It's a bummer though that it's limited to Telsa. Would love to see a fuller one of his all bold statements about robotics, tunnel transportation, space travel, and AI.
The best counter argument to that is that he did manage to predict/make into reality electric vehicles (when going into that industry was crazy) and reusable rockets. If someone makes a thousand moonshot attempts but still succeeds with two that's impressive.
It's really amazing. Anyone still remembers Dojo ? 2 years ago or so they stated that they start to mass produce Dojo and it was supposed to be a top 5 supercomputer in the world by the end of 2024...
How should we consider other claims by CEOs, like claims made about the future of AI? What about claims made by politicians? Or claims made by the Federal Reserve?
Throwing ones hands up in the air and giving up, would be valid if it was actually hard. The example you have given just mixes up CEOs, Politicians and the Fed.
Being charitable, this is a question of whether someone can understand all these domains well enough to make out good from bad. Yes - people have. It takes time, effort and a desire to learn these things, but its done regularly.
Did he always have this problem? I don't recall this from the early Tesla days. I have the totally subjective impression that the predictions have been getting worse and worse.
The thing seems to be that he's made the same claims since the beginning and things are always being pushed out every year .. "fully self driving taxis in 2 years"
He's the perfect salesman for giving investors hope, and delivers some things but promises everything.
The hyperloop.. Colonizing mars by 2025 I think was one claim..
It's incredible there is something wrong with a group of people completely unable to see when someone is lying to them. And no matter how many times they are lied to, as long as they are rich enough they believe them.
I don't know what to think anymore about this. He has continuously conned his way along and does it just long enough to jump to the next con.
Tesla is crashing and somehow people though giving him a huge pay package made sense. Cyber truck is flopping but now he's again living off government graft by having another company buy up the dead weight supply. Tesla is only around because of govt subsidy and now that that's dead he's turned to another govt spigot. While supposedly being opposed politically to what he's doing.
And time and time again people still make up excuses because they can't believe they were conned.
Probably the biggest sign AI is going to flop is him starting talking about it being right around the corner.
Little technical skills, no forecasting ability, we saw how much his "efficiency management" philosophy flopped when done in public via DOGE (vs behind the scenes in a private company) and yet people keep falling for it. As long as he can keep spitting out BS, people keep falling for it.
I always thought the story ended with the emperor and his entourage being embarassed after the child said he's naked... but no, it ends even more close to real human behavior. (Sorry for writing a clickbait sentence).
I think you think about it in the wrong way. The obvious con is what hypes the fan base. They think they are in on it and that they will fool the "NPCs" or what ever they call normal people.
If something is literally incredible, then it's prudent to stop and consider whether it should be believed or that you have made an incorrect assumption. In this case, you wrongly assume that Musk is somehow being rewarded for something that happened in the past, or for something that might not even happen. The reality is that the pay package will only have value if Elon manages to dig Tesla out of the hole.
Despite how much conning you believe Musk has done (I won't refute it), Tesla is a company that actually builds cars, and while the Cybertruck flopped and anyone could see that coming from a mile away, that doesn't really affect the Tesla bottom line. That Musk grifted the government into buying them doesn't really do anything besides saving Tesla some money.
I wouldn't buy Tesla shares, I still don't really see their crazy valuation, but I would buy a Tesla car, as they are ostensibly awesome. If you disregard all the lying Musk has done it's still an epic car with unrivaled self driving capabilities.
That he starts talking about something historically has been a sign that some part of it is going to be a reality. You can stand apart from the crazy people who worship the ground he walks on, and still appreciate that he accomplishes great things. Whether it's through conning and grifting, or hard work and keen insight, there are still an electric car company and a rocket company where there weren't before.
Just stop reacting to people believing or shouting things or grotesque behaviors, and just look at the actual reality. It'll do you a lot better than just believing everything Musk says is BS.
The problem with the stock market is, even if you know with 100% certainty that EM is lying and Tesla is overvalued, you only can cash in that knowledge if the stock price makes contact with reality.
In fact even if every single shareholder in Tesla knows that the price is unsustainable they can still hold out for a greater fool for years. To a large extent you are betting on what the crowd will do, not what the company will do.
Beyond a certain point it becomes self-reinforcing. You will distort everything else about your world view to support that lie. You will surround yourself with other people who believe it and live in a completely internally consistent reality, surrounded by a vast conspiracy trying to bring you down.
The really killer part is, I can't even be 100% certain that it's not me. I'm quite sure, and justify it solidly, but then, I would.
There's never been any such ability. Musk has been promising actual full self driving within a year or two yearly or multiple times a year since 2015 (and partial such since 2014 at least).
> For years, we've been told a lot of things that have never come to fruition.
Sometimes I wonder if Musk's astronomical pay package is an engineered rug pull on Tesla's investors. Imagine if they know the jig is up and intend to fleece stockholders one last time by leaving them holding the bag when the house of cards comes crumbling down.
He engineers perceptions, finance, and govt funds, not technology. Every report and available evidence shows he is barely technologically astute, nevermind genius; the accomplishments of his teams are despite him not because of him.
Which is why a better description would be: The Greediest Man On Earth.
And of those things we've been told, a high percentage of them have had to do with battery technology. Science is full of discoveries, science at scale doesn't always work out like we've hoped.
Everything I remember about the Jobs RDF was entirely about things like MacWorld Expo presentations. Selling lesser-performing products for more by claiming they did more with things like Photoshop bakeoffs, or with (claimed) style over substance. (I was a big long-term Mac user so I felt like Mac OS was enough of an advantage over Windows for a long time that it wasn't just style over substance.)
Musk just took it way further. When Jobs missed with the RDF it was on stuff like the G4 Cube being "cool" enough to make up for its issues. He wasn't promising miracles.
Doing a quick bit of searching based on the 4680 makes me think that there has been or will be a change from NMC811 to LFP chemistry in the 4680, including one article talking about changing to US and European-based in-house manufacturing and reducing dependence on China.
I'm no fan of Tesla, but this looks like the collapse of the contract with the supplier for the battery chemistry they've moved away from, aka "no [more] big deal."
Which cell technology to use depends on the application. Tesla actually uses BYD blade batteries in some of their vehicles sold in Europe. The main issue with prismatic cells is that to be safe, they must be made with LFP chemistry, which hurts energy density. LFP is also worse at charging/discharging when cold, though battery management software mostly solves that.
Cylindrical cells make sense for higher performance NMC and NCA chemistries, as they can be cooled more easily (coolant lines can run in the voids between cylindrical cells), and any single cell failure is less likely to cascade to other cells. Batteries with cylindrical cells were easier to repair, but nowadays cells are welded together instead of bolted, so that's no longer an advantage.
Yep. Prismatic cells have poorer packaging-to-material ratio (circles are optimal). They offer better thermal properties, but thermals are not the main limiting factor anymore.
And the US automakers tried prismatic cells before. Chevy Volt used them in 2012!
Yeah, it's typical of Elektrec to interpret anything Tesla-related in the worst light.
I personally fact checked articles about "Autopilot disengages milliseconds before collision" and the one related to Benavides v. Tesla case.
In the first case they jumped to conclusions. In the second case they "forgot" to mention any details that contradict their narrative: that there were two cases separated by years, that the police has received all the information they needed in the first case, that the driver was pressing the accelerator.
My understanding is Fred (Electrek) has been nothing but negative about Tesla since he got upset that they haven't released the roadster yet. Something to do with having enough referral points to get one. It has become his whole identity and it is sad to see.
Reuters earlier this year - "The development of the 4680 battery has been facing troubles, with the company losing 70% to 80% of the cathodes in test production compared with conventional battery makers, which lose fewer than 2% of their components to manufacturing defects, the report said."
The company L&F referenced in this article were supplying said cathode material.
A headline that actually undersells the article. The 2,900,000,000 $ deal to 7,400 $ is not just a 99% reduction, it is actually over a 99.999% reduction. I guess that is one way to get the "march of nines" they keep promising.
Tesla is actually starting to make cathodes in house via a dry process, which is why they are no longer buying cathode material from this supplier. Typical sloppy reporting from Electrek.
> Tesla is actually starting to make cathodes in house via a dry process, which is why they are no longer buying cathode material from this supplier.
The latter part of this is speculative. Tesla may have begun shipping dry cathodes but it isn't clear that they're capable of matching the former third-party volume. Tesla would absolutely need the additional 4680 volume if Cybertruck sales were meeting their original projections (as opposed to now when they are ~an order of magnitude lower).
Tesla had a ridiculous lead over everyone and they spaffed it.
No new features, no HUD, no dashboard. They want 60k for cars which have nothing in them. Other companies have now ripped the software and the iPad, so they have nothing unique.
All they had to do was continue to improve the product. They didn’t even try.
I' m not defending Tesla for a moment, but I disagree with your take...
1) Wasn't it always inevitable that, once tha large established car manufacturers really started to knuckle down to creating EVs, that Tesla's lead and 'moat' would mostly vanish? They still have some of the most efficient EVs available, and their UI/UX is still one of the best, but of course they'll face compeition, and of course their competitors will try to differentiate in all directions, and especially those that are superficially attractive (and less expensive to deliver) like interior design.
2) Back in his earlier, pre-crazy days, Musk suggested (something along the lines of) that Tesla's goal wasn't to be a huge successful car company, so much as to prove that EVs were viable as everyday cars, and drive a revolution in the car industry. By this measure, they've mostly succeeded.
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Big picture, totally agree that Tesla seems to have lost its way over the past few years, which unsurprisingly correlates (to an outside observer) with Musk's apparent changes in judgement and behaviour, with its consequent impact on Tesla's image and desirability amongst consumers. The Cybertruck turns out to have been a huge misstep, and not having delivered a 'model 2' - i.e. a small mid-sized option - (maybe instead?) is a huge miss.
