Tesla Q1 2021 Results | Hacker News Reader

Tesla Q1 2021 Results

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Whatever you may think of Tesla and Musk, you have to agree that they've accomplished something rather incredible.

Few would have thought this possible not that long ago:

* 185K vehicle deliveries in Q1, +109% versus a year ago [a]

* 2.7K supercharger stations, +41% versus a year ago

* 24.5K supercharger connectors, +44% versus a year ago

* 92 MW of solar generation deployed in Q1, +163% versus a year ago

* 445 MWh of solar storage deployed in Q1, +71% versus a year ago

* Revenues of $10.4B in Q1, +74% versus a year ago

* EBITDA of $1.8B in Q1, +94% versus a year ago

* Over $17B in cash on hand

* New S, X, Roadster, Cybertruck, and Semi models on the way

* Berlin, Texas, and Shangai-expansion gigafactories coming online

* Four additional gigafactories already in development

Wow. Just... wow.

[a] And that figure understates growth, because it includes a 10K decline in S and X deliveries due to the upcoming launch of new S and X models.

> 92 MWh of solar generation deployed in Q1, +163% versus a year ago

This is a typo (should be 92 MW), but also made me think about how you could have fun metrics like MW/h rate of solar deployed or MW rate of storage deployed.

Oops. Silly me. Thanks for pointing it out. Corrected.

They can always come up with statistics like 92MW x 5 hours-per-day = 460MWh/day x 365 days = 167,900MWh = 167GWh/year. You can see marketing claim of 167GWh yearly capacity coming online for last year!

The human capacity to invent never ceases to amaze!

I find it delightful to think of EV charging rates in MPH. The original Leaf tops out at around 24 MPH, while modern Tesla super chargers are 200+ MPH charge rate.

Just reached over 1000 MPH charging at a V3 supercharger last week.

> * Four additional gigafactories already in development

Where did you see this? Best I can tell, 4 new models (Cybertruck, Roadster, Semi, Unannounced) are in development but only one more gigafactory (TBD) is in the works. Perhaps you misread things?

Agree though, astounding rate of growth at this scale.

Berlin and Texas are still under construction, with neither having produced a single delivery car yet. I think they did conflate models with factories as you suspect, though.

Berlin factory is not necessarily behind the corner. Tesla is trying to cut corners there but Germany is not Wild West to let them do whatever they want.

I have two separate and (mostly) unrelated feelings.

Musk has done something remarkable as you say.

At the same time, the market cap is nuts and a portent of doom.

Bigger than all car companies combined, by market cap?

A market crash could take down Tesla and set back electric car adoption by 20 years.

A few years ago I'd agree it would be a major EV setback but there are so many other options now I don't think that's the case any longer.

I'm very optimistic about Rivian. It's Tesla but without the ego thinking they are smarter than 50 years of manufacturing lessons.

They drive the first two Rivian's in the Long Way Up documentary with Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman who ride early Harley Davidson Livewire motorcycles.

I think that if Tesla were to go belly-up because of some sharemarket issue, that it'd be very easy for all the other manufacturers to back off their BEV plans. Not necessarily outright cancel them, but just not push for it and possibly let it fizzle somewhat. They'd have the excuse that "Well, Tesla failed, and they were more valuable than all of us combined at one point, so... we'll just be more cautious"

One major issue is adoption. While there's a whole lot of people who want BEVs, price is still a major concern, as is infrastructure.

Tesla make it dead simple with their supercharger network - find a charger, plug in, fast charging happens. The find a charger thing is integrated into the car, and often has feedback about what chargers are busy or unavailable.

Unfortunately, outside of Europe and the UK, the BEV charging story is pretty terrible.

Volkswagon, who arguably have the biggest incentive to make this work, have a pretty atrocious charging experience in the US, as demonstrated by Engineering Explained[1] with their latest and greatest model the 'ID.4'

Europe and the UK have put down standards and basically forced some level of interoperation between charging network systems, which reduced friction for EV owners.

The other issue is getting dealers onboard. If you're someone for whom an EV might make a whole lot of sense, there's approximately zero chance you're going to get recommended an EV, even if the dealer has one to sell you (either because the dealership dont' keep units to test-drive, or the manufacturer doesn't sell a BEV). Dealers hate them, because there's little to no after-sales servicing requirement. I've seen many stories about people basically having to argue or beg a dealer to let them buy or even order an EV.

Perhaps Manufacturers could go with direct sales a-la Tesla, but there seems to still be a lot of political power left in the dealer networks, so that isn't necessarily going to be possible any time soon.

What will convince me that EVs are here to stay is when dealerships are pushing BEVs right alongside their ICEs.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EotuxCptcM4

> Europe and the UK have put down standards and basically forced some level of interoperation between charging network systems, which reduced friction for EV owners.

They standardized the connector, but the problem (at least in my area in Austria when I looked into it 2 years ago) was that there are so many competing charging networks with different contracts and pricing models that it was basically unusable.

Near my house there were 3 chargers from different companies, each with space for two or three cars. If I wanted to use either of them, I would have to sign up with three networks, pay monthly fees for two of them, and have vastly different prices on each of the chargers.

The fast charging prices were also so high that I'm not sure it's any cheaper than a gasoline car.

I don't know if it's gotten any better since then, but as far as I could tell EVs only make sense if you can charge the car either at your home or at your workplace.

I was under the impression that all, or at least most, EV charging networks in the UK and EU allowed a PAYG model, where you tap your credit/debit card against the machine.

> The fast charging prices were also so high that I'm not sure it's any cheaper than a gasoline car.

While it being cheaper than gasoline is a nice perk, I think it's more important to get a wider deployment of fast charging infrastructure (and that is dead easy to use).

Without massive deployments of charging infrastructure, it won't matter what it costs - people will not buy EVs if they've got no way to rapidly recharge.

Governments should also be incentivising deployment of on-street charging infrastructure for areas where off-street parking is difficult or uncommon.

No, its Tesla if Tesla could have seen the future and copied its playbook from itself. Rivian is emulating the Tesla strategy to a remarkable degree, which might make them a bit smarter than every other car company but does not make them a Tesla competitor, or even that interesting.

Tesla is still building cars in a tent, and with an alarming lack of quality assurance. Generally, Toyota Production System principles are available for anyone to use. Tesla has achieved a remarkable amount of things but manufacturing efficiency is not one of them.

It would still be significant even today. While more good quality dedicated BEV platforms are (finally) coming to market in cars people can actually buy, with the exception of maybe the Nissan Leaf this has only really started in earnest recently with stuff like the new Ioniq 5 platform from Hyundai and VW’s MEB architecture etc in the last year.

The next 5 years will see a big change for sure, but the legacy ICE automakers are still many years behind Tesla (often by their own admission - see VW CEO remarks on state of the VW groups car software platforms etc).

I kindly disagree with your critique. BUT I am also very biased. This is because I am an owner of a Model Y, but I do not own any stock in Tesla whatsoever. I do not like nor trust Elon Musk, especially with my retirement.

I think people want EV's and when they see that they only need to spend a little bit extra for that extra range and access to a nationwide supercharger network. They are willing to pay for it. I don't think a drop in stock is going to change that mentality. Other automakers keep trying to build a quality EV, but they simply do not hold up to a Tesla.

I think the cat is out of the bag for EVs: enough people have tasted them and wouldn't go back, and enough manufacturers got into the game, that even if Tesla was to fail, enough people would be asking for it, and enough manufacturers would already be advanced enough in their plans to keep the ball rolling.

Basically, Tesla's mission is 99% accomplished.

In Europe there is still too few charging facilities.

Basically an EV only makes sense if you own a house and can get your own charger.

The V2 supercharger still needs around 20 minutes for an 80% charge, while the new BMW iX3 needs around 30 minutes for 80%.

The Tesla V3 supercharger is promising, but the killer feature will be a unified charging platform and not one for each car maker.

> Basically an EV only makes sense if you own a house and can get your own charger.

New houses in the UK have required chargers as part of planning permission for 5 years. Most people have, or can have, a 3KW socket installed in their driveway, very cheaply (like 2-3 tanks of fuel)

73% of cars in the UK are parked on private property overnight. Most cars do under 8,000 miles a year, or 160 miles a week, 77% of cars passing an MOT in 2019 did under 10,000 miles/year, or 200 miles a week.

At 5 miles per KWh, that's 15mph of charging, or 200 miles in one overnight charge.

There are large city areas with no off-street parking.

I'm currently sitting in a terraced house in East London.

37% of cars in urban areas are parked on the street. There's a whole separate question about why so many people in urban areas have cars of course.

The direction of travel is that it will be uneconomical to keep a petrol car in London in 10 years time, even if they were still available for sale, so it's fairly meaningless. People will have to adapt.

" People will have to adapt"

I think that's a particularly unhelpful way of framing it, when actually we are trying to help people adapt new technology.

"it will be uneconomical to keep a petrol car in London in 10 years time"

Just means that people will hold on to their old cars, because they can't plug them in - and be a bit poorer. Now, if "people will have to adapt" means that there needs to be a massive effort to provide in-street charging infrastructure, you might be right.

When you say "in their driveway", you are already excluding everyone who doesn't have a driveway. I can recall maybe two or three people I know who have their own driveways.

If the GP's statistics are correct, how does your anecdote changes anything? More than 70% of all car owners is a very viable market.

73% parking on private property doesn’t mean 73% have their own driveway, and it was only mentioned that it’s cheap to install a charger in a fairly recent driveway.

I suppose GP’s question is how does that 73% figure change when you look at people who can realistically have a charger installed in their parking spot.

"More than 70%" does not mean "More than 70% have their own driveway". Apartments don't have driveways and underground garages are often hard to retrofit.

I used to live in a block of flats with, I was a director of the management company. We nominally had 1 parking space each, but it wasn't allocated.

We looked into putting in outside sockets, it was fairly low cost, the difficulty would be apportioning the metering as we didn't have allocated parking spaces, but with allocated parking spaces it's not a problem.

On my own housing estate in a typical British town almost every house has a drive. Those with two cars and just one drive that park 1 car on the drive and one on the street, but that's fine, just swap them occasionally (or better yet get rid of the extra car)

I can't think of seeing underground parking anywhere in the UK, other than commercial ones in cities like NCP etc.

> "the difficulty would be apportioning the metering as we didn't have allocated parking spaces"

There are already various technical solutions to this. Most chargers now days are "connected" - ie have a WiFi chip or cellular modem built in to the charging unit. Identification/billing can be apportioned via a RFID card or app interface.

In future, "Plug & Charge" will make it possible for the vehicles to securely identify themselves to the charger for automatic billing, doing away with the need for an app or RFID.

If cost of the chargers is an issue (ie you want a large number of outlets but it's initially split between only a few EV owners who are willing to pay for them), then consider something like Ubitricity (ubitricity.com) where the outlets are "dumb" and the billing smarts are built into the cable which EV owners purchase.

>>> Most cars do under 8,000 miles a year, or 160 miles a week

It's not a useful stat - the only useful one is how many journeys per year can I not do in an electric vehicle in the UK with one 30 minute stop or about 15 mins of charging.

I think the answer is very few because the UK is small, but averages don't really cut it when you plan a drive to Scotland and can't get there without 2 extra hours of delay compared to a petrol vehicle.

I wouldn't drive 500 miles in my corsa either, I'd rent a car more suited for the task

> 73% of cars in the UK are parked on private property overnight.

Define "private property". Is a private, shared (like in tens/hundred of vehicles shared) parking a "private property" by this statistic?

I found a study [1] based on the results of a survey (2021) from the European Union that states:

> Several conclusions can be derived in terms of the significance of driving patterns in relation to the potential use/substitution of a larger portion of the car fleet with electric drive vehicles. In particular, the average distance that is daily driven in 6 members states ranges from an average of 40 km (UK) to an average of 80 km (Poland). Such distances can be comfortably covered by battery electric vehicles that are currently already available on the market. Further R&D improvements in battery systems could ensure that the “range anxiety” factor is minimized. Considering the long recharging time of the energy storage systems of an EDV, the duration of the parking profiles is a good indicator for the estimation of potential recharge time availability. In our survey it has been revealed that the parking time after the last trip of a day amounts to more than 16 hours per day. This duration is more than sufficient to comply with the potential need for a full slow recharge of an average EDV battery. Also, almost 10% of the drivers in the survey park in a private garage or their home, places where a recharging point could easily be installed. The active parking time, defined as the parking periods between which the car is used during a day for several purposes, amounts to 6 hours.

[1] http://publications.europa.eu/resource/genpub/PUB_LDNA25627E...

> ”the killer feature will be a unified charging platform and not one for each car maker.”

In Europe there is already a single unified charging standard: CCS.

The entire industry, including Tesla superchargers, use this same charging standard.

I don't disagree but I think your point doesn't contradict what I'm saying about there being enough momentum already. It's not perfect right now but it's still already good enough to keep going, and the weather forecast shows clear improvements are coming.

Tesla doesn't _need_ to raise more money now though. They may do so to accelerate factory buildouts etc, but it's cash-positive.

So a stock crash would be inconvenient, but unless it leads to a shareholder revolt or something, wouldn't really matter.

It wouldn’t, even traditional car manufacturers like VW are massively ramping up their electric car production. They just don’t have Elon musk for PR

Voltswagen definitely made some noise. I think the other large car manufacturers have been learning a few tricks.

They also do not have the technology, the software capabilities or the charging network. In fact all they have is PR right now. Their EV offering is at 5 to 8 years behind Tesla and and they are moving slower in R&D.

> the software capabilities

Am I wrong or the cars were running software for at least a decade? What kind of software can’t VW develop?

Traditional manufactures software sucks in every way possible

> A market crash could take down Tesla and set back electric car adoption by 20 years.

Why? Even if TSLA dropped to 1 cent today, all factories, employees, supply chain, IP, sales channels etc would remain intact.

Lets start with two assumptions. In 10 years, majority of cars sold will be electric. Majority of cars sold will have self driving capability. Tesla is a leader in both. Much of the traditional knowledge companies have about ICE engines do not help them build a better electric car. That knowledge is worthless for the future. Stock price represents future value.

In electric cars, the battery is the only “hard” part, and that is (or maybe just was) “third-party” even for Tesla.

And level 2 is not self-driving and is just dangerous. And I don’t see how would we get to level 3, let alone higher levels.

And stock price represents.. basically hype, which is remotely may be based on some figures.

> Much of the traditional knowledge companies have about ICE engines do not help them build a better electric car.

True, but look around at the electric platforms being developed by traditional car companies. Mercedes has one, BMW has one, VW has one, Nissan has one, etc.

Most of them will be transitioning. The stock price represents future value where that value is Tesla absolutely crushing everyone else, which we can now say with ~80% confidence won't happen. Irrational exuberance.

> Majority of cars sold will have self driving capability.

Self-driving is always around the corner, just 5 years away.

Tesla is not just a car company. They are diversifying their income. Trucks, vans, are things they are planning to do but are holding back on because of a lack of battery to build those and because of continued spectacular demand for very lucrative high end cars.

And that's just vehicles. Their solar business is scaling nicely. Grid storage is a growth market as well. And of course they are pairing their solar with domestic storage as well. All rapid growth markets. That's why their market cap is what it is. Multiple rapid growth markets, a proven ability to scale and execute, etc. That's why investors love them.

A market crash would be brutal for everyone. Particularly those with struggling product lines and outdated products that are very dependent on both to secure the revenue to invest themselves out of that mess.

Yeah, perhaps it's easier to understand Tesla's valuation if we look at is as a solar energy company, not just a car company.

No, that gets even harder to understand, as Tesla sucks at solar.

Most car manufacturers sell trucks, vans, etc as well.

No, a market crash would not touch Tesla as the stock and the company are two different things. The fact that a lot of people want to pay top dollar to own a share of the pie is not the Tesla operations churning out cars (or not.)

This is correct. To add TSLA took advantage of it's massive stock price rise to pad it's coffers with a number of stock offerings.

They now have a warchest of billions of cash and cash equivalents (like BTC) that they can use to expand without going back to the public market for cash for a while. Especially with their cash flows looking a lot better now.

Yes. A lot of the stock rockets do this now, so sure - that connects the stock to the company.

If you're still seeing tesla as a car company you're missing their home-energy business and their utility business.

Look at the australian mega-battery project. They've reduced power outages and normalized the grid.

As household solar+battery installs grow, they're going to eat into the massive utility business.

They're much bigger than cars because they are not just cars.

> If you're still seeing tesla as a car company you're missing their home-energy business and their utility business.

Tesla Energy lost a little over $100 MM this quarter. Last quarter they lost less money. Solar installs have never recovered from the 2016 peak - they're barely at 50% what they were then.

The economy of scale is working in the wrong way and Tesla is competing in a commodity space against companies who are vertically integrated and specialize in the type of batteries and solar panels in use - in fact Tesla often buys batteries from them.

This is like if Apple were selling iron ore. The fan boy consumer may pay a 100% premium, but 99.9% of the world will just buy the cheapest iron ore around.

Tesla is not terribly dependent on its share price. They have 17 Billion in cash on hand so they can fund their operations for quite a few years to come, even in a market downturn (we had a market downturn last year by the way in which they continued to grow).

A large drop in shareholders certainly would disappoint shareholders but they are the ones valuing Tesla so high. Musk is on the record saying the share price is too high and it's factoring in a ton of potential future growth.

They sold some of their BTC holdings right?

Yes they sold 10%, source: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1386821144037236737

> New S, X, Roadster, Cybertruck, and Semi models on the way

There is also a lot of noise around the sub $30k mystery car Musk hinted about at the battery event. He said $25k, but given Tesla’s pricing history, $28-30k is more likely.

To be honest, given Tesla's pricing history and Musk's... claim-making history, $35k is more likely. But I can dream.

The Model 3 is pretty close to $35k, so while the compact car might not hit precisely $25k, it should be distinctively below $30k.

Musk is bad about price promises, but $10k is a huge exaggeration, you can still get the Model 3 for $39k. The Model 3 was available to anyone who preordered it for that price and was available for around $37k for some time.

You suggestion puts it around $3k below the cost of the Model 3, which begs the question of why put out a second model at all. If it’s not in the $28k or less, there really isn’t a ton of point to it.

I had to look it up but for reference in Q1 2021 the big auto makers delivered the following.

Ford: 521,334 GM: 642,250 Toyota: 2.46 million VW: 2.5 million

If Tesla holds up they'll be larger than Ford in 2 years and be the largest automaker in the world in 4 years.

Obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/605/

Not quite to the point, as the growth of Tesla isn't just a single data point, but the growth is pretty constant over many years.

Because it’s the initial phase of the curve? COVID is exponential until it isn’t, on what basis do you think it’s fair to extrapolate?

About 8 years of growth following the exponential curve? Just look at all the quarter numbers.

Of course, at a certain point Tesla is going to stop growing exponentially. The competition is growing, the total car market is limited. But if Tesla is continuing on the current trajectory for 2-4 more years, they have a chance at becoming the largest car manufacturer in the world.

Only if other companies aren’t growing faster. VW tripled electric car sales in 2020 compared to 2021: https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/2021/01/Volkswagen-bran...

When you sold 1 car yesterday, and sell 2 today, you have doubled your sales. It's misleading to talk about growth in terms of percentage points (or doubling/tripling, etc), if it's somewhat low numbers.

Are you seriously writing it under a comment that just linearly extrapolated tesla’s production?

I am not even downvoting that comment because it seems to be such a great example of the blatant cognitive dissonance Tesla and Musk evoke in many people.

VW has just started selling their first "real" electric cars based on their all new platform.

If that platform works out then Tesla is going to compete not against one or two new models, but they'll suddenly compete against two dozen models.

Unless VW fucks something up in the next year, I just don't know how Tesla expects to compete with them. Tesla only has a handful of high end cars; they have no family cars, no vans, no compact cars, no busses.

VW is great at building models for every niche and at every price point. No matter what kind of car you want, VW (or Skoda or Audi) has multiple options for you.

Tesla is currently still ahead, but I'm not sure they can match the breadth of VWs upcoming model palette (if VWs new platform works out).

