- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
Will he really need customers much longer? I mean it seems like he can just have any government agency replace their fleet with his trash in the name of “efficiency”.
He tied the financing of his loan to buy Twitter with Tesla shares, if they tank it pressures the Saudis to call in the billions they loaned him for the purchase. He’d survive, but it would embarrass him which would be funny.
Even worse is, he can use the government to sabotage the competition, as Russia and Hungary did.
The thing is, if this follows the Hungary script, Musk is going to become replaceable.
He doesn’t command votes like Trump does, but is rich enough to be a threat. Look up Simicska.
Apparently a big part of Tesla’s business is selling carbon credits to other automakers… Which relies on them having a certain number of EV sales. If they drop below a threshold, then they can’t sell those credits anymore.
so we can kill government workers and important people easier? i think elon Musk funded the failed trump assassinations /j
Pretty soon the only government workers left will be Trumpler’s goons. I’m ok with them dying in swastikars.
Nazism has no place.
I would like a Chinese EV, but the capitalists are enforcing protectionism.
I would too, but you have to understand why the USA is blocking these cars from coming in. The cost of these cheap EVs are not based off of supply and demand. Its not even this cheap because of effectiveness or efficiencies. Its from the CCP subsidies. The CCP wants to dump on the competition in efforts to kill off anyone making a car, then start jacking up the price after they have market share.
So capitalism.
State capitalism, but yes.
We don’t want that evil capitalism here in the US. No sir.
Yes, we get to prioritize USA industries vs China’s. I’m down for that.
“Our chineze vs their chinese.”
I’m also pretty sure their security / safety standards are pure ass. I barely trust our automakers, I sure as shit don’t trust the fucking CCP
I live in Taiwan and we call those China made cars tofu cars. Their domestic cars are terrible. So many of them are going out of business because the the CCP lowered down the subsidies.
I won’t be caught dead in one.
That’s only half the truth though. The main reason why they’re so cheap is because they manufacture everything in the supply chain themselves. Everything. They have their own mines for their resources, they make their own batteries (which they’ve been doing for ages), they make their own electronics, they make their own software etc. They also have a completely different mindset. For them they are rolling electrical devices with some software. They don’t need the knowhow of the traditional car manufacturers. And then they bought the Audi designer along with his entire team to make the cars look good.
Edit: I’m talking about BYD. The rest is pretty much irrelevant.
Yes, there are efficiencies since all the tech is pretty close, but that pales in comparison to the sheer dollars injected into the industries. 231 billion dollars. Compare that to the 2nd closest investment into a car manufacturer which is the USA at 30 billion.
Each one of these new 500+ car manufacturers produced cars at a loss. Not because efficiencies. Because of subsidies. In some cases, not even sold at all. https://youtu.be/vplPmxVRcnk
Here in Taiwan, we get unfiltered China news.
My dude the US subsidizes the shit out of its electric car industry. When someone brings up “supply and demand” and just tries to pretend that the economy is exactly what they learned in their econ101 class.
They are doing the tarrifs on Chinese EVS because (1) they can’t compete on price and (2) the Chinese EVS are just a superior product.
You’re right on China though. They are just doing exactly what the US has done for decades. It’s just that the US doesn’t like having to actually compete with another country. So instead of actually making better and cheaper cars they instead just decide to tell the American people “nah, looks like you’re just being a shit Tesla”
The US loves to say “free market” but notice how they don’t allow a free market to force their industry to actually innovate and compete.
China is not “cheating” by subsidizing it’s industry. That’s literally just standard shit every government does. Thats just an excuse. America is subsidizing it’s EVs too. They just have worse EVs.
Trump is all about removing regulations and stated “for every new regulation, 10 must be revoked.” During his first term it was 2. He is moving the market that way, and boy oh boy is it going to suck for the consumer and small companies that want to compete.
So much to unpack here but I’ll do my best to address everything you’re saying here.
1- Chinese cars can’t compete in price: yes because China has been dumping subsidies into the market, inflating the supply. China dumped 231 billion dollars into EVs from 2009 to 2023. Over 500 electric car brands were created due to this injection. There is only are less than 100 left after China stopped the subsidies.
