Tesla's energy storage business gets sucked into the company's downward spiral

94 pointsposted 15 hours ago
by rntn
(techcrunch.com)

96 Comments

BSOhealth

13 hours ago

Not unfair coverage. If your company is trading with a PE of 181 and your YoY sales have been decreasing at greater rates YoY (and we’re literally only talking about 400k cars, equals a >trillion valuation?), you deserve more scrutiny than many others, at least.

passwordoops

12 hours ago

Thing is, rational people have been pointing this out for a decade (at least). The spiral has much less to do with fundamentals than politics. And now that Elon and Trump are back at it, Tesla has both sides of the aisle suddenly scrutinizing the company

JumpCrisscross

12 hours ago

> spiral has much less to do with fundamentals than politics

Tesla’s brand has become trash in a year. I have a neighbour who had PowerWalls installed a few years ago. He spray painted over the branding last year because it was embarrassing. (I live in Wyoming.)

cfloyd

10 hours ago

Your neighbor is weird

trickyager

10 hours ago

This isn't weird, really. Rational people tend to not like being associated with fascists, and with Elon at the helm Tesla is strongly associated with American Fascism at the moment.

JumpCrisscross

9 hours ago

> Rational people tend to not like being associated with fascists

This is fair, but I don’t even think it’s that. They just don’t want everyone walking into their garage to immediately associate them with Musk. This is true for folks on the left, who call out his fascism. But it’s also true if someone with MAGA leanings walks in.

palmotea

6 hours ago

> and with Elon at the helm Tesla is strongly associated with American Fascism at the moment

That's overblown. Telsa is strongly associated with an idiot who's so immature and stupid that he's managed to annoy pretty much everyone.

fooblaster

9 hours ago

My personal favorite is the Tesla apology bumper sticker. I want to signal I care, but I only care about 20$. Love the virtue signaling while driving round a 50k$ donation to Elon.

stogot

7 hours ago

I have people posting long apologies on LinkedIn about how they needed a new car but they disagree with (insert rant). It’s embarrassing they even post it. No one on LinkedIn even needs to or cares to know what car you drive, it’s just platitude virtue signaling

Marsymars

7 hours ago

FWIW, I’ve covered the branding on everything in my house. I don’t need my home to be advertising corporate brands to me/family/guests.

JumpCrisscross

9 hours ago

For what it’s worth, I was putting in solar panels with battery back-up, and PowerWalls were the least-bulky option, and I killed it last year because again, I don’t want to have something that partisan (and frankly toxic) so close.

XorNot

12 hours ago

For a decade? The politics has been a recent problem. For a decade though Tesla has had serious production problems that were dismissable under "but they're ahead".

Except it hasn't happened - they still have trouble with QA and building enough cars cheaply enough, and now the market has caught up with them.

And then into this mix, Musk decided to publicly side with the political aisle which hates his core customer base and his core product line.

stevage

12 hours ago

And more importantly his core customer base hates his chosen politics.

simondotau

9 hours ago

Anyone investing in Tesla at its current stock price is not doing so because of the success (or otherwise) of its automotive business. It’s a long-term gamble on autonomy solutions. The company would be worth 10 times more if they pull it off, but I give it a 10% chance of succeeding

7e

8 hours ago

Waymo is way ahead of them. I give them a 1% chance.

user

13 hours ago

[deleted]

teslaq

12 hours ago

[flagged]

xyst

11 hours ago

All of this to pave way for tax cuts for billionaires, cutting corporate tax rate.

Fucking parasites. This country truly needs a French Revolution and competent leaders.

Get these geriatric fucks out of office. And no more of this bullshit pseudoscience neoclassical economic theory used as basis of economic policy. Fuck reagonomics/trickle down economics.

slashdev

12 hours ago

That's pure propaganda, those numbers are wildly inflated

0cf8612b2e1e

12 hours ago

Say the number is inflated. How many attributable deaths is sufficient to be angry?

mslansn

11 hours ago

How much money should we spend to avoid every single death? Is the answer ∞?

adamhartenz

12 hours ago

What if it was not 14 million, but 14,000 deaths? Would that be ok with you?

teslaq

12 hours ago

The Lancet, which came up with the estimates, is an internationally respected publication https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Also, ten separate global institutions co-authored this page -- is the conspiracy to inflate deathcount that wide-ranging? What factors on the Lancet's paper are you objecting to specifically?

