Tesla ending Models S and X production
(cnbc.com)564 points by keyboardJones 4 days ago
564 points by keyboardJones 4 days ago
He's not just the leader, he's the primary beneficiary, and he's a blatant white supremacist. He's arguably responsible for the deaths of over 1 million people world wide from his short tenure shutting down USAID[0]. So yeah, I'd say its more than fine to take pleasure in his failings.
Not nearly as sad as people getting emotionally invested in corporations.
Add why should anyone look past their opinions about the leader?
We have the saying “the fish rots from the head” for a good reason. Tesla has been rotten ever since Elon got involved.
Actions have consequences. Maybe an upshot of this is that people will learn not to put all their eggs in the POS’s basket.
Nobody here seems to remember that this was always the plan: release expensive cars to bootstrap the company which allows them to release progressively cheaper cars until everyone can afford one.
Not a fanboy, but this seems like it went exactly according to plan.
You already have it. Musk's earliest promise of a $30k price point appears to be an interview in September 2009: https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2009/09/25/teslas-elon-musk-on-...
Adjusted for inflation, $30k then is around $45k now. Tesla sells a Model 3 for just over $35k.
It doesn't make any sense to hold someone to a promise like that and not adjust it for inflation. I think you can legitimately complain that he didn't meet the timeline he was aiming for.
I think your point is fair, but look at the 2026 Nissan Leaf.
The base is around $28k. This feels like one of the first "affordable" EVs in the USA. It also comes with decent tech without a subscription, and has comparable ranges to Teslas.
Meanwhile folks are waiting (no, not really) for their $35K Cybertruck...
Yes. It's interesting to see a consequence of this strategy, which is at least some part of your model 3/Y customers bought it because "it is a Tesla", and being Tesla is premium. If you get rid of the premium, you lose that aura. But maybe the impact is small.
I wish people that jeer Musk would decide if he’s running his companies or not. They think he’s an ignorant figure head and a conniving strategist. I don’t care either way just stick to one.
I simply dont care how good or bad the cars are. I will never put a penny in Elon's hand. He is a despicable nazi and a terrible person. I hope he goes bankrupt.
If they want to sell a buttload more cars just make FSD free on all Tesla’s, done.
The possibility of FSD is probably the only reason I paid $10K more for a M3 over a BYD Seal. But free FSD? Who can compete with that. Nobody.
Also, turning FSD into a subscription is total enshittification and I hate it. It would also go a long way to coax back peeved off buyers and convince them not to make their 2nd EV a different brand.
My current sentiment towards Tesla for making FSD subscription-only AFTER I bought my car? Screw you. Go to hell. It’s MY $80k asset. I feel betrayed.
Is it just me or does Tesla design the doors so when you look at the car from the front with both its doors open it looks like their logo.
someone is stuffing their channels, huh? first the fsd fiasco, now this
Having read through the comments I think this is pretty bad take. The vast majority of the criticism seems pretty reasonable to me. By any metric you would use on any other company, Tesla is overvalued. It trades largely on hype/missed promises. It’s bitcoin but with regular earning reports. Your inability to read critical thought and not scramble to claim mental derangement because those doing the criticizing don’t agree full heartedly with your supreme leader is pretty funny to me.
> Tesla never refreshes their models
I'v seen quite a few Tesla Ys that needed repairs and... they seem to improve the car year to year or even months to months. Car interface suddenly changes to RJ45, some metal parts changed to aluminium (if I'm not mistaken), various things that become easyer to fix and so on. Low Voltage battery getting Li-Ion. Front under body changes: https://service.tesla.com/docs/BodyRepair/Body_Repair_Proced...
And then the airbag controller gets newer and newer.
Not something to market about, but you see steady incremental improvements.
What I want to say, the serviceability is very good for the cars. You get open documentation, you can access toolbox for a price, but it's there for the simple DIYer. Need to change pyro fuse? No problem, pop up docs, order part, change it. The parts are cheap.
