Tesla has over $5Bn in cash and positive operating cash flow. You can argue about $TSLA the equity's valuation, but whether it survives long-term is no more questionable than whether VW survives.
No different then if legacy automakers survive the next downturn. Ford debt is junk rated now (how many $50k-$70k pickups can you sell to marginal creditors?), GM is a retirement/pension system that happens to make cars (and lost $2 billion on the UAW strike), and Fiat Chrysler/Peugeot are merging to survive (Fiat owes Tesla ~$2 billion over the next 3 years for ZEVs to continue selling cars in Europe).
Who has the most to lose at peak car? Certainly not Tesla. They'll shift to selling more utility battery storage, or Class 8 semis. In California, lots of solar/battery business to be had in PG&E territory alone for the next decade while PG&E and CA gov flounder about nationalizing that infra (which is a matter of when, not if). What will other light auto automakers make as demand falters? Cutbacks.
Sure, Tesla has large amounts of debt. This is the best macro economic condition to have it in (low interest rates). They just need to keep ahead of the debt service curve (profit + cash flow). And if we're about to enter a contraction/recession, interest rates are not going to be going up (insert most recent fed rate cut here). Will it be easy to refinance that pile of TSLA bonds coming up for maturity? I say yes, but what actually happens is anyone's guess. They could do another equity raise and dilute existing shareholders with some grumbles but everyone would go along for the ride (me included).
Smart folks argue Tesla is an energy company that happens to sell cars. Close. Tesla is a financial engineering act that converts mountains of capital and customer dollars into energy and auto products (Solar City was similarly a financial engineering act, PPAs for customers funded by bond markets before solar got so cheap PPAs no longer made sense).
When I just read the headline linked here on HN, I confess I immediately thought of Betteridge's Law ("Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'"). But of course, that's not fair, so I did click through to the scanned article and gave it a quick read.
It's been a least a decade that Porsche label car as "Turbo" as a product line and not based on the feature. The term "Turbo" is just a legacy term in its product line.
Vitamix and Robot Coupe both make 'Turbo' blenders.
Intel offers 'Turbo Boost' CPUs.
Miele makes a 'Turbo' vacuum cleaners.
Intuit makes a 'Turbo' tax preparation product.
Porsche buyers know that 'Turbo' means 'it's the fast, non-track variant', and normal people also know it means 'this one is fast'. A few nerdy pedants will get upset, but literally nobody cares about them. They weren't going to buy one anyway.
As a car guy, I strongly disagree. In the car world, nearly without exception, including all previously Porches, "Turbo" is a label indicating that a specific piece of hardware is installed on the ICE: a turbocharger.
This is like putting a "manual" or "automatic" label on an electric. Sure, you could probably consider an electric a manual 1 speed or automatic 1 speed, but it's not going to get anything but marketing BS eye rolls from anyone that knows about cars.
Exactly! As an owner of a Turbocharged ICE sports car (EVO X) I can say that turbocharger(s) in a car gives it some very specific characteristics (namely a specific torque curve to the engine) which differentiates it from a non-turbocharged vehicle. The turbocharger compresses the input charge and is driven by the exhaust gases. If companies start labelling non-turbocharged vehicles as Turbo, it's a complete mis-representation and a faux-pas in my opinion. Porsche has simply got it wrong here.
They're marketing to a younger crowd. Average age of a Porsche owner is 40. Go where the puck is going to be, not where it is. My elderly neighbor with his Porsche might not appreciate the reference, but mid 30s I enjoy it.
I suppose young was the wrong word. Perhaps "fun" or "not stuffy" would've been better? Fart mode, theater mode, pop culture naming of options in the vehicle config > fit & finish. I don't have an exact name for it, but I can see the difference between my older neighbor and what he values in his Porsche vs what I value in my Model S.
>I don't have an exact name for it, but I can see the difference between my older neighbor and what he values in his Porsche vs what I value in my Model S.
More interest in the driving experience rather than just a form of transportation? As a die-hard auto enthusiast I can assure you that a lot of younger people would be driving Porsches if they weren't so expensive. The 911 is now starting at over $110k and the entry level Boxster and Cayman just under $60k. Porsche's options are also notoriously expensive, so if you don't custom order a barebones model through the dealer and wait for it to be made that $57k Cayman is likely going to cost you $75k+. There are a lot of objectively better performing sports cars for those prices, but none of them have the refinement that Porsche offers. Also, the PDK is quite possibly the best DCT available on a car under $200k. I have a GT-R if that tells you anything about what I value in a car. For most auto enthusiasts Tesla is pretty far down on the list of desirable vehicles for anything other than a dense traffic daily driving commute. I've driven a few Teslas and while they're nice vehicles packed with awesome technology, they don't check the boxes I'm interested in for how much they cost.
