Tesla sales plummet in the UK, France, and Germany
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Does this mean that people can't rent moving trucks like U-Hauls?DMC DeLorean gross weight: 1442kg.
Tesla Cybertruck gross weight: 4007kg (lowest US gross weight).
IIRC the limit for normal driver licenses in large part of Europe is a gross weight at or below 3500kg, though this can now go up to 4250kg for "alternative fuel" and electric models if all of the excess weight can be attributed to this (IE weight without battery/inverter or LN2 storage can't exceed 3500kg). It should be obvious that a DMC-12 was never in any danger from this.
The gross weight includes driver, passengers (some standard weight per person) and allowed luggage and as far as I can tell the Cybertruck "should" not exceed the 4250kg limit but I can't easily find out if it exceeds the "max 3500kg without battery" limit. The Ford F-150 Lightning EV IS sold in Europe but it's lighter and may not need to includes as many passengers into the weight? It does make me wonder if you go overweight if put anything big in itIE, using it as intended...
As some might have guessed, a number of big EVs have surprisingly low "allowed luggage" weight on their registration cards in Europe to make them legal to drive on normal drivers licenses. And no, having a license that allow driving larger/heavier vehicles doesn't override the registration card number for the vehicle, you're stuck with what the manufacturer put there when they registered the vehicle.
Very heavy vehicles is actually a problem in the US too - in a number of places a massive hunk like the original Hummer (7557lb curb weight!) aren't technically allowed to enter residential areas! So a lot of the people who used the original H1 as personal cars violated local laws (and/or HOA restrictions, sigh) every time they drove to their house - due to laws written to keep out big delivery vehicles out of residential areas back when they were much lighter... Not much came out of that but still funny. Not sure how that plays out for other (lesser) heavy vehicles.
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You don't appear to be up to speed on the paradox of tolerance and why it's important to not tolerate intolerance that is openly displayed in the form of Nazism and fascism more generally.
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More to the point, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes invaded around the 6th Century, displacing the Celts who wound up mostly in the South West (Wales and Cornwall). So what makes them so special? They were there first, except for the people who were already there?
Keep going, and this whole argument turns into Stewart Lee's bit about the Beaker People.
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not sure why I was quoted
but whatever you do don’t tow with cybertruck
its hitch is just mounted to cast aluminum uni-body - its rated something silly by Tesla but that’s just in straight line back from hitch
much lower ratings vertical or side loading - which tends to be important when going over bumps, around corners or braking
lot of social media posts of cybertrucks with entire rear sections ripped off while attempting towing (some quite public)
not quite as numerous of Cybertrucks losing wheels (and entire suspension units) when hitting a low curbs. but getting there.
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i always find it slightly amusing when these self professed ‘cosmopolitan, liberal and progressive person’(s) find certain terms (like fascist, racists, Nazi) to be offensive and rude and suggest those using them are being bigoted when accurately using them.
they find the descriptive use of the terms highly offensive but don’t seem to mind the concepts those terms are in reference to or object when they are being actively promoted
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I'm not sure why it quoted you too...I didn't notice...I was looking at:
It just occurred to me that moving vans like U-Haul (probably a US thing) or other box-truck moving trucks wouldn't be allowed with regular license. is that true?
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Kind of.
Still within the 7700 lb gross vehicle weight a (Euro-spec) Ford Transit can fit some 5300 lbs and 14 ft of cargo.
That's more or less between a U-Haul 10 ft and 15 ft truck.
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With all due respect, this is nonsense. GM is a major car company. They're priced at 7.5x earnings. Ford is a major car company. They're priced at 6.4x earnings. TSLA is priced at 173x earnings.
You see the difference? The TSLA price is over 200 times the major car company price. That's for a mediocre medium-sized car company with a declining market share.
If there's any reason for that differential other than Elon Musk I'd like to hear it.
As far as the price being stagnant, so what? It's stagnant at a ridiculously high price. Take Musk out of the equation and that "stagnant" price drops by 95%. If you think any other CEO could maintain or increase that price you're out of your mind.
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That didn't take long.
Story broke yesterday of a back-room deal to buy a bunch of armored cyber trucks. They are back peddling now, but there was a plan to drop $400 million on those ugly ass pieces of shit. Despite the downsizing of the government. Only rational explanation was a a corrupt kickback to the presidents boss.
