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This is really why I'm a little bearish on Tesla. It's not because of their issues, which can be overcome, but because now that the EV market has been validated other bigger, richer, and more experienced car companies are going to come into the space and offer Tesla a whole lot of competition.

Unlike space flight (Elon's other big venture) cars are not an industry that has been totally moribund since the 1980s. It's a lot harder to disrupt a healthy industry than it is to disrupt the walking dead (ULA, Roscosmos, etc.).

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Have you seen the car on stage? https://www.pscp.tv/w/1kvKpaEpLekGE at 17:00.

I would reserve that (it won't be available before 2020 and they have yet to have the battery production ready to make the car in volume!). Tesla's Model Y will be presented in a few months.

I seriously doubt that Mercedes will be able to make good EV in volume before Tesla.

>I would reserve that (it won't be available before 2020 and they have yet to have the battery production ready to make the car in volume!). Tesla's Model Y will be presented in a few months.

This. EV production comes down entirely to battery availability. It looks like Mercedes is making the same mistake as Nissan initially did, and thinking they can roll their own battery tech and production facilities. They would be far better off striking deals with LG or Panasonic as the rest outside of Tesla have done. The 64kWh 2019 Nissan leaf (only real competitor to Model 3) will be using LG chem batteries, as does the Chevy Bolt/Volt.

There's absolutely no way Mercedes will make up for a 15 year head start on battery tech that Tesla has. I'd expect to see them building EVs at $100k+ MSRP and quantities under 20k/year, and having serious battery degradation issues along with other idiosyncrasies of LiPo chemistry that have taken decades to work out in large scale manufacturing. They will be making small batches of pricey luxury EVs while Tesla, Nissan, and GM are producing millions of units for the masses in 5 years.

If I'm not mistaken, Tesla still uses battery cells from Panasonic in their cars.

They do, but they have their own cell chemistry and they're really the only car manufacturer with their own production coming online soon at quantities high enough for volume.

Plus they do the battery pack design, construction and software themselves. That includes testing of what temperature, power draw and charging regimes cause degradation, how to keep the cells within a good regime while maintaining performance, when to cheat, how to prevent fires and so on. You don’t just put 7000 cells in parallel and call it a day. (Well, some manufacturers do, but the results vary).

> they have yet to have the battery production ready to make the car in volume

Same with Tesla.

The Gigafactory in Reno will cover 600,000 cars per year (with 70+ Kwh battery) and the Chinese one (currently under construction in Shanghai) will add 200,000 by 2020.

No other Western automakers has even plan to achieve half of that.

Tesla is supply-constrained and delivered a record 40,000 vehicles in Q2 2018. Mercedes-Benz delivers just under 30,000 vehicles per month. And MB isn't even an especially high volume manufacturer.

We're talking about batteries. Where are Mercedes going to get them from to build EVs in bulk?

If Tesla was a battery company, we could talk about batteries. But Tesla is a car company, and manufacturing 600,000 batteries isn't going to accomplish much if they can only manufacture 120,000 cars (let's be optimistic and say 200,000). Unless they turn around and sell the leftover 400,000 batteries to Mercedes-Benz, in which case, there's your answer.

You keep moving the goalposts. This series of comments started with someone pointing out that Mercedes don't have capacity to build a lot of batteries. Then you said 'Same with Tesla'. But thats not true.

your original comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17910814

If Tesla had the capacity to build more than 40,000 electric cars per quarter, they would deliver more than 40,000 electric cars per quarter. They don't.

Speculating about vaporware gigafactories is just that, speculation. Until they're actually building cars at scale--any kind of cars--I would take any promises about future production capacity with the same grain of salt as Elon's impulsive tweets about "funding secured".

Tesla is not more than just a "car company" They have their hands in electric vehicles, lithium-ion battery energy storage and solar panel manufacturing...

https://www.tesla.com/energy

>Mercedes-Benz delivers just under 30,000 vehicles per month.

ICE cars, yes. However EV's are completely constrained by battery production, which Mercedes has literally not even begun to develop. It's a completely different comparison.

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