2- The Chinese EV are a superior product: which one of the 500 car companies are you referring to? outside ofthe top China brands (Geely, BYD), they all sorta suck.
China is doing is state sponsored “dumping”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) which artificially reduces prices to gain market share and has a negative effect on the industry. Every country in the world, not just the US, has an anti dumping policy, including China.
While we the consumer would love to spend pennies on the dollar for an electric cars, the effect is only temporary and when we start losing car companies due to this practice, prices always, ALWAYS, are higher after we lose competition.
Anti dumping policies is not hindering free market. The second you inject 231 billion dollars of government subsidies into an industry, is the second it no longer becomes a free market.
Yes, the USA has also has given subsidies. In total about 30 billion dollars. A drop in the bucket on the 231 billion the CCP has injected.
Would love to know where you’re getting your numbers from for the US and China. I surely hope it’s not just the AI response on top of Google. But that’s what it seems like. You’d literally have to write a whole research paper to get a good comparison because these are heavily consumer based subsidies within each country and China just has a much larger market it sells to heavily inflating the credit because of population. Also, you didn’t list a date range for your 30 Billion number.
You also have to account for state level subsidies and tax credits in the US in addition to Federal programs, grants, loans, etc. Would love to read a paper on this if you have a source.
But, even using your numbers 30 Billion (something I don’t think is accounting for State or EV infrastructure spending; but again, I’d like to see a source) is not a “drop in the bucket”. It’s 13% of what you listed for China over 14 years. Interestingly enough China also outselling the US in terms of market share. Comparing the subsidies of a country that owns the plurality of the market to one that does not is silly. Subsidies are going to increase WITH sales. China is selling significantly more cars. You’d have to compare the subsidies and adjust them based on units sold.
Doing some “Google AI response results” myself China is selling about 8x more EVs than the US (in 2023).
Hmmm. 8x30 = 240 billion. Weird. Again, I’m not taking my numbers seriously but I’m not taking your numbers seriously either because you didn’t sight a source, adjust for units sold, or give a date range for your US numbers.
But you’re just not comparing this correctly. You HAVE to adjust for units sold. Which you are not.
You can fellate Winnie the Pooh on your own time. It comes with its own whole set of problems.
Edit: Come at me tankies. You’re morons for giving a single dollar to the CCP.
Nothing quite says “American Capitalist bootlicker” more than proudly paying more for an inferior product while complaining that it’s the Communists fault.
8% drop in car sales isn’t great but I think the article is overselling the idea that the company is straight up dying. (Sadly) Most people just don’t make a connection between how they spend their money and the politics of the people they prop up.
They’re definitely dying in Europe. The YoY sale numbers are horrific.
It’s close to 50% drop in Europe. The EU has 500 million people. They may not know it yet but Tesla is on hospice care.
Plus of course if the US ever does impose import fees on Europe the obvious response would be to impose import fees on Tesla’s. It’s a luxury item so the general public probably won’t hugely care, and it will hit the only person really to blame for all of this without unnecessarily targeting other US businesses. You know, how import fees are supposed to be used
Tesla is definitely dying unless they can turn this around quickly.
Surplus capacity is expensive, and I bet they are already operating at a loss. And turning around a bad reputation is hard.
Their models are dated, the cheap Tesla is cancelled, the Cybertruck is a catastrophic fiasco, and the model Y has already lost a lot of popularity, so even a new mode already said to be mostly a facelift, is unlikely to make a huge difference.
The drop in sales in January in EU is 50%, and they are losing market share in China and USA too. So I think the actual drop is higher now than 8%.
Note that for Nissan a 5% drop last year was called catastrophic!! And their survival is also questioned, and they are way bigger than Tesla.To your list add that new Tesla sales are also competing against an increasing number of Tesla owners who now want to divest themselves of the brand.
More used Teslas on the market will only push down the market rates and thus profits of new Teslas even further.
