Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Teslas Aren’t Worth It Anymore?”.
Portion of this video is sponsored by canon. I had never seen anything like this. I’D read the reviews. I’D watched, every video i could find, but seeing it myself and experiencing it in person, was something that i will never forget. It’S 2013 and i just took delivery of the tesla model s.
Everything about this car was earth-shattering, a giant touch screen, over-the-air updates, an electric car that was fast and didn’t. Look like a golf cart. This was something new, and this was something different and to tesla’s credit, it took the rest of the auto industry over a decade to catch up. That’S how far ahead the tesla model. S was when it debuted in 2012, but now in the middle of 2022, every automaker is an ev automaker, even the legacy ones, ford, cadillac, hyundai, kia, the rest of them and they’re new players on the block. You’Ve got lucid and rivian that are gunning for what tesla has done so well and after that model s i excitedly traded in for a model x that i loved and after that model x, i went to model 3 that i absolutely loved as well. But now after eight years of driving tesla’s, i no longer own one, and i’m not sure i will anytime soon and after seeing how the company has changed, how the competition has moved kind of starting to wonder. Are they still worth it? I’M gon na get this just out of the way uh.
The economy is questionable right now, not just car makers, but every company is struggling to find the sweet spot between affordability and deliverability and tesla’s, obviously no different there. So in the past few years tesla’s had, i think saying, a wild shift in pricing is an understatement now to their credit, there’s no dealer here, so i’m not dealing with a 50 000 markup, 20 000 markup. Never knowing what you get when you go to a dealer, you at least know what the price is going to be when you buy the car, so in the positive side.
So let’s talk about the other side of that. At one point, the model 3 was an actual 35 000 car, even if it was hard to find you could, at one point for a very finite period, buy a 35 000 ish model three. Now the starting price is 47 000 model y started at fifty. Three thousand dollars: now the price is sixty six thousand dollars the newly redesigned model s started. Eighty five thousand dollars now starts at a hundred and five thousand dollars and the model x which i’m going to talk way more about in a second started at 95.
000. Now costs a whopping 121 000, i’m not talking about when these cars launch. For the s and the x, i mean like when the redesign happened, that was the price, blame the economy pandemic supply chain or blame tesla, but those are very real price increases across the board and they are becoming harder and harder to swallow. Those are factors, though, that could change elon recently tweeted, that, if inflation dies down, prices could go down too. It wouldn’t hold your breath, but theoretically it is something that could happen and look. I obviously get the price. Adjustments have to happen uh, but it seems like tesla’s taking this a bit far and their sales numbers might just be reflecting that and before all the rage happens again.
I’M coming from somebody who spent a lot of money on tesla’s, i’m coming from somebody who’s, a tesla shareholder somebody who wants tesla to succeed so much like apple in the world when tesla does well the rest of the automotive industry tends to follow. I think it’s! The benefit of everybody for tesla to be successful, but they just had their first down quarter in two years. They delivered 250 000 cars, which is an incredible number, but it’s less than the previous quarter and tesla. I think, probably rightfully so claim. This is due to supply chain issues and shutdowns, which certainly happened and again, i’m sure this is the case, but having your lowest priced car be near 50, 000 probably isn’t helping sales either. So, despite not driving a tesla, i tend to have inadvertent. I guess brand loyalty. I actually got my start on youtube, shooting videos with canon cameras. I think at this point everybody knows canon.
Everybody knows canon’s reputation for quality, for innovation and sort of pushing sort of the digital envelope forward. But what you might not know is: that’s not all the products canon make. In fact they use that sort of pedigree for other products like this guy. This is the canon zoom digital monocular and john you’re saying.
What is that? Actually it’s in the name uh. It is a monocular, so close one eye cover one. I like a pirate and it lets you do a lot of really cool stuff. So i have three kids so being able to sort of sit down and watch my kids at soccer games to get a closer view of what they are doing and see them score. Their goal is awesome if you’re into bird watching it’s an awesome way to check out and sort of see all those things that are going on. And it might not be something that you always think that you want or need. But if you’re, in a position where you need to see far away having a binocular and having a digital monocular can fit in your pocket is awesome and the zoom here is really solid too so optically you’ve got 100 millimeters and 400 millimeters and digitally go all The way to 800 as well, so you can get real close, then of course, being canon. You can obviously take stills or video with it.
But that’s not really the big point here. It’S about closing the distance with family with nature, with sort of seeing the world around you closer and in that aspect the canon zoom digital monocular absolutely does that. So if this sounds like something you want to try we’ll put a link to it down below i’ll, see you guys real soon. So all right, why am i bringing this up uh? Well, because of the first time in years i no longer own a tesla uh and, more importantly – and i think surprisingly to me – i’m not missing it at all and i kind of can’t help but look at the current state of tesla.
So again i talked about the cars that i’ve driven when the lease on my model 3 was up. It was time to get something new. I knew for a fact that i wanted to go electric. There was no doubt, i’m not going back to gasoline, but after looking at essentially the same dash for a while, i wanted to try something new. Try, a new car, try something different and sort of see what that was all about now, at least to my mind. Tesla still has huge advantages. Supercharger network is probably chief among them for a lot of people who can’t charge at home, but even that gargantuan advantage, i think in some instances is not as big as people might think. Due to lines.
