from Hacker News

Tesla shuts down Cybertruck production for days at critical time for the company

by tedd4u on 12/5/24, 4:25 PM with 35 comments

• by mmastrac on 12/5/24, 4:52 PM

  Cybertruck was probably the last gasp for the fumes of Elon's impenetrable (at the time) persona of a wunderkind. This is probably where the memeing was more important than the product, which is almost certainly why the product 1) sucks and 2) is failing.

  Pre-Cybertruck, it felt like Tesla cared about a product first, and the memeing was just a cute bit of personality in everything (fart modes, ludicrous speed, etc). After that, it's like _everything_ was about Elon's popularity and whether it was a good product or not was secondary.

  Now that the Elon bubble burst (including my own), it's much easier to see the crazy hype bubbles he managed to spin around everything -- a poor self driving system (the hints were there), production quality issues (again, the hints were there), safety problems, etc.

  My impression is that SpaceX has mainly kept out of this, but if Tesla starts to really tank I wonder if he'll turn his eyes on using SpaceX for his own ego-massaging needs.

• by wnmurphy on 12/5/24, 5:02 PM

  The very first sentence is highly biased and draws an invalid conclusion. They attribute this to vehicle demand, without basis.

  It's likely due to retooling for a planned lower cost trim.

  Elektrek mostly writes misleading articles like this.

• by qwerpy on 12/5/24, 4:58 PM

  Ah, didn’t realize we were already due for our weekly anti-Tesla article. Gotta give everyone their opportunity to make barely topical rants about Elon.

• by pengaru on 12/5/24, 5:20 PM

  > Given that it is a critical time for Tesla deliveries, particularly of its flagship model, the timing is suspect

  That PoS is tesla's flagship model? TIL

• by dlcarrier on 12/5/24, 4:57 PM

  It takes a lot more information than that to know how productive a manufacturing line is. How many shifts per day do they have? What's their preventative maintenance schedule like? Are they doing any retooling?

  Any line that's not running nearly 24/7 is underutilized, but retooling can trade some downtime now for a permanent increase in output.

  If a manufacturing line goes from three shifts a day to two, that's a significantly larger decrease than taking a few days off per month. Assuming that they're only ruining a single shift, and that the downtime is because they're outpacing demand, this does give us some information about what their utilization is, but even that doesn't tell us how well a product is doing.

  Keeping inventories low can decrease some costs and is especially incentivized by some tax regulations, but it requires fast increases in production, which is easiest done by building out more manufacturing capability than is expected.

  tl;dr: If you want to know how well a product is doing, look at the sales figures. If you want to read into the strategies the manufacturer is making, scrutinize the assembly line.

• by paulpauper on 12/5/24, 4:56 PM

  hmm the stock is certainly unfazed

• by zzzeek on 12/5/24, 4:55 PM

  Elon Musk's current play is that he is attempting to literally occupy the federal government and the actual White House as some kind of "co-president" role he's been making for himself. Intrinsic in this position are all kinds of ways he can personally tailor policy towards his own financial preferences, in particular having direct influence over blunt instruments like tariffs to hobble competitors to his car company, as well as obviously placing ventures like SpaceX front and center over competitors such as Blue Origin.

  What people should keep in mind is the general trajectory of highly influential people who find themselves riding along with this particular POTUS, mainly in that the timespan of these partnerships tends to be pretty short, almost proportionally to the general charisma of the subject, and that once ejected from the center, things tend to get pretty bad pretty fast. Rudy Giuliani is literally breaking down in courtrooms that he can't pay his bills. Clearly Musk won't have that kind of problem but once you get thrown off this particular ride, there's no getting back on.