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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

The point was more that Tesla has already scaled beyond the level where "these companies know how to build cars" is reasonable spin. Tesla's building plenty of cars, making money doing so, scaling rapidly, and can only be expected to be doing better still by the time those competitors arrive in the market. That's not to say that they won't be highly competetive cars, they might (I for one certainly hope they are). But you don't get to handwave away Tesla's existing success on the basis of production numbers.

Honestly... your argument is a year stale. The window on "Tesla can't scale" closed. They did.

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I am not sure that's a fair statement. The other manufacturers (most, but especially in the luxury segments) build higher quality cars with much lower rates of error. Tesla enthusiasts (much like early adopters of things) are forgiving and overlook a lot of imperfections (fit and finish on teslas vary greatly -see Youtube reviews). This has been the primary reason holding me back for purchasing one.

Tesla's existing accomplishments and ability to meet tough goals is admirable, but their first to market advantage is starting to fade away as more companies bring to market competitive cars without the quality issues (however few they might be pumping out for now).

The statement was about industrial scaling. Arguments based on fit and finish and market preference are sort of a different thing.

Failing to maintain product quality is an indicator of inability to scale.

The quality has gotten much better though.

> Honestly... your argument is a year stale. The window on "Tesla can't scale" closed. They did.

They are not building at the scale of the large automakers. To build at the scale of millions of cars per year is significantly more difficult than what Tesla is doing now, and it is not simply a matter of building more of the same factories.

> They are not building at the scale of the large automakers.

No, but they're building at the scale of the small automakers, for whom you don't seem to be predicting imminent death due to their inability to scale.

If Jaguar (which was your example!) isn't about to collapse under the weight of their low-volume inefficient processes, then neither is Tesla.

To wit: you're spinning. Pick a different argument, this one is old.

They still have only 1! factory. Compared to any almost any other automotive manufacturer that is a bespoke operation.

I didn't say they were big, I said they had scaled to a level where they were competing very well in volume with established brands (c.f. the Jaguar example above) and that by extension, this senseless prognostication that "Tesla is going to fail because they can't scale" is stale spin and you guys need to find new arguments. They scaled.

I mean, yeah, they built one big (heh, giga) factory instead of a few smaller ones. Your argument seems to be "OK, fine, they built one big factory, but they for sure can't build another!". And that's silly.

They have a battery factory in Nevada and a car factory in Fremont.

They have greater capacity to build batteries than any other car manufacturer.

They have a greater propensity to build BEVs than any other car manufacturer, since they are all dependent on dealerships who live and die on income from servicing ICE vehicles.

There is not going to be any rapid change to BEVs from established manufacturers. It will be all talk, no action until the last dealership closes down.

Tesla produced 77,000 vehicles in Q1, worldwide. Let's assume they hit their target of 400,000 vehicles in 2019. They would still need to triple production after that point to reach the top 20 of auto manufacturers in 2016: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_manufacturers_by_motor...

And is being the top 20 some sort of required metric for being a "valid" car manufacturer? I'm growing increasingly tired of these arguments that because they're so far behind the "established" players that they'll never be successful or worth supporting. A company can be successful and valuable while not being the absolute leader. It's a bit disingenuous to put them down for not making as many cars as conglomerates that have been around for ~100 years...

I'm not putting Tesla down for not making as many cars as century-old conglomerates. They don't even make as many cars as Chinese and Korean manufacturers that were founded in the 1980's. In fact, the century-old conglomerates themselves manufacture fewer cars than Toyota and Volkswagen.

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