7 ms·

It's kinda shocking how poorly traditional auto manufacturers are failing at keeping pace with Tesla, but I think that's not going to last forever. Many have al

by tootie 5y ago

It's kinda shocking how poorly traditional auto manufacturers are failing at keeping pace with Tesla, but I think that's not going to last forever. Many have already committed to ending their production of gasoline vehicles in very short order. I think a good example to look at is how the hybrid market has shifted since the Prius. Toyota blew everyone out of the water for years, but sales have plummeted in recent years as competition has caught up. Rivian has even less of cushion since the electric F-150 is due to hit dealerships next year.

nikanj 5y ago
Tesla sales process features up to 95% less slimy car salespeople. I’d pay a premium to not have to deal with the local Ford/GM/etc dealership, who are all about scamming me into overpriced financing deals. Traditional auto manufacturers need to bring the buying process to this century, but that would sour their existing sales pipeline. I believe this conondrum is called ”local optimum”
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  >t scamming me into overpriced financing deals. Um, you are admitting that you can be scammed. If you don't understand loans, yes, you can be scammed. Don't admit that. The last new car I bought: I walked into the lot, said I want that one, and took the lowest interest loan for 48 months. I didn't want a 72 month loan. I didn't want an extended warranty. I was done with the sales person in 15 minutes, and done with the finance department in 45 minutes. It's all in how you manage the situation. If you waffle and flake and can't decide, or don't understand loans or pointless "extras", then you're toast.
  - thatswrong0 5y ago
    I just bought a car. I wanted to pay cash, and made it clear I would come back with the a cashier check the next day when my bank open. They said in order to “lock” the car in for me overnight, that I’d have to sign up for a loan (that I could just pay off immediately). It took a bunch of back and forth to make it clear I just wanted to pay cash and I’d be back tomorrow with a check. They finally relented and said ok we’ll put a complimentary hold on the car and accepted the fact I was paying cash. Then of course after finalizing that they pushed a bunch of vastly overpriced maintenance programs and severely misrepresented the expected costs of said maintenance if I didn’t purchase the plan. At least they had the courtesy to give me the time to quickly run the numbers in order to verify it was a terrible deal for me. The whole point is that buying a Tesla doesn’t involve this pointless, anti-consumer, borderline lying, slimey process. People shouldn’t have to worry about being scammed when making one of the largest purchases in their life. The traditional dealership model is terrible for your average consumer. Why on earth are you defending that?
    - SavantIdiot 5y ago
      You could have just said, have a nice day, and left. Were you that desperate for a car immediately? I'm not defending slimy car salespeople, but I'm not siding with your wishy-washy behavior.
      - thatswrong0 5y ago
        So I could go to another dealership and have the exact same experience? This is such a weird hill to die on.
      - skinnymuch 5y ago
        Where would the person go? For most cars, you have to go to a cars salesperson
  - Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
    It is incredibly alarming to me that your message is "Don't let yourself get scammed" rather than "Yeah, car dealerships should stop trying to scam people."
    - SavantIdiot 5y ago
      It's both. You need to advocate for yourself and not just decide to be a victim, and the government needs to regulate many, many predatory industries because half the population is below average intelligence, and, well, I believe a government is supposed to lookout for its citizenry (including when I get too old to understand tech and people try to take advantage of me, which they will). Yeah, go ahead and call me a nanny-state liberal. I'm OK with that.
  - rictic 5y ago
    Needing to push through people who are trying to scam you is very unpleasant for many people. Others get a kick out of it, I get that, but it just not being a part of the process at all is a big win for me.
- kgwgk 5y ago
  Allegedly slimy Tesla has been scamming people into paying thousands of dollars for a useless FSD package for years. The coast-to-coast test drive of a fully self-driving Tesla is four years late and counting.
  - bink 5y ago
    When you go to buy a Tesla the online order form will ask if you want FSD. You click "no". That's the extent of it. They don't try to push it on you, convince you it's a good deal, or call you a sucker for saying "no". It's just an option like any other.
    - kgwgk 5y ago
