called sophisticated investors really believed that in the not too distant future uber would have a fleet of driverless vehicles shuttling people around.

FWIW, I don't believe we'll see anything like that in my lifetime (I'm 37). The last few years of development in this space, for me, have proven that it's a much harder problem than people thought and that the early big improvements in the tech gave people false hope.

Supposedly, in some places, transport planners, who really should've known better, made decisions about mass transit projects on the basis that self-driving cars were coming any day now. If _they_ got it so wrong, why would investors do any better?

There was a weird period a while back where basically everyone except people who actually worked in the area seemed to believe the self-driving car was nigh.

My recollection of those cases is that those who believed mass transit was a boondoggle that no one uses were using the imminence of self-driving cars to argue against mass transit projects that they already opposed.

Most of those in charge of transit do not believe in transit. (in the US). Most politicians see transit as a way to shovel money into some special interest: they appoint a supported to lead transit as a way to reward help with no concern if they appoint someone who will be good.

>Did investors really believe that?

They didn't. I don't know what OP is talking about. Uber's self-driving initiatives were always a moonshot.

You say that like Musk didn't say a whole litany of things, including "By 2019, it will be financially irresponsible NOT to own a Tesla, because it will be paying for itself and making you money in your sleep as a Robotaxi."

Yeah - Musk says a lot of idiotic things, but even with that I maintain that these kinds of statements is not what drove Tesla (crazy) valuation.

I don't know who actually believed it, or if it had any real impact on investors, but it seemed to be a common comment on self driving threads on HN ~5 years ago that instead of ownership, there would just be idle fleets of cars that you would summon from, and you'd simply subscribe to a vehicle service as a monthly cost.

I still see that all the time. I don't think it will happen: there are too many advantages to owning your own car.

"Now that self driving cars are many decades away, instead of less than one decade away"

The promise was, that it will be here today. And this is clearly not happening and this is (one reason) why people feel bullshitted and so the trust and the stock go down.

So I also would not bet, that in 10 years FSD is ready, but I certainly see it as a possibility.

Every time I read something like "are many decades away" and "less than one decade away" I ask myself if we have a prophet here... Since nobody knows what will be discovered today and tomorrow nobody can make claims that "something is many decades away". And on the other side, nobody can make claims for "less than one decade away", because some lunatic with the atomic bomb can stop the progress of an almost finished project... We can only speak about "probabilities" here...

>We can only speak about "probabilities" here...

Yeah but this is colloquial speech, the probabilities are there just implicit because it would be exhausting to make this explicit in everyday speech.

Investment is nothing but a game of probabilities.

If it's true that self-driving is likely to be developed in the next 10 years than Tesla and Uber are good investments, because there's a reasonable chance of a world-changing, market-monopolising product making your investment incredibly profitable.

If self-driving is unlikely in the near-term then Tesla and Uber are not so attractive - you're looking at investing in an overvalued electric car manufacturer with limited production and a money-pit taxi operator, respectively. If a moon-shot innovation like self-driving is still likely in the next 25 years then on the other hand there's not a whole lot of reason to believe that these companies are the one's that will get to capitalise on it, rather than the established (cheaper) manufacturers or some new upstart. There are far safer investments out there.

All that's happened here is that people have lost faith that these companies are likely enough to develop a world-changing technology to justify their recent high stock prices.

What about them is market-monopolising? Cruise and Waymo both are working on self driving cars and making progress (those are ones I know, I'm sure there are others that I'm not aware of). The traditional taxi businesses are watching this, and won't sit still.

>The idea that services like Uber without the drivers would make car ownership obsolete drove those valuations.

Huh? What? No. That's not where the valuation came from. To be fair to Uber, they created a new type of market for which there was an immense demand for. Their self-driving initiatives were a moonshot and maybe got some people excited and therefore invested in Uber (see Tesla/Musk), but not quite the same as saying it drove their valuation.

>Tesla, ... were priced as if self driving cars are almost here.

Tesla was/is a hype stock based on the personality cult of Elon Musk that stemmed from being first-to-market with EVs. The valuation wasn't really driven by whether or not Tesla cars are self-driving.

You must have missed part of the huge hype bubble when Musk claimed that Teslas with FSD would be "appreciating assets" because owners would be able to rent them out as robotaxis when not using them. He said they should be worth up to $200k because of that, and also this p2p robotaxi fleet would make Uber and all taxis obsolete. If FSD was actually full self-driving, then the idea makes a lot of sense.

Yes, Tesla customers and investors believed it because of the personality cult of Musk, but there was an actual (albeit wrong and likely deceptive) business proposition that gave investors a reason to value it as being worth more than all the other auto makers put together. That proposition depended entirely on FSD being only X years away and that Tesla would produce the best FSD product.

https://electrek.co/2019/07/16/tesla-cars-worth-100k-200k-fu...

> You must have missed part of the huge hype bubble when Musk claimed that Teslas with FSD would be "appreciating assets" because owners would be able to rent them out as robotaxis when not using them.

