Comment by rswail 4 days ago
So he milked Tesla for another $2B to subsidize xAI, has dropped the models to 2 (3 and Y), revenue is down, growth is negative, BYD is eating Tesla for lunch, followed by the other CN and KR vehicle companies.
He doesn't have FSD, camera only navigation without sensor fusion with LIDAR will fail, the only thing keeping Tesla where it is is the bullshit dispersal field that surrounds Musk.
Tesla has become a meme stock. The stock's performance is disconnected from the company's performance.
I agree that Tesla has clear strengths, like the vast amount of data they've collected from their cars, and their charging network, but it's also obvious that something is going very, very wrong with that company. The stock value is not reflecting that.
> like nobody trusts Huawei or Xiaomi phones.
Loads of people trusted Huawei, even after all the hyperbole about backdoors for the government. It needed regulators banning Huawei to knock their share of the market and protect the homegrown spyware.
The government bans on Huawei were obviously do to three reasons: network security, economic competition, and politics.
Huawei doesn’t only make phones — they also make the cell network infrastructure and they sell it at much lower costs than American companies do. The US put pressure on allied countries to divest from Huawei infrastructure (especially 5G cell networking) to both avoid the security risks and to leave those allies with only American companies to buy from.
And we can’t forget that Trump very publicly used Huawei’s executive as a hostage to a negotiation.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extradition_case_of_Meng_Wanzh...
>Tesla is leading and succeeding. People have faith in Musk as a leader. Nobody trusts CCP EVs, just like nobody trusts Huawei or Xiaomi phones.
That sounds literally like a religious mantra. Do rational investors have 'faith' in the Costco CEO? Do they even know his name on top of their head?
Faith and trust is something nobody uses to describe Musk. Maybe you should pop your own bubble you seem to live in? Using faith and trust while completely ignoring twitter?
Tesla investor meetings are just lots of investor bros who have faith in Musk. They trust that Musk can continue to deliver the mindshare that he previously did to get the stock price to where it is.
I think he has tremendous downside risk, but there are a ridiculous number of people who still have “faith and trust” in him despite all of his downside risk.
The gamble with Cybertruck failed. It’s common sense, that such a vehicle will fail. The successful cars are made for masses and not for niche buyers. Common sense product could be something smaller than Model 3 for Europe and this car would eat Chinese for lunch. Expensive experiment failed, it’s time for consequences. Does Tesla have resources for another car experiment? Will it stay a car company?.. Or it will be now a manufacturer of robot soldiers?..
> Common sense product could be something smaller than Model 3 for Europe and this car would eat Chinese for lunch.
Yeah, that would be the Model 2, which Musk cancelled, then denied he cancelled, then has made no effort to review whatsoever so it exists in a limbo state of zero people working on it but it not being officially cancelled. Either way, it didn't come out in 2025 as planned.
https://www.cbtnews.com/tesla-execs-raise-red-flags-after-mu...
For a normal company, this would be disastrous. For a meme stock, this makes total sense since anyone claiming the Model 2 is dead can be shouted at by fans saying Musk himself disputed it was dead.
The completed original line up was
S 3 X Y
The C didn’t fit that, nor would a 2. Unless he’s aiming for a lineup of products that has you seeing someone next Tuesday.
And he couldn't get E (the original intended name) because Ford had it trademarked.
> smaller than Model 3 for Europe
A few years ago, perhaps. But the brand has become tainted to the point where the exact people who would buy such a car are now avoiding Teslas. Instead, European manufacturers are filling that niche with cars like the Renault 5.
> the exact people who would buy such a car are now avoiding Teslas
The traditional fix for this is to license the technology and do manufacturing for another carmaker to brand.
It's super common for brand X of car to actually be a rebadged Y with slightly different shaped body panels.
However, it only works if your product is good and you have decent margins. That means you have to compete with china cars, since the obvious thing for a western brand to do is to rebadge a chinese designed car and split the margins with the chinese designer/manufacturer.
> the obvious thing for a western brand to do is to rebadge a chinese designed car and split the margins with the chinese designer/manufacturer
Actually this is already happening with the Dacia Spring/Renault City: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongfeng_Motor_Corporation#eGT...
> However, it only works if your product is good and you have decent margins.
Not sure if the product has to be good. Look at the lineage of my wife's car The 2019 Chevy Trax, based on the Buick Encore, based on the Opel/Vauxhall Mokka. It isn't a good car under any of the badges, but it does run, and is small, but the crazy thing is my Ford Ranger gets roughly the same milage as it. Note: the gas milage is probably an American issue, because it runs a naturally aspirated i4 gas engine instead of a more efficient turbo diesel.
Why would a small Tesla "eat Chinese for lunch" - the brand is tainted (to put it mildly) and the Teslas I've been in didn't seem to have great design or build quality?
There are people like me who still buy teslas. Buddy picked up his new Model Y couple weeks ago. The price and the whole package is fine. Zero interest financing is absolutely nice. Elon showed his real face during children rescue drama in Asia. With this defamation story it was well known who he is for years. Political involvement was the visible tip of an iceberg for everyone.
Now if you ask me if the German car managers are better I doubt it. Gassing apes by Volkswagen in US is on the same level as Elon. Mercedes guy was complaining about lazy workers too much. Only BMW guy was able to keep acceptable silence. Overall German equivalent of model Y is at least 20000€ more expensive than Elon‘s car.
Personally I don’t buy anything from China if I can. I am not brave and as the Ayways story showed clearly, that great Chinese car can quickly be without any service. Maybe it’s ok to lease such car for couple years, but I don’t want to have car after small accident for what no replacement parts are available.
Several years ago I wanted to buy an electric car. I didn’t like Musk, so my plan was “anything but Tesla.” Chevy Bolt was unavailable due to the fire problem. Cadillac Lyriq and Hyundai Ioniq 5 weren’t out yet.
I drove everything available to buy in my area. My real options were the Mustang Mach-e, Volvo XC40 Recharge, Hyundai Kona, Polestar 2. I decided to test drive a Model Y for completeness.
