Tesla Hate Is Making Insurance More Expensive for Owners
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
It doesn't need to make sense to you, personally, the HN commentariat, to be effective political action.
People are protesting Musk. Something like 75% of Musk's current wealth comes from Tesla stock.
Tesla stock is going down.. so it is helping the cause
In case of Musk, if those protests work and as you say 'the jig is up', he can go from the richest man on earth to bankrupt in a space of months.
He is very 'cash poor' and has pledged a lot of Tesla shares as collateral to fund his other businesses.
If Tesla is priced as an automaker (shares would be in the ±10-20$), Musk will be bankrupt.
Then what? “We win” somehow? Nailed it?
Who cares?
For me, it will be the end of the biggest con, the stock market has ever seen. And I can't wait to read about the details behind it, once the dust settles.
Some say Tesla shouldn't be valued as a car stock; it should instead be valued as a Tech stock. Well, Tesla traded at a P/E about 4-5 times that of NVIDIA which itself had a high P/E compared to the other Magnificent 7 which in turn have a high P/E compared to the stock market in general.
What exactly is Tesla so great at that they deserve this enormous valuation? Its P/E has gone down to ~110 now, bit this is still incredibly high compared to e.g. NVIDIA which is trading at a P/E of ~40.
Tesla sold millions of cars that were supposedly going to become Robotaxis with a simple software update, somewhere in 2019. SIX YEARS AGO. Tesla even showed screenshots of a ride-sharing app. SIX YEARS AGO. Now it's obvious to anyone, that those cars will never become Robotaxis, as Tesla pivots to trying to fake a Roboataxi service this year, with remote operators.
But the greatest con of course, was towards investors. Of course nobody is complaining now, since the stock is still a meme stock. Just wait a bit more...
It's overpriced and not available where I live, but I'd love one. It doesn't do everything under the sun as promised, but I'd rather drive less than more. The basic 10 year old Autopilot is already huge help.
I'd say it's about 80% delivered. Far from a con.
Do you seriously believe the company was valued at >1T$ because investors believed that an "FSD 80% delivered" is enough ?
Tesla and Elon claimed ALMOST 10 YEARS AGO, that the car will drive itself from Los Angeles to New York. Just think how insane this is, even today. And then look up the state of their technology 10 years ago.
Of course self driving will be solved one day. Probably not by Tesla. But it doesn't matter - they were selling this stuff for almost 10 years already, knowing perfectly well it doesn't work. But hey, next version will blow your mind !
I’m tine if you call it “some self driving”, I don’t care. I’m not going to put my car as a taxi, that’s stupid.
So yes, we would very much win and there are a lot of people who care.
Legitimately, Teslas have been the best cars I've ever owned, but thanks to Elon, I will never buy another one, so long as he runs the company.
* - not you, Cybertruck
Which makes sense. The company sold to left-leaning, environmentally conscious buyers, and the CEO has now rebranded Tesla to basically the worst thing for that demographic. Sales are down, resale values are dropping, and insurance rates are rising. And there is no real opportunity on the horizon to save the company and/or the brand (robotaxis without LiDAR..?)
Maybe it looks like scorched earth on reddit, but in reality it's just a lot of people realizing the brand has self-destructed.
It's even more confusing, who are they supposed to sell it to, if no one should drive these cars (and how big of a loss are they expected to take in order to sell it)?
This whole thing is about destroying already bought vehicles to intimidate potential new buyers, and thus lowering future sales. Not that I support the vandalism, but I think that's the kind of logic they are applying here.
I also see reports of some Tesla making it to 500k miles. Honestly there is so much nonsense on both sides and you can't even trust any numbers coming out of Tesla because they have distorted the truth so many times.
That does not take into account that they are increasing the market size themselves with Starlink.
And with Starlink it remains to be seen if that can be profitable. I doubt it. The Starlink satellites deorbit every 5 years and need to be replaced (CapEx+++).
This is compared to the trillion+ EV market.
Both Starlink and Starship are >$5B programs. SpaceX has not raised nor borrowed near enough money to fund both of those programs, indicating that they've got sufficient cash flow to mostly self-fund both of them as well as pay the salaries of >13,000 employees.
He's been telling about Mars for _2 decades_ and people somehow think he's a nazi about to pull off ethnic cleansing.
A friend had a rental for 4 months when the panoramic sunroof cracked on his Tesla.
The vandalism isn’t computed in yet, and will immediately resulted in dropped coverage. If the Feds label it as terrorism, insurance generally excludes riot and terrorism from coverage anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_Risk_Insurance_Act
TRIA insurance against terrorism is required by law to be offered as a rider. It's actually shockingly affordable, because the law shifts the ultimate financial burden for any events between $200 million to $100 billion onto the federal government. So insurers have a reasonable cap on their expenses and don't need to rely on traditional re-insurers for black swan events.
