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Alienating Tesla Buyers by the Cybertruck-Load

• indiebat 3y ago
  I see every comment is some version of “everything is caused by elon doing or not doing something”, and I wonder if people care this much about other car manufacturers and their decision makers. This is just a curious thought-out-loud, I have no stake in political dumpster fires That being said, being far out as politically as I am (for my own peace), I think it’s elon’s own doing, offering manufacturing support updates online and his car manufacturing company’s customer complaints being too online and journalists with unusually strong political beliefs covering it with new and ‘hot’ headlines day to day (like it’s news!) I wonder if someone have data of customer complaints from german and chinese car manufacturers (EV or otherwise) and why we don’t see that a lot in news (or at all, are they perpetual frictionless motion machines?!) It’s also funny people have to bring up Elon’s politics and use it as a cover to justify their own arguments of his illegitimacy and inability to lead a company he built (for most part), have these people ever looked at political affiliations of all industrialists or top executives of major companies? they generally tend to skew more conservative naturally (at least elon craps on people of all political directions he find funny at any given moment)
• deleted 3y ago
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• langsoul-com 3y ago
  I wish there was more detail on how he alienated the historical buyers. Very details light.
• deleted 3y ago
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• readyplayernull 3y ago
  No mention of the full self driving only 5 years away.
  • drcongo 3y ago
    Five dog years.
  • red-iron-pine 3y ago
    shoot in 10 years we could have fusion. self-driving fusion cars!
• AnotherGoodName 3y ago
  The newest Tesla's (eg. The 2024 model 3) don't have indicator or wiper stalks. They have two very non tactile buttons in the steering wheel to indicate. These buttons are impossible to press when you're rotating the wheel (eg. At a roundabout where you're turning but need to exit. In fact I don't think the current design should be legal given how dangerous it is. I want a new car but cutting nessesities to save a few dollars more than anything else has ruled out 2024 model Tesla's. It may be Musk's insanity that led to this but the end result is the same. The newest models of Tesla are no good.
  • webnrrd2k 3y ago
    The windshield wipers are anannoyingly bad design. If you want to alter the wiper's setting and if you don't press the little wheel-button just right or a few seconds too late then you change the radio volume or station, depending on exactly how you hit the button.
    • AnotherGoodName 3y ago
      Yeah they broke the auto wipers in a past models update when they decided cameras were enough and got rid of the $1 rain sensor. The broken auto wipers weren't a deal breaker till the recent change to remove the stalk completely though.
      • webnrrd2k 3y ago
        Yeah, it seems like a fairly small thing until you're in rain, and the wipers are going crazy over a few drops of rain, or are too slow during a heavy downpour. You're constantly interacting with this awkward setup to change the rate the wipers work at, and it's fairly easy to accidentally change the radio station or volume.
    • nsxwolf 3y ago
      Does anyone make an EV with a user interface modeled after every car I've ever actually driven? I hated driving the Model 3. It was like an iPad on wheels. Does anything out there have normal turn signals, normal windshield wipers, a dashboard that's in front of you, and doesn't slam the brakes every time you relax your foot a little bit?
• mmmwww 3y ago
  Amazing how much time people spend analyzing how Elon is screwing up and the bitter verbiage used at every turn. Just divest and be done with it.
  • macintux 3y ago
    Train wrecks invariably draw a crowd.
• throwaway984393 3y ago
  [dead]
• knicholes 3y ago
  I wonder if the author is going to bet against TSLA.
  • ahahahahah 3y ago
    There's a lot of bets against Tesla that I would gladly take. Ones based on the stock price or that need to account for the current borrow costs not so much (though the borrow costs are where they are at because so many other people are willing to take those bets against the stock price).
• yieldcrv 3y ago
  I’m a little torn on this, I don’t personally think EV car buyers care that Elon Musk has an incendiary personality. Nobody cares about his insensitive engagement farming on twitter when it comes to their EV car purchase. Even TSLA investors don’t care, culturally conservative (but we know how you party) fund managers in the middle east don’t care, very sensitive Chinese state management doesn’t care, you think American urbanites that are in the market for an EV care just because he’s being edgy? Nobody cares, he’s amusing. His expensive problems are dumb and only benefit the moneyed urbanite, that $40bn purchase of twitter was a $40bn cash infusion to all those shareholders in the bay area. He’s a demented foreigner from a messed up family that we’re all going to take advantage of by enabling him to get high on his own supply, its the American way. I think the only person he could alienate are some fanboys and fangirls. The people repping merchandise. I think EV buyers care more about variety in car models to choose from. Tesla has been making the same thing for 12 years and any wow factor is completely gone, replaced by…. everyone else, some which are joining the tesla supercharger network.
