Tesla teardown finds electronics 6 years ahead of Toyota and VW
asia.nikkei.com
asia.nikkei.com
Go to a tesla showroom, Look at the doors of the model three. Note that they don't line up.
Look at the paint job, notice that there are bumps and chips, especailly on the edges of the doors. This is on a _demo_ car, stuck in a showroom. these should be perfect.
Even a budget Kia has better build quality than this.
Its not the isolated parts of a car that makes it good, its the whole package. (yes that works both ways. )
Personally I doubt most customers notice or care, but it’s an obvious thing to criticize.
Most new car companies are small affairs that hand-build fairly simple cars at luxury prices from their garage. They get away with it because they offer something unique. So does Tesla, only they try to do it at scale.
So model 3 might be a luxury car, but the cost to own is clearly lower than any of the luxury cars you mention, except the BMW i3.
Over 200k miles How much will you spend on brake pads? Brake Discs? Gas? How about the scheduled 40 Oil changes?
How about things outside of the regular maintenance? Belts? Catalytic converts? Timing chain? Engine mounts? Head gaskets? Spark plugs? Clutch?
How many miles will you burn driving to/from gas stations?
How much of your time worth finding, using, and returning from gas stations? Do you really want to visit a smelly gas station covered with signs about the cancer it causes (in California anyways)?
Sure a Tesla over 200k miles will burn a fair amount of power around 50,000 kwh (75 kwh per 300 miles or so). But the other consumables are few. Sure wipers, tires (replacement and rotation), cabin filters, windshield fluid, etc. But generally the electric motors have few parts, are extremely reliable, and don't require any regularly scheduled maintenance.
I've had 2 Subarus and a low end Acura Integra. And most maintenance I've had (except tires/and wipers) was for something that didn't exist on an electric car. Timing chains, spark plugs, oil changes, head gasket, catalytic converter, engine mounts, clutch, etc.
Also ignoring the federal, state, PG&E, and similar incentives?
Even ignoring all the above I think the Tesla is still cheaper to own.
AAA claims that the average car costs $0.592 per mile. For above mentioned 200,000 miles that's $118k. Not sure there's a more "average" car than a camry. No oil changes, brake changes, gas, engine mounts, timing chain, belts, etc is going to significantly decrease that number for the Tesla. Sure electricity isn't free, but it is way cheaper than gas. There's a target I visit often in my town that allows 2 hours of free charging per visit, and where I work charging cost $10 per month. I could easily spend less than $200 per year for the Telsa electricity. Since June 2019 I've spent a total of $30.00 (5 visits) at superchargers despite numerous road trips to Stanford, Reno, SF, Napa, Tahoe, Downieville, etc.
Additionally it's looking like Tesla's last a fair bit longer than the equivalent ICE car. So at 200k miles you could just keep the model 3, or sell it for a non-trivial amount of money. Already hearing reports of Model S's making it to 1M km and the taxi service is switching to model 3's. Should have an ideal how well the model 3 does near 1M km soon.
Speaking of resale value: https://cleantechnica.com/2020/02/18/tesla-model-3-has-least...
So the $40k model 3 lost 5.5% after 1 year ($2,200). Presumably the camry is worse than the honda fit (#5 on the list). So it lost at least $3,000 in value in the first year. Amusingly the worst depreciation numbers are many of the Tesla competition (BMW, Audi, Jaguar, and Volvo).
So yes, I think keeping a Tesla for 200k miles will be cheaper than a Camry. More fun to drive, safer, and cheaper. Doubly so if you count wasting an hour or two on weekend for an oil change.... 40 times.
Having had ICE cars over 10 years old and over 100k miles I can say first hand that the maintenance costs can add up quickly.
I’m not. Those are all reasons the Model 3 is still an entry-level luxury car, as is the price.
This seems like a proverbial "reality distortion field" to me. The Tesla model 3 came out about 7 years after the Nissan Leaf, didn't it? And given a reasonable budget, it's arguably still not an example of a car "you can buy".
Yes, there were Teslas before the model 3, but there were also electric cars from other manufacturers for many years.
The modern Leaf fixes these problems by being as expensive as a Model 3, and its still slower.
To get to 226 miles of range with the Leaf puts you at $38k. To also get intelligent cruise (standard on the SR+ Model 3 at 40k), you will need another couple thousand dollars on the Leaf.
The tax break and dealer negotiation do make the Leaf cheaper, but the list price alone really doesn't.
Sure when making cars at 5k a week or more, there's some mistakes. A friend had a piece of trim misaligned. Tesla came out, on site, and fixed it. He's pretty happy.
No one else could get away with Tesla quality at luxury pricing, but they sell vehicles.
* Nissan Leaf: 31k
* Kia Soule EV: 33k
* Chevrolet Bolt: 38k
You can argue forever about technicalities, but $33K is not an apples-to-apples comparison. In fact, I would say if you are comparing brand new 2020 cars, $50K+ for the model 3 is more realistic, and you should take into account the discounts other cars have.
You may be thinking of the originally proposed SR/SR+ half leather and half linen or whatever they were talking about. They scrapped that.
So, plastic.
Sure, you can make crap leatherette material that is way too hot and sticky and feels like cheap vinyl, but that's not what this is.
https://www.cars.com/for-sale/searchresults.action/?mdId=362...
The Bolt is the best value for money EV in the world at the moment. It's untouchable in price for range.
I don’t think of the money spent as buying luxury. What it’s buying are the other amazing aspects of the car. Performance, range, efficiency, connectivity, updates, safety, etc. which may have some overlap with features of luxury cars, but it’s better to think of it as a next generation car where you are paying for that new tech, and any luxury touches you may get, while not measuring up to a teak wood console in some other car, are bonuses. Instead of the teak wood and alligator leather cigar holder or whatever, you are getting AWD that beats the pants off Subaru, Audi quattro, or anyone else, and all the other amazing things Tesla gives you.
For many drivers other issues take precedence.
I personally hate cars but still have to drive, like the environment, want less pollution and hate car maintenance even though I can do it.
When other car's can recognize stop lights the panel spacing might be a factor.
Tesla doesn’t advertise.
Guess who does? The car companies that you seem to think have a better price/value offering. Hmm, so yes, the power of marketing is incredible indeed.
Imagine if they did, what their sales would be.
As long as it is functionally sound, I don't think minor cosmetic issues will materially impact public opinion. The general public is unaware of body panel alignment as a concept.
The worst fit and finish I ever saw was my sister's 1980 Dodge Aspen.
I’d add my impression was that the mechanical reliability and price were the key factors.
It would also be important for us to agree on what truly is minor cosmetics versus total negligence or awful design and material quality.
