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Comment by pwinnski | Hacker News Reader

It's hard not to see this as bad for Tesla.

The one thing Tesla supporters have pointed to more than anything is that Tesla had a large head-start in battery tech over all of the competitors. So Chevy is shipping many more Bolts than Tesla is shipping all models combined, but Tesla's headstart in battery tech and manufacturing would keep them a contender.

Now their head of battery tech is gone and they've missed model 3 targets by a very wide margin due to problems with batteries.

I'm not sure how reliable their lead in batteries is right now.

There's still that supercharger network, though. I suspect we'll be hearing more about that now that other points in Tesla's favor are dwindling.

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> So Chevy is shipping many more Bolts than Tesla is shipping all models combined

Chevy shipped a few hundred more Bolts than Teslas one month. Tesla is way ahead on the year, and October is always a slow month for Tesla for whatever reason. It’s netiher a trend (yet) not is it ‘many’.

Also, those are dealer shipments - anecdotally, I see tons of them on dealership lots being advertised way under list price. The exact opposite of the situation Tesla is in.

This point about dealer shipments and number of vehicles in the lots, is conveniently skipped by many reporters reporting to feed the "Tesla is dead" hype cycle.

In terms of whats happening with the teams at Tesla, it certainly looks like a lot of churn, but it's hard to know the real severity of it because of the over reactions by the press.

4 years at a company is a good amount of time. I'd be worried if the Head of Battery at Tesla was a super star engineer who joined with a lot of fanfare and then left the company in less than a year or two (e.g. Chris Lattner joining Tesla and leaving after a very short stint).

No one is saying TSLA is dead, this is the most annoying argument from fan boys, they have a market cap over 50 Billion dollars and ship Cars in only thousands. So, here is the point, a significant part of their valuation is scaling up from thousands to half a million to million in immediate future. That is the real bet.

Scaling up in Auto-industry is not an easy one, and they are having tough time, also not being highlighted is that the base price of $35,000 is not realistic and every thing is said and upgraded the Model 3 averages in high 40s or low 50s. These are important factors esp. when Model 3 is supposed to the Model T of 21st Century.

TSLA currently is in a bad situation and they have to turn around swiftly, because their stock-price assumes they will hit home runs in perpetuity, while they are struggling to get their Second home run.. That is the point of discussion.

Tesla is about to ship 100k electrical cars this year, not counting in the Model 3. So they are the largest producer of electrical cars by a large margin.

The Model T was $575 in 1912, when the average salary was ~$600/year.

...and there weren't cheaper cars than the Model T. There are cheaper cars than the Tesla Anything. Your comparison is meaningless.

But there were not extremely-reliable, well-marketed, mass-produced alternatives to the Model T available for 1/3 the cost...

TSLA is bleeding talent all over. Your allusion to Lattner is just one example out of many.

Their CFO churn is one great example. I’m surprised they can find anybody to happily sign off on Musk’s borderline fraudulent activity.

People will be poached in a hot market, people will burn out, people's job will outgrow their ability to perform it. That's just the way it is in a high growth company.

After Facebook didn't sell to Yahoo, they lost their entire management team.

> After Facebook didn't sell to Yahoo, they lost their entire management team.

Do you have a link where I can read more about this?

https://youtu.be/mH11ImPJeDc?t=2m40s

> Chevy shipped a few hundred more Bolts than Teslas one month

In the US only (majority of Teslas sold oversees in October, as is always the case in the first month of each quarter).

Wasn’t the “Bolt outsells Tesla” thing also based only on US sales?

Bolt is not outselling Tesla anywhere. They're getting crushed in the US and abroad. Tesla has ~75,000 deliveries from q1-q3 vs Bolt deliveries of less than 17,000. Not to mention these are ModelS and ModelX sales which are way more expensive than Bolts. The reason why Tesla does not publish monthly numbers is because they ship in batches and monthly numbers won't make any sense. So for example in October they mostly ship abroad so domestic sales are practically nothing. This is only because Tesla decided to ship foreign cars for this period, not because out of the blue the entire nation decided not to buy any Tesla cars in October. People have used this as propaganda against Tesla and to misinform people to think that no one is buying Tesla and everyone is buying the Bolt which isn't remotely true

I've never understood what their lead in batteries really is. Isn't it well known that Panasonic manufacturers and supplies battery cells to Tesla?

