Even Republicans are falling out of love with Tesla | Hacker News Reader

Even Republicans are falling out of love with Tesla

economist.com

51 pointszhengiszen48 comments

I'm surprised anyone ever fell in love with Telsa. Even before Musk's political turn, he always struck me as an untrustworthy liar (aptly demonstrated by the "Full Self Driving" fiasco), which always made me wary of anything he was associated with.

Tesla built an extensive EV infrastructure and amazing cars when everyone outside of Tesla said EVs are fad. The cars were unmatched and they brought the EVs mainstream. Falling in love in the says past was easy (I owned two Tesla’s). Falling out of love was quick and swift though :))))

Wait who was saying EVs were a fad? I’m probably fairly described as an EV pessimist, but that’s mostly manifest in a) the long timeline I expect electrification to take and b) the non-EV holdouts that are going to be hard to convert for logistical reasons.

who was saying EVs were a fad

in 2012 when the supercharger network plans were announced - just about everyone :)

You are both right. Tesla was very special and the way Musk conducted himself was very concerning.

https://archive.ph/seYD7

When did the rolling coal crowd ever fall in love with Tesla?

There are a lot of Republicans who aren't the rolling coal crowd, though. The partisanship is really weird that way. More Americans support environmentally friendly policies than vote Democrat, for example -- unless you tell them it's a democratic party policy, in which case they reject it.

> unless you tell them it's a democratic party policy, in which case they reject it.

The Democrats are that bad, huh.

30 years of propaganda will do that

> 30 years of propaganda will do that

That's a bullshit excuse. Who knows about the future, but for the last 30 years the Democrats have been perfectly free and have had ample opportunity to counter any "propaganda" against them. If their association taints popular policies in the eyes of the Americans, the party is, at a minimum, incompetent.

Agree Democrats are largely ineffective and incompetent.

But countering propaganda is way harder than spreading propaganda. It's easier to spread all over right-wing media that Democrats are working tirelessly to protect an MS13 gang member than to protect due process and the rule of law for all Americans while defending a man that most likely has no ties to MS13 or crime in general and was wrongly deported.

It's like the Fox news defamation case loss against Dominion. They spread those lies (while knowing they were lies) for weeks and millions of Americans believed them. Those same Americans have no idea they paid close to a $1 billion settlement for those lies.

Propaganda fits nicely in 3 sentence memes that are designed to invoke fear and emotion but is hard to counter without long and sometimes complex explanations that involve nuance.

How many conservative still believe there are public elementary classrooms that have litter boxes for kids to identify as cats?

Americans still think other countries pay for Trump's tariffs. Why? Because it's easy for Trump to tweet lies 40 times per day about how good tariffs are and it's finely time for these countries "to pay their fair share". How easy is it to counter with a rational and thoughtful economic discussion of why the tariffs will fail to achieve any stated goal?

It plays a role though. The right wing has been lying for decades and making up their own version of the world and a lot of people have bought into that such that we now have a dangerous clown as US president (and they still think he's great).

> we now have a dangerous clown as US president

And what does it say about Democrats that Americans rejected them to chose a "dangerous clown" instead?

You keep making some sort of vague attacks against the democrats, and yet haven’t made any concrete comparisons. Starting to wondering now if you’re a Russian shill.

i think it says a lot more about the American citizenry. they'd rather burn it all down or hate their fellow citizens than whatever they did have.

the real question is: what does that say about humans in general (since we see this pattern repeated recently in a few other countries), particularly when stressed?

it turns out, a few thousand years of civilization isn't enough to evolve significant growth in the prefrontal cortex or atrophy in the lizard-brain, so to speak

we're not much more rational than cavemen, and thus biologically as likely as them to break stuff when angry or be fooled by those who promise salvation

unfortunately, some seek to exploit those vulnerabilities: making the promises; feeding the anger; manufacturing stress & FUD to decrease decision quality

But it's not. Look at the number of people who voted for Trump believing he would do things he explicitly said he wouldn't. Right-wing control of media sources is a really powerful thing, from Murdoch to Sinclair.

The democratic party gerontocracy is a problem - they really seem to want to just play politics and get individual people re-elected in many cases - but we really do have a propaganda problem in addition to a batch of senior democrats wholly unprepared to face the moment.

