darganon

See, you are incapable of nuance.

Also, you said he "literally" said something twice that is plain wrong. Enjoy your alternate reality.

This is what I'm talking about, that was from the investor call, which you didn't read the transcript to, and have a cherry picked paraphrase.

I can't do the fancy formatting, but here's the quote:

I mean, I don't know what our competitors can do, except we've done relatively better than they have because if you look at the drop in our competitors in China sales versus our drop in sales, our drop was less than theirs. So, we're doing well. But I think Cathie Wood said it best. Like really, we should be thought of as an AI or robotics company.

If you value Tesla as just like an auto company, you just have to -- fundamentally, it's just the wrong framework and if you ask the wrong question, then the right answer is impossible. So, I mean, if somebody doesn't believe Tesla is going to solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company. Like that is, but we will and we are and then you have a car that goes from 10 hours of use a week, like an hour and a half a day to probably 50%, but it costs the same.

Here's the question he was answering:

OK. My follow-up, Elon, on future products. If you had nailed execution, assuming that you nail execution on your next-gen cheaper vehicles, more aggressive giga castings, I don't want to say one piece, but getting closer to, say, one-piece structural pack, unboxed, 300-mile range, $25,000 price point, putting aside robotaxi, those features unique to you. How long would it take your best Chinese competitors to copy a cheaper and better vehicle that you could offer a couple of years from now? How long would it take your best Chinese competitors to copy that? Thanks.

So for your nuance, I see something along the lines of "Our value isn't in simply the vehicles, it's in the FSD/robotaxi concept, so speculating on someone copying our car it won't eat into our business because autonomous driving will be the best of everything."

Now, I don't agree with all of that, but get some nuance in your life.

Yeah, their powerwall, and the Mega pack. Also yes, they brand themselves as an energy company. They make really, really big batteries. They also operate superchargers, which if you have experience with electric vehicles are streets ahead of any other charging networks.

https://www.tesla.com/support/energy/powerwall/virtual-power-plant

And no, they don't sell FSD for other cars, but it's still an AI product they are selling to people for money, right now. Maybe in the future they'll license it out to other people, but that's pure speculation on my part.

I'm not sure if you can buy their car batteries individually, haven't looked into it, although I have looked into buying a used one and using that as a power wall, as it would be cheaper for shitloads of storage.

I don't like Musk either, but you're willfully ignoring quite a lot of what Tesla does and has accomplished because of their mouthpiece. Talking about it requires nuance because they have done a tremendous amount of good, while making some suboptimal changes.

Tesla sells a shitload of batteries outside of their cars, so yeah I'd say they're a battery company.

They also sell the FSD software, which is "AI" so they do have an AI offering, for some definition of AI.

Also, they sell solar panels, so they're a solar panel company.

I own a Tesla because my engine died at 95k miles in my 2016 VW, with regular maintenance, and it was $11k for just the engine, not counting labor to install it.

I could change it myself, and I could have bought a used engine for roughly $5500, but the economics of that dont work out.

I'm willing to take my chances with a battery pack installation.

Also, 200 miles range is 6x the average daily miles driven, so for almost everyone, it should be plenty! Unless you're thinking we should mass produce solutions for the 1%?

The benefit is incredible and undeniable, as long as you can plug in to a wall somewhere regularly. If you have to rely on public fast charging they may not be for you.

The only benefit of a gas powered engine is you can fill the gas tank up in about 5 minutes.

Because that's only for certain video games.

https://www.kbb.com/kia/recall/

Every manufacturer has recalls, like that fun Telluride one that lights the car on fire if you adjust the driver seat too much!

The answer is always no. I just want to know who these people are that wake up, get in their truck, tow their boat 800 miles every single day are.

They don't exist, they would just rather inconvenience themselves 364 days a year to shave an hour off a long trip one day a year.

It's absurd.

Offering open wifi for the public is a terrifying thought.

There wasn't anything resembling influencers, and mostly you were talking to other nerds.

People were much more technically savvy, and creating their own homepages with guestbooks and construction gifs.

No, because they normalize and have a relative metric.

The most stolen car is an SRT hellcat, which has a total production run well under Model 3 production in a single quarter.