I have a 2021 Model Y and a 2023 S Plaid. I'll never go back. The Plaid is truly an amazing car. It will beat super cars in 0-60 and the quarter mile (at a fraction of the cost), seat 5, reach speeds over 200 mph, has lots of storage in the trunk + frunk, has an SSD + GPU with an 18" screen that has Steam installed and works with wireless controllers, self driving is great, the phone placement is the most optimal I've ever seen in a car, no key needed (just walk up to the car and it knows you are you because of your phone, or use a credit card style key), and the audio system it outstanding. Oh, and the white interior looks like a space ship, makes no noise, has long range, has a screen in the back to watch Netflix and YouTube. Other than looks, I can't figure out why I'd buy an exotic car (I don't track them).
Not only cost, but why is accelerating quickly or reaching 200mph important? GP also mentioned 5 seats as important, and to me, those are counter needs.
Even on the autostrada I would say it's typical t go 130km/h (80 mph) so I'm not sure of the context where 200mph is required.
For me it would be completely pointless because I enjoy chilling while driving at 80kmh on country roads and not being hyper focused on what’s happening around me because I’m doing 200 on the autobahn.
But I get the thrill of launching a car at insane speed. I just don’t personally see the point and would never spend those money for a car.
I’d much rather buy a few hectares of forest with those money.
German Autobahn, for those handful of sections without at least temprary speed limits. And on tracks, but let's be honest, vehicles like the Plaid, and similarly heavy vehicles, suck at tracks. Going fast in an almost straight line is easy.
I said heavy cars suck on a track. Why? Because they have a harder time cornering, consuke more energy, increase tire wear and brake performance degrades as well. That is a question of weight, and weight alone.
Also, and every racing series shows that, one fast lap doesn't guarantee good results in a race.
The autobahn where I have driven is quite straight. Track performance depends a lot on the tires, and weight can help with right turns due to friction enhancement. Also, tracks through mountains are where EVs shine.
Because max speed is only useful on roads like the autobahn. Acceleration is something that will available from 0. It sure brightens up your day.
To get supercar performance in a normal car is pretty nice and unheard of until Tesla came along. Yes it is still expensive, but less so than other cars with worse performance. You had to get the 911 or similar with all the addons for like 300k to get worse performance and not even close to the same comfort levels.
I feel like it's hard to get how important fast acceleration is until you have it. Kind of like people who insist that their 60Hz screen "looks just as good", or how their 10 year old laptop is "still super fast and why would I upgrade it?".
Edit: Just to clarify, I'm not necessarily talking about Plaid levels of acceleration. But just going from a Suburu Crosstrek (One of my cars) to a Tesla in "chill" mode (which I usually keep my Tesla in for tire longevity and not making my wife car sick) feels so much safer.
Acceleration makes you a much worse driver, because you don't anticipate anything anymore. I've noticed this after buying an EV, and the Tesla drivers on 280 are even worse than me :-).
This is unappreciated until you have it. In Pittsburgh - there are multiple highway onramps that end with Stop Signs. Onramps. When there's any legitimate traffic; a legacy civic or similar car can be seriously dangerous to merge with.
> Not only cost, but why is accelerating quickly or reaching 200mph important?
For all of human history, we have chased speed. Finding the fastest at running, finding the quickest horse, designing the fastest trains, buying the fastest cars.
Bingo, additionally the Model S is as fast/faster in a straight line…but a Supercar will pass it right by in turn 1. The car is a technological marvel…but not magic.
That exact same person recently released a video saying he needed to apologize to Tesla. (His words not mine). https://youtu.be/ot8zw9UKdgY
The gist is that he originally thought his concerns about the plaid couldn't be addressed easily, but it turns out that they were all addressed through Tesla's (off-the-shelf) track package. Part of what surprised him is that his suspension concerns were alleviated solely through a software update.
...record for EV cars. 1000HP and a literal ton of batteries will do that. The top 50 ahead of it is pretty much every supercar made in the last 20 years and they all have less HP. Additionally, it cooks brakes and turns like a 4500Lb Sedan would. The Ring is a fast track with lots of acceleration zones. None of this should shock anyone. It is fast in a straight line, it, by definition, can't stop or turn nearly as fast as a supercar ever could. It is an incredible work...but not magic.
both can be true. if you watch footage of people driving them on the ring, you'll notice they have to to take corners at much slower speeds and then make up time on the straighter sections. even accounting for the higher weight, model s plaid makes a lot more power than the other cars on that leaderboard.
I don't mean to move the goalposts, just pointing out it mostly hits that time by having an insane power to weight ratio and adequate brakes. or in other words, going really fast in a straight line.
The plaid isn't top of class at cornering, but the idea that it can only do straightaways is a dated view based on pre-track-package days. See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36575033
you're right lol. I was basing this comment off of misha's previous video. just watched his lap with the track package and he's passing all kinds of cars in the corners.
Top 50 in a 1000HP car (The fastest accelerating production car, short the Rimac) on one of the fastest tracks in the world is not exactly hard. The ring is mostly a speed, accel, and nuts track. (That is, long wide-open sections, lots of slow turns then accelerate, and lots of hairy off-angles and sketchy blind turns.)
Also, the Model S may be top 50...but the 50 ahead of it is basically every supercar made in the last 20 years and all of them have less HP to go faster.
> Top 50 in a 1000HP car (The fastest accelerating production car, short the Rimac) on one of the fastest tracks in the world is not exactly hard
That's a bit misleading considering there are very few 4d cars on that list. 'not very hard' but ~almost no one else is doing it. For consideration; on a 7+ minute lap it's within .1s of an Enzo Ferarri.(!!!!!). That's Impressive, even if the Enzo is a few years on now.
But the Tesla Plaid ain't pretending to go after exotic supercars. It's pretending to be a luxury car.
A Porsche Panamera however starts at $97 K and you already get a very nice one for the $135 K the Plaid costs. And it's actually a luxury car: it's in another league of quietness (wind noise dominates on the highway and the Panamera is simply much better sound insulated), audio (try a Burmester + double-glazzed windows in a Panamera: it's 1000 Watts and 18 speakers of bliss), way more luxurious, way more comfortable, handles better, gives a much better feedback through the steering wheel, has higher quality material all over the interior, etc.
That's my issue with the Model S: it's a very expensive car and you've got not just a bit but way more luxurious cars in that price range.
Now there's the issue of TCO, image (some don't want to be seen in a Porsche but have no issue driving a $135 K Plaid for example), gasoline vs EV, etc.
All I'm saying is $135 K ain't cheap and for that amount you have actual luxury cars that do drive superbly available.
This is a very good point. The model s when it was 80k was a lot of car for the money. At 130k, the main selling point is the insane acceleration, which is fun, but not 50k worth. The other improvements are nice, but as you say many very high end cars, with better finish can be had for 130k.
FYI I own an S, which I picked up for 50k used (2016 model in 2019) and I love it to bits, but can't see myself getting another due to how expensive they are now. Hopefully my battery lasts!
EVs are still relatively expensive, but even the ones priced closer to an average car price are remarkably quiet, feel quick, and ground-up EV designs offer more space.
EVs aren't inherently expensive, the issue is that the industry tends to advertise and equip EVs as a status symbol and price them as a luxury, rather than focus on simple/cheap designs that would have more impact on emissions.
That's not only EVs, the way the industry pushes SUVs is also painful. But it's really annoying to see what could be a great improvement wasted with regards to the challenges we're facing.
A more appropriate example is the Renault Zoe (starts at 30k euros in France) or the Dacia Spring (starts at 16k euros in France) which are actual cars that seat 4-5 people, and have 200km+ range (more than enough for the vast majority of trips taken).
> EVs aren't inherently expensive, the issue is that the industry tends to advertise and equip EVs as a status symbol and price them as a luxury, rather than focus on simple/cheap designs that would have more impact on emissions.
True, but the main issue here (according to manufacturers, at least in Europe), is supply chain issues making smaller cars unprofitable, thus forcing them to focus on bigger more luxurious models with bigger margins.
A standard-issue Tesla 3 with no optional frills checks these boxes:
seat 5, has lots of storage in the trunk + frunk, an 18" screen, self driving is great, the phone placement is the most optimal I've ever seen in a car, no key needed (just walk up to the car and it knows you are you because of your phone, or use a credit card style key), and the audio system is outstanding. Oh, and the white interior looks like a space ship, makes no noise, has long range, has a screen in the front to watch Netflix and YouTube.
This is not what the GP was talking about and a standard model 3, which is less then half the price of the car they described, it’s still luxury priced and until this year? Was about double the average American car price.
I would sincerely hope when your paying that much you get a good car.
You shouldn't factor in incentives. That's not a change in the price of the car, that's splitting the cost between multiple buyers - one of whom is the taxpayer.
Yeah, it's funny reading his promotion of one of the most expensive sedans in the world as being somehow "underrated" lol.
Even funnier when you consider it has the panel gaps and material quality of an AliExpress gaming console, but it doesn't matter because "the interior looks like a space ship".
> Last year, the Model Y was the best-selling vehicle in Europe and California, the fourth best-selling in China despite China’s different tastes and model availability compared to the rest of the world, and was on the US top ten list but significantly behind several trucks and SUVs. These performances made it the third-best selling car worldwide.
> But now, it looks like Tesla’s #1 sales prediction has come true. The Model Y has dethroned the Toyota Corolla as the world’s best-selling car in Q1 and looks like it may well maintain this position for the full year.
As numerous other commenters have noted, who the hell knows with Tesla?
They announced and had an ad campaign that they were the best selling car in Australia, which surprised Toyota. And Australia's consumer watchdog, and it was discovered that they were not even close, and had been counting pre-orders and other such things, factory used sales as new, etc., and the DOL registration data proved it wrong.
That being said, yes, the MY sells very well. But even in Electrek's article, you can see the weasel words...
"significantly behind several trucks and SUVs", and then "but now, it's #1 sales prediction comes true", and then the goalposts silently shift, "best selling car" (because it is still being outsold by some of those trucks and SUVs).
The GPU can play games from steam while you stare endlessly at the 1 hour this recharge is going to take, lol. And yeah, a ton of Tesla fanboys love quoting 0-60 but get real quiet when you ask about weight or quality.
Yes...depending on battery discharge state and, rather violently, on how lucky you are on charger use and functionality. It is a large gamble in most parts of the US depending on times and luck. You absolutely couldn't plan a calendar appt around it without adding 30 minutes of buffer.
Also the point was around gaming, if you are gaming in the car in your garage instead of on a proper TV, you are spending your money weirdly.
> You absolutely couldn't plan a calendar appt around it without adding 30 minutes of buffer.
You can say the exact same thing about driving a traditional ICE vehicle 5+hours due to traffic. EV is a bit less convenient on road trips - yes; but it's much more convenient every other day of the year if you have a home charger.
HDMI is not enough, unable to touch screen and no signal/control about car status. CarPlay/Android Auto is another solution, but underpowered chip tend to be annoying also for them.
Why is this even a selling point? There are no roads for this. I've never needed to personally go this fast. In actual emergencies, this would put both me and the person with the emergency at risk.
And honestly, the companies can claim that all they want. Pretty much no one is going to test it themselves.
by the time you're looking at $100k+ cars, you've moved into "want" territory, not "need". some people want a car that can give them a massage. some people want a car that can go 200 mph, even if they'll never do it personally.
> And honestly, the companies can claim that all they want. Pretty much no one is going to test it themselves.
uhh, people are definitely going to verify a claimed top speed of 200 mph lol. give the car reviewers a few months to get their hands on one.
That they won't realistically use, even in an emergency. Most roads aren't built for this speed nor are the buyers trained in it. They aren't being sold for racing. Few are going to go to a proper place to test it.
Car reviewers, sure - on a closed road that has a proper surface or on a track. Most owners aren't going to do this.
I agree it doesn't really make sense, but I guess I don't understand what the problem is. not every purchase in life has to be made based on the output of a spreadsheet. as long as they don't actually drive 200 mph on public roads, why care? I worry a lot more about the clapped out sentras in my area.
But I kinda agree, as a german I feel like we should have a universal tempo limit of 130kmh.
The only reason I can see to stay unlimited would be as a policy measure for quicker EV transition, e.g. by limiting ICE cars to 120kmh and keeping unlimited for EVs.
There are (large) parties in Germany that will never allow for a general tempo limit. Introducing it at least for ICE would at least reduce traffic CO2 from the most inefficient modes of travel (high speed ICE).
Most places where these are sold do not have such roads. I've lived in a number of places, spanning an ocean. Most do not have these roads - not where it is legal.
