Even ignoring Musk's shenanigans, anyone buying a new EV may need to reconsider whether Tesla is in it (supporting consumer-owned EVs) for the long haul. Recent moves, and even quotes from Elon, suggest they might not be.
"Because we're really moving into a future that is based on autonomy and so if you're interested in buying a Model S and X, now would be the time to order it, because we expect to wind down S and X production in next quarter and basically stop production of Model S and X next quarter. We'll obviously continue to support the Model S and X programs for as long as people have the vehicles, but we're gonna take the Model S and X production space in our Fremont factory and convert that into an Optimus factory, which will... with the long-term goal of having 1 million units a year of Optimus robots in the current S/X space in Fremont."
Nvidia started funding piracy sites too; https://torrentfreak.com/nvidia-contacted-annas-archive-to-s...
If you are billionaire+ it's "legal", and if not at least financially worth it + almost never punishment on management.
If you are worth xx'000 you personally go to jail, you get into very big troubles, and get ruined.
Getting a judge to rule on something is also part of that “the law is just the law” and it’s obvious that judges are more willing to rule on cases for the poor and powerless than the rich and connected.
Most of the things corporations do aren't as clear cut as a traffic violation. So in those cases, you only know if something is illegal when it's made it through the courts
https://www.nhtsa.gov/interpretations/timereplcepartpollak12...
That said, Tesla is a very unusual automaker in most senses and I'm not sure what their aftermarket parts situation is.
It seems like an incredible waste to throw away a car after 5 years.
A big part of what I look for in a car is a long lasting manufacturer that publishes to end users technical and repair information, including part numbers and procedures, together with a healthy third party part supplier ecosystem and independent repair infrastructure.
That doesn't mean that information needs to be available for free or that the parts themselves are cheap -- Volvo parts are not cheap -- but they are available and the information, engine specifications, repair manuals and workshop manuals are available.
If you don't have that, I'm not interested in buying the car. A car is far too expensive to treat as a disposable consumer good. I'm worried that more and more, manufacturers are locking down their systems, putting information behind paywalls where you can't make your own backup copy, and doing things like adding DRM to their parts to prevent indy shops from working on them.
Often after a decade or so, companies will sell the designs to dedicated parts makers. For example, Volvo has Volvo Classic Parts, and they even have a reman program, and will even 3D print parts not available. Mercedes has Mercedes Classic Parts. Chrysler has MOPAR, etc.
Here you can browse parts for a 1968 Mercedes SEL: https://classicparts.mbusa.com/c-280sel-223
If you are a business, the costs of designing the part has already been paid, if you can sell the design and get some royalty payments, why wouldn't you turn those old plans into cash?
And of course there is a huge industry of Chinese clones and other suppliers that will provide replacement parts that are not genuine.
Be prepared to pay, though :)
In my experience service departments are basically a large warehouse with a small set of assembly machines running at any given time where you are setting up time to produce some random part for a day or two and then change to something else, whereas the real production assembly lines are designed to produce as many of X part for the latest car as possible.
Several of the old mold machines where I worked that made parts for this service business ran DOS, with PCMCIA cards to load programs. I helped a process engineer get these PCMCIA cards working on his contraband laptop running win98 (obviously banned from the network) because we could never get them working with anything newer. This was in like 2021.
Boston Robotics robots are over there doing backflips and the only thing I’ve seen Optimus do is in extremely controlled environments.
I'm not in robotics, but I look at humanoid robots and, while incredible examples of engineering know-how, they seem to be a long way from useful in commercial applications. Am I jhust ignorant of their true value? Seems like all I ever see them doing is parkour.
I think they are perfectly capable of writing software to drive the robot - if Musk doesn't stick his head in like he did with LIDAR/FSD and impose some stupid requirement that handicaps the product.
Tesla clearly has at least some AI chops, and if Musk can bullshit for long enough, they might have enough time to make these robots more than just props.
Elon thinks it would be too expensive to have to write code for every task you might ask one of these to do, they want it to be fully autonomous.
Their engineers aren't behind keyboards typing C++, they're wearing VR headsets and feeding the data to a LLM, although even that is probably too specific for Elon's long term plans. Obviously he doesn't want to have to have people repeat actions hundreds of times before the dumb robots figure it out. Especially for "simple" tasks like serving drinks at press events.
