Together with electric cars, autonomous driving, and ride-brokering services like Uber and Lyft, we really are in a primordial soup phase of transportation. There's going to be some rapid changes even in the next 5 or 10 years.
>However, once people realize they can pay $35,000 for a killer car that can earn them $30,000 in a year by simply pressing a button and telling your car to go pick up passengers for you while you work or sleep — it’s game over.
That is not happening in the near future. At least not in a meaningful scale.
Yeah, I don't see why companies like Uber and Lyft would, so to say, share a piece of the pie, instead of buying these types of cars themselves.
I could see competing products (Apps) with less infrastructure launching this business model though. So I guess it might exist in one way or another in the end.
I was going to post a response on how they wouldn't have enough money from private sources to build that many taxis but it seems it'd cost only ~$23 billion to replace every single taxi in the United States with a Model S. That's shockingly cheap.
Well, you could do it to defray some of the cost of the car by making use of its idle hours, but it probably wouldn't make sense to buy a car just (or even mostly) to rent it out, for much the same reason that individuals don't do it today.
Plus, when Teslas are usable as self-driving cars, the value of the rides provided will drop precipitously -- that figure would be more like $5000, and you'd have to lock up usable hours for it and perhaps pay some penalty to renege on specific hours.
Those two effects are mutually opposing forces - are car owners willing to take the risk of someone contaminating their car by smoking, spilling, eating, puking or having sex to earn a pretty penny?
I think all robotaxis will have inward facing dashcams that transmits into a vault in the cloud in near real time. If the car comes back undamaged, the video is deleted.
People who hire robotaxis might need to have money in escrow if they don't have enough reputation.
Escrow really doesn't exist on a personal level today - why would people suddenly go from the current situation to being perfectly find putting hundreds/thousands of dollars in an escrow account in the future? What do we do about people who can't afford that?
Note that in my country, it's rare for hotel rooms to require credit cards or deposits. (Debit cards are required so they can charge you later if necessary, but they don't put a hold on them.) There's certain chains that do, but it's mostly an American thing.
Renting a car requires one, but there's also more generally a high barrier to renting a car - plenty of forms, showing your license, booking in advance, etc etc. There's also no choice. The same is not true for getting in a taxi. Why would I put down a deposit to ride in an automated car, really?
If the interiors of said cars were built like Honda Elements, Toyota FJ Cruisers, or police-spec Chargers, why not? Any crap that passengers leave can be hosed out.
There are these things called markets. I don't expect this particular scenario to happen anytime soon. But I pretty much guarantee that if I can buy $OBJECT in a competitive market and rent it out for some ridiculous rate of return in a competitive market, competition for that renting will drive down prices until it's not a ridiculous rate of return any longer.
It's likely that the Model 3 will not include free Supercharging, so that's probably when it'll be over as far as when they start selling cars that don't get it for free.
As for existing cars, never. Free charging is part of what you get with the car, and they'd be breaking that contract if they changed it unilaterally. Fortunately, electricity is usually pretty cheap, and on average the money they set aside from each car for running the Superchargers will match or exceed the cost of running them.
A speculation I read often is that Tesla will continue offering free charges to Tesla vehicles and will pay for it by charging to charge (hmm, how to better phrase that) non-Tesla electric vehicles.
I suspect all of tesla's high end cars will always have it- their lower grade cars are probably going to have a subscription of some kind.
Also, consider that tesla essentially owns the largest amount of electric stops in the US. They've got their foot in the door, no other manufacturer is going to come close. When electric cars really kick into gear, tesla controls the gas pumps, and can charge everyone else, while still giving free to their own cars, which is a pretty good incentive.
Correction: Model 3 will offer supercharger access as a subscription in addition to a [paid up front] bundle included with the purchase price.
(it's never been "free", just added on to the purchase price as an option, and later as a standard feature)
Ignore the editorialized headline. The actual quote is:
>The obvious thing to do is decouple the Supercharger Network from the cost of the Model 3. So it will still be very cheap—and far cheaper than gasoline—to drive long-distance with the Model 3, but it will not be free long distance for life unless you’ve purchased that package. -- Elon Musk http://www.plugincars.com/model-3-owners-will-pay-access-tes...
Right, Tesla is not forthcoming on the details, so this is all pure speculation. If I had to guess, most Model 3 buyers would balk at paying for the Supercharger option at purchase time, as it increases the cost of the vehicle significantly (even at $3,000 that would be a 10% markup to the total price of the vehicle), with most surmising they could probably get by with free charging available at supermarkets, malls, office complexes, public spots or parking garages.
Tesla has the technical capability though to sell Supercharger access in time-limited slots (unlimited Supercharger access for the next 7 days, good for that coast-to-coast trip one is planning), on per-kWh basis (plug in, have your credit card on file with Tesla app, start charging), as well as introduce variable pricing (more expensive kWh during periods of heavy use and long lines at Superchargers, cheaper and/or free access during periods of low activity). Historically they've been very driver-friendly, so if I had to guess, they might make all of those options available, as they each cover a specific use case.
Eh the $1k of lifetime Supercharger energy per customer aren't very concerning for Teslas bottom line.
I'd be much more concerned they have to keep warranting so many batteries and engines. This guy got a new battery and engine at 75k miles, so they are pretty much down >$10k on his car alone. And he's far from the only one who casually mentions having the most expensive part of the car exchanged for free.
If they remain a luxury car company 1000 dollars a car isn't a huge deal breaker, but if they start mass producing mid range cars, that's a huge percent of the typical profit margin for cars.
> However, once people realize they can pay $35,000 for a killer car that can earn them $30,000 in a year by simply pressing a button and telling your car to go pick up passengers for you while you work or sleep
Long before that is the case, there'd be no incentive for the manufacturer to sell the car at all; they'd make more money just pushing the button themselves the minute the car rolled off the assembly line.
> I imagine selling the cars externalizes the cost of financing the car and risks associated with the service.
Sure, and that makes sense in most realistic cases. A $35,000 car that returns an expected $30,000/year isn't a realistic case. Anywhere remotely close to that, and the case for selling the cars to consumers to realize (reduced) returns more quickly and insulate the manufacturer from risk just isn't there.
Heck, even if the company decides they don't want to be in the business of owning the fleet, the fact that it is expected to return $30K a year means that the price that can be supported will be much higher (or, conversely, the fact that the car can be sold for $35K will drive down the returns as more people buy the car, and supply drives down market clearing price for all the productive uses.)
Not really they can externalize the risks on their own.
But if they own the cars they can save a metric ton of money.
You would be surprised just how much of the cost of a mid range car is in the interior not only because they need to outsource those materials and gadgets usually but because the interior is one of the few things that is still done mostly manually.
An autonomous car that drives people around doesn't need an infotainment system, doesn't need fancy driver and side passenger seats doesn't need tons of stuff.
Heck you would be able to take out the driver/passenger side completely out of the picture if you are designing a dedicated autonomous taxi.
