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Even ignoring Musk's shenanigans, anyone buying a new EV may need to reconsider whether Tesla is in it (supporting consumer-owned EVs) for the long haul. Recent moves, and even quotes from Elon, suggest they might not be.

quote from Tesla latest earnings call, at 04 min..

"Because we're really moving into a future that is based on autonomy and so if you're interested in buying a Model S and X, now would be the time to order it, because we expect to wind down S and X production in next quarter and basically stop production of Model S and X next quarter. We'll obviously continue to support the Model S and X programs for as long as people have the vehicles, but we're gonna take the Model S and X production space in our Fremont factory and convert that into an Optimus factory, which will... with the long-term goal of having 1 million units a year of Optimus robots in the current S/X space in Fremont."

I genuinely don't understand, is the Optimus real? Isn’t there a like 10 to 1 ratio of Boston Robotics demos to Optimus demos? Has it ever been verified to actually do anything?

Boston Robotics robots are over there doing backflips and the only thing I’ve seen Optimus do is in extremely controlled environments.

I second this. Is there anyone who actually believes Optimus is going to be a success and has any sort of data to back that up?

I'm not in robotics, but I look at humanoid robots and, while incredible examples of engineering know-how, they seem to be a long way from useful in commercial applications. Am I jhust ignorant of their true value? Seems like all I ever see them doing is parkour.

Optimus could do really well if they had all the smartest robotics engineers working on it...

But it seems that ~80% of the smart people I know refuse to work for Musk on principle, and the remaining 20% prefer to work somewhere that pays well (Musk companies do not).

End result is he has a team of mediocre engineers working on it which is why their demos appear years behind some competitors like Boston dynamics and Unitree.

I think the same is happening to Tesla cars (not much innovation in the last few years).

I mean, it well be true that Tesla and SpaceX are populated by mediocre engineers.

I doubt it, considering their accomplishments.

What has Tesla accomplished lately? I mean, within the last decade?

They certainly have accomplished amazing things. They had a lead that even five years ago was considered insurmountable. But they've made at best incremental progress, the kind made by mediocre engineers. The only novelty was the Cybertruck, which didn't live up to expectations and didn't open up any new domains.

SpaceX is still advancing, though even that is getting a bit of an asterisk if they can't get Starship to fulfill its promise.

I suspect they had an amazing team, but the last few years the best people have been departing and they are being replaced by mediocre people due to Musks involvement in politics.

> I second this. Is there anyone who actually believes Optimus is going to be a success and has any sort of data to back that up?

If there was no competition (there is), and he met the price envelope he's talking about (Cybertruck suggests he won't), I can buy the idea that there's a market opportunity for a few tens of millions of humanoid robots which are even just 5% AI and 95% remote workers in VR headsets, just because this means you can get cheap 3rd-world wages running your "made in America*" factories.

But there is competition, and I don't think he'll meet his price target.

As for the AI: even when I forecast under the assumption of continued improvements of hardware and software, I see at least a ten year gap between any given level of self-driving car and a humanoid robot small enough and light enough to get into the driver's seat of a normal car and drive it to the same standard, and that's just for driving a car, not all the other things people like to imagine in a world where androids are good enough to generically replace human labour.

* insert any other nation as desired, it works in any place where wages are higher than the cheapest nation with reliable internet (modulo the TCO of the robot, which nobody knows yet).

This will lead to minds getting blown as all those "foreigners coming here and taking our jobs" whose deportation people demand, are now "working from home in a different country and still taking our jobs" and the US in particular will have to wrangle with how this is a first amendment issue because remote control is just speech isn't it?

And when we consider how the current AI boom seems to have come with a total lack of even the most basic security considerations in their usage, these robots, wether** AI or remote controlled, are absolutely going to get turned into Mr-Stabby-the-totally-deniable-assassin.

** pun not intended, but when I noticed the misspelling I decided the implications still worked as a joke.

Elon's hype level over Optimus practically off the charts. He has profit projections that have Optimus be effectively all of GDP in the future. Say what you want about Elon, but he does put his money where his mouth is and I believe he will try to manufacture robots. Also, the S and X models are old and their market segment is heavily saturated at this point so it makes sense for Tesla to exit those model lines.

Optimus is also a bit of a "squirrel!" for the market that he likes to talk about whenever sales figures at Tesla start flagging. Meme stocks only work as long as people still believe in infinite exponential growth.

> Also, the S and X models are old and their market segment is heavily saturated at this point so it makes sense for Tesla to exit those model lines.

Car companies typically invest in new models in the same segment in order to stay competitive with the other car companies.

Tesla is not your average car company.

Is there any evidence there is any kind of market a humanoid robot at all?

(Regardless, from what I've seen, the Chinese will own this segment too.)

Right. How many people actually want a remotely monitored robot collecting personal data, that will likely also require a hefty monthly subscription?

And he's talking about an eventual price point of $30K a robot. So a bit high for early adopter middle class folks who are just curious.

There is some value in producing a lot of solid hardware, but nowhere even close to Tesla's absurd valuation.

I think they are perfectly capable of writing software to drive the robot - if Musk doesn't stick his head in like he did with LIDAR/FSD and impose some stupid requirement that handicaps the product.

But the whole shtick with Optimus is that they aren't writing software. It's supposed to be all LLM training so when you buy your robot you can give it orders like "do the dishes", "clean the gutters", "dig a backyard pool for me", or "build me another Optimus" and you can go off to do whatever while it completes the task.

Elon thinks it would be too expensive to have to write code for every task you might ask one of these to do, they want it to be fully autonomous.

Their engineers aren't behind keyboards typing C++, they're wearing VR headsets and feeding the data to a LLM, although even that is probably too specific for Elon's long term plans. Obviously he doesn't want to have to have people repeat actions hundreds of times before the dumb robots figure it out. Especially for "simple" tasks like serving drinks at press events.

I feel like society is decades away from being comfortable with "you can go off to do whatever while it completes the task"...regardless of whether or not the tech is there.

You say this like it's a bad idea. These VLA models are going to be even more disruptive than the coding models because otherwise it's prohibitively expensive to set up an industrial robot for most uses.

My main doubts about Tesla's plan are that they will sell enough of these to get benefits of scale or that Musk will force the engineering team to "skip lidar" again and compromise the design.

It's yet another gamble where if it works out he will look like a visionary and if it doesn't he'll look like an idiot. The exact sort of bet that Elon never fails to go for.

But how would we evaluate "perfectly capable" without evidence, there's just been no evidence they've done anything so far right? Am I missing something? I guess looking closer it was only announced four years ago. But it seems like it's only been smoke and mirrors so far.

I think FSD is very impressive, even if it is still pretty unsafe.

Tesla clearly has at least some AI chops, and if Musk can bullshit for long enough, they might have enough time to make these robots more than just props.

And China is likely to do to Tesla robots what they’ve done to the cars. I assume the bans will be incoming, because the US can’t have millions of Chinese kung fu robots sitting about pouring tea, waiting for critical mass.

https://youtu.be/gfJTX1Y0ynM

Optimus is a longer horizon promise that allows Elon to keep kicking the "can of untold profits" down the road. Tesla car hype has fizzled, robotaxi is currently fizzling, so the new promise is optimus. Elon sells dreams and visions, not really products.

Tesla absolutely cannot keep it's valuation without a promise for it's delusional stock holders or actual massive revenue streams.

This it could be the real strategy. Because the more credible promises you make, the more valuable is your company. If sales of cars are spiraling down, then what promises remain there to keep valuation ?

Accuracy.

> Elon sells dreams and visions, not really products.

Do you want me to pull out a list, or can you google it for yourself?

Sure, he also sells dreams and visions. Sure, all the dumb money is going to regret it once the smart money dumps on them.

Yet, claiming he doesn't really sell products (and or services, which he also does) is absolutely ridiculous.

I think that the point of the comment was not that he does not sell any products, but that he predominantly sells dreams & visions, if you use TSLA market cap as a guide. If you look strictly at the products he sells, the valuation of his company ought to be somewhere between 50% and 100% of Ford. By that analysis it seems like TSLA is about 97% hopes and dreams.

The hype to fizzle cycle is shortened with each new dream and approaching zero, which is the true value of the company.

You are correct to be suspicious, but don't be impressed by backflips. Those are just for show. Doing "real work" is the test. As is doing real work for a compelling price.

So no parts when they are eventually needed!

Do manufacturers tend to pump out parts for old models after they are superseded by newer ones?

Yes, because they make money selling the parts, and there are warranty requirements that are hard to fulfill if you don't have parts.

