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Comment by 8fingerlouie | Hacker News Reader

I think we can safely assume that Tesla, in it's current state, is done for.

Used car dealers won't take them as trade-ins, and neither will Tesla (which basically just auctions them off). Sales have dropped around 50%, and is still dropping, and with tariffs on steel, aluminium, and just about everything not made in the US, they're about to get a whole lot more expensive.

I'm not even sure that removing the CEO will fix the problem. People associate Elon Musk with Tesla, and even a very public outing of him will not change people associating hime with it.

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And somehow it's still valuated at more than the entire german auto industry + toyota + byd.

But it's easily explainable because I read tesla will have fully autonomous cars by 2014, and uber will buy every single autonomous tesla by 2020

Well, to be fair, the second half of your statement is true. Uber did buy every last fully autonomous Tesla available in 2020

What Musk doesn’t seem to understand is that when you’re representing a company at the highest level, visibility matters—a lot. That’s especially true in the car industry, where buying a vehicle is a big decision for many people. If he’s not willing to set aside his ego, he might not be the right person to run a company of this caliber.

Alienating your customer base is one of the worst things you can do in this space, where what you drive is often seen and judged by others. Tesla cars, once admired for their innovation, are now starting to feel like rolling political bumper stickers—loud, divisive, and hard to ignore. That kind of perception doesn’t help sales.

He once described empathy as a weakness, but the lack of it is clearly catching up to him. If he had even a bit more empathy, he might have better understood how his personal behavior reflects on the company—and how people would respond to it.

They will be sold on Ebay as Nazi memorabilia.

i mean, it's genius. they're keeping all the cybertrucks, are breaking them down and when importing steel is too expensive to buy because of the tariffs, they'll make a killing! Every cybertruck is basically a rolling depot of valuable resources! It really is 5D Jenga they are playing, you simply have to be very intelligent to understand. /s

Not enough Ds. Elon is playing eighth dimensional Joe Rogan brainrot logic, you simply cannot comprehend such things.

Marijuana ketamine doublespeak Nazi salutes will bring quintillion valuation, what part of that don't you understand?

I think we can safely assume that Tesla, in it's current state, is done for.

I wouldn't bet on it. People have short memories, and Tesla still make pretty good cars. The new model Y launching now has gotten a lot of praise from all the reviews I've seen. If (big if) Musk can keep his head down and stop making non car/spaceship related headlines and perhaps take a less prominent role in Tesla, I suspect this will blow over.

The thing is, in Europe at least, it was never about Tesla, it was always about Elon Musk doing the so called "roman salute", doing stuff that borders on election interference in Germany with the AfD, and Vance just kinda made it worse, which somehow also backfired on Elon.

The reason people in europe are not buying Teslas is because of Elon Musk, and regarding short memories, just about everybody i know, technically skilled or not, still knows that Steve Jobs was "the face of Apple", despite some of them not even being born when he died. People remember Elon Musk the same way with Tesla, and i don't see that going away soon.

I agree for people who can afford a Tesla. There’s a whole world out there that couldn’t care less because it was always way beyond their budget anyway.

I also think that people won’t exactly remember what he did but as usual, what will stay are emotions. And at the moment it’s simply embarrassing to be associated with Elon —Tesla owner bashing is irresistible for some, they make sure these owners will remember the embarrassment.

Maybe if Musk changed course and returned to solar power and saving the planet rather than alt right politics things would improve? Not sure if that's happening though.

Who would be stupid enough to believe him ever again?

The “hate” for Elon is strong in Europe.

I seriously doubt there’s any coming back with him at the wheel.

We already had one fascist leader in Europe, and we really don’t want another one, so Elon coming out as a full Nazi did immense damage to his personal and commercial brand. That’s also at least partly the reason for the strong dislike for the current US administration in Europe.

Trump, Vance and more have openly supported the extreme right, made baseless accusations about censorship, and worse. It’s way beyond a political belief, in Europe it’s personal.

The problem is the market dynamic of EVs.

The people most likely to buy EVs are also the people that Elon has alienated. Your average red-state voter is not very likely on the EV bandwagon.

There was a period of time when Tesla was the only game in town for EVs. Now? That's not the case anymore with multiple automakers with competitive if not flat out better products, wider dealer and service networks, and compatibility with Tesla's charging network.

The brand damage he's done has been immense.

If the White House Tesla sales event converted any of them, it will be very short-term blip.

Mainline ICE companies take their branding dead seriously, unlike apparently Tesla and its CEO. Their very existence is based on the macho masculinity paranoid male pickup truck driver.

There's no way they cede that in any way to Elon and Tesla. Tesla's pass for the next 10 years was still going to be through progressive buyers.

It really shocks me that people are so ignorant about branding and advertising to not recognize what Elon did to his own brand. I thought everybody in the country had seen Mad Men at a minimum.

Ever since the release of the model y, Tesla has been run utterly incompetently. After the model Y release, Tesla showed embarked upon a model, expansion and platform expansion in order to expand into global markets which probably would require six platforms and well over 20 different variations and trims.

They should have started in a low end and high-end brand vastly increased their fit and finish options

They probably should have merged with another struggling ICE company like Nissan or something to gain a lot of engineers and manufacturing capacity and OEM relationships.

They should have started pushing their advanced drive train to phevs using this other car company.

They should have pushed their brand into things like e-bikes scooters, side by sides and a lot of other electrification opportunities where they could both make Superior products and push their brand to further places. Build more competence with more users to gateway them into EV ownership.

Obviously all this is too little too late

Rivian seems like the one that is going to have a lasting footprint. Much, much slower growth, but the How I Built This podcast episode with RJ Scaringe[0] convinced me that he's the real deal and all the things that people thought Musk was. Scaringe is an actual engineer and has plodded a careful, sustainable path for Rivian. We'll see how it works out, but I was pretty impressed by the interview.

[0] https://wondery.com/shows/how-i-built-this/episode/10386-riv...

The big question for Rivian is if they can break into the global market or if they will remain an essential North America only brand. Say what you want about Tesla, but they were really the first US car in forever that really broke through internationally.

Rivian's pace of growth is far more measured (podcast very much worth the listen) and I think that until their smaller models arrive, their growth is going to be more constrained. The R3X is probably the first product that will make sense for an international market (since the R1T and R1S are both quite large) and that's not coming until 2027.

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