Tesla's European sales tumble nearly 50% in October | Hacker News Reader

Tesla's European sales tumble nearly 50% in October

finance.yahoo.com

36 pointsdoener57 comments

Europeans have still not forgotten the impact of WW2. Musk sieg heiling on live TV (twice!!!) is not something they take lightly. Tesla sales of cratered over there, rightfully so, because of his completely unforced error.

I’m European and nobody cares about WW2. References to that period of time do not go beyond punchlines. I have no idea why Tesla sales are cratering but this isn’t it.

I'm European and I care. Keep you ignorance for yourself.

I guess you're not in Germany.

https://www.autoblog.com/news/94-of-germans-wouldnt-consider...

Have you even clicked the article?

> T Online has now reported that bots manipulated the survey, with 253,000 votes originating from just two U.S.-based IP addresses

Yes, it's clear you have no idea. You can be ignorant in Europe too.

If you're not a total doofus, you should be able to look around you and see how things still today are worse off because of the nazis than they would have been without them. But we have doofi among us, so you might just be one.

Maybe it depends on your age group but a lot of people do care. They gassed my grandfather's brother for example. It's not that ancient history.

Also fascist WW2 tanks rolling into Ukraine is somewhat reminiscent of the phenomenon of modern fascist tanks rolling into Ukraine.

It's almost like the world isn't a joe rogan podcast

> Meanwhile, Tesla's Chinese competitor BYD (BYDDY), which sells a mix of pure EVs and hybrids, reported sales jumping 207% to 17,470 units sold in Europe. Another major China rival, SAIC, saw sales climb 46% to just under 24,000 vehicles sold.

From January to October this year, BYD has already sold nearly 140,000 units in Europe, an astonishing increase. Even setting aside people’s personal feelings about Musk, the main reason is probably that Tesla no longer has much competitive advantage. The BYD he once openly mocked with “have you seen their cars?” and laughed about by end up completely defeating Tesla in the European market

Personally, the one I most want to buy in the future is the Yangwang series, even though it’s very expensive. Or the series that comes with the drone feature.

The BYD cars are starting to look quite nice too. I saw one the other day that must have been a Seal and thought "that's a cool looking car what is it? huh a BYD"

> the main reason is probably that Tesla no longer has much competitive advantage

Yep, I think Tesla simply squandered its clear advantage and slowed research and innovation, while everybody else was accelerating.

I sat in one of the first BYD a couple years back, and for all the mocking of Tesla quality standards, it was a rattle fest, I thought I'd never buy one for sure. But if there's one thing I really appreciate about China is the ability to iterate stupid fast and make it totally about business, zero emotions. Car rattles too much? We'll fix it.

Forward to last year when I took an Uber in London which was a BYD Seal: dead silent, spacious and good looking, and they keep improving the hardware. The brand is back on my possible next-buy list.

You would never guess this while driving around in my small European country. The amount of Teslas is baffling and I still see very new ones every day.

Compared to the number of Chinese cars i see their numbers seem really small though.

I would mention a few non-political things:

- their cars keep on "deprecating" controls, such as turn signal and drive select stalks, mechanical door releases, defog, dashboard and other critical controls. unsafe and a cheapo move.

- the model y looks ugly now, especially lighting. the older version looks nice, and was a best-seller.

- cybertruck

all of this just hands market share over to the competition, which has appeared.

I actually like the new Model Y's styling. Taste is personal.

I still won't buy one, but not because I think it's ugly.

Tesla's stale line-up is extremely boring compared to the competition. Americans don't have access to the broad market of EV's due to their extreme market protectionism.

They put the drive select stalk back after feedback, and they never had a dashboard on the 3 and Y (I have a Model 3 and it works fine without one).

Can't speak for defog or mechanical door release, I haven't noticed either, but would be shocked if they are gone as they both seem like they'd be legally required. Defog in particular would be bizarre to remove from a car, especially given it's just a mode of the A/C.

from what I can tell the s, x, 3 and truck have no stalks. The y has a turn signal stalk. I read there might be an official way to get a turn signal stalk on a 3.

my opinion: a decent car would have a decent set of stalks with dedicated controls at your fingertips, like various light controls, various wiper controls including non-ai interval, turn signals, drive select. and a dashboard for status, and other settings (not critical controls) on center screen.

Stock at all time high makes no sense.

Tesla stock never did.

