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Comment by ucaetano | Hacker News Reader

It is clear that Tesla is failing to deliver any competitive advantage besides its early start.

It has failed to achieve what is the standard baseline for mass production of cars today, a sustained production rate within controlled quality parameters, and failed to differentiate in other areas, falling behind most other automakers (and non-automakers) in innovation (especially autonomous driving).

There is still hope that it will solve the Model 3 problems, but at this point (including the desperate "volunteers to prove the haters wrong" email) it seems more and more unlikely.

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If they’re failing to deliver any competitive advantages, why are there still no competitive cars available from any other company, or even just announced?

So far the closest thing is the Bolt, and it’s not all that close.

1) EVs are really not what many people want in a car

2) Other companies like to sell cars at a profit. That hasn't yet been achieved with EVs.

Tesla is actually turning a profit on their cars. It's just the massive investments in manufacturing production eat up everything.

Momentum. Tesla got an early start. A decade means nothing. Ford was founded 115 years ago.

Here's the problem. Tesla's cars have two key things that make them competitively interesting: Autopilot and their electric drivetrain. Take those away and their cars are a special kind of "offensively uninteresting". The interiors are horrible, deserving of a car half the price. The build quality is inconsistent. The tech is pretty cool. Parts are unavailable.

So, start with autonomous. Which is easier: for another company to achieve autonomous on-par with Tesla, or for Tesla to fix the design and engineering problems they've been having? 3 years ago, people might have said the latter. But today, we can name 3 companies who arguably have on-par or better driverless tech than Tesla (Google, GM, Uber). There are cars you can literally go buy today that get 90% to what the Model S does (2018 Audi A8, 2018 Accord, 2018 Cadillac CT-6). In some cases, they do better. Where's the competitive advantage?

Electric drivetrain. Tesla is still leading here. For how long? BMW will have an electric mini out in 2019, an electric X3 out in 2020, and 25 all-electric models by 2025. Audi will have an all electric Q6 by 2019, you can put a pre-order in today, 310 mile range. Toyota is planning 10 EVs by early 2020s. Ford is releasing an EV performance car in 2020 (huge missed opportunity to resurrect the Thunderbird brand, as they went with "Mach-1"). Volvo just spun off Polestar into a performance EV brand. The list goes on.

Tesla's massive investment in energy development will be the single thing that might save them; if they fail at making cars in 6 years, at least they can sell batteries to the companies who, well, know how to make cars. But, oh guess what, VW is sourcing their batteries from LG Chem and Samsung. Toyota is making them in-house, and they've said publicly they've achieved a "research breakthrough" on solid state batteries they aren't sharing [1].

I want Tesla to succeed. But, frankly, they have about a year to get it together. That means fix their QA issues, up the interior quality, get autopilot working, drop prices across the line. Possible? Honestly, it doesn't seem likely. But I'm holding out hope.

[1] http://www.autonews.com/article/20171026/COPY01/310269958/to...

I'm not interested in buying a Tesla because of the autopilot. Frankly, I'd buy a Tesla even without the autopilot option.

Would you buy them without the autopilot and electric drivetrain?

If you want an EV today, that makes complete sense. They're the best, among the only on the market.

In three years, that won't be the case, and you'll probably be re-evaluating your position.

It's also entirely possible that AfD wins 2021 election, kills all CO2 incentives, after which no new BMW EV model will be built, because they are not competitive on level playing ground.

What are you talking about. I'm driving a Zoe as we speak. Super competive relative to a car I can't buy.

There's a few pure electrics out there: BMW i3, Renault Zoe, Nissan Leaf are probably the best selling ones.

And all of those have instruments panels...

> It has failed to achieve what is the standard baseline for mass production of cars today, a sustained production rate within controlled quality parameters

Which is ironic given that Tesla is in the old Fremont facility where Toyota schooled GM on how to do exactly that ...

Exactly, with industry-standard infrastructure and plenty of highly-qualified and experienced professionals up for grabs, it is puzzling how they are failing so hard.

My guess is a mentality of "everything is wrong, let's rebuild it from scratch internally and it will be better", ignoring decades of practice and experience.

It turns out that buildings don't know how to build cars. People do.

Which is kind of amazing because their issues of just trying to get cars down the line and trying to fix them after they are built before delivery sounds exactly like the kind of stuff GM used to do that Toyota amazed them by avoiding.

> and failed to differentiate in other areas, falling behind most other automakers (and non-automakers) in innovation (especially autonomous driving).

What other car has better autonomous driving?

Compared to the current, non-MobilEye Teslas, the Leaf, the A6, the CT6. Even the old Model S has better autonomous driving than the current one.

Oh, and Google. By very, very far.

Tesla hasn't even caught up to its original Mobileye-powered Autopilot.

Do any other autopilot systems from legacy automakers improve with over the air software updates? Do they revise their algorithms with fleet data?

I can't get Waymo/Google autopilot in a vehicle I can buy. I can get Tesla's autopilot.

The latest Tesla autopilot software update (2018.10.4) has shown drastic improvements (30+ Youtube videos from owners in thread): https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/84xt43/collect...

Being a "leap forward" still puts it behind others. But if your criteria for quality is being able to hope that one day you'll get an update, well, that still puts you behind Cadillac and possibly others.

You can continue to hope and wait for Tesla to deliver. So far, it hasn't.

> Do any other autopilot systems from legacy automakers improve with over the air software updates?

Who cares? I'm not buying a luxury vehicle on promises of what it might do given enough time.

To each their own of course. I'd have no qualms about buying my Model S again.

I'm unwilling to buy a car stuck in time in it's model year, or that must wait years for a software upgrade. Then again, I'm happy with my iPhone, bugs and all; it'll get updates too, and works just fine between iOS updates.

