Porsche's Electric Mission E Is Poised to Compete with Tesla's Model S
wired.com
wired.com
No it isn't. Tesla's Model S is in production, and has been for two years. Porsche's Mission E isn't even near production yet. Even the details about the production car's final range and horsepower seem to be tentative. The only serious advantage the car would have over the Tesla would be the 15 minute charger, which apparently isn't finished yet.
The Mission E looks much, much better than any Tesla model.
However, I suspect they will change the front bonnet design significantly in order to comply with pedestrian safety standards. Which would be very unfortunate for the aesthetics of the vehicle.
The Tesla appeals to a different class of person who is purchasing a car for different symbolic reasons.
Initially, the Toyota Prius 2nd Gen was panned for its ugly look, but ultimately its distinctiveness became a marketing point as it became a status symbol of its own right - as evidenced by Honda copying it in its 2nd generation Insight.
The subjective qualities that define the 'desirable look' of the Misson E may be rejected by some segments of the Tesla market.
modern 911s only vaguely hint at the originals. the size difference alone is enormous. http://a3.files.airows.com/image/upload/c_fit,cs_srgb,dpr_1....
The Model S looks have never been wonderful, nor distinctive. It's a great car. It's just not a great looker. The Porsche is a looker. We'll have to wait and see how the finished product performs.
One guy said, "Do you want to drive it? Other guy responded, "I've had a few--and just don't want to risk a DUI. You know how they are here."
I thought it was a slightly weird conversation. The vehicle just looked like a typical four door sedan. Typical for this area.
When it drove by, and I couldn't hear the engine, I realized why they had that conversation. My inner thought, while sitting on my tailgate of my old truck, was if I won the lottery---I would buy a yacht, and a Tesla.
Of course--a few good friends, to enjoy the toys, is the real wealth.
Hence the word "poised" as in it will at some point compete with Tesla.
Given that (a) the Tesla S has a pretty cheap looking interior, (b) Porsche is a premium brand with exceptional design sensibilities and (c) Tesla has limited distribution channels I suspect Porsche will easily be a match for Tesla.
When Porsche enters new markets they usually do so with very solid products e.g. Cayenne, Macan.
Supercharge is free for tesla owners afaik why can't they charge other ev owners, this seems to be both lucrative and savvy as it will solidify their tech as the standard which will give them the edge since they control its life cycle.
There was a tesla promo in the business center i work at and I got finally a chance to sit in one and considering the 100k> GBP price tag it has in the uk it didn't feel like a luxury car at all.
Even tho the display model had their best interior the leather didn't feel as good as entry level German cars and the nice carbon fiber inlaid dashboard just felt cheap and squeaky.
The interior of the tesla is to me pretty much the same quality of most higher end sedans like the accord and the Passat not anywhere close to luxury car levels.
Yes, but since it's scheduled for 2019, it will compete with Tesla's 2019 lineup, not their current 2015 lineup and models.
> Given that (a) the Tesla S has a pretty cheap looking interior, (b) Porsche is a premium brand with exceptional design sensibilities and (c) Tesla has limited distribution channels I suspect Porsche will easily be a match for Tesla.
Agree, but in the same way that Porsche has four years to figure out how to get the thing working, Tesla has four years to improve interior quality.
Not saying Tesla can't fix these things, but they are real issues.
The plastics and leather are simply low quality compared to what you see in high end cars. And there is a lack of refinement in the finishes and the spacing of the various components.
And by 2019 Tesla probably will have something similar.
There is a certain class/mindset/attitude of car buyer that even if they don't have a tesla now is just never going to buy a ICE car again. It doesn't matter the price or the specs or the this or the that - the ship has sailed and history has moved on.
The problem is, there were no options other than the Tesla. Or at least, no options that weren't, essentially, onion-esque parodies of what electric cars are (I'm looking at you, super lame mercedes B-class).
So it is great, great, great news that there will be more than one car to choose from.
What? The target year for this planned Porsche car is 2019.
What I mean by that is car companies are geared-up and used to introducing new and seriously updated models every year or two. They go through many iterations and designs, have hits and misses. And they sell millions of cars per year in the process.