> they have no family cars

Why can’t you use a Tesla for a family car? Most of them have four seats. What else do you need for most families?

A non-touchscreen way to operate windshield wipers. VW makes a car with an electric drivetrain, Tesla makes an electric drivetrain with a place to put people and things.

I don’t really get what you mean, sorry? Why does a family need different wiper controls to a single person? And obviously you can put people and things in a Tesla.

They’re saying that it’s not a real “car” unless there’s physical wiper controls.

Or reins. Steering wheels are inaccurate and a dangerous invention, people have already died because of it.

So the person responsible for keeping their family alive doesn't look away from the road trying to perform a very common task. A car is designed around the idea that maintaining the driver's attention on the road is the primary function. I am not sure what is driving the design of Teslas for the newer models.

I like Teslas in general, but their decision to remove things like buttons and stalks from their vehicles is both dangerous and stupid, and people have already died because of it.

There's a really great video about the cockpit design of fighter aircraft. Basically, everything is color coded and feel the same in every plane to avoid mistakes like what telsa is introducing.

You’d imagine they would have engineers think about this stuff. Such dummies!

Looking forward for that link of a death caused by operating the wipers. I haven’t touched mine (not Tesla) for years since they work automatically, maybe other families have special windshield wiper adjustment needs?

https://www.tesladeaths.com/

https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/26/21154502/tesla-autopilo...

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/01/waymo-ceo-tesla-is-not-...

Tesla resists efforts to prevent distracted driving, and also resists the consistent call from regulators properly set expectations for the capabilities of its autopilot feature. People are dying as a result. You'll notice that you won't find the same articles about GM's SuperCruise feature, because they don't oversell the feature and have more safety measures in place to make sure drivers aren't distracted.

Waymo's CEO even claims that Tesla isn't a competitor. There is an obvious conflict here, but he's not the only one saying that 1) Tesla will never have a fully autonomous driving system and 2) their existing autopilot feature is falsely advertised and dangerous.

Hold on, you were talking about the danger of operating the wipers on the touchscreen. That is completely unrelated to autopilot.

You’re just pushing your agenda here. By the way, a tip on that: that first site completely discredits any kind of safety discussion as soon as it’s mentioned. It scares you with a long list of accidents when only 6 are potentially related to autopilot in a decade of its existence, vs 1.3 million deaths happening every year for all car brands.

https://medium.com/@MidwesternHedgi/teslas-driver-fatality-r...

> Remember that BMW and Audi combined had 9 driver fatalities in nearly 900,000 vehicle years? Clearly, 11 Tesla driver fatalities in 265,000 vehicle years is not a good start. But even those numbers likely understate the danger of driving a Tesla...

> Even without making any adjustment whatsoever for missing fatality data, Tesla drivers are much more likely to die than their peers driving other luxury cars. Eleven deaths in 265,290 vehicle-years is a stunningly high driver fatality rate of 41.46. That’s quadruple the rate of Audi and BMW, and more than triple the rate of all luxury cars combined.

The issue is whether design decisions by Tesla are leading to fatalities. They are, if you compare them to the luxury segment they are in. Advertising an autopilot feature which does not work, and moving standard controls to a distracting, inconsistent touch screen interface is leading to more crashes and more deaths.

Tip of the hat: don't discredit information because you don't like it.

My X has wiper controls on the stalk. Does that make it a real car for you?

https://electrek.co/2020/08/04/tesla-wiper-controls-ruled-il...

That doesn’t take away the fact that the physical controls are there for the using.

As well as automatic and voice controls.

As with any car, if the driver chooses to look away from the road for any reason, they have to be responsible about it, and they did have other options here.

As I said in another reply, Tesla is the only company advertising automated driving and other features that don't work in edge cases which is bad news for staying alive, even if you aren't the person driving a Tesla. They are also actively removing standard physical controls that have been around for decades, and through design, they are training people to rely on a touchscreen device that is not consistent or reliable.

Sure there are people who also hit cruise control on a 96 Accord and expect it to drive itself, but Honda never told them that would work. These are the kind of realities Tesla should responsibly deal with as a mass market manufacturer, but they don't want to take the PR hit to accept accountability and potentially have to refund millions of dollars for a feature that doesn't work as advertised. They'd rather blame the drivers for as long as they can get away with it.

> training people to rely on a touchscreen device that is not consistent or reliable.

This is a common misconception, easily avoided by getting some firsthand experience owning a Tesla.

We literally do not use the touchscreen for driving. And for that matter, almost not at all while driving.

As with any tool there will be those who misuse it and put others at risk. I look forward to hearing you give even a single example where a human driver was not to blame. And, preemptively so you won’t waste your own time, I don’t mean citing links where if you dig in you find that the link does not support your case.

It’s true that over time people will learn to rely on controls less and less. The world has been through similar transitions with horse and buggy -> car for example. There will be accidents along the way but the end result will be a world with far fewer accidents.

Its possible there is a better way to get to that world, but I haven’t thought of one. Perfect systems do not just spring up out of nowhere.

> This is a common misconception, easily avoided by getting some firsthand experience owning a Tesla.

So a software update has never changed the order or location of user interface elements?

> I look forward to hearing you give even a single example where a human driver was not to blame

https://www.tesladeaths.com/

There are at least 3 known cases where autopilot failed and someone died. (Also note that no one has died from the failure of Waymo or SuperCruise driver assist tech.) Here are a few articles in the past few days on the same subject.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/business/teslas-autopilot...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2021/04/20/tesla-a...

https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/fatal-driverless-...

The NTSB has also outlined the many issues with Tesla's autopilot feature.

https://www.ntsb.gov/news/events/Documents/2020-HWY18FH011-B...

> The investigation identified the following safety issues:

> - Driver Distraction.

> - Risk Mitigation Pertaining to Monitoring Driver Engagement.

> - Risk Assessment Pertaining to Operational Design Domain.

> - Limitations of Collision Avoidance Systems.

> - Insufficient Federal Oversight of Partial Driving Automation Systems.

> - Need for Event Data Recording Requirements for Driving Automation Systems.

As far as I know, Tesla has not even responded to this report. A good place to start heading towards that better world is for Tesla to demonstrate some accountability.

>There are at least 3 known cases where autopilot failed and someone died.

Depending how you falsely define "failure," Autopilot can be falsely said to fail all the time.

If you set an unrealistic bar, it can fail each and every second of every drive, according to some fallacious definitions.

Fully replacing the driver is not a claimed feature of the current system.

Future systems, sure. But current systems? Nope.

Therefore, as has been clearly stated in many places, the human driver is responsible for maintaining safe operation of the vehicle.

So, the human is to blame in these cases, not Autopilot.

Why are you getting into the definition of fallacious? Read the NTSB report.

> The Tesla Autopilot system did not provide an effective means of monitoring the driver’s level of engagement with the driving task, and the timing of alerts and warnings was insufficient to elicit the driver’s response to prevent the crash or mitigate its severity. Requirements are needed for driver monitoring systems for advanced driver assistance systems that provide partial driving automation (SAE Level 2 systems), and Tesla needs to develop applications that more effectively sense the driver’s level of engagement and that alert drivers who are not engaged...

> Despite the system’s known limitations, Tesla does not restrict where Autopilot can be used. Tesla should incorporate system safeguards that limit the use of partial driving automation systems (Autopilot) to those conditions for which they were designed...

> The Tesla’s collision avoidance assist systems were not designed to, and did not, detect the crash attenuator. Because this object was not detected, (a) Autopilot accelerated the SUV to a higher speed, which the driver had previously set by using adaptive cruise control, (b) the forward collision warning did not provide an alert, and (c) the automatic emergency braking did not activate. For partial driving automation systems to be safely deployed in a high-speed operating environment, collision avoidance systems must be able to effectively detect potential hazards and warn of potential hazards to drivers

Autopilot 1) failed to detect a distracted driver and engage them, 2) is not limited by Tesla to areas where it actually works, and 3) depends on collision avoidance which does not work. Tesla is claiming they will solve these problems without LiDAR. Volvo, Waymo, GM, VW, and many more claim that even semi-autonomous driving isn't possible without it. We'll see how many more people have to die before Tesla changes their mind.

We have to be careful about moving the goalposts to measure Autopilot according to supposed qualities it never claims to have.

It’s likely that implementing the suggested solutions would add more problems than it solves. For one thing some of them would exacerbate one problem you seem to be concerned about, driver overconfidence and over reliance on the system.

So while these bureaucratic opinions are fascinating, like many such committee driven conclusions they should be taken with a grain of salt. Tesla has thought things through pretty well.

Ultimately the best solution for now imho is to keep full responsibility with the driver.

If autopilot allows itself to be activated in an area where it doesn't work, who is accountable for that? If it depends on collision avoidance that performs far worse than other solutions, who is accountable for that? When Tesla sells a $10k package that calls itself autopilot and then people die when they have it turned on, who is accountable for that?

> So while these bureaucratic opinions are fascinating, like many such committee driven conclusions they should be taken with a grain of salt. Tesla has thought things through pretty well.

Every other driver assist technology limits its own scope to prevent over-reliance. That's because those companies (Subaru/Toyota/GM/Ford/Volvo/BMW/VW) are working with regulators across the world to develop and adhere to standards. If Tesla's solution was better, you'd have some numbers to back it up instead of a bizarre assertion that industry experts are suddenly clueless when they are part of a regulatory body.

Tesla has created an unreliable semi-autonomous system and made it available before it's ready against the advice of the NTSB and other regulators. That is irresponsible and people who would have otherwise been paying attention have died because they, like you, assumed that "Tesla has thought things through pretty well."

Much like an IT department that fights tooth and nail against a third party security audit, it should be obvious why Tesla is so dedicated to pretending that there isn't a problem. They don't want to admit autopilot isn't ready, and will likely never be dependable until they have proximity sensors in addition to cameras like every other solution does. They'd rather blame the drivers for relying on the technology they just paid for. It's a ridiculous defense that will ultimately fall apart.

You don’t seem to be reading the clear onscreen warnings about this stuff from Tesla. There is a lot of misinformation out there, so I can understand how you could form negative opinions about them. My personal, first hand experience of their stance, as the owner of two Teslas both with the FSD option paid for, has been different from what you describe.

BTW about FSD I don’t expect it anytime soon. I paid for it (yes twice!) to support the company at a time when it was in a fragile financial state. It does give me some small benefits for now but I do look forward to more in the future. I don’t know how it will turn out but I’m thrilled to help do a small part to enable awesome futuristic technology! And to support a company that is not brain-locked sticking to the playbook of a committee of fuddy duddy old world car thinkers.

>Tesla has created an unreliable semi-autonomous system and made it available before it's ready

Can you think of a better way?

Really. The obvious (bad) answer people come up with here is "just wait until it's perfect and release it then, and only then."

But I don't see how that's realistic. How, in your mind, could that possibly work?

There are plenty of technologies that are working in a limited scope for driver assist, and functioning reliably if not perfectly. Tesla's death rate (measured in vehicle years) is three times that of their competition in the luxury segment.

Step 1 is to not sell something called Full Self-Driving/Autopilot when it can't do either of those things. Step 2 is to develop a reliable system (per NTSB advice) to make sure the driver is paying attention. Step 3 is to make sure it's only active in the domain where it can be trusted. Step 0 is to not do anything else until your collision avoidance works as well as your competitors.

Consider these differences:

"Subaru EyeSight Driver Assist Technology" -- with disclaimer about not being optimal in all conditions

"GM SuperCruise hands-free driving-assistance" -- with a similar disclaimer

"Tesla Full Self-Driving" -- and their disclaimer is "Full Self-Driving is in early limited access Beta and must be used with additional caution. It may do the wrong thing at the worst time, so you must always keep your hands on the wheel and pay extra attention to the road. Do not become complacent."

The marketing bait and switch is pretty common, but this is "Thanks for the $10,000 USD for Full Self Driving. It doesn't work. Don't trust it. In fact, pay extra attention while it's on."

I have never seen the tech community so excited about paying to be alpha testers for technology that is literally killing its users.

I understand what you’re saying but you missed the question. It was how do you develop an FSD system? The systems you mention are not FSD, and only one of the three (Tesla) is working toward FSD. Do you see a better approach to get to FSD?

I don’t agree that the system is killing its users of course. That kind of inflammatory wording doesn’t help anything imho. The users are possibly contending for Darwin awards… they are doing it to themselves.

Maybe you misunderstand. My Tesla doesn't have touch screen wiper controls at all. Does that make it a real car now?

Teslas have a physical button that controls the wipers when needed. They also can run automatically. Finally they also can be operated via the touch screen, but I never use this last option. You seem to think it’s the only option, but that’s not the case.

In every safety system, there is a point where human intervention can override automated activity. In almost every car these systems have standard tactile controls so you can override through muscle memory in an emergency without taking your eyes off the road. (If you haven't noticed, even the icons used on stalks and buttons are standardized across the industry as a matter of safety). In a Tesla, overriding the auto sense wiper feature is available through an interaction with the touch screen at the precise moment when a driver should not be distracted (ie, when they are having trouble seeing through the windshield). As far as I know, they are the only auto manufacturer that doesn't stick with standard stalks for things that affect visibility (wipers/headlights/turn signals, etc).

This is why I don't think a Tesla is a feature complete car -- it simply lacks the common set of safety features found in every other modern vehicle.

They are adding features all the time through software updates. I hope it is never feature complete, because I enjoy getting these updates!

> available through an interaction with the touch screen

Not exactly. It’s on the stalk as a physical button.

https://electrek.co/2020/08/04/tesla-wiper-controls-ruled-il...

> On Model 3 and Model Y vehicles, Tesla didn’t install normal windshield wiper settings through a steering wheel stalk.

> Instead, the automaker is detecting the rain through its Autopilot cameras and automatically adjusting the speed based on the strength of the rainfall.

> If the driver wants to adjust the speed, they need to do it through the center touchscreen.

> The driver in Germany was adjusting those settings when he lost control of the vehicle and crashed.

The wiper can actually be activated via the stalk on Model 3 and Model Y. Not every fine grained setting, but the actions you need.

> The driver in Germany was adjusting those settings when he lost control of the vehicle and crashed.

Yes, user error. He should have used the physical button or voice controls instead. I mean, when driving, the first rule is pay attention to the road.

Anyone can snipe and nitpick, but in actual use with responsible drivers the system works great. With irresponsible drivers, all bets are off, as with any car.

With "family car" I meant something like the VW Touran. A somewhat affordable car that still has enough space for all the stuff you might want to take along, like strollers, backpacks, scooters, kid bikes, skis, helmets, boots whatever. (Not all of that at the same time obviously)

There isn't really a great EV in that category yet, but I hope it's just a question of time.

Obviously you can use any car as a family car, but my impression is that Teslas are more targeted at commuters (except maybe the Model X, but that's so expensive that it's not really an option for any family I know).

I see plenty of families in Teslas; it turns out there are lots of families who can afford it.

A new Model S was too rich for my blood, so I picked one up used. Great family car. Massive amounts of storage. We're out of the stroller years but it would be great with a stroller.

That’s exactly what the Model Y and Model X are. Both beat an ID4 in cargo volume without even counting the frunk (which VWs don’t have).

Even the smaller Model 3 is plenty for a 4-person family, while it doesn’t beat in liters because of ceiling height the trunk is very spacious.

I guess I should have avoided the term "family car", since there are lots of different types of cars that are suitable as a family car.

So I searched Wikipedia and the types of car I was thinking about are apparently called "Compact MPV" [1]. My thinking was that these cars are mostly targeted at families, so I called them "family cars", but apparently people have different ideas what a family car is.

My point was that VW is going to end up building a large number of different EVs in the next couple of years, and Tesla will face the problem that each of their models will have to compete with 3 models from VW.

No matter what model Tesla your interested in, there will be a car from the VW group with slightly more space, and one that's cheaper, and maybe one that's a bit sportier. It's going to be very different from now, where there's very little competition to Tesla (if you want an EV)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_MPV

We need VW to do this. But Tesla isn’t going to be standing still in the next few years either. Their platform and lead in technology and integration, let alone the lack of legacy costs, provides genuine competitive advantage.

Superchargers.

As a German, I don't see VW getting it together rapidly.

Germany doesn't get life in #Neuland. VW and most of the German industry are respective leaders in some niche by being good at through mechanical engineering IP. Electrical cars are simple. Innovation is in software, DRM business models and battery tech which is all completely foreign to the German industry. People here get Teslas for the charging infrastructure alone, as the alternative is a huge mess. Don't forget, VW is still trying hard to lobby for their known turf, pushing for hybrids and hydrogen combustion mechanical marvels...

Germany doesn't get it. The pandemic has shown, the era of old white me... industrialist has forced the country between a rock and a hard place.

While Musk is shooting consumer internet into space, our leaders had long, exhausting talks, recognizing Germany's need to modernize and embrace technical progression and they fearlessly concluded: It's time to let go of fax by 2030.

German here as well. In general, I share your pessimism.

One thing to point out about VW is that their CEO, Herbert Diess, seems to get it. To name two anecdotal pieces of evidence, Elon had asked him to become CEO of Tesla back in 2015 [1] and he had conversations with Chinese battery supplier CATL about car batteries as far back as ten years ago [2].

[1] https://electrek.co/2021/04/13/ceo-elon-musk-reportedly-hire...

[2] https://www.teslarati.com/volkswagen-herbert-diess-ev-cell-p...

I don't know... This year I lost all hope for Germany's future. This goes beyond VW. Until now, I kinda thought everything is going to be alright, Germany is a rich country and all. I wasn't aware of the extend of moral corruption in the CDU. They really eroded the whole country for personal gains. I've never been this disappointed and disillusioned by politics and society as I am for the last few month.

True, hopefully that'll motivate the CDU to clean up their act / code of conduct.

On the bright side, two of the leading companies in the mRNA vaccine space are based in Germany (BioNTech and CureVac), so there is still some ability to innovate.

They won’t be able to compete on price, because they’ll be bidding for batteries on the open market along with everybody else. Takes another 5 years to build out capacity, and who knows what Tesla will have accomplished by then.

VW already sold 134k in 2020, of which 56k were the id.3 that effectively was available since september 2020.

In Norway, where 54% on new cars sold in 2020 were electric, Volkswagen group sold more than twice as many electric cars (mostly Audi e-Tron and VW id.3) as Tesla.

Same goes for extrapolating Tesla results, no?

Tesla has already lost marketshare in almost every market so they won't be bigger than Ford in 2 years. They will likely lose their regulatory credits some time this year because VW, Audi, Porsche and Ford have strong offerings.

How does Tesla lose market share while achieving record (+ 109%) sales? The market certainly hasn’t been growing faster than Tesla has.

When you define the market as electric vehicles instead of passenger vehicles. In Europe, the electric vehicle market is growing very fast.

But all these EV sales come at the expense of gas/diesel sales, so I think it is a bad idea to consider EV's as a separate market.

Because the EV market grew much faster, e.g. +260% for Germany (from 108k in 2019 to 395k in 2020).

Sure, but market share should be considered as a percentage of the overall car market, not just electric sales.

It's unrealistic to expect that Tesla would continue to dominate the EV market forever. It is realistic to expect that Tesla will become a significant player in car sales globally.

> It's unrealistic to expect that Tesla would continue to dominate the EV market forever. It is realistic to expect that Tesla will become a significant player in car sales globally.

How could Tesla become a significant player in the overall market without being much more significant in the EV market, which is a small subset of the former?

EV sales are growing rapidly as a portion of the overall vehicle market, and will continue to do so.

Eventually, virtually all vehicle sales will be electric. This will happen faster in some regions than in others.

What are you saying?

How can Tesla be a significant player in car sales globally, when as a percentage of EV car sales, they are decreasing?

Think about it for a second and it will come to you. As more cars turn EV, unless Tesla maintains their marketshare, they will become less and less significant. They've lost marketshare in the first year that the major car companies have introduced reasonable EVs. Their 2nd derivative is negative.

Tesla is valued at 3X Toyota with having a fraction of the sales. What happens when the EV market becomes fully realized, but Tesla isn't the market leader but a small player. Do they still deserve to be 3X Toyota's market cap?