Countering propaganda here involves stooping to levels of lies, deception, corruption and scorched earth policies that are categorically abhorrent and frankly I don’t think the kind of people that run as democratic representatives are capable of.

When we all realized we needed a commuter car in the family to save a crap ton of money. Rather spend $4 in electricity than $25 in diesel for a 100 mile commute.

That’s a weird comparison, given you can commute 100 miles for like $8 of gas with a $10k car. Breakeven on fuel costs is in the order of decades on that commute.

I have an electric truck and I get ~300 miles on $9 worth of electricity vs $115 for a full tank of gas on the ICE model for around 400 miles.

Right, but I'm saying comparing like-for-like models of big truck vs. EV for commuting is a bad/weird comparison. You can cut your fuel costs by like 2/3 by moving from a big truck to a compact ICE car for commuting. (Or even a smaller/more efficient truck - e.g. a hybrid Ford Maverick costs about $25 in gas for 300 miles.)

And sure, you might have a legit reason to need a full-size pickup for commuting, but that doesn't apply to 90% of people who actually commute with full-size pickups.

My comparison was pretty apples to apples. I have a big EV truck and I’m comparing it to a big ICE truck. They’re both Ford F150s.

Yes, it was apples-to-apples, and my point is that it's still a bad comparison, because it's like there are a hundred people comparing whether whole Cripps Pink or Fuji apples are more cost-effective for feeding their pets, but 90 of those people have pet grasshoppers that they could feed with leftover lettuce.

Ditto, my off-peak charging costs about 1/5th the cost per mile of burning gas.

And we have some of the most expensive electricity in the US.

If you can charge at home, electric is much cheaper. I don't know about "public" charging, since I don't use it.

In my experience public charging is about as expensive as using gas. But 99% of my usage is with home charging.

I’m center/right, and a car enthusiast.

I’d love to have a Tesla, for the torque and for the simplicity of the drive train. I don’t think I’m a rarity.

The "rolling coal crowd" fell in love with Musk when he bought Twitter in retaliation for them blocking Babylon Bee.

The more recent Trump alignment is just icing on the cake (or fly ash for your concrete, if you want to strain the metaphor)

Are you saying Musk paid $44B for Twitter out of spite over a D-list comedy website?

Of all the articles and podcasts I followed around that acquisition, this is the first time I have ever heard it tied to the Babylon bee. Do you have a source?

Musk loving maga people told me ...

And also

https://www.dailywire.com/news/elon-musk-contacted-the-babyl...

Loving Musk yes, but loving Tesla?

Cult of personality thing.

Plus, Plaid mode

Nothing is going to turn this train wreck around. Tesla vehicles are dated, uncomfortable, fit and finish are questionable. Cyber truck sales are falling off a cliff, and his competition is killing it. These vehicles, including robots, are just hardware. The Chinese are light years ahead, and the whole thing is just not going to end well for the company at these valuations, and this isn't even addressing the fact that he is the face of MAGA along with Trump.

The best thing Musk can do is disappear, maybe go to Mars or something for a while...

> Elon Musk is right to shift his focus back to carmaking

No. The damage to Tesla's reputation has already been done, and the only way to fix it is for the board to fire Elon Musk as CEO.

> Listings for the Model 3 have increased by 63%; those for the Model Y have rocketed by 80%. The pattern can be seen in both left-leaning states, such as Massachusetts and New York, and right-leaning ones, such as Indiana and South Carolina.

Many Democrats live in red states and many Republicans live in red states. It may be true that Republicans are selling their Teslas in increasing numbers, but this isn't a convincing argument. Even in a red state, I would expect EV owners to be mostly Democrats.

Massachusetts might be partly due to economics. It has a combination of low gas prices and high electric prices that makes it the least favorable state for EVs.

Using statewide average gas and electricity prices as of a couple weeks ago or so (whenever I last grabbed the data) a pure ICE RAV4 has a lower energy cost per mile than a Tesla Model Y (the trim with the highest MPGs) there on the highway. The Tesla still wins in the city.

Change that Toyota to a RAV4 Hybrid (non-plug in) and then the RAV4 wins both highway and city.

