Elon Musk’s EV company is running a social-media campaign blaming European traffic deaths on red tape. Its safety claims don’t hold up, experts say, but regulators are starting to buckle.
Elon Musk’s EV company is running a social-media campaign blaming European traffic deaths on red tape. Its safety claims don’t hold up, experts say, but regulators are starting to buckle.
Why are people still buying those Nazi-mobiles??
Because they are the best. It’s not that deep?
Just good i guess. Good and pretty cheap
There was research done in norway that 3 out of 4 tesla owners buy a new tesla when they need a new car
Doesn’t Norway have a 100% tax on non-electric cars or something? Be interesting to see if Tesla stays that popular as more options come to market.
If you manage to get a good one. A large section of them are absolute garbage.
Deplorians
Swasticars
Wankpanzers
I drive one. It’s a slightly older model, generation 3 hardware, back from the days when everybody loved Elon (before he threw in with the GOP).
The car is fantastic. FSD is fantastic. Love the guy or hate him, it’s the best car I’ve ever owned by a significant margin.
As someone who actually drives FSD, and the older version of it too, it is very good. On the highway it drives better than I do. At least once it has saved me from what otherwise would have been a serious collision- I was in the middle lane minding my own business, suddenly the car slams on the brakes and swerves into the left lane. I’m thinking it’s lost its mind, when a pickup truck comes barreling straight from an on-ramp into the left lane. Had the car not reacted it’s entirely likely they would have crashed into me.
I don’t excuse Elon’s politics. I think he has done a lot of good for our civilization with SpaceX and Tesla and bringing about the era of actual electric cars (which previously were perpetually always 10 years away). At the same time, I think his efforts to get Trump reelected have been extremely harmful. He does not tolerate incompetence in his companies and I don’t understand why he tolerates it in his politics.
So it’s valid to argue the guy is a net negative on society, it’s valid to argue he has helped benefit politicians who resemble Nazis, and it’s certainly valid to criticize his ‘from the heart’ gesture that really did look an awful lot like a Nazi salute.
The guy still makes an excellent car.
As a car guy, this is wild, and makes me question if you’ve driven other electric cars. IMO Teslas aren’t that much fun to drive compared to other electric cars, and with the FSD thing that makes me think they’re primarily targeted at people who don’t like driving anyway. Which is fine, but like, IMO they have slow, grainy steering and overall feel like tanks in the bad way.
I don’t think Musk made electric cars happen any faster. The delay was technical, caused by lack of lithium batteries, older batteries just couldn’t do the range. Once there were lithium batteries, lots of companies started making practical electric cars. We saw a renaissance in portable power tools at the same time for the same reason, and Musk isn’t involved in that industry at all (although if he was half the “industrialist” he claims to be, I think he would be).
He was right about the need to build out big capacity for building lithium batteries and charging stations, but hardly alone in saying this stuff, and mostly appropriated government money for these things rather than using his own.
Not according to the crash statistics… 21% higher than average death rate in crashes (coming in 21st out of 26 compared brands) and that’s 2023 numbers, so before the cybertruck.
thank you for an intelligent comment that’s not just DURR ELON BAD
I’ve driven a bunch of electric cars. In terms of driving feel, Tesla is good but not great. The suspension (pre-refresh model Y) is stiff without feeling particularly sporty, the steering is decent but not amazing, accel is above average, and I like the one pedal driving but some people hate that. The interior (of any of them, including the ‘luxury’ model X/S) lacks some creature comforts compared to many others in the price range. If not for the low CG reducing body roll in turns it’d probably not be nearly as fun to drive.
In terms of overall ownership experience though, it’s fantastic. I like driving, but the few points I lose in not having something more sporty like a Taycan or Volvo XC40 EV (which is super fun to drive) or a Polestar 2 (even more fun to drive) is made up for by everything else. The software is fantastic and it’s continually updated OTA with actual features, unlike traditional automakers. There’s an absolute minimum of bullshit upsells- no subscribing for heated seats for example, only subscriptions are the connectivity package and FSD. The app and phone key work 100%. Unlike virtually every other automaker, Tesla isn’t data mining my driving and text messages to sell the data to insurance companies and marketers.
And quite honestly- FSD is a huge part of the package. I love driving, but I drive a lot and I don’t like having to when I’m not in the mood. If I’m blasting around some twisty roads on a nice day of course I’m driving. But if I’m on the highway for 2 hours, that’s just a boring slog.
Finally there’s service. Tesla comes to me for most things, and I’ve needed VERY little. The service manual is free online. There’s NO upsell.
Speaking of upsell- the process of buying the car was BY FAR the best of any car I’ve ever bought. There was ZERO pressure, just people available to answer questions. And no dealer markup, no ‘market adjustment’, no haggling over price, no four-square scam to get me to pay more than I want to, no page full of dealer options. Here’s the car, here’s the price, put in a credit card and show up with a bank check on delivery day. I’ve purchased a couple of ‘nice’ cars in my life, from ‘good’ dealers who I really like, but I’d pick the Tesla experience EVERY time.
If I wanted an EV purely on how it drives- based on what I’ve driven so far I’d go for a Polestar 2 or a Taycan.
As a practical vehicle- Tesla all the way.
