There’s a Tesla plant that employed many people and they used to get a good discount. The infrastructure is also much better for owning an electric car in the bay area so people bought early when there were fewer options and less complaints.
This also makes it way more affordable as there is a really robust inventory of used Tesla cars as well so it’s more like $10k instead of $40k in many instances.
My brother in-law worked at that factory. It’s the old NUMMI plant in Fremont. Elon probably calls it gigadouche factory 69 or something now. They absolutely did not get a discount. If you bought one at full price, they did gave you FSD free in later years. He was there for like 8 years until last year.
It’s oddly common vehicle even where I live and they all look the same, just different color. At a quick glance it’s hard to even tell Model S, 3 and Y from eachother.
I just bought a used model 3 this week. I went to a supercharger station and there were 10 other teslas there and most of them were white, the rest were black, there may have been one or two gray ones there. Almost all of them were Xs or Ys. Mine is blue so I don’t feel too bad. I’ve been contemplating getting a wrap, maybe green, but it’s hard for me to justify spending that much money just to be a little different aesthetically.
I hate Elon but there’s some great engineering that went into the Teslas, except maybe the Cybertruck. There really aren’t any other electric cars that are quite as good. I like the idea of a Kia EV6 or a Hyundai Ioniq 5 and they look great, but surprisingly the EV6 didn’t have nearly as much head room as the model 3, and I’m 6’4". I look forward to the day when Tesla ditches Elon.
IMO the day Tesla ditches Elon is the day unstoppable decline starts within the company. People get complacent and stop innovating. Elon has stopped this from happening so many times now.
I don’t personally agree with everything Elon says but you can’t deny his ability to push the boundaries and get stuff done.
Steve Jobs was widely known as a huge asshole aswell but I think it’s pretty undeniable that he was also a genious. I think the same applies to Elon. He pretty much single handedly popularized electric vehicles and the innovation he’s pushing on rocket technology and satellite internet is quite amazing especially considering it’s all coming from a single man. I wish he’d get off social media and focus on what matters. I still hope that he succeeds though, because the world benefits from it.
It seems quite common that exceptional people like him more often than not come with their not so positive personality quirks and he’s no exception here.
It could be the use of single man twice in the same paragraph that is a bit irking. Obviously there are teams of people actually designing and executing what these companies deliver. There’s certainly something to what Musk decides to manage that proves successful.
Sure, but that’s true with all other successful people aswell. There’s always a team of competent professionals behind them. However I think it’s still true to say that you could pick any individual from that team and replace them with someone else with no significant change to the end product but once you remove the head figure the innovation is very likely going to stop right there.
Yeah I was having a shower after left my comment and thought, oh man, Twitter is a terrible counter example of performance. What do you think of that situation?
I don’t really have an opinion it and I haven’t been following the changes there very closely. From my personal point of view I haven’t noticed much of a change but perhaps I’m not the most typical twitter user to begin with. The niche section of it that I hang in has pretty much left unchanged.
I liked what he said of it in the beginning about how in a well-balanced social media platform the left and the right should be equally unsatisfied but that doesn’t seem to have been the case here as it seems to be almost exclusively the left that’s abandoning the platform. I’m definitely noticing a strong right-wing bias in the recommended content that occasionally finds it’s way into my non-political feed there.
I can’t deny his ability to push boundaries and get stuff done. Wouldn’t say that’s a good thing as the boundaries he pushes are more often labor laws than innovation.
The fact is that good leadership is more stable than this. What Tesla really should want is closer to the way Boeing did pre merger like 30+ years ago where they see themselves as an engineering firm with a product rather than a product company. They’ve clearly done a lot of great stuff regarding batteries and such, but they’re terrible at auto manufacturing, and they’re held both up and down by their vision of themselves as a tech company. Their fsd is cool and also going to get them in trouble with the dot and nhtsa. Move fast and break things was sketchy for Facebook and fatal for an automotive company.
People with Bay Area tech salaries could often afford $40-$60 or more for a car. Up until a few years ago, Teslas were kind of the most practical thing if you could afford an EV with good range. There were not a lot of other long range / faster charging EVs on the market.
These says I’m not seeing as many Teslas with dealer plates. There are other long range / fast charge options out there. People are often buying other stuff if they’re buying their first EV. Kias, Fords, Rivians, Polestars. Telsa isn’t the only game in town anymore.
The real trick is to look at the carpool stickers. Ours are expired but they’re still on the car; they’re the pinkish purplish ones. I see a lot of expired red ones too.
My favorite is when they put on an aero kit with canards, a bumper and a wing. Like, good job, now you’ve made it less efficient and it’s still the same car as everyone else around you.
The end of the day, they had the best range and charging specs for quite a while. The competition arguably didn’t catch up until after the Model 3 and Y had been out for a while.
It’s not unoriginality. It was a lack of good alternatives. That’s why Telsa is hurting now. The real competition finally started shipping.
Sorry, was trying to be snarky about someone laying off the entire charger division. Obviously we don’t know the financials but it really seems like throwing away one of the biggest actual differentiators, in favor of a moonshot where it’s hard to see how they’ll deliver
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