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> Tesla's strengths lie in battery technology,

At the moment, and likely for the next 5+ years, the EV industry is going to be dominated by battery technology. Batteries determine pricing, speed, charging speed, and range. You can't have a great car if you can't nail those things.

BMW & VW have managed to make EVs which are great in every other way, but without getting the basics right, nobody is buying.

> ...an army of blind supporters...

Tesla has some glaring issues (IMO largely around self driving and quality control), but they've nailed the things about a car that people care about: Price, Performance, & Range. Complaining that people like Tesla's while ignoring the obvious advantages Tesla brings to the table just points out your own biases.

BMW's best EVs have 60% of the range of the bottom end Tesla and only marginally better performance. That makes it a bit difficult to point at Tesla and say they are successful due to "Blind Supporters".

> BMW & VW have managed to make EVs which are great in every other way, but without getting the basics right, nobody is buying.

The Renault Zoe is the best selling EV in Europe so far this year. The VW ID.3 might manage to outsell the Zoe in 2020 even though the ID.3 has only been out for a month or so. It'll be interesting to see where the ID.3 ends up by year's end.

Tesla is far from perfect but saying that it's strength is in "an army of blind supporters" is just ridiculous. Tesla is moving and innovating very fast, not just in battery tech but also electric drive train, vehicle mass manufacturing, energy storage, etc.

Tesla/Elon hate is strong these days, probably outweighs the fanboyism.

They’ve also innovated a fully green business model - selling tax credits as consistent, bonafide revenue.

Is it Tesla fault that other manufactures are dumb? Every company plays with the same regulatory framework. People here want more regulation to force companies to go green but then relentlessly clown companies that play well within these regulation.

Tesla was well on its way to profitability, and would have easily been without Corona. They managed to make a little profit anyway because the used credit sales. Even without Credits they would have had impressive results given the global situation.

In Q3 Tesla will make a profit way beyond credits and then this 'lets distract from reality' story-line can die too. And in Q4 people who made this argument will really start to look incredibly dumb.

Tesla is making money because they have really fantastic margin on their cars and have really good ROI but instead of talking about that everybody deflected and made fun of them that they made profit 'only' because of credits.

I don't get it on one side you got the people that think Musk is god. Mention to them that there are a lot engineers and techs doing the heavy lifting and they get really really mad.

Then you got the other side that thinks Tesla is a grift. And mention that it appears they've been making a small profit on every unit shipped and those guys lose it on you.

Profit on units shipped is the mark of going business. Means the investors cash is being spent on building out the business not subsidizing a money losing business.

Well isn't it pretty much the same with all other discussions on the Internet.

No one wants to discuss, they just want to make a point. It is similar situation with Apple's App Store. You see people, even on HN defending Apple, saying it is Apple's Platform they can do whatever they want. Which is fine as a statement, but without really ever addressing the question raised by the counter party.

Nope -- I think it's brilliant. So many 'unrealized revenue' sources to dip into for any Q.

Is it fully green? Or are they trading polluting heavy metals and chemicals and co2 from mining operations for co2 produced from internal combustion engines?

It seems like they are externalizing their environmental impact, like a traditional multi-national but with the added business model of selling credits earned from selling electrics.

Or am I wrong? Is the pollution created by these huge batteries being netted out from their credits?

Pretty much all serious studies on this show that over the lifetime you easily beat ICE.

And only because the not so optimized yet supply lines is it even a question.

The thing is, you need to mine nickel/graphite once and then cycle it 5000 times. If you compare this to the equivalent driving distance in gas its not remotely close. Also, all of these batteries will be recycled, so it only needs to be mined once.

The credits he refers to are fuel efficiency standards that manufactures need to have across their fleet.

Yes, I understand that over the lifetime, electrics beat ice. But does that calculation include the fuel efficiency credits. Or probably more directly, do the fuel efficiency credits take into account the co2 emitted for building the battery in your electric? It's probably just looking at fuel efficiency.

The credits are about the efficiency of the car, it does not take into account production. So I guess one could argue EV are getting an even better deal.

Not knocking the quality of German products, but I work in biotech and I've noticed German companies that I've worked with to be inbcredibly slow. We purchase custom fabricated equipment and other supplies from all over the world and German companies often are slow to respond to technical questions about products and other sales related inquiries. Its almost feels like they're doing us a favor by giving us their time. Maybe its cultural expectations, but meanwhile local US suppliers are way too pushy, but at-least we get our questions/concerns addressed quickly.

