Tesla posted its first annual drop in sales since the first year of the pandemic, as increased electric vehicle competition from Chinese and Western automakers ate into demand.
CEO Elon Musk’s electric car company reported it built 433,000 vehicles but delivered only 387,000. That’s down from the 484,507 cars it delivered in the final three months of 2023, and it’s also down from the 422,875 vehicle sales in the first quarter of last year.
Tesla has responded to increased competition by cutting prices. Although Tesla is more profitable than traditional automakers, the price cuts have been squeezing the profit margins that helped boost the stock. Investors’ expectations that the company would grow sales in the future had also been supporting Tesla’s lofty stock price, which made it the world’s most valuable automaker.
Musk likes to pretend he knows things. He claimed a vision system can do everything a human does with their eyes. So he figured they could save a few bucks per car by not using a dedicated rain sensor like virtually every other car that has automatic wipers. So the vision system attempts to detect rain. And gets confused by dirt, bright sun, insect splatter, etc.