As soon as Tesla's first-quarter 2024 earnings report came out, its stock price plummeted by 4.9%, and it has fallen by more than 35% this year. One-third of the market value evaporated, totaling more than US$260 billion (about 1,880.9 billion yuan).
This figure is almost able to repay the sky-high debt of 2.4 trillion for Evergrande!
This also made Musk, who had just returned to the position of the richest man, fall from the throne again at the beginning of this year. forced Tesla to lay off 10% of its global workforce and "focus on all aspects to reduce costs and increase efficiency".
And the misfortune is that Reuters took the opportunity to "stab hard", saying that a person familiar with the matter broke the news: Tesla will give up the $25,000 low-cost electric car plan!
Given Reuters' "social" status, many shareholders believed it, Tesla's stock price plummeted nearly 6% again, and even its first CEO, Martin Eberhard, said at the HSBC Global Investment Summit in Hong Kong that he was "sorry" and believed that China's opportunity in this area had come.
"We've all seen in the news that Tesla has postponed or canceled its low-end Model 2 program, which is a shame for them, but it also bodes well for China to really roll it out in this space. ”
At this moment, Musk couldn't sit still.
A set of "debunking rumors + RoboTaxi released on August 8" combo punch forcibly pulled the stock price back to 5%, and threw out the explosive prediction that "mankind will be expected to achieve self-sufficiency on Mars within 20 years" at the speed of light.
Some people are excited and feel that the future is promising, some people ridicule Lao Ma and bragging, just to change the topic, and some people think that these are marketing gimmicks, and Tesla is about to lose the pressure......
Hello everyone, I am the president of the Electric Vehicle Corporation.
Today, let's talk about where the pressure on Tesla comes from, who is the "opponent"?
To illustrate this, let's first talk about Tesla's dream of low-cost electric vehicles.
01. Low-cost electric vehicles:
Musk's original dream?
As early as October 2008, when Tesla delivered its first model Roadster, it was dissatisfied with many pre-order car owners because of the high price of $110,000, and Musk was also "besieged" and became the target of public criticism.
But even so, Tesla actually sold cars at a loss, because the cost of a Roadster at that time was $120,000! The capital chain was on the verge of breaking, and it became Tesla's first bankruptcy crisis.
Later, Musk successfully got the life-saving money from Daimler and the U.S. Department of Energy, which brought the Model S and Model X that turned Tesla over, but the sound of "expensive" is still endless.
It wasn't until the emergence of the Model 3 that was truly affordable and the Model Y, combined with the Model Y, that Tesla became truly popular all over the world. And Musk's "future plan" for Tesla has officially surfaced: take the mass route.
When it comes to the Volkswagen route, we have to mention the world's highest-selling car brand, Toyota.
Toyota has always been an economical, durable, and reliable representative in people's hearts, and even forced giants such as Ford and General Motors to have no way out and asked the US government for help: "If you don't care about Toyota, the United States will not have its own car brand!"
But at the same time, many people will ignore a crucial point: the success of Japanese cars, including Toyota, was inseparable from the "help" of the external environment - the oil crisis.
In October 1973, the Fourth Middle East War broke out, and the price of crude oil rose fivefold from $2.7 per barrel to $13 per barrel!
At the same time, new emissions standards have been introduced, leaving gas-efficient muscle cars and luxury cars in the United States to be overwhelmed by fuel-efficient, durable small Japanese cars.
Although in the end, the United States offered a "treaty card", demanded that the Japanese government sign the Plaza Agreement, and even demanded that the total sales of Japanese cars in the United States should not exceed 60 million units. However, Japanese cars are still rooted in the United States, and luxury brands such as Lexus and Acura have also been incubated, and even today the American market is one of the main positions of Japanese cars.
Obviously, when the energy revolution is the time, it is the opportunity for new brands to rise.
Because of this, Tesla wants to make a lower-priced electric car, take the mass route, and become the Toyota of the electric car industry.
According to Musk's previous statement, this Volkswagen model (most likely the Model 2) has been scheduled for production at the Mexican Gigafactory, and it can basically be seen this year. The outside world speculates that its price is also $25,000.
(Hypothetical image of Model 2 posted on the Internet)
But on April 5, Reuters took advantage of the trough of Tesla's sales decline in the first quarter and suddenly jumped out and said: Tesla has canceled the plan for low-cost models and will focus on the research and development of the Robotaxi business of self-driving taxis.
Moreover, there are reasons for giving up:
China's new energy vehicles, which are more cost-effective, are coming!
02. Involution price, outward volume:
The American dream, the Chinese round?
Tesla's "low-price strategy" has been successful in both the U.S. and Chinese markets. Both in terms of sales and profits, low-priced models are almost imperative.
But as we all know, the reason why Tesla was able to survive the production capacity hell crisis of the Model 3 that year was precisely because it chose China, and the Shanghai factory that was put into operation in ten months made Musk so excited that he took off his coat and danced, and also drove the success of the whole industry chain.
