It's remarkable how simple it appears to build lots of cars, but its one of those things that is completely and utterly counter-intuitive.
Logic says - get all these parts together, assemble them and off a car comes out. Forget about engineering - assume all R&D work is done/frozen, the supply-chain complexity alone is staggering. 2000+ suppliers, with multiple redundancies. Keeping the assembly line moving without a hiccup is a compounding a chain of all problems - all probabilities of things going wrong at each station/module/step.
Another beast of an industry(which I am intimately familiar with) is semiconductor manufacturing. But, it actually appears to be hard unlike car manufacturing. Making 4 million chips a day, containing 2 billion transistors sounds hard af and it is.
Manufacturing is a very interesting field to get into (even as software engineers). Ever heard of this game - Factorio? You get to play that in real life (with some pain and big rewards). If you can master manufacturing, you're unbeatable because the entry point is so steep, learning curve is steeper and scaling up is nothing like spinning up Kubernetes clusters and instances (no offense meant).
Hey, kudos to all the people that burned midnight oil, persevered through tough times at Tesla, congratulations. If you work at Tesla plant, please share your story!
"Global sales totaled over 400,000 Leafs by March 2019"
That is awesome and the Leaf is a fantastic vehicle only limited by its range. But it does not sound like one million Nissan Leafs have been produced. And the Tesla milestone still carries extra significant because all of its models are reasonable replacements for ICEs in most households. The Leaf is suited to a much smaller set of use cases.
I can understand critiquing Tesla's business models, their claims about the cars, their financial status, or even Musk's character. But calling what Tesla has done over the last 10 years unimpressive makes no sense to me.
They produce great cars that people love, but people generally love high-end very expensive cars.
A Nissan Leaf is not as nice of a car as a Tesla Model 3 in pretty much any way, but it also costs 3/4 of the price. Meanwhile, the Leaf is profitable per-car, and the base model Tesla Model 3 is barely break-even per-car, even with the very aggressive accounting that Tesla uses. Tesla can't keep producing base Model 3's at the price they are selling them for (even at over $40k), they are a loss leader to look competitive on price, the profitable version is well over $50k without government subsidies that will end this year (and the performance model is over $60k). A leaf is around $30k.
The way it is stated "No other automaker has achieved that kind of volume when it comes to producing long-range electric passenger cars." gives them some wiggle room in their claim. Still, it is a very impressive feat for an automobile startup.
You're getting a lot of flak but this was my reaction too. The mistake was comparing it to the leaf instead of all cars the company produced and confronting the futurist hype train head-on. This is 2020, a million cars isn't impressive. Fuel efficient hybrids have done more to help the climate than Tesla has. Just look at Europe, electric cars are so practical and efficient that countries are working to ban their competition.
Whoever invented lithium batteries created the electric car sector (In fact he won a Nobel prize for it, https://news.uchicago.edu/story/john-b-goodenough-shares-nob...). Everything else has existed since the 1800s (although it has been refined over time). There were even attempts at electric cars in the 1800s. In fact, almost 40% of all cars in 1900 were electric! If they had lithium batteries in 1890 we would have been driving electric cars for the last 130 years.
GM had a great electric car in the mid 90s that couldn't compete due to lead acid batteries being heavy and having poor energy density (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1). Put Lithium batteries in an EV1 and people still wouldn't have wanted it because oil prices were low, but it beat the Model S to market by nearly 20 years and again given a better battery technology like lithium would probably have led to a majority of cars being electric today.
The main driver for car companies to produce electric cars is not competition with anyone, it's the new stricter fleet emissions standards in the world's two biggest car markets: China and Europe. Car companies will market and sell electric cars in China and Europe in preference to other regions for the time being because of this.
There's no urgency for Toyota to produce electric cars because they've been making hybrids for a long time and they're already in a good position with the new emissions standards.
None of that addresses my points. Electric cars haven't escaped being toys for rich people, if they had you wouldn't be seeing Europe and California talking about the need to protect electric cars via legislation. On the other front, increasingly efficient ICE engine designs have done far more to reduce emissions in the present.
That's a really imperssive milestone. And Tesla still has a huge prospect of the mass market in the future(e.g. in China or India), and that's exactly what their current direction.
Over the last year? Oh no, in its entire lifetime. Still it is valued more than many traditional manufacturers, and there is no mystery tech in building an EV.
Still never understood why governments don't take "oil prices are low" as an opportunity to put in a carbon tax. The low prices offset the tax for the consumer, but then you make it revenue neutral by either cutting some other taxes (e.g. payroll tax) or paying out the money as a UBI.
The result is you stimulate your economy because some of the tax is getting paid by foreign oil interests but all of the money is going to your citizens.
Tesla should now focus on a mass market electric vehicle to take the climate crisis- something like a closed two-wheeler with broad tyres. Good for traffic and temperature controlled too. Chinese people would buy it in droves.
Two-wheeled Chinese vehicles is a market that's already cornered by cost-effective incumbent Chinese manufacturers. What exactly would this American luxury brand have in that market?
Better safety features, for one. Chinese cars, especially cost-effective ones, cut corners that would make them unsaleable in countries with higher, enforced, safety standards.
Yes I'd imagine China has cornered the market on Chinese products /s
Innocent typos aside, I think these sorts of vehicles are dramatically underused / undersold in the US. So there may be still a market to be opened up, at least if you can get some value before the international competition comes in.
I think here American company has to market these things, less they be branded as foreign and wimpy. And even then, looks at segway it's a delicate act.
The question sounded like a challenge, so how about Autopilot? Even for two wheelers. I think going forward the autonomous driving will be even stronger differentiator.
That's one take, but I'm more excited by the cybertruck and what it means for larger electric vehicles. I could see all-electric camper vans or RVs being a thing that a certain group of people wouldn't mind paying a premium for.
I have seen some tiny single seater electric "cars" around recently. They are kind of like your regular mobility scooter but with a roof and windows. I saw a short mention of these about to be trialed somewhere in Europe which would allow children to drive them around since they have the same top speed as ebikes which kids are also allowed to use.
Seems like a good idea tbh. Kids largely get locked out of the outside world due to car centric design. This seems like a pretty good solution which is no less safe than cycling. Maybe even more safe since its more visible.
It's great what tesla has done to push electric vehicles to the point of a status symbol, and prove their viability as an every day driving car.
Tesla is a remarkable company, but they are terrible at building and delivering cars, which is very much the primary competence needed to succeed as a company that sells cars. Their production rates have dramatically trailed their promises, and while they are valued at around $160B, they are hoping to build about 500k cars this year. Volkswagon builds that many cars every 2 weeks or so, and actually makes a profit on each car, as does Toyota (10M cars each, per year, for VW and Toyota, 7M for GM and Hyundai, per year). Tesla is worth more than any two other car companies (other than Toyota) while producing around 5% as many cars as any one of them, if Tesla hits their goals.
Success as as a car company is more about being able to produce cars that people want -- efficiently, than it is about designing cars that people want. Otherwise Lamborghini would be selling more cars than all the other car companies combined, if posters and dreams could somehow translate into units shipped without regard to price or ability to actually build cars in the necessary volume. The two huge success stories in cars are Ford, who invented the assembly line, and Toyota, who invented Kanban, both of which dramatically increased the quality while decreasing the labor input of manufacturing cars. Tesla, with all their claims of automation, produces cars using about 1/3 the automation of Toyota today (9 vs 24 cars for full-time employee per year) while using accounting tricks to claim large per car margins, while showing a large loss using standard accounting practices.
I think if I had to make a guess, Tesla will be in the same chapter in the history of cars as DeLorian and Duesenberg.
> I think if I had to make a guess, Tesla will be in the same chapter in the history of cars as DeLorian and Duesenberg.
I don't actually know what chapter that would be. Delorean was around for 3 years, and made ~9000 cars. Duesenberg (of which I had never heard) made race cars, somewhere under 1000... There really isn't a good comparison to be made with Tesla.
Tesla is just starting to ramp up their gigafactories. The one in Reno is still only 20-25% built. Plus china, new one in Germany, and rumors of one soon to be announced in Brazil.
Even the factory they have now is not very well automated and it shows in the price and their ability to deliver cars at volume. Maybe they will improve that over time, but that's like saying maybe RedHat will make a desktop OS that displaces Windows and OSX, it's possible if they do the hard part - which they haven't been able to do so far. The hardest part about being a car company is building the cars.
The one thing I don't get is that everybody assumes there is unlimited demand for Tesla cars, Tesla just needs to be able to produce. But realistically, let's assume that in 1-2 years government subsidies will end then how many people will still want an EV for a price tag of minimum 30k & can afford it? All that Tesla produces are cars for the premium segment despite some mass market rhetoric.
They did mostly in US, there are still some significant subsidies in European and Asian countries. Regardless I believe demand for EVs will explode in the next decade and Tesla's challenges will stay in production, not in demand.
It's like you haven't done your homework. The most surprising thing to me over the past year is how strong demand has remained, as subsidies phased out. All 3 of my Model 3 referrals, in fact, happened in Q4 of 2019, and all from friends saying "hey, I'm gonna buy a Tesla, don't you have a referral code or something?" It had nothing to do with me talking about the car, or giving them rides, or anything. Just totally out of the blue.
I was one of the many folks who (probably like you?) was thinking, once summer 2018 turned into fall 2018, and Tesla worked through the backlog of Model 3 orders (and the well-publicized cancellations and demand for deposits back) that there wouldn't by much demand left. I guess that shows my blind spots as a car person, I just assumed everyone knew about most new vehicles on the market, and what they had to offer. But their prevalence in the market has only driven demand harder.
I think there is a massive market of young people that would love to own a Tesla when they reach the required income level. It’s a green product, from a company with grand ambitions to address climate change, and an incredible car. Everyone I know who has one loves it, and most who get to drive them, wish they had one. It feels like the future, and 30k isn’t a crazy price for the value if offers.
As a young(ish) person, what would most interest me in an electric car is essentially an electrified Corolla. I don't derive any value from performance, features, or looks. I care about safety, reliability, range, and cost.
A Model 3 with 500km of range is over triple the price of a Corolla and a Leaf is over double the price in my market - they just don't make financial sense until they drastically drop in price.
I own a new 2020 Corolla Hybrid and it gives me 58 mpg mileage and cost me $25,000 including all the destination, DMV, etc. charges plus with 3 years of add-on maintenance. Impressive considering when I pay $350 EMI ($0 down-payment on 84 months loan) every month on it and it already saves me about $70 that same month on gas compared to my previous car. So overall the Adj EMI would be just $280.
> there is a massive market of young people that would love to own a Tesla when they reach the required income level.
I'm one of them. If I would be on the market for a car it would be a Tesla, but I most likely never will never own one. It's a great car, green, geeky and the performance is superb, but I much prefer to use public transportation when getting around. Most of my friends (age ~30) with disposable income just don't want a car. We live in cities in Europe where public transportation is good enough. Owning a car is just a burden if you would only use it for weekend getaways.
The people who live in the countryside where you need a car for day-to-day life just can't afford it.
I'm absolutely in this boat. I don't drive enough to justify a 45k expense (after options), but if I were driving more I absolutely would. Considering I live in a city with almost no public transportation, it's basically guaranteed if I can't walk to work anymore.
It looks like the world is going to choose number 2.
If subsidies end they are going to have to be replaced by something else. A carbon tax is the best option, but strict fuel economy standards like Europe has is also an option.
It's being on a mature market vs being on a new, not yet well-developed market. The second has a much larger growth potential. That is, while Toyota is great, it's unlikely that your investment in it will return tenfold. With Tesla, the chances are much higher.
Also, Toyota started making cars in 1933 (licensed GM models), Tesla, in 2012 (an all-new class of cars).
Another would be to say in the end, it's the same "mature" market, one more EV sell is most likely one less ICE sell.
And it's not like EVs have tremendously changed the equation, the price is about the same (total cost of ownership), the capabilities are about the same (slightly better on some aspects, like performance, slightly worst in term of autonomy and refueling/recharging time). Right now, EVs are not extending or creating a market but are triggering a re-composition of this market.
Maybe in the future, we will see more deeper changes which will trigger a major shift (autopilots that work? reduction in cost? (EVs are engineeringly simpler than ICE vehicles)) but we are not there yet.
I am surprised. A few short months ago, many were writing Tesla's obituary. (Mostly in the financial news. Maybe it was an attempt to manipulate the stock price.)
The funny thing is that the corona virus will do more to reduce pollution than tesla cars ever will. Currently, they just sell luxury vehicles that are much heavier than existing cars (where did all that mass come from?), require hours to refill, and have poor range. The one trick they have is that they can accelerate fast, once. What progressives never mention is that the number one cause of pollution is population size.
Elon Musk is another one of those progressive tech people that the rest of society has stopped caring about because they realized that we weren't progressing to anywhere good, and that technology doesn't solve anything. None of them are leaders to anyone other than a small group of naive 20 somethings.
Logic says - get all these parts together, assemble them and off a car comes out. Forget about engineering - assume all R&D work is done/frozen, the supply-chain complexity alone is staggering. 2000+ suppliers, with multiple redundancies. Keeping the assembly line moving without a hiccup is a compounding a chain of all problems - all probabilities of things going wrong at each station/module/step.
Another beast of an industry(which I am intimately familiar with) is semiconductor manufacturing. But, it actually appears to be hard unlike car manufacturing. Making 4 million chips a day, containing 2 billion transistors sounds hard af and it is.
Manufacturing is a very interesting field to get into (even as software engineers). Ever heard of this game - Factorio? You get to play that in real life (with some pain and big rewards). If you can master manufacturing, you're unbeatable because the entry point is so steep, learning curve is steeper and scaling up is nothing like spinning up Kubernetes clusters and instances (no offense meant).
Hey, kudos to all the people that burned midnight oil, persevered through tough times at Tesla, congratulations. If you work at Tesla plant, please share your story!