Tesla vs. Brooklyn 🚘

Home » Unlabelled » Tesla vs. Brooklyn 🚘

Tesla vs. Brooklyn 🚘

View in Browser

Nightcap fans! Take a nice deep inhale and savor tonight's newsletter, because we're taking next week off to rest and consume frankly unreasonable amounts of pie. We encourage you to do the same. Let's get into it.

By Allison Morrow

☕ COFFEE TALK

All right, this inflation talk was all a bunch of fun and games until coffee got involved.

Here's the thing: Coffee futures climbed on Thursday to their highest level since January 2012 — yet another commodity that's jacking up your grocery bill.

And just to give this catastrophe more of a 2021 edge, the reason for the price spike isn't even primarily about the supply chain (though that's not helping anything). It's climate change. Remember that?

Severe drought and unusual frosts in Brazil are the primary culprit here, and it's setting off financial alarm bells, my colleague Matt Egan reports.

Like many parts of the planet, Brazil's coffee-growing regions have been hammered by a prolonged drought. Then in July, the country was hit with the worst frost it's seen since 1994.

WHAT IT MEANS FOR YOU

Now, you probably haven't seen your Starbucks order get more expensive…yet. That's because it and other coffee sellers buy their beans far in advance and have hedging strategies in place to lock in prices. That allows them to defend their profit margins and keep prices in check, cushioning the blow from swings in the futures market, Matt explains.

But analysts say the increase is imminent. And what are you gonna do, not drink coffee? Drink less coffee? LOL no. Your daily cup of legal addictive stimulant is what economists call "price inelastic." My local coffee shop could literally start charging me $40 for a large coffee and I would just have to start a side gig to support my habit. (I'm exaggerating. But only a little.)

Knowing all this, you might be tempted to start panic-buying your favorite beans to lock in your supply at a lower price, the exact kind of consumer behavior that makes inflation feed upon itself and lift prices even higher… I'm supposed to tell you not to do that. But I'm definitely doing that.

#️⃣ NUMBER OF THE DAY

900

CVS is closing 900 stores over the next three years in response to the changing of "consumer buying patterns." That's 10% of its locations. The closures are part of broader realignment of the chain's retail strategy, including remodeling some stores to add more health services.

One analyst said the closures are the result of CVS having "too many overlapping locations" and the dilapidated state of its stores that has "pushed some of them into the downward spiral of irrelevance." (Look it's harsh but we all know it's true. When I got my Covid shots, it was in a CVS that could have been a backdrop for a zombie apocalypse movie, just sayin'.)

🚗 FULL SELF-LOATHING

As we've discussed here before, Tesla's "full self-driving" system is a blatant misnomer. We heard that from customers who opted into the service and posted their hair-raising close encounters online. Just to be sure, my colleague Matt McFarland went to check it out first-hand.

Spoiler: It didn't go so great.

CEO Elon Musk says "full self-driving" is the future, and that cars will be able to shuttle humans from point to point safely in the near future. Maybe he's so optimistic because he's rolling around on the cute suburban roads of Palo Alto. But what happens when you try it out in my neighborhood, Elon? This is Brooklyn, baby!

Matt met up with a Tesla owner to see how the system does in real traffic, and doesn't get much realer than Flatbush Avenue. For the uninitiated, Flatbush is a monstrous two-way commercial stretch in the middle of Brooklyn that can flummox even the most experienced drivers. Potholes? Oh, we got 'em. Pedestrians? Everywhere. Cyclists? Somehow, yes (though they should really weave through Boerum Hill or Fort Greene if they're taking bridge into the city, takes a little longer, sure, but so much safer… I digress)

The point is Flatbush is loud and congested 100% of the time; it is pure chaos. I love it.

Here are some highlights from Matt:

"Full self-driving" needed a lot of human interventions to avoid calamity.
At one point the car continued full speed ahead toward a construction site.
It sometimes makes jerky turns — not a huge problem for sweeping suburban curves, but uncomfortable in such a dense city.
The braking felt random. At one point a car came close to rear ending us.
Getting honked at was common. Not unheard of on Flatbush, but folks were quick to express their displeasure at the sporadic braking and the system's refusal to push into an intersection while waiting to make a left turn on a green light.
What "full self-driving" could do well was impressive, but the experience was unnerving.

In other words, it's a $10,000 party trick. And a dangerous one at that.

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON?

💸 Your move, Elon. The director of the United Nations' World Food Programme laid out a plan to spend $6.6 billion to combat world hunger — a direct response to a back-and-forth with Elon Musk, who claimed he would sell Tesla stock to fund a plan if the WFP could describe "exactly how" it would work.

💰 A group of cryptocurrency investors is trying to buy a rare copy of the US Constitution that's being auctioned by Sotheby's. That is entirely true, and potentially the plot of an upcoming Nicholas Cage movie.

📉 Oil prices are finally starting to fall, thanks largely to expectations that the US and China will release some of their strategic reserves.

🚘 Ford and chip manufacturer GlobalFoundries said they plan to work together to boost supplies for the automaker's vehicles and the broader US auto industry but gave few details about what the deal entails. (Also, like, you guys couldn't have gotten together to fix this, I dunno, a year ago?)