> no key needed (just walk up to the car and it knows you are you because of your phone, or use a credit card style key)
This feature, while I am sure loved by most people and is evident from the sales, is not something that I like and hence would never own a Tesla. I simply don't like the idea of my car and car's app beaming my data to HQ all the time.
The phone/key lock works through Bluetooth and does not require live connectivity.
Teslas do phone home a lot for other stuff, but for better or worse, so do most other modern-day cars. And the Tesla UI is pretty zealous about asking for your permission for all the things.
I am not sure if other auto manufacturers are doing similar data collection, but based on [0], they sure seem to collect a lot. I hope, as you say, they let you pick what data you permit them to collect and also let you use features of _your_ car if you deny some permissions.
> Teslas do phone home a lot for other stuff, but for better or worse, so do most other modern-day cars. And the Tesla UI is pretty zealous about asking for your permission for all the things.
How many other cars send your private videos to HQ to be shared among employees on internal meme pages?
Few modern traditional cars have a slot to put their key in either. My wife's Audi as example, if the fob is dead; you place the dead fob cupholder. ~almost the exact same place I'd use the Card to start my model 3.
They do not. Primary means of entry/starting the car is your cell phone. You also get a set of RFID cards which you can put in your wallet to use as a backup.
You can optionally buy a key fob if you want something more traditional, but it's still electronic and wireless.
Functionally, the "backup" key (which looks like a credit card in Tesla's) is identical to the backup mechanism to a traditional keyless entry fob. If you've ever had a keyless entry fob go dead because the battery runs out, you start the car by holding the key fob over a special location (usually either the start button or on the steering column where a key would be). Same concept, but the backup key for a Tesla doesn't have the integrated key for normal keyless functionality. That's what the cellphone all is for.
I thought all keyless fobs had secret keys inside of them.
There's one inside the one for my Lexus (and you have to pop the cover off the door handle), and on Mercedes the start/stop button is removable to reveal a slot where the fob actually clicks in.
Excuse me if this is a bit forward but who asked? In other words, why do hn commenters go off on tangents to the extent that in some posts you'll find more irrelevant tangents than discussion of the article in the link?
> why do hn commenters go off on tangents to the extent that in some posts you'll find more irrelevant tangents than discussion of the article in the link?
Stimulation of interesting discussion and anecdotes is the lifeblood of HN? I understand this one doesn't interest you, but I bet some others do and don't interest me.
Musk is a product person which most other brands seem to lack and people seem to care more about the product much more than the image it might be associated with(Musk's political actions). Looks like he managed to strike a product-market fit with the laptop class, which most other brands missed probably because they don't have much touch with that class.
Not a Musk fan but his product and business skills are undeniable. Let's just hope he doesn't go too eccentric.
All Musk managed was replacing the gap dimensions between body panels with the funtionality of the entertainment software as one of the most useless measures of car quality. But what can I say, percieved quality (!) was a measure in cars since forever.
That so, Tesla did really good. Added benefit: Software is nothing traditional automotove excels, while build quality is nothing Tesla excels in. So, the now managed to make Teslas weakness irrelevant while highliting everyones elses weakness.
It doesn't have the brakes for it's speed to be safe. I had a Model X and the fit and finish was poor. That, their yoke gimmick, and Elon's nonsense means I won't but another Tesla.
The plaid has upgraded brakes, and they work just fine. What’s not safe about them?
Also, if you had fit issues (honestly more rare the past few years) you should have reported this at delivery, just like any other car. The finish, well, that’s personal preference.
Ultimately I think you just don’t like Elon, and that’s ok - but Tesla is not Elon
> Also, if you had fit issues (honestly more rare the past few years) you should have reported this at delivery
Many do. Tesla leads the market in that over 70% of new deliveries require at least one service center visit in the first 30 days of ownership to correct a factory/delivery defect.
Really interesting the almost universally negative replies to this. From the class of people who gush about whatever latest shiny device Apple put out. Is it jealousy? Or politically motivated?
The only thing motivated here is your implication that the answer must be one of these two reductive answers, while so many commenters have given very reasonable and valid reasons for their opinion.
Teslas do have problems other cars at their price point don’t. I’ve been in my fair share of Model 3’s and my 2006 Lexus RX handles much better and has a vastly nicer interior than a new 2023 luxury car. Also software wise driver assist is awesome but honestly as long as I can get CarPlay to work anything else is fluff, and I bought a $400 box you can mod into the car to make that happen. Without the tax credit it’s arguably not a great value
What I do think people don’t give credit Musk enough for is that he’s willing to put money into some completely bonkers ideas and make them work. EV’s and affordable space travel were laughable ideas until Tesla and SpaceX. Without Elon we would not have the nuspace industry as it exists today
Having driven these cars before. I will never understand the hype. TSLA marketing and PR department is very good if they have people frothing at the mouth and shilling their products.
Does the S model still come with parking USS? My 2023 model Y doesn’t have them and it’s unforgivable. Unless they revert back to shipping with them or drastically improve the vision counterpart then I don’t think I would get another Tesla. I’m hoping that in 4 years when I change car someone else has come up the curve in terms of infotainment and charging infrastructure.
Why does a car need all this bling to begin with? When do you get to actually use it? Can't imagine wanting to sit in a car to play a game on the center console. I do, however, miss easy to reach physical buttons for the AC and music.
The long range is nice though for sure. Can't wait for that to trickle down to everyday EVs for us plebs.
> Why does a car need all this bling to begin with? When do you get to actually use it?
Conspicuous consumption [1] describes the consumer practice of buying and using goods of a higher quality, price, or in greater quantity than practical.
Just like with smartphones, since we get all these technical leaps in one package with all the drawbacks - complete remote control over our appliances and data - we happily ignore them.
It's an EV. It's dead simple to "go fast" with one.
Sustaining that speed is something they have issues with.
Whatever floats your boat, but I find the interior of tesla's incredible bland and boring. Stale "futuristic" BS that's devoid of any personality.
"SSD and GPU" is a freaking bizarre thing to tout. You mean it has an entertainment system with a full computer with enough grunt to light gaming on. Yippy.
They make hardly any money on them so how much it matters is debatable. Tesla is Apple and BYD is like One Plus (bad analogy because One Plus doesn't sell many cars) but still.
Tesla isn't at much risk from BYD. BYD will eat the low end of the market around the world though.
You can't compare Tesla profit with other car manufacturers. The numbers are not calculated the same way. If you take your Volkswagen to have something fixed within the warranty period, then the cost of repair is taken from the warranty repair pool associated with that model/year configuration, lowering the profit per sold car.
If you take a Tesla in for repair, they'll most of the time do a goodwill repair which doesn't come out of the warranty pool, and therefore doesn't affect profit per car.
They work out to the same number in the end, but per car profitability looks better for Tesla when trying to attract suck... outside investment.
If Tesla presented its numbers the same way that Toyota and Ford did, they would both have higher profits-per-car than Tesla despite selling many cheaper cars, due to the huge markups on their real moneymakers: trucks sold to U.S. customers (Ford's profit on an F350, their most expensive vehicle, can exceed the retail price of a Model 3.). The profits on trucks are why Musk is trying to get into the truck game with the Cybertruck.
> If Tesla presented its numbers the same way that Toyota and Ford did, they would both have higher profits-per-car than Tesla despite selling many cheaper cars
No they would not, and this is a ridiculous thing to say if you had taken even 5 minutes to look at the earning reports of these companies.
Even when accounting for the small differences between car manufacturers on how they make their per-car-profit calculation, they still report their total earnings the same way.
2022 Tesla made $13B selling 1,3 million cars.
2022 Toyota made $18B selling 10,5 million cars.
2022 Ford lost $2B selling 4.2 million cars.
2021 Ford made $17.9B selling 3.9 million cars. (added Ford's 2021 result for a better comparative)
Every car manufacturer does some slight variation on how they get their margins per car figure, but it does not account for major difference you think they do.
not just the profit on trucks, they're the overall number 1 selling vehicle in the US, and are popular elsewhere. desert warlords love their tacoma/hilux...
They're producing more cars, still making a profit.
I work for a company that isn't the absolute most profitable per unit. My investments are full of companies that aren't absolutely the most profitable per unit.
> Tesla is Apple and BYD is like One Plus (bad analogy because One Plus doesn't sell many cars)
Yeah, it's a very bad analogy, nobody on budget buys a OnePlus 11. A One Plus 11 is 1- just slightly cheaper than an iPhone 14 and 2- is technically on par https://www.makeuseof.com/oneplus-11-vs-iphone-14-plus/ - almost a counter example ironically
At the end of the day both plug in hybrids and bevs are capable of driving without gas and entirely on electricity. The only meaningful difference wrt electric driving is battery size
Genuinely surprised they haven’t shipped them for sale to Africa. It’s where a lot of old combustion vehicles from Europe end up. Maybe not worth the effort?
I'm sure they'll ship some off to Africa if they can't find any other options, but as you say they're competing against used clunkers from Europe, so the margins will be terrible.
Africa doesn't have the grid capacity to support a shift to electric vehicles. Right now South Africa (i.e., the richest country in Africa) has daily rolling power cuts (aka "load shedding") because they don't generate enough electricity for current demand, let alone for widespread EVs.
The major advantage of liquid fuel compared to electricity is that it's easier to transport and store, and harder to steal, which is why I don't think EVs will see significant take up in the third world.
They can't generate enough electricity because of corruption. When you have people actively sabotaging power generation, there are bigger concerns than the transition to EVs. If you attempt to transition the country to renewables, then you'll be killed.
Thanks, my mistake! I did misread it as China having a surplus of EV cars instead of ICE cars. Either way Africa is a tough market. But I think my point about a stable electric grid as a prerequisite for EV take-up still stands.
As someone who's heard anti-Chinese propaganda noise for most of the past three decades, none of which ended up having any basis in reality because it's propaganda, yeah I'm filing that along with the rest.
My favourite one is the ghost cities. Sure some are still under-populated/didn't work out as well as planned but by and large the pre-building of cities/districts has worked out well.
Almost all of those sales are in China though. They're starting to enter Western markets and having some success, mostly by being the cheapest EVs around, but Tesla is still outselling them 4:1 in Australia despite steeper price tags.
Not OP, but there are not enough resources for all of North America, Europe, China and India to live the lifestyle of the average US person. So I guess they are hopeful that India won't reach that level of consumption.
Very wrong. I do hope they reach this level of consumption. But don't do it by relaying on cars as a primary means of transport. The car market should stay small even as the economy grows.
This can be achieved by systematically ban cars from cities. By investing far more into trains then into highways. By having good public transit even to remote places. And by encouraging small vehicles when necessary.
Even if the power stations were running on petrol it would be worse because of the inherently lossy nature of transferring power to the grid, across the grid, to the battery, from the battery, to motor(s) to the wheels.
I'm not saying it's bad to move to electric vehicles just that it's not the wonderful win for global warming in China (or really anywhere else) right now and for the foreseeable future.
Internal combustion engine uses only about 30-40% of the energy in gasoline, because it can't make use of the majority of the energy wasted as heat. Stationary power plants can use that heat.
Electricity transfer, battery charging, and electric motors are all over 90% efficient, with overall "well to wheel" efficiency around 80%.
Sure, but Teslas competition isn’t really BYD. The competition is EV vs ICE vehicles. BYDs product mix is more towards the low end although they do have a couple of models that compete head to head.
There is plenty of room in the market for BYD and Tesla. For the next decade at least we won’t reach the saturation point for EVs. Remember it I will end up eating pretty much the entire ICE market barring some incredibly small niche segments.
We are looking at 2035 or 2040 before EV players really start going head to head for the same slice of the pie instead of just growing the pie.
Can confirm. My anecdotal (!) experience: recently went car shopping. The cheapest EV that I liked was the Mustang Mach E, about 56,000 USD and a 9-12 month wait time.
I ended up going with a Mazda CX-5. Out the door price was around 36,000 USD and it was available that day.
EV companies need to make cars that are affordable first. So far they only seem to target the luxury car market.
I came across about 50 Mach E vehicles a couple of weeks back stored in unusual location, between a country club and upscale mall. Struck me as odd given the spot doesn’t generally get used for new vehicle storage and just the sheer number of them.
Really? It starts at 52,000 USD for a new 2023 model, that’s not including taxes and other fees. Where are these mystical “under 30k” offers? Is it for a new or used model?
Tesla changes pricing frequently but I just went to their site and they are showing a base Model 3 RWD at $32,740 after the $7,500 federal tax credit. So that would put it at just over $40k before incentives. Also remember that several states also have incentives that may apply.
Iirc, they now also have a deal to supply Tesla with batteries at their Berlin's factory. They have also launched in Europe earlier this year, though I have not yet seen a BYD car on the road (UK).
