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Comment by softwaredoug | Hacker News Reader

It is quite interesting from a branding perspective how hard it may be for traditional car companies to convince you to buy their electric car. Is a company like VW really investing, in the long run, in electric cars in the way Tesla is? Should I _really_ trust their one-off electric car they build to dip their toe in?

You wonder what it WOULD take for VW, Chevy, Ford, Toyota etc to convince you their product and commitment was on par with Tesla

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I see what you mean from a focus standpoint, but I feel like the traditional carmakers will likely always do better at quality, safety, and longevity for traditional stuff. Panel gaps, paint, proper automotive grade components, and so on.

Me too, cars are just much more than their engines and drivetrains.

They are, and even so, these companies still know far more about the engineering principles that go into both.

Tesla certainly has heaps of special knowledge that these companies will need to catch up on or innovate themselves, but I suspect in the scheme of things, even lower end car manufactures are better-rounded across the design/build process.

You wonder what it WOULD take for VW, Chevy, Ford, Toyota etc to convince you their product and commitment was on par with Tesla

That they've been making production electric cars longer than Tesla, like Nissan has?

(Though my singular Nissan dealer experience kinda put me off Nissans for a while.)

Yeah, and its not like the Leaf is great. It is fairly recent that they've started making cars as good as the Model 3 and Y.

Seriously? How much does a Leaf cost in comparison to a Model Y? For the price of a Model Y, I expect the body panels aligned, and the paint not orange-peeled, like the Nissan. After that, we can compare the $35K car to the $90K car.

Ford putting the Mustang brand on an EV is a pretty big indicator to me.

Feels a bit like Nokia getting serious about smartphones a year after the iPhone has come out.

Nah if anything Ford is more like Microsoft.

That would have worked if they had built something that was actually good. I mean, Google did pretty well with that strategy.

The Mach E is a great competitor too.

This, Ford’s new CEO seems like he’s putting the company full steam ahead on electric. Plus outwardly admires Tesla, he’s a real car geek.

Toyota actually made a plugin hybrid with a reasonable electric only range (68km or so), which is a great way to gradually switch people to electric. That seems to be a sweet spot range-wise -- to the point that they say to run on gasoline occasionally otherwise it can go bad in a year and corrode fuel system.

It would take an excellent product, that's it. Best in class performance, efficiency, range, reliability, design, value, etc. for a single model is what is needed to prove their ability.

Volvo's commitment has convinced me, at least. But does it matter if the brand is all electric or not? I'd base my decision on the specific model.

I fear the other way, that Elon will jump on the next thing before Tesla becomes more than a rounding error.

I think that Skoda CityGo and the VW 1UP second gen are probably the best town cars there are (in EU sense).

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