News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Tesla Second Quarter 2018 Update by gamblor956 on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @06:48PM (#17667780)
Toyota took 7 years as well. They did not start selling the Prius worldwide until 2000, and they hit 280k worldwide sales within 7 years.

But if you want to compare yearly figures...the non-liftback models went from 0 sales to 530,000 in sales in just 2 years. Now that is impressive. And it's also the counterpoint to Musk's Tesla: both Tesla and Toyota knew that demand existed for their cars. But Toyota knew how to execute properly, and did so, and was able to satisfy that demand. Tesla so far has royally fucked up, continues to fuck up, and it's up in the air whether they'll be able to right the ship before they run out of money.

Re:Tesla Second Quarter 2018 Update by rconti on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @06:58PM (#17667830)
I'm sorry, but this strikes me as extremely disingenuous.

They didn't invent the market, the Prius was just a better Honda Insight (primarily by virtue of having 3 more seats). Again, they deserve massive credit for their accomplishments.

But, again, they lose the "sales increase" by a wide margin unless you tweak that by insisting on limiting it to "a single model".

Certainly we don't know if Tesla will survive but the challenges facing a new carmarker of any sort are simply massive, rather than just producing a slightly-differently-propelled model in addition to the millions of conventional cars you already produce.

And where you really fall over is by trying to argue about "the non-liftback models" which I can only presume means the discontinued[1] Prius V which is a slightly-differently-bodied version of an existing car.

[1] https://www.toyota.com/priusv/

Re:Tesla Second Quarter 2018 Update by dmode on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @07:31PM (#17668024)
Toyota had 80 years of car manufacturing and selling experience before the Prius. Of course, they will be able to execute properly on a product (which is an incremental innovation).