For years, we've been told a lot of things that have never come to fruition.
Just 6 months ago, we were told that Robotaxi would be available to half the US population by the end of the year.
https://electrek.co/2025/07/23/elon-musk-with-straight-face-...
Now excuse me while I go check on where my 2016 full-self-driving Tesla car. It was supposed to pick me up 9 years ago, something must have happened.
The question - is Musk lying on purpose, or is this more 90-90 rule where he made (obviously wrong) assumptions based on current progress?
Musk also bought into Tesla.
So its not like he invented some kind of alien technology.
It was always about having good enough marketing to permit 10 years of R&D to make the car actually attractive.
https://thedriven.io/2023/06/22/tesla-to-start-building-its-...
I've recently been shopping for another electric SUV and to be told that to get charging stops on your long trip 'through an app on your phone' instead of built into the navigation is.... Wild
Edit: it needs to be said that I consider a car a solution to the A to B problem, and nothing more :) This was one of the premium German automakers by the way. On a ~$50k car....
Many like Polestars and Renaults are built on Android Automotive (different from Android Auto) and the built-in navigation is full Google Maps with direct access to the cars battery state and control systems.
Works perfectly on my Renault Megane E-Tech.
That's my expectation too.
> For some the quality of the data isn’t as high, but it will be there.
This is a real issue. You might be stranded with low quality suggestions. Chargers that don't work. The large number of accounts you need to have as every charger has their own etcetera
In an EV it's a necessity.
Xiaomi? Huawei? Avatar? Or do you mean only the ones available in the US?
I've obviously not tested every car out there. But for years Tesla has been the only car that came close to the convenience of a gas powered car. Their charging infrastructure really allowed it to be a normal car when you live in populated areas.
Who knows where you live and what options you have? Who knows what you considered? Maybe that's why the question was asked?
> I've obviously not tested every car out there. But for years Tesla has been the only car that came close to the convenience of a gas powered car. Their charging infrastructure really allowed it to be a normal car when you live in populated areas.
Charging infra have nothing to do with their cars besides maybe the US. They are barely leading in anything anymore, especially in countries with heavy EV competition, like China. When I was in China this year, I saw Teslas everywhere, but most of them were a few years old. Most of the new cars were Chinese EV brands, and they seemed better on most metrics in the same segment, which included quality. They're losing market share in the EU and worldwide.
I don't know what to think anymore about this. He has continuously conned his way along and does it just long enough to jump to the next con.
Tesla is crashing and somehow people though giving him a huge pay package made sense. Cyber truck is flopping but now he's again living off government graft by having another company buy up the dead weight supply. Tesla is only around because of govt subsidy and now that that's dead he's turned to another govt spigot. While supposedly being opposed politically to what he's doing.
And time and time again people still make up excuses because they can't believe they were conned.
Probably the biggest sign AI is going to flop is him starting talking about it being right around the corner.
Little technical skills, no forecasting ability, we saw how much his "efficiency management" philosophy flopped when done in public via DOGE (vs behind the scenes in a private company) and yet people keep falling for it. As long as he can keep spitting out BS, people keep falling for it.
But the stock keeps hitting new all time highs.
In fact even if every single shareholder in Tesla knows that the price is unsustainable they can still hold out for a greater fool for years. To a large extent you are betting on what the crowd will do, not what the company will do.
The really killer part is, I can't even be 100% certain that it's not me. I'm quite sure, and justify it solidly, but then, I would.
They mistakenly believe, like temporarily embarrassed millionaires/capitalists [1], that they are actually in the winning group.
It's available! Everyone in the US can go to Austin and get a ride in a Tesla robotaxi!
https://electrek.co/2025/12/22/tesla-robotaxi-project-austin...
First with autopilot, then with boring's tunnels, then a $39k cybertruck, then ...
What's that saying about "fool me so many times I can't keep count" ?
Whatever angry feeling we may have towards Elon Musk, he's not the richest man on earth for nothing.