Tesla stock dipped a little today it seems but it's still up 8 percent over the month. I really don't understand those investors and how they price a struggling company so highly.
> I really don't understand those investors and how they price a struggling company so highly.
Struggling, not so much: '24/'25 revenue of just under $100B, with Q3'25 record profitability and deliveries yielding $1.5B net income. Strong liquidity and a current ratio of about 2, boosting short-term financial stability. Solid cash reserves and relatively low debt ratio.
High stock price: far exceeds that of traditional auto makers even though Tesla's revenue is significantly lower. High valuation reflects investor expectations of growth and future tech upside. Exuberant? Probably. OTOH, Tesla has delivered better ROI for investors than the other automakers.
Tesla is probably the only EV maker with declining sales for the last two years. Quite a feat in a booming market, and remarkable considering that the stock already has a few orders of magnitude of growth priced in.
there was a rush to buy electric cars in the US for as long as the $7500 incentive was in place, so the Q3 2025 number if inflated; it's a pull forward effect.
Sales have been flat for 3 years and the delivery numbers in Europe are catastrophic
on a fully diluted basis, the market cap is above $1.6tn, so at a PE of 20, they'd have to generate something like $80bn in profit per year - hard to do in an industry that is as brutally competitive and low margin as passenger cars.
They lost the massive US subsidy making EV’s appealing and are getting outcomes in China. Model E and Cybertruck have anemic and shrinking sales numbers etc.
With many traditional auto makers you at this point have to wonder if they are still going to be around in ten years. Companies like Ford, Toyota, BMW, etc. are not looking so great. They each have the dilemma of a market that's shrinking by double digit percentages year on year (ICE cars) while another market is growing by the same percentage (EVs).
The way Toyota and Ford deal with this is reducing investments in EVs while at the same time meeting increased EV demand by heavily leaning on other companies to make them some EVs. Ford is working with VW and Renault in Europe. Toyota is working with big Chinese manufacturers in China. So is Ford. BMW has some success with their recent EV models but it is taking big hits with demand for their overall products in markets like the US and China.
The US is clearly lagging the EU and China when it comes to electrification. It's not at all clear that Tesla is doing much better. Their market share has tanked in markets where EVs do well (China, EU). However, it does have its own tech and still plenty of money. Where other manufacturers are leaning on outside suppliers, Tesla is pushing their own technology hard for just about everything. Including self driving cars and batteries. It's a different strategy at least and one that isn't dependent on the ICE market doing well or Chinese manufacturers doing all the technical heavy lifting.
Tesla's stock price is based on investor expectations on some of those bets working out eventually. Even if a lot of that stuff seems like it is struggling right now, it's too early to write all of it off as failed. The 4680 is still expected to be a big part of the semi's Tesla is expected to finally start mass producing in 2026. Self driving tests are still continuing and might eventually add up to something that works well enough. And it's also a relavant format for LFP based chemistries.
The problem for all of them have right now (especially Tesla) is that the Chinese are moving full steam ahead and are doing really well on technology and growth currently. Including things like self driving and of course batteries. The 4680 seems like it is old news when solid state is happening and new chemistries other than NMC are starting to dominate. And FSD while impressive has plenty of competition from other vendors at this point. Rivian has its own version. So do several Chinese vendors. And of course Waymo is actually moving lots of passengers autonomously at this point.
My take is there are not really any reasonable Tesla investors left. Due to a steady supply of Real Believers, anyone with a short bet got burnt time after time.
So these people are no longer shorting. Sane long-only people, likewise have been out for a long time. You're left with a clique of people who won't sell regardless, and when Elon promises to make ice cream with robotaxies, they'll buy a bit more stock.
When only irrational people trade something, the price and market for it are irrational too.
The stock market learns from experience, because it's made of people who learn from experience.
Imagine an investor's experience with TSLA. From the beginning, they're flooded with news reports about 'fundamentals' this, 'fundamentals' that, about how Tesla would imminently collapse, how it's a scam, yada yada. Said investors _constantly_ see themselves being right and those skeptics wrong. Tesla is in fact disrupting an industry. They really are just continuing to scale. Marginal profitability keeps going up. Their cars keep getting better. FSD keeps getting better. The competition that people kept pointing at kept failing to materialize. None of this seems to change the skeptics' byline.
Tesla is actually in a materially worse position than it was a few years ago, by many metrics, but the stock price isn't set by 'fundamentals', it's set by the people setting demand for the stock. With TSLA, this is disproportionately going to be people who have learned to and gotten rich from ignoring the people loudly telling them why investing in Tesla is a bad idea.
A market will correct eventually, but corrections either require people to change their minds or run out of capital. Neither has happened yet, so the market can't correct.
If you want to understand how Tesla bulls pump the stock, check out any of the numerous videos of Dan Ives you will find on YouTube. He is regularly invited on CNBC and other financial new media as well as on financial blogs/vlogs. Here is one recent video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecLsZ4bkW6Q
Think of Tesla as a well-funded pharmaceutical company that has invented a cure for a widespread ailment (call it “driving”) and now is waiting on regulatory approval.
Because you're getting a biased storyline both here and over there. The 4680 supply chain isn't a requirement for anything to succeed at Tesla. The product still sells, just with lower profit per unit. At best, it marks the removal of the current Cybertruck battery pack chemistry. Everything else about the future of Tesla is (as always) clickbait speculation.
TSLA exposure is a call option on Musk succeeding (with success criteria being "TSLA price go up") regardless of reality. SpaceX is buying up Cybertrucks; is it illegal? Will anyone do anything about it? That sort of success (quasi fraud). The product is the stock and the hope there is a greater fool who will buy it eventually.
The "new economy" is full of self-dealing. That's the result of loose (or non-existing) regulations on monopolies. It all starts with Wall Street controlling stocks on thousands of large companies that are ultimately owned by small groups of the same shareholders. Now it's evolving to large sectors owned by fewer and fewer people.
All BEV sales, not just Tesla, are tanking, at least in the USA. Ford and and others have retreated on their plans as well. Tesla may be worse off because of Musk's extracurricular antics but BEVs are not selling well.
have because despite the story that most people try to tell about the market and the economy... in the late- and post-ZIRP era, it's been mostly based on Hype, Feelings, and Vibes.
It's why the entire S&P 500 teeters on the back of 7 companies without any presently viable paths to profitability that would justify the current valuations.
It's why repeatedly lying for a decade+ made Elon so rich even though the business output and fundamentals never really matched the valuation.
Still doesn't - this valuation is mostly vestigial beliefs that AI would eliminate an entire workforce ("history often rhymes") of drivers and replace car ownership with subscription.
The majority of the performance in the market has little to do with actual material value being produced and everything to do with how much rent finance bros think they can extract from the stock.
“If you want to learn something on this show tonight, buy Tesla,” Lutnick told Fox News host Jesse Watters.
In this economy we have a billionaire clan selling hot air and backing each other up. The main "achievements" of this administration are in pumping Bitcoin, "AI", cannabis sales and and online gambling.
The promise of self driving is what's driving Tesla stock.
Two things can happen:
The dream is a bust, and Tesla is worthless.
Or the dream pans out, and almost all other car companies are worth a lot less.
Unless you absolutely want to believe that either self driving is impossible, or Tesla is uniquely unable to achieve it, the valuation is not entirely unwarranted.
Put shortly, Tesla is not a car company, it's a bet on self-driving cars.
Tesla is not the only company to achieve self-driving, and all companies that achieve it share the market with them.
(Or the fourth option, it will take decades for self-driving to take even a significant market of "driving" as humans continue to want to own and drive cars rather than short-term rentals.)
A more likely outcome is that all major auto manufacturers offer self driving.
Ford and Mercedes already have Level 3 systems. Toyota is working with Waymo. Several Chinese automakers have self driving, at various levels of quality.
It's going to become a routine feature of cars. Tesla isn't even the leader.
It omits a lot of other scenarios that increase the actual risk of betting on Tesla...
Self-driving becomes a commodity and so there's no unique Tesla win.
Self-driving becomes something only Tesla controls but (in the fleet/rental model) doesn't bring back returns to justify this investment because of extremely high capital, maintenance, regulatory, or other costs.
Self-driving becomes something only Tesla controls but (in the personal-owner model) doesn't bring back returns to justify this investment because it doesn't motivate the entire world to splash out on new vehicles overnight and also doesn't override other existing biases/preferences.
Self-driving is won by someone else (maybe someone with less religious views about Lidar, say) and Tesla no longer can even sell that promise.
Those are just the ones that occur to me in a few minutes!
Framing it as unwarranted to not think "Tesla is uniquely unable to achieve it"...? Seriously?
The real question is if Tesla is uniquely ABLE to achieve it, above others in the market... including new startups or tech/auto-maker partnerships which may yet form.
Tesla has some supply chain innovation, but none of what they do can't be replicated... and Musk's slavish commitment to video as opposed to LIDAR is hobbling them.
Electrek’s ‘reporting’ has proven so one-sided that I take all their stories with a bucket of salt. Even if the truck has been a flop I doubt their whole battery program has been. Perhaps they’re rejigging suppliers and pausing whilst they get ready to ramp up cyber cab production lines
And what evidence do you base those assumptions on? According to the journalists at electrek despite Tesla having capacity to manufacture 250k cybertrucks per year, they're only selling 20-25k per year
I actually get a kick out of Eletrek’s roasting of Elon and Tesla, but if you read a few of their articles, it’s clear they don’t like him. Lots of opinions and editorializing in the articles. I have no problem with that, you just have to realize where they are coming from and base your interpretation accordingly
Yeah, I'm getting the same feeling. They've announced that semi will use 4680 and Cyber Cab as well, right? If that's the case, this would point to a specific supplier issue rather than something more general.
It isn't something that I've looked into in depth, but it feels like a lot of the discussion isn't hitting the mark here.
The haters on here are ridiculous. If everyone who ever had a product that failed in the market was called a fraud on HN then probably almost everyone would be. SpaceX failed on their first three launches. All the haters here would have voted to shut it all down. Glad Elon's able to recover from business failures without going to the HN comments section to find out what he should do next.
I honestly don’t follow this much but I doubt that production ramp up is the Cybercab’s long pole when they’ll need a significant number of market approvals for FSD to reach critical mass.
When somebody is siding with reality, especially a media source, that's a reason to listen to them more not less.
And when it's straight up facts easily verifiable from others sources, pretending that it's not based in reality is just sticking your fingers in your ears and screaming "la la la la" which is something that even very few 12 year olds do.
The only fact was about the contract which is like a sentence of the article. Then it goes into a guessing game on what it could mean, with the most negative spin possible.
$7,386 seems to be roughly one Cybertruck batteries worth (the only vehicle that uses that battery).
As in they literally expect to build one more Cybertruck battery and that's it. I'm guessing the excess stock in the Tesla factories covers spares for a few years already.
I wonder when the cancellation will be announced by Tesla? It's all but leaked at this point.
The picture of Tesla across internet is so polarizing. X and YouTube is full of Tesla is the future vibe. Electrek and HN is calling it a complete scam. I am sure it's in the middle, but I can't find a balanced opinion anywhere.
But I have seen Electrek being too negative about Tesla always. And never reporting anything positive as such.
research what's in the product if you're interested in buying, and then take your risk as a consumer as with any new product one buys. Or research into the company if you want to buy shares.
Is anybody surprised by the cratering demand for the Cybertruck (directly attributable to 4680 troubles)? Tesla sold the idea of a crazy space truck to a bunch of techie dorks, who then pulled out of the deal when faced with the reality of owning a vehicle that they have to clean with Barkeeper's Friend. This was the obvious result.
I would buy a Cybertruck tomorrow if it had a gas engine. I would buy a $10,000 or $15,000 gas generator add-on if it enabled unlimited range (provided I have gasoline).
There are just too many places, even in California, where I have to limit my trip because of electric range.
I know there’s a lot of Tesla/Elon hate here. I’m not denying any of it. I’m just sharing a genuinely strange experience I wasn’t expecting.
We needed a car again. Sold ours a year ago and got by with Uber, rentals, taxis. Life changed a bit and we needed something more predictable. I was planning to buy something used and boring and didn’t really care what.
My wife asked, “What about an EV?” We can’t charge in our rental garage, but there’s a Tesla Supercharger literally across the street. Took a Tesla test drive mostly out of curiosity.
And… I drove maybe 1% of that drive. The rest was on full self driving (FSD).
Fast forward, I now own a Tesla, and about 99% of my driving is on FSD.
Important context: when we picked it up, it was still on v13. It immediately made an illegal turn and scared some pedestrians in a crosswalk. So yes, I get the concern and skepticism. I had it too.
Then v14.2 landed.
Whatever they changed in that release feels real. It’s not just incremental. It feels like a different system. Elon says “we finally cracked it” (and probably says that all the time), so take that with a grain of salt, but with my very small sample size… it kind of looks like they might have.
Two moments that really stuck with me:
While self-driving, the car clearly anticipated a bus making a massive wide turn into our lane and hung way back until the maneuver was complete. It saw that developing long before I did.
At ~70 mph, I was mid lane-change with my blinker on when a driver towing a large trailer decided to drift into the same lane without checking their blind spot. The Tesla instantly aborted the lane change and smoothly moved back, avoiding what would’ve been a nasty accident. No panic, no hard braking, no drama.
I know this probably sounds like shilling. I’m not interested in the politics and don’t want to defend any of that. But it genuinely feels like stepping into the future, and honestly a much safer way to drive.
I want Rivian, Waymo, whoever to nail this too. I hope they do. But right now, Tesla seems to actually have something that crossed a line from “demo” to “wow, this is real.”
I didn’t expect to come away thinking that. But here we are.
This genuine technological breakthrough is real and should be a main topic when discussing Tesla.
Admittedly, the road to a working version of FSD has been a bumpy one, with many overly optimistic timelines, but now it's finally here, and it is almost completely ignored.
NotXButY, going on irrelevant tangents, rules of three, I felt this was LLM slop and I looked into your posting history and saw you never used “” style quotes, only "", before this post. Yup, it's slop. Care to share what you are gaining from posting chatGPT slop that slurps elon here? were you paid for this?
The future of electrification is at risk because the market chose to bet on TSLA. Many companies backpedaled on EV and the POTUS is making a major push towards oil (including invading Venezuela). The future looks grim.
The "theft" they are really worried about is the loss of oil industry profits.
That's who is sock-puppeting all these misanthropes.
US capitalism was fine with a few wealthy people driving around some novelty luxury cars with EV motors in them. China turned it into an actual mass market product.
Only investor's share prices at risk, there's no risk to the future of electrification.
Look at solar, an industry that has continual bankruptcies, yet is eating the world. New players grow, die, and get replaced all the time, in a continual churn of new technology.
That Tesla would die a death was not inevitable, merely a choice due to recent years of extremely poor leadership and terrible mismanagment. Even now, Tesla may pull out of the slump and recover! It's doubtful it will ever justify its share price, but it's likely that if it ever gets fairly priced as a company, it could be sold to a US auto major that is regretting it's failure to produce EVs for the international market, and wants to try to catch up. Maybe. That time might have passed too...
i don't understand americans, two years ago i wanted a tesla, now i want a byd, you've let down the only american company competing against the chinese, all because of trump and politics
Elon's personality has been known before he ever came out in support of Trump. Think back to when he called someone trying to rescue kids a "pedo" because they ignored his idea of building a submarine. Moreover, his inability to deliver on promises has been a well-known fact for years.
I think you're underselling what Trump and Musk has done to the stability of Democracy in the US. Aside from all that, there are other American car manufacturers with great EVs: Mustang Mach-E, Chevy Equinox/Bolt/Blazer, etc. Not saying that BYD isn't better, but comparing to Tesla, there is plenty of US competition.
Worth noting this Branden Flasch video from a year ago talking about how the charging speed on the 4680 pack tesla Model Y was uncompetitively slow and arguably shouldn't have been sold: https://youtu.be/eQeziVkRwSA
The actual facts of this reporting could just as likely be explained by vertical integration, very typical of Tesla, or of a supplier shift due to absurdly high tariffs.
In any case I'm more and more convinced that Tesla does not hold any significant advantage anymore over legacy automakers in EV space like Volkswagen group, which has 20+ electric models.
How easily can stocks be redirected to eg energy supply logistics and make battery stacks?
How easily can the inputs be redirected by the source to more viable longterm contract sells?
How strongly will this push back on mining and minerals in related fields? E.g. palladium prices have collapsed, could this kind of thing move mining product pricing?
Aren’t shaped prismatic cells the current state of the art anyway? The article mentioned BMW and Rivian using this size of cylindrical cell but I believe the latest from GM, Hyundai, and VW are all prismatic after the earlier designs were either pouch cells or cylindrical.
I guess it depends on who you’d ask. BMW made a switch from prismatic cells to cylindrical design only recently, and it looks like the biggest gain was in costs and weight efficiency. The range/capacity ratio didn’t improve that much. Although, to be fair, none of these parameters depend on battery alone.
The big lie that you've all been sold is that Tesla has any kind of battery technology at all. Outside of repackaging Panasonic (in America) and other batteries (abroad), Tesla has dabbled in a few experiments and they all failed.
Unfortunately nobody else makes any good electric cars at this time, and certainly none that have anything approaching FSD. But you can't buy one due to Elon's treachery. It's extremely frustrating.
A little tangential, but seeing now the name of the steering-wheel-less cabs, why'd they name it Cyber{truck,cab} anyway? Doesn't it imply we use them to drive through the internet?
I actually did want a lighter, 2 Wheel Drive Cybertruck (for $40,000). The "Long Range" trim was close. But it was actually $70k not the $60k they were saying.
Get rid of the touchscreen and the four-wheel-drive steering and the electrical flush door handles, the hatch thing in the back, smaller wheels, any other electronic features like 120v inverters, etc. solid rear axel would be nice but that would be a major redesign.
what would it look like to directly sell EV batteries to consumers? what would have to happen?
this sort of happened. the people who sold these battery materials for the 4680 thought they were making a B2B sale, and they still wound up making a B2C sale - that ended in disaster - in disguise.
These cells aren't special, they're all off the shelf designs. The 4680 got some marketing spin, but really it was just a bigger form factor with a tweaked chemistry that apparently just didn't work out. And of course that means you can meta-spin the failure as "supply chain collapse", etc...
Obviously, no, you can't just buy a bunch of 21700 cells and stuff them in the car yourself, the balancing and calibration needs to happen in an integrated way and that repair (digging into a 400V DC battery!) is just way too dangerous for amateurs. But the batteries themselves are mature technology and kinda boring.
Note that you should never buy raw cells from Amazon. They are always fake or under-spec. At the very least, this seller claims "Multiple Protections" when this is a fully unprotected cell.
Distributors usually won't sell to regular consumers, but there are specialized retailers who base their reputation on selling quality goods, usually to the RC, flashlight, and vape market.
It is totally absurd how far Tesla has fallen behind legacy auto makers, who are now starting up their own battery production and are very close to actually releasing a 25.000 Euro car in Europe.
Musk increasingly feels like a charlatan selling snake oil. He is great at hype and storytelling, not so great at execution. Big promises, missed timelines, excuses reframed as genius.
