Nope, very happy and on to my second M3.
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Have you lost faith in Tesla?
- Thread starter DeejUK
- Start date
Jason71
Well-Known Member
Haven't lost faith and love my car. But I am concerned for the future of the Brand and feel its an unnecessarily uncertain time. I've never been a Musk fanboy, and when buying the car i said to myself that i didn't base my purchase decision on my opinion of the CEO (the same as any car purchase i had made). When we test drove the Model Y we decided it was the car we wanted.
I am uncertain about Musks future involvement with the company and wonder if a Tesla without him has a big future. If he feels he is getting pushed out he has the ability to destroy the company quickly.
I am uncertain about Musks future involvement with the company and wonder if a Tesla without him has a big future. If he feels he is getting pushed out he has the ability to destroy the company quickly.
ChrisInTheCar
Member
Wouldn't say I've lost faith. I have another ~3 years left on my lease, so plenty of time yet. Where I'm at, at the moment though, is that I'll definitely shop around for my next car - it wouldn't be an instant purchase of another Tesla, and if I had no EV atm I'd probably just get an MG 4.
Whatever price point you buy a Tesla or any other EV for, you’re essentially buying a car that costs £15k less than the sticker price and then the extra is because of the battery pack.
Comparing costs to an ICE car in the same price bracket is therefore pointless. A Tesla isn’t a premium car, it’s a mid-tier car with an expensive battery, which is why when you comparing between EVs, anything that does actually have a more premium interior is generally more expensive and those that are in a comparable price bracket like the VW cars are generally actually a lot worse in terms of quality.
Zilla91
Active Member
As usual it’s our friends from across the pond. So much for their fondness of freedom of speech
As for the topic at hand, I don’t have faith in a large corporation and never will.
I love the cars despite the fairly lengthy list of gripes that I have. When the time comes to replace the M3P and MY will I get another one? I don’t know, I’m not a fortune teller. Quite like the idea of replacing the M3P with the new EV Porsche Cayman but I’d have to see what that’s like and how it’s priced - same with the MY and the new EV Macan. As you can tell I have a bit of a Porsche itch that I’d like to scratch
I would agree.
I tend to agree that brand affinity doesn't really help any consumer. It just blinds you to shortcomings and potential benefits that you might otherwise get elsewhere. All the while said brands are making crazy margins and - particularly in Tesla's case - cutting down functionality or reducing quality.
These companies are not our friends, and any sane consumer should approach purchasing a product of theirs with their eyes wide open, particularly in terms of relying on future promises that are not enshrined contractually (wish I could have told my 3 year younger self when I bought FSD).
I tend to agree that brand affinity doesn't really help any consumer. It just blinds you to shortcomings and potential benefits that you might otherwise get elsewhere. All the while said brands are making crazy margins and - particularly in Tesla's case - cutting down functionality or reducing quality.
These companies are not our friends, and any sane consumer should approach purchasing a product of theirs with their eyes wide open, particularly in terms of relying on future promises that are not enshrined contractually (wish I could have told my 3 year younger self when I bought FSD).
Ehhh if people can stand behind their complaints and make coherent arguments as to why it's a big deal (for them), I'm fine with that. One man's wine is another man's poison, after all. I don't get the logic of pre-emptively "disagreeing" with an open vote on something just because you don't like the fact the question is even being asked. Seems pretty lame to me.
Grant Gerke
Member
Purchased a model Y this year and loving it. Can’t wait to see the cyber truck up here later this year and hope they announce a $30,000 car this year… Maybe a China first.
Would love to see a CEO a Twitter announced soon. Happy new year to everyone
Would love to see a CEO a Twitter announced soon. Happy new year to everyone
I still think the Model 3 is a fine car, but I'm no longer convinced that Tesla will remain the leading manufacturer of EVs by the time my current car is up for renewal. In the past they were truly innovative, but they seem to have given up on anything that doesn't suit the vision of becoming a RoboTaxi company.
What exactly was the point of the 4680 cells, they seem to have achieved nothing for owners. Same goes for these mega castings, what good does that do me. FSD is obsessed with driving on 'City Streets' which isn't where I want self driving (long boring motorway drives please).
At the same time they keep ignoring V2x which is something that I would benefit from, and fundamentally seems to be a very sensible answer to the variability of renewable power sources.
Hyundai/Kia, Ford (f150 tech, not the truck) and Rivian seem to be the people moving forward. It's sad to see Tesla squander their position, Elon needs to step back and allow someone new to lead.
What exactly was the point of the 4680 cells, they seem to have achieved nothing for owners. Same goes for these mega castings, what good does that do me. FSD is obsessed with driving on 'City Streets' which isn't where I want self driving (long boring motorway drives please).
At the same time they keep ignoring V2x which is something that I would benefit from, and fundamentally seems to be a very sensible answer to the variability of renewable power sources.
Hyundai/Kia, Ford (f150 tech, not the truck) and Rivian seem to be the people moving forward. It's sad to see Tesla squander their position, Elon needs to step back and allow someone new to lead.
The main point of the 4680 is speed and scale of production which over time will lead to lower prices for consumers. Version 1.0 of the cell is doing well even if not meeting some of the unrealistic expectations some people had. Raw materials in, cars out. Which will eliminate waste on things like profit for Panasonic or CATL.
Same for the castings, all about scale and speed of production, which over time will come down to the consumer, right now the gas used to melt the Aluminum for those castings is bloody expensive, hence the LNG re-gasification plant under construction at the Berlin factory.
I don't care about Tesla making even more profit per car, achieves nothing at all for me. Other manufacturers are delivering capabilities that customers want.
The unknown quantity of so many castings is surely the repairability after an accident. Will they require more "write-offs". Will insurers up premiums if they're more expensive to repair? It might save Tesla some money manufacturing but shift the costs elsewhere?
I didn’t say anything about Telsa making more profit.
If they’re going to bring prices down for consumers they need insanely high volume and both 4680s and castings achieve that through speed of production per vehicle and eliminating supply chain costs. In the short term while they integrate the new technologies, that’s expensive and the benefits won’t be immediately realised, in the long term it’ll dramatically reduce the price of the vehicles.
They haven’t even got any full size 4680 production lines underway yet beyond their Kato Road pilot line, give them time to get the process ramped and Berlin and Austin online. You can’t have it both ways where they invest in new features but you don’t see the point of things they’re implementing before they’ve had an impact. It took them 8 months to make their first million 4680 cells and they now at a run rate of a million in 8 days. They’ve done that in a little over 18 months going from making zero batteries to almost a million a week. That’s an insane level of progress even by the standards of the biggest doubters.
In the case of Tesla a huge amount of your money is pure profit. They are acknowledged to have the biggest margins of just about any manufacturer in this price range and anyone who buys one now is paying through the nose. No way would I buy an M3 or MY at current prices.
A friend of mine has an MG4 which cost a lot less than half the price of my M3P. I wouldn’t say the interior of the MG is inferior to my M3, and at motorway speeds the MG is significantly quieter. It has its faults and, ultimately, the M3 is a better car, but is it worth more than twice as much? No way. Teslas are not good value for money. And that’s before you start shelling out for permanent beta FSD vapourware.
The MG is ugly and slow though.
Margin is a good thing, when they didn’t have good margins a couple years ago people were crowing about them going out of business and not being a real car company, if they do have strong margins people like you complain about value for money. You can please some of the people some of the time etc.
That's a big "if" there, and I've seen no evidence of it lately.
I wouldn’t describe the MG as ugly. My M3 is by far the ugliest car I’ve ever owned, and the MY sinks to new depths of ugliness. But I don’t buy cars for their looks. O-62 in 7.5 secs is not exactly rapid by EV standards, but it was hot hatch territory just a few years ago. MG produce excellent cars that are fantastic value for money.
Tesla need people like you who are quite happy with their massively inflated profit margins.
ElectricIAC
Good-Natured Rascal
They’re going to have to, if only to undercut other manufacturers.
There is no big if at all.
Of course there’s no evidence of it lately, when inflation is still >10% in most major markets and raw materials costs on everything from copper to lithium are all still more than double what they were in 2020, despite being off their peaks.
When Telsa started selling the standard range Model 3 back in 2019 they were losing money on each of those vehicles even at 2019 prices which is why it was taken off-menu and eventually killed off. So we can extrapolate from that info the cost to produce and deliver at that time was about $36k per vehicle, now add in the raw material costs increases and it’s entirely unsurprising that costs had to rise.
All car manufacturers have seen price increases of raw materials with supply chain and war impacts. A good chunk of raw battery materials were and still are sourced from Russia and Ukraine which alone has a huge impact. Every other start-up EV manufacturer has similar issues leading to the brouhaha over at Rivian when they upped their truck price and the Lucid also struggling for margins as they ramp. Ford stated earlier in the year they’re making no profit on the Mach E due to supply chain impacts, so this isn’t a Tesla issue alone, nor is it some malevolent corporate greed. It’s just the state of supply chains reflected in price. They absolutely will come down over time and the more Telsa do to innovate and implement in-house tech like batteries and castings the faster that will happen.
