If that platform works out then Tesla is going to compete not against one or two new models, but they'll suddenly compete against two dozen models.
Unless VW fucks something up in the next year, I just don't know how Tesla expects to compete with them. Tesla only has a handful of high end cars; they have no family cars, no vans, no compact cars, no busses.
VW is great at building models for every niche and at every price point. No matter what kind of car you want, VW (or Skoda or Audi) has multiple options for you.
Tesla is currently still ahead, but I'm not sure they can match the breadth of VWs upcoming model palette (if VWs new platform works out).
Germany doesn't get life in #Neuland. VW and most of the German industry are respective leaders in some niche by being good at through mechanical engineering IP. Electrical cars are simple. Innovation is in software, DRM business models and battery tech which is all completely foreign to the German industry. People here get Teslas for the charging infrastructure alone, as the alternative is a huge mess. Don't forget, VW is still trying hard to lobby for their known turf, pushing for hybrids and hydrogen combustion mechanical marvels...
Germany doesn't get it. The pandemic has shown, the era of old white me... industrialist has forced the country between a rock and a hard place.
While Musk is shooting consumer internet into space, our leaders had long, exhausting talks, recognizing Germany's need to modernize and embrace technical progression and they fearlessly concluded: It's time to let go of fax by 2030.
One thing to point out about VW is that their CEO, Herbert Diess, seems to get it. To name two anecdotal pieces of evidence, Elon had asked him to become CEO of Tesla back in 2015 [1] and he had conversations with Chinese battery supplier CATL about car batteries as far back as ten years ago [2].
[1] https://electrek.co/2021/04/13/ceo-elon-musk-reportedly-hire...
[2] https://www.teslarati.com/volkswagen-herbert-diess-ev-cell-p...
On the bright side, two of the leading companies in the mRNA vaccine space are based in Germany (BioNTech and CureVac), so there is still some ability to innovate.
Why can’t you use a Tesla for a family car? Most of them have four seats. What else do you need for most families?
There isn't really a great EV in that category yet, but I hope it's just a question of time.
Obviously you can use any car as a family car, but my impression is that Teslas are more targeted at commuters (except maybe the Model X, but that's so expensive that it's not really an option for any family I know).
A new Model S was too rich for my blood, so I picked one up used. Great family car. Massive amounts of storage. We're out of the stroller years but it would be great with a stroller.
Even the smaller Model 3 is plenty for a 4-person family, while it doesn’t beat in liters because of ceiling height the trunk is very spacious.
So I searched Wikipedia and the types of car I was thinking about are apparently called "Compact MPV" [1]. My thinking was that these cars are mostly targeted at families, so I called them "family cars", but apparently people have different ideas what a family car is.
My point was that VW is going to end up building a large number of different EVs in the next couple of years, and Tesla will face the problem that each of their models will have to compete with 3 models from VW.
No matter what model Tesla your interested in, there will be a car from the VW group with slightly more space, and one that's cheaper, and maybe one that's a bit sportier. It's going to be very different from now, where there's very little competition to Tesla (if you want an EV)
I like Teslas in general, but their decision to remove things like buttons and stalks from their vehicles is both dangerous and stupid, and people have already died because of it.
Looking forward for that link of a death caused by operating the wipers. I haven’t touched mine (not Tesla) for years since they work automatically, maybe other families have special windshield wiper adjustment needs?
https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/26/21154502/tesla-autopilo...
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/01/waymo-ceo-tesla-is-not-...
Tesla resists efforts to prevent distracted driving, and also resists the consistent call from regulators properly set expectations for the capabilities of its autopilot feature. People are dying as a result. You'll notice that you won't find the same articles about GM's SuperCruise feature, because they don't oversell the feature and have more safety measures in place to make sure drivers aren't distracted.
Waymo's CEO even claims that Tesla isn't a competitor. There is an obvious conflict here, but he's not the only one saying that 1) Tesla will never have a fully autonomous driving system and 2) their existing autopilot feature is falsely advertised and dangerous.
You’re just pushing your agenda here. By the way, a tip on that: that first site completely discredits any kind of safety discussion as soon as it’s mentioned. It scares you with a long list of accidents when only 6 are potentially related to autopilot in a decade of its existence, vs 1.3 million deaths happening every year for all car brands.