a Institute of Collective Health, Federal University of Bahia, Bahia, Brazil b ISGlobal, Barcelona, Spain c Facultat de Medicina i Ciències de la Salut, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain d Paediatrics Department, Hospital Sant Joan de Déu, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain e Fundação Ariel Glaser, Maputo, Mozambique f Centro de Investigação em Saúde de Manhiça, Maputo, Mozambique g ICREA, Barcelona, Spain h Institut Clínic de Medicina I Dermatologia, Hospital Clínic de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain i CIBER de Epidemiología y Salud Pública, Instituto de Salud Carlos III, Madrid, Spain j University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

hermitcrab

12 hours ago

I'm guessing there isn't much overlap in the venn diagram of people who buy green energy products and the people who want to be in any way associated with Musk.

Musk has:

-Alienated a very large part of his customer base.

-Wasted resources on the 21st century Edsel that is the Cybertruck.

-Picked a fight with the President of the USA.

-Consistently failed to deliver on his promises.

I can't see how this ends well for Tesla.

nico

12 hours ago

The stock market is a joke

Yes, yes, I know it can stay irrational for longer than I can stay solvent

But TSLA jumping almost 5% on news of failing earnings, is just ridiculous

sokoloff

15 hours ago

With all the noise and uncertainty around tariffs and resulting supply chain disruptions, I’m surprised it’s only down 0.8GWh (7.7%)

Maybe they’re running installs months behind sales and worse quarters are ahead.

tonyedgecombe

15 hours ago

According to the article the broader market is expanding.

sokoloff

14 hours ago

The way I read that paragraph is that Q1 (the prior quarter) set a record overall, but it’s not clear whether tariffs hurt others in Q2 as it was in Q2 when Tesla’s installs fell 7.7% QoQ despite having slight growth YoY in Q2.

malshe

14 hours ago

Tesla's installs fell in Q1 too: For the second consecutive quarter, deployments of its Powerwall and Megapack stationary storage products have declined, according to stats released by Tesla.

sokoloff

14 hours ago

For Q1, Tesla installs were down 5.5% quarter-on-quarter but up 156% (to 2.56x) versus the same quarter a year prior.

didip

13 hours ago

Too bad. It's the booming part of the business.

PW3 not compatible with PW2 is another bone-headed decision. I would have bought one if I can daisy chain PW3 to PW2.

blipvert

13 hours ago

Go fash, lose cash.

devjab

12 hours ago

It's wild that the aristocracy has to re-learn that rule of law, equality and liberalism are sort of great when you don't want the king to be capable of taking your toys at a whim.

thordenmark

12 hours ago

Wanting the government to spend within its means is hardly fash.

detourdog

12 hours ago

The unapologetic seig heils at a political event sent me fash vibes.

stevage

12 hours ago

But that does not describe Musk's politics.

dyauspitr

8 hours ago

Is that why we’re spending $170 billion on ICE and increasing the deficit by $3.5 trillion?

mindslight

5 hours ago

Sure, it's the support of fascism that's fash - fascist leader, fascist gestures and dog whistles, fascist bringing the bureaucracy to heel under one autocrat. If Musk manages to somehow help sink the big ugly spending bill, it could be the start of a long redemption arc. But I'm not holding my breath.

FredPret

12 hours ago

That might be what Elon and many other conservatives want, but the guy he allied himself with to get that done has ruled by decree so far

jmyeet

14 hours ago

TSLA continues its years-long trend of not only defying fundamentals. Here are, off the top of my head, the current, serious risks to Tesla:

- Brand damage done to typical Tesla buyers and in countries that subsidize EVs;

- Downturn in sales in Q1 and likely future continued declines;

- Likely loss of the EV tax credit in the US;

- A likely upcoming recession with (currently) one quarter of negative GDP growth;

- Tariff risks;

- Competition, particularly from Chinese automakers;

- Supply chain risks; and

- Risks to the Tesla business in China as political and tariff fallout as the administration seeks to ratchet up a trade war with China.

Yet Tesla still trades at a P/# of 173.

TSLA is a bet on Elon. That's it. But it won't be because of any fundamental success in the business. It'll be a question of how much looting of government coffers it can do.

Elon has realized he needs to diversify the business, hence the robotaxis. My bet is that will never go GA and likely will kill or seriously wound someone and get sued out of existence.

rickydroll

14 hours ago

If Tesla's board of directors had any cojones, they would dump Musk and distance themselves from him and his actions.

darth_avocado

14 hours ago

They are in a tough spot re:Elon. While long term, distancing Tesla from Elon and focusing on developing better EVs that out compete BYD, Xiaomi and other Chinese competitors would be the healthy move, they also realize that the company’s unreal valuation is completely tied to Elon and his made up storylines that never get delivered (FSD, Semi, Roadster 2, 4680 battery etc.). Dumping Elon would wipe out hundreds of Billions in shareholder value and the lawsuits would be brutal.

rickydroll

14 hours ago

What do they say in most commercials about investing? Oh yes, "Investing in securities carries the risk of loss."

They could sideline him, perhaps put him in an oubliette for a while, then make some serious improvements to the current product line and start cultivating a culture of working without Musk.

darth_avocado

14 hours ago

I agree with the sentiment, however the board has fiduciary responsibilities towards the shareholders. If they make decisions that materially affect the company, in this case by destroying the valuation, then the shareholders can sue.

It will be extremely difficult for the board to justify that having Elon and letting him do whatever he wants is more damaging for the stock than kicking him out.

tayo42

13 hours ago

> his made up storylines that never get delivered

I don't get who is still out there believes him enough to put their own money into this company. But the stock keeps going up. I just don't get it?

XorNot

12 hours ago

It's a memestock. People are just gambling not investing. You see TSLA in the news, the news is bad so you know a bunch of people are rushing off to bet it goes up anyway...so you do too.

tayo42

11 hours ago

That's retail investors though? They're not really making the stock move?

baggachipz

14 hours ago

He owns them all, they would never even consider firing him.

user

12 hours ago

[deleted]

marcusverus

14 hours ago

As the parent said, Tesla's PE ratio indicates that investors are betting on massive future growth, obviously because of Elon's track record of delivering on his promises of new tech (....eventually). If getting rid of Elon caused Tesla to be priced like other car companies, the price would go down by 90+%.

No sane board member would consider that a serious option.

sokoloff

13 hours ago

Board members are also significant shareholders, so they’d be tanking their own position (and would be hard to argue if they sold out shortly before distancing him that they had no insider knowledge of it).

LightBug1

12 hours ago

That's the only way I'd even have a second thought about Tesla ... but this is the cost of being all-powerful ... the inability to give up that power.

Even then, Tesla's duck is cooked. They're facing strong winds, reputational and otherwise, at the exact same time as the competition have come of age.

The perfect storm. It will take time, but Tesla are done.

lemoncucumber

14 hours ago

Also the risk of their unproven approach of not using lidar for self driving, unlike every competing self-driving system.

simondotau

9 hours ago

What’s your definition of “unproven” which doesn’t cover what Tesla has achieved, but does cover what Waymo has achieved? Hint: one of those has driven at least two if not three orders of magnitude more miles unaided by humans.

Just to be clear, because a lot of people who don’t follow this closely may not appreciate it, the 3-D spatial awareness component of Tesla’s stack has been solved problem for a couple of years now. The long tail problem is path planning and decision-making. LIDAR doesn’t make that any easier, even in theory.

user

3 hours ago

[deleted]

gamblor956

8 hours ago

Hint: one of those has driven at least two if not three orders of magnitude more miles unaided by humans.

Yes we all know that Waymo has done this but this thread is about Tesla.

3-D spatial awareness component of Tesla’s stack has been solved problem for a couple of years now

A lot of people have died because their self driving Teslas did not have spatial awareness and crashed into stationary objects at full speed. Clearly we have different definitions of construction "solved".

simondotau

6 minutes ago

It's critical to note that Autopilot is not FSD, and has nothing in common with FSD, other than running on the same physical hardware. Autopilot is a brand name for lane centering / adaptive cruise control, similar to Nissan ProPilot and Ford Co-Pilot. Deaths attributed to the misuse of lane centering / adaptive cruise control features are commonplace among all makes of car, but deaths in Fords and Toyotas rarely make media reports, because the media is in the business of generating clicks.

A lot of people have died because their self driving Teslas

Two is not "a lot".

In the USA in 2023, the fatality rate of human drivers was 1.26 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles in the USA.

Over the 60 million miles driven by Waymo vehicles, the number of fatalities involving a Waymo is one. This is a fatality rate of 1.67 deaths per 100 million miles. (It should be noted that this isn't a statistically meaningful number because Waymo vehicles have driven so few miles.)