Lesson learned, till next time !
He engineers perceptions, finance, and govt funds, not technology. Every report and available evidence shows he is barely technologically astute, nevermind genius; the accomplishments of his teams are despite him not because of him.
Which is why a better description would be: The Greediest Man On Earth.
In particular, nothing that comes out of his mouth regarding AI makes any sense.
And still, people listen to him as if he was an expert. Go figure.
His latest bullshit was about Tesla cameras and fog/rain/snow - on an investor call, no less - "Oh, we do photon counting directly from the sensor, so it's a non-issue".
No. 1, Tesla cameras are not capable of that - you need a special sensor, that's not useful for any real visual representation. And 2, even if you did, photon counting requires a closed "box" so to speak - you can't count photons in "open air".
And no-one calls it out.
Both SpaceX and Tesla are accomplishments if you consider where their competitors are.
CATL, BYD, and other Chinese manufacturers are absolutely killing it at Tesla's expense, Because their markets have actual, sharp-elbowed competition requiring actual innovation.
If not for crew dragon, the US would be begging Russia for seats to the ISS still. Is that your preferred outcome?
Musk just took it way further. When Jobs missed with the RDF it was on stuff like the G4 Cube being "cool" enough to make up for its issues. He wasn't promising miracles.
Tesla isn't a robotics company it's a meme company (2027)
Remember in 2016 when people would be on Mars by 2018?
I'm no fan of Tesla, but this looks like the collapse of the contract with the supplier for the battery chemistry they've moved away from, aka "no [more] big deal."
2023 article confirming NMC chemistry: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1149/1945-7111/ad14d0
5/2025 article discussing change to LFP: https://roboticsbiz.com/teslas-4680-lfp-battery-explained-ch...
3/2025 article comparing BYD's LFP and Tesla's NMC/NCM: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266638642...
The company L&F referenced in this article were supplying said cathode material.
ref https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-plans-four-new-batt...
Struggling, not so much: '24/'25 revenue of just under $100B, with Q3'25 record profitability and deliveries yielding $1.5B net income. Strong liquidity and a current ratio of about 2, boosting short-term financial stability. Solid cash reserves and relatively low debt ratio.
High stock price: far exceeds that of traditional auto makers even though Tesla's revenue is significantly lower. High valuation reflects investor expectations of growth and future tech upside. Exuberant? Probably. OTOH, Tesla has delivered better ROI for investors than the other automakers.
This fully explains the market valuation, of course! Never mind a swarm of retail investors driven by a news media that covered Musk as if he were Tony Stark for years, this market cap is fully based on solid fundamental analysis of expected future revenue.
The people voting Afd et al. are NOT people buying EVs. The venn diagram of those groups is two circles.
The two most popular EVs in China are the Wuling Mini and the Geely Xingyuan. The first one costs $4500 for the base model, and the second one is $9800. And you can get a very decent EV for $15k with plenty of options.
In 2-3 years, these $5k and $10k cars will only get better, and they'll just slaughter all the competition in markets outside the US and Europe. Especially once used cars start appearing at a fraction of the cost.
Traditional auto manufacturers are dead. Full stop. They just haven't realized it yet. Tesla had a chance to compete in this market with Model 2 but Musk decided to blow their lead on a completely stillborn and gimmick-filled robotaxi.
The big dog is BYD though. Twice as many as 2nd place Tesla.
Indeed. Global 2024 data shows Tesla selling about 1.8M. EV's only by that group of automakers comes to around 1.5M. Toyota and Ford are hybrid-first, not EV. VW is the only legacy automaker that comes near Tesla's EV scale. Mercedes prioritizes margin over volume. Rivian is capacity-limited.
But it is stunning that legacy automakers are sticking to fossil fuels.
They also know that this means that the EU will push the target date for the end of fossi fuel cars.
Sales have been flat for 3 years and the delivery numbers in Europe are catastrophic
on a fully diluted basis, the market cap is above $1.6tn, so at a PE of 20, they'd have to generate something like $80bn in profit per year - hard to do in an industry that is as brutally competitive and low margin as passenger cars.
