"Who knew EVs would be more than a niche/compliance car market?!" -- the people running BMW's i-division.
I'm sure years from now Tesla will get no credit for dragging incumbent carmakers kicking and screaming into the EV market, but they really should get the lion's share of the credit for this. Because I'm certain that without Tesla, BMW and other carmakers wouldn't even have started making "EV platforms" or EVs from scratch until 2030+.
If memory serves me correct Toyota Prius was really the first to push the Hybrid/EV concept mainstream. That isn't to say that Tesla didn't have an impact but there were EV initiatives underway well before them.
Even though this is true, I actually think I agree with the premise that Tesla was a big deal here. For all that is wrong with Tesla, they made electric cars really cool, even to car people. I think that step was an important but incredibly difficult step.
The Prius is fine. Practical vehicles. Probably still a more reasonable choice for many. But, Tesla made electric cars look like the future, even to the average person.
I must add that I am not really a Tesla zealot. I drive a Civic, Teslas seem too expensive (not necessarily over priced, just too expensive for me) and have their fair share of issues. But what they did for the perception of EVs is different than what anyone else has done imo.
The Tesla broke usual electric car strategy by making something hot not utterly lame and stodgy[1]. Which is what all electric cars were until then. The economics of that actually worked.
The Prius at least fit into Toyota's market segment.
[1] This is not totally true. There were some once off electric cars in the 1990's that were sporty. Friend dated a women that owned one. It only had a range of about 40-50 miles but it was FAST.
> The Tesla broke usual electric car strategy by making something hot not utterly lame and stodgy[1]. Which is what all electric cars were until then. The economics of that actually worked.
Tesla did a great job at making EV cool, there's no question about it.
BUT, economics of that are still TBD. They still fail to achieve any sustainable profit as a business, few years after their mass market vehicle debuted, and have to keep on raising money, on very unfavorable terms.
Tesla cracked the problem of making people buy electric cars in significant numbers. Everything else is a supply-chain and manufacturing optimization problem. Extremely challenging, obviously, and maybe Tesla won't be the winner. But those problems are fundamentally irrelevant until the you've cracked the problem of mass sales.
Making people want a product isn't enough to get economics to work.
They struggle to produce it cheaply enough, at least as of right now. Manufacturing, at scale and within costs is really really hard. Tesla's initial math for cracking the economy was based on full automation of the production, that failed spectacularly. As a result they have a lot of human labor costs they didn't plan for, so problem of optimizing it got even harder.
Did Tesla made desirable product? Yes, of course. Can they crack the economy of it? We'll see.
Tesla didn’t make people want the product. That’s meaningless. What they did that matters is that they made people pay for the product, at a price point that competes favorably with BMW’s low-end luxury cars.
You’re correct that Tesla’s future and costs are uncertain, but that’s irrelevant. What is relevant is that the production cost of a Model 3-type EV will never be as high as it was in 2018. It will never be as high as it is in 2019. Even without miraculous supply chain improvements, the cost of lithium batteries and electric drivetrains is on a relentless downward path. If Tesla can make one now at $10 in profit (obviously they make more than that), then whichever company is doing so in 5-8 years will be earning thousands in profit. And if the manufacturer is not BMW, it will be the end of that company as a viable competitor.
Tesla was able to sell electric cars for more than the marginal cost per unit in a large enough volume to be viable. Full stop. After that Tesla's profitability or not is just accounting shenanigans. How bad/good a deal was this for the investors. And is this company viable and make money. Are two separate things.
Investors can lose their shirt on a viable company. Just as they can make bank on a company that's a flash in the pan. Investors can often make money on companies that are actually failing and going to fail. There is probably an correlation between how hardball the company plays it's investors and the companies ultimate viability.
As I said above, it really doesn't matter whether Tesla survives long term. Just as it doesn't matter to the cellphone industry whether Nokia survives, or to the PC industry whether IBM, Apple and Commodore survived. Tesla built the product that proved the consumer demand existed today. BMW (and other manufucturers') strategy was predicated on the idea that large-scale consumer demand was years away. Tesla made that strategy obsolete.
I don't think BMW started an EV division to take on the prius though (I could be mistaken). The point being that Tesla is forcing the industry hand to move faster than it would on its own. That isn't to say the Prius didn't have an impact but Tesla carries significantly more weight in catalyzing progress than the Prius.
They certainly helped. The 2nd Gen Prius (which was completely redesigned and features the "shuttlepod" shape we're all familiar with today was launched at a time when oil prices were climbing rapidly, peaking in '08. No one remembers the 1st gen model, which coincidentally launched when oil was around an all-time low. But my parents and many others got the 2nd gen, and I recall even more conservative-minded people being quoted as driving the Prius for "national security' reasons. It was a ground breaking car, yes. But it had the benefit of taking advantage of a global price spike in oil.
Yeah. I remember the Chevy Volt (Electric w/ gas reserve) was decently covered/had decent popularity back in the early 2010's. I think there was another notable pure electric one as well.
No, Toyota's Prius pushed hybrids. By the time it wanted to push pure EVs, Tesla was a much more established EV brand.
Same with the electric RAV4, which I believe was the first EV in the past 20 years or so. They made it, and then barely changed anything at all to it 20 years later.
Toyota doesn't care about EVs and never did, even when it struck them in the face.
Research more about the 1997-2000 period mentioned there. Sure Tesla had a part to play in the adoption of EVs but it is more about existing at the right time and bringing on the right (for the business) ceo than about any special vision.
Everything began with the Tesla Roadster showing that you could build an attractive all-electric car. That was in 2008. There is no way anyone could seriously claim that was an evolution of the hybrid lackluster NiMH Toyota Prius.
ADD: what actually begat the Roadster was AC Propulsion’s 2003 Tzero [1], a company which can be traced back to the famous EV1 (of “Who Killed The Electric Car”).
I think the old car companies would have happily ignored Tesla for way longer, had China not started demanding that a good chunk of new cars sold have to be electric. It's fear for the Chinese market that really drives drives the incumbents to EVs.
This idea that Tesla dragged everyone else "kicking and screaming" into the electric era idea is nonsense. Nissan was shipping Leaf models in the tens of thousands a year when Tesla was still producing just a few hundred Roadsters.
No, actually you are wrong! I’ve been an ev freak for a long time. Lots of people made EVs. Are you going to say next that Tesla didn’t do anything because karma was making evs as well ten years ago? Tesla absolutely did drag everyone else kicking and screaming, besides Nissan and some others. Tesla was the first company to make a serious ev that looked like a normal car and claimed to be like a normal car, not some niche golf cart like the leaf. Tesla was the first one to encroach on ice territory in this way, and everyone hated them for it. The other car companies hated them, the New York Times hated them and wrote false stories about the model s, even top gear got in on the action and staged a battery failure on their review of the roadster. Gawker maintained a death watch on Tesla. People in general loved to hate Tesla. I remember very clearly because as a Tesla “fan boy” in 2010 I didn’t make very many friends to say the very least. To EV people who were watching all this happen a decade ago, and there weren’t many of us back then, the overwhelming consensus was that Tesla was the only one pushing things forward and they got enormous pushback from every other entity in the automotive industry as a whole besides a few people. Nissan was not pushing things forward. They made a golf cart that looked like an insect. They showed no signs of making a real sedan like Tesla. They didn’t build charging infrastructure. I’m sorry man but you are flat out wrong. Go ahead and call me fanboy, it won’t make you any less wrong.
As someone who has owned both the Leaf and the Model S I agree with this. The only value of the Leaf was it was a very inexpensive but embarrassing way to get a carpool lane sticker in the Bay Area. It could not drive at highway speed for any material distance so “commuter’s golf cart” is accurate.
But now the Model S is the best sedan on the road at any price, and I’ve driven the 2019 BMWs and others. The interiors are cluttered up with incoherent “luxury” features to try to justify the price point, but nothing works that well together except for the drivetrain itself. I don’t want a crystal shifter knob and eight different buttons to lower the rear seats and a head-up display that occasionally knows the speed limit and iPads protruding from the seat backs and a lane-keeping feature that randomly jerks the wheel. This stuff makes the retracting door handles on the Tesla seem almost practical.
