When Reuters reported in April that Tesla had scrapped plans for a long-promised, next-generation $25,000 electric vehicle, the automaker’s stock plunged. Chief Executive Elon Musk rushed to respond on X, his social-media network.

“Reuters is lying,” he posted, without elaborating. Tesla’s stock recovered some of its losses.

Six months later, Musk appears to have backed into an admission that Tesla dropped its plans for a human-driven $25,000 car. He said in an Oct. 23 earnings call that building the affordable EV would be "pointless” unless the car was fully autonomous.

  • @skyspydude1
    1•1 month ago

    Very, very broadly, I’d say a lot of my concerns boil down to them convincing the broader industry as a whole that cutting costs and delivering a shit product is okay, so long as you’re doing it as a “technology company”

    • Pushing out buggy, half-baked SW because “we’ll fix it with an OTA” and a recall has little to no direct financial impact, allowing for you to gamble lives on hopefully getting a SW update out before the bugs cause accidents or deaths, rather than spending the time/money to get it right from the start.

    • Removing stuff like important, standard hard controls (buttons/stalks/etc) to make everything a touch control, purely for cost cutting, but acting like it’s because buttons are “old tech”

    • Pushing that 100% BEV is the only current solution, rather than pushing for a far cheaper mass improvement of fuel economy and scaling BEVs as HEVs grow too, especially in developing markets.

    • Using a proprietary charging standard for nearly a decade, solely as a sales tactic, and only cooperating with other OEMs once it allowed them to collect government subsidies

    Those are just a few I can think of off the very top of my head, and the ones I’ve seen have the most impact on the broader industry. I can go into more detail on any of them as well.