Reuters reported on Friday morning that Tesla (Motto: Our Cars Will Kill You!™) has decided to scrap development of the one product that anyone who isn’t an incel with an Armageddon fetish might care about purchasing from them: inexpensive electric cars.
Tesla, what would you say it is that you do around here?
Tesla has canceled the long-promised inexpensive car that investors have been counting on to drive its growth into a mass-market automaker. […] The automaker will continue developing self-driving robotaxis on the same small-vehicle platform, the sources said.
So no inexpensive Teslas, but we might still get Johnny Cabs. Sixteen-year-old us thinks the future is quite the mixed bag.
The decision represents an abandonment of a longstanding goal that Tesla chief Elon Musk has often characterized as its primary mission: affordable electric cars for the masses. His first “master plan” for the company in 2006 called for manufacturing luxury models first, then using the profits to finance a “low cost family car.” […]
As recently as January, Musk told investors that Tesla planned to start production of the affordable model at its Texas factory in the second half of 2025.
Elon Musk microdoses a lot of hallucinogens. He has admitted this on the record, so anything he says should be taken with a grain of salt the size of Zimbabwe.
Tesla is reportedly getting out of the cheap electric car business because China is cornering the market with vehicles that only cost around $10,000, whereas Tesla’s model was going to start at $25,000, and there simply are not enough Musk stans in the world to make this a competitive contest.
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Musk is nowhere near flooding the streets of America with robotaxis, his cheapest sedan currently goes for a cool $39,000, Tesla’s business has suffered thanks to his erratic leadership of Twitter over the last year and a half, and the Cybertruck fiasco has probably not yet finished crushing any reputation Tesla might still have enjoyed as a quality vehicle manufacturer.
So this would seem a bad time to drop a product that, even with competition from China, seems like his best bet at running a regular business with a plausible future. As opposed to his other businesses, which involve shooting off the occasional rocket or planting computer chips in the brains of unsuspecting monkeys.
But running a business will never be as important as saving humanity from the woke mind virus or population collapse or whatever other weird mash-up of William Gibson and Jean Raspail is tickling his brain stem at the moment. Hence the going all in on robotaxis.
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The Reuters report did lead to a fun piece of art starring Tesla’s stock price chart, which we have titled “Stonk Go ‘AIYEEEEEEE!.”
Mind you, that’s only about an 8-point drop, but it looks hilarious.
Not long after the Reuters report hit, Elon responded to it on Twitter:
This is, to put it mildly, a very unspecific denial. But it was enough to help Tesla’s stock bounce back, thus generating a second piece of art titled “Stonk Go BRRRRRR.”
Great job, he’s really earning that $55 billion pay package his friends on Tesla’s board tried to sneak him.
The stock market is so much fun, bouncing back and forth on the word of a Nazi who spends most of his time pushing Great Replacement Theory on the cesspool of a social media site that he turned into a white supremacist community center. We’re sure glad our retirement partially depends on this magic money machine.
Reuters has owned the Elon Musk beat for awhile, winning awards for its coverage of his many weirdnesses and poor decisions, so if Elon is denying the report, it is a good bet that it is very, very true.
[Reuters]
Why not take that money you will now save on a cheap Tesla and donate it to Wonkette? We almost never spontaneously burst into flames and kill you!