Lying Has Become the Norm
Mary Barra of GM and Joe Biden star in: American Dementia
I am listening to the New York Times interviewing Mary Barra, who is building the narrative that GM, which famously killed the electric car, has taken the lead in electric vehicles. This is absurd, of course, because Tesla, standing alone, created the electric car revolution. Just a cursory look at the numbers shows how absurd it is. Biden promoted this lie of GM leadership in electric cars because of the United Auto Workers union pressure on the government to help legacy auto companies undermine Tesla, which was not invited to any meetings about the transition to electric cars.
We have Teslas, and I can say without equivocation that Mary Barra and Biden are both borrowing from the Trump playbook, which states that if you ignore the facts and just make up your own, people who don’t know the reality will follow you off into your alternative reality. This is also called going down the rabbit hole. When I voted for Biden as an alternative to Trump, I expected he would model ethical behavior for the citizenry, including corporate leaders.
Tesla is the only company outside of China which has proved it can produce electric cars at scale and at a profit.
If GM was not partnering with a Chinese auto maker which produces the The Hongguang Mini, which retails for five grand and doubles as a coffin, it would have nothing much in the way of numbers. As it is they are proclaiming themselves the leader, even though they don’t own even a majority of the Chinese company. When it comes to the technology of electric cars, the Volt and the Hummer are their efforts. Barra said she drives a Volt, which proves she lies. Driving a Volt is dangerous.
An electric Hummer capitalizes on nostalgia, like when Chrysler put out a van that looked like a bread truck. It was mechanically a piece of crap but people didn’t know that until they’d driven it for awhile. I think it’s the same thing with legacy electric cars thus far. Where is GM’s supercharger network? And why do their batteries catch on fire so often they are forced to blow up any Tesla fire to front page news, even if it the Tesla was innocent. There are about 150k fires a year in gasoline vehicles.
Ford’s CEO, Jim Farley, was not willing to be as transparently corrupt as Barra. Farley, in an employee meeting, mentioned that Tesla’s Model 3 is now the bestselling vehicle in Europe, in the UK, and in most months it’s the best selling vehicle in California. That’s the best selling vehicle, not just electric vehicle.
They are selling so fast it’s hard to get one and used Tesla’s are selling sometimes for more than they cost originally.
Tesla’s market cap is $1.09 trillion, compared to GM’s which is at about $88.6 billion and Ford’s at just under $80 billion. Tesla can raise several billion without greatly diluting their stock, but raising that amount would dilute the stock of Ford or GM. Tesla does not have a dealer network, like Ford and GM and other legacy brands. A buyer just configures the car online with a few clicks of a cursor and it is delivered. I don’t know about you, but I always dreaded going into an auto dealership. How it can feel humiliating even when you’re paying cash is a mystery, but they will find a way.
Why would the government and corporations and even stock analysts gang up to undermine Tesla? Think about it. Big advertising is the fuel that drives the American media, and legacy automakers are big advertisers. It is baked into the budgets, and holds power over corporate decisions, regardless of how much that is denied. When there was separation between advertising and news the point of it was that the news would be objective because advertisers could not control content. Because the public owned the airwaves, the price of broadcasters’ using them was allotting programming time to public service, such as news. Now news is a product hawked 24 hours a day, and the main driver of news now is click bait. It’s all about money for nothing. Tesla spends zero on advertising. Sales are word of mouth. I have two friends who have bought Model 3s after seeing ours.
Ignoring Tesla is ignoring reality
Biden didn’t just lie, he knew he was lying and fostered a false narrative about the electric car industry when he failed to invite and feature Tesla as the leader in the American electric car industry.
The reason he did this was that he was politically supported by unions, in this case the UAW. Because of this he ignored Tesla and promoted GM, which sold more Bolts in 2017 than in 2020. They catch on fire. The Hummer has a 325 mile range, down from the estimated 350 range first advertised, and costs north of a hundred grand. But the reality is that the GM cars are made in Mexico and are being given subsidies because there are Mexican unions, not because they are US made. The implication is that Tesla does not pay workers scale. The reality is that Tesla gives stock options to employees, so if you work on the floor, the guy next to you might be a millionaire. You might be as well. You can get very rich as a cell worker at Tesla.
The analysts say Tesla stock is way overvalued compared to the legacy companies like Ford, GM, and the German and Japanese ICE car manufacturers. But Tesla is a technology company, and it can’t be directly compared to these legacy corporations, or any other corporation for that matter, because any employee can introduce and see immediately implemented a positive change in manufacturing. To block this is a firing offense. Tesla can thus introduce changes within hours, and often does. It sold a half million cars last year and a quarter million in the third quarter of 2021. To ignore Tesla is to shift the Democratic Party onto the same playing field as the Republican Party with the easy and unapologetic lying baked into the model.
Sandy Munro is disgusted by how Tesla is being treated
Tesla is building out the charger network not just in the public sector, but they manufacture the Power Wall which can charge from solar panels to make the car essentially free to drive locally. Nobody else is even close to this unless they piggyback on Tesla’s chargers and reverse engineer their cars to copy them. Sandy Monroe knows as much about the industry as anybody, and he has demonstrated that Tesla’s design is so much more efficient that some of the competitors are, by comparison, a joke. Rivian can brag about how much range it has, but it can get it only by increasing the size of the battery pack, which increases the price substantially. It’s a lot easier to make prototypes than to manufacture at scale, and automakers are burning through cash.
It would seem that when a company has succeeded in making the American Dream come alive, producing jobs and wealth and reducing pollution by producing a product not just as good as, but far better than, existing products, the government would be supportive. It is just the opposite. How can we survive as a can do nation, quick to innovate and change, if our politicians are getting on stage and staying things they know are not true in order to support companies which are wasteful, inefficient, and obviously corrupt? I voted for Joe Biden because Trump is a cancer. But Biden lies knowingly and deliberately, also. He is dementia.
