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Leaving aside (and I know this hard) the controversy of Tesla's valuation, Elon Musk and the environmental virtues of electric cars, think what a historic succe

Leaving aside (and I know this hard) the controversy of Tesla's valuation, Elon Musk and the environmental virtues of electric cars, think what a historic success Tesla is as a car company. There have been dozen(s) of car companies started in the US since WW2 and you could argue that not one of them has been a success. The biggest Kaiser Motors, has probably been surpassed. For decades American and Japanese manufacturers have tried to compete with European luxury brands. American companies had almost no success and Japanese very little. Lexus does well, but it never displaced German car sales the way Tesla is now. I am not a Tesla fanboy, but I do like cars. You have to respect the product.

jessriedel 7y ago
In a recent podcast interview, Musk claims there have been thousands of new (EDIT: American) consumer car companies and that every single one has failed besides Tesla (if I recall correctly). Presumably this counts every incorporated team that made a rudimentary prototype.
- aantix 7y ago
  Do you remember the podcast?
  - jessriedel 7y ago
    Third Row. Can't remember if it was part 1 or 2, but probably 2. It's very fanboyish, but there are some good stories on there about the early days of SpaceX and Tesla.
- baybal2 7y ago
  BYD - been around for an eternity by silicon valley standards, few other genuinely new Chinese brands (ones which are not subsidiaries of BAIC or FAW,) Vinfast, Peroda
  - jessriedel 7y ago
    Sorry, I forgot to mention he specified American.
- cjhopman 7y ago
  Tesla has burned through more money than all of them combined.
rconti 7y ago
As a sidenote, it's easy to get lost among the "how many hundreds of thousands of model 3s can tesla produce in a year", but I just saw an overall production stat and noticed they're over 900,000 cars lifetime, and hadn't heard it mentioned elsewhere. 1 million vehicles sold will be a real milestone. I stumbled upon a comment online, recently, from a guy who went on and on about peak oil for years. In 2008, he made a joke about "Tesla will have surpassed the US car industry". I don't remember the time horizon, but the first Roadster was delivered to Elon in February 2008. It just made me reflect on what we'd think of that prediction/joke and how it turned out, if we were to go back in time.
- latortuga 7y ago
  Musk tweeted about how they reached 1M just yesterday.
- rtsil 7y ago
  > 1 million vehicles sold will be a real milestone. They've just passed 1 million vehicles manufactured so that shouldn't take long.
- tardo99 7y ago
  Tesla's 10-K shows an accumulated shareholder deficit of $6B. That's over and above money spent to buy factories which are still operating. That's $6k a car at 1M cars sold. Add to that the $7500 rebate the US was providing until recently. That's $13.5k, on average, they lost per car they sold through the end of 2019. Saying nothing about Tesla cars versus other companies, that's a huge financial advantage against other car companies. This is particularly true given that most of those car sales happened post-Q1-2018, when Tesla had already established a strong brand. I'm not sure any established player could, at that point, compete with a company that gets to lose $13.5k per car they sell. That would be like if Nissan started building base-model Sentras and selling them for $4500. Yes, they would sell a lot of them. As markets normalize and Tesla has to compete on a level playing field, my guess is their product is viewed more and more as what it is: a luxury car. Nothing wrong with that, but it's hard to see them owning more than a few percent of the market, especially considering established companies have gone all in on electric at this point. And, nothing can justify a price-sales multiplier of 20 for the company. Nothing.
d1zzy 7y ago
AFAIK when I was in Europe I would have loved to be able to buy Japanese cars but they were the top taxed cars, some crazy >20% amount or so. So there was no choice but to buy "local". With Tesla it seems a lot of countries are giving out serious tax breaks so I wonder how much of that will continue once those incentives stop.
- nordsieck 7y ago
  > With Tesla it seems a lot of countries are giving out serious tax breaks so I wonder how much of that will continue once those incentives stop. My understanding is that gas is quite expensive in many European countries compared to the US, so even if there are purchase incentives that expire, I think there is probably still strong economic pressure to buy electric. Until someone else comes out with a strong electric vehicle offering, that means Tesla.
  - bjelkeman-again 7y ago
    An electric car is generally 1/5, or less, the cost per km to “fill up” in Europe
    - mrich 7y ago
      Unfortunately not the case in Germany, unless you have a house with solar. And its mostly due to taxes.
      - jungturk 7y ago
        Its 2-3x what most US residents would pay. https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/ https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/ https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/what-german-households-pay-power https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/what-german-house...
- hibikir 7y ago
  Just like a big percentage of Japanese cars destined to the US market are assembled in the US or Mexico, Tesla will probably build their highest volume cars in the EU the moment it makes sense. They've broken ground for a large factory in Berlin already.
dd36 7y ago
And that’s to say nothing of what they’re doing to drive down battery costs through economies of scale and basically creating the energy storage mass market. $100kWh is revolutionary. Every home in sunbelt America can have decent backup or go off grid with solar for mere thousands of dollars. I still think few people grasp the paradigm shift that’s on the horizon. The bottleneck is no longer fuel costs and delivery. It’s technology cost and it’s declining rapidly. Look at Enphase’s IQ8X grid forming micros. The future is coming fast.
- adventured 7y ago
