Tesla slashes vehicle and self-driving-ish software prices as shares plummet After a week beset by disaster after disaster, Tesla has decided to reassure investors that it's still a safe bet … by discounting prices around the world. Prices began falling on Friday, when Elon Musk's electric car operation slashed $2,000 off the price of Models Y, X, and S while leaving the sticker prices unchanged on …
Tesla will eventually be absorbed into one of the big global car collectives like Stellantis, VW Group or Renault-Nissan Alliance … or die and be asset stripped.
Most manufacturers have pretty much caught up/overtaken - esp. BMW in 2024 and others with almost affordable Model 2 beating vehicles are either here or on their way - like the Peugeot e208/eCorsa, eKona/eNiro, MG4 or coming soon VW ID2 (aka eUp).
Tesla missed the scale up/out gap about 5 years ago and instead of productionising - at scale perhaps with a partner like Toyota - the Model 2, they wasted huge amounts of resource on the stupid CyberTruck..
I've owned two Teslas. When I was waiting for the second I tried FSD on my model 3 for a month. After a few days I called Tesla to remove the option for my Model X. At the time, I was locked in for $8,000. It wasn't worth $8k then, and it still isn't now.
Tesla still haven't figured out how to make rubber trim stay on the car, or front axles that don't vibrate until they eventually snap and fail. Why anyone would believe they're close to solving FSD is a mystery to this Tesla owner.
"Tesla still haven't figured out how to make rubber trim stay on the car, or front axles that don't vibrate until they eventually snap and fail. Why anyone would believe they're close to solving FSD is a mystery to this Tesla owner."
And yet, you bought a second one! Did the first not suffer those issues or did you not have it long enough for them to manifest?
I still can't believe people are willing to pay $8,000 pa for access to 'full self drive' which neither full or self driving. Its a level 2 driver aid that still requires you to be in control of the car at all times.
So calling their tech 'Autopilot' and 'full self drive' are misleading at best and dangerous at worst. As no matter how many warnings you tell some people they are just going to assume 'full self drive' means exactly that and expect their car to be able to drive itself under all circumstances.
Considering level 5 fully autonomous driving has been promised as coming since 2019 and has yet to materialize (the new date is August now with Elons robo taxi apparently) Tesla keep kicking the can down the road yet still charging its customers a subscription for what amounts to a fancy cruise control and auto parking feature.
Personally i don't see even with the advances in AI we have had recently, that current on the market Tesla's are ever going to achieve level 5 autonomous driving via a software update like what Tesla has been promising.
Circa 2008 I bought a used Toyota Corolla for $800 and had it for, I think, three years before selling it to the neighbor because of an electrical problem I didn't have time to diagnose. (Turned out to be a simple fix, once he tracked it down.) I replaced the clutch slave cylinder on it because having a momentary clutch, rather than one that actually stays engaged as long as the pedal is down, was a bit of a pain at stoplights and such. I think that and an oil change were the only maintenance I did to it.
Not adjusted for inflation, of course, but I'd call that a couple of orders of magnitude more value for cost than Tesla's so-called "self driving". Though I hate driver aids so my opinion of the latter will be low in any case.
And to rub salt in musks wounds, Mercedes comes along and starts shipping level 3 autonomous vehicles before tesla even has level 2 worked out.
I don't understand the fools that thought Tesla was worth more than the 10 biggest automakers combined. Their designs are crap, their manufacturing is crap, their software is crap, so where is the value?
I don't understand the fools that thought Tesla was worth more than the 10 biggest automakers combined.
I'm not sure if anyone really did, just like they didn't believe AOL was really worth more than Time Warner. But that's not how capital markets really work. Tesla initially had an advantage by being first mover in a new market and with fairly impressive numbers. But the real reason for the high valuation was the financial engineering Musk employed to juice returns: the company never made much money on the cars but it did on the CO2 certificates they were eligible. With the higher valuation, Musk was then able to get better funding terms, which allowed him to do more deals such as Solar City. Huge balance sheet but very low debt and nearly positive cashflow, what's not to like when Treasuries have zero or negative yields? Small investors pile in buying small quantities of shares, driving the valuation even higher. I've lost count of how often we've seen Silicon Valley and the banks dupe retail investors like that. Suddenly, it seems everyone has a got a turkey.
Then inflation appears, as if by magic, along with competition and Musk offers Tesla shares as collateral in the Twitter deal. But, hey, everything he touches turns to gold, right? The competition appears and governments start winding down ruinous subsidies, and the valuation starts going backwards.
Even then, if I was getting into a price war, I wouldn't go with 4 or 5 % discounts. But, hey I'm not a dope-smoking sociopath! And shareholders will probably still award him the stock options.
"so where is the value?"
