> Historically, there have been a few other companies that had hundreds of thousands of pre-orders, where you would end up waiting years for your car to be built and delivered to you. Their names were Lada, Volga, etc. Soviet auto companies had the exact same problem Tesla has - inability to meet demand.

Because genuine competition in the Soviet Union was not allowed. Don't want to wait for Mr. Musk's Magical Mystery Car? Then buy a damn Honda Civic or something. A huge pre-order list is notable when it occurs in a context where people have many other options not involving a long wait. It proves the existence of real demand, not "demand-because-of-a-lack-of-alternatives". Proving this demand is important for a small company which is trying to scale up.

>what Musk spins, and reality.

The reality is that they are the first serious electric car company. A tiny enterprise that took on the old Detroit giants and is winning.

When you see people putting down hard earned cash for something three years into the future, they are not being tricked, they are investing in disruption. He's such a terrible orator you couldn't describe him as a charlatan. It's his actions and people's wallets speak the loudest.

I'm not at all implying that the money will go poof. What I do mean is that inability to meet demand is actually an incredibly serious problem for a car manufacturer - one that's more closely associated with failing Soviet enterprises, regardless of spin to the contrary. Having three years of cars in your backlog isn't winning. Waiting three years for your car to arrive isn't revolutionary.

Meanwhile, Detroit produces more cars then that in two weeks.

Tesla might win eventually, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

> Waiting three years for your car to arrive isn't revolutionary.

Context : No other car manufacturer will have a comparable EV on the road in the next 3 years. I will take what Tesla gives me.

The Bolt ships in a couple months.

It doesn't have the self driving hardware, it's otherwise comparable to the Model 3.

That's a pretty big difference to me. The possibility that the model 3 could save my family and I an accident over it's 10 year lifetime is pretty important to me.

How can there an "inability to meet demand" on a product that hasn't been released yet? Or right, that isn't possible.

Once it is released then we can talk about the rate of mfg vs backlog but it is pure silliness to argue against a product because lots of people want it.

> Having three years of cars in your backlog isn't winning. Waiting three years for your car to arrive isn't revolutionary.

By this logic, Apple is a huge disappointment because they won't give me my iPhone 8S until 2019.

>A tiny enterprise that took on the old Detroit giants and is winning

In what way are they "winning" against Detroit? Certainly not in revenues, profits, miles driven or cars produced.

Yes, they "own" one segment": high end electric vehicles. No one there is close. But Detroit owns many others. Why does the one that Tesla dominates carry so much weight?

Tesla's market cap is $30bn, more than Renault, Mazda, Chrystler or Subaru (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9055885). If they execute well on the Gigafactory, they may apply a multiplier on this market cap, reaching above Toyota ($200bn), even with a tenth or a hundredth of their production. Why would it be more valued, per car produced? Because of its future potential.

> Why does the segment that Tesla dominates carry so much weight?

The stock market is adjusting for a <10% market share of ICE cars in 2050. It's a Schroedinger situation: If the <10% hypothesis is wrong, then we're all dead (more precisely: Half of us are living under giant cataclisms, the Gulf Stream has stopped, the costal cities are flooded, and our economy is so disorganized that we can't plan where the money will be), so markets don't need to account for this situation. So all Detroit/Toyota industries are slowly shrinking in comparison to Tesla, unless they adapt. It may be hard to imagine if you live in USA because they rely so much on cars for their lifestyle, but our civilization will get rid of petrol cars within our lifespan. This is also the genius of Musk: He saw a version of the future that is obvious but that no other American citizen could understand, and he executed on it. Hence the importance of travelling the world or meeting many people when we want to innovate.

By the way, maybe a sweeping change is preparing that the petrol generations can't foresee. We could imagine things like an international agreement on global warming suddenly reducing the worldwide production of cars. It's impossible today, but educated people may have good reasons to believe something like this will happen, in which case Tesla wins all.

>Tesla's market cap is $30bn

I'm not sure how having a disproportionately high market cap indicates "beating" anyone. It's the whim of the markets.

>If they execute well on the Gigafactory, they may apply a multiplier on this market cap, reaching above Toyota ($200bn)

Based on what, exactly? This is Silicon Valley math. Who on earth is going to pay Toyota prices for a company that you yourself say might only have a fraction of the production? What sort of investment would that be?

I know this is taboo around here, but one day high-growth slows and companies become "established" and it's about how much money they make and return to shareholders. If Tesla is making as many cars as Toyota and as much profit is Toyota, then they'll be priced like Toyota. Why would it be any other way?

>So all Detroit/Toyota industries are slowly shrinking in comparison to Tesla

There were over 70 millions cars sold in 2015. Tesla delivered about 50 thousand, for about a 0.07% market share. Are you surprised that they are able to grow relative to specific players in a massive industry?

