Tesla sales dropped 60% in Germany

The problem is R&D. Tesla absolutely is not and will not compromise on all that self driving car R&D and other engineering work.

And that's expensive.

Yeah I’m aware the interest rebate is just a rebate like any other but the cost of such rebates is much higher if the baseline interest is 4% than if it’s 1%. The difference between 0% and 2% is as expensive as the subsidy between 7% and 5% but I don’t think it will sway as many customers

As I mentioned elsewhere, he is supporting certified fascists in Germany.

I get that the US has normalized Trump and the adjacent fascist symbolism to a massive extent, but to many people in Europe this does not look like a political disagreement within democratic boundaries.

Not at all, its all self-inflicted. He keeps insulting most of Europe, continuously, like a rich spoiled kid for literally no gain on his part, ego is too big to have any control over it and his mental instabilities don't help.

If you can respect such a man and even give him your money thats you, but many folks don't. Colleagues who own Tesla now regret buying it, literally putting those meme stickers 'I bought this car before elon went fascist'. Right leaning all of them.

Its not about left-leaning, no need to spin it that way, he managed to insult literally whole spectrum of people in Europe apart from neonazis. Not many of those buying teslas as one can imagine.

> adversarial nation state campaign

if there really is organized mass corruption then it could be an “ adversarial deep state campaign”. The claims of wrongdoing are so severe that they need to start providing the evidence publicly asap and file some charges.

I honestly don’t know what to think yet but I agree with you the level of vitriol and unhinged comments is at extreme levels and even here on HN. That said he is intentionally trying to mass trigger as many people as possible likely strategically for a reason we can’t see yet.

You're right about Reddit. It has become hysterical since the election. If you want an example of what left-wing conspiracy theories look like, just spend some time in the default subreddits.

That said, I doubt Musk's politics have had much of a positive or negative effect on Tesla's sales. There's been a significant increase in competition at the same time as many European countries are entering recessions. That's going to be a much bigger factor.

No it is just a (awful) trend nowadays. There are countless free Tesla stock photos: https://unsplash.com/s/photos/tesla

And ironically AI built this image based on the works of photographers that remain uncredited.

Any smart shareholder will have sold their share by now. I'd expect all remaining shareholders to have truly bought into the Elon myth.

The implicit justification for valuing Tesla now is not "we sell good cars", it is state capture.

There are no fundamentals justifying valuations of most multi-trillion dollar US companies, and yet here we are. Also, Tesla is currently the only US company that figured out how to make EVs profitably. And one of the very few in the world. All the remaining companies able to profitably make EVs are in China, which we for some reason must "contain" somehow.

They've been propped up on the whole "retail trader" "HODL" ecosystem, bolstered by the promise of FSD/Autopilot/Robotaxies making every other car company obsolete.

At some point, that facade is going to collapse. Every time I point this out, I get jumped by a bunch of Tesla fanboys, $TSLA holders and the usual associated crowd.

So, I'm going to list some major problems with Tesla, in brief summaries of no particular order

1) FSD is a half truth. I am genuinely impressed with the progress they've made and I think Tesla is one of the leaders in the field. HOWEVER: their approach to risk (laying it on the owners), their lack of robotaxi operations center, and even the hardware in the vehicles not being capable for true FSD and remote monitoring, means that all Tesla vehicles on the road today will NEVER be FSD/RoboTaxi capable without: major hardware upgrades (expensive per vehicle), substantial backend upgrades for live support (time consuming), and serious hiring of live support (they've gotten started but this will completely change the math on OpEx). [0]

2) They have huge risk around new battery technologies. This has become a global race. If someone (such as Toyota) introduces a genuine leapfrog (which they seem to be conservatively teasing in the usual Japanese way with solid state batteries), then Tesla is in some serious shit. Tesla's investing heavily in R&D, so I think they're probably not screwed on this point, but it will be a major point of contention for them in the near future.

3) Public opinion: Elon has decided to make himself the Conservative of the Year. I, personally am not a conservative, but it doesn't take a genius to realize that he's polarizing the addressable market for a mass market consumer product. This is increasingly true outside of the US.

4) Upper limits of addressable markets, pending infra: charging infra is getting better, but the simple fact is that they're reaching the point of diminishing returns. The end goal is probably something like be an L2 charger (ideally better) at every parking meter and a farm of them in every WalMart parking lot. Much progress is being made, but it will still be many years before it's where electric cars are feasible for - let's say - 80% of the US domestic market. NACS went a long way in alleviating this.

5) Competition from China: China is deeply incentivized by market forces to build electric cars (they do not have domestic oil). Their domestic market is huge and economies of scale kick in even for relatively niche products. They are already eating at the low end of the electric car market. They are also hungry and see designing beautiful and good things as a matter of national pride[1].