For reference, 462 BYD EVs have been sold in the Netherlands this year up to May. Last year were zero. Electric busses are driving around for years now (but not without issues).
It really makes me think an electric car future is going to happen. This possibility was dismissed all my life (“what about road trips?) but the demand is there.
I recently drove a 2019 Tesla Model 3 from NYC to Montreal via Vermont. Personally, I wouldn't do the route I took in a Tesla (/EV) again. The 'range anxiety' set definitely in during the trip because, when departing NYC, I entered my destination in Vermont and the navigation system showed I'd have 47% battery remaining upon arrival... I ended up arriving with 19% battery and I was in the middle of the nowhere. Due to the prevailing weather conditions (the car kept saying the battery was cold) and it was raining I guess the battery dropped quicker than it should have? I was stressing out because my wife would be late to meeting her client had I went to the nearest supercharger and I didn't know if I would have enough battery to make it to the charger if continued and dropped off to the client, given how fast the battery was dropping. After dropping her off, I had to charge the car a further 3 times at superchargers, adding an extra 1h45m to the whole trip to Montreal. I also charged the car once going from NYC to Brattleboro, which was another 30m, so almost 2h15m in spent charging the car.
YMMV but I think the obvious thing to do for anyone who worries about range is to use an EV for daily and hire the right car for a long trip. I don’t buy a car for my 1% trips, I buy a car for my 99% trips.
When I need a 4x4, I hire. When I go on a weekend away with lots of gear, I get a trailer or larger car. Big family outing, people carrier. Fetch furniture, Uber van. Getting a huge car and using it for shopping or dropping kids off is allowing the rare use case to dictate how you experience the typical use case. Harder to park, fuel, maintain.
Hiring also means I don’t have the “wrong” large car which doesn’t fit the rare holiday where I need more seats or storage.
You've inadvertently made me feel better about purchasing an ICE car last year. I'd been having some regrets that I hadn't worked harder to find an EV (or at least a plug-in hybrid) that met my other requirements.
Since I don't commute to work, and usually take transit or walk for local trips, the bulk of my driving is longer trips. Range anxiety would kill me in an EV.
I do think there are some cases where it makes sense to at least choose the features of a car with some minority-trips in mind. For example, I drive to a snowy, mountainous region 2-3 times a year. I decided to buy an AWD car (sedan, as I dislike driving larger vehicles like SUVs). With the trips I've made since then, the added cost between the AWD and non-AWD versions of my car has already been covered by the savings in not having to rent a vehicle with AWD.
Tangential, but I was also offered an EV when I rented a car last week (after flying across the country), but I had no idea what the charging situation would be at my destination, so I turned it down and got an ICE car. Turned out to be the right call, as there were no charging facilities where I was going.
A cheap and easy way to increase the size of the car you already have is to buy a roof box. Our previous car was a small hatchback and interstate trips with our three kids in the back would have been impossible without the roof box. I only bought a bigger car when my oldest kid was pushing 6 feet and running out of legroom in the back seat of the hatchback.
Sure, but I only used the roof box on occasional long trips when we had lots of luggage (e.g., visiting the grandparents interstate for Christmas). So I might have paid a few tens of dollars extra in fuel, but it was certainly far cheaper than buying a bigger car when we otherwise didn't need the extra space.
The roof rack and Thule box cost maybe $1200 AUD. But the rack was also useful for attaching bicycle carriers.
A larger car is likely going to have worse fuel economy and/or range than a smaller car. If you get the larger car, you take that hit every single time you drive it. If you get the smaller car and a roof box, you take that hit only when you mount the roof box. If that's most of the time, then sure, it probably makes sense to get the larger car. But I don't think that's the GP's use case.
The larger car is likely more expensive to purchase in the first place than the smaller car plus the roof box.
Meh, I'm currently on a cross-island road trip with. Family of four in a >10 year old, manual, brown diesel grandtourer/station wagon. Trunk and roof box fully loaded.
Long range fuel consumption at 5.3L/100kms, as usual at summer conditions.
A plug-in hybrid could be a good choice for probably most people. There are quite a few with an EV range of 30-45 miles (e.g., Prius Prime is 44 miles). In the US the average driver drives 37 miles per day which would be mostly or completely covered by EV mode.
I rented an Ionic PHEV a while back when I was in LA and was surprised how efficient it was! I drove the entire day, from West Hollywood to Santa Monica and then down to LAX and only used about 1 gallon of gas. It blew my mind at how efficient it was.
People are not gonna buy 5 cars or hire cars just for every use case. They want one car that can handle most of their needs. If the range on these vehicles doenst increase we will never see true mass adoption.
But i dont see how a road trip is an outlier. I get that needing a 4x4 is one, but most people go on some form of long trips a few times every year i would think.
It all depends on what kind of EV you have. Top of the line Model S has 400 miles of range and add to that supercharging. You will be able to drive almost as quickly as with an ICE car - you loose like 20 minutes on 620 miles.
The limiting factor then becomes the driver of the car - rest stops, food and so on.
You're replying in a thread where the issue at hand was more than two hours of recharge, and a bunch of stress around the car's trip planner being way too optimistic about the range of the vehicle in the first place. Maybe your statement is true in some cases, but clearly not all.
Even before owning an EV, whenever I would do a road trip, I would rent a car/SUV. it gave me a piece of mind. I wasn't putting 100s of miles on my car. It was much easier.
A road trip is an outlier for me. I go on maybe 1-3/yr. The other 360 days, my driving is local, and with home charging I never worry about filling up.
This strategy is not working if many people go long trip at the same time. This is happened for a long time in Japan, highway (and train) get jammed about 10 days every year. This is also pain for EV fast charger usage, so govt should encourage people to distribute holidays.
You must have very limited use cases, I tried to do that but ended up with a vehicle that was heavily compromised because half my use cases are at odds with the other half.
I was driving to my office job in an F150, burning enough gas to finance and fuel a new Civic, all while being terrible to drive.
So I did the logical thing, and added a vehicle that was efficient and enjoyable to drive, a motorcycle.
But it's agility made me only further resent the truck during the winter months, so I also added a compact luxury sports sedan.
Worst part was the F150 was both "too much" truck to daily drive, but never enough when I needed to do truck stuff.
Tried to landscape my home with some crushed rock, had to do 9 trips bottomed out because of it's paltry payload. Couldn't tow enough to borrow a friend's skid-steer. Had to buy my bricks a half-pallet at a time, a full pallet bottomed it out before the forklift had even finished putting the full weight on.
Downsized the F150 to a Tacoma, anything over 1200lbs and it's more practical to pay for delivery using a proper commercial truck anyways.
In the end I ended up with 3 vehicles, and if I had the means I'd have 4, I'd split the compact luxury sports sedan into a small sports car and a full sized luxury sedan for long highway travels. And this is all before even adding an EV.
tldr: In the motorcycle community they say the correct number of bikes is always 1 more than what you have. I strongly feel that applies to cars/trucks too.
I recently drove my electric vehicle through my town and saw 5 electric vehicles in a row. This is not terribly unusual now. A friend is buying a hybrid rather than a pure ICE not because of environmental concerns but because it drives better in traffic. A number of countries will make sales of new ICE cars illegal in a few years time.
True mass adoption is already here. Not to say that I don't agree that range needs to increase (although it's incredibly rare I'd want to drive more than 250 miles without a 15 minute break). But I don't think the transition to electric will stop or slow or is really in any danger.
I think at this point most EVs are bought for performance or economic reasons rather than environmental reasons. I still haven’t gotten over the acceleration on my i4.
And that's my point really. EVs have some disadvantages (although for most people these are not as serious as claimed if you can get the longer range versions), but overall they have a lot to recommend them simply as cars, even beyond their benefits to the environment. Even in a hypothetical world where nobody cared about the environment, and governments weren't penalising ICE cars, mass adoption of electric cars would still be inevitable at this point.
I don't think range is really the issue. If charging stations were as prevalent as gas stations, and charging time was much lower, that'd probably be sufficient for most people.
I got used to this by my second road trip and it’s a nonissue. You control discharge rate Tina large extent. Battery on track to hit 0? Low speed from 74 to 69 and you do just fine and arrive at 12%. Have near 50k miles in road trips and won’t ever buy a Dino bone burner again.
I regularly do a 200 mile mountain pass with a 75MPH limit, and have been explaining all this to my wife regarding our new Tesla.
But I'd have never admitted how much more efficient our old ICE car would have been at 50MPH than the usual 85MPH I preferred (it's 3 lanes wide and empty, so it's not unsafe to go slower, I just didn't want to).
Battery swap is probably not the way. My prediction is charging times will get much faster with better battery tech in the next 5 years. We might be able to get a full charge in under 10 minutes - which starts to match the convenience of a gas fillup.
I don't see manufacturers agreeing on a standardized battery pack size and shape. I also don't see battery swap stations getting built to the density needed, even if only as a supplement to charging stations. Battery swap stations would be significantly more expensive to build and maintain than charging stations.
Regardless, we don't have battery swap, and I don't think any (serious) manufacturers have plans to go that route, so it's a moot point.
What you describe is just a rookie mistake being a new EV driver. Humans learn and adapt very well. You'll get used to it very quickly if you keep driving EVs. You'll learn to do route planning better and those won't be problems.
But why would I want to deal with the hassle of better route planning when I can just drive an ICE car and not worry about it?
Sure, there's a breaking point where gas prices go up crazy high, and there are the environmental concerns, but I don't think it's surprising or even unreasonable that part of the EV push back is "have to relearn how to plan trips".
One other thing that bothers me about this is that the range of a gas car is somewhat independent of weather conditions. An EV losing a chunk of its range (completely messing up your route planning) because it was colder outside than expected... well, that's just not acceptable.
Bingo. You don't have to agree with me but in my opinion anyone who needs a car and can afford an EV but not driving one is morally reprehensible. We needed to reduce our fossil fuel usage twenty years ago. People putting their own convenience above the environment are selfish and short-sighted.
yeah no. wife yelling at the top of her lungs because of low battery. No thank you. Leased and gave up an EV, now will wait until normal-priced ev's are solidly in the 400+ miles range. I have no desire to graduate from your "rookie" to an "ev planning pro" and wait until everyone else around me does that, too.
What is additional range going to help with here? You misjudged your range, almost certainly due to Tesla overestimating remaining range (not taking into account all variables), and your wife yelled at you for it. Having an extra 100mi range will just delay that scenario, not prevent it. It takes about one longer trip to understand how speed/conditions affect range and how that necessitates an earlier departure time. Next time just plan for a quick stop after 100mi or so to give you some extra confidence. Faster charging and more stations will help out though, no doubt.
EVs are highly efficient so the driving conditions make a huge difference. ICEs have a constant base consumption that we have gotten used to. It's unsettling at first, but as your consumption goes high a lot in high speed, you can save huge quantities (much more than you expect) by driving slower. You will lose less time than you think driving slower. Last time I spent 30 min behind a fast bus and quickly doubled my reach, more than enough to arrive home safely even while driving faster again.
I think the idea of not taking an EV because in some edge case one might lose a few minutes (30m for charging most vehicles nowadays) extremely superficial and selfish in view of the huge disaster that is the climate crisis. Think about how your kids and grandkids will read such comments in 50 years.
Here's a quick derivation based on first principles in high school physics. The amount of work done against a constant opposing force (imagine air resistance) is distance times force. If we assume a constant speed, then there is no net force and no electric energy is converted to kinetic energy, then all the electric energy is for doing the work. Suppose you are driving the same distance but double the speed, that fixed opposing force (air resistance) will quadruple. So doubling your speed consumes four times as much energy but you arrive in only half the time.
This is of course a crude approximation but just drive slower if you have range anxiety.
If only there was some way to transmit the power from the engine to different gear ratios for efficiency at different speeds. That would be the future.
Not sure if you are sarcastic... Gear ratios are needed by ICE because ICEs have a much smaller RPM range, and can't go down to 0 without stalling. There are some EVs that have gearboxes, the cost/benefit of that is still unclear.
How is air resistance the issue here? We are talking about the powerband of the motor. These are two independent concerns that ought not to be conflated.
A co-worker drove to SLC from LA (abut 700 miles) in their Model 3 a few months ago. It took over 24 hours, including charging along the way, and they had to pre-plan their stops to make sure they could make each charger without their battery dying.
I recently drove to a campground in Yellowstone from LA (about 1000 miles) in an ICE SUV in less than 15 hours, including multiple rest/food breaks and traffic delays in the park due to road work. We didn't plan any stops on the way, and only got gas when we stopped for restroom breaks.
