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Comment by lnsru | Hacker News Reader

The people are different and their taste is different. One must really love Tesla’s design language. For me it’s weird with single big display in the middle and I picked competing Kia EV6 model just because of that.

Tesla is/was a status symbol without competition for long time and logically it will need to adapt to the new reality. There are Mercedes EQS and EQE now. Well made luxury cars from old luxury brand with known history. There are many many new brands coming with electric vehicles in all segments and Tesla will have hard times for sure.

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I tried out the Kia and Hyundai EV platform and found the infotainment incredibly bad. The Kia in particular is a case study in UX anti patterns. Toggles for switching the same capacitive buttons between different functions is almost a caricature of good UX in a car.

The Hyundai was better, but still everything was capacitive and unintuitive.

The Tesla big screen and UX is also bad, but I certainly wouldn’t put the Kia or Hyundai infotainment on a pedestal as a job well done. I am personally waiting to see what Honda or Toyota release.

A bigger issue (to me) is that EVs are just too expensive. You won’t save money unless you’re comparing an EV to a luxury car. If you’re comparison shopping an EV6 against a CRV you’ll never get the numbers to work. And if you’re in the market for a luxury car would you rather have a Kia or a Tesla??

> EVs are just too expensive

Per https://insideevs.com/news/586195/tesla-model3-rwd-tco-toyot... 5-year Total Cost of Ownership of Model 3 SR is about the same as Toyota Camry for an average 10k miles / year driver.

And that was probably calculated with the old gas prices.

And if you get the new usage based insurance from Tesla (available in 8 US states) then you might additionally save on insurance (see e.g. https://twitter.com/jd_average/status/1543083099701010434 saving $1.6k for 2 cars compared to Geico).

It doesn't make sense for most people who realistically can't drop on a Tesla.

My car, all the maintenance, the insurance and all the fuel I can put in my car over its entire lifespan even at current fuel prices is cheaper than the lowest entry cost for a Tesla.

My car cost £5k for reference with 20k miles on the clock and does 66mpg.

I can afford a Tesla. I just think it's a waste of money.

assuming you're in the UK, which car would that be ?

Citroen C3

There's no need to rely on fuzzy math from Tesla or Inside EVs. Those comparisons are comically inept.

The base Model 3 now costs $48,490 whereas the Toyota Camry starts at $25,845. The absolute most expensive Toyota Camry trim is the XSE V6 with a sticker price of $36,270.

Edmunds estimates the 5 year total cost of ownership for that Toyota Camry at... $45,211. The cash cost to own that Camry is $45,211 + $36,270 for a total cash cost of $81,481.

Edmunds doesn't have an estimate for a 2022 Model 3, but their 5 year total cost of ownership for a 2020 Model 3 is... $53,660. $48,490 + $53,660 is $102,150.

This is the most absurd and generous (to Tesla) comparison I could possibly make and the Model 3 is 25% more expensive. It's two year old Model 3 compared to the most expensive Camry you can buy.

If I compare base model to base model it just gets comically out of hand. The 5 year total cash cost for a base model Camry is $25,845 + $31,413 for a total cost of $57,258. The Model 3 is 78% more expensive over five years.

You have to really seriously gamify the numbers to come out ahead on any EV. Things such as absurd vehicle comparisons, extending the length well beyond the length that people actually keep their car, discounting or ignoring deprecation, assuming absurd and unrealistic increases in gas, etc.

Wait, what? Doesn't the total cost of ownership already include the initial purchase price? Why do you add sticker prices to TCOs in your comment?

Technically it's depreciation rather than purchase price that counts toward TCO, but that's part of what "total" means. Also, using depreciation rather than purchase price would probably favor the Camry even more.

Lmao yeah I'm sure inside EVs dot com is unbiased

Tell me, did they find the same if you buy a ten year old Tesla vs a ten year old Camry? My dad bought a 1992 Miata in 2005 for $2500 and then drove it for fifteen years.

Has anyone even heard of someone buying a used Tesla?

