Then, it turned out, people bought them by the hundreds of thousands, single-handedly recreating the market for EVs.

Then, other manufacturers noticed, and started realizing they might be left behind if they didn't take EVs seriously.

Now, sure, there are many competitors, but even still they have only been built in small quantities.

How long Tesla's edge will last is an open question, but there's no question that Tesla has single-handedly exploded the demand for EVs in the consumer vehicle market.

Otherwise, Nissan would have been Tesla. They have produced some of the first practical EVs, way before Tesla did. Unfortunately, they made them for the Japanese consumer, not for the average american. At least not initially.

I love my LEAF, but a little over a dozen times per year, I have to trade cars with my spouse to accomplish some particular day's driving.

But I don’t think Nissan would’ve been Tesla: they didn’t think people would pay for a full-range EV (and still don’t, looks like?) and didn’t prioritize it. For many Americans that means the LEAF could not be their only vehicle.

The supercharger network also played a huge role in normalizing EVs, in particular in making the Tesla Model S the first car you could convince yourself was a great car that “happened to be an EV”. The S isn’t perfect, but it doesn’t have any huge, obvious EV-related deficits, like the LEAF’s range and charge time.

To this day, GM sells that "direct competitor" with a ~55kw charging limit.

Tesla is what made the other manufacturers realize that people were willing to wait 15-25 minutes on DCFC while road tripping electric cars.

Tesla created the market for high-performance EVs. They did not create the overall EV market. The high-end market is only a small part of the numbers.

If “high-performance” means “can handle the daily driving needs of > 50% of the population” then I guess you’re right, Tesla only created that market.

The Zoe also had a 150km+ effective range, which is more than enough for most people (maybe less so for Americans).

Tesla’s chief designer himself: “We are past the idea of an environmentally friendly vehicle needing to look different. People don't want to sacrifice anything, including style, to own an efficient car.”

You definitely had to compromise to own it, on almost everything aspect. Despite everything else, people were buying it because it was electric.

But my point is that could do everything an American expects a baseline car, like a Honda Civic, could do - it worked as a car in addition to being electric, which is more than can be said for the Leaf and Zoe, on range and charge time concerns alone.

> But my point is that could do everything an American expects a baseline car, like a Honda Civic, could do - it worked as a car in addition to being electric, which is more than can be said for the Leaf and Zoe, on range and charge time concerns alone.

Sure, at 100k$, which is too much for what an American expects of a baseline car. I am sure Renault and Nissan could have done it to if they had multiplied the price by 4, but then it would defeat the entire purpose of a practical everyday car. It's like saying that Ferrari makes practical every day cars because of the GTC4Lusso.

Let me ask you this: The Model S outsold the Leaf and the Zoe, and helped launch a new car company that has now sold more BEVs than any other manufacturer. Why do you think that is?

One possibility is that they made EVs that many people wanted to buy, and people bought them. I'm proposing that this is the case, and the fact that the Model S sold well despite costing $100k is an extremely strong indicator of this.

New EVs, even those from established manufacturers, are emulating Tesla, not the Leaf or Zoe.

Without Tesla, we may have had many Leaf or Zoe-like vehicles, but given how uptake of those vehicles went, it seems unlikely that we'd be where we are today -- in California, in 2021, BEVs were ~10% of all new vehicles sold.

Personal opinions of the cost or style of Tesla's EVs aside, one can't deny that Tesla made EVs attractive in the eyes of Californian consumers, and as goes California, so goes the world (for better or worse).

Also the Renault Zoe looked just like the Renault Clio, that is, a normal car.

It is my belief that those "competitive cars" wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been for Tesla.

Do you realize how bad that is? People had to adapt to the S limitations.

At least those were new markets.

At the end of the day you can't explain love and people love Elon Musk. Guys from all over the world are in a sort weird parasocial relationship with the guy. That never happened with the CEO of MySpace and BlackBerry

Worship and bashing/hate are the domain of the crazies/extremists/zealots who are a vocal minority, really a small proportion of the world. Most people thankfully are more balanced and rational in their perspectives.

The Leaf and the 3 basically met in the middle at the same time at about the $45K price point for similar cars.

Tesla was only first in the category of outrageously expensive cars for virtue-signalling rich people who fake-care about evironmentalism. And fake self-driving.

Looked at another way, if the LEAF and 3 cost the same, would many people have bought the LEAF?

Their recharge network still sets them apart as well.

In many industries, you can see these "bar-raisers."

Starbucks didn't invent coffee, but they created a mass market for a more premium sort of coffee in a country that previously didn't see coffee as something more that a thing you chug down in the morning so you can wake up.

Nintendo didn't invent video games, but they raised the bar for home consoles after the "great video game crash" and have repeated the feat several times since despite rarely if ever being on the cutting edge of tech.

And so on.

Tesla did something similar. Previously, electric cars and hybrids were seen as dorky and decidedly uncool by most. Tesla changed that public perception. It's hard to imagine the "luxury" electric car market existing without them. Perhaps another company might have accomplished the same feat, but Tesla was the first one to pull it off.

From a raw innovation standpoint, these advances are huge because by creating new market segments, they ensure a flow of money into those markets. Tesla's expense has paved the way for billions if not trillions of dollars into EV R&D and battery R&D. That matters, a lot.

