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

That maybe the case but they cant have stock sitting in a field. They will have to offer good deals. Either by price cuts, finance deals or good trade in deals. The year ahead will tell.

I think that was already established here to be virtue signalling, and nothing more.

The M3 and MY are savage cars at their price point.

I was working in a luxury car company for the last 3 years. Doing Software Design and implementation…

What I found strange is the glorification of Tesla in the industry. It went outside common sense, what ever Tesla did was right and all others were wrong.

I explained that Tesla were smart an had a product in the market years in advance, but that is all it was… They had the only EV from £40k to £130k. Because they had that and leader who leveraged it and himself into genius status. This is a billionaire trick of today, they pay a social media company to make them sound like godlike intelligence… This has all the hallmarks of Seanie Fitzpatrick and Anglo Irish, maybe not as bad but the unquestioning brilliance bit was there…

So Tesla moved towards the DTC(Direct to Customer) with the Agnecy model… This was the OEM owns the vehicle and the dealer is only an agent… Who gets more money? Tesla, Who gets less? Dealer. Customer benefit, probably less as Dealers will use 20 somethings sell you a luxury car, bad after sale service.

I said that the car market is now getting flooded in Tesla space and Customers would not accept that especially if coming from a known trusted brand. It might have seemed novel and new at Tesla but very old quickly for people who spend £100k+ on a car. Those people expect service and that is why good car sales guys make good money, they know how they want to be treated and make it happen.

This is what surprises me at Tesla being so valuable… Do they have the ground break tech which gives them the competitive advantage? Musk has massively tarnished his personal brand and in places he will always be a stigma to the company.

So what you're saying is we should buy bikes? 😉

There's a strong chance your bike will be made in China by a Chinese govt owned factory

One they have to factor in they're buying an aging model which could well be obsolete soon.

Two, if they buy now and there's a price cut later they'll get shafted on depreciation. So better to wait and see

Yes and yes

Three, they have to factor in the increasingly real risk of vandalism and abuse from people who aren't fans of Elon's policies

This hasn't proven to be the case so far in Ireland, generally speaking the people who vandalise Teslas will vandalise any car so you'll never really be safe

Back in 2019 if you wanted a long range EV with good charging speeds and a great charging network behind it your choices were Tesla or nothing. Now there's plenty of other options and Tesla has to contend with the fact they can't just do whatever they want now without losing customers

This is true, however the product Tesla offers today is a family sized D-segment car with a battery capable of 350-400km and capable of charging at up to 170kW (Still above 50kW to 90%) for a price of €36,984 with a referal link. To my knowledge that's not something that any other car manufacturer offers. That great charging network you refer to is expanding as well. I think that's largely why Tesla is surviving here, price.

However, I accept this is only true for Ireland and maybe England

We'll you'd be wrong, I know several people who have opted against even giving them a test drive because of Musk, and chosen other EVs instead.

The fact that sales are plummeting across Europe pretty much proves that Musk's actions have a negative effect on sales and habe turned off potential customers.

Sales in Ireland are so far better than last year. Mainland Europeans might be more sensitive to his antics and that is their right. Car prices tend to be lower on the continent as well so that might help there

I know several people who have opted against even giving them a test drive because of Musk

I know serval people who took test drives despite him so I guess they cancel each other out.

And as we learned, there are buyers with no intention of looking at Tesla who are happy to say "I would never buy a Tesla because of Musk".

There are also buyers (on here) who couldn't buy Tesla because their wives wouldn't allow them, who still wished to claim some weird perspective on the moral high ground anyway.

There is plenty of room for all buyers in the market and while Tesla cars are absolutely brilliant at their price points, there are other very good marques with great offers as well. If you truly wish to take a principled stand you probably wouldn't buy any car to be fair - all the marques have their ugly underbellies.

Tesla sales are down in Germany as a protest against the CEO's ugly 3rd Reich gesture. Sales are up in this country because Irish people couldn't give two figs about such things and are at least honest enough to admit it without reaching for some veil of moral superiority.

As someone commented a while back on one of the other threads; which is worse - being selfish or being disingenuous?

The brand’s basically ruined now. It’s a 'Muskmobile'—forever tied to his politics: X/Twitter, his direct involvement with the Trump administration, clumsy and often deeply offensive dabbling in international relations, the DOGE nonsense, online rants and quasi-meltdowns, and the fact that he backs policies completely and utterly at odds with what people most likely to choose an EV actually care about.

Then there’s the Cybertruck, which is basically self-satirising. I don’t think that one even needs explaining.

I don’t see really any way it recovers without him being very dramatically ousted by the board—which isn’t going to happen, since he controls so much of the company. I'm no expert, but when you've a hugely overvalued company, largely based on hype and a cult like followers bubbling up the stock market, and driven by a rather controversial and erratic personality, and competition that's rapidly caught up and even surpassed them at this point, I just can't see it ending well.

But what about cabin space? Obviously the ID3 is shorter than the Model 3 but that's a difference in the type of car. The Model 3 has a long bonnet whereas the ID3 has a short stubby one. Same with the boot.

The boot space may be more usable in the ID3 it being a hatchback even if it's smaller. I'd imagine the frunk is included in the storage space comparison? None in the ID3 which isn't surprising with the short nose.

Tesla is half a meter longer, which makes a huge difference.

I saw musk describe the leak as being a breach of ethics as opposed to being totally untrue, which suggests there’s something to it. That said It would be completely unreasonable of the Tesla board to not be doing some form of succession planning in private. Most companies do.

imho the entire anti-Tesla stuff goes away with Musk, simply because the cars are too good in their market segments to ignore, and Tesla isn’t the problem, Musk is.

One thing I’d bet my house on is that the ego projects like the CT would go with musk too.

Tesla hasn’t delivered anything innovative since the Y announcement in Oct 2018 - I mean innovated, announced and then delivered to the public.

Absolutely nothing in 6-7 years, except for spin, bluff and bluster.

one thing is very clear since the M2 was initially binned 12 months ago, is that Musk has completely lost interest in selling cars.