Re:Formation of Tesla Advanced Automation Germany
by usrusr on Tuesday November 08, 2016 @02:23PM
(#12903141)
Nokia wasn't sitting still either, they just refused to be yet another brand repackaging a third party OS. In that sense, there is actually quite a lot of similarity: where Nokia was reluctant to repackage Android, car manufacturers are reluctant to give up their engines as the central value-adding component. An EV drivetrain is trivial except for the battery and the charging infrastructure, access to which is implicitly sold with each Tesla. Both of them are about as alien to a company that is good at making engines as becoming a Google, Amazon or Facebook would be.
The car industry is not sitting still, like Nokia. They are gradually preparing for the EV revolution. Just like Tesla is preparing for mass production.
> They also have the nerve to attack them in their own backyard where they can take advantage of German suppliers etc. What will be next? A Gigafactory in Europe?
Maybe. They allready have a factory next door from Germany, in The Netherlands, just like the German manufaturers have factories in the US.
Tesla is just going after the talent they couldn't find in the US. Nothing wrong with that. If BMW acquired a manufacturing specialist, noone would notice. But for Tesla it's still special.
> Both are still concept cars but they represent what they expect their EVs should look like.
No, they are concept cars. Concept cars have always looked a little ridiculous. Yes, the production i3 looks quite ridiculous in my opinion, but BMW never meant to sell them in any meaningful quantities. It's an experiment that sells better than expected.
BMW have also announced fully electric mini's and X3's. They will be a little later to the game when compared to Tesla. But this is historically not a winner takes all market.
> And the Tesla cars will have been trained with tens of billions of miles of self driving by then.
We all don't know how this market is going to develop (legally and technically) and which companies will be cooperating / sharing data. There are still a lot of ways to catch up. Maybe new technology comes along that will slash the amount of required training data, obliterating Tesla's advantage. We don't know.
> How are the Germans going to catch up?
They have the knowledge and infrastructure to scale up manufacturing across a broad line of models. They also have loyal customers who trust their brands. In a lot of markets, VW's cars were still selling even during / after the software debacle.