It is and so is the sum of nonsensical replies to the entire thread.
It makes sense though, with the experience of the average app/website these days. Those devs come here and you can pick them out with ease.
I called this event years ago, it has been obvious in foresight.
Lol yeah Tesla is doing so great they just got rid of two flagship models.
Government rebates have ended. Sentiment towards EV has shifted negatively in consumer eyes. Manufacturers are sticking to gasoline. Even Jeep just got rid of all their electric stuff.
Maybe they'll be good for self driving robot taxis over in California with "FSD."
Past performance does not indicate future success.
Nop. The S and X were always meant low volume high priced. And it's a great strategy. Didn't Tesla repay loans before it was due?
Challenge is that even that good past performance was shat upon by people. I hate Elon. But I don't think Tesla is doing bad at all. GM is shitting itself on EVs.
There is no evidence of unsupervised robotaxis actually rolling out. These are just the same promises Elon has wrongfully done since literally 10 years and some publicity stunts.
Yes, privy influencers. And it was supervised from the car behind it. No one else was able to find such a ride. Tesla cars also autonomously self-delivered. Which also turned out to be a one-off publicity stunt. Up until now, nothing points to that this is something different this time.
Most of the people are bashing Tesla because they 1) Overpromised and underdelivered 2) They claimed/acted like they're so ahead that nobody can touch them.
Now, other automakers are closing the gap fast, and their overpromise of camera-only FSD is reaching Duke Nukem Forever levels, while other automakers use a diversified sensor set with more conservative autonomy levels because they value human lives more than playing fast and loose (plus, they are scrutinized way more heavily for various right and wrong reasons).
For me, it's not hatred, but I saw that they were hyped a bit too much and need some correction, and this correction is coming hard for them.
Valuations means nothing except investor trust. We have seen some spectacular collapses under unbelievable valuations. Theranos had a valuation of $9 billion. Tesla is not a scam or balloon per se, but they were a bit too overconfident of their moat.
FSD has been maturing for ~an entire decade now. Their latest stunt with moving the supervisor to chaser cars has made a lot of people understandably angry anew: Musk has to hit his robotaxi milestones to get more billions, so he's forcing the programme ahead with smoke and mirrors to get his stock option grants.
Their profit is decreasing, revenue growth is negative. Their autonomy programme is always "just one more update" away. Humanoid robotics is already full of competition from hundreds of other startups and larger companies (even Amazon, an AI sceptic, has a significant robotics programme).
I wouldn't call them a failure, but they certainly seem to have lost their way, and you have to really drink the kool aid to be able to justify the valuation in any sense.
It really was the argument there; that he'd been in business so long with such great returns that everyone assumed it had to have been looked into by everyone else.
> If a company was overvalued for a couple of years, it's ok to be sceptical. Tesla has been at such high valuations for many years now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Madoff
"Madoff said that he began the Ponzi scheme in the early 1990s, but an ex-trader admitted in court to faking records for Madoff since the early 1970s."
The SEC stuff rhymes a bit, too:
"The SEC's inspector general, Kotz, found that since 1992, there had been six investigations of Madoff by the SEC, which were botched either through incompetent staff work or by neglecting allegations of financial experts and whistle-blowers. At least some of the SEC investigators doubted whether Madoff was even trading."
Now, Tesla actually makes stuff; it's not a ponzi. But it's a wildly inflated stock that looks entirely divorced from the business metrics available to us.
How would I even know what Elon’s politics are? He’s too busy running the worlds biggest companies to get involved with politics.
Elon Musk doing Nazi salutes and calling people "retarded" on Twitter all the time has absolutely nothing to do with my stance on Tesla or how I feel about them.
I just don't like Tesla's vehicles, how they look, or the interiors of them. Nothing to do with the individual.
Shutting down low-volume, complex project, that needs to be substantially redesigned to be competitive, while these resources can be redeployed elsewhere, in high growth areas? I disagree: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46805773
"HN is dying" is a cliche, I know, but I seriously want to bookmark this thread to revisit it in 10 years - I'm sure it will age even better than (in)famous Dropbox thread. So from that perspective, HN is alive and well :).
The level of cynicism of the discussion is overwhelming, frankly. I get it that some people don't like Musk because of his politics, but why should that prevent people interested in technology to at least try to present a steelman case?
Let me try it, at a risk to be down-voted to oblivion...
1. As people correctly point out, S&X are outdated, low volume models. Investing more engineering time in them doesn't make any business sense; these engineering resources and capital should be clearly redeployed elsewhere.
2. People think that Waymo is supposedly better(?) than FSD, but at least some very well informed people (and NVIDIA as a company) believe that it's not. Personal anecdote: an older (HW3) version of Tesla drove me perfectly well in Yosemite last weekend, in on winding mountain roads with 0 cell phone coverage. It will take Waymo forever to map everything there properly with LIDAR, and true autonomy only in selected metro areas has limited value.
3. It's obvious that when we have autonomous, general purpose humanoid robots, they will completely transform our societies. Any such robots would require an enormous AI/vision investment. Say what you want about Elon, but xAI basically caught up with the top LLM shops in ~18 months, and now have comparable AI training capacity. You can bet against Optimus, but who else would have the skills to bring both the technology and the AI to market first? China? Good robotics, but no enough data to train their vision models comparing to Tesla, at least not yet.
4. So the bear case is that (a) driving autonomy is not possible without LIDAR, (b) Tesla can't bring another very complex product to market, and (c) autonomous robots are not possible in our lifetime. If you look at the AI progress even in the last 12 months, that's a tough sell to me.
What are the serious, tech-based counterarguments to the points above?
Okay, I'll bite. For the record, I own Tesla stock and I am generally bullish about AI.
I'll try to provide some counter-points specifically regarding the rate of progress.
3. It's much easier to catch up in capability (ex. LLMs) than it is to achieve a new capability (ex. replace humans laborers with humanoid robots). You can hire someone from a competitor, secrets eventually leak out, the search space is narrowed etc.
4(c). To me, what's most important is whether or not truly autonomous humanoid robots happens in 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, etc. rather than in our lifetime.
These timelines will be tied to AI development timelines which largely outside the control of any one player like Tesla. I believe the world is bottlenecked on compute and that the current compute is not sufficient for physical AI.
It's extremely easy to be too early (ex. many of the self driving car companies of the past decade), and so for Tesla, there is a risk of over-investing in manufacturing robots before the core technology is ready.
Thanks, these are fair arguments!
Re: both 3 and 4(c) - agree that compute (or maybe even power for that compute) is likely to be a bottleneck in the next 3-5 years. However, I think Tesla/xAI are better positioned than many competitors as Tesla is a manufacturing company first and foremost; and this expertise (which is shared freely between Musk's companies) can help it to build it's own data centers, power generation (e.g., solar), or - in the most bullish case - even fab capacity.
1. Your argument is that cutting off a rotting limb is good. Obviously it is, but I'd rather not have a rotting limb in the first place. I want a healthy, revenue-generating limb.
2. Waymo has been offering a driverless taxi service for some time now, and Tesla is not. That's a hard fact. Meanwhile your arguments are beliefs and personal anecdotes.
When, or rather if, Tesla starts offering their service, they will be behind Waymo by approximately however long ago Waymo started theirs, so at least a few years.
Unless you have some "serious, tech-based counterarguments"?
3. It's also obvious that when we have AGI, fusion, etc., they will completely transform our societies. I promise I will deliver you those by the end of this year. Send money now. If my timeline slips by a little—maybe a few decades—well, it was just a best-effort estimate and I did deliver in the end!
4. No, the bear case is that there's no real reason to believe Tesla would be the company that captures the market vs any other company. Their solar, tunnelling, and now car business models have failed/are failing, so they must win on self-driving/robots.
