Tesla publishes its financial results for 2023; profit margin shrinks

Revenues only grew by 3 percent year over year, disappointing the market.

See full article...

 

[peterford]

China puts up with the DPRK because it acts as a buffer between it and the RoK (and the US). And the DPRK knows this and exploits that to its advantage. However, China isn't a "very supportive ally" by any stretch.

Edit: My initial point was that the OP didn't give any rationale for why they think buying Chinese is bad.

Ok, I'll bite. I am OP.

I'll bite because I don't want to be - even incorrectly - repeatedly described as Xenophobic or Sinophobic. What's also amusing here is that you also assumed I'm American, which I'm not - partially why the original post specifically called out "globally". So, two great assumptions by you from the off.

The reason I didn't go into detail is because - get this - not every post on the internet has to describe every facet of every point that's described to every reader's satisfaction. If that was done you'd end up with the traditional wall of text that everyone hates and everyone skips over. But, we'll be on page six here, so why not go a little longer.

The Chinese people have achieved astonishing things over the past four decades, they've worked to a degree that most in the west I think have no real idea. As might be expected of a notionally communist country, it's been leashed in the direction of the greater good rather than the individual, but what they've achieved economically is incredible. Of course, someone needs to buy that stuff and as such they have contributed an enormous amount of good to large parts of the rest of the world.

One fundamental issue though is that (as I understand it) there's very little social welfare there - when you're old you have to rely on your family and your investments. The result of that is that people don't tend to perform consumer spending and instead invest - with the hard work, this has been linked to staggering growth infrastructure and business'. People have been investing in a way that doesn't make sense to a western MBA who looks at this situation and willingly outsources most of the local work out to people who are willing to work very hard for very little short term return.

It's also true however that the Chinese government is only really interested in China. To an extent that could be said to be myopic. Look at Belt and Road. Look at the nine-dash line. From their angle, this is all done to help the People (at least until the arrival of the current President, removing term limits rarely ends well) but from outside it has an enormously extractive feel.

Now, are the Chinese government the "bad guys" here? Are all the other nations angels? My God no. I'm British. We have sinned so much. We have sinned against the Chinese. But historical of deeper or more recent note do not forgive current actions.

So you have a people who have little choice but to invest. You have a government who have a very distinctive view on how to help "the people". You have business leaders in other countries absolutely willing to save every penny. You have consumers absolutely willing to save every penny.

What do you end up with? A willingness to pretend you're still a developing nation and a willingness to dump onto the market in such a way as to, deliberately or not and with assistance or not, gut industries in other nations around the world. Then the willingness of the government to exploit this politically with a view on helping their own people - as governments should do!

Now the USA and Europe have been burnt on this before and are both big enough and ugly enough to shut their markets to China either by obvious tariff or by less obvious subsidy. The IRA in America is very much an attempt at this. But this doesn't impact the rest of the world - Chinese manufacturers can still dump their increasingly good and very cheap high tech on those countries and thus out compete the American and European manufacturers who would otherwise have hoped to sell there. This is what I meant when I said globally in the first post.

Now I say again. Are the Chinese unique in this? Not at all. Look at the history of the UK, US and even the trade surpluses of Germany over the past decade and how that has impacted the overall economics of the European Union.

But they need a balance, a counterweight. And so I return to my original point: I'd rather Tesla be the wolf than the Chinese manufacturers.

Now, please feel free to tell me that I'm being reflexively sinophobic, maybe that I'm uninformed and haven't thought about this.

 

[ringobob]

Have a close look at the egg when the robot releases it; there's a very visible shift in its position, which strongly implies that they were using magnets to position it. And if they were using magnets, that in turn raises the question: was it a real egg? I'm willing to bet a very large sum of money that it wasn't.

I would have been far more impressed with the egg demo if they had done all of the careful handling and then deliberately crushed the egg to show that it was a real, raw egg, rather than a prop that would be much more forgiving of excess pressure from the robot's fingers. That they didn't do that is, to me, very telling - it certainly makes it extremely plausible that that part of the video was faked.

Just watched it, I don't see any evidence of magnets, what it looks like to me is that the robot got it close to all the way set down, and then dropped it into the receptacle the last few millimeters. It was a tray made to hold (and cook) eggs, you could drop it into place and it would look just like that. Of course, a human would have placed it in there, it wouldn't have dropped it at all, even a few millimeters. Which I think makes sense, as I imagine that would be the hardest part of the task for a robot to do successfully. There's a lot more fine motor control being built into the fingers than there is in the arms, and the speed to approach the surface is an arm problem.

Which isn't entirely undermining your point - they're showing us a partial success and not really saying anything about it so people are free to imagine it's doing more than it actually is. It's just a question of scale. I doubt they would put an entirely faked section in a video like that - they'd have to be phenomenally incompetent (i.e. Musk/Tesla would have to be terrible at finding and attracting the appropriate talent, which we know is not true) to not have anything to show this far along, so presumably they would be showing what they can actually do - they're just implying that they've solved problems that they haven't solved yet. Like a robot folding a shirt using no human input, and placing an egg without dropping it. And they don't actually say it's doing those things, and they don't edit those things out of the video, but they don't point them out either, so that they can get some people to assume.

 

[Scary Devil Monastery]

Ok, I'll bite. I am OP.

I'll bite because I don't want to be - even incorrectly - repeatedly described as Xenophobic or Sinophobic. What's also amusing here is that you also assumed I'm American, which I'm not - partially why the original post specifically called out "globally". So, two great assumptions by you from the off.

The reason I didn't go into detail is because - get this - not every post on the internet has to describe every facet of every point that's described to every reader's satisfaction. If that was done you'd end up with the traditional wall of text that everyone hates and everyone skips over. But, we'll be on page six here, so why not go a little longer.

