It's hard to feel optimistic about Tesla these days. Musk is gutting the company while dangling bizarre and wildly unrealistic promises in front of shareholders (releasing Optimus robot, self driving taxis, licensing self driving tech, training AI models on all Tesla cars, launching unnamed cheaper product lines – all by the end of the year). This will get a short term stock price boost and probably get his $56 billion pay package approved, but when then? Who saves Tesla from reality after Musk gets his money and checks out?
You know, I have to hand it to Elon. We often hear about how successful companies turn "corporate" and stop being able to innovate because they need to preserve their successful product lines; e.g. Google's ad business. And the leadership in those companies often talk about how they want to "be a big company that acts like a startup" but it's usually just lip service. Well, this is what it actually looks like and it's not pretty; even the customers hate it let alone the employees.
I will always remember what one of my previous bosses told me.
I had built this whole E-Commerce platform for him and his company (I single-handedly did all the coding, infrastructure, etc. Not taking any credit for their incredible sales team.) that was running in multiple countries, bringing in millions in sales.
But I started getting pretty bored once it was stable enough and just running and started seeking greener pastures.
And he said (I'm paraphrasing) most people are either builders or maintainers, and rarely both. And he said I was a builder at heart. So I hate maintaining things. Which is why, when I helped hire my replacement, he was VERY much a maintainer, and he flourished in that second phase since it had reached maturity.
Using that framework, I think that the ratio of builders to maintainers at Tesla is not healthy right now. It seems VERY healthy at SpaceX, for example. They're innovating on new technology AND on efficiencies of the existing tech and logistics.
The builders got them to where they are (I'm still a generally happy Model 3 owner), but the maintainers are the ones who make the maintenance and service experience great, incrementally improve manufacturing, parts availability, all those unsexy things that have more to do with logistics, building superchargers etc.
Because they are too lopsided with builders, they keep inventing new stuff instead of continuing to innovate with EVs. For a while there were enough builder type challenges with manufacturing but even those challenges seem to be exhausted.
I'm surprised to see that they've gutted the supercharger team because it seems like the ultimate "services" sector where they're in better shape than anyone else to make basically free "services" type money from ALL EVs in coming years with NACS.
I have heard another version of this classification: people are either builders, or scalers, or optimizers, but rarely combine the traits. They are good for different stages of the company growth. Builders are good at the most risky and innovative stage from founding the company to getting first customers. Scalers know how to become big and profitable. Optimizers squeeze the juice and keep moats deep.
I think there are only 2 types of people: those who buy into schemas that divide people into between 3 and 16 groups with cool names and those who don't.
Your schema doesn’t account for companies that only have a management tack or an ic track with no opportunity for someone to sometimes lead teams and sometimes make technical decisions. I think you’ll find it’s better if you simply encompass the natural numbers.
According to Gödel's incompleteness theorems, there never exists a complete set of types of people, because there’s always one more type — people writing about those types.
I think this explains the trouble at my current company. We're a couple years into the scaling phase and it's become clear that our CEO is a builder and doesn't know how to scale.
I don't think he understands that and there's really not anything I can do about it but move on.
There was a show (if someone has the reference please add it) where these business guys were discovering chefs and working to turn their restaurants in to franchises.
There was a huge wake-up call as they kept working with this brilliant chef who all but refused to write down recipes, share processes, or do anything but run his restaurant the way he always had. He just couldn’t see that going from restaurant to franchise was an entirely different thing than running a great restaurant.
If I remember correctly, ultimately despite a bunch of different creative approaches, they had to back off.
I think about that a lot when businesses want to go from building to scaling.
About 5 years ago, I had a conversation with my CTO that amounted to this. He told me paraphrasing, "I'm a one trick pony. I take companies from this size to this size and when I'm done, I move on to the next. I'm very good at this and I'm happy doing it." Plus he made a lot of money doing so. I'd worked with him at two companies and it clicked that he had a playbook and he ran that playbook at each new company. He refined the art of going from this stage a to stage b.
I really took it to heart and changed what I thought about career progression. I'm probably a builder/scaler I def get bored in the maintenance phase.
Maintenance/optimization is an interesting stage: on one side, there you mostly need to execute by playbooks rather than be creative. Is it boring? On the other side, it is the stage where you need the most skill and expertise: you actually need to know all those playbooks, and standards, and regulations, and best practices, and war stories. There you stand on the shoulders of giants and establish connection between today and many centuries of others experience. You do need to innovate still, but that is now an intricate art of balance between not wrecking the ship and still being relevant. Is _that_ boring? I don’t know. I want to try it closer to my retirement.
> You do need to innovate still, but that is now an intricate art of balance between not wrecking the ship and still being relevant. Is _that_ boring? I don’t know. I want to try it closer to my retirement.
It's probably experience bias but the maintenance phase orgs I have worked for were more like warehouses that kept systems on shelves and let them rot until all the customers bled away. These were mostly growth by acquisition PE companies. It was like working at a fruit stand selling only rotten fruit. We were never given time, budget, or resources for even basic modernization. Everything was firefighting. One team after acquisition, lost their devops team, and let their pipelines degrade over 5 years to the point they couldn't deploy anymore. I've seen on-prem solutions deployed 20 times to a VM across 50 VM's and called cloud. It took a weekend for the team to deploy (10-15 people because support had to manually test every env because it was so fragile). They also tend to attract and retain talent that is done learning and growing. I had an Ops Engineer at one of these orgs tell me in 2023 that no one told them they had to learn Docker. They know what they know, and they push back on anything new which in turn drives away engineers that do want change. Everyone knows it's broken but no one will commit any resources to fixing it. The business doesn't care as long as they are retaining.
It's minefield and even when they talk about how committed they are to change during the interview you walk into fortified silos and no support or budget to break the deadlock.
>you actually need to know all those playbooks, and standards, and regulations, and best practices, and war stories.
The way I see it is these companies need it, but it is impossible to satiate that need, so they must find the next best thing.
If you have a project with 500 individual contributors or even just 50, it is impossible for one person, even geniuses, to understand and comprehend the whole. It is also impossible to staff all those positions with top talent at scale.
