Lucid is possibly the worst managed automative company.
Beautiful cars, targeting the wrong part of the market (luxury sedan), and just not well run.
Went to a sales center this summer and was basically told GFYS.
6-12 months wait, we don't know.
No test drives, but if you put in a deposit, maybe you can test drive in the fall before config.
Yes, we have a floor model but no you cannot sit in it, let alone even touch it.
Again, would you like to place a deposit sir?
Less than 6 months later, by early December, despite reducing targets, and missing those reduced production targets.. they have immediately available inventory?
By EOY 2022 something like 30% of the cars they had ever produced were not yet delivered? LOL.
Right now theres a dozen sitting on their website to "buy now", all in different color combos.
I'm sure 100s in inventory to replace those listings as they sell. Reports from show rooms all over the country of people seeing the same cars sitting on the lots.
Note Tesla's available inventory generally tells you where the car is, and has a long unique URL that implies strongly that the listing is for a single physical vehicle. The Lucid listings are ambiguous enough to mask there being 10s or 100s of units in that config available. Some of the listings are 2022 model year still!
GFYS has trickled down to many non-EV dealers as well, in my experience. I visited a Subaru dealer in a high-population area last year and was told that they had one specific model coming in one specific undesirable color coming in about 4 months and asking if I wanted to reserve because it wouldn't last long.
Friends had a similar experience with Toyota - it was impossible to get the exact model and config they wanted (plugin Hybrid) so they settled for a similar model , put a deposit down, and still had to wait 6+ months for delivery.
Remember the key thing here.
Lucid/Rivian/Tesla are direct sales model.
With a traditional dealer you are dealing essentially with middlemen who inventory vehicles or get order allocations from the manufacturer. Traditional dealers mostly make money on financing/parts/services/etc. If the dealer has no inventory/allocations then they don't really care about you. So they don't want you wasting their time if you are going to go order the car somewhere else. And realistically, you shouldn't care about them.. you have 1000 other places to go buy a Ford.
In the direct sales model, every person in that store works for the manufacturer as well. They are poisoning customers on the brand in its totality rather than just Joe Shmo Ford dealer in town. The stores are all portals to the same national inventory / order queue.
To go from "GFYS" in July to "Please buy our cars" in November/December is inept.
It is always fascinating how different car sales are in the US when compared to Europe. In Europe, for new cars at least, dealer sell production slots. You configure your car, the dealer gets a delivery date from the OEM, you get yoyr car at that date or pick it up at the factory.
Pre configured cars are either exposition cars, cars registered for a day to move OEM inventory, or dealer inventory, not sold like above. Or they are 6-12 months old and coming from various short term leasing and rental services. This approach makes planning for OEMs a lot easier as well. Oh, and you always pay whatever the ticlet price is,inus negotiated disclunts. Nothing like list price plus, just because the dealer feels like it.
Some US franchised dealers will order a car for you, but you'll usually pay full MSRP with little room to negotiate. Porsche, for example, does a large fraction of their sales that way.
But custom ordering for many cheaper mainstream brands has become kind of pointless. The manufacturers no longer allow picking and choosing individual options and instead roll everything into a couple of large option packages. So, if you want the good sound system then you have to pay for the sunroof as well even if you don't want it.
Many US consumers expect to buy a vehicle off the lot and drive it away that day. Part of that is cultural. But many customers come in to buy because their old car was just wrecked or broken down, so they can't afford to wait months for a replacement.
> Some US franchised dealers will order a car for you, but you'll usually pay full MSRP with little room to negotiate.
That has not been my experience at all. I frequently order my new cars when I'm buying a domestic brand. I pay invoice or less. (I did not buy a car during the pandemic mess). The dealer has a guaranteed sale with minimal overhead. I haven't yet had one tell me to go away.
> how different car sales are in the US when compared to Europe
It is not consistent in the US. You can order a car from any of the domestic manufacturers (or European ones, AFAIK). You take what you can get from the Asian manufacturers, when it shows up.
I wouldn't say that's GFYS, depending on how the dealership staff handled it. Supply issues are everywhere, but I agree that not letting people even sit in a car is crappy customer service.
Crappy customer service at the sales point - where they don't even have any money from you yet is a really bad sign. It's only going to go downhill from there generally.
Especially knowing their nearest service center was 100s of miles away, but "coming soon" near me.
Had a great experience with Ford ordering a Mustang Mach-E (including transparent pricing at MSRP as well as canceling a reservation for another one - they refunded the deposit with no questions asked). Ford is really working hard to get their dealerships and their whole org to perform - Jim Farley and his top lieutenants (at least on the EV side) seem to be the best leaders in the industry. I was impressed.
Compare this to Hyundai/Kia, where every dealership was staffed by the stereotypical sleazy salesmen trying to charge me $10K over MSRP. They make great cars but lost control over their dealerships.
Interesting. I had the opposite experience after placing an early pre-order for the F-150 Lightning. The expected delivery date kept slipping back, the price kept increasing, and the salesman I was forced to interact with had no idea what was going on. They did refund quickly after I cancelled, though.
If Ford is really working hard to get their dealerships to perform then why are they still charging $15K additional mark ups on the Mustang Mach-E? I looked at buying one but there's no way I'm going to be a sucker and pay a sleazy dealer over MSRP.
> no way I'm going to be a sucker and pay a sleazy dealer over MSRP
Everybody talks like buying direct from the manufacturer will solve this. I feel like people aren't paying much attention to Tesla. Sure, there isn't a mark-up per se, but they just ratchet the price up as necessary to extract maximum profit. Same as the dealer. The big difference being that the dealer actually has competition for your business but Tesla is the only place you can go to buy a new Tesla.
