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They had the first mover advantage, but then Musk lost interest in the company and let it just sit there for the last five years or so without making sure that they have a future-proof product pipeline and that those products are actually being delivered on a reasonable schedule. Now they are increasingly turning into an EV also-ran while their moonshots are unlikely to work out any time soon.

Realistically, he should have put someone else in charge after the launch of the Model 3 to develop the company further, but I don't think his ego allows it.

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The problem is that EVs are basically a solved problem. There isn't any technological advantage to be gained, since the technology in an EV is very basic (+) compared to ICE vehicles. So then it comes down to manufacturing, and there China is king.

(+) Except for the battery, but that's a very long term battle with very tiny steps.

My brother bought a Tesla recently. They dicked him around with delivery, and he had to pay a ton to get charging infrastructure installed at his house, but it's fast so he's happy. On a recent visit, he finally showed me the car, and it was hilarious how janky the final product is. Everything seems cobbled together-- a good example is that there's apparently two separate voice assistants (plus his phone) and none of them can talk to each other, so commands like "turn on the defrost" are responded to with "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that".

Controls as simple as the door handles are unintuitive, with the handle apparently being the emergency release that doesn't lower the window (for who knows why). You have to brief your passengers on egress like it's an airplane.

EVs might be a solved problem, but Tesla is still fighting their own additional layer of complexity that they added on top. The added subscription nonsense makes him look like a fool for having bought in, something I am definitely even more reluctant to do now that I've seen it play out.

> Controls as simple as the door handles are unintuitive, with the handle apparently being the emergency release that doesn't lower the window (for who knows why). You have to brief your passengers on egress like it's an airplane.

I caught a ride with a friend in a Tesla, and when we stopped I opened the door - like a human being operating a century-old piece of technology - and he looked at me like I was crazy, and told me not to do that.

Truly, a bonkers decision.

Yeah, it apparently damages the weatherstripping (and maybe the window and other things) and is meant to be used only in an emergency /facepalm. Which is probably why your friend was alarmed.

I didn't care, I still tested it out the day I picked up mine to see where the manual handle is and make sure it works, because just a couple days earlier two people had gotten trapped in a burning Tesla, were unable to figure out the mechanism, and died.

I have a 2022 Model 3, and the hilariously tragic part is that the voice assistant was great and basically never gave me any problems until they shoved Grok into it, whereupon it broke completely. I never use it anymore, they effectively removed a feature from my car.

Whoa, did Tesla pull an Apple? Siri used to work okay on the iPhone, but once it got LLMed it frequently sits there indefinitely while failing to make any progress on even the simplest commands.

Apple did an even worse job than you think: they didn't even LLM Siri so I guess it just broke.

Counterpoint: I like my Tesla, and I find the AI assistant diverting and useful. I have very little doubt the functionality of the limited on-board voice assistant will be merged into Grok (it's literally on the coming features).

Whether you like this or not, who cares? The pace of improvement in Tesla software compared to any other manufacturer is astonishing, and astonishingly good.

I have no love for the CEO, but my Model Y is a very interesting (and intuitive) car.

Diverting?

In Italian divertente is entertaining. Parent probably speaks a Romance language and got hit by a "false friend".

That's actually a valid (of old fashioned) usage in English too, it's just a bit weird to value in a voice assistant for your car.

I have it set to the "Gork" personality, which is occasionally correct and useful, but is very often genuinely funny. It's like a Spicoli-with-a-PhD that answers your query when it "feels like it".

I have a RULES file for my coding agent which I invoke when I get bored. It basically simulates a real office environment saying things like "while the queue is full our worker is sitting in the corner with its thumb up its ass looking at the wrong queue".

Which is hilarious, but when I'm driving on the freeway and trying to add milk to my grocery list or add a navigation stop at the hardware store (no idea if these are things you can actually do, I'm just using what feel like plausible use cases for a car voice assistant) I wouldn't want the additipnal distraction of the voice assistant being funny.

I have an older X, and I'm kind of happy that the AP and Infotainment hardware in it is largely deprecated, and they are unlikely to be able to shove Grok crap into it. It will stay largely the same for the life of the car.

Do a quick press of the voice button and the old voice control activate; if you hold it down or press too long, it uses the grok AI which can't do anything (and I never use).

This is part of the reason why I believe cars should delegate as much software functionality to your phone as possible. Phones have good voice assistants and they will get better, same with GPS and music. Just let the phone do it. Plus, when the software is out of support you don't have to buy a new car.

What if I don't have my phone, or if someone else drives the car?

These are niche enough use cases I don't think they're worth bothering about.