Most people decline this rider anyways, no matter how cheap it is - and therefore most people are not covered for terrorism related damages.
For example, if your insurance company would otherwise have to declare a claim as due to non-terrorism, and just pay it (because they'd probably lose in court if they didn't pay), but because you had the terrorism rider, they decide to declare it as due to terrorism, and then you get a less-desirable experience?
(For imagined example of less-desirable, maybe you have to wait longer to get paid while the company interacts with gov't, or the reimbursement is calculated or capped differently, or some consumer protection you'd normally have doesn't apply.)
> insurance generally excludes riot and terrorism from coverage anyway
If that's true, they'd have even more incentive to declare a claim as due to terrorism if you didn't have a rider. They could avoid paying it altogether.
But if you had a terrorism rider in those cases, then maybe it's worse for you, because then they wouldn't be denying the claim initially, but maybe instead you're stuck in a different process, with various downsides, and maybe less able to contest the assertion?
The question for that example scenario then is: would having a rider give the insurance company a viable option that is less-desirable to you.
(Such as because it delays you getting paid, you get paid less, it gets into a buck-passing Kafkaesque process between government and insurance company, there are less protections, etc.)
Interesting claim. Can you share any research or source into this?
Oh and how does insurance get 10x cheaper?
Enshittification is a real thing, and happens because benefits were front-loaded through ponzi (in this case backed by money printing and the public market retirements that must rebalance based on S&P or other indexes).
There are also higher risks with 'licensing' a Tesla. Both to society as a whole, and to the owners themselves. Licensing isn't owning, and you get what you pay for.
Few of the people who choose to get a Tesla actually think about what they are doing aside from their own ego, which is actively supporting un-American ideals.
How-so?
A Tesla is not a car, it is a sensor/node based computer that is networked and connected that performs the functions of a car.
A networked computer with many sensors is part of a mass distributed network called "Remote Sensing Networks" or RSNs.
The short-term profit on money isn't in building the car. It is in selling the data that has been collected and aggregated to the highest bidder, while getting you to pay for your own enslavement to such willfully provided subscription data.
Every time you see a Tesla while driving, whether it is on or off, the Tesla logs you and your passengers face, biometrics, behavior, location, history, travel, and other hints that may be visible including EM following a master data-management strategy that is built on big-tech primitives at their data center. This includes conversations or more intimate settings which have already leaked to the general internet (in some cases).
It is illegal for anyone to film, and distribute film of others, and record conversation without their explicit and specific consent, let alone such other aspects of personal data, where it contains everywhere you go, what you do, even in your own backyard or within your garage (home), or your neighbors (where consent is not given). Yet this is what Tesla is doing through complacent consent, and coercion (corruption by dependency in sunk cost/function).
A Tesla is not the only RSN, your cell phone does this, your media players (Roku) and Smart TVs do this. Your laptops, modern OS (Windows), and too many other devices to count do this. When profit is guaranteed, monopolists seek coercive control, and information is power.
If you have these, you have consented to have a digital soldier mediating in every aspect of your life whether you know it or not. Even though they didn't tell you what they were doing. They were not required to specifically say what and how they used that data, and they defined it broadly and ambiguously. Dis-aggregation of Alarm, and Separation of Concerns.
That is how the banality of evil (complacency) becomes the radical evil (Nazi's).
What does that open the door to or allow?
Abuse, Coercion, Arbitrary Discrimination, Loss of some things that become everything. These are the same abuses that inspired the constitution's third amendment, and what led us to join the War for self and others during WW2.
We are repeating what lead up to the American Revolution, and because so many people have wilfully blinded themselves they can't see the consequences of their actions while they actively participate towards definite systems failures, mindlessly.
"No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law."
Implicit in this is that there remains a rule of law, which has mostly failed.
I really pity the people who have such little awareness that they go and buy a Tesla. It is like waving the communist/fascist flag which is statism, for all to see... we're American. "Yes, but what kind of American".
This has happened before, and it is too late to stop it from happening again.
We've gone full circle.
The rich used to start ivy leagues and build libraries. This guy is cutting off funding for the poor and declaring himself, proudly, a "deadly threat" to people he perceives as "woke".
And the "99%" thing is pretty dubious regardless. Elon Musk has been a garbage person for years. A self-dealing creep. >80% of Tesla sales have happened over the past four years.
And of the people I know with Teslas, zero of them are "green, left-leaning" buyers. They're people who wanted the novelty with the crazy acceleration and the boasting tech. I feel like this "leftist car" thing was never, ever true for the brand. And if it was sales would have been 0 for the past six years or so, but there are an endless rank of daytraders and crypto bros who need their Teslas.