It feels like car technology stopped when the generation of those born in the 40's retired. Ever since then, younger generations have been focussed on the internet, computers and phones, and the car has become a tool like a pencil - it works well enough, and new models only see incremental changes.
The fact that the CAN bus is not wireless is rather a feature in terms of safety.
On the one hand - and thank God; routing car controls over networks by default sounds like a tremendously bad idea.
On the other hand - while a lucky accident in case of cars, modern electronic devices also don't have these, but for different reasons. When was the last time you could make your phone call people and send text messages over wireless connection, via an API built into the phone? Last time I remember being able to easily do it was in the feature phone era.
Modern hardware is increasingly controllable through hidden, restricted, undocumented APIs, or public APIs that require installing third-party software, go through third-party servers, and involve signing some contract or accepting some ToS. That same API-providing-software then proceeds to exfiltrate any and all data it can get its hands on. I do not want any of that in a car.
What kind of "car technology" are you talking about? It sounds like you're talking about traditional tech, not tech that increases the ability of the driver on the road.
Is it ironic that this post was posted using tcp/ip dating from much before 1986.
Yes, it would be nice if it was open sourced or documented outside obd2 interpreters. (Though much of it is documented for an industry insider paying fees) or if it openly supported higher bandwidth.
No reason why a 20'x8' low voltage system needs wireless, especially given that similar systems often exist < 1' a way.
Every single GM, but who is counting. And I bet other manufacturers as well.
https://jalopnik.com/the-tesla-model-3s-superbottle-easter-e...
I keep hearing people talk about fit and finish problems with Tesla vehicles, but I simply don't see it. I was so paranoid when I took delivery of mine that I literally brought a measuring tape. They've long since fixed the body panel problems and it manifested itself more with older Model S/X and the very first batch of Model 3s. This "problem" is pretty much gone, and this argument is like beating a dead horse.
Disclaimer: own a Model 3 and have since Nov 2018
Overall Tesla's customer satisfaction is really, really high. Most owners are extremely satisfied with their cars, even if they have a few warts. They really are the Apple of the automotive world.
That's because most of the owners have new cars.
Wait until they need to have their car serviced by Tesla or until their batteries degrade and are subject to a forced OTA "upgrade" that removes capacity i.e. Model S.
https://electrek.co/2019/10/04/tesla-software-updat-battery-...
"But Tesla is a luxury model that competes with Porsche and should make me feel fancy and be super nice etc etc" ...eh kinda, but not really, IMO. The S model does but future models are aimed at a more down-market segment and are going mainstream.
"But, when next to the car, I was stunned. Not only was the paint without any discernible flaw, but the various panels formed a body of precision that was beyond reproach. Gaps from hood to fenders, doors to frame, and all the others appeared to be perfectly even, equal side-to-side, and completely parallel. Gaps of 3.5 to 4.5mm are considered word-class. This Model 3 measured up."
https://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/a28008116/tesla-model-...
The worry with things like gaps between panels isn't just cosmetic - it's that the process control to achieve "reliably waterproof even after 15 years" is harder than "visibly perfect"
There was a time when a sunroof was a liability on a car as they so often developed leaks. People who can remember this time aren't looking to return to it :)
High end Volvo’s are a good example of old-school quality — gorgeous interiors, beautiful trim. But they’re still predominantly internal combustion engine era designs. The height of it from a luxury finish standpoint. But, Tesla’s different.
Maybe it’s that petro cars reached a peak, and the only way to really differentiate has come down to “door sound” and body panel alignment measured in nanometers.
Also, the condition of the body and the interior matter more to the vehicle’s resale value than the condition of the rest of the car - again they are indicators of the quality and care taken with the rest of the car.
If they can’t manage tolerances measured in millimeters, how can they manage manufacturing and assembly tolerances measured in the thousandths of a millimeter?
Yes.
Internal combustion engines require intense tolerances. If your cylinder head is 1mm out of spec you're going to have serious problems.
But if the wire winding bundle for the electric motor is 5mm out of spec? You'll be fine.
The areas in a Tesla where tolerances are actually important- the batteries and PCBs- are subject to completely different engineering practices. Nobody's going to get cross trained from fitting door panels to placing SMCs... which is done by a robot anyway.
Do you (literally) kick the tires of a car before you buy it?
If the doors are misaligned it either means the chassis is deformed, or at best the hinges are misaligned.
That doesn't bode well to what happens in a crash, or if it rains. Are the seals oversized to account for slop? what happens when they get old?
If I'm dropping $100k on a new car, I want to make bloody sure its built well. That doesn't mean that people won't buy them, far from it.
Look, I get it, Tesla is new and shiny. But lets not over-rate them. They have parts that are very well built. but the software, chassis and interior are not part of that.
This is implicitly saying that what matters is not even the specific car you are buying, but the image of the company and their entire lineup being electric.
This cuts in the opposite direction for me - it is a significant reason why I wouldn't buy a Tesla (other than the price). The company is so tied to Elon that if some sort of scandal happened to him, it would instantly taint owners of the cars.
I'm not in the US but people in my region comment how all US vehicles have poor panel quality. I've spoken to paint shop employees and garage mechanics who say the panels of US cars have gaps that are embarrassingly large. In the mind of a buyer that makes you question overall quality.
And never buy a white car either they rust because the panels don't get warm enough to drive out moisture.
One had body panels that were mostly plastic, and lasted 18 years. The other is five years old. Neither shows any sign of rust.
Just guessing, I don't own a car.
I wonder what the demographics are exactly of people who buy Model 3's, is it their first $40k+ vehicle?
One thing is abundantly clear, the people who are super excited about "new" tech in Teslas aren't following motor news. People seem to have no clue whatsoever that a lot of the tech you can get in a Tesla exists in other cars as well. Tesla is definitely at the top of the pack, but they're not ahead of the pack.
It looks exactly like when Apple announce a "new" feature, and all the Android owners moan and bitch that their phones have had this feature for years, yet all the apple owners are super happy about their new iPhone with this new cool feature that they've never seen before.
They "shouldn't" be happy, but due to marketing warping people's perceptions, they are. I suspect something like that might apply to Teslas and the people who buy them. If you've never owned or driven a BMW 3-series or similar, and then switched to a Tesla Model 3, I perfectly understand why you think your Tesla is the best car you've ever had.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Automobiles/Tesla-teardown-...
That is exactly my point, yet their announcements always make it to the tech press, because they are the darling of the tech world.
> Meanwhile, every other legacy car company pays millions a year in paid ads
When was the last time you saw an ad for a Mercedes S-class, Audi A8 or BMW 7-series?
I'm betting never, because those companies don't really advertise their most advanced cars to a mass market. And when they advertise them, they highlight the luxury and sophistication, and shut up about all the tech. So people generally don't know about all the stuff they have, and those cars are loaded.
