Is this really a surprise? There are physical realities, and a single company can't suddenly reinvent a century of industry experience with some Silicon Valley pixie dust and government subsidies. Tesla, like many startups, is just rediscovering what it takes to build a car and what other companies have already figured out. Bringing a new drivetrain is not enough.
I guess because most of their competitors are 100 yrs old? Making cars is really, really hard. Tesla’s first mass produced car was only ten years ago, and their top two models 6 and 3 years ago. The average age of their entire fleet is in the low single digits.
There's a HN meme of sorts that goes like "I can build that same website functionality in a weekend, why does company XYZ employ 5000 people to do it?!"
It's a recurring theme because there's some truth to it. Someone can indeed build the core functionality of that website in a weekend, if they ignore 99% of the difficult work of doing it in production and supporting customers and all the rest of the mundane but important parts.
Building a car isn't that hard really. Lots of people do one-off car build in their garage with basic tools and a shoestring budget. And they can build a fun car which works! Sure, it's not maintainable nor supportable but they built it and it works great.
So while Tesla is well past the guy in a garage stage, they are still at the stage of "building cars is really easy" (if you ignore all the maintainability and supportability and long tail of parts availability and everything else that established manufacturers know how to do).
Honestly, That's not good enough. In the car world you can recruit car engineers to fix simple car production problems. Objectively most of Tesla's issues are due to the poor fit and finish of the cabin and general fitment of things together. IF you ignore the whole electric engine and just treat it like and ice vehicle, Telsa should just be building on the knowledge of others and hiring Toyota engineers to help the nail things like delivery a simple service schedule. Making sure that cars roll of the line with everything tight and having spares ready for consumable parts.
It's not an acceptable excuse to shrug your shoulders and say that they're new at this. The concept of delivering a vehicle isn't new and Telsa has a TON of money.
Change the genre of product to Tech / software engineering. If Telsa was a software company shipping a crap product that broke all the time and then suddenly you found out that they didn't do XYZ of industry standard you'd hold them to account for not taking standard approaches to standard problems.
Tesla produced the same number of cars in 2022 as they did in all years combined from 2012-2020. If you think it's easy to just stand up that level of production capacity, and that they are actually they are just ignoring simple production problems, then you are underestimating the challenge.
Things like panel gaps are not necessarily easy fixes - i.e. what if you know the solution to a 1mm improvement, but can't easily fix it without taking the production line down for x weeks because you need to change the robot arm and conveyor system?
There is a concept in manufacturing called the andon cord (a button / pull that activates a claxon and stops the line). Once the line stops, everyone swarms the problem and works on a fix. Toyota in the 80s pioneered its use and then beat the big 3 at manufacturing quality.
They aren't pulling the andon cord because the panel gap's are within tolerance but could be improved.
Parent post is talking about general fit and finish (i.e. tolerances being wide), try being a production line operative and pulling the andon because you think panel gaps could be decreased.
You are supposed to be pulling it if you notice the wiring loom is broken or something like that, not just fit and finish.
Besides, people are talking in this thread like lean / six sigma are new concepts that won't be already be fully embedded in the existing Tesla plants - this stuff is basic manufacturing which will already be fully embedded, but is just misunderstood by most people.
It seems that one basic misunderstanding is the idea that you could just jump into the deep end and start producing six sigma quality at scale. You can’t. Each sigma represents an order of magnitude of additional work at refining the production process, and that does not happen overnight.
Totally agree - you don't put an andon cord on your production line or 'do six sigma' and suddenly get perfect car quality - it's a slow and incremental process.
I guarantee they wouldn’t shut down the line while they wait for a fix for within-tolerance panel gap improvements - they would work on designing a fix that would be implementable on the line while continuing manufacture. Designing, Testing and Commissioning an improvement will often take many months.
The zero defect thing is fixing issues early rather than fixing them at the end - not shutting down the whole line if you identify that a tolerance can be improved and waiting for the fix.
As I understand it, the parent post is talking about defects that cause actual issues. If that's the case, then it sounds to me like the gaps aren't within tolerance.
Then you take it down and not make a sub-par product. I'm not sure why we all need to ascribe some sort of Messianic vibe to a car company. I'm also not sure I want to bow to the altar of "whip your well-paid employees to sacrifice the best years of their lives to push out meh vehicles" either.
1000% behind the electric push, but dang y'all, it is car company
People don’t realize that even corporations have budgets and have to choose what to invest in. It’s not as if TSLA is paying dividends. All of the money that comes in goes to somewhere.
They chose to invest in certain things (sales, manufacturing ramp up, pickup and semi development, charger network, driverless development etc.) and not in others (panel gaps, fit and finish, etc.)
Easy to decide you disagree but it is working for them.
>In the car world you can recruit car engineers to fix simple car production problems.
I'm no "car engineer", but I doubt most of Tesla's production issues are "simple".
>Change the genre of product to Tech / software engineering. If Telsa was a software company shipping a crap product that broke all the time and then suddenly you found out that they didn't do XYZ of industry standard you'd hold them to account for not taking standard approaches to standard problems.
Software is the last comparison I would have made. First of all Tesla is a software company. Secondly, the software industry is notorious for terrible products gaining massive market share. cough Google Docs/Sheets/Slides.
I don't know why you think Google Docs, Sheets and Slides are terrible products, I personally think they're great and much better than the alternatives that came before them, particularly in the problems they wanted to solve: fully Web-based document creation, editing and storage, and collaboration.
He merely asked why it’s considered a startup. Startup companies take employees from established competitors all the time. Startups can also make products poorly too.
Their valuation is three times larger than Toyota, yet they manufacture only 10% as much cars a year. It’s still deeply rooted in hopes of future expansion and innovations, lack of which they might not survive.
They sold about 1/8 the cars Toyota did in 2022 but they also made about 8x the profit per car. And Toyota has a huge debt load whereas Tesla had money in the bank + was growing + FSD will Soon™ be here (and if/when it does, Tesla's profits will explode) + there's the energy business + there will probably be something like AWS for AI in a year or three.
