The Leaf has been in mass production since at least 2010, predating all Teslas but the Roadster, a limited edition vehicle based on the Lotus Elise chassis (edit) first designed sometime in 2004 or 2005(end edit). The Leaf itself first premiered in 1997 as a prototype at the LA Auto Show, and was sold in similar numbers to the Roadster over the next decade until the production model was released in 2010.
Why is Tesla getting kudos for something Nissan did first?
Why is Nissan supposed to get credit for something GM did first?
edit: cute downvotes, but the fact is GM was the modern pioneer on electric vehicles.
"The General Motors EV1 was an electric car produced and leased by General Motors from 1996 to 1999. It was the first mass-produced and purpose-designed electric vehicle of the modern era from a major automaker"
It wasn't an in-house test program. They were leased to the public in California, as GM s way of working within an incentive/mandate system that existed at the time (Toyota’s original RAV4 EV and Honda's EV+ were, as well.)
"One industry official said that each EV1 cost the company about US$80,000, including research, development and other associated costs;[67] other estimates placed the vehicle's actual cost as high as $100,000.[2] Bob Lutz, GM Vice Chairman responsible for the Chevrolet Volt, in November 2011 stated the EV1 cost $250,000 each and leased for just $300 per month.[68] GM stated the cost of the EV1 program at slightly less than $500 million before marketing and sales costs, and over $1 billion in total, although a portion of this cost was defrayed by the Clinton Administration's $1.25 billion Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles (PNGV) program.[69][70][71] In addition, all manufacturers seeking to produce electric cars for market consumption also benefited from matching government funds committed to the United States Advanced Battery Consortium."
Well yea, if you include the governments contribution they spent over 1 million per EV1 produced. Look only at material costs and labor you can get ~80k each, but cost to GM per unit is really a question of: (how much GM spent on the program) / (number produced).
Anything else is subject to spin as for example it costs money to setup a factory making just (parts) + (labor costs) overly optimistic. Similarly marketing and sales costs can easily inflate unit costs to make it look worse.
On the other hand if GM could have used current battery technology and current battery costs they may have tried to make it work. But, it was clear at the time it was going to fail so they had fewer incentives to keep costs down.
> Well yea, if you include the governments contribution they spent over 1 million per EV1 produced.
You're not actually reading the paragraph. It says that the government contributed an unspecified amount from a $1.25 Billion budget to GM. And that the contribution defrayed the stated costs by GM which means a portion of the $500 million they spend was grant money.
GM Produced less than 1200 EV1s in the 4 years it was available. Tesla has made more Model 3s in two months than GM ever made EV1s.
Cost estimates for the EV1 range from $80-250k per car, the $250k figure came from Bob Lutz, a GM Vice Chairman.
and 3.
If you ever actually experienced the EV1 then you'd know that it pales in comparison to even the lowest end Leaf. It was a production version of Impact concept from which it was derived with only minor improvements. This was a 1990s quality GM car with a trim level around that of a Cavalier in a package smaller than a Honda Del Sol.
GM introduced the concept of an electric car to the public but the image they portrayed was unfavorable at best. You didn't look at the EV1 and think "this will take over the world", you thought "I could make that in my garage over the weekend."
Tesla gets credit for delivering the first no compromise EV and one that's actually inspirational.
Nissan gets credit for delivering the first EV that just about anyone can own or see themselves drive.
Because the Leaf has long been closer to a golf cart than a useful electric car. (Though it's getting better.)
The 36,200$ 2018 NISSAN LEAF® SL has a 151 mile range in theory, but you need a significant reserve meaning it's effectively significantly smaller than that. With a 30 mile reserve that's ~121 miles. And needs another $1590 to get a quick charge port and cable.
Tesla has continuously had a backlog of sales IMO because nobody else has gotten a great electric car to market.
Again, the Leaf has been getting much better over time and may work well for many people.
Honestly that makes me think less of Nissan and more of Tesla. Nissan has been working on the Leaf for 20 years and that's what they have to show for it? Mean while Tesla went from nothing to 3 from scratch mass production EVs in a decade.
Full disclosure, I own a 2015 Leaf and I have a reservation for a 3.
Nissan, a 100 year old company, has been developing electric vehicles for 20 years and has 1 mass produced vehicle that has sold over 300k units in the last 8 years.
Tesla, a 14 year old company, has been developing electric vehicles for 14 years and has 3 mass produced vehicles that have sold over 230k units in the last 3 years.
Man I wish it was more widely available in the US. I've been interested in once since they were first released, but they were never available to test drive in NM when I looked. I know that someone must be selling them because I occasionally see them on the road, maybe I just have bad timing. I finally gave up last month and bought a Bolt because I'm convinced that GM will hit the 200k federal tax credit before the 2018 Leaf is available here. I love my new Bolt, but wish I could have compared with the Leaf first as it is a much more affordable car, and has sufficient range for our purposes.
The Bolt looks to be a much more useful vehicle, with a range of over 100 miles more than the Leaf.
