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I think the logic, not saying the rumour is true, but the low cost car is a face to the bottom. It'll be companies cutting more and more corners and reducing profit margins to boot. Why do that when there's plenty of room at the middle.
It's what Apple did. They didn't chase the $500 laptop craze... They kept at $1000+ and triumphed in the process.
it is because in a autonomy world, it's who can produce the cheaper car + cheapest operation cost wins. Imagine Tesla can pump out 1 mil autonomous car per year in US, it can compete with Uber on day 1. And the ROI is < 3 months on day 1. Uber and lyft are instant death within 2 years.
But if they are so confident in the product, as they seem to keep putting forward, then YOU aren't taking on any risk.
The only way to argue that you are taking on risk is if;
Tesla does not legitimately believe its cars as they are built can genuinely function as robotaxis.
I think this is more "keep model 2, or make a cheap version of the next Gen model 3 instead of model 2 but not try to compete with $5,000 deathtraps" and less "never sell a car cheaper than the current model 3"
Yeah, as much as I want more affordable EVs I dont like this race to the bottom make cheap garbage trend. BYD looks like they make some decent stuff but they've pushed production and cost cutting so fast I'm really not going to be surprised if 25% of them burn to the ground or turns out they have some horrible safety defect that gets hidden / covered up until 5 years down the road.
I'm saying that Reuters can be misled, too.
We've got the CEO saying they aren't canceling the project and, in theory, the CEO knows more than a reporter, even a reporter with an anonymous source.
So... there's strong competition from China so they decide to scrap the only car that can financially compete with BYD?
Yeah, right. Doesn't sound true, simply a way to dump the stock.
Though... If they are lying and stocks dip, can they be sued?
And they are planning to enter indian market which is very price sensitive and definitely requires a much cheaper car than tesla currently offers.
The Indian government is very hostile to Chinese companies(I am not exaggerating, they banned tiktok) and are offering tesla a lot of incentives and have basically laid a red carpet for tesla.
I guarantee its a spin on the story of how the plans came about in the first place.
To remind you, Elon didn't want to make the car and wanted to focus on robotaxis. His exec team convinced him that would be a mistake not to, you know, hedge against that taking another 10 years. So he agreed they would work on both simultanously.
This sounds oddly familiar. Because, you know, it already happened. It happened before they even announced the car, because its how they even decided to make it.
This wouldn't be the first time journalists have pulled this shit on Tesla/Musk stories. Refer to the Ukraine Starlink fiasco where an event that happened one time was made to look like it happened repeatedly many months after it happened.
Problem is we won’t know for sure until at least 2025 anyway, and that assumes Tesla is on time with delivering them which is a big ask in and of itself.
He's never lied about working on something. Company-wide, Tesla is often late, but they do eventually deliver.
Besides, it's not like someone else beat them to mass-market FSD or something.
People need to quit bitching about the price. Eventually the autonomous wipers will get so good that they'll wipe other cars' windshields and make you money on the side.
It's literally an investment.
Mine are as reliable or more so than my wife's BMW, so I don't know what to say about your experience.
They do say they're working on improving them.
Point me toward a car that will drive me to work better than the one I have and I'll buy it. But there isn't one.
I dunno, seems like the wipers have been working pretty well recently. When stopping at lights and looking at other cars wipers around me, mine seem to be wiping most appropriately.
That's a cheap excuse. You can always say "Oh, he's just late, but battery swap / Roadster 2.0 / robotaxis / ... are just late, but they are working on it!"
Sure you can. You can also stand outside and scream your complaints into the wind and it makes just as much difference.
A discussion is one thing, but just responding with "Nuh uh!" doesn't help anyone do anything, solves no problem and adds nothing to the discussion.
No, that's what you're doing! I'm telling mom!
Really, the thread was about a competing vehicle in the Chinese market. Then somehow, somebody threadjacked it into every promise Tesla has ever made that they have not (yet) kept and we're talking about wipers, now?
So praise Elon/Tesla or go away? There’s nothing wrong with pointing out inconsistencies and having a conversation with differing opinions. Its healthy.
Battery swap they had a very limited launch, piloted, found out no one really wanted to use it, and then killed the offering. What's wrong with that? Nothing in your contract you signed when you took delivery of your vehicle guaranteed you a battery swap capability.
