Tesla to build 25,000-euro car at German plant
reuters.com
reuters.com
You have no perf, no comfort, no status
20k is a lot of money to put in a car for most people in Europe, you can buy a decent used ice car and enough gas for the next 50 years if you exclusively use your car in an urban environment
https://www.autojournal.fr/economie/voitures-electriques-neu...
I would have the budget for such a price, but I certainly wouldn't want to pay it. For official business there are company cars and I drive perhaps 5000 km per year. I still have a car and I need it to visit some more remote people and for convenience.
Paid 2.5k for it and I have it since a few years. I do have a mechanic, so repairs are cheap, but you can guess about my expectations for buying the next car. Haven't seen EV with attractive prices yet.
Electric cars in general will be the only option. The big countries in the EU are banning selling new petrol cars in 2035. So they'll definitely succeed, there's no option!
Not everyone is living in Amsterdam, Berlin, London,... city center.
I lived there for a couple of years during my CERN days.
They will "succeed" because the government will force us to use them. It's us citizens who will succeed or fail to have freedom to move, depending on how wealthy we are ;)
If you buy a ten year old Nissan Leaf for, it will still be quite usable and be desirable enough that people are willing to pay a lot more than 2.5K for it. And if the time comes, you can put a new battery in it for 4-5K or so and drive it for another decade+.
And of course there aren't that many EVs that old around to begin with because the market was relatively new and small ten years ago. Most EVs on the road are probably younger than 3 years or so. They'll be on the road for a long time and might change owner a lot. But it will take some time to trickle down.
Here is a Nissan Leaf from 2011 for 5K:
https://www.marktplaats.nl/v/auto-s/nissan/m2041841167-nissa...
There is no mention of remaining battery capacity, only the original is listed.
For that kind of money you can fairly easily find a Renault, Skoda or if you're lucky a VW with lower mileage and probably a newer model year.
But also more then what a good part of the population is willing to afford to pay for a car. Weather hear or in the US a lot of people buy second,third,fourth hand.
And that's a problem I think massively underestimated, a least currently electric cars are kinda badly suited for being resold, especially if they come from companies with pretty bad service/walled garden reputation like Tesla.
A car is not a luxury good: it's something I buy because I have to. I'll go Dacia this time.
I would say that the Fiesta is 10k too expensive.
Looking at how much material it takes to make and how complex it is, I would expect a car to cost ~100 more than a bike, but in reality it's more like ~10 more
Price is never about the material used... an iphone would be $200 if it was the case. Look into economy of scale, how money is made through maintenance/parts/after sale services, &c.
I said complexity and materials. An iPhone is extremely complex but it's only so cheap because electronics scale extremely well, probably only software does better.
Logically there should be more bikes than cars so the economy of scale should be in their favor. Bike maintenance isn't cheap either. Cars need to go through much more certification etc.
The more I think about it the less sense it makes. I think there's crazy competition on cars, but not on bikes.
> Logically there should be more bikes than cars
There are twice as many cars than bikes in France from what I can find online, not sure about the rest of the world.
Fair point but what I meant in my initial post is even a top of the line Trek Slash doesn't have a quarter of the technology included in the lowest end Fiat Panda. Even the best e-bikes are still quite simple compared to a car.
And I say that as a bike nerd.
A supermarket bike, not suitable if you're a bit serious and many repair shops will refuse to repair them because it's not worth it. For a decent bike you'd probably paying at least 3-4x more.
>There are twice as many cars than bikes in France from what I can find online, not sure about the rest of the world.
Google tells me worldwide daily production of bikes is 300.000 and cars 100.000. (IMO It would really be sad if it was otherwise)
In 1990 you could buy a Golf GTI for 77k french francs, which is 19000 euros today. And that was the best golf money could buy.
Today the absolute base model Golf costs 32k euros. The current GTI starts at 48k. Even the polo starts at 19k+, and that's the shittiest vw you can buy.
The bottom line is back in the day any working person could buy a bas model shitbox, now the low class workers needs a 10 years loan to do the same
>It turns out that a driver of a car 18 or more years old is 71 percent more likely to die in a bad crash than the driver of a car three years old or newer.
https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2013/09/study-measu...
