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Comment by bpodgursky | Hacker News Reader

I'm not convinced Tesla's schizophrenic strategy is any worse than the strategy of the legacy American automakers, which is to sleepwalk directly into a volcano (when Chinese EV manufactures break into the market with $10k SUVs)

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Elon gambled with cybertruck and didn’t won. The winning strategy was to outcompete Chinese with smaller affordable vehicle. I would call it common sense strategy after all.

The cybertruck was a disaster but I think the main issue is they didn't do any new model after that for almost a decade.

Also, Musk getting into politics and alienating most of its consumer base, of course.

That last part is a big thing, especially in Europe where a lot of their sales have almost stopped as no one wants to drive a nazi car.

AfD seems to be doing a little too well across the sea for me to believe that

Musk’s problem is that the intersection of “votes AfD” and “willing and able to buy premium electric vehicle” is relatively small

Problem is, AfD voters also don't want to drive Teslas (not because they disagree with Elon's politics, but because "only hippies drive EVs, patriots drive real cars".)

They might see a rebound from last year which was a bad year for them but that's likely driven by some pretty aggressive price cuts.

China is actually nearly 3x bigger market for them than Europe and we have clearer numbers on how that's going:

  2019:  45,372
  2020: 137,459
  2021: 320,743
  2022: 439,770
  2023: 603,664
  2024: 657,102
  2025: 625,698

2026 so far has been shaping up to be a huge contraction. Only 316,251 were shipped in the first 8 months. (BYD sold 440k units in August alone)

Tesla has managed to alienate the entire left wing while not enticing the right wing.

> as no one wants to drive a nazi car

Volkswagen had €322 billion in revenue last year and was literally in every way founded by the Nazi party.

The requirement for the air-cooled engine in the Beetle came from none other than Mr. Stubby Mustache himself.

With a small difference of some 90y or whenever VW was founded between that and now, while Musk is doing Hitler salutes in recent years. Other than that, your argument would make sense.

the nazi party doesn't exist anymore and their ceo doesn't do nazi salutes

> no one wants to drive a nazi car. That explains why VW, Audi, Porsche, Mercedes, and BMW are doing so poorly. You know, those companies actually founded by Hitler. First rule of advertising is claim your week points are your strong points, and the first rule of politicizing is blame everyone else for what you are guilty of.

the only mistake was politics.

Their original strategy to make a mass market Model 2 after Model 3 was good. 8 years ago I was eagerly awaiting its release.

Then sometime around when the Ketamine began flowing the plan seems to have changed.

So I would add ketamine to politics.

What’s weird about all this is that the democrats were pretty pro-Tesla / pro-SpaceX before Elon Ketamized the Fed. And the democratic platform would have improved industrial policy via-a-vis renewables.

We can only conclude that the Ketamine haze addled his brain and he simply ignores the advice of those around him.

That a common failure mode

Cybertruck technology ended up in cybercab and semi, so whether the vehicle itself won might not be relevant in long run.

Two other vehicles that barely exist?

The interesting part is that small affordable EVs was Teslas initial goal IIRC. Changing horses in the middle of the stream just did not workout? I’m sure Tesla will be fine in the end though. There is always someone coming to the rescue.

Buying a Tesla vehicle (or not) became a referendum on Elon himself. It became a small personal action one could take to feel like you could actually do something that had an effect. Whether or not it accomplished the goal is precisely the center of debate, but regardless, the feeling was real.

No, the winning strategy was to release a conventional-looking truck, say something that very much looks like an F150 or a Silverado.

The Cybertruck, or what it should have been, was never meant to be an entry-level truck like the Slate, and the market for trucks clearly shows people are wanting to spent money on big trucks.

They (Elon) gambled they could reduce the price of the rest of the truck enough to make an “affordable” BEV by radical changing how it was built - turns out that wasn’t possible.

Ford gambled they could build a BEV truck like an F150 and make it affordable enough to attract their normal buyers. Turns out that wasn’t possible.

I’m not sure I see why one failure was better than the other.

> No, the winning strategy was to release a conventional-looking truck, say something that very much looks like an F150 or a Silverado.

