Tesla battle with Swedish unions spreads to Denmark
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Teslas are doing just fine in Europe:
https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/tesla-europe-sales-figures/
Almost no-one I know cares about what Musk says on twitter, they just want an good electric car, and they buy them. The Model Y is the top selling car in europe.
https://www.fleetnews.co.uk/news/tesla-model-y-likely-to-be-...
Please - at least look up figures before posting stuff like this.
Edit: it’s amazing I’m getting downvoted on HN which is supposedly a scientific community. The person I was replying to made claims which were wrong which I point out with numbers. Yet people are so obsessed with hating musk they downvote me.
Comparing model sales doesn’t make a lot sense. Tesla only offers 2 different models in the 40-60k range. Now look at VW and then add very similar cars from Skoda, Audi and Cupra.
Of course your’e still right Tesla’s market share in Europe has only been growing over the last couple of years.
Consumers wanted electric cars a long time ago, those old-timers just denied us because it would've hurt their short-term profits.
I think VW maybe made a marketing mistake by making the eGolf and eUp so... non-obvious (there was really almost no way to tell they weren't a normal Golf/Up from the outside); it lead people to believe that the ID.3/4/5 were their first electric cars.
Either Tesla folds OR sales drop because you can't service your car. This isn't rocket science, but unless you have sales data for the last month there's not much to really debate with beyond anecdotes.
You have three options: 1) government legislates everything tightly, 2) small government & pro-company, 3) small government & pro-employee. Simply put Sweden is 3, 1 is basically off the tables here, and 2 is against the Scandinavian culture.
As this is HN, then I also have to mention that Hyundai API (bluelink) has limits on how many queries you can do in a 24h rolling window. 20 or 50 queries, depending on the type…
https://www.golem.de/news/restwert-problematik-sixt-draengt-...
Problems: remaining car value is too low after use, very high maintenance costs.
If one buys an expensive premium car and has lost resale value fast, that's probably not positive for anyone who buys a car.
Colleague has model S, the most powerful plug he can have in his Swiss home can charge 9km of normal ride per hour (forget hills or generally cold weather like we have now till April). So overnight he is happy if he gets enough charge to go to work and back. I can't imagine living with constant range anxiety like that, since he has only this car.
Sure there is 150KWh charger somewhere out there, so now he needs to plan trips specifically to top up, with some waiting included.
Even if it was a more normal 11 or 7kW/h charger it’d still have him driving 80km or 125km, neither of which is anywhere near what a Tesla should be capable of.
[1] Of course there is a semantic issue at play here as well: efficiency referring to both range/energy as well as power out/power in, and whether anyone actually has the right to drive a 845 hp cybertruck around in the midst of a climate crisis and global mass extinction when ~100 bhp ought to be enough for almost all commuting/leisure use.
> diesel ICEV ranges from 25 % to 37 %
> The EV fed by a natural gas power plant shows the highest WTW efficiency which ranges from 13 % to 31 %
> While the EV supplied by coal-fired and diesel power plants have approximately the same WTW efficiency ranging between 13 % to 27 % and 12 % to 25 %, respectively
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020SJRUE..24..669A/abstra...
a) Regulate the half-dozen coal plants in the country to clean up their shit and install scrubbers
b) Somehow force 100k already sold ICE vehicles to install aftermarket pollution reduction doodads
My point is not “we shouldn’t do evs” and more we are taking too long to electrify cars and this leaves out trucks, ships, and most trains (at least in the US). But that lack of electrification is outmatched by our inability to decarbonize the energy grid worldwide - with the decrease of % energy nuclear, it’s been met with increase in natural gas despite massive spikes in wind and solar. Additionally, since energy demands grow every year (eg electric cars now demand electricity from the grid) total energy is growing which means that despite increasing solar and wind, fossil fuel production has gained market share and total fossil fuel production has also grown. In no way is our grid energy production on a positive direction to becoming decarbonized.
Look at what happens to the % of fossil fuels when nuclear energy mix shrinks over time even as solar and wind increase drastically: https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix
Looks like maybe solar/wind are able to take market share from coal (likely because regulations and popular opinions have made less profitable), a decrease in nuclear is directly correlated with an increase in natural gas usage. That’s pretty telling to me.
Also, nuclear is the only energy source that can generate enough energy to make carbon recapture possible and doesn’t come with unsolved energy storage requirements for the grid.
Segment D (large), a class with 36 entries (albeit with some apparent duplications):
- Model 3 is the most efficient, and the Model 3 long range is the joint third-most efficient
- Model Y is the seventh-most efficient, and subjectively the most efficient 'SUV-shaped' (i.e. higher roof, less aero) in the class. The MY LR is ~13th most efficient.