Read up on their new ev sale requirements or the dealers lose our access to EVs. They are trying but limited by state laws. And I'm no fan, I don't want to ever buy a car from a dealer again. The state laws block Tesla and rivian sales in some states.
Went to a Kia dealer in San Jose to look at the 2023 EV6 in early February. It was getting great reviews in magazines like Car and Driver. Sales guy said they had only two of that configuration on the lot. Wouldn't let us sit in them or take them out for a test drive. Absolutely nuts.
Walked away and went down the street. Every other dealer was more than happy to go on test drives, even when they had low inventory.
This is one reason I ended up buying a second Tesla rather than an Ioniq 5. Hyundia/Kia dealers are accustomed to dealing with a particular kind of customer who seems more willing to take the abuse. It makes expensive Kia/Hyundai cars a tougher sell, because you are buying into a dealership experience that frequently sucks. Not just sales, but service down the road.
This feels like a common KIA dealership thing, which is a shame, because they are finally making somewhat interesting cars now.
Around the time Kia Stinger GT came out and the hypetrain was pumping at the max (2017-2018), I heard plenty of stories of people being refused Stinger test drives at the dealerships. Most of them had a common theme of the potential buter not "looking right". I.e., too young or not looking like what the dealership employees imagine someone who could afford Kia Stinger would look. Often it was outright refusal, other times it was some bs made up reason, even though it was obvious the cars were used for test drives and were available. Conveniently enough for the dealership, just not for those specific customers.
This is extremely ironic, because the more "premium" the car brand is, the better they treat you at the dealership, even if you clearly cannot afford it at the moment. Here is a personal anecdote.
I went to a BMW dealership once (the most "premium" brand dealership I've ever went to by that point in time), because I was thinking of upgrading my decade+ old Camry. I didn't have money at the time to buy, but that was fine, because I had honestly no idea what car I wanted in any terms other than i wanted it to be "good" and "no larger than a Camry, preferably closer to being Honda Civic-sized". So I scheduled a bunch of test drives at different dealerships to try out a bunch of different cars and see it for myself. Plus, even if I had the money to buy at that time, I knew that a major redesign was coming for BMWs I was looking for in the next few years, and I was going to wait until then regardless. I didn't want to waste anyone's time, so I honestly told all of that to the salesman working with me at the dealership. The experience I got was great, even with all of that info in mind. No aggresive sales tactics, no "we might have a financing option that could work for you" insistence after being told "no" once, suggesting other fun cars to try ("since you aren't planning to buy now anyway, wanna try this cool i8? I know a street about a mile away that is a long stretch with no cameras or cops, and it is usually empty, so we can test out the car there for real."), and in general just providing great service all around (any inventory questions and delivery times were discussed in the most plain and no bs terms). I don't even like BMW cars, but this experience made me strongly consider one in the future and understand why some people swear by brands like Mercedes/Audi/BMW/Porsche/etc., despite some of their cars being pretty questionable and (arguably) not the best bang for the buck.
Disclaimer: I've never owned and still don't own a car from any of the brands mentioned, and neither do I have any relationship with those companies outside of test driving a few of their cars.
100% this.
I bought a BMW EV partially because the dealer experience was so good.
He was like, here's the demo car.. we have an inventory car on the way in 3 months or you can customer order with 6-9mo wait. Zero pressure.
The guy was like hey here's the car.. let me run a copy of your ID, here's the keys to the car, take it for a spin and come back in 30min let me know what you think. This was at the same time other EV makers couldn't be bothered to keep a demo car on lot, or if they did wouldn't let you drive/touch/etc. Even let me come back with my wife and take if for an hour out on the highway, etc to test in more conditions.
Car manufacturers discovered that they can get higher profit margins per vehicle with supply constrained, and now they are addicted to it. GM is actually cutting production to avoid having to give up the "low supply" margins. This is the kind of thing that works until some competitor decides to ramp production and drop prices and eat your lunch. On a side note Tesla is just opened up their Texas gigafactory and recently dropped prices across the board.
This is a prisoner's dilemma situation, and it doesn't look like it's in anyone's interest to defect. By keeping supply constrained, everybody's profit margins are rising.
Hyundai is poised to suppress Stellantis in the US in new car sales because they're one of the few manufacturers actually selling a product the average American can afford. This is despite some serious quality issue headwinds.
It's one thing to not have cars on the lot, its another to have one there and try to take deposits from people while not let them touch/sit in the car 2 feet away!
Don't you have to get a crazy amount of miles on that car to make it worth paying close to six figures? How do most people not just walk away from that kind of deal?
If you are buying at MSRP, the RAV4 Prime almost never makes sense without the federal tax credit (that it no longer qualifies for). If you buy one, you are doing it for the increased performance or your own desire to have a PHEV. If you are simply in it for the most economical RAV4, get the regular hybrid trim.
I visited a Subaru dealer in a high-population area last year and was told that they had one specific model coming in one specific undesirable color coming in about 4 months and asking if I wanted to reserve because it wouldn't last long.
How is this GFYS?
The car you wanted was not on the lot, so you had to factory-order it. That meant a wait. And due to the pandemic-related parts issues, that meant a much longer wait than normal.
Would you have preferred they lie to you, tell you that the car you wanted was just about to arrive, and then string you along for months until it actually did arrive?
(I also ordered a Subaru last year in a high-population area. I had to reserve it in advance, and waited 4 months for it. It's a good thing I did, since that model and trim has been selling immediately as soon as it arrives on the lot: within 250 miles of me, the only available vehicles have been reservations on dealer-orders that were placed by buyers who also placed factory orders.)