If Musk actually believed this it was irresponsible of him to sell any cars at all since holding onto them would have yielded a better return for investors/stockholders.

Probably not actually. If you rent your car you, you also need to clean it. Musk/Tesla isn't setup to do that, and the overhead of getting setup for that type of operation means that while is a profitable small business idea it may not work out for a large company.

While there is a business in that space to be had, I'm not convinced it is very big.

That was the rationale for why they planned on not actually allowing leases of the Model 3 to buy out their lease at the end. Since robotaxi was right around the corner...

Not sure what ever happened there, but I think Tesla managed to hold firm on that stance and won by luck since the used market bubble happened...

> If Musk actually believed this it was irresponsible of him to sell any cars at all since holding onto them would have yielded a better return for investors/stockholders.

When Musk announced this, he said they were still selling Teslas because they needed just a bit more real-world data to 'complete' FSD.

Hype is not a crime. It enabled Tesla to access cheap capital. But Tesla went too far and starting collecting money for something that won't work anytime soon and possibly not within the lifespan of Teslas on the road now.

The promise was "buy this car and soon it will self-drive" (and for Uber it was "Never mind we don't have a sustainable business model now, we will soon with self-driving").

>The promise was "buy this car and soon it will self-drive" (and for Uber it was "Never mind we don't have a sustainable business model now, we will soon with self-driving").

OK - you can make that argument. The point I'm disputing is OP's statement that "Tesla, and even more Uber, were priced as if self driving cars are almost here." I don't believe that statement. That is, I don't believe that the valuation of either company was based on the idea that FSD was almost here.

> Uber, were priced as if self driving cars are almost here

Source? I struggle to even find it mentioned in Uber’s S-1 [1]. (To say nothing of Lyft.)

[1] https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001543151/f0dcd9a...

> Now that self driving cars are many decades away

So when I see these driverless cars in my neighborhood with no one in the driver's seat, is that just my imagination?

For so many years, the car ads were selling us freedom. The open road, and you're in the driver's seat. Driving could be fun, not just a means of getting somewhere. Sure, they were trying to manipulate public perception, but they were doing so in a way that resonated with a lot of people.

A robot driving your car? Where's the fun in that?

Look close. They are selling Dad (as in a male, and probably white) on driving, while they are selling mom (female) and the kids on enjoying the ride. As ads become less sexist you will see more females in the driver seat, but most ads are still selling the whole family experience, and that includes getting places while someone else in in control. Even when they do show females driving, the focus on the ads is less on the experience of driving and more on other features of the car.

that's a cherry on top. 99% of people come to unfortunate realization that in this country they need to buy some car to get their ass to work or daycare on time. That's what drives the big number. Everything else is just "now that you're here, let us show you how much more fun than the other brands we are"

Perhaps some people did give a negative answer, but that isn't really why the median is zero. If you asked 100 people, and 51 said $0, and the other 49 said anything else at all (including all saying $1m) then the median would be $0. No negative answers needed.

I never understood how self-driving could not have been seen as race to bottom. At least if there was more than one platform in competition. It would happen in both selling vehicles and in offering their services. There is enough people that are very price sensitive and would go for cheapest option. Just look at airline market.

I believe the reason is much simpler - 2017-2019 was a peak of hopes for Tesla. New models, scaling up, Roadster, Semi, Cybertruck announced, the competition was weak and sky was the limit. FSD / Robotaxi was promised to be ready in matter of weeks/months.

The shares were around $20-25 (today's worth, taking in account the splits). I do not see any reason why it would be worth more than that.

- Roadster and Cybertruck are not only late, they were even removed from their landing page. DOA. Ford, Rivian and even GM brought solid product (pickups) to the market and the fat cake is being eaten. - Semi was very late and doesn't look too promising. - FSD turned from an advantage to a huge liability. I believe it has now a negative value (current and potential future lawsuits). - competitors started producing comparable or better cars at better prices (VW ID3, Mercedes EQE, any EVs from Hyundai/Kia) - there's a strong perception of Elon being bored with Tesla. We've got a billion dollar ship with no captain.

I do not believe in Elon's political involvement having such a great impact, other than taking his attention away.

I'm not sure you can say that when the market cap is still 10x car companies that deliver orders of magnitude more cars than them. Even a high growth car company wouldn't justify that valuation.

No, Tesla is still very overpriced for a car company based on hype.

> The latest blow came on January 3rd... It lost 12% of its value—roughly $50bn, or one Ford Motor Company—in a day.

It's not going to completely correct in a day. As you note, its value may be inflated by two orders of magnitude. Musk's hijinks with Twitter have cost him dearly in investor confidence -- both indirectly, as his behavior there is erratic, and directly, as his loans for that deal are backed with Tesla stock. And then there's the non-delivery of FSD, which is the real "dream" that he's been selling so hard.

