From experience in the 3D printing space, it's too early to say Bambu out-Prusa'd Prusa, because there hasn't been enough time to know whether the Bambu printers will outlast a Prusa printer. The business model the author is discussing is not unlike the business model for Glowforge, and based on my wife's experience in that industry I'm not sure that business model is working out so well.
I've been printing continuously on a pair of Mk3s for 4+ years, minimal maintenance. (That is, wear and tear on print plates and nozzles, and one thermistor replacement.) Maintenance is important once you venture beyond hobbyist needs.
I did buy a Bambu P1S instead of a Mk4 this year when it was time to add a another printer for my wife's side gig. It's a great machine, except when it has problems. The software is bad at diagnosing the problem, and the UI gets really confused on status messages, and the software wants nothing more than to hold your hand down the wrong path to fix the problem. There's a veneer to everything Bambu that makes it look good as long as you don't look too closely. I'll see where this printer is at after 4+ years of continuous printing, but based on my present experience I'd be surprised if my P1S is still running in 2 years. (And no, its not lost on me that as a Prusa purchaser I bought from their competitor this time around.)
I expect Bambu to push Prusa to compete on features - I am fine as a non-hobbyist paying a higher premium for reliability.
Can confirm; >5 years on a Model 3 and other than tires $0 in maintenance so far. >3 years on a Model Y and other than tires, $0 in maintenance so far. Absolute huge cost and time savings compared to my ICE vehicles, even when I perform my own maintenance on them.
Tesla will also come to my house (or any other address I specify within their service coverage area) with a mobile ranger to do the service I don't want to do myself (brake fluid exchange every 2 years). I wish other automakers would offer this. Not EV specific, but a material improvement in user experience imho. Major work will still require a shop visit (dropping the HV battery pack, motor replacement, other major mechanicals).
(I am aware of YourMechanic and other similar services, but having the unified experience with a brand is nice and fancy, I can order it in the Tesla app and the maintenance records can easily transfer to the next VIN owner)
While probably true, I would love to see the traditional car dealership business model go away. The only reason anymore to have a dealer is a place to test drive, and you do not need a huge lot full of cars for that.
Traditional brands sell many more SKUs than Tesla. It is likely they will need a large lot just to have all the variations in SKUs available for test drive. Tesla isn't particularly good at their so-called "demo drive" actually. Last time I tried to test drive both AWD and RWD variations of the same model but they couldn't do that. Needless to say I didn't buy a Tesla.
Great call out. They sell cars to capture future service revenue. This is why you can't sell EVs effectively with a dealership model. The product threatens their survival.
People talk about "oh I don't want to spend 15 minutes charging at a supercharger on road trips". Yeah, I'd rather do that once in a blue moon rather than the weekly drive out of my way to spend 5-10 minutes at a gas station with semi-sketchy people loitering the area. Or deal with the ever-changing gas prices that go up every time a dictator in the middle-east sneezes.
Can you not accept that other people have different needs than you? Some people do 350+ mile one way trips regularly, not "once in a blue moon" and EVs are just less convenent for them. I have trips like that at least monthly, sometimes weekly. I can do that on a single tank of fuel and not have to worry about finding a charger along the way or when I arrive or if my hotel will even have working chargers (I'm sure some hotels offer this but I personally have never seen it and I stay at moderately decent hotel like Hampton Inn).
You make a good point that different people have different needs, and everyone tends to argue from their own perspective. And, like you, I would not rely on hotel chargers.
However ... if you drive a Tesla, there are very few places in the United States where you would have to "worry about finding a charger along the way." Enter your destination in the nav, and it will pick a convenient Supercharger for you.
You're probably not planning on converting to a BEV anytime soon, but check out Tesla's trip planner on your monthly 350+ mile drive. I think you'll be surprised.
Yeah but if charging stations become as ubiquitous as gas stations, this becomes a lot less of an issue.
And quite frankly my 10-gallon tank has like a 400 mile range, and newer electric cars have like a 300 mile range, so the gap is getting pretty narrow.
95% of people commenting on this thread live within a short drive of the Amtrak North East corridor and absolutely should convert to an EV as fast as possible. For people who dont live in the NY megolopolis... the factors are different.
