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Comment by dghughes | Hacker News Reader

>“A lot of consumers don’t need anything fancy, a commute is all they ask from a car,”...

Tesla has lost its way with expensive cars loaded with sensors, launch control. Tesla jumped the shark when Musk mentioned gas rockets as an option. Wasn't the original philosophy of Tesla to give away EV patents to make the world a better place?

I don't need a car or a truck that can go 0 to 60 in 2 seconds. I want safe car with a reasonable range that doesn't cost $100K.

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You got everything wrong. Tesla is doing it right by hitting the high-end market first, while they are ramping up the production. Once they know how to automate everything, they will go for cheaper cars.

It's not like they are sitting on a massive supply of cars that nobody wants to buy. They sell them all.

Exactly. $25k car is expected in 3 years. 10 years and we might get one for $15k or less.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/22/21450916/tesla-battery-pa...

You act like Elon spends all his time on build a rocket car. The overwhelming focus at Tesla, is lowering the cost of the car, specifically the batteries. The amount of time and engineering going into that is 10000x higher then goes into Roadster. He literally called the Roadster dessert, the only reason they are making is to show that an EV is better in every possible way then a Gas car. And the SpaceX package they probably only doing because Elon want to build the most insane car in the history of humanity (and probably drive it himself).

> I don't need a car or a truck that can go 0 to 60 in 2 seconds. I want safe car with a reasonable range that doesn't cost $100K.

That's the whole point behind battery work they are doing, to be able to make a car the price of a Honda Civic that can everything a modern car should do, including drive itself in many situations and enough range to drive it whereever you like.

It seems like you are massively underestimating how difficult it is to produce millions of EV. The whole global battery industry right can only support a few million cars a year.

Then get a Chevy Bolt. A 3-year lease is almost free once you start stacking all of the available incentives.

+1 to this. I love my Tesla, but when we decided to pick up an EV for my wife to use, the Bolt was the obvious choice $6K out the door for a 3 year lease at 15K miles/year. $20K if you'd like to roll the dice and buy it outright.

For what she will save on gas compared to her previous ICE daily driver, the Bolt is practically free.

I'm gonna ask for references: Where in the world did you find a new $20K Chevy Bolt?

They go on sale several times a year with big stacked incentives. I can't give you a reference directly to one advertised at 20K, but here is one at 21.7K: https://www.carrchevrolet.com/new/Chevrolet/2020-Chevrolet-B...

I shopped around and got another local dealer to undercut Carr by more than a thousand bucks. But they don't advertise that price on their public web site.

$2500 of the discount is coming from a state tax rebate (which is applied at the time of purchase, not something you have to wait for when you file your taxes). $3000 is from Costco, and I have no idea who actually pays for that.

So some people won't get all the way down to $20K, it'll depend on what state they live in and whether they are Costco members or not. Some states do better than $2500. Carr likes to say "everyone qualifies for this price" so I'm not sure what their discounts are comprised of.

Here are two recent deals that were <$0 net for a 3-year lease:

https://forum.leasehackr.com/t/nj-bolt-premier-mic-drop-5618...

https://forum.leasehackr.com/t/signed-2020-bolt-lt-1700-one-...

Those are pretty great deals, due to the excellent local incentives. I was quoted $57xx for one-pay 36mo 10K/yr lease. We opted for a 15K/yr lease at a little over $6K instead because my wife puts a lot of miles on her daily driver. We won't go negative, but my wife was spending $200/mo on gasoline previously, so our only net cost will be the insurance (which would also be a wash except we're keeping the old daily driver for it's utility aspect).

It's actually kind of funny that I have experience with that California dealer. Make no mistake, if you show up in person, they will do all the same nasty tricks that most dealerships will. However, for some reason, it seems like they have an abnormally good online division.

You send them a request online; they send you a pretty good, but not great, offer via email with no hidden garbage and no irritating attempts to pull you in in person. You go in, and they see if they can run the financing through themselves and shrug if your financing is better. You sign paperwork and drive off with the car.

3 people in my circle of acquaintances bought cars from them simply because their online presence is so pain-free.

They must have decided that running low touch, higher volume through the online pathways is a better choice. Presumably online buyers fall into 1) will waste your time grinding you down, so sending an offer and being done minimizes the time wasted and 2) wanting to interact with people as little as possible so those customers will bite at a good offer with a bit of profit baked in as long as you don't make them deal with people very much.

Dealers are very pragmatic about sales tactics. They absolutely stereotype people walking in off the street vs online, and among the people that do walk in they stereotype based on gender and race. They will use different tactics with Mexicans, blacks, whites, etc. Effective dealers (going to avoid using 'good' in this case) realized pretty quickly that the folks who work the deal online will just walk instantly if you feed them the usual line of crap. The best shot at closing the deal is to go directly to the best price and be done with it, because they probably won't wait around for a second shot.

Just a hypothesis but Telsa is a self-driving car platform that just happens to sell vehicles right now.

The trajectory Tesla is taking is where a user buys subscription to a Tesla vehicle, all cars have the same feature set but what is available to you is based on the subscription you've bought. So if you have the autopilot option bought it will be available to you in whichever car that arrives.

In this case it makes sense to push out homogeneity amongst all of its vehicles out there.

That's more than a hypothesis; it's the plan.

https://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part-deux

"In cities where demand exceeds the supply of customer-owned cars, Tesla will operate its own fleet, ensuring you can always hail a ride from us no matter where you are."

How are these shared cars not going to be treated like crap like most other shared vehicles, such as scooters? At my old college, drunks flipped a shared smart car onto its roof for sport.

The Tesla ride sharing network that's in the works (but slow-gowing in the actual full self-driving department) is supposed to be more like Uber than Hertz. If you mistreat the car and the next person reports it as dirty, you'd probably get charged extra or barred from using them if you were a repeat offender.

These cars will be able to drive themselves to centers where they can be cleaned and detailed if and as needed. Scooters today can't.

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