I’ve seen that too, but you didn’t read what I said and you’re taking an unnecessarily defensive position. You really think GM or BMW couldn’t make a similar electric motor? There’s no IP covering it so they could literally just copy the design! Or can Tesla magically assemble things better than anyone else even though they can’t even put an interior together. Do you really think they also couldn’t strap a bunch of Panasonic batteries together? That’s all a Tesla battery pack is. There’s a reason they aren’t doing these things.
They are not “stealing market share” from anyone and I never said or implied that, but it’s an interesting straw man argument. They have the market share they do simply because no one has bothered or cared enough to enter this market…until now.
The Tesla fanboys are so rabid and blinded by their lust that they ignore the serious issues and just make excuses for them. Abhorrent quality control. Very poor service network. Days and days of waiting for simple parts. Inability to enter or even exit the vehicle. Frequent and undiagnosable no-start conditions. Trim pieces falling off. Control arms snapping. Wheel arches that were never designed or tested for use in snow which leads to snow piling up in the rear bumper. The list goes on and on. And, no big deal, just a few cases of spontaneous combustion and the autopilot steering into semis or concrete barriers. Can you imagine if a Chevy Bolt had these problems? GM has decades of experience killing people from design flaws. I’d like to think that they’re past the point of rushing half baked products to market assembled in tents with no PPAP just to appease shareholders.
This is true with almost every other tech company, and yes, Tesla is a tech company first. If you think about it, what does Apple have that makes it the most valuable company? I don’t believe they even own the factories.
I am not taking a defensive position and I hear what you are saying but it simply doesn’t make sense to me. What you are saying is that Tesla’s product can easily be duplicated/bettered and yet the established brands have put out inferior EV products by choice while watching Model 3 sales going through the roof in a declining (luxury sedan) segment.
I work for a big tech company doing industry forecast on and off for about 8 years now. When I first started we knew our core product (hard disk drive) would have significant penetration from solid state drives in the second half of the decade even though SSD volumes globally was tiny compared to HDDs back in 2012. We have been modeling this for the past 8 years and planned our investments, production volume and revenue accordingly. We concluded that building a NAND fab was too expensive and without our own NAND flash it didn’t make sense to compete against SSDs in certain market segments. I just cannot simply comprehend that the car manufacturers didn’t model EV penetration into their ICE market or simply decided to ignore it by letting a startup grab sales from them even though they could have easily matched or bettered the startup’s product. Their conclusion must be the same as ours, it is too much money/effort to invest in the EV tech so let’s focus on core competencies.
I am not a Tesla fanboy (don’t own Tesla stock or product) and acknowledged in multiple posts that they have many issues/inefficiencies. My position is that their issues can be fixed but their first-mover advantage cannot be easily beaten. I am saying they have designed unique hardware/software and built infrastructure (charging stations and battery production capacity) that will take years and billions to match. Your position differs from mine in that you think their first-mover advantage (battery production capacity, software, charging infrastructure, chip and battery design) means nothing and can easily be bettered by others if they only decide to do so.
Appreciate your perspective! To give my background I am an auto industry guy, I’ve seen the capabilities of all of the major OEM’s. The scale and resources that they each have are an order of magnitude higher than that Tesla has - for better or worse. I see how Tesla can barely handle making three cars and basically produces only variations of the same battery and motor. GM for example has like 10 different engine platforms each with variants and who knows how many unique vehicles (60? 100?) Imagine if GM said tomorrow that they’re going to completely stop all ICE R&D and production and only produce electric cars. To me an analogy would be like the US mobilizing on December 8 1941; Japan at the time had a tremendous advantage in military equipment and personnel but was extremely limited in ultimate resources. Within 3 years Americans were standing on Japanese soil. I believe any of the major OEM’s could overtake Tesla if they wanted, but they don’t see it as profitable or necessary at this point. But it’s coming…they are all dumping massive resources into battery electric drivetrains.
Currently, Tesla’s bonds are selling on the secondary markets for 88 cents on the dollar—an unusually low value. "To be trading at 88 means that these bondholders are expecting to only be paid 88% of the principal amount of these bonds—that is, not 100% as owed contractually
The bigger news today is that Tesla, which is investing insanely (dare we say betting the farm) on their new factory in China, still doesn’t have an operating license yet but agreed to pay $300MM+/yr in taxes or give the land back (with the improvements):
I think there’s blame on both sides here. Musk and marketing should’ve used a different name for their system. “Autopilot” gives too much of a false sense of security vs Super Cruise, Pro Pilot Assist, etc. However, the manual clearly does state that you should be paying attention as the system isn’t designed for FSD yet, and people are just plain stupid, and play Russian roulette “cause it’s cool.”
OTOH, Musk is somewhat of a genius in the fact he got people to be live Guinea pigs, and made them pay substantial money for doing so.
If this goes to court, the question will be: can a person who has heard some of the things Tesla and Musk have said about Autopilot reasonably understand what “Autopilot” does and does not do? They’ll put a bunch of clips up of him talking about how sophisticated it is and all of the things that it can do since the beginning of the year and how close FSD is to regulatory approval it is, and making jokes on Twitter about a guy getting laid while “driving” on auto pilot.
If you just look at the March rebranding of all the features that used to be auto pilot and enhanced auto pilot and full self driving and the fact that most Tesla owners are confused.
The risk to Tesla is not even that they lose this one case for wrongful death, but that a court determines that the liability of a car using assistive technology belongs with the manufacturer and not the operator because of how that technology has been branded.
Yes, In the process to help bolster investment, Musk’s mouth may have caused him some grief again and over glorified what the capabilities are now and in the near future. His famous over promise and under deliver playbook.
That said, I suspect this gets settled out of court, docs sealed and swept under the rug. He doesn’t need nor want a high profile trial, so I suspect he and legal settle.
Same thing would happen if a semi pulled out in front of a brand new Audi with driver assist features. This isn’t a defect with the car. It’s a shame that people continue to malign Tesla over safety, when they have one of the safest cars on the road. (Both standard active safety features + strong crash structure)
you guys can’t help yourself…lol. When elon tells you to jump off the cliff, DON’T DO IT!