A lot actually, it's not legal to drive them in a lot of city centers
71% more than virtually 0 is not really a problem imho. And still, we could have modern cheap cars with modern crash safety for much less than the computers on wheel they're trying to sell us
https://www.hotcars.com/tesla-compact-ev-what-we-know/
https://www.motorlogue.com/tesla-model-2/
show several design proposals and speculation.
> In addition to keeping the cost of R&D and production low, Tesla wants to ensure the compact EV is easy to manufacture.
It's simple and other manufacturers have done it for years. Just use standard parts where possible. Stop designing custom headlights, glass, wheels, etc, etc.
I would also advise to Tesla to build an even lower cost model, perhaps with the following specs:
* 2 seats and some space for shopping/luggage
* Half range (~200 miles or so), shorter charging time
* Lightweight, smaller motors, inverters, etc
* Repairable (keeps the cost down in the second hand market), use off-the-self components where possible
They could call it "Tesla Model # Lite". The market would be people who drive to local towns, etc, and back. If I were them I would sub-contract an existing manufacturer to build it too.
[1] https://www.estrima.com/en/models/biro-big/
[2] https://newatlas.com/urban-transport/estrima-2022-biro-elect...
I also wonder if this is targeting the market where BYD is so successful. I imagine most chinese customers would buy a tesla vs a BYD if they had similar pricepoints.
Smaller Cars!1! OTOH that might be something if it means removing some tanks from the streets.
However, out of the mouth of mr Musk it sounds more like hot air to distract from their cybertruck, roadster, semi truck, Tesla taxi/autonomous driving, and reliability (TÜV) failures.
And wasn’t the model 3 already supposed to be the affordable Tesla?
https://www.tesla.com/en_eu/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-... says "So, in short, the master plan is: Build sports car. Use that money to build an affordable car. Use that money to build an even more affordable car. While doing above, also provide zero emission electric power generation options."
There's no mention of stopping after a particular model.
Roadster, Model S, Model 3.
So, sure they may sell a handful of cars built at this factory at 25k, but more realistically this may be hitting the price point the Model 3 was aiming for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_next-generation_vehicle
The only real news here is that Tesla is planning to build them in Germany, in addition to the previously announced Mexico plant.
The minimum wage in Germany is €12/h (Oct 2022), compared to $7.25/h in the US (2009). When introduced in 2015 the German minimum wage was €8.50/h. If it had only ever been adjusted for inflation, it would have been at €10.05/h at the start of 2023. By contrast, if the US minimum wage had been adjusted for inflation following its last adjustment in 2009, it would have been at $10.40/h by now. Remember that anything less than correcting for inflation represents an income reduction as it means a loss of spending power.
For additional context: in German law, minimum wage is tied to a representative index of union wages (the Tariflohnindex, tracked by the federal office of statistics). Despite an overall decline in membership (mostly due to the "liberalization" of the job market, i.e. the creation of temp work agencies whose "contractors" can not join unions - though these may still benefit from union wages negotiated in the companies they are stationed at, and the heavy regulation around unions effectively prohibiting micro-unions like in the US or coordinated "solidarity" strikes) this index provides a good "temperature gauge" for wage developments. In other words: when union wages (in aggregate) go up, minimum wage goes up. When they stagnate, minimum wage stagnates.
This is different from welfare (formerly Hartz IV, now Bürgergeld, which previously was supposed to be a form of federal UBI) which is intended to track inflation as it is only meant to cover a standard of "needs" (which in turn are supposed to be individualized by taking into account various factors like number of people in the household).
In other words: welfare exists to provide a social safety net to cover a person's needs, federal minimum wage exists to provide a baseline for wages to ensure employees are paid a non-exploitative wage for their labor if they're unable to join a union that would help them negotiate a better wage and there is no union available to them.
So minimum wage is really more of a "fallback union wage", typically benefitting direct hires in low prestige jobs like cleaning. Note that a better equivalent of American company-specific unions is the construct of a Betriebsrat, a form of works council, which the employees of any company with at least 5 "regular employees" are eligible to form and grants special protections to its elected officials (the number of which is also specified by law). Neither has anything to do with worker ownership, i.e. cooperatives, or employee share schemes (more common in the US).