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I remember their plan is basically how Ford operated. It's just crazy to see them beat the competition so badly. I remember seeing the concept car for the Che

by JayHost 11y ago

I remember their plan is basically how Ford operated. It's just crazy to see them beat the competition so badly. I remember seeing the concept car for the Chevy Volt a few years ago and thinking how cool it was. Then they released it and made it aerodynamic and thus BORING. It's pretty nuts this car is 35k and the list of advantages to disadvantages can be summed as. There's no reason to buy any other car.

tajen 11y ago
The lifetime of most cars is 14-20 years (half of it on the second-hand market). Tesla's is 8 years, if I understand. It makes their cars twice as expensive in effect.
- sudhirj 11y ago
  8 years for the battery or the car? The batteries are replacable in a minute or so.
  - green7ea 11y ago
    The batteries are the single biggest cost in an electric car. The rest is all much cheaper than a conventional car. Replacing a your batteries would be a significant cost compared to buying a new car. It might even be 1/3 of the new ticket price.
    - akmiller 11y ago
      Last I saw the battery expectation is around 15 years. In 15 years, at the rate of development of EV's and research/development being put into batteries, it would be reasonable to expect that batteries would be significantly cheaper with much better technology.
  - NickM 11y ago
    8 years, unlimited miles for the battery and the drivetrain. 4 years and 50k miles for everything else.
- bronson 11y ago
  The warranty is 8 years. Cars don't just die the moment the warranty runs out, including Teslas. https://www.teslamotors.com/blog/infinite-mile-warranty https://www.teslamotors.com/blog/infinite-mile-warranty
  - jedmeyers 11y ago
    The is no practical way to service a Tesla yourself or in a 3rd party repair shop, like you can a 15 year old Civic. Therefore used Teslas would quickly become financially disadvantageous to service and their price would approach zero on a secondary market.
    - _ph_ 11y ago
      Which current production car is easily serviceable at third party repair shops? They are pretty much all closed down computers. Also, most services required on the engine and support for older cars are just not required on a Tesla. So it is not obvious that it would be more expensive to maintain than any other car, most likely the opposite.
      - gambiting 11y ago
        Things are really not as bad as you think. Even in brand new cars you can replace the brakes, suspension, wishbones, dampers, steering column, oil pans, all filters, oil&fuel pumps, service the air conditioning unit and I am reasonably certain you could do full engine maintenance as well. Most importantly, parts for any new vehicle are publicly available, be it a Fiat 500 or a Mercedes S-Class. On the other hand, Tesla will not sell you the parts. Tesla can at any time deactivate your vehicle if they think it's not fit for driving(as they already do in case of accidents), even remotely, and you have to bring it to their dealership to have it reactivated after it passes their tests. I can't think of any conventional car that you have to do that for, I've seen Range Rovers after horrible crashes that have been fixed and put on the road again, and no one had to ask Land Rover for permission to do that. But even if we forget about that - the biggest cost of owning a second hand Tesla is always going to be the battery. As the value of a Tesla falls down with time, the cost of a new battery for it will remain constant, making a purchase of a second hand Tesla prohibitive. Think about it this way - a cost of 2009 MacBook might have fallen down to around ~$100, but a new battery for it will cost you ~$150. The computer got cheap with time but the parts remained the same price, making a purchase of a 7-year old laptop a bad idea, unless you can do without a battery(and obviously you can't do that in a car). In conventional cars, if you have a 20-year old Mercedes with a dead engine, you go online and find the same engine, with fewer miles on it and in running condition, you buy it for a few hundred dollars, get it installed and you are back on the road. In a Tesla, no one is going to fit you a second-hand electric motor if your old one dies, because Tesla won't allow it.
Hermel 11y ago
>It's just crazy to see them beat the competition so badly. The BMW electric cars (i3 and i8) are quite successful, beating Tesla sales-wise in Germany and selling half as many world-wide. The great weakness of the Tesla S in the German market ist the German autobahn, where it runs out of energy very quickly (after an hour or so for aggressive drivers). The Tesla S is not designed for sustained high speeds.
- jvm 11y ago
  Surely you have never tried to operate an i3 at 80 MPH, I can assure you it has at most 50 miles range at that speed.
- martin_bech 11y ago