Funny enough I can comment on this with some data…
I was involved in a study a few years back that looked (in part) at how engineering undergraduates defined entrepreneurship and startup. It fortunately the results from that part ended up on the cutting room floor to focus out main paper on something else…
Generally, to undergraduate engineers, entrepreneurship and startups are defined by the following things:
Being in Silicon Valley/San Francisco
Doing something related to technology
Being financially successful (yes…noting another finding was that they often subconsciously conflated revenue and profit, but only when told the financial data was from a “startup”)
In mentality, I guess. If I was pressed to give a definition right now, I'd say a company stops being a startup when they have self-sustaining revenue without continual outside investments and subsidies propping them up. That hasn't been the case for Tesla the entire 20 years of the company's existence.
Also, valuation is effectively meaningless. That valuation has nearly zero correlation to Tesla's actual value.
tesla is a startup because it allows less strict oversight from the public. “startup” seems to now simply mean “burn cash until market dominance” or “regulations have mot caught up to our industry”. it is not an actual startup, just a court of public opinion one, allowing it to do shady shit under the guise of progress at any cost
I once read an opinion that stated that Tesla will eventually lose because they don't continually introduce new or updated models (say, every year) like other car brands do, and that person thought that they will lose customer favor because of it because their cars will be "the old thing" with no "new thing" available. In other words: Cars are fashion too, and Tesla only has one entry in each category. It's a good entry, but it's only one entry nevertheless.
I thought that was an interesting observation, and I've been reminded of it ever since. Maybe that person was right.
While unlikely to be that person, haha, I have mentioned that before. And I think the fashion argument is just one part of it. This whole time, it has showcased a hole in Tesla's capability. They simply aren't able to iterate their fleet. Look at Kia and Hyundai. They have dozens of models across all sorts of markets, and they were able to waltz into the EV market with immediate success. They already have more EV and hybrid models than Tesla's EV models and are quickly adding more. There's also an argument that hybrids are a growing, relatively untapped market sector, something Tesla is unlikely to be able to expand into.
An interesting take. I think we're already moving in a direction (at least in the US) where Tesla is becoming less "cool," but that's mostly because of their CEO, not their cars.
Tesla targets a very narrow range of the car market. It doesn't make much sense for them to have two similar-sized models, because the Venn diagram of "people who want an EV" and "people who want a $SIZE $BODY_STYLE" is already pretty narrow.
Did you not know that the Model S and X had new body, interior, mechanicals just a couple years ago? Making it the quickest production car ever made. How is that ancient history?
That's just a single example. To add just such an example to the other end of the scales: their factories still move at a glacial pace. Even a tortoise is faster.
To me teslas are still annoying and dangerous because of a bunch of small things last time i rented one, like buying a great computer, but the screen colours are inverted:
1) No buttons but shit quality touch "areas in places you have to guess" on steering wheel, is straight up dangerous, and incredibly annoying because you can't "get a feel" for anything you have to do, ie. turn lights, wipers etc.
2) No other knobs for sound, climate etc. instead touch screen. Same thing stupid, slow and dangerous.
3) No speedometer, "just look constantly to the right and down" ok now it's getting in to joke territory.
4) Shit interior.
A Renault Zoe cheap mini car is easier in day to day use because of this.
This is like reading a review of an iphone from an older dedicated blackberry user. It can take a bit to get used to advances in technology.
The Tesla UI is the best car UI I've ever used. By far. I would never want to go back.
1. There's zero guessing. The steering wheel touch zones are very nicely marked by bumps. I have never put my finger in the wrong spot.
2. You can configure the steering wheel buttons to do sound/climate/etc. But you're mostly meant to use voice and put everything on auto.
3. Never in my life have I just stared at the speedometer. Why are you staring at it so much? Is something wrong?
I don't buy this progress analogy. I'm from Scandinavia where we have Bang&Olufsen which were early adopters of touch controls, and it never came to sit well with me, knobs are still better.
I also used to produce music and buttons were always better, more tactile, then comes latency which is another modern problem - imagine a touch piano with 40ms delay, not good.
Someone also mentioned militaries changed back from touch to knobs because you'd never get the same speed and "feel".
I'm convinced the human mammal is simply adapted to use our hands with tools and materials that give good solid, instant feedback with lots of tactility, texture, depth and even sound and we'll hopefully realise this in the UX world.
Regarding the "who even looks at a speedometer" is just bizarre to me as a city/provincial driver also in Scandinavia. You need to look there continuously as speed limits more or less constantly change when driving here; from 30, to 50, then 40, then 80, then 30 and going more than 30% over you can get a huge fine and 1/3 strike to get your license revoked, ie. you actually have to glance quite a bit which i guess is why car manufacturers have put speedometers there for 100 years, isn't this a normal part of driving a car?
We've been using touchscreens daily for about 15 years now, and I am still enraged by the fundamental stupidity of a UI that puts your fingers on top of the thing you're trying to see, with gestures required that you can only guess at.
Just saw that they put the right and left indicator on the Cybertruck on top of each other on the left side of the steering wheel. Yeah that some really innovative UI. Watch MKBHD’s video on the Cybertruck and you’ll see that they’ve ran out of innovation and are just changing things for the sake of changing them. No rear view camera, driving console on top, no latch for glove compartment, no door handles, etc.
I’m all for innovation, but it just seems like Elon is being a contrarian since none of this improves driving at all. Deep down, it seems like Elon is checking how much he can mess with his loyal base by moving things around and making the driving UX worse. Probably strokes his ego.
Subjective. I feel completely the opposite about them when I've driven them.
Impressive technology, and admirable strides towards their mission, impressive engineers ... but with many failing: FSD, repairability, boring drive-feedback, insurance pricing, focus on speed over alsmost everything, manufacturing quality both inside and outside, and the design language of a taxi-cab to top it all off ... only the S can be considered a decent looking vehicle.
But, above all, once you lose goodwill (via the CEO behaving like a thirsty attention-grabbing idiot) you lose nearly everything. This is what I don't think is factored into their ridiculous company valuation.
Tesla have been both one of the most impressive companies of the last 20 years, and one of the biggest dissapointments (to me).
I'm curious what model you drove that led you to that opinion. I drive an AWD Model 3, but also drive a 2006 Subaru STI on the track. The STI doesn't have the original suspension (which wasn't bad, just wore out eventually) - now it has stiffer, much sportier, suspension for track racing.
All that said, I think the Model 3 feels remarkably sporty for how heavy it is. You can feel that weight in corners for sure, but I'd hardly call the ride "numb". I can't accelerate entirely through a typical corner like I can with the STI, but once the weight settles, and you're coming out of a corner, you can make up whatever was lost when scrubbing speed with instant torque. I think because of that, it feels far more like my STI than most all other cars I've driven.
We don't like "getting used to" going back in history.
Where the f*ck is a HUD in a tesla? That's exactly the kind of car which should be getting cool space-age tech like that.
Elon already went on twitter and said no HUD ever and disparaged people asking for it.
Why did another comment saying basically the same thing get mass downvoted and killed? HUDs are some of the coolest features in cars and tesla refusing to implement it is a deal breaker for a LOT of people in the know.
Exactly how I think too.. I recently moved from a BMW to the model y, dearly miss the superb hud on the beemer. I just can't understand why Tesla are being such obstinate donkeys even if comes to hud. With speed cameras every few km in Melbourne (Australia), and speed tolerance of just 2km over the limit, I am forced to take my eyes off the road abs double check my speed get frequently. If Tesla refuse to incorporate hud, then I will change to a BYD when the time comes to upgrade my model y. There is no shortage of alternatives today. I hope Tesla realise that their cars are starting to look too basic in comparison with the competition.
HUD symbology is focused at infinity, so there's no 'background'. The symbols and the real world are at the same hyperfocal point.
Fighter pilots have been using HUDs for 70 years and in the past 20 years they have become common in airliners as they hugely improve safety in low-visibility operations.
You might reconsider that opinion when you get old. When you cannot see well at short distances, it's difficult to see the writing on the monitor, so the HUD navigation really helps.
You’re just straight out incorrect. The HUD doesn’t obscure vision, and if adjusted correctly for position allows you to keep your eyes closer to the horizon while maintaining awareness of important information.
It’s the best thing about my new car and I can’t imagine buying something, other than a track beater, without it in the future.
The HUD is order qualifying for me now. I’ve had it in four BMWs, and if I had to do without gauges (which I don’t, because that is idiotic), the only acceptable substitute would be an HUD.
Drive by feel, isn’t this something everyone develops? You start to notice how fast things move outside the windows like trees, poles, lane lines. Admittedly, if stressed or excited then I tend to go a little faster but I check the speedometer then. Also I drive ICE and can hear/feel the engine. Guess that would be different in a Tesla.
Anyways, generally plenty of feedback to observe without needing to glue your eyes to a speedometer. Is this not a common thing?
I often discover I'm going well over the speed limit when driving my Model 3. I don't think the lack of speedometer (that I can see without looking down and to the right) is entirely to blame - though its location not being in my line of sight doesn't improve things.
For me, it's the relative silence of going from 0-60 MPH in under 4 seconds that does it. I have an ICE car that can almost do that, but it does so very loudly requires me to shift gears manually as it happens. It's a full body and mind experience, one full of very obvious feedback.
Mine is set to chime when I go 8 mph over (you can define this). Also, I tend to use the traffic aware cruise control on the highway to set a speed and not have to worry about it. Also, the speed is in the top left corner, it’s very easy to flick your eyes there.
As with most of the things that people worry about with these, it’s actually not a problem.
Checking and staring are two different things. I can glance at another woman without being slapped in the face, staring at that same woman may result in other outcomes.
I'll reluctantly agree with this notion, but will say that being the best car UI is hardly difficult to achieve.
> There's zero guessing.
What? Do you use the UI every day? I do, and I'm constantly guessing where the latest UI update moved things to.
I suspect my Model 3 doesn't have "touch zones" on the steering wheel either, since if it I did, I'd certainly be touching them unintentionally. Or maybe my Model 3 does have them, and I just haven't found the UI control/setting to know if I do or not.
The configurable steering wheel button is a huge win in terms of usability, and it's also relatively new to the Model 3.
> you're mostly meant to use voice and put everything in auto.
Some of us don't have voices. Being able to speak out loud should not be a requirement for driving a vehicle.
Regarding everything being in auto: when everything is in auto, sometimes the car wants to automatically slam on the brakes or swerve into oncoming traffic or stopped police cars. You may be comfortable with that risk. I am not.
I have also never stared at my speedometer, but that's usually because on most cars it's easy to just glance down and see a speedometer.
On the Model 3, you have to: remember where the speedometer is now (since UI updates have moved it - it's had 4 different locations since I've owned my Tesla). Once you do find it, you have to ignore all the other UI baubles crowding around it. There are dancing grey 3D models of nearby vehicles, notifications, yellow icons, if your blinker is on, and you found the setting to enable it, sometimes a side camera overlay alternating between something you can see and full yellow/white from brightness of the blinker over exposing the shot, green icons, models of nearby vehicles that are swapping out between a truck shape, a sideways car shape, cones, then back into the sedan model (even though the vehicle it's rendering is actually a tiny old pick up trick).
It UI may be the "best car UI" you've ever used, but that doesn't mean touch-screen-only controls in a vehicle are even remotely a good idea.
I'm in no position to say how you should find joy in life, but your 0.002% number is so grossly inaccurate that it borders on insulting. I'll assume you're being ignorant rather than being an ableist. Maybe you're trying to make a point too, but people who call others out for "grasping at straws" don't make mistakes like that.
Thing is, the number of adult Americans who cannot use their voice to control a Tesla is about 17.5 million.
What you categorize as "grasping at straws" is me responding to a post where someone asserted that "you're mostly meant to use voice and put everything on auto" to operate your car. Remarking that not everyone can do that isn't grasping at straws, it's just a fact. Even if we used your 0.002% number, that's easily 600k people who cannot operate a Tesla using only their voice. Voice control is not a solution to poor controls.
Weird, too, that of all the things I said, that's what you decide to reply about. The one, actually non-subjective reason why "using your voice" isn't the solution, is the one thing you consider to be a stretch.
You forgot the third: they (Silicon Valley) also change the world. For the better. Most of my (and my family’s) every day work and fun are coming from SV. I would not give it up for anything else. If occasionally breaking things is the price - I am more than willing to pay it.
In Norway they revolutionised the car market. They were the very first electric car that people actually wanted to buy. If it hadn’t been for Tesla proving the market for electric cars, I don’t think any other brands would have bothered. So far in 2023 83% of all new cars are electric.
In 2022 every fourth car sold (including petrol/diesel) was a Tesla.
You forgot the very "unimportant" detail which was that electric cars in Norway were zero VAT and tax for electric cars until this year (normal VAT is 25%).
Well, gee, no wonder that people were buying them left and right when the tax discount was about 16-20k NOK per car on average!
And that is just buying the car - Norway subsidizes electric mobility in many other ways so even today registering a new electric is cheaper than a gasoline car, despite the gas powered vehicles normally costing about 50% less.
So, please, when waving this sort of argument about, don't "forget" to put it in context.
Norway is a special case because of government policies, not because Tesla did anything particularly great there. They were just the only ones on the market at the time so people essentially had to buy a Tesla if they wanted to benefit from the generous subsidies because there simply wasn't anything else available. Today the situation is different, though.
This does not, however, change the fact that it became one of the first mass markeds in the world for electric cars, where Tesla has kept the lead even when all the legacy auto companies are selling electric cars. The Model Y is the most sold var model in Norway in 2023, outselling the number two, VW ID4 by 3-4 times.
Model Y is the most sold car model in the world in 2023.
Of course it was leader in a market of one. The alternatives were Nissan Leaf and probably the first gen Renault Zoe. Nobody would buy those.
The original argument was not that they were "leader" but that somehow people were buying Teslas for their quality or being better than everything else.
This just brought the price of electric cars in line with petrol cars of the same size.
When Tesla introduced the Model S there were no other electric sedans on the market.
Tesla introduced the Model X in 2015, it’s now 2023 and you still have to wait almost 2 years more if you want Volvo’s competitor to the Model X. Even with all the amazing subsidies Volvo is still a decade late to the party!
yes - wouldn't it be lovely to see governments uninvolved in these sorts of market decisions?
If the government discounts cars by 25% - that's one thing. But let's not forget too that the greater part of the cost of running a car (the fuel) is mainly made up by tax on the fuel - it itself is an artificial price.
Nothing about transport is reflective of the underlying reality. Its simply a governmental chess board, and could be shifted at any time by new legislation, eg if a tax is introduced to add 50% tax on the electricity used for cars.
Regardless of the worthiness of this or that cause - its most interesting that none of this the free market in action. Its also licensing, government grants, taxes... in all honesty what is the difference between this and communism - where the government overtly controls the actions of the masses?
> yes - wouldn't it be lovely to see governments uninvolved in these sorts of market decisions?
I agree. It should start with stopping all fossil fuel subsidies, 7 trillions/year and growing. And ethanol subsides, subsidizing ethanol production on 40m acres, just in US.
And have fossil fuel companies pay for their own military to protect their 6 million assets and 16 million transportation flows[2]. It should be determined by the companies themselves (free market) if these are worth protection, instead of having Govts protect these worldwide. Solar, on the other hand, will not require there protections, it does not depend on the exploration, extraction, shipping, processing, burning, waste output of any fuel. Solar is distributed, on every roof and field, nearly impossible for anyone to invade and destroy.
> the greater part of the cost of running a car (the fuel) is mainly made up by tax on the fuel
That may be true in Europe, but not here in the US. In the US, the federal gasoline tax is currently about $.18 per gallon, and state taxes range from about $.09 to $.58 per gallon[1] (with the median around $0.27). The average price of gasoline in the US has been around $3.00 per gallon[2] ($0.79 per liter), so the total tax would range from about 9% to 25% of the cost, depending on the state.
The price of gas in most European countries is much higher, with Norway paying over twice the US average (US $7.87 / US gallon).[3]
Norway has been has been massively subsidising EVs for a decade.
While Tesla probably played a role in EV adoption, I think you are overstating it by a lot. If the main factor wasn't economic we would see these same stats in every other country where a Tesla can be bought.
>Norway has been has been massively subsidising EVs for a decade.
And every country has been massively subsidizing ICEs since their creation, both explicitly and implicitly (by failing to price in the enormous externalities, engaging in nasty geopolitics up to and including war for oil, tolerance for enormous human atrocities and authoritarian regimes, etc).
Economics certainly matters, but there still have to be vehicles people want to actually buy and can perform as they wish. For me BEVs haven't hit that yet even though I could afford one. Like, there's been a surprisingly slow rollout when it comes to trucks, I think the Cybertruck is the first one I'd consider a real useful (in theory) truck with a minimum of a 6.5' bed. Except build quality is apparently pants, there is all the Tesla spying, and they downgraded the max range option from 500 (paper, which they also apparently lied about) miles (which even on paper would be like 300-350 miles in winter which would be a good useful range), and other problems. Even if the US Government offered me 50% subsidies or something ludicrous for a BEV truck it wouldn't matter if there's literally nothing I want to buy. I think building cars that were actively good vs what came before mattered, as does the charging network. Even if Tesla has run into awful scaling problems and founder-syndrome as happens so often that doesn't IMO negate that.
Norway is one of the countries with the highest GDP per capita. I think this puts the norwegian consumer in a better position to by an EV even if it costs more than a comparable ICE vehicle. Not sure that is true all over the world.
This is not true, the Leaf was selling in the thousands before Tesla entered the Norwegian market in mid 2013. The Leaf was the best selling car of all new cars in October 2013.
I might also have bought one if I had been in the market for a car at that time. But not because I would have wanted it, but because I would have needed it :)
I think my comment above was indeed a bit snarky and is rightfully getting downvoted.
Only car. Was commuting to and from grad school, my folks place, and my apartment. I pushed it pretty far, and was able to access 240 charging in 2/3, and used 120 overnight. Admittedly did not have a kid, and my wife was able to walk everywhere during the weeks. It was a great car tho!
I feel like the subsidies given by the government did that. Free parking, free cash towards the car, no taxes, etc. Is what revolutionised the electric car market. And of course most new cars are electric. They are banning the sale of gas powered cars in a couple years in Norway. Maybe Tesla made a car prior wanted but the government made it easy for them to buy it.
Let me quickly ask you if Norwegians are seeing the same rates of Tesla mishaps as the rest of the world ( or atleast North America )?
If you happened to be unaware all of these Tesla-skeptics ( atleast this latest round of skeptics ) are being buoyed by this Reuters report about major problems Tesla owners have faced off late. One describing a new owner's experience with his spanking new Tesla : "The vehicle’s front-right suspension had collapsed, and parts of the car loudly scraped the road as it came to a stop."
Tesla blamed drivers for failures of parts it long knew were defective
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-musk-steering-suspension/
Don’t understand how that guy ended up paying for the failure as under UK Consumer Law that fault is presumed to be a manufacturing one on a car that new and Tesla should replace the card
BMW did bother. They started selling the i3 at the same time then Tesla. And I think it was even better sold then Tesla in the states for some time.