Good point, the article states a Tesla that only had 10k miles on it, had dropped in value by about 40%!!
With such low mileage cars on the used market so cheap, Tesla will absolutely be competing against their own used cars.Plus of course people are more likely to be trying to buy used cars (of any brand) or not buying any cars at all given the current economic situation. Which of course is also elon’s fault, at least partly.
Nobody at Tesla headquarters voted to alienate their customer base. No board meeting decided to turn their electric car company into a political lightning rod.
This is technically not true. The board keeps Elon Musk on as CEO of Tesla, and they granted him the biggest bonus package ever, while he was already very controversial and clearly was losing his mind, because they thought he would be able to make them money.
You are 100% correct. They knowingly doubled down on him. They can all ride his coattails straight to hell.
You’re right, that’s not just technically untrue. The board voted with their wallet, by giving him even more money than ever, so he could continue doing what he is doing. The people on the board wouldn’t give a shit if only Nazis buy their cars, as long as there’s enough of them to keep buying.
Well joke’s on them though, because it seems Musk has found a way to tap US citizens directly, so he probably doesn’t even care much about Tesla anymore now that it is failing.
I think his worth is mostly attached to Tesla stocks still.
It is and if he loses that wealth I’m pretty sure he is getting kicked to the street. He has no other skills that aren’t readily available by folks who aren’t utterly unstable drug addled dipshits.
About a week ago I saw a brand new model Y (still had the 90 day temporary plate) sporting one of those “bought before elon…” stickers.
Temporary plates could be someone moving out of state. Are you sure it was the latest model?
They all look the same I would never be able to tell myself
Man, talk about copium.
Knowing how badly Tesla has managed their supply chain, it’s possible they paid for it in 2016.
They’re not paid until delivery
I didn’t know till …tomorrow.
Elon has always been a terrible person, but he was once focused on things that society actually needed, like electrifying transportation to avoid climate collapse.
He seems to have gone sharply downhill into total insanity by taking ketamine while locking himself in a rightwing echo chamber. It’s the perfect storm of dissociating from reality.
Elon has always been a terrible person
The problem with Elon is he’s been provably an idiot for the past 25 years.
The first thing I ever heard about Musky is that back in 2000-ish he wanted PayPal to take their infra, throw out all the Linux/BSD in use, and move everything to Windows NT.
Anyone who was even remotely IT adjacent in that era can come along and tell you how utterly moronic that idea is.
Anytime I’ve ever heard him blather on about some stupid shit that doesn’t exist except in his delusions or talk about, well, ANYTHING technical or specialized all I was ever able to think of is that he got lucky that Thiel didn’t drain all of his blood and leave his corpse in a ditch.
From a musk pov it’s 100% logical. Money.
Why? Win2k was quite stable. Stable enough to use it in warships.
Linux/Bsd is not free. When you use it in your company you want pro support. That support comes free with windows enterprise licenses. So the cost difference there is almost non existent. And, MS being M$, they would’ve sweetened the deal. A lot. Just think of the marketing worth of this deal for MS.
And lastly: Who is cheaper? A good linux admin or a windows guy?
So 90% of the stability at 50% of the cost. That’s not a bad deal.
If that was true, Linux would have died a long ago.
Potential ketamine addiction aside, he’s just gravitated toward where he sees more money and unfluence for himself. He wanted the prestige of being a leader in tech, so he used his influence and money to build SpaceX. Then he bullied his way into the ownership of Tesla, desperately wanting to appear as a genius to libertarian and liberal minds alike, but he’s never been any less of an authoritarian. When Trump rose to power the first time, he sat and watched and along with the rest of the Silicon Valley Moguls, he began to move himself into positions of influence with populist politicians, borrowing the evangelical right’s playbooks and throwing himself into the spotlight no matter the reason. He pivoted off his falsified image as some kind of American self-starter into MAGA rhetoric.
Musk doesn’t have lofty ideals or any real focus on the betterment of society. I don’t think he ever did. He just wanted to be a real life Tony Stark and command the influence that came with it. Now he doesn’t need to, because he’s got Trump in his back pocket and is mostly untouchable by any normal means.
