Why do they assume auto makers will just sit there and do nothing?
I have seen far too many "projections" that assume nothing will change - they are always wrong, and thus worthless (unless it's your job to make the change).
I have seen far too many "projections" that assume nothing will change - they are always wrong, and thus worthless (unless it's your job to make the change).
For most of the history of the automobile, the UX was standard and very simple. Now there's a major expectation-resetting going on. The UX of a Tesla is not something that just can be bought from a third-party supplier and bolted on like a fuel injector or axle or radio. At best, the software departments of big automakers are accustomed to building embedded systems. Making the transition to will not be easy.
I want tactile controls (knobs and levers and pushbuttons) I can use by feel without taking my eyes off the road.
And, of course the UX of a Tesla is something that just can be bought from a third-party supplier and bolted on like a fuel injector or axle or radio. It's just a matter of hiring some smart developers. Many readers here could probably do it in a weekend ;-).
to adjust heating/volume/switch song/etc i don't need to lose focus on road, i just know which knob to turn or which button to press. I know by experience that when i look at central panel, nuke can blow in front of my car and my eyes would barely register it since it's not in my direct focus - very, very dangerous.
it feels much more premium to have dedicated physical controls for all required tasks. fuck tablets in cars, it's horrible idea that should be put only into cheapest cars, or straight forbidden.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM1-Yh5fwB8
Building a good embedded touchscreen UI is not so much rocket science as it was just 5-7 years ago. There are a lot more people with the knowledge nowadays - because of the mobile app revolution.
The iphone appeared as soon as the hardware shrunk enough to be able to support it. Earlier tablets failed mainly because the hardware just wasn't capable enough.
The car itself is a complicated platform with many components. How they communicate will affect how easy it is for the developers to build reliable, secure, components. (e.g. braking systems preferably shouldn't be open to everyone https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...).
Then you have the cloud aspect, which allows users to access car data and functionality from apps, allows the car manufacturer to do analytics, etc. Now you have a car company that's responsible for running safety-critical servers in the cloud. Again, this leads to huge variation in reliability, developer experience, and security (e.g. your car's climate control is best left to yourself and not everyone else https://www.troyhunt.com/controlling-vehicle-features-of-nis...).
TLDR Software is eating cars.
Because the hype will be with the new, and auto makers will be perceived as "old" even if they release electric cars, which will be tough because they're already behind Tesla.
Everyone wants to have that Tesla, and no one wants a Blackberry even if the newer versions have touch and have all the features of an iPhone.
It happened in the smartphone industry, with taxi apps etc. etc. It's hard to shake off widespread public perception short of reinventing yourself which is possible, but quite rarely seen.
The car manufacturers don't appear to be ignoring tesla at all. In fact, Tesla is being outsold by more than one of the "old" companies electric cars today.
If you have to compare it to phones, it's much more similar to iphone vs android. Android might not have been first, but they responded quickly.. a variety of phones/cars allows manufacturers to meet the requirements of more market segments.
At the end of the day, Tesla/Apple can only offer a handful of models.. if you don't like it, you're choices are the large variety produced by Android manufacturers. That virtually guarantees Android will have a greater market share than the iphone/Tesla.
Powerwall clearly is not a complimentary product of a car. If it was wildly successful, it would have had minimal effect on Tesla's car sales, while having a significant effect on it's battery production.
Similarly, SolarCity (which is merging with Tesla) increases demand for batteries.. but again, has little effect on their car sales.
In fact, the one thing all of their products share in common (solar, powerwall, cars) is that they increase the demand for batteries.
Tesla may be a car manufacturer.. but it would easy to think their primary business is actually batteries.
And, while Tesla cars might be bragworthy and worthy of showing off to your friends, house batteries are not. All that really matters is cost and efficiency.
Also, existing EV owners don't have an EV <> Household bidirectional interface connected, and I'm not aware of any serious vehicle manufacturers claiming they will do this. Probably because if the battery has an X kilometer / Y year warranty, how does using it as a household power reserve affect that warranty?
Here in Japan, Nissan has been advertising the capability on TV, and the equipment is available for general sale
An X Km warranty is just an X KWHr warranty in different units.
