>8 million Teslas have been manufactured

If taxis get cheaper, people will use them in even more situations, like daily commutes. Why not?

Sure --- if roborides are cheap enough and safe enough, more people will use them.

The immediate question for Tesla and their investors --- can they really provide "safe" robo rides using their current approach?

This is far from being proven since Tesla is only rated as Level 2 autonomy which according to Tesla itself, requires constant supervision. Placing passengers and the public in danger with inadequate technology is a textbook legal definition of negligence.

The longer term question; assuming they solve FSD --- is can they make tons of money from cheap rides? Enough to justify their current outlandish stock price.

The US isn't like that. The people with the money for the magic taxi are in the burbs.

The fantasy that any of this nonsense is a sustainable business, especially when the charismatic leader completely FUBARed his government hobby project and is biting the hand that feeds him. Tesla's biggest source of revenue is the US government.

Which part of Tesla EV is a fantasy? The part where the volume explodes enough to justify a P/E of 170 today.

Absurdly idiotic statement. Tesla has gone from 50k cars sold in 2015 to 1.78m in 2024. Their marketcap has increased from 31b to 1.3t in the same period. That’s not even factoring the potential growth of Optimis.

I bought a model Y dual motor in 2021 is it’s been hands down my best car ever. Almost zero maintenance. Yet more proof of never take stock advice from HN, in fact do the opposite in most circumstances. Elon derangement syndrome at its finest.

The Model Y is literally the best selling car on earth across all categories and people on HN are still calling it a fantasy.

This is just driven by partisan anti-Elon sentiment.

It's morbidly fascinating to watch people distort and diminish the success of an American sustainable transportation company that changed the world for the better.

If Elon had supported Biden and Harris (despite Biden's repeated sleights against Elon's companies), we probably wouldn't see the levels of Musk Derangement Syndrome we're seeing now.

Shame it all got so political. I don't blame Musk for that - he is just a CEO who is open about his politics. I blame the Left for being completely intolerant of anyone and any company that doesn't strictly adhere to their ideology.

Whereas on the other hand I've gained handsomely from holding Tesla stock for many years, and plan to hold it for many more years.

It feels good to support American-made sustainable technology that has revolutionised the electric car and battery storage markets.

I struggle to understand those who would short-sell Tesla, unless they have some kind of emotional hangup against Elon Musk or government efficiency?

I might do the same if they weren’t a privacy nightmare. The tech company running the robotaxi service would need to buck some Silicon Valley trends before I’d use their product

Weird to see people buy inferior cars on the basis that they cannot tolerate car company CEOs having different political opinions to their own.

> If this were true, the market for EVs would decline in entirety

I was just reading a different article[1] that pointed out 4 of the top EV sellers in the US (Tesla, Ford, Kia and Hyundai) have announced Q2 drops in sales. BMW is the another top EV seller whose sales dropped in Q2[2]. Of major sellers, only GM has risen.

It's probably too early to say that "the market for EVs" is declining, but this doesn't seem great.

[1] - https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/tesla-sales-q2-2025-e2087...

[2] - https://www.theautochannel.com/news/2025/07/01/1549392-bmw-r...

> On a per mile basis it was cheap

Just to make this concrete: I keep spreadsheets for all my vehicles, and I enter every single fuel up. My family's CRV costs $0.161/mile to drive.

I bought a VW ID.4 in January, and I also track its recharges. That car costs $0.030/mile. I don't know yet about maintenance, but just for the daily driving, gas costs 5.36x that of an EV. What would be a $45 fill-up of gas is an $8.40 electric bill.

The "Hype" (not sure why we're using scare-quotes here; as if somehow EVs are the only thing that aren't subject to the Gartner Hype Cycle) surrounding EVs include some of the following:

- Range is vastly overstated, especially in adverse weather conditions (like cold, snow, or even heat) As an example, in spring, when conditions are perfect (70 degree weather, not too sunny, not too cloudy), my Tesla Model Y LR that is supposed to get 330 miles from a 100% charge gets ... 250. That's not even close to accurate. In winter or in adverse weather conditions it can drop down to as much as 180. That's close to a 50% drop.