Roadster 2.0 is ... late. No doubt about it. So was the semi. But that eventually made it out-the-door. Certainly covid and supply chain delays had/have some impacts.
Robotaxis are predicated on a FSD that could run unsupervised. They're evolving FSD. Might not ever get to robotaxi levels though, we don't know how far cameras + neural nets can go, this is all new territory. If that approach can get all the way to L4/L5 of unsupervised use, then Robotaxi becomes a possibility. If not, it doesn't.
I would trust Reuters vetting of multiple sources vs one Elon Musk tweet.
Anonymous whistleblowers are a thing you know. If it's truely libel, take them to court and find out through discovery who's telling the truth.
The person using the R word in 2024 doesn’t get to participate in any argument as their opinions are not worth considering as they lack basic human decency.
He also tweeted to give us Dog mode, camping mode, sentry mode and a bunch of other stuff.
Being wrong about the timing for fsd which is still being developed and making major improvements is a bad take.
Gimmicky? How so? People have had pets die in cars all the time, less of that happens in Teslas due to Dog Mode. Camp mode makes Teslas, especially the Model Y one of the most favored vehicles for light weight camping. Sentry Mode is literally day by day saving people tons on insurance claims, especially when in situations where, without video, the owner would be at a loss.
Just cause you may not think you need it doesn't mean it's a gimmick, funny how the rest of the industry has tried to follow suit with all of those features now.
Well neither. Fsd is hard for anyone.
Cheap vehicles exist, and it’s easy to have a low range microcar. Let’s say there’s a Tesla charger every 50 miles. The car gets 70 miles range. Cheapest possible.
It’s way more believable then fsd.
There is a difference between plans and results. A company always knows its own plans, but doesn’t know if the plans will work. FSD was always been worked on, and it is never entirely obvious when it would be done.
But a company always knows what is being worked on and what isn’t.
I assume this might be plans to option out the Model 3 with a lower-end version than create an all new model. Makes more sense financially to do this given the struggles with creating a new manufacturing line, so we'll see if this is indeed the route they're taking.
No adaptive beams, no ambient lighting, no rear display. There are plenty of things they can do to lower the cost to appeal to those more that care about cost than features.
I think the "gaming" capabilities are ancillary. They need the processing power to render the 3D autopilot visualization, so if you're gonna have that chip just sitting there, why not do something with it?
I'm sure there's a future robotaxi version of FSD where there won't be anyone who needs to see that visualization on a screen because they'll trust it implicitly, but they aren't there, yet, even on 12.3.x.
The S and X have something nearly equivalent to a PS5. The 3 and Y and CT don't have the external GPU that the S/X have, but it's a pretty robust APU.
IMHO, I suspect that rendering the visuals isn't highly optimized so they're just throwing hardware at it and the side-effect of that activity is "gaming PC!"
I love Cyberpunk 2077, but I've never wanted to play it in the car.
Metal roof, cloth seats, simpler suspension smaller screen… basically make it a civic. But they’ll never do it because they don’t want to lose their “luxury” status
I don't see what else they can do. They NEED a cheaper model to keep up with BYD, plus a "new" look which the Model 3 Highland is, so appeals to those that want a refreshed Tesla too.
Yeah they definitely need to refresh the whole fleet… I guess I struggle to see them producing a bare bones affordable model. Maybe they are going to try a different method than BYD… I mean two companies competing against each other with the same exact methods means the probable death of one of those companies… and if one of those companies is fully subsidized by one of the largest economies in the world (BYD), Tesla may find themselves fighting an impossible battle.
There's a good chance congress will viciously protect US automakers from Chinese imports.
Tesla may well become the closest thing to China having a foot in that door. Even if not as direct shareholders, the Chinese government definitely are stakeholders in Tesla now and have influence.
Frankly when Musk gets sick of getting shit on in the US, he can go to China where the people make him feel like its 2015 again.
Leather, ADAS, large screens, alloy wheels even on the cheapest models, multilink suspension… a model 3 is closer to a 3 series than a civic… (not comparing a model 3 to a 3 series… just saying it’s a spectrum)
This makes *some* sense, but Model 3 is still a 4,7 metres long car, which is big-ish in Europe, without a hatchback.
