It is remarkable that a US company had an enormous lead in BEVs for a decade. Then they just kinda stopped innovating, and slid backwards.
BYD were breathing down their neck after a few years.
It already charges in 20-30 min at Tesla chargers and has a practical range of around 600 kms, so super fast charging is a bit of a straw man.
Their big downfall is they lack an advertising department willing to spend $1B on pro-electric propaganda to debunk all the Trump/big oil propaganda. IMO EVs have addressed all the main product concerns, and the last ones are buyer stupidity.
If I'm going on a long trip, I just make sure I start charging from > 50% the previous day, and I'm good. It's trivial to manage the state of charge when you have a charger at home and a planned trip coming up.
The average person in America drives about 37 miles a day.
EVs gain about 3-5 miles per hour on a household 120V charger.
You sleep for about 8 hours and are probably home away from work and errands for an about 12 hours.
Do the math: 3 miles per hour for 12 hours is 36 miles.
And even if you don’t keep up with your pace, the weekend can act as additional time to charge. Or if you drive more on the weekend, you can basically decide that you’re going to go to a fast charger every 2-4 weeks just like a gas car (or maybe even less frequently than a gas car).
Let’s say you drive 50 miles a day but you’re only able to charge up 35 miles per day at home. If your vehicle’s range is 250 miles that means you need to go to a fast charger every 15 days including a little room for reserve power.
Also, all of this is even less of a concern if you live in a country with 240V power.
The fact that I can do 100km with 3 €, even with our expensive electricity, is icing on the cake.
If you don't have a charger at home, though, an EV is a chore, I agree.
I also don't have a fast electric charger at my house, and yet I still also own an EV.
And even with that, very few places seems to be willing to build competing charging stations that will undercut those prices. The only way to actually save money is to have a charging stations at home or at work where you pay the normal (through still very high) cost that the utility company take.
But I actually do most of my charging as trickle-charging from a regular home outlet, despite it being slow; it adds about 40 miles of range per 24 hours of charging. My car sits in my driveway most of the time so that's actually sufficient most of the time.
Good thing I only need to fast charge a few times a year, on long trips (or consecutive trips away from home/a plug).
I agree with you about just stopping to charge for a few minutes along the way if I need more, though.
If Telsa were still innovating, they'd have rounded out their offerings to fill in the gaps that are now getting filled with other brands in the world outside the USA.
Tesla sells more vehicles than Mazda, and both brands are in a similar semi-premium non-luxury segment. Compare lineups between these brands.
How does Mazda have 3.5 SUVs and Tesla only has 1.5? (The .5 is counting the CX-70 and CX-90, and the Y and YL as essentially the same car)
Mazda is able to offer a sedan and hatchback variant of the 3.
They also have a city car in Europe, the Mazda 2. Absolutely nothing in the segment from Tesla.
And of course, Mazda has the legendary MX-5, which chugs along selling a very respectable quantity while the Tesla Roadster remains MIA.
Where is Tesla’s lineup? For being a being China-focused brand, where is their premium/luxury van? For being a US-focused brand, where is their family 3-row Grand Highlander killer? How did they botch a truck made in Texas?
Isn’t that all that matters ?
Where the ball is vs. where the ball is heading.
Musk (and TSLA shareholders keeping the price where it is) is arguing the ball is heading to robotics and AI; I think we're at least a decade from the robotics+AI vision he's trying to sell the dream of, and in the meantime he may lose the car business by everyone else out-innovating on vehicles with regards to stuff he's either lost interest in, or lost the trust of the best designers an engineers to hire to work on for him.
It’s not like Tesla runs a Japanese-style corporation with tons of product breadth…they don’t even have product breadth in their primary business.
If they couldn’t maintain market leader status in their primary area of expertise, what makes them likely to gain market leader status in a tangentially related field?
It seems like an incredibly random product opportunity, and it’s highly suspicious of being a stock pump mechanism.
> CATL also says the battery retains more than 90% of its original capacity after 1,000 ultra-fast charging cycles
https://www.evdances.com/blogs/news/hongqi-unveils-ultra-fas...
All you need to do is an honest look at how many days a year you drive 500+ miles per day. People can't seem to do that and fixate on the ultra long distance road trip that they might make once per year. And neglecting to realize that they stop for bathroom breaks and food and so the actual time you're simply waiting for charging is, at best, maybe 20-30 minutes per year.
99% of the time you would be plugging your car into the charger at your house. And it just charges overnight.
I guess it's different if people have no way to charge their car at home or have it plugged in overnight. But in that case a lot of times they can pick up charge while at work, or whole doing grocery shopping, etc.
Even for road trips there are different ways to approach it. Some people just want to get to their destination fast and don’t mind eating at wherever the charger is. Others take road trips differently and would want to eat at the best restaurant at each local town they pass through, which may not be where chargers are. And if there are many passengers the bathroom breaks are usually not aligned with when the car needs charging. The perfect scenario of getting food or bathroom breaks exactly when the car needs charging could be a rare scenario.
Even if your use case is "only take the car on 500 mile road trips and I don't want to stop for 15 minutes", you should be able to understand how exceedingly rate that is.
Think about your phone. Do you plan how you'll charge that quickly? Do you know where you can get a quick charge at a local mall while ordering coffee? Nope, it just gets charged over night when you're asleep, no problem.
With respect to your phone analogy, if I weren’t able to charge my phone at home or at work, I would definitely be interested in being able to fast-charge it at some conveniently located business
If you have a wall plug at home, an EV is basically always full. I'm shopping for a flat and one of my non-negotiable requirements is a parking spot with a plug. The one I'm looking at now even has a three-phase plug, which is a nice extra, but not really necessary.
The products aren’t “done.” They’re stagnant.