> Lmao yeah I'm sure inside EVs dot com is unbiased

Tell us what did they got wrong. Gas is more expensive than electricity. The more you drive, the more you save. At some point you the amount you save will equal the difference in price.

> Has anyone even heard of someone buying a used Tesla?

Plenty of people buy used Teslas and you can too: https://www.tesla.com/inventory/used/mx?arrangeby=plh&zip=33...

It's hard to buy 10 year old Tesla because their oldest cars are 2012 Model S, then 2015 Model X and then 2017 Model 3 and 2020 Model Y.

But some people do sell them and some people buy them.

As it happens Tesla's retain their value better than most cars which is another factor that helps in Total Cost of Ownership.

> Gas is more expensive than electricity.

This is heavily dependent on where you charge. California has the highest gas prices in the US but gas is still cheaper than charging at a public charging station in California.

Well, this [1] guy did buy a 8 year old one.

[1] https://people.com/human-interest/tesla-owner-blows-up-his-c...

Has anyone even heard of someone buying a used Tesla?

Yes! Only 2 years old though, so not a good data point.

Lots of dumbassery, had to get approval from Telsa or the warranty would be void.

I mostly have calls while driving, so infotainment is rather secondary gadget for me. Software will be ironed out in coming months. The car is still too new. I think even parking brake was failing and recent software update fixed it.

I wouldn’t buy any current Tesla as luxury car. EQS is my favorite or BMW iX as cheaper alternative. Or 2008 Tesla Roadster :-) I know couple very wealthy individuals driving that ancient car as a statement.

Edit: about being too expensive. I doubt it. With current petrol prices in Germany my monthly saving on petrol alone will pay for electric vehicle. I forecast seeing liter for 2,5€ in winter here.

I think even parking brake was failing and recent software update fixed it.

Good grief. I don't care what car company, but if anything should be 100% manual, a simple cable system, it's this.

Computer controlled emergency brake! Insanity!! But sure, manufacturers save a few dollers per car.

Computer goes nuts, can't steer, or accelerator stuck, yeah, sure, same borked code will probably stop the emergency brake from engaging.

This. Is. Insane.

You have no idea how bad it is. I have worked with automobile programming and the pressure from management to put hardware safety feutures in software instead is high.

The "ignition key" doesn't do anything nowadays.

Just you wait until the brake pedals or steering wheel get electronic only.

2.5€ is already the price on some Austrian highways…

> And if you’re in the market for a luxury car would you rather have a Kia or a Tesla??

Tesla build quality[1] has nothing in common with luxury. Lucid is trying to fill the "luxury EV" gap.

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

Doesn't really seem to matter to people in the luxury segment. If luxury buyers cared about quality Land Rover would have gone out of business ages ago. It's as much a status symbol as it is an actual luxury purchase.

> A bigger issue (to me) is that EVs are just too expensive. You won’t save money unless you’re comparing an EV to a luxury car.

Certainly in terms of raw price, but a lot of companies in the UK are doing effectively a company car scheme so you pay for the car pre-tax (saving about 20-45% depending on your tax rate). That same saving doesn't apply to ICE vehicles (gets eaten up by benefit in kind tax).

They still have the best software. That’s why I think the new Apple Car Play is such a big deal. If everyone uses their phones OS on their car, Teslas advantage goes away.

I’d rather the car has no software at all past simple audio connection myself. My current set up is a BT connection to my iOS device and it is absolutely spot on for reliability and I have full voice and tactile controls for everything.

Exactly. The current phone "integration" into cars is bullshit, akin to the $100 AM radio rip-off of the '70s.

All we've needed in cars for the last 15 years is a goddamned WELL in the dashboard to put our phones in. Have swappable plastic inserts for different phone models, and integrate a power supply and (for non-Apple victims) an audio line.

"Problem" solved.

Except for the profit, when you upgrade to the premium system.

bingo

> I’d rather the car has no software

I'm not sure I want to rely on a buggy iOS/CarPlay/AppleCar UI. Ok for media, but the way Apple is pitching this, it would be the operating system of the whole car's UI including showing things like oil pressure and tachometer.

