German automakers who once laughed off Elon Musk are now starting to worry
latimes.com
latimes.com
"Yeah, they laughed Elon Musk off so much that Daimler acquired nearly 10 percent of Tesla in the early days.
But at least they found an 88 year old (!) former executive of Daimler that dismissed Tesla."
"https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/4fmrrl/german_a...?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/4fmrt6/german_a...
(In fact, you could probably work out the approximate timing of this occurring using graphs of industry-wide improvements in Li-ion batteries and extrapolating when it will reach 4x today's capacity/weight and capacity/cost as a back of the envelope calc.)
1) They generally have lower drag numbers than gas cars.
2) Diastances in Germany are less than in the US, so you're probably not going to bomb along for as long of a time.
Yes, 15000 looks about right. That being said, it feels quite low.
About a third of the contiguous US has almost no people relative to the rest except for a few population centers (Intermountain West and Great Plains). There are several states with population densities higher than Germany, and quite a few within a factor of three, and naturally those will tend to have more people than the others.
So I'm not sure the median surrounding population density for an individual in the US would be that much different from Germany -- I'd think cultural factors, including public transportation availability, would have at least as much an effect on average distances driven.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/07/convoy-se...
But, backing up a bit. What percentage of the German auto market cares little for high-speed performance characteristics? I don't know, but I suspect it's enough to keep the whole formula in the 'worry zone' for German auto makers.
I'm not saying German carmakers shouldn't worry. I'm saying that they have a bulwark in their domestic market for a little while longer.
No, but the German expectation is of a 200kph car. So a 4 fold increase in the power consumption over American cars is quite reasonable. (Americans are just a bit north of 100kph on the highway. 100-120)
Higher speed/power consumption over shorter distances/times is actually bad for EVs, because the time spent waiting for recharge vs. driving is proportionately worse.
I think what Tesla achieved in this market cannot be praised enough: Not only do they build electric vehicles that are actually usable, they also managed to create a brand with a perceived quality that is on par with that of the biggest premium car markers in the world.
Every auto maker on the planet is heavily investing in EV technology. I'd say we're well beyond "starting".
Apparently the old minds of VW et al. are too slow to adapt. Let's see whether this situation becomes a giant slow-motion crash of German automakers (and therefore the German economy) or whether they can pull through with their promise to "not be the first, but the best" on the market.
Tesla does source its current batteries from Panasonic though.
a new company producing cars isn't doing much "from scratch", other than design, and the basic concepts there are also pretty well established. as far as i can tell tesla is producing the same basic product as everyone else except all the tech people are into it because of elon musk, where they probably hated or didn't pay attention to cars before.
I agree that Tesla's are an economic substitute for Toyotas but when you step into a Model S as a car guy you know it's different.
There's only two reasons I didn't buy it 1) I love road trips and there's one supercharger station in my province, and more importantly 2) I couldn't afford it. Tesla's are like BMWs you know they aren't that reliable, are really expensive, but there's nothing like driving one. Like BMW, it's a smiles per gallon car you buy it because when you step on it, it goes, not because it gets great gas milage.
in other words, same basic product as any high end fast car. this is coming from someone who has a high end fast car, is a car guy, has a 'brand', and has ridden in all the high end fast cars.
they're all basically the same.
musk is a car guy and lives in LA (bel air), car capital of the known universe. he's a genius for recognizing this market angle.
Right - the i3, which is the only electric car BMW makes, and is shaped like a prototypical, onion-parody of an electric car.[1]
Here's a prediction:
Another 5 years, on top of the prior 5 years, of car-show prototypes and concept cars, with cutesy sub-brand "i" and "e" monikers, and nothing to buy but hybrid cars with little chainsaw engines inside of them.
[1] ... although, I will say that the interior of the i3 is very progressive and well done. Very impressive.
I'm a big fan of industrial design/architecture/automotive design and try to study it extensively, albeit at the hobbyist level. My all time favorite cars are probably the 1973 Porsche 2.7RS and the 1960 Aston Martin DB4GT Jet by Bertone. I only say this as proof that I usually have what most would consider fairly good taste in cars and yet the i3 might be one of my favorite sub $100k cars released in the last few years.
I admit that it tends to photographic poorly and BMW has a habit of painting them some very unflattering colors, including some really weird two tone colorways. The first time I saw the i3 in person it was painted a "unique" burnt orange/copper color and I thought it was hideous. Then when I finally saw one in person painted dark grey with nicer wheels my opinion completely changed.
I also really like its size. I work right next door to Tesla's design studio here in Hawthorne and I can barely cross the street without seeing a model S. While I like the overall body shape there are a number of things that I strongly dislike such as the chrome accents around the windows and much of the front fascia, not to mention the large size. The i3 seems much more forward thinking to me from a design perspective. I’ve never actually sat in or driven one though.
I’m curious if you or others wouldn’t mind sharing what you dislike about the i3, hopefully I haven’t completely lost my sense of style.
I live in the SFBA and therefore see a lot of these in person.
It's not that, by itself, it's a bad design - it's that it follows in a long, almost comical line of "things that look like electric cars" - sort of like the Mercedes B class. As I say, if you were mocking up a typical electric car for the onion, you'd come up with basically that.
The model S has, in my opinion, a LOT of design shortcomings, but what is notable about it is that it's just a car. It's not a future car or a weird car or a thing that looks like an electric car - it's just a normal car-looking-thing.
I grew up in SF and still visit family a couple times a year and I'm always surprised that I don't see very many Tesla's in SF, at least in my area west of Twin Peaks. I've seen more i3's, I wonder if the smaller size is more attractive to SF residents. Meanwhile, whenever I spend time in Manhattan Beach I can barely cross the street without almost getting run over by a model S.
I live in Marin and it is tesla-city here. Everyone has a model S. There are intersections where multiples pull up at the same time.
I've also seen 8-10 model X cars in the last week or so.
Unrelated: the other "it" car in Marin seems to be a diesel powered BMW X5 or diesel porsche cayenne, which is just baffling to me. Why anyone would want to visually "see" a brand new modern car, but aurally "hear" a badly maintained lawnmower is beyond me.
You'd think these rich marin moms would be more discerning, but what do I know...
I didn't realize these modern diesels still sound terrible, are they really that bad?
You know the somewhat recent Jetta TDI (2.0 ? 1.8 ?) that's really, really loud ? They're not quite that bad. But they're loud, and the loud they make is an antique loud. A non-precision loud. Noises that nice new luxury cars shouldn't make.
I am in europe regularly for rsync.net and the diesel A6 and A8 (among others) are not any better.
It's really just a terrible aesthetic. I don't know why people put up with it.
Much like the auto sector, it seems that German industry is able to compete on quality and efficiency, but not on innovation.
The beer itself is still the old recipes, brewed under the Reinheitsgebot.
Big Brew simply made a shitload of money by selling unsuspecting Americans stuff that a German wouldn't even want to smell, much less drink, and then bought up German breweries to teach them proper brewing.
During prohibition, the breweries went out of business and the brewers found other occupations. After prohibition, the new breweries that popped up produced beer of much lower quality. They found that the American public was just happy to have beer, and was way less picky about the quality of that beer. You'd think that after only 15 years of no beer, the former quality would be re-established, but I guess there wasn't a market for it anymore.
Same thing happened in California with the wine industry. It took decades after Prohibition before good quality wine returned. Those re-established wineries were producing some pretty terrible wines in their early years.
I have previously owned an M3 and driven a few other German sedans, mostly BMW. They are much more confidence inspiring. But I still reserved a Tesla Model 3.
The article made lots of assumptions about what the Germans are upto without actually finding out. Great journalism.