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The EV1 was way, way ahead of its time, and was more or less outright killed for various reasons including car makers having deep sunk cost in ICE engine tech.
by api 11mo ago
The EV1 was way, way ahead of its time, and was more or less outright killed for various reasons including car makers having deep sunk cost in ICE engine tech. The battery tech back then was vastly inferior to today but it was still good enough for a shorter-range economy EV that could have replaced a gas for a lot of daily commuter drives, especially for two-car families.
For reference: the first generation Nissan Leaf had similar range to the EV1. I still have one of these. It's our family's second car, and has run flawlessly for over 10 years with virtually zero maintenance. Range is still about 60 miles per charge.
BTW... despite the antics of Musk, I think he was absolutely instrumental in advancing car electrification. Yes there were others making EVs, but Tesla was the first to make them cool and in so doing force the rest of the industry to move. Without Tesla dragging the industry kicking and screaming into EVs I think we'd still be stuck with almost 100% ICE cars. China might have done it, but that's because they don't have the same sunk cost in ICE engines we have.
- ZeroGravitas 11mo agoWhy did you name check Musk and not the actual founders of Tesla, Eberhard and Tarpenning, that took advantage of their experience with lithium batteries and the forward-thinking Californian regulatory regime to found their company there to build an electric sports car?
- leobg 11mo agoHow about “volume production” as a reason?
- ZeroGravitas 11mo agoStill Californian government providing orders of magnitude more cash for that to happen than Musk ever did. Is there some technical contribution by Musk I'm unaware of?
- api 11mo agoGood point, and they're worth name checking too, but the company didn't go anywhere big until Musk took over. Musk clearly has (or at least had) a great skill when it comes to scaling companies doing hard things. If he had one under his belt, like Tesla, I'd be willing to chalk it up to luck, but he has two: Tesla and SpaceX. Both have been spectacular successes doing things most people run away from screaming with their tail between their legs, namely volume production of innovative cars and aerospace. IMHO SpaceX is a lot more impressive. There's an old joke: how do you become a millionaire? A: start as a billionaire and found an aerospace company. I think without him Tesla would have been a boutique car company. They would have made expensive boutique cars for a subset of visionary EV early adopters, but would not have moved the industry. To move the industry you have to grow hard and fast enough to scare legacy car makers into trying to play catch-up, which is what Tesla did. The only other thing I can imagine moving big car makers like this would have been the government mandating an EV transition. Big bureaucratic things only move when kicked. People hate acknowledging this because Musk's politics have turned so many people off, but unfortunately there appears to be no correlation between skills in one domain and being a generally well adjusted human being. The world doesn't work this way. A person can be good at something and still be a lunatic or an asshole. I mean... if we dismissed all achievement of people who were assholes or lunatics, we'd basically have to throw out 2/3 of all music. If anything there might be a slight negative correlation between extreme skill in some domain and being well adjusted, for a variety of reasons including the weird way people treat "savants" in any field. I also suspect a big one is that people with messed up backgrounds (bad childhood, etc.) or psychological issues sometimes "over-compensate" by achieving hyper-skill in some area.
- EliteGadget 11mo agoI see Musk in the the same way that I see Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs was famous for his "reality distortion field". I think that Musk/Tesla gave Politicians the idea that everyone can go electric and as a result it ended up being mandated into law. Then manufacturers had to try to make cars which were electric.
- dboreham 11mo ago> A person can be good at something and still be a lunatic or an asshole. There's a correlation. He's "successful" precisely because he's a lunatic/asshole.
- throwaway48476 11mo agoBecause the poster was referring to promotion, of which elon was much more successful than the actual founders.
- bryanlarsen 11mo agoThey didn't found their company to build electric sports cars, they founded their company to design and sell conversion kits, and famously got into a big argument with Musk when he wanted to sell complete cars.
- ZeroGravitas 10mo agoI can't even find Elon stans with this take on the early Tesla drama, do you have a source?
- maxerickson 11mo agoHow much do you think the EV1 cost just to build? I don't know, but I'd bet it wasn't "cheap second car" low.
- frankus 11mo agoI had a couple of coworkers who had them. I vaguely remember it being based on a ~$35k value in 1997 dollars, so definitely out of my price range as a new graduate earning only a little more than that in a year. On top of that I'm pretty sure the unit economics were firmly in the negative, even discounting the R&D costs. They were pretty remarkable though—I got a chance to drive a pre-production one at a ride-and-drive a year before and was super impressed.
- frankus 11mo agoPre-Tesla EV companies were kind of stuck in a catch-22, where they couldn't enter the low end of the market (because the tech was still super costly) and they couldn't enter the high end of the market (because either the performance was lacking or they didn't have the resources to scale production). But with a combination of throwing a lot of money at the problem, being in the right place at the right time, and good execution, they managed to scale up the high end of the market enough to eventually move (somewhat) down-market.