Often after a decade or so, companies will sell the designs to dedicated parts makers. For example, Volvo has Volvo Classic Parts, and they even have a reman program, and will even 3D print parts not available. Mercedes has Mercedes Classic Parts. Chrysler has MOPAR, etc.

Here you can browse parts for a 1968 Mercedes SEL: https://classicparts.mbusa.com/c-280sel-223

If you are a business, the costs of designing the part has already been paid, if you can sell the design and get some royalty payments, why wouldn't you turn those old plans into cash?

And of course there is a huge industry of Chinese clones and other suppliers that will provide replacement parts that are not genuine.

Be prepared to pay, though :)

This reminds me that in the early days of Tesla they were complaining about the difficulty of competing on pricing with established automakers because they subsidize the cost of the vehicle at sale with profits from selling parts/service - a stream of revenue unavailable to a startup

It’s still possible to order new and original parts for SAAB models, almost 20 years after they went under. The spare parts are made by a separate company which is still going.

IIRC, by law manufacturers are required to maintain parts and service for vehicles for a minimum of 10 years. Whether superseded, discontinued, whatever.

But what happens when Musk decides the law doesn't apply to him...

The law will adapt, same as it adapted for OpenAI/Anthropic when they started doing piracy to train their LLMs

Nvidia started funding piracy sites too; https://torrentfreak.com/nvidia-contacted-annas-archive-to-s...

If you are billionaire+ it's "legal", and if not at least financially worth it + almost never punishment on management.

If you are worth xx'000 you personally go to jail, you get into very big troubles, and get ruined.

No? The law is just the law. But until someone actually gets a judge to rule that what they did is illegal...

Buying a 30M USD mansion to the daughter of the judge is going to fix that.

In a banana republic.

Do you actually look at the current US landscape and think “the law is just the law” for the rich and poor alike?

Getting a judge to rule on something is also part of that “the law is just the law” and it’s obvious that judges are more willing to rule on cases for the poor and powerless than the rich and connected.

The point I was trying to make was that whether or not something is illegal is typically decided by a judge.

Most of the things corporations do aren't as clear cut as a traffic violation. So in those cases, you only know if something is illegal when it's made it through the courts

This is an urban legend. Safety defects have to be remedied by the manufacturer for a period of 10 years, but that remedy doesn't have to involve replacement parts.

https://www.nhtsa.gov/interpretations/timereplcepartpollak12...

I agree, looks like you are correct. It seems that it is just one of those things that manufacturers have agreed to do voluntarily, in the absence of a specific law. I imagine they have calculated that the loss of goodwill from abandoning a product quickly would outweigh the cost savings (especially since there is so much sharing of parts that keeping a few specialty components on hand is not going to move the needle much).

It’s not about goodwill. Selling parts is simply a good business. The margins at authorized dealers are crazy.

Yes. Auto manufacturers tend to have contracts with different tiered automotive suppliers that have heavy-hitting production lines for current vehicles, and also maintain a 'service' department where these style of products are produced. The tools for producing these parts have really good lifetimes, and you can take the tooling and put it into whatever mold machine you have written the program for, or set it up for another machine.

In my experience service departments are basically a large warehouse with a small set of assembly machines running at any given time where you are setting up time to produce some random part for a day or two and then change to something else, whereas the real production assembly lines are designed to produce as many of X part for the latest car as possible.

Several of the old mold machines where I worked that made parts for this service business ran DOS, with PCMCIA cards to load programs. I helped a process engineer get these PCMCIA cards working on his contraband laptop running win98 (obviously banned from the network) because we could never get them working with anything newer. This was in like 2021.

It depends. Lots of parts are shared by multiple models or even companies so it may be the case that nobody has made for example a new water pump specifically for your car for 10 years, but the design is the same as the 2025 something else so you can just use that one. There are also warehouses with older parts that can last for years. You can also pull replacements from junked cars that have not been crushed yet. In some cases third parties manufacture replacement parts when the supply runs out, but those replacements are often of poor quality and sometimes are only vaguely shaped correctly and require extra work to actually fit on your vehicle. Keeping old cars running is a challenge, especially if the car was obscure when it was new.

A lot of parts are refurbished too. Transmissions, differentials for example.

Their subcontractors do.

For traditional vehicles, there's typically a large marketplace of first-party and third-party auto parts for vehicles going back several years. Depends on the make and model, but usually yes.

That said, Tesla is a very unusual automaker in most senses and I'm not sure what their aftermarket parts situation is.

This is a concern for me not only for the Tesla but for the new Chinese manufacturers. When I've talked to owners of these cars (in other countries), the consensus seems to be "you use it for 5 years and then throw it away". Not because the car has poor build quality, but because there aren't local mechanics that can service it, it's impossible to find documentation such as torque specs and service procedures for anything but trivial stuff you'd find in an owner's manual, and it is very hard to find parts.

It seems like an incredible waste to throw away a car after 5 years.

A big part of what I look for in a car is a long lasting manufacturer that publishes to end users technical and repair information, including part numbers and procedures, together with a healthy third party part supplier ecosystem and independent repair infrastructure.

That doesn't mean that information needs to be available for free or that the parts themselves are cheap -- Volvo parts are not cheap -- but they are available and the information, engine specifications, repair manuals and workshop manuals are available.

If you don't have that, I'm not interested in buying the car. A car is far too expensive to treat as a disposable consumer good. I'm worried that more and more, manufacturers are locking down their systems, putting information behind paywalls where you can't make your own backup copy, and doing things like adding DRM to their parts to prevent indy shops from working on them.

Wait, wait, don't tell me, let me guess: "The robots will make their own replacement parts," stated Musk.

What is this supposed to mean in the sense of Tesla being in the car game for the long haul? They're stopping production of 2 of their oldest model cars, but they're continuing to make and sell their most popular models globally the 3 and the Y.

The model S and X are their oldest most expensive models that aren't even sold everywhere in the world.

However the Model 3 and the Model Y are, of which the Model Y was the most popular car model sold globally of any manufacturer.

In Australia I see Model 3s and Model Ys everywhere. Stopping production of the S and the X, you wouldn't even notice it here.

So Tesla abandons cars ? Keeps only the Cybertruck ?

No, they'll still be making the Model 3.

They'll also keep making Model Y, the most sold car model in the world.

They are going to have a hard time keeping it that way in 2026, since they were just barely ahead of both #2 and #3 (Toyota Corolla and Toyota RAV4), and as far as I know Toyota hasn't done anything to annoy a large fraction of the demographics that have bought the most of their cars in recent years.

* As claimed by Musk.

Thanks

Autonomy or robots? Because autonomy very much still includes (personal) transportation?

> shenanigans

It's a lot more than "shenanigans": he's likely responsible for the deaths, via starvation and illness of hundreds, thousands, or more. The quick and sudden DOGE cuts ripped those programs that were keeping people alive away, without any chance to phase in replacements.

Current estimates are 500,000-1,000,000 directly from aid cuts https://www.cgdev.org/blog/update-lives-lost-usaid-cuts with 1.6 million deaths projected.

From that URL: our estimates of “lives saved per dollar” from US aid are, at best, ballpark estimates

I can't help being very suspicious of up to a million dead without identifying a single dead individual, or country or even continent where these mass deaths are supposed to have occurred.

Also from that URL (with links):

> There is on-the-ground evidence of resulting impacts: Rising malnutrition mortality in northern Nigeria, Somalia, and in the Rohingya refugee camps on the Myanmar border and rising food insecurity in northeast Kenya, in part linked to the global collapse of therapeutic food supply chains. Spiking malaria deaths in northern Cameroon, again linked to breakdown in the global supply of antimalarials, and a risk of reversal in Lesotho’s fight against HIV, part of a broader health crisis across Africa.

"Spiking malaria deaths in northern Cameroon" links to an article[0] which states:

> BOGO, Cameroon, Oct 2 (Reuters) - Nine-month-old baby Mohamat burned with fever for three days before his family took him to the closest health centre in northern Cameroon, but it was too late. He died of malaria that day. Mohamat's death was part of a spike this year in malaria fatalities that local health officials attribute to foreign aid cuts by the United States. Before the cuts, Mohamat might have been diagnosed earlier by one of more than 2,000 U.S.-funded community health workers who would travel over rough dirt roads to reach the region's remotest villages. And at the health centre, he might have been treated with injectable artesunate, a life-saving drug for severe malaria paid for by U.S. funds that is now in short supply. But the centre had none to give out.

So the URL very directly identifies a dead individual, a country and a continent, while also mentioning other cases that we hopefully all can agree will also directly lead to deaths.

Do you take issue with this example? Or why are you stating that they're not "identifying a single dead individual, or country or even continent where these mass deaths are supposed to have occurred"?