Most auto enthusiasts will end up in a performance Model 3 (I’d wager). Hard to beat the value compared to the other vehicles (and their exceedingly high prices) you mentioned.
I'm not sure that you fully understand what aspects of a car's performance that enthusiasts seek. Just about any car can slide around a corner or go fast with enough coaxing, but the feedback and feel are not something that can be programmed or "tricked" into the experience. I say that as a GT-R owner, a car that is often criticized by enthusiasts as a "computer on wheels". A common saying in the auto enthusiast community to emphasize handling and feedback goes something like "it's more fun to drive a slow car fast than a fast car slow". That's not a literal statement about velocity, but more about how driver feedback is almost everything in the driving experience. Driving a Miata at on a curvy road with hairpin turns is more fun to me than doing the same in a Ferrari 488. The Ferrari is capable of so much more, but it doesn't provide the same experience to the driver in that environment. EV's in the same way have a much narrower scope of "ideal enjoyment" due to physical limitations, but in time they'll be worked out.
Most enthusiasts will absolutely not end up in a performance Model 3 for quite some time. I've been behind the wheel of one, along with a Model S P90D and a Model X P100D. They have impressive low end acceleration, but from an auto enthusiast's point of view that's where their allure ends. Model 3's (and all Teslas in general) have very poor top end acceleration which is crucial for track use and drag racing, they're extremely heavy for their size, they overheat easily with aggressive driving and most importantly they feel numb and isolated to the driver. Those are all great for a comfy daily driver, but for performance driving they're all negatives.
I'm excited to see how the Taycan fares, because Porsche knows how to design enthusiast cars. If anyone is going to bring EV's to the consumer auto enthusiasts, it's them.
Most of those 30k+ are ICE vehicles, though. How much of the ICE vehicle infrastructure and manufacturing capacity and know-how is going to be irrelevant in the EV world? EV's have fractions of the number of parts, their chassis and structure are categorically different due to battery vs fuel tank and weight and aerodynamics, not to mention how much of VW's know-how is in gasoline ONLY parts?
It just seems to me these legacy automakers who haven't done much at all are in for a rude awakening. If battery costs keep declining, anyone who isn't using a battery is going to get smoked on costs, and this is in a carbon-tax free scenario. In many economies with environmentally friendly policy, we should see EV's smoke ICE vehicles on cost MUCH sooner.
If I understand you correctly, battery-powered motors are much simpler than internal combustion engines, and battery costs are decreasing. Under this argument, VW's ability to build 30k+ car chassis + (complex combustion) engines + interiors, etc. each day is going to be challenged by what aspect of building these simpler electric cars?
To date, EV sales are still a bit of chicken-and-egg, and Tesla does have a clear charger network advantage in parts of the world. But EV sales are a very small fraction of overall automotive sales, and until that changes, any doom and gloom on the traditional automakers is still exaggerated.
Battery production. Battery manufacturers are extorting legacy automakers because they don't have their own capacity (LG Chem specifically). The bins you picked from before for ICE production are not the bins you pick from for EV production (for propulsion, at least).
Tesla built GF1 in the Reno desert because, at the time (2013) [1], they forecast that at 500k/vehicles a year (which they're almost at), they would be consuming worldwide battery cell manufacturing capacity. And here we are with everyone else playing catch up trying to eek out the batteries they need to deliver EVs to compete against Tesla.
I think one of the issues that should be worrying for Tesla, is that it's really Panasonic doing the heavy lifting on the battery side. I'm quite certain when it comes to it, Panasonic are going to be happy selling to Ford/GM/VW/BMW. It's true that Tesla is disrupting the automotive industry, but people don't really appreciate that the automotive industry involves thousands of suppliers of individual components that are then used to build a car by the manufacturers.
I'll worry about that when Ford/GM/VW/BMW makes an EV worth buying. Until then, the TSLA/Pano partnership seems to be working without issue. The special sauce is the cell chemistry and the battery management system, which Tesla owns.
Tesla/Pano have been having a lot of issues - a lot of it being on the Tesla side. Pano is no longer making those batteries just for cars because TSLA can't meet the volume needs
My understanding is that it's because Pano doesn't like Tesla's management style of the relationship (Pano prefers a loose feedback loop and team autonomy, Tesla wants it tight with rapid iteration and constant feedback up the chain), and that Tesla is about to scale up their own cell manufacturing. Feel free to throw citations in if you have solid evidence it's a demand issue, because Tesla sales figures and their last earnings call don't indicate that (their Model 3 backlog actually increased while deliveries also increased).
