I wonder if the Chinese will pull a Toyota (high quality, and cheap) or if they’ll end up being a different flavor
I think Tesla is still the luxury brand even in China, and that can sustain a company for a long time, but I predict it'll lose more market share for a while.
Source: https://podcasts.apple.com/no/podcast/in-good-company-with-n... (Episode from 9 Apr 2024 - interview with Elon Musk)
If I can see it then how is it that every car company hasn’t been preparing low cost EV offerings of their own?
A few are but most seem in denial. Ford is the only US one I’ve heard rumors about having something in the works.
Tesla meanwhile spent tons of capital and time on ridiculous microniche products like the cybertruck.
Me too. I was working in the German automotive industry back then, and left when I saw Tesla and China going full steam ahead on all things EV while German car makers were still pushing on diesel, and still do.
>If I can see it then how is it that every car company hasn’t been preparing low cost EV offerings of their own?
For the same reason Kodak invented the first digital camera and then shelved it to not compete with their film manufacturing business long enough for the Japanese to beat them at digital and kill them.
Big corporations are fiefdoms with vested interest to maintain their status quo, not to push to company to self-disrupt itself, meaning they'll just wait and watch someone else eats their lunch.
https://www.fleeteurope.com/en/financial-models/europe/featu...
All these companies have massive debt, low margin, need to continue to make money on ICE.l, transition to EV. To also make a profital low cost EV is insanly hard. They are struggling to develop a profitable high cost EV.
A lot of the supply chain is in China, so investing in that is pretty hard.
Because the low cost Chinese EVs is a dumping operation organised by China thanks to low cost manufacturing and large public subsidies.
You can't necessarily compete against this as a company if your government doesn't protect you.
A Chinese EV is ~$10,000 cheaper in China than it is outside of China. This is a massive advantage to Chinese vehicle manufacturers. They can scale up production using the internal market, and then use that scale to push down the external unsubsidised price.
Pretty much exactly the same as the US. An American EV is about $10,000 cheaper in the US than elsewhere. $7500 because of the rebate, and the rest in shipping and other costs.
They... have, though? As far as I know, most of the European ones have at least one more or less ready to go. Generally not on the _extreme_ low end (ie not competing with the 10k BYD), but Renault, VW and Stellantis all have models in the 20-25k range pre-subsidy due to launch in the next year. The Dacia Spring (20k) has already been out for a bit, of course.
Because they didn't believe that EVs or small cars were something that could be profitable, at least not compared to the high margin, cash cow SUVs. Instead, they did what they did the last few decades - invest into lobbying to keep emission standards relaxed. Only when Volkswagen and a fair few others got caught cheating, that business model went down the drain and suddenly they had to change.
> A few are but most seem in denial. Ford is the only US one I’ve heard rumors about having something in the works.
BMW is investing almost two billion dollars into its Spartanburg plant to produce electric versions of the X series SUVs [1].
> Tesla meanwhile spent tons of capital and time on ridiculous microniche products like the cybertruck.
Indeed. The thing is a joke on wheels... it shows that unlike SpaceX with Gwynne Shotwell, Tesla (and Twitter) don't have an "Elon handler" responsible for pushing back.
[1] https://www.press.bmwgroup.com/global/article/detail/T042217...
Space launch is not like cars or really most other products. Your customer is highly technical and highly informed and they absolutely will not launch on a rocket that doesn't meet certain design criteria and in many cases they will require the ability to review the rocket's actual design blueprints and software (with NDA in place). NASA and the DOD will demand this, full stop.
If SpaceX didn't have someone like Shotwell pretty much running the show there's no chance they'd ever get a customer beyond the low end of the satellite launch market. They'd also have trouble getting the FAA to allow them to fly, and with good reason. A rocket is basically a bomb that explodes in one direction, and many of its failure modes involve it exploding in all directions.
Elon's been great (at least in the past) at assembling teams, getting funding, and motivating people to do really hard shit. (Not sure how he'd fare today with his baggage... his brand has taken a hit.) He also knows enough about engineering to hire competent engineers. Beyond that I see little sign that he's actually good at managing or day to day operation and certainly seems no good at product design. This differs from Jobs who at least had killer intuition there. Jobs would have laughed the cybertruck out of the room.
But it's not some attempt to punish him. It's because I don't trust him to be a stable long term owner of the company that is building and servicing my car.
I could see myself buying a Chinese EV.
How does that make me a hypocrite?
I think the bottom line for many people is EVs are still not as cheap as ICE options and definitely not as convenient, yet. When that situation changes I don't know why most consumers would stick to ICE.
You can go to Alibaba and buy a $5,000 EV and then spend a similar amount to import it. It's a lot of hassle, but makes for an entertaining Youtube video.