I'm not crazy about the styling, but that's just personal preference. I wish automakers didn't feel the need to make EVs so gaudy and quirky looking. They just scream "look at me I'm a complete nerd!!"
I could see it being more useful in an area with a large metropolitan area or many closely spaced towns. In a more sparse state like NM, that extra 90 miles round trip isn't big enough to make much of a difference, unless charging stations expand significantly in the future. We bought it knowing full well that we would take our other vehicle out of town most of the time.
There are some attempts to make normal cars electric. The current one is VW Golf, it's small but it's a regular-looking car that also has a fully electric version.
They did in fact ignite the electric car market. The attempts to deny them credit for that are fascinating.
Every major auto manufacturer is aggressively moving to electric vehicles because of the spark that Tesla provided. It wasn't the Nissan Leaf that caused BMW to freak out and radically alter their plans and move everything toward electric. The same goes for all the rest of the automakers.
It'd be like pretending the iPhone didn't set off the smartphone boom, because hey the blackberry existed.
That's pretty funny right there as Tesla has no marketing budget to speak off. Kindly tell me last time you saw a Tesla ad (made by Tesla)?
Electric cars are as old as ICE cars (look up Baker Electric for one's). That's beside the point. What Tesla did was to produce an electric car that was truly desirable and from many metrics, better than an ICE car. You simply cannot deny Tesla's massive impact on the car industry, even GM have publicly acknowledged it.
Their build quality problems are solvable. So are the production issues. These are not issues that will sink the company, especially because they are solvable and generally something to be expected during hyper growth like Tesla is right now.
> And this isn't even their biggest problem, which is that the cars are too expensive for the mass market.
How is Tesla's biggest problem that their cars have a very high ASP? Demand is not a problem for Tesla at all, much less their biggest one.
Now, if you think that Tesla should make a cheaper car, don't hold your breath. Elon has said many times that rather than make a cheap electric car, he thinks it will make more sense to make a mid-price car that can do self-driving to earn the owner money during off-driving hours that the owner can then use to offset the cost of ownership of a Tesla.
Yes it is a bold play, and it might not work. But Tesla's biggest problem is not that they make expensive cars. I'm not sure what their "biggest problem" would be, except for solving their current issues so that they could scale up more smoothly.
You have to be incredibly out of touch to think people are going to want to rent out their personal car to filthy strangers to help offset the cost of ownership.
> You have to be incredibly out of touch to think people are going to want to rent out their personal car to filthy strangers to help offset the cost of ownership.
You have to be incredibly out of touch to group all car consumers into the same category. That's insulting and rude and wrong.
I, for one, and literally everyone I know in person, would absolutely jump up and down with excitement, throw-our-money-at-Tesla-forever if I could buy a Tesla and rent it out to offset the cost.
You are incredibly out of touch if you think that there aren't hundreds of millions of people just like me on this one.
Edit: And, what, HN agrees that "filthy strangers" is a good way to talk about your fellow peers and neighbours? Ugh. The people renting cars are not "filthy strangers". They're just people. Why is all this hateful language, specifically pointed towards the less-wealthy in society, considered reasonable language on HN? It's rude as shit and infuriating that it's tolerated here.
People over whom you have social interaction- neighbors, work peers and so forth- are on better behavior than arbitrary strangers.
This isn't a solid rule by any means, but I think most people with experience in retail know what I'm talking about... if someone thinks they're never going to see you again, they will behave very differently, and never for the better. There is a HUGE difference between your peers, neighbors, and "fellow humans".
OTOH, Airbnb and VRBO make pretty compelling arguments the other direction; I suspect this is at least partly due to security deposits and the reputation systems where owners can leave feedback about renters.
Agreed -- this seems like a terrible plan. Taxis are designed to be durable more than comfortable, have drivers to constrain rider misbehavior, and generally have fares ride in back, and they still get nasty. If I wanted my car to serve as an unsupervised taxi, it would have to be durable inside, I could never leave any personal belongings in it (e.g. gym bag, sunglasses, recent purchases), and I would have to get it seriously cleaned on a regular basis. That would dramatically increase the cost and/or decrease the value of ownership.
Just look at bikes: either you hire/"share" a 40-pound tank that sucks to ride, rent something decent with a substantial deposit, or buy a nice bike that you would never loan out to random strangers.
Public transportation is a great thing, but it is fundamentally different from private vehicles.
Uber and Lyft are "monumentally successful" (while still hemorrhaging money and, in one case, flirting with being sued out of existence) because people are bad at math. People are much better at noticing that their stuff gets trashed. Don't underestimate the importance of "with a driver."
Okay but if your argument is that "people won't sign up for it", you are clearly wrong. Regardless of the financial success of those companies, they are everywhere in just about every major city and even most suburban areas in the US.
Throw a streaming camera in the car, and require a credit card on file, and they can trash the inside of my car all they want, they are just paying for the cleaning or new interior.
Think it’s that easy? Good luck, if they don’t pay then maybe go through your insurance, which is a lot higher too because you need special insurance since you use your car for commercial purposes.