And cost-wise LG Chem seems competitive enough to Panasonic anyway, keeping in mind leaked figures for Bolt.

18650 cells are a commodity component. Combining thousands of them into an effective battery pack is a very complex engineering task. Tesla have filed hundreds of patents relating to pack design and battery management. They have several just relating to "thermal runaway mitigation", which is a fancy euphemism for "stopping the battery pack from catching fire". It's not sexy, but it's crucial stuff.

https://patents.google.com/?assignee=Tesla+Inc

You're free to use their patents, there is no charge.

For anyone wondering: https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you

There is actually a charge, you are also giving up the right to enforce you own patents on Tesla I believe.

Can you please provide a reference of this? Sounds very heroic of Tesla/Musk.

https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you

Sibling post also has the link but I don't want you to miss it.

It was that since they secured rights to a key resource for it's products.

It's essentially the Apple move - by outmaneuvering competitors on key resources it allows higher margin or products that others can't even create.

Apple has a couple moves for cornering the supply chain. Sometimes they work with manufacturers to develop specialized hardware under the terms that they will only be used to build Apple products for a certain timeframe (usually a couple years IIRC).

Apple also uses some fairly specialized, extremely high-precision equipment that only a few companies in the world have the skill to manufacture. Apple has enough purchasing power to buy up all of the capacity that those manufacturers can produce for years at a time, and in doing so they lock out competitors from using that equipment.

It's possible, but seems really unlikely to me that Tesla has the capacity or purchasing power at this point to corner the supply chain like Apple does.

I'm interested in learning more about this. Could you links some resources, especially around the manufacturing equipment?

https://blog.bolt.io/no-you-cant-manufacture-that-like-apple...

https://www.engadget.com/2011/08/04/apples-hold-on-metal-cha...

Discussed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2848283

> When Apple's iPhone4 was nearing production, Foxconn and Apple discovered that the metal frame was so specialized that it could be made only by an expensive, low-volume machine usually reserved for prototypes. Apple's designers wouldn't budge on their specs, so Gou ordered more than 1,000 of the $20,000 machines from Tokyo-based Fanuc. Most companies have just one.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_38/b41950584...

That is even more unbelievable. What are they implying, nobody else will manufacture batteries?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-28/china-is-...

If Tesla has an adequate supply of cells for their needs (due to contracts with Panasonic and their own factory), but other car manufacturers have to compete with each other on the open market for a supply of cells that is inadequate for high-volume production, then that's a big advantage for Tesla in the short/medium term. They can focus 100% on electric, whereas the major manufacturers will have to stick mostly with gas and hybrids for the majority of their revenue.

If China were to produce many times more cells than Tesla, we could still have a major battery shortage for most of the world's auto manufacturers.

According to an Economist article from Aug 12 2017, the Chinese companies currently in a margin-sacrificing battle to outscale each other. Increasing volume allows them to drive down per-unit costs, so everyone is expanding their production and exceeding the demand for customers. I would be very hesitant to bet on an American company beating the Chinese companies on price and scale for battery production.

> But getting prices down this way has not just produced cheaper, better batteries. It has also resulted in significant overcapacity. Cairn ERA estimates that last year the manufacturing capacity for lithium-ion batteries exceeded demand by about a third. Both it and BNEF say that the battery manufacturers are either losing money or making only wafer-thin profits on every electric-vehicle battery they produce. Despite the seeming glut, though, they all have plans to expand, in part to drive prices even lower. Mr Jaffe explains their thinking as that of the “traditional Asian conglomerate model”: sacrificing margins for market share. This may be a sound strategy given the ever-greater hopes for electric vehicles in the near future. But at the moment it is also one that looks rather unnerving. Although Mr Jaffe believes that increased demand for both electric vehicles and stationary storage will justify the rush to expand, he accepts that, for now, “It feels like a gold rush—but there’s no gold.”

https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21726069-no-need-sub...

It's more of a cost per kWh or total volume advantage they were hoping to secure, I think.

My brain: "They're not lead batteries." "Oh, their LEAD in batteries! Stupid homonyms!"

Homographs actually. Homonyms are two words that are spelled differently but sound the same.

If you're going to correct someone, get it right. Homographs have the same spelling but different meaning. Homophones have the same sound but different meaning. Historically, a homonym was both a homograph and a homophone. Nowadays, homonym can be used to mean either homograph or homophone. So homonym was correct for modern usage.

Looks like you're right. I've never seen that usage before, but according to dictionary.com's third definition, that is "loosely" correct. An example of language evolving I guess!

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/homonym

1) Tesla likely secured a good deal for Panasonic batteries, as I think some of them were co-designed, like the latest bigger 207000 battery cell. From what I've seen in past articles, Tesla always had the cheapest battery packs per kWh.

2) Tesla also likely has a significant advantage in battery pack architecture, from safety (they offered to teach Boeing how to design battery packs so their EV planes don't catch fire a couple of years back), to withstand more extreme weather conditions (hot or cold), to having an industry-leading battery degradation performance. I think I've seen reports of Tesla batteries only losing 4-5% of charge capacity after 100,000 miles.

Tesla was always an oddity in using such small cells (18650s) in the first place. A Model S has thousands of cells; a Renault Zoe, say, has 192. The 20700 is rather similar to the existing, and fairly old, 26650. Tesla may well have interesting battery technology, but it’s not the cells; they’re nothing very special.

IMO it's a deliberate choice - 18650s have a much higher surface-to-mass ratio, so are much easier to cool. For a car like the Model S, thermal management of the battery pack is one of the key limits on performance.

Yep the universe conspires to prove something... even that ordinary battery turns info a pinnacle od battery-goodness when Tesla touches it

> I think I've seen reports of Tesla batteries only losing 4-5% of charge capacity after 100,000 miles.

That one is easy to do with overprovisioning - similar to SSDs and I believe even HDDs do this to account for inevitable degradations during operation.

The narrative I've heard is that the secret sauce is the battery-pack that combines the cells, controls temperature, balances loads, etc. Not sure if this is an accurate narrative.

That can only explain the performance or the ludicrous mode, if really.

I thought Tesla was always marketing that their selling point is cheaper batteries, which cant be a USP, as Panasonic can always manufacture the same for GM/Ford etc.

How can it explain the performance or the ludicrous mode?

Ludicrous mode being a software update could easily be that you already have the performance innately but they cap your output at 85%. Same as any game where you have to pay to get the extra features/items (DLC) but every other player in the game already has the item when you're around them. All the players get it, it's just a flip of a bit to enable the item for you. Just costs $10k in this case...

Initially ludicrous mode was not just a software update. You could get it on your (already delivered) MS P90D, but had to bring it into service. They changed a fuse and activated ludicrous mode in software.

Of course, today all Tesla P100D get built with that fuse already in place - so it's "just a software upgrade" today.

There's quite a bit of electrical magic going on for a fuse to be able to handle insane current bursts while retaining a good response time in case of a catastrophic fault.

IIUC the fuse is an electrically triggered explosive device. Badass, huh?

What's going on is that the current drawn while flooring a ludicrous vehicle is a largish fraction of the current that should cause an instantaneous fuse blow. A fuse that melts at a given temperature and heats up as I^2 R wasn't going to cut it. In the electrical distribution industry, you'd get a fancy circuit breaker with an electrical trip device and call it a day. This has two issues for Tesla. First, your average electrical trip device uses a current transformer, and those don't work for DC. Second, DC current is considerably harder to interrupt than AC, and the current the fuse needs to carry is in the kA range (I have no idea what the short circuit current is), so a circuit breaker would be rather large. Hence a fuse, with a little explosive inside, with an active circuit, presumably using a Hall effect sensor, the voltage drop across the fuse, or maybe just a reed switch.

(Hmm. It's nice when fuses and such don't need external power. I wonder if there's sufficient voltage drop across the fuse during a fault to power the circuit that blows the fuse? I bet there is. It could even be a very simple circuit like a Zener diode in series with a resistive heater that sets off the explosive.)

