Have we misjuded Tesla

[dcarrigg]

Re: Have we misjuded Tesla

Tesla (and Porsche, Audi, BMW et al) aren't trying to sell their expensive EVs as a way to save on fuel, or lower maintenance costs. That might be one of the outcomes, but the people who buy them aren't bragging how frugal they are when at the country club.

And that, I think, is one of the problems with the Bolt and the Leaf. They are damned expensive and just scream "eco-nomy car" when you drive up in one. I imagine vegans with man-buns living in converted warehouse co-ops in Seattle is a limited market.

As for GM, that corporation needs a major re-think. I thought the Volt, particularly Gen 2, was a pretty reasonable vehicle. However, compare the interior of a Volt with the interior of a Model 3. Just count the difference in the number of buttons. On every surface in the Volt. Looks sort of like the interior of an Impala. Or any other GM sedan. Nothing special to differentiate it as somehow more technologically advanced.

This is in the day and age most people run their lives using a touch screen phone. That flat sales statistic for the Volt you mentioned speaks volumes.

A couple of years ago Buick had this on their stand at the Detroit Motor Show. Hinted at some styling cues from the iconic late '60s Rivieras. Imagine if GM had screwed up the courage to put an electric drivetrain in this, and undercut the price of a comparably equipped Model S, with no wait time.

Hell, they don't sell this car in any form. Look at the plain vanilla stuff they are peddling. Fortunately the Buick brand seems to sell well in China. Gawd knows why anybody in North America would buy a Buick.

GM does some things right. Mostly on the truck side. The new Colorado I've always thought filled an important niche--the affordable, stripped down, work truck. While Ford turns the F-150 into their huge, base truck at $30k, Chevy sneaks in a smaller $20k, manual option that didn't exist. Sales have been growing 40% y/y. This was a good move.

On the car side, I never understood the plan, nor the offerings. What's the difference between an Impala and a Malibu? Is one for boys and the other for girls? Impala didn't quite feel full-size and for years they shared a base engine.

To confuse things further, in 2014, they repacked Aussie's Holden Commodore as the Chevy SS, sized somehow miraculously in between the Malibu and the Impala on the Camaro's zeta platform. Why in the hell would you want a dead to rights mid-to-full-size rear wheel drive family sedan with a corvette's v8 under the hood and paddle shifters in 2014 unless you were an Aussie lunatic? Unless dad really likes the idea of bringing little tommy and sally to school in a sleeper, drifting through the snow along the way, it's nuts. And it didn't sell stateside. Go figure.

What's the difference between a Spark and a Sonic? I don't know. Why have 2 mid-size and 2 sub-compact offerings? Worse still, the Volt and the Cruz shared the Delta platform, and it was obvious. Same with the G2 platform and the Spark and the Bolt. The spark isn't electric.

Anyways, compare it to anyone else, and it's easier to follow the sub-compact->compact->mid-size->full-size logic. Fiesta->Focus->Fusion->Taurus for Ford. Yaris->Corolla->Camry->Avalon for Toyota. Never could fathom why GM left Chevy with such a convoluted car segment.

[touchring]

Re: Have we misjuded Tesla

You make the all too common mistake of not only underestimating the Americans, but also completely lacking understanding of how its economy is completely unlike Europe or Asia.

When the Americans are finished with EVs everybody there will have one, while in Europe and China they will remain expensive baubles enjoyed by the upper class. It's what the Americans do best. Scale.

But is there even enough nickel or cobalt to build a car for everyone in America? Unless there's a new type of battery that doesn't depend on limited resources, I don't see how EV use can be widespread anywhere in the world.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Have we misjuded Tesla

You make the all too common mistake of not only underestimating the Americans, but also completely lacking understanding of how its economy is completely unlike Europe or Asia.

When the Americans are finished with EVs everybody there will have one, while in Europe and China they will remain expensive baubles enjoyed by the upper class. It's what the Americans do best. Scale.