My main doubts about Tesla's plan are that they will sell enough of these to get benefits of scale or that Musk will force the engineering team to "skip lidar" again and compromise the design.
Indeed.
Even with 9 million total cars sold, Tesla still has yet to solve for driving safely with no interventions across just the contiguous USA.
With a similar approach, a million robots operating for years is still a long way short of gathering the data needed for training an AI to autonomously operate safely in a full range of industrial environments.
(That said, IMO remote-controlled humanoid robots still make a lot of sense, they'd only need a little bit of AI to assist rather than to do everything; if I was in Musk's position, I would be selling that vision of the future rather than claiming fully autonomous AI-driven androids are anywhere near).
I'm experiencing AI that is very fast, but also kinda dumb and thoughtless.
But it seems that ~80% of the smart people I know refuse to work for Musk on principle, and the remaining 20% prefer to work somewhere that pays well (Musk companies do not).
End result is he has a team of mediocre engineers working on it which is why their demos appear years behind some competitors like Boston dynamics and Unitree.
I think the same is happening to Tesla cars (not much innovation in the last few years).
I doubt it, considering their accomplishments.
They certainly have accomplished amazing things. They had a lead that even five years ago was considered insurmountable. But they've made at best incremental progress, the kind made by mediocre engineers. The only novelty was the Cybertruck, which didn't live up to expectations and didn't open up any new domains.
SpaceX is still advancing, though even that is getting a bit of an asterisk if they can't get Starship to fulfill its promise.
(Regardless, from what I've seen, the Chinese will own this segment too.)
Optimus is also a bit of a "squirrel!" for the market that he likes to talk about whenever sales figures at Tesla start flagging. Meme stocks only work as long as people still believe in infinite exponential growth.
Car companies typically invest in new models in the same segment in order to stay competitive with the other car companies.
If there was no competition (there is), and he met the price envelope he's talking about (Cybertruck suggests he won't), I can buy the idea that there's a market opportunity for a few tens of millions of humanoid robots which are even just 5% AI and 95% remote workers in VR headsets, just because this means you can get cheap 3rd-world wages running your "made in America*" factories.
But there is competition, and I don't think he'll meet his price target.
As for the AI: even when I forecast under the assumption of continued improvements of hardware and software, I see at least a ten year gap between any given level of self-driving car and a humanoid robot small enough and light enough to get into the driver's seat of a normal car and drive it to the same standard, and that's just for driving a car, not all the other things people like to imagine in a world where androids are good enough to generically replace human labour.
* insert any other nation as desired, it works in any place where wages are higher than the cheapest nation with reliable internet (modulo the TCO of the robot, which nobody knows yet).
This will lead to minds getting blown as all those "foreigners coming here and taking our jobs" whose deportation people demand, are now "working from home in a different country and still taking our jobs" and the US in particular will have to wrangle with how this is a first amendment issue because remote control is just speech isn't it?
And when we consider how the current AI boom seems to have come with a total lack of even the most basic security considerations in their usage, these robots, wether** AI or remote controlled, are absolutely going to get turned into Mr-Stabby-the-totally-deniable-assassin.
** pun not intended, but when I noticed the misspelling I decided the implications still worked as a joke.
Tesla absolutely cannot keep it's valuation without a promise for it's delusional stock holders or actual massive revenue streams.
The model S and X are their oldest most expensive models that aren't even sold everywhere in the world.
However the Model 3 and the Model Y are, of which the Model Y was the most popular car model sold globally of any manufacturer.
In Australia I see Model 3s and Model Ys everywhere. Stopping production of the S and the X, you wouldn't even notice it here.
It's a lot more than "shenanigans": he's likely responsible for the deaths, via starvation and illness of hundreds, thousands, or more. The quick and sudden DOGE cuts ripped those programs that were keeping people alive away, without any chance to phase in replacements.
Despite popular belief, it is not the job of the US Tax Payer to feed the impoverished world. How many billions have been sent to Africa? People need to make their own countries great instead of waiting for more Gibs from the USA.
This is an overly simplified perspective. Work at this scale requires impressive logistics and commitments that are haphazardly "rug-pulled" can have catastrophic consequences, regardless of whose "job" it is.
