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Comment by belltaco | Hacker News Reader

>Why do they assume auto makers will just sit there and do nothing?

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.

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The difference is that Blackberry spent years ignoring the iphone, pretending they didn't need to change anything.

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.

I have a feeling Tesla is a battery company that makes cars to prove a point and generate demand for their batteries.

That's reductive, even if it does indicate the competitive edge tesla has.

I agree.. but it's interesting to think of Tesla in that way.

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.

More battery production -> lower battery prices -> lower car price -> more car sales.

Powerwall doesn't make a lot of sense. It's about 30-40% more expensive than other batteries that were on the market when it came out.

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.

If you already have a Tesla you effectively have a powerwall too. All you need to do is plug it into your home circuit and store whatever energy you want. If the car isn't moving it's just a huge battery. The extra hardware required to convert the energy in the batteries back to household power is pretty trivial, and it shares major characteristics/components with the electronics in the power module of the inverter driving the electric motor in the car.

I don't see the point of that either. It'll just wear out your expensive battery more quickly. And to what end?

One thing that doesn't wear out your battery at all is a smart controller that charges your battery when energy is cheapest. So all that excess night-time wind energy can be sopped up, not to mention that day-time excess solar energy for cars that plug in at work.

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.

In addition to the sibling comment, I'll add that I don't want to have think about whether my EV is at 100% or 30% despite it being connected to the charger for the last 12 hours since I got home from work the day before.

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?

Obviously if you need a full tank you'd unplug your house from the car. But the point of the Tesla car is that, like a gas car, 30% tank is enough for 99% of the days of the year.

An X Km warranty is just an X KWHr warranty in different units.

> I'm not aware of any serious vehicle manufacturers claiming they will do this.

Here in Japan, Nissan has been advertising the capability on TV, and the equipment is available for general sale

http://ev.nissan.co.jp/LEAFTOHOME/index.html

Some Tesla cars have more capacity built in than you can use. You can unlock the extra capacity by paying more. They could use that as distributed storage.

Chevy will probably be the largest electric vehicle manufacturer in a year or two. They're #2 right now, and the Chevy Bolt comes out soon. The Bolt is a useful car, the price is affordable, it has more range than the Tesla Model 3, and the Chevrolet Division of General Motors has a track record of building large numbers of cars at low cost.

I think range anxiety is over-played because 1. people don't drive for long distances all the much anyway and 2. battery capacity improves 8% year on year, within 9 years it will have doubled and it will be a moot point.

But what about when you do want to drive a long distance? Unless you just want to drive in circles around a major metropolitan area where charging stations are plentiful it's going to require having a planned route/schedule and sticking to it. That's a huge decrease in utility compared to a vehicle you can fuel up anywhere. Unless chargers become close to as common as gas stations EV range will have to be greater than that of traditional vehicles.

> Unless chargers become close to as common as gas stations [...]

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.

Charging a 60 kWh battery in two hours requires average power of 30 kilowatts, i.e. about ten times more power than available from a regular household outlet. So you really need proper fast charging infrastructure.

Relative to the feed going into my house (not just a standard outlet), that doesn't seem too bad. People like to make it sound like electrical distribution is some giant hurdle... I don't see the problem.

What happens when thousands of people all get home from work at around the same time, and then plug in their cars? There's your problem, because most populations aren't going to be wanting brownouts.

The solution to overnight charging is potentially even more trivial: Smart grid-aware chargers (if Nest can do it, so can your car); surge pricing; eliminating individual car ownership in the coming autonomy craze.

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...)

This will be a non issue in less than 5-10 years.

Same thing you do when you own a sedan and want to go on a big camping trip or move to a new apartment. You rent a journey-approppriate car for the rare special case.

you would be surprised how many people do need long distance travel, and not just once or twice per year. for me and quite a few people I know, till electric cars can make at least 800km in single push of 130 kmh real traffic, they are useless as private cars. it will come, but maybe in 5-10 years.

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

"Completely useless" is way too strong.

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.

[1] http://www.statisticbrain.com/commute-statistics

> you would be surprised how many people do need long distance travel, and not just once or twice per year.

> 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.

I'm sure if you're taking a long trip, you'll stop somewhere long enough to charge the battery. Anywhere where you park for a long time can have a charger. A hotel, restaurant, or theme park are examples of places where you will park long enough to charge.

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.)

People aren't anxious about the range for their typical commute, they are anxious about rare or unforeseen long-distance trips.

Exactly. This is why range anxiety is the issue and not just range.

They just need to be reminded that they can rent a car for long trips. Some car sellers even bundle in a gas-car rental stipend with the electric car purchase.

This is an inconvenience that doesn't exist with gasoline cars. Sorry, no sale.

