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Comment by Shivetya | Hacker News Reader

Don't matter where its built, but if you are only selling cars the top one percent can afford you are not changing the world. GM will be first in the US with a two hundred mile range EV that is priced within the range of every day new car buyers. While Tesla deserves credit for showing people you can build an electric for everyday use; heck what can't you build for 100k?; they never had the resources the big auto companies have. There have been some good articles showing that GM/LG and BMW have taken the lead in battery tech already. (GM is already boasting a 145 KwH cost for the Bolt and BMW did a simple but very effective modular system with cooling)

Tesla's plan was to make money where it could with the limited volumes they were going to restricted to because they were new to building cars. Big companies can do more with smaller margins because of quantity.

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> Don't matter where its built, but if you are only selling cars the top one percent can afford you are not changing the world.

Once upon a time, only the top one percent could afford cellular telephones. Now, subsistence farmers in the poorest nations in the world have them. Markets for these sorts of things frequently start with the rich, and then expand.

I think you're giving GM a bit too much credit here, there's one thing that's sorely lacking: Infrastructure.

Tesla already has a fantastic network of superchargers.

CCS(which GM is betting on) has very low penetration(Sea -> Portland is a dead-zone, also Portland -> North CA) compared to CHAdeMO.

Telsa has the advantage of a better infra(120kW vs 50kW) and the ability to use other standards like CHAdeMO.

This is what constantly puzzles me about other manufacturers' plans to get into the EV market. As far as I know, nobody has plans for a usable fast charging network.

One could argue that you don't need one. Most people don't take road trips that often. But they want to be able to. It's one of the most common questions I get about my Model S: "What if you want to take a road trip?" You can make a pretty easy economic argument that you're better off with a shorter-range car for daily driving, and renting something for your once-a-year road trips, but most people just won't do that.

It's great that the GM has the Bolt and other manufacturers are planning to make EVs with decent range. But without a fast charging network, what's the point? I can't see them moving beyond a small niche.

The question I have is, why isn't any other manufacturer addressing this the way Tesla has and is? Are they, and they just aren't discussing it (or I've missed it)? Do they think third parties should take the lead? Do they think it's not important? Are they just incapable? Do they not actually care about the success of their EVs?

Yeah, and even then most of the standards are 50kW(or less) which means that Tesla still has a 2.4x charging advantage(yes I'm aware CCS is supposed to go up higher, but from what I've seen it's limited to 126A vs Supercharger's 300A and we don't see any of them in production yet).

I'd say an even bigger problem is simply that the installations aren't very good.

If Tesla had gone with CHAdeMO and put up 50kW CHAdeMO Superchargers everywhere, that would make road trips somewhat more annoying, but it would still be doable. You don't get to charge at 120kW all the time anyway, since the charge rate tapers off as the battery gets full, and temperature matters. It would definitely slow you down, and I'm glad they didn't do this, but I think it would still work.

But if you try to do a road trip on CHAdeMO as it stands, it's a major crapshoot. The stations are almost always single units. That means that if it's occupied or broken, you could be in trouble. There are a lot of stations that only do 20-25kW, some by design, some because they're half-broken. Often they're not maintained well, so they can remain broken or half-broken for months.

Contrast with Superchargers, where they almost always have 4-8 stalls and are maintained such that you can count on them.

I wonder if Tesla would allow other companies to use their charger network (assuming they implement compatible battery tech)?

Supposedly, the Tesla Model 3 is going to be cheaper than the Chevy Bolt when it comes out.

"Musk points out that Chevy's claimed $30,000 price tag assumes the $7500 federal tax incentive for zero-emissions cars, putting the vehicle's true price at $37,500. The Model 3, Musk insists, will come in at $35,000 before any incentives, meaning buyers will only be on the hook for $27,500. And that's before any additional state-based incentives."

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