Traditional auto manufacturers need to bring the buying process to this century, but that would sour their existing sales pipeline. I believe this conondrum is called ”local optimum”
The coast-to-coast test drive of a fully self-driving Tesla is four years late and counting.
When true self-driving is approved by regulators, it will mean that you will be able to summon your Tesla from pretty much anywhere. Once it picks you up, you will be able to sleep, read or do anything else enroute to your destination. You will also be able to add your car to the Tesla shared fleet just by tapping a button on the Tesla phone app and have it generate income for you while you're at work or on vacation, significantly offsetting and at times potentially exceeding the monthly loan or lease cost. This dramatically lowers the true cost of ownership to the point where almost anyone could own a Tesla. Since most cars are only in use by their owner for 5% to 10% of the day, the fundamental economic utility of a true self-driving car is likely to be several times that of a car which is not.
Base AP is really good on its own anyway.
Um, you are admitting that you can be scammed. If you don't understand loans, yes, you can be scammed. Don't admit that.
The last new car I bought: I walked into the lot, said I want that one, and took the lowest interest loan for 48 months. I didn't want a 72 month loan. I didn't want an extended warranty. I was done with the sales person in 15 minutes, and done with the finance department in 45 minutes.
It's all in how you manage the situation. If you waffle and flake and can't decide, or don't understand loans or pointless "extras", then you're toast.
The whole point is that buying a Tesla doesn’t involve this pointless, anti-consumer, borderline lying, slimey process. People shouldn’t have to worry about being scammed when making one of the largest purchases in their life. The traditional dealership model is terrible for your average consumer. Why on earth are you defending that?
Were you that desperate for a car immediately?
I'm not defending slimy car salespeople, but I'm not siding with your wishy-washy behavior.
This is such a weird hill to die on.
TSLA absolutely deserves credit for making this happen, but like the namesake Nikolai Tesla did the hard work and Edison swooped in a took all the credit.
What an odd thing to say. They are at around 1 million cars/year versus Ford's 6 million/year, GM's 6-8 million/year, and Chrysler's 2 million/year.
So Tesla is in the same ballpark of volume as the US big 3 already.
Unless you mean the top 3 worldwide auto manufacturers Toyota, VW, and Hyundai, which aren't /that/ much higher in volume (10.4mio, 10.4mio, and 7.2mio respectively).
That's the difference between making $100,000 a year or $720,000 a year (or $1,040,000 a year).
Yeah, that's a big difference.
If you look at their timeline for EV scaling, its laughable.
And sooner or later the ICE market will collapse and expose the terrible economics on their EVs.
Turns out mass manufacturing ICE engines doesn't actually magically make you good at batteries.
Tesla growth will have them overtake companies like BMW and Geely within 2 years. 1-2 years after that they will overtake Ford and friends. By then GM might have lost another million of so in sales as well.
By 2025 Tesla will be one of the bigger car makers on the market and will be 100% electric with their own batteries, while most current EV makers will not even be at 40% electric sales.
You are totally misguided on how easy it is to make batteries and EV a commodity. And you assuming that other manufactures can magically do it better then Tesla despite a huge amount of evidence that they simply can't.
> will be 100% electric with their own batteries
And their own mines. From my casual reading, only the Chinese manufacturers will have comparable integration, economies of scale, efficiencies.
Even so, I think you are still understating Tesla's many competitive advantages.
The biggest one, IMHO, is Tesla insurance. As Warren Buffet has shown with Geico, this is among the lowest cost capital available. Meaning Tesla will have even better financials than their competitors.
It's such an obvious idea. It still baffles me why GM chose loans over insurance, GMAC, all those years ago.
But I agree, they have lots other potential income streams.
I visit a gas station about once a week for maybe five minutes, that’s another “I guess that would be nice”, but it doesn’t bother me and I would probably visit the convenience store part anyway, so it’s not worth any kind of electric car premium and I’m not sure about the downsides - what if I forget to charge at home overnight, getting a charger at home, what do I do when there’s a hurricane and no power for weeks, etc.
Also, this is not limited to electric cars, but I have one car with a bunch of controls moved to the touchscreen and I’m never doing it again.
Even when I do hear about Teslas (I do not see very many here), people seem much more excited about the "it drives itself!" (invariably all have been majorly oversold on the capabilites of autopilot) and almost never mention the EV part. I do think automatic cruise control and lanekeeping are nice features particularly on very long drives, but those two in particular are widely available now.
If I ever (can afford to) buy an electric car, this is actually the strongest selling point for me. It's enough of a reservoir to keep my most important electronics powered up for weeks.
And of course, where I might be able to get in the car or my old beater truck, drive 50 miles, and come back with 50 gallons of gas, generator running for my family all the while, I guess recharging the battery would be...a much more troublesome venture. If gas stations have trouble with capacity during those times, then the length of the charging time is going to have a massive disparate impact on the lines on charging stations. It's going to be nightmarish. And I also have to think about husbanding my car charge so there's enough to leave and get recharged...
I think the "car as backup generator" is a fantastic idea for those unpredictable short blackouts that happen once in a blue moon, just not for hurricanes. I probably would buy an electric car before I bought an automatic whole-home generator.
In my area smog and air quality from exhaust is not a concern. I don't worry myself with climate change because it is not only inevitable, but an inevitable part of living on earth. We can try to shift and reduce our impacts, but we cannot eliminate them, and at any rate it's much too late for the CO2-caused climate change concerns. My buying one more ICE car does not matter. It doesn't affect my consumption behavior or that of most other people.
I think a good example to look at is how the hybrid market has shifted since the Prius. Toyota blew everyone out of the water for years, but sales have plummeted in recent years as competition has caught up. Rivian has even less of cushion since the electric F-150 is due to hit dealerships next year.