Tesla’s death is “not close” says Musk, as operating margin drops to 2%

As Elon Musk helps undo regulations, regulatory credits keep Tesla profitable.

See full article...

 

[AusPeter]

Gitlin is quick to remind you that he’s a ‘doctor’. A casual perusal of his LinkedIn reveals that his phd is in fucking pharmacology ffs, not in engineering or in finance. Using that title while reporting on automotive/financial matters implies that it is relevant to the subject at hand, something that could hardly be further from the truth.

I’m guessing he failed to make it in science or academia so had to resort to becoming an ‘automotive journalist’, something that any two bit influencer with a cellphone could do. But If you want to continue to fellate ‘Dr’ Gitlin, please don’t let me stop you.

Ahhh. Ad hominem. The retort you use when you don’t have anything intelligent to contribute.

 

[stormcrash]

Where does the financing originally come from if not profit?

Gee I don't know? Maybe from a loan, or from raising equity by selling shares? You know, the normal ways businesses finance themselves and get started?

 

[Uragan]

Gitlin is quick to remind you that he’s a ‘doctor’. A casual perusal of his LinkedIn reveals that his phd is in fucking pharmacology ffs, not in engineering or in finance.

Okay and? You could have looked at his bio on Ars and it would have told you the same thing without resorting to stalking him on LinkedIn.

And that doesn't change the fact that he has his Ph.D.

Using that title while reporting on automotive/financial matters implies that it is relevant to the subject at hand, something that could hardly be further from the truth.

Wrong.

I’m guessing he failed to make it in science or academia so had to resort to becoming an ‘automotive journalist’, something that any two bit influencer with a cellphone could do.

Or maybe he wanted a change of pace/career? People switch fields all the time.

But If you want to continue to fellate ‘Dr’ Gitlin, please don’t let me stop you.

You're the one fantasizing about sucking dick apparently.

 

[Uragan]

Sure, Cybertruck inventory might be piling up, but it’s not materially relevant to Q1 results. Model Y is Tesla’s top-selling vehicle by far, and production was paused at all factories for retooling. That shutdown is what actually moved the needle this quarter—everything else is noise by comparison.

Sure... just ignore the fact that Tesla sales have been plummeting in Europe for the past two quarters. That has nothing to do with Juniper.

 

[WaveMotionGum]

If the Post Office was allowed to only service profitable addresses, they wouldn't need "subsidising" either.

But society decided that a universal postal service was a public good worth paying for, so the Post Office was created with a universal service obligation.

Shhh, don't educate him, this is hilarious.

 

[AusPeter]

Sure... just ignore the fact that Tesla sales have been plummeting in Europe for the past two quarters. That has nothing to do with Juniper.

Aren’t EV sales also up in general in Europe?

 

[Uragan]

Pretty much, "great" relative to peers bleeding billions.
Ford guides a $5-5.5 B EV loss for 2025, GM torched Cruise entirely, VW bowed out of Argo. Tesla, even on its “worst” quarter, still added to its $37 B cash hoard while everyone else went hat-in-hand to bond desks. The scoreboard is cash-flow, not feelings.

Comparing an entire company's earnings to another company's singular sector is disingenuous... and I'll keep pointing that out as many times as you keep raising it.

Retooling one plant is a tune-up; swapping all four Model Y lines to giga-castings + 4680-ready under-bodies simultaneously is open-heart surgery. Inventory days of supply actually FELL to 22 while the lines were dark, so there was no magical “backlog” to drain. Shanghai hits volume “this summer,” Austin’s already shipping refreshed cars. Let’s revisit the “nothing to point to a recovery” claim once those numbers post.

Gosh... it only took 3 weeks to do the retooling... so they had plenty of inventory in the wings while the production lines were down.

