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Comment by hef19898 | Hacker News Reader

hef19898

It still comes down to a race between Tesla figuring out the complete automotive supply chain and competitors figuring out EVs.

Tesla had, and I would assume still has, production hell. Now it's delivery hell. Both are solved, controlled and executed constantly by other car companies (VW has an exception with the new Golf 8 that proves the rule).

The competition is still struggling to solve EVs, some like Jaguar and Audi and BMW and others seem to be ahead of others.

Advantage Tesla: EV brand, EV dedicated basis for their cars, software and experience with batteries

Advantage competition: scaling production and delivery, economies of scale

I would argue that the window of opportunity for Tesla is closing now. Which might not be good news for them. And given the ever shorter life cycles in the automotive sector the window ever was max. one facelift / model replacement. Which again is something the competition is doing constantly for decades now. Tesla never did it once.

So I see the advantage on the competition but not by a big margin. Had Tesla solved their production and supply chain earlier the margin wouldn't be there at all or Tesla even be a head of others. The biggest risks for Tesla are a) to miss the window of opportunity they have and be b) to run out of cash before their issues are solved. Both are related and I suspect Elon is much a help regarding the cash side as he is a hindrance regarding the rest.

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Tesla has one more advantage over all the fossils: they're all in. The old guys are still challenged on mission, twisted up and fighting internally, bringing out weak token products designed to not hurt their ICE lines.

I think this is probably more important than people give it credit for. I have an acquaintance who works R&D at a traditional car company (but on self driving features) he says the internal 'fights' between ICE and electric are very real and damaging.

You can experience it first hand if you go try to test drive a Chevy Bolt - Motor Trend car of the year in 2017. I spoke to dealers who (pretended?) unawareness of the model and didn't want to help me find one. Another tried to talk me out of it. Finally one dealer was well informed about its pros and cons, and had several for sale.

Another example: bmw i3. 114 mile range on the 2017 model, really? And that's up from less than 100 miles before that. Painfully token.

The big problem the big auto manufacturers are having is the battery and cost. A mass-market electric car cannot cost as much as Tesla's offerings, and a huge part of that cost is the battery. Even with the most optimistic cost projections of battery costs in the near future, it's hard to see how to offer an electric car which is competitive on both cost and range with an ICE car.

True, if they're going to price under Tesla, they'll need the courage to be unprofitable until they have the volume to get positive.

Another issue is subsidies. Carmakers have enjoyed billions from the states... https://www.reuters.com/article/us-toyota-mazda-jobs-factbox...

That's not counting an $80b bailout... https://www.thebalance.com/auto-industry-bailout-gm-ford-chr...

And what about gas prices being artificially kept low with subsidies... https://www.nrdc.org/experts/danielle-droitsch/time-us-end-f...

So the true cost and TCO of an ICE car is not at all obvious to compute compared to an electric.

It's just a car, to the salesman. If I went in and looked for a Chevrolet Equinox and the dealer didn't have anyt, they'd try to sell me another model.

Just like if you went to Best Buy looking for a certain TV, they'll just try to sell you the one on the shelf

I've had on multiple occasions gone into a dealership and had them tell me that they have the car i'm asking about, but that I don't want that car, and that I want this other car instead.

I went into nissan to look at the Juke a while back, the asshole wouldn't even let me look at it until I literally started leaving. He just kept pressing the Rogue saying that I'd like it a lot more... Then when he finally took me to it, it was still wrapped in plastic and they said they couldn't do a test drive.

Another time I went to go look at the Chevy Bolt when it first came out, they said they had a few in stock, but they would not stop trying to get me to test drive a Malibu instead. They kept pushing how it was a better car, how it was cheaper, how it would go further, how it looks better.

Eventually they let me test drive the Bolt, but the whole time the guy just kept pointing out how all the features in the car were also in the Malibu.

It just left such a shitty taste in my mouth. I literally went in there asking about a single model of car each time, and it seemed like they did everything they could to actively sabotage my ability to buy it.

I went in to dealer, money in hand, to buy a specific car I knew they had in stock and that I'd already picked out. The salesman then proceeded to convince me that I actually wanted this other model which would be much better for me. Fine you've convinced me, how much for that other car. Salesman comes back a couple of minutes later and sheepishly admits they don't actually have that car in stock and won't be getting any for 4-6 weeks. I walk out without buying a car.