It's like storage, only it costs almost nothing: all you need is a lot of cars with overly-large batteries plugged in, and a little predictive software.
I mean, doing 1500km travel (which i do 1-2x per year) would mean 4 hour drive, then couple of hours of forced wait, again drive and so on? completely useless
If you regularly drive more than 300km, then yes, ICE vehicles will remain your only option. But if you are a suburbanite or city-dweller who has a typical round trip commute of 70 miles or less[1] then in the very near future a Tesla Model 3 or equivalent will be the economically rational option for you to purchase.
I think about buying a EV in the same way as I would think about choosing the number of bedrooms in a hypothetical house purchase: do I overpay for a house with one extra bedroom, in the rare case I have relatives or friends once or twice a year, or do I offer to put them up in a nearby fancy hotel for that rare case? Similarly, do I buy the car that fits my needs for 95% of my day to day driving, is economical to run, and rent a car when I need the extra range, or do I overpay day to day for the rare edge case where I need that extra range?
Then again, plenty of people choose ridiculously oversized SUVs to drive their kids to school so we shouldn't expect drivers to suddenly become economically rational in their vehicle choice.
> I mean, doing 1500km travel (which i do 1-2x per year)
which is it? Things you do once or twice per year are exactly what the GP is talking about. Rent a car that can.
Besides, I believe the Model S can go for about 400km at 130 km/h, so realistically you'd have two half-hour breaks at a supercharger. It's not so bad if you combine it with lunch / coffee. If you were to take the recommended driving breaks (at least 15 minutes every 2 hours) and increase the interval from 2 to 3 hours (because people who do 1500km pushes probably don't take as many breaks as they should), then you end up with 30 minutes more. That's not ideal, but not too bad either.
If an EV supports 120V outlets, then chargers are already more common than gas stations by many orders of magnitude. Fast charging is a different story... But for long road trips, taking a break for a couple hours every 400 miles doesn't sound like a bad idea, and we already have ample rest stops along most highways.
People like to make it sound like cultural problems are insurmountable. Sometimes, that may be true. Other times... we just have to suck it up and realize: The future is already here, and it requires change. Personally... I'm excited to get away from a gasoline automotive economy -- at least electricity is agnostic as to the source of EMF.
(In fact, a whole bunch of car batteries hooked to the grid sounds a lot like distributed energy storage required to smooth demand curves...)
And then you don't need to go out of your way to buy gas!
But, that considered: I see a lot of stories about developments in rapid charging. IMO, in about 5-10 years an EV will be able to charge to 90% capacity in 10 minutes.
That's about as long as I spend at a gas station when I drive long distances. (I usually go to the bathroom, stretch my legs, ect.)
that's assuming people have more than one car. a person can get a rental car, this is added mental task that you're asking a person to do. if you're requiring the user to think/work you're going to lose a lot of users.
That's the marketing angle that will be played, obviously for people here in a general socioeconomic sense there's no problem affording an EV and no problem getting a rental at the drop of a hat anywhere on the planet. Like claiming those airplane thingies will never catch on because people don't like renting cars and we are all familiar with suddenly having a transoceanic or cross continent travel dropped in our laps so we'll all be forced to live on houseboats or something. I mean, everybody travels all the time, so no body should be permitted to own a car that isn't for travelers, right?
The marketing push we can all look forward to is exhaustive explanation via legacy TV commercials and perhaps product placement on sitcoms, etc, that only poor people can't afford to rent a car for weird long trips and being poor isn't cool, so that'll kinda take care of itself.
Unless, like many people in my city, you park on the roadside because your 19th and early 20th century houses don't have carparks.
Having an EV-only inductive charging parking spot every here and there might help in the future (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_charging#Electric_ve... - it's coming), but probably will neither be cheap to retrofit nor very practical.
This is an issue that needs to be solved for EVs to become practical here.
Unless you forget to plug the car in the night before.
Unlike switching the lights off you have to get out of the car to plug it in.
If the car is going to beep before you get out then it's not a reminder for something I've forgotten,as with lights left on, it's just irritating UX noise, like the "don't forget your mobile phone" message. After a very short time I go blind to that.