Faded and almost gone. To give Tesla their due, they did bring EVs into the public consciousness and scared the incumbents into rapidly accelerating their plans. Without Tesla, I wonder where the EV market would be today? Probably years behind the current position. But Tesla have screwed up badly, what with starting out buying up a minnow and not having real car manufacturing experience so their expensive cars were plagued with issues and they never really got past that while the incumbents, with generational and institutional experience in the market adapted and are now eating Teslas lunch.
Yes, credit should be given where it's due and Tesla pretty much created the EV market by showing that electic cars could look as "good" as normal cars and not the seemingly endless line of dorky concept cars that had been the market until then. And Musk should also be given credit for taking the risk on something other than a "platform" (Uber, et al.), and one that required real capital investment, rather than just paying for customers. But the rest, especially bypassing the banks to get money from the capital markets, is straight out of modern MBA manuals. We'll see how well that works when it comes to refunding their debts with interest rates no longer zero and stock prices at all time highs, thus suppressing the potential for gains in any putative stock for cash deals.
It can't be true, Musk's and Tesla's ethics are beyond reproach:
NHTSA Finds Teslas Deactivated Autopilot Seconds Before Crashes
I hate "adaptive" cruise control. The whole point of cruise control is that I want my vehicle to go the speed I set. Then I'm going a consistent speed, I don't have to watch the speedometer, I can easily estimate my time to the end of this leg of the journey, other drivers can predict what my vehicle will do, and so on. Idiotic ACC suddenly slowing the car down dramatically because an idiot cut into the lane only one car length ahead of me makes it useless, and with ACC I have to keep checking the speedometer if there's a vehicle in sight in front, since you never know when you'll come up behind someone going a bit slower.
The ACC on my wife's car will even apply the brakes when going down a long hill. Car, if I want the brakes, I'll step on the pedal. It's just a horrible piece of technology.
Musk said the price of FSD would "only go up" in the future as it would sometime enable yearly revenue of $100K from having your car act as an autonomous taxi instead of sitting in your garage!
It did go up from up $12K to $15K since then, but dropping the price doesn't make it seem like it is going to be generating a yearly income of $100K for Tesla owners anytime soon. I look forward to all the interesting confabulations Musk will come up with for the analyst call when they announce earnings, or lack of. I'm sure El Reg will run all the most outrageous ones in a story so I won't have to go looking for them.
But it’s another feature they can brag about.
It’s like buying a razor because one of the features are that it can be used on a boat(*) but actually owning a boat or intending to, but just in case…
(*) I have no real idea what was in the box, I presume it was a 12v DC charging adaptor.
Yeah, and, sure, affluent Tesla owners for sure would let random strangers use their autonomous car...
If I could buy an autonomous car that could generate $100K in revenue a year bopping around as a driverless taxi I'd buy a dozen to drive for me, making a deal with some auto detailing place to have the cars stop by as needed to have vomit cleaned off the seats or whatever. In theory, of course. In reality if one could earn a lot of money doing that enough others would get in on it that it would drive the profit way down, but even if I only made the $100K the first year I'd still come out ahead.
And you don't have to be that 'affluent' to buy a Tesla model 3. There are always people who struggle to make ends meet and do side jobs, like driving an Uber or delivering food or whatever. Being able to sit at home with your feet up while your car earned money would making spending more for an autonomous car attractive for them, even at the risk of the car coming home covered in vomit once in a while. After all that can happen if you're driving the car too, and your own physical safety is also at risk. A woman might rather have her car drive itself and risk damage than drive strangers around at night herself and risk assault or worse.
Tesla's can plummet... off a cliff. About a half hour or so south of where I live there's a bunch of mountains with winding roads. Every weekend people with their sports cars are out their driving up and down them, and every weekend the cops are hauling up what's left of some poor bastard and their car after they didn't make the turn sending them over a couple hundred foot sheer drop.
There’s reports that Porsche has made too many Taycans and can’t shift them. Rumours are that you can pick up a new one for a massive discount, so the residual value for existing owners has dropped to, well, nil. Battery worries seem to be the issue, no one wants a second hand one. If this is a pattern across the whole industry, then there’s going to be a lot of people who have lost a lot of money…
I know several people who have bought Nissan Leafs second hand. Seems to be on a basis of the car being cheap enough that, if you get 2 years motoring, it’s worth it (or at least not ruinous). The seller didn’t pay that much for it in the first place, so it’s a doable deal from their point of view too.
This might be where the elec car market can work, at the bottom end. That perhaps fits the billing, a small cheap car with a small cheap range for a modest price with low economic risk to any of the owners used for the small cheap journeys that make up the majority of the journeys driven. That people might have something else for the rarer long distance family trips is less important.
