I invested in Tesla because I wanted this to happen. For me, Tesla is not successful unless it changes the ecosystem around it. If, while doing that, it goes under as a car manufacturer, but in the end changed the ecosystem for the better, that's great! Sometimes a thing only exists in order to make itself redundant.

I doubt this will happen, though. Instead, I expect it to be like the iPhone vs Android: there will continue to be a premium electric car by the people who launched the first real contender, but other companies will outscale them and eventually provide really competitive products. That's also fine. (Note that Android was a newcomer as well....)

It is worth reading those books and understanding the thesis. Because it is directly relevant to the current situation. We are looking at the gas -> electric conversion, in about the projected time frame, and all of the reasons for why traditional manufacturers were likely to fumble are all there. And the creation of hybrids that you point to is as relevant to the survival of traditional car manufacturers as the creation of sail/steam hybrids was to sailboat manufacturers roughly a century ago. (News flash, the big ones all made those hybrids, and none successfully made the transition to pure steam ships.)

This is not to say that Tesla will be a big player in the all electric age that is coming. But its odds are better than Ford, Toyota and GM.

1) Automobile efficiency has moved dramatically since the 70's and that's due to government regulation. That regulation continues to push the industry as a whole.

2) The regulation goes beyond automobiles, were moving to alternative fuels as a people. Auto's will be drug along with that shift.

3) Automobiles and selling cars, in general, are a lot more than JUST the drivetrain. All that was really talking about with electric is a drivetrain. It's not clear to me yet that everything about a car has to be rethought to simply make it electric.

it isn't "has", it is an opportunity to rethink what hasn't changed in the last 100 years.

Google/Apple (and probably Uber) can attach drivetrain to their platform while Ford/GM just aren't capable of producing a platform to attach to their drivetrains. Tesla is an intermediate step in that direction and it looks like a good [though far from sure] candidate to make it successfully into the future of electric connected self-driving cars.

In the case of cars the key performance characteristics that we need are ability to accelerate into freeway traffic, braking ability, range, and recharge time. Electric is naturally worse than gas on all of these characteristics at the same price point, however battery technology is improving at a predictable rate and it will eventually meet the characteristics that people need for daily life. At which point pure electric becomes viable for all of us.

Therefore the prediction from 20 years ago was that the pure electric cars would likely to come from something that perhaps looks like a glorified golf cart, which will eat out the car market from the bottom up.

Tesla doesn't look like this because Elon pursued an unexpected angle. He found that he could produce acceptable high performance electric cars long before the initial projection, because the profit margins on gasoline cars in that category were high enough to absorb the insane cost of the batteries. As battery technology improves, he is able to move down the quality curve. But to do so, he has to keep thin profit margins.

Traditional manufacturers still face the traditional problem. They can't afford to offer an equivalent electric car at an equivalent price because their cost structures are too rich. But he's moving down the value chain and broadening, and not moving up. By the time he can offer a mass market car, he'll have an unbeatable edge.

Of course even if Tesla's plan doesn't work, don't count out large electric golf cart companies moving up market into automobiles like Marshell Electric Vehicle Co Ltd, EZ-GO, Xiamen Dalle Electric Car Co. LTD and Polaris. Just as was predicted 20 years ago.

Either way, I do not think it likely that most established automobile companies will survive the electric transition. If they do, it will be the first case that I know of where established brands are successful in switching to an inferior technology.

GM released the Bolt several months ago, which has a longer range than the Model 3, and you can drive one off of a dealer lot right now. I test drove one and it's an awesome, fast, and affordable electric car. An average person, without any kind of pre-order, will not be able to drive off a lot with a 3 for at least another 2 years. Tesla has completely missed the ball. GM will be on their 3rd revision of the mass-market electric car by then. That's not even counting Toyota who are several revisions into the Leaf and many more into the Prius which eats Tesla's entire product line for lunch.

The Model 3 is a comparable car starting at $35,000 but is planned to sell at an average of $45,000 with an independently estimated profit percentage of around 25%. That means that the cost of production is somewhere around $34,000.

If costs continue looking like that, as both companies scale electric car production up, which manufacturer would you prefer to be?

