Europeans have still not forgotten the impact of WW2. Musk sieg heiling on live TV (twice!!!) is not something they take lightly. Tesla sales of cratered over there, rightfully so, because of his completely unforced error.
I was in Italy over the summer and they seemed to universally detest musk, and trump there. So much, in fact, that it is embarrassing to be a US citizen in Europe with these fools “representing” the US.
did you meet people who base buying a car off of who the car company owner supported in a foreign (to them) election?
or would you say these were ordinary people or more the kind of people paying attention to international events? (genuine question).
I get that to an american it's contentious, but imagine not buying a toyota car or samsung phone because the powerful head of that company gave huge amounts to a conservative politician in their country. That's how I look at elon/trump in the us, and given I never hear normal people (not reddit/hackernews/guardian) talking about ANY of this stuff, I'd guess I'm not alone.
I'm in Portugal and I have definitely met people outside of tech who talk about Musk in ways that I'm pretty sure mean they would not consider buying Teslas.
Same applies to some friends in France.
I assume the topic comes up more with me because I lived in the US for a long time before moving back to Europe, but I'm guessing their opinions are there even if the topic doesn't come up as often in conversations with other locals, for example.
Considering he is a fascist, makes nazi sign, spent hundreds of millions of the money he made to elect a mad man, yes, that’s enough to influence me not to buy their cars.
Do I know who the CEOs of all car companies vote for? No.
But also none of them spent so much capital electing Trump and threatened to destroy Canada’s sovereignty so I guess I make my consumer choices with the info I have.
It's weird when you see an account like this on HN (a tech site) and when you check their comment history the only comments more than a few words long are in defense of American right wing political talking points.
It definitely feels like there's been an uptick in the past few months of far right brigading. There's been a number of times where I've seen incredibly low effort and inflammatory posts flag-killed from recent accounts only to be vouched for and revived.
I’m European and nobody cares about WW2. References to that period of time do not go beyond punchlines. I have no idea why Tesla sales are cratering but this isn’t it.
> Meanwhile, Tesla's Chinese competitor BYD (BYDDY), which sells a mix of pure EVs and hybrids, reported sales jumping 207% to 17,470 units sold in Europe. Another major China rival, SAIC, saw sales climb 46% to just under 24,000 vehicles sold.
From January to October this year, BYD has already sold nearly 140,000 units in Europe, an astonishing increase. Even setting aside people’s personal feelings about Musk, the main reason is probably that Tesla no longer has much competitive advantage. The BYD he once openly mocked with “have you seen their cars?” and laughed about by end up completely defeating Tesla in the European market
Personally, the one I most want to buy in the future is the Yangwang series, even though it’s very expensive. Or the series that comes with the drone feature.
The BYD cars are starting to look quite nice too. I saw one the other day that must have been a Seal and thought "that's a cool looking car what is it? huh a BYD"
You would never guess this while driving around in my small European country. The amount of Teslas is baffling and I still see very new ones every day.
- their cars keep on "deprecating" controls, such as turn signal and drive select stalks, mechanical door releases, defog, dashboard and other critical controls. unsafe and a cheapo move.
- the model y looks ugly now, especially lighting. the older version looks nice, and was a best-seller.
- cybertruck
all of this just hands market share over to the competition, which has appeared.
Tesla's stale line-up is extremely boring compared to the competition. Americans don't have access to the broad market of EV's due to their extreme market protectionism.
Investors have a lot of faith in Elan because of his track record of achieving very unlikely challenges (design and mass produce electric cars, design and launch rockets, ...).
The problem is that a lot of its supporters and investors cannot distinguish between solving complicated problems (the ones Elon Musk excels at) and complex problems (the ones Elon Musk is trying solve now: FSD, robotics, etc...).
For reference, a complicated problem is one that you can break down into pieces and solve each individual piece within some tolerance and as a result solve the whole problem. For example, how do I build a rocket that can get X kg of load at a given orbit or how do I design an electric car to transport 4 people 200 miles.