For me for example, if I bought a second hand car for £7k that cost next to nothing to charge and it lasted 2 years before the battery was completely zonked, I’m well ahead of the game and could afford to scrap it when it’s useless. But I’d not be wanting to spend £40k on a car that’s also going to be worth nothing in 2 years’ time. It doesn’t matter if that’s got 200 miles range because I don’t need that on a daily basis, and it’s not enough for when I do do long distances.
Though if we all followed this bangernomics model of electric car ownership, we’d be doubling the number of vehicles in ownership.
The other weird aspect is that I can see that the replacement price for a short range battery in a small car could be a lot lower than a high priced leading edge high capacity car.
I'm glad that I get an EV as a company car. The value loss thus isn't my problem, nor is the far higher price paid for electricity when on the move - I objected to the damn thing, but taxation forces this.
Thank God it's at least something with a decent dealership, and not made by Tesla.
That said, I was once trained to first define a problem and THEN look for a solution. Immediately going electric feels suspiciously like there's another agenda in play behind the scenes.
"That said, I was once trained to first define a problem and THEN look for a solution. Immediately going electric feels suspiciously like there's another agenda in play behind the scenes."
The problem is well enough defined. Implementing various parts of the solution such as providing an adequate charging network is the tough bit. No, a couple of charging points per motorway service station is not adequate.
Yup. Let's start with the power network that has to get all that power to the right place.
I know that in the Netherlands companies can't get a new connection because the power network is saturated and it takes years to get a few extra lines drawn. If we can't even get the industrial side scaled up, what hope is there for the domestic side?
People used to carry spare petrol cans in their car for long trips. Is there space in the back of Tesla for a spare battery?
No. The power to weight ratio of petrol is high enough to make it a viable solution for personal mobility. We're really not there yet for electricity.
Gasoline 46 MJ/kg
Tesla battery 269 Wh/kg = 0.97 MJ/kg
Indeed.
I used to think that's it's not the global emergency that St. Greta was telling us all, and we could gradually transition over a few decades.
After watching "Climate: The Movie" (and reading a whole bunch of other stuff) I'm starting to think that the whole thing is a giant scam. Or at least massively exaggerated.
Watch it while it's still available, as it has several very intelligent people (Nobel prize winners) telling us not to panic.
Anonymous because the Overton window hasn't yet shifted on this one enough, but I think in a couple of years this will be the mainstream view.
Buying a second hand EV for £7k and scrapping it after two years may well work for you, but until just one of the EV manufacturers comes up with a clearly defined answer as to how to replace the end-of-life batteries in any of their EV's which doesn't involve the me as the customer being multi thousands of £'s out of pocket in the process then an EV as a mode of transport will never be an option for me.
This is the fucking huge elephant in the room for EV's but no one seems to want to acknowledge that it's even there.
There’s reports that Porsche has made too many Taycans and can’t shift them. Rumours are that you can pick up a new one for a massive discount, so the residual value for existing owners has dropped to, well, nil
So, off I go with much hope and optimism to see if I can get me a nice cheap Taycan and it turns out that "There's reports that" and "Rumours are" mean the same as it has always done on the Internet. Synonymous with "bullshit".
I could get a nice cheap 10 year old Panamera, there's plenty of those within my reach. But Taycans, unless "nil" is an acronym for "Not In my League" cost considerable amounts on the used car market.
Possibly what the OP is referring to is the trade in price.
To my understanding government policy put a heavy onus on the trade to sell new EVs, not used EVs. So the trade in is unwanted by the dealership as it detracts from chances of selling a new car (and hitting gov targets and avoiding fines). So they dealership offers the owner a derisable trade in figure.
But a dealer being a dealer they'll take the car wack on a markup and stick it somewhere.
Stick a 3yr old Taycan on webuyanycar and it'll give you a ballpark figure.
[click click] just did that and on a low mileage 4yr old Taycan they offer £40k (I know they'll offer less on the day but as a ballpark normal trade in). On a car that was probably specced at about £95k new that's a 58% loss in 4yr. Not great for a Porsche but not unusual or excessive for most car brands.
Indeed, and as most Taycan drivers are on some version of a lease deal, they have agreed a monthly price that they or their business is happy with and they don't need to give a shit about the residual.
Poor residuals might increase the cost of future lease deals but "reports and rumours suggest" there is a lot of pub bore FUD being pushed around by thickos.
Once solid state batteries hit the market in volume around 2027-28 I think most vehicles with liquid electrolyte batteries are going to take a huge value hit. On the plus side those batteries will be much smaller and cheaper, so it might be possible to put one in an older vehicle, while at the same time significantly reducing the vehicle weight. Vehicles like some of the newer Teslas with structural battery packs would be problematic. Structural battery packs probably should have waited until the batteries were good enough to last the life of a vehicle.
