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Comment by deepsun | Hacker News Reader

I've got plenty of downvotes here on HN for critiquing him on Stage 1, herd mentality is relevant for HN community just as well.

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Correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember stage 1 being maybe 2011. There were plenty of Musk critics back then, as there are now, but they seemed to have been completely wrong on pretty much everything. I remember people saying he was a charlatan whose technology would never work and even if it did it would never get mainstream market penetration. I feel like you would have smugly chuckled if anyone told you the following things that are true:

1.) Tesla cars will be ubiquitous on American roads

2.) The best selling model of car globally would be a Tesla

3.) Most cars would be made in the US, yet still be price competitive with foreign competition

4.) SpaceX rockets would be re-used multiple times per week

5.) SpaceX's launch business is highly profitable despite lowering prices to less than 10% of what they used to be

6.) SpaceX launches more mass to orbit than the rest of the world combined

1. Tesla has sold ~2.5-3M cars since 2017 in the US. There’s more than 200M cars on the road in the country. Ford has sold more F series trucks in the last 4 years than Teslas have been sold ever.

2. The only reason Model Y is the best selling car in the world is because 3/4 of the sales come from the US and Tesla only sells one model of SUV. Other brands sell many different variants and multiple models in the same category across the world.

3. Teslas are not at all competitive in other markets. BYD is eating their lunch.

4-6. Yes, but the global market for space launches is projected to barely touch $30B by 2030. Global competition for this market is only getting fiercer with multiple US startups, India, China and more recently France.

Now let’s talk about the failures.

1. Nueralink 2. FSD 3. Roadster 4. Cybertruck 5. Hyperloop 6. $2T in Doge cuts 7. Robotaxi 8. Starship 9. Tesla Semi 10. 4680 battery 11. Boring company tunnels 12. Bots that were going to disappear on Twitter

The list is very long when you actually include all the data points.

Neuralink appears to be working, albeit slowly--as should be expected, because the space is hard.

Cybertruck shipped and is commonly seen all over my city, so "failed" seems to be incorrect.

Starship...works? Again, the space is hard.

The tunnels...are dug?

I'm not a Musk fanboy but you're just making a bad case.

If the standard for evaluation is that the tunnels are dug, then I really don’t have anything else to add.

> ”3.) Most cars would be made in the US, yet still be price competitive with foreign competition”

Globally, 50-55% of all Teslas sold are manufactured in China, and a further ~10% in Europe. Only around 35-40% of Teslas are made in the US.

I talked about Musk the person.

Tesla was founded by different guys, Musk just forced them out.

SpaceX is indeed very cool, but not because of Musk. He just put his name on everything that might have been cool, even if dumb (remember Hyperloop? I always wondered on what grounds PR teams associated Hyperloop with Musk, as the idea was very old, and he didn't give it any money -- what relation he even had?)

I've heard from SpaceX insiders that they don't like the guy very much. SpaceXers do cool stuff, and then Mr. Musk comes in and makes everyone believe it's he himself done all that.

Or probably I'm just allergic to narcissism.

If you're not getting downvoted at least some of the time on HN you're doing something wrong. I've caught plenty of downvotes myself for arguing that Mars was never going to happen and is just a recruiting tactic for SpaceX to hire idealistic young engineers and pay them sub-market wages because the dream of Mars is part of their compensation.

All the hardware they've actually invested in, including Starship, is in fact foremost for launching satellites into Earth orbit. Starship in particular is optimized for this.

"Full Self Driving" was also a giant scam. Got heavily downvoted for that as well.

You should expect to be downvoted for being wrong.

It is a scam. "Full Self Driving" isn't even close to Level 3 autonomy or even Level 5.

Tesla got away with this deceptive advertising and scammed [0] their customers believing their vehicles would soon reach full self driving autonomy.

The only ones defending this are likely the ones that still haven't realized that they got scammed by Elon. Sorry that happened to you.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/legal/tesla-must-face-californias-fa...

How is this false opinion so common? I use self-driving regularly it has always worked more or less flawlessly

Self-driving is a thing. Full self-driving, commonly known as "level 5 autonomy", has been claimed for over a decade. These claims have been made so many times it has a dedicated Wikipedia page!

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

So basically we don't have full self driving, not because it doesn't work but because the regulators haven't approved it yet? Seems a little misleading to claim this is some failure on the part of Tesla's technology

But those levels are kind of bullshit. If a car is autonomously driving but needs an attentive driver in the seat for legal reasons you're stuck at what, level 2? Even if you never actually need to override/intervene?

Teslas running the latest hardware (manufactured 2023+) and software are actually nearly there, IMO. I used it for two months and never needed to intervene. It's not perfect yet but I believe it actually drives better than most people now.

However, the millions of Teslas on the road with older hardware are absolutely useless in comparison where you will need to intervene a lot. The latest FSD software only works on the latest hardware so these older cars are stuck on either old FSD versions (which are proven to be bad) or get slimmed down versions to fit lower specs (which we know wont be as good). It's unsafe and they really should disable it for all of the older vehicles and issue refunds for people who paid for FSD.

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