> Remember that BMW and Audi combined had 9 driver fatalities in nearly 900,000 vehicle years? Clearly, 11 Tesla driver fatalities in 265,000 vehicle years is not a good start. But even those numbers likely understate the danger of driving a Tesla...
> Even without making any adjustment whatsoever for missing fatality data, Tesla drivers are much more likely to die than their peers driving other luxury cars. Eleven deaths in 265,290 vehicle-years is a stunningly high driver fatality rate of 41.46. That’s quadruple the rate of Audi and BMW, and more than triple the rate of all luxury cars combined.
The issue is whether design decisions by Tesla are leading to fatalities. They are, if you compare them to the luxury segment they are in. Advertising an autopilot feature which does not work, and moving standard controls to a distracting, inconsistent touch screen interface is leading to more crashes and more deaths.
Tip of the hat: don't discredit information because you don't like it.
This is why I don't think a Tesla is a feature complete car -- it simply lacks the common set of safety features found in every other modern vehicle.
Not exactly. It’s on the stalk as a physical button.
> On Model 3 and Model Y vehicles, Tesla didn’t install normal windshield wiper settings through a steering wheel stalk.
> Instead, the automaker is detecting the rain through its Autopilot cameras and automatically adjusting the speed based on the strength of the rainfall.
> If the driver wants to adjust the speed, they need to do it through the center touchscreen.
> The driver in Germany was adjusting those settings when he lost control of the vehicle and crashed.
> The driver in Germany was adjusting those settings when he lost control of the vehicle and crashed.
Yes, user error. He should have used the physical button or voice controls instead. I mean, when driving, the first rule is pay attention to the road.
Anyone can snipe and nitpick, but in actual use with responsible drivers the system works great. With irresponsible drivers, all bets are off, as with any car.
As well as automatic and voice controls.
As with any car, if the driver chooses to look away from the road for any reason, they have to be responsible about it, and they did have other options here.
Sure there are people who also hit cruise control on a 96 Accord and expect it to drive itself, but Honda never told them that would work. These are the kind of realities Tesla should responsibly deal with as a mass market manufacturer, but they don't want to take the PR hit to accept accountability and potentially have to refund millions of dollars for a feature that doesn't work as advertised. They'd rather blame the drivers for as long as they can get away with it.
This is a common misconception, easily avoided by getting some firsthand experience owning a Tesla.
We literally do not use the touchscreen for driving. And for that matter, almost not at all while driving.
As with any tool there will be those who misuse it and put others at risk. I look forward to hearing you give even a single example where a human driver was not to blame. And, preemptively so you won’t waste your own time, I don’t mean citing links where if you dig in you find that the link does not support your case.
It’s true that over time people will learn to rely on controls less and less. The world has been through similar transitions with horse and buggy -> car for example. There will be accidents along the way but the end result will be a world with far fewer accidents.
Its possible there is a better way to get to that world, but I haven’t thought of one. Perfect systems do not just spring up out of nowhere.
So a software update has never changed the order or location of user interface elements?
> I look forward to hearing you give even a single example where a human driver was not to blame
There are at least 3 known cases where autopilot failed and someone died. (Also note that no one has died from the failure of Waymo or SuperCruise driver assist tech.) Here are a few articles in the past few days on the same subject.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/business/teslas-autopilot...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2021/04/20/tesla-a...
https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/fatal-driverless-...
The NTSB has also outlined the many issues with Tesla's autopilot feature.
https://www.ntsb.gov/news/events/Documents/2020-HWY18FH011-B...
> The investigation identified the following safety issues:
> - Driver Distraction.
> - Risk Mitigation Pertaining to Monitoring Driver Engagement.
> - Risk Assessment Pertaining to Operational Design Domain.
> - Limitations of Collision Avoidance Systems.
> - Insufficient Federal Oversight of Partial Driving Automation Systems.
> - Need for Event Data Recording Requirements for Driving Automation Systems.
As far as I know, Tesla has not even responded to this report. A good place to start heading towards that better world is for Tesla to demonstrate some accountability.
Depending how you falsely define "failure," Autopilot can be falsely said to fail all the time.
If you set an unrealistic bar, it can fail each and every second of every drive, according to some fallacious definitions.
Fully replacing the driver is not a claimed feature of the current system.
Future systems, sure. But current systems? Nope.
Therefore, as has been clearly stated in many places, the human driver is responsible for maintaining safe operation of the vehicle.