Explosives in high current fuses is interesting, but not new or specific to Tesla. https://youtu.be/yTdngnsyNSE

I think that's the other way around. The fuses in that video trigger a tiny exclusive as a side effect of blowing. IIUC Tesla'a fuse blows because an explosive is triggered.

There a lot more electronic / electric circuit magic in there with the battery for it to achieve the ludicrous mode ability.

Initially when I heard that, I thought Tesla was bluffing. But the Ludicrous mode with P100D performance, and the fact that no other electric car maker is able to match that, leads me to believe that they are not bluffing.

> ...the fact that no other electric car maker is able to match that...

The 100,000 dollar plus luxury electric saloon market isn't exactly overflowing with competition yet, so I'm not sure this really proves anything. Given time and a stronger focus on electric models, I have few doubts the usual German contenders will build electric cars every bit as quick.

The "legacy" car manufacturers have been slow to wake to Tesla's successes in some regards, but that looks set to change rapidly over the next decade.

Maybe nobody else thought ridiculous mode is worth the money. What magic exactly do you need to discharge 100 kWh in 10 minutes?

I dont know. If I knew, I'd be working for Tesla, or working on a startup that'd compete with Tesla, similar to how the head of battery engineering at Tesla did. :)

The company behind lithium-ion battery technology in Tesla Gigafactories is Panasonic. They own the core patents and IP. Same is true for solar PV cells.

Tesla currently has a lead in:

- battery range (the tech and battery production capacity doesn't disappear with the manager)

- charging network (passing 1,000 stations)

- autonomous driving (miles recorded and in all kinds of traffic and weather)

- selling online and through own dealers in malls as opposed to through independent dealers in the outskirts of town

- integrating electric into every part of the car design

- over the air updates

- brand (you don't think f Nissan, Chevy, BMW etc. as EV makers)

They are also still the only manufacturer that makes EVs look attractive and perform better than ordinary cars. Everybody else on the market seem to deliberately make ugly cars with mediocre performance. The reason probably is the simple fact that Tesla wants you to buy electric cars whereas the other manufacturers already make money on selling combustion engine cars and would make less selling EVs. They are in the EV market reluctantly.

In theory, the above could change quickly. But how does a company that for 100 years has made combustion engine cars and has thousands of employees, suppliers, facilities, contracts, etc all geared up on selling combustion engine cars through dealerships and who are dependent on making money on spare parts and repairs of mechanical parts suddenly pivot into selling EVs that barely need repairs online or in malls? It's as likely as Google launching a Facebook challenger. Or Microsoft beating Amazon on selling consumer goods. Actually, it's less likely since all the incumbent car manufacturers run on razor thin margins. They don't have piles of cash to reinvent themselves. It's more like Nokia winning the smart phone game or a news paper beating Google on selling online ads.

My bet is still on Tesla, but it would be nice if I'm wrong and the incumbents rise to the challenge.

Its not about the car, its about company unable to make money

"Now their head of battery tech is gone and they've missed model 3 targets by a very wide margin due to problems with batteries."

Perhaps a look at this from the other way around is more revealing. They were having issues with batteries --> now their head of battery tech is gone.

Its not a bad theory but it is one that I am not sure evidence supports that inference.

First, the problems (as stated in the article) that Tesla is claiming are the primary constraint with the Model 3 are related to battery manufacturing capacity. That could potentially be related to technology/design obviously, but manufacturing could also just be a production problem. Those batteries in NV are actually built primarily by Panasonic [0]. Interestingly, that article also discusses the fact that Tesla has pulled back on plans to power the factory using a solar roof. Critically, that has left them relying on grid power which has enough power bumps (2-3/week) that it is a major production headache and is combined with labor difficulties in the factory in regards to talented and trained technicians.

Second, according to other industry sources [1] The issue is not the batteries but the body manufacturing. The body (which is also the frame in modern unibody cars and even most trucks) line is almost certainly being done by hand based on rate of production. The line isn't just not installed in CA yet, its not even fully built by the Michigan supplier. Why? Someone has to take the blame and it can be either Musk [2] or Tesla [3] because it sure isn't my fault. Toyota gives away the secrets of its internal process for free (partially as internal motivation to continue to improve...because they now must get better to stay on top) but hey they also have a full time CEO. Toyota offered to help Tesla, until Musk kept making fun of fuel cells. On the otherside there is what is happening now, with Tesla sending (confused and in flux) plans to their body line supplier a year after major OEM's sent plans for NEXT years models. Not to mention that the same journalists reported this all a year ago...because Tesla hadn't even begun the permitting process necessary to hit its own ramp timeline with the state of California [4].