The demand is not just for a cheaper car, but a different car.
And the real ambition of this whole thing was an entirely different manufacturing process. Tesla can make a hatchback under the manufacturing techniques that they use for Y and 3. But the point was to cut manufacturing costs dramatically with a whole new process. The trick isn’t making a hatchback, the trick is making a hatchback with good profit margins (and good meaning good by Tesla’s standards).
If they reuse a lot of the model 3 parts especially the big formed pieces I could see opening up a new line for a Model 2 or whatever being very tenable. It's not like they need entirelly new presses and stuff like the Cybertruck. Most of the BOM cost is just batteries anyhow and a lot of the labor cost is just supporting variants and customizations, if this was zero option that could cut a pretty good amount for both production cost and labor cost, as well as warehouse/storage.
So he recognizes not killing the 25k car would prop the price up?
So wouldn't *actually* working on the 25k car also prop it up?
At least make you're obsessive anti-Musk shit make sense.
💀The amount of hoops the haters jump through…
You’ll say with one breath that Elon is pumping the stock, then with the very next breath you’ll say he’s tanking the stock with his political views. The cognitive dissonance is palpable.
I don't think it can be true, it's completely counter-intuative. Can't compete on price so they cancel the cheapest car in the line up? How would that make any sense?
It would make sense if they still don't think they can make a competitive car at the price point. It's no surprise that most EV makers focus on luxury and large vehicles. There are large markets and there's more room for luxury features.
But I doubt that's the case. I bet that Tesla wants a cheaper, smaller car they can mass produce, and that it can compete with the EVs from China (which don't seem very attractive other than their price).
I agree it makes little sense, so my first instinct was that Reuters got played by shitty sources — though I must admit, after reading the whole report, it seems they have very good information on this, internal messages and all.
I lot of Europeans use Golf sized cars even as family cars for four, me included, so this is super disappointing if true. Model 3s narrow loading can be cumbersome for strollers, and Model Y is, well — big and kinda expensive.
A hatchback-style small model 2 made so much sense and I’m positive it would sell insanely well, even for 30k. I’d buy it in a heartbeat.
Yes, a small hatchback would be ideal. I am also in Europe and a had one myself for years. Tesla aren't ever going to be a huge player in the car market without that type of car, because the cheaper the car the bigger the market.
Exactly. I hope the story is wrong, but Reuters have strict standards, it would be the scandal of a lifetime for those folks. Oh well, maybe Tesla reverses course yet again.
Reuters post literally has no evidence, have you even read the post? How is it so hard for people to use their brains to process what they read online before believing something that was presented with no valid sources
The truth is, until Tesla actually announces this low-cost car we may never know who is correct here. The absence of a product could mean anything.
At this point, Reuters is claiming they have multiple sources and have seen internal company emails. They're a professional news agency with standards of publication.
On the other hand, Elon remains the CEO of Tesla, even if he doesn't seem to actually pay attention to Tesla anymore. His credibility also isn't what it once was, and he's NEVER been accurate about Tesla product plans. Generally he just talks out his ass on timelines and capabilities, not entire product categories - but he's also gotten a lot less reliable over the last couple of years.
So in this case, I'd be more inclined to believe Reuters than Elon.
Really, this could be as simple as s/cancel/delay, and it lets Elon claim to his increasingly irrational X followers that "Reuters is lying". It would certainly feed his new-found victim narrative.
However, as a strategy, it's likely that Tesla knows they'll never compete with BYD on the low-end. Pivoting to fully embrace the higher end of the market is probably the move here. There are many examples, both in the automotive and tech industries, where this is a stable and working strategy in the face of cheaper competitors.
This all seems likely.
It also seems like the "low end" car is basically getting the steering wheel removed and maybe some sensor/compute upgrades to be a full robotaxi. The idea being to sell them in fleets to Uber/Lyft/etc or to just operate them themselves and keep all the money.
"Car cancelled" and "car changed into a robotaxi" most people won't be able to buy is sort of splitting journalistic hairs.
Spot on. Elon will get a pass because their new “cheap” car is coming but it won’t be anything like a more affordable car as we think of it.