----
It might be tempting when one has been asleep at the wheel to chalk up the rise of Chinese carmakers led by BYD to unfair subsidies, especially since leaders in Washington and Brussels have done so. No doubt, China is far from a free, fair and open market. The scale and pervasiveness of corporate subsidies at the federal and local level far exceed what other market-based economies offer.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-10-17/byd-s-...
----
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-10/china-s-c...
EVs were subsidised in the west, e.g. in California (#4 "country" by GDP), Norway, and US tax incentives - which have gone away after the Trump anti-renewables Bill of 2025. MRSPs for EVs were slashed after September 2025 due to the loss of this subsidy, and 2 months later Ford cancelled it's electric F-150 program.
Of course, the salaries and working conditions are going up in China while west is eroding worker rights as fast as we can. One the factories will come back here simply because we'll end up cheaper. Don't buy solar made by Xinjiang forced labor, by solar panels made by illegal immigrant prison labor!
It'd like me saying that Barry Bonds only won the home run records because he used steroids. It wasn't entirely the steroids but I'm sure they certainly didn't hurt.
They are also way cheaper and at comparable quality to western cars.
They lost the massive US subsidy making EV’s appealing and are getting outcomes in China. Model E and Cybertruck have anemic and shrinking sales numbers etc.
I sometimes forget that’s not the real name.
You're misreading. $100B annual revenue. 1.5B quarterly new income.
Q3 2025 was record revenue of $27B (up 12% YoY). Operating margin was 5.8% (down from 10.8 Q3 2024).
Why the lower profitability? Higher expenses for AI and R&D costs, lower EV prices (very strong competition), etc.
How does that justify Tesla's valuation?
Is it based on the idea that the margin can be improved?
You got it reversed.
For Q3'2025, GM net income $1.3B on $48B revenue (down 0.3% YoY). Tesla, in contrast, generated $1.5B income on $28B revenue (up 12% YoY).
GM's income was down 56.6% while Tesla's was down 37%.
GM had higher operating income than Tesla, however. Explained by Tesla's more aggressive investment in R&D and AI.
Yeah, sure.
On the contrary, Teslas remarkably high stock price means it's less likely to go up and a big correction is more likely.
It sounds like you're arguing that high valuation compared to fundamentals means buyers expect gains from future buyers paying more sounds like a Ponzi, but it isn't, it is speculation.
The comparison doesn't make sense. Some surface features of speculative markets can look Ponzi-like, but the underlying mechanics are very different.
A Ponzi-scheme returns to earlier participants directly from money contributed by later participants, with no real underlying business generating value. In a Ponzi-scheme, there is no real product (or it is irrelevant), the operator controls payouts, and investors are promised steady or guaranteed returns. None of that applies to Tesla stock.
Ponzi-schemes hide losses, smooth returns, collapse suddenly. Tesla stock is volatile, has had large drawdowns, and public reflects bad news, margin compression, demand shifts. Volatility is a sign of a market, not a Ponzi.
If BYD was in the US I think we could check this box reeeeaaally quickly. It would make Tesla irrelevant.
I personally prefer a BYD, Musk has damaged his brand by being so political, but the BYD product is (IMO) superior.
Having said that BYD isnt without its issues (eg. over reporting of range)
Why? What's your logic?
There's a huge market opportunity here that all our manufacturers are missing, seemingly on purpose. BYD, and others, would absolutely sweep the competition.
This part is the smell.
"It's not a car company, it's a AI/Robot/whatever company." The valuation is supposedly justified by a future product that perpetually fails to materialize.
It's obviously not a classical Ponzi scheme in the mechanical sense where payouts are controlled by a central party. It has major Ponzi vibes though, with new money continuing to reward old money even though the fundamentals and products haven't done anything to justify that continued influx - only the hype has.
The actual underlying product, the cars, don’t match the crazy valuation.
67% of Americans have said they'll never consider buying a Tesla. 56% cite Musk as either the entire reason or part of the reason. [0]
Tesla IS Elon Musk. Without him they're nothing, with him they can't access 2/3rds of the market. Why would anyone invest in that?
[0] https://www.yahoo.com/news/two-thirds-of-americans-now-say-t...
* don't believe the 67% will follow through with that after experiencing FSD
* don't need 67% of Americans to purchase the car. Robotaxi use is plenty.
* look beyond the American market and its pathetic 5% EV share.
Thanks for explaining the other side of it.
I’ve tried v13 few weeks ago, knowing it works so well. Still got shocked how good it is.
They’ll have to drop the price of it tho, but even then 10M cars * $100 per month is $12b of revenue per year.
I'm fairly certain every auto manufacturer and many non-auto manufacturers are working on it. I doubt they'll be able to patent anything truly important to the process, since others beat them to the market with most of it. Or am I missing something essential?
Musk is a shit human, but to an investor, everything he touches turns to gold. Whether his companies make anything useful doesn't matter, what matters is that the stock price in his companies goes up, so people give him more money. This works until it doesn't.
Just because stock is trading on memes, doesn't mean it can't keep doing so well past your solvency to short it...
The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
Meaning you also need to get the timing just right otherwise you'll lose big, even if Tesla crashes and burns to zero just after.
> "Short it then"
I can smell your personal finance through the screen.
It doesn't mean that Tesla stock won't crash unless it actually delivers a Holy Grail. Which is supremely unlikely
Musk can move money around SpaceX/Tesla/XAI/whatever the next story to investors is to prop up valuations and share prices, but can he win against China's clean tech export machine? Long term, I think not (China is a third of global manufacturing capacity as of this comment, and the world is their TAM). So he'll do the tech bro thing, giving talks, going to demo days, spending his wealth on pet projects, etc, while innovators innovate and point the firehose of these products at the world. Are you going to talk people out of his religion? Unlikely. The faithful will remain so, because that's how the human brain sometimes operates.
Ember Energy: China Cleantech Exports Data Explorer - https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e... (updated monthly) ("In 2024, China produced around 80% of the world’s solar PV modules and battery cells, and 70% of electric vehicles.")
US warns China overproducing EVs, batteries, semiconductors for global dominance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41909869 - October 2024
China's Batteries Are Now Cheap Enough to Power Huge Shifts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954508 - July 2024
China Already Makes as Many Batteries as the Entire World Wants - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40933773 - July 2024
(as of this comment, ~50% of light vehicle sales in China are NEVs [battery electric of plug in hybrid] while exporting ~6M units/year, more than total annual US light vehicle sales)
Our so-called "gdp" is mostly rent and legal ponzi schemes
https://fortune.com/2025/03/20/howard-lutnick-pumps-tesla-st...
“If you want to learn something on this show tonight, buy Tesla,” Lutnick told Fox News host Jesse Watters.
In this economy we have a billionaire clan selling hot air and backing each other up. The main "achievements" of this administration are in pumping Bitcoin, "AI", cannabis sales and and online gambling.
It's why the entire S&P 500 teeters on the back of 7 companies without any presently viable paths to profitability that would justify the current valuations.
It's why repeatedly lying for a decade+ made Elon so rich even though the business output and fundamentals never really matched the valuation.
Still doesn't - this valuation is mostly vestigial beliefs that AI would eliminate an entire workforce ("history often rhymes") of drivers and replace car ownership with subscription.
The majority of the performance in the market has little to do with actual material value being produced and everything to do with how much rent finance bros think they can extract from the stock.
