Might effect new buyers decisions I guess, but since about 99% of Tesla's were sold to green, left-leaning buyers, before the Elon hate-fest, I am not sure how targeting that group of people for your hatred is helping any "cause".
Nah. Insurance is based on the numbers, and Tesla is a shitty company to have financial liability to fix. There’s no parts, few shops, and lots of stuff to get stuck with.
A friend had a rental for 4 months when the panoramic sunroof cracked on his Tesla.
The vandalism isn’t computed in yet, and will immediately resulted in dropped coverage. If the Feds label it as terrorism, insurance generally excludes riot and terrorism from coverage anyway.
TRIA insurance against terrorism is required by law to be offered as a rider. It's actually shockingly affordable, because the law shifts the ultimate financial burden for any events between $200 million to $100 billion onto the federal government. So insurers have a reasonable cap on their expenses and don't need to rely on traditional re-insurers for black swan events.
Most people decline this rider anyways, no matter how cheap it is - and therefore most people are not covered for terrorism related damages.
Is there a downside to having a terrorism rider, other than higher premiums?
For example, if your insurance company would otherwise have to declare a claim as due to non-terrorism, and just pay it (because they'd probably lose in court if they didn't pay), but because you had the terrorism rider, they decide to declare it as due to terrorism, and then you get a less-desirable experience?
(For imagined example of less-desirable, maybe you have to wait longer to get paid while the company interacts with gov't, or the reimbursement is calculated or capped differently, or some consumer protection you'd normally have doesn't apply.)
> insurance generally excludes riot and terrorism from coverage anyway
If that's true, they'd have even more incentive to declare a claim as due to terrorism if you didn't have a rider. They could avoid paying it altogether.
My question was about cases in which they wouldn't/couldn't deny claim due to terrorism on weak grounds, since they'd be taken to court for denying the claim, since the grounds are weak.
But if you had a terrorism rider in those cases, then maybe it's worse for you, because then they wouldn't be denying the claim initially, but maybe instead you're stuck in a different process, with various downsides, and maybe less able to contest the assertion?
I tried to clarify when I posted the original question, with an example scanario, in which, without the rider, you'd simply get paid, because the insurance company doesn't want the lawsuit.
The question for that example scenario then is: would having a rider give the insurance company a viable option that is less-desirable to you.
(Such as because it delays you getting paid, you get paid less, it gets into a buck-passing Kafkaesque process between government and insurance company, there are less protections, etc.)
The problem with Tesla is they used financial engineering to get where they are today, and that cycle eventually catches up to you.
Enshittification is a real thing, and happens because benefits were front-loaded through ponzi (in this case backed by money printing and the public market retirements that must rebalance based on S&P or other indexes).
There are also higher risks with 'licensing' a Tesla. Both to society as a whole, and to the owners themselves. Licensing isn't owning, and you get what you pay for.
Few of the people who choose to get a Tesla actually think about what they are doing aside from their own ego, which is actively supporting un-American ideals.
How-so?
A Tesla is not a car, it is a sensor/node based computer that is networked and connected that performs the functions of a car.
A networked computer with many sensors is part of a mass distributed network called "Remote Sensing Networks" or RSNs.
The short-term profit on money isn't in building the car. It is in selling the data that has been collected and aggregated to the highest bidder, while getting you to pay for your own enslavement to such willfully provided subscription data.
Every time you see a Tesla while driving, whether it is on or off, the Tesla logs you and your passengers face, biometrics, behavior, location, history, travel, and other hints that may be visible including EM following a master data-management strategy that is built on big-tech primitives at their data center. This includes conversations or more intimate settings which have already leaked to the general internet (in some cases).
It is illegal for anyone to film, and distribute film of others, and record conversation without their explicit and specific consent, let alone such other aspects of personal data, where it contains everywhere you go, what you do, even in your own backyard or within your garage (home), or your neighbors (where consent is not given). Yet this is what Tesla is doing through complacent consent, and coercion (corruption by dependency in sunk cost/function).
