What do you think of when you think of Tesla, or maybe the better question is who do you think of? Tesla is unique in how closely customers and investors link their feelings about the company to their feelings about its CEO, Elon Musk, and Musk you might have noticed, has been making plenty of news lately.
Bloomberg has been reporting that Twitter laid off about half of its workforce last week. Some thirty seven hundred workers were fired via email.
Elon setting off an uproar with a series of tweets suggesting a negotiation between Ukraine and Russia.
On Twitter, Elon Musk said he'd be up for a cage match if Zuckerberg agreed. Zuck fired back on Instagram, simply saying, send me a location.
I'll say what I want to say, and if if the consequence of that is losing money, so Beia.
So you wonder will Musk's very public and divisive personality impact the fortunes of the world's mode most valuable automaker. Tom Randall, a senior reporter for Bloombergreen went to find out.
A person said, I feel like my original interest in Tesla was partly built on my trust and interest in him, and now my continued interest in Tesla survives despite him.
I'm west Kosova today on the Big Take. Tesla owners are conflicted about Tesla's owner. Hey, Tom, great to see you again.
Anyway, good to see it too.
Tell me about this project because it was a huge undertaking and it's really interesting.
All right.
So if you can think back to the summer of twenty eighteen, like this was when Tesla had hit kind of peak drama. It was on the verge of bankruptcy because they couldn't make the Model three. You know, they had built these two huge factories and just nothing was working. And then on July first, this was five years ago, Tesla announced a breakthrough and they had made five thousand cars in a single week, and that was kind of the.
Week that changed the world for evs.
Tesla is said to be pausing some Model three production just days after reaching his target of five thousand cars a week. The news comes as some analyst question whether company can sustain those high output levels.
So what we wanted to do back then was no, like what kinds of vehicles was Tesla making, you know, could these compete with the rest of the auto industry or were these, you know, a bunch of lemons. So we reached out to Tesla owners and about seven thousand of them took our rather extensive survey about their car and about their experience buying it, and.
There were a lot of mixed results, but there was one.
Kind of big takeaway back then, and that was that they had built an internal combustion killer.
People loved these vehicles.
After they got over some initial like scratches in the paint and you know, misaligned panels on the doors. After that, they really their cars. So now it's been five years and we wanted to know if the car had held up. You know, this is the world's first mass produced EV and you know, how had people's opinions changed. A ton of interesting results, but once again, one thing kind of really stood out, and it wasn't about the car. It was about the man who makes them.
Yeah, and that's really kind of the focus of your story. Is that Elon Musk, who is once part of the appeal for a lot of Tesla buyers, Now those same people you returned to them these years later have really mixed feelings about him.
It's really interesting.
Several dozen questions that we asked verbatim the exact same question back in twenty eighteen and now, and these are the same people, you know, these are the initial buyers, the people who had taken a risk on Elon Muskin, on Tesla. And out of all those questions, by far, the biggest change in opinion, and it wasn't even close, was opinions about Elon Musk. You know, that is not the only takeaway of the story. We broke this story
up into three large parts. We have over forty graphics, and to me, what really stood out is a kind of dichotomy between you know, how people felt about the cars and how they felt about Musk, and it's kind of hard to overstate both feelings. Driving enjoyment. It was almost a perfect score among thousands of people. It was over ninety nine percent of them said the Model three was a joy to drive, and like, when can you get ninety nine percent of people to agree on anything?
It's astonishing. And then on the other hand was Musk's harm to Tesla's reputation, which was also overwhelming. People overwhelmingly said that.
What in particular about Elon Musk did people say they didn't like or had concerns about it?
All surrounds Twitter and his acquisition of Twitter last October and kind of his behavior on Twitter since then. I think he's come across as a bully to some of them. Also, his politics have shifted. He brought in Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in for his campaign announcement for President of the United States. He has hosted Tucker Carlson's show and promoted them regularly on Twitter once he was let go from
Fox News. And you know, he has amplified a lot of conspiracy theories that have been wrong and you know, I think have been abhorrent.
