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It's Still Funny That 1k People Gave Tesla $250k for a Roadster Six Years Ago
- teruakohatu 3y ago> Much the same way Starbucks isn’t really a coffee company, Tesla isn’t really a car company. > Tesla is a promise company. It makes promises to its customers, various governments, and other businesses. Those promises require up-front payment, and whether they come to fruition or not, the company keeps the money while continually blowing through deadlines. This is a silly statement to make. It produced the world’s top selling car in Q1 2023.
- jeron 3y agoThis is Jalopnik. They used to be a good website but now they’re just a silly publication that writes silly articles with silly statements
- huytersd 3y agoJust because you disagree with them doesn’t mean it’s now a “silly” website.
- lazzlazzlazz 3y agoJalopnik is a silly website, and not because the person you're replying to disagrees with them. :)
- duluca 3y agoYet it still sells vaporware. I was really excited for this company, but the self driving promises and fails, in addition to build quality issues made it a no go for me. While I buy new/unproven tech all the time, I guess I draw the line at cars.
- nxm 3y agoBuild quality issues are common with any new products (ask legacy automakers) and are really a non issues in Teslas now.
- alpaca128 3y ago> Tesla Is the Most-Recalled Car Brand—By Far—of All Cars, Trucks, and SUVs > Tesla Model Y was the highest, with 62.4 recalls projected over its 30-year lifetime > The brand with the fewest projected recalls is Mercedes-Benz, followed by Toyota and Lexus. https://www.autoweek.com/news/industry-news/a43625242/tesla-is-the-most-recalled-car-brand/ https://www.autoweek.com/news/industry-news/a43625242/tesla-...
- varjag 3y agoMy ID.4 had one recall but it's been at a shop over a dozen times now.
- renewiltord 3y agoMy Subaru has had far fewer and they're not a big deal. You just get them fixed when you take them in for scheduled service. It appears that the Tesla recalls include things like https://repairpal.com/recall/22V063000 https://repairpal.com/recall/22V063000 Those get fixed over the air. Can't say I'd care that much if I owned a Tesla. The number doesn't matter that much.
- hef19898 3y agoIt should. Cars get recalled for serious flaws. That means Tesla is shipping flawed products to paying customers that get used in the road, and then try to fix those OTA like some app on a phone. That is bad engineering, period.
- renewiltord 3y agoWell, I don't think I'd be much bothered if I'm honest. Instead of going to the mechanic's it just gets fixed while parked outside? I think I would prefer that to my Subaru.
- hsbauauvhabzb 3y agoWhat is Starbucks if not a coffee company?
- Asparagirl 3y agoArguably, Starbucks is a mid-sized bank that also sells coffee. “Here's the shocking part -- Starbucks has about $1.6 billion in outstanding gift card balances. That info comes courtesy of its annual 10-K filing with the SEC. This essentially means Starbucks is getting a $1.6 billion loan from its customers at a 0% interest rate. And it's paying that loan back in coffee, not cash. It's already a great deal for Starbucks, but it gets even better. Some customers don't end up redeeming their gift card balances, which means the coffee chain doesn't even need to pay back the full "loan" amount. For the 2022 fiscal year, Starbucks reported $196 million in breakage, meaning unused gift card balances…” https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/banks/articles/this-is-the-worst-bank-in-the-world-according-to-wall-street-expert-vivian-tu/ https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/banks/articles/this-is-the-w...
- xcdzvyn 3y agoI've heard similar things said about airlines, but I'm not convinced; this relegates every company selling something they'll exchange their products for a "bank" rather than what they obviously are - supermarkets, department stores, airlines, coffee shops, petrol stations. Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, Steam? Banks. Chipotle? Bank. Even if it technically conforms to a broad sense of the word, what's the point? I go to Starbucks to buy coffee. So it's a coffee shop.
- meheleventyone 3y agoI guess the way to look at it is does Starbucks sell coffee to make profit or does it sell coffee to get people to buy gift cards to make profit. The idea of a loss leader being part of the core visible business isn’t that strange. Even better if you can make money on both though! Hopefully there is enough nuance in the world to recognise that they are both coffee shops and a bank. In the same way Google is both a search company and ads company.