> "As more cars turn EV, unless Tesla maintains their marketshare, they will become less and less significant."

No, that's not neccessarily true at all.

Let's imagine that in 2021, EVs are 2% of car sales globally, and Tesla has 50% of the EV market. That means that Tesla has 1% share of the entire car market.

Now imagine that in 2031, EVs are 50% of car sales globally. And Tesla's share of the EV market has "shrunk" to 20%. But that's still 10% of the entire car market. Even assuming no market growth, that's an enormous 10X (1000%!) sales growth for Tesla over 10 years!

Even though its share of the EV market has shrunk, Tesla is selling 10X more cars and is a far more significant company in 2031.

If the market expands faster than your market share shrinks, your business still grows.

Examples: IBM with IBM PC, Apple with iPhone.

Examples: IBM with IBM PC

And we all know how many IBM PCs IBM has sold over the past decade.

I think that IBM might actually be the most apt analogy for Tesla. 20 years from now Tesla will be a niche player in the market they built basically from scratch.

I mean, as a TSLA shareholder I'm...fine with that? A few years ago people were predicting the company would go bankrupt before they ever became profitable, now the bear scenario is that they become the largest company in their sector by a huge margin until settling into dominant complacency.

I still think they will end up as a subsidiary of one of the laggards.

Why? Which companies will be the main players in that scenario?

VW, Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Geely perhaps? Or some other Chinese company we haven't really heard of yet?. I don't see Tesla turning itself into the sort of company that can (or wants to) successfully compete in the top 5 carmakers by volume or revenue. I think they'll be happiest playing in the high performance niche and leave making the EV Corolas and Polos of the world to Toyota and VW

All that being said, I'm far from confident enough in this prediction be to be actively betting against Tesla.

IBM PC was released 40 years ago, in 1981. They sold their PC division in 2004, after 23 years of run, when PCs were on every desktop and every server rack.

If Tesla goes out of business and sells itself to an Asian automaker when EVs have completely conquered the transportation landscape, I'll be OK with that :)

Oh, completely agree. No matter how the future of Automotive transport plays out from here, Musk and Tesla have undeniably etched themselves permanently into the history books.

That assumes the other car manufacturers aren't growing too. Most of the car industry has had their best growth in 1st quarter sales for nearly a decade.

It will be interesting to see Q2 numbers - March sales seemed to be contributing most to the quarterly growth, but the chip shortage may effect production.

Most manufacturers selling EVs have had decent sales on those. They are basically flying off the shelves. Plugin hybrids are popular as wellof course but they are more complex to build and maintain than a simple battery EV: they have a cost disadvantage.

And that's a problem in a market with low margins that is about to be flooded with ever cheaper EV models. Petrol and Diesel cars are still important to a lot of manufacturers and that's market that is looking pretty grim right now.

Short term there are those manufacturers that have been planning and building giga factories (to build batteries and assemble cars) for the last few years and are bringing more online. And there are those who did not do that and are now struggling to secure battery supplies to match their ambitions. It will take them many billions to fix that. All while their existing ICE product lines are under increasing pressure.

The likes of Toyota, GM, VW, etc. will be very dependent on their ICE production for the foreseeable future. Of those, VW and GM are very serious about ramping up production capacity of course. Particularly VW looks like a solid contender for the #2 position behind Tesla short term at this point (that's their own stated ambition even). But still, most of their sales is still ICE vehicles and that's just not a growth business at this point. Lower margins, lower volume, and the threat of obsolescence decimating the second hand value.

However, the real threat to manufacturers is coming from China. Cheap mass produced EVs are already a reality there. There are multiple manufacturers there producing very high quality products that are looking to start exporting. 10-15$K EVs in the current market would be highly disruptive to companies depending on selling lots of 15-20K ICE vehicles. That's why Tesla is looking to produce a 25$k vehicle in China.

Tesla cars are not interesting for many customers in EU (except maybe nordic countries), they will go with VW/Audi/BMW or other brands. You can't easily extrapolate the growth from US to EU or other parts of world.

That’s a bold statement. Here in Berlin I am seeing the model 3 a lot these days.

https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/renault-zoe-ecli...

Less Tesla's are getting sold while other car makers have massive growth in their sales.

My comment cited anecdotal evidence so defer to your link with facts.

The Porsche Tychan is a really compelling threat to the Model S, too.

Zoe is smaller and cheaper than Model 3. In the market of upper middle class and upper class vehicles (like BMW 3, 5 7 series, Mercedes C, E class, Audi A4 and above), Tesla was outselling the others combined for a year in a row.

The real question is if Tesla has real plans to grow down into the Zoe category. the mass production of Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi, or Volkswagen group or Toyota is another ball park from what Tesla does today. Each of them produces about 10 Mio vehicles y/y, and the margins really are in the high volume there.

My personal bet is Tesla stays in the upper middle class and upper class vehicles, and is not the new VW/RNM/FCA/Toyota/FMC, but the new BMW, Mercedes, Audi. And Porsche.

Let's see what happens after the Berlin factory opens up; this will reduce both delivery time and costs (tax/tariff etc), and make it cheaper and easier to ge the Tesla. Also, the car built in Berlin would be better suited to European moods, regarding quality etc...

> Let's see what happens after the Berlin factory opens up

Which most probably won't happen in 2021. Meanwhile, Tesla already dropped to third place in total EVs sold in Germany (a bigger EV market than the US), and place 4 and 5 have nearly the same numbers. I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla drops out of the top 5 in 2021.

> this will reduce both delivery time and costs (tax/tariff etc),

There are no tariffs between US and EU for car sales, and tax (vat) will be the same as before.

Teslas are too expensive. The average selling price for a car in the EU is lower than in the US (for developed countries) and much lower than in the US (for the developing countries).

And they'll produce more cars than there are atoms in the universe before the end of this century.

Sound prediction! Do you have an MBA?

Yes, for the looks, but this was based on old Intel.

That's how you end up with 400 husbands: https://xkcd.com/605/

* 4 dozen == 48

this right here. this is a spot data point. momentum, inferential analytics, etc. are beholden to error and volatility

If the singularity happens on schedule they'll all be paperclips long before then.

Now I imagine God looking into the petri dish watching car and paperclip forming entities fighting each other over the measured resources of the experimental culture medium, seeing the beauty of balancing forces, having naturalistic fallacies touch him where he likes to be touched, a lot.

Universal Paperclips reference for anyone wondering. An absolutely wonderful little game.

https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html

Though I think the comment is more about https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/paperclip-maximizer

Right now Tesla is outperforming competition on three points:

  * 0-100km/h times
  * Range
  * Charging network

I believe most people don't care about the 0-100 speed. And most people can live with a little less range. So this leaves the network as a selling point. I believe it depends on the country how important this is. For example in the Netherlands you can cross the whole country on one charge. So you don't need a network.

Only recently competition is shifting focus to electric cars and more and more great EVs are being released. For example the new Hyundai Ioniq 5 is a car I personally would prefer over a Tesla.

So Tesla is doing great but I think they are becoming 'just another car brand'.

You forgot:

* Software

Diminishing returns come much faster and harder for software in cars. Software not being the main focus of a car.

Especially now with Android Auto/Apple CarPlay.

> Diminishing returns come much faster and harder for software in cars. Software not being the main focus of a car.

That used to be true. With self-driving technology I'm not sure that's true anymore. Tesla has even offered hardware updates to improve self-driving of older models. I haven't heard of anyone else doing that yet.

> Especially now with Android Auto/Apple CarPlay.

Eh. That's just infotainement, and cars can still provide significant value without using that. When driving a Tesla I don't miss CarPlay, and I rarely use it in my Kia even though it's better than the built-in infotainment stuff. Mostly just for navigation if I know it's a complex route. But again, I never miss CarPlay for navigation in Tesla cars because the built-in system is very good and always up-to-date through OTA.

> That used to be true. With self-driving technology I'm not sure that's true anymore. Tesla has even offered hardware updates to improve self-driving of older models. I haven't heard of anyone else doing that yet.

Nobody has self-driving tech in production. What they do have is a combo of adaptive cruise control, lane keeping assist, lane changing assist and park assist.

Full self-driving tech is still at the basic research stage, just like cold fusion reactors. It could be out in 5 years, it could be out in 40. Nobody's going to "OTA" that.

Excuse me, what "self-driving" is that? For all of Musk's grand promises of "self-driving in 6 months time, just you see", nothing has ever happened. Why people take anything that conman says at face value is beyond me.

Do you really want software auto-updates with potentially breaking changes in your car though?

Chances are, you will end up with the iPhone situation, where a 10-year-old phone is now essentially a brick - the software 'updates' just made things slower on the older hardware, if they support the older hardware at all. Do you really want that in your car?

For comparison, you can get a 20-year old car today that would work today as well as on the day it was made - mechanical controls still respond instantly, radio still works.

And then suddenly you find that the Teslas are a lot more expensive than they seem, because the depreciation will be more severe. Not only that, but I would question their green credentials if the cars are forced to become obsolete after N years.

I think the software component is truly underestimated. It's been said that Tesla is really a software company that happens to build cars, and I can believe it. I'm not sure that VW, GM, or Ford will ever be able to compete on the software front, they just don't have it in their DNA.

I kinda view it like Silicon Valley; there's nothing intrinsic about the specific place on the map that makes it a great place to develop software. But other places just can't seem to replicate it. I've heard talk of Silicon Alley in NYC but it doesn't seem to compare. I'm not sure it's possible to recreate SV somewhere else, just like I'm not sure it's possible to recreate Tesla inside GM.

There is a really good example of this in the Q1 report. The chip shortage that has hit a lot of car manufacturers also hit Tesla, but they quickly changed hardware and developed new firmware. Only a software savvy company can do that.

The efficiency (miles per kWh) of Tesla's is still quite ahead of the competition. This allows for relatively smaller/cheaper batteries.

I get the definite impression that Tesla are engineering their cars to perform well in the test - their cars seem to consistently underperform the official range estimates in actual real-world testing in a way that others don't.

This doesn't seem to be true. Hyundai Kona Electric 64kWh gets 3.6 Miles per kWh and the Kia e-Niro 64kWh gets 3.5 Miles per kWh in real world tests.

They are more efficient and have more range than any of Teslas offerings:

https://www.whatcar.com/news/what-car-real-range-which-elect...

They are perceived to be very far ahead on vehicle assist and self-driving. I can't say if they actually are technologically speaking, but I think the perception they have will give them a significant benefit for years ahead.

A part of that is the frequent software updates, and even options of updating the hardware. It makes customers feel like their car could get full self-driving eventually, even if it doesn't ship with it now. Maybe it'll never happen, but the effect on sales is real.

I would also prefer Ioniq 5 or Kia EV6. But if I cared about self-driving I would probably get a Tesla. And as the other commented pointed out, their software is generally way better than the competition, and that's really what's making me think twice about getting VW or Skoda, even though I like their new EVs otherwise. I will also make sure to go through reviews on the software and updates of Hyundai and Kias new cars before I buy them. I'm happy with my current Kia Soul EV even though it doesn't get OTA updates. They did upgrade to support CarPlay, which I was really happy with, but that's it. That's fine for a car with such simple software. But for a car with more advanced features like the ones coming out now, it's just not.

My Hyunadi's driver assist (adaptive cruise control, active lane keeping) is comparable if not more reliable feeling than Tesla's autopilot.

Is this really the case? Maybe in the US, but here in the Netherlands people are not very positive about Tesla's self-driving capabilities. The main reason is that Teslas don't understand Dutch roads. Another is the list of broken promises made by Elon. But of course this can change in the future.

I rented Model-3 in Norway. Self-driving just did work not on curved mountain roads unless one is prepared to tolerate constant jerks to left and right. So I quickly turned that off.

But I was impressed by how well the car could stick to the car in-front and keep the safe distance under all conditions including heavy rain at night. This is a mayor safety feature.

Yes, but ACC does work well in a lot of cars.

the tesla advanced driver assistance software seems to be fairly top of the line too in terms of outperforming the competition. There isn't much missing in the Wikipedia "ADAS" list of feature examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_driver-assistance_sys...

In the European market the range advantage might not be a big deal, but it's a major selling point in the American market. Probably the biggest concern I hear from people about going electric-only is range anxiety - the notion that they might need to drive a long distance on a whim and worry they might be "stranded" with no battery, regardless of the actual likelihood of that. With America's generally poor public transit infrastructure and car-as-default culture, it's even a fairly reasonable concern in many cases.

Maybe once the charging network becomes as saturated as gas stations are range can no longer be an issue, but we're nowhere near that point outside of major cities.

I think even in the European market it may be a factor. It's not uncommon to drive somewhere on summer holidays, I'm in the UK and sometimes drive across France or down to Spain for summer hols - or skiing holidays. It's stupid that this is a consideration when buying a car, I know. But it certainly has a chilling effect when I think about our over-night drives to get to the Alps for a Saturday morning.

Buy an electric car for everyday stuff, hire a car for holidays?

That's not really a thing in Europe.

Renting a big nice car for a 1 week holiday (so ~10 days) sets' you back 1000$, which is a bit over the average net monthly income over here. You can rent a small shitty car for much less, but then you might as well just use your own car.

If money is not an issue, renting a car, picking it up, etc. is a bit of a pain. Since money is not an issue, you might as well spend more on a better car that doesn't force you to do this.

Very very few are going to buy a car that forces them to spend one month full of salary to rent a different car for larger trips.

I don't think your number is accurate, at least not for western europe. Also you have to compare what you save in terms of purchase price (and electricity cost, because you drive a lighter car) with what it costs for renting over the lifetime of the car. The salary level doesn't really factor in directly.

The real reason more people don't do it, is that a car is a status symbol and most people like wasting money on it. Musk knows that and uses it for his PR. And of course still not many people are used to the new cost pattern of electric cars.

You can buy a used VW Golf 4 years old with <50k km for < 10.000 EUR.

You can probably re-sell it 4 years later with 100k km for 6k EUR.

There isn't an electric car that can compete with this today.

You could buy a Tesla 3 for ~30k EUR, and then rent at 500 EUR every 3 months (being extremely cheap), and in those 4 years, just the renting almost matches the entire price of the VW Golf.

For the numbers of the electric car to even make sense long term you'd need cheap ass electricity, which at least in central Europe you only get if you charge at home. The moment you charge outside, gas is almost always cheaper than electricity.

That still leaves insurance, repairs, etc. on the table. Repairing a popular car like a Golf is dirt cheap.

The rental part is unnecessary and can be removed from your calculations. That being said, yes a Golf is cheap, if not considering the incremental long term cost to the environment and the future. It’s the tragedy of the commons.

I was comparing a big electric car with a fat battery vs a cheaper electric car with a smaller battery + a rental car for holidays. Of course buying a used ICE car is currently still cheaper.

Wow. Thats expensive. I just checked and in LT there is a car sharing network, where you use cars on demand, and here one week rent for VW T-Corss is 125€. 379€ for month. +0.2€/km (fuel is included in price)

Why is it stupid? If anything Europeans would be more sensitive to delays in their trip because of charge issues.

If you're going on a weekend getaway then the difference between 4-6 hours of driving and 8-10 is huge.

I live in Croatia and have dark memories of standing in front of gas stations on the highway in the summer and waiting for +30 minutes in the heat to do 3 minutes of gas pumping. I wonder what sort of problems will EV driving tourists be going through in the next few years as they become more popular.

Because for exceptional peak usage you could also just rent a car, and then optimize your car choice for the day-to-day usage. Driving a smaller battery around takes less energy, so it is cheaper to buy and cheaper to drive.

> In the European market the range advantage might not be a big deal,

It wouldn't be a big deal if charging time was < 5 minutes.

I do occasionally (once per month or two months) go somewhere that's 800km away.

Driving at 180-200km/h avg speed and refueling once that's a 5 hour trip.

If I have to drive at 120 km/h and charge multiple times I'm looking at > 8h trip or more.

I also drive to some places at 300km distance or so for the weekend, and these places might not have a charger close, and/or harsh conditions (e.g. some small village in the Alps).

I'm a bit skeptic that I can do a round trip to those without charging, and even if I charge, i'm skeptic that at very cold temperatures the battery will hold up well for the last 50-80km part of each way in which there might not be any charging stations (e.g. holding charge for 200km over the weekend or a full week at less than -20 C).

Also, in Europe, a significant chunk of the population rents and lives in apartment buildings, often without parking spots, which means you can't charge an electric car over night. Combine that with few charging stations and waiting at a charging station at 6 am for 1 hour is something people having electric cars actually do talk about. So if your commute is 80km, you probably want 800km of range to only have to charge the car once per week.

Also, charging in the street (there are very very few parking spots outside that do have charging) is extremely expensive (much more than just using gas).

Maybe all these fears are unfounded?

But in a nutshell: battery kilometers at high speed, battery holding at very cold temps for a week, and the ability to cheaply charge at night are what I see people talking the most about, when discussing electric cars.

In pretty much all discussions, diesel cars just sound like the better deal (they are cheap right now).

You may or may not be exaggerating but if you aren't then you are definitely an outlier. Which kind of sucks for you because it's going to be hard to keep doing this when the rest of the world has moved on.

Outlier in which sense ?

There is a lot of people from southern Europe and northern africa (morroco, algeria, etc.) living in central Europe (France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, etc.). There is a lot of people from East Europe (Poland, Ukraine, Czec republic, Croatia, Turkey) living in Central Europe as well.

How do you think these people travel to visit their families every couple of months ? They do 1000km per way trips with the car.

If you just have to cross Germany, you are not going to be driving there at 100km/h. I do 600-800km ways in Germany a couple of times per year, and do drive 220km/h everywhere where it is allowed and condition are good. Your average speed is never that cause traffic and so on, but over 190km/h average speed is doable if you travel at the right hours which I always do because... you don't want to spend 800km stuck on traffic.

Why not flying? Because while central europe has good airports, wherever they might be flying to might have an airport 3 hours away, requiring them to rent a car, etc. which as mentioned costs one month of net salary.

In Germany, for example, ~50% of the population rents. As a renter, its up to your landlord to retrofit your parking spot with an electric supply for your electric car. That costs money, and if the landlord says no, you can't do this yourself. Is not up to you.

Electric cars are more a "social problem" in europe than a technical one.

How do you think these people travel to visit their families every couple of months ? They do 1000km per way trips with the car.

The average annual milage across the whole of the EU is 12,000Km per year, it's even lower in Eastern Europe.

Most people aren't making these sort of trips regularly.

You are an outlier.

> The average annual milage across the whole of the EU is 12,000Km per year, it's even lower in Eastern Europe.

I do these trips every 2 months.

My average mileage is 9,000 - 10,0000km per year.

I don't really know what point you are trying to make with average mileage or where you got that number from.

But average mileage doesn't say anything about the frequency and the length of the trips people do on their cars.

Most people I know don't have a car. The ones that do have a car commute to work via public transportation or bike. They only use the car on the weekends, or holidays.

800km * 2 * 6 times a year = 9600km

So you don’t use your car for anything else at all during the year?

Either you’re misreporting how many times you travel (you said “a couple times” earlier) or your yearly mileage.

So are you saying that you bought a car to use it only 6 times a year (going at 220km/h and risking to kill other people) and never use it for anything else? If you want to throw your life away at least don’t kill someone else. If you want to throw your money away it’s better to do some charity.

This is exactly the reason why I still have doubts about EVs (for now).

While hydrogen cars are less efficient I still think it will be a better option for the near future.

In a city like Stuttgart people have to park in double rows. Unless they can fully charge their EV in < 5 minutes those cars will never convert from combustion engines to a battery car. Hydrogen will solve this much faster than batteries.

Have you stopped to think about the insane infrastructure that goes into supporting car driving? There are millions of gas stations across the planet, that had to be built, then continually supplied. Not to mention the billions (?) of km of asphalt roads. We did all that in the 20th century. What's so impossible about building chargers? I don't get it.

As for driving at 200kph, that's just dangerous (unless you're in a no-speed-limit autobahn, where at least other cars expect you to go fast), not to mention fuel inefficient. By all means, please go ahead and crash your car, that's your risk, I guess. The snag is that you share the road with other users and you can kill them too. So don't be a selfish prick and please drive safely. Either way let's assume most people just want to go at 120kph.

