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One substantial possible factor in Tesla's bankruptcy is competition. You suddenly now deal with car manufacturers which are woken up to the electric drive age.

One substantial possible factor in Tesla's bankruptcy is competition. You suddenly now deal with car manufacturers which are woken up to the electric drive age. Thought exercise: how can competition take serious levels while Tesla produces half or more of the world's battery capacity?

will_hughes 9y ago
> You suddenly now deal with car manufacturers which are woken up to the electric drive age. This keeps getting repeated, but all I see are some meagre efforts which seem primarily focussed on headlines rather than actually delivering mass-scale EVs. Concepts. Demonstrators. The closest any of them have come is the Bolt (which is limited in availability, and their dealer networks regularly push people away from buying), and the Leaf (which until the most recent model still looked far too much like a golf buggy and had very limited range). These are large companies with massive departments used to pushing out new vehicle models every year and updating production lines to suit. I'm still yet to hear of any of the major manufacturers sign contracts for large scale battery deliveries to support any mass EV production. I don't understand why their outlook is always 2019-2020-2025-2030 for their full EV range unless they're just hoping for Tesla to fail and finally be able to point out and say "See, EV doesn't work!" so they can go back to what they've been doing for a long while.
- sharpercoder 9y ago
  Exactly my point. They can design an electric car just fine, they can produce an electric car sans battery just fine, they can sell them just fine. They can't setup scale-up battery production sites within years. That's why serious competition from traditional car manufacturers won't happen anytime before 2022. Chinese producers are a different story. They have the government behind them for resourcing (Lithium and Cobalt). I see Chinese manufacturers as the most serious possible competition. However, it's not unlikely the government will not allow exporting of electric vehicles on a mass scale since they will want to use them theirselves.

will_hughes 9y ago

> You suddenly now deal with car manufacturers which are woken up to the electric drive age. This keeps getting repeated, but all I see are some meagre efforts which seem primarily focussed on headlines rather than actually delivering mass-scale EVs. Concepts. Demonstrators. The closest any of them have come is the Bolt (which is limited in availability, and their dealer networks regularly push people away from buying), and the Leaf (which until the most recent model still looked far too much like a golf buggy and had very limited range). These are large companies with massive departments used to pushing out new vehicle models every year and updating production lines to suit. I'm still yet to hear of any of the major manufacturers sign contracts for large scale battery deliveries to support any mass EV production. I don't understand why their outlook is always 2019-2020-2025-2030 for their full EV range unless they're just hoping for Tesla to fail and finally be able to point out and say "See, EV doesn't work!" so they can go back to what they've been doing for a long while.

sharpercoder 9y ago
Exactly my point. They can design an electric car just fine, they can produce an electric car sans battery just fine, they can sell them just fine. They can't setup scale-up battery production sites within years. That's why serious competition from traditional car manufacturers won't happen anytime before 2022. Chinese producers are a different story. They have the government behind them for resourcing (Lithium and Cobalt). I see Chinese manufacturers as the most serious possible competition. However, it's not unlikely the government will not allow exporting of electric vehicles on a mass scale since they will want to use them theirselves.