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Not a big fan of Tesla myself, but surely if they figure out self driving that’ll make their cars relevant for the forseeable future? On top of that they seem t

Not a big fan of Tesla myself, but surely if they figure out self driving that’ll make their cars relevant for the forseeable future? On top of that they seem to be able to make cars cheaper and more quickly than most of the incumbents.

afavour 3y ago
For sure. But that’s an absolutely massive “if”. Almost guaranteed we’ll be transitioning to EVs (I mean, we already are at a small scale) before full self driving is reliable.
traceroute66 3y ago
> they seem to be able to make cars cheaper and more quickly than most of the incumbents And that's exactly what the output of their factories feel like. Cheap and quickly built. ;-) More haste, less speed and all that ...
wsatb 3y ago
The big players are just late to the game, but have been making cars for decades. They will easily overtake Tesla on number of EVs built as they transition. Tesla isn’t good at making cars. And every year my confidence in full self driving goes down. They are good at charging though and will print money doing that.
- mywittyname 3y ago
  I wouldn't call the established players "late to the game" vis-a-vis self-driving. They've been dumping plenty into research and acquisition and are probably near parity with Telsa. The perception of the larger players as laggards comes from the fact that they aren't as keen to lie consumers and investors. Their leadership doesn't enjoy the same privileges as Musk does.
- Reason077 3y ago
  The big incumbents (US, EU, Japanese) have high cost bases and may struggle to compete on price with Tesla, as well as emerging Chinese competition. The real "secret sauce" behind Tesla right now is that they've figured out how to produce affordable, desirable EVs at scale while maintaining industry-leading margins.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  Are you a time traveler from 2014? Tesla is now closing in on run rates of 1.5-2 million. They are on bath to overtake companies like BMW in total sales. They are already far more profitable. You seem to still think of Tesla as some small fish. Tesla is the biggest BEV producer in the world by a large margin. They produce more EV then all of the major German producers put together and at better margins. Volkswagen is the 2nd largest car company in the world and they have been all in on EV for many years now, and Tesla is highly competitive with them and actually makes far higher profits. A high level Toyota engineer said of the Model Y 'its a piece of art' (and that was not even the newest generation). Volkswagen CEO said that Tesla is beating them on production efficiency. If you want a reality check, go look at Toyota first EV and compare it to Model Y. They are not even in the same class, Tesla beats it on literally every metric. If you still think large car companies can just easily spin up millions of EV per year, you are deluding yourself. You are even more optimistic then the car companies own incredibly optimistic predictions. Ford and GM have even stopped saying they will catch Tesla, its now a race for Nr.2. > Tesla isn’t good at making cars. Based on what? Your subjective insights? Tesla cars have very high margin and are cheaper then competitors in the same class. But they suck at building cars? Tesla cars have high costumer loyalty and high consumer satisfaction in every survey? But they suck at making cars? Are you sure your not mixing up your personal feeling with the real world. > And every year my confidence in full self driving goes down. They don't need self driving to be highly profitable. > They are good at charging though and will print money doing that. Actually charging doesn't make much money, its a terrible business.
  - sunflowerfly 3y ago
    If you include PHEV, Tesla is second behind BYD. Even if you look at EV only, the margin is not insurmountably large. When the big automakers (Ford, GM) truly change over they will dwarf Tesla. https://www.ev-volumes.com https://www.ev-volumes.com