Right now, driving an EV means giving up a significant amount of freedom and turns what should be a pleasant road trip into a stress-inducing chore...and that doesn't even take into account the lack of charging options at home for those of us who don't live in single-family dwellings.
> A co-worker drove to SLC from LA (abut 700 miles) in their Model 3 a few months ago. It took over 24 hours,
....how?
HOW!?
I drive a Model 3. I recently drove from Portland, OR to Santa Clara and back 665 miles each way. Each way only took ~12 1/2 hours.
I'm sorry, but either your co-worker is lying, or they're bad at driving, or there's more to the story. Did they think they need to charge to 100% at each charging stop or something?
Portland to Santa Clara is a relatively flat drive. LA to SLC is not, plus a fully-loaded Model 3 in extreme weather (at least, extreme for EVs) and the need to charge multiple times on the way due to charging anxiety related to the lack of chargers en route, the overnight stay in a motel due to the delay related to charging...yeah, it's over 24 hours, easily.
You might want to consider that not everybody is driving themselves; some people have families with them and that changes the calculus of how you approach the drive.
Eh...I just went to ABRP, told it to map me from LA to SLC, assuming 500 kg (1,100 lbs) of extra weight, 0 C temperatures, and some extra range anxiety (Arrive at each charger with at least 30% battery), and it STILL only estimated a total of 12 hours.
> A co-worker drove to SLC from LA (abut 700 miles) in their Model 3 a few months ago. It took over 24 hours, including charging along the way, and they had to pre-plan their stops to make sure they could make each charger without their battery dying
Sorry, your co-worker is likely lying... that would mean something like 14 hours of charging per 9 hours of driving which is very far from reality. Easy way to check: https://abetterrouteplanner.com
No, they were definitely not lying, and its one of the things that turned them from a Tesla enthusiast into someone who won't be getting a Tesla ever again (ongoing issues with AP/FSD being the other).
Assuming infinite fuel/charge, LA to SLC is 9 hours of driving with good traffic, in temperate weather.
In the winter, temperatures along the way can approach or drop below freezing; in the summer most of the drive is 100+ degree temperatures. In both cases, the temperature drastically lowers range before taking AC/heating into account. This has little to no effect on ICE vehicles (except at the start of the drive when the engine is warming up) but has huge effects on EV vehicles; cold can reduce EV range by as much as 40% and the heat reduces range by about 15%. This means that a Model 3's theoretical range would only be about 200-280 miles. This means the car has to be charged at least twice for the trip to Vegas, and 2-3 times for the trip from Vegas to SLC. It turns out the charging situation is great from LA to Vegas (Barstow, Baker, and Primm) but almost non-existent past Vegas (essentially nothing past Vegas until you reach St George, hence the need to plan stops.
If you're lucky and the Supercharger is available when you need it, great.. Not so great when all the spots are taken, and you're either waiting in the cold/heat or relying on the EA station a few miles down having working charging. Unfortunately, EA stations along this route generally don't have supercharging speeds...
While in Yellowstone I encountered a handful of Teslas from Angelenos who said that it took them the better part of 2 days to get there (but otherwise weren't specific about the time, route, charging situation, etc), so it's not an isolated incident.
Long story short: just because you're a techie and can optimize your EV driving doesn't mean everyone else will. Your experience is the exception, not the norm.
I drive an EV (not Tesla) in a part of the country that is cold during the winter, there is no need to explain how it works. You can go into ABRP and change the reference consumption to 50% of the initial value and hopefully understand why no one with any experience will believe it took 24 hours to travel 700 miles on an interstate route with plenty of chargers.
> It turns out the charging situation is great from LA to Vegas (Barstow, Baker, and Primm) but almost non-existent past Vegas (essentially nothing past Vegas until you reach St George...
Both Tesla and EA have chargers 80 miles from Vegas in Mesquite? And something like 14 locations combined between Vegas and SLC?
> ...relying on the EA station a few miles down having working charging. Unfortunately, EA stations along this route generally don't have supercharging speeds...
Every EA station between Vegas and SLC has >= 1 charger at 350 kW, I don't understand what you are saying. Regardless, the charging curve for a Model 3 spends a lot of time <= 150 kW so it doesn't make a ton of difference.
> Long story short: just because you're a techie and can optimize your EV driving doesn't mean everyone else will. Your experience is the exception, not the norm.
This makes sense in parts of the country where fast charging is scarce. The route between LA and SLC is full of chargers, both Tesla and CCS. Tesla handles the routing for you, there is nothing to optimize on this route.
Both Tesla and EA have chargers 80 miles from Vegas in Mesquite? And something like 14 locations combined between Vegas and SLC?
They do...now...They did not several months ago when my coworker attempted this drive. At least, none that were working or available.
Every EA station between Vegas and SLC has >= 1 charger at 350 kW
Yes, they do. And they have on average of 0 working chargers at 350 kW, so the theoretical charging speeds are irrelevant.
Tesla handles the routing for you, there is nothing to optimize on this route.
Ah yes, Tesla does such a good job at routing. Just like how it loves to route cars into trucks and stopped vehicles. Just because your experience with your empty Tesla works for you doesn't mean it works for families with greater charging needs.
> They do...now...They did not several months ago when my coworker attempted this drive. At least, none that were working or available
The Mesquite EA location has photos on Plugshare dating back to 2019 and the Tesla locations opened in 2021 and 2022. You can check https://supercharge.info for opening dates of the superchargers along the route. EA built that interstate out quite a while ago.
> Just because your experience with your empty Tesla works for you doesn't mean it works for families with greater charging needs.
I don't drive a Tesla but I also don't understand what this means. The route has superchargers and EA chargers all over, damn near perfectly spaced out, and the navigation system includes them in routing. If your coworker took 24 hours on this route, it was not caused by driving an electric vehicle. Again, you can use ABRP, modify the variables, and check for yourself: it is not possible to get anywhere near that amount of charging time on that route regardless of conditions.
> I recently drove a 2019 Tesla Model 3 from NYC to Montreal via Vermont. Personally, I wouldn't do the route I took in a Tesla (/EV) again. The 'range anxiety' set definitely in during the trip because, when departing NYC, I entered my destination in Vermont and the navigation system showed I'd have 47% battery remaining upon arrival... I ended up arriving with 19% battery and I was in the middle of the nowhere.
I drove from Montréal to New York City in a gasoline powered car late at night, and in the 150+ miles between Plattsburgh and Albany I got range anxiety because I was getting low on gas and couldn't find any gas stations open. Of course this was in the days before smartphones and Google Maps and Gasbuddy etc.
Yeah fair enough, before pay-at-the-pump and proliferation of 24HR gas stations and navigation systems, you definitely had to think about your range more, especially in rural areas. But most gas powered cars have at least 300 miles of range. My truck has 720 miles of range. And if you always fill up at half a tank, you'd be hard pressed to find a path to travel on in the U.S. in 2023 that doesn't hit multiple gas stations with 24 hour pump access.
It's also true that running out of gas doesn't require a tow. You just need roadside assistance to bring 5-10 gallons to get you back on the road in minutes.
Source? Even as an EV owner/enthusiast I find that a little hard to believe.
I find the idea of the portable power fascinating and have watched some YouTube videos on them, but it seems like a very expensive and niche thing so far. I've seen one company on YouTube that showed it off.
I wanted an EV since back when I lived in an apartment, wished there was some sort of big capacitor on wheels I could charge all day from a normal outlet that would then fast charge my car for a few minutes.
Most actual products seem to use batteries and cost thousands, and are for some unique scenario where you somehow can't just public charge. Still find them neat though.
I think they typically just tow you to a charging station, seems a lot easier/faster/cheaper given they already own tow trucks.
In my opinion the only cost effective battery to travel around with would be the one inside an existing EV, I just hope we get beyond household outlet speeds for V2L. Would be neat if a passing EV could rescue at 50kw or something fast.
GP meant that they avoid range anxiety by filling up (to 100%) when half the tank is remaining. That way if they get into a situation where they can't find a gas station nearby, they still have a half tank remaining to burn to find one.
Sure, you've effectively halved your normal-case range, but a refill of an ICE car is much less of a hit to your trip time than a recharge of an EV, and your best-case range (if you really need it) still remains the same.
That dismissal held some water until we hit a point where batteries were cheap enough, high capacity enough, and there were enough chargers. We’re still just at the beginning. In 10 years it’ll all be much better
The overwhelming majority of car trips are possible in even the budget EVs.
Road trips are a problem, but charging infrastructure will eventually handle it. During the cross over period you could rent an ICE car.
I don't think 1 road trip a year is enough to sway most people off the idea of an EV if they want one. It's only going to sway those who are already skeptical.
We’ve known for a while now that it was going to happen, right? And that all those countries that are committed to phasing out ICE cars by 2035 are being way too conservative. Isn’t it estimated that within a year or two, you’re going to have to pay a premium just to purchase an ICE car? And that premium is just going to keep growing as battery costs continue to shrink.
God I hope it's not that soon. There's like nowhere to charge an electric car near me.
They really need to work on charging infrastructure before they convince me to buy an electric car.
And the cost still needs to come way, way down. It seems like every electric car that has any decent range is a luxury car. I don't want a luxury car, I just want a super basic cheap car to get me from point a to point b.
The cost is a big issue for me still. I get it, but I paid $15k for a car 10 years ago - small hatchback that's been more than enough for my needs. The only options I have for EVs are either 2-3x the size (Rivian, F150, Model X) or 4-5x the cost (Tesla, Lucid, Polestar), or both. I barely drive a hundred miles in a week, and often less, but having range to do a 2-3 hour road trip is a big bonus.
You can't even get a quality EV with a shorter range though for less than 50-70k. I'm not even sure I've spent that much on my car over the last decade, including gas, insurance, repairs, and initial cost. Makes it hard to justify the upgrade.
GM is ending production of the Bolt later this year. They lost money on every one they sold. GM CEO recently said they won’t be able to make sub-40k EVs until the end of this decade “maybe longer”. GM is really struggling with the transition to EVs. Ford is struggling too but at least has a plan…
I suppose my curiosity there would be if it's a smart idea to buy a car model that's getting discontinued - would it be more difficult to get it repaired in the future? Will it be hard to get replacement parts later?
Sadly it's not anticipated to return to Australia;
One reason it's shame we'll never see the Bolt on Australian roads is because it actually stemmed from an electric vehicle concept designed here by GM’s Australian design centre and went into production in 2017.
Now, of course, with GM all-but out of Australia – apart from its ties to the shrunken GMSV outfit here – it's less likely than ever we'll ever see the Bolt models here.
Yea, there was a brief experiment with smaller stuff 5ish years ago, but that seems to have dried up hard and left us with 2-ton trucks and SUVs or high end luxury sedans being the only options in the US for EVs.
Seems like there may be 500evs coming back next year, so may look into that.
It's good that the Tesla charging port (NACS) is well on its way to becoming a cross-manufacturer standard in the US, so it may make more sense soon to have smaller EVs that don't need to have as large of a capacity to find the few Electrify America stations.
Yea, one of the current ironies is that the folks most able to use/charge an environmentally friendly car are the people living in environmentally unfriendly single-family homes. I've yet to see an apartment complex with more than 2-3 charging points for a building of hundreds of units, and plenty of older condo/apartment housing stock can't even easily retrofit chargers into the lot without spending tens of thousands of dollars on it, assuming your local power system supports it.
Having to drive five to ten miles and wait for most of an hour to charge is just a bad experience.
As number of electric cars increase converting parking lots to charging stations will increase as well. Though I think currently just like we have incentives for cars we need incentives for businesses to install chargers specially for chargers with solar backend to speed up the change as more chargers are built more people will move to electric as it gets more convenient.
China this year reached $10k car with BYD introducing its $10k cars with sodium ion batteries, these are not like previous cheap cars which were practically golf carts. With the prices of batteries and solar electricity falling 10%-12% a year on avg I think electric cars are going to take over a lot faster than people are expecting. Main reason being cost ice cars are almost 3 times as expensive to run today as an electric car already. It will be 5-8 times in 5-8 years.
I have friends who own EVs without access to home charging who charge at the grocery store once a week while shopping. The car is done charging before they’re done shopping for groceries.
The trick is to distribute chargers everywhere, because your car is going to be parked somewhere long enough to charge unless you’re a taxi or some other high utilization use case. Most will charge at home and or work, but some cannot.
Yea, it's what I'd have to do, I suppose, but it would mean driving to a grocery store 2-3 times further away, and my average trip to the store these days is only 10-20 minutes which I doubt is long enough for a full charge.
My office and home don't have chargers and probably won't for a while, so I'd essentially have to make a special trip out on the weekends to charge my car while I get lunch nearby or something.
