What’s happening at Tesla? Here’s what experts think.
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What’s happening at Tesla? Here’s what experts think.
https://arstechnica.com/?p=2021522
Can things be turned around at Tesla, or is this the beginning of the end?
https://arstechnica.com/?p=2021522
Can things be turned around at Tesla, or is this the beginning of the end?
"However, in 2024, I do believe it’s well past time to Elon to step aside. The lack of focus on the core business is hurting the company’s long-term prospects, especially in China, where there is a huge amount of competition, and those companies are redesigning products every two years," Abuelsamid said.
. . . Just don't expect it to happen. "Unfortunately, Tesla has effectively no corporate governance from its board full of Musk cronies, and he will never acknowledge when he has made a mistake and will thus not step aside," Abuelsamid said.
Death it is, then.
And it's be okay with that honestly.
Sure he's an asshole, always was, but his money got the electric car competition started and now there's actually viable cars and a somewhat competitive market that could survive the loss of Tesla.
That's like saying that Apple started the home computer competition going.
There's a big difference between bucking trends and skipping steps for the sake of being different, and actually moving the industry forward.
Under a non-sociopathic leadership Tesla battery and engine tech would have been in most Western car brands by now.
Instead, let's look at what Tesla has really brought us:
That's the Tesla legacy that the car industry has inherited.
Tesla’s biggest move was that they were willing to actually compete with an EV. GM released one in the 90s and seriously go look into it. Everyone who bought it fucking loved the thing. But gm killed the project and destroyed the vehicles.
Tesla actually took sales away from ices. That forced them to actually sell evs
GM made an electric car in 1996 (the EV1). It even has a random cult following to this day. Tesla's original founders sort of re-jumpstarted the electric car with new branding but we've been making electric cars for a long time. Range, cost, and infrastructure is what held us back not competition. Now we have the infrastructure (which I will say is what Tesla has largely given us, and what should be the way forward for their business model). The Nissan Leaf was the best selling electric vehicle of all time when Tesla launched the roadster (that same year). The problem really is that most car companies are bad at marketing electric cars to this day. In 2012 Ford launched an all electric Ford Focus. Just about nobody knew about it.
He did not start the entire thing and I'm sick of hearing people say that. He took a company from other people and ran it into the ground both by hemorrhaging money and with poorer and poorer build quality and I am quite literally sick of his face.
That last sentence stuck out to me too, a simple summary of all this mess. The other interesting part was at the end of the article, where they talk about the potential for the NHTSA requiring a recall fix for the "autopilot" feature that would be so expensive as to seriously damage the company:
The scenario there is if the government is really serious about Autopilot, and frankly, I don't remember the last time NHTSA investigated the efficacy of a recall remedy... he knows that NHTSA is insisting on a hardware fix for Autopilot and FSD," Niedermeyer said, referencing the auto safety regulator's unusual decision to apply extra scrutiny to Tesla's 2-million-car safety recall, announced last week.
With 2 million affected cars on the road, any fix that requires hardware—adding back radar, perhaps, or infrared gaze-tracking driver monitoring, wouldn't be cheap or quick to complete. "If NHTSA demands a level of remedy to problems that can't simply be done affordably... then it's a negative margin business with no way out. And that's a problem you can't just spend your way out of," Niedermeyer said.
Right! Like he knows the jig is up so he’s pulling out all his capital now to let the memestock fanbois take the fall. God forbid anyone rich ever suffer consequences.
Someone with deep pockets needs to buy the super charging network.
Rebrand and keep building.
I'm pretty sure there's a path to wealth in that idea. I have neither the means nor the skill. But some does. Just not Musk.
Someone needs to eminent domain the super charging network and run it as a service or at worst a utility.
The answer is actually pretty simple. Musk is a man child who doesn't like criticism. He lives in a bubble. He fires people who disagree with him and listens to anybody who fawns over him. He appeals to the loudest ones he allows himself to hear. That's why he made that dumbass truck. There's not actually many people who want that hideous, broken monstrosity, but his worshippers shouted that they wanted a truck.
He's also scrambling to get money coming in. Twitter is falling apart. People are starting to wake up and realize that he's nothing more than a lucky nepo dipshit. To soften his losses, he's doing a shitload of layoffs and cutting corners wherever he can. Quality is dropping on his products that already had quality issues. Brand recognition and reputation will start to be a net negative factor as a result.
If he wants to turn Tesla around, musk needs to pivot to producing tech for other car companies and stop making cars themselves.
All Musk wants is that bong-hit of attention he gets from getting his name in the news. This is why he blew 44 billion on Twitter. He really doesn't care if Twitter or Tesla succeed or not. He gets bored with his toys quickly if they don't provide him with the attention he craves.