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Comment by mcast | Hacker News Reader

The difference is Tesla had a moat with the electric car market, there were no affordable and practical EVs 10 years ago. OpenAI is surrounded by competition and Meta is constantly releasing Llama weights to break up any closed source monopolies.

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Tesla is still overvalued today with a moat that is more a puddle than anything. Elon realized that cars weren't gonna carry the hype anymore, so now it's all robotaxi, which will almost certainly be more vaporware.

I think he’s even past robo taxi and onto AI and robots that build robots that build robotaxis. I wish I were joking.

The Nissan Leaf was far more affordable than a Tesla 10 years ago and very practical for anyone living in a city.

While it was an affordable vehicle, saying that it was practical is an overstatement. Charging networks were abysmal and actually still are for non-Tesla compatible vehicles. If you had experience using EVgo and similar small networks you probably wouldn't sound as confident.

People back then didn't use charging networks; they charged at home (or work).

Since I am technically "people", I can assure you that there indeed existed non-Tesla charging stations in 2014. I was living in a medium size city in an apartment. Since your original comment is specifically about cities, I would like to point out that cities are often associated with apartment buildings, lack of individual garages, etc. Even today saying that EV owners in cities mostly rely on charging at home or at work does not seem valid.

That wasn't my comment but I will say that lots of people have houses with garages in cities. Those that don't often will choose to not purchase an electric vehicle.

Eh it was pretty limited. The Leaf (then) couldn't go from my house, to the airport in my city (Melbourne) and back on one charge. That always made it a dealbreaker for me.

And that's going by Nissan's claimed range, not even real world. So that's on a 100% charge, when the car is brand new with no battery degradation, and under the ideal efficiency conditions that you never really get.

Surely your city is not 50 miles wide?

What's dogecoins valuation? Cardanos? Bitcoins? There is a nigh-infinite amount of capital ready to get entranced by a sexy story.

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