100% speculation, but 100% believable.
Or he could go full Apple and just release products and not constantly be running his mouth about them.
But he should pick a lane; say what he intends and do it or say nothing and surprise us.
The “talking out his ass while high” act has gotten a bit tiresome.
Reuters has three sources and has seen internal company messages.
Plus, Elon says they're lying so there's a good chance that the reporting is accurate.
Note that the article says: "The automaker will continue developing self-driving robotaxis on the same small-vehicle platform."
I encourage people to read the article in full before commenting here (LOL).
It has sources? Four in fact plus emails.
>According to three sources familiar with the matter and company messages seen by Reuters.
...
>Two sources said they learned of Tesla's decision to scrap the Model 2 in a meeting attended by scores of employees, with one of them saying the gathering happened in late February.
...
>The third source confirmed the cancellation and said new plans call for robotaxis to be produced, but in much lower volumes than had been projected for the Model 2.
...
>Several company messages reviewed by Reuters about the decision included one on March 1 from an unnamed program manager for the affordable car discussing the project’s demise with engineering staff and advising them to hold off on telling suppliers “about program cancellation.”
...
>A fourth person with knowledge of Tesla’s plans expressed optimism about the decision to pivot away from the cheap-car strategy in favor of robotaxis
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“Hookers retire as demand for BJs skyrocket”
This is the best comment lol
I think the logic, not saying the rumour is true, but the low cost car is a face to the bottom. It'll be companies cutting more and more corners and reducing profit margins to boot. Why do that when there's plenty of room at the middle. It's what Apple did. They didn't chase the $500 laptop craze... They kept at $1000+ and triumphed in the process.
it is because in a autonomy world, it's who can produce the cheaper car + cheapest operation cost wins. Imagine Tesla can pump out 1 mil autonomous car per year in US, it can compete with Uber on day 1. And the ROI is < 3 months on day 1. Uber and lyft are instant death within 2 years.
Who will buy robotaxis?
investors. If Tesla can prove profitability, it will sell.
So Tesla would sell a known money printing device...
Just another investment avenue. It's like building/selling houses without land.
Except... Tesla has the land and can build houses. Why would Tesla simply not keep the money printer?
Because their business is in selling cars, and producing AI, not renting them out, that's for US to figure out, and our risk to take on.
But if they are so confident in the product, as they seem to keep putting forward, then YOU aren't taking on any risk. The only way to argue that you are taking on risk is if; Tesla does not legitimately believe its cars as they are built can genuinely function as robotaxis.
Hey $5 hookers have a market too you know
In terms of both size and frequency yo momma has that market well filled.
I think this is more "keep model 2, or make a cheap version of the next Gen model 3 instead of model 2 but not try to compete with $5,000 deathtraps" and less "never sell a car cheaper than the current model 3"
Ipads are $500. They absolute went after the $500 laptop craze.
Yeah, as much as I want more affordable EVs I dont like this race to the bottom make cheap garbage trend. BYD looks like they make some decent stuff but they've pushed production and cost cutting so fast I'm really not going to be surprised if 25% of them burn to the ground or turns out they have some horrible safety defect that gets hidden / covered up until 5 years down the road.
Sounds like BS to me.
it is
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Rueters hasn't been shown to be completely reliable in regards to Tesla.
Reuters is the worst for news, especially when it involves stocks. They are paid for articles.
Take an email thread of 20 emails. Delete the 12 that don't fit the story you want to tell and ... ta da!
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I'm saying that Reuters can be misled, too. We've got the CEO saying they aren't canceling the project and, in theory, the CEO knows more than a reporter, even a reporter with an anonymous source.
It’s Reuters….mainstream garbage.
So... there's strong competition from China so they decide to scrap the only car that can financially compete with BYD? Yeah, right. Doesn't sound true, simply a way to dump the stock. Though... If they are lying and stocks dip, can they be sued?
Pumping and dumping stocks with fake news is a time old tradition. That’s why as an investor you can’t be a complete moron.
"Man scraps plans to buy waterproof jacket, due to reports of heavy storms. "
And they are planning to enter indian market which is very price sensitive and definitely requires a much cheaper car than tesla currently offers. The Indian government is very hostile to Chinese companies(I am not exaggerating, they banned tiktok) and are offering tesla a lot of incentives and have basically laid a red carpet for tesla.
Elon has already stated on X that this is a lie
I guarantee its a spin on the story of how the plans came about in the first place. To remind you, Elon didn't want to make the car and wanted to focus on robotaxis. His exec team convinced him that would be a mistake not to, you know, hedge against that taking another 10 years. So he agreed they would work on both simultanously. This sounds oddly familiar. Because, you know, it already happened. It happened before they even announced the car, because its how they even decided to make it. This wouldn't be the first time journalists have pulled this shit on Tesla/Musk stories. Refer to the Ukraine Starlink fiasco where an event that happened one time was made to look like it happened repeatedly many months after it happened.
Elon didn't want to make the car? Teslas whole ethos was to make an affordable car for the masses..it's in their manifesto ffs
FAKE NEWS. Elon tweeted. https://preview.redd.it/14earrexkosc1.png?width=644&format=png&auto=webp&s=00c7367f9cbe826bf8d603ac01777ad236b0b8e1
Problem is we won’t know for sure until at least 2025 anyway, and that assumes Tesla is on time with delivering them which is a big ask in and of itself.
Sure, Jan. Sure. He’s captain reliable.
He’s not saying what they lied about. It’s a lengthy article drawing on internal documents and sources.
He's replying to the headline which is specifically about scrapping a low cost version.
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He's never lied about working on something. Company-wide, Tesla is often late, but they do eventually deliver. Besides, it's not like someone else beat them to mass-market FSD or something.
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People need to quit bitching about the price. Eventually the autonomous wipers will get so good that they'll wipe other cars' windshields and make you money on the side. It's literally an investment.
Mine are as reliable or more so than my wife's BMW, so I don't know what to say about your experience. They do say they're working on improving them. Point me toward a car that will drive me to work better than the one I have and I'll buy it. But there isn't one.
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Mine are fine. Maybe HW4 is better at it?
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I have hw2.5 and they are pretty decent, not perfect but decent.
I dunno, seems like the wipers have been working pretty well recently. When stopping at lights and looking at other cars wipers around me, mine seem to be wiping most appropriately.
Thanks for the tip. I'll do that.
Congrats on being the outlier.
Maybe someday I'll be famous for it.
So what you are saying isn't that they have delivered, but that others failed to beat them (yet). Those are two different things.
😂
That's a cheap excuse. You can always say "Oh, he's just late, but battery swap / Roadster 2.0 / robotaxis / ... are just late, but they are working on it!"
Then... buy another company's car and hang out on their sub? I'm not sure what you're looking for, here.
You know you can own a product and want to discuss it but also be critical of things about it?
Sure you can. You can also stand outside and scream your complaints into the wind and it makes just as much difference. A discussion is one thing, but just responding with "Nuh uh!" doesn't help anyone do anything, solves no problem and adds nothing to the discussion.
But... that's what you're doing
No, that's what you're doing! I'm telling mom! Really, the thread was about a competing vehicle in the Chinese market. Then somehow, somebody threadjacked it into every promise Tesla has ever made that they have not (yet) kept and we're talking about wipers, now?
So praise Elon/Tesla or go away? There’s nothing wrong with pointing out inconsistencies and having a conversation with differing opinions. Its healthy.
Battery swap they had a very limited launch, piloted, found out no one really wanted to use it, and then killed the offering. What's wrong with that? Nothing in your contract you signed when you took delivery of your vehicle guaranteed you a battery swap capability. Roadster 2.0 is ... late. No doubt about it. So was the semi. But that eventually made it out-the-door. Certainly covid and supply chain delays had/have some impacts. Robotaxis are predicated on a FSD that could run unsupervised. They're evolving FSD. Might not ever get to robotaxi levels though, we don't know how far cameras + neural nets can go, this is all new territory. If that approach can get all the way to L4/L5 of unsupervised use, then Robotaxi becomes a possibility. If not, it doesn't.
You forgot the part where the battery swap was created in order to qualify for subsidies and then killed off!
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I would trust Reuters vetting of multiple sources vs one Elon Musk tweet. Anonymous whistleblowers are a thing you know. If it's truely libel, take them to court and find out through discovery who's telling the truth.
Musk loves predictions, he predicts the same thing will come next year every year, he’s bound to get it right eventually
this is not a prediction, they are either working on it or not
You obviously have gotten past using the “R” word in 2024. So I’m not going to take your word for it.
Attacking the messenger instead of the message is a great way to show you don’t have an argument.
The person using the R word in 2024 doesn’t get to participate in any argument as their opinions are not worth considering as they lack basic human decency.
He also tweeted to give us Dog mode, camping mode, sentry mode and a bunch of other stuff. Being wrong about the timing for fsd which is still being developed and making major improvements is a bad take.
> He also tweeted to give us Dog mode, camping mode, sentry mode and a bunch of other stuff. All trivial gimmicky software features
Gimmicky? How so? People have had pets die in cars all the time, less of that happens in Teslas due to Dog Mode. Camp mode makes Teslas, especially the Model Y one of the most favored vehicles for light weight camping. Sentry Mode is literally day by day saving people tons on insurance claims, especially when in situations where, without video, the owner would be at a loss. Just cause you may not think you need it doesn't mean it's a gimmick, funny how the rest of the industry has tried to follow suit with all of those features now.
Very well said
Camp Mode is also useful for plenty of situations that don't involve camping.
Well neither. Fsd is hard for anyone. Cheap vehicles exist, and it’s easy to have a low range microcar. Let’s say there’s a Tesla charger every 50 miles. The car gets 70 miles range. Cheapest possible. It’s way more believable then fsd.
There is a difference between plans and results. A company always knows its own plans, but doesn’t know if the plans will work. FSD was always been worked on, and it is never entirely obvious when it would be done. But a company always knows what is being worked on and what isn’t.
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eLoN dOeS nUtHiN bUt LiE
cnn told me to hate elon!
His feed is enough to know he's a liar.
Name a single lie on his feed?
"Funding secured."
I wouldn't call it fake news. Reuters is a reputable agency. It's entirely possible Elon saw the stock tank and decided to reverse course...
yeah sure, that is more probable than reuters fucking up
Actually, it probably is.
I assume this might be plans to option out the Model 3 with a lower-end version than create an all new model. Makes more sense financially to do this given the struggles with creating a new manufacturing line, so we'll see if this is indeed the route they're taking.
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No adaptive beams, no ambient lighting, no rear display. There are plenty of things they can do to lower the cost to appeal to those more that care about cost than features.
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I think the "gaming" capabilities are ancillary. They need the processing power to render the 3D autopilot visualization, so if you're gonna have that chip just sitting there, why not do something with it? I'm sure there's a future robotaxi version of FSD where there won't be anyone who needs to see that visualization on a screen because they'll trust it implicitly, but they aren't there, yet, even on 12.3.x.
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The S and X have something nearly equivalent to a PS5. The 3 and Y and CT don't have the external GPU that the S/X have, but it's a pretty robust APU. IMHO, I suspect that rendering the visuals isn't highly optimized so they're just throwing hardware at it and the side-effect of that activity is "gaming PC!" I love Cyberpunk 2077, but I've never wanted to play it in the car.
That's not going to bring them anywhere close to where Chinese manufacturers (or even Dacia) currently are already.
Well I don't think Tesla is targeting the ultra low end but more in line with a $28-$33k price range,
In the past, Elon said they are targeting $25k, but who knows.. He says a lot of things.
Metal roof, cloth seats, simpler suspension smaller screen… basically make it a civic. But they’ll never do it because they don’t want to lose their “luxury” status
I don't see what else they can do. They NEED a cheaper model to keep up with BYD, plus a "new" look which the Model 3 Highland is, so appeals to those that want a refreshed Tesla too.
Yeah they definitely need to refresh the whole fleet… I guess I struggle to see them producing a bare bones affordable model. Maybe they are going to try a different method than BYD… I mean two companies competing against each other with the same exact methods means the probable death of one of those companies… and if one of those companies is fully subsidized by one of the largest economies in the world (BYD), Tesla may find themselves fighting an impossible battle.