Nitpick. You don't factory order a Subaru (or Toyota, or any other Japanese automaker for that matter). You can put your desired specs on a waitlist, however, for when one that matches comes out of the pipe. This is distinct from a domestic manufacturer like GM, where you absolutely can place an order for a car exactly matching your desires, and it will get allocated and produced with your name already on it, configured exactly as you want.
If you want to nitpick about it, some Subarus are made in the U.S., in Indiana, and you can factory orders those models. https://www.subaru-sia.com/about
This is distinct from placing a reservation on an already-specced vehicle in the pipeline, which you can still modify with packages (but for which the engine, paint, and internal trim colors are locked). I placed a reservation on a dealer-ordered vehicle which just happened to already be specced the way I would have factory-ordered it.
Random contrary data point: I was around when two Subarus were purchased from the Bozeman dealer last year. Yes they had no cars on the lot (plenty of overpriced used vehicles) but if you were willing to wait a couple of months and take the vehicles in their incoming pipeline all was good.
I'd say that is dealer specific, I purchased a new Impreza in September of 2021, my specific trim and options weren't on the lot, and was easily given a factory order.
Got a '22 Impreza Sport Hatchback with no hassle, would easily recommend this dealer again.
Seems to be the case on the Impreza forum too, as most owners are buying factory orders from the dealers, with a few saying that the dealer only sells Imprezas thru custom orders.
As for other models, that may be different. My family had no issue with getting a Forester.
I bought a tiny bit of stock before the SPAC merger and I've come to the same conclusion.
Did you know the entire company is really controlled by the king of Saudia Arabia? That's a fun fact buried deep in the investor docs. Perhaps he and the company don't care if it's successful? Maybe they'd even like it to fail.
Lucid is a money pit for the Saudis so they have something to point to and show that they’re trying to move away from fossil fuels. You’d have to be completely insane to buy one of those things though. Especially when there are better and cheaper options without warranty risk.
The more I looked at it, the more it seemed obvious that Lucid/etc super small, non-scaled EV startups were to be treated as rich boy toys.
It can't be your primary car. It might need to travel 500 miles to get service and be gone for weeks. It might never get the ADAS software they claim they have in R&D. It might go bankrupt before your warranty is up. It may go to $0 before you can resale it. Etc.
The real problem for Apple ever getting into EVs is that they have not managed US production at scale in decades. This is the challenge of domestic auto sales and what most EV startups are failing at.
So buying a neat-o car that can't scale production & service network isn't going to help Apple much.
My tinfoil hat belief is that the design was solely to please their investors, an electric Mercedes S Class. Sad because it really is the best designed EV in the market IMO.
Weird. Although I drive a Tesla Model S Plaid, I recently wanted to test drive a Lucid. I reached out to Lucid through their website, received a scheduling call the next day, and had a very pleasant experience test driving a Lucid one week later.
I don’t know whether Lucid is having issues building or moving their inventory, but my experience of their customer service was 100% satisfactory.
No, Faraday is (was?) the worst managed automotive company. Faraday never even managed to build a non-working prototype.
Lucid actually has cars on the road. They're great cars, but at their price point they need more exterior visual flair to match the expectations of the luxury set.
Lucid mistimed the market. By the time their cars were ready, the low interest rates were a distant memory and their target market (highly paid tech workers) had started cutting back on spending due to massive industry layoffs.
Note that Lucid today is basically exactly where Tesla was at this point a decade ago, but Tesla had the benefit of 0% interest rates goosing spending.
Did they literally tell you to get lost? The unavailability of test drives has been a problem for all of these new EVs, including rivian, and it was true for Tesla when they first started selling. I'm suspicious of the lack of demand for rivians, because people like him so much and they're selling used for over lust price, barely, at this point. The lucids are just too expensive for what you get so I can believe they've had a reduction in people waiting, the wide variety of other competitive EVs hurt them more than rivians because there's a shortage of trucks.
There is a huge demand knee for EV's at price parity with ICE's. VW, Ford & Tesla all plan on being able to sell EV's profitably at price parity in 2025 or earlier. If your startup isn't planning on selling a hatchback for $20k, a small SUV for $30k or a truck for $40k after rebate it's likely not viable.
Something has got to give in North America, car prices have inflated but public transit costs and ridership in cities is at risk of a "death spiral", and there's a lot of people who can't afford the first who are going to be screwed by the second.
The same white collar workers that can afford the price of a new EV and have a place to charge it, are doing WFH now; they were also the same people doing daily commutes and paying into public transit which made it cheaper for everyone.
Even when I was commuting to a downtown office I seldom went straight between home and office. Most days I had at least one other stop for school drop-off, gym, club meetings, shopping, etc. This alone made public transit completely unusable. It just wasn't possible to get where I needed to go within the fixed time constraints I had.
Higher interest rates for dealers and buyers, decreasing price market adjustments coupled with increasing interest rates on held inventory which aren't selling.
It will be harder to sell EV startup products in a down economy especially if lavish public fund (ie your tax money) subsidizations of purchase are removed.
There's a point in the chart of real ecological outcomes where holding onto an older car is far more "eco-friendly" than buying a Tesla. It's imperative we take this into account now that we're seeing monstrosities like the Hummer EV. The new Hummer weighs over 9000 pounds, twice the weight of a Tesla. Giants like these and other electric trucks/SUVs could undo much of the progress we're seeing here.
> There's a point in the chart of real ecological outcomes where holding onto an older car is far more "eco-friendly" than buying a Tesla.
Cash for Clunkers has long been derided for the same reasons. Sure some real lemons got turned in and destroyed, but so did a lot of perfectly serviceable older vehicles. Used car prices are still elevated thanks to that.
I saw that as a way to bolster new car sales solely to prop up the failed Big 3 auto makers that basically went bust during the 08 crash.