To a lot of people.
And what specifically do people say in the survey about that.
Well, they're angry with him for doing it, and they want him to stop. And there's a real sense of being deeply conflicted because, you know, Tesla owners, I think, more so than the general population, give Elon a lot of credit for building the things that he's built and building something that they all have deep feelings toward. You know, Tesla, it's brand and it's superchargers, pushing the future forward on
electric vehicles. This is something that all of these early Tesla owners feel very very strongly about, and they do think that Elon still supports all of those things, but
they feel like he no longer represents their values. We asked a number of questions about, you know, does he still serve as a role model for other business leaders, and people answered overwhelmingly no. And whether or not Elon Musk's politics represent theirs, if his values represent theirs, if his actions have impacted the brand, and that one people felt very strongly that he had hurt the brand of Tesla.
Maybe you can tell us what happened in between the time of that first survey when you said it was pretty precarious for Tesla and now, because boy, have their fortunes changed.
So much has changed since then. I mean, Tesla is now the world's most valuable car maker by far. You can add up the next ten combined and their market value is equivalent to Tesla's. And Elon Musk has become the world's richest person because of that. And now electric vehicles. The move toward electric vehicles around the world seems to
have hit kind of an inevitable stage. More than five percent of the world's sales last year were electric, and that's not including hybrids, that's just pure electric vehicles and Tesla's kind of leading that charge.
Tell us how you conducted this survey, because it was really big and you got a lot of information from people.
It was multipart.
First, we went back to the people who responded to our original survey back in twenty nineteen, and out of those, I think we had several thousand people responded again.
So we got a large response.
Rate there that we were able to compare their responses to back then. Then we also opened up a second study of new Tesla owners just so that we could make sure that you know, these original Tesla owners were kind of representative of feelings from.
People who purchased their cars later.
In all, if you just look at their comments when we had open ended questions, we had more words. The word count of their comments between the older surveys and this new survey was more than the entire Harry Potter series combined.
One of the things in the earlier survey seemed to be that people felt cool driving at Tesla because it was an electric vehicle, but also because Elon Musk was kind of cool. How has that changed.
Yeah, So one of the things that we wanted to do with this survey is really allow people to speak in their own words. So we have these kind of comment graphics that you can search through all of the original responses and there's a perfect comment in response to what you're saying. A person said, I feel like my original interest in Tesla was partly built on my trust and interest in him, and now my continued interest in Tesla survives despite him, And I think that was kind
of a common theme in there. Another person said, you know, Elon Musk is one hundred percent the reason why I may never consider purchasing another Tesla again. I love the vehicle, but do not want to support someone who has such vitriol and low opinion of the very people who have made.
Tesla a success.
One of the things that's so fascinating about this is I wonder how many Toyota owners could tell you the name of the CEO of Toyota, or Volkswagon owners name a brand, and yet Elon must seem to be so tied up in the identity of not just the cars, but of the people who bought them.
One of the things that shifted was people's how they report their sense of community, and in that last survey back in twenty nineteen, people would talk about you know, you would see another Tesla driving on.
The road and you would wave to them, or you know.
At the supercharger, people would just strike up conversations everywhere you went, And now that is kind have changed. You know, part of that's inevitable, part of a company getting bigger, but part of it is, you know that they feel like this is almost like a political yard sign that they're driving around in that is expressing a certain kind of belief. And you know, as one person said, but I'd prefer that he not be so tied to the image of Tesla. I don't want my car to be
an Elon Musk conversation starter. And you can imagine just rolling up to a friend's house and everybody just constantly wanting to start talking about Elon Musk, purely because they drive a Tesla. And you're right, there's no other vehicle in the world, and maybe no other product in the world that has that kind of symbolic resonance with the CEO.
Now, these are some of the negative comments about Elon Musk, but you spoke to a lot of people, and not all people felt that way.
