> Bolt, Volt, Leaf, i3, ELR - and is pulling away from the pack at an ACCELERATING pace

But this is way too breathless. The Nissan Leaf is the best selling electric car of all time. They've sold 350k of them and by all accounts it's a very decent small car. And that's great for everyone because it pushes the infrastructure to adapt and creates the market. I expect Nissan-Renault to keep moving upmarket and Tesla downmarket to a point where we will be more or less fully served in 4 or 5 years. That wouldn't have happened as fast without Tesla but lets not ignore the existing manufacturers that have already done incredibly well on this and give them credit over the ones that are still sitting on their hands.

What? I've been following the market and Tesla has not brought no new innovation in any aspect of the car (engine, battery technology etc). They've just hired some great designers and invested a lot in marketing. You can't even say that their cars are competitively priced. I've seen way more innovation from Chinese electric car builders.

Also, wrt to software, Teslas are basically hacked together, according to multiple reports and analyses, teardowns.

False. Elon Musk frequently states in interviews that Tesla spends nothing on marketing. There are no Tesla television commercials, no online ads, no billboards and no paid placements. Tesla doesn't even participate in automotive trade shows. 100% of what you passively interpret as "marketing" is unpaid, organic news coverage, social media buzz and seeing actual Tesla vehicles on the road.

Tesla runs a referral program and will even give you its most expensive car for free if you do enough marketing for Tesla. I don't know how much Tesla spends on that program, but "nothing" is not a good estimate.

if you think that, they're doing a really good job.

It may not be traditional advertising, but there's certainly tons of advertising going into it.

Anyway... as with discussions of the iPhone ad infinitum, it's not about developing innovations de novo, but rather about taking different features and incorporating them into an offering that holistically beats everything else.

We'd seen all of the iPhone's features in earlier phones... but their combination and integration in the first iPhone revolutionised the industry.

Likewise, we've seen electric cars before, but Tesla shook the industry up by creating an electric car which had no major compromises and could --together with the revolutionary Supercharger network-- could completely replace an ICE car for almost all use-cases.

Ford was doing that in the late 80s when they started making electronically controlled transmissions (and I doubt they were the first). I doubt they were first.

Functionality gets integrated to the ECU. Then engineers decide that the ECU doesn't need to care about the windows and the HVAC so it gets its own module. Then they decide that there's no reason to have all these extra modules when the ECU can just do it. Wash, rinse repeat. Everything old is new again the cycle time is just long enough that most people don't remember.

Edit: Why is this down-voted?

Of course, by the time the thing is designed, components are sourced and so on, the pendulum might have well have swung the other way.

I've got a news flash for you my friend: everything is basically hacked together.

[1] https://cleantechnica.com/2018/03/11/tesla-model-3-motor-in-...

You're talking past my point. I didn't say they were innovative, I said they showed they could build electric cars that match ICE ones and even surpass them in some regards. That doesn't require that much innovation, just putting very well together existing technology. It's the iPod all over again. Not innovative but it actually put the technology in a usable state for the mass market.

I currently drive a BMW 3 series. It has size/features/range that are enough (and often exceed) what I need. No one except Tesla offers anything I can reasonably replace that car with. Not even BMW themselves who offer the quirky i3 but nothing like the Model 3. While all the carmakers were fumbling around making hybrids a little bit better Tesla went and jumped ahead with getting an electric sedan built. There's no point in me getting a hybrid, I already average exactly 50mpg (4.7 l/100km) with the current diesel, a hybrid wouldn't add much if anything. Switching to an electric can be a 2-4x step for cost and CO2 depending on electricity costs and share of renewables in the grid at your location.

Or in other words, the quality of the experience is so high that the product pretty much sells itself.

Don't look into CAN bus and anything by Ford, then.

"Marketing, promotional and advertising costs are expensed as incurred and are included as an element of selling, general and administrative expense in the consolidated statement of operations. We incurred marketing, promotional and advertising costs of $66.5 million, $48.0 million and $58.3 million in the years ended December 31, 2017, 2016 and 2015, respectively."