He has been promising fully autonomous Teslas since at least 2015 and “level 5” self-driving within a couple of years, yet cars still require human oversight and true autonomy remains elusive.
He said Tesla robotaxis would be on the road by 2020 and then “next year” repeatedly, which never happened.
He promised an affordable $35,000 Model 3 and a cheap family EV, but those never materialized as advertised.
He unveiled the Cybertruck with specific features and price points that did not pan out, and several promised add-ons never appeared.
He set repeated production deadlines for the Tesla Roadster that kept slipping for years.
And his Mars colonization timelines are still nowhere near realistic.
The same cycle keeps repeating, with fans focusing on a few wins while ignoring a long list of missed commitments. At some point it stops being bold vision and starts looking like a confidence game.
The thing you made up sure seems odd yes! The facts are that it is not currently used in any other vehicle and we can assume by the fact that the contract was written down by 99% that there is no plan to do so in the near term, otherwise they'd actually, you know, need the batteries.
But don't let facts get in the way of some good bullshit!
Don't worry, the 99% reduction in battery materials is just a strategic pivot to an 'asset-light' approach. The 4680 supply chain isn't collapsing, it’s just being 'optimized' for a future where cars apparently don't need batteries—just FSD subscriptions and robotaxis that run on optimism.
I don't want to pile on you as I see you've already taken a hit - so I'll leave the voting out of this. But consider how many people you knew in the 80s/90s with a Laser Disc player. It was very niche. You likely had one techy nerd friend, or you had a friend that had a dad that was always buying "the next big thing". I think I knew ONE GUY that bought a laser disc player. Contrast that with just Tesla (not even EVs). You likely know 4 or 5 friends or family that own one. The model Y was the best selling vehicle last year. Whether that trend lasts into the 2050s, none of us can know. But calling it a failure? I just don't see it.
Electric cars were a failure, their market share tanked back in the 1910s. So a vague "electric cars failed in the market" is technically true. However, that past failure is quite distinct from the current electric car thing.
The technology is fine, it's the leadership. Plenty of other countries are rolling out EVs fine, we (the US) just can't seem to build out the charging infrastructure or standardize on a charging port.
(And don't forget that Laserdisk was quite successful for what it tried to do, and that when you buy physical videos today, they're in optical disk format.)
I think the amount of vitriol in this thread directed at one of the most successful tech entrepreneurs of all time is sad. He may be too optimistic in his predictions but at least he has goals worth achieving and doesn't stop just because it doesn't work the first time.
Can I ask you something since you love to brag about being a VC? Do you guys have any morals? Seriously. Because from some one that was raised to believe that lying is wrong and that liars (which Elon blatantly is) are not to be respected, you all seem to have no real values other than money and power.
I picture some evangelical church where people get together every week to amp each other up and randomly yell out some angry sound bites while looking around eagerly for approval.
In addition to being one of the greatest mass murderers in history, he is a financial scam artist of the highest order. Give yourself permission to step outside of his complex of lies and be rational for a bit.
For years, we’ve been told that the 4680 cell was the “holy grail” that would allow Tesla to produce a $25,000 electric car.
For years, we've been told a lot of things that have never come to fruition.
Just 6 months ago, we were told that Robotaxi would be available to half the US population by the end of the year.
https://electrek.co/2025/07/23/elon-musk-with-straight-face-...
There is an entire Wikipedia article about Musk's (mostly) failed predictions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
Neat.
It's a bummer though that it's limited to Telsa. Would love to see a fuller one of his all bold statements about robotics, tunnel transportation, space travel, and AI.
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At what point is it fair to call the list something other than ‘predictions’
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"Predictions" feels like the wrong word for what a CEO is saying his company is intending to deliver.
The only one that actually came true out of the long list was a 'prediction' he made about something happening in the same month.
I had no idea this existed, that's pretty damning.
The question - is Musk lying on purpose, or is this more 90-90 rule where he made (obviously wrong) assumptions based on current progress?
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The best counter argument to that is that he did manage to predict/make into reality electric vehicles (when going into that industry was crazy) and reusable rockets. If someone makes a thousand moonshot attempts but still succeeds with two that's impressive.
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Actually a very interesting article! Didn't know he'd been selling this lie for so long.
That looks like it would make the basis of a nice Tesla class action law suit!
'failed predictions'
I am an old man.
In my youth we called this lies. Or investor deception.
Some would even go as far as calling what he claims fraud but hey...
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It’d be neat to have a dedicated site similar to killed by google.
See also elonmusk.today
"Tesla, where we make the impossible late"
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It's really amazing. Anyone still remembers Dojo ? 2 years ago or so they stated that they start to mass produce Dojo and it was supposed to be a top 5 supercomputer in the world by the end of 2024...
https://thedriven.io/2023/06/22/tesla-to-start-building-its-...
The Dojo team left tesla to do their own ASIC. https://www.theverge.com/news/756706/tesla-dojo-team-shut-do...
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The full Robotaxi rollout is going to happen as soon as they finish fulfilling the Roadster preorders.
so like 2080 or thereabouts?
2026 is the Year of Tesla on the Desktop.
Tesla fans have no ability to learn from past lies.
Fool me once, shame on you, fool me 65535 times...
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Maybe "cultists" is a better word than fans, with Musk as their guru.
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How should we consider other claims by CEOs, like claims made about the future of AI? What about claims made by politicians? Or claims made by the Federal Reserve?
With analysis? Like what else?
Throwing ones hands up in the air and giving up, would be valid if it was actually hard. The example you have given just mixes up CEOs, Politicians and the Fed.
Being charitable, this is a question of whether someone can understand all these domains well enough to make out good from bad. Yes - people have. It takes time, effort and a desire to learn these things, but its done regularly.
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Did he always have this problem? I don't recall this from the early Tesla days. I have the totally subjective impression that the predictions have been getting worse and worse.
The thing seems to be that he's made the same claims since the beginning and things are always being pushed out every year .. "fully self driving taxis in 2 years"
He's the perfect salesman for giving investors hope, and delivers some things but promises everything.
The hyperloop.. Colonizing mars by 2025 I think was one claim..
Good article here https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-lists/elon-musk...
I'm happy he's pushed space access but everything else, he's coming across as a bit of a confidence man.
Very much yes.
It's incredible there is something wrong with a group of people completely unable to see when someone is lying to them. And no matter how many times they are lied to, as long as they are rich enough they believe them.
I don't know what to think anymore about this. He has continuously conned his way along and does it just long enough to jump to the next con.
Tesla is crashing and somehow people though giving him a huge pay package made sense. Cyber truck is flopping but now he's again living off government graft by having another company buy up the dead weight supply. Tesla is only around because of govt subsidy and now that that's dead he's turned to another govt spigot. While supposedly being opposed politically to what he's doing.
And time and time again people still make up excuses because they can't believe they were conned.
Probably the biggest sign AI is going to flop is him starting talking about it being right around the corner.
Little technical skills, no forecasting ability, we saw how much his "efficiency management" philosophy flopped when done in public via DOGE (vs behind the scenes in a private company) and yet people keep falling for it. As long as he can keep spitting out BS, people keep falling for it.
> Tesla is crashing and somehow people thought giving him a huge pay package made sense.
There’s only upside for shareholders.
Musk’s package is entirely performance-contingent and structured as 12 stock grants.
And the targets are very ambitious: valuation ($8.5 trillion) and operational goals (20M cars, 10M FSD, 1M robotaxis, $400B profit) over 10 years.
https://poole.ncsu.edu/thought-leadership/article/inside-the...
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Only simpletons can't see the end game of beautiful profits!
https://americanliterature.com/author/hans-christian-anderse...
I always thought the story ended with the emperor and his entourage being embarassed after the child said he's naked... but no, it ends even more close to real human behavior. (Sorry for writing a clickbait sentence).
I think you think about it in the wrong way. The obvious con is what hypes the fan base. They think they are in on it and that they will fool the "NPCs" or what ever they call normal people.
If something is literally incredible, then it's prudent to stop and consider whether it should be believed or that you have made an incorrect assumption. In this case, you wrongly assume that Musk is somehow being rewarded for something that happened in the past, or for something that might not even happen. The reality is that the pay package will only have value if Elon manages to dig Tesla out of the hole.
Despite how much conning you believe Musk has done (I won't refute it), Tesla is a company that actually builds cars, and while the Cybertruck flopped and anyone could see that coming from a mile away, that doesn't really affect the Tesla bottom line. That Musk grifted the government into buying them doesn't really do anything besides saving Tesla some money.
I wouldn't buy Tesla shares, I still don't really see their crazy valuation, but I would buy a Tesla car, as they are ostensibly awesome. If you disregard all the lying Musk has done it's still an epic car with unrivaled self driving capabilities.
That he starts talking about something historically has been a sign that some part of it is going to be a reality. You can stand apart from the crazy people who worship the ground he walks on, and still appreciate that he accomplishes great things. Whether it's through conning and grifting, or hard work and keen insight, there are still an electric car company and a rocket company where there weren't before.
Just stop reacting to people believing or shouting things or grotesque behaviors, and just look at the actual reality. It'll do you a lot better than just believing everything Musk says is BS.
> Tesla is crashing
But the stock keeps hitting new all time highs.
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Well, he cashed in 2 billion of govt money for the moon mission and that doesn't look like it will fly.
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The problem with the stock market is, even if you know with 100% certainty that EM is lying and Tesla is overvalued, you only can cash in that knowledge if the stock price makes contact with reality.
In fact even if every single shareholder in Tesla knows that the price is unsustainable they can still hold out for a greater fool for years. To a large extent you are betting on what the crowd will do, not what the company will do.
