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The Chevy Bolt Is the Ugly Car of the Near Future

bloomberg.com

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Re: The Chevy Bolt Is the Ugly Car of the Near Future

#51

Post by Thorncorona »

colechristensen wrote: post #36
pseudometa wrote: post #5

"Tesla loses money on every car too." This is false, Tesla averages $18,000 margin on every model S & model X it sells. "So how did GM pull off a $30,000 car with 200 miles of range?" It didn't. It is $30k only after $8000 of federal tax credits.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong. It seems like the battery packs on cars are engineered to manipulate people, and this would be an easy way of making two very different cars seem the same. Lithium batteries degrade. With heat, with time, with charge cycles. Article after article writes about how Tesla's battery packs barely degrade! 8% capacity loss over 100,000 miles. This has to be a lie. Unless they've come…

Keep in mind you wouldn't regularly fully discharge a car battery pack, however you would discharge a phone battery. Thus capacity reduction occurs at a slower rate than a laptop or phone.

Re: The Chevy Bolt Is the Ugly Car of the Near Future

#52

Post by ekzy »

forgetsusername wrote: post #33
pseudometa wrote: post #5

"Tesla loses money on every car too." This is false, Tesla averages $18,000 margin on every model S & model X it sells. "So how did GM pull off a $30,000 car with 200 miles of range?" It didn't. It is $30k only after $8000 of federal tax credits.

Tesla also includes the tax credit in their price. And at present they don't even have a car. Why are people so bitter that GM is competing? Is this not a good thing?

Even if we can now witness the benefits of competition in the short term (cheaper electric cars for us), it is not necessarily a good thing because it can force the company to be competitive to stay alive, instead of spending cash on R&D (innovation).

Re: The Chevy Bolt Is the Ugly Car of the Near Future

#53

Post by slg »

colechristensen wrote: post #36
pseudometa wrote: post #5

"Tesla loses money on every car too." This is false, Tesla averages $18,000 margin on every model S & model X it sells. "So how did GM pull off a $30,000 car with 200 miles of range?" It didn't. It is $30k only after $8000 of federal tax credits.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong. It seems like the battery packs on cars are engineered to manipulate people, and this would be an easy way of making two very different cars seem the same. Lithium batteries degrade. With heat, with time, with charge cycles. Article after article writes about how Tesla's battery packs barely degrade! 8% capacity loss over 100,000 miles. This has to be a lie. Unless they've come…

Shouldn't this be an easy think to prove/disprove by just measuring the electricity used to charge the car over time? If my car required 15-20% more gas each year, it would be pretty obvious by simply keeping an eye on the amount of money I spend on gas.

Re: The Chevy Bolt Is the Ugly Car of the Near Future

#55

Post by BenoitEssiambre »

RKoutnik wrote: post #19

This article (like many) misses why people buy Teslas. Teslas are amazing cars that just happen to be electric - not the other way around. The large car companies think that "electric" is enough to sell a car, whereas Tesla knows they need luxury options, autopilot & the supercharger network. I've got a Model 3 reservation myself and wouldn't even think of switching to the Bolt. I want a nice car, not just an electri…

I think Tesla's underappreciated marketing technique is the fact that they make buyers feel like they are not just buying a car but they are part of an historically unprecedented epic effort to use bleeding edge tech to save humanity from global warming, dirty fossil fuels and even from being stuck on earth.

It's not clear to me if the humanity saving efforts are 100% genuine on Musk's part or if part of them are intentionally conceived as marketing but it works either way.

Re: The Chevy Bolt Is the Ugly Car of the Near Future

#56

Post by colechristensen »

slededit wrote: post #43
colechristensen wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong. It seems like the battery packs on cars are engineered to manipulate people, and this would be an easy way of making two very different cars seem the same. Lithium batteries degrade. With heat, with time, with charge cycles. Article after article writes about how Tesla's battery packs barely degrade! 8% capacity loss over 100,000 miles. This has to be a lie. Unless they've come…

SSDs do this exact same thing. The individual flash cells have much lower durability than the drive itself.

Hard disks do too but the difference is that for disks it's more or less an essential function.

If you don't leave plenty of spare sectors over the very inevitable bad sectors will cause the drive to fail outright.

Perhaps that's a decision I'd like to make myself but it's still an essential function no matter what.

Leaving spare capacity in my battery isn't an essential function. That extra hundred or two miles the first few years of ownership has value and if I use it right away I don't lose anything (except marginally faster wear on the battery pack)

The disk issue is about essential function. If I left no spare room the disk would have unrecoverable failures in days or weeks.

The battery issue is only about perception. If I left no spare battery charge the battery would function exactly the same. It's life would only be reduced in that I'd be using it more (this is assuming that my above theory is correct)

Re: The Chevy Bolt Is the Ugly Car of the Near Future

#57

Post by [deleted] »

colechristensen wrote: post #36
pseudometa wrote: post #5

"Tesla loses money on every car too." This is false, Tesla averages $18,000 margin on every model S & model X it sells. "So how did GM pull off a $30,000 car with 200 miles of range?" It didn't. It is $30k only after $8000 of federal tax credits.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong. It seems like the battery packs on cars are engineered to manipulate people, and this would be an easy way of making two very different cars seem the same. Lithium batteries degrade. With heat, with time, with charge cycles. Article after article writes about how Tesla's battery packs barely degrade! 8% capacity loss over 100,000 miles. This has to be a lie. Unless they've come…

[deleted]

Re: The Chevy Bolt Is the Ugly Car of the Near Future

#58

Post by untog »

RKoutnik wrote: post #50
untog wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't doubt you're correct in summarising why many current Tesla owners buy Tesla cars. But if they want to be hugely, mass market successful they need to expand their client base beyond customers who "need" luxury options in a car. It's Tesla that would need to match GM's market proposition, not vice versa. > I want a nice car, not just an electric one, and Tesla's got that in spades. And I suspect many Bolt owner…

> And I suspect many Bolt owners want an economical car, not a luxury one, and the Bolt's got that in spades. See my other reply in this subthread - Bolt/Model 3 will be equivalent in terms of price, so I don't see how the Bolt is more "economical".

Certainly possible, but the Model 3 isn't available yet and (according to link in the article) is predicted by some to not be available until 2018. So it's difficult to compare the buying choices for customers when one car can be bought and the other cannot.

Re: The Chevy Bolt Is the Ugly Car of the Near Future

#59

Post by sidlls »

RKoutnik wrote: post #49
dirkg wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want a nice car Translation: I can afford a luxury car, Tesla is one of the nicer luxury cars and happens to be electric.

The Model 3 starts at $35k, the Bolt at $37.5k. If you're in the market for the Bolt post-Model 3 launch, then there's not much difference in price - why not go for the classier car?

You're conflating price exclusivity with classiness.

Re: The Chevy Bolt Is the Ugly Car of the Near Future

#60

Post by elsonrodriguez »

photogrammetry wrote: post #30
codeulike wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Nissan Leaf looks about the same as other Nissan cars - check out the Note or Juke. And I think the Bolt looks fine. You just have a weird fear of hatchbacks in the USA.

The LEAF looks way better than the Juke.

I think the Juke was invented to fill the void the Aztek left.
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