Yeah, I mean, in fairness to Elon Musk, a lot of people still hold him in very high regard. Looking through the comments, a lot of people like to compare him to different figures, and there's a lot of you know, Edison and and Reford. You know, those were kind of the most common comparisons da Vinci, and almost all of them were positive, apart from the comparisons to Trump, and that was the number one comparison I think to another figure.
So yeah, I mean.
People still admire him, and even people who don't like his politics still like the company and what they're doing, and they think the company represents something that they like and they just kind of wish he would stick to that.
After the break, how are veteran Tesla owners getting along with their cars? How We talked a lot about how Tesla owners feel about Elon Musk, But what about the cars themselves? Apart from Musk, you said, they really like the cars. Do they want to buy another one?
To answer the first question, first, they love their model threes like that was an overwhelming response. They said, this car held up and it continues to kind of surprise and delight them with new updates to the vehicle. One person said, I'm not a car person, but this car touches my soul, you know, And that's the kind of depth of feeling that I think was expressed in this survey toward the Model three. So on a one to five scal, people said the Model three, they rated the
performance of four point ninety five. You know, it's almost a perfect score. Ease of use four point eight three, you know, design of the vehicle four point seven seven, and reliability four point six y nine. Those are out of the park scores in terms of how people feel about their car. So we really wanted to explore this idea of whether these perceptions of musk were affecting people's
car purchasing behaviors. So we asked them a number of questions about which vehicles they're looking at, if they're looking at a new car, or if they had sold their Model three and purchased another.
Car, what vehicle did they purchase.
And we all so ask them about their future plans to buy a Model three, And you know, it really stuck out how much people still plan to buy a Tesla between seventy five and eighty seven percent, depending kind of on how you ask the question of people who own a Model three plan to buy another Tesla in the future. So that's kind of an overwhelming brand loyalty, right, And I think any other company would be very happy with those numbers.
The question is like, would those.
Numbers be even higher if Elon weren't taking these political stands, And you know, there's a lot of indication that that is the case.
It's been about five years.
Now, and for people who buy new cars, that's about the time when people replace their cars once it comes out of warranty, they buy a new car. And so of the people who have sold their model threes, we asked them, you know, did you buy a Tesla or if you didn't, why not?
And Elon Musk was the.
Number one reason why they didn't buy another Tesla again.
Tell me about those numbers they actually look like.
So it's highly unusual for a CEO to actually be affecting buying decisions. But here, I think is an interesting example. Ninety six percent of owners with positive views of Musk said that they would buy a Tesla again. On the other hand, out of owners who said that they wouldn't buy a Tesla again, ninety one percent of them had very unfavorable opinions of Musk. So how they feel about the CEO really is driving decisions at the extreme ends.
And another interesting result is that if you ask Tesla owners what vehicles they're considering buying in the next two years, the number one choice by far is.
The Tesla cyber truck.
Fifty two percent are considering that, followed by the Model Why at.
Twenty four percent.
Now, if you expand the options beyond other Teslas than the top choices the Rivian R one s but it doesn't even compare to the interest in the side truck.
And why is it that people are so interested in this cyber truck.
The first time I saw it, I didn't know how to kind of place it. I didn't know what I thought of it because it didn't look like a car to me. It didn't fit that kind of perception in my In my mind, it's extremely angular and huge flat surfaces, so a huge flat windshield. You know, it's all stainless steel as well, so it's a cyber truck. You know, it looks like something from a Mad Max kind of
vision of the future. And you know, I think a lot of people kind of laughed at it and said, nobody would ever buy that, and that's going to stick out and I think as they've seen these vehicles over and over, they're starting to kind of put that in their mindset as you know, something that could be a vehicle, And I think opinions have changed, and I think people might be surprised by the amount of support that has built up for it.
One other really interesting thing that you were able to find in the survey is about battery data. Evy, batteries have always been, you know, obviously the heart of the vehicle, but do they last? How long did they hold the charge? They're super expensive and difficult to replace. What did you find in the survey?