For the mainstream, likely about 18-24 months after BYD breaks ground on their Mexican factory, which could happen any day now.
And it depends on your definition of "cheap". BYD is obviously going to start with American sized vehicles. The Internet might want the subcompact $10,000 Seagull, but we're much more likely to get something like the $35,000 Atto 3 as the cheapest model to start.
The only one you can is the EX30, but even that's more pricy than a Tesla Model 3.
The truly cheap EVs you see in Asia (eg. The lower end BYD, Zeekr, MGs) are aimed at developing markets, not developed.
And yes, plenty of Eastern European members of the EU (the ones where the cheaper end EV makers are targeting) are still developing/emerging markets - Romania, Hungary, Poland, and Bulgaria still are developing (though might not be in 10-15 years).
Higher end Chinese EVs like Polestar and Volvo (Volvo has been Geely for almost 2 decades now) are aimed at developed countries, in order to manage the brand perception.
Is anyone actually saying that?
But then, I don't expect the people thinking about (and rejecting) buying a Tesla to be the same ones that buy a Chinese car because of the price.
I’d rather drive a reliable EV from China (a country that manufactures every “American” tech staple such as iPhones) than drive a Cybertruck for example.
Hence, no hypocrisy (in the main).
The next 5 years will be painful for Tesla.
For example:
https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/china-brand-hyper-use... (archive: https://archive.ph/LlQV2)
https://uk.motor1.com/news/715871/im-l6-ev-solid-state-batte...
https://newatlas.com/automotive/im-ls-lightyear-solid-state/
That's a great solution for electric cars: Install "battery swap" walls on each gas station, and make cars allowing said battery swap (if the car "floor" is full of batteries, make it so that it is split in "packs" that can be pulled from the side to be swapped)
You won't be able to get a car which isn't connected, just like its increasingly hard to get a TV that isn't connected. The cultural acceptance of this has been driven from the trillions spent by advertising companies in double-dipping -- companies not content with making a product and selling it for a markup, they have to squeeze an extra $10 out of that $500 TV -- and that has massively weakened the security of society, both directly (Internet of Shit) and through expectations (IoT supply chains controlled by hostile agents)
- Bought Twitter with Tesla stock as collateral
- Tesla faces falling EV sales and external competition
- Unionisation pressures, declining product quality, Elon losing his reach and audience's good graces
- Stock price falling too low can trigger a margin call on his loans
- Starts actual marketing, price cuts
- Price cuts chew into profits, stock falls
- Announces "real FSD" for 100th time
- Announces "robotaxis"
- Layoffs happening
While this might end up with a small bump in the price to avoid the margin calls, it might also end up being part of a downward spiral for Tesla in the end, depending on where and what they are cutting.
It would be unfortunate to see Tesla crash after everything due to his wish to buy Twitter and I think we might see him ousted in the following year or so. Before it was "Elon is Tesla's marketing driver so we can't kick him out", nowadays it seems way less so with him being more of a detractor.
Also, although I would never own one, I truly enjoy seeing Cybertrucks out in the world; they're so novel and iconoclastic and have character that so lacks in modern mass-manufactured vehicles, but it looks like they might also be a sucking wound on the company.
There's a basic principle as old as time which goes something like "never discuss politics, religion, and sports with co-workers". The reasons are obvious.
What kind of absolute moron is going to assume the public face of a few fragile companies and insist on making broad gratuitous ignorant public statements on each and every single one of these topics, sometimes bundling a bunch of them together?
All my favourite CEOs inauthentically mirror the perceived beliefs of their customers in order to sell more products.
Even ignoring all theose expensive quality issues, some Teslas seem to be a money sink:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaModel3/comments/rl0v50/can_som...
Look, there are plenty of CEOs who's politics I don't agree with (in fact there are more than a few) but:
1. I don't go on the roof and shout that they should be "silenced" because _I_ have somehow concluded that they are idiots because their views don't align with mine
and 2. I don't judge their technology or service based on whether they support my favorite political candidate.
So if you are not purchasing a Tesla because of Musk congratulations but I suggest you also start boycotting all other CEO's who has a view you don't like, otherwise it will just make you a hypocrite.
Presenting not purchasing a Tesla, a green technology which is actually good for the planet, in the name of politics as an act of martyrdom isn't impressive.
People here hate on Musk, yet they worship a known scammer like Altman. I hope the irony is not lost on everyone.
It boggles the mind how basic mechanisms to protect workers from health and safety issues and overall abuses are often mindlessly parroted as contributing to a company's problems.
Listen, if you are incapable of treating employees as people or even lookout for their own personal safety, the problems are not caused by workers getting together to do something to save themselves.
If your company fails at this fundamental level, the failure lies in the way your company is managed.
You are the problem if you want workers to work nights and weekends. You are the problem if you depend on workers sleeping in the office or factory floors to meet arbitrary deadlines.