This is why online car shopping needs to be a thing. I experienced the exact same thing. I'm a highly informed customer who knew every car I wanted to see but almost every sales guy ignored that fact, besides at a Honda location. Which isn't surprising that I ended up with a Honda.

I would have bought it online if I could and it's very possible I wouldn't have ended up with a Honda, that has to play a role in each company's auto sales.

Same here, I ended up going into an Audi dealer after the Bolt fiasco, and it was a night and day difference. When I asked a question about a car, they answered it happily! When I wanted to look at a car, they took me to a few. When I wanted to test drive one, they pulled up their inventory of cars and asked what one I want to test drive.

No "you don't want that", no "we are trying to keep the miles down on that one", no condescending talk about how some other car is probably more in my range.

And unsurprisingly I ended up getting an Audi!

It's one of the big reasons why I think the whole "online sales" thing is perfect with Tesla. They have showrooms in many places where those who want to look at and ask questions about the cars can go, and when you actually want to buy, you buy it like something off amazon, and it gets delivered when ready.

The Costco Auto Program is worth checking out: https://www.costcoauto.com

You can pick the car and get pre-negotiated pricing online. You still have to go to the dealer to actually pick it up, but you don't need to be "sold to", negotiate the price, etc. The people I know who have used it have gotten excellent prices, but it's always worth comparing to the estimates from Consumer Reports or other sources.

Good to know.

I used https://www.unhaggle.com to find out the MRSP of the car and saved about $2k from the list price, basically the lowest price the dealer could offer. It's basically a lead-gen system for dealerships which I discovered after my experience mentioned above. The dealer was very welcoming with us using it and said it was getting more common.

I worked in a small sales and marketing office for IBM in the early 90's. I remember the sales people, who made very good money from mainframe sales, openly discussing how they didn't even want customers to know about RS6000's. I think the margins were pretty low on RS6000's at the time.

Anyway, internal struggles holding back product lines is a very real thing.

This is a good point — remember that Kodak released some of the first digital cameras. They still failed to switch fast enough.

The shift want just digital cameras it was also the iPhone that made the digital camera obsolete.

With digital cameras they were losing film revenue which was larger than camera sales.

Car companies don't own gas stations so they will switch faster and easier than Kodak.

There will be some struggles internally but not as much I suspect.

Plus modern EVs have demonstrated more performance then ice so it's really just a matter of catering to demand as it changes.

The challenge here is more on Tesla to make a sustainable car company than it is on old companies to convert.

If a startup car company in Czech can make a hyper car EV that beasts a Veyron in acceleration then there is nothing proprietary about the tech and incumbents will have an easier time switching as demand evolves.

> more performance than ice

In some axes, WAY more. The new Roadster 0-60 is 1.9 sec, which is 0.3 faster than everything on the production list. That list needs updating now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fastest_production_car...

The Roadster hasn't been released yet so nothing needs updating yet.

It's also not all about 0-60 (at least for the motorsport market). Tesla's seem to still have issues under sustained high performance driving[1]. There's many cars with significantly slower 0-60 times that smash the Model S around Nürburgring due to batteries overheating and being put into limp mode. As the technology improves no doubt this problem will go away, but it doesn't look like we're there just yet.

For perspective the Model S made it around the track in about 10 minutes, an old diesel Jaguar S Type with a 0-60 time of 8.5~ seconds did it in about 9 [2 & 3].

[1] https://insideevs.com/news/323053/tesla-model-s-fails-to-lap...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_N%C3%BCrburgring_Nords...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaguar_S-Type

Kodak wasn't even really a camera company latterly and hadn't been a serious camera maker since the Japanese (mostly)--who still collectively mostly own the high-end camera space--cornered the market. They were primarily a photographic consumables business.

Even had they executed more aggressively and better than they did, they'd have gone through hard times. (See Fujifilm which did a better job with a smaller company and still struggled.)

This made me think of the future of gas stations.

Will they just conver to charging stations, and charge customers to use them?

