Originally published at: Despite price cuts, Tesla still producing more cars than it can sell | Boing Boing
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Maybe they should have a fire sale. 
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Sales are apparently up quite a bit following the price cut, but this AP headline is misleading. The details in the article are pretty much all bad news:
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The price cuts are squeezing other EV makers pretty hard. Tesla has unprecedented per-car profit margins. They’re quite cheap to make, and getting cheaper. When you sell a 40k car for 50k, there’s good money to be made. Until recently they were the only game in town.
The only company that’s close to competing is BYD and arguably that’s only because they have crazy low wages.
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I’ve seen a few glowingly positive articles over the past month talking about how the price cuts are some kind of 4D chess moves by Musk and that the strategy is successful. Additionally i’ve seen related news talking about how the horridly designed Tesla truck supposedly has very strong demand and aticipation for its release is high 
I’m tired of people loving on this clown
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A never ending fire sale that doesn’t stop no matter how much water you use?
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I have an Ioniq 6 reserved. I won’t buy a Tesla as long as Elon runs it. Plus I like supporting more open charging standards even though CCS is way behind the supercharger network. I give credit to Tesla for pushing other manufacturers to make some great options. But ever since Elon went off the deep end, I can’t buy their car.
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As far as I can tell Musk has little to do with the day to day of the company. Cutting prices is actually a good strategy for them right now but that decision would have been made by the exec team, not Musk. They must be annoyed that he gets all the credit when they do something good in spite of him.
As @robertbos said, Tesla’s profit margins are really high for a car maker. 20% compared to more like 5% in the rest of the industry. They’re in a good position to squeeze the market. I’m no business expert, but I’d guess this is something to do with the vertical integration of their dealer network. Basically the factory gets to keep all the markup that would be going to the independent retail dealers.
But fuck Musk. Ugh.
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“ “And as Elon said, as long as you offer a product with value at affordable price, you don’t have to worry about demand.””
That’s a really bad business strategy. Especially in a recession. You always have to worry about demand.
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I wonder how much water is used to manufacture non-EV cars. It’s important to hold Musk to account, but some perspective on better vs worse. A casual search suggests that the average ICE vehicle uses 3 cubic metres of water compared to a typical Tesla at 2.2. The source is biased, but it’s a pretty basic stat.
We shouldn’t let ICE industry giants pretend their shit don’t stink. There’s a lot of anti-EV propaganda out there that conveniently omits the equivalent consumption on the ICE side. Like they’ll harp on about EV material mining of lithium, copper, etc - but conveniently fail to mention that ICE vehicles require the mining (and burning) of petroleum products and not a whole lot less copper.
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FWIW, and full disclosure I have a few hundred shares of Tesla stock, I think Musk should be removed from the CEO position of Tesla as a brand liability. It’s clear that his engineering “direction” is no longer useful (if it ever was, but I maintain that he’s at least been listening to some good voices until recently) and that his attitude is pulling down the value of the company long-term as a vehicle for pushing the car industry forward into electrification.
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i think the reference was to this, and not manufacturing
which granted might be a little soon since people died 
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Their manufacturing process is years ahead of legacy auto - casting car bodies is also a major improvement. They’ve made huge strides in reducing cruft in their manufacturing process, they’ve streamlined the wiring in vehicles dramatically. As much as the centralized computer system has caused problems, it also means you don’t need dozens of microcontroller modules.
They’ve vertically integrated a lot more than just dealers (which has been huge for their margins, for sure). They make parts in-house that other companies contract out for in a lot of cases. Sandy Munro has a couple of great videos doing teardowns on the vehicle engineering about cost savings.
Didn’t Tesla say they were moving to CCS for their cars and stations?
https://www.tesla.com/en_eu/support/non-tesla-supercharging#live-countries
This is one area where it looks like the universal adoption may finally be coming to pass.
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Is that why steering wheels fall off?
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Yeah, lithium battery fires are no joke. It’s a risk that has to be mitigated.
Still, some context is necessary. Teslas have far fewer fire incidents per vehicle-kilometre than any ICE vehicle, which, it’s worth mentioning, rely on millions of tiny explosions in sequence to drive their engines. It’s right in the name. The fires that do happen are more intense, and additional training (and rapid response) is needed for those.
It’s a tradeoff. Batteries are being improved all the time, and safety regulations have to be put into place.
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Wait, is he actually describing Tesla’s offerings with those words?
I mean, yeah, Tesla has some lower priced offerings but those are extremely stripped down and nobody buys them. To get pretty much any of the tech Tesla is known for, you’re doubling/trebling the base price.
He’s always been there. He’s got a long reputation of being there that predates Tesla. Hell, when Top Gear shit on the original Roadster for being a bad car while the rest of the automotive press was uncritically swooning over it, he sued them. He’s always been terrible.
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Yeah, that’s a problem. Lurid incidents like this are great for the media to latch onto. I think it’s important to keep in mind the wider context: problems like this happen with any company’s manufacturing process, especially new automakers.
Tesla has to be held to account for their manufacturing processes. I totally agree with that part.
no, no. it’s why they’ve been sued successfully so many times by their employees for the rampant sexual harassment and racism in the tesla factories
they’re years ahead in workplace practices
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I mean, yeah, Tesla has some lower priced offerings but those are extremely stripped down and nobody buys them. To get pretty much any of the tech Tesla is known for, you’re doubling/trebling the base price.
I don’t think this is correct. The Model Y, for example, has two trim levels and I see a lot more of the base model than the performance model. You can add FSD and other stuff, but in no way are those compulsory upgrades (I didn’t add them; I know a lot of people that didn’t either) and they certainly don’t apply a multiplier to the car’s base price.
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