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Comment by atonse | Hacker News Reader

I’ve said this a thousand times. The difference between SpaceX and Tesla is Gwen Shotwell. She is an excellent check on Elon Musk.

You need both. It’s the difference between a company with exceptional engineering talent that also runs well, and a company with exceptional engineering talent that doesn’t run well.

I’m really happy with my Model 3 and I continue to wish them success. But these kinds of moves are just pure uncontrolled Elon Musk as-the-engineer. He’s as bad at estimating as I am. I knew the state of machine learning when I decided to just get EAP and not FSD. I’m not celebrating their miss, I’m just saying all this was avoidable.

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How on earth are you seriously claiming that Tesla "doesn't run well"?

They've gone from nothing, to a major competitive auto manufacturer, in 10 years. Not only that, they've built out the service and infrastructure to support themselves as a major auto manufacturer, as a side project.

Seriously look at this map: https://www.tesla.com/findus?v=2&bounds=58.46119224394316%2C...

If this was tesla's only accomplishment, it would still be a major one.

They mean relative to SpaceX. Within their respective fields, it seems like SpaceX is much more ahead of the competition than Tesla is.

Is Tesla not far ahead of the competitors?

Im currently sitting at one of the Tesla Superchargers in Phoenix. It’s full of cars. There is a CHAdeMO charger across the lot and I’ve never seen somebody use it.

Have any of Tesla’s competitors (other than the Ford ~~model t~~ mustang) even shipped yet?

“Nikola” appears to have been a blatant scam. Rivian hasn’t shipped. Lucid hasn’t shipped.

Meanwhile Tesla has a month long waitlist (at least), a retail store network, charger network, service network, and is on the 4th generation of actual shipped products.

That’s sounds exactly like spacex to me. The competitors (if you could even call them that yet) are trying their best to copy SpaceX but so far even Jeff Bezos seemingly infinite wealth hasn’t been able to do it.

Regular manufacturers have lots of full electric cars. As you say, SpaceX basically has no competitors.

I’m not saying Tesla isn’t ahead. I’m saying SpaceX is comparatively much more ahead. Tesla at least has competition.

> Have any of Tesla’s competitors (other than the Ford ~~model t~~ mustang) even shipped yet?

VW's brands (VW/Audi/Porsche) are shipping and leading the market in Europe. Deliveries in the US are ramping up as well.

>Is Tesla not far ahead of the competitors?

Depends on region. "Renault's Zoe was the best-selling electric car in Europe in 2020, beating the Tesla Model 3 to second place." [1]

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/972845/electric-vehicles...

Also depends on how/what you are measuring. The Zoe is almost $25k cheaper than the base model standard range Model 3 (at least here in Sweden), which explains why it sells so well. I don't think anyone would claim it is a better car than the Tesla, or ahead technically in any way, and you could argue that they aren't in really competing since one is so much smaller and cheaper than the other.

But yea, in Europe a lot of manufacturers sells decent fully electric cars.

Doesn't Phoenix have Waymo full self driving taxis that literally anyone can take upon landing at the airport?

Tesla might be (way) ahead of auto-manufacturers when it comes to churning out individually-owned electric cars and providing a great experience for their customers, but I don't think Tesla is ahead at all when it comes to self-driving.

Not from the airport AFAIK. There is an area in Tempe/Chandler where that is true, but not the airport.

That might be true but its a bad standard to use. There are lots of highly competitive car companies of gigantic scale already existing.

Rocket launch was a far smaller market that was basically run by governments only for all practical purposes.

Both business for by all practical reasoning have performed absurdly well.

If it weren't for their ridiculous stock price nobody would call them a major competitive auto manufacturer. Their sales are not major and if it weren't for their ability to sell credits they would not be remotely competitive.

Sure, except their stock prices reflect the brand itself. Drive in front of a 5 year old and they know "mommy thats the car that can drive itself!" What car brand has ever has that type of reach? If you have a sportcar, you get a generic ooo look a ferrari/lamborgini. Something most will never reach. But a tesla will be their next car.

The only other brand that has this reach would be Apple. Every single communications player have been gunning for them since iPhone 1. No one has even come close.

You over-estimate your typical 5yo by a large amount.

I don't know about that. My plain white Model Y gets a LOT of attention from people of all ages, including the under 10 crowd. I've driven other, more flashy cars, and have never gotten as many "Oh look!" reactions in my neighborhood. It constantly surprises me, in a good way.

This is how I feel about the Steve Jobs and Jony Ive dynamic. The two of them together was a great match, but when Jobs died Ive was left to his own devices and kinda just ran with his own worst impulses ("make everything as thin as humanly possible", etc).

While this is certainly true for falcon 9 I wonder if Shotwell is deliberately letting Elon go unrestrained on Starship. Maybe SpaceX winning the Artemis contract changes things but until now Starship was an area where they were free to make whatever claims they want and to fail as much as they like. Elon the hype man could run wild.

People need to stop with this idiotic idea that Shotwell is some firefighter constantly holding Musk back. This is a meme at this point.

Shotwell and Musk are working together very closely and have for 10+ years. Shotwell is often just as aggressive as Musk. On Starship specifically Shotwell has been just as agressive as Musk.

And Elon is not a 'hype man' he is the Chief Engineer no matter how much people want to ignore that and call him a marketing guy or business guy or a hype man.

NASA was clearly impressed with what SpaceX is doing with Starship and that was during the time when 'hype man' was running it (according to you). Accept of course we know that Shotwell is very much involved.

Starship is developed the way it is because it is the most of how ambitious it both for operations and production. And those criticizing have clearly never developed a fully reusable rocket the size of a sky scraper so their criticism is mostly worthless.

I will look for that YouTube video that Shotwell herself describes their roles.

To (badly) paraphrase, Elon is definitely the visionary and chief engineer. He’s the one who says things like “we can go to Mars in 7 years” and everyone gasps and says he’s out of his mind. Then he lays out “no, we can do x,y,z and make it there, correct?” And then people kind of nod. And then she takes his ridiculously ambitious vision and has to figure out how they run a company with that goal. It really is that sort of dynamic. I am saying that with her, they are a terrifyingly effective duo. He needs that in Tesla.

I own Tesla stock. I want them to continue to wildly succeed. It’s for that reason I want Elon to have a true peer there too.

I'm not saying somebody like that would not be beneficial.

The quote doesn't actually disagree with what I have said however.

Her name is Gwynne Shotwell just fyi

Was debating whether I should get FSD or not on the Model 3. Eventually decided not to despite the egging ons of some people at a Tesla forum I frequent to pull the trigger.

From everything I could glean, the technology does not seem mature yet, and shock!!!, despite the disbelief of some robotaxi/FSD evangelists, I actually like driving. Ok, so I don't like stop and go barely moving traffic, but I don't think FSD can handle that today or anytime soon anyways.

I totally agree with you about Tesla needing a Gwynne-like figure – I’ve said it myself before on this forum.

However, away from the controversy about their approach to and messaging around full self driving, Tesla is otherwise pretty exceptional, if you look at what they’ve achieved. (As detailed by some of the other replies to your post.)

Tesla is one of the most successful companies in American history, for you to say it doesn't run well reveals either unreasonable standards or misplaced priorities.

I’m actually a happy owner of a model 3, and generally a cheerleader for the company. I want companies like Tesla that turn industries upside down to succeed wildly. Let’s start there.

However, Tesla as a company seems to jump from burst to burst of technological wizardry. Build a great car, get stuck in manufacturing hell. Solve the manufacturing problem, you’ve injured a bunch of factory workers. Solve that problem, you’ve now created exceptional battery cooling tech. Solve that problem, but owners can’t get their cars fixed in a timely manner. Solve that problem and then you have suddenly raised solar panels prices 3x. Build amazing solar tiles but then your FSD was always a fad.

It’s a constant thing where they are jumping around from tough problem to tough people to constantly put out fires. Again, they have a world class engineering talent so they solve these problems with exceptional solutions that often leapfrog their competitors. But it feels like they jump around a lot.

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