The Chinese people have achieved astonishing things over the past four decades, they've worked to a degree that most in the west I think have no real idea. As might be expected of a notionally communist country, it's been leashed in the direction of the greater good rather than the individual, but what they've achieved economically is incredible. Of course, someone needs to buy that stuff and as such they have contributed an enormous amount of good to large parts of the rest of the world.

One fundamental issue though is that (as I understand it) there's very little social welfare there - when you're old you have to rely on your family and your investments. The result of that is that people don't tend to perform consumer spending and instead invest - with the hard work, this has been linked to staggering growth infrastructure and business'. People have been investing in a way that doesn't make sense to a western MBA who looks at this situation and willingly outsources most of the local work out to people who are willing to work very hard for very little short term return.

It's also true however that the Chinese government is only really interested in China. To an extent that could be said to be myopic. Look at Belt and Road. Look at the nine-dash line. From their angle, this is all done to help the People (at least until the arrival of the current President, removing term limits rarely ends well) but from outside it has an enormously extractive feel.

Now, are the Chinese government the "bad guys" here? Are all the other nations angels? My God no. I'm British. We have sinned so much. We have sinned against the Chinese. But historical of deeper or more recent note do not forgive current actions.

So you have a people who have little choice but to invest. You have a government who have a very distinctive view on how to help "the people". You have business leaders in other countries absolutely willing to save every penny. You have consumers absolutely willing to save every penny.

What do you end up with? A willingness to pretend you're still a developing nation and a willingness to dump onto the market in such a way as to, deliberately or not and with assistance or not, gut industries in other nations around the world. Then the willingness of the government to exploit this politically with a view on helping their own people - as governments should do!

Now the USA and Europe have been burnt on this before and are both big enough and ugly enough to shut their markets to China either by obvious tariff or by less obvious subsidy. The IRA in America is very much an attempt at this. But this doesn't impact the rest of the world - Chinese manufacturers can still dump their increasingly good and very cheap high tech on those countries and thus out compete the American and European manufacturers who would otherwise have hoped to sell there. This is what I meant when I said globally in the first post.

Now I say again. Are the Chinese unique in this? Not at all. Look at the history of the UK, US and even the trade surpluses of Germany over the past decade and how that has impacted the overall economics of the European Union.

But they need a balance, a counterweight. And so I return to my original point: I'd rather Tesla be the wolf than the Chinese manufacturers.

Now, please feel free to tell me that I'm being reflexively sinophobic, maybe that I'm uninformed and haven't thought about this.

You know, I nodded along to that until you got to the point where somehow you'd rather the at-home white supremacist be the wolf than the chinese people from afar.

And that's where you lost me, at least. Although the saying that two wrongs don't make a right often demands context there is little context at all in the statement that one wrong can not be made better by a worse and more immediate wrong.

Musk is a man who cheers 'Mein Kampf' rhetoric on the bullhorn he recently bought, showing he's willing to spend 40+ billion dollars just to strike a blow against, in essence, nazis getting choked out of public participation by the sane and rational. The factories Teslas are built in are almost literally klan halls, and in the offices of Tesla hearing a manager describe the few colored underlings to work there with the N-word is just tuesday.

This is one of the most influential people in the world and especially within western politics and US politics in particular. Directly putting money into his pockets is a verifiable contribution towards the goal of undoing western democracy. Something I don't see happening even if you were to buy a BYD.

And that entire either/or debate was disingenuous and flawed to begin with, because nothing stops you from getting a Kia, Hyundai or Bolt for that matter, if your mind was set on not supporting China. There are viable alternatives which are neither BYD or Tesla these days.

You may not be reflexively sinophobic but you're certainly reflexively exculpatory towards Elon Musk. In a way so blatant I'd almost have to ask why you're pulling that flawed a premise into the debate and propping it up as an argument.

 

[Snarky Robot]

I doubt they would put an entirely faked section in a video like that

They were literally just caught cropping a puppeteer out of a video and only bothered to come back and explain it after getting caught. That ENTIRE VIDEO was intentionally misleading to the point of faking. The video claiming the Tesla is driving itself (which is still up on the website) is ALSO entirely misleading and they faked what they claim to show.

Tesla is more than happy to make fake or misleading videos to lie to their fans and the public. It’s silly to pretend they wouldn’t.

 

[peterford]

You know, I nodded along to that until you got to the point where somehow you'd rather the at-home white supremacist be the wolf than the chinese people from afar.

And that's where you lost me, at least. Although the saying that two wrongs don't make a right often demands context there is little context at all in the statement that one wrong can not be made better by a worse and more immediate wrong.

Musk is a man who cheers 'Mein Kampf' rhetoric on the bullhorn he recently bought, showing he's willing to spend 40+ billion dollars just to strike a blow against, in essence, nazis getting choked out of public participation by the sane and rational. The factories Teslas are built in are almost literally klan halls, and in the offices of Tesla hearing a manager describe the few colored underlings to work there with the N-word is just tuesday.

This is one of the most influential people in the world and especially within western politics and US politics in particular. Directly putting money into his pockets is a verifiable contribution towards the goal of undoing western democracy. Something I don't see happening even if you were to buy a BYD.

And that entire either/or debate was disingenuous and flawed to begin with, because nothing stops you from getting a Kia, Hyundai or Bolt for that matter, if your mind was set on not supporting China. There are viable alternatives which are neither BYD or Tesla these days.

You may not be reflexively sinophobic but you're certainly reflexively exculpatory towards Elon Musk. In a way so blatant I'd almost have to ask why you're pulling that flawed a premise into the debate and propping it up as an argument.

Note that in my original post I said "as soon as we're generally electric, I don't care about Tesla". But hey, we don't do nuance on the internet, do we.

Check my posting history if you want - I've said many times that Musk is a terrible person. I was too positive on him for too long I admit. I was very wrong.