> Sure, there are some cars with a few things.
I don't think you know what the state of the art is among the other car companies. Mercedes launched automatic lane changes before Tesla did, for example. Audi had stop&go cruise control before Tesla even launched Model S. BMW has had night vision pedestrian detection for years, Teslas don't have that. You can't even get a HUD on any Tesla, yet pretty much every other car brand offers that as an option on some of their models.
> No electric car until this year
That's a bit unfair considering the other car makers haven't really put out any electric cars with the same looks and features as their existing gas cars before now.
> 6 years ahead, some specifics:
1) Yeah, I already read the article that this post was about, not just the HN comments.
2) There are zero specifics in that article, it talks about a single thing, and that is that the core processing unit of Teslas are way ahead of the competition. Cool, but not exactly informative or specific.
Judging a Tesla by the panel gaps is reminiscent of the Blackberry execs judging early iPhones by battery life (ironically). The game has changed.
Or, in other words:
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
That is, by far, the most extensive and reliable source we have on this topic but please point to any other study that might say the contrary.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-tesla-model-3-survey...
Perhaps ironically, Kia has really upped their game in the past few years, to the point where I'd argue they aren't a good example for this comparison.
I was _very_ skeptical of people talking about fit and finish. I was assuming its people trash talking.
However, I have now seen it with my own eyes.
Nevertheless buyers don't seem to care that much about this.
Is this a recent thing or do you mean the $20k+ as budget in this context? The last budget (cheap manual) Kia I sat in felt like a tin can deathtrap.
I test drove it 3 times. Hated it the first time in 2018. Late 2019, I used auto-pilot on 880 and 101. I was sold. There isn't a car available now that can drive on Autopilot with that confidence. I don't let it drive on auto over 30mph, and under it is where it really shines, takes the edge off of bumper to bumper traffic. I bought it.
I took delivery on the last day of year, was a little pissed off at Tesla, that they left me with little choice if there were any issues with it. I got home, saw no issues and felt relieved. I now love the car. The Audio is turned on the moment I open the door. The temperature is set to my liking and I glide with one finger press. There are no keys, and my car knows I go to work in the morning, so the directions are set. I get on the freeway, usually bumper to bumper, set autopilot, chill out and listen to radio. I think I am a much happier person now.
I also wish it would not refuse to unlock about 10% of the time. I may just get the fob.
I also started using sentry mode even in my garage, which helps tremendously, because it seems like the root cause is the car going to sleep.
Edit: And the new fob is awesome. Different tech from the old one as you've probably heard, with different security/convenience tradeoffs. (With the old one being more secure, but to an insane level, and the new one being ever so slightly less secure but still very good in my admittedly fuzzy understanding of it). No issues whatsoever since getting that.
That being said, your info is out of date. The fit and finish isn't an issue anymore.
In the 90s there were a myriad of pragmatic sports cars built, with the focus on performance over fine details.
Door gaps has been a funny development, it's important aesthetically of course, but I think unfairly it has become a shorthand for a car's overall build quality.
No one understands what’s actually inside a car and what physically distinguishes a good car from a bad one, so they latch onto the one parameter they can actually see and touch and understand: body panel alignment and paint quality.
Or is your argument more that if they can't fix the 'easy' things then that is an indication of more systemic problems with the integrity of the car
Tesla's real advantage is their battery production. No one else can compete with them on battery price or production volume at a similar quality: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/10/teslas-competitors-play-catc...
Custom silicon seems like a much harder problem for VM/Toyota. Unless a supplier can build something for them I don’t see either company innovating like Tesla. Basically Tesla’s secret sauce is the Tech not the EV components.
Continued improvements to battery tech will bring the costs down for Tesla which is important for them to do if they want to succeed.
Custom hardware and software will also give them cost advantage and help them in the long term.
Mobileye?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/mobileye-ends-partnership-with-...
" Mobileye NV said it would no longer provide its computer chips and algorithms to Tesla after a current contract ends due to disagreements about how the technology was deployed. Mobileye provides core technology for Tesla’s Autopilot system, which allows cars to drive themselves in limited conditions."
What evidence is there that custom silicon has any advantage in the self-driving race, let alone in cost competitiveness?
Their hardware (maybe, at best) solves one of the easy pieces of the self-driving puzzle. It doesn't get them any closer to solving the hard parts. But it sure helps from a marketing perspective, which is kind of important if you want to continue selling a $6000 feature that essentially is just a promise for the future and thus requires buyers to "believe".
Nvidia built a custom chip for Nintendo, I'm sure they would build one for Toyota or VW.
You can scale up manufacturing of inferior batteries, but you still will have an inferior product.
Isn't it Panasonic that manufactures the batteries and sells them to Tesla? Can't they sell the same batteries to everyone else too?
The intellectual property for the chemistry is 100% Tesla’s and can not be reused by Panasonic for other manufacturers. In places where Panasonic builds batteries for other manufacturers, they use more traditional chemistry that includes more rare earth metals. Tesla’s chemistry is patented and can’t be duplicated. It is one of their several “moats”.
If/when Tesla increases battery production beyond its storage and car/semi lines of business, they will probably acquire/merge other car companies on the cheap.
The only thing that can eliminate Tesla's advantage is a catch-up solid battery tech that everyone has access to, and even then Tesla will have lots of infrastructure advantages.
The supposed battery advantage isn't really there. So hopefully the Maxwell stuff is better.
Traditional automakers would rather have batteries that don't easily overheat or catch fire when damaged (NMC) than cheaper batteries (NCA).
It's just one example, but here is a new porsche ev that caught fire https://electrek.co/2020/02/17/porsche-taycan-fire-burning-g.... Does porsche use nmc batteries? What is the problem with nca, where from experience the overall product is superior to all comers?
Battery pack production. Tesla purchases batteries from Panasonic and LG (and thus is susceptible to that supply).
> the production rate of battery cells in the Gigafactory had reached 3.5 million '2170' cells per day.
Tesla: $158/kWh Competitors: "more than" $200/kWh
Model 3 SR+ has a 54 kWh battery.
Tesla advantage = (200 - 158) * 54 = $2268 per car.
Yes, an advantage today, but not too bad.
But even that kind of a margin benefit may not justify the current valuation...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/08/business/volkswagen-trade...
They did use off-the-shelf components. They performed poorly and they resulted to developing a custom die with the right components to handle the task of computer vision. They explicitly stated this in multiple interviews. The off-the-shelf solution was crap.
Additionally, Tesla still grows their sales and customer base exponentially. This means that most significant changes in strategy during the production ramp-up will require (in the form of deprecation of now-obsolete production resources) only a small fraction of the investments required to achieve their full, steady-state production capacity.