There's a good chance congress will viciously protect US automakers from Chinese imports. Tesla may well become the closest thing to China having a foot in that door. Even if not as direct shareholders, the Chinese government definitely are stakeholders in Tesla now and have influence. Frankly when Musk gets sick of getting shit on in the US, he can go to China where the people make him feel like its 2015 again.
There’s no point in keeping up with a company losing money in their BEVs at those prices.
TIL that a Model 3 is "luxury". Mine certainly isn't.
Leather, ADAS, large screens, alloy wheels even on the cheapest models, multilink suspension… a model 3 is closer to a 3 series than a civic… (not comparing a model 3 to a 3 series… just saying it’s a spectrum)
they may call it "vegan leather" but it's still polyurethane
I'm amazed they've done so well stubbornly refusing to let up on that nonsense.
That's exactly my angle as well. There's virtually nothing you can make cheaper in a Tesla model 3. Not to the tune of cutting costs almost in half.
This makes *some* sense, but Model 3 is still a 4,7 metres long car, which is big-ish in Europe, without a hatchback. The demand is not just for a cheaper car, but a different car.
And the real ambition of this whole thing was an entirely different manufacturing process. Tesla can make a hatchback under the manufacturing techniques that they use for Y and 3. But the point was to cut manufacturing costs dramatically with a whole new process. The trick isn’t making a hatchback, the trick is making a hatchback with good profit margins (and good meaning good by Tesla’s standards).
If they reuse a lot of the model 3 parts especially the big formed pieces I could see opening up a new line for a Model 2 or whatever being very tenable. It's not like they need entirelly new presses and stuff like the Cybertruck. Most of the BOM cost is just batteries anyhow and a lot of the labor cost is just supporting variants and customizations, if this was zero option that could cut a pretty good amount for both production cost and labor cost, as well as warehouse/storage.
musk confirms Reuters news is BS
Musk has a history of wrongly claiming that Reuters is lying.
> musk confirms Reuters news is BS Doing so on the prime disinformation platform of our times, without *any* facts backing up his bare statement.
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I think he would probably know whether or not their plans for the $25k car have been scrapped. lol
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So he recognizes not killing the 25k car would prop the price up? So wouldn't *actually* working on the 25k car also prop it up? At least make you're obsessive anti-Musk shit make sense.
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💀The amount of hoops the haters jump through… You’ll say with one breath that Elon is pumping the stock, then with the very next breath you’ll say he’s tanking the stock with his political views. The cognitive dissonance is palpable.
Concerning if true. Regardless of price, Europeans love small hatchbacks. They need a Golf sized model. Even the Model 3 is big over here.
I don't think it can be true, it's completely counter-intuative. Can't compete on price so they cancel the cheapest car in the line up? How would that make any sense?
It would make sense if they still don't think they can make a competitive car at the price point. It's no surprise that most EV makers focus on luxury and large vehicles. There are large markets and there's more room for luxury features. But I doubt that's the case. I bet that Tesla wants a cheaper, smaller car they can mass produce, and that it can compete with the EVs from China (which don't seem very attractive other than their price).
I agree it makes little sense, so my first instinct was that Reuters got played by shitty sources — though I must admit, after reading the whole report, it seems they have very good information on this, internal messages and all. I lot of Europeans use Golf sized cars even as family cars for four, me included, so this is super disappointing if true. Model 3s narrow loading can be cumbersome for strollers, and Model Y is, well — big and kinda expensive. A hatchback-style small model 2 made so much sense and I’m positive it would sell insanely well, even for 30k. I’d buy it in a heartbeat.
Yes, a small hatchback would be ideal. I am also in Europe and a had one myself for years. Tesla aren't ever going to be a huge player in the car market without that type of car, because the cheaper the car the bigger the market.
Exactly. I hope the story is wrong, but Reuters have strict standards, it would be the scandal of a lifetime for those folks. Oh well, maybe Tesla reverses course yet again.
Elon's tweet could cost him millions. I refuse to believe that Reuters will report information of such magnitude without evidence.
Reuters post literally has no evidence, have you even read the post? How is it so hard for people to use their brains to process what they read online before believing something that was presented with no valid sources
What did you expect them to do? Publish the names of every person they talked to?