[0]: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

Individual stories spotlighting lives lost in the wake of these cuts aren't hard to find. Do you want me to Google that for you?

By that reasoning you should be suspicious of the claim that cigarette smoking has caused any deaths from lung cancer, since no one has ever identified a single individual whose lung cancer could be proven to be from smoking.

“the total lives at risk from aid cuts to 1.6 million lives lost per year”

It’s a projection, a risk, and a rate, not a claim it has already happened to specific people.

More lives would be saved if usaid never existed.

US AID was always about soft power. No reason Europe or China can’t step up and fill that demand.

Sure, but while the world waits for another super power to step up lives are being lost. The US could have announced a phase down with a hard pressure campaign to get the other countries to take over with no loss of life.

Instead these are just numbers in a statistic and opportunities for leverage in geopolitics instead of real lives with as much depth and meaning as your own.

> Instead these are just numbers in a statistic and opportunities for leverage in geopolitics instead of real lives with as much depth and meaning as your own.

I didn’t vote for this, it’s not about me, I have no control over this. I live in California, we never voted for Trump. Please don’t lecture me about how I feel.

So did the US reach an agreement with them first in order to avoid thousands of easily preventable deaths?

So softpower kept all these peole alive?

Ofc this is overly simplistic. There is hard power enabling soft power and there are alturistic extreme radical leftists actively seeking out and staffing such programs.

Fun fact : there are poor people in America who need help. Some of which served in the military, or they come from families which several people served in the military. Do these people not come first?

Despite popular belief, it is not the job of the US Tax Payer to feed the impoverished world. How many billions have been sent to Africa? People need to make their own countries great instead of waiting for more Gibs from the USA.

I hope such egotistical zero sum thinking leads to the economic isolation of the US. 4chan Fun fact: You and only can make america great again, amirite. Who needs steady deficit funding when you have freedom.

We don’t (didn’t) do it because it’s our job, we do (did) it because it’s the right thing to do.

I’m surprised that preventing famine and malnutrition is controversial

>We don’t (didn’t) do it because it’s our job, we do (did) it because it’s the right thing to do.

We didn't do it because it's the right thing to do, we did it for soft power, to spread our political and cultural influence and have leverage against those governments to serve our interests. Nations are not moral actors.

> Do these people not come first?

Not to republicans who have repeatedly voted down measures to take care of people getting straight up cancer from abysmal practices during the middle east wars that they started.

Those same republicans also voted down support for the aid workers of 9/11 dealing with absurd health issues from all the dust.

Literal heros and innocent victims, but republicans don't want to spend pennies on them.

> Despite popular belief, it is not the job of the US Tax Payer to feed the impoverished world.

This is an overly simplified perspective. Work at this scale requires impressive logistics and commitments that are haphazardly "rug-pulled" can have catastrophic consequences, regardless of whose "job" it is.

When I was looking at being a bone marrow donor, they talk about this. The process for such donation is involved, including minor surgical procedures for the donor. But they talk about autonomy and consent, and one of the topics is this (paraphrasing): Do I have the right to change my mind about donation at any time?

The answer: while you always maintain the legal right to withdraw consent, at a certain point in the process, the recipients existing bone marrow is destroyed in preparation for your donation. At that point, there may be considered a moral obligation to continue the donation, as without your donation, the recipient will die, due to the destruction in preparation.

> How many billions have been sent to Africa?

Speaking for myself, I'd rather continue sending billions to Africa than contributing ~1.5% of Israel's GDP in foreign assistance to it.

If you are curious, the number #1 beneficiary of USAID is Ukraine, by far, and just behind #2 is Israel.

Sounds more like foreign influence than actual survival help. Maybe USAID even funded wars, and caused more death and chaos, who knows. Difficult to predict what's next. Perhaps it will be good because countries will adapt and shine, instead of having local dictators surviving on these aids, etc.

Also, there is a thing about people depending on you:

I am feeding birds during winter, so at some point they depend on my food. Should have I had started feeding them at all or not ?

If I didn't feed them, technically less birds would have died because they would never had a chance to live...

Except Israel is an economically sound and undamaged country who has the upper hand against its enemies and Ukraine has been invaded and is the underdog of in this war ?

It doesn't look that weird to me that humanitarian assistance would go to people who need it the most ? Do Israelis currently need heaters not to die from the cold after their energy system has been destroyed ?

It's as if helping populations in need would buy you goodwill and popularity. Crazy to thing about it. I don't see how program trying to contain the spread of AIDS or preventing people to die from the cold is "funding" war. Not sure what you are on about. People will not adapt and shine, they will die or be more miserable, or revolt and probably be crushed. Civil war is always an option too.

But your bird comment tells me you just don't care. You should have started with that.

The comments above mine were blaming USAID saying that it caused more damage because it existed and made people became dependent on it, and (in their logic) that it would have been better if it did not exist.

If you look above you can see the whole concept “people die because of USAID”. It’s not my concept.

I am showing with the bird analogy how this is absurd. That you always have the choice to feed the birds or not.

At the end, it’s still a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” type of dilemma, like all important political interactions.

Nobody knows if the long-term impact will be positive or negative. It can push countries to take care of their population, to have new coalitions of countries (what if China double-down and offer more aid ?), etc.

Pretty much unknown. I hope it will eventually work out for the innocents who are victims of politicians who are in comfy places.

Sure, let's send them malaria nets, food engineered for being able to eat without dying after being starved and free condoms, why not ?

You know Republicans keep cutting services to veterans right? While democrats pretty much always vote in favor of benefits for vets.

You choices aren't to either fund vets or fund aid. Your choices are to cut both or save both and I have a feeling you voted to cut both.

What help for these Americans did the Republicans put forward and approve along with these cuts? All I saw was a cut to the affordability of healthcare for those people. Did I miss some help that is coming that they didn't have before the USAID cuts?

> it is not the job of the US Tax Payer to feed the impoverished world.

Other countries would like to contribute (more), but the people that represent us taxpayers want to keep all the inluencing for your good selves.

Great news. Trump and DOGE cut programs for domestic poor too!

Citation:

https://www.wakeuptopolitics.com/p/doges-final-failure

[flagged]

And to be clear, there is a difference between America not being obligated to save lives and tearing away treatment once you’ve started providing it. DOGE did the latter, and some of the cases are horrific, experimental devices being left implanted in study participants.

There's also a difference between winding down a charity program and abruptly pulling support overnight such that even if other entities or organizations wanted to take up the mantle, doing so would be 100x more difficult (or in some cases impossible)

[flagged]

Atrocities can be repeated. There is nothing wrong with reiterating the negative outcomes a specific person has unleashed to towards societies greater good.

Yet we're still downplaying it all with words like "shenanigans." The comment above didn't even get onto the subjects of election interference, MEGA or MechaHitler/white genocide.

When a comment starts with "Even ignoring Y, there's also Z" or "Setting aside Y, there's also Z", it shouldn't be read as downplaying Y. It's a way of introducing a secondary issue Z without first needing to write a 1000 word essay that gives due weight to issue Y and any other issues that are more important than Z.

This is useful to do when issue Y is widely known and well-explored elsewhere, but issue Z hasn't received as much attention. It my no means is an attempt to downplay the importance of Y, merely to create a space for conversation about a more niche issue Z.

It's disappointing to see so much attention put into replies attacking the OP for not giving adequate weight to Y, when the very premise of their comment was to create a space to discuss Z.

No, you've abstracted it too far. I understand the grammatical construction, I'm not sure what suggested that I don't. The issue is referring to the spread of fascism in the world as if it's a little mistake anyone could make.

It's disappointing to see this defended.

Yeah at first this was all "man Elon turned a lot of people off" and now it seems like "uh ... is Tesla quitting?".

If they do end up quitting this will be the weirdest ever business story.

Agreed, Tesla will sell autonomous miles not cars going forward, Model Y is still the best selling car on planet earth for many years in a row though so they'll keep selling that as they make large profit margins on it (unlike every other EV maker who are making a loss)

Model Y is #8, not #1. Note this is specific to the US. If you include the entire world, it would be lower.

https://www.kbb.com/best-cars/top-10-25-best-selling-cars-tr...

Worldwide, the top models are Tesla Model Y, Toyota RAV4, and Toyota Corolla, all pretty close together (in 2024 it was 1.09 million Y, 1.08 million Corolla, 1.02 million RAV4 [1]). Sources for 2025 have the same 3 at the top in a close spread, with some disagreement over the exact order.

