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Comment by electrondood | Hacker News Reader

This tired trope needs to die. "Competition" has been "coming" since 2013. Good luck to them.

Competition is here! Ford's electric F150 is selling quite well, and most of the other major auto brands have electric options on the market too. I haven't seen the sales figures, Tesla is probably still leading the EV segment at the moment, but they need to do something to keep up. They haven't put anything that they've announced on the road since the model 3.

> Ford's electric F150 is selling quite well

> I haven't seen the sales figures

This is just a fantasy. While it reviews well, they are impossible to buy and Ford struggles to make any money from it. Ford sold just 13,000 of them last year. Maybe it might sell well in future, but to date its a rounding error on total F150 sales.

I would recomend actually being familar with the rough sales volumes before passing opinion on them, personally. Tesla's lead is not some fanboy exaggeration.

> They haven't put anything that they've announced on the road since the model 3.

The Model Y, They shipped nearly 800k of them last year alone. The Tesla Semi is also shipping now.

They are impossible to buy because Ford has been selling them faster than they can make them. Will it be the top selling EV of 2023? No. Will Ford keep making them? Absolutely.

They are impossible to buy because Ford loses money on each one. The recent massive price increase doesn't help sales, and is critical to actually stemming the losses in short term. Ford in bald financial terms simply can't sell the F150 Lightning at scale, yet, and timeline to profitable at scale production is not clear at all.

Of the 13k that have been shipped, a very large percentage are registered in Michigan - Ford employees. The amount of F150 Lightnings that have made it through the retail channel to actual customers nationwide is still really low.

13k sales of any vehicle in a year is not fast by any definition appropriate for the US car industry, especially a truck! My point still stands - the F150 Lightning to date has not sold well, at all, loses a lot of money for Ford, and the 150,000 a year by Autumn 23 as Ford previously targeted seems a pipe dream.

Only cause their price was artificially lowered on release , they recently were forced to bump their lightning model price up pretty I high

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a43473797/2023-ford-f-150-...

Tesla is blowing everyone else out of the water in terms of sales- at least 4x the rest of the market combined. Ford was also losing money on every lightning sold- they've just bumped the base price up again.

The competition is coming, but it won't put a hard crimp on Tesla until battery prices drop significantly and EVs stop being luxury goods.

> Tesla is blowing everyone else out of the water in terms of sales- at least 4x the rest of the market combined.

Nope [1].

[1] https://www.ev-volumes.com/

I see a whole bunch there related to % change, but it looks like the hard numbers are behind paywalls.

See the chart on the bottom of the page. The bars are 2022 sales (green for pure EVs, blue for plug-in hybrids), and the numbers to the left are the percent change from 2021.

And how much is Ford loosing on each electric F150, and how much profit is Tesla making on each vehicle? Ford still has a long, long way to go.

Market Reality is hitting and they are being forced to raise their lightning prices waaaay higher

You can't compare numbers when they're not produced using the same methodology.

And they may finally be arriving, which is good; but yeah, they're not here yet. I also feel like Tesla originally expected the competition to catch up much faster, and honestly it feels like a few things actually stumbled when that didn't happen.

Tesla's still riding most of its (IMHO/AFAIK) innovations: EVs as a status symbol; charging network; dealerships; manufacturing. Of those, only manufacturing has any pressure on towards continual improvement. (More chargers has demand, but not pressure).

Still. There's more non-Tesla fast chargers around every year, there's way more way better looking EVs from all the other brands; it is coming. I do think they'll catch up, but I don't know if they'll reach the point of competing for pack leader.

Disclosure: I freakin' love my Tesla Model Y.

I bought a VW ID.4. I love it, and in my area I'm starting to see as many Ioniq 5's as I do Teslas.

The Ioniq 5 is a solid choice. I regret buying my most recent Tesla and wish I had gotten the Hyundai instead. Especially now that the supercharger network is opening up.

Well, you can place your bets on the market then if you’re confident we’re wrong.

The F-150 was already the most popular vehicle. I wouldn't expect Ford's stock to explode any time soon.

Why would anyone bet against the greatest promoter on earth? Doesn't make sense because the bet isn't restricted enough in scope. I bet people here would be willing to bet on number of sales in the next 10 years if that were possible.

So what bets have YOU placed?

I'm risk averse so I've been picking up short-term CD's at 5% interest.

https://www.topgear.com/car-news/electric/top-gears-top-20-e...

At some point you get dangerously complacent if you believe you’re so far ahead of the competition that they’re forever catching up.

In 1995, when Windows 95 launched, Apple bought newspaper ads highlighting how Microsoft’s new OS was adding features that the Mac had ten years earlier. They completely ignored the reasons why people wanted PCs instead of Macs. The company nearly died and was only saved by the “reverse acquisition” of NeXT and a total platform pivot by Steve Jobs.

EVs were a small irrelevant market segment until 2017ish.

Just to be clear, the competition was coming. Now the competition is here.

There are even more competitors coming too.

What you are referring to is the Veblen good effect Tesla has. You think that the brand is beyond competition, which I unfortunately agree with. People buy feelings, and there is a feeling when you buy an Elon Musk product.

> People buy feelings, and there is a feeling when you buy an Elon Musk product.

After his acquisition of Twitter there's a feeling alright. Just not the one there used to be.

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