I think there is also some hard-to-quantify loss of ‘luxury-branding’ for Tesla. It was an obvious luxury brand when it came out with the initial couple cars, but (I think) this is no longer the case for multiple reasons, like stated by many others:

It would create construction jobs, but every dollar of land acquisition would likely go into a rich person’s pocket. (for example, Nancy Pelosi)

I’m thinking about making a time-lapse-style video of an upcoming cross country drive (from behind a car windshield). I’d guess this 360-camera wouldn’t be a great idea *inside* a car, so does anyone have any other suggestions on how to do this. Ideally it would record HD(?) for ~12 hrs, and then I’d offload at…

But in reality we’re so far off from L4/L5 autonomy that I don’t see the point of talking about it publicly

I guess I’m just a pessimist, but ... with real estate prices where they are, and the world full of NIMBYs, I doubt that much can be done to improve public transit in most of the US. Sure you can add some buses, but anything that requires fixed infrastructure like a subway or train is going to cost many billions per…

We recently reported how some employees didn’t find out they were laid off until trying to use their key cards at Tesla facilities.

I’m not talking about the US, I’m talking about USSR (and modern Russia) and China under Mao. Religion was definitely not the problem in those two countries. Stalin was responsible for ~7million, and Mao is >5x higher than that (admittedly a bunch of that was starvation due to idiotic government decisions rather…

+1. I still remember people saying back in ~2016 that the “Model S is the Camry of Palo Alto”. Now the Model Y is not too much more expensive than a loaded Corolla!

The whole “anti-religion / religion is evil / religion breeds ignorance” concept was a lot easer to rationalize back in the 19th century when just about everyone was religious. Now humanity (unfortunately) has a couple of major examples of avowed atheist tyrants that show that large groups (countries) of humans are…

So what’s it going to take for TSLA to lose $500B market cap and get to a realistic valuation?

I’m not going to buy a Tesla any time in the foreseeable future, but I bet the number of consumers who avoid Tesla specifically because of Elon is pretty small. (I think the Jalopnik population is massively skewed this way, though.)

Maybe this is why they cancelled the $25K Model2 — it would have actually been like $28-29K, and now you can buy a Model Y for like $34K.

Hold on, no one suggested a Volvo yet?! I suspect these will be much cheaper to maintain vs. a MB or Jaguar. I’d go with the T5 to avoid the complex turbo+supercharged T6, or the really over complicated turbo+super+hybrid T8.

People thought the Beetle was subsidized by Germany? It was practically designed in the 1930's and the factory was literally rebuilt by the Allied forces post-WWII, not the German government.

Just imagine in some future time when something like FSD *does* work well: people will be using it to drive during all the ‘normal’ conditions. Unfortunately, it’ll still give up when things get really hard like during a thunderstorm or blizzard. Now you’ll have people who have very little recent experience driving…

BMW invested with SGL Carbon in that plant in WA. It’s not a BMW plant, and BMW has sold their stake in this plant back to SGL according to:

It would be really horrible for tons of people who cannot afford new cars. Not just ‘poor’ people but also the huge numbers of middle class people who gotta drive the latest $60-80K pickup or body-on-frame SUV.

Congrats.  I can’t wait to see the final pictures / video!

Counterpoint: the i3 was a failed experiment in carbon fiber body construction and a CARB compliance car to allow BMW to sell expensive, fuel-inefficient cars to wealthy people in California.

Don’t forget that $10k Seal also was built using tons of beneficial Chinese government subsidies and regulations.  Not to mention that no one here would buy it -- it’s tiny.