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Comment by starchild3001 | Hacker News Reader

Feels like Musk should step down from the CEO role. The company hasn’t really delivered on its big promises: no real self-driving, Cybertruck turned into a flop, the affordable Tesla never materialized. Model S was revolutionary, but Model 3 is basically a cheaper version of that design, and in the last decade there hasn’t been a comparable breakthrough. Innovation seems stalled.

At this point, Tesla looks less like a disruptive startup and more like a large-cap company struggling to find its next act. Musk still runs it like a scrappy startup, but you can’t operate a trillion-dollar business with the same playbook. He’d probably be better off going back to building something new from scratch and letting someone else run Tesla like the large company it already is.

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This is not a heavily researched comment, but it seems to me that the Model 3 is relatively affordable, at least compared to available options at the time. It depends on your point of comparison: there is a lot of competition for sure. The M3 was successful to a good degree, don’t you think? I mean, we should put a number on it so we’re not just comparing feels. The Model Y sells well too, doesn’t at least until the DOGE insanity.

Here's some heavy research for you -- Model 3 is competing with the likes of BMW, Audi etc. That's not considered the "affordable" tier. It's called luxury. Here's a comparison:

https://www.truecar.com/compare/bmw-3-series-vs-tesla-model-...

I will charitably interpret “heavy research” as a joke.

It is hard to interpret the smugness above in a positive light. It is unhelpful to you and to everyone here.

If you want to compare an electric car against combustion-engine vehicle, go ahead, but that isn’t a key decision point for what we’re talking about.

The TrueCar web page table does not account for a $7,500 federal tax credit for EVs. I recognize it ends soon — September 30 — if only to head off a potential zinger comment (which would be irrelevant to the overall point).

All in all, it is notable that ~2 minutes asking a modern large language model for various comparisons is more helpful than this conversation with another human (presumably). If we’re going to advocate for the importance of humanity, seems to me like we should start demonstrating that we can at least act like why we deserve it. I view HN primarily as a place to learn and help others, not a place for snarky comments.

A better modern comparison showing less expensive EVs would mention the Nissan Leaf or Chevy Equinox or others. The history is interesting and worth digging into. To mention one aspect: the Leaf had a ~7 year head start but the Tesla caught up in sales by ~2018 and became the best-selling EV — even at a higher price point. So this undermines any claim that Tesla wasn’t doing something right from the POV of customer perception.

I don’t need to “be right” in this particular comment — I welcome corrections — I’m more interested in error correction and learning.

Here’s another list:

https://www.edmunds.com/electric-car/articles/cheapest-elect...

The model 3 is 1.5x more expensive than the cheapest car on the list, and it’s not obviously better than other things in its price range.

Here are some brands that have delivered more affordable EVs than Tesla: Kia, Hyundai, Chevy, Cooper, Nissan.

Note that all of these cost about 2x more than international competitors.

On top of that, Ford’s upcoming platform is targeting $30K midsize pickup trucks. Presumably, most other manufacturers have similar things in their pipelines.

Tesla is already behind most of its competitors, and does not seem to have anything new the pipeline, so the gap is likely to expand.

They’ve clearly failed to provide affordable EVs. They’ve been beaten to market by a half dozen companies in the North American market, and that’s with trade barriers blocking foreign companies that are providing cars for less than half these prices.

> Tesla is already behind most of its competitors, and does not seem to have anything new the pipeline, so the gap is likely to expand.

Behind? In what way? Please don't leave your fundamental criteria and assumptions unstated. You are prioritizing affordability above everything else, even range.

If you value your audience's time, please write more directly and clearly. [1] Don't try to sneak something past us. Instead, just come out and say it. Then you'll realize you need to make the case for why your criteria and assumptions are worth emphasizing. That would lead to interesting discussions like:

- What kinds of range do drivers want and why?

- What kind of trips do they do?

This is what we should be doing here -- unpacking our arguments, learning from each other, synthesizing. I'm so done with the low-quality comments from people that have little excuse. If you can write code or survive the tech industry, you probably have sufficient logical reasoning power and an understanding of constructive discussions. Or am I expecting too much? Seems to me such a person has little excuse to not step up the comment quality.

This concludes my lecture.

[1] By taking an extra ~X minutes to do so; it will save N * X minutes of the audience's time where N is the audience size. One you get in the habit of it, X will be relatively small. If you aren't willing to put in this effort, your comment ends up being a net negative towards the goal of helping people quickly and efficiently think about various pieces of the arguments.

“Affordable”, clearly. Even if you want to move goalposts to “affordable long range” the Chevy Equinox meets the criteria and is on the list.