> We did all that in the 20th century. What's so impossible about building chargers? I don't get it.

I never said its impossible, I said that right now they are not there.

In the 18th century, without proper roads, between the choice of a car with wooden wheels and a horse, I'd have 100% of the time would have bought the horse.

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> As for driving at 200kph, that's just dangerous

No, it isn't. Driving 120kph in the autobahn is more dangerous than driving 200kph. You are forcing everyone that wants to drive at the recommended speed of 130kph to overtake you with 10 kph speed difference, blocking 2 lanes. Add a truck to the situation to block a 3rd lane, and you have just created a big blockage in the highway, which is what causes most autobahn accidents. This makes _you_ one of the biggest dangers to others on the high way.

> Not to mention fuel inefficient.

It is, however, very time efficient.

If you want to trade fuel efficiency over everything else, walking is better than using a car.

The moment you decide that walking is not "fast enough" you are already making a trade-off between time efficiency and fuel efficiency.

Just because your time is worth less than most people's time and you prefer driving at 120kph, 10kph below the recommended speed, does not mean that most people agree with you. The traffic guidelines actually disagree with you, which is why they recommend at least 130kph.

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> Either way let's assume most people just want to go at 120kph.

The recommended autobahn speed is 130kph. The slowest lane usually goes at 140-150 kph.

I don't see the point of making an assumption that's clearly incorrect.

> By all means, please go ahead and crash your car, that's your risk, I guess.

If you think that driving at 200kph is dangerous, I have to assume that you never took highway driving classes as part of your driving license, most of which force you to drive at high speed. A consequence of doing this is that your comfort speed goes up with enough training, so when you are actually driving at 160kph or so, you are driving 20% slower than what you are trained to drive, which makes it actually much safer.

If you only were trained to drive at 120 kph, and have never received trained to drive substantially faster than that, you are always driving at 100% of your training / skill level, which means small mistakes have larger consequences than if you have a 20% buffer of error.

So arguably, _you_ should be driving at 100 kph through national roads, instead of driving on the highway until _you_ receive proper training.

> In the 18th century, without proper roads, between the choice of a car with wooden wheels and a horse, I'd have 100% of the time would have bought the horse.

There were no automobiles in the 18th century.

> No, it isn't. Driving 120kph in the autobahn is more dangerous than driving 200kph.

Yes, it is. Data shows accidents increase with speed, yes, even in autobahns, let alone in highways with speed limit.

Also, you were talking about motorways/highways in general, the overwhelming of which have speed limits, and not about autobahns in particular.

> 130kph has to overtake you with 10kph difference

I used 120 as it's the highway speed limit in most of the world. Replace 120 with 130, the point is driving at the speed limit. You are talking about going 200kph, so I don't see what you're trying to get at here.

> Just because your time is worth less than most people's time and you prefer driving at 120kph, 10kph below the recommended speed, does not mean that most people agree with you. The traffic guidelines actually disagree with you, which is why they recommend at least 130kph.

Ahahaha, what the hell is your problem. I drive the speed limit instead of driving like a maniac because my time is not so valuable as yours?

> The slowest lane usually goes at 140-150 kph. I don't see the point of making an assumption that's clearly incorrect.

Again, simple data falsifies your assertion. Measurements taken put the percentage of people going over 130kph in German highways at between 35% and 60%. So your "slowest lane goes 150" thing is hilariously off the mark.

> If you think that driving at 200kph is dangerous, I have to assume that you never took highway driving classes as part of your driving license

Again with the German exceptionalism? Yes I did drive on the highway to get my license of course. No, I didn't drive nearly twice the speed limit in those lessons.

> training, I'm such a good driver, stick to taking the bus until you git good

Nothing you can say changes the fact that higher speed means more risk of crashes. This is documented, and you are no exception. Everybody thinks they're great drivers so the rules don't apply to them.

---

Finally: in your previous posts you complained that electric cars can't travel at 200kph when the temperature is -20°C. Well if you're such a good driver you should know that it's reckless (and indeed forbidden) to drive at such speeds in such cold weather.

Uh, not to be too much of an Internet nitpicker, but according to [1] there's around 168,000 gas stations in the US. That's a pretty big car-using market right there.

Numbers for China are harder to come by, a quick search yielded [2] which states around 120,000 stations in 2019.

So, extrapolating from those two data points, I still think "millions" is a bit too many-sounding.

1: https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/quizzes/answerquiz16.shtml

2: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190226005504/en/Chi...

> I believe most people don't care about the 0-100 speed.

You say that, but almost every single person I've given a ride to in my Model Y has come away from the acceleration portion of the trip amazed and wanting more. Older men, young kids, soccer moms, teenage girls, all get that breathy expression when you effortlessly pass someone on the expressway. And this is a Model Y, one of the slowest Tesla's on the market. A Model S P100D would have them cursing under their breath and pulling out their wallet; I know it did for me.

Not care is perhaps a bit strong. But pay the price? Most opt out of that.

People feel that way the first time they feel the acceleration of any electric car, even a Nissan Leaf.

I've ridden in a Leaf and didn't notice anything remarkable. A Tesla was entirely different.

I don't like this direction of development. I would like to see cars in future used for transportation and not racing. There is no place for racing on public roads especially in cities. So acceleration should be irrelevant.

It's like building bigger and bigger cars than other ones on the road to "be more safe" but at the end everyone is driving around in tanks (except other traffic participants like pedestrians and bicyclists). Same with "i'm faster than you"...

It’s not for racing. It’s a safety feature that can get you out of a tight spot to avoid a collision. It’s also enjoyable.

Once we get rid of human drivers in all cars then the first part won’t be needed anymore. When that day comes, we will be safer but we will miss the fun acceleration of these days.

People usually forget that they can also use breakes to get out of tight spot, which is usually safer, and by the way it has even greater acceleration (negative though). By the way high power and high acceleration usually takes you to that tight spot. Isn't?

Sometimes it’s the high power (way higher than acceleration as you correctly point out) of other people’s braking that gets you into a tight spot.

In any case in some situations it’s good to have the flexibility of both options, not just the braking option.

I'm sure it's great in the beginning. But is it €60k great?

Tesla is a status symbol. As long as they maintain that status they will be fine. Stats don’t matter that much with regards to being a status symbol.

Charging network got me to buy a Tesla over an IONIQ 5 a few weeks ago. I used to drive a Kia e-Niro and we'd use Plugshare to find odd fast chargers at fast food restaurants or gas stations and pray they weren't occupied when we got there or else we'd hop a few minutes to the next one. It can get super frustrating if you're out of luck. Maybe next car if the network is good enough.

Nissan has sold more of the Nissan Leaf worldwide than Tesla has sold all its models combined.

Edit: it has been pointed out that this is incorrect. Apparently, Leaf sold as much as Tesla sold in 2020.

This is factually incorrect.

I quick bit of Googling finds that just the Model 3 has sold ~800k while the Nissan Leaf as sold a total of ~500k

Or phrased in a different manner:

Tesla needs to double their car production, every year, the next 4 years to get to the size of Toyota or VW.

How realistic is that?

Ford has being down for the past years, closing factories worldwide. I think their focus now is on the SUV/Pickup trucks and exiting other markets.

Yeah, and yesterday I wrote a line of code. Today I wrote two. This means in about three weeks I will write the linux kernel from scratch.

I expected Musk-hype in this thread but nothing quite so ridiculous as these idiotic "analyses".

Famous last words.

Reminds me of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

I don't see the connection.

> I expected Musk-hype in this thread but nothing quite so ridiculous as these idiotic "analyses"

Of course there is a ceiling which any product maker will hit eventually, but the OP made a prediction that Tesla could become the worlds biggest car manufacturer and the response to that was to label this an "idiotic analyses".

This reminds me of how Ballmer was laughing at Apple and literally 12 months later Apple was the leading smartphone maker and has been the most successful smartphone company to date and the first company in human history to even cross the 1 trillion valuation mark. So yeah... I wouldn't write off Tesla as becoming the largest car manufacturer in the near future and certainly not call it an idiotic analyses.

Do you see it now?

It is an idiotic analysis on the basis of a couple cherry-picked data points: the performance of rival companies on this particular quarter, plus the performance of Tesla in the past year, plus the assumption that all future growth will be extrapolated from each single data point.

I'm pretty sure Samsung is leader in sales, maybe second when it comes to profit though.

In any case, issue with Tesla is that's it's priced to just not be the leader, but the whole car market and then some.

If there are already trends that other car manufacturers area outselling Tesla, clearly trajectory is not towards even market lead.

Your global figures for Ford and GM look wrong to me... but otherwise, I agree: If Tesla continues to grow at these rates, yes, eventually they will catch up with leading car manufacturers, all the way up to VW, currently the world's largest.

Tesla's online manufacturing capacity at quarter-end was ~1.05M EVs/year (~600K/year in California, ~450K/year in Shanghai), which works out to a run-rate of 262K/quarter, vs. 180K deliveries in Q1.

The two gigafactories already in construction, Berlin and Texas, look likely to come online within ~12 months. They should add at least 1M more EVs/year in manufacturing capacity, bringing the max possible quarterly run-rate to 500-600K/quarter.

The four gigafactories already in development look like to come online within 2-3 years, and should add at least 2M EVs/year in manufacturing capacity, bringing the max possible quarterly run-rate to 1M+/quarter.

To catch up with VW, Tesla would have to add 10-20 additional gigafactories beyond the 2 already in construction and the 4 in development. And of course, they would have to find buyers for all those EVs, most of which would have to be low price-tag, entry-level, mass-market vehicles, like Toyota's RAV4 and Corolla, and VW's Tiguan and Jetta.

It's possible for Tesla and Musk to overtake the likes of VW in volume -- if anyone can, it's them. But it's not certain that they'll be able to do it. Success is far from guaranteed, given that all automakers are going 100% electric now.

It's possible for Tesla and Musk to overtake the likes of VW in volume -- if anyone can, it's them. But it's not certain that they'll be able to do it.

It's not certain they'll want to. Much better to stay a higher end brand and focus on "fun" and exciting high end cars people (and other car makers) aspire to, rather than trying to out compete Toyota and VW in making Corolas and Polos.

Maybe. Scale become more and more important in the long run for sustaining market-leading, cost-efficient innovation. Whoever has the greatest scale in EVs will likely have the best and cheapest (per-unit) batteries, cameras, sensors, software, etc.

Don’t forget that the VW group and Toyota very much compete in the luxury market.

Porsche, Audi, Bugatti, and Lamborghini are all part of the VW group. VW is majority owned by the Porsche-Piëch family.

Toyota has Lexus.

Selling only luxury cars sounds appealing in terms of profit margin, but the automotive industry has a lot of complex systems with high development costs where economies of scale come into play.

Sure, but the big difference in my mind is that they both started in mass market segment and then eventually added separate luxury brands to their portfolio.

Tesla started pretty high end and are trying to move down into the mass market.

i'm not trying to be snide, but it's worth noting that so much of this is fueled by government subsidies and investments into electric vehicle technology. And the current administration is looking to at least double that investment. Things are going to be great for Tesla, but what happens when the subsidies stop?

In a sense, a lot of Ford's growth was fueled by government investment in new roads. Ford kept growing after the government stopped investing, and I think it will be about the same for Tesla. but I'm not sure. The subsidies are so direct and in 15 years EVs will be the rule and not the exception.

Tesla seems like a great investment right now. just not sure how long it will last

- While government incentives (tax credits) do help electric car adoption, in the US the ran out for Tesla quite some time ago. So the current growth of Tesla in the US is not fueld by incentives. On other markets they do play an important role though.

- Negative incentives (like CO2 taxes) for fossil fuel cars are going to grow.

- Most importantly: battery prices are in a constant downfall. We are quicky approaching the point where electric cars are cheaper to make than fossil fuel cars. In the TCO they can be cheaper already.

mind you ford was in a completely different situation in the early 1900's. they made an entire new mode of transportation available to the masses that cut down travel times considerably. most people commuted on foot or by train prior to the car.

this massive change of transportation is not what is happening with Tesla.

Tesla hasn't had the Federal tax credit for all of 2020. Most of the rest of their "subsidies" are local government deals, which are common to any large manufacturer.

There are foreign governments that do have sales support, but domestic sales remain about half their total.

(Bottom line. I am a consumer that pays money for the best product. And I will buy the best product, not the hype. I dont understand why all the downvoting, you are doing it every day when you go to a market? Do you worship John Harvey Kellogg when eating the corn flakes? Probably not.)

Ok, now here is where I object. Musk hasnt done anything incredible/remarkable, YOU have done it, the STOCK INVESTORS have done it, the tesla car BUYERS have done it.

Without people trusting, investing and buying the hype, this would just be another failure. But due to the hype he got enough of resources to pull it off. He is a lair, cheater, snake oil seller that was so successful in his deceit that he was actually able to pull something off.

It was not him to be grateful for explosion of electric car market. YOU are.

And now that the market has woke up, it is time to buy electric car. But certainly not Tesla. I want a good car not the hype while on the other side I am grateful to everyone that bought the hype and I give you all the credits for doing it. I will get a good electric car out of it. You keep the hype.

aero-glide2: sure and at the end the second to the market won where the first one has created the market, shown mistakes in the product, cheated a "few" people, and allow second one to learn from them and create better product - there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Consumers get the better product. Worshiping Musk? Irrational. I worship those that gave him the money.

ryzvonusef: Nothing has changed here. I am just stating the facts. He has shown there is a market for eCars (tm) pushed others to actually start making electric cars. I am perfectly fine with that. And I will buy some car from well established company as I want quality, not words. "lair, cheater, snake oil seller" this is just a fact. Sorry, I am not into fanboyisms clouding my judgement (I also dont have anything against him - I just dont care) and I am just stating how I see the things and I think that I see them very realistic and sane.

Isn't that just every Silicon Valley company? Create hype with impractical demo, raise funds, and then actually build the product. I see nothing wrong with this approach unless you are Theranos.

> Ok, now here is where I object. Musk hasnt done anything incredible/remarkable, YOU have done it, the STOCK INVESTORS have done it, the tesla car BUYERS have done it.

and none of that would have happened if Musky hadn't decided to not only invest in this little startup called Tesla... but KEEP at it... he could have at anytime cut his losses, and ditched Tesla, he had more than enough on his plate with SpaceX; fame, glory, money, whatever...

And yet he kept at it, year after year, for the past decade and a half, and NOW... after all this time and effort, here we are...

I find it hilarious when people go out of their way to slice out Musk from any Tesla/SpaceX news item; it's OK, you can both admit his accomplishments AND still consider him a dick...

Jesus, no one is asking you to S.elon's.C, but your assertion was that Musk was not responsible for the explosion of electric cars (heh), whereas he really was.

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> Do you worship John Harvey Kellogg when eating the corn flakes

I don't live in a breakfast-cereal eating culture, so I have no clue about which cereal is better, but there is no denying that Kellogg invented the cornflakes market, just like Musk did with the eCar.

-Are there better cereals/eCars? Duh.

-Were both Kellogg and Musk absolute weirdos? Yes.

-Should their products be the default choice in their sector? No, competition spurs growth.

-Does that change the fact that they created their markets? NO. They did, and they deserve acknowledgment for that.

----

By all means, buy a competitor product, i don't give a damn, we don't even have regular electricity flow in my country, EV of any kind are a far dream.

But being anti-Musk does not a personality make, and frankly it's getting cringy at this point.

It just pollutes the comment stream and makes everyone's experience worse.

But, don't we need less cars ? I'd be happier if Elon would actually be successful at removing cars. Why doesn't he build trains instead.

Why didn't they just quickly turn the titanic when they saw the ice berg?

He builds cars because he wants to make a shitload of money and be incredibly famous. (Optimistically) you can get one or the other by building trains, but not both.

It’s easy to conflate the idea that trains need investment and that Musk is the wealthiest mad on Earth. He doesn’t have enough money or the political capital to create a meaningful rail option like, say, LA to SF at high speed. His only option are promoting much cheaper alternatives like the Boring company or (inspiring for now) Hyperloop.

Even then, all those projects are far away from profitability and heavily criticised. His car business offers both a credible option to reduce ownership (with a self-driving fleet) and finances his other ideas. Overall, he’s expressed interest in fast point-to-point transport and realism about how flying would be far more expensive, energy-wise, so I’m sure that, when he has the means, he’ll look into a rail-based option.

Doesn't even still cover enough to justify its current market cap.

If anything these figures are just what the market cap has already adjusted to & why the market is unimpressed by the numbers. So while it is amazing it is not 'wow'

"Model 3 was the best-selling premium sedan in the world, outselling long-time industry leaders such as the 3 Series and E Class. This demonstrates that an electric vehicle can be a category leader and outsell its gas-powered counterparts."

I find this to be a major milestone in the transition to BEV. This is an achievement.

What’s amazing is that just 5 years ago, it seemed like a distant goal. People were skeptical of Tesla in 2015 (rightfully so). Almost went bankrupt in 2017. They dug themselves out of there despite of Elon’s PR shenanigans. Pretty amazing I think! Now about that stock price, I’m not so sure. It’s like next 20 years are baked into $735/share price now.

The inflated stock price is easy to explain: intangibles are part of the balance sheet.

In my guesstimation, Tesla will be making electric cars with a range to dollar ratio that can’t possibly be matched by incumbents for the foreseeable future.

VW and the rest are more capable of producing a refined car, but (again, my opinion) Tesla’s EV advantage is similar to the big three’s various inertial advantages that they enjoyed in the mid-20th century.

Perhaps more US-specific: buying a Tesla over something like a VW ID.4 gives you the supercharger network. It will be years if not decades before the general open standard charging network can compete with that benefit of ownership.

So I just bought an ID.4 this weekend after seeing on HN on Friday that it launched in the US. I also test drove a Tesla Y just to double check Saturday morning before doing so.

Tesla Y is for sure faster and the better drive. It's also like 10-15k more expensive and that's not even before VW's rebates. The interior was weird -- tiny headrests, tiny mirrors, and really poor back visibility. A giant screen in middle and nothing else wasn't particularly great, and I don't have CarPlay (I know Tesla has a lot of functionality in their system, but I'd personally rather drive it all from my phone to have a more continuous experience in car and out of car). On that screen was a 'video game'-ified representation of what Autopilot was seeing... not only distracting, but kept being wrong while I was stopped at a red light staring at it as it missed the cars in front of me and kept rapidly alternating what direction the incoming lane was going to turn. And that's driving the car? Scary!

I don't care about being faster, the ID.4 is plenty fast. I also don't really care about 250mi versus 350mi range or whatever right now.. all are inconvenient for a super long trip. I just recently drove from SF to near Canada... that was a very long multi-day drive and I would for sure not want to have multiple 35m+ stops in addition to the long drive. Until the technology gets WAYYY better I'll just rent ICE cars for a very long drive. Until then 250mi is plenty to get around the Bay Area knowing I can just plugin at home overnight to recharge.

VW has build a Electrify America charging network from a 2B settlement for their diesel emissions standards. If they're smart they'll capitalize on this and win much more in the long run by becoming Exxon AND a car company... their network isn't exclusive to their cars.

With everyone coming online in the next couple years, Tesla is going to have very real competition. I don't think the areas that they're better at are quite as make/break for car decision making as they claim to be. Elon Musk himself certainly doesn't help as a very divisive figure (and was part of the reason I didn't want a Tesla).

These are almost the exact reason I'm looking forward to test driving an ID.4. I just don't care about the acceleration enough to have that be a plus. I hope you like your ID.4, it really seems like a 'regular car' BEV.

As a former Audi owner, I would never ever buy anything from VW (certainly not after the dieselgate scandal). But good luck with your $45k purchase!

Why specifically? Don’t we want to support them in EVs?

Btw it’s -9k with rebates. But I also leased as I anticipate it being uncompetitive in 3 years. Everyone has EVs coming so the tech and competition will mature quickly. This is a first gen car for VW.

There is no obligation to "support" a for-profit corporation like some kind of charity. Certainly VW deserves no such charity. It is a recidivist emissions violator that has been caught doing defeat devices on multiple occasions. It treats customers with the same contempt as it does the EPA.