My mistake if that was what was intended to be communicated. That was not my interpretation of the comment. Going to try to find if and what the bottleneck is if that is the issue.
> I'll worry about that when Ford/GM/VW/BMW makes an EV worth buying.
Well you wouldn't have to worry about this regardless unless you are the competition. But otherwise it's like saying "I'll worry about EVs when I can charge them in 3 minutes at every corner". If you worry only when the threat already materialized then it was pretty short sighted. Which is an ironic attitude considering we're literally talking about companies ignoring reality until it hit them in the face and the threat materialized.
VW is arguably in third place, which is not a bad place to be in. Tesla is obviously King. Toyota is doing fantastic. Nissan is pushing EVs, though the quality of their vehicles leaves something to be desired.
VW is not behind most of the market; they're leading it. Tesla's huge early lead will stick around for a very long time, if not indefinitely. They'll become a player as big as VW and Toyota. But, these other manufacturers will catch up and begin to compete just fine.
There's plenty of manufacturers that should be concerned (Ford being the biggest one). VW (and by extension, Audi, Porsche, etc) is not one of them.
Volvo also seems to be bringing the goods when it comes to EVs now in the form of Polestar 2 [1].
Personally I have been very positively surprised of Tesla after owning one for a few months and I it would take very much to make me give up all it's niceties but I think the Polestar is a sleeping tiger when it comes to sales. It seems to generate a bit of grass root buzz in the EV communities here in Norway.
So some of the incumbents are finally taking the shift to new power trains seriously, but there will be slaughter for those who can't keep up in the long term.
This is the first I've heard of it and it looks absolutely amazing. An EV car with a fully-featured interior, reasonably long range, competitive price, and a design that doesn't look like something out of a circus sideshow. I'm really excited about what the EV market will look like next time I'm in the market for a new car.
>How much of the ICE vehicle infrastructure and manufacturing capacity and know-how is going to be irrelevant in the EV world?
Not very much. It really doesn't matter what kind of powertrain you have in your vehicles, the biggest part of the manufacturing process is everything else that makes up a vehicle. Frame, suspension, brakes, doors, windows, seats, dash, cabin interior, lighting, electronics, safety systems, sensors, testing, inspection, etc. etc. etc. On top of that, plenty of automotive plants these days get fully-assembled engines and sometimes driveshafts as well from other factories for efficiency and bolt them into vehicles rather than doing build-up from scratch.
I've spent quite a bit of time in vehicle factories of several OEMs. I would estimate that less than a quarter of an average factory line is used for powertrain.
That’s at the assembly plant though where the powertrain resolves to a few part numbers. In terms of R&D, warranty, service and overall longevity it represents a lot more than that.
Agreed. Parts* & Service are two giant profit centers that take a big hit with EVs, which is one of the reasons dealers have been so resistant to selling them for years now. The actual manufacturing doesn't get a whole lot easier, though, which is one of the reasons there have been so many EV startup failures.
*Note: Parts here means only powertrain parts. Tesla, for example, is notorious for having massive delays in repair parts availability for things like doors, trim, and windows.
Companies like Toyota and VW roll out a new chassis once or twice a decade and you see some amount of shared powertrain parts everywhere from economy level to high-end performance and luxury models. They're really good at building common skeletons where every part of a car is pieced together like interchangeable legos. The research cost is high but the investment is inevitably returned with the scale and time available to these entities.
Nearly all high precision sensors are made by BOSH which are also used in Tesla. Without these sensors, BMC circuits (also done in Germany) EVs will not take off.
VW's revenue in 2018 is €235.85 billion so that means they spent 5.7% of revenue on R&D. For comparison, Nokia spent 11% of their net sales in 2007 on R&D, at the time when they appeared invincible, also the year iPhone was announced. Those huge numbers usually don't correlate with success.
I think you're underestimating VW's understanding of the situation, but I do agree that lagging automakers are in for a world of hurt. I don't foresee Peugot-Chrysler (or whatever it's called by that time) surviving the EV revolution in its current form, and I'm pretty bearish on GM as well.
VW group is pushing EVs via all of its major brands (VW, Audi, and Porsche at the very least). These models are also not being treated as one-off afterthoughts (GM style) or cars with a totally different design language from the core brand (BMW i3 style), but match the design language and performance characteristics that I would expect of each brand, all with increasingly impressive battery ranges.
They have the global manufacturing/supply chain well figured out, design modular chassis that see use across almost every vehicle in its brands' portfolios over each decade, and this translates to getting nearly-unbeatable pricing from intermediate parts suppliers.