The same argument holds for the potential case of major changes in battery technology. (Replacements of current fleet excluded, which would not happen for batteries). If Tesla's current battery technology is obsolete in 5-10 years, that's not a very big deal as their sales are expected to be a multiple of today's by then, and the new technology would be phased in during the expected production ramp. (If Tesla fails to grow by a multiple of today's sales, they have largely failed).
Did you ever try to rollout change to millions of units of anything, with individual owners of each item, operating in vastly different environments and with additional modifications from those owners?
Rolling updates is A HUGE issue, if you need reliability. It’s not a random app. It’s, for majority of the people, second most expensive purchase in their live (only behind a house). Messing up with that is very very risky.
I seriously doubt Tesla is not actively improving the chip, and if they need a fundamentally new software approach, then they have the process/iteration loop established.
> All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving Hardware
> Oct 19, 2016
> To make sense of all of this data, a new onboard computer with more than 40 times the computing power of the previous generation runs the new Tesla-developed neural net for vision, sonar and radar processing software
^ this refers to the nvidia thing 'onepremise says was too bad for the job.
https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now...
https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/19/13340938/tesla-autopilot...
I don't have time to dig it all up, but they were talking about the potential for computer upgrades as far back as 2016 as well: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/789008557341454336 (though not for pre-2016 vehicles).
I can see where people who don't follow the company closely wouldn't have been aware of this, though. And, obviously there have been plenty of false and misleading statements made in this area.
> the production rate of battery cells in the Gigafactory had reached 3.5 million '2170' cells per day.
Remember this isn't about the power of the ASIC processing, it is about minimizing the power consumption of the chip so the EV range is affected as little as possible.
I thought that was weird, I know Toyota cars have radar and I’m not sure about Teslas. IMO as an armchair observer the sensor array is far more interesting than any of this.
Personally, if I were to buy another car (and hopefully I don’t have to any time soon) I’d want the processing electronics to be off the shelf not weird custom stuff that’s going to have all kinds of corporate social crap attached to it.
Edit: to make it clear, I’m not saying one manufacturer is better than the other. I’m upset about this because it’s (IMO) more of a marketing thing (and maybe a way to have some leverage over 3rd party repair shops) and not really a technical improvement. There’s been a lot of weird social stuff masquerading as technological advancements everywhere. these have resulted in some small groups of people abusing computers to manipulate everyone else and once you recognize that pattern you get very cynical with articles like op.
Figuring out new ways to eliminate uneconomic quality is an ongoing revolution everywhere.
8 cameras, 12 ultrasonic sensors, and 1 forward-facing radar.[0]
I'm not bitter, though. I knew what I was getting into when I dropped nearly 60K on this thing. But still, would like them to catch up in some areas they are lagging in.
The number of "tech people" that think Tesla has some chip building advantage over the likes of companies like NVIDIA is astonishing.
Tesla's marketing compares their chip to older NVIDIA boards. NVIDIA has better tech available off-the-shelf:
https://www.businessinsider.com/nvidia-fires-back-at-tesla-c...
And what do I get for all that power it's consuming? It routinely misses cars and people literally inches away. Sometimes it records, sometimes it doesn't. And lately my car has decided 90% of the time not to turn on the dashcam, though sentry mode activates pretty reliably. It's half-assed. Tesla needs fans to hold them accountable instead of white-knighting for them.
Quit making false comparisons to your crappy doorbell. It is very different and they're designed for very different things. They don't work the same.
No they didn't. First off it doesn't need to use all eight cameras, but "three orders of magnitude" is obviously way more than 8x.
> If they do anything fancy with a neural network (which they almost certainly do), they it might be another 2x the power.
If it takes more power to do the same calculations, that's a bad thing, not a defense.
> Then you have 10x the power which is one order of magnitude.
"It does it super inefficiently, and then uses 10x power on top of that somehow" is awful!
Also you're rounding way down.
The comparison to the doorbell makes a lot of sense, and "not working the same" is irrelevant to the complaint.
Maybe the secret is marketing, and the extra engineering is kind of like a MacGuffin. Essential, but the details don't matter.
Now, traditional car maker are catching up in terms of EVs. While Tesla is improving on the production side. So Tesla's window of opportunity is closing, slowly but surely. Marketing obviously has an impact in that as well.
So Tesla risks, and has risked, a huge window of opportunity. Simply by ignoring the hard learned automotive lessons because of disruption, Musks genius and such. Which was a stupid thing to do, Tesla had the automotive world on EV tech, throwing that away... is stupid.
Off the shelf electronics are mutually exclusive of "all kinds of corporate social crap"? I would think the former is the most expedient way to deliver the latter.
You need to do your learning on the car and stream back the error component to the mothership.
In particular, the article talk about supply line disruption. Rebuilding your supply lines means you can't use the existing ones, and that's certain not to be cheap either.
I don't know if I agree with this unless you mean to define "good internal politics" as internal politics that drives a company to self-disrupt.
As shown by the article, self-disruption isn't possible as a big company because the friction of changing things like supply chains and other capital. You really need to start another company that, in a sense, competes (and sometimes at least for a time complements) the larger company. Good internal politics would help to not squash internal competition, but it isn't, I think, enough to purposefully set up that competition.
They make it quite clear in their public conversations that Tesla-style innovation rates are the goal, but in private conversations lament that they're stuck working in a 3-year product cycle due to the innovation rates in their supply chains (as most of the specs and hardware are generated in collaboration with external suppliers).
As a sibling comment mentions, this structure also creates lots of resentment in some of the traditional Toyota departments who are being disrupted by this.
What they can't do is become another kind of organization.
If new nimble competitors working in a new way appear, old companies, with vastly more money but a settled bureaucracy, just slowly die, rather than adapt.
That's a big problem many companies are facing in this day and age.
For example traditional newspapers companies are transitioning to digital publishing. This not only impacts how content is published but also how content is produced for a different medium.
I heard a podcast a couple fo years ago with (I believe) the CTO of the NYT. He said that the digital part of the NYT was almost a different company altogether. In the past years I worked at a paper publishing/education company and that was my experience as well. I was in charge of the digital product dept and we were like a black box inside the company. Nobody there really understood how we worked.
- They'll use Microsoft Sharepoint and Microsoft OneDrive for file and document management, not because they're better products but because Microsoft wishes that they don't use a competitor's products and Big Japanese Car Co respects the desires of their partners.
- After a demo between a new company with superior in-car tech and an old partner with inferior in-car tech, BJCC chooses the old in-car tech because once you're a partner with BJCC, BJCC takes care of you through the good and the bad.
- If you direct a meeting, whether small or large and you say something incorrect, the one person in the crowd that noticed your mistake won't say anything and will actually nod their head in agreement and respect. This is due to the saving-face aspect of the culture.