Renting a car for certain uses that don't fit your model? That exists with gasoline cars.

Range anxiety is enormously overrated. With an EV you wake up every single day with a 100% full charge. This is rarely mentioned for god knows why. Also, for the rare long range trips you drive your non EV.

>you drive your non EV

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.

"rental car"

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.

i don't think it would get that far. we're living the intersecting of type of cars and ownership of cars. if it's a play on status i see Uber and such services dominating this marketing space. why rent and drive yourself, only the poor drive themselves.

> With an EV you wake up every single day with a 100% full charge.

Unless you forget to plug the car in the night before.

That's a minor UX hurdle. The car can beep at you if it isn't plugged in, like it beeps of you leave the lights on.

Well you can down vote me all you want but it's not a UX problem that's been solved so far and it's a legitimate factor in range anxiety.

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.

You need a Tesla robotic charger snake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMM0lRfX6YI :) (it's only a prototype for now).

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.

> With an EV you wake up every single day with a 100% full charge.

Unless, like many people in my city, you park on the roadside because your 19th and early 20th century houses don't have carparks.

This is a big problem in many European cities. Many people in cities (and just about all in city centres) don't live in a house, they live in a flat. And while the newer ones in very large cities often do, most older apartment buildings don't have parking garages. I think my neighbours would be mildly annoyed if I were to lay a 30m power cable from my third floor window to my (hypothetical) EV somewhere close to the house. Not to mention the strangulation issues for those nasty pedestrians on the sidewalk in between house and car.

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.

This. You can't turn an aircraft carrier on a dime but if you get it turned around in time you usually win.

I also think that Tessa lead is overestimated due to the cult of personality around their CEO. Particularly around these parts. GM was making electric cars in yeh 90's.

The SV Echo Chamber loves to worship its own.

Yeah - the Bolt's going to be a nice car. I'm leasing a Spark EV now (more or less a prototype Bolt sold as a CARB compliance car) and it's a fun lil' car.

>Everyone wants to have that Tesla

...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.

I've seen a lot of electric cars. I've seen one Tesla ever, and I saw it at the end of a long road trip to the Bay Area.

I see a lot of Teslas around Seattle.

On the other hand, here in the Northern Europe, people even outside of tech circles talk about Teslas and recognize them on the streets. But I very rarely hear people talking about other electric car models. I think Tesla has already tremendous global brand for such a young company.

And how many people recognise Teslas direct competitors? Audi, BMW, Mercedes, etc.? :)

Of course more people recognise the old guard, but that wasn't the point. The point is that Tesla already has a significant global mindshare in electric cars despite the fact that they have only sold less than 200K cars to date. I bet I'm not far off when claiming that almost everyone who is considering of buying a full electric car has heard about Tesla.

This has been debunked already. They can profitably produce cars but have chosen to double down on investment to grow and create new technologies. They are a hardware startup and can't scale "easily" like a tech startup could.

>This has been debunked already.

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.

That bigger companies spend more on R&D has nothing to do with whether Tesla is able to turn a profit.

> Because the hype will be with the new ...

> 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.

Established companies ARE putting out EVs and getting better at them every year.

> 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.

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.

No, more like Apple almost accidentally killed Nokia (with a little help from Microsoft and Samsung).

The point being:

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.

GM is shipping a (practical) mass market electric platform in a few months. They are apparently behind Tesla when it comes to autonomous features, the Bolt looks to be competitive with the Model 3 as a daily driver and will beat it to market.

>They are apparently behind Tesla when it comes to autonomous features

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.

They have a non zero chance of activating it in cars that they are selling now (or at least in the near future). You can't do that trick if you don't commit to the hardware.

More broadly I think you are right, it's hard to see where the different groups really stand from the outside.

>You can't do that trick if you don't commit to the hardware.

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.

If only it wasn't ugly as fuck.

The model 3 is no beauty queen either.

Not necessarily.

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.

> Honda Insight

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.

Good point.

The first generation Prius wasn't exactly a hot-seller. It was still a compact car and the battery pack reduced the utility even more. The second-gen was the home-run for Toyota. It was about the same size as a Camry for not much more money and a lot of additional utility, especially around 2008-2009 when gas prices were absolutely crazy.

What are the other interesting designs?

I would have no problem buying an 'old' car if price/performance was right, as would many others, not to mention that outside of hipster circles people value old brands as reliable and trustworthy. You can't comparre brands like VW and BlackBerry.

Nobody wants a Blackberry... but hundreds of millions want Samsung, LG etc. etc. etc.

Not everyone wants a Tesla, that's just absurd. There will be plenty of buyers across the price range from cheap Asian commuter cars to mainstream Ford and GM to luxury BMW and Mercedes EVs.

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