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Comment by throwaway5752 | Hacker News Reader

Most people don't need or want FSD. They want an actual steering wheel and an actual stalk in order to activate turn signals. They want reliable well-made electric vehicles that don't take long to repair.

Musk has spent many billions of dollars building something his target market doesn't require. Tesla does not currently have product-market fit.

Musk should resign his board and CEO positions and stop interfering with internal decision-making. And refrain from rumored ketamine use.

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people might even want fsd if it worked… except of course it only works on the highway and my 1986 hyundai had cruise control that did 93% of what tesla’s “f”sd does

Look up videos on YouTube before commenting

that's funny :)

> They want a steering wheel and stalk in order to activate turn signals.

They just brought that back in the Juniper refresh.

>Tesla does not currently have product-market fit.

Yet, it sells the best selling car on Earth.

> Yet, it sells the best selling car on Earth.

A lot of that is selling just 2 mass-market models. And it only barely beats out the Toyota Corolla, except that Toyota also sells the third highest volume model (the RAV-4) and the 8th (the Camry).

>It only barely beats out the Toyota Corolla

"Only" does a lot here.

The Corolla is the #1 product of a century-old conglomerate. Tesla started mass-producing cars less than 17 years ago.

That’s largely as a result of its branding strategy (single brand, only two mass-market models). There are 19 production vehicles based on VW’s MEB platform, say, most of them very similar. This is fairly typical; all of the big car manufacturers have at least a couple of brands, and many models, and some (notably VW, Stellantis, GM) have _dozens_ of brands, largely with shared platforms.

But when you add up sales for all models from each company, there are 12 companies that sell more cars each year. Market share is 11.07% Toyota, 6.41% VW, 4.87% Honda, 4.82% Ford, 4.56% Hyundai, 3.84% Nissan, 3.77% Suzuki, 3.53% Kia, 3.48% Chevrolet, 3.47% BYD, 2.67% Mercedes-Benz, then 2.77% for Audi and Tesla, and bringing up the rear of the top 15 is 1.85% for Renault

Yet, Tesla makes more profit than most. It's like saying Apple has no market-fit vs Android because it's far less popular… until you realize it's a strategic choice to sell fewer vehicles but at higher margins.

Tesla hasn't started going down market with cheaper cars. But they've said new, cheaper models will be released by June 2025. We'll see what happens for the cheaper and higher-volume segment of the auto market.

But for now, Tesla has the most popular model with the highest margins.

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