And CRAP.
The Model Y was obviously the best car. So much more refined than the other options. Way better charging network. 7 seat option. The only real downside was the zany CEO.
Fine, I thought. I’ll live with it.
I bought a Model Y and love it.
But.
I’ll never buy another Tesla. I have a bumper sticker disavowing the CEO. I paid off its loan so nobody would make money from me owning a Tesla. I honk support at the No Kings protestors outside the local Tesla facility.
I think the only thing that can save Tesla is a crash/buyout/relaunch. Get Musk out of the picture. Reset the stock price to something sane. Ditch the distractions. Release a Model 2. Keep expanding the SuperCharger network.
That’s a long hard road. Nobody involved makes money in that scenario. It’ll only happen when there are no other options.
As for me, I’m driving my Model Y until the wheels fall off. With the bumper sticker.
> Teslas I've been in didn't seem to have great design or build quality
Design is subjective (I like it), and build quality. Not sure, I don't have issues with mine except one where after 2 years frunk latch started failing. It was replaced in an hour when I went to service center.
Teslas are the cheapest EV for the features offered in Europe. I would gladly buy another car, but they are either more pricey, or lack features. (I did market research 2 years ago when I was buying Model Y, the closest one was ICE - RAV4 for similar price, but I didn't want ICE).
not having door handles in an obvious location is such a subjective "feature" that people have been killed in fires because of the door handle placement.
I've lost count of the number of times i've seen tesla drivers "defrosting" their door handles. You may live in a sunny desert but many people do not.
I spent a month in Spain driving a BYD daily and it was fine. I just don’t like the tackiness of the interior and not in love with the exterior either. The handling is also ok, nothing exciting. There’s something still very Chinese about these cars. Not saying that matters if you just want an affordable and reliable EV that takes you from point A to B. BYD can do that perfectly fine. I personally like the design of the Model Y (own one) very much, it also feels much more “alive” particularly the dual motor. There’s no comparison with the BYD I drove. Also never had any issues with build quality other than the charging port malfunctioning, and it was fixed outside my house, all I had to do was touch a button in the app to call service. FSD is pretty damn amazing. The tech is great and the updates do make the car better in many ways. I hope Tesla finds its way because apart from all the controversy they can make good cars.
Regardless, owner is a nazi and utter POS to be polite, basically same material as trump. Nothing in the world is going to change that, not now not in 40 years. He keeps insulting whole Europe (meaning all of fucking us living here) and our leaders almost daily, looking down on us very publicly.
Why the heck would I buy such car, even if it costed 1 euro? Have some self-respect and morality ffs, do you also go to restaurant where you know they will spit on you and insult you, just because they have cca same stuff as all other places, often worse while more expensive? [1]
[1] https://www.autoevolution.com/news/tuev-report-2026-tesla-mo...
Even without Musk's public persona, the Tesla build quality is infamous. I would never.
The entire car is a surveillance machine and the company is happy after a crash to taint the driver in the public’s eye if it will improve the image of their AutoPilot. It’s bad enough having to deal with car insurance after a crash without your car’s manufacturer blaming you in public, sending the recipients to news outlets.
Tesla has a monopoly on their car repairs, which reduces the number of mechanics qualified to work on it, increasing the cost and the wait time.
Teslas are a very expensive platform to service being largely an aluminum frame. Difficult+expensive to repair and replacements are expensive compared to cheaper cars which usually have more plastic. This means insurance is also expensive.
And this doesn’t even begin to get into the weirdness of their reputation for hiring private eyes to stalk employees and call the police to in an attempt to get an employee killed. Having an exec who has a ketamine problem and mania issues doesn’t lend itself to long term stability.
because there is still 2012-era belief hanging around many people that Tesla's EV tech is superior to anything else
What I've seen so far from Chinese car makers (BYD and MG, to be precise) is, to put it bluntly, the bare minimum. Build quality so-so, design is… unconventional and software is just bad. It drives, but only just.
Maybe the more recent models, like the Xiaomi thing, are better. But at the moment, Tesla is at least on par, if not better. The brand being tainted is very relevant though.
You see electric Volvo's everywhere in the more electrified markets in Europe like Norway and the Netherlands. Especially the smaller models like the ex30 and ex/xc40. They fit very well design-wise and I think software quality wise in the European market and they are essentially Chinese (Zeekr). I think it helps that they use Android Auto as the main interface and some of their designers are still located in Sweden. Korean electrics are also taking over marketshare hand over fist.
And the Renault 4, the Hyundai Inster, and the Dacia Spring, and the Citroën C3, Fiat 500e, Kia EV3, Leapmotor T03.
There are heaps of small/subcompact EVs on the European market now, all with very competitive prices. The newer ones seem to be getting cheaper and cheaper.
Honestly I reckon a Tesla M2 will have a hard time succeeding in this market.
Good enough that Ford is planning to slap their badge on it and hope Europe doesn't forget Ford while they are busy not actually manufacturing EVs.
> The successful cars are made for masses and not for niche buyers.
When Tesla got started, full EVs were extremely niche. They were known for their short range and nothing else. Tesla defeated common sense. This is what supports their anti-common-sense stock price.
Is there any indication that they're going to "defeat common sense" again? They're cancelling products, making marginal improvements to old models, alienating their customers, etc.
Tesla as a car company seems dead-set on a continuous downward spiral.
Maybe the switch to robots will pay off and you'll be right. Somehow, I'm skeptical.
> Is there any indication that they're going to "defeat common sense" again?
If you equal Elon to Tesla then there are plenty of - SpaceX dominates near-earth orbit payload launches. A private company competing against and replacing NASA would have been a laughingstock idea 30 years ago. xAI made competitive SOTA models despite a very, very late start.
Of course Elon isn't Tesla. I think the biggest risk of Tesla now is the investors realizing he's more into AI and politics and will siphon resources from Tesla to his other companies.
Except SpaceX "competing and replacing NASA" is ... also a meme.