Tesla has a lead on both the battery and software, but while other brands are catching up significantly on these fronts, Tesla does one thing better that I don't see any other manufacturer daring to tackle: vehicle purchases. Every stage of buying a car at a dealership is worse than the last, and maintaining these frustrating middle-men and their shopping lots full of unsold vehicles adds unnecessary cost to every vehicle's consumer price.
Tesla's Chinese Gigafactory is just popping out it's first Model 3's now, and will ramp up to a similar output in the coming months, so they're about to double their output, and start building another Gigafactory in Europe starting next year.
So let's say Tesla will be making 3K cars a day a year from now, or 10% of VWs output (I haven't checked the numbers, just trusting the parents's post).
That would leave some, but not much time for VW to get their house in order before they face a serious challenge. But that assumes that Tesla's and VWs markets are the same, whereas I believe VW also has much lower-priced market segments than Tesla.
If VW wants to make 30k+ EVs per day, they would also have to figure out how to make batteries for all those cars.
Right now, Tesla's GF1 and 3 have that locked down with a significant head-start in time as well as tech. They started in 2013 because they foresaw that 500k cars per year would use up the entire world's battery production. They also acquired Maxwell tech to further stream line their cell production with denser and easier-to-manufacture cell chemistry. All of that will be big hurdles for other OEMs to overcome (and that is IF they dedicate resources to it without half-assing it for compliance purposes).
The reverse is also true. Tesla is approaching a million electric vehicles sold, does VW even have 10% of that? 5%? Tesla has a learning curve advantage, specifically on electric cars.
Learning curves are a tricky beast though. While the incremental benefit during the early stages is enormous, it doesn't act as a particularly good competitive moat.
Someone with say a large budget and global operations can easily stomp on it. The fact that VW's INITIAL planned capacity (800 p/d this spring [0]) is almost equal to Tesla's total capacity after all their ramping up should be quite informative as to how fragile Tesla's lead is.
The traditional car makers clearly got sucker punched here by a masterful Musk move...but I didn't hear any giants drop yet. Which to me suggests they might be swinging back somewhere in the future.
Yeah I think the companies can catch up technologically.
The big problem is what will they do with all the unemployed workers?
One of the big things coming out of the GM negotiations was the question of the future of a reduced size of the workforce needed to build electric vehicles.
In the long run, that will be the workers' (and perhaps society's) problem, not the manufacturers'. If manufacturing requires fewer workers, either existing manufacturers will shed staff or new, leaner, upstarts will sell an equivalent product at lower cost.
Tesla has one operational factory. After copy pasta like they've already done in Shanghai, they will start closing in on the largest car manufacturers. Not only will they catch up, but each new factory will have increased efficiency and thus profit margin gains.
This is categorically wrong. Tesla has at least two factories (Fremont and Reno). The factory in China is coming online next month. Plus there’s a series of smaller tooling facilities in Europe.
They are experienced in solar cell manufacturing too. And they're more verticalized than the incumbents so they make more things than their competitors on a per-vehicle basis (they make their own seats, for instance).
Nokia, RIMM & Motorola had the same "advantage" in their day. It ends up actually being a disadvantage because they couldn't let go of their legacy know-how.
Going from 0 to 1k is very difficult. Going from 1k to 30k, much easier.
That is a very apocalyptic headline. Global electric car market share projections tend to be quite spread but the high-end I have seen is something around ~30% by 2040.
So even if German manufacturers were unable to compete with Tesla or Chinese electric manufacturers at all which is in itself a questionable assumption, the lions share of the market will still be traditional engines.
The entire article is very confused and mixes up autonomous driving with electric vehicles and the emissions scandal so it's heart to discern a clear point, but saying that Google is a competitor of Volkswagen is just a category error.
Here you go, 57% prognosis. But personally, I’d bet for 95% in 10 years (in EU and US). Assuming the infrastructure is in place, I don’t see a reason for people to buy ICU cars really...
„Based on analysis of the evolving economics in different vehicle segments and geographical markets, BNEF’s Electric Vehicle Outlook 2019 shows electrics taking up 57% of the global passenger car sales by 2040, slightly higher than it forecast a year ago. Electric buses are set to hold 81% of municipal bus sales by the same date.”
Because of the two bullet points I do not see neither Mercedes or BMW in trouble. However, VW is another story. I see them being in a 'stuck in the middle' dilemma: Price wise, there is no beating the Chinese which can pump out sub $20k electric cars and the Model 3 has shown that an upper bracket $35k Tesla sedan can fulfill the vital requirements people have for electric cars (range, charging speed, comfort). So in the end, I don't see them dying, just losing a limb or two.