- Bringing others on board with a decision when you don't have access to the primary data or analytics is much easier when it involves copying a competitor. It also diffuses responsibility if things go south. Saying we did secret teardowns of a Tesla model 3s and are basing our design decisions off these teardowns means you can say it was Tesla's decision, not "my" decision.
On the other hand, BJCC has historically cared a lot more about not pissing off car owners by making more reliable vehicles at fair prices that are less likely to break down. For that reason, at the end of the day, I buy a BJCC car.
It's the old argument of individualism vs. collectivism. The right balance is probably some amount of both.
Tesla with its valuation can afford to scale up aggressively as long as it can continue decreasing manufacturing prices with Wright's law.
Toyota is too dependent on their supply chain to piss them off by bringing too much in-house. Eventually they will get there but it’s going to be a slow delicate transition, because I don’t see Toyota taking a massive leap and reshaping the way they do things from top to bottom.
Take this gem: "Young companies like Tesla, on the other hand, are not shackled to suppliers and are free to pursue the best technologies available."
Try the automated windscreen wipers on any big car brand, they're mostly made by Bosch and they work, even on a 15 year old car. Then Tesla came along with their own approach, guess what, they didn't work for more than a year on any second generation model S because they switched from buying a working module to creating their own in software.
After having driven a model S for a while I'm very much a Tesla sceptic. Because I noticed I was accepting a lot of things from them that I would never have from BMW or Audi. When the "this is a cool innovation" feeling goes away, you're looking at a very mediocre car that can't compete in the price range that it's in.
That being said, I'm puzzled when you say its mediocre in comparison. My 3 got smashed and I have a Mercedes replacement for a few days during repairs and it really feels like a big, loud and clumsy car with an obnoxious amount of chrome. Maybe its the difference in price range, the 3 completes at a much lower price point.
Not sure about Mercedes, but I guess they gave you an A or B class without much luxury options as a loaner. I've seen those as rental cars as well, not great compared to their higher end cars. That would be a 30-40k kind of car here, the model 3 starts at 64k if you pick anything but white and want long range (not performance), and that's excluding autopilot.
So in my opinion they're pricing themselves into a market their cars can't really compete in.
Could you elaborate a bit, please? I'd like to know what I'd miss if I chose Tesla.
- Quality in general with a lot of rattling sounds and cheap materials. Asked them to fix a few of these, service was super friendly, but they never really got it fixed. Not easy to describe but the magnitude of this is really worse than a low-end VW. Which is super annoying if you live in a place with non-perfect streets. (And the engines being quite makes it worse because it's more noticeable)
- Seats were not what other brands offer in adjustability etc. I didn't mind so much in the test drive, but it's annoying if you drive a lot (this has been fixed in the newer generations so you should be fine now).
Software:
- Automatic windscreen wipers just not working, for which they promised an update. Took almost a year for them to work.
- Entertainment system crashes, had to sort of reboot it sometimes to get things back to work.
Mechanical:
- Adjustable suspension failed twice, about a year apart. They claimed it was my fault for driving over speedbumps, but our other car (BMW 5 GT) is older, has the same system, and never failed.
- One door handle failed, which I think was a build quality issue, it just didn't come out anymore.
- Sunroof was leaking after winter, which took them multiple attempts to fix. And after that it had annoying wind noise at highway speed as if something was misaligned. Did not bring it back again after that because I was a bit done with it, just bought another brand as a next car.
What he said was that the electronics were light years ahead anything he had seen before, but he wasn't surprised given its a silicon valley car. The chassis on the other hand was way behind the likes of Toyoda.
I can understand that your mileage may have varied but this was through visually inspecting the electronics, not using them in action.
The difference is that everyone just buys a simple moisture sensor and Tesla decided to go with a needlessly complex setup based on their cameras. Sure that requires a way more advanced image processing chip, an impressive software achievement in image processing etc.
However, from the consumer perspective (that matters much more if you sell millions of cars to the masses instead of a few hundred thousand to enthusiasts): They had no working automatic windscreen wipers, that puts them 15 to 20 years behind the others. Not 6 years ahead.
They really need to get better at the basics of car making quickly, before the likes of Ford, BMW, Volkswagen etc get good at building electric cars. I guess they have several years left to do it because the big guys move slow, but in their current state they're going to be in trouble no matter how advanced their CPU is.
It's also a lot harder to change a CD while you're driving than a tape. And until CD burners were around you couldn't do mixed tapes for road trips on CDs.
When "factory CD" units started to appear they were multiples of the price of aftermarket units, and initially of such low quality initially that the FM modulators sounded better. The disc handling on some of the early units was ludicrous, too: "just get my CD out please" was common.
* edit: also people used "CD to cassette adapters" which are worth mentioning because of how ingenious they are. Its a headphone plug on one end and a cassette shell on the other, the headphones drive coils that excite the tape player's read head.
Source: installed car audio as a sideline in the late 80s early 90s.
The next issue is/will be assistive driving systems which will become more sophisticated and common--perhaps up to even full self-driving under some conditions. We'll probably reach a point where cars that are otherwise perfectly operational will lack what are considered table-stakes (or even legally required) convenience/safety systems in new vehicles.
Luckily for Tesla, most of the other car companies disdain software engineering and see it beneath them and mechanical engineering. My friend had sold his software company to BMW in 2008 and they didn’t even ask him to join BMW. Even more shocking they used the same software for over ten years with NO upgrades and updates.
Emission-cheating software?
No, really, VW sees itself as mainly SW company. Told directly from one of its outsourced development houses.
In seriousness, it's no surprise that older vendors will incrementally upgrade their hardware and work with suppliers rather than starting from scratch and obsoleting all suppliers. Likewise, I assume $startup_du_jour has a tech stack "6 years ahead" (whatever that means) of more established players.
edit: s/de jure/du jour. Thanks lorenzhs
Off-topic, but I think you meant "du jour" (of the day) instead of "de jure" (by law) :)
one area they suffer not highlighted is that each supplier maintains its own code base and while I bet they are obligated to share that with the automobile manufacturer it is still a separate team that does not integrate with other suppliers, all this meaning that since Tesla codes all their own ECU and everything feeds up they have a much easier time adapting to new tech and also fixing issues as they come along
OTA alone is a major headache for any traditional manufacturer to implement because they don't make all the electronics so they have to rely on the suppliers coming on board. Worse they also have to convince the dealer network this is a good change because it will take work from them. BMW just recently demonstrated their ability to OTA with some improvements sent up which allow customization of non driving related functions. We know that Audi supports limited OTA for eTron and the Chevrolet Bolt while it has the ability no one seems to report it being use.
for the most part the article is a bit too fanboi for me, after all Tesla riding this edge is just as likely to have issues with hardware that does not stand up to the abuse an automobile can give it
A brand like Toyota or VW has to ship at magnitudes greater scale and at much lower price points. Manufacturers have much less breathing room for component failure on a Golf or Corolla, so they choose battle-tested parts or either from prior generations or whatever they've found works well on their luxury brands.