Add to that all the other crap that every car now has to have to be competitive and it adds up to a metric ton of saving.
Ford/GM/Whoever can design the cheapest simplest shittiest car they can think off that no one would ever want to buy because it doesn't have 5 different suspension settings and xband radio that sync with your phone to get you your latest podcasts and a climate controlled cup holder that keeps you drink cool in the summer and warm in the winter, seat warmers padded pedals and that turbo charger because when buying a 30K it's 0-60 is still important for no apparent reason.
They can cut the cost of making the car by probably 50% easily if they don't have to built it to compete in the market, no one cares about 0-60 or xband when they take a 15min uber ride.
And not only would you save money on the manufacturing you would save tons of money by being able to recycle the cars afterwards, you can get a very large part of the cost of the BOM of a car by recycling it and since car manufacturers basically say bye bye to the car once they ship it to the dealer they never see a penny out of it.
The next big saving/cost reduction is not having to deal with customers a very large portion of the cost of a car is the infrastructure and network a car manufacturer has to set up to support the car.
They have to provide service for the first 3 years 100,000 miles - that's gone, they have to setup a network of authorized dealers and provide support and training - that's gone, they have to setup a network of authorized repair and service providers - that's gone.
They have to track every car and know where and when it was sold and where it is if they need to do a product recall - that's gone or well every easy since they run all the cars.
They have to support the car by law by providing replacement parts sometimes for decades depending on the country which means they either build considerably more parts than they need or have to continue to have the ability to construct them for years which is expensive as duck - this is also gone.
Heck the advertisement costs alone is probably couple of 100's of millions a year globally if not N/A only, take that out too because now you don't need to tell people what's in your new Fjord Mikata M30 because you aren't selling direct to customers anymore.
If you can reduce the cost of the car by 50%, and get 60-80% of the cost of the BOM back by recycling it after 3-5 years it's a no brainer to cut the middle man and stop selling cars to people period.
When take out all of that the financing becomes a non-issue the cars are assets not only that they have value but they also generate income even if Ford/GM needs financing they won't have issues getting it for the same reason that for individuals it's easier to get financing for a work vehicle than for a leisure car.
> Long before that is the case, there'd be no incentive for the manufacturer to sell the car at all;
True! Given that a large portion of US car sales are 'fleet sales'[1], it's very likely that car companies that lead in automation with sell their cars to their own subsidiary automated taxi companies.
It's also worth noting that some car companies already have their own car-sharing services - BMW with ReachNow and Mercedes Benz with Car-to-Go. The moment they have their own reliable automated driving systems, they will turn those into taxi services.
That's exactly what they plan on doing. Musk even implied as much. Though it will take a few years to get to that point. First they have to deliver all the pre-orders and the purchases that follow. Then there's the matter of states creating a legal framework that allows for cars with no occupants.
I've said this before on HN, and it got kind of laughed off, but I really think the next stepping stone toward autonomous cars is drone cars.
That is, having remote drivers assisted by all the "autopilot" features that improve situational awareness. These features make it easier to drive a car in person, but they could also be used to make it easier to remote a car.
I see many possibilities for this. Designing cars that don't have a driver seat, holding more passengers. Having passengers be able to face each other.
Remote pilots handoffs to other pilots via overlapping handshake. Might be able to figure out a way for multiplexing multiple cars across a smaller group of pilots.
Anyway, I think this is far more achievable than self driving in the near term.
The problem I see with this is latency. Round trip time for a laptop on wifi (this will need a wireless connection to the vehicle) could get up to 200ms at times. At 60mph the car will be 17 feet from where the operator's screen shows it best case. You've also added 1/5 second to all reaction times. A lot of people would die if every driver's reaction time went up by that much.
Well, round trip time of light to GEO is 280ms plus processing time on the satellite plus "last mile" connections on earth. I usually see closer to 500ms on satellite internet. In most of Canada, I've never seen a wifi network give me better than 150ms to AWS in us-east in Virginia or us-west in Oregon. Even in SF pinging another server in SF with a wifi connection in the middle can get more than 80ms. For a bus system in a constrained area, you may be able to do it, but you'd probably be better off just going with tracks of some kind to eliminate drivers entirely.
Some are suggesting that 5G adoption will enable services that will need compute to be near the cell tower, or the backhaul. Services such as low latency AI based assistants and autonomous vehicles. Sorry I can't find the articles I've read on this.
I think you're onto something here, but I don't think it will be done at the scaling of 1-to-1 drone pilot per vehicle. If you look at the situations where "autopilot" and autonomous vehicles have failed, you can think of many of these events as systemic changes.
A car pulled over on a stretch of road which has no shoulder due to construction -- This is a systemic change on that stretch of road that applies to more than 1 car. The same even goes for a semi truck making a left turn across two-lanes of single direction highway traffic -- That is a momentary systemic change to that section of road.
My conclusion: I do think that remote supervision of "self-driving" cars will be important. But I don't think the supervision will be done on the scale of one pilot for a single car. Rather, I think such cars will uplink their sensor data to huge datacenters where huge computer systems will monitor the road network as a system. (Much as this drone system can monitor a whole Mexican city. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12374668)
This systemic monitoring system will then alert the autopilot computers of cars on the road to take exceptional actions, or perhaps even send an alert to the driver to take over for awhile. (So in the examples above, the system would tell cars to edge over in the lane to avoid the stalled car on the shoulderless road, or detect semi-trailers crossing the highway in front of a speeding car on autopilot.)
My prediction is that the real money will be in drone powered agricultural robots. Why force people to physically pick produce when they could do the same from their home (or another country perhaps). And 24/7 to boot.
They're only able to offer trips for $15 because if someone is already making the drive anyway the marginal cost of carrying one more passenger is close to $0.
> There are university Facebook rideshare groups in California that offer that trip for $15.
That's because those are real rideshare groups, not Uber-style quasi-taxis; the additional cost of an extra passenger when you are already planning on taking such a trip is small (at $15, you are well above it, and recovering costs you would have born without the extra passenger.)
That really tells you nothing about the costs when you aren't piggybacking on someone already planning on making the trip.
That doesn't matter. What matters is these automated fleets will have to compete with that en masse, as I'm sure the killer app for ridesharing will come out within the next 10 years.
I think that this is the endgame. The car companies (or Uber or Google) will provide fleets. Competition between them will keep prices low enough to dissuade people from buying cars of their own. Uber/Google/GM/Ford would probably not want you to have the sharing app if you're not part of their world.
>Long before that is the case, there'd be no incentive for the manufacturer to sell the car at all; they'd make more money just pushing the button themselves the minute the car rolled off the assembly line.
If they sold a car, they get profit immediately. If they kept the car for their own fleet, it would take longer to earn the same profit and then add additional overhead of maintaining the fleet, the reservation system, refunds, additional litigation, etc. Also, if the market is super saturated, they can sell cars to companies unable to make a profit. The manufacturer still gets the sale even thought the car doesn't realize a profit through a fleet.
