Is Elon Musk hurting Tesla? (Mod Note Post #1)

Same could be said for every EV maker, they've been forced to cut prices to sell cars which eats your profit margin

If every company experiences roughly the same problems, then it's a market issue. If one company suddenly experiences a drop whereas the competition is unaffected then that company screwed up

There seems to be more of the former affecting Tesla at the moment than the latter

Given a Harris presidency would possibly mean more oversight and regulation for Twitter and SpaceX/Starlink in particular, it seems clear that it wouldn't favour Musk at all who likes the whole laissez-faire style of economics

I think you've hit the nail here, while Tesla enjoy several competitive advantages, there are other areas where the competition is catching up

They've also given away some of their unique selling points, opening up the Supercharger network being the biggest one. It's certainly beneficial to me as a non Tesla owner to have access to the network, but there were definitely some sour opinions from Tesla owners when it got announced

Anecdotally, during my one and only experience of using the Supercharger network, I was getting several dirty looks from passing Tesla owners since I was effectively taking out two chargers due to the short cables. I'm going to throw out a viewpoint that some owners are a slightly bitter about the whole experience

I think they're also losing credibility on the tech side of things. FSD might have been a good selling point back in 2012 when the tech bros were all drunk on the kool aid and thought it would be done in a couple of years. Now it seems to be further away than ever

So I'm not sure they're the best "by a mile" anymore. By a few yards might be closer to the truth

Interesting article on Electrek

https://electrek.co/2024/08/08/tesla-working-through-giant-cybertruck-backlog-pretty-fast/

So it's looking like a lot of reservation holders aren't turning into eventual buyers

On one hand, I don't think this is surprising, it's a $100 refundable deposit so I think a lot of people chucked one down on the off chance they decided to buy one

However, there's a few aspects where you could point the finger at Elon for screwing up

First is the obvious overpromising and under delivering. The CT is late, significantly more expensive, shorter ranged, less efficient and has fewer features than promised. On top of this there seems to be some significant build quality issues, and also the thing doesn't seem as good at truck stuff than other electric trucks

Yeah okay, what else is new? But that leads into my second point

By setting the deposit so low, this created a false sense of demand which could impact them long term. With the 1 million reservation holders Tesla had to assume that there could be a million people looking for Cybertrucks and plan production accordingly

Now it's looking more like they'll be way over capacity and might have to cut prices, which always looks great for your flagship luxury product.

If the reservation had been set at something higher, you could argue they'd get a lot fewer reservations but much more of them would turn into real orders

I don't know if Elon chose the reservation amount, but he definitely knew about it and the potential consequences. I suspect it was a ploy to generate a lot of apparent interest upfront and boost the share price, like seemingly every other decision lately