I think you are heavily underestimating the size of VW. For example Audi (a VW brand) is the direct competitor to BMW and Mercedes, while Porsche (and Bentley, Lamborghini) are aiming even higher.
The only problematic brands are the ones like Skoda that try to build much cheaper versions of VW cars (so for them EV might double the end price).
I daily drive a VW Mk7 Golf R, (~$43k new) and I've driven a ~2017 Model S (~$88k new) many times over the past few years. If I were to compare those two vehicles on everything except the engine, its an extremely tough sell for the Model S. I'm a huge fan of what Tesla is doing, but the fit and finish, build quality, and overall product at the end of the line felt seriously unrefined at its price point.
It seems the mid-range of the EV market will get very crowded in the near future, and unless Tesla (or for that matter BMW) find some serious advantages I don't see how they'll compete with established automakers who are already pumping out 30x the volume.
Meh, the germans have been coming for a long time and have made zero dent. At some point it will happen but it's easier for Tesla to improve their fit and finish than for the germans to find a winning strategy in the ev market.
The interesting bit is that the German manufacturers all seem to have aligned on "some point" being somewhere between 2023 and 2025 as the date where they all expect to sell more EVs than ICE. Post-dieselgate VW seems to have a fire lit under them, and it's starting to sound a lot less like optimism and a lot more like a threat (to American manufacturers). It sounds like it is going to be very interesting to watch the next half-decade.
Maybe German-made Teslas will be nice too if that is where their next factory winds up? Instead of killing German cars they will become (partially) German cars.
not likely. for example a big screen without tactile feedback is bad, stupid, and dangerous in a car. its those sorts of things the germans got right that dont even seem to be on teslas radar. it would drive me insane to drive a tesla in a canadian winter, as much as i want to never visit a gas station again!
Everyone will benefit when the sickening automobile life cycle of "new model every X years" dies out for good. For that to happen it needs to die in Germany just like it's dying in the US.
BMW and others should be making BYOB (Bring Your Own Battery) models. Let the dealers leverage the best battery for their market, and battery warranty plans.
«I think it was the head of the self-driving division at Google.
When we asked him, “When do you think, we will find self-driving cars in cities?” He said, “Well, I have a daughter who is 10 years old. And I think by the time she’s the age of having a driving license, I hope that the Google car will be operational in the city.” So that was about 10 years ago.» – Alain Bertaud
Having worked in the automotive sector of German and Japanese carmakers, with European, Japanese and American plants I have to say news coverage on the industry to me has devolved into something more resemblant of sports gossip. I.E. there is an immense audacity of bystanders with zero experience in the field to make bold claims about things like what the customers really want (the fans), which technology really works (the strategy) or what kind of fallacies CEOs and engineers fall for (team-management) that these bystanders apparently all get.
The car is one of the most successful products in history, I'd like to call it the German iPhone (although it took Americans to make it a mass-market product in the first place). And like the iPhone it has left its visible imprint in our public life. If you think digital detox is a thing, wait for how much bad rep smartphones will get in 50 years (if they continue to exist). Cars shape our surroundings for over hundred years now.
It is no wonder then that cars get to be the scapegoat for all sorts of things. And it is no wonder that people have highly politicized arguments about technologies, markets and processes of which they have zilch experience whatsoever except their own filter bubble inflaters. Go to HN and say something positive about Tesla and watch how you get downvoted. Say something negative and watch how much faster you'll get downvoted. SUV drivers are getting socially leprous [1][2] although it is the strongest selling car of the last decades.
Talking about the automotive sector has become toxic.
I looked at the 2nd hand Tesla car and i always wonder whether it is not the production but the longer life (less corrosive part and/especially if battery is replaceable ) plus full maintenance history (you pump, you hit, your suspension). The industry is totally changed. You may not have the volume even the no of cars are more.
There are many value investment videos saying that BMW is a much better investment than Tesla. It already producing lots of EVs and making money on them.
No one knows anything. Will an existing dealer network help or hinder? Will there be a Foxconn of EVs? Will Amazon sell everything? Will there be a 90% reduction in personal car ownership?
The car industry is massively over-invested. Most will die but who or what will replace it?
My $0.02 worth is transport as a service will mean an 80% reduction in car ownership. Only car nuts and people in remote areas will own a car.
The frustrating part of BMW is that I'd like to replace my 325i sooner rather than later with an all electric vehicle. My only choice in that price category seems to be Tesla. How much longer do we have to wait for the Germans to put forth their mid-priced line of all electrics? The i8 is just ridiculously priced.
Pretty soon the German automakers will stop bragging that their cars have “23 computers”. They’re computers in the way arduinos are computers. Their cars have no capability of doing matrix math for any kind of real processing.