It'll be tough, most gas stations don't have a lot of space for a lot of charging stations and nothing to do while you wait for the charge. The large truck stop style ones might be able to convert more easily because they already have the larger lots and buildings with spaces to sit inside while you wait.

I have heard anecdotally that gas stations make terrible money on their actual fuel sales and the real margins are on food inside so it may work out in the end but that low but broad base flow may be an important part of the business.

In the end though they'll probably largely die out inside cities with charging mostly happening at home, at work, or in parking decks/lots. There will definitely be a need for them along highways and stuff though to service long drives. In the end that's a looooong ways off, even if you completely ban the new sale and import of ICE vehicles there's going to be a long tail for used cars until electric vehicles become 100x less expensive.

Yeah, at this point inside US cities the majority of pumps have been moving to the model of grocery stores with pumps attached, and that model still works with chargers augmenting and then replacing pumps, because grocery stores generally are useful places to charge while you shop. (Just as malls seem to be good places to add chargers, if you expect and/or want people to linger/browse while they charge.)

Convenience stores and restaurants will still be useful on the highways with or without gas pumps around. (People will always need to use a restroom or grab some grub on long road trips.)

I figure some smart "medium fast" food restaurant that benefits from a lingering dining experience, but doesn't take too much advantage of it (ie, doesn't actively slow the diner down), will integrate chargers into their franchise plans and become the new king of the highways in the way that MacDonald's (and regionally, Waffle House) became synonymous with pit stops along the open road in the 50s and 60s.

It won't work quite as well just because it takes so much longer to charge an EV than it does to gas up a regular car. So the limited lots of existing stations will have a much lower turnover rate than they do now. Also most places around me are very much just the traditional convenience store you can only get a very limited selection of stuff (like a smattering for fruit and milk at best with maybe some cereals or something) those places aren't going to be long stops to shop around in so charging at them isn't going to be a draw.

> Convenience stores and restaurants will still be useful on the highways with or without gas pumps around. (People will always need to use a restroom or grab some grub on long road trips.)

Yeah like I said in my original post I don't think they'll go 100% out of business along highways but it will largely be the larger stops that have some restaurant integrated or just restaurants along the highway that survive not the small snack food and gas places that are a majority today. Charging (today and for the foreseeable future unless there's another breakthrough in batter tech that pans out at large scales) just takes too long for anything without some kind of food or other attraction to make sense as the charging stations on longer trips.

It's eventually going to be something that happens when the car is parked, rather than a specific stop for charging/gassing up. I've already seen parking garages and street side meters equipped with EV chargers (although rarely an EV parked there). Ideally all batteries would be standardized, so you'd just pull up to a place and swap like you would a propane tank, but open standards aren't as inticing to investors as trying to dominate market share with proprietary tech and licensing it to everyone. Probably going to take a law standardizing swappable EV batteries to nip that bad behavior in the bud.

The valet game should get interesting. Pay extra to guarantee charging would be a quick and easy way to gouge a few more pennies.

As far as gas stations goes, I don't see a route where most of them aren't folding. Franchises don't have the resources to retool like a big corporation that can light money on fire every month and still increase in value.

Swappable batteries likely won't be cost effective for cars for safety reasons, if nothing else. Most EVs have the batteries "buried" in impact-protected spots, with firewalls between them, and in such ways that the battery is reliant upon and sometimes in turn contributes to the structural integrity of the car. Even if the packs were standardized by regulation, getting safe access to the packs in most EVs is expensive and unsafe access is potentially hazardous to long-term fire and/or structural safety of the vehicle.

Anyway, yes, the focus on charging inside of cities should be places that cars are already parked. For travel between cities, it will be businesses that can best take advantage of 30-45 minutes of downtime (assuming fast charging), and I do think it's going to be a restaurant chain and/or mini-mall concept that's going to be the best fit for highway travel. It's going to take a smart franchise or two to experiment there, and it may even be an existing franchise like Pilot or MacDonald's perhaps, but it will be a shift away from smaller convenience stores to probably something larger with more to do.

The one spot I see swappable batteries probably happening is on large trucks where space isn't at so much of a premium and the charge time actually costs the operators money. In cars yeah the batteries probably won't be in an accessible area for easy swapping.

