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Comment by penglish1 | Hacker News Reader

The great thing about corporate missions & goals is that they are written so broadly: "Our goal when we created Tesla a decade ago was the same as it is today: to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to market as soon as possible. " (https://www.tesla.com/blog/mission-tesla).

Thanks to Tesla - seriously(!! COULD not and WOULD not have happened without them), we now have a compelling mass market electric car on the market.

The Chevrolet Bolt.

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Well no, companies have been trying on EV every decade since the invention of the car.

The Prius normalizing an electric drive train pushed full electric further into the mainstream then Tesla has. Granted Tesla's investment into batteries bumped Panasonics time line up a bit and bumped full BEV up a bit but a compelling mass market electric car on the market has been clearly inevitable since 2000.

Edit: I changed it from "Tesla ... may have". To "Granted Tesla " to more accurately reflect my evaluation of Tesla's contribution to the time line.

Fair enough - I did fail to give Toyota credit, where credit is definitely due.

But I would say it is more a case of "necessary, but not sufficient."

Toyota unarguably pushed electric into the unsexy, mass production, mass consumption mainstream. This was a necessary step.

But Tesla showed that electric COULD be luxury, performance, etc - not necessary for mass market - but the related headlines generated arguably were.

But also that _pure electric_ could be delivered with _more than enough_ range to eliminate range anxiety, even with "notably better than a Prius" levels of performance. And it could at least appear to be "mass manufactured" (even if, on Toyota/Chevy/Nissan scale, or if you will, BMW/Mercedes/Lexus/etc they really weren't). This WAS necessary, and did cause a tipping point that, IMHO led to the Chevy Bolt.

The Prius led to the Bolt evolutionarily.

The Model 3 led to the Bolt "by Marketing force."

And now we have a Bolt.. and basically no Model 3.

We'll see what happens in the next couple of years.

You jest, but knowing Musk, he'd consider that a win.

The point of Tesla under his lead was always to make transportation electric ASAP; not necessarily for Tesla to be the biggest player forever. I.e. Tesla is means to an end, not an end itself.

Tesla is a means to an end... value for its stockholders.

Well, not really.

Not really, since Chevy began designing the Bolt in 2012 ... (that is, before the model S was even introduced)

Ha!

In any case I'm not sure I'd give credit to Tesla on that. The Bolt seems more like a response to the Leaf and friends than it is to anything like a Model S.

Maybe. Without a broad consensus from all the involved individuals at Chevy, we'll never know. Were they looking more at the (first edition at the time?) Leaf or the hypothetical and probably unnamed at the time "Tesla mass market model with X miles range and $Y price tag?"

If they were aiming for the Leaf, it appears they got to market faster and better (specs) than the 2018 Leaf. A little surprising from Chevy (when compared to Nissan), particularly since they didn't really have a first edition to build on themselves.

If they were aiming for the Model 3 - they got to market faster and "at least in the ballpark" spec-wise, AND at much much higher volumes than Tesla. To me this is less surprising. A mass-market car producer could get to market with a high-volume car faster than Tesla? And in higher volumes? That isn't so surprising. It would have surprised me _even less_ if Toyota had done it, though they clearly weren't trying. It does surprise me a little that Nissan hasn't, though it is fairly clear that they aren't trying _hard_.

Eh, the Bolt doesn't really impress me. I hope Nissan makes a better version of the Leaf. That's something I'd actually consider.

The second generation Leaf was just launched in Japan, and will come to the US next year, I believe.

It seems to have much better range (two battery options with 40kWh and 60kWh which give est range of 150 and 200 miles, resp).

That sounds exactly like Renault Zoe's range and battery options.

Well they are called the Renault-Nissan Group nowadays aren't they ?

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