I don't know that that means much. When the American big three saw Japanese carmakers overtaking them in terms of quality, delivering products people wanted etc., many entered into these ventures and bought sizable stakes, etc., but maybe except for Ford, I don't think they extracted much out of those partnerships.
I think GM would have gone straight out of business if they hadn't had their joint venture with Toyota (NUMMI). You can say they didn't learn as much as they could have, but I don't think you can say they got much out of it. You could say that GM owes its existence to Toyota.
That comment was also posted in /r/Futurology, where it got even more points, but they deleted the submission there -- which is really saying something for that subreddit! (They normally have an extremely optimistic attitude toward Tesla, electric cars, and future technologies in general.)
Good! I really hope that the car industry will finally start to take electric vehicles seriously, not only in Germany but everywhere around the world. It was a good strategy and justified to make money with an existing and mature technology (combustion engines) but it seems that the time for electric vehicles finally draws near. I really hope that the pressure from Tesla forces the other car makers to finally produce an electric car of practical value, so far most of their prototypes had only PR value.
I think what Tesla achieved in this market cannot be praised enough: Not only do they build electric vehicles that are actually usable, they also managed to create a brand with a perceived quality that is on par with that of the biggest premium car markers in the world.
When I see the factory videos of the production of the BMW i3, or that interview with the Monroe guy whose company took apart and analysed the i3... It seems to me BMW is well ahead of Tesla in many ways.
For BMW and others, they should have the advantage. They already have R&D, factories, distribution, and the workers in place. Tesla is having to build up everything from scratch including a battery factory.
The battery factory is owned and operated by Panasonic. Tesla itself operates out of the former Toyota/NUMMI factory in Fremont and has re-hired a substantial number of skilled autoworkers in the area.
yes, parent comment is typical carguy fanboyism translated into 21st century context. my favorite carbrand is special and unique, because of X reasons!
a new company producing cars isn't doing much "from scratch", other than design, and the basic concepts there are also pretty well established. as far as i can tell tesla is producing the same basic product as everyone else except all the tech people are into it because of elon musk, where they probably hated or didn't pay attention to cars before.
I'm a car guy, the type that loves manual transmissions, etc. My 'brand' is Toyota/BMW. I scoffed at electric cars as being even worse than an automatic, all that changed when I stepped into a Tesla.
I agree that Tesla's are an economic substitute for Toyotas but when you step into a Model S as a car guy you know it's different.
There's only two reasons I didn't buy it 1) I love road trips and there's one supercharger station in my province, and more importantly 2) I couldn't afford it. Tesla's are like BMWs you know they aren't that reliable, are really expensive, but there's nothing like driving one. Like BMW, it's a smiles per gallon car you buy it because when you step on it, it goes, not because it gets great gas milage.
so it's too expensive, and isn't practical, yet you pine and lust for one. it's also really really fast, and looks super duper cool and it's somehow better than the others. does any of this sound familiar?
in other words, same basic product as any high end fast car. this is coming from someone who has a high end fast car, is a car guy, has a 'brand', and has ridden in all the high end fast cars.
they're all basically the same.
musk is a car guy and lives in LA (bel air), car capital of the known universe. he's a genius for recognizing this market angle.
Isn't that exactly the point that Tesla made electric cars desirable (not practical)? Not sure that can be easily dismissed. They took a class of car that usually seen as weak and put into the same class as Porsche. That is no small feat IMHO.
I suspect the person you replied to was talking about the new Gigafactory that is being built, which I believe will be primarily owned and operated by Tesla, although Panasonic is an investor.
Tesla does source its current batteries from Panasonic though.
"When I see the factory videos of the production of the BMW i3"
Right - the i3, which is the only electric car BMW makes, and is shaped like a prototypical, onion-parody of an electric car.[1]
Here's a prediction:
Another 5 years, on top of the prior 5 years, of car-show prototypes and concept cars, with cutesy sub-brand "i" and "e" monikers, and nothing to buy but hybrid cars with little chainsaw engines inside of them.
[1] ... although, I will say that the interior of the i3 is very progressive and well done. Very impressive.
This will probably be an unpopular opinion but I absolutely love the look of the i3 and don't understand the widespread derision it receives.