      You’re a sucker if you pass on this opportunity of making money! When true self-driving is approved by regulators, it will mean that you will be able to summon your Tesla from pretty much anywhere. Once it picks you up, you will be able to sleep, read or do anything else enroute to your destination. You will also be able to add your car to the Tesla shared fleet just by tapping a button on the Tesla phone app and have it generate income for you while you're at work or on vacation, significantly offsetting and at times potentially exceeding the monthly loan or lease cost. This dramatically lowers the true cost of ownership to the point where almost anyone could own a Tesla. Since most cars are only in use by their owner for 5% to 10% of the day, the fundamental economic utility of a true self-driving car is likely to be several times that of a car which is not. https://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part-deux https://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part-deux
      - geoduck14 5y ago
        And it is ONLY 2 years away!
      - tootie 5y ago
        I live in NYC. If I could tell me car "go find parking" it would be a miracle.
    - _ea1k 5y ago
Amezarak 5y ago
As a regular consumer, I am not sure what advantage electric cars provide that I should be champing at the bit to get one. If I had to get a new car today I’d get a gasoline engine. I think the automakers see this and aren’t worried about “keeping pace”; while I guess electric is probably the future for political and resource exhaustion reasons, it’s not the immediate future.
- hasdf 5y ago
  if you have a garage there is the huge advantage of not having gas/oil fumes filling up your garage and seeping into your house. This was a big plus to me but I seem to be more sensitive to this then some people
- Ekaros 5y ago
  I would go with hybrid, probably not even plugin one. Was cheap when I got my current car, which with my current use should last decade. I really doubt we will actually hit the goals politicians are currently setting.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  Have you driven an electric car? They're a much better driving experience. Silent, instant acceleration, never have to waste time at the gas station.
  - Amezarak 5y ago
    My car is already very quiet, and I have never in around 20 years of driving put the accelerator anywhere near the floor anyway. I guess it’s “nice” to have better acceleration and I appreciate people drive differently than I do, but doesn’t accelerating hard waste charge in an electric car too? I visit a gas station about once a week for maybe five minutes, that’s another “I guess that would be nice”, but it doesn’t bother me and I would probably visit the convenience store part anyway, so it’s not worth any kind of electric car premium and I’m not sure about the downsides - what if I forget to charge at home overnight, getting a charger at home, what do I do when there’s a hurricane and no power for weeks, etc. Also, this is not limited to electric cars, but I have one car with a bunch of controls moved to the touchscreen and I’m never doing it again.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
Traditional automakers move in 10 year cycles largely due to safety, support, and the huge volumes they will incur. TSLA can't touch the volume of the top 3. Funny how people forget that. I believe the top 3 are letting TSLA spend all the money and make all mistakes working on the infrastructure before they swoop in and make EVs a commodity instead of a luxury product. TSLA absolutely deserves credit for making this happen, but like the namesake Nikolai Tesla did the hard work and Edison swooped in a took all the credit.
- reportingsjr 5y ago
  > TSLA can't touch the volume of the top 3 What an odd thing to say. They are at around 1 million cars/year versus Ford's 6 million/year, GM's 6-8 million/year, and Chrysler's 2 million/year. So Tesla is in the same ballpark of volume as the US big 3 already. Unless you mean the top 3 worldwide auto manufacturers Toyota, VW, and Hyundai, which aren't /that/ much higher in volume (10.4mio, 10.4mio, and 7.2mio respectively).
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    I think 7.2x-10.4x is the opposite of "not that much higher". That's the difference between making $100,000 a year or $720,000 a year (or $1,040,000 a year). Yeah, that's a big difference.
- panick21_ 5y ago
  Tesla has not yet scaled to their volume but equally those manufactures are not even remotely close to producing the same amount of EV as Tesla does. If you look at their timeline for EV scaling, its laughable. And sooner or later the ICE market will collapse and expose the terrible economics on their EVs. Turns out mass manufacturing ICE engines doesn't actually magically make you good at batteries. Tesla growth will have them overtake companies like BMW and Geely within 2 years. 1-2 years after that they will overtake Ford and friends. By then GM might have lost another million of so in sales as well. By 2025 Tesla will be one of the bigger car makers on the market and will be 100% electric with their own batteries, while most current EV makers will not even be at 40% electric sales. You are totally misguided on how easy it is to make batteries and EV a commodity. And you assuming that other manufactures can magically do it better then Tesla despite a huge amount of evidence that they simply can't.

