Summary
Tesla faces a second consecutive year of sales decline after a 13% drop in Q1 2024 deliveries, the steepest in nearly three years.
CEO Elon Musk’s alignment with Donald Trump and far-right politics has damaged Tesla’s brand, triggering global protests and vandalism.
Analysts attribute the sales slide primarily to reputational harm, compounded by aging models and fierce competition from BYD and others.
Deutsche Bank forecasts a 5% sales dip this year. Musk’s political role has fueled calls for boycotts, with concerns that prolonged involvement could cause lasting brand damage.
Their brand is forever broken. Even if musk 180d here I’ll never touch tesla again. This is coming from an S owner. If I didn’t own the car already you bet your ass if I need to replace it I’ll not even look at a tesla ever again.
Even if musk stepped down from tesla and got out of politics.
Tesla is forever musk, like bill gates and Microsoft.
I’m one-and-done with my Model Y. I got it shortly after the Y was released in part because I felt it was a decent EV for the price at the time, and in part because their Supercharger network is a nice option to have (and I’ve used it a fair amount).
Even if Musk wasn’t such a public buffoon and acted more like other auto industry CEO’s I wouldn’t buy another Tesla either. The vision-only system sucks not only in inclement weather, but bright sunny conditions as well. It’s also terrible at detecting rain for auto-wipers, oncoming cars for auto high beams, etc. The build quality of the cyber trucks is sketchy. They haven’t made any significant design changes in years, other than maybe replacing the steering wheel with a yoke (and I refuse to even ride in a car with one). They seem too proud of creating things like “fart mode” and holiday light/music shows instead of something actually useful like improved speech recognition & more robust voice commands (“tune radio to wxyz”???) and on and on…
The way I see it, when it’s time to replace my Model Y there will be plenty of other competitive EV choices from big automakers like Honda, Toyota, etc. as well as newer ones like Rivian. And now that the Tesla charger has become an SAE standard and non-Teslas can charge at Superchargers there’s even less incentive to stick with a Tesla EV.
The charger network was the only thing to get me to consider tesla. All of their cars ive ridden in have felt like first generation Hyundai rattle traps. Now, Hyundai has figured their shit out and makes a damn fine car now. Tesla, not so much.
Could always get back at that asshat by donating your Tesla to PBS or NPR (assuming of course you could afford it).
Affording things? In this economy??