SpaceX Buys over 1000 Cybertrucks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46405984 - December 2025
Last week: Elon Musk's SpaceX bought tens of millions worth of Cybertrucks Tesla can't sell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46317462 - December 2025 (6 comments)
Elon Musk's SpaceX and XAI Are Buying Tesla's Unsold Cybertrucks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45572152 - October 2025 (8 comments)
Tesla's European Sales Plunge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46391352 - December 2025 (3 comments)
Tesla US sales drop to nearly 4-year low in November - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46248803 - December 2025 (60 comments)
Tesla looks to reset strategy amid sluggish India sales - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46084554 - November 2025 (2 comments)
Tesla's European sales tumble nearly 50% in October - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46063634 - November 2025 (57 comments)
Tesla sees worst sales performance in China in years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45881302 - November 2025 (1 comment)
BYD Pulls Ahead of Tesla in UK, Closes Sales Gap in Germany - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45859618 - November 2025 (35 comments)
Tesla's German car sales more than halve in October as wider EV sales jump - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45827314 - November 2025 (135 comments)
[Flagged] Tesla sales in Germany have cratered from last year, data shows - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45826384 - November 2025 (28 comments)
Study: The Musk Partisan Effect on Tesla Sales - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45825382 - November 2025 (2 comments) ("Without the Musk partisan effect, Tesla sales between October 2022 and April 2025 would have been 67-83% higher, equivalent to 1-1.26 million more vehicles. Musk’s partisan activities also increased the sales of other automakers' electric and hybrid vehicles 17-22% because of substitution, and undermined California’s progress in meeting its zero-emissions vehicle target.")
Tesla Cybertruck sales are flatlining - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45573985 - October 2025 (17 comments)
Tesla Pivots to Robots as Investors Question Sales and Soaring Valuation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45228566 - September 2025 (3 comments)
[1] https://www.thebignewsletter.com/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=thebignewsletter.com
I don’t even know what to call the kind of system we have.
> BYD announced in 2022 its plans to launch a fleet of car carriers to build what it calls a “maritime bridge” to support its global sales growth and supply chain. The company said it would invest about $687 million to develop a fleet of eight car carriers. The first of the vessels, BYD Explorer No. 1 was delivered in January 2024 followed by BYD Changzhou in December 2024, and BYD Hefei, which was the company’s first owned PCTC. Each of the first three vessels has a capacity of 7,000 units. [My note: current BYD vertical integration marine fleet capacity is ~30k units when including the Shenzhen vessel mentioned above, but does not include capacity through third party charters]
[1] China EV Exports Worldwide Rise 87% Year over Year to 199,836 in November [2025] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-29/china-ev-... | https://archive.today/Q80Zs - December 29, 2025
[2] Chinese EV Manufacturer BYD Takes Delivery of [World's] Largest Capacity Car Carrier - https://maritime-executive.com/article/chinese-ev-manufactur... - April 24th, 2025
(think in systems; US light vehicle TAM is ~18M units/year, global TAM is ~90M units/year; Tesla US sales will finalize at ~600k units for 2025)
Two things can happen:
The dream is a bust, and Tesla is worthless.
Or the dream pans out, and almost all other car companies are worth a lot less.
Unless you absolutely want to believe that either self driving is impossible, or Tesla is uniquely unable to achieve it, the valuation is not entirely unwarranted.
Put shortly, Tesla is not a car company, it's a bet on self-driving cars.
Tesla is not the only company to achieve self-driving, and all companies that achieve it share the market with them.
(Or the fourth option, it will take decades for self-driving to take even a significant market of "driving" as humans continue to want to own and drive cars rather than short-term rentals.)
It omits a lot of other scenarios that increase the actual risk of betting on Tesla...
Self-driving becomes a commodity and so there's no unique Tesla win.
Self-driving becomes something only Tesla controls but (in the fleet/rental model) doesn't bring back returns to justify this investment because of extremely high capital, maintenance, regulatory, or other costs.
Self-driving becomes something only Tesla controls but (in the personal-owner model) doesn't bring back returns to justify this investment because it doesn't motivate the entire world to splash out on new vehicles overnight and also doesn't override other existing biases/preferences.
Self-driving is won by someone else (maybe someone with less religious views about Lidar, say) and Tesla no longer can even sell that promise.
