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)
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I don't know anyone who thought he was a funny memer man. And definitely cos-play Tony Stark was inside his head.
It was always the other way around, he was okay because he pursued improving road technology doing the things we want but car manufacturers refused. He stopped doing that and was only a Nazi waving, drug addled, idiot and is treated as such.
> I don't know anyone who thought he was a funny memer man. And definitely cos-play Tony Stark was inside his head.
I mean, do you think his Iron Man 2 cameo was random? He was absolutely seen as the "IRL Tony Stark" by a decent number of people back in the day. I don't kbow what circles you have/had, but he definitely was generally liked across the board (or at the very least, not hated) pre-twitter.
Sorry TSLA holders, it's partly my fault as I got my 5 years old Model Y checked by a third party garage for everything that should be fixed by Tesla before the end of the main warranty period.
Look, I get that Elon wants to chase AI, but why not do relatively simple, low-cost things like build a proper 7-seat SUV that uses the Cybertruck platform - or even a properly stretched Model Y platform (rather than the six-seater L)? Or how about a delivery van on a stretched Y platform?
In Europe, they are usually known as MPVs or "people carriers"; Renault has made their Espace since 1984 (though, it looks like they abandoned that format in 2012); there was also the Renault Grand Scénic, which ended in 2022. So not a uniquely American concept, but it seems like the market in Europe for them is thinning significantly. A shame though, I really like the look of that Espace mk1.
Also the Citroen Grand C4 [1], which is a 7-seater where the back row fold down to get a completely flat foor - great family car. It's been replaced by the Space Tourer now I believe, which goes up to a 9-seater.
It's not really a vehicle that many people need. Our VW Caddy seats 7 with the third row of seats, but that was installed for a week before we took it out and it's been in the garage since then. I've had the car full of stuff more often than I had it full of people. And even then it's mostly air in a car that's shaped like a brick wall that's been driven around most of the time. I can drive it at around 6.5 l/100 km of gas, but 7.1 is more typical. So a more sensible choice would have been a smaller and more efficient car.
Full size MPVs are status symbols in Japan and China, they're making a little bit of a comeback in Europe at the moment with various copies of the Toyota Alphard like the Lexus LM and about 50 different Chinese clones arriving soon like the Denza D9, Xpeng X9, Zeekr 009 etc. I have an imported Vellfire, so I'm quite exited for all the clones coming.
I feel like the opposite is true, Americans seem oddly opposed to vans, minivans, and people movers. Toyota alone make something like 20 different models with three rows of seats as standard, and school event parking where I am is packed with 7 seaters.
Wasn’t Tesla Model X a 7 seater?
Because tesla has always been selling dollars for $0.50. Investing in their product lines doesn't help them, it's always been a grift and a shell game. Some great products have come out of it, but the valuation has never been one where selling more products helps the business, unless it can lead to the hype train.
Sure, but if they're losing money, you go looking for ways to make a bit more money without having to spend too much. My contention is at least some of these things could be done relatively cheaply and would generate additional sales.
Tesla may be getting belted from pillar to post elsewhere in the world by the Chinese but they a) still have a near-monopoly in EVs in the US, and b) have a cost-competitive EV manufacturing operation in China from which they can supply other parts of the world.
That still doesn't help their image problem, which is still very real for many left-leaning affluent consumers around the world, but that's less of a problem for commercial vehicles.
The total market cap of all the Chinese car companies combined is about 300B.
Tesla alone is worth ~5x that, because the market rewards this behavior of chasing new things.
If Tesla suddenly pivoted to 'caring about cars' and tried their best to produce low cost reliable EVs, the market is going to punish them by valuing them at less than 300B. That is, if they succeed at that. If they fail, which would be more plausible, they go bankrupt.
Why would they voluntarily do that?
We could do that by changing public opinion or regulating what public companies must do/report, but that seems somewhat unlikely. It's so much easier to claim that autonomous driving will be solved in six months :)
> It's so much easier to claim that autonomous driving will be solved in six months
Why so long? Six months? According to God-King Trump who apparently knows everything better than anyone, we're already well past "AI" into Super-Intelligence. Just ask the Machine-God to bestow autonomous driving upon us and we're good to go, yeah? Time to bring on those flying cars in every garage we was all promised decades ago!
BYD had revenue of 110B while tesla had 96B and both have around 4B dollar of profits. BYD also has better credit line (from Chinese govt), which is the whole point of market cap. I dont think official market cap value reflrct this reality.
