Sure. And selling the most popular car on the planet is a failure?

Didn't the US government put ~$80b into rescuing GM etc, years ago?

Subsidies bootstrapped the EV industry. Stupid policies mean walking away from the investment, ceding the market to foreign competitors, and doubling down on legacy ICE crap the rest of the world no longer wants...and Americans will be less and less able to afford.

>the most popular car on the planet

That's the Toyota Corolla. I find this inaccurate glazing of musk to be relatively common but it always strikes me as profoundly weird.

To be charitable, according to at least some reports, the Model Y was the best selling car of 2024.

I was googling the data for 2025 and it seems that it’s number 2 now (behind the RAV4 to my surprise) with the Corolla at 3.

No idea how accurate these are, finding global numbers was harder than I thought.

Also, if you compare the entire model line up sales, Tesla isn't even in the top ten in sales. Tesla could disappear entirely and the car industry wouldn't even notice.

But the metric is good since it incentivizes car companies to make 1 good model instead of many different with the intent to confuse buyers

Car buyers are not confused. The market is naturally highly segmented. My needs "every day low distance compact car that can cope with city centre narrow streets with once a month motorway driving" is not met by the same car as "family of 5 with big dog living in a village"