> You know, Tesla doesn’t do any advertising, or we don’t do any paid endorsements

Source: https://www.recode.net/2018/11/2/18053428/recode-decode-full...

The 10-K states the truth in black and white. If Musk makes a contradicting statement in an interview, the 10-K is correct and he is not. If the 10-K is fraudulent, people are going to jail.

Judging by Elon's tweets, they do expect to be able to produce cars for that price in the near future. Whether or not they will sell them near the cost of production probably just depends on demand vs supply.

They've done no such thing. They've made another vehicle to compete with BMW, Audi, and Mercedes. Which is fine, but let's call it what it is. There is no such thing as a $35k Model 3, and it could still be many years before we see one.

Truth is, Tesla sells well. Chevy bolt does not sell that well. And one of the major reason Tesla sells so well (50k model3 at 50k$ in a quarter) is because of the futuristic hype and image. So they will never admit that Tesla makes just another premium car, or that autopilot is just another driver assistance program.

https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/mid-range-waiting-ro...

And also, you can't pre-order it - you can put the same deposit down, if you want, as everyone else - that's 1k, and can apply that to a LR/MR and in the future SR.

Also worth noting, the MR and the LR have different inverters, with the MR sharing the same inverter as the SR.

Winter is coming ;-)

At this point, no one is locked in on that deposit. Anyone can cancel at any time - until you click purchase with a additional payment for the car, which is only after the car is available for purchase.

Nothing new is ever profitable until you get past the early prototype and scaling stages. For big capital intensive stuff only government historically has pockets deep enough to burn enough money to get big stuff off the ground (sometimes literally). Rockets, jet engines, microprocessors, huge scale power grids, the Internet, genomics, supercomputing, nuclear power, solar power, the list goes on and on.

Private investors just have too low a risk tolerance and too short a time horizon.

I actually wish this weren't so, but it is so.

It's also terribly hypocritical to bash Elon for taking government contracts when everyone does it. Why do you think Amazon's HQ2 is going to be in the DC area?

If EVs weren't tipping we'd still be talking about how peak oil (the depletion of easy/cheap oil) means the end of modern transportation.

Tesla didn't make Musk a billionaire. The PayPal acquisition did that.

Does Tesla even still get subsidies? They got that DOE loan years ago but they paid it back and lots of other auto makers got government loans back then too. Or are you referring to EV tax credits? In that case those are also subsidizing Nissan, BMW, GM, and any other company selling a mass market EV.

  If Balmer hadn't studied spectral lines, Planck may not have proposed the quantum. Then Bohr may
 not have conceived his model of the atom, which means Heisenberg and Schrödinger wouldn't have
 developed their formulations of quantum mechanics. That would have left Bloch without the tools he
 needed to understand the nature of conduction in metals, and then how would Schottky have figured
 out semiconductors? It's hard to imagine, then, how Bardeen, Brattain, and Schockley would have
 developed transistors. And without transistors, Noyce and Kilbey couldn't have produced integrated
 circuits.

  Almost every major technological advance of the 20th and 21st centuries originated with basic
 research that presented no obvious or immediate economic benefit. That means no profit motive, and
 hence no reason for the private sector to adequately fund it. Basic research isn't a waste of tax
 dollars; it's a more reliable long-term investment than anything else in the Federal government's
 portfolio.

Solar City, Tesla, The Boring Company, and Space X aren't releasing public research, it's all private IP and manufacturing.

You literally could not benefit from their progress if you wanted to. You'd be sued. Their employees can't even work in related industries due to somewhat spurious non-competes.

you have changed your original comment a few times so it is difficult to respond to, but I'm not sure large tech companies would succeed with unions, people need to educate themselves and learn how to negotiate in highly skilled areas, I look at a local railroad company near me that employs a lot of people and does not invest money in improvements because they cannot afford due to how the union has negotiated, it has stopped innovation entirely. Engineers are still learning light switches, this should be completely automated so we stop having mistakes of train engineers texting people and causing accidents... what a shameful loss of life.