Credits were $595 M; free-cash flow was $664 M and operating cash-flow $2.2 B. Do the subtraction: even if credits were zero, Tesla still printed black ink. And credits don’t vanish next quarter unless legacy OEMs magically meet CO₂ targets while losing money on every EV they build. (Hint: they won’t.)

Uh... Tesla's net income was $420M. Their credits were $595M. If they didn't sell any credits, they would have had a negative net income.

Cybertruck: ramping at ≈3 k / week, faster than Rivian or Lucid ever managed.

Why? They can't even sell more than 6k in 3 months. Why do they need to make half that every week?

FSD has >2B real-world miles vs Waymo’s ~50 M rider-only miles.

Comparing FSD to Waymo's implementation is also disingenuous. Waymo is a L4 ADS. FSD is a L2 ADAS.

Also, Waymo's logged miles are as "real world" as Tesla's.

Bottom line: you can keep writing eulogies, but until another automaker ships millions of BEVs at positive margin and funds a $10B-a-year AI program out of operating cash, the grave you’re digging is still conspicuously empty.

Why is Tesla spending money on AI when Musk has xAI? That is an insane conflict of interest and waste of Tesla's money. (Not to mention that plenty of Nvidia hardware got diverted from Tesla to xAI... or that xAI poached Tesla employees.)

 

[Uragan]

Aren’t EV sales also up in general in Europe?

They're also up in the US... and yet Tesla's US sales and market share went down in Q1. How odd, right?

 

[Tonkaman]

How are you supposed to increase supply (lowering the cost to price gap, profit) without the funding (ie. profit) to do so? You are arguing that profit is evil, which is really the crux of this whole issue, and I'm demonstrating that it's not (rent-seeking is a different story -- that's the venue of tax collectors).

The postal service is like the worst example of all. Come on. We subsidize them to deliver junk mail. If they were more efficient, we wouldn't need to subsidize them, and they wouldn't have strong private competition as they do.

The post office is the perfect example of a service that could be great but is purposely underfunded and hobbled by Republicans. Forced to fund pensions 70 years into the future for employees not even born yet, and prices they charge were set by congress without any relation to actual costs, and they don't control their expenses because congress also won't let them close locations.

If those restrictions are lifted, the USPS is much more efficient and lower cost to operate than UPS or FedEx.

 

[Tonkaman]

Comparing an entire company's earnings to another company's singular sector is disingenuous... and I'll keep pointing that out as many times as you keep raising it.


Gosh... it only took 3 weeks to do the retooling... so they had plenty of inventory in the wings while the production lines were down.


Uh... Tesla's net income was $420M. Their credits were $595M. If they didn't sell any credits, they would have had a negative net income.


Why? They can't even sell more than 6k in 3 months. Why do they need to make half that every week?


Comparing FSD to Waymo's implementation is also disingenuous. Waymo is a L4 ADS. FSD is a L2 ADAS.

Also, Waymo's logged miles are as "real world" as Tesla's.


Why is Tesla spending money on AI when Musk has xAI? That is an insane conflict of interest and waste of Tesla's money. (Not to mention that plenty of Nvidia hardware got diverted from Tesla to xAI... or that xAI poached Tesla employees.)

On the retooling bit, I do this all the time. Adding a few die casting presses is not "open heart surgery." That's work that can easily be done ahead of time in a separate area and then tie into the existing production line quickly.

Open heart surgery is when Ford changed the F150 over to an all aluminum body. They ripped out the entire Body Shop down to bare concrete floors, installed a 100% new Body Shop, all in only 8 weeks. They did this 1 plant at a time, staggered, so that customers never noticed any interruption in deliveries.

 

[Cthel]

Because too much of society is nostalgic and irrational and doesn’t understand they’re still paying for something when that thing is funded by taxes. If it was a social good worth paying for, people would pay market price for it.

They do.

You pay for social goods through taxation, as a society

Or do you want Fire Fighters to demand cash up front to extinguish your burning house?

 

[dobrien75]

They do.