You know you see these pictures of people waiting hours to charge their car, that’s less of an advantage than i think a lot of people think. Fortunately i had the benefit of charging at home. So supercharger network was never a giant selling point uh for me. So if you, if you don’t know like, i said i don’t own a tesla, i do have a rivien r1t, which is my primary car and i love it, but to charge that on road trips, for example, i have to rely on electrify america and evgo which, To some experiences is not nearly as reliable as a supercharged network. Having said that, i do still have an order for a model x. For my wife, we have three children, she loved the model x. We placed that order when the redesign was announced. So i got that original price uh now that car to buy it today is 30 000 more expensive.
So, like i said, while tesla might not have a dealer markup, a 30 000 change in about a year might as well be a dealer markup and there’s no negotiation that goes into that. That is the price of the car, i’m not sure, if she’s looking for that car, if you’re still going to keep it and maybe buy it and flip it, but these price changing and price variability and fluctuation is very real. And if you decide that you want to get a model x today, your weight is probably going to be between 8 to 18 months, depending on which one you want to get and listen. This is probably just inwardly, focusing and self-importance, but the fact that i’m having these questions about tesla and debating getting tesla somebody who’s into tech and cars, i think maybe, is a sign of tesla’s perception, perhaps shifting [ Applause ] now, unfortunately, for tesla, i’m not sure, As much i can do about this at the moment, the economy is not something they can control at all i mean everything has a shortage. You name it there’s some shortage going on, so i understand that prices and supplies are going to have to change supply and demand curve are going to meet somewhere. What tesla does have control over, though, is the public perception and up until now, tesla was seen as the leading ev innovator and rightfully so they were not only leading the pack, they were the whole pack, but i’m not sure that that’s the case anymore. I think, for a few reasons, there’s no pr department at all, so there’s no sort of unified message coming out of tesla. The unified message, if there was one coming out of tesla, is from elon musk himself, a a revolutionary businessman who, let’s say, is eclectic online and whether you love or or hate elon musk.
I think a lot of people are running to tesla because of him, but i think a lot of people are going the opposite direction because of things that he is doing online. But it’s not just one person and, to put it all on elon’s feed is probably not fair uh, but the messages that do come out of tesla is generally about their new features. Their new things that are coming so yeah, full self-driving beta, is awesome. And yes, the idea that tesla could build a robot is awesome. Yes, the tesla semi is awesome, yes to a lot of people. The cyber truck is incredible, but as of right now, none of that is real products. Full self-driving is still very much in beta and not full self-driving the rest of those products you can’t buy, or at least reliably use as advertised every day, tesla’s been an absolute role in the product announcement department, but they’ve been lacking in the product delivery department. All you need to do to fix.
This is stop talking about products as if they are real, and i do see this as a bit of a catch-22 though – and i i get it these features sound incredibly cool make tesla seem like a futuristic company. People start talking about them and ultimately i think that does sell cars, but i think it also leads this appointment when customers realize the full features aren’t actually there i mean for how many years has full self driving been just 12 months away for how many years Have we seen a full self-driving road trip is coming all these sort of huge announcements, these forward thinking statements that don’t come to fruition. Ultimately, i don’t think helped the reputation and then also the competition is starting to catch up to tesla when it comes to features and tech. Like i said at the intro, it took a good decade for this uh to happen. So now, if i want an eevee with something like a huge touchscreen front trunk tons of power, crazy acceleration, you can get that from other companies, ford, rivie and lucid hyundai and a bunch of others pretty much. Every car maker has an ev that checks one or all of those boxes.
I would love to see tesla take more leaps with their designs and software, and this isn’t a quick fix, but it’s something that i think would help sort of set them apart long term. I think tesla’s also been plagued by issues that other car manufacturers haven’t played with. I think every car manufacturer you could pin a problem.
Bmw wants the charity subscription fees for pretty much a steering wheel. Tesla’S issue has long been build quality, so perhaps your car was built perfectly, but panel gaps, thin paint have been issues that have plagued more teslas than most other manufacturers, perhaps way to solve. This would be improved. Quality control better service after the fact and tesla leaning hard into what they did when the model s launched show something we haven’t seen before. A yoke is a cool thing, but it’s still a steering wheel.
What is that thing that tesla can do that? No other company can do tesla, for all intents or purposes as a software company. It also makes hardware their software is so incredible and still so far ahead. Anybody else, i would love to see tesla lean heavily into the software lean heavily into ai and machine learning. As the advantage that that company has and push that message out instead of showing products that maybe will never come to fruition, show what’s going on behind the products already on the road to get people pumped and excited and get them talking. And maybe the solution is not to announce new things, but to perfect what they already have. Their products are incredible for range for battery technology and software. They sort of that.
Let’S call that the box – it’s already really good, make the box perfect, make tesla known for every car that comes off of that factory line, no matter where that factory comes from to be perfect and pristine and give tesla a reputation that they probably deserve for quality And software and technology all together into an incredible product, it really couldn’t hurt, and this is all coming again from somebody who wants tesla to succeed, and i certainly am aware that saying anything negative about tesla enrages, the most die-hard of fans. But i think, even that subset of people could acknowledge that there are areas where tesla could improve. And if you look at the apple side of the equation, they are not the only ones – selling cell phones, anymore, they’re, not the only ones with touch screens and multi-touch and all the rest of that.
But they are pushing that they’re trying to be the best and they are pushing the message at least whether it’s true or not, that every product they deliver will be quality. I think tesla could learn a lesson from that, whether it’s true or perception push quality over quantity push quality over a bunch of new products, and if they do that, i think tesla really can recapture the magic with that original model s and also push the entire Industry forward .