It's very overpriced as a tech company for what it actually delivers as well

I'm not gonna say TSLA isn't overpriced but number of cars isn't a great metric. Let's look at some financials:

Tesla: mcap $388B, debt $9B, op income $12B, free cash flow $9B

GM: mcap $49B, debt $110B, op income $10B, free cash flow $1B

Ford: mcap $48B, debt $139B, op income $11B, free cash flow $3B

Tesla makes more money than Ford or GM, while having much less debt. The fact that they sell fewer cars means their margins are higher, and they have more room to grow. Maybe they shouldn't be worth eight times more than Ford or GM, but they should definitely be worth more.

And if you believe that the industry is going electric, then Tesla is already there, while legacy auto has a lot of work to do, and Tesla's low debt load makes them better positioned to do lots of R&D.

yeah, and then there is a "little" asset like Superchargers network which makes Tesla ownership, at least in US, much more attractive.

Edit. I'm not implying that Tesla is fairly priced, underpriced or overpriced. But this whole situation reminds me a time when I invested in Tesla IPO after reading lots of "Don't DO IT!" articles in media.

And Tesla is still growing at amazing rates. So by now I would say it under-prized.

What should worry GM investors even more is that GM has made EV goals over the past 7 years that they have failed to meet by a long shot. AND today they are still claiming that they will sell more EVs than Tesla in 2025 AND all of their profit comes from ICE cars/trucks today.

It is totally valid to criticize musk for not delivering a full self driving car on when he said he would, but that hasn't put the profitability of the company at risk. If GM cannot deliver a volume Car at a profit in a world where ICE is illegal what is going to happen?

Debt in itself doesn't matter when you value a company. What you want to look at is shareholder equity, which is assets net of liabilities. When you look at that indicator, Tesla comes behind GM and Ford.

Tesla: $31.0 bn

GM: $65.3 bn

Ford: $42.1 bn

That's a good way to look at it, sure. But it includes the value of fixed assets like factories. Debt compared to income is still a valuable indicator, since it's income that makes the debt payments, and also pays for things like R&D.

You can quibble with the real value of GM and Ford's assets. If I built a factory for a billion dollars that makes horse buggies, is it actually worth a billion dollars if I was forced to liquidate it?

Car companies deserve to have a severely depressed valuation because they're currently being forced to transition away from internal combustion. The ICE manufacturing industry is the worst one to be in because government are determined to kill you.

Tesla doesn't have this overhang and is also growing very fast.

Car companies arguably operate in _the_ most heavily competitive and capital intensive industry on Earth. Like airlines, there's an argument that they can only manage to exist due to government subsidy. If Tesla evaporated tomorrow, Hyundai/Kia would likely eat their lunch; in a few years, GM will be ready.

It's a brutal business, which is why I think it's fascinating.

Yea having test driven the Mach E, Ioniq 5, and XC40 Recharge there is no way I’d buy a Tesla either. We liked all of those better than Model Y and Model 3. Going with the Volvo, it just feels nicer to actually drive, and has built in Google Maps with Google voice controls.

Talking from experience you will not be disappointed with the XC40!

I am intrigued by the V60 cross country, but it seems that it's one step behind the various XC (40, 60, 90), in terms of hybrid engine, etc.

Right. Tesla's problems are car-company problems. Build quality. Production backlog. Delayed new models. Repair parts stocking. Repair center operations. Cost growth. All the dull and boring stuff they have to fix, or their market cap shrinks to what their production output justifies.

Well, they have those problems AND a CEO that (at best) can be called divisive, and who staked a lot of his stock in a separate company that is also (at best) divisive.

What happened in 2020 that made investors think Tesla was a tech company instead of a car company? Based on the graph in TFA, it seems like investors maybe used to price the valuation right. (Caveat: I have no idea if they did, but the valuation used to be in line with other car companies, I guess?)

> What happened in 2020 that made investors think Tesla was a tech company instead of a car company?

My guess is nothing. Investors just piled on looking to make a quick buck on a rising stock, and it fed an enormous bubble. Money was looking for somewhere to go. The market is only rational over a very long timeline.

That was the year when major central banks said publicly that low interest rates were here to stay for a long time.

The companies with the most debt were the ones to gain the most. Those promises did not age well however and valuations are still correcting from that.

Not sure of the exact timeline here, but for a while Musk was explicitly promising that within a few years, true FSD would be a reality. He said you'd have to be insane not to buy a Tesla, because your car would be out there making money for you as an autonomous taxi when you're not using it. A car that pays for itself and then some would be a true paradigm shift, but as we can see now, his predictions were hot air.

They had a lot of money and needed somewhere to put it. Then just back-rationalized the higher multiples from there.

... at least until interest rates go down again

I think this is really the answer. We've entered into a scary scenario for the US economy: it lives and dies on cheap credit supplied by the Fed. When the Fed drops rates, people chase yield and you get stuff like NFTs and valuations that are detached from fundamentals. When interest rates go up, the market just waits for them to go down again...

From the perspective of addressable market opportunity, personal vehicles are a steady size and satisfied market. There are cars that you can buy from $500 junkers to $500k monstrosities, and there is little opportunity to 10x the addressable market size.

Electrification of cars, while critically important for the climate, does not open an entirely new modality of life in the way that cars initially did. It's not transformative as a business model.

Therefore, unless they cause a major behavioral switch that is monetizable, EVs will just eventually replace the current car market. Tesla's potential growth as an EV maker is directly proportional to traditional automakers' car market loss, to the extent that happens. Does that justify a 10 or 20x valuation? Only if you think they will reach dominant global market share of all cars. To do so they would have to have an non-replicable comparative advantage, which they have failed to demonstrate.

In 2021, Tesla pivoted to become the leading AI/Robotics company in the world. They had an investor day with a robot and everything.

Did they really pivot or is this just Elon Musk's usual smokes and mirrors bullshit to distract people from other issues?

I mean the idea that Elon Musk could extend Tesla into a robot company is laughable — and as laughable all the other things Elon Musk has actually accomplished.

Is that more or less laughable than all the things that he promised but didn't accomplish?

The vast majority of businesses that are started don't accomplish what they promise. It's not really a valid criticism of an entrepreneur.

Ok, but, have you seen Boston dynamics robots? Much more capable. In fact, what Tesla showed seem worse than the old Honda Asimo robots in terms of tech.

So to call it a leading robotics company is just so strange since they are just entering the space.

You can see that Asimo has very capable hands, which even boston dynamics robots don't. Just like in art, the hands are the hardest to replicate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMyxgmW9TyE

https://asimo.honda.com/

In case the sarcasm above isn't clear, see the video of the 2021 reveal (a human in a catsuit): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsNc4nEX3c4

And the 2022 re-reveal (in which humans have to push it onto the stage): https://twitter.com/BriannaWu/status/1576021072239300608

Why are Rivian and Lucid stocks also getting hammered? All 3 seem to move together. Feels more like EV stocks being dumped.

Maybe its incumbent automakers finally ramping up the competition and putting electric vehicles on the road. Telsa has probably been overvalued for a while and needed to come back to earth but between their R&D and massive lead in charging networks I still think they have a bright future. I think the R1T is the coolest truck on the market right now and the R1S is my most desired suv but now that all of the incumbents are starting to ship electric trucks its going to be hard for them to compete. Those vehicles are like $100k+ with a reasonable configuration. I don't understand Lucid at all.

I think competition is the key. 2022 was the year that we started to really see the incumbents flex their muscle and prove that they could build just as good an EV as a dedicated EV manufacturer. Combine that with their proven ability to build cars profitably and it starts to make the future of the startup manufacturers look pretty bleak. It's an extremely competitive market with a huge barrier to entry.

My suspicion is that in the next 5 years or so, Rivian, Lucid, and similar startups will be defunct. I expect Tesla to persist long term, as their financials are decent now. Though I think their product strategy is very non-conventional and if consumers aren't convinced by it then it could be a stumbling block to their future success.

> Rivian, Lucid, and similar startups will be defunct.

I expect some will be bought out, and a brand of someone else. Some will be defunt as in bankrupt. I wouldn't be surprised if one of them survives as a small niche manufacture.

Rivian, for one, spends over twice as much to build a car than they end up selling it for. The disparity is larger than Tesla's has ever been, as I recall, and there's every reason to believe they can't simply scale their way out of it. They have to figure out how to fundamentally build the car using less than half the effort and material it takes today.

Legacy car companies have big manufacturing advantages and are coming out with competitive designs.

Higher interest rates decrease the value of future growth.

Lucid sold 6000 cars last year. They are going to go bankrupt in 2023 or at the very least, common shareholders are going to get wiped out by debtholders.

Tesla is a battery manufacturer that happens to make cars. Remember, they also make the Powerwall and grid-scale storage.

I think the bigger question we should ask ourselves is, "What is a tech company?"

Tesla are a battery pack manufacturer, they mostly use cells manufactured by Panasonic and CATL.

LG too.

I thought the Gigafactories manufactured the batteries whose design they license from someone else that then get assembled into packs of various sizes.

Are you saying the Gigafactories are not making batteries at all?

Tesla does manufacture their own battery cells, though they're having trouble scaling up.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/inside...

Pretty sure the Gigafactory in NV has LG staff inside them making the Cells, or rather running the machines that makes the cells. While it is under one roof I think there are 2 businesses inside, one LG and 1 Telsa

interesting. was not aware they were 4-walling the set up to keep them separated to that extent. does that say anything about how LG feels about the relationship with Tesla, or anything about how LG feels about the ability of Tesla employees? Are the batteries coming out of the Gigafactory only for use by Tesla, or are they making LG branded batteries to be sold to LG customers? If they are selling LG products, then I could see why LG would have a much more vested interest in the factory. If they are only Tesla products via a licensing deal, why would they be as interested?

