I shamefully admit I almost pulled the trigger on a Tesla Model S Plaid back in 2021 or 2022. Flush with a shit ton of cash, but fortunately I was reading reports of production build quality issues, many recalls, and ultimately pulled back my deposit.
Looking back at it. The one decision I have no regrets on.
That’s the part I never understood. Even if you weren’t a Musk fan boy and before Musk showed his true colors, Telsa has always, ALWAYS been shit quality. I remember back in 2015, or so, there was a video of someone finally getting their Telsa and it had a massive crack running the length of the driver side A-pillar, yet they just ignored it.
If you were an EV early adopter, Tesla is the only brand that delivered the range.
So, they were the only game in town for a lot of buyers.
Not nearly as big a problem now. Tesla has real competition which is why sales are crashing.
Tesla is basically a case study in top down engineering. Radical ideas promised by marketing, sometimes good and sometimes bad, executed in a massive fucking rush which results in tons of build quality and general delivering on promises issues.
Which only worked at first because they were a start up. At that point many people will accept the early adopter woes, but Tesla never quite matured out of it.
yep. They rested on their laurels, thinking their success of being first would always be success.
and now the big automakers have their own electric cars, that are properly built, and damn cheap compared to tesla prices.
and the first tesla musk had any design input on was the cybertruck, which is nothing more than the fever dream of an edgy emotionally stunted 13 year old, and built to about the same quality as you would expect from one
It was more to do with hubris. Scaling up production of anything as complex as a car is going to result in quality issues unless your production engineers are world-class. Tesla thought they were smarter than the carmakers, and learned early in the process that that was bullshit. Then Musk came in and relied on hype rather than engineering to move units.
I’ll have to be honest and admit back when I was in high school or so, I was enthusiastic about electric cars and his seemed like some of the best. He was also opening up the charging standards so that there could be a mixed playing field. Back then, I was likely ready to dismiss small critiques as the retaliation of the fossil fuel industry.
God I hate old me.
All your reasons were valid though. Teslas were the best electric cars for a long time, probably not so anymore. Tesla as a brand has done good things, like you say opening up their charging standard which is superior to all the other competitors.
Personally, I wouldn’t get a Tesla because they are sort of like the apple of car companies, e.g. anti-consumer and anti-repair. Plus, Musk owning it is another big negative.
Just like model ts were the best for a long time because they were the only ones.
tesla just had good marketing, while thier TESLAS have been lacking QC for quite a while.
You’re always supposed to hate or be embarrassed by the old you; that means you learned. It means growth. It’s a good thing.
Take it from an old man, at a certain point you will grow beyond having to feel “embarassed” by your former self, because your ego won’t be tied to it.
Old man here as well. I follow the doctrine of non-repudiation: I did a lot of stupid things when I was young. But I own them and don’t hate my former self for doing them. Mind you, I didn’t hurt anyone (except emotionally, and not intentionally) and wasn’t a criminal. If that were different, maybe I’d have to process it differently.
Probably not that much different tbh.
I think you can understand something without embracing it or condoning it. I did a few bad things, it’s understandable that kids with that age and upbringing will, as long as you own what you did, put right what you can and atone for the rest, there’s no need to hate yourself.
The Roadsters were well-made. That was when production volumes were low and Musk hadn’t bought the company yet.
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Sure am glad I couldn’t afford one of those things back when I wanted one.
Right? Who knew that making a product that half of the population wants to buy and then making your brand based around the exact half of the population that lives in contempt of this product instead was a bad idea?
1/3. These cretins are a loud, fascist minority.
If I were to drive one, I would never let such circumstances push me to sell.
I’m so glad that I lost my job in 2016 and had to cancel my Tesla Model 3 reservation. When I eventually got a better paying job in 2017 I played it safe -assumed I could lose it at any moment- and bought a Chevrolet Spark which has served me well.
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I hope they lose money because they bought a 1939 Volkswagan with an electric motor on it, and then claimed
Well how was I meant to know the man who lives on the internet 24/7 and can’t shut up about his opinions of women, non-whites, fascism, lgbt, and lies like he needs his pants to be warm for the winter, was somehow a bad guy? I bought a cool sticker, so I’m absolved of giving him any money :^)
These people bought them because they thought he was a real life Tony Stark, especially the early models and Cybertrucks. I consider everyone driving in one a useful idiot for Trump and Musk.
Hell yeah, I’ve been wanting a model 3 for years. Glad politics will bring that dream to a reality 😀 lets go electric vehicles!!! One less gas guzzler on the road.
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Same people proudly claiming the market is self regulating shocked when the market responds to them being openly fascist cunts.
The brand is forever damaged. Sell while you can.
I feel bad for Nikola Tesla having his name associated with all this nonsense. Not even death let him escape from rich assholes taking credit for the work of others.
if Nikola Tesla weren’t a eugenicist i’d agree with you
The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man’s new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit. The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct. Several European countries and a number of states of the American Union sterilize the criminal and the insane. This is not sufficient. The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.
Oof, that’s a tough read.
It was a common view, especially among progressives, from the late 1890s to the start of WW2. The temperance movement embraced eugenics, so did the family-planning movement, and through it, early feminism.
Eh, I don’t buy this. There were always dissenters and weirdos and people knew differently. There were trans pioneers. There were vegans. There were abolitionists. Not everyone was like that.
Tesla wasn’t a biologist, let’s leave it at that. Humanity’s greatest biological strength is their adaptability, which requires variety. Eugenicism is inherently disadvantageous to humanity because it reduces their ability to adapt and respond to environmental threats. A counter to that would be E.O. Wilson, see Half Earth, a short read that emphasizes biodiversity.
