Tesla Passes Ford by Market Value

I find it shocking that something as simple as personal belongings would be a "lock in" to existing technology.

It's like saying "I prefer my horse, I can feed it grass off the side of the road, but you have to find some fancy petro-chemical station for your auto-mobile? Insane! My gas grows next to the road!"

I get it, but try to put yourself in the place of someone younger who doesn't make decisions like "I would never replace my car because I keep spare diapers there!"

>If "mobility" were so desirable, ZipCar would have taken off 10 years ago. The "mobility" market will be about the size of the taxi, bus, and train market.

This is very Bill Gates "no one would ever need more than ..." argument. Come on!!

ZipCar has literally nothing on the future of mobility.

You (and many people your age, conditioned from birth to place massive value on personal car ownership) may never move past that paradigm. You might go to your grave in 50 years a proud owner of a vehicle in an era where almost no one owns.

I think, instead of sagely predicting failure, maybe try creativity, use that entrepreneurial mindset to solve future challenges.

You want to keep spare diapers nearby? Why not have a secure storage module in the vehicle, lets say the trunk can be split into 2 or 4 secure storage modules.

You order an autonomous electric vehicle to your location, ETA 5 minutes. You hit the "bring my secure storage container to my location" option, restricting the available pool of cars to meet your need to those close to your container, at a small additional fee.

Boom, the "insolvable" problem of personal storage in a vehicle is solved by commoditizing the storage and use the AI vehicle to transport it where you need.

I'm sure you could come up with a better solution if you tried.

It's not a generic claim at all, and not surprising a town like Portland has a number of Teslas.

Tesla ships nowhere near as many cars as Ford. Doesn't matter what you may see locally or what "blends in", but there is nothing generic about the number of cars Tesla produces (which is very small compared to Ford, and other major Auto companies). Tesla has nowhere near the level of business as the other major auto companies.

As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, there is nothing generic about:

"Tesla sold 40,697 vehicles in the U.S. last year, according to researcher IHS Markit. Ford sells that many F-Series trucks in the U.S. about every three weeks"

Ford sells that many trucks every three weeks. Every three weeks, versus an entire year for Tesla.

Maybe the Model 3 will change that, but I do not have high hopes with how thinly spread Elon is.

Or they're counting on other people thinking the same thing and running off w/ their money at just the right time before the ship sinks.

> "Why hasn't Ