Is Tesla on the road to irrelevance?
Zero: The Climate Race
Bloomberg
4.7 • 219 Ratings
🗓️ 6 June 2024
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Over the past 18 months, Tesla has missed its sales goals, seen its share price fall and waded through a series of dramatic decisions from Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk, who cut car prices, fired much of the Supercharger team and announced nebulous plans to release a robotaxi. All of that looks like a pivot away from the original mission of making mass-market electric cars, but does Tesla going off course really matter to the EV transition? On this week’s Zero, Bloomberg Opinion columnist Liam Denning digs into Tesla’s strategy and what its evolution means for global adoption of electric cars.
Explore further:
- Past episode with Carnegie Mellon University professor Venkat Viswanathan on the futuristic promises of flying cars and emission-free aviation
- Past episode with Bloomberg NEF’s Colin McKerracher on why China has been successful in the EV transition where others haven’t been
- Past bonus episode with Bloomberg NEF’s Colin McKerracher on electrifying vans, trucks, and buses.
Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Mythili Rao. Special thanks this week to Kira Bindrim, Brendan Newnam, Anna Mazarakis and Alicia Clanton. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit https://www.bloomberg.com/green.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Zero. I am Akshadrati. This week, Tesla's Road to Irrelevance. |
| 0:05.0 | There's a lot to say about Tesla. |
| 0:21.4 | It's the world's most valuable auto company, |
| 0:24.0 | and it's a big player in the electric vehicle market. |
| 0:27.1 | And of course, it's run by a loud man with a talent for provocation. |
| 0:32.3 | Elon Musk is always in the news, and so is Tesla. |
| 0:36.0 | But on this episode, we want to take a step away from the spectacle and look more closely |
| 0:41.3 | at Tesla, the business and its role in putting us all in electric cars. |
| 0:47.8 | The transition to electric vehicles is fully in motion. |
| 0:51.8 | Global EV sales in the last six years have risen from 2 million to 14 million. |
| 0:57.9 | Meanwhile, Tesla is moving away from producing low-cost electric vehicles and signaling that it |
| 1:03.8 | wants to be an AI company, not a car company. So what's really going on? And at this point, if Tesla doesn't succeed, would it be catastrophic |
| 1:14.4 | for the transition to electric vehicles, or would it not matter? To answer those questions, |
| 1:20.0 | I talked to someone whose columns I read to try to make sense of Tesla. Bloomberg Opinion |
| 1:25.6 | columnist Liam Denning has been following the company's fortunes for quite some |
| 1:29.7 | time. |
| 1:30.6 | We talked about Tesla's latest pivot away from cheaper EVs, its long-promised robotaxies, |
| 1:36.6 | and where in the world, Tesla still remains vital. |
| 1:39.5 | Thank you. Liam, welcome to the show. |
| 1:57.9 | Thank you for having me. |
| 1:59.3 | Now, Liam, let's just start with the bare-bones |
| 2:02.0 | story of Tesla, but Elon Musk first became an investor in the company in 2004 and then took |
... |
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