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Comment by dzonga | Hacker News Reader

Tesla has no moat

1. Batteries - BYD has them beat 2. Self Driving tech - other players are better 3. Luxury brands already provide the luxury aspect & even better built cars 4. in the US they're being saved by US protectionism. in Europe etc - we already see the chinese brands making inroads for EV sales

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I mostly agree on all points, but what self driving tech is better? I've periodically looked at the options, and nothing really seems to compare in North America. Maybe BYD and others have great tech, but stuff like Blue Cruise works hardly anywhere in Canada, and to me, that makes it virtually useless.

Certainly waymo is better, but you can't buy it. Yet, anyway.

He’s probably thinking of robo taxi self driving. So that would be e.g. Waymo.

I don’t think anyone has better self driving for consumers out atm, but you could argue that’s because other companies are not using their customers as beta testers. I’ve seen demos that may indicate Mobileye has tech that’s just as good if not better. But they don’t release it to end users until it’s fully ready.

I don’t think Tesla has any special sauce, and that when the tech is actually ready for unattended full self driving in a consumer car, other car makers will come out with solutions around the same Tesla. One difference is maaaybe Tesla will be able to update old cars (probably with a hardware update). While I think others will only support it on new cars.

Yeah this.

The argument for years has been something like:

> Tesla will solve self-driving and everyone will be left unable to compete. Also, AI is advancing rapidly and will solve all kinds of problems for society.

But apparently it will not solve self-driving for anyone else but Tesla.

I gave up trying to argue with Tesla fans years ago. They are immune to logic which invalidates their priors.

http://comma.ai isn't self-driving, just really good cruise control (better than Blue cruise, imo), but most importantly, you can get it today. (And for less than $8k.)

That’s just Tesla auto pilot and smart cruise control on most new models. It’s definitely nice, but not full self driving.

TBF all I really want is highway driving. I probably even prefer signalling lane changes manually. Comma looks pretty neat.

"I've tried all the options I have here in the country that banned the major players and I don't think any are better."

“I like to be snarky and mean to people on the internet who aren’t as lucky as me to have diverse consumer choices.”

Protectionism on inputs kills manufacturing. Imagine having to pay 15% more for all inputs and trying to compete with someone who doesn't have pay that.

Well, at least domestically you don’t have to compete with someone who doesn’t have to pay that because their product is probably tariffed directly.

Internationally, yes if you manufacture the international product in the home country, but AFAIK in auto at least there are usually satellite factories and have been for some time, and those wouldn’t be subject to home country tariffs would they?

Precisely, you need to set up plants overseas to dodge the input tariffs instead of onshoring manufacturing for export. That causes reductions in manufacturing investment compared to the alternative.

Compared to the alternative where the domestic plants don’t exist at all because they are competing domestically with low cost foreign products?

In that hypothetical they can't compete because of labour protectionism and immigration restrictions, not because there's some intrinsic reason it's too expensive to manufacture in one country versus another.

Not only that, Teslas nowadays look like they belong in a museum - so fucking old and outdated. I own 2014 Tesla S, my neighbour has 2025 Tesla S, same fucking car - literally. My car was THE shit back in the day, lots of broken necks looking at it … now, 12 years later, someone (fewer and fewer) is paying $90k for exactly the same car. Tesla X was great looking - circa 2016… Tesla 3 is like a Kia and Model Y is just 3 that is blown up a bit.

> My car was THE shit back in the day, lots of broken necks looking at it … now, 12 years later, someone (fewer and fewer) is paying $90k for exactly the same car

That's what Porsche also discovered, the hard way.

I live in the US and I would happily buy a Chinese EV if the price was right. However, there is no price for which I will buy a Tesla, ever.

Tesla also has a big Elon problem in that the blue cities where self-driving Taxis will be most profitable may opt for Waymo or boycott Tesla over politics.

I’m not going to allow “Nazi salutes” to be downgraded to “politics”. It’s still too soon to be a Nazi. Hopefully it will always be.

I just value my life enough that Waymo seems to be the better route. Tesla hasn’t shown that they’ve solved the problem while waymo definitely has.

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