For an L3 charger, 20 minutes is a lot. If you are 20%, it should get you to 70% or so, it takes longer to go from 70 to 100% given how battery charging works.
Indeed! I literally just charged a long range model y at a 250kw Supercharger from ~20% to ~80% in 17 minutes (per Teslascope) this morning after towing a ride on trencher back to the rental shop. Was done before I had finished using the rest room and getting a coffee at the grocery store.
Ya, I think people really underestimate how fast L3 charging is, especially for cars running on empty. But not all grocery stores have L3 chargers, and they can get really busy in holiday weekends. I plan my trips around these, but I wish they had more capacity.
Tried this while in Hawaii with a rental EV (with no charging at my hotel) and it did not work at all. Hawaii is one of the states with the most EV's per person and there's frequently chargers in places like malls and grocery stores (whole foods and target in particular). However, because there's so many EV's, all of these chargers are always in use, and there are usually lines or people waiting around to snag a spot as soon as it becomes available. It was a massive inconvenience and put me off of EVs for the near future: I'd either need an sfh or to be somewhere that figures out public charging when more than a tiny fraction of the total vehicles on the road are electric.
Yea, I feel like this is also likely an issue. You can't let yourself run too low because you can't for-sure get a charger quickly if you don't have one at home. I regularly run down to a sub 10-mile range and less than a half-gallon of gas in my ICE car now because I live by a couple gas stations, so I'm never more than a couple minutes away from being able to fill my car.
If I had to drive around for a while to find an open charging spot, I'd have to be more opportunistic about where/when I charge to stay ahead on it.
This. It's weird that EV owners do virtue signaling from their house and commute by car everyday, while condo people can't afford EV and don't commute by car. Slow EV charger at condo parking is what every govt should invest, instead of huge subsidy for vehicle.
I have no way to charge at home though, being in an apartment. I don't plan to change that any time soon. I am certainly not changing where I live just for my car when a gas car works fine.
Unfortunately there are a lot of people who can't feasibly charge at home, like people who have to park on the street, or who rent their home and don't have access to anything but a 120V 15A outlet, assuming they have access to an outlet at all where they park their car.
Hmm, tell that to the millions of people living in the UK in terraced/town houses where the only charging option is to drag a cable over the public footpath to the road side....if they manage to get a parking space directly outside their home.
Most people don’t understand this. They are so used to going to gas stations that they think they will have to regularly go to charging stations. All that time wasted refueling simply goes away as your car gets “fueled up” while you sleep.
Do you have charging where you live? (Private garage or parking spot?) All you really need is charging where you live, and charging along highways. I have literally never gone to any of the chargers within 30 miles of my house.
Hardest part is for apartment buildings. No big incentive to install chargers for public use.
No, There is no charging anywhere "near" my home. I park in an uncovered open apartment parking lot.
Same thing for at work.
And checking the charging maps shows very few options anywhere near me and the few places that do only have a couple plugs. Would be annoying to find it's in use by the time I get there so I would have to wait for them and then me.
Is it feasible to have charging installed at your home or office? To reiterate what GP said, I basically never charge anywhere except at home (currently in a private carport that I got a charger installed at, previously in an apartment building with a single shared charger for ~50 spots, 4-5 EVs).
I don’t really see how I could convince my apartment or the company I work for to install chargers any time soon.
Sure maybe in years it will be common enough, but that’s my entire point. It doesn’t seem common at all around me yet, and I’m not going to buy an EV before charging is reasonably available.
Some jurisdictions are going to start mandating this for large car parks. The transition is definitely going to be very uneven; the closer you are to the centre of a big city with an air quality problem, the sooner it will arrive.
Hawaii already has this rule for what it's worth. The issue there is that they have so many EV's on the road that these chargers are always in use and have lines (and aren't really that fast to begin with). Having experienced that, I still wouldn't get an EV without a guaranteed place to charge at home.
Sure, but you're missing the point that you yourself just made: "are going to start", as in, they haven't yet. Most people are not going to buy an EV today without a reasonable charging solution, banking on the idea that situation will fix itself at some point in the hopefully-not-to-distant future.
Yeah, it's always been a chicken-and-egg transition problem. There's always a least convenient link in the chain. Hence all sorts of schemes to nudge people / subsidize early adopters so the cycle of "we don't need to solve charging because nobody has EVs"/"we can't have an EV because there's no charging" is broken.
Hence why I think it will expand outward from urban centres, motivated by e.g. ULEZ requirements.
Sounds like you live in the middle of nowhere. I live in what people consider the middle of no where and there are a number of Tesla charging stations near me.
I live 10 kilometers from the center of Stockholm in a dense suburb with a population of 55 000 (Stockholm is a small center core with lots and lots of suburbs).
There are perhaps 20 chargers in total in the entire suburb. Maybe 8 of them are fast chargers. There are another 20 in neighbouring suburbs.
And no, it's not an American suburb with single family homes. It's an European suburb with apartment complexes.
The charging infrastructure can improve literally overnight.
Around me there were very few places until McDonald's suddenly decided to have a charger at every drive-thru, and now I have as many chargers as McDonalds' around me.
The charging infrastructure will take years to improve. "Literally overnight" is a laughable exaggeration. Pretty sure even McDonald's can't install EV chargers at each drive-thru "literally overnight".
But they do. Commercial locations like malls already have power available, so it's not a large-scale infrastructure project, but a matter of digging a cable and hooking up a box.
Did a long road trip in a Kia EV6. (Houston to San Diego and back) Stops weren't always super convenient, but it wasn't that long ago that trip wasn't even possible.
Electric cars have a lot more problems than range.
Toxicity and pollution of producing the battery is an immediate one. And the fact it's junk in 5-6 years, obsoleting often the entire car (or requiring an extremely expensive replacement).
The fact BEV are much heavier and are wearing down the roads much faster.
And while ICE are of higher risk of a fire, an ICE fire seems like child's play compared to a BEV fire. This thing is impossible to put out and turns everything around to fine (and very toxic) dust (including, again, the road below).
The first major evacuation event that hits a primarily electric-vehicle city is going to sorely test that idea. Batteries need to hold about 3-4x the charge that they currently do to make that plausible without endangering thousands.
EVs are probably in a better position than most ICE vehicles in that situation.
You won't consume fuel while at a dead stop in the traffic jams. You'll have peak efficiency when moving at low speeds in the traffic jams. You'll already be charged up at home, while everyone else will be waiting in line at gas stations to fill up. Some people won't even be able to get gas, because the stations will run out in the rush.
Vehicles travel for hundreds of miles in the event of a major storm. Some places may be up to 6 weeks without power upon returning. So you drive your battery powered car back home, and now it's dead, and you have no way to recharge it. Guess what you're going to be relying on to get basic essentials given that FEMA vehicles are NOT coming to you to deliver food? Someone else's ICE.
So when it's 100 degrees and 90 percent humidity outside and your neighbors with the ICE vehicles have gone to the gas stations for refills to both their vehicles AND their generators so that they can run a portable AC unit, you're utterly out of luck with your electric paperweight. I suppose you have a shot if you still have working solar panels, but in the situations I mentioned... LOL. Even if the winds don't shred them, the debris will.
I don't follow. EVs will fare much better in a city or regional evacuation.
EVs should be more efficient when driving at low speed than an ICE car, and the regenerative braking in stop-and-go traffic will help reclaim some wasted energy.
EV's don't expend power running the motor when stopped in traffic. Most ICE cars out there do not auto shut off their engines when idling (it's fairly recent that many newer cars have that feature), and even those that do need to turn the engine back on after a few minutes in order to run the car's electronics.
For the people who can charge at home (admittedly, there are many who cannot), their cars will likely already be fully charged when the evacuation order comes down. And we already know what happens with ICE cars when there's excessive demand for fuel: hours-long waits at the pump, and gas stations that run out entirely.
When hurricans etc are about hit an area, Tesla sends out an update to over-ride charge limits and fully charge the cars pre-emptively, sends notifications and alerts on the app, and makes super charging on the route free.
The first few things you mention are great, but giving away fuel for free (whether it's gasoline or electricity) is an unsustainable marketing stunt, and won't last.
Let's see Tesla's growth rate when they're closer to Toyota's size. And speaking of meaningless numbers, who cares about market cap? How does revenue compare? Toyota is about 3x, I think?
They're literally responding to someone commenting about stock price
Tesla sales growth currently seems limited by their ability to produce, so that's fairly bullish
Market cap isn't meaningless, though. Neither is debt. Market cap should be a function of assets, so presumably if Toyota had as little debt as Tesla it would be ~480b market cap.
Why is Tesla higher? It has a better story (not saying I buy it, but at least I can explain it!):
At one point, Tesla was worth more than: Toyota, Volkwagen Group, Hyundai/Kia, General Motors, Ford, Nissan, Honda, Fiat Chrysler, Renault, Suzuki, Daimler, BMW, Mazda and Mitsubishi combined. (Plus several Chinese manufacturers: SAID, Geely, Changan, Dongfeng).
I'd love anyone to justify that with a straight face.
Well no.. They don't have better self driving prospects. Tesla claimed in 2016 that the driver was only in the seat for regulatory reasons. We're now in 2023 and Tesla is still only level 2, nowhere near autonomous driving.
> Let's see Tesla's growth rate when they're closer to Toyota's size.
Not sure what point your trying to make, though. Smaller, faster-growing companies usually do trade at a premium over their larger, slower-growing counterparts. That's just... kinda how the stock market works?
You can certainly object to the magnitude of the difference between the two companies' PE ratios, but otherwise nothing seems weird here.
P/E tells most of what you need to value a company that is stable in size. Tesla could grow earnings 10x and it would still have a higher P/E with the same valuation. It's way out of line unless you believe they are going to own half the world market for cars one day. I suppose if SpaceX can obtain 90 percent of the launch market, why not Tesla?
Toyota and Tesla don’t just manufacture and sell cars they have a more complicated business model. Tesla’s EV charging network for example should clearly be part of their valuation and is unrelated to Toyota’s business strategy.
IMO people are heavily discounting Toyota’s stock compared to their car/total sales for two reasons. Most critically their 200+ Billion dollars of debt, but also the significant sign of mismanagement from their useless investment in Hydrogen.
Hydrogen aircraft/heavy equipment could have real utility, but it’s simply not compelling for passenger vehicles. High capital and operating costs + low energy density + low efficiency all for faster fueling times.
People making along trips want to charge quickly and are willing to pay ~3x the retail cost of electricity to do so. So it can be quite profitable right now.
Longer term I expect charging to become a low margin commodity business, but other networks have had serious reliability issues so people may be willing to pay a premium simply to know everything will work when they get there.
PS: Even longer term I expect in road charging to become a thing on major highways, but that’s easily 20+ years away.
This is delusional. Hydrogen is a fundamentally superior technology compared to BEVs. Tesla is the facing the next big crisis when the limitations of battery reveal itself. Batteries are simply not a sustainable technology. It is Tesla that is being disruption by innovation, not Toyota.
He's not wrong, but the world has picked a different path.
Hydrogen only creates water, and can be refuelled as quick as gas.
Wouldn't have minded driving one of those Toyota Mirais, but there isn't even a Hydrogen station at the other end of the long trip I regularly do, nor is it any cheaper than gas anyways.
And that's the story all over, better tech environmentally and practically but no infrastructure, no hype, and no momentum. It's dead.
The world has not picked a path at all. We are currently still dependent on ICE cars. And the BEV era will come and pass without ever seriously challenging that dependency.
Also I feel there are 2 other significant variables in play. Software is often an oligopoly type market. Self driving is likely to rewrite car manufacturers to those that solve this well and those that don't. Tesla for right or wrong has been viewed as one of the best bets here.
Elon factor. He's been a significant factor in quite a number of significant companies created. That seems an attractive bet he will do good things vs anyone else.
I think most have realized by now that self-driving is not a serious possibility anytime soon for anything other than a nice option to upsell the car by some small margin.
And Tesla FSD is not even best-in-class between car manufacturers (Mercedes is, with actual approved and shipped commercial L3), not to mention the entire self-driving market (where Waymo is way ahead).
>Elon factor. He's been a significant factor in quite a number of significant companies created. That seems an attractive bet he will do good things vs anyone else.
I'm pretty skeptical on all things Elon these days.
> Tesla for right or wrong has been viewed as one of the best bets here.
Really? From what I've read and seen, Tesla's self-driving is starting to feel like the butt of most jokes in the space. And Musk's absurd insistence that cameras are the only sensors anyone needs isn't doing their technology any favors.
> Elon factor.
