Sales tank as investors get ready to decide whether to make Musk a trillionaire.

Tesla’s shareholders are ready to vote tomorrow on whether to give Elon Musk an even more vast slice of the company in an effort to keep him focused on selling electric vehicles. Currently, the trolling tycoon appears a little obsessed with the UK, a place he appears to conflate with Middle Earth, which investors may or may not take into account when making their decision. What they ought to take into account is how many cars Tesla sold last month.

Although Tesla only publishes quarterly sales figures and does not divide those up by region, slightly more granular data is available from some countries via monthly new car registrations. And the numbers for October, when compared year on year to the same month in 2024, should be alarming.

  • manxu@piefed.social
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    1 day ago

    Y’all complain about Musk and about the quality issues of the hardware. I am more worried about the software and the willingness of the company to paywall basic functionality. I will never buy a car that can be bricked by the manufacturer remotely because I am not willing to pay a subscription.

  • TheDemonBuer@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    EV adoption in the US is going to suffer as a result of the industry being dominated by tech bros. It’s unfortunate that buying into the EV industry in the US also means buying into a toxic culture. I just want a car that happens to be electric, I’m not interested in joining a techno-utopian cult.

    • worhui@lemmy.world
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      22 hours ago

      It’s hard for a normal person to comprehend. He takes it because it can be taken.

      In this case people understand money, so they think he wants more money. He wants to TAKE and that money exists so he should take it. He may not want it or have any plans for it. The sheer fact it can be taken is why he is taking it.

      That is the true way of the .001%

      If it can be taken it should be taken by them.

      Want, need , enough, not enough are all more advanced thoughts . It’s only ‘Me Take’

    • comador @lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      It’s never enough. You get to a point you don’t ever want to live below your means ever again. To stay at that level you want double, triple what you have now so you can stave the losses of the next crash. The greed grows.

      You get to a point where you worry something or someone outside of just recessions will take it away because you’ve seen it happen to others and you’ve worked too hard to get it. The greed grows.

      The sad part is this isn’t something new nor isolated and every single human being is capable of it because greed literally is a survival instinct in all of us.

      The only only only resolution is to go back heavy taxation. For the US, that means to pre 1960s and post US Civil War 1860s taxation when top earners paid up to 90% tax on ALL 100% of their earnings no matter how it was made.

      • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
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        1 day ago

        If it was only that, 100 million would still be enough for a very luxury lifetime. It’s more of a kick for them, like in gambling.

        • comador @lemmy.world
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          23 hours ago

          Yes, that’s another possibility, but not the only one. Greed manifests differently for everyone.

  • Corporal_Punishment@feddit.uk
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    1 day ago

    The UK market is filling with electric cars from multiple manufacturers now. Cars made by actual car companies.

    We have a mini as a run around. It is a better car in every way to a tesla. Range is excellent, handling is amazing and the build quality is what you’d expect from a premium vehicle.

    Its actually a car. Not a test bed for unproven technology.

    Teslas are cars designed and made by a computer company, nothing more.

  • defunct_punk@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Tesla has failed to expand its range beyond the Models 3 and Y, both of which look increasingly stale despite recent cosmetic tweaks.

    Dunno why reports continue to blame the sales on the styling of the cars instead of the fact that the very public CEO of the company, who is kind of inseparable from the whole brand, is polarizing to say the very least.

    Tesla cars look fine. Genuinely they do. They’ve stuck with their own design language so that their cars are apparently “Tesla” on the road, and that kind of brand recognition is something designers spend their whole lives trying to create. You recognize them, like an Apple product. Sure, 15 years ago, everyone was trying to copy Apple and Apple’s own image suffered a bit from design oversaturation, but they pushed through it, waited out the trends and for the competition to move onto the next thing, and held their ground and kept a good-looking, consistent lineup. Tesla is basically the same.

    Tl;dr: it aint the cosmetics

    • warm@kbin.earth
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      2 days ago

      Teslas are fucking shit cars made as cheaply as possible. People literally burn to death in them trying to find the door handle.

      Yes, the CEO is a human piece of shit, but the cars shouldn’t be bought regardless.

      • Strider@lemmy.world
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        9 hours ago

        Indeed, the cars were always shit but still people thought having one was cool, I never got that (first hand experiences!). And still the stock went up.

        Only when he fully openly went Nazi, it painfully slowly changed.

      • Leon@pawb.social
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        2 days ago

        The fact that they’ve had multiple vehicle designs that break when it rains is nuts.

        • SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca
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          22 hours ago

          At one point they replaced parts with pieces of wood from Home depot.

          The batteries last but the motors don’t. They also are impossible to repair from minor crashes and cost a fortune to insure. Parts can take months to source.

      • GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca
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        20 hours ago

        That is a design issue, but it is not a cosmetic design issue. Having never been in a Tesla, I don’t know if the fundamentally flawed interior door handle has any great impact on aesthetics. That said, Teslas, even cybertrucks, are very distinctive. Their esthetics have little bearing on the quality of the build (this is the entire philosophy behind knock-off brands).

        So, while I don’t thing you’re wrong, that has no relevance to the OC’s statement.

        • warm@kbin.earth
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          15 hours ago

          They dont have a door handle for… aesthetics. The cybertruck is a dangerous piece of metal because of… aesthetics.

          It’s all part of the overall design of the cars. So I’d say it’s pretty relevant.

          • GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca
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            14 hours ago

            I have never seen the inside of a Tesla, yet I can recognize them from a block away. The door handle may be something their owners notice, but it isn’t what makes them recognizable to passersby. This is like saying people recognize iPhone because of the triple tap functionality. It’s unique, but isn’t what makes people recognize them at a glance.

            There are perfectly good reasons to not like Teslas, safety and giving money to Elon among the top. Don’t dilute your message with irrelevance and inaccuracies.

            • warm@kbin.earth
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              11 hours ago

              It’s not irrelevant at all. I can recognize most cars from a distance, the tesla design isn’t special. The sharp edges of a cybertuck are an aesthetic choice that effects the car overall, if you have to make your car so fucking dangerous to stand out, you did something very wrong.

              Design affects and is affected by all factors, a car looking a certain way is not an irrelevant factor to anything else. If you are ignoring how they interact, then any cosmetics are irrelevant themselves as at that point you no longer have a car, but a shell.

    • Ancalagon@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Eh they look like trash but are so common now and the other manufacturers have made copy cats. But you’re right.

      • defunct_punk@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        I disagree but that’s just my opinion. I love Ramsian design and the (exterior of) Tesla’s do it well. The new Prius is good too but gets a bit too futuristic to call it Ramsian.

        Either way, my point is that most of the copy cats have moved on to other designs, “trend chasing.” Yeah, a couple years ago every automaker was ripping off Tesla, but I don’t see that anymore, they’re going towards a more 80s angular look. What I’m saying is that Tesla’s maintained their design language really well. That’s not a fault, it’s a success. Tesla cars are apparently Tesla on the road, just like an iPhone is obviously an iPhone and not one of the thousands of iPhone copycats that were on the market ~10 years ago or how a Starbucks is obviously a Starbucks, and not one of the thousands of wood-toned internet cafes that came up a few decades ago.

        • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          At this point in time Teslas stand out from the rest because they look like a mildly tweaked (mainly the higher back, inset door handles and big fat tablet in the middle of the dashboard) late 90s sedan or roadster design, because late 90s vehicles of these categories are the core visual styles they copied and tweaked in an attempt to make them look futuristic, a style which they haven’t changed since.

          (Maybe that stuff was very different from the common car in the roads in North America, but it wasn’t in Europe).

          The novelty value of inset door handles is gone, plastic interiors and big fat mid-dashboard tablets on a pedestal look ugly and dated, and the core car body design style just looks like your parent’s car back in the day.

          Tesla are kinda like those old Sci-Fi Movies from before flat screens and computer graphical user interfaces whose idea of futurism were fancier cathode tube screens and showing fast moving green screen text. The thing is, only beloved Sci-Fi filmic universes with cult followings (or alternative universe ones, like steampunk) still keep those visuals in any new movies, and Musk has been busy blowing up what little cult following Tesla had (which itself was already limited because, unlike Apple, Tesla never stood for quality and that following was mainly linked his own personal cult and perceptions of higher eco-friendliness than the rest, both now gone).

          • anomnom@sh.itjust.works
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            1 day ago

            The 90s gave us some of the most aerodynamic cars (or lowest CoD cars) of all time. We’ve been going backwards since then because styling for aggressive grills and SUV heights makes it impossible to be highly efficient. EVs need very advantageous they can get to increase range in order to sell in the US, so flowing 90s designed are a necessity and a form following function that I can’t deny. I like the new Prius for the same reasons.

            I like the new Model Y refresh in person (the 3 less so), because front fascia were never very good looking IMO. The new light bar thing makes it less bulgy and slightly Ramsian (I guess, I can’t remember Dieter Rams making anything aerodynamic though, or really even curved for that matter!). The touchscreen bullshit and Nazi owner will keep me from ever buying one though.

            The cyber truck is of course excluded from all this, and should go rot in a scrapyard of bad ideas along with the rest of Elon’s ideas.

            • Ancalagon@lemmy.world
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              15 hours ago

              Lol see you get it, just with one vehicle. Now do the others. They are trash cars. Literally spyware on wheels and if he ever did push an ai driving mode they would be remote controlled bombs.

              • anomnom@sh.itjust.works
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                13 hours ago

                It’s also insane that Elon thinks he’s worth a fucking trillion dollars for this effort too.

