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Comment by kemitche | Hacker News Reader

> who can compete with Tesla

From my seat, that really remains to be seen. The existing companies don't seem to have found a way to compete with Tesla's EVs yet. They may get there eventually, but Tesla has it now.

Regarding valuation, one point I read elsewhere is that Tesla does a lot more in-house, which adds to the valuation, whereas the existing companies will buy a lot of their parts and/or contract out work. I don't have a source on the specifics, but if true, the logic certainly seems reasonable and would explain things. The value of a company shouldn't be based on their final product, but on the value they added to the parts/components they took in to create that product.

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>From my seat, that really remains to be seen. The existing companies don't seem to have found a way to compete with Tesla's EVs yet. They may get there eventually, but Tesla has it now.

This somewhat reminds me of BlackBerry. They're basically the only game in town right now, and thus maintain a market advantage.

However as larger companies shift to EV's as the technology matures how will Tesla be able to maintain its advantage and market valuation?

Should the VW group, Toyota, or the Renault–Nissan–Mitsubishi Alliance decide to go all in on EV's will they be able to produce something akin to the iPhone to Tesla's BlackBerry?

No! No, no, no. This will not happen. It's a total pipe dream.

These ancient companies, so set in their ways, who have been incrementally making tiny adjustments to their cars for decades, will never "suddenly leap forward" to come out with something more advanced and more appealing than a Tesla.

Tesla isn't the blackberry here, the other car companies are! You're basically the guy in 2008 saying "sure Apple has an advantage now, but what will they do when Blackberry catches up and shifts to touchscreen based phones?" Guess what never happened.

VW group is going very heavily for mainstream EVs, seriously ramping up production, and the models don't look like the toy concept EVs of yore either.

Maybe Audi and BMW have to think about what it means to make a competitive EV since their price-points are similar to Tesla's, but VW proper will be pushing EVs at the ~$30k MSRP range. They don't need to be more advanced than a Tesla at that price because there is no significant market of people cross-shopping $50k Teslas and $30k VWs. What these manufacturer's need to do is release electric cars with reasonable ranges, near existing price-points, that look and feel "German Car".

Volkswagen ID.3 will be ~30k€ not 30k$, so about 33k$. Tesla model 3 is ~40k$ not 50k$. So it’s only 7k$ difference, not 20k$ as you wrongly assume.

Still not coming to the US?

https://ww.electrek.co/2019/12/13/vw-not-launching-id3-elect...

The ID.3 isn't but the bigger ID.4 will be:

https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/volkswagen-id4-electric-s...

It's supposed to get its official reveal in the next month or so.

I read that VW will start EV production in Tennessee in 2022. Seems like a long way off.

It will be imported to start. Local production later.

>You're basically the guy in 2008 saying "sure Apple has an advantage now, but what will they do when Blackberry catches up and shifts to touchscreen based phones?"

Not really. BlackBerry basically invented the smartphone, and introduced it to market success. We're talking pre-2008 BlackBerry is Tesla today.

Tesla basically invented the EV, and is leading the market.

I think where the analogy breaks is that Tesla didn't invent cars. Electric cars are new as a viable thing and have some advantages and disadvantages, but they're not a difference in kind, like a Blackberry/smartphone was over a thing that only makes phone calls. They compete directly with the old thing on the traditional terms, like performance and fuel cost.

People are going to start preferring electric cars. They're faster and more efficient and battery improvements are likely to continue to reduce their disadvantages (up front cost and range). The traditional carmakers could make a strong commitment to electric cars right now, the question is will they? It's like asking Microsoft to embrace Linux in 1999. They could do it, and they might be better off if they did, but you can certainly see why they might drag their feet in a way that makes them worse off in the long run.

They also have a huge problem with dealer incentives, because the dealers make most of their money on service and electric vehicles need less service, but the dealers are the ones choosing which cars to promote to anybody who walks in the door. It's no use to make a great electric car if any time somebody comes in looking to buy it, the dealer convinces them not to.

> These ancient companies will never "suddenly leap forward" to come out with something more advanced and more appealing than a Tesla.

Volkswagen are doing exactly that. They have many BEVs models coming out this year across their multiple car brands (such as VW, Audi, SEAT, Skoda, Porsche).

The Porsche Taycan is the only 800 volt EV on the market today. The Volkswagen ID.3 has similar range to a Model 3 at a lower price point.

Even Audi's headlights are interesting. They're essentially projectors fast enough to run animations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2ara0My_Yg

Chevy and Hyundai already offer EVs with better range than the Model 3 SR+ at a lower cost.

Too bad no one cares about them and no one is buying them.

Yeah, it's a shame. I have a Bolt and absolutely love it.

This comment comes across as wishful thinking and not thoughtful analysis.

People have been saying this same shit for a decade and yet here we are in 2020 and still "the legacy manufacturers will be catching up ANY DAY NOW, just need a LITTLE more time."

I think that you are close, but its more like Tesla is Apple now and the rest of the industry is trying to be Android. Where Tesla dominates the US with a proprietary charging network, others are slowing inching (or millimetering?) forward with open charge networks and a variety of new designs.

Eventually they are bound to catch up on volume. But by then, might Tesla have a significant desirability advantage? And in the auto-market, desirability is an amazingly effective proxy for assessing margin advantages.

Tellingly, though, Blackberry failed not in the face of emerging competition from the existing establishment (e.g. Nokia and Palm) but because it got one-upped by another, even more innovative platform by a newcomer to the mobile market.

I mean, I agree that at some point Tesla is going to get beaten. But to argue that GM or Toyota will do it seems... less likely.