Couldn't resist a small dig here, but German cars are well known to be money-pits. :)

Diz iz because ze Cyber is absolute "Neuland / Terra Incognita" for us. Even our (current) chancellor said so in public ;>

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/neuland

Also maybe ambiguities between metric/imperial measurements, area of competence, having to ask around to be safe, waiting for answer/confirmation, and so on?

Well there are lots of little things that I noticed. One example - I found that there wasn't a 'point person' who could quickly get us answers. We're used to having a go-to person who will nag internal team-members and make sure the customer is taken care of. We were shuffled across different teams for no apparent reason which slowed things down. There just seemed to be more internal inflexibility/bureaucracy than we're used to here in the US. We did end up buying equipment from the company in the end, so I might travel there sometime soon and experience the business culture first-hand.

I don't know - my friends who work on a wide variety of cars say porsche is near the top.

I guess the thing is - they're competing against cars that are not designed to come apart. Is it a sea-change to the models of televisions and computers that are designed to be purchased and disposed of at the end of their lives?

> an army of blind supporters

What makes you say that the supporters are blind? Judging by the success of the company, shouldn't its supporters get a little more credit?

There are supporters then there are people making memes about Elon Musk the God King and using their entire paycheck to buy weekly options.

Blind doesn't mean wrong.

It does mean that it did not fit into how they have traditionally computed value propositions.

A lot of the people who I know bought a Tesla, did it for other reasons. It was status symbol, a tool for virtue signalling, a luxury first and a car last. A ton of these friends were cross shopping the Tesla with a Civic, Corolla or a Prius. Because for these non-car enthusiasts, if not Tesla, they couldn't imagine spending that kind of money on a car.

It is similar to how Apple convinced non-traditional customers to buy a $500 watch or how Beats convinced your average person to splurge $300 on headphones that didn't even sound great. The first adopters ordered their cars 3 years out, before they'd even seen one reviewed.

The blind-ness comes from the numerous contradictions that Tesla represents.

The Tesla is fast, but it is bought by non-enthusiasts who never speed. The Tesla is green so it'd appeal to sustainability activists. But Manufacturing consists a bulk of carbon footprint, so if you cared you'd get a used car. Tesla also has toxic and exploitative work practices that someone who loves sustainability would generally disavow.

Teslas are great cars and provide a very different value proposition. But, the reason Tesla is doing well is not because it beat the Germans at their own game (as the articles want to imply). It is because they played a different game all together.

Tesla - " Exploration and exploitation "

What a horrifying point. First of all lots of people who would have bought expensive cars bought Tesla, its absurdly wrong to claim every Tesla buyer would have bought a Civic instead. You are suffering from massive selection bias.

And consumer products are almost always more then just pure base value.

> But Manufacturing consists a bulk of carbon footprint, so if you cared you'd get a used car.

So everybody who cars can never buy a used car and the people who buy new cars buy gas cars that eventually turn into used gas cars?

Do you really not understand how that makes absolutely no sense what so ever?

> But, the reason Tesla is doing well is not because it beat the Germans at their own game (as the articles want to imply). It is because they played a different game all together.

German game was to build expensive cars the people really wanted. And so did Tesla.

> Auto manufacturers tunnel visioned on gas vehicles, and made investments a bit too late

Did they? Last time I've checked EV market wasn't exactly eating gas market lunch. Sure, it's destined to, but as of today I don't think we have data to show that traditional OEM investments were too late.

Slowly, then all at once.

Survivorship bias is when you differentiate "necessary investment" from "foolish panicking" retrospectively by whether it worked out well or not.

Agreed, but the self-driving one is the only place where I could differentiate between the two with reasonable confidence due to decent domain and insider knowledge.

The acquisitions of Cruise, Nutonomy and the like were so inflated for the tech they had, that you can almost call it being fleeced. It was a good idea to get these companies as acqui-hires, but for between $0.5-1.5 billion the big companies got algorithms that would be obsolete in a year and a few talent employees, who they could have obtained for faaaar cheaper. (Zoox by amazon at least made some sense)

What is hilarious, is that Waymo is still so far ahead in the data game that I doubt it is possible for them to even catch up. Self-driving has become a tech problem, and suddenly the likes of Uber, Google and Apple find themselves far better equipped to handle what is now a data science problem than any of these traditional companies.

My prediction:

The breakthrough moment for self-driving will come from Waymo or Amazon's Zoox (the ones with tons of 3d data). The 'winning' company will then licence the tech to every 3rd party car manufacturer and you will have an android like self-driving ecosystem, where they are all more or less the same.