Raw talent and engineering is replaced with heuristics and policies and red tape.
It becomes like sailors operating a ship made with forgotten technology. They each have superstitions and operational knowledge about their little part, but nobody has the ship schematics.
Similarly, there probably isn't single person on the planet that could fully explain how a modern computer works in detail.
>If you have a project with 500 individual contributors or even just 50, it is impossible for one person, even geniuses, to understand and comprehend the whole.
It is impossible to know every detail, but it is certainly possible to understand and comprehend it. The ability to zoom out and zoom in is essential for senior leadership (even if some people appear unfit based on this criteria). Of course it works only if your organization is… ehm… organized and doesn’t look like a bunch of unicorns of all sorts and colors, so that you can extrapolate the methods of work of one team to another.
> Similarly, there probably isn't single person on the planet that could fully explain how a modern computer works in detail.
This will be the downfall of modern society. When nobody remains who understands all the tech we rely on it's only a matter of time before the whole house of cards comes down.
What's fneascinating is that build -> scale -> maintain is a similar lifecycle to a human: create and pivot quickly with fluid intelligence and high energy at first, then settle into your lane and grow, and then use your accumulated domain-specific knowledge and wisdom that no one else has, at a slower pace.
But the progression is not necessarily the same time scale for the product and the person. Maybe it was in the past, before computing.
Clearly this basic idea crops up in numerous forms. Part of the point of this specific scheme is that it is circular: once a given thing has reached the town planner stage, it has become some combination of pervasive and dependable and well-understood, ready to be used as one of the foundations for future exploration.
I've been a builder for a lot of my life but the last 10 years I've worked as an optimizer. The interesting thing about that is the work and playbook I used in the past is more of just a standard industry practice now. I used to do an audit and find a ton of low-hanging fruit and go from there. Nowadays, there's a lot less to correct and I have to think in different ways to provide true value.
Just found the talk on YouTube ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WazqgfsO_kY ). Thank you! It expanded on the basic idea of "cost of failure" very well. I've tried to argue his points with mixed success, but now I can point to a talk given by someone who cut his teeth at Facebook.
That is not good, because what Tesla needs is a much larger range of models. Minivans. Delivery trucks. A real pickup. Work trucks. The Semi.
What really disturbs me about recent Tesla communication is that the Semi is just not being mentioned.
Tesla is basically a battery packager at its core business. The Tesla Semi represents a massive amount of demand for packaged batteries, and Tesla's model has the best prototype-demonstrated abilities. That is what the next ten years of the company is about at the core.
Elon needs to go. Give him the 56 billion, and then send him off his way to ruin Twitter which isn't important. Tesla is one of the most important companies in the world in terms of keeping the EV transition on the cutting edge and keeping the feet to the fire on the old ICE companies. Maybe the Chinese companies will take that up, but there is so much uncertainty in China now.
Tesla is taking too long to release models. It is NOT good at building. Their battery leadership is gone, CATL and other chinese companies raced past them.
The future of EVs is LFP and Sodium Ion, and then probably Li-S or Na-S. Tesla has no leadership in those, it's all China.
> What really disturbs me about recent Tesla communication is that the Semi is just not being mentioned.
There's a pretty compelling argument out there that an electric semi is currently not economically viable because the weight of the battery cuts into the weight the semi can haul without exceeding the gross vehicle weight limit on public roads. In this regard, it may be telling that Tesla's first customer was a company that sells potato chips - one of the lightest weight per volume products you can transport.
It may not completely offset the battery weight, but electric class 8 trucks have an additional 2000 pounds of GVWR allowed.
I would say the biggest headache for Tesla in the semi space is that they were not first to market and there are multiple competitors shipping trucks now. And while Tesla has decent battery production, CATL makes way more and is evolving the technology much faster. Everyone else will just use those batteries. Maybe Tesla will too, if they keep trying to make the Semi a viable product.
> It may not completely offset the battery weight, but electric class 8 trucks have an additional 2000 pounds of GVWR allowed.
I wonder if they did a calculation to determine if this course of action will actually save more carbon emissions than it will cause in the form of road destruction and the need for refinishing them from the increased weight.
> What really disturbs me about recent Tesla communication is that the Semi is just not being mentioned.
It's not being mentioned because it's a dumpster fire.
It has delivery rates that today are 30% of their contractual obligations for 2017, seven years ago now.
Pepsi, Sysco, UPS and Walmart have or are all given up and gone to competitors.
Musk even implies that the outlook won't improve there. Blames battery availability, actually.
EV trucks should have a shoe-in for lot tenders, it works well with the recharge cycle, would work with drop in batteries, etc., but Musk wants his on the Interstate, regardless of feasibility.
He's also managed to convince the faithful that no-one else is doing or capable of doing commercial sized EVs, despite BYD having 60,000 electric buses operating, and others.
Yeah I absolutely agree. The way it was told to me, there are 3 types of people: Commandos, soldiers and police. Commandos like cutting their own path through the jungle and going behind enemy lines to do something nobody thought possible. Soldiers work as a team to make a stable foothold. And after the area is secure, police keep the peace and deal with problems that come up.
The world will always ask commandos to stay around as soldiers and soldiers to stay around as police. But that’s not their role. They’re needed elsewhere.
I saw this with my own eyes back in college. A friend started a computing facility newsletter. Every Sunday he was up until dawn finishing the copy in it, and then Monday he would find a working printer and print copies. I think he was funding it himself for the first few months. One of the computing staff (the “student liaison”) fought him every step of the way. He was constantly being trouble, making it hard to distribute the newsletter. Telling him he couldn’t use the printer. Random stuff like that.
Well. My friend was reliable and 6 months passed. Every week the newsletter came out and it became part of life on campus. My friend moved on and guess who put up their hand to keep running it? It was the liaison. The same guy who had made it so hard to start in the first place. He’s just a born police man. I think deep down he loves maintaining the status quo. Once the newsletter was part of the status quo, he naturally took it on himself to keep it going.
Founders are good at founding, which is generally a very shortsighted and aggressive activity.
At some point, the business needs stability. Founders that stick around too long often cannot make that transition and end up making long term success untenable.
