Summary
Tesla reported its first annual decline in deliveries, with 1.79 million vehicles delivered in 2024 compared to 1.81 million in 2023.
Fourth-quarter deliveries (495,570) fell short of analyst estimates, causing Tesla shares to drop 7%.
Challenges included rising competition in Europe and China, declining sales despite price cuts, and growing inventory of Cybertrucks.
Analysts cited CEO Elon Musk’s political involvement as a potential distraction.
While Tesla plans to release lower-cost autonomous vehicles in 2025, its lack of affordable EVs and intensified competition have strained its market dominance.
This is a joke ntended to illustrate the sometimes absurd oversimplification that has to be made to do certain calculations. An apple falls out of a tree from 20 feet off the ground, how long does it take to hit the ground. Well, what is the drag coefficient? Assume it’s a sphere. OK, what about the texture, the air temp, wind, is the ground level and flat, etc etc. And as the problems increase in complexity the number of variables increases exponentially. So your professor might tell you to "Assume it is a spherical cow of uniform density“.
Often these estimates are actually quite good and trying to account for all variables isn’t needed.
Sounds like fun. There’s going to be that 1 grad student who is like, but how close of approximation is it really and can we use other knowledge to fine tune it… I’m going to launch a cow with a trebuchet and get some better answers.