© Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
2 月 20 日，斯图加特总部传出的战略转向比财报数据更具象征意义：
奔驰宣布全面放弃 EQ 系列坚持多年的「风阻优先」设计理念。
这个曾以 EQS 创下 0.20Cd 全球最低风阻纪录的品牌，在纯电车型销量暴跌 23% 的残酷现实面前，终于承认「鹅卵石」造型的失败。
财报数据显示，2024 年奔驰纯电车型交付量骤降至 18.51 万辆，被宝马（36.85 万辆）远远甩开。更危险的信号藏在财务深处：
中国市场销量下滑贡献了全球跌幅的 88.5%，这个昔日利润奶牛市场，如今正被本土品牌的智能平替浪潮吞噬。
设计语言的溃败只是冰山一角。当 EQS 被抱怨「这不像一辆奔驰」时，自主品牌领先的智能化进一步凸显了奔驰的滞后。奔驰引以为傲的豪华叙事，正在被中国市场的智能电动车解构为「古典奢侈品」——
精致、昂贵，但缺乏时代共鸣。
设计转向的背后是触目惊心的财务失血。
2024 年奔驰营收 1456 亿欧元，较 2023 年下滑 4.4%，息税前利润（EBIT）136 亿欧元，同比暴降 31%，少了 60.61 亿欧元；净利润 104 亿欧元，下滑了 28.4%，股价当日跌幅领跌欧洲 STOXX 50 指数。
具体到奔驰旗下三大业务板块，乘用车板块的变化最为显著，数据显示，2024 年的总收入为 1077.61 亿欧元，同比 2023 年下滑 4.4%，调整后的 EBIT 为 86.77 亿欧元，同比上年大幅下滑 40.5%，少赚了 55.75 亿元。
整体来看，奔驰在单车均价在 2024 年跌到了 55.3 万元，较三年前缩水 18%；乘用车利润率从 12.6% 腰斩至 8.1%。
奔驰表示，乘用车利润的下滑主要原因是销量的降低与后续的降价，产品组合也不被市场所认可，尤其是在中国市场。
数据显示，2024 年，奔驰乘用车 2024 年的总销量为 198.34 万辆，较上年减少 60648 辆，下降 3.0%；中国市场销量为 68.36 万辆，同比下滑 7.3%，其中中国国产奔驰的销量为 56.31 万辆，同比下滑 4.7%。算下来，中国市场的销量下滑占其总减少量的 88.5%。
可以说，中国市场的溃败击穿了奔驰财报最后防线，令其利润跌至四年来的最低水平。
面对自身陷入的销量危机，奔驰认为，积极的产品政策和降低成本，是两个必要的应对举措。
其中，针对降本，奔驰在财报中设立了一个目标——到 2027 年削减 10% 的生产成本，并通过深度本土化重掌市场主动权。这场涉及 200 亿欧元的成本手术正在三个维度同步展开。
首先，奔驰明确不会关闭位于德国的工厂，但会将其中一款车型的生产转移到匈牙利工厂，以降低 70% 的生产成本。其次，有 120 个关键零部件将转向本土采购。最后，奔驰将把财务、人力资源和采购等岗位外包，并通过退休不招新和协商裁员来缩减员工规模。
同时，更快的产品更新节奏也透露出奔驰的紧迫感。
2025 年秋季，搭载「无图 L2++」智驾系统的 CLA 将会成为奔驰智能化转型的首个试验场，其软件调试已抽调北京、上海研发中心 600 名工程师联合攻关。另外，按照规划，国产长轴距 GLE SUV 也将在 2026 年落地；在 2027 年之前，奔驰将推出 7 款中国专属车型，涵盖 VAN.EA 电动商用车平台和燃油车型。
随着密集且丰富的新车型的推出，奔驰认为，他们将在 2027 年开始实现销量和销售回报率的增长。
与此同时，奔驰在研发上也有不少动作。
据 Autocar 报道，奔驰与 Factorial Energy 合作研发的全固态电池已在英国进入实测阶段，搭载该电池的 EQS 原型车的实际续航突破了 998 公里，较现款提升了 25%。不仅如此，该电池与传统锂离子电池相比，重量减轻了 40%。
▲搭载固态电池的 EQS 原型车
此外，今年随着 CLA 进入中国消费者视野的不仅是全新的 MB.OS，还有线控转向等源自 VISION EQXX 概念车的技术。另一方面，奔驰在北京获批高快速路 L4 测试牌照，也与前不久德国 L3 系统限速提升至 95km/h 形成了技术呼应。
事实上，尽管营收出现了大幅下滑，但奔驰并没有削减在研发方面的投入，尤其是在乘用车板块。财报显示，奔驰在 2024 年的研发投入高达 87 亿欧元，在 2025 年，奔驰还将维持这一投入水平。
对于奔驰来说，2025 年的形势必然会比 2024 年更加严峻，奔驰很清楚这一点，他们预计，今年的利润还将进一步下降，利润率会在 6% 到 8% 之间。
随着财报披露，奔驰最新的产品规划也一并揭晓。令人意想不到的是，他们的重心又重新落回到燃油车上——预计到 2027 年底前，奔驰将发 19 款油车和 17 款电动汽车。
资本市场读出了奔驰纯电战略收缩的潜台词，这家曾笃定表示要在 2030 年全面电动化的企业，正在重启 4 缸引擎的研发，AMG 高性能部门甚至还在为 V8 发动机开发插混系统。所有的这些动作，与奔驰在纯电上的努力形成了看似荒诞的对冲。
奔驰首席财务官 Harald Wilhelm 在财报会议中说：
燃油车的销量仍然远远超过电动汽车，同时它们也有着更高的利润率。
按照规划，将在今年上市的全新 CLA 不仅提供纯电车型，还将推出配备四缸发动机的 48V 轻混车型。随后，奔驰的「门面」S 级也将在 2026 年迎来改款升级。
重新开始关注内燃机产品的奔驰，也在坚持他们的高价值路线。
奔驰 CEO 康林松强调，奔驰将通过「聚焦高潜力细分市场」来平衡利润率与电动化转型压力，例如充分挖掘迈巴赫、G 级等高端豪华产品线的潜力，继续巩固品牌势能；AMG 系列则会依靠新一代的电气化 V8 来抢占性能车市场。
「奔驰已经为校准运营平衡点，并在不久的将来恢复到两位数的盈利水平做好了充分准备。」Wilhelm 说。
只有中国市场最为特殊。
作为奔驰全球最大单一市场，中国不仅是其销量基石，更是技术创新的前沿阵地。在奔驰交出这份财报的同时，「In China，for China」的口号再次喊响。
事实上，奔驰在中国拥有德国以外规模最大的研发网络，研发团队超过 2000 人，拥有北京和上海两大研发中心，传说中「不到 12 个月就量产上车」的高速 NOA，正是在中国诞生的。
去年 7 月，就在小鹏发布 XOS 5.2.0 的前一天，奔驰在其上海研发中心展示了他们的最新进展，他们的 L2++智驾系统已经可以应对非对齐路口无保护左转、主动压线避让、无保护掉头等场景，且效率颇高，所用时间要短于导航的预估时间。
11 月初，康林松还与奔驰中国研发自动驾驶及车联网负责人王忻，在上海进行了一次无图 L2++高阶智驾 beta 版本的实测。期间，搭载该系统的测试车辆自主完成了上海市区 21 公里，全程 50 分钟的道路驾驶，全程 0 接管。
这些技术突破的背后，是奔驰「In China，for China」战略的加速落地，当小鹏、华为等本土玩家用互联网速度迭代智驾系统时，奔驰正试图证明百年车企的体系化能力。
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Sewing pieces of textile or other sheet materials dates back to the Stone Age if not before, and needles fashioned from bone are among man’s oldest tools. Until the nineteenth century, all forms of sewing were performed using the hands. Since then machines have gradually become available, and were popularised in the twentieth century, although a great deal of sewing is still done by hand. Across much of Europe and the Western world, sewing has traditionally been one of the key skills of women, although it has also been a professional task for men from sailors to surgeons. This article looks at those whose sewing goes beyond simply joining fabrics using thread, and tomorrow’s looks more broadly at sewing as an activity.
Although weaving has played an important role in several classical myths, sewing wasn’t as prominent. Even in Christian religious painting, it has only become a feature in more recent times.
In Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s early pre-Raphaelite painting of The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1848–9), the young Mary is embroidering with her mother, Saint Anne, while her father, Saint Joachim, prunes a vine, by that time a thoroughly socially-acceptable activity for a gentleman. Rosetti uses Mary’s embroidery to introduce the symbolic colour red, signifying the Passion to come, and this slow, painstaking activity as a symbol of the demands of motherhood.
The most common narrative role of sewing in paintings is that of a woman supporting a cause or a person.
The patriot leader Giuseppe Garibaldi adopted the red shirt as an improvised uniform for his supporters, particularly the Garibaldini, who followed him in the Expedition of the Thousand of 1860, that led to unification of Italy. Odoardo Borrani’s Sewing Red Shirts for Volunteers (1863) shows four middle-class lady supporters eagerly doing their bit for Garibaldi’s cause.
In Edmund Blair Leighton’s Stitching the Standard from 1911, a young princess sits in a cutout at the top of a castle wall, sewing the black and gold flag to be flown from the castle. She comes straight from Arthurian legend, or a fairy tale, perhaps.
Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale shows Elaine of Astolat in her illustration for the 1913 edition of Tennyson’s account of this story in his Idylls of the King. She sits sewing in the family castle, guarding Sir Lancelot’s shield.
Mothers, wives and daughters of fishermen provided their shoreside support, as shown by Anna Ancher in this Fisherman’s Wife Sewing from 1890.
Joaquín Sorolla’s Sewing the Sail from 1896 shows a scene on a patio at Valencia’s El Cabañal beach, during the Sorolla family holiday in the summer of that year. Although it may look a spontaneous study of the effects of dappled light, Sorolla composed this carefully with the aid of at least two drawings and a sketch. It shows the whole family engaged in one of the more technically challenging supporting tasks ashore.
Just as fishermen’s wives weren’t allowed to go to sea, other women sewing in supporting roles were also left behind. In the case of Wenzel Tornøe’s Seamstress, Whit Sunday Morning of 1882, that may not have been intentional. This seamstress had been engaged in making costumes to be worn for the Danish festivities of Pentecost (Whitsun), when many Danes rise early to go out and see the sun dance at dawn. By the time the festival morning has arrived, she has fallen asleep over her work, exhausted, with an oil lamp still lit beside her.
Harriet Backer’s Kone som syr (Woman Sewing) (1890) takes us back to more familiar daytime lighting, as a woman (a wife in the Norwegian title) sits at her sewing. This appears to have been a quick oil sketch, with its gestural depictions of potted plants, table, and chair, going beyond Impressionism.
Over the last four months, I have posted a series of twenty articles about paintings showing rural life in Europe between 1500 and the 1920s. At the start of that period, countries across Europe were overwhelmingly rural, with about 80% of their people living in the countryside and engaged almost entirely in agricultural work. By the end of the nineteenth century that had reversed, with 80% living and working in cities and towns. This new series looks at where all those people went to live and work, the towns and cities, and what happened to them there.
Cities are of ancient origin. In its heyday, the city of Babylon had a population exceeding 200,000 and covered an area of about 3.5 square miles. Paris, the largest city in Europe in the early fourteenth century, had only just reached that size, and even now modern Paris has only ten times the population it had in 1328. By 1780, Paris had trebled in size, to a population of 650,000, and its accelerated growth during the nineteenth century saw it grow to 2.7 million in 1901.
Conventional wisdom holds that the size of cities is primarily limited by the population required to remain in the country to produce food for those in the city, and the city’s limited employment prospects. The first was changed dramatically by the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, and the second by the ‘Industrial Revolution’. As we saw in the previous series, there wasn’t any discrete revolution in agriculture, but a prolonged series of improvements in yield. The Industrial Revolution started in rural areas, close to sources of its raw materials such as coal for energy and ores for the production of metal.
Cities were also vulnerable to depopulation, as the result of destruction in war, natural disasters, and epidemics including the Black Death and other outbreaks of plague, cholera and other infectious diseases that swept Europe from the Middle Ages until the twentieth century. They were also dependent on reliable supplies of food, and years with bad harvests could have significant impact on the growth of cities, even when they had a range of supply areas and good food security.
Nevertheless, with improvements in agriculture and the rise of manufacturing industry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, towns and cities across Europe grew by attracting people from the country, and by their own increasing birth rate.
The lure of city life is well summarised in Jean Béraud’s fashionably-dressed Milliner on the Champs Elysées. This was all about the promise of material goods and wealth, fine clothes, and smart carriages, all the things that were lacking in rural life.
Artists like William Hogarth had been moralising about the dangers of this since the early eighteenth century, in visual stories such as his Harlot’s Progress.
Its general outline is of an innocent country girl, Moll Hackabout, who comes to London, and immediately falls into the hands of a notorious brothel-keeper and madame. Moll becomes the kept mistress of a wealthy merchant, but later slides into common prostitution. She’s arrested, and ends up in London’s Bridewell Prison. Having earlier contracted syphilis, that disease progresses, steadily killing her. She finally dies at the age of 23, mourned only by her fellow prostitutes.
Moll Hackabout is first shown arriving at the Bell Inn, Cheapside, dressed in the fine bonnet and white dress of an innocent country girl. She’s seen being inspected by Elizabeth Needham, a notorious brothel-keeper and madame. Hogarth gives the latter black skin lesions as a mark of longstanding syphilis, and her face is aged.
In the doorway at the right is an equally notorious rake, Colonel Francis Charteris, and his pimp John Gourlay, who are also taking an interest in the arrival of a fresh young innocent. In Moll’s luggage is a symbolic dead goose, suggesting her eventual death from gullibility. The address on the label attached to the dead goose reads “My lofing cosen in Tems Stret in London”, implying that Moll’s move to London has been arranged through intermediaries, who will have profited from her being trafficked into the hands of Elizabeth Needham.
Behind Moll, an itinerant preacher is engrossed in spreading the message to his small ad hoc congregation in the back of a covered wagon. In front of that a pile of pots is just about to collapse, as is Moll’s life.
I’m sure those prospects weren’t in the minds of Erik Henningsen’s Farmers in the Capital (1887) when this country family first arrived in Copenhagen, complete with their large chest and farm dog. Around them city-dwellers are dressed fashionably, and stare at the outsiders with their rough clothing and filthy wooden clogs.
What these migrants found was different from the stories they had heard.
Frits Thaulow’s The Smoke from 1898 shows a suburb overwhelmed by the smoke, with houses crammed up against the factory walls. Few cities enforced any separation between industrial areas and housing, and there weren’t restrictions on the discharge of smoke even in densely populated zones. The water surface is also grimy and lacks the artist’s distinctive intricate reflections.
Children found their work very different from that in the country. Instead of looking after livestock and gleaning, they found themselves working long hours in demanding and often hazardous surroundings.