[0] https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you

Their progress is not available for public use, period. Go ahead, try to use any technology developed by Tesla and see what happens. They're simply popularizing their own products.

American corporations have done great work convincing you that unions are a bad thing. You're going as far as blaming employees for Tesla-specific safety reporting issues. https://www.revealnews.org/article/tesla-says-its-factory-is...

The whole point of subsidy is to encourage business in a specific area. It would sound like it's working as intended, encouraging business and all.

Would you be happier if the subsidies were completely wasted on a non-viable business?

Tesla was not and is not a major automaker. Their market cap may be large but they don't employ all that many people or ship all that many cars (so less people upstream are dependent on them) Tesla was founded in 2008. They would not have been eligible for loans the .gov gave to GM/Chrysler. That would have been like a small town bank asking to be bailed out along with the wall street banks.

Eventually it'll show up due to demand but the flywheel is slow to turn. I think a 3-4 year head start is about right and also in line with most technological head starts (Bezos famously talked about it some time ago and why AWS is the reason they are winning since it had no viable competitor for 7+ years), but like Amazon/AWS, if it takes any longer than that... you're handing Elon a huge amount of time.

If this is the case, doesn't it destroy the arguments of renewable energy advocates that "utility scale" batteries to store solar/wind energy are anywhere close to being realistic?

https://www.motortrend.com/news/nio-es8-challenges-tesla-mod...

It's not like the late 00s where SSDs were viable but deemed not yet cost effective. Solid state batteries IIRC don't even have a proof of concept much less any adoption.

https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/2018/06/volkswagen-test...

https://media.ford.com/content/fordmedia/fna/us/en/news/2015...

I’m sure there’s more but manufacturer after manufacturer is buying, investing in, poaching from, and acquiring EV/battery tech.

Having electric plugs in supermarkets and doing some 15min breaks when using highways - that's already good enough.

I expect long-term we'll probably settle on something like 75% batteries / 25% hydrogen for ground transportation, and the reverse of that ratio for aircraft (although I wouldn't expect hydrogen planes to be using fuel cells).

Most of the new light rail and subway lines in the US are electric trains.

Taking a figure of half a million dollars per mile (which is less than the numbers I could find, but let's be conservative) you're looking at ~130 billion dollars. That's theoretically affordable for the government, maybe, but never going to happen politically speaking.

I also think the idea that EV batteries are just around the corner from commoditization may be a bit premature. Getting the most out of the batteries (think efficiently, power, and especially reliability) currently means a pretty significant engineering integration effort in power electronics, packaging, and thermal management. Having your own vertically integrated production capacity is huge - you get to precisely control (and also pay the risk for) exactly the batteries that fit your design. It’s exactly the same kind of advantage legacy automakers are defending with ICE engines. In 5 years, perhaps there will be contract battery manufacturers who can churn out massive quantities of high quality batteries at a price similar to building your own factory. I bet that timeframe may actually be closer to 10 years. Clearly Tesla isn’t sitting still... where will they be a decade from now.

Very similar to the complaints about Amazon moving in on sellers with their own products once they see what is selling well with independent sellers.

Teslas competitors aren't going to sit idly by whilst Tesla takes the whole market.

And as far as crushing -- the Bolt or Volt is the only EV I'd even consider. For the compromises I'd have to make, a Tesla is far too expensive.

It's worth pointing out that it's likely that the constraint on Bolt production out of GM has not been vehicle demand, but battery supplies from LG Chem. They basically made as many Bolts as they could get batteries from LG Chem, and that's all.

Please verify your sources to avoid spreading misinformation.

ha!

Ford vs Chevy trucks. No car like Mopar. Think of the muscle car heydays of the 60s and 70s.