I think Musk might be running out of steam. The Twitter fiasco shows how unstable and unfocused he is; the whole thing could collapse like a house of cards at any time. I had extreme respect for him 7 years or so ago, but that has eroded over time, and now I see him as a delusional, abusive asshole who happened to have the charisma (a nice way of putting "talent for emotional manipulation") to help build some successful businesses. (And it still remains to be seen if Tesla and SpaceX will continue to be successful in the long term.)
> GM has a P/E ration of less than 6. Are they distressed? If not, isn't that absurdly cheap?
Reminds me of amazon vs everyone or nflx vs blockbuster. The 'market' seems to think tsla is just going to keep growing and gobble up much of the auto market share. Both amazon and nflx had absurd PEs for a long time. Eventually their grew into it.
6 P/E looks enticing as long as you think the 'E' is going to maintain itself over the long term. Do you think GM is going to maintain their earnings?
Exactly! TBH, I made a few bucks on F back when their PE was similarly low. Their EV strategy made sense and their current product line was in demand too. It seemed like an easy and relatively safe bet, and it worked out.
GM is a more difficult case. Their current efforts around Ultium haven't gone so well so far, and their ICE product line isn't even that much better. I think they will do well, but they have a lot of work to do.
The car market is switching quickly to EVs, GM has not shown that they can produce them, they recently discontinued their Chevy Bolt. They keep promising wonders in 3-5 years, but the years are ticking by. You don't want to be stuck trying to sell ICE cars in 10 years... Their only bright spot is Cruise, which has a shot at making a lot of money. Right now they're burning billions though, which means that at any sight of trouble, GM might cut their losses there, or try to sell it.
The only people I know wanting a Chevy already own chevys. Of course, most of the people that I know that own chevys would be happy with something else too.
The market cap tells you what you need to know. Is there a way in which Tesla can grow the total vehicle market, expand alone into adjacent protected, high value markets, or reasonably exceed Toyota’s market share? If not, they’re over valued.
They are still valued on $300k per car future numbers from when they were supposed to be renting cars with AI drivers in 2020, and the exuberance and “playing with house money” crowd has just kept the music going.
It is a more complete number to use. Unfortunately, debt (and equivalents, and even cash depending on its location) aren’t always or even often a simple addition or subtraction.
Hah, if only Toyota... At one point, Tesla was worth more than: Toyota, Volkwagen Group, Hyundai/Kia, General Motors, Ford, Nissan, Honda, Fiat Chrysler, Renault, Suzuki, Daimler, BMW, Mazda and Mitsubishi combined. (Plus several Chinese manufacturers: SAID, Geely, Changan, Dongfeng).
If Tesla were a car company. However, Tesla is also a fuel-station company. You could just as easily value it against BP or Shell to get better market cap representation.
That's not a power plant... they are producing 0 electricity. They are allowing powerwall OWNERS to act as a grid-scale BATTERY. A battery != a power plant and produces nothing even remotely resembling a real power plant in recurring revenue.
Again, they are producing 0 electricity, they are selling a battery to someone else to use.
Let me know when Tesla starts building their own solar farms or nuclear power plants and using it to power their supercharger network. That will be the only way it's at all comparable to Shell.
>If you don’t consider power price arbitration a “power plant” when even the US Department of Energy does, then I’m not sure how to bridge our gap.
Except they don't, they specifically call it out as a "virtual power plant" because it doesn't produce power, and isn't regulated by the rules of a power plant that actually generates power.
So again, a battery, not a power plant, not actually producing any power. And at a cost that will be dramatically undercut by the wave of cheap LifePo4 batteries that make significantly more sense for grid storage and are slowly trickling into the US now that patents have expired.
>Tesla is also constantly vertically integrating. The writing is on the wall. If you’d rather not see it, then ok, that is your prerogative.
The "constant vertical integration" the Tesla fanboys constantly screech about is just a lot of marketing around doing exactly what every other auto company has done in the past. The fact they're finding secondary uses for their battery tech is great. But across the board, outside of EV's, they produce a vastly inferior product. The powerwall is an inferior product to countless existing home battery solutions. Their "solar roof" was literally a bailout of his cousin and is vastly inferior to existing solar panel options, and grossly overpriced. What's their total install base? 1,000 houses? Have they even hit that with the "solar shingles", not the bait and switch overpriced solar panel options?
I can't even tie a Tesla charger into my utility provider's night and weekend plan, I have to use a chargepoint or enel charger. So tell me all about this massive lead they've got.
It’s the attempt to fulfill the story they’ve been selling since the beginning, which is exactly the EV-company-but-with-sticky-SaaS-revenue you’d expect from SV.
A problem when you try to span those markets is you lose access to support from other major companies because you open up too many competitive fronts.
A further problem is when you try to reproduce a model (oil companies) that is dependent on finding and securing resources when almost everyone has a sufficient and unending oil-well-equivalent permanently incident on their roof.
What sort of a mega pack business does Toyota have? What are the long term prospects for their Robot? What tech is Toyota going to sell to other car companies to make money?
Why is Toyota investing in hydrogen when it makes no sense? What is Toyota going to do about it's massive debt.
These are some of the reasons Tesla is valued at what it is and Toyota is what IT is. Toyota has nothing exciting on the horizon that is going to dramatically change things for them.
Not to mention they make a pittance per car compared to Tesla.
Others discussed hydrogen. Frankly it seems to me to be a bad bet by Toyota. I assume they have better information than I do, but they also may have been prevented from a reasonable position on battery vs hydrogen by some internal politics or other dynamics.
The robot:
Tesla seems to have approximately reproduced the state of Japanese robotics in 2000 (Honda Asimo) using technology that has seriously advanced in twenty years. I am not qualified to say what the future value of that is, or why battery packs are a competitive advantage to something that never leaves the home.
Tech to sell to other car companies:
Humans run the other car companies. What will they do if they recognize a competitive threat with a technology advantage? Will they say “great, let’s buy that from our competitor since they’re clearly superior”? Or are they more likely to say something like “let’s figure out a way to neutralize or eliminate this advantage” and then go about doing it (even as a collective)?
Tesla hired Toyota execs to build their manufacturing line. There is little chance that Toyota could not, if it could get out of its own way, do what Telsa is doing from a manufacturing and technology perspective. This to me suggests that others will, even if Toyota culturally cannot make it happen.
The profit per vehicle available is primarily indicative of competition. Toyota is a mature company in a mature segment with a lot of competition. Tesla is entitled to those numbers as long as they can maintain them and stave off competition. Some people think they will be able to do that for a long time. I’m not one of them.
Tesla’s barrier in justifying their market cap is not only the other car companies, of whom there are roughly a dozen with similar revenue or higher. In the process of capturing the value they are talking about, their competition becomes major portions of the structure of global markets in the energy and transportation sectors, at least.
Hydrogen is a fundamentally superior technology to batteries. It is Tesla that will eventually have to move on to fuel cell cars, not Toyota doing the other way around.
If you realize that fuel cells are electrochemical systems, you'd also realize that there is no fundamental difference between how a fuel cell and a conventional battery works. Fuel cell cars are also EVs, just without the expensive and heavy battery.
I understand that fuel cells are electrochemical systems.
I also understand that there are fundamental limits to their physics and to the storage and transfer of hydrogen that put it at a severe disadvantage to batteries in these respects.
Batteries also have the practical advantage that if a charging cable fails it does not with some probability spontaneously ignite into an invisible 1400 C flamethrower.
There are no fundamental limits when compared to batteries. You cannot name them because they don't exist. The point of fuel cells being electrochemical systems is to explain that these limits don't exist.
What you're really arguing is the existence of practical limits. The problem is that most of these practical limits are solvable. Some have long been solved, and most anti-hydrogen claims are attacking an version of the technology that hasn't been true since the 1990s. In reality, FCEVs are already pretty close to BEVs on efficiency. This is especially the case once you look at full lifecycle costs and energy consumption, where battery production and recycling are going to be major penalties.
A hydrogen car is arguably safer than a battery car. The problem is that battery fires continue until they consume the car. But since hydrogen is lighter than air, hydrogen fires are not persistent nor do they surround the car with fire. This argument is basically fearmongering, and is as silly as Edison's attacks on AC power.
Tell me how you get to 90% efficiency (or even 50%) in a system in practice going from not hydrogen (let’s say water, and you don’t even need to pressurize it or filter it for this example) to vehicular thrust.
Hydrolysis maxes out at 65% efficient. Then you need to compress the hydrogen to 700 bar. Don’t forget to transport it unless you are doing hydrolysis and compression in your home. Then you need to convert it back to propulsion.
Do that and make it beat EVs without hand waving at battery recycling (old EV batteries are great for a lot of uses and better than primary products in many lower volume markets, so this argument is nonsense). Please cite your sources.
Electrolysis maxes out at 100% efficiency. And theoretically, so can the fuel cell. So if both sides are 100% efficient, then there's your answer. Also, compressed gas is an energy storage idea. You can in theory extract energy from that.
It's worth noting that electrolysis and fuel cells are electrochemical systems. It is only BEV propagandists that wants you to not be aware of this. If more people knew this, they'd know that FCEVs are eventually going to catch up and surpass BEVs. So instead, they lie and spread FUD like crazy.
Electrolysis cannot hit 100% efficiency. Maybe the approximate math can, if you only consider the first law of thermodynamics, but you’ll violate the second the moment it enters reality.
Alkaline electrolysis maxes out at 66% theoretically. PEM is maybe 80% but that’s neglecting system-level losses.
You cannot extract energy from compressed gas if your fuel cell requires gas at that pressure in order to operate.
There is this weird cult of first principles I keep encountering where people think they’ve cracked the code but they just don’t understand systems.
You are completely wrong. You are not thinking of the laws of thermodynamics. You are thinking of Carnot’s theorem. Which doesn’t apply because electrolyzers are not heat engines. They are electrochemical systems, just like li-ion batteries. What you’re writing is just pseudoscience.
Fuel cells do not operate at 700 bars of pressure. There is definitely a possibility of extracting energy from compressed gases.
Sorry, but you are spouting total bullshit on all levels here. The only cult is whatever battery/electrification fanbase you’re a part of. You are just repeating BEV propaganda designed to shut down critical thinking and defame all alternative ideas. If anything, this type of tactic is a good sign that we are witnessing the end of the BEV, mainly because its advocates must resort to blatant lies to promote it.
Hydrogen is a fundamental superior technology compared to batteries. If anything, Toyota is decades ahead of Tesla. Everything Tesla is aiming to do is just a pale imitation of what Toyota is already achieving.
And yet I've seen at most a handful of hydrogen-powered cars since they've been available commercially, and I've only once seen a refueling station for them.
Superior technology -- assuming it is; I have no idea -- often doesn't win.
The problem with that thinking is that BEVs are guaranteed to be more expensive in the long run. A hydrogen car is basically an EV minus the most expensive part. That is going to be a decisive advantage.
Because PE is a key indicator for evaluating how much a company is worth, but then this dates from the days when investors were looking for sustainable growth and dividends not stock buybacks.
Toyota hasn't released a good BEV yet (bz4x's battery and drivetrain are a decade behind the state of the art), and poured a ton of money into hydrogen which isn't happening for passenger cars.
I suspect the stock is priced with the possibility that Toyota is reacting to EVs the way Nokia and Blackberry to the iPhone.
Tesla fanboys need to stop being so short-sighted. All innovation in cars will not stop at the BEV. There will be a next technology leap beyond the BEV. And if you think honestly about what that is, it will be hydrogen cars. Simply because they are EVs without the limitations of the li-ion battery.
As a result, people need to think carefully about what comes next. If anything, BEVs represent a transitional technology. You can think of them as being what Reddit is right now. Sure, it disrupted what came before (i.e. Digg), but it is not the end-result of that particular business sector. And if that is the case, then it is likely that Tesla, not Toyota, that faces the biggest challenge in the future.
Sorry to break it to you, hydrogen or e-fuels definitely have a place in the future for fertilizer, seasonal storage and maritime shipping. For personal vehicles BEVs won nearly 10 years ago.
See the "Hydrogen ladder" for further, more eloquent, information.
The simple fact is that fuel cell cars are also EVs. As a result, there are no fundamental limitations compared to BEVs. They are fundamentally guaranteed to be just as good as BEVs.
And since BEVs are not a sustainable technology, they are destined to be replaced by their truly sustainable alternative. Which is a "battery" made from water. That is the self-evident future of EVs.
> The simple fact is that fuel cell cars are also EVs. As a result, there are no fundamental limitations compared to BEVs. They are fundamentally guaranteed to be just as good as BEVs.
In other words, you pay for two cars in one when you could simply pay for one car and charge it from any wall outlet.
And if someone said that vacuum tubes are the future, what is your response? It's pure absurdity to claim that an obsolete technology is the future. You'd immediately get up and ridicule the obvious non sequiturs in their logic. FYI, BEVs predate the ICE car. It is an incredibly outdated idea.