Last I checked they still never release their EV profit alone, always bundling the numbers with plug-in hybrids and high-margin battery sales to other companies. If BYD made money on EVs there'd be no need for shenanigans, of course.
Wasn't Tesla unprofitable until as late as 2020? And I mean, fully unprofitable, with no shenanigans to save it.
Why for US companies is it okay to be unprofitable while they grow, but for Chinese companies it is shenanigans?
Also, if they actually sell things such as high-margin batteries, is it even shenanigans? Using a profitable division to finance the growth of another division sounds like excellent business strategy to me. Better than promising bullshit FSD to artificially inflate the stock price.
Yeah I’d love a cybervan or model XL. Pretty much every family I know would get one. In lieu of that we all got model Ys / cybertrucks instead, and then we grumble about it when the in-laws come to visit and we need to drive two cars to take the family out. YL is fine but they needed to go further. Need 3 proper rows and storage space!
Why not a Cyberbus based on the cybertruck platform? I’d kill for 8–12 passenger minibuses in the LVCC tunnels during CES instead of the 3 passenger Teslas.
I'm arguing that the fair value of boring companies making reliable things should be much higher. We don't do that, you have to promise hot air based growth to prevent your valuation from crashing.
> I'm arguing that the fair value of boring companies making reliable things should be much higher.
In theory (occasionally in practice) when you purchase a stock you are purchasing a piece of the future cash flow of that company. For a company which operates in a known environment and we can roughly predict how their revenue will grow (i.e. boring companies), the correct fair value of the stock can be easily computed.
So, no, those predictable companies should not be valued much higher, they are already valued correctly because the are no big surprises in their future, the profits and revenue are predictable.
This logic breaks down with companies where the growth can't be predicted to any reasonable accuracy. So in those you're just buying the hype, which sometimes turns out to be real, sometimes not.
Unfortunately this also incentivizes some companies to pump themselves purely on hype so they never get valued on actual revenue and profit. Tesla is a prime example of this. If you value them as a car company we can easily compute a fair value, but that number is very low. So, instead, robots! AI! self-driving! Space! That keeps the fair value an unknown, so it can ride the wave of hype for a long time.
Starship and Starlink are prerequisites for the silly Starmind, so I don't think they'll quite as badly destroy their core competency as they are doing at Tesla.
which is the philsophical/moral point of view which asks: If you had to randomly be born in anywhere in the world, how would you prefer the world work?
Very few people would choose the one where there's a slight chance they're in the wealth classes currently.
Not moving towards equality is just a selfish choicel.
There was an HN post recently about “startup anti-patterns” [0]. And the broad takeaway was that most failures stem from preventing facts on the ground from reaching you, i.e., the company plows ahead with a strategy that misses or actively ignores countervailing data.
Yes, that would be the punishment. It's also why Elon is irreplaceable. You might think the long-term health of Tesla would be well served by leadership that would build on the remarkable initial success of creating a viable mass market electric car company. As many on the thread pointed out, there are many plausible ways to formulate a product that would do exactly that.
But that would be a massacre of shareholder value. One more quarter of a ridonculous valuation is worth more than having a product that will keep Tesla viable as a car company. The idea that Grok could become a first tier AI product is more valuable than a mass market SUV, because that untested idea keeps the share price up.
Until it doesn't. If you can predict the day that happens, I want to subscribe to your newsletter.
What's funny is that nobody even believes the SpaceX/Tesla fever dream stuff - not even the fanboys. Data centers in space that violate the laws of logistics+thermodynamics? 30 trillion dollars worth of revenue?
No, they only believe that somebody else believes this shit. The entire valuation of Elon's companies is based on greater fool theory. But it notably is called greater fool, not infinite fool; we are going to run out of fools at some point...
Just like an instrument panel and an indicator stalk.
It’s a shame, because even after all these years Teslas are still state of
the art in quite a few aspects (their packaging and drivetrain efficiency, among others). But here in Oz where we have a smorgasbord of cheap and excellent Chinese EVs, there are better options unless you want FSD above all else.
It's disappointing. They were the leading electric car company, and then they blew it. No new good models. The robotaxi that never quite works. The Cybertruck.
The humanoid robot army. The out-to-lunch CEO off being a political.
Tesla should be building something like the Slate pickup. Or like BYD's midrange models. Things that would actually sell.
One of the lessons of the electric car industry is that when gas car companies build electric vehicles, the vehicles suck. They're usually adapted versions of gas cars, which means too much structure and cost in the wrong places. This usually comes out as a $5000 price penalty for the electric model. Tesla was well placed to avoid that.