It is good though that you got your vehicle on lease. If it is like my first-generation A4, everything will start to fall apart after 3 years.

I wouldn't just say 250 vs 350 is a wash on trips . While the Y isn't better then ICE for road trips its way better then the VW for EV road trips

My point being that neither of which I want to take on a road trip. For that very rare occasion (for me), I’d rent an ICE.

A 350 mi range makes all the difference on a trip to Yosemite, Sacramento, Tahoe.

> And that's driving the car? Scary!

The visualization happening there is more limited than what the car actually sees via the cameras, probably for performance reasons (it runs on a Intel Atom processor in the 3/Y) - you can see a more detailed representation on page 8 of https://tesla-cdn.thron.com/static/4E7BR9_TSLA_Q3_2020_Updat... and you can see more from public personalities with access to the beta https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tesla+fsd+beta

> With everyone coming online in the next couple years, Tesla is going to have very real competition.

This is true, but BEV sales is currently only 3% or so of the total automobile market. There is so much room for growth. Tesla, VW, GM, and practically all major automakers pour money into BEV not to take a share in the 3% slice of the market.

Tesla will remain the leader in the BEV in the foreseeable future even with more competition. Smaller slide likely, but of a much bigger pie.

I recently compared the number of charging stations for Tesla, Ford and VW here in Reno. Tesla had some, Ford had many, VW had very few. In markets like this that’s gonna hurt for a while.

Except most real world tests show Tesla doesn't go any further than competing cars regardless of what their self reported EPA estimates say.

Can we have a source here?

Here's a range test of a Tesla Model Y (EPA range 326 miles) versus a Ford Mustang Mach E (EPA range 270 miles). But in a real world drive the Mach E gets more range:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSmSiOo-v8s

Tesla likes to maximize their EPA test cycle results to make the advertising look good, but it doesn't necessarily translate to real world results.

The difference, as other testers have noted, is that Tesla's notion of "0% battery" is a bit more conservative than other brands.

It's important to appreciate that the utility of energy efficiency metrics are different for ICE and EV. In an ICE car, fuel efficiency is pretty much just a stand-in for running costs and tailpipe pollution, so it makes sense for the test cycle to represent a plausible balance of city and highway driving.

But when it comes to vehicle range, you mostly care about range in the context of long distance driving. What matters is highway cruising efficiency, not some emissions-focused test cycle. So when judging the range of an EV, it should be as simple as highway efficiency multiplied by usable battery capacity.

> The difference, as other testers have noted, is that Tesla's notion of "0% battery" is a bit more conservative than other brands

It's not enough of a difference to account for the range deficit. Add on 12.6 miles for the Model Y and 7.3 miles for the Mach E. The Mustang still comes out on top:

https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1131706_tesla-saves-mor...

> But when it comes to vehicle range, you mostly care about range in the context of long distance driving.

Yes, the Mach E does it better.

> What matters is highway cruising efficiency

No. What matters is how far you can drive for the money you spent.

I don’t disagree with any of that. Sorry if my prior post implied that I thought Tesla vehicles were special or magical, I’m just pointing out that it’s not so straightforward to interpret the metrics.

My point was about efficiency, not range. Range can easily be made higher by putting in a bigger battery, which is precisely what Ford did here. Quoting from your own citation: "Keep in mind that the Tesla Model Y is more efficient than the Mach E but it has a smaller battery. Its battery pack is 75 kWh nominal. The battery pack in the Mach E is quite large, it's basically 99 kWh nominal."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSmSiOo-v8s&t=61s

Note that the above are nominal (i.e. physical) battery capacities. Ford generally promotes the usable capacity of the battery, which is 88 kWh. The equivalent usable capacity of the Tesla battery is unknown, but it's likely to be a similar fraction.

You correctly point out that what matters is how far you can drive for the money you spent. I agree. When you add up the money you spent on electricity to fill up the battery, then the Model Y goes further per dollar spent on electricity.

> The equivalent usable capacity of the Tesla battery is unknown, but it's likely to be a similar fraction.

It isn't unknown and it's not a similar fraction. It's 73 kWh usable in the Model Y:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYxTJzZ5sJY

A better question is why does Tesla not reveal such a basic detail in its marketing.

> When you add up the money you spent on electricity to fill up the battery, then the Model Y goes further per dollar spent on electricity.

You aren't going to see much benefit from that. The difference is 6%.

The Mustang Mach E is thousands of dollars cheaper than the Model Y with the current incentives that it qualifies for. The California Route 1 trim is cheaper even without incentives and gets even more range because it's rear wheel drive. That's a lot of charging to make up the difference.

That logic does make sense if we assume that the purchase price of a vehicle is entirely for the battery and all other parts of the car are free.

Nonetheless, even if we accept your logic, your point remains a weird one. The vehicle with a 88 kWh "usable" capacity goes a little bit further on the highway compared to the vehicle with a 73 kWh "usable" capacity. Is this supposed to be a surprise to anyone?

My point was about efficiency, not range. Range can easily be made higher by putting in a bigger battery, which is precisely what Ford did here. Quoting from your own citation: "Keep in mind that the Tesla Model Y is more efficient than the Mach E but it has a smaller battery." That was my point. You're making another point and I'm not disagreeing with it.

> Nonetheless, even if we accept your logic, your point remains a weird one.

It isn't weird that car buyers consider how much the car will cost them.

> Is this supposed to be a surprise to anyone?

This has all been a surprise to you. You're not across the detail but that's okay. Now you know more.

> The difference, as other testers have noted, is that Tesla's notion of "0% battery" is a bit more conservative than other brands.

Most reviews also note that tesla clings to their bullshit remaining range number until the battery is near depletion then suddenly drops. Other EVs have a remaining distance gauge that closely matches actual remaining range.

https://driving.ca/tesla/model-s/features/feature-story/rang...

our 2019 100D promised 491 kilometres of electrically-powered zero emission motoring while the Porsche’s said the Taycan would only be able to manage 345 km.

the Porsche had almost exactly delivered its expected range — 342 km according to our calculations, versus its original 345-km claim — the Model S was all but as dead as a door-nail at 355 klicks. For the record, the Tesla underperformed its predicted range by some 136 kilometres, or negative 27 per cent, while the Taycan exceeded its EPA rating by 15 klicks (more than four per cent).

According to the linked article they were going noticeably above the Model S's optimum driving speed. In fact, they're driving at a speed above the USA highway speed limit. Not sure this is sufficient to claim "most real world tests show Tesla doesn't go any further than competing cars"

It was 77.6 mph - under the speed limit in areas of texas and the real world driving speed of inner west states.

I bought a Ford Mach-e, after comparing the mileage, build quality and pricing with model Y. The Tesla drives better, performance wise they felt the same, but build quality and cabin noise is way better in the Mach-e.

Also, surprisingly actual road mileage is better in the Mach-e too[1].

Tesla felt like a car built around the software and ford felt like a car with the software as an afterthought. But I like driving cars (drive a manual right now), so, don’t really care as much about the software as others.

[1] https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/electric-car-range-and-cons...

Tesla has ~2,000 charging stations (with 20,000 chargers).

The stations seems to cost a few hundred thousand dollars.

So they have a lead, but it's roughly a billion dollars (or maybe 2) to build out something similar, that isn't going to take decades.

There are tens of thousands of places that might install a couple high power chargers (restaurants and similar). Doesn't take that many of them to add a lot of capacity, even if it isn't spaced out quite as well.

It's not impossible, it just takes planning and multiple technical steps. Until the last 6 months, no other cars had plug in and charge (with your car telling the charger the credit card number and/or car id)! You had to sign in to an app or scan your card on the charger itself.

Telsa also is the only car manu. was access to enough batteries to ship car in en masse. All the the companies making evs are significantly limited by batteries. Finally teslas have much better energy efficiency/mile. 800v charging and car systems is one area tesla is behind (they are 400v).

That other vehicles are getting plug and charge is a sign of the lead eroding. They only have to figure it out the one time.

I would expect battery production capacity to be somewhat lumpy (with big shifts when new mines or factories open). That can take a long time and I haven't looked at where things are, but it also means that there can be a very sudden shift.

I follow the development of the stations pretty closely. It is much much much harder than you think it is. Some stations take well over a year from permitting to lighting them up. Tesla has also made deals with a lot of businesses and states to put them on highway rest stops. The other charging stations are spotty at best. I live one mile from the Electrify America HQ. Even the station at their HQ is iffy and I had issues with payments on it.

Also Tesla has two full production lines for the station gear. One in Shanghai and one in Buffalo NY. Electrify America is a hodgepodge of 4 different suppliers gear.

Tesla has made approximately 2000 deals. Years aren't decades, and the cost just isn't high enough that it will drag out.

It's sort of neutral that there's more than one manufacturer of the other chargers, if the chargers work well with vehicles it doesn't matter if they come from 15 factories or 2.

Tesla clearly has a lead. My point is that it is unlikely to be durable.

The lead remains durable in the medium term because Tesla can remain doggedly single-minded. Whereas established automakers have monumental scale investments in their present-day supply chains which can't easily be write off.

Long term? While I don't feel confident hazarding a guess when the ICE–EV inflection point will occur, I expect that inflection point to be marked by a series of corporate collapses as the transition (or indeed the failure to transition) ultimately bankrupts them.

No there are issues with the EA chargers being from different vendors. This article is really good and gets into it:

https://insideevs.com/news/389891/exclusive-interview-electr...

“Electrify America currently uses units made by ABB, BTC, Signet, and Efacec. Every time they have a software or hardware update, it has to be done on all four brands, and they don't always all work the same afterward. Fitezek has to work out the kinks with all four partners and they all respond on different timelines. I could see that this was clearly a pain point for him.”

> Tesla will be making electric cars with a range to dollar ratio that can’t possibly be matched by incumbents for the foreseeable future

That isn't true today, never mind the future. If you want range to dollars then the Chevy Bolt is hard to beat. Especially with deals like this:

https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/chevy-bolt-ev-available-f...

It's also important to consider real world miles versus paper miles. Tesla's EPA range figures are inflated. On paper, the Tesla Model Y should have more range than the Ford Mustang Mach E. But in real world driving the Mach E has the greater range:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSmSiOo-v8s

Almost went bankrupt during the first Roadster deliveries in 2008 as well: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-43365710

> I find this to be a major milestone in the transition to BEV. This is an achievement.

While I agree it would be great if we had 0 emission vehicles, today EV in US or Germany run largely of coal , hence battery production is anything but green...

Thus I still don’t see the point of what’s called « Transition ».

Climate change is real , but at the moment without nuclear fusion I fail to see how this is going to change anything it seems to be deporting the problem to be honest.

Coal is 20% not most

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_power_in_the_United_Sta...

It’s not an either or problem. It’s an also problem. Make power plants cleaner and make cars cleaner. Hit it from Both ends.

> Coal is 20% not most

You’re right ! US has shifted from coal ... to Natural Gas !

I don’t think that this is solving the problem , natural gas comes from fracking ... but it’s definitely a small win knowing how big is America and how much less natural gas produces CO2.

Natural gas is already a big step as it only emits 2/3rds of the CO2 per kWh compared to coal (high hydrogen content). Also, gas power plants can be regulated faster than coal power plants, so they work much better together with wind/solar power and make the transition easier.

There are a ton of viable and productive energy production methods that at least start to address climate change between where we're at now and "nuclear fusion".

Fission may have plenty of issues, but lets not pretend that the entire world is "fusion or bust".

> Fission may have plenty of issues, but lets not pretend that the entire world is "fusion or bust".

Unfortunately , that’s no how it’s work.

Yes fission is great ! France runs on Fission it works greats.

Problem ? In 2015 at the current rate of consumption 130 years of uranium left on earth !

Sadly for us International Nuclear association estimated that if most country shifted to Nuclear that uranium would shift from 130 to just 30 years...

Regardless of how your turn the problem you’ll always end up to the same solution to satisfy the world need for energy :fusion.

Especially if you intend to have EV widely deployed.

> Problem ? In 2015 at the current rate of consumption 130 years of uranium left on earth !

First of all, this is nonsense. The same old peak-blabla nonsense.

Second of all, thorium can be used in current reactors. Third, thorium is practically unlimited.

Existing nuclear 'waste' and nuclear bombs contain huge amounts of potential energy as well.

With newer reactors these limits can be further broken by moving from terrible utilization to much higher utilization. And lets not ignore that modern CO2 turbines can improve efficiency by a further 20% at least.

There is absolutely no limit to fission in any theoretical or practical sense.

Its arguably renewable as volcanoes transport new thorium to the surface.

Uranium is practically unlimited too. We can extract it from seawater for $200/kg.

Germany has more solar than coal

https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy_pie/chart.htm?l=en&...

But does it have more renewables than Fossil fuels?

Don't cherry pick the data on a week when there's loads of the sun in Germany. Take whole "normal" 2019. for example: https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy_pie/chart.htm?l=en&...

Coal - almost 30% vs less than 10% of solar

Ah you're right, I didn't catch that the default view is "this week." Thanks.

> today EV in US or Germany run largely of coal

No? Coal accounts for 11% of US energy production. 7.5% for Germany.

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/736640/energy-mix-german...

Unfortunately, you seem to have misread the report you quoted. Germany's not-so-secret is lignite, a dirtier kind of coal supplying 16.8% of its electricity. Lignite together with traditional coal at 7.3% supplied 24.1% of Germany's electricity. [0]

[0] https://strom-report.de/germany-power-generation-2020/

And steadily declining year on year. The next government is likely to feature the green party and possibly even a green party prime minister. IMHO that will set in motion an accelerated shut down of lignite and coal, which only narrowly got averted by the CSU in the current government (the CDU looked more likely to compromise on this). Even so, it will likely take a while.

Otherwise the headline here is that renewables are already the dominant source of energy in the German market. Gas is the only thing growing in market size currently other than renewables and that's mostly just offsetting the decline of coal and nuclear. Overall, renewables grow faster. Otherwise, many EV owners also put solar on their roofs and/or buy power from renewable sources or charge at public chargers hooked up to renewable sources. So, the notion that EVs are powered by coal is very dated at this point.

Lots of reasons to expect accelerated lignite shutdown and solar/wind buildup indeed. And quite impressive to see that 50.5% of Germany's electricity production was wind, sun and water already!

I didn't know the German political system had a prime minister. What's the role of the prime minister, and how does it relate to the chancellor and to the president?

The point of the transition to BEV is that electricity production is fungible. It's easier to modify the mixture of generation sources and to scale into renewables a whole lot faster than trying to modify or convert the drivetrain of an ICE vehicle.

Furthermore, even if renewables do not fully power the BEV, it's easier to filter/capture pollutants at a single point source of generation than it is to try to capture these things across millions of vehicles. It's not just CO2 that's harming the environment, it's also nitrogen oxides, particulate matter, formaldehyde....

Even if all your electricity comes from burning fossil fuels switching to EVs should be an emissions win.

Your fossil fuel burning electrical generation facility can be equipped with things to capture emissions. So can a fossil fuel burning car, but the car needs to be small, mobile, and light weight and that limits how much you can capture emissions. The electrical generation facility doesn't have those constraints.

In addition to capture, there's also simply efficiency — those same factors cut into how much power is obtained from a particular quantity of fuel and a large professionally-maintained facility which isn't weight/size-constrained should be much better there. If it's going to be burned, we should get maximum value out of it.

The other big win is time: if I buy a conventionally-fueled car now I'm locking in its use of fossil fuels for 15+ years unless there's a major improvement in biofuels whereas if I buy an EV in many states I can at any time switch to 100% renewable electric charging. A non-trivial percentage of EV owners will consider that option over the life of the vehicle and that opens the possibility of policy makers making a substantial change without needing to coordinate with millions of people: bring wind, solr, geothermal, nuclear, etc. capacity online and you have a guaranteed day one reduction in the CO2 generated for transportation.

It also moves the emissions away from where people live for the most part. Not as much a win with CO2, but gas cars spit out a lot of other nasty stuff too.

Definitely - and regenerative braking should cut into the brake residue which contributes to conditions like asthma, although it won't change tire dust much.

That's just not true.

Also, we can't have both "electric cars are only for rich coastal elites" and "... but the power they're run on is the dirtiest power available in coal country"

Model 3 is a premium sedan ? Oh :/ Where are my paint color options, ventilated seats ? What about parts for my local car shop ? Did they forgot the safety features unique to german cars ?

Now compare 0-60 and infotainment systems.

Is premium how fast the car goes, or how many paint colors it comes in? Different people have different requirements.

You are likely paying over 100k to get a car as fast as a model 3.

It's still not a premium car.

Premium is defined by price, not your desired feature set.

I think most people define premium by the build quality, interior design, options etc. But if you want to only define it by price, then the model 3 is definitely not in the premium segment. It's a very cheap car... So much so that I know a few people that literally joke at a white model 3 company lease as "your consulting job must suck"

FWIW, I drove a BMW 328i for 20 years. Paid $39,000 for it. Put 230,000 miles on it. I loved that car dearly.

I replaced it with a Model 3 and put 70,000 miles on it so far. Paid $49,000 for it, which is in the mid-point of what you'd pay for a new 328i. It's even more fun to drive, with operating costs at about 1/4 the BMW.

The model 3 looks like a $25,000 car when you buy it new though, and that's my problem with it.

25k cars don’t have the sound system nor performance nor screens of a 3. Let’s sit side by side with a civic and compare...

I agree. Among other things, it's not shaped like other cars. I found the nose off-putting when I first saw the prototypes, and I was really skeptical about the display and mounting in the center of the cabin.

In all sincerity, after reading through the comments, it seems to me that the folks making negative claims are picking specific things they don't like, or relating what they've heard about the car. I expect that if they spent a week driving it in place of their current pony, they'd change their opinion. The overall experience is better than any other car I've driven.

Also, there are for sure people who simply don't care about the driving experience itself and see cars as nothing more than transportation. For them, I also can see the a Tesla would have much less appeal.

The rich get after market effects.

So you're defining premium cars by the things that everyone hates about those cars, other than build quality.

The German car companies will nickle and dime you to death with options, they have terrible interiors/user interfaces, etc. Granted I wish the model 3 had cooled seats but meh.

Even a model S doesn't count with that logic.

They did patent a system for heating and cooling seats[1], so I suspect that will come eventually.

[1] https://pdfaiw.uspto.gov/.aiw?PageNum=0&docid=20190291613&ID...

Compared to a luxury German car I think the model 3 has far worse isolation, more plastic and vibrations, fake leather, much less seat options in terms of adjustments, often misaligned panels. All OK for the mid range car that it is, but I was responding to Tesla calling it the best selling premium car.

'More plastic and vibrations...' Please be more specific. More plastic than the BMW or Mercedes?

And what parts are vibrating? Do you mean making an audible sound? Or the car is shimmying?

Premium sedan, not sports car. E classes do not and have never competed on 0-60 times

“Premium Sedan” includes a lot of things. BMW certainly classifies driving performance as part of that. As does Lexus. Mercedes has it’s own performance models.

Now if you wanted to argue that the Tesla Model 3/Y aren’t “Luxury Sedans”, I think you have a point. Not so much for the reasons you list, but because the ride is harsher than the Mercedes. But then, some BMWs have a similar ride so it’s hard to say.

Premium sedan has nothing to do with 0-100 km/h times. Those don't differ between segments.

What Model 3 lacks is quality interior and options.

>You are likely paying over 100k to get a car as fast as a model 3.

Define fast

I believe they are talking about 0-60 times.

Model 3 Performance in Track mode is #12 in this list[0]. The least you can pay for this version is $55k.

#13 is a Jaguar XE SV Project at $188k

#11 is a Bentley Bentayga at $160,000

#10 is an Acura NSX at $157,000

[0] https://www.motortrend.com/news/quickest-cars-motortrend-201...

> Now compare 0-60

What is this, kindergarten?

It's in the same price bucket. If in your opinion is not a premium sedan, it's all more impressive.

Let's not forget impossibly advanced German car user interfaces, such as trackpad to gesture individual characters to spell a word!

