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Comment by eddieplan9 | Hacker News Reader

You mean like how all the cell phone makers caught up with Apple's iPhone?

Not saying TSLA has no risk: for one thing, they still have not figured out how to scale up production. But in general, I think we tend to overestimate the incumbents' advantage. Most incumbents have too many old interests that hold them back. There is an article [1] about German automakers' unwillingness to commit to EVs because the profit from ICEs are way way higher than that from electric ones because of ICE's complexity.

(Similarly, this is the reason why most of the wind farms in China are not connected to the national grid, because the existing power plants do not want to shut down and lay off workers.)

[1] http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/german-governme...

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Apple was not the first company to make a smart phone.

Name a major smartphone maker pre-iPhone that's still a major smartphone maker now. Being first with an inferior product (Tesla certainly isn't in that category) is irrelevant to the discussion at hand and the parent poster didn't claim Apple was first, just that they lead the market (overcoming all the incumbents at the time) in the early days before Android caught up and passed them.

Tesla is inferior to all luxury brands in all aspects except being electric and self driving. When compared to Volvo, Mercedes and their ilk, Tesla are behind on prestige, interior styling, after-sales support, economies of scale, supply chain management, navigating world wide bureaucracies, etcetera. It remains to be seen if Tesla will catch up on these faster than the other brands can catch up on self driving and electric vehicles.

Right, except in the hard tech areas. I suspect it will becomes a bigger differentiation when setting the standard. Focusing on chrome would be a waste of immediate effort. It makes more sense to work on the commonalities of the energy infrastructure that augment the existing landscape than on what chrome goes best with the seat's heated-leather-ass-warmer. The luxury brands won't have the energy generation and storage solution to match. The competition has an enormous supply chain problem that's just getting worse unless they jump on board with Tesla's charging standard.

In Europe they have standardized on a different charger design, I don't see how charging can be a major differentiator once electric cars become common. A charging station is extremely inexpensive compared to a gas station and those are ubiquitous

Tesla has better 0-60 acceleration.

I doubt 0-60 time cracks the top 5 of most people's wants when they are buying a car.

The fixation on this is odd. I see plenty of Teslas and very fast imports around here in north CA but they always seem to be taking it easy...

0-60 time is a little important to me (but no, I don't need Tesla's level stats). Getting on a freeway and merging in traffic is an example of where it's useful. I'm not one of those drivers who thinks it's ok to not be going traffic flow speed by the end of the entrance ramp, so having an electric car that can easily do that is something I value. Many hybrid / EV vehicles strain to do it at times in my experience (I've test driven most of them on the market today).

Well and customer retention and 0-60 times. Tesla owners love their cars more than any other brand.

Hi, can you give me the sources/reasoning behind your statement?

I have first hand sales experience with luxury brand vehicles (read: RR/Bentley price class). Technology oriented US customers love Tesla. Sure, top notch luxury is nice, shiny and gives a unique experience, but at the end it is a different kind of experience from that a Tesla customer seeks. At the end, they buy both.

I've driven many cars from most major luxury brands (including Porsche, Mercedes, BMW, Ferrari, Bentley, Jaguar, Lamborghini, even Bugatti). At it's price point, there's no other car I'd personally rather drive. Maybe my characteristics for a car are different than yours. But as far as comfort, performance, feature set, and styling I vastly prefer the P100D over any other car in its price category (aka $100-150k range).

^ This, and the intergration of electronics into the vehicle are the arguments I heard from test driving customers. Thanks for the answer.

I wonder why the downvote for my question. It was not the tone, I hope.

Not sure, wasn't me who did it.

And Tesla wasn't the first company to make an electric car. So what?

The point is that they popularized the electric car by getting it right, just like Apple popularized the smartphone by getting it right.

Agreed. What strikes me as perhaps noteworthy is that I can remember when Hyundai started selling cars in the United States, and it took quite awhile (from memory, until the early 2000s) before anyone was taking them seriously. Meanwhile, Tesla seems to have become entrenched in the mindshare of the American populace much, much more quickly (in the same way that the iPhone did relative to Android).

Tesla may or may not be around to reap the rewards of their popularization of the electric car, but they've definitely made an impact, and done their part to push automotive thinking forward by at least a decade IMO.

Engineering a reliable car is hard. Even Nissan and Toyota, who spent decades wiping the floor with cars from the big 3, struggled when it came time to apply that expertise to building full size trucks.

Yes, there is some institutional inertia that holds back the incumbents. However, there is also a huge store of knowledge about what to do and what not to do.

Here's a somewhat relevant story from my time at Boeing. When the 737-7/8/900 was being designed, some young bloods looked at the vertical stabilizer and said "Oh my God! Look at all this useless structure! We'll use cutting edge FEA and CATIA and show those old pencil-and-paper slide-rule jockeys how it's done." Everything looked great, and they started building the new aircraft in Renton. Except that during flight testing, they found that the new vertical stabilizer assembly was cracking. They had to stop the line (very expensive), remove assemblies from built aircraft (very expensive), and pay penalties to airline customers for delivery delays (astronomically expensive). If memory serves, they had to take a $1B writedown. There were also public firings of high-level executives.

Apple was the first company to make the smart phone as we now know it. The entire concept across the smart phone spectrum today, is directly derived from what Apple did with the first few iPhone iterations - in every possible regard. Every competitor that came after for years did little more than copy the iPhone's features.

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