To clarify I don't want CarPlay or iOS in the car. I want the car to have its own platform which is not connected to the non-essential functions and my iOS device can do that in isolation. The only real functions that are required for integration are audio controls and BT has already solved that.

And that audio connection better be fully airgapped from every other wire in the car.

The radio used to be that way. Just power essentially.

I wonder, if Tesla can bootstrap, why not an EV company on the extreme low end.

What do you do for things like maps though?

Apple Maps

You said you just have a Bluetooth audio connection - so you’re just listening to the readout of the directions? That doesn’t sound like a great experience.

The phone has a screen and sits on the dash. I don't use BT audio for directions, only for calls and Apple Music.

> The phone has a screen and sits on the dash.

It doesn’t take a leap of imagination to understand why a proper large screen, integration into the instrument cluster, and the HUD if you have one, is safer and easier to use than a tiny phone hanging off your dash.

You’re also for example missing out on your car's ability to do dead reckoning when there is a poor GPS signal.

Depends how badly designed your car is. Mine sits just to the top left of the steering wheel.

The phone does dead reckoning as well. It has accelerometers and a compass built in.

They have pretty software that is shit.

I don't own a Tesla, but whenever I ride with friends the center console shows an overhead type view of the other cars around. The cars randomly blink in and out, indicating it doesn't know if the other car really exists or not.

A cars UI has has exactly one function: provide accurate and actionable information to the driver. You should never need to second guess the information you are receiving.

Pretty much every company that tries to capture the environment around it uses a probabilistic model that takes in the raw sensor data and makes predictions about things in the surroundings. The random blinking you see on the Tesla screen is essentially saying that Tesla's model prediction confidence is borderline and changing from instance to instance. Is that great? No, but they can't do much using just vision data. What's the alternative? Show the cars even when your model is not confident anymore just for user experience reasons and give false sense of confidence? That's not ideal either.

Imo I don't know any other consumer car company that shows anything like that on their cars infotainment console. Companies like Waymo and Cruise do a much better job at capturing surroundings but they are in a different market where it makes sense to spend a ton of money on each car to add many LiDARs and significant compute in the car.

> I don't know any other consumer car company that shows anything like that on their cars infotainment console.

You seem to be on to something here...

> What's the alternative?

Just show the navigation stuff. The driver should be able to see other cars with their eyes. The car clearly isn't good enough at spotting them itself, so why further distract the driver by trying to guess?

> The cars randomly blink in and out, indicating it doesn't know if the other car really exists or not.

The wild flickering of lines, obstacles, humans and cars in perfect clear daylight conditions is absolutely flabbergasting to me and erodes any trust I have into self driving capabilities. It's outright scary.

You are probably talking about autopilot, not FSD beta which is entirely different stack.

Cars that are running basic autopilot show basic autopilot visualizations.

>Well made luxury cars from old luxury brand with known history.

I laugh whenever I hear someone talking about Tesla, etc, "disrupting" the "legacy auto industry". The "legacy auto industry" (and I'm mostly talking about the German manufacturers) are going to be just fine. After all, they are the backbone of one of the dominant EU member states. Do you really think they are going to be caught by surprise by the mandated transition to EVs?

The EV6 looks stunning. Tesla design feels very old and boring now. Gotta be like 6 years since they updated the design right?

Both Model 3 and Model Y are best selling cars with 1 year wait list for new orders.

Changing the design would be a very stupid thing to do.

Don't fix what ain't broke.

Unlike other car makers with yearly cadence of changes, Tesla iterates on the guts of the car on an ongoing basis.

Model 3 / Y got front casting with giant casting machines.

Then back casting.

Then structural battery pack.

Ongoing work on improving the batteries etc.

I wouldn't call software updates the "guts of the car". Also, Covid and the war in Ukraine made sure that everyone has long lead times for new cars. Funny how that was a negative point for legacy manufacturers ("see, they can't even manage their chip supply") while it is somehow a plus for Tesla ("those cars are so in demand, Tesla can't even manufacture enough", as if not being able production to meet demand is a good thing for a hardware company...).

