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Comment by deepGem | Hacker News Reader

Yep. I am a Tesla shareholder and the growing short interest makes owning the stock all the more exciting.

Just because Toyota, Honda and the like manufacture gasoline cars at a large scale, one cannot postulate that they will overnight produce electric cars at the same scale. Assembly line retooling is a big deal.

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Tesla has the batteries, but they don't have the rest of the car. Honda and the like, even GM, can churn out new models built to very high standards much faster than Tesla. BMW is doing very well with pure electrics without much press. They are looking at shipping 100k electrics this year. Tesla may be the cool luxury brand in california, but BMW is in a different league in terms of build quality and worldwide acceptance. If tesla misses the "cool" factor, BMW is right their. That potential for upset is driving the shortsellers.

Personally, I'd never buy a car from someone as small and young as tesla. They just don't have the legs. I've been brought up to buy good used cars and drive them until they die. I expect 20+ years. BMWs, Mercs, hondas, even jeeps and Volvos really do last that long if you are nice to them. Until I see a 25yo Tesla driving down the road I am not a potential customer.

I was considering buying a Tesla a few years ago, but the finish and interior of any other luxury sedan blew the Teslas out of the water, and it's definitely where they are lacking.

However, I wonder if it's harder for Tesla to get better at fit & finish and interiors and quality, or if it's harder for the entrenched players to gut their petrolhead heritage, and sacrifice their lucrative combustion engine business, and especially the lucrative service & repair business it creates.

Another angle is that Tesla is Silicon Valley bred, they're a software company through and through. The other companies treat software as an afterthought, their infotainment systems range from "monstrosities" to "I don't want to claw my eyes out yet". None are good. Some are bearable. Teslas is good, and it's an obvious priority, and software is such a huge part of modern cars and their performance, that the hardware will be commoditized.

It's definitely interesting!

> Tesla is Silicon Valley bred, they're a software company through and through

Are they, really? I'm not impressed. Software is very central to their cars, and I think the end user experience is pretty abysmal. Which is par for a car manufacturer, of course, but I had other expectations given their Silicon Valley heritage. Get Apple involved already! They don't seem to be going anywhere with their own car investments anyway...

> Tesla has the batteries, but they don't have the rest of the car.

Tesla doesn't have to make a single car anymore if automakers would make a real electric car; they'd just supply the industry with batteries. But, compliance cars. So, Tesla plods on with their own vehicles.

It's the batteries. Tesla has a big lead over other OEMs in battery cost. This is obvious in the energy storage space.

Also, if some new battery tech comes out, then Tesla will get their hands on it, being half the world's battery supply.

Plus alternates. Toyota is pushing strongly for Hydrogen. And if petrol station chains are forward thinking they will encourage this too. Electric is too easy to make the petrol station redundant.

If I was Caltex/Shell/BP/Exxon etc I would be forming a group to drive support to hydrogen, both via govt and manufacturers. Should consumers largely go electric not many people will turn up to their shops any more.

It is going to be difficult to make money with hydrogen filling stations; both liquid and compressed hydrogen come with huge challenges in terms of transportation and storage.

Petrol stations will not make much money on electricity if they install chargers, but they will sell a lot of food to customers waiting to charge, even "supercharging" is quite slow..

Food/waiting thing is a good point but I imagine the bulk of people, if electric, will charge overnight and rarely need out-of-home power.

According to wiki the cost to put in Hydrogen fueling infrastructure would be about 20% of electric: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_station

That sounds like one of those "alternative facts". After following the cite trail from Wikipedia, it was apparently something someone from the hydrogen car industry said at a conference. No further cite or info on what exactly they are counting in that figure.

This cannot be true, unless there is a new way to store hydrogen which is completely revolutionary.

Cost difference does seem counter-intuitive but not an expert. I also wonder if rather than transporting hydrogen around they could make it on site from piped water. Not sure if electrolysis of water has scale benefitsm of mass producing hydrogen then trucking around. That could reduce cost of transport... but then that would be much the same as electric anyway with the inevitable energy loss on conversion...

EV chargers are much cheaper to operate/install than gas pumps; and gas pumps should be less expensive than hydrogen filling stations, i.e. something does not add up here.

It's very expensive to keep hydrogen cool enough to stay liquid, but it's not exactly cheap to keep hydrogen compressed in massive tanks that always leak either. Moving it around is another problem, I find it extremely unlikely that this costs less to operate than electric infrastructure, which is static.

Hydrogen doesn't really make much sense to me. It's hard to work with so if you've got a bunch of it laying around why not combine it with some CO2 frozen out of the air to form methane, something you can pack much more densely in tanks and which won't tend to leak through so many things? You'll produce CO2 when you burn it but no more than what went in to creating it in the first place. Some back of the envelope math says you're losing about 25% of the energy in the Sabatier process to do that but it makes all the transportation and storage of the fuel so much simpler.

Because it isnt about the science. In most jurisdictions if co2 comes out the tailpipe it isnt "zero emmissions" regardless of the overall numbers. There are also other non-carbon forms of pollution that any ic engine must address (no2 etc).

> Tesla has a big lead over other OEMs in battery cost.

Do they though? How come GM was able to shop a reasonably priced Chevy Bolt as a competitor to Model 3?

I realize that in car manufacturing GM is a leading brand with economies of scale working for it, but in electric battery world they're a nobody, so I'd expect them to pay close to market price, no Gigafactories and all?

Do they lose money on Bolts?

Yes, they lose money on bolts or at least break even. I'm trying to find the source on it but from what I read the reason they are making the bolts is to get ZEV credits that'll offset their larger & more profitable trucks and gain experience in building electric cars so if (when?) they have to compete head to head with Tesla on a larger scale that they'll have the knowledge to do so.

I don't know if it's all about ZEV credits, those have dropped to "pennies on the dollar" nowadays, so would be more efficient just to buy them on the open market (which GM still does) http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-trump-decision-on-e...

There have been 250K Nissan Leaf cars made already.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Leaf

And Renault have delivered over 100k all electric cars (spread over 4 models, though most of them are the Renault Kangoo Z.E. and the Renault Zoe Z.E.)

I wish Nissan would import the Kangoo Z.E. into the US. Hell, I wish Nissan would import the Twingo into the US.

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