I’ve heard it called “Founder’s Syndrome” when a founder can’t bring themselves to step away and hand their creation off to a better caretaker.
A company like Tesla needs stability if they want me to buy an expensive product like a car - whether it be $25K or $50K. Right now I'm shopping used EVs. Won't pick a Tesla b/c I keep my cars for 15+ years and I can't be sure that a Tesla will be affordable to own during that ownership. They may not even exist in 15 years. I'm pretty sure most of the other mainstream brands will be.
In fact my biggest worry is that the software will be abandoned and as cars age, edge case bugs will appear, but there’ll be no way to fix them.
There’s going to need to be a robust aftermarket for vehicle software.
Though, I don’t know if I’d trust some random EBay dongle or even Dorman to patch my drive-by-wire steering that’s been pulling to the left a bit in a 15 year old Tesla.
One person’s maintaining is another person’s building. There are definitely many many very competent people with a “builder” mindset that would get a kick out of building a good maintenance / service experience.
It’s simply that these things aren’t respected by…someone…or someones, and don’t get the attention they deserve from the people that could provide it.
> One person’s maintaining is another person’s building
IMHO, if you have a shitty harassing manager, you can switch from maintaining to being anti-work in a few months. And having a good manager can lift you from being a maintainer to being a tech lead at any company. This is a simple psychological trick that most companies have not figured out yet and it's very sad.
Management is hard and ICs often underestimate the difficulty.
Employees are diverse, and what works for one, doesn't work for another. Similarly, what ICs say will work and what actually works are usually very different.
To be fair, I think everyone underestimates the difficulty—including managers, the people that hire them, and the people who org companies to "require" a large number of people with these scarce skills.
While I agree ICs underestimate the difficulty, I think what ICs are usually responding to is that the managing isn't good. Whether that's because managing is difficult or because their manager is bad is in some sense not what matters. Those problem are the managers' job or the managers' managers' job.
I used to be like this but I think it's more like...why build something if you don't reap some of the benefits?
I've build several products for several companies / individual, some of them were hugely, hugely successful, and then I'd leave and build the next thing. I just got tired of it after a while. Now I hang around for a bit more maintenance and more often than not something cool comes along.
Assuming that framework is true - which I’m not challenging at all -, why would you need to _fire_ the builders, instead of pivoting them to new greenfields projects - as I assume Tesla has many.
Unless your CEO isn’t a maintainer/optimizer himself?
> I'm surprised to see that they've gutted the supercharger team because it seems like the ultimate "services" sector where they're in better shape than anyone else to make basically free "services" type money from ALL EVs in coming years with NACS.
Yeah, this did seem surprising to me as well. This is one of those mailbox money type of systems. However, I'm guessing they've realized that maintaining the infrastructure is something they do not want to do. So instead of running the network, they should just make the chargers, or license them for others to build. Tesla is pretty much the quintessential example of a rent-seeking company, so these ideas seem right up their alley
My understanding is they were offering subscription services. I could have misremembered that. I know other makers were considering the same type of thing.
There are only two subscriptions that Tesla offers: FSD and Premium Connectivity.
And since you still have the option to purchase FSD outright, I don't consider the subscription option as rent-seeking.
With Premium Connectivity, the way I see it, it's necessary to actually cover the costs associated with it. For those unaware, Premium Connectivity, you don't get any video/audio streaming services in the car, and the navigation can only use bare maps rather than satellite imagery. Note that these limitations don't apply if you instead tether to a mobile WiFi AP, such as your phone. The $10/month pays for the extra data your car uses on the mobile network, which could be a LOT of data if you watch video streaming while supercharging frequently.
Unless Tesla is getting a sweetheart unlimited data deal from some carrier, there are probably some people that actually cost Tesla money from streaming a ton of video. But someone like me, who drives only ~5 hours/month, I'm probably not using much data from the audio streaming.
There are more. In the US, there's Tesla Electric for home charging at a fixed rate. Then there is the Supercharger membership for non-Tesla owners for a reduced rate per kWh.
Anytime someone is trying to keep their hand in my pocket with continuous payments for something used to be a one time payment rather than offer the same but as a service is rent seeking to me. Am I confused on the definition?
What would be an example of that? Most that I can think of involve a company (cough BMW cough) offering a feature they used to sell outright, for a monthly fee. The fee being much lower than the outright price of that feature. They're still offering something of value, in this case convenience and lower cost (if you don't want it all the time, buying it incrementally may well be cheaper than buying it outright; Tesla FSD comes to mind as a contemporary example).
I think the problem most people have with the BMW trick is that they include the feature physically, but disable it. That does almost smell like rent seeking, but I think it does not quite get there. Manufacturers routinely hold back a bit and don't deliver maximum capability. For reasons like emissions, or longevity, whatever. This isn't much different IMO, if you're not paying anything for it then the fact that they included it anyway is immaterial.
Probably the most common kind of rent everyone thinks of, property rental, is also not rent-seeking. There is value in what is being provided.
To go back to a car analogy, it would be like BMW engaging the brakes on your car and then charging you a fee release them so you could drive (even better, making it legally required to pay the fee in order to drive on public roads). They're not providing any value at all, and then demanding money for it.
The pejorative term, in the economic sense, tends to be reserved for rents obtained by gaming the system, rather than the usual kind that charges for use of property or capital.
Example: a utility company lobbies for a law requiring utilities to charge a junk fee.
Non-example: I charge someone to live in my spare bedroom.
Tesla is offering use of something they built (Superchargers, self-driving software, etc.) in exchange for a fee. They aren't gaming the system to force anyone to pay. You might not like the pricing model, but there's nothing economically wrong with it.
Yes, that's not rent-seeking. Rent-seeking is basically collecting money without offering any service or product in return. It does not benefit the economy, in contrary to profit-seeking, which is what Tesla is doing.
No, this is phase 2 of what every SV business[*] looks like these days. Once the initial growth period is over in whatever the business is actually good at, you need to pivot into some new nonsense (AI these days) because the business is chasing infinite growth. That leads to this kind of flailing around trying desperately to hit another bullseye, instead of focusing on what the business already does well.