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Beyond a certain point it becomes self-reinforcing. You will distort everything else about your world view to support that lie. You will surround yourself with other people who believe it and live in a completely internally consistent reality, surrounded by a vast conspiracy trying to bring you down.
The really killer part is, I can't even be 100% certain that it's not me. I'm quite sure, and justify it solidly, but then, I would.
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> there is something wrong with a group of people completely unable to see when someone is lying to them.
They mistakenly believe, like temporarily embarrassed millionaires/capitalists [1], that they are actually in the winning group.
[1] _ https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck#Disputed
There are 24 hours left in the year. Don't lose hope!
And Tesla's ability to tightly align promises with engineering and supply chain execution seems to be slipping
There's never been any such ability. Musk has been promising actual full self driving within a year or two yearly or multiple times a year since 2015 (and partial such since 2014 at least).
But he says that every year in the earnings call, he will say it again in the q1 call. 'By september' full of confidence and no one calling him out.
"The car is driving itself. The human is only there for legal reasons." (Tesla, 2016)
Tesla video promoting self-driving was staged, engineer testifies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34415413 - January 2023 (342 comments)
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"It's technically true at any given point in time" - Felon Musk, probably.
> For years, we've been told a lot of things that have never come to fruition.
Sometimes I wonder if Musk's astronomical pay package is an engineered rug pull on Tesla's investors. Imagine if they know the jig is up and intend to fleece stockholders one last time by leaving them holding the bag when the house of cards comes crumbling down.
I'm still sour of how easily I was deceived while being so happy when envisioning a future that won't come.
First with autopilot, then with boring's tunnels, then a $39k cybertruck, then ...
What's that saying about "fool me so many times I can't keep count" ?
Whatever angry feeling we may have towards Elon Musk, he's not the richest man on earth for nothing.
Lesson learned, till next time !
>>he's not the richest man on earth for nothing.
He engineers perceptions, finance, and govt funds, not technology. Every report and available evidence shows he is barely technologically astute, nevermind genius; the accomplishments of his teams are despite him not because of him.
Which is why a better description would be: The Greediest Man On Earth.
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And of those things we've been told, a high percentage of them have had to do with battery technology. Science is full of discoveries, science at scale doesn't always work out like we've hoped.
Everything I remember about the Jobs RDF was entirely about things like MacWorld Expo presentations. Selling lesser-performing products for more by claiming they did more with things like Photoshop bakeoffs, or with (claimed) style over substance. (I was a big long-term Mac user so I felt like Mac OS was enough of an advantage over Windows for a long time that it wasn't just style over substance.)
Musk just took it way further. When Jobs missed with the RDF it was on stuff like the G4 Cube being "cool" enough to make up for its issues. He wasn't promising miracles.
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Year isn't over yet, hah.
BYD Atto 3 enters the chat
> Just 6 months ago, we were told that Robotaxi would be available to half the US population by the end of the year.
It's available! Everyone in the US can go to Austin and get a ride in a Tesla robotaxi!
Reports say there are only about 10 Robotaxis operating in Austin at any one time.
https://electrek.co/2025/12/22/tesla-robotaxi-project-austin...
https://www.teslarobotaxitracker.com/
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Just wait another 6 months /s
Tesla isn't a car company it's a robotics company (2025)
Tesla isn't a robotics company it's a meme company (2027)
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https://spaceflightnow.com/2016/04/27/spacex-announces-plan-...
Remember in 2016 when people would be on Mars by 2018?
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[flagged]
Doing a quick bit of searching based on the 4680 makes me think that there has been or will be a change from NMC811 to LFP chemistry in the 4680, including one article talking about changing to US and European-based in-house manufacturing and reducing dependence on China.
I'm no fan of Tesla, but this looks like the collapse of the contract with the supplier for the battery chemistry they've moved away from, aka "no [more] big deal."
2023 article confirming NMC chemistry: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1149/1945-7111/ad14d0
5/2025 article discussing change to LFP: https://roboticsbiz.com/teslas-4680-lfp-battery-explained-ch...
3/2025 article comparing BYD's LFP and Tesla's NMC/NCM: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266638642...
This makes sense but does it make sense to manufacture LFPs as 4680 cylinders instead of rectangular blocks/blades, given https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_Blade_battery ?
Which cell technology to use depends on the application. Tesla actually uses BYD blade batteries in some of their vehicles sold in Europe. The main issue with prismatic cells is that to be safe, they must be made with LFP chemistry, which hurts energy density. LFP is also worse at charging/discharging when cold, though battery management software mostly solves that.
Cylindrical cells make sense for higher performance NMC and NCA chemistries, as they can be cooled more easily (coolant lines can run in the voids between cylindrical cells), and any single cell failure is less likely to cascade to other cells. Batteries with cylindrical cells were easier to repair, but nowadays cells are welded together instead of bolted, so that's no longer an advantage.
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Yep. Prismatic cells have poorer packaging-to-material ratio (circles are optimal). They offer better thermal properties, but thermals are not the main limiting factor anymore.
And the US automakers tried prismatic cells before. Chevy Volt used them in 2012!
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Yeah, it's typical of Elektrec to interpret anything Tesla-related in the worst light.
I personally fact checked articles about "Autopilot disengages milliseconds before collision" and the one related to Benavides v. Tesla case.
In the first case they jumped to conclusions. In the second case they "forgot" to mention any details that contradict their narrative: that there were two cases separated by years, that the police has received all the information they needed in the first case, that the driver was pressing the accelerator.
My understanding is Fred (Electrek) has been nothing but negative about Tesla since he got upset that they haven't released the roadster yet. Something to do with having enough referral points to get one. It has become his whole identity and it is sad to see.
Reuters earlier this year - "The development of the 4680 battery has been facing troubles, with the company losing 70% to 80% of the cathodes in test production compared with conventional battery makers, which lose fewer than 2% of their components to manufacturing defects, the report said."
The company L&F referenced in this article were supplying said cathode material.
ref https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-plans-four-new-batt...
A headline that actually undersells the article. The 2,900,000,000 $ deal to 7,400 $ is not just a 99% reduction, it is actually over a 99.999% reduction. I guess that is one way to get the "march of nines" they keep promising.
At some point the question isn’t “how many nines” but “why is the contract worth $7400 and not $0”.
It was on some very nice letterhead and quite tastefully bound in a bespoke leather case!
Maybe they can still invoice Tesla for some office stationary or something.
we humans aren't really good after the first couple 9's
Tesla is actually starting to make cathodes in house via a dry process, which is why they are no longer buying cathode material from this supplier. Typical sloppy reporting from Electrek.
> Tesla is actually starting to make cathodes in house via a dry process, which is why they are no longer buying cathode material from this supplier.
The latter part of this is speculative. Tesla may have begun shipping dry cathodes but it isn't clear that they're capable of matching the former third-party volume. Tesla would absolutely need the additional 4680 volume if Cybertruck sales were meeting their original projections (as opposed to now when they are ~an order of magnitude lower).
The entire article is speculative.
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Vertical integration only makes sense if you're actually ramping output
Tesla had a ridiculous lead over everyone and they spaffed it.
No new features, no HUD, no dashboard. They want 60k for cars which have nothing in them. Other companies have now ripped the software and the iPad, so they have nothing unique.
All they had to do was continue to improve the product. They didn’t even try.
I' m not defending Tesla for a moment, but I disagree with your take...
1) Wasn't it always inevitable that, once tha large established car manufacturers really started to knuckle down to creating EVs, that Tesla's lead and 'moat' would mostly vanish? They still have some of the most efficient EVs available, and their UI/UX is still one of the best, but of course they'll face compeition, and of course their competitors will try to differentiate in all directions, and especially those that are superficially attractive (and less expensive to deliver) like interior design.
2) Back in his earlier, pre-crazy days, Musk suggested (something along the lines of) that Tesla's goal wasn't to be a huge successful car company, so much as to prove that EVs were viable as everyday cars, and drive a revolution in the car industry. By this measure, they've mostly succeeded.
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Big picture, totally agree that Tesla seems to have lost its way over the past few years, which unsurprisingly correlates (to an outside observer) with Musk's apparent changes in judgement and behaviour, with its consequent impact on Tesla's image and desirability amongst consumers. The Cybertruck turns out to have been a huge misstep, and not having delivered a 'model 2' - i.e. a small mid-sized option - (maybe instead?) is a huge miss.
Tesla stock dipped a little today it seems but it's still up 8 percent over the month. I really don't understand those investors and how they price a struggling company so highly.
> I really don't understand those investors and how they price a struggling company so highly.
Struggling, not so much: '24/'25 revenue of just under $100B, with Q3'25 record profitability and deliveries yielding $1.5B net income. Strong liquidity and a current ratio of about 2, boosting short-term financial stability. Solid cash reserves and relatively low debt ratio.
High stock price: far exceeds that of traditional auto makers even though Tesla's revenue is significantly lower. High valuation reflects investor expectations of growth and future tech upside. Exuberant? Probably. OTOH, Tesla has delivered better ROI for investors than the other automakers.
Tesla is probably the only EV maker with declining sales for the last two years. Quite a feat in a booming market, and remarkable considering that the stock already has a few orders of magnitude of growth priced in.
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If revenue or profit was the deciding factor TSLA wouldn't be valued as highly as it is.
there was a rush to buy electric cars in the US for as long as the $7500 incentive was in place, so the Q3 2025 number if inflated; it's a pull forward effect.
Sales have been flat for 3 years and the delivery numbers in Europe are catastrophic
on a fully diluted basis, the market cap is above $1.6tn, so at a PE of 20, they'd have to generate something like $80bn in profit per year - hard to do in an industry that is as brutally competitive and low margin as passenger cars.
