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That "mid-sized car company" has revolutionised an ~120-year industry while still managing to remain at the forefront, that's why its valuation is so high (even

That "mid-sized car company" has revolutionised an ~120-year industry while still managing to remain at the forefront, that's why its valuation is so high (even though I also do believe it's over-valued). I'm not saying this as a Tesla-lover nor as a fan of Musk, in fact, as a lover of gasoline engines and of cars in general I see this as a tragedy (I regard EVs as refrigerators with some wheels attached), but it is what it is.

SemanticStrengh 5y ago
Where is the revolution? There are competitive cars vs tesla for electric. Even if tesla have an edge, it's evolutionary, not at all revolutionary.
- dotnet00 5y ago
  I assume revolutionary in that other companies have only really started taking EVs seriously due to the success of Tesla.
  - adventured 5y ago
    People constantly attempt to pretend Tesla didn't spark the EV revolution, because they can't stand to give Musk and or a US company credit. It's the same reason they aggressively pretend Apple didn't spark the smartphone revolution (when it all very obviously derived from the iPhone and its dramatic impact, right down to the design of the phone and interface being copied by everyone else). It's the same reason if you say the US invented the Internet here on HN, you'll get confused replies by people from outside of the US that are entirely ignorant of that fact, because of foreign revisionist history and the desperate desire to deny the US credit for its vast accomplishments (the America bad brigade). The same goes for eg the transistor, microprocessor and countless other prominent technologies that revolutionized the world.
    - MisterBastahrd 5y ago
      So what? It's still a business and it is tiny compared to the big players. Tesla is only a slightly better value than crypto given how insanely overvalued the stock is. If the company had an $80B market cap, it would still be vastly overvalued.
      - mensetmanusman 5y ago
        Tiny compared to ICE sales which will soon be regulated out of existence in many countries in the coming decades.
      - ckw 5y ago
        If Tesla had a market cap of $80B it would be trading at 6.06 times Q1 earnings annualized. Having grown revenue 81% and gross profit 147% in the prior year… It’s currently undervalued at 10x that price. Re being small: its operating income was greater than Toyota in Q1, and it has two new factories that are yet to ramp production.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    Nissan and Renault took EVs seriously before Tesla came out with the Model S - Renault was working on the Zoe since before 2008.
    - dotnet00 5y ago
      Renault were working on the since before 2008 (2005 apparently), yet they only brought a product to market in 2012. The Tesla Roadster was developed around the same time, yet deliveries started in 2008. By the time Renault got around to actually making the Zoe available to customers, Tesla had been selling the Model S for 6 months. I don't think they were taking EVs particularly seriously if they took that much longer to put out a less sophisticated product despite having vastly more resources at their disposal.
      - sudosysgen 5y ago
        Sure, because the Tesla Roadster is half a car, and cost is no object. They literally took an existing car, and built an EV conversion kit, money be damned. Making the first mass-market EV was going to take multiple years, no matter what. You need to engineer the entire car, at scale, and you need to hit a price-point. Tesla didn't have such an issue. I can't stress enough how much more difficult it is to make an affordable product than one where price is no object.
- paganel 5y ago
  > There are competitive cars vs tesla for electric It is my belief that those "competitive cars" wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been for Tesla.
  - Bubble_Pop_22 5y ago
    MySpace, BlackBerry come to mind. At least those were new markets. At the end of the day you can't explain love and people love Elon Musk. Guys from all over the world are in a sort weird parasocial relationship with the guy. That never happened with the CEO of MySpace and BlackBerry
    - SemanticStrengh 5y ago
      I feel like the growth of people that bash him is higher than people that worship him. In any case there is a parasocial component to it indeed.
      - hackerfromthefu 4y ago
        I think you will find a much bigger 'silent mainstream' of those who Respect him for the significant progress he's brought into our world. Worship and bashing/hate are the domain of the crazies/extremists/zealots who are a vocal minority, really a small proportion of the world. Most people thankfully are more balanced and rational in their perspectives.
