Sales tank as investors get ready to decide whether to make Musk a trillionaire.
Tesla’s shareholders are ready to vote tomorrow on whether to give Elon Musk an even more vast slice of the company in an effort to keep him focused on selling electric vehicles. Currently, the trolling tycoon appears a little obsessed with the UK, a place he appears to conflate with Middle Earth, which investors may or may not take into account when making their decision. What they ought to take into account is how many cars Tesla sold last month.
Although Tesla only publishes quarterly sales figures and does not divide those up by region, slightly more granular data is available from some countries via monthly new car registrations. And the numbers for October, when compared year on year to the same month in 2024, should be alarming.
Eh they look like trash but are so common now and the other manufacturers have made copy cats. But you’re right.
I disagree but that’s just my opinion. I love Ramsian design and the (exterior of) Tesla’s do it well. The new Prius is good too but gets a bit too futuristic to call it Ramsian.
Either way, my point is that most of the copy cats have moved on to other designs, “trend chasing.” Yeah, a couple years ago every automaker was ripping off Tesla, but I don’t see that anymore, they’re going towards a more 80s angular look. What I’m saying is that Tesla’s maintained their design language really well. That’s not a fault, it’s a success. Tesla cars are apparently Tesla on the road, just like an iPhone is obviously an iPhone and not one of the thousands of iPhone copycats that were on the market ~10 years ago or how a Starbucks is obviously a Starbucks, and not one of the thousands of wood-toned internet cafes that came up a few decades ago.
At this point in time Teslas stand out from the rest because they look like a mildly tweaked (mainly the higher back, inset door handles and big fat tablet in the middle of the dashboard) late 90s sedan or roadster design, because late 90s vehicles of these categories are the core visual styles they copied and tweaked in an attempt to make them look futuristic, a style which they haven’t changed since.
(Maybe that stuff was very different from the common car in the roads in North America, but it wasn’t in Europe).
The novelty value of inset door handles is gone, plastic interiors and big fat mid-dashboard tablets on a pedestal look ugly and dated, and the core car body design style just looks like your parent’s car back in the day.
Tesla are kinda like those old Sci-Fi Movies from before flat screens and computer graphical user interfaces whose idea of futurism were fancier cathode tube screens and showing fast moving green screen text. The thing is, only beloved Sci-Fi filmic universes with cult followings (or alternative universe ones, like steampunk) still keep those visuals in any new movies, and Musk has been busy blowing up what little cult following Tesla had (which itself was already limited because, unlike Apple, Tesla never stood for quality and that following was mainly linked his own personal cult and perceptions of higher eco-friendliness than the rest, both now gone).
The 90s gave us some of the most aerodynamic cars (or lowest CoD cars) of all time. We’ve been going backwards since then because styling for aggressive grills and SUV heights makes it impossible to be highly efficient. EVs need very advantageous they can get to increase range in order to sell in the US, so flowing 90s designed are a necessity and a form following function that I can’t deny. I like the new Prius for the same reasons.
I like the new Model Y refresh in person (the 3 less so), because front fascia were never very good looking IMO. The new light bar thing makes it less bulgy and slightly Ramsian (I guess, I can’t remember Dieter Rams making anything aerodynamic though, or really even curved for that matter!). The touchscreen bullshit and Nazi owner will keep me from ever buying one though.
The cyber truck is of course excluded from all this, and should go rot in a scrapyard of bad ideas along with the rest of Elon’s ideas.
Pedestrian safety laws in EU also influence design. Not in USA, where pedestrians are considered homeless.
Yeah for sure, other than hard points under thin hoods I suspect a lot of 90s cars were a lot safer for pedestrian impacts too. Even things like the Ford Taurus, Buicks, Maximas and Stanzas, Camry and Accords were all smooth low front facias and hoods.
You can have airflow friendly design without the flat single color body, plastic interiors and a tablet on a plastic pedestal.
Agreed that the whole SUV trend was a massive step back in so many ways, but being in Europe I’m not even comparing Tesla’s design with SUVs, I’m comparing it with other cars in the same category since they are still most of the cars in Europe.
Even something like a Mini Cooper EV looks downright daring next to the stale styling of Tesla’s offering.
The cars that I notice on the roads which leave me with the same overall impression in terms of looks as Teslas (minus the ugly tablet on a plastic pedestal look) are BYDs, which are way cheaper.