I don't actually think it's that easy, and I would most likely not ever do something like that, but I think it's ridiculous to imply that nobody would sign up for such a service, hell the fact that over 2/3s of my friends in college were driving for uber and lyft on their off-time, a few of them actually bought newer cars just so they could Uber/Lyft and easily made the difference back.
Still, even without the "general population ridesharing" aspect, I'd love to "rent out" my car to friends and family. Between myself and my wife, we really don't need 2 cars, but we have 2 because there are some semi-rare instances where we both need to be somewhere different. The amount of time that we both need to be somewhere different at exactly the same time is even more rare.
If we had a self-driving car capable of taxiing us around, it would allow us to drop down to 1 car instead of 2, meaning it can be quite a bit more expensive and still save us money.
> Throw a streaming camera in the car, and require a credit card on file, and they can trash the inside of my car all they want, they are just paying for the cleaning or new interior.
You might want to think this one through a bit more carefully. One dude hides a joint in his back pocket, and now your car smells like weed. Another accidentally sat on a piece of gum earlier, and now part of it is stuck to your seat. When do you notice? How do you decide who is at fault, or when to start a credit card dispute? You will have a dozen random people using your car every day, very few malicious, but none with any interest in taking care of it beyond not trashing it. Taking care of "your" car will become a full-time job.
EDIT (slow-ban reply): Fair enough. Plenty of people have rental properties. I think it seems like an enormous hassle, but it can apparently be a decent living or side-hustle, so I could be wrong about cars.
And again every single one of those scenarios happens every day with uber and lyft, and they still have a massive number of drivers working for the service every day.
I don't really want to get into an internet argument on the details of how uber and lyft work, but most of those things are easily solvable right now in-app with the click of a button, and I've personally seen the "difficulty" of having to take a few photos of what the last rider did to your car, upload it in-app, and have the company pay for repairs/cleaning in the span of a day or 2.
None of this is "impossible" to solve, and I could absolutely see the future of cars being less of "this is my car" and more of "i'm buying this as an investment" similar to how some people buy and rent housing, especially 50 or 100 years from now.
FYI you can (almost) always get around the "slow reply" limitation by clicking on the age of the comment which brings you to a new page where you can normally comment.
Although I believe the moderation is more strict for comments that do that, as the whole point of the reply throttling is to prevent low-effort angry replies.
People are already successfully renting out Porsches and Teslas on Turo in my city at over a hundred dollars a day (and with 5 day minimums!).
If you give me $500 you can puke in my car all you want. And I'm relatively well-off and don't need the money, imagine someone struggling to make the payments like most Americans.
People also rent out their homes on AirBnB. Yet we don’t live in a world where most people buy a primary home they can’t afford with the intention that they will just rent it out to offset the mortgage a bit. The closest we get is people getting roommates for an apartment.
Turo (fka RelayRides) has been successful at doing exactly this. Airbnb has also shown people's willingness to share personal spaces to offset their mortgage or rent.
Yea? And how do you know these platforms haven’t already peaked? If so many people are willing to rent out space why isn’t damn near every house on AirBnB? There is nothing to support the idea that a few people being willing to rent out space means a much larger class of consumers is willing to do so.
If that is your position, it's quite different from your initial statement that GP had to be "incredibly out of touch".
There are multiple, billion dollar companies where users rent out large, personal assets to others. I don't see that as "nothing to support the idea". It's direct evidence that people are willing to do it at a reasonable level of scale.
I'm not sure what level of scale you're thinking or what you're responding to at this point. If you can scale back a bit on the hyperbole and adversarial mindset, I'm interested to discuss.
The notion that people are so desperate for an expensive Tesla that they will buy it and then happily rent it out to help pay for the cost is out of touch. People have other options, people value keeping their private property private, and people will certainly just wait for when they can buy a cheaper used Tesla, just like any other car.
It is interesting to consider how much fully autonomy will impact attitudes toward private property. I agree it's a stretch to assume most potential buyers are willing to rent their car out as an autonomous vehicle to offset the cost.
However I do think that % of people will be higher than it is today because full autonomy creates more situations where you've bought an expensive asset which sits idle throughout most of the day when you're working or sleeping.
Elon's assuming that Tesla will be the first to market with Level 5 autonomy. If that's the case, people will be willing to pay a huge premium to get one, especially if they think they can offset the costs by having it "pay for itself while you sleep".
" Their build quality problems are solvable. So are the production issues. These are not issues that will sink the company, especially because they are solvable and generally something to be expected during hyper growth like Tesla is right now."
Don't underestimate production and quality. It takes a lot of time and experience to get the supply chain reliable and cost efficient. This is not software where you can make changes quickly. You need tooling and production facilities which are expensive and take years to build.
I am not underestimating production and quality. I even said that I think that Tesla's production and quality problems they have currently are their biggest problems. I do not underestimate them - but I also do not think they will sink the company.
> This is not software where you can make changes quickly.
Compared to the previous industry's way of doing things, yes it is like software where you can make changes quickly. Even on the scale of years, Tesla is showing itself to be more agile than traditional car manufacturers.