Yeah, so that was a big kind of unknown. Tesla has started to release some results on its Model X and Model S kind of their luxury vehicles, and how those batteries hold up over time, but we still didn't have any kind of indication for the Model three and Model Why, and these are by far the world's biggest sellers. The Model Why is going to be the world's best selling vehicle of any type this year, or it's tracking
toward that, which is really remarkable. But we and yet we don't know how those kinds of batteries hold up over time, And so we were able to kind of plot this out among hundreds and hundreds of Tesla owners, and what we found.
Is that the batteries lost between eight.
And nine percent of their capacity after one hundred thousand miles. And you know, this is the first major study of the Model three, Model Y battery degradation.
Tesla has the Model S.
And Model X, and those were two earlier vehicles and their luxury vehicles, and these results are consistent.
With Tesla's data for those.
And it's consistent and perhaps even a little better than I think what most industry estimates would be for battery degradation. So I would say that that's a good result for them, although there's a couple of big caveats. First, I think there's a wide distribution of results, meaning that you know, at fifty thousand miles, some people had full battery capacity like a brand new car, while others had huge drops, you know, ten fifteen percent of battery capacity in the
first few years of ownership. And that variation was reflected in people's comments about the car, where you know, some.
People were dissatisfied.
You know, they had planned on having a certain amount of capacity for their lifestyle, and you know that kind of disappeared faster than they expected. The other caveat is winter driving, and we already knew that batteries perform worse in very cold temperatures, and part of that is just keeping the car warm.
You know, you've got the heater on. But there's a pretty big drop.
But we didn't really know what kind of drop that was, so we surveyed it, and out of thousands of Tesla owners, the average decline was about twenty eight percent of battery capacity at freezing temperatures. And I think, as somebody who pays close attention to battery technology, that's not a very surprising number. I think that's kind of in line with
what I would have expected. But I think for new owners, a lot of people were unprepared for that, and this really threw a wrench in their plans for how to use the car.
This survey also gives some fresh numbers on two of Tesla's most innovative and also controversial features, and that's the full self driving feature and autopilot. Can you tell us first, what is the difference between those two things for people who don't drive Tesla's autopilot.
You know, Tesla was kind of the first or one of the first to come out with. It's a driver's system, So on the highway, it will match the speed of cars in front of you, or it will keep up with the speed limit, it will keep you in your lane. Those things are kind of commonplace now, but Tesla had one of the earliest systems and one of the systems that they really allowed it to kind of do more
for you than anybody else was willing to do. But looking at these stats of how people feel about autopilot really kind of show you the complexity of this issue. On the one hand, twenty eight percent of owners said that autopilot has put them in a dangerous situation, and that's up from thirteen percent in twenty nineteen. Now that
sounds like a really bad number. But on the other hand, thirty eight percent of owners say that it's actually saved them from a dangerous situation, and that's up from twenty eight percent in twenty nineteen. Now they have this other product, full self driving, which you pay fifteen thousand dollars to have acce this, but it's not really full self driving. It makes a lot of the car's decisions for you, but you have to constantly be in touch with the wheel and ready.
To take over because it is a work in progress.
And this is the first real survey of two thousand of the full self driving what TESS called beta testers. So these are the people who have this enabled on their system and are using it day to day, and we.
Had a lot of mixed results.
We asked people how it performed against all sorts of different challenges, and what we found is, you know, it did really well in some of the very basics, like stopping at stop lights and stop signs. People were very satisfied with that, did pretty good around pedestrians, but it did not well in construction zones, around emergency vehicles, and in several other of the trickier categories. And the results show that they really are still a long way to
what they're calling full self driving. Interesting thing about full self driving is how much people are using this. Tesla owners estimated on average that autopilot or full self driving was deployed for about seventy percent of their highway miles and almost thirty percent of city driving.
And where's Tesla say about those kinds of results?
So I think the company is careful to say that you always have to have your hands on the wheel that this is a work in progress and that it's learning, whereas Elon Musk will tweet about how the next iteration of it is mind blowing and incredible and really pushes the idea that they're almost there.
