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Comment by Certhas | Hacker News Reader

I'm not convinced about the multi year advantage. Everyone else has EVs out. They are not pushing them, probably because they are reaping the profits on past ICE investments, but the next tech platforms under development for years now at VW/Mercedes/BMW are electric.

VW is planning to get to 10 million EVs by 2022. I'd give credit to Musk and Tesla for bringing forward this point by several years, but it would be silly to write that goal off as empty bluster. (After all they have been selling a well reviewed plug in electric vehicle since 2014, even if no one ever heard about it, and it was priced relatively high. Maybe so as to not interfere with ICE profits).

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But no one else is mass producing EV's. VW is just starting to talk about building a gigafactory. Everyone is doing a lot of talking, but they are all years behind Tesla. And even if they stop talking and start doing, they'll need to build a more compelling product than Tesla. That will be very very difficult. Tesla FTW.

"Chinese sales of domestically-built new energy vehicles in 2017 totaled 777,000 units"

To first approximation none of these were Teslas. EVs are being mass produced.

Mass producing a car might be difficult. But the others manufacturers are already doing that.

They need to figure out how to mass produce electronic drive trains (vastly simpler than what they are building now) and batteries. Batterys are more complex, but most of battery production coming online in the next years is Chinese. Tesla is a fraction of what the Chinese are bringing online.

I don't see any reason why Teslas long term potential should be higher than, say BMWs. Mind you, creating a BMW size company from scratch while driving the electric transition and a pace faster than we otherwise could have hoped for are amazing achievements.

> Chinese sales of domestically-built new energy vehicles in 2017 totaled 777,000 units

Those are gasoline electric hybrids, no more impressive than a Prius technologically from a decade ago that has been brought down in price.

China is not mass producing EVs, which is why it's 777,000 "new energy vehicles." That phrasing is the give-away. Otherwise we could just pretend the Prius was the first mass produced EV, when it was not.

You are right that this figure includes hybrids (PHEV), but the vast majority, 652.000, are pure battery (BEV):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_energy_vehicles_in_China#/...

I did check that before but copy pasted the wrong line.

yes they are. in a recent trip to china nearly all of my didi trips were in electric vehicles from two or three different manufacturers. all of these cars were nice but clearly affordable. and as the other commenter pointed out, china still sells more electric vehicles than anyone else in the world. china also has a high-end electric vehicle maker in nio.

It's not just talk. Several projects have already started in Europe. Some of them have former Tesla executives.

Tesla owns the patents and innovates only in the battery packs. The battery cell technology is owned by Panasonic.

South Korean, Japanese and Chinese are leading in battery cell technology and not all of them are teaming with Tesla.

And how will you charge them for road trips, on Tesla's supercharging network? It takes time to build up the network.

Rent an ICE car for the couple of times a year I take a road trip. The other 350+ days a year, I can use my electric vehicle just fine.

The way Nissan did < Dealers.

Also, car companies can get together and let their cars charge at each other’s dealers. Then lock out Teslas until TSLA agrees to join.

Also, gas stations don’t make money selling gas (!!) but by selling candy [1]They couldn’t care less if they’re charging $60 to fill your car or 0.60. In fact, the longer it takes to charge your car unattended the more Andy you’ll buy

[1] source: talk by Exxon-Mobile VP at my univ. back in ‘08 (?)

Profit is from cigarettes. Source: friend who buys gas stations.

It's the other car dealers who will have to pay Tesla. T has the best chargers and all over the places you want them to be. T can already use all the other charging standards but they can't use Tesla chargers.

The head start for charging in Europe is considerably less than in the US. Plus there are _many_ players building up charging networks all over Europe.

China seems to already have a charging network that does not include Tesla at all.

From a purely US point of view it might look like Tesla is the only game in town for the foreseeable future. In European cities I have seen more Car2go electric vehicles/charging stations than Teslas.

I hear this a lot, but it's always (necessarily?) very vague. What scenario(s) are insufficiently affected by the first mover advantage? Define the scenario(s), define "insufficiently", define first mover/head start.

> VW is planning to get to 10 million EVs by 2022.

They say, as they discontinued production of VW eGolfs.

Which related company recently launched an electric car? How many pre orders did they get?

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