You pay for social goods through taxation, as a society

Or do you want Fire Fighters to demand cash up front to extinguish your burning house?

Cue Sam Seder to talk to the Libertarian

 

[AusPeter]

Short version:
Training-time fusion ≠ test-time crutches.

Long version:
Tesla does use lidar, just not in the way you think:
Andrej Karpathy explained that Tesla straps “science-project” lidars onto a subset of fleet cars during data collection to build 3-D ground-truth labels, then discards the devices for inference because the network can already infer depth from parallax, motion, and multi-view geometry. Vision learns from lidar; it doesn’t need to carry lidar.

Why stacking more sensors isn’t a free safety win:

• Failure modes overlap. A low-sun glare can blind lidar receivers just like image sensors; heavy rain, fog and snow inject so much back-scatter that object detection rates nosedive. University of Warwick tests show lidar false detections spike and object range collapses as rainfall nears 50 mm/h.
• You still need vision for colour (traffic lights), semantics (lane arrows, hand signals) and text. Once you need cameras anyway, the marginal value of a second depth sensor gets eaten by cost, packaging, and new corner-cases (e.g., chrome bumpers reflecting your own laser pulse).
• Brittleness in practice: Waymo’s lidar+radar+camera stack is confined to geofenced, and still halts operations for monsoon dust storms, while FSD v12 is logging >2 billion real-world miles across 42 countries.

Dynamic range beats sunglasses:
Tesla’s HW4 cameras capture >120 dB dynamic range via rapid multi-exposure HDR, double the human eye. The network sees three forward cams (narrow-, main-, fisheye) plus side/rear cams, each with overlapping FOVs, then stitches them with temporal context. When you and I squint at the glare, the net keeps perfect exposure on at least one imager.


Safety proof is in the interventions:
Internal telemetry (and the crowd-sourced “V12 Safety Scoreboard”) shows intervention rates plunging below one every hundreds of miles and headed to the four-figure mark. If a camera-only stack were “inherently flawed,” it wouldn’t improve as the dataset scales; it would plateau. The curve is still bending.

Fusion is a tactic, not a law of nature
Yes, Redundancy 101 says “multiple modalities are good.” But engineering is trade-offs: if one modality can already perceive every driving cue with sufficient redundancy (multi-camera stereopsis + motion parallax + radar priors) and you possess the world’s largest labelled vision dataset, piling on a second depth sensor that degrades in weather and costs $1 k per unit isn’t automatically superior. Data density > sensor density.

Bottom line: vision-only isn’t dogma; it’s empirical: cheaper BOM, fewer failure modes, trained with lidar-generated labels, and already out-performing multimodal rivals in open-set geography. When a lidar-heavy production fleet matches Tesla’s real-world scale and safety metrics, I’ll happily revise the view. Until then, the sun-glare strawman is just that, a bright distraction.

Now do mud. Or insect swarms.

 

[ducatisymphony]

You seem more interested in character assassination than concepts and truth, but I'll answer. There is no fully successful economic implementation in history of any kind, but the massive increases in wealth (including among the lower class) seen from state socialist countries' deregulation and privatization, and more relevant for our time, the difference in economic growth between the US and Europe over the past 20 years and the fact we've contributed most of the technological innovation despite a smaller population, is plenty of evidence that less regulated forms of capitalism have been more successful in maximizing the area under the curve of prosperity. (Btw, it's not the Overton window when positions switch sides completely, as they have so often in US politics, from foreign policy to civil rights to tariffs to anti-censorship).

It isn't character assassination when someone simply uses your own words against you. That wound is entirely self inflicted.

Increases in wealth among the lower class? My friend, that is some serious mental gymnastics. The rest of that is a completely unsubstantiated word salad with little correlation to reality and citing no specifics to make any attempt to do so.

