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Comment by redm | Hacker News Reader

I just don't see Tesla becoming mainstream before traditional manufacturers fill the potential market opportunity. Volvo just announced they will only produce Hybrids in the future. [1] All the major manufacturers have hybrid programs they are bringing to the mass market.

It's not that Tesla will or won't be successful, it's just that as it succeeds, it's changing the ecosystem around it. Traditional manufacturers offerings are becoming more and more attractive.

I think Tesla is appealing to the tech/gadget market right now. For me, everything about Tesla cars and its buying process feels new and fresh. But..

When it comes time to buy my next car I'll probably end up going to traditional car dealerships, looking around, test driving, and picking something through a traditional channel. It's just the path of least resistance and there's a lot more variety.

[1] http://www.yorkdispatch.com/story/money/business/2017/07/05/...

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> It's not that Tesla will or won't be successful, it's just that as it succeeds, it's changing the ecosystem around it.

I invested in Tesla because I wanted this to happen. For me, Tesla is not successful unless it changes the ecosystem around it. If, while doing that, it goes under as a car manufacturer, but in the end changed the ecosystem for the better, that's great! Sometimes a thing only exists in order to make itself redundant.

I doubt this will happen, though. Instead, I expect it to be like the iPhone vs Android: there will continue to be a premium electric car by the people who launched the first real contender, but other companies will outscale them and eventually provide really competitive products. That's also fine. (Note that Android was a newcomer as well....)

I forget which of The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution had the section on electric cars. But back in the 1990s it was projected that on current trends, electric cars would become viable around 2020. And explained why it was likely that traditional manufacturers would fumble the ball, all offer hybrids, and in the end most would go out of business because they couldn't make the transition.

It is worth reading those books and understanding the thesis. Because it is directly relevant to the current situation. We are looking at the gas -> electric conversion, in about the projected time frame, and all of the reasons for why traditional manufacturers were likely to fumble are all there. And the creation of hybrids that you point to is as relevant to the survival of traditional car manufacturers as the creation of sail/steam hybrids was to sailboat manufacturers roughly a century ago. (News flash, the big ones all made those hybrids, and none successfully made the transition to pure steam ships.)

This is not to say that Tesla will be a big player in the all electric age that is coming. But its odds are better than Ford, Toyota and GM.

Maybe. A few thoughts:

1) Automobile efficiency has moved dramatically since the 70's and that's due to government regulation. That regulation continues to push the industry as a whole.

2) The regulation goes beyond automobiles, were moving to alternative fuels as a people. Auto's will be drug along with that shift.

3) Automobiles and selling cars, in general, are a lot more than JUST the drivetrain. All that was really talking about with electric is a drivetrain. It's not clear to me yet that everything about a car has to be rethought to simply make it electric.

>It's not clear to me yet that everything about a car has to be rethought to simply make it electric.

it isn't "has", it is an opportunity to rethink what hasn't changed in the last 100 years.

Google/Apple (and probably Uber) can attach drivetrain to their platform while Ford/GM just aren't capable of producing a platform to attach to their drivetrains. Tesla is an intermediate step in that direction and it looks like a good [though far from sure] candidate to make it successfully into the future of electric connected self-driving cars.

The problem that those books focus on is the difficulty in switching from an existing superior technology that meets the needs of an existing market to a new inferior technology that will some day meet the needs of an existing market, but does not yet. The problem is that the initial markets for the new technology are marginal ones that established companies do not easily get motivated to deliver to. And by the time that a mainstream audience is potentially interested, new companies have sprung up for these marginal markets that happily undercut the profit margins that established companies depend on. So everyone naturally migrates up market and this continues until established companies have such a small slice of market that they go bankrupt.

In the case of cars the key performance characteristics that we need are ability to accelerate into freeway traffic, braking ability, range, and recharge time. Electric is naturally worse than gas on all of these characteristics at the same price point, however battery technology is improving at a predictable rate and it will eventually meet the characteristics that people need for daily life. At which point pure electric becomes viable for all of us.