Segment F (luxury), a class with 60 entries (albeit with some apparent duplications):
- Model S is 3rd (dual motor) and 6th (Plaid) most efficient
- Model X is mid-pack, but again subjectively the most efficient large 'SUV-shaped' car in the class.
I'd also add that while I don't follow the EV space closely, a good proportion of Tesla's frequent car updates are focussed on improving efficieny - aero, heat-pumps, etc.
Firstly it turns out charging your car is a pain in the ass in some places, particularly here in London. The chargers are regularly damaged and poorly maintained or completely rammed. There is also nowhere to park to charge at home. On top of that the electricity pricing options are so volatile that it is actually hard work to find a cost effective charging option on a regular basis which means you have to plan everything. Ad-hoc trips being a planning exercise really doesn't work well.
Secondarily, the cost savings didn't add up when you factor in depreciation and capital cost anyway. Especially when there is nothing competitive to petrol vehicles on the second hand market where the majority of sales volume is.
Add to that the toxic Musk association and the constant pushing and marketing and I think people are getting fatigued and unsympathetic at this point. The market is damaging itself with dishonesty, inflated claims and toxic association.
The four people sold their (3x Tesla, 1x BMW) and two went back to petrol cars and the other two said they'd never own another car again.
My EV will definitely be a net saving over a petrol car. 2.5 years in, and it’s basically a given at this point. And this is in a country without any government rebates.
For example I drove a second hand vehicle for 8 years until the start of this year and the whole total cost of ownership over the entire time didn't even get to half the sticker price of the cheapest EV on the market.
We can all talk around a point.
Europe has no problem with center-right politics; it is mostly center-right. It's the extreme right, racism, etc that people are very sensitive about. Also because of some unfortunate history about 80 years ago.
Godwin's Law was about heated Usenet discussions that have nothing to do with politics where people would eventually end up calling each other nazis. That's a totally different situation than Elon Musk inviting actual nazis and white supremacists to Twitter, paying them for their contributions, boosting and retweeting then, and kicking out critics.
Dominated by the Koreans and Germans. Car and Driver had similar conclusions for their 10 Best annual rankings for the EV category which didn't include a Tesla.
Tesla's charging network is king, but the actual automobiles themselves are no longer class leading.
So I just called to ask my partner who has experience in the automotive industry and knows way more about cars than me. Here's the general sentiment he expressed:
* There are lots of competitive options here that are growing in popularity, and more companies are producing solid electric options that are easily competitive with Tesla.
* One example was the Polestar 2, with which he said Polestar/Volvo can be said to have "caught up" almost 4 years ago. According to him Volvo's 100 years of experience with hardware helped make the Polestar a better vehicle hardware-wise, _but_ Tesla still has better software. He said it takes older manufacturers longer to catch up on that front. He said it depends on what the consumer values more: It would at this stage be reasonable to say the Polestar is better if your priority is the physical car itself. But if you value software, you might favor Tesla out of the two.
* Some companies are innovating in a way that Tesla has not, such as Nio's swappable batteries.
* There's lots of innovation and choice in the space, and where a few years ago Tesla seemed like the only option, there are other manufacturers who have "caught up" by now with their offerings by offering affordable, high-quality electric vehicles
https://fdm.dk/nyheder/nyt-om-biler/2023-07-fart-paa-disse-b...
Hummers were more or less considered political symbols in support for the US war on Iraq, and like, pollution and gasoline waste.
But that's a niche car which might benefit from being "rad" politically.
Musk isn't doing anything unusual in that regard. The only reason he attracts such opprobrium is the left feel they should have ideological control over every institution. Musk isn't on board with that and it infuriates them.
I don't know, how often? I'm genuinely curious because as a movie-goer, I've never been told that I'm obliged to like a movie because of the genders/races of the actors.
https://www.outkick.com/hollywoods-war-on-toxic-fans-makes-n...
The 2016 dud “Ghostbusters” may have unofficially been the first time a Hollywood product singled out “toxic” fans. The franchise reboot, which reportedly lost Sony $70 million, included a scene where the budding Ghostbusters attack their online trolls.
The director, Paul Feig, added the sequence to directly attack the film’s critics.
https://youtu.be/XMVqNO3hRlc?si=6pOvAitq1NRX-nTX&t=281
"If you don't come see it, then you're sending a message that black women cannot lead the box office globally, that you're supporting that narrative"
I'd recommend educating yourself further on the reality of what you're blaming "the left" for
I'm quite familiar the argument, but my personal experience in a Model 3 (and subsequently a Mercedes) suggests that an overabundance of geegaws is nothing so much as a crib mobile for upright adults.
A week ago that was Sweden. Now it's the Nordics. Let this marinate through Christmas, and it may find home in European legislatures.