2nd: Car tech was traditionally slow moving, which has a lot to do with a strong focus on safety (at least from my experience with automotive customers).
[1] http://carsalesbase.com/us-car-sales-data/tesla/tesla-model-... [2] https://www.heise.de/autos/artikel/Deutschlands-meistverkauf...
I expect that they're behind Tesla on most electronics, but my complaint was that comparing an economy brand like Toyota or VW with Tesla isn't an apples-to-apples comparison for a lot of reasons.
>It could end the auto industry supply chain as we know it.
or just on pargraph later at:
>One stunned engineer from a major Japanese automaker examined the computer and declared, "We cannot do it."
The first sentence is apodictical and catastrophic.
The second one is meaningless and sensationalistic.
No need to read further an article that is clearly a "plug" and that - besides and as per comments here on HN - is also factually inaccurate.
Now I'm scared. I hope it is mistake of Nikkei and these two subsystems doesn't have anything in common, including power supplies.
The in-car entertainment system is run on a separate Intel Atom based computer. The ECU controlling the car itself is completely separate from both of these. You can reboot the main display of the car while driving on Autopilot and it will still perform the same.
The infotainment system runs a custom linux distribution running on ARM (MCU1) or intel atom (MCU2).
They talk to each other but they are independent.
I could imagine situation, when hacked infotaiment system overloads power supply, and if power supply is shared, it takes down ECU too, for example.
I hope, Tesla's engineers better than that.
That's not how auto engineering works. Read up on Controller Area Network (CAN)Bus. Tesla MCUs (Touchscreen) are on a completely separate sub-system from the power-train/braking systems.
> I hope, Tesla's engineers better than that. Sure. Most of Tesla engineers came from other auto manufacturers. Lot's of them were form the UK during the development of the Model S.
There are two versions of the MCU and 3 or 4 versions, depending on how you count, of the autopilot computer.
It does have an infotainment screen, but otherwise: no AI, no Autopilot, 5 seat vehicle, Air Conditioning, and a 416km range
I also have wanted an EV truck that's more old fashioned -- it's not like you need ASICs and GPUs to move charge between wheels and a battery. For getting something that's built to last and won't make decisions for you I would check out Bollinger -- I read somewhere they were keeping it as much of a self-service architecture as possible to appease customers who need to maintain the vehicle 'in the field'
From their website: "the Bollinger B1 might well be the last truck you’ll ever need to buy"
If that old-school minimalist aesthetic really appeals to you, more power to you... but it definitely doesn't seem to be meant for the majority of folks.
If you ask me, Bollinger is competing with Mercedes G wagons and Lamborghini LM002 in creating a status symbol, like the Tesla Roadster did -- at small volumes you have to pick an audience that will be happy to pay up.
As for simple to maintain... isn't that the appeal of EVs already? Unless you have to do maintenance on the battery or motor... but that isn't going to change any time soon. 400V isn't anything to mess around with.
It's pretty clear for more car buyers the market has spoken and folks want more infotainment/screens/AI/whatever, so it seems that type of vehicle is definitely going to become less and less common.
Mantainability is a plus. But the big feature would be not worrying about your car getting remotely bricked for some arbitrary reason, or losing some essential function because your OEM's servers are down.
If a company is capable of constantly monitoring your machine, and updating it OTA, I don't doubt that their liability with respect to whatever you do to your car increases significantly.
Depending on how you like to drive, and where you drive, not fighting the smart driver 'assist' features of vehicles could be a feature as well. I read a commenter on HN some time ago about GPS-assisted headlamps preventing them from providing much needed illumination to something (wrecked vehicle, iirc) off the side of the road.
Personally, I've played enough Assassin's Creed and GTA to know I wouldn't trust a smart system to predict my intent in a life/death scenario.
It's apparently an off-menu option, but you can request one without a SIM card, so effectively all the cell network stuff is disabled. Then, if you are worried about updates bricking something... just don't update it and never connect it to the WiFi? Seems like that gets you most of the way there.
Also, besides traffic navigation and streaming stuff, what do you actually miss by not connecting it to the internet?
By way of example, I once found myself stranded at 3am about 45 miles from anyone I could get help from with a cracked radiator, no radiator cap, a gimp alternator, and no cell reception. I was too poor to afford a tow, had work the next day, and was in no position to get the vehicle properly fixed in a timely manner.
The answer to the problem was a soda can, an oil rag, a backup battery, a few rolls of duct-tape, and periodic stops to replenish my watered-down coolant whenever the engine began to redline.
Doubtless there was a more elegant solution to my problem. But that's what I came up with, and that's what I used in spite of my check engine light's protests.
A smarter vehicle might well have noted how much damage I was doing to it, and refused to even start for me.
The problem itself probably wouldn't turn up in an EV. But knowing with confidence that I can jury rig my car with 'incompatible' but available parts, or limp it home without triggering a safety mechanism that can only be reset by an authorized mechanic has become important to me, even if my commutes are broadly limited to city limits anymore, and I can afford a mechanic now.
Similarly, it's important to know that your car can be worked on by unlicensed mechanics in a pinch. Part of that is being confident that you won't lose that option in an OTA update, and that your car won't actively look for open WiFi hotspots in order to check for that (smart TV's are rumored to do this, I would assume a car is at least that advanced).
There are also issues of trust to be had around cameras replacing mirrors without offering a good fallback to the driver.
The market has spoken, it doesn't really care about these things, so ultimately I don't think a dumb car'll be an option going forward. But those are what I believe to be reasons to want one.
Anything beyond that (e.g. motor or battery problems) aren't going to be fixed like that no matter what EV you buy. Also, those pretty much all can't be hot-serviced on the side of the road anyways on modern cars since everything is more compact, less accessible, etc.
You almost can't buy a car without at least a 6" screen for the infotainment outside of the cars trying extra hard to appeal to the budget market.
I feel strongly enough about it that I'd support a regulatory approach for eliminating touchscreens in cars.
Regardless of your preference on in-car UX, screens displaying most of the info are here to stay.
That's exactly my point. Your only options are "nice car with touchscreen" or "mediocre car without". There's no opportunity for the market to, you know, actually speak.
It's much like the current 4k TV market. Once upon a time, The Market™ spoke in favor of putting "smart" functionality in TVs, and so manufacturers added computers with greater and greater complexity and visual pizazz and apps and such.
