5 ms·

I'm not convinced that the traditional automaker can even produce a solid electric car. All attempts so far have been very lackluster and not something that I

• rebootthesystem 11y ago
  I think you might be looking at it the wrong way. All other companies know exactly how to build an electric car. It really isn't that difficult. What they have is zero interest in is building a $100K electric car nobody will buy. Tesla has only sold somewhere around 90,000 Model S's and they seem to be losing thousands per sale. This Wikipedia page has number on various models: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automobile_sales_by_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automobile_sales_by_mo... For example (units sold): Audi A3 3,000,000 Audi A4 5,000,000 BMW 3 series 9,500,000 BMW 5 series 5,000,000 Chevy Camaro 4,800,000 Corvette well over 1,300,000 Chevy Impala 13,000,000 sold over 1,000,000 cars in a single year Chrysler Minivans 11,000,000 Fiat Punto 8,500,000 Ford Escort 20,000,000 Ford F series 33,000,000 Ford Model T 16,500,000 ...just for fun Ford Mustang 9,000,000 Honda Civic 16,500,000 Mazda 3 4,000,000 Mercedes C Class 6,900,000 Mercedes S Class 4,000,000 Nissan Sentra 15,900,000 Toyota Corolla 40,000,000 Volkswagen Golf 30,000,000 Anyhow, it is probably fair to say these companies know how to build cars and have the infrastructure to support just about anything. Electric cars are far simpler and very well understood from an Electrical Engineering perspective. What all of these companies are waiting for is for the financial equation to bend in favor of electric vehicles. That means storage technology with somewhere around a 4x gain over current state of the art. In other words, twice the energy in half the volume and probably half the cost (or less). The minute that battery technology becomes available all car companies will absolutely jump on it and we are going to see fantastic high-quality cars coming out of all of them at different price, performance, quality and sophistication levels. When that happens Tesla will be in an interesting spot. They lack the capital and manufacturing horsepower to go toe-to-toe with the giants. My guess is they'll remain a luxury e-car brand and produce a new car every three to five years or so. Perhaps they'll have a parallel battery business, if an only if they can compete with the like of Samsung other other giants who will surely have economies of scale in their favor when manufacturing new storage technologies. I am concerned we might be at the footstep of a major improvement in energy storage technology and I simply have very little interest in getting stuck with an $80K Tesla nobody is going to want. This could very well be the wrong way to think about this. As I said before, I am not a fan boy. I am looking at this purely from a financial perspective first. I am not interested in buying another expensive toy car, I already have the fire-breathing twin turbocharged fun cars. To me an electric is what I would call a working car. It has to make financial sense. It has to pay for itself within a reasonable period of time. I am not going to buy one because I am in love with Tesla, that is a stupid way to make financial decisions. And that's the problem with an $80K to $100K price point if we are at the edge of a step change in technology as well as other vendors coming online with viable options for less.
  • manicdee 11y ago
    As long as you understand that "losing thousands per sale" is a number achieved by dividing Tesla Motors' "losses" by the number of cars they've sold, without paying attention to what those losses involve: i.e.: massive investment in capital as expected for a startup in a new industry. Where is Porche's supercharger network? How will you charge the car in 15 minutes when there's no supercharger available? What change in technology is coming down the pipeline? The so-called "Lithium-Air" battery requires a store of liquid Oxygen (which is not "air" but don't let the facts get in the way of a headline), then there are the Aluminium batteries which are nice in the lab. Getting a technology from the lab to production is a decade-long effort, assuming there's anyone interested in commercialising the technology. There are incremental changes to Lithium batteries, with a new manufacturing technique promising more capacity and a different process promising batteries that last "forever". The market for Tesla Model S and Model X right now is people with cash to burn on a status symbol that will be current for at least two years. When the Porche E comes out, the market will already be different. People will be used to the idea of electric cars, there will be more charging stations at all levels, and hopefully we'll have something closer to an industry standard for charging. Let's revisit the numbers when the Model 3 is out.
    • rebootthesystem 11y ago
      New industry? What new industry? It's the automobile industry. No, sorry, the battery industry? Or did you mean the sheet metal fabrication industry? Or suspension fabrication industry? What new industry are you talking about? Tesla has done a great job snowing everyone about creating a new industry when they've done nothing of the sort. Electric cars aren't new at all. As an example, go back to EV1. People need to stop this delusion about electric cars somehow being special or difficult. They are EASY when compared to internal combustion cars. It's just an overgrown RC car, or electric forklift or golf cart. What, you think controlling hundreds of horsepower electronically is somehow special? Please, there have been electric machine, like backhoes, that are electrically powered for decades. How about massive electric cranes? Electric motors and their control is well understood science. In fact one of the "bibles" on the subject, by Kenjo goes back decades. Not much changed. Same with switched reluctance drives, depending on how you look at it they go back anywhere from 30 to over 150 years. Then there's the business of the supercharger network. The future of electric cars depends on universally available charging facilities, just like gas stations. A single vendor charging system isn't going to scale when you have ten, twenty or fifty million electric cars on the road. And Tesla isn't going to build that network. Tesla only has some 90,000 cars out there and you can read reports of people having problems at supercharging stations. According to Tesla, they have over 500 supercharger stations. If we extrapolate from there, in order to support the over 250 million cars on the road in the US (if 100% of them were electric) you would need nearly 1,500,000 supercharger stations. That is so far beyond a single company it would be ridiculous to even begin to assume it would be a possibility. So, BMW and others don't have a supercharger station problem at all. The 500 Tesla installations in place right now are a mere rounding error in the installed base required to support massive deployment of electric vehicles. My guess is that charging will become far more distributed as technology advances. Once you have $30,000 cars that can go 600 miles on a full charge the game will change significantly. People will charge at home, work or while shopping. You happen to be making my argument. The reason the large car makers haven't jumped in isn't because they can't make electric cars. They can make them just fine. They can run circles around Tesla. No, the reason is that the costs are too high for mass adoption and the infrastructure would cost even more. When the equation is at the correct balance point they'll jump right in, en masse. Tesla will either sink or swim, I don't know. A lot will depend on what they are standing on when that happens. But, it will happen. Regarding Model 3. If Tesla can build it, so can everyone else. And they might be able to do it better and cheaper. There is no magic. I don't hate Tesla. Not at all. I simply choose to do my best to be objective about the options in front of us today. In order for a Tesla to make sense financially you'd have to drive it about 100 miles per day and do so for business purposes in order to have tax advantages. Much below that and you can do far, far better with a good IC car from many brands. Once you get to the point where you only drive 20 to 40 miles per day there are a number of electrics with 20 to 80 mile range that make far more sense than a Tesla. Now, if the purchase of a Tesla is about obtaining a badge indicating one is a member of a club and to simply feel good about the appearance of being environmentally responsible, hey, you know, maybe the $100K is worth it. At one point my wife and I were seriously contemplating buying a Model S and a Model X (one each). That was until we did the numbers and it really started to not make very much sense. Then we sat in one and the interior was, well, it didn't compare well to our German-made cars at all. And then the Model X design started to be shown about and it was a total joke. It just stopped making sense. Sorry. That's my reality. Others might be perfectly happy. It isn't about money at all, they just don't make sense.