[*] and more and more all the rest of them as well.
This isn’t what “being a big company that acts like a startup” looks like. This is what being a company that has a scatterbrained dictator for a CEO looks like.
Tesla isn’t building a robot because a scrappy team in the company discovered an opportunity for innovation. They’re doing it because the CEO suddenly demanded it between doses of amphetamines.
Tesla would look like a big company with a startup mentality if they were pumping out new automotive products that made some level of sense.
Hyundai and Kia more closely resemble what this would look like in a large company. All their new cars have unique bespoke designs and a laser focus on giving customers a compelling offering in every category.
Don't know for me Tesla Innovations look more like traditional corporate innovation which can continue no matter the cost as long as the correct person support it.
And in the context of this news I don't see much innovation just some cost-cutting to continue to prop up some moonshots to the detriment of the automaker portion of Tesla.
This is a good point. Innovation is when you put out press releases about an idea that came to you as you crawled out of a k-hole. Few large corporations have the smarts to promise a vehicle that can cross a small sea and deliver one that goes out of warranty if you take it through a car wash
The answer is probably for big companies to let themselves get big but then start investing in the startup ecosystem. New things that aren't a good fit for BigCo should be done in actual startups.
I think trying to put everything under one umbrella is actively harmful. In its most extreme it gives you the Soviet politburo. I've speculated before that the real reason that capitalism seems to work better is because of this multiplicity of organizations allowing the system to route around dysfunction. When everything is all one big corporation (as it was in the USSR) dysfunction in any area becomes fatal and cannot be recovered from.
I agree, this is how you continuously re-kindle the startup environment. It's kind of like reformatting your computer and installing your OS fresh. You have to do it, it's a pain in the ass, you don't want to do it, but when you're done you have a clean, speedy computer without all the built up logs, junk etc taking up the hard drive bogging things down. Tesla will rehire again shortly and we'll be seeing employee numbers rise back again. I'm seeing a lot of commentary that will be irrelevant in a month or less once the careers page reopens positions listings.
It looks like they are a car company in the rise, taking on huge incumbents with a 100 year lead, are in spitting distance of becoming one of those multigenerational institutions and decided to blow their brains out on stage.
They aren’t at the point of disrupting themselves, this is like if Google terminated search in 2004. It’s idiotic, period.
I mean, you fire all the people who know how to do the job and it’s gonna take years to get that skill set back. He could reverse it tomorrow and the damage is done. Utterly remarkable.
He's done this before and it ended in Tesla having increased head count, over double the output of vehicles, so I'm curious how this will turn out in the coming months. I am thinking a repeat of the last time.
I'm sorry but you're bordering on delusional here. The Model Y has been the highest selling car in the world for several months over the last year. The Model 3 and S are also high up there. I will grant you that cybertruck was a colossal waste of time. It's selling but resources would have been better allocated to their low-cost car. Even Elon has admitted the same about CT and Y in hindsight.
But car sales are down across the entire market, this isn't exclusive to Tesla or EV's. Interest rates are just too high for your average consumers and discretionary spending continues to drop. It's myopic to think Tesla are doing something wrong without looking at the state of things.
What are you talking about? Tesla has been SLOW to ship innovative products after they grew. Musk focused on SCALE not new product development. That's why a 2015 Tesla, now 8 years old practically looks the same as one today. Even the cyber-truck was slow to deliver (other manufactures got to EV trucks first).
Also their entire lineup of actual cars is now outdated.
The ark is almost Shakespearean. Pioneering renegade builds an empire, lets it go to his head, and leads two thirds of it to ruin. I just hope spacex escapes the same fate.
I recall that she landed some clutch contracts for SpaceX >10 years ago, but I haven't heard much about her since. What has she done that makes you think she's up to running SpaceX?
The fact that SpaceX isn't missing any steps despite its continued expansion in programs, i.e. Superheavy, Starship, Starlink, space refueling, Lunar landers, in the context of Musk's significant distractions.
SpaceX's path is also economically rational. No cyber space yachts. Just rapidly improving customer cadence, capability expansion, and margin bumps.
Tesla, on the other hand, could really use his creativeness, practical realism and will-to-succeed focus again.
The tech sucks. Lack of 360 cameras. Lack of RADAR. Lack of Ultrasonic sensors. Lack of Android Auto/Apple Carplay. Lack of integrated Rearview mirror camera. Lack of Heads-up Display (let alone augmented reality HUDs integrated into the GPS navigation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8tl0KmqaqU)
That's just the standard tech everyone likes in cars in the year 2024. There's also the lack of physical windshield wiper controls, physical highbeams, or physical climate control buttons. (Everything is tablet-only for the ultimate cheapness / low-end experience).
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The funny thing is that we're in a situation where a 2016-era Model 3 has a better driving experience than the refresh. Well, you know, until they software-disabled the Ultrasonics and RADAR units to make the older model worse.
I'm always fascinated to see a critique about a device (car in this case) that never once even mentions the core thing(s) the device is supposed to do.
You didn't even mention any of - fuel mileage, road noise, driver fatigue, comfort of seats, performance of HVAC, visibility, crash safety, passenger comfort and entertainment, storage volume, leg room. You know, transporting meat sacks safely, comfortably and cheaply.
I personally think it's because vehicle manufacturers have spent the last ~20 years not really improving the core vehicle at all, and instead convincing people that massage seats and car play are actually important. Personally I think they're a distraction from the fact most cars today get the same horrible mileage they did 20 years ago.
If someone made a car that was comfortable, easy to drive, had plenty of storage and was super cheap to drive (like 3l/100km / ~70 US MPG) I'd be all over it.
And that is what EVs are. So far they're mostly focusing on the core product and have not spent the time or money on the fluff.
I have expectations. If I just wanted to safely transport people from pointA to pointB reliably and efficiently, the answer is a Toyota Corolla Hybrid at nearly half the cost.
If you're competing against $40k vehicles, then I think its fair to compare to... I dunno, an Ioniq 6 or something? Full EV, faster charging, better tech, better road noise, etc. etc. etc.
