Rolls Royce Ends Boom Supersonic Partnership

Tesla have top ranks in safety, the best most performant interior board computer, their glass roofs are pretty amazing, their internal heating/cooling system is the best in the industry by far. The reliability of their engines and battery packs is actually extremely good. Their structural engineering with their castings is ahead of anybody in the industry. The Model S is literally the fastest production car in the world. They have the largest global fast charging system and the single best integration of cars and charging.

If Tesla gets criticized for quality control most of the times its fit and finish something a lot of people don't actually car that much about. The majority of Tesla cars are produced in China and those cars have an excellent reputation for quality.

> I personally know has said their first Tesla will also be their last.

Tesla has the highest consumer satisfaction ratio and the highest costumer retention ratio in the industry.

But I'm sure your personal experience is what is most important in this discussion.

In terms of subsidies, Tesla wasn't actually subsidies that much. The received a 400M loan from the DoD for advanced vehicle manufacture. At that point however, even without the DoD they could have raised that money. Tesla payed that lone back early and with interest. DoD also gave much larger loans to GM and Ford, neither have fully paid back their loan yet.

The tax subsidies only started years later and Tesla profited from the 7500k tax credit. However this was limited to 250k vehicles and Tesla blew threw that very fast and have since operated without a tax credit and had to compete against vehicles coming in from all the global car companies that all got this tax credit. GM also used that tax credit. So did Tesla get a subsidy that helped them, I would say yes but this was open to all car companies and a number of them took advantage of it.

Tesla also gets the same tax reductions as any large company that makes large investments in particular regions.

> My impression is that Tesla succeeded thanks to Musks personality that made the customers forgive unfulfilled promises that they paid thousands of dollars for.

Not sure what this is based off. You don't build a company the size of Tesla based on forgiving costumers.

Yes, sure some costumers waited a while for their model 3 because of production issues, but this isn't really unique to Tesla. Car production often gets delayed. And costumers did not 'forgive' this universally, many canceled their order and bought something else.

But here is the thing, the demand for Tesla electric cars was so high that it didn't matter.

Tesla was successful because they had a product that a huge amount of people desperately wanted, and after some initial delay they got it to those costumers in very large numbers with very good unit margin.

In fact, Tesla often increased the spec of the delivered product compared to the one that was initially ordered.

And the money from reservation undelivered vehicle and FSD is certainty not why Tesla is successful.

Tesla is successful because they sell a 1 million+ vehicles a year with an automotive margin of 30%.

> I mean, Tesla still delivered stuff that people value. Just not the promised ones.

Can you explain what you mean? What did they not deliver on?

Some people (a minority of costumers) didn't get the FSD but that certainly not most costumers.

Government come in and sometimes push forward the technology industry already has, mostly by just given those industries more investment money.

But industry still invests gigantic amount of money to push technology forward and those innovations are constantly and consistently changing the game.

Government invests something in X and then for the next 100 years people in forum can say 'see this only happened because of X'. But that ignores a lot of the work before and after to actually make it game changing.

And what we also need to consider is that very often that huge government investment fails and goes nowhere. And at the same time large private investment can also fail.

To conclude from this no private investment can ever be game-changing doesn't really follow.

Starlink is a recent example that is pretty game-changing. Government didn't invest in it directly. Sure in the last 100s government invest in rocketry and electronics and antennas but so did private industry at a much larger overall rate (outside of rocketry).

So I think, at the end of the day, government will always have its fingers in almost every pie and will always talk about their success and never talk about their failures. If Boom isn't successful, well you can't innovate without the government. If Boom is successful, well Boom profited from government investment in supersonic military technology so they couldn't have done it without government.

So these kinds of arguments all circle in on themselves. At the end of the day, if you invest lots of money in something game-changing most of the time its gone go to shit, no matter who does it.

Yeah idk about that part, I doubt we need more of anything that enables more pollution