The labor/environmental costs of car manufacturing is relatively low and more than made up in the cost of shipping cars. One example of this was the number of foreign car manufacturers that were relocating manufacturing to the NAFTA region to serve the U.S. car market even before the tariff nonsense.
The area where China might have an edge is batteries cost. I’m not convinced that’s the case but even if we assume it is, it’s irrelevant because Chinese battery companies are largely not vertically integrated with the automakers and have been selling those batteries to non Chinese automakers at the same rates in an open market.
The reason Chinese EVs are cheaper is plain and simple competition. Some of those price advantages will disappear as Chinese companies need to start showing profits, but a lot of those won’t because they were the result of genuine innovation driven by the tremendously competitive market and the economies of scale that were rapidly created.
Keeping that in mind, while a lot of Tesla’s missed opportunities are self owns, the larger problem ultimately was the lack of govt support in developing a competitive ecosystem in the US.
One critical correction though: BYD makes 16% of the world's batteries. And makes cars. So there is vertical integration in play. https://cnevpost.com/2026/02/04/global-ev-battery-market-sha...
Ford and Stellantis are meanwhile busy trying to partner with Chinese companies, to make their own battery factories. Even though it seems like maybe they'll end up making more batteries for stationary power than for vehicles.
Tesla had that, all Musk had to do was refrain himself from waving his hand around in that certain fashion.
New registrations in Sweden for the past 3 years, Sweden alone would've probably absorbed about 14000 cars of that unsold stock.
2023 20388 341835 0,0596428101276932 (5.96%)
2024 21894 314485 0,0696185827622939 (6.96%)
2025 7254 314426 0,0230706112089967 (2.31%)
2026 2849 72525 0,0392830058600483 (3.93%)
The worst news for Tesla isn't the sales though, with "Texas-like" distances in Sweden (and Norway and Finland) there was a perception that only Tesla cars could properly handle the distances without getting too much battery angst.
When people started looking around they realized that the other carmakers were getting their shit together and could actually deliver cars that handled distances well enough.
The difference is that most customers have the financial wiggle room to buy a more expensive phone. With cars this is an entirely different story because cars are the most expensive things people own (besides a house).
For most people it holds that a car should just get them from A to B. The money for anything more fancy is better spent on something else.
There is a reason Apple is not in the car business.
What caused Elon to lose his ability to manage it is subject for debate, I personally believe he discovered drugs in 2019 and the rest is history.
He just took a wrong turn and seems hell bent on staying on it.
Obviously it's always been latent in Elon, but he was a pretty bog standard lightly-if-apolitical silicon valley startup guy for most of his adult life. The free speech erosion under the Biden admin is what really started to "red pill" him and eventually led him off the cliff. It's a sad story really, but an important one because I think there are a lot of people in the same boat, and understandign them is important if we want to correct the trajectory of our country's ship. It's a damn hard problem though.
Both of these took place in 2020, when Trump was president, but of course Trump's greatest coup was to make everybody think Biden was president in 2020.
There really isn’t a good excuse.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/mark-zuckerbe...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers...
Though IMHO it's not just a Biden problem, it's a "everybody in power" problem. They just can't seem to resist (ab)using their power to shape the conversation and censor their opponents. It's also not new, it's been happening for hundreds of years at least. But it did get a lot more brazen under Biden IMHO with Twitter/Facebook etc and admin officials telling private companies what to censor (err, "moderate").
andy do you really think the Hunter Biden laptop story was equivalent or even close to "yelling fire in a crowded theatre"?
The tendency was probably always there given the serial lying about self driving started circa 2015, or the weird ego trip of ousting the founders and getting himself called co-founder, but if we’re looking for a point event the removal of his long time PA in 2014 still stands out to me.
Is it his politics? He seems to have reasonable beliefs there. It's not like he's been supporting Trump unconditionally. He doesn't always agree with Trump. Is it because of his stance in favor of free speech? How is that a bad thing? As someone who doesn't like any side of politics, I don't get it.
Do you honestly think Elon is a Nazi? If so, what actual proof do you know of?
His politics also seem to align very much with white supremacy and the far right.
I think we got a few steps beyond "reasonable beliefs".
I mean, perhaps it is reasonable for you, but then we will find very little common ground.
Nobody else at Tesla made Nazi salutes, and publicly bullied, abused, and humiliated their own daughter, and perpetrated DOGE's destruction and corruption. Tesla ("they") had nothing to do with any of that, but suffered from Elon doing it.
The problem is that we often attach a company or a larger idea to a single person, even when it is much much bigger than that individual. People started boycotting Tesla because of Elon Musk, without considering that Tesla is actually thousands of engineers, workers, and managers. And majority of decisions are not done by Elons.
But people tend to think in terms of heroes and anti heroes. Cesar Chavez is another example of how this dynamic plays out.
How can (generally) dropping sales and having 50,000 unsold cars on stock be the right move?
But seeing as how they haven’t launched a decent car in a decade, and have utterly failed to launch true FSD as promised, I have no confidence that they can succeed in a new market given they are demonstrably shit at their core competency
You live by the sword, you die by the sword. If people were so smart where were they when Musk was hyping autonomous vehicles being just around the corner for years? Or the fact that the board of directors kept raising his compensation to insane levels because he kept threatening them that he'll walk out? The company chose to do this. People didn't. Now that he is tanking the valuation, we don't need to separate out Tesla and Musk. They are one and the same.
Just look at Martha Stewart Living during her incarceration.
Celebrities are great at building brands, but they need to back away from their personal successes have bootstrapped the new brand before something they do becomes a liability.
Subway made their own celebrity spokesperson (Jared) and hitched their wagon to him for far too long. One or two years is understandable, but Subway had him so long it merged its identity with Jared until the truth about Jared was revealed.
