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Europe's EV sales surge 26% in 2025 while Tesla faces decline

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65 points doener | 1 comments | 23 Sep 25 10:42 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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rmu09 ◴[23 Sep 25 11:57 UTC] No.45345721[source]▶
US made cars had the reputation of being low quality, too big, too heavy and too inefficient for european cities.

Tesla was somewhat different. People bought Teslas not for their promised "self driving" capabilities (I know no Tesla driver that took those promises at face value or got the FSD option FWIW), but one motivation was to "stick it" to snobbish arrogant european manufacturers wanting to develop "clean" ICEs with "green fuels" or other non-sensical crimes against thermodynamics like H2-cars.

Now, Tesla (and the US in general) has a brand toxicity problem, and it is worsening. People I know that would consider a Tesla some years ago now drive electric VWs or BWMs or KIAs, often times much more expensive cars than the comparable Tesla 3 / Y model.

This trend will probably continue the next years, and I don't see a way for Tesla to repair the brand image.

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bayindirh ◴[23 Sep 25 12:10 UTC] No.45345851[source]▶
Tesla killed its brand reputation thrice.

- First they went "camera only", alienating people who knows the tech.

- Then they mocked car industry for so long. It was a necessary poke at first, but they didn't get prepared, and the elephant proved that it can run.

- Then Elon's Trump affair and all the shebang happened.

The broken FSD promises, using non-auto rated parts (and related failures), being negligent of their own errors and acting like they are deaf to the criticism is the cement between the layers.

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storus ◴[23 Sep 25 12:18 UTC] No.45345963[source]▶
They had camera-only tech employing multiple 4k cameras running at over 2000fps. Not your grandma's 480p/25fps webcam many car manufacturers use as parking cameras. 2000fps gives you enormous safety margin even in case of individual frame misdetection. The long-tail issues they hit are present on LiDAR vehicles as well but LiDAR is much slower, more difficult to process and sensor fusion adds its own errors.
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1. ModernMech ◴[23 Sep 25 16:12 UTC] No.45349033{3}[source]▶
> The long-tail issues they hit are present on LiDAR vehicles as well but LiDAR is much slower, more difficult to process and sensor fusion adds its own errors.

The long tail is long no matter what. Which is why the most robust solutions deploy sensors with orthogonal sensing modalities that can compliment one another. By relying on only one sensor type, Tesla has made it hard for their system overly brittle, which has resulted in avoidable deaths and destruction.

> LiDAR is much slower, more difficult to process

LiDAR in my experience is much easier to process, as the sensor stream is just an array of distances. Camera in my experience is much harder to process, as the sensor stream is an array of RGB values from which you have to infer distances. So by what metric are you alleging LiDAR is more difficult to process?

> sensor fusion adds its own errors.

You'll have to do a degree of sensor fusion across all the camera sensors anyway, so going camera-only don't absolve you of having to fuse sensor streams and come up with a belief. Sensor fusion in general tends to decrease overall system error as more sensors are added.