The US is a country that lurches forward in jolts. Institutions are designed so that little happens for a long time, then explosive change comes all at once, about every 30 years. And once it happens, there's no turning back. There are many barriers to new transit adoption here. By many measures, the Eisenhower Interstate System is the biggest man made project of all time. It took 35 years, from 1956 to 1992 to complete the plan. It's a hell of a sunk cost. Meanwhile, the US is still rather rural and suburban compared to most developed nations. Not very dense. Along the way, lots of businesses rely on ICE vehicles, from gas stations to mechanics to parts shops and dealerships. Commuting distances are high by OECD standards. Homes are not designed for EVs in the older and colder parts of the country. Still other places remain heavily dependent on coal and oil for electric generation, negating lots of the benefits. And trucks are simply a bigger part of the work life and culture in many places. Big SUVs popular in others. Meanwhile inequality is at record highs and increasing, making even marginal increases in the costs of vehicles increasingly bigger barriers to mass adoption. Not one part of any of these barriers has much to do with climate change skepticism or domestic oil production. Nor are these sorts of problems insurmountable. But things tend to scale, and fast, when either things don't require much government involvement and can skirt regulation on account of being new, or when federal institutions align and enough people distributed across state and local jurisdictions can make money off of a change that entrenched interests cannot stand in their way. We're still a country where pumping your own gas is illegal in New Jersey. The US has lots of legislation already on the books around zero emission vehicles, but it's happening at the state level. Of course, who selling cars in the US wants to be locked out of California & New York et all? So even if the nine states only account for a third of the US population, they can wag the dog.

But there's going to be a lot more to it, and it's going to require some serious incentive realignment. For the millions of houses that only have 120v AC and no garage, it would take 80 hours to fully charge a Model S. That drops to 12 hours if you have a 240v AC circuit installed in your home. For some intrepid souls, you can get around this relatively cheaply by running some extension cords around a couple 110v outlets (probably on different circuits) and into an up-converter that spits out 220v AC you can buy for a few hundred dollars. But you're going to have to leave that rube goldberg nonsense hanging out the window in the snow plugged into your car, hoping that no kids/animals/other things show up and knock it out. For millions more in apartments or rented homes or condos with HOAs, this probably isn't even an allowed option. A majority of occupied housing units in the northeast do not have garages or carports, even though the figure is only at 45% nationwide. Landlords and lack of garages are probably a bigger real barrier than climate skepticism. You maybe can get somewhere about half of the residential cars to switch over to EVs without encountering this sort of problem. But even if you have a comfortable DC charging station near you, blowing an extra hour or two every day at a public charging station is a big downside. And trucks are going to be tougher to crack. Then there's the winter issues. ICE cars are a godsend if you're used to nor'easters knocking out the power for 3 days here or a week there and you don't have a generator. Lots of folks off the grid enough that some wood/oil/propane combo can be set up to get enough heat and hot water to make it livable without lights and keep the pipes from freezing. Little inverter lets you charge the electronic doohickeys off the engine, and can still drive to the store and work. Now I'm on small potatoes, but little downsides to adoption add up.

[santafe2]

Re: Have we misjuded Tesla

Meanwhile inequality is at record highs and increasing, making even marginal increases in the costs of vehicles increasingly bigger barriers to mass adoption.

Regarding financial inequality, post WWII, I agree. But this isn't anything new. The middle class in the US has been shrinking for 50 years ever since union busting and blaming the poor for their plight became popular in the late 60s. This great age of middle class prosperity you're fond of lasted maybe 15 years. It's not America. America is a meat grinder that punishes the poor for their failures and rewards the rich for success. This isn't a great country to be average.

For the millions of houses that only have 120v AC and no garage, it would take 80 hours to fully charge a Model S.

Give it a decade or so, wireless charging will be widely available. You're making an argument which assumes technology will not continue to move forward. It took decades for the automobile to replace the horse in New York. People simply got tired of removing a million tons of horse manure from the city every year. Innovation solves problems. If those innovations create new problems, innovation will solve those as well.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Have we misjuded Tesla

Regarding financial inequality, post WWII, I agree. But this isn't anything new. The middle class in the US has been shrinking for 50 years ever since union busting and blaming the poor for their plight became popular in the late 60s. This great age of middle class prosperity you're fond of lasted maybe 15 years. It's not America. America is a meat grinder that punishes the poor for their failures and rewards the rich for success. This isn't a great country to be average.

