[mrtksn]

Unpopular opinion but wasn't Tesla subsidised and missed the cost goals anyway? My impression is that Tesla succeeded thanks to Musks personality that made the customers forgive unfulfilled promises that they paid thousands of dollars for.

Almost as if Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos imitated Musk instead of Steve Jobs and kicked the can down the road and delivered traditional but improved blood test machines and kept promising stuff down the road by collecting money and be edgy on Twitter, she could have been a hero by now.

I mean, Tesla still delivered stuff that people value. Just not the promised ones.

Tesla makes the best computerised vehicles out there and has built a valuable charging network, not the stated goals but valuable anyway.

[MichaelCollins]

I wish Tesla would cut it out with the computerized car bullshit and focus on making the best battery cars instead. They shouldn't need bullshit like "it will be fiscally irresponsible to not buy our cars because it will be a robotaxi that pays for itself"; it imperils the long-term success of the company for a short-term boost in sales. And it alienates anybody with a modicum of critical thinking.

[mrtksn]

Okay but the genius of Musk was this computerised car stuff and it's exactly where the traditional car manufacturers fail. Just recently the CEO of VW changed and the important part of the failure of the previous CEO was their shit software on their electric cars.

It's not like Tesla managed to make cheap electric cars? They managed to make cars with good computers and this is something that people actually want.

Essentially, Tesla made the first usable as daily driver electric car by promising stuff that people believed they want(but very hard to make) so they can collect money and make sales but doing stuff that people actually needed(within the reach of the current technology) to live with electric cars.

[mrguyorama]

Actually, I desperately want the software world to stay as far away from cars as possible. Even in a VW, I know I will go 100k miles with zero issues with most of the stuff. Someone somewhere wants to put javascript between me and that, and I hope they have a bad life.

[mrtksn]

I suspect you are thinking of touchscreens, not necessarily the computerised cars?

[mrguyorama]

No, as soon as we allow average devs (instead of people working on much more limited ECU software) there will be someone insisting they should put node into it, and run some part of the car on some stack that involves 3 gb of js dependencies, and will inevitably only work half the time, outside of their extremely limited testing.

Car software will only be reliable as long as it doesn't seem prestigious to write software for cars.

[MichaelCollins]

Furthermore, before they put cell radios in cars, you could count on the software buried deep in your car working in a consistent manner. Now with over-the-air updates, your car can suffer a software regression at any time.

[sidewndr46]

Musk didn't even contribute to the automotive technology, at all. It's the result of an acquisition of a company called "AC Propulsion".

[panick21_]

The narrative about Musk being some genius exploiter of subsidies playing 4D chess with all kinds of financial and marketing trickery is total nonsense if you actually look into it.

In terms of subsidies, Tesla wasn't actually subsidies that much. The received a 400M loan from the DoD for advanced vehicle manufacture. At that point however, even without the DoD they could have raised that money. Tesla payed that lone back early and with interest. DoD also gave much larger loans to GM and Ford, neither have fully paid back their loan yet.

The tax subsidies only started years later and Tesla profited from the 7500k tax credit. However this was limited to 250k vehicles and Tesla blew threw that very fast and have since operated without a tax credit and had to compete against vehicles coming in from all the global car companies that all got this tax credit. GM also used that tax credit. So did Tesla get a subsidy that helped them, I would say yes but this was open to all car companies and a number of them took advantage of it.

Tesla also gets the same tax reductions as any large company that makes large investments in particular regions.

> My impression is that Tesla succeeded thanks to Musks personality that made the customers forgive unfulfilled promises that they paid thousands of dollars for.

Not sure what this is based off. You don't build a company the size of Tesla based on forgiving costumers.

Yes, sure some costumers waited a while for their model 3 because of production issues, but this isn't really unique to Tesla. Car production often gets delayed. And costumers did not 'forgive' this universally, many canceled their order and bought something else.

But here is the thing, the demand for Tesla electric cars was so high that it didn't matter.