  • roorodger 3y ago
    Hey, I just bought an EV two weeks ago, and the main reason I didn't get a Tesla was Elon. So, I can't speak for other EV car buyers, but this one definitely cared about Elon's "incendiary personality" and not wanting to support him.
    • bruce511 3y ago
      Yeah, but we're outliers in the real world. I mean, you're aware of Elon and Twitter, and read tech news etc. My mom (quite literally) has never heard of him and certainly doesn't link any decisions she makes to her non-opinion of him. That said, Tesla's are an opinionated car. You either like the touchscreen interface, lack of familiar car stuff etc, or you don't. You're either prepared to pay premium prices or you aren't. Fundamentally there are a LOT more EV choices now, filling more market segments. So sure, Elon's personality absolutely plays a part. He is the "face" of the brand and that matters. Sales have definitely been lost by that. At the same time, there are many other factors coming into play. It's hard to pull just one out and blame the decine of sales on just that.
• rokkitmensch 3y ago
  Nice to see Barry on HN! Long live blogs!
• roorodger 3y ago
  I'm a only a single data point, but: I was recently in the market for a new EV, and the biggest reason that I didn't go with Tesla was Elon. Full stop.
  • mmmwww 3y ago
    and you are not the only one, i'm sure. You have a valid viewpoint. Also, not everyone makes their car/EV purchase based on who Elon is. Some might care more about the car itself and how it competes with others. Some might not even know who Elon is, or what he's done on twitter.
    • rapsey 3y ago
      > Also, not everyone makes their car/EV purchase based on who Elon is More like barely anyone in the real world does.
      • roorodger 3y ago
        The referenced Strategic Vision survey's data disagrees.
        • rapsey 3y ago
          Funny that the linked blog author whose company produces a very popular investing podcast (compound and friends) like to say only boomers answer surveys. Only just recently (last or previous episode) they found a hilariously large discrepancy between surveys and real world data. Surveys are probably the least reliable and least accurate data sources. You can't trust them to be even directionally correct.
      • drivingmenuts 3y ago
        Knowing who Elon Musk is and what he does is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, I know better than to give my money to that asshole. On the other hand, that asshole is constantly taking up space in my head. On the gripping hand, both of those standpoints are, more or less, useless.
• andrewflnr 3y ago
  > this one feels like it was so obvious to see coming by bringing together data from very disparate sources and nailed the eventual outcome Don't give yourself too much credit. You didn't really need the "very disparate data sources" to see which way the trend was going to go. Of course EV buyers were interested in climate change, and those people heavily intersect with the liberals that Musk has seemed determined to alienate alienate since at least a couple years before the Twitter purchase. Anyone could see this coming from miles away. The only question was when and how much. Right? Did we not all see this coming?
• webwielder2 3y ago
  Two things can be true simultaneously: 1. Musk committed a catastrophically huge unforced error with his right wing buffoonery. 2. Tesla was MASSIVELY overvalued and a huge drop in valuation was inevitable regardless of Tesla’s performance.
  • mmmwww 3y ago
    Exactly.
  • rapsey 3y ago
    3. Teslas are still very popular and their owners are generally happy with them. 4. The terminally online crowd that hates Elon only seem large because they are loud online.
    • text0404 3y ago
      5. tesla share price is down 41% in 2024 6. the WSJ reports that tesla sales are down among democrats, who outnumber republicans 5:2 in EV sales: https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/elon-musk-turned-democrats-off-tesla-when-he-needed-them-most-176023af https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/elon-musk-turned-democrat...
