This is all so frustrating. Tesla could have easily been an American auto maker generational success story. Instead they’re working hard to undermine their own success, turn their brand toxic, and even design vehicles that are unappealing to key purchasing demographics (Cybertruck).
No. For all practical purposes, Chinese cars are perfectly fine for most consumers. Since you cannot beat China on manufacturing costs, this war is already lost. Musk or no Musk.
There is no reason Chinese EVs couldn’t have been beaten on cost.
The labor/environmental costs of car manufacturing is relatively low and more than made up in the cost of shipping cars. One example of this was the number of foreign car manufacturers that were relocating manufacturing to the NAFTA region to serve the U.S. car market even before the tariff nonsense.
The area where China might have an edge is batteries cost. I’m not convinced that’s the case but even if we assume it is, it’s irrelevant because Chinese battery companies are largely not vertically integrated with the automakers and have been selling those batteries to non Chinese automakers at the same rates in an open market.
The reason Chinese EVs are cheaper is plain and simple competition. Some of those price advantages will disappear as Chinese companies need to start showing profits, but a lot of those won’t because they were the result of genuine innovation driven by the tremendously competitive market and the economies of scale that were rapidly created.
Keeping that in mind, while a lot of Tesla’s missed opportunities are self owns, the larger problem ultimately was the lack of govt support in developing a competitive ecosystem in the US.
(Sales in 2026 were low until March 2026, Musk probably gotta thank Trump for oil-prices jumping up enough to move the needle again)
The worst news for Tesla isn't the sales though, with "Texas-like" distances in Sweden (and Norway and Finland) there was a perception that only Tesla cars could properly handle the distances without getting too much battery angst.
When people started looking around they realized that the other carmakers were getting their shit together and could actually deliver cars that handled distances well enough.
> Chineese phonemakers exist yet Apple pulls in a significant portion of profits due to their _halo_ allowing them to sell at a higher price point.
The difference is that most customers have the financial wiggle room to buy a more expensive phone. With cars this is an entirely different story because cars are the most expensive things people own (besides a house).
For most people it holds that a car should just get them from A to B. The money for anything more fancy is better spent on something else.
Buying a Tesla was already considered edgy in some demographics, but doing that famous fascist gesture because you feel powerful definitely crossed a line as far as Europeans are concerned.
DOGing half the US population didn't help. I guess he wasn't content firing most of twitter, then begging half of them to come back, only to then lament that twitter had lost 80% of it's value in this processs wasn't enough. He had to do the same to the entire US ... and it's still working.
What changed is he took the mask off. He was always the sleaze that he is today, but a lot of us were fooled into believing he wanted to do something good.
He brought good things due to high-conviction bold moves though, like democratizing EVs, reusable rockets, and most of all, actual internet in airplanes.
I don't agree after reading Walter Isaacson's excellent biography of Elon. It's deeply unfortunate that the book is already a few years old, I'd love and buy the hell out of a 2nd edition that is updated with the last few years.
Obviously it's always been latent in Elon, but he was a pretty bog standard lightly-if-apolitical silicon valley startup guy for most of his adult life. The free speech erosion under the Biden admin is what really started to "red pill" him and eventually led him off the cliff. It's a sad story really, but an important one because I think there are a lot of people in the same boat, and understandign them is important if we want to correct the trajectory of our country's ship. It's a damn hard problem though.
There are a lot of people who are unhappy with the steps the government took to crack down on COVID misinformation, and some people are still upset about Twitter's decision to limit spread of the Hunter Biden laptop story (which was entirely unilateral, and reversed within 24 hours).
Both of these took place in 2020, when Trump was president, but of course Trump's greatest coup was to make everybody think Biden was president in 2020.
2018 (tham luang cave rescue) is when the cracks really started showing up, so the trajectory was probably set a while earlier.
The tendency was probably always there given the serial lying about self driving started circa 2015, or the weird ego trip of ousting the founders and getting himself called co-founder, but if we’re looking for a point event the removal of his long time PA in 2014 still stands out to me.
What did he do specifically to crater his reputation?
Is it his politics? He seems to have reasonable beliefs there. It's not like he's been supporting Trump unconditionally. He doesn't always agree with Trump. Is it because of his stance in favor of free speech? How is that a bad thing? As someone who doesn't like any side of politics, I don't get it.
Two very public Nazi salutes without any attempt to deny it afterwards will certainly crater anyone's reputation. It's not really politics, but more a question of humanity, but then people don't become billionaires without having a contempt for others and a desire to underpay and mistreat everyone you come into contact with.
I think Tesla as a company is doing the right moves. The management (excluding Elon) seems solid and smart.
The problem is that we often attach a company or a larger idea to a single person, even when it is much much bigger than that individual. People started boycotting Tesla because of Elon Musk, without considering that Tesla is actually thousands of engineers, workers, and managers. And majority of decisions are not done by Elons.
