Tesla's Share of U.S. Electric Car Market Falls Below 50% | Hacker News Reader

Tesla's Share of U.S. Electric Car Market Falls Below 50%

nytimes.com

31 pointslxm38 comments

Anecdotal: 8 years ago, Tesla would be at the top of my list if I was looking to buy a luxury or electric car. It had, and to some extent still has, a nice buzz to it. It was the Apple of the car industry. Today, I would feel downright ashamed to buy a Tesla, knowing that my money will be directly fueling Elon's wallet and ego. I've never seen someone burn their reputation as quickly as he did with his twitter acquisition.

Who cares about Elon's reputation?

What I do care about is that they ARE becoming the apple of the car industry. Everyone stares at a screen all the time.

Everything on the touchscreen, less physical controls every model. No turn signal stalk, no shifter stalk, critical controls on the touchscreen. seriously?

Yeah. I disliked Tesla before it was cool because I didn't like their product decisions or Musk's lies about self-driving. His fandom rushing to defend all the faults of the products and company made me even more wary.

IMHO, it's lame and kinda pathetic to sour on them just because of Musk's politics.

Good luck charging your next ev outside of Tesla's charging network. Seems like your going to be funding Elon either way..

Between my 69 Beetle and P 912, Elon can shove his supercharger up his ... sorry for the humblebrag, I love them passionately in a way no Tesla will ever be loved, particularly being 40-50 years old.

I always felt that Tesla was the compromise you'd have to make if you wanted an EV. Now the compromise is Electrify America if you go for an EV from an established auto manufacturer, but fortunately that's changing.

One thing Tesla is exceptional at is building and maintaining a rapid charging network. Now that they're opening up to non-Tesla EVs I can only imagine a more rapid decline in their market share. Tesla superchargers and a Toyota or Lexus EV? Sign me up yesterday!

Don't count on it. He's ruining that too.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/05/tesla-does-180-on-super...

Twitter/X seems to be doing OK after getting rid of a lot of fat

a social platform is not the same thing in any way shape or form.

A lot of that fat was in areas like trust and safety.

Which is now coming to bite them as EU is expected to announce the final warning to Twitter about the spread of toxic content before they impose a 6% fine of total revenue. All whilst advertising revenue has plummeted and continues to drop.

No matter where you look Elon is not showing a lot of business acumen.

From what I understand, Elon’s primary motivation behind buying Twitter was to preserve free speech on the internet. That’s kind of an American thing. I don’t see Elon changing that to bend to the laws and rules of the EU.

I have my opinions, but one of them that’s mixed in there is respecting the willingness to stay true to the ideals and value of free speech, even if it means losing advertisers or whatever else. Freedom of speech is important, and we can’t have honest debates about serious topics without it.

I mean...

https://www.businessinsider.com/free-speech-censorship-elon-...

https://restofworld.org/2023/twitter-blocked-access-punjab-a...

He did say that, sure .. he just doesn't walk the talk.

It was to buy a place no one could shut him up. He adores censorship as long as its of other people. Dude gives exactly zero shits about free speech.

if stagnation is doing OK, then I suppose, but growth has basically stalled

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40924369

The website barely works for me on my phone anymore. Just spinners whenever I try to open anything or load more content.

Twitter as a software system ? Yeah, that's not really hard.

Twitter as a platform ? It went horrible - spam bots multiplied, the 'pussy in bio' were everywhere, and I've stopped using it completely when there were literal nude / porn pictures in the answers, on topics that have nothing to do with that.

Twitter stopped working for not logged-in people. Which is most people. It worked before. But now it is apparently in maintenance mode.

> One thing Tesla is exceptional at is building and maintaining a rapid charging network

I wonder if laying off the entire 500-person Supercharger team will affect this at all.

That's been my concern as well. Having a charging network so reliant on Tesla => Musk does not seem the most secure foundation and much more like the shifting sands parable. I would be much more happy to have a Tesla/Musk free system, but so far we haven't seen any serious candidates.

When your CEO turns the brand from a status symbol to the opposite, it's "concerning".

> Tesla accounted for 49.7 percent of electric vehicles sales from April through June, down from 59.3 percent a year earlier.