Also I called them comparable, but they really aren't. After looking at safety in accidents, the driving assist and so on, my family doesn't consider them equivalent. We put a deposit on a Model 3 which we hope to buy next year. Traditional manufacturers are well behind Tesla on key amenities like that.

Tesla expects to produce and sell 80,000 units of the Model 3 in 2017.

We'll see if they hit that target, but come on ... in what reality can this be described as having "completely missed the ball"?

With an already outdated charging system! In terms of styling and execution, I'd accept a position that GM is more competent than Tesla -- especially for the conventional vehicle-as-appliance crowd. But in terms of knowing where to go in the future, I think GM has a considerable disadvantage.

Congrats, you got a hybrid now (not unlike a Chevy Volt).

For example, just look at the battery packs which are essential to an electric car. Tesla was unable to find a supplier that could meet their requirements, so they designed and produced their own batteries and now have a $5 billion gigafactory to increase production volume and decrease costs (with more gigafactories on the way). If you're another car company trying to enter the EV market, what are your options? Buy inferior battery packs at a higher cost from a different supplier? Try to replicate Tesla's battery technology and then convince your board to build a gigafactory so you can produce them at the required volume and cost?

Why not another option - battery manufacturer notices that if they build an equiv. battery they can sell to every car manufacturer in the world. With the higher volume they'll be able to do it for less than Tesla if they are only building for their own cars.

I believe Tesla is gearing up for the car purchase after your next one. You're currently thinking in terms of a car that you'll be driving. For those cars, you're right, there are other car manufacturers that will be more successful.

However, once cars are fully automated, the entire game will change. Market leaders of today will be up-ended. That's when I believe Tesla, Google, and anyone else who has driverless technology will take over the industry.

That goes double for the taxi companies like Uber, Lyft, Juno, etc.

This may be true, but nothing I have seen so far suggests that ubiquitous full automation will arrive until long after the likes of Tesla and Uber have run out of money. From here, it looks like we still have several rounds to go for each of

- Can we actually do it?

- Will the regulators let us do it?

- Will the public believe we can do it and trust us to do it safely?

That assumes there are no black swan events undermining the whole car industry in the meantime. Given the increasing population and congestion issues in many big cities, the corresponding increasing interest in planning/zoning policy so that using cars to get around is less essential, and the environmental implications of this kind of vehicle even if it's a hybrid or totally electrically powered locally, I think there's also a slight chance that demand for this kind of technology will never reach critical mass at all.

I've been following Audi for some time. [1]

[1] http://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/politics/alba...

Mercedes or Volvo getting caught with a product in the ways Tesla has been getting caught would be unacceptable to their customers. The brand damage would be massive. Tesla as 'the new kid on the block' has a lot of leeway to mess up that you would never accept from an established brand. The whole autopilot saga is an excellent example.

By the time Volvo or Mercedes release a next level self driving car you can simply expect it to work, all the time. Until then they will release small incremental steps on their 'driver assist' technology.

I think the opposite is happening - that Tesla is under much more scrutiny because they're the new one on the block. Because the established automakers have done some terrible shit, which would absolutely kill Tesla as a company.

I'll gladly find sources and further elaborate, if you're interested.

> That goes double for the taxi companies like Uber, Lyft, Juno, etc.

The interesting thing is that you didn’t mention Mercedes Benz.

Mercedes Benz owns a few carsharing and Taxi apps in Europe, almost all Taxi operators lease cars from Mercedes Benz (which, in return, gets better deals with them), Mercedes Benz licensed the entire Tesla IP and has used it already in one model, and they’ve got their own electric cars and self-driving prototypes as well as self-driving trucks.

Mercedes Benz is the most likely candidate to build a vertically integrated Taxi solution. They’ve got deals with all major cities, with Taxi operators, they own the IP, they’ve got the apps and the infrastructure, and they’ve got the required prototypes.

The Model 3 will tell us a lot. If they can ramp up production fast enough, if they can fill orders quickly enough, if they can satisfy the 'ordinary' customer's service expectations, they may take their place in the long run as one of those 'traditional' auto manufacturers long-term.