Therefore the prediction from 20 years ago was that the pure electric cars would likely to come from something that perhaps looks like a glorified golf cart, which will eat out the car market from the bottom up.

Tesla doesn't look like this because Elon pursued an unexpected angle. He found that he could produce acceptable high performance electric cars long before the initial projection, because the profit margins on gasoline cars in that category were high enough to absorb the insane cost of the batteries. As battery technology improves, he is able to move down the quality curve. But to do so, he has to keep thin profit margins.

Traditional manufacturers still face the traditional problem. They can't afford to offer an equivalent electric car at an equivalent price because their cost structures are too rich. But he's moving down the value chain and broadening, and not moving up. By the time he can offer a mass market car, he'll have an unbeatable edge.

Of course even if Tesla's plan doesn't work, don't count out large electric golf cart companies moving up market into automobiles like Marshell Electric Vehicle Co Ltd, EZ-GO, Xiamen Dalle Electric Car Co. LTD and Polaris. Just as was predicted 20 years ago.

Either way, I do not think it likely that most established automobile companies will survive the electric transition. If they do, it will be the first case that I know of where established brands are successful in switching to an inferior technology.

You got me wondering, how much efficient would it be to just burn fuel through a transformer to run a DC motor ?

You could potentially make your engine, or whatever is burning fuel, more efficient by itself, if it is no longer required to drive a transmission and can run at any speed. Add a battery, and that enables you to do more stuff, such as regenerative breaking.

Congrats, you got a hybrid now (not unlike a Chevy Volt).

A large engine is generally more efficient than a small one. Most cars are in the 20% range. Steam turbines do better than 40%. So even with transmission and storage losses, having a centralized engine outside of the vehicle is much more efficient.

Except, they didn't fumble on anything.

GM released the Bolt several months ago, which has a longer range than the Model 3, and you can drive one off of a dealer lot right now. I test drove one and it's an awesome, fast, and affordable electric car. An average person, without any kind of pre-order, will not be able to drive off a lot with a 3 for at least another 2 years. Tesla has completely missed the ball. GM will be on their 3rd revision of the mass-market electric car by then. That's not even counting Toyota who are several revisions into the Leaf and many more into the Prius which eats Tesla's entire product line for lunch.

I'm inclined to agree with you, except that people do buy Teslas and there is a huge waiting list for the Model 3. So your model seems to lack some explanatory power.

Chevy Bolt has sold 8,000 units total.

Tesla expects to produce and sell 80,000 units of the Model 3 in 2017.

We'll see if they hit that target, but come on ... in what reality can this be described as having "completely missed the ball"?

looks matter, I'd rather drive a 3 than a bolt/volt, leaf, or prius. + the safety / tech is much better in teslas (self driving prius anytime soon?).

Except, they didn't fumble on anything...GM released the Bolt several months ago

With an already outdated charging system! In terms of styling and execution, I'd accept a position that GM is more competent than Tesla -- especially for the conventional vehicle-as-appliance crowd. But in terms of knowing where to go in the future, I think GM has a considerable disadvantage.

The Bolt costs $37,500 and according to rumor GM is losing $8-9000 per car for that. So let's say that the real cost of manufacture is $46,000.

The Model 3 is a comparable car starting at $35,000 but is planned to sell at an average of $45,000 with an independently estimated profit percentage of around 25%. That means that the cost of production is somewhere around $34,000.

If costs continue looking like that, as both companies scale electric car production up, which manufacturer would you prefer to be?

Also I called them comparable, but they really aren't. After looking at safety in accidents, the driving assist and so on, my family doesn't consider them equivalent. We put a deposit on a Model 3 which we hope to buy next year. Traditional manufacturers are well behind Tesla on key amenities like that.

You can drive one off the dealership right now because no one else wants to. GM doesn't have the capacity to make anywhere near as many electric vehicles as Tesla does right now.

There's good reason to believe that electric cars are the future and will soon be a massive market. I think there's also good reason to believe that Tesla has a big head start on the competition and has the opportunity to dominate this market if they execute well.