White petit bourgeois center-right corporate capitalist Democrats that engage in environmental virtue signalling are “left-leaning”, if you view things from sufficiently far to the right.
source
George Bernard Shaw
I can see how one could make a plausible argument for this...
> [...] I'm going back to plain gas powered Hondas. I'm choosing specifically non-turbo non-hybrid models. The American people, with their choice of President, have shown me they don't care about the present or the future. I'm sure their president will keep gas prices low. I don't see any reason for me to suffer for their benefit or anyone else's. The American people have chosen to doom us all, so why not just make life easy on myself.
...but that makes no sense whatsoever.
A non-plug in hybrid is a gas car. All the energy used by its electric motors comes from either using the gas motor to charge its battery or from regenerative braking. It just uses less gas per mile than a non-hybrid and is more reliable than a non-hybrid [1]. If you want to drive a 100% powered by gas car and want to make life easy on yourself a non-plug in hybrid is the way to go.
Unless you need a pickup truck or something similarly beefy it is hard to make a case that a gas powered non-hybrid is better than a non-PHEV hybrid.
[1] Yes, non-plug in hybrids from the top hybrid car makers like Toyota and Honda are more reliable than gas cars. It is a little counterintuitive because you'd expect that hybrids would be much more complex due to having both gas and electric drive systems, but it turns out that they also remove quit a bit, and also the drive train can actually be simpler. Toyota's transmission on its hybrids for example is mechanically much simpler. The data from Consumer Reports and others that track reliability show about 25% fewer problems on non-plug in hybrids.
Let me ask this: maybe, just maybe, it was before Elon went politically to far right and started cater to Russia, and to try reabilitated Nazism with actions and History revisionism?
I mean, when we saw Putin try to get Hitler off the hook and blame Poland for WW2, it was kind of expected, not only because Putin finances Neo Nazis all over the world, but because it suits his current agenda.
Now when Elon is doing it, it doesn't look weird to you? It's just the "hate-fest" maybe...
That is not to say the opposite - that I think all anti-Tesla hatred/actions are justified. I'm just refuting your opinion specifically.
I have a lot of thoughts that run in both directions on topics like this, including this one. However, this specific case is especially far gone, in terms of drawing lines between "understandable" and "unreasonable" on any given anti-Tesla action/opinion, simply because of the fact that he and some of his supporters invoke Nazism. If it wasn't for that, I could more confidently say something like, "No, that one is over the line" for any given anti-Tesla thing. But I can't.
Maybe Tesla should change that.
That's ludicrous.
There have been, what, more than 50 self-driving fatalities in Teslas already? Of course the insurance premium would be higher.
In an S-class. The comment above compares it to a MB A-class.
Tesla produces no car in the MB S-class category.
So if the SAE standards don't reflect that, they are poor standards
Clearly the two are not connected - it just hasn't been enough time for insurance rates to be adjusted based on recent happenings. The industry does not react that fast.
Any ideas?
ex. "The cost to insure a Tesla Model 3 went up 30 percent last year.". Nothing happening in March of this year is affecting the price of insurance from last year. I have no doubt that stuff happening in March of this year will affect insurance prices this year but Tesla insurance is just expensive because the availability of Tesla repairs is low.
Whether or not law enforcement (which is most likely state level and therefore didn't change this year) can figure out whose doing vandalism isn't going to affect the price as significantly as Tesla's own inability to repair vehicles.
Tesla and Tesla charger vandalism was high last year by the anti-ev crowd
It's expected to be higher occurrence, but less measurable (ie, petty vandalism) by the anti Elon crowd
If Sentry mode records the perpetrator, the cops have to find it criminal, and then the DA decides to prosecute....
Good luck civilly pursuing every door ding or the mustard that fell off a sandwich -- even if somebody holds their ID up to a sentry mode camera, or drives off with their license plate clearly visible.
And while Teslas have Sentry mode that could detect things like paint, door dings, tire vandalism to record a criminal act, law enforcement has rarely been able to enforce much except the extreme or flagrant.
I think it's more likely they'll start enforcing jaywalking laws against children playing hockey in the street.
Now, I'm not saying anyone should vandalize someone else's car for political reasons but as a campaign to dissuade people from buying Teslas this seems to be quite effective.
Law enforcement has both generally been spared direct cuts and had federal accountability measures removed, so they, and especially the worst actors, have plenty of reason to friendly to the regime.
I don't think they have any particular beef against cutting federal workers.
> as a campaign to dissuade people from buying Teslas this seems to be quite effective.
Terrorism is generally effective. That's kind of the point, to effect change through violence. Although hopefully, that effect doesn't escalate to enforcement of real ID on the Web to deal with all of the people promoting terrorism on social media platforms.