  Just getting people to think differently about these things is extraordinary. Making the Powerwall an accessible consumer good, is an important step forward. Tesla single-handedly changed the public's perception of electric vehicles. Some people obsessively, maniacally try to deny Tesla the credit they deserve for changing the auto market (for the exact same reason some people try to deny Apple the credit it deserves for entirely changing the phone market). Nobody else did it, which is also why they're so far ahead of their peers. The giants of the industry handed them a decade headstart.
djehh3r7d 7y ago
That didn't leave the controversy behind at all, most of the controversy is far past their valuation. Tesla is only interesting as a car company to people who are willing to lower their expectations below those placed on the actual car companies. They market themselves as environmentally friendly while representing a comedically small percent of global emissions reduction. And within the auto industry itself the increasing efficiency of ICE vehicles has reduced emissions by far more than Tesla and their electric car hype. At the same time, they advocate infrastructure expansions to accomodate their vehicle's needs while handwaving away the emissions and environmental consequences this process would create. And every time this is mentioned people just blubber some line about the long term while covering their ears to the tide of environmentalists saying that we need change /now/. They might conquer Europe through legislation but the only reason that's practical is because European countries are tiny so the range issue is less relevant to them. Tesla hasn't actually cleared their hurdles, they've surrendered to them. Meanwhile, they drum up this idea that Tesla's can be more than toys for rich people even though no one blue collar who isn't already a hard fan chooses a Tesla. In fact, speaking of legislation, they're so uncompetitive that Europe has to ban ICE engines for them to gain ground. Even you framed this as Tesla competing against luxury brands, key word being luxury. This world where they've paved the way for cheap mainstream electric vehicles is a fantasy. They've paved the way for novelty in the luxury market and since doing so have shown little aptitude beyond their ability to wield that accomplishment as a shield to deflect criticisms.
- random314 7y ago
  You should self reflect about how incredibly bitter you sound. Tesla is a new successful electric car company that is helping with CO2 emission reduction. Nothing in your rant challenges this.
  - mehrzad 7y ago
    And how are the emissions of electric car and car battery production looking?
    - CydeWeys 7y ago
new_realist 7y ago
Tesla has lost $6.5B over 17 years. It’s cheap money which has allowed it to persist despite these losses.
- foota 7y ago
  Seems pretty cheap?
- bjelkeman-again 7y ago
  You say losses, i say investments. I expect they will be recouped now.
  - selectodude 7y ago
    Toyota is the most profitable large car manufacturer on a per-vehicle basis and they make under $3,000 per car. Tesla needs to manufacture a few million more cars and not lose another penny before they recoup that investment.
    - cma 7y ago
      Tesla charges $7,000 for full self-driving vaporware, and has already recognized a huge portion of it, even though they haven't delivered practically any of the value of it (they claimed your car would appreciate by over $100,000 when it entered the robotaxi fleet this year). More than Toyota's whole margin, they spent a lot on it but recently cut R&D significantly even though they aren't close. Maybe with the latest fundraising round they will increase R&D again and deliver before the cars that were bundled with it are falling apart.
- m463 7y ago
  I've sort of wondered about that. Governments should foster entreprenuers, the most important source of economic growth, and cheap money might be more successful and egalitarian than fingers-in-the-pie subsidies or other methods.
- Dumblydorr 7y ago
  Cheap money is great for new companies. Whether it be Amazon, netflix, uber, lyft, Airbnb, lets face it: they all get a ton of cheap money to finance their technical coding and R&D. This is not a bad thing inherently, what we are describing is how you get hard technology to scale much faster.
Barrin92 7y ago
>Elon Musk and the environmental virtues of electric cars this is arguably a pretty big red herring and despite good intentions the focus on electric cars will probably be a disaster by prolonging the broken American car-centric development. Mind you an electric vehicle is only as clean as its primary source of energy (at the moment its lifetime emissions are about 70% of a traditional car), and the production of particular the batteries is ecologically problematic to say the least.
- breakyerself 7y ago
  How are electric cars prolonging the car centric system? Were we on the verge of overhauling our transportation infrastructure and I just didnt hear about it?
  - Barrin92 7y ago
    I'm not going to pretend to be optimistic about the capacity for large scale social transformation in particular in the US I'll give you that, but there have been increasing voices for revitalizing rail. I think electric cars will prolong the situation by giving influential people in the managerial and political class, in particular, the illusion that EVs are a big enough step towards changing our lifestyles and that it will induce a sort of "I've done my part" complacency. Basically a Tesla is the car equivalent of a biodegradable Starbucks cup. I've even heard people like Zuckerberg say the 'future' is autonomous vehicles in hyperloops carrying people from or to ever larger suburbs. If that's the future I hope spacex works out so I can be shot to Mars at least
    - hyperbovine 7y ago
      Not social — geographic and historical. With the exception of the Acela corridor, where rail actually thrives, it’s just not viable in America. The distances involved are too vast, and the development took place in a way that is incompatible with rail. Nowhere is this more evident than the farce that is the LA-SF HSR. The situation in Europe is quite different. Cities are much closer together, and they have been building railroads for close to two centuries. European style rail travel will never be viable in the US.