You might want to watch this video [1] from 2013, showing a near standard Mercedes S-Class in autonomous drive mode. A current overview can be found here [2].
I really don’t know that much about Mercedes. I know more about BMW because they published some info about their autosar implementation. There’s a lot of technical debt, that I think most automakers need to pay back before they go fully autonomous. They can’t just do what they have always done and just add an Autonomy ECU, connectivity ECU, and a EV ECU. And even if they could, they realize they are going to give too much value to their suppliers if they did.
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[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 180 ms ] threadWho has the most to lose at peak car? Certainly not Tesla. They'll shift to selling more utility battery storage, or Class 8 semis. In California, lots of solar/battery business to be had in PG&E territory alone for the next decade while PG&E and CA gov flounder about nationalizing that infra (which is a matter of when, not if). What will other light auto automakers make as demand falters? Cutbacks.
Sure, Tesla has large amounts of debt. This is the best macro economic condition to have it in (low interest rates). They just need to keep ahead of the debt service curve (profit + cash flow). And if we're about to enter a contraction/recession, interest rates are not going to be going up (insert most recent fed rate cut here). Will it be easy to refinance that pile of TSLA bonds coming up for maturity? I say yes, but what actually happens is anyone's guess. They could do another equity raise and dilute existing shareholders with some grumbles but everyone would go along for the ride (me included).
Smart folks argue Tesla is an energy company that happens to sell cars. Close. Tesla is a financial engineering act that converts mountains of capital and customer dollars into energy and auto products (Solar City was similarly a financial engineering act, PPAs for customers funded by bond markets before solar got so cheap PPAs no longer made sense).
Usual disclaimer: TSLA investor, vehicle owner.
No.
My old PC had a Turbo button and it also did not have forced air induction.
You just gave me a hilarious idea for a PC mod.
Vitamix and Robot Coupe both make 'Turbo' blenders.
Intel offers 'Turbo Boost' CPUs.
Miele makes a 'Turbo' vacuum cleaners.
Intuit makes a 'Turbo' tax preparation product.
Porsche buyers know that 'Turbo' means 'it's the fast, non-track variant', and normal people also know it means 'this one is fast'. A few nerdy pedants will get upset, but literally nobody cares about them. They weren't going to buy one anyway.
As a car guy, I strongly disagree. In the car world, nearly without exception, including all previously Porches, "Turbo" is a label indicating that a specific piece of hardware is installed on the ICE: a turbocharger.
This is like putting a "manual" or "automatic" label on an electric. Sure, you could probably consider an electric a manual 1 speed or automatic 1 speed, but it's not going to get anything but marketing BS eye rolls from anyone that knows about cars.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094012/
In any case, Volkswagen is going for Star Wars references with Porsche:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vo95p9mdiWg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gc-fWmWxx4Q
And Marvel references with Audi:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmgwBKzHIuA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hpNFDpRNlc
More interest in the driving experience rather than just a form of transportation? As a die-hard auto enthusiast I can assure you that a lot of younger people would be driving Porsches if they weren't so expensive. The 911 is now starting at over $110k and the entry level Boxster and Cayman just under $60k. Porsche's options are also notoriously expensive, so if you don't custom order a barebones model through the dealer and wait for it to be made that $57k Cayman is likely going to cost you $75k+. There are a lot of objectively better performing sports cars for those prices, but none of them have the refinement that Porsche offers. Also, the PDK is quite possibly the best DCT available on a car under $200k. I have a GT-R if that tells you anything about what I value in a car. For most auto enthusiasts Tesla is pretty far down on the list of desirable vehicles for anything other than a dense traffic daily driving commute. I've driven a few Teslas and while they're nice vehicles packed with awesome technology, they don't check the boxes I'm interested in for how much they cost.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=DSRWKxytW40 (Top Gear Model 3 vs BMW M3)
Most enthusiasts will absolutely not end up in a performance Model 3 for quite some time. I've been behind the wheel of one, along with a Model S P90D and a Model X P100D. They have impressive low end acceleration, but from an auto enthusiast's point of view that's where their allure ends. Model 3's (and all Teslas in general) have very poor top end acceleration which is crucial for track use and drag racing, they're extremely heavy for their size, they overheat easily with aggressive driving and most importantly they feel numb and isolated to the driver. Those are all great for a comfy daily driver, but for performance driving they're all negatives.
I'm excited to see how the Taycan fares, because Porsche knows how to design enthusiast cars. If anyone is going to bring EV's to the consumer auto enthusiasts, it's them.
Tesla makes ~1k cars a day. VW is at 30k+....and has been for years.