A Tesla is not the only RSN, your cell phone does this, your media players (Roku) and Smart TVs do this. Your laptops, modern OS (Windows), and too many other devices to count do this. When profit is guaranteed, monopolists seek coercive control, and information is power.
If you have these, you have consented to have a digital soldier mediating in every aspect of your life whether you know it or not. Even though they didn't tell you what they were doing. They were not required to specifically say what and how they used that data, and they defined it broadly and ambiguously. Dis-aggregation of Alarm, and Separation of Concerns.
That is how the banality of evil (complacency) becomes the radical evil (Nazi's).
What does that open the door to or allow?
Abuse, Coercion, Arbitrary Discrimination, Loss of some things that become everything. These are the same abuses that inspired the constitution's third amendment, and what led us to join the War for self and others during WW2.
We are repeating what lead up to the American Revolution, and because so many people have wilfully blinded themselves they can't see the consequences of their actions while they actively participate towards definite systems failures, mindlessly.
"No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law."
Implicit in this is that there remains a rule of law, which has mostly failed.
I really pity the people who have such little awareness that they go and buy a Tesla. It is like waving the communist/fascist flag which is statism, for all to see... we're American. "Yes, but what kind of American".
This has happened before, and it is too late to stop it from happening again.
I'm sorry, but either it's factually true (or mostly there, to be chartiable) or it's just good vibes and made up, and the latter doesn't lead to curious discussion, an important ethos for this site. If you make a claim then understandably people will try to evaluate the claim to see if it's true, and to also decide whether the conversation can be held in good faith or not.
If you look at places like Reddit where the organizing is happening, they don't differentiate between left-leaning buyers of years past, and in fact call them out for being complicit by not selling their (paid for?) car. It's scorched earth and is not limited to new buyers.
Reddit might not be representative of the larger shift. I am sure there is plenty of hatred, and even violence that makes the news, and that stuff is bad, but I mostly see people politely nudging those they know that own Teslas to sell them.
Which makes sense. The company sold to left-leaning, environmentally conscious buyers, and the CEO has now rebranded Tesla to basically the worst thing for that demographic. Sales are down, resale values are dropping, and insurance rates are rising. And there is no real opportunity on the horizon to save the company and/or the brand (robotaxis without LiDAR..?)
Maybe it looks like scorched earth on reddit, but in reality it's just a lot of people realizing the brand has self-destructed.
It's even more confusing, who are they supposed to sell it to, if no one should drive these cars (and how big of a loss are they expected to take in order to sell it)?
If a foreign government that the US was acting hostile towards was so inclined, they could highly tariff Tesla sales/service and offer buy-outs to make existing owners whole where they simply crush and recycle the cars to deny Tesla any service revenue.
Sounds dramatic (scorched earth! my lord), but the posts I've seen are like, "here's the anti-tesla flyer that was left on my friend's tesla" and then a bunch of upvoted comments replying that it's dumb and counterproductive to target people who bought their teslas years ago.
> It's scorched earth and is not limited to new buyers.
This whole thing is about destroying already bought vehicles to intimidate potential new buyers, and thus lowering future sales. Not that I support the vandalism, but I think that's the kind of logic they are applying here.
Build quality is so bad, those old cars will destroy themselves. Wonder how many of the original 2018 model 3 are still on the road. The other day I saw a comment chastising a person complaining about their 120k Model 3 battery failing and how its already at end of life. I was gobsmacked.
I also see reports of some Tesla making it to 500k miles. Honestly there is so much nonsense on both sides and you can't even trust any numbers coming out of Tesla because they have distorted the truth so many times.
Listen every company will make mistakes at some point in their life. Toyota has earned so much of a reputation of quality over many decades that it has become a meme and is reflected in resale values and insurance rates. Tesla continues to produce sub standard quality and thanks to their actions they have burned their reputation with everyone other than their shareholders so they don't get the benefit of the doubt anymore. How many times are they going to promise this or that and say that they have fixed their quality only to find out they have lied yet again?
Hence why they've now said they're a robot company. Yet any bullish targets now are more likely to be based on Musk awarding himself large government contracts than technical advancements.