For example, just look at the battery packs which are essential to an electric car. Tesla was unable to find a supplier that could meet their requirements, so they designed and produced their own batteries and now have a $5 billion gigafactory to increase production volume and decrease costs (with more gigafactories on the way). If you're another car company trying to enter the EV market, what are your options? Buy inferior battery packs at a higher cost from a different supplier? Try to replicate Tesla's battery technology and then convince your board to build a gigafactory so you can produce them at the required volume and cost?

>> Buy inferior battery packs at a higher cost from a different supplier? Try to replicate Tesla's battery technology and then convince your board to build a gigafactory so you can produce them at the required volume and cost?

Why not another option - battery manufacturer notices that if they build an equiv. battery they can sell to every car manufacturer in the world. With the higher volume they'll be able to do it for less than Tesla if they are only building for their own cars.

How long will it take them to catch up with Tesla (while Tesla is simultaneously advancing their own battery tech)? And even if they can hit that milestone, they'd presumably have some amount of profit margin built into the prices. So to actually compete with Tesla on battery price (and why would they even want to) they'd need to advance beyond Tesla in terms of manufacturing efficiency and/or volume. I don't know of any company poised to fill this gap in the foreseeable future.

It's called a factory. Gigafactory is a made up word.

Gigafactory is a proper noun referring to the specific battery factory built by Tesla; I just didn't bother to capitalize it

Tesla seems primed to become the battery and software supplier for modern vehicles.

> When it comes time to buy my next car I'll probably end up going to traditional car dealerships, looking around, test driving, and picking something through a traditional channel. It's just the path of least resistance and there's a lot more variety.

I believe Tesla is gearing up for the car purchase after your next one. You're currently thinking in terms of a car that you'll be driving. For those cars, you're right, there are other car manufacturers that will be more successful.

However, once cars are fully automated, the entire game will change. Market leaders of today will be up-ended. That's when I believe Tesla, Google, and anyone else who has driverless technology will take over the industry.

That goes double for the taxi companies like Uber, Lyft, Juno, etc.

Will I even be buying the next car after this one? Most people own cars for 8 to 10 years. We could be looking at rental cars in the future by that point rather than outright ownership.

From what Elon Musk writes, his plan is that either you'll be renting other people's cars, or making some extra money by renting out your own: https://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part-deux

Already now Leasing contracts enable exactly this. Every odd years you will get a new car but you pay basically for the access to the vehicle not the car itself.

I've read plenty of traditional manufacturers working on self-driving cars too. They just don't seem to be as visible as Google/Uber/Tesla etc.

I've been following Audi for some time. [1]

[1] http://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/politics/alba...

That's mostly because they are sensitive to brand damage in ways that Uber and Tesla (not Google) are not.

Mercedes or Volvo getting caught with a product in the ways Tesla has been getting caught would be unacceptable to their customers. The brand damage would be massive. Tesla as 'the new kid on the block' has a lot of leeway to mess up that you would never accept from an established brand. The whole autopilot saga is an excellent example.

By the time Volvo or Mercedes release a next level self driving car you can simply expect it to work, all the time. Until then they will release small incremental steps on their 'driver assist' technology.

I'm sorry but that's just flat out wrong. Just last year Mercedes advertised their blatently inferior (compared to Tesla's AP1 at the time) driving-assist features as literally "Self-driving" and saw NONE of the backlash that Tesla faced with the autopilot accident. And Tesla has never advertised their current or former Autopilot as being "Self-driving".

I think the opposite is happening - that Tesla is under much more scrutiny because they're the new one on the block. Because the established automakers have done some terrible shit, which would absolutely kill Tesla as a company.

I'll gladly find sources and further elaborate, if you're interested.

What their marketing department yells versus what they deliver has a huge gap, what I'm talking about is not the marketing part but the actual tech. I'm not aware of MB or Volvo getting into the kind of crashes that Tesla has been having.

