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Comment by gitah | Hacker News Reader

This is a very Silicon Valley / US bubble mindset. Telsa/GM/Nissan have made much contribution but your are missing the major factor driving the EV industry forward which is government industrial policy.

The real reason is EU and China have announced their intention of banning ICE vehicles around 2030 with China having very aggressive EV marketshare goals starting next year. Companies that do not meet EV sale goals will have to buy credits from others that do just like a carbon emission market. This is causing all major automakers to not be complacent and invest heavily in EVs.

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This is misleading. These (quite recent) changes in governmental policy have come about as a result of things that Tesla managed to achieve, firstly, on its own, and secondly, through its effects on the behavior of other automakers. No major automaker was meaningfully working on EVs before Tesla; now they all are.

Indeed, to a rare degree, the shift we're seeing in a major sector of the world economy is the result of the unilateral actions of just one person: Elon Musk.

Without hard proof, but having watched the last decade of environmental tech developments wit interest, I agree with you pretty much completely. None of those policies would exist if there was no hope of the success of the commercial technology within those timeframes. It would be like legislating nuclear fusion power generation. Nobody else did much of anything until Tesla began succeeding, and more importantly prepped the consumer market for EV demand.

This is typical Silicon Valley hype taking credit for everything. There were many EV manufacturers around the same time as Tesla (ex. Nissan, BYD). Even earlier, the supply chain for lithium batteries got momentum due to electric buses and hybrid vehicle manufactures but no one gives them credit, only Tesla for some reason. Currently, Tesla is only a small chunk of the entire EV and battery market but still gets all the credit.

You can see this in the Tesla Semi or the Tesla battery pack announcement. Companies have been mass producing them 4 years before and are already being used in production today. However, being B2B, these products were largely low key. But somehow Tesla gets all the credit these and "moving the industry forward". Chinese and Korean battery manufactures have also been expanding production like crazy and account for the vast majority of production but only the GigaFactory gets any mention which cause some people think Tesla alone is responsible for the decreasing price of batteries.

Major auto manufactures are working on EV mainly due to government policy. I agree private companies seeing traction selling EVs is a large impetus for the new government policies, but to only credit Tesla is over-exagerating it's contributions. How much does Tesla influence Chinese policy when 95% of Chinese EVs are made by domestic brands?

Can you give us a list of companies producing semi trucks with large range starting 4 years ago? All of the ones I've seen have small ranges.

Likewise, can you tell us what BYD should be praised for? They keep on announcing that they're going to compete with Tesla head-to-head with long-range high-performance cars, but the only thing they've managed to get volume on are low-performance, lower-range Chinese compliance cars. Tesla is praised for making electric cars sexy; is BYD doing that?

Third, I'm sure you've noticed that at the lower end of the US market, the Leaf gets a lot of credit, as does the Bolt.

1) New models will obviously have more range than ones 4 years ago... My point was the Tesla Semi should be treated as incremental rather than revolutionary, just like releasing a new smartphone model with more RAM than one 4 years ago. Also the Tesla Semi hasn't even launched yet so they can easily overpromise making comparisons with any existing offerings difficult.

2) As with Ford for ICE vehicles, affordable EVs selling higher volumes are much more important to than the premium EVs offered by Tesla in terms bringing the tech mainstream. In this way, BYD and Nissan should be credited much more than Tesla. In terms of contribution, I would put BYD much higher than Tesla: BYD manufacturers their own batteries, sell more vehicles, drive industry competition in the much more relevant CN market, and their success influnced the Chinese government to phase out ICE cars.

3) My post was specifically replying the the person above who was worshipping Musk on a pedestal and giving all the credit to Tesla.

1) The first electric cars were from the early 1900s, everything since should be treated as incremental, just like the iPhone wasn't that much of an advance over other smartphones.

2) Halo products are a concept, but apparently not in cars. BYD's failed attempts to introduce premium cars, followed by eventual success in me-too compliance cars for the Chinese market deserves a participation award. Not praise.

3) Uh, OK. Never mind the facts, let's focus on opposing Musk worship.

Don't think I can ever convince people like you. In terms of scale, driving down costs and adoption, Tesla is a shrimp.

Keep being arrogant and think the world revolves around Silicon Valley tech companies. When EVs completely replaces ICE, people like you will think Musk did by himself against dumb incumbents while completely ignoring the much much greater contributions of everyone else.

I'll just leave with this statistic [1]:

> China’s demand for electric bus batteries is almost equal to that of demand for all electric vehicle batteries

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-08/china-goe...

Huh, you just made up a bunch of stuff and said I believe it. I'm not the strawman you were attempting to beat.

Government policy would cave-in if the private companies lacked innovation and told them it was impossible. You need existence proofs like Tesla, who are highly leveraged to making EVs work and don't care a wit about preserving the old business.

As a concrete example, consider the government effort to shift ethanol-to-be-mixed-with-gasoline from food-based sources to non-food sources like switchgrass. No one figured out how to efficiently turn switchgrass into ethanol, so it failed. And that was despite a huge economic incentive.

In contrast, the government effort to promote electric cars, solar energy, and wind energy appear to be really paying off.

Yes, the US will be a rounding error for the next decade. China will have tens of millions of EV's within a decade.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/05/business/ford-china-elect...

They will soon have millions of charging stations:

"China's government is seeking to combat range anxiety for electric vehicle buyers with a pledge to build a charging station for every vehicle on the road by 2020. China plans a total of 4.8m charging outlets and stations by 2020"

https://www.ft.com/content/f9aece28-d65f-11e7-8c9a-d9c0a5c8d...

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