“Moving the goalposts” is a phrase with a particular meaning. I’m not doing that here. I’ve explained myself at length, above.

Are we reading the same list?

The mini cooper EV is a joke of a car. 114 miles is ridiculous for $30k. Likewise, the 'base' Nissan Leaf is 150mi for $30k isn't much better.

The crossover/small-SUV segment is a little more competitive, but still you're comparing vehicles with quite dissimilar (n.b., worse) specs for lower prices.

If all you care about is a car that is electric that can be driven, then sure, there's cheaper cars. That doesn't mean they're better or reasonable for most consumers.

The goal is specifically “affordable” cars. Even the 114 mile cooper is going to be fine for commutes. That makes it a perfect second car for two driver households.

I’ve never driven one, but if it’s anything like my i3, it’s probably by far the sportiest thing on that list. Apparently it’s “a hoot to drive”, but the suspension is a bit stiff:

https://www.topgear.com/car-reviews/mini/cooper-electric

$30K for a quirky sporty commuter car seems completely reasonable to me.

(Also, the range is rated significantly higher in Europe for some reason. It probably outperforms EPA in the real world.)

An “affordable” car that isn’t useful is worthless. In general, people do not want cars that can only drive 114mi in ideal conditions. It reduces overall battery lifespan (since you put more cycles on it), and also can’t be used for anything except around the town. I would say the same thing about the i3 unless you’re talking about the gas engine generator one.

Also, I looked up mini’s current offerings in the US. They don’t sell that car. The cheapest car they sell is the “Countryman SE ALL4” which starts at 47k and gets a meager 212mi of range.

Our i3 is good enough for 95% of our trips, and we rarely get it below 20% (the computer reports 100% when the cells hit 90%). There have been zero times when we needed the other car at the same time as the i3, and the i3 couldn’t handle either trip.

Also, battery wear out on them is basically unheard of. Even if it were a thing, they have an extremely long transferable battery warranty (try finding an estimated dealer price for a swap). If you do somehow kill the battery, third party replacement ones can have higher range.

I honestly don’t know why you think 113 miles is worthless for a secondary car. Wyoming has the highest number of miles driven per year in the US at 24K. That’s 65 miles a day, so the 113 mile car will be more than adequate for most trips for the average Wyoming driver, assuming they drive daily.

The US average is 14K miles.

114mi of range isn’t actually 114mi. That’s my problem. If you treat the battery properly, you’d not use the bottom or top 10% (better would be not using bottom/top 20%, but that’d be impractical at that range), and then you need to add battery degradation of 10% or so. That means your 114mi range is more like 82 miles. Then, because it’s epa range, that means the actual range on the highway is going to be worse. So you’re closing to 60 miles of range.

Sure that’s more than the “average” commute even in high usage areas, but people don’t generally have super consistent average commutes. You’ll have a shorter average commute and then a longer drive with errands and such.

Also, having a car that needs to be essentially fully charged every day means you have to always, always remember to plug it in. Not as convenient as a car you need to charge every couple days.

They went from no revenue to the 9th most valuable company in the world under him. No vehicle sales to having the best selling vehicles in the world.

They are still profitable, have very little debt and a ton of money into the bank.

Every company has hits and misses. Bezos started before Musk and still hasn't gotten his rockets into orbit.

> No vehicle sales to having the best selling vehicles in the world

They have the best selling model in the world (their Model Y). But their total sales of all models are way behind many other car companies.

These car companies sell more cars each year than Tesla (ordered by total sales): Toyota, Volkswagen, Hyundai-Kia, GM, Stellantis, Ford, BYD, Honda, Nissan, Suzuki, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Renault, and Geely.

Toyota and Volkswagen each sell more cars in a year than Tesla has sold over its lifetime, and Hyundai-Kia's annual sales are about the same as Tesla's lifetime sales.

By revenue rather than units these companies sell more per year: Volkswagen, Toyota, Stallantis, GM, Ford, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Honda, BYD, and SAIC Motor. (Edit: I accidentally left out Hyundai-Kia)

If I had to guess, I’d say the original Tesla founders had a greater influence than Musk. His track record, frankly, is unimpressive. He’s been promising full self-driving “next year” since 2016, yet it’s still nowhere close. Aside from the Model S and X, there hasn’t been a major innovation under his watch. The real groundbreaking work likely came before him. His reign? Far from remarkable. Each year has been a cycle of overpromising (often outright lying) and underdelivering. As for Tesla’s stock? Well, markets can stay irrational far longer than most people can remain solvent.

Tarpenning and Eberhard left Tesla in 2008 and 2007 but somehow they had a greater influence? They contributed no money, nearly tanked the company but somehow were more important.