This insidious definition of Uber as a taxi company must be highlighted. Their entire business model is based on them insisting they are not a taxi company and as such the taxi laws do not apply to them. Everyone knows this is horseshit and when there's no focus on it , just calls Uber a taxi company and ignores cheerily the devastating effect Uber has on the rule of law. What would remain of society if every company could pick which regulations they want to keep and which ones they don't?

Well, Paypal's been getting away with pretending to not be a bank for over a decade now...

They're not a taxi company. They do not take street hails and as such, their regulation needs are different. For example, there's no need (or at least less need) for the government to regulate fares since people trust the Uber app to give them a fair price (whereas if you're a tourist and you were to just hop into a random unregulated car you hailed, it would be difficult to tell if you were getting a fair price).

It's not solely about price. It's also about safety of the car and driver.

They are functionally equivalent to a taxi company and should be treated as such.

Honestly, ordering an Uber on a mobile app is the current-day equivalent of a street hail of a Yellow Cab (or other legitimately licensed, metered, and branded taxicab)

People and companies have always broken laws. Why is it especially a crisis when "disruptive" tech companies dare the law to stop them?

> However, once cars are fully automated, the entire game will change. Market leaders of today will be up-ended. That's when I believe Tesla, Google, and anyone else who has driverless technology will take over the industry.

> That goes double for the taxi companies like Uber, Lyft, Juno, etc.

The interesting thing is that you didn’t mention Mercedes Benz.

Mercedes Benz owns a few carsharing and Taxi apps in Europe, almost all Taxi operators lease cars from Mercedes Benz (which, in return, gets better deals with them), Mercedes Benz licensed the entire Tesla IP and has used it already in one model, and they’ve got their own electric cars and self-driving prototypes as well as self-driving trucks.

Mercedes Benz is the most likely candidate to build a vertically integrated Taxi solution. They’ve got deals with all major cities, with Taxi operators, they own the IP, they’ve got the apps and the infrastructure, and they’ve got the required prototypes.

And that in my opinion will be the ultimate nail in '3rd party apps' for mobility. In the end, the car manufacturers own the hardware and will easily take over the market once the elephants have started dancing.

GM is invested in Lyft and Mercedes Benz has their Car2go division. Seems to me that the traditional car companies have a reasonable head start into the autonomous "transporation as service" area as Tesla does, just from another direction first.

However, once cars are fully automated, the entire game will change.

This may be true, but nothing I have seen so far suggests that ubiquitous full automation will arrive until long after the likes of Tesla and Uber have run out of money. From here, it looks like we still have several rounds to go for each of

- Can we actually do it?

- Will the regulators let us do it?

- Will the public believe we can do it and trust us to do it safely?

That assumes there are no black swan events undermining the whole car industry in the meantime. Given the increasing population and congestion issues in many big cities, the corresponding increasing interest in planning/zoning policy so that using cars to get around is less essential, and the environmental implications of this kind of vehicle even if it's a hybrid or totally electrically powered locally, I think there's also a slight chance that demand for this kind of technology will never reach critical mass at all.

I agree. I think a lot of the 'terms of use' that come with Teslas will be problematic for them, and things like the cost of repair, the strict lack of market competition, and other issues will leave a lot of room for conventional auto manufacturers to step in.

The Model 3 will tell us a lot. If they can ramp up production fast enough, if they can fill orders quickly enough, if they can satisfy the 'ordinary' customer's service expectations, they may take their place in the long run as one of those 'traditional' auto manufacturers long-term.

There's a lot that can be missing or not at scale in the luxury car market that won't fly at the Model 3's price point.

Yeah I think it might be easier for the traditional car companies to slide into making electrics than people think.

I could easily imagine the traditional car companies making the exact same successful models as now, but with the electric engine being a checkbox option.

The 2017 Electric Volkswagen Golf is apparently quite good.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-drive/reviews/new-cars...