I'm a big fan of industrial design/architecture/automotive design and try to study it extensively, albeit at the hobbyist level. My all time favorite cars are probably the 1973 Porsche 2.7RS and the 1960 Aston Martin DB4GT Jet by Bertone. I only say this as proof that I usually have what most would consider fairly good taste in cars and yet the i3 might be one of my favorite sub $100k cars released in the last few years.
I admit that it tends to photographic poorly and BMW has a habit of painting them some very unflattering colors, including some really weird two tone colorways. The first time I saw the i3 in person it was painted a "unique" burnt orange/copper color and I thought it was hideous. Then when I finally saw one in person painted dark grey with nicer wheels my opinion completely changed.
I also really like its size. I work right next door to Tesla's design studio here in Hawthorne and I can barely cross the street without seeing a model S. While I like the overall body shape there are a number of things that I strongly dislike such as the chrome accents around the windows and much of the front fascia, not to mention the large size. The i3 seems much more forward thinking to me from a design perspective. I’ve never actually sat in or driven one though.
I’m curious if you or others wouldn’t mind sharing what you dislike about the i3, hopefully I haven’t completely lost my sense of style.
"I’m curious if you or others wouldn’t mind sharing what you dislike about the i3, hopefully I haven’t completely lost my sense of style."
I live in the SFBA and therefore see a lot of these in person.
It's not that, by itself, it's a bad design - it's that it follows in a long, almost comical line of "things that look like electric cars" - sort of like the Mercedes B class. As I say, if you were mocking up a typical electric car for the onion, you'd come up with basically that.
The model S has, in my opinion, a LOT of design shortcomings, but what is notable about it is that it's just a car. It's not a future car or a weird car or a thing that looks like an electric car - it's just a normal car-looking-thing.
Thanks for responding, you make some good points regarding the i3 looking like an electric car while the model S just looks like a normal car. The i3, along with maybe the Volt, are still for me the first cars to get the "electric car" look right. Slightly quirky but nothing comical like the earlier attempts, although I can see why not everyone likes this look.
I grew up in SF and still visit family a couple times a year and I'm always surprised that I don't see very many Tesla's in SF, at least in my area west of Twin Peaks. I've seen more i3's, I wonder if the smaller size is more attractive to SF residents. Meanwhile, whenever I spend time in Manhattan Beach I can barely cross the street without almost getting run over by a model S.
"I grew up in SF and still visit family a couple times a year and I'm always surprised that I don't see very many Tesla's in SF, at least in my area west of Twin Peaks."
I live in Marin and it is tesla-city here. Everyone has a model S. There are intersections where multiples pull up at the same time.
I've also seen 8-10 model X cars in the last week or so.
Unrelated: the other "it" car in Marin seems to be a diesel powered BMW X5 or diesel porsche cayenne, which is just baffling to me. Why anyone would want to visually "see" a brand new modern car, but aurally "hear" a badly maintained lawnmower is beyond me.
You'd think these rich marin moms would be more discerning, but what do I know...
"I didn't realize these modern diesels still sound terrible, are they really that bad?"
You know the somewhat recent Jetta TDI (2.0 ? 1.8 ?) that's really, really loud ? They're not quite that bad. But they're loud, and the loud they make is an antique loud. A non-precision loud. Noises that nice new luxury cars shouldn't make.
I am in europe regularly for rsync.net and the diesel A6 and A8 (among others) are not any better.
It's really just a terrible aesthetic. I don't know why people put up with it.
Agreed, except maybe for PR, as nowadays it seems like Elon Musks is the new Steve Jobs in the mind of a lot people of the "Tech Community" or other incompetent "Tech Journalists" (sorry for the pleonasm).
It is exactly this why the world needs Elon Musks: To break out of the cycle of endless iteration of the same old technology. While conventionally fuelled motors have come a long way and today the cleanliness of fully electric vehicles might be a bit dubious given how electricity is largely produced and the bad battery technology employed, a large enough push in the right direction will fix that too.
Apparently the old minds of VW et al. are too slow to adapt. Let's see whether this situation becomes a giant slow-motion crash of German automakers (and therefore the German economy) or whether they can pull through with their promise to "not be the first, but the best" on the market.
Meh, the auto industry has been making real attempts at EV every decade for the last century or so. Last generation is what gave us the Prius. Tesla might have helped push us into pure EV a generation earlier but it was going to happen in our life times anyway.
> The winner in the German category of beer have been American breweries typically for many years now.