There's been a lot in the news lately about the supercharger network, which is pretty important for people who want to drive outside of cities or highly populated areas where there tend to be more Tesla's how do people feel about their ability to fuel up?
This has been arguably Tesla's most important tactical move as a company. The United States did not have charging infrastructure when Tesla was ready to start selling cars, so it built its own. And now just in the last few months, we've seen almost every major automaker.
Reach deals with Tesla.
You know, Ford and GM at BMW and also the other charging companies to use Tesla's plug in technology.
Starting early next year, Fords could plug into one of the thousands of Tesla charging stations in the US and Canada. Ford President and CEO Jim Farley says the deal will more than double Ford's charging network as the company prepares to launch a new series of electric vehicles. In twenty twenty five.
It's very quickly becoming the de facto plug for the United States. You know, Tesla owners, we asked them about this plan, Tesla's plan to open up the supercharging network to other brands, and they were very mixed.
About this idea.
A lot of people said that this was great because it was going to really open up EVUS to a lot more people in the United States, and others said that this was going to lead to longer lines at the supercharger and why should four be able to benefit from this product that they didn't contribute to the cost
of building it. We did ask about EV satisfaction, like the EV lifestyle, how did they like living with the EV's And one question that really affected how they answered that was whether or not they had a charger at their home. So for people who have chargers at their home, they say that driving an ev is more convenient than keeping their gasoline vehicle fueled. But for people who don't have a charger at home, they tend to say it's less.
So it makes a big difference, and that's going to be one of the challenges going forward in the United States is making sure there's enough chargers and figuring out the solution for people who don't have the ability to charge in their garage.
Tom, I imagine you went to Tesla with all this information and asked them what they had to say. What did they have to say?
Yeah, we sent an email to Elon. They don't have any public relations department anymore. They ended up that I think in twenty nineteen. But we sent an email directly to him and told him about what the results would be and asked if he'd like to comment on it, And we haven't heard back.
When we come back. Now that Tesla's big in mainstream, does Musk loom is large in buyer's minds. Looking over all these responses and all this data about how people feel about Elon Musk, Ultimately, does it really matter how people feel about Musk when it comes to their decisions about Tesla.
I think for Tesla it's a tricky question. I think for any other company the answer is most likely no. But for Tesla, this is a company whose whole kind of image and identity.
Is tied up with this guy.
His struggles have been Tesla's struggles and vice versa, and so I think it matters in terms of that story that kind of helped Tesla get to where it is today. That struggle, you know, if people don't buy into the story as much as they used to. I think over time, you know, Tesla will lose some of the magic of its brand that's taken it to where it is today, especially with so much other competition entering into the marketplace.
So if you were Elon Musk reading this survey, what would the big takeaways for you be? What would the lesson learn be?
It's funny you say that.
I have spoken to Tesla employees who were in the room near Elon Musk's desk when the first survey came out in twenty nineteen, and they said that when each new part came out, there would be cheers going up in the offices because of how overall it.
Had been received.
You know, that would quickly be followed by emails from the managers about things that they needed to put on their to do list.
I don't know if he is reading it or not.
If I were reading it about myself, I would have to take a moment to think about what it is I'm doing and.
If it's worth the cost.
Because I think he's lost some people who really really deeply supported him and no longer feel that support. As for the rest of the vehicle, I think Tesla can feel pretty good about the fact that their vehicle has
held up across every reliability question that we asked. You know, people still really like this car, and they said that it's performed better than any other car that they've owned, And I think the people at Tesla can feel pretty good about that and about the direction of a lot of their new products.
From insurance to solar.
People really like the things that they're making and not get caught up in the politics of the CEO.
Tom. Thanks so much for coming on the show.
Thanks Lis, This has been great.
Thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. For more shows from my heart Radio, visit thee heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us questions or comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of The Big Take is Vicky Ergalina. Our senior producer is Katherine Fink. Our producers are Michael Falero and Moberrow hilde Garcia is
our engineer. Our original music was composed by Leo Sidron. I'm West Kasova. We'll be back tomorrow with another big take.