Tesla's in Its Flop Era | Hacker News Reader

Tesla's in Its Flop Era

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35 pointsrntn80 comments

Tesla was in a ridiculous bind.

Its market cap was about 4 to 5x higher than any other car company. That kind of difference is hard to justify based on tangibles such as 'well, their brand has more value' or 'well, they are just.. better at building cars than their competitors'. Sure, but, 5x with no way that other companies can catch up in the next 10 to 15 years?

Instead, it 'worked' by peddling itself as tech company that so happens to make cars.

The problem is, that veneer requires upkeep. Specifically, actually selling to the masses requires being competitive with them, but, lowering prices and acting like a car company would thus starts eating away at the idea that Tesla is a tech company and not a car company.

Screwed if you do, screwed if you don't. Because the car companies have 'caught up' and are now making all-electric sedans with tech integration. And the car industry is trying to squeeze out the all-electric sedan with cheaper hybrids. Tesla can no longer rely on 'sports brand uniqueness' (that market is no longer solely tesla's, and it is far too slow for tesla's current valuation).

I have no idea how to solve for that. I'm assuming tesla's stock is on its way to be ~25% of what it is now.

This is why Elon will be lashed to the mast for the entire ride of TSLA down to auto industry comparables. Nobody will take the CEO job to be blamed for that inevitable further decline in stock price, no matter how well they could run that company.

What prevents me from buying a new Tesla is really Musk himself. I love my M3, but not enough to want to line his pockets further with a new purchase. If I was to buy another, it'd be from a 3rd party, used.

(I get that even if I bought it used, I'd still be paying that $9 / mo for the connectivity, so it's still technically giving Tesla money. Can't always "win" it all.)

Also to pre-empt comments regarding wait till you hear about other CEOs who are bad / worse that you are funding - you're right; can't fight battles with everyone, have to pick and choose, and this is the one I choose.

Beyond that, someone as emotionally brittle and allergic to criticism as he is will inevitably create a yes-men culture, which will destroy engineering discipline & lead to declining quality. No way around it.

The one thing you absolutely need to preserve engineering quality is the ability to take criticism.

What are you talking about? Removing turn signal stalks and adding a yoke with no progressive steering is engineering at its absolute finest. Do you really think Elon would just surround himself with yes men that implement stupid ideas just because he thinks it "looks cool"?

> Do you really think Elon would just surround himself with yes men that implement stupid ideas just because he thinks it "looks cool"?

Yes, I suspect a lot of us do think exactly that.

I think the commenter was being sarcastic via the "Removing turn signal stalks and adding a yoke with no progressive steering is engineering at its absolute finest" remark.

I honestly struggle to tell these days.

Me too. I use the sarcastic mark (/s) nowadays when conveying that through text.

I was definitely being sarcastic!

Sorry for taking that wrong. The fanboy logic can be so ridiculous at times that it's really hard to tell.

It isn't clear Tesla ever had quality. His management persona was in place day one and has very consistently made decisions that negatively affect quality, much less the real challenge of building a car company from scratch. Teslas have pretty consistently ranked low on quality rankings.

I would love to hear exact reasonings behind this hatred of Musk. Not typical talking points, but actual detailed examples.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Views_of_Elon_Musk

For me, things started going downhill when he called a diver a "pedo guy" during the cave rescue story. I get it was determined by the court to not fall under defamation, but it just left a sour taste.

He loves to overpromise and underdeliver. As someone who bought FSD on his 2018 M3, it's still not in a state where I feel it can be safely used outside of a highway. I guess it's an issue of credibility here.

Q-Anon promotions: https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-qanon-2024-election/

Great replacement theory: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/elon-musk-...

I don't agree with his thoughts on Ukraine / Crimea:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1576969255031296000

I'm sure I can conjure more examples where we disagree ideologically or from my POV he's just an asshole, but it's a waste of my time to find even more specific examples and get into a potential flame war over why to hate or not hate him.

The time required to find examples that don't seem like it's from a highly "biased" source is far greater than the person asking simply the question and will most likely not respond in kind.

This will be my only response to the topic and I will not respond any further.

Hope that helps.

QAnon is so obviously a pun/joke on Q rumors, I'm not sure what the outrage is about.

