Tesla to lay off everyone working on Superchargers, new vehicles

Not withstanding how folks might reasonably hate the CEO, or want different features than offered by the two main selling affordable cars, Consumer Reports is pretty easy to check and there are far, far, more reliable electric cars at this point.

The reality distortion field of "every negative thing out there is just a personal attack out to destroy Musk" only holds out for so long.

Essentially he makes the point that, if you have to own a fleet and maintain it, even if you stop paying driver's wages, you're not making profit compared to market rates for Uber drivers. Sad implication is that uber drivers themselves are underwater after taking into account depreciation and maintenance.

A fleet where Tesla operates a network without needing to own or maintain the capital equipment is a lot more profitable, and they're one of the few companies positioned to pull it off (certainly not Waymo). Essentially, Tesla could make money on the vehicle sale, make money on the maintenance, and make a platform fee on the taxi network. Wonderful economics on paper.

Win-win too: the car-owners supply the capital and in return receive the freedom of their own car plus an offset to their depreciation via the rental cash flow. That would mean that teslas would have incredible resale value compared to 'dumb' cars that don't produce cashflow.

That said, trust in the network is key, and Tesla + Musk aren't exactly winning public trust recently. If this is going to work, each incremental rider needs to be able to trust that

- if they try to book a Tesla robotaxi they will be able to find one available, nearby and in the time they want it

- the car will work (well maintained, enough charge for their trip duration)

- the self-driving will be safe

While all those things are straightforward, to be honest, it's hard for me to imagine how they can provide a better value proposition than human Uber/Lyft in that regard, where in major cities a car is always 10 min away or less, and the driver has both a financial and survival interest in ensuring it's well maintained and safe (the driver's life also depends on it).

Maybe the niche will be suburban or exurban places where human ride shares don't have enough demand to efficiently match with supply, and where people are okay waiting / planning in advance if they're sure a car will come. Could be some overlap with starlink market fit.

What standardization will bring is more investment and development. Companies are less interested in investing in infrastructure when there are dumb standards fights which lead to pointless incompatibilities.

Part of the reason why Europe's EV infrastructure is further along is because of standardization. Everyone can build to the same standard and have it work with all brands of charger and all brands of car.

With CCS winning the protocol war in North America and with Tesla's plug now standardized as SAE J3400 (aka CCS type 3), more companies will be willing to build out more chargers. North America is years behind where it could have been, but at least it's slowly heading towards standardization and compatible charging infrastructure.

They also seemed to overhire on boondoggles and not concentrate on execution.

Back in the day, I was constantly getting pinged to be a PM for their ML Infra team, but the pay was meh and they probably could have done better by acquihiring additional companies (similar to what they did with Deepscale).

It's not his (pseudo?) conservative views, I'm actually somewhat politically conservative. I just have a ton of antipathy toward him as a person. I'm not proud of this, but he's a person I actively want to fail.

I'm curious how common my viewpoint is.

Wasn't that already clear, like, five+ years ago? When they were trying to get the Model 3 in production, I remember stories of Musk visiting the site, getting into people's business, and firing them impulsively if he didn't like something. Stuff like that and the repeated lies about FSD led me to write them off years ago.

My last car cost $10,000 and has been a solid, stable workhorse for over a decade now. If I bought a Model Y today, would it still be working in 10 years? Would I even be able to get parts for it anymore? Or would both the car and the car manufacturer be defunct? I'm not sure exactly what I'd guess the odds are, but I'm pretty sure they're nowhere near good enough for me to be willing to wager $30,000 on that bet. And that's largely because of the pattern of rash, impulsive behavior on the part of the person at the helm of the company.

Sadly, most of the ownership appears to be Musk and closely affiliated funds, but those funds could be enticed to vote him out if enough money is lost.

Musk pushed all questions about new models to the Robotaxi event in August and the media filled in the blanks and ran with "new, cheaper model" putting words into Musk's mouth.

He did say they weren't going to build a new production line.

Smart move at the time but they said recently that it's not actually necessary now as there's a tsunami of cheap, high performance batteries. And those batteries are readily available to (and sometimes built by) their conpetitors

> Tesla is not just laying off Daniel Ho, director of vehicle programs and new product introduction, but also his entire team.

> All of which makes the decision to get rid of senior director of EV charging Rebecca Tinucci—along with her entire team—a bit of a head-scratcher.

(It's not a hugely well-written article, and I can kind of see how you could get your reading of it by reading only the headline and the first paragraph, but if you read the whole article it's clear enough.)