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Q3'25 was a known blip due to the rush to get the $7500 U.S. tax break, which IIRC, even Elon noted.
Past performance is meaningless here.
They lost the massive US subsidy making EV’s appealing and are getting outcomes in China. Model E and Cybertruck have anemic and shrinking sales numbers etc.
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With many traditional auto makers you at this point have to wonder if they are still going to be around in ten years. Companies like Ford, Toyota, BMW, etc. are not looking so great. They each have the dilemma of a market that's shrinking by double digit percentages year on year (ICE cars) while another market is growing by the same percentage (EVs).
The way Toyota and Ford deal with this is reducing investments in EVs while at the same time meeting increased EV demand by heavily leaning on other companies to make them some EVs. Ford is working with VW and Renault in Europe. Toyota is working with big Chinese manufacturers in China. So is Ford. BMW has some success with their recent EV models but it is taking big hits with demand for their overall products in markets like the US and China.
The US is clearly lagging the EU and China when it comes to electrification. It's not at all clear that Tesla is doing much better. Their market share has tanked in markets where EVs do well (China, EU). However, it does have its own tech and still plenty of money. Where other manufacturers are leaning on outside suppliers, Tesla is pushing their own technology hard for just about everything. Including self driving cars and batteries. It's a different strategy at least and one that isn't dependent on the ICE market doing well or Chinese manufacturers doing all the technical heavy lifting.
Tesla's stock price is based on investor expectations on some of those bets working out eventually. Even if a lot of that stuff seems like it is struggling right now, it's too early to write all of it off as failed. The 4680 is still expected to be a big part of the semi's Tesla is expected to finally start mass producing in 2026. Self driving tests are still continuing and might eventually add up to something that works well enough. And it's also a relavant format for LFP based chemistries.
The problem for all of them have right now (especially Tesla) is that the Chinese are moving full steam ahead and are doing really well on technology and growth currently. Including things like self driving and of course batteries. The 4680 seems like it is old news when solid state is happening and new chemistries other than NMC are starting to dominate. And FSD while impressive has plenty of competition from other vendors at this point. Rivian has its own version. So do several Chinese vendors. And of course Waymo is actually moving lots of passengers autonomously at this point.
> High valuation reflects investor expectations of growth and future tech upside.
Yeah, sure.
I wonder if there are still legacy short positions (from 2018-2020 era) that prop up the stock price by covering during dips.
That the stock has gone up a lot does not mean it will continue going up.
On the contrary, Teslas remarkably high stock price means it's less likely to go up and a big correction is more likely.
1.5B net on $100B revenue is not great. 1.5%? If that's not struggling, it's uncomfortably close.
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It has delivered a better ROI in the same way a ponzi scheme can deliver higher ROI.
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My take is there are not really any reasonable Tesla investors left. Due to a steady supply of Real Believers, anyone with a short bet got burnt time after time.
So these people are no longer shorting. Sane long-only people, likewise have been out for a long time. You're left with a clique of people who won't sell regardless, and when Elon promises to make ice cream with robotaxies, they'll buy a bit more stock.
When only irrational people trade something, the price and market for it are irrational too.
There's nothing to understand really. Tesla is a meme stock, and will keep rising as long as Elon and others keep hyping it up.
I don't understand why this keeps working. The dude doing the hyping is widely hated.
67% of Americans have said they'll never consider buying a Tesla. 56% cite Musk as either the entire reason or part of the reason. [0]
Tesla IS Elon Musk. Without him they're nothing, with him they can't access 2/3rds of the market. Why would anyone invest in that?
[0] https://www.yahoo.com/news/two-thirds-of-americans-now-say-t...
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I don't think Tesla stock has traded on fundamentals for a while.
Or ever.
Of course it hasn't, it is a cult of personality.
Short it then
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Tesla's stock is a tulip future at this point.
The stock market learns from experience, because it's made of people who learn from experience.
Imagine an investor's experience with TSLA. From the beginning, they're flooded with news reports about 'fundamentals' this, 'fundamentals' that, about how Tesla would imminently collapse, how it's a scam, yada yada. Said investors _constantly_ see themselves being right and those skeptics wrong. Tesla is in fact disrupting an industry. They really are just continuing to scale. Marginal profitability keeps going up. Their cars keep getting better. FSD keeps getting better. The competition that people kept pointing at kept failing to materialize. None of this seems to change the skeptics' byline.
Tesla is actually in a materially worse position than it was a few years ago, by many metrics, but the stock price isn't set by 'fundamentals', it's set by the people setting demand for the stock. With TSLA, this is disproportionately going to be people who have learned to and gotten rich from ignoring the people loudly telling them why investing in Tesla is a bad idea.
A market will correct eventually, but corrections either require people to change their minds or run out of capital. Neither has happened yet, so the market can't correct.
If you want to understand how Tesla bulls pump the stock, check out any of the numerous videos of Dan Ives you will find on YouTube. He is regularly invited on CNBC and other financial new media as well as on financial blogs/vlogs. Here is one recent video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecLsZ4bkW6Q
Wow, that is the least confidence-inspiring person I've ever listened to (and perhaps laid eyes upon).
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Think of Tesla as a well-funded pharmaceutical company that has invented a cure for a widespread ailment (call it “driving”) and now is waiting on regulatory approval.
I see a lot of Teslas on the road. But I spend a lot of time in Massachusetts and some in California.
Teslas CEO bought the presidency of the USA.
Because you're getting a biased storyline both here and over there. The 4680 supply chain isn't a requirement for anything to succeed at Tesla. The product still sells, just with lower profit per unit. At best, it marks the removal of the current Cybertruck battery pack chemistry. Everything else about the future of Tesla is (as always) clickbait speculation.
Stock market is all based on vibes at this point. Giant gambling system
Has been for much of the late-and post-ZIRP period.
Our so-called "gdp" is mostly rent and legal ponzi schemes
TSLA exposure is a call option on Musk succeeding (with success criteria being "TSLA price go up") regardless of reality. SpaceX is buying up Cybertrucks; is it illegal? Will anyone do anything about it? That sort of success (quasi fraud). The product is the stock and the hope there is a greater fool who will buy it eventually.
SpaceX Buys over 1000 Cybertrucks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45228566 - September 2025 (3 comments)
The "new economy" is full of self-dealing. That's the result of loose (or non-existing) regulations on monopolies. It all starts with Wall Street controlling stocks on thousands of large companies that are ultimately owned by small groups of the same shareholders. Now it's evolving to large sectors owned by fewer and fewer people.
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All BEV sales, not just Tesla, are tanking, at least in the USA. Ford and and others have retreated on their plans as well. Tesla may be worse off because of Musk's extracurricular antics but BEVs are not selling well.
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have because despite the story that most people try to tell about the market and the economy... in the late- and post-ZIRP era, it's been mostly based on Hype, Feelings, and Vibes.
It's why the entire S&P 500 teeters on the back of 7 companies without any presently viable paths to profitability that would justify the current valuations.
It's why repeatedly lying for a decade+ made Elon so rich even though the business output and fundamentals never really matched the valuation.
Still doesn't - this valuation is mostly vestigial beliefs that AI would eliminate an entire workforce ("history often rhymes") of drivers and replace car ownership with subscription.
The majority of the performance in the market has little to do with actual material value being produced and everything to do with how much rent finance bros think they can extract from the stock.
Tesla has the government and a vast propaganda apparatus behind it:
https://fortune.com/2025/03/20/howard-lutnick-pumps-tesla-st...
“If you want to learn something on this show tonight, buy Tesla,” Lutnick told Fox News host Jesse Watters.
In this economy we have a billionaire clan selling hot air and backing each other up. The main "achievements" of this administration are in pumping Bitcoin, "AI", cannabis sales and and online gambling.
The promise of self driving is what's driving Tesla stock.
Two things can happen:
The dream is a bust, and Tesla is worthless.
Or the dream pans out, and almost all other car companies are worth a lot less.
Unless you absolutely want to believe that either self driving is impossible, or Tesla is uniquely unable to achieve it, the valuation is not entirely unwarranted.
Put shortly, Tesla is not a car company, it's a bet on self-driving cars.
There's a simple third option you omitted:
Tesla is not the only company to achieve self-driving, and all companies that achieve it share the market with them.
(Or the fourth option, it will take decades for self-driving to take even a significant market of "driving" as humans continue to want to own and drive cars rather than short-term rentals.)
A more likely outcome is that all major auto manufacturers offer self driving. Ford and Mercedes already have Level 3 systems. Toyota is working with Waymo. Several Chinese automakers have self driving, at various levels of quality. It's going to become a routine feature of cars. Tesla isn't even the leader.
This is the Pascal's wager of stock arguments.
It omits a lot of other scenarios that increase the actual risk of betting on Tesla...
Self-driving becomes a commodity and so there's no unique Tesla win.
Self-driving becomes something only Tesla controls but (in the fleet/rental model) doesn't bring back returns to justify this investment because of extremely high capital, maintenance, regulatory, or other costs.
Self-driving becomes something only Tesla controls but (in the personal-owner model) doesn't bring back returns to justify this investment because it doesn't motivate the entire world to splash out on new vehicles overnight and also doesn't override other existing biases/preferences.
Self-driving is won by someone else (maybe someone with less religious views about Lidar, say) and Tesla no longer can even sell that promise.
Those are just the ones that occur to me in a few minutes!
Well, they don't have a self-driving car but they do have a self-driving share price!
Framing it as unwarranted to not think "Tesla is uniquely unable to achieve it"...? Seriously?
The real question is if Tesla is uniquely ABLE to achieve it, above others in the market... including new startups or tech/auto-maker partnerships which may yet form.
Tesla has some supply chain innovation, but none of what they do can't be replicated... and Musk's slavish commitment to video as opposed to LIDAR is hobbling them.