The smart move would be to sell cars and also keep a fleet. It really depends on how well they could manage the fleet being a car manufacturer. They are quite different businesses and you don't get much overlap, other than the vehicle at cost and perhaps maintenance parts.
The even smarter move would be to franchise the fleet so you push off the management and operating costs but increase your sales and take part of the profit for branding, advertising, etc. The fleet would of course cross brand the vehicles.
Maybe, depends on what the overhead is and if you sell that car to yourself at cost or not. Fleets could be an ultra low margin business. You also have to take into account inflation. Also, when companies don't "stick to the knitting," they often don't as well as their core business because an SVP of Tesla marketing has different skills than an SVP of Hertz marketing.
Certainly a higher risk than just selling a car and taking the profits immediately.
>If they sold a car, they get profit immediately. If they kept the car for their own fleet, it would take longer to earn the same profit and then add additional overhead of maintaining the fleet, the reservation system, refunds, additional litigation, etc.
A car company can raise capital and manage fleets much better than individuals can.
I don't know if you've seen Elon's last announcement, but that is basically exactly what Tesla is planning to do with the Model 3.
Sell the car and let people loan it out to an autonomous fleet with the app. Tesla would also have its own fleet for cities without enough Tesla owners.
This would allow people who could otherwise not afford a 35k electric car (before incentives) to buy one and is the reason he doesn't think it'll be necessary to build another cheaper version.
> If they sold a car, they get profit immediately. If they kept the car for their own fleet, it would take longer to earn the same profit and then add additional overhead of maintaining the fleet, the reservation system, refunds, additional litigation, etc. Also, if the market is super saturated, they can sell cars to companies unable to make a profit. The manufacturer still gets the sale even thought the car doesn't realize a profit through a fleet.
Car companies already run their own financing companies so they are used to this model of technically buying their own product.
Don't they know about depreciation? Or are these cars riding on perfect roads and in perfect weather? This resembles the fairy-tale of Moses's followers receiving manna from God while crossing the Sinai.
And I really can't understand how some people still think that these cars will run on free power from now to eternity. Energy costs money, be it gasoline, coal or electrical power, there's no silver bullet, there's no free lunch.
>Long before that is the case, there'd be no incentive for the manufacturer to sell the car at all; they'd make more money just pushing the button themselves the minute the car rolled off the assembly line.
So there will be many tens of millions of people who want to buy such a car, plus car rental agencies, but no car manufacturer will sell to them? That seems pretty unlikely. Can you think of any similar case?
I think deprecation should only be taken into consideration if one is planning on selling the car in the future, and I get the feeling that he is planning on driving that car into the ground.
I think the point being made was, if you don't plan on selling something, does it matter what it's worth?
As in, I'm not going to factor my child's value into my assets since I'm not going to sell it. Or in the OP's case, since his car will never be sold, it's not relevant how much value he's losing by keeping it for x years. Not that the car's value doesn't depreciate, just that the value of the car isn't ever important after the initial cost.
Right, but the author was estimating cost over the lifetime of the vehicle, not possible breakeven down the road if they get bored and sell or some other general use-case. In the author's case, is the up front cost they included not enough?
I guess maybe you're being pedantic and saying everything's value is always important to make measured decisions, but that seems lame in this discussion so I assume I'm glossing over some fundamental fact.
Even if you plant to drive it into the ground, you have to spread the cost of the car over the lifetime of it's use. If the Telsa only lasts 9 years, that's is going to add cost to his usage. If it lasts 30 years, that's going to reduce the cost of usage.
Otherwise any sort of calculation of expenses is missing one of the biggest components, the cost of the car.
I think 9 years is at the high end. The drive train was replaced at 65K and the battery was replaced at 75K miles which probably makes "into the ground" not much longer than when the 8 year warranty runs out.
> Otherwise any sort of calculation of expenses is missing one of the biggest components, the cost of the car.
They include the cost of the car as the first calculation...
> Total Cost of Ownership:
>> Cost of Tesla: $79,000 used with 35,000 miles
Is that not enough? Do you need to calculate the potential earnings every day that you decide not to sell the car over it's lifetime?
Also, perhaps this is tangential, but the author was calculating how much they had lost or saved over the course of ownership up to that point. I feel like the OP in this subthread didn't actually read the article and just commented after skimming over the cost breakdown thinking it was supposed to be something it wasn't (i.e., a cost/benefit analysis for the car's lifetime).
I think the point is that he's spent $79,000 on the car, which appears to be glossed over somewhat when calculating the TCO. What does T stand for, after all? The price of the car absolutely must be included.
Absolutely agree. Another commenter says "doesn't matter if he's planning to run the car into the ground" but a) we don't know that and b) In theory anything mechanical (or electronic) has a useful life whereby that life is reduced by wear and tear. You could argue that 100 miles is de-minimis but not 100k miles.
Depreciation, insurance, commercial operating costs & warranty issues due to non-personal use. Of course, OP did state "earn" which probably means "net", but as stated before, why would a manufacturer or service concede a presumably plausible revenue stream in the first place?
Flagstaff, AZ gets electricity from the Cholla Power Plant in Northern Arizona. The plant burns coal and is considered one of the dirtiest power stations in the nation.
Just consider that owning a Tesla or any plug-in electric in Flagstaff is completely backwards.
From a city pollution point of view, it is not, as you have no exhaust. And you are only a power plant upgrade away to have all cars automatically "switch".
Actually, from a city pollution point of view, cars registered in Flagstaff do not even have to pass smog. Flagstaff does not suffer from pollution like much larger metropolitan areas. The local environment is completely beside the point anyway.
We're not replacing coal power stations. It isn't an "upgrade" away. Our energy demand is increasing so any new stations supplement rather than replace existing power stations. The stakeholder wouldn't shutdown a power station before its lifetime anyway. They need to recoup their investment. The current operational units at the station will not be shutdown until 2025 and they'll probably add more to extend the lifetime of the station.
And furthermore, if the plant was to be supplemented with solar, where do you think the energy will come from at night when the car is plugged in?
Why do you think Tesla is getting in the battery business as well? Energy storage will become extremely important as we move away from fossil fuel energies.
> We're not replacing coal power stations. It isn't an "upgrade" away. Our energy demand is increasing so any new stations supplement rather than replace existing power stations.
Ontario, Canada (where I live) shut down its last coal plant in 2014 and our nighttime electricity costs US$0.0669 per kWh.
We did it by not being irrational wimps about Nuclear.
> We're not replacing coal power stations. It isn't an "upgrade" away. Our energy demand is increasing so any new stations supplement rather than replace existing power stations.
That's simply wrong. Cheap natural gas has been choking off coal all over the country. Plants have been closing as a result and every year since we have generated less electricity from coal than the year prior.