If your managers try to argue their company can cease to exist if it can no longer subject workers to all kinds of abuse, your company should not exist at all, and the world will be a much better place without it.
There’s still tons of activity there but to me it feels the site is in a death spiral, the team seems to just manage keeping up with bugs so there is very little useful product innovation happening, or at least it seems like that to me.
That doesn't mean that all of those changes are a positive, but the pace surely improved.
I wonder how much of the complaining comes from people that primarily used it for politics and culture war shit - their filter bubbles have been popped and they're now seeing things they didn't used to see and therefore it's "gone to hell".
I confess that when he started the downward spiral, I thought it might be part of some marketing strategy: they had to bring the other half of the population who think global warming is a hoax/unimportant to EVs in order to be truly successful. It became clear very quickly that he's just losing his sanity.
Then he starts his drunken/high/unwise posts and memes, both libelous ("pedo guy"), and financial ("Taking Tesla private") etc, he came out angry about people protecting themselves from covid, and of course his circle, just like people on social media, shifted, and egged him on more and more. His descent spiraled and eventually the lawyers and accountants couldn't get him out of it when it came to Twitter. It's destroyed his finances, lost his reputation, sucked his time, and he entered the spiral of conspiracy and hatred.
We've all read about people who have committed career suicide on twitter, or at least caused themselves major problems (Justine Sacco comes to mind, but James Gunn too), but Musk is a category on his own. I look forward to a detailed biography.
It's bizarre how far that guy has fallen after being one of the greatest corporate fundraisers and hype men of all time. I guess some personalities don't respond well to being an unaccountable mega billionare.
That he'd turn that leverage to X though, I didn't like to see. Even as a Musk fan, it looks like a functional alcoholic buying a bar. Twitter probably does have a lot of military value as a propaganda vector, but it's hard to see how he could be an improvement over Jack Dorsey without ending up in conflict with the military industrial complex that pays for that propaganda.
How much of his immense wealth and power has he used to help the environment in ways that don't enrich himself?
As for enriching himself by helping... I don't think there's a perfect solution there. The Rockefeller-Gates system of making money in one industry and funding purely philanthropic ventures in another comes with its own moral hazards. For profit work in a field of public interest comes with different ones. Both are preferable to taking no interest in the public good IMHO. Personally, if I was a billionaire I'd try to fund ventures that are in the public interest and also have paying customers, it promotes a certain kind of honesty that would be important to me, but I think any oligarch that claims to be trying to help should be given the benefit of the doubt, societal incentives are just so much more aligned that way.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...
If I could I’d accumulate Tesla starting next year as fed rate cuts kick in.
He's rarely been more than half accurate on any of his economic predictions.
... I mean, advocating for protectionism could hardly be described as a "hard free market" position.
Protectionism doesn't fit neatly on a left-right scale (both sides have indulged from time to time) but it's clearly not a free-market position.
Price has to go down before it rises back. The rivals such as Fisker, Rivian and Lucid are the ones which should be worried at this point.
It's hard to believe that the self-driving tech will develop well at this rate.
This is impressively wrong. German coal power production in 2023 was at it lowest in 60 years.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-coal-power-pro....
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1413285/electricity-impo...
The graphs are clear: coal shrunk from 33% to 26% of electric power generation last year. Some people expected an increase. They were wrong and the greens were right.
This is in part due to the fact that Germany is now able to import more energy compared to 2022 which saw a decrease in gas availability but also a reduction in nuclear energy production in France due to technical issues.
The question is just exactly how large.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...
But for the world the total use of fossil fuels is going to keep growing long-term unless we mass switch to nuclear, which is unlikely. My 2c.
I live in a manufacturing city in .de btw, and the "badly hit" manufacturers are hiring.
Nuclear is expensive to build [0]. It is expensive operate, even with the massive subsidies of insurance and waste deposit costs by the taxpayer.
On top of that Germany has no exploitable Uranium deposits any more (after delivering Uranium to the USSR for decades, mine was closed 1990), so Germany would need to import nuclear fuel, e.G. from Russia (as the US does [1]). I don't think depending on Russia for energy security is a good idea.
[Edit] Hard coal and ignite usage is down https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c...
[1] https://kyivindependent.com/german-customs-detains-ship-load...
This is incorrect. Uranium is quite common and could be supplied by Canada, Australia, Kazakstan, Niger and a few other countries.
But it doesn't matter. It's not possible to lead a factual discussion on nuclear energy in Germany. Since the 1970s it has been mainly an emotional / ideological matter.
What is incorrect about "for example from Russia, like the US imports uranium from Russia"?
U.S. nuclear power plants imported about 12% of their uranium from Russia in 2022, compared to 27% from Canada and 25% from Kazakhstan, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
And a bill was passed in 2023 to ban imports from Russia - https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-house-passes-bill-bannin...