Disagree. I watched the EV space for a long time. Read some historical articles- even going back into the 1990s electric cars were always ‘10 years away’. Batteries WERE always the reason. But until Tesla, every car company was focused on large format cells. GM did large format NiMH for the EV1, and it worked pretty good, except the instant they were allowed to they sold that tech to Chevron who only licensed it out to companies not building BEVs. Same thing with lithium- large format lithium had a lot of problems including runaway safety issues that hadn’t been solved.
Elon’s contribution was to make a pack full of 18650 laptop cells, coddle it with great thermal management and armor, and call the result a vehicle battery. He saw that innovation was happening a lot faster in the small cells than in large format cells, so those were what he’d use.
It was one of those ‘that can’t possibly be right… but it seems to work better than anything else’ type things.
So back in 2006, when legacy automakers were saying profitable EVs were not physically possible, Tesla was making money selling Roadsters. In 2012 when legacy automakers were saying a profitable mass market EV wasn’t possible, Tesla was making money selling Model S.
As far as I’m concerned, Tesla essentially embarrassed legacy automakers into building EVs.
I’d point out that many companies have taken government funds to build EV chargers, none anywhere near as successful as Tesla. There’s 2x more Superchargers than all other DC fast chargers combined. And that’s NOT because nobody wanted to build them.
Love to see that stat? Everything I’ve read suggests the exact opposite.
Sry but Elon bought Tesla and removed the two engineer’s who actually built the original Tesla Roadster. Elon could just not exist and we’d be better off.
He is the incompetence in his companies. All his success is riding on the shoulders of people who actually know what they’re doing in spite of him. There’s numerous examples of him barging into things and fucking them up when he thinks he knows better. He’s a fucking idiot and always has been.
Correct. Twitter and his various maladventures with Trump are prime examples.
Incorrect. Provably incorrect.
SpaceX was basically all him.
Tesla was basically all him- he started out as just an investor but when Eberhard was screwing up the Roadster’s gearbox he took over, made the (obvious in hindsight) to replace the finicky shifting transmission with a simple reduction gear and a larger motor for torque, and got the car out the door. Model S, X, 3, Y, all him.
Elon is good at some things, bad at realizing what he’s not good at, VERY bad at understanding that other people’s feelings matter to the goal of getting things done.
That’s what makes him incompetent. He’s a contrarian that got lucky a few times. The vast majority of his existence is him being a fucking idiot and an asshole. On top of that he’s a nazi. Just look at his twitter account.
Anecdotally, I’ve personally spoken with many former & current SpaceX employees who would disagree with you. He’s mostly known for slowing shit down by interrupting their work with “disruptive” new layouts for assembly lines and then fucking off for another six months.
Yeah I’ve talked to a number of ex-Elon company people also.
He is damn near impossible to work for. I’ve heard him called ‘the pigeon’- he swoops in, craps on whatever you’ve been pouring your life into for 6 months, and flies off. He has zero sense of work life balance, made only slightly tolerable by the fact that however hard he drives his people he drives himself even harder. Dude’s the richest man in the world and he lived in an off the shelf modular house for a few years because he couldn’t be bothered spending the time to buy a real house, sleeps under his desk half the time.
He also sets near impossible goals and then gets his people to meet them. You read about Raptor engine evolution, what’s less discussed was the insane pressure from Elon to make them more powerful and easier to build. Less machine time, avoiding exotic materials like Inconel, more chamber pressure, etc. But here we are.
Or let me ask this— if Elon wasn’t a factor, then why didn’t anyone before SpaceX a. produce a privately owned orbital rocket, and b. produce any sort of reusability in an orbital rocket? If Elon wasn’t a factor, then why didn’t anyone before Tesla sell a full production electric car?
you own nothing. you drive a remote controllable car with a helpful built-in surveillance system affecting people not only in it, but outside everywhere you drive.
Do you read the news?
Of the various privacy invading shit that goes into cars, Tesla is probably the least bad.
Like Tesla personnel sharing video from their customers from inside?
Sharing video with law enforcement as well? Without a judge having to sign off on it?
That Tesla?
TBH as a non-Tesla owner, Teslas are the only brand of cars that I’ve encountered that light up and verbally threaten me that they’re recording me when I walk by.
He’s been a shithead billio his entire life.
He did not make the car. He just bought the company.
I’ve been following Tesla pretty closely since long before the first Roadster came out. This is false.
There were a few co-founders of Tesla. One of them had opened an LLC. Elon and others bought into that because it was faster than forming a new LLC from scratch.
The original Roadster was mostly Martin Eberhard in charge, Elon was a backseat investor who wasn’t very involved with the design. Eberhard’s design used a two-speed gearbox- a real engineering challenge to make a gearbox that can shift gears under load at 15,000 RPM. They went through multiple designs which all failed reliability tests after significant engineering expense. After a couple of those is when Elon stepped in, pushed out Eberhard, and took over the company. Elon then decided the car would have a single reduction gear, no shifting, and a larger motor to provide the necessary torque. In hindsight this was the right decision as pretty much every EV today uses the same setup.
Elon was then significantly involved in the design and engineering of the Model S, X, 3, etc.
If you want more info search archive.org for the Tesla blog any pre-Roadster timeframe.
Okay now this is just an ad.
So I don’t get to have an opinion you disagree with without being a shill?
To be completely fair, your post that I commented on did not conatain an opinion.
Okay fair opinion is the wrong word- it contains what I believe to be provable facts.
Would you care to disprove them? Or is their incorrectness simply your opinion? :)