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Comment by sliken | Hacker News Reader

Dunno. People thought it was crazy to start an electric car company. Electric cars were horribly impractical, and nobody has started a new car company in the USA in many decades.

Now of course that Tesla has demonstrated that it can be done, there's many similar attempts (like Rivian). It's not clear to me that we could have a Tesla without having Elon much with a few billion in his pocket.

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Mmm, there were electric car companies in the US before Tesla, started within a decade of Tesla.

AC Propulsion (1997) tried producing the t0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AC_Propulsion_tzero

In January 1996, Corbin Motors began work on developing an electric vehicle. The Sparrow passed final testing for Department of Transportation certification in April 1999. In September of that year, the Sparrow production line began manufacturing multiple vehicles in Hollister, California. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers_Motors

They weren't successful, but that's different than your point about "nobody has started a new car company in the USA in many decades".

Electric cars have been around since cars have existed. The only reason ICE ruled cars is because we hadn't gotten to an acceptable power storage ratio comparable to the insane amount of potential power stored in oil.

Why is Tesla outcompeting everything in the electric vehicles market by such a big margin? There is still no car that is able to compete with Model S from 2012 on the range.

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

By being way more expensive. Tesla doesn't have some secret new battery chemistry, they just put more batteries in the car.

That and they market the hell out of the car, cutting out middle men where possible. The aren't burdened by the dealership model and have been very protective of their brand. It's not like electric cars weren't made by the large auto makers, they just weren't willing to spend as much as Tesla has to feet to profitability. When Toyota made the Prius they went all in, now the Prius tech is in many of they're other cars. American manufacturers doubled down on bigger, higher polluting trucks and SUVs that all look the same and haven't had innovation in years.

While true, it doesn't seem relevant to my observation that "nobody has started a new car company in the USA in many decades" before Tesla is not correct.

I'm sorry my point wasn't to criticize your point, just bring up why electric cars stopped development in favor of the ICE cars. I was intending to add to your point not take away.

Thanks for the clarification!

Since Tesla is still losing money, I wouldn’t exactly say they are “successful”.

The cars are profitable and have a healthy margin, it's just that Tesla is investing the profit into growth. Said growth has been pretty impressive. They've gone from 0 to 1000 cars per day or so, and given their average selling price that puts them ahead of quite a few others, at least in the US market.

Is amazon not successful because for most of their existence they have invested in growth over taking profits?

The cars have a marginal profit of 3% to 4% after you remove the tax credits and that’s not enough to cover their fixed cost. They aren’t “reinvesting” profits. They aren’t making enough to cover fixed costs.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimcollins/2019/01/18/teslas-pr...

As far as Amazon. It’s still doubtful that Amazon retail will ever have the margins to justify its value. AWS on the other hand should stay a high margin business.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/04/14/is-amazon-com-reta...

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