HN Reader

The next shoe to drop will be shifting Model Y production from Fremont to Austin. Fremont will make Model 3s. Austin will make Model Ys and Robotaxis/2s. Cybertruck will be canceled. None of the Tesla plants will be making robots at any scale for many years.

Tesla will become a case study on how to completely waste the first-mover advantage.

For many people, the very term EV itself is still ubiquitous to Tesla.

And somehow Tesla is still worth more than every other non-Chinese automaker combined. $1.5T.

GM? $80B. Stellantis? $40B. Toyota? $280B. Mercedes-Benz? $60B. BMW? $55B. Volkswagen Group? Also $55B.

I’m sure I’ve missed plenty of others, but I could miss some 18 $50B automakers, and Tesla would still be worth more than all of them combined.

If Tesla was valued fairly, it would probably be at the tune of $5B. But I’ll never bet against it, because the markets can remain irrational for longer than I can remain solvent. And for some unbeknownst to me reason, the markets value Tesla as a hot tech company, not a 3rd rate automaker, which is what it actually is.

And to add insult to injury, even GM Super Cruise is widely renowned as better and safer than Tesla’s current “FSD”.

So he milked Tesla for another $2B to subsidize xAI, has dropped the models to 2 (3 and Y), revenue is down, growth is negative, BYD is eating Tesla for lunch, followed by the other CN and KR vehicle companies.

He doesn't have FSD, camera only navigation without sensor fusion with LIDAR will fail, the only thing keeping Tesla where it is is the bullshit dispersal field that surrounds Musk.

Why is it seen initially so negatively?

There's nothing inherently wrong with a company deciding to stop producing models that are extremely old, have newer comparable models that are more widely available globally and sell multiples more of. So why would you keep those older models?

If anything its a good thing. But its Tesla so nothing they do will be spoken positively of.

> “If you’re interested in buying a Model S and X, now would be the time to order it.”

I can't tell if this is real and he realizes the traditional luxury brands have beaten him or if he's just using the classic rug store sales tactic.

Tesla is a meme stock in a similar manner to GME. You cannot bet against them even if they have incredibly unsure future prospectives because there are too many believers who will buy any dips.

I am confused about what Tesla is doing. They have effectively two automobile products now with one failed product (cybertruck). reading various articles about this doesn't make it more clear. Do they not want to be a car company?

Relevant part: "Tesla's far more popular models are the 3 and Y, which accounted for 97% of the company's 1.59 million deliveries last year."

Five years ago, during the 2021 Q1 earnings call, Musk was asked about Models S and X. He responded:

> I mean, they’re very expensive, made in low volume. To be totally frank, we’re continuing to make them more for sentimental reasons than anything else. They’re really of minor importance to the future.

It seems fairly easy to find figures on how many cars Tesla has produced each quarter but, surprisingly (at least to me), it's harder to find compiled information on (for each quarter):

- Average Selling Price;

- Cars produced vs cars sold;

- How many unsold cars are in inventory. I did find this [1];

- A model breakdown of the above 2.

The reason I'm interested in this because my theory is that:

1. Sales have been shifting from the Model S/X to the Model 3/Y, which reduces average selling price and overall profit. Stopping production is really about the inventory glut;

2. Unsold inventory is going up, particularly for the Cybertruck; and

3. Tesla marketshare is collapsing in many markets due to a combination of brand collapse among the most likely EV buyers and competition from lower-priced alternatives, particularly Chinese EVs in developing markets.

So what exactly is propping up this company at an above $1T market cap?

[1]: https://electrek.co/2025/06/17/tesla-tsla-inventory-overflow...

A genuine question, what are the use cases for Tesla's Optimus robots? Are they consumer products that help with household chores, industrial robots for warehouses or manufacturing, a play toy, something else?

One of Oxide+Friends predictions was "6 year: Tesla is out of the consumer car business".

https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/predictions...

Feels a lot like giving up. I guess this is why there is such a strong change in the Tesla messaging, to Robotaxis and robots. But maybe this is inevitable. The cars being made in China are pretty amazing and I don’t think it is possible for American or European companies to compete.

Elon's $1T tranches are mostly based on market cap, right? Switching from just a carmaker to a "physical AI" company could be all he needs to convince the stock market to ignore Tesla's declining profits and raise the market cap even higher.

