[JayHost]

I remember their plan is basically how Ford operated.

It's just crazy to see them beat the competition so badly.

I remember seeing the concept car for the Chevy Volt a few years ago and thinking how cool it was.

Then they released it and made it aerodynamic and thus BORING.

It's pretty nuts this car is 35k and the list of advantages to disadvantages can be summed as.

There's no reason to buy any other car.

[ZeroGravitas]

> It's just crazy to see them beat the competition so badly.

There's a video talk on youtube by one of the original Tesla co-founders, Marc Tarpenning:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf15nMnayXk

and his take on it (in amongst lots of other cool info), learned from later consulting for those same companies, was that the car companies outsourced everything but the engine. Then tesla came along, bought all the standard parts (windscreen wipers etc.) from these third party companies, and have no need for ICE engines.

So now you have people, who built their entire corporate status hierarchy around ICE engine experience, trying to start afresh.

[coredog64]

Third party should be in quotes. Visteon, Delphi, Denso et al aren't really what you'd think of when you think third party. They're more of a way to split up parts of the same business for tax/labor advantages.

[jzwinck]

Outsourcing everything but the engine is an interesting concept and I'm sure it applies to some cars. But I have a striking counterexample. The Ford Taurus SHO from the 90s had a Yamaha engine and a Mazda transmission. This was a flagship car, and from its inception Ford outsourced design and manufacture of the main thing that made it unique.

[Hermel]

>It's just crazy to see them beat the competition so badly.

The BMW electric cars (i3 and i8) are quite successful, beating Tesla sales-wise in Germany and selling half as many world-wide.

The great weakness of the Tesla S in the German market ist the German autobahn, where it runs out of energy very quickly (after an hour or so for aggressive drivers). The Tesla S is not designed for sustained high speeds.

[martin_bech]

The i3 is a nice small car, but warranty of the battery is horrible, and the range is only so so, specially in cold weater. The i8 is really a plug in hybrid, looks really amazing, but is slower, holds fewer people, and has less space than my Tesla Model S85D. The autobahn is very valid point, driving at 200km/h+ for sustained amounts of time will drain the battery(the amount if sheer wind resistance, makes power used pr km. skyrocket), but driving at 130-150km/h, and stopping and charging when you are low (10% chargeish) is quite effective, as you charge quite fast, when the battery is warm, and low. Thankfully the autobahn always has sections of roadwork, and here the Model S powertrain is very effective at cruising :) .

[Reason077]

The i3 is a nice small car, but warranty of the battery is horrible

The battery on the i3 is warrantied for 8 years or 100,000 miles, with a drop below 70% of the original capacity considered to be a battery failure.

Tesla also have an 8-year battery warranty, with unlimited miles, but (afaik) they do not explicitly specify what level of capacity loss would be a warranty failure.

Considering most people are unlikely to exceed 100,000 miles in 8 years in a "city car" like the i3, is this really a horrible warranty?

[martin_bech]

I was sure the warranty was worse, when I was looking at buying one, but 70% of realworld range would be something like 44miles on a full charge to empty. That would be horrible. My Tesla has lost very very little range in ist first year, 1 or 2%.

[Reason077]

I see your point. A 30% drop in capacity in an 80-mile range car is worse than a 30% drop in one that started with 280 miles.

But these are worst-case scenarios. Hopefully the batteries will last much longer than what they're warrantied for.

And with any luck, affordable aftermarket battery replacements will be common enough by the time the battery needs replacing (and may give a lot more range, too).

[Reason077]

The great weakness of the Tesla S in the German market ist the German autobahn, where it runs out of energy very quickly (after an hour or so for aggressive drivers).

OK, if you're averaging 200 km/h on the Autobahn then you will run out of energy pretty quickly. But this is just as true with ICE vehicles. If you're getting twice the energy consumption in an EV then you'll also be getting twice the fuel consumption in an ICE, and you'll have to stop and refuel pretty quickly.

So, with an EV, as long as there is a fast enough charger at the other end, who cares? You travelled 200km in that hour, you probably got where you wanted to go. Even if you spend 25 minutes recharging at a supercharger, you still got there quicker than if you drove at 100km/h!

Audi are already talking about 800V, ~300kW fast chargers that can recharge that 200km of range in 10 minutes. At these kind of speeds, the difference between recharging an EV and refuelling an ICE car becomes pretty negligable.

The Tesla S is not designed for sustained high speeds.

Simply not true. There's plenty of Tesla videos on YouTube showing sustained, comfortable driving at 200km/h+ autobahn speeds.

[pluma]

> averaging 200 km/h on the Autobahn

The recommended average speed on the Autobahn is 130 km/h. In reality due to congestion, noise reduction, construction work and maintenance there are probably more stretches with limits below that than not (typically 80 km/h or 60 km/h around roadworks, though there are also plenty of 100 km/h and 120 km/h stretches for no obvious reasons). Typical comfortable driving speed tends to be no more than 180 km/h, though if you don't want to have to break and accelerate all the time you probably don't want to go too far beyond 160 km/h.