TSLA has long been disconnected from any semblance of fundamentals.

What would it take to reconnect there? evidence that FSD and robots are vaporware?

Evidence that he's going to stop getting boatloads of government money probably

Investors have a lot of faith in Elan because of his track record of achieving very unlikely challenges (design and mass produce electric cars, design and launch rockets, ...).

The problem is that a lot of its supporters and investors cannot distinguish between solving complicated problems (the ones Elon Musk excels at) and complex problems (the ones Elon Musk is trying solve now: FSD, robotics, etc...).

For reference, a complicated problem is one that you can break down into pieces and solve each individual piece within some tolerance and as a result solve the whole problem. For example, how do I build a rocket that can get X kg of load at a given orbit or how do I design an electric car to transport 4 people 200 miles.

Complex problems are problems you cannot break into pieces and plan for before hand, usually because you have unknown unknows and you have a lot of feedback loops (when you change something it changes something else you though you had already solved). This are the types of challenges Elon is taking on now: FSD, robotics, etc...

What I thought was very revealing though is that Blue Origin's New Glenn mission will actually beat SpaceX to Mars. In fact no SpaceX rocket has ever done anything in relation to Mars.

And starlink is nothing but an evolution of many networks that already exist, most famously Iridium, but couldn't make it work commercially due to satellite cost.

Meanwhile the Blue Origin launched ESCAPADE satellites will establish a 24/7 telecommunications link between the Mars surface and Earth, in addition to their research goals, in September 2027.

It's baffling to me that TSLA shareholders can see their CEO's antics (Nazi salute on global television, DOGE, splitting time between idk how many companies, being erratic on Twitter, committing securities fraud ("funding secured")), and still decide that this clown is the right man to lead the company.

I just can't get myself into a mindset where that makes sense.

TSLA has been a meme stock disconnected from fundamentals for a while and literally the only reason is Elon. If Elon wasn't CEO and there was just a normal person then they'd probably be priced a lot closer to the P/E ratio of a regular automaker (~5 instead of 288)

What do you think OpenAI's valuation would be without Sam?

I think there are other people that can do Elon's role but definitely rare.

The two likely factors are Chinese EV imports and Tesla association with hard right wing and Nazi ideology in buyers minds.

The simple reason is that the product is not good. Nothing to do with ideologies.

I disagree. It has everything to do with ideologies. He seig heiled on TV twice; that's not something they will ignore.

It's both for many people.

I think the product is good. But, I won't buy one until Elon either admits to and apologizes for all of his past bad acts, or has no control over the company anymore. Unfortunately, I think neither is likely.

Is this the same product that killed people because the electric doors wouldn't open after a crash and they perished alive in a fire?

Other than the nonintuitive emergency door opening procedure, it’s a good product. ;-)

(Apparently they’re looking at addressing that particular issue: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/573575/tesla-is-looking-to-...)

While Musk's antics and politics definitely have a part to play, it's also obvious that Tesla hasn't innovated nearly as much and their cars are becoming outdated in an EV landscape of constant innovation. Their last big play (The Cybertruck) was horrendous both in design and execution.

There is no competitor with anything remotely close to FSD.

https://www.mbusa.com/en/owners/manuals/drive-pilot

Not close. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h3WiY_4kgkE

FSD would be a competitive advantage if it could Full Self Drive. Since it cannot, it doesn't matter how not remotely close any competitor is.

FSD keeps causing fatalities and Tesla has tried to obfuscate and delete the crash data on more than one occasion, data which implicates FSD being liable for the crash.

Nah. https://www.tesla.com/fsd/safety

That's a party trick unless it can drive me while I'm taking a nap in the backseat. If I still need to be paying full attention to potentially intervene at any time, what's the point?

Of course its utility will become much greater at that point, I agree. I still wouldnt buy a car without it even in its current state. Changes the experience A LOT as is.

https://media0.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExNXAxbXlwa3...

Surely any time their sales has good growth somewhere, you'd be sharing similar stories about that positive news, right? Surely.

Are Tesla shares doing well in any major market across the world?

Europe is the second biggest EV market (China is the biggest, North America third). Tesla's market share has seen a steady decline in Europe:

https://eu-evs.com/marketShare/ALL/Groups/Line/All-time-by-Q...

At a time when the overall EV market share is growing in Europe:

https://www.acea.auto/pc-registrations/new-car-registrations...

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