jessriedel 7y ago

In a recent podcast interview, Musk claims there have been thousands of new (EDIT: American) consumer car companies and that every single one has failed besides Tesla (if I recall correctly). Presumably this counts every incorporated team that made a rudimentary prototype.

aantix 7y ago
Do you remember the podcast?
- jessriedel 7y ago
  Third Row. Can't remember if it was part 1 or 2, but probably 2. It's very fanboyish, but there are some good stories on there about the early days of SpaceX and Tesla.
baybal2 7y ago
BYD - been around for an eternity by silicon valley standards, few other genuinely new Chinese brands (ones which are not subsidiaries of BAIC or FAW,) Vinfast, Peroda
- jessriedel 7y ago
  Sorry, I forgot to mention he specified American.
cjhopman 7y ago
Tesla has burned through more money than all of them combined.

rconti 7y ago

As a sidenote, it's easy to get lost among the "how many hundreds of thousands of model 3s can tesla produce in a year", but I just saw an overall production stat and noticed they're over 900,000 cars lifetime, and hadn't heard it mentioned elsewhere. 1 million vehicles sold will be a real milestone. I stumbled upon a comment online, recently, from a guy who went on and on about peak oil for years. In 2008, he made a joke about "Tesla will have surpassed the US car industry". I don't remember the time horizon, but the first Roadster was delivered to Elon in February 2008. It just made me reflect on what we'd think of that prediction/joke and how it turned out, if we were to go back in time.