- jjulius 3y ago>This is a silly statement to make. It produced the world’s top selling car in Q1 2023. A company, on the whole, can operate as described therein while still simultaneously producing "the world's top selling [whatever]". I mean, this article basically proves that point - Tesla took up-front payments from people six years ago for a car that it still hasn't delivered, and the Model Y was the best-selling car of Q1 this year.
- teruakohatu 3y agoI am not defending Tesla making promises, but does anyone who popped down $250k on a preorder with no release date care? They probably are on a secret mail list with Musk and are enjoying the secret progress updates.
- jjulius 3y ago>I am not defending Tesla making promises... Ah, got it. Just a heads up, maybe try and refrain from quoting long sections about a company making promises and then immediately follow that section with, "This is a silly statement to make". I don't think I would've misunderstood your approach had you only quoted that first sentence about Tesla not being a car company.
- jrflowers 3y ago> They probably are on a secret mail list with Musk and are enjoying the secret progress updates. This is a good point. They probably have his phone number and call him up to chat when they can’t sleep. They probably have one long tandem bike that they ride around on together but you’ll never see the mainstream media report on that
- siddheshgunjal 3y agoBut we cannot deny the fact that, musk introduced the roadster out of desperation to get some up-front payment and save Tesla. It is possible that roadster specs were made up and now the RnD department is suffering to achieve the same, delaying the deliveries of the final product. So he basically did sell the promise but now Tesla has to deliver it as 6 years is a very long gap.
- HaZeust 3y agoThey refunded everyone who wanted one years ago...
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- hef19898 3y agoThe alternative would have been a credit line from a bank, that also needs to be reimbursed, eithbinterest! Reimbursed down payments from customers are an interest-free credit. Well played actually... And quite despicable.
- borski 3y agoNot true.
- HaZeust 3y agohttps://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-roadster-pricing-founders-edition-removed-website/amp/ https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-roadster-pricing-found... > Tesla does note that the reservation is still refundable, so if the final price is too high or it doesn't materialize, you can cancel and get your money back. If you don’t wish to trust the media, here’s the Reservation Policy itself: https://www.tesla.com/sites/all/modules/custom/tesla_smartling/smartling/api-translations/documents/reservation-agreement/en-US/TeslaRoadsterReservationAgreement.pdf https://www.tesla.com/sites/all/modules/custom/tesla_smartli...
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- hirako2000 3y agoStarbucks too. the world's stop selling coffee chain. Was wondering whether Tesla did deliver these sales, and for that quarter they did: 466,140 units. Like for Starbucks, goods are there.
- tanepiper 3y agoMight be the worlds top selling car, doesn't make the people that buy them any less worse drivers
- throwaway2037 3y agoWoah, I cannot believe it. You are right. You can Google for: <<Tesla Model Y was the world's best-selling car in Q1 2023>> https://uk.motor1.com/news/669260/tesla-model-y-best-selling-car-q1-2023/ https://uk.motor1.com/news/669260/tesla-model-y-best-selling...
- borski 3y agoBeing a "company that builds cars" and being a "car company" are different things. Tesla is a sales and R&D company, which happens to occasionally produce cars worth buying.
- hef19898 3y agoAnd other car makers don't have sales nor R&D? Tesla is a car maker, not a tech company regardless of how hard want to spin it otherwise.
- janalsncm 3y agoReading the linked article about the 5,300 lb Lucid, it’s pretty bananas that a car which weighs 1000 lb more than a Mustang (just for reference because it’s a recognizable muscle car) can do a sub 2 second 0-60. https://jalopnik.com/the-1-234-hp-lucid-air-sapphire-almost-made-me-barf-it-1850956542 https://jalopnik.com/the-1-234-hp-lucid-air-sapphire-almost-...
- serf 3y agoelectric vehicles are interesting in that regard because of the radically different power-band and torque numbers compared to ICEs. if the majority of your time is spent spinning rubber fruitlessly at launch then you can begin to lessen the problem by adding weight to increase mechanical friction. electric vehicles are torquey, so their weight profiles vs. their 0-60s is a lot different than you'd expect from an ICE.