  - SemanticStrengh 5y ago
    But why? Did tesla open source key scientific innovations in the scaling of batteries? Don't think so. See e.g. The seres f5 from Huawei. I don't know wether it's great but about the main metric, it has a higher range than teslas (1000km)
    - toyg 5y ago
      This is a bit of a "why dropbox when i can rsync" comment. Tesla brought glamour and practicality to a field stymied by boredom and theoretical concerns. They pledged to build an EV people would actually want to use, bringing all the latest tech to drive UX with no regard for tradition. They set to solve consumer problems, and they are succeeding in doing that.
- zamfi 5y ago
  Tesla produced the first ICE-equivalent EV sedan that was not merely a "compliance vehicle" in decades. Then, it turned out, people bought them by the hundreds of thousands, single-handedly recreating the market for EVs. Then, other manufacturers noticed, and started realizing they might be left behind if they didn't take EVs seriously. Now, sure, there are many competitors, but even still they have only been built in small quantities. How long Tesla's edge will last is an open question, but there's no question that Tesla has single-handedly exploded the demand for EVs in the consumer vehicle market.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    By the time Tesla had sold 100,000 Model S cars in the US, Nissan had already sold over 110 000 Leafs. Tesla created the market for high-performance EVs. They did not create the overall EV market. The high-end market is only a small part of the numbers.
    - alvah 5y ago
      "The high-end market is only a small part of the numbers" correct, but in a parallel universe where Tesla didn't exist & the typical EV looked & performed like a Leaf, would anyone actually want an electric car? Marketing and psychology are important.
      - sudosysgen 4y ago
        Sure, as evidenced by the fact that more people bought cars that performed like the Leaf and Zoe than Model S's. Also the Renault Zoe looked just like the Renault Clio, that is, a normal car.
        alvah 4y ago
        bought != wanted...
    - zamfi 5y ago
      The Leaf that Nissan sold while the Model S was Tesla’s only sedan (ie 2012-2017) was not an ICE-equivalent vehicle. It was explicitly a city vehicle with a < 75 mile official range, an effective 40-50 mile range, and no fast charging. If “high-performance” means “can handle the daily driving needs of > 50% of the population” then I guess you’re right, Tesla only created that market.
- ckw 5y ago
  The revolution is in manufacturing and vertical integration: you have to look at margins. Tesla’s operating margin was 19.2% in Q1, and is apt to rise. Very few other companies even make a profit on their EVs, and none that do are anywhere close to Tesla’s margins, to my knowledge. This means that nominally competitive electric cars aren’t. In principle Tesla could squash its pure EV competitors by selling below their cost of production, and any legacy auto company transitioning to EVs will be in a similarly dire position. Incidentally, these margins are also far higher than those of ICE manufacturers. For example, Toyota in Q1 had lower operating income than Tesla, despite having 4x the revenue.
sudosysgen 5y ago
There is no revolution to speak of. Tesla is an evolution in the high-end EV market. In the mid-range market Tesla was late to the punch and faces stiff competition, and in the low-end market they aren't an entity to speak of.
- Turing_Machine 5y ago
  > in the low-end market they aren't an entity to speak of. So... like Apple?
  - lupire 5y ago
    Far more people can afford iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air than can afford any Tesla car.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    iPhones are in the low-end market because you can buy them used at reasonable prices. You can get an iPhone SE 2020 for less than 200$. You can't get a Tesla used for 5000$.
- jacobsenscott 5y ago
  There's no competition in the mid/low cost market - there are no mid/low cost EV's. The leaf rides like a bottom end ICE compact and costs as much as a very nice ICE sedan, and not really that much less than a low end tesla. Honda/Ford/Toyota don't have anything in the EV space. They might have something on their web sites, but no dealer will have them in stock.
  - sudosysgen 4y ago
    Of course there are low end EVs. The Wuling Mini EV (which is the worldwide best seller iirc) can be had for 10,000$ with 200km of range. Also, at price of a Leaf or Zoe, you don't get a high end sedan, you get a Honda Civic, which is one of the cheapest sedans.
robertlagrant 5y ago
Well, refrigerators killed the ICE industry :D
- SemanticStrengh 5y ago
  What about the Thanos car though?