latortuga 7y ago
Musk tweeted about how they reached 1M just yesterday.
rtsil 7y ago
> 1 million vehicles sold will be a real milestone. They've just passed 1 million vehicles manufactured so that shouldn't take long.
tardo99 7y ago
Tesla's 10-K shows an accumulated shareholder deficit of $6B. That's over and above money spent to buy factories which are still operating. That's $6k a car at 1M cars sold. Add to that the $7500 rebate the US was providing until recently. That's $13.5k, on average, they lost per car they sold through the end of 2019. Saying nothing about Tesla cars versus other companies, that's a huge financial advantage against other car companies. This is particularly true given that most of those car sales happened post-Q1-2018, when Tesla had already established a strong brand. I'm not sure any established player could, at that point, compete with a company that gets to lose $13.5k per car they sell. That would be like if Nissan started building base-model Sentras and selling them for $4500. Yes, they would sell a lot of them. As markets normalize and Tesla has to compete on a level playing field, my guess is their product is viewed more and more as what it is: a luxury car. Nothing wrong with that, but it's hard to see them owning more than a few percent of the market, especially considering established companies have gone all in on electric at this point. And, nothing can justify a price-sales multiplier of 20 for the company. Nothing.

d1zzy 7y ago

AFAIK when I was in Europe I would have loved to be able to buy Japanese cars but they were the top taxed cars, some crazy >20% amount or so. So there was no choice but to buy "local". With Tesla it seems a lot of countries are giving out serious tax breaks so I wonder how much of that will continue once those incentives stop.

nordsieck 7y ago
> With Tesla it seems a lot of countries are giving out serious tax breaks so I wonder how much of that will continue once those incentives stop. My understanding is that gas is quite expensive in many European countries compared to the US, so even if there are purchase incentives that expire, I think there is probably still strong economic pressure to buy electric. Until someone else comes out with a strong electric vehicle offering, that means Tesla.
- bjelkeman-again 7y ago
  An electric car is generally 1/5, or less, the cost per km to “fill up” in Europe
  - mrich 7y ago
    Unfortunately not the case in Germany, unless you have a house with solar. And its mostly due to taxes.
    - jungturk 7y ago
      Its 2-3x what most US residents would pay. https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/ https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/ https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/what-german-households-pay-power https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/what-german-house...
hibikir 7y ago
Just like a big percentage of Japanese cars destined to the US market are assembled in the US or Mexico, Tesla will probably build their highest volume cars in the EU the moment it makes sense. They've broken ground for a large factory in Berlin already.

dd36 7y ago

And that’s to say nothing of what they’re doing to drive down battery costs through economies of scale and basically creating the energy storage mass market. $100kWh is revolutionary. Every home in sunbelt America can have decent backup or go off grid with solar for mere thousands of dollars. I still think few people grasp the paradigm shift that’s on the horizon. The bottleneck is no longer fuel costs and delivery. It’s technology cost and it’s declining rapidly. Look at Enphase’s IQ8X grid forming micros. The future is coming fast.

adventured 7y ago
Just getting people to think differently about these things is extraordinary. Making the Powerwall an accessible consumer good, is an important step forward. Tesla single-handedly changed the public's perception of electric vehicles. Some people obsessively, maniacally try to deny Tesla the credit they deserve for changing the auto market (for the exact same reason some people try to deny Apple the credit it deserves for entirely changing the phone market). Nobody else did it, which is also why they're so far ahead of their peers. The giants of the industry handed them a decade headstart.

djehh3r7d 7y ago

That didn't leave the controversy behind at all, most of the controversy is far past their valuation. Tesla is only interesting as a car company to people who are willing to lower their expectations below those placed on the actual car companies. They market themselves as environmentally friendly while representing a comedically small percent of global emissions reduction. And within the auto industry itself the increasing efficiency of ICE vehicles has reduced emissions by far more than Tesla and their electric car hype. At the same time, they advocate infrastructure expansions to accomodate their vehicle's needs while handwaving away the emissions and environmental consequences this process would create. And every time this is mentioned people just blubber some line about the long term while covering their ears to the tide of environmentalists saying that we need change /now/. They might conquer Europe through legislation but the only reason that's practical is because European countries are tiny so the range issue is less relevant to them. Tesla hasn't actually cleared their hurdles, they've surrendered to them. Meanwhile, they drum up this idea that Tesla's can be more than toys for rich people even though no one blue collar who isn't already a hard fan chooses a Tesla. In fact, speaking of legislation, they're so uncompetitive that Europe has to ban ICE engines for them to gain ground. Even you framed this as Tesla competing against luxury brands, key word being luxury. This world where they've paved the way for cheap mainstream electric vehicles is a fantasy. They've paved the way for novelty in the luxury market and since doing so have shown little aptitude beyond their ability to wield that accomplishment as a shield to deflect criticisms.

random314 7y ago
You should self reflect about how incredibly bitter you sound. Tesla is a new successful electric car company that is helping with CO2 emission reduction. Nothing in your rant challenges this.
- mehrzad 7y ago
  And how are the emissions of electric car and car battery production looking?
  - CydeWeys 7y ago

new_realist 7y ago

Tesla has lost $6.5B over 17 years. It’s cheap money which has allowed it to persist despite these losses.

foota 7y ago
Seems pretty cheap?
bjelkeman-again 7y ago
You say losses, i say investments. I expect they will be recouped now.
- selectodude 7y ago
  Toyota is the most profitable large car manufacturer on a per-vehicle basis and they make under $3,000 per car. Tesla needs to manufacture a few million more cars and not lose another penny before they recoup that investment.
  - cma 7y ago
    Tesla charges $7,000 for full self-driving vaporware, and has already recognized a huge portion of it, even though they haven't delivered practically any of the value of it (they claimed your car would appreciate by over $100,000 when it entered the robotaxi fleet this year). More than Toyota's whole margin, they spent a lot on it but recently cut R&D significantly even though they aren't close. Maybe with the latest fundraising round they will increase R&D again and deliver before the cars that were bundled with it are falling apart.
m463 7y ago
I've sort of wondered about that. Governments should foster entreprenuers, the most important source of economic growth, and cheap money might be more successful and egalitarian than fingers-in-the-pie subsidies or other methods.
Dumblydorr 7y ago
Cheap money is great for new companies. Whether it be Amazon, netflix, uber, lyft, Airbnb, lets face it: they all get a ton of cheap money to finance their technical coding and R&D. This is not a bad thing inherently, what we are describing is how you get hard technology to scale much faster.

Barrin92 7y ago

>Elon Musk and the environmental virtues of electric cars this is arguably a pretty big red herring and despite good intentions the focus on electric cars will probably be a disaster by prolonging the broken American car-centric development. Mind you an electric vehicle is only as clean as its primary source of energy (at the moment its lifetime emissions are about 70% of a traditional car), and the production of particular the batteries is ecologically problematic to say the least.

breakyerself 7y ago
How are electric cars prolonging the car centric system? Were we on the verge of overhauling our transportation infrastructure and I just didnt hear about it?
- Barrin92 7y ago
  I'm not going to pretend to be optimistic about the capacity for large scale social transformation in particular in the US I'll give you that, but there have been increasing voices for revitalizing rail. I think electric cars will prolong the situation by giving influential people in the managerial and political class, in particular, the illusion that EVs are a big enough step towards changing our lifestyles and that it will induce a sort of "I've done my part" complacency. Basically a Tesla is the car equivalent of a biodegradable Starbucks cup. I've even heard people like Zuckerberg say the 'future' is autonomous vehicles in hyperloops carrying people from or to ever larger suburbs. If that's the future I hope spacex works out so I can be shot to Mars at least
  - hyperbovine 7y ago
    Not social — geographic and historical. With the exception of the Acela corridor, where rail actually thrives, it’s just not viable in America. The distances involved are too vast, and the development took place in a way that is incompatible with rail. Nowhere is this more evident than the farce that is the LA-SF HSR. The situation in Europe is quite different. Cities are much closer together, and they have been building railroads for close to two centuries. European style rail travel will never be viable in the US.