SpaceX is essentially the same kind of commercial provider as always, except that they didn't sit on laurels of 1960s ICBM work, and among other things built their own additional infrastructure.
... But remember they were explicitly early financed to do that by DoD and NASA.
Everyone knew that was the future and that the big auto manufacturers were deliberately dragging.
No-one (serious) thought there was a market for the cybertruck.
The stock price is pure madness, it's like it's priced in robotaxis, but that's clearly not going to happen for Tesla. And if it did, it would be a small-ish market, their brand has become toxic in so many big markets.
> No-one (serious) thought there was a market for the cybertruck.
If they'd hit the price and performance of the launch announcements they might have. $40k base for what he initially talked about is a vastly better proposal than $61k base for what he actually delivered.
What I could see happening is Alphabet getting an exclusive lock on Tesla (probably not buying because the stock is too high) and then quasi-merging it with Waymo for a fully integrated, functional robo taxi company. A bit like when they bought Motorola phone division.
You couldn’t possibly be singing that tune if you were taking their robotaxis taxis every day for the past half a year and seeing how well they drive (albeit supervised)
> Everyone knew that was the future and that the big auto manufacturers were deliberately dragging.
Definitely not. Car electrification was definitely not obvious, and Tesla had to do many semi-impossible things to make it even slightly feasible.
It will be a manufacturer of vaporware if you look at how much they announced over the last years and how much of that has actually materialized...
But yeah, I guess Tesla lives by its CEO (and his grand promises that keep the stock price up) and dies by its CEO (who alienated Tesla buyers by, amongst other things, throwing his lot in with a regressive fossil fuel supporting administration and by personally supervising the dismantling of agencies such as USAID).
The Cybertruck was very clearly designed to be a low production model to figure out teething issues in manufacturing and design. Think Plymouth Prowler. Like seriously, nobody makes a body out of heavy gauge sheet metal with simple shapes if they're planning on volume, it doesn't pencil out vs more die complexity and thinner material. But the future growth to justify that never seems to have materialized....
So he's off by, what Elon might say is an "order of magnitude"
I write that off as marketing BS. They very clearly didn't design it based on those expectations though.
Cybertruck was supposed to be for the masses. The just weren't able to hit the price point required because of overly optimistic engineering assessments. I think the whole stainless steel construction concept didn't work as first designed.
And of course, Cybertruck design might not have been mass compatible buy being ugly. But that is subjective, if it was cheap and functional and without the political connotations it might have been different.
But it was certainty a risky bet.
To be "for the masses", it would need to:
- be smaller
- have an actually usuable truck bed
- be painted (so rust isn't an issue)
- have a body that's not literally duck taped together in some places and can easily snap in others
- use steel (which bends) for body construction
- be suitable for towing hauls
- not be ridiculously overpowered (...to the extent where engine can overpower the breaks)
- have good visibility with a windshield that isn't at a sharp angle to the ground and body geometry which doesn't maximize blind spots
- not have sharp corners that the cut you or doors that can decapitate your dog
- have door handles that make doors openable in case of emergencies/no power situations/electric shorts
- not have bulletproof glass (WTF, "for the masses"?) which makes makes it harder to rescue people when accidents happen
- be easily repairable, or at least amenable to repairs in local non-Tesla shops, with customers being confident it their warranty won't go poof (as the law requires)
- be easily customizeable for different applications (particularly when it comes to the bed)
- not look so different from other trucks without any reason other than "Elon Musk wants to be edgy": ugly is subjective, being a billionaire's fashion statement isn't
...to start. That's off the top of my head.
And, of course, being priced for the masses, which doesn't just happen. It's a design requirement.
As it stands, the Cybertruck is, and has always been, a rich boy's luxury toy — and it was designed as one.
It really seems like something got to Musk's head that he thought the world has so many edgy rich boys.
You want to see a modern truck "for the masses"? That's Toyota IMV 0, aka Hilux Champ [1]. Ticks all the above boxes.
And hits the $10,000 price point [2]. A literal order of magnitude cheaper than the Cybertruck.
Speaking of which: a car "for the masses" isn't a truck. It's a minivan (gets the entire family from one place to another), it's a small sedan/hatchback (commuter vehicle), a crossover/small SUV to throw things, kids, and dogs into without having to play 3D Tetris in hard mode.
But not a pickup truck, which is a specialized work vehicle.
The masses aren't farmers and construction workers (most people live in the cities, and only a small number needs such a work vehicle).
The popularity of The Truck in the US is, in a large part, a byproduct of regulation which gives certain exemptions to specialized work vehicles.[3]
That's not even getting to the infrastructure part: trucks shine in remote, rural areas. And while one can always have a canister of gas in the truck bed, power stations can be hard to find in the middle of the field or a remote desert highway.
But again, it's not impossible to make a truck for the masses (at least for certain markets). That's the $10K Hilux Champ.
For all the luxury aspects of the Tesla sedan, it's been one of the most (if not the most) practical electric vehicles on account of range alone. It also looked like a normal car at a time when EVs screamed "look at me, I'm so greeeeeen!" from a mile away (remember 1st gen Nissan Leaf or BMW i3?). It was conformal and utilitarian, while also being futuristic and luxurious enough for the high price point was fair for what was offered.
The public image of having a Tesla was good: you are affluent, future-forward, and caring for the environment.
The Cybertruck went back on everything that made Tesla a success: it's conspicuous, impractical, overpriced, and currently having publicity rivaling that of the recent Melania documentary.
It was not a risky bet. It was an a-priori losing bet. The world simply never needed as many edgy toys as Musk wanted to sell.
And driving a car shaped as an "I'm a Musk fanboy" banner really lost its appeal after a few Roman salutes and the dear leader's DOGE stint.
Overly optimistic engineering assessments? Perhaps, but they are much further down on the list of reasons of Cybertruck's failure.
[1] https://www.roadandtrack.com/reviews/a45752401/toyotas-10000...
[2] https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/2025-toyota-imv-0-pickup-...
[3] https://reason.com/2024/02/02/why-are-pickup-trucks-ridiculo...
