Hacker News Reader

Comment by drcongo | Hacker News Reader

Tesla's build quality is closer to the kind of $50 Android phone you find on wish.com than it is to Apple's. I have no idea how Bloomberg clickbait articles end up on here so often, but this particular one is a new low - an article about VW that they've shoehorned both Tesla and Apple into for the clicks.

View on HN

Not to mention this belies a misunderstanding of Apple's business model. Tesla owns 80% of the electric car market and makes zero profit. That sounds an awful lot like Android's place in the market (72% market share, 30% of profit share) [1] Samsung only has 17% profit share - nobody else makes any money.

Apple's always owned the entirety of the profit in the entire global smartphone space.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2019/12/22/global-...

Tesla had about 18% market share in October and it's probably gone down from there.

https://electrek.co/2020/10/30/tesla-tsla-market-share-globa...

Indeed, I was using the US numbers [1] - my bad.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/tesla-cars-ev-registratio...

I wonder if the alleged China made 25000$ model will change that.

And the Berlin gigafactory. It seems the casting machines are already being installed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8kjwRExLl0

How is investment in growth (e.g. gigafactory construction) recognized financially?

I'm more curious how investment of carbon credits (the only source of profit) which are soon to no longer be required by their competitors, in speculative bubbles (e.g. Bitcoin) which are primarily fueled by Chinese coal plants is accounted for. I'd love to have coffee with their Master of Coin.

There's been no increase in coal usage in China in 10 years though

Sounds like there could have been a coal decrease. That's not a great argument IMO as they have been investing heavily in alternative energy production, especially hydro and solar. Coal usage needs to go down to zero, and anything that impedes that process is maddening to see.

It's recognized by investors who try to make an honest assessment in order to make good investment decisions. Thankfully, this is not a popularity contest.

By any reasonable non-pedantic measure, Tesla has actually been quite profitable over the last couple of years. They've put their entire profit towards building additional production capacity. Of course, they've also used the current investment climate to make capital raises that are bigger than their profits.

IIRC, Tesla have reported profit and cashflow minus capital spending for the last few years, and these numbers show what you expect: A business that's very profitable from a per-unit perspective.

The market cap is a different question, but let's treat that as a separate question.

I had a short infatuation with Audis (VW) until I owned them. My S5 got hauled off by Carvana on Monday and my wife's SQ5 just got traded in on a Ford yesterday.

Fit and finish was impeccable and certainly better than Tesla's, but they were constantly breaking in ridiculous ways. My advice, never ever own one outside of warranty unless it's >20 years old and you can wrench on it yourself.

YMMV of course.

My wife had an Audi as company car for a while - which kept breaking. Meanwhile I've had VWs and now Skodas for years and never had a problem.

As long as they keep it simple they do OK. Audis are rolling wiring harnesses.

For VWs, it's always the electrical systems.... If it's 10 years old, I can almost guarantee it's going to have problems. With that said, you'll always see the rouge 1999 Jetta tooling around town, and either the owner got really lucky, or they've worked on it.

Sister in law had a ~’04 Jetta. Mechanically it was sound, but it did have a continuous stream of electrical problems. My nephew had an ‘09 CC that blew a fuel pump and then blew up an engine. Nice car otherwise.

The only car we've had that had electrical problems was a Toyota - where the instruments would keep cutting out. Turns out this was caused by the sunroof...

Edit: Sunroof leaked, water collected at lowest point inside car where Toyota had decided to locate electrical connectors that fed the instruments.

Our B5 Passat (as new) had a superior features/interior quality/fit and finish than my Toyota Corolla but guess which one spent the most time at the dealer not for regular servicing ???.

2 x coil packs, Tie end rods, Vacuum pipe to the intake manifold, A/C heat exchanger.

This was all before 60,000 km.

They are showroom queens. I loved sitting in the stitched suede seats of the RS7 and making vroom sounds while my wallet was getting shredded in service.

This has been my experience with late 2000's BMWs too. Man they look gorgeous. You can pick one up for under 10 grand now... There's a reason why.

What are you smoking? Apple has had a ton of problems with quality on their recent airpods max launch, widely documented. Also remember the apple butterfly switch keyboard fiasco?? Sony has much better quality than Apple right now.

Where did Sony come into this?! Were there not enough entirely unrelated brands in the headline for you?

the journalist probably own some $TSLA

Reply on news.ycombinator.com