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Comment by sampton | Hacker News Reader

I can't remember when was the last S/X refresh. It's nuts they just let it go stale and shut the factory down.

The refresh would need large investment. And it seems that S/X weren't selling that well to warrant such an investment. Just looking around - SV, a key market for Tesla - everybody buys 3 and Y, not S and X. In some sense it seems that 3/Y cannibalized S/X.

I don't know if it's genius or madness, but all of Tesla's cars look the same. When I see a Tesla, I can't tell if it's a 3, S, X, or Y unless I get close. The most distinct one is the X with its fancy doors.

So when I hear they're cancelling the S and X I can't even picture which cars we're talking about.

While that's true, S/X were considered luxury vehicles, 3/Y mainstream and they far, FAR outsold the S/X. In most cases, volume trumps individual prices.

Of course, that doesn't mean they had to discontinue those lines.

As luxury vehicles they were also competing in a different market, where competitors have caught up.

How can legacy auto refresh models every two years and Tesla cannot?

Perhaps it has to do with sales numbers? The Model S and Model X were not selling well.

Pretty sure the Mercedes S-Class is also not selling a ton of units.

268K of 5 top end Mercedes models were sold in 2025 (and like 1/3 of them were sold in Maybach or AMG version!). Where is Tesla S and X combined sales were only 32K in 2024 and 18K in 2025.

You wouldn't mistake Mercedes S-Class for E-class and E-class for C-class. Even BMW 7 vs. 5 vs. 3 look more distinct than Tesla S vs. 3 and X vs. Y. The Mercedes and BMW do the good job of market differentiation while in my view Tesla failed here, and thus cheaper 3 and Y cannibalized sales of S and X. Thus, paradoxically, given that Tesla started in luxury segment, Tesla hasn't recently been capturing that high margin of the luxury segment (which is doing very well overall - just look at those Maybach and AMG numbers)

The problem is just there is no concept of a car company where they only sell their standard mass market vehicles. Somewhat more expensive higher margin vehicles are in the lineup for almost all the other companies. Its kind of strange to suggest its not worth it when it is seemingly worth it for most other companies.

Maybe the wisdom of having a 'full lineup' is wrong and has to do with making dealers happy.

On the other hand, having 99% of your sales be 2 very similar vehicles seems questionable strategy.

It is worth it when it is done right, i.e when you do correct market differentiation (see my other comment here on Mercedes) to avoid your low end cannibalizing your higher end. This high margin really helps you, and this is why almost everybody does it. EVs are probably even better suited for it given that the platform itself is easier/cheaper to share between the low end and the high end - thus the current Teslas S/X story looks even more of a failure as by releasing 3/Y that similar to S/X (that probably helped a lot with 3/Y sales though) they forced themselves into the need for a very significant (expensive) redesign of S/X while having very low sales of it.

The big issue with S/X was that they were not luxury enough, in terms of performance they were fine. So the redesign was mostly needed in terms of interior quality, materials and so on. Not that crazy expensive and something all other car companies manage to do.

I see it differently - they needed to redesign everything except the power train. I.e. in addition to the interior, externally it should have been looking way upscale from 3/Y. Giving that their design language is already almost 2 decades old, they needed (and actually would still need it for 3/Y max 5 years down the road) to have a full redesign for S/X similar to how BMW did with 2002 7-series trickling down that design into 2004 5-series and 2006 3-series (or like Mercedes did with S-class in 1996 and trickling down that to E and C later)

Musk's goal all along was to get away from boutique production. He wants to sell millions of cheaper cars, not thousands of cars for wealthy people.

Not sure it's going to work out. Without some big jumps in battery tech, EVs are going to be difficult to sell without subsidies.

Musk would love to be selling several billion dollars per year of model S/X sales, the issue is they aren’t that competitive with other cars in the luxury segment thus the falling sales numbers.

Tesla’s doesn’t really have a complex strategy at this point, they are getting squeezed out of the high end by legacy automakers where their lower cost batteries don’t matter as much. They are absolutely fucked on the low end as soon as Chinese cars enter the picture.

So self driving is really the only option to sell any long term upside to keep the stock from tanking. It’s not a very convincing argument, but you play the hand your dealt.

