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It's alarming just how in bed with the government and regulators Tesla has been. I don't get it. They are and have been a middling startup car company. I don't
by bmitc 2y ago
It's alarming just how in bed with the government and regulators Tesla has been. I don't get it. They are and have been a middling startup car company. I don't understand how they've had access to so much government and regulatory corruption.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoYou mean like all the other middling tech startups in bed with a lazy regulator? Looking at you uber/lyft/lime/bird/doordash et al.
- bmitc 2y agoYea, it's all alarming. It's so ridiculous. None of these companies provide any real value, but people salivate over performing corruption for them and throwing money at them. I haven't ever understood.
- recursive 2y agoNone of them? The auto industry seemed to be convinced that EVs were impossible until Tesla showed them the blueprint.
- bmitc 2y agoI'm not sure that Tesla showed anyone the blueprint of anything. If the air from the EV hype pops tomorrow, Kia and Hyundai could drop their entire EV lines with barely a hiccup. Tesla, not so much. And it was easy for Kia and Hyundai and others to wait for a market to develop. If anything, they used Tesla for market research, whereas Tesla needed to lean on venture capitalist money, government grants and subsidies, and cutting every corner possible to squeak out a handful of models that they can barely keep up with.
- recursive 2y agoPersonally, I think there's very little hype, and no air to be released. There are plenty of EV manufacturers now. But precious few that do it sustainably at a profit. Is it still only Tesla? I don't know who else is breaking even. Perhaps they still have something to learn.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoWhen a company makes something they rarely are introducing anything new to a market, but are ordering components that are already being manufactured in sufficient quantity in the market to be sourced en masse, and have an assembly company actually build something from these components. Tesla has done some things like some of the assembly in house but they aren't exactly mining the lithium themselves either. They are a customer to many other companies you might never hear about unless you order EV components for an automaker. Tesla's existence is therefore an inevitability of the wider supply chain bringing these components to market. If there were no Tesla, we'd probably still be seeing EVs emerging today, thanks to the expansion of the components markets that make a car like a Tesla or a Chevy Volt possible. Now, Tesla might have lead to these component manufacturers to scale up some knowing they have a buyer, but still, they existed already.
- recursive 2y agoI can believe it was inevitable, and I can also believe it was accelerated by years from what it would be otherwise.
- Rury 2y agoEVs aren't all that novel... I mean the first ones were made over 100 years ago. It was just battery tech which was keeping them from being a practical possibility until lithium ion batteries came along, and existing auto manufacturers being lazy to innovate once they did, due to having an oligopoly and large capital investments in other tech.
- recursive 2y agoI thought it was obvious from context, but I meant selling EVs used for transportation commercially as a sustainable business, not just the concept of a vehicle powered by batteries.
- rsynnott 2y agoI feel this is a _little_ bit of a myth; the Model S, Nissan Leaf, and an unsuccessful car based on Renault’s Z-E platform (the more successful Zoe followed a year or so later) all came out within months of each other.
- recursive 2y ago> the Model S, Nissan Leaf, and an unsuccessful car based on Renault’s Z-E platform One of these things is not like the others. Take the Model S out of the list, and the world might have concluded that EVs weren't yet practical.
- rsynnott 2y agoI'm... fairly sure that both the Leaf and the Zoe outsold the Model S, tho? Of stuff launched that year, the Leaf was the most significant, IMO, as it was _vaguely affordable_.
- King-Aaron 2y agoOne word: Lobbyists.
- prawn 2y agoWouldn't lobbyists typically be stronger for larger and entrenched incumbents?