by tootie 5y ago

nikanj 5y ago

Tesla sales process features up to 95% less slimy car salespeople. I’d pay a premium to not have to deal with the local Ford/GM/etc dealership, who are all about scamming me into overpriced financing deals. Traditional auto manufacturers need to bring the buying process to this century, but that would sour their existing sales pipeline. I believe this conondrum is called ”local optimum”

SavantIdiot 5y ago
>t scamming me into overpriced financing deals. Um, you are admitting that you can be scammed. If you don't understand loans, yes, you can be scammed. Don't admit that. The last new car I bought: I walked into the lot, said I want that one, and took the lowest interest loan for 48 months. I didn't want a 72 month loan. I didn't want an extended warranty. I was done with the sales person in 15 minutes, and done with the finance department in 45 minutes. It's all in how you manage the situation. If you waffle and flake and can't decide, or don't understand loans or pointless "extras", then you're toast.
- thatswrong0 5y ago
  I just bought a car. I wanted to pay cash, and made it clear I would come back with the a cashier check the next day when my bank open. They said in order to “lock” the car in for me overnight, that I’d have to sign up for a loan (that I could just pay off immediately). It took a bunch of back and forth to make it clear I just wanted to pay cash and I’d be back tomorrow with a check. They finally relented and said ok we’ll put a complimentary hold on the car and accepted the fact I was paying cash. Then of course after finalizing that they pushed a bunch of vastly overpriced maintenance programs and severely misrepresented the expected costs of said maintenance if I didn’t purchase the plan. At least they had the courtesy to give me the time to quickly run the numbers in order to verify it was a terrible deal for me. The whole point is that buying a Tesla doesn’t involve this pointless, anti-consumer, borderline lying, slimey process. People shouldn’t have to worry about being scammed when making one of the largest purchases in their life. The traditional dealership model is terrible for your average consumer. Why on earth are you defending that?
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    You could have just said, have a nice day, and left. Were you that desperate for a car immediately? I'm not defending slimy car salespeople, but I'm not siding with your wishy-washy behavior.
    - thatswrong0 5y ago
      So I could go to another dealership and have the exact same experience? This is such a weird hill to die on.
    - skinnymuch 5y ago
      Where would the person go? For most cars, you have to go to a cars salesperson
- Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
  It is incredibly alarming to me that your message is "Don't let yourself get scammed" rather than "Yeah, car dealerships should stop trying to scam people."
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    It's both. You need to advocate for yourself and not just decide to be a victim, and the government needs to regulate many, many predatory industries because half the population is below average intelligence, and, well, I believe a government is supposed to lookout for its citizenry (including when I get too old to understand tech and people try to take advantage of me, which they will). Yeah, go ahead and call me a nanny-state liberal. I'm OK with that.
- rictic 5y ago
  Needing to push through people who are trying to scam you is very unpleasant for many people. Others get a kick out of it, I get that, but it just not being a part of the process at all is a big win for me.
kgwgk 5y ago
Allegedly slimy Tesla has been scamming people into paying thousands of dollars for a useless FSD package for years. The coast-to-coast test drive of a fully self-driving Tesla is four years late and counting.
- bink 5y ago
  When you go to buy a Tesla the online order form will ask if you want FSD. You click "no". That's the extent of it. They don't try to push it on you, convince you it's a good deal, or call you a sucker for saying "no". It's just an option like any other.
  - kgwgk 5y ago
    You’re a sucker if you pass on this opportunity of making money! When true self-driving is approved by regulators, it will mean that you will be able to summon your Tesla from pretty much anywhere. Once it picks you up, you will be able to sleep, read or do anything else enroute to your destination. You will also be able to add your car to the Tesla shared fleet just by tapping a button on the Tesla phone app and have it generate income for you while you're at work or on vacation, significantly offsetting and at times potentially exceeding the monthly loan or lease cost. This dramatically lowers the true cost of ownership to the point where almost anyone could own a Tesla. Since most cars are only in use by their owner for 5% to 10% of the day, the fundamental economic utility of a true self-driving car is likely to be several times that of a car which is not. https://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part-deux https://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part-deux
    - geoduck14 5y ago
      And it is ONLY 2 years away!
    - tootie 5y ago
      I live in NYC. If I could tell me car "go find parking" it would be a miracle.
  - _ea1k 5y ago