Joan Planella i Rodríguez’ The Little Weaver (1882-89) is a superb Naturalist painting with strong social content. This is a replica of the artist’s original completed in 1882. It shows a young girl working at a large and complex loom in Catalonia, as a man lurks in the background, keeping a watch over her. Machinery had no safety guards, and industrial accidents were commonplace.
Oslo, like other major Nordic cities, was small by comparison with Paris, and even in 1900 had a population of just 230,000, about the same size as Babylon at its height. Yet its growth in the nineteenth century was concerning many, including the artist and writer Christian Krohg.
His Tired from 1885 was part of a longer-term exploration of the theme of fatigue and sleep, particularly among mothers. The young woman seen here is no mother, but a seamstress, one of the many thousands who worked at home at that time, toiling for long hours by lamplight for a pittance. At the left is an empty cup, which had probably contained the coffee she drank to try to stay awake at her work.
Home work as a seamstress was seen at this time as the beginning of the descent into prostitution, a major theme in Krohg’s work. The paltry income generated by sewing quickly proved insufficient, and women sought alternatives, which all too often led to prostitution. During the 1880s, therefore, in some countries in Europe, the sewing machine was seen as a precursor to a woman’s moral downfall, the top of the slippery slope.
Just before Christmas 1886, Krohg’s first novel Albertine was published by a left-wing publisher. Its central theme is prostitution in Norway at the time, and the police quickly seized all the copies they could find, banning it on the grounds of violating the good morals of the people. At the same time as he was writing that novel, Krohg had been working on his largest and most complex painting: Albertine in the Police Doctor’s Waiting Room (1885-87).
In the novel, Albertine starts as a poor seamstress, who is mistaken for a prostitute by the police officer in charge of the section controlling prostitutes. He plies her with alcohol, then rapes her. She is summoned to be inspected by the police doctor, whose examination further violates her, making her think that she is destined to be a prostitute, and that’s exactly what happens.
Albertine is not the prominent woman in the centre looking directly at the viewer. Krohg’s heroine is the simple and humble country girl at the front of the queue to go into the police doctor for inspection. Behind her is a mottley line of women from a wide range of situations. At the right, in the corner of the room, is another country girl with flushed cheeks. Others are apparently more advanced in their careers, and stare at Albertine, whose profiled face is barely visible from behind her headscarf. Barring the way to the surgery door, and in control of the proceedings, is a policeman.
Most of those who moved into the cities left relatives behind. Although their homes in the country may have been primitive, they realised that in the city they needed a constant supply of money to avoid falling into debt and risking eviction.
This family of four has just been Evicted, as shown by Erik Henningsen in 1892. With them in the snowy street are their meagre possessions, including a saw implying the father is a carpenter. In the background he is still arguing with a policeman.
For every young woman who succeeded as a fashionable milliner, there must have been thousands who became trapped in prolonged, exhausting labour, and a few who lost everything.
This young mother and child in Arturo Michelena’s Charity from 1888 have shacked up in a hovel. A pair of bourgeois ladies have arrived to do their bit for charity, without which the mother and child would have starved and died of disease.
In the coming weeks and months, I aim to bring paintings of the reality of life for urban revolutionaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I hope you will join me.
Each year I celebrate the lives and works of artists with anniversaries. This coming year there’s a host of major artists, from the pioneering woman painter Sofonisba Anguissola to John Singer Sargent. Here’s the crowded calendar for the coming twelve months.
8 January: in 1925, George Wesley Bellows died. Born in 1882 and brought up in Columbus, Ohio, he was a co-founder of the Ashcan School with his gritty views of life in New York during the early twentieth century, and after the First World War became famous for painting boxing contests.
13 January: in 1625, Jan Brueghel the Elder died. He was born in 1568, son of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and specialised in landscapes and floral still lifes. He collaborated with his friend Peter Paul Rubens in some of the finest paintings of the early seventeenth century.
13 March: in 1825, the Norwegian landscape painter Hans Fredrik Gude was born. He trained in Düsseldorf, and returned there to teach later, and then in Karlsruhe. In addition to magnificent views of Norway, he painted in Wales and Scotland, and died in 1903.
14 April: in 1925, John Singer Sargent died. He was born in 1856, and trained, worked and lived for much of his life in Europe, first as a sought-after portraitist in Paris, then in London. One of the most prolific and brilliant oil and watercolour artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he had a particular affection for Venice.
17 April: in 1825, Henry Fuseli died. Born in 1741 as Johann Heinrich Füssli in Zürich, Switzerland, he fled to England in 1765, where he established his reputation. He specialised in ‘Gothic’ narratives, and was appointed Professor of Painting in the Royal Academy.
9 May: in 1825, James Collinson was born. He was a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but resigned when he considered it was bringing Christianity into disrepute. He remained an outsider afterwards, and died in 1881.
8 July: in 1925, Robert Polhill Bevan died. Born in 1865, he trained in Paris and was invited to join the Camden Town Group by Walter Sickert. He had a particular interest in the remaining working horses in London, and painted their final years.
17 July: in 1925, Lovis Corinth died. Born Franz Heinrich Louis Corinth in 1858, in a village near what’s now Kaliningrad, he trained in Munich, and painted there and in Berlin. He was a founder member of first the Munich Secession then the Berlin Secession. When at the peak of his career in 1911 he suffered a major stroke, but successfully returned to painting.
28 July: in 1925, Léon Augustin Lhermitte died. Born in 1844, he trained in Paris and immediately specialised in painting rural life in realist style, and established an international reputation.
16 October: in 1925, the Norwegian painter Christian Krohg died. Born in 1852, he trained in Karlsruhe under Hans Gude, then in Berlin. He joined the Nordic Impressionists in Skagen, Denmark, and became a prolific social realist. He also wrote and worked as a journalist, and lived much of his career in Oslo, where he became the first director and professor of the State Academy of Art.
16 November: in 1625, Sofonisba Anguissola died. She was born in 1532 in Cremona, Lombardy, and became one of the first women artists to train in Italy. She enjoyed a long and highly successful career as a portrait painter, and even advised the young Anthony van Dyck.
20 November: in 1625, Paulus Potter was baptised. He was born into an artistic family, and was trained in his father’s workshop. He became one of the first specialist animal artists, but died from tuberculosis in 1654 at the age of only 28.
29 December: in 1925, Félix Vallotton died. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1865, he trained in Paris, and initially painted in a detailed realist style. He joined the Nabis, then afterwards painted a series of strange domestic interiors, followed by transcendental landscapes.
29 December: in 1825, Jacques-Louis David died. He was born in Paris in 1748, where he trained and rose to become the leading Neoclassical artist. He became involved with the French Revolution, and was close to Robespierre and other leaders, for which he was later imprisoned. He then aligned with Napoleon, and following his fall from power, David went into exile in Brussels.
I hope that you’ll join me in celebrating the lives and works of these painters in the coming year, and wish you a happy and successful New Year.
In the first of these two articles tracing the history of paintings of the Bay (or Gulf) of Naples, I reached the late work of Clarkson Frederick Stanfield in the 1850s. Just to recap and save you from having to look back, the Bay sweeps anti-clockwise through three-quarters of circle, from the island of Ischia in the north-west, through the great city of Naples in the north, past the slopes of Mount Vesuvius with the remains of Pompeii, to Sorrento in the south-east, and ends with the island of Capri in the south.
When Edgar Degas was in Italy between 1856-59, he made a number of landscape sketches, some in oil on paper, others like this View of Naples (1860) in watercolour. None seems to have been developed into anything more substantial, though, and he then switched to history painting and portraiture for the next decade or so.
