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Comment by runako | Hacker News Reader

Agree with most of this. The key difference from (say) 2018 is that the incumbents are necessarily in a "bet the company" phase with respect to EVs. No matter who wins, it's clear that at a minimum it's going to be a tough bit of competition for Tesla.

Cybertruck vs F-150 Lightning in particular could go either way. F-150 has a ton of brand equity among people who already own trucks. It will not help Tesla that F-150 Lightning w/300 mile range will be effectively ~$17k cheaper at launch. Similar compares are likely to play out against Model X and eventually Model 3 and Model Y.

> Tesla is planning by 2025

I own Tesla stock, but nobody can take seriously their projections 4 years out. (Remember that we were supposed to be awash in fleets of self-driving taxis for the last couple of years.)

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Funny how people always use self-driving to claim anything Tesla says will not happen.

Yet other predictions did come true. Tesla has managed to keep up its growth up for quite a long time even when people made fun of them for their claims.

Self-driving is fundamentally different to scaling manufacturing.

They are still globally outselling VW by 2x in terms of BEVs and GM and Ford are not close.

In my opinion neither F-150 or Cybertruck will have a demand problem for years. So it really doesn't matter what the performance-vs-price is 'at launch'. Overall the Cybertruck is very competitive.

> Funny how people always use self-driving to claim anything Tesla says will not happen.

They used this differentiator to presell hundreds of millions (billions?) of dollars of nonexistent software to their customers. It wasn't a one-time gaffe by the CEO. It's absolutely fair game. (But if you don't like that, pick one of their other products and compare initial the initial announcement to the actual first availability. They miss their initial dates, it's part of their culture of setting dates very aggressively.)

Again, I'm very pro-Tesla. I can also recognize that their projected timelines are fantasy, even when they ultimately end up delivering in the end.

> They are still globally outselling VW by 2x in terms of BEVs and GM and Ford are not close.

As a Tesla shareholder, this comparison is silly. None of those legacy manufacturers have released "real" EVs yet. An EV Jetta vs Model 3 is the interesting compare, and it's still likely some years out.

I understand the complaint, but it really has nothing to do with the question about manufacturing scaling.

> None of those legacy manufacturers have released "real" EVs yet.

This is simply not true. ID3, ID4, Mach-E are very real, BMW, Mercedes have also released vehicles of that class. Including from China, Geely (Volvo, Polestar) BYD, Xpeng and so on.

These are all build on competitive platforms that the manufacturer hope to reuse the next few years.

Its just that in the US, many of these are almost not sold so in the US Tesla has a huge market share. In Europe Tesla market share is already far lower.

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