The rapid acceleration of economic inequality is experienced differently than a steady state of high inequality. From the 1870s to the 1920s was half-a-century of high inequality. But the trajectory was actually a slow gini drop from about .50 to .48. The last 40 years have been a rapid shot up from about .37 to about .48. The only other comparable period of rapidly accelerating inequality in America was the 30 year chunk between Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln that culminated in the Civil War. The difference between periods of relatively high, but stable, income inequality and periods of accelerating income inequality is that predictions made based on recent decades' experience work in the former, but often fail to grasp the profound effects of the latter. The US was much more equal in 1989 than it will be in 2019.

Anyways, point is that people who can't afford to own their own homes or build garages or install 240v electric service aren't going to suddenly be able to afford a wireless charging driveway in 2029 or so. People still skip out on leather upholstery, real wheels, and sunroofs. Point being it's not an innovation problem. It's a wage problem.

Give it a decade or so, wireless charging will be widely available. You're making an argument which assumes technology will not continue to move forward. It took decades for the automobile to replace the horse in New York. People simply got tired of removing a million tons of horse manure from the city every year. Innovation solves problems. If those innovations create new problems, innovation will solve those as well.

I've gone on about this before, but the automobile didn't replace the horse, it replaced the electric streetcar and cable cars. There were more horses in the US at the end of the Model T's production run in 1927 than there were at the start in 1908, despite the fact 15 million of them rolled off the assembly line. The real collapse of the horse population in the US was later in the Great Depression and during WWII. And it was because Americans ate them. It continued to drop until it bottomed out in 1960, and it has more than tripled again since then. The ban on horse meat remains. NYC and Boston already had subways before the Model T, too. Horses and subways filled different niches than cars. EVs will fill niches too. They just may not end up filling the exact same space ICE cars do. At least that's the point I'm trying to make here.

[GRG55]

Re: Have we misjuded Tesla

Next year I'm asking Santa to put one of these under the tree.

[Milton Kuo]

Re: Have we misjuded Tesla

Give it a decade or so, wireless charging will be widely available.

If I had been drinking a beverage, I would have sprayed the beverage all over my computer when I read the above. It is extremely unlikely that there will be wireless charging stations for EV vehicles anywhere, especially a home where a wired solution is eminently more practical. There is an inverse square lossiness to wireless power transmission and, even ignoring that, wireless transmission of large amounts of power is dangerous if something gets between the source and the sink.

There is a startup, uBeam, that foolish investors put a fairly large amount of money into that is facing up to the reality of what engineers and physicists told them right from the start (7 years ago) about the difficulties of wireless power transmission that make it impractical for commercial use.

In this case, we're not talking about Qi charging pads where the device to be charged is within millimeters of the charging pad and is being charged at 5 W or 15W. We're talking about electric vehicles that will be at least 20 cm away (assuming charging coils in the ground) and will require thousands of watts of power.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Have we misjuded Tesla

Next year I'm asking Santa to put one of these under the tree.

Damn. That really was one of those 'a picture is worth 10,000 words' moments! The aesthetic clash is something. Kinda think that might be art. Something to frame and put on the wall or a college dorm.

[vt]

Re: Have we misjuded Tesla

The adoption of technology is the key.

The future I envision is no one owns a vehicle within 50 miles of a medium to large city.

There will be self driving Uber/Lyft type companies, and you won't need to own transportation. The cost of transport for the average family will drop as low as one tenth of current transportation family budget.

Baby boomers will welcome them as their ability to drive declines, and millennials don't seem to want them as much.

A big reduction in fossil fuel pollution, much less cost of maintenance for owners of vehicles, less cost of famiy insurance as auto insurance cost is 2nd to health care.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Have we misjuded Tesla

The adoption of technology is the key.

The future I envision is no one owns a vehicle within 50 miles of a medium to large city.

There will be self driving Uber/Lyft type companies, and you won't need to own transportation. The cost of transport for the average family will drop as low as one tenth of current transportation family budget.

Baby boomers will welcome them as their ability to drive declines, and millennials don't seem to want them as much.

A big reduction in fossil fuel pollution, much less cost of maintenance for owners of vehicles, less cost of famiy insurance as auto insurance cost is 2nd to health care.

Don't know about you, but we blow as much on health insurance premiums in a month as we do to insure all the cars for a year, and that's not counting the tens of thousands of dollars in co-pays, co-insurance,, deductibles, and out-of-network fees if you ever have to use the damned health insurance. Costs about $40 per month per car. Maybe double that for full insurance. Can still buy a used car cheaper than $1,000. Registration, insurance, gas, and all-in, it's still far cheaper than Uber or Lyft. Don't need all the extra money to pay some far off Silicon Valley billionaire or VC firm or a team of software engineers.