Where is their proper 3 row SUV, not a hacked together half-effort like the YL?
Where is their passenger premium van product for China?
Remember that this is a company with a huge factory and presence in China, and they were the first mover in that market, but they’re getting eaten alive by competitors.
Meanwhile, in Europe, the Volkswagen Group is outselling Tesla in EVs. The #1 EV in Europe is a Skoda, and on top of that Tesla doesn’t make a European style city car. Small sedans like the Model 3 are really not popular in Europe, you need a hatch.
And I haven’t even brought up the Cybertruck selling a couple hundred thousand units below company expectations, that is kind of a low blow cherry on top.
Apparently not so much, the restyle and a consolidated assistance and charging network make people prefer it over the homemade products lately, which keep innovating but you essentially need to re-learn from scratch every time (my original source article is in Italian - https://www.vaielettrico.it/troppa-scelta-poca-fiducia-i-cin... ; this is the closest I could find in English: https://paultan.org/2026/01/21/tesla-model-y-again-best-sell... )
> They’re stagnant.
To some degree, I agree. Esp. on the 800V part which could make charges a bit faster. But I think they're overall stagnant: they pushed a ton of boundaries in the first 10-15y because they had to make something people could buy and use, but now that innovation push has diminished greatly: the cars work for most people, and the range is acceptable and not such a big inconvenience that pushes people to other brands. So no sense in going axial flux motors (that everyone is experimenting with) or bigger battery capacities, or even 48V + Ethernet instead of 12V + CANbus (the CyberTruck has these, but I don't think it has trickled down to the other models).
> Meanwhile, in Europe, the Volkswagen Group is outselling Tesla in EVs. The #1 EV in Europe is a Skoda, and on top of that Tesla doesn’t make a European style city car. Small sedans like the Model 3 are really not popular in Europe, you need a hatch.
Yes, but the Model Y remains the single unique best-selling car. VW needs to put together a few vehicle models to get to the same numbers. And I think the reason is the same as with China: Tesla has always been EV only, and built assistance and infrastructure for it, while VW doesn't have a very clear direction and makes products which are perhaps slightly mechanically superior, but feel inferior on the software and UX side. A car with hardware equivalent to Tesla (which now has 2 trims and 2 battery picks) costs anyway more than the base Tesla (you need to add a few optionals to the VWs). What Tesla is lacking in Europe are smaller models with ~450-500km range.
BYD is likely moving a few hundred thousand more pure BEVs than Tesla each year, although it’s hard to gauge the exact mix given that they have hybrids and ICE vehicles.
I am not saying Tesla is in doomed in China or anything like that, they’re a top brand. But they should be definitively the #1 brand and their product lineup is short 2-3 models.
However, a nice dull car company with Tesla's sales would be worth 1-10% of Tesla's market cap, and I don't know what happens if Musk is e.g. sentenced to prison time, or even just stripped of US citizenship and deported, or even just the SEC gets their teeth back and bans him from serving as CEO of publicly traded companies like they almost did for the "$420" tweet. That bubble popping may reveal financial shenanigans whose unwinding cause a fire-sale that ends the company.
This is why I'd say Tesla's stagnating. They don't have brands to fill in those gaps, other car makers don't feel the need to say "best selling model", they just go for the total sales.
Similar thing happened to Apple with the original iMac: it was the (world's? USAs?) "best selling model" of personal computer. The entire company was still struggling and had like 5% of the total personal computer market, but they had only one model of consumer-focused personal computer and everyone else had loads of models.
I think Apple are still only around 10% of the personal computer market today, their money is from branching out to phones and so on.
Huh? In June the best selling EV in China is Model Y across all price ranges. Model 3 a tie for the 8th with many ~$10k entry level higher up. If you only rank among ~$40k, then it's a tie for the 4th.
This is very very far from faltering so badly.
Toyota didn’t start outselling GM until 2021. Honda and Hyundai still sell fewer vehicles than Ford and GM in the US.
Tesla still sells a lot of product and does relatively well for itself, but proportionally to its prior status in the market, it has fallen far.
Tesla’s small model range makes their numbers look better because they can say that their two volume models sell very well. In reality, BYD is shipping hundreds of thousands more BEVs than Tesla and Volkswagen Group is outselling Tesla in Europe.
Another way to put this is to say that it’s really impressive that the Model Y sells number similar to the RAV4 and CRV in the United States. It’s far less impressive when you consider the fact that Toyota has nine SUVs in their lineup.
When you have a small model lineup like Tesla has it skews things a bit. Let's say you have a buyer who really likes the Tesla brand and wants a subcompact city car, or maybe they want a 3-row SUV. Let's say about 40% of them say "you know what, I like Telsa so much, I'll compromise and get a Model 3 even though it's bigger than what I want" or they say "I'll get the Model YS even though it's not a full large sized 3-row SUV I want."
This scenario now pads the numbers for those models and makes it look like the Model Y/YS/3 are incredibly successful, even though they didn't quite fit their buyer demographic and those buyers might not be back as repeat buyers as soon as there's another option available on the market that works better for them.
This hypothetical leaves 60% of potential buyers defecting to other brands right away. They'll say, "Tesla doesn't make what I want, I'll go buy an EV9 or a Renault 5 instead, even though I prefer Tesla."
A lot of those buyers are buyers that Tesla could have had, but they don't have because their model lineup is too thin.
This is exactly why most large volume brands have some kind of badge engineering and sub-brands going on. Toyota doesn't lose any buyers that want a Camry but want it to be more luxurious, those buyers are directed to Lexus. Hyundai doesn't lose any buyers that want more aggressive/sporty/modern styling, those buyers go with a Kia.
Tesla sells far too many cars to not have any of this yet, but they've just under-expanded, IMO.
That's worth accounting for - I'm likely not alone.