Musk and Tesla are the leading proponents for electric cars.
The right has made EVs a political issue. They think EVs are the devil. Probably a communist plot. Maybe the communist devil’s plot.
The left tends to be more pro EV. Not so much pro Elon.
Trump is rolling back EV plans and funding for charging stations. So it doesn’t look like his feelings have changed.
Who is going to buy Teslas? The Right aren’t going to suddenly like EVs. He may get a few converts but I can’t believe that many will suddenly like EVs. I can’t see anyone even remotely leaning left buying a Tesla now. There are some early indicators that Tesla sales are dropping but it’s too early to tell the long term impact.
All you need to do is look at a news story and then read the comments to know that electric vehicles are a political issue. What is going to be the impact of Musk’s current role on the issue? To me this looks like a victory for China. BYD is already neck and neck with Tesla for sales worldwide. This can only help them. Does Musk even care? Is Tesla the toy he’s bored playing with?
I’ve been wondering this lately myself, and this is my conclusion. Not so much that he’s bored with Tesla, but that he’s through with it. It provided the cash for his real ambitions.
Reading all this stuff about the future the tech bros are trying to usher in, I think Musk is a bit different in his world view. He thinks that mankind is destined for the birth of a new era, a technological paradise that can only be brought on by rapid, unchecked progress. Maybe it’s a Mars colony, maybe it’s the AGI singularity, but he believes there will be some tipping point after which life for all humans will get better.
And he thinks that suffering will continue until we reach this point, therefore getting to that point is the most important thing humanity should be working towards. That end justifies any means.
This is why he’s so focused on merit. Why he doesn’t care about the environment. Why he doesn’t care about putting people out of work. Why he doesn’t care about transparently selling out to the alt right.
It’s why he has 13 kids and supports eugenics. It’s all about getting humanity to burn as hot as we can until this goal is achieved. At which point everyone will be forced to acknowledge Musk’s brilliance for saving us all.
It’s all ego driven, yes, but in furtherance of this lofty goal of saving everyone from themselves.
Incorrect. Maybe they used to, but Musk aligning with Trump made them great.
Tesla is a lifestyle brand now. People are eagerly buying Tesla and taking weeks off of work to drive thousands of miles just get a glance of Musk and his rockets. Tesla is a MAGA brand. They will be fine.
Cite? I still see mostly negative comments about EVs from the right on all stories about them. Trump is signing EOs against them. There may be a few converts but I don’t see many giving up their F150 for a Tesla.
As I said there are indications that sales are trending down hard. It is still too early to tell how much it is about politics. U.S. sales aren’t the only thing to watch.
Elon Musk and his sycophants don’t view Tesla as being an automaker; they think it is a “technology company” and expect to pivot to making autonomous humanoid robots, “AI”, et cetera. Elon is very much an “idea guy”, and for all of his pretensions of sleeping on factory floors and claiming to have designed every system on the Model S, he doesn’t actually know about or do any work in the detail levels of engineering and manufacturing, and when he tries to it is often a complete shitshow, such as when he tried to impose a requirement at Tesla for almost completely automating the assembly. Musk is very good at exactly two things: creating cult-like hype about his ideas and products his companies make, and claiming credit for the ideas of others; in the case of colonizing Mars, concepts that largely come from artistic renderings of the Golden Age of Science Fiction that are so scientifically invalid it is shocking that anyone takes them seriously.
Elon Musk is into whatever garners him attention from both adoring fans and the detractors who he can put on a big performance by insulting them. He’s the oldest 12-year-old edgelord on the Internet, posting “dank memes” and making fascist salutes not because he has any sincere ideology but because it gets him clicks. That he has attached himself to a demagogue and managed to insert himself deep within US government payment and accounting systems is dangerous not because he has some nefarious plan but because he likes to fuck with things in order to see how much outrage he can generate. For as much as people compare Donald Trump with Batman’s Joker, it is really Elon that wants to see the world burn just for the kicks because he’s bored with merely being rich and the leader of a cult of wannabe techbros incels.
I’ve leaned left for my whole adult life, hate Elon, and I’m on my 2nd Tesla. I bought the first one with little Musk-associated guilt because he seemed nutty then but not particularly political. But he’s clearly gone mega-hole now, so my decision last year to buy the updated Model 3 Performance was a tough call. I overcame my misgivings because the car does everything I want, the way I want. The nearest competitors (BMW M3, etc) cost tens of thousands more and burn gas.
I feel guilt about the car whenever I read news about Musk, but that’s all forgotten when I’m behind the wheel. My complicated feelings are similar regarding Roman Polanski and Chinatown.
My really blue NJ neighborhood is crawling with Teslas, none of which look that old. My next car will be electric, but there’s no way it will be a Tesla. However, many of my very-liberal neighbors manage to get past Musk and buy one.
I also don’t understand why he’s trying to turn off all of his customers.
My wife’s opinions regarding politics and Musk closely match my own, and she has a Tesla Model Y. I recently asked her if her car were totaled, would she buy another. She said she would.
The competition in the EV market here is fierce. Regulatory pressure (not just long term conversion mandates, but major cities with strict low-emission rules today) is buoying demand, so there are lots of alternatives on offer. My wife and I will be dumping our diesel Nissan in the next year and are currently debating between a VW and a Peugeot. Tesla is far, far from the only game in town now, the way they were.
Europe is a lost market for them. I don’t see them staying at any significant level above “small niche player.”
Here’s another article about Tesla crashing and burning (metaphorically, rather than literally like usual) in the European market, with lots of numbers for reference.
I still can’t figure out why Teslas market cap is so high. Their market cap on face value should be around 50-100 billion. Not 1.1 trillion. It has dropped a little bit from 1.3 trillion, but still.
The only reason teslas sell so well in the US is because of tariffs on Chinese EVs, and because no other car company is capable of building a good EV to sell in the US yet.
Internationally, Tesla is losing market share to Chinese manufacturers like BYD.
Tesla seems like they are 5 years away from their cars being mostly lost in the crowd. They can’t compete with China, Musk has driven away his left wing buyers, and once non-Chinese EV makers enter the market then Tesla will have even more problems.
Tesla’s market cap should be well under 10 billion based upon the quantity of vehicles they produce, their reputation for (generally poor) quality, all of the issues with braking, Autopilot/FSD, and melting down at inconvenient times, notwithstanding that they haven’t updated their cars in years which were already more boring than a Camry and the fiasco that has been the Cybertruck rollout. The massively inflated market cap is on the basis of Tesla being a ‘tech’ company rather than an automobile manufacturer, just like WeWork was a ‘tech’ company instead of a corporate slumlord.
Yes, this. The way eugenics has consistently worked in practice is that the already-advantaged are declared genetically superior, and the disadvantaged inferior. With non-genetic reasons for their position totally handwaved away.
As far as somebody like Musk is concerned he is by definition the genetic apex of humanity and as many women as possible should have his children. Because if he wasn’t innately superior he wouldn’t be rich, after all. Meanwhile the non-rich are all subhuman parasites who should be sterilized.
You might want to check out Rivian and Lucid. Their cars are frequently reviewed as superior to Tesla, they just haven’t found the X factor to make a splash with the public yet. Also, so far, they have nothing to compete with the price of the model 3, but are both planning to bring out a lower-priced model later this year.