At no point do I complement Musk in any recent post. I talk about Tesla.

 

[Scary Devil Monastery]

Note that in my original post I said "as soon as we're generally electric, I don't care about Tesla". But hey, we don't do nuance on the internet, do we.

Check my posting history if you want - I've said many times that Musk is a terrible person. I was too positive on him for too long I admit. I was very wrong.

At no point do I complement Musk in any recent post. I talk about Tesla.

No, and that makes it even weirder why you keep clinging to the implication that there is either BYD or there is Tesla. I would get it if your general idea from the start was a general attempt to ethics in consumption, but it's very much not. You're pointing at one confirmed thug, and one person not confirmed to be a thug, operating out of a bad nation-state, and decided to support the confirmed thug as if that was the only viable choice.

Just ad notam - I did check your posting history and that I did is one reason why I assume a certain amount of confusion on your part, because when the argument you defend can be boiled down to "I've only got <false premise> to go on and therefore i need to <horrifyingly weird conclusion>" Someone needs to tell you that your line of thought has gone off the rails.

Because here are the fairly self-evident statements of fact we can point to;

1) China, as a political entity, is a bad actor.
2) China's political resilience to change and immunity to western censure over their genocidal behavior in-country can be largely ascribed to the way they own the supply chain of western industries.
3) China's own industries do not contribute significantly to the successes of the PRC as a polity.
4) Buying a BYD vehicle primarily benefits Wang Chuanfu of whom not that much is known except that unlike Musk he's a self-made man who apparently still lives fairly frugally and has literal zero impact on western - or for that matter, chinese - politics.
5) Musk is the wealthiest man in the world and is an open advocate of fascism, racism, and bona fide nazi rhetoric.
6) Purchasing a Tesla directly benefits Musk.
7) Benefits to Musk becomes direct fiscal and political benefits to US fascism, racism, and nazism in an era where there is already real risk that US democracy is toppled.

I don't know the conditions of Chuanfu's factory workers but, for the sake of argument, let's assume they're overworked, underpaid wage slaves all engaging in various degrees of bigotry, just like Musk's, and take them out of both sides of the douchebaggery equation.

You buy a BYD you end up giving the PRC some money in the form of what they tax Chuanfu. That's it. Predictable harm.
You buy a Tesla you might as well have given the entire profits to the american white supremacy movement. Wholesale.

That is already a whopping difference and if you think these two harmful outcomes are comparable I suggest you go back and check your logic again. One outcome here is clearly verifiably worse than the other, from the pov of ethics.

And, of course, 'As soon as we're generally electric' rings a bit hollow when you've got Kia, Hyundai, Land Rover, Ford, Audi, BMW and others churning out viable competition to both TSLA and BYD. There's no need to consider either BYD or Tesla today.

 

[babydocmd]

$293 - July 18th 2023
$208 - January 24th 2024

Brutal six months, down 29%.

It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy

No wonder he’s asking for an increase in his stake in the company, that said, if the board gives it to him, there should be a massive shareholder revolt.

He won't get it. No Board of a public company would ever be able to get away with such a wanton waste of resources. Tesla share price is based on FUTURE value with baked in cars, solar, battery storage, and AI. If CEO Musk delivers he will EARN an unrivaled fortune. He currently has 715 million shares and 300 million options. Issuing him more shares makes zero sense. Once he exercises those options, the man will literally make a billion dollars every time the share price increases by $1. That's literally a textbook description of being invested in a company's success.

 

[ringobob]

They were literally just caught cropping a puppeteer out of a video and only bothered to come back and explain it after getting caught. That ENTIRE VIDEO was intentionally misleading to the point of faking. The video claiming the Tesla is driving itself (which is still up on the website) is ALSO entirely misleading and they faked what they claim to show.

Tesla is more than happy to make fake or misleading videos to lie to their fans and the public. It’s silly to pretend they wouldn’t.

I literally said they're intentionally misleading, I've said it in a few comments now. I'm not pretending anything. Maybe the issue is that I don't find the demonstration that impressive, so I see no reason to believe it's fake. If it were showing something revolutionary (like the self driving video in question), I might feel differently. I'm not saying they're unlikely to fake anything ever. I'm saying there's no reason to fake anything in this video. As another commenter said earlier in this thread, Tesla hasn't done anything or shown anything or claimed anything that couldn't be accomplished by anyone with enough money and the ability to attract talent, in the time that they've been working on this. They imply it, by attempting to crop out the puppeteer, but they don't claim it. It is, therefore, misleading, not fake. It's relying on people's assumptions, and only correcting them when forced.

If they start showing something worth faking (like the self driving video), then I'll be more skeptical.

 

[Snark218]

I literally said they're intentionally misleading, I've said it in a few comments now. I'm not pretending anything. Maybe the issue is that I don't find the demonstration that impressive, so I see no reason to believe it's fake. If it were showing something revolutionary (like the self driving video in question), I might feel differently. I'm not saying they're unlikely to fake anything ever. I'm saying there's no reason to fake anything in this video. As another commenter said earlier in this thread, Tesla hasn't done anything or shown anything or claimed anything that couldn't be accomplished by anyone with enough money and the ability to attract talent, in the time that they've been working on this. They imply it, by attempting to crop out the puppeteer, but they don't claim it. It is, therefore, misleading, not fake. It's relying on people's assumptions, and only correcting them when forced.

If they start showing something worth faking (like the self driving video), then I'll be more skeptical.

Is that supposed to make it better? A lie by implication or omission is still a lie, just as much as a lie of commission. Am I supposed to cut anybody any slack when they lie just because the lie is a bad, obvious one?

