7 ms·

This seems really optimistic about the adoption of electric cars. I suspect adoption will be drastically slower than you're imagining, and hybrids as well as ga

by notJim 7y ago

This seems really optimistic about the adoption of electric cars. I suspect adoption will be drastically slower than you're imagining, and hybrids as well as gas vehicles will remain relevant for a long time still. Toyota of course has the top-selling hybrid, and introduced a plug-in hybrid version recently. Ford was in the #2 spot and Toyota was again in the #3. Honda takes #5. I think the thesis of these automakers is that they can ride the transition from gas -> hybrid -> plugin hybrid -> electric. I hope you're right, but from what I see, it seems unlikely. Additionally, Nissan has the #4-selling electric car, and Chevy has the #2. I think you are overstating your case.

jbms 7y ago
Automakers don't like gas/electric hybrids as they are more complex to design and manufacture than either gas or electric vehicles. Fuel-cell/electric hybrids are a different value proposition and will keep going. But they'll increasingly drop gas hybrids and jump to full electric, perhaps after the next generation of vehicles.
- RussianCow 7y ago
  They're going to follow customer demand. If demand for electric cars remains low, they aren't going to abandon the types of cars that are selling really well for them in order to simplify the production process. And there are a lot of reasons to think that demand for electric cars is not going to skyrocket all of a sudden: range anxiety, lack of charging stations, gas prices being fairly low, the time it takes to charge, etc.
- jppope 7y ago
  Honda's Tesla killing fuel cell civic has a price tag of $300K+.
ZeroGravitas 7y ago
The number one factor that leads to one future or the other is battery price. With high battery prices the market stays with hybrids longer. With cheap and plentiful batteries it moves faster to full EV. What'll be interesting is if some vendors have access to lots of cheap batteries and so are living in one future while competitors are in the other.
- netsharc 7y ago
  Hah.. also: fear of war (with Iran) -> oil went up -> people think e-cars will be more attractive -> TSLA up. One time a few years ago, oil went down and TSLA followed. It'd be interesting to see what will happen with the incoming recession (although then all stocks might go down with people pulling out of the market).
vardump 7y ago
> Toyota of course has the top-selling hybrid, and introduced a plug-in hybrid version recently. I thought that was in 2012? Of course "recently" is kind of subjective. Edit: Ah, so they only introduced plug-in hybrids in the United States in 2016. Wonder what took them so long.
- javagram 7y ago
  Fuel prices in the USA are quite low. There isn’t much demand for a plugin hybrid. People looking for “green” cred and branding may go straight to an electric car, while everyone else buys SUVs and light trucks.
- jppope 7y ago
  Most of the major automakers work in 5 year cycles, where the cars are basically the same for 5 years but get cosmetic changes. Major design changes need to be part of the next cycle if its non-trivial.
boardwaalk 7y ago
We’re about one step away in battery tech (which Tesla leads on, among other things (efficiency, integration, etc) from a mid range electric car be upfront cost equivalent with an mid range gas car. Once that’s there, plus charging infrastructure (which is rapidly coming up) the other benefits (maintenance, torque, quiet, fuel costs, etc) will be front and center for every car buyer making the choice between the two technologies. I don’t think it’s too optimistic. VW with the ID.3 seems like they’re the only ones who will be able to match the scale and qualities of product to the Model 3/Y in the near term. We’ll see though. It’s interesting in any case.
- genS3 7y ago
  do they have a roadmap for charging infrastructure? What if they sell millions and it takes 20min to charge knowing that most people will charge at similar times when going to work?
  - aviraldg 7y ago
    Wouldn't most people just charge at home, overnight?
    - d1zzy 7y ago
      That may work in suburban America but I'm not so sure about the rest of the world. Most of my life I've lived in apartment complexes (US) / blocks of flats (Europe) where there was no car charging possibility when parking. It would require huge infrastructure changes to allow most people to be able to charge at home and work, this is different from gas powered vehicles where you need a relatively small number of (centralized) points that distribute fuel. With electric cars that number needs to be much larger and it's distributed. It can be done over decades for sure but it won't happen overnight.