Tesla's core product, the car, has worse safety, tech, and other features than any competitor. And with regards to the Highland update, it doesn't even add any of the recent innovations that are "fashionable" in today's day-and-age.
Its 2024. A freaking Corolla has some of the features I listed above, at again, nearly half the price of a typical Tesla. Tesla's tech stack is severely out of date even with the update.
> If someone made a car that was comfortable, easy to drive, had plenty of storage and was super cheap to drive (like 3l/100km / ~70 US MPG) I'd be all over it.
I think that's called a Ford Maverick. Ford Maverick ain't 70mpg, but its cheaper to drive than supercharger / fast chargers (where costs skyrocket for EVs to 30+ cents / kwhr).
I find this to be a weird perspective because EVs, and especially Tesla, seem to be focused entirely on fluff. That's one of the reasons they cost so damn much compared to ICE "economy" compacts.
Things like "pop out" door handles and steel body panels are fluff. A steering "yoke" is fluff. Side glass that can withstand a steel bearing is fluff. Constant (broken) FSD promises are fluff.
Features like a HUD or stalks on the steering wheel would make a driver's experience better and more comfortable. The former they never added, the latter they removed (probably to improve margin).
The last EV I drove was a Renault Zoe, as they're available for hire from the street with an app.
It is a normal, small, city car. Windscreen wipers on the usual stalks, knobs and buttons for climate control, etc. In part because it lacks some electronic safety features (lane-departure warning, automatic emergency braking) it has a very poor safety rating.
> Side glass that can withstand a steel bearing is fluff.
This one I actually think would have been somewhat useful, presuming it was cheap enough to actually use. I don't throw steel bearings at my car, but I would imagine that strength probably carries over to stuff falling out of trucks, rocks being flung by tires, etc.
It's not world-changing, but it would have been useful.
Do you regularly drive your car into lakes? I would legitimately be surprised if I ever know a person that this has happened to never mind if it ever happened to me.
There was a wealthy lady that was driving drunk I believe in the news who put her Tesla into her pond by accident and drowned b/c she couldn't get the windows down and the doors to open. Her biggest problem was the alcohol though.
Friends could not save her b/c they could not break the laminated glass. We have safety hammers in all of our cars for that reason.
> Personally I think they're a distraction from the fact most cars today get the same horrible mileage they did 20 years ago.
You can't fight physics. A gas-powered sedan weighed down by all the modern safety requirements can only get ~43mpg on the highway.
A hybrid boosts this to ~55mpg and also greatly improves city efficiency.
Above those numbers, you're looking at engines that are severely underpowered (1.0 liters) or is more EV than gas car.
> I personally think it's because vehicle manufacturers have spent the last ~20 years not really improving the core vehicle at all, and instead convincing people that massage seats and car play are actually important.
Well, yes. To please the American consumerist mindset, you have to keep inventing new features even if the new feature is a complete gimmick or just a subscription, or taking out physical buttons (e.g. all strictly negatives).
> If someone made a car that was comfortable, easy to drive, had plenty of storage and was super cheap to drive (like 3l/100km / ~70 US MPG) I'd be all over it.
At that point why not just wish for a magic horse that flies or something. 70 MPG is an EV number. You'll never get a gas car that gets that mileage.
> A gas-powered sedan weighed down by all the modern safety requirements can only get ~43mpg on the highway.
Meanwhile in 1988 (36 years ago!) one could buy a Honda CRX that got 49mpg on the highway.
Weight is indeed the enemy here. To cut energy consumption and emissions we need to rethink the madness of 4000lb+ cars. I want to buy a 1600lb car with mindblowing mpg numbers using modern engine technology.
I was driving a 2016 Ford Fiesta. Last year I decided it was too small for my family of three. I wanted an EV, and my needs focus on exactly the practical stuff you describe. I don't need a car that I can turn into a robotaxi or whatnot. I was incredibly disappointed by Tesla. I tried all the EVs at the DC auto show and it feels like all the legacy manufacturers have caught up with Tesla at every price point. I ended up buying a Bolt EUV. It's amazing how much comfort and capability I got per dollar spent. Much better than any Tesla.
No HUD. Auto sensing wipers that never actually sense when it’s raining. Lack of physical buttons. No way to keep the sun out of the car making it feel like a greenhouse. Much less A/C vents than other cars. Plastic horrible interiors. No road noise isolation. You have to share the only screen with the passenger.
They actually continuously deployed that wiper breaking update. My car in 2019 had wipers that worked.
That and the phone key never working, especially when it was raining and I was holding a child and groceries… that was it for me. Traded it in for a gas car. I’m not pumped about oil changes but at least the company won’t be able to remotely deploy bugs to my working car features
> Auto sensing wipers that never actually sense when it’s raining
I've never had auto sensing wipers, and am curious. Do they actually make enough of a difference to be worth the added hardware?
The manual wipers with controls on one of the steering column stalks in my car are so little effort to use that I usually am not even aware of it. I see rain on the windshield and then I see the wipers deal with it and have to infer that I must have started them because that is much more likely than someone surreptitiously install an after-market automatic wiper system.
It's one of those things that's kind of nice, but also generally unnecessary and I could easily live without, for the exact reason you mention. Manual wipers on a stalk are just right there next to your hand anyways, hardly an inconvenience when you need to use them.
About the only time auto wipers are handy is when you're driving through an area where the precipitation is highly inconsistent, torrential downpour one minute, a light sprinkle the next.
Of course, Tesla doubled down on their automatic wipers by removing the stalk. -_- In my 2019 Model 3, I can't change wiper behavior on the stalk, though there is a button on the end that if I press, it forces a single wipe, or continuously wipes if I hold the button. It also causes the display to show the wiper speed adjustment UI, and allows me to tilt one of the steering wheel controls to change the setting, so I don't HAVE to use the touch screen. But tbh, I'd still rather just have a stalk with a knob that sets the setting.
I’d say they are ok. But the problem with Tesla is that you either have the auto-sensing option or you have to go through the screen in the middle. The don’t have the stalk option.