 

[thekaj]

I do wonder what the market is they're trying to target. A robot with a general-purpose AI for household chores or receptionist duties would be immensely useful and popular, but that's the stuff of sci-fi; we're a long way from general AI. That leaves industrial uses where the robot is programmed for each task, but for those you generally want a robot with a specialized shape, not an android. And that market is already well-supplied by other companies.

It's standard Musk. Loudly proclaim that he's going to revolutionize an existing system by doing X, something no one else is doing. Everyone in that area notes that the reason why no one is doing X is that because it was tried decades ago and found to be less efficient/impossible/impractical. Musk spends years and millions upon millions of dollars trying to do X, only to come to the same conclusion that everyone else did decades ago, and then has to spend several more years in redesign to come up with something close to what everyone else does.

Happened when he claimed he was going to make a factory that was all robots. Happened with the design of the Cybertruck. Happening with the Boring Company. My guess is that within 5 years, the "Optimus" line of robots will look suspiciously like existing robots, as his engineers baby step him into understanding that the human body is a terrible platform to design functional robots around.

 

[Celery Man]

Of course, that's been happening for decades: https://www.statista.com/statistics/185369/median-hourly-earnings-of-wage-and-salary-workers/. There was a covid-bump near the end of that chart (that looks much larger than it actually was -- note the y-axis labels), but purchasing power hasn't really budged since the 1970's.

However, the amount of money hoarded by the 1% has increased non-stop in that time.

 

[TimeWinder]

If they start showing something worth faking (like the self driving video), then I'll be more skeptical.

To this point, specifically, it's incredibly worth faking, because at this point demonstrating that there are alternate technologies making rapid progress toward becoming products is the only thing propping up Tesla's share ridiculous share price.

It also fails the sniff test. They go from faking a robot with a human in a suit, to robots that can't even stand by themselves, to multi-talented robots that can do all sorts of delicate manipulations, to having to fake stuff with a puppeteer again? That doesn't seem like a normal progression.

And that's before we consider Elon's constant, unending lying about basically everything. He's literally under an SEC injunction because he lies about stuff to manipulate the stock too often.

 

[ringobob]

Is that supposed to make it better? A lie by implication or omission is still a lie, just as much as a lie of commission. Am I supposed to cut anybody any slack when they lie just because the lie is a bad, obvious one?

No? When did I say that? We're talking about what's in the video. I see no reason to believe there's anything fake in the egg video. This isn't a quality judgement about Tesla, it's just a practical assessment of what we're seeing in the video. I'm not saying that misleading instead of faking is somehow a laudable improvement. I'm saying that I see no reason not to take that egg video at face value, so long as you don't assume that it's doing more than it is, and Tesla is making efforts to make it appear that it's doing more than it is with clever cropping and showing stuff that isn't as difficult as they want you to believe it is.

Just because they mislead with ease doesn't mean that the egg is fake. That's all I'm saying. It's a real robot, it's a real egg, and Tesla can actually accomplish that, and there's no good reason to believe they couldn't. The danger is that people start to believe Tesla can't do anything, and then having that belief undermined when Tesla actually does do something (and no matter what, no one can deny that Tesla has actually accomplished plenty during its time as a company), they might turn around and think that all those nay sayers were wrong and get sucked back in to the Musk RDF.

It doesn't help anyone to exaggerate Tesla's failures any more than it helps to exaggerate Tesla's successes. It doesn't make Tesla an honest company I would trust with my money. It's just reality.

 

[ringobob]

To this point, specifically, it's incredibly worth faking, because at this point demonstrating that there are alternate technologies making rapid progress toward becoming products is the only thing propping up Tesla's share ridiculous share price.

It also fails the sniff test. They go from faking a robot with a human in a suit, to robots that can't even stand by themselves, to multi-talented robots that can do all sorts of delicate manipulations, to having to fake stuff with a puppeteer again? That doesn't seem like a normal progression.

And that's before we consider Elon's constant, unending lying about basically everything. He's literally under an SEC injunction because he lies about stuff to manipulate the stock too often.

It's incredibly worth showing progress, and they're making progress, and it should be expected that they're making progress. The early days of any development project seem to grow by leaps and bounds, because there's so little at the beginning. Every new addition adds a ton to the platform.

If a company wanted to jump into any development area, and had the resources and ability to recruit the appropriate talent, I would expect to see progress like this over this timeframe. It's easy to show progress (that doesn't break new ground) with a competent team and a couple years. The one and only constant that is true about Tesla (and Musk companies in general) is that they have a practically unrivaled ability to recruit talent.

They still have yet to show anything that actually impresses the robotics industry. The only people saying there's anything worth crowing about in these videos are the folks arguing whether it shows Tesla is way ahead, or way behind. It's neither, it's just showing Tesla solving problems that have been solved, and not solving problems that haven't been solved yet.

 

[Peflitydap]

Tesla really was the first who built a viable battery car that could hold its own against traditional cars. Granted, it was expensive and poor quality.


It may surprise you that I'm actually defending Tesla here. But credit where credit is due, IMO.

To me the big innovation that Tesla did was be a brand new company going into the automotive sector, and in a completely distinct portion of the automotive sector. Successful brand new automotive companies hadn't existed in the US for decades. Even the Big Three were closing down marques. Tesla's success inspired the new wave of EV only companies by showing it was possible.

 

[Uragan]

Ok, I'll bite. I am OP.

I'll bite because I don't want to be - even incorrectly - repeatedly described as Xenophobic or Sinophobic. What's also amusing here is that you also assumed I'm American, which I'm not - partially why the original post specifically called out "globally". So, two great assumptions by you from the off.

Where did I assume you were American? And what's the other assumption? Your post looks very xenophobic/sinophobic considering you present a false binary position: either a person can buy a Tesla or they can buy a EV made from a Chinese OEM... and you give no context as to why a person should avoid buying from a Chinese OEM other than the OEM is Chinese... as seen below:

I want an electric car future ASAP and if Tesla have to be the wolf at the door of the established manufacturers, I'd rather them than the Chinese manufacturers. Globally, that is.