I was talking about mass market for an electric truck.
- F150 is big
- Its perfectly usable, claim otherwise are nonsense. Arguable depending on your workload it has advantages. Not being as good for side-loading is a downside, but many people can't side-load F150 either. But having a cover that locks safely is clearly an upside. In terms of what people actually use these trucks for, like shopping or picking up a few things from Home Depot the bed is useful. Secondly, beds are empty 99% of time anyway.
- All electric trucks are not perfect at towing loads over long distances. For short distances its very good. And again 99.99% of time people are not towing loads long distances. The issue is really only if you want to tow loads long distances as fast as possible.
- Visibility is better then F150
Most of the rest is just nit-picking or looking at the issue only from one side.
And you completely ignore that F150 is already a truck for the masses, as it is literally the most sold vehicle in the US, and it doesn't have to cost 10k. Comparing the Cybertruck to something like Toyota IMV 0 makes no sense when F150 was the target.
> The popularity of The Truck in the US is, in a large part, a byproduct of regulation which gives certain exemptions to specialized work vehicles.[3]
Something that is often claimed but isn't true. That's a contributing factor but by no means the only reason.
That the Cybertruck would fail wasn't common sense. It failed because it sucked. I was supposed to be tough but it crumbled apart, and it didn't meet the European safety standards. Its design while controversial, had personality, problem is that it is the personality of Elon Musk, it was great when he was popular, but that popularity dropped sharply during the last years.
Niche buyers are fine, Ferrari makes a lot of money doing just that, and cars made for the masses are not always successful
Also, I am not a big fan of small EVs, and I live in Europe and I like small cars. Problem with small EVs is the range. Batteries are big, heavy, and expensive. It is fine in bigger, higher-end cars like what Tesla makes, but on a smaller, budget-friendly car, you have to make compromises, and consumers may demand a price too low to make good profit. So it is not guaranteed to be a market worth taking, especially if you have to compete on price against the Chinese.
Any discussion of Tesla without mentioning Musk's actions is missing the most important piece. I heard someone on this site use the term "mind share", as in before Musk decided to alienate his main customer base, Tesla had the biggest "mind share" of any company in the world. I looked forward to buying a Tesla one day. Now, with Musk licking Trumps boots and actively doing very real damage with his work in DOGE and other things, I will literally never buy anything from that company ever again. It doesn't matter what Chinese car companies are doing. It matters that he stands for everything I don't so I will not give him my money.
> could be something smaller than Model 3 for Europe
Lol... not with those tariffs. In fact, I'd be willing to bet we see higher growth of Tata than Telsa in Europe over the next 10 years.
Yes but the factory seems to be struggling to find staff, and the job adverts I see around Berlin suggest the hiring team is out of touch with what appeals to the German job market:
... but they aren't canceling the Cybertruck?
Re: Robots bla bla: yeah, of course. FSD bla bla. Meh.
It didn't fail imo - it was intended a low-volume product for next-gen Tesla tech - Ethernet based fieldbus, 48V systems, area controllers etc. The philosophy is the same like other high-end cars - you field test your latest experimental tech first in a car with lower sales but high margins - if your fancy stuff has a 1% failure rate, in a 100k production run, that's 1000 vehicles - high but manageable.
If you sell millions and its your main product, your company is over. This is the same playbook German manufacturers followed since forever. I bet the next gen Model 3 and robotaxi will get the cybertruck tech.
It failed based on the sales projections that Tesla set. Also, several reviews have not exactly been kind, along with lots of comments from owners about annoying issues and malfunctions.
If Tesla needed beta testers for things they hadn't figured out yet there would have been better ways to go about that.
That is the opposite story that Musk told when hyping the Cybertruck, though.
Musk projected that the Cybertruck would sell 250k annually. It's selling around 20k. Even for Musk, that isn't normal exaggeration; that's a huge difference.
>>The gamble with Cybertruck failed.
Has it? I really don't know but I see these every day in my major city and there was a closed mall parking lot filled with cybertrucks the local dealer used to park there which were quickly turned over.
Yes. It's a flop:
https://insideevs.com/news/784715/tesla-cybertruck-ev-sales-...
A flop is not a truck that was the best selling in the world two years ago and then 3/4 as many as Ford's EV truck and more than everyone else (according to your link).
And since when is HN just like Reddit when one is downvoted for asking a question for clarity?
Probably because it’s a segment they think they can grow and is a new vehicle type, rather than redundant.
Ford recently stopped it. https://www.npr.org/2025/12/15/nx-s1-5645147/ford-discontinu...
That's all good, don't worry, the stock is doing quite well, near its record high. A man jumping around in spandex is all they need.
It's actually bizarre how seemingly nothing impacts $TSLA: profits down 46%, revenue down 3%, cutting successful product lines that used to sell quite a bit, a massively failed product in the Cybertruck, FSD promises still unfulfilled, and on top of all that US$ 2 billion siphoned away to another unrelated company.
With all of that, the stock closed upwards on the after market hours. Perhaps only Musk's death could cause it to tank, would have never expected to see a cult of personality being run on the top of S&P 500 market caps, what a strange world...
I think it was the FT that observed about a year ago that even as institutional investors were pulling away from US equities, retail investors (redditors, if you will) were filling in the gap quite enthusiastically. (You know, "Buy the dip!! " and brethren.)
I don't know to what extent that's still the case. But someone always ends up with the hot potato no matter what.
Its not bizzare. Retail investors can no longer compete with big banks, who pretty much set the stock price. Elon solidified this with DOGE by removing oversight of such things.
At this point, investing is exacly like playing slots at casino.
It’s being valued on the hope that they will crack full self driving. People still believe they will crack it.
Once they actually start bleeding money they will go down.
But Apple under Steve Jobs had all the financial numbers to support it, it wasn't valued solely on Steve Jobs' personality, the products were there, and being loved by consumers. Revenue wasn't dipping while the stock was going up, revenue, market share, profits were consistently on the rise.
Also in Europe, an old state company called Renault is beating Tesla with the R5.
