Agreed. I know nothing about automotive engineering or car design, but the hype around Tesla always puzzled me. If this start up can all of a sudden make an economical electric car, then surely the existing automotive manufacturers could do it quicker and cheaper. Toyota, Mercedes, Ford, etc... already have existing designs from decades past that they could at least use as a base. They have experts in material science, car design, and actual resources/contracts to actually build one. If it made sense.
Sometimes the incumbents are just too entrenched in what they are doing to make what out an outsider sees as an obvious move.
I applaud people and organizations that take that chance, innovating and trying new things even when there's a high chance of failure. Worst-case, they fail and other people can learn from their mistakes and hopefully do better next time. Best case, they change the world.
Is this a new idea, though? It's not like supersonic commercial jets are a new thing and they haven't been built. The economics of building a commercially viable production supersonic plane is much more difficult to do than building a car or writing a new website to disrupt Facebook or Google.
I 100% agree that people need to be exploring this stuff. That being said, I'll believe it when I see it.
The situation with supersonic flight is very different, the requirements and skills are very similar the ones of traditional plane manufacturers and supersonic flight wouldn't really canabalize their traditional business. I think they simply see that it doesn't make sense. I mean boom can't really explain what has fundamentally changed since tge concorde that supersonic flight is now economically viable.
* Re-sell third party products for a while ("Until our own offering is ready"). If the recently posted self parking video is to be believed, the in-house products are still not on par with the third party predecessors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsb2XBAIWyA
* Pre-sell your product years before it's ready.
* Aggressively suppress internal and external criticism.
* Avoid objective evaluations of your product.
There's zero way they don't KNOW internally that asking an inattentive driver to take over with no warning doesn't work, and that they aren't as safe as they are trying to spin.
Faster? What is that supposed to mean? Tesla is the largest EV maker by volume (not sure if I miss any Chinese ones).
Substantial better build quality? Define substantial. Who decide that? Certainly not the consumers, because they can’t get enough of Tesla cars.
Consumer Reports stopped recommending Teslas because of the abysmal quality of their vehicles. And every Tesla owner I personally know has said their first Tesla will also be their last.
Almost as if Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos imitated Musk instead of Steve Jobs and kicked the can down the road and delivered traditional but improved blood test machines and kept promising stuff down the road by collecting money and be edgy on Twitter, she could have been a hero by now.
I mean, Tesla still delivered stuff that people value. Just not the promised ones.
Tesla makes the best computerised vehicles out there and has built a valuable charging network, not the stated goals but valuable anyway.
It's not like Tesla managed to make cheap electric cars? They managed to make cars with good computers and this is something that people actually want.
Essentially, Tesla made the first usable as daily driver electric car by promising stuff that people believed they want(but very hard to make) so they can collect money and make sales but doing stuff that people actually needed(within the reach of the current technology) to live with electric cars.
In terms of subsidies, Tesla wasn't actually subsidies that much. The received a 400M loan from the DoD for advanced vehicle manufacture. At that point however, even without the DoD they could have raised that money. Tesla payed that lone back early and with interest. DoD also gave much larger loans to GM and Ford, neither have fully paid back their loan yet.
The tax subsidies only started years later and Tesla profited from the 7500k tax credit. However this was limited to 250k vehicles and Tesla blew threw that very fast and have since operated without a tax credit and had to compete against vehicles coming in from all the global car companies that all got this tax credit. GM also used that tax credit. So did Tesla get a subsidy that helped them, I would say yes but this was open to all car companies and a number of them took advantage of it.
Tesla also gets the same tax reductions as any large company that makes large investments in particular regions.
> My impression is that Tesla succeeded thanks to Musks personality that made the customers forgive unfulfilled promises that they paid thousands of dollars for.
Not sure what this is based off. You don't build a company the size of Tesla based on forgiving costumers.
Yes, sure some costumers waited a while for their model 3 because of production issues, but this isn't really unique to Tesla. Car production often gets delayed. And costumers did not 'forgive' this universally, many canceled their order and bought something else.
But here is the thing, the demand for Tesla electric cars was so high that it didn't matter.
Tesla was successful because they had a product that a huge amount of people desperately wanted, and after some initial delay they got it to those costumers in very large numbers with very good unit margin.
In fact, Tesla often increased the spec of the delivered product compared to the one that was initially ordered.
And the money from reservation undelivered vehicle and FSD is certainty not why Tesla is successful.
Tesla is successful because they sell a 1 million+ vehicles a year with an automotive margin of 30%.
> I mean, Tesla still delivered stuff that people value. Just not the promised ones.
Can you explain what you mean? What did they not deliver on?
Some people (a minority of costumers) didn't get the FSD but that certainly not most costumers.
If we agree to not make it a big deal of people not receiving the products they paid for and if we agree not to make it a big deal for delays and low quality then sure, Tesla is just as any other company.
If people didn't make it a big deal that Theranos runs its test on Siemens machines we wouldn't have had a Theranos scandal too!
If we not make it a big deal for Tesla missing the targets for making the cars cheap and collecting pre-order money for products that not deliver(or deliver late if you kick the can down the road long enough) we can say the exact same thing about Theranos. Let's not make a big deal on how much blood is actually required to run the tests today, it would be 1 drop next year(update the next year every year)!
If you choose to put the threshold of "subsidy received" above what Tesla received, you can claim that Tesla did not receive subsidies. I think TicTac sweets had some trick like that, i.e. if you define 1 TicTac as one serving and if the calories of 1 serving is below the threshold to report you have 0 calories per serving and as a result you can claim the whole box is calorie free!
It really depends on what you choose to forgive or not, I guess.