His GRT outlook is quite logical. More illegal immigrants = more votes for particular politicians, more expensive housing, and lower wages. He's been very clear he prefers extremely tight borders for illegal immigrants and hugely open ones for highly qualified legal immigrants. I think the majority of American's would agree with that.

I also disagree with his Ukraine/Crimea thoughts, but it's quite logical from his viewpoint. He sees an increased risk of Nuclear War over Eastern Ukraine as not worth it, and has mentioned that a few times. I'm sure he understands his mortality and time left, and is just thinking on a civilizational level. I will point out the irony in you stating this, when Starlink has been instrumental in the Ukrainian defense.

Again, I haven't seen anything particularly damning.

Illegal immigrants driving up housing prices and Great Replacement Theory are not the same things.

I don't really get the controversy around the so-called Great Replacement Theory.

Europeans have factually ceased to be a majority in the US in the younger generations, and given that humans do die of old age this will surely follow through to the population overall. The demographic trends are driven by factors that factually could be influenced by government policy if there was a will to do so.

If someone is unhappy about this, it's certainly reasonable to disagree with them or to call them a racist or whatever. But the way people talk about this "theory", it's like they think it isn't really happening and that people who do think it's happening are delusional.

Can someone explain this to me?

At least in the US, it is believed by a % of an entire faction that the absence of that government policy you mentioned is intentional, malicious, and designed to create new voters that are in the other faction’s pocket. And so the Great Replacement is a plan, rather than an observation, and this is where I see the controversy. The news here (“news”) is even pushing this narrative (I know this bc I was accosted with it today, in person), though I am not sure they use the terminology.

Illegal immigrants can't vote, have never been able to vote, and there's absolutely no evidence that they've ever voted more than a random one-off that's almost always caught and prosecuted. Lying on your voter registration form is a felony and it's the height of internet addled smooth-brain delusion to insist that vast swaths of illegal immigrants are going to commit felonies that include providing their name and address to vote in an indirect democracy because one of the political parties is marginally less hostile to them.

Illegal immigrants are counted by the census and total population is used to allocate congressional districts. High rates of illegal immigrants in a district therefore increases the voting power of the citizens living there. This allows illegal immigration to distort election results without anyone casting a ballot.

Which is an entirely different issue and not at all what any of the weird culture warriors that hang around on X have claimed is their concern.

So are legal immigrants, along with everybody else.

I can see why Texas is excited to ship folks north.

> there's absolutely no evidence that they've ever voted more than a random one-off that's almost always caught and prosecuted.

To be more precise, the evidence is that non-citizen attempts to vote are somewhere on the order of one vote in ~hundred million. Screwing up voter registration forms is somewhat more common, but people who actually cross reference databases have found that the people who incorrectly mark "I want to be registered to vote" on their drivers license forms don't actually vote, which suggests it's mostly a mistake.

There are issues with the amount of people on voter registration rolls who shouldn't be, but I should also point out that anytime someone claims ridiculously high numbers of potential misvotes, it's because they do coarse-grained database mismatches, and so they'll catch people whose names match. When you do the actual legwork, the voter registration issues go down dramatically, and the principal cause of that is that people aren't correctly unregistered when they move (and people don't attempt to vote in their previous place of residence, so there's very few actual vote attempts!)

In fact, the largest category of illegal vote attempts I believe is felons who try to vote. Because the voter registration system does a poor job of actually working out who is a felon whose right to vote has been revoked.

You did, I'm sure, skip over the multiple accusations of pedophilia to a cave diver, by accident.

Remember when Nancy Pelosi's husband was attacked by his gay lover with a hammer? Reality might not remember, but Musk certainly did.

In other words, you disagree with the reasons people don’t like him.

It’s one thing to disagree with someone, but to trivialise their reasoning as “talking points” is…actually probably what I’d expect. Never mind.

There’s no shortage of “detailed examples” carefully and dutifully enumerated online. Again, if you haven’t seen them yet, you simply don’t see them as problematic.

In the car world, the abbreviation 'M3' usually refers to a BMW M3. not a Tesla Model 3.

Yeah, I was really confused. This guy loves his BMW M3 but wants to ditch it for a Tesla?

Ah, sorry. Haha, didn't know. Yes, I meant a Tesla Model 3.

I think you're not alone. You're not just buying a car, you're buying into a brand. You'll be seen in it often, in public, it's not like some guilty pleasure you can indulge in the privacy of your home late at night.