I just saw an R5 on the street in the bright green. Super cool looking car. There are a whole bunch of promising small EVs coming out in the EU. Hyundai Inster, VW ID.1, Kia EV2, etc.
I have an opinion on EVs that basically the only models that make sense are the ones shaped like the 3 and Y.
I feel like EVs are a checkbox product - you either make things 'good enough' for the customer - range, driving dynamics, power, charge speed, smart features, autonomous stuff or don't.
To get range right you need a big battery and low drag and efficiency - the only way you can make the first 2 things in the same vehicle is to create an aerodynamic shape.
This is a packaging problem, you need to make the car low, and long - so you stretch it out, so the battery can be thinner and no longer pushes up the rest of the vehicle. You also have a lot of place in the front for crash structures, and aero shaping. Finally since your car is big (D segment), you can charge more money as per conventions of the market.
If you make a C or B segment car, you either reduce the battery size to save money, which makes it impractical for general use or pack in all that stuff into a smaller volume, and you get a car thats more expensive to make than a Model 3, while having worse drag and range, while the market expects you to charge less for it.
These small cars only make sense with a small battery, but you wouldn't want one for yourself as a second car - hence the robotaxi.
So no, your hypothetical Model 2 would not be cheaper if you didn't compromise it in some major way, which they dont wanna do.
Upwards differentiation is also hard for Tesla - base models are already powerful enough, have all the smart features, they wont compromise on autonomous stuff etc.
This is not only my opinion but the market's - S and X sold like 2 orders of magnitude less cars than the 3 and Y.
I think the S and X (and Roadster) sold less because they were expensive early models trying to create a "premium" halo-effect (if so, they succeeded).
For range, how much range is sufficient? This may be one area where the EU and US need fundamentally different vehicles, as per the saying "in America 100 years is a long time, in Europe 100 miles is a long way". Certainly the EU market supports B-segment with 44kWh @ 320 km / 199 miles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citroën_C3#Europe_(2024)
> This is not only my opinion but the market's - S and X sold like 2 orders of magnitude less cars than the 3 and Y.
They sold less because they're far more expensive and have to compete against much more well put together products. Meanwhile, their platforms are 10 years old and there are now other offerings in an overall niche field.
You're right about aero to an extent, but aero is only felt on long highway drives and it can be mitigated somewhat with a couple more cells. Some consumers will choose style for a cost premium. Others will choose something more expensive simply because they don't want to support Musk.
I assume the S and X are being cancelled because 3 and Y are cannibalizing them with a very close product for a much better price point. Both have premium trim options. There’s very little difference in interior space. Aside from the doors on the X there’s just not much differentiation.
I own the Y and drove the S as a loaner. The S is a noticeably better car. Also has 1000hp.
I've got a 2025 Model 3 and was blown away by what a great vehicle it is for the price point. I'd be curious how much of a difference there is between and S and a Model 3 Performance.
Forgot that the cybertruck was a sales flop and quality joke, and that the Tesla Semi is now the elephant in the room.
He’s been dead for more than a year. Is this his 2018 take?
> camera only navigation without sensor fusion with LIDAR will fail
I'm not so sure on this one. I think we'll see it this year. It will have embarrassing bugs (ie. running over cats which are hiding under the car) and we'll see lots of issues to begin with (ie. the car stops in the middle of a freeway because a camera got splattered with mud).
But I think they'll achieve the goal of something that can be deployed fairly widespread without public outrage causing it to be banned without lidar.
This is the first year that I personally think that it will come this year...
Actions speak louder than words, and the fact that a 'cybercab' production line is firing up this year is also a strong indicator - the fact they didn't do that 5 years ago means tesla leadership didn't think it was going to work back then. 'cybercab' wouldn't sell well as a 2 seater if it couldn't self drive. (although the actual mass production will be delayed till next year is my guess, but we'll see model 3 or y being used for a taxi service in the meantime)
I think he meant "keeping TSLA where it is".
Tesla's sales have suffered, yes, and Elon's image is a significant contributor to that, besides all the reasons directly related to the cars themselves.
But Tesla's stock price is still stuck in irrational heights, not even remotely justifiable by the company's performance.
It just seems that people reconsider purchasing a physical object way quicker than they reconsider a stock investment. Maybe because the stock investment, especially in TSLA, is considered more like a gamble - "as long as others also think that this stock will skyrocket, even just because they think that others like me think it will skyrocket - as long as that's the case, I'm good with buying shares".
Tesla is a meme stock. Its being buoyed up by retail investors (Elon Musk fanbois) and, its been said, by Saudis and others who were trying to curry favor with him (possibly to try and get Trumps ear or other greasy bullshit). The stock is completely divorced from reality, which also attracts further investment--as long as its disconnected from the fundamentals of being a company that has to make a profit, you can argue its worth 100 million billion dollars or a googel, both are just as valid.
SpaceX is going to go public so he doesn't need Tesla any more.
Even though tesla has only 2 models, i would still consider it for a new car, if not for Elon Musk. I have an Y, and it does everything i want it to do. Drives nicely, lots of (cargo) space, no friction charging when driving in Europe. Just plug it in a supercharger and it loads fast. No hassle with subscriptions and cards. Very reliable.
With the 3 and the Y they're already catering for a large part of the market demand, but a smaller model, and a stationwagon might help get it up to 80%+ of all demand.
Up until recently teslas were regularly ranked around the world as the least reliable car brand. https://www.topspeed.com/germany-declares-tesla-model-y-is-l... and https://electrek.co/2025/12/11/tesla-ranks-dead-last-used-ca...
TUV inspection failures are not a good indication of reliability. The lack of Tesla dealers and no need for yearly servicing means issues get caught at the inspection step for Tesla where for others they are caught at the pre-inspection step.
Also, you need a breakdown of the failures as wear and consumables (washer fluid low, splits in wipers, headlight alignment, mobile phone holder in wrong location) can be a failure but would not be a good indicator for lack of quality.
That is bad. One issue seems to be that brakes of electric cars can get issues over time as they are not used enough (because instead of true braking the regenerative recuperation is used).