Cash 4 Clunkers gave both used cars and new cars a price jump and increased sales, which helped the auto makers to coast along some more. I'm sure no lobbying effort went into that at all.
I also don't drive very much (~4k miles per year), part of the desire to upgrade would mostly be for safety with the ever increasing size/weight/acceleration of other vehicles on the road.
Heard someone say recently: "we need less cars and we need less car"
Yeah, and it makes sense that the luxury market (which I'll define as anyone who could comfortably afford a $40k+ new car) is getting saturated. Even if the top 10% of households buys 4 EVs a piece (ha), we should be reaching saturation in the near future. Anecdotally I see several Teslas a day on the highway just getting to/from work, and I'm in suburban PA, not Silicon Valley.
For my part my family has two old Toyotas that I can't justify getting rid of until I either get an unexpected windfall or their engines/transmissions give out, and if one got totaled tomorrow our budget would be sub-30k for a replacement.
We are going to greatly miss pick'n'pull and other salvage yards when they are gone. Countless families keep their older vehicles running by salvaging parts at weekends so they can get to work on Monday and keep a roof over their head.
Why do you seem them going away? There's a growing aftermarket for EV parts. There and companies making drop in replacement parts for EV systems, modules, and even individual boards.
I see your point, but I'd be much more willing to try to work on an EV myself than a ICE vehicle. So many fewer parts and with the computer diagnostics it seems like replacing a drive motor or something would be a lot simpler than replacing the engine.
There are some companies that make aftermarket replacement controllers for motors and stuff, although they are generally performance oriented.
I hope in time more 3rd party repair options open up, due to sheer tenacity or competent right to repair legislation.
There is no intention to allow people to work on their EVs. Between DRM and impossible complexity the vast majority of cars after around 2008 are almost impossible to fix yourself by design.
The next generation of vehicles are likely to drive away themselves if you haven't made payments and even drive themselves to be crushed.
OTOH, it's far easier to do basic maintenance on an EV than it is on an ICE, mostly because there's so much less to do. You can get away with just doing tires & windshield wipers, but you should also occasionally lube the brakes, test the brake fluid for water and change the cabin air filter.
I am more or less in your boat but the average passenger vehicle is now selling for almost $50K. That would be more than twice what I've ever paid for a new vehicle (which is 15 years old, but still!). I'm not sure the EVs are that uncompetitive compared to the current options.
People who care about costs will prefer a used car with all the luxury features of a few years ago vs the basic new car. People who are willing to spend money on a new car demand luxury features.
There are business who buy basic new cars yet (tax law and deprecation makes this a smart move), but otherwise nobody will buy a basic new car: there is always a better deal.
In the 1950s a basic car made a lot of sense as cars did not last as long (without major maintenance - engine rebuilding used to be a lot more common)
Not affluent. They have to have a good income as the poor and lower class are priced right out. However most are in the middle class and living at or beyond their means. Those who are affluent and not rich are buying older used cars and keeping them running for many years. You can save several hundred thousand dollars over a lifetime while still driving cars - money they invest. (not to be confused with the poor who don't have that money in the first place and thus can't invest)
If you don't have a car at all there is potential for several hundred thousands more saved. However if you live where this is good transit you are spending several hundred thousand on that: not only do you have to account for fares, but also areas with good transit tend to have both higher taxes and higher rent. Still getting rid of a car is a great idea to save money, and if you can get rid of all you are mostly likely better off (just not by as much as you would think compared to the frugal car owner)
For large groups this large income and affluence are linked, also people living above their means are likely to lease. Similarly some wealthy people don’t have cars, but many people without cars are simply poor.
Exactly this. While I could afford an $80k vehicle, I refuse to do so. I hate owning a car and only do so because I live somewhere with absolutely no public transportation.
When these vehicles stop being only for virtue-signaling and actually made for the masses, I will definitely be getting one.
At least VW seems to have given up on that plan. The ID.3 is only getting more and more expensive when it was planned to get cheaper. They plan to raise ICE prices even more though.
I cancelled my Rivian order precisely because they kept on changing my configuration to the point I was still going to pay a huge premium for a vehicle that I didn't intend to order.
I am willing to wait but Rivian and the others have lost so much credibility to deliver that I do not even trust a deposit with them.
So I will continue to wait until manufacturers can ship these things as ordered.
Deleting the option to have the max battery pack along with quad motors was what pushed me over the edge. I was still with them when they removed some of the other gizmos like electric bed cover but the battery and motors are what I really wanted.
If I wanted a dual motor config I'd just have ordered a Ford, which would probably deliver sooner, for less money, and probably better supported in the long run.
Could be worse, you could be GM writing off your loan then selling your investment in Lordstown Motors only to have Foxconn step in to legitimize the business.
I visited their website yesterday and really liked their two models. Beautiful cars, but I just can't fathom spending >CAD100k on one. And that's before tax where I live. Just so unattainable.
Max Pack + Quad is no longer an option for pre-orders and now is Dual Motor + Max pack. The Max pack has likely dropped 1 battery module that it would have had. Power Tonneau is gone but may return.
So mostly the "drastic" things that have changed are related to motor/battery unknowns.
Adventure never included the kitchen or tent you had to purchase it, they just are re-working it and or discontinuing it. The main issue is their lack of communication around timelines.
They have so many issues in their powertrain. I work for a major oem and we chose not to even test the rivian vehicle for competitive benchmarking since the performance was so poor, there was nothing to learn from it.
They are using BOSCH motors and Samsung batteries. At least until their new dual motor config comes out with their own motors. I'd say this is neither poor or great since these are mostly industry standard options.