As for the Overton Window, you seem to fundamentally misunderstand what that means. The Republicans and Democrats shifting their target demographics some 60 or so years ago (which is what I am assuming you are referring to in a vague hand wavey way) has nothing to do with that. Here, a quote from Wikipedia might be helpful to you:

"The Overton window is the range of subjects and arguments politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time.It is also known as the window of discourse. The key to the concept is that the window changes over time; it can shift, or shrink or expand. It exemplifies "the slow evolution of societal values and norms".

One last thing. I, personally, don't think a country's GDP is necessarily an accurate reflection of the quality of life people living in that country enjoy as your response seems to poorly argue. Your argument that a lack of regulation has created wealth for everyone in the U.S (including the lower class) is misleading at best. The wealthiest are certainly more wealthy in that scenario but the lower class are certainly not. I would much rather be a member of the lower class in many other countries than in the U.S. Countries that actually provide social support mechanisms for the less fortunate.

 

[dobrien75]

I would much rather be a member of the lower class in many other countries than in the U.S.

Most definitely. The apparent wealth of the US economy belies the terrible poverty problem that the US has. Travelling a few years ago, I was shocked at the inner city poverty in a lot of West coast cities of the US. The wealth inequality in the US is the worst I've ever seen

edit: East is not West

 

[ScifiGeek]

If the Post Office was allowed to only service profitable addresses, they wouldn't need "subsidising" either.

But society decided that a universal postal service was a public good worth paying for, so the Post Office was created with a universal service obligation.

I think we can be quite sure that a selfish Musk Stan that celebrates the end of humanitarian aid, doesn't give a shit about the public good.

He's on his shitposting account, best to ignore him and he'll flip back to his regular tech account, when he gets bored.

 

[orwelldesign]

but other healthcare should be deregulated

It's weird as fuck, then, isn't it, that countries where healthcare is a human right instead of a profit opportunity spend less and have better outcomes, then, isn't it? Seriously, the numbers don't lie: everywhere spends less and gets more.

Anecdote: my first MIL had lung cancer. Also, no insurance. She could not get the help she needed, because the only healthcare she got until her last six months was at the ER. It is probable that she would have lived a lot longer, were US health policy sane.

Medicine? Is a terrible place for capitalism. Just absolutely terrible. Anyone who thinks otherwise doesn't know any poor people.

 

[AusPeter]

Ford’s entire 2025 guidance is +$10-12B ICE/trucks & –$5-5.5B Model e. When one silo devours half the house, it’s fair to ask how long the pantry lasts. Tesla’s business model is BEVs; Ford’s BEV unit burns cash faster than Tesla prints it. Apples to apples? Tesla is still the only mass-BEV maker booking any black ink.

Inventory days of supply fell to 22 while the lines were dark; production (433 k) still out-ran deliveries (387 k). If “plenty” existed, you wouldn’t see DoS shrink. Three weeks was the cut-over; stamping dies and giga-cast cells were pre-staged for months.

Correct, on GAAP net. Yet the quarter still produced $664 M free-cash flow and $2.2 B operating cash, swelling the war-chest to $37 B. Credits goose profit, but liquidity stayed green without them.

Early S-curve: Tesla built ~3k/week by April, faster than Rivian or Lucid hit 50k/yr pace. Exoskeleton, 9-t die-casting and steer-by-wire all need validation runs before full clip. Target remains 250 k/yr; we’ll know by year-end.

Regulatory labels ≠ capability.
Waymo’s 50M miles sit inside geofenced U.S. metros; FSD’s >2B miles span 42 countries, snow, dust, left-hand traffic, you name it. Tesla calls it L2 because the driver is still legally liable, not because the stack can’t drive.

The diversion: December ’24 Nvidia memo shows 12 k H100s originally slated for Tesla were swapped with 12 k later X/xAI orders, delay, not cancellation.

