I guess when your CEO has a highly publicised pivot to a position that’s the antithesis of your customers views it doesn’t help. What’s that saying — “Go Fash Lose Cash”?
Add to that spending large amounts of his own money to help elect people who promised to and then did remove the EV tax credit, which means that those potential customers who were not driven away for ideological reasons would find they had to spend 10-20% more for a Tesla than before.
Those people he worked hard to elect did other things to harm Tesla besides making the cars more expensive. Over the last few years about 30% of Tesla's profits were from selling emissions tax credits to car companies that make ICE cars. Those other companies needed the credits because not enough of the ICE cars met EPA emissions standards. But now those emissions standards are no longer enforced, and so there is no need for them to buy credits.
The people he worked to elect also promised, and have been implementing, policies that will make electricity more expensive in many areas. There were already several states where electricity was expensive enough and gasoline not too expensive so that a Prius there would actually cost less to operated in energy costs per mile than an EV. Rising electricity prices could make that true in more places. (And yes, I'm talking about home electricity prices. For people who do not have adequate home charging and rely on commercial charging a Prius beats an EV on energy costs in most states). That too is probably going to cost Tesla some sales.
I mean, also, they haven’t had a new car in about 7 years (unless you count the joke truck thing, but c’mon now), and outside the US the competition has really made them largely irrelevant.
While Musk being a loony is certainly making things worse for them, even without that you’d expect them to be in a bad place.
Politics aside, the fact that now a handful of companies offer competitive cars at similar pricepoints, while there has been a general slump in EV demand doesn't help either.
There has not, to be clear, been a slump in EV demand, unless you assume that the US is the only market (it is in fact the smallest of the big three, and the other two are growing).
There has, to be clear. I looked up the actual stats, and sales growth has been slowing, with 2024 numbers being virtually identical to 2023, and in 2025, an actual decline would've happened, if not for a lot of people giving a one-time boost, as people rushed to take advantage of the incentives that were going away.
> I looked up the actual stats, and sales growth has been slowing, with 2024 numbers being virtually identical to 2023
Where are you getting these stats/are you _sure_ they’re not US-only stats? Any actual data I find shows a healthy increase in sales on the order of 25% 2023-2024, maybe 20% 2024-2025. (Eg https://open-ev-charts.org/#electric-sales:quarter). Possibly you have a really unusual personal definition of the words ‘virtually identical’ and ‘slump’?
Sorry for the misunderstanding, I looked up US-only stats, as I thought that was the thing being discussed. My parent comment was about US sales, in retrospect, I shouldve made it clear :)
Yeah, the US market is currently slow, but it’s also the smallest of the big three. And it’s a more complicated market; people drive longer distances, and like very big cars or trucks. And has a fairly weak domestic sector; only really three legacy manufacturers. It’ll get there, but it is going to lag Europe and China; it’s just more demanding.
I suspect the strategy was 'we've already saturated the liberals. If we can release a truck and I switch to the other side I can capture the other side of the market as well'.
End result is he has neither side and neither the trucks nor the sedans are selling well!
I don't think Musk or Tesla had a strategy in this regard, Musk was just being impulsive and didn't really think about his brand, I think he isn't really self aware even if he must be smart in some other regard (unless his success is an accident, which I doubt).
I imagine he has fallen in the very common trap of being surrounded by sycophants.
A lot of people have a very strong incentive to attach themselves to wealthy/powerful people, and then try to manipulate their understanding of the world and events to their favor.
And the AI videos are going the same way as full self driving:
1) looking like Tesla is easily two year, probably more behind everyone else
2) the others are seeing real SOTA performance ... and are not planning products because they think it won't work, or at least not yet
I must say ... really reminds me of the Tesla autopilot situation.
And I'd add 3) the really impressive robots, ie. the ones based on Boston Dynamics, are not based on ML algorithms. They are augmented by AI, not running actual AI algorithms in the control loop. The founder was an electrical engineering professor who moved into a CS direction (you know the sort of person who insists not just writing control loops in realtime, in assembly, but actually develops custom hardware for those algorithms. And I don't mean FPGAs or DSPs, I mean actual circuits)
So the entire approach of Tesla (and a lot of other startups) could be very wrong, and could very well be 5 theoretical breakthroughs removed from being feasible.
100%. We are seeing the bet of hard coded functions vs AI learned functions play out for us over the next year or two. Waymo has special case code for so much of their stack. Tesla removes special case code and replaces it with inference. Same with the Boston Dynamics vs Tesla robots. Tesla is making a bet that custom case code isn't going to scale nearly as fast as AI inference scales. Good news is that if one feels strongly one can place bets with one's money! If one doesn't feel strongly you can just comment on HN or Reddit or just watch.
It’s really hard to do sarcasm online in a way which is clear, still funny, and doesn’t normalize beliefs you oppose or make it easy for people to dismiss you with the “both sides” fallacy. It’s been a staple of internet humor for decades but I now think that was a mistake.
I’d note also that while the stock is up about 15 percent and a fraction over the last year, the S&P 500 is up 16 percent and a fraction over the same period. Given a company with declining sales, for two consecutive years it seems likely that the stock price is due for a big correction.
