I don’t think it’s impossible - to unfortunately use the same argument as Musk, we self-drive with a pair of small variable-resolution cameras and a massive brain, and manage ~100M miles per fatality.

Oh no, so he had to pay like a 20% tax rate on his capital gains?

Nah, don’t give them a discount.  Companies using roads for commercial purposes should be paying their way, else roadbuilding is just a subsidy for trucking.

I think your idea is reasonable. But then someone would have to say “Elon, you were wrong about stainless” and then get fired. This is a guy that accepted multi-year delays on the Model X because of the stupid rear doors instead of just saying “oops that was an expensive, unreliable, low-benefit-to-consumers error”.

Good thing they’ve avoided buying tooling, in exchange for only a 3+ year delay while they figure out how to actually make the thing.

Or if they do have 25% fewer, I bet they make really garbage products.  Farley can see how many engineers he’s got, how many QC problems he has, but he can’t see how many QC issues his comparable competitors have got.

The rumours I’ve heard is that the gigapress’d (single piece cast aluminum) chassis of the Model Y is a “you crack it, you total it” proposition. There’s not much chance of a repair.

By the time you need a new battery (200-300k miles), you need a new ICE, transmission, or other major service.

Arguably the cost of the 420 joke when buying twitter was only the marginal amount of cents per share he added to make sure it ended in 420.

I would sit here and argue with you about how false your claim is that range numbers differ from the real world, I believe there would have been a lawsuit class action or otherwise about Tesla lying about their range

A lot of it will just go to being collateral for loans he’s taken. Many rich folks that are only rich on paper due to stock holdings take out loans backed by their shares so that they can actually go do rich-people things.

Given those operating costs for The Loop, I wonder if at some point their contract will get canceled and whoever owns the actual tunnel (assuming it’s not Tesla or The Boring Company) just installs a high-speed airport-style people conveyor. If you can get a continuous stream of people up to 10mph, your…

The big difference is that they don’t claim to be able to handle these conditions, so it’d be unfair to put them there.  I assume if they expanded to northern cities it’d be the same slow, deliberate, gradually-expand-the-envelope approach they’ve taken everywhere else.

California just passed a law about false advertising in car ADAS systems, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens now.

It does/did: it meant that way more cars get the full $7500 until March, making it even more tempting for GM or Tesla buyers to wait until 2023 to buy a car.

A possibly-benign interpretation is that they’re just trying to fill the gap until the $7500 IRA EV tax credit/rebate/whatever activates on Jan 1.

The upfront cost is higher, but over the course of the ownership period the lack of ICE maintenance and fueling costs can almost make up for it, sounds like.

If that cash would’ve or could’ve been invested and you can get a good interest rate, paying cash is a bad idea. My $27k car that I bought in 2012 with cash (that had been invested and would’ve otherwise stayed invested) has cost me like $55k in opportunity cost. The dealer would’ve given me 2% financing and instead I…

If they’ve got the parts in-house and can get cars built that match to the order list, they might be able to book the revenue whether the customer is ready for delivery or not. I’ve worked for companies that were teetering on the financial brink and this kind of “get it built and ‘shipped’ so we can book it as revenue…

I think the pitch is always that “we pay for this show once, but bring in subscriptions for it for the next 50 years”. It’s a decent pitch if you make good content. I grew up watching Disney films that were like 40+ years old at the time, that my parents still had to pay full price for. Dumbo, Sleeping Beauty, and…