They make them--besides the Golf, there are pure electric versions of the Ford Focus, Audi A3, Kia Soul, BMW 3-series, Fiat 500, and Smart, and some of those have been around for years. People seem to prefer electrics (and hybrids for that matter) that are unique--or maybe, dedicated electric platforms make for better electric cars than do ICE cars with a drivetrain swap.

Even if large traditional car manufacturers switch to electric vehicles at scale, won't Tesla have quite a headstart at least when it comes to their battery production capabilities?

Markets are wonderful things, and it doesn't always pay to be first.

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/10-battery-giga...

Perhaps, but the traditional car manufacturers already have a massive head-start in profits. :) If it comes down to it they can spend some money/time to ramp up their supply lines to competitive levels and come out fine.

It's also worth noting that the differences between Tesla and traditional car manufactures are much less than the differences between SpaceX and the traditional aerospace companies. There's no real business innovation on the Tesla side that the traditional manufacturers will have problems emulating aside from autopilot, whereas SpaceX introduces a whole new industry paradigm.

You think that money is the key to scaling up new manufacturing lines, when in fact new manufacturing lines scales up through really hard engineering, and no good, driven, or genius engineer is going to go work for Ford or GM regardless of pay. They want to work at Tesla where they can actually have autonomy and decision making power.

Interviews of SpaceX and Tesla engineers show how much they've grown out of the conservative engineering molds they found at large, bureaucratic companies like Ford and GM.

Edit: Basically Ford and GM are manager driven. They are about small, incremental change where you don't change too much too fast. And you are one cog in a line of 50 cogs. At Tesla it's cutthroat and bloody, so if you get recognition and clout early on, then you basically get to do whatever you want. At least that's my understanding and that's the understanding that good engineers have

So in your mind there are no good engineers who prioritize their families and don't want to work weekends? No good engineers with sick/infirm relatives who need care outside of work? No good engineers who are turned off by (according to you) the need to be "cut-throat and bloody" at what's supposed to be a constructive, team-based endeavor? No good engineers who can't or won't just uproot themselves and their families on a whim?

Right now I work 60 hours a week between my current job and side projects, and while I'd love to work for SpaceX or Tesla from a professional standpoint (my 3rd-grader self literally drew "designs" in pencil for warp drives after watching Star Trek with dad), the fiancée and I are probably going to have kids in the next 3-4 years, and she has her own career to think about. At that point I imagine I'll cut back on the side projects as well as take time off from work here and there to help her out. From what I've heard I doubt I could do that at Tesla/SpaceX without professional consequences. But I guess that just makes me a shitty engineer who is simply incapable of doing something as god-like as helping scale a production line. :P

The issue at the traditional manufactures is leadership, not talent. If the leadership reforms and adapts the talent will be there. That's a large if, but certainly not improbable if Tesla seriously threatens their core business.

To answer your first question, a strong yes. You are a worse engineer for not losing your family over it. That's a hard pill to swallow for everyone but it's also true; the engineer that lives in his work will be better than you and might be 2-5x more effective than you at any given company.

What the issue is at traditional companies doesn't matter, the fact is that they suck and they cultivate lazy engineering. I hope that 100,000 engineers kill themselves working for Tesla because humanity itself will not survive without their effort, and then the trillions of humans that have lived and died will have done so in vain, and all of that is much more important than your kid's star trek drawings and warm-fuzzies.

I felt compelled to downvote due to the tone of this answer. But I'll try to resist that temptation.

Objectively speaking, someone who does not have a family can work more hours, not necessarily produce better work. But they can, potentially, as long as the "extra" hours are also focused on work. Not sure how long that is sustainable.

I'd like to ask this: if we need to kill hundreds of thousands of people to try to save the human race, are we even left with something worth saving?

It is not clear to me that workers need to sacrifice themselves to death in order for us to survive. There is no evidence of any impending catastrophe that would require such sacrifice.

I don't think you know what day of the week it is friend.

A study by the Standford CS department shows that total productivity sharply declines after 50 hours of work in a week. Mistakes get made, inefficiencies are introduced. I only shoot for 60 because I can typically vary the work and disperse it over the weekends, which helps.

https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/crunc...

