Hacker News Reader

Comment by rsynnott | Hacker News Reader

> I own two Teslas and their service is horrible.

Genuinely curious; why did you buy the second one? I might possibly be slightly over-vindictive with brands, but once a brand fails me I’m very reluctant to buy something else from them (a Samsung TV with some silly quality control and firmware issues was enough to make me swear off Samsung, and the Nexus 7 (original one; the one that tended to degrade after about a year) was enough to convince me never to buy hardware from Google again, say). In particular, I would never buy the _same thing_ (most current Tesla cars are ~the same thing) from a company where I’d already bought one defective thing.

View on HN

Ironic fact: The Nexus 7 and the original Tesla Model S share the exact same flaw: They both used a Tegra 3 SOC with memory that would effectively fail in shorter-than-normal time. The outcome is that the system would get slower or in the Tesla's case, crash.

I’m shopping for anything EV other than a Tesla now. There are many options now, but Tesla is still way ahead with the power train. Most competitors aren’t at the same place on range & performance yet.

It’s an amazing power train glued inside a 90s-era Oldsmobile.

Mercedes EQ ?

Beautiful car and great competition against the Model S. I've been ogling one at the dealership I bike past regularly.

The Mach E has a mere 40mi less range (290mi) and slightly better performance than the Model Y. They are also adding support for NACS (Tesla charger port) at some point soon. That's the only comparable EV that I know of at the price point, but there's definitely more.

Ford can't sell Mach Es to save their life, though, because they don't have ludicrous mode/800 HP/name appeal. Massive flop from Ford (and I say that as the biggest ford fanboy in this thread.)

You and I know that the ford is made much better for "less", for obvious reasons But ask yourself, who is going to buy a heavy electric SUV from Ford?

-a typical mustang GT buyer? No way.

-a person who currently has a model S/Y/3? fat chance.

-a new EV buyer? Too expensive and "bland". Does all EV things "middle".

-A ford Fan? I'll gladly take the f150 lightning over mustang.

I want to see the f150 lightning and similar really make a dent/impression.

Target market for the MachE is explorer and escape owners looking at EVs. Lightning and MachE aren’t anywhere close to the same price point.

# of MachEs at local dealer = 3

# of F150s sitting on lot >1 month = 50-100

You missed the "I want a get from A to B SUV, without Tesla" - which is squarely me. The type of shit in the article, right to repair, and general Elon bullshit has me very uninterested in Tesla.

> -a new EV buyer? Too expensive and "bland". Does all EV things "middle".

It is actually SUV-sized (unlike the likes of the Kona, which you may be comparing it to - it is only shaped like an SUV). It can be cheaper than the Model Y, depending on the sku - and those two are the only budget EV SUVs that I am aware of (the E-Tron and iX are significantly more expensive).

Bland? Who cares. There are people who only care about the utility that a vehicle has to offer.

It is servicing an area of the market that only has one other deeply incompetent (as-per the article) competitor.

I’m very hopeful that in five years time, Tesla has been so thoroughly lapped by the rest of the car industry that they have to start closing some of their gigafactories.

I’d bet good money on that.

I love my Tesla and I too hope that other automakers get better at producing EVs. Competition is great and the whole world wins when everyone gets better. I'm looking forward to being able to get an electric Audi, Volvo, VW, etc. and be confident that the software, updates, charging infrastructure, etc. is be better than Tesla's system. That day is not today, but I hope it's soon.

I'm a big fan of my Chevy Bolt. ~250 miles range is plenty for commuting and making day trips to friends and whatnot. Any further than that and I'd want to fly, anyway.

It makes me so happy that Chevy decided to no longer discontinue the Bolt. I’m both poor and currently very happy with my current car (ford cmax). But once this guy’s life is over, I’m looking to a bolt next. Or if Tesla has the rumored Model 2 out by then I’ll consider that as well.

> I might possibly be slightly over-vindictive with brands

At your rate, you might run out of brands to buy from ;-)

Eh, that’s two over about the last decade. I’ll manage :)

Being "in the market" it wasn't until thr new crop of Hyundai EVs came out that there was anything approaching the Tesla in the car-design feature set. Sure you could buy a Prius, but I always felt like the Prius was designed to be ugly and awkward to drive specifically so it wouldn't hurt Toyotas billions of dollars of ICE sales.

Because I needed a 3-row vehicle, I refuse to buy anything that runs on gasoline, and the Supercharger network is the only viable high speed charging network in the US.

How do you think that electricity is most likely being generated?

I didn't know the Nexus 7 had issues I had mine for almost 10y and just gave it away to someone it is still working and the battery too (albeit not really long anymore).

For some users the storage became _extremely_ slow over time. Not sure did anyone ever really figure out what was going on.

That's just normal flash memory degradation when you are using low quality chips. It's very common, especially among low end Samsungs. It's not something that can be fixed on the software side.

It was really very rapid in the Nexus 7 for me, though. I think my iPad Air 2 has it to an extent now, say, but it’s _9 years old_; it is somewhat understandable. My 2012 Nexus 7 was starting to behave very badly a year in.

Were you doing any rooting, flashing of custom roms, large i/o operations like video stuff or similar? The average flash memory chip quality of that era (depending on the supplier) wasn’t great, they can’t handle as much read-write cycles as typical modern consumer silicon.

It used some eMMC storage that would massively slow down as it filled.

You may have had the second iteration. They released a slight upgrade about a year later under the same name, and it wasn't susceptible to the same degradation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com