There's a lot that can be missing or not at scale in the luxury car market that won't fly at the Model 3's price point.

I could easily imagine the traditional car companies making the exact same successful models as now, but with the electric engine being a checkbox option.

The 2017 Electric Volkswagen Golf is apparently quite good.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-drive/reviews/new-cars...

It's also worth noting that the differences between Tesla and traditional car manufactures are much less than the differences between SpaceX and the traditional aerospace companies. There's no real business innovation on the Tesla side that the traditional manufacturers will have problems emulating aside from autopilot, whereas SpaceX introduces a whole new industry paradigm.

Interviews of SpaceX and Tesla engineers show how much they've grown out of the conservative engineering molds they found at large, bureaucratic companies like Ford and GM.

Edit: Basically Ford and GM are manager driven. They are about small, incremental change where you don't change too much too fast. And you are one cog in a line of 50 cogs. At Tesla it's cutthroat and bloody, so if you get recognition and clout early on, then you basically get to do whatever you want. At least that's my understanding and that's the understanding that good engineers have

Right now I work 60 hours a week between my current job and side projects, and while I'd love to work for SpaceX or Tesla from a professional standpoint (my 3rd-grader self literally drew "designs" in pencil for warp drives after watching Star Trek with dad), the fiancée and I are probably going to have kids in the next 3-4 years, and she has her own career to think about. At that point I imagine I'll cut back on the side projects as well as take time off from work here and there to help her out. From what I've heard I doubt I could do that at Tesla/SpaceX without professional consequences. But I guess that just makes me a shitty engineer who is simply incapable of doing something as god-like as helping scale a production line. :P

The issue at the traditional manufactures is leadership, not talent. If the leadership reforms and adapts the talent will be there. That's a large if, but certainly not improbable if Tesla seriously threatens their core business.

What the issue is at traditional companies doesn't matter, the fact is that they suck and they cultivate lazy engineering. I hope that 100,000 engineers kill themselves working for Tesla because humanity itself will not survive without their effort, and then the trillions of humans that have lived and died will have done so in vain, and all of that is much more important than your kid's star trek drawings and warm-fuzzies.

Objectively speaking, someone who does not have a family can work more hours, not necessarily produce better work. But they can, potentially, as long as the "extra" hours are also focused on work. Not sure how long that is sustainable.

I'd like to ask this: if we need to kill hundreds of thousands of people to try to save the human race, are we even left with something worth saving?

It is not clear to me that workers need to sacrifice themselves to death in order for us to survive. There is no evidence of any impending catastrophe that would require such sacrifice.

A study by the Standford CS department shows that total productivity sharply declines after 50 hours of work in a week. Mistakes get made, inefficiencies are introduced. I only shoot for 60 because I can typically vary the work and disperse it over the weekends, which helps.

https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/crunc...

Also my fiancee supports me in my efforts and gives me an extra reason to go to work in the morning. She makes me more productive and provides much needed support and motivation (we largely depend on my salary at the moment). Now sure if I had no desire for a family or friends or life experiences and became some kind of solitary engineer-warrior-monk, and was able to do so without falling into severe depression, maybe I'd be marginally better, but the difference would not be nearly enough to warrant the sacrifice. Even Elon Musk spends some (albeit limited) time with his family and talks about how he's had to tone it down recently (from getting 4 hours a night to 6 hours), and recently tweeted about having a fun night mixing wine and ambien. I have no doubt he works harder than me, but even he has a family and down time.

Also, I work at a big traditional defense contractor. Large companies are hardly monolithic. Some programs suck and are staffed by lazy/ineffective engineers, but my program's customer is quite satisfied at the moment, as are other programs' customers. That's why we get business, we do have competition that will take it from us if we don't deliver. You can't paint 100,000+ employees with one brush, and trying to do so makes you sound unintelligent. Correspondingly your statement "What the issue is at traditional companies doesn't matter, the fact is that they suck and they cultivate lazy engineering." makes it clear that you're not interested in discussing the issue and more interested in validating your own beliefs, which you have no evidence for beyond having "read some interviews". Once again, that diminishes your credibility.