You have forgotten that there are other non-Chinese OEMs that are not also Tesla. You have other choices for an EV right now that don't fit into your binary categories.

The reason I didn't go into detail is because - get this - not every post on the internet has to describe every facet of every point that's described to every reader's satisfaction. If that was done you'd end up with the traditional wall of text that everyone hates and everyone skips over. But, we'll be on page six here, so why not go a little longer.

Then don't get bent out of shape when someone interprets your post a certain way because you neglected to add context that would clarify your position. I'm not saying you have to go down every rabbit hole and explain every bit of nuance to death in every single post... but words (or the omission thereof) have intentional meaning.

The Chinese people have achieved astonishing things over the past four decades, they've worked to a degree that most in the west I think have no real idea. As might be expected of a notionally communist country, it's been leashed in the direction of the greater good rather than the individual, but what they've achieved economically is incredible. Of course, someone needs to buy that stuff and as such they have contributed an enormous amount of good to large parts of the rest of the world.

What does this have to do with shunning Chinese EV OEMs exactly other than an ad hominem? (Specifically argumentum ad passiones or appeal to emotion.)

One fundamental issue though is that (as I understand it) there's very little social welfare there - when you're old you have to rely on your family and your investments. The result of that is that people don't tend to perform consumer spending and instead invest - with the hard work, this has been linked to staggering growth infrastructure and business'. People have been investing in a way that doesn't make sense to a western MBA who looks at this situation and willingly outsources most of the local work out to people who are willing to work very hard for very little short term return.

Okay... That sounds pretty similar to the US in some respects. Are you going to tell us that we should shun American EV OEMs because of the lack of social welfare in the US.

It's also true however that the Chinese government is only really interested in China. To an extent that could be said to be myopic. Look at Belt and Road. Look at the nine-dash line. From their angle, this is all done to help the People (at least until the arrival of the current President, removing term limits rarely ends well) but from outside it has an enormously extractive feel.

One could make that argument about any government: i.e., they put their own country's interests above the interests of others. And Belt and Road does serve the PRC's interests in a myriad of ways. While One Belt One Road does help out the countries that it touches, it significantly positively impacts the Chinese economy and diplomatic ties to those countries, for example.

Now, are the Chinese government the "bad guys" here? Are all the other nations angels? My God no. I'm British. We have sinned so much. We have sinned against the Chinese. But historical of deeper or more recent note do not forgive current actions.

No one is framing the PRC as "the bad guys" or that every other nation is "angelic" in nature. What does Britain's role in helping shape the current socio-economic and political landscape have to do with your xenophobia/sinophobia other than to deflect from the criticism?

So you have a people who have little choice but to invest. You have a government who have a very distinctive view on how to help "the people". You have business leaders in other countries absolutely willing to save every penny. You have consumers absolutely willing to save every penny.

What do you end up with? A willingness to pretend you're still a developing nation and a willingness to dump onto the market in such a way as to, deliberately or not and with assistance or not, gut industries in other nations around the world. Then the willingness of the government to exploit this politically with a view on helping their own people - as governments should do!

Okay... and? What's the point of bringing this up?

Now the USA and Europe have been burnt on this before and are both big enough and ugly enough to shut their markets to China either by obvious tariff or by less obvious subsidy. The IRA in America is very much an attempt at this. But this doesn't impact the rest of the world - Chinese manufacturers can still dump their increasingly good and very cheap high tech on those countries and thus out compete the American and European manufacturers who would otherwise have hoped to sell there. This is what I meant when I said globally in the first post.

None of that negates that there are other EV OEMs out there that aren't Tesla or Chinese.

Now I say again. Are the Chinese unique in this? Not at all. Look at the history of the UK, US and even the trade surpluses of Germany over the past decade and how that has impacted the overall economics of the European Union.

But they need a balance, a counterweight. And so I return to my original point: I'd rather Tesla be the wolf than the Chinese manufacturers.

Now, please feel free to tell me that I'm being reflexively sinophobic, maybe that I'm uninformed and haven't thought about this.

The fact that you reflexively jumped to an erroneous binary conclusion to the EV market, i.e. Tesla or China, still feels pretty xenophobic or sinophobic, considering there are other options out there. The fact that you would rather put money in the pocket of a right-wing racist nutjob who is using his money (and subsequently your money) to undermine Western democracies in order to position authoritarian demagogues into power... says a lot as @Scary Devil Monastery already pointed out.

 

[Peflitydap]

No, and that makes it even weirder why you keep clinging to the implication that there is either BYD or there is Tesla. I would get it if your general idea from the start was a general attempt to ethics in consumption, but it's very much not. You're pointing at one confirmed thug, and one person not confirmed to be a thug, operating out of a bad nation-state, and decided to support the confirmed thug as if that was the only viable choice.

You do understand that there are a couple of dozen Chinese EV manufacturers, right? Not just BYD. Figure 4 in this link shows that the State Owned SAIC was outcompeting BYD in recent years in EV exports. Musk pretty much just bosses around his employees and customers and whines about what countries expect from him. Xi Xinping bosses around other countries.

 

[Peflitydap]

Okay... That sounds pretty similar to the US in some respects. Are you going to tell us that we should shun American EV OEMs because of the lack of social welfare in the US.

The US is less than Europe, but certainly greater than the PRC, in needs-based welfare.

None of that negates that there are other EV OEMs out there that aren't Tesla or Chinese.

Wake us when they're exporting on the same order of magnitude, please.

I'm personally mostly okay with buying Chinese for regular products. Like all other countries, most of them are fine people and I want to support them. I'll feel much better though when the state isn't shutting down protests. And even better when the people have more of a direct say on who governs them federally.