Lol. No. Solid-state batteries / structural batteries are NOT going to change the situation. That's nothing but more hype.
Solid-state batteries have even worse issues with degradation and fast-charging, and "structural" batteries while saving weight, sacrifice safety. It's more musk-ist crap.
They have been in development since the 90s. There's a good reason that they have never made it to market: They don't work. Batteries need electrolytes and intercalation materials. The electrolyte needs to be a powerful solvent for good ion mobility (ie low resistance, fast charging) and the ions need a structure to fill on the other side (intercalation) otherwise they plate unevenly and form dendrites
There have been various failed attempts to bring them to market, most notably sakti3, which was a Theranos-like fake unicorn, bought by Dyson and ultimately led to the daft prat losing billions
The few I have seen either have extremely low capacity (coin cell size), low cycle life, or extremely low power density, especially for charging.
As for structural batteries: great for an F1 racing car, but not so great for maintainability (good luck replacing one) or crash safety
Not forgetting insurance…
A large part of the increase in insurance costs people will be experiencing this year are due to increased costs of “repairs” / write-off of EVs…
Also remember many of those company car EVs are practically uninsurable, as their performance puts them into the same insurance bracket as Maserati’s et al.
I saw a video recently(which appears to be related to this article https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg3q95ednqwo ) regarding this previous tesla engineer reporting floor mat getting stuck on cars about a decade ago
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/former-tesla-engineer-says-company-175946111.html
"One engineer said he had wanted to fix a problem with the Model S's driver's seat floor mat since 2012. As designed, the floor mat could interfere with the brake, the engineer claimed."
Awww. My little hyundai i30 is 10 years old next year and does 700 miles on a full tank. Its euro 6 diesel so for now is able to go anywhere.
It's £0/year tax and does less than 2000 miles/Yr.
We drive to South France once a year but use the wife's car for that ... another soon to be 10 year old euro 6 diesel Peugeot 2008. This does about the same miles per tank and uses adblue for emissions.
Again, £0/Yr tax (vehd or whatever).
Both are clear of any finance and we both wfh with the occasion trip out, never usually very far, 30 miles if we are feeling adventurous.
Now, convince me to throw one or both of those perfectly good cars away for an EV which would devalue like mad AND cost us upwards of £200/mo in finance plus £120/Yr tax.
https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-maintenance/the-cost-of-car-ownership-a1854979198/
https://datahub.transportation.gov/stories/s/NHTSA-Recalls-by-Manufacturer/38mw-dp8u/
https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/2024-u-s-auto-sales-figures-by-manufacturer-automaker-rankings/
I know a few folk with Teslas they all seem to love their cars but the comments always follow the same pattern, they love it (fast smooth range etc)them follow up with a long list of quality control issues that would never be acceptable on any mainstream manufacturer (misaligned panels, condensation in lights, paint runs on panels, bits falling off, seats collapsing).
In fairness everyone I know with a hybrid (from varied manufacturers) has experenced some form of significant charging or software related issue as well, but not panel gaps or bits falling off.
I've also heard the stories about residuals on EVs being appalling but I think there are wider issues causing that (government policy skewed towards new vehicles, plus an immature 2nd hand market).
Myself I'll be hanging onto my older non electrified cars for a while longer. I prefer ICE but largely I think the quality on current cars has dipped so low (across the board really) I really don't want any of them.
In fairness everyone I know with a hybrid (from varied manufacturers) has experenced some form of significant charging or software related issue as well
One of our cars is our 3rd hybrid. No problems with any of them that is related to the hybrid system. One of them had an auto fold down mirror that was a bit slow.
I've owned two hybrids. My 2011 Volt had issues with the charge door sensor switch and eventually with cell balancing, but that was after 110,000 miles. The build quality was fine.
My 2018 Honda Clarity PHEV has had no powertrain issues so far other than the SmartCharge app being buggy. Fortunately the car has a charge timer that works just fine. I also had a rattle from the trunk area that turned out to be mis-adjusted bump stops.
Our large company fleet won't allow us to order Tesla cars partly due to the erratic pricing on the cars which is a financial risk to the company.
Model3 standard range is the only car they offer which I respect as good quality and value for money. If you want a tall car go for another marque and if you are looking at an expensive Model3 then stop and buy a BMW i4.
The only comfort I can take from them dropping prices is that the price of company cars which I am allowed order will drop in response. Let them drop another 2000 euro more and destroy their margin.
I expect VAG and Polestar will adjust their prices in coming weeks.
Polestar is excellent alternative to Tesla and VAG software quality is steadily increasing from a baseline of pitiable to nearly acceptable wtih each software release.
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