And I don't give a damn what you think about my 3rd grade drawings (fyi you clearly rushed through reading my post and missed the phrasing, I don't have a 3rd grade kid). It was meant to support the statement that I actually am passionate about space tech and would love to work on what SpaceX works on, nothing more.

And warm-fuzzies are clearly something you need more of in your life. Tesla will probably help save the world, but they're hardly the only force out there, or even the decisive force when it comes to combating climate change. Even if they fold I don't think you have too much to worry about.

I've been polite up to this point, but I'll be blunt: You sound like a 14 year old who's sole knowledge of the world comes from blog posts. Which is fine, but don't expect anyone to take you seriously. You have to earn that when you're in a room of strangers (which is what this forum largely is), and you've only done the opposite.

Fiancees are great, I agree. And I don't think there is anything wrong with families.

You admit yourself that your company has some bad programs. Those programs are hemorrhaging money that comes from the public. That's really awful and everyone involved should be fired for wasting taxpayer money.

I dunno about the rest of this, I'm just super passionate and I'm willing to come along and tell some mid-level engineer at a big company that he sucks and his company sucks, because it's probably true. I could come to your company and observe long coffee breaks, people who put in three hours a day, and all that stuff, and you'd brush it off when I brought it up. It's cynicism because that's what is actually out there. People suck. You try and rationalize it but your company is going nowhere fast as soon as the government contracts and fat military cheques run out.

I'm in my 20s and and been incredibly hard working and suffered a lot in my life, I'm just very passionate and I'm willing to tell you that your company is really not good, because it's not.

A lot of those programs probably are due to fold. At the end of the day that's up to the customer. As I said, we have competitors willing to snap up business on fairly short notice. Quite often the contracts are structured so that the customer can cancel them at will, no lock-in.

Saying everyone involved should be fired is a carpet-bomb solution that risks punishing good talent. Sometimes the program you work on ends, or you want a career change, and take what looks like a good opportunity but turns out to be shit. Sometimes a change in leadership turns a good program bad and there are no good transfer opportunities. There are no glassdoor.com reviews for internal company programs, if you're lucky you get hearsay, and I've known many good engineers that were stuck on bad programs for some time before being able to transfer off. Fire the offenders sure, but it's not black and white.

I wouldn't brush any of the criticism off, actually. I'm well aware of my company's institutional flaws, many of us gripe about them on a daily basis. But I think you'd be surprised how many of us bag lunch and work unpaid overtime when deadlines are near. I'm not defending my company, but I am defending most the engineers I've met there. A lot of us are actually hoping for some extra competition to shake up upper management. Hell we had no less than two dozen people, including a low-level manager watching the SpaceX live-stream when they landed the first Falcon 9, and we were as excited as anyone. We'd universally love to work on something like that, but we don't get to pitch contracts or control the money. I can't speak for the entire company, or even a substantial fraction of it, but that's my neck of the woods. The picture is not as black and white as you think. Don't let your passion or prior suffering blind your attention to detail.

Yeah, my company sucks when it comes to vision (and some other things). Here's hoping SpaceX eventually makes us better in that regard. Not that my program's in danger anytime soon, we're not in SpaceX's direct line of business. I'm in my late 20s BTW.

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/10-battery-giga...

For the time being EV/Gas hybrids like the Volt are a lot more practical and cheaper. I could walk off the lot with a lightly used Volt for half the price of a Model 3 and get the vast majority of the benefits (autopilot simply isn't a big selling point for me at the moment) with none of the downsides.

Would it mean I couldn't take it camping to the UP in Michigan? Likely, but I go every 3 years at most anyway. I would just rent a dinosaur bone boner from Hertz for the weekend if I really needed it.

Cities are still half the population.

There will still probably be areas of the country where it will be hard to find charging stations (although gas stations are infrequent in those parts currently, its much easier to bring some extra gas in a can then an extra battery).

pg said it best when he said something like "Traditional manufacturers vs Tesla is like Microsoft in 1997 vs Apple in 2017"

It's debatable whether software is important enough to matter, but when the most valuable feature of most cars is that you can turn off their horrible software, that's an opportunity.