The beer itself is still the old recipes, brewed under the Reinheitsgebot.
Big Brew simply made a shitload of money by selling unsuspecting Americans stuff that a German wouldn't even want to smell, much less drink, and then bought up German breweries to teach them proper brewing.
I hear that prohibition was a huge factor in the decline in quality in American beer in the early 20th century. The hoards of Germany immigrants in the 19th century established breweries (including Coors and Millers) that produced good-quality beer.
During prohibition, the breweries went out of business and the brewers found other occupations. After prohibition, the new breweries that popped up produced beer of much lower quality. They found that the American public was just happy to have beer, and was way less picky about the quality of that beer. You'd think that after only 15 years of no beer, the former quality would be re-established, but I guess there wasn't a market for it anymore.
Same thing happened in California with the wine industry. It took decades after Prohibition before good quality wine returned. Those re-established wineries were producing some pretty terrible wines in their early years.
As Elon would suggest, let's take this down to first principles. In some ways, Germany, with its focus on carbon emissions and clean power is a great market for EVs. There is a big obstacle, however. Air resistance at highway speeds is proportional to the square of the velocity. Kinetic energy is also proportional to the square of the velocity. What this means, is that there is a bigger physics barrier to making an acceptable Li-ion battery EV to run long distances on the Autobahn. Battery tech is going to reach "awesome" levels for the US a lot sooner than it will reach "awesome" levels for Autobahn-stormers.
(In fact, you could probably work out the approximate timing of this occurring using graphs of industry-wide improvements in Li-ion batteries and extrapolating when it will reach 4x today's capacity/weight and capacity/cost as a back of the envelope calc.)
I think the basic physics of what you're saying are valid.
But, backing up a bit. What percentage of the German auto market cares little for high-speed performance characteristics? I don't know, but I suspect it's enough to keep the whole formula in the 'worry zone' for German auto makers.
My lowly W124 1995 Mercedes 300 was meant as an ordinary family sedan, with just a bit over 150hp. The tradition is that even ordinary cars in Germany be able to hang on the Autobahn.
I'm not saying German carmakers shouldn't worry. I'm saying that they have a bulwark in their domestic market for a little while longer.
The Honda CRX was famously cited by auto journalist David E. Davis as a minimal car he'd be willing to drive on the Autobahn with. That only had just a bit over 100 hp and could just barely make it past 100mph. My point isn't that German cars are overpowered. My point is that they aren't really, but they're still expected to be able to hang with it on their highway system. If an EV is going to have a sharply reduced uninterrupted highway driving time, then the unavoidable minimum charging stop time of 30 minutes is going to have a proportionately larger impact on travel times there.
Germany is also slightly smaller than Montana and nearly 10x as dense as the US, greatly reducing the relevant distances people regularly need to drive.
This is not actually that true. Germany is 7x as dense as the US, but Germany is only 5.9x as dense as the contiguous US.
About a third of the contiguous US has almost no people relative to the rest except for a few population centers (Intermountain West and Great Plains). There are several states with population densities higher than Germany, and quite a few within a factor of three, and naturally those will tend to have more people than the others.
So I'm not sure the median surrounding population density for an individual in the US would be that much different from Germany -- I'd think cultural factors, including public transportation availability, would have at least as much an effect on average distances driven.
I'm not sure how relevant "regularly" is if you want to replace someones only car (multi-car households are a different story, but also a large limitation of the market). Yes, for most people you could cover 90-98% of their days with 100 km range, but nobody wants to rent a car just because they have a 600+ km trip planned. It still needs to be able to do that distance with not too many charging stops.
Not everyone in Germany has a 300kph car. Be that as it may, self-driving capability and V2V should do away with speed limits as well as traffic lights. And, as in high-speed rail, I expect crashworthiness to give way to crash-avoidance. So cars will be lighter and sleeker than they are now.
No, but the German expectation is of a 200kph car. So a 4 fold increase in the power consumption over American cars is quite reasonable. (Americans are just a bit north of 100kph on the highway. 100-120)
Higher speed/power consumption over shorter distances/times is actually bad for EVs, because the time spent waiting for recharge vs. driving is proportionately worse.