For reference: https://youtu.be/_aV91djgwEc

I'm astonished this made it to production. Red tape and bureaucracy means nobody is willing to push back against a feature that is bad and potentially dangerous (maybe not any more dangerous than touchscreens though).

In my experience working for a US subsidiary of a Japanese company, there's very little "push back" by underlings. That's simply not part of the culture.

As for peers, rather than underlings, the key word is consensus. Which is only achieved after endless months of interminable meetings during the day and interminable socializing during the evening. Maybe they finally reach consensus because they're worn out by all the discussion?

I hate touchscreens on the dash of moving cars. This interface is (perhaps?) worse, since the guy was making mistakes even in a stopped vehicle. But it would be interesting to try to use the interface while moving. One's hand is probably more stable down low, resting on the console, rather than extended out in space reaching for a touchscreen?

Either way, the interface is much worse than physical buttons on a console or dash.

> maybe not any more dangerous than touchscreens though

Maybe not any more dangerous than fancy lane control marketed as full self driving...

Acura is German, not Japanese, you're not replying to the correct comment, I think.

Also, Acura's trackpad or whatever just needs a cursor. I wonder why they didn't think of that.

Acura is luxury division of Honda, and headquartered both from the Japan and USA

Damn, I can't edit my comment. I meant that Acura is Japanese, not German. I wrote the comment the other way around :-(

Regarding headquarters, true, but it's still a division of Honda, which most people would consider a Japanese company.

My 2018 Audi has the same braindead touchpad interface. It's completely unusable.

Ah, damn. I wonder if they've changed something recently. I saw that more recent Audi models seem to have a 2 screen UI (driver console and central screen).

There are few repairs needed so parts don't matter ;-) More seriously I do hope that there can be third party access to shop manuals and repairs though.

> Model 3 is a premium sedan ?

I'm with you. It's certainly a premium price, but (IMHO) it really shouldn't be considered "premium" on overall build quality or accoutrements.

The model 3 really isn't a premium sedan. It's more like a mid range Skoda than an Audi, with a cheap plastic interior and pretty bad build quality.

They sell very well because it's cheap and in many countries you get a great tax deal on them making it even cheaper. Which I'm really happy for because EVs help against climate change. But I'm also very happy I cancelled my pre-order and don't have to drive a model 3.

So tell us what one should drive instead of a model 3?

What you can buy instead is 99% based on personal preference, I cancelled the model 3 and got a BMW because I liked the few I had before. But my co-founder would never drive a BMW. He returned his second model S and got an Audi EV instead. Which is not a car I would pick.

My point is that a model 3 isn't really a luxury car, it's an entry model and has the build quality and options that go with that.

So I don't get this. You bash the Model 3 for build quality but you support BMW which is notorious for having horrible reliability.

I'd pick the car with just okay paint and maybe some not-so-perfect gaps over a car that I know is going to cost me thousands in maintenance.

OP could be in Europe. German premium cars are a lot cheaper to maintain there (still more than a Toyota though), and somehow seem to have less issues than the US.

In Europe indeed, no idea why American BMWs are so much worse. There is also a huge amount of complaining online about the dealers, that could be part of the problem.

Had a similar feeling driving a rental VW Passat in the US, it felt like they make a special US version. Most notable difference was a very very lazy feeling gearbox.

Funny you mention Passat. I owned one for a few years and it was pretty solid, was surprised esp. hearing all the negative towards VW reliability. But then I rented one in Florida that felt like it was about to rattle itself apart.

And just so I don't sound like a Tesla fanboy or anything, I got a Model S high mileage loaner that also felt like it was about to break apart at any second.

I guess Americans just can't make cars! I hear the Chinese made Model 3's are really solid

Yes I had the same comparison having also rented several VWs in Europe and feeling like it's an entirely different car in the US.

Not sure whether a US market BMW is produced locally. If they are that would explain a lot in terms of US customers complaining about reliability and thinking a model 3 is like a German luxury car while to European customers it feels like a cheap American car. The frame of reference isn't the same.

Edit: So a quick Google shows a US BMW 3 series is produced in Mexico. And apparently has to use at least 50% locally made parts according to Mexican law.

According to ADAC (in german) BMW is pretty good in terms of reliability. https://www.adac.de/rund-ums-fahrzeug/unfall-schaden-panne/a... They do mention battery issues with the BMW 5 series prior to 2010.

Great to learn today that the model 3 is not a premium car. My whole life has been a lie. How do I refine my tastes to appreciate premium cars like the bmw like you? I never had a mentor who could teach me the finer aspects of premium taste.

I do think the model 3 is a premium car, and I don't understand how you can say the opposite with a strong confidence. But some other cars are better on some aspects, and worse on some aspects.

It's not very important but when you close a door or the trunk on the model 3, it doesn't sound premium. It has this cheap metallic sound. When driving, the sound proofing is not the best either compared to similar priced EVs. About the interior materials, I am not a fan of the fake leather and I prefer the real leather you can find in most premium vehicles but I know it depends a lot on tastes and many like that it's not dead animals skin. The top of the trunk has no cover and someone at Tesla had fun with the hot glue gun on the car I rented, but I heard that the Porsche Taycan has no cover either.

At the same time the model 3 has a great entertainment system, drives super well, and I love the interior design. I would like to replace my old "premium" BMW i3 with a "premium" Model 3.

What you're saying may be an important detail for car enthusiasts but that's mostly irrelevant given the context. From the business side of things what matters is that the Model 3 outsells all of its competitors at its price point.

If anything, the fact that a car that uses cheap plastic is outselling the car that doesn't use the cheap plastic at the same price is phenomenal.

Skoda's have pretty good build quality nowadays.

This is a very tricky presentation of the larger image. The document mentions the "Premium Sedan" category market, not the entire market.

So looking at the Premium Sedan market share in the US (which is arguably the most important market in the world) the numbers show a 1% decline in sales for 2020 - "The midsized car segment continues to lose share in the US car market in 2020. Sales were down 22% in an overall market down 14%. As a result the share of midsized cars drops by 1 percentage point to 10.2%, and in absolute numbers, the 1.5 million sales make this the lowest year of this millennium and long before it." - from https://carsalesbase.com/us-car-sales-analysis-2020-midsized...

So while the premium sedan category (including Tesla 3) is declining overall, Tesla is reporting to its shareholders the "great achievement" of winning that sales declining race.

If the whole market declines but your share of the overall market raises and you overtake everybody else in that market that is clearly an achievement.

Given that this is literally the first mass market car by Tesla, achieving leading sales globally over comparable products by BMW and Mercedes is clearly pretty important.

And as they said, they hope Model Y will hopefully be the best selling vehicle globally next year.

This is important to point out after 5 years of FUD about how Tesla has no demand.

Selling more of the less selling cars is not an achievement by any means.

All the other companies are changing production towards different other categories, but the “achievement” Tesla wants their shareholders to be happy about is that they sell more of the cars less and less people are buying.

If you sell more horses worldwide out of the “four legged category” it has no relevance as long as less and less people are buying horses for transportation.

I'm not sure one years data point makes for a trend. Especially not 2020.

I have no data to back it up, but it seems likely that the people who can afford a luxury car are also the people that could afford to stay home during the pandemic. Personally, I'm finding it hard to justify a new car when I'm 6 months overdue for an oil change and not even at half the miles. :-)

He's speaking of the movement from luxury sedans to luxury SUVs and crossovers.

Just because sedans are not the biggest market anymore doesn't mean competition is over or that there is not still a gigantic amount of money in it.

Tesla is of course also expecting to sell more CUV and Pickups in the future and we have seen the sales growth of the Model Y.

Seriously making the argument that being the globally highest selling car in a well known very well specified category with their first ever turley mass produced car after just a few years of production is not an achievement is just insane argument.

Even Ford stopped making the Mustang sedan. There is a move to SUVs across the auto industry. I'm not sure if winning a rapidly shrinking segment is as much of an accomplishment as Tesla wants investors to believe.

That's not accurate in any form. The Mustang was not a sedan, but a coupe, and Ford has not stopped making the Mustang in the current form. You can still order a GT500 with 12mpg city. They added an electric version, the Mach-E, which is more of a crossover format.

I wouldn't call that a version, the Mustang Mach-E is a different product line. Just shares the branding and takes some design cues. It's like an adopted son who gets dressed up like the father, but has different genes

> And as they said, they hope Model Y will hopefully be the best selling vehicle globally next year.

It's very important to wonder "how much of this is EV demand" vs "how much of this is car specific demand". Tesla's Model 3 sales basically declined in lockstep with Model Y's rise: https://cleantechnica.com/2021/02/15/tesla-model-3-model-y-o...

It will be interesting to see if Tesla can grow them simultaneously going forward, but it hasn't really seemed to be the case. This doesn't make me bullish on any prediction that the Model Y is going to be the best selling vehicle globally.

A company founded in 2003 on an entirely different concept of automobile propulsion has taken the lead in a multi hundred billion dollar market. Hell yes that’s an achievement and it doesn’t need scare quotes.

"has taken the lead"

Has taken the lead on the "premium sedan" category market, where less and less people are buying "premium sedans".

What scare quotes?

taking the lead on a declining market (while producing more cars overall) is impressive, assuming that market isn't due to be completely wiped out.

Let me rephrase it as "Premium sedan segment would be in free fall if not for Tesla Model 3, a car that didn't exist 4 years ago". People flock to Model 3 despite it being in a less trending segment. They could have got a SUV instead, but they didn't. Sound impressive to me.

It seems that in trying to debunk marketing spin you've deployed even worse spin of your own:

> the premium sedan category (including Tesla 3) is declining overall

Uh... wat? Model 3 sales are growing very rapidly! Trying to argue that they aren't because the category they are being compared to is not is... somewhat weird.

I mean, look. The M3 is now selling more cars than Mercedes or BMW do in the same price segment. That's... pretty impressive, isn't it? I don't think that's spin, the E Class and 3 Series are very successful cars. They seem like a pretty good benchmark.

But yes: it's true that people bought fewer of them during the pandemic. It's also not very surprising, nor very informative about Tesla, who sold far more cars in 2020 than 2019.

"is... somewhat weird."

No, it's not. If you sell more horses worldwide out of the “four legged category” it has no relevance as long as less and less people are buying horses for transportation.

I repeat the more focused point: you don't find it impressive that a car from a manufacturer that was barely on the map five years ago is now beating the Mercedes E Class (edit: C class, sorry) in its own price category?

I mean, by your logic if Tesla isn't impressive for what the Model 3 is doing then Daimler Chrysler must be a flaming disaster, right?

Look at their statement and realize how Tesla is intentionally misleading their shareholders.

If Tesla is so impressive, why do they need to do that?

What incorrect idea do you think shareholders may have taken away that is any worse than "Model 3 sales are shrinking" that you tried to imply above?

> This demonstrates that an electric vehicle can be a category leader and outsell its gas-powered counterparts.

ICE is currently 97% of the automobile market. A BEV taking the lead in any vehicle segment is a major milestone. Nothing is misleading about that.

I agree it's impressive myself. Though they probably mean C or A Class. The E class is larger and quite a lot more expensive than a Tesla 3.

I'm not sure how a Model 3 or a BMW 3 Series can be compared to a Mercedes E Class. The comparable cars there seem to be the Tesla Model S and the BMW 5 Series. The Mercedes equivalent of a BMW 3 Series or a Tesla Model 3 is the C Class.

Greatly increasing the number of horses you sold in a time when people are buying less horses overall is a better achievement than doing so when total horse purchases increased, not a worse achievement.

Not necessarily. If you mean by a "we were running against the wind" sense, sure, but if you mean in a "what should the valuation of your company be" sense, no.

Can we please not refer to the Model 3 as the M3, an already well known car from a competing manufacturer in the same segment?

I think we can all infer that when referring to mass market sedans, the super-sport model of one particular BMW is not what is being referred to.

The BMW M3 is a different car than the BMW 3 Series. An M3 is as much a 3 Series as an Alpina B3 is a 3 Series. It is ambiguous in this situation. I had to read the comment several times to figure out if it meant that somehow BMW was selling more M3s than the whole 3 Series lineup.

>> The M3 is now selling more cars than Mercedes or BMW do in the same price segment.

> I had to read the comment several times to figure out if it meant that somehow BMW was selling more M3s than the whole 3 Series lineup.

The whole 3 Series lineup is not in the same price segment as the M3, is it?

How could BMW sell more M3 cars than the total number of cars they sell in that price segment?

The usage is ambiguous because it may mean something like the BMW M3 even at a higher price is now generating more sales than the normal 3 Series lineup but those sales are not included in these numbers.

Using the name of a car from an adjacent price range in the same segment is absolutely ambiguous, especially when Tesla is competing on price/performance.

If you want to abbreviate it then call it a TM3 or something. The M3 has been a car for 35 years and it's too similar to the Model 3 for that not to be confusing.

Sometimes it’s ambiguous. In this particular case not that much, I think. That comment is in the context of “Tesla 3” and “Model 3” mentions in the two preceding paragraphs. (And Tesla is selling as many model 3 cars in one year as M3 cars have been sold by BMW in 35 years!)

The mention of "Model 3" in the previous paragraph is what makes the usage of M3 even more confusing. Why inconsistently use this "unambiguous" abbreviation? Especially in a sentence that references BMW?

It’s in the larger context of Model 3 sales relative to other cars with an unclear definition of what those cars are. They compare sales of the Model 3 to the Mercedes E class! It’s reasonable then to wonder if M3 numbers are or maybe are not included.

Additionally the M3 has been a significant volume seller in the past. There are a lot of E46 M3s in comparison to the rest of the E46 fleet. It would surprise me to learn BMW is selling more G80 M3s than G80 3 Series but with declining sales in the segment maybe the “premium” car is the one retaining sales.

The usage of “M3” is ambiguous because at first glance all of that seems possible, if surprising.

Why are we arguing about this? The M3 is a 35 year old name that is in the same segment as a Model 3. Calling a Model 3 an M3 is always going to cause confusion. It would even cause confusion on the showroom floor of a Tesla dealership.

I think the true “spin” is that you think the E Class and 3 Series are way more important than they are because they USED to be important. That’s the cache Tesla is using.

The Germans will admit the SUV are the US market (look at their lineup) and the day that the Y outsells GL class cars, then I’ll eat humble pie.

For Context: The SUV class of the same relative size sells about 3x the sedan.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210108005349/en/Mer...

> the day that the Y outsells GL class cars, then I’ll eat humble pie.

Do you really have doubt this day isn't coming very soon? 2023 tops. Mercedes SUV are niche luxury. Tesla will only shed away price on the Y's due to declining battery prices, improved manufacturing with gigafactories, and their mission of reducing emissions by getting everyone into EV's.

Don't count out Mercedes' ability to come up with a seemingly overly robust lineup of models that cover every conceivable variation/combination of needs for the luxury SUV consumer.

I mean sometimes I think "who the hell needs a GLB AMG??" but it's one of the few SUVs of that size that seats 7 passengers and serves a need for families in certain EU and Asia markets.

Any given Mercedes SUV may be niche luxury but they cover many many niches with their lineup.

> it's one of the few SUVs of that size that seats 7 passengers

Literally the Model Y also. Not sure if this is the need you're referring to or something else. But Mercedes is far behind on EV's and not even close to Tesla. This switch is happening now, if you haven't noticed all the SUV PHEV, ID.4 launch, and Toyota BZ4x announcement. Once the majority of developed nations aren't using much gasoline, taxes will be raised and Mercedes lack of EV will be critical. I mean they are almost dead last behind Tesla, VW, BMW, Nissan, Toyota, Honda, Ford, GM, etc.

I have extreme doubts in the trajectory of the Model Y.

Tesla bundles its sales with the Model 3 (bad sign) & 3rd party data suggests they sold 3k in Q4:20 with negative trending.

I agree EVs are the future, I think Tesla was a major innovator in the space, but has stagnated recently and the blind faith in Musk / Tesla is ultimately bad for the cutover

> Uh... wat? Model 3 sales are growing very rapidly! Trying to argue that they aren't because the category they are being compared to is not is... somewhat weird.

I mean, kind of? It's much more complicated when you look at market over market. Tesla sales in the US haven't really grown much since the summer of 2019, and that's despite releasing a whole new model in that period. They've definitely been selling more cars, but the majority of that growth is fueled by entering new markets, not growing existing ones. That's important, because both types of growth have different levels of sustainability.

Pandemic and working from home. I wasn’t about to buy a new car.

This isn't just the pandemic, the fact that Model Y sales just displaced Model 3 sales in the US should be concerning. Also, given the narrative that Tesla is a supply-limited company, the pandemic really shouldn't change their sales at all.

I'm surprised by how micro-managey Tesla is with their Model 3/Y prices. Most manufacturers release a static MSRP for that model year. However, Tesla the past year was dropping prices $500-$1,000 periodically. And then as of last month, has raised prices $500-$1,000 twice.

Maybe they are doing A/B testing of the price?

In reality this is likely because they suspect the US EV tax credit extension to pass and they're slowly increasing the price to indirectly grab some of that as profit.

Is that in the US or Europe. In Europe they bounce it around a bit because of shipping costs from US and China fluctuating.

Now that you mention it - they're almost replicating the dealer experience.

In the beginning Tesla's selling point was that they were not a dealer, you go to the showroom and there is no pressure because everyone pays the same price.

Except with their pricing monkey business, you're replicating the same high-pressure "buy now before the price goes up"... for everyone.

Aren't they over the hump? Can they get away from gym-membership stuff?

Combine that with the variability of other nonsense - when will I get my car/truck? surprise! square steering wheel! etc...

A true premium experience should treat people better, and ONLY inflict positive drama.

Every 2 or 3 months it changes for everyone when they +/- it by $500. It's not a negotiation. It is surprising to me they do this, I cannot understand the tweaking.

I was looking at a used car, and it changed price several times a week. You might also look at the experiences of used tesla buyers. The price isn't the only thing they've played with, they've been doing the same sorts of things with features and even warranty coverage, all of which have in general gotten worse.

Other manufacturers are manage prices with consumer and dealer incentives. If you pay attention to car promotions, there's almost always a lot of differences in consumer cash back by model. Some manufacturers almost always have a baseline cash back, but if they want to raise prices, they can reduce that; if there's a model they want to move, it gets more, etc. Premium brands like to push leases and run promotions there. For the manufacturers with a captive finance company, there's even more room to play with pricing there.

I don't think Tesla runs promotions like that, so if they want to change the price, they have to change the price.

Other manufacturers don't deal with customers directly. There is at least as much, if not more, micromanagement of pricing and allocation in the traditional dealer world, it's just hidden from the public. And it's not unique to the auto world either, every vendor of items sold via large single contracts has an ability to pinch pennies that isn't available to small ticket retail items.

It seems like a bad business practice, because it screws the resale value of any current owners. People want MSRPs to remain relatively consistent to their purchase, and greater uncertainty also generally makes lease rates higher because they need higher prices in order to justify the additional risk they take on.

They're balancing their production capacity with price. I.e. price that keeps delivery window not too long or short. They could sell them cheaper, but then they would be limited by manufacturing capacity.

Even if Tesla eventually failed, this is an achievement. They've fully validated the EV market. I highly doubt that we'd be seeing accelerating EV adoption like this without Tesla.

Too many countries are banning ICE sales in the next decade. So they have at least a decade of life left.

Nissan deserve some recognition as well, it's not just Tesla.

I own a Leaf. They're great cars, sort of the electric alternative to the Honda Civic and more economical than Tesla, but they're not cool or sexy. Tesla made EVs cool and desirable for car people.

Also the Tesla Roadster was slightly before the Leaf if my memory is correct. It was a super-expensive niche car but it showed what an EV can do.

BTW my Leaf out-accelerates many muscular gasoline cars. The torque curve benefits of EVs are universal and apply even to wimpier EVs.

The E-class is an entirely different class from the Model 3 and 3 series. Maybe just a C-class typo.

Pretty impressive, especially considering that the 3 series is a similar age (both ~2018). The C class is getting long in the tooth, though, dates to 2016.