So, the human is to blame in these cases, not Autopilot.
> The Tesla Autopilot system did not provide an effective means of monitoring the driver’s level of engagement with the driving task, and the timing of alerts and warnings was insufficient to elicit the driver’s response to prevent the crash or mitigate its severity. Requirements are needed for driver monitoring systems for advanced driver assistance systems that provide partial driving automation (SAE Level 2 systems), and Tesla needs to develop applications that more effectively sense the driver’s level of engagement and that alert drivers who are not engaged...
> Despite the system’s known limitations, Tesla does not restrict where Autopilot can be used. Tesla should incorporate system safeguards that limit the use of partial driving automation systems (Autopilot) to those conditions for which they were designed...
> The Tesla’s collision avoidance assist systems were not designed to, and did not, detect the crash attenuator. Because this object was not detected, (a) Autopilot accelerated the SUV to a higher speed, which the driver had previously set by using adaptive cruise control, (b) the forward collision warning did not provide an alert, and (c) the automatic emergency braking did not activate. For partial driving automation systems to be safely deployed in a high-speed operating environment, collision avoidance systems must be able to effectively detect potential hazards and warn of potential hazards to drivers
Autopilot 1) failed to detect a distracted driver and engage them, 2) is not limited by Tesla to areas where it actually works, and 3) depends on collision avoidance which does not work. Tesla is claiming they will solve these problems without LiDAR. Volvo, Waymo, GM, VW, and many more claim that even semi-autonomous driving isn't possible without it. We'll see how many more people have to die before Tesla changes their mind.
It’s likely that implementing the suggested solutions would add more problems than it solves. For one thing some of them would exacerbate one problem you seem to be concerned about, driver overconfidence and over reliance on the system.
So while these bureaucratic opinions are fascinating, like many such committee driven conclusions they should be taken with a grain of salt. Tesla has thought things through pretty well.
Ultimately the best solution for now imho is to keep full responsibility with the driver.
> So while these bureaucratic opinions are fascinating, like many such committee driven conclusions they should be taken with a grain of salt. Tesla has thought things through pretty well.
Every other driver assist technology limits its own scope to prevent over-reliance. That's because those companies (Subaru/Toyota/GM/Ford/Volvo/BMW/VW) are working with regulators across the world to develop and adhere to standards. If Tesla's solution was better, you'd have some numbers to back it up instead of a bizarre assertion that industry experts are suddenly clueless when they are part of a regulatory body.
Tesla has created an unreliable semi-autonomous system and made it available before it's ready against the advice of the NTSB and other regulators. That is irresponsible and people who would have otherwise been paying attention have died because they, like you, assumed that "Tesla has thought things through pretty well."
Much like an IT department that fights tooth and nail against a third party security audit, it should be obvious why Tesla is so dedicated to pretending that there isn't a problem. They don't want to admit autopilot isn't ready, and will likely never be dependable until they have proximity sensors in addition to cameras like every other solution does. They'd rather blame the drivers for relying on the technology they just paid for. It's a ridiculous defense that will ultimately fall apart.
BTW about FSD I don’t expect it anytime soon. I paid for it (yes twice!) to support the company at a time when it was in a fragile financial state. It does give me some small benefits for now but I do look forward to more in the future. I don’t know how it will turn out but I’m thrilled to help do a small part to enable awesome futuristic technology! And to support a company that is not brain-locked sticking to the playbook of a committee of fuddy duddy old world car thinkers.
Can you think of a better way?
Really. The obvious (bad) answer people come up with here is "just wait until it's perfect and release it then, and only then."
But I don't see how that's realistic. How, in your mind, could that possibly work?
Step 1 is to not sell something called Full Self-Driving/Autopilot when it can't do either of those things. Step 2 is to develop a reliable system (per NTSB advice) to make sure the driver is paying attention. Step 3 is to make sure it's only active in the domain where it can be trusted. Step 0 is to not do anything else until your collision avoidance works as well as your competitors.
Consider these differences:
"Subaru EyeSight Driver Assist Technology" -- with disclaimer about not being optimal in all conditions
"GM SuperCruise hands-free driving-assistance" -- with a similar disclaimer
"Tesla Full Self-Driving" -- and their disclaimer is "Full Self-Driving is in early limited access Beta and must be used with additional caution. It may do the wrong thing at the worst time, so you must always keep your hands on the wheel and pay extra attention to the road. Do not become complacent."