I still think you are underestimating how much effort goes into production and quality of physical products. The "previous industry" are no dummies and they have optimized their processes for a long time. It will be very difficult for Tesla to catch up in short time.
I don't expect Tesla to catch up in a short time. It has already been decades almost, and I would expect it to be decades more. Without doing any real math, 2040, 2050 seems like a good mental calculation result for when I would expect Tesla to be a larger company that matches or surpasses the outputs of their competitors in terms of car production. Yes, it takes a long time to build a car company. Tesla isn't going anywhere, production issues or not. They will find a way, and they will do it more efficiently than previous car companies.
> The "previous industry" are no dummies
I don't agree with this, but I wouldn't use the word dummy exactly either. I would say stubborn, and they are very very stubborn. It will take them longer to pivot to winning and sustainable strategies like Tesla's than it will for Tesla to resolve its production and scaling issues.
> Elon has said many times that rather than make a cheap electric car, he thinks it will make more sense to make a mid-price car that can do self-driving to earn the owner money during off-driving hours that the owner can then use to offset the cost of ownership of a Tesla.
What Elon is really saying is that the early adopters are subsidizing development of fleet vehicles that aren’t aimed for significant individual ownership.
Owning a personal vehicle and renting out it's idle time is a big maintenance and liability commitment which inherentlt reduces the reliable access that is the whole reason for ownership.
Specialized rental operations will be able to optimize handling the liability and maintenance overhead. Individual owners will be better of not owning and doing on-demand rental of self-driving vehicles than renting them out, because specialized rental orgs will drive the rental price down to where non-specialists won't be able to make a profit with the maintenance and liability costs imposed.
Interesting, although those are sort of nit picks, they probably reflect the overall engineering quality of the Model 3. While I don't have much context on this, it does seem concerning.
I wasn't able to find anything by Munro on the Model S--I wonder what they have to say about that car.
Is the Bolt not good enough? It has similar-ish performance to the base Model 3. It's not as pretty, but it's quite functional. It also lacks the supercharger network, so maybe we discount that. That said, it is easier to get one right now, and though the list price is similar I'll bet you could get a much better out-the-door price from GM with discounts and incentives.
I'm almost certain that more Model 3s will be delivered this year than Bolts, but I think it is a bit too early to claim that the Model 3 is already out-producing and out-selling it. The Model 3 did have more deliveries than the Bolt in January (1875 vs 1177), but that is only because the beginning of the year is a slow for cars sales in general. There were only 2 Bolts available in my entire state, because the 2018 models haven't arrived yet. However in December the Bolt sold 3227 units, and its average monthly sales for last year (1941) were above the Model 3's highest monthly deliveries to date.
Another thing I like about Tesla is the abandonment of model years being a thing. It would be great if Tesla keeps refining its vehicles, not changing the external style much for decades, and going for super reliability in the long run. No reason the electric motor and chassis can't last a million miles or more.
Model 3 production (and thus sales, since they’re all spoken for at the moment) is rapidly increasing, so I feel comfortable making that claim now. Sales figures from January reflect production rates going all the way back to early December.
It probably is good enough for me, but I don't see how it's better than the Model 3. It's slower, shorter range, doesn't look as nice (although that's subjective), and more expensive.
edit: I'd like to see the downvoters deal in facts rather than emotion; Tesla is almost guaranteed to bring their burn down to a trivial rate by the end of 2018, it isn't a challenging leap from where they're at now with Model 3 production:
$3.4 billion in cash. $277m cash burn in the quarter (a dramatic decrease there).
43% revenue growth with the Model 3 barely contributing in the quarter. 10k to 15k Model 3's likely to be produced in the second quarter.
Build quality... you mean on the first couple thousand Model 3's? How is that surprising?
I'm not a particular fan of Tesla in any regard, and this looks pretty straight-forward. The pessimism is comical.
They could do a ~$2 billion equity raise any time - against their $58 billion market cap - and fund the company as-is for another two years, on top of the runway they already have, without missing a beat. That's assuming the Model 3 doesn't ramp up meaningfully and push them toward cash flow positive in the coming six to eight quarters.
How does 20,000 Model 3's in the fourth quarter sound? That's an additional billion in sales just for that quarter. If Musk avoids building another giant plant in the next four or five quarters, their cash burn will drop toward zero rapidly.
Build quality... you mean on the first couple thousand Model 3's? How is that surprising?
Most other manufacturers work out the kinks before mass production begins.
How does 20,000 Model 3's in the fourth quarter sound? That's an additional billion in sales just for that quarter. If Musk avoids building another giant plant in the next four or five quarters, their cash burn will drop toward zero rapidly.
If Tesla could demonstrate that they were actually capable of producing 20,000 Model 3's in a quarter, people wouldn't be so pessimistic. As it stands, they're still struggling to produce a few hundred cars a quarter without serious quality control concerns, and they've missed every self-imposed target for several years straight. (Tesla reported roughly 2500 Model 3s in all of Q4. For comparison, most other manufacturers can produce more cars than that in a single day.)
