Tesla reports 14% decline in deliveries, marking second year-over-year drop

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.

It seems you are not up to date on Bangalore (India). The unit economy of taxis has gotten out of hand. People now prefer bike taxis. Those were banned recently and reportedly that is causing even the Auto Rickshaw costs to spiral.

> If taxis get cheaper, people will use them in even more situations, like daily commutes.

This seems straight out of the Uber pitch from its early days. "Our total addressable market is the entire auto industry because people will prefer taxis over driving themselves". And a decade later where are we? Most ridesharing apps are shrinking day by day.

The unit cost of a taxi isn't sustainable in a long term. People might want to pay for someone to drive them around but that is an expensive proposition.

Robo taxis now seem to be selling the same dream. Cut out the driver and that will make rides cheaper. But deploying taxi is going to be a huge expenditure. This might be doable with VC money upfront and even cheap just like the early days of Uber. But in the long run same thing is going to happen. Once all competition is gone robotaxis are not going to be any cheaper. It will be back to square one.

> If taxis get cheaper, people will use them in even more situations, like daily commutes.

That was my life in Beijing until I moved back to the states 8+ years ago. Forget about even buying a car, where would you park it? The subway was an option, especially after line 10 opened which was basically one line to work but...it was always really crowded and I didn't like standing for an hour (loop lines aren't very direct).

But there were too many cars, to make it work I had to shift my working hours, so I would leave super early (~6 AM) and come home around 3PM. It definitely didn't feel sustainable but it worked out (now I WFH...and in LA I lived right next to my lab...so I still avoid driving).

The business of robotaxis is equivalent to the business of cheap taxis, and we know cheap taxi services are not trillion dollar companies.

> Bangalore > Uber because the traffic is insane

Robotaxis can't deal with insane traffic, and would be disadvantaged when aggressive drivers learn how to trick robotaxis to give way submissively.

Some countries have highly developed road systems that are more predictable, and where drivers are more likely to cooperate rather than aggressively defect.

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

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.

>8 million Teslas have been manufactured

The fantasy was that Tesla would somehow become the only electric car maker, or indeed the only car maker. This was obviously stupid, but it was the only way that the valuation would make any sort of sense.

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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?

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The robotaxi sales pitch is an inherent contradiction --- robo rides will be safe, readily available, cheap --- and wildly profitable.

Maybe pick one or two of these at best but all of the above is highly unlikely.

What makes this unlikely is simple marketplace competition. Just as unlikely as Tesla conquering the auto manufacturing market.

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

You're skimming over the fact that the car is doing 99.999% of everything

Can we please stop calling it "robotaxi"?

Talk to Elon. He has "Robotaxi" painted on the side of his vehicles.

He forgot to mention one small little detail --- owners would have to ride along to supervise their "autonomous" vehicle. Otherwise, they will be sued for negligence when (not if) the "Full Self Driving" screws up.

> 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...

> Up until 2021, everybody buying an EV expected to be underwater

Not if they believed the CEO of Tesla, he was out there telling them they would be buying an appreciating asset. And now, that might sound dumb (and in hindsight very clearly is), but there were a lot of people who did believe.

> 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.

The cybertruck is the full vehicle version of the mistake Musk made by pushing for the falcon-wing doors on Model X. He said that was a huge mistake, and nothing like that would ever happen again.

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.

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.

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

Well the problem there is that you don’t know which companies will pay better than bonds and which ones won’t.

Haven’t run the numbers, but I assume that you could take the S&P 500 over whatever timeframe you want, remove all the stocks that didn’t outperform bonds, and be left with a basket of stocks that wildly outperforms the actual S&P 500.

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 :)