Compare to their same reports on Jaguar's upcoming EV [5], It looks like Tesla continues to either (1) not now how to do manufacturing or (2) are still working to define the disruptive innovation in manufacturing that allows them to not test their production line. That disruption has escaped places like Toyota (and every other car manufacturer), Intel (and every other semiconductor manufacturer), and every other manufacturer in general who run a LOT of prototype prior to committing to production and build that time into their schedules. The other option is (3) Musk knew all this a long time ago and has been misleading folks for quite a while.

TL;DR: Tesla thought it was immune from the god given rules of running a factory. Human and robot factory employees are not AWS instances. Meatspace =/= code

Side story: One area Toyota save immense time was reducing the time it took to change over metal stamping dies from 3 days to less than ten minutes [6]. GM took a lot longer to learn these lessons [7].

[0] https://dailykanban.com/2017/10/tesla-gigafactory-solar-powe...

[1] https://dailykanban.com/2017/10/model-3-body-line-still-in-d...

[2] https://dailykanban.com/2017/07/fremont-problem-starts-m/

[3] https://dailykanban.com/2017/10/source-tesla-responsible-mod...

[4] https://dailykanban.com/2016/09/docs-reveal-teslas-productio...

[5] https://dailykanban.com/2017/11/no-production-hell-jaguars-p...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-minute_exchange_of_die

[7] https://history.gmheritagecenter.com/wiki/index.php/1986_Die...

>So Chevy is shipping many more Bolts than Tesla is shipping all models combined

What? That's not even remotely accurate. Tesla sold ~75,000 vehicles in q1-q3. Year to date sales for Bolt is approximately 17,000. And that includes all cars sitting at the car dealership not even sold. Tesla only counts a sale once it's delivered into the customers hands. Bolt sales are a very tiny fraction of Tesla's sales.

Do you have a reference for the statement that Chevy is selling more Bolts than all Teslas combined? This sounds farfetched.

It's true for October, at least: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/11/the-chevrolet-bolt-was-...

For the US only. Tesla generally ships most cars oversees on the first month of the quarter and loads up in the US in the last month of each quarter.

Also supposedly Chevy is losing money on the Bolt.

As a Tesla shareholder, I advise caution going down the "profitability" line of argument when making comparisons.

https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/08/03/2192188/electric-vehi...

GM lose $9k on every Volt right now after subsidies and are also having trouble selling them.

http://fortune.com/2017/07/17/gm-shutdown-chevy-bolt-supply/

Here in Quebec, they're sold out as soon as they're available.

Here in Northern Europe, where the Bolt is sold as the Opel Ampera-E, if you order one today you're not getting it until 2019 because of the huge waiting list.

But they make up for that with volume.

Is Tesla shipping a compact?

Margins get thinner (or in this case negative) closer to the bottom of the market.

Tesla doesn't have the EPA slowly tightening the CAFE noose so selling Bolts at a loss might still be a net profit for GM over all because it offsets more profitable products.

But if come Republicans have their way then all federal subsidies will be gone, but Tesla's were going to start tailing off shortly anyway (they're close to reaching their subsidy cap); so it would hurt GM (and others) more than Tesla.

So?

Why is this a political discussion all of a sudden?

Lets play a game. How much would you have to be paid to drive a Chevy Bolt? I would probably do it for 50% of the cost of the thing.

While this comment was snarky, it gets at something very real.

The Bolt has great range and I’m sure it’s a joy to drive, but it’s an ugly, tiny subcompact.

No one outside of our tech early-adopter bubble is going to pay $35,000 for a car that looks like that. Every other car that looks like that sells for $18-20k. Most people don’t care what the propulsion is.

