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Comment by throwaway0a5e | Hacker News Reader

Nissan wasn't "winning" like Toyota was.

While Toyota was raking in wheelbarrows of easy cash from moneyed buyers Nissan was selling Altimas for bottom dollar to people who were rolling in negative equity from a Dodge Journey.

This is standard BigCo stuff. You get a lead and you lose that lead because you don't jump hard enough onto the next big thing because you don't want to divert resources over the thing you're currently winning with. IBM, Boeing, Ford, Microsoft, they've all been down this road.

Nissan never had that lead so they had nothing to stop them from going into EVs deep enough to grab a good share of the market.

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Nissan beat Tesla by years with the first mass market EV with the Leaf. In some ways the 2022 Leaf is still a much better value than the Tesla model 3 if you don't need frequent fast charging. The price is a lot lower and the reliability and build quality are excellent.

The Leaf can fast charge and this is now included in all models, but it can only suck down 50KW vs Tesla now being able to draw 100+KW. It also uses ChaDEMO which is a fading standard, though still very common where I live. Apparently there are some converters in the works to let the Leaf charge off CCS and perhaps even the Tesla network in the future, but they'll probably cost hundreds of dollars since apparently a DC fast charge mega-dongle is not trivial.

In other news: there is now a market for dongles for cars. I have seen the future and it has a dongle.

I think people don't really like plug-ins unless its Tesla and has a fast charge. That is all I can think of. Tesla ride quality is also pretty good if everything is going right, can't comment on a bolt or leaf.

Depends on your driving habits. If you are a heavy driver or a frequent road tripper I'd recommend getting a Tesla or at least a car with faster charging than the Leaf.

In Europe they've standardized the chargers.

I agree. We have a Bolt, and until recently a Tesla. If I were buying again right now, I'd get a Bolt (if there wasn't a stop-sale, at least). When we got ours, the brand-new price was $24K. For 258 miles of range, and basic 50kW fast charging, that's a ridiculous deal. For a Model 3, I'd be into it damn near twice that.

I wonder how this all works out long term for Tesla. From a first principles standpoint, they don't really have much. The Nissan Leaf is a workhorse. But Tesla is killing it these days.

Interestingly, at work we have some DC charging stations. The "Tesla" stations are actually a ChaDEMO Chargepoint station coupled to a Tesla "dongle". So the dongle not only exists, but seems to be very feasible. It just needs to work in the other direction.

Newer Nissans are supposed to use the CCS standard (if Nissan gets its crap together and actually launches the Arya).

Yeah what I mean it's not the government to blame for Toyota ineptitude.

Or you could argue the government assigned Toyota for Plan A with Hydrogen/FCEV path and Nissan was assigned to the backup Nuclear/BEV route.

Honestly, with Toyota clout the opposite could likely happen: it assigned the government of Japan to promote Hydrogen.

Hm, possibly. Strongest Hydrogen push was like 15-20 years ago. Pivotal change to BEV right now is a trainwreck to current manager classes at the height of their career.

Mitsubishi also invested to BEV by i-MiEV and PHEV by Outlander PHEV. Finally they acquired by Nissan.

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