Tesla’s car sales continue to slump, yet its latest master plan floats free of such earthly concerns. The negative headlines that greeted the plan – “sounds like AI slop”, “a smorgasbord of vague AI promises”, “reads like LLM-generated nonsense” – were a fair reflection of a document: long on utopia, short on detail.
Tesla’s 983-word statement promises “sustainable abundance” and “infinite growth”, while saying next to nothing about electric vehicles.
Who needs cars when you have Optimus, the humanoid robot Elon Musk says will eventually account for 80 per cent of the company’s value?
The contrast with earlier manifestos is stark. In 2006 Tesla pledged to fund mass-market EVs through sales of a sports car. Later plans promised trucks, solar roofs and self-driving fleets.
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Many goals went unmet, but at least they were concrete, as opposed to platitudinous abstractions.
Meanwhile, in August, Tesla registrations plunged 47 per cent in France and 84 per cent in Sweden, even as those EV markets grew. Sales halved in the Netherlands, and fell 42 per cent in Denmark.
Across western Europe, Tesla’s market share has slid to 1.7 per cent from 2.5 per cent. And yet, investors remain indulgent.
Commentators pointing to the stock’s 12 per cent slide this year miss the wider story: shares are still up by half over the past year, despite multiple big earnings misses and shrinking EV sales. Mock the vagueness, mock the robots, but investors keep lapping it up.
The one infinite thing about Tesla, it seems, is investor patience.