The reason the Model 3 has a higher ceiling than the Bolt (if Tesla can figure out their production hell) is because it has the looks and amenities expected of a $35,000 car.

We’re never going to solve emissions if only environmentalists and tech lovers like us stop driving gas cars. There have to be alternatives that are compelling to the masses - and not just that, but compelling at their price point.

> No one outside of our tech early-adopter bubble is going to pay $35,000 for a car that looks like that. Every other car that looks like that sells for $18-20k. Most people don’t care what the propulsion is.

People care about the TCO though. If you're gonna make that extra $15k back in fuel savings in the first two years (and I have no idea whether that's the real number or not, and it's probably very dependent on local fuel charges) then regular people will sign up for that.

Also, aesthetics aren't universal. Just because you might think it looks like an ugly car doesn't mean that everyone does. IMNSHO there are much uglier cars on the road than the Bolt, which seems to me rather squarely mediocre/median in looks.

As much as I'm into Tesla, a friend of mine has a Bolt and they're way fun to drive, for a Chevy and that kind of car. They accelerate pretty well. Nowhere near what I'd expect of a Tesla, but still pretty torque-ish.

I've not driven the Bolt, but a few of the other "cheap" electric cars (Leaf, Kia Soul, NV200). They all feel pretty torquey-ish. It never really made sense to me compared to petrol cars I've driven based on the actual torques.

Then I figured: it's because you can floor it in an EV and nobody notices, so you do it all the time. Whereas in a similar class petrol car, if you floor it from zero and keep it in the optimal rev band, you sound and look like a huge idiot.

Petrol engines will have higher "peak torque", but only in the ideal part of their rev range, whereas EVs have almost flat torque at any speed.

I don't think that's the case here. Electric engines have more torque at 0 RPM and over their RPM curve, and it's clearly observable/reproducible if you like, ~race with someone else at a red light, where the other person in their petrol car is also flooring.

The advantage of electric engines, any electric engine, over ICE is that something like 99% of the maximum torque is available from 0rpm to redline.

That doesn't make any sense. Just think how much power the engine would have to be able to produce near the redline if it produced anything decent at 5 MPH for that to be true (considering that Tesla's mainstream cars only have 1 gear).

Edit: Just to be clear, a constant torque would imply a linearly increasing power output when increasing the revs. Of course Tesla doesn't have that – what they have is high torque, and thus significant power output already at very low revolutions. A typical small DC electric engine has an almost linearly decreasing torque curve (unless capped), although I don't really know specifics about Tesla's engines.

Force, not power.

Basically: for an internal combustion engine the force is the force of the explosion averaged over time, so the higher the RPM the shorter the time between explosions the higher the average force (until you get to a point where your cylinders are moving so fast the start fighting against each other).

For an electric car the force is the voltage, there's no impulse to average out, it's just continuous force.

Now of course in reality it's not that simple and you actually do have a torque curve, but compared to ICE it's basically a square wave.

That's not true, the other poster had it right. You have peak torque at stall and it decreases mostly linearly all the way to zero at peak rpm. Power is simply torque times speed. Also torque has a basically linear relationship with current, not voltage.

It's a shame seeing people just downvote comments without doing even the most basic research to try to disprove someone.

For proof, here's the actual torque curve for a Model S. http://mihalache.free.fr/TSLA/ModelS.png And you can see very clearly the torque curve looks nothing like a square wave.

Also your assertion about internal combustion engines is wrong as well. At higher RPMs you get less duration with the valves open and you can't get as much fuel and air into the cylinder. It's not that mechanical losses are taking away that force, it's that those explosions are less powerful as you approach redline. Then once you're right up at max RPM you start having to deal with stuff like valve float where the springs pushing the valves back up can't keep up with the camshaft but that's over complicating it for a basic explanation.

At the price of a Bolt, it's great fun to drive. It doesn't compare to a $100k Tesla, obviously, but for a $30k car, it's nice.

I’ll answer your question after you tell me how many hours you’ve spent behind the wheel of a Bolt.

