Tesla is re-entering rougher waters

Tesla is back in rougher waters again as the stock got hit today by multiple bad articles. So let’s just dive straight into it and start at the top, going from not great, to bad.

- China made EV sales down 18% YoY for Tesla

The China Passenger Car Association makes a nice report every month on the amount of cars that are being shipped from the Tesla factory in Shanghai. The same association also reported that deliveries of China-made Model 3, and Model Y vehicles slid 30.2%. Not great, however not a true surprise as we know that Tesla altered the production schedule some weeks back. A move that resulted from a lowered need for production. If this was al the bad news, Tesla would be fine, unfortunately, it’s not. Let’s continue.

- US regulators seek more data in Tesla autopilot probe

I wanted to link an article from Bloomberg on Yahoo Finance, which could not have been written in any more negative stance, unfortunately they changed it to be more neutral. It was quite funny to see how biased and doomish it was been written. But let’s keep it at facts for now as we look at what the matter at hand is.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration wants data from Tesla on how many times drivers have been warned to put their hands on the wheel before and after the recall the company did last December.
The reason for requesting more data is that it wants to find out if Tesla has done enough to prevent misuse of the system after 20 more crashes occurred.

This is not great news but the NHTSA has been on Tesla’s heels over autopilot for quite some time. I don’t really expect that much of it, but it has the potential to be nasty, and certainly to spark, or keep Tesla in that negative loop.

- Tesla to face self-driving competition

An English start-up “Weyve” has closed a $1.05B round C funding, led by Softbank. Weyve wants to develop a self-driving system that is based on a self-learning system, rather than a rule-based system. This is the same path Tesla has been going on. Weyve has the goal of developing this system in order to sell it to a variety of auto OEMs, something Tesla has not been particularly eager to do. This is also what Tesla is quite known for.

This Weyve system is still far behind on Tesla’s system and in terms of development just getting started, but by trying to build a similar system to Tesla, it will be a competitor, something that may not be very welcomed news. In my opinion, also the worst news of the three articles today, as it is the realest thread. Backing Weyve are companies like Microsoft and Nvidia. Yeahhh, currently two companies with the most reach in AI…