According to Wikipedia it is Panasonic not LG but Panasonic is making the batteries in the factory.Tesla owns the land and building, and leases parts of the building to several suppliers

It is not uncommon for a manufacturer to have dedicated machines or entire factory just for one customer

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigafactory_Nevada

Tesla has only delivered a handful of relatively small "Megapack" grid storage battery systems so far. And they have had multiple fires.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/20/tesla-megapack-battery-caugh...

Grid storage might eventually be a major business for Tesla but I doubt that it will drive huge profits. They don't have any unique sustainable competitive advantage and the customers are extremely price sensitive, so I expect long term profit margins to be low.

Even if the market can remain irrational for a while, in the end it very much remains driven by expectations of growth and revenue.

"tech" as it's called benefits from a non-linear scale factor: serving one more person does not directly correlate to a static increase in cost, it's more derivative in nature (cost increases onefold with each order of magnitude). Add to that globalisation for free. That's how you can expect more growth and revenue from a "tech" company than from traditional industries. Service has an almost 1:1 relationship, manufacturing is kind of in the middle, where you benefit from scale but still need to purchase matter, and time from people to build stuff.

In that way tesla is not a tech company. To build an additional tesla you need more people and more robots. You need to purchase steel, lithium, leather, etc. You need to ship that Tesla. Growth doesn't come to them at a derivative cost.

As an investor you might judge that they might have better software, or better cars, and ride a wave of electrification that other manufacturers don't, which justified a higher price because their potential for growth is higher. That's not entirely true anymore, everyone else is producing electric cars now, at prices that are often cheaper, so their advantage is not that big anymore.

Manias, panics and crashes - nothing new under the sun.

But actually no, in the age of 24/7 viral digital titilation, manias have been upgraded to hysterias.

Once the dust of this cycle settles the tangible "tech" advances booked will actually quite meager and people will not believe how many got so excited about so little.

Entire theses and books will be written about how general STEM illiteracy and FOMO coupled with unprecedented liquidity create fertile soil for all sorts of bizarre collective phenomena.

Cathie Wood is not going to like this. I think her bear case is TSLA is a $7T company by 2026. I can’t say I agree with her.

The entire worldwide car industry won't be worth 7 trillion dollars in 2026.

Car companies were asleep at the wheel before Tesla. Selling EVs is perfect because they have lower OpEx at the cost of a higher CapEx. Higher CapEx means more revenue for the car manufacturers, and higher valuations in the long run if they can maintain their profit margin.

Car manufacturing will be a more valuable industry as EVs become the standard, but definitely not fast enough to quadruple the value of the industry in a handful of years. Not unless we start overvaluing every company like Tesla.

She is amazing, somehow manages to take Elon at his word on everything when even his biggest fans use phrases like "Elon time"

Her valuation makes sense if you think Tesla's going to dominate the car industry and robotaxi and displace truckers with FSD and have Tesla robots replace all factory workers and nurse, rent out the supreme dojo chips to the whole world, etc.

A good thing to remember here is that most of the media-based investing is the product that Wall Street* sells. Cathie Woods' job is marketing and sales. She needs to make "big bets" or say outlandish things because her market niche is hyper-focused on tech futurism. She'll take her carry and move on with her life and so long as she can always move the goalposts people will continue to invest based on that marketing. Once 2026 and Tesla isn't a $7 trillion company (though I personally think it still has massive upside if Elon quit being a fucking lunatic) she can say the pandemic or Twitter or something stymied the growth and it's actually 2036 now that it'll be a $7 trillion company and so invest now! Etc. etc.

* This is an oversimplification and financial firms do provide very valuable services and products to customers and clients around the world.

https://archive.ph/hNC7i

So does this mean investors can't create new catergories and must think in absolute terms and existing boxes? How would could we, humans who know boxed thinking leads to fallacies and know the world is made of continuums in many (infinte?) dimension, use that to beat the market...?

There’s a saying in trading “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”

My opinion is that Tesla wanted to be a tech company, wanted to lead the game with autopilot and other tech features, and eventually stop making cars and license out the tech. Turns out, its not that "hard" to get to the point they are at

I went to CES in 2020 and there were almost no electric cars. This year, there a ton (from what I can gather from news and video coverage). Additionally, there are companies like Nvidia who are building out all the tech needed as off-the-shelf parts for the tech that Tesla has had to build itself. Cars are becoming like PCs.

Tesla had its decade head start, and it did amazingly. In my opinion, however, there is no way it can compete with the entire ecosystem of high-tech plus the manufacturing knowledge of the major car companies.

Absurd headline.

It's still WAY too overpriced to conclude that investor consensus is that it's just a carmaker. Market cap has a long way to fall before that conclusion holds.

Exactly. Tesla stock price should be looked at in a log plot.

Regardless, it's still 10x overvalued if we're simply considering it to be a carmaker.

It's currently 7x the value of Ford with a fraction of the production.

Fraction of production, but a multiple of profits, and a massive advantage in growth rate. Companies are priced on cashflow and growth rate, not production.

Tesla has a far better debt position, has far, far larger growth and is already making far more money then Ford. Not to mention the battery manufacture, super charger network and so on and so on.