I wouldn't dump millions into a custom GPS solution for that 1 time out of 1 million someone drives a car without a smartphone. Especially when that GPS system is guaranteed to be worse than Google maps and not as well supported.

If someone else drives your car they can connect their phone. Which is an improvement, because now they have THEIR music and navigation. See, it comes with personalization out of the box and automatically!

> Especially when that GPS system is guaranteed to be worse than Google maps and not as well supported.

I use my car's GPS nav over my phone's because I don't notice being appreciably worse for navigating, but I do notice the ads on Google Maps being appreciably worse than the lack of ads on my car's nav system.

Also doing nav on my phone thrashes my phone battery.

It should be impossible to drive a car without a phone?

No it should definitely be possible, I just don't think it's worth while creating a subpar and poorly-supported GPS system when phones exist. Especially when said system is forced over phones, which often happens because companies want to promote their own shit. As if their shit don't stink, when really it's the smelliest.

We don't need 1 million different applications that we have to try to integrate together. Just let me connect my messages, my GPS, my music player, even my calendar. Personally, I could give a rat's ass how fancy Tesla's interface is or GM's. It will always, always be second best to what's available on modern smartphones.

EVs are a solved problem, but as amelius notes the real tech is the battery. Tesla + Panasonic has a built in advantage in terms of battery manufacturing. Tesla has a massive amount of capital, if they put it into reducing and scaling manufacturing of vehicles and batteries, I think they could probably win. Now maybe Telsa has looked at the numbers and decided they can't win and are choosing to pivot rather than die a slow death.

I don't think that is what is happening here. Instead, Tesla is continuing the strategy that brought them to this disaster of going all in on driverless. That isn't a bad strategy, but if they get the timing wrong a third time, they destroy the company and they have gotten the timing wrong on this twice already. This strategy has two downsides:

1. AI has no real moat and Tesla has largely pursued commodity sensors, meaning that other than EVs+battery tech (which Tesla appears abandoning), robotaxis have no hardware or software moat.

2. They could use network effects to win, in which case their competitors are not other car companies but Uber and Lyft. Uber has been pursuing the same long term strategy at Tesla.

Now by itself, going all in robotaxi, is risky but could work if they time it right. Tesla isn't going all in on robotaxi since they are splitting the effort between robotaxi and Optimus robots.

It is likely that the experience Tesla gets with Optimus robots will help other robotics companies, but unlike robotaxis where the timing might (but probably won't work), the timing is clearly isn't right for Optimus.

It seems like the motivation here is that Musk is aligning Tesla to a narrative that justify the absurd stock price, even if that narrative isn't reality.

> It seems like the motivation here is that Musk is aligning Tesla to a narrative that justify the absurd stock price, even if that narrative isn't reality.

Since Tesla stock has always been 90% based on the narrative, the narrative is the reality (and the product) of Tesla, and the actual machinery made and sold are just props and decorations to create the impression of it.

Maybe they should rebrand themselves as poTemkin: keep the T logo and the mysterious Slavic vibe, while shedding the pretense about what they're about.

Won't affect the stock anyway. Everyone knows the company is overvalued based on promises and perception alone.

Everyone's just betting on the charade going on one moment longer than their hold on the stock.

If you squint, the Cybertruck is shaped like a pyramid on wheels, which couldn't work any better as a visual metaphor for the enterprise.

Kia is making these incredibly popular cheap EVs and who knows who their CEO is? Probably some middle aged Korean in a business suit.

Automotive industry versus tech industry.

The CEO of Kia doesn't even have a wikipedia page!

> Tesla + Panasonic has a built in advantage in terms of battery manufacturing.

What advantage do they have over CATL, BYD, and LG?

CATL batteries perform better: https://electrek.co/2026/01/06/catl-ev-batteries-significant...

CATL is rolling out sodium ion batteries: https://electrek.co/2026/01/23/ev-battery-leader-plans-first...

CATL, BYD, and LG are developing solid state batteries. Everyone is.

> It is likely that the experience Tesla gets with Optimus robots will help other robotics companies

Why? Other robotics companies have been doing it for longer. Is Optimus better than Atlas:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9e0SQn9uUlw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIhzUnvi7Fw

If Tesla has lost the advantage in battery tech, that is unfortunate and speaks poorly to Tesla's long term strategy. Reclaiming this lead would be an important strategic goal and I disagree with that not being prioritized.

> Why? Other robotics companies have been doing it for longer. Is Optimus better than Atlas:

Atlas costs about half a million dollars, targeting a price tag of $160,000 once mass produced, and assumes the user will be able to do some maintenance.

Optimus is targeting a price tag of $30,000, but probably costs around $80,000 to produce. It is plastic, it is cheap, it doesn't work.