When you look at brands rather than models then it is no contest. For 2025 the top 15 was Toyota with 11.3 million sold, VW with 9.0, Hyundai Kia at 7.3, GM at 6.2, Stellantis at 5.6, Ford at 4.6, BYD at 4.6, Honda at 3.5, Suzuki at 3.3, Nissan at 3.2, Geely at 3.0, Changan at 2.9, BMW at 2.5, Renault at 2.4, and Mercedes at 2.2.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/239229/most-sold-car-mod...

https://electrek.co/2025/12/31/elon-musk-claims-tesla-model-...

They refuse to use lidar

They cut the lifetime subscription to fsd

They canceled two Tesla models

They're converting Tesla factories to make Optimus robot

I was going to buy a Tesla but now have concerns.

You weren't concerned by Tesla recalling 5.1 million cars in 2024, more than Ford, and recalling the Cybertruck 5 times in 18 months[1]?

You weren't concerned by Consumer Reports ranking Tesla in last place out of 26 manufacturers for reliability[2]? Or their quality control so poor that customers are buying their own delivery inspection checklists[2]?

You weren't concerned by Tesla Owners reporting Tesla authorized repair centers keeping their cars for months unable to source parts to repair them, or consumers unable to buy replacement parts[3]?

You weren't concerned by the worker awarded $130M for hostile work environment filled with racial abuse at a Tesla factory, after paying another worker $1M for racist abuse at their factory, and facing a class action about racist discrimination[4][5][6]?

You weren't concerned about Tesla's telemetry tracking all details about every drive and sending it back to HQ to train their FSD?

You weren't concerned by any of Musk's behaviour, such as his misleading statements about FSD delivery dates and abilities for years, about the sportscar that would jump with compressed air, about the Cybertruck and Semi truck abilities, about the Hyperloop, about getting Tesla to buy his cousin's failing SolarCity, about trying to get a trillion dollar paycheck out of Tesla, etc?

[1] https://www.carscoops.com/2025/04/which-tesla-models-have-ha...

[2] https://www.carscoops.com/2025/04/which-tesla-models-have-ha...

[2] https://www.jalopnik.com/teslas-quality-control-is-so-bad-cu...

[3] https://www.teslaownersonline.com/threads/tesla-cant-supply-...

[4] https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/usa-form...

[5] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/tesla-laws...

[6] https://edition.cnn.com/2025/04/18/business/tesla-black-work...

To be honest I haven't really kept up that closely until recently when I started looking for a new car but that is concerning!

Is any other US company making a play for putting these shiny new AI's in bots like Musk is trying to do with Optimus or has society just resigned itself to shovelling money on to his doorstep?

EVs have the technological novelty of a washing machine. The only way to win this game is by making fabrication cheaper, and we all know that China can't be defeated here.

> EVs have the technological novelty of a washing machine

This has been similarly true of ICEVs for the better part of the last 100 years.

> This has been similarly true of ICEVs for the better part of the last 100 years.

Well no, since a 1926 engine is very different from a 2026 engine.

An early 90s fuel injected computer controlled engine is pretty similar to a current engine though (just incremental improvements), so we could say fairly similar for the last ~35 years. But not 100.

No, over 100 years there have been vast improvements in efficiency in ICEVs. In EVs, the curve is mostly flat.

The hope is for better batteries, but developments are excruciatingly slow.

The curve is mostly flat for EVs because they started with such high efficiency to begin with. At their best, internal combustion engines are quite terrible so there has been more room to make improvements.

Even so, the vast, vast majority of cars in the past 100 years have had all of the technical innovation of a washing machine (and that might well be underselling the washing machine!).

> developments are excruciatingly slow

10% a year on average, something like that? ICEVs haven't had that kind of incremental improvement in a loooooong time.

You have to zoom out a bit. EVs are still improving of course because they are relatively new. It's not fair to compare that to the last few decades of car history. You can make any flat looking graph look steep by zooming.

The only part of an electric car that hasn't been in development for at least as long as any ICE vehicle is the battery. So really it all comes down to that one thing.

EVs are as old as ICE vehicles, people should compare both on the same scale.

> over 100 years there have been vast improvements in efficiency in ICEVs. In EVs, the curve is mostly flat.

This may be true, but my family's "daily" ICE vehicle costs us about $0.162/mile to run; our actual daily EV costs about $0.028/mile -- almost one sixth as much. It doesn't matter how much more improvements ICE vehicles achieve, they're not going to catch up to the "mostly flat" EV curve.

EVs are incredibly efficient. It's why aerodynamics matter so much and they all look so weird. The electricity from fossil sources they use is also efficiently generated at scale and in many states, mostly from renewables. It's equivalent to driving an ICE car that gets 200mpg in the absolute worst case.

Hence the eMPG.

If you compare a 2012 tesla model s 70D (the most efficient model tesla had then and arguably the gold standard) it had 33.4 kWh/100mi EPA, the 2025 LR is 27.2kWh/100m which is nearly 22.8% less and this while being larger.

What's even crazier is that a tesla 2008 tesla roadster had 28kWh/100mi EPA combined, which is more than today's model S.

Literally there isn't a single combustion car (not including hybrids) which comes anywhere close to this improvement.

Also I don't know about other countries, but I'd argue that in 20 years at least in Europe the fuel economy of diesel cars has gone worse due to emissions, I'm talking about real world usage, regardless of what this WLTP non-sense says.l

Crucially the flat EV curve puts them mostly ahead of where ICEVs have been for their entire history.

It's not really an ICE vs EV thing, more that "EVs as hip new technology improving leaps and bounds annually" isn't really a thing and they're the car version of air fryers.

This is, to me, actually a good because there's no longer any early adopters remorse anymore so no reason not to buy one now because it won't be outdated in six months.

I believe you have a mistaken impression. First, the bottom has fallen out of the used market creating significant buyers remorse for early adopters. Buyers remorse also for the switch from the previous US charging standard to Tesla's. And people are generally waiting with bated breath for advancements in battery technology for charging speeds, longevity, and capacity. Accurate or not, people are waiting for the technology to mature so they don't have an EV that isn't worth what they paid for it.

> First, the bottom has fallen out of the used market creating significant buyers remorse for early adopters.

I feel this directly. On paper I've lost more money on my Model 3 than I have on the previous half dozen cars combined, I'm pretty sure. But on the other hand, Ford canceling the Lightning has (at least temporarily) improved the resale value on my Lightning considerably. I couldn't really sell it today for what I paid for it, but I wouldn't be that far off.

Problem is that I don't really love the Tesla, but I do love the Lightning. Ha! So I keep them both but for differing reasons.

> the switch from the previous US charging standard to Tesla's

As an aside, this is finally happening for real! Several models coming to market now are shipping with J3400 (aka NACS) ports standard. Yay! I look forward to a time where the days of various adapters being required are firmly behind us.

> First, the bottom has fallen out of the used market creating significant buyers remorse for early adopters.

The very high deprecation is often noted but the comparison is mostly in relation to sticker price, but the high discounts plus subsidies mean that the average discount for an EV was way higher than on ICE cars. Most of the high depreciation disappears once you take into account what the first buyer would have actually paid for the vehicle (often a five-digit discount), at least in my used car market. Some models seem to actually hold their value remarkably well, particularly those with no/few known issues and no real successors.

I bought my car in the very brief period (a few months) where my purchase did not qualify for the tax credit. After 3.5 years of ownership, cars like mine sell for $15k, roughly 50% what I paid for it. The car works perfectly and the model has no widespread issues. I'm definitely planning to keep it, but my original plan was to trade it in for something newer when battery tech got battery. Seems like that's no longer in the cards.

Yeah, but if you had the tax credit that presumably almost all other buyers got, then the amount of depreciation would be completely normal or even relatively low, depending on how high the EV subsidy was in your state (I'm assuming something in the 5-10k range?).

Another example would be small EVs (Zoe, e-up etc.) - the list price on these was often really high, like 25+k (and they were technologically obsolete already 5-6 years ago). But then you got 5k+ in EV subsidy, with the OEM also matching the subsidy, and you would've ended up actually paying like 15k for them. Now, 3-4 years later, these go used for 12-13k. So in reality they lost barely any value (20% deprecation over 3 years), but the published deprecation figure would be 60+%.

This explains why despite these "EVs suffer huge deprecation" claims there are actually very few bargains on the used market to make.

I hear people say this, but I also see announcements from Chinese carmakers like this:

"NEW: Latest EV model boasts full charge (200 miles) in only ~5 minutes"

To me, that seems like a leaps & bounds improvement.

> No, over 100 years there have been vast improvements in efficiency in ICEVs. In EVs, the curve is mostly flat

Engine and battery performance are analogous.

What vast improvements in ICE? From 20% to 40% efficiency?

> there have been vast improvements in efficiency in ICEVs. In EVs, the curve is mostly flat.

Uh yes, because it's really hard to improve the efficiency of something that is 4 to 5 times as efficient...

https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10963

If it were only about costs, German car manufacturers would have been out of business since the 80s.

For the greater majority of people, cost has always been the main factor.

You can be a luxury brand, but that doesn't scale.

Scales well enough for being a manufacturer with robust sales (let's ignore the daft share price a moment), and Tesla were ideally placed to capitalise on being the brand name in EVs until Elon decided to torch the brand equity, particularly with the demographics most likely to buy brand new EVs...

So have not heard of Volkswagen?

VW had massive, ahem, political support.

So too have current Chinese car manufacturers.

It's not just a question of the long haul. About 25% of new model 3's failed their first inspection in 2024 in denmark. That means they aren't road legal without repairs. That's compared to 9% of other electric cars. And yeah, they run a 4 year warrenty, so when the first inspection is due after 4 years, it also conviniently out of warrenty.

It's even worse with the Y where 50% (yes, HALF) of 2021 models failed their first inspection.

I was under the impression EV's are relatively maintenance free, especially compared to ICE. What are the typical failures of those teslas?

They have had problems with the suspension arms, but word on the street is that it’s just the brake discs.

Denmark is significantly more moist than California, and EVs regenerative braking doesn’t wear the braking discs, so they rust, thus failing inspection.

The solution is trivial (periodically disable regenerative braking), but many people didn’t know.

> They have had problems with the suspension arms, but word on the street is that it’s just the brake discs.

That is certainly one of the issues, but 22% of the model Y's had loose suspension arms. So the brakes (which I agree is a more minor yet still inexcusable issue) aren't the only issue.

The EV is usually not the problem. The suspensions don’t age well.

The headlights also often need adjusting.

Honestly I think it depends if Trump stays in power above his current term (not here to argue whether or not its possible). But he knows he cannot collect billions of tax payers subsidies for EVs and then flip a switch and have factory producing Optimus bots. That 100% fraud, and only Trump will ignore it.

How is it fraud for a company to change focus and start producing other kinds of products? It's not fraud in the same way that promising that the car would be able to drive itself from Los Angeles to New York in 2017 and selling people "Full Self Driving Hardware" is.

Tesla single-handedly created the market for EVs. There are over 9 million Teslas on the road worldwide. That's a much bigger return on their subsidies than most government programs.

Have you forgotten about the Nissan Leaf? Tesla created the market for expensive sports car EVs, but Nissan made the market for EVs for the mainstream.

The Tesla Roadster came out first, by a couple years, but only sold about 2500 over its lifetime. By the time Tesla got its second model out, a couple years after Leaf went on sale, Leaf had 50k sales.

It took until 2020 for Tesla cumulative sales to catch up with Leaf cumulative sales.

The first generation Leaf belongs more to the early curiosity phase of EVs than the mainstream. Funny looking, less than 100 miles range, and slow charging via a port that never caught on outside of Japan. Tesla didn't just build a car that addressed the biggest EV objections (range, charging speed, looks), they also built a DCFC network that has more ports than all of the other ones combined. Without the charging network there is no EV market.

Maybe that's true but maybe it also isn't? Tesla or no Tesla, China would've thrown incentives at domestic EV makers to reduce their dependence on oil imports. Without Tesla maybe there would be fewer EVs in North America and Europe today. But I don't see history playing out very differently elsewhere. The economics are just too strong.

Why would that be fraud? Is the subsidy something other than giving the people purchasing EVs a "rebate"?

A good lawyer could argue that Tesla must be aware that exiting the auto market would immediately crash the value of all existing Teslas because it would essentially create a sunset date for those vehicles, given how much software they're running. Good luck to anyone trying to sell a used Tesla once that announcement is made, because who would buy a car that is going to be bricked at some point?

How is that good lawyer going to make the case that Tesla should somehow be liable for this? Tesla doesn't owe any duty to keep resale values up.

> I think it depends if Trump stays in power above his current term (not here to argue whether or not its possible)

If that were to happen, we will not be caring at all about Tesla's choices, so I'm not sure how you can make such a statement and then claim there is no argument to be had.

The subsidies are things like emissions credits and tax credits for purchases. They applied to units already manufactured and sold. There's no conceivable case for fraud if they decide to stop making EVs.

LMAO. do you say the same for Rivian or any of the other EV's actually failing?

I look at Rivian with their forthcoming R2 and they seem to be making a lot of effort. While Tesla has been milking the same basic design for coming up on 10 years now, and even removing features. I can see an argument that Tesla isn't really trying to win, they seem to be coasting.

Tesla owner here, I agree. One of my cars is over a decade old and I don't see any compelling reason to upgrade. They're still nice, but aside from "Self Driving" the improvements in that time are fairly minor and incremental. They need an actual truck, not the monstrosity they're trying to sell. The new Roadster is six years late. Once the S and X are dropped they're only going to have three models on offer, and no matter how good they are that's going to leave out a lot of customers whose needs/wants aren't met by those three.

They got distracted by self driving and let that take up all of their attention. Now they're pivoting to robots before they've even got their first distraction working. They needed somebody who could tell Elon "no" about eight years ago.

False dichotomy. The market for BEVs isn't limited to BEV-only companies. Most considering one not made by Tesla are probably looking at an incumbent manufacturer instead.

I am not surprised. Considering only the main segment, i.e. Model 3 and Model Y, there has not been any major innovation by Tesla for years.

No significantly better battery technology. No significantly more powerful or efficient motors. No significantly improved comfort.

They have been making minor improvements in many areas, yes. For instance, they added ventilated seats, adaptive suspension, front camera, etc. But those are not new technologies that would make them stand out. The competition already had such features before.

Meanwhile, the Chinese cars have head-up displays, massage seats, vehicle to load, internal power outlets, fridges, dimmable glass roofs and what not.

One might argue that Tesla is improving their driving assist technologies and that is, in Tesla's view, supposed to be the deciding factor which would make them stand out. But I am not sure about that.

Their better driving assist (the so-called "FSD") has not been available in Europe for years. But that is almost besides the point.

The most important question is, in my opinion, the following: Who cares about those systems enough that they would be willing to pay $100 a month or $8k, $10k, $15k or even more one time for this kind of technology?

From what I have heard, the majority of drivers does not care. Not for this kind of money. No matter how good such a system might be.

Assuming that there will be a significant number of people who would be willing to pay thousands of dollars extra for a driving assist feature is, in my opinion, detached from reality.

But when you compare the technology you mention in an EV, then compare it to an ICE vehicle its still miles ahead.

You buy any popular ICE vehicle and it has hardly any of the features you list above across both manufacturers.

> the technology you mention in an EV, then compare it to an ICE vehicle its still miles ahead

Yes, that is typically the case. But I am not suggesting to compare against the ICE cars at all. I am only suggesting to compare Tesla against the other EV cars.

The only advantage of ICE cars is at the moment their lower price.

FWIW I have heard the exact opposite. The people I know love the self driving feature.

This is not about loving the feature. It is about willing to pay the current asking price for it.

millions of owners have bought FSD

Yes, 1.1 "millions" in particular, according to Grok:

> 1.1 million active FSD subscriptions/purchases globally (reported in Tesla's Q4 2025 earnings deck and call)

most importantly their design looked bad/aged already at the time of release, let alone many years later when you have beautiful EVs from Porsche, Xiaomi or Hyundai available

Tesla stock up 15% on the news, probably.

2.25% so far today. How does this seem to always happen?

When you are investor and broadly choose to buy US companies (which is what most people do), you get Tesla in the list (e.g. QQQ) as part of the package, and this pushes price higher, no matter if you believe in Tesla specifically or not.

In addition, existing investors are very very deep into Tesla now, and don't want to lose.

The sandcastle is quite fragile so one of the best strategy for everyone (funds and Musk) is to keep buying more, no matter if the news are bad or not. It works, until other people disagree with you, but so far, nobody is interested into losing that game.

> When you are investor and broadly choose to buy US companies (which is what most people do), you get Tesla in the list (e.g. QQQ) as part of the package, and this pushes price higher, no matter if you believe in Tesla specifically or not.

I actually short Tesla just enough to offset my long positions that come as part of my regular ETFs.

Can you share more specifics on how you go about doing that? Do you do that for your long non-ETF positions too?

> Can you share more specifics on how you go about doing that?

I buy multi-year put options, there's some fuzziness around the appropriate strike price and number of options for a given long position, but effectively I'm paying the option premium to limit my downside risk.

> Do you do that for your long non-ETF positions too?

No, my non-ETF positions are negligible.