Propulsion tech aside that's one hell of a learning curve advantage.
It just seems to me these legacy automakers who haven't done much at all are in for a rude awakening. If battery costs keep declining, anyone who isn't using a battery is going to get smoked on costs, and this is in a carbon-tax free scenario. In many economies with environmentally friendly policy, we should see EV's smoke ICE vehicles on cost MUCH sooner.
To date, EV sales are still a bit of chicken-and-egg, and Tesla does have a clear charger network advantage in parts of the world. But EV sales are a very small fraction of overall automotive sales, and until that changes, any doom and gloom on the traditional automakers is still exaggerated.
Tesla built GF1 in the Reno desert because, at the time (2013) [1], they forecast that at 500k/vehicles a year (which they're almost at), they would be consuming worldwide battery cell manufacturing capacity. And here we are with everyone else playing catch up trying to eek out the batteries they need to deliver EVs to compete against Tesla.
[1] https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_attachments/g...
Demand ^ Emphasis mine.
Well you wouldn't have to worry about this regardless unless you are the competition. But otherwise it's like saying "I'll worry about EVs when I can charge them in 3 minutes at every corner". If you worry only when the threat already materialized then it was pretty short sighted. Which is an ironic attitude considering we're literally talking about companies ignoring reality until it hit them in the face and the threat materialized.
VW is not behind most of the market; they're leading it. Tesla's huge early lead will stick around for a very long time, if not indefinitely. They'll become a player as big as VW and Toyota. But, these other manufacturers will catch up and begin to compete just fine.
There's plenty of manufacturers that should be concerned (Ford being the biggest one). VW (and by extension, Audi, Porsche, etc) is not one of them.
Personally I have been very positively surprised of Tesla after owning one for a few months and I it would take very much to make me give up all it's niceties but I think the Polestar is a sleeping tiger when it comes to sales. It seems to generate a bit of grass root buzz in the EV communities here in Norway.
So some of the incumbents are finally taking the shift to new power trains seriously, but there will be slaughter for those who can't keep up in the long term.
[1] https://www.polestar.com/cars/polestar-2
Not very much. It really doesn't matter what kind of powertrain you have in your vehicles, the biggest part of the manufacturing process is everything else that makes up a vehicle. Frame, suspension, brakes, doors, windows, seats, dash, cabin interior, lighting, electronics, safety systems, sensors, testing, inspection, etc. etc. etc. On top of that, plenty of automotive plants these days get fully-assembled engines and sometimes driveshafts as well from other factories for efficiency and bolt them into vehicles rather than doing build-up from scratch.
I've spent quite a bit of time in vehicle factories of several OEMs. I would estimate that less than a quarter of an average factory line is used for powertrain.
*Note: Parts here means only powertrain parts. Tesla, for example, is notorious for having massive delays in repair parts availability for things like doors, trim, and windows.
They also spend €13.6 billion on r&d every year.
VW group is pushing EVs via all of its major brands (VW, Audi, and Porsche at the very least). These models are also not being treated as one-off afterthoughts (GM style) or cars with a totally different design language from the core brand (BMW i3 style), but match the design language and performance characteristics that I would expect of each brand, all with increasingly impressive battery ranges.
They have the global manufacturing/supply chain well figured out, design modular chassis that see use across almost every vehicle in its brands' portfolios over each decade, and this translates to getting nearly-unbeatable pricing from intermediate parts suppliers.
Tesla has a lead on both the battery and software, but while other brands are catching up significantly on these fronts, Tesla does one thing better that I don't see any other manufacturer daring to tackle: vehicle purchases. Every stage of buying a car at a dealership is worse than the last, and maintaining these frustrating middle-men and their shopping lots full of unsold vehicles adds unnecessary cost to every vehicle's consumer price.
Tesla's Chinese Gigafactory is just popping out it's first Model 3's now, and will ramp up to a similar output in the coming months, so they're about to double their output, and start building another Gigafactory in Europe starting next year.
That would leave some, but not much time for VW to get their house in order before they face a serious challenge. But that assumes that Tesla's and VWs markets are the same, whereas I believe VW also has much lower-priced market segments than Tesla.
Right now, Tesla's GF1 and 3 have that locked down with a significant head-start in time as well as tech. They started in 2013 because they foresaw that 500k cars per year would use up the entire world's battery production. They also acquired Maxwell tech to further stream line their cell production with denser and easier-to-manufacture cell chemistry. All of that will be big hurdles for other OEMs to overcome (and that is IF they dedicate resources to it without half-assing it for compliance purposes).