> Most other manufacturers work out the kinks before mass production begins.
There were tens of millions of vehicles recalled for manufacturer defects in America alone last year, and the same can be said about 2016. I don't think this statement is a fair one.
> Most other manufacturers work out the kinks before mass production begins.
The vehicle quality reviews on the bottom half of all auto manufacturing says otherwise.
> If Tesla could demonstrate that they were actually capable of producing 20,000 Model 3's in a quarter, people wouldn't be so pessimistic.
They keep proving an ability to produce volumes of cars, and people keep acting like they've never built any cars at all -
"As for its higher-priced Model S sedans and Model X sport utility vehicles, Tesla said it delivered a record number during the quarter. Model S and X deliveries grew 10 percent globally over Tesla's prior record in the third quarter, and were up 28 percent compared to the fourth quarter of 2016."
Right now they're forecasting 2,500 per week of the Model 3 for the end of the first quarter. If they can hit that very near-term marker, they can hit 5k in the fourth quarter.
The way the skeptic game has worked - all the way back to the Roadster days - with Tesla is this: the skeptics say blah blah blah, Tesla can't blah blah blah. Then Tesla eventually does what they say they will. Then the skeptics move the goal post, and the entire cycle repeats, while the skeptics continue to pretend Tesla has never produced vehicles at volume. Meanwhile Tesla keeps powering forward, selling more and more vehicles each year, with their revenue skyrocketing.
The F150 line at Dearborn Truck (the famous River Rouge plant featured in many terrible tales from the beginning of the UAW) produces 650 vehicles a shift on average, 2 shifts per day. The plant manager gets kinda angry when production drops below 600 vehicles in a shift because that starts costing him part of his year end bonus. That's a single plant for a vehicle with an insane amount of variation (body style, engine types, transmission, wheels, interior, etc. etc. etc.). The fact that Tesla can't produce half as many cars a week (on average, bursting doesn't count) as their smaller-by-market-cap competition does for one line on one shift on one day is not good. To respond to a sibling comment -- they have been producing vehicles, but not at scale, not at anything like the scale they claim they'll produce Model 3's. Not. Even. Close.
That's because their cash burn declined dramatically. Cash burn is the primary threat to their business today.
The path they're on now, puts them to near profitable by the end of the year. That's while simultaneously missing the old Model 3 forecast by a mile. They're forecasting 5k Model 3s produced per week in the second quarter. Assume that production rate is further delayed until the fourth quarter, they'll still be near break-even on their cash burn rate.
I guess the US Government / Air-force, and other launch customers paid for the launch since they have active Falcon Heavy contracts with SpaceX. This test was part of the certification process.
I'm pretty sure that Tesla didn't pay anything for the advertising. It was Elon's own Roadster. If you look closely, the Tesla logo wasn't included in the Falcon Heavy launch promotional video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tk338VXcb24
Investors look at what management expected versus how they performed to gauge how well they know their business and market. When they say "We expect to lose $100M this quarter." and "only" lose $90M, even though it may be the most they have ever lost, it was less than they were expecting. So perhaps the business is better than they know.
The headline makes it sound like bad news. This was actually better than expected news. This would be like having a headline of "Sports Team Scores Least Points This Season" burying the lede that they actually won the game.
To be sure, there is plenty of mediocre to bad news in this quarterly report. They still can't make cars at nearly the rate they expected. They're not even mentioning the the autonomous stuff any more. But the loss itself wasn't really bad news.
If I was going to lose $675 million of someone else’s money, I might be tempted to cushion the news by first predicting an even bigger loss, then putting a positive spin when things didn’t turn out as bad as predicted - “clearly things are turning around”. You anchor down and focus on the improvement.
The most neutral way to put it would be to say "Tesla Reports Loss of $675.4 in 4th Quarter." So yes, there's some hyping going on, to get the clicks from all the Musk haters.
However, this isn't a team that won the game; it's a team that lost $675M in 3 months. That's not wonderful good news that got manipulated and twisted around by the media. Not even if you use that trick where you make up a number ahead of time and then the reality looks good by comparison.[0]
Some will say it's an "investment" of $675M. That will become true if it pays off, but currently it's a loss, and will remain a loss unless/until it makes money. Investments vs. "bad investments" (losses) are defined retroactively in other words, and we dont know yet.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadThe Nissan Leaf is expanding where it is being sold.
https://electrek.co/2018/02/06/nissan-new-leaf-sales-seven-a...
There are now 300K Nissan Leaf's on roads:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/sebastianblanco/2018/01/09/niss...
Kudos to Tesla for pioneering and kicking off electric cars.
Really goes to show how far behind Tesla's competitors are.
Why is Tesla getting kudos for something Nissan did first?
edit: cute downvotes, but the fact is GM was the modern pioneer on electric vehicles.