Waymo is 5 years ahead of Tesla, but Tesla has 50% of Google's market cap, with 10x the P/E.
So something isn't being priced correctly.
This omits the fact that Musk has slashed costs in critical areas of Tesla cars, notably in relying only on visual sensors.
They abandoned the hardware most promising to help enable self-driving.
Electrek’s ‘reporting’ has proven so one-sided that I take all their stories with a bucket of salt. Even if the truck has been a flop I doubt their whole battery program has been. Perhaps they’re rejigging suppliers and pausing whilst they get ready to ramp up cyber cab production lines
And what evidence do you base those assumptions on? According to the journalists at electrek despite Tesla having capacity to manufacture 250k cybertrucks per year, they're only selling 20-25k per year
I actually get a kick out of Eletrek’s roasting of Elon and Tesla, but if you read a few of their articles, it’s clear they don’t like him. Lots of opinions and editorializing in the articles. I have no problem with that, you just have to realize where they are coming from and base your interpretation accordingly
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and SpaceX has been a major buyer of Cybertrucks
Maybe actually the read the entirety of my post before replying
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> get ready to ramp up cyber cab production lines
The word on the street is this is only 2 weeks out.
Right after fulfilling the roadster orders.
And right before the Dyson sphere that will power Grok AI is deployed.
Yeah, I'm getting the same feeling. They've announced that semi will use 4680 and Cyber Cab as well, right? If that's the case, this would point to a specific supplier issue rather than something more general.
It isn't something that I've looked into in depth, but it feels like a lot of the discussion isn't hitting the mark here.
Almost all these articles always read like hit pieces. Find a way to spin the story in the worst possible way.
The haters on here are ridiculous. If everyone who ever had a product that failed in the market was called a fraud on HN then probably almost everyone would be. SpaceX failed on their first three launches. All the haters here would have voted to shut it all down. Glad Elon's able to recover from business failures without going to the HN comments section to find out what he should do next.
Ya it is terrible and very much not what HN is about. Elon has delivered so many things that to doubt him is pure stupidity.
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I honestly don’t follow this much but I doubt that production ramp up is the Cybercab’s long pole when they’ll need a significant number of market approvals for FSD to reach critical mass.
Let's stay positive folks! /s
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Funny how similar sibling comment is. There’s definitely no anti-tesla brigading happening.
https://imgur.com/a/bPnYwja
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When somebody is siding with reality, especially a media source, that's a reason to listen to them more not less.
And when it's straight up facts easily verifiable from others sources, pretending that it's not based in reality is just sticking your fingers in your ears and screaming "la la la la" which is something that even very few 12 year olds do.
The only fact was about the contract which is like a sentence of the article. Then it goes into a guessing game on what it could mean, with the most negative spin possible.
> In a regulatory filing today, L&F revealed that the contract’s value has been written down to just $7,386.
> No, that is not a typo. $2.9 billion to roughly $7,400.
Ooft. That’s one hell of a write down. Imagine the person that had to do the calculation and report it back.
$7,386 seems to be roughly one Cybertruck batteries worth (the only vehicle that uses that battery).
As in they literally expect to build one more Cybertruck battery and that's it. I'm guessing the excess stock in the Tesla factories covers spares for a few years already.
I wonder when the cancellation will be announced by Tesla? It's all but leaked at this point.
Maybe they did this to keep the contract with a symbolic value; or to avoid the headlines that Tesla 'cancelled' the contract?
A '99% write down' is such an uncommon term that many people might not register it.
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"In a regulatory filing today, L&F revealed that the contract’s value has been written down to just $7,386.
No, that is not a typo. $2.9 billion to roughly $7,400."
https://electrek.co/2025/12/29/tesla-4680-battery-supply-cha...
The picture of Tesla across internet is so polarizing. X and YouTube is full of Tesla is the future vibe. Electrek and HN is calling it a complete scam. I am sure it's in the middle, but I can't find a balanced opinion anywhere.
But I have seen Electrek being too negative about Tesla always. And never reporting anything positive as such.
research what's in the product if you're interested in buying, and then take your risk as a consumer as with any new product one buys. Or research into the company if you want to buy shares.
Is anybody surprised by the cratering demand for the Cybertruck (directly attributable to 4680 troubles)? Tesla sold the idea of a crazy space truck to a bunch of techie dorks, who then pulled out of the deal when faced with the reality of owning a vehicle that they have to clean with Barkeeper's Friend. This was the obvious result.
I would buy a Cybertruck tomorrow if it had a gas engine. I would buy a $10,000 or $15,000 gas generator add-on if it enabled unlimited range (provided I have gasoline).
There are just too many places, even in California, where I have to limit my trip because of electric range.
I'm surprised no one has done the generator.
It's ugly, poorly built, expensive and not very good as a truck. A gas engine will not fix all these flaws.
I know there’s a lot of Tesla/Elon hate here. I’m not denying any of it. I’m just sharing a genuinely strange experience I wasn’t expecting.
We needed a car again. Sold ours a year ago and got by with Uber, rentals, taxis. Life changed a bit and we needed something more predictable. I was planning to buy something used and boring and didn’t really care what.
My wife asked, “What about an EV?” We can’t charge in our rental garage, but there’s a Tesla Supercharger literally across the street. Took a Tesla test drive mostly out of curiosity.
And… I drove maybe 1% of that drive. The rest was on full self driving (FSD).
Fast forward, I now own a Tesla, and about 99% of my driving is on FSD.
Important context: when we picked it up, it was still on v13. It immediately made an illegal turn and scared some pedestrians in a crosswalk. So yes, I get the concern and skepticism. I had it too.
Then v14.2 landed.
Whatever they changed in that release feels real. It’s not just incremental. It feels like a different system. Elon says “we finally cracked it” (and probably says that all the time), so take that with a grain of salt, but with my very small sample size… it kind of looks like they might have.
Two moments that really stuck with me:
While self-driving, the car clearly anticipated a bus making a massive wide turn into our lane and hung way back until the maneuver was complete. It saw that developing long before I did.
At ~70 mph, I was mid lane-change with my blinker on when a driver towing a large trailer decided to drift into the same lane without checking their blind spot. The Tesla instantly aborted the lane change and smoothly moved back, avoiding what would’ve been a nasty accident. No panic, no hard braking, no drama.
I know this probably sounds like shilling. I’m not interested in the politics and don’t want to defend any of that. But it genuinely feels like stepping into the future, and honestly a much safer way to drive.
I want Rivian, Waymo, whoever to nail this too. I hope they do. But right now, Tesla seems to actually have something that crossed a line from “demo” to “wow, this is real.”
I didn’t expect to come away thinking that. But here we are.
This genuine technological breakthrough is real and should be a main topic when discussing Tesla.
Admittedly, the road to a working version of FSD has been a bumpy one, with many overly optimistic timelines, but now it's finally here, and it is almost completely ignored.
NotXButY, going on irrelevant tangents, rules of three, I felt this was LLM slop and I looked into your posting history and saw you never used “” style quotes, only "", before this post. Yup, it's slop. Care to share what you are gaining from posting chatGPT slop that slurps elon here? were you paid for this?
The future of electrification is at risk because the market chose to bet on TSLA. Many companies backpedaled on EV and the POTUS is making a major push towards oil (including invading Venezuela). The future looks grim.
> The future of electrification is at risk because the market chose to bet on TSLA
It really isn't. BYD is progressively becoming ubiquitous here (large South America city)
Thats why Potus is planning to liberate you guys.
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They essentially gave away the market to Chinese companies, while at the same time complaining that China is "stealing" something.
Why didn’t the Europeans come out on top?
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The "theft" they are really worried about is the loss of oil industry profits.
That's who is sock-puppeting all these misanthropes.
US capitalism was fine with a few wealthy people driving around some novelty luxury cars with EV motors in them. China turned it into an actual mass market product.
The future looks Chinese.
Trump is going to be lauded in the history books for sure. The Chinese history books, that is. Before this massive self-own, we at least had a chance.
And electric
Only investor's share prices at risk, there's no risk to the future of electrification.
Look at solar, an industry that has continual bankruptcies, yet is eating the world. New players grow, die, and get replaced all the time, in a continual churn of new technology.
That Tesla would die a death was not inevitable, merely a choice due to recent years of extremely poor leadership and terrible mismanagment. Even now, Tesla may pull out of the slump and recover! It's doubtful it will ever justify its share price, but it's likely that if it ever gets fairly priced as a company, it could be sold to a US auto major that is regretting it's failure to produce EVs for the international market, and wants to try to catch up. Maybe. That time might have passed too...
The market didn’t choose to bet on Tesla. It was the only game in town for years.
For the US and the US only.
I disagree on that, just growing pains in the US
i don't understand americans, two years ago i wanted a tesla, now i want a byd, you've let down the only american company competing against the chinese, all because of trump and politics
Elon's personality has been known before he ever came out in support of Trump. Think back to when he called someone trying to rescue kids a "pedo" because they ignored his idea of building a submarine. Moreover, his inability to deliver on promises has been a well-known fact for years.
He regularly delivers on promises. What he consistently fails to deliver on is timelines.
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I think you're underselling what Trump and Musk has done to the stability of Democracy in the US. Aside from all that, there are other American car manufacturers with great EVs: Mustang Mach-E, Chevy Equinox/Bolt/Blazer, etc. Not saying that BYD isn't better, but comparing to Tesla, there is plenty of US competition.
> Aside from all that, there are other American car manufacturers with great EVs: Mustang Mach-E, Chevy Equinox/Bolt/Blazer, etc.
Teslas aren’t perfect, and they are definitely starting to get a bit dated, but the list you made has precisely zero “great EVs” imho.
