Hacker News Reader

Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

It really isn't comparable.

In the areas that Apple competes there are a handful of serious competitors and they deliberately place themselves in markets where they know they can offer a superior experience. In the automative industry there are dozens of competitors. And most of them over at least some cars that are higher in quality than Tesla. And of course none of them have the problem of electric cars namely range and worrying about recharge locations. Which is a concern for the mainstream masses.

For me Tesla is more like the Windows Phone. A great product but with quite a lot of uncertainty around it's longterm future.

View on HN

> namely range and worrying about recharge locations. Which is a concern for the mainstream masses.

I don't think the masses drive 200 miles a day on the regular. That's $500+ a month in gas.

Daily isn't the problem, it's the weekend excursions.

In America. Much of the rest of the developed world considers 400 miles of driving over a weekend to be crazy talk.

In Europe a weekend, or even a daily trip if you happen to live close enough, to the mountain in winter for skiing is considered common and acceptable.

The distance is well inside the range of Tesla's battery if it wasn't for the altitude and the cold weather. If you don't have a charging station at your destination, better start walking...

In the part of Europe I'm from, we have trains for this eventuality...

I'm glad we've zeroed in on "in the part of a continent that I live in" from your initial pan-Europe generalization.

I'm glad we've uncovered the fact that you consider "the developed world" to be the continent you're from... O_o

It would also be worth adding that the part of Europe with good train coverage is "much of it".

Lucky. "America", ie the US, is pretty huge and empty. When I was in college, my friends would often drive about 350 miles one way to go home for the weekend/holidays. Public transportation is so much shittier here than many other "developed" countries I've lived in. Sucks because I've never owned a car lol.

I wonder if subsidised petrol also adds to it. It'd be a rare Australian (in my experience) who attempted to regularly drive between major cities (excluding Canberra) - they'd just fly.

I also get the impression that air transport in most of the rest of the world is much much more reasonable. AirAsia has made most of Asia pretty accessible, there are a gazillion competing low-cost airlines in Europe, and Australian air travel seems to be cheap enough that I have friends who city hop at weekends without much effort.

Of the four continents I've lived for more than a year on, North America and Africa see people taking heroic car journeys, Europe and (South East) Asia much less so.

Finally there seems to be a real class divide on public transport. Middle-class Europeans and Asians will jump on a coach, where I don't think any of the Americans I know have every been on a Greyhound bus...

I have ridden my share of Greyhound's man. They are always very long and if you have a bad driver they are quite scary.

Where I went to college, flights were often canceled and cost around 300$ one way. Between cities in the US we do have pretty competitive prices for flights. Cars were definitely the preferred means of transportation and if you car pooled the cheapest.

Oddly enough we had an ok bus system, it was pricy but the fare was included in your tuition.

Which is such a strange phenomenon to me. I don't balk at driving ten hours from LA to Redding a couple times a year just to visit family, but that's longer than it takes to drive from Berlin to Paris. If I lived in Europe, I'd be visiting a different country every other weekend.

That's seen as pretty crazy here too.

To be fair, there was a point in my life when I was driving 900 miles round trip every other week or so, but that was about a girl, and before I had enough money to take a plane...and looking back I was viewed as crazy by most people for doing so.

> In the areas that Apple competes there are a handful of serious competitors and they deliberately place themselves in markets where they know they can offer a superior experience.

Yes, but how did they get there? Twenty years ago, Apple made "a great product but with quite a lot of uncertainty around it's longterm future." Though I personally think that any comparisons are facile, the point is that Tesla is poised to follow a similar path.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com