At this time, Tesla is not the only one that has the opportunity to seize the new energy revolution and establish a great new energy vehicle brand. BYD, Geely, Wei Xiaoli and others are all eager to try and prepare to challenge Tesla's position.
Previously, although Tesla was "dismissive" about Xiaomi's pricing, it was because Musk wanted to form a larger "ecological chain" than "car-home-mobile phone", but in any case, the car is destined to be one of the links.
Tesla's position, Musk is absolutely impossible to lose, but how to fight?
The president of Xiaomi and even the various advantages of domestic new energy brands has discussed many articles, as long as the "foundation" of Chinese manufacturing is there, domestic new energy has a natural cost advantage.
In terms of the pricing of the Xiaomi SU7 entry model "about equal" to 199,000, what kind of price does Tesla Model 2 have to come up with, in order to maintain profit margins, but also achieve a "huge success" sales advantage?
Not to mention that there is also "798" Qin in the back, 10 tens of thousands of zero runs, more than 200,000 Wenjie M7 and even a vote of domestic new energy, space, configuration, and cost performance are everything.
Taking 10,000 steps back, leaving the Chinese market to look at markets such as Europe and the United States, the momentum of China's auto supply chain and domestic brands going overseas has been basically irreversible. Even Tesla's Mexico factory itself has "co-opted" a large number of Chinese supply chains such as Sanhua Intelligent Control to build factories in Mexico.
Aside from tariffs, there are few effective strategies that can make China's new energy less competitive.
Therefore, even if Musk says that Tesla has an absolute advantage, Volkswagen will tell him with the plummeting stock price: 10,000 don't believe it!
As a result, a "small essay" by Reuters successfully wiped out a lot of Musk's net worth. But soon, Musk turned on the mockery mode on X, directly saying that Reuters was "lying again".
Reuters also did not admit defeat, and directly replied: "Don't just fight, come up with evidence!"
So, Musk really came up with "evidence" - but it was not a low-cost electric car that he met, but RoboTaxi, a robotaxi that was unveiled on August 8.
This makes people a little puzzled: Tesla is still a car company at this stage, what kind of secret weapon can this RoboTaxi be?
03. Self-Driving Taxi:
Is it medicine, or is it the ambition of a businessman?
Let's talk about RoboTaxi first, the so-called robot taxi is actually a model that can achieve unmanned driving, and this is Musk's "ultimate expectation" for Tesla.
The first is the taxi positioning itself, which covers part of the commercial vehicle market, and more importantly, Musk also uses a "blueprint" to make this RoboTaxi among the ranks of family cars.
This blueprint is: every Tesla owner can rely on automatic driving in the future to let Tesla, which is not used for the time being, run "Didi" to make money.
Of course, this is also called "a big pie" by many people, because not to mention autonomous driving, even the ethics and division of responsibilities have not been realized, so you play driverless taxis with me?
However, "fixed-route driverless" has begun to be realized on a small scale, and even Google and other brands of driverless cars have been legally put on the road in the United States.
The essence of this trend is called "travel cost shifting".
Because the essence of taxis is actually a kind of travel cost of "transferring people from A to B", only a small part of this cost is the actual fuel and electricity costs, and more is the "service fee" of the driver and the platform.
For example, only a few yuan of your 50 yuan taxi fare may be electricity money, and the rest is the loss of the vehicle, as well as the driver's salary and the platform's profit.
Once the driverless taxi is realized, it can at least save the highest proportion of "driver fees". You only need to buy a driverless car that can "run for taxi", and it can fully cover your taxi expenses for more than ten years.
This is perhaps the best blueprint for the future of public transport to "personal transport".
Whether it is in the Reuters revelations or Tesla's daily news, this RoboTaxi is based on that low-cost model.
This means that the low-cost model that Musk said before did not skip the ticket, and gave it an autonomous driving shell!
Maybe the taxi companies themselves don't know.
One day, it will not be a competing company, let alone Didi, it will be a technology company in the shell of a car company.
I have to say that Musk understands gimmick marketing, and Reuters does his best to perform with the appearance.
In fact, Musk has publicly said many times before: Tesla is a robot company, and it is indeed pushing Tesla to move forward on the road of robots.
At the 2022 Tesla AI Day, the humanoid robot Optimus was launched, and NVIDIA chips were also hoarded, and human brain-computer interfaces and AI technology were developed...... A series of operations are all his bets on the "future mode".
Therefore, Musk's robo-taxi is just a foreshadowing to take this plan further and lay the groundwork for the eventual "transformation".
It is true that this road is full of thorns and "fantasy", facing many crises from energy, chips, transformers, ethics and morality, but it is a direction.
And Musk, as a "businessman with dreams", has this lofty belief in changing the mode of human existence and changing the world, which is certainly a part of his self-realization, but all this is by no means "free".
The real competition is still hidden in the footprints of the future.
Perhaps, Musk is not the one who "holds the salary for the public", but he is indeed very good at "gathering the power of the crowd", as is the case with Tesla, FSD, RoboTaxi and the new travel mode in the incubation.
However, we don't need to be overly adoring or hostile, because every direction is a gamble until we win.