Saying that Tesla is a 'fraction of production' is just an incredibly ignorant analysis of a company.

It's not about tech or not tech, it's about potential for growth and earnings. TSLA does not have the upside we all thought, and they are showing no signs of wanting to acquire huge swaths of market share by buying competitors while they have/had the valuation to do so. In other words, TSLA is not realizing their potential to "take over the world" and is behaving like a normal, big company in a mature market.

Well that's not good, because the build quality of the car isn't that great... Seems other companies have caught up in the EV space.

Car companies tend to be priced (as investments) in one range. Some good, some bad.

Real estate companies, same thing.

Cab companies, you know the drill.

So being one of those, but with computers & the web, does not permanently lift you out of your lane. Tesla is a car company, WeWork is a real estate company, and Uber/Lyft are cab companies.

In the most optimistic scenario possible, it is difficult to imagine how their future is bright enough to justify a valuation on the order of 10x GM. They would have to take the entirety of the car market, which is obviously not going to happen.

They're definitely still a tech firm, just one that consistently misses promised release/delivery dates by 2-3 years

Any other company that would miss release dates as much as Tesla does would have crashed by 90% by now

FSD has missed, and will continue to miss delivery by much longer. Cybertruck is a child's drawing of a cool truck. Frito-Lay doesn't seem to believe the full load range for the Semi. <cough>Roadster</cough>. Teslabot? Any recent sightings?

Elon's "genius" is that he pushes companies to take bigger than normal risks. But then he gets lost in survivorship bias. Not an uncommon trajectory in business.

Viewing Tesla from afar, I've noticed...

The Good:

I remain excited by their large die castings, aka gigipresses. It seems to me this will lead to better fit and finish (eg. the unforgivable panel gaps).

I support their cradle to grave supply chain integration.

I like that they make their own tech such as chips and batteries.

IIRC, Tesla leads in reducing part count and labor hours.

The Bad:

Terrible labor relations.

Psychotic spokesmodel.

Declining brand value.

Reportedly poor quality software.

Bad FSD strategy. No LIDAR, wtf?

The Unknown:

Future cost of capital? Tesla previously had some clever sources of revenue. Govt investment, incentives for EVs, selling emissions credits to other OEMs, customer provided capital thru pre-sales. What's Tesla future play?

Tesla could offer auto insurance, capturing some of that idle capital, a la Buffet & Geico.

Employee morale. Compensation thru stock options is fantastic for growth companies. With the recent devaluation, I'd be super pissed and looking for a new gig.

Their rollout of the 4680 battery with new chemistry seems to troubled. This seems important.

Can their reboot of FSD R&D catch up? New team, finally accepting need for LIDAR, etc.

Rollout of Cybertruck seems contingent on 4680 transition. What's plan 'B'?

Will executive board (investors) boot Elon Musk? He really seems like Tesla's ongoing biggest risk, biggest liability. ("Thank you your service, here's your award plaque, now please go away.")

Every time there is an article about Tesla, the vast majority of comments here are either too critical, too ignorant, or just FUD. It's too unbalanced, no other company (good or bad) gets such bad treatment here. I see many of the HN audience here are just repeating the media narrative without their own experience or even trying to understand the topic. Yes, Tesla is moving at the forefront of EV development, and yes, sometimes not everything is delivered as promised or on time. But on the other hand, this is HN, we're supposed to love new technology and engineering! Why so negative? It's pathetic.

Yeah, some comments here also feel the need to justify that they’re not an “Elon fanboi” if they’re saying positives about tesla which shows how bad it is.

The whole FSD debacle feels like people just arguing semantics and gotchas. I recently watched some videos of FSD operating in tight, hilly and unusual roads in CA. I was very impressed, its obv not perfect, but its fucking cool. People here made it sound like a scam.

As a FSD purchaser, I can tell you that watching videos do not give you the full experience of sitting in the driver's seat while FSD is on. The amount of times I need to regularly overtake control in both urban and rural environments on simple turns is enough to make me not recommend the FSD option to prospective Tesla buyers. At this point, the way it's marketed, I would lean more towards scam than even gimmick.

But do you agree it's getting better with every update?

Each update is erratic with its own set of positives and negatives, I wouldn't say there is a particular trendline. Random.

Because the explosive rise and sudden collapse of the company's valuation are interesting in and of themselves as a market story.

The valuation of the most valuable car company in the world has fallen 70% in the past year. Tesla has shed more in market cap in the past year than the GDP of most countries. How is that not remarkable?

It's emblematic of the collective insanity of tech investors in the past couple of years - that's the interesting story, and that's where the criticism lies. Tech investors have made comically bad, bad bets industry-wide in recent years, and Tesla has been one of the biggest.

It's not overly critical to think Tesla's valuation has been insane and unjustifiable, or that it's "just a car company". At least saying it's "just a car company" is admitting that there's some fundamentally valuable business behind it, unlike some other money-pit companies out there.