When I was looking at being a bone marrow donor, they talk about this. The process for such donation is involved, including minor surgical procedures for the donor. But they talk about autonomy and consent, and one of the topics is this (paraphrasing): Do I have the right to change my mind about donation at any time?
The answer: while you always maintain the legal right to withdraw consent, at a certain point in the process, the recipients existing bone marrow is destroyed in preparation for your donation. At that point, there may be considered a moral obligation to continue the donation, as without your donation, the recipient will die, due to the destruction in preparation.
> How many billions have been sent to Africa?
Speaking for myself, I'd rather continue sending billions to Africa than contributing ~1.5% of Israel's GDP in foreign assistance to it.
Sounds more like foreign influence than actual survival help. Maybe USAID even funded wars, and caused more death and chaos, who knows. Difficult to predict what's next. Perhaps it will be good because countries will adapt and shine, instead of having local dictators surviving on these aids, etc.
Also, there is a thing about people depending on you:
I am feeding birds during winter, so at some point they depend on my food. Should have I had started feeding them at all or not ?
If I didn't feed them, technically less birds would have died because they would never had a chance to live...
It doesn't look that weird to me that humanitarian assistance would go to people who need it the most ? Do Israelis currently need heaters not to die from the cold after their energy system has been destroyed ?
It's as if helping populations in need would buy you goodwill and popularity. Crazy to thing about it. I don't see how program trying to contain the spread of AIDS or preventing people to die from the cold is "funding" war. Not sure what you are on about. People will not adapt and shine, they will die or be more miserable, or revolt and probably be crushed. Civil war is always an option too.
But your bird comment tells me you just don't care. You should have started with that.
If you look above you can see the whole concept “people die because of USAID”. It’s not my concept.
I am showing with the bird analogy how this is absurd. That you always have the choice to feed the birds or not.
At the end, it’s still a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” type of dilemma, like all important political interactions.
Nobody knows if the long-term impact will be positive or negative. It can push countries to take care of their population, to have new coalitions of countries (what if China double-down and offer more aid ?), etc.
Pretty much unknown. I hope it will eventually work out for the innocents who are victims of politicians who are in comfy places.
In your logic, you should have never "fed the birds" to start with but the people giving birth to children in f** up places are not going. "Mmmm I may wait for having that child on whether humanitarian aid will come" or "The likelihood of civi war is big in my country, I will wait for a safer period". They just have the child. Also those people may want to live too since they are already alive.
So just like for birds, not feeding them because it would create a population that cannot sustain itself would mean having lots of birds dying. Also I like to live in a world where some humans are not considered as birds.
> Nobody knows if the long-term impact will be positive or negative. It can push countries to take care of their population, to have new coalitions of countries (what if China double-down and offer more aid ?), etc.
Sure but that's besides the point the whole point of the parent was introducing the complexity of, once you have given some aid, you are responsible for the deaths you caused if you pull it out too quickly for the recipients to adapt. As others have said it's not like the US have coordinated themselves and given time to have other countries to share that load more evenly. Also it seems with administration, a lot of the time, cruelty is the point: Showing your base you are hurting their preferred target instead of actually being efficient. An example of that would be the handling of illegal immigration. A big spectacle but a needlessly cruel and inefficient one.
You choices aren't to either fund vets or fund aid. Your choices are to cut both or save both and I have a feeling you voted to cut both.
Not to republicans who have repeatedly voted down measures to take care of people getting straight up cancer from abysmal practices during the middle east wars that they started.
Those same republicans also voted down support for the aid workers of 9/11 dealing with absurd health issues from all the dust.
Literal heros and innocent victims, but republicans don't want to spend pennies on them.
Other countries would like to contribute (more), but the people that represent us taxpayers want to keep all the inluencing for your good selves.
I’m surprised that preventing famine and malnutrition is controversial
We didn't do it because it's the right thing to do, we did it for soft power, to spread our political and cultural influence and have leverage against those governments to serve our interests. Nations are not moral actors.
I can't help being very suspicious of up to a million dead without identifying a single dead individual, or country or even continent where these mass deaths are supposed to have occurred.
It’s a projection, a risk, and a rate, not a claim it has already happened to specific people.