I don't think it will be possible. A gas station can refuel 20 cars per hour; there's no way you can do that with a charging station.

Probably they would die out, and hotels would do long distance charging, since you need to charge it when you sleep. People would just not be able to do medium or small distance charging at all except at their home.

Turn them all into Starbucks, but with EV charging stations.

Kodak made more money from film sales then all camera manufactures do today, combined.

If they went all-in on digital, the company would have still 'collapsed'.

From what I know of at least european car makers, they see the writing on the wall, especially with various governments making noises about banning petrol and diesel cars in the next decase or so, and they are heavily investing in the switch, even if it's not so obvious to consumers at the moment because the industry moves slowly.

> Advantage competition: scaling production and delivery, economies of scale

Really? Evidence suggests otherwise.

Hyundai Kona Electric: huge backorders, yet they only made 2000 of them in February. https://insideevs.com/news/343420/hyundai-kona-electric-prod...

Audi eTron: 2019 production targets lowered 20% to 45K/year. https://www.electrive.com/2019/04/23/audi-revises-production...

Jaguar seems to be doing OK with the iPace, but they only sold 1400 of them in February, and of course Jaguar as a car company is a similar size to Tesla.

I'd say in general terms including conventional vehicles and not only EVs.

That's what I meant.

Tesla is wasting time, money and focus by investing too much in self-driving tech (they're even having their own chip division now! - is Tesla really in financial a position to compete with Intel/Nvidia now?).

Not to mention they made all of their Model 3's thousands of dollars more expensive by including the "full self-driving hardware-that-wasn't" in every unit to the point where it didn't even make sense for Tesla to sell the base model anymore.

Keep it simple stupid - focus on making great high-value EVs, and keep dropping their prices in a profitable manner. Stop throwing billions of dollars on "full self-driving tech" that will never work well enough.

there is a line of reasoning, rarely articulated, that EVs will never reach the price points it would take to fully 100% replace ICE cars in the private/personal market.

li-ion batteries have done an excellent job walking down the learning/cost curve, but we can all see the way it bends and how much headroom is left in the chemistry. we'll likely hit $100/kwh in the next few years, but even just $80/kwh is likely 5+ years away after that. the model 3 will never start with a $2.

so if you're going to bottom out at around 3x the price it would take to fully replace the existing market... then you have to figure out a way to get 3x+ the value out of the asset you're delivering.

that means some combination of lasting 3x longer (~500k miles) and/or being in use 3x more (~600hrs/year). the former is viably unlocked by the EV engineering advantages, but w/r/t the latter, individual drivers have no intention of tripling their car usage. so it simply has to be turned into some kind of shared asset.

imho self driving makes this a nirvanna, so I'm glad they're pursuing it, but its not actually required. tesla could add a basic uber/lyft feature set to their existing app and then when the last 0.01% of self driving winds up taking years longer than elon said it would he can blame the regulators and just make it a regular human-driver ride sharing app.

remember the mission is the end of carbon emissions, so any plan for "lets just get good market share and margins in the luxury segment" is a plan to fail.

I've read that the wiring harness of a modern ICE car costs more than the transmission.

Do you think it's possible that all we need is ~$100/KWh, after which due to diminishing returns, find better ROI improving other areas like a dramatically cheaper wiring harness?

Yes but its not enough and its not soon enough. Tesla needs to stoke demand this quarter. Humanity needs to be driving toward zero emissions yesterday.

IMHO privately owned electric vehicles will only ever have been a historical oddity of the transition between personally owned cars and shared/pooled cars.

I think that view neglects the costs of the fossil fuel infrastructure. At some point gas stations are going to start closing for lack of customers. That time is a while off yet, but all of the existing stations are not going to be able to be supported by say, half as many ICE cars. Convenience will go down and at some point prices may go up as the existing infrastructure is paid for by fewer stations and less fuel. At the same time electrics will continue getting better, cheaper and more convenient. This could provide an extra push.

I agree with your points on a longer time horizon, but elon needs to solve for model3 demand now (this year).

EVs will not drive the kind of oil distribution market retraction you're describing until they're at least 10% of cars on the road, which would be years and years after they're 10% of new cars sold.