"The General Motors EV1 was an electric car produced and leased by General Motors from 1996 to 1999. It was the first mass-produced and purpose-designed electric vehicle of the modern era from a major automaker"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1
If you want to be technical about it though, then Pope Mfg deserves credit first the first mass-produced EV, released in...1897. (see http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/223/electric-car-timeline.html)
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Cost to produce, 500,000$ each. GM had zero interest in rolling these things out to the public and it showed.
Adjust for inflation and that's well over 700,000$ each in today's money.
Cost per unit would have dropped if they where making 10,000 + / year. However, that was not their goal.
"One industry official said that each EV1 cost the company about US$80,000, including research, development and other associated costs;[67] other estimates placed the vehicle's actual cost as high as $100,000.[2] Bob Lutz, GM Vice Chairman responsible for the Chevrolet Volt, in November 2011 stated the EV1 cost $250,000 each and leased for just $300 per month.[68] GM stated the cost of the EV1 program at slightly less than $500 million before marketing and sales costs, and over $1 billion in total, although a portion of this cost was defrayed by the Clinton Administration's $1.25 billion Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles (PNGV) program.[69][70][71] In addition, all manufacturers seeking to produce electric cars for market consumption also benefited from matching government funds committed to the United States Advanced Battery Consortium."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1
Anything else is subject to spin as for example it costs money to setup a factory making just (parts) + (labor costs) overly optimistic. Similarly marketing and sales costs can easily inflate unit costs to make it look worse.
On the other hand if GM could have used current battery technology and current battery costs they may have tried to make it work. But, it was clear at the time it was going to fail so they had fewer incentives to keep costs down.
You're not actually reading the paragraph. It says that the government contributed an unspecified amount from a $1.25 Billion budget to GM. And that the contribution defrayed the stated costs by GM which means a portion of the $500 million they spend was grant money.
adjust for inflation and that's well over 1 million / car.
Cost estimates for the EV1 range from $80-250k per car, the $250k figure came from Bob Lutz, a GM Vice Chairman. and 3.
If you ever actually experienced the EV1 then you'd know that it pales in comparison to even the lowest end Leaf. It was a production version of Impact concept from which it was derived with only minor improvements. This was a 1990s quality GM car with a trim level around that of a Cavalier in a package smaller than a Honda Del Sol.
GM introduced the concept of an electric car to the public but the image they portrayed was unfavorable at best. You didn't look at the EV1 and think "this will take over the world", you thought "I could make that in my garage over the weekend."
Tesla gets credit for delivering the first no compromise EV and one that's actually inspirational.
Nissan gets credit for delivering the first EV that just about anyone can own or see themselves drive.
It's like when the better looking kid gets more attention.
The 36,200$ 2018 NISSAN LEAF® SL has a 151 mile range in theory, but you need a significant reserve meaning it's effectively significantly smaller than that. With a 30 mile reserve that's ~121 miles. And needs another $1590 to get a quick charge port and cable.
Tesla has continuously had a backlog of sales IMO because nobody else has gotten a great electric car to market.
Again, the Leaf has been getting much better over time and may work well for many people.
Full disclosure, I own a 2015 Leaf and I have a reservation for a 3.
What's your definition of mass production?
Tesla, a 14 year old company, has been developing electric vehicles for 14 years and has 3 mass produced vehicles that have sold over 230k units in the last 3 years.
I'm not crazy about the styling, but that's just personal preference. I wish automakers didn't feel the need to make EVs so gaudy and quirky looking. They just scream "look at me I'm a complete nerd!!"
Tesla is the only one who gets this right.
Every major auto manufacturer is aggressively moving to electric vehicles because of the spark that Tesla provided. It wasn't the Nissan Leaf that caused BMW to freak out and radically alter their plans and move everything toward electric. The same goes for all the rest of the automakers.
It'd be like pretending the iPhone didn't set off the smartphone boom, because hey the blackberry existed.
My sentiments exactly, and I can't understand what you're trying to say here. You've defeated your own point.
Electric cars are as old as ICE cars (look up Baker Electric for one's). That's beside the point. What Tesla did was to produce an electric car that was truly desirable and from many metrics, better than an ICE car. You simply cannot deny Tesla's massive impact on the car industry, even GM have publicly acknowledged it.
The car gets the best mileage per charge in town (hybrids anyway), so "wind efficient" isn't really a thing.
And this isn't even their biggest problem, which is that the cars are too expensive for the mass market.
> And this isn't even their biggest problem, which is that the cars are too expensive for the mass market.
How is Tesla's biggest problem that their cars have a very high ASP? Demand is not a problem for Tesla at all, much less their biggest one.
Now, if you think that Tesla should make a cheaper car, don't hold your breath. Elon has said many times that rather than make a cheap electric car, he thinks it will make more sense to make a mid-price car that can do self-driving to earn the owner money during off-driving hours that the owner can then use to offset the cost of ownership of a Tesla.
Yes it is a bold play, and it might not work. But Tesla's biggest problem is not that they make expensive cars. I'm not sure what their "biggest problem" would be, except for solving their current issues so that they could scale up more smoothly.
You have to be incredibly out of touch to group all car consumers into the same category. That's insulting and rude and wrong.