Good though: If you are in an accident Teslas are the safest car one can buy
https://www.ancap.com.au/media-and-gallery/media-releases/22...
> The Tesla Model Y achieved the highest overall weighted score of any vehicle assessed by ANCAP in 2025, recording strong performance across all areas of occupant protection and active safety technology.
They still are, the Danish statistics report ~45% of tesla having issues compared to ~7% of the whole plethora of electric vehicles, that's a lot
https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/news/nearly-half-of-tesla-mo...
"Most of the issues involve critical components like brakes, lights, and suspension. Many cars fail because of play in the steering or faulty axles. These are problems rarely seen at the same level in competitors like Volkswagen or Hyundai."
I just received a consumer association (consumentenbond) test on car reliability and this time the Tesla Y is the most reliable EV in the overview. It scored 9.3 out of 10. The Toyota Aygo is the most reliable ICE with a score of 9.7. Looks like Tesla has massively improved their reliability.
That’s my thought as well. The X isn’t much bigger than the Y and the price point is much higher. Same with the S and 3.
The markets the have been missing to this point are the big passenger / cargo carriers like a minivan or full size SUV.
This LIDAR wank annoys me.
If you can train a policy that drives well on cameras, you can get self-driving. If you can't, you're fucked, and no amount of extra sensors will save you.
Self-driving isn't a sensor problem. It always was, is, and always will be an AI problem.
No amount of LIDAR engineering will ever get you a LIDAR that outputs ground truth steering commands. The best you'll ever get is noisy depth estimate speckles that you'll have to massage with, guess what, AI, to get them to do anything of use.
Sensor suite choice is an aside. Camera only 360 coverage? Good enough to move on. The rest of the problem lies with AI.
Even the best AI can't drive without good sensors. Cameras have to guess distance and they fail when there is insufficient contrast, direct sunlight and so on. LiDARs don't have to guess distance.
Cameras also fail when weather conditions cake your car in snow and/or mud while you're driving. Actually, from what I just looked up, this is an issue with LiDAR as well. So it seems to me like we don't even have the sensors we need to do this properly yet, unless we can somehow make them all self-cleaning.
It always goes back to my long standing belief that we need dedicated lanes with roadside RFID tags to really make this self driving thing work well enough.
Nah. That's a common "thought about it for 15 seconds but not 15 minutes" mistake.
Making a car that drives well on arbitrary roads is freakishly hard. Having to adapt every single road in the world before even a single self-driving car can use them? That's a task that makes the previous one look easy.
Learned sensor fusion policy that can compensate for partial sensor degradation, detect severe dropout, and handle both safely? Very hard. Getting the world that can't fix the low tech potholes on every other road to set up and maintain machine specific infrastructure everywhere? A nonstarter.
>Self-driving isn't a sensor problem. It always was, is, and always will be an AI problem.
AI + cameras have relevant limitations that LIDAR augmented suites don't. You can paint a photorealistic roadway onto a brick wall and AI + cameras will try to drive right through it, dubbed the "Wile E. Coyote" problem.
You are correct, but the problem is nobody at Tesla or any other self driving company for that matter knows what they are doing when it comes to AI
If you are doing end to end driving policy (i.e the wrong way of doing it), having lidar is important as a correction factor to the cameras.
So far, end to end seems to be the only way to train complex AI systems that actually works.
Every time you pit the sheer violent force of end to end backpropagation against compartmentalization and lines drawn by humans, at a sufficient scale, backpropagation gets its win.
>Every time you pit the sheer violent force of end to end backpropagation against compartmentalization and lines drawn by humans, at a sufficient scale, backpropagation gets its win.
I fully agree, but your statement is quite ironic.
For driving, humans drive well because we operate more like Mu Zero model does - we can "visualize" the possibilities of the future states depending on what we do and pick the most optimal path. We don't need to know what the specific object is on the road, the fact that we can recognize that its there, in our path, and understand the physical interacting of a car hitting something that is taller than a bump means we can avoid it.
The way to implement self driving is exactly that - train your model to take sensor data and reconstruct a 3d space in latent dimensions, train another model to predict evolutions on the 3d space given time history with probabilistic output, and then your inference is a probabilistic guided search in that space with time constraints based on hardware. Mu Zero is nothing new, and already proved that you don't even need a hardcoded model of environment to operate in.
And you don't even need human driving data for this, as the model will be able to predict things collisions solely based on pure physics. And as a bonus, as you enhance it with things like physical models of the cars, where it can reconcile what it thinks the system is going to do versus what the physics calculations predict, you can even make it drive well in snow with low traction.
The irony of your statement is that everyone who is going end to end is manually hand coding all these hacks (like image warping in the case of Comma AI) to make the training work, all because the training data is just not sufficient, which is the exact same exercise as humans drawing lines.
And if you doubt that what Im saying is true, again, Mu Zero was proven to work. Driving is just another game where you can easily define a winning scenario, the board, and moves you can make, and apply the same concepts. The only technical part becomes accurately determining the board from sensor data.
Just don't drive up north in the snow and your good.
> If you can train a policy that drives well on cameras, you can get self-driving. If you can't, you're fucked, and no amount of extra sensors will save you.
Source: trust me, bro? This statement has no factual basis. Calling the most common approach of all other self-driving developers except Tesla a wank also is no argument but hate only.
This is so dumb, I don't even know if you are serious. Nobody ever said it is lidar instead of cameras, but as additional sensor to cameras. And everybody seems to agree that that is valuable sensor-information (except Tesla).
Yet he's still doing less damage than others chasing the AI bubble, as competition is growing in the EV market.
Meanwhile, RIP Windows, Google Search, and maybe the entire games industry, maybe even then end of affordable home computing and being forced to rent computing power from 'the cloud'.
Google search? They already have an AI assistant at the top of every search result.
Google is winning the AI race. They did with self driving and they are doing it with LLMs. They are sitting back quietly not making noise and then massively rocking the status quo regularly.
I suspect they are going to do similar in the field of quantum computing.
