> they change the world. For the better.
That's up for a through debate, but not today. Let's leave it at I don't agree that part 100%.
That's up for a through debate, but not today. Let's leave it at I don't agree that part 100%.
In 2022 every fourth car sold (including petrol/diesel) was a Tesla.
https://elbil.no/om-elbil/elbilstatistikk/
https://www.elbil24.no/nyheter/hver-fjerde-nybil-var-en-tesl...
While Tesla probably played a role in EV adoption, I think you are overstating it by a lot. If the main factor wasn't economic we would see these same stats in every other country where a Tesla can be bought.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_produ...
And every country has been massively subsidizing ICEs since their creation, both explicitly and implicitly (by failing to price in the enormous externalities, engaging in nasty geopolitics up to and including war for oil, tolerance for enormous human atrocities and authoritarian regimes, etc).
Economics certainly matters, but there still have to be vehicles people want to actually buy and can perform as they wish. For me BEVs haven't hit that yet even though I could afford one. Like, there's been a surprisingly slow rollout when it comes to trucks, I think the Cybertruck is the first one I'd consider a real useful (in theory) truck with a minimum of a 6.5' bed. Except build quality is apparently pants, there is all the Tesla spying, and they downgraded the max range option from 500 (paper, which they also apparently lied about) miles (which even on paper would be like 300-350 miles in winter which would be a good useful range), and other problems. Even if the US Government offered me 50% subsidies or something ludicrous for a BEV truck it wouldn't matter if there's literally nothing I want to buy. I think building cars that were actively good vs what came before mattered, as does the charging network. Even if Tesla has run into awful scaling problems and founder-syndrome as happens so often that doesn't IMO negate that.
I think my comment above was indeed a bit snarky and is rightfully getting downvoted.
https://bilmagasinet.no/bilaret-2013-ble-historisk-godt/
The Leafs were small and had a very short range. They were no replacement for petrol or diesel cars for families. Unlike Tesla S and X.
If you happened to be unaware all of these Tesla-skeptics ( atleast this latest round of skeptics ) are being buoyed by this Reuters report about major problems Tesla owners have faced off late. One describing a new owner's experience with his spanking new Tesla : "The vehicle’s front-right suspension had collapsed, and parts of the car loudly scraped the road as it came to a stop."
Tesla blamed drivers for failures of parts it long knew were defective
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-musk-steering-suspension/Well, gee, no wonder that people were buying them left and right when the tax discount was about 16-20k NOK per car on average!
And that is just buying the car - Norway subsidizes electric mobility in many other ways so even today registering a new electric is cheaper than a gasoline car, despite the gas powered vehicles normally costing about 50% less.
So, please, when waving this sort of argument about, don't "forget" to put it in context.
Norway is a special case because of government policies, not because Tesla did anything particularly great there. They were just the only ones on the market at the time so people essentially had to buy a Tesla if they wanted to benefit from the generous subsidies because there simply wasn't anything else available. Today the situation is different, though.
Model Y is the most sold car model in the world in 2023.
Not quite, the Toyota Corolla and RAV-4 both outsold it
If the government discounts cars by 25% - that's one thing. But let's not forget too that the greater part of the cost of running a car (the fuel) is mainly made up by tax on the fuel - it itself is an artificial price.
Nothing about transport is reflective of the underlying reality. Its simply a governmental chess board, and could be shifted at any time by new legislation, eg if a tax is introduced to add 50% tax on the electricity used for cars.
Regardless of the worthiness of this or that cause - its most interesting that none of this the free market in action. Its also licensing, government grants, taxes... in all honesty what is the difference between this and communism - where the government overtly controls the actions of the masses?
I agree. It should start with stopping all fossil fuel subsidies, 7 trillions/year and growing. And ethanol subsides, subsidizing ethanol production on 40m acres, just in US.
And have fossil fuel companies pay for their own military to protect their 6 million assets and 16 million transportation flows[2]. It should be determined by the companies themselves (free market) if these are worth protection, instead of having Govts protect these worldwide. Solar, on the other hand, will not require there protections, it does not depend on the exploration, extraction, shipping, processing, burning, waste output of any fuel. Solar is distributed, on every roof and field, nearly impossible for anyone to invade and destroy.
[1] Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies Reached $7 Trillion in 2022, an All-Time High: https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuel-subsidies-2022
[2] https://github.com/Lkruitwagen/global-fossil-fuel-supply-cha...
That may be true in Europe, but not here in the US. In the US, the federal gasoline tax is currently about $.18 per gallon, and state taxes range from about $.09 to $.58 per gallon[1] (with the median around $0.27). The average price of gasoline in the US has been around $3.00 per gallon[2] ($0.79 per liter), so the total tax would range from about 9% to 25% of the cost, depending on the state.
The price of gas in most European countries is much higher, with Norway paying over twice the US average (US $7.87 / US gallon).[3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_State...
[2] https://www.finder.com/gas-prices
[3] https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/gasoline_prices/Europe/
OPs point had nothing to do with wether the government subsidised EVs or not.
The original argument was not that they were "leader" but that somehow people were buying Teslas for their quality or being better than everything else.
Second, they are still the leader. The quality arguments are clearly nitpicky since people seem to be buying them in droves anyway.
When Tesla introduced the Model S there were no other electric sedans on the market.
Tesla introduced the Model X in 2015, it’s now 2023 and you still have to wait almost 2 years more if you want Volvo’s competitor to the Model X. Even with all the amazing subsidies Volvo is still a decade late to the party!
Were it not for Tesla, America wouldn’t be on a path towards electrified transport. The tradeoffs are incredibly germane to the topic.
So, yes, it's up for debate.