I, for one, and literally everyone I know in person, would absolutely jump up and down with excitement, throw-our-money-at-Tesla-forever if I could buy a Tesla and rent it out to offset the cost.
You are incredibly out of touch if you think that there aren't hundreds of millions of people just like me on this one.
Edit: And, what, HN agrees that "filthy strangers" is a good way to talk about your fellow peers and neighbours? Ugh. The people renting cars are not "filthy strangers". They're just people. Why is all this hateful language, specifically pointed towards the less-wealthy in society, considered reasonable language on HN? It's rude as shit and infuriating that it's tolerated here.
Your fellow humans are not "filthy strangers".
This isn't a solid rule by any means, but I think most people with experience in retail know what I'm talking about... if someone thinks they're never going to see you again, they will behave very differently, and never for the better. There is a HUGE difference between your peers, neighbors, and "fellow humans".
OTOH, Airbnb and VRBO make pretty compelling arguments the other direction; I suspect this is at least partly due to security deposits and the reputation systems where owners can leave feedback about renters.
Just look at bikes: either you hire/"share" a 40-pound tank that sucks to ride, rent something decent with a substantial deposit, or buy a nice bike that you would never loan out to random strangers.
Public transportation is a great thing, but it is fundamentally different from private vehicles.
Throw a streaming camera in the car, and require a credit card on file, and they can trash the inside of my car all they want, they are just paying for the cleaning or new interior.
Still, even without the "general population ridesharing" aspect, I'd love to "rent out" my car to friends and family. Between myself and my wife, we really don't need 2 cars, but we have 2 because there are some semi-rare instances where we both need to be somewhere different. The amount of time that we both need to be somewhere different at exactly the same time is even more rare.
If we had a self-driving car capable of taxiing us around, it would allow us to drop down to 1 car instead of 2, meaning it can be quite a bit more expensive and still save us money.
> Throw a streaming camera in the car, and require a credit card on file, and they can trash the inside of my car all they want, they are just paying for the cleaning or new interior.
You might want to think this one through a bit more carefully. One dude hides a joint in his back pocket, and now your car smells like weed. Another accidentally sat on a piece of gum earlier, and now part of it is stuck to your seat. When do you notice? How do you decide who is at fault, or when to start a credit card dispute? You will have a dozen random people using your car every day, very few malicious, but none with any interest in taking care of it beyond not trashing it. Taking care of "your" car will become a full-time job.
EDIT (slow-ban reply): Fair enough. Plenty of people have rental properties. I think it seems like an enormous hassle, but it can apparently be a decent living or side-hustle, so I could be wrong about cars.
I don't really want to get into an internet argument on the details of how uber and lyft work, but most of those things are easily solvable right now in-app with the click of a button, and I've personally seen the "difficulty" of having to take a few photos of what the last rider did to your car, upload it in-app, and have the company pay for repairs/cleaning in the span of a day or 2.
None of this is "impossible" to solve, and I could absolutely see the future of cars being less of "this is my car" and more of "i'm buying this as an investment" similar to how some people buy and rent housing, especially 50 or 100 years from now.
Although I believe the moderation is more strict for comments that do that, as the whole point of the reply throttling is to prevent low-effort angry replies.
If you give me $500 you can puke in my car all you want. And I'm relatively well-off and don't need the money, imagine someone struggling to make the payments like most Americans.
There are multiple, billion dollar companies where users rent out large, personal assets to others. I don't see that as "nothing to support the idea". It's direct evidence that people are willing to do it at a reasonable level of scale.
I'm not sure what level of scale you're thinking or what you're responding to at this point. If you can scale back a bit on the hyperbole and adversarial mindset, I'm interested to discuss.
However I do think that % of people will be higher than it is today because full autonomy creates more situations where you've bought an expensive asset which sits idle throughout most of the day when you're working or sleeping.
Elon's assuming that Tesla will be the first to market with Level 5 autonomy. If that's the case, people will be willing to pay a huge premium to get one, especially if they think they can offset the costs by having it "pay for itself while you sleep".
Don't underestimate production and quality. It takes a lot of time and experience to get the supply chain reliable and cost efficient. This is not software where you can make changes quickly. You need tooling and production facilities which are expensive and take years to build.
I am not underestimating production and quality. I even said that I think that Tesla's production and quality problems they have currently are their biggest problems. I do not underestimate them - but I also do not think they will sink the company.
> This is not software where you can make changes quickly.
Compared to the previous industry's way of doing things, yes it is like software where you can make changes quickly. Even on the scale of years, Tesla is showing itself to be more agile than traditional car manufacturers.
> The "previous industry" are no dummies
I don't agree with this, but I wouldn't use the word dummy exactly either. I would say stubborn, and they are very very stubborn. It will take them longer to pivot to winning and sustainable strategies like Tesla's than it will for Tesla to resolve its production and scaling issues.
What Elon is really saying is that the early adopters are subsidizing development of fleet vehicles that aren’t aimed for significant individual ownership.
Owning a personal vehicle and renting out it's idle time is a big maintenance and liability commitment which inherentlt reduces the reliable access that is the whole reason for ownership.