Tesla brought glamour and practicality to a field stymied by boredom and theoretical concerns. They pledged to build an EV people would actually want to use, bringing all the latest tech to drive UX with no regard for tradition. They set to solve consumer problems, and they are succeeding in doing that.

I don't have an interest in Tesla nor do I particularly like Musk, but objectively speaking, they must have done something right - they started a mass-car company from scratch in the third millennium, something very very hard; they popularized a technology that had failed to get traction for decades, and have taken the fight to behemoth corporations that had been bearish on the sector's overall future since the '90s. That simply cannot be just marketing or "gimmicks".

The "supercharger" network is something that no other manufacturer was doing or was seriously interested in doing, and it's an extremely practical concern.

> When the IC companies convert over

... a lot of them they might well end up buying batteries from Tesla. Tesla will also continue to be the benchmark against what EV will be measured, in the same way Ford continued to be a reference for decades after competitors matched them.

Everyone else has to buy to cover the 99% pctile or they’re screwed when they need to do something somewhat unusual (long drive to grandmas house, move, vacation, family emergency, whatever).

And for those who say ‘just rent!’ - I’ve tried, and most of the times you’d want to, you can’t get a rental, because a bunch of other folks got there first! Rental companies can’t buy enough cars to handle peak usage a few times a year.

If 90% of the time one can own a median vehicle wherein they never have to go to the gas station, the vehicle lasts 1,000,000 miles, they aren’t emitting CO2, and gas prices go past five dollars…

it might be common sense to use the savings from the situation to rent vehicles to satisfy the other 10% of your needs.

But hey, maybe your idea of common sense is to sit around 16 feet in the air with 120 mph winds blowing against the side of your moving brick.

EV was, at best, a curiosity and definitely nobody's main focus, until Tesla first showed EV cars are not golf carts (with the rooadster) and then that they can be a desirable higher-class sedan (with Model S).

If Tesla went bankrupt today, we'd still be firmly on the path to phase out ICE cars.

This was totally unconcievable just a few years ago. Tesla did that.

I would say that the advance in battery technology, the laws introduced by state of California and north european countries did more than Tesla ever did.

Also the Renault Zoe, still top selling EV cars in europe, had her first concept car showed in 2005 and was on sale only 5 months after the Model S in 2012. The Leaf also predates the Model S.The 1st generation Tesla Roadster sold poorly like most other contemporary EVs and most of the sales happened in her last year in 2012. It was as niche as all other EVs in the market in its first 3 years of commercial life. The Mitsubishi i-Miev and its Citroën and Peugeot variant outsold the Tesla Roadster by more than a factor of 10. Almost 30000 cars between 2008 and 2014.

What Tesla achieved was showing the wealthy people they could greenwash their way to the same energy wasting life by going EV. A good publicity stunt.

Look at i-Miev and the Roadster and tell me which one do you think a typical car lover would love more. If you think that would've taken over the car market .. then you're definitely not in the same circles I am :-)

Other car makers started paying serious attention only when Tesla inexplicably didn't go under and Model S started to be a success.

>Look at i-Miev and the Roadster and tell me which one do you think a typical car lover would love more. If you think that would've taken over the car market .. then you're definitely not in the same circles I am :-)

The car industry do not care what the typical car lover love more. They have been a dying breed for more than 3 decades. The i-Miev and derivated counterpart sold 12 times more than the roadster because they are actually usable things and not enthusiast toys. It even outsold the Model-S in all the other markets than USA when they were both available.

The Model-S,X,3 and Y success came much later. The automotive industry definitely had a more cautious approach in the upper end segment but they weren't sleeping.

As to why - ICE dealers didn't want to lose recurring revenue streams and ICE manufacturers didn't want to disrupt the means through which they would service the loans that they took out to build out their present ability to manufacture at scale. The incentives were perverse and in some cases still are perverse enough that the ICE industry has to be forced to help kill itself off, rather than dying willingly because it is right.

It's the same reason they aggressively pretend Apple didn't spark the smartphone revolution (when it all very obviously derived from the iPhone and its dramatic impact, right down to the design of the phone and interface being copied by everyone else).

It's the same reason if you say the US invented the Internet here on HN, you'll get confused replies by people from outside of the US that are entirely ignorant of that fact, because of foreign revisionist history and the desperate desire to deny the US credit for its vast accomplishments (the America bad brigade). The same goes for eg the transistor, microprocessor and countless other prominent technologies that revolutionized the world.

It's still a business and it is tiny compared to the big players. Tesla is only a slightly better value than crypto given how insanely overvalued the stock is. If the company had an $80B market cap, it would still be vastly overvalued.

It’s currently undervalued at 10x that price.

Re being small: its operating income was greater than Toyota in Q1, and it has two new factories that are yet to ramp production.

The Tesla Roadster was developed around the same time, yet deliveries started in 2008. By the time Renault got around to actually making the Zoe available to customers, Tesla had been selling the Model S for 6 months. I don't think they were taking EVs particularly seriously if they took that much longer to put out a less sophisticated product despite having vastly more resources at their disposal.

Making the first mass-market EV was going to take multiple years, no matter what. You need to engineer the entire car, at scale, and you need to hit a price-point. Tesla didn't have such an issue. I can't stress enough how much more difficult it is to make an affordable product than one where price is no object.

Incidentally, these margins are also far higher than those of ICE manufacturers. For example, Toyota in Q1 had lower operating income than Tesla, despite having 4x the revenue.

So... like Apple?