> There is on-the-ground evidence of resulting impacts: Rising malnutrition mortality in northern Nigeria, Somalia, and in the Rohingya refugee camps on the Myanmar border and rising food insecurity in northeast Kenya, in part linked to the global collapse of therapeutic food supply chains. Spiking malaria deaths in northern Cameroon, again linked to breakdown in the global supply of antimalarials, and a risk of reversal in Lesotho’s fight against HIV, part of a broader health crisis across Africa.
"Spiking malaria deaths in northern Cameroon" links to an article[0] which states:
> BOGO, Cameroon, Oct 2 (Reuters) - Nine-month-old baby Mohamat burned with fever for three days before his family took him to the closest health centre in northern Cameroon, but it was too late. He died of malaria that day. Mohamat's death was part of a spike this year in malaria fatalities that local health officials attribute to foreign aid cuts by the United States. Before the cuts, Mohamat might have been diagnosed earlier by one of more than 2,000 U.S.-funded community health workers who would travel over rough dirt roads to reach the region's remotest villages. And at the health centre, he might have been treated with injectable artesunate, a life-saving drug for severe malaria paid for by U.S. funds that is now in short supply. But the centre had none to give out.
So the URL very directly identifies a dead individual, a country and a continent, while also mentioning other cases that we hopefully all can agree will also directly lead to deaths.
Do you take issue with this example? Or why are you stating that they're not "identifying a single dead individual, or country or even continent where these mass deaths are supposed to have occurred"?
[0]: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
Instead these are just numbers in a statistic and opportunities for leverage in geopolitics instead of real lives with as much depth and meaning as your own.
I didn’t vote for this, it’s not about me, I have no control over this. I live in California, we never voted for Trump. Please don’t lecture me about how I feel.
Ofc this is overly simplistic. There is hard power enabling soft power and there are alturistic extreme radical leftists actively seeking out and staffing such programs.
They cut the lifetime subscription to fsd
They canceled two Tesla models
They're converting Tesla factories to make Optimus robot
I was going to buy a Tesla but now have concerns.
You weren't concerned by Consumer Reports ranking Tesla in last place out of 26 manufacturers for reliability[2]? Or their quality control so poor that customers are buying their own delivery inspection checklists[2]?
You weren't concerned by Tesla Owners reporting Tesla authorized repair centers keeping their cars for months unable to source parts to repair them, or consumers unable to buy replacement parts[3]?
You weren't concerned by the worker awarded $130M for hostile work environment filled with racial abuse at a Tesla factory, after paying another worker $1M for racist abuse at their factory, and facing a class action about racist discrimination[4][5][6]?
You weren't concerned about Tesla's telemetry tracking all details about every drive and sending it back to HQ to train their FSD?
You weren't concerned by any of Musk's behaviour, such as his misleading statements about FSD delivery dates and abilities for years, about the sportscar that would jump with compressed air, about the Cybertruck and Semi truck abilities, about the Hyperloop, about getting Tesla to buy his cousin's failing SolarCity, about trying to get a trillion dollar paycheck out of Tesla, etc?
[1] https://www.carscoops.com/2025/04/which-tesla-models-have-ha...
[2] https://www.carscoops.com/2025/04/which-tesla-models-have-ha...
[2] https://www.jalopnik.com/teslas-quality-control-is-so-bad-cu...
[3] https://www.teslaownersonline.com/threads/tesla-cant-supply-...
[4] https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/usa-form...
[5] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/tesla-laws...
[6] https://edition.cnn.com/2025/04/18/business/tesla-black-work...
If they do end up quitting this will be the weirdest ever business story.
It's even worse with the Y where 50% (yes, HALF) of 2021 models failed their first inspection.
The headlights also often need adjusting.
Denmark is significantly more moist than California, and EVs regenerative braking doesn’t wear the braking discs, so they rust, thus failing inspection.
The solution is trivial (periodically disable regenerative braking), but many people didn’t know.
That is certainly one of the issues, but 22% of the model Y's had loose suspension arms. So the brakes (which I agree is a more minor yet still inexcusable issue) aren't the only issue.
https://www.kbb.com/best-cars/top-10-25-best-selling-cars-tr...