I just don't get how Tesla is not ahead on Self Driving. Waymo has spent 10 years mapping the same city and its basically the single easiest place to do self-driving in the whole world.

If you actually look at Tesla presentation, a huge part of the problem they are dealing with is handing things like 50000 different kinds of speed limit signs in every country in the world. Assigning lights to the associated lanes and things like that. Finding the 0.00001% cases like object falling of trucks on the highway. Understanding complex intersection without prior mapping data of any kind.

I have not heard a single clear explanation how Waymo will go from where the currently are, to overriding a global general solution.

Tesla is a silicon Vally tech company that is trying to get its hand on the exact same people that Apple and Google are. And they unlike Apple and Google have their own gigantic data-gathering fleet across every first-world country. They are so far ahead of everybody in terms of data and data gathering its not even remotely close.

The reason Tesla seems to get no respect is that (a) Elon Musk over-promised and now he is forever labeled a joke that can never be taken seriously (b) the consumer product on the road does not yet do all the things it claims it will one day do so it providing something for people to criticize.

Tesla is the only company that believes that 2d vision can solve the whole problem. Every other company uses it with LIDAR. It may be hubris, but I simply cannot see how vision alone will be sufficient to solve self-driving.

This is especially true in heavy rains, snow and any driving condition that doesn't follow the nicest of layouts like the Bay Area. This means that occlusion will stay unsolved by definition. Even if it works out one day, my intuition is that 3D maps / LIDAR self-driving is going to be ready sooner than that, purely due to having richer data.

Also, from what I know, (very little but) Tesla isn't THE company landing top self-driving and vision talent. They seem to be going to Waymo, Uber, Apple and Nvidia instead. Additionally, while I deeply respect Andrej Karpathy, he simply doesn't have the same research credentials as some of the distinguished professors who lead the other groups.

3D self-driving labs are all building on each other's work, as the cost of GPUs and LIDAR sensors has dropped by orders of magnitude over the last decade. Cameras and sensors on the other hand remain more or less where they were 10 years ago, and Tesla is left alone to compete with everyone else.

> This is especially true in heavy rains, snow and any driving condition that doesn't follow the nicest of layouts like the Bay Area.

CommaAI also believes lidar are a bad idea.

Tesla has cars using their technology everyday all over the world and thus have 10000x more insight into how conditions effects their hardware/software.

While Waymo has spend 10 years testing in Arizona and basically never once had to contend with these problems.

And lidar does have its issues in certain conditions as well, its not some magic technology.

> They seem to be going to Waymo, Uber, Apple and Nvidia instead.

Very hard to judge that. I would like to see the numbers on that. The main evidence to me is that SpaceX/Tesla always rank highest on 'Where you want to work' for engineering students.

Also, it seems to me that Tesla is focusing very having a basic framework that non-super AI experts can improve the system. That is the only way you can even begin to manage the complexity of the global road network something people like Waymo has defiantly not yet even begin to solve.

> 3D self-driving labs are all building on each other's work, as the cost of GPUs and LIDAR sensors has dropped by orders of magnitude over the last decade.

And Tesla makes its own hardware that dropped even more compared to what everybody else uses.

> Cameras and sensors on the other hand remain more or less where they were 10 years ago, and Tesla is left alone to compete with everyone else.

Lidar by itself does nothing, you still need cameras and sensors as well, so it is purely added cost. There is simply no denying that high quality cheap lidar that can be deployed on millions of cars doesn't exist yet.

I would not be against Tesla using lidar. My more important point is that I think HD mapping is a horrible idea, lidar or not. And as long as that is the way you approach the problem you will never have a general self driving solution.

I wouldnt mind if Tesla used Stereo-vision, but they try doing self driving with single view crappy cameras. First it was 30 fps 6640x480 monochrome Mobileye EyeQ3, now its 3? center mounted 36 fps 1280x960 monochrome/red cameras.

What do you make of this 2018 blog post and predictions discussing Uber, Waymo, comma.ai, Tesla, Google, General Motors, etc. https://blog.piekniewski.info/2018/10/29/ai-winter-update/ ?

IMO Tiktok is a random example. They're not a moonshot tech company, and they were just serving a pent-up demand that came from the death of Vine under Twitter.

Tiktok is an example of getting caught unprepared, by the sudden rise of a competitor you weren't aware would or could exist.

Tiktok is capturing a market that was huge and did exist on vine. Anyone could have seen that a vine competitor would have inevitably popped up after twitter killed it. It was a massively popular platform and probably the worst move twitter ever did as a business.

> under pays So does the german car industry via proxy by temporary employment agencies. AFAIK at least since the 90ies.