So while I agree the affect you describe will help, we don't have time to wait for it.

I think the time horizon for a step change in oil distribution is a lot shorter than people expect, precisely because it will be more likely a severe step change (ie, a snowball/crash) than an easy transition. Oil distribution is extremely complex, amazingly baroque, and has only a small number of players (they use a shell game [Shell Oil pun intended] of a large number of different "station" brands, but are really only a few companies left). When instability hits, it is likely to hit hard and look almost immediate (look at 70s Oil crises, for example).

I don't yet have a guess what percentage of the car fleet needs to be EV for that to happen, but that number is also not the only potential disruption that may happen to cause it (again, we have the 70s Oil crises as examples).

(Not that causing an Oil crisis is necessarily the right way to combat climate change, but in the question of chicken-and-egg between ICE and EV, people sure have a short memory for how volatile Oil is.)

It is currently manufacturered in Fremont California. Nothing in Fremont is cheap, it is no different than manufacturing in Manhattan, since employees need to pay for super high housing costs and deal with high costs of doing business.

Manufacturing in China could bring the cost down significantly, with lower wages, taxes, material costs, etc.

i don't know why this comment is being downvoted. He's absolutely right about every word. Fremont is not a place to be building cars. If you're gonna build in the US, Tesla could have chosen almost any other city in the US and gotten labor cost that was 33% cheaper.

Software companies can afford the higher labor cost in the bay area because they tend to have really large margin when they win. Car companies have very very low margins, even when they win, so they really need to pay attention to things like labor cost. This is a huge mistep for Tesla and shows poor judgement on Elon Musk or whoever decided to do it in Fremont.

Tesla over estimated the benefits of automation. Maybe they thought that labour costs wouldn't be that much of a factor anyway.

Musk long ago was talking about his calculations about the physical limits to assembly speed. “the output is going to be volume times density times velocity.” https://electrek.co/2016/09/15/elon-musk-confident-that-tesl...

A genius no doubt. I will see you all on Mars.

They bought the old NUMMI factory that used to make GM and Toyota cars. It was active right up until they bought it in 2010 (they announced the sale a month after NUMMI closed) so my guess is they were able to accelerate early progress because of that purchase.

In the long run, I'd agree, the expense vs. reward calculation doesn't make sense now. But GM and Toyota successfully used that plant for something like 30-50 years before that and there was a whole community of auto workers living around it, so I'm not sure I'd say that was poor judgment for them at all.

Nobody expected housing prices to go up 100%+ over the last few years. 2010-2015ish was a real estate boom period for Valley workers if anything. You had post-recession housing fire sales; AirBnB wasn't big enough yet to incentivize empty houses; Google, Apple and FB didn't quite own the entire Menlo Park->Sunnyvale corridor yet; etc. Good times.

> EVs will never reach the price points it would take to fully 100% replace ICE cars in the private/personal market

The Chevy Bolt and to a lesser extent the Model 3 have already hit the "Corolla/Civic/Sonata/et al" sedan sweet spot for new sales. The mean in new car sales has always been around and just above $30k. Certainly the mean in total car sales is closer to $20k, but that hugely because of the secondary market and fast depreciation (used car sales). It's still too early to tell what sort of impact models like the Bolt and Model 3 may have on used sales (and obviously production numbers are still a factor, especially with Tesla's production and delivery woes).

Chinese manufacturers have been exploring the "bottom" of the EV market much more effectively than the US and EU markets simply because they don't need the carrot of luxury to attract early adopters in quite the same way. If Chinese EV companies are to be believed, hitting below that magic USD$20k mean is possible with new car sales alone due to EV supply chain efficiencies that ICE supply chains can't match.

> self driving makes this a nirvana

I feel self-driving is a red herring/impossible goal like the 60s AI boom all over again, and we're all going to look back on this in a decade or so and wonder what everyone was thinking.

Also, ride sharing isn't likely the answer in current America. It's enough of a culture shift to get gas-lovers/petrolheads to enjoy/love/trust EVs. It's even more of an ask to remove ownership from the question and to force them to only ever rent a car. We might not have time to take only one hurdle at a time, but we may have to.