    - panick21_ 3y ago
      But I'm not including PHEV as those are a very different supply chain. > the margin is not insurmountably large Mhh sorry what? Look at how tiny Ford is. And you have to understand that Ford was very, very late at doing battery partnership. Their battery factories are very late. So they will not scale very fast the next 3-5 years because of battery constraints. At the same time, GM on this diagram looks way larger then it is in reality. The reason GM looks big is because of one tiny China only micro-car that yields almost no profit and will never be exported (and sales have gone down this year already). Their actual Ultium sales are barley existing. You keep thinking these companies are so much bigger then Tesla, they are not. Ford and GM have less then 2x the revenue of Tesla. Tesla has faster growth and less debt and less aging infrastructure (they have brand new factories) and now legacy business. In terms of available capital Tesla can actually deploy far more, and raise money far more then Ford or GM. Let me give you an example, Volkswagen. The ID.3 is comparable to the Model 3 and it came out in 2019. It was part of their MEB platform, something they had majority invested years before that. In 2018 they said they would invest 50 billion $ and have since increased that. Clearly they matched Tesla in spending for the last 8 years or so. And yet look at the chart, they have half the BEV sales of Tesla. And Volkswagen is consider very successful in the EV world. You vastly underestimate how hard it is to transition to EV. Just because Ford, GM, Honda and so on are bigger then Tesla, does not magically mean they can just start mass producing EV. Go at actually look at how hard it is to scale, even for large companies with huge ability to invest. > (Ford, GM) truly change Have you looked at Ford and GM own predictions. Because you seem to have a higher opinion on these companies then they themselves have. Ford just talked about how they would be losing money for many more years and then only just match what Tesla is doing just now. Large companies often over promise what they can do. But you actually go beyond that and claim that they under promised and will do significantly better then they themselves believe. Of course GM just learn a hard lessen with their initial battery factory, scaling is hard and that why Ultium had almost no sales in Q1.
- jandrese 3y ago
  Sometimes I feel like people live in a different universe than me. Do you know how many electric vehicles Tesla is likely to deliver in 2023? 2 million. Do you know how many GM is hoping to deliver? 150,000. Do you know how many they have delivered YTD? 40,000. And they're ahead of Ford, Rivian, and all other US EV manufacturers. Only cheap Chinese only EV brands have a similar volume. "Easily overtaking" Tesla is not happening at this point. It will be a real fight to ramp production up to Tesla numbers. Did you know that the Tesla model Y was the best selling car in the world thus far in 2023? Not EV, car. It beat out the gas powered Toyota Corolla. https://www.motor1.com/news/669135/tesla-model-y-worlds-best-selling-car-q1-2023/ https://www.motor1.com/news/669135/tesla-model-y-worlds-best...
FireBeyond 3y ago
That 'if' is a big one. Musk said, in 2015: "Self-piloting cars are a solved problem." "I view it as a solved problem. We know exactly what we need to do and we will be there in a few years." Last year, though, he was backpedaling: "Our focus is on solving the problem."
- dehrmann 3y ago
  2023, his focus is on Twitter.
  - rasz 3y ago
    and Twitter bot spam is a solved problem
skrtskrt 3y ago
I think the vast vast majority of people (non HN techies) at this stage don't care that nearly as much about self driving as they do about having an electric/Hybrid/PHEV car that's just a great total package of a car - something that the existing car manufacturers are far, far better at than Tesla. Even manufacturers like Chevy and Ford can run circles around Tesla in terms of overall quality. Anecdotally in LA which has tons of electric cars, people that originally had interest in the status symbolism of Tesla jumped back to Mercedes, BMW, and Volvo(Polestar) the instant those manufacturers had viable electric options. People are banging down Toyota's doors for the plugin hybrids. Those people are not buying a Tesla in the meantime. People are just waiting for their existing trusted manufacturers to produce enough capacity.