Eugenics only makes sense to cowardly people who are afraid of being treated how they would treat others. It’s a bad idea to Cavendish Banana Hapsberg people (oh and btw eugenics is deeply tied to incest kinks, see Elon and Trump).
Again, this is thinking that is pretty intuitive if you aren’t bloodthirsty and pathetic
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People say that because they support it and they don’t think it’s a big deal. There were always anti-eugenicist movements (and always people opposed to fucking children, and having slaves, and even eating meat or going to war, and other morally shitty things justified with this excuse). That’s literally how the movements against these things came about - people throughout time have been against them. You just discount them because you align yourself with the other side, for some reason.
Tesla was not mentally well. But he had the power to make weapons, including a so called “Death Beam” https://www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_mispapers.html
And look, Trump connection:
After a three-day investigation, Trump’s report concluded that there was nothing which would constitute a hazard in unfriendly hands, stating:
“His [Tesla’s] thoughts and efforts during at least the past 15 years were primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character often concerned with the production and wireless transmission of power; but did not include new, sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results.[233]”
In a box purported to contain a part of Tesla’s “death ray”, Trump found a 45-year-old multidecade resistance box.
https://www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_mispapers.html
An operation code-named “Project Nick” was heavily funded and placed under the command of Brigadier General L. C. Craigie to test the feasibility of Tesla’s concept. Details of the experiments were never published, and the project was apparently discontinued. But something peculiar happened. The copies of Tesla’s papers disappeared and nobody knows what happened to them.
The morning after the inventor’s death, his nephew Sava Kosanovic´ hurried to his uncle’s room at the Hotel New Yorker. He was an up-and-coming Yugoslav official with suspected connections to the communist party in his country. By the time he arrived, Tesla’s body had already been removed, and Kosanovic´ suspected that someone had already gone through his uncle’s effects. Technical papers were missing as well as a black notebook he knew Tesla kept—a notebook with several hundred pages, some of which were marked “Government.”
P. E. Foxworth, assistant director of the New York FBI office, was called in to investigate. According to Foxworth, the government was “vitally interested” in preserving Tesla’s papers. Two days after Tesla’s death, representatives of the Office of Alien Property went to his room at the New Yorker Hotel and seized all his possessions.
Dr. John G. Trump, an electrical engineer with the National Defense Research Committee of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, was called in to analyze the Tesla papers in OAP custody.
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It’s not about “judging,” it’s about not feeling sorry for Tesla’s name being attached to a shitty eugenicist since he himself was a eugenicist
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Imagine disregarding the entire domain of Tesla’s work - changing the entire world as we know it with his research and innovations - and the comment they need to make for online points is some virtue-oriented pat-me-on-the-back-im-ethical blorp about random social norms of the time. lol but cry.
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He had really bad autism. He was in love with a pigeon. Brilliant he was, but mad as a hatter.
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I think he was just intuitively good at seeing what exactly is the portrayal of electricity and magnetism. A unique genius with a certain insight.
I sometimes feel that there were many businesses concerns that grew around his early research and they were so successful that his newer research must have been a threat to that.
Through all the mystery, half-truths, and frankly magical thinking people have with this man, it’s really hard to know what he was up to in his final days of work, before he became a homeless bag-man. I somehow feel, without making any kind of declarative statement, that he was working on transmission of energy with longitudinal (vs transverse) waves, and discovering methods of conveying and extracting electrical potential from and through Earth.
Inline Edit: To expand on the above paragraph: The Earth doesn’t really “absorb” electrons like a pillow absorbing a ping pong ball. The energy in the negative charges that the Earth grounds must move in waves, therefore they’re grounded but now the waves are bouncing around in the Earth; that energy still exists and may sum with other waves in an additive way. I believe, again without making a declarative statement, that Tesla recognized this and was pioneering research on how to transmit energy via, and gather momentum from those waves. There were successes transmitting energy and encoded information through Earth which can be repeated today with garbage dump salvage electronics. I believe he was discovering a few dangerous things as well: Harmonic discharges of electrical devices to ground could be captured (think telecommunications and military); and he was conducting novel elemental research on tapping Earth to harmonize and extract force(s) - what these things portended led to his complete scientific alienation.
The word “free energy” always obliterates any form of rational discourse. But there was something to it in a way, but to clarify, not in a literal way. Not in the sense of violating fundamental laws of conservation, rather seeing the “other side of the coin” that if the Earth is effectively infinite Ground then it’s also effectively an “infinite” source of power if harvested.
I’ve never really “researched” the man directly but what I do know comes from quite a bit of my casual STEM self-study over decades.
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If it makes you feel any better his first name has fared just as poorly in terms of automakers lmao
I’m actually a big fan of Edison Motors, who are working to make heavy trucks into hybrids. And they’re Canadian!
I’m excited for their hybrid conversion kits
Me too. I want to get another of the car I drove in high school and slap a hybrid kit in it
The car I had in high school is absurdly rare these days.
I had a 1989 Ford Probe.
Did the probe share parts etc with the eagle talon and the Mitsubishi eclipse or am i thinking of something else?
His legacy can live on with Dr Parkinstein. (Parker Edmondson)
Elon is getting slapped by the invisible hand.
I think this hand ain’t invisible. Well at least one finger isn’t.
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whos buying used teslas? its like asking for trouble consider thier defectiveness.
Speaking from personal experience, most likely immigrants who don’t know much about us politics and still watch news and shows from their home country or in their own language.
Growing up, even though I was born in the USA, I’d only listen to what my parents heard (until I was a teen), watched what they watched (Univision, etc), are mostly Salvadorian food at home.
what you expect from temupanzers
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