- borski 3y agoNot only that, but they can enforce nearly 50-50 weight distribution (the Lucid Air is something like 49.5/50.5) and the torque doesn't all come from a single spot in the car, then having to be distributed. With the Lucid, each axle gets a motor, and the back axle gets two, so you can distribute the torque at will, limited only by how much power the battery can output, since the motors can do more than the battery will let them. You also get things like torque vectoring on the rear wheels, so you can send that thing into turns at high speeds like nobody's business without a squeal to be heard. It's honestly pretty wild.
- karamanolev 3y ago> if the majority of your time is spent spinning rubber fruitlessly at launch then you can begin to lessen the problem by adding weight to increase mechanical friction. It doesn't really work like that. Say you double the weight, but keep the coefficient of friction - you also double the force. But the now-doubled force has to accelerate double the weight, so the acceleration remains absolutely identical. That's a small simplification, because on snow, gravel, mud and other loose surfaces you have a more complicated relationship, but on asphalt it holds more or less exactly. The reason EVs accelerate better is usually because of instant, better-controlled and gapless application of torque and power - no shifts, no delays, no turbo lag, etc.
- up2isomorphism 3y agoThis is just a fake till make it thing. It is too often now and people forget it’s name.
- rickdeckard 3y agoIsn't "fake it till you make it" about presenting self-confidence in achieving something despite not (yet) having the skills to do so? What Tesla did was starting a presale on a product they probably had no intention or resources to actually build, in order to get a cash-injection to continue working on Model3 ramp-up... I'd argue even the cybertruck wasn't seeing much of development work beyond that presentation during that period, considering that the self-praised exoskeletton chassis of it actually turned out to be impractical and was dropped entirely.
- karamanolev 3y agoWasn't it the case that the exoskeleton design was drop in favor of the (industry standard) unibody?
- rickdeckard 3y agoYes, you're right, I mixed up the terms. Corrected my post there, thanks!
- jauntywundrkind 3y agoWhat's so pernicious though is the fail it till you make it. This absurdly performant roadster 2 isn't going to happen, ever. Tesla semi seems unlikely to be real. Cybertruck seems dubious. There's no skunkworks team of engineers that can go wild & make dreams fantastic dreams real here. But just riding the grift, riding the promises along, that's been ok. There's been no checks. The lies enabled survival amid the darkest times, actually: the fantastic lies are the only thing that counted, for a while. You say "it is too often now" but actually it feels like the opposite. There isn't anyone left swinging for big, as far as I can tell. Everyone is receeding. No one is making new big claims. I don't like the lies, but I think we are better as a species holding ourselves in some heat of competition, to be good, to try hard, and it feels like we're in a diminishing expectations world, and that... that is shit. That is the failure mode, where the broadband efforts of trying all cojointly give up. I don't like it.
- slowhadoken 3y agoThat's the nature early adopting. I've always paid more to support products I believe in even though the first iteration isn't as great others down the road. I like the first dumpy PS3. I like development.
- sureglymop 3y agoI've done the same. However, in this case there is no adopting going on at all... I never preorder things.
- slowhadoken 3y agoI rarely preorder stuff but when I do I do so cautiously.
- borski 3y agoNo; early adopters need a product to adopt. This is grift.
- slowhadoken 3y agoTesla sells cars, consumers buy them. Seems straightforward. This link on the other hand is 90% ads.
- dkrich 3y agoThis works in a zirp environment after the Steve Jobs era where a single company released one success after the other. People believe anything and have personal interest in pumping claims they know to be at best exaggerated, at worst outright fraudulent. The problem for Tesla, though, is that we aren’t in a zirp environment anymore so money will become harder and harder to come by and they have exhausted the early adopters. They are already suffering deflation in their prices, having to cut prices to stimulate demand which still seems to result in lackluster numbers relative to valuation. I don’t see how this company is going to sustain its valuation given the basic fundamentals at play. BTW, it’s important to understand that Elon is incredibly focused on the share price and his genius perception. This was made evident in 2022 when he split the stock in an attempt to create incremental buyers during a very tumultuous time, but he was careful to do a 3 for 1 split so that the stock price would still be three digits (it was around $900 at the time) so that the perceived value wouldn’t be diminished. He’s also made reference to the share price and worked frantically on Twitter to try and pump the share price and hurt short sellers on many occasions. CEOs who are overly concerned with share price fluctuations are always a red flag for me and in Elon’s case it is abundantly clear he needs to keep the savior image going. I would not be at all surprised if the timing of the CT delivery event came about due to nervousness over the slumping share price.
