>a huge supply chain and R&D costs around combustion engines

You mean largely trouble-free engines that run on ultra-cheap gas?

ICE has environmental issues, of course, but the idea that electric is universally superior is questionable. There's no range anxiety with gas and any backyard mechanic can fix most issues. Your locked down $100,000 IoT car is a completely different beast.

>Much of this will be of zero value in the near future.

Says who? If anything everyone is bearish on electric since gas prices have fallen and how range and recharge times will always be less convenient. Electric might replace gas but it won't be in the near future and nothing stops Ford from launching an electric line of its own. Electric cars are a solved problem if you can convince people to pay the premium and deal with the range anxiety and long recharge times. Ford has already announced an electric Mustang and F-150 on top of the $30,000, pre-rebate, 2017 Focus you can buy today. Tesla has no monopoly on electric tech. The barrier to entry is non-existant for other car companies.

edit: saying that the government will ban ICE isn't a market statement its a regulatory hope and for most nations a far off proposal. The idea that Tesla can only succeed with the government literally making their competitors illegal isn't actually a pro-Tesla argument. You guys are much less convincing than you think you are.

>Says who

It is foreseeable that ICEs will become banned, at least in Europe. Right now there is still too much lobbying by the traditional car makers, but long term there is no other choice for reaching climate goals.

Edit: See e.g. http://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/the-end-of-the-internal...

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/germany-asks-eu-to-think-...

That would never work in the US. It would be both impractical and politically impossible. Most people don't have 35k to drop on an electric car, and even if they did the infrastructure doesn't exist.

If American car companies want to sell in the EU, which is about 500 million people, they will soon have no other choice.

Things change. The car will landscape will look pretty different in 20 years.

Gas isn't "ultra-cheap" in most other parts of the world, especially Europe and Japan. Norwegians are buying Teslas at an absurd rate. Watch for Europe to switch to EVs sooner; their main roadblock is the charging infrastructure. Unlike here in America, where suburbanites all have garages that can be easily retrofitted with a charging port, Europeans don't have that luxury usually. They're a lot like the eco-conscious pro-EV city dwellers here in America who park on the street and have no garage.

Norwegians are buying Teslas mostly because of tax breaks and parking/toll discounts.

Combustion engines in vehicles like the F series trucks aren't going away any time soon. You need generational leaps in battery technology and safety to compete with those trucks. The whole "rugged, dependable" thing that they play on the television is not just for show. I've got a former co-worker who buys a new F-350 supercrew every couple of years before selling it and the depreciation is less than a lease for a midsize sedan.

If it's so rugged and dependable, why does he need to buy a new one every couple of years?

Do you understand the difference between want and need?

He uses the thing as a commuter vehicle and to tow boats every now and then. The reason he gets a new one is that the dashboard computer systems on these things get updated from year to year and he prefers to stay up with the most current technology.

For most vehicles, 100K miles is nearing end-of-life. For an F series truck, 100K miles isn't even the halfway point.

consumerism

Because Tesla's cars are not "hugely complicated contraption[s] made up of hundreds of mechanical parts?"

To a much lesser degree. An electric engine is a lot simpler, mechanically, than an ICE. To the point that, I think, major malfunctions will result in replacement of the engine instead of fixing engine components. Given good refurbishment logistics, this is much more efficient.

Ehhhh. I work with batteries and have worked with electric engines in the past. When an ICE vehicle breaks down, or doesn't work, or goes fast, or goes slow, we know why. With batteries and electric engines, when stuff doesn't work... nobody really knows why.

Copied from another comment I made on HN:

Nobody really understands lithium-ion batteries. One production run might have substantially higher or lower capacity. Some batteries might explode. Some batteries are high discharge and some are low discharge. The "explanation" for all of these things is 'heat'.

Imagine that happening to any other industry (for example the auto industry.)

- "Why did my car just explode!?" "Heat"

- "Why does this car last a tenth the lifetime of this car?" "Heat"

- "Why does this car go a thousand times faster than any others?" "Heat"

- "Why is this entire production run of cars not working?" "Heat"

People say "heat" for two reasons: 1) because nobody understands li-ion batteries and 2) because yes, the real answer does have something to do with heat.

Batteries are one of the most important industries and critical to every company on HN. But the state of the art of batteries is putting together random metals with a bunch of random chemicals and watching which ones don't explode.

Imagine talking to the CEO of Boeing: "We just did our millionth test, engines made of cheese and wings made of coconut shells. It crashed during takeoff, of course. We haven't had any improvements in over a decade, but we're sure we'll get there eventually - we've spent billions on research so far. Wanna come watch test 1,000,001? We're trying engines made of cheese and potato-chip wings next!"

The reasons you mentioned are precisely the reason why an ICE based car selling company can't suddenly wake up one day and build electric cars.

Engineering takes time, Tesla has spent a lot of time building and testing battery tech that works. And they are using it across multiple applications.

If you get reliable electronics in, then without frequent oil changes, and tubeless tire. A electric quite literally is a zero maintenance car.

Hmm. The battery stuff is hard, yes, but only one company has to figure it out. Battery companies sell to everyone. All the battery breakthroughs so far have benefited every EV player. The actual meat-and-potatoes of Tesla's battery tech is actually from Panasonic, who has no problems selling cells to whoever wants to buy.

And EVs are absolutely not zero maintenance, that's just a fantasy. Even in dream-world where we have tires that never need to be replaced and no oil changes, batteries are always going to be a large part of the car's cost and only last a few hundred charge cycles.

I'm sorry, but that's just not true.

The basic premise of an electric "engine" is simpler than that of an ICE, but when you actually make the car, it's nowhere near as simple on paper. Just look at the issue people have had with getting Tesla's repaired... the "mechanics" don't even know that you have to keep the battery charged.

Also, don't ignore the fact that we have 100+ years of experience with ICE.

Judging by the electric motor portion of the telsa manufacturing I would say it is much more simple than ICE https://youtu.be/AVCCroN7vS0

Also, I would argue electric motors have been around far longer than ICE because it is simpler. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_motor

>>the "mechanics" don't even know that you have to keep the battery charged.

I've been through the CRT -> Flat screen television phase in India.

Arguments were typically like these. How will TV repairmen fix these new TV's which have move like plug and play internals. Therefore new flat screen TV's won't sell?

In the end it didn't work out well for TV repairmen. If its easier to identify and swap the malfunctioning part, you need lesser and lesser skilled professional to service these goods. You can dumb down the process to a point anybody can do it.

Dealerships aren't company owned. Ford sells cars to independent dealers who mark them up and sell them to the consumer.

Don't underestimate the value of dealerships, Tesla took two months to replace a friends cracked windscreen

There is such a thing as retooling your existing infrastructure. Nobody is saying that Ford's offering will be a homogenous Ford vehicle... hell, neither is Tesla.