GM had record sales figures, just before they filed for bankruptcy. The problem with the car industry is that if you’re willing to sell at a loss, any level of sales can be achieved. But that is not a viable business. In reality, too many car companies are selling BEVs at a loss. This will have consequences soon.

The solution is to eliminate self-driving cars and instead invest more in mass transit and walkable neighborhoods.

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It could mirror the economic stagnation of Japan that begun in the 1990s. Very similar set of circumstances.

You’re better off spending it on stuff like mass transit and the like. It won’t just all disappear at some point in the future.

You won’t be saying that once the market crashes. You’ll realize that there are much better ways of spending that money. Like far more practical emissions reducing solutions.

Not really. It’s mainly about gaining market dominance on a technology they think is the future. They’ll build them right next to the massive coal plant alongside a million other things they’re subsidizing.

It’s the result of massive subsidies. When they stop, this market will crash like a house of cards.

IOW, this is right-wing propaganda. And given her skin-color, you can add racism to that mix too.

Mass layoffs is going to make it worse, not better.

You still have to pay out warranty work either way. Someone has to fix it after all.

There are many people who have made the claim that Tesla doesn’t really make money. You can google it up. Just look for stuff like “tesla profits” or “tesla not profitable” and you see it. Also, the only people who do vigorously insistent that Tesla is profitable are the fanboy investors and some of the least credible analysts out there. It screams gaslighting no matter how you look at all.

You have to build the entire system out yourself. That costs a lot of money. The dealership model also costs the manufacturer basically zero dollars, because it really profits on used car sales and maintenance works. You don’t make anymore money by having your own dealerships. The whole argument that there’s some secret behind Tesla’s business smacks of gaslighting, not something that actually holds up to reason.

It’s been a long standing issue with Tesla’s accounting. No one can really explain how profits are actually being generated going back years, especially considering everyone in the West is losing money on EVs. It’s also being ran entirely by sycophants and people with minimal qualifications, with zero accountability anywhere. So it just seems, via Occam’s razor, that they’re cooking the books.

That depends on how bullshit the numbers really are. If it is just Jack Welch level of financial shenanigans, you can see a stump version of the company eventually surviving. If it is worse than that, then probably not.

They have a direct sales model which is more expensive to operate and exaggerates profit margin. There’s also reason to believe they are wildly understating warranty costs plus ignoring R&D costs. People who look closely have consistently concluded that Tesla cannot really be making money, or have very narrow profit margins at best.

Huge price cuts will compound these problems dramatically.

Enron was a huge business that had millions of customers. It just happened to lose money while doing so. The crime was that they hid that last part.

There’s good reason to believe that Tesla is an Enron-esque style fraud. No one in charge has shown any business acumen, and no one can explain how it is actually profitable. But that requires only stooges and yes-men on the board. There cannot be any accountability.

That’s true of ethanol, but not biodiesel. High cost is a consequence of insufficient supply. Basically, it was how the market stopped further biofuel growth.

Then China is just repeating Brazil. Brazil was one of the few countries that could pull off biofuels in a real way. But it was a unique situation, and it doesn’t work elsewhere.

Which is the truth, pretty much everywhere. There simply won’t be enough chargers, likely ever.

It’s a repeat of what happened to biofuels. It was hyped as the magic solution for fossil fuels, until people began to realize that we weren’t in any position to scale up production of biofuels to the levels needed. After a brief period when we fantasized about ideas like cellulosic ethanol or algae oil, which never really happened BTW, we ultimately just gave up on biofuels.

Battery powered cars are likely to do the same thing. We are at the point were we are realizing that this won’t scale up. There’s going to be a brief period of fantasy solutions to the problem too, but those probably won’t happen either. After that, we will move on from BEVs.

“Flying cars” are pretty much always shitty helicopters.