Turns out F150 Lightning was not the winning strategy.

> Turns out F150 Lightning was not the winning strategy.

Keep in mind that this wasn't a truck designed to be an EV from the ground up, it's merely an adaptation of the gas-powered F150. What Tesla could have brought to the table was an EV-native truck. The Cybertruck is more or less that, but the goofy design is probably what killed it.

Won't the US government just keep raising tariffs to 'protect' America from those evil Chinese manufacturers?

In any case, just because the legacy incumbents might also be incompetent, doesn't excuse Tesla.

I'm not going to defend the Cybertruck execution, clearly they misjudged the demand.

But Optimus is a fair play. Don't grub for scraps in an efficient competitive market. Make a new market, go big or go home.

The problem I see there is that apart from the sci-fi aspect, what's the market for humanoid robots really?

Really? The sci-fi aspect is it. A humanoid robot with enough intelligence to compete with the average human is going to be something like cars or electricity or the wheel or the Internet. The market then is all labor. Companies paid $13T to employees in the US in 2025, so some component of that.

I just doubt that a generalized form (in this case humanoid) will actually be better for most applications. We can build specialized robots to perform tasks, which can be optimized to perform what they need to do. If I want to deploy a robot in my factory to do some blacksmithing (I don't know why this example came to mind), I don't need it to be a robot that is built to also be suitable to be a bartender. Why not have specialized robots for the applications (which become easier to develop too)?

We have built professions to work around our own form because that's what we're stuck with. Robots can take many forms, so why make them average at all things instead of making robots perfect for one (or a few).

most industrial use robotics is actually this. from the pick and place in electronics and pharmaceuticals to weld and assembly for mechanical. the 'humanoid' robotics ideals are part of the same grift idealogy that pushes replacement of people in all kinds of roles. We are also not going to colonise the moon in the next decade either. Same reason, it a billionare pipe dream that doesnt conform to practical physics.

When do you want to colonize the moon then?

Cost. Manufacturing efficiency. It's easier to make 1,000,000 of the same thing than it is to make a million different variations. I'm sure we'll see specialization, and two arms isn't enough, and we don't need heads if there's a 360 degree camera, but bipedal is probably the base. But going back to your question, there's enough usefulness in average for it to be a huge market.

Works until you run out of money. I work in AI robotics. Yes, it’s promising. No, nobody is deploying anything remotely useful for a while.

It would be so lame to work in non-AI robotics…

I disagree, there’s a lot of fascinating problems in pure robotics.

Honestly Ford is doing something right with the new Fathom truck, but mostly their catching up to Tesla in terms of manufacturing. The Chinese companies caught up and passed up Tesla in that game about a year ago.

At some point, the reality of being in a highly competitive market must set in and valuations need to come down to Earth.

The lightning was fantastic as well.

The fact that Ford in the 2020s took a look at the lightning (which is not a bad vehicle by any means) and thought "this really isn't cutting it" is a good sign.

Henry Ford was the original Elon Musk. He was obsessed with efficiency, minimalism, and just a smidge of Nazism. They only offered the Model T in one color. Tesla doesn't paint the damn Cybertruck at all. A Ford Motors that goes back to its roots (without all the weird white supremacist stuff), would be a strong auto maker indeed.

If they follow what they did with AI and make it open-source, I’m first in line to buy. The Spider-Man ads on BMW is just the beginning and even if you would never buy an open-source car, doesn’t mean it won’t keep the competition honest.

What makes you think you'd ever be allowed to buy a Chinese EV in the US?

You can’t even buy a car in Texas unless it’s from a dealership. Dealerships and Car Manufacturers use regulatory capture to make sure their moat stays. I’m sure they will try to block Chinese EVs and buying one is a long ways out.

You can't buy a Chinese EV anywhere in the US. They are banned. Even if you wanted to pay the 100% tariff, you can't buy one because they ban any cars with any software made in China and certain Chinese made hardware

The difference is in the valuation of those vs TSLA

The tariffs will save us

Tariffs in the US will be just effective as the EU EV tariffs. It will protect the industry for some time, and at the same time make it go stale and irrelevant.

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