Musk has decided to be a highly visible CEO. He regularly makes strong, often controversial, statements and is constantly in the media cycle. When all eyes are on you you get higher highs but also lower lows. This is why a lot of CEOs prefer to keep a low profile.

What did Elon do to make Tesla earn so much money that the original founders couldnt do? Is it just about debt loans needed?

He's very good at pushing people to work overtime.

Is it like Steve Jobs and his workers took who the abuse because they were paid well? Or they had Stockholm syndrome?

It is more the latter than the former, plus wanting to have name X on the CV.

Games industry follows a similar pattern.

Suckering people to believe that the company will go to the moon. Or in other words, generate hype.

He sold cars. Turned Tesla into an absolute hype monster.

The original founders were not making a mass market car.

Tesla wasn't earning any money at all until two years ago. Until then it was coasting by on debt and selling carbon credits.

The whole 2010s was a debt driven economic cycle. Very cheap money for those who can dream up a use for it. And some people are great at selling dreams.

Over-promise on what they could deliver and how fast they could deliver.

Actually make a production car that people could buy.

He bought into a car company that made no cars. The people trying to imply he bought his way into the auto industry are trolling just as much as Elon does all while complaining about Elon trolling. Sure he wasn't a Founder of Tesla in the technical sense, but everything important that happened, happened after he bought it.

Marketing. He's a one man marketing department. Some might say that that's all he is, but apparently it goes a long way.

Obligatory "tech is not an industry, but an operating model":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27693634

The only advantage Tesla has is their charging network. They were forced to build it out because they were the first car out there and they needed to provide a way for their customers to use their cars. However now it has become their strength. Without a fast charging network all the other cars are restricted to a narrow radius. The car itself should be commoditized any day now.

Tesla is not the only fast charging network though. In Switzerland for example there are many (Move, GoFast, Ionity, etc.) and some are even cheaper than Tesla.

In the US at least their charging network is top tier. EA is rolling out pretty wide with US highways but most non-Tesla Supercharger site's reliability is laughable right now. To the point where they simply don't work when it's cold outside [0].

We (US) really need more competition in this space.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fq0RAjJ1PKQ

According to the International Energy Agency, Europe (includes UK) has 49 thousand fast chargers vs. the USA's 22 thousand. (Also 307 thousand slow chargers vs 92 thousand.)

That's a much bigger difference than I would have expected. Probably the slow charger need is less in the USA with more houses and fewer apartments, but the fast charger requirement should be higher, with longer average journeys and more interstate travel.

I don't often travel by car, so I'm rarely in the kinds of places a fast charger would be located, but on a recent trip to Britain I was surprised to see so many chargers. I think they were in almost all the car parks we used. The UK has 7 thousand fast chargers, 29 thousand slow.

(China's numbers are incredible, 470 thousand fast chargers!)

https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2022/trends-in...

https://www.zap-map.com/statistics/

Well, if you take population into account (even just the EU part of Europe has more population than the US) the difference between US and Europe is not that big. China though...

TSLA is a good trading stock. I am buying here at $110. The negativity is a good thing.

Elon hit 11 out of 12 milestones of his 10 year pay package in 2 years and then sold $40 billion of stock to buy another company. Seems like a solid buy here.

I don't own a Tesla or stock cause I am poor, but I believe in Tesla and a lot of what Elon Musk has said in the past. I thought the Giga Factory idea was great. The Cyber Truck actually looks cool to me, mostly cause it's futuristic and different. I also don't think Elon cares that much if the stock goes down, as long as he is able to move forward with his vision, which hopefully he is able to do, because if I were being optimistic and taking him at his word, then it's an exciting future. It won't all go as planned, but nothing ever does.

What would it take to shake your beliefs?

You of course can think whatever you want, but it seems to me that many people, myself included, once felt like you do about Tesla and Musk. But for many of us, his actions over the past several years have caused me to adjust our perspective. I no longer believe he has good intentions, or will deliver on most of what he promises. I wouldn’t buy a Tesla at this point, and I definitely would have a few years ago.

I’m just curious if you’ve thought about what might make you adjust your view of him.

I'm in this boat. I've been happy overall with my Model S purchase but compared to luxury car makers it is overpriced and nowhere near as good. The best thing about owning a Tesla in the US is the Supercharger network.

Things that turned me off:

- Many times under warranty getting stupid things repaired that were clearly manufacturing problems or just boneheaded mistakes when putting the car together. Crazy for a $102k automobile. - Once warranty wore off ran into an issue where the car warned me it might not start again and it needed service immediately. Tesla scheduled my service 2 weeks out and charged me $1000, for something that when I googled it was a common problem and that the service center told me wasn't something I had done. At this point I was pretty frustrated. - Elon's antics: when he called one of the heroes who rescued those kids from the cave a pedo to sate his own ego I was flabbergasted. I've paid more attention to his actions since then and they've only made me think less of the man. I truly think he has done too many recreational drugs and has destroyed his mind.

The giveaway was all the cars they make.

Investors stated fact.

This is a pointless distinction. All car companies are tech companies.