Car maintenance is such a huge burden. I don't want see car mechanics out of job, but sincerely the amount of money wasted in parts is astonishing (included the high labour cost due to massive amount of parts and differences in configurations to deal with).
Once the average person knows the maintenance cost is that low it will probably provide yet another inflection in EV curve adoption.
And you’re being charitable here, because you are omitting the all-too-frequent case of work being done when it’s not necessary. That’s what bugs the hell out of me.
I had to change the brake disks on my 2014 i3 because they rusted too much as I didn’t use them enough. Remember to brake once in a while if you live in an area with salty roads.
> Come now, amortize what the eventual service costs will be...
I've been driving one since 2018, 80K miles. I've had to change tires probably 30-40% faster than ICE cars of a similar caliber (FWIW I also have become more careful on tires too). I've had exactly a cost of $1200 on it so far (not counting tires).
I think that's actually pretty decent. I think people also switch cars every 5-6 years too?
Well, no oil changes, but I suspect long-term there may be big things like on ICE cars. 12v battery, air conditioner, coolant changes (fewer), motor issues, big battery. There are a lot of electronics. Crashes might be fewer, but it seems the cars are expensive to fix.
Hopefully there will be parts long-term, and repair infrastructure.
I did have to have the 12v battery replaced on my 2018 Model 3, but I think they've now transitioned to Lithium-ion 12v batteries on the newer cars, so I'm not sure if that'll be an expected maintenance item much longer.
SUVs are being sold like candy, and they are heavier than your regular sedan. This is especially so in the US, where it's not just SUVs but also trucks, and they are both bigger and heavier than in Europe. Being heavy is not exclusive to EVs.
Tire store source tells me it's not just the weight, but many drivers are aggressively regenerative breakers and enjoy their aggressive acceleration as well.
We didn't hear about tire wear as much on the Nissan leaf.
We've taken 5% of cars that had 7+ second 0-60 times and replaced them with 3 second 0-60 cars. And we've removed the most direct cost of that acceleration (fuel).
Tires are also super expensive. Reading my maintenance logs, in all but one year of the prior 5 of ownership with my ICE doubling my tire interval would have been more expensive than all other maintenance. 2016 4Runner for reference, and I do most of the labor myself.
> EVs chew through tires because they’re heavy as hell.
Nonsense most EVs are very similar in weight to their ICE counterparts. My Model S weighs about 2 100 kg, a comparable sized ICE car such as an S-class Mercedes weighs slightly less to slightly more depending on which options you specify.
Oh come on. EVs have many advantages, but "most EVs are very similar in weight to their ICE counterparts" is straight-up untrue.
Model S Long Range: 510lb heavier than a BMW 540i XDrive
Model 3 Performance 379lb heavier than a BMW 330i XDrive
Rivian R1S weighs over 7200lb.
University of Leeds study (UK): electric cars are 312 kilograms (688 pounds) heavier on average than comparable vehicles powered by gasoline engines.
Why do you compare Tesla Model S to a luxury car? Model S is not comfortable, it is noisy, has low quality interior. Is it because it is expensive? Any Ferrari is more expensive and it is not a luxury car.
I have that problem but it probably some something to do with some combination of browser addons I have installed. When I launch the link in a Private Firefox window they seem to work.
I've owned a Model 3 for over five years (~100K miles) and a Model Y for over 3 years (~45K miles). $0 maintenance excluding replacing the tires. This has been a game changer for me, since I perform my own maintenance on all of the vehicles I own - it's made me lazy about cars and I love it. :) Of course I cannot replace the batteries and I will have to have that done sooner or later, and who knows how much that will cost.
My friend has worked as a mechanic for some years and completed his diesel mechanic certification a year ago because the need for gasoline engine mechanics is likely going to decrease substantially before he can retire.
From what I gather from Oblomovka[1] [and based on my own memory of this period]:
It was a place where the primary early users of the Internet did not frequent, but could be something an ordinary person would be exposed to out of necessity. (Think, maybe some service that lets one send faxes via email; notably you'd need to create an account and spend money.) But, at some point, this reversed, and ordinary use cases dominate - online banking, e-commerce, school - such that even finding the original sort of content that comprised most of the Internet can be very difficult.[2]
As an example, cooking recipe websites in the early Internet contained cooking recipes - no stories, no SEO optimization - and then sometimes at the bottom of the page participated in some sort of link exchange with other recipe websites and perhaps a page hit counter. This was an Internet for the technologist, and one might find their way there from a BBS, IRC, email, word of mouth, or early search engines that naively indexed keywords, or you know, by surfing a webring. These sites seldom existed for any sort of commercial gain and were often a hobby project.
