Generally when people are down on Tesla or Elon Musk, it's because they want them to succeed at displacing internal combustion engines.
They're not rooting for internal combustion engines, they're rooting for electric cars and annoyed when the company (or Musk) flounders from self-inflicted damage. At least, that seems like most of the criticism here. No one is going to respond well to an advocate of a technology they want to succeed saying and doing stuff that actively harms the cause (prime examples: George Hotz with autonomous vehicles, RMS with basically everything that RMS has ever advocated, or Julian Assange allowing Wikileaks to become a tool of corrupt governments rather than a force against them).
It's great to give credit where credit is due, but even more important to hold people and companies accountable when they screw up, especially people and companies that you want to succeed.
This is exactly right. I'm bearish on Tesla, and frequently criticise it.
But I only care because I was an unashamed fanboy earlier in life. Musk kept flipping the coin to bet the company, and succeeded against all odds. It was riveting to watch.
But once Tesla got large... nothing changed. He's still flipping. Model 3? Flip. Automated factory? Flip. Autonomous driving? Flip. 420? Flip. Solar City? Flip. Tesla is a single misstep away from bankruptcy, and it need not be.
I no longer see him as someone undeterred by the odds to achieve something great, but more like a narcissistic gambler. He's not taking risks to achieve a goal, the risks are the goal. His Twitter antics don't help.
The only thing that makes it ok is that competition is legitimately catching up now. Maybe not in the smart car arena, but we are seeing real electrified competition.
I don't give a fuck if people buy cars with a cute UI or not. I do care that we move to electrification. If Tesla dies, the latter will happen at a largely uninterrupted schedule with the state of the industry in 2019. I love the idea of legislation that moves that along faster. I'd happily take a tax hike to make it happen.
Tesla fans love to hate on the "shorts" as if the only possible motivation to criticize Tesla is profit based. To that strawman I've blatantly constructed I hypocritically reply: stop arguing against strawmen.
I agree with a lot of what you've said here but I don't think anyone is legitimately catching up. There are all kinds of announcements but no one else really building EVs in the US in volume:
https://insideevs.com/news/343998/monthly-plug-in-ev-sales-s...
We are getting close though but need Tesla to keep the pressure on for a couple more years.
It's going to take time for the industry to ramp up volumes, but my sense is the commitment is there now. Many EU countries are banning new ICEs in just 11 years; that's not a lot of time to make a full transition. If Tesla went bankrupt tomorrow, I don't think the overall ramp would slow down much, and it'll ultimately end with production far higher than what Tesla alone can achieve.
If Tesla (and Nissan) never existed, this entire timeline may have been offset by 5-10 years. I believe they deserve credit for lighting the fire, but by now it's self sustaining.
The big ones are doing things at a scale Tesla can only dream of. It takes a lot of time to change production lines and the big ones don’t have much incentives to switch off ICE. The governments need to help us here.
Ford sold one million F-150s last year. A F-150 every 29 seconds. That’s only one model.
Without going off on a tangent, large companies aren’t able to innovate like smaller companies can. They prefer to buy or partner with smaller company to build someone, Mazda developed the old Ford Ranger. Ford just invested $500m in Rivian.
Exactly. Making Tesla criticism about criticizing alternative energy is a false equivocation.
There are strong arguments that Tesla is being ran very poorly by Musk (solar city acq, VW cash denied, SEC fines, etc.) despite the company being one of the champions for electric vehicles.
1) Stop making ridiculous promises about self-driving capabilities.
2) Stop giving out timelines that everyone knows aren't going to be hit for every single model.
3) Get production quality under control. Seriously, a stupid percentage of Model 3s are getting handed to customers with defects that would keep them from even making it out of the factory at any other OEM.
4) Get aftermarket logistics figured out so people aren't waiting months for their cars to get repaired.
5) Stop flip-flopping on sales models. Is Tesla selling via brick and mortar stores or not? Is it using low pressure guidance-oriented sales or calling up customers with pre-orders trying to pressure them into upgrading to a more expensive configuration? Is their pricing fixed or going to drop another $1,000 next month?
6) Stop treating employees like churnable garbage. I work in the auto industry and the number of ex-Tesla employees floating around who got burned out or sick of political bullshit in record time is astounding in comparison to every other OEM.
7) Stop treating driver safety as a suggestion. I mean that in the broad sense, not in the mechanical engineering sense. Ex. autopilot should never have been released in any capacity that allowed drivers to take a nap or read a book while the car happily plowed into a semi-truck or median.
I’ve been most bothered by the exaggerated claims and projected deadlines for AP functionality and FSD. But not being able to raise money through presales, as well as banking on the premium image that leading in autonomy confers, would make Tesla even less solid of a company, at least financially.
Tesla basically creating a market for EAV is very cool, and no matter what, I think Musk deserves a place in the history books for it.
No need to give up. Just acknowledge that is a hard problem whose success date is notably indeterminate. Then stubbornly refuse to talk about future features and only talk about one's already shipping today. If the future is going to arrive so soon, why bother to break in advance? Let everyone be amazed when it does arrive.
I love the autopilot feature, but the cars are still great without it. Tesla can be very successful and sell a lot of cars without any more self driving features.
I think that's one of the main problems I have toward Musk. He started with a strong 'hard science' stance on problems and all of a sudden he became just another salesman. If he just stated where they were .. I'd be less annoyed. But maybe it doesn't mesh well with PR
EVs are a false peak. So long as everyone is driving around in their own personal automobile, we're doing nothing to address autocentic development, with all it's accompanying sprawl, concrete, ashphalt, steel, and general hi-consumption culture that goes with it.
We need an entrepreneur to do with the city what Elon did with the car. How on earth you would fund something of that scale, I’m not sure. And many country’s attempts at “cities of the future” have ended up as ghost towns. I’d love to see someone develop a new walkable, eco-friendly city from scratch somewhere in the U.S., but all odds are against that kind of thing.
I just don't get the obsession of some people with "walkable cities". What is reasonable walking time at -20 during snowstorm or at +30 at blazing sun? Multiply that with reasonable pedestrian speed and get outer diameter of the mystic "walkable city". The way I would define reasonable values that would be roughly 2-3km. That's a village, not even a town.
Within a 3 km radius you can access 28 square kilometres. Central Paris, a classic walkable city, has a density of 6,500 residents/square kilometre. That's more like a medium sized city you can have access to within 3km if you build for people instead of cars.
They're not rooting for internal combustion engines, they're rooting for electric cars and annoyed when the company (or Musk) flounders from self-inflicted damage. At least, that seems like most of the criticism here. No one is going to respond well to an advocate of a technology they want to succeed saying and doing stuff that actively harms the cause (prime examples: George Hotz with autonomous vehicles, RMS with basically everything that RMS has ever advocated, or Julian Assange allowing Wikileaks to become a tool of corrupt governments rather than a force against them).
It's great to give credit where credit is due, but even more important to hold people and companies accountable when they screw up, especially people and companies that you want to succeed.