Musk's behavior excites some, but much like Trump, who he approximates, he turns off a lot more, and arguably a proportionally greater percentage of his target market.

Musk could do himself (and his shareholders) a lot of favors right now by handing over running of Tesla to someone else, but it's unlikely his ego will allow him to do that.

> I'd still be paying that $9 / mo for the connectivity

What does this mean?

https://www.tesla.com/support/connectivity

Elon Musk isn't helping, sure, but this is really just a long-overdue market correction. Tesla was valued like a tech company, but now investors are realizing that it is, in fact, a car company. It never made sense to value it higher than every other auto manufacturer combined while it had a small fraction of the sales of a single one.

I also wonder about how much tech the Chinese gov got out of the China Tesla factory to help build the Chinese EV competitors, which are also eating into their market share.

Stuff like this is why I think anti-China propaganda is so incredibly effective and strong.

It’s so weird. Tesla uses Chinese batteries because they’re simply better. Batteries are the most important part of a EV. China’s EV industry was already huge by the time Gigafactory Shanghai opened. Tesla China isn’t even a joint venture. It’s fully owned by Tesla.

But here, a user boldly and confidently claims that the CCP stole Tesla tech which allowed Chinese companies to dominate the EV industry. As if Tesla has some kind of secret tech that China stole in 2020 and within 1-2 years, Chinese EVs are now much better because of that secret.

People here seem to think so little of Chinese people. I wonder if they’ve ever stepped inside a Silicon Valley company before and find that most of them have a huge number of both Chinese Americans and Chinese foreigners in R&D. But I suppose people think that the Chinese in America are only smart because they’re under the supervision of Americans. Chinese in China must be dumb.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_intellectual_pr...

Thank you for the response. I had to think about what I wrote. Yeah, I am most likely affected by anti-China / CCP propaganda. My mind does go to theft when I think about Chinese advancements relative to American ones (such as EVs and CPUs). It's hard to unwind that, but I'll think more in the future before I'd confidently express such thoughts if they should even be said with confidence.

I do not think Chinese are dumb at all. They're definitely gaining footholds in different sectors that America is supposedly strong in and that is not something a "dumb" nation would be able to accomplish. Underestimating people in these situations would probably be fatal.

My issues are with the CCP / Chinese gov and not the people themselves. Probably as a result of said propaganda. One can dislike a government and still respect its people.

> It's fully owned by Tesla

Is it really? Correct me here. I currently think that foreign businesses in China must be partially owned by a Chinese entity and that eventually leads to some form of CCP meddling.

We don’t know if they stole anything, it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary, but they definitely played Elon like a fiddle. They lured him in by letting Tesla China stay wholly owned, granting it a low corporate tax rate, and giving it below-market loans. Tesla then contracted with tons of local suppliers, who ended up working and sharing knowledge with domestic automakers as well. A year and a half later, their cars explode onto the market and eat Tesla’s lunch.

https://open-ev-charts.org/#electric-ratio:CN:year

China’s EV industry was already well ahead of the US by the time Tesla arrived.

And yes, Tesla China is wholly owned by Tesla USA.

The problem I’m pointing out is that people here automatically assume that China steals in order to compete. They never give China credit. Since China actually leads in EV, they don’t have to steal. It’s companies like Ford, GM, Volkswagen that have to steal from Chinese companies.

> It’s companies like Ford, GM, Volkswagen that have to steal from Chinese companies

Good joke!

> Good joke!

Not sure why you think it’s a joke. Just check the state of Ford, GM, and Volkswagen EVs. They’re significantly behind.

Yes because they don’t have the benefit of stolen ip and local suppliers who are also built on stolen ip.

https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=40137096

Recursion!

> People here seem to think so little of Chinese people.

I don’t get the feeling that HN belittles Chinese people or any particular race. What I do feel is that HN is pro freedom of speech and pro democracy. The idea that a dictatorship can advance beyond us is a scary thought. It is scary because it means maybe the freedoms we now enjoy may in fact be detrimental to humanity’s progress. This, I believe, is why you may see more anti-CCP opinions on HN.

They’re not. They’re pro-power and pro-money. They don’t want competition from China.

At the end of the day, it’s always about power and money.

No, the scary thought is another leader like Mao rising to the top of modern day China. The world wouldn’t survive this and there’s nothing preventing it.