> If Tesla is making as many cars as Toyota and as much profit is Toyota, then they'll be priced like Toyota

But maybe Toyota will return fewer profit per car? Ah, you've already accounted for that. There are other variables: If production is equal today, but if Toyota is expected to halve its production in 2040, the Toyota share will get lower and lower until it's half of Tesla. Other variables can be the health of their distribution system (a vendor with no cardealer lock-in will save a lot on sales), customer trust, innovation methods (e.g. Toyota's methods only led to the invention of Prius, whereas Tesla's methods led to the invention of a fully-electric car with a lot of autonomy, so it's a predictor that Tesla's innovation scheme will produce better things than Toyota in the future), marketing methods (They spend little in advertising and are able to have thousands of viewers watch their keynotes without pushing ads in the newspapers), a legacy of employees that might be hard to re-train, or a forecast that huge R&D expenses will be necessary to keep being relevant in the market of 2040. It's not "a whim of the market", it's that Toyota is shrunk by default in 2050 whereas Tesla is alive by default in 2050.

> Tesla delivered about 50,000, for about a 0.07% market share. Are you surprised that they are able to grow relative to specific players in a massive industry?

..and Tesla plans to deliver 500,000 in 2018, for about 0.7% of the market share. Then I personally think they'll become even more popular (because of law advances, both against pollution and in favor of self-driving cars, and because of social status, geeks, comfort and market-specific innovations like the air filter that will be appealing in China, etc) and that means 7% market share in 2022, etc. So I'd buy Tesla shares for a higher price than Toyota's because I'd trust them more for delivering good dividends in the long term.

Note: I'm neither a financial advisor nor an owner of Tesla shares.

Not high end EV — EV period. Why so much weight? Because it's literally the only direction left for land based vehicles to go (the puns write themselves!) in the next century at least?

> Take Tesla 3 pre-orders, for instance. Tesla spins 400,000 pre-orders for a car that you might not receive in the next three years as the most amazing innovation in automobile manufacturing.

Because it kind of is when we're talking about an electric car. Tesla's competitors can't come up with those numbers for EVs combined (even with hybrids). GM is expected to make 30,000 Bolts for next year, for instance (and it may or may not sell all of them).

That said, I'm skeptical the Autopilot 2.0 hardware is a "Level 5 autonomous system". I think a good rule of thumb would be to subtract about "one level" from what Musk promises, as he always tends to be a little overoptimistic, even if what he creates still ends up being better than the competition.

Take the first Autopilot, which Musk said is "Level 2". It's probably more like a real Level 1. It only works under very specific situations, and even when those specific situations are met (a highway) it can still fail, because Tesla may have accounted for US highways but not European ones, or other road quirks. See the recent Autobahn accident because the Autopilot couldn't properly identify "yellow lines" as opposed to white ones.

So yeah, I expect this to be more like Level 4 ... three years from now (as ready for mainstream use, not just a demo). I don't think we'll see true Level 5 until the 2020s. I think there are still many unexpected things Musk and his engineers aren't foreseeing right now.

> Because it kind of is when we're talking about an electric car. Tesla's competitors can't come up with those numbers for EVs combined (even with hybrids).

Check your sources, we're at well over a million EV/PHEVs[0] combined nowadays and the model S is a bit over 10% of that. It's been a while since I last saw an EV parking spot with chargers that was empty.

Now that I checked it, the Leaf alone is past those numbers for the Model 3.[1]

[0] http://gas2.org/2015/09/22/1-million-electric-cars-now-in-th...

[1] http://nissannews.com/en-US/nissan/usa/channels/Global-Sales...

Level 5 is unachievable and unnecessary. There will always be some small number of locales that confound the system. But if you can't use autonomy a few times per year, who cares?

When we get to level 4 the game is over, it's just an adoption curve at that point.

20W meat computers with stereo mics and low-res HDR cameras are level 5 autonomous, don't underestimate digital ones.

The humans brains processing power for visual and spatial stuff is amazing. We may get there for computers one day - but we are not even close yet.

I don't know how "unnecessary" it is if we're talking snowed roads, country roads, roads that haven't been painted in a decade or longer, or if we're talking about autonomous cars without a wheel.

Under those conditions, it's pretty much Level 5 or bust. But yes, that doesn't mean Level 4 cars won't start getting adopted, especially if the autonomous systems are just another "feature" on a regular car (hopefully EVs in all or most cases).

Having to turn off self-driving features will be like losing cell service. It's not what you paid for, it can be mildly inconvenient, but you get over it and on with your day.

I've seen some sources that the original Volkswagen Beetle had upwards of 150,000 pre-orders. But then WWII happened and none of them were delivered to civilians until the company was resurrected after the war.