Munro has done a very detailed teardown of both the Rivian and the Lightning. The main complaint of the Rivian was that it was overbuilt and they are spending too much money. Otherwise, it's been given very high reviews for quality.
I suppose you could argue that the quad motor config is maybe something other OEMs wouldn't take up for many reasons, but it's not a "Poor" choice. It's resulted in one of the most unique vehicles to ever exist, which was probably a very good brand building strategy. The problem with Rivian now is that they haven't been able to pivot to mass market vehicles quickly enough.
the point i am trying to make is about 'vehicle integration'
most of the oems don't make their own emotors. they 'engineer' vehicle attributes and provide the suppliers like Bosch with system level targets. this process is generally referred to as target cascading. if i want motor to sound xdB at driver ear, my vehicle needs to provide ydB isolation and then source needs to be at zdB, if this process is not hashed out well, you end up with poor isolation. you also have to consider variability in source and your manufacturing.
This is the area where an automaker shines or crumbles, doing this poorly results in poor experience and hence poor reliability/quality. most of major oems think rivian is struggling in this area and just now laid of most of the sme's lol
I recently went through a car shopping experience and i spreadsheet-ed the crap out of both identifying a vehicle(based on few criteria important to me, such as fuel economy, front leg room and front hip room[1], safety and reliability) and comparing potential candidates on the used car marketplace.
Cars that mostly met my criteria were Tesla Model Y Long Range and Toyota Camry hybrid. I then proceeded to calculate the cost in fuel($4.40/gallon near me) and in energy($0.35.kwh off-peak thanks PG&E) and the cost to drive Tesla for 1000 miles were within a dollar of the cost for Camry Hybrid to do the same thing.
But Tesla would cost $20k more and a trip SF-LA would mean 2 stops to recharge, whereas Camry Hybrid can do it on a single tank of gas.
So i bought a lightly used 2020 Camry hybrid after expanding my search to about a 500 mile radius using AutoTempest.com which aggregates multiple car marketplaces.
[1] My current car at the time was Volvo XC70 with extremely comfortable seats that Volvo is known for and i wanted to replicate as much of that comfort as I could.
Rivian has changed my config 4 times and pushed back my order two years. They are changing it again and can’t even give a real ETA. It’s great to keep customers updated but like if you can’t stick to anything you say it’s not really helpful.
What a weird perspective. EV _startups_ are losing their luster, but they don't even mention the fact that total EV sales are rising and it's largely due to legacy players like Ford, Chevy, Kia, Hyundai releasing the first plausible competitors to Tesla. The EV startup market was always considered a long shot. Nobody expected even Tesla to be able to stay competitive once the big players got into the game. It took longer than expected, but it's happening now. They left a big enough opening for Tesla to reach a degree of scale, but I'd bet against anyone else disrupting this market in the next 10 years. Why put your name on a year long waitlist for a Rivian when you can buy a Ford now?
I hope some of the "startups" stick around because the Polestar 2 we bought last year is the best car I've ever owned, and when we go to replace our second car it will be a Polestar 3.
Polestar is not really a startup though, is it? Without the expertise of car building, those "startups" have little chance of success, and Polestar is a good example of combining startup-like mindset with production know-how and capability of an established manufacturer.
Polestar is a Geely brand, which is about as far from being a "startup" as you can get. Much of the underlying technology is shared across the Geely portfolio and they've been a global EV leader for some time.
I agree with your comment, except the last part. I cancelled my f150 lightning order because they told me I wasn’t going to get a 2023 and they raised the price by $7500.
Some Ford dealers actually have Mustang Mach-E vehicles in stock again but most are charging additional mark ups in the $14K range. You'd have to be really foolish or desperate to pay that much when equivalent gas vehicles are so much cheaper.
One of Tesla's underappreciated advantages is that because they were completely new, they eschewed the dealership model. Every legacy manufacturer is inextricably wedded to the dealers. At least in the US.
I've seen a lot of used Mach-Es too. In fact it's amazing how many people will wait 2-3 years for a brand new car that fits exactly what their ego asks for vs just going out and buying a used version that fits 80% of their requirements.
We were seriously considering a Rivian truck to replace our 09 Ford Escape, but it seemed like every time we checked into it the wait time and price estimate kept climbing. Eventually we just decided we'd rather have a no-frills EV from an autogiant than a luxury truck from a startup that seems to be having a lot of issues meeting demand and quality control (based on anecdotes and pictures I'd been seeing while subbed to the Rivian subreddit at the time).
We ended up purchasing a 23 Chevy Bolt EUV that happened to be sitting on a lot in Omaha while we were passing through. Snagged it for MSRP and I've put almost 5000 miles on it since November. Couldn't be happier with the purchase.
The trouble with these startups is that they focused on the overpriced "luxury" niche. That worked for Tesla in the early days. Now, though, electric cars are common, and price matters. Tesla finally had to cut prices.
If your pickup trucks start around US$100,000, you have a problem.
The company that really gets this is BYD, in China. They started out making low-end vehicles, and now they make decent mid-range EVs. They passed Tesla in output in mid-2022. So far, they haven't sold into the US, but they do sell in Europe.
The first is really blocked on the second & third.
Taking a train to New York or Chicago is fantastic. If you've never used their transit systems before it may take a bit to get used to them, but you can step off the train and go about your business. When I have Amtrak points to burn, I love taking a "day trip" to Chicago, a thousand miles away. I can arrive at 10am and leave at 9pm, and run out of time before I run out of things to do.
If you take the train into a smaller city, you better hope there is a car rental on whatever bus loop they have.
And therefore things for all of, including the parent poster, can do is:
1. Vote in local elections, because zoning is a local elected official kind of thing
2. Get involved in city council, zoning board of appeals, etc
3. Perhaps even run yourself, or at least get together with like minded individuals in your area and organize
Range in EVs is interesting because it costs a fortune up front, but for most people doesn't get used very often. Yes, there's some benefit to battery lifespan, but it's hard to justify the thousands of dollars extra when buying the car.
It would be really cool if you could rent/add battery expansion packs to your EV when you do need them - like a big USB power bank - but we need a lot more standardization in the technology first.
Here in CA we have spent billions of dollars on high speed rail over the past decade but the project just keeps getting delayed and the price tag keeps going up. If we could build these projects for merely 2x what it costs in other countries, we'd have affordable rail by now.
I do wonder if a lot of these EV startups are suffering from "This Is A Feature, Not A Product” syndrome. Rivian and Tesla have made some very good and clever design choices, but nothing a major auto-maker couldn't clone.
Teslas are significantly more efficient than anything from legacy manufacturers. That's not just one trick, but ground-up design and engineering of the whole drivetrain. Also look at packaging — Tesla manages to pack everything neatly to leave room for a large frunk, while every legacy manufacturer still leaves a jumbled mess under the hood.
In batteries and charging only Hyundai/Kia is competitive, and that's somewhat by brute force, because their cars aren't as efficient. VW charging speed peaks at half of Tesla's speed. Renault, Nissan and Stellantis charge at 1/3rd or 1/4th of Tesla's speed, and they probably don't even realize how important that speed is. They are so far behind that I don't expect them to survive.
And every legacy manufacturer still sucks at software. I don't mean self-driving stunts, but basics like navigation that includes charging stops accounting for charging speed and availability. They still think they can upsell you $2000 for an Android tablet from 2010.
Yet people have been saying that about Teslas, and EVs in general for almost a decade now. But they are still way ahead of everyone else (in the west) in terms of sales and production, even with traditional manufacturers shifting hard towards EVs.
And I'm including myself here, I'm genuinely surprised that Tesla has managed to survive and even thrive, with insane production growth rates YoY. I genuinely believed it was a hype fueled meme (I still wouldn't touch the stock, though) that would stall the moment they attempt scaling production, but the results are pretty conclusive on that regard.
People have been literally saying this since 2016. I don't know anything about car manufacturing, but current evidence suggests the cloning Tesla is harder than it appears. Give me a year when you expect an American car maker to sell even a quarter of the electric vehicles that Tesla sells that year.
Really hope Lucid succeeds. Their cars are just incredible pieces of engineering and design - at the high end obviously the market is limited, though, so hope they're able to make the mass market transition at some point.
Their infotainment system definitely had a ton of bugs, and early versions of the software were glitchy to the point of absurdity.
That said, they have been making consistent, steady improvements to the software, such that over the past 6ish months it has gotten much, much better (especially since the 2.x update which was vastly more stable and performant). I rarely hit software issues these days.
The idea that someone could be locked in or out of a car during a software update is deeply disturbing. What if one party is a child and the other an adult? We all know that software updates don't always complete correctly or on time.
This also seems like an exploit that could be used to lock someone in or out of their car.
> The idea that someone could be locked in or out of a car during a software update is deeply disturbing.
Definitely disagree. I read this blurb in the article, and honestly if I were the author I would have been embarrassed to put that in there. The app and the car give you tons of warnings that the car will be locked while an update is running. It also never starts updates automatically - it's a multi-step process you have to go through in either the app or car.
I posted above that I definitely had issues early on with some of the software, but the fact that the car locks during an update was not one of them, and I've never seen this complaint on the Lucid owners forum.
Being a supplier to an OEM is a tough gig. They know down to the penny what a component costs to produce and they collude with the other manufactures to ensure that manufactures buy for the smallest possible profit margins at the worst possible terms; just enough to keep the supplier going. It's basically The Walmart Model.
That being said, several tech companies whose names you'd recognize have attempted to get into the vehicle infotainment space over the years, including Microsoft. But no one has found long-term success in the market (likely for the reasons mentioned above).
It’s a smallish market (total number of automakers is low) AND the automakers see it (rightly) as differentiating and valuable. So they don’t want to “fund competitors” - unless it is something like CarPlay.
It’s kinda sad because it’s a major selling point and everyone would benefit from it not being shit.
I think Apple considered it, but their iPhone business is too big to risk it - at most I see them extending CarPlay more and more and maybe doing something with AI driving as a licensable option.
Many cars are basically iPhone accessories, no need to risk that market by making your own car.
They are beautiful well engineered cars but the company just seems incredibly poorly run.
I actually went through the experience as a potential customer and bought a similarly priced competitor from a German legacy maker because there was no BS.
Anecdotally, I know people who wanted (and still want) an EV, but the production delays made them buy ICE vehicles so they could have something to drive until they could get them delivered. Which means they are cancelling their pre-orders because they expect their car to last more than a year.
I live in Georgia, a place where everyone owns trucks. I honestly don't think it would matter what Tesla released, because it's Tesla. It will have a rough general acceptance curve in Georgia and I'm not sure that would change a ton based on vehicle form.
Personally, I don't care if it can do what I need.
But it is fair to say that acceptance often has a very significant social component (and most engineers ignore this). It's often impossible to gain acceptance of a very new thing in one step (to different), but possible by producing multiple in between points. This is true even if the end thing is much better.
So for other vehicle makers, I would expect them to be smart enough to get to amazing end state in steps instead of trying it all at once
Pretty sure people would also like an electric Honda Civic (they don't even have a plugin-hybrid, just a efficient Accord and CR-V) or anything else that feels reliable and is priced similarly to ICE.