Lastly this doesn't change the fact that Tesla fared the worst in the automaking competition this year w.r.t. everyone else, and they're faking till they're making it. More automakers are always good, but more pretending is always bad (cough VW, Cummins, cough).
I never disagreed. I’m saying the case at hand, EVs, provide a potent balance of the tradeoffs Silicon Valley’s methods involve.
On one hand, you get the capacity for transformational change. Change that can be for the general good. On the other hand, we have costs ranging from a culture of normalised lying to ideological nothingburgers gaining currency due to their proximity to, well, currency.
Put another way, remove Silicon Valley from the equation and yes, we have safer cars. But we also have little reason to be optimistic about ever hitting carbon zero in this country. The latter is more globally relevant than the former.
Totally agree. But looking at specifics, and dissecting why they work or do not, helps suss out patterns.
For example, Tesla’s benefits are amplified—perhaps even characterised—by their ecosystem effect. That doesn’t happen when you have a quasi-monopoly like Facebook. On the other hand, their downsides are largely a function of lying. That’s common across Silicon Valley, and may similarly have a systematic treatment. (Or, at least, if you’re replicating the model, consider removing that in your iteration.)
Same with Silicon Valley. There are certain negative aspects to it but overall we are discussing this on the amazing supercomputer it created, with software it wrote, on platforms it maintains [1]. I seriously doubt the majority of people would want to go back to a world without SV's innovations.
[1] of course it wasn't SV alone, there were many contributions from all around the world, it's just that SV spearheaded the changes and lead us on this path.
Do you mean the military dictatorship? I’m not sure if they are reliable sources. But yes, Myanmar blames lots of their ethnic violence problems on Facebook, it couldn’t be bad governance at all right?
It's the opposite, Tesla is a huge net negative, whereas Facebook is a huge net positive.
People are so weird these days, they come to hate the stuff that they use everyday and idolise stuff that would never use nor need to use
I believe it has to do with the fact that most people really aren't happy with themselves or their lives
Tesla’s did kick off the trend of big screens in cars. I prefer buttons to touch screen interactions while driving, but many people want an iPad and Tesla made that happen.
EVs are unique in their battery requirements. They demand high-discharge, high-endurance, very fast charge batteries, and Tesla did some research on that front. What's important that they were not the sole researchers in that area.
On the other hand, they lack the know-how required to make cars efficiently and assemble them with state of the art methods (minimal/standardized fasteners, fatigue management, fast manufacturing with consistent quality and finishing, etc.).
A great visual is this video of someone snapping together much of a Model Y like legos, in ten minutes by himself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lawGMl8sHzc
Another fun one is Munro's comparison of the thermal management systems for a Model Y and Ford Mach-E: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1kHsd3Ocxc
The battery chemistry and production methods didn’t change fundamentally from Goodenough’s formulation. What did was scale manufacturing. China took the lead, with A123’s tech. But Tesla showed there was demand for EVs in the rich world, and that production could be tamed such that money could be made from it. (EV batteries share little to no production footprint with cells for consumer electronics. They drain differently.)
Pretty much every EV sold in America today was financed by investors looking for the next Tesla, or announced by manufacturers in response to Tesla.
That, too, is up for discussion, but not for now. I’ll leave it by saying that, without Tesla willing to sell cars at a loss for a long time, it might be a bit less further on that path, but I think California and/or the EU would have forced it by now to get on that path, by setting goals for cars sold within their jurisdictions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_effect, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect)
There also can be discussion about whether Tesla’s path is the right pat, but that definitely is for another time.
For hybrids, maybe. California is a major oil producer [1]. That lobby counterbalanced the environmental wing for decades. If there wasn’t a mass-market EV, Sacramento wouldn’t have had many options.
> that definitely is for another time
Lol, is this a thing now? We’re obviously discussing it at this time.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_crd_crpdn_adc_mbbl_m.htm
If not for Tesla, America (& the Western world in general) might not be on a path towards private inefficient electrified road transport, leaving much more room for investment in & upselling of vastly more sustainable non-road transport, as has been done in China.
Musk in particular has form here - consistently blocking & derailing all potential high-speed rail projects for the west coast in favour of white elephants (the material result being a maintained reliance on roads, and - by extension - his big cobalt-mine-dependent business).
Musk ran California’s high-speed rail through the Central Valley?
I like public transport. But America isn’t built for it. Switching to trains would mean upending and dissolving tens of millions’ communities. There was no other path without EVs and trains galore; it was—and is—between EVs and ICE cars.
Seems a very honest interpretation of events to purport that Musk has had no influence over transport in California.
> America isn’t built for it.
That rhetoric is used the world over as an excuse to bolster against progressive innovation of all kinds. It's been debunked countless times. "Dissolving" communities to make way for rail is of course also nonsense.
You mean, America was un-built from it. We had it, but the car and oil industry lobbied it away. We can rebuild it. Don't believe the hype.
Yes. It was traumatic and widely regarded as a mistake. Given the precedent, and our massively increased per-capita resources today versus in the post-War era, you'd be fighting an army of suburban Jane Jacobs to remake America à la China or Europe.
[1] https://www.wri.org/insights/countries-adopting-electric-veh...
[2] https://cleantechnica.com/2023/02/25/us-electric-car-sales-i...
[3] https://electrek.co/2023/10/12/ev-sales-7-9-us-market-volvo-...
(Side note: the standard-range Teslas use lithium iron-phosphate batteries which don't contain cobalt.)
And that is good news because? So that 100 year from now the avg temperature would be 0.005C less because we'd have substitued the black pollutant produced by Arabs with Star and Stipes Lithium (or lithium which comes from countries that are in the sphere of influence of the US)
This effort is a spit in the face of people who are alive and have big problems right now, that's the reason why they are engaging in rolling coal as a form of protest against this nonsense.