In another year or two the Model S will feel, well, dated and old. I have to admit having had this very thought. I've been considering purchasing one for the past year and was going to make a decision in January. And I keep running in circles with multiple arguments in my head.
First there's the "this look is getting old" argument. Sorry, superficial, but, hey, that's the way it works. This this wasn't a real-life criteria we all use to buy cars they would still look the way they did twenty years ago because nobody would care.
Then there's the interior. As others have pointed out, not the best. I'll just leave it at that.
I find my self less interested in a car who's outward and interior design is already several years old.
I am not interested in a Tesla because I am a fan boy. I am not. I would like an electric car because I have a nice solar infrastructure at home that I designed to be able to support two electric cars. I also want to stop burning fossil fuel for transportation. I am also very interested in lane-keeping or auto-pilot technologies while on a highway. And, finally, it is a business decision based on facts: I find myself driving quite a few miles per week and, if you do the math, going electric just makes sense.
Then there's the question of battery technology. I can't help but think we are not very far from a shift in battery technology. I, frankly, don't want to find myself in two or three years with a US $90K Tesla sporting an outdated battery, outdated exterior and outdated interior and a tough resale landscape because Toyota, Nissan, BMW, Mercedes, Porsche, Ford, GM and even Yugo (raise your hand if you remember them) has a pure electric with 200+ mile range for $40K.
All car companies know how to make electrics. It ain't that difficult when compared to making IC cars. In fact, if you already have a well-tuned infrastructure to build the rest of the car efficiently --which all other car companies have in droves-- building an electric car is actually simpler.
Tesla's SUV? Please. It's a joke.
Why would any of those companies leapfrog Tesla in battery technology when that's literally Tesla's core competency and they're poised to become the largest battery manufacturer in world?
There are companies, much larger and far more experienced than Tesla who have been working on battery technology for far longer.
I've been flying model airplanes for thirty years. When electric flight was in it's infancy we used heavy NiCd battery packs. I had competition gliders with six pounds of NiCd batteries occupying a huge volume.
Fast forward to a few years ago (about a decade?) when LiPo chemistry started to become available. Today I fly that same glider with a battery pack that is half the volume, a third of the weight, four times the energy content and probably twice the power delivery capability.
Tesla didn't do that. Companies like Sanyo, Panasonic, Samsung and other battery makers did that. The primary market probably being portable computers and later smart phones and all manner of small portable devices.
I doubt these companies have been sitting around doing nothing. They all know the next major market for them is in electric cars. Tesla does not manufacture their own cells, therefore it is probably safe to assume the next major evolutionary step in battery technology is likely to come for those who's core competency for decades has been energy storage chemistry.
That said, Tesla and SpaceX are known for their out of the box approach to engineering. There's no reason to think that, perhaps, they might have a unique take on cell chemistry that might be that next-generation battery pack with twice the energy in half the volume. That remains to be seen. Here's the thing with physics and chemistry: They tend not to change just because you are a maverick. There's a lot of knowledge out there and Tesla does not have a monopoly on that.
Don't get me wrong, I would love to see a US company own the next generation of battery technology. I just think that isn't likely to be the case.
Competition is a great thing and I'm looking forward to the benefits it brings (lower price, faster innovation, etc.) but I'm just not sure that Ford, Toyota, BMW, Porsche, etc. will be the ones that provide it. I think we might be looking at a sea change, like 100 years ago when all the carriage coach manufacturers tried to make cars. They will try, but the new upstarts will beat the pants off of them.
This Wikipedia page has number on various models:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automobile_sales_by_mo...
For example (units sold):
Audi A3 3,000,000
Audi A4 5,000,000
BMW 3 series 9,500,000
BMW 5 series 5,000,000
Chevy Camaro 4,800,000
Corvette well over 1,300,000
Chevy Impala 13,000,000 sold over 1,000,000 cars in a single year
Chrysler Minivans 11,000,000
Fiat Punto 8,500,000
Ford Escort 20,000,000
Ford F series 33,000,000
Ford Model T 16,500,000 ...just for fun
Ford Mustang 9,000,000
Honda Civic 16,500,000
Mazda 3 4,000,000
Mercedes C Class 6,900,000
Mercedes S Class 4,000,000
Nissan Sentra 15,900,000
Toyota Corolla 40,000,000
Volkswagen Golf 30,000,000
What all of these companies are waiting for is for the financial equation to bend in favor of electric vehicles. That means storage technology with somewhere around a 4x gain over current state of the art. In other words, twice the energy in half the volume and probably half the cost (or less).
The minute that battery technology becomes available all car companies will absolutely jump on it and we are going to see fantastic high-quality cars coming out of all of them at different price, performance, quality and sophistication levels.
When that happens Tesla will be in an interesting spot. They lack the capital and manufacturing horsepower to go toe-to-toe with the giants. My guess is they'll remain a luxury e-car brand and produce a new car every three to five years or so. Perhaps they'll have a parallel battery business, if an only if they can compete with the like of Samsung other other giants who will surely have economies of scale in their favor when manufacturing new storage technologies.
I am concerned we might be at the footstep of a major improvement in energy storage technology and I simply have very little interest in getting stuck with an $80K Tesla nobody is going to want. This could very well be the wrong way to think about this.
As I said before, I am not a fan boy. I am looking at this purely from a financial perspective first. I am not interested in buying another expensive toy car, I already have the fire-breathing twin turbocharged fun cars. To me an electric is what I would call a working car. It has to make financial sense. It has to pay for itself within a reasonable period of time. I am not going to buy one because I am in love with Tesla, that is a stupid way to make financial decisions. And that's the problem with an $80K to $100K price point if we are at the edge of a step change in technology as well as other vendors coming online with viable options for less.
Where is Porche's supercharger network? How will you charge the car in 15 minutes when there's no supercharger available?
What change in technology is coming down the pipeline? The so-called "Lithium-Air" battery requires a store of liquid Oxygen (which is not "air" but don't let the facts get in the way of a headline), then there are the Aluminium batteries which are nice in the lab. Getting a technology from the lab to production is a decade-long effort, assuming there's anyone interested in commercialising the technology.
There are incremental changes to Lithium batteries, with a new manufacturing technique promising more capacity and a different process promising batteries that last "forever".
The market for Tesla Model S and Model X right now is people with cash to burn on a status symbol that will be current for at least two years.
When the Porche E comes out, the market will already be different. People will be used to the idea of electric cars, there will be more charging stations at all levels, and hopefully we'll have something closer to an industry standard for charging.
Let's revisit the numbers when the Model 3 is out.
Tesla has done a great job snowing everyone about creating a new industry when they've done nothing of the sort. Electric cars aren't new at all. As an example, go back to EV1.
People need to stop this delusion about electric cars somehow being special or difficult. They are EASY when compared to internal combustion cars. It's just an overgrown RC car, or electric forklift or golf cart. What, you think controlling hundreds of horsepower electronically is somehow special? Please, there have been electric machine, like backhoes, that are electrically powered for decades. How about massive electric cranes?
Electric motors and their control is well understood science. In fact one of the "bibles" on the subject, by Kenjo goes back decades. Not much changed. Same with switched reluctance drives, depending on how you look at it they go back anywhere from 30 to over 150 years.
Then there's the business of the supercharger network. The future of electric cars depends on universally available charging facilities, just like gas stations. A single vendor charging system isn't going to scale when you have ten, twenty or fifty million electric cars on the road. And Tesla isn't going to build that network.
Tesla only has some 90,000 cars out there and you can read reports of people having problems at supercharging stations. According to Tesla, they have over 500 supercharger stations. If we extrapolate from there, in order to support the over 250 million cars on the road in the US (if 100% of them were electric) you would need nearly 1,500,000 supercharger stations. That is so far beyond a single company it would be ridiculous to even begin to assume it would be a possibility.
So, BMW and others don't have a supercharger station problem at all. The 500 Tesla installations in place right now are a mere rounding error in the installed base required to support massive deployment of electric vehicles.
My guess is that charging will become far more distributed as technology advances. Once you have $30,000 cars that can go 600 miles on a full charge the game will change significantly. People will charge at home, work or while shopping.
