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Comment by tootie | Hacker News Reader

It's kinda shocking how poorly traditional auto manufacturers are failing at keeping pace with Tesla, but I think that's not going to last forever. Many have already committed to ending their production of gasoline vehicles in very short order.

I think a good example to look at is how the hybrid market has shifted since the Prius. Toyota blew everyone out of the water for years, but sales have plummeted in recent years as competition has caught up. Rivian has even less of cushion since the electric F-150 is due to hit dealerships next year.

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Tesla sales process features up to 95% less slimy car salespeople. I’d pay a premium to not have to deal with the local Ford/GM/etc dealership, who are all about scamming me into overpriced financing deals.

Traditional auto manufacturers need to bring the buying process to this century, but that would sour their existing sales pipeline. I believe this conondrum is called ”local optimum”

>t scamming me into overpriced financing deals.

Um, you are admitting that you can be scammed. If you don't understand loans, yes, you can be scammed. Don't admit that.

The last new car I bought: I walked into the lot, said I want that one, and took the lowest interest loan for 48 months. I didn't want a 72 month loan. I didn't want an extended warranty. I was done with the sales person in 15 minutes, and done with the finance department in 45 minutes.

It's all in how you manage the situation. If you waffle and flake and can't decide, or don't understand loans or pointless "extras", then you're toast.

I just bought a car. I wanted to pay cash, and made it clear I would come back with the a cashier check the next day when my bank open. They said in order to “lock” the car in for me overnight, that I’d have to sign up for a loan (that I could just pay off immediately). It took a bunch of back and forth to make it clear I just wanted to pay cash and I’d be back tomorrow with a check. They finally relented and said ok we’ll put a complimentary hold on the car and accepted the fact I was paying cash. Then of course after finalizing that they pushed a bunch of vastly overpriced maintenance programs and severely misrepresented the expected costs of said maintenance if I didn’t purchase the plan. At least they had the courtesy to give me the time to quickly run the numbers in order to verify it was a terrible deal for me.

The whole point is that buying a Tesla doesn’t involve this pointless, anti-consumer, borderline lying, slimey process. People shouldn’t have to worry about being scammed when making one of the largest purchases in their life. The traditional dealership model is terrible for your average consumer. Why on earth are you defending that?

You could have just said, have a nice day, and left.

Were you that desperate for a car immediately?

I'm not defending slimy car salespeople, but I'm not siding with your wishy-washy behavior.

So I could go to another dealership and have the exact same experience?

This is such a weird hill to die on.

Where would the person go? For most cars, you have to go to a cars salesperson

It is incredibly alarming to me that your message is "Don't let yourself get scammed" rather than "Yeah, car dealerships should stop trying to scam people."

It's both. You need to advocate for yourself and not just decide to be a victim, and the government needs to regulate many, many predatory industries because half the population is below average intelligence, and, well, I believe a government is supposed to lookout for its citizenry (including when I get too old to understand tech and people try to take advantage of me, which they will). Yeah, go ahead and call me a nanny-state liberal. I'm OK with that.

Needing to push through people who are trying to scam you is very unpleasant for many people. Others get a kick out of it, I get that, but it just not being a part of the process at all is a big win for me.

Allegedly slimy Tesla has been scamming people into paying thousands of dollars for a useless FSD package for years.

The coast-to-coast test drive of a fully self-driving Tesla is four years late and counting.

When you go to buy a Tesla the online order form will ask if you want FSD. You click "no". That's the extent of it. They don't try to push it on you, convince you it's a good deal, or call you a sucker for saying "no". It's just an option like any other.

You’re a sucker if you pass on this opportunity of making money!

