Many have argued that Musk's shift to far-right politics is responsible for some of this decline -- and it certainly makes some sense -- but I wonder if the cause and effect are being conflated. If Musk were aware that Tesla was going to lose this much ground due to factors beyond his own mismanagement, including the threat of Chinese imports and a widespread shift away from EVs due to a right-populist sentiment swin…
Part of the trouble here is that was always the case. The best selling "car" in the US is the Ford F-series truck. Followed by the Chevy truck, two Japanese SUVs, the Stellantis truck, the GMC rebadge of the Chevy truck, a Chevy SUV and then the Tesla Model Y.
To get anywhere they were always going to have to appeal to the people who buy trucks.
And when everything is polarized and your product is tribe-coded, how do you do that?
I suspect the error here was buying Twitter and then aligning with the party expected to take power instead of buying Twitter and then using it to shift things in the direction of depolarization.
It also doesn't help that the Cybertruck looks weird and costs too much. I mean you can blame attitudes as you like but then there's the fact that the F-150 starts at ~$40k and the Cybertruck starts at ~$80k. They need the battery prices to come down more before people are going to buy something that needs as much battery as a truck.