But people tend to think in terms of heroes and anti heroes. Cesar Chavez is another example of how this dynamic plays out.
It could be, except it's not factually correct (and an element of truth is necesssary for good humor). GP was talking about Tesla, not about Elon. The correct pronoun for a company is surely "they"
The most amusing to me is that British English considers a company a collective noun, and says "Apple are going to make an iPod" whereas the US considers it a singular entity and says "Apple is going to make an iPod".
Tesla has an P/E Ratio of 332 (in comparison, Apple has 31.3) - the stock price is not based on measurable numbers so I don't think that the unsold EVs will have any consequences for the valuation.
When reality finally sets in it will not be pretty.
The figures quoted here are old, since EV sales have gotten a massive boost from spiking oil prices. The actual figures aren't out yet but anecdotal evidence at least in Australia suggests sales in March (across all brands, not just Tesla) doubled from February.
That said, for Tesla this is only a bandaid, since they have absolutely nothing in the consumer pipeline beyond the current increasingly uncompetitive offerings. Chinese brands like BYD, on the other hand, are laughing all the way to the bank.
Obviously the oil spike, while not a relatively massive price hike historically, is clearly accelerating the pace of electrification, similarly to how COVID accelerated the use of zoom and other remote work platforms. But also similarly, it will probably be the case that gas is still used for some needs, just not nearly as many as today. People still do prefer their gas ranges, and its not as if natural gas is a great pollutant. But electricity is easier to manage than ever now, given battery capacity.
Induction requires your cookware to sit flat against the surface or it won’t heat up (and the range will shut off after a certain time). With natural gas the flames rise through convection and wrap around the contours of the pan. This means many traditional pieces of cookware with round bottoms simply will not work on induction but work fine on natural gas.
Induction also requires the cookware to be ferromagnetic. This rules out a lot of traditional cookware materials such as clay, copper, brass, and stone. Many of these traditional materials are also accompanied by traditional shapes (round bottoms, gently sloped sides) that take advantage of the convection properties of open flame cooking.
Many recipes rely on these traditional vessels for optimal cooking performance. Woks, for example, work much better with a round bottom so liquids can pool in the middle, letting you use less oil for stir frying but still allowing ingredients to spend time in the pooled oil.
The temperature profile of a round-bottom wok over gas flame is also superior to a flat-bottom wok on induction: the traditional wok has a bright hot spot at the bottom (where all the oil is pooling) in addition to heat up all around the sloped sides, for rapidly reducing liquids that come out of foods and cooking sauces (soy sauce, shaoxing wine) with an arc-splash technique. The flat-bottom wok on induction has a uniformly hot surface on the bottom but the sides remain cool, causing all liquids in contact with the sides to run down to the bottom and begin boiling, just like when you try to stir-fry in a frying pan.
Candy-making is another cooking process that benefits greatly from the convection of natural gas combustion, since molten sugar will crystallize around the sides of a pan if they are not hot enough. Traditional candy-making is done in thin-walled, tin-lined copper pans. These pans don't work at all on induction (no ferromagnetic materials) but even if placed on a ferrous plate they would not perform well due to lack of heating of the sides.
I mean, if you are looking at unventilated kitchens, you are going to get bad values cooking. Pretty much period. Yes, by products of burning gas are bad. But by products of cooking are already bad. Ventilate your kitchen.
Induction is also faster to boil water, easier to clean since it's just flat glass, and safer since an induction stove without a pot/pan stays room temperature (in fact, they usually can detect if a pot/pan is present and automatically turn themselves off)
Induction is also particularly nice for certain types of cooking because many induction stoves can be set to a specific temperature instead of just to a power level.
Just reported, yes, that's globally and throughout the past 12 months so that's a 10% work force reduction overall.
In the same period they're posting record sales, it's possible that's mostly a reduction in bleeding edge sales promotion staff, influencers, etc now they have better recognition.
Two press takes on likely the same company press release material.
Mostly unrelated (my surprise that BYD had nearly a million employees) - but a fun vibe coded game would be to give a company, maybe some stats about it, and then you try to guess the number of employees.
I posted two links that both say that, of course both appear to mirror the same primary source.
You'd have to drill into both cleantechnica and the BYD presser for the exact details and caveats that come with all such reporting.
Revenue and deliveries reach new highs
BYD reported 8039.6 billion yuan (1,123 billion USD) in revenue for 2025, alongside 4.60 million vehicle deliveries, according to the NBD. Overseas deliveries reached approximately 1.05 million units, according to Sina reporting, marking the first time the company surpassed the 1-million-unit mark in exports.
Could be. People are not very logical and schools don't teach math anymore.
It is somewhat complex subject. Taking in account actual use, cost of fuel and maintenance and then comparing it to purchase price and depreciation is bit of a work. And I don't think too many people do that when they should.