After the rejection of his masterwork Florence from Bellosguardo, the Pre-Raphaelite landscape painter John Brett didn’t hang around in England, but went out to Italy again for the summer of 1863.
Massa, Bay of Naples (1863-64) is perhaps the most spectacular of the oil paintings that Brett completed during this Mediterranean campaign, and appears to have been painted from a vessel on the water.
He had travelled there on board the SS Scotia, although it’s unclear whether that ship served as his floating studio, or he may have transferred to another. The Scotia arrived in the Bay of Naples by 9 September, following which he went to stay in Sorrento, then Capri by November. It’s therefore likely that he continued to work on this finely detailed painting during the winter of 1863-64.
His work wasn’t in vain, as this transformed his career. Alfred Morrison bought this painting for the substantial sum of £250, and Brett was to benefit further from his generous patronage. By August the following year Brett could afford to buy his own yacht, and tried a change of tack: painting the British coast using studies made in front of the motif, and working on his finished paintings in his studio.
Alfred William Hunt’s Bay of Naples – A Land of Smouldering Fire (1871) was probably based on sketches and studies made during his tour of the Mediterranean during the winter of 1869-70. This view is taken from the top of the Vómero, a hill to the west of Naples. In the left foreground is a wall from the fortifications. In the far distance, across the bay, is Vesuvius, still partially lit by the rays of the setting sun.
The Italian Impressionist Giuseppe De Nittis painted this Seascape near Naples in 1873, early in his career.
The following year the Catalan artist Marià Fortuny painted Portici Beach on the waterfront of Naples. Tragically, he contracted malaria while painting there en plein air, and died from that when he was in Rome just a few months later.
Alessandro la Volpe was a local landscape painter, whose View of Capri from 1875 shows the island in a heat haze, from the hills above Sorrento.
Oswald Achenbach’s View of Capri (1884) shows the island from a similar vantage point in the hills above Sorrento. Achenbach was one of several members of the Düsseldorf School who visited Italy on multiple occasions during his career, ending with this extended visit that started in 1882.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted Bay of Naples, Evening during his stay of several weeks in Naples in 1881. He had been unable to paint when in Rome earlier, but once he arrived in this city was able to complete figurative works and two matching landscapes of the bay. Although it was recognised that these two views represent morning and evening, for some years they were confused, and this painting was thought incorrectly to show the bay in the morning.
In this painting of Sorrento from 1899, Ukrainian artist Mykhaylo Berkos shows trees growing in an old ruined building facing the Bay of Naples, on the Sorrentine Peninsula closest to Capri.
In his later years, the American landscape artist Charles Caryl Coleman lived on the nearby island of Capri. In 1906, at the start of Vesuvius’ eruption in April, he travelled to the mainland to paint A Shower of Ashes Upon Ottaviano in pastels. This shows the dust- and smoke-laden air of the Naples suburb Ottaviano at ten o’clock in the morning. Although Ottaviano was spared anything worse than dust and smoke in 1906, it was badly damaged during the volcano’s last substantial eruption in 1944.
My last two paintings are both by the Italian-American artist Joseph Stella, who came from the city of Muro Lucano, inland and to the east of Naples.
Stella’s Purissima from 1927 places a mystical woman between the two sacred Ibis birds. In the background is the Bay of Naples, with Mount Vesuvius at the right.
This undated landscape sketch of Vesuvius III probably dates from the same period, and looks south-east across the Bay of Naples, with Castel dell’Ovo nearest.
在 2017 年的日内瓦国际车展上，阿斯顿·马丁可谓大放异彩，不仅展出了当时热销的 Vantage，还带来了 Valkyrie 女武神及其 AMR Pro 版本的量产车型。
那是阿斯顿·马丁与红牛 F1 车队合作的结晶，运用了大量源自 F1 赛场的技术。它的车身设计由 F1 空气动力学专家艾德里安·纽维亲自操刀，还配有 DRS 可变尾翼系统、KERS 动能回收系统、推杆悬挂以及方程式风格的驾驶舱。
怎么看都是一辆四个轮子的 F1 赛车。
但那是一辆只属于少部分人的玩具，限量生产 150 台，这里面还算上了用于测试的原型车、测试车，以及 25 台赛道版本——真正量产的公路版本只有 99 辆。
就连阿斯顿·马丁自家 F1 车手阿隆索，也是在今年才有幸获得了属于他的 Valkyrie。
那么我们这些普通人，怎么办呢？阿斯顿·马丁给了我们一个更接地气的选择。
阿斯顿· 马丁 Valhalla，一款原定于 2021 年发布的中置超跑，在跳票了 3 年以后，终于成功问世。
虽然它依旧延续了 Valkyrie 的造型，但和「老前辈」比起来，Valhalla 已经「脚踏实地」了许多，总算不是那种一辈子都没机会见着一次的样子。
在产量上，Valhalla 也比 Valkyrie 的 99 辆多了不少，直接上到 999 辆，是一辆真正意义上的量产车型，就连阿斯顿·马丁执行主席劳伦斯·斯特罗尔也说：
作为阿斯顿·马丁首款量产的中置超跑，Valhalla 是这个超豪华品牌的真正转型之作。
老斯特罗尔口中的「转型」，不是别的，正是现在进行得如火如荼的「新能源转型」。
Valhalla 不仅是阿斯顿·马丁首款量产中置超跑，同时也是第一款采用 PHEV 动力形式的超跑，一台 4.0L V8 双涡轮增压发动机和三台电机共同组成了它的动力系统，能够在全时四驱的模式下迸发出 1079 马力和 1000Nm 的扭矩，2.5 秒破百，然后朝着 350km/h 这一限速目标不断逼近。
具体来看，虽然 Valhalla 足足比 Valkyrie 少了四个气缸，用上了阿斯顿·马丁有史以来最强大的配置。
这台 V8 引擎采用「Hot V」结构，拥有两个耦合紧密的高流量双涡管涡轮，还用上了干式油底壳以降低重心，内部的平面曲轴设计还可以提高发动机的响应速度。
在各种尖端配置的加持下，Valhalla 的发动机能够在 7200rpm 时爆发出 812 马力的峰值功率，动力完全输出到后轴。尾气则通过带有主动式阀门的轻量化排气，形成了可调节的纯正阿斯顿·马丁排气声浪。
前轴的动力则由两台 400V 的 150kW 电机提供，同时它们还负责扭矩矢量分配以提高牵引力和车头响应，并主动消除转向过度和转向不足，还能在换挡时提供扭矩填充来消除涡轮迟滞，纯电模式的驱动也是由这两台电机负责。
不过数据就有点不太好看了，在纯电模式下，Valhalla 的最高时速为 140km/h，纯电续航里程只有 15km——
为了不为车身增加不必要的负重，Valhalla 的电池容量只有 6.1kW。
在 Valhalla 的后桥，还有一台集成到变速器中的后置电机来充当启动发电机，且同样支持动力输出、提供扭矩填充，带来更猛烈且连续的加速；后轴上的电子限滑差速器也确保了车辆的可操控性。
它的变速箱也有点意思，是一个带电子倒挡的八速双离合变速箱。阿斯顿·马丁还创新性去掉了倒挡机构，借助电机来实现倒车功能，以减轻变速箱的重量。
对于超跑来说，在各个地方抠重量实属常规操作。阿斯顿·马丁这次用上了与 AMPT（阿斯顿·马丁性能技术公司）合作打造的碳纤维单体壳座舱，并为 Valhalla 配备了铝制副车架。不过，尽管采用了大量轻量化材料，但复杂的混动系统依旧让它的车重来到了 1655kg。
眼看车身是没办法了，阿斯顿·马丁便着手于优化簧下质量。