Self-driving is looking really bad, they're badly losing to Waymo.
They have shown nothing in terms of robots. If anything, dressing people up as robots and showing that is a rather negative signal. Oh, and robots are at least a 10x harder problem than self-driving.
Tesla isn’t a market leader in any of these things. It’s a decent shop, but not a leader in any of these things you’ve mentioned.
Only if you are confusing FSD and actually autonomous. Which is basically just a bait and switch on Musk's part. FSD is whatever Musk says it is, actually autonomous is another thing entirely.
Thanks for saying this. For new, impressionable minds here who read most of the comments here and think this it's all devs - it isn't. A lot of us value Musk and incredibly awesome tech like FSD and aren't consumed by political partisanship. That tells you more about the commenter than Musk.
Some of these same commenters were trying to make you believe not long ago that FSD wasn't going to be competitive with Waymo because it dropped LIDAR. If you bring that up now they'll just change goalposts. There's no point even arguing with someone unable to approach an argument in good faith.
What's with the "outdated" adjective? There's nothing in the US market even remotely close to the X. Every other EV is a slapdash pile of hoobajoobs and knobs that can't even drive itself.
Source: 45000 miles in a bit over two years, loved every minute of it. Makes our other high priced German car a disappointing machine to be avoided if possible.
Dropbox really was shit, the fact that we lampoon the HN anti-Dropbox guy is evidence that this place died long ago. You really could have just done it with rsync and I'm so glad Claude Code exists to kill every other shit SaaS business that doesn't deserve to exist. Dropbox first please.
i think there's a danger here of underestimating how varied mankinds 'mindware' is at large.
for us lot who were 'born in it, molded by it' (tech), it can be very hard to internalize that there are a lot of people out there who legimiately cannot for the life of them wrap their head around a computer, or the internet, other than "wifi logo = i can video call my grandkids".
you could say services like dropbox are outreach/charity organisations that onboard the masses onto 10x productivity curves (whether they like it or not!)
and to be honest, ive become guilty of drag n dropping tarballs to/from my gdrive account when im too dumb to figure out the ssh proxy tunnel incantation (or beg an llm for one for the 1000th time.) so really, everyone wins.
im not sure claude code will change all that much for the non-technical segment. from their point of view, you changed one terminal window for another. so what? its still a black box (literally).
Hard to tell whether you are serious or sarcastic, but assuming it's the former: my contrarian position on CC vs SaaS is that in the quest to kill shitty businesses people will discover that creating a high-value SaaS is very non-trivial. CC would kill a whole category of low effort SaaS while at the same time substantially raising the quality bar for SaaS that people are willing to pay money for.
Given the product splits, Model S and X served no further purpose besides taking up production capacity. If that unlocked capacity is used for more Model 3/Y builds or other product lines, then that would be a net positive for the company as opposed to continuing on with S/X for the sake of having product range.
S launched in 2012.
X launched in 2016.
Both launched with slow rollouts.
Meanwhile, the average car in use today is 13 years old and getting older. (I currently drive a 22 year old car)
It definitely turns me off buying a used model S to know it's being discontinued. And if I extrapolate that to the 3/Y, a new purchase.
Given my desire for a midsize family sedan, it makes it feel like BMW i4 or Porsche Taycan just won me over in the future.
I think of the i4 as being more of a Model 3 / BMW 3 series size car, isn't it?
The S is more in line with with 5er.
I love the way the Taycan CrossTurismo thing looks, but holy hell getting in and out of it is like getting in and out of a sports car. I expect it to be slightly compromised compared to the competition, not.. extremely compromised.
I'm likely out of the loop, but what evidence is there that Optimus is anywhere close to ready for prime time, or any commercialization at all? I haven't seen anything compelling yet outside of highly edited videos in controlled settings.
How does it "make sense" to you, really? Can you provide more rationale ?
If state backed car industry like China's is dumping world wide it would be silly to head to head with them. You're just going to burn cash and a country can go at that a lot longer than a public company ever could.