Tesla was successful because they had a product that a huge amount of people desperately wanted, and after some initial delay they got it to those costumers in very large numbers with very good unit margin.

In fact, Tesla often increased the spec of the delivered product compared to the one that was initially ordered.

And the money from reservation undelivered vehicle and FSD is certainty not why Tesla is successful.

Tesla is successful because they sell a 1 million+ vehicles a year with an automotive margin of 30%.

> I mean, Tesla still delivered stuff that people value. Just not the promised ones.

Can you explain what you mean? What did they not deliver on?

Some people (a minority of costumers) didn't get the FSD but that certainly not most costumers.

[mrtksn]

This comment itself is an example of forgiving customers.

If we agree to not make it a big deal of people not receiving the products they paid for and if we agree not to make it a big deal for delays and low quality then sure, Tesla is just as any other company.

If people didn't make it a big deal that Theranos runs its test on Siemens machines we wouldn't have had a Theranos scandal too!

If we not make it a big deal for Tesla missing the targets for making the cars cheap and collecting pre-order money for products that not deliver(or deliver late if you kick the can down the road long enough) we can say the exact same thing about Theranos. Let's not make a big deal on how much blood is actually required to run the tests today, it would be 1 drop next year(update the next year every year)!

If you choose to put the threshold of "subsidy received" above what Tesla received, you can claim that Tesla did not receive subsidies. I think TicTac sweets had some trick like that, i.e. if you define 1 TicTac as one serving and if the calories of 1 serving is below the threshold to report you have 0 calories per serving and as a result you can claim the whole box is calorie free!

It really depends on what you choose to forgive or not, I guess.

[panick21_]

I have never spent a single $ on a Tesla product so I have nothing to forgive.

People should be able to get their money back for the FSD package, I totally agree. I don't know what the status of that is. In my opinion that it should legally clear that you can get your money back as it clearly does not does what it said on sale but I have not read the contract.

As a costumer that would piss me off if I couldn't get my money back on that and law suite would make sense.

Given the absurdly high demand for second hand Tesla and your ability to resell the FSD package while there are lots of people who pay extra for that package, it isn't nearly on the same scale as what Theranos did. In fact since many bought it of much less then it is now, you might have a change of making money.

And FSD sales are a tiny % of Tesla overall business. That makes it very different from Theranos. What makes it also very different is that Tesla has a reasonable chance at delivering and is continually investing and improving towards that goal. They have the capital to continue to work on that, they are not just burning investor money.

Theranos had no realist hope of ever making money and no capital to continue research.

> If we not make it a big deal for Tesla missing the targets for making the cars cheap and collecting pre-order money for products that not deliver(or deliver late if you kick the can down the road long enough) we can say the exact same thing about Theranos.

No we can't. That's an absurd claim. You reserve a product and you can get your money back if you don't get it, that is no different then many other reservations and is totally common practice in the industry.

And no idea what 'making the cars cheap' is supposed to mean.

> If you choose to put the threshold of "subsidy received" above what Tesla received, you can claim that Tesla did not receive subsidies.

Every large industrial company receives subsidies of various kinds. This is simply the world we live in. But some how it gets brought up far more often with Tesla then with other car companies while Tesla actually received less and they absolutely for certain did not receive enough subsidies to somehow claim Tesla was bootstrapped by the state or had some sort of unfair advantage.

So its really just used to downplay what they achieved, "Oh look they had X subsidy therefore XYZ". The reality is the car and road transport are subsidized and Tesla is part of that market.

I would prefer much of that money being spent on trains but I'm not gone shit on Telsa for existing in reality.

[mrtksn]

Sure, if you forgive every wrongdoing and if you omit every action of Musk that does not fit the narrative what is left is a honest cars manufacturer that succeeded purely on its own merits.

I can't really argue against that.

[panick21_]

Receiving money from the government is not a wrong doing. Taking reservation is not a wrong doing.

Literally the only point you have is that FSD does not grantee money back and I don't actually know if that is true as I don't know the details of the sales contract.