When you look at brands rather than models then it is no contest. For 2025 the top 15 was Toyota with 11.3 million sold, VW with 9.0, Hyundai Kia at 7.3, GM at 6.2, Stellantis at 5.6, Ford at 4.6, BYD at 4.6, Honda at 3.5, Suzuki at 3.3, Nissan at 3.2, Geely at 3.0, Changan at 2.9, BMW at 2.5, Renault at 2.4, and Mercedes at 2.2.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/239229/most-sold-car-mod...
This has been similarly true of ICEVs for the better part of the last 100 years.
The hope is for better batteries, but developments are excruciatingly slow.
This is, to me, actually a good because there's no longer any early adopters remorse anymore so no reason not to buy one now because it won't be outdated in six months.
I feel this directly. On paper I've lost more money on my Model 3 than I have on the previous half dozen cars combined, I'm pretty sure. But on the other hand, Ford canceling the Lightning has (at least temporarily) improved the resale value on my Lightning considerably. I couldn't really sell it today for what I paid for it, but I wouldn't be that far off.
Problem is that I don't really love the Tesla, but I do love the Lightning. Ha! So I keep them both but for differing reasons.
> the switch from the previous US charging standard to Tesla's
As an aside, this is finally happening for real! Several models coming to market now are shipping with J3400 (aka NACS) ports standard. Yay! I look forward to a time where the days of various adapters being required are firmly behind us.
The very high deprecation is often noted but the comparison is mostly in relation to sticker price, but the high discounts plus subsidies mean that the average discount for an EV was way higher than on ICE cars. Most of the high depreciation disappears once you take into account what the first buyer would have actually paid for the vehicle (often a five-digit discount), at least in my used car market. Some models seem to actually hold their value remarkably well, particularly those with no/few known issues and no real successors.
Another example would be small EVs (Zoe, e-up etc.) - the list price on these was often really high, like 25+k (and they were technologically obsolete already 5-6 years ago). But then you got 5k+ in EV subsidy, with the OEM also matching the subsidy, and you would've ended up actually paying like 15k for them. Now, 3-4 years later, these go used for 12-13k. So in reality they lost barely any value (20% deprecation over 3 years), but the published deprecation figure would be 60+%.
This explains why despite these "EVs suffer huge deprecation" claims there are actually very few bargains on the used market to make.
"NEW: Latest EV model boasts full charge (200 miles) in only ~5 minutes"
To me, that seems like a leaps & bounds improvement.
Engine and battery performance are analogous.
This may be true, but my family's "daily" ICE vehicle costs us about $0.162/mile to run; our actual daily EV costs about $0.028/mile -- almost one sixth as much. It doesn't matter how much more improvements ICE vehicles achieve, they're not going to catch up to the "mostly flat" EV curve.
Even so, the vast, vast majority of cars in the past 100 years have had all of the technical innovation of a washing machine (and that might well be underselling the washing machine!).
> developments are excruciatingly slow
10% a year on average, something like that? ICEVs haven't had that kind of incremental improvement in a loooooong time.
Uh yes, because it's really hard to improve the efficiency of something that is 4 to 5 times as efficient...
What's even crazier is that a tesla 2008 tesla roadster had 28kWh/100mi EPA combined, which is more than today's model S.
Literally there isn't a single combustion car (not including hybrids) which comes anywhere close to this improvement.
Also I don't know about other countries, but I'd argue that in 20 years at least in Europe the fuel economy of diesel cars has gone worse due to emissions, I'm talking about real world usage, regardless of what this WLTP non-sense says.l
Well no, since a 1926 engine is very different from a 2026 engine.
An early 90s fuel injected computer controlled engine is pretty similar to a current engine though (just incremental improvements), so we could say fairly similar for the last ~35 years. But not 100.
You can be a luxury brand, but that doesn't scale.
The Tesla Roadster came out first, by a couple years, but only sold about 2500 over its lifetime. By the time Tesla got its second model out, a couple years after Leaf went on sale, Leaf had 50k sales.
It took until 2020 for Tesla cumulative sales to catch up with Leaf cumulative sales.
If that were to happen, we will not be caring at all about Tesla's choices, so I'm not sure how you can make such a statement and then claim there is no argument to be had.
They got distracted by self driving and let that take up all of their attention. Now they're pivoting to robots before they've even got their first distraction working. They needed somebody who could tell Elon "no" about eight years ago.