Massive Tesla Slump (Is this the Beginning of the end?) | Auto Expert John Cadogan

Ford and General Motors just overtook Elon Musk’s electric car cult, by market capitalisation. I’m sensing a house of cards, and the winds of change are certainly blowing. This could well be the beginning of the end for Tesla.

Tesla is little more than a confidence trick aimed at rich, green imbeciles dumb enough to believe you can actually spend and consume your way to a sustainable future. I’m not click-baiting you. That’s a reasonable analysis of Tesla.

Unfortunately for the cult, Tesla is hemorrhaging money. Like that scene in the operating theatre where a nurse shouts ‘we’re losing him’. It’s bleeding so profusely because the company is just not very good at building cars, and the captain is a nut.

Stock analyst Wedbush Securities describes Tesla’s current position as a (quote) “code red situation”. The share price has plunged 20 per cent over 10 trading days, and the company has fallen behind GM and Ford by capitalisation.

Tesla shares are at their lowest level in about 30 months.

“With a code red situation at Tesla, Musk & Co. are expanding into insurance, robotaxis, and other sci-fi projects/endeavors when the company instead should be laser-focused on shoring up core demand for Model 3 and simplifying its business model and expense structure.” - Dan Ives, Wedbush Securities.

GM and Ford are both quite sick, too, let’s not forget - both, like Tesla, in massive job-cutting mode. Ford just announced the decimation of its white-collar workforce - 7000 jobs there. GM recently cut 14,000. And Tesla is letting 3000 workers go (it’s cut 15 per cent of the workforce since July).

Weapons-grade bullshitter Elon Musk is cutting costs. After an epic snake-oil sex-up of the company, recently, spearheaded by those proposed robotaxis - it just rolls off the tongue - which saw even more rich green dickheads hand Tesla another $2.7 billion (USD) to burn, Musk declared the company had ‘only’ enough cash for 10 months at (quote) “the current burn rate”.

(Rare moment of honesty there. It is such a cash-incinerating bullshit machine.)

Almost half a billion of that 2.7 disappeared faster than you could shovel it into a furnace. Up in smoke immediately, just covering the loss Tesla made in the first quarter. It’s just gone. $2.2 billion remains - but not for long. They paid a $920 million in convertible note debt in March, and $566 million more is due in November.

So the cult has effectively turned $2.7 billion of additional investment into $1.6 billion - without building a single car. Well done there. That’s a neat trick. I could turn $2.7 billion into $3 billion by the end of the year. No problem. Tesla’s guaranteed to turn it into $1.6.

There’s no way Tesla will hit its Model 3 production target either. The heavy hauling Semi is a pipedream - Musk is deathly silent on this - I’m sensing massive refunds there, to the likes of Walmart. More cash, incinerated...

And I guess it would be nice if they could actually make some of those solar roof tiles they promised, too… But unfortunately that’s apparently also just fiction.

“By the middle of next year, we’ll have over a million Tesla cars on the road with full self-driving hardware, feature complete, at a reliability level that we would consider that no one needs to pay attention,” - Elon Musk

Which brings us to RoboTaxis - turn your Tesla into an autonomous taxi while you’re not driving it. Tesla takes 35 per cent off the top and you get to keep the rest. Sound like a plan?

No shit - Mr Musk actually said that about a month ago, publicly, at the company’s headquarters. Only one small problem there: it’s just not physically possible. This is pure science fiction. Level five autonomy does not exist. The technology is not even on the way off the drawing board. It’s decades away.

Calling this ‘million robotaxi’ announcement ‘half-baked’ is simply too kind. Even if the tech was here, now, beta-tested and ready to roll out (and it’s not - level two is - kinda - here now, and that’s where the car can steer itself on a really well delineated freeway as long as a vigilant driver is overseeing it for the duration)...

...but even if level five was upon us, there is no way a million vehicles would be up and running next year. The regulatory framework of insurance liability, legality, regulatory approvals and compliance, etc., would take far longer than that to sort out.

Cadogan