
German automakers who once laughed off Elon Musk are now starting to worry - shawndumas
http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-0419-tesla-germany-20160419-story.html
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herge
To crib the top Reddit comment on this article for free internet points:

"Yeah, they laughed Elon Musk off so much that Daimler acquired nearly 10
percent of Tesla in the early days.

But at least they found an 88 year old (!) former executive of Daimler that
dismissed Tesla."

"[https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/4fmrrl/german_a...](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/4fmrrl/german_automakers_who_once_laughed_off_elon_musk/)?

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mc32
I don't know that that means much. When the American big three saw Japanese
carmakers overtaking them in terms of quality, delivering products people
wanted etc., many entered into these ventures and bought sizable stakes, etc.,
but maybe except for Ford, I don't think they extracted much out of those
partnerships.

~~~
thrownaway2424
I think GM would have gone straight out of business if they hadn't had their
joint venture with Toyota (NUMMI). You can say they didn't learn as much as
they could have, but I don't think you can say they got much out of it. You
could say that GM owes its existence to Toyota.

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mc32
I think there was untapped potential and undelivered potential. And the things
they learned propagated way too slowly. That's my take.

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stcredzero
As Elon would suggest, let's take this down to first principles. In some ways,
Germany, with its focus on carbon emissions and clean power is a great market
for EVs. There is a big obstacle, however. Air resistance at highway speeds is
proportional to the square of the velocity. Kinetic energy is also
proportional to the square of the velocity. What this means, is that there is
a bigger physics barrier to making an acceptable Li-ion battery EV to run long
distances on the Autobahn. Battery tech is going to reach "awesome" levels for
the US a lot sooner than it will reach "awesome" levels for Autobahn-stormers.

(In fact, you could probably work out the approximate timing of this occurring
using graphs of industry-wide improvements in Li-ion batteries and
extrapolating when it will reach 4x today's capacity/weight and capacity/cost
as a back of the envelope calc.)

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arcticfox
Germany is also slightly smaller than Montana and nearly 10x as dense as the
US, greatly reducing the relevant distances people regularly need to drive.

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_wo6a
This is not actually that true. Germany is 7x as dense as the US, but Germany
is only 5.9x as dense as the contiguous US.

About a third of the contiguous US has almost no people relative to the rest
except for a few population centers (Intermountain West and Great Plains).
There are several states with population densities higher than Germany, and
quite a few within a factor of three, and naturally those will tend to have
more people than the others.

So I'm not sure the median surrounding population density for an individual in
the US would be that much different from Germany -- I'd think cultural
factors, including public transportation availability, would have at least as
much an effect on average distances driven.

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ThePhysicist
Good! I really hope that the car industry will finally start to take electric
vehicles seriously, not only in Germany but everywhere around the world. It
was a good strategy and justified to make money with an existing and mature
technology (combustion engines) but it seems that the time for electric
vehicles finally draws near. I really hope that the pressure from Tesla forces
the other car makers to finally produce an electric car of practical value, so
far most of their prototypes had only PR value.

I think what Tesla achieved in this market cannot be praised enough: Not only
do they build electric vehicles that are actually usable, they also managed to
create a brand with a perceived quality that is on par with that of the
biggest premium car markers in the world.

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forgetsusername
> _I really hope that the car industry will finally start to take electric
> vehicles seriously_

Every auto maker on the planet is heavily investing in EV technology. I'd say
we're well beyond "starting".

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RGamma
It is exactly this why the world needs Elon Musks: To break out of the cycle
of endless iteration of the same old technology. While conventionally fuelled
motors have come a long way and today the cleanliness of fully electric
vehicles might be a bit dubious given how electricity is largely produced and
the bad battery technology employed, a large enough push in the right
direction will fix that too.

Apparently the old minds of VW et al. are too slow to adapt. Let's see whether
this situation becomes a giant slow-motion crash of German automakers (and
therefore the German economy) or whether they can pull through with their
promise to "not be the first, but the best" on the market.

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Avshalom
Meh, the auto industry has been making real attempts at EV every decade for
the last century or so. Last generation is what gave us the Prius. Tesla might
have helped push us into pure EV a generation earlier but it was going to
happen in our life times anyway.

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Luc
When I see the factory videos of the production of the BMW i3, or that
interview with the Monroe guy whose company took apart and analysed the i3...
It seems to me BMW is well ahead of Tesla in many ways.

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wil421
For BMW and others, they should have the advantage. They already have R&D,
factories, distribution, and the workers in place. Tesla is having to build up
everything from scratch including a battery factory.

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thrownaway2424
The battery factory is owned and operated by Panasonic. Tesla itself operates
out of the former Toyota/NUMMI factory in Fremont and has re-hired a
substantial number of skilled autoworkers in the area.

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beachstartup
yes, parent comment is typical carguy fanboyism translated into 21st century
context. my favorite carbrand is special and unique, because of X reasons!

a new company producing cars isn't doing much "from scratch", other than
design, and the basic concepts there are also pretty well established. as far
as i can tell tesla is producing the same basic product as everyone else
except all the tech people are into it because of elon musk, where they
probably hated or didn't pay attention to cars before.

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fleitz
I'm a car guy, the type that loves manual transmissions, etc. My 'brand' is
Toyota/BMW. I scoffed at electric cars as being even worse than an automatic,
all that changed when I stepped into a Tesla.

I agree that Tesla's are an economic substitute for Toyotas but when you step
into a Model S as a car guy you know it's different.

There's only two reasons I didn't buy it 1) I love road trips and there's one
supercharger station in my province, and more importantly 2) I couldn't afford
it. Tesla's are like BMWs you know they aren't that reliable, are really
expensive, but there's nothing like driving one. Like BMW, it's a smiles per
gallon car you buy it because when you step on it, it goes, not because it
gets great gas milage.

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beachstartup
so it's too expensive, and isn't practical, yet you pine and lust for one.
it's also really really fast, and looks super duper cool and it's somehow
better than the others. does any of this sound familiar?

in other words, same basic product as any high end fast car. this is coming
from someone who has a high end fast car, is a car guy, has a 'brand', and has
ridden in all the high end fast cars.

they're all basically the same.

musk is a car guy and lives in LA (bel air), car capital of the known
universe. he's a genius for recognizing this market angle.

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foobarrio
Isn't that exactly the point that Tesla made electric cars desirable (not
practical)? Not sure that can be easily dismissed. They took a class of car
that usually seen as weak and put into the same class as Porsche. That is no
small feat IMHO.

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mabbo
The winner in the German category of beer have been American breweries
typically for many years now.

Much like the auto sector, it seems that German industry is able to compete on
quality and efficiency, but not on innovation.

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mschuster91
> The winner in the German category of beer have been American breweries
> typically for many years now.

The beer itself is still the old recipes, brewed under the Reinheitsgebot.

Big Brew simply made a shitload of money by selling unsuspecting Americans
stuff that a German wouldn't even want to smell, much less drink, and then
bought up German breweries to teach them proper brewing.

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Maultasche
I hear that prohibition was a huge factor in the decline in quality in
American beer in the early 20th century. The hoards of Germany immigrants in
the 19th century established breweries (including Coors and Millers) that
produced good-quality beer.

During prohibition, the breweries went out of business and the brewers found
other occupations. After prohibition, the new breweries that popped up
produced beer of much lower quality. They found that the American public was
just happy to have beer, and was way less picky about the quality of that
beer. You'd think that after only 15 years of no beer, the former quality
would be re-established, but I guess there wasn't a market for it anymore.

Same thing happened in California with the wine industry. It took decades
after Prohibition before good quality wine returned. Those re-established
wineries were producing some pretty terrible wines in their early years.

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grillvogel
what is the drive feel of a Tesla compared to a nice German car? Most cars
feel really bad to drive compared to a nice BMW/Audi, and I've always assumed
that the Teslas may have decent tech but still probably don't drive as well as
cars made by people with much more experience than the Tesla guys. Is this
accurate?

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kbob
I test drove a Model S with the base wheels and suspension on damp roads. It
was fine. A little soft and a little understeery, exactly what you'd expect
for a large, non-performance car. The AWD was unobtrusive.

I have previously owned an M3 and driven a few other German sedans, mostly
BMW. They are much more confidence inspiring. But I still reserved a Tesla
Model 3.

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RodericDay
This is the new form of advertising I suppose.

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ianpurton
All the German automakers are spending heavily on electric vehicle research
and most of them are still making a profit.

The article made lots of assumptions about what the Germans are upto without
actually finding out. Great journalism.

