[this_user]

They had the first mover advantage, but then Musk lost interest in the company and let it just sit there for the last five years or so without making sure that they have a future-proof product pipeline and that those products are actually being delivered on a reasonable schedule. Now they are increasingly turning into an EV also-ran while their moonshots are unlikely to work out any time soon.

Realistically, he should have put someone else in charge after the launch of the Model 3 to develop the company further, but I don't think his ego allows it.

[amelius]

The problem is that EVs are basically a solved problem. There isn't any technological advantage to be gained, since the technology in an EV is very basic (+) compared to ICE vehicles. So then it comes down to manufacturing, and there China is king.

(+) Except for the battery, but that's a very long term battle with very tiny steps.

[ultrarunner]

My brother bought a Tesla recently. They dicked him around with delivery, and he had to pay a ton to get charging infrastructure installed at his house, but it's fast so he's happy. On a recent visit, he finally showed me the car, and it was hilarious how janky the final product is. Everything seems cobbled together-- a good example is that there's apparently two separate voice assistants (plus his phone) and none of them can talk to each other, so commands like "turn on the defrost" are responded to with "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that".

Controls as simple as the door handles are unintuitive, with the handle apparently being the emergency release that doesn't lower the window (for who knows why). You have to brief your passengers on egress like it's an airplane.

EVs might be a solved problem, but Tesla is still fighting their own additional layer of complexity that they added on top. The added subscription nonsense makes him look like a fool for having bought in, something I am definitely even more reluctant to do now that I've seen it play out.

[EthanHeilman]

EVs are a solved problem, but as amelius notes the real tech is the battery. Tesla + Panasonic has a built in advantage in terms of battery manufacturing. Tesla has a massive amount of capital, if they put it into reducing and scaling manufacturing of vehicles and batteries, I think they could probably win. Now maybe Telsa has looked at the numbers and decided they can't win and are choosing to pivot rather than die a slow death.

I don't think that is what is happening here. Instead, Tesla is continuing the strategy that brought them to this disaster of going all in on driverless. That isn't a bad strategy, but if they get the timing wrong a third time, they destroy the company and they have gotten the timing wrong on this twice already. This strategy has two downsides:

1. AI has no real moat and Tesla has largely pursued commodity sensors, meaning that other than EVs+battery tech (which Tesla appears abandoning), robotaxis have no hardware or software moat.

2. They could use network effects to win, in which case their competitors are not other car companies but Uber and Lyft. Uber has been pursuing the same long term strategy at Tesla.

Now by itself, going all in robotaxi, is risky but could work if they time it right. Tesla isn't going all in on robotaxi since they are splitting the effort between robotaxi and Optimus robots.

It is likely that the experience Tesla gets with Optimus robots will help other robotics companies, but unlike robotaxis where the timing might (but probably won't work), the timing is clearly isn't right for Optimus.

It seems like the motivation here is that Musk is aligning Tesla to a narrative that justify the absurd stock price, even if that narrative isn't reality.

[wg0]

This is a very realistic analysis which isn't going to be very popular.

The battery progress is more an accidental discovery than research problem alone.

[t_tsonev]

There have been significant advances in power electronics and electric motors in the recent decades. Yes, there's not a lot to gain when you're starting at 85%+ efficiency, but it's far from "basic" technology.

[jinushaun]

You can say the same about the traditional car industry. Just because it’s a “solved problem” doesn’t mean you can ignore the TAM.

I think people are frustrated because Musk has been pretty up front that Tesla only exists to further his goals for Mars and robots. He doesn’t actually care about selling cars.

[MagicMoonlight]

Teslas don’t even have HUDs, there’s plenty of work left to do

[jjfoooo4]

I recently read Origins of Efficiency by Brian Potter, and one of the interesting things it talks about is the path of the Model T.

Ford invested heavily in an in-house, highly optimized production pathway for the Model T. Other manufacturers sourced a lot of their parts from vendors.

This gave the Model T a great advantage at first, but they had a lot more trouble than competitors in coming up with new models. Ford ended up converging with the rest of the industry in sourcing more of their parts externally.

The lack of new Tesla models makes me feel like a similar pivot is what Tesla needs. My suspicion is that they probably need a less terminally distracted Musk to pull it off.

[yardie]

One of the things Jim Farley, Ford CEO, brought up was they have a lot of 3rd party suppliers, and changes take a long time to implement. So a firmware update may require change notifications and responses from dozens of suppliers for something like door locks. This was in response to why Ford couldn't do firmware as fast or as often as Tesla. Vertically integrated means you have 1 big ship to turn around. Modern JIT manufacturing means your ship is built of 100s of cards and each one needs to be turned.

The lack of new models from updates I believe comes from the fact the CEO is busy elsewhere and the board is reluctant to address that. They have made the P/E so high that they can only continue to function in one direction, do just enough to bring in more outside investment.

[hinkley]

I think I read somewhere that the model T went something like 12 years without substantial changes to its design.

Ford wouldn’t have known about The Innovator’s Dilemma and possibly not about Sunk Cost Fallacy.

Deming had to go to Japan to get his ideas taken seriously and it nearly bankrupted American manufacturing that they wouldn’t listen to him.

[PolygonSheep]

> they had a lot more trouble than competitors in coming up with new models.

I'd read somewhere that it was mainly because Henry Ford was dogmatic that the Model T was perfect, all the car anyone would ever need forever.

[1970-01-01]

First mover advantage was GM's EV1. Tesla would not exist if GM didn't go and crush every single EV1 they could find.

[lallysingh]

The EV1 gave GM no advantage.

[hinkley]

It’s almost as if a company would be better off having a CEO who wasn’t also the CEO of four other companies while also dabbling in geopolitics.

[gizzlon]

and drugs

[TacoCommander]

The end game is the SpaceX IPO which will make him a trillionaire, and then he doesn't need Tesla any more.

[toomuchtodo]

Indeed.

SpaceX in Merger Talks with xAI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46814701 - January 2026

[rchaud]

Regular IPOs usually have commitments from pension funds, mutual funds, private equity firms and other institutional investors secured in advance of going public. How many of those parties would be interested considering that SpaceX really only has one main customer whose business isn't guaranteed considering his political partisanship?

[burningChrome]

Or the Boring Company which most people have also completely forgotten about.

[scottyah]

He barely needs Tesla now, pretty much the only thing stopping electric cars from being ubiquitous are people in politics and media. The new mission statement is just to make everything for everyone, which I guess solves the people-on-earth problems he wanted to tackle. Next is a push for Mars (which again is mostly threatened by some politicians at this point).

[habinero]

His entire wealth is basically paper anyways.

[113]

I don't think the problem was a lack of Elon Musk's involvement.

[preisschild]

> Realistically, he should have put someone else in charge after the launch of the Model 3 to develop the company further, but I don't think his ego allows it.

Well he knows more about manufacturing than anyone else alive on Earth, so he can't be replaced /s

(yes, he actually did say that)