    • red-iron-pine 3y ago
      cybertruck is bombing hard and essentially any discussion about them is how crappy that turned out to be. apocalypse-proof truck that can't even handle a car wash. big buys by Hertz, et al, have also been a disaster, with the company ditching most of their EVs due to higher costs. most discussions about the other teslas have been mixed but generally positive, but that's mostly irrelevant to stock price unless they're going to buy new EVs every year; the average age of a car on the road is ~11 years. This means Tesla has now saturated it's potential market, is failing to grow it, and will likely start rent-seeking behaviors via subscription price increases to attempt make up for the losses; these will alienate a lot of current, mostly-happy users, and push others away. kia, ford, and chinese makers have good options, and they will win a lot of current and potential telsa customers. in other words, musk has saturated, then alienated, his core market, and failed to expand into new ones. to hit the real value of that stock price it's going to need to fall wayyyy more than 40%; we'll see if the market movers that hold a lot of tesla, like the saudis, will let that happen
• dashundchen 3y ago
  Musk's deranged "anti-woke" and racial obsessions[0], combined onto the huge quality problems I regularly see pop up online, plus the never ending "full self driving by the end of the year" sideshow all turned me off Tesla. A unserious CEO leading an unserious company, selling an expensive and potentially lethal machine. I don't want to drive a car whose safety features change weekly with whatever Musk tweets out. Maybe a few years back before COVID I would have been a Tesla customer. Instead I opted for an EV from a traditional manufacturer. Great quality and drive, it suits me just fine, even if the software isn't the most advanced. [0]Funny to me that the anti-woke reactionaries are way more obsessed with race and gender then almost any left wingers I have known. They build up these social media scarecrows of what is "woke" to rile themselves up.
  • rapsey 3y ago
    > combined onto the huge quality problems I regularly see pop up online Tesla problems get multiple orders of magnitude of attention than any other manufacturer. German EVs with the possible exception of BMW are highly unreliable with a lot of problems. You will not hear that from the news but you will from a VW mechanic.
• anonfordays 3y ago
  It's pretty crazy to watch companies so far ahead in their fields fumble the lead. This reminds me of Toyota fumbling the gigantic lead they had with hybrids and electric power trains.
  • red-iron-pine 3y ago
    dude just wanted to gamble the farm on hydrogen fuel cells
• hindsightbias 3y ago
  Fascinating this generation of phone swipers who cling to their wiper stalks and steering wheels. What’s “OK Boomer” for Millenials and Gen Z?
  • rsynnott 3y ago
    I mean, this seems like a fairly classic example of Chesterton’s Fence. There is a _reason_ that car interfaces have been pretty similar for a very long time. By and large, they _work_. Occasionally someone tries a change, and it works, and is widely adopted. Usually, it does not work, and is abandoned either in testing, or after failure. Peugeot used to be a particularly prolific offender here. The lesson you should take from this is _not_ “right, we should introduce lots and lots of changes at once, and not bother with the testing” (I flatly don’t believe that the indicators-as-touch-buttons-on-steering-wheel thing was tested on actual humans before being implemented; if it had been it would never have seen the light of day).
  • red-iron-pine 3y ago
    you gonna rail against how pans, or shirts, or toilets have been the same for centuries too? there is a reason things stay the same, esp. when it comes to safety-related controls.
• b7we5b7a 3y ago
  While I agree that Musk's personality is damaging Tesla a lot lately, and it lost a huge chunk of the accumulated goodwill, I still don't get how people manage their daily lives then. Shall we stop buying Nestle products? Luxottica? Oil companies? Clothing products? The list goes on. Besides that, the closing sentence and some comments regarding stalks and buttons demonstrate once again that many people have never driven a Tesla for more than a 2h rental: > Of course, there is much more competition today, and Tesla’s designs are getting old, and looking a little stale. Their huge decade-long software advantage is now probably somewhere in the 2 -4 year range. The design is minimal due to aerodynamic reasons, and competitors have essentially the same lines, with perhaps a slightly more rounded accent to it. Interiors are minimal because half the point of Tesla is save on costs on 200 buttons that you never use once. The software makes up for it 99% of the time. Similar priced cars in the same segment are still nowhere near the efficiency or software quality of Tesla. Yes, FSD is still in beta, sure, but the infotainment experience is still unmatched, and it's not a 2-4 year headstart, it's more in the 5-10 year range.
  • drcongo 3y ago
    Millions of people boycott Nestle products still, with no downside to their lives beyond missing out on Kitkats. Not driving around in an advert for a right wing nutjob isn't going to negatively impact anyone's life.