That's true, you're right. Overall coal use is declining, but it has be well established that at night when electric cars are charging you're probably getting power from even cheaper coal that could come from several states away, even if you don't happen to have coal plants in your state.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but quick calculation indicates that Tesla using only energy from Cholla (one of the dirtiest plants in the US) would produce about the same amount of CO2 (13.6kg per 100km) as 5L/100km car (Ford Fiesta) would produce (12kg per 100km).
As you can probably improve your electricity mix quite easily, it sounds like that from fuel CO2 emission perspective, electric car is always at least as good choice as gasoline car.
Lithium ion batteries have been recyclable for a while now-- Best Buy has receptacles for used ones. It's been slow to get off the ground because virgin production is still rather cheap.
There is no process for recycling /automotive/ lithium ion batteries, but that's because their use is so recent--the first commercially available lithium ion EV (Tesla Roadster) wasn't released until 2008. However, EV batteries are essentially the same as commodity lithium ion batteries (e.g. stacks of 18650 cells that you can buy on Amazon), and those have been recycled for a while.
Are you also in Flagstaff? I've been surprised by the number of Tesla's I see given that one likely has several hours of charging to look forward to to get to Phoenix and back.
Interesting take. There is already a subprime lending crisis in the automotive loan market, along with a glut of used cars that somehow arent depreciating. I wonder if people start deciding that they want to overspend on a car they want and decide to "uber" their way into affording it...
Hehe, they cannot drive the jalopies to Mexico fast enough. It is amusing to see a junker towing two more junkers along I-10 enroute to today's crossing point.
Amusing, that is, until you speak to some dealers and find out the "why" is to keep used vehicle values inflated.
"Tesla also has an 8 year, unlimited mileage warranty for the Drive Train & Battery. This was great, as I did have the drive train replaced at about 65,000 miles and the battery replaced at about 76,000 miles."
You can read this as:
"Tesla also has an 8 year, unlimited mileage warranty for the engine and fuel tank. This was great, as I did have the engine replaced at about 65,000 miles and the fuel tank replaced at about 76,000 miles."
That just makes it that much crazier. The most important and expensive components of this car actually do break down fairly quickly, but the manufacturer just covers them under a lifetime warranty!
Right — assuming people bought their cars and used them normally (10-15k per year), having to replace the battery and drive train for say 50% of cars under warranty would be pretty die. He's also quite likely effectively free-riding on the supercharger system.
If Tesla's costs for electricity are similar to mine (a big assumption, I know), then that 27,615 mile trip cost them about $1,100. With 20+% margins on $70,000+ cars, I think they're doing OK on that end.
I don't think his experience with the battery and drivetrain are typical. I've heard that earlier cars had a lot of drivetrain replacements, but not so much recently. And when Tesla replaces them, it's often because of a simple problem and it's just easier to throw in a new one than to fix the existing one on site. They then ship the old one back to the factory, refurbish it, and use it for another replacement. I haven't heard much about battery replacements under warranty. From what I do hear, most people with high-mileage Model Ss are still doing great with their batteries.
He's presumably using a lot more power than was assumed. There's nothing wrong with it (and heck, he's free publicity for Tesla), but if everyone did it then it wouldn't work.
Yeah.. having to have the complete drive train and battery replaced really undermines this:
> The Tesla isn’t a typical prissy $100,000 car. It’s meant to be driven, and driven hard. It’s not just a daily driver, it’s a high performance yet practical and extremely safe car. It’s better than a traditional car in so many categories it’s fall down funny.
Makes it sound like you almost have to drive it it hard to be sure to wear out the motor and battery before the 8 years is up so you can get the free replacement (extrapolating from his anecdote, to assume many have to get both replaced at 76,000 miles; probably not valid to extrapolate, but the whole post was encouraging others to extrapolate on the positives by giving his low maintenance costs, etc.).
The door handle replacement costs seem outrageous too; I wonder if the energy-efficiency savings from them over the fleet makes up for the total labor/other-costs involved in producing and repairing them.
The fact that the entire drivetrain was replaced sounds bad, unless you understand the unique way that Tesla handles service. Their cars are actually designed so the drivetrain can very easily be removed and replaced, so when there's any kind of problem, they just go ahead and replace the whole thing for the sake of expediency. Then they can refurbish the damaged drive unit on their own schedule and use it to repair the next car that comes in with drivetrain problems.
Because of this, they'll sometimes replace the whole drivetrain for something as minor as an odd sound. A drivetrain replacement doesn't mean the same thing that it does with your typical gas car.
Similar deal with the battery pack. It just drops right out of the bottom of the car, so it makes for a better service experience if they can just replace it and give the car straight back rather than leaving the owner without a car while they embark on a potentially lengthy repair process.
Assuming they've made it easy to swap out, it might actually be significantly cheaper. Repairs can be done at a central location, by experts who do it all day long. Customers are back on the road quickly and happily.
Swapping out the drivetrain for minor issues is great when the car is under warranty. But what about when the warranty is up? What is the bill going to look like to replace all that?
When they start putting in, as you say, refurbed parts that already had 70,000 miles on them, will they really be as good as new?
Tesla knows that fucking people is bad for business. Even when you're #1, it's how you quickly not be #1. Even when you collude with your "competitors" in the #2 and #3 spots to make sure #4 is always very far away, #4 eventually becomes #1 after enough tries (and, usually, after enough #4s).
Tesla most likely will charge something that makes Detroit look bad. A Tesla drivetrain has a fraction of the complexity and parts a gas or diesel vehicle has.
Also, the Model S drivetrain is somewhat the first of it's kind. There have been single speed transmissions made before in cars (in and out of electric vehicles), there have been high torque transmissions made (for vehicles much larger than a Model S), but nothing quite like the unique problem the Model S presents.
The oldest Model Ses are now on their 4th year of warranty. Presumably, most failures so far have been in the first production revision of the product, and given the highly iterative nature of Tesla's product workflow, they have improved the product based on real world feedback.
I don't want to know what the first generation drivetrain failure rate is, as they will be covered under the 8 year/unlimited miles warranty, and replaced with the newest revisions. I want to know what today's drivetrains will look like in 4 to 8 years.
Also, in comparison, most vehicles don't last longer than 8 years. Most people will have put over 100 thousand miles on their vehicle at that point, most vehicles start falling apart just over the 125 thousand miles line, unless you've been very meticulous about babying your vehicle.
Tesla's bet is that massively reducing the number of parts and complexity of said parts will dramatically cut down on failure. This is a long term bet, and early analysis of the first generation of Model Ses only paints half the picture. The whole picture seems to illustrate that Tesla is very good at iterative design, something Detroit does not value as a skill.
Edit: As a side note, I live in Maine. Maybe we're just especially hard on vehicles up here.
> Also, in comparison, most vehicles don't last longer than 8 years. Most people will have put over 100 thousand miles on their vehicle at that point, most vehicles start falling apart just over the 125 thousand miles line, unless you've been very meticulous about babying your vehicle.
