Tesla told Austin workers on its Model Y and Cybertruck lines to stay home for the week of Memorial Day, three workers told Business Insider.
The break is unusually long, the workers said. Production lines were up and running during the same period last year, they said.
The electric vehicle maker notified employees earlier this week. The workers, who are paid hourly, were told they could either take paid time off or come in for cleaning and training but would not be working on the production line.
Tesla deliveries dropped 13% year over year during the first quarter.
I’ve been arguing the Q1 result was cooked already from day 1 they came out. The actual result is probably way worse. One of the reasons is that Tesla has been producing way to many cars, and the cars on stock are overvalued to push the deficit into the future. Where they probably hope to camouflage the loss in other ways.
But competition is intensifying, and Tesla is already at a very low margin on each car sold. Increased competition is at a point where Tesla will have to sell cars at a deficit. While at the same time write off value on stock. Or alternatively lose even more marketshare.
The glory days where Tesla had the highest margin per car sold in the industry are long gone.
Yes, all that, but the effect of Elon completely alienating the people who wanted to buy Teslas can’t be understated. I don’t hate the cars at all, but my god I loathe Elon and would never give him money.
Absolutely, if Elon had been a normal CEO, Tesla would probably still be riding on the reputation they had few years ago.
What I’m saying is that it will be hard for Tesla to make a comeback, even if they somehow manage to restore the name.
They are no longer a technology leader, and they aren’t leading on value either, which makes Tesla just one among many options.
And it seems they can’t keep up with the competition anymore, now that the traditional auto makers have learned the basics of making a good EV. And China is so far ahead on batteries and Fast Charging it isn’t even funny.
Both BYD and CATL have batteries that can charge 3 times faster than the fastest Tesla!
In USA Tesla is protected by tariffs, So USA has lower competition, but in Europe and China, I don’t think Tesla has much of a future, (EU has 3 times as many BEV models to choose from than USA!) and even USA will be a a huge uphill struggle, because they have such poor brand recognition.
I don’t think Musk can turn Tesla around, the claimed options to do that are RoboTaxi, and AI and robots. But Tesla is not even close to be leading in any of those fields. So Tesla will be a company with huge R&D costs, but little money coming in. Unless Musk can keep conning new investors of course.
The little Ford EV hatchback they sell in Europe is a lot more attractive than a Tesla personally. I just wish we could get them in the US, but the CEOs have apparently decided by fiat (hah) that no small cars are desired.
The Focus is AFAIK discontinued, but maybe you mean the Puma?
The Puma Gen-E is what I was thinking of, could’ve sworn it was a 2-door though. Must’ve confused it with something else.
That’s a cool car IMO, but personally we want something with better range.
It is quite impressive in efficiency though 13.1 kWh/100 km. And it is decent for fast charging.
Why?
Every vehicle doesn’t need to do everything. Otherwise we’d all buy turbocharged Hummers with a trailer for extra fuel. It’d be nice to have some middle ground between a smartcar that confined to surface streets and something you’d take a roadtrip in. A worst-case ~150-200 mile range is enough for a boatload of people to commute 50 miles and not have to worry. If you can plug it in overnight, even on just 120v, charging speed is a negligible concern.
I think a lot of range anxiety is weird. A lot of gas cars from the 80s/90s/00s have ~300/400 mile range per tank, but that’s because you don’t want to go to a gas station every day. If you could just trickle in gas overnight they could’ve had much smaller tanks too.
Because I live in a country that gets cold in the winter, and the 200 mile range is already not enough to go to Copenhagen and home again on Autobahn.
But I absolutely get that it would be an excellent car for many people, but for us we are looking for 300 miles minimum WLTP.
We can get that at a similar price buying a used car that is 3 years old and has an 80 kW battery, that also charges 10-80 in just over 20 minutes.
You may be right, but the 1½ hour drive home already feels long, and we don’t want to add a 20 min charge stop to that.
We have an ICE car, and we have 800+ km range going 140 km/h on the Autobahn for about half the distance when visiting family almost 500 km away.
The 200 mile range would in practice ad almost an hour for recharging on such a trip, even at lower speeds. As it is we can stop once on the way home.
We only have one car, and we intend to keep it that way. If we didn’t have heavy taxes on owning a car, we could have 2, and have a smaller BEV for daily use.
Of the many cars I’ve owned throughout my life, I have never owned one that didn’t do at least 600 km on a full tank.
The 200 miles in practice is only 200 km depending on weather and speed. In cities a BEV is relatively close to the rated range in perfect summer weather. But it drops quickly in non ideal conditions. I think it depends a lot on where you live, and what you do with the car on a regular basis.
When charging is only 5 minutes it will matter less.
“You’re making that up.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Focus_Electric
But the Focus is the only hatchback I could think of.
Sorry, it was a joke from the old machinima Red vs Blue. There’s a truck called the Warthog and someone suggests it looks like a Puma. Another person says “you’re making that up”.
It’s at 1:46 https://youtu.be/Rju4RWdEyZk
That was far too old a reference to drop casually. My bad.
The warthog has a purely electric transmission, right?
Nah it’s not too old, 10 years is peanuts. It’s just not my thing.
But thanks form explaining. 👍
The brand can recover if they remove Musk but I’ll never support it cause the Nazi will still get his cake from w.e cars get sold.