> getting squeezed out of the high end by legacy automakers where their lower cost batteries don’t matter as much. They are absolutely fucked on the low end as soon as Chinese cars enter the picture.

The deep irony here is that after ~15 years of trying ti differentiate from the legacy American automakers, they land in a very similar competitive position. Chinese EVs are in the process of running the table outside the protectionist markets of the EU + US/Canada.

Eventually those protective barriers will fall as they protect a relatively small number of citizens by taxing the majority. It remains to be seen whether the US and European domestic producers will survive.

You may have to play the hand you have, but Musk was the dealer and he is still losing.

What's their competition on the high end? Porsche, Cadillac? Do Rivian or Genesis count?

If they are eating into model X or S sales it obviously counts here.

Porsche, Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Genesis, and Cadillac are all competitive in different ways. Stat wise someone buying the electric G-Wagon is making a poor decision, but swagger is a selling point which very much costs Tesla sales.

Cadillac’s approach of a huge dumb battery powering a huge heavy vehicle may not be ideal for the average use case, but customers are going to prioritize different things. One SUV just can’t be the best solution to every lifestyle.

Audi and Mercedes? (Well in Europe where the highend Teslas barely had any sales anywya, at least). Porsche is probably a tier or so above

Lucid runs circles around the S when it comes to build quality and features.

They're very cool in theory. My impression from the EngineeringExplained guy's experience isn't great. And Lucid does something similar to Tesla where too much (IMO) is controlled through the touchscreen.

A significant fraction of his issues were both him and his wife using their phones as key’s. He obviously it should still work, but it’s something of an edge case.

What about sales, though?

They outsold the model S last year which was their primary competition.

They successfully launched their second model, the gravity, which would have competed with the X but will now likely just outright replace it.

Their mass produced $50k SUV is expected to launch this year.

> Without some big jumps in battery tech, EVs are going to be difficult to sell without subsidies.

The actual sales figures show otherwise, but sure, there's still a lot of uncertainty with regards to batteries / range, I can imagine even moreso in the US. Traveled to Austria a while ago in an EV (~1000 kilometers), we had to stop 3x on the way, but the battery was good for another 2.5 hours of driving after a coffee. I keep hearing that "solid state batteries are around the corner" and they will solve all problems with capacity and safety / fire risk, apparently. I'll just sit and wait patiently, it'll take years before their production capacity is on par with current battery tech.

The whole battery thing is a massive misunderstanding of how EVs work vs gas vehicles.

For an EV with a range of 250 miles (400km) you can drive 400mi (645km) with one (1) thirty minute stop.

That's pretty much, drive 3 hours, stop for 30 minute lunch, drive 3 hours.

The confusion stems from the fact that gas cars don't fill up themselves before you depart, and they don't fill up themselves when you arrive. There are rather large differences between gas and electric cars, but people still treat EVs like gas cars, and demand EVs be more like gas cars.

Isn't it more like 4 hours?

The EPA tests at 55MPH, and driving faster than that will yield a lower range, so each 200 mile leg should take closer to 4 hours.

I factored that in since a 250 mile EV is sold as usually around 300-320mi

You’re still giving the EV more range than it would have. You’re not supposed to drop below 20% or charge above 80% so following that an EV with 300 miles total range would only have 180 while in a gas car you can comfortably nearly empty the tank without issue.

If his goal was to sell millions of cars he would have developed something beyond Model 3 and Y. But he canceled the next generation programs.

And yet Chinese EV's are flying out of their factories, well, a few are - most are self driving out to the shipping yards.

This despite the 2025 support by the Chinese state for the Chines EV industry now being almost nothing.

  By contrast, defenders of China could point out that the data show that subsidies as a percentage of total sales have declined substantially, from over 40% in the early years to only 11.5% in 2023, which reflects a pattern in line with heavier support for infant industries, then a gradual reduction as they mature.

    In addition, they could note that the average support per vehicle has fallen from $13,860 in 2018 to just under $4,600 in 2023, which is less than the $7,500 credit that goes to buyers of qualifying vehicles as part of the U.S.’s Inflation Reduction Act.

Old source: https://www.csis.org/blogs/trustee-china-hand/chinese-ev-dil...

but the arc of less subsidies is clear.

