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Comment by lazylizard | Hacker News Reader

What differentiates 1 electric car manufacturer from another? Superior driving dynamics? Superior ride? Superior batteries? Superior motors?

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What differentiates one ICE car manufacturer from another? Already they're using the same basic engine design (and often the same engine) between brands. With ICE cars it comes down to aesthetics, passenger features, and marketing. No different than EV makers.

Interiors and reliability

All of the above? Plus a lot of other things like styling, interior, infotainment, soundscape and sound dampening, dealership/repair network, and so on...

There’s nothing magical about electric cars that takes away all the hard parts of building a car. Look at all the maintenance issues Teslas have with falcon wing doors and so on to see the potential issues that can turn customers away even on an electric car. Just because you have an electric motor instead of an engine doesn’t mean you don’t have all the other parts of a car to deal with and tweak.

Electric cars typically have 1% the moving parts of an internal combustion engine vehicle. If the chassis is built well, you just need to swap out the motor and battery as needed, and flush the coolant every 5 years. There's no belts, chains, pumps etc for the most part to maintain or replace. The model X is pretty complex but if you look at the model 3 it's just a bunch of plug and play parts like a PC.

You could pretty much say the same thing about an ICE car though - plug and play standardized parts, ever since the Model T. I’ve owned my ICE for almost a decade and never needed to service the engine other than routine oil and filter changes.

There’s plenty of room for differentiation between electric cars, even the ones that already exist are plenty different. (Just like my ICE vehicle is different from other ICEs in many, many ways besides the engine)

The Model 3 has this: https://jalopnik.com/the-tesla-model-3s-superbottle-easter-e...

That's astonishingly less than a car's cooling systems (radiator, A/C, oil pump, etc.) It'll be fun to see what other EV makers come up with.

The interior is too hard to swap out and it’s not worth it.

I guess it depends on if we are talking about enthusiasts or the average consumer? If we are talking about the average consumer I would assume in order of importance; Reliability, vehicle range, charging time, ride quality, available technology, interior quality.

For the average "enthusiasts" seen in the comments section of Car and Driver's facebook page it would be more along the lines of; 0 to 60mph time, nurburgring lap times, 0 to 100mph times, quarter mile times, looks. But for actual enthusiasts who have an interest in Electric Vehicles i would say all the things you mentioned are fairly important. But really, to the average consumer who purchases something like a Camry or Accord, I feel as if reliability/range/technology (by that i mean things like apple car play, lane assist, and other QoL technologies) and value are really what the average person is looking for.

> If we are talking about the average consumer I would assume in order of importance; Reliability, vehicle range, charging time, ride quality, available technology, interior quality.

You forgot the most important thing: price.

You're paying for the support, trust, goodwill and culture of the brand and the particular product. PR is the conveyor belt/crafter of those ideas, it's up to how they treat you that matters.

And, if you have a problem with a new or used vehicle, call Steve Lehto, a hilarious Lemon Law lawyer I watch on YT.

https://www.youtube.com/SteveLehto

The software.

I want to turn my car on over the internet from my phone and heat it up 15 min before I leave the office two blocks away. Then I want to put it in autopilot for the mind-numbing straightforward freeway traffic on my commute.

I don't care what other car manufacturers have to offer if they can't do the above. And as long as it's under $60k I don't care what the price is either.

You can try to figure out why the current market leader in various markets is preferred: Tesla (high end), Leaf (lower end non-China), and whoever is leading in China.

If you go by HN discussions, you'll quickly find out that Tesla makes terrible cars and has no special technology, so you might want to try a non-HN source of data :-D

Safety, reliability, service, fit and finish, range.

Superior marketing

Meh, everyone knows how to do marketing. But differentiation itself is an important part of successful marketing in a crowded market. So the better answer may be, brands differentiate themselves in exterior and interior design and not much else.

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