Amezarak 5y ago

As a regular consumer, I am not sure what advantage electric cars provide that I should be champing at the bit to get one. If I had to get a new car today I’d get a gasoline engine. I think the automakers see this and aren’t worried about “keeping pace”; while I guess electric is probably the future for political and resource exhaustion reasons, it’s not the immediate future.

hasdf 5y ago
if you have a garage there is the huge advantage of not having gas/oil fumes filling up your garage and seeping into your house. This was a big plus to me but I seem to be more sensitive to this then some people
Ekaros 5y ago
I would go with hybrid, probably not even plugin one. Was cheap when I got my current car, which with my current use should last decade. I really doubt we will actually hit the goals politicians are currently setting.
colinmhayes 5y ago
Have you driven an electric car? They're a much better driving experience. Silent, instant acceleration, never have to waste time at the gas station.
- Amezarak 5y ago
  My car is already very quiet, and I have never in around 20 years of driving put the accelerator anywhere near the floor anyway. I guess it’s “nice” to have better acceleration and I appreciate people drive differently than I do, but doesn’t accelerating hard waste charge in an electric car too? I visit a gas station about once a week for maybe five minutes, that’s another “I guess that would be nice”, but it doesn’t bother me and I would probably visit the convenience store part anyway, so it’s not worth any kind of electric car premium and I’m not sure about the downsides - what if I forget to charge at home overnight, getting a charger at home, what do I do when there’s a hurricane and no power for weeks, etc. Also, this is not limited to electric cars, but I have one car with a bunch of controls moved to the touchscreen and I’m never doing it again.

SavantIdiot 5y ago

Traditional automakers move in 10 year cycles largely due to safety, support, and the huge volumes they will incur. TSLA can't touch the volume of the top 3. Funny how people forget that. I believe the top 3 are letting TSLA spend all the money and make all mistakes working on the infrastructure before they swoop in and make EVs a commodity instead of a luxury product. TSLA absolutely deserves credit for making this happen, but like the namesake Nikolai Tesla did the hard work and Edison swooped in a took all the credit.

reportingsjr 5y ago
> TSLA can't touch the volume of the top 3 What an odd thing to say. They are at around 1 million cars/year versus Ford's 6 million/year, GM's 6-8 million/year, and Chrysler's 2 million/year. So Tesla is in the same ballpark of volume as the US big 3 already. Unless you mean the top 3 worldwide auto manufacturers Toyota, VW, and Hyundai, which aren't /that/ much higher in volume (10.4mio, 10.4mio, and 7.2mio respectively).
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  I think 7.2x-10.4x is the opposite of "not that much higher". That's the difference between making $100,000 a year or $720,000 a year (or $1,040,000 a year). Yeah, that's a big difference.
panick21_ 5y ago
Tesla has not yet scaled to their volume but equally those manufactures are not even remotely close to producing the same amount of EV as Tesla does. If you look at their timeline for EV scaling, its laughable. And sooner or later the ICE market will collapse and expose the terrible economics on their EVs. Turns out mass manufacturing ICE engines doesn't actually magically make you good at batteries. Tesla growth will have them overtake companies like BMW and Geely within 2 years. 1-2 years after that they will overtake Ford and friends. By then GM might have lost another million of so in sales as well. By 2025 Tesla will be one of the bigger car makers on the market and will be 100% electric with their own batteries, while most current EV makers will not even be at 40% electric sales. You are totally misguided on how easy it is to make batteries and EV a commodity. And you assuming that other manufactures can magically do it better then Tesla despite a huge amount of evidence that they simply can't.