悬挂上，Valhalla 前悬用上了推杆悬挂（可透过碳纤维车身看到）。这样的悬架构成可以将减震器从前轮内侧的气流中移出——就像 F1 赛车那样，从而改善流向后侧冷却器的气流。
前后刹分别配备了 410mm 和 390mm 的前碳陶刹车盘，以此来抑制这辆千匹猛兽。另外还有两种不同的锻造轮毂，搭配专注于赛道的米其林 Pilot Sport Cup2 轮胎，号称减轻了 12kg 的簧下质量。
虽然恩佐·法拉利曾经说过「只有无法制造出优秀发动机的人才会研究空气动力学」，但在现代超跑里，空气动力学已经成为了一个必点的技能点。
虽然 Valhalla 的造型设计保守了许多，但我们依旧能够在它身上看到硕大的扩散器和用于发动机进气和变速箱冷却的车顶进气道。
阿斯顿·马丁表示，这一独特的车顶气道采用一体式歧管，全新的增压空气冷却器（ACAC）能够为 V8 发动机提供更低温度的空气，来压榨更强大的动力。
后方的主动式尾翼是主动式空气动力学的重要组成部分，最大可升高 255mm，在 240km/h 时产生 600kg 的下压力。
除了看得到的尾翼，还有一个主动式前翼隐藏在 Valhalla 的格栅后方，这辆车的制动不仅仅是依靠与柏油路面的接触，在驾驶员大力制动时，前后扰流板会在 0.5 秒内协同工作，将下压力的压力中心向后移动，提供极致的制动性能和更高的稳定性。
这套主动空气动力学系统不仅可以在制动时发挥作用，在「赛道模式」下，前后扰流板都会活跃起来，通过不断改变姿态来优化下压力和车身平衡。
当你不需要它们时，它们也能完美收起，不破坏优雅的车身线条。
此外，Valhalla 还直接照搬了 F1 赛车的侧裙设计，用上了 5 个涡流发生器。它的车门也凹成了一个风道，将气流引导至进气口。马丁表示，即便没有展开尾翼，它的车身也有着极好的启动效应。
用转动的方式打开旋翼式车门，你会发现，在 Valhalla 内部，阿斯顿·马丁这次也换了一个思路。
和之前的 Vantage、Vanquish 都不同，Valhalla 的座位明显紧凑了不少，驾驶座更靠近车辆中线，臀高比也更低，脚跟几乎与臀部齐平。马丁说，这套座椅尽可能地还原了 F1 赛车的坐姿，副仪表台上的各种按钮也都触手可及。
我们渴望捕捉驾驶体验中的纯粹情感。
阿斯顿·马丁深知，Valhalla 作为一款中置引擎超级跑车，其驾驶体验的重要性远超传统 GT 车型。因此，在 Valhalla 的内饰设计中，驾驶感受被置于至高的地位，而豪华感则退居其次，为纯粹的驾驶激情让路。
车载娱乐系统就没什么好介绍的了，反正都是要接 CarPlay 的。
其实除了 Valkyrie，在开头提到的 2019 年日内瓦车展上，阿斯顿·马丁还发布了一台叫 Vanquish Vision 的概念车。
官方表示，这辆概念车将会成为阿斯顿·马丁品牌首款入门级中置后驱超跑，对标当时的法拉利 F8 Tributo、兰博基尼 Huracán 等车型。
它虽然不会像 Valhalla 那样用上这么多的碳纤维，但也会采用铝合金车体，并延续现有的外部造型，而且还更加内敛优雅。
更重要的是，这辆入门车大概率不会限量，如果你不小心错过了 999 辆 Valhalla 里的其中一辆，那么不妨留意一下这辆车。阿斯顿·马丁计划在 2022 年推出它的量产版本。
我知道，现在是 2024 年 12 月。再等等吧，Valhalla 跳票了 3 年才出来，这辆更便宜的小车，自然也就延后了。
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Few modern Christmas traditions have their origin in Gospel accounts of the Nativity. Read those, and you’ll see no mention of the ox and ass that appear inside the shed depicted widely over much the last 1,600 years. Although literary sources for them don’t appear until the eighth century, they started to feature in visual art in about 400 CE, and became frequent in miniatures in manuscripts from the tenth century onwards.
It’s probably Duccio’s Nativity with the Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel from 1308-11 that formed the prototype for paintings over the following centuries, with its humble shed set into rock, the Holy Family, attendant ox, ass and sheep, shepherds and angels. This triptych was installed at the high altar in the cathedral of Siena, Italy, on 30 June 1311, and remained there for nearly two centuries, only being removed in 1506.
By the dawn of the nineteenth century, artists like William Blake were departing from that well-worn tradition.
By comparison, Blake’s Nativity from 1799-1800 is extraordinary. On the left, Joseph supports the Virgin Mary, who appears to have fainted. Jesus has somehow sprung from her womb, and hovers in mid-air, arms outstretched as if preparing for crucifixion. On the right, Mary’s older cousin Elisabeth greets the infant with her own son John the Baptist on her lap. Although most unconventional, at the top right Blake still includes the familiar oxen, and a cross or star burns bright through the window at the top.
Jean-Léon Gérôme was one of the first to set the traditional Nativity scene inside a different context, as a reminder of the events that were taking place at the eastern end of the Mediterranean during the reign of the Roman Emperor Augustus. In The Age of Augustus, the Birth of Christ (c 1852-54), the emperor sits on his throne, overseeing a huge gathering of people from all over his empire. Grouped in the foreground in a quotation from a conventional nativity is the Holy Family, whose infant son was to transform the Roman Empire in the centuries to come.
Later in the nineteenth century, progressive artists interpreted the traditions amid more contemporary surroundings.
Fritz von Uhde’s Sacred Night triptych, painted in 1888-89, shows three scenes from his contemporary recasting. In the centre is a modern interpretation of the classic Virgin Mary and Child, with the adoration of the magi on the left, and a delightful angelic choir singing amid the barn’s rafters on the right.
Uhde’s undated Christmas Night concentrates on the Nativity, in another atmospheric interpretation of the Holy Family of Joseph, the infant Christ, and the Virgin Mary in their improvised accommodation in Bethlehem.
Maurice Denis also transcribed several Biblical narratives into more recent settings. One of his most impressive is this thoroughly modern Nativity from 1894, where the birth of Jesus takes place in a contemporary French town. However, the artist couldn’t omit the traditional ox and ass behind the Holy Family, and the guiding star still burns bright in the sky.
Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale’s watercolour of The Nativity is another contemporary interpretation of the cowshed, singular in the dress of the mother attending to her infant. Joseph is absent, though, as is the traditional ass or donkey.
Joseph Stella’s Crèche from 1929-33 is an ingenious framing. At its centre is the Nativity crib so often shown at Christmas, with an audience who might have been drawn from the artist’s home city in Italy, playing traditional bagpipes in homage.
That conveniently leads us to tomorrow’s final article covering paintings of the Christmas festival. Until then, I wish you a very merry Christmas!
The association between two plants, holly and ivy, with the feast of Christmas appears peculiarly British, and best expressed in the traditional carol The Holly and the Ivy. Apparently, holly has been a symbolic reference to Jesus Christ since the Middle Ages, now explained by its red berries representing the drops of blood of the crucifixion, and the crown of thorns worn by Jesus. Ivy then forms a symbolic reference to Christ’s mother, the Virgin Mary.