At the risk of exposing my obvious naivety, my guess is that TSLA is a proxy purchase for many people for SpaceX. I won't be surprised if SpaceX becoming public causes TSLA to tank.

Or maybe it's all because of index funds. What bothers me most about that is that if TSLA tanks, so does a big chunk of the S&P 500 and therefore my 401(k). Hrmph.

I suspect you may be right. My guess is that Telsa will be bought out by SpaceX so they can cover up loses from various parts of the company, namely X and xAI.

Like security backed bonds but on a company scale.

With SpaceX having loads of government contracts, they become more immune to failure via odds of a bailout.

I suspect Musk will negotiate with Musk to convince SpaceX to buy Tesla for more than its market value to avoid the otherwise inevitable crash.

Either that or eventually Tesla drops to ~$50/share, but since that would hurt the Musk ego, the buyout is the much more likely outcome.

People expected something like that to happen, so only the few most naive people waited for the news to sell. As a result, people that would sell because of that sold already.

On the other hand, after those few people sell, the stock won't fall anymore, so the people that were waiting for it to stop falling before they buy make their move.

That's very common, but not reliable for you to make a profit on it. And anyway, those short-term changes are mostly meaningless.

The entire market feels like some kind of musical chairs. Sit down too soon and you miss out on the up, up, up!

Unfortunately, we will only find out once the house of cards collapses.

I think I have figured out the system. Literally any news about Tesla (only bad news recently) -> Tesla stock rises.

In many ways I’m impressed they sell that much. They basically just sell one model here in a space with a ton of competition.

Also since there is no FSD here and the European autopilot they have is not competitive with the travel assist type offerings from other brands.

Really? They just launched FSD ride along, and it's amazing. No need to own or drive a car anymore

There is no FSD in Europe.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaLounge/comments/1r79t3k/tesla_...

https://youtu.be/hcNE8DVLtqA

Etc

https://www.tesla.com/events/fsd-supervised-ride-along-nl

missing /s ?

Oof. Good thing they're a "robot company" now. At least until an Optimus decapitates somebody and Tesla has to pivot to monorails or whatever...

Yep... this user (breve) doesn't like Tesla.. ..we got it now.

breve posted on HN:

Tesla EU registrations crash 17% (Feb 24, 2026)

Tesla Crash rate 3× worse than humans (Jan 29, 2026)

EV sales booming without Tesla (Nov 17, 2025)

By the way.. Tesla is no more a car company anymore.. change your software :)

> The growth looks even stronger when you strip out Tesla’s numbers.

Every registration of an electric vehicle contributes to growth, even from a maker that is losing market share; they should reconsider their funny math.

If you strip out Tesla's numbers, which contribute electric cars, you have less growth.

Petrol/Diesel registrations down 25% YoY seems like a much more interesting story. If that was EVs there would be headlines "EVs are over! It was just a fad" but when it happens to ICE cars it's crickets?

It's honestly impressive how Tesla has managed snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Seriously. While it can't be more than speculative, it's a pretty solid speculation that a competent follow on to Model 3 would've put the rest of the automotive industry so far behind they would never catch up.

Instead, Elon wasted the opportunity on the Cybertruck ego trip to show that he's the genius that transformed cars. Once people catch on to the fact that launching 15 to 25 refueling rockets isn't a viable way to get beyond earth orbit, another project is going to turn out to be an Elon ego trip.

I get your point about Tesla. I don't get it at all about SpaceX...

You might have said the same about landing and reusing a booster. It's impossible, until someone does it.

If they screw up a project it's mostly their own money they're burning.

You want to take a ride on Starliner? Because without crew dragon the US would still be politely begging Russia for seats to the ISS.

The Nazi salutes were kind of a turn off for many European customers. Just not flying so well here.

I was just looking at Elon's X posts for 24 hours and there were about 15 posts about immigrants, pakistani rape gangs and so on, a few about AI, none about cars. He seems distracted.

Nazi salutes tend not to go down well in Europe. Especially for the sort of people who are interested in buying EVs.

8,075 owners didn't seem to mind it. Gigafactory 4 hums along with them. That's still a respectable output for any car factory.

Tesla and similar companies really make me wonder if we still live in a capitalist system. If wealth is sufficiently concentrated - the value of anything becomes tied to the whims of the few who can transact at that level.

How a stock goes up while sales growth, profitability, and other measures go down on a multi-year trajectory defies my understanding.

> If wealth is sufficiently concentrated - the value of anything becomes tied to the whims of the few who can transact at that level.

Sounds like capitalism to me.

> If wealth is sufficiently concentrated - the value of anything becomes tied to the whims of the few who can transact at that level.

You just described a capitalist system: a system built and controlled by and for those who control the capital.

Same as any other economic system: power is usually concentrated around a very small group of people. In socialism and communism, that concentration typically occurs within the party leadership or central planning apparatus.

However, in free-market capitalism, anyone is allowed to participate in capital formation and accumulation. Ownership is not formally restricted to a political class. Entry into markets is open in principle (unless it stops being a free market), and capital allocation is decentralized through free and voluntary exchange rather than administrative decree.

That does not mean capitalism eliminates power concentration, as Wealth can accumulate and translate into political influence. But the mechanism of power differs: In centrally planned systems, control flows from political authority. In market systems, control flows from voluntary transactions and competitive success.

> But the mechanism of power differs: In centrally planned systems, control flows from political authority. In market systems, control flows from voluntary transactions and competitive success.

This is a boilerplate theoretical explanation of capitalism which bears very little resemblance to how things actually work in most Western capitalist societies, particularly America.

A cursory glance at the majority of large markets reveals that they are dominated by a handful of massive companies, who use their enormous wealth and influence to steer (centrally planned) political policies, thereby stymying competition and entrenching their position.

> anyone is allowed to participate in capital formation and accumulation

In the same sense that nobody is allowed to sleep under a bridge.

I don't follow. Even now there is nothing preventing anyone here from making something for millions of dollars. While VC capital is closed to a select few, a person in a garage can still make it big.

Communist counties tend to gate keep even more. To the point that it is entirely who you know, with little concern to what you do.

> Even now there is nothing preventing anyone here from making something for millions of dollars.

Any one person might. But the system is setup such that's it's almost impossible for everyone to do well.

> Communist counties tend to gate keep even more. To the point that it is entirely who you know, with little concern to what you do.

And in capitalist countries, it's how much money you have. Swings and roundabouts.

> Same as any other economic system

Only if you limit yourself "capitalism" and "communism" as the two economic systems you are are considering. What we should be doing is noticing that these two systems fail in very similar ways (concentration of power in a small group of people), and think about what kind of system might not fail in that way.

Have you ever witnessed any other version of capitalism? Do you believe in the invisible hand of the free market? It's neither invisible nor free

Please read that text. It explicitly calls for reasonable government oversight.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that when leftists say “capitalism” they often mean “the ability of capital to set the rules of markets” rather than just “markets”. This causes people who use the latter interpretation and leftists to talk past one another quite a bit. Which is one of the reasons that leftists have sounded this alarm bell for at least twenty years and no-one has paid attention.

When leftists say "capitalism" they mean something closer to what conservatives and free market libertarians mean by "fascism."

Capitalism is a big money party. Leftists are the party poopers, actually just slightly less drunk than the rest of the guests, and pointing out that lighting up fireworks indoors isn't a good idea. Booo-hooo, shut up lefty! *BANG*

Command economies break too. Capitalism has occasional fires like a forest. This is good. It allows things to shake out. New growth comes from the destruction. Command economies don't. They just continue to grow weeds and tall trees until everything is choked. Then they wonder why everything is garbage.

The US is moving to a fascist economy. That is a form of command economy. For example the FDA is controlled by big pharma.

Capitalism with the ultra-wealthy is functionally the same as a command economy.

Kia and Skoda are the biggest sellers in my country. They beat the shit out of a model 3.

Tesla XYZ are luxury cars and thus irrelevant for the unwashed masses. Yet they get all the press...

they are not even luxury cars compared to Porsche, Mercedes or other EV brands

No surprise there. There is so much competition these days and the market is exploding, especially on the lowest end - Dacia's Spring for example is 15.700 €, if you add Germany's subsidies of 6000 € you're at 9.700 € [1] for a brand new car, even if it isn't even made in Romania but in China instead (the fact that this is likely still making a profit despite shipping costs is insane). On the high end, BMW and Mercedes have finally caught up as well, and produce better cars for the same price point with a better support/maintenance infrastructure.

Meanwhile, what does Tesla have in production? Dated stuff on the mid to high price range, rumors are they will stop making some models entirely and a "Cybertruck" that not just looks so similar to a dumpster that raccoons confuse it with literal dumpsters [2] but is unable to ever be certified for European roads because its form is seen as a threat to road safety. So that alone has a serious impact on Tesla's sales.

Then come the never ending stories about supply chain issues especially for spare parts and the quality control issues - like, WTF, a Cybertruck is 60k? Why should people put up with delaminating glue (and why was glue used in the first place?) or rust issues [3]? So that's another dent in the sales, people don't buy lemons.

And finally, the antics of Elon himself and the company in general. The cars are nicknamed "swasticars" ever since Musk's infamous right arm salute, in the Nordic countries (that used to love Tesla) they are refusing to deal with unions for two years now [4], and here in Germany there is a big dispute related to the upcoming works council election (i.e. what y'all Americans would consider an union) [5].

There just aren't that many reasons left to buy a Tesla, and the reasons to buy an ICE vehicle are rapidly going away as well. I'd have zero issues buying a Dacia Spring or a Citroen, if only they'd add a trailer towing hitch that can be used for more than a bicycle rack.

[1] https://www.dacia.de/kampagnen/daciaelektrobonus.html

[2] https://www.news.com.au/technology/motoring/motoring-news/an...

[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterlyon/2025/04/21/tesla-cybe...

[4] https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-sweden-strikers-tax-issues-i...

[5] https://www.dw.com/en/germany-tesla-charges-trade-union-memb...

I would say BMW had already caught up with Tesla since they released the BMW i4 and the iX.

Both are great EVs surpassing Tesla in some aspects. Probably also the most efficient cars outside Tesla.

The i4 is a damn tank, even more so the iX. For the American market both probably are a good fit, but for the German market they're just too big, we're not that SUV-crazed like the American market is thanks to the "SUV loophole".

BMWs problem, that set them back quite a bit, was the i3. A solid car on the technical side, but its design was... yuck, and it was designed for a very very limited subset of people. Too small like my 1.58m wife? Even with the seat moved to the maximum forward, uncomfortable (to outright unsafe) to drive, too high like me with 1.87, again uncomfortable to drive but at least I can reach all pedals.

Nonsense look at VW and their cheating scandal (don't look into their history where they actually did work for the actual real Nazis), Elon's hand gesture, which was 100% not a nazi salute, is nothing compared to that. VW still sell cars ok.

> Elon's hand gesture, which was 100% not a nazi salute

Yes, much like how the J6 adventure was a guided tour. The problem with assertions like yours is that both of these things were caught on video, which makes them somewhat more difficult to make plausible excuses for.

Most of us manage to go our whole lives without getting accused of making nazi salutes, not because we are magic, but because we just don't make them. It's just this one, simple trick!

[flagged]

Videos exonerate such examples. They definitely do not exonerate Musk.

Leave the goalposts alone, please. There is video of Elon's two gestures. If it were a photo from an instant in time, you'd have a point.

If you would like to counter with video evidence of any other politician doing a correct nazi salute on live TV, please do share.

[flagged]

> Typical leftist low IQ trope

I gotta say, if you think I am a leftist, then you must be very, very, VERY far to the right.

He’s trying to gaslight everyone who watched video of Musk doing a Sieg Heil salute that it wasn’t a Sieg Heil.

He’s probably at the end of the spectrum on right/left politics.

I agree. My BIL is similar, with a completely straight face (and at this point I assume full belief) he calls J6 a guided tour.

I guess the ADL is a far right organisation too. Im done, can’t argue with brainwashed people.

Trusting your own eyes over what someone else says is brainwashed? What kind of ass backwards assessment is this?

The ADL stood very much alone in their assessment, if you might recall. You have latched on to the one organization that agrees with you and completely ignored the rest of the world.

I don’t need to hear ADLs opinion because I watched it with my own eyes.

I like the DARVO attempt at calling us brainwashed.

> don't look into their history where they actually did work for the actual real Nazis

If that kind of argument is on the table, also don’t look into Elon’s Nazi-sympathizing grandpa who moved to be able to rule over Blacks, nor his father’s illegal mining under apartheid that funded the Musk family.

And his mother isn't any better when it comes to racism herself [1], and her father (=Elon's maternal grandfather) Joshua N. Haldeman was not just an outspoken Apartheid supporter, but a conspiracy peddler and White Nationalist [2][3].

Musk's entire family is rotten to the core if you ask me, it's a surprise he could put up enough of an act to credibly convince liberals for well over a decade that "he's a good one".

It's actually been a topic here on HN before but found very, very little resonance [4].

[1] https://www.aol.com/elon-musk-mother-sparks-backlash-1701291...

[2] https://www.derstandard.de/story/3000000263400/elon-musks-fr...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_N._Haldeman

[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Some of this is covered in the 'Books could kill' podcast:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/elon-musk/id1651876897...

it is quite entertaining, considering the subject matter.

I mean isn't hasn't he been winking to antisemitism in his tweets for some time now ? Reinstated nazi accounts on tweeter ? "Mechahitler" ?

It just seems there is a trail

No other brand - aside Apple - holds such power of flagging the owner/wielder of an object as an asshole.

In other news, the lack of demand makes them pretty cheap at the moment. You can find a 2023 HW4 Plaid Model S for <$50k.

To be fair, that is probably with like 75-100K miles.

why? would you buy a used cellphone with 70% functioning battery?

EV batteries degrade nowhere near that fast.

https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-battery-life-80-percent-capa...

And even a 80% battery on a model S is still 320 miles of EPA range which is a lot better than many other EVs.

A model S is also significantly more expensive than many other EVs so that's not super surprising?

For the right price, maybe? I've given old cellphones to friends for the price of a meal or pizza before, so maybe around there.

Getting a used car for a few thousand dollars even if it's fairly worn out is still way more tempting than buying new, right?

ICE also degrade over time. Batteries tend to last way longer than internal combustion engines.

My 13 year old Volvo has 138,000 miles and the same mileage as advertised when it was first sold. Also, when an engine goes, you can rebuild it, you can do a valve job, or replace the gaskets, replace the oil pump, replace the cylinder sleeves and you have a brand new engine. Or if you have scratches on your cylinder walls, you can bore those out and install wider pistons, rebalance the crankshaft, although on many modern engines the cylinder sleeves are effectively sprayed on and are just a few microns thick, in which case you need to get a machine shop to bore out the lining and install a race sleeve with custom pistons, which is expensive, but you can do it. And you can do this for less than the replacement cost of a car battery, both in terms of price and more importantly in terms of minerals required. You are talking about adding at most a couple of pounds of steel or aluminum versus manufacturing a new 700kg lithium iron with a lot of circuitry.

The main constraint now on car longevity is going to be the circuitry and all the electronic modules. Those expire with time and need to be replaced, and they are the same for EV and ICE, I'd wager that EVs have much more. Thermal stresses, vibrations, capacitors degrade over time, there is corrosion from moisture, etc. How many years do you think all those Tesla boards will last? I would worry about them more than the battery, which has proven to be very durable, and long term we will find ways of servicing these batteries without requiring replacements. Or at least, some manufacturers will, and smart consumers will buy from them. Just think of the problems a 20 year old computer has, one that has been used for an hour a day for 20 years. Now imagine one constantly vibrating, left outside in the sun and rain, etc. What would be the survival rate of that board over 20 years? Not good.

What we all need is an open source car for the electronics, as well as right to repair laws. That is probably the most important thing needed to keep cars on the road.

Not to be that guy, but citation needed. My Pontiac Vibe engine from 2007 worked fine when I got rid of in 2025. Still got about the same fuel economy. My old ass Silverado needed new piston seals but has over 200k miles and still gets 22 mpg on the high way at 70 mph.

Replacing an iPhone phone battery is trivial cost-wise, why not?

> > In other news, the lack of demand makes them pretty cheap at the moment. You can find a 2023 HW4 Plaid Model S for <$50k.

> why? would you buy a used cellphone with 70% functioning battery?

Did you test that particular battery before making that statement or how do you know what percentage it's at?

A used 1000hp car is a lot more fun than even a new cell phone.

The US auto market is like the UK in the 80's. As the UK is flooded with Chinese appliance cars - I seriously doubt that VAG or anyone else can stop them. It's over for domestic automotive industries unless we are willing to accept higher prices via anti-competitive measures to keep some manufacturing domestic.

That doesn't seem to be the case across Europe based on current sales.

Looking at marketshare in the EU+EFTA+UK 2025 to 2026:

VW Group went from 26.8% to 26.7%. Stellantis went from 15.5% to 17.1%. Renault Group went from 9.8% to 8.7%. Hyundai Group 8.4% to 7.6%. BMW Group 7.0% to 6.9%. Toyota Group 8.0% to 7.2%. SAIC Motor was flat at 2.0%. BYD 0.7% to 1.9%. Tesla 1.0% to 0.8%.