It definitely looks like a typo. But the Audi A6 is also an equivalent to the BMW 5 Series or Mercedes E Class. The A5 seems like a better comparison to the Model 3.

I wonder if the numbers are also wrong? Did they actually compare E Class and A6 sales instead of C Class and A5 sales?

Are 4 Series included in with 3 Series numbers? What about M cars?

Good point. Since they specifically mention sedans, likely it's limited to 4 door 3 series, C class, A4 type cars, wagons/coupes/convertibles need not apply.

Yeah the A4 and A5 seem comparable but Tesla only mentions the A6, a larger sedan like the 5 Series or E Class. I'd like to see the detailed numbers on this.

Also, the 3 Series wagon seems like it would be included in these numbers?

3 series wagon is no longer sold in the US, sadly.

That is sad. But this raises another question, is Tesla only quoting US sales here?

If I were Tesla, I would absolutely exclude wagons, because it makes my numbers look worse, and IMO it's legitimate because it's a different body style (I'm a wagon lover, but I own a Model 3).

I can understand them excluding wagons if they did. The issue is I don't know what these numbers actually represent so it's hard to draw any conclusions. Is there somewhere with more detail on what numbers they actually used for the "Global premium vehicle sales" graph on page 8?

Honest question: how does this factor in with BMW's leasing program? Most people I know (outside of... myself... lol) refuse to actually buy a BMW, and just lease it.

Are these numbers included?

Lease German, Buy Japenese/Korean/Asian.

I've heard this many a time.

Teslas are still pretty new, but generally speaking leasing them is not a great choice. The terms are fine, but financially you are better off buying one and selling it after 3 years. They tend to hold their price a lot better than a Mercedes or a BMW.

That makes them a great choice for lease companies. Lease companies are popular for company cars in e.g. the Netherlands and the UK. EV adoption in that market is very high because of this reason. I agree it makes less sense for private ownership; though the lack of hassle associated with ownership is worth something to some people as well.

Fully charged recently did an episode on second hand value of EVs. Basically, lease cars are sold in auctions and they indeed hold their value amazingly well. Most EVs produced since 2012 are still on the road and are still very decent value.

There are definitely reasons leasing is appealing, dealing with trade ins and resale can be a big headache.

I tend to hang onto vehicles for 7+ years regardless so it’s not a big issue here.

Modem 3 a premium sedan, well idiots will be idiots I guess, carry on the torch.

That's just cleverly chosen comparison point. The only "premium" thing about Teslas is their price. They have laughably low quality compared to top BMW or Audi models.

Why is Model 3 even considered as a premium? What makes it premium comparing to established German holy trinity (BMW, Merc, Audi)? It's average car at best, and with its notorious build quality standards it's not even an average.

As noted elsewhere, I've put 70,000 miles on my Model 3. After driving a 328i for 20 years, the Tesla is more fun in every way.

As for build quality, my maintenance so far is $850 for a windshield. Cuz... I drive it so fast all the time, pebbles chipped away at it until it cracked down the middle. That's it.

I can also attest that operating costs are 1/4 the BMW. Energy costs, yes, but also $0 for brake pads (I'm at 90% after 70k miles), $0 for fluids (no oil, brake fluid, transmission fluid, radiator flush, ...).

So reading your comment, what makes it premium? Fun and cheaper maintenance?

For reference, I put 230k miles on a 328i, 80k on an E430, 70k on a 2017 Model 3.

The good:

- Handling. Model 3 is sharper acceleration, flatter and faster curves, 4-wheel active traction control(<- this is amazing, it automatically corrects the car's position when breaking traction)

- Sound System. Model 3 sound system is better than either of the other two. Moreover, it actually improved since I bought it through software upgrades. They even download new firmware into the amplifiers.

- Comfort. The Tesla seat is amazingly comfortable. I drove for 9 hours on Sunday for example. Never felt fatigued, no soreness, no pressure points in my ass. In the other cars, which are also very comfortable, I'd at least have a sore lower back after that amount of time in the saddle.

- Charging: Since Tesla has a captive charge station network, charging is a non-event. Back in to the stall and plug it in. It's fast and getting faster. No credit card input to futz with. Note that I don't have experience using other systems, but I've seen them collocated with Tesla chargers and I've seen users struggle trying to figure out how to get the juice flowing.

The Not Good:

- If the window is rolled down when you close the door, you can hear that it's not secured within the door (not premium).

- The trunk doesn't lift when you unlatch it from the console (not premium).

- Some carpeted seams are overlaid rather than joined. That seemed to be a miss in premium.

Overall, I'd say they focused on the elements that matter most (drive, comfort, sound) and the lesser factors, while important, will be corrected over time (fingers crossed).

FWIW, I did not label it as Premium. I don't know what I'd label it as, cuz I think BEVs are a different enough experience to have their own label. Just trying to offer some objectivity in this thread.

You should still change the brake fluid every few years. I don't know what Tesla recommends but most car manufacturers recommend brake fluid flushes every 2-5 years (the Germans generally recommend 2 year intervals, GM generally recommends 5 year intervals, the Japanese brands seem to recommend 3 year intervals).

DOT 3, 4, and 5.1 fluid will absorb water on purpose and disperse it throughout the fluid. Over time if you do not flush out this water-contaminated fluid it'll start to cause corrosion inside the brake system.

Yes, I agree. Will do soon.

The price makes it premium

Let's call it bad value for money then

One interesting tidbit: they appear to be reporting a $272M in revenue from the sale of Bitcoin holdings

Interesting.. I didn't expect that.

This is interesting, I would have expected a loss. I recall MSTR had to report a loss in 2020 even though it went up a lot, due to how GAAP works with bitcoin. Basically if you buy bitcoin (or any property) at $X, then it dips to $Y, then goes back up to $Z, you have to report the difference between X and Y (purchase price - lowest point) as a GAAP loss.

That $272M number is proceeds from selling digital assets, not profits.

as in the sale of the btc itself.

I don't see where in this report

See the $272M "proceeds from sales of digital assets" in the statement of cash flows on page 26.

Bitcoin could crash at any time. They need to hedge against that.

any source for your claim ?

It went down more than 10% in the last two weeks? It's not based on anything substantial.

"Prices on things could go up or down." "PLEASE WHAT IS YOUR SOURCE ON THAT??"

They have cash balances, that’s quite a good hedge against Bitcoin going in either direction.

That's roughly 3000 cars sold in crypto at ~90k per car

This is a pretty big pivot from:

  "You can now buy a Tesla with Bitcoin... Tesla is using only internal & open source software & operates Bitcoin nodes directly. Bitcoin paid to Tesla will be retained as Bitcoin, not converted to fiat currency"

Turns out it will in fact be converted to fiat currency while Elon continues to pump his bags on Twitter.

  "What does the future hodl?"

In any other asset class this would be blatant, illegal market manipulation.

I believe this is what you call the ol' pump-n-dump.

It’s obvious with his pumping of doge coins.

What law specifically are you referring to? Can you link to it?

Totally. That would be the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and 18 U.S. Code Sections 371, 1341, 1343, 1348, and 1349. I’ll leave it as an exercise for you if you’d like to read the full text but an analysis is available as [1].

There’s a reason Tim Cook isn’t out on Twitter shilling the companies Apple has invested in while selling their shares. I’m led to believe Club Fed isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

[1] https://www.criminallawyergroup.com/practice-areas/securitie...

Did you read your own link? It about "pump and dump" schemes and explains that they are fundamentally about false positive statements.

"Generally, securities fraud occurs when someone makes a false or misleading positive statement about a company or the value of its stock, inducing others to make a financial decision based on that false statement."

This is Musk's exact defense - he very cleverly says nothing concretely positive about anything, and very specifically puts it in a public forum with Twitter.

It's quite brilliant, although maddening to folks with less of a stomach... which is why he's in the position he's in - he makes those grey-area decisions.

Where all of them add up in the future, only time will tell - but for now, results are squarely in his favor.

Cryptocurrency is not a stock and lots of people make predictions and bold statements about other things like gold and silver.

Nothing here would be significant if the other side of the equation wasn't people soaking up the slightest drip of nonsense and turning it into a frenzy of something they don't understand.

> Cryptocurrency is not a stock and lots of people make predictions and bold statements about other things like gold and silver.

Surely you have an example then of a publicly traded company picking up a pile of assets like gold or silver, talking them up on social media while selling them?

Would your blanket exception for crypto apply to security tokens or just utility tokens?

It’s interesting that you once again accuse people of not knowing what they’re talking about because they disagree with your opinions.

Your link stated that the core of securities fraud is about making false positive statements about a company or stock.

His statements were not false and not about a company or stock. It is debatable if they were even positive. Even your quote is only saying they wouldn't convert to USD and no time frame is given.

There is no "exception" here.

> It’s interesting that you once again accuse people of not knowing what they’re talking about because they disagree with your opinions.

This is a hallucination. I didn't accuse anyone of anything. I asked if you read your link since it directly contradicts what you are saying.

> His statements were not false and not about a company or stock. It is debatable if they were even positive.

Correct, it's not about a company or a stock, which is something I led with in my initial reply ("In any other asset class this would be..." -- which I have since learned applies unevenly to security types although for the record I was talking about stock). I haven't said he committed a crime, and I do not believe he has committed a crime.

I think it's pretty distasteful however to take advantage of the crypto community he claims to champion. Your claim he's not actively working them into a froth is certainly at best a generous take. [1]

> ...not about a company or stock. > There is no "exception" here.

This I do not believe to be entirely true. Some of the rules I linked, specifically the Securities Exchange Act, are written to apply to securities, not stock (which are of course a sub-type of security). I believe, and IANAL so this should be taken with a grain of salt, that security tokens should be covered by at least that law.

How about cryptos that represent stock, like the Tesla-stock backed coin Binance launched? That might just be a job for a judge to sort out.

> This is a hallucination. I didn't accuse anyone of anything.

I was making reference to past times you've specifically accused me of not understanding crypto. With that in mind, I read "nothing here would be significant if the other side of the equation wasn't people soaking up the slightest drip of nonsense and turning it into a frenzy of something they don't understand" as referring to me. If it did not, I apologize for misreading.

However, your characterization is once again neither charitable, nor particularly civil.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/ronshevlin/2021/02/21/how-elon-...

> I think it's pretty distasteful however to take advantage of the crypto community he claims to champion.

That's not what I replied to. You said it was a pump and dump and blatant illegal market manipulation.

> Your claim he's not actively working them into a froth is certainly at best a generous take. [1]

This is a lie and another hallucination since I never said anything even remotely close to this. You said it was 'blatant illegal market manipulation' and I showed you that what you linked contradicts that explicitly.

> However, your characterization is once again neither charitable, nor particularly civil.

lol, you literally lied and invented something I never said.

> That's not what I replied to. You said it was a pump and dump and blatant illegal market manipulation.

I literally quoted my self when I said it would be illegal in a different asset. And yeah, of course he’s manipulating the price, I even showed a study where they evaluated such. And yes in my opinion he’s pumping the price so he can exit higher.

> This is a lie and another hallucination since I never said anything even remotely close to this.

> lol, you literally lied and invented something I never said.

Pretty sure this isn’t within the spirit of site rules.

You’re welcome to disagree with me but you’ll have to be civil if you’d like me to engage. There are other venues for leveling baseless personal attacks.

I suspect at this point your only goal is to win an argument at all costs, and it’s not a good look, so I’ll leave you to it. Enjoy your day!

> Pretty sure this isn’t within the spirit of site rules.

Then don't do it.

I guess this is the 'attack how you say it stage'.

You said "Your claim he's not actively working them into a froth is certainly at best a generous take. "

Show me where I said that.

You said a tweet saying they would accept bitcoin is 'blatant illegal market manipulation' and a 'pump and dump'. All I did was quote your own source to show that there are no laws being broken. Someone saying they accept a currency is not illegal no matter what happens to the price or how much it upsets you.

Quoting your own words and pointing out that you are for some reason fabricating arguments is the opposite of being uncivil. Don't make false hyperbolic statements out of frustration if you don't like having to back them up.

> I guess this is the 'attack how you say it stage'.

Like I said, I'm happy to engage with you once you decide to abide by site rules :) I'm not interested in engaging in a conversation with someone accusing me historically (and apparently, presently) of not knowing what I'm talking about and hallucinating. If you wish people to engage with you, do so civilly.

Your personal attacks are neither acceptable nor welcome, and your goal is clearly to engage in pedantry for the purposes of winning an argument rather than exploring an idea. That's not what this site is for.

Have a great day! :)

What would you call you saying I said something that I didn't say?

> Nothing here would be significant if the other side of the equation wasn't people soaking up the slightest drip of nonsense and turning it into a frenzy of something they don't understand.

But people do, and that's why we have laws against crooks and scams. Just because people are stupid, exploiting their stupidity doesn't make you less of a criminal.

In the case of crypto, the laws haven't caught up yet, and they need to do it fast.

Announcing that your company accepts a currency is not 'blatant and illegal market manipulation' or a pump and dump or a scam no matter how ridiculous people's reaction is.

No matter how upset you are, this is just a question of legality.

Read this re full self driving: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26519357

I've never seen a more blatant example of securities fraud than that. And yet he gets away with it over and over. Year after year.

Where's my full-self-driving taxi? I want to buy one and rent it out and get rich! /s

And for comic relief, see the true state of FSD "beta". Be sure to watch the videos: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26519244

A) Tesla Inc's own purchase of bitcoin's were traded at a profit, this has nothing to do with bitcoin they earned from people buying cars with bitcoin. That's not a pivot from anything.

B) Voluntarily disclosing you are buying something, which Elon and Tesla Inc did, has nothing to do with selling it. There is no regulation in the securities or futures market that would have changed that. You are suggesting a fictional higher standard exclusively for cryptocurrencies. In the securities market, disclosure for all trades exists when the owner is more than 5% or 10% of the total supply. There is no regulation that would have applied here even if crypto was regulated like securities or futures, except possibly the disclosure that they bought bitcoin into the company balance sheet because in 2020 that would be considered a material change for any equity investor. They filed the 8-K and posted on twitter to avoid non-disclosure scrutiny, and they get a nice pump out of it from people that derive their confidence in cryptocurrencies from S&P 500 CEOs.

C) You, again. Creating negative conflated conclusions for benign crypto topics, again. Why do you do that? There is a mild chuckle to be had about Tesla goosing earnings by flipping their bitcoin within a quarter, but adding all that extra fluff onto it? Why?

Would this be okay to do as a private individual? I'm just thinking that if he doesn't mention any of his companies and just say something like: "I like this stock/crypto", if that would still be illegal and/or market manipulation.

Then some days later, make payment available with Bitcoin.

Not revenue, rather $272M cash flow from Digital assets. They also spent $1.5Bn in purchases. So net is ~1.2bn.

They are pretty transparent about that in the beginning of the report: "Net cash outflow of $1.2B related to Bitcoin in Q1"

Elon claims they sold the 10% only to prove the liquidity of bitcoin and he himself hasn't sold any of his personal holdings[1]

1. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1386821144037236737

Ah yes, I remember falling for the "we only sold to prove our liquidity" back in my young and naive investment years.

Imagine buying $1.5 BB of something and not knowing if it's liquid.

You're either grossly incompetent and should be kept away from all money, or an ARK investing analyst.

Hence you sell someone to prove to your observers that it is, indeed, liquid.

> We believe that a vision-only system is ultimately all that is needed for full autonomy. Our AI-based software architecture has been increasingly reliant on cameras, to the point where radar is becoming unnecessary earlier than expected. As a result, our FSD team is fully focused on evolving to a vision-based autonomous system and we are nearly ready to switch the US market to Tesla Vision.

This is a huge gamble IMHO. If you have access to LIDAR and RADAR, why not use them?

Possibly patent constrained?

Unnecessary cost and complexity are the reasons Tesla has quoted before. One less sensor to buy, or replace when it breaks.

I’m not convinced. There’s good reasons they’re the lone player in the self driving space with this vision only play.

> When radar and vision disagree, which one do you believe? Vision has much more precision, so better to double down on vision than do sensor fusion.

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1380796939151704071

As I’ve commented above, “conflicting sensors” doesn’t make much sense as an argument. If sensors A and B conflicted, you could just ignore sensor B and get performance at least as good as just having sensor A.

Does sensor B have enough other benefits to outweigh the costs of adding it? I don’t know, but that’s the actual crux of this problem.

Sensor B “enhancing” sensor A is the exact same situation as a sensor conflict. How do you tell them apart? You’re oversimplifying the issue as if it was a matter of simple addition.

I don’t see how “enhancing” and “conflict” are the same. As gkop pointed out, the two sensor types may have different ranges of view, or may agree about situations where just sensor A may be uncertain.

It's a shame people at Boeing seem to have the same outlook on this question. Cost a few hundred people their lives recently. When two sensors disagree, you don't know which one is right, but you know there's something wrong. You're going to fail, but at least you can fail safe. With only one sensor, you don't have that option.

Hence my question, "How much precision do you need to keep from running into a parked truck?"

How much precision do you need to keep from running into a truck?

Since Lidar doesn't use moving parts I imagine it should be easy to make it last longer than the life of the vehicle.

You are confusing radar and lidar I think. True solid state automotive lidar is largely still in a research state. Most 'solid state' lidar sensors actually have very tiny moving parts in the form of MEMS assemblies. Even more delicate than a macro mechanical assembly.

But for radar, correct, those modules are available as a commodity for automotive lifescales.

The general problem is that simple, cost effective radar is low precision while expensive, complex lidar is high precision.

Looks like the 2022 Wey SUV from Great Wall Motors will have a true solid state lidar from Ibeo / ZF.

Because cars are currently being sold as FSD ready so you can't ever release LIDAR/RADAR after the fact.

Current Teslas are already fitted with radar, though Tesla wants to remove it from future models.

I'm not entirely convinced it's a good idea, but one convincing argument I've seen is that sensor fusion is hard and it's not a priori clear which sensor to believe when they provide conflicting information. It's entirely possible that they get better predictive accuracy from vision-only data then in the analogous situations with vision+radar data.

I don't find this argument convincing at all. Just ignore the lidar in situations where lidar and vision conflict and you have the original decision.

They probably started without lidar due to the cost (Tesla is one of few companies actually selling cars to customers, who are sensitive to price). The price of lidar has come down, but I would guess it requires a fair amount of expensive rearchitecture to add it in now, and they haven't bitten the bullet yet.

Elon has said many times they would use Lidar if they thought it was needed / beneficial. In fact he and the SpaceX team designed a Lidar into the Dragon spacecraft to help it dock with the ISS (which is obviously a HIGHLY sensitive operation with extremely strict rules), and he said it was perfect for that scenario.

He was asked point blank if they would use Lidar as Tesla even if they were free... and he said no. In their opinion it's simply not the right approach to generate photons and read them as they come back. It's preferable to simply read the photons that are already coming in.

"Just ignore the lidar in situations where lidar and vision conflict and you have the original decision."

Then why have lidar? If it's only purpose is to agree with vision or you just discard it, then why even have it?

Hypothetically, 1. Improved confidence when both signals agree 2. Improved field and range of view

I’m arguing against the idea that conflicting sensors is an issue. Clearly you can do no worse with sensors A and B than with just sensor A.

You might want to not have sensor B to lower the cost (as I suggested). Or you might want to have both sensors A and B because the provide some synergies (as gkop pointed out, better range of view, increased confidence, etc.). But it’s definitely not enough to just argue that the sensors may conflict.

Sounds like a good reason to dump LIDAR. if vision is good enough to always defer to, why bother with something contradicting?

See my other comment. I’m making a counter argument to the specific claim that conflicting sensors is an issue. I have no idea if the added benefit of Lidar outweighs the costs, but it doesn’t seem logical that “conflicting signals” could be an issue.

The industry has been sensor fusion for decades. Training Autopilot neural networks to hallucinate road parts is easy but doing uncertainty estimation on simple radar measurements is hard? Also you still have to fuse the data from the multiple cameras.

I'm almost doubting my entire knowledge in the field now when all of a sudden everyone just accepts that "sensor fusion is hard" statement.