If it's an alarm on a mobile/smart watch it's still a tedious chore to have to plug in a car when it's raining or I'm in a rush or I've parked in a spot without a charge point.
People _will_ forget to charge their cars, just as they forget to charge their phones and they will be late because of it.
If purely electric cars are to be brilliantly convenient everyday repacements for fossil fuels they'd be better with either some kind of induction charging, fast charging that doesn't take hours or hydrogen fuel cells.
If we had better ways of splitting hydrogen we could "fast charge" anywhere water and electricity is available.
But no, it's not a huge issue. New cars seem to come with apps nowadays, so as you said your car can just send you a notification to your phone if you haven't plugged it in five minutes after arriving back home. And maybe another one if it's still not plugged in before you go to bed.
Unavailability of charging (see sibling comment) is a bigger issue that won't be as easy to tackle. But reminding users to charge their car isn't what's hindering EV adoption. You can be late if you forget to fill up your petrol car, too. That can easily take ten minutes if there's a bit of a queue.
...in Silicon Valley. Tesla is far smaller than you think. The market and mind share outside of extremely wealthy sectors of the country is miniscule. Nobody where I live has even heard of them (unless, of course, you are a technically inclined forum reader).
HN seems to think Tesla has already won (even though they can't profitably produce a vehicle), and that everyone working for the auto majors are old, stodgy, and stupid. But I'm betting otherwise. I think they see that the writing is on the wall, and they're allowing Tesla to do much of the leg work.
No, this hasn't been "debunked".
Have you ever looked at what all the auto majors spend on R&D? Do you you think that it's $0? Both GM and Ford spent $7 Billion on R&D last year. Tesla spent under $1BB. Yes, those old, stodgy, do-nothing companies outspent Tesla by a factor of 10-1 on R&D. This is a heavy R&D based industry.
> no one wants a Blackberry even if the newer versions have ...
I agree that there is a hype aspect to this, but I don't think it's the whole story. You rightly point out that it's hard to shake off widespread public perception short of reinventing yourself. I think that in many cases the perception is earned.
As is often pointed out, there are many aspects of the iPhone that are not original to Apple. Tesla isn't the first company to come out with an electric car. I don't think hype alone is going to have people shelling out tens of thousands of dollars for a new car.
What prevented the established companies from putting out compelling products themselves? After all, they already have experience in the industry. Clayton M. Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma" discusses this in part. And once you've lost the perception of being competitive, you're playing catch up on both marketing and product. Ouch.
Much like how Red Bull completely replaced Coca-Cola.
Or that time Microsoft was replaced on the desktop by Ubuntu.
Or that occasion when the Segway killed off bicycles.
Sometimes the incumbent wins. Sometimes they don't.
Making sweeping generalisations across all competitive landscapes in all industries isn't a very effective method of forecasting in particular industries.
I'm not even sure this is the case. Tesla, with AP2.0, seems to be starting from scratch. New cars will have no autonomous features. I'm not convinced they have a technological lead over other players in what is becoming a saturated space.
More broadly I think you are right, it's hard to see where the different groups really stand from the outside.
I agree, this was a pretty slick move all around. Add the hardware (which is simple and cheap), collect data, iterate on the technology, and sell it now as a "game-changer" and "upgrade". Elon has a knack for packaging things like this.
The Honda Insight hit big Western markets before the Toyota Prius around the turn of the century, but ultimately the Prius became the most popular hybrid vehicle.
What customers want in a car is different from what they want in a phone.
The (original) Honda Insight was a tiny 2-seater of a car, more tech demo than "ordinary" car, and perhaps it's the gift of hindsight but the Prius' popularity for with people that own one car, as a 4-door 5-seater car vs a non-sportscar 2-door 2-seater car seems all but guaranteed. (How many people do you know that own 2-seaters vs 5-seaters?)
Similarly, the vast majority of smartphones these days are (unfortunately) glass bricks, as first popularized by Apple. There were other interesting designs out there, but ultimately the iPhone design became the most popular smartphone design.