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Comment by charlimangy | Hacker News Reader

Tesla has been setting fire to their brand, mostly by their CEO acting out. Apple has the affordable-luxury design chops to leap to the head of the class, as they did with the watch. Phone and Siri integration, plus I'm sure their product teams would come up with a bunch of great stuff. Maybe it's Apple Car built by BYD.

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Elon's antics are wrecking Twitter, but Tesla is chugging along nicely all the same. Most of the world doesn't follow or care about Silicon Valley CEO drama in the same way that we here on HN do.

FWIW I cancelled Tesla order because of Musk. Wouldn't be caught dead driving one after the unhinge that keeps unfolding (and that is also very easy to pick up in the mainstream news).

Anecdata: I know multiple people who are intending to buy an EV for their next car, and all of them have removed Tesla from their list of possible purchases because of the CEO's behavior over the last couple of years.

And sure, maybe I live in a "woke bubble", but that's a bunch of revenue that would almost certainly have ended up with Tesla that's now going elsewhere.

And I know multiple rural people (who disagree with you on everything) who either have bought or are planning to buy Tesla vehicles because they're now affordable and really really good.

Also, people who already own Teslas aren't going anywhere. Immense brand loyalty for good reason.

I don't dispute that Teslas are a good car. I can definitely see why people would like to buy one, and indeed the people I know who intended to buy one did so because it was a good car. There are some issues, sure, but on balance I'm sure there are many happy customers.

I don't see them becoming more affordable though: it looks to me like both Model 3 and Model Y prices are high, and in fact they're only staying still because Tesla is removing features from the low-end configurations.

Here's a price chart:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1F5IQOynIawoXiJPVarLD...

Notably, as inflation rises, they're still dropping prices. Extremely laudable.

Please, pollute the planet so you can prove to a few people on the internet how real your Twitter-related emotions are.

Is Tesla the only EV manufacturer in the world?

You tell me what the EV landscape would look like today had Tesla not succeeded, and whether that delta is really of equal worth to someone's purportedly painful experiences using a microblogger.

That's a terrible argument. Putting aside that no one can possibly know that, you seem to be under the impression that Tesla Motors invented something revolutionary. All they did was put lithium batteries in an electric car and slapped an iPad in it. Pretty cool, but there's nothing they've done that any other car company couldn't have done from day one. Everything else they've done has been a gimmick, but their promise is that these vehicles can drive themselves and make everyone money by working as taxis, and if that never happens (which looks inevitable now), then all they are is a car company, and plenty of other car companies make EVs now.

Enemy centered mindset. You both lose, but he doesn’t know you exist.

That's just rudimentary ethics.

I lost nothing, more like dodged the bullet really considering their mileage shenanigans, and I don't give an f whether Musk knows I exists.

If it was about ethics then the signal wouldn’t come from prominence in the media (do you scrutinize ceos of your everyday products, tesla is an org far beyond Elon, etc).

> mileage shenanigans

Sour grapes

Lol, you are funny.

He offloaded a ton of TSLA to finance the twitter deal, reducing his ownership from 22% to 13%. Now he wants to dilute shares to claw back control.

Twitter has undoubtedly been a distraction.

https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/elon-musks-losing-stre...

Right now people are following along because Tesla is the market leader and they see the cars on the street, but they rely heavily on media and word of mouth for marketing. I think they're very vulnerable to an Apple marketing blitz, but it sounds like it's not happening, so it's all hypothetical.

A few years ago I saw frequent signs from my social set that Tesla was considered a great innovator and a really cool company. The news has not been good the last year, and I haven't heard any sentiments like that in a while.

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