- HWR_14 3y ago
  > Those people are not buying a Tesla in the meantime I've noticed people signing leases on ICE cars to wait out the delivery of their preferred EV solution.
  - skrtskrt 3y ago
    it would be amazing if more people realized that keeping the car you have is still the most environmentally friendly solution. I'm going to keep my ICE car until it is unreasonably old or impractical for me, which is probably at least 8 more years. At that point who knows what the electric car landscape will look like, but certainly production will be massively more ramped up. PHEVs will be the perfect car for most people. It will do 99.9% of people's trips on pure electric, and not have any compromises on long road trips either.
    - HWR_14 3y ago
      In fairness, the people I know doing this want a new car. They are not trying to do the most environmentally friendly thing. But I believe in old ICE as opposed to new EV, on environmental, economic and other grounds.
jandrese 3y ago
Musk absolutely underestimated the difficulty of full self driving. He's still doing it today. FSD is one of those techs that makes for awesome demos but it has thousands of edge cases that are hard to test for even with millions of vehicle miles recorded in their big AI datacenter. The tell for me is Hyperloop. That is an optimal environment for FSD, a closed and contained track that has only identical vehicles on it, and yet they still use a human driver. I only wonder how long it will take before Elon becomes disillusioned, maybe it will never happen. Maybe they'll pull a rabbit out of their hat and actually get it to work. I'm still skeptical.
- Robotbeat 3y ago
  Maybe only optimists can do it
- cypress66 3y ago
  I agree with the difficulty of self driving. However I wouldn't d pay attention to the hyperloop thing. It would be trivial to "hardcode" a car to drive at least the tunnel part. It's almost certainly that the FSD team doesn't want to waste time with that.
zdragnar 3y ago
My driveway is windy and gravel. I live at the end of a windy, gravel road with a steep drop off on one side. The road it connects to is a back country road with NO lane markings at all. Deer are prone to watching you approach, then jumping out at the last minute. You need to slow down when you first see them, not when they start moving. I doubt FSD will get to the point I would ever fully trust it outside of a freeway or city, and almost certainly never for the 2-3 miles closest to my house. Now, if they can get the cars cheap enough that I can actually afford one, I might be interested. There are 4-6 trips I take a year in the 250-400 mile range, with zero public transport available inbetween (rural-ish to rural-ish areas), and not paying for the gas would be nice.
- bseto 3y ago
  a big FSD youtuber (100k subs, Dirty Tesla) Lives outside the city on gravel roads.. .and it seems to do ok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qt56idWv9rw&t=10s&ab_channel=DirtyTesla https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qt56idWv9rw&t=10s&ab_channel...
HWR_14 3y ago
I mean, that same sentence structure justifies a lottery based retirement plan. You only have to get the numbers once after all. I haven't seen any evidence they are able to make cars more cheaply and quickly than the incumbents.
- MattRix 3y ago
  Just look up the margins on Tesla’s cars vs EVs from other manufacturers. For example, Tesla’s net profit margin in Q1 2023 was 13%, meanwhile Ford is hoping that their electric vehicle division can get to 8% net profit by 2026 (they currently lose money on them)
  - HWR_14 3y ago
    Aren't those margins including amortization of capital expenses? And don't those decrease as cars/year goes up?

