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by epgui 1401 days ago
I think the skepticism is reasonable, but that’s not really what my comment is about.
1 comments

Are these outside "engineering and design" reviews from a big conflicted youtuber stockholder guy (Sandy Munroe)?
I highly doubt Sandy Munroe's opinion can be bought at any price. He speaks his mind.
Yes, that’s one of them. What evidence do you have that he has a conflict of interest or is a shareholder?
I've watched a lot of Munro (and even bought one of their retail reports for fun) and the thing that most bothered me that looked like tesla bias was when he was doing side-by-side stats comparisons of all of the mid-size crossovers like the id.4, mach-e, and tesla y. he kept on harping about the epa range in the comparison and never once mentioned the methodology of the epa estimate and the fact that manufacturers have a lot of leeway to conduct the test themselves - and either overreport or underreport the epa range. this was really glaring to me because tesla is known to stretch their range estimates (as do other manufacturers), but some manufacturers seem to deliberately underreport (mercedes, porsche, ford with some models of the mach-e for example). given that he's in the business of competitive analysis he HAS to know this, but he never said a word about it, which I think made tesla look a little better than it should have. it's one thing to just present the epa range and leave it at that, but he was using it as the basis for a ton of discussion and derived numbers and basically putting down the non-tesla cars... all without mentioning the limits of the number

I think this is the video I'm remembering, but he reused charts like this a lot https://youtu.be/p0kFZ9CVLNg?t=512

see this for some real-world testing, there's lots like it and the results usually skew a certain way for each car. for example, there's about a 20% delta in epa vs. tested range for the tesla y LR and mach-e standard range in his chart. the tesla artificially looks 20% better! and this delta was well-known at the time of his video https://insideevs.com/reviews/443791/ev-range-test-results/

to your question about conflicts of interest, owning a stock is a conflict of interest. nobody needs to show that something is happening inside his head, the circumstances exist and that's it. I think he's usually pretty good and I still watch the videos, and he trades on his reputation and I still regard him as a good source. but I'm still glad to learn that he's sold the stock

I guess he sold after the conflict of interest criticism. Now his conflict would be in capture to his audience of Tesla megafans.
Reasonable skepticism based on the facts presented.
A conflict of interest accusation is pretty serious, and I think if all you had to go by is your skepticism, you probably shouldn't just make that claim as if it were a known fact: that's just very dishonest.

Sure, be skeptical, but then maybe say something like "I have no evidence for this, but I believe his manifest enthusiasm can only be explained by the fact that he's trying to manipulate the stock price to his own benefit."

Sure, it sounds less rhetorically convenient, but it's more honest.

It is my understanding that he had a substantial amount of shares up to 2021-07-29. After criticism about the conflict of interest he claims to have divested his shares.