You happen to be making my argument. The reason the large car makers haven't jumped in isn't because they can't make electric cars. They can make them just fine. They can run circles around Tesla. No, the reason is that the costs are too high for mass adoption and the infrastructure would cost even more. When the equation is at the correct balance point they'll jump right in, en masse. Tesla will either sink or swim, I don't know. A lot will depend on what they are standing on when that happens. But, it will happen.
Regarding Model 3. If Tesla can build it, so can everyone else. And they might be able to do it better and cheaper. There is no magic.
I don't hate Tesla. Not at all. I simply choose to do my best to be objective about the options in front of us today. In order for a Tesla to make sense financially you'd have to drive it about 100 miles per day and do so for business purposes in order to have tax advantages. Much below that and you can do far, far better with a good IC car from many brands. Once you get to the point where you only drive 20 to 40 miles per day there are a number of electrics with 20 to 80 mile range that make far more sense than a Tesla.
Now, if the purchase of a Tesla is about obtaining a badge indicating one is a member of a club and to simply feel good about the appearance of being environmentally responsible, hey, you know, maybe the $100K is worth it.
At one point my wife and I were seriously contemplating buying a Model S and a Model X (one each). That was until we did the numbers and it really started to not make very much sense. Then we sat in one and the interior was, well, it didn't compare well to our German-made cars at all. And then the Model X design started to be shown about and it was a total joke. It just stopped making sense. Sorry. That's my reality. Others might be perfectly happy. It isn't about money at all, they just don't make sense.
Not another charger! I suppose the Porsche market isn't filled with range-anxious commuters, though.
It is part of the Volkswagen group which means the combination of Porsche, VW, Audi could put some market weight behind the charging implementation.
One of these days I'd like to know why there are no (well known) one-motor-per-wheel proposals.
So much fun to be had with trajectory control ...
Tesla current beats them on almost all marks:
310 Mile range: This is using the UK cycle which is commonly compared to EPA cycle(which is lower). Using UK to UK you get:
- ~320mi range P90D / P90DL
- 350mi range 90D
- P90DL: 2.8s
- P85D/90D: 3.2s
As for the 15min charging. We haven't seen it in production at all. Also the fact that they're going with 800 VDC pack means there's a good chance it won't work with any other DCFC standard(CHAdeMO, SAE Combo, SuperCharger) without a step-up transformer so you'll be limited to only Porsche's chargers.
Also you can buy a Tesla today, not years down the line.
I really don't understand where all this "Porsche is going to beat Tesla" press comes from, it's like Apple claiming they were the first company to support Open Source, there's nothing to back it up.
By contrast, if I type "Porsche" into Google, I get a huge list of resellers and dealers. I have no idea which ones are honest, dishonest, which ones do repair, which ones only sell used, which ones I'm going to have to haggle at...
You are on a technology news site, and you are seriously arguing against buying a Tesla because you don't know where their nearest store are, despite this being trivially easy to look up on the internet?
Here. You buy them here: https://www.teslamotors.com/
You can only buy a Tesla in a handful of countries. I can buy a Porsche in most of them through Porsche itself and through their dealership network. The distribution channel of the existing car manufacturers is very hard and costly to recreate.
> there's nothing to back it up
Porsche has a proven track record.
Again, you are comparing the dealer network of Tesla today, with the dealer network of Porsche today, despite the fact that you cannot buy this car yet, and have no way of knowing whether or not it will be offered throughout their entire dealer network.
That's area where Porsche can compete easily.
Anyway, main problem of Tesla nowadays and in 2019 is to build enough car. They are like if Apple in 2007 could only produce 1 million iPhone slowly ramping up to 4 millions in 2015. So Porche could very well "beat" Tesla, simply with a larger production capability. Anyway, that's all good for us and even for Tesla as it grows the market.
What other brand can do to Tesla is forcing them to chose their target market. Either they step up against Porsche as a luxury brand. There is plenty of room in the market for load of constructor - see the current market for reference. Or go for the premium market (i.e. what they are mostly, even if slightly expensive ), which is actually quite a good market (BMW Serie 3/5, ...) but they will need to seriously ramp up their production.
Also, if you don't want to wait for a Tesla there's plenty of inventory/CPO ones available.