For example a nuclear power plant has employed 700 people. A solarpark does not need a lot of FTE employees to operate (+ low maintanance).
That does not include waste deposit costs for hundreds of years and real insurance costs without subsidies by tax payers.
But electric car sales are up year-on-year; who cares if one car brand isn't?
> and we are introducing huge tariffs on electric vehicles from China
This may or may not happen; it's not clear that the impact will be huge in the long-run if it does, as the manufacturers will likely just set up shop in Europe (similar to how European manufacturers build a lot of their US-market cars in the US to avoid punitive US tariffs).
It's kind of unclear just how much this organization actually is Greenpeace or not. That being said, extremist political parties and movements (e.g., UKIP), are so often financed by Russia as a form of covert ops that I wouldn't be surprised to find that they were a significant backer of Green Peace proper as well.
Sometimes what you need is to trim the fat.
If the company is doing mass layoffs on top of that then it pretty much always means financial trouble. And these layoffs tend to affect the talent that you want to keep.
When the big tech companies have been doing mass layoffs, the vibe amongst the workers and on here has always mostly been: but they're making so much profit!
The reality is that an astute and strategic CEO/board will do layoffs as a last resort in order to steer a company through troubling times ahead. Tesla forecast a large drop in 2024 EV sales, which is now happening. They didn't do the layoffs until their forecast turned out true.
Now if Tesla is really alreadly slicing that close to the bone (like Microsoft when it used to cut 10% every year), then it could be detrimental. But if I had to bet w/o any inside knowledge, I'd guess the 10% cut is still not going to hurt that much, and could be a boost.
It's a different story though when a labor intensive manufacturer with a 50% projected growth is laying off people...
Yes, every time you starve you need to do it.
This layoff, like most, seems more driven by top line sales and stock performance than individual worker performance. I doubt 10% of Tesla's workforce just happened to turn into "fat" shortly after a brutal earnings report.
Most EVs are charged at home (great!) but any extended trip does require charger access and the situation in the US is quite patchwork except for Superchargers. Also chargers are needed for taxi/rental services and for apartment/condo dwellers who likely won't be able to plug in at home.
China and Europe (to a lesser extent) have made much bigger inroads than the US. I wonder why.
I feel like electric vehicles are great for homeowners to drive around town, but there are some hurdles to conveniently use them for cross-country trips.
If you can identify these people, then getting rid of them is the right move. But it's super hard to figure out who they are.
This excuse is deployed in every layoff but rarely mentions that if true, most of the people losing jobs should be the managers who weren’t doing their jobs. I will also note that most of the people I have seen not contributing positively were responding to the incentives management had set, or coping with policies and resource cuts. Every time it’s been a large group of people, they were working hard at something counterproductive some VP or consulting company came up with, not sitting around watching Netflix.
Learned helplessness is a critical concept in organizational psychology. people eventually learn it's not worth pushing for things in the org, and stop caring and checkout.
Demming was all about how the system creates outcomes, and this is a common outcome.
This has nothing to do with that.
There's huge demand issues as Teslas are getting really old and nothing useful is in the pipeline (and no that childish truck doesn't count).
But some people aren't obvious slackers. They might take a simple task ('you're in charge of logistics within the warehouse'), and make it far more complex than necessary ('we're gonna need 3 teams of logistics workers who will move parts only in a clockwise direction as directed by this homegrown custom designed work scheduling system, which by the way we're gonna need a team of 10 coders to maintain').
Those people aren't slackers. In fact, to everyone else around them, they look like the best workers who achieve the most. But, by overcomplicating tasks, they in fact pour resources down the drain when they solve a simple problem the hard way.
Sometimes these workers are overcomplicating tasks deliberately (an excuse to become a team lead), sometimes they have misunderstood the requirements, and sometimes because they failed to research or take advice from others on a simpler/easier/cheaper/faster approach.
Either way, firing them is good for the business, but usually bad for morale (because the people near them see a hard worker being fired and become scared about their own position, often leading to the real best people jumping ship).
So, the common approach is to do mass firings every ~5 years, because the morale hit is lower to do it all in one go.
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2024/02/13/chancery-finds-te...
In 2018, it was restructuring.
In 2019, it was "profitability cuts".
In 2022, it was "elon has bad vibes about economy".
Now, in 2024, Tesla is 1.5x the employee size than in 2022, but does 2x the employees cut, after failing to reach targets and amid high market pressure.
Do the math.
This, in turn, impacts Elon's securitization of Twitter. It might also impact his hold on Tesla as well.
Also aligns with overall anti-EV push by big-oil.
https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Aelonmusk%20woke%20broke&...
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-lay-off-more-10-0948...
