Expert perspective on the accomplishments of Tesla from none other than sober authority Road and Track via columnist and professional race driver, Jack Baruth.
Read the whole article here for some important updates about road safety stats and autopilot, Leave Tesla Alone:
“In any even remotely sane universe, Americans would be as proud of the Tesla Model S as we used to be about the moon landing or about winning the Cold War.”
…Needless to say, the world of 2016 is a thoroughly insane universe, so none of the above is happening. Instead, there’s a cottage industry springing up of people who are trying to make a name, or a living, or both, disparaging Tesla and its products. Instead of celebrating the existence of a self-autonomous electric car, they are focused on whatever individual gain they can scrape for themselves off the bottom of Elon Musk’s shoe.
These individuals are assisted in their quest by a media that long ago decided that it was completely okay with killing the society on which it parasitically feeds. Every potential flaw in a Tesla, every customer complaint, and every perceived shortfall from perfection in the product, the company, or its people is endlessly chewed into pulp by the mandibles of these filthy dung beetles in an effort to find a morsel of notoriety on which they can subsist. These people can’t look away from their own navels long enough to contemplate the technological miracle of a self-driving electric car that runs elevens in the quarter. They’d rather focus on minor quality issues or customer-relations missteps.
Note that the harshest critics of Tesla and its products are not affiliated with Nissan, General Motors, BMW, or Ford. Instead, they are gadflies who rarely have any industry experience whatsoever. Few of them could change a tire on a minivan without getting help from a mechanic. I’m not aware of any serious Tesla critic who has the ability to design, and engineer, and produce so much as a $19.95 remote-control electric car on his or her own.
Again, in any sane world nobody would pay any attention to the opinions of completely unqualified individuals on any given topic.”
As we look under the hood of headline highs for the S&P (now trading at a wide-eyed 24.9x estimated GAAP earnings of $86.44 in March), we see that investor flows (red bars below, shown since 1985) have continued to gush out of US stocks even as the price has gone parabolic. So who or what is buying at garish valuations? Why price-insensitive, trend- following computer algos and liquidity-spewing central banks, of course. We will agree with the breathless business media in this much: the S&P 500 is ‘high’ alright.