This is seen in cameo in two paintings by British artists of the nineteenth century.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted a couple of works on and about Christmas, of which A Christmas Carol from 1867 is probably the more interesting. His model is Ellen Smith, described as a ‘laundry girl’, who is dressed in items from the artist’s collection. There are several allusions to Christmas, particularly the Virgin and Child just above the model’s face, and a sprig of holly with its red berries at the end of her musical instrument.
Sophie Gengembre Anderson’s undated Christmas Time – Here’s The Gobbler! includes a larger spray of holly on the wall at the top right.
Otherwise, holly is only exceptionally identifiable in paintings, and the only reference I have found is in a single work by James Tissot, where it appears together with ivy, but not in reference to Christmas.
Tissot painted The Farewells soon after his flight to London following the Franco-Prussian War and Paris Commune. This couple, separated by the iron rails of a closed gate, are in late eighteenth century dress. The man stares intently at the woman, his gloved left hand resting on the spikes along the top of the gate, and his ungloved right hand grasps her left. She plays idly with her clothing with her other hand, and looks down, towards their hands.
Reading her clothing, she is plainly dressed, implying she is perhaps a governess. A pair of scissors suspended by string on her left side would fit with that, and they’re also symbols of the parting taking place. This is reinforced by the autumn season, and dead leaves at the lower edge of the canvas. However, there is some hope if its floral symbols are accurate: ivy in the lower left is indicative of fidelity and marriage, while holly at the right invokes hope and passion.
Ivy has longer and more extensive traditions throughout European painting, although it too is only exceptionally identifiable.
In mythology, a thyrsus or thyrsos is a form of staff or even spear decorated with plant matter. In its strictest form, it should be a wand made from the giant fennel plant, decorated with ivy leaves and tipped with a pine cone or artichoke. It’s almost invariably an attribute of the god Dionysus (Roman Bacchus), and his devotees, maenads or bacchantes. It’s thus associated with prosperity, fertility and their over-indulgence in the form of hedonism. In the extreme, it can be tipped with a metal point and used as a club.
Annibale Carracci’s Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne (1597-1602) is a marvellous fresco on a ceiling in the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. Dionysus is sat in his chariot with his thyrsus, here a long staff wound with ivy leaves but without any tip. Although a feature of many other paintings, this is one of very few decorated with ivy.
Ivy also makes an appearance in a not dissimilar painting with open narrative, this time by Philip Hermogenes Calderon in 1856.
Calderon’s Broken Vows is an early ‘problem picture’. A beautiful young woman, displaying her wedding ring, stands with her eyes closed, clutching a symbolic ‘heart’ area on her chest to indicate that her love life is in trouble. On the ground near the hem of her dress is a discarded necklace or ‘charm’ bracelet. The ivy-covered wall behind her would normally indicate lasting love, which was her aspiration.
A set of initials are carved on the fence, and on the other side a young man holds a small red flower in front of his forehead, which a young woman is trying to grasp with her right hand. The wooden fence appears tatty, and has holes in it indicating its more transient nature, and affording glimpses of the couple behind, but only tantalisingly small sections of their faces.
Calderon here deliberately introduces considerable ambiguity. The eyes of the shorter person behind the fence are carefully occluded, leaving their gender open to speculation. Most viewers are likely to conclude that the taller figure behind the fence is the unfaithful husband of the woman in front, but that requires making assumptions that aren’t supported by visual clues. Whose vows are being broken? Calderon invites us to speculate.
Like laurel, ivy can also be worked into a crown.
Francisco Pradilla’s watercolour of A Flute Player Crowned with Ivy is a delightful example from 1880. But it took Pierre Puvis de Chavannes to envisage ivy being used instead of a length of rope.
In Puvis’ Fantasy from 1866, one of the two people in this idyllic wooded landscape is using a length of ivy to school a winged white horse, either Pegasus or a hippogriff.
Although seldom clearly identifiable in landscape paintings of trees, one of Paul Nash’s last conventional landscapes is an exception.
Oxenbridge Pond from 1927-28 shows a pond at Oxenbridge Farmhouse, Iden, not far from the artist’s home. Patterns of brushstrokes are assembled into the textures of foliage, ivy covering a tree-trunk, even the lichens and moss on the trunk closest to the viewer, at the right edge.
Wikipedia on the carol The Holly and the Ivy.
Elon Musk 真是个讲故事的好手。
The future should look like the future.
虽然看着有些冰冷，虽然还有一段时间，但把这么激进的设计落地，真的令人佩服。
尤其那只手，和那辆大车。
我要收回之前的话，Tesla 不是下一个丰田，丰田太小了。
它更像「通用」，即是 GE，也是 GM。
在上个月去上海之前，@取景框看世界 在微信上邀请我一起做一期关于设计行业的科普视频，面向学生群体做一次对行业整体状况的分享。这次是 B站 向他发起的约稿，也是他频道的主要内容类型之一。答应他后，从上海回来我就根据自己这么些年的体会和反思，录了一期比较掏心窝的内容。由于参与的人比较多，直到前天，节目才终于上线。
点击图片跳转到播放页面因为参与的人数比较多，我说的话也比较多，所以在汇总的成片里需要剪掉一些。但我又觉得难得录一期视频（从去年11月到现在都没有更过视频了），为了保证表达的完整性，我还是得有一个自己的版本。但因为实在忙得顾不过来，于是麻烦 @小雨 帮我把这条视频剪了出来。
毕竟是 @怪物尚志 的御用摄影/后期，有他的帮忙，我的视频里头一回多了许多配合文案的动画，比我一个人在镜头前单口相声好看多了。这一期花絮，也在昨天发了出来，跟正片错开一天。
点击封面跳转到播放页面这期视频的封面是我昨晚用 midjourney 画的。
在这条视频里，除了科普工业设计的一些基本概念和行业现状，我也特别聊了一下 AIGC 和设计师之间的关系。前两个月虽然一直很忙，但我也一直在关注 AIGC 的动向。这两个月的变化实在是过于惊人了！
以下是我去年八九月用 midjourney 画的一些东西：
然而在这短短半年内，版本已经从当时的 v3 发展到了现在的 v5。ChatGPT 也从 GPT-3 发展到了 GPT-4，坊间传言 GPT-5 的研发已经完成且爬完了全网所有视频，可以直指某一条视频中的某一段话，只是还没发布。可以说开年后的这两个月内，AIGC 的发展速度已经大大超乎了预料，甚至正处于失控的边缘，它们正在开始颠覆一些东西。将来会发生什么，无法预料，但一定有什么事情已经在发生了。
所以我觉得，无论如何，再忙也得重新用起来。光是跟进各种新闻和消息是不行的，midjourney 前两天刚发布了由图片转译成 prompt 的新功能，多模态的 AI 已经不远了，这会更进一步推动人和 AI 之间的交互。我觉得，自己还是得保持使用状态才行。所以前两天我又重新充了值，开始体验它的新版本。
我先试着画了一些机甲的东西，例如这样的：
上面的两张的用 prompt 直接生成的，但下面的两张，是用 /remix 命令修改了部分描述词后的新图。可以看到下面的图和上面的图保持了相关性，于是我想试试，如果用这个命令替换背景会是什么效果，于是有了这组车的图：
上面的两张图是用 prompt 直接生成的，当我用 /remix 替换了背景描述的 prompt 之后，就生成了下面的两张。更换环境之后，车辆的姿态和镜头视角几乎没有变化，车身的反光与环境之间的关系也很自然，这个效果已经可以说非常惊人了！
然后，我随便画了一些白色的机器人站在燃烧废墟上的场景：
用 /remix 替换了机器人配色部分的描述词后，生成了下面这样的图：
对 /remix 有了基本的体感之后，我开始尝试用 /blend 命令来做一些融合的实验。
首先，我随便描述了一个赛博少女，得到一些随机的图：
接着，我再随便生成一个红发少女：
材料准备好之后，开始把它们进行组合。
第一次先尝试融合两张图，一个是游戏画风的机甲人，一个是二次元的赛博少女。
它们俩合成后，得到了以下这个人物：
新角色具备其中一张图里人物的长相特征与体态，也有另一张图的配色和机甲特点。虽然得到的结果具有随机性，但既然可以这样融合，那么应该也可以通过 /blend 命令来得到一些更有目的性的创作。