Yes we do. A lot of people, for a lot of different reasons.
For me, it will be the end of the biggest con, the stock market has ever seen. And I can't wait to read about the details behind it, once the dust settles.
What makes Tesla exactly a con? Their cars are amazing appliances, literally nothing in market like it, for less than a Toyota. FSD is largely delivered. Space internet for everyone (soon potentially also with Freedom™ now that Trump is involved in demonopolising space or whatever it's called) with a phone. Where is the con???
A lot of things, I will just cite one - "FSD is largely delivered". Really ? Can you tell us, where Full-Self Driving is really fully self-driving ? Like being able to summon your car from Los Angeles to New York, like Elon claimed one will be able to do in 2017 !
Tesla sold millions of cars that were supposedly going to become Robotaxis with a simple software update, somewhere in 2019. SIX YEARS AGO. Tesla even showed screenshots of a ride-sharing app. SIX YEARS AGO. Now it's obvious to anyone, that those cars will never become Robotaxis, as Tesla pivots to trying to fake a Roboataxi service this year, with remote operators.
But the greatest con of course, was towards investors. Of course nobody is complaining now, since the stock is still a meme stock. Just wait a bit more...
You can buy supervised FSD right now. It works extremely well to the point testers are bored out of their minds - their channels became worthless since it barely makes any mistakes.
It's overpriced and not available where I live, but I'd love one. It doesn't do everything under the sun as promised, but I'd rather drive less than more. The basic 10 year old Autopilot is already huge help.
Yeah, that's the problem with a real Full Self Driving. It's either 100%, or it's not. 80% doesn't make the cut.
Do you seriously believe the company was valued at >1T$ because investors believed that an "FSD 80% delivered" is enough ?
Tesla and Elon claimed ALMOST 10 YEARS AGO, that the car will drive itself from Los Angeles to New York. Just think how insane this is, even today. And then look up the state of their technology 10 years ago.
Of course self driving will be solved one day. Probably not by Tesla. But it doesn't matter - they were selling this stuff for almost 10 years already, knowing perfectly well it doesn't work. But hey, next version will blow your mind !
Before the inauguration, Tesla was trading at a P/E 30 times bigger than Toyota. Now it's about half that (110).
Some say Tesla shouldn't be valued as a car stock; it should instead be valued as a Tech stock. Well, Tesla traded at a P/E about 4-5 times that of NVIDIA which itself had a high P/E compared to the other Magnificent 7 which in turn have a high P/E compared to the stock market in general.
What exactly is Tesla so great at that they deserve this enormous valuation? Its P/E has gone down to ~110 now, bit this is still incredibly high compared to e.g. NVIDIA which is trading at a P/E of ~40.
Elon Musk’s power is based on his wealth. A bankrupt Elon Musk will no longer be able to influence politics in several nations. He won’t be able to buy the US presidency. He won’t be able to threaten primaries against US representatives. He’d lose Twitter. He’d most likely no longer be running the so-called Doge.
So yes, we would very much win and there are a lot of people who care.
What sucks is that the cars* are actually very, very good cars. I've owned three of them so far, and I love driving and owning them. They take almost no maintenance, and I've only had one problem that needed me to take it into the shop, and it was for a recall that was totally handled in a day, and they gave me a loaner.
Legitimately, Teslas have been the best cars I've ever owned, but thanks to Elon, I will never buy another one, so long as he runs the company.
With rational investors I doubt it. Space launch market size is like 20 billion. One launch is 70 million and they had 133 of them in 2024. Times two (currently at half market share) this would be 18 billion.
That does not take into account that they are increasing the market size themselves with Starlink.
And with Starlink it remains to be seen if that can be profitable. I doubt it. The Starlink satellites deorbit every 5 years and need to be replaced (CapEx+++).
Shotwell has claimed that Starlink is cash-flow-positive. They also have >5 million subscribers. ARPU is likely > $1000.
Both Starlink and Starship are >$5B programs. SpaceX has not raised nor borrowed near enough money to fund both of those programs, indicating that they've got sufficient cash flow to mostly self-fund both of them as well as pay the salaries of >13,000 employees.