I'd imagine sensor fusion in this context isn't a singular problem right? It seems entirely plausible that for Tesla's system, it's straightforward to integrate cameras where the resolution is known and data is homogenous in a certain way, and that it's hard to integrate and use radar data into that system.

The Model 3 has a ARS-4B radar and these things usually already do perception for you, so the output is a list of vehicle velocity and pose. Given what I know about Autopilot , I don't see how is that hard to fuse. And I doubt the supplier of the radar (Continental) gave Tesla raw data access.

I just think there's more to the story than we're getting. Impossible to tell for an outsider though.

like 90%+ of living beings on the planet use eyes to navigate. Seems to work for them. None use LIDAR or RADAR, only a few use SONAR.

By that reasoning, shouldn’t the fastest living beings move around on wheels instead of legs?

Just because something works for evolution/nature, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a simpler/better engineering alternative.

We have spend hopelessly many years trying to build machines that walk — Now Boston Dynamics seem to be there. But it is really complicated compared to wheels, and their machines are not running at 2-300 km/h.

Birds do exist and can reach speeds up to 200 mph (320 km/h).

Someone disputes that birds can fly fast and do visual navigation?

https://birdsarentreal.com/

Computers sometimes need additional aid to compensate for the lack of human brain.

> If you have access to LIDAR and RADAR, why not use them?

I think LIDAR is a very expensive part (~$10,000). Also, it is difficult to integrate with the car's design such that it does not make the car ugly. Tesla probably does not want to do a separate self-driving testing fleet, instead they want to use the existing Teslas on road to get training data. So they cannot use LIDAR in all cars sold to users.

I am sure if fully functional LIDAR units magically start selling for $100-$500 Tesla will start using them.

It is a gamble, but also betting on LIDAR is a gamble, as it could be a pit to fall in if it turns out not to be beneficial. The big benefit of LIDAR is, it gives you very good 3D data about your environment. Unfortunately, it completely misses a lot of information which is essential for driving and actually a lot of our traffic rules are based on things which you cannot detected with LIDAR: traffic signs, traffic lights and so on (you could detect the sign itself with high precision, but not what it reads).

This means, LIDAR could just be additional sensor data augmenting the camera information. But it adds a huge cognitive load when combining the data. Besides the costs of the LIDAR system itself, it adds to the computational costs. Once the 3D-data from the cameras only is "good enough", you might get better results by spending the available compute resources rather on improving the analysis of the visual data alone. And the 3D data Tesla seems to be getting from the cameras seems to be pretty good already.

The big elephant in the room isn't to recognize a road sign correctly, it is to decide, whether it applies to the car or a different lane, road or whether it is actually a burger king logo :). There LIDAR might be just a distraction.

It will be interesting to see how the autonomic car race will pan out. Especially, when competitors are using different strategies. That als ensures, that not everyone is going into the wrong direction.

Because that adds cost. The game here is producing a car that is cheap to manufacture that can drive itself without having to have a data center in the trunk and a large lidar bump on the roof.

The gamble here is on the software, not the hardware. All the accidents that happen are not a failure of sensors not sensing but of software not detecting what the sensors captured. We're talking cars crashing into things on a clear day. Cars not recognizing situations that a human would recognize from the captured video. Etc. They need to solve that anyway. Regardless of whether they have lidar or not.

Other companies like Waymo pushing the Lidar agenda are also behind on their schedules to launch autonomous driving. But at least they have actual driver less cars on the road right now driving actual passengers around in very select markets.

Either way, this is more or less a greenfield market without a lot of contenders shipping actual products yet. So, Tesla can afford to spend more time developing this market. If they nail this somehow, eventually, it will be a big growth driver for them.

Not sure if the cost and the "lidar bump" will still be arguments in the future. Heck, the latest iPhone has a lidar sensor integrated! Surely with a lot less capabilities than what you would need in a car - but it proves that it can be built small and cheap. And I would say that more data from sensors that sense different things will always result in better decisions by autonomous driving software.

This is just my personal belief: but I really don't think an AI advanced enough to actually do self-driving will have trouble getting all the information it needs from cameras.

It seems to me that accurately determining signs, construction work, pedestrians, bikes, and even the intention/direction of these, is way harder than just reconstructing a 3D space from the cameras. I think the neural nets will have to do this internally anyway to be able to predict the direction a pedestrian is about to walk.

So I think LIDAR may be a benefit for limited self-driving in the short term. If it's a benefit in the long term remains to be seen, but there's good arguments that Teslas gamble will pay off, as they're allowed to use all their focus on the part of the AI that's most important for daily driving.

It's sort of fascinating the segmentation thing here.

They put it into the "premium sedan" segment when considering sales vs. competition. But in the same presentation, you'll see that most (I want to say two-thirds by eyeballing the chart) of the customers buying Teslas are trading in non-premium brands.

Is that notable? Most car purchases are upgrades from less expensive vehicles. Are BMW trade-ins less likely to be non-premium?

I guess it's possible that Tesla is different here, though if it is, doesn't that argue to the brand's strength? It's getting people who wouldn't normally drop $50k on a car to open their purses.

Do you think Apple regrets not buying Tesla ~2017-2018 when they had the chance, given indications they are working on an Apple Car? Why or why not?

Do corporations experience emotions?

Yes

This will keep the philosophers busy for a few 1000 years.

I would say no, they don't regret it, because there'd be too much of a personality clash between Musk and the rest of Apple leadership - and if they bought Telsa and then outed Musk, what's the point of buying Tesla?

As someone who never really liked either one (though I did buy a Tesla), Musk is nearly a clone of Jobs in affect and attitude and reality distortion effect.

All those people who are SO UPSET about the spin regarding FSD, for example, are just echoing what all us folks on Linux PCs were saying about Macs through the 90's and early 00's. Remember when the Altivec G4 was a Supercomputer on a Chip despite being slower than a P3 you could buy at Sears? Same deal.

Frankly I think had it happened, Musk would be running Apple today.

Except that Jobs and Apple are all about secrecy, and while they may hype up things they don’t announce things until they exist. Elon’s Twitter account is practically the inverse of Apple.

The secrecy thing was very much a part of the iPhone era. Jobs oversold the Apple III for months before its underwhelming release decades earlier, and the culture he left behind spent years promising a 68040 machine that Motorola couldn't deliver.

It's true that "surprise release" was a Jobs thing where it isn't a Musk thing. I just don't know how definitional that really is -- at the end of the day they're selling very different products with different sales processes. My point was just that they both could lie with a straight face and make 60% of the audience believe them on a reliable basis.

> Musk is nearly a clone of Jobs in affect and attitude and reality distortion effect.

Eh, Musk has more negative tendencies than Jobs, especially related to his public behavior and honesty. Whatever you might think of Jobs, whenever he issued a firm statement it came true. iPhones were always released on schedule.

Musk is years late and many miles short on almost every product he announces. Full Self Driving was supposed to be a thing two years ago. The Tesla Model 3 was supposed to be $35,000 and was also released years late. Tesla Semi? Nonexistent. The Tesla SolarRoof that was the reason for the acquisition of SolarCity never got out of Beta.

Jobs also never had the same "$420 funding secured"/"bet you a signed dollar he's a pedophile" behavior Musk has had either. Steve Jobs was definitely a immanently flawed person, but he didn't exhibit the same degree of complete disregard of the consequences of his actions as Musk does, at least not at comparable ages.

Not trying to defend Musk, but his goals are orders of magnitudes harder than what Jobs had to face.

Musk is on a mission to Mars and is scared of anything that might delay his ultimate goal.

Maybe, but we shouldn't defend people's behavior based on their goals. Musk has a massive habit of either stretching the truth, deceiving, outright lying -- whatever you want to call it -- that Jobs didn't. It's a very important distinction.

If a kid growing up in technology asked me which one should they try to emulate more, I would say Steve Jobs without a doubt. There are far less moral failings you have to defend within his biography.

And two, we should definitely be incredibly skeptical of someone willing to achieve certain goals at all costs. Like ... is going to Mars even a good goal? It's certainly far from obvious that it is. Someone willing to lie, cheat and steal in order to achieve that is not someone I want in my society.

I think Musk will always be a controversial figure.

"Musk has a massive habit of either stretching the truth, deceiving, outright lying -- whatever you want to call it -- that Jobs didn't."

How do we know it's not his honest belief? That said, I don't think anyone takes (or should take) Musk's promises keeping a straight face when it comes to delivery timelines.

I doubt there's anyone who genuinely thinks he is not a major forward pushing force in cleantech and space industry.

I believe, in the long run, especially cleantech is likely to be a very important component battling climate change and local pollution. This could very well be about humanity's survival. I'm not saying Musk is somehow single-handedly responsible for this or even that his concrete contribution has been much yet, but what I am saying is that he's showing the industry a way for all this not only to be doable but to also be profitable. And that's the only way I see cleantech going forward — profit.

In even longer run we really need to get into space and learn how to live there. Both for not having all of the eggs in the same basket, but also to develop true steady state recycling.

Now whether or not Musk delivers on these remains to be seen. At least so far he has been one of the greatest hopes. Not the only one, mind you, but he really has pushed space industry and EV industry forward.

That said, I fully agree immoral behavior should not be tolerated.

How do we define how much achievement discount we should apply based on other behavior? Should the negative always totally eclipse the positive?

That fact that people still write this shit with a straight face makes me want to become a hermit and leave this world behind...

Can you elaborate? I'm pretty convinced that's Musk's true motivation. He put his personal fortunes at stake based on this conviction, nearly losing it all.

Seems crazy for someone to do that unless it's truly their greatest passion.

His COVID tweets almost certainly lead to people taking unnecessary risks and dying alone and intubated. Fuck Elon.

I wouldn't put much blame on him specifically, but yeah, he was enormously irresponsible with a lot of his communication during the pandemic.

Hated those tweets. He did seem to realize his mistake, but not to be man enough to actually admit it.

I’d you’re going to turn this into a competition you need to mention the child that Jobs abandoned?

Elon Musk is not a stellar husband or father. The stuff described here is as bad as anything Jobs ever did: https://www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/a5380/millionaire-start...

Nope. I think Apple knows this is overpriced and buying a company is very different from buying a stock. Intrinsic value is fraction of the market price and prevailing price Apple likely had to pay. My guess is Elon also asked for a board seat plus executive management role. Me thinks Tim was smart to pass despite how it appears right now.

No, Elon would have never worked inside of Apple's culture IMO.

Why would they? They make so much money it's not even funny. Tesla is also a very different beast then iPhones, who knows if it would have been as successful.

For the car and battery engineering experience and factories I guess. But I guess Apple can outsource to a car assembler like Magna or Foxconn instead.

It was always a "what the hell does Apple do with all of it's capital" question. They figured that out though -- just buy back stock. Anyone accusing them of being uncreative there has to argue that the hundreds of billions that they returned to investor hands would be better allocated with some forced merger like buying Tesla. It's not a failure to return money to shareholders. It's a recognition of the limitation of your ability to allocate capital.

If they don't regret it they are absolute morons. The value gained alone is incredible. Literally nobody with half a brain would say no to this deal now.

Apple has been working on the Apple car for year and years. Whenever that happens, having the Tesla tech and manufacturing there would clearly be asset.

Not to mention that I would be a huge amount of money on Tesla self driving Tech being far better then what Apple is fiddling around with.

So in 2021/Q1 no Model S/X were produced and only 2030 were sold (-83%). What happened?

They have refreshed the Model S and X. So no cars produced while updating production lines

Part of the fun is how Elon has to discuss everything from battery technology to ‘roof protuberances’.

Why did Model S/X production drop to 0?

Model S and X are getting major refresh soon, Tesla stopped production of older spec while switching to new one. First deliveries of new Model S and X are coming "very soon".

> Net cash outflow of $1.2B related to Bitcoin in Q1

What is this?

Bitcoin? I can tell you all about it!

Only joking, Tesla bought $1.5b in Bitcoin back in February: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/08/tesla-buys-1point5-billion-i...

Why is solar deployment measured in MW and not # of installs? It doesn't seem like the best metric for measuring growth.

Presumably because price is basically per kW, and installations can vary significantly in size?

They only offer 4 sizes. They could break it down by # of installs per size:

https://www.tesla.com/support/energy/solar-panels/going-sola...

It makes no sense to break down the value of installed capacity that everyone will understand into four different meaningless values.

Not to mention that order mix is almost always guaranteed to be a highly prized secret that companies rarely give out. You don't see Apple breaking down iPhone shipments by their variants in detail.

There are two solar installs going in my county just north of me. One is 5000 acres and one is 3500 acres. If I buy a 10kW system for my house I could increase the number of systems by 50%!

Are they Tesla?

Sure, but Tesla Solar generally advertises to smaller customers. If they get one big deal, its addition might overwhelm the sustainable growth in their business. They've definitely had multiple situations like that before with their energy storage business.

more importantly, why is it in any economic to install solar cells on a home instead of at scale on a solar farm?

Same reason you have heating units in your house/building rather than at a municipal heating plant … people want to buy self-sufficiency for their house/building, and it's easier than scoping/building large-scale projects and running wires and dealing with municipalities.

self-sufficiency has a cost, hence my "economic" question. Also, steam transmission is way less efficient than electricity transmission.

It does appear people are willing to pay those costs :)

Also, electricity transmission appears to be much more expensive than generation. On my PG&E bills in California, delivery costs 2.5x as much per kWh as generation for 100% renewable power.

One benefit of rooftop solar is reduced transmission losses, but that isn’t usually enough to offset the costs from small scale/custom installation work. People like having them on their own rooftops for self-reliance, to flex on their neighbors, and to feel like part of the solution to climate change.

those aren't strictly "economic" reasons.

Economic for who?

Solar farms charge us grid retail prices everyday. Here in Australia, my payback time on home installed solar ended up to be 3.5 years. Not a bad investment.

for the economy as a whole. In the US, would anyone other than Prius drivers install solar panels if there were no tax credit?

For two basic reasons:

- the home owner owns the roof top and it is already there and unused, for a solar farm, the energy company needs to find and acquire land.

- the home owner uses most of the produced electricity at cost rate, a grid company has a lot of additional costs a home owner does not have, like operating a grid, ensuring service 24x7.

land is cheap. especially in the desert where there's lot of sun, and not much else.

"Not much else", like no customers for the electricity produced? /s. Yes, there are regions for example in the US, where putting up solar cells would be very cheap. But then you have to run power lines to where your customers are. That can be 1000 kilometers or more. Doable, but that certainly affects the economy of things. And yes, I think the US should put large solar farms into its deserts. And of course, there are countries, where land is not cheap and there might not even be deserts. Here in Germany for example, basically all land is somehow used.

My man Elon day traded Bitcoin with Tesla $$ sitting in the bank, memed it up on twitter and showed it as TSLA profit. TSLA share holders should thank everybody who bought bitcoin at 60k.

Earnings beat but I wonder how this whole mega-growth story keeps being reiterated now despite flat revenue for 3 years. Don't get me wrong, I love Tesla and what they are doing for accelerating the transition to sustainable energy. That company is just priced to perfection.

> flat revenue for 3 years ???

2018 - $21.5B

2019 - $24.5B

2020 - $31.5B

2021 (annualized) - probably $35-$40 B

That’s pretty flat compared to the share valuation.

It’s still 30% annual growth.

Before that Period Tesla had low share growth, after 2017 there was catchup.

Also, revenue doesn't capture the whole story. Share price indicates something about longer run growth potential and margin development.

This is peak HN, calling 30% annual growth on a $750 billion company flat

The $750 billion valuation (approaching the combined value of other car companies) is precisely why I said that it was flat compared to the valuation growth, the valuation has grown about 1300% in the last few years.

Also the vast majority of those profits are not car sales but regulatory credits and Bitcoin sales, they are barely in profit on selling cars, which makes the valuation even more absurdly optimistic. IMO Tesla will do well and get to perhaps 30% of the global car market and some of energy, but that still doesn’t justify their valuation today, let alone any future growth.

> they are barely in profit on selling cars

Did you even see the earnings report yesterday? I don't care about non-cash expenses (Stock-based compensation of 614M).

They made a profit of $1.05 billion out of which ~102M was from the bitcoin sale and 518M was from reg credits. In what world is ~$430 million in a single quarter "barely anything"?

Greater than 60% of their profit is still from one-offs which are likely to go away soon (or even become liabilities like the bitcoin), their PE ratio is > 1000, and they have only just turned the corner and started profiting from car sales; in previous years they made a loss, which is fine in a growing company, but they are not some super-profitable company which justifies their valuation - their valuation is a projection of future growth, and I don't think it's unreasonable to say their valuation is very optimistic given their sales and position in the market.

I stand corrected. Thank you! Still not exactly mega-growth. Especially compared to the share price.

We're used to growth in orders of magnitude in the tech industry, but keep in mind that in the end, this is an automobile company, whose business has side benefits in battery tech. Automotive is a stagnating (and at times shrinking) industry with relatively low margins, again unlike tech. Opportunities for overall growth are rare, as market saturation is quite high. In that environment, a steady 20%+ growth is respectable, to put it very lightly.

Share price is a whole other discussion, of course.

How is 100% growth in 3-4 years not mega growth in a capital intense industry?

Revenue doubling over 3 years isn't mega growth?

Tesla isn't some start up that just IPO'd, it's one of the world's largest companies. Very few companies manage to double revenue in 3 years.

So you might next claim that revenue only doubled but stock price 10x'd over that time period. Well the reason is pretty simple, an investor who buys Tesla before its revenue grows will enjoy a better return on their investment compared to an investor who waits until afterwards to invest.

When investing, you want to look to the future potential of the company, not its past. If every 3 years Tesla manages to double their revenue, then after 6 years Tesla's revenue will match what you think is a reflection of today's stock price. At that point it will be too late to capitalize off of Tesla's stock price.

So either Tesla fails to continue its growth, maybe people end up losing interest in electric vehicles and other projects Tesla is working on, or maybe its competitors manage to produce a better electric vehicle and end up with superior battery technology... or Tesla will continue to dominate this sector, will continue innovating in this area, and in so doing will capture new segments of the electric vehicle economy that very few people are able to appreciate today.

The stock market is risky business, no one has a crystal ball, but the market is indicating that electric vehicles are going to be the future, and Tesla is the dominant player in this emerging market.

It helps when you have the global media in your pocket

> Tesla isn't some start up that just IPO'd, it's one of the world's largest companies.

Based on what?

Employees? 70K is not even on the chart. (Top 10? 500K+)

Revenue? $31.5B is also not even on the chart. (Top 50? $130B+)

Profit? $800M, again, not even on the chart. (Top 10? $24B).

Market cap? This is the only area where Tesla broaches the top ten, and it has nothing to do with being a "large" company.

The one factor that you conveniently dismiss (market cap) is usually what people look at when talking about company size.

I don't think anyone would call Berkshire Hathaway a large company - or be surprised if it doubles it's revenue in 3 years. I think Teslas stock is somewhere in the space between VW and Berkshire Hathaway, the value is already accounting for a future, much larger company. Similar to some recent IPOs, like Coinbase.

Did you make a typo? You don't think Berkshire Hathaway is a large company?

Also maybe you personally wouldn't be surprised if BRK didn't double revenue over three years, but people who are in the financial space would be absolutely shocked if it did so, considering the last time BRK managed to double it's revenue over a three year period was from 1988 to 1991.

It’s mega growth for companies that move atoms instead of electrons.

Their guidance actually indicates more then $40 Billion. 2021 was a down year for Tesla. Given that Q1 usually the worst Quarter they made $10 Billion I would expect significantly over $40 billion this year.

And its hard to see how 2022 will not continue this, 2022 will bring two huge new factories to full scale, Berlin and Austin. It will also see launch of Cybertruck and Semi at least.

The list of companies that can grow at that rate at that size is very small.

Their automotive margin (excluding credits) has improved significantly over this period. Improving unit margins with improving volume is a powerful combination and Tesla, they are only just really establishing true global scale and global production. Their profitability has a good outlook as well.

Tesla is now entirely valued on the "self driving taxi fleet" and "selling self driving software" stories panning out for the valuation to work. If Tesla doesn't get autonomus self driving, or if it gets beat to market by someone, it's got no way to justify valuation.

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