"Gas car" companies like Volkswagen or Volvo also have EVs built from the ground up, and have models cheaper than Tesla, most of the time with slightly lesser range or other specs but price/performance wise in the same ballpark.
If anything makes it more expensive it's the habit of certain manufacturers to nickel and dime buyers over every option.
Tesla isn’t interested in being a car company. That’s pretty clear from the fact they only sell 2 cars and some sort of dump truck. Though I don’t see people using the truck’s trash capacity too fully, generally only the driver’s seat is filled with detritus.
Beyond the long track record of unmet Musk's announcements, Tesla is strategically in a very difficult situation: it went from being the sole option for an electric car, to being a small mid-market player with quality issues.
- chinese companies are now exporting with 25% discount for similar quality
- premium brands occupy the $80'000+ car segment with better comfort and quality
- Tesla sells as many as Renault, a local European player, except the later built a strong alliance network to get scale economics.
I won't even mention the failure of the Cybertruck, which cannot even be exported to Europe due to its dangerous design.
In short: they'd rather merge now with a traditional car company while they have a high valuation, much like US West did with QWest at the end of the Internet bubble. Or else...
I drive a shitbox but if I was gonna buy a new car and I had the money to buy one it would probably be tesla considering their realistically the only American car companies that make their cars in the US. Rooting for them to do well, because I live in the midwest and have seen what happens when these trash can companies overshore manufacturing.
Seeing it happen now too with college jobs is funny, because all those same people making fun of your community for complaining about lack of jobs after the factory they built their city around leaves, now are complainjng abiut the same thing. H1B yourself. Love those Indians. Anyway, everyone loses no class solidarity, the poors fighting amongst themselves like animals.
A friend of mine who's all in on Musk told me a few months ago that Tesla's business hasn't been cars for a while. It's all Optimus and Cybertaxi, where demand will be infinite and we'll all be paid by our governments to stop working since Optimus will do everything and Cybertaxi will take us anywhere. Not today, of course, but in the future. Future being explained in the exact same elastic terms as Musk does.
The fact that he was serious and thinks that Musk is the only tech CEO not in this for his own benefit and enrichment is what makes me believe that this is more of a cult than anything else.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 3.0 ms ] threadValuation +420%. Easily.
Also, Musk getting into politics and alienating most of its consumer base, of course.
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.
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.
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.
At some point, the reality of being in a highly competitive market must set in and valuations need to come down to Earth.
In any case, just because the legacy incumbents might also be incompetent, doesn't excuse Tesla.
It was always the other way around, he was okay because he pursued improving road technology doing the things we want but car manufacturers refused. He stopped doing that and was only a Nazi waving, drug addled, idiot and is treated as such.
I mean, do you think his Iron Man 2 cameo was random? He was absolutely seen as the "IRL Tony Stark" by a decent number of people back in the day. I don't kbow what circles you have/had, but he definitely was generally liked across the board (or at the very least, not hated) pre-twitter.
Tesla's product line is narrow and aging rapidly.
[1] https://www.autotrader.co.uk/cars/used/citroen/grand-c4-pica...
Tesla may be getting belted from pillar to post elsewhere in the world by the Chinese but they a) still have a near-monopoly in EVs in the US, and b) have a cost-competitive EV manufacturing operation in China from which they can supply other parts of the world.
That still doesn't help their image problem, which is still very real for many left-leaning affluent consumers around the world, but that's less of a problem for commercial vehicles.
The total market cap of all the Chinese car companies combined is about 300B.
Tesla alone is worth ~5x that, because the market rewards this behavior of chasing new things.
If Tesla suddenly pivoted to 'caring about cars' and tried their best to produce low cost reliable EVs, the market is going to punish them by valuing them at less than 300B. That is, if they succeed at that. If they fail, which would be more plausible, they go bankrupt.
Why would they voluntarily do that?
We could do that by changing public opinion or regulating what public companies must do/report, but that seems somewhat unlikely. It's so much easier to claim that autonomous driving will be solved in six months :)
Why so long? Six months? According to God-King Trump who apparently knows everything better than anyone, we're already well past "AI" into Super-Intelligence. Just ask the Machine-God to bestow autonomous driving upon us and we're good to go, yeah? Time to bring on those flying cars in every garage we was all promised decades ago!
Last I checked they still never release their EV profit alone, always bundling the numbers with plug-in hybrids and high-margin battery sales to other companies. If BYD made money on EVs there'd be no need for shenanigans, of course.
Why for US companies is it okay to be unprofitable while they grow, but for Chinese companies it is shenanigans?
