Alienating Tesla Buyers by the Cybertruck-Load
ritholtz.com
ritholtz.com
I want a new car but cutting nessesities to save a few dollars more than anything else has ruled out 2024 model Tesla's. It may be Musk's insanity that led to this but the end result is the same. The newest models of Tesla are no good.
It turns out that not all lessons from building rockets make sense with a car.
Trimming weight is a huge benefit in rocket design. The less weight the rocket has, the more fuel it can carry, and this mass ratio has a non-linear effect on how much, how far can you carry. Rocket failure is a part of life which you just accept and can iterate.
But mass ratio just doesn't have the same importance for cars. Safety, reliability, usability are kings. Few kilograms extra are unimportant. The recent Cybertruck's accelerator pedal issue was quite illustrative there.
If you want to alter the wiper's setting and if you don't press the little wheel-button just right or a few seconds too late then you change the radio volume or station, depending on exactly how you hit the button.
I hated driving the Model 3. It was like an iPad on wheels. Does anything out there have normal turn signals, normal windshield wipers, a dashboard that's in front of you, and doesn't slam the brakes every time you relax your foot a little bit?
Except the Solterra's range was kind of short and charging was more painful than a Tessa. Tesla really has charging down, and that's a big deal if you cannot charge at home or work. Teslas charging is both faster and generally works at more stations. The Solterra seemed to have more trouble syncing up, and the plug wasn't as common, so you had to plan ahead more.
I can tell you as an automotive EE though, everything has questionable choices right now. If I wanted an EV, I think the RAM 1500 is the least offensive then the GM.
Maybe the Blazer EV but you need to deal with the screen a bit more.
Or is everything so tied together, so conjoined to ideology that bad Tesla equals bad Musk? Should I hope for a SpaceX explosion because Elon thinks we should control our borders more?
All I see here are meek people looking for more ammo or easy points in the culture war they seem to want so badly. Careful what you wish for.
Also, not everyone makes their car/EV purchase based on who Elon is. Some might care more about the car itself and how it competes with others. Some might not even know who Elon is, or what he's done on twitter.
More like barely anyone in the real world does.
That being said, being far out as politically as I am (for my own peace), I think it’s elon’s own doing, offering manufacturing support updates online and his car manufacturing company’s customer complaints being too online and journalists with unusually strong political beliefs covering it with new and ‘hot’ headlines day to day (like it’s news!)
I wonder if someone have data of customer complaints from german and chinese car manufacturers (EV or otherwise) and why we don’t see that a lot in news (or at all, are they perpetual frictionless motion machines?!)
It’s also funny people have to bring up Elon’s politics and use it as a cover to justify their own arguments of his illegitimacy and inability to lead a company he built (for most part), have these people ever looked at political affiliations of all industrialists or top executives of major companies? they generally tend to skew more conservative naturally (at least elon craps on people of all political directions he find funny at any given moment)
Maybe a few years back before COVID I would have been a Tesla customer. Instead I opted for an EV from a traditional manufacturer. Great quality and drive, it suits me just fine, even if the software isn't the most advanced.
[0]Funny to me that the anti-woke reactionaries are way more obsessed with race and gender then almost any left wingers I have known. They build up these social media scarecrows of what is "woke" to rile themselves up.
Tesla problems get multiple orders of magnitude of attention than any other manufacturer.
German EVs with the possible exception of BMW are highly unreliable with a lot of problems. You will not hear that from the news but you will from a VW mechanic.
Don't give yourself too much credit. You didn't really need the "very disparate data sources" to see which way the trend was going to go. Of course EV buyers were interested in climate change, and those people heavily intersect with the liberals that Musk has seemed determined to alienate alienate since at least a couple years before the Twitter purchase. Anyone could see this coming from miles away. The only question was when and how much. Right? Did we not all see this coming?
1. Musk committed a catastrophically huge unforced error with his right wing buffoonery.
2. Tesla was MASSIVELY overvalued and a huge drop in valuation was inevitable regardless of Tesla’s performance.
4. The terminally online crowd that hates Elon only seem large because they are loud online.
6. the WSJ reports that tesla sales are down among democrats, who outnumber republicans 5:2 in EV sales: https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/elon-musk-turned-democrat...
big buys by Hertz, et al, have also been a disaster, with the company ditching most of their EVs due to higher costs.
most discussions about the other teslas have been mixed but generally positive, but that's mostly irrelevant to stock price unless they're going to buy new EVs every year; the average age of a car on the road is ~11 years. This means Tesla has now saturated it's potential market, is failing to grow it, and will likely start rent-seeking behaviors via subscription price increases to attempt make up for the losses; these will alienate a lot of current, mostly-happy users, and push others away. kia, ford, and chinese makers have good options, and they will win a lot of current and potential telsa customers.
in other words, musk has saturated, then alienated, his core market, and failed to expand into new ones.
to hit the real value of that stock price it's going to need to fall wayyyy more than 40%; we'll see if the market movers that hold a lot of tesla, like the saudis, will let that happen
I think the only person he could alienate are some fanboys and fangirls. The people repping merchandise.
I think EV buyers care more about variety in car models to choose from. Tesla has been making the same thing for 12 years and any wow factor is completely gone, replaced by…. everyone else, some which are joining the tesla supercharger network.
My mom (quite literally) has never heard of him and certainly doesn't link any decisions she makes to her non-opinion of him.
That said, Tesla's are an opinionated car. You either like the touchscreen interface, lack of familiar car stuff etc, or you don't. You're either prepared to pay premium prices or you aren't.
Fundamentally there are a LOT more EV choices now, filling more market segments.
So sure, Elon's personality absolutely plays a part. He is the "face" of the brand and that matters. Sales have definitely been lost by that.
At the same time, there are many other factors coming into play. It's hard to pull just one out and blame the decine of sales on just that.
i also find it hard to believe your mom has never heard of elon musk, the richest man in the world, and who is discussed on like every media outlet ever.
he is not the "face" of the brand, like some athlete on a box of wheaties, he's a chief executive and is actively determining the direction of the company; the cybertruck was his idea.
The old Tesla had a feeling of a visionary, sci-fi, ecological, luxury (because of the price point mainly) car. Today, when I see Tesla, the main feeling I get is disgust. People are not rational actors when buying things - you often decide what you want to buy based on wants/feelings and then your brain finds a way to rationalize the decision.
What’s “OK Boomer” for Millenials and Gen Z?
The lesson you should take from this is _not_ “right, we should introduce lots and lots of changes at once, and not bother with the testing” (I flatly don’t believe that the indicators-as-touch-buttons-on-steering-wheel thing was tested on actual humans before being implemented; if it had been it would never have seen the light of day).
there is a reason things stay the same, esp. when it comes to safety-related controls.
Besides that, the closing sentence and some comments regarding stalks and buttons demonstrate once again that many people have never driven a Tesla for more than a 2h rental:
> Of course, there is much more competition today, and Tesla’s designs are getting old, and looking a little stale. Their huge decade-long software advantage is now probably somewhere in the 2 -4 year range.
The design is minimal due to aerodynamic reasons, and competitors have essentially the same lines, with perhaps a slightly more rounded accent to it. Interiors are minimal because half the point of Tesla is save on costs on 200 buttons that you never use once. The software makes up for it 99% of the time.
Similar priced cars in the same segment are still nowhere near the efficiency or software quality of Tesla. Yes, FSD is still in beta, sure, but the infotainment experience is still unmatched, and it's not a 2-4 year headstart, it's more in the 5-10 year range.