That's sounds crazy. Where I live (Europe), a car with 100k miles is maybe at 40% of it's lifetime. My car has almost 100k in it, and it is completely fine (it's a French (!) car), it has two small scratches on it and everything works as expected (no, it's not babied if you don't consider a 2 yo baby sitting in it).
This is anecdata of course, but really, 100k miles is nothing. My father drives a Skoda with 420k miles in it at the moment -- it definitely doesn't look like new but it works.
European traffic patterns seem to be much different than American ones. Driving culture in Europe is radically different. Chronic stop and go traffic, and also the obsession of over-salting roads in the north, and the insanely hot conditions down south, eat cars. In addition, most Europeans rely on public transportation for a lot of what we'd use cars for.
Not only that, European models of cars seem to be much higher quality than typical US ones, partly due to the tastes of European culture, partly due to EU regulation.
Top Gear over the years has had at least one segment about this from a British/European point of view, but I quick Google isn't telling me which episode.
> > Also, in comparison, most vehicles don't last longer than 8 years. Most people will have put over 100 thousand miles on their vehicle at that point, most vehicles start falling apart just over the 125 thousand miles line, unless you've been very meticulous about babying your vehicle.
> That's sounds crazy.
That is crazy. Unless you like having car payments, or that "new car" smell, you can get 200k miles from most cars without a lot of "babying". This means regular oil changes and such. And you need to pay attention. Noises, loss of oil, and such indicate problems that don't just fix themselves.
What really harms a car's lifetime is the willingness of the owner to take care of it. And rust (at least in the parts of the world that get snow).
In the northeast US almost every car I've owned has ultimately been retired predominantly due to rust. The car I now own with 160K miles I haven't driven in the winter for a number of years and the mechanics at the dealer are always surprised that I have this model (which I bought in its final model year) on the road and that it hasn't rusted out.
It is 20 years old and things are still improving but rust as a limiting factor on lifetimes in the winter.
> Also, in comparison, most vehicles don't last longer than 8 years. Most people will have put over 100 thousand miles on their vehicle at that point, most vehicles start falling apart just over the 125 thousand miles line, unless you've been very meticulous about babying your vehicle.
This is BS. The average vehicle age in the US is 11.4 years [1] and has been steadily increasing every year. At 12k miles a year, that would make ~140k roughly the average mileage for a vehicle in the US.
I've just driven my 9-year vehicle over a 4,000 km roadtrip in Europe which included going through the Swiss Alps at 2,000 meters of altitude (which was something for a 1.4-liter car). I certainly do expect to keep my vehicle for at least another 5 years. I'm also in the market for buying a late-'90s W202 Mercedes.
I have barely done any maintenance for the last two years on my 2000 BMW 3 series and it is running strong at 256k miles. I don't exactly baby it when I drive either
There's a single motor (or two, for the 4WD versions), plus axle(s) to the powered wheels. Some consider the battery to be part of the drivetrain also.
I understand they recalled all the drivetrains. And will likely do it until all the engineering secrets have been uncovered and solved. I don't see it as a big deal, just part of bringing a highly engineered (accelerated, disruptive) and breakthrough product to market. Another way, do you think the automotive industry got where it is in 10 years? They had oil cloth for windows.
They have to cover them under a long warranty, because otherwise people wouldn't want to buy their cars. Imagine if Tesla owners like him started getting repair bills for tens of thousands of dollars in a regular basis. Hugely damaging to the brand.
I sure hope not. Many gas cars don't even go in for their first service until 100,000 miles. 300,000 is not even difficult to hit on any car built in the last 30 years.
> The main problem areas involved the drivetrain, power equipment, charging equipment, giant iPad-like center console, and body and sunroof squeaks, rattles, and leaks.
I have a tesla and somehow in 4 years of ownership have not had to replace my drivetrain (anecdote, blah blah). But earlier, Tesla had a goal to get people back on the road faster, so they had a deliberate policy of replacing drivetrains since it was so easy. Now they decided it was better to just fix minor issues. Result is not so many drive trains have been replaced since then.
> I called a friend who lived nearby and asked him to take my kid home. No need for both of us to be stuck on the side of a freeway. He suggested we put the car in neutral and roll it over to the shoulder or down the onramp and onto the street. Great suggestions, but we couldn't get the car out of gear.
This seemed to be a common issue. Yeah, I know you were fine anecdotally, but so are hundreds of thousands of people with Takata airbags.
The reliability metric is not "how many people are fine", but instead "how many people had issues". For a 100k vehicle, the number of issues reported on the Tesla S is far above its competition. Enough so that Consumer Reports had to rescind their spectacular recommendation.
Here is another positive testimonial[1] of Tesla Model S's long term reliability. Great reliability, simpler design (than conventional ICE cars), unlimited mileage warranty and cheaper per-mile operating cost make Tesla Model S a terrific choice for taxis.
Ok, but what are the costs beyond $100k? Even the worst cars as far as maintenance (BMWs and such) can make it to $100k fairly reasonably. This is even more important in the Tesla apparently because after 8 years you're shit out of luck on the powertrain apparently, at least according to another post here, and that's where the actual expensive parts lie. If this guy comes back in a few years (after the warranty expires) with this same Tesla at 200k still going strong and still having spent only a couple thousand max on repairs, that'll be a real achievement. As it stands, this simply shows the Tesla is not a total lemon, incredibly useful information, but expected.
I had to replace an interior door handle on a '99 Miata (interior is far easier than an exterior; exterior means pulling the door skin off for access and having to deal with paint matching), and a Miata is real straightforward repair job. But I still took a photo of each and every little piece I pulled off not knowing when one would break or be deformed before or after this process. (And having to locate a dealership to order the part shipped while showing him a handful of broken parts and a complete photo of "this doohickey".)
$1000 would be steep price to pay for a Corrolla but not outlandish. I would bet the cost of replacing one on a BMW 3 series would be more.
Their main point is not that Tesla cars are badly manufactured. But that they don't make repair manuals available, they don't sell replacement parts, they lock down access to the car's systems, don't give salvage titles, and that these cars will be very difficult and expensive to repair in the future.
> Tesla Road Trip Savings: My 27,615 mile (the circumference of the Earth is 24,901 miles) 48 State plus Canada road trip cost $8.37. I had to pay for electricity 2 times, the rest was FREE thanks to the Tesla SuperCharger network. There were about 180 SuperChargers when I started the trip. There are now almost 300 in the USA. Gas savings assuming a 25 MPG car using a national average of $2.75 a gallon = $3037.
I'll be impressed if that was 100k of "taking corners in a spirited manner on potholed" roads, something every car sold to an auto enthusiast in a state with a real winter is subject to. That's where I draw the line for "hard miles". Putting around the southwest in a manner that doesn't scare customers isn't hard miles. "Abused" is a misleading title.
