Originally published at: Price of Musk's battery-powered MAGA hats could continue to drop significantly in coming months | Boing Boing
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I’d like to see a graph only comparing electric vehicles from these other manufacturers. I wonder if it has more to do with the fact that we haven’t really figured out the used car market for EVs. That EVs lose their value quicker than ICE vehicles at the moment, due to fears about battery deterioration
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I’d expect this to be more about Tesla’s latest and most popular model being the cheaper one, so the percentage of cheaper cars hitting the second hand market will be increasing for a while yet?
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Could be. I see it as people seeing that while nobody has made a single EV that is better then Tesla at all aspects of being an EV we are seeing EVs that bet Tesla on nearly every individual aspect (with the arguable exception of the quality of Tesla’s long distance charging network). Like a friend of mine bought a Ford Mach-e because they liked it better then Tesla, not because of Elon being a negative, or the relative prices. The Ioniq EV 6 on paper charges faster than Tesla (and in the real world at select chargers when the Ioniq’s battery is warm enough, which sadly it isn’t as smart as Tesla at pre-warming), and so on.
Oh, another possibility is as time goes on Tesla is later and later to market in the vitally important (in the USA) pickup truck segment, and unlike past years where Tesla “only” lost out to another “upstart” (Rivian) Ford’s F150 is on the market and has some real advantages over the CyberTruck, and that is even the “not yet shipped might not even be all it has been promised to be” version of the CyberTruck.
And a stronger possibility is not that Elon’s crazy is more visible now, but that he keeps selling off Tesla stock to keep up payments on Twitter’s giant loan (er, Elon’s giant loan to buy Twitter). Which one can argue is actually just a manifestation of Elon’s crazy. Anyway more shares not in his hands basically makes the supply of liquid shares larger so even if demand remained constant would result in a lower stock price for Tesla.
…but really it is hard to tell what exactly is driving stock prices. The real answer is likely a mix of everything the original article says, and any new idea in the comments here 
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Batteries would honestly be my biggest concern about buying a used EV. As long as the mileage is low, you’ll probably be OK.
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At this point, the only way Tesla can boost the price of its car is by adding a coal-rolling feature.
God, don’t give him any ideas!
Honestly, that might be the only way to save Tesla at this point. Go all-in as the new MAGACAR – you’d probably have a fair number of Trumpers get rid of their Ford Super Dutys for a similarly-priced Tesla…
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They just need to add a machine gun mounted to the bed of the “cybertruck”.
And eventually produce the vehicle.
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Though the number may be growing, I’d be curious to see the Venn diagram of Tesla owners and MAGA folks. Most right-wingers I personally know love the new, unimproved Elon, but are very disdainful of electric cars as a concept.
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Early on, the Tesla was seen as a rich person’s status-symbol toy. That’s changed, but the MAGA rubes might still be able to reconcile it that way.
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@frauenfelder Not to sound like a whiner but I’m not on-board with being called a ‘Maga’ supporter because I own a Tesla (I’m willing to bet a fair amount of @boingboing readers are) just because the owner is a Hypocritical Bawbag, any more than someone that owns a Oculus is one cos Lucky Palmer is a Bawbag in training.
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Yeah, seems a bit hallucinatory to me. When I think Tesla owner, the stereotype is definitely a spectrum from tech centrist to champaign socialist.
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Much more accurate to call him the CEO than “owner” as he currently only owns something like 1/8th of the company.
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Their carpool lane stickers expire too and historically that’s trashed their resale value. Pre-Covid the BMW I3’s were basically free after their sticker expired.
If you want the express lane on the 880 its $14 each direction for less than 10 miles. If you do that every day that’s a new car payment.
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I’d still go with the Prius.
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Wow, didn’t realize he doesn’t have a controlling number of shares. Here’s hoping they oust him soon.
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Respect.
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I bought a Chevy Bolt last week. When it came down to it my choices were the Ford Mach-e, Hyundai Ionic 5, and the Bolt. I excluded Tesla from consideration 100% because of Phony Stark, otherwise the Model 3 would have been a contender for my money.
If Tesla doesn’t mind living off the drool left behind by the MAGAs, that’s their choice. If they want to seriously compete, the board is going to need to fire him.
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Amen. Put my money down on a model 3 in 2016 because it was the only viable electric option (not trusting GM at that point - at least Tesla had a track record of reliable batteries), we wanted to go electric for the environmental impact, the car had excellent safety specs, and we knew we would need a new car in the next couple of years. And the tax credits made it affordable. At that point Elon was, at worst (that we knew), just a sad wanna-be edgelord trying to get dates using Twitter.
If only the board would ditch him. They won’t, because they are worshippers at the throne, but he’s not doing the company any favors. Not just with his blaringly insane Q bullshit, but some of this other blind alleys. Robots? Not what I want from (anyone) Tesla. And they should face it - someone should keep working on fully automated driving, but Tesla needs to just stop with the “it’ll be out this year!” It’s a LONG way from being even safe to use.
I’m just waiting for him to announce that JFK Jr. has asked him to be his 2024 running mate so he has to take a leave of absence from everything (natural-born citizenship doesn’t mean anything when JFK Jr. is back from the dead!).
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