[JoshCole]

> “Lying” is a bit emotive, suggests you might be a bit too invested here to get the argument the GP was making.

Emotion doesn't come into it. You built an argument upon a poor foundation. In strictly logical terms even if your argument structure was correct your argument would be invalid because its premises aren't correct.

You said several things that are objectively false. I know them to be false because I have first hand experience which shows me that they are false. Moreover, considering that Tesla has an industry leading satisfaction score, I know that my experience is not uncommon. What is uncommon, even vanishingly rare, is the veracity of the statements which you used when building the case against Tesla.

Perhaps I sound emotive because I referred to what you did as lying. The principle of charity isn't leaving me much room for you, because you are either wrong and informed or wrong and uninformed. You can take your pick, but whichever you choose don't cheapen the debate by appealing to me as being emotional.

> Look, Tesla got early success in EVs by being considerably better where everyone else was weak (drivetrain, battery, software, charging network). That doesn’t mean it’s not weak where they are strong (QC, basic manfacturing competencies like panel gaps, dealer network, interaction switchgear refined over generations).

This is a very different argument than the idea that it is a no brainer to go with Mercedes. You are moving the goal posts. It is a stronger argument too. Unfortunately, you don't support it well. For example, the argument for the dealer network being an advantage rather than a liability seems doubtful to me. Years back during the era Tesla was rising there were other EVs. Dealerships recognized that recurring revenue from maintenance wasn't as high for these vehicles. They intentionally sabotaged sales of EV vehicles, following perverse incentives, by doing things like giving test rides on vehicles which hadn't been charged and then using the resulting failure to persuade to other purchases. This is a liability, I think, but existing laws tend to protect dealerships as a model at the expense of car companies. So it isn't something that Mercedes and other car manufacturers can easily circumvent. Worse is that the experience at a dealership is much much worse than ordering things over the internet. Tesla just drives the car to your door after you order it. Dealerships expect someone else to drive you there and to go through high pressure sales channels. Tesla can pursue a three click and order model, but dealerships would be furious and go after automakers legally if they were cut out of the loop.

> Regardless, what matters is there are people who feel about Mercedes the way you clearly feel about Tesla.

Again, you are making a very different argument. We started with average Jane not devoted Mercedes fan. Trying to strawman my position by switching from average Jane to devoted Mercedes fan is not at all in keeping with the principle of charity. It also does a disservice to the OP you try to represent, because it contradicts their post, yet you act like you are speaking for them.

> GP is betting there’s a huge market for “car like I always knew it from a manufacturer I love except with a battery” and I’ll bet they’re right.

Which is reasonable, which lets you convince yourself you are right, but average Jane would rather pay $100k for four times as much space or save $50,000 to $80,000 and /still get more space and better range. And she might even like the Tesla aesthetic more than Mercedes: it is Tesla, after all, that has the majority of the EV market. Presumably if their aesthetic was strictly inferior to alternatives that wouldn't be the case. Regardless it doesn't really matter - taste is by its very nature subjective. It is the heart of qualia, not a criteria we can evaluate on behalf of others without knowing their preference set.

[marbletiles]

The principle of charity is to make the strongest possible version you can imagine of the opposing argument, and I also struggle with constructing yours. It appears to be “no electric car buyer with $140k to spend could ever rationally choose anything other than a Tesla”.

If that’s your position, as a Tesla owner who has invested an awful lot of effort across this post in battling Someones Wrong On The Internet, I’m going to say there’s emotion at play, yes.

If it’s merely “a Mercedes isn’t a slam dunk choice, Tesla still has something to offer”, well yes, that is true.

Regardless, and after reflecting on everything you said, I do now think Tesla is quite like Apple here. Just as with the first few years of the iPhone, they created the market and had it essentially to themselves. They offer a limited set of choices and highly opinionated take-it-or-leave design with fixed high prices.

Now the other manufacturers are arriving, just as the array of Androids did, with a variety of models, price points and customisability.

Now will follow years of mutual incomprehensibility and internet arguing over why one set of trade-offs are objectively better than another.

[JoshCole]

> It appears to be “no electric car buyer with $140k to spend could ever rationally choose anything other than a Tesla”.

My argument is that it isn't credible that buying the Mercedes is so obviously superior that is, and I quote the GP, "the no brainer" decision on account of it being "better value for money" because on every metric worthy of note the Tesla has superior statistics while lower cost except for qualities which are highly subjective. Moreover, the GP used a comparison with a vehicle that is in a different class - an SUV versus a sedan. Tesla has a sedan style vehicle - it crushes on the metrics much moreso than the SUV does while being at the same price point. Moreover, on pure value? They have comparable metrics for $80,000 less. I'm absolutely sure some people will prefer the aesthetic of Mercedes, but claiming value for money superiority let alone claiming it so much so that the purchase is a no brainer is objectively wrong whereas the accurate claim that they have a potential subjective appeal is a much lesser claim that I don't disagree with.

> Now the other manufacturers are arriving, just as the array of Androids did, with a variety of models, price points and customisability.

Yes, that is pretty much exactly what is happening. Complete with the death of the former type of phone and the threat to legacy business which that shift includes.

It is slow in happening because mass manufacture of cars isn't something that happens instantly - we don't even have the capacity in terms of minerals to meet the demand that the shift is creating, nor the volume of production at a high enough ramp to allow for the mass transition as we saw with phones. So a lot of people aren't noticing that it is like this, because the transition with phones was relatively fast. They are using the wrong mental model of transition speed. The better one is something more like the transition from horses to cars - fifty years after the ICE engine, horses finally got phased off farms, these transitions are playing out on a much larger time scale then our transition to smart phones, but they aren't actually so different.

Mercedes in this model isn't Apple, but Blackberry - great and in theory they should be able to survive, on the fundamentals of the current product, they have an advantage. Ergonomically, they execute better, but tragically they do so according to the old paradigms. The thing that a lot of people are anticipating is that the old paradigms are about to be destroyed by the smart car which in this case means the car that drives itself, not the car that runs on electricity provided by batteries. Thus, the Tesla valuations.

Ironically, auto makers like Mercedes-Benz are actually relying on BlackBerry QNX for some of the smart car war. So in a way we're seeing the BlackBerry versus Silicon Valley play out a second time. It is kind of shocking to me that they would go this route, since I figured the obvious partnerships would be with Google, not Blackberry, but I don't find their decision to be a strategic blunder. When I realized the strategic position that BlackBerry put itself in with regard to car companies, I switched to long BlackBerry. Apparently the market disagrees with me on this potential. It seems firmly convinced Tesla will win, but I suspect everyone will get to full self-driving sooner rather than later even if Tesla does get there first.

> They offer a limited set of choices and highly opinionated take-it-or-leave design with fixed high prices.

Tesla will not aim to be high priced; they'll aim to be the budget vehicle. It is a strategic imperative introduced by both climate change needing to be solved and also by the demand for vehicle telemetry to enable deep learning at a massive scale. So while this is true historically, it is a bad going forward prediction as to how Tesla will behave. You can already see this in their strategic decisions with the Model 3, which after factoring in ToC is actually a contender among budget cars, rather than the luxury segment. They don't want to be Apple; they want to be the future.