Cap-ex still colossal: Musk says Tesla will spend $3-4 B on Nvidia kit and $10 B total on AI this year, Dojo wafers plus GPU clusters.
Reuters

Governance: Swap disclosed to the board; terms filed in the 10-Q. Because the chips all end up in Tesla data centers, the change is timing, not theft.

Disclosing something to the Tesla board is meaningless while the board remains not independent of Musk.

 

[AusPeter]

Sure, but first you do meteor showers, locust plagues, and a surprise cameo by Godzilla. Goalposts are easier to move when you put them on wheels.

It’s not a moving goalpost if I can encounter mud and insect swarms in my daily driving.

If you can’t answer the question then just say so and don’t resort logical fallacies.

 

[Uragan]

Early S-curve: Tesla built ~3k/week by April, faster than Rivian or Lucid hit 50k/yr pace. Exoskeleton, 9-t die-casting and steer-by-wire all need validation runs before full clip. Target remains 250 k/yr; we’ll know by year-end.

Psst... The Cybertruck doesn't have an exoskeleton. And one would hope that the validation would be done before the vehicle goes into production. People shouldn't be beta testing a whole new vehicle for Tesla. (And certainly not on their own dime.) Considering how many problems the Cybertruck seems to have, they should have done a lot more validation before releasing it to the public.

The Cybertruck is on track to not even sell 25k this year. Making 50k/yr or 250k/yr doesn't matter if they don't sell. Hence why Tesla has been removing the Foundation Edition branding from existing vehicles and trying to sell them. And s-curves don't go down.

Regulatory labels ≠ capability.
Waymo’s 50M miles sit inside geofenced U.S. metros; FSD’s >2B miles span 42 countries, snow, dust, left-hand traffic, you name it. Tesla calls it L2 because the driver is still legally liable, not because the stack can’t drive.

Uhhhhhhhhhh... if the driver is liable, then it isn't nearly as capable as Waymo's implementation.

Only one company is currently running autonomous taxis without drivers... and it isn't Tesla.

Cap-ex still colossal: Musk says Tesla will spend $3-4 B on Nvidia kit and $10 B total on AI this year, Dojo wafers plus GPU clusters.

Dojo isn't a thing, hence the pivot to using Nvidia.

 

[orwelldesign]

Why wasn't she paying for insurance? Got too expensive after Obamacare? I personally think people should pay out of pocket for healthcare, as that's the only way to incentivize healthy behavior. HSA's are great, let doctors own hospitals again and make sure prices are advertised clearly (and not higher if you're uninsured).

She wasn't paying for insurance because she couldn't afford it. You can't possibly actually be this obtuse, can you?

And pre-ACA, she was uninsurable, due to preexisting conditions. As were a lot of other people.

When you go to the hospital on an ambulance, generally, you're in no fit state to say "take me to Baptist instead of Northern, they're 15% cheaper." And, often, because Baptist is 30 miles further away, making that choice might literally kill someone.

Making medicine capitalist is holding a gun to the head of the ill or injured. I mean, ffs, my brother died in February because he couldn't afford the ER bill or the ambulance ride, so decided to "tough it out." That's very common in the USA. Everywhere else recognizes it as insane.

Didn't you say you were a socialist? You're terrible at this. Entertaining trolls maintain consistent positions. Your views aren't consistent with socialism at all. They aren't even consistent with themselves FFS.

Or did you mean that you work for a socialist government? Hypocrisy isn't a good look, you leech. Your position is obviously surplus and wasteful and needs eliminated.

 

[Uragan]

Is your only aspiration in life to be a pensioner? I know what the Overton window is; it doesn't describe positions that switch sides which I listed in the thing you responded to but barely read. I have been to China and Cuba and talked to many who lived through command economy experiments and deregulation. I've also studied it in school extensively. You have no idea what you're talking about. BTW, working class wages rose more under Trump than either Obama or Biden, and will rise more with mercantilism and the shutoff of illegal immigration.