Also my fiancee supports me in my efforts and gives me an extra reason to go to work in the morning. She makes me more productive and provides much needed support and motivation (we largely depend on my salary at the moment). Now sure if I had no desire for a family or friends or life experiences and became some kind of solitary engineer-warrior-monk, and was able to do so without falling into severe depression, maybe I'd be marginally better, but the difference would not be nearly enough to warrant the sacrifice. Even Elon Musk spends some (albeit limited) time with his family and talks about how he's had to tone it down recently (from getting 4 hours a night to 6 hours), and recently tweeted about having a fun night mixing wine and ambien. I have no doubt he works harder than me, but even he has a family and down time.

Also, I work at a big traditional defense contractor. Large companies are hardly monolithic. Some programs suck and are staffed by lazy/ineffective engineers, but my program's customer is quite satisfied at the moment, as are other programs' customers. That's why we get business, we do have competition that will take it from us if we don't deliver. You can't paint 100,000+ employees with one brush, and trying to do so makes you sound unintelligent. Correspondingly your statement "What the issue is at traditional companies doesn't matter, the fact is that they suck and they cultivate lazy engineering." makes it clear that you're not interested in discussing the issue and more interested in validating your own beliefs, which you have no evidence for beyond having "read some interviews". Once again, that diminishes your credibility.

And I don't give a damn what you think about my 3rd grade drawings (fyi you clearly rushed through reading my post and missed the phrasing, I don't have a 3rd grade kid). It was meant to support the statement that I actually am passionate about space tech and would love to work on what SpaceX works on, nothing more.

And warm-fuzzies are clearly something you need more of in your life. Tesla will probably help save the world, but they're hardly the only force out there, or even the decisive force when it comes to combating climate change. Even if they fold I don't think you have too much to worry about.

I've been polite up to this point, but I'll be blunt: You sound like a 14 year old who's sole knowledge of the world comes from blog posts. Which is fine, but don't expect anyone to take you seriously. You have to earn that when you're in a room of strangers (which is what this forum largely is), and you've only done the opposite.

There might be a study that supports working shorter hours but the truth is that if keep a mental image in your brain for longer, it will be easier to recall that mental image later. This is how Calculus was invented, keeping the image of the problem in the brain at all times; that is how good work gets done, and that is when inefficiencies are reduced.

Fiancees are great, I agree. And I don't think there is anything wrong with families.

You admit yourself that your company has some bad programs. Those programs are hemorrhaging money that comes from the public. That's really awful and everyone involved should be fired for wasting taxpayer money.

I dunno about the rest of this, I'm just super passionate and I'm willing to come along and tell some mid-level engineer at a big company that he sucks and his company sucks, because it's probably true. I could come to your company and observe long coffee breaks, people who put in three hours a day, and all that stuff, and you'd brush it off when I brought it up. It's cynicism because that's what is actually out there. People suck. You try and rationalize it but your company is going nowhere fast as soon as the government contracts and fat military cheques run out.

I'm in my 20s and and been incredibly hard working and suffered a lot in my life, I'm just very passionate and I'm willing to tell you that your company is really not good, because it's not.

Sure. And yet Thomas Edison intentionally nodded off with a handful of ball bearings (to wake him up just as he nodded off) to help solve problems. Diffuse mode learning, aka putting things on the back-burner can be very useful for solving complex problems. As any number of articles posted here can attest, there's more than one way to skin that particular cat.

A lot of those programs probably are due to fold. At the end of the day that's up to the customer. As I said, we have competitors willing to snap up business on fairly short notice. Quite often the contracts are structured so that the customer can cancel them at will, no lock-in.

Saying everyone involved should be fired is a carpet-bomb solution that risks punishing good talent. Sometimes the program you work on ends, or you want a career change, and take what looks like a good opportunity but turns out to be shit. Sometimes a change in leadership turns a good program bad and there are no good transfer opportunities. There are no glassdoor.com reviews for internal company programs, if you're lucky you get hearsay, and I've known many good engineers that were stuck on bad programs for some time before being able to transfer off. Fire the offenders sure, but it's not black and white.

