The Motley Fool on $TSLA (Nov 6, 2026)

I did want to touch on Tesla before We started recording only a few minutes. Elon Musk announced that the Cyber Truck is going to be ending relatively soon. Lou, we have now seen Tesla stop producing the Model S, which is really what I think kind of made that company what it is today, the Model X.

And now the Cybertruck, they're focusing entirely on they're going to transition that manufacturing uh capacity to their new Cyber Cab.

Well, in one sense, what you what took you so long? Okay, they it hadn't worked, you know. So, so, so I I think good on them for, you know, moving on from it. But there are questions like, do they want to be an auto company, especially if there is this big merger coming and there's going to be it's going to be a very diversified company, energy, AI, there's uh self-driving with all, you know, these cyber taxi, there's a lot of directions to go.

They haven't done a product refresh even with what they have in a while. Just a a real refresh like you see from Detroit. I know the criticism always been, you know, you don't want to be like Detroit, but to some extent having consumers who aren't bored with your product is a better way to sell product.

I I don't think this is true, but I sometimes wonder like if this merger happens and especially with so much kind of the China headache where defense contractors aren't supposed to have major manufacturing footprints in China and SpaceX is a defense contractor.

I do almost wonder if part of the long-term vision is is to just carve autos off or just kind of not do that anymore.

seems like a big shift from the narrative. only what four or five years ago they were supposed to be producing a quarter million cyber trucks that that in my opinion is the the big thing here which is not to say that Tesla is against innovation but it does beg the question of why are you doing this and why are you doing this now and um you could say it's simplifying a product line to lose point ahead of a potential merger but I also think it's interesting that when you look across the board sales of electric vehicles globally have been challenged and Tesla for forever has said we are going to be a mass market lowcost producer of electric vehicles Obviously, the Cybert truck does not meet that definition of mass market low cost.

So, you could say this is Tesla getting back trueer to its roots. But if you look at some of their international competition, they're entering the mass market lowcost vehicle a lot more effectively than Tesla is.

So, I do have to wonder here about what their strategy is if they decided to go premium. And to your point, maybe that's the cyber cap. Maybe it's new innovations post cyber truck.

Or if we use some of this capacity to really get back to the roots and try to get a vehicle that costs closer to 15 or$20,000 in electric vehicles on the road here in the United States.

Sales are not going great at Tesla compared to what expectations were a few years ago. I know you're not saying that Cybert truck equals EVs because the whole point and and the whole point with what happened to Cybertruck was is it wasn't what people wanted to EVs.