[0] While we're at it, Alphabet has invested heavily in companies doing 5g rollouts - which is a requirement for a RoboTaxi in my opinion. Elon seems to be short sighted in his apparent belief that 5g isn't needed, nor a vision hw update, and they can really build a 0-intervention RoboTaxi. Don't get me started on his refusal to include LIDAR. I wish him the best of luck.

[1] I have a lot of complaints about how China and Chinese industry operates, at a moral level. But one must also recognize that as they're late to the table, they are at a disadvantage and they know it. A lot of the things they do that offend and disgruntle western tech people - especially around IP - are frankly, perfectly rational (even if I personally don't like it). The DeepSeek leader Liang Wenfeng put his attitude around China's behavior in a very refreshing manor, which really humanizes a group of people that many like to denigrate:

We believe that with economic development, China must gradually transition from being a beneficiary to a contributor, rather than continuing to ride on the coattails of others. Over the past 30 years of the IT revolution, we barely participated in core tech innovation.We’ve grown accustomed to Moore’s Law “falling from the sky”—waiting 18 months for better hardware and software. Scaling Law is treated similarly. However, these advancements are the result of generations of relentless effort by Western-led technology communities. Because we haven’t been actively involved in this process, we’ve come to overlook its significance.

The issue is that Tesla actually _could_ dominate the American market and several others. They have some quality issues and a big personality issue but if they ditched those and had an iconoclast who wasn't ... an autistic Nazi... at the helm Tesla could be Apple. They have a great product that is hampered by some failures (the personality of their leader, the failure of self-driving, the sizable minority of lemons they put on the sales floor).

But like, Tesla almost has the best car available on the market anywhere. Almost.

They could wipe the floor of any of the existing incumbents. Could.

Tesla parked near me has a bumper sticker to the effect of "I bought this before Elon went crazy, sorry"

Interestingly, BYD is selling more cars in the UK than Tesla is.

It doesn't help that full EVs are still at a kind of progressive-status-symbol stage of the adoption curve - the people who buy them are exactly the same people who'll see all the Nazi crap and be put off by it.

Tesla is becoming the new Merc in the Indian community. It seems to becoming the new status symbol car. Not sure what Indians in the UK think of Musk.

As I understand it the salute was a calculated move to prevent a split of the MAGA crowd between the H1B-immigration-push top-hats and the no-immigrants-anywhere bottom-crowd. Nothing like a large gesture to distract the plebs both in and out of the echo-bubble. And the fact that there so many occurences of the number 88 in Tesla's prices, test-speeds, anywhere an arbitrary two-digit value can be inserted, well, it's plausibly deniable right?

> The former is of course a tempting viewpoint for those who have not had the same education about the holocaust that the average German receives, and looks in from the outside without understanding that it's not "guilt", or even a unique German burden that we put on ourselves.

He did raise a valid point that has been raised before, that is actually widely known, and that is specifically German, and it has little to do with "make sure fascism doesn't rise again". It's just that because he said it it is spun like crazy.

You can call it guilt, you can call it castration (and there is a bit of both), you can call it moving from one extreme to another (and I think your "we don't have a bigger duty" is somewhat illustrative), you can call it what you want, but it is true that the spectre of WWII and of the Nazi period has a huge influence to this day in Germany and not necessarily for the better (from a German POV). It shows, for example in how meek Germany is with using its military, or in their immigration policy, most 'infamously' Merkel's open door policy in 2015 (which has spectacularly backfired since), etc.

It's worth highlighting that guilt is not the same as rememberance.

Yes, clear as night and day. He would face charges in Germany and if you ask the general public in Europe they will tell you it was that.

People think it was and that's all that matters

> but was it a nazi salute?

Yes.

It was clearly something that looked a lot like a Nazi salute. And it was twice, this wasn't just an unfortunate camera angle. And Elon has been commenting (positively) on tweets by various extreme right figures for a long time now, so there is additional information here as well.

Tell you what: if it wasn't, then any sane person doing it would be mortified of the accusation that it was, and would do their utmost to emphatically ensure everyone that it wasn't.

So either it was, or Musk is simply not sane. Or both.

(It's both).

Does it matter if it was or it wasn't, specifically intended to be a NAZI salute?

He's acting like a NAZI in every relevant way except the symbolic and superficial. (Well... except for that one very public time.)

He's very aggressively and openly supporting far-right parties, including the AfD in Germany.

He's suggested to Germans to get over the shame of their past -- guess what he's referring to here!

He basically owns the US Executive branch in the same way that fascists "integrate" business and politics.

He loves to single out vulnerable minority groups for public vilification (the transgendered), including personally taking steps to materially harm them.

Him and Trump together want to control the racial makeup of the country, and have collaborated on mass arrests and deportations.

Etc...

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and salutes like a duck...

It was either a nazi salute, or a "Heil, Ceasar!" In the context of a presidential inauguration, either one is very, very bad.