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

there’s definitely an element of the anti-Midas touch about Musk at the moment.

If he leaves doge, the reality is that he would need to also go back to actively working in Tesla and not keep the same level of (publicly obvious) Involvement in politics in order for people to return to Tesla - and that assumes they can maintain their market leading position with the 2 cars they have -

But overall, people have short memories

there will be no domestic/retail demand for a $20-30k humanoid toy. No chance.

As for Musk’s quote - he’s lying. You know it. I know it. Everyone knows it.

We’ve been saying for years here that whenever there’s a cliff-face of a day for Tesla stock, he pulls out the smoke and mirrors - low and behold, they deliver AWFUL numbers, miles below even the Bear estimates, and right on queue there’s a leak about maaaaaybe he’s leaving doge and going back to running Tesla, just a rumour, a leak, and it’s enough to turn a -6% opening drop into a 5% close. The man is a frickin genius!

were Musk to leave Tesla and sell his stake, I think most people’s attitude towards the company would be changed overnight. As said so many times, this is very much a personal anti-musk problem, not a problem with Tesla.

Completely disagree: I think the company has lost its engineering prowess, its cars are aged, the cybertruck has failed, and the Chinese have won the EV race, and to top it off the brand has been diminished.

I reckon another few years and Stellantis will be selling e Berlingos as Teslas.

Funny thing is they let them copy their tech to get into the Chinese market. Now the Chinese are ahead in a lot of areas and the euro big brands aren't far off it at all.

With that taken into account, you look at the clown running it. Most people hate this man. That will affect sales massively when there are other options.

The new model 3 and more importantly new model y are really good cars. It won't matter if everybody hates the owner and there are other viable options.

That's the Chinese replication model though.

What a Chinese buyer wants in a vehicle and what a European buyer wants may be very different.

"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home", attributed to Ken Olsen, DEC, 1977 (just before the whole thing exploded

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers”, Thomas Watson, IBM (admittedly 1943)

Well, Tesla have bought parts for more than 10,000 obtimus. They plan to produce 5000 this year and up to 50,000 next year.

It's April now. End of year is < 8 months away. So the timeframe for seeing actual results is quite short. You can't really spoof much on that.

They must have an idea of a market for these. Why would you produce them if you haven't a hope of selling them? It may not be low-end domestic for a long while.

Just to point out the obvious, all of Teslas big promises over the last few years have amounted to pipe dreams that never come to fruition. They continuously just push out those promises. And realistically what we've gotten over the last few years is the cybertruck

FSD is possibly the biggest flop of the last decade in terms of column inches and R&D spend, versus potential future revenue stream.

the initial $12k cost 5-7 years ago might eventually end up having to be a $1k spec option, and it’s still US-only for years to come (as the China experiment failed in a matter of weeks in March).

Originally just 6% of US cars optioned FSD, and zero in other markets.

TLDR: By the time it’s ready, the market might well have passed it by.

LiDAR eh …

you’re linking these projects to the Tesla share price - the share price has now surpassed the car business case, the side projects business case (which you’ve listed), and into the “Ai something something something” business case - and even beyond that into a show of support from the Muskateers. The retail buying of the stock yesterday was bonkers

In the US, you’d be amazed how many Tesla drivers are also longterm stockholders. It’s hard to argue with someone who has made you market beating returns

I'd actually say the dislike of Musk and it's hit to Tesla has been progressive for well over a year. Just he accelerated it when he tried the act of unelected president.

Yep….not hurting Tesla at all…..

Or this…

Musk's idea, and it may be proven wrong in the end, is that humans use 2D vision with all the inference that goes with that. We don't even use paralax much at distances over a few meters. His bet is that eventually vision will be all that's required and all the extra sensors are just adding expense and complexity.
Tesla have some way to go to demonstrate better than human level safety. I read that they have of the order of 500 miles without intervention but this needs to get to something of order of 500,000 miles. We'll see what happens in Austin and any statement of where they have gotten to with non-intervention.
I kind of believe that the vision based thing will be shown to be adequate with enough training. There is the possibility that this is wrong though. "Success is one of the possible outcomes".