If a Tesla is this cheap to drive, and self-driving cars cut out the labor costs of transportation services, then it becomes cheaper to just use Uber et al than own your own car. At that point the ICE auto industry will be really screwed, and the switch to all EV cars could come about a lot faster than has been predicted.
Out of curiosity I had a look at the current pricing of a Tesla in Australia. My jaw just about dropped when I found that a new P90D costs $255,000 AUD. That is a difference of $50,000 if you convert the US price to Australian. Ouch.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadThat is not happening in the near future. At least not in a meaningful scale.
I could see competing products (Apps) with less infrastructure launching this business model though. So I guess it might exist in one way or another in the end.
Plus, when Teslas are usable as self-driving cars, the value of the rides provided will drop precipitously -- that figure would be more like $5000, and you'd have to lock up usable hours for it and perhaps pay some penalty to renege on specific hours.
People who hire robotaxis might need to have money in escrow if they don't have enough reputation.
If you try to rent a car without a credit card, you are usually required to put down a deposit.
Renting a car requires one, but there's also more generally a high barrier to renting a car - plenty of forms, showing your license, booking in advance, etc etc. There's also no choice. The same is not true for getting in a taxi. Why would I put down a deposit to ride in an automated car, really?
Lol
As for existing cars, never. Free charging is part of what you get with the car, and they'd be breaking that contract if they changed it unilaterally. Fortunately, electricity is usually pretty cheap, and on average the money they set aside from each car for running the Superchargers will match or exceed the cost of running them.
Of course, it's never really free, us customers pay for it one way or another. "Included and unlimited" is probably a better way to describe it.
>will pay for it by charging to charge
will subsidize supercharger access for Tesla vehicles via selling access to non-Tesla Electric vehicles
Also, consider that tesla essentially owns the largest amount of electric stops in the US. They've got their foot in the door, no other manufacturer is going to come close. When electric cars really kick into gear, tesla controls the gas pumps, and can charge everyone else, while still giving free to their own cars, which is a pretty good incentive.
(it's never been "free", just added on to the purchase price as an option, and later as a standard feature)
Ignore the editorialized headline. The actual quote is:
>The obvious thing to do is decouple the Supercharger Network from the cost of the Model 3. So it will still be very cheap—and far cheaper than gasoline—to drive long-distance with the Model 3, but it will not be free long distance for life unless you’ve purchased that package. -- Elon Musk http://www.plugincars.com/model-3-owners-will-pay-access-tes...
Tesla has the technical capability though to sell Supercharger access in time-limited slots (unlimited Supercharger access for the next 7 days, good for that coast-to-coast trip one is planning), on per-kWh basis (plug in, have your credit card on file with Tesla app, start charging), as well as introduce variable pricing (more expensive kWh during periods of heavy use and long lines at Superchargers, cheaper and/or free access during periods of low activity). Historically they've been very driver-friendly, so if I had to guess, they might make all of those options available, as they each cover a specific use case.
I'd be much more concerned they have to keep warranting so many batteries and engines. This guy got a new battery and engine at 75k miles, so they are pretty much down >$10k on his car alone. And he's far from the only one who casually mentions having the most expensive part of the car exchanged for free.
It's pretty clear that to get supercharger access in the Model 3 you're going to need to tick that option too.
Long before that is the case, there'd be no incentive for the manufacturer to sell the car at all; they'd make more money just pushing the button themselves the minute the car rolled off the assembly line.
I imagine selling the cars externalizes the cost of financing the car and risks associated with the service.
Sure, and that makes sense in most realistic cases. A $35,000 car that returns an expected $30,000/year isn't a realistic case. Anywhere remotely close to that, and the case for selling the cars to consumers to realize (reduced) returns more quickly and insulate the manufacturer from risk just isn't there.
Heck, even if the company decides they don't want to be in the business of owning the fleet, the fact that it is expected to return $30K a year means that the price that can be supported will be much higher (or, conversely, the fact that the car can be sold for $35K will drive down the returns as more people buy the car, and supply drives down market clearing price for all the productive uses.)
But if they own the cars they can save a metric ton of money.
You would be surprised just how much of the cost of a mid range car is in the interior not only because they need to outsource those materials and gadgets usually but because the interior is one of the few things that is still done mostly manually.
An autonomous car that drives people around doesn't need an infotainment system, doesn't need fancy driver and side passenger seats doesn't need tons of stuff. Heck you would be able to take out the driver/passenger side completely out of the picture if you are designing a dedicated autonomous taxi. Add to that all the other crap that every car now has to have to be competitive and it adds up to a metric ton of saving. Ford/GM/Whoever can design the cheapest simplest shittiest car they can think off that no one would ever want to buy because it doesn't have 5 different suspension settings and xband radio that sync with your phone to get you your latest podcasts and a climate controlled cup holder that keeps you drink cool in the summer and warm in the winter, seat warmers padded pedals and that turbo charger because when buying a 30K it's 0-60 is still important for no apparent reason. They can cut the cost of making the car by probably 50% easily if they don't have to built it to compete in the market, no one cares about 0-60 or xband when they take a 15min uber ride.
And not only would you save money on the manufacturing you would save tons of money by being able to recycle the cars afterwards, you can get a very large part of the cost of the BOM of a car by recycling it and since car manufacturers basically say bye bye to the car once they ship it to the dealer they never see a penny out of it.
The next big saving/cost reduction is not having to deal with customers a very large portion of the cost of a car is the infrastructure and network a car manufacturer has to set up to support the car. They have to provide service for the first 3 years 100,000 miles - that's gone, they have to setup a network of authorized dealers and provide support and training - that's gone, they have to setup a network of authorized repair and service providers - that's gone.
They have to track every car and know where and when it was sold and where it is if they need to do a product recall - that's gone or well every easy since they run all the cars. They have to support the car by law by providing replacement parts sometimes for decades depending on the country which means they either build considerably more parts than they need or have to continue to have the ability to construct them for years which is expensive as duck - this is also gone. Heck the advertisement costs alone is probably couple of 100's of millions a year globally if not N/A only, take that out too because now you don't need to tell people what's in your new Fjord Mikata M30 because you aren't selling direct to customers anymore.
If you can reduce the cost of the car by 50%, and get 60-80% of the cost of the BOM back by recycling it after 3-5 years it's a no brainer to cut the middle man and stop selling cars to people period.
When take out all of that the financing becomes a non-issue the cars are assets not only that they have value but they also generate income even if Ford/GM needs financing they won't have issues getting it for the same reason that for individuals it's easier to get financing for a work vehicle than for a leisure car.
True! Given that a large portion of US car sales are 'fleet sales'[1], it's very likely that car companies that lead in automation with sell their cars to their own subsidiary automated taxi companies.
It's also worth noting that some car companies already have their own car-sharing services - BMW with ReachNow and Mercedes Benz with Car-to-Go. The moment they have their own reliable automated driving systems, they will turn those into taxi services.
[1] http://www.autonews.com/article/20160307/RETAIL01/303079955/...