And a solidarity strike in Austria, like in Sweden, would be incredibly unlikely as I don't think there's the legal framework for that in Austria, and in general, striking is not really part Austrian labor culture but more like bending over to wealthy industrialists donors to the conservative OVP party, which is why I put my money on France.
No, but there's a unique alignment between labor (which is popular with voters) and industry (which fears Tesla) that could create real political momentum. This is a dumb alignment to force. Tesla is doing it.
They might be worried that if they go down this route then they get set on a path to become their outdated competitors.
They petrified when they became inflexible. Adaptability, not orthodoxy, is how challengers win.
To be clear, I don't think we'll see some pan-European labour movement against Tesla. But I do think it's becoming increasingly lucrative to take pot shots at the firm. If that starts happening in EU capitals, that's twenty-eight needless distractions to dispatch.
This might be the one move stupider than starting this fight, an innovator's dilemma [1] own goal.
The Nordics are a high-income EV beachhead. Tesla has best-selling cars. This entire fight is currently intrigue. The risk is it metastasising into a political crisis. What makes that crisis a crisis is it threatens those sales. Decamping--in effect, surrendering--positively nukes them.
In Hungary when driving along the Budapest-Wien railway I can often see trains full of cars on some stations waiting for their timeslot (passenger trains have priority over freight in Europe).
Why? What does it have to do with the “innovators dilemma”?
Beachhead. You’re opening a beachhead for a competitor to start small with ample margins.
The countries without a sea connection, or energy pipelines to such a country are having harder time getting energy. Mostly German automotive firms and their supply chain have factories and those usually have some unionization, though truly not as strong as in the Nordics, and the workers can indeed be paid with lower wages without inducing discontent.
But the striking Swedish Tesla workers aren't working in production, they're working in services. So even if Teslas would be made in Romania or Bulgaria, you still need to service them in Sweden, you won't send them to Bulgaria for service.
>of course lacking infrastructure would make it harder
What infrastructure is lacking? Poland, Czechia and especially Romania are already quite big auto manufacturing hubs.
There must be some reason Tesla decided to build their massive factory in Germany?
The same reason cheaper cars are made in lower-cost countries and premium cars in high cost countries, and Tesla is still a premium car.
Tesla went to Germany because it has the best infrastructure for automotive and they're making premium cars and can afford the higher costs of building in Germany as time to market was more important for them to gain market share than reducing costs. Cost reduction comes at a later stage.
But that doesn't mean Eastern EU countries have bad infrastructure, otherwise nobody would build cars there.
If we want EVs to get cheaper to rival those from China, then either those German workers will have to accept lower wages, or the EVs will have to be made in lower labor countries. There's no free lunch.
But we still agree that they have worse infrastructure and that lower labor costs and no pesky unions didn’t seem to offset that in Tesla’s case.
> If we want EVs to get cheaper to rival those from China,
Higher tariffs would also be a perfectly reasonable solution.
Because, like I already said, Tesla had to enter the EU swinging to quickly maximize market share. And since its vehicles are all premium anyway, it could afford the higher cost of German manufacturing, but as the EV race heats up in the future moving into the lower cost segment, I'll bet you factories in the East will happen otherwise you can't have cheap EVs.
>Higher tariffs would also be a perfectly reasonable solution.
Do you want an EV future or not? Because as long as EVs stay more expensive in the EU, the average joe will keep buying ICEs, and EU EV industry will fall behind the Chinese one anyway making them uncompetitive exports. The EU car makers need to haul ass on the EV side kicking and screaming otherwise tariffs won't save them forever from going bust.
Sure, you can put tariffs on Chinese imports and tariffs already exist, but then the Chinese will do in the EU, what the Japanese did in the US: build local factories in low wage areas to build affordable cars, and still undercut the local competition.
Not at the cost of the European car industry.
> Because as long as EVs stay more expensive in the EU, the average joe will keep buying ICEs
Why would tariffs affect EV prices disproportionately more than that of ICE cars?
> US: build local factories in low wage areas to build affordable cars, and still undercut the local competition.
Which is IMHO probably thr best outcome. You’d have actual competition driving prices down but Chinese manufacturers wouldn’t have unfair advantages like when they are allowed to import cars from China.
Also US has much higher tariffs than thE EU. So I don’t think they are necessarily hurting electrification that much.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/585024/leading-car-autom...
Edit: That statistic only shows number of cars coming out the assembly lines but the automotive sector is way bigger than that. There's also OEM suppliers and parts manufacturing, including SW, that also contribute to the auto sector.