Tesla had more aggressive marketing that was hot air at the end of the day …
I don't think anyone who needs a car would trade their current family car for an i3. It's a nice extra car to use for commuting to the office or popping by the shop, but it can't exactly fit a family of four heading out for their summer holiday.
The i3 came out before the model 3. Before the model 3, Tesla only had the model S (and maybe X?), which is not meant for mass market like the 3 was. Until 2017, Tesla simply didn’t have a mass market vehicle.
> Were it not for Tesla, America wouldn’t be on a path towards electrified transport
That, too, is up for discussion, but not for now. I’ll leave it by saying that, without Tesla willing to sell cars at a loss for a long time, it might be a bit less further on that path, but I think California and/or the EU would have forced it by now to get on that path, by setting goals for cars sold within their jurisdictions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_effect, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect)
There also can be discussion about whether Tesla’s path is the right pat, but that definitely is for another time.
You think the GM and Ford gigafactories would have taken up the slack, ignoring the chance to milk existing ICE investments for another decade? The charging network would have spontaneously emerged and somehow been as good as what Tesla delivers?
> California and/or the EU would have forced it by now to get on that path
For hybrids, maybe. California is a major oil producer [1]. That lobby counterbalanced the environmental wing for decades. If there wasn’t a mass-market EV, Sacramento wouldn’t have had many options.
> that definitely is for another time
Lol, is this a thing now? We’re obviously discussing it at this time.
Without Tesla German incumbents would have lobbied EU just to mandate biofuels and there would be fever EV:s. Tesla did drag an industry kicking and screaming to EVs.
If not for Tesla, America (& the Western world in general) might not be on a path towards private inefficient electrified road transport, leaving much more room for investment in & upselling of vastly more sustainable non-road transport, as has been done in China.
Musk in particular has form here - consistently blocking & derailing all potential high-speed rail projects for the west coast in favour of white elephants (the material result being a maintained reliance on roads, and - by extension - his big cobalt-mine-dependent business).
> derailing all potential high-speed rail projects for the west coast
Musk ran California’s high-speed rail through the Central Valley?
I like public transport. But America isn’t built for it. Switching to trains would mean upending and dissolving tens of millions’ communities. There was no other path without EVs and trains galore; it was—and is—between EVs and ICE cars.
> Weren't communities dissolved to build the massive highway network US has?
Yes. It was traumatic and widely regarded as a mistake. Given the precedent, and our massively increased per-capita resources today versus in the post-War era, you'd be fighting an army of suburban Jane Jacobs to remake America à la China or Europe.
Seems a very honest interpretation of events to purport that Musk has had no influence over transport in California.
> America isn’t built for it.
That rhetoric is used the world over as an excuse to bolster against progressive innovation of all kinds. It's been debunked countless times. "Dissolving" communities to make way for rail is of course also nonsense.
China may be investing in rail but that doesn't seem to be incompatible with BEV adoption. As of 2022, 22% of all new car sales in China were electrics.[1] In the US it was only 6% that year[2], and looks to be about 8% for 2023.[3]
China also would have invested heavily in EVs regardless of Tesla. They simply don’t have much oil, and importing it is a huge national security problem for them. Couple that with their huge pollution problem and tons of cars even with lots of mass transit options, EVs were inevitable and already coming along before the model 3 came out.
I doubt that. The innovation in lithium ion batteries was fueled by the demand for consumer electronics, laptops in particular. It’s the batteries that made electric cars possible.
Tesla’s did kick off the trend of big screens in cars. I prefer buttons to touch screen interactions while driving, but many people want an iPad and Tesla made that happen.
> innovation in lithium ion batteries was fueled by the demand for consumer electronics, laptops in particular
The battery chemistry and production methods didn’t change fundamentally from Goodenough’s formulation. What did was scale manufacturing. China took the lead, with A123’s tech. But Tesla showed there was demand for EVs in the rich world, and that production could be tamed such that money could be made from it. (EV batteries share little to no production footprint with cells for consumer electronics. They drain differently.)
Pretty much every EV sold in America today was financed by investors looking for the next Tesla, or announced by manufacturers in response to Tesla.
Giving where credit's due, some of the high-discharge long-endurance Li-Ion research is done by Tesla. Other electronic devices generally converge towards slow-discharge, semi-fast charge, low self-discharge batteries.
EVs are unique in their battery requirements. They demand high-discharge, high-endurance, very fast charge batteries, and Tesla did some research on that front. What's important that they were not the sole researchers in that area.
On the other hand, they lack the know-how required to make cars efficiently and assemble them with state of the art methods (minimal/standardized fasteners, fatigue management, fast manufacturing with consistent quality and finishing, etc.).
Tesla's manufacturing has come a long way in the past few years. In 2018, Sandy Munro famously tore down the new Model 3 with a lot of criticism for things like their excess of parts, fasteners, and welds. They made a lot of changes, including some he suggested, and now Munro tends to rave about how well they're engineered for ease of manufacture. This is a guy who gets paid by Big 3 auto companies to help improve their manufacturing.
Even if we take for granted that Tesla is a net positive, Tesla isn't SV. For every Tesla there is a Facebook that is a net negative. Just ask Myanmar.
> Tesla isn't SV. For every Tesla there is a Facebook
Totally agree. But looking at specifics, and dissecting why they work or do not, helps suss out patterns.
For example, Tesla’s benefits are amplified—perhaps even characterised—by their ecosystem effect. That doesn’t happen when you have a quasi-monopoly like Facebook. On the other hand, their downsides are largely a function of lying. That’s common across Silicon Valley, and may similarly have a systematic treatment. (Or, at least, if you’re replicating the model, consider removing that in your iteration.)
TV helped changing quite a few regimes throughout history, and not always for the better. However, I do not think anybody would dispute the fact that TV was, overall, a net positive for mankind.
Same with Silicon Valley. There are certain negative aspects to it but overall we are discussing this on the amazing supercomputer it created, with software it wrote, on platforms it maintains [1]. I seriously doubt the majority of people would want to go back to a world without SV's innovations.
[1] of course it wasn't SV alone, there were many contributions from all around the world, it's just that SV spearheaded the changes and lead us on this path.
I can't recall him ever writing black on white that TV was a net negative for humanity, but the thesis of Neil Postmans Amusing Ourselves to Death seems to heavily imply it. It is - as far as I can tell - a pretty influencial thesis on these matters.
