Musk, Tesla, Twitter, And SpaceX Had A Hell Of A Year

BYD built more cars in 2022 than Tesla did, though its 1.86 million sales included more than 946,000 plug-in hybrids. The Chinese automaker’s sales growth, however, means that it will become the global EV sales leader in 2023. Back in 2011 Elon Musk scoffed at the idea of the company competing with Tesla. With BYD on schedule to produce 1.3 million EVs this year, Elon is no longer laughing.

Pretty much anyone who has used Tesla’s ‘autopilot’ driver assistance software and updated ‘full self-driving’ can confirm that it’s dangerous, essentially acting as an experiment on public roads. After a report from the NHTSA determined Autopilot didn’t do enough to stop drivers from misusing it, a recall was issued for two million Teslas. And the recall doesn’t really go far enough.

Another 120,000 Teslas were hit with a recall because the doors won’t stay closed in a crash. A line of code was changed in an update that prevents the cars from keeping their doors locked and closed in the event of a collision. The code was present in earlier versions, but for some reason was modified out before it went live in an over-the-air update. It’ll be re-inserted with another OTA update next year.

Tesla has been shifting the blame for broken suspension components to the customer for the last several years, despite knowing it was a problem. A recent Reuters report confirms that front upper control arms were prone to early failure with no provocation, across the Tesla model line. Tesla paid for around 120,000 vehicles to be repaired under warranty, but customers with older cars paid for an additional 31,000 control arm repairs out of pocket.

“You certainly shouldn’t be expecting suspensions to fail within the first few years of owning a vehicle,” former acting NHTSA administrator David Friedman said in an interview.

A little over four years ago, Tesla unveiled the Cybertruck, and promised it would be delivering to customers in 2020. In late November, the company finally made good on the promise, albeit to just ten company employees. Production hasn’t really ramped up in earnest, but people are starting to get their hands on the behemoth electric truck. It’s far more expensive than promised, and doesn’t have the range or acceleration figures that Elon touted in 2019, but it’s here. Sort of.

Of course many of the pre-production trucks were spotted broken down, Elon has doubled-down on the Cybertruck-can-be-a-boat thing, and battery production delays will push truck deliveries out even further. But if you’re waiting for a Cybertruck, Tesla will give you a $1,000 coupon for a different Tesla product while you wait. You might be waiting a while.

Tesla customers were getting a bit miffed that the electric automaker will only sell its cars in black, white, red, and blue. So it started offering additional colors as wraps, so it wouldn’t have to invest in updating its assembly line paint departments. Despite a price of $8,000, these Tesla’s wrap jobs look typically terrible.

“Buying a car today is an investment into the future. I think the most profound thing is that if you buy a Tesla today, I believe you are buying an appreciating asset, not a depreciating asset.” Elon Musk said that in 2019, and like many of his bold vision statements, has continually been proven wrong every minute of every day since. Hundreds of thousands of Tesla buyers have driven tens of thousands of dollars of value out of their cars.

Some Tesla models lost as much as $40,000 in residual value in the first year of ownership, thanks to Tesla’s sharp price cuts. Rental car companies, in particular Hertz and Sixt, are not happy about it.

Elon’s mask has been coming off for the last few years, and that trend only continued in 2023. Elon espoused concerning levels of antisemitism, transphobia, anti-immigration pro-eugenics rhetoric, neo-nazi conspiracy theory, and white supremacism. Don’t worry, he’s ‘looking into it.’

When his actions started showing signs of hurting his companies and their profits, Musk got defensive and told the boycotting Twitter advertisers to ‘go fuck yourself’ in a live interview. When Disney pulled its advertising from Twitter, and CEO Bob Iger criticized Musk’s ideologies, Tesla removed Disney+ from its in-car entertainment options. Because on top of everything, Elon is a petty bitch.

Surveys seem to indicate that Elon’s online persona is driving customers away from the brand. He claims he doesn’t care.

Reports from Tesla’s Texas Gigafactory indicate that workers are getting seriously injured on the job, because of corner cutting, a focus on speed, and poor safety precautions. Some workers are getting caught under or between machines, others are exposed to toxic chemicals, and others still are getting lacerations from an assembly robot.

Tesla’s Giga Berlin factory in Germany has similar levels of concerning worker injury, including acid burns and amputations. Meanwhile a worker in Tesla’s Chinese factory died because a safety gate didn’t lock, and nobody checked to clear equipment before turning it on and crushing the man.

I can’t really say anything that wasn’t already said in Collin Woodard’s piece on this back in November:

It’s not exactly a secret that Elon Musk’s luck at Tesla didn’t translate well once he took over Twitter. Ad revenue is down, users are leaving and it’s become mostly useless for finding trustworthy news sources. And apparently, those problems have hit Musk hard. Even harder than any of us might have previously guessed. Following the takeover, Musk began to “spiral down,” and at one point, it got so bad that Twitter employees considered calling for a wellness check on him because they were worried he might hurt himself, author Ben Mezrich claimed in a recent interview with CNBC.

Read more here.

Elon Musk has been promising Teslas would drive themselves for a decade, and the promises keep coming. This guy has been moving the goal posts since 2013, and he came back again this year to let us know that self-driving cars would be here by the end of 2023 (of course). Not only are self-driving cars on the horizon—apparently just days away—but they’ll “save Tesla,” though it’s not clear from what.

