Comment by philistine
7 days ago
I'm sure insurers will love your arguments and simply insure Tesla at the exact same rate they insure everyone else.
I think Tesla's egg is cooked. They need a full suite of sensors ASAP. Get rid of Elon and you'll see an announcement in weeks.
Large fleet operators tend to self insure rather than having traditional auto insurance for what it's worth.
If you have a large fleet, say getting in 5-10 accidents a year, you can't buy a policy that's going to consistently pay out more than the premium, at least not one that the insurance company will be willing to renew. So economically it makes sense to set that money aside and pay out directly, perhaps covering disastrous losses with some kind of policy.
> I'm sure insurers will love your arguments and simply insure Tesla at the exact same rate they insure everyone else.
Insurers would charge 4 times as much for insurance I think. Which matches what I've seen when quoting insurance for Teslas before.
Always comes up but think it's worth repeating: if he's not there the stock will take a massive haircut and no Tesla investor wants that regardless of whether it would improve Tesla's car sales or its self-driving. Elon is the stock price for the most part. And just to muse on the current reason, it's not Optimus or self driving, but an eventual merger with SpaceX. My very-not-hot take is that they'll merge within months of the SpaceX IPO. A lot of folks say it ain't happening, but I think that's entirely dependent on how well Elon and Trump are getting along at the moment the merger is proposed (i.e., whether Trump gives his blessing in advance of any announcement).
Tesla's only chance at this point is government money. Consumers just aren't buying. It doesn't help that Elon was heavily involved with Epstein and is constantly spouting white nationalist propaganda on X. This is on top of his gaffe with "My Heart Goes Out to You". Only a certain type of consumer is going to buy from a company like that.
What form would those funds take? I would agree that the government could pull one lever that would cause Tesla's sales to spike and that would be reintroducing the ev credit. To really juice them they'd have to reintroduce and increase it. I don't think there's another lever they have at their disposal that would do anything material. The government buying a bunch of vehicles for a single or multiple departments wouldn't move the needle. Basically you have to incentivize the masses to purchase. Of course none of that would happen with the current admin and congress. EV's are anathema to the platform.
As an aside, the situation at Tesla sure is getting stranger. I don't know if it was yesterday or earlier in the week, but Elon saying that at least one Cybercab will be sold to a "consumer" before the end of '26 for under $30k makes no sense (yeah yeah promises promises). But wasn't the idea that Tesla would control the fleet? Why would they sell a person a Cybercab to operate as a taxi? That would mean that there's profit to be had by that buyer and so why the heck wouldn't Tesla just keep that profit for itself and run the entire operation? Some kind of balance sheet gimmick? Offloading the insurance risk to someone else?
Maybe someone reading this long-ass reply will clue me in. And I get it the majority of the folks these days think it's all vaporware, but doesn't the vaporware at least have to make some sense?
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