You should also factor in lax human rights enforcement in China (which acts like a subsidy essentially in effect and is not factored in these calculations):

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/10/human-rights-...

BYD is at the bottom of the list (worst for human rights). Tesla is second at the top (better for human rights).

> You should also factor in ...

Thank you for the suggestion.

I should point out that is not my work, and dates from 2023. If you follow the link to the work quoted you might be able to contact the authors and pass them your thoughts.

You are citing a source to tell a story about subsidies.

Lack of worker safety standards can be considered to be a government subsidy when doing a comparison.

Therefore, it's reasonable to point out that it should be factored in.

Absolutely. Even better, suggest that the authors factor that in to their presentation.

Now, I'm not going to tell you what _you_ should do, nor would I even tell you what I think you should do.

I'll leave that to @thesmtsolver2 and others who enjoy that type of thing.

This is a retarded list of self reported paper commitments, not actual practice, i.e. no actual supply chain assessment was done, not that you can trust a propaganda shitrag like amnesty. Tesla simply "promises" in their PR to be better for human rights. Hint 50%+ of Tesla exports come from Tesla Shanghai which uses same supply raw material supply chain as rest of PRC auto, functionally they're the same.

Meanwhile how do you factoring in PRC manufacturing is simply more modern with more labour saving automation, i.e. they simply have less people to "abuse". PRC simply be peak human rights by eliminating the most humans from process.

You'd expect subsidies to drop as supply chains mature and economies of scale kick in. What about subsidies to inputs like electricity, aluminum, batteries, etc?

You would be better answered by reading the link and any methodology references.

Perhaps "support" already factors in all relevant subsidies.

> He wants to sell millions of cheaper cars, not thousands of cars for wealthy people.

Why hasn't the cheap car been designed yet then?

The Model 3 is pretty cheap for an EV. The average car in the US is over $50k now, so it's competitive on price.

If $50k is competitive for you, that should be a sign something's gone wrong.

In Europe we can get new cars for less than half that price, both for domestic production and also post-tariffs on Chinese imports.

> If $50k is competitive for you, that should be a sign something's gone wrong.

Or, on the contrary, a sign that something went right. If Europeans weren't drowning in poverty, they would also buy more expensive cars.

> Europeans weren't drowning in poverty

How come the US has a higher rate of struggling with groceries (12.2% US vs 8.5% EU), healthcare (44% US vs. 18.6% for costs) EU, education costs, etc.?

> they would also buy more expensive cars.

Price != quality. European cars have better safety standards, as well as being cheaper to own and run. American cars… the vibe I got from them on trips was the expectation for them to serve as an additional air-conditioned entertainment room that just happened to be on wheels, whereas the European ones are mostly a mode of transport unless you're specifically into luxury brands.

> How come the US has a higher rate of struggling with groceries (12.2% US vs 8.5% EU), healthcare (44% US vs. 18.6% for costs) EU, education costs, etc.?

Reliability of statistical data. The more totalitarian a state is, the more out of touch with reality it can be in its statistics. If we look at the statistics provided by North Korea, they have zero on all the points mentioned. Europe isn't there yet, but it's moving at full speed. Their cars even safer and cheaper to own and run than European ones.

> The more totalitarian a state is, the more out of touch with reality it can be in its statistics.

That's more of an American problem than an EU one at the moment.

We're not the ones shooting unarmed protesters in the head ten times after removing their legally owned gun, nor faking arrest photos, etc.

Even before that, our leaders have not* called for the death penalty to be used against politicians reminding troops of their existing obligations to not follow illegal orders.

Even before that, the US government shutdown at end of last year means some economic data was never collected at all.

Even before that, DOGE having Musk at the helm had obvious conflicts of interest with regards to e.g. ongoing investigations against Tesla.

* to my knowledge, but TBH wouldn't be surprised if Orban has, but also Hungary is to the EU as, IDK Wyoming perhaps, is to the USA.

> We're not the ones shooting unarmed protesters in the head ten times after removing their legally owned gun, nor faking arrest photos, etc.

To be fair, can you even "open carry" a firearm anywhere in Europe? Isn't the UK trying to ban pointy kitchen knives[1]?

[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/crime/general/uk-considering-point...