When true self-driving is approved by regulators, it will mean that you will be able to summon your Tesla from pretty much anywhere. Once it picks you up, you will be able to sleep, read or do anything else enroute to your destination. You will also be able to add your car to the Tesla shared fleet just by tapping a button on the Tesla phone app and have it generate income for you while you're at work or on vacation, significantly offsetting and at times potentially exceeding the monthly loan or lease cost. This dramatically lowers the true cost of ownership to the point where almost anyone could own a Tesla. Since most cars are only in use by their owner for 5% to 10% of the day, the fundamental economic utility of a true self-driving car is likely to be several times that of a car which is not.

https://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part-deux

And it is ONLY 2 years away!

I live in NYC. If I could tell me car "go find parking" it would be a miracle.

Yep, and most people don't buy it and recommend against it for others too.

Base AP is really good on its own anyway.

Traditional automakers move in 10 year cycles largely due to safety, support, and the huge volumes they will incur. TSLA can't touch the volume of the top 3. Funny how people forget that. I believe the top 3 are letting TSLA spend all the money and make all mistakes working on the infrastructure before they swoop in and make EVs a commodity instead of a luxury product.

TSLA absolutely deserves credit for making this happen, but like the namesake Nikolai Tesla did the hard work and Edison swooped in a took all the credit.

> TSLA can't touch the volume of the top 3

What an odd thing to say. They are at around 1 million cars/year versus Ford's 6 million/year, GM's 6-8 million/year, and Chrysler's 2 million/year.

So Tesla is in the same ballpark of volume as the US big 3 already.

Unless you mean the top 3 worldwide auto manufacturers Toyota, VW, and Hyundai, which aren't /that/ much higher in volume (10.4mio, 10.4mio, and 7.2mio respectively).

I think 7.2x-10.4x is the opposite of "not that much higher".

That's the difference between making $100,000 a year or $720,000 a year (or $1,040,000 a year).

Yeah, that's a big difference.

Tesla has not yet scaled to their volume but equally those manufactures are not even remotely close to producing the same amount of EV as Tesla does.

If you look at their timeline for EV scaling, its laughable.

And sooner or later the ICE market will collapse and expose the terrible economics on their EVs.

Turns out mass manufacturing ICE engines doesn't actually magically make you good at batteries.

Tesla growth will have them overtake companies like BMW and Geely within 2 years. 1-2 years after that they will overtake Ford and friends. By then GM might have lost another million of so in sales as well.

By 2025 Tesla will be one of the bigger car makers on the market and will be 100% electric with their own batteries, while most current EV makers will not even be at 40% electric sales.

You are totally misguided on how easy it is to make batteries and EV a commodity. And you assuming that other manufactures can magically do it better then Tesla despite a huge amount of evidence that they simply can't.

Yes and:

> will be 100% electric with their own batteries

And their own mines. From my casual reading, only the Chinese manufacturers will have comparable integration, economies of scale, efficiencies.

Even so, I think you are still understating Tesla's many competitive advantages.

The biggest one, IMHO, is Tesla insurance. As Warren Buffet has shown with Geico, this is among the lowest cost capital available. Meaning Tesla will have even better financials than their competitors.

It's such an obvious idea. It still baffles me why GM chose loans over insurance, GMAC, all those years ago.

Their lithium mine will take a couple years and it will never be the majority of their lithium supply.

But I agree, they have lots other potential income streams.

As a regular consumer, I am not sure what advantage electric cars provide that I should be champing at the bit to get one. If I had to get a new car today I’d get a gasoline engine. I think the automakers see this and aren’t worried about “keeping pace”; while I guess electric is probably the future for political and resource exhaustion reasons, it’s not the immediate future.

I would go with hybrid, probably not even plugin one. Was cheap when I got my current car, which with my current use should last decade. I really doubt we will actually hit the goals politicians are currently setting.

Have you driven an electric car? They're a much better driving experience. Silent, instant acceleration, never have to waste time at the gas station.

My car is already very quiet, and I have never in around 20 years of driving put the accelerator anywhere near the floor anyway. I guess it’s “nice” to have better acceleration and I appreciate people drive differently than I do, but doesn’t accelerating hard waste charge in an electric car too?

