| 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. |
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.