  The i3 is a nice small car, but warranty of the battery is horrible, and the range is only so so, specially in cold weater. The i8 is really a plug in hybrid, looks really amazing, but is slower, holds fewer people, and has less space than my Tesla Model S85D. The autobahn is very valid point, driving at 200km/h+ for sustained amounts of time will drain the battery(the amount if sheer wind resistance, makes power used pr km. skyrocket), but driving at 130-150km/h, and stopping and charging when you are low (10% chargeish) is quite effective, as you charge quite fast, when the battery is warm, and low. Thankfully the autobahn always has sections of roadwork, and here the Model S powertrain is very effective at cruising :) .
  - Reason077 11y ago
    The i3 is a nice small car, but warranty of the battery is horrible The battery on the i3 is warrantied for 8 years or 100,000 miles, with a drop below 70% of the original capacity considered to be a battery failure. Tesla also have an 8-year battery warranty, with unlimited miles, but (afaik) they do not explicitly specify what level of capacity loss would be a warranty failure. Considering most people are unlikely to exceed 100,000 miles in 8 years in a "city car" like the i3, is this really a horrible warranty?
    - martin_bech 11y ago
_pmf_ 11y ago
> It's just crazy to see them beat the competition so badly. They have not made a single dollar of profit. Yes, it's an incredibly successful and impressive technology demonstration, but production at the scale that is now required is completely different from the development stage. One example: regular manufacturers are only able to keep their high production numbers because they are able to compensate for hiccups in the supply chain for one model by having evolved to be able to switch a factory to another model in a very short timeframe. A monoculture like Tesla (only model 3 in significant numbers) prevents this.
- illumin8 11y ago
  Correction: every car they sell is profitable, but they've chosen to reinvest those profits to increase future manufacturing capacity.
kelseyfrancis 11y ago
> There's no reason to buy any other car. This seems beyond out-of-touch. There are plenty of good reasons. Cost, size, and the fact that you might need a car now and can't actually buy a Model 3 yet would be chief among them. It seems like a pretty great car if you're in its particular market though.
_fizz_buzz_ 11y ago
> It's just crazy to see them beat the competition so badly. This amazes me so much. I cannot believe that companies like Volkswagen basically ignore the EV market (except some half-assed E-Golf or something). I mean even if it really turns out to be fad - which I don't believe - don't they want to hedge their bets a little bit? Has nobody there ever heard of companies like Nokia, Blackberry, etc.?
- adwn 11y ago
  It's the innovator's dilemma [1] in action. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma
- mikeash 11y ago
  Toyota is the one that really baffles me. I can sorta understand car companies ignoring electric and just continuing to plod along with fossil fuels. I don't think it's wise, but it's what they know. But Toyota seems to be ignoring electric and instead focusing on hydrogen, which just makes no sense whatsoever. It's like they read a collection of EV myths (there's nowhere to charge, you can't take road trips, it's worse for the environment than a normal car) and decided to build a car that made them come true.
  - tamal 11y ago
    Meanwhile Toyota partners with Tesla to produce the minimum required number of zero-emissions vehicles in California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_RAV4_EV#Second_generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_RAV4_EV#Second_generati... All the while denying that it's a good idea. Baffling.
    - mikeash 11y ago
      I'm not sure I see your point. Of course Toyota is going to build EVs if they're required to by law. It's not like they're going to give up the entire California market just because they don't believe in EVs.
ZeroGravitas 11y ago
> It's just crazy to see them beat the competition so badly. There's a video talk on youtube by one of the original Tesla co-founders, Marc Tarpenning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf15nMnayXk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf15nMnayXk and his take on it (in amongst lots of other cool info), learned from later consulting for those same companies, was that the car companies outsourced everything but the engine. Then tesla came along, bought all the standard parts (windscreen wipers etc.) from these third party companies, and have no need for ICE engines. So now you have people, who built their entire corporate status hierarchy around ICE engine experience, trying to start afresh.
- jzwinck 11y ago
  Outsourcing everything but the engine is an interesting concept and I'm sure it applies to some cars. But I have a striking counterexample. The Ford Taurus SHO from the 90s had a Yamaha engine and a Mazda transmission. This was a flagship car, and from its inception Ford outsourced design and manufacture of the main thing that made it unique.
- coredog64 11y ago
  Third party should be in quotes. Visteon, Delphi, Denso et al aren't really what you'd think of when you think third party. They're more of a way to split up parts of the same business for tax/labor advantages.