I do want a car that drives great and looks great and minimizes maintenance and running costs. No ICE drivetrain can deliver the same acceleration thrill as the Tesla drivetrain, so what’s the point? The only thing left is range and hauling power, so pickup trucks, vans, and for now, SUVs.
No number of additional premium features can compensate for an overall worse driving and ownership experience. It’s basically a new class of car. I was very skeptical but that’s the truth.
Of course, some won’t value what it can do, but the hate over minor details is not justified.
That's really depends on what you want from a car, doesn't it? For me, all personal and IMHO, of course, multi-month repairs over trivial issues, having to plan your trips around charger stations, and, yes, lack of luxuries that are by today not out of place even in in midrange cars costing less than half the price of a model S... that's not minor issues.
And of course I am too old and cynical, and want my stick shift back, but the driving experience in Model S was very much blah. That's one of those things that you can do well only if you know how to build cars, not computers on wheels.
As for ownership experience, maybe it is that bad with BMW, although I doubt it, but I've never had any problems with Audi, and it has been far more pleasant than what I've heard of Tesla...
It's incredibly short-sighted to not call the Nissan leaf a serious EV, just because you happen to not be in the target market. I understand there is some frustration and venting in your post, but there is no reason for being derogatory about products that happen to not be targeted at you, or at California. California is not the center of the world, and neither are you.
What's a niche golf cart is the US is a mainstream car in France (or Japan). There's a reason why Renault's equivalent of the Nissan Leaf, called Renault Zoe, is even smaller than the Leaf: it's tailored to the French urban market.
Interestingly the German market is probably more vulnerable to Tesla than the French one (since after all this is about BMW). Tesla is after the like of BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Lexus, etc. But not the like of Renault, Peugeot, Nissan, Honda, Volkswagen, Opel, Fiat, etc. (Though of course Volkswagen owns Audi, so it's not all that simple...).
As a New-Yorker (currently, hopefully not for too long) I stand on the side: I don't even have a valid US driver license. I mean, what could I possibly do with a car in NYC?
What a bunch of nonsense. I never said the leaf isn’t a serious ev. I said it’s a golf cart because that’s what it is. It can barely make it on the highway and has a very limited range. Some people want that. Most people want something like a Toyota Corolla (literally most people according to sales) and nobody in the ev community had tried to challenge the corolla segment until Tesla. That’s all I’m saying. I’m not saying that the leaf isn’t “serious.” What is even the point of your comment? Did you even read into the context and sentiment of my comment? I said nobody made a good looking, long range ev and pushed it with charging infrastructure until Tesla did it. What does that have to do with a bunch or rude Parisians driving around in clown cars? Nothing. Go back to France.
Doubling down on it being a golf cart sure sounds like you dont think it is a serious EV to me, unless you think golf carts are serious EV's.. Just saying.
I'm sure it was perfect for some people - just like a smart car. But it would fall down for typical daily usage for lots of people who don't care about cars, but do have a highway commute, say.
The leaf was never a threat to the BMW, Mercedes and Audi lines. The Tesla, from day one, was. So yes, that threat from Tesla absolutely deranged at least the German manufactures into the electric era.
The leaf was always too compromised to be viable. The model S and model X at least competed, and the model 3 is rolling most of it's competition along traditional germans.
This... is not true. Lots of people were excited by the Prius, specifically. In the 2000s that car was so hot that it was a mark of status for Hollywood celebrities to be seen driving them.
The Leaf, yeah, nobody ever got too excited by that. But the Prius was genuinely A Thing.
Prius was definitely a thing. And objectively not a great car, but a perfectly serviceable one for lots of people. The first "green" vehicle to do that, really.
I'm sure years from now Tesla will get no credit for dragging incumbent carmakers kicking and screaming into the EV market, but they really should get the lion's share of the credit for this. Because I'm certain that without Tesla, BMW and other carmakers wouldn't even have started making "EV platforms" or EVs from scratch until 2030+.