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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

61% of EVs in the US are Teslas but everyone here hates Elon so head in the sand.

Legacy auto EVs are garbage. They ignored Tesla for almost 15 years, and then once Tesla was Goliath, surprise pikachu. The time to build battery factories was when Tesla was building battery factories circa 2014-2015. The fact that Tesla predicted selling 500k EVs a year by 2020 was laughed at, and now they are approaching 2.3M/year total capacity of EVs alone (while still building 40GWh/year of stationary storage).

Good luck.

https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_attachments/g...

(yes, yes, I agree Elon is a monster, but he has also been effective)

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I rented a Model Y for a weekend, now that is garbage.

I went to a showroom I looked at Teslas. I could not find a single car with even panels gaps. The wipers don't work. The car doesn't have USS anymore and Tesla vision sucks. I could go on and on and on. I seriously considered one but just too many shortcomings.

For the price of Model Y, I can buy a Lexus ES300h(car is QC and build perfection) and drive that car for the next 15 years with oil changes once a year.

Why does everyone suddenly care about panel gaps?

It feels like the quip everyone uses without any meaningful value.

It just illustrates what priorities Tesla sets. They are expensive cars yet their quality is low both in and outside. For example the interior lining of the doors is easily damaged, just moving a cardboard box against it rips it. This doesn't happen in my 11 year old BMW and it isn't even a top of the line model, just a bog standard 116d.

Or when talking about BMW, nobody know but they have some 3-layered paint that is much harder to scratch than typical paint of say VW or french cars. People like to bash premium cars but its exactly getting as much as you pay for

If they don't put the car together well for the parts you see, how well did they put it together for the parts you don't see?

Do panel gaps really matter? Probably not, but if I'm paying Tesla prices, maybe?

> Why does everyone suddenly care about panel gaps?

There's absolutely nothing sudden about people caring about panel gaps on new vehicles.

Cockeyed panel gaps are a tell-tale of a used/bodged vehicle, this has been the case my entire life. It's the last thing you want to see on what's supposedly a new vehicle, and it sticks out like a sore thumb.

My two vehicles are 20 and 24 years old. Neither have panel gaps. If they were able to do that decades ago, why not now?

Because normally they are a given

People note frictions.

Same. The Model Y was completely uninspiring. I liked my old Chevy Bolt better.

It didn't help that the experience of renting from Hertz was terrible, but renting the Y seemed to confirm every terrible Tesla rumor and then some. It didn't drive well, the range was surprisingly bad(abused battery maybe?), the controls were confusing and distracting, and hell, even the acoustics of the interior were terrible(glass roof is dumb).

Everything I've seen on Tesla's controls make me want to run away. Unfortunately, most other auto manufacturers are copying many of these bad ideas because they're trying to cargo cult tesla's success so I probably in for a bad time when I need a new car regardless.

> I rented a Model Y for a weekend, now that is garbage

And yet it takes the #4 spot for most vehicle sales in 2023 in the US, and likely the #1 spot globally.

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/g43553191/bestselling-cars...

> I could not find a single car with even panels gaps.

I keep hearing this from people, especially my friends who work for other manufacturers. I personally couldn't care less.

Hell, if they sold it pre-scratched and pre-dented It'd be even better, would same me the paranoia of something happening to it.

I’m going to blow your mind right now. They sell pre-dented and pre-scratched cars! Have you ever heard of the used car market? And the prices reflect that!

Why would anyone pay new car prices for a damaged car? It has lower resale value.

Except there's massive difference between a car with an imperfect appearance, and once that's been driven before and e.g. no longer covered by warranty.

> Why would anyone pay new car prices for a damaged car? A) I didn't say it had to be the same price. Sell the car with a bumper blemish and give people a discount to account for the fact that you didn't have to reject parts.

B) People might buy it for the same reason that others gent bent out of shape about panel gaps; personal differences in what they value.

Your comment is now shadow banned. It is not visible on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38121199 when I am logged in, but visible when browsing in private.

Too late to edit. It was a glitch.

Elon has many issues but a characterizing him as a “monster”? Sounds like an affirmation of someone whose heart isn’t really in what they are saying but they have to to toe the party line.

He’s a sorta autistic dude who sometimes talks to the public in a k-hole instead of going through a spokesperson like his peers.

As far as the cars go, I think most Americans can see that spending an extra $10k on an EV Chevy isn’t gonna keep the Saudis from draining Ghawar Field. I wonder how cheap BYD and VinFast can get their imports.

Americans can’t really point to other country’s emissions as an excuse though. They have by far the largest emissions per capita. And car ownership (where families frequently own multiple cars!) is a non-trivial portion of that. Individuals are admittedly not the best placed to fix this.

I've heard him described as "fascist curious".

It’s shorthand for “low empathy power hungry industrialist who is willing to destroy anyone who sleights him in the most minimal of ways, while dishing out abuse liberally to anyone who crosses his path” but that’s a mouthful. The dynamics are public in both books and online media covering him; a fresh, recent example is Grimes tweeting at his recent biographer “Tell Elon I want to see my kid.” Partners, workers, anyone really who Elon feels he has power over gets the brunt of his dysfunctional emotional configuration. Could not care less about his politics, it is about how he treats other humans.

https://www.google.com/search?q=elon+abussive

https://www.google.com/search?q=elon+petty

https://fortune.com/2023/09/12/elon-musk-walter-isaacson-boo... ("One of Elon Musk’s favorite video games taught him the ‘life lesson’ that ‘empathy is not an asset.’")

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/15/tesla-asked-cooley-to-fire-l... ("Tesla asked law firm to fire attorney who worked on Elon Musk probe at SEC, report says")

https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/10/04/making-sense-of-grime... ("Grimes sues Elon Musk after she said he wouldn’t let her see their son")

> Indeed, reports and Grimes’ since-deleted social media posts indicate that the situation has become rather ugly, with allegations that Musk is being a controlling bully. In posts last month on Musk’s X platform, Grimes alleged that he wasn’t allowing her to see one of their children and threatened to take him to court unless he let her see her son or responded to her lawyer. She said the situation was “utterly ripping my family apart.”

I’ll ask one of the folks tracking Elon facts publicly to aggregate all of the citations on the topic, so the next time I say “monster” a simple URL citation will do. As a high empathy human, I fully stand behind my characterization based on all available public evidence. Hurt people hurt people I suppose.

Tesla just steeply discounted the hell out of their cars. The minimum discount I can recall was $10k. Several cars were dropped by over $30k. They basically just fucked the resale value of all their existing customers. This was done out of desperation. EV demand fell off a cliff after the pandemic.

Good! This increases the pool of potential buyers while putting more distress on legacy auto. Tesla can afford the margin compression. If they are less profitable, that’s fine, replacing combustion units is most important to pull forward the combustion supply chain death spiral.

Tesla does not owe current customers firm resale value.

From what people that work at Tesla have told me, Elon is more of a chaos agent than someone actually solving problems.

chaos is what you need to cause a disruption. that's how big ideas come, and there's no one better than Elon at turning them into reality.

> (yes, yes, I agree Elon is a monster, but he has also been effective)

How is the man that has actually made a huge difference in battery-powered cars and actually made them seem like a viable alternative to gas a 'monster'. And yet the dozens of environmentalist activists who have done nothing but make a fuss and complain seen as the good guys. This sort of praise of mediocrity and ineffectiveness is the root cause of so many issues today.

Musk has been extremely effective. Maybe that means there is something about his thinking and methods of action that we should seek to replicate instead of criticize.

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