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You had the opportunity to blame one person or an entire country. Which did you choose?
There's both collective blame for the US, and also individual blame for the idiocy of Musk. No choice necessary.
The country that chose the one person?
Being a Nazi is a huge red line
We voted with our wallets. Between communism and Nazis, communism was the lesser evil. This is Musk's WW3.
Communism has killed hundreds of millions of innocent people. It's not cute or funny.
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Americans? Elon Musk is one person. He might be the richest person in the world but he doesn't represent us.
Worth noting this Branden Flasch video from a year ago talking about how the charging speed on the 4680 pack tesla Model Y was uncompetitively slow and arguably shouldn't have been sold: https://youtu.be/eQeziVkRwSA
There's a lot of speculation here.
The actual facts of this reporting could just as likely be explained by vertical integration, very typical of Tesla, or of a supplier shift due to absurdly high tariffs.
Which bmw models use that battery?
In any case I'm more and more convinced that Tesla does not hold any significant advantage anymore over legacy automakers in EV space like Volkswagen group, which has 20+ electric models.
Yet the 4680 was supposed to be a platform shift, not a single-model experiment
How easily can stocks be redirected to eg energy supply logistics and make battery stacks?
How easily can the inputs be redirected by the source to more viable longterm contract sells?
How strongly will this push back on mining and minerals in related fields? E.g. palladium prices have collapsed, could this kind of thing move mining product pricing?
Aren’t shaped prismatic cells the current state of the art anyway? The article mentioned BMW and Rivian using this size of cylindrical cell but I believe the latest from GM, Hyundai, and VW are all prismatic after the earlier designs were either pouch cells or cylindrical.
I guess it depends on who you’d ask. BMW made a switch from prismatic cells to cylindrical design only recently, and it looks like the biggest gain was in costs and weight efficiency. The range/capacity ratio didn’t improve that much. Although, to be fair, none of these parameters depend on battery alone.
Seems odd to have a supply contract without a penalty clause.
What is TSLA's valuation based on anymore? Maybe next week it'll be the moon colony they’ll have up and running in 2028.
author (Fred Lambert) cannot be trusted. very biased anti-elon writer.
I ride in budget BYD’s regularly in Asia.
Tesla is absolutely fucked.
The big lie that you've all been sold is that Tesla has any kind of battery technology at all. Outside of repackaging Panasonic (in America) and other batteries (abroad), Tesla has dabbled in a few experiments and they all failed.
Turns out making a box is even easier than a larger tootsie roll.
Unfortunately nobody else makes any good electric cars at this time, and certainly none that have anything approaching FSD. But you can't buy one due to Elon's treachery. It's extremely frustrating.
This 2 hour old entry with 242 comments and 231 points has dropped off the front page. Interesting.
A little tangential, but seeing now the name of the steering-wheel-less cabs, why'd they name it Cyber{truck,cab} anyway? Doesn't it imply we use them to drive through the internet?
Its even better with the ancient Greek definition of cyber. Then it becomes a steer-truck/cab, literally implying the opposite.
I actually did want a lighter, 2 Wheel Drive Cybertruck (for $40,000). The "Long Range" trim was close. But it was actually $70k not the $60k they were saying.
Get rid of the touchscreen and the four-wheel-drive steering and the electrical flush door handles, the hatch thing in the back, smaller wheels, any other electronic features like 120v inverters, etc. solid rear axel would be nice but that would be a major redesign.
You should look at the Slate...
https://www.slate.auto/en
Not falling for that again, I'll consider it when it actually exists
Swap "solid rear axle" with "De Dion axle" and your description fits the Slate truck pretty well.
Slate truck or telo trucks could be the move
what would it look like to directly sell EV batteries to consumers? what would have to happen?
this sort of happened. the people who sold these battery materials for the 4680 thought they were making a B2B sale, and they still wound up making a B2C sale - that ended in disaster - in disguise.
> what would it look like to directly sell EV batteries to consumers? what would have to happen?
It looks like this: https://www.amazon.com/JESSY-3-7-Volt-Rechargeable-Battery/d...
These cells aren't special, they're all off the shelf designs. The 4680 got some marketing spin, but really it was just a bigger form factor with a tweaked chemistry that apparently just didn't work out. And of course that means you can meta-spin the failure as "supply chain collapse", etc...
Obviously, no, you can't just buy a bunch of 21700 cells and stuff them in the car yourself, the balancing and calibration needs to happen in an integrated way and that repair (digging into a 400V DC battery!) is just way too dangerous for amateurs. But the batteries themselves are mature technology and kinda boring.
Note that you should never buy raw cells from Amazon. They are always fake or under-spec. At the very least, this seller claims "Multiple Protections" when this is a fully unprotected cell.
Distributors usually won't sell to regular consumers, but there are specialized retailers who base their reputation on selling quality goods, usually to the RC, flashlight, and vape market.
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In other news: https://www.electrive.com/2025/12/17/powerco-starts-unified-...
It is totally absurd how far Tesla has fallen behind legacy auto makers, who are now starting up their own battery production and are very close to actually releasing a 25.000 Euro car in Europe.
Musk increasingly feels like a charlatan selling snake oil. He is great at hype and storytelling, not so great at execution. Big promises, missed timelines, excuses reframed as genius.
He has been promising fully autonomous Teslas since at least 2015 and “level 5” self-driving within a couple of years, yet cars still require human oversight and true autonomy remains elusive.
He said Tesla robotaxis would be on the road by 2020 and then “next year” repeatedly, which never happened.
He promised an affordable $35,000 Model 3 and a cheap family EV, but those never materialized as advertised.
He unveiled the Cybertruck with specific features and price points that did not pan out, and several promised add-ons never appeared.
He set repeated production deadlines for the Tesla Roadster that kept slipping for years.
And his Mars colonization timelines are still nowhere near realistic.
The same cycle keeps repeating, with fans focusing on a few wins while ignoring a long list of missed commitments. At some point it stops being bold vision and starts looking like a confidence game.
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So this battery pipeline can only be used for the cybertruck? Cannot be adapted to be used with the other vehicles? That seems odd.
The thing you made up sure seems odd yes! The facts are that it is not currently used in any other vehicle and we can assume by the fact that the contract was written down by 99% that there is no plan to do so in the near term, otherwise they'd actually, you know, need the batteries.
But don't let facts get in the way of some good bullshit!
Yeah, that's obviously not true.
Maybe your brain could tell us where the batteries are being used and who is producing them.
You know, evidence, instead of just something that resides in your brain.
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If you see electrek news , these are just plain sour haters.
Cyberteack is a flop. This battery has a parallel track and is used elsewhere so conclusions are just basesless .
Isn’t this design DOA though, with LFP and upcoming solid state batteries?
Where else are the batteries used?
It says in the article other manufacturers are using 4680 tech in their cars, BMW, Rivian ...
Don't worry, the 99% reduction in battery materials is just a strategic pivot to an 'asset-light' approach. The 4680 supply chain isn't collapsing, it’s just being 'optimized' for a future where cars apparently don't need batteries—just FSD subscriptions and robotaxis that run on optimism.
Electric cars is a failed technology. By 2050 it will be gone and remember like the laser disk of cars
I will never go back to a ICE car after 30k km of driving an EV
What failed in the technology?
Because batteries are the only part you can criticize, take a look at the sodium batteries made by CATL:
https://cnevpost.com/2025/12/29/catl-expects-sodium-batterie...
https://carnewschina.com/2025/12/28/catl-confirms-2026-large...
It's a real breakthrough in battery tech. With gasoline you simply can't have this.
I don't want to pile on you as I see you've already taken a hit - so I'll leave the voting out of this. But consider how many people you knew in the 80s/90s with a Laser Disc player. It was very niche. You likely had one techy nerd friend, or you had a friend that had a dad that was always buying "the next big thing". I think I knew ONE GUY that bought a laser disc player. Contrast that with just Tesla (not even EVs). You likely know 4 or 5 friends or family that own one. The model Y was the best selling vehicle last year. Whether that trend lasts into the 2050s, none of us can know. But calling it a failure? I just don't see it.
We will see. I drove them for 9 years. I , sadly , saw the reality
Electric cars were a failure, their market share tanked back in the 1910s. So a vague "electric cars failed in the market" is technically true. However, that past failure is quite distinct from the current electric car thing.
The technology is fine, it's the leadership. Plenty of other countries are rolling out EVs fine, we (the US) just can't seem to build out the charging infrastructure or standardize on a charging port.
(And don't forget that Laserdisk was quite successful for what it tried to do, and that when you buy physical videos today, they're in optical disk format.)
The U.S. already standardized on a charging port: Tesla's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Charging_Standa...
Wouldn't be if we could buy byd cars in the US
Electric car sales keep growing and even their biggest critics agree they are better to drive than ICE cars.
I think the amount of vitriol in this thread directed at one of the most successful tech entrepreneurs of all time is sad. He may be too optimistic in his predictions but at least he has goals worth achieving and doesn't stop just because it doesn't work the first time.
Can I ask you something since you love to brag about being a VC? Do you guys have any morals? Seriously. Because from some one that was raised to believe that lying is wrong and that liars (which Elon blatantly is) are not to be respected, you all seem to have no real values other than money and power.
I picture some evangelical church where people get together every week to amp each other up and randomly yell out some angry sound bites while looking around eagerly for approval.
I guess Nazi salute didn't help.
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In addition to being one of the greatest mass murderers in history, he is a financial scam artist of the highest order. Give yourself permission to step outside of his complex of lies and be rational for a bit.
One of the greatest mass murderers in history...? I uh, am morbidly curious to hear your thought process here.
Sorry what? Who did he murder?
This is the sort of lunacy that immediately gives your argument zero weight.