Tricking Out Tesla
Consumer Reports walks like those short shorts are too tight
We’ve had a Tesla Model 3 for quite awhile now. Mostly it’s my wife’s car, because she is a computer geek and they have a relationship from which I am politely excluded most of the time. I come around and they stop talking. When Consumer Reports first tried a Tesla, they were glowing. Best car ever. And then they did something odd. They reversed course and began to criticize the car, and recently did something overtly hostile. They said the car is dangerous, which clearly does not comport with any evidence. By evidence I mean something which isn’t created by the seeker for reasons unknown. The entire value of Consumer Reports is objectivity. Without that they are worth nothing.
Elon Musk famously sold short shorts on his website to troll the Wall Street “experts” who bet his stock would crash and burn. Instead it skyrocketed, not because of Wall Street, but because of consumers, like us, who bet on Musk in the same way we bet on Steve Jobs. They are people who bring us products we really want to buy, and we have an interest in their survival and success. We paid a premium for the early edition of the dual motor long range M3 because that was the Model 3 Musk sold first. He needed the money, and we were willing to invest in him.
I remember on the TSLA owner site how people were up in arms that the price dropped after they bought. They weren’t listening to what Musk said he was doing, ramping up to quickly get to a $35k electric car. But the first Model 3’s were twice that. It was a leap of faith, and it was the first time we bought a car without ever seeing it. What did we miss? The ordeal of buying a new car, that’s all. It was ordered and the price was the price, and it was delivered. Simple and easy. I hope to never enter an ICE showroom again.
Think of the number of parts in an ICE engine, how much antifreeze is sold, oil changes, motels where you are growing a beard while waiting for the parts to arrive from Yokohama.
There is an industry that has been cranked up to inflict damage on Tesla’s consumer appeal, because it is costing some very big institutional investors a shitload of money. Once the stock was listed on the big board, these investors are required to have a certain amount of it in their portfolios. Were they going to pay the price it came in at or drive it down? Remember Cramer talking about how easy it is to manipulate stocks?
Look at this headline: “Will highly overvalued Tesla Stock see a correction after S&P inclusion?” You drive down a stock by driving negative coverage, and you do that with money. There are as many journalists as cops on the take. Or they call themselves journalists. They shill products.
And the funds that shorted the stock were like King Lear on the heath as it kept going up. We have to drive it down with rumors and bad news. But Consumer Reports is above all that. They don’t accept advertising and they pay for products they test. They get money from grants, as from foundations for example. And I for one do not look askance at the woman who heads it just because she moved there from the Ford Foundation.
I tax not you, you elements, You owe me no subscription
I wouldn’t compare a Tesla with an ICE car, because Tesla has something no other auto manufacturing company has: Elon Musk, the guy who embarrassed Boeing by leaving it behind and revolutionizing space exploration for ten cents on the dollar. Of course his cars are better, and they’re safer as well. But that misses the point. Tesla is not a car company but an energy company. The stock has to be weighed with that in mind.
“In the 3rd quarter, we registered one accident for every 4.59 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged. For those driving without Autopilot but with our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 2.42 million miles driven.”
Musk is a man who does not own stock in any company he is not actively administering. He puts all his money into what he wants to create and accomplish. In contrast, Consumer Reports is out there jerry rigging a Tesla without anybody’s permission, so that it will drive without hands on the wheel. This is released in association with a news story about two men who died in a fiery crash in a Tesla in which there was nobody behind the wheel. First of all, this was false.
If the car had been on autopilot they’d be alive, it wasn’t, and the fire was extinguished in minutes, not hours. And Consumer Reports is saying, “Look how dangerous this car is.” Right. There are more than 150 gasoline car fires a day. And how many ICE cars have been rigged with a rock on the throttle and a corpse behind the wheel? They were self driving cars too, and movie stars to boot. So that means we can’t have nice things? But what Consumer Reports did was drive down the stock price, which is worth millions to a few very rich people.
Sometimes circumstantial evidence is overwhelming, Thoreau said, like when you find a trout in the milk. It didn’t wander up from the brook looking for protein. These weird and dishonest attacks on Tesla, under the circumstances, are attacks on the stock. Attacking the stock has become a huge industry with billions of dollars riding on driving it down. That doesn’t mean there can’t be honest criticism, it means that there’s a lot of dishonest information being pushed out to destroy while Elon is trying to build. It is the perfect metaphor describing what someone faces trying to change entrenched money, like oil and gas.
I know how good the Tesla is. I’m going to get another one, a truck if I’m not so old I’ll look ridiculous in it. Lol. But what do I care? If I fall asleep, like Pancho’s horse it will take me home. And as far as Consumer Reports goes, they made themselves into a joke with this last stunt. Whatever goodwill that was gained by the early editorial staff, when it was a physical magazine, has been squandered on clickbait positions which come up short.