I believe kitchen knives, without good reason (being a chef is a good reason, have just bought it ditto), are already banned in public in UK.

Still, UK does have a firearms licensing process; I doubt anyone at any protest would be allowed one, but the response of UK police only escalates to "pin to ground then shoot in head" when they've mistaken you for a suicide bomber wearing an explosive vest and expect you to blow yourself up in a crowded subway train (which has happened! I don't excuse this! But this is still less stupid than claiming someone is armed after removing their weapon).

With the appropriate permit, yes. Which is also the case in Minnesota.

(The permit requirements differ a lot between countries, but that an implementation detail, you should not be killed while respecting the law)

This is all terrible. But how does this change the fact that Europe has a more totalitarian government, committing more political assassinations and persecuting political opponents, while Europe is mired in poverty?

I mean, compare the median wages of factory workers in Europe and in the US and the amount of taxes they pay to support gangs of alien rapists.

Do you mean Russia?

Because while Russia is indeed within the continent of Europe, counting it in this context is about as sensible as calling Venezuela and El Salvador "American" just because of the continent they happen to be part of.

If you didn't mean Russia, I have no idea what fiction you're reading.

Not that any of this justifies American cars being overpriced, having no real low-end options. You're way more car-centric than we are, lots of you need cars, whereas many more of us are fine without any, so you having no cheap (new) options is more surprising.

Ah, you’re talking about the regime that fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labour Statistics because the president didn’t like the figures, right?

Right?

Scary to realize how some people in the US have been brainwashed into thinking European countries are totalitarian states drowning in poverty

Just be rich (in debt) like Americans seems like a bad plan for a global brand. Poorer countries outside NA and the EU buy stuff too, y'know.

If you're implying the US car market is hamstrung by manufacturer collusion, stupid regulations, and a legal environment that caters to dealers at the expense of customers, then... I agree.

> Musk's goal all along was to get away from boutique production. He wants to sell millions of cheaper cars, not thousands of cars for wealthy people.

So the literal opposite of the Cybertruck, which was released less than a year ago.

According to the Wikipedia article the first one rolled off the line in November 2023. That’s a good two years.

Not to mention the Roadster

The non-existing vehicle Musk still was able to get suckers to pay him for

Tesla got the job done, which was empower Musk, not manufacture EVs at scale. The stock is the product.

Maybe I’m just naive enough, because I love cars and progress, but I think you agree that he really showed our whole small world that EV can exist and work. Everyone laughed, no one believed it will work and here he still is rich and we have Teslas everywhere. Driving, not killing more people than other brands.

I think China would’ve gotten us to here without Tesla.

Except that the Model Y accounts for more fatalities than any other car out there.

Going to need a citation on this one.

I don't even think it is correct. Teslas as a whole have twice the fatality rate [1] per billion miles as the industry overall and the model Y has a rate 4x the industry average, but that can't overwhelm the fact that there are too few Teslas on the road to make that 2x or 4x turn into more total fatalities.

[1] https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a62919131/tesla-has-highes...

A quote from the original study [1], in which Porsche 911 is the 4th on the list

“The models on this list likely reflect a combination of driver behavior and driving conditions, leading to increased crashes and fatalities.”

I would like to remind you that Tesla's least powered vehicle has around 300HP and needs ~7s to go from 0 to 100km/h. Musk is a moron but Teslas are still good and safe vehicles.

[1] https://www.iseecars.com/most-dangerous-cars-study

Is it really safe to unleash 300hp daily drivers with instant torque and significantly greater weight to the general public?

That's another question, and not a dumb one at all! But still, while the product is what it is, there is still personal responsibilities in using it properly and safely. Otherwise we should ask regulators to just prohibit this kind of vehicles.

That ship has long since sailed. My college-age niece just bought her first car, which is a 2012 V6 Mustang with 305hp, naturally aspirated. I'm sure it's lighter, but that just makes it faster.

While you're correct on the one hand, Tesla made EVs feasible and mainstream, did the investments and caused a rolling effect of worldwide investments in e.g. batteries and EVs, and government subsidies that also made investing in EVs more attractive to competitors.

