The lesson of Tesla

[Dissident]

Tesla cars were always dog shit and experts always knew it

even with Elon suing and otherwise intimidating reporters who dared to be negative on Tesla and bribing other reporters ( like Fred Lambert of Electrek ) with promises of free Tesla Roadsters ( something on which he never delivered ) the word was out for anybody who was interested in the truth - Tesla was garbage

and yet nobody was interested

just like nobody cares that Ferrari or Aston Martin quality is garbage

Tesla was cool and that’s all anybody cared about

Tesla was cool because most people who wanted one couldn’t have one

but Tesla’s promise to shareholders was that of exponential growth … and many years ago i have warned on Twitter that you can’t have both - you can’t have exponential growth and remain cool at the same time - something is only cool when it is rare and unattainable - and exponential growth means literally the opposite of that

and yet nobody listened …

all this time Legacy Automakers resisted making EVs because they knew what i knew - but their shareholders didn’t care and demanded EVs that competed with Tesla. as VW CEO said at the time they had to make EVs because they saw lines of credit drying up because nobody wanted to invest in a “legacy” business, everybody only wanted to invest in EVs.

and so Legacy started churning out EVs … a few were complete flops like Nissan Leaf, Chevy Bolt and Mercedes EQS Sedan …

and a few were hits like Porsche Taycan, Audi E-Tron and E-Tron GT, Mustang Mach E, Ford F150 Lightning, Hummer EV, Polestar 2 …

the combined effect of these releases was 2-fold:

1 - the notion that EVs were some magical technology that only Tesla could master was destroyed

but more importantly:

2 - the perception of EV scarcity was destroyed

there was a VERY BRIEF moment lasting only about 2 years when the industry was making a killing because everybody was buying EVs and then …

and then reality has set in - EVs were not the future, they were not a status symbol, they were just a fad …

all the Legacy automakers that promised to end ICE development and go full EV did a 180 and returned to ICE because after only about 2 years the customers were done with the EV fad …

and Tesla was on the ropes but Elon did manage to get Biden to make Tesla’s supercharger standard the national US charging standard ( NACS ) instead of the previous open standard ( CCS ). when one by one Legacy automakers started switching to NACS that IMO saved Tesla from certain doom, because Superchargers were Tesla’s one moat that was itself on the ropes with CCS slated to surpass it.

and then … Elon decided he wanted to be president of United States … a republican president at that.

this was the final nail in Tesla’s coffin. people were already out of reasons to buy Teslas and Elon gave them a reason not to buy one.

but the lesson alluded to in the title is this - the quality of the product DOES NOT MATTER.

Tesla’s rise and fall both happened in complete isolation from the actual quality ( or lack thereof ) of the car itself.

Tesla rose despite building shit cars. And it fell for reasons completely unrelated to the quality of their cars, them being unsafe, the shit service and so on.

It rose purely on hype, it fell because the hype cycle has run its course, and it was buried because their customers were Liberals and Elon went Republican.

at no point in any of this did anybody care that:

1 - slaughterpilot kept killing people by driving into highway dividers, semi trucks etc
2 - people kept burning alive in Teslas unable to get out because of no door handles
3 - that everything you take for granted in cars ( like sun roof that opens ) is missing in Tesla
4 - that you have to spend an hour in line for a supercharger to charge it
5 - that you can’t get out of Florida in a hurricane in an EV
6 - that tesla shipped cars without proper tires or brakes
7 - that people kept waiting months for parts
8 - abysmal quality of paint, fit and finish

and on and on …

NOBODY CARED

they didn’t care when Tesla was on the way up …

and they didn’t care when it was on the way down …

the lesson is simple - people are DUMB ANIMALS UNABLE TO JUDGE THE SUBSTANCE OF ANYTHING

they buy and sell purely on hype

as a former pro wrestler said ( after watching stars manufactured in the WWE by having fake chants of approval pumped through the speakers into an arena, and people always falling for it and beginning to echo those chants ) - “people do not think - they follow the noise”

PEOPLE JUST FOLLOW THE NOISE

that is the real lesson of Tesla.

the corollary to that is you can’t argue with morons. you have to give them what they want even if you know it’s going to kill them.

because legacy carmakers understood everything from day one, but they were powerless to do anything, because they were not in the driver’s seat - the investors were.

and investors are DUMB MOTHERFUCKERS who fell for Elon’s lies, because people tend to believe anybody who promises to make them rich quick.

PS: i have an article on a similar topic here:

Carmaker Mentality

i was reading about BMW 5 Series Station Wagon and whether it will come to US: and came across this fascinating discussion: the perception of wagons is significantly different in the US than in Europe. While customers from the Old Continent buy Touring models for their extra cargo capacity and the more convenient tailgate, Americans are about styling: “When we discuss [this topic] with the U.S. colleagues or with the dealers, it’s very interesting because the demographics are totally diffe…

where i explain how European Automakers deliberately refuse to sell wagons in America to keep them artificially scarce and therefore cool.

PS2: the reason i was never in favor of shorting Tesla is because knowing something is a fad isn’t the same as being able to time the downturn. shorting is inherently dangerous and i do not recommend you short anything unless you have insider knowledge, which would technically make it illegal. thus i do not recommend shorting and never have even though i always said that Tesla was a scam and a fad.

and also being a scam doesn’t guarantee that the downturn will ever come at all. most things in this world are scam. the church is a scam. government is a scam. federal reserve is a scam. and so on.

if you think knowing something is a scam is reason enough to short it you’re a fucking idiot.

[OldFriendSaysHello]

At the end everything is about marketing and pressing emotional buttons of herd mentalities. Look at McDonalds or Gucci bags made in China. Re EVs yeh the fad is definitely passè and the funniest thing is how legacy are so late to the party that now all major manufacturers are releasing EVs - nobody actually wants them at all (https://www.motortrend.com/news/2026-dodge-charger-daytona-r-t-discontinued-ram-ev-delays) Re TSLA as a stock I think Musk is working with US gov on other things so they closed their eyes on Tesla stock manipulation and total nonsense garbage promises and I suspect secretly funneled money to prop it up as a business, as they care more fore Boring Co (building underground military bases) and SpaceX sending cheap spy satellites and god knows what else.

[kanyewest]

Teslas are for dorks and Indians now. I’d feel like a retard driving around in one

[Alkiphron]

Here, they’re invariably driven by white liberals. And even if I were interested, I have no use for EVs because I actually take cross country road trips or long drives, so I am not going to tolerate anything beyond a hybrid or PHEV. I am not going to wait for a car to charge.

If I wanted to like drive a muscle car down the autobahn sort of thing I’d rent a Tesla in Sioux Falls and drive it down I-80 for a day to get it out of my system. Everyone flies at top speed down that empty straight road just like it’s the German autobahn. I mean, maybe there are police, but I never saw any springing speed traps.

[Dissident]

@Alkiphron

If I wanted to like drive a muscle car down the autobahn sort of thing I’d rent

most supercars are garage queens. that is they just sit in the garage and rarely get out on the road.

people who own them typically daily drive something boring like a Lexus.

Lexus is your wife and mother of your children. she doesn’t excite you but she is there for you. and a Ferrari is the young girl you occasionally allow yourself to enjoy even though you know it can only bring trouble.

from that perspective i think it would make sense to let’s say rent a Lambo for a weekend in Miami and then drive a Lexus for the rest of the year while living some place boring like Boston. sure it would probably cost thousands to rent the Lambo for the weekend but if you owned one you would never drive it anyway, and you would need an extra garage spot, and you would still need to pay insurance and change oil if you never drove it, and all all the rubber and plastic parts and paint would still age even if the car was never used.

this might be worth it if it’s a collector’s item, but if it’s just a super nice and fast car but is not collectible you would be pouring money down the drain.

i look at used Porsche listings and many of those cars have mileage of like 10,000 for a car that lost $100K in value to depreciation over time but was barely driven. so whoever owned it paid 10 dollars per mile in depreciation watching the car sit in the garage. by contrast a Camry used for Uber with 200K miles on it only lost $20K in value or $0.1 per mile. 100 times difference.

when you look at it that way you realize whatever crazy price it costs to rent a Lambo for that Miami weekend it is probably not as bad of a deal as it seems. of course you would need to have a busy weekend for it to be worth it.

only issue is there is no room for hoes in a Lambo. maybe make it a Bentley.

Convertible so you can make eye contact with prostitutes.

apparently that bad boy rents for just over $1,000 per day. if you’re going to use it to pick up hoes it might be worth it. if you’re just going to use it to commute it’s a waste of money.

this particular Bentley ( 2025 GTC ) appears to be built built on Porsche Panamera platform / Drivetrain, but whereas Panamera is a family car that can go on the race track this is a Pimp Mobile that can go on the race track.

Technically you can put hoes in the back of a 911 but it would be somewhat mean spirited to do that for more than a 5 minute hop. And if you put them in the back of a Panamera you lost the frame because they will be so comfortable back there they will think you’re their Uber and not their daddy. I think Bentley GT / GTC hits the sweet spot in terms of hoe accommodations in the back.

it seems current VW Auto Group strategy is for Panamera and Bentley to share the same platform with Porsche emphasizing performance and Bentley emphasizing luxury. that isn’t to say that Bentley is slower - but rather that FOR THE MONEY you get more performance per dollar with Porsche whereas Bentley is more of a cost no object proposition that happens to be just as fast as the Porsche but nobody cares about that because nobody gets one to race it on the track ( although it can do it ).

i think this is the right strategy. in the past Bentleys seem to have been based on Audis which made no sense because Audi always had performance below BMW and Mercedes and that made Bentley a rather sad vehicle, but now that it’s based on Porsche it is proper.

in fact i think the only reason Porsche Panamera exists at all is to provide a platform for the Bentleys, because Porsche doesn’t sell enough Panameras to justify the incredible amount of Engineering that goes into that car.

When you look at Panamera in isolation it’s a failure compared to let’s say 911 ( in terms of money it makes ). But when you realize that it enables the Bentleys then as a product family it is equally as successful as the 911.

Car reviewers don’t talk about this because they work for the Automakers and their job is to pretend that Bentley and Porsche are both unique niche automakers, as opposed to just market segments in VW Auto Group line up.

[Dissident]

@OldFriendSaysHello

At the end everything is about marketing and pressing emotional buttons of herd mentalities. Look at McDonalds or Gucci bags made in China.

yep. it has been this way since the days of Edward Bernays

Edward Bernays

convincing women that cigarettes were “torches of freedom” …

@OldFriendSaysHello

Re EVs yeh the fad is definitely passè

it’s interesting that it took EVs about a decade to stop being the future whereas NFTs did it in about a year and Apple Vision Pro in about 2 weeks.

@OldFriendSaysHello

and the funniest thing is how legacy are so late to the party that now all major manufacturers are releasing EVs - nobody actually wants them at all (https://www.motortrend.com/news/2026-dodge-charger-daytona-r-t-discontinued-ram-ev-delays)

well that particular car ( Dodge Charger EV ) was particularly poorly reviewed, it was very expensive for a Dodge, Very Heavy and just not good. so we can’t use this example to paint the entire Legacy EV business. this particular car being a FLOP has less to do with it being an EV and more to do with it simply being a poorly executed product, like Pontiac Aztec for example:

which is a legendary flop in the Automotive Industry to the point of books being written about how something like that could even happen …

likewise the total failure of Mercedes C 63 AMG E-Performance cannot be extrapolated to suggest that Plug-in Hybrids are failing. in fact PHEVs are doing very well. it’s just that particular car was made by people who badly mis-judged what the customer wanted, and then marketed the car to precisely the wrong customers.

but PHEVs overall are doing great. i saw the new M5 PHEV twice already in the wild. it is actually a worse car than C63 in almost every way and double the price but it gave customers what they wanted - namely a V8, whereas C63 posts great track times but nobody cares about that. nobody buys cars to take them on the track.

@OldFriendSaysHello

Re TSLA as a stock I think Musk is working with US gov on other things so they closed their eyes on Tesla stock manipulation and total nonsense garbage promises and I suspect secretly funneled money to prop it up as a business, as they care more for Boring Co (building underground military bases) and SpaceX sending cheap spy satellites and god knows what else.

US GOV isn’t going to attack any domestic tech Giants. They seek cooperation not confrontation. They will happily attack foreign companies like VolksWagen ( Dieselgate $15 Billion Fine ) or TikTok.

All the domestic tech companies work for government in some way. In case of Elon his Space-X is joined at the hip with NASA which is a government agency. Starlink has arleady been used as a bargaining chip in conflict where if you’re at war in some ditch Elon will give you free Starlink, but then if you misbehave he will turn it off.

Elon knew for a while that Tesla has no future, which is why he ( and his brother and others at the top of Tesla pyramid ) has been selling Tesla stock for years now. It’s hard to run a Ponzi scheme forever.

Tesla may be circling the drain but Elon is in his prime. But he can’t let Tesla fail completely because that will damage his personal brand. he is diversifying into other things like Twitter, DOGE etc. and i am sure he will remain successful overall on the balance of his companies but people still associate him with Tesla so he has to control Tesla’s bleeding somehow so that he won’t be seen as a failure.

also Elon’s father in an interview a few years ago said Elon thinks he is about 5 years behind his plans for himself … he said that when Elon was already world’s richest man … if that is true then Elon’s ambitions go far beyond money …

Elon also said it was “very interesting” when Medvedev said that Elon will be America’s president …

and Trump said he will be running for 3rd term … so they will be rewriting the constitution to eliminate restrictions preventing Trump from running and will likely also remove restrictions that would prevent Elon from running …

so my guess is Elon’s ambition is to be US President and also to start a Mars Colony … add to that AI and Neuralink …

Tesla at this point is not much more than boat anchor around Elon’s neck but he can’t easily extricate himself from it without it looking really bad …

[Alkiphron]

One thing to keep in mind about German automakers is the shifting geopolitical sands. The EU badly shot themselves in the foot by taking sides against Russia, since up until then most of their energy needs were supplied by Russian pipelines. What happened since then was that the energy costs in the EU shot up and this has done a serious number on their industrial capacity. Germany in particular got badly hit. As a result, German automakers have now started making more vehicles in the USA, since it’s a huge market for them anyway, and I would expect that to increase with time, since it’s not like the Russian genie is being put back in the bottle.

[Dissident]

@Alkiphron

German automakers have now started making more vehicles in the USA

Europe is only the 3rd largest car market after China and US, and with deglobalization ( tariff wars etc. ) most products will be manufactured in the market where they are sold.

so even if all factories in Europe close that won’t really hurt the automakers that bad because most of the cars sold globally won’t be manufactured in Europe anyway.

it will hurt the people who used to have jobs in the factories but it won’t affect the automakers that much because they can simply move the robots making the cars from Germany to USA

a lot of new car factories are being built in the south - like in the Carolinas. a lot of cheap labor there and you don’t need geniuses to work the assembly line. 80 IQ is enough. just have to be able to stand on your feet all day without getting exhausted - same as for an Amazon Warehouse worker. basically any Nigger or Immigrant can do this work, and even some women.

also, with more advanced automakers almost all of the work is done by robots. so it doesn’t even matter how much money you pay the workers. if you have to pay a little more in US than in Germany it will make no noticeable difference. a $50,000 car comes off an assembly line every minute. what difference does it make if the assembly line worker makes $20 or $30 per hour.

more realistically they will keep ONE factory in Germany where the engineers can test that everything works correctly, then they simply copy that assembly line to the other markets.

the other possibility is that Trump will give those engineers a Visa and they will simply come to America. which is something i am personally in favor of. better to lose your job than have your entire nation collapse from a hyperinflation death spiral. if the country is doing great you will be able to survive on welfare. if the country is fucked you will be shot like a dog on the street even if you’re rich.

overall Trump is doing a great job for America. the problem is he’s not doing anything to fight AIPAC, the Jews or the Deep State. only people he went after were his PERSONAL enemies, but he’s not trying to dismantle the overall system.

still, it’s better than nothing. even in Europe they are feeling the heat - they are acknowledging the blow-back from pushing too hard and they are temporarily retreating to regroup.