So it doesn't really seem like BYD is eating into the sales of European manufacturers yet. VW + Stellantis + Renault + BMW + Mercedes + Volvo + Jaguar Land Rover was 66.9% in 2025 and it's 67.1% in 2026, an increase of 0.2 percentage points (looking at just VW + Stellantis + Renault, it was an increase of 0.4pp).

We'll see what happens going forward, but Chinese cars aren't killing it yet. SAIC Motor is flat. BYD is doing very well, but it's a lot easier to grow when you're small. I think that Chinese cars will present challenges, but I'm less sure that it's over for European automakers. Right now, European automakers are marginally increasing their marketshare (probably more noise than anything, but not evidence of decline).

I think BYD is a strong company and I think they'll continue to gain marketshare, but will others? SAIC has seen modest European growth since 2024, but nothing really threatening and they're sitting at 2% marketshare and their modest growth seems to becoming no growth. Chery is really small. Geely is ultra small without Volvo.

So it feels like it's really the BYD story. BYD is the company actually making inroads and growing at a significant rate. And I don't think that a single company can destroy the European auto industry. It's possible BYD could become 10-20% of the European market and that would be a major win for them and make a significant dent in competitors. But do you see them becoming more? Are there other companies that seem promising?

> And I don't think that a single company can destroy the European auto industry.

I’m still surprised auto hasn’t turned into a duo-tri-opoly.

Took a while but ~60% of eu cell phones are an Apple or Samsung.

If anything, the Chinese entrants are reversing some effects of automotive consolidation.

I guess marketing still convinces people that tons of vehicle choice is still necessary.

In the UK Chinese cars are hitting 10% of total cars sold not just imports

The US government has already chosen the higher prices via anti-competitive measures route, specifically to keep affordable Chinese and even Japanese cars out of the market.

Anti-competitive measures ensure domestic decline, just a matter of time.

> The US auto market is like the UK in the 80's ... It's over for domestic automotive industries unless we are willing to accept higher prices via anti-competitive measures to keep some manufacturing domestic

That is what is happening. The reality is that the demographic that manufactures cars is different from the demographic that purchases EVs [0].

That said, American battery manufacturing has silently been booming despite public political consternation [1] thanks to defense against overproduction.

Also, it's hypocritical to demand American autoworkers lose their jobs while demanding tech bros be defended against the H1B program [2] and offshoring [3].

Protectionism for me, market forces for thee.

[0] - https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/08/16/georgia-ev...

[1] - https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/eenews/2026/02/23...

[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44469669

[3] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39909329

A lot of people’s problems with H1B visas has nothing to do with protecting American jobs. The truth is H1B visa are a method of exploiting foreign workers. Make H1B run for a fixed time period and not be tied to a specific job and you’ll simultaneously boost the supply of highly-skilled workers and ensure they get a fair market price.

> Make H1B run for a fixed time period

They already are.

> not be tied to a specific job

I agree, and lobbied for that on the Hill years ago but this was during the DREAM act battle [0] so it got nowhere.

> you’ll simultaneously boost the supply of highly-skilled workers and ensure they get a fair market price

I agree.

[0] - https://www.politico.com/story/2013/12/nancy-pelosi-immigrat...

Is it hypocrisy? Or is it "I support whatever I think is good for the American consumer and America generally"? Most real people couldn't give less of a fuck about market fundamentals and purity.

There are only ~440,000 Americans employed in computer-related work [0] compared to ~4,000,000 Americans employed in the automotive industry [1], ~1,700,000 Americans in the transportation manufacturing industry [2], and ~500,000 in electronic components manufacturing [3].

More American consumers would be negatively impacted by layoffs in well paid manufacturing industries that are fairly geographically distributed like the automotive industry than an industry that is consolidated in a handful of single party states like the software industry.

More bluntly, SWEs primarily live in single-party states like California, Washington, NY, and Texas; represent a fraction of employees Americans; and work in a politically irrelevant industry (if the tech industry was actually politically powerful the H1B rule would have never been proposed). In essence American SWEs are politically irrelevant and do not matter as they cannot swing elections.

[0] - https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes151299.htm#nat

[1] - https://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iagauto.htm#emp_national

[2] - https://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iag336.htm

[3] - https://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iag335.htm

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Sure. But Mussolini made the trains run on time - right?

Can you give an example of one of these "useless" green programs?

> But Mussolini made the trains run on time - right?

making an inappropriate hand gesture is comparable to being a mass murderer?

> Can you give an example of one of these "useless" green programs?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra

Your own example undermines your point. Solyndra, a company, was part of a much larger Energy Department program that was profitable for the US government. Tesla itself was kept afloat by loans from this program [0]. This has all been well-reported, you can read up on it. [1]

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/22/4356860/tesla-repays-465-...

[1] https://www.npr.org/2014/11/13/363572151/after-solyndra-loss...

The Goomba Fallacy strikes again.

Did Tesla's EVs reduce carbon emissions or not? You can't say it without contradicting your party/religion.

Pretty sure the science is settled on EVs and carbon emissions, is there something you find controversial?

Good doesn't wash away bad

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> Tesla registered just 8,075 vehicles across the EU, EFTA, and UK in January 2026, a 17% decline from the same month last year.

That's 8075 Teslas too many.

Almost all car companies register new cars to their name to raise the official sales number and unregister them quickly afterwards.

Renault was the one that did it the most in Belgium in 2015 : https://bestsellingcarsblog.com/2015/08/strategy-renault-cha...

Another fair and balanced headline from Fred, has he put out a neutral to positive article on Tesla in the last 4-5 years? What did Elon do to him?

If you are really into EVs, like the author clearly is, than what is happening to Tesla is just sad. Tesla is being run into the ground. It was, and could be, the great American EV success story. But now it's being destroyed by a guy who has clearly lost it. And don't forget that taxpayers have foot the bill for Tesla to have this shot in the first place.

Literally just had to make that 25k EV, but I guess Ketamine sidetracks you?

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He never claims to be unbiased, and had personal beef with Tesla as a shareholder. https://electrek.co/2024/09/05/i-sold-all-my-tesla-shares-ts...

Why is Elon Musk a free man?

We have a publicly verifiable history of repeated violations that would put any American away for a long time.

POSIWID perspective: a[1] purpose of wealth is if you have a billion dollars, you are exempt from rule of law.

1. of course there are more

What specifically? I suspect it's just stuff you're angry at because of excess social media consumption, not actual crimes that have long prison sentences applied to typical perpetrators.

[flagged]

Something is up globally.

VAG sold 71 Audi Q4 E-tron in whole Q4 in the US. Only three Q8 E-trons. 220 Q6 and 248 VW ID.4 .

Best VAG EV seller for Q4 is Porsche Taycan at 1,672 cars.

Total US EV sales Q4 across all manufacturers is 234,171

Audi stopped Q8 e-tron production in early 2025. I don't know how much allocation the US has had of the semi-replacement (S)Q6, and A6 was not launched at all.

Q4 is a bit weird, since it's just a more expensive ID. 4, and not exactly more premium. Actually less premium feel than the sister car Skoda Enyaq, but that's not available in the US.

They're a bit out-of-phase with BMW and Mercedes right now, who just opened the books on their new platform cars. Perhaps you could argue it was bad timing with the Q6 being a bit of an "inbetweener", but the PPE platform was delayed, to be fair.

The US market is extremely regressive due to the changing regulatory environment. I fully expect new ICE cars without catalytic converters in the near future.

This is not representative of the rest of the world.

They might be happy that they can keep making V8s, but they have to know any future administration could easily outlaw any design that goes too far backwards. Such a car will also not be able to be sold anywhere else in the world. Heck, by the time they design, tool, and produce such a beast it could already be too late.

Well, just leave the catalytic converter out in the US variants of cars and pocket the difference. That's a far simpler change.

I don't want that, but given everything else that's going on, it wouldn't be a surprise.

The demand for EVs is crashing across the board. Porsche for example is now in dire straits because they had promised to make the 718 only as EV and with demand going down, they'll revamp the platform and get ICE 718s back.

Unless the feds can take California out of the regulatory picture, I don't expect major steps backward. Almost half the country adopts California's emissions standards.

> These are results for what is bev market auto industry > Search instead for what is bev market auto industru > AI Overview > The Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV) market involves vehicles powered exclusively by electricity via onboard battery packs, without any internal combustion engine. It is a rapidly growing, high-investment sector within the automotive industry aimed at zero-emission transportation. Key aspects include accelerating market share, intense competition, and improvements in charging infrastructure.