Mhhh, makes sense.
The tariffs though is a great point. Definitely a boon for Tesla from good old Papa Trump. It's grotesque.
When reality finally sets in it will not be pretty.
Source: At the End of https://asymco.com/2026/03/31/melius-highlights-fcf-while-re...
Edit: typos
As a thought experiment could you have a publicly traded company with zero revenue and zero assets. It’s literally paper. What would stop its stock from “mooning” if the Keynesian beauty contest or the global stock casino decided it should?
What mechanism pushes the other way? Nobody pays dividends anymore.
That said, for Tesla this is only a bandaid, since they have absolutely nothing in the consumer pipeline beyond the current increasingly uncompetitive offerings. Chinese brands like BYD, on the other hand, are laughing all the way to the bank.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-17/kitchen-pollutants-st...
Induction also requires the cookware to be ferromagnetic. This rules out a lot of traditional cookware materials such as clay, copper, brass, and stone. Many of these traditional materials are also accompanied by traditional shapes (round bottoms, gently sloped sides) that take advantage of the convection properties of open flame cooking.
Many recipes rely on these traditional vessels for optimal cooking performance. Woks, for example, work much better with a round bottom so liquids can pool in the middle, letting you use less oil for stir frying but still allowing ingredients to spend time in the pooled oil.
The temperature profile of a round-bottom wok over gas flame is also superior to a flat-bottom wok on induction: the traditional wok has a bright hot spot at the bottom (where all the oil is pooling) in addition to heat up all around the sloped sides, for rapidly reducing liquids that come out of foods and cooking sauces (soy sauce, shaoxing wine) with an arc-splash technique. The flat-bottom wok on induction has a uniformly hot surface on the bottom but the sides remain cool, causing all liquids in contact with the sides to run down to the bottom and begin boiling, just like when you try to stir-fry in a frying pan.
Candy-making is another cooking process that benefits greatly from the convection of natural gas combustion, since molten sugar will crystallize around the sides of a pan if they are not hot enough. Traditional candy-making is done in thin-walled, tin-lined copper pans. These pans don't work at all on induction (no ferromagnetic materials) but even if placed on a ferrous plate they would not perform well due to lack of heating of the sides.
Not really. You’ve obviously not used modern induction cooktops (though if you’ve gone to a restaurant you’ve eaten from it).
> The temperature profile of a round-bottom wok over gas flame is also superior to a flat-bottom wok on induction
Explain why induction cooktops are incredibly widespread across modern Asian restaurants. You’ve really got to update your priors.
Don’t listen to me, listen to a professional chef (who runs an awesome restaurant in Shenzhen): https://youtu.be/vgv_IiSZarY?si=fgl1w1udQ72xqY3n
Candy making, I’ll concede because I have no experience. In every other way induction is still better.
Fried rice IS a quick dish with a proper gas burner.
An equivalent induction stove would be around 5000W, which I think exists. The problem with inductioning a wok is the tossing motion removes the wok from the heat, unlike over a big flame. It probably doesn't matter, but maybe it does.
The main difference is that the gas instantly turns off, whereas with induction, the stove surface the pan sits on is just as hot as the pan, because the pan heats it up via contact, so it's almost like electric in that way. I kind of doubt this matters except in certain specialty things like candy making. I'd consider myself a very proficient chef at the level of a new culinary school graduate (minus the restauranteering modules), and in practice any stove type is just fine. I'm not going to rip out my gas stove though; it came with the house and adds resale value.
Induction is also particularly nice for certain types of cooking because many induction stoves can be set to a specific temperature instead of just to a power level.
In the same period they're posting record sales, it's possible that's mostly a reduction in bleeding edge sales promotion staff, influencers, etc now they have better recognition.
Two press takes on likely the same company press release material.
* https://www.autoblog.com/news/the-ev-boom-is-changing-and-10...
* https://carnewschina.com/2026/03/31/byd-cuts-100000-jobs-wor...
That infomation lags current events, perhaps they are taking staff on now EV demand has spiked following oil shock.
This says that sales are actually down. Where are you getting record sales from?
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/04/02/byd-sales-down-20-4-in-...
I posted two links that both say that, of course both appear to mirror the same primary source.
You'd have to drill into both cleantechnica and the BYD presser for the exact details and caveats that come with all such reporting.
Revenue and deliveries reach new highs
BYD reported 8039.6 billion yuan (1,123 billion USD) in revenue for 2025, alongside 4.60 million vehicle deliveries, according to the NBD. Overseas deliveries reached approximately 1.05 million units, according to Sina reporting, marking the first time the company surpassed the 1-million-unit mark in exports.
BYD slashes 100,000 jobs yet posts record sales. Inside the cost cuts, profit squeeze, and why it’s still leading the global EV race.
BYD sales are down.
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/04/02/byd-sales-down-20-4-in-...
It is somewhat complex subject. Taking in account actual use, cost of fuel and maintenance and then comparing it to purchase price and depreciation is bit of a work. And I don't think too many people do that when they should.
https://www.regit.cars/car-news/uk-fuel-price-hike-sparks-36...
Also lol, you're funny implying that ICE cars aren't overpriced tablets on wheels either. It's all cars nowadays. And UK's cheapest car right now happens to be a pretty decent EV anyway, a Dacia Spring.
probably to differentiate from their limited testing of Robotaxis in Austin https://robotaxitracker.com/?provider=tesla
And there's a community which tracks their progress independently https://teslafsdtracker.com/
if he'd make peace with Vivian
his fear keeps him holding in tears
I guess I'll just buy a Rivian
(article from today)
“You don’t understand the vision” “This is actually a good thing” “HODL”
The rest of will just buy Xiaomi SU 7's....
"Corportations are people too, and can experience racism as well!"
Certified YCombinator moment.