Cuba and China aren't communist countries... Hope that helps. And Cuba's economy sucks because of the useless embargo that the US has held against it for over 60 years... not because of its economic model.

 

[Uragan]

She wasn't paying for insurance because she couldn't afford it. You can't possibly actually be this obtuse, can you?

And pre-ACA, she was uninsurable, due to preexisting conditions. As were a lot of other people.

When you go to the hospital on an ambulance, generally, you're in no fit state to say "take me to Baptist instead of Northern, they're 15% cheaper." And, often, because Baptist is 30 miles further away, making that choice might literally kill someone.

Making medicine capitalist is holding a gun to the head of the ill or injured. I mean, ffs, my brother died in February because he couldn't afford the ER bill or the ambulance ride, so decided to "tough it out." That's very common in the USA. Everywhere else recognizes it as insane.

Didn't you say you were a socialist? You're terrible at this. Entertaining trolls maintain consistent positions. Your views aren't consistent with socialism at all. They aren't even consistent with themselves FFS.

Or did you mean that you work for a socialist government? Hypocrisy isn't a good look, you leech. Your position is obviously surplus and wasteful and needs eliminated.

Wait... they're claiming to work for the government now? I thought that they had all this anecdotal evidence because of so many friends and family members working for the government.

 

[Uragan]

Bottom line: vision-only isn’t dogma; it’s empirical: cheaper BOM, fewer failure modes, trained with lidar-generated labels, and already out-performing multimodal rivals in open-set geography. When a lidar-heavy production fleet matches Tesla’s real-world scale and safety metrics, I’ll happily revise the view. Until then, the sun-glare strawman is just that, a bright distraction.

So... why did a German court find Autopilot defective for normal use if it's supposedly "better"?

And Waymo's safety record is far better than Tesla's.

 

[ducatisymphony]

Is your only aspiration in life to be a pensioner? I know what the Overton window is; it doesn't describe positions that switch sides which I listed in the thing you responded to but barely read. I have been to China and Cuba and talked to many who lived through command economy experiments and deregulation. I've also studied it in school extensively. You have no idea what you're talking about. BTW, working class wages rose more under Trump than either Obama or Biden, and will rise more with mercantilism and the shutoff of illegal immigration.

No, you don't know what the Overton Window is. Your previous response proves that and your assertion that you do know is further proof that you are not to be believed or taken seriously. Instead of being concerned with my ability to read your posts, perhaps you should understand them yourself before hitting post.

Did you really believe my reference to "other countries" was a reference to China or Cuba? I don't think you are actually that stupid....are you? Can you think of any other countries that might have been a reference to? The list isn't that short.

I can't say whether you have studied economics or not....I can say with absolute confidence that if you did, you certainly didn't understand it. You ramble incoherently using terms you clearly don't actually understand. One example of this would be claiming that the lower class have more wealth by claiming working class wages rose more under Trump than Obama or Biden. If you understood economics the way you claim, you would know that what really matters is Real Wages (or inflation adjusted wages) and you would reference those.

You make assertion after assertion with nothing to validate them other than vague hand waving and a pathetic appeal to authority. We can all see through you, you are fooling nobody.

 

[orwelldesign]

Btw, I’m not a libertarian, I’m a socialist government worker.

Wait... they're claiming to work for the government now? I thought that they had all this anecdotal evidence because of so many friends and family members working for the government.

Yeah, pretty sure this one belongs in the circular file. I always find it hilarious when government workers complain about waste in government. The entitlement is just &&chef's kiss&& -- all those other government workers are lazy bums performing unnecessary duties, but no, MY job is necessary.

(Hypocrite, leech, or troll?)

 

[Uragan]

Yeah, pretty sure this one belongs in the circular file. I always find it hilarious when government workers complain about waste in government. The entitlement is just &&chef's kiss&& -- all those other government workers are lazy bums performing unnecessary duties, but no, MY job is necessary.

(Hypocrite, leech, or troll?)

Troll.