The Chinese have learned a lot from the west, sure, some through espionage, but most directly through the west teaching them. Many German companies have cooperated with Chinese ones or manufactured, even for decades.

China can compete because they have serious engineering talent which had a long time to learn and both government and private industry, which recognized a major trend and managed to capitalize on it. To be frank the "stealing of R&D" is pure cope by people who do not want to acknowledge that the Chinese can actually make competent cars.

You're right. I shouldn't have implied that, and as you said it does come from a fear of realizing that truth.

Given enough time, people, resources and focus, one can definitely capitalize on this. They have all that and it should be acknowledged.

China is now capable of producing world class tech in any consumer industry. They even lead the world by a long way in some (eg camera drones)

Yes, but I experience again and again people completely in denial about this. Often they view China as the producer of low cost and low quality products flooding global markets, which certainly is true, but at the same time Chinese companies have actually learned how to produce high quality products, that can actually compete with western offerings.

The correction here is a side effect of drastically poor business results. Not mere perception differences.

Not just a car company, but a company that isn't "growing exponentially" now that it's achieved some scale (ie no longer a miniscule base).

It's also an interesting thing as a car company. Other existing car companies make dozens of models across regions and are able to rev them constantly, including entire refreshes. Tesla can barely manage the three models and a meme that they currently have, one of the models being over a decade old.

I'd have to agree. The market for electric vehicles in the US seems to be saturated. If they can somehow add in a plug in hybrid, I could see them gaining sales. That won't happen though.

Musk's Tweet about FSD is pretty much spot on. Just being electric isn't enough of a market differentiator anymore. Too many copycats. Sacrificing a new model to focus on FSD is a great move. Many stockholders probably won't be able to stomach it, though.

> Not quite betting the company, but going balls to the wall for autonomy is a blindingly obvious move.

> Everything else is like variations on a horse carriage.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1780376546148327690

> Sacrificing a new model to focus on FSD is a great move.

Musk has been saying level 5 fsd is just around the corner for well over a decade, demonstrating a large and persistent disconnect between expectations and reality. That makes the reward/risk ratio of sacrificing a model to sink more into fsd rather questionable. The outcome isn't just not guaranteed, it isn't even known to be solvable with today's technology.

People will buy nice electric cars that aren't riddled with quality issues. Investing in QA (where Tesla has next to none) is a bog-standard, practically-guaranteed route to improving products. But that doesn't excite this "brilliant leader" so it's off the table.

This sacrifice isn't a "great move," it's another mark in Musk's record of bad gambles.

> People will buy nice electric cars that aren't riddled with quality issues.

Anecdata: my father bought a VW ID.4 1 year after I got my M3 (2019). The MY wasn't available yet. VW ID.4 has been at the garage 3-4 times/year for various (mostly software) issues. Same with my mother's Peugeot e-208. My M3 got the latest software update the next day after an imperfect firmware update made autopilot sometimes unavailable, all done with the technicians via the Tesla app.

You can choose between amazing efficiency and software, and perhaps a 1mm-off panel on 1 out 1000 vehicles, or perfect esthetics but horrible software.

Teslas are still not perfect, and a stronger QA would definitely make for a better image, I agree. Still, Tesla has made a lot of progress, you don't find as many people complaining about QC/panel issues anymore on reddit. But competitors still have a ton of catching up to do.

The eternal optimism of Tesla fans continues to astound me. The cybertruck has just been recalled because the soap they used to install accelerator pedals made them slip off, and you're telling me people are complaining less about panel issues?

Other manufacturers have recalls too, for equally dangerous conditions, but only Tesla ever makes the news (I'm not defending Tesla, just proving a point). CT has been out for ~4 months, 4k units delivered, platform engineered from scratch, new low voltage system, steer by wire, ...... inevitably something will slip.

Compare a brand-new everything to minor updates to existing cars:

- https://www.cbsnews.com/news/toyota-lexus-recall-2020-2022-f...

- https://www.cbsnews.com/news/toyota-recall-50000-corolla-rav...

- https://www.cbsnews.com/news/toyota-recall-rav4-suv-2023/

- https://www.cbsnews.com/news/toyota-recall-tundra-fire-risk/

And this is just Toyota, which as far as I can gather is considered reliable and trustworthy.

> only Tesla ever makes the news

This bald-faced lie is revealed by the very news you share further down your comment.