I would say that about up to 250 km/h car seems to be an expectation based on the manufacturer listed electronically limited maximum speeds for normal German family cars. 2 liter turbo diesel BMW goes up to 240 km/h without any problem, but that is not a common German highway speed, I would put it (based on my limited experience) to around 160, up to 180 km/h.
German highway speeds aren't as high as some think, especially not on a continuous stretch. Average speed on not-speed-limited sections I'd peg at around 160km/h, 100mph. When I lived in LA I rarely saw people coast at less than 75-80mph. And the distances in CA are huge!
what is the drive feel of a Tesla compared to a nice German car? Most cars feel really bad to drive compared to a nice BMW/Audi, and I've always assumed that the Teslas may have decent tech but still probably don't drive as well as cars made by people with much more experience than the Tesla guys. Is this accurate?
I test drove a Model S with the base wheels and suspension on damp roads. It was fine. A little soft and a little understeery, exactly what you'd expect for a large, non-performance car. The AWD was unobtrusive.
I have previously owned an M3 and driven a few other German sedans, mostly BMW. They are much more confidence inspiring. But I still reserved a Tesla Model 3.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] thread"Yeah, they laughed Elon Musk off so much that Daimler acquired nearly 10 percent of Tesla in the early days.
But at least they found an 88 year old (!) former executive of Daimler that dismissed Tesla."
"https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/4fmrrl/german_a...?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/4fmrt6/german_a...
I think what Tesla achieved in this market cannot be praised enough: Not only do they build electric vehicles that are actually usable, they also managed to create a brand with a perceived quality that is on par with that of the biggest premium car markers in the world.
Every auto maker on the planet is heavily investing in EV technology. I'd say we're well beyond "starting".
a new company producing cars isn't doing much "from scratch", other than design, and the basic concepts there are also pretty well established. as far as i can tell tesla is producing the same basic product as everyone else except all the tech people are into it because of elon musk, where they probably hated or didn't pay attention to cars before.
I agree that Tesla's are an economic substitute for Toyotas but when you step into a Model S as a car guy you know it's different.
There's only two reasons I didn't buy it 1) I love road trips and there's one supercharger station in my province, and more importantly 2) I couldn't afford it. Tesla's are like BMWs you know they aren't that reliable, are really expensive, but there's nothing like driving one. Like BMW, it's a smiles per gallon car you buy it because when you step on it, it goes, not because it gets great gas milage.
in other words, same basic product as any high end fast car. this is coming from someone who has a high end fast car, is a car guy, has a 'brand', and has ridden in all the high end fast cars.
they're all basically the same.
musk is a car guy and lives in LA (bel air), car capital of the known universe. he's a genius for recognizing this market angle.
Tesla does source its current batteries from Panasonic though.
Right - the i3, which is the only electric car BMW makes, and is shaped like a prototypical, onion-parody of an electric car.[1]
Here's a prediction:
Another 5 years, on top of the prior 5 years, of car-show prototypes and concept cars, with cutesy sub-brand "i" and "e" monikers, and nothing to buy but hybrid cars with little chainsaw engines inside of them.
[1] ... although, I will say that the interior of the i3 is very progressive and well done. Very impressive.
I'm a big fan of industrial design/architecture/automotive design and try to study it extensively, albeit at the hobbyist level. My all time favorite cars are probably the 1973 Porsche 2.7RS and the 1960 Aston Martin DB4GT Jet by Bertone. I only say this as proof that I usually have what most would consider fairly good taste in cars and yet the i3 might be one of my favorite sub $100k cars released in the last few years.
I admit that it tends to photographic poorly and BMW has a habit of painting them some very unflattering colors, including some really weird two tone colorways. The first time I saw the i3 in person it was painted a "unique" burnt orange/copper color and I thought it was hideous. Then when I finally saw one in person painted dark grey with nicer wheels my opinion completely changed.
I also really like its size. I work right next door to Tesla's design studio here in Hawthorne and I can barely cross the street without seeing a model S. While I like the overall body shape there are a number of things that I strongly dislike such as the chrome accents around the windows and much of the front fascia, not to mention the large size. The i3 seems much more forward thinking to me from a design perspective. I’ve never actually sat in or driven one though.
I’m curious if you or others wouldn’t mind sharing what you dislike about the i3, hopefully I haven’t completely lost my sense of style.
I live in the SFBA and therefore see a lot of these in person.
