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Comment by startupfounder | Hacker News Reader

This is the issue: charging times & price point.

To sell units beyond their first adopters they need to address key issues with electric cars (and I am all for EVs). What they need to do is license their technology to Ford and GM to get mass market appeal and to help build/develop EVs in the $20k range. As the article states, "It projects selling 20,000 cars next year, which is a relatively high number among luxury brands."

This is really what is going to happen: the will be acquired by a larger brand.

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I live on the east coast and I am staring to see a fair number of charging stations in garages. So far it's mostly for corporate cars but I have been thinking Car sharing services could be well served by going electric. They generally own the parking space, the car is moving short distances, but while plugging them in is easy refilling the tank is something of a pain. It's probably not a huge market but selling say 5k cars per year to that market seems vary doable with the added bonus that initial costs are less important.

Car2go, which is part of Daimler, is doing this in some cities with their Smart-car car sharing program (some cities use both electric and gas Smart cars). Tesla technology is in the Smart EV's.

"It projects selling 20,000 cars next year, which is a relatively high number among luxury brands."

Actually this is quite low. BMW sells around 110K units a year in the US alone - http://online.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3022-autosales.html

Although I do agree the best bet for the survival of the technology is to get bought by a larger brand.

> Actually this is quite low. BMW sells around 110K units a year in the US alone...

I could be wrong about this, but I suspect the median selling price of a BMW in the U.S. is about $10,000 less than the cheapest Model S. Selling 20,000 cars that start at $50K would be a feat.

BMW has 10 different models, and their best-seller--the 3 series--has a considerably lower base price than the Model S.

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