Complex problems are problems you cannot break into pieces and plan for before hand, usually because you have unknown unknows and you have a lot of feedback loops (when you change something it changes something else you though you had already solved). This are the types of challenges Elon is taking on now: FSD, robotics, etc...
While Musk's antics and politics definitely have a part to play, it's also obvious that Tesla hasn't innovated nearly as much and their cars are becoming outdated in an EV landscape of constant innovation. Their last big play (The Cybertruck) was horrendous both in design and execution.
FSD keeps causing fatalities and Tesla has tried to obfuscate and delete the crash data on more than one occasion, data which implicates FSD being liable for the crash.
That's a party trick unless it can drive me while I'm taking a nap in the backseat. If I still need to be paying full attention to potentially intervene at any time, what's the point?
I think the product is good. But, I won't buy one until Elon either admits to and apologizes for all of his past bad acts, or has no control over the company anymore. Unfortunately, I think neither is likely.
It's baffling to me that TSLA shareholders can see their CEO's antics (Nazi salute on global television, DOGE, splitting time between idk how many companies, being erratic on Twitter, committing securities fraud ("funding secured")), and still decide that this clown is the right man to lead the company.
I just can't get myself into a mindset where that makes sense.
TSLA has been a meme stock disconnected from fundamentals for a while and literally the only reason is Elon. If Elon wasn't CEO and there was just a normal person then they'd probably be priced a lot closer to the P/E ratio of a regular automaker (~5 instead of 288)
or would you say these were ordinary people or more the kind of people paying attention to international events? (genuine question).
I get that to an american it's contentious, but imagine not buying a toyota car or samsung phone because the powerful head of that company gave huge amounts to a conservative politician in their country. That's how I look at elon/trump in the us, and given I never hear normal people (not reddit/hackernews/guardian) talking about ANY of this stuff, I'd guess I'm not alone.
Same applies to some friends in France.
I assume the topic comes up more with me because I lived in the US for a long time before moving back to Europe, but I'm guessing their opinions are there even if the topic doesn't come up as often in conversations with other locals, for example.
Do I know who the CEOs of all car companies vote for? No.
But also none of them spent so much capital electing Trump and threatened to destroy Canada’s sovereignty so I guess I make my consumer choices with the info I have.
I might even say it's suspicious.
I'd guess this says more about your centrism (ie maybe what you perceive as american right wing are more universal than you realise)
> I might even say it's suspicious.
of what?
https://www.autoblog.com/news/94-of-germans-wouldnt-consider...
From January to October this year, BYD has already sold nearly 140,000 units in Europe, an astonishing increase. Even setting aside people’s personal feelings about Musk, the main reason is probably that Tesla no longer has much competitive advantage. The BYD he once openly mocked with “have you seen their cars?” and laughed about by end up completely defeating Tesla in the European market
Personally, the one I most want to buy in the future is the Yangwang series, even though it’s very expensive. Or the series that comes with the drone feature.
- their cars keep on "deprecating" controls, such as turn signal and drive select stalks, mechanical door releases, defog, dashboard and other critical controls. unsafe and a cheapo move.
- the model y looks ugly now, especially lighting. the older version looks nice, and was a best-seller.
- cybertruck
all of this just hands market share over to the competition, which has appeared.
I still won't buy one, but not because I think it's ugly.
The problem is that a lot of its supporters and investors cannot distinguish between solving complicated problems (the ones Elon Musk excels at) and complex problems (the ones Elon Musk is trying solve now: FSD, robotics, etc...).
For reference, a complicated problem is one that you can break down into pieces and solve each individual piece within some tolerance and as a result solve the whole problem. For example, how do I build a rocket that can get X kg of load at a given orbit or how do I design an electric car to transport 4 people 200 miles.
Complex problems are problems you cannot break into pieces and plan for before hand, usually because you have unknown unknows and you have a lot of feedback loops (when you change something it changes something else you though you had already solved). This are the types of challenges Elon is taking on now: FSD, robotics, etc...
(Apparently they’re looking at addressing that particular issue: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/573575/tesla-is-looking-to-...)
I just can't get myself into a mindset where that makes sense.
I think there are other people that can do Elon's role but definitely rare.