It's not that, by itself, it's a bad design - it's that it follows in a long, almost comical line of "things that look like electric cars" - sort of like the Mercedes B class. As I say, if you were mocking up a typical electric car for the onion, you'd come up with basically that.
The model S has, in my opinion, a LOT of design shortcomings, but what is notable about it is that it's just a car. It's not a future car or a weird car or a thing that looks like an electric car - it's just a normal car-looking-thing.
I grew up in SF and still visit family a couple times a year and I'm always surprised that I don't see very many Tesla's in SF, at least in my area west of Twin Peaks. I've seen more i3's, I wonder if the smaller size is more attractive to SF residents. Meanwhile, whenever I spend time in Manhattan Beach I can barely cross the street without almost getting run over by a model S.
I live in Marin and it is tesla-city here. Everyone has a model S. There are intersections where multiples pull up at the same time.
I've also seen 8-10 model X cars in the last week or so.
Unrelated: the other "it" car in Marin seems to be a diesel powered BMW X5 or diesel porsche cayenne, which is just baffling to me. Why anyone would want to visually "see" a brand new modern car, but aurally "hear" a badly maintained lawnmower is beyond me.
You'd think these rich marin moms would be more discerning, but what do I know...
I didn't realize these modern diesels still sound terrible, are they really that bad?
You know the somewhat recent Jetta TDI (2.0 ? 1.8 ?) that's really, really loud ? They're not quite that bad. But they're loud, and the loud they make is an antique loud. A non-precision loud. Noises that nice new luxury cars shouldn't make.
I am in europe regularly for rsync.net and the diesel A6 and A8 (among others) are not any better.
It's really just a terrible aesthetic. I don't know why people put up with it.
Apparently the old minds of VW et al. are too slow to adapt. Let's see whether this situation becomes a giant slow-motion crash of German automakers (and therefore the German economy) or whether they can pull through with their promise to "not be the first, but the best" on the market.
Much like the auto sector, it seems that German industry is able to compete on quality and efficiency, but not on innovation.
The beer itself is still the old recipes, brewed under the Reinheitsgebot.
Big Brew simply made a shitload of money by selling unsuspecting Americans stuff that a German wouldn't even want to smell, much less drink, and then bought up German breweries to teach them proper brewing.
During prohibition, the breweries went out of business and the brewers found other occupations. After prohibition, the new breweries that popped up produced beer of much lower quality. They found that the American public was just happy to have beer, and was way less picky about the quality of that beer. You'd think that after only 15 years of no beer, the former quality would be re-established, but I guess there wasn't a market for it anymore.
Same thing happened in California with the wine industry. It took decades after Prohibition before good quality wine returned. Those re-established wineries were producing some pretty terrible wines in their early years.
(In fact, you could probably work out the approximate timing of this occurring using graphs of industry-wide improvements in Li-ion batteries and extrapolating when it will reach 4x today's capacity/weight and capacity/cost as a back of the envelope calc.)
But, backing up a bit. What percentage of the German auto market cares little for high-speed performance characteristics? I don't know, but I suspect it's enough to keep the whole formula in the 'worry zone' for German auto makers.
I'm not saying German carmakers shouldn't worry. I'm saying that they have a bulwark in their domestic market for a little while longer.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/07/convoy-se...
1) They generally have lower drag numbers than gas cars.
2) Diastances in Germany are less than in the US, so you're probably not going to bomb along for as long of a time.
Yes, 15000 looks about right. That being said, it feels quite low.
About a third of the contiguous US has almost no people relative to the rest except for a few population centers (Intermountain West and Great Plains). There are several states with population densities higher than Germany, and quite a few within a factor of three, and naturally those will tend to have more people than the others.
So I'm not sure the median surrounding population density for an individual in the US would be that much different from Germany -- I'd think cultural factors, including public transportation availability, would have at least as much an effect on average distances driven.
No, but the German expectation is of a 200kph car. So a 4 fold increase in the power consumption over American cars is quite reasonable. (Americans are just a bit north of 100kph on the highway. 100-120)
Higher speed/power consumption over shorter distances/times is actually bad for EVs, because the time spent waiting for recharge vs. driving is proportionately worse.
I have previously owned an M3 and driven a few other German sedans, mostly BMW. They are much more confidence inspiring. But I still reserved a Tesla Model 3.
The article made lots of assumptions about what the Germans are upto without actually finding out. Great journalism.