[llanlad2]

Re: Have we misjuded Tesla

You make the all too common mistake of not only underestimating the Americans, but also completely lacking understanding of how its economy is completely unlike Europe or Asia.

When the Americans are finished with EVs everybody there will have one, while in Europe and China they will remain expensive baubles enjoyed by the upper class. It's what the Americans do best. Scale.

Next year I'm asking Santa to put one of these under the tree.

Your second quote (next year's Santa wish list) is the reason why the US won't lead on electric. North Americans drive big cars/trucks based on access to cheap oil. There is no incentive.It's not a matter of underestimating Americans. Unless I'm underestimating their willingness to give up their love of big ICE trucks.
VW is throwing 50 billion at electric.Granted some US companies are also investing (a lot less) but much of the investment will take place in China which is bringing in stringent EV sales targets. Your belief in US exceptionalism is correct but only in that when it comes to cars the US market is exceptional. Globally the best selling cars of the last 30 yrs have all been VWs, Toyotas and Hondas . GM quit Europe because it couldn't compete. The markets are different.
It will come down to capital investment and political expediency not US exceptionalism.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Have we misjuded Tesla

Just this year Ford just announced $11 billion at electric, aiming for 40 hybrid and electric models by 2022, 16 of which are to be EVs, 24 of which are to be hybrids. VW's more than twice the size of Ford, so it's a pretty comparable investment. They're scrapping all their ICE cars. Not sure what will happen vis-a-vis tariffs with China, but the plan is for them to roll out the cheap-o ICE cars in the North American market starting next year, and at prices that significantly undercut all existing companies. This is why both Ford and GM are running away from the ICE passenger car market, with the exception of the Corvette and the Mustang and niche stuff. Ford and GM make the bulk of their cash on trucks here. But GM is and has been gearing itself more toward China and their market. Still, they're making investments in electric vehicles, if more modest, aiming for 20 models by 2023. If anyone's playing the long and steady game, it's Toyota. It took about a decade for hybrids to grab 3% of the market, and they led on that, 9% of total sales now. They're predicting it will take even longer for EVs to grab 4 or 5% of the market. Jim Lentz is a smart guy. Toyota does well in North America and around the world. They're aiming to jump to 15% hybrids as total sales here by 2021. That's a big move.

[EJ]

Re: Have we misjuded Tesla

If anything offered in this thread has value, it should be very clear in the next year or so. In November of 2017 EV sales in the US were ~17,000 cars. In November 2018, ~44,000. A YOY ~150% increase. Where did it come from? Tesla. In November 2018 they controlled almost 56% of the US market and sold 24,600 of the 44,000 EVs sold. If the quality is as bad as proposed here, they're toast. Tick tock.

The Dec. 31, 2018 deadline for the end of the $7,500 Federal EV tax credit has acted as an end-of-year sales incentive.

Historically, EV tax credits have been played an important role in EV sales. Let's see how well Tesla products sell without it.

[santafe2]

Re: Have we misjuded Tesla

The Dec. 31, 2018 deadline for the end of the $7,500 Federal EV tax credit has acted as an end-of-year sales incentive.

Historically, EV tax credits have been played an important role in EV sales. Let's see how well Tesla products sell without it.

We'll have to see how this plays out. The Trump administration has not campaigned against, or come out against, renewable energy. It's possible the Dems in the House will give the president a win on "border security" in trade for a few of their promises including EV tax credits. As support for the idea that Republicans aren't against renewables, I offer the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018 which extended solar tax credits for stationary renewables. I'm not saying your cautionary note is incorrect, just that the game is not clearly over. It would not surprise me if the January bill offered by the House Dems to restart the government doesn't include a face saving border security attachment along with a little something for EVs. Well see.

[Techdread]

Re: Have we misjuded Tesla

The fewer people who buy cars the less of a print run there is on each vehicle & the higher the cost to manufacture as the fixed costs are spread across a smaller number of units.

I think this will ultimately be a lot like Lyft & Uber drivers: sounds like a good idea, but ultimately high churn because the numbers don't really back out well for many people.

Looks like to me it's lease a car that these guys are aiming at, unless they do get the price down.