有了第一次的体验后，第二次我用三张图片进行合成：
图一是现画的半透明金属机器人，图二是上面准备好的红发少女，图三是现画的骑士。
这三个合成出来的新角色，同时具备了细碎的金色细节、波浪红发、银白色盔甲：
但这不是我想要的，我想试试加大红发少女的比例。在垫图的方式下，可以通过 –iw 命令来分配各个图片之间的权重占比，但是在 /blend 中不能这么操作。于是，我想通过把合成的新图作为素材，再一次与红发少女进行融合，并加入机甲的元素来强化她身上盔甲的质感。
二次合成使用的图，如下：
合成出来的新角色我非常满意！
她既有红发少女面部和眼神的特征，又把两副银白外甲融合得非常优雅，也保留了初始半透明金属机器人遗传下来的金色金属关节的特征，又做出了图三机甲的坚硬感和图一外甲的银白光泽。这一次的融合很成功。
但如果 /remix 可以局部替换特征，那么这些没有写 prompt 而是通过 /blend 直接合成的图，能否通过 /remix 加入新的 prompt 来修改已有的特征呢？
为了让实验效果明显一些，我想让盔甲的白色部分比例缩小，增加金属部分的比例，于是就先把这批图重新刷了几遍，直到出现肩甲是金色的变异版本：
然后不断在此基础上进一步变异，强化金色肩甲的特征：
准备好之后，我在 /remix 中添加新的 prompt：pink armor
以下是修改特征后的结果：
整体的效果我还是挺满意的。一来，新生成的人物很好地保持了最初红发少女的眼神和神态；二来，金色金属被替换成粉色金属后，金属质感的表达是正确的。虽然头发也一起变成了粉色，这确实是没完全理解指令，但原有的发色搭配新的粉色盔甲也确实不是很和谐。
到此，重新开始用 AIGC 工具的热身完毕，找回一些感觉了。
至于这期视频封面里用到的车图，是我昨晚用 Maserati 和 Ferrari 以及 Apple 和 Tesla 分别杂糅出来的缝合怪。虽然乍一看好像没什么新奇的，但是如果我把去年八月底用 midjourney 画的汽车拿出来对比，就会意识到这是多么疯狂的进化速度了：
上面三个是去年八月用 v3 画的车；
下面这些是昨晚用 v5 画的车：
虽然工业设计有大量的细化和落地工作是 AI 无法干的，但从目前来看，无论是 midjourney 还是 Stable Diffusion + controlNET 都已经可以很好地帮助设计师完成概念发散和快速枚举了。这样的图像质量，通过垫图、remix 和 blend 的组合使用，完全可以在创意初期快速拉出一批高质量的「草图」，设计师可以把更多的精力放在对方案思路的推敲、对细节的考据以及各个环节的沟通协调上。
从今年二三月开始到往后的十一二年，人类社会将迎来一场以破坏为开端的变革和创新。
无论我们是否愿意，都将一起进入新的世界。
A hugely controversial company that aims to transform the future of transportation, and our world by introducing an electricity revolution, Tesla has been in the media spotlight for years. As its valuation surpassed all other car manufacturers that sell much more cars and have much more history than Tesla, we must ask ourselves, does the magical story of Tesla really stands?
Elon Musk has received many praises throughout the years and has managed to gather a very enthusiastic following. Arguably, he can be considered as a social media influencer that utilizes his following to achieve his goals. He frequently interacts with his fanbase on twitter and replies to requests from random users which keeps the flame going. It is like having a hand-shaking meeting which is practiced by singers and others alike in Japan, where their fans would be able to shake their hands and the star would typically say a sentence in return. This has proven to be hugely successful in Japan, and based on Elon’s twitter feed, the same works online.
His cult of personality has grown through arguably one of his most damning failures, the production numbers of Tesla Model 3, where for months the actual production numbers remained much less than his promised ones, and as Tesla faced more bottlenecks in increasing production capacity, he kept on promising more without delivering. However, he even managed to turn this in his personal following’s favor, when he finally delivered by pulling some ‘superman tactics’, such as by working extremely long hours, sleeping in the factory, being actual hands on with the production line, building a temporary factory in a tent, and flying in equipment from Germany. However, if we cut out Elon’s cult of personality, we will see that this as a huge red flag instead of Elon pulling his magic. It is unfathomable that Elon as the CEO of Tesla has to get on the production lines to make things worked out, as he was instead wasting precious time needed to make proper, good, and reasonable decisions as the CEO instead of a production line worker. Tesla does not pay him to be on the production lines making tweaks, Tesla pays him to make those proper, good, and reasonable decisions that he neglected to do, when he instead made bold claims about the production numbers without a way of fulfilling it. Flying in heavy equipment was the solution to increasing the production numbers but had there been better planning, such an expensive manoeuvre could have been avoided entirely.
The truth is, Elon remains much less than a responsible CEO and is more of an engineer that likes to focus more on the technical as seen by his role as chief engineer in SpaceX. A responsible CEO would not have said ‘The coronavirus panic is dumb’, ‘Am considering Tesla private at $420’, ‘Tesla stock price is too high imo’, and much more. What Elon has instead continuously demonstrated is that he is very much still an individual that is not willing to be bound by his duties and rules that apply to him, and such an individual in charge of the biggest car manufacturer in the world by valuation, makes him Tesla’s greatest asset and liability at the same time.
‘Autopilot’ is a feature that can be included in Tesla EVs, but the term is misleading. For one, assisted driving technology is classified into different tiers, each representing the extent that machine is in control of the car, or autonomous level. Tesla’s autopilot feature is classified as level 2 where the car can act autonomously but requires constant driver supervision who needs to be prepared to take over control at all times. A German court has ruled Tesla’s claims misleading and there have been numerous cases where the driver who is supposedly in constant supervision instead falls asleep or is on their phone. The National Transportation Safety Board have criticized Tesla’s lack of system safeguards in a fatal 2018 Autopilot crash in California and for failing to foresee and prevent the ‘predictable abuse’ of autopilot.
The fact is, although the claims on ‘Autopilot’ are believed to be abusive and dangerous or at the minimum, misleading by many professionals, they are kept in Tesla’s marketing. This decision is just one of the many intentionally made decisions that show a truer picture of Tesla’s culture, one that does not consider itself to be accountable to rules that apply to Tesla, just like its CEO.
One such instance happened in China, the biggest car market in the world and where Tesla has gained huge grounds, some literal, as Gigafactory 2 was opened in Shanghai a few months ago. Just as the sales of Tesla cars grew, so did the problems that encountered it. Tesla has been ordered to recall 30,000 cars by the China’s State Administration for Market Regulation, but instead of addressing the suspension problem that forced the order to recall those cars, Tesla instead blamed it on ‘driver abuse’ without offering any evidence to support the claim. This came after Tesla executives were summoned by the China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology back in March 2020 because Tesla used the old version of computer chips in Model 3s instead of the new version as promised to the consumers, which sparked outrage and resulted in the same Chinese government agency to formally require Tesla to immediately correct the chip downgrade, which Tesla again, instead of recognizing the problem and their own fault, blamed their actions on the supply chain disruption due to COVID-19.
