Founded in 2003, Tesla is the top manufacturer of electric vehicles in the US. Led by billionaire CEO Elon Musk, the automaker upended the industry with the futuristic designs and technology of the Gigafactory, the Model S sedan, the Model X SUV, the mass-market Model 3, and soon, the Model Y compact SUV and the unconventional, Blade Runner-inspired pickup Cybertruck. The company has also experienced a number of growing pains on the path to that status as a leader, including public clashes with government agencies, and it commonly faces questions about its technology, issues with its manufacturing, and the treatment of its workforce. The Verge covers all of Tesla’s product launches and ambitions, including energy generation and storage, and the push towards autonomous cars.
As it enters its third month, the Tesla Takedown movement shows no signs of slowing down.
Is Tesla really cooked? Watch as The Verge transportation editor, Andrew Hawkins, walks us through how Elon Musk’s unprecedented takeover of the federal government has transformed public opinion of his car company into something increasingly toxic instead of futuristic, with some owners suddenly selling their cars even at a loss.
An arrest has been made in connection with a recent incident where someone wearing all black threw Molotov cocktails at vehicles and spray painted “resist” on the doors of a Tesla collision center in Las Vegas.
As reported earlier by the Las Vegas Review-Journal and other outlets, Paul Hyon Kim has been arrested and is facing charges including arson as well as the destruction of property, and law enforcement officials said he would also be booked on federal charges later today.
The company’s sales in January and February are down nearly 43 percent year over year, according to new registration data from the EU. Meanwhile, overall electric vehicle registrations are up 28 percent across the continent, as EVs capture 15.2 percent of total EU market share. People still really like EVs, just not the one associated with Elon Musk.
The Chinese automaker reports 777 billion yuan ($107 billion) revenue for 2024, comfortably topping Tesla’s $97.7 billion over the same period. The two companies shipped similar numbers of EVs last year, but add in BYD’s hybrids and it delivered more than double the vehicles Tesla did.
Last week the company unveiled car charging tech that’s twice as fast as Tesla’s, delivering 249 miles of range in just five minutes.
[bloomberg.com]
Tesla news lately includes a leader with a second or maybe seventh job in politics, protests, vandalism, a White House lawn advertisement, record high trade-in numbers, and a Cybertruck recall to fix glued-on trim pieces that can’t stay attached.
So, to beat the allegations that it might be cooked, tonight Musk and Tesla put on a hastily announced “all hands” meeting that was streamed publicly. Business Insider reports employees were only notified of the unusual event shortly before its scheduled start at 9:30PM ET. You can watch it here (Tesla says you should skip to 28 minutes in since it didn’t start on time, or try YouTube), but today’s Decoder episode on Tesla is probably better and shorter.
One of Tesla’s usually favorable Wall Street analysts, Dan Ives from Wedbush, published a note pleading with CEO Elon Musk to spend less time at DOGE. “Tesla and Musk are facing a defining chapter in their future and how Musk handles this next few months will be pivotal to the long term growth trajectory of Tesla in our view,” Ives wrote. Another thing Ives says Musk needs to do is prepare lower-cost vehicles for 2025.
The Tesla Takedown movement is rallying against Elon Musk, and it’s only getting bigger.
The Financial Times compared the electric automaker’s capital expenditure in the last six months of 2024 to its valuation of the assets that money was spent on, and discovered that $1.4 billion has “gone astray.”
Looking at last year, in the third and fourth quarter combined, Tesla spent $6.3bn on “purchases of property and equipment excluding finance leases, net of sales” according to its cashflow statements. Over on the balance sheet, however, the gross value of property, plant and equipment rose by only $4.9bn in that period, to $51bn.
$6.9 billion minus $4.9 billion equals $1.4 billion, or the sum the paper says appears unaccounted for. It’s a bit complicated, but unless Tesla reports the missing money in its next earnings report, it could indicate that something fishy is going on — beyond a stock collapse amid a global protest movement.
Can you trick a Tesla’s camera-based Autopilot system, which has been linked to hundreds of crashes, using simulated rain, fog? Will it barrel through a wall covered in an image of the road beyond, like Looney Tunes’ Wile E. Coyote slamming into the Road Runner’s fake tunnels?
Yes you can, according to Engineer and YouTuber Mark Rober’s testing. (Bonus: Rober also uses LiDAR to map Disney’s pitch-black Space Mountain coaster. )
Tesla has been promising more affordable models as the thing that will help pull it out of its current rut. But a new report out of China (by way of Electrek) suggests that they’re likely to be stripped down Model Ys. This follows reports that the company was testing sub-$35,000 Model 3s in Mexico with cheaper materials and fewer screens. Based on the 36kr report, the project is being spearheaded by Tesla’s Chinese engineers — which makes sense, because car companies in that country have really cracked the code on cheap EVs.
Donald Trump livestreamed a Tesla showcase in the White House driveway on Tuesday, apparently reading the notes of a Tesla sales pitch as he performed choosing one of its EVs to purchase from five delivered for the event.
Standing alongside Elon Musk, Trump attempted to boost the automaker, after prices of its shares dropped 15 percent over the last five days, and said he’d label violence against its locations as domestic terrorism.
Although there have been an increasing amount of protests against Tesla, “the Seattle Fire Department (SFD) has not yet said whether foul play was suspected as the cause of the fire, which is under investigation,” according to KOMO News.
Musk tweeted that in 2022, adding that it could “...cross rivers, lakes & even seas that aren’t too choppy.” Today Electrek highlights this incident that occurred Monday morning in Ventura, CA.
It’s unknown if the Cybertruck’s driver forgot to engage “wade mode” or made some other error while trying to launch a jet ski from the boat ramp, but KABC reports the vehicle was completely submerged by the time fire crews arrived. A Facebook post says it took about an hour and a half to recover the Cybertruck.
At least, that’s what this SEC filing says. He’s one of several insiders who’ve been selling lately, I notice; the chair of Tesla’s board, Elon Musk’s brother, and Tesla’s CFO all dumped tens of millions in shares last month, too. Tesla shares closed today at $222.15, down 41 percent this calendar year. They’re still up about 25 percent from this time last year. It remains unclear whether the continuing Tesla protests have rendered the brand toxic.
[sec.gov]
With Tesla shares crashing over 50 percent since December, some shareholders are left wondering how much longer they can hold out. Fortunately Reddit is a place where financial masochism thrives, and losses that cross into the six-figure territory are seen as a sign of fortitude. A post from a Tesla shareholder who lost “tens of thousands” of dollars and was looking for coping strategies yielded these absolutely master-class responses:
