There are definitely a significant number of people who claim they will never buy a Musk car. Most of the ones I know wouldn’t buy an EV of any kind so it’s a hollow promise but that’s not to discount that they are losing sales because of him.
That said, over 1.2 million Model Ys were sold last year making it the best selling vehicle in the world. They are still selling a shit ton of Teslas. I wouldn’t be worried that growth has slowed from historically amazing previous growth. Model Y prices have dropped significantly and with the tax credit they are very price competitive. Tesla is supposedly coming out with an economy car in a couple years and I expect that to be a huge seller.
For the record, my wife and I are shopping for next generation vehicles, with Tesla having been on the list, but had massive negatives to us (not an absolute no, but massive) for him being such a … Musk. But the prices were very competitive for our needs after the last recent wave of cost cutting. Still, combining the interior (which my wife hated), the poor results with timely servicing and repairs, and Musk being Musk got it kicked the hell out of the revival round.
Musk’s biggest WIN may also be counting against him. With the Tesla charger standard being adopted, if we get our BEV in 2025ish timeframe, then we can be assured of having a BEV which can take advantage of the maximal range of charging networks.
Sadly (it’s all in another thread) our first new vehicle is going to be a PHEV before the BEV.
Just another data point - we had a deposit down on a Model Y some years back, but I bailed and got it back…
One of the reasons was a distrust of Musk himself, and the potential for him to do something totally stupid that would render servicing the car to be problematic.
Since then he’s only gotten worse, and a Tesla is totally off the table now when we want to move up from our LEAF.
A couple of weeks ago I did a quick search on the CEOs of other American car companies. I was going to show that they were dicks too but all of them are squeaky clean
I would buy an EV if I had adequate means to charge it and it otherwise met my needs. But I would not buy a Tesla vehicle, and not just because Elon Musk has made it clear to the general public that is a proto-fascist lickspittle and a general bullshit artist, which is something I was aware of long before his public “twitter battles” with random people, narcissistic insistence on putting himself in the middle of a cave rescue and lambasting an actual technical advisor by accusing him of being a pedophile, his pandemic health regulation shit-fits, his litigious SLAPP-suing of everyone who dares to publicly criticize him, and general assholery and claims of being the smartest guy in every room while he spastically gibbers jargon that he is incoherently parroting from what he has heard actual experts say.
Like @TrueCelt, I don’t trust either Tesla’s privacy or software reliability practices, know enough about the design and construction of Tesla vehicles to be very concerned with their long term durability and (especially) repairability, and consider many of their bait & switch practices with options and subscriptions to be shady as hell even compared to most automakers. On top of that, Tesla has a reputation of treating workers terribly, knowingly permitting campaigns harassment to occur in their facilities and using all means barely legal and otherwise to intimidate and suppress whistleblowers. I wouldn’t take a Tesla if you offered it to me for free.
We have a leased Model Y, but we’re returning it next week (earliest possible date to return without penalty) and we definitely did not consider another Tesla. about 50% poor ownership experience and 50% Elon distaste.
The other CEOs may indeed be ruthless, bloodthirsty capitalists keeping the working man down, but that’s par for the course. They at least aren’t bloodthirsty capitalists that are also actively platforming and supporting nazis, racists, conspiracy theorists and insurrectionists. So they got that going for them, which is nice.
My thought is that the demographic (woke, for example) that is likeliest to want an EV is also least likely to want to have anything to do with Musk. Count me among them, although I am reluctant to give up my 17 yo Honda Fit.
You visit two car dealerships. In each case, you meet the person who will be supervising the infrastructure on which you will be depending for maintenance, hardware and software upgrades, etc for the next ten years or so.
At one dealership, this person is a consummate professional of stable character. At the other, this person walks out of the office drunk off his ass bellowing out stream-of-consciousness nonsense that occasionally mentions redirecting corporate resources to some dubious goal.
Does this difference influence your decision about which dealership to patronize?
Much has been made of Musk’s public antics but I think his private antics are also significant. The truth is, he’s just been a much worse CEO for Tesla over the last few years and the public can tell.
The Model 3 and Model Y were bombshells when they first released, they were far and above the experience of other cars, let alone other EVs and people flocked to them. But what seems to have been a fatal mistake in retrospect is that Musk wanted to ape Apple in that they only had a Macbook Air and a Macbook Pro and an iMac and a Mac Studio and a Mac Pro and they could sell the same machines year after year vs other car manufacturers who were more like HP with their DGX45B-12C.
That seems to have worked in computer land but it turns out car makers know what they’re doing, the regular refreshes and overhauls and model years predictably result in a bump in sales and new lines keep things fresh. For a non-Musk counterexample, look at what happened to The Prius:
A predictable bump for each refresh and then decline until the 2023 sales figures were 1/8th of their peak.
The 2024 Model 3 is significantly 2017 Model 3 but the average person couldn’t tell you what any of the differences are and they just view it as a tired, old car. Meanwhile, they are aware that Musk’s attention is focused on niche products like the Cybertruck/Roadster/Semi which are consistently late and underwhelming and there’s a reasonable belief that the rest of the car industry is catching up while Tesla is slowing down and not putting in basic things like overhead 360 camera views and Carplay and even taking out things like camera based parking because the company is distracted.
What Musk needs to do is to push out the Model 2 ASAP but the rumors are that it might be cancelled and then immediately start working on the Model 3.X and Y.X (because we know how much he loves the letter X) which is a ground up reimagining of the Model 3/Y for 2027. But, of course, he won’t do that so even people who have zero opinions of his political beliefs are going to rationally choose cars that aren’t Tesla.
Well, doing a very limited range of models does help generate gee-whiz statistics about your model being the most popular (because the competition’s stats are more widely fractured). The problem is that those statistics aren’t all that impressive even for people who aren’t consciously aware of the fallacy because they don’t gibe with what they actually see on the roads.
The real problem with Musk (besides the toxicity) is that he’s enamored with sexy projects. The low-cost “model 2”? Boring. FSD/robotaxi? Exciting!
Reports are that the layoffs include a lot of people who were working on the NV9 (code name for low-cost car), so that project, despite Musk’s denials, is dead. And even if they get FSD working, I doubt it’ll help the company all that much.
The best thing Musk can do for Tesla is to resign as CEO or whatever position he has and let someone else do the job. He can go off an play with his rockets or boring tunnels or whatever. Tesla doesn’t need him.
On an even simpler level, I’m sure the other CEOs are capitalist jerks in their usual ways but I don’t get the impression that any of them are so desperately concerned with being loved by crypto memelords or trolling the libs that they’ll make capricious and self-destructive business decisions to get there. I’ve seen what Musk has done with Twitter but at least Twitter’s main cost to most people is time. A car is the largest investment many people will have (depending on whether or not they have a mortgage) and I don’t need the same person behind that as well. So, yeah, I’d be interested in an EV but I couldn’t ever see myself seriously considering a Tesla.