 

[Uragan]

Wake us when they're exporting on the same order of magnitude, please.

So, you're shifting the goalposts. There are other OEMs that offer EVs that aren't Chinese in origin or Tesla, which was the point.

 

[Peflitydap]

So, you're shifting the goalposts. There are other OEMs that offer EVs that aren't Chinese in origin or Tesla, which was the point.

peterford's goalposts aren't mine. Even he, IIRC without looking back, was talking about leading things. As of now Tesla and Chinese manufacturers as a whole are leading the pack. That is the other point.

Hyundai seems to be doing okay in fully-EV production. It's not expecting to expand sales much this year, but hopefully it does once its new plants come on line.

The thing about the Chinese manufacturers is the really low entry-level pricing on some of their models. I really wonder if anyone else is going to be able to meet that for a full-EV. People like me are going to be stuck either buying Chinese if they're ever available where we live, or at best plug-in hybrids.

 

[sjl]

Just watched it, I don't see any evidence of magnets, what it looks like to me is that the robot got it close to all the way set down, and then dropped it into the receptacle the last few millimeters. It was a tray made to hold (and cook) eggs, you could drop it into place and it would look just like that.

I'm saying that I see no reason not to take that egg video at face value, so long as you don't assume that it's doing more than it is, and Tesla is making efforts to make it appear that it's doing more than it is with clever cropping and showing stuff that isn't as difficult as they want you to believe it is.

I can see where you're coming from. That said, to make it absolutely clear for anybody else who's looking on: I'm referring to the video at
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpraXaw7dyc
, at about the 1:20 mark. To me, the shift in the egg's position is too abrupt for it to be a simple drop - it looks to me like it's jumping into place rather than dropping into place. (I even bumped the video quality up to 4K, just in case it might have been a lo-res artifact.. nope, looks even more fake to me at the higher resolution.)

My response to your comment about "Tesla ... making efforts to make it appear that it's doing more than it is ..." is that using a fake egg - that won't break if the pressure is too much - is very much in alignment with the values they have shown in their prior videos (as well as their customer service, etc., etc., etc.)

I am not prepared to simply accept that the egg is genuine. To me, it is far more likely that it is fake, because that would make the "demonstration" much easier.

Which, okay, probably says more about the level of my cynicism in all things Tesla than it does anything else... but is there anybody here who can genuinely and sincerely say, given all their track records in all their promises about things like full self driving and suchlike, that it is wrong to be so cynical?

they're showing us a partial success and not really saying anything about it so people are free to imagine it's doing more than it actually is

Which, to me, is a form of lying. They are implying something that is false, and letting people fill in the gaps. That is a form of lying, even if they are not - technically - saying anything false themselves.

Time, I guess, will tell. It usually does.

 

[ringobob]

To me, the shift in the egg's position is too abrupt for it to be a simple drop - it looks to me like it's jumping into place rather than dropping into place.

To be clear, I definitely see the motion you're seeing, to me that motion appears influenced by the egg-shaped tray it's dropping into. It's not just dropping down, it's dropping down and shifting slightly as it settles into the bottom of the curve.

I'm certainly not saying it's definitely not a fake egg, but ignoring the context of Tesla's known willingness to deceive, and I'm not arguing against that, looking purely at the video itself I don't see anything that makes me think the egg is fake. Perhaps, given our mutual acknowledgement of Tesla's less than total honesty, this is splitting hairs, but I go back to there's no real benefit to making any assumptions about the egg being fake. Anyone who is absolutely convinced Musk can do no wrong will ignore anything outside the video, and won't be convinced by what they see in the video, and anyone that can see Musk and Tesla for what they are doesn't need the egg to be fake to not trust Musk or Tesla.

I see these sorts of things more as a distraction. If the egg was fake, that'd be an embarrassment for Tesla, but we're unlikely to ever get a reliable final answer on that. Likewise, if it were proven to be true, it just gives ammo to Musk's sycophants for nothing. They get a "win" because the robot did something that isn't as impressive as they make it seem. Just let it not be impressive. A quick google tells me it's been done at least twice before, though one of them isn't really a "hand" in any sense of the word (though, it can actually pick up an egg yolk without breaking it, so that's pretty cool).

 

[peterford]

Where did I assume you were American? And what's the other assumption? Your post looks very xenophobic/sinophobic considering you present a false binary position: either a person can buy a Tesla or they can buy a EV made from a Chinese OEM... and you give no context as to why a person should avoid buying from a Chinese OEM other than the OEM is Chinese... as seen below:


You have forgotten that there are other non-Chinese OEMs that are not also Tesla. You have other choices for an EV right now that don't fit into your binary categories.


Then don't get bent out of shape when someone interprets your post a certain way because you neglected to add context that would clarify your position. I'm not saying you have to go down every rabbit hole and explain every bit of nuance to death in every single post... but words (or the omission thereof) have intentional meaning.


What does this have to do with shunning Chinese EV OEMs exactly other than an ad hominem? (Specifically argumentum ad passiones or appeal to emotion.)


Okay... That sounds pretty similar to the US in some respects. Are you going to tell us that we should shun American EV OEMs because of the lack of social welfare in the US.


One could make that argument about any government: i.e., they put their own country's interests above the interests of others. And Belt and Road does serve the PRC's interests in a myriad of ways. While One Belt One Road does help out the countries that it touches, it significantly positively impacts the Chinese economy and diplomatic ties to those countries, for example.


No one is framing the PRC as "the bad guys" or that every other nation is "angelic" in nature. What does Britain's role in helping shape the current socio-economic and political landscape have to do with your xenophobia/sinophobia other than to deflect from the criticism?


Okay... and? What's the point of bringing this up?


None of that negates that there are other EV OEMs out there that aren't Tesla or Chinese.