In reality, hydrogen cars are far cheaper to make than BEVs. They have very little raw material needs. They do not need the hundreds of kilograms of batteries that BEVs need. They only need water as their raw material. That's fundamentally a superior idea. You can never make a coherent argument that an EV powered by rare or limited resources could ever be a better idea.
Again, a fuel cell car is literally an EV, only one whose "battery" is made from water. You cannot do better than that.
That's a bit of a disingenuous analogy; vacuum tubes have already been supplanted by a better technology. Hydrogen may be a better technology than BEVs, but it hasn't supplanted anything.
> You can never make a coherent argument that an EV powered by rare or limited resources could ever be a better idea.
Better idea or not, BEVs are being produced in ever-increasing numbers. Hydrogen cars are not. Sure, maybe that will change at some point in the future, but I think BEVs have too much momentum and capital behind them to fade away any time soon.
As an aside: judging by your word choice and tone in your comments, you seem to be emotionally invested in hydrogen cars. That's fine, but I think how you're presenting things is hurting your argument quite a bit.
Then you can use whatever technology that hasn't be driven into obsolescence yet, but basic physics nearly guarantees that outcome. Maybe flash memory versus HDDs, or perhaps fiber optics over copper wires.
BEVs where at basically zero not that long ago. The problem is that economically, they are always going to have a major upfront cost. And the more range and the larger the car, the bigger this will be.
It's Tesla fanboys that are invested in a particular outcome. My own opinion is just asking "what comes next?" If you ask that question honestly, you'll end up with the same opinion that I have.
No. Fuel cells can be constructed with no special materials. Even those that need them need extremely small quantities of it. A PEM fuel cell needs about as much platinum as a catalytic converter.
• Hydrogen's end-to-end efficiency is low (losses in electrolysis + transport + fuel cell), so running costs are inherently a couple times higher than BEV's. This alone IMHO kills chances of mass adoption, as people will simply not want to pay more.
• EV charging stations are already common, unlike hydrogen fuel stations that barely exist anywhere. Charging stations are easier and cheaper to install and maintain (no need to deliver fuel or deal with moving parts for high pressure or cryogenic storage), so this is likely to stay in BEV's favor.
• You can't refill the high-pressure hydrogen just by plugging into your home outlet. For people who can charge BEV at home it is a huge convenience.
• The range of the Toyota Mirai is barely higher than long-range BEVs'. It doesn't even solve BEVs' main shortcoming, despite compromising a lot of space for hydrogen tanks!
• High-end BEVs can already recharge to 80% under 20 minutes, and don't require you to be near the car while charging (so you can get a coffee/toilet break at the same time). All of this trouble and cost to shave it down to a 5 minute refill, which you have to spend attending to the pump, is just not worth all of the fuel costs, wasted car space, and rollout of a new fuel pipeline.
Hydrogen may find uses in aviation, or long-distance trucks, maybe heavy machinery, but it's a poor fit for passenger cars and has already lost.
1) That's a lie by BEV companies. I keep on telling people that fuel cell cars are EVs. So where does argument even come from? It comes from nothing. There is no basis to make this claim. Not to mention that the point of renewable energy is their lack of raw material requirements, not their inherent efficiency. If you can imagine a world where solar energy is nearly free, than so can hydrogen.
2) Which is meaningless because hydrogen distribution is fundamentally cheaper. Once you realize that pipelines are cheaper than wires, you will eventually realize that hydrogen stations will be cheap to deploy and ultimately be cheaper than building enough charging stations for everyone.
3) Actually you can because home electrolysis is fully doable. This is another completely made-up argument. The only thing to be brought up is that you don't want home recharging at all. After all, cars are driven outside on the road, not at home. Once you have a network of refueling stations, you don't need a redundant refueling system at home.
4) That's like saying an ICE car has barely longer range. Your ignoring the fact that you need something like $30k of batteries to match that range in a BEV. For a FCEV that comes at a tiny cost.
5) And yet it is still an advantage. Five minutes, especially when you realize it is guaranteed everything single time, is a major advantage. And you will never have to worry about damaging the battery when refueling this fast.
This is ultimately a short-sighted argument. When hydrogen cars are no more expensive than ICE cars and the fuel is basically free, where does that leave BEVs? It doesn't. This is the end of the BEV.
> cars are driven outside on the road, not at home
Are you just trolling now? :) Do you think people charge their BEVs in their living room?
1. Even solar is not free - hardware has a cost and finite lifetime. We're not close to post-scarcity with electricity, so there will be cost for foreseeable future. "Free" hydrogen from production peaks isn't enough for mass adoption, especially that grids start to use batteries too.
2. Even if a tanker beats UHVDC, I'd expect last mile distribution cost to be really bad for a physical good.
3. A wallbox costs $600+, which IMHO is already outrageous. I can't imagine electrolysis station with high pressure pump to be cheaper. 30 seconds plugging in a driveway beats 5 minutes refuelling.
4. Fuel cells are expensive. BEVs are already cheaper than hydrogen cars.
5. Reliability of hydrogen stations is currently pretty low, worse than uptime of DC chargers.
You imply there are going to be a breakthroughs in hydrogen storage and fuel cell efficiency that will make hydrogen cars not suck, but not account for possible improvements in batteries. They have been gradually improving over the last decade, and got an order of magnitude cheaper too. There are further improvements in the pipeline, especially that exponentially increasing demand funds further development. Physics of hydrogen storage however are as tough as ever.
They're literally charged in their garages. This is the same idea.
Seriously, what is your point here? Once you are a few miles away from home, you are closer to a public refueling station than your home. If there is a ubiquitous public refueling system, what is the value of home refueling/recharging? It is not much of a selling point.
1) Solar is already pretty cheap now. Turning solar and water into hydrogen will follow the same trajectory. It only shows your shortsightedness by not realizing this.
2) It is cheaper to distribute hydrogen than electricity. Pipes are fundamentally cheaper than wires. This is obvious if you looked at the basic physics of a pipe compared to wires.
3) A hydrogen pump is ultimately just a fuel pump. No more sophisticated than a natural gas station. And the problem with BEVs is that you can't move from that charge port for hours. A hydrogen car will always be refueled in 5 minutes.
4) Fuel cells are cheap and rapidly getting cheaper. You are blatantly inverting reality here. Hydrogen cars are cheaper than BEVs to make. Full stop. And it won't even be close once everything is said and done. An FCEV will cost no more than an ICE car to produce in the long run.
5) That's funny because you're admitting that DC chargers are terribly unreliable. Meanwhile, hydrogen stations usually suffer from lack of fuel, not lack of function. In the long run, this will cease to be an issue.
> You imply there are going to be a breakthroughs in hydrogen storage and fuel cell efficiency that will make hydrogen cars not suck, but not account for possible improvements in batteries. They have been gradually improving over the last decade, and got an order of magnitude cheaper too. There are further improvements in the pipeline. Physics of hydrogen storage however are as tough as ever.
There already have been "breakthroughs" in hydrogen storage. You do realize hydrogen cars are available right now and work exactly as advertised? This entire argument is trapped in the year 2010 and has never moved on. Not to mention the basic physics of batteries can never be solved. You will always have a large and heavy battery pack and it will always take a long-ish time to recharge. Instead of fantasizing about magic batteries from the future, it's time to thinking seriously about what comes after the BEV altogether.
That would show actual foresight. It would demonstrate that you really understanding the concept of disruptive innovation.
Wow market cap! What a great measurement...of what a bunch of gamblers on a secondary market say a company is worth is all its shares could magically be sold without affecting the sale price.
You are right, I apologize. My quick googling gave me the wrong PE for Tesla. The correct PE is about 77. I didn’t notice because during the euphoria phase it was insanely over 1000 so 261 seemed plausible.
I think someday reality will set in and Tesla stock will plummet, but I would be crazy to short it. I guarantee Tesla fans can stay irrational way longer than I can stay solvent.
I think regardless Tesla is positioned to have a lot of value. Granted I don’t know a whole lot about it so let me know if I’m wrong but it seems like even if their cars fizzle out eventually they are still building the majority of electric car infrastructure. If more and more companies cut deals with Tesla to use their stations they may end up being some majority of the countries “gas stations”. If I were investing in them it’d be as an energy company instead of a car company.
Tesla is just building big transformers and ways to plug cars into them, though. They're not building power plants; they still have to buy their "fuel" from third parties. To me, that makes this aspect of their business much less compelling.
It’s funny that people have been coming out of the woodwork finally, realizing Teslas worth the valuation because of the charging station partnerships they’ve done recently. Those are actually meaningless and will contribute a very very tiny percentage of profits into the future. The reason Teslas valuation is so high is because people value it as an AI company which may dominate Robo taxis and humanoid robots in the future
Why do you say that? It seems like it’s going to be really hard to build a network of fast charging stations for EVs and Tesla has a big head start it seems like.
Why would that be hard? Aside from company politics, what's stopping Shell or Exxon or BP from outfitting their gas stations with EV charging equipment? Clearly they don't see such a move as profitable right now, but as EV adoption increases, that could change.
I'm not saying doing so is trivial; aside from the equipment cost, many/most/all of those stations will also need electrical supply upgrades. But they at least already have the land, and a company like Tesla will have to deal with equipment cost, electrical supply upgrades, and the cost of acquiring land.
Nobody remembers the first gas station. Nobody remembers who built the better gas pump. EV charging is already well down the path of simply being another commodity
It is hard. But tesla is opening it up to the competition basically for free. It’s actually a bad move for tesla if you’re only concerned with profit, but it aligns with their mission of accelerating the transition to sustainable energy. People just find it hard to believe that a company that size actually cares about its mission
All that means is that you don't believe your own story.
People said this all the time about Tesla a few year ago. But the stock value back then is easly justified by what they have achieved since.
So the reality is that 'Tesla fans' were not irrational, but they were simply correct. And the people who endlessly repeat the 'market can stay irrational longer then you can sty solvent line' were simply wrong.
Its also an absurd fantasy that Tesla stock is only carried by irrational Musk fan boys. When in reality is mostly large institutional investors who do the same financial analysis on Tesla as anything else they buy.
Good work; you successfully managed to time the market. I'm sure there were many, many others who didn't make out so well.
Now redo the calculation a bunch of times to account for all the other possible times you could have both opened and closed that short position, and see how many other times you would have turned a profit. Probably not in many of them.
You got lucky. Contrary to some popular belief, lucky timing is not a generally-applicable investing strategy.
Not even. Musk had a company which had plans for an online bank (can you imagine?) but it wasn't working out so well. So his company merged with one that was in the process of creating PayPal (trademarked, prototype in place)...
Musk was the largest shareholder of the combined companies, so he was made CEO...
And promptly spent four months complaining that the working prototype needed to be thrown away, because it was written in Java on Solaris, and he didn't understand it, and he wanted it rewritten in Classic ASP on Windows.
Four months, because at that point, the board, lead by Peter Thiel had had enough of it and removed him as CEO.
definitely not the smartest at the heights of marie curie nor stephem hawking
but smart and rich enough to be worth more than all of us in this thread
shorters are literally betting against the guy that spearheaded reusable rockets in space, i'm not saying all his decisions and perspectives are agreeable, but seriously what do you all think is your leverage against the guy?
Another smart guy that is almost as rich is short tesla ie Bill Gates I don't know or care about who is right and who is wrong just saying your investment should not be purely based on Musk name. Personally I think Tesla might win the car race but as prices for electricity, batteries and pc chips keep going down. I am not so sure about self driving cars being worth that much as it will be race to the bottom in terms of price and cost.
Cheaper electricity is coming that is the bigger change than most people realise not electric cars. So far majority of electricity has been produced using fossil fuels a finite resource where as solar is practically an infinite resource price for harvesting it as well as storing it keeps dropping.
That is phenomenal. Exponential growth of anything at this scale is unheard of. That too when Toyota is struggling to deliver Hybrid vehicles in my area (> 2y wait time).
Any automaker is eligible for those subsides if they sell EVs (with a bonus based on US content). Their lack of will or ability to deliver is all that holds them back. Sell EVs if you want government support. I am unwilling to argue the merit of EV subsidies, that conversation has no value.
It’s amazing because Tesla built an EV that is wildly in demand roughly around the price of the average new car accounting for subsides. The Model Y was the best selling car globally last quarter, beating out Toyota.
Tesla makes their Chinese EVs in China and sources most of its supplies there. Almost all other foreign car companies in China are 51-49 join ventures (with 51 being the Chinese partner's controlling share) so they are also eligible for those subsidies.