Well, it's being reported as a surge in interest, whether that is followed by increased sales or not will be seen in the next month or two once these cars are delivered. But anecdotally, second hand EVs which were flooding car lots everywhere have substantially thinned out. There are still some, but a lot less than a month ago.
Also lol, you're funny implying that ICE cars aren't overpriced tablets on wheels either. It's all cars nowadays. And UK's cheapest car right now happens to be a pretty decent EV anyway, a Dacia Spring.
So according to the article, it had 48k extra cars during a quarter in 2024 and now the new record of 50k in Q1 2026, after they sold 358,023 out of 408,386.
Great things to have on balance sheets. With inflation their value can only go up. And as they are level 6 self-driving capable as is soon they can be sold for massively more money. Really they should stock pile hundreds of thousands more.
You're completely right. I've got an idea for an investment strategy. We start a company, and issue shares. We use the money to buy Teslas, and hold them as assets. As the value goes up, the value of the company will rise. Then we issue more shares, at a higher valuation, and use the money to buy more Teslas. Infinite money glitch. I call it a Drivable Asset Treasury company.
The article mentioned the tax incentive, and I’ve seen many do the same. I’ve rarely ever heard anyone talk seriously about how much the USA spends on oil subsidies.
I think q1 is a weak quarter for sales so it might be that inventory build is normal in this quarter. Economic weakness and high energy prices will not help sales though.
What do you have to do to get people to realize that SOB is basically a Nazi? Nobody seems to care that he’s a racist POS supporting extreme right-wing causes.
One would be in my driveway but we cancelled it right when it was about to be delivered when Elon began his decline into madness. Know your audience and your buyers man. Maybe hide your alt right nonsense when your buyers love the earth and the environment.
If your moral development is at the level where you need to use neighborhood yard signs to make your argument, should you really be trying to educate people on the internet yet?
The labor/environmental costs of car manufacturing is relatively low and more than made up in the cost of shipping cars. One example of this was the number of foreign car manufacturers that were relocating manufacturing to the NAFTA region to serve the U.S. car market even before the tariff nonsense.
The area where China might have an edge is batteries cost. I’m not convinced that’s the case but even if we assume it is, it’s irrelevant because Chinese battery companies are largely not vertically integrated with the automakers and have been selling those batteries to non Chinese automakers at the same rates in an open market.
The reason Chinese EVs are cheaper is plain and simple competition. Some of those price advantages will disappear as Chinese companies need to start showing profits, but a lot of those won’t because they were the result of genuine innovation driven by the tremendously competitive market and the economies of scale that were rapidly created.
Keeping that in mind, while a lot of Tesla’s missed opportunities are self owns, the larger problem ultimately was the lack of govt support in developing a competitive ecosystem in the US.
Tesla had that, all Musk had to do was refrain himself from waving his hand around in that certain fashion.
New registrations in Sweden for the past 3 years, Sweden alone would've probably absorbed about 14000 cars of that unsold stock.
(Sales in 2026 were low until March 2026, Musk probably gotta thank Trump for oil-prices jumping up enough to move the needle again)The worst news for Tesla isn't the sales though, with "Texas-like" distances in Sweden (and Norway and Finland) there was a perception that only Tesla cars could properly handle the distances without getting too much battery angst.
When people started looking around they realized that the other carmakers were getting their shit together and could actually deliver cars that handled distances well enough.
The difference is that most customers have the financial wiggle room to buy a more expensive phone. With cars this is an entirely different story because cars are the most expensive things people own (besides a house).
For most people it holds that a car should just get them from A to B. The money for anything more fancy is better spent on something else.
What caused Elon to lose his ability to manage it is subject for debate, I personally believe he discovered drugs in 2019 and the rest is history.
He just took a wrong turn and seems hell bent on staying on it.
Obviously it's always been latent in Elon, but he was a pretty bog standard lightly-if-apolitical silicon valley startup guy for most of his adult life. The free speech erosion under the Biden admin is what really started to "red pill" him and eventually led him off the cliff. It's a sad story really, but an important one because I think there are a lot of people in the same boat, and understandign them is important if we want to correct the trajectory of our country's ship. It's a damn hard problem though.
Both of these took place in 2020, when Trump was president, but of course Trump's greatest coup was to make everybody think Biden was president in 2020.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/mark-zuckerbe...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers...
The tendency was probably always there given the serial lying about self driving started circa 2015, or the weird ego trip of ousting the founders and getting himself called co-founder, but if we’re looking for a point event the removal of his long time PA in 2014 still stands out to me.
Is it his politics? He seems to have reasonable beliefs there. It's not like he's been supporting Trump unconditionally. He doesn't always agree with Trump. Is it because of his stance in favor of free speech? How is that a bad thing? As someone who doesn't like any side of politics, I don't get it.
