We're talking about a company that spent more than a billion dollars to build an assembly line they discovered after the fact wouldn't work...
It's not safe to say anything about Tesla's capabilities or competencies at this point.
It's not safe to say anything about Tesla's capabilities or competencies at this point.
Munroe's teardown also had some interesting findings (both good and bad, but that was the goal):
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/04/29/munro-tesla-model-3-tea...
A suspension worthy of formula one was quite a compliment. I'd say there are some things that Tesla does uniquely well. Safety is another one. Remember that time the NTHSA literallyu broke their testing machine when testing the Model S for crash safety? No? Here are some videos:
https://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/videos/a5238/watch-the...
That reads like an ad paid for by Tesla
You can "engineer" the hell out of something and still do a terrible job as an engineer. Tesla's infatuation with novel, clever things often gets in the way of shipping. Their fiasco with the model X gull-wing doors is just one example of a billion.
It's easy to make your car better when you can charge vastly more and you've got tons of VC money you can blow through in pursuit of some distant goal. Established car companies have no such luxury.
This is not to say Tesla hasn't had some wins, but on the whole they're losing.
Arguably Tesla is the Juicero of cars.
Isn't that called "disruption" and is the entire reason Silicon Valley exists?
It's easy to make a billion dollar start-up if you get two billion in cash you can blow on acquisitions. It's hard to make that company survive more than ten years.
When Tesla runs out of VC money, which they will, things are going to turn ugly in a hurry. All this money they've blown on door hinges and sending cars into space will be gone and they'll have to turn a profit. I'm not sure they can without massively cutting back and radically simplifying their product.
I feel pretty confident in my right to criticize Tesla for it's presumptive and poorly executed overreach.
The market for clean vehicles exists because Toyota and Nissan showed there was demand for it. Tesla came in and made better-looking cars (from a distance, they're quite shoddy looking up close), but they're competitively only because Toyota and Nissan have chosen to stick with their distinctive designs rather than put their EV tech into mainstream vehicles.
And Tesla's big problem is that the rest of the industry is finally getting around to putting their EV technologies into mainstream vehicles, almost all of which are better made and far more reliable.