afavour 3y ago

For sure. But that’s an absolutely massive “if”. Almost guaranteed we’ll be transitioning to EVs (I mean, we already are at a small scale) before full self driving is reliable.

traceroute66 3y ago

> they seem to be able to make cars cheaper and more quickly than most of the incumbents And that's exactly what the output of their factories feel like. Cheap and quickly built. ;-) More haste, less speed and all that ...

wsatb 3y ago

The big players are just late to the game, but have been making cars for decades. They will easily overtake Tesla on number of EVs built as they transition. Tesla isn’t good at making cars. And every year my confidence in full self driving goes down. They are good at charging though and will print money doing that.

mywittyname 3y ago
I wouldn't call the established players "late to the game" vis-a-vis self-driving. They've been dumping plenty into research and acquisition and are probably near parity with Telsa. The perception of the larger players as laggards comes from the fact that they aren't as keen to lie consumers and investors. Their leadership doesn't enjoy the same privileges as Musk does.
Reason077 3y ago
The big incumbents (US, EU, Japanese) have high cost bases and may struggle to compete on price with Tesla, as well as emerging Chinese competition. The real "secret sauce" behind Tesla right now is that they've figured out how to produce affordable, desirable EVs at scale while maintaining industry-leading margins.
panick21_ 3y ago
Are you a time traveler from 2014? Tesla is now closing in on run rates of 1.5-2 million. They are on bath to overtake companies like BMW in total sales. They are already far more profitable. You seem to still think of Tesla as some small fish. Tesla is the biggest BEV producer in the world by a large margin. They produce more EV then all of the major German producers put together and at better margins. Volkswagen is the 2nd largest car company in the world and they have been all in on EV for many years now, and Tesla is highly competitive with them and actually makes far higher profits. A high level Toyota engineer said of the Model Y 'its a piece of art' (and that was not even the newest generation). Volkswagen CEO said that Tesla is beating them on production efficiency. If you want a reality check, go look at Toyota first EV and compare it to Model Y. They are not even in the same class, Tesla beats it on literally every metric. If you still think large car companies can just easily spin up millions of EV per year, you are deluding yourself. You are even more optimistic then the car companies own incredibly optimistic predictions. Ford and GM have even stopped saying they will catch Tesla, its now a race for Nr.2. > Tesla isn’t good at making cars. Based on what? Your subjective insights? Tesla cars have very high margin and are cheaper then competitors in the same class. But they suck at building cars? Tesla cars have high costumer loyalty and high consumer satisfaction in every survey? But they suck at making cars? Are you sure your not mixing up your personal feeling with the real world. > And every year my confidence in full self driving goes down. They don't need self driving to be highly profitable. > They are good at charging though and will print money doing that. Actually charging doesn't make much money, its a terrible business.
- sunflowerfly 3y ago
  If you include PHEV, Tesla is second behind BYD. Even if you look at EV only, the margin is not insurmountably large. When the big automakers (Ford, GM) truly change over they will dwarf Tesla. https://www.ev-volumes.com https://www.ev-volumes.com
  - panick21_ 3y ago
    But I'm not including PHEV as those are a very different supply chain. > the margin is not insurmountably large Mhh sorry what? Look at how tiny Ford is. And you have to understand that Ford was very, very late at doing battery partnership. Their battery factories are very late. So they will not scale very fast the next 3-5 years because of battery constraints. At the same time, GM on this diagram looks way larger then it is in reality. The reason GM looks big is because of one tiny China only micro-car that yields almost no profit and will never be exported (and sales have gone down this year already). Their actual Ultium sales are barley existing. You keep thinking these companies are so much bigger then Tesla, they are not. Ford and GM have less then 2x the revenue of Tesla. Tesla has faster growth and less debt and less aging infrastructure (they have brand new factories) and now legacy business. In terms of available capital Tesla can actually deploy far more, and raise money far more then Ford or GM. Let me give you an example, Volkswagen. The ID.3 is comparable to the Model 3 and it came out in 2019. It was part of their MEB platform, something they had majority invested years before that. In 2018 they said they would invest 50 billion $ and have since increased that. Clearly they matched Tesla in spending for the last 8 years or so. And yet look at the chart, they have half the BEV sales of Tesla. And Volkswagen is consider very successful in the EV world. You vastly underestimate how hard it is to transition to EV. Just because Ford, GM, Honda and so on are bigger then Tesla, does not magically mean they can just start mass producing EV. Go at actually look at how hard it is to scale, even for large companies with huge ability to invest. > (Ford, GM) truly change Have you looked at Ford and GM own predictions. Because you seem to have a higher opinion on these companies then they themselves have. Ford just talked about how they would be losing money for many more years and then only just match what Tesla is doing just now. Large companies often over promise what they can do. But you actually go beyond that and claim that they under promised and will do significantly better then they themselves believe. Of course GM just learn a hard lessen with their initial battery factory, scaling is hard and that why Ultium had almost no sales in Q1.
jandrese 3y ago
Sometimes I feel like people live in a different universe than me. Do you know how many electric vehicles Tesla is likely to deliver in 2023? 2 million. Do you know how many GM is hoping to deliver? 150,000. Do you know how many they have delivered YTD? 40,000. And they're ahead of Ford, Rivian, and all other US EV manufacturers. Only cheap Chinese only EV brands have a similar volume. "Easily overtaking" Tesla is not happening at this point. It will be a real fight to ramp production up to Tesla numbers. Did you know that the Tesla model Y was the best selling car in the world thus far in 2023? Not EV, car. It beat out the gas powered Toyota Corolla. https://www.motor1.com/news/669135/tesla-model-y-worlds-best-selling-car-q1-2023/ https://www.motor1.com/news/669135/tesla-model-y-worlds-best...

