Note that the very impressive $15k profit per vehicle was their 2022 full-year result when they were jacking prices nearly every month to take advantage of demand.

This is true, but very few CEOs make their views so publicly known. Mary Barra and I likely don’t see eye-to-eye politically, but she doesn’t go out of her way to say “I hate the (insert group I support), hey here’s a retweet from a (political group I hate)“

At $50/hr, the amount of time it’d take me to do an actual in-depth dive on every car in my target market (3-4 in that segment, probably 3-4 in each size-adjacent segment in case there’s a deal) would quickly eclipse my likely savings.  And I’m still not going to find out of there’s a higher-than-usual rate of lemons…

Because there’s immense information asymmetry, even if you do your research. The dealer knows all kinds of info you won’t be able to access: the average selling price of that model at their dealer, and likely manufacturer-wide. They know how long it’s been on the lot, they know how likely it is they’ll sell it the…

The inflation reduction act is pretty similar to the Chinese strategy, but with a bit of a softer touch.  A ton of incentives for businesses to build it in North America, and companies are falling over themselves to set up battery plants in the USA because of it.  Good to see the US do some actual industrial policy,…

I’d worry more that the thing is made of rocket-grade stainless steel. Once autopilot runs over someone else’s car, what body shop is going to want to acquire and then weld this very particular grade of stainless to fix the bump.

They claim they have a million $100 deposits for what they claimed was a $40k, 500-mile truck.  Releasing “soon”, announced 2019 with zero other truck competition.

True, but if you wait until it’s no longer selling before starting an development cycle, then you’re waiting through 3-4 years of no-sales while your engineers cook up the new vehicle. So if TSLA wants to keep selling cars like the S or X, they need to start developing ones that actually look refreshed a couple years…

Also: crew makes up more than 25% of the people on board, so that means the other passengers are a proportionally bigger issue than the crew.

I’m a Hamilton fan, think Masi screwed Hamilton, and I think it’s hilarious. “No Michael No” was just sheer Toto emotion and is worthy of mugification.

I’m surprised they were badly damaged and recovered so quickly. That’s an intense amount of planning just to go for a joyride.

They went public via SPAC, so the VCs sure did! Merge to a SPAC, insiders get to foist their shitty company’s shares on the public without having to do the diligence of an IPO, and then watch the public’s shares plummet from $200/share to $0.

Just a sec, replacing a $60k/year driver with $200k of LIDAR, a massive liability policy, and tens of millions of dollars of software didn’t make economic sense? What? Well at least the company founders probably paid themselves well for a few years.

Also, watch out for the insurance or repair costs on that ingeniously-built Model Y that eliminated hundreds of components with a giant casting. Tesla may have saved on their costs, but they passed the costs onto you!

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.