- DavidPiper 3y agozirp = Zero Interest-Rate Policy
- tehbeard 3y agoThank you.
- ArtTimeInvestor 3y agoRobotaxis. Car rides are a big market. There are 2 billion cars on the road. If 10% of car rides are done in a robotaxi, that is over 200 million rides a day, over 70 billion rides a year. Sell a ride for $10 and that's a 700 billion dollar market. Capture 10% of that and you make $70B a year. One taxi can do over 100 rides a month. That is $1000 in revenue. Operating cost should be less than half of that. So you have 50% margin: $35B profit per year. At a p/e of 30, that is over $1T market cap. Teslas current market cap is $700B.
- Roark66 3y agoThings like this make one think. Perhaps bullshitting on a cosmological scale is an extremely valuable skill for a modern CEO of a billion dollar plus tech company? Think about it. From the point of view of someone responsible for a huge company that may well go under due to bad cash flow. Is it better to bamboozle a thousand rich people into lending you a chunk of spare change for a couple of years, or risk going under with a company that employs thousands of people and affects hundreds of thousands indirectly in its supply chain. Considering it like that one can feel almost sorry for Elon forced into the role of a bullshitter by his enormous responsibility...
- vasco 3y agoI did not expect to read a treaty on why society has forced Elon into being a bullshitter that we should feel sorry for today. Thanks for the laugh.
- barrysteve 3y agoOr you could ask rich people and get willing contributions. There is an amazingly deep irony that someone who was supposed to be building fully automated gigafactories, is being apologized for lying for funds and failing to deliver tech.
- h0l0cube 3y agoThe sort of person who can drop a quarter million on vaporware probably wouldn’t miss that money anyway
- kaptainscarlet 3y agoYou'd be surprised how silly people can be with the little money they have.
- h0l0cube 3y agoSomeone losing their savings on a Roadster would be newsworthy enough that Tesla would just refund them rather than take the bad PR
- decafninja 3y agoThings like this, the Cybertruck, etc. could have been delivered years ago if it weren’t for Elon’s weird obsessions and distractions.
- tempestn 3y agoThat assumes that if Elon were less distracted, i.e. more focused on Tesla, it would improve the performance of the company. The opposite could be true.
- cbsmith 3y ago...and, you know, a global pandemic.
- iancmceachern 3y agoAren't these and the cybertruck, etc. The distraction?
- dr_dshiv 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Roadster_(second_generation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Roadster_(second_generat... Wikipedia has sources and more details, in case you are interested. I haven’t found any evidence of people paying for it, though
- jillesvangurp 3y agoVery insightful indeed. It suggests this article is not factual. Not the first anti Tesla article from that website featured on HN. Light on facts and evidence usually. And in this case spreading (deliberate?) lies. "Test rides were given at the event for those who immediately paid the first $5,000 of a $50,000 deposit to pre-order the vehicle" A bit less dramatic than Tesla getting a quarter million for nothing, which the article is leading with. Presumably, the kind of people that have 250K would also be able to hire some expensive lawyers to get it back in case of a failure to receive a car. I don't think that happened. The narrative that Tesla survived near bankruptcy by ripping off wannabe roadster customers seems like it is a complete and utter fabrication. Those 5k deposits are still interesting of course but I doubt that made a lot of difference for Tesla. Assuming the number of 1000 people is actually correct of course. Which given the rest of the article is not a safe assumption. That's a lot of test rides. Just saying. The roadster would have launched in 2020, which as some people may have forgotten was the first covid year that created a few logistical challenges for lots of companies; Tesla included. Then we got the Ukraine crisis, chip shortages, etc. So, yes they are 3 years late, not 6, delivering what was always going to be a bit of a niche car. And there seem to be some valid reasons as to why that might be. Also, people took test rides so the car was real enough for that. Tesla actually managed to keep on growing marketshare in the past three years throughout these events. So they aren't doing that poorly.