> The Chevy Bolt and to a lesser extent the Model 3 have already hit the "Corolla/Civic/Sonata/et al" sedan sweet spot for new sales

GM sold 18,000 Bolts in 2018 [1]. Over the same period, Toyota sold 280,000 Corolla Sedans [2].

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/3/18166619/gm-ev-tax-credit-...

[2] http://carsalesbase.com/us-car-sales-data/toyota/toyota-coro...

The implication in the further context from what you quoted was sweet spot for price for new sales (not actual numbers of sales).

I think you underestimate how many companies do chip design. That part of it is actually quite unremarkable.

And while that transitional Nvidia hardware obviously isn't ideal, it's still necessary to run Autopilot today. And it is what is allowing Tesla to gather mountains of real world training data for its machine learning algorithms.

I'm not confident Tesla will pull off their vision of a driverless taxi business, but if they do pull it off, the business fundamentals promise astronomical revenues. Nobody questions that Uber and Lyft are viable businesses. Tesla's plan is to be in their space but with cheaper fuel, cheaper labor and a greater revenue share.

> Keep it simple stupid - focus on making great high-value EVs, and keep dropping their prices in a profitable manner.

Problem is, self-driving is an essential part of their image of high-tech luxury. Their marketing strategy depends on being the opposote of KISS. Making the best cars they can while also being electric is the only way to get the volume necessary to make electric affordable.

I don't care about self-driving tech in the least, for me it is about as likely for us to get level 5 autonomy as us getting nuclear fusion soon. Just make a good cheap electric car that works. The new Tesla chip info I've heard promising it next year sounds like a complete lie/classic Elon Musk fabrication.

https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/elon-musks-dumb-lie-about...

> Both are solved, controlled and executed constantly by other car companies.

Executed for ICE cars and their components. They don't have the supply chains for batteries, inverters, or electric motors.

If only it was so clean cut. Tesla isn't even operating in all 50 states due to specific laws in 1/2 which prohibit direct sales. This is part of the reason for switching to service centers and transitioning sales completely to app based purchasing.

Tesla is driving the biggest wedge of change through the world economy in the 21st century. The impact these changes have will affect everyone who uses, sells, services and advertises automobiles. It's no wonder the amount of outright vitriol the press propagates given the lack of advertising Tesla does.

> Tesla is driving the biggest wedge of change through the world economy in the 21st century.

I suspect the press vitriol is because Musk actually believes crap like this. Nobody likes someone who is high on their own kool-aid.

True. Couple of things on that.

Yes, the existing supply chain is not geared towards EVs (which is serious problem in terms of chanel masters and such). Still the knowledge and tools and processes and people are there. Combine that with the fact that an EV is actually less complex an ICE powered car incumbents, I assume, should be able to switch easily (biggest issues being internal struggles keeping them from executing as a lot of powerful people in these companies have to loose a lot). Still, the basis is there as is the purchasing power and the aftermarket activities and such.

As far as Tesla is concerned, they have production hell and delivery hell. On top of that I suspect they have a kind of procurement hell as well with Panasonic as one the most important suppliers. Together that results in Supply Chain hell. So while Tesla's SC is geared towards EVs im not sure on the execution side.

But this is just my outside point of view.

> Advantage competition: scaling production and delivery, economies of scale

And service, and spares. This is where Tesla is really struggling. Especially spare parts.

That said, their "Tesla Ranger" program where the mechanic comes to you is the future. It is easily one of the coolest things Tesla does and is a sensible way to scale out their service centers which are (admittedly) overbooked.

Would you mind sharing more info about VW Golf 8 you mentioned?

Sure Tesla can make good cars, but not if it has to sell them at a profit. Over the lifetime of Tesla, each car has been subsidized by like 10k from shareholders and 7.5k from government. Both subsidies are going away as we speak.

I read earlier that model 3s had. 20% gross margin. I’m happy to find the source again if you’re interested, but I'd also love to see your source.

When considering whether a fleet of cars has been profitable, you can’t consider only the gross margin (which excludes certain company fixed costs to arrive at an answer to “was that last car we made profitable?”) but must also consider overall profitability (“did we make money doing all of the things we did?”)

