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As much as many of us would like to attribute this to Elon's recent arc of desperately seeking approval from the Gamergate crowd hurting the Tesla brand (which

by jmyeet 4y ago

As much as many of us would like to attribute this to Elon's recent arc of desperately seeking approval from the Gamergate crowd hurting the Tesla brand (which it does), this is really just the used car market returning to Earth. Like many things, car demand fell off a cliff in 2020 and then roared back to life in 2022. There was lots of shuttered capacity and it takes time to ramp that up. Since most cars are produced overseas, this was doubly hurt by sea freight demand also going through the roof. Of course this increased demand for used cars. 6-12 months ago you'd see story after story of 2 year old cars having trade in values of basically the new sticker price. That was never going to last. Either the new prices were going to go up (which some did) or used prices were going to crash. New car production finally caught up and used car prices have started to crash. There's a lot of speculation that this is going to cause a lot of issues with underwater auto loan debt. We will see. Tesla has the additional issue that more and more EV options are becoming available. So I really don't think this has much to do with Musk at all.

cma 4y ago
Tesla/Musk held a presentation in 2019 (Autonomy Investor Day) where he said you would be crazy not to buy their cars, they will be the first appreciating assets and likely go up over $200K due to their robo taxi network going online across the nation in 2020. He said they would handle all human drivable conditions by then and that they just needed winter 2019 to finalize ice and snow autonomy. They did turn out to appreciate, but so did the whole used car market, for very different reasons.
eightysixfour 4y ago
Not only this, but gas prices are back down too. If you chart the sale of hybrids and such with gas prices, demand tracks pretty closely. Car market coming down from the stratosphere, impending tax credits, and reduced gas prices are a perfect storm for Tesla prices to fall like a rock. They have a high unit margin and room to bring prices down, but there is substantial danger as others pick up the competition. Rumors of a Model 3 refresh soon are also floating, which may give the informed buyer some pause.

by jmyeet 4y ago

cma 4y ago

Tesla/Musk held a presentation in 2019 (Autonomy Investor Day) where he said you would be crazy not to buy their cars, they will be the first appreciating assets and likely go up over $200K due to their robo taxi network going online across the nation in 2020. He said they would handle all human drivable conditions by then and that they just needed winter 2019 to finalize ice and snow autonomy. They did turn out to appreciate, but so did the whole used car market, for very different reasons.

eightysixfour 4y ago

Not only this, but gas prices are back down too. If you chart the sale of hybrids and such with gas prices, demand tracks pretty closely. Car market coming down from the stratosphere, impending tax credits, and reduced gas prices are a perfect storm for Tesla prices to fall like a rock. They have a high unit margin and room to bring prices down, but there is substantial danger as others pick up the competition. Rumors of a Model 3 refresh soon are also floating, which may give the informed buyer some pause.