In a sense yes, the mobile phone market shifted from being phones to mobile computers, and a computer company dethroned them.

For all I know as cars become more integrated with computers we'll see an iCar, or a Google Car which will shake up the industry. Currently major car brands view tech companies as their competition in the long run.

You're implying that the legacy manufactures could come up with some radically new sort of ev that would be as superior to Tesla cars as the iphone was to the BlackBerry. But the legacy manufacturers are already producing and designing ev's, and they are all inferior to Teslas.

  > Tesla does a lot more in-house, which adds to the 
  > valuation, whereas the existing companies will buy
  > a lot of their parts and/or contract out work.

In that respect, they remind me of Apple. However, I thought cars and their component parts were considered to be commodities. Are investors now arguing that not having hardware design know-how is going to hurt the big car companies?

It's cheaper this way.

The suppliers are beholden to their master and can live or die on a whim. GM, et al know the cost of manufacturing down to a penny and control supplier margins very tightly. They also collude with other manufactures to suppress prices.

> The existing companies don't seem to have found a way to compete with Tesla's EVs yet

If you look at actual vehicle sales, I'd say this quote is optimistic at best. Tesla is still very much fighting an uphill battle in terms of market share.

Optimistic? In the US, Tesla is selling an order of magnitude more cars per month than value EV's like the Leaf and two orders of magnitude more than "Tesla killers" like the iPace or eTron.

https://insideevs.com/news/343998/monthly-plug-in-ev-sales-s...

Tesla isn't selling 1.3 million cars per year yet like Ford, so yes, optimistic. I wasn't speaking about strictly the EV market. Why would the big automakers need to compete in the EV market when EV adoption numbers still only amount to a rounding error in terms of the big companies' overall sales?

Why? Because it obviously won't be a rounding error in a few years time.

2 reasons.

1) We have to do something about climate change. Doesn't mean we will, but more and more countries besides Norway will get serious about it.

2) At some point BEV's will be price competitive with ICE. The $40K Tesla Cybertruck is cheaper than a medium duty crew cab from legacy manufacturers.

1) EV's will not solve this problem

2) Price is only a very small part of the adoption equation, people happily pay $80k for ICE pickup trucks for instance.

3) You didn't add this but I will - it's not clear the EV platform is the preferred alternative to the ICE for consumers yet, as evidenced by overall global vehicle sales.

I mean, multiple companies have higher quality electric vehicles, but that isn't what sells. The name is what's selling.

Tesla's are pretty ugly, they have horrible reliability. You don't buy a Tesla for style, you buy it to show off.

> multiple companies have higher quality electric vehicles

When I bought my Tesla in mid-2018 the alternatives were the Bolt and the Leaf. Both had significantly worse range--I was looking at a 180-mile roundtrip commute for the next year, so range was important. Both were uncomfortably small for me. Neither matched Tesla's driver assist features for my almost entirely highway commute. Neither had fast-charging options along my commute route; Tesla had two superchargers.

The situation has changed a bit in the last 1.5 years, but still nobody else matches Tesla's range or charging network.

I'm not sure what metric you're using for quality, but Tesla won me over on features, not name.

> Tesla's are pretty ugly

Subjective. The X is a bit strange, but the falcon doors are actually super convenient (as long as they don't break). The S and 3 exteriors are both very nice looking in my opinion, though I'm not such a fan of the spartan interior on the 3.

> I was looking at a 180-mile roundtrip commute ... Tesla had two superchargers.

Oof. The last thing I'd want to add to an already horrible commute is a supercharger stop, or more.

> the falcon doors are actually super convenient (as long as they don't break)

Kinda a pain in the ass in a garage.

> Oof. The last thing I'd want to add to an already horrible commute is a supercharger stop, or more.

The Tesla had enough range that if I was able to charge regularly I didn't need the supercharger, but it was a nice backup if something prevented me from charging.

Also stopping halfway through the drive and grabbing a snack while at the supercharger wasn't really a bad thing.

>Kinda a pain in the ass in a garage

I have a standard 7ft garage door and they can fully open with about 2 inches of clearance at the top. Not really a pain at all.

Having tried all reasonably priced EVs, its not a question of style. My original plan was to get a Leaf but I ended up buying a Tesla. It just drives better than the other cars and you get a much better car with a larger second row, more practical cargo space with a Tesla than the other EV options. That is without mentioning that you have to wait months to get a Leaf plus or a Kona electric. The latest VW may be interesting but it didn't exist at the time. I don't see where the higher quality electric vehicles are coming from.

It is a very polarizing car, some strangers will go up to you and tell you how Tesla will go bankrupt, you'll have no one to service the car, it will lose all its value and other things like that. "The name" is nearly a liability to me. It is just a car, it is useful.

> "The name" is nearly a liability to me.

Yes, same here. I also initially wanted a Leaf, in part because I don't really want my car to be so conspicuous--before the Tesla I drove a tan Corolla, about as inconspicuous as you can get. But the Leaf (and Bolt, which was the other EV option at the time) simply didn't make sense.

> they have horrible reliability

Any references about this? So far I've only found evidence they're functionally highly reliable.

The early build quality was poor and they had a lot of problems with ordinary things breaking that had nothing to do with being electric and everything to do with being inexperienced at making cars. They could be doing better now but it's a little early to say because the more recent cars aren't that old yet. Either way it seems more like teething issues than something they won't get right eventually.

Meanwhile it's fairly unambiguously true that electric drivetrains are a lot simpler and should require less maintenance in general.

They have fantastic reliability. You heard wrong.

Short seller FUD, on the other hand, is quite real.

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