The marketing bait and switch is pretty common, but this is "Thanks for the $10,000 USD for Full Self Driving. It doesn't work. Don't trust it. In fact, pay extra attention while it's on."
I have never seen the tech community so excited about paying to be alpha testers for technology that is literally killing its users.
I don’t agree that the system is killing its users of course. That kind of inflammatory wording doesn’t help anything imho. The users are possibly contending for Darwin awards… they are doing it to themselves.
Examples: IBM with IBM PC, Apple with iPhone.
And we all know how many IBM PCs IBM has sold over the past decade.
I think that IBM might actually be the most apt analogy for Tesla. 20 years from now Tesla will be a niche player in the market they built basically from scratch.
If Tesla goes out of business and sells itself to an Asian automaker when EVs have completely conquered the transportation landscape, I'll be OK with that :)
All that being said, I'm far from confident enough in this prediction be to be actively betting against Tesla.
But all these EV sales come at the expense of gas/diesel sales, so I think it is a bad idea to consider EV's as a separate market.
It's unrealistic to expect that Tesla would continue to dominate the EV market forever. It is realistic to expect that Tesla will become a significant player in car sales globally.
How could Tesla become a significant player in the overall market without being much more significant in the EV market, which is a small subset of the former?
Eventually, virtually all vehicle sales will be electric. This will happen faster in some regions than in others.
How can Tesla be a significant player in car sales globally, when as a percentage of EV car sales, they are decreasing?
Think about it for a second and it will come to you. As more cars turn EV, unless Tesla maintains their marketshare, they will become less and less significant. They've lost marketshare in the first year that the major car companies have introduced reasonable EVs. Their 2nd derivative is negative.
Tesla is valued at 3X Toyota with having a fraction of the sales. What happens when the EV market becomes fully realized, but Tesla isn't the market leader but a small player. Do they still deserve to be 3X Toyota's market cap?
No, that's not neccessarily true at all.
Let's imagine that in 2021, EVs are 2% of car sales globally, and Tesla has 50% of the EV market. That means that Tesla has 1% share of the entire car market.
Now imagine that in 2031, EVs are 50% of car sales globally. And Tesla's share of the EV market has "shrunk" to 20%. But that's still 10% of the entire car market. Even assuming no market growth, that's an enormous 10X (1000%!) sales growth for Tesla over 10 years!
Even though its share of the EV market has shrunk, Tesla is selling 10X more cars and is a far more significant company in 2031.
* 0-100km/h times
* Range
* Charging network
Only recently competition is shifting focus to electric cars and more and more great EVs are being released. For example the new Hyundai Ioniq 5 is a car I personally would prefer over a Tesla.
So Tesla is doing great but I think they are becoming 'just another car brand'.
Maybe once the charging network becomes as saturated as gas stations are range can no longer be an issue, but we're nowhere near that point outside of major cities.
If you're going on a weekend getaway then the difference between 4-6 hours of driving and 8-10 is huge.
I live in Croatia and have dark memories of standing in front of gas stations on the highway in the summer and waiting for +30 minutes in the heat to do 3 minutes of gas pumping. I wonder what sort of problems will EV driving tourists be going through in the next few years as they become more popular.
Renting a big nice car for a 1 week holiday (so ~10 days) sets' you back 1000$, which is a bit over the average net monthly income over here. You can rent a small shitty car for much less, but then you might as well just use your own car.
If money is not an issue, renting a car, picking it up, etc. is a bit of a pain. Since money is not an issue, you might as well spend more on a better car that doesn't force you to do this.
Very very few are going to buy a car that forces them to spend one month full of salary to rent a different car for larger trips.
The real reason more people don't do it, is that a car is a status symbol and most people like wasting money on it. Musk knows that and uses it for his PR. And of course still not many people are used to the new cost pattern of electric cars.
You can probably re-sell it 4 years later with 100k km for 6k EUR.
There isn't an electric car that can compete with this today.
You could buy a Tesla 3 for ~30k EUR, and then rent at 500 EUR every 3 months (being extremely cheap), and in those 4 years, just the renting almost matches the entire price of the VW Golf.
