Musk and Tesla Strategy?

This Atlantic story (limited gift linked) made me wonder about Tesla’s long term strategy. Why would they fire their experts? Not like they can’t go elsewhere?

Excerpt

Take a road trip in an electric car, and you’ll quickly realize that gas stations are incredible. Nothing in the world of EVs is as fast or easy as… filling up your tank in just a few minutes, and getting on with your day. It’s not just that chargers are still hard to find. They can be dreadfully slow, adding as little as 25 miles of battery life every hour. Plenty of faster ones exist, yes, but there is no guarantee that they will work. A long-distance drive in an EV still requires a lot of planning and a lot of luck.

But if you drive a Tesla, the experience is better. The company’s Superchargers are speedy—adding up to 200 miles of charge in just 15 minutes—and simple to use. Set up an account with Tesla and charging initiates automatically after plugging in. There’s no fumbling with screens or swiping a credit card. Superchargers consistently clock in as the most reliable EV chargers in the U.S.

Even though Tesla Superchargers make up nearly three-quarters of America’s fast chargers, most non-Tesla EV drivers have had to look for a plug elsewhere. That’s because Tesla’s cars use their own proprietary charging port, similar to how the Lightning Connector is only for Apple products. But in recent months, Tesla has opened up its Superchargers to cars from Ford and Rivian. With a brick-size charging adapter, drivers can plug into more chargers than ever before, alleviating one of the biggest challenges to owning an EV. Many more automakers may soon get Supercharger access and adapters, but that has gotten complicated by Tesla’s shocking and sudden decision to fire its entire Supercharger team last week. So much about the adoption of electric vehicles in America now hangs on a dongle.

Tesla isn’t opening up its Superchargers out of the goodness of Elon Musk’s heart. In 2021, Tesla’s charging port seemed doomed: To encourage standardization, the federal government had decided to subsidize charging stations with the Combined Charging System (CCS) connector used by other automakers. The company responded by open-sourcing its connector—which it renamed the North American Charging Standard, or NACS for short—and struck a deal with the government to make its chargers accessible to other automakers. Since then, nearly every major automaker has announced that they’ll build the NACS port into future vehicles, including Ford, Rivian, GM, Volkswagen, Hyundai, Kia, Volvo, BMW, Nissan, and Jeep. (That’s not even the full list.) Tesla’s North American Charging Standard has functionally become exactly that: the new charging standard for America’s EVs. Tesla has received billions of dollars in federal funding to rapidly build more Superchargers—promising to double the number by the end of the year—and could bring in billions more from Supercharger fees.

Because the boss snorted K and decided they weren’t being “hardcore” enough?

The Cybertruck was clearly designed as a joke. I can’t imagine any other reason.

Musk is firmly in his Howard Hughes era.

They didn’t fire their experts really. The got rid of the new acquisitions team. They still have people who will be expanding the size of existing sites and all of the maintenance people are still employed. He claims that he’s devoting $500m to this.

Regardless, it’s obvious (to me anyway) that the charging piece of the company will be spun off and fairly soon.

Should have happened yesterday. It’s a billion dollar business with considerable risk and costs, and an attractive time to sell before Chinese firms get better established elsewhere.

Some of us don’t understand Musk’s brilliance…

I wonder if he got in a snit with the head of the group and fired all of them in a fit of pique. The article said that “some” of them were rehired. I also wonder how many told him to fuck off.

I’m blinded by the darkness of his acumenical radiance. Although to be honest, I’ve had orchestra seating to Musk’s antics for several years of Falcon 9 and Heavy development, and found the public perception of his perspicacity to be vastly overestimated in that arena.

This would be completely ‘on-brand’ for Musk. He’s a ‘shoot first, and keep shooting until you hit something’ kind of leader.

Except Hughes actually understood something about aircraft and the aviation business instead of just mumbling bullshit to adoring tech-‘bros’ and uncritical fans who love the imagery without recognizing that it’s mostly vaporware.

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Hughes was also excited enough about his business / brave enough to actually fly in his own aeroplanes. Musk has still not gone into space despite having access to his own private spacecraft.

Has he driven a cybertruck without the accelerator fix?

I don’t know that this really proves much; it isn’t as if astronauts actually ‘fly’ a rocket into space, and having travelled in vehicles designed by their companies doesn’t make either Jeff Bezos or (especially) Richard Branson particularly knowledgable about propulsion or space launch. If there is anything which I believe that Elon Musk is actually sincere about it is his desire to “retire on Mars” just because he brings it up at the drop of a hat even though there is no possible way to make such a venture profitable or scam enough people into buying into it to make back an investment.

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New Cybertruck issues and recall:

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I posted this over in the Chinese EV thread:

Exclusive: Trump’s transition team aims to kill Biden EV tax credit

Summary: Tesla is now poised to take advantage of two benefits afforded by cozying-up to the rising Administration: 1) eliminating the EV tax credit will be harder on Tesla’s domestic competitors since Tesla owns a much larger share of the US market, and 2) it’s not likely any Chinese EVs (or any other foreign competitor) will appear in the US market any time soon.

Tesla has over the years been the biggest beneficiary of EV tax credits like the one in Biden’s IRA legislation, along with similar credits that preceded it. And yet it now may stand to gain from killing the subsidy because that could hurt rising EV competitors more than Tesla.

Musk himself pointed out as much in a July earnings call when asked about the possibility of losing the subsidy, along with battery-production tax credits, under a Trump administration.

That credit is $7.5k off the top of any EV with a MSRP below a certain value. Model Y and 3 qualify but not X and S. It’s a huge incentive.

Elon Musk:

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