- 93po 3y agoFake, made up hit pieces against Elon and his companies? Definitely never seen on HN before They do it because it works. Everyone in the comments here accepts it at face value and dogpiles
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- alfor 3y ago[flagged]
- euazOn 3y agoYou may want to rethink your comment.
- alfor 3y agoright, I forgot the only high speed low latency internet by satellite and soon for cellular too.
- alfor 3y agoSaid another way the risk/reward of Musk is out the ordinary. We are too afraid and slow, he is pushing forward faster (and breaking things too) I still can't believe were we are with NASA in 2023 having gone to the moon in 1969 with tech soo far away from what we have now. Without people pushing things we are falling backward in almost all areas beside informatics.
- _ink_ 3y ago> "freeing the west from fascism." What?
- alfor 3y agoread the Twitter files. Basicaly the government is embedded in all big tech and media and control the narative. What stories are told what is suppressed, who get elected, etc. Exposing it is bringing a lot of heat toward Musk
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Kbelicius 3y agoTwitter files were hand picked by Musk and shared with select reporters to share on twitter, often without any context. They were an attempt from Musk to control the narrative and did not reveal anything new.
- jerglingu 3y agoThe degree of singular outrage this guy produces is something else. It's like a switch flips in peoples' brains and they go through a two-minutes (or maybe two hours in this article's case) hate session when they comment about him. Who else has gone from such adoration from the general internet to such revulsion?
- openopenopen 3y agoMany people looked up to him, until they realized that they were being tricked with empty promises. The reaction of realizing that you have been lied to is quite strong and lasting.
- draw_down 3y ago[dead]
- jwestbury 3y agoIt's a name not everyone will remember, but Musk is not unlike Peter Molyneux in some senses. The reason Musk has generated so much hate, though, is that he's become quite powerful, with an outsized impact on western society, and many see him as especially dangerous as a result.
- fx1994 3y agoHeh, Rimac sold robo taxi to Croatians, we paid and got nothing. I'm 100% sure whole electric car scheme is a scam. It's just a current thing that will go away in 50 years or so.
- bigtones 3y agoIf you invested that $250k in Tesla shares rather than a Tesla Roadster deposit it would be worth more than $4,000,000 now.
- openopenopen 3y agoOr if you invested $1k in Tesla shares, it would be worth more than $16k now. I can see why tesla fanboys/shareholders are so protective about the Tesla's image..
- tempestn 3y agoIf you'd invested the 250k and then held through all the various strata of insane valuations between then and now, yes. I never regret not buying these stocks because I know I would've sold 100 times over.
- rightbyte 3y agoThat is my cope for bitcoins too. There is no way I would have hold on to the shares either.
- GaryNumanVevo 3y agoIt's kind of ironic that my $TSLA winnings went directly into getting my new Porsche 911 track upgrades
- sinuhe69 3y agoSorry for my ignorance but I’ve never been interested in car. I wondered why they said Tesla has not delivered the roadster. Is can not be so hard to produce a roadster (if you have already produced other cars), isn’t it? So what is the problem? They don’t see the market for it?
- wlonkly 3y agoThe main claim, as I understand it, is that they are not capable of hitting the promised performance numbers.
- INTPenis 3y agoI wonder how many of those 1000 people used a large chunk of their life savings. Or went into debt. I mean 250k dollars is a lot more than I have saved up. I couldn't imagine paying that much for a vehicle pre-order. Are all 1000 of them very rich bay area millionaires?
- tempestn 3y agoI would certainly guess most are fairly rich. I wouldn't be surprised if there were one or two serious fans in there that stretched for it though.
- 6510 3y agoIt only seems like a long time because we are a single planet civilization.
- iancmceachern 3y agoI could have designed and built my own in this time