      - Fjolsvith 7y ago
        I can see charging trucks going around all night and topping vehicles up mobile resupply like.
abainbridge 7y ago
A few fairly large economies are planning to ban sales of new fossil fuel powered cars by 2030 and a bunch more by 2040. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehicles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehic...
ReverseCold 7y ago
> Additionally, Nissan has the #4-selling electric car, and Chevy has the #2. From here: https://insideevs.com/news/343998/monthly-plug-in-ev-sales-scorecard/ https://insideevs.com/news/343998/monthly-plug-in-ev-sales-s... - by # of units sold, no one is even close to the Model 3. People with money to buy electric cars with can probably afford a $50k car (Model 3) that does everything well over $less cars that do everything kinda poorly.
- cjhopman 7y ago
  You linked to something that only looked at a small fraction of the global market.
jppope 7y ago
It's not optimism, it's arithmetic: Tesla is stealing units from the other car companies. The other car companies require those unit sales to keep the prices the where they are otherwise they have to raise prices (same goes for insurance). Sure maybe for the next 2-5 years people will do business as normal but are you really going to buy a Corolla for $30K when you can get a Tesla Model 3 for $30K? That is what will cause a quick shift.
- briankelly 7y ago
  A new Model 3 is 36k, a new Corolla is 19.6k MSRP. Realistically you can get the Toyota for less than half the price of the Tesla. I am not convinced that gap can be closed in 5 years, much less 2.
  - jmpman 7y ago
    Corolla gets 32mpg. Assume 200,000 miles over the life of the corolla, that’s 6250 gallons of fuel. $2.79/gallon where I live for $17437 of fuel over the life of the corolla. $19600+17437=$37k The Tesla requires 50,000 kWh to drive 200,000 miles. At $0.08/kWh (what I’m paying), that’s just $4000 in electricity. $36k + $4k = $40k That’s surprisingly close for a Tesla Model 3 versus a Corolla.
    - jjeaff 7y ago
      8 cents per kw/hr is nearly the cheapest rate in America. And most people will not be on track to drive 200k miles in their car before the loan is paid off. Which leaves them upfronting a very large percentage of the savings.
      - jmpman 7y ago
        https://www.srpnet.com/prices/home/electricvehicle.aspx https://www.srpnet.com/prices/home/electricvehicle.aspx Yes, Arizona has good rates.
    - xbmcuser 7y ago
manicdee 7y ago
Tesla has already sold every car they can manufacture, and their entry price is $40k-ish in the USA. Other manufacturers are limiting how many BEVs they produce, and still managing to sell most of the ones they build even though they are universally objectively worse than any Tesla offering. Tesla Model 3 is the best selling BEV in every market it participates in (not sure about numbers compared to PHEVs). It is selling in comparable quantities to ICE vehicles in the same price range. A significant number of people buying Model 3 are upgrading from cars costing half the price. There is little to no indication that EV adoption will slow down (before pointing to a drop in Model 3 sales in the USA consider that the one factory supplies the entire world outside China).
- clouddrover 7y ago
  > Tesla Model 3 is the best selling BEV in every market it participates in No, that's incorrect. The Model 3 is the second best seller in France: https://ev-sales.blogspot.com/2019/12/france-november-2019.html https://ev-sales.blogspot.com/2019/12/france-november-2019.h... It's the third best seller in Germany: https://ev-sales.blogspot.com/2019/12/germany-november-2019.html https://ev-sales.blogspot.com/2019/12/germany-november-2019.... And it's the 9th best selling BEV in China: https://ev-sales.blogspot.com/2019/12/china-november-2019-updated.html https://ev-sales.blogspot.com/2019/12/china-november-2019-up...
  - manicdee 7y ago
    Chinese Model 3 production only started in November. Check back in February, you’ll find it’s the highest selling vehicle (perhaps by model, though I am betting also by manufacturer). Europe-wide, Tesla Model 3 is top of the charts by a wide margin. The articles you linked mentioned this, France and Germany are behind because the vast demand for Tesla in Netherlands and Norway is sucking all the supply up before France and Germany get a seat at the table. As Fremont production improves and the German Tesla factory opens, we’ll see that lead grow as Europeans switch to BEVs en masse to escape the cheating ICE manufacturers.
    - clouddrover 7y ago

