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Comment by pmorici | Hacker News Reader

When Tesla's competitors stop designing and electric car and start designing a really great car that just happens to be electric then Tesla will have competition. Until then all the supposed Tesla competitors will be a joke.

For example it was recently reported that the Jaguar I-pace requires that you drive 17 MPH with the climate control off to achieve the manufacture specified range per charge. [0] They have 6 months worth of unsold inventory sitting on dealer lots in the US.

Tesla's strength is in getting market share from buyers who first and foremost want a great car. Everyone else is targeting suckers willing to make decisions contrary to their economic interest to show they care about the environment.

[0] https://cleantechnica.com/2019/08/13/jaguar-i-pace-sales-hav...

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> When Tesla's competitors stop designing and electric car and start designing a really great car that just happens to be electric then Tesla will have competition. Until then all the supposed Tesla competitors will be a joke.

This.

I never understood why car manufacturers all make such weird wacky electric cars. When the Model S came out it was such a relief that finally there was a _normal_ looking electric car.

What I want is an electric 5-series, not the wacky i3. Don't change the appearance, just the drive train.

I had the 2013 then the 2015 Nissan Leaf. At least from the outside it meets the "Weird whacky" criteria. If you look at the 2019 Nissan Leaf, it looks very conventional.

It turns out there's a very good reason to do that: these early models appeal to early adopters. The range kinda sucked. And yet I was happy to be an early adopter because of my nerdiness—and the financial incentives made it hard to refuse. But it definitely required planing insofar as range was concerned. At the same time, knowing that I'm putting up with these inconveniences for benefit of having some new early tech that few others have... that was worth it to me. It was also worth it to some of my friends but definitely not to most of them, who wanted first and foremost a car that didn't come with a peculiar usage pattern.

Now the 2019 Nissan Leaf has twice the range as those older models, it looks "normal", doesn't require much forethought in terms of destination distances, and is marketed to a broader audience. At the same time, the tax incentives have almost all disappeared (the $5k Georgia one is gone) and that is the normal course of action because these cars don't carry the inconvenience that they used to.

Tesla is trying to make cars to compete with other makers’ non-electric cars.

Other makers are trying to make cars to compete with Tesla, without competing with their own non-electric cars.

Currently, it is probably impossible to achieve a good profit margin on a mass-market electric car. Battery costs are too high this early in the manufacturing process. Tesla is willing to operate at the bare edge of fiscal viability while they scale… maybe even below viability. Other makers would have to take a gigantic drop in profit to compete with that.

Model 3 is estimated to be "solidly profitable": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17542864

Tesla operates at no profit, but not because they couldn't with the hardware, but rather because they still need to scale. The old manufacturers wouldn't even need to do much of that.

Sometimes it's worth taking some temporary losses to get a new foothold in a growing market.

Maybe I’m alone in this opinion but I’m tired of all these boring looking sedans. It seems all cars out there on the road look like identical bars of soap. Maybe the grill of this car looks a little different and the tail light cluster on that car has a different style but in general they all look the same. If a modern sedan is 10 meters away I can’t tell you if it’s a Camry, Civic, Accord, Taurus, Jetta, Altima, or any other model, unless I look at the badges.

Let’s get some more variety.

Tesla seems to have the advantage that investors are willing to supply it with endless amounts of cash to fuel it's unprofitable operations year after year. In its 16 year history, it has never turned an annual profit. It has lost billions and billions of dollars. Tesla just received another $2 billion lifeline infusion earlier this year.

Other automakers have to play by more sane financial rules.

That's exactly what the same people also said about Amazon.

My understanding is that amazon was basically cash flow positive, but ran GAAP losses and never really "struggled" financially.

Whereas Tesla does indeed have some systemic financial issues.

In other words Amazon could have been "profitable" on a GAAP accounting basis fairly early on, but Tesla would struggle to do that.

Tesla makes a profit on every car that they sell[0].

There are more people wanting to buy Tesla's than they can currently produce[1].

Telsa needs to spend more money to increase production. They make money on each car sold and they can sell a lot more than they currently do. Tesla being in the red in order to increase production is the same scenario that Amazon was in.

[0] https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/07/26/tesla-management-t...

[1] https://electrek.co/2018/07/03/tesla-model-3-long-backlog-re...

Specifically, Amazon was cash-flow positive but deliberately chose to reinvest all their profits into the company instead of paying out dividends, so that appears on the books as a loss but it really isn't.

That's a nice story, but the numbers don't support the narrative. Tesla's been reporting revenue for 13 years (that I can find). So I took the first 13 years of both Tesla and Amazon financials. Amazon was breakeven by year 7. Telsa is just losing more money as time goes on. (Apologies for bad HN formatting). Here's the data:

Tesla annual net income, in millions:

Year 1: -$78

Year 2: -$82

Year 3: -$56

Year 4: -$154

Year 5: -$254

Year 6: -$396

Year 7: -$74

Year 8: -$294

Year 9: -$889

Year 10: -$675

Year 11: -$1,961

Year 12: -$976

Q1+Q2 Year 13: -$1110

Amazon annual net income, in millions (rounded):

Year 1: $0

Year 2: -$100

Year 3: -$700

Year 4: -$1400

Year 5: -$600

Year 6: -$100

Year 7: $0

Year 8: $600

Year 9: $400

Year 10: $200

Year 11: $500

Year 12: $600

Year 13: $900

yes and being able to run at a loss for decades was also an advantage for Amazon.

Amazon was breakeven by year 7 of its existence (2003). They never went "decades" losing money.

> In its 16 year history, it has never turned an annual profit.

I don’t think that’s something that could be said about Amazon.

Official range numbers come from a government testing cycle (EPA in the US), so you should get the listed range under more or less the same conditions with any car.

Over 17.5k miles (mostly highway driving, AC pretty much always running) I'm within 2% of the EPA rated range/efficiency on my Model X.

BMW electric Mini is due to go on the market in spring 2020 - they’re manufacturing them now in Oxford. I guess that counts as a 'real electric car'. Whether it’s a great one remains to be seen.

Range is not as great as the 3 (150 vs 210 miles IIRC?) but it’s a smaller car, so doesn’t have as much room for batteries as the 3 or S do.

The EPA range of the electric mini is 114 miles, the Model 3LR is 310 miles. Make sure you use the same measurement standard when comparing vehicles: the WLTP standard massively overstates range.

The LR version of the model 3 costs a lot more than the Mini is projected to cost. Even the stock Model 3 costs £12k more than the currently planned price of the electric Mini (both including UK electric car grants.)

That’s why I compared the Mini with the range of the ordinary Model 3 & not the LR version. The price difference between the stock models is wide enough already - it seems completely unreasonable to compare a £25k electric vehicle with a £45k one!

In the US, the Tesla 3SR+ is $39K with a 220 mile range, and the electric Mini is projected to start at $35K-$38K with a 114 mile range. I don't expect the electric Mini to sell well in North America.

The Long Range version of the Model 3 is almost twice the price of the electric Mini, so I'm not sure those are really comparable.

I would say for the Mini range is not as important as for a Model 3. They are supposed to be city cars with a very specific design and great handling. They are usually way more expensive than competition with similar specs, but still sell a lot because of those two traits.

> For example it was recently reported that the Jaguar I-pace requires that you drive 17 MPH with the climate control off to achieve the manufacture specified range per charge.

Normal European city driving then.

Except the Tesla isn't a "really great car".

The Model 3 is basically an upscale take on a page out of the FCA playbook. It's a straight line rocket with a middle of the road interior crowned by a massive touchscreen.

Don't get me wrong, there's definitively something to be said for that but Tesla does not make good all around vehicles.

Tesla make vehicles that excel at a few things and are mediocre in most other regards. If they were great all around vehicles upper class suburbanites would be buying them as general daily drivers instead of task specific cars (commuting in this case), a market segment currently filled by the station wagon/crossover/small suv spectrum. For reasons that are outside the scope of this comment, I think Tesla is wise to build sedans for upscale buyers rather than enter the crossover and compact car free-for all.

Tesla's cars utterly dominate the sales charts for every segment they are in. If they're only being bought as a niche car, then I guess every other luxury automaker's cars are even more niche.

As an owner of a Model 3, I will say that it isn't just a really great car, it's the best car I've ever owned or driven. There are SO MANY different elements of the car-owning experience Tesla redesigned to make dramatically better for the user, not to mention the incredible performance of the car.

I've driven nothing but BMW for the last decade and several of my friends now drive Teslas. I can't think of a single aspect other than subjective preference for rear-wheel drive bias where the BMW is any better than the Tesla. And it is objectively worse on a number of easily measurable factors. Anyone who thinks these cars are not fantastic is in denial. Are they perfect? Of course not. But on virtually any measurable scale they absolutely blow their competition out of the water at their price-point.

Despite the false narratives like this, Tesla really is a great car to drive. https://youtu.be/xpFe8k1vjcg

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