                We need privacy laws that stop the data collection and all camera data should be stored locally unless opted in. That goes for the whole damn industry though. Tesla may be the first/worst, but it’s all garbage.

                What’s annoying is that I like the batteries, charging management and motors in Teslas. I’d love to get my hands on a gutted car and convert a few classic vehicles to EV. That’s really the thing Tesla has given the car community. N

            • SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca
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              22 hours ago

              Pedestrian safety laws in EU also influence design. Not in USA, where pedestrians are considered homeless.

              • anomnom@sh.itjust.works
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                21 hours ago

                Yeah for sure, other than hard points under thin hoods I suspect a lot of 90s cars were a lot safer for pedestrian impacts too. Even things like the Ford Taurus, Buicks, Maximas and Stanzas, Camry and Accords were all smooth low front facias and hoods.

            • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              24 hours ago

              You can have airflow friendly design without the flat single color body, plastic interiors and a tablet on a plastic pedestal.

              Agreed that the whole SUV trend was a massive step back in so many ways, but being in Europe I’m not even comparing Tesla’s design with SUVs, I’m comparing it with other cars in the same category since they are still most of the cars in Europe.

              Even something like a Mini Cooper EV looks downright daring next to the stale styling of Tesla’s offering.

              The cars that I notice on the roads which leave me with the same overall impression in terms of looks as Teslas (minus the ugly tablet on a plastic pedestal look) are BYDs, which are way cheaper.

      • defunct_punk@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        They look like Tesla cars from 10 years ago, which is what I was talking about with maintaining brand design identity versus trend hopping, which is an admirable thing. Like Apple or Starbucks or IKEA, whose product design is instantly recognizable and has been established for decades. I’m talking purely from an industrial design standpoint here.

        • tornavish@lemmy.cafe
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          2 days ago

          Apple looks totally different than it did 10 years ago.

          But you’re right about IKEA, they haven’t changed shit

          • defunct_punk@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago

            Why do you think modern Apple looks totally different than it did 10 years ago? Genuine question. Even with all the criticism of Apple I’ve ever heard, “design inconsistency” has never been one of them.

            • Leon@pawb.social
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              2 days ago

              The latest version of their OS’ is inconsistent as hell. At least for iOS and iPad. It’s a massive half-assed rush job with no thought put into it. It’s very un-Apple-like.

              • tornavish@lemmy.cafe
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                2 days ago

                Agreed with macOS 26, those new borders on the finder icons? WTF Apple? That weird edge gap? The fucking corner radius?

                What’s next, round windows?

                • Leon@pawb.social
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                  1 day ago

                  On iOS and iPad OS you get different keyboards if the app you’re using hasn’t been updated to use Liquid Glass. The keyboards have slightly different layouts because of them having slightly different padding. There’s also a bug with key presses not registering properly.

                  I personally also really dislike the multitasking update for iPad. I didn’t need or want windows, which is whatever, but I don’t see why they had to get rid of the old side-by-side two app snapping system and slide-over apps.

                  They kept the weird stage manager in addition to the new windowing system. I guess having three different systems is too much, but I bought an iPad to use as a tablet, not a mini laptop.

                  Both stage manager and the window system is really cumbersome to use when your only input is touch, unlike the old side-by-side and slide-over app system.

                  Since it’s an iPad, touch is the primary input, but it feels like they’re moving to make it a laptop hybrid first, and I personally don’t care for that.

                  The massive amounts of added dead/white space in apps is also weird. I guess it can work on iMacs and whatnot with large high resolution displays, but on a regular iPad you just lose screen real-estate.

            • tornavish@lemmy.cafe
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              2 days ago

              Totally different and design inconsistency are very different

              I understand that the iPhone is basically a slab of glass, like most other phones

              This is around 10 years apart for the “desktop” mac

  • foodandart@lemmy.zip
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    2 days ago

    Musk stated not too long ago, he felt empathy was a weakness of western society.

    So… too bad for Tesla. Oh well.

    • JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz
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      14 hours ago

      Status symbol. Like how many of them keep buying iPhones just so they can show others they could afford an iPhone. Being expensive and not Chinese is pretty much the exact point.

    • demonsword@lemmy.world
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      21 hours ago

      it’s implied that we’re talking about potential customers, people who could buy Teslas but are shopping elsewhere instead

      • FauxPseudo @lemmy.world
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        20 hours ago

        The 's at the end of Tesla says that they have some sort of possession of these people. That happens after a purchase, and can’t happen of these people are actively avoiding a purchase.

  • dan69@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    I’m just scared that the “few one off stories” regarding door handles aren’t a big f’in red flag. Or even some how magically cars drive into a pond…

    • hitmyspot@aussie.zone
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      1 day ago

      From what I’ve seen, it looks like it’s staggered based on metrics to be delivered to trigger it. I hope they approve it, which causes the share price to crash and then he destroys his wealth in the greedyprocess and doesn’t get any of it.