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Comment by rvnx | Hacker News Reader

The technological gap is tightening, Tesla was alone before, the same way that Nvidia is "alone" for now.

Tesla still has some advance in terms of autopilot (in the US), but for all other things, it's an electric car with a great software but a rather low-quality hardware finish if to compare with other brands like Mercedes.

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> The technological gap is tightening, Tesla was alone before, the same way that Nvidia is "alone" for now.

It's worse than that. Nvidia has a moat (deployed software and the open source software ecosystem) that buys them at least a few years, even if a well-resourced hardware peer appeared out of thin air tomorrow. Tesla has nothing like this. The cost of switching away from them is negligible, and they have half a dozen extremely well-resourced competitors.

It also has much better range than the Mercedes, accelerates faster, costs nearly half as much, and can use Superchargers. I can forgive the slightly less fancy "finish" for all that.

When Tesla gets tight for money they raise the Supercharger price to more than gas, it happened once around 2018 during a cash crunch.

I rarely use it (the vast majority of Tesla owners charge at home), but when I do, I appreciate the fact that it's there, even if the price is higher. It's still cheaper than gas. I actually think that's kind of the idea. One or two long road trips per year become possible. With most other EVs they're a dicey proposition still.

Yeah I think they lowered it back after a backlash and an improvement in their financial situation.

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