That is, having remote drivers assisted by all the "autopilot" features that improve situational awareness. These features make it easier to drive a car in person, but they could also be used to make it easier to remote a car.
I see many possibilities for this. Designing cars that don't have a driver seat, holding more passengers. Having passengers be able to face each other.
Remote pilots handoffs to other pilots via overlapping handshake. Might be able to figure out a way for multiplexing multiple cars across a smaller group of pilots.
Anyway, I think this is far more achievable than self driving in the near term.
Latency is an issue, but I think 200ms is a pretty high number.
you can get 250ms round trip to a geosynchronous satellite. Surely we can beat that on the ground.
I think you're onto something here, but I don't think it will be done at the scaling of 1-to-1 drone pilot per vehicle. If you look at the situations where "autopilot" and autonomous vehicles have failed, you can think of many of these events as systemic changes.
A car pulled over on a stretch of road which has no shoulder due to construction -- This is a systemic change on that stretch of road that applies to more than 1 car. The same even goes for a semi truck making a left turn across two-lanes of single direction highway traffic -- That is a momentary systemic change to that section of road.
My conclusion: I do think that remote supervision of "self-driving" cars will be important. But I don't think the supervision will be done on the scale of one pilot for a single car. Rather, I think such cars will uplink their sensor data to huge datacenters where huge computer systems will monitor the road network as a system. (Much as this drone system can monitor a whole Mexican city. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12374668)
This systemic monitoring system will then alert the autopilot computers of cars on the road to take exceptional actions, or perhaps even send an alert to the driver to take over for awhile. (So in the examples above, the system would tell cars to edge over in the lane to avoid the stalled car on the shoulderless road, or detect semi-trailers crossing the highway in front of a speeding car on autopilot.)
To the people who think I'm insane: There are university Facebook rideshare groups in California that offer that trip for $15. Today.
That's because those are real rideshare groups, not Uber-style quasi-taxis; the additional cost of an extra passenger when you are already planning on taking such a trip is small (at $15, you are well above it, and recovering costs you would have born without the extra passenger.)
That really tells you nothing about the costs when you aren't piggybacking on someone already planning on making the trip.
If they sold a car, they get profit immediately. If they kept the car for their own fleet, it would take longer to earn the same profit and then add additional overhead of maintaining the fleet, the reservation system, refunds, additional litigation, etc. Also, if the market is super saturated, they can sell cars to companies unable to make a profit. The manufacturer still gets the sale even thought the car doesn't realize a profit through a fleet.
The smart move would be to sell cars and also keep a fleet. It really depends on how well they could manage the fleet being a car manufacturer. They are quite different businesses and you don't get much overlap, other than the vehicle at cost and perhaps maintenance parts.
The even smarter move would be to franchise the fleet so you push off the management and operating costs but increase your sales and take part of the profit for branding, advertising, etc. The fleet would of course cross brand the vehicles.
Well, no, it would take longer but the profits would be higher, too, so it would still be the smart move to make.
Certainly a higher risk than just selling a car and taking the profits immediately.
A car company can raise capital and manage fleets much better than individuals can.
But the car company has a competitive advantage in that it could choose not to sell to anyone while they build out a fleet maintenance operation.
But if multiple companies solve the problem at the same time, maybe Hertz has the advantage.
Sell the car and let people loan it out to an autonomous fleet with the app. Tesla would also have its own fleet for cities without enough Tesla owners.
This would allow people who could otherwise not afford a 35k electric car (before incentives) to buy one and is the reason he doesn't think it'll be necessary to build another cheaper version.
Car companies already run their own financing companies so they are used to this model of technically buying their own product.
And I really can't understand how some people still think that these cars will run on free power from now to eternity. Energy costs money, be it gasoline, coal or electrical power, there's no silver bullet, there's no free lunch.
So there will be many tens of millions of people who want to buy such a car, plus car rental agencies, but no car manufacturer will sell to them? That seems pretty unlikely. Can you think of any similar case?
As in, I'm not going to factor my child's value into my assets since I'm not going to sell it. Or in the OP's case, since his car will never be sold, it's not relevant how much value he's losing by keeping it for x years. Not that the car's value doesn't depreciate, just that the value of the car isn't ever important after the initial cost.
Yes, it matters. There are a lot of intangible assets that are not sold (such as Goodwill), even those can be given quantifiable value
I guess maybe you're being pedantic and saying everything's value is always important to make measured decisions, but that seems lame in this discussion so I assume I'm glossing over some fundamental fact.
Otherwise any sort of calculation of expenses is missing one of the biggest components, the cost of the car.
They include the cost of the car as the first calculation...
> Total Cost of Ownership:
>> Cost of Tesla: $79,000 used with 35,000 miles
Is that not enough? Do you need to calculate the potential earnings every day that you decide not to sell the car over it's lifetime?
Also, perhaps this is tangential, but the author was calculating how much they had lost or saved over the course of ownership up to that point. I feel like the OP in this subthread didn't actually read the article and just commented after skimming over the cost breakdown thinking it was supposed to be something it wasn't (i.e., a cost/benefit analysis for the car's lifetime).
Just consider that owning a Tesla or any plug-in electric in Flagstaff is completely backwards.
We're not replacing coal power stations. It isn't an "upgrade" away. Our energy demand is increasing so any new stations supplement rather than replace existing power stations. The stakeholder wouldn't shutdown a power station before its lifetime anyway. They need to recoup their investment. The current operational units at the station will not be shutdown until 2025 and they'll probably add more to extend the lifetime of the station.
And furthermore, if the plant was to be supplemented with solar, where do you think the energy will come from at night when the car is plugged in?
Eventually, stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage
Ontario, Canada (where I live) shut down its last coal plant in 2014 and our nighttime electricity costs US$0.0669 per kWh.
We did it by not being irrational wimps about Nuclear.
http://www.energy.gov.on.ca/en/ontarios-electricity-system/c...
https://www.cns-snc.ca/media/ontarioelectricity/ontarioelect...
That's simply wrong. Cheap natural gas has been choking off coal all over the country. Plants have been closing as a result and every year since we have generated less electricity from coal than the year prior.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_power_in_the_United_State...
> In the first quarter of 2012, the use of coal for electricity generation declined substantially more, 21% from 2011 levels.
As you can probably improve your electricity mix quite easily, it sounds like that from fuel CO2 emission perspective, electric car is always at least as good choice as gasoline car.
I don't think his experience with the battery and drivetrain are typical. I've heard that earlier cars had a lot of drivetrain replacements, but not so much recently. And when Tesla replaces them, it's often because of a simple problem and it's just easier to throw in a new one than to fix the existing one on site. They then ship the old one back to the factory, refurbish it, and use it for another replacement. I haven't heard much about battery replacements under warranty. From what I do hear, most people with high-mileage Model Ss are still doing great with their batteries.
"What if everyone behaved that way Yossarian?"
