Hacker News Reader

Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

Pretty much every carmaker sells out its cars the moment they leave the factory since 2020. That isn't limited to Tesla.

View on HN

The carmakers are selling every car they make, but that's now because dealers are rebuilding their inventories. The number of cars sitting in dealer inventory has gone up quite a bit over the past few months. GM can count that as a sale, but at some point dealers are going to stop buying cars faster than they are selling them...

This is surprising to hear since the interest payments on sitting inventory has been steadily rising due to rate increases.

At the same time people aren’t as flush with cash. During the pandemic, car dealerships were selling cars sight unseen and months from delivery. Buyers aren’t going to accept that anymore. The dealerships need inventory to show people.

Our local ford dealer went from 20-40 new cars on the lot in 2020-2021. They're at over 400 on the lot now.

From my experience the IONIQ5 is a much much better car than Tesla3/Y

The IONIQ5 is also evidence that if Tesla ever did have a lead on "design" of EVs, that lead is now lost. The IONIQ5 looks... cool. When I see one on the street, it stands out, and I want one, even though I don't really care for cars or EVs. Teslas had some of that feeling in the early days, but they seem very pedestrian to me now.

Could just be my brain being weird. Or could be the fact that there are Teslas freakin' everywhere in most of the (non-aggressively-red-to-the-point-of-drinking-gasoline) USA now.

That's because unlike Hyundai, Tesla can produce EVs in large numbers.

I edited my previous comment but yes. What I wrote is that Tesla isn't anymore in a market where it's the only relevant EV maker and now Porsche, Mercedes and even Korean automakers make much more appealing EVs than what Tesla has in the lineup.

Isnt that due to the chip shortage brought on by covid? Car companies wanted to and had the ability to produce more cars if they had the chips. I dont think that was Tesla's ceiling.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com