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>what Musk spins, and reality. The reality is that they are the first serious electric car company. A tiny enterprise that took on the old Detroit giants and i

by drcross 10y ago

>what Musk spins, and reality. The reality is that they are the first serious electric car company. A tiny enterprise that took on the old Detroit giants and is winning. When you see people putting down hard earned cash for something three years into the future, they are not being tricked, they are investing in disruption. He's such a terrible orator you couldn't describe him as a charlatan. It's his actions and people's wallets speak the loudest.

vkou 10y ago
I'm not at all implying that the money will go poof. What I do mean is that inability to meet demand is actually an incredibly serious problem for a car manufacturer - one that's more closely associated with failing Soviet enterprises, regardless of spin to the contrary. Having three years of cars in your backlog isn't winning. Waiting three years for your car to arrive isn't revolutionary. Meanwhile, Detroit produces more cars then that in two weeks. Tesla might win eventually, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
- denzil_correa 10y ago
  > Waiting three years for your car to arrive isn't revolutionary. Context : No other car manufacturer will have a comparable EV on the road in the next 3 years. I will take what Tesla gives me.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    The Bolt ships in a couple months. It doesn't have the self driving hardware, it's otherwise comparable to the Model 3.
    - sliken 10y ago
      That's a pretty big difference to me. The possibility that the model 3 could save my family and I an accident over it's 10 year lifetime is pretty important to me.
- mohaine 10y ago
  How can there an "inability to meet demand" on a product that hasn't been released yet? Or right, that isn't possible. Once it is released then we can talk about the rate of mfg vs backlog but it is pure silliness to argue against a product because lots of people want it.
- gruturo 10y ago
  > Having three years of cars in your backlog isn't winning. Waiting three years for your car to arrive isn't revolutionary. By this logic, Apple is a huge disappointment because they won't give me my iPhone 8S until 2019.
forgetsusername 10y ago
>A tiny enterprise that took on the old Detroit giants and is winning In what way are they "winning" against Detroit? Certainly not in revenues, profits, miles driven or cars produced. Yes, they "own" one segment": high end electric vehicles. No one there is close. But Detroit owns many others. Why does the one that Tesla dominates carry so much weight?
- nzp 10y ago
  Not high end EV — EV period. Why so much weight? Because it's literally the only direction left for land based vehicles to go (the puns write themselves!) in the next century at least?
- tajen 10y ago
  Tesla's market cap is $30bn, more than Renault, Mazda, Chrystler or Subaru (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9055885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9055885). If they execute well on the Gigafactory, they may apply a multiplier on this market cap, reaching above Toyota ($200bn), even with a tenth or a hundredth of their production. Why would it be more valued, per car produced? Because of its future potential. > Why does the segment that Tesla dominates carry so much weight? The stock market is adjusting for a <10% market share of ICE cars in 2050. It's a Schroedinger situation: If the <10% hypothesis is wrong, then we're all dead (more precisely: Half of us are living under giant cataclisms, the Gulf Stream has stopped, the costal cities are flooded, and our economy is so disorganized that we can't plan where the money will be), so markets don't need to account for this situation. So all Detroit/Toyota industries are slowly shrinking in comparison to Tesla, unless they adapt. It may be hard to imagine if you live in USA because they rely so much on cars for their lifestyle, but our civilization will get rid of petrol cars within our lifespan. This is also the genius of Musk: He saw a version of the future that is obvious but that no other American citizen could understand, and he executed on it. Hence the importance of travelling the world or meeting many people when we want to innovate. By the way, maybe a sweeping change is preparing that the petrol generations can't foresee. We could imagine things like an international agreement on global warming suddenly reducing the worldwide production of cars. It's impossible today, but educated people may have good reasons to believe something like this will happen, in which case Tesla wins all.
U2407_U0003 10y ago
Are they competing against Detroit though, or against Ingolstadt, Stuttgart, Yokohama and Munich?

by drcross 10y ago

vkou 10y ago

I'm not at all implying that the money will go poof. What I do mean is that inability to meet demand is actually an incredibly serious problem for a car manufacturer - one that's more closely associated with failing Soviet enterprises, regardless of spin to the contrary. Having three years of cars in your backlog isn't winning. Waiting three years for your car to arrive isn't revolutionary. Meanwhile, Detroit produces more cars then that in two weeks. Tesla might win eventually, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

denzil_correa 10y ago
> Waiting three years for your car to arrive isn't revolutionary. Context : No other car manufacturer will have a comparable EV on the road in the next 3 years. I will take what Tesla gives me.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  The Bolt ships in a couple months. It doesn't have the self driving hardware, it's otherwise comparable to the Model 3.
  - sliken 10y ago
    That's a pretty big difference to me. The possibility that the model 3 could save my family and I an accident over it's 10 year lifetime is pretty important to me.
mohaine 10y ago
How can there an "inability to meet demand" on a product that hasn't been released yet? Or right, that isn't possible. Once it is released then we can talk about the rate of mfg vs backlog but it is pure silliness to argue against a product because lots of people want it.
gruturo 10y ago
> Having three years of cars in your backlog isn't winning. Waiting three years for your car to arrive isn't revolutionary. By this logic, Apple is a huge disappointment because they won't give me my iPhone 8S until 2019.

forgetsusername 10y ago

>A tiny enterprise that took on the old Detroit giants and is winning In what way are they "winning" against Detroit? Certainly not in revenues, profits, miles driven or cars produced. Yes, they "own" one segment": high end electric vehicles. No one there is close. But Detroit owns many others. Why does the one that Tesla dominates carry so much weight?

nzp 10y ago
Not high end EV — EV period. Why so much weight? Because it's literally the only direction left for land based vehicles to go (the puns write themselves!) in the next century at least?
tajen 10y ago
Tesla's market cap is $30bn, more than Renault, Mazda, Chrystler or Subaru (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9055885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9055885). If they execute well on the Gigafactory, they may apply a multiplier on this market cap, reaching above Toyota ($200bn), even with a tenth or a hundredth of their production. Why would it be more valued, per car produced? Because of its future potential. > Why does the segment that Tesla dominates carry so much weight? The stock market is adjusting for a <10% market share of ICE cars in 2050. It's a Schroedinger situation: If the <10% hypothesis is wrong, then we're all dead (more precisely: Half of us are living under giant cataclisms, the Gulf Stream has stopped, the costal cities are flooded, and our economy is so disorganized that we can't plan where the money will be), so markets don't need to account for this situation. So all Detroit/Toyota industries are slowly shrinking in comparison to Tesla, unless they adapt. It may be hard to imagine if you live in USA because they rely so much on cars for their lifestyle, but our civilization will get rid of petrol cars within our lifespan. This is also the genius of Musk: He saw a version of the future that is obvious but that no other American citizen could understand, and he executed on it. Hence the importance of travelling the world or meeting many people when we want to innovate. By the way, maybe a sweeping change is preparing that the petrol generations can't foresee. We could imagine things like an international agreement on global warming suddenly reducing the worldwide production of cars. It's impossible today, but educated people may have good reasons to believe something like this will happen, in which case Tesla wins all.

U2407_U0003 10y ago

Are they competing against Detroit though, or against Ingolstadt, Stuttgart, Yokohama and Munich?