I'm under impression that the value of Tesla comes from the brand itself and Elon Musk's persona. The tech itself is nothing special, they are far behind in autonomous driving but the brand is very strong, they easily upsell "one day it will be autonomous" packages.
Their battery tech is better than everyones. ( Why is the Audi E-tron and Jaguar I-pace Less range than even the cheapest Tesla? )
Their autonomous is better than everyones. ( Don't know why you think they're far behind, the only other player with a comparable product is Supercruise and that is on one version of Cadillac ).
The data they have on their cars/collection pipeline is better than everyones.
Because their car is software there are all sorts of quality of life perks that exist from the dashboard.
So tired of hearing these cars aren't any better when they're some of the highest rated cars of all time and consistently compete with cars much more expensive.
The Audi e-tron deliberately over-provisioned the battery to give it a longer life and to enable faster charging. Only 88% of the battery (about 83 kwh) is available for use, but the upside of that is the e-tron can maintain a 150 kilowatt charge rate up to 80% state of charge which no other current EV can do:
https://support.fastned.nl/hc/en-gb/articles/115015420127-17...
Not even the Tesla Model 3 on the new Tesla V3 chargers:
https://electrek.co/2019/03/07/tesla-v3-supercharger-action-...
The e-tron's main problem is that it's too heavy for the battery it has. It either needs a bigger battery or a lighter construction or both.
But the Hyundai Kona EV, the Kia Niro EV, and the new Kia Soul EV all have good range for a good price. The Kona narrowly beat the Model X in this 1000 km road trip comparison:
https://insideevs.com/hyundai-kona-electric-race-tesla-model...
Tesla doesn't seem very far ahead.
No, the car has a computer that controls the systems in the car like all the modern cars. Receiving software updates to a computer is not a huge tech challenge. And no, you don't receive performance over the internet, you receive a driving configuration that may better utilize the hardware. Can be easily done by any manufacturer.
>Their autonomous is better than everyone
Factually wrong, they are a category down from actual self-driving tech developers. But if you decide to skip the self-driving part and call it driving assistant or something, then yes it's a pretty good driving assistant that can follow lines etc. Some people think that calling the driving assistance software an autopilot is borderline false advertisement.
Well they're the only people offering anything this quality unless your one of the hundreds of people in Phoenix that can order a Waymo (that still has a person driving).
>some people think that calling the driving assistance software an autopilot is borderline false advertisement.
Well my 'driving assistance' drove me 95% of the way to work this morning hands free feet free, seems pretty appropriate to call it autonomous to me.
And yet almost all car companies are—with rare exceptions—entirely averse to the modification of car software updates for anything more substantial than bugfixes, device compatibility and trivial tweaks.
It might not be a tech challenge, but it is a corporate one. It seems like no car companies want their cars to ever change in any way, lest a single word of their owner's manuals might need to be rewritten.
BMW for example will provide software updates to their iDrive head units: either as a trivial patch for device compatibility, or as a more substantial update applied by the dealer. And the latter sounds great... EXCEPT that their system configuration is guided by the car's build date, and if a useful feature was released after your car was built, you probably won't get it.
By way of example, my May 2013 build date BMW F20 shipped with no screen overlay for volume changes. In order to get that overlay, I first had to get the software flashed by the dealer (there was an actual crashing bug which was another story) and then I had to "code" the car myself to make iDrive think its build date was a year later. Once I did that, I got a screen overlay for volume changes.
That doesn't sound like anything special. Engines have been computer controlled for a long time now. Depending on the temperature, fuel mixture, etc you can have a single engine with completely different characteristics. This is something VW took advantage of in Dieselgate by improving the performance of the car outside of emissions tests. If your car was affected the only thing that was changed by the recall was the software. Of course OTA updates are more convenient than driving to your dealer but software updates themselves are not a competitive advantage of Tesla.
Then lets see an example? As I asked the first time?
>but software updates themselves are not a competitive advantage of Tesla.
That is crazy to me. It's an advantage specific to Tesla. Clearly it's not game changing for a lot of people, but it is an advantage.
I swear that this applies to every industry, A "strong" personality in front of the company + avg product = Established brand
