The Future of Electric Vehicles Is Golf Carts, Not Tesla

It's amazing how much an article can be both correct and miss the point so strongly.

>"The critical limitation preventing EVs from disrupting the lowest end of the traditional auto market is battery performance, but battery costs are declining every day. As battery technology improves and costs continue to decrease, low end EVs will rapidly gain on their traditional competitors."

This is literally what Tesla is banking on. You can't sell a mass market car without low cost high density batteries, but you can't invest in low cost high density batteries without proving that people will buy electric cars. Which was the point of the Roadster and now the S and X. Battery technology won't improve from golf carts because golf carts only need to go 10 miles, and we've had batteries that could do that for years.

At first I thought the article was misleading because it was poorly thought out. After reading two other article that are linked in first paragraph, I think the article is deliberately misleading, and part of an effort to disparage Tesla/EVs by Thomas Bartman/Harvard Business Review. To what end...? I can only speculate.

I will not bother to present the reasons why I think the article itself is wrong. I will just point out for Hacker News' amusement, that the one of the linked articles that the parent article cites to support its position is also written by Thomas Bartman. The other... heh... the one entitled "Tesla’s Not as Disruptive as You Might Think" does not have an author listed. But it refers to work done by "Tom Bartman and his team". If you are reading this, HBR: Who was the author, and why is his/her name not listed??

Here is another article by the same guy.

https://hbr.org/2015/04/why-tesla-wont-be-able-to-scale

He argues that Tesla will not be able to scale for two reasons.

The first and most credible reason is that Tesla has already established an overhead structure for low volume, high margin cars and that it will not be able to change this structure for Model 3. This is a legitimate point, but it cannot be said that this is a reason why it would be impossible for Tesla to scale. The title suggests that it is.

The second point he made was that because Tesla "dealers" are in the business of making money, they will always give higher priority to selling the more expensive, higher margin cars than cheaper ones. He is saying that this is going to be a major impediment to the success of Tesla in their high volume aspirations. I think it is obvious that this is a laughable argument. Even if we pretend for a moment that customers have absolutely no control over what they buy, this argument falls flat. Tesla has exercised more control over their retail experience than any other car company that I know of. And they do this in spite of huge resistance from the automotive establishment. It is bizarre to propose that the Model 3 will fail because Tesla won't be able to get their own sales people in line. And the arguments in the "golf cart" article are just as vapid.

I live in rural China. Most of the taxis in the local town are little dinky box-like EVs. However, basically everyone prefers the excellent electric scooters to these because they are much faster. The EVs are only good for multiple passengers, rainy or super-windy days (due to glass enclosure) or bulky cargo.

In most of the big cities, electric scooters dominate. Cars are fairly useless due to a frequent lack of parking and very bad traffic... what you get when millions of people buy cars and attempt to drive around a city with roads that were designed for foot traffic or horses. It's amazing how fast things are changing. Almost full-circle back to bicycles, which were the only option about 15 years back.

What the article refers to as golf cart technology has been around for decades. In the UK, for example, we used to have large numbers of electric milk floats delivering milk in most towns[0]. So I'm not clear on what the authors think has changed. Maybe its just a Tesla bashing headline to get more views. I clicked on it because I had earlier read about one of the Tesla co-founders new company targeting electric trucks given they are much bigger polluters[1], and wondered if there was some similar logic here.

[0] According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_truck "for most of the 20th century, the majority of the world's battery electric road vehicles were British milk floats"

[1] http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/01/31/tesla-cofounde...

Yeah, and the future of computing is tablets, not PCs.

As in the tablet-vs-PC case, most people aren't going to give up full-featuredness for a little temporary convenience. They want both, so if people buy golf carts it's to supplement and not replace full-sized vehicles.

We need to rethink the whole "car" concept we have today. Electrical carts certainly could be alternatives for many applications - but so would be plain (possibly electrical) bicycles. A key to Tesla's success so far was, that they did not try to push a different mobility model first, but tried to make an electrical car which fits best with the way we drive today. And there are already enough people around who find the Tesla a too big deviation from what they are accustomed.

I don't really see a big niche for these vehicles in the cities I've lived in. Most people would rather share a full-featured car than own one with severe limitations.

Parking is the biggest hassle with having a car in a dense city, and making the car electric doesn't solve that problem. Car sharing, on the other hand, can help a lot.

Maybe there could be a car sharing service that features this class of a vehicle, and is cheaper than Zipcar, etc.

The future of Tesla is batteries, not vehicles.

> "their only alternatives are mopeds, bicycles, public transit or walking, all of which are clearly inferior"

I stopped there. I have trouble imagining in what sort of mind a slow moving EV could be thought better than bicycles or walking.