- Taking an EV on a long trip is not a simple prospect; and even now in 2025 Tesla still hasn't made it convenient to put in a destination and get there. Somehow the tesla navigation assumes (and up until this latest software update you had to do it yourself) that somehow when you get to where you're going a charger will be within x% of you, for whatever percentage of "x" is when you arrive at your destination. Until the latest update, we had to trick the Tesla by making our destination a round trip affair, to get it to give us a super-charger that would hopefully be close to where we're going, so it wasn't a matter of getting to our destination and manually figuring out where the nearest supercharger is. (We use it for Hockey, so we are frequently driving up the East Coast from the DC Area).

- To keep on the Super Charger issues, it is common to arrive and find undocumented issues with Superchargers (their latest updates also seem to have tried to deal with that problem, though it's not 100% fixed), or entire Supercharger stations literally being out of service but not documented on their side.

- Outside of First party charging; the thirdparty charging, like through Chargepoint et. al. is even worse. As an owner of a Tesla, it's more likely that any third-party charger I try to use will have a problem where my car doesn't actually charge. It's super annoying and at a recent visit to Hershey Park PA, I didn't find out until I came back two hours later that no charging had occurred. I don't blame Tesla for this (though it'd be nice to have a push notification warning me after 5 minutes that nothing is charging), but this is a larger EV Problem. - Overall, taking an EV somewhere still means planning your trip carefully to ensure your destination has charging, how you're getting there has charging, and a back-up plan in case that charging doesn't work.

- Like recently, my spouse took our Tesla to Massuchusetts to pick up our daughter from Soccer camp; and to where we were going there was literally a route that was backed up for 4 hours, and another route that had no superchargers for about 100 miles. So we could either deal with the fact that she was in traffic for four extra hours, or we could deal with the fact that no first-party chargers were in the other route and hope the third-party chargers were up to snuff.

- Wear and tear on the car tires. I got 30,000 miles out of my tires and the tire technician said that was pretty good. They regularly deal with Teslas and other EVs that eat through tires much more quickly than the tires are rated for (and these are Tesla approved tires) due to the weight of the vehicle and the braking dynamics.

- Supply chain for repairs. There's lots of collision centers in the Washington DC area. There are lots of vehicles hanging out, waiting for parts. By far the most vehicles that stay out there the longest (both from my conversations with folks that work at the collision centers and my own eyeballs, I pass two every day) say that EVs, especially Teslas, have a much longer lead time than non-EV vehicles for parts, and that there are not as many OEMs for those parts. So that means if you get in a wreck with a Tesla, you can be waiting weeks or months when someone else might only wait a week or two for a part. As the supply chains improve for EVs that will get better, but that's still a concern for now, and a reason why you can't go "all EV" if you do any serious driving (like we do).

- Charging is not yet as easy as finding a Gas station and taking five minutes to pump gas. It's 15-30 minutes at a Supercharger depending on what you're charging to. Luckily most of the super chargers I used have good amenities close by, but some don't. Some are random mall parking lots with nothing nearby.

These are things the hype cycle doesn't tell you about and you don't realize until you've actually owned an EV and tried to make it your day-to-day vehicle. It's wonderful for short commutes to work; but there are real drawbacks, especially using it for long distance trips or trips that include winter weather.

Let me start with the App.

The Tesla App allows me to lock, unlock the car, pop and close the trunk, check the cameras, schedule it to warm itself up, input destinations, see its real-time location, and see charging issues.

The app isn't clunky to use. It's wonderful, and it's really well made.

The car's infotainment system is vertically integrated; all of the features are available in one common interface and work well with one another. The car will automatically turn down the fans when I'm on a call, as just one example.