> BYD is eating Tesla for lunch
For some reason my Youtube echo chamber is trying to convince me that BYD makes so many cars but cannot sell them. It's really bizarre. Other things it's trying to convince me of "Don't get an electric car. Period", "Ukraine won. Done deal", "Trump is devastated" about something else every day. Yes I do want the latter two to be true and it's playing on that but I don't get the BYD thing.
BYD is selling a lot of cars, but they're also making a lot more cars than they can sell at sticker price in China, as does every other Chinese car company. This oversupply leads to all kinds of distortions, like dealerships registering cars as "sold" to make their sales targets and then selling those brand-new cars as "used" at a discount. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/local-...
Maybe your YouTube echo chamber additionally thinks that this will cause BYD to collapse, but I doubt that. There are about a hundred Chinese EV manufacturers in worse financial shape, who're likely to go bankrupt first, which should reduce oversupply enough for BYD to survive.
There's not really NEV oversupply, the EV adoption curve will keep shooting up from 50% to 100%, many PRC EV companies will die from competition/pricewar consolidation not broader oversupply, since EV industrial base is still undersupply relative to 100% adoption curve.
Oversupply is in legacy ICE displacement due to rapid domestic EV penetration. "Zero-milage used car" accounting trick is primarily to export excess capacity of gasoline cars (now that EV has taken over) that aren't moving domestically anymore. MOST of PRC exports are ICE, IIRC 60-80%, there's plenty of global demand for ICE still. Pushing domestic sku new car with crushed domestic demand as "used" exports where there's plenty of demand = meet sales target, but less through discounts but import fees engineering - used cars circumvent import duties, certifications, warranty requirements etc. It's a lifehack to unload domestic ICE inventory, not EV. This also likely transient effect because NEV transition in PRC happened so fast ICE manufacturer that target domestic market caught flat footed. They need a few years to either retool to EV or shift primarily to target export markets that still has appetite for affordable gasoline cars.
The Reuters article focuses on exports because that's what their target audience is likely to be interested in, but the People's Daily article they reference in passing https://paper.people.com.cn/rmrb/pc/content/202506/10/conten... is treating it as a domestic problem, highlighting the appearance of "zero-mileage used cars" on the second-hand market, specifically calls out EV companies for putting quantity over quality, and floats stimulating used car exports as part of the solution.
Also, at least the EU doesn't distinguish between new and old cars when importing from outside the EU https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/buying-and-selling-car... presumably precisely to avoid creating the kind of loophole you imagine exporters are exploiting. But they aren't; they just hurt their own profitability to juice their numbers and chase growth.
Domestic problem as in domestic involution problem not a EV overcapacity problem. I'm pointing out important to distinguish between ICE and EV, ICE is structural overcapacity, EV is under capacity but involution. ICE zero mile shenanigans is to liquidate/ unload excess inventory that doesn't have demand in PRC, mostly targeting loopholes in russia, central asia, mena. There's (less regulates) markets other than EU.
BYD/EV zero mile hack is more for subsidy harvesting, they're trying to dip on domestic subsidies for new sales then skip on stuff like servicing/warranty because used sale, i.e. shady involution behavior that abuse national policies, hence crackdown. It's not because EV are excess capacity, but so many EV players involuting and accountants find creative ways to carve margin. It's not EV sector makes 100 cars can only sell 50, because overcapacity, so discount to sell 100. It's EV sector makes 100 cars, sell 100 @1% margin but with some engineering they sell 100 @2% margin.
Yes, there are some brands that does use it for price cuts, premium brands, i.e. nio/xpeng, who won't lower sticker price, so they have to flip to lower price in used market. But that's also less overcapacity, more PRC EV moving so fast last few years no one wants 12 month old models. AKA tech stack progressing so fast / involution pressures so hard consumers won't pay sticker for anything older than 1 gen. What happens PRC manufacturing turns car cycles into phones obsolescence cycles. The broader the point here is EV makers are generally not doing accounting tricks to sell more cars due overcapacity / lack of demand (what over capacity implies), they're doing accounting tricks to sell the same amount of cars to make their razer thin involution margins slightly less razer thin, at the expense of the government.
I agree that this decision is insane and the whole Optimus/xAI bullshit is tiring, especially with the shareholders actually voting against the xAI investment, but you should try today's FSD. It's genuinely good and shouldn't be discarded wholesale because the guy sucks.
The problem is not how well Tesla's FSD works, compared to other FSD from other manufacturers.
The problem is that Musk has been promising it for almost 10 years and it is still not sufficiently stable to be rolled out and relied upon by car owners.
FSD is only actually "ready" in terms of the whole "don't need to own a car for personal transport" when there can be passengers and no driver.
When Mom can dispatch the family car to pick up the kids from school.
> When Mom can dispatch the family car to pick up the kids from school.
Tech level, I agree--that's FSD.
But even if we had that tech today, Mom ain't sending the car without getting a police visit.
You can't even let your kids go to the local playground alone anymore. They're not going to be captain and first mate alone in a vehicle if the Karens have anything to say about it.
Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) is officially classified as a Level 2 advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS). Despite its advanced capabilities, it requires the human driver to remain fully attentive, monitor the environment, and be ready to take control immediately.
So it's literally nothing special compared to other manufacturers. I am happy to argue that's it's a better Level 2 than most others, sure. But it's still just that. No magic, no bullshitty "by 2017 the car will drive itself from New York to Los Angeles". No it hasn't and no it won't.
If Tesla's FSD existed in isolation, it would be a fantastic breakthrough that signposted the future.
If.
It doesn't exist in isolation. The competition isn't just from the American firms, but also European and Chinese, and it isn't really possible to overlook Musk himself given both his long history of Musk over-promising and under-delivering, deflecting blame.
Even the current release isn't what Musk was talking hopefully about a decade ago, e.g.:
Our goal is, and I feel pretty good about this goal, that we'll be able to do a demonstration drive of full autonomy all the way from LA to New York, from home in LA to let's say dropping you off in Times Square in New York, and then having the car go park itself, by the end of next year. Without the need for a single touch, including the charger.