I wouldn't brush any of the criticism off, actually. I'm well aware of my company's institutional flaws, many of us gripe about them on a daily basis. But I think you'd be surprised how many of us bag lunch and work unpaid overtime when deadlines are near. I'm not defending my company, but I am defending most the engineers I've met there. A lot of us are actually hoping for some extra competition to shake up upper management. Hell we had no less than two dozen people, including a low-level manager watching the SpaceX live-stream when they landed the first Falcon 9, and we were as excited as anyone. We'd universally love to work on something like that, but we don't get to pitch contracts or control the money. I can't speak for the entire company, or even a substantial fraction of it, but that's my neck of the woods. The picture is not as black and white as you think. Don't let your passion or prior suffering blind your attention to detail.

Yeah, my company sucks when it comes to vision (and some other things). Here's hoping SpaceX eventually makes us better in that regard. Not that my program's in danger anytime soon, we're not in SpaceX's direct line of business. I'm in my late 20s BTW.

Honestly I think the biggest hurdle for breaking into the mainstream is still charging infrastructure and the all-electric nature of Teslas. Sure superchargers are a lot more common than they used to be but they're nowhere near the saturation of gas stations (the need for which will ramp-up if the model 3 sells) and good luck if you go out into a rural area.

For the time being EV/Gas hybrids like the Volt are a lot more practical and cheaper. I could walk off the lot with a lightly used Volt for half the price of a Model 3 and get the vast majority of the benefits (autopilot simply isn't a big selling point for me at the moment) with none of the downsides.

You cant compare the two. Ever car needs a gas station a few times a month. An ev owner could charge at home and literally never use a supercharger. You dont need a supercharger in every tiny rural town.

For EV to replace cars you need to have superchargers along the main roads (already getting there) for long trips and also some place for visitors to charge in small towns (either superchargers or chargers at hotels, campgrounds, rest stops, etc.

There will still probably be areas of the country where it will be hard to find charging stations (although gas stations are infrequent in those parts currently, its much easier to bring some extra gas in a can then an extra battery).

I'm thinking more about travelers passing through. Even if I owned a Tesla I literally couldn't take it to see my relatives in rural North Carolina, or go camping in many locations. Right now supercharger station coverage is about as effective as cell service was 10 years ago. It's there, but there are noticeable dead zones that lots of people (although perhaps not people in the HN bubble) will care about. Hopefully Tesla can continue making money and build out the infrastructure further, but right now for anyone on a strict budget, even a Model 3 is paying a large premium for an ultimately less capable vehicle. At their current rate of expansion, maybe in 5 years I'll start thinking about an upgrade. :)

Sure, there are many infrastructure products that are different from cities versus rural areas. Tractor maunfactures do awful business in cities, but John Deere is still sucessful.

Cities are still half the population.

Sure. So EV will not become 100% of cars tomorrow. But I think right now with the current charging infrastructure, EVs could be something like 90% of cars (or at least a very large amount). I could replace both of my cars tomorrow with EVs and be OK.

Would it mean I couldn't take it camping to the UP in Michigan? Likely, but I go every 3 years at most anyway. I would just rent a dinosaur bone boner from Hertz for the weekend if I really needed it.

There's one area that traditional car manufacturers can't compete in: software.

pg said it best when he said something like "Traditional manufacturers vs Tesla is like Microsoft in 1997 vs Apple in 2017"

It's debatable whether software is important enough to matter, but when the most valuable feature of most cars is that you can turn off their horrible software, that's an opportunity.

I wonder how many of the traditional manufacturers will have as secure a supply chain as Tesla for the battery capacity needed to build much more than a hybrid dominated lineup.

VW and GM are investing heavily in building infrastructure for the electric cars they'd come up with in near future.. That means battery manufacturing facilities, testing infra and tweaking/creating new factories.

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