Tesla Sales Down 55% UK, 58% Spain, 59% Germany, 81% Netherlands, 93% Norway

At some point you have to wonder if there's some manipulation going on? Do 100s of bots buy and sell these stocks at specific times to keep the price up? Maybe there's an institutional investor or few who secretly back Elon and are part of a scheme?

A bit speculative reply but would appreciate if anybody links any such analysis'/investigations.

From my limited knowledge, I know people have been shorting Tesla based on fundamentals for a while now but haven't been successful.

They don’t care because Musk is marketing Tesla not as a car company but as a technology company (building robots and self driving rental service). And why does he do that? Maybe because his car sales are down…

Tesla is the world’s largest meme stock. People stopped applying rational pricing models, and rationality in general, to it a lot time ago.

There's a lot of true believers who think Tesla+Musk will crack self driving and/or humanoid robots any day now.

It’s Elon. It’s a meme stock. Fundamentals don’t matter. That his wealth is so wrapped up in the public valuation of Tesla I guess investors think he will do everything he can to keep th stock price up that is until SpaceX goes public the I think he won’t care because his wealth will come form that primarily.

>What exactly is the market pricing in?

Elon Musk.

And soon self drive will also work on Mars. Tesla and SpaceX are now joint at the hip.

This is a quote from Tesla latest earnings call, at 04 min..

"Because we're really moving into a future that is based on autonomy and so if you're interested in buying a Model S and X, now would be the time to order it, because we expect to wind down S and X production in next quarter and basically stop production of Model S and X next quarter. We'll obviously continue to support the Model S and X programs for as long as people have the vehicles, but we're gonna take the Model S and X production space in our Fremont factory and convert that into an Optimus factory, which will... with the long-term goal of having 1 million units a year of Optimus robots in the current S/X space in Fremont."

Saw lots of BYD in New Zealand recently. Probably more than I saw in Hong Kong.

Did Musk actually ever promise a $25k car?

> market cap of 400 billion

And hence Musk will be the CEO.

Tesla has a marketing department. It just refuses to talk to anyone except to talk at journalists...and journalists are so desperate to get quotes, they'll put up with it.

When Tesla started with the "no marketing department" nonsense, the press should have just stopped quoting them or covering them. Especially given that half the things Musk says are blatant lies.

TSLA market cap is 1.29 trillion today.

Of course, with a P/E ratio of over 381

> Tesla came from nowhere, developed essentially one world-dominating product (lumping the 3 and Y together), then the CEO basically ruined everything.

It seems strange to attribute only the fall -- and not the rise -- to the CEO

It's not a car company anymore, it's an energy company... Ahem, I mean self-driving... Er, maybe robots? ... Okay, that not going so well? How about quantum? That's probably a thing, right?

Tesla seems basically priced based on hype, rather than anything relating to its actual business.

It's a cult. Really. This is a stock devoid of any connection to reality, fundamentals, products, anything. All that matters is that Musk is on the nameplate. Do not bet against the ability of people in a cult to remain irrational in the face of overwhelming evidence. Do not touch the cult.

The market can remain irrational longer than we can remain solvent.

And possibly also the overt government corruption is priced in.

Still making fantastic profit every quarter. So there's really no issue.

God help us all if AI takes over the stock market and starts making rational decisions!

See also: meme stock

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme_stock

BYD is not, despite the press, really very big in Europe (though it is in a couple of individual countries, notably Spain). Europe-wide, Geely, the Chinese manufacturer that everyone forgets about, is actually bigger: https://eu-evs.com/marketShare/ALL/Groups/Bar/All-time-by-Qu...

A lot of it is subsidized by the Chinese government and also, BYD's sales in January were down 33%

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Musk may let it fall for a bit of a discount before rolling it up, Katamari-style, into SpaceX, and preserving his ridiculous Tesla package.

Gravity doesn't exist when you're in a K-hole. That's why we can become a extraterrestrial society in the next 5 years (repeat infinitely - in 5 years)

All EVs will naturally be more reliable than ICE cars because there are a lot less components that can break!

> Not having turn stalks

Aren't turn stalks back now?

2019 is far too new to make any pronouncements on reliability. Get back to us in 2035.

That's an uncommon experience.

Tesla is a very strong leader for faults, breakage, and costly maintenance/repairs in the 3-5 year old segment.

See any European comprehensive car inspection statistics report.

