Yeah, I always got the impression that, the closer you get to the "epicenter" of Tesla's initial operations, the stronger the anti-Tesla sentiment. Which initially seems weird. After all, shouldn't people be rooting for their "home team"?

But if you're doing you're commute and you're stuck behind a Tesla testing FSD beta, I can imagine being annoyed. I can see how that almost feels as if the company banking profits that you and other drivers have to pay for. That is a point that is hard to see for someone living outside of any FSD Beta hotspot.

> Ford went from 0 to 3 million cars in less than 10 years. Without electricity, robots, or fancy technology.

Also without, initially, competition or regulation. And with some other benefits as well. From Bill Bryon, One Summer, which I happen to be reading at the moment:

> In 1914, Ford introduced an eight-hour day, forty-hour week and doubled average salaries to $5 a day in what is often presented as an act of revolutionary magnanimity. In fact, it was necessitated by the costly waste of high employee turnover – a breathtaking 370 per cent in 1913. At the same time, Ford established its notorious Sociological Department, employing some two hundred investigators who were empowered to look into every aspect of employees’ private lives – their diet, hygiene, religion, personal finances, recreational habits and morals. Ford’s workforce was full of immigrants – in some periods as many as two thirds of his employees were from abroad – and Ford genuinely wished to help them live healthier, more satisfying lives, so his sociological meddling was by no means entirely a bad thing. However, there was almost nothing Henry Ford did that didn’t have some bad in it somewhere, and the Sociological Department certainly had a totalitarian tinge. Ford employees could be ordered to clean their houses, tidy their yards, sleep in American-style beds, increase their savings, modify their sexual behaviour, and otherwise abandon any practice that a Ford inspector deemed ‘derogatory to good physical manhood or moral character’. [...] Ford also hired black men, though he nearly always gave them the hottest, dirtiest and most exhausting jobs.

Not trying to dismiss Ford's achievements here. It's just that nobody can replicate Ford today. If scaling car production was such an easy thing, and Teslas are of such terrible quality, competition such as Lucid and Rivian should be having an easy time. Yet that's not what we're seeing at all.