Its stock is down 43% from it’s all-time high in July 2023, almost all of that just this year. Admittedly that peak came after an even faster rise through early 2023 and the stock is now back to where it was a year ago.
But this is not just about crazed behaviour on Wall Street. There are good reasons for the fall, and they’re not all to do with Tesla but with the entire EV market:
Tesla, which accounted for 55% of all U.S. EV sales last year. Tesla’s closest competitor last year was Ford, which accounted for just 6% of the U.S. EV market, and as I noted in February, FoMoCo lost nearly $65,000 for each of the 72,000 EVs it sold last year. Meanwhile, EV maker Rivian lost a whopping $107,000 for every vehicle it sold. (Rivian’s stock has fallen by more than half this year.)
Put simply, Tesla is the bellwether for the EV business, and it’s in trouble. Last week, the company announced it was laying off more than 10%, or about 14,000, of its employees. The move comes after a quarter during which the company missed delivery expectations and just before it reveals its quarterly profits on Tuesday.
The rest of that Substack article, by Robert Bryce, has ten charts explaining the problems of the EV market, of which the picture above is the first, using those century-old quotes about how great EV’s were going to be. It’s amazing how the optimism never changes:
In 2014, Tony Seba, an author and lecturer in “entrepreneurship, disruption, and clean energy” at Stanford University, declared, “By 2025, gasoline engine cars will be unable to compete with electric vehicles.” He continued, claiming that internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles “are toast.” In a 14-page presentation called “Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation,” that was subtitled, “How Silicon Valley is making oil, nuclear, natural gas, coal, electric utilities and conventional cars obsolete — by 2030,” Seba claimed “solar, wind, electric vehicles, and autonomous (self-driving) cars will disrupt and sweep away the energy industry as we know it.” He also declared that “Transportation will never be the same again” and that “energy and transportation as we know it today will be history by 2030.”
You can be forgiven for such optimism in 1901, but not in 2014 in the face of the things that Bryce identifies.
No Minister 
I had a hybrid that was great although the car I bought after it seems almost as fuel efficient and is a lot more fun to drive.
I’m hoping that one day one of the 10ish Tesla charging stations that the local supermarket put in will be used. It’s only been a year so I may be rushing them.
To be honest I’m surprised that Tesla has lasted anywhere near as long as it has (although I should be thankful as maybe it helped fund Starlink of which I am a huge fan)
Ok not really related, but pretty cool:
Propellantless propulsion drive.
Yah, I’ve been watching that one for a while now – a British guy was the original driver of it IIRC, and I thought the last efforts to replicate his tests had failed.
But this is an actual NASA scientist (retired), with credibility from past work, who has produced something that looks like it.
I read about it the other day in NextBigThing, and the following link, whole covering the same stuff, also includes the physics equations. Haven’t looked too closely at those (it’s been a few years since I tangle with such) but they’re not really complex.
But the only real proof is if they test it in space. Given that all they need is a tiny cubesat or such, that shouldn’t be too expensive. They can ride-share on Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket from here in NZ.
Here it is, in Wired from 2020. His name is Jim Woodward, and he’s another physics prof.
Here’s an earlier piece from 2017.
And from 2018.
Thanks for those. Found that first link (previous post) a bit hard to read; others were good. I find this stuff fascinating, and interested to see how the thrust generated is improving exponentially. Yes – space tests will be very important.
I wonder if this has other applications? Not power generation (I expect conservation of energy to still apply, even though they say they’re seeing things in that area they can’t explain).
Well I’ve long thought that if you could develop an anti-gravity device (ha ha), then you might be able to arrange a bunch of them in a sphere where their anti-g fields intersected, creating enormous g-forces at a very tiny, point in the middle.
You place a blob of deuterium at that point, the g-forces crush it and heat it and voila, you get nuclear fusion just like a star, without all that laser or tokamak engineering.
Think of the arrangement as being like and atomic bomb, where a sphere of high explosives surrounds the plutonium core, which is crushed by the implosion wave when the explosives are detonated.
Same principle here but with anti-g-fields. 😅😅😅😅