SemanticStrengh 5y ago

Where is the revolution? There are competitive cars vs tesla for electric. Even if tesla have an edge, it's evolutionary, not at all revolutionary.

dotnet00 5y ago
I assume revolutionary in that other companies have only really started taking EVs seriously due to the success of Tesla.
- adventured 5y ago
  People constantly attempt to pretend Tesla didn't spark the EV revolution, because they can't stand to give Musk and or a US company credit. It's the same reason they aggressively pretend Apple didn't spark the smartphone revolution (when it all very obviously derived from the iPhone and its dramatic impact, right down to the design of the phone and interface being copied by everyone else). It's the same reason if you say the US invented the Internet here on HN, you'll get confused replies by people from outside of the US that are entirely ignorant of that fact, because of foreign revisionist history and the desperate desire to deny the US credit for its vast accomplishments (the America bad brigade). The same goes for eg the transistor, microprocessor and countless other prominent technologies that revolutionized the world.
  - MisterBastahrd 5y ago
    So what? It's still a business and it is tiny compared to the big players. Tesla is only a slightly better value than crypto given how insanely overvalued the stock is. If the company had an $80B market cap, it would still be vastly overvalued.
    - mensetmanusman 5y ago
      Tiny compared to ICE sales which will soon be regulated out of existence in many countries in the coming decades.
    - ckw 5y ago
      If Tesla had a market cap of $80B it would be trading at 6.06 times Q1 earnings annualized. Having grown revenue 81% and gross profit 147% in the prior year… It’s currently undervalued at 10x that price. Re being small: its operating income was greater than Toyota in Q1, and it has two new factories that are yet to ramp production.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  Nissan and Renault took EVs seriously before Tesla came out with the Model S - Renault was working on the Zoe since before 2008.
  - dotnet00 5y ago
    Renault were working on the since before 2008 (2005 apparently), yet they only brought a product to market in 2012. The Tesla Roadster was developed around the same time, yet deliveries started in 2008. By the time Renault got around to actually making the Zoe available to customers, Tesla had been selling the Model S for 6 months. I don't think they were taking EVs particularly seriously if they took that much longer to put out a less sophisticated product despite having vastly more resources at their disposal.
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      Sure, because the Tesla Roadster is half a car, and cost is no object. They literally took an existing car, and built an EV conversion kit, money be damned. Making the first mass-market EV was going to take multiple years, no matter what. You need to engineer the entire car, at scale, and you need to hit a price-point. Tesla didn't have such an issue. I can't stress enough how much more difficult it is to make an affordable product than one where price is no object.
paganel 5y ago
> There are competitive cars vs tesla for electric It is my belief that those "competitive cars" wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been for Tesla.
- Bubble_Pop_22 5y ago
  MySpace, BlackBerry come to mind. At least those were new markets. At the end of the day you can't explain love and people love Elon Musk. Guys from all over the world are in a sort weird parasocial relationship with the guy. That never happened with the CEO of MySpace and BlackBerry
  - SemanticStrengh 5y ago
    I feel like the growth of people that bash him is higher than people that worship him. In any case there is a parasocial component to it indeed.
    - hackerfromthefu 4y ago
      I think you will find a much bigger 'silent mainstream' of those who Respect him for the significant progress he's brought into our world. Worship and bashing/hate are the domain of the crazies/extremists/zealots who are a vocal minority, really a small proportion of the world. Most people thankfully are more balanced and rational in their perspectives.
- SemanticStrengh 5y ago
  But why? Did tesla open source key scientific innovations in the scaling of batteries? Don't think so. See e.g. The seres f5 from Huawei. I don't know wether it's great but about the main metric, it has a higher range than teslas (1000km)
  - toyg 5y ago
    This is a bit of a "why dropbox when i can rsync" comment. Tesla brought glamour and practicality to a field stymied by boredom and theoretical concerns. They pledged to build an EV people would actually want to use, bringing all the latest tech to drive UX with no regard for tradition. They set to solve consumer problems, and they are succeeding in doing that.
zamfi 5y ago
Tesla produced the first ICE-equivalent EV sedan that was not merely a "compliance vehicle" in decades. Then, it turned out, people bought them by the hundreds of thousands, single-handedly recreating the market for EVs. Then, other manufacturers noticed, and started realizing they might be left behind if they didn't take EVs seriously. Now, sure, there are many competitors, but even still they have only been built in small quantities. How long Tesla's edge will last is an open question, but there's no question that Tesla has single-handedly exploded the demand for EVs in the consumer vehicle market.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  By the time Tesla had sold 100,000 Model S cars in the US, Nissan had already sold over 110 000 Leafs. Tesla created the market for high-performance EVs. They did not create the overall EV market. The high-end market is only a small part of the numbers.
  - alvah 5y ago
    "The high-end market is only a small part of the numbers" correct, but in a parallel universe where Tesla didn't exist & the typical EV looked & performed like a Leaf, would anyone actually want an electric car? Marketing and psychology are important.
    - sudosysgen 4y ago
      Sure, as evidenced by the fact that more people bought cars that performed like the Leaf and Zoe than Model S's. Also the Renault Zoe looked just like the Renault Clio, that is, a normal car.
      - alvah 4y ago
        bought != wanted...
  - zamfi 5y ago
    The Leaf that Nissan sold while the Model S was Tesla’s only sedan (ie 2012-2017) was not an ICE-equivalent vehicle. It was explicitly a city vehicle with a < 75 mile official range, an effective 40-50 mile range, and no fast charging. If “high-performance” means “can handle the daily driving needs of > 50% of the population” then I guess you’re right, Tesla only created that market.
ckw 5y ago
The revolution is in manufacturing and vertical integration: you have to look at margins. Tesla’s operating margin was 19.2% in Q1, and is apt to rise. Very few other companies even make a profit on their EVs, and none that do are anywhere close to Tesla’s margins, to my knowledge. This means that nominally competitive electric cars aren’t. In principle Tesla could squash its pure EV competitors by selling below their cost of production, and any legacy auto company transitioning to EVs will be in a similarly dire position. Incidentally, these margins are also far higher than those of ICE manufacturers. For example, Toyota in Q1 had lower operating income than Tesla, despite having 4x the revenue.