They have a shortcut but still requires you to look at the screen in the middle. I don’t know how this car is considered safe
Most of those examples aren't the cars being outdated really. They were intentional decisions to either cut costs or two stubbornly do it their own way. A tech refresh wont give you radar because Elon didn't want radar. They could have had it years ago but didn't. Same with carplay and android auto. They wanted their software stack.
Elon is specifically removing features and trying to sell a worse car to people. Here we are nearly a decade later and people are seriously asking "what's wrong with a Tesla??"
Well, have yall seen what the Highland Refresh has ___removed___? That's my point, its a worse car now.
Caveats aside - other manufacturers are a lot more segmented in terms of brands/models trying to cover more price points while Tesla has like 5 models - it is still pretty impressive. I wonder if it would perform as well without Chinese EVs being banned on the US (my guess is yes), but that's another story.
The fact that sales dropped off a cliff this year is also interesting. What meaningful happened in this period? More competition from other manufacturers in the EV space? Market saturation (the addressable market of people that would buy EVs was already covered)?
> and probably get his $56 billion pay package approved
Maybe I'm not understanding something here, but how does him getting the $56B not crash TSLA stock and the ultimately the company? AFAIKT TSLA has only made about $32B in profit during it's entire existence as a company (and that could be an overestimate - I don't think it accounts for earlier losses which would take it closer to $27B). So why should Musk get almost 2X that? Why would any shareholder (other than Musk) vote for this kind of payout?
I mean the fact that the comp package got thrown out well after it being approved and him making the metrics is mind blowing. It is not honoring a deal but hey - someone has to pay the lawyers.
This is just kind of an artifact of how our legal system works. Judges don't generally answer hypotheticals, you have to do it and then see how it pans out.
All that being said, I would be pretty surprised if this outcome wasn't mentioned as a risk to the board or Musk. They're talking about paying him ~10% of the company's _market cap_ as a bonus, and almost double the revenue the company has made in its entire existence. I'm not terribly surprised that a judge looked at that and immediately thought "breach of fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders".
That brings up an awful lot of questions. Does it really take $50B to motivate him, given that his wealth is largely denominated in TSLA stock anyways (meaning he suffers if the stock price drops)? Is there really no one who would do it for cheaper? Firing Elon and hiring a $200M/year CEO would save the company like $50B; why is the board so confident that Elon is going to provide more value to the company than saving $50B on labor costs?
Perhaps paying Elon is the right move to make. I'm dubious, but I'm also not a shareholder, so my opinion does and should mean basically nothing. I do hope that if the shareholders vote to approve the bonus, they're allowed to pay it out. They're adults, they should be allowed to do what they believe is in their best interest.
The first time the compensation was approved, it was through shareholder vote with Elon abstaining.
The question raised later was not if the shareholders were adults allowed to approve it, but if the information they were given about the board negotiators had sufficient disclosure.
Inadequate disclosure on paper legally opened the door to questioning if the negotiator of Health fiduciary duty to the shareholders.
My personal opinion is that a different CEO then Elon could not have generated 500 billion dollars of irrational hype. Additionally, I think that if Elon left in 2018, there could have been substantial reputational damage to Tesla.
Negotiations between two parties who both stand to profit heavily are tough. They are tough because Leverage is based on who is more willing to self-destruct and walk away
Yeah, I'm split on the issue. The court was right on the technicalities around disclosure, but it was also plain as day the board was musks buddies and the stockholders still approved it the first time.
Could the board have negotiated a better deal if they weren't buddies? Probably, but that's why board composition matters.
The judge said they thought Musk would have made the milestones without the comp because he already had skin in the game.
It was about reaching a certain stock valuation only, not the the profits.
Public companies are strange creatures. You'd expect a company's valuation to be proportionally tied to its revenue and profit, but it rarely is and Tesla is an extreme case of this.
> You'd expect a company's valuation to be proportionally tied to its revenue and profit, but it rarely is and Tesla is an extreme case of this.
No, you'd expect it to be tied to the market's assessment of the company's total lifetime value. That will hopefully be informed by revenue and profit, but isn't limited to those, as disruptive companies might be round the corner about to wipe it out, or vice versa.
Yes and since no one can accurately predict that, its valuation is based more on speculation, rather than what could be extrapolated from the numbers alone.
Which is probably a bit counterintuitive for most people. At least for me it was.
Matt Levine has a great newsletter where he regularly delves into questions like this. He recently wondered, somewhat seriously, if the era of valuing stocks based on fundamentals was a fad that's now over.
I guess I was thinking about how a more regular/predictable business would usually be sold by its owners for a multiple of its yearly revenue, for example.
Would the same apply to unicorns? Probably not, because they're special.
Both situations are still betting on future potential, either via earnings maintenance/growth, or via betting on being able to sell the equity at a higher price to a subsequent buyer.
I was seriously considering getting a Tesla despite my visceral hatred of what Musk has done to Twitter, primarily because the price incentives are really amazing compared to other alternatives, but most of all the charging network.
So this is beyond bonkers for me - literally about to hand cash over while holding my nose, but then they kill one of the major reasons I was willing to overlook Musks behavior?
Seriously, WTF is this guy on, and more importantly, how much? Nobody sober and sane would do this.
Elon alreay explained it on Twitter. Better to follow him there rather than rely on second hand information on news or HN, which tend to mispresent what he actually says. He said that they'll focus on maintaining and expanding current Supercharger stations, and won't build new ones for now.
You don't do strategic shifts in direction on the spot, with the team finding out they were fired from news articles, a few days after investors call where you say nothing about this plan and babble about robotaxis instead.
Yo do throw bossy tantrums that way. I mean, he flat out wrote he made an example of the sacked team:
> “Hopefully these actions are making it clear that we need to be absolutely hard-core about headcount and cost reduction,” he wrote in the email seen by The Information, which also announced the end of the public policy team led by departed executive Rohan Patel. “While some on exec staff are taking this seriously, most are not yet doing so.”
Meanwhile -actual- end stage FSD is nowhere in sight (this means northeastern winter nights with poor road conditions, not "it handles roundabouts so much better than the previous version!")...
The cheaper CT and whatever else he's promising will never see the light of day...