Learning curves are a tricky beast though. While the incremental benefit during the early stages is enormous, it doesn't act as a particularly good competitive moat.
Someone with say a large budget and global operations can easily stomp on it. The fact that VW's INITIAL planned capacity (800 p/d this spring [0]) is almost equal to Tesla's total capacity after all their ramping up should be quite informative as to how fragile Tesla's lead is.
The traditional car makers clearly got sucker punched here by a masterful Musk move...but I didn't hear any giants drop yet. Which to me suggests they might be swinging back somewhere in the future.
[0] https://insideevs.com/news/380318/vw-id3-production-30-day/
The big problem is what will they do with all the unemployed workers? One of the big things coming out of the GM negotiations was the question of the future of a reduced size of the workforce needed to build electric vehicles.
Or rather it's more likely that they're just taking the big switch as a chance to redesign everything. Incl production processes.
That would have happened by next cycle anyway in my view. Electric merely hastened it a bit.
Going from 0 to 1k is very difficult. Going from 1k to 30k, much easier.
So even if German manufacturers were unable to compete with Tesla or Chinese electric manufacturers at all which is in itself a questionable assumption, the lions share of the market will still be traditional engines.
The entire article is very confused and mixes up autonomous driving with electric vehicles and the emissions scandal so it's heart to discern a clear point, but saying that Google is a competitor of Volkswagen is just a category error.
https://about.bnef.com/blog/electric-transport-revolution-se...
„Based on analysis of the evolving economics in different vehicle segments and geographical markets, BNEF’s Electric Vehicle Outlook 2019 shows electrics taking up 57% of the global passenger car sales by 2040, slightly higher than it forecast a year ago. Electric buses are set to hold 81% of municipal bus sales by the same date.”
Yeah, who wants to put up with converting to and from UTF-16 all the time when you're just trying to get to work in the morning?
* A brand image of luxury, comfort with a touch of 'arrogance', epitomized in the BMW turn signal meme
* Creating a great looking and feeling interior
Just as the apple watch has shaken up the wearables market (see more here https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/29/fashion/smartwatches-appl...). The same is due to happen to the mass consumer car market.
Because of the two bullet points I do not see neither Mercedes or BMW in trouble. However, VW is another story. I see them being in a 'stuck in the middle' dilemma: Price wise, there is no beating the Chinese which can pump out sub $20k electric cars and the Model 3 has shown that an upper bracket $35k Tesla sedan can fulfill the vital requirements people have for electric cars (range, charging speed, comfort). So in the end, I don't see them dying, just losing a limb or two.
The only problematic brands are the ones like Skoda that try to build much cheaper versions of VW cars (so for them EV might double the end price).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Group
[1] Betteridge's Law of Headlines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
It seems the mid-range of the EV market will get very crowded in the near future, and unless Tesla (or for that matter BMW) find some serious advantages I don't see how they'll compete with established automakers who are already pumping out 30x the volume.
Having worked in the automotive sector of German and Japanese carmakers, with European, Japanese and American plants I have to say news coverage on the industry to me has devolved into something more resemblant of sports gossip. I.E. there is an immense audacity of bystanders with zero experience in the field to make bold claims about things like what the customers really want (the fans), which technology really works (the strategy) or what kind of fallacies CEOs and engineers fall for (team-management) that these bystanders apparently all get.
The car is one of the most successful products in history, I'd like to call it the German iPhone (although it took Americans to make it a mass-market product in the first place). And like the iPhone it has left its visible imprint in our public life. If you think digital detox is a thing, wait for how much bad rep smartphones will get in 50 years (if they continue to exist). Cars shape our surroundings for over hundred years now.
It is no wonder then that cars get to be the scapegoat for all sorts of things. And it is no wonder that people have highly politicized arguments about technologies, markets and processes of which they have zilch experience whatsoever except their own filter bubble inflaters. Go to HN and say something positive about Tesla and watch how you get downvoted. Say something negative and watch how much faster you'll get downvoted. SUV drivers are getting socially leprous [1][2] although it is the strongest selling car of the last decades.
Talking about the automotive sector has become toxic.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_lz0diqWJU [2] https://www.tz.de/muenchen/muenchen-suv-fahrer-werden-boese-...
No one knows anything. Will an existing dealer network help or hinder? Will there be a Foxconn of EVs? Will Amazon sell everything? Will there be a 90% reduction in personal car ownership?
The car industry is massively over-invested. Most will die but who or what will replace it?
My $0.02 worth is transport as a service will mean an 80% reduction in car ownership. Only car nuts and people in remote areas will own a car.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIJeqD3Ax40 [2] https://www.autotrader.com/best-cars/7-best-semi-autonomous-...