How is something as recent as this already affecting interest rates? If this is true, then only negative short term trends can have such an effect. Otherwise I would expect rates to lower just as quickly when public ire moves onto the next outrage generator.
Nissan Leaf: $94/mo Tesla Model 3: $140/mo
If I sell— and it's a terrible financial decision (laid off in the fall)—I will assuage some of my fears and worries, but I will make the world worse for everyone else (more carbon in the atmosphere).
I suppose it might if you replace with a non-EV, but there are plenty of good EVs.
You could argue that the next driver will pick up the slack for me, but I can't guarantee that to be the case.
The best way to look at it is that cars are getting redistributed: left-leaning people that bought Teslas are trading them to right-leaning people (that's who are buying such cars today).
Those right-leaning people are getting fairly good deals from their perspective, and they'll use those cars, same as any traded car.
In fact, this is probably going to be a net win for the environment, because for many of those right-leaning people this will be their first electric vehicle, and some of them will continue that habit going forward. This is bringing EVs to a population that was resistant to them until now.
Source: Go look at your last bill.
Source? Go look at your last bill.
Should? No. Would? Yes.
It doesn't seem likely the government will have to bail them out.
They also wouldn't have to pay to create a new pay package to replace the voided one. This process is surprisingly expensive to create and implement a CEO pay package.
There were more reasons that shareholders voted for the package in the revote, but omitting others as I don't think they are related to financials
With how our society is set up, you are suggesting not holding any political viewpoints or preferences.
I had a whole diatribe typed up that I deleted because I realized I cannot actually empathize or have a theory of mind for how you could think this was an acceptable way to live life. Do you silo every interaction you have with everyone else?
These boycotts only work as isolated, selective outrage. It is the same with countries. If you wanted to be consistent, you'd have to boycott every country in the world. They all do some bad things.
Citation please
in other words, there are plenty of valid complaints, but "abnormal" or denying a clear democratic mandate aren't any of them.
The plausible deniability angle would hit a little better if Musk hadn't also been endorsing a number of Nazi-adjacent parties and views, pushed literal white nationalist views repeatedly (which he has been doing for years -- he isn't concerned about birth rates, he is literally only worried about white birth rates while he runs his creepy birthing farm down in Texas, and that's aside from his endless "empathy is our weakness" attacks on migrants), and most recently literally excused Hitler on the basis that really it's the public servants who are to blame.
It's quite incredible really. If the guy wasn't already absolutely soaked with extremely far right rhetoric and beliefs -- save the absurd "oh he's a centrist" nonsense that zero people believe if they have any functioning grey matter at all -- it might have been excusable as something that just looked concerning.
when you say 'my heart goes out to you' your hands typically stay on your heart ( which he seemed to know to do then ) or move very slightly directly out, not diagonally and up.
not to mention the out and out white supremacists thought that's what it was.
i would probably view this more charitably in his favor if he just apologized or clarified like a mature person. instead he doubles down on 'corrupt' media, calls to defund wikipedia, and makes juvenile nazi jokes.
Punishing people (vandalism, scrawling Nazi symbols, hostile/threatening interactions on the road) for owning a brand of car and not sharing your viewpoints is not fine.
What the OP and others like them actually want is a total lack of accountability for bad actors, and they will pick whatever argument is convenient in that moment regardless of consistency.
Thank you for eloquently putting this into words.
I guess the new normal (building your identity around politics) is either the cause of or correlated with the general rise in mental illness in our modern society.
Yes, not talking or caring about politics within various social silos is (used to be) normal.
I think this phrasing mellows the reality that he has, regardless of intent, displayed Nazi-like behavior. Why not tear at a company whose absentee CEO acts this way? Tesla is not the only great car or the only great car company. Let it thrive or die based on myriad factors, including leadership optics.
It should come to mind for elon, not car buyers. He built a car company based on environmentalism that naturally appealed to people with environmental concerns and then pivoted to publicly insulting and denigrating those exact people.
It's not even really political. Elon isn't the first CEO to hold political values that differ from a majority of the company's customers. It's the fact that he goes out of his way to call his most likely customers retards.
I buy things that make me happy or give me an advantage of some sort. I wouldn't want to lose that. Someone else's politics or personal life don't matter to me.
I refuse to make purchases on Amazon. Sometimes that's a minor inconvenience: perhaps the alternative has slower delivery. Sometimes purchasing elsewhere probably costs me more than it would on Amazon.
My purchase value is low considering the whole world, but it's not zero. I can also influence my employer's decisions, which are larger — and we use Azure rather than AWS.
I wonder if it's weird to be vandalizing somebody's car for being the same luxury brand as the car you sold last week. Does it feel revolutionary? Resistance libs are basically Carlists now.