For the numbers of the electric car to even make sense long term you'd need cheap ass electricity, which at least in central Europe you only get if you charge at home. The moment you charge outside, gas is almost always cheaper than electricity.
That still leaves insurance, repairs, etc. on the table. Repairing a popular car like a Golf is dirt cheap.
It wouldn't be a big deal if charging time was < 5 minutes.
I do occasionally (once per month or two months) go somewhere that's 800km away.
Driving at 180-200km/h avg speed and refueling once that's a 5 hour trip.
If I have to drive at 120 km/h and charge multiple times I'm looking at > 8h trip or more.
I also drive to some places at 300km distance or so for the weekend, and these places might not have a charger close, and/or harsh conditions (e.g. some small village in the Alps).
I'm a bit skeptic that I can do a round trip to those without charging, and even if I charge, i'm skeptic that at very cold temperatures the battery will hold up well for the last 50-80km part of each way in which there might not be any charging stations (e.g. holding charge for 200km over the weekend or a full week at less than -20 C).
Also, in Europe, a significant chunk of the population rents and lives in apartment buildings, often without parking spots, which means you can't charge an electric car over night. Combine that with few charging stations and waiting at a charging station at 6 am for 1 hour is something people having electric cars actually do talk about. So if your commute is 80km, you probably want 800km of range to only have to charge the car once per week.
Also, charging in the street (there are very very few parking spots outside that do have charging) is extremely expensive (much more than just using gas).
Maybe all these fears are unfounded?
But in a nutshell: battery kilometers at high speed, battery holding at very cold temps for a week, and the ability to cheaply charge at night are what I see people talking the most about, when discussing electric cars.
In pretty much all discussions, diesel cars just sound like the better deal (they are cheap right now).
As for driving at 200kph, that's just dangerous (unless you're in a no-speed-limit autobahn, where at least other cars expect you to go fast), not to mention fuel inefficient. By all means, please go ahead and crash your car, that's your risk, I guess. The snag is that you share the road with other users and you can kill them too. So don't be a selfish prick and please drive safely. Either way let's assume most people just want to go at 120kph.
Numbers for China are harder to come by, a quick search yielded [2] which states around 120,000 stations in 2019.
So, extrapolating from those two data points, I still think "millions" is a bit too many-sounding.
1: https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/quizzes/answerquiz16.shtml
2: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190226005504/en/Chi...
I never said its impossible, I said that right now they are not there.
In the 18th century, without proper roads, between the choice of a car with wooden wheels and a horse, I'd have 100% of the time would have bought the horse.
---
> As for driving at 200kph, that's just dangerous
No, it isn't. Driving 120kph in the autobahn is more dangerous than driving 200kph. You are forcing everyone that wants to drive at the recommended speed of 130kph to overtake you with 10 kph speed difference, blocking 2 lanes. Add a truck to the situation to block a 3rd lane, and you have just created a big blockage in the highway, which is what causes most autobahn accidents. This makes _you_ one of the biggest dangers to others on the high way.
> Not to mention fuel inefficient.
It is, however, very time efficient.
If you want to trade fuel efficiency over everything else, walking is better than using a car.
The moment you decide that walking is not "fast enough" you are already making a trade-off between time efficiency and fuel efficiency.
Just because your time is worth less than most people's time and you prefer driving at 120kph, 10kph below the recommended speed, does not mean that most people agree with you. The traffic guidelines actually disagree with you, which is why they recommend at least 130kph.
---
> Either way let's assume most people just want to go at 120kph.
The recommended autobahn speed is 130kph. The slowest lane usually goes at 140-150 kph.
I don't see the point of making an assumption that's clearly incorrect.
> By all means, please go ahead and crash your car, that's your risk, I guess.
If you think that driving at 200kph is dangerous, I have to assume that you never took highway driving classes as part of your driving license, most of which force you to drive at high speed. A consequence of doing this is that your comfort speed goes up with enough training, so when you are actually driving at 160kph or so, you are driving 20% slower than what you are trained to drive, which makes it actually much safer.
If you only were trained to drive at 120 kph, and have never received trained to drive substantially faster than that, you are always driving at 100% of your training / skill level, which means small mistakes have larger consequences than if you have a 20% buffer of error.
So arguably, _you_ should be driving at 100 kph through national roads, instead of driving on the highway until _you_ receive proper training.
There were no automobiles in the 18th century.
> No, it isn't. Driving 120kph in the autobahn is more dangerous than driving 200kph.
Yes, it is. Data shows accidents increase with speed, yes, even in autobahns, let alone in highways with speed limit.
Also, you were talking about motorways/highways in general, the overwhelming of which have speed limits, and not about autobahns in particular.
> 130kph has to overtake you with 10kph difference
I used 120 as it's the highway speed limit in most of the world. Replace 120 with 130, the point is driving at the speed limit. You are talking about going 200kph, so I don't see what you're trying to get at here.
> Just because your time is worth less than most people's time and you prefer driving at 120kph, 10kph below the recommended speed, does not mean that most people agree with you. The traffic guidelines actually disagree with you, which is why they recommend at least 130kph.
Ahahaha, what the hell is your problem. I drive the speed limit instead of driving like a maniac because my time is not so valuable as yours?
> The slowest lane usually goes at 140-150 kph. I don't see the point of making an assumption that's clearly incorrect.
Again, simple data falsifies your assertion. Measurements taken put the percentage of people going over 130kph in German highways at between 35% and 60%. So your "slowest lane goes 150" thing is hilariously off the mark.
> If you think that driving at 200kph is dangerous, I have to assume that you never took highway driving classes as part of your driving license
Again with the German exceptionalism? Yes I did drive on the highway to get my license of course. No, I didn't drive nearly twice the speed limit in those lessons.
> training, I'm such a good driver, stick to taking the bus until you git good
Nothing you can say changes the fact that higher speed means more risk of crashes. This is documented, and you are no exception. Everybody thinks they're great drivers so the rules don't apply to them.
---
Finally: in your previous posts you complained that electric cars can't travel at 200kph when the temperature is -20°C. Well if you're such a good driver you should know that it's reckless (and indeed forbidden) to drive at such speeds in such cold weather.
There is a lot of people from southern Europe and northern africa (morroco, algeria, etc.) living in central Europe (France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, etc.). There is a lot of people from East Europe (Poland, Ukraine, Czec republic, Croatia, Turkey) living in Central Europe as well.
How do you think these people travel to visit their families every couple of months ? They do 1000km per way trips with the car.
If you just have to cross Germany, you are not going to be driving there at 100km/h. I do 600-800km ways in Germany a couple of times per year, and do drive 220km/h everywhere where it is allowed and condition are good. Your average speed is never that cause traffic and so on, but over 190km/h average speed is doable if you travel at the right hours which I always do because... you don't want to spend 800km stuck on traffic.
Why not flying? Because while central europe has good airports, wherever they might be flying to might have an airport 3 hours away, requiring them to rent a car, etc. which as mentioned costs one month of net salary.
In Germany, for example, ~50% of the population rents. As a renter, its up to your landlord to retrofit your parking spot with an electric supply for your electric car. That costs money, and if the landlord says no, you can't do this yourself. Is not up to you.
Electric cars are more a "social problem" in europe than a technical one.
The average annual milage across the whole of the EU is 12,000Km per year, it's even lower in Eastern Europe.
Most people aren't making these sort of trips regularly.
You are an outlier.
I do these trips every 2 months.
My average mileage is 9,000 - 10,0000km per year.
I don't really know what point you are trying to make with average mileage or where you got that number from.
But average mileage doesn't say anything about the frequency and the length of the trips people do on their cars.
Most people I know don't have a car. The ones that do have a car commute to work via public transportation or bike. They only use the car on the weekends, or holidays.
So you don’t use your car for anything else at all during the year?
Either you’re misreporting how many times you travel (you said “a couple times” earlier) or your yearly mileage.
While hydrogen cars are less efficient I still think it will be a better option for the near future.
In a city like Stuttgart people have to park in double rows. Unless they can fully charge their EV in < 5 minutes those cars will never convert from combustion engines to a battery car. Hydrogen will solve this much faster than batteries.
You say that, but almost every single person I've given a ride to in my Model Y has come away from the acceleration portion of the trip amazed and wanting more. Older men, young kids, soccer moms, teenage girls, all get that breathy expression when you effortlessly pass someone on the expressway. And this is a Model Y, one of the slowest Tesla's on the market. A Model S P100D would have them cursing under their breath and pulling out their wallet; I know it did for me.
It's like building bigger and bigger cars than other ones on the road to "be more safe" but at the end everyone is driving around in tanks (except other traffic participants like pedestrians and bicyclists). Same with "i'm faster than you"...