I won't deny that depending on the time of day and the particular route you may be able to drive 200+ km/h on the Autobahn but talking about the implications of 200 km/h average speed as if it was an even remotely realistic representation is frankly absurd.

[lucaspiller]

> where it runs out of energy very quickly (after an hour or so for aggressive drivers)

Won't this be the case for any car though, especially sports cars which usually have a lower range? If you are driving at an average speed of 160km/h+ then you are going to need to stop fairly often. With the current EV technology any car will feel limited compared to an oil powered car which you can 'recharge' in under 5 minutes.

[usrusr]

Sure, that holds for any EV. Aerodynamic drag is such a drag, to put it in a really terrible pun.

That's why in a market with a high speed road network, the whole gambit of marketing EV as sexy fast car fails. It's trivial to make an EV max out traction for acceleration (aka "american fast") but battery density makes it impossible to give them any semblance of high speed endurance ("german fast").

It's therefore absolutely no surprise that the german car industry is doomed to focus on boring "reasonable city car" for their EV efforts and does not build their own entries for the Tesla class of cars. They have to skip the training wheels phase of building expensive luxury acceleration monsters and jump right into the much more difficult task of selling boring, reasonable cars that won't take a deadly hit when the manual says that you can't go fast if you want to see anything close to the advertised range. The autobahn has been a successful marketing stunt for many decades ("might be designed by engineers who push 200 km/h every day on their way to work" was an implicit ingredient of brand identities), but for electric, it is suddenly backfiring.

[JugMarker]

I would love a Tesla for my daily commute in Frankfurt, but there are no charging stations. I actually live in walking distance of a Tesla store, but you can charge your car only during business hours.

[jvm]

Surely you have never tried to operate an i3 at 80 MPH, I can assure you it has at most 50 miles range at that speed.

[tajen]

The lifetime of most cars is 14-20 years (half of it on the second-hand market). Tesla's is 8 years, if I understand. It makes their cars twice as expensive in effect.

[bronson]

The warranty is 8 years. Cars don't just die the moment the warranty runs out, including Teslas.

https://www.teslamotors.com/blog/infinite-mile-warranty

[jedmeyers]

The is no practical way to service a Tesla yourself or in a 3rd party repair shop, like you can a 15 year old Civic. Therefore used Teslas would quickly become financially disadvantageous to service and their price would approach zero on a secondary market.

[Reason077]

The is no practical way to service a Tesla yourself or in a 3rd party repair shop

Do you think that will still be true in 8, 12, or 15 years?

There's nothing about an EV that makes it fundamentally more difficult to service or repair compared to an ICE vehicle, other than the fact that they're not as common yet. But in time, EVs will be as ordinary as any Honda.

There's some interesting videos on YouTube where a guy in Switzerland bought a used Tesla motor and inverter, dragged it back to his flat and managed to power it up and spin it using his own custom built universal controller (he's planning to use it in his own electric car conversion).

The point is: EV aren't some magic black box that can't be understood by normal people. They can be hacked, serviced, repaired just like any other car.

[_ph_]

Which current production car is easily serviceable at third party repair shops? They are pretty much all closed down computers. Also, most services required on the engine and support for older cars are just not required on a Tesla. So it is not obvious that it would be more expensive to maintain than any other car, most likely the opposite.

[gambiting]

Things are really not as bad as you think. Even in brand new cars you can replace the brakes, suspension, wishbones, dampers, steering column, oil pans, all filters, oil&fuel pumps, service the air conditioning unit and I am reasonably certain you could do full engine maintenance as well. Most importantly, parts for any new vehicle are publicly available, be it a Fiat 500 or a Mercedes S-Class.

On the other hand, Tesla will not sell you the parts. Tesla can at any time deactivate your vehicle if they think it's not fit for driving(as they already do in case of accidents), even remotely, and you have to bring it to their dealership to have it reactivated after it passes their tests. I can't think of any conventional car that you have to do that for, I've seen Range Rovers after horrible crashes that have been fixed and put on the road again, and no one had to ask Land Rover for permission to do that.

But even if we forget about that - the biggest cost of owning a second hand Tesla is always going to be the battery. As the value of a Tesla falls down with time, the cost of a new battery for it will remain constant, making a purchase of a second hand Tesla prohibitive. Think about it this way - a cost of 2009 MacBook might have fallen down to around ~$100, but a new battery for it will cost you ~$150. The computer got cheap with time but the parts remained the same price, making a purchase of a 7-year old laptop a bad idea, unless you can do without a battery(and obviously you can't do that in a car).

In conventional cars, if you have a 20-year old Mercedes with a dead engine, you go online and find the same engine, with fewer miles on it and in running condition, you buy it for a few hundred dollars, get it installed and you are back on the road. In a Tesla, no one is going to fit you a second-hand electric motor if your old one dies, because Tesla won't allow it.

[MertsA]

>Even in brand new cars you can replace the brakes

Just as a note, that's not always true. Replacing brake pads is one thing, but if you need to take the caliper off for service or air gets into the ABS system, you may find yourself unable to properly bleed the brakes without access to the tools needed to get the ECU to bleed the ABS system.