> The Tesla isn’t a typical prissy $100,000 car. It’s meant to be driven, and driven hard. It’s not just a daily driver, it’s a high performance yet practical and extremely safe car. It’s better than a traditional car in so many categories it’s fall down funny.
Makes it sound like you almost have to drive it it hard to be sure to wear out the motor and battery before the 8 years is up so you can get the free replacement (extrapolating from his anecdote, to assume many have to get both replaced at 76,000 miles; probably not valid to extrapolate, but the whole post was encouraging others to extrapolate on the positives by giving his low maintenance costs, etc.).
The door handle replacement costs seem outrageous too; I wonder if the energy-efficiency savings from them over the fleet makes up for the total labor/other-costs involved in producing and repairing them.
(disclaimer: I own some TSLA stock)
Because of this, they'll sometimes replace the whole drivetrain for something as minor as an odd sound. A drivetrain replacement doesn't mean the same thing that it does with your typical gas car.
Similar deal with the battery pack. It just drops right out of the bottom of the car, so it makes for a better service experience if they can just replace it and give the car straight back rather than leaving the owner without a car while they embark on a potentially lengthy repair process.
When they start putting in, as you say, refurbed parts that already had 70,000 miles on them, will they really be as good as new?
Tesla most likely will charge something that makes Detroit look bad. A Tesla drivetrain has a fraction of the complexity and parts a gas or diesel vehicle has.
Also, the Model S drivetrain is somewhat the first of it's kind. There have been single speed transmissions made before in cars (in and out of electric vehicles), there have been high torque transmissions made (for vehicles much larger than a Model S), but nothing quite like the unique problem the Model S presents.
The oldest Model Ses are now on their 4th year of warranty. Presumably, most failures so far have been in the first production revision of the product, and given the highly iterative nature of Tesla's product workflow, they have improved the product based on real world feedback.
I don't want to know what the first generation drivetrain failure rate is, as they will be covered under the 8 year/unlimited miles warranty, and replaced with the newest revisions. I want to know what today's drivetrains will look like in 4 to 8 years.
Also, in comparison, most vehicles don't last longer than 8 years. Most people will have put over 100 thousand miles on their vehicle at that point, most vehicles start falling apart just over the 125 thousand miles line, unless you've been very meticulous about babying your vehicle.
Tesla's bet is that massively reducing the number of parts and complexity of said parts will dramatically cut down on failure. This is a long term bet, and early analysis of the first generation of Model Ses only paints half the picture. The whole picture seems to illustrate that Tesla is very good at iterative design, something Detroit does not value as a skill.
Edit: As a side note, I live in Maine. Maybe we're just especially hard on vehicles up here.
That's sounds crazy. Where I live (Europe), a car with 100k miles is maybe at 40% of it's lifetime. My car has almost 100k in it, and it is completely fine (it's a French (!) car), it has two small scratches on it and everything works as expected (no, it's not babied if you don't consider a 2 yo baby sitting in it).
This is anecdata of course, but really, 100k miles is nothing. My father drives a Skoda with 420k miles in it at the moment -- it definitely doesn't look like new but it works.
Not only that, European models of cars seem to be much higher quality than typical US ones, partly due to the tastes of European culture, partly due to EU regulation.
Top Gear over the years has had at least one segment about this from a British/European point of view, but I quick Google isn't telling me which episode.
> That's sounds crazy.
That is crazy. Unless you like having car payments, or that "new car" smell, you can get 200k miles from most cars without a lot of "babying". This means regular oil changes and such. And you need to pay attention. Noises, loss of oil, and such indicate problems that don't just fix themselves.
What really harms a car's lifetime is the willingness of the owner to take care of it. And rust (at least in the parts of the world that get snow).
It is 20 years old and things are still improving but rust as a limiting factor on lifetimes in the winter.
This is BS. The average vehicle age in the US is 11.4 years [1] and has been steadily increasing every year. At 12k miles a year, that would make ~140k roughly the average mileage for a vehicle in the US.
[1] http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub...
Is that a regular occurrence?
I'd be interested to hear the reasons so much needed to be replaced, instead of just a passing mention that a large amount of repairs were done
Seems like a large-scale manufacturing defect affecting 2013 and 2014 Tesla Model S.
http://www.consumerreports.org/cars/tesla-reliability-doesnt...
> The main problem areas involved the drivetrain, power equipment, charging equipment, giant iPad-like center console, and body and sunroof squeaks, rattles, and leaks.
But the Drive train of the Tesla Model S is notoriously bad.
http://www.edmunds.com/tesla/model-s/2013/long-term-road-tes...
> Drive Unit IV: The Milling
That's the article when Edmunds had to replace the drive unit for the 3rd time (aka: the 4th Drive Unit)
http://www.edmunds.com/tesla/model-s/2013/long-term-road-tes...
> I called a friend who lived nearby and asked him to take my kid home. No need for both of us to be stuck on the side of a freeway. He suggested we put the car in neutral and roll it over to the shoulder or down the onramp and onto the street. Great suggestions, but we couldn't get the car out of gear.
This seemed to be a common issue. Yeah, I know you were fine anecdotally, but so are hundreds of thousands of people with Takata airbags.
The reliability metric is not "how many people are fine", but instead "how many people had issues". For a 100k vehicle, the number of issues reported on the Tesla S is far above its competition. Enough so that Consumer Reports had to rescind their spectacular recommendation.
[1] http://jalopnik.com/heres-how-a-tesla-taxi-held-up-after-100...
I had to replace an interior door handle on a '99 Miata (interior is far easier than an exterior; exterior means pulling the door skin off for access and having to deal with paint matching), and a Miata is real straightforward repair job. But I still took a photo of each and every little piece I pulled off not knowing when one would break or be deformed before or after this process. (And having to locate a dealership to order the part shipped while showing him a handful of broken parts and a complete photo of "this doohickey".)
$1000 would be steep price to pay for a Corrolla but not outlandish. I would bet the cost of replacing one on a BMW 3 series would be more.
Their main point is not that Tesla cars are badly manufactured. But that they don't make repair manuals available, they don't sell replacement parts, they lock down access to the car's systems, don't give salvage titles, and that these cars will be very difficult and expensive to repair in the future.
If ford tried it people would complain, but Tesla locking things down is just fine.
> Tesla Road Trip Savings: My 27,615 mile (the circumference of the Earth is 24,901 miles) 48 State plus Canada road trip cost $8.37. I had to pay for electricity 2 times, the rest was FREE thanks to the Tesla SuperCharger network. There were about 180 SuperChargers when I started the trip. There are now almost 300 in the USA. Gas savings assuming a 25 MPG car using a national average of $2.75 a gallon = $3037.
Out of curiosity I had a look at the current pricing of a Tesla in Australia. My jaw just about dropped when I found that a new P90D costs $255,000 AUD. That is a difference of $50,000 if you convert the US price to Australian. Ouch.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12304241