Those are just the ones that occur to me in a few minutes!
The real question is if Tesla is uniquely ABLE to achieve it, above others in the market... including new startups or tech/auto-maker partnerships which may yet form.
Tesla has some supply chain innovation, but none of what they do can't be replicated... and Musk's slavish commitment to video as opposed to LIDAR is hobbling them.
They abandoned the hardware most promising to help enable self-driving.
So something isn't being priced correctly.
> No, that is not a typo. $2.9 billion to roughly $7,400.
Ooft. That’s one hell of a write down. Imagine the person that had to do the calculation and report it back.
As in they literally expect to build one more Cybertruck battery and that's it. I'm guessing the excess stock in the Tesla factories covers spares for a few years already.
I wonder when the cancellation will be announced by Tesla? It's all but leaked at this point.
A '99% write down' is such an uncommon term that many people might not register it.
Tax reasons? Keep it on the book and write the loss off against other profit over coming years? No clue how it would work in practice but it sounds taxy.
The word on the street is this is only 2 weeks out.
Right after fulfilling the roadster orders.
And right before the Dyson sphere that will power Grok AI is deployed.
It was only once he realized that he has been duped and those will never materialize that the coverage turned negative.
And when it's straight up facts easily verifiable from others sources, pretending that it's not based in reality is just sticking your fingers in your ears and screaming "la la la la" which is something that even very few 12 year olds do.
Indeed, they've been stubbornly siding with reality instead of Musk's cheerleaders, stockholders, hype and vapourware.
> pausing whilst they get ready to ramp up cyber cab production lines
Makes me think of the Rick and Morty line: "Wait, maybe he's pulling out his sword to surrender"
It really isn't. BYD is progressively becoming ubiquitous here (large South America city)
Fewer new entrants? America has Tesla, Rivian, Lucid, et cetera in the EV native camp, and Waymo in the autonomous-native camp.
If we limit ourselves to export variants, Europe has Polestar. (And by this metric, China has dozens of new entrants in both fields.)
The problem is: they can’t make them cheap enough to compete with China in developing countries. I’m not sure if they even want to do that at this point, the margins there are so low. It’s easier to just rebadge a Chinese car as your own (Renault and GM already do that in SA).
I think short term focus is far too rewarded in Western companies. In fact that's pretty much the only oversight given to the CEOs. The next quarterly report is all that matters. Even if you wanted to do the right thing and focus on long term goals office politics will ensure that a single down quarter where you focused on long term investments will be punished by those looking to move up. Pump the numbers each and every quarter and don't bother about long term visions since those aren't important for your career, bonuses and golden parachute. The big shareholders too aren't worried about the long term either since shareholders are fluid. Pump this quarter and they can move their investments to the next company before the rot sets in.
The companies that do extremely well in the West are those with singular stable long term leadership where the leaders have authority (or simply majority ownership) to take risks. Berkshire Hathaway, Meta, Nvidia, Amazon, Musks companies, Apple (under Jobs when he was around), etc.
This is partly why Tesla stock price is ridiculous. The competition is the traditional car companies which are extremely poorly run while Tesla is seen as a company run by a singular individual with more authority to take on longer term projects than just the next quarters goal. I think the market isn't correctly taking into account the possible mental illness from Musk but none the less there is merit to the idea that a company with singular stable leadership will be more successful than those which have quarterly focus.
This can be seen in many many examples. I actually don't think SpaceX is particularly well run either but their competition are companies where the only thing that matters for their leadership is the next quarterly report. So it's a case of a poorly run company vs an extremely terribly run company (eg. Boeing). No wonder SpaceX is doing well when their competition is fucking Boeing. Likewise with Amazon vs Walmart, Apple under jobs vs Apple not under Jobs, etc.
China commonly avoids this trap with stakeholder rather than shareholder based governance. This is less than perfect but it's still a league better than the race to the next quarter that Western shareholder governed companies have been doing. Details from an academic point of view: https://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/2025/06/18/what-chinas-e...
