They've been propped up on the whole "retail trader" "HODL" ecosystem, bolstered by the promise of FSD/Autopilot/Robotaxies making every other car company obsolete.

At some point, that facade is going to collapse. Every time I point this out, I get jumped by a bunch of Tesla fanboys, $TSLA holders and the usual associated crowd.

So, I'm going to list some major problems with Tesla, in brief summaries of no particular order

1) FSD is a half truth. I am genuinely impressed with the progress they've made and I think Tesla is one of the leaders in the field. HOWEVER: their approach to risk (laying it on the owners), their lack of robotaxi operations center, and even the hardware in the vehicles not being capable for true FSD and remote monitoring, means that all Tesla vehicles on the road today will NEVER be FSD/RoboTaxi capable without: major hardware upgrades (expensive per vehicle), substantial backend upgrades for live support (time consuming), and serious hiring of live support (they've gotten started but this will completely change the math on OpEx). [0]

2) They have huge risk around new battery technologies. This has become a global race. If someone (such as Toyota) introduces a genuine leapfrog (which they seem to be conservatively teasing in the usual Japanese way with solid state batteries), then Tesla is in some serious shit. Tesla's investing heavily in R&D, so I think they're probably not screwed on this point, but it will be a major point of contention for them in the near future.

3) Public opinion: Elon has decided to make himself the Conservative of the Year. I, personally am not a conservative, but it doesn't take a genius to realize that he's polarizing the addressable market for a mass market consumer product. This is increasingly true outside of the US.

4) Upper limits of addressable markets, pending infra: charging infra is getting better, but the simple fact is that they're reaching the point of diminishing returns. The end goal is probably something like be an L2 charger (ideally better) at every parking meter and a farm of them in every WalMart parking lot. Much progress is being made, but it will still be many years before it's where electric cars are feasible for - let's say - 80% of the US domestic market. NACS went a long way in alleviating this.

5) Competition from China: China is deeply incentivized by market forces to build electric cars (they do not have domestic oil). Their domestic market is huge and economies of scale kick in even for relatively niche products. They are already eating at the low end of the electric car market. They are also hungry and see designing beautiful and good things as a matter of national pride[1].

[0] While we're at it, Alphabet has invested heavily in companies doing 5g rollouts - which is a requirement for a RoboTaxi in my opinion. Elon seems to be short sighted in his apparent belief that 5g isn't needed, nor a vision hw update, and they can really build a 0-intervention RoboTaxi. Don't get me started on his refusal to include LIDAR. I wish him the best of luck.

[1] I have a lot of complaints about how China and Chinese industry operates, at a moral level. But one must also recognize that as they're late to the table, they are at a disadvantage and they know it. A lot of the things they do that offend and disgruntle western tech people - especially around IP - are frankly, perfectly rational (even if I personally don't like it). The DeepSeek leader Liang Wenfeng put his attitude around China's behavior in a very refreshing manor, which really humanizes a group of people that many like to denigrate:

We believe that with economic development, China must gradually transition from being a beneficiary to a contributor, rather than continuing to ride on the coattails of others. Over the past 30 years of the IT revolution, we barely participated in core tech innovation.We’ve grown accustomed to Moore’s Law “falling from the sky”—waiting 18 months for better hardware and software. Scaling Law is treated similarly. However, these advancements are the result of generations of relentless effort by Western-led technology communities. Because we haven’t been actively involved in this process, we’ve come to overlook its significance.