This is a pretty meaningless cumulative metric which considers things like "Legal obstacles to foreign labour", "ICT priority for government", "Graduates in science", "Schools connected to the internet", "Telecom revenue", "Nature of competitive advantage" and many other, some of which are pretty hard to measure [1]. I wouldn't count such a metric as a measure of "volume of innovation".
[1] https://www.innovendo.net/pdf/archiv/Global%20innovation%20i...
My point is that having these Union collective bargaining agreements doesn't impact innovation in either # of successful startups or just general country innovation metrics.
> Stockholm is surprisingly innovative
This is only when you do an intellectually dishonest trick of comparing Stockholm the city to american states capita-wise. If you compare Stockholm (0.8 unicorns per capita) to other large cities, it will lag behind NY (1.48 UpC), Boston (3.5), Austin (1.0), Denver (1.4) etc.
How?
30 in Stockholm, population of ~950,000 21 in Boston, population of ~650,000 7 in Denver, population of ~700,000 etc...
I was going off of government info [0] but if you manually check you'll find it still works out albeit unicorns change pretty often at the moment.
[0] https://start.stockholm/en/about-the-city-of-stockholm/how-t...
edit: Okay Boston might have 31 [1], but while you're comparing leading cities to Stockholm you still have the remainder of the US which brings innovation rankings down. My overall point that Sweden has a decent level of innovation & startups (per capita) while maintaining a much better standard of living still stands IMO.
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/hub/greater-boston-area-unicorn-s...
It would be strange to compare a capital of one country to the countryside of another.
Anyone know if the german Tesla factory is unionized?
Considering IF Metall started the current strike after trying to get deal signed for six years, I guess IG Metall will be still reporting "progress" out to 2030...
Next year there are new elections for it.
This is the situation at Tesla Sweden, which pays wages below the market average and tries to cover the gap with stock options which Tesla is free to rescind at any time. There is also a points-system that in practice requires unpaid overtime in order to get a raise.
Specifics such as salary, overtime, vacation etc are more tangible and with more direct impact on working conditions. But striking for a specific type of agreement, which ties conditions in one workplace to a broader context are a different matter. That is a more strategic play which is about who sets the rules and who has the power.
Swedish labor laws are actually fairly lax (depends on what you compare with ofc), where the state has handed over essentially legislative power to the "parties", the large union organisations and organisations of employers / companies. A little corporatistic if you want.
These parties then negotiate and the resulting CBA's fills in blanks in the legislation (such as minimum salary levels etc) and other benefits. With a CBA in place, strikes are forbidden if the deal is kept. It's renegotiated every couple of years. Many companies / local unions also have local amendments (which are negotiated on a more local level).
This model is generally appreciated by both the unions and large enterprisey companies. It gives stability to the companies.
However... Tesla is of course not part of these employer organisations. A typical software startup or even fairly large (< ≈1000) white-collar employers are not part of these organisations either. About 10% of workers are outside of CBA (like me and probably the majority of developers in Stockholm). Those companies don't value having to commit to a CBA, might have different compensation schemes etc. The workers at these companies are typically happy and well compensated. It's not uncommon to see stuff like "Our pensions are according to the CBA" even if they don't sign the CBA.
Employees of these non-CBAcompanies can still be in the union though, as you get benefits even without CBA, and part of the unemployment insurance is typically through the union.
Further, according to both Swedish labour law and EU negative freedom of association principles, entering into a CBA is not required.
But, the whole Swedish model depends on most employers signing the CBA, especially those in blue collar industries where the risk of exploitation is higher. No union is going to strike about e.g McKinsey not having a CBA, but Tesla mechanics I think are too close to home of the blue collar unions.
I do wonder how this will end... Tesla signing an CBA seems out of the question, and I think the union might have overplayed their hand here. Many Tesla employees are not striking (nor want a CBA), many Tesla customers who might have had a good impression of the unions were pissed of when the union put a strike on e.g changing to winter tires of Tesla cars (even at non-tesla shops).
Of course they failed to force the 32 hour workweek during the negotiations over the last few months but UAW workers seem to get more vacation days than Volvo in addition to much higher wages (and profit sharing bonuses etc.)and pensions.
did you mean the 40 or 48 hour workweek?
Instead they ended up negotiating higher 20-60% wages and improving some other benefits but no reduction in working hours.
But in my opinion, the overtime demand was just a "duck"[1]. Something easily negotiated away so that the union and company could meet in the middle. It's standard procedure in negotiations to make ridiculous demands so that you don't have to negotiate away non-ridiculous demands.
I’m not sure how is that different from the UAW in the US? They do all of those things and seem to be as or even considerably more successful than European unions at achieving those things.
This was all achieved through an agreement with the union.
Also it’s not like anyone working in non union factories owned by Japanese, European manufacturers or Tesla are earning anything close to the minimum wage anyway.