In other words the Western incentives for leadership is pretty broken (except when the leadership has the stability to avoid worrying about these short term incentives). I have the opinion that it's likely to lead to the fall of the West in the long term. We can see China repeatedly winning in various fields, electric cars being a clear example. We can also see in the West whenever we have shareholder based governance the companies have poor long term outcomes.
And in North America they failed to bring dealers to heal.
It's ok, it's only our children's future at risk.
That's who is sock-puppeting all these misanthropes.
US capitalism was fine with a few wealthy people driving around some novelty luxury cars with EV motors in them. China turned it into an actual mass market product.
Look at solar, an industry that has continual bankruptcies, yet is eating the world. New players grow, die, and get replaced all the time, in a continual churn of new technology.
That Tesla would die a death was not inevitable, merely a choice due to recent years of extremely poor leadership and terrible mismanagment. Even now, Tesla may pull out of the slump and recover! It's doubtful it will ever justify its share price, but it's likely that if it ever gets fairly priced as a company, it could be sold to a US auto major that is regretting it's failure to produce EVs for the international market, and wants to try to catch up. Maybe. That time might have passed too...
Teslas aren’t perfect, and they are definitely starting to get a bit dated, but the list you made has precisely zero “great EVs” imho.
But don't let facts get in the way of some good bullshit!
You know, evidence, instead of just something that resides in your brain.
vs
> where the batteries are being used
It's just a different battery cell size with less overhead. 46 by 80 mm instead of e.g. 21 by 70 mm.
Get rid of the touchscreen and the four-wheel-drive steering and the electrical flush door handles, the hatch thing in the back, smaller wheels, any other electronic features like 120v inverters, etc. solid rear axel would be nice but that would be a major redesign.
He has been promising fully autonomous Teslas since at least 2015 and “level 5” self-driving within a couple of years, yet cars still require human oversight and true autonomy remains elusive.
He said Tesla robotaxis would be on the road by 2020 and then “next year” repeatedly, which never happened.
He promised an affordable $35,000 Model 3 and a cheap family EV, but those never materialized as advertised.
He unveiled the Cybertruck with specific features and price points that did not pan out, and several promised add-ons never appeared.
He set repeated production deadlines for the Tesla Roadster that kept slipping for years.
And his Mars colonization timelines are still nowhere near realistic.
The same cycle keeps repeating, with fans focusing on a few wins while ignoring a long list of missed commitments. At some point it stops being bold vision and starts looking like a confidence game.
this sort of happened. the people who sold these battery materials for the 4680 thought they were making a B2B sale, and they still wound up making a B2C sale - that ended in disaster - in disguise.
It looks like this: https://www.amazon.com/JESSY-3-7-Volt-Rechargeable-Battery/d...
These cells aren't special, they're all off the shelf designs. The 4680 got some marketing spin, but really it was just a bigger form factor with a tweaked chemistry that apparently just didn't work out. And of course that means you can meta-spin the failure as "supply chain collapse", etc...
Obviously, no, you can't just buy a bunch of 21700 cells and stuff them in the car yourself, the balancing and calibration needs to happen in an integrated way and that repair (digging into a 400V DC battery!) is just way too dangerous for amateurs. But the batteries themselves are mature technology and kinda boring.
Distributors usually won't sell to regular consumers, but there are specialized retailers who base their reputation on selling quality goods, usually to the RC, flashlight, and vape market.
Cyberteack is a flop. This battery has a parallel track and is used elsewhere so conclusions are just basesless .
Because batteries are the only part you can criticize, take a look at the sodium batteries made by CATL:
https://cnevpost.com/2025/12/29/catl-expects-sodium-batterie...
https://carnewschina.com/2025/12/28/catl-confirms-2026-large...
It's a real breakthrough in battery tech. With gasoline you simply can't have this.
(And don't forget that Laserdisk was quite successful for what it tried to do, and that when you buy physical videos today, they're in optical disk format.)