sudosysgen 5y ago

There is no revolution to speak of. Tesla is an evolution in the high-end EV market. In the mid-range market Tesla was late to the punch and faces stiff competition, and in the low-end market they aren't an entity to speak of.

Turing_Machine 5y ago
> in the low-end market they aren't an entity to speak of. So... like Apple?
- lupire 5y ago
  Far more people can afford iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air than can afford any Tesla car.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  iPhones are in the low-end market because you can buy them used at reasonable prices. You can get an iPhone SE 2020 for less than 200$. You can't get a Tesla used for 5000$.
jacobsenscott 5y ago
There's no competition in the mid/low cost market - there are no mid/low cost EV's. The leaf rides like a bottom end ICE compact and costs as much as a very nice ICE sedan, and not really that much less than a low end tesla. Honda/Ford/Toyota don't have anything in the EV space. They might have something on their web sites, but no dealer will have them in stock.
- sudosysgen 4y ago
  Of course there are low end EVs. The Wuling Mini EV (which is the worldwide best seller iirc) can be had for 10,000$ with 200km of range. Also, at price of a Leaf or Zoe, you don't get a high end sedan, you get a Honda Civic, which is one of the cheapest sedans.

robertlagrant 5y ago

Well, refrigerators killed the ICE industry :D

SemanticStrengh 5y ago
What about the Thanos car though?