Also, if they actually sell things such as high-margin batteries, is it even shenanigans? Using a profitable division to finance the growth of another division sounds like excellent business strategy to me. Better than promising bullshit FSD to artificially inflate the stock price.
Market cap is not a useful comparison because it can (as here) be driven by hype.
A better comparison is revenue and profit, that tells us a lot more about the business each is operating.
They want to be valued as a ~~scifi~~ tech company.
Which is fair, given that the market and by extension we, have chosen to brutally punish boring car companies that make reliable high volume cars.
I'm arguing that the fair value of boring companies making reliable things should be much higher. We don't do that, you have to promise hot air based growth to prevent your valuation from crashing.
The behavior we incentivize is the one we'll get.
In theory (occasionally in practice) when you purchase a stock you are purchasing a piece of the future cash flow of that company. For a company which operates in a known environment and we can roughly predict how their revenue will grow (i.e. boring companies), the correct fair value of the stock can be easily computed.
So, no, those predictable companies should not be valued much higher, they are already valued correctly because the are no big surprises in their future, the profits and revenue are predictable.
This logic breaks down with companies where the growth can't be predicted to any reasonable accuracy. So in those you're just buying the hype, which sometimes turns out to be real, sometimes not.
Unfortunately this also incentivizes some companies to pump themselves purely on hype so they never get valued on actual revenue and profit. Tesla is a prime example of this. If you value them as a car company we can easily compute a fair value, but that number is very low. So, instead, robots! AI! self-driving! Space! That keeps the fair value an unknown, so it can ride the wave of hype for a long time.
If the world's wealth was equally distributed, it would be pretty punishing for everyone who is commenting on this platform.
Very few people would choose the one where there's a slight chance they're in the wealth classes currently.
Not moving towards equality is just a selfish choicel.
It is. People are selfish.
Companies even more so.
[0] https://www.itamarnovick.com/intro-to-startup-anti-pattern-s...
But that would be a massacre of shareholder value. One more quarter of a ridonculous valuation is worth more than having a product that will keep Tesla viable as a car company. The idea that Grok could become a first tier AI product is more valuable than a mass market SUV, because that untested idea keeps the share price up.
Until it doesn't. If you can predict the day that happens, I want to subscribe to your newsletter.
No, they only believe that somebody else believes this shit. The entire valuation of Elon's companies is based on greater fool theory. But it notably is called greater fool, not infinite fool; we are going to run out of fools at some point...
Push out competitors and get the market, bet the market is large enough.
Are you convinced enough that you are correct to short the stock though?
The market hype is quite similar, so even if its a metaphoric commparison, it makes sense :-))
It’s a shame, because even after all these years Teslas are still state of the art in quite a few aspects (their packaging and drivetrain efficiency, among others). But here in Oz where we have a smorgasbord of cheap and excellent Chinese EVs, there are better options unless you want FSD above all else.
Visually yes, but technology still vastly mogs all but zeekr maybe.
But that doesn’t matter - most people seem to buy cars entirely by how it looks.
Tesla should be building something like the Slate pickup. Or like BYD's midrange models. Things that would actually sell.
One of the lessons of the electric car industry is that when gas car companies build electric vehicles, the vehicles suck. They're usually adapted versions of gas cars, which means too much structure and cost in the wrong places. This usually comes out as a $5000 price penalty for the electric model. Tesla was well placed to avoid that.
But they blew it.
If anything makes it more expensive it's the habit of certain manufacturers to nickel and dime buyers over every option.
- chinese companies are now exporting with 25% discount for similar quality - premium brands occupy the $80'000+ car segment with better comfort and quality - Tesla sells as many as Renault, a local European player, except the later built a strong alliance network to get scale economics.
I won't even mention the failure of the Cybertruck, which cannot even be exported to Europe due to its dangerous design.
In short: they'd rather merge now with a traditional car company while they have a high valuation, much like US West did with QWest at the end of the Internet bubble. Or else...
"Tesla lines up $30 billion credit lines as capex, AI push accelerate"
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...
Electrek's full time job is to dunk on anything Elon Musk touches.
Seeing it happen now too with college jobs is funny, because all those same people making fun of your community for complaining about lack of jobs after the factory they built their city around leaves, now are complainjng abiut the same thing. H1B yourself. Love those Indians. Anyway, everyone loses no class solidarity, the poors fighting amongst themselves like animals.
The fact that he was serious and thinks that Musk is the only tech CEO not in this for his own benefit and enrichment is what makes me believe that this is more of a cult than anything else.