> I'm unwilling to buy a car stuck in time in it's model year

You know I used to think this way, then all my computing devices started changing often for the worse with every update.

For me a stable device that doesn't change month-to-month is a feature, not a disadvantage. Give me the LTS branch of the car world.

I can appreciate that perspective. I want to live at the bleeding edge, and don't mind the inconveniences or regressions. I can't take my money with me when I die, so after savings and basic needs are met, I want to live in the future (even if the products are still in beta!).

I can't get that sort of experience from stodgy, risk adverse legacy enterprises. I want to support enterprises that want to succeed or die.

EDIT: Edit after your edit, keep the LTS builds, give me nightly! Tests pass? Ship it!

Please don't beta test your products on the same roads I'm using with my stable branch ;)

> Tests pass? Ship it!

If there are bugs, more tests! And always, always, always degrade gracefully.

> I want to live in the future (even if the products are still in beta!)

Now we're getting in to why traditional automakers are 'stodgy' and 'risk averse'.

I do agree that there is a lot that can be improved in cars, but a ship software at a million miles an hour approach seems like the kind of practice that will end up externalizing the costs to the rest of us.

Edit: I'm gonna leave this up, but it doesn't really reflect the friendly tone I'm trying to put across - I've enjoyed this chat.

This is the kind of self-centered, callous mindset that runs over innocent pedestrians.

It’s a car, not a web site. People other than the drivers’ lives are at risk when you drive on public roads.

I’m the one who is responsible for the vehicle at all times, not an Uber safety driver who isn’t paying attention, and I take that responsibility seriously.

Can you be isolated to a testing serv^H^H^H^H roads?

Maybe you just don’t want the pain of feeling like you wasted 100k.

I only spent a bit more than half that on a CPO Model S, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. If you have the means, I highly recommend it. By far, my favorite car having owned several Corvettes, an SLK 350, a luxury pickup truck, and a Subaru STI.

Given the accidents, you might as well drive a regular car and take your hands off the wheels and you'd roughly replicate the quality of their "autonomous diving".

Ironically Autopilot 2 is better than Autopilot 3, so older Teslas would be one car.

As someone who spent $8K on Enhanced Autopilot 15 months ago, I'd say that pretty much everyone has better autonamous driving. My brother-in-law got a new Honda Accord a few months ago, and says on the highway he can just take his hands off the wheel and let it do it's thing.

My fancy-schmancy Tesla Models S meanwhile can do an ok job of following lanes as long as you keep your hands on the wheel and pay attention to ensure that whenever it doesn't detect your hands on the wheel that you give it a little tug.

I love my Model S, but they really bit off more than they can chew in the "writing our own software" department.

Do you have 2018.10.4 or above? It drove me through 220 miles of rain including torrential downpours yesterday with ease. Up until that update, I’d agree that AP2 was sub par but the new update has dramatically improved EAP.

> It drove me through 220 miles of rain including torrential downpours yesterday

This sounds terrifying. Why did you trust it enough to experiment with your life?

And the lives of everybody else on that road.

I just got 2018.10.4 a week or less ago. I haven't put many miles on it yet, but it does seem like a big improvement in the small testing I've done, as far as the driving.

> My brother-in-law got a new Honda Accord a few months ago, and says on the highway he can just take his hands off the wheel and let it do it's thing.

I have the new Accord. It's not really autonomous. Adaptive cruise control and auto-braking aren't bad, but the lane keep mostly just jiggles the steering wheel to notify me when I depart the lines, and all the time it mistakes construction and seams in the pavement as lane lines.

I tried the Audi A6's self driving feature and it was fantastic.

I don’t see evidence of the failure. As far as I’ve seen, Tesla has met and then exceeded every single production target they’ve set, including Model 3 production start (which was on time even, last summer). Some were delayed by _years_ but they hit them.

The most recent goal they have set is 5000/week. It was originally slated for Q4 2017. So that date has slipped now by at least 3 months.

I doubt they’ll hit it in Q2. Maybe they won’t hit it until 2019.

But all available evidence suggests the will hit it. Every previous goal was met, why would this be the first one that isn’t?

Don't the goals and targets include doing it by a stated date?

> As far as I’ve seen, Tesla has met and then exceeded every single production target they’ve set.

> The next goal they set was 5000/week. It was originally slated for Q4 2017. So that date has slipped now by 3 months.

Those feel like unambiguously contradictory statements.

> Every previous goal was met, why would this be the first one they can’t hit?

Because... they quite literally did not hit the goal?

I didn’t say they hit those goals on time I said they hit the goal. Therefore they’ll most likely hit this one. Not on time, but no one expects that.

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4159709-tesla-headed-credit...

This is just one (of many) "short case" articles against TSLA. According to almost every source I've come across, Tesla has continually shifted the goalposts around meeting their production schedules, and is burning through cash at an unsustainable rate.

Recently their credit rating has been downgraded, and they need, and it will be difficult to get, a massive amount of debt to continue operations.

I'm not real clear on what people base their expectations on them succeeding on.. hype?

An excerpt:

"In downgrading, Moody's states:

Tesla's ratings reflect the significant shortfall in the production rate of the company's Model 3 electric vehicle. The company also faces liquidity pressures due to its large negative free cash flow and the pending maturities of convertible bonds ($230 million in November 2018 and $920 million in March 2019). Tesla produced only 2,425 Model 3s during the fourth quarter of 2017; it is currently targeting a weekly production rate of 2,500 by the end of March, and 5,000 per week by the end of June. This compares with the company's year-earlier production expectations of 5,000 per week by the end of 2017 and 10,000 by the end of 2018."

That doesn't sound like "exceeding production targets" to me

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