Edward Niedermeyer

From 2018. The book’s main thesis is that Tesla has always faced challenges delivering on Musk’s outsized promises, but that luck and bravado have enabled it to maintain a soaring stock price. Focuses on production/engineering issues, like whether they actually had the claimed fast chargers or chargers that operate on solar power, rather than on treatment of workers, etc. Unfortunately, the book undercuts its own thesis, which is that Musk has been definitively exposed as unreliable, because after every exposure documented, enough people shrug or cry fake news to keep Tesla stock high. Still, it’s hard to think the party can last forever; as Niedermeyer points out, the legacy car companies are not shy about investing in competing cars and can actually make a lot of cars that work, something that Tesla has not shown. Also, the future of electric cars is probably not mostly in high-end, luxury brands, but in basic production configurations that can be built into cheap cars as well as a few high-end models, again something that the big makers can do and Tesla can’t. Of course, the market can stay irrational longer than you or I can stay solvent. So I guess we’ll see.… (meer)