it's a social experiment. "if we don't do it top-down, will the educated and driven try to make us do better or do it themselves?". the answer revealed itself when architecture and design remained procedural but failed to emphasize and to build around the goal of social evolution and identity seeking. instead we got Gentrification, efficiency nobody asked for and wealth wasted on uninspired and demotivating pseudo-game theorists.
it's funny how nobody noticed in time that the side effects of these many experiments destroyed more beauty & opportunities, especially in urban convolution and social convection than they have revealed in data about human nature and civilized networks ... "we happened to become a community and build around the growing desires of our children and our own" is something you only hear on garden plots, even though on the country side everywhere, people are now third and fourth generation heirs.
> Which is really bad compared to both the market expectations, the pre-orders, Musk's expectations
Hopes and expectations, black holes and revelations (-Muse). Another take: The stock price is still on the uptake, which leads me to believe that the expectations, projections and Musk's personal comments were merely, as they so often are, for the broader public.
The data you linked to shows a long term trend upwards, which, as a lot of people would expect, isn't going to continue because the competition has not only caught up and outpaced Tesla in many ways but the market for EV's diversified and now serves many more tastes than before.
Tesla was a bit "Vanilla" and their Banana Split 'Cybertruck' is a pretty cool addition that will always stand out and be a pretty investment for fanboys of "the man who's gonna bring us to Mars, what did you do?", as a commenter on reddit put it once (I'm probably paraphrasing).
Musk owns 13% of all Tesla shares, and no other investor owns entire chunks so the amount of shareholders is pretty damn high, with lots of people who are not in tech or big on investments in general, which makes a continued rise of the stock price despite missing "market expectations" quite a bit more interesting.
People understand that Tesla became a company that will deliver even in uncertain times. And their Gigafactories and the entire tech approach behind it, as much marketing hype as it was, is crazy competent.
They have a different tech approach to Waymo and their software needs a lot more honing than Google's little moonwalker, who probably had early access to the Ingress and Pokemon Go Dataset and have a shitload of time series data on where pedestrians and dirty scooter drivers are more likely to be expected, and who are thus 'safer' than other self-driving systems and even humans.
Even if Tesla won't spice up their line up, AI, especially GenAI will give a not-yet-liquid-enough Vanilla target group the financial means to buy into the green revolution with what is still, despite the hate, a status symbol of people who are not poor anymore but more importantly, who are progressive.
And as soon as their tech stack 'can see properly', and we know that will happen, they will make headlines, get good PR and get back right to the edge of all the expectations, don't you think? It's just a matter of time.
I was never a fan of tech demos and never believed a CEOs audience who claps like it's going to make good money from all that marketing hype no matter how shitty the sales are going to be or how scripted the demo actually was, revealed by thousands of bloggers and vloggers and traditional journalists, all of which drives exposure and peeks the interest of newcomers and long time lurkers who due to long enough exposure, suddenly start to like and wield the techy and marketing lingo.
"by the end of June (2024), Tesla had produced 11,000 Cybertrucks. (...) around 30,000 Cybertrucks by the end of the quarter (..) likely more than half of the ~23,000 “other vehicles” Tesla delivered in Q3 were Cybertrucks"
Only because we humans are used to judge "on short notice" all the time. The bigger picture translates into "crazy competent", but that might be a matter of opinion.
> I can see people expected the White House to help
I don't think "help" is the right word here. Elon got and will continue to get contracts for all the baby steps into space. And the "portfolio gang" knows, expects and works/cooperates on stuff without any of it falling into the problem of "insider trading".
This is all very superficial but I am not suited for a deeper dive.
If I got the whole thing right, sales can 'crater' as much as they want, if shareholders don't sell and or offer shares at a higher price and or if new 'investors' buy what is offered at the current price, the stock goes up.
Amazon wrote red numbers for decades but it's stock kept rising. In the end, the company fulfilled pretty much all promises made and the "trust" and "cooperation" of the stakeholders paid off.
Tesla is a crazy competent company. Just because the markets change preferences or the target group is 'stuffed', doesn't mean that the corporation won't perform in the near future. In fact, if stock price stays high despite plunging sales, somebody knows something ... (or the CEO of the company hangs out in the White House a lot)