Atlas is better than Optimus but all measures. The advantage of Optimus so far has been, the mass production-->usage until failure-->improvement cycles that are already underway. Tesla is, as an extremely high cost, slipping on every single banana peel first and this is clearing a path for other companies to learn what doesn't work when you switch from functional over-engineered robot to barely functional robots that can be mass produced.

Telsa isn't alone in this space, but they investing a lot and trying to cut corners. So much of engineering is learning the corners you can cut and the corners that cause a battery fire after 8 weeks of use.

> Tesla + Panasonic has a built in advantage in terms of battery manufacturing. Tesla has a massive amount of capital, if they put it into reducing and scaling manufacturing of vehicles and batteries, I think they could probably win.

This is a very wrong way to tell the story.

Tesla + Panasonic were the first to commit to a massive factor car cells with very advanced chemistry. But this advantage didn't hold long as the model was soon copied.

And at that point, when that investment happened Tesla did actually not have 'a massive amount of capital'. And Panasonic also didn't, and even more so, Panasonic didn't want to go all in on batteries. As they were a company from Japan that still believed in the Hydrogen future.

By the time Tesla had serious capital, the other battery companies had long shot past Tesla+Panasonic and it wasn't even close.

Claiming that Panasonic and Tesla can win now is just silly and based on nothing.

Tesla was actually pretty clever on this and invested rather a large amount in their own battery supply chain. And they spun up a whole battery supply chain pretty quickly. But arguably they were a bit two ambitious. Musk really pushed the boundary with the cells, introducing or trying to introduce a lot of things that were hard to do and simply took time. They should have started more conservatively first and only tried to innovated once they could match the other companies on the standard process.

There was no chance for them to be a massive battery supplier to the outside, but making their own batteries for their own cars and getting better margin then all the other companies was well within the cards. And that by itself is a win.

But overall their battery strategy wasn't really the problem. They did a lot of good things there. And things that can pay off over time. The problem was to much investment in stuff other then batteries and their car models. The most important thing for them was to have growing volume every year. Work on manufacturing improvements and fight on margins.

But as you say, I agree the focus on driverless was a mistake.

This is a very realistic analysis which isn't going to be very popular.

The battery progress is more an accidental discovery than research problem alone.

There have been significant advances in power electronics and electric motors in the recent decades. Yes, there's not a lot to gain when you're starting at 85%+ efficiency, but it's far from "basic" technology.

You can say the same about the traditional car industry. Just because it’s a “solved problem” doesn’t mean you can ignore the TAM.

I think people are frustrated because Musk has been pretty up front that Tesla only exists to further his goals for Mars and robots. He doesn’t actually care about selling cars.

Traditional car industry is toast.

Teslas don’t even have HUDs, there’s plenty of work left to do

I recently read Origins of Efficiency by Brian Potter, and one of the interesting things it talks about is the path of the Model T.

Ford invested heavily in an in-house, highly optimized production pathway for the Model T. Other manufacturers sourced a lot of their parts from vendors.

This gave the Model T a great advantage at first, but they had a lot more trouble than competitors in coming up with new models. Ford ended up converging with the rest of the industry in sourcing more of their parts externally.

The lack of new Tesla models makes me feel like a similar pivot is what Tesla needs. My suspicion is that they probably need a less terminally distracted Musk to pull it off.

One of the things Jim Farley, Ford CEO, brought up was they have a lot of 3rd party suppliers, and changes take a long time to implement. So a firmware update may require change notifications and responses from dozens of suppliers for something like door locks. This was in response to why Ford couldn't do firmware as fast or as often as Tesla. Vertically integrated means you have 1 big ship to turn around. Modern JIT manufacturing means your ship is built of 100s of cards and each one needs to be turned.

The lack of new models from updates I believe comes from the fact the CEO is busy elsewhere and the board is reluctant to address that. They have made the P/E so high that they can only continue to function in one direction, do just enough to bring in more outside investment.

I think I read somewhere that the model T went something like 12 years without substantial changes to its design.

Ford wouldn’t have known about The Innovator’s Dilemma and possibly not about Sunk Cost Fallacy.

Deming had to go to Japan to get his ideas taken seriously and it nearly bankrupted American manufacturing that they wouldn’t listen to him.

> they had a lot more trouble than competitors in coming up with new models.

I'd read somewhere that it was mainly because Henry Ford was dogmatic that the Model T was perfect, all the car anyone would ever need forever.

First mover advantage was GM's EV1. Tesla would not exist if GM didn't go and crush every single EV1 they could find.

The EV1 gave GM no advantage.