Go for a Prius and then there are 8 states where the Prius beats the Tesla on both city and highway (Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont). There are two where the Prius wins highway but not city: California and New Jersey.

The states most favorable to EVs are Washington, Idaho, North Dakota, Utah, Nebraska, Oregon, Wyoming, Montana, Nevada, Missouri, South Dakota, Iowa, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma.

In those states gas prices would have to fall about 60% (Washington) to 35% (Oklahoma) for the Prius to win.

It's interesting that most of the states where energy prices most favor EVs are red states.

Note: the above was using residential electricity prices. For people that can't charge at home the Prius will win a lot more. Around here the best commercial charging is about twice what residential charging costs. If that holds elsewhere then I think only about 8 states would have the Tesla come out ahead of the Prius.

Yes I think EVs don’t make sense for most people who rent. Unfortunately that’s a large segment of people.

My residential rate is $0.11 per kWh and $0.56 at an electrify America charger. That’s a steep hike for those who can’t install a charger at home.

Waking up in the morning to a fully charged car, for a fraction of a gallon of gas ($4.60 here) and never having to stop and fill-up or charge is a dream.

Exactly this. The difference in a “red” or “blue” state is usually only about 5% of the population. The only place this is not true is DC.

As a board member, you would be unhappy? The board members represent the investors. As an investor, what would your assessment be for Tesla as part of your portfolio?

The stock is down nearly 34% this year. Would you be happy with those metrics as an investor and/or board member? If the CEO of a company you invest in decided to alienate the majority of said company's customer base, would you be happy as an board member?

Tesla's sales are dropping, in large part because many EV buyers would be embarrassed to be seen driving a car made by a company run by a guy that's actively dismantling the US government and who gave a Nazi salute at a rally when Trump was inaugurated. If they weren't selling carbon credits to other manufacturers, they'd be operating at a loss.

If I were a Tesla shareholder, I'd be pessimistic about the company's future as long as Elon's name is associated with the brand.

They were a highly successful company that made some of the most popular cars, but now their brand is toxic solely because of the actions of their CEO. Tesla is would be much better off without him.

He has also not shown the ability to design new products. All of their vehicles except the Cyber Truck where in design when he bought the company. His one product is a flop.

> selling carbon credits to other manufacturers

Any links?

That would mess with environmental arguments per dollar or km.

I think he meant CAFE credits, for other car companies that can't meet their CAFE obligations.

> No. The damage to Tesla's reputation has already been done, and the only way to fix it is for the board to fire Elon Musk as CEO.

Maybe in the USA. But I don't think it would make much of a difference in a lot of countries. It is still an American car with a stained past.

Honestly if he announced tomorrow "Hey that was a hell of a bender, and I regret it - I'm leaving politics and focusing on running my companies" and he actually STUCK to that, then I'd be happy. Mostly because I believe people are most dangerous when they think they have nothing to lose (I've heard privately he's talking a lot about being #2 assassination target after Trump) and get pushed into more extreme positions by the culture being so black and white these days. If he was truly out of politics I wouldn't give two cares if he's an asshole or not. But yeah, somehow I doubt he'll get over the sunk cost fallacy and just dip out of politics. He really needs to choose though - if he's going full into politics he should be really get out of Tesla. He's got pretty much full control over the Tesla board though, if I understand correctly.

Naw. He’s a small little bitter angry man with daddy issues and low self esteem. No matter what he said I would never buy it. He’s a clown.

He did two Nazi salutes on national television, compromised national security, destroyed thousands of careers, compromised the security of public sector jobs, used his obscene wealth to try to buy votes twice while controlling and entire party into capitulation by threat of primary, used his roles to break federal law for advertisement purposes, abused his role to award himself contracts, has spent a decade lying to investors and consumers, is on ketamine, keeps getting caught trying to pay to impregnate women, conspired to destroy public infrastructure projects, and actively spreads toxic right-wing rhetoric while amplifying hate speech in social media.

That's not even to mention the business itself in how he has failed to ever produce a successful product at Tesla since he purchased it (the Cybertruck is the only project not already started at acquisition).

And if he just said "sowwy fow weelsies", you'd be okay with that? Are you kidding me?

Is everyone just completely and totally ideologically bankrupt now? Does nobody have a single shred of common sense to avoid huksters?

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