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Comment by lvl102 | Hacker News Reader

That gross margin is coming down as competition ramps up. They have two more years before Toyota rolls out new batteries. That doesn’t even include Rivian’s cheaper competition model which they will reveal in March. They have no FSD. They have no AI. They have no “robots”. All vaporwares. Doesn’t help public opinion of Elon Musk and Tesla changed dramatically in the past 24 months. Progressives rather drive ICE than a Tesla.

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AFAIK, none of the traditional automakers are producing EVs at any kind of scale even remotely close to Tesla. And Rivian isn't even in a consideration until they're actually profitable. If anything, I'd say BYD is more of a competition than either Toyota or Rivian and they're not even in the US market yet.

I wanted to check your statement: "none of the traditional automakers are producing EVs at any kind of scale"

It's really tough to find numbers of cars produced! I don't think they make those numbers public even. All the numbers I could find were units sold. Units sold should be a proxy of unit produced to some extent (so perhaps this is fair to look at).

It appears these are the numbers [1] for 2023 (as of 2023 Q3) for global sales of battery-electric vehicles:

    Tesla: 888,879 and 21.7% share (vs. 19%)
    BYD Group: 615,064 and 15% share (vs. 11%)
    Volkswagen Group: 311,359 and 7.6% share (vs. 7.3%)
    SAIC (incl. SAIC-GM-Wuling): 308,899 and 7.5% share (vs. 10.8%)
    Geely-Volvo: 236,847 and 5.8% share

Volkswagan I consider to be a traditional automaker. BYD was founded in 1995, I'm not sure if that is considered traditional yet. VW being at one third and BYD being at 80% is certainly a difference, but not a "any kind of scale" difference. VW and BYD are producing at scale.

> I'd say BYD is more of a competition than either Toyota or Rivian and they're not even in the US market yet.

Indeed, particularly in China and growingly in European markets. This other resource states that BYD (BEV) sales have surpassed Tesla in Q4 2023 [2]. The same resource has some interesting notes about planned production expansions

[1] https://insideevs.com/news/680475/world-top-ev-oem-sales-202...

[2] https://www.investors.com/news/tesla-vs-byd-2024-tsla-stock-...

I'm not sure where you got the numbers for the others, but Tesla's are easy to find: https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-vehicle-production-...

1.8M for 2023. Noone outside of China is particularly close.

Numbers are sales and should be found in the citation.

Do you have numbers for production of other companies? I'm probably most interest in VW.

It would be surprising to me if sales represented sales of old inventory, but that could be the case. I would more suppose that sales are for more recently produced inventory. Thus while 80% the sales of tesla does not mean 80% production, but seems like 50% is plausible. I would consider 50% of 1.8M to be producing at scale.

Eager to see what the numbers are. It would be wildly interesting if sales were somewhat close but production was not

> two more years before Toyota rolls out new batteries.

"Or the horse may learn to sing."

That is, of course, unless the horse, is the famous Mr. Ed.

> Rivian’s cheaper competition model which they will reveal in March

You'd be lucky to get a currently-available Rivian in 2025 if you ordered now, how many years until you realistically could take delivery of this new Rivian model?

Edit: I stand corrected on current availability, see below. Still think it will be years until you will get a new, cheaper model that hasn't been announced yet.

That simply isn't true. It's quick to get an R1S or R1T. My delivery advisor said a custom configuration in the Boise area could pop up in as little as a couple weeks.

that's not true. R1S available in 1-2 weeks at the shop: https://rivian.com/configurations/list?MODEL=R1T

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