It wasn't the first modern EV?

Doesn't matter if it was or wasn't, it was a failure that GM never followed up with. Why it was a failure is also irrelevant, because whether you feel it was a technical failure or killed by GM, GM never did anything with the project or knowledge. Effectively it was a curiosity.

If GM killed it to keep it from succeeding, then there is massive precedent to never reuse the tech. In fact, their NiMH battery patents were sold to Texaco/Chevron who held them close and never let anyone use them. From that point, they couldn't follow-up without dumping even more cash into it, effectively burying it. Until new lithium battery tech matured, there was no way to do it again.

>If GM killed it to keep it from succeeding

They didn't, and this is just absurd.

Not only were electric cars available since the very beginning of cars, but they've always been available as niche options. There are tens of electric cars that postdate the EV1 and predate the Tesla. Do you even know their names?

We have stupidly cheap gas. An electric car has only ever been a curiosity for America. Even now, the primary driver of people buying electric cars is ideological, and a mild convenience of never having to go to a gas station.

Pre-lithium battery electric cars are a huge hassle, for very little gain, even outside the US. The history of cars is a global one, and no amount of conspiracy theory about GM can counter the fact that nobody else made electric cars either, even in places with drastically more expensive and unreliable gasoline.

They have always been a novelty, like hydrogen and LPG and compressed gas engines.

Hybrids were the closest anyone got to making older battery chemistries meaningful for car-style transportation, and even that was extremely limited.

About compressed gas, they have so much cheaper fuel that they are the norm here in Brazil for Uber drivers. So, not a novelty

Brazil also pioneered flex engines that work with either alcohol and gasoline, and gasoline in Brazil is sold with high alcohol content

I agree with this.

Cheap gas, car culture and the incredibly long distances makes America a very different place from the urban centres of the Netherlands, China and Korea.

Exactly. The battery tech the EV1 had was never going to be a big seller in the US.

GM didn't sell EVs for years after releasing the EV1. They didn't get any market advantage from the EV1 because they left the market after, for a long time.

We are in complete agreement here. They wasted their lead.

They didn’t have a lead. It’s like saying the DC-X was ahead in propulsive landing over F9, or the LG Prada had a lead over the iPhone.

Being first isn’t enough to establish a lead. You also have to be in competition, which means selling product.

It is very widely known that GM held a 7 year head start on every other automaker on manufacturing the modern EV. Several other EVs were sold during it's time in low volume.

The EV1 was a regulatory anomaly. The tech wasn't there yet for mass market adoption.

It’s almost as if a company would be better off having a CEO who wasn’t also the CEO of four other companies while also dabbling in geopolitics.

and drugs

I think we can all agree that the world would be a better place if Elon made time for his kids instead of whatever the fuck it is he’s been doing.

He does more than dabble in drugs

The end game is the SpaceX IPO which will make him a trillionaire, and then he doesn't need Tesla any more.

Indeed.

SpaceX in Merger Talks with xAI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46814701 - January 2026

Regular IPOs usually have commitments from pension funds, mutual funds, private equity firms and other institutional investors secured in advance of going public. How many of those parties would be interested considering that SpaceX really only has one main customer whose business isn't guaranteed considering his political partisanship?

Their main customer is Starlink and it will continue to be cash printing machine.

Their second customer is the Federal government and SpaceX has a monopoly on cheap reliable fast launch services that will overcome most politics. Even EU companies and Amazon and OneWeb have been forced to use them because there is no better option.

Unfortunately, enough for many regular people to be screwed when that stock crashes.

What do you base this on?

Or the Boring Company which most people have also completely forgotten about.

Because it’s boring.

Not in principle, mind you.

It's just that the company has stalled every major project they started, and, so far, completed a rather shitty an uninspiring one in Vegas that has no reason to exist in the first place (it's subway but with Teslas instead of trains).

Its only purpose is to prevent the money from being spent on viable public transportation projects, and in that sense, it's very interesting that it got so far.

Or, digging tunnels is a lot harder than expected and there have been no big technical leaps to change that. The idea is great, but only if the cost goes down and digging speed goes up by a lot.

I assume you got a cut of the $23bn my state took with the promise of a high-speed rail, which afaik is the only "viable(?!)" transportation project that could have been affected by this, or you just hate subways/subterranean transportation progress?

The idea isn’t great, tunnels for cars or pods have really low throughput (low occupancy + safety margin headways, even at a high speed). And it hinged on them magically revolutionising an already highly mature field, which surprise, surprise didn’t work out.