And he's delivered 36 of 100 Semis promised for 2017, and has basically implied there's little chance of that situation changing (blaming battery availability).
Lol, if he is planning on training on his cars Mercedes/Daimler had that idea back in 2018. I built the demo for the idea using nomad and a bunch of Jetson/Drive boards, and gave a quick presentation to the new CEO (of Daimler!). It’s also patented, for what that is worth.
You picked my curiosity here. What exactly is there to patent here? AI training is being done a computer and that computer happen to be physically located inside a car. How do you patent the location of a computer?
Except Elon seems to have confused this with "driving innovation." The two __can__ correlate, but do not need to. Like I think it is fair to say that Tesla did push the other manufacturers to start pushing electric cars, but it is hard for me to argue that Tesla led the way through innovation. Not that they didn't do innovative stuff, but that the contribution here wasn't all that large.
On the contrary, it’s hard not to be impressed with Tesla. They moved more Model Y cars than any other car the world over. They unseated Toyota Corolla as the best selling car. That’s just incredible.
> Musk made clear in a call with analysts earlier this month that he is focused on opportunities in artificial intelligence, robotics and autonomous robotaxis.
> Optimus robot, self driving taxis, licensing self driving tech, training AI models
I think it might be worth saying that:
1) Tesla has already accomplished its stated mission of making EV cars mainstream. This was Musk's goal from the beginning, and (insofar it is true that he's interested in working on "world changing problems" and not in making money per se) the mission of Tesla as a driver of transformation is accomplished.
2) Musk might have decided since a while that Tesla has a desperate need to pivot, because being a mass producer of a mature technology in the West is not sustainable in the long run.
Try planning a trip from Seattle to Madison, WI and let me know how normal that feels for you.
Try driving from Mt Shasta to Sacramento in 115 degree heat and see how many fast chargers are working on I-5
I don’t think I would call EVs mainstream until your average renter has access to a home charger. It simply will never be mainstream if people have to worry about when they’ll be able to get their next charge.
Getting there? EV and hybrid were 16% of US 2023 sales.
All new apartment construction and shopping centers near us includes some EV chargers, so renters are slowly catching up. We're getting there. Until then it will be driven by homeowners and fleets.
As an apartment renter, unless they mandate or even completely subsidize existing apartment complexes of a certain size or larger (i.e 100+ residents or something along those lines) install EV charging it will remain an issue here.
The vast majority of apartments still have no EV chargers and simply aren't moving to get them installed at all.
I myself was in the market for an EV but would have trouble charging at my apartment. I messaged my apartment complex about installing EV support and whether they considered it and they basically sent a 1 sentence email which can be summarized as "lol no".
This is an accurate take. I own my house, so GM paid to install my charger. If I were s renter, they would have given me a bunch of charging credits instead. Every year, I'm seeing more chargers. It's rare for me to worry about charging the car.
For some reason I have initial charge set to 40%, but even then there’s several chargers in range. At recharges are quick going to 60% which means if consumption is higher you could charge for a free more minutes and easily get to 80%.
I have done the second drive a handful of times. The Anderson Rd and Airport Way Walmarts are your best bet for DCFC.
When temps are above 110, which is at least a month of normal summer weather, you will be lucky to have 2/5 chargers operating at those sites. And they will be throttled to 30kW which is a pitiful fraction of the advertised 350kW rate
EA didn’t install the transformers in the shade. They don’t work, period. This was my experience two summers in a row.
Imagine having kids and a dog in your car for a road trip and having to park for over an hour in direct sunlight at 3pm while you squeeze enough charge to limp through the wastelands of NorCal. And I-5 is still your best route.
I haven’t even tried the ride east through Idaho and Montana. In winter it will be much riskier and you have to put a lot more faith that the station is working as expected. The mountains and freezing temps will also add a huge variance to your estimated range.
We stayed at Leavenworth,WA in a cabin and there were exactly two EA fast chargers at a Safeway on the mountain. Woke up one morning in 20 degree cold with 25% charge and wasn’t sure I could even make it
As A renter, I wish more people thought like this. It is 100% the impediment for me going EV on my next vehicle purchase. I don't see apartment complexes like mine (built ca. 2000) retrofitting parking stalls for any level of charging without subsidy and lots of kicking and screaming.
Garage doors aren't mainstream by this definition because they aren't essential for owning a car. They're just a convenience.
EV charging is essential to owning an EV. Almost all EV manufacturers ask that you keep your EV plugged in practically as much as possible for battery health. In most apartment dwelling this is currently not a possibility and there isn't enough incentive for many existing complexes to install anything in much of the country.
At home charging isn't essential for owning an EV. They're just a convenience.
We can argue back and forth, about ubiquity vs mainstream, but ultimately the point I am making is that these definitions are merely opinions.
Who cares if evs are mainstream or not. If you can get at-home charging, speaking from my own experience, owning an EV is awesome. If you have to rely on public charging, it is not as convenient, and requires more effort.
If you are someone who goes to Costco, the PX, or Walmart to get gas, then using public charging is a wash. If you are like me, who uses the nearest gas station, public charging was a bigger pain than filling up a tank.
CA has only 1 fast charging station per 5 gas stations, and they are by far the most kitted out state
And the biggest footprint of those is Tesla, which still is restricted to only Teslas
And a fill up with gas takes 5 minutes compared to up to 45 minutes at DCFC, assuming you aren’t waiting for one.
So yes “all major automotive companies offer EVs” but the mainstream experience that drivers expect is nowhere near there for an EV unless you own a home and have installed a charger.
Insanely wealthy person is not interested in “making money per se”?
Nobody amasses this wealth without being financially obsessed. No amount of ‘effective altruism’-esque “I need more money so I can do more amazing things” justifies it, especially when you put so much on the line to…buy a social network and as a vanity project.
It actually does seem to be correct, in that Musk doesn't exactly spend his money on homes or cars or yachts or other material possessions - it seems all his money goes to philanthropy and his businesses (hence the 'per se').
> Most of the ones I know consider money as a tool that can be used towards something, not as a goal by itself.
And if you need a massive amount of money to achieve a goal, you obsess about money. Elon (ostensibly) isn't building soup kitchens and community gardens.
