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Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

> 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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