> (I'm not defending Tesla, just proving a point)

Your argument takes the form of a whataboutism, which does not actually prove anything.

> Musk has been saying level 5 fsd is just around the corner for well over a decade, demonstrating a large and persistent disconnect between expectations and reality.

You literally have Musk's Director of Engineering telling/"reassuring" the State of California that Musk's statements on FSD are "visionary, and not reflective of engineering reality".

Brilliant

Why anyone would take what he says about FSD seriously, and with any shred of hope attached, is beyond me at this point. What he says here is logical, but he has so consistently failed to deliver I can’t fathom continuing to have faith in what he says about FSD.

It literally went from being a solved problem in 2015 - "I view it as a solved problem. We know exactly what we need to do and we will be there in a few years” - to somehow getting un-solved along the way. In 2022, "Our focus now is just on working on solving this problem".

Classic 90/90 rule. Not surprising to anyone who has done innovative engineering. The last stretch is always the hardest.

"Innovative engineering?" I think you mean "fundamental research." The classic ∞/100 rule?

I think most realistic beliefs are that FSD is a minimum of a decade away (personally, my belief is more than, and when it does come to life, it won't be Tesla)...

Anyone who says "it's a solved problem, we just need to implement it" is deluding themselves, and as soon as you poke... it's qualifier, after qualifier, after qualifier. Tesla isn't in "the last stretch". Navigating around Pittsburgh at night in winter blizzard conditions, with poor roads and signage, whiteout over what street markings there are, and poor visibility?

That's the last stretch, not "it handles roundabouts far better than it did in FSD version x-1!".

If it’s not surprising to anyone who has done innovative engineering, how did Elon miss it?

Focusing on FSD is car company suicide. It's a focus on selling cars to people who don't like cars and would rather do without one entirely. You can sell some cars like this but ultimately it's a dead end, you soon sell one to everybody who wants one, nobody else does, and the market for your cars crashes.

This has been covered in the past. Some people may own their car but the robotaxi model folds into transportation infrastructure, like Uber. Cars sitting in parking lots and driveways 90% of the time is incredibly stupid and wasteful. Not to mention commercial transport. The market is enormous.

Stock is up almost 7% after hours. Someone is believing the robotaxi/autonomous driving narrative.

So we get neither a cheap Model 2 nor actual FSD.

Just like how Trump creates some new sensation when he's in a tight spot, Musk creates some new vaporware. In this cases he's even resorting to recycling existing vaporware.

"Full Autonomy in 9 months! No this time I mean it!"

FSD just killed a guy today.

Worth mentioning: I don't believe they have confirmed it was FSD yet. It just says Autopilot which can be the basic one which just keeps you in a lane.

In any case it's frightening that any version of it it wasn't capable of detecting a motorcycle in front of the car and stopping.

It probably was FSD -- FSD is available to pretty much everybody in April, so it seems unlikely he was using Autopilot.

But what seems likely to me is that the driver had his foot on the accelerator. FSD is relatively timid. For example, it will slam on the brakes if it sees a pedestrian that it thinks might cross in front of the car. The driver can press on the accelerator to prevent this. I've gotten used to just keeping my foot on the accelerator for one particular road where FSD is particularly prone to slowing down for no good reason.

“Copycats” is a bit rich.

When were they not focusing on FSD? It was promised like 5 years ago.

This is just a rationalization as to why the car company isn't growing, despite people claiming they'd own the entire market.

I do wonder if he's doomed FSD/robotaxi by being stubborn about lidar. The self-driving problem is unlike most other ML problems due to its mission critical nature. Having 2 modalities that can be cross-checked will reduce edge case hallucations that cause crashes. Like, instead of probability p that you don't see the truck in the middle of the road, you reduce it to nearly p^2. This non-linear reduction in faults that comes with cross-checking modalities is not intuitive. I never bought Musk's justification: "Lidar is not how humans do it". Why would we intentionally handicap ourselves to the tools available to biological evolution?

Seeing how hard it's been for Cruise and Waymo, who use lidar, and only operate in a small area, I am not expecting a functioning Tesla robotaxi that regulators will allow on the road anytime soon.

> Sacrificing a new model to focus on FSD is a great move.

They are actually not doing that. TSLA said on the earnings call they are accelerating the completion of the cheaper Model 2 platform. That's what driving up the stock price AH.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-earnings-q1-175358835.h...

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