I don’t get Why the hate and easy one liners like this, when Tesla refunded the only gov lease they got with interests while all legacy are digging their deficit further, the rest is equal grounds for all manufacturer to compete.
American should be proud and supportive for any local company actually dedicated to quit fossil fuels or anything about not relying on another country.
I imagine it's much like any other manufacturer with an over-the-top fanbase. The constant gushing and cheerleading creates opposition out of thin air. I'm not sure there has ever been a set of fans as dedicated as Tesla ones, to be honest. Hell, they still accuse anyone who dares to disagree with being short on TSLA.
The post they were responding to said “not relying on another country” so pointing out Tesla’s reliance on China is a contrary argument. In fact the supply chain for EVs is even more complex than that. China has a huge hyper-financed chokehold on many processing steps but the raw materials come from across the globe. On the other hand, ICE vehicles have a relatively simple supply chain so it’s a big weakness that EVs currently have and well worth pointing out.
> On the other hand, ICE vehicles have a relatively simple supply chain
Relatively simple == simpler, but I would point out it's brittle because just-in-time hyperoptimisations sucked it dry of spare capacity. Stocks of EMS microchips held up production.
Most of a car outside of ICE/EV differences are the same inputs, same supply chain. Tesla's stamped bodyparts require metal billets the same way normal auto car body panel stampers do.
Inside of ICE/EV differences Tesla runs flow processes to make batteries close to site. The input supply chain for batteries is pretty simple. I am not sure I would say the supply chain behind a fuel injection system is as simple, it has mechanical and electromechanical and electronic parts in profusion. Lots of points of brittleness.
> Most of a car outside of ICE/EV differences are the same inputs, same supply chain.
It is an obvious statement that where they’re the same they have the same supply chain.
> The input supply chain for batteries is pretty simple
EV battery supply chains are the most complex out of all inputs for both classes of car other than microchips. There are many countries including highly geopolitically complicated ones like the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Russia that provide vital material inputs.
> it has mechanical and electromechanical and electronic parts in profusion
Fuel injectors are older and simpler tech and have nowhere near as complicated a supply chain as EV batteries.
The government has rules about air quality. Companies that can't match those rules have to pay other companies that do match those rules money. Its not money from the government.
If other companies are to dumb and incompetent to make their cars follow emissions regulation, then that's their own fault.
It delivered over (and presumably sold) 96% of the vehicles it has produced. Presumably the price cuts have had their desired effect on reducing unsold inventory
> The deliveries are the most ever in a quarter for Austin-based Tesla, and a 83% increase from a year ago. The company also managed to trim the gap between production and deliveries — a figure closely watched by analysts — to 13,560 units in the second quarter. In the first quarter, it produced nearly 18,000 more cars than it delivered to customers.
Both could theoretically possible if they have bought on online a lot of factories or lines .
This is not the actual case while possible, they have been investing heavily in production capacities in Berlin , Shanghai, Texas etc however they are not so far outstripping demand with new capacity.
Bringing capacity online takes years of planning , it is quite possible that market conditions no longer support that kind of growth (recession/more competition etc).
Tesla has very aggressive capacity being built in Texas , Mexico, Berlin and Shanghai not to mention other component plants in Nevada, Canada Netherlands etc.
It is quite probable next year they cannot keep growing sales aggressively as before and some capacity will idle despite breaking records and hitting targets and having more unsold inventory .
I don't like that there is an income level cutoff. Hear me out... a single person with an income of $299k living in Nebraska has way more expendable income than a single income family with 4 kids with an income of $299k living in the bay area.
> how would you determine what a person should receive?
If it's truly an incentive, incentivize everyone. I know people who make $1 million/year who will argue over $10. $7500 would absolutely affect their behavior even though they can afford an EV without it.
It is truly insane that its 15k more for large cars. Afaik its really bad that everyone has big cars when they absolutely dont need them. No matter if they are EVs they are still lot less efficient…
Seems like this could have been incentive for people to go back to normal sized cars - it should have been same or even more for cars than for large vehicles.
Anecdata, my recent Tesla is better and worse in some ways - well put together, slight panel gaps, but some edges are sharp enough to cut myself on. Wonder what service will say.
If you are looking for build quality I would still look elsewhere. Tesla is literally cutting corners.
The F-150 Lightning is already popular and an easy sell to truck people. The only market for the Cybertruck is people who like the design, want a truck, and don't want to be mistaken for Republicans because they're in an F-150.
I vote mostly Republican (when there is a sane one on the ballot) but the Cybertruck will be my first truck. It’s the first electric truck made by a proven EV manufacturer.
If you’re being serious, it would boggle my mind that people pick vehicles based on politics. Suppose Bernie Sanders was CEO of a EV company that made great cars. I’d happily buy one of his cars!
It's going to launch and then be silently killed. The Cybertruck is late to the party, where Ford is delivering actual products normal people can want.
Worse, the Cybertruck is looking less and less useful: the payload capacity is ? The tray size is ? Basically what is a Cybertruck for? Who is buying it compared to another vehicle at this point?
It's a pile of features which no one needs, and very quiet about the ones people do. No one needs "shatter proof windows" in a car. No one needs it to be a boat. What I need is it to carry heavy loads and seat 5 people. Can it do that? Can it do that better then something else?
Total truck sales in the US are 2 million a year. Total BEV truck sales so far is under 50k per year.
Saying the Cybertruck is to late make absolutely no sense what so ever.
Its a total misunderstanding on the ability of Ford and Rivian to grow their sales. Ford has a serious battery issue, as they were very, very late in setting up their own battery factories.
> the payload capacity is ?
Better then that of the competing trucks ...
> The tray size is ?
The same as an F150
> Basically what is a Cybertruck for?
The same thing most trucks are for, for dumb Americans to feel cool.
> Who is buying it compared to another vehicle at this point?
Anybody who would buy a dumb truck.
> No one needs "shatter proof windows" in a car.
Actually window replacement can have pretty high cost.
> No one needs it to be a boat.
That's not an official feature but something Musk talked about on twitter once.
> What I need is it to carry heavy loads and seat 5 people. Can it do that? Can it do that better then something else?
Yes it can. It will also be far more efficient then the F150 meaning you will spend far less on fuel. And it will likely have better range to.
Also it will likely be cheaper, F-150 has gone up in price and dealers add another huge chunk on top.
I thought that about the Suzuki off roader which never goes off road. They sell like hotcakes. I thought "smart" cars were a bad idea. They sold like hotcakes in the markets in Europe (I saw 5 parked nose-to-tail in a street once in roma and they were NOT the same owning company or anything)
People buy ugly cars. God knows why. Why did people go bananas for the beetle?
With the amount of money spent on tooling to ramp up a new vehicle program especially one as unique as cybertruck, they cannot just silently kill it later on like its nothing. It would hit the company very seriously given how much is riding on the success of this thing.
Ford still seems unable to produce significant numbers of EVs nearly as efficiently as Tesla can. I suspect pricing of the Cybertruck will be quite a bit lower than the Lightning.
Only half joking but I’m getting one for the bulletproof windows and body. I have to commute to Seattle, where very recently a pregnant woman was randomly executed by a gunman in broad daylight while sitting in her car waiting at a red light.
I only kind of want a truck but the cybertruck claims to add enough interesting features (bulletproof, 500mi range, Teslas charging network and autopilot) that it crosses the threshold into buy territory for me.
And yet the vehicle will carry absolutely no ballistic rating. So "bulletproof" means, "sure, sometimes the bullet doesn't go through but we didn't want to commit to that".
Cybertruck will not have bulletproof windows. Its just a shatter prove window. What's bullet proove is the exterior skin of the vehicle, but only against small caliber.
I think Cybertruck will mostly compete with off-road SUVs like Grand Cherokee / 4Runner / Bronco, etc, and smaller pickups like Tacoma, Ridgeline, and Ranger. It will not directly compete with F150s & up in the 3/4 ton and up segment, because they're more heavily used for work and towing and the shape of the vehicle and range while towing is prohibitive for that.
There is no way the cyber truck will compete with any actual offroad truck. It doesn’t have the clearance or departure angles or anything you’d want while offroading. It’s clearly made to stay on pavement unlike the rivian truck.
Plenty of "off road trucks" are just used casually for camping and traversing dirt roads & snow covered pavement. That being said, the CyberTruck will hold its own, it's going to have adjustable suspension with up to 16 inches of ground clearance, with a 35 degree approach angle and 28 degree departure angle: https://www.caranddriver.com/tesla/cybertruck
Given the tendency for Elon to lie and “just one more year” for things to come out and then when they do they are a shadow of what’s promised I’ll believe any of that when it’s actually for sale.
As for using it for casual camping who cares people take everything here camping. Heck I’ve seen plenty Tesla’s down FSRs here to go camping parked next to miata’s.
I can’t speak for everyone, but if it has vehicle to home power and a button to the play Mad Max fury road theme while shooting flames… I’m buying one.
What's amazing is how people on HN can be so ignorant.
Look at Tesla sales growth over the last 10 years. Its pretty consistent. You can not look at that growth and say 'look here is where Musk got distracted'.
Also, the success now, is because of the technology and investment work done 3-5 years ago.
Not liking a person is fine, Musk has issues, but there is no reason to drop your brain when evaluating business numbers.
It's amazing how you switched metrics from production numbers to sales numbers to make a point. Nevermind the number of unrealized buyers who are passing on the brand because of it's toxic leadership, but perhaps you can switch metrics again to counter this point?
The difference between production and sales is literally utterly and completely irrelevant in regards to the argument you made. How you can even think that matters in this context is beyond me.
> Nevermind the number of unrealized buyers who are passing on the brand because of it's toxic leadership, but perhaps you can switch metrics again to counter this point?
What could have happened in some other theoretical universe that only exists in your imagination is utterly irrelevant.
My original comment pertains to how employees can execute on a mission, not how a market will respond to what they produce. Meaning while increases in morale can be conducive to higher productivity, someone working in a factory can't control what they produce.
That makes absolutely no sense. Tesla has had amazing growth for the last 10 plus years. They are now able to sell as much as they do because of all the investment and engineering done 3-5 years ago.
The CEO paying slightly less attention for a few months doesn't magically make factories produce more cars.
> Tesla beat estimates about 20k but tesla had severals sales - I thing 4 or 5 times
Yes they did do discount. Tesla still has higher margin than pretty much all the other car makers. They still have room to adjust price if they want.
> Tesla still didn't delivery 15k cars = parked in warehouse because no orders
Any difference that other car makers? There are always cars in the inventory for all makers. For Tesla you can see the numbers. Others may hide it by shipping unsold vehicles to dealers. It's also not "no orders", only "not yet ordered"
Also, Tesla did deliver 466K vehicles, which is a record. With all the competition coming and the headwinds, they still manage to beat the record.
Tesla inventory rates are still very low in terms of overall industry. And this quarter the inventory went from 15 to 16, so it almost didn't change at all.
The folks who predicted the subprime mortgage crisis nearly went bankrupt waiting for their bets to pay off. Sometimes predictions are correct on the facts but not the timing; we'll see. (Twitter similarly took longer than a lot of folks expected to implode, but the wheels seem to be coming off...)
Tesla's share price is still that of a technology company rather than a car company. It's not yet entirely clear whether that's warranted, but their self-driving moat is rapidly shrinking. I'd much rather be a SpaceX investor than a Tesla one.
I do believe there was a point where Tesla could have imploded. But I think we are well past this now. Tesla figured out their production and most of their technical issues. The competition is getting a bit stiffer, however Tesla has so much volume now that traditional car makers missed the point where they could have been a real danger to Tesla by competing in the EV market.
Tesla the company, I think, is unlikely to implode and disappear. I think they'll be one of the large automakers for a long time, competing with the other big ones.
Their share price still has a decent chance of doing so, down to a P/E ratio more similar to the other car makers.
Yes I think the pe is largely based on the assumption that they will be able to transition to selling high margin assisted driving services, but that remains to be seen. Other self driving plays are much more mature and actually in production (e.g. Waymo), but still facing criticisms and odd behavior.
Does anyone find the timing of all this suspicious? It’s like once Elon left to focus on Twitter (and destroy what’s left of it), Tesla is suddenly doing a lot better. Probably without his constant meddling people are actually able to do their jobs.
In which sense is Tesla doing better after Elon "left"? The sales seem to be pretty much on track with what's expected [1]. Software and manufacturing quality doesn't seem to be much affected either.
You mean the fake video made by a competitor that then refused to actually release the footage from inside the car that proves the video wasn't staged. And the same test was repeated with non fake conditions and couldn't be reproduced.
Amazing how people can dislike on person so much to then buy the bullshit from another complete charlatan hook line and sinker.