The fact that you reflexively jumped to an erroneous binary conclusion to the EV market, i.e. Tesla or China, still feels pretty xenophobic or sinophobic, considering there are other options out there. The fact that you would rather put money in the pocket of a right-wing racist nutjob who is using his money (and subsequently your money) to undermine Western democracies in order to position authoritarian demagogues into power... says a lot as @Scary Devil Monastery already pointed out.

Ah, my mistake, I assumed you were discussing in good faith. Not something I'll repeat.

 

[kkeane]

To me the big innovation that Tesla did was be a brand new company going into the automotive sector, and in a completely distinct portion of the automotive sector. Successful brand new automotive companies hadn't existed in the US for decades. Even the Big Three were closing down marques. Tesla's success inspired the new wave of EV only companies by showing it was possible.

There were tons of companies that did that - what sets Tesla apart here wasn't that they innovated the concept, but that they didn't sink. That, too, is due to Elon Musk, who was willing to capitalize the company with his PayPal billions.

On the detail level, the real innovation was that (pre-Musk) Tesla recognized that laptop batteries have become cheap, powerful and available enough to be used in a car (albeit only at the time a small number of expensive cars).

 

[Peflitydap]

I can see where you're coming from. That said, to make it absolutely clear for anybody else who's looking on: I'm referring to the video at
, at about the 1:20 mark. To me, the shift in the egg's position is too abrupt for it to be a simple drop - it looks to me like it's jumping into place rather than dropping into place.

Just watched it for the first time from your video. It looked that way to me too until I slowed the video to 1/4 speed, and then it looked completely normal. I'm in agreement with ringobob that it looks to be the shape of the receiver that makes it look weird at normal speed.

 

[TimeWinder]

Just watched it for the first time from your video. It looked that way to me too until I slowed the video to 1/4 speed, and then it looked completely normal. I'm in agreement with ringobob that it looks to be the shape of the receiver that makes it look weird at normal speed.

Either way, it's deeply telling that in light of Elon/Tesla's claims for great advances in robotics, their habit for deception has poisoned their reputation to the point that the best argument in their favor right now is "Well, one of the four+ presentations they made might not have been fake/unsuccessful."

 

[Peflitydap]

There were tons of companies that did that - what sets Tesla apart here wasn't that they innovated the concept, but that they didn't sink. That, too, is due to Elon Musk, who was willing to capitalize the company with his PayPal billions.

On the detail level, the real innovation was that (pre-Musk) Tesla recognized that laptop batteries have become cheap, powerful and available enough to be used in a car (albeit only at the time a small number of expensive cars).

Yep, that's exactly what I was saying. They took the jump and successfully pulled off a sustaining new automobile manufacturer in the US. Something that hadn't been done for decades. If you look at this list you'll see a variety of manufacturers (Stutz, DMC, Zimmer, Vector, probably a few others I missed) have tried it since the 70s, but they all folded relatively quickly (though Stutz made it 24 years with extremely limited manufacturing).

 

[jock2nerd]

The market doesn't consider it to be a car company. Just look at the P/E.

Some quick Googling shows:

Toyota Motor Corporation has a P/E of 10.4, with a Market Cap of $271B.
Mercedes Benz Group has a P/E of 4.3, with a Market Cap of $70B.
Volkswagen Group has a P/E of 4.2, with a Market Cap of $59B.
Honda Motor Company has a P/E of 8.5, with a Market Cap of $52B.
General Motors Company has a P/E of 4.9, with a Market Cap of $47.5B.
Ford Motor Company has a P/E of 7.2, with a Market Cap of $44B.
Hyundai Motor Company has a P/E of 2.5, with a Market Cap of $33B.
Nissan Motor Company has a P/E of 5, with a Market Cap of $15B.
Mazda Motor Corporation has a P/E of 6.5, with a Market Cap of $7B.

Even the current superstar, BYD Company (which now sells more EVs than Tesla), has a P/E of 18.7, with a Market Cap of $74B.

Tesla has a P/E of 67, with a Market Cap of $660B.

Compare this to Apple's P/E of 31.7, Microsoft's P/E of 39, or Alphabet's P/E of 31.

The market clearly doesn't even consider Tesla to be a large, stable tech company.

To find a comparable P/E in a large company, you need to look at examples like Nvidia (current P/E of 80). Right or wrong, the market clearly considers Tesla to have similar growth potential as Nvidia and its GPU compute business.

You are missing several critical items:
1) Debt load - as Tesla has very little debt and the legacy Automobile companies are saddled with very large amounts of debt
2) Obsolete assets - as the legacy Automobile companies have factories full of rapidly obsoleting assets
3) Stealerships - Tesla doesn't have them, and the legacy Automobile companies are currently stuck with them.

Having said all that, Tesla's stock is probably overvalued by half, which is disappointing to me as a shareholder, but eventually the P/E will trend to that of Apple.

 

[Uragan]

Ah, my mistake, I assumed you were discussing in good faith. Not something I'll repeat.

Guess you couldn't refute any of my points. Oh well.

 

[jock2nerd]

I thought Elon doesn't criticize China because of the whole capitalists line up with fascists to temporarily make more money line. Is that not true?

Not just that, but he pledged to "support socialism" in China, though since China has really been a Fascist country for several decades now, he really pledged to support that instead.

Note: For Americans who wouldn't recognize Socialism if they tripped over it, Fascism is the combination of (1) Autocratic government, (2) Capitalism, (3) Government control of 'private' companies.

 

[Uragan]

Note: For Americans who wouldn't recognize Socialism if they tripped over it, Fascism is the combination of (1) Autocratic government, (2) Capitalism, (3) Government control of 'private' companies.

Maybe don't talk down to your intended audience...