They don’t. Their market cap is higher than all the successful car companies combined. Becoming a successful car company would cost Elon half of his unrealized capital gains. It’s far better to be the company who is going to make us $30,000 robot slaves because that’s a bigger market and one he’ll own entirely.

The only question is what will be the next hype cycle when that succeeds about as well as the Cyber Truck.

SpaceX is making that majority (70%) of its revenue, and all of its profits from Starlink, and mostly from subscriptions.

98% of government money SpaceX receives is payment for services rendered, which they provide at a significantly lower cost than their competitors.

On the other hand, their competitors are routinely receiving actual handouts. For example, ULA used to receive a $1 billion annual "Launch Capability" stipend essentially just to keep their lights.

> Musk expects ~80% Of Tesla's value will be Optimus robots [1].

Well one way to do that is destroy so much of Tesla that the Optimus division is 80% of the (much smaller) value that remains.

There is a lot of anti-American sentiment on HN and Reddit. You may think it a bit ironic, but maybe the "YCombinator" part takes a back seat to "Hacker News".

+1 agreed. Everyone just seems to be an Elon hater (which is totally fine) but don't expect it from HN.

What market insight explains TSLA other than the same thing you'd hear on Reddit: that TSLA investors are a glassy-eyed, slack-jawed cult?

Are there any other explanations that can be steelmanned, just for the sake of an even-handed discussion? "We're going to build humanoid robots" just doesn't seem like enough. Neither does "We're going to build robotaxis", considering that other companies like Waymo are already well ahead of Tesla in that sector.

That’s a rather tortured logical contortion.

Isn’t it simpler to assume that he honestly holds the views he says he holds?

> Tesla now has to pitch electric cars to right-wing climate-change deniers, which is not a great strategy to adopt voluntarily or otherwise.

Part of the trouble here is that was always the case. The best selling "car" in the US is the Ford F-series truck. Followed by the Chevy truck, two Japanese SUVs, the Stellantis truck, the GMC rebadge of the Chevy truck, a Chevy SUV and then the Tesla Model Y.

To get anywhere they were always going to have to appeal to the people who buy trucks.

And when everything is polarized and your product is tribe-coded, how do you do that?

I suspect the error here was buying Twitter and then aligning with the party expected to take power instead of buying Twitter and then using it to shift things in the direction of depolarization.

It also doesn't help that the Cybertruck looks weird and costs too much. I mean you can blame attitudes as you like but then there's the fact that the F-150 starts at ~$40k and the Cybertruck starts at ~$80k. They need the battery prices to come down more before people are going to buy something that needs as much battery as a truck.

They didn't have to box themselves into "pitching electric cars to right-wing climate change deniers."

I've heard there are rumours there are least three or four countries outside the US. In several of them, EVs are selling like like hotcakes, or at least not with the current American militant hostility to the very concept.

I suspect they spent too long riding the horse they got here on though. Making an EV appealing to American premium buyers was a marketing coup. Selling it as a software-style "we'll continue iterating with OTA updates" was an interesting alternative to the model-year redesign when you're targeting an early-adopter audience used to regular software refreshes.

But now these things are a liability. Your product matrix is full of America-centric designs with iffy product-market fits in other markets (will a Model S or Cybertruck literally fit in some side streets of Europe or Asia?) You've failed to make a recognizable, exciting redesign of an existing model, so what you do have looks dated. You never really developed a reputation for quality or reliability. These are product problems that have nothing to do with politics. You could have addressed them and been a viable player elsewhere, even as the US continues to eat itself alive. (Of course, that might have involved not intentionally rubbing your brand all over a highly polarizing and toxic political scenario)

I was excited about Tesla back when they were a novelty. I can recall going to the mall with the Microsoft Store (remember those? They sold "bloatfree" PCs because it used to be the OEM who loaded them full of crapware instead of MS itself) to buy a Windows 8 tablet, and then looking across the aisle to see a Model S on display at the Tesla "not really a dealership" stall.

I bought like $2000 in shares back then, figuring one day, jokingly, they'd be worth enough to exchange for a new Tesla. It looks like I could probably get one now. But these days, I just want a BYD; they seem to be actually building a coherent product line and long-term vision.

I mean, there's no need to go all 4D chess here, really. Sometimes a crazy person who tweets about "woke mind viruses" at four in the morning is just a crazy person who tweets about "woke mind viruses" at four in the morning.

> but I wonder if the cause and effect are being conflated.

Tesla is an ugly car. And they didn't had a new model since at least 10 years.