That's exactly what I want. A runabout town car with enough range that I don't have to think about charging it on a cold winter Saturday where I might go 125+ miles running errands all over the metro area. I'll keep my ICE vehicle for road trips, at least until the charging network gets more reliable, but I'd love to never burn a drop of gasoline unless we are headed out of town.
I like the theory that musk is trying to win over the truck buyer segment's hearts and minds via twitter anti woke signals before releasing it to ensure there is an accepting market.
If you look at a map of the best selling vehicle by state and overlay who they voted for in the last few elections it's pretty clear who he needs to cozy up to and win over. I'm not thrilled about it, and it solidifies my choice not to buy a tesla, but it makes business sense to my uneducated eye.
Personally I like my nissan leaf and would like a nice simple plug in hybrid truck, not an electric brodozer.
That’s a pretty dumb theory. The cyber truck depends on a gigapress that just finally made it to the US to their plant in the last couple of months.
Second, it already had massive preorder demand from before the Twitter drama. There was no need to ensure demand.
Finally, the market for the cyber truck is going to be all of the people who were conscious about fuel efficiency and wanted a truck before but downgraded to a car/crossover. The cyber truck will not make a dent in any rural truck sales where towing and hauling is common.
As a counter anecdote, me and a few friends who preordered cybertrucks don’t care about fuel efficiency. We just love the bizarre looks and extreme performance/range. Personally I also bought into the hype around its toughness because I need to haul kids around in an area that is infamous for suicidal deer.
I’m even fairly ambivalent to the fact that it has a truck bed. Maybe I’ll carry lumber once a year. I’d rather have a 3rd row of seats.
Point one and two are good, I wasnt aware they had as many preorders almost as the last 3 years combined of f-150 sales, but sooner or later they are going to need to sell to people that don't actually care what kind of powerplant is under the hood to grow their market share and overtake ford nationally.
A Cybertruck pre-order costs $100, and it’s refundable. I’m not sure what the actual demand for those things will be when people have to put real money down.
Depends on what you're buying. Existing models like the S or 3 have much shorter delays, upcoming models like the Cybertruck are worse. I had a 3 delivered in about two weeks.
In 2022, when these decisions were being made, it depended on the model. The Y and X did have such delays. The more expensive configurations of the 3 and S did not. The lower cost 3 and S's had longer lead times and I don't know which side of the divide they would fall on. And the cybertruck obviously is far in the future.
For most, the EVs coming out of Chevy, Ford, VW, Kia/Hyundai, etc are more than enough, especially if they can go down to a dealership today and drive home with one. Even more so when most dealerships have financing options that can reach customers that the boutiques can't.
This is at least partially related to the change in the rules for the US EV tax credits. The price cap and manufacturing country restrictions mean that many buyers are seeing $7500-10000 added to their net price. Price elasticity isn’t zero, even for luxury buyers
Hondas, BMWs, Teslas, Jeeps. The truck is my favorite combination of performance, utility and quality. Especially compared to the Tesla, the build quality is exceptional.
The Rivians look great, I’d probably get one if I wasn’t concerned about long-term viability of the company and the charging network when going on road trips. For now I’m going to stick with my Y but in a few years if the cybertruck doesn’t pan out for whatever reason and Rivian is looking solid, I’ll get one.
Edit: am aware that Tesla is opening up their network. I want to wait and see how that works out practically. Are enough of them going to be upgraded to support 3rd party cars to make road trips feasible?
EV are still too expensive and if one does not have a charger at home, it does not save that much money over ICE, plus it comes with the inconvenience of wasting time waiting for charging. It is that simple.
Funny, I start every morning with full range and very rarely dip below 50% SOC by the end of the day.
I have been using the portable charger that came with my EV, sharing the 30A outlet with my dryer. The only times I've "wasted time waiting for charging" is when I'm on a road trip, and that time was spent in a nearby store doing shopping I've needed to do anyway.
My municipal electrical rate is $0.11/kWh and I've saved a small fortune compared to my old gas vehicle.
In Iowa I have to pay an extra EV fee with my yearly vehicle registration/tags. I'm honestly not sure what that fee goes to in Iowa, but I imagine such a thing could be adopted to pay for an EV's share of the fuel tax.
Edit: looks like it does in fact act as the fuel tax for EVs.
Fuel taxes come nowhere near paying for the roads. Only a lack of imagination prevents us from replacing any lost tax revenues.
My town puts a $9/mo fee on my water bill to pay for road improvements. Everyone in town pays in regardless of how much or what they drive. The money is also being spent on sidewalks and bike routes, so non-drivers benefit too.
>My municipal electrical rate is $0.11/kWh and I've saved a small fortune compared to my old gas vehicle.
For you it makes sense. Our residential rate just hit $0.20/kWh, excluding rider and admin fees. Plus higher purchase cost plus several thousand dollars more insurance rates compared to an ICE.
When you start getting closer to $0.20/kWh https://www.fueleconomy.gov/
then there is no much different between EV and hybrid.
If you then account for the fact that EVs can easily go for
a +$10k over the hybrid equivalent...then you should come to the conclusion
that EV is not that convenient, if at all.
Also, many have mentioned the possibility of charing at work ... good luck
with that.
I am in favor of EVs, but infrastructure is not there yet and as said they are
still too expensive. Also, given the pace of innovation, I think EVs depreciates
faster than Hybrid equivalent.
Thanks to solar panels my EV charging has no ongoing cost.
Frankly even if solar were even with gasoline I'd still prefer solar because I generate it myself. No supply chain issues, refining problems, or oil disruptions can stop me from driving or increase my cost to drive.
If you keep saying "infrastructure is not there" then it will never get there. You need demand to kickstart infrastructure deployment. Maybe infrastructure isn't good where you live but for a lot of people it exists and continues to improve. Lots of parking lots in the bay area have electric charging points now - there were approximately zero just 10 years ago.