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/13/g-s1...ion-order-400-million-worth-of-armored-teslas
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Adding a couple of tonnes of armour (either RHA or composite) to a cybertruck would surely do wonders for its already-famous off-road capability...
I wonder how much of the contract price would have gone into redesigning the door handles to have a mechanical manual backup, because the DoD aren't going to accept anything that fails the "Oh bugger, the tank is on fire" test if the electrical system dies.
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oh. they might accept it,
not like the military is against graft in principle, plenty of weapon systems include it
then they’ll just quietly decommission them after a while, when no unit is stupid enough to willingly check them out of motorpool twice
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Of course Tesla didn't kickstart the industry. Nissan's & Mitsubishi's boards made the respective independent decisions to mass-produce a BEV long before anyone had ever heard of the California startup. Nissan was pretty optimistic, and expected 150K unit sales the first full year of production, and accordingly set up production lines near the first 3 major markets, in Japan, the UK and US. In retrospect they were overoptimistic, but they certainly did the work.
What really set off the industry was (1) pollution in Chinese cities, which caused the Chinese government to give BEVs preferential treatment at all levels (investment in carmakers, registration allocations, consumer subsidies) ans (2) EU emissions targets, which long predated Tesla and would be clearly impossible to meet without BEVs.
Tesla at most shortened the switchover by 2 years.
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I'm not sure it's much of a surprise, but the January sales numbers for Europe are out and the trend continues
BBC News said:
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Tesla's share price was somewhat predicated on 50% growth for a few more years, instead we are seeing a 50% slide. I'm surprised that share price isn't collapsing more.
I guess some are counting on "Robotaxi's" or just simple corruption to boost Tesla revenue.
I guess some are counting on "Robotaxi's" or just simple corruption to boost Tesla revenue.
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Because too many people are invested in keeping the hype going that they will gladly go into denial as long as possible until the gravity becomes too much to keep the bubble inflated and it pops in dramatic and devastating fashion
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I think the first quarter numbers will hit the stock hard. So far we hear about just part of markets, EU, China, etc....and quarter is only half over. I suspect full quarter numbers will be jarring.
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I predict Tesla becoming a penny stock within 1-2 years if Musk remains CEO. Not because of his personality, but because he is paying zero attention to business and a carmaker, any carmaker, requires a fulltime CEO.
Yes, I know that various folks incl. DrGitlin say it's worth $20/share as a car company. Nope. Not given that it has no future models whatsoever, its newest model is a 2-country horse unsuited for conservative pickup buyers, and it totally failed at commercial fleet offerings.
No A-, B- or C-segment models which is what most of the planet's drivers drive.
What about solar? Plenty of companies doing that better with better tech.
And storage batteries? Very different market, selling to utilities on TCO than selling to consumers.
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I'd argue that if Musk would actually not pay attention to Tesla and he'd be strictly its largest shareholder, Tesla would do just fine. It's pretty trivial to find a person to run a company, especially if that person has been de-facto running it for the last year or so anyway. The issue is that he shows up just often enough to shit on things (anyone remember the sudden firing of the entire Supercharger team?) and that he's turned toxic enough to reduce his addressable market by 2/3rds.
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That's complete bullshit. Yes, the Leaf was mass-produced. However, it was a gimped city car with an air-cooled battery and zero charging infrastructure. When the Model S came around with the supercharger network, it was an absolute game-changer of a car. It seated up to 7, had a range to make day-trips possible, a charging network that made road trips possible, and performed unlike any full-size sedan ever made until then.
It was the first BEV that could become the primary car for anyone.
Man, were you not around about 10-15 years ago? Basically every analyst and expert said that BEVs had no future, and that Prius-style technology was where it's at. Every single discussion I ever had with anyone about BEVs was just 15 minutes straight of dispelling false ideas about how everything works.
If Tesla had not been around, could someone else have figured out the magic sauce? Sure. There wasn't any special scientific breakthrough necessary. But 12 years ago, no one had anything remotely like a Model S even on the drawing board. Hell, the vast majority of people were convinced that a car like the Model S was doomed to fail, and anyone attempting anything like it would just fail too.
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US-centric much? The US is not a major BEV market and never was by any metric (marketshare, annual distance driven by a BEV, number of brands, number of models...)
Right back at you. The Model S was so expensive it could not have been a primary car for 99% of the world's drivers, and it's larger than any public parking spot in many countries including mine, so basically unusable.
My country has had mass-produced BEVs since 2011 -- B- and C-segments, and BEV marketshare for 2024 was 25% (PHEVs an additional 7%). Sure, it's a small country, and annual driving distances are small, so long-distance recharging networks are less important. Who cares? Plenty of people here have a BEV as their primary or only car (most households here have a single vehicle).
We get mostly Chinese and European models. They do the job, and did this long before Tesla was around.
There are >50 BEV brands on offer, and about 80 models, from small city cars to crossovers, sedans, station wagons, 6/7/8-person minivans, commercial compact vans and larger commercial vans. Plenty of electric buses as well. To this date, the only Model S I have ever seen here was one belonging to MobileEye, in 2016, used to develop AutoPilot, during the period MobileEye did this work for Tesla.I've never seen a Model X.
Oh, and <10% of households here live in single-family or semi-detached homes. Everyone else lives in apartment towers, and commonly needs to run 5-14 floors of wiring from their apartment's panel to their underground parking spot to install an overnight EVSE. Sounds expensive, right? Still worth it, and there's no subsidy for that.
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Good CEOs are absolutely not a dime a dozen, anywhere. I've personally known CEOs of multiple >100000 person companies.
And carmaking is esp. complicated -- you can't rely on patents or network effect: It's a highly regulated industry, and basically depends on good supply chains, good engineering and good integration. Balancing and maintaining all that over long periods isn't easy.
Musk has always been a micromanager (yes, including at SpaceX, but there the damage was apparently limited because actual rocket engineers are required), so he's never been willing to let well enough alone. I don't think there's ever been anyone who actually ran Tesla for a full year without Musk interfering (maybe before his initial investment).
The other issue is the BoD. They're supposed to determine strategic goals for a company, which the CEO is supposed to carry out. At Tesla, the majority are Friends of Musk and have abdicated all fiduciary and other responsibility to him. so there's no long-range plan.
No carmaker BoD would have authorized the Roadster II for a carmaker in Tesla's situation. VAG, with >100 models and 5x the sales may be able to justify launching a brand like Bugatti they knowingly lose money on, just for the prestige -- but not Tesla which wasn't even profitable at the time. They should have designed a C-segment hatch/crossover instead.
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No, he will find a way to get the government he now controls to route money to Tesla. They already had the botched back-room cybertruck deal. They've probably already tried to find another way to keep Tesla stock valuations high
Trump needs Musk. For his money, and what his money can do. Not just his propaganda machine (x), but also as threat of a musk-backed primary challenge to any Republicans who don't play ball. "you want to vote your conscience? Well musk will back a good boy in the next primary and he'll be able to outspend you 10:1, no matter how much support you manage to find."
No way a man looking to become an autocratic dictator is going to let stupid things like rules and procedures get in the way of making sure his funding is secure. The US government will buy broken teslas to park them somewhere at a 10x markup, before he lets that particular money spout go dry.
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Musk just used his position to steal and give a 2 billion dollar contract to Starlink:
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/28...to-steal-2-billion-faa-contract-from-verizon/
So it probably won't be hard to funnel some billions to Tesla as well.
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In California. In most of the rest of the country it was still a non-starter due to lack of charging outside the home. It is vastly better today, but still has a long way to go.
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Maybe... But companies dependent on gov't handouts tend to get dinged on valuation by 30-50% at least (that's a rule of thumb from VCs).
If the entire US economy gets nationalized and sold off Russia style anything could happen... But then the admin would be seriously fighting the billionaires (not the 4-5 at the presidential crowning ceremony -- all of them). They'd be funding the civil war at that point.
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Verizon's not going to let that go without a fight, and they have an army of lawyers with decades of experience on contracts like this. Verizon may be evil but they're competent/lawful evil vs Musks chatoic evil
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Of course, that "decades of experience" was with a government/legal system that at least pretended to function according to the letter of the law.