Once we get rid of human drivers in all cars then the first part won’t be needed anymore. When that day comes, we will be safer but we will miss the fun acceleration of these days.
In any case in some situations it’s good to have the flexibility of both options, not just the braking option.
A part of that is the frequent software updates, and even options of updating the hardware. It makes customers feel like their car could get full self-driving eventually, even if it doesn't ship with it now. Maybe it'll never happen, but the effect on sales is real.
I would also prefer Ioniq 5 or Kia EV6. But if I cared about self-driving I would probably get a Tesla. And as the other commented pointed out, their software is generally way better than the competition, and that's really what's making me think twice about getting VW or Skoda, even though I like their new EVs otherwise. I will also make sure to go through reviews on the software and updates of Hyundai and Kias new cars before I buy them. I'm happy with my current Kia Soul EV even though it doesn't get OTA updates. They did upgrade to support CarPlay, which I was really happy with, but that's it. That's fine for a car with such simple software. But for a car with more advanced features like the ones coming out now, it's just not.
But I was impressed by how well the car could stick to the car in-front and keep the safe distance under all conditions including heavy rain at night. This is a mayor safety feature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_driver-assistance_sys...
They are more efficient and have more range than any of Teslas offerings:
https://www.whatcar.com/news/what-car-real-range-which-elect...
* Software
I kinda view it like Silicon Valley; there's nothing intrinsic about the specific place on the map that makes it a great place to develop software. But other places just can't seem to replicate it. I've heard talk of Silicon Alley in NYC but it doesn't seem to compare. I'm not sure it's possible to recreate SV somewhere else, just like I'm not sure it's possible to recreate Tesla inside GM.
Especially now with Android Auto/Apple CarPlay.
That used to be true. With self-driving technology I'm not sure that's true anymore. Tesla has even offered hardware updates to improve self-driving of older models. I haven't heard of anyone else doing that yet.
> Especially now with Android Auto/Apple CarPlay.
Eh. That's just infotainement, and cars can still provide significant value without using that. When driving a Tesla I don't miss CarPlay, and I rarely use it in my Kia even though it's better than the built-in infotainment stuff. Mostly just for navigation if I know it's a complex route. But again, I never miss CarPlay for navigation in Tesla cars because the built-in system is very good and always up-to-date through OTA.
Nobody has self-driving tech in production. What they do have is a combo of adaptive cruise control, lane keeping assist, lane changing assist and park assist.
Full self-driving tech is still at the basic research stage, just like cold fusion reactors. It could be out in 5 years, it could be out in 40. Nobody's going to "OTA" that.
Chances are, you will end up with the iPhone situation, where a 10-year-old phone is now essentially a brick - the software 'updates' just made things slower on the older hardware, if they support the older hardware at all. Do you really want that in your car?
For comparison, you can get a 20-year old car today that would work today as well as on the day it was made - mechanical controls still respond instantly, radio still works.
And then suddenly you find that the Teslas are a lot more expensive than they seem, because the depreciation will be more severe. Not only that, but I would question their green credentials if the cars are forced to become obsolete after N years.
Tesla's online manufacturing capacity at quarter-end was ~1.05M EVs/year (~600K/year in California, ~450K/year in Shanghai), which works out to a run-rate of 262K/quarter, vs. 180K deliveries in Q1.
The two gigafactories already in construction, Berlin and Texas, look likely to come online within ~12 months. They should add at least 1M more EVs/year in manufacturing capacity, bringing the max possible quarterly run-rate to 500-600K/quarter.
The four gigafactories already in development look like to come online within 2-3 years, and should add at least 2M EVs/year in manufacturing capacity, bringing the max possible quarterly run-rate to 1M+/quarter.
To catch up with VW, Tesla would have to add 10-20 additional gigafactories beyond the 2 already in construction and the 4 in development. And of course, they would have to find buyers for all those EVs, most of which would have to be low price-tag, entry-level, mass-market vehicles, like Toyota's RAV4 and Corolla, and VW's Tiguan and Jetta.
It's possible for Tesla and Musk to overtake the likes of VW in volume -- if anyone can, it's them. But it's not certain that they'll be able to do it. Success is far from guaranteed, given that all automakers are going 100% electric now.