I am sure some aristocrats somewhere are pissed off that we’re not all listening to Bach and reading Kant for our entertainment, but that does not make TV a net negative. It just shows once again that we (as a society) should never give power to various “experts” over our individual choices.
Do you mean the military dictatorship? I’m not sure if they are reliable sources. But yes, Myanmar blames lots of their ethnic violence problems on Facebook, it couldn’t be bad governance at all right?
As with most things it's probably a combination of factors, one of which is Facebook essentially monopolising internet access in the country while stoking the fire.
YouTube would also be popular, in most of SEA the internet means mostly Facebook and YouTube, to the chagrin of Chinese internet services who can’t even compete outside of China in their own backyard (well, TikTok is hugely popular there, as it is here, Myanmar is also blaming TikTok and YouTube for ethnic violence, so it just isn’t Facebook). But I’m not sure how Facebooks‘s popularity equals a monopoly, they aren't engaging in anti competitive behavior, the infrastructure is free for use by competitors. The only thing Facebook puts in beyond other markets is localization and marketing.
Because they offered free service only to Facebook in developing countries (including Myanmar) using their FreeBASIC program[1], thereby establishing a defacto monopoly and building a anti-competetive moat against any competitors.
That would only be true if other companies couldn’t do that as well, like google did. And also, this hadn’t impeded TikTok’s ability to take market share away from Google when it became popular.
I look SV's effect on global scale, because I neither live in the US, nor located on the continent itself. Also, the debate is about SV's global impact at full spectrum, not only about Tesla.
So, yes, it's up for debate.
Lastly this doesn't change the fact that Tesla fared the worst in the automaking competition this year w.r.t. everyone else, and they're faking till they're making it. More automakers are always good, but more pretending is always bad (cough VW, Cummins, cough).
I never disagreed. I’m saying the case at hand, EVs, provide a potent balance of the tradeoffs Silicon Valley’s methods involve.
On one hand, you get the capacity for transformational change. Change that can be for the general good. On the other hand, we have costs ranging from a culture of normalised lying to ideological nothingburgers gaining currency due to their proximity to, well, currency.
Put another way, remove Silicon Valley from the equation and yes, we have safer cars. But we also have little reason to be optimistic about ever hitting carbon zero in this country. The latter is more globally relevant than the former.
> > America wouldn’t be on a path towards electrified transport
And that is good news because? So that 100 year from now the avg temperature would be 0.005C less because we'd have substitued the black pollutant produced by Arabs with Star and Stipes Lithium (or lithium which comes from countries that are in the sphere of influence of the US)
This effort is a spit in the face of people who are alive and have big problems right now, that's the reason why they are engaging in rolling coal as a form of protest against this nonsense.
There is this paradox of technology where despite a ton of technology it seems that productivity is not shooting up for society as a whole.
I'll try to find the article.
It looks more like technology is <<redistributing>> wealth, which is SUPER scary since technology inherently allows concentration.
Facebook killed 1 million newspapers, yay, now 1 American corporation can siphon all those profits to... no one even knows where, since it's probably parked in some tax haven. It created 10k jobs paid 500k each by killing 10 million jobs each paid 60k. I'm not super convinced the end result is better.
> The productivity paradox (also the Solow computer paradox) is the peculiar observation made in business process analysis that, as more investment is made in information technology, worker productivity may go down instead of up. This observation has been firmly supported with empirical evidence from the 1970s to the early 1990s.
The link you pointed to doesn’t have any empirical data and the paper it links to doesn’t seem to load. Regardless, we’re 30 years from the 90s now and if anything it seems like productivity has been accelerating since then (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB), arguably because of technology.
Also, what’s the argument for Facebook killing newspapers? Craigslist was siphoning off a main source of newspaper revenue for papers long before Facebook arrived. Would you also argue against the end result of moving on from local classifieds sections?
> I'm not super convinced the end result is better.
He said from the warm comfort of his home, with a full belly, writing on a supercomputer created in SV, with software written in SV, on a platform build by SV on a global network created, of course, by the SV.
Would you give up technology then? Nobody stops you but I seriously doubt the productivity of hand-plowing fields is in any way higher than that of modern farm equipment.
Ah, the old "you can't criticize anything unless you're a luddite". Inevitably, you'd excuse them too cause they don't have experience. Make an actual argument.
Counterpoint: The new crop of BYD EVs seem to be really well built - up with European/Asian brands in their market segment.
They still lag somewhat in other areas (drivetrain efficiency, software, ADAS etc.), but to say that a new company can't build cars well is simply just not true.
The only reason I bought a Tesla in April of this year is because they'd sell me one. Every other car company gave me the same line: give us money, we'll call you in July/August. They all had outrageous dealer markups. Two weeks after I bought my car, Tesla lowered the price on the X: they sent me a check for the difference. I ended up calling customer service to figure out why they'd sent me a check!
How is this report a reliability index? If you service your car often because it needs constant maintenance (oil changes), the safety inspection won't find minor issues to complain about
They are still innovating. For all of its other drama the Cybertruck has some amazing innovations. It's now a 48V system, uses an ethernet bus, uses un-treated stainless steel, etc.
Again, I'm not remotely claiming the Cybertruck is a great vehicle or that it won't have any problems, but they definitely are still innovating on vehicles.
Marketing? Tesla never really had a marketing department and now doesn't even have a PR department, last I heard.
Its steel body panels alone qualify as both disruptive market and technical innovation. There's exactly nothing else like it.
Did you see Munro's walking tour of the steel fab? The welding of the interiors to their respective body panels is awesome. Just one of dozens of process and technical innovation. Terrific stuff.
Acknowledging caveats about Musk, leadership, working conditions, FSD, yadda yadda aside:
Other manufacturers certainly have noted Cybertruck's reduced part count (BOM) and labor hours. They've gotta be concerned.
Like Apple with the iPhone, Tesla will continue to be more profitable than its competitors. Cheaper cost of capital, pour those profits back into R&D, fly wheel effect, etc.
Wouldn’t it be more fair to compare a Chinese made Tesla to a Chinese made BYD? Surely, some Chinese consumer sentiment has been developed since they compete head on in the Chinese market?
Chinese Teslas might be higher quality since China has forced Tesla to do multiple recalls for door faults, suspension failures and accelerator problems, including for issues Tesla straight forwardly lied about to customers and regulators in the US and Europe.
