Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Interesting, as it feels to me like people take anything positive about that company as gospel.

Disclaimer: I don't give a fig either way whether the company succeeds or fails though I have a very hard time understanding how they can ever maintain their mkt cap.



I’m for almost any company succeeding that doesn’t cause a lot of negative externalities and whose business model is you give them money and they give you stuff where in exchange for me getting a produce of value, they can be a profitable on going concern.


The media in general hypes up Tesla way more than any other automaker. Like every Tesla crash makes headlines. Name any other automaker that faces the same scrutiny.


The media is the one who hypes up Tesla?

Musk has pursued an strategy that's built around very aggressive PR. This gives him lower marketing cost and lower cost of capital, so it's a reasonable approach. But he has to take the bad with the good. That includes critical articles as well as the many fawning ones.


> Name any other automaker that faces the same scrutiny.

Name any other automaker that makes claims like these about their automatic cruise control: "the person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself."[1]

[1] https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2018/05/23/49...


How about Ford: full self-driving by 2021.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/15/ford-plans-a-ride-sharing-se...

https://corporate.ford.com/articles/autonomous-technology/au...

Tesla thinks they can get there faster by a year.


Did you read my comment? Tesla didn't claim that they can get there faster, Tesla claimed that their automatic cruise control doesn't require a driver at all.

Again, here is what Tesla claimed:

> "the person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself."

Ford has never made a claim that spurious and dangerous like Tesla has.


No other automaker promises full autonomy next year and calls their driver assist "Autopilot".


Media coverage of Tesla didn't meaningfully change from the days before self-driving craze, when they were only building an electric car and sticking to facts in their marketing. They had to fight the strongly negative bias of the press since the get go; it's only recently that they started to give the press the rope on which to hang them.




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: