7 ms·

You say that, but I actually love my VW ID.4. I test drove Audi's eTron, Tesla 3 & Y, and ultimately bought an ID.4. I liked that it wasn't a Tesla (especially

You say that, but I actually love my VW ID.4. I test drove Audi's eTron, Tesla 3 & Y, and ultimately bought an ID.4. I liked that it wasn't a Tesla (especially in the Bay Area where it's gotten BMW-asshole status.. and I say that as a previous BMW owner), was more comfortable, bigger interior, had CarPlay, more like a traditional car (no single middle screen), and was quite a bit cheaper. Were there things I liked better about other cars? Sure. But they largely weren't the important factors for me. I also got 3 years of free charging with the Electrify America network, which is no small thing, although I primarily charge at home now. I wouldn't downplay any competition. It can take a while to catch up, but cars are fickle things that people buy for all kinds of reasons. It's not like pre-Tesla everyone owned only one brand.

gitfan86 5y ago
Of course there will be other brands. The iPhone is by far the most successful phone brand, and they ship less than 30% of new phones each year. Something similar could happen here, where GM loses share like Nokia did, and new companies like Lucid take a market segment, like LG does with phones.
- jonplackett 5y ago
  Important to note though that Apply extract a great deal more than 30% of the profit from the market
  - sliken 5y ago
    The most recent numbers I've heard of is 75%. So android is typically a battle to the bottom, with various mostly failed efforts, consolidation, various vendors giving up on markets, etc. Motorola (bought and then sold by google), Sony, HTC and many others are not making much profit. Samsung is doing better, but constantly fighting cheaper competitors. Seems like Samsung is doing as well as it is, because of synergies relating to their production of CPUs, having a chip fab, screens, dram, flash, and cameras for the world wide market. Android's a tough market to be in, you are competing with Google (who makes pixel phones), numerous low cost manufacturers, Apple, and your ecosystem taxed by google through the app store and the market is split among many companies in the android system so it's hard to catch google's services, play store, etc. Not that android manufacturers aren't trying. Amazon made an effort, but seems to have largely given up on calling their devices android.
    - jonplackett 5y ago
      I wonder if driverless cars could follow that same android lath with Waymo being the alternative car OS that all the other companies have to use - but this time having to also pay google a lot more!
      - sliken 5y ago
        Possible, I would see waymo providing a autonomous driving solution ... as long as they could show ads during the trip.
- thow-58d4e8b 5y ago
  Please, please - could people stop making this analogy? Cars are not phones, and will never be. American lower class or Chinese middle class are not going to shell out $70k for a new toy every two years. Cars are not going to be made with 60% margins. You cannot wear a car in your pocket to show it off to your relatives or business partners. Apple's business model, in short - is selling mediocre hardware for premium prices, and mask it with excellent software. Optimizing software to make it 10x better, faster, using less battery - fairly common. For any activity that interfaces with the physical world - forget it - we're tapped out, making 2-5% improvements per year. No amount of refinement will make a $20k econobox sellable for $60k (also, ironically, LG dropped out of phone business)
  - dexen 5y ago
    >You cannot wear a car in your pocket to show it off to your relatives or business partners. There's a few striking errors in your post, and this one is the most glaring - in that it's very visual, and also very wrong. Consider the photo of the Tesla (Model 3) key fob [1]: it's a small car that one does, in fact, wear in one's pocket to show it off to one's relatives or business partners. Similar with the Tesla App [2] - it shows a desirable car on your phone's screen for the very same reason; the rest is nice extras. [1] https://imgur.com/a/L4AwONf https://imgur.com/a/L4AwONf [2] https://imgur.com/a/oBw64Dy https://imgur.com/a/oBw64Dy
gotmedium 5y ago
* >and was quite a bit cheaper* There are reasons why your ID.4 is cheaper than the others (and it always boils down to quality of the parts). Take a look at this Tesla, Ford, & VW's Electrical Architectures for instance. There are other tear-downs that can confirm https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRkm6-bBk4U https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRkm6-bBk4U
- ayewo 5y ago
  Thanks for linking to this nice 40-minute deep dive by Sandy Munro with help from his peers at https://www.3isinc.com https://www.3isinc.com
ajross 5y ago
> I liked that it wasn't a Tesla And that is why everyone expects them to own the car market in the coming years. When the competition's best marketing opportunity is selling to people who've pre-decided to buy something else, you've already won. No one decides to buy a car because it's "not an Audi". (As a Y owner, btw: the ID.4 absolutely does not have a larger interior.)
- misiti3780 5y ago
  Per this link, the BMW has more trunk space than the Model Y: https://www.volkswagenofdesmoines.com/model-comparisons/2021-vw-id-4-vs-2021-tesla-model-y/ https://www.volkswagenofdesmoines.com/model-comparisons/2021... but it hardly matters, it's comes in 2nd to the Model 3/Y in every other category. If ugliness was a category, the ID.4 would certainly win that though!
  - ajross 5y ago
    I haven't seen that number before, and seems somewhat spun having looked closely at both cars. The most commonly cited metric in EV circles is Bjørn Nyland's "banana box" test[1]. Both cars held 9 boxes in the back in a standard configuration, but the Y went up to 26 with the seats folded vs. 25 in the VW. And the Y has a frunk which holds another, where the ID.4 skipped that feature (somewhat inexplicably). The Tesla is also just a somewhat larger car, to the tune of 8cm of width and 17 in length. It's definitely "bigger" for basically all reasonable consumer use cases. I'm sure there's something that fits in it that won't in the Tesla. [1] So-named because, well, it's obvious. Nyland is probably the single best source for EV comparisons out there Definitely a must-follow youtube channel if you're into this stuff.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  "It's not a domestic" is basically the entire value prop of the Toyota pickups and SUVs these days (last 5yr) though they have fancy marketing ways of saying that.
  - truffdog 5y ago
beanjammin 5y ago
It takes 30 hours for VW to build an ID.4 vs 10 for Tesla to build a Model 3. That won't be an easy gap to close.
- zz865 5y ago
  Seriously, does anyone really care about how many hours it takes?
  - patagurbon 5y ago
    The manufacturers no doubt. Musk, and by extension Tesla, has been seriously focused on ease of manufacturing. Probably since the huge problems Tesla faced in the late 2010s.
    - captnObvious 5y ago
      They should be. The longer the build cycle the more errors there will be in the build. Each job is a dependency for the next job. A long build time either indicates that individual assembly technicians have too many steps in their job (it is much harder to remember 25 steps than 5 steps) or that the plant is assembling more parts locally than their competitors. If you have an engine shipped in complete from your supplier that is less time your plant spends assembling a dependency at build time. Electric cars should in theory assemble much faster than gas. Fewer parts. Less complexity in the mechanical assembly of the drive train. When corporate overlords dictate that an assembly plant meet production numbers that it isn’t capable of accurately producing they shell out complete garbage. Inspection lines flag errors that managers ship with disregard in order to meet numbers. Every time.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    The economics of scale trickle down into cost savings for the consumer, even if it is by only a fraction of what the manufacturer saves. There's a reason the id.4 costs about the same as a base Model 3 and you get less of a car for it (not factoring in federal tax credit, which might be returning to Tesla soon anyways).
- 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pbreit 5y ago
This sounds like an Android take (although apparently you are an iPhone owner).

gitfan86 5y ago

Of course there will be other brands. The iPhone is by far the most successful phone brand, and they ship less than 30% of new phones each year. Something similar could happen here, where GM loses share like Nokia did, and new companies like Lucid take a market segment, like LG does with phones.

jonplackett 5y ago
Important to note though that Apply extract a great deal more than 30% of the profit from the market
- sliken 5y ago
  The most recent numbers I've heard of is 75%. So android is typically a battle to the bottom, with various mostly failed efforts, consolidation, various vendors giving up on markets, etc. Motorola (bought and then sold by google), Sony, HTC and many others are not making much profit. Samsung is doing better, but constantly fighting cheaper competitors. Seems like Samsung is doing as well as it is, because of synergies relating to their production of CPUs, having a chip fab, screens, dram, flash, and cameras for the world wide market. Android's a tough market to be in, you are competing with Google (who makes pixel phones), numerous low cost manufacturers, Apple, and your ecosystem taxed by google through the app store and the market is split among many companies in the android system so it's hard to catch google's services, play store, etc. Not that android manufacturers aren't trying. Amazon made an effort, but seems to have largely given up on calling their devices android.
  - jonplackett 5y ago
    I wonder if driverless cars could follow that same android lath with Waymo being the alternative car OS that all the other companies have to use - but this time having to also pay google a lot more!
    - sliken 5y ago
      Possible, I would see waymo providing a autonomous driving solution ... as long as they could show ads during the trip.
thow-58d4e8b 5y ago
Please, please - could people stop making this analogy? Cars are not phones, and will never be. American lower class or Chinese middle class are not going to shell out $70k for a new toy every two years. Cars are not going to be made with 60% margins. You cannot wear a car in your pocket to show it off to your relatives or business partners. Apple's business model, in short - is selling mediocre hardware for premium prices, and mask it with excellent software. Optimizing software to make it 10x better, faster, using less battery - fairly common. For any activity that interfaces with the physical world - forget it - we're tapped out, making 2-5% improvements per year. No amount of refinement will make a $20k econobox sellable for $60k (also, ironically, LG dropped out of phone business)
- dexen 5y ago
  >You cannot wear a car in your pocket to show it off to your relatives or business partners. There's a few striking errors in your post, and this one is the most glaring - in that it's very visual, and also very wrong. Consider the photo of the Tesla (Model 3) key fob [1]: it's a small car that one does, in fact, wear in one's pocket to show it off to one's relatives or business partners. Similar with the Tesla App [2] - it shows a desirable car on your phone's screen for the very same reason; the rest is nice extras. [1] https://imgur.com/a/L4AwONf https://imgur.com/a/L4AwONf [2] https://imgur.com/a/oBw64Dy https://imgur.com/a/oBw64Dy

