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.