Over the 3.8 billion miles driven by Tesla FSD, the number of fatalities involving a Tesla running the FSD software stack is two. This a fatality rate of 0.05 deaths per 100 million miles. If those 3.8 billion miles were driven by humans, you would expect 46 more deaths to have occurred.

standardUser

14 hours ago

> he needs to diversify the business, hence the robotaxis

The robotaxis are the biggest risk of all. It's not a "hence" that can be relied on for a win and to change the conversation. It's a huge embarrassment and a reminder of Musk's repeated false promises.

sneak

13 hours ago

75% of the trips I take in my Model 3 across a standard US city (admittedly one without snow) are handled by FSD with no interventions on my part.

Waymo has of course been operating for some time now.

I think autonomous taxis are inevitable for Tesla and others.

standardUser

13 hours ago

Automatous vehicles are absolutely inevitable and Waymo has completely lapped Tesla. It's not impossible for Tesla to catch up, but it's not likely. Their tech is insufficient, their public record is non-existent, and Musk is famously inept at working with the many local governments and bureaucracies he needs to appease if he ever hopes to start pilots in the biggest markets. Meanwhile, Waymo is maybe a year away from becoming the Kleenex brand of driverless taxis, with over 10 million rides sold and a truckload of bureaucratic good will already built up.

cfloyd

10 hours ago

Waymo has not lapped Tesla. At all.

martinpw

13 hours ago

> 75% of the trips I take in my Model 3 across a standard US city (admittedly one without snow) are handled by FSD with no interventions on my part.

Is that meant to be making a case for Tesla's robotaxis? Because 25% of trips requiring interventions sounds dismal for a service that is rolling out now.

tverbeure

11 hours ago

I shortly tried FSD during their May and November freebie month last year. There were times when an intervention wasn't strictly required, just like you can't intervene when your angsty teenager with learning permit is at the wheel, but it was still shockingly bad.

I have no doubt that there's a good percentage of FSD users out there who don't intervene to avoid lowering stats even if they rationally know that they should have.

sneak

11 hours ago

Why would I care more about “stats” than my own car and my own safety? I am not penalized in any way for disabling FSD when the car does something dumb.

tverbeure

7 hours ago

Many people, after spending a good chunk of money on something, become part of the tribe and feel the need to justify their purchase. It’s just human nature.

Not saying that you’re one of those, but as others have pointed out: 25% of rides with a force intervention is absymal and didn’t have the impressession that you thought so too.

25% puts it in party trick category, not something that should be allowed on the road.

sneak

7 hours ago

FSD is only $100 per month.

user

11 minutes ago

[deleted]

JumpCrisscross

12 hours ago

> autonomous taxis are inevitable for Tesla and others

I agree. But I think the autonomously native are going to eat the legacy manufacturers, including Tesla, for lunch.

We haven’t even started seeing partisan regulatory backlash against Tesla’s autonomous taxis yet. I’d be shocked if they’re ever permitted in New York or California, for example. I wouldn’t be surprised if they wind up banned in Europe, China and India, too. And that’s before weighing how Trump could dick Tesla around.

gamblor956

8 hours ago

Thats a 25% failure rate.

For comparison, that's many times worse than a drunk driver.

sneak

8 hours ago

Ten years ago it wasn’t possible at all. Plot the line.

user

13 hours ago

[deleted]

lovich

14 hours ago

you're forgetting domestic political risks as he has chosen to fight the admin now

nirav72

12 hours ago

I'm not sure what Elon stands to gain by taking on the admin. Sure Elon has piles of cash to dump on various congressional races. But that's about it. On the other side, Trump currently has the full power of the U.S government to take apart Elon's empire. Including Elon. He is better off making amends and focus on his businesses. Even if he does lose out because of the BBB.

k8sToGo

14 hours ago

You forgot the software risks. Other companies already passed them.

foxglacier

13 hours ago

This article really needs to be a graph. From what I can make out:

2023 average quarter 15.7 GWh / 4 = 3.9 GWh [1]

2024 average quarter 31.4 GWh / 4 = 7.85 GWh

2024 Q4 11 GWh

2025 Q1 10.4 GWh

2025 Q2 9.6 GWh

So I guess it's up from the same time last year but down from the peak Q4 2024? Maybe it's seasonal and it's actually growing not shrinking?? The numbers also don't distinguish between residential and utility installs. Maybe they had one huge utility customer in Q4 2024 that distorted everything?