I’ll never stop laughing when Tony Stark treats Musk as a nobody.
Iron Man II, "Yeah. Later. Blown. Off. Bet Musk is still proud of that cameo.
“I think that’s a good idea.”
“You do? Then we’ll make it work.”
Sick burn
He has single handedly ruined the reputation of ketamine… Despite being pretty tolerable at the right dosage (doctors literally give it to children for surgery). Kind of a bummer.
However, long term (or even like medium term) ketamine abuse can completely fuck your bladder up. I hope he starts pissing blood and it feels like passing a kidney stone every time.
That’s in addition to what that kind of continuous dissociation will do to the way a person thinks and behaves. And with someone like him, in the position he’s in and how he thinks, nothing good comes of it. Dude already thinks everyone else is an NPC.
probably his upbringing. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/26/elon-musk-peter-thiel-apartheid-south-africa
some may turn out ok, but many people with shitty parents turn out shitty as adults.
Plenty of people have shitty parents and turn out fine. That’s no excuse at all.
Dr Dorothy Bishop resigned from the Royal Society back in November 2024 because of Musk. Everybody knew. And being an FRS is a huge, huge deal to a British scientist.
Not as big a deal as virtue signaling to that particular British scientist, naturally, but it’s quite important to the other ones I’m sure.
Of course the fascists invented a dismissive phrase to label anyone objecting against them.
Damn, your temp plates are 90 days? Where do you live?
Oregon
Ours (Vegas) are only 30 days
Wow. Our DMV didn’t get us our plates for for almost 2 months, and from what I’ve heard, that’s faster than usual.
A more concise headline is “Nobody wants a Swastikar”
Well VW is still around. Maybe Teslas will be classic cars in 80 years.
/s: They will all self immolate.
VWs never randomly caught fire. And also they don’t look like if Transformers could somehow breed, but had an abortion.
This.
And VWs were survivors, crossing the desert under air cooling and repairable usually with a pair of pliers and a screwdriver. The rear bumper can hold a grown man perched back there manually pulling the throttle if you bust the linkage … or, so I … hear.
I worry Teslas wouldn’t survive long enough to become classics. They don’t seem to be survivors.
/63+71+71super here.
I checked on where Edsel prices have gone. They mostly match inflation. Not a worthwhile investment as a car that people are interested in decades later because it’s an infamous failure.
I believe this is the part where we get sued for not buying his cars.
Like companies getting sued for not advertising on Twitter
That was the joke, yes
I think he would be relieved to get rid of Tesla if someone would buy it. The full self-driving promise was always a matter of interpretation, and the cars they build are more expensive symbols of status than practical products. Tesla can’t compete with global EV manufacturers, that’s a Damocles sword waiting to fall.
SpaceX is where the money is now, and all the electric innovation Tesla did can be used for something else.
Musk is getting $8 million each day from the US government to destroy the US government. He was given $44 billion to destroy Twitter. He’s not worried about money.
The full self-driving promise was always a matter of interpretation
There’s nothing to interpret. It does not fully drive itself.
@OutlierBlue @TeamAssimilation but it will next year, right? Let’s just ignore all those times it’s veered into the wrong lane or onto train tracks or whatever, it’s fine. Next year, next year, next year.
And Mars in a decade.
Starship was supposed to be doing trips to mars each year by last year. Instead it has sometimes managed to not explode on a suborbital trajectory. But of course regulations are what hold it back…
And he wonders why NASA turned him down for bringing those astronauts back…
SpaceX turns the impossible into late
Musk is neither a Tesla nor an Edison; he is a Barnum.
Not safely anyway.
Fortunately for him, and unfortunately for us, he undoubtedly has full control over whichever department defines the word “safely”.
Only usable for federal highways, shit could still be banned by the DMVs or equivalents which would basically be a death knell for it.
Don’t give him any ideas!
I’m sure he already calls his lawyers every day at 3 AM while half blitzed on K to pitch exactly that
its not the death of the electric car. Its the death of a bad one.