They may discover that all of their expensive arguments and maneuvers are thwarted by the new paradigm of "Because President Musk says so"
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.. or as long as Trump and family get their Vig
- aka juice, the cut, the take, the margin, the house, bribery, payoff, or Vigorish
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True but they're still going to be loathe to capitulate against a business as big and with as deep pockets as Verizon. They have to know that betraying big business would mean the end for them and their oligarchy dream
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I have to respectfully call Bullshit on both counts.
What is the valuation of SpaceX $350 billion last I checked? They are the biggest government teat suckler of the current era. Do we really believe they are worth $600 billion if not for their dependence on government handouts? What market exists for their product WITHOUT government handouts. How would they have even made it to today without government handout. That assertion may be common, but it simply does not pass the sniff test when it comes to Musk and his ventures. And that was BEFORE he took unilateral control over the US purse.
As for Billionaires fighting back, that too is bullshit. Sure each one individually will try to resist having their business nationalized, but they will fail to work together because they see each other as rivals. "So what if he takes out Zuck", Musk will think to himself, "how can I use this to gobble up Meta's users?" Their selfishness will prevent them from collective action, and selfishness is THE literal defining trait of the billionaire class.
And even if the billionaire class manages to find their collective conscience and decides to bankroll the rebellion, all trump needs to do is take control of the banks. Something he absolutely will be able to do using his control of congress and the courts. Then he can freeze their assets (just as we do with foreign oligarchs) and use those assets to fund his own groups (proud boys et al.). Or if he is really feeling his oats, he can simply have the CEO of one major tech company publicly executed. The rest will fall in line like little ducklings, offering up their companies for pennies on the dollar if it means they get to walk away with their families and lives intact.
We all need to accept that no one is going to save us but ourselves, and the billionaire class is NOT LIKE US. They will not be coming to our rescue, even if/when the administration turns its sites on them and their companies. Because by that point, it will be too late.
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We'll have to agree to disagree, and wait to see what will happen.
I have seen the results of a fast, efficient campaign by a large collection of billionaires to counter populist economic government programs. Granted, this wasn't in the US, but the principles and motive forces aren't different. And the government does not control banks -- esp. in the US, with its Federal dispersal of banks -- more the other way around. The banks can buy any senior Federal official they need to. Ditto a company like Verizon.
And take a large industrial company like GM -- its employees and unions will be with management.
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I too have seen the power of billionaires to counter populist government programs, but in my experience, they don't do that by fighting the government directly (what you are predicting). They use misinformation campaigns to undermine the support for populist initiatives. Either by deliberately mischaracterizing the objectives, goals, and expected outcomes of the policy, or by making it seem like the "wrong people" (brown, female, educated, gay, trans, etc.) might benefit from it.
None of those strategies will work on Trump becuase, and this is key, he doesn't give a fuck about the party he ostensibly leads. If the Republicans never win another election, he doesn't care. So he is completely insulted from any impacts of his administrations policies being unpopular. Like an inconsiderate lover, he got his already. What the fuck does he care if you are not satisfied and sitting in a wet spot?
As for the banks. The same assassination playbook that can bring the tech CEO's to heel can be used to bring the banks around. Assassinate the head of Citibank, and see how many banks resist illegal government orders. I think underestimate the amount of real power the ability to assassinate anyone inconvenient is to getting what you want, in spite of the law.
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Sorry, my bad !I will kindly request that you do not make sex similes when talking about Trump.
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sorry to resurrect a dead thread but this is just too pitch perfect
https://electrek.co/2025/03/07/tesl...quests-on-last-days-of-canadian-ev-incentive/
… if there was any doubt that this company is at its core a scam
https://electrek.co/2025/03/07/tesl...quests-on-last-days-of-canadian-ev-incentive/
… if there was any doubt that this company is at its core a scam
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Musk would probably prefer the swamp drains into the piggybank he owns outright as opposed to the one where he has to deal with a fraying veneer of accountability to other shareholders.
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While I’m not a big fan of thread necromancy, I think that 1) under a week isn’t really “dead” enough to warrant an apology and 2) your post is very germane to the topic at hand.
Considering how much Tesla’s stock price has slumped through the election, I’m not surprised to see them trying to game the system. I only hope that Transport Canada does a proper investigation as to what happened and puts the screws to Tesla if anything shady actually occurred.
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