Depending on the car there really might not be any feasible way to complete some repair other than to have the dealer fix it. It's not even just obscure dealer only parts that other vendors don't make. When it comes to anything related to programming control modules, the manufacturers seem to want to lock this down as much as possible.

[_ea1k]

The Mac example for batteries is an unrealistic one. For most computers, replacement batteries are actually relatively cheap.

You do make a good point about the motors, though. I haven't seen much hope for an outside replacement for that, though.

[manmal]

You are correct. We don't know what batteries will cost in 8 years though. They might be as cheap as a used Mercedes engine then.

[anexprogrammer]

Most of them.

The little third party garage I've used for years has enough of the diagnostic computer kit to handle most problems. When something unusual pops up they have a good relationship with at least some of the main dealers to proceed - without me having to pay main dealer prices on anything.

They have the added advantage that I trust them to have done the work they say they have.

They're not unusual as far as independents go, just a couple of guys doing a good job.

I don't think many independents can support electric vehicles, but I'm sure specialists will spring up as the market continues to mature.

[sbalea]

My 2 years old BMW is one of those heavily computerized cars and can easily be serviced at third party shops. There's a whole network of them that specialize in BMW service, maintenance, and modding. Not to mention that anyone interested can, ahem, 'acquire' BMW service software and start hacking away at their car. You need to expand your tool set to include an Ethernet to ODB2 adapter, but that won't stop even an amateur tinkerer like me. Teslas, on the other hand, don't even provide a working ODB2 port, and attempts to hook up to the car's internal network were met with legal threats.

[Reason077]

Teslas, on the other hand, don't even provide a working ODB2 port, and attempts to hook up to the car's internal network were met with legal threats.

I don't know about legal threats, but there is information available online about how to access the Model S CAN bus:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Exploring-the-Tesla-Model-S-...

[zhte415]

My wife has a 9 year old BMW which is servicable at 3rd party shops. Including sensor work and debugging error messages. BMWs are so ubiquitous, perhaps part of the reason.

[_ea1k]

There is a small industry of third party companies servicing hybrid vehicles at the moment, including refurbishing of battery packs.

If the product is successful, similar services will emerge for Tesla products.

[tajen]

Tesla deactivates the car and declares it unfit for road if any part was replaced, until you bring it in for service. Beyond 8 years, we don't know yet how to obtain this service. If Tesla clarified this unknown, it could almost double the value of the cars.

[sudhirj]

8 years for the battery or the car? The batteries are replacable in a minute or so.

[NickM]

8 years, unlimited miles for the battery and the drivetrain. 4 years and 50k miles for everything else.

[green7ea]

The batteries are the single biggest cost in an electric car. The rest is all much cheaper than a conventional car. Replacing a your batteries would be a significant cost compared to buying a new car. It might even be 1/3 of the new ticket price.

[akmiller]

Last I saw the battery expectation is around 15 years. In 15 years, at the rate of development of EV's and research/development being put into batteries, it would be reasonable to expect that batteries would be significantly cheaper with much better technology.

[_fizz_buzz_]

> It's just crazy to see them beat the competition so badly.

This amazes me so much. I cannot believe that companies like Volkswagen basically ignore the EV market (except some half-assed E-Golf or something). I mean even if it really turns out to be fad - which I don't believe - don't they want to hedge their bets a little bit? Has nobody there ever heard of companies like Nokia, Blackberry, etc.?

[mikeash]

Toyota is the one that really baffles me. I can sorta understand car companies ignoring electric and just continuing to plod along with fossil fuels. I don't think it's wise, but it's what they know. But Toyota seems to be ignoring electric and instead focusing on hydrogen, which just makes no sense whatsoever. It's like they read a collection of EV myths (there's nowhere to charge, you can't take road trips, it's worse for the environment than a normal car) and decided to build a car that made them come true.

[tamal]

Meanwhile Toyota partners with Tesla to produce the minimum required number of zero-emissions vehicles in California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_RAV4_EV#Second_generati...

All the while denying that it's a good idea. Baffling.

[mikeash]

I'm not sure I see your point. Of course Toyota is going to build EVs if they're required to by law. It's not like they're going to give up the entire California market just because they don't believe in EVs.

[adwn]

It's the innovator's dilemma [1] in action.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma

[kelseyfrancis]

> There's no reason to buy any other car.

This seems beyond out-of-touch. There are plenty of good reasons. Cost, size, and the fact that you might need a car now and can't actually buy a Model 3 yet would be chief among them.

It seems like a pretty great car if you're in its particular market though.

[_pmf_]

> It's just crazy to see them beat the competition so badly.

They have not made a single dollar of profit. Yes, it's an incredibly successful and impressive technology demonstration, but production at the scale that is now required is completely different from the development stage.

One example: regular manufacturers are only able to keep their high production numbers because they are able to compensate for hiccups in the supply chain for one model by having evolved to be able to switch a factory to another model in a very short timeframe. A monoculture like Tesla (only model 3 in significant numbers) prevents this.

[illumin8]

Correction: every car they sell is profitable, but they've chosen to reinvest those profits to increase future manufacturing capacity.