Interesting that they're cutting S/X but keeping the Cybertruck. Whatever metric they're using (revenue, profit, units, etc.) that led them to cut the S/X would surely have similar numbers for the Cybertruck, if not worse.

I know that the Model S platform is old but for me it was always seen as a halo car. I've owned three of them and I really wished they would release a completely redesigned S version.

This is sad in that I was serious about finally getting one in two to three years (We have two Model 3 LRs already), but is fantastic in that no other car interests me and I now don't have this hyper materialistic goal distracting me.

If Tesla completely exits automotive and decides to license their FSD tech (or someone else catches up), then I'll probably just get whatever the equivalent of a Bolt is then with that and premium sound.

And they just might, too. Recall that the EV tax credit went away this year along with regulatory credits to other auto OEMs, which was a huge part of their business. This combined with the Cybertruck (unsurprisingly!) missing sales targets is problematic.

Coming up next: Tesla to end production of all cars and sell only NFT/Crypto with pictures of Cybertruck going to the moon/mars. This is the only company which provides Speculation as a Service. With a complete monopoly on SPaaS, the market cap will skyrocket to $20 Trillion. Elon will be given Nobel peace prize for saving mankind from itself as well as physics.

No more S3XY lineup of models? I'm surprised Musk was okay with breaking that up.

The elephant Tesla mocked has run, and stomped over them. Now there comes the pivot.

While "The old auto establishment" is not a benevolent structure, they proved that experience is something earned with time and doing things. Corporate knowledge and memory is real, and you can't beat it with brute force.

They started the change, but they failed to keep up with the pace. Also hubris, greed and monies.

It is sad, but big sedans do not sell well and the X really needed to be replaced with something completely different. There are now several other 3 row EV SUVs competing with it, and even low volume ones (eg, R1S) outsell it easily.

Don't be surprised if something else takes its place as they do need something larger than Y and less expensive than X was.

I think ever Elon made some strange moves (the chainsaw image, mass-firing people at DOGE and elsewhere or the right-arm gesture) people question more why they should give money to where he is associated with. Tesla suffered from this, in addition to the design becoming awkward compared to older models.

Tesla’s models, S 3 X Y, meant “Sexy”, especially since the logos were written in this order in the menu bar of their website, which is also their order of creation. What are they going to do with “3Y… ?”

> Tesla is developing Optimus with the aim of someday selling it as a bipedal, intelligent robot capable of everything from factory work to babysitting.

“Full Automated Parenting”. You win a Darwin award on behalf of your kids if you fall for this shtick.

I can get them ending products. That is natural cycle. But what should be worrying is that they have not already introduced at least one model that replace either one. It looks like real stagnation which in long term will kill the company.

> Tesla is developing Optimus with the aim of someday selling it as a bipedal, intelligent robot capable of everything from factory work to babysitting.

I did not look forward to the news articles about robots accidentally dropping or squashing babies.

Hard to believe, but it's almost 10 years since they announced the new Roadster

I'm almost surprised they didn't end model 3 production too. Benefit would be much smaller since 3 and y are already so similar.

I’m a little sad (nostalgic?) about this decision. Model S is a truly historic vehicle.

X sure, but the S? it was the best in the lineup

why not kill the cybertruck instead?

Tesla must be in serious trouble given recent erratic moves

FSD will launch next year, of course. Just like every year.

Looks like they are not selling the larger vehicles at all, so why not kill the truck too? It’s god awful and a flop. Ego? Or thy want to try to revive it?

What they are really signaling though is with EVs they are not able to differentiate between the higher and lower cost models enough to show value to the higher end models. This is a huge failure IMO. Model S was the OG car that really was looked up to when it launched. It did have them luxury image, by not matching the build and interior of the car to the image Tesla really dropped the ball. Now the S is seen as inferior to the other luxury cars in that price range and so it’s becoming tough for Tesla to differentiate between the 3 and S.

This actually brings up the larger question, does musk care about cars at all at this point? Or does he just want to move on to robots? Feels like his heart is not on the cars.

Any other car company would create an S / X MkII.

I just hate that what's actually going on with this company is so buried between Musk's bs, and people hate Musk so much that they spew bs as well. Seems to be just "pick your liar" with this company.

X going away probably isn't surprising given sales dynamics. More people would tend to opt for the cross-over or sedan. The model S is a little more shocking since it was always niche, but honestly Tesla doesn't have the trim to be priced like that and I suspect in order to get from where they're at to BMW/Audi etc., just isn't where they want to invest their money.

This definitely feels like an "oh no, people stopped buying" pivot but the moves themselves make sense.

So many Tesla/Musk haters around here.

Pretty sad seeing people take pleasure in the company failing. See past your opinion about it's leader. At the end of the day, it's the company that brought vehicle electrification to the masses and has acted cash cow for SpaceX, Starlink and Neuralink.

Nobody here seems to remember that this was always the plan: release expensive cars to bootstrap the company which allows them to release progressively cheaper cars until everyone can afford one.

Not a fanboy, but this seems like it went exactly according to plan.

I wish people that jeer Musk would decide if he’s running his companies or not. They think he’s an ignorant figure head and a conniving strategist. I don’t care either way just stick to one.

If they want to sell a buttload more cars just make FSD free on all Tesla’s, done.

The possibility of FSD is probably the only reason I paid $10K more for a M3 over a BYD Seal. But free FSD? Who can compete with that. Nobody.

Also, turning FSD into a subscription is total enshittification and I hate it. It would also go a long way to coax back peeved off buyers and convince them not to make their 2nd EV a different brand.

My current sentiment towards Tesla for making FSD subscription-only AFTER I bought my car? Screw you. Go to hell. It’s MY $80k asset. I feel betrayed.

Is it just me or does Tesla design the doors so when you look at the car from the front with both its doors open it looks like their logo.

Probably one of the dumbest decisions taken by a CEO?

"HN is dying" is a cliche, I know, but I seriously want to bookmark this thread to revisit it in 10 years - I'm sure it will age even better than (in)famous Dropbox thread. So from that perspective, HN is alive and well :).

The level of cynicism of the discussion is overwhelming, frankly. I get it that some people don't like Musk because of his politics, but why should that prevent people interested in technology to at least try to present a steelman case?

Let me try it, at a risk to be down-voted to oblivion...

1. As people correctly point out, S&X are outdated, low volume models. Investing more engineering time in them doesn't make any business sense; these engineering resources and capital should be clearly redeployed elsewhere.

2. People think that Waymo is supposedly better(?) than FSD, but at least some very well informed people (and NVIDIA as a company) believe that it's not. Personal anecdote: an older (HW3) version of Tesla drove me perfectly well in Yosemite last weekend, in on winding mountain roads with 0 cell phone coverage. It will take Waymo forever to map everything there properly with LIDAR, and true autonomy only in selected metro areas has limited value.

3. It's obvious that when we have autonomous, general purpose humanoid robots, they will completely transform our societies. Any such robots would require an enormous AI/vision investment. Say what you want about Elon, but xAI basically caught up with the top LLM shops in ~18 months, and now have comparable AI training capacity. You can bet against Optimus, but who else would have the skills to bring both the technology and the AI to market first? China? Good robotics, but no enough data to train their vision models comparing to Tesla, at least not yet.

4. So the bear case is that (a) driving autonomy is not possible without LIDAR, (b) Tesla can't bring another very complex product to market, and (c) autonomous robots are not possible in our lifetime. If you look at the AI progress even in the last 12 months, that's a tough sell to me.

What are the serious, tech-based counterarguments to the points above?

I guess self-driving will be done by the humanoid robots now

Makes sense and it sounds like Optimus is getting ready for prime time.

Are they betting Robotaxi will replace all cars in the future?

Sitting over here in Asia, I am doing a wild guess:

Most people in the western world have no clue HOW bad the crisis in our electronics industry caused by AI BS, tariff wars etc is.

When you wanted to get anything done in China as a western company, last year you might have issues to have China allow EXPORT. For example due to the pissing contest about Nexperia, a lot of really basic chips like USB controllers suddenly were forbidden for export.

And since January 1st 2026, things got far worse: Now some standard connectors (that are, amongst others, used in cars) that are made in the USA can no longer be IMPORTED into China. Which means that you now can typically will have parts missing on PCBAs that you then have to re-solder with the missing US components somewhere else. And many don't have the competence for this anymore.