If it had been possible to speed up and reduce the cost of tunneling, the thing that would most make sense is running regular trains through them. But they never had any real ideas to actually make it cheaper or faster (apart for making it too small for proper emergency egress), just the idea that SV tech guys would be able to find a way to do it.

I disagree, tunnels for transport of both people and goods, especially in high-density urban areas is the best way to go. Walking and biking is great for their distance, but cars and trucks are still needed for larger and heavier items. Using shared transportation (like a train) is terrible for "The last mile". Doing everything at night just seems like a band-aid and sucks for all those workers.

The idea of trying to solve the hard infrastructure problem of digging first also seems like a great idea. Build the aqueduct before you build the millions of houses and farms, and even let anyone do that part.

It's still premature to say that they haven't revolutionized the field, people around the world are still digging tunnels so there's still a market. It wouldn't be the first time an already highly mature field got revolutionized, I still don't get why you're so anti-tunnel.

Here is the thing, you demand incredibly high amounts of capital cost for not actually achieving much. And that capital could be use for far, far, far, far more useful things the city actually needs. Like high capacity transports, like metros, trams or bike lanes.

The amount of goods that need to be transported to stores and such things isn't that big. And using literally free unused roads at night or early in the morning is just a great deal.

For individual transport last mile is regularly being done by cargo bike or small electric truck just fine.

But you are right, tunnels do make sense for some things. Like transporting garbage underground. Or transporting heat underground for district heating, or district cooling. Both would be better investments then trying to move logistics under-ground.

There is a reason, no serious attempt anywhere in the world is trying to move logistics under-ground. There are just so, so many better ways to invest in the city. Its literally not even in the Top 100 most needed things.

Specially in the US where the road network is so hilariously overbuilt that it could serve 10x the amount of people on the same area if public transport was just taken minimally serious. And in the US, underground cargo transport isn't even in the Top 1000 things a city should consider spending money on.

Metros are in tunnels.

There’s only so much gridlock you can avoid without going above or below grade. I was shocked when I moved to Seattle and they had no subway system. It was made even worse by being crammed up against a tall hill with a ridiculously deep lake behind it. They are finally changing it now but I’d spent time in Tokyo before, and time in London and Paris shortly after and it was a real head scratcher. One bus tunnel helped, as was evidenced when they shut it down for a couple years, but cmon.

Seattle also is a great example of "why tunnels for cars are not tantamount to a public transport network".

As well as all the impediments to the glorious vision of the parent commenter's "tunnels everywhere" as a panacea.

Yes, WHEN you build tunnel you need to make it the highest possible capacity. And not some low capacity tax system.

Because The Boring Company hasn't built any tunnels worth noting, perhaps, and stalled most of its projects.

This isn't a case against tunnels, this is a case against The Boring Company.

The tunnels aren't a great idea apriori. Good luck pitching the tunnels idea in Venice.

The tunnels may be a good or a bad idea depending on many variables, and the tunnels that the Boring Company has actually built are worthless.

As for the tunneling equipment: selling those machines isn't their core business, and there's no evidence these machines have, or may in the feasible future, do anything revolutionary in the tunnel industry (i.e., built radically better, radically cheaper, or radically faster).

The idea of having such machines is good. They don't have such machines.

> It's still premature to say that they haven't revolutionized the field

It's never premature to say that. Read what you wrote.

You can say a field has been revolutionized once a revolution takes place.

It's hasn't.

The impact of the Boring company on the way tunnels are dug is, very sharply, zero.

Is it possible that they will? Sure. It's also possible that Britney Spears will. She still has the time, it's premature to say she wouldn't do it, right?

Their mistake was to go from tunnels to transportation systems. I'm sure there are some innovations possible in tunnel boring. But that's not going to be some massive growth market.

But trying to reinvent transportation was stupid.

> But trying to reinvent transportation was stupid.

It's not stupid, it's weaponized incompetence to divert funding from actual transportation infrastructure to their non-solutions which are all about the company owner's biggest money-making product (cars).

Not to mention that keep getting fined for improper disposal of waste material. Just dumping tunneling fluid into the sewer.

They just work "underground"

He barely needs Tesla now, pretty much the only thing stopping electric cars from being ubiquitous are people in politics and media. The new mission statement is just to make everything for everyone, which I guess solves the people-on-earth problems he wanted to tackle. Next is a push for Mars (which again is mostly threatened by some politicians at this point).

His entire wealth is basically paper anyways.

I don't think the problem was a lack of Elon Musk's involvement.

> Realistically, he should have put someone else in charge after the launch of the Model 3 to develop the company further, but I don't think his ego allows it.

Well he knows more about manufacturing than anyone else alive on Earth, so he can't be replaced /s

(yes, he actually did say that)

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