Today you could reasonably expect to find your way to a cooking recipe site via a search engine where each recipe has been SEO optimized with a nonsense story and you might be prompted to log in with Google or create an account to view the actual recipe. The target audience are the people who are the norm and would have been those visiting the hinternet two decades ago, out of necessity [e.g., pay to send a fax via email], but today they are just normal people performing normal activities.
Something like today's network of sites two decades ago would be hinterlands by the blog's definition - not frequented[2]. Today, it is the norm.
There were also tech sites that reviewed computer hardware in writing. Sometimes with pictures. There were websites with video game walkthroughs - also in text, with pictures! There were websites with silly things people wrote about, and funny stories, and the usual tinfoil hat stuff. But the tinfoil hat stuff was secluded away on a tinfoil webring on angelfire.
There were tons of stores. Usually the more legit ones partnered with yahoo shopping or whatever. I remember buying Pokemon Yellow from a video game store based out of Canada lol. I think it was called dragon.ca? There were TONS of places. Some would take a week to ship but you usually got your stuff. :D
IRC had something for everyone. Those networks had tens of thousands of people online at any given time, talking about everything from tech to trash (literally) lol.
There were also web directories. As I recall, google started off using one of those as a source.
There was also stuff like AOL that had its own little ecosystem of corporate-sponsored stuff.
There's some selection bias in here too. People who have had excellent customer service experiences on Twitter aren't taking into account the number of people who did call or email customer service versus the substantially fewer people who used Twitter for the purposes of contacting companies for customer service.
Of course a company should have used Twitter for customer support - fewer requests, and the requests that you do handle often convert to free advertising. Win win.
> the requests that you do handle often convert to free advertising
This cuts both ways. If you have a well-oiled customer service team working in public, great! But if something major goes wrong one day and you have 3 million people @ing you with no easy way to identify their account in your system and suddenly your hashtag starts trending... that's free advertising too.
I did not say I succeed, sadly. I actually have a somewhat problematic hip condition that would probably best be solved by replacement, but that seems like an irreversible decision that binds me ever more deeply into the system, which is depressing.
I grew up in a small city in upstate NY where a lot of eastern Europeans immigrated in the early 20th century up until the second war. Going to my friends' houses in the 80s - it was normal for the extended family to all live under one roof - there were a few families with grandparents who did not speak any English at all, and only spoke Czech, Hungarian, or Polish. Of course, the people these non-English speakers did business with on a daily basis for most of their lives in the US were speakers of those languages, and they could also rely on their children - my friends' parents - to translate.
For several undergraduate courses, especially the preconditional courses for more advanced courses, there exist CLEP exams. I took a handful of these and got full credit while in the military - at the time they were $99 for each test, and my education command paid for them as a benefit.
There could be a better system here, of course: for example if MIT offered a pay-per-exam for everything they released as open coursework and stood behind the accreditation. It doesn't have to be 1:1 for credits either, as an exam may not be representative of lab work when lab work is present.
I've been printing continuously on a pair of Mk3s for 4+ years, minimal maintenance. (That is, wear and tear on print plates and nozzles, and one thermistor replacement.) Maintenance is important once you venture beyond hobbyist needs.
I did buy a Bambu P1S instead of a Mk4 this year when it was time to add a another printer for my wife's side gig. It's a great machine, except when it has problems. The software is bad at diagnosing the problem, and the UI gets really confused on status messages, and the software wants nothing more than to hold your hand down the wrong path to fix the problem. There's a veneer to everything Bambu that makes it look good as long as you don't look too closely. I'll see where this printer is at after 4+ years of continuous printing, but based on my present experience I'd be surprised if my P1S is still running in 2 years. (And no, its not lost on me that as a Prusa purchaser I bought from their competitor this time around.)
I expect Bambu to push Prusa to compete on features - I am fine as a non-hobbyist paying a higher premium for reliability.