I think we got a few steps beyond "reasonable beliefs".
I mean, perhaps it is reasonable for you, but then we will find very little common ground.
The problem is that we often attach a company or a larger idea to a single person, even when it is much much bigger than that individual. People started boycotting Tesla because of Elon Musk, without considering that Tesla is actually thousands of engineers, workers, and managers. And majority of decisions are not done by Elons.
But people tend to think in terms of heroes and anti heroes. Cesar Chavez is another example of how this dynamic plays out.
For example: “Meta released a new product, they (Meta) are calling it …”
Mhhh, makes sense.
The tariffs though is a great point. Definitely a boon for Tesla from good old Papa Trump. It's grotesque.
When reality finally sets in it will not be pretty.
Source: At the End of https://asymco.com/2026/03/31/melius-highlights-fcf-while-re...
Edit: typos
That said, for Tesla this is only a bandaid, since they have absolutely nothing in the consumer pipeline beyond the current increasingly uncompetitive offerings. Chinese brands like BYD, on the other hand, are laughing all the way to the bank.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-17/kitchen-pollutants-st...
Induction also requires the cookware to be ferromagnetic. This rules out a lot of traditional cookware materials such as clay, copper, brass, and stone. Many of these traditional materials are also accompanied by traditional shapes (round bottoms, gently sloped sides) that take advantage of the convection properties of open flame cooking.
Many recipes rely on these traditional vessels for optimal cooking performance. Woks, for example, work much better with a round bottom so liquids can pool in the middle, letting you use less oil for stir frying but still allowing ingredients to spend time in the pooled oil.
The temperature profile of a round-bottom wok over gas flame is also superior to a flat-bottom wok on induction: the traditional wok has a bright hot spot at the bottom (where all the oil is pooling) in addition to heat up all around the sloped sides, for rapidly reducing liquids that come out of foods and cooking sauces (soy sauce, shaoxing wine) with an arc-splash technique. The flat-bottom wok on induction has a uniformly hot surface on the bottom but the sides remain cool, causing all liquids in contact with the sides to run down to the bottom and begin boiling, just like when you try to stir-fry in a frying pan.
Candy-making is another cooking process that benefits greatly from the convection of natural gas combustion, since molten sugar will crystallize around the sides of a pan if they are not hot enough. Traditional candy-making is done in thin-walled, tin-lined copper pans. These pans don't work at all on induction (no ferromagnetic materials) but even if placed on a ferrous plate they would not perform well due to lack of heating of the sides.
Not really. You’ve obviously not used modern induction cooktops (though if you’ve gone to a restaurant you’ve eaten from it).
> The temperature profile of a round-bottom wok over gas flame is also superior to a flat-bottom wok on induction
Explain why induction cooktops are incredibly widespread across modern Asian restaurants. You’ve really got to update your priors.
Don’t listen to me, listen to a professional chef (who runs an awesome restaurant in Shenzhen): https://youtu.be/vgv_IiSZarY?si=fgl1w1udQ72xqY3n
Candy making, I’ll concede because I have no experience. In every other way induction is still better.
Induction is also particularly nice for certain types of cooking because many induction stoves can be set to a specific temperature instead of just to a power level.
In the same period they're posting record sales, it's possible that's mostly a reduction in bleeding edge sales promotion staff, influencers, etc now they have better recognition.
Two press takes on likely the same company press release material.
* https://www.autoblog.com/news/the-ev-boom-is-changing-and-10...
* https://carnewschina.com/2026/03/31/byd-cuts-100000-jobs-wor...
That infomation lags current events, perhaps they are taking staff on now EV demand has spiked following oil shock.
This says that sales are actually down. Where are you getting record sales from?
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/04/02/byd-sales-down-20-4-in-...
I posted two links that both say that, of course both appear to mirror the same primary source.
You'd have to drill into both cleantechnica and the BYD presser for the exact details and caveats that come with all such reporting.
~ https://carnewschina.com/2026/03/31/byd-cuts-100000-jobs-wor... ~ https://www.autoblog.com/news/the-ev-boom-is-changing-and-10...BYD sales are down.
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/04/02/byd-sales-down-20-4-in-...
It is somewhat complex subject. Taking in account actual use, cost of fuel and maintenance and then comparing it to purchase price and depreciation is bit of a work. And I don't think too many people do that when they should.
https://www.regit.cars/car-news/uk-fuel-price-hike-sparks-36...
Also lol, you're funny implying that ICE cars aren't overpriced tablets on wheels either. It's all cars nowadays. And UK's cheapest car right now happens to be a pretty decent EV anyway, a Dacia Spring.
(article from today)
“You don’t understand the vision” “This is actually a good thing” “HODL”
The rest of will just buy Xiaomi SU 7's....
"Corportations are people too, and can experience racism as well!"
Certified YCombinator moment.