Hacker News Reader

Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

I don't know, government waste and most policy sucks. But there's no reason we can't do stuff or even try.

For instance, take Tesla. It wasn't anything revolutionary. Any auto manufacturer could have invested in battery technology and building a compelling EV, but they didn't. Same with manufacturing in America. Every manufacturer took as given that they have to outsource manufacturing to oversees and components to third parties. But it didn't have to be that way. It takes someone naive and optimistic enough to try something different.

View on HN

It's easy to forget that Tesla was made possible almost exclusively through government incentives. This is something that most people seem to have forgotten: Tesla exists because the government created incentive programs that paid in cold hard cash. Musk took advantage of those programs, and Tesla absolutely would not have been nearly as successful (and likely not existed) without it.

As much incentive as the oil & gas industry receives?

This is incredibly overstated. There are "incentives" for all sorts of activities. These incentives were available to all manufacturers. We should have "incentives" to produce electric vehicles and manufacturing in America. Insane not to. And these incentives are often "you would normally have to pay us X million in taxes, but we'll let you pay less". When the alternative is something not being built and no tax revenue, it makes sense. And a lot of subsidies were to buyers of EVs

> In 2019, the loss was $862 million, but for 2020 there is a huge profit of $721 million.

> However: A closer look at the figures published last week shows that Tesla is still making losses with actual sales of electric cars - around $500,000 in 2020.

> In 2020, carbon certificates brought in $1.6 billion, without this revenue the numbers would still be below red.

https://www.electrichunter.com/ev-news/tesla-makes-money-co2...

With a "profit" margin that jumpy and a history of unrentability, i think it's fair to say that Tesla only exists today because of subsidies. It's not just tax benefits, as you frame it, but in this case EU-CO2 certificates, a direct "revenue" stream.

Also available to other companies

Back then tesla was a unicorn.

Billionaires can claim child benefits too.

And Unicorns are about valuation, not money in the bank.

The government should find ways to strategically invest in developing major industries. The market for them is global and China has/will have a bigger internal market than the US, so without intentional development we'll get a continued industrial consolidation that is bad for the US and the world. I have robotic lawn mowers and vacuum cleaners made by Chinese companies partly because an intentional policy from China's government to grow these capabilities locally.

The current administration is literally cutting all those strategic investments

I think they're cutting strategic investments that they don't have personal investments in, as suggested in their banana republic handbook. They seem to be fine with fossil fuel investments for example.

I wouldn't be surprised if they start investing again once they destroy the competition and create rival companies in their stead.

Right now they seem to be swatting away wind and solar and propping up nuclear companies that are in their pocket.

The titles read like they're straight out of The Onion:

"Trump Media To Merge With Nuclear Fusion Startup"

https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Trump-...

wtf, I missed that one. I’m really sorry for anyone living in the US but the country you knew is dead, whatever the new country is, the old rules don’t apply. It’s now closer to a 3rd world country where literally everything all the time is corruption, as a core fundamental value of the administration

the way the us govt has behaved internationally i wouldnt be surprised if countries/people actively boycott made in america.. the market for us goods and services would definitely have shrunk.

What was the incentive and was that specific to Tesla?

This is such a braindead take. Ford could have taken advantage of those same EV incentives. Any other new startup could have too. Tesla got nothing special.

The biggest miracle of Tesla is that they somehow got liberals to argue against government incentives for electric cars

... against Alon, not EVs.

The government should give incentives to do things that benefit the future of the country. All auto manufactures had the same incentives but instead of building actual good vehicles they instead shipped more production to Mexico and continue to build the absolute most dog shit vehicles in the world.

Not a single US auto manufacturer, outside of Tesla, has a good EV, nor FSD. Waymo is buying thousands of Chinese cars because of how shit US car manufacturer are.

They are the worst of the worst. They shouldn't even be in business they are that bad at building cars which they literally invented.

Can you say point to any other industry that hasn't used subsidies/ selling to the gov? Oil and gas, semi conductors, compute... Everyone sells and gets loans from the gov... Tesla like the least.

> It takes someone naive and optimistic enough to try something different.

You mean Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, right?

Tesla would be nothing without Musk. That doesn't take away from Eberhard and Tarpenning; they started the company after all and are great engineers. But it would be nothing without Musk.

And it would be nothing without Eberhard and Tarpenning

The people who tried something different and did the work on batteries weren’t Musk. That’s the comment I was responding to. Musk has been a good showman though, and he seems to be a genius financial engineer with a cult following

That's Straubel, sorry

> Any auto manufacturer could have invested in battery technology and building a compelling EV, but they didn't

...because Tesla sold luxury vehicles at relatively low volume. By the time Elon reneged his "$25,000 EV" promise, China was ready to export vehicles that actually hit that price point. The only thing preventing Americans from driving affordable EVs is Elon's federal protectionism. Is that really progress?

The Model Y has shifted over a million units every year since 2023 and sits at the top of many "world's best selling car" rankings.

Obviously it's not a cheap car, but it's still mass market, not luxury.

It's only mass-market in the US because of subsidies and tariffs. Chinese EVs change the equation entirely.

Outside the US protectionist bubble, Tesla is seen as a luxury brand and their inability to deliver a $25,000 EV doesn't help.

As of March 2026, the Model Y is the best selling car in China.

https://teslamagz.com/tesla/model-y/tesla-model-y-becomes-ch...

Also South Korea, Australia, the EU, etc.

No it's not. It was the most sold during March, but that's it.

Local sources (https://www.autohome.com.cn/hangye/showroom/) tend to show that it's Xiaomi / Geely that's leading the race in 2026.

Additionally, sales numbers doesn't correlate with the brand image of Tesla : it is a luxury brand, no matter how you put it.

You're talking brands, I'm talking car models. And your own source lists the Model Y as the #2 best selling model cumulatively for 2026, behind only the Geely EX2 (星愿), which is a third of the price.

Also, you seem to be implying it's somehow a bad thing to have a luxury brand image with mass-market sales, but that's a pretty rare thing to pull off and it's also the key to huge margins. See also: Apple.

Look, Musk is a despicable human being, but the Model 3/Y has been a ginormous hit and it transformed the global EV market. Does he deserves all the credit for pulling this off? Of course not. But you need to stick your head pretty deep in the sand to pretend that a) it was not a success, and b) that Musk had nothing at all to do with it.

So you're technically correct, but IIUC Tesla is still the most delivered (customers taking delivery) EV brand in China. Draw what conclusions you will from that fun fact

Isn't that wholesale which does not always land to customer sales? Honestly I don't know much about all of this.

It's not wholesale

> It was the most sold during March, but that's it.

Also June, and a better link for monthly sales by model from your source is https://www.autohome.com.cn/rank/1.

Basically Model Y has been consistently in top 3 by monthly sales of EV in China so far in 2026. If you count by 3-month or 6-month periods, it is only next to Geely EX2 at 1/3 of its price as pointed out by another comment.

Part of the fluctuation is due to one month of every quarter the Tesla Shanghai factory is oriented at export, so domestic number drops dramatically.

HN is full of ppl claiming Chinese EV is superior in every way without realizing that Tesla is incredibly popular in Chinese domestic market.

Yeah that was a quick sumup based on the fact that the parent was not posting in good faith. Thanks for the precision.

I guess it's to Tesla's advantage that unlike most manufacturers, they don't make a million different models which end up dividing sales.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com