Specialized rental operations will be able to optimize handling the liability and maintenance overhead. Individual owners will be better of not owning and doing on-demand rental of self-driving vehicles than renting them out, because specialized rental orgs will drive the rental price down to where non-specialists won't be able to make a profit with the maintenance and liability costs imposed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16305520
I wasn't able to find anything by Munro on the Model S--I wonder what they have to say about that car.
Spoiler, there is none.
https://insideevs.com/monthly-plug-in-sales-scorecard/
I wouldn't turn one down though.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/07/tesla-q4-2017-earnings.html
Which part of it isn't looking good?
$3.4 billion in cash. $277m cash burn in the quarter (a dramatic decrease there).
43% revenue growth with the Model 3 barely contributing in the quarter. 10k to 15k Model 3's likely to be produced in the second quarter.
Build quality... you mean on the first couple thousand Model 3's? How is that surprising?
I'm not a particular fan of Tesla in any regard, and this looks pretty straight-forward. The pessimism is comical.
They could do a ~$2 billion equity raise any time - against their $58 billion market cap - and fund the company as-is for another two years, on top of the runway they already have, without missing a beat. That's assuming the Model 3 doesn't ramp up meaningfully and push them toward cash flow positive in the coming six to eight quarters.
How does 20,000 Model 3's in the fourth quarter sound? That's an additional billion in sales just for that quarter. If Musk avoids building another giant plant in the next four or five quarters, their cash burn will drop toward zero rapidly.
Most other manufacturers work out the kinks before mass production begins.
How does 20,000 Model 3's in the fourth quarter sound? That's an additional billion in sales just for that quarter. If Musk avoids building another giant plant in the next four or five quarters, their cash burn will drop toward zero rapidly.
If Tesla could demonstrate that they were actually capable of producing 20,000 Model 3's in a quarter, people wouldn't be so pessimistic. As it stands, they're still struggling to produce a few hundred cars a quarter without serious quality control concerns, and they've missed every self-imposed target for several years straight. (Tesla reported roughly 2500 Model 3s in all of Q4. For comparison, most other manufacturers can produce more cars than that in a single day.)
There were tens of millions of vehicles recalled for manufacturer defects in America alone last year, and the same can be said about 2016. I don't think this statement is a fair one.
The vehicle quality reviews on the bottom half of all auto manufacturing says otherwise.
> If Tesla could demonstrate that they were actually capable of producing 20,000 Model 3's in a quarter, people wouldn't be so pessimistic.
They keep proving an ability to produce volumes of cars, and people keep acting like they've never built any cars at all -
"As for its higher-priced Model S sedans and Model X sport utility vehicles, Tesla said it delivered a record number during the quarter. Model S and X deliveries grew 10 percent globally over Tesla's prior record in the third quarter, and were up 28 percent compared to the fourth quarter of 2016."
Right now they're forecasting 2,500 per week of the Model 3 for the end of the first quarter. If they can hit that very near-term marker, they can hit 5k in the fourth quarter.
The way the skeptic game has worked - all the way back to the Roadster days - with Tesla is this: the skeptics say blah blah blah, Tesla can't blah blah blah. Then Tesla eventually does what they say they will. Then the skeptics move the goal post, and the entire cycle repeats, while the skeptics continue to pretend Tesla has never produced vehicles at volume. Meanwhile Tesla keeps powering forward, selling more and more vehicles each year, with their revenue skyrocketing.
The path they're on now, puts them to near profitable by the end of the year. That's while simultaneously missing the old Model 3 forecast by a mile. They're forecasting 5k Model 3s produced per week in the second quarter. Assume that production rate is further delayed until the fourth quarter, they'll still be near break-even on their cash burn rate.
The SpaceX launch was truly amazing, everybody was talking about it at work!
I wonder if that was the most expensive car commercial in history? Did Tesla pay SpaceX for promotional consideration?
Surely it was the cheapest, no? Tesla spent ~$0 for a huge amount of global advertising.
SpaceX was already going to spend the money for the launch and the media has given what is effectively free advertising covering the historic event.
Certainly someone paid for the launch. I think it was a super clever play.
I'm pretty sure that Tesla didn't pay anything for the advertising. It was Elon's own Roadster. If you look closely, the Tesla logo wasn't included in the Falcon Heavy launch promotional video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tk338VXcb24
To be sure, there is plenty of mediocre to bad news in this quarterly report. They still can't make cars at nearly the rate they expected. They're not even mentioning the the autonomous stuff any more. But the loss itself wasn't really bad news.
However, this isn't a team that won the game; it's a team that lost $675M in 3 months. That's not wonderful good news that got manipulated and twisted around by the media. Not even if you use that trick where you make up a number ahead of time and then the reality looks good by comparison.[0]
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring
Some will say it's an "investment" of $675M. That will become true if it pays off, but currently it's a loss, and will remain a loss unless/until it makes money. Investments vs. "bad investments" (losses) are defined retroactively in other words, and we dont know yet.