Funny how that was a negative point for legacy manufacturers

Well, Tesla didn't have a massive drop in sales, due to chip shortages, or a changed business model.

When I used to buy cars, I'd swing by the dealership, find one I liked, and haggle + drive away same day.

Drove by a few dealers last month. They have massive lots, which used to have 100s of cars, now bare.

I've driven my car 2 years longer than normal. That's 2 years lost profit for some car maker.

So yeah, it makes them look bad.

None of the things I've listed (giga casting, structural battery pack) are software.

Tesla is growing production 50%+ year-over-year. Despite pandemic, chip shortages and war.

If you don't think that is balls to the walls execution then please list all the other manufacturing companies that did better than that in last 3 years.

Evan Apple, widely regarded as logistics genius, recently had a month long wait for all models of mac book pro.

In contrast, GM went from 10 million cars in 2016 to 6.3 in 2021

https://www.statista.com/statistics/225326/amount-of-cars-so....

Pretty much every legacy car maker had declining sales in the last couple quarters.

So yeah, I do think that comparatively Tesla is doing much better.

And here I thought the article is about a car company that tripled production within one year.

Tastes differ. The EV6 looks like a smashed crossover to me. Really not a fan of the wagon/crossover look.

I'm still looking forward to see Tesla pull off its first face lift followed by its first model update. There are still things legacy manufacturers do routinely that Tesla never did so far.

Model S and Model X had a giant refresh of everything but the exterior.

Tesla updates the cars on an ongoing basis, which is a much faster rate of innovation than a yearly refresh done by legacy car makers.

Most of the changes are to the guts of the car, hence invisible.

But they also do changes to exterior and interior, like removing chrome, changing center console etc.

Those are not in-your-face changes but they're there.

They are not changing the exterior probably because it's a good business sense to not change change a product that sells faster than you can make it.

Once they have "we could make more cars than we're selling" problem, they can go back to design studio.

Tesla design isn't so much about looking good as about looking distinctive. People have to be able to tell that it's a Tesla before they even see the logo. It's a characteristic of fashion/vanity brands in all markets. As another example, a lot of fashionable clothes or shoes are actually - and often deliberately - quite unappealing by any standards much outside the fashion industry (including "influencers") itself.

Tesla dropped the ball going from niche bespoke vehicles to mass production. Big “senior engineer from Chernobyl” as they disregarded a lot of common automotive knowledge and opted for consumer grade components.

Can you be more specific? I've been driving mine for almost 5 years now and it's better in almost every way to every other care I've ever owned.

For example this [0] They used non-automotive grade LCD, which due to heat in summer will go into yellow discoloration or LCD will start leaking adhesive or will just die.

[0] https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27989/teslas-screen-saga-shows...

Let's put things into perspective.

Toyota just recalled their first EV, bz4x because, I kid you not, the wheels where falling off.

I guess Toyota couldn't find automotive grade hub bolts.

https://mashable.com/article/toyota-recall-bz4x#:~:text=The%....

And it's not like it's an isolated thing. Cars from all car makers are being recalled for things way worse than LCD discoloration.

The difference is how much press coverage even small Tesla things get compared to much more serious issues in other cars.

Like Mach E which was recalled for potentially shutting down the drive train, another recall for roof not being properly bonded to the car and another for loose bolts.

GM's Bolt had every single car recalled for a batter defect that could (and did) lead to explosion.

Jaguar i-pace was recalled for "The front passenger seat frame may be missing fasteners, resulting in a seat frame with insufficient strength."

Id.4: "An unreliable battery connection may cause a stall, increasing the risk of a crash."

I'll take a yellowing lcd vs. wheels falling off.

One thing is mistake in process - i.e. Toyota or ID4 problems. Other thing is deliberate use of low grade, but cheaper parts, which can't long term survive in given environment. So your "perspective" makes no sense, only mudding waters.

What are these tests really trying to prove though?

90+ degrees C (194 F) for 408 hours is their "lowest" intensity test. That's 17 days of continuous solar radiation for 24 hours per day, which is hardly a consumer grade test.

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