The cameras turn on and show me the blind spots when I'm changing lanes (my only complaint there is that the side-view mirrors do not physically allow me to position them as recommended by NHTSA).

The integrated maps also include charging station availability; and the maps automatically update (I don't need to buy an SD Card from a manufacturer with the updated maps). The software team is able to push updates to my car; so if there are bugs with their bluetooth, it gets fixed without me having to go to the dealership and hoping they care enough about their technology stack to fix it.

If there are bugs, they get fixed; and since they're not dealing with different third-party modules, they own the entire stack that is in the car.

My only complaints are that I can't use Waze on my Tesla, which shows where cops are, and sometimes their navigation routes are wonky and aren't practical (like driving through the middle of DC to avoid going around the beltway), but otherwise the technical experience of owning and operating a tesla an using their infotainment system is lightyears ahead of any other car I've driven.

Contra that with the Volkswagen I just rented where its Carplay crashed and crashed the whole infotainment system; or the bug where its rearview camera stayed on until I manually closed it when I shifted into drive;

(responding to earlier version of comment referencing China).

Note that Tesla learned a lot of their vertical integration and manufacturing expertise from the Chinese. Their first factory in Fremont produced low quality product at a high price. Then they built a factory in China using a lot of local expertise which produced a much higher quality product much cheaper. Their German factory is a clone of the Chinese factory.

Reports are that Ford is in panic mode after analyzing the quality and performance of recent Chinese cars. If other companies are similar perhaps positive changes will be made in at least some of them.

To be fair, they also dismantled tons of important things with quiet constituencies that had nothing to do with Musk (USAID / PEPFAR, NIH, NEA, etc. etc.)

> gutted

FAA laid off 400 employees out of 45,000.

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration laid off 4% of their employees

CFPB was responsible for probing Tesla for any customer complaints around auto-financing loans but they had not yet ever formally fined or sued Tesla. They were closest attempt at being 'gutted' with around 90% reduction, but all layoffs were halted by a judge.

So if he did try to gut them he failed.

I'm sure Teslas automated features work well in California, where their engineers are based. They do not, however, work as well in the varying climates found on the East Coast. This is funny as a "works on my machine" approach to testing, but tragic since real lives are at stake.

Just FYI "basically requires zero intervention" is nowhere close to what's needed for self-driving.

It needs to be probably 1-2 orders of magnitude better than what the vast majority of people would actually experience as "zero interventions ever".

One intervention every 80 miles ("basically zero") is 178 interventions per year for the average American driver. Let's say conservatively that 10% of those avoids an accident, you're looking at 17 accidents caused by each driver per year, never mind the accidents they're just victim to due to misfortunate of being near someone else's 17 annual accidents.

https://www.npr.org/2022/05/20/1100356233/elon-musk-sexual-m...

> The woman says Musk asked her friend to perform sex acts in exchange for him buying her a horse. Earlier, the flight attendant had reportedly been encouraged to learn how to give massages.

> The flight attendant filed a sexual misconduct claim against Musk, and SpaceX paid her $250,000 in 2018 as part of a settlement that's bound by non-disclosure and non-disparagement clauses, Insider reported.

You can use the “internet” to search “Elon + horse” and “self serve” your curiosity.

Yeah. The fact is Tesla is a volatile stock. You can paint any picture you want if you select the right timeframe.

Assuming "the market" to act "rational" (which can be questioned to some degree in that case - there is hype and the Musk-Factor ..) the driver is that the news may still be better than the prediction: If everybody two days ago assumed a decline of sales by 30% the stocks dropped back then, then real numbers come and decline is "only" 14% they raise again as the bad news are still better than assumed.

(The 30% is just an arbitrary number)

Elon does alot of manipulation of the stock. Also, the market is kind of shell shocked and has no idea wtf to do.

you're right tho :)

How is this not amazing news?

TSLA has a 14% decline in deliveries but 19% increase in stock price. The direction of the company should be clear, decline deliveries by 100% for a sweat 2000% stock appreciation.