All cars are bad. Combustion or not.
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There is a Tesla New Buyers delivery checklist you can find online that was written by a group of Tesla enthusiasts. Just a few years ago one of the items on the checklist was “Make sure you can put the car in Park (and that it stays parked)”. (Ref: https://driveteslacanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Tesla-Model-3-Delivery-Checklist.pdf).
I’m not away of any other car where this was something people had to check before delivery — apparently it was a bit of a common problem for a time. That seems absolutely crazy to me, and a major failure of QA as it poses a significant safety hazard.
Actually, no. Tesla always had huge QA issues. Panels not fitting on the cyber truck really isn’t the first time that stuff just doesn’t quite fit on teslas
My buddy messed up and spilled a drink in his model X. When pulling up the carpet and panels to clean up he found a bunch of blue painter’s tape where there were supposed to be wiring harnesses and screws. You’ll note that blue painters tape is designed to be temporary, and will not last more than a year or two.
Nope. Tesla Model 3 Ranked Last In German TUV Reliability Report https://www.carscoops.com/2023/12/tesla-model-3-ranked-last-in-german-tuv-reliability-report/
2-3 years Tesla Model 3 14.7% defect rate
German TUV Reliability Report
Those numbers are very misleading, as it includes rust on the brakes.
EVs don’t use their brakes as often due to regen, and vehicles with one pedal driving where you can come to a complete stop without using the brakes, use it even less.
A large portion of these failures are from some rust appearing from lack of using the brakes. Using the brakes more frequently, or intentional aggressive braking would clear the rust, but it’s a fail if it’s there when you take it in.
That’s not to say there aren’t other problems, but it’s not as bad as the dead last 14.7% makes it look, and it’s not wholly about poor quality as the report implies, as that isn’t a quality problem.
Tesla has some of the better one pedal driving and more aggressive regen set ups as well, so the brakes are used less.
Breaks are kinda important.
Sure, but a little rust because they weren’t used isn’t a problem, comes off when you use them, but is an instant fail. The brakes are not damaged or broken.
All brakes rust when not used. If you drove around in the rain today, then didn’t drive for a few days, you’ll probably have a little rust on your brakes. You go for a drive and then it’s gone.
If you take your car in for a pre-inspection report, and they see some rust on the brakes, they will tell you to drive it around a bit using the brakes a lot before taking it in to be inspected.
it’s not an actual problem, and not indicative of a poor quality vehicle.
Edit: To be clear - the drivers should be using the brakes more to clear them so it doesn’t build up to excessive amounts which may be a problem at some point, but the test fails them well before it’s an actual problem.
Edit: Also, where the model 3 failed a lot outside of the brakes was the front suspension. There are legitimate problems with the front suspension on the older Model 3s. Those are legitimate fails and are a quality issue (there’s even a service bulletin for at least one of the problems)
Someone downvoted you. Just wanted to say, that said person is a moron.
Oh it’s more than just someone, that post has -3 and the other one is -6.
Talking about Tesla against the narritive/hivemind always results in this, especially when it’s truthful things.
Dunno, if it’ll blast marches …
That’s @Daojoan@mastodon.social, for those who can follow Mastodon handles. Worth following!
Thanks. I’m still figuring all this stuff out.
We all know what’s going to happen, Elon just going to get a “government contract”, where he can make it so that teslas will be the main vehicle manufacturer for government.
Fuck. What if Elon is just gonna start making weapons? Didn’t he flaunt a flamethrower for his lame company years ago?
Boring*
I hope so. Any one who signs up for trump’s military deserves to burst into flames
Well not nobody. Turns out there are some Nazis. /s
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Looking through the comments, this is a troll account
I’ve seen an increase in new Teslas where I live, not a decrease.
Yeah but that’s the logic that the climate change denies also used.
“Global warming can’t be real, as it snowed yesterday”
Fair point, I live in a red county so more is kind of expected I suppose
Sounds like a creepy place
You’re not wrong, it’s infuriating to see more of them