by notJim 7y ago

jbms 7y ago

Automakers don't like gas/electric hybrids as they are more complex to design and manufacture than either gas or electric vehicles. Fuel-cell/electric hybrids are a different value proposition and will keep going. But they'll increasingly drop gas hybrids and jump to full electric, perhaps after the next generation of vehicles.

RussianCow 7y ago
They're going to follow customer demand. If demand for electric cars remains low, they aren't going to abandon the types of cars that are selling really well for them in order to simplify the production process. And there are a lot of reasons to think that demand for electric cars is not going to skyrocket all of a sudden: range anxiety, lack of charging stations, gas prices being fairly low, the time it takes to charge, etc.
jppope 7y ago
Honda's Tesla killing fuel cell civic has a price tag of $300K+.

ZeroGravitas 7y ago

The number one factor that leads to one future or the other is battery price. With high battery prices the market stays with hybrids longer. With cheap and plentiful batteries it moves faster to full EV. What'll be interesting is if some vendors have access to lots of cheap batteries and so are living in one future while competitors are in the other.

netsharc 7y ago
Hah.. also: fear of war (with Iran) -> oil went up -> people think e-cars will be more attractive -> TSLA up. One time a few years ago, oil went down and TSLA followed. It'd be interesting to see what will happen with the incoming recession (although then all stocks might go down with people pulling out of the market).

vardump 7y ago

> Toyota of course has the top-selling hybrid, and introduced a plug-in hybrid version recently. I thought that was in 2012? Of course "recently" is kind of subjective. Edit: Ah, so they only introduced plug-in hybrids in the United States in 2016. Wonder what took them so long.

javagram 7y ago
Fuel prices in the USA are quite low. There isn’t much demand for a plugin hybrid. People looking for “green” cred and branding may go straight to an electric car, while everyone else buys SUVs and light trucks.
jppope 7y ago
Most of the major automakers work in 5 year cycles, where the cars are basically the same for 5 years but get cosmetic changes. Major design changes need to be part of the next cycle if its non-trivial.

boardwaalk 7y ago

We’re about one step away in battery tech (which Tesla leads on, among other things (efficiency, integration, etc) from a mid range electric car be upfront cost equivalent with an mid range gas car. Once that’s there, plus charging infrastructure (which is rapidly coming up) the other benefits (maintenance, torque, quiet, fuel costs, etc) will be front and center for every car buyer making the choice between the two technologies. I don’t think it’s too optimistic. VW with the ID.3 seems like they’re the only ones who will be able to match the scale and qualities of product to the Model 3/Y in the near term. We’ll see though. It’s interesting in any case.

genS3 7y ago
do they have a roadmap for charging infrastructure? What if they sell millions and it takes 20min to charge knowing that most people will charge at similar times when going to work?
- aviraldg 7y ago
  Wouldn't most people just charge at home, overnight?
  - d1zzy 7y ago
    That may work in suburban America but I'm not so sure about the rest of the world. Most of my life I've lived in apartment complexes (US) / blocks of flats (Europe) where there was no car charging possibility when parking. It would require huge infrastructure changes to allow most people to be able to charge at home and work, this is different from gas powered vehicles where you need a relatively small number of (centralized) points that distribute fuel. With electric cars that number needs to be much larger and it's distributed. It can be done over decades for sure but it won't happen overnight.
    - Fjolsvith 7y ago
      I can see charging trucks going around all night and topping vehicles up mobile resupply like.

abainbridge 7y ago

A few fairly large economies are planning to ban sales of new fossil fuel powered cars by 2030 and a bunch more by 2040. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehicles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehic...

ReverseCold 7y ago

> Additionally, Nissan has the #4-selling electric car, and Chevy has the #2. From here: https://insideevs.com/news/343998/monthly-plug-in-ev-sales-scorecard/ https://insideevs.com/news/343998/monthly-plug-in-ev-sales-s... - by # of units sold, no one is even close to the Model 3. People with money to buy electric cars with can probably afford a $50k car (Model 3) that does everything well over $less cars that do everything kinda poorly.

cjhopman 7y ago
You linked to something that only looked at a small fraction of the global market.

jppope 7y ago

It's not optimism, it's arithmetic: Tesla is stealing units from the other car companies. The other car companies require those unit sales to keep the prices the where they are otherwise they have to raise prices (same goes for insurance). Sure maybe for the next 2-5 years people will do business as normal but are you really going to buy a Corolla for $30K when you can get a Tesla Model 3 for $30K? That is what will cause a quick shift.

briankelly 7y ago
A new Model 3 is 36k, a new Corolla is 19.6k MSRP. Realistically you can get the Toyota for less than half the price of the Tesla. I am not convinced that gap can be closed in 5 years, much less 2.
- jmpman 7y ago
  Corolla gets 32mpg. Assume 200,000 miles over the life of the corolla, that’s 6250 gallons of fuel. $2.79/gallon where I live for $17437 of fuel over the life of the corolla. $19600+17437=$37k The Tesla requires 50,000 kWh to drive 200,000 miles. At $0.08/kWh (what I’m paying), that’s just $4000 in electricity. $36k + $4k = $40k That’s surprisingly close for a Tesla Model 3 versus a Corolla.
  - jjeaff 7y ago
    8 cents per kw/hr is nearly the cheapest rate in America. And most people will not be on track to drive 200k miles in their car before the loan is paid off. Which leaves them upfronting a very large percentage of the savings.
    - jmpman 7y ago
      https://www.srpnet.com/prices/home/electricvehicle.aspx https://www.srpnet.com/prices/home/electricvehicle.aspx Yes, Arizona has good rates.
  - xbmcuser 7y ago

manicdee 7y ago

Tesla has already sold every car they can manufacture, and their entry price is $40k-ish in the USA. Other manufacturers are limiting how many BEVs they produce, and still managing to sell most of the ones they build even though they are universally objectively worse than any Tesla offering. Tesla Model 3 is the best selling BEV in every market it participates in (not sure about numbers compared to PHEVs). It is selling in comparable quantities to ICE vehicles in the same price range. A significant number of people buying Model 3 are upgrading from cars costing half the price. There is little to no indication that EV adoption will slow down (before pointing to a drop in Model 3 sales in the USA consider that the one factory supplies the entire world outside China).

clouddrover 7y ago
> Tesla Model 3 is the best selling BEV in every market it participates in No, that's incorrect. The Model 3 is the second best seller in France: https://ev-sales.blogspot.com/2019/12/france-november-2019.html https://ev-sales.blogspot.com/2019/12/france-november-2019.h... It's the third best seller in Germany: https://ev-sales.blogspot.com/2019/12/germany-november-2019.html https://ev-sales.blogspot.com/2019/12/germany-november-2019.... And it's the 9th best selling BEV in China: https://ev-sales.blogspot.com/2019/12/china-november-2019-updated.html https://ev-sales.blogspot.com/2019/12/china-november-2019-up...
- manicdee 7y ago
  Chinese Model 3 production only started in November. Check back in February, you’ll find it’s the highest selling vehicle (perhaps by model, though I am betting also by manufacturer). Europe-wide, Tesla Model 3 is top of the charts by a wide margin. The articles you linked mentioned this, France and Germany are behind because the vast demand for Tesla in Netherlands and Norway is sucking all the supply up before France and Germany get a seat at the table. As Fremont production improves and the German Tesla factory opens, we’ll see that lead grow as Europeans switch to BEVs en masse to escape the cheating ICE manufacturers.
  - clouddrover 7y ago