Tesla’s answer to the second is “no” for substantially all of the company history.

Agreed. The are using gross margin to fuel crazy growth. Much like Amazon. Tesla went from 0 2012 to #1 in 2018 in the premium segment.

Certainly looks like if they stopped expanding at a crazy rate that they would collect profits at a very healthy rate.

I'm sure just about everyone in the premium segment would love to "fail" by selling 63,000 cars costing over $50k each with gross margin of 20%.

Tesla doesn't make good cars. They make unremarkable cars with good drive-trains. It's like the EV version of FCA's ~700hp offerings. Sure the interior and build quality are kind of crap for what you pay but with 700 ponies on tap you don't care.

This is a joke right? They make some of the most highly regarded cars of all time. Recently buying one and showing it off almost every single person (30~) was blown away at how much better it was then their car and wanted one in the future.

Tesla has many problems but making bad cars isn't one of them, these things are awesome.

No it's not a joke. The Model 3 and Model S have relatively high NVH and a relatively cheap feeling interior compared to vehicles of the same class and price point. You're paying German car money but it goes to the drive-train instead of the "luxury German driving machine" experience. There's nothing wrong with that but to talk up Tesla's vehicles as though they're luxury cars is foolish.

Yeah thanks for explaining it to me, I own one. I personally couldn't care less about the interior but I understand some people do. The driving/overall experience to me is night and day when compared to ICE vehicles or even other EV competitors.

I just can't agree with that on the model 3. The model 3 is basically BM 3 series money, and there is nothing particularly phenomenal about the BMW 3 series from a luxury standpoint.

Are you talking about the elusive $35,000 model 3s? Because most Teslas sell for 5-series and E-class prices.

IDK my SR+ with autopilot was 39,500, before a 3750 tax incentive.

I just priced out a BMW 330i (all wheel drive), which starts at $42,250. The Tesla M3 Long Range (dual motor) starts at $49,500. However, the BMW base price does not include "luxury trim" (i.e., chrome highlights), "convenience package" (basically lumbar support and keyless entry plus app access), "driver assistance", or "parking assistance". All of these seem to be standard in the M3 LR. Once you add those packages, the 330i pops over $51k. If anything, it looks like Tesla has set their prices to compete directly against the 3 series line. (These prices don't include tax subsidies or destination charges, etc.)

The ASP of Model 3 in the US is ~50k, if I'm not mistaken. The base price is just under $40k USD. In the US, the base price for the BMW 3 series ranges from ~40K to ~$56k for the M badge.

Also, the options packages for the BMW will tend to add up. TACC cruise is standard on the Model 3 SR+ for $40k. AFAIK, that will add at least 1k or so to the BMW.

The interiors aren't all that nice though, certainly not for how much change they are asking for. Having everything behind a hulking iPad sucks when you are driving a car. Give me dials, give me buttons that click in, give me levers, give me something where I can tell where the setting is with my fingers without having to take my eyes off the road. I'm really surprised car manufacturers have gotten away with cramming so many features into touch screen interfaces that give you zero feedback if you aren't staring at the screen, it really should be illegal as its absurdly dangerous.

That is really not true. Each individual car is sold for more than the cost of manufacturer. Statistics like this tend to take fixed costs and historical costs into account in a way that shouldn't be divided by unit volume.

I caution you to read more about this, as you see statistics like this quoted often in the press. It is almost always an indicator of issues with article quality.

"And given the ever shorter life cycles in the automotive sector the window ever was max. one facelift / model replacement"

That assumes that Tesla's competitors actually have the expertise to compete.

Its been mentioned elsewhere I believe, that Audi's Etron has less range per kwh of battery, compared to a Tesla.

Tesla also has a charging network.

I'm tempted to turn your statement around and say there's a rapidly closing window for the other car makers to start taking EVs seriously. I suspect theres going to be a tipping point situation where the market for EVs is going to rapidly increase, and the established car makers better hope they have something they can sell, and at scale, because theres the Chinese as well as Tesla all ready to go. My crystal ball doesn't tell me what car companies are going to go bust, but I predict there'll be some big names, and Tesla could be one of them, I doubt it would disappear as a car making entity though.

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