Then, the Chromecast and Roku and Fire TV and such became popular, and - better yet - ended up being much easier to upgrade as technology marched on (you only have to replace a $35-or-so dongle or box instead of having to replace a whole multi-hundred-or-thousand-dollar TV). On top of that, the cable companies started to dip their toes in offering these "smart" features in their own set top boxes, as did Nintendo/Microsoft/Sony with their gaming consoles, and there were and still are zero TVs able to replace either category of device. So now you have a bunch of TVs with smart features that go entirely unused (or, worse, actually break, taking the TV with it) because other devices offer better versions of those features and can actually be upgraded without replacing the entire TV.
Unfortunately, since The Market™ has already spoken, there is now to my knowledge exactly one 4k TV manufacturer that offers consumer-grade TVs without smart features (Sceptre), and certainly not on store shelves (I had to buy mine on Amazon, with all the risk of damage and theft that entails, and the only Prime-eligible one was the 50"). Literally every other 4k TV - including any at a brick-and-mortar store, be it Best Buy or Fry's or Wal-Mart or what have you - has smart features that cannot be removed and that are either 1) already outperformed by $20-100 devices on those same exact shelves or 2) going to be outperformed within a year because technology marches on and no TV offers a way to upgrade the computational hardware.
Traditional car companies are finding that making an electric car is hard (emphasis on electric)
Tesla is finding that making an electric car is hard (emphasis on car)
They do seem to be been caught off guard by some combination of how quickly the electric car market has taken off, and what is possible to build.
There seems to have been a reliance on the argument that people need a range of X and because that isn't achievable the market will be small.
I think that complacency and/or conservatism may be the real issues here.
It's not entirely dissimilar to the slow response of the American car industry to the rise in quality of Japanese cars. But that also provides a model for how they might (albeit slowly) rise to the challenge
My view of that is based on the rapid construction of the China gigafactory, and the sooner-than-expected Model Y deliveries.
The only company with proper prioritization of EV development outside of Tesla is VW. GM would be next, but they still are going too slow and clearly don't have full C-level executive buyin
That is simply not true.
All of the manufacturers apart from say Toyota have made EV the number one priority for their companies. Mainly because of the impending EU regulations on emissions.
Porsche has the best EV car on the market. BMW sacked their CEO because of a lack of EV progress, Mercedes has most of their innovation going into the EQC series. There are stories everywhere on how the companies are rapidly shifting to EV.
Taycan is by most reviews the best EV car out there. And we have EVs from BMW, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes, Volvo, VW etc already being sold today in pretty sizeable numbers.
The problem is (a) getting enough battery supply, (b) convincing consumers to buy them, (c) getting the costs down and (d) the somewhat lacklustre growth in EV demand.
Citation needed.
They also made a calculated decision not to recall the device nor properly replace the screens for those affected. Forums are littered with stories of people who suffer from the yellowing and are forced to live with it.
Lots of people have had success getting the yellowing fixed without charge after going through arbitration. I'd prefer if they would fix it under warranty, obviously, but it's not a huge deal.
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/yellow-borders-on-ma...
https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/mcu-touch-screen-yello...
If the adhesive that holds the screen together is not automotive grade then the whole unit is not automotive grade.
[1] https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27989/teslas-screen-saga-shows...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_RAV4_EV#Second_generati...
After articles like this, I remain unconvinced.
You’re thinking of PR, which by definition is unpaid.
NVIDIA already did, at the time the Tesla chip was publicized:
It’s not useful to compare the performance of Tesla’s two-chip Full Self Driving computer against NVIDIA’s single-chip driver assistance system. Tesla’s two-chip FSD computer at 144 TOPs would compare against the NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Pegasus computer which runs at 320 TOPS for AI perception, localization and path planning.
And more in the pipe...
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2019/04/23/tesla-self-driving/
As mentioned, in a car you really want automotive grade components, at least due to the heat and vibration it needs to sustain.
[1]: https://www.mitsubishielectric.com/news/2019/0423-b.html
It just usually sucks to pay a lot of money for a car that's so far behind all the cheap devices that I have.
Likewise a car parked outside in Montreal in winter might reach -40 degrees C (-40F) inside.
Your electronics need to work through that entire temperature range, cope with repeatedly thermally cycling between extreme and room temperature and then keep doing it for more than 10 years.
I baked cookies on the dash one day. Not hot enough for caramelization though so the flavor was lacking.
Surely I had covered parking most of the time.
Similarly if plugged in (which I do when I'm below -20F and not driving) it will heat thing to protect itself.
Not to be pedantic, but it will be the same usable screen, you will just have been sold higher expectations by then. An unfortunate byproduct of progress. Things are good enough until one day they aren't :)
(An almost fanatical devotion to quality and process control being another major factor!)
Chances are you will still be able to buy that entertainment screen in 15-20 years' time.
(An almost fanatical devotion to quality and process control being another major factor!)
They even wrote a book in it, "The Toyota Way".
I think the new models come with Android or Apple Car integration but mine has a UI that looks and feels from 20 years ago. Not only it's fugly, but it's slow and unresponsive. Bluetooth disconnects randomly. Sometimes the phone connects but not the audio. The volume control is a fucking touchscreen slider which is totally unresponsive. Jesus, the team that did that had no idea what they were doing.
The Tesla was the first UI I tried that felt as good or better than this years phones. Nice large, clear, color display. Fast UI, pinch and zoom, etc. I do wish they spent a bit more on ram/SSD to keep a better local cache. Seems silly to zoom in, then zoom out and have to wait for the infill.
https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27989/teslas-screen-saga-shows...
It's not that Toyota or VW can't afford in software/hardware research - because they have more than enough resources for this. Those are the biggest car manufacturers in the world. They simply price more reliability. Especially Toyota is good example for that, their models are usually 3-5 years in "gadgets" behind VW group or Korean makers, but their cars offer solid reliability and usually they simply drive for years without much troubles.
Another example of how Tesla is ahead: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a30361800/tesla-model-3-lo... >Not only is this the first time we've ever had a long-term car suffer a catastrophic failure while parked, it's also an extraordinarily rare case of any car leaving us stranded, something unacceptable for any new vehicle, particularly one that costs $57,690 and with merely 5286 miles on the odometer. Even our problem-prone Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio was at least able to limp to the dealer following each one of its numerous issues.
Unless you're describing something else, that issue is limited to older Teslas:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/flash-memory-wear-killing-...
> Not only is this the first time we've ever had a long-term car suffer a catastrophic failure while parked
Any other car "being parked and then later failing to start" is not newsworthy. It was interesting in this case because it was detected and the owner notified via push notification that it occurred.