Tesla does plenty of recalls in the states, they just aren’t broadcasted as widely and proudly as they are on CCTV.
It could be that the Shanghai factory is more well run, or it could get experience from the other factories, the model 3 is just 7 years old and before that Tesla was doing more small scale production.
But historically Chinese produced cars are worse than those made in other countries. Toyota, for example, has huge quality problems in China that it didn’t have in US or Japanese produced cars. It would be cool if it is the opposite for Tesla.
My last two new ICE cars had horrible infotainment that crashed constantly, loose fits, and an interior that rattles until it drives one to violence. I'd say they are competing on even grounds here.
What does your poor choice of ICE cars have to say about Tesla though? Having a crap experience across the board isn't a redeeming feature you think it is.
> What does your poor choice of ICE cars have to say about Tesla though?
That one of the tricks Tesla is figuring out is how to cook the books on these figures.
I drive an ICE Subaru, and I love it. But some friends visited and didn’t tighten the gas cap once, which put the infotainment system into a fit, which put a bunch of other systems into a conniption, systems totally unrelated like ABS. (?!) The issue persisted across restarts and ultimately required servicing.
How was this recorded? User error. In part because there is a dealership between me and the manufacturer that is responsible for servicing the vehicle.
A loose gas cap triggers an EVAP leak code + check engine light on pretty much every car made since the early 2000s. Now depending on said car, all traction control and ABS might be half-disabled as soon as the CE light turns on. Usually newer cars will disable more systems to bring you back to the dealer.
ex. my current car had an intermittent O2 sensor issue, which would turn the traction control in lazy mode and try to kill me in snow/ice conditions by reenabling itself at the worst possible moment when detecting slippery conditions. My previous car had traction controls completely independent from engine faults.
No fan of Tesla(rented one, hated it), but you have a point. Subaru had two different firmware issues that caused us to be stranded two different times(the battery charge issue and the fuel gauge issue). Both were known issues when we were stranded, but Subaru failed to notify us. I had to go to the dealer and specifically request the firmware updates.
Now, granted, my Subaru has a wonderfully designed interior, doesn't require using a touchscreen, has consistent panel gaps, etc...
I'm willing to bet a lot, that there was no causation between youe ABS having issues, and a loose gas cap. These events just happened at the same, general timeframe.
Wouldn't be the first time the dealership was telling customer complete BS assuming that they don't have a clue in order to either get out of a warranty repair or to inflate an invoice.
Also dealerships not having a clue is not rare either. Many garages these days only connect a computer to the diagnostics port, download whatever error codes are shown and tell the shocked driver that half of their car is kaputt with the repair likely going to be several thousands of euro.
All the while the real problem is a blown fuse for one of the control units or a wire has chaffed and broke somewhere - and the diagnostic codes come only because the ECU can't talk to some sensors because part of the vehicle's CAN bus is down.
As another commenter mentioned, this is actually expected behaviour [1]. Because it’s precedented, it’s treated as okay [2].
To me, the car broke. Plainly and simply. And had Tesla had a similar fuckup, I don’t think they’d find sympathy. (Reasonably.) That’s something that comes with a longevity.
Yes it should be better documented. I ran into this as well on my Subaru, but once the cap is on proper it -should- turn off within ~1hr of driving (constant or short trips)
To wit; if you don't put AdBlue in a diesel it will eventually outright stop working altogether even though it's only there for emissions.
Yes but by saying those particular words, thousands of dollars left your bank account and entered theirs. Is it possible that is the only reason they said them?
This is clearly BS, since it was either coincidence or an electrical/systems problem. The shamelessness of making that claim that is incredible.
Some might question that this could be an electrical or systems problem, but the gas cap on my Kia, a relatively flimsy piece of plastic, will disable the car if not replaced properly. How does this manifest itself? With a check engine light on the dash.
This is the most stupendously idiotic misfeature in an otherwise well designed (and reliable) car.
I would like a map that is up to date and has a good UX. Spotify and podcasts. Voice controls that allow me to hear and speak text messages.
Basic stuff, impossible for Volkswagen.
EDIT: I agree with the replies that say this should be handled by CarPlay/Android Auto. In which case I’d like my cars software to support that well.
EDIT2: Oh and there has to be an api where the car shares charge state and range estimates with my phone, such that my phone can plan a route around charge stops.
This is better provided by your smartphone which already gives you access to your digital life and controlled with android auto.
I wouldn't want to have to setups accounts in my car. Also you don't necessarily want the persons who borrow your car to know everythings about you including every single place you have marked as favorite.
Me too, but I want none of this built into the car (not even if just as a "dumb" Android Auto screen) because this technology will look outdated and tacky in 5 years
I am quite happy with Peugeot and Jaguar. Never tried Car Play or Android Auto and never will so, Bluetooth streaming is all I need. I heard all kind of horror stories from the latest VW software so. Which is funny, because Skoda seems to be a lot better despite being the same group.
VW don’t even support CarPlay though. I am stuck with an android POS that literally does nothing other than take up dashboard space, and a phone glued to the front of it. Can’t even listen to music as the tuner has never worked, and Bluetooth has a range of about 2cm. Dealer said it’s working as intended.
where do you live that VW doesn’t support car play or did they drop support? My last two vws going back to 2017 in the US support it and so have vws i’ve rented in Spain.
Do you have the basic media unit that doesn't do anything or what? Otherwise you can just google the instructions to update and unlock your unit's features for free. Most MIB2(.5) units can easily be hacked.
It ain’t MIB2, or MIB - rather some ancient POS that runs android 6 and doesn’t even have a USB port. It’s just… Iberia, I guess. They know they can get away with getting rid of crap old stock here and people will accept it as the shiny new thing.
TomTom doesn’t know the place I searched for earlier and my phone doesn’t know the battery state of my car. (Though the latter could
Be fixed through an api)
This. I still drive a 2001 auto in no small part because it’s a car instead of an ipad on wheels. I don’t want a GPS or any of that distracting nonsense, and I don’t want my car spying on me.
I'm not a fan of my Tesla and can't wait to replace it but the video games/Netflix are for when you're charging, you can't watch Netflix while driving on the infotainment
Aren't everybody using android auto (or its Apple equivalent) these days anyway?
The builtin infotainment system is usually just a second thought that exist just to showcase something in the showroom and setup android auto at first use.