As these stories show, the below-grade manufacturing is far from just a few instances in Tesla, be it in China or elsewhere. It is in fact the culture of Tesla that causes this, of course, at the expense of its customers and potential future sales.
Beyond manufacturing problems that are caused by this culture, these has been numerous whistleblowers and articles that is alleging all sorts of crazy acts happening within Tesla. Mr. Karl Hansen has filed a lawsuit alleging Elon and Tesla’s management have ‘intentionally interfered with efforts to seek employment with other employers in retaliation for outspoken union support’, actively concealed and participated in spying on its employees, improper contracts, theft orchestrated by organized crimes, terminated a Tesla employee’s contract after reporting the theft of $13,000 USD of copper wire to law enforcement, and more. There are more claims after from Mr. Hansen’s, and numerous lawsuits have been filed in what is described by some media as ‘Whistleblower Hell’. It is likely that we continue to see more allegations to come out of Tesla, a terrible position to be in for anyone, especially so for a company that dissolved its U.S. PR unit in October 2020.
To a large extent, Elon is Tesla, and so is his mentality the Tesla culture. Just as his successes support the entire company, so does his own problems creep in. This translates into troubles for Tesla, and if not managed well enough, could be potential deathtraps that threatens the existence of the company itself. The mentality of Elon Musk to ignore the rules whether social expectations, constraints, or perfectly legitimate laws has sparked equal number of innovations and PR crises that lacks a PR department to manage (in the U.S.), and this does not always mean well for the culture of any company, let alone a multinational which is the most valuable car maker in the world.
Simply put, Tesla’s history of troubling actions will continue into the future as it is the company culture that shapes its actions, and Elon’s mentality that shapes its culture.
Tesla in 2018 became the first foreign car manufacturer to be in sole possession of its Chinese subsidiary, this is followed by the construction of Gigafactory 2 in Shanghai after being offered very beneficial terms by the Shanghai Municipal Government. Construction progressed at a rapid pace and production started just 1 year later in 2019. One of the most impactful effect that Giga Shanghai has brought has been the lowered production cost of Tesla EVs in China, since localized production gets rid of import taxes and lower cost overall. As a result, Tesla has been able to lower its offerings in China to attract more customers, but the way this has been accomplished has tainted its image.
The way that Tesla has lowered the price of its offerings can be described as bad business practice at best, and on the far end, intentionally fooling its customers. Tesla lowers its prices without any prior warning or compensation for customers that have purchased the cars right before the price was lowered. Often customers find themselves to have purchased the car the very day before the price decrease, when Tesla sales agents employ marketing techniques to urge customers make the purchase quickly, presumably before the price is lowered. It is not one, or twice, or thrice that Tesla has lowered its prices this way, but Tesla has adjusted its prices near 60 times after entering the Chinese market which saw the price of Model 3 slashed in half. Predictably this has angered customers that think they were tricked into buying the cars right before the price decrease, often without any compensation and this has sparked outcry on Chinese social media.
Lowering the price of products is generally a good thing for a business because it attracts more customers, but the way that Tesla has done it has made Chinese consumers weary of purchasing Tesla cars because there would be no guarantee that the price would drop by 10% right after you have made the purchase.
Apart from the price issue, Tesla has sparked more outcry on Chinese social media after the recent article that came out with allegation such as quality control issues, ‘Giga-sweatshop’, Tesla operations in Greater China being isolated from the rest of the world bringing opportunities to use practices banned by the company elsewhere, and sales personnel selling Model 3s through private channels at a discount, in stark opposition with the direct sales model that Tesla embraces.
PingWest is the media that published the article, and this is the third instalments of their ‘Tesla China chaos’ series. Only the third is translated into English, and the Chinese version offers much more detail and includes links to the first two instalments of the series.
Disclaimer: My words do not constitute professional opinion, investment advice, or any similar notion in any way, it is only my personal speculation as a tourist and is not meant to be taken seriously beyond the mere literary expression, and the actions you take out of my words is taken entirely at your own responsibility.
In this chapter, I will only address the latest instalment of the series by combining what is described in the article and what I saw and speculate as a result at Tesla’s Giga Shanghai.
There was nothing notable about the factory, the east side expansion was on its way and trucks transporting construction materials were parked on the side of the road. However, given what I was able to see through the extremely limited information outside of the factory, I believe that the article mentioned prior is true.
On the road out of the factory gates, the side is littered with primarily 2 kinds of rubbish, masks and food packaging, in particular, masks were on top of food packaging suggesting that the food packaging existed before the pandemic began. This corroborates with the claim that Giga Shanghai’s food options have been deteriorating since it opened (in 2019, before the pandemic) and inadequate. The container made guard room at the gate of the factory also show signs of trouble, I was unable to take pictures inside due to the guards but if you believe what I say, there was the phone number for the local police station placed at a prominent position that is easy for viewing by the guards. I believe that it was placed later and was not there initially because it was in an awkward position, put on the wall surrounded by plans of the factory and other images, far away on the left-side from where other phone numbers are posted (on the right-side). This has led me to believe that the police number was put there later because they did not put it along with all the other phone numbers (that were on the right-side of the wall), but only felt it was necessary later, potentially due to the chaos described by PingWest.
The other speculation I would make is that Giga Shanghai faces management chaos. This is the car transporter truck that came out of the factory and this is the same truck a few minutes later stopped at the end of a road. You can tell it is the same truck because it carries Teslas and is white, the other car transporter truck that came out of the factory around that time is blue. The white truck stopped at the end of the road where I observed all other trucks make a U-turn to head towards the highway. I was unable to take a picture of the two workers (due to fear of increased risk as I have lingered around the factory for sometime already) so you have to take my word for it. Two workers were standing on the left side of the truck, one appears to be the driver as the driver’s cabin door was open and there was no one inside, and he wore the driver’s uniform I saw earlier, and the other one appears to be another type of worker, potentially a supervisor as he wore a different uniform than the two kinds I saw earlier. The ‘supervisor’ was holding a binder that contained documents and a pen, and he appeared to be checking with the driver on something. While it is impossible to speculate on the content of the binder or what they were specifically checking on, I believe this shows the management chaos as no reasonable company would conduct its final checks on its deliveries right outside the factory instead of inside, because of the increased risk. Furthermore, this appears to be an isolated instance as I did not see the blue truck that departed later, suggesting that they only discovered something wrong with the white truck last minute and managed to stop it right outside of the factory. In the best sense this shows mismanagement as it is risky to park a truck full of newly made cars at a road construction site, worse this shows the chaos in management that even the checks on new deliveries cannot be done properly.
Tesla has come far and has made giant leaps. Elon Musk has been monumental for Tesla in terms of pushing it to come to where it is today. Not willing to obey the rules is the reason behind Tesla’s numerous innovations, but also its crises. A Chinese proverb says that ‘water floats, and sinks a ship’, what has made Tesla Tesla, could also ultimately be its downfall.
252 judgements: Behind the lawsuits that Tesla brought onto itself in China (in Chinese)
Tesla’s ‘Autopilot’ misleading, Germany rules
NTSB warns about law oversight of new car tech
US agency opens probe into 115,000 Tesla vehicles over suspension issue
Tesla, recalling 30,000 cars in China, blames ‘driver abuse’
Tesla attributes recall of nearly 50,000 cars in China to driver abuse
How Elon Musk built a Tesla factory in China in less than a year
Tesla to recall 3,183 Model X vehicles in China, market regulator
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