gotmedium 5y ago

* >and was quite a bit cheaper* There are reasons why your ID.4 is cheaper than the others (and it always boils down to quality of the parts). Take a look at this Tesla, Ford, & VW's Electrical Architectures for instance. There are other tear-downs that can confirm https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRkm6-bBk4U https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRkm6-bBk4U

ayewo 5y ago
Thanks for linking to this nice 40-minute deep dive by Sandy Munro with help from his peers at https://www.3isinc.com https://www.3isinc.com

ajross 5y ago

> I liked that it wasn't a Tesla And that is why everyone expects them to own the car market in the coming years. When the competition's best marketing opportunity is selling to people who've pre-decided to buy something else, you've already won. No one decides to buy a car because it's "not an Audi". (As a Y owner, btw: the ID.4 absolutely does not have a larger interior.)

misiti3780 5y ago
Per this link, the BMW has more trunk space than the Model Y: https://www.volkswagenofdesmoines.com/model-comparisons/2021-vw-id-4-vs-2021-tesla-model-y/ https://www.volkswagenofdesmoines.com/model-comparisons/2021... but it hardly matters, it's comes in 2nd to the Model 3/Y in every other category. If ugliness was a category, the ID.4 would certainly win that though!
- ajross 5y ago
  I haven't seen that number before, and seems somewhat spun having looked closely at both cars. The most commonly cited metric in EV circles is Bjørn Nyland's "banana box" test[1]. Both cars held 9 boxes in the back in a standard configuration, but the Y went up to 26 with the seats folded vs. 25 in the VW. And the Y has a frunk which holds another, where the ID.4 skipped that feature (somewhat inexplicably). The Tesla is also just a somewhat larger car, to the tune of 8cm of width and 17 in length. It's definitely "bigger" for basically all reasonable consumer use cases. I'm sure there's something that fits in it that won't in the Tesla. [1] So-named because, well, it's obvious. Nyland is probably the single best source for EV comparisons out there Definitely a must-follow youtube channel if you're into this stuff.
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
"It's not a domestic" is basically the entire value prop of the Toyota pickups and SUVs these days (last 5yr) though they have fancy marketing ways of saying that.
- truffdog 5y ago

beanjammin 5y ago

It takes 30 hours for VW to build an ID.4 vs 10 for Tesla to build a Model 3. That won't be an easy gap to close.

zz865 5y ago
Seriously, does anyone really care about how many hours it takes?
- patagurbon 5y ago
  The manufacturers no doubt. Musk, and by extension Tesla, has been seriously focused on ease of manufacturing. Probably since the huge problems Tesla faced in the late 2010s.
  - captnObvious 5y ago
    They should be. The longer the build cycle the more errors there will be in the build. Each job is a dependency for the next job. A long build time either indicates that individual assembly technicians have too many steps in their job (it is much harder to remember 25 steps than 5 steps) or that the plant is assembling more parts locally than their competitors. If you have an engine shipped in complete from your supplier that is less time your plant spends assembling a dependency at build time. Electric cars should in theory assemble much faster than gas. Fewer parts. Less complexity in the mechanical assembly of the drive train. When corporate overlords dictate that an assembly plant meet production numbers that it isn’t capable of accurately producing they shell out complete garbage. Inspection lines flag errors that managers ship with disregard in order to meet numbers. Every time.
- judge2020 5y ago
  The economics of scale trickle down into cost savings for the consumer, even if it is by only a fraction of what the manufacturer saves. There's a reason the id.4 costs about the same as a base Model 3 and you get less of a car for it (not factoring in federal tax credit, which might be returning to Tesla soon anyways).
5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

pbreit 5y ago

This sounds like an Android take (although apparently you are an iPhone owner).