Likewise, based on a video I saw recently from someone reproducing Tesla's 2016 "Paint It Black" drive, Tesla's AI is only now around the performance level that they faked in 2016.
Don't get me wrong, that level was impressive… just, the world isn't isolated developments.
I'm not sure it is a bad decision given:
"Tesla’s far more popular models are the 3 and Y, which accounted for 97% of the company’s 1.59 million deliveries last year."
How can you say camera only navigation won’t work with such finality when humans manage just fine every day! You literally have an existence proof of it working.
It would be possible to build an ornithopter, evidenced by the existence of avians, but it turned out the easiest ways to make flying machines were otherwise.
I like the comparison, but with aviation on a fundamental level we made it simpler (removing actuation), not added more (senses we dont need)
What counts is the overall complexity, not the complexity of a single subsystem.
Using more senses allows simpler processing of the sensor data, especially when there is a requirement for high reliability, and at least until now this has demonstrated a simpler complete system.
I'm not sure I agree. I think just having wings that flex a bit is mechanically simpler than having an additional rotating propellor. After all, rotating axles are so hard to evolve they never almost never show up in nature at a macro scale. Sort of a perfect analogy to lidar actually. We create a new approach to solve the problem in a more efficient way, that evolution couldn't reach in billions of years
Jet engines do not strike me as being inherently simpler than muscles, not by a long shot.
They're still the best way we know of going about the business of building a flying machine, for various reasons.
Others in this subthread discussed the comparison of the complexity of different ways of achieving flight itself, but I think there is an interesting discussion in that... well... we do add senses we don't technically need to achieve stable flight (but are very useful for safe flight and have reduced the incidence of aviation incidents and accidents dramatically).
Whether it be altimeters based on radio[1] or air pressure[2], avoidance and surveillance systems that use radio waves to avoid collisions with other aircraft[3][4], airborne weather radars[5], sensors that measure angle of attack (AoA), GNSS location, attitude, etc, many aircraft (even unpowered gliders!) have some combination of special sensing systems that aren't strictly necessary to take off, fly to a destination, and land, even if some are required for what many would consider safe flight in some scenarios.
Many of these systems have redundancies built in in some form or another and many of these systems are even built into unmanned aerial systems (UASes) big and small.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_altimeter
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_altimeter
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision_avoidance_sy...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Dependent_Surveillan...
Is it still a decent gamble after you've been trying (and failing) for a decade, and numerous well funded competitors are going the easy way, and when there is huge upside to being first, and when the value of FSD easily covers the rapidly falling cost of LIDAR?
No. It's not a good idea. It's not a good gamble. It's stupid, and the engineers can see it's stupid. A lot of them have quit, reducing the very slim chances of it working even further.
Because FSD driving not navigation is going to be held (rightly) to a much higher standard than human driving.
Humans are fallible and we have other sensors, like hearing, or touch (through feedback on the steering wheel) that are also involved in driving.
We already have other sensors that are not vision that work with us when driving like ABS and electronic stability.
The other reason it's dumb is that adding LIDAR and proper sensor fusion makes things better and the cost of LIDAR is rapidly dropping as its installed across new fleets in CN and elsewhere.
Yeah and we should replace the wheels with legs. every other company disagrees with musk, putting alternate sensors on even low end cars.
The safety record of humans is not so great. They tend to fail in snow, ice, fog, rain and at night. We should be aiming a little higher.
I don’t think it makes sense to limit yourself while you are still figuring out what really works. You should go with a maximum of sensors and once it works, you can see what can be left out.
Yeah, but even if the safety level was 10% better, let's say--nobody would accept that rate. It wouldn't get adopted, we wouldn't be happy to save those lives. People would be outraged.
I think it's got something to do with an innate belief to self-determination. It's fine if I make a mistake to kill myself, and it's not fine if someone else does. It's super not fine if someone dies at the hands of a rich person's technology. Outrage, lawsuits, "justice."
While I am in the camp that believes camera-only FSD won't succeed, your comment isn't entirely accurate.
CCD and CMOS sensors can easily work in sub-freezing temperatures with various kinds of heating. There are 10's of millions of surveillance cameras installed outdoors in sub-freezing climates that work fine.
Cameras also have moveable IR cut filters, which is analogous to your sunglasses example.
Human eyes do have greater dynamic range in the visible light spectrum, but solid state sensors can commonly interpret light above 1000nm, and of course you can do thermal/IR imagers to provide optical sensing of wavelengths outside of what a human can see.
Sensor technology relative to the human eye isn't what is holding FSD back.
This is commonly said but trivially falsifiable — a blind human crosses the street better than a Tesla.
Eyesight isn’t the thing. Humans have a persistent mental model of the world, and of the physics that drive it. Our eyes only check in every now and then to keep our model up to date.
Our ears and sense of touch do a lot of work in walking and driving, too. Trying to narrow it all down to vision is silly.
Deaf people drive.
I knew a guy with no arms who drove with his prosthetic hooks. Of course he can feel vibrations and things through his ass, but so could the car if they wanted. Do they use accelerometer data? (I don't know the answer to that) Do they have ABS sensors that can detect wheel lockup/speed status? Because I don't.
I believe I can drive a car to the legal standard, remotely, with a good enough camera array.
> Do they have ABS sensors that can detect wheel lockup/speed status? Because I don't.
You should fix that. Go out on a rainy day and slam the brakes hard enough for it to kick in. There's an obvious vibration and knowing what it feels like might save your life.
Humans have cameras (eyes) + AGI. Cars have to compensate with LiDARs and other sensors that humans don't.
Careful now. You'll get branded as a "Tesla hater" for stating facts like that. Or you'll get unflattering ad-homs comparing you to the Electrek guy
> He doesn't have FSD, camera only navigation without sensor fusion with LIDAR will fail, the only thing keeping Tesla where it is is the bullshit dispersal field that surrounds Musk.
So if I hear what you're saying, the stock will be up another 50% this year!