Is the supercharger network really all that big of a deal for the average electric car user, though? As of 2016, there were about 13k charging stations with 30k chargers in the US. 613 of these, with 3600 chargers, were Tesla. And the US is behind the curve here; there are 5000 stations with 14k chargers in the UK. Even most fast chargers are not Tesla, either in the US or worldwide. In the US, Tesla’s network is arguably better distributed along interstates, but this is mostly a US-specific problem.

The superchargers are arguably a big deal for model S and X users, who I believe often have free charging. As I understand it, Model 3 users wont have this, though? So what’s so special about the Tesla ones, especially outside the US?

Have you driven an electric vehicle for any significant amount of time?

Number of stations is meaningless. At any given time, a sizeable portion of them will be out of commission. Some will not be accessible outside business hours (the ones at dealerships being the biggest offenders) or will be ICE'd. Even worse, some will be listed as working, but then fail to connect and charge your car at all. This has happened to me, multiple times. In one case, leaving me stranded, as I did not have range to reach the next one, after being unable to charge at two different locations. And that was in San Jose, not in the middle of a desert.

I have not checked your numbers, but I seriously doubt 30k is the number of fast chargers. Instead, those will be the slow, L2 chargers, which take 4 hours for a full charge on a Nissan Leaf. Quick chargers are much fewer in number, break frequently and, in the US, can be on two, competing standards (CHADEMO and whatever is that Ford and other manufacturers use).

In contrast, Tesla's network is much better maintained, each location has many chargers, and they are all Tesla's proprietary fast chargers.

Not to mention, Tesla cars can use their chargers, L2, and have adapters for other quick chargers.

TL;DR- This is not an apples to apples comparison.

Here in Shenzhen I believe the government sponsors the installation of a new charging point wherever you want it when you buy a car. About half of the taxis are electric, and that is growing. The electric taxis are cheaper (combustion taxis have an extra per-trip tax) and more spacious, and manufactured by BYD.

IMHO two things:

a) "fast charger" is a loose term and is often used for anything exceeding 20kW. Superchargers deliver up to 140 kW (split between two cars) or 120 kW (to one car). That's why Tesla/Elon sometimes refer to them as "level 4 charger", although the specification ends at level 3. Other manufacturers are now getting on that train with (according to specification) up to 400 kW

b) The notion of the "average electric car user" does not take into account that yes, people drive less than 80km per day on average, BUT they go on the occasional road trip. And they don't want to have a car sitting around just for road trips. They want one that can do both (commute & roadtrip). That's where the supercharger network helps

Not sure about the situation in the US. The bulk of the ‘fast chargers’ in the UK, mentioned above, are CHAdeMO (40-60kW, generally, though higher power are coming) and Mennekes (usually 44kW). This isn’t as fast as the Tesla ones, but it’s not 20kW either.

They might still have a lead in battery tech.

For instance, suppose Chevy needs to go through this retooling at some point in the future and set back production at that point.

A set back is not proof that they don't have a lead in battery tech.

However, it should be asked: what is the nature of the lead? What is superior about the batteries? How does this lead manifest?

A Bolt is a $36K-$7.5K car. A Tesla is a $100K-$7.5K car. These are very different cars, a Golden Delicious vs Honeycrisp comparison. Of course the Bolt is going to outsell the Tesla.

Who cares how many Bolts are sold, if the average Tesla sells for two or three times as much. As they used to teach in business school, its not your share of the market that counts, its your share of the market's profits. Also, maybe no one is making a profit yet but the point is, if you can charge a lot more than your competitor you don't have to outsell them in units.

In their earnings call last week, Tesla said that their margins on existing vehicles were dropping, and they were diverting resources from the Model S and Model X to focus on the Model 3.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15605480

Even dropping, Tesla’s margins are still higher than legacy automakers.

Except that they use wildly different accounting practices than the rest of the industry to make their numbers look better. For example, they don't include the cost of R&D (like every other manufacturer does), and they use retail price instead of wholesale price when calculating margin.

If you use the correct numbers, their margins are significantly lower than the rest of the industry.

It's fair to use the retail price since they sell direct to consumer

> Now their head of battery tech is gone and they've missed model 3 targets by a very wide margin due to problems with batteries.

Maybe there is some causality between these two statements...

And my state has just invested millions in a big bank of Tesla batteries to stop us losing power again this summer. Hurray?

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