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RE: The Importance of Moonshots for Tesla

in LeoFinance2 years ago

I'm absolutely happy to be wrong about the demand for Tesla vehicles decreasing... but my guestimation is that:

  • Elon's politics have turned off potential left-leaning buyers
  • Elon's right-leaning peers aren't interested in EVs in the same numbers
  • Tesla's inconsistent quality issues across all models turns off repeat customers
  • Incentives in the IRA bill will slowly make union-made vehicles more attractive
  • Hybrids growing at a fast rate due to people's inherit range anxiety/infrastructure issues

Definitely happy to see where the numbers land over the next few quarters... but I'm mostly confident we'll see a decline in demand trendline over the next couple of years.

I'm not confident Tesla will expand their Supercharger network at a slower rate, apparently site owners are getting e-mail bounce backs and can't contact anyone...obviously this could be a short-term issue, but we'll see. There was a lot of experience and knowledge that left with those 500 employees, and I'd guess we don't see too much in the way of new superchargers or maintenance anytime soon. Tesla had won a funding agreement with the US govt to build more superchargers, so I'm curious to see if that goes to another company now.

You're right, I have no idea what stage the new Tesla vehicle models are at, but industry experts that I've seen talk about this say that suppliers would already be providing materials, parts for new production vehicles for 2025 - which apparently that hasn't happened. Tesla has surprised people before, and their secrecy is incredible, but people I think are trustworthy don't think it's possible to keep secrets this big (given the amount of input required from external parties for new production lines), but I guess we'll see. I think it's more likely than not that new model lines are years away.

The Hyundai Ionic 6 has been getting really good reviews, the Kia EV9 is pretty popular, the Rivian R1 has a solid fan base, the Ford F-150 lightning seems to be selling well, apparently Mercedes Level 2 autonomy has been surprisingly good, Toyota's hybrid models are popular and of course BYD has the backing of the CCP. I genuinely feel like the EV market has changed so much in the last year.

Toyota, Hyundai, Kia and Mercedes all have relatively consistent quality builds that people trust and so I do expect that to hurt Tesla in the years to come.