Electricity has the benefit of an existing grid everyone is already connected to, large chunks of time when that grid runs at a tiny fraction of its capacity, and really easy capacity upgrade paths that operators already do all the time (eg when an industrial plant expands or a new commercial facility is built).
You should have read my first comment where I said that it is not convenient _unless_ you can charge it at home. And here you are … “thanks to solar panels” … you are the exception not the rule. Many people don’t live in houses, let alone have the possibility of installing solar panels and pay premium for an EV car.
Let me guess … you have a Tesla…
I will just wait perhaps in the next 5 to 10 years. For now I am happy with my hybrid.
If limitations like the above are not worked out I'd be shocked if these restrictions don't get pushed back or reconsidered at that time. How many times have CO2 emission reduction targets been pushed back, adjusted, or just ignored?
Something like 20% of drivers don't have access to home charging and another 10% need to haul heavy items a lot. You guys can sit this one out for another decade. We are nowhere close to 70% of new car sales being electric anyway.
I can't provide a citation for my 20% stat, but as I remember it, it was for car owners. If you live in NYC in an apartment and ride the subway, you don't count. I wonder how many of those EU apartment dwellers are car owners.
Guess: The actual data is that 20% of new cars are sold to people in apartments. Because the folks in apartments don't replace their cars as often, and/or are more likely to buy used cars.
No disagreement on the $$$, but I have no issues with trickle charging at home on an external power outlet. My frequent driving is really just daycare drop-off/pick-ups and into the office once or twice a week. The office has L2 charging so I can get a solid few hours to top things off, but I very rarely stop at an L3 charger... and on those rare occasions, I'll know ahead of time, so I can run into the grocery store that hosts the Electrify America station in their parking lot and there's no time lost.
So as long as L1 trickle charging is available at home or work, this can be a non-issue for many driving habits.
I was/am interested in a Rivian R1T but the fast charging network is probably the biggest variable holding me back. Rich Rebuilds did a great video where he experienced first-hand what a PITA it is to travel long stretches in one (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eosf7CeSGyA). My hope is in the next 2-5 years Ford will become a top 3 in the EV space solely to help move EV charging infrastructure forward.
I'm curious if (and if so, how) these startups think they're going to survive when the supertankers of the large auto companies complete their miles-long turn and start production at the scale they do ICEs now. The scrappy first-mover advantage will only go so far.
Or are they just angling to be bought up by the big boys as an exit?
US infrastructure does not support electric vehicles, full stop. There are structural headwinds by default that prevent uptake because the logistics fail at a certain point when not subsidized.
This was all totally planned for by the oil companies pushing for more investment in exurbs and highway construction
"The market" doesn't want EVs and EV infrastructure because the majority of equity holders financially benefit more on a margin basis from the petro-dollar based system that ubiquitous EVs would threaten.
However because a subset of rich (and debt insensitive) individuals want a sexy new thing that has marginal ecological benefits at small scale, we had a boom period where excess capital (and unsustainable debt) was being spent to try and push EVs into the market.
When cleaning ladies and burnouts are using EVs because it's as trivial as using a petro-car then I'll grant that the market is working, but as it stands 'The Market" is only given token nod to electric and it's a fashionable thing to do in the US, it's not sustainable the way it is happening.
Full stop. You seem pretty certain. How do you explain what's happening in the US (particularly in California)? Are you saying infrastructure currently does not support or won't in the future?
I would hypothesize that if you counted up the cumulative stored joules of existing and accessible petro-energy stocks and compare that to the equivalent with electrical generaton, then evaluate what it would take to replicate the logistics networks that provide electricity *above and beyond* current electrical generator capacity, it wouldn't even be close to capable of being a 1:1 replacement without a century of no or negative margin investments that people have no incentive for.
It's like crypto - people got excited with Musk's sexy vision of the future and so it caused a mania around it. A private company cannot possibly fund this scale of infrastructure development because it requires decades of losing money.
The challenge is that it's in conflict with 100 years of oil-based infrastructure development that still has the same incentives.
I really want to get an electric Ford Transit van but the range is just so tiny its not workable for me. Is there some technical reason EVs don't support consumers adding big battery extension packs to increase range?
I wonder if fire hazard is a reason. Tesla already reccomend fire departments just let the cars burn out in a safe space, which can take a long time, I can't imagine how bad a van full of batteries would burn
sell something like the ID4 for $30-35K and you will have tons of buyers. will be interesting to see how many ID4's they sell because they cost $40K and they are made in Tennessee so they qualify for the EV tax credit which puts them in that price range.
Beautiful cars, targeting the wrong part of the market (luxury sedan), and just not well run.
Went to a sales center this summer and was basically told GFYS. 6-12 months wait, we don't know. No test drives, but if you put in a deposit, maybe you can test drive in the fall before config. Yes, we have a floor model but no you cannot sit in it, let alone even touch it. Again, would you like to place a deposit sir?
Less than 6 months later, by early December, despite reducing targets, and missing those reduced production targets.. they have immediately available inventory?
By EOY 2022 something like 30% of the cars they had ever produced were not yet delivered? LOL.
Right now theres a dozen sitting on their website to "buy now", all in different color combos. I'm sure 100s in inventory to replace those listings as they sell. Reports from show rooms all over the country of people seeing the same cars sitting on the lots. Note Tesla's available inventory generally tells you where the car is, and has a long unique URL that implies strongly that the listing is for a single physical vehicle. The Lucid listings are ambiguous enough to mask there being 10s or 100s of units in that config available. Some of the listings are 2022 model year still!
Insane.