Roadster: Tesla's biggest scam yet

Hm I disagree. FSD is a far greater scam. And the TWO MILLION Cybertruck reservations also pumped the stock. The Roadster is merely a "free loan" from fans who don't mind losing out on literal millions they could have had IF they invested the money elsewhere. :)

I don't think anything he says or does drives the stock anymore. TSLA is now in Full Self Driving mode. It just goes up because people think it's going to keep going up.

Yeah, i agree. Though the "2020 roadster" as electrek called it back in 2017-2019 after the 2017 announcement, might be the most obvious scams in terms of ease to understand. Tesla Semi is a fairly obvious scam too (funny enough, they 'started deliveries' in 2022 but still haven't delievered more than a couple dozen. The tesla bot is probably their 'biggest' scam now, but it's so hard to measure the effects of these scams as their stock is currently 20-30x higher than it should be if you took into account what tesla is actually selling today.

right. if you actually calculate the valuation using any reasonable model of current (not future promised) performance, it's really hard to get more than 5% of their current valuation. That means 20x of the valuation is rubbish or based on future promises. And if history has told us anything, Tesla and Elon never deliver on their promises.

Wait for flying Tesla that Musk said will show up at end of this year...

The Roadster always reminds me how deluded and gullible fans are. I remember discussions when Porsche unveiled the Taycan and fans explained to me how outdated it already was based on the specifications of the Roadster, which wasn't even real yet. Meanwhile, although it's not particularly successful, to be honest, the Taycan is in its second generation, and the Roadster is still not here, and most likely, when it does arrive, it won't deliver what was promised years ago.

With sales crashing, even that 5% wouldn't be sustainable. What few products they do produce, nobody wants anymore because of either better competing product, or they just want nothing to do with him now that people find his political involvements offputting. The brand is permanently tarnished and cannot be fixed.

I'd love a Taycan if I had silly money.

The point about the roadster basically just being a $250 million capital raise was interesting. One could argue FSD at least provides a product, even if it's not the product as promised.

The whole idea of reserving a car, or paying in advance for a feature, is so alien to me. Maybe not as alien as doing it for a videogame, which can be copied an infinite number of times and delivered over the internet, but still. Why do people give free loans to businesses?

It's getting more and more difficult to identify the biggest Tesla scam, since their whole business and future product line is an endless stream of scam fake products.

I think roadster is the biggest scam in the regard that it wasn’t even delivered after 8 years. FSD is probably the biggest scam in the fact that it has never worked as advertised after 8 years. I’m not sure what’s worse but Tesla definitely needs to make their reservation holders whole. They were able to use their money to stay solvent and now that they’re massively successful they need to pay them back with interest imho. And by successful I just mean big enough and have enough cash flows to easily pay these customers back. Or, you know, actually create and deliver the product…

The crazy thing about the roadster is that there are a few companies out there that could have been subcontracted to build them. Companies like Multimatic who do the chassis for the Ford GT and Porsche race cars, or Dallara could have brought this vehicle to market in 24-36 months.

Hopefully he is in it while testing it, just to show courage I mean.

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Scam? They are using my money and have been developing a better and better Roadster for 8 years. . . Think how awesome this car will be with 8 years of development. Don't think Tesla just took the money because they were in a financial crunch trying to start the Model 3 and Model Y production lines. . . and have done absolutely ZERO work on the flying roadster. That would be inconcievable!

But…there are so many to choose from.

AI audio. top speed of "125 miles" - ai creator / child creator not heard of mph? Come on!!!?

The Odometers, or lack thereof, is a pretty big scam. That’s all their cars

Depreciation on them is quite bad so you don't need that silly of money if you are gutsy enough to buy used. I see a '21 with 14k going for $41k. Could probably negotiate it a bit less.

Add to that the Taycan actually being remotely worth the asking price. It's Porsche quality at Porsche expense. With the Roadster, you WOULD get Tesla quality (which is about as well put together as a Dacia) for Lambo prices.

tsla is teslas greatest product

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They're waiting for the semi to be ready to deliver them. Or FSD. Whichever comes first.

It's gonna be FLYING next year, according to Elon. So deffo no SCAM whatsoever. You guys just aren't READY for the super BRAIN that elon has

It’s not a loan because you never get it back

This is the "Star Citizen" of the car world and its wild that people still think this will be a thing

It’s not a loan because no one got anything from it and can’t get a refund

I hear ya, cause it was def oversold, but FSD sort of exists. The roadster was complete fiction from the beginning

It’s a total indictment of the markets imo. We’re supposed to believe economic science but then meme stocks like TSLA just operate like Ponzi schemes. Tesla is in huge long term trouble, the markets should be punishing the fuck out of this company. They have no new models, they are promising nonsense. And the face of the company immolated his reputation on the world’s stage. They should be operating in full crisis mode, firing Musk, and promising competent steady leadership.

