I know a couple of "faithful" investors who put money on late last year who are still telling themselves it's only temporary.
I don't think you can call 31% growth lacklustre.
Tesla customers were willing to overlook that due to the focus on software and cutting edge tech at the expense of quality but people later realized quality also matters in a object you sit in and your life depends on it, since a car is more than an iPad.
Not coming from that kind of family background personally this was somewhat of a surprise to me when a friend first explained how they were expecting a vehicle to hold its value.
The Tesla’s seats were already worn down so I could feel the steel tubes beneath the upholstery. The Benz was still fine.
That’s better finish which I would care about without being a car enthusiast.
The model S had paint runs and the drivers door didn't shut properly.
Your car enthusiast might care to a different sort of extreme or niche (like wanting real leather not PU; or not wanting leather because the '66 never came with leather) but it's still caring about finish IMO, just different aspects.
I absolutely bought a Lexus because I perceived it as high quality - reliable, assembled properly, good finishes. Same for my BMW, though it’s almost certainly less reliable. My Honda truck, I expect reliable utility, not luxury.
Fit and finish are absolutely things that non-geeks care tremendously about.
Cars have no network effect as the roads are open standard accessible to any vendor and Tesla never had any secret sauce that kept well funded competitors from competing.
Once the big traditional manufacturers started taking electric cars with diver assist features seriously they had the skill and money to match(and in some cases exceed) Tesla and that means Tesla will have to price their cars competitively.
put another way, it's not just making cars, it's making the ecosystem. every phone after the iphone was trying to be the iphone, for example.
for Tesla, it would have been something like getting charging stations everywhere, and getting the 3 price so low that they become ubiquitous. then the Hertz buy might have made sense, you'd see taxis everywhere switching (and they kind of did in some cities), and stronger adoption outside of tech-bro cities.
Models 3/Y are literally one of the cheapest EVs available in EU/US?
> Hertz dumping them due to ROI problems
Hertz frankly had a pretty terrible strategy going in. Buying a ton of cars without any infrastructure for them (Hertz locations without chargers).
BYD Dolphin is 34 990 € and a Tesla Model 3 is 41 990 €. And both are pretty high up there in comparison to like a hybrid Toyota Corolla.
Tesla is anything but the cheapest EV.
They aren't (in EU)? Dacia Spring, Citroën e-C3, Fiat 500e, BYD Dolphin, ID.3 & Peugeot e-208 to name a few are quite a bit cheaper.
Er, no. Peugeot, Renault, Volkswagen etc. all make (way) cheaper models. Heck, even Volvo now has an EV (the EX30) that is ~EUR 8k cheaper than a Model y. Not even mentioning the Asian brand like Hyundai etc.
In part because the carmakers were probably unsure about its long term performance with a totally new technology, but the main reason was other.
It just happens that the environmental emissions of a car maker fleet was calculated as the average of emissions from all their models in the current market.
Those tiny, squared EV that looked like toys were built with the only purpose to decrease the brand average value. Thus they could have models contaminating more in the upper categories. (Plus painting the brand in green for PR purposes).
All of this changed after Tesla started to show its claws and to be taken seriously.
Right now VW is even protesting suggestions that the coming ICE ban should be overturned.
Things have totally changed though VW-group dealerships now really push electric cars and its the ICE cars that are stuck in the back.
>Things have totally changed though VW-group dealerships now really push electric cars and its the ICE cars that are stuck in the back.
Yes. The e-Golf was essentially a Beta Test, a Golf 7 built into an EV. Nowadays VW EVs have their own dedicated platform.
Of course sellers can have their own reasons to sell you this and not that.
The maker tells their dealers how much cars of each model they must sell to keep the relationship as official dealer. If the seller is reluctant to sell a particular model you can expect that this model has not been assigned a high priority in the list of X cars that must be sold yearly to fill the objectives.
But the flagship for self-sabotage EVs, back in the 90s, was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1 : they were never even really sold, but leased, and almost all the few thousand produced were destroyed.
Absolutely Tesla is almost single handedly responsible for getting the EV market from where it was 10 years ago to where it is today. Without Tesla the EV market would almost certainly be years behind where it is right now. No argument from me on either point.
The question is any of that relevant today? Tesla paved the way, but now the market is wide open and 'everybody' is jumping on. Does Tesla still have anything special to offer or will they just be another midsized 'luxury' car brand
I hate dealing with POWER8 systems, but the idea that IBM isn't relevant ain't true.
arguably there is a Ship of Theseus argument that the company that built the PC is long, very long, dead.
I don't care what signal you want to send, i don't care if you were lied to or you are conscious you're doing it. Stop.
It's like the "We invented the first mouse" used by Apple stans to prop up their favorite brand against Microsoft: nice for the brand war argument (no one cares, really), but now most people actually believe that and it's almost a truth. If you are USian, well, maybe improving your country political discourse start with improving your own discourse on social media, and if you're not: why are you pushing a foreign country narrative?
The early history of EV in European carmakers are plenty of WTF were they thinking?. Have you seen the Citroen Ami?. Later the brands gradually changed its mind, in part by the Renault success but mostly for Tesla. We could say many things about Tesla but at least they tried to build cars and not toasters from the start.