Tesla’s ‘Autopilot’ driver assist systems caused 736 major crashes and 17 deaths since 2019. Can we really expect a Tesla-developed self-driving car to be safe?

The rocket test was intended to prove the ship’s viability. Launching from Boca Chica, Texas, Starship suffered five engine failures and entered a spin before detonating just four minutes after liftoff. The resulting debris caused massive environmental damage, including four acres of forest burned down. As a result of the failure, the FAA determined SpaceX could not launch another one until it proved that it had fixed the failures.

Musk biographer Walter Isaacson spent years working on the book chronicling the billionaire’s life, and it finally released this year. Elon Musk, launched in September, told the world many things we already knew, and a few things we didn’t. According to Isaacson’s writings, Tesla is still working on a $25,000 compact EV, SpaceX denied Ukraine access to the Starlink network for a drone strike on Russia, Tesla engineers hated the Cybertruck, and so much more.

Back in April a jury awarded a former Tesla factory worker $137 million—a judge reduced that payout to just $3.175 million—in a workplace racism case.

“The prevalence of the use of the N-word inside of Tesla’s workplace is an indication that they did not care about how their African American employees felt,” Bernard Alexander, one of Diaz’s lawyers, said during closing arguments, as quoted by the Times. “It was a complete affront to every African American inside the workplace.”

Tesla is involved in three other active cases regarding the harassment of black workers.

When The Boring Company was awarded a contract to build a 68-mile network of tunnels under Las Vegas, Elon Musk promised that the company would expand the tunnels at a rate of one mile per week. After seven years, the project has dug just 2.4 miles. Instead of a mile per week, that averages out to just 34.7 feet per week.

The company jokingly named its first tunneling machine “Godot” after the Samuel Beckett play in which two characters wait for the arrival of someone named Godot, who never arrives.

After a decade of fighting over charging standards, it seemed that everyone but Tesla had settled on CCS for the North American market. Earlier this year, however, Ford set off a cascade of automakers jumping ship to adopt the Tesla-developed NACS (North American Charging Standard) port in order to use the Tesla charging network. Since the Ford announcement in May, General Motors, Honda, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Volvo, Rivian, Fisker, Subaru, Hyundai, Kia, Genesis, and Volkswagen AG brands have all announced a transition to NACS for this market.

Back in June Elon Musk took to Twitter to challenge Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight. Shortly afterward the Meta CEO replied with the above photo of himself captioned “send me location” accepting the fight. Zuck, to his credit, has been training to fight in mixed martial arts competition, and has won Jiu-Jitsu tournaments. Musk claims he used to get in ‘hardcore street fights’ as a kid in South Africa.

The fight has been postponed indefinitely, because Elon is a wuss. Zuckerberg posted on Threads: “Elon won’t confirm a date, then says he needs surgery, and now asks to do a practice round in my backyard instead. If Elon ever gets serious about a real date and official event, he knows how to reach me. Otherwise, time to move on. I’m going to focus on competing with people who take the sport seriously.”

Famed director Darren Aronofsky will take on the arduous project of an Elon Musk biopic, based on the Walter Isaacson biography, for A24 films. Weird nerds everywhere will go see this on opening night, and they’ll like it for the wrong reasons.

Tesla and Porsche have been fighting over the Nürburgring lap record for production electric sedans for the last couple of years, and it seems the two companies are deeply invested in one-upping each other. In 2019 Porsche set a lap record of 7:42, just before the Taycan was unveiled to the public. Tesla claimed the Model S Plaid beat that record, but never proved it, a month later. In 2022 Porsche beat Tesla’s claimed 7:35 with its own 7:33 lap time. Back in June Tesla took a Plaid with the $15,000 ‘Track Pack’ to Germany, where it ran an alleged 7:25.231 lap.

The Plaid track pack adds carbon ceramic brakes, sticky Goodyear tires, and a higher top speed at 200 mph. Porsche is allegedly working on a track-focused Taycan GT, which will likely take that record right back next year.

Tesla’s second-gen Optimus robot is the biggest news in tech since Mark Zuckerberg grew legs in the Metaverse. Elon Musk claims this robot will eventually account for the “majority of Tesla’s long-term value.” Considering where Tesla was with the robot at its AI day last year, Optimus has made big steps forward, as the new model is faster, lighter, more agile, and uses delicate sensors in its fingers to pick up fragile things like eggs without cracking them.

Musk also says that the robot will eventually replace workers at Tesla factories, once it is capable of boring, repetitive, and dangerous tasks. Dangerous tasks pretty much describes working in a Tesla factory.

During Tesla’s “Investor Day” presentation, Musk confirmed that the company would be building a new Gigafactory in Nuevo León, Mexico, near Monterrey, and that it would be the biggest Gigafactory in the Tesla portfolio. The plant was initially going to be declined by Mexican president AMLO over concerns of access to water amid the region’s historic droughts, but eventually given his blessing after “Elon Musk assured him water would not be a concern.”

Per CNBC:

In 2018, Epstein told The New York Times writer James Stewart that he had been advising Musk after the Securities and Exchange Commission opened a probe into Musk’s comments about taking the company private.

When The Times reached out to Tesla for comment, the company strongly denied that claim, saying, “It is incorrect to say that Epstein ever advised Elon on anything.” Epstein had predicted to Stewart that “everyone at Tesla would deny talking to him or being his friend,” according to an article about their interview.

Not necessarily something Tesla or Elon did this year, and we didn’t really learn anything new, but it’s funny all the same.