\~8%. You can get to 3% of their current valuation just with their cash reserves.

I wouldn’t say biggest.

"FSD is a scam" says every bum that never even rode in it lmao, dude come on now even shitstream media is now giving up and actually saying the truth about it , so maybe you should follow the lead of your masters and praise it like they did 😂😂

A scam? U do realize they are actively talking about it and have been for months now as they prepare for updated demonstration event right? 😂😂😂

Well some of that is going to roadster reservations and fsd paybacks when its obvious it wont work.

I would put cybertruck above roadster, the insane over promise and under deliver on that one is amazing.

Had me in the first half.

I don't think Tesla would ever subcontract out something that is so 1:1 with the end product. It would give another company and possibly the public to a real representation of how many units they are moving.

They announced it 7 years ago and have held 50k interest free deposits for that entire time meanwhile making it difficult to refund the deposits and kicking the can for the last half decade with minimal updates... Yes absolutely a scam like the FSD that's just around the corner for a decade or the robots that are people in suits

This is the best summary of the situation I have ever read. I would add the giant grift he is pulling on NASA with the Starship HLS, which is supposed to get to the moon, but is way behind schedule after burning through most of the contract money. One could also mention the huge environmental and societal impact of Starbase.

I'm vaguely interested in how much arsefuckery Jesus and the Beatles are known for, and whether it is with each other or individually.

Ah, so you’re a swallower I see!

If tesla had delivered a roadster body on like just a modified production chassis instead of wasting all that effort on cybertruck it might have been pretty different. Mazda miata (mx5 here in the UK, Honda s2000..)

Well at least we’ll have flying cars by the end of the year /s

Everything about Tesla is a scam

Bigger than Tesla Semi? Bigger than Hyperloop? Bigger than FSD? Literally everything they do is a scam, hard to pick just one as the 'biggest'.

some asshole TAer on yt last night was actually saying now that $450 is in play the market will want to see $500 Sure, what's another $150B in market cap, a Boeing, Arm, or Capital One

FSD drove me the 200 miles from the Berkeley Hills to home last weekend, with one intervention since it wasn't making a difficult bay area freeway exit/merge confidently enough. I'd give it a solid B as an $8000 add-on now; it'd get an "A" if I could safely fall asleep on it.

bragging rights being an early adopter

well the dumb thing is that nobody's made a goddamn simple 2-seat electric sports car, since the original Tesla. I guess pack weight is screwing up the dynamics of the car design, but I'd pay MSRP for an electric Porsche 944-like car.

What is the truth about it though? I drove using the FSD and it worked for the most part, it's impressive for what it does. However, the +/-$8000 price was for being able to drive itself across the continent, and being a self-driving taxi while you sleep and an appreciating asset. That's what was promised when you paid the $8000. It's nowhere near being allowed as FULL self driving, i.e. you're legally allowed to not pay attention and text all you want. You can blame regulators, you can say it's really good (it is good) but it's fundamentally NOT what was promised. You HAVE to pay attention 100% of the time, it still disengages often enough to make it unsafe to not pay attention, and you are 100% legally responsible if you don't. In that sense, it's a failure and a scam, since it's not what you paid for.

The Boring Company should get a nod too.

I’d love an EV MX-5 once solid state battery tech gives us enough power density.

At the very least it's digusting how there are still big institutions putting money into something like this without any real fundamentals..

Sycophant board

Quite a claim, given the magnitude of all the other scams.

The only thing propping up Tesla's share price is religious faith in Elon to somehow "fix" things. The amount of Tesla bag holding if Elon leaves the company would be legendary. A trillion dollars in market cap would be incinerated overnight. All the shareholders know this, so they're willing to just cross their fingers and throw in their lot with a con man. There is no such thing for Tesla as "promising competent steady leadership." They're pot committed.

Sounds exactly like the "Autopilot" experience, which has been around since 2016 or whatever. If you have to monitor the car the entire time to intervene, it is a level 2 system. Every single major manufacturer has a level 2 system at this point.

