OPINION:
Tesla had me convinced, for a while, that it was a cool company.
It made cars that performed animatronic holiday shows using their lights and power-operated doors. It came up with dog mode (a climate control system that stays running for dogs in a parked car), a GPS-linked air suspension that remembers where the speed bumps are and raises the car automatically, and “fart mode” (where the car makes fart sounds).
And, fundamentally, its cars had no competition. If you wanted an electric car that could go more than 250 miles (402 kilometres) between charges, Tesla was your only choice for the better part of a decade. The company’s CEO, Elon Musk, came across as goofy and eccentric: you could build great cars and name each model such that the lineup spells “SEXY”.
Or you would, if not for the party-killers over at boring old Ford. Ford thwarted Musk’s “SEXY” gambit by preventing Tesla from naming its small sedan the Model E, since that sounds a bit too much like a certain famous Ford, the Model T. So Musk went with Model 3, which either ruins the joke or elevates it, depending on how much you venerate Tesla and Elon Musk. I count myself as a former admirer of Musk and Tesla, and in fact put a deposit on a Model 3 after my first drive of one.
But the more I dealt with Tesla as a reporter — this was before Musk fired all the PR people who worked there — the more sceptical I became. Any time I spoke to anyone at Tesla, there was a sense that they were terrified to say the wrong thing, or anything at all. I wanted to know the horsepower of the Model 3 I was driving, and the result was like one of those oblique Mafia conversations where nothing’s stated explicitly, in case the Feds are listening. I ended up saying, “Well, I read that this car has 271 horsepower,” and the Tesla person replied, “I wouldn’t disagree with that.” This is not how healthy, functional companies answer simple factual questions.
That was back in 2017. In the years since, Tesla’s become even crankier, while its competition has loosened up. Public perception hasn’t yet caught up with the reality of the situation. If you want to work for a flexible, modern company, you don’t apply to Tesla. You apply to 120-year-old Ford.
Tesla’s veneer of irreverence conceals an inflexible core, an old-fashioned corporate autocracy. Consider Tesla’s remote work policy, or lack thereof. Last year, Musk issued a decree that Tesla employees log 40 hours per week in an office — and not a home office — if they expected to keep their jobs. On Indeed.com, the question, “Can you work remotely at Tesla?” includes answers like, “No,” and “Absolutely not, they won’t let it happen under any circumstances,” and “No, Tesla will work you until you lose everything.”
But on the other hand, the cars make fart noises. What a zany and carefree company!
Ford’s work-from-home rules for white-collar employees, meanwhile, sound straight out of Silicon Valley, in that the official corporate policy is that there is no official corporate policy — it’s up to the leaders of individual units to require in-person collaboration, or not, as situations dictate. There are new “collaboration centres” in lieu of cubicle farms, complete with food service and concierges. That’s not the reality of daily work life for every person at Ford — you can’t exactly bolt together an F-150 from home — but it’s an attempt to provide some flexibility for as many people as possible.
Ford also tends to make good on its promises, an area that’s become increasingly fraught for Tesla. Ford said it would offer a hands-free driver assist system, and now it does, with BlueCruise; you can take your hands off the steering wheel when it is engaged on pre-mapped sections of highway. Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system is not hands-free in any situation, despite its name, and Tesla charges customers US$15,000 for the feature on the promise that someday it will make the huge leap to full autonomous driving.
If you want to pay US$15,000 for a feature that’s currently subject to a US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recall whose filing is titled “Full Self-Driving Software May Cause Crash,” don’t let me stop you, but a Tesla engineer also recently testified that a company video purporting to show the system in flawless action was faked. This makes sense, given all the other very real videos of Full Self-Driving doing things like steering into oncoming traffic or braking to a complete stop on a busy street for no reason. Tesla’s own website warns, “The currently enabled features require a fully attentive driver, who has their hands on the wheel and is prepared to take over at any moment.” So, full self-driving, except for that.
Tesla’s long-promised new vehicles, like the Cybertruck and a new version of its Roadster, also keep getting delayed. The Cybertruck was unveiled in 2019, and on Tesla’s most recent earnings call Musk admitted that it won’t be in production this year, which is becoming an annual refrain. Sure, Ford sold only 15,617 electric F-150 Lightning pickups in 2022, but that beats the Cybertruck’s sales by, let’s see, 15,617. Besides stealing Tesla’s market share on trucks, Ford’s stealing its corporate impishness, too — when the electric Mustang Mach-E was unveiled, Ford demonstrated its tailgating possibilities by filling its drainable front trunk (or “frunk”) with shrimp. “Frunk shrimp” became a meme, which surely tormented the emperor of try-hard social media posting, Elon Musk.
Speaking of which: Twitter. I will hazard the opinion that Musk’s US$44 billion purchase of Twitter has not exactly burnished Tesla’s reputation. Besides showcasing the questionable decision-making inherent in paying that much for Twitter, Musk’s heightened profile on the platform hasn’t really done him any favours. For instance, when the bulk of your car company’s sales are in blue states, is it helpful to tweet, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci”? Moreover, you’d think that the self-appointed class clown of corporate America would at least strive for a joke that eschews the hacky “my pronouns are/I identify as” construction. Maybe just go with “Fauci makes me grouchy?” Elon, let’s workshop this next time.
Maybe predictability isn’t trendy, but if you buy a new car you’d probably like to think that its manufacturer won’t cut the price by US$13,000 the next week, thus destroying your car’s resale value. And you might hope that features you pay for work on the day you pay for them, and not at some unspecified future date. Maybe you want a car from a company whose CEO isn’t indelibly associated with the product.
I just bought a Jeep and I have no idea who the CEO is there. That’s cool with me.
- Ezra Dyer is a columnist for Car and Driver magazine
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Ezra Dyer
Illustration by: Annu Kilpeläinen
© 2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES
