You could say the same thing about Henry Ford.
Or Otto Benz.
“Meh, he just put an ICE on wheels.”
there is no “trying hard enough”. That’s my point. It’s just another car. There’s nothing particularly innovative about Tesla cars. And unless Tesla has something other car manufacturers can’t build then it will get pushed aside like Tucker, Bricklin, or DeLorean were. Look at Saab. Nice cars. Gone.
Had Bricklin brought their rotary Vee into production THAT would have been something. Not even close. People would have lined up for that. Look how hard it was to bring a Wankel rotary to market. It was a tremendous problem child.
As for the tallest building in the world that would depend on how it was constructed. Constructed a building in the middle of town with narrow streets on all sides, THAT’s something.
There is little chance of Tesla innovating ahead of the pack when large production numbers are called for and that’s their Achilles heel. They’re already a day late and a dollar short.
So, can you name a few successful automotive engineering innovations which Tesla is failing to match?
Yes, producing a car in a timely manner using normal capitalization methods.
Is it really that hard to understand that Tesla is a poorly funded company struggling to survive?
Can I ask you what sort of personal pleasure you get out of intentionally misunderstanding the words “engineering” and “finance?”
And again, what are some examples of automotive engineering that you consider innovations? Do you even know any?
Yanno, let’s forget the electric thing for the moment. I’ll say that–for the sake of argument–that the batteries and motors and stuff are all trivial and will be easily replicated.
Let’s instead look at safety ratings. Obviously, all automakers pay a lot of attention to safety ratings, and for some consumers it’s the primary metric for buying a car. There’s a huge amount of competition here, and every automaker brags about their ratings on at least some of their models. They’ve been at it for decades and should have lots of experience.
So how is it that Tesla came in and built a much safer car than anyone else? This isn’t an area where the other automakers could plausibly take a wait-and-see approach; they all have an interest in building safer cars now, since it has such a direct effect on their sales. Tesla should have been starting from way behind, and yet they leapfrogged the others.
If what they were doing was so easy, the others should have been doing it already. They aren’t, so we can plausibly conclude that what Tesla is doing is not actually that simple.
I’m not sure what to make of an article that calls the Model X a “sprout utility vehicle”.
You could not possible be any more wrong about that statement. Henry Ford literally brought efficient production methods into being and buried all but the biggest companies doing it. Even today, they were the only American company capable of riding out the recession without government bailouts.
While Americans are buying 50 mpg Prius’s Ford is selling 65 mpg diesels in Europe.
What part of “can’t make production timelines” are you having difficulties understanding? this was discussed early in this thread. They are poorly funded.
Right, Ford. Hey, did you know that under the same loan program (Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing) that gave Tesla $465 million–which they paid back in 2013–Ford got a $5.9 billion loan? Which they mostly haven’t paid back yet?
This was not exactly a bailout in the GM sense. But it’s hilarious when people say that Tesla is suckling at the government teat when Ford gets over ten times the amount of money in development loans (and still doesn’t produce an electric car with >100 mi range).
It’s a shitty article that wasn’t even edited, let alone fact-checked. It’s barely in the English language.
If you have evidence that Tesla’s capital expenditures are outstripping their ability to pay them, lay it on the table.
I can’t speak to Bricklin or Saab, but Tucker and DeLorean basically sold modified versions of Detroit cars, didn’t they? Musk’s Tesla is hardly doing the same thing.
they didn’t build a much safer car than anyone else. they are in the upper 1% and that’s for one of their cars. Kudos to them. Not having an engine in the front gives electric cars a huge crumple zone.
Doesn’t affect the point I’ve been making. They don’t have the engineering staff, production lines or capital to compete against other car makers. They will be pushed aside when demand for electric cars goes mainstream.
Dollar for dollar, what are they doing that isn’t a modified version of a Detroit car?
Do you think Toyota, Honda, GM, Ford, Mazda etc… are sitting on their hands in respect to electric cars? There’s a difference between spending money on research and wasting money on low number production. Again, going back to the Volt, it was given a tremendous amount of free press. The same people on this board lauding Tesla’s greatness said the same thing about the Volt. It is literally the same discussion. You WANT Tesla to succeed therefore it will.
How is Tesla going to compete against companies with magnitudes of greater resources when electric cars become mainstream?
I’m not sure what the technical term is Magiver is doing in this thread. It’s sort of like spreading, it’s sort of like FUD, and it’s lot like moving oneself to an entirely different football pitch every page to find new goalposts.
He’s indefatigable, at least. Since GM and Ford have both produced electric cars, I’m now guessing he works for Toyota or Daimler-Benz? Alternatively, in petroleum refining? :shrug:
So why does the Leaf only have a 4-star NHTSA rating? Or the Fiat 500e? How about the Focus electric only getting a 4-star in rollover?
All pure electrics and should have the same advantages of the Model S. Unless they screwed up and put the motor in front when they didn’t need to, or didn’t put the battery on the floorpan to lower the CG, or…
Maybe I was unfair in my last post. Let me see if I understand your argument, Magiver.
You’re saying that electrics are “not mainstream” and that when they “become mainstream,” companies like GM, Toyota, and Honda will enter the market in a big way, and Tesla will fail to be a leader in electric car production.
Um. Well, yeah, that’s plausible. But Tesla already is a leader in electric car production. And importantly, in electric car marketing, design, and innovation.
GM, Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Ford, and VW are huge companies. Tesla is not. Of course the other guys have economies of scale. Tesla’s business plan in that environment is not to be Preston Tucker and sell a slightly improved version of a typical Ford. Tesla’s business plan is to make cars that feel like a sea change in transport, and sell them to a niche audience at a high markup. That’s not a bad idea at all.
I see you ignored post #379, where I said this:
Tesla is doing quite well for a startup from outside the big auto companies.
Your point is well taken. GM has much larger infrastructure. Bob Lutz said similar about Tesla’s difficulties. But GM’s interests are divided, in that their infrastructure and engineering are still geared toward fuel-injected petrol-burners. Tesla only sells electric cars, batteries for same, and associated tech. They are all in on electric in a way even Nissan isn’t yet.
You’ll note that Bob Lutz, father of the Volt, is now heading a small company called VL Automotive, working on electric cars.
In the long run, VL and Tesla might be bought out by bigger companies, as has happened to automakers before. But the work they’re doing on infrastructure has value, just as the Leaf and Volt infrastructure has value to Nissan and GM. I don’t think they’re just going to wither away.
What they have done is prove that electrics work very well, can work better than petrol-burners, and can even be high-performance luxury vehicles–almost completely demolishing one of the major arguments about electric cars before they came along.
The Leaf tried to make electrics normal, and that is worth a lot.
Tesla made them* cool.* That is game-changing.
I’m not sure GM in general was really behind the Volt. It’s a good car, in theory, and I’d happily drive one, in theory. It wasn’t marketed as well as it could be.
Just lately I saw an ad for a hydrogen fuel cell car, from somebody. Honda? Toyota? Toyota. It looks OK. At least they’re advertising it.
The Tesla Model S starts at $75,000.
The Nissan Leaf, Ford Focus Electric, and Fiat 500e all start at around $30,000, and are significantly smaller cars.
It is hardly surprising that a larger, more expensive car is safer than a smaller, cheaper car. It is also not surprising that the Tesla has a longer electric range than cars costing less than half as much.
I don’t see any sign that Tesla’s engineering is any better than any other high-end manufacturer. What distinguishes Tesla is that they have identified a market that the other manufacturers did not think existed, or didn’t think was large enough to be sustainable - that for expensive, luxury all-electric cars. Tesla has done a fantastic job of producing an excellent product in that segment, and they deserve a lot of credit for a doing top-tier engineering and product design work.
But, technologically, a Tesla is nothing groundbreaking. It is very competent engineering, and I’m sure they’ve invented many things and filed many patents like any large-scale engineering effort would, but fundamentally, it is an electric car using normal electric motors and nearly off-the-shelf Panasonic battery cells, with a nicely-designed passenger cabin sitting on top. They have not invented their own battery chemistry or even their own cell design.
The reason Tesla has the market to itself at the moment is that the other manufacturers have chosen to focus on affordable, mass-market electric cars, not $100,000 luxury machines. This was in part because they need to sell a lot of electric cars in order to bring their fleet average fuel economy down, and selling a relatively small number of $100,000 luxury electric cars doesn’t help enough to justify their investment.
The real test of Tesla’s engineering will come in the next 3-5 years when they try to compete with the Chevrolet Bolt (nominally, a $30,000 electric with a 200-mile range) and similar products from other high-end manufacturers like BMW, who will be obligated to sell more and more electric cars in order to meet their fuel economy targets.
EDIT: In response to foolguinea’s post: Tesla deserves a lot of credit for making electric cars cool, I completely agree. But this was a marketing and product design triumph, not an engineering one.
Why are you hanging your argument hat on one star? I gave it kudos. Good on them that one of their cars made it into the upper 1 percent of safety ratings. What’s your point?