Tesla Sales Drop 17% in California
cleantechnica.com
cleantechnica.com
I checked and its true, down 17%.
The other parts don't seem to be true, ex. sort of middle of the pack would make me think 50th percentile of the manufacturers in the graphic, but its 75th.
Don't mean to seem pushy, I just noticed in myself that I tend to call things clickbait when I had in mind a stronger claim the article doesn't make, and then the article doesn't say it. But really, that's all on me, unless there's dishonesty in the headline.
They should remove every bit of article that focuses on Telsa, and write about the entire industry instead.
Also, some people are just Tesla focused and want to think specifically about Tesla. As an Apple customer I'd pay attention if Apple sales went down, regardless if phones went down across the world.
Their point is that Tesla got to where it is due to a variety of factors that did not apply to most of the other manufacturers, that some of those factors had built-in time limits that may be being reached, and that Musk has been doing things that will reduce some of those other factors.
Seems unfair to say its clickbait because it should cover the thing it covered that is enabling us to call it clickbait.
Elon Musk has been pumping Tesla with never ending promises of full self driving cars arriving just next year but which never arrive.
Elon Musk has been pumping Tesla with unbelievable promises of building AI, robots, etc, and has been demanding a 40B payday to keep those projects in Tesla.
Elon Musk has been manipulating Tesla as a peon of his own personal ideological whims and political battles, going as far as using non-business assertions to drive his strategic business decision such as moving the company across states.
Elon Musk has been a vocal supporter of far-right and fascist ideals, something that no other CEO is so moron to the point of ever doing the same, when Tesla's primary market is the middle/upper middle class which leans primarily into the liberal/social democrat political spectrum and who are the primary victims and target of said fascist movement.
There are many, many differences between Tesla and all other auto makers, and these differences are all self-inflicted foot-in-mouth mistakes made by Elon Musk.
Basically "everyone" in a Blue State Urban Environment looking for a large sedan or crossover for the last two years has ended up buying a Y. But... now we all have our cars, and the market is saturated. There are other markets to sell to, but those take different products. The Y too small to grab minivan/SUV owners, the 3 is still too expensive to make the same impact in the compact segment, etc... (The cybertruck production ramp is still shipping every car, so we don't know where demand will top out there yet).
Obviously the financials don't care about "why" you're down 17%, but it's important to recognize that the reason is emphatically *not* that people don't like their Teslas. It's that everyone who wants a Tesla has one now.
An idea that Tesla in some sense invented the modern electric car become popular later (probably driven by strength in the US; the Leaf and Zoe were not particularly US-market-friendly cars, and the Zoe was never even released there), but it’s kinda ahistorical.
Leaf was a nerdy glorified golf cart, like all other EVs before it.
Hype aside, Tesla showed the market that you didn't have to look like a dweeb driving an electic car.
And no, I don't own a Tesla, and would not own one, but I give credit where it's due.
Actually, I think one lesson to the manufacturers from the first-gen was that you shouldn’t make electric cars too similar to normal cars. The e-Golf, in particular, people often didn’t realise it even existed. Second-gen electric cars like the i3/4 and Hyundai Ioniqs are notably weirder-looking than the first gen.
(Again, I do think that for America specifically the early electric cars were not well-targeted, which was more or less inevitable; the US is a more difficult market than Europe or China due to the range requirements, and also a much smaller market for electric cars than either.)
Looking at the entire US, the numbers look a bit different. Teslas best selling car sold 10% less, not as bad as RAM and some others (RAM PU -25%). At the same time more vehicles are being sold (+5%) and companies such as Toyota and Honda are looking really strong.
Look at the image at the top of article, and ignore the rest.
What is everybody's guess when they will have the first robotaxi on the road somewhere, offering rides without a safety driver? Could be interesting to look back in the future and see how close or how far off we have been with our guesses.
My feeling is that it will happen in about 2.5 years. Could be next year, could be in 5 years. So if I had to guess, I'd say in 2.5 years.
Given priors:
- Same stonk pump in 2018, famously Elon called Teslas appreciating assets because of the looming robotaxi release. Shared screenshots of a ridehail app.
- No action on a ton of precursors for this to happen, in hardware or software. My favorite is "do the cameras have wipers yet?", because its simple and intuitive.
My guess is about the first car using Tesla software to offer commercial rides. No matter when it was build or who built it. Because the most interesting part is the software.