Hacker News Reader

Comment by masto | Hacker News Reader

A rising tide lifts all boats. I'm just happy there are an increasing number of EVs coming on the market. And people will have their reasons for choosing one or another, so it doesn't have to be that one car is objectively best across the board and therefore gets 100% of the sales.

I'm very happy with my Model 3 but what I really want to see is acceptance of electric cars as a viable and sensible option for a lot of drivers, and the infrastructure that comes along with that.

View on HN

Of course. I'm not trying to play a game of 'my EV is better than that EV' (nb I drive a Leaf). I'm pointing out that many people underestimated the lead Tesla has in EV technology. This year we've seen major, and esteemed, automakers put things into production that are clearly years behind what Tesla can do. I'm glad they are joining in, but I'm just trying to set the record straight.

FWIW the Kia Niro EV (and the Hyundai Kona Electric which is based on the same platform) are very serious competitors for the Model 3. Kia and Hyundai seem to have got the EV tech figured out. But alas they can't hardly manufacture any of them. So thats Tesla's other advantage - a whopping huge battery factory.

At the last investors meeting, battery production is what Elon said is the main bottleneck at this time for model 3s.

AFAIK, all the others are going to get their batteries from third party vendors (except maybe Nissan?). That is going to cause a cost for everyone but Tesla.

isn’t Panasonic the ones that provide all of the batteries that end up in Teslas?

my understanding is that Panasonic has been losing money so they’ve started scaling back production. which lead to Musk taking shots at them.

Panasonic provide the cells, Tesla combines thousands of cells into battery packs, and the battery packs are quite complex bits of engineering, with monitoring, cooling, heating, balancing etc.

Panasonic isn't scaling back production. Tesla is the one who refused to approve additional scaling up because Panasonic hasn't been able to reach the promised production rate with their existing capacity.

> Nikkei said that Panasonic “froze” a decision to put an additional $900 million to $1.35 billion of investment into the Nevada Gigafactory in a bid to “reduce its dependence on the automaker.” Tesla is Panasonic’s biggest customer for electric vehicle batteries, and the Japanese battery maker had already suffered millions in losses due to the slower-than-expected ramp-up of Model 3 production.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/11/18305976/tesla-panasonic-...

Yeah parent is saying Tesla denied that Nikkei report. Might be true, might be not, but lying would be very risky for a public company. Remember Bloomberg story about stealth chips in Supermicro servers?

Also, energy efficiency means lower costs. If you need a 20% bigger pack for the same range, that’s almost a 20% more expensive pack.

That’s the entire profit margin of a profitable car model.

Exactly this. It’s also thousands of dollars worth of energy cost over the vehicle’s lifetime and enhances the effective charging rate (miles charged per minute). It also reduces weight.

Efficiency is hugely important for profitable and desirable electric vehicles and significantly enhances the environmental advantage as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com