Hacker News Reader

Comment by nutjob2 | Hacker News Reader

Something people don't really think about much is how Tesla had a huge head start in the EV business. It did well and people saw that as success, but really Musk has squandered that lead with really poor management.

Tesla could have more or less owned the US car industry if it had pushed its advantage aggressively. If Musk had used the SpaceX model and appointed someone competent to run Tesla while he was a figurehead of sorts Tesla would be many times its size.

Instead we had a chaotic Tesla expansion, the '"pedo guy" guy' and Musk hiding in the K-Hole from his apparent childhood traumas.

With Musk now pretty much fully off the reservation and into far right politics, Trump neutering of the EV transition (also Musk's doing) and pushing fossil fuels, Tesla has a grim future and may end up in the dustbin of history sooner than later.

View on HN

You assume the goal is to dominate the EV market. It seems pretty clear that this hasn't been Teslas revealed preference for a long time. The goal is to keep raising the stock price. If that involved selling fewer EVs Elon would do it. He turned Teslas humble beginnings as an EV company into just the first stage in $TSLAs booster rocket to the moon, one that it already separated from.

Or we could realise that they still have that lead, and they were limited in the US by US government policy that propped up Detroit for union/votes rather than economics/environment.

Meanwhile BYD had US money with a a friendly government enhancing it.

You shouldn’t be angry with Musk, you should be angry with Trump/Biden (ignore left/right they both let Asia take Battery and chip technology on their watch).

Not defending Elon, he’s clearly got some flaws, but Telsa’s expansion has been phenomenal, even with massive head winds against it, just look at Rivian, VW, Lucid, Ford, GM… or anyone if you want to talk about “squandering”.

> You shouldn’t be angry with Musk, you should be angry with Trump/Biden (ignore left/right they both let Asia take Battery and chip technology on their watch).

I mean, you should be mad at both. But it started far before either of their presidencies. They just continued or amped up policies that came before them.

Biden might have tried to (weakly) reverse it in his term but it was far too late at that point. You could probably say the same for Trump in his second term if you are being charitable and steelmanning both.

It's not just presidents or even politicians though. It's the entire American corporate system and it even extends down into responsibility from regular citizens. We need wholesale change in how we do business and interact together as a society.

The rot might start from the top, but it certainly extends to the bottom. Think of how the average union UAW worker acted during their peak days vs. how a Chinese line worker acts today. We certainly are capable of doing good work, but not under the current cultural zeitgeist.

> Or we could realise that they still have that lead, and they were limited in the US by US government policy that propped up Detroit for union/votes rather than economics/environment.

Which policy or policies?

Have you not seen Tesla's stock price? Autopilot? Robotaxis?

(I say this as a Tesla owner who literally doesnt drive anymore since I just use autopilot. I also live in downtown austin and see Robotaxis everywhere)

Lol I've pretty much checked out of HN since the discussion here is reddit r/technology level of competence.

The idea that TSLA is failing is so completely moronic that it's astonishing.

The stock is at an all time high?

The election broke a lot of people and the daily negative Tesla and political posts are HN's way of compartmentalizing them. Otherwise they would metastasize all over the entire site.

I agree with you. It could put a huge dent in the tens of thousands of American lives lost every year if autonomous driving was mandated. Barring that, at least I'll protect my own family by using self-driving in the largest possible car (truck) I can buy.

I have such a difficult time with this. Not the self driving part, but the largest possible car/truck part.

As a cyclist in a very truck-and-large-car-obsessed state I really hate them and their drivers scare me. And because of that I have a really hard time convincing myself that I should be in one too vs. a smaller more practical car. But at the same time I realize that my family getting hit in a Honda Accord (most likely by a much larger car) is going to be quite a bit worse than if we get hit in a Cybertruck or GMC Sierra.

There are many things you can understand are a tragedy of the commons and yet decide to make a choice that is not optimal for yourself even if it makes you worse off.

Would you rather share the road with a Cybertruck that's driving itself with all the cameras and sensors and collision avoidance features, or a Honda Civic being driven by a human who could be young/old/on their cell phone/fleeing police?

For real. I just assume that anyone who talks like that has never driven the car and has not used FSD in the past couple years.

Say what you want about Elon, his politics, whatever, but the cars and technology are absolutely incredible.

> but the cars and technology are absolutely incredible.

Tesla is securing its status as a legacy EV manufacturer. They are the behind the EV technology curve these days.

For example they don't charge as fast as other EVs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cy46Ag0djjk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAky0r8n5sk

The Zeekr 7X charges at a peak of 415 kW:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rb4U2CSYY0

To be fair stock price is not a great indicator of much. Sales are down YoY with no prospect of recovery. Stock price has no bearing on current operations unless they raise capital by selling equity. It’s also been the case that Tesla stock price has been disconnected from performance often. The amount of ill will he’s generated among his core market is enormous, and the tailwinds he had with green policy have been replace with significant head winds with an aggressively (and bizarrely) pro-pollution administration based on a retribution model than a technocratic model. This is especially bad for Tesla as musk actively sought retribution so there is no reason to believe this is going to go well for Tesla over the next few years. He dumped all over his customers to curry favor with someone that now hates him and has a history of actively seeking revenge - what a mess.

As an owner of two Tesla and a frequent user of autopilot with FSD, I don’t believe we will be seeing a significant rollout in any but the easiest to travel areas. SF, LA, Seattle or the other places Waymo currently is either running or preparing to operate are much more challenging road environments than Austin, and Waymo is already fully autonomous with years of track record in these areas. There’s no chance robotaxi will overtake Waymo - I use them often, use FSD often. They aren’t comparable - Waymo is considerably more advanced and capable.

Sorry man, I wished Tesla was going to win out, but by shifting focus to ever more bizarre efforts away from their core cars (when’s the last time a real X or S model refresh happened?) they lost the initiative. BYD and the other legion of Chinese EV are going to eat Tesla alive within 5 years. I’ve had the chance to ride in and drive many of the brands overseas and they are a fraction the price and about as good. It’s over.

Stock price is certainly a better indicator than any numbers coming out of China. The question isn't whether the numbers are fudged but how many times were they fudged, at each step in the reporting chain.

It's weird to me that when people talk about Tesla, the business, is doing poorly, the retort is citing the stock price as if that's somehow what the person is talking about and not going to be seen as disconnected from fundamentals by the person you're talking to. So many things were being used to justify the stock price have simply not materialized. For example, the idea that Dojo would be a lasting moat does not appear to be materially true.

As a business, they've seen declining yearly revenues (2025 is expected to be lower overall) and declining sales on a YoY basis in a sector that has seen tremendous growth. The article we're on literally is how Tesla squandered their lead over BYD.

Autopilot and FSD are neat (for some definition of neat) but have clear competitors with Waymo being far ahead in deployment. BYD has their own developing system that's not as good but it's not clear to be that FSD will be some kind of enduring advantage either given that parallel systems are also being developed.

If smartest analysts of wall street are leaving money on the table, go ahead, take it.

> It's weird to me that when people talk about Tesla, the business, is doing poorly, the retort is citing the stock price as if that's somehow what the person is talking about and not going to be seen as disconnected from fundamentals by the person you're talking to.

Incidentally the same way people defend Bitcoin.

IBM stock price IS INCREDIBLE TOO until you realize it is financial engineering

Reply on news.ycombinator.com