It seems like you are thinking about "tech" from a value proposition standpoint (i.e. that car manufacturers are building value through technology, and thus that makes them a tech company).

This article is referring to the term used in more of a financial context - referring to how the company will grow and scale. In this context, "tech company" refers to a company with very low marginal CoGS that exponentially decays with scale.

The distinction is highly relevant if you're deciding how to value a stock. For whatever reason the public markets had been valuing Tesla (and every other EV startup) as though it was going to benefit from tech-like high margins and free distribution.

great article, but:

"And the natural Tesla-owners among the wealthy progressive set are less prepared to overlook Mr Musk’s libertarian antics at Twitter"

banning journalists and parodies he doesnt like == libertarian, got it!

Real libertarianism hasn't been tried.

The closest attempt failed miserably: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/30/colorado-...

Investors conclude that Tesla has successfully alienated the vast majority of their potential customers via their CEO pushing baseless conspiracy theories on Twitter as visible in declining demand in the last few months since Elon unraveled.

We’ve also been shown that Elon doesn’t know how to run a tech company. It’s been obvious before the Twitter takeover from all the half baked features that were shoehorned in and abandoned.

Oh no, Elon failed so hard at running tech companies that he accidentally built three of the most innovative companies of the last 20 years and became the worlds richest man… you can hate him all you want but don’t underestimate him. I hate that I have to be the voice of reason here since I really hate his god complex but I can at least respect what he’s built. That list includes X/PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX. Don’t let your hatred blind you. He sucks but running innovative companies is his bread and butter. Twitter isn’t innovative though and I hope it crushes him.

Elon didn't "build" any of his businesses, he is and always was the "money guy". He provided startup capital for X.com and SpaceX, but never did any substantial technical work on either. He bought Tesla after they already had several prototypes and started cosplaying as "founder" and fired everybody who called BS.

Any tips for the rest of us on how we can "money guy" our way to one of the richest people on earth?

Step 1: Inherit a fortune from your family of modern day slavers

Step 2: Have those loads of that money available during the first months of a widely anticipated telecom revolution.

Step 3: pour that money into the most obviously practical use case of the brand new technology to quickly capture market share, optimally one where network effects will solidify your monopoly in perpetuity, such as payment processing

Tesla owns so much data that it has collected(and will only continue to amass more in the future)from its customers that it is the very definition of a successful tech company. Economist is an embarrassment for journalism.

That's an odd definition for "tech company." Is your point, though, that that data are valuable? If so, what for?

Selling to interested buyers to use that information in target ad campaigns?

--I want to target my new car advertising campaign at any Tesla owner with FSD that recently had a wreck or near-wreck.

--I want to target my bloated overpriced techy product that will collect all sorts of personal data specifically at Tesla owners as they are clearly okay with this behavior.

Regardless, that doesn’t NOT make Tesla a tech company.

Calling Tesla a ‘car maker’ is like calling Amazon a used bookseller.

I feel like I am really at a loss to explain this .. if someone at HN doesny understand why data is valuable, I can add nothing to the discussion. My day job is farming a small plot of land.

This wasn't me not understanding why it might be valuable. This was me asking you to explain what makes you think this is valuable, how valuable you think it is, and why you think it's a unique advantage to Tesla.

One way to look at this would be the ARPU from data-intensive services like Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc. Typical orders of magnitude here is dozens of dollars per year per user; I think Amazon shopping is closer to $100 if I remember right.

I dimly recall some idiotic tech blog claiming that in the future, cars would be free because of the value of ad targeting based off of collected car data, which is hilarious:

- Cars cost three orders of magnitude more than any reasonable revenue per user from such ads

- Cost of a car per year (depreciation + maintenance) is, what, 2 orders of magnitude higher than that?

- There are cheaper ways to get that data, like...free smartphones? Yet nobody does that.

"Data is the new oil" sounds good, but it leaves out a lot of important details, like "how do you monetize that data" and "how much do you make for it?" If monetization is ads, the answer is "not much."

Well..I can give you another example. In agriculture, the data extracted from the field is more valuable than farm gate prices.

For example, you can generate weather data from a farm. That income doesn’t belong to the farmer but to the one who owns the land or the data.

Data has so much value addition. Grain doesn’t ..not for the farmer anyways. Income from value added data is taxable. Farm income isn’t.

We generally look at value from the pov of whether it can be taxed and whether it will generate employment which leads to more taxation. Money which creates value in a capitalistic economy is tied to employment and purchasing power.

Data can be reused again and again to create taxable goods. All food will become someone’s poop.

I am just making scribble points. But I am sure you can fill in the blanks.

Don’t other car companies also collect data?

Data isn’t what makes a tech company successful. It’s the application of that data into a product. They have Autopilot as their seminal data product, but it is buggy.

I think you underestimate the value of data. It is stock in trade. Without data there is no automation. A lot of it is noise and very little signal.

The one who reigns the era of automation and AI will be the one who possesses all our data.

Is that much personal data an asset or a liability?

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