What Is Going Wrong At Tesla? – CleanTechnica

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

---

I wrote an article a few days ago that I think has to be classified as “venting.” Once being an extremely influential site covering Tesla’s positive, I feel reality has pushed us to cover more and more concerns at Tesla. Naturally, many Tesla fans (especially TSLA shareholders) have not been thrilled with this, and some even hate us — or, I should probably say, me — quite vehemently. I don’t think ignoring reality is smart, even when reality stings, and the push from so many people to ignore or deny reality has irritated me. So, as some of these concerns are “proven out” more, it’s hard to not let out some of that frustration with tribalism and reactionary hate. Also, I want to point out that there are many good people who hold a lot of shares of TSLA for good reasons and it can be very hard to make any changes in that world (stocks and money management). There’s a difference between wishing for the best (or having a very optimistic mindset) and hating on people for pointing out inconvenient truths and disagreeing with you on some things.

I was overwhelmed with appreciation from all of the support provided under that article — comments I just got to reading a few days later because of other obligations. Also, unsurprisingly, there were many, many superb comments under the article. I could — and maybe should — post many more of them in their own articles, but one popped out at me to repost, and then I decided to grab a few more under the similar theme to include here as well. The theme is in the headline: “What is going wrong at Tesla?” If you don’t think anything is going wrong, that’s fine, but I don’t see how anyone can objectively have that opinion when Tesla sales dropped in 2024 and it was not that long ago that we were being told Tesla sales should increase ~50% a year (on average) through 2030. On to the comments:

From disqus user “CMG300” (the comment that reminded me I could repost comments as new articles and just called for that to be done):

“I do not want Tesla to fail because they have a great product (that’s been allowed to stagnate) and a ton of smart people working for them (albeit, a notable absence of brains sitting at the top).

“As astute readers may have picked up, I feel that the biggest problem at Tesla is the CEO. He’s gone from hero to villain in a very short time.

“I feel he’s abandoned the mission (transitioning the world to sustainable energy). This is important because smart people are motivated to come work and give their best for Tesla BECAUSE it’s a worthwhile cause. As they’ve strayed, there’s less and less reason for top talent to stay and we’re seeing a continual brain bleed out of Tesla.

“To the extent that Musk even shows up for work at Tesla, he’s more interesting in throwing his weight around (firing the SC team, devoting all resources to autonomy), than to pushing the aging product lineup forward.

“Musk is also engaging in rampant ‘resource tunnelling’. That is to say, he’s doing his best to strip out the valuable parts of Tesla and redirect them to areas that he personally controls. The most recent example is his conflict of interest in AI. With him putting off Tesla acquiring GPUs so that his private AI company could have them. Another example is with the Twitter takeover. He pushed as many of the engineers at Twitter to quit as he could, then backfilled the gap by pulling over a bunch of Tesla software engineers on a temporary basis. Oh, and he broke his on rule and suddenly began advertising on Twitter/X.

“Oh, and how could I forget his politics. Not much needs to be said here other than he keeps attacking his natural customer base. As competition ramps up in the EV space, people will look elsewhere first because Musk is doing his best to make driving a Tesla a political statement.”

From Matthew Green:

“I’m pretty unhappy with Musk for his politics as well. But the biggest concern I have is the reduction in vehicle quality and features. My 2018 Model 3 has radar and sonar and turn signal stalks and a huge amount of power. The latest Model 3s have changed battery chemistry (fine, but not great) and removed the radar and sonar and the turn signal stalks. Trading ‘up’ to a new Model 3 means I will be effectively trading down to a lower-quality vehicle.

“The big issue here is that I understood the Model 3 to be a compromise back in 2018: it was hard to build a high-quality car at that price range, so some things needed to go. No dashboard (instead a center console), a very basic interior, etc. I still loved the car because nothing else like it existed. But now it’s six years later and some really nice stuff is showing up on the market. I expect Tesla to improve the car, not reduce its feature set. The long range is still nearly $50k before government rebates (and excluding FSD)! Why shouldn’t I buy a car that’s nicer than the one I have for that kind of money?”

citizenjs writes:

“For a few years, it’s been pretty obvious that Tesla would have (and now has proven to have) an issue with producing only 1.5 mass market models (3+Y) that they were slow to refresh. There was always going to be a ceiling for sales, with the only question being how many.

“The Toyota Corolla has spent decades as the top or near-top selling car in the world. But if Toyota announced one day that they would basically abandon all market segments except Corolla + a Corolla hatchback and make up the difference by just selling more Corollas, that would be universally (and correctly) regarded as an insane plan.”

*Rich writes:

“I feel that Tesla has peaked and is now in decline relative to their automotive products. The reason is similar to what has happened to many corporations in the past — ‘yes-men’ management, a ‘group-think’ board of directors and only a part-time CEO who uses an antiquated management style — authoritative rule by fear. (Much like his new boss.)

“Reminds me of the Osbourne Computer company who had it all at the beginning of their industry, portable personal computers. Then sales of their minimal product line stalled and they went bust, while the CEO had been too busy with speaking engagements and TV appearances about promised future products that came too little and too late.”

MadDash writes:

“I think that far too much emphasis is placed on the Robotaxi and FSD and not enough on increasing the model range. Tesla needs a small, cheaper car. There are a very limited number of buyers for a polarizing vehicle like the Cybertruck, and this vehicle has no future in Europe. Maybe Australia? Maybe China? I think Tesla is a great company, and I don’t care about Musks politics – I buy the product. If politics was such a major component in people’s buying strategy then nobody would buy a VW. VW spent decades lying to and deceiving its customers, and had factories in China using forced Labour (Uyghur people). I only see the Robots being suitable for industrial applications in the near future, and I think the Robots suffer the same problem as FSD – the big breakthrough is always just around the corner.”

To which, Username Taycan responded:

“If you’ve been following Tesla for any length of time you might have noticed that the optimism is always due to some project which is always just over the horizon, but never actually appears over it.

“We’ve had the factory that built the factory (atleast twice), we’ve had Tesla’s unsurpassable battery tech, their was the SC moat, the flying Roadster, allegedly a production ready Semi then Tesla is worthless without FSD, oooh we are an energy company now, no, no we are a robotics company … and an AI company…

“Something as simple as spending an afternoon sitting down with designers and sketching out a model 3 based pick up or a van, or … and extracting more value from the work they’ve already done would mark them out as what they are, a small car manufacturer, and would you do that if a significant portion of your wealth was leveraged against the Tesla share price?”

As always, our comments section is a gold mine. The comments are frequently better than the article itself. Thank you to all of you commenters mentioned above, and everyone else, for chiming in!