How does #3 comport with #2 exactly? While the basis of Fascism does have the government running some of the means of production, it didn't have control over all of it.

 

[TimeWinder]

Note: For Americans who wouldn't recognize Socialism if they tripped over it, Fascism is the combination of (1) Autocratic government, (2) Capitalism, (3) Government control of 'private' companies.

According to the self-proclaimed #1 news source in America and their viewers, "Socialism!" (capitalization and exclamation point required) is defined as "any time the government spends money in a way I don't like." (See also: "woke")

 

[jock2nerd]

BMW and other German makers had rain-sensing wipers that worked flawlessly over 25 years ago.

Part of Tesla’s problem is NIH.

Jivejebus said:


The fact that Tesla can't figure it out speaks volumes to their engineering.

I think the bigger problem is the CEO thinks everything can be solved in software, whereas you actually need the right sensors for the software to work properly.

Having said that, the auto-wipers generally work well on both of our Teslas, though that's in the Atlanta 'burbs, so other parts of the country/world may have different experiences. I generally find light or occasional rain to be the biggest problem, to which we tap the end of the left stalk to trigger a wipe.

Some of the problem is the cameras used to detect moisture are in a different part of the windshield, that occasionally triggers wipes when the windshield in front of the driver appears clear, and I suspect a bug splat near the camera as the culprit, so triggering the windshield washers usually fixes that.

BTW Removing the forward radar and ultrasonics was a terrible decision. We have a 2018 Model 3, with them and a 2023 Model Y without them. "Tesla Vision" is, IMHO, a design regression, but that goes back to my original point about the CEO.

 

[Peflitydap]

Maybe don't talk down to your intended audience...

How does #3 comport with #2 exactly? While the basis of Fascism does have the government running some of the means of production, it didn't have control over all of it.

It has power over all of them. E.g. Alibaba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alibaba_Group#Listing

In non-fascist countries the executive government could not do such a thing without having to go through a process of lawsuits and appeals.

But no, the PRC is not fascist because the corporations and employee syndicates don't have political power[1]. This was one of the fundamental tenets of classical fascism. I'd say on this tenet that the US (even with minimal union representation) is closer to classical fascism than the PRC. The PRC obviously has other tenets of fascism, but as a whole it's not really the same thing.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_fascism

Italian fascism promoted a corporatist economic system, whereby employer and employee syndicates are linked together in associations to collectively represent the nation's economic producers and work alongside the state to set national economic policy.[3] This economic system intended to resolve class conflict through collaboration between the classes.[4]

Edit: "tenant" to "tenet"

 

[jock2nerd]

Maybe don't talk down to your intended audience...

How does #3 comport with #2 exactly? While the basis of Fascism does have the government running some of the means of production, it didn't have control over all of it.

Fascism comes from the idea you can have private ownership of companies,while the (autocratic) government calls the shots. Economically superior to government ownership.

Mussolini was originally a Communist organizer and Fascism evolved from that, presumably when he realized the benefits of being feted and funded by the wealthy.

But Fascism rapidly deteriorates into Crony Capitalism (autocrats favoring their cronies) and upward corruption as the wealthy bribe the autocrats.
Disfavored capitalists do not do well in Fascist societies, ex: Jack Ma (et al) being sent to "re-education" camps in China, and the various Russian Oligarchs jumping out of 5th story windows

 

[jock2nerd]

I do wonder what the market is they're trying to target. A robot with a general-purpose AI for household chores or receptionist duties would be immensely useful and popular, but that's the stuff of sci-fi; we're a long way from general AI. That leaves industrial uses where the robot is programmed for each task, but for those you generally want a robot with a specialized shape, not an android. And that market is already well-supplied by other companies.

IHMO, without supporting evidence, I think the target for the robot is SpaceX. A lot of benefits to using humanoid robots on Mars.

 

[Snarky Robot]

You are missing several critical items:
1) Debt load - as Tesla has very little debt and the legacy Automobile companies are saddled with very large amounts of debt

This comes up a lot from people defending Tesla, but it’s well past time they realize that a good chunk of this legacy auto “debt” is likely just consumer financing, which has been known for years. In Q3 2023, 86% of Ford’s “debt” was through their internal financing. It’s booked at debt, but it makes them money (because they get interest).

In other words, folks who have a bias towards Tesla are looking at money that a consumer owes to a “legacy auto” company and going on about how Tesla doesn’t have those debts, when in fact what they’re looking at is a massive profit center. The fact that Tesla doesn’t have such a profit center isn’t a good thing.

Edit: found a link for the claim about “debt”
Edit 2: added one specifically for Ford in 2023

 

[Snarky Robot]

It’s also the case that debt isn’t inherently a bad thing. Borrowing $15 billion at an attractive rate is generally better than blowing $15 billion of your cash reserves.

 

[Peflitydap]

This comes up a lot from people defending Tesla, but it’s well past time they realize that a good chunk of this legacy auto “debt” may just be consumer financing. In other words, folks who have a bias towards Tesla are looking at money that a consumer owes to a “legacy auto” company and going on about how Tesla doesn’t have those debts, when in fact what they’re looking at is a massive profit center. The fact that Tesla doesn’t have such a profit center isn’t a good thing.

Edit: found a link for the claim about “debt”

Greatly informative link, but also funnily dated.

The company had over $67 billion in cash at the end of their last quarter. Heck, they could buy Tesla (TSLA) at a very generous premium and still have some left for snacks for the board room.

...

Lets look briefly at Wells Fargo (WFC) a highly respected and sought after large US bank.

 

[Snarky Robot]

Greatly informative link, but also funnily dated.

Funnily enough, I intentionally went with such a dated reference to show how old this misunderstanding is. And then I realized that might be misunderstood (because I couldn’t figure out a good way to phrase it without rewriting the whole post) and added one from 2023 to compensate.