It's not certain they'll want to. Much better to stay a higher end brand and focus on "fun" and exciting high end cars people (and other car makers) aspire to, rather than trying to out compete Toyota and VW in making Corolas and Polos.
Porsche, Audi, Bugatti, and Lamborghini are all part of the VW group. VW is majority owned by the Porsche-Piëch family.
Toyota has Lexus.
Selling only luxury cars sounds appealing in terms of profit margin, but the automotive industry has a lot of complex systems with high development costs where economies of scale come into play.
Tesla started pretty high end and are trying to move down into the mass market.
It will be interesting to see Q2 numbers - March sales seemed to be contributing most to the quarterly growth, but the chip shortage may effect production.
And that's a problem in a market with low margins that is about to be flooded with ever cheaper EV models. Petrol and Diesel cars are still important to a lot of manufacturers and that's market that is looking pretty grim right now.
Short term there are those manufacturers that have been planning and building giga factories (to build batteries and assemble cars) for the last few years and are bringing more online. And there are those who did not do that and are now struggling to secure battery supplies to match their ambitions. It will take them many billions to fix that. All while their existing ICE product lines are under increasing pressure.
The likes of Toyota, GM, VW, etc. will be very dependent on their ICE production for the foreseeable future. Of those, VW and GM are very serious about ramping up production capacity of course. Particularly VW looks like a solid contender for the #2 position behind Tesla short term at this point (that's their own stated ambition even). But still, most of their sales is still ICE vehicles and that's just not a growth business at this point. Lower margins, lower volume, and the threat of obsolescence decimating the second hand value.
However, the real threat to manufacturers is coming from China. Cheap mass produced EVs are already a reality there. There are multiple manufacturers there producing very high quality products that are looking to start exporting. 10-15$K EVs in the current market would be highly disruptive to companies depending on selling lots of 15-20K ICE vehicles. That's why Tesla is looking to produce a 25$k vehicle in China.
Which most probably won't happen in 2021. Meanwhile, Tesla already dropped to third place in total EVs sold in Germany (a bigger EV market than the US), and place 4 and 5 have nearly the same numbers. I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla drops out of the top 5 in 2021.
> this will reduce both delivery time and costs (tax/tariff etc),
There are no tariffs between US and EU for car sales, and tax (vat) will be the same as before.
Less Tesla's are getting sold while other car makers have massive growth in their sales.
The real question is if Tesla has real plans to grow down into the Zoe category. the mass production of Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi, or Volkswagen group or Toyota is another ball park from what Tesla does today. Each of them produces about 10 Mio vehicles y/y, and the margins really are in the high volume there.
My personal bet is Tesla stays in the upper middle class and upper class vehicles, and is not the new VW/RNM/FCA/Toyota/FMC, but the new BMW, Mercedes, Audi. And Porsche.
The Porsche Tychan is a really compelling threat to the Model S, too.
I expected Musk-hype in this thread but nothing quite so ridiculous as these idiotic "analyses".
Reminds me of this:
Of course there is a ceiling which any product maker will hit eventually, but the OP made a prediction that Tesla could become the worlds biggest car manufacturer and the response to that was to label this an "idiotic analyses".
This reminds me of how Ballmer was laughing at Apple and literally 12 months later Apple was the leading smartphone maker and has been the most successful smartphone company to date and the first company in human history to even cross the 1 trillion valuation mark. So yeah... I wouldn't write off Tesla as becoming the largest car manufacturer in the near future and certainly not call it an idiotic analyses.
Do you see it now?
In any case, issue with Tesla is that's it's priced to just not be the leader, but the whole car market and then some.
If there are already trends that other car manufacturers area outselling Tesla, clearly trajectory is not towards even market lead.
Tesla needs to double their car production, every year, the next 4 years to get to the size of Toyota or VW.
How realistic is that?
Of course, at a certain point Tesla is going to stop growing exponentially. The competition is growing, the total car market is limited. But if Tesla is continuing on the current trajectory for 2-4 more years, they have a chance at becoming the largest car manufacturer in the world.
Edit: it has been pointed out that this is incorrect. Apparently, Leaf sold as much as Tesla sold in 2020.
Ford: 521,334 GM: 642,250 Toyota: 2.46 million VW: 2.5 million
If Tesla holds up they'll be larger than Ford in 2 years and be the largest automaker in the world in 4 years.