> How many high net worth individuals do you know / have you met?
If you don't think wealthy people obsess over money, I'd honestly wonder how many YOU have met. Not fretting over small amounts of money, or not being ridiculously frugal does not mean that wealthy people do not stress over money.
If they really used money towards that goal, wouldn't they cease to be HNWIs? The fact that they still holding large wealth kind of contradicts what they're saying.
> Musk might have decided since a while that Tesla has a desperate need to pivot, because being a mass producer of a mature technology in the West is not sustainable in the long run.
I'm sorry just... what? Being in a position to sell products to a robust and demanding market is a bad thing? What in the Business Major brain are we saying here?
And frankly calling their products "mature technology" feels like a stretch given Tesla is regularly stubbing it's toe on pretty benign design problems that numerous other automakers have had nailed down for decades.
Yeah nothing about my Tesla is mature technology. Every update is a couple steps back. Every design revision is cost cutting and feature removal (in the name of simplicity of course). We still don’t have auto wipers that work.new still don’t have rear cross traffic alerts when backing up. The cars are laughably bad at parking themselves still. Tesla made a slightly polished MVP and stopped there.
My former boss who owns one once had to have their service person come up to Green Bay from Chicago (about 3 hours) because his stupid door handles wouldn't extend and he was stuck at a grocery store.
I mean, both of Musk's endeavours after Paypal, that is, Tesla and SpaceX- were incredibly high-risk bets with the goal of opening entirely new markets where there was none (ev cars and private space launches). At the time Musk was justifying his choice of investments with the idea of doing something new and important for humanity (transitioning out of fossil fuels and colonise other planets)- but in any case it's clear that he wanted to work on something cool and that his choices were not driven primarily by a rational money-making strategy.
Fast-forward to 2024, while SpaceX is still delivering science fiction, Tesla is now an EV automaker among many- you can buy EV cars from any automaker and there is a deluge of cheap brands coming from China. Is Musk interested in owning and running a regular car company? I don't think so. I think he's desperate to find something else that is cool enough and incredibly high risk and high returns. Maybe using the capital and infrastructure from Tesla itself- and humanoid robotics seems a good candidate.
Tesla going forward with next level fSD and competition (Ford) is recalling 130k vehicles for hands free tech.
Optimistic about your equity you invested or the problems they are working on? I mean equity been overstated for awhile - but that's the Musk effect. However Tesla is still far ahead of the competition - I see more Teslas coming on the roads around here then any other EV (not as many cybertrucks though).
>I see more Teslas coming on the roads around here then any other EV (not as many cybertrucks though).
Because we can't buy vehicles from the Chinese competition.
>However Tesla is still far ahead of the competition
Are they?
Did anyone catch the recent All In Podcast? They were talking about Tesla's robotaxi lead, so Calacanis showed them a video of Waymo operating robotaxis today and Chamath and Sacks had literally never seen it before; "This is amazing!".
Pretty easy to believe Tesla is the leader when you don't know what's out there.
No I don't listen to All-in I can't stand listening to any of that self-indulgent nonsense.
FYI - because Chamath and Sacks haven't heard of Waymo operating robo taxis before (which is mind-blowing that they didn't know that considering a good portion of their job is an alternative take on the news) does not mean the rest of the world doesn't.
Tesla is indeed way ahead on self-driving.
In terms of Chinese EVs - that will certainly bring in a lot more competition but they aren't the same class of vehicles. It's like comparing fiat 500 and an audi a6.
In what metrics is Tesla ahead on self driving? Waymo has been operating (actual self driving) in SF for years without major incidents, and has been doing revenue service for nearly a year now. Tesla has shown nothing even remotely close to the level of self driving as Waymo, even in a controlled environment.
For actual self driving, Tesla is going to need a fully revamped sensor package on the car, as well as major updates to their core software. Id be shocked if they are operating revenue service within even a few years
I haven't seen Waymo videos for a few years, but can they do things on highways the way Teslas can? I've only seen a couple of around-town videos, so I don't know.
Mercedes and BMW are offering driver assistance you can buy today that is more advanced than Tesla on the freeway. Tesla is in no way a leader in automated driving.
Interesting! I don't know loads about self driving cars, but my understanding was that Tesla's self driving has done a lot of freeway miles, and not just in a small simple area.
"Tesla miles" are also a misleading metric because they don't factor in all the times the driver has to take back control over the vehicle to ensure safe operation, it's just the sum of arbitrary stretches of self driving that don't represent true autonomous operation.
I agree it's not the same, but that's sort of my point. Tesla's gone for global usage, with automatic deactivation, whereas Waymo has done a very specific area of roads built in a similar style. It's broad vs deep, is what I mean.
Right, so what you really mean is urban vs highway driving. In self driving, urban driving is considered much more challenging precisely because of the characteristics you listed. That's why you see Waymo only now dipping into highway driving because the primary taxi market is all inside busy cities.
Then I’m afraid you’re unclear because the cities Waymo operates in all have different characteristics and don’t have “similar style of roads”. Driving in SF is very different from driving in Phoenix.
Waymo is currently doing a huge amount of testing on the freeway. But also, Waymo is fully autonomous in the entirety of San Francisco (and a few other cities). Its not just an assist program that you have to keep your eyes on, its a legit full self driving system, leagues above Tesla's.
> They were talking about Tesla's robotaxi lead, so Calacanis showed them a video of Waymo operating robotaxis today and Chamath and Sacks had literally never seen it before; "This is amazing!".
... Why on earth would anyone listen to this? I mean, based on this, it's people who don't know even the very basics of the market talking about it anyway.
(I'm still struggling with the idea of _Jason Calacanis_ being the voice of reason, in any context...)
Also Chamath the "SPAC king" who made his money on the transactions selling garbage companies to the masses as someone being quoted as a source on anything is right there with Calcanis.
BYD have about 30 models, is the thing. Tesla have gone with a rather unusual product strategy for a car maker; four models, of which two have negligible sales. Realistically, any large manufacturer who went down this road could take that crown away from them, though it probably would not be a good idea for that manufacturer to do that.