So you double down on what you have that no one else can compete on.
Interesting argument because most Americans seem to have decided governments are inefficient at doing things? So they're efficient at car building now?
Sitting over here in Asia, I am doing a wild guess:
Most people in the western world have no clue HOW bad the crisis in our electronics industry caused by AI BS, tariff wars etc is.
When you wanted to get anything done in China as a western company, last year you might have issues to have China allow EXPORT. For example due to the pissing contest about Nexperia, a lot of really basic chips like USB controllers suddenly were forbidden for export.
And since January 1st 2026, things got far worse: Now some standard connectors (that are, amongst others, used in cars) that are made in the USA can no longer be IMPORTED into China. Which means that you now can typically will have parts missing on PCBAs that you then have to re-solder with the missing US components somewhere else. And many don't have the competence for this anymore.
This is all just wild speculation.
And I am pretty sure that right now it will be next to impossible to source parts for such a complex product like a robot. I need grey market brokers locally in Shenzhen to get even the most basic stuff at insane prices. And a lot of stuff simply is no longer available at all, due to things like "Intel has replaced anyone with a brain with an AI, and now no longer is able to produce and chip embedded N150 CPUs from the US to China, because... how?".
Tesla is now putting in 4680 battery cells back into the Model Y. Years after they had discontinued the 4680 program. What does that mean? They are using up whatever parts they still have, like everybody else in the electronics industry is now doing.
Good luck buying a computer, phone, fridge, car or toaster in the second half of 2026.
Tesla has no moat - but one thing I will give to Elon is his incredible strategy in building Tesla
1. Build sports car
2. Use that money to build an affordable car
3. Use that money to build an even more affordable car
4. While doing above, also provide zero emission electric power generation options
he got distracted by side-missions, his personal shitty side
however if you separate the ideas from the person you can see how such a simple strategy was executed successfully
The thing is it’s hard to stop at 4.
5. Peace out from Tesla for a while to pivot hard into far-right politics, using outsized power and influence to wage culture wars, alienate core customers, and inject volatility into a brand that was built on trust, optimism, and engineering credibility.
6. Unveil Optimus as the next grand pillar of the vision, not as a shipping product but as a perpetual demo, a future-shaped distraction that soaks up attention while core execution, margins, and credibility quietly erode.
The problem is that Tesla in step 1 and 2 was a ground-breaking EV market leader.
Tesla step 6 Optimus robot is not. Others are ahead, with less hype and more delivery. See Boston Dynamics / Hyundai
Is there another car out there in the US that has a way to type in an address, tap a button, and it drives you there? All other car manufacturers software is terrible.
Electric cars hype topic is has rotted away. Time to bring new, yet novel for the the public. Now people will belive in the musk stories of the future shaped by the humanoid robots, not shaped by the electric cars. Who cares if in 3 years they will switch to another subject if stock keeps being pupmed (and compoensation keeps flowing in the hands of this guy).
His idea is to keep involving more investors, more people, government is possible in tesla's orbit with nice stories. When other are so invested the failures aren't his problem anymore, he got hist compensation which is tied to the company price.
Elon should be sending robots to the Moon, Mars and the Asteroid Belt. That would make much more sense.
Setup automated low gravity refueling depots. Then automated mining of the solar system will scale up as it more than pays for itself. And as with Starlink, SpaceX synergy would give him a serious advantage.
Much faster to achieve (despite the challenges), less expensive, and more profitable than a human Mars colony which would burn money without return for decades.
(Regardless of wishful thinking, civilizations coming backup is a second substrate adapted to the rest of the solar system, not a colony suffering truly miserable conditions. Although I am all for human exploration, which would also be easier and cheaper on the back of expanding automated infrastructure.)
Pretty sad seeing people take pleasure in the company failing. See past your opinion about it's leader. At the end of the day, it's the company that brought vehicle electrification to the masses and has acted cash cow for SpaceX, Starlink and Neuralink.