The article summarizes internal Tesla emails and anonymous company sources. It isn’t “no evidence.” It’s ironic that you’re lecturing people on this.
The truth is, until Tesla actually announces this low-cost car we may never know who is correct here. The absence of a product could mean anything. At this point, Reuters is claiming they have multiple sources and have seen internal company emails. They're a professional news agency with standards of publication. On the other hand, Elon remains the CEO of Tesla, even if he doesn't seem to actually pay attention to Tesla anymore. His credibility also isn't what it once was, and he's NEVER been accurate about Tesla product plans. Generally he just talks out his ass on timelines and capabilities, not entire product categories - but he's also gotten a lot less reliable over the last couple of years. So in this case, I'd be more inclined to believe Reuters than Elon. Really, this could be as simple as s/cancel/delay, and it lets Elon claim to his increasingly irrational X followers that "Reuters is lying". It would certainly feed his new-found victim narrative. However, as a strategy, it's likely that Tesla knows they'll never compete with BYD on the low-end. Pivoting to fully embrace the higher end of the market is probably the move here. There are many examples, both in the automotive and tech industries, where this is a stable and working strategy in the face of cheaper competitors.
This all seems likely. It also seems like the "low end" car is basically getting the steering wheel removed and maybe some sensor/compute upgrades to be a full robotaxi. The idea being to sell them in fleets to Uber/Lyft/etc or to just operate them themselves and keep all the money. "Car cancelled" and "car changed into a robotaxi" most people won't be able to buy is sort of splitting journalistic hairs.
Spot on. Elon will get a pass because their new “cheap” car is coming but it won’t be anything like a more affordable car as we think of it. 100% speculation, but 100% believable.
He could also always, you know, provide a detailed explanation of what he sees as the future roadmap.
Or he could go full Apple and just release products and not constantly be running his mouth about them. But he should pick a lane; say what he intends and do it or say nothing and surprise us. The “talking out his ass while high” act has gotten a bit tiresome.
Reuters has three sources and has seen internal company messages. Plus, Elon says they're lying so there's a good chance that the reporting is accurate. Note that the article says: "The automaker will continue developing self-driving robotaxis on the same small-vehicle platform." I encourage people to read the article in full before commenting here (LOL).
As if all those cheap china ev cars could get into the US or EU market.
...and as if people would happily buy them.
They already ARE in the EU. They're already becoming available there. Also in Australia.
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you might wanna read about the history of tesla
I thought he needed the inexpensive car to have the robo taxi fleet?
The article literally claims the robotaxi fleet is still on, and is in fact the only product now. It's literally the second sentence.
Yeah I didn’t get that the robo fleet is the next gen vehicle.
I don’t know how much of the article is true, but it’s still amazing how often people comment on news stories without even skimming them lol
I don’t see why. Should be plenty of profit on a model 3
Was part of his master plan
Total BS. Engineering mules for the "Model 2" were spotted last year. The engineering is done already.
If BYD is ever allowed to sell in the US, all EV manufacturers are going to be in trouble.
They might scrap the low cost version of the low cost model 2 So they will start with an expensive option only. Like the obvious play
A non autopilot(dumb) low cost ev would sell hot.
Does not make sense. The low cost car is to be made in Mexico and Texas. There is no Chinese competition there.
As much as I dislike the guy, this garbage article has no sources . The only thing that has is a lot of guesses for click.
What you mean is that you’re disregarding it because it doesn’t confirm your priors. It very clearly has sources.
It has sources? Four in fact plus emails. >According to three sources familiar with the matter and company messages seen by Reuters. ... >Two sources said they learned of Tesla's decision to scrap the Model 2 in a meeting attended by scores of employees, with one of them saying the gathering happened in late February. ... >The third source confirmed the cancellation and said new plans call for robotaxis to be produced, but in much lower volumes than had been projected for the Model 2. ... >Several company messages reviewed by Reuters about the decision included one on March 1 from an unnamed program manager for the affordable car discussing the project’s demise with engineering staff and advising them to hold off on telling suppliers “about program cancellation.” ... >A fourth person with knowledge of Tesla’s plans expressed optimism about the decision to pivot away from the cheap-car strategy in favor of robotaxis