Obviously it shouldn't have happened, especially since it's a newer car. But it's the push notification that made it newsworthy. "My car wouldn't start and had to be towed to a dealer to get fixed for an incredibly rare issue that happened to me" could be written for any car, and nobody would care.
there's many interpretations. the most obvious is that industry insiders were wrong about their expectations, since the technology has reached the market this early. the other is that the 6 years estimate is way too generous, given production units exists, and late adoption cycle is usually two years. the third is this is a "my darling tesla" advertisement.
somehow I am more inclined to sit between position one and two, especially since the productization of ai chips is already in the works[1], but still.
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613305/this-chip-was-demo...
"Toyota believes in developing mutually beneficial, long-term relationships based on mutual trust with all suppliers. To foster that trust, we pursue close and wide-ranging communication to share our business knowledge to enhance our business relationship." (https://www.toyotauk.com/toyota-in-the-uk/supplier-relations...)
> The real reason for holding off? Automakers worry that computers like Tesla's will render obsolete the parts supply chains they have cultivated over decades, the engineer said.
Strikes me as a typical low-reliability design. Would be surprised if this unit lasts ten (or even five) years.
Right now everyone is worrying that batteries will become a commodity market soon and all the investments in building a battery factory will become worthless. However, the reality is that existing car manufacturers get left behind without access to batteries. Tesla is building Gigafactories everywhere and doesn't suffer from this major problem.
On an electric car I do care about battery management electronics though. That’s where I thought Tesla had the important edge over the competition.
https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27989/teslas-screen-saga-shows...
I'd rather wait for the likes of Toyota to do things right with automotive-grade components and automotive-grade programming and automotive-grade testing than trust my life to whatever hackery Tesla wants to brogrammer into its ASICs.
The article's probably right about some Japanese engineer saying "I can't do this". Not because that engineer doesn't know how to do it, or because of some relationship with component manufacturers, but because doing so would be ethically questionable at best.
Even Toyota has a better track record than Tesla here.
Not to mention the numerous ways current automotive manufacturers fail at cyber security. Stuff like OnStar and being able to shut down cars remotely.
Ouch
Latecomer advantages.
It's not like Tesla manufactured the chips and components in house unless I'm not aware that Tesla now has its own PCBA and component factory.
https://ir.tesla.com/board-directors/larry-ellison
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-02-15/larry-elli...
Meaning you can't adjust anything while driving?
https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21127243/tesla-model-s-aut...
Looks like we're talking about the same Tesla that disables features remotely on your car.
It doesn't even matter who was in the right on that incident, looks like a dangerous car to me. And I did used to envy the US for having it available...
I wouldn't be surprised if newer models do away with these ASICs until the software is further along.
Humans don’t have lidar and we are able to navigate the world. If the windows of the car was replaced by a low latency screen, showing exactly what we’d see if we looked out the window, we could drive just fine, so cameras do provide enough data to self drive. You just need a smart processor.
But while humans can successfully correct for this issue through extended interpretation of perceived images and training, it becomes almost a necessity for a stupid computer. I believe a fast and efficient stereoscopy would make identifying objects much easier. But it isn't neither trivial to implement, nor very performant to my knowledge.
A Lidar would be an alternative of course.
[0]: https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...
Also, given humans drive a lot, even with those astronomical odds, if you drove 15k a year for 60 years, you’d have an almost 1% chance of dying in an auto accident.
Tesla hasn’t show any capacity to deliver quality cars at scale, nor provide service to them, whatever their ambitions. Combined with all their SEC problems, it’s reminiscent of Preston Tucker’s car company:
(as of mid-January) Tesla's market capitalization is $93 billion, compared to $50 billion for General Motors and $37 billion for Ford
No other car company is going to be buying them out unless they crash very very badly
I do expect Tesla’s is dramatically inflated, I have no idea if Toyota would buy them, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility. If Toyota could successfully integrate all the Tesla stuff into their vehicles, it would also have a greater impact than anything Tesla will likely accomplish on their own.
Toyota: 228.41 Billion
Tesla: 144.2 Billion
Look, I’m a firm believer in the “market can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent” and especially in our post-2008, QE money printing, Saudi sovereign wealth fund, unmoored-from-reality present. So honestly, who knows how it will all pan out. Maybe we now just live in a hyperreal future where Musk’s marketing shenanigans are materially equivalent to the solid fundamentals and record of a company like Toyota. Could very well be.
The Toyota engineer worried about jobs in the supply chain is just the tip of the ice berg. ICE cars are substantially more complex and require much more regular maintenance (all the way down to increased tire and brake wear).
Incumbent auto makers not only have to worry about resistance to change upstream, they need to worry about downstream too.
[I hold no equity short or long position on Tesla now, have not over the past few years, and do not plan to going forward. My personal investing is outside of public markets in general.]
Sounds like you expect their growth to plateau in the next few years. That’s an fine theory, but it’s not “more fundamentals-based” than the theory it will continue for another 10 years.
What universe are you living in? Can't be the same one I'm in ... pretty cool, though, that HN has implemented a multiverse-spanning internet forum.
I feel the same when I see people falling for all the marketing hype around Musk and his companies.
He’s definitely inherited Jobs’ capacity for reality distortion. But Apple is still chugging on long on that, despite years of quality and design problems, so who know how it will all pan out.
What about SpaceX? Their technical achievements are literally unprecedented, and they are dominating a market that has been the sole domain of an increasingly consolidated handful of incumbent military-industrial giants for the better part of a century. Dismissing those achievements as marketing hype is, again, absurd.
I am shaking my head in sad bafflement. Your whole schtick just reads like sour grapes, and why? If you want to have a real conversation about this stuff, you need to get over the edgy negativity.
As to Space X, I don’t fall for the notion that their engineering accomplishments are somehow solely dependent on Musk. A lot of really talented people work there and have done some really incredible feats of engineering. If those were regularly attributed to them instead of with Musk, I would have greater respect for the whole enterprise.
Whether the direction they’re pushing things, the privatization of space exploration and it’s underlying research, is a good thing, is also a separate conversation that I doubt you or I would agree on.
I don't own any Tesla products, nor do I have any direct investments in any of Musk's companies. Also, I think the guy is a literal maniac and I'd never want to work under him. I think you're far more invested in your viewpoint than I am.
> As to Space X, I don’t fall for the notion that their engineering accomplishments are somehow solely dependent on Musk. A lot of really talented people work their and have done some really incredible feats of engineering. If those were regularly attributed to them instead of with Musk, I would have greater respect for the whole enterprise.
I never said they were "solely dependent on Musk." You brought up, and I quote (with emphasis mine), the "marketing hype around Musk and his companies." I haven't mentioned Musk at all until this comment.
Reality distortion intensifies, eh? It seems that the one you're really trying to convince is yourself (via some very flimsy straw men), and it's not my job to make you see reality objectively. Good luck.