"Taking the skin off the Model Y, it was truly a work of art. It's unbelievable,"
"It's a whole different manufacturing philosophy," while another added, “We need a new platform designed as a blank-sheet EV."
2. Toyota is behind. Check what the Chinese and Germans are doing. Though you can't really do that since most of those cars aren't sold in the US.
Volkswagen had a market share of ICE cars of ~20%, for EVs it's now closer to 1%. EVs are way easier to build and a lot of Chinese companies are doing it successfully. They are offering cheaper EVs. They are selling in Mideast/Asia and now start to enter Europe as well.
None of these cars is particularly bad - while I'd still take the Korean EVs before anything else today, the Chinese are coming. German manufacturers only produce premium level cars few people can afford and they produce them badly. ID.3 is too expensive for its segment and too much of the car just doesnt work well.
The specs and price gap between a Renault Zoe (Inexpensive, with consequently low acceleration, top speed, handling and range, but absolutely a joy to use in a city or on short trips - perfect balance of price/specs) and a Tesla M3/MY is quite wide and should allow some other manufacturers to wedge themselves into a rather popular segment, with profit.
And yet... there's hardly anything better than a Zoe, they immediately approach or pass the price of a Tesla (looking at you Volkswagen, Cupra, Audi, Mercedes, etc) while being worse by an impressive margin (paltry top speeds, uncomfortable ranges, rather primitive features, etc). You start getting cars something favorably comparable with a baseline Tesla M3 RWD when you add a good 20k to its price, it's ridiculous. And apparently they're hardly breaking even on those, while Tesla has a decent profit margin, what's wrong with them?
I'm also hoping China and Korea will upend this market because established EU/US manufacturers surely won't.
And practically, even on the German Autobahn, a top speed difference of 220 to the rare 250 km/h plus doesn't show. One traffic jam, or even just enougj traffic, and everybody ends up next to each other anyways.
Power is nice, because cars simply a nicer to drive. Plus you can pull better, which is also important. Going back in time so, 150-180 bhp was considered top knotch performance, the Audi A3 gained a lot of his reputation in the early 2000s due to two models, just below the S3, having that power output.
I din't know, all the engine size, top speed, power and acceleration discussions feel like me playing top trump (the card game for children were you compare numbers for e.g. cars), and less than an adult objevtively evaluating cars. Not that car evaluations and buying decissions need to be objevtive so, mine aren't. But up talking one model / brand by down talking others, based on purely subjective criteria, is childish. It does allow for great marketing campaigns so.
Porsche can afford to give their customers Dacia levels of digitalization because they're premium sports cars that sell anyway, but the Asians are coming after the other German brands and will steamroll them if they don't start getting their act together.
>What stands out most is Tesla's integrated central control unit, or "full self-driving computer." Also known as Hardware 3, this little piece of tech is the company's biggest weapon in the burgeoning EV market. It could end the auto industry supply chain as we know it. One stunned engineer from a major Japanese automaker examined the computer and declared, "We cannot do it."
are all everywhere for Tesla, like they are for Apple. I've seen entire sites dissect the Apple Watch or Apple mobile cameras, or Teslas.
Their competitors are very comparable yet you have to hand it to Tesla, their behind the scenes PR game is through the roof.
Still digitalisation so, sure. And still linked to EVs, traditional car journalism still caters to a crowd of ICE fanatics, but overall much more a thing of marketing than engineering. For Tesla, the risk still is Musk. But they seem to be doing a good job of distancing themselves enough from his recent antics to not be hurt by them, while staying close enough to benefit from his personal brand.
So pardon me if I lend more credence to the notion that tech companies outstrip car companies when it comes to technology.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/44068/over-10-percent-of-tesla...