Besides EVs, Tesla's long term revenue could very well be in the supercharger network, too. It's not as exciting as self driving cars, but the oil companies have been the most valuable companies / stocks worldwide without being exciting like that. I mean I don't think EV charging will be anywhere near as big as oil because it doesn't involve nearly as much infrastructure or international trade, but it's still big, especially if governments refocus on replacing ICEs with EVs.

(the focus has been let go because the subsidies were too popular and expensive)

I agreed on the supercharger network, which made it pretty surprising when Musk fired the entire supercharger team.

> The stock is the product.

Musk reeks of scam. But for a stock pump and dumb scheme there sure are a lot of teslas on the road.

Tesla sold 1.7M cars in 2024. Toyota sold 11.1M cars in 2024.

Tesla’s current market cap is $1.43T. Toyota’s current market cap is $354B.

There really aren’t that many teslas on the road, and their sales are declining.

This kind of maybe made sense for a while their revenue was growing at a very fast pace but now that its stagnant/falling they are no different to any other car company.

I wonder if this coincides with Musk getting into politics? Never a good choice to alienate half your customer base. Michael Jordan famously said he never got into politics because "Republicans buy sneakers, too."

Tesla stock isn't valued as a car company

Which is exactly the problem.

The stock is priced on expectations of how many humanoid robots they might sell over the next decade.

Those expectations in turn treat humanoid robotics as if Tesla is the only game in town, when Tesla's Optimus is not yet available for purchase and other companies already ship.

Then someone brings up the value of Tesla's AI to those robots, and here's my response to that to save re-writing it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46799603

"Robots"

A product no one knows if there is a real demand for promised to be made by a company that has no core competency in robotics

But hey let's just value this BS in the trillions because why not. Sam Altman's ChatGPT is not far behind

Oh, Optimus is much worse than ChatGPT.

ChatGPT, for all its flaws, does actually exist and definitely isn't just a remote-control-based illusion, and some people even pay for it.

Optimus, the only thing we can be sure is real is the hardware, which is the least interesting part. But even if they really are running just on software without remote control, the one and only thing they've shown in any public demo that would actually be impressive, was voice comprehension in a noisy environment.

Elon would save Tesla by force xAI to buy it like twitter does

because why not???? at least Grok is real and we are years away from real "Skynet"

SpaceX for weapon delivery, xAI for the brain and Tesla for robot chasing

Has it all really been just one giant grift to steal every Americans social security number.

And what would he do with them?

The same systems had labor board whistleblower info.

Why would musk love to identify (or at a minimum, but a huge chilling effect on) labor board whistleblowers? The world may never know.

Try to impair democracy through election denial groups? Absolute power and all that jazz.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46734078

The Trump administration admits even more ways DOGE accessed sensitive personal data - https://www.npr.org/2026/01/23/nx-s1-5684185/doge-data-socia... - January 23rd, 2026

Case No. 1:25-cv-00596-ELH - https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.577...

> The unnamed employees secretly conferred with a political advocacy group about a request to match Social Security data with state voter rolls to "find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States," the filing said. It remains unclear whether any data actually went to this group.

“Maybe you do not care much about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.” —- David Frum

So why the car company? Also I was told there is no voter fraud. Is that just because nobody’s looking?

> So why the car company?

How else was he going to become wealthy? Wealth is unelected power. Show me evidence he’s after anything but power.

> Also I was told there is no voter fraud. Is that just because nobody’s looking?

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

https://www.npr.org/2024/10/11/nx-s1-5147732/voter-fraud-exp...

https://www.brennancenter.org/topics/voting-elections/vote-s...

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/debu...

There is no material voter fraud. It is a red herring to disenfranchise voters.

Additional citation:

The Georgia voter data is clean - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46856850 - February 2026

I'm not following your logic.

What you responded to was a quote of a request that claimed that was what they were looking for. Whether it was a good-faith request or they used the data for only that, etc is the real question.

And if they did find something, it would obviously have been in court a long time ago.

>Also I was told there is no voter fraud. Is that just because nobody’s looking?

I was told you haven't raped anyone, is that because we haven't looked into it?

Unless there's evidence that something happened when decisions need to be made we assume it didn't.

It's so sad an engineer like you believe there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election even after all the investigations. It speaks volumes to your abilities in all aspects of life.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com