I'm no Tesla defender but this is clickbait. The chart shows car sales are down across the board, Tesla is sort of in the middle of the pack, and the model Y is still the current top selling car overall.
The other parts don't seem to be true, ex. sort of middle of the pack would make me think 50th percentile of the manufacturers in the graphic, but its 75th.
Don't mean to seem pushy, I just noticed in myself that I tend to call things clickbait when I had in mind a stronger claim the article doesn't make, and then the article doesn't say it. But really, that's all on me, unless there's dishonesty in the headline.
It's clicbait for making it seem as if Telsa is somehow unique in being down, and they go on an entire sidebar/tirade about it. But actually there's nothing different about Telsa vs the other car manufacturers.
They should remove every bit of article that focuses on Telsa, and write about the entire industry instead.
Reading the chart does make me think different thoughts about Tesla. The brands that are doing worse than Tesla are "special" brands in my view. If Jeep is doing worse I just think about how they're already on the way out. But to me Tesla is the Apple of cars. Tesla dropping changes my worldview, but not Jeep, Ram, or Chrysler.
Also, some people are just Tesla focused and want to think specifically about Tesla. As an Apple customer I'd pay attention if Apple sales went down, regardless if phones went down across the world.
> It's clicbait for making it seem as if Telsa is somehow unique in being down, and they go on an entire sidebar/tirade about it. But actually there's nothing different about Telsa vs the other car manufacturers.
Their point is that Tesla got to where it is due to a variety of factors that did not apply to most of the other manufacturers, that some of those factors had built-in time limits that may be being reached, and that Musk has been doing things that will reduce some of those other factors.
> But actually there's nothing different about Telsa vs the other car manufacturers.
Elon Musk has been pumping Tesla with never ending promises of full self driving cars arriving just next year but which never arrive.
Elon Musk has been pumping Tesla with unbelievable promises of building AI, robots, etc, and has been demanding a 40B payday to keep those projects in Tesla.
Elon Musk has been manipulating Tesla as a peon of his own personal ideological whims and political battles, going as far as using non-business assertions to drive his strategic business decision such as moving the company across states.
Elon Musk has been a vocal supporter of far-right and fascist ideals, something that no other CEO is so moron to the point of ever doing the same, when Tesla's primary market is the middle/upper middle class which leans primarily into the liberal/social democrat political spectrum and who are the primary victims and target of said fascist movement.
There are many, many differences between Tesla and all other auto makers, and these differences are all self-inflicted foot-in-mouth mistakes made by Elon Musk.
Yeah, this is better understood as a story about saturation. Tesla (really the Model Y specifically) walked into a market in the spring of 2021 as the world was recovering from the pandemic and had extra cash, with a product that was just plain wildly better than any alternative from any vendor. And it ran away with the market.
Basically "everyone" in a Blue State Urban Environment looking for a large sedan or crossover for the last two years has ended up buying a Y. But... now we all have our cars, and the market is saturated. There are other markets to sell to, but those take different products. The Y too small to grab minivan/SUV owners, the 3 is still too expensive to make the same impact in the compact segment, etc... (The cybertruck production ramp is still shipping every car, so we don't know where demand will top out there yet).
Obviously the financials don't care about "why" you're down 17%, but it's important to recognize that the reason is emphatically *not* that people don't like their Teslas. It's that everyone who wants a Tesla has one now.
I mean, yes, probably? The Nissan Leaf came out before the Tesla Model S, and the Renault Zoe at about the same time (after, particularly in the Zoe’s case, many years of knocking around as concept cars). VW e-Golf shortly after. This was all a consequence of a combination of li-on batteries getting (just) good enough and government subsidies (California and half of the EU were all but begging the manufacturers to make electric cars, for years); once those conditions were met, about four or five manufacturers launched entrants within a year or so of each other. The Leaf and Zoe are far more archetypical electric cars than the Model S; Tesla’s first truly mass-market car, the 3, didn’t come out til years later.
An idea that Tesla in some sense invented the modern electric car become popular later (probably driven by strength in the US; the Leaf and Zoe were not particularly US-market-friendly cars, and the Zoe was never even released there), but it’s kinda ahistorical.
Teslas were the first "normal" electric car. From the beginning they performed well and looked good. And though range maybe wasn't great at first, it was still better than anyone else, by a lot.
Leaf was a nerdy glorified golf cart, like all other EVs before it.
Hype aside, Tesla showed the market that you didn't have to look like a dweeb driving an electic car.
And no, I don't own a Tesla, and would not own one, but I give credit where it's due.
The e-Golf was more or less literally a Golf with a different engine. The Leaf was a fairly normal hatchback, very similar to other hatchbacks popular in Europe and Asia. Tesla’s first ‘normal’ car was the model 3 (the S was too high-end/expensive to qualify), which came far later than either.
Actually, I think one lesson to the manufacturers from the first-gen was that you shouldn’t make electric cars too similar to normal cars. The e-Golf, in particular, people often didn’t realise it even existed. Second-gen electric cars like the i3/4 and Hyundai Ioniqs are notably weirder-looking than the first gen.
(Again, I do think that for America specifically the early electric cars were not well-targeted, which was more or less inevitable; the US is a more difficult market than Europe or China due to the range requirements, and also a much smaller market for electric cars than either.)
I was actually thinking of the Roadster. Based on a Lotus Elise. It looked good, it was thrilling to drive. It totally broke through the lines people had drawn in their minds around the idea of what an electric car could be.
Note that this is despite significant price drops.
Looking at the entire US, the numbers look a bit different. Teslas best selling car sold 10% less, not as bad as RAM and some others (RAM PU -25%). At the same time more vehicles are being sold (+5%) and companies such as Toyota and Honda are looking really strong.
It seems the focus of Tesla has mostly shifted to operating robotaxis.
What is everybody's guess when they will have the first robotaxi on the road somewhere, offering rides without a safety driver? Could be interesting to look back in the future and see how close or how far off we have been with our guesses.
My feeling is that it will happen in about 2.5 years. Could be next year, could be in 5 years. So if I had to guess, I'd say in 2.5 years.
- Same stonk pump in 2018, famously Elon called Teslas appreciating assets because of the looming robotaxi release. Shared screenshots of a ridehail app.
- No action on a ton of precursors for this to happen, in hardware or software. My favorite is "do the cameras have wipers yet?", because its simple and intuitive.
I also have the feeling that there is a good chance Tesla cars built in 2024 won't become robotaxis. But that is a different question.
My guess is about the first car using Tesla software to offer commercial rides. No matter when it was build or who built it. Because the most interesting part is the software.
Thats fair, and apologies, I edited that bit out as you were replying. (for posterity, at the end I had a stronger claim saying I was happy to put 6 figures on Teslas shipped in 2024 will never have a paid ride without someones hands on the wheel. Then I remembered that was irrelevant :P )