by JayHost 11y ago

tajen 11y ago

The lifetime of most cars is 14-20 years (half of it on the second-hand market). Tesla's is 8 years, if I understand. It makes their cars twice as expensive in effect.

sudhirj 11y ago
8 years for the battery or the car? The batteries are replacable in a minute or so.
- green7ea 11y ago
  The batteries are the single biggest cost in an electric car. The rest is all much cheaper than a conventional car. Replacing a your batteries would be a significant cost compared to buying a new car. It might even be 1/3 of the new ticket price.
  - akmiller 11y ago
    Last I saw the battery expectation is around 15 years. In 15 years, at the rate of development of EV's and research/development being put into batteries, it would be reasonable to expect that batteries would be significantly cheaper with much better technology.
- NickM 11y ago
  8 years, unlimited miles for the battery and the drivetrain. 4 years and 50k miles for everything else.
bronson 11y ago
The warranty is 8 years. Cars don't just die the moment the warranty runs out, including Teslas. https://www.teslamotors.com/blog/infinite-mile-warranty https://www.teslamotors.com/blog/infinite-mile-warranty
- jedmeyers 11y ago
  The is no practical way to service a Tesla yourself or in a 3rd party repair shop, like you can a 15 year old Civic. Therefore used Teslas would quickly become financially disadvantageous to service and their price would approach zero on a secondary market.
  - _ph_ 11y ago
    Which current production car is easily serviceable at third party repair shops? They are pretty much all closed down computers. Also, most services required on the engine and support for older cars are just not required on a Tesla. So it is not obvious that it would be more expensive to maintain than any other car, most likely the opposite.
    - gambiting 11y ago
      Things are really not as bad as you think. Even in brand new cars you can replace the brakes, suspension, wishbones, dampers, steering column, oil pans, all filters, oil&fuel pumps, service the air conditioning unit and I am reasonably certain you could do full engine maintenance as well. Most importantly, parts for any new vehicle are publicly available, be it a Fiat 500 or a Mercedes S-Class. On the other hand, Tesla will not sell you the parts. Tesla can at any time deactivate your vehicle if they think it's not fit for driving(as they already do in case of accidents), even remotely, and you have to bring it to their dealership to have it reactivated after it passes their tests. I can't think of any conventional car that you have to do that for, I've seen Range Rovers after horrible crashes that have been fixed and put on the road again, and no one had to ask Land Rover for permission to do that. But even if we forget about that - the biggest cost of owning a second hand Tesla is always going to be the battery. As the value of a Tesla falls down with time, the cost of a new battery for it will remain constant, making a purchase of a second hand Tesla prohibitive. Think about it this way - a cost of 2009 MacBook might have fallen down to around ~$100, but a new battery for it will cost you ~$150. The computer got cheap with time but the parts remained the same price, making a purchase of a 7-year old laptop a bad idea, unless you can do without a battery(and obviously you can't do that in a car). In conventional cars, if you have a 20-year old Mercedes with a dead engine, you go online and find the same engine, with fewer miles on it and in running condition, you buy it for a few hundred dollars, get it installed and you are back on the road. In a Tesla, no one is going to fit you a second-hand electric motor if your old one dies, because Tesla won't allow it.

Hermel 11y ago

>It's just crazy to see them beat the competition so badly. The BMW electric cars (i3 and i8) are quite successful, beating Tesla sales-wise in Germany and selling half as many world-wide. The great weakness of the Tesla S in the German market ist the German autobahn, where it runs out of energy very quickly (after an hour or so for aggressive drivers). The Tesla S is not designed for sustained high speeds.

jvm 11y ago
Surely you have never tried to operate an i3 at 80 MPH, I can assure you it has at most 50 miles range at that speed.
martin_bech 11y ago
The i3 is a nice small car, but warranty of the battery is horrible, and the range is only so so, specially in cold weater. The i8 is really a plug in hybrid, looks really amazing, but is slower, holds fewer people, and has less space than my Tesla Model S85D. The autobahn is very valid point, driving at 200km/h+ for sustained amounts of time will drain the battery(the amount if sheer wind resistance, makes power used pr km. skyrocket), but driving at 130-150km/h, and stopping and charging when you are low (10% chargeish) is quite effective, as you charge quite fast, when the battery is warm, and low. Thankfully the autobahn always has sections of roadwork, and here the Model S powertrain is very effective at cruising :) .
- Reason077 11y ago
  The i3 is a nice small car, but warranty of the battery is horrible The battery on the i3 is warrantied for 8 years or 100,000 miles, with a drop below 70% of the original capacity considered to be a battery failure. Tesla also have an 8-year battery warranty, with unlimited miles, but (afaik) they do not explicitly specify what level of capacity loss would be a warranty failure. Considering most people are unlikely to exceed 100,000 miles in 8 years in a "city car" like the i3, is this really a horrible warranty?
  - martin_bech 11y ago

_pmf_ 11y ago

> It's just crazy to see them beat the competition so badly. They have not made a single dollar of profit. Yes, it's an incredibly successful and impressive technology demonstration, but production at the scale that is now required is completely different from the development stage. One example: regular manufacturers are only able to keep their high production numbers because they are able to compensate for hiccups in the supply chain for one model by having evolved to be able to switch a factory to another model in a very short timeframe. A monoculture like Tesla (only model 3 in significant numbers) prevents this.

illumin8 11y ago
Correction: every car they sell is profitable, but they've chosen to reinvest those profits to increase future manufacturing capacity.

kelseyfrancis 11y ago

> There's no reason to buy any other car. This seems beyond out-of-touch. There are plenty of good reasons. Cost, size, and the fact that you might need a car now and can't actually buy a Model 3 yet would be chief among them. It seems like a pretty great car if you're in its particular market though.

_fizz_buzz_ 11y ago

> It's just crazy to see them beat the competition so badly. This amazes me so much. I cannot believe that companies like Volkswagen basically ignore the EV market (except some half-assed E-Golf or something). I mean even if it really turns out to be fad - which I don't believe - don't they want to hedge their bets a little bit? Has nobody there ever heard of companies like Nokia, Blackberry, etc.?

adwn 11y ago
It's the innovator's dilemma [1] in action. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma
mikeash 11y ago
Toyota is the one that really baffles me. I can sorta understand car companies ignoring electric and just continuing to plod along with fossil fuels. I don't think it's wise, but it's what they know. But Toyota seems to be ignoring electric and instead focusing on hydrogen, which just makes no sense whatsoever. It's like they read a collection of EV myths (there's nowhere to charge, you can't take road trips, it's worse for the environment than a normal car) and decided to build a car that made them come true.
- tamal 11y ago
  Meanwhile Toyota partners with Tesla to produce the minimum required number of zero-emissions vehicles in California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_RAV4_EV#Second_generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_RAV4_EV#Second_generati... All the while denying that it's a good idea. Baffling.
  - mikeash 11y ago
    I'm not sure I see your point. Of course Toyota is going to build EVs if they're required to by law. It's not like they're going to give up the entire California market just because they don't believe in EVs.

ZeroGravitas 11y ago

> It's just crazy to see them beat the competition so badly. There's a video talk on youtube by one of the original Tesla co-founders, Marc Tarpenning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf15nMnayXk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf15nMnayXk and his take on it (in amongst lots of other cool info), learned from later consulting for those same companies, was that the car companies outsourced everything but the engine. Then tesla came along, bought all the standard parts (windscreen wipers etc.) from these third party companies, and have no need for ICE engines. So now you have people, who built their entire corporate status hierarchy around ICE engine experience, trying to start afresh.

jzwinck 11y ago
Outsourcing everything but the engine is an interesting concept and I'm sure it applies to some cars. But I have a striking counterexample. The Ford Taurus SHO from the 90s had a Yamaha engine and a Mazda transmission. This was a flagship car, and from its inception Ford outsourced design and manufacture of the main thing that made it unique.
coredog64 11y ago
Third party should be in quotes. Visteon, Delphi, Denso et al aren't really what you'd think of when you think third party. They're more of a way to split up parts of the same business for tax/labor advantages.