Google upgraded Android Auto to a backward incompatible version right before I bought my second hand 2016 car. The car manufacturer never upgraded the software of the car so I don't even know what Android Auto can do. But everybody has their own phone so if it's OK at home and on a bus it will be OK in a car too.
Tesla isn't. Which is really frustrating because the voice control in the Tesla does not work reliably (maybe functions 20% of the time, and that's _if_ the button on the steering wheel to start it works - usually that fails to register even before I attempt to speak to the car)
Will android auto even work wireless? Any bigger bump and it stops working, so I jut put my phone in a plastic handle that is attached to the window with a suction cup..
I don't know, GPS navigation is typically the kind of situation where I would want to keep my smartphone plugged to charge anyway. I is the biggest power sucking usage of a smartphone imho.
I assume you're using Tesla. Do you live in one of their core markets? I doubt Tesla Maps or whatever it's called holds a candle to Google Maps for non-US, non-Western Europe regions.
No, it's a Skoda. I mostly just use the navigation which is very usable, plus with a subscription you also get live traffic. There's a few things which annoy me about the infotainment but that's inherent to the whole system (like annoying popups on boot), so CarPlay doesn't fix that.
> loose fits, and an interior that rattles until it drives one to violence
Confirmed. Friends in the car maintenance business have witnessed for years a quality fall (materials etc).
"Infotainment", I hope I will not have the experience (apart maybe from removing some), but my last car was the first one with a sound system that hissed.
I watch Sandy Munro sometimes. His comments on how to cut costs sometimes sound brilliant, and sometimes sound like a race to the bottom. I suspect that's the problem: even the experts don't know what the consequences of a certain cost cutting measure is.
At a polar opposite, I'm reminded of the wonder of walking across the Brooklyn bridge and thinking, "they don't make them like this anymore".
What is there to be fair about? We've had various iterations of GPS navigation for decades now. Yet, most maps on most infotainments are unusable slow pieces of rubbish. UX of various GUIs has been a point of research for a very long time. Yet, they are discovering it as if it was a completely new concept, the concept of touching something and it actually doing something in a short amount of time. It's like they are purposely ignoring the plethora of mobile devices and GPS units of the last decades.
> Because these are bonus features and not necessary for driving unlike tires that won't fall off.
> Seems like Tesla fails at the core feature of a car.
Thank god the existing manufacturers have this nailed down, like Toyota[0], Dodge [1], Ford[2], Mazda[3], or even high end manufacturers like Lamborghini[4].
Teslas are priced as luxury cars but they aren't luxury cars. They have strong selling points, like the amazing battery compared to other EVs or their looks (I do find the Model S very nice / sleek) but the quality of the interior/materials and sound proofing simply isn't there, not by a mile.
Here's a list, for example, of some actual luxury cars:
I was highly disappointed when I went in a Model S: I'm used to actual luxury cars and I simply don't know how to put it nicely: to me a Model S is a complete rip off price-wise.
I'd urge anyone thinking that Tesla is luxury to go in a Mercedes dealership and sit in a class S or go to a Porsche dealership and sit in a Panamera (or in the Taycan 100% EV). That is luxury.
FWIW the Tesla Model S and Porsche Panamera (for example) entry models begin at the same price so it's not apple and orange comparison: that's why I say Tesla is sold as luxury, at the price of luxury, but is not luxury.
Tesla had the first mover advantage on offering EVs. I don't think they will be able to charge the premium going forwards compared to say Mercedes and still have the low quality interior and general mechanical quality at Dacia level.
I don't know, man, my 2016 Model S has been lower maintenance than any of my past or current cars, with the exception of our RAV-4 which has way, way lower miles on it (90K vs 30K). So, YMMV.
It's a bummer because with Elon's antics I don't see myself owning another Tesla, but my experience so far has been great.
Lucky you, a month out of warranty mine had an issue that was $1000 to fix. It was, IMO, clearly a manufacturing defect they should have handled but did not. It was really fun being stuck at a grocery store with my infant in below-freezing temperatures with a car that would not start!
Some of the Chinese companies that are now dominating some corners of the electric car market barely existed 5 years ago and they score far better than many expected on reliability scores.
I guess scale allows you to compensate for years of experience.
Would be interesting to see how they will test your theory in the next few years. My hypothesis is a few chinese brands will be scoring in the top 10% of reliability in the next 5 years.
China's ability to manufacturer at both speed and scale is indeed impressive and scary. I think I saw some Navy worries that China is able to build naval ships and carriers at speeds well beyond the U.S. capability, and that within just decades, they will have double the ships.
> Is this really a surprise? There are physical realities, and a single company can't suddenly reinvent a century of industry experience with some Silicon Valley pixie dust and government subsidies.
That may be, but Tesla didn't have to rediscover everything from scratch, just like SpaceX didn't have to reinvent rocketry from scratch but rather stood on the shoulders of decades' worth of giants.
A big concern I have with Tesla is that I have no alternative service providers. When Tesla charges one $2000 to fix a broken gear, the person would have no choice to but to accept it.
Tesla was necessary to tip the EV market though by bringing that new drive train, because legacy car companies would have mostly dragged their feet on EVs for as long as possible.
I mean, they could presumably afford to hire people who know how to do this. It is not a secret; for the right money you can get the process expertise.
Your views are spot on, just one thing: Tesla is out of startup mode for like what, 10, maybe even 12 years? They are just another seasoned manufacturer stringing along, well, with rock-bottom 'quality'.
It is just that his highness, greatest pretengineer of recent times, SEC-convicted fraudster, CCP-affiliated (some say owned) dude whilestill holding US security clearances, documented drugster and potentially affiliated too with Mexican cartels, has a strong NIH syndrome, and thinks he's smarter than decades of engineers contributing their discoveries into our human knowledge pool. Constantly overruling the more sensible people still working for him by authoritarian decrees.
OP is comparing them against the legacy car making industry - they are still a 'young' player by a long way, and a relative newcomer.
Besides, the SEC scandal is pretty small-beer in terms of auto industry scandals - see the VW emissions scandal, the safety scandal of Toyota which is only just kicking off, General Motors ignition switch scandal, going all the way back to the classic defective gas tank scandal from Ford...
Interesting it makes no mention the federal loans were repaid in full, early, with interest.[1] As apposed to GM & Chrysler who got billions in bailouts that were never repaid. [2]