This is all just wild speculation.

And I am pretty sure that right now it will be next to impossible to source parts for such a complex product like a robot. I need grey market brokers locally in Shenzhen to get even the most basic stuff at insane prices. And a lot of stuff simply is no longer available at all, due to things like "Intel has replaced anyone with a brain with an AI, and now no longer is able to produce and chip embedded N150 CPUs from the US to China, because... how?".

Tesla is now putting in 4680 battery cells back into the Model Y. Years after they had discontinued the 4680 program. What does that mean? They are using up whatever parts they still have, like everybody else in the electronics industry is now doing.

Good luck buying a computer, phone, fridge, car or toaster in the second half of 2026.

Tesla has no moat - but one thing I will give to Elon is his incredible strategy in building Tesla

1. Build sports car

2. Use that money to build an affordable car

3. Use that money to build an even more affordable car

4. While doing above, also provide zero emission electric power generation options

he got distracted by side-missions, his personal shitty side

however if you separate the ideas from the person you can see how such a simple strategy was executed successfully

Elon should be sending robots to the Moon, Mars and the Asteroid Belt. That would make much more sense.

Setup automated low gravity refueling depots. Then automated mining of the solar system will scale up as it more than pays for itself. And as with Starlink, SpaceX synergy would give him a serious advantage.

Much faster to achieve (despite the challenges), less expensive, and more profitable than a human Mars colony which would burn money without return for decades.

(Regardless of wishful thinking, civilizations coming backup is a second substrate adapted to the rest of the solar system, not a colony suffering truly miserable conditions. Although I am all for human exploration, which would also be easier and cheaper on the back of expanding automated infrastructure.)

Before Tesla came along there were a small number of EVs but they were all pretty bad because their only purpose was to serve as “compliance cars” in states like California so automakers could sell more gas cars. (See the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? for more on this.)

So Tesla deserves credit for building the first electric cars that people actually wanted to buy. They also deserve credit for building the largest and most reliable charging network - a key factor in making electric car ownership more feasible.

But they’ve made a lot of poor decisions recently and all the money and power went to Elon’s head. I think it was beneficial to the world for Tesla to exist and do that important work early on, and now it’s beneficial to the world for the company to die.

I think Tesla would make way more sense if they got out of the car part of the business. Serving the consumer market directly is very expensive.

Their electronics, batteries, motors, etc., are world class. Packaging this up into something a partner can use to build actual cars could have less risk. An electric motor or battery can propel many kinds of automobile. They tend to keep their value better when stored in this format too. The moment everything is integrated into a car, things get very bad very quickly unless you're selling Ferraris or Lamborghinis.

So is the new roadster just not happening?

> Tesla’s far more popular models are the 3 and Y, which accounted for 97% of the company’s 1.59 million deliveries last year.

TIL that Model S hasn't been as popular. But hopefully when the 2nd gen Roadster finally gets released that it will fill in the slight gap left by Model S's discontinuation.

Tesla's secret weapon will be the dyson sphere. Probably complete within 2.. 3 years maximum.

I can imagine Musk selling these very models with AI slapped onto them and call it revolutionary

Do you believe Mr Musk though?

So essentially down to making one car huh.

Electric cars hype topic is has rotted away. Time to bring new, yet novel for the the public. Now people will belive in the musk stories of the future shaped by the humanoid robots, not shaped by the electric cars. Who cares if in 3 years they will switch to another subject if stock keeps being pupmed (and compoensation keeps flowing in the hands of this guy).

His idea is to keep involving more investors, more people, government is possible in tesla's orbit with nice stories. When other are so invested the failures aren't his problem anymore, he got hist compensation which is tied to the company price.

Really sad. I loved my Model S. Amazing car.

I simply dont care how good or bad the cars are. I will never put a penny in Elon's hand. He is a despicable nazi and a terrible person. I hope he goes bankrupt.

someone is stuffing their channels, huh? first the fsd fiasco, now this

Dropping the S and X is going to kill the market for them. Who is going to buy a car that they know is getting discontinued?

> converting Fremont factory lines to make Optimus robots

I’m very bullish on humanoid robots, but this seems absolutely batshit insane to me. These things are no where near ready for full scale production.