After reading this and comments recently made by Elon about “Tesla is not a car company” it is really looking as is they are ready to just bail on cars and take the revenue of the Supercharger Technology patents to concentrate on Self Driving Taxi’s.
The large deal in China 2 days ago seems to have triggered things being put into motion that have been planned/feared by workers.
This passage speaks volumes to me;
“Just as puzzling is the departure of Daniel Ho, director of vehicle programs and new product introduction, along with his entire team.”
Time will tell.
Anybody here work there, have any insight?
Elon Musk is not bi-polar.
Left-right, left-right, up-down, up-down.
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Tesla as a company has ridden the wave of success and capitalized in thst by being the first successful and profitable producer of electric vehicles. They provided a product that no other manufacturer had an answer to or an equivalent product (the model S and then model X and Y, and lately, the model 3). However, now they’ve essentially saturated the market with umpteen masses of Model 3s that nobody is buying that and inventory is piling up. We have a tesla dealer here in town, opened in the modst of the pandemic. It was pretty bare at first, but in the last year the lot has filled up a lot with unsold cars. Its actually like that for the Chrysler/Dodge/Jeep dealership across the street-who knew nobody wants to pay $50,000 for a Jeep Wrangler or $70,000 on a Ram 1500?) is so full they’ve had to lease space for excess inventory at church up the street. Nobody wants to pay $40000 (that’s after the federal and WA State rebates totaling $9000 for new EV purchase) for a Model 3 sedan when you can go buy a lightly used Toyota Camry or Honda Accord or Civic hybrid fot half that price and doesn’t need a charger station every couple days and will last for 200,000 miles.
Tesla dug their own hole and is surviving on revenue streams from other business ventures so that’s where they will invest and divest from others…that includes layoffs and “restructuring”
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Unleas there’s some world-beating double secret sauce they’ve A) kept under wraps, and B) can patch into existing vehicles with an OTA update, this is madness as TSLA’s autopilot full self driving is not even a little bit close to being capable of autonomous operation.
I’ve said before that I think Tesla could survive into the future as a chain of charging stations, but not if they keep trying to make cars. In the 2060s it’ll be a trivia piece, like “You know Tesla charging stations?” “Yeah, of course” “Well, this says in the 2020s they used to make cars until it all ended in the largest class action lawsuit in history at the time”.
Of course, right now, Emerald Money is putting that in jeopardy too by firing the people who made their charging stations a success, and even actually damaging the chances of NACS being adopted as a standard.
I still feel like overall, Elon is going to end up spoken of in the same sentence as Enron and Worldcom, the main question is just exactly which of his companies.
It’s just the Ketamine.
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The raison d’être for the supercharger network has always been to help sell Tesla automobiles. It generates revenue, yes, but I imagine that said revenue perhaps covers operations. And sometimes it probably doesn’t, but since the network is a benefit for Tesla drivers things get handled whenever costs exceed revenues … unlike EA et al trying to make a go at it running fast-charging networks as standalone businesses.
Tesla the automaker could make it if they started behaving sensibly - drop Musk as CEO, halt the cybertruck, abandon the full self-driving fever dream, revive development of the rumored “Model 2” low-cost vehicle, and undertake solid actions to escape the trust thermocline they find themselves being dragged into. Of course this would require an independent Board of Directors, which Tesla famously lacks so the pain is going to have to reach the point that the meme stock effect collapses before shareholders litigate and force any of this can happen. At which point it may well be too late.
Yeah, but their goal has been to sell access for a while. They even got their charging port standard adopted by other manufacturers by promising interoperability with their chargers.
Also, just stop all the idiotic design decisions. Give them a reasonable set of physical controls, doors that can actually be opened in an emergency, an option to not waste money and weight on a stupid glass roof, etc.
For sure, the sudden appearance of NACS/J3400 (FKA ‘The Tesla connector’) wasn’t an act of charity. I just don’t see that much money in the business seeing how EA, Chargepoint, et al struggle with uptime; this could be teething as they prove out what works and what doesn’t in fast charger design, a lack of personnel to service them, or revenue problems with the business model.
Filling stations now almost universally exist to draw customers into the attached C-store where the real money is made for the operator. As costly as DC charging is per mile relative to gasoline/diesel, it’s going to be difficult to make money on charging as slow home/work charging is how the overwhelming majority of charging is done.
It’s possible that TSLA has some secret sauce on their supercharger designs that avoid the reliability issues that plagues others. While TSLA superchargers are immensely better at initiating charging on other OEMs’ vehicles than EA et al they still suffer the multiple-choice charging rate problem since unlike their own vehicles TSLA has neither inside knowledge of their workings nor the ability to push updates to them. One does hope they’re more motivated to improve the experience … but the CEO also axed the entirety of that team so whoops.
Physical controls are a hill that TSLA may choose to fight for - stupid touchscreens (the screen component of which is required anyway for backup cameras) are cheap relative to buttons, knobs, stalks with a look refresh being but a software update away.
FWIW the front doors of S/X and 3/Y have reasonably accessible backup mechanical controls. Backdoors seem to be another matter - I’ve read of the 3/Y locating an unmarked pull wire behind an unlabeled access panel.
Market unfortunately loves glass roofs. I see them as double downsides - in addition to being expensive negative structure I live in Texas where no matter the quality of glass and tint they’ll invite more sunlight into the vehicle.
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