Still a commanding market share, so much so that in a mature market it would draw the ire of Lina Khan. That being said, the first derivative does not look good. TSLA stock up like 9 days in a row. Maybe this puts on the brakes, but latest move seems like some short covering mixed in.

Tesla just announced days ago Q2 deliveries exceeded predictions, so this headline looks like a misleading statement that EV adoption over all is accelerating, and Tesla sales are expanding too.

> EV adoption over all is accelerating

The data I've seen is growth is still strongly positive, but not as much so in previous years. positive 1st deriv, negative 2nd deriv.

> Q2 deliveries exceeded predictions

This is such a weird thing, I wouldn't get too hung up on it. The "predictions" here were basically a consensus of the most recent predictions. If you look back just one month, it's possible that the predictions had been twice as high but had since been revised down and it would still be reported as missing predictions.

An interesting exercise is to look back at someone who was doing detailed analysis of Tesla's future trying to justify it's then current value and see how accurate it was. Like take a look at this predicting 2M in 2023 (which 2024 looks like it will still miss): https://www.reddit.com/r/teslainvestorsclub/comments/qsn7ve/...

If you tracked the predictions over time, even just the last quarter, at the beginning of the quarter the consensus was over 500k. Saying that they "beat expectations" is, while technically correct, going to be almost universally interpreted incorrectly. This sort of mismatch between the technical, naive reading of words and their actual meaning is a big contributor to retail investors generally making rather poor decisions.

Their Q2 sales fell quarter-on-quarter vs Q2 2023; it's just that analysts had expected an even greater decline than the one which materialised (consensus was 439k, they sold 444k, a year ago they sold 466k).

This might be temporary because people who want a new Model Y are waiting for the refresh to come out, and those who wanted a new Model 3 likely also waited for the anticipated refresh to come out before pulling the trigger.

I think Tesla is being outcompeted, has fallen behind, and is now going all in on pipe dreams rather than producing a car that competes in quality to other car manufacturers.

I’m not sure that’s necessarily a bad thing for them. I don’t think they’re capable of competing with the giants conventionally. They have to remain unique in some subjective way.

I’m not sure it will make a good product, though.

I think that is true on looks and some parts of the cabin aesthetic (ie no turn signal stalk is stupid) but the ubderlieing tech is still atleast a decade ahead of everybody (electric motors, battery pack, etherloop instead of canbus, rapidly approaching full 48v across all systems, maybe self driving. etc.). I think you will see the next couple refreshes fix a bunch of the more glaring aesthetic problems and the much ahead tech will continue to make the cars the most profitable as they ratchet down prices squeexing everyone else.

> but the ubderlieing tech is still atleast a decade ahead of everybody (electric motors, battery pack, etherloop instead of canbus, rapidly approaching full 48v across all systems, maybe self driving. etc.).

- motors are about the same as their competitors in the same price range

- same with batteries, though they have more US capacity to build batteries. However, there is a ton of domestic battery manufacturing capacity coming online in the next year or two.

- etherloop is better than than canbus, as is 48v on a technical level. But its also currently a competitative disadvantage for Tesla, they are missing out on economies of scale because they can't share components with ICEs. To maintain dominance they need to do a lot better in the budget space.

- full self-driving is vaporware at best, and other manufacturers are catching up to what's actually available -- mercedes is the only level 3 certified brand

I heard that most of the U.S car manufacturers have drastically reduced their EV car manufacturing due to the slowing economy, so that means once demand for cars picks up again, they'll be ill-prepared to meet the demand for EV cars. (As demand for EV should keep growing steadily in the long run over ICE vehicles)

It’s a reduction in acceleration, not velocity. They are still increasing the number of EVs they produce, but have slowed down increases in capacity. Sales growth is also slowing down, but not falling. This could still be a problem, however.

Competition should be a good thing right?

For us, the consumers, yup. TSLA shareholders, probably not.

According to capitalism, competition should encourage Tesla to work harder to deliver a better product, if Elon is the smartest CEO in the world, that should be good for TSLA shareholders.

I can't read because of the paywall, but are their relative sales down but absolute sales up?

Tempted to guess "no" since there's a bit of an EV winter going on, even though EVs are the future...

https://archive.ph/Gh9tq They are a bit vague on absolute sales

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