Quite a baseless accusation to make, I have no masters and neither does anyone else on this sub. Elon's not going to mention you on Twitter for glazing him. A level 2 autonomous system is all fun and games until it suddenly attempts to kill you. I know this well, because the precursor to this tech, called "Autopilot" at the time, nearly ended my son's and my life on an icy road back in early 2023. FSD uses exactly the same cameras that navigated my 2017 Model S 100D to near catastrophe, with the same fundamental frailties. I would never trust this inept, buggy technology with my or anyone else's safety.

Preach it.

If anybody buys a car as an investment, rather than to use and enjoy, I don’t think they can be helped. Cars are (aside from a few, wild edge cases) depreciating assets.

>and I think the delivery probably became more about trust in Tesla as an organisation.  Perhaps the utter uncertainty about weight, range and the promised "megacharger" network with "guaranteed 7 cent power" contributes to that "lack of trust". If TSLA really could deliver a $180k truck with a million mile warranty, 500 mile range, and 7 cent guaranteed charging price (with the network too, of course), they wouldn't be able to make them fast enough. Of course they simply cannot deliver this.

Deliveries were again going to start in early 2026 but the plan was to make most of it in China. Somebody changed the plans with tarifs.

They mean they depreciate really fast. That car was probably 110k new not even 3 years ago.

FSD is a scam not in the sense that it doesn’t work at all but in the sense that the CEO materially misrepresented what was being purchased. Elon literally said your Tesla would make you money being loaned out as a robo taxi. That sort of thing should be punished.

Problem is, there's no market for simple 2-seat sports cars, electric or not. Mazda's pretty much got what market there is covered with the Miata. There's some market (not very large) for non-simple sports cars like the Vette and 911, and for status symbol cars like Lambos. If you're designing electric cars there'd be a much bigger payoff with a sedan or "SUV" body style. Maybe you can talk Mazda into doing an electric Miata.

Absolutely scam 🤬🤬🤬

But getting from a B to an A is a lot harder than going from a D to a B.

Porsche is working on an electric Cayman. It was supposed to be launched in 2025, but has been delayed due to the bankruptcy of Northvolt, which was to supply the high-performance cells required for a relatively light battery that still enables high dynamics and adequate range. Rumor has it that it has also been delayed due to the generally weak demand for electric cars.. In any case, pre-production are already being tested in public, development appears to be quite advanced. The market launch is now planned for 2027.

Don't be silly, it'll be out next year! /s

You can actually assume that Musk takes on all taxi operations and it still won't justify the evaluation. We are in a world where Tesla is going to need to take over all transportation for the evaluation to make sense. FedEx has a market cap of $67 billion. The numbers don't add up...

"Think how awesome this car will be with \[another\] 8 years of development." - fixed it for you. ;-)

You win Key Bother! Based on Tesla's rapid pace of improvement, I hope they spend another 20 years making the Roadster!!!

110k to 41k in three years is brutal.

Tha particularly pisses me off. I wasnt alive in 69 and would love to see us land on the moon again. Idk who thought it was a brilliant idea to agree to sign a contract where a single moon landing would require dozens of launches to orbit simply to fuel the lander. Smarter Every Day made a really good video on it.

Let's take a moment to think about the 'influencers' who used referral codes to snag a 'free' Roadster that will never come.

Tesla scams, like the hugely popular Model Y you mean? What I note is an endless stream of bs concerning Tesla. They make a great tin can to go from A to B. They let the Chinese stress about cheaper ‘shopping trolly’ EVs, and their export to places that allow them. Australians bang on about tariff free cars, but again the model Y is by far the most popular EV there, and the Model 3 the next most popular. This flies in the face of those ‘begging’ Tesla to fail.

I was just thinking about how this reminds me of star citizen.

Selling a car that doesn't exist is a pretty big scam lmao

Fake self driving, semis that don't exist, roadster that doesn't exist, 40k 350 mile+ truck, your car is a Robotaxi, the cars appreciate, coast to coast FSD next quarter, robots that do everything, something something AI... Sure works on the stock though

This is interesting from another perspective. There is a curious math exercise that one can do to estimate the total size of the current stock market bubble. It is very crude as it requires two factors that are at best informed guesses. If you project the total value in current dollars of the next thirty years of global value production (GDP with the D being changed to another G) and then discount that to present value using a reasonable factor of say 7%, then compare that to the estimated equity value of all publicly traded and privately held enterprises, the two figures should be equal. Using World Bank figures for these estimates places the equity estimate at about 4x of the value creation estimate. But it is actually about double that, because the entire excess has to be in the publicly trade half. Then if one does a sector analysis, almost the entire excess is in tech stocks.

Make it until you fake it. Or is it the other way around with Musk. Hard to tell, Tesla is so INSANELY overvalued one has to invent new words to describe it..