[1] https://www.energytrend.com/news/20250115-49006.html

jeffbee

13 hours ago

Being a white-label outlet for Panasonic batteries in North America is not an amazing business, especially if you set your own brand on fire.

kkfx

12 hours ago

Well... A personal take as someone who build his own domestic p.v. power plant with storage:

- 99% of what's available on the market is NOT meant to be integrated, and that's a big break. I have and EV with a 400V battery and there are on sale p.v. inverters supporting 400V batteries with BMS canbus comms. There is NO DAMN REASON why my car can't be a powerful and big extra battery for my home, just no one have done so, because grid operators dislike semi autonomous people...

- despite having many open stuff Tesla is a self-contained ecosystem, which is in general a bad thing and in particular if they do not offer nothing really complete in their own garden. I do want V2L and V2H for my EV, at least many EVs offer the former. Not Tesla.

- heat pumps and cold/hot water storage could enable a big energy savings well integrated with p.v. so far only Toyota have announced an experiment of car+home p.v.+heat pump project and I still see nothing on sale. Tesla offer none as well, even if "they evolve the concept of heat-pump in cars"...

So well... Why buy a PowerWall? A Victron MultiPlus/Quattro and Chinese batteries offer more power, more storage, more modularity at a cheaper price... Victron also offer an EV domestic charging station BADLY integrated with home p.v. (sometimes does not star charging even if there is plenty of p.v. available, charging settings are awfully limited, for instance you can't say "go full power with Sun, but keep going from the grid as needed at maximum X amps till a certain time" and similar not that strange nor complex logic)...

chankstein38

14 hours ago

That "dark cloud hanging over Tesla" has a name.

asteroidburger

14 hours ago

Has a weird odor to it, wouldn't you say? A sort of musk, perhaps?

SlowTao

14 hours ago

It hangs around for a while, like far longer than it should, almost Elon-gated.

user

13 hours ago

[deleted]

user

13 hours ago

[deleted]

user

13 hours ago

[deleted]

Alupis

13 hours ago

The "downward spiral" of Tesla is greatly exaggerated - almost entirely by those who hate the CEO's politics and therefore irrationally hate anything near him.

Most of your other "big" car companies are also experiencing down-trending sales. Perhaps not the the same percentage as Tesla, but as soon as people are told to hate something/someone else, sales will go back like they always have. People have a short attention span - and only a minority of people wear their politics around as some sort of identity. An even smaller minority of the people cheering on the "downward spiral" of Tesla were ever going to be a Tesla customer (ie. a luxury brand car buyer).

The "downward spiral" of Tesla is greatly exaggerated.

verteu

13 hours ago

> Most of your other "big" car companies are also experiencing down-trending sales.

But they're priced at P/E of 7, while TSLA is P/E of 170.

Negative growth at 170 P/E is... Much, much worse than negative growth at P/E of 7.

bradfa

13 hours ago

Honda Q2 sales are up year over year, and not just slightly. Figures came out today: https://hondanews.com/en-US/honda-corporate/releases/release...

erulabs

13 hours ago

Well to be fair the new civic hybrid is a really fantastic car at a great price and exactly what most car buyers need. And additionally their model Y competitor the Passport is very nice and well priced.

I’d consider Honda a bit of an outlier considering the quality of their offering this year.

yongjik

12 hours ago

> only a minority of people wear their politics around as some sort of identity

I think you accidentally hit the nail on the head here. Yes, only a minority of people do that, and Musk is one of them! Which is a problem when your job is selling cars to people.

matthewdgreen

13 hours ago

If you're at a 180+ P/E and you're not growing, you're in big trouble.

cfloyd

10 hours ago

My thoughts exactly. I don’t care for the CEO’s politics but I don’t tie my morals of owning a vehicle to it. That’s just silly. Imagine if we did that with all other companies. Stocks rise and fall. Hell, Tesla’s has a ton. Ignore the noise.

ASinclair

13 hours ago

Is Tesla's stock priced like other "big" car companies experiencing down-trending sales?

mr_toad

13 hours ago

> only a minority of people wear their politics around as some sort of identity

A minority perhaps, but not an economically insignificant one. The sales of MAGA hats show that a significant number of people literally wear their politics as a form of identity.

9283409232

13 hours ago

It is and isn't. Tesla's downward spiral gets more media traction than other companies but that doesn't change the fact it is in a downward spiral. I may be one of the few people that read Tesla's recent financials and they are completely propped up by two things: Tesla holds a lot of Bitcoin which increased in value and other companies buy carbon credits from Tesla which is a large source of revenue for them. If either of these two things were to change, Tesla would be in a very bad situation. Rumor is that Trump is trying to kill the entire carbon credit thing. This would be a disaster for Tesla.