I visit a gas station about once a week for maybe five minutes, that’s another “I guess that would be nice”, but it doesn’t bother me and I would probably visit the convenience store part anyway, so it’s not worth any kind of electric car premium and I’m not sure about the downsides - what if I forget to charge at home overnight, getting a charger at home, what do I do when there’s a hurricane and no power for weeks, etc.

Also, this is not limited to electric cars, but I have one car with a bunch of controls moved to the touchscreen and I’m never doing it again.

The acceleration isn't about pedal to the metal, it's about the delay between pushing the gas and the car beginning to accelerate. Obviously none of these things are must haves, but imo and in the opinion of almost everyone I've asked, electric cars are more enjoyable to drive than ICE ones.

I think most people are pretty content to drive cars that are not "enjoyable" to drive. There are a lot of ICE cars out there much more fun to drive than the average commuter car. I don't think people other than car and maybe tech enthusiasts rate this factor very highly - which goes back to what I'm saying, I don't think the major car manufacturers are really losing out because they don't have a popular EV out right now.

Even when I do hear about Teslas (I do not see very many here), people seem much more excited about the "it drives itself!" (invariably all have been majorly oversold on the capabilites of autopilot) and almost never mention the EV part. I do think automatic cruise control and lanekeeping are nice features particularly on very long drives, but those two in particular are widely available now.

I'm not trying to say an EV will change anyone's life. It's just a little bit better than an ICE car in every way except road trips.

> what do I do when there’s a hurricane and no power for weeks

If I ever (can afford to) buy an electric car, this is actually the strongest selling point for me. It's enough of a reservoir to keep my most important electronics powered up for weeks.

My 'most important electronics' might be different than yours, they're my AC, well pump, and refrigerators/freezers. :) But yes, you can still run them for a while...as long as you're willing to make the tradeoff that you can't leave the house without losing power, and using the car as your home energy supply means trading transportation charge for power. That makes me uneasy.

And of course, where I might be able to get in the car or my old beater truck, drive 50 miles, and come back with 50 gallons of gas, generator running for my family all the while, I guess recharging the battery would be...a much more troublesome venture. If gas stations have trouble with capacity during those times, then the length of the charging time is going to have a massive disparate impact on the lines on charging stations. It's going to be nightmarish. And I also have to think about husbanding my car charge so there's enough to leave and get recharged...

I think the "car as backup generator" is a fantastic idea for those unpredictable short blackouts that happen once in a blue moon, just not for hurricanes. I probably would buy an electric car before I bought an automatic whole-home generator.

5 minutes at the gas station (10 minutes if Costco) every 400-600 miles is not too bad. How many charging sessions would that be, and how much time to plug and unplug? For my plugin hybrid, using gas is more time efficient (especially since I'd get a better electric rate if I charged at my outbuilding rather than my house, and that would add more walking time)

It takes me 5 seconds to plus in when I park in my garage. Gas stations are also much worse in cold climates, definitely wouldn't be as big of a deal if lived somewhere where it wasn't freezing in the winter.

if you have a garage there is the huge advantage of not having gas/oil fumes filling up your garage and seeping into your house. This was a big plus to me but I seem to be more sensitive to this then some people

I suppose if you aren't concerned with exhaust fumes, air quality or climate change.

I observe that the vast majority of people are not worried about these things. Some of them do talk about it, but do not make even simple changes to their lives that would reduce their impact. (Single most important impact anyone can make: stop buying stuff you don't actually need.)

In my area smog and air quality from exhaust is not a concern. I don't worry myself with climate change because it is not only inevitable, but an inevitable part of living on earth. We can try to shift and reduce our impacts, but we cannot eliminate them, and at any rate it's much too late for the CO2-caused climate change concerns. My buying one more ICE car does not matter. It doesn't affect my consumption behavior or that of most other people.

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