"His track record is unimpressive"... I can see why you say that, I mean, took Tesla from almost nothing to a trillion dollar company. Started the most prolific rocket and satellite company in history (but hey, it's only rocket science right?), provides internet to places that it never even had the possibility of getting to, and providing untold millions the chance to get on the internet.

Started a company that is giving the paralyzed the ability to use a computer controlling their brain, and is working to restore sight to the blind.

Totally unimpressive. There are so many people who have done these things /s

> They contributed no money

That's contradicted here:

> The two co-founders funded the company until early 2004, when Elon Musk led the company's $6.5 million Series A financing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Tarpenning

Doesn't even say any amount of money that they funded. That could be $30 for all we know

It's public record, on Musk's word, that Eberhard was in the series A too for $75,000:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/12/29/how-much-equit...

Your claim was

> They contributed no money

Where did you get this from?

Tesla also licensed the design from tZero before the series-A I believe. And Eberhard was sort of keeping tZero afloat:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88KHfX_kPIY

musk glazer detected

Are you going to address any of their points, are is this the best rebuttal you have?

Tesla haters tend to just move the goal posts.

I don't hate Tesla. I've owned two of them, and still have one. I just think severe underperformance and hallucinations are going on with the company.

FSD has been a complete lie since the beginning. Any reasonable person who followed the saga (and the name "FSD") can tell you that. It was mobileye in 2015-2016, which worked quite well for what it's, followed by unfilled "FSD next year" promise since then every year.

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

A complete lie that drives me to work every morning? I'm not seeing what the lie is

Daily reminder that Telsa is not — nor was ever intended to be — a car company. Tesla is fundamentally an "energy generation and storage" (battery/supercapacitor) company. Given Tesla's fundamentals (the types of assets they own, the logistics they've built out), the Powerwall and Megapack are closer to Tesla's core product than the cars are. (And they also make a bunch of other battery-ish things that have no consumer names, just MIL-SPEC procurement codes.)

Yes, right now car sales make up 78% of Tesla's revenue. But cars have 17% margins. The energy-storage division, currently at 10% of revenue, has more like 30% margins. And the car sales are falling as the battery sales ramp up.

The cars were always a B2C bootstrap play for Tesla, to build out the factories it needed to sell grid-scale batteries (and things like military UAV batteries) under large enterprise B2B contracts. Which is why Tesla is pushing the "car narrative" less and less over time, seeming to fade into B2C irrelevancy — all their marketing and sales is gradually pivoting to B2B outreach.

> Telsa is not — nor was ever intended to be — a car company. Tesla is fundamentally an "energy generation and storage" (battery/supercapacitor) company.

> The cars were always a B2C bootstrap play for Tesla, to build out the factories it needed to sell grid-scale batteries

This seems like revisionist history. They called their company Tesla Motors, not Tesla Energy, after all.

This is a blog post from the founder and CEO about their first energy play. It seems clear that their first energy product was an unintended byproduct of the Roadster, they worried about it being a distraction from their core car business, but they decided to go ahead with it because they saw it as a way to strengthen their car business.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090814225814/http://www.teslam...

I think that blog talks about selling their batteries to other car manufacturers.

But, to support your wider point, there's some reporting that the initial grid BESS Megapack batteries had a test setup in the car park at Tesla and Elon was unaware they existed until they got mentioned to him in a meeting and someone pointed out the window to explain.

He immediately wanted to shut that project down to focus on cars.

> Telsa is not — nor was ever intended to be — a car company. Tesla is fundamentally an "energy generation and storage" (battery/supercapacitor) company

Are we still doing this in 2025?

Uber is not a taxi company it’s a transportation company! Just wait until they roll out buses!

Juicero is not a fruit squeezing company it’s an end to end technology powered nourishment platform!

And so on. Save it for the VC PowerPoints.

Tesla is a car company. Maybe some day it’ll be defined by some other lines of business too. Maybe one day they’ll even surpass Yamaha.

Tesla fans don't seem to be aware of the existence of conglomerates. Imagine Tesla did half the things Hyundai did.

Are you an investor of Tesla by any chance?

Nope. Don't even own a car. Military-industrial-complexes are just my special interest. And apparently Musk's, too. (What do grid-scale batteries, rockets, data-satellite constellations, and tunnel boring machines have in common? They're all products/services that can be — and already are being — sold to multiple allied nations' militaries. AFAICT, this is 90% of the reason Trump can't fully cut ties with the guy.)

I mean if that’s true they’re _really_ overvalued; that sort of commodity utility stuff is very low margin.

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