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Comment by scient | Hacker News Reader

The scenarios you described sound like straight from "The Innovators Dilemma". Except the companies thinking this way were disrupted out of business.

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What is truly disrupting about Tesla?

The biggest disruption is the quality of the electric drivetrain. We are quickly finding that a "mediocre" electric drivetrain feels better to the average driver than a very good gasoline drivetrain.

That isn't what people intuitively expect, but once that expectation changes, the market is going to see major disruption. Gasoline based powertrains will not be seen as the superior choice by most people 5 years from now.

I have no doubt that this is a factor is why Tesla is going somewhere - I don't know that this is enough to 'render all that came before obsolete'.

I'm hopeful yet though - I think a transition to electric power for cars would be wonderful - there are currently many drawbacks to electric power, mostly relating to batteries yet still to be overcome.

Yeah -- and you don't lose half your fuel economy by getting the one that goes 0-60 in 4 seconds.

> We are quickly finding that a "mediocre" electric drivetrain feels better to the average driver than a very good gasoline drivetrain.

At first glance, that seems like more of a reason for low-end electric cars to disrupt Tesla.

I'd fully expect that challenge to come from one of the established manufacturers.

We're still early-days yet on electric car technology - there are still many hurdles to overcome yet to make the technology practical for most drivers - so its really hard to say what the future will hold yet - I'm excited for the potential, but I'd like to think I see the realities of it.

Yes, but some of us motorheads like that vibration and noise of a gas engine :-)

Everyone keeps talking about the cars... when it's really about the car factory:

> Ford has 23 global assembly plants that built 6,651,000 cars and trucks in 2016. [...] Elon Musk can imagine a single Tesla factory producing 5.25 million cars per year per assembly line [...].

> If this becomes the way to go for global car makers then Ford has 22 assembly plants it needs to scrap. I wrote scrap rather than sell because if every one of Ford’s competitors is doing the same thing there won’t be any buyers for those old factories.

[1] http://www.cringely.com/2017/06/05/the-robots-are-coming/

Consider for a moment the logistics of moving 14,383 cars per day out of a single factory, nevermind all the parts needed to build them. (assuming a 15 foot long car, its (ballpark number) 43 miles of cars parked end to end.. per day).

The logistics and storage of both material and finished goods are part of why Ford has 22 factories to produce 6.5 million cars.

Well one thing Tesla has going for them is that they have way less parts per car when compared against traditional ICE based drive trains.

as well as the cars can drive themselves out of the factory

And one factory that's not gonna do too well when the Pacific plate decides it's had enough of SV's BS and shakes things up.

Total parts, perhaps, total assemblies - not really.

> 43 miles of cars parked end to end.. per day

So two miles per hour? That doesn't actually sound too bad.

around 560 cars per hour - consider that a normal auto plant runs at 60-100 cars per hour - so what was proposed by the linked post was a 600-1000% increase in production - its largely a impossibility - because imagine for a moment of parking 10 cars per minute (or so) of operation.

So you hire more people to do the parking...? What's impossible there?

That's if we assume they don't just self-park.

The hard parts by far are actual production and getting in enough materials. If you can get in a thousand each of every single part, it's easy in comparison to get a thousand assembled cars back out.

Thinking just a little further, once the autonomy of the vehicle is good enough, there's no need to park the vehicle at all - you just tell it to start driving to a dealership or an owner's home.

There'd be some additional logistics to figure out how to recharge the vehicle as necessary on route, but that's a very different problem, and probably also amenable to automation.

its the space to store the cars, as well as the logistics of shipping them out - 14,000 cars comes out (optimistically) about 650 autoracks (railcars) per day - each one of those autoracks is 145 feet long. The scale of what is being discussed is near impossible, as it would mean an plant several orders of magnitude larger then any other ever constructed.. and I'm just focusing on the output - the logistics for the inputs for manufacturing are just as daunting.

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