FireBeyond 3y ago

That 'if' is a big one. Musk said, in 2015: "Self-piloting cars are a solved problem." "I view it as a solved problem. We know exactly what we need to do and we will be there in a few years." Last year, though, he was backpedaling: "Our focus is on solving the problem."

dehrmann 3y ago
2023, his focus is on Twitter.
- rasz 3y ago
  and Twitter bot spam is a solved problem

skrtskrt 3y ago

I think the vast vast majority of people (non HN techies) at this stage don't care that nearly as much about self driving as they do about having an electric/Hybrid/PHEV car that's just a great total package of a car - something that the existing car manufacturers are far, far better at than Tesla. Even manufacturers like Chevy and Ford can run circles around Tesla in terms of overall quality. Anecdotally in LA which has tons of electric cars, people that originally had interest in the status symbolism of Tesla jumped back to Mercedes, BMW, and Volvo(Polestar) the instant those manufacturers had viable electric options. People are banging down Toyota's doors for the plugin hybrids. Those people are not buying a Tesla in the meantime. People are just waiting for their existing trusted manufacturers to produce enough capacity.

HWR_14 3y ago
> Those people are not buying a Tesla in the meantime I've noticed people signing leases on ICE cars to wait out the delivery of their preferred EV solution.
- skrtskrt 3y ago
  it would be amazing if more people realized that keeping the car you have is still the most environmentally friendly solution. I'm going to keep my ICE car until it is unreasonably old or impractical for me, which is probably at least 8 more years. At that point who knows what the electric car landscape will look like, but certainly production will be massively more ramped up. PHEVs will be the perfect car for most people. It will do 99.9% of people's trips on pure electric, and not have any compromises on long road trips either.
  - HWR_14 3y ago
    In fairness, the people I know doing this want a new car. They are not trying to do the most environmentally friendly thing. But I believe in old ICE as opposed to new EV, on environmental, economic and other grounds.

jandrese 3y ago

Musk absolutely underestimated the difficulty of full self driving. He's still doing it today. FSD is one of those techs that makes for awesome demos but it has thousands of edge cases that are hard to test for even with millions of vehicle miles recorded in their big AI datacenter. The tell for me is Hyperloop. That is an optimal environment for FSD, a closed and contained track that has only identical vehicles on it, and yet they still use a human driver. I only wonder how long it will take before Elon becomes disillusioned, maybe it will never happen. Maybe they'll pull a rabbit out of their hat and actually get it to work. I'm still skeptical.

Robotbeat 3y ago
Maybe only optimists can do it
cypress66 3y ago
I agree with the difficulty of self driving. However I wouldn't d pay attention to the hyperloop thing. It would be trivial to "hardcode" a car to drive at least the tunnel part. It's almost certainly that the FSD team doesn't want to waste time with that.

zdragnar 3y ago

My driveway is windy and gravel. I live at the end of a windy, gravel road with a steep drop off on one side. The road it connects to is a back country road with NO lane markings at all. Deer are prone to watching you approach, then jumping out at the last minute. You need to slow down when you first see them, not when they start moving. I doubt FSD will get to the point I would ever fully trust it outside of a freeway or city, and almost certainly never for the 2-3 miles closest to my house. Now, if they can get the cars cheap enough that I can actually afford one, I might be interested. There are 4-6 trips I take a year in the 250-400 mile range, with zero public transport available inbetween (rural-ish to rural-ish areas), and not paying for the gas would be nice.

bseto 3y ago
a big FSD youtuber (100k subs, Dirty Tesla) Lives outside the city on gravel roads.. .and it seems to do ok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qt56idWv9rw&t=10s&ab_channel=DirtyTesla https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qt56idWv9rw&t=10s&ab_channel...

HWR_14 3y ago

I mean, that same sentence structure justifies a lottery based retirement plan. You only have to get the numbers once after all. I haven't seen any evidence they are able to make cars more cheaply and quickly than the incumbents.

MattRix 3y ago
Just look up the margins on Tesla’s cars vs EVs from other manufacturers. For example, Tesla’s net profit margin in Q1 2023 was 13%, meanwhile Ford is hoping that their electric vehicle division can get to 8% net profit by 2026 (they currently lose money on them)
- HWR_14 3y ago
  Aren't those margins including amortization of capital expenses? And don't those decrease as cars/year goes up?