KEY POINTS
- Emails circulated inside Nvidia and obtained by CNBC show that Elon Musk told the chipmaker to prioritize shipments of processors to X and xAI ahead of Tesla.
- Musk has said he can grow Tesla into a major player in artificial intelligence and that the company is spending heavily on Nvidia’s AI processors.
- By ordering Nvidia to let X jump the line ahead of Tesla, Musk delayed the automaker’s receipt of over $500 million in processors by months.
With the dropoff in EV purchases, maybe this was on purpose to protect Tesla’s profit numbers in the short term
There is no dropoff of EV purchases, just Teslas, and just barely. One contributor to that is that there is a wait-list. A bigger contributor is that being associated with Elon isn’t as cool as it once was.
Tesla Q1 sales were down 13% YoY. Most major competition posted high double digit growth. Tesla is in trouble.
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That’s Audi. Nobody looks to Audi for affordable vehicles EV or non.
Volkswagen is where you should be looking for affordable. The ID.4 starts at just under 40k before any incentives which push it closer to 30k.
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Audi is not exactly a budget brand though. Instead you could point to something like Chevy releasing the Equinox and originally intending for it to replace the Bolt but having the starting price at $43k with a cheaper one in the future. They were literally going to permanently end production of their most popular vehicle because they wanted the higher margin items that few could afford.
US manufacturers are building high-margin EVs instead of low-margin high-volume ones.
Also Americans are stupid - they want to buy EVs for the one or two 300+ mile trips they take in a year, instead of one for the 40-ish mile daily commutes.
But this isn’t entirely stupid. Many Americans have very limited vacation time; weekend getaways are the norm, and are optimized for. This means that for a lot of folks, skiing on a weekend (or even worse, a long weekend) means that lots of other people are doing the exact same thing.
Specifically, I’m in San Francisco, so heading up to Tahoe for a weekend/long weekend is a standard thing to do. It’s about 200 miles each way, so you’re going to need to recharge. Which wouldn’t be a problem except that everyone else is doing the exact same thing, on essentially the same schedule; this is a recipe for delays when the infrastructure is vastly inferior to the gas station network (and the charge time is obviously greater than the few minutes spent at the pump).
You might think that you could optimize for the daily trips and use rentals for getaways, but using chains on a rental car can be problematic/against TOS. Which can be a problem going up to a ski resort (AWD often ok, but not guaranteed).
I’m all for phasing out dinosaur burners, but the issue is not without nuance.
The nuance is, as exquisitely demonstrated in your post, that people (particularly us in the western world) are mostly unwilling to give up creature comforts and change our behaviors to help slow down global warming. (And I’m including myself in that statement as well.) Most of the issue you describe could be solved by more and better mass transit, so you don’t have hundreds of cars trying to share charging infrastructure, but… see my first sentence.
Sure, but Chevy was essentially forced by public opinion to continue making the Bolt EV, which is an affordable and well-liked little car.