There’s a saying about watching what people do, not what they say, that seems to apply well to Musk. The proof that Elon cares about wealth is that he keeps doing everything in his power to gain more of it (well, up until recently, but only because he found he can access power directly instead of indirectly through more wealth).
wrong. the people in question are not "protesting" anything. they are committing violent destruction of property against random people who happened to buy an EV. calling them "protesters" only does a disservice to those who actually are. these people are criminals to catch and lock away, nothing more.
Sadly I think, and for some time now, we are well past the point where political action needs to make sense either to the people involved or to the people outside. The message, the narrative, they’re whatever you want them to be. Whether that makes sense - much less where the truth lies - is irrelevant.
It's obviously being offered as justification for the anti-Tesla behavior (using the context of the GP in a tongue-in-cheek way). You may reasonably disagree, but the message wasn't unclear.
Well, is your claim that's it's isnt working? Perhaps after Tesla is bankrupt 6 years from now, tycoons with political ambitions will be less likely to adopt extremist political stances.
It doesn't need to make sense to you, personally, the HN commentariat, to be effective political action.
Thanks to Leon's salute, instead of buying 1-3 more Tesla's in my lifetime, I'm going back to plain gas powered Hondas. I'm choosing specifically non-turbo non-hybrid models. The American people, with their choice of President, have shown me they don't care about the present or the future. I'm sure their president will keep gas prices low. I don't see any reason for me to suffer for their benefit or anyone else's. The American people have chosen to doom us all, so why not just make life easy on myself.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
> Thanks to Leon's salute, instead of buying 1-3 more Tesla's in my lifetime [...]
I can see how one could make a plausible argument for this...
> [...] I'm going back to plain gas powered Hondas. I'm choosing specifically non-turbo non-hybrid models. The American people, with their choice of President, have shown me they don't care about the present or the future. I'm sure their president will keep gas prices low. I don't see any reason for me to suffer for their benefit or anyone else's. The American people have chosen to doom us all, so why not just make life easy on myself.
...but that makes no sense whatsoever.
A non-plug in hybrid is a gas car. All the energy used by its electric motors comes from either using the gas motor to charge its battery or from regenerative braking. It just uses less gas per mile than a non-hybrid and is more reliable than a non-hybrid [1]. If you want to drive a 100% powered by gas car and want to make life easy on yourself a non-plug in hybrid is the way to go.
Unless you need a pickup truck or something similarly beefy it is hard to make a case that a gas powered non-hybrid is better than a non-PHEV hybrid.
[1] Yes, non-plug in hybrids from the top hybrid car makers like Toyota and Honda are more reliable than gas cars. It is a little counterintuitive because you'd expect that hybrids would be much more complex due to having both gas and electric drive systems, but it turns out that they also remove quit a bit, and also the drive train can actually be simpler. Toyota's transmission on its hybrids for example is mechanically much simpler. The data from Consumer Reports and others that track reliability show about 25% fewer problems on non-plug in hybrids.
It would be if anyone cared to do anything about it. It's not even legal to modify trucks to fart out black smoke like that to begin with but it's never stopped them from doing it. Cops do not care about that issue.
Usually this type of thing isn't really about a cause but making oneself feel better. The stuff that is actually beneficial to a cause tend to be less emotionally satisfying.
Protests and ethics and capitalism and products and politics are more complicated than that. If collateral damage or somehow hurting anybody in "your" half of The Two Groups (which is a faulty premise to begin with) is ruled out, you're wiping out nearly all opinions and protest. Things just aren't that simple (though it's convenient to pretend they are when it lets us point a finger at the enemy out-group - look at their hypocrisy/in-fighting!)
That is not to say the opposite - that I think all anti-Tesla hatred/actions are justified. I'm just refuting your opinion specifically.
I have a lot of thoughts that run in both directions on topics like this, including this one. However, this specific case is especially far gone, in terms of drawing lines between "understandable" and "unreasonable" on any given anti-Tesla action/opinion, simply because of the fact that he and some of his supporters invoke Nazism. If it wasn't for that, I could more confidently say something like, "No, that one is over the line" for any given anti-Tesla thing. But I can't.
i didn't quote you that way. you said you do not think that all anti-tesla actions are justified. "actions" in this case heavily implies not picketing their HQ but the recent spate of vandalism and destruction. you didn't say you do think that all such actions are not justified.
if that is the case, then we have no disagreement, and i'm glad this cleared things up.
The person you're replying to isn't me. You did misquote me in your post, and then maliciously paraphrased, which is why I didn't reply, but I just wanted to point out that the person who replied to you was a different person.
i didn't maliciously paraphrase, that's a sentiment a reasonable number of extremely online types seem to share. if you're saying i didn't seem to favor that sentiment, well, obviously.
This probably doesn't fit the two-team paradigm. When you consider the objectives might be something different from ensuring democrats win offices in two years, the rationale may make more sense.
It's clearly intended to impact new buyers. Most of Musk's wealth is tied up in Tesla, and that funding allowed him to both buy an election and -- gestures broadly -- demonstrate convincingly that he is an absolutely reprehensible, garbage-bin of a human.
The rich used to start ivy leagues and build libraries. This guy is cutting off funding for the poor and declaring himself, proudly, a "deadly threat" to people he perceives as "woke".
And the "99%" thing is pretty dubious regardless. Elon Musk has been a garbage person for years. A self-dealing creep. >80% of Tesla sales have happened over the past four years.
And of the people I know with Teslas, zero of them are "green, left-leaning" buyers. They're people who wanted the novelty with the crazy acceleration and the boasting tech. I feel like this "leftist car" thing was never, ever true for the brand. And if it was sales would have been 0 for the past six years or so, but there are an endless rank of daytraders and crypto bros who need their Teslas.
> And of the people I know with Teslas, zero of them are "green, left-leaning" buyers.
White petit bourgeois center-right corporate capitalist Democrats that engage in environmental virtue signalling are “left-leaning”, if you view things from sufficiently far to the right.
That’s definitely an exaggeration. I’d bet it’s closer to ~60% green left leaning, and another ~30% libertarian, tech types. Would still mean at least 60% of his former audience is lost.
I also think there are a lot of people who are neither and just bought teslas because they're a relatively high performance exec-style car at a decent price
In fact, Elon Musk is the source of the hatred. He can’t seem to go a day without amplifying weird depraved shit like “Hitler was actually a commie” and “recipients of benefits are part of the parasite class” that makes people shudder with disgust. Plus the whole illegally dismantling our federal government thing.
Let me ask this: maybe, just maybe, it was before Elon went politically to far right and started cater to Russia, and to try reabilitated Nazism with actions and History revisionism?
I mean, when we saw Putin try to get Hitler off the hook and blame Poland for WW2, it was kind of expected, not only because Putin finances Neo Nazis all over the world, but because it suits his current agenda.
Now when Elon is doing it, it doesn't look weird to you? It's just the "hate-fest" maybe...
> The Musk derangement syndrome is strong here still, I see.
I just realized you’re the other guy glazing musk in this thread.
How do you have someone who makes themselves the center of attention constantly, does polarizing shit like carry a chainsaw into the government to symbolize how he’s cutting it all down, and by his own admission is doing things that will upset people,
And then you waltz in here and accuse all of us of being deranged for even talking about it?
> Musk was a darling of the left like 2 years ago.
Not in any leftist circles I was in. You can look through my post history and find me criticizing Musk for wanting to put indentured servants on Mars well before the Twitter buy. There is no such thing as a good person who is a billionaire, and I've never said otherwise.
What exactly are you saying that we CT owners "deserve"? I like my CT. It has served my family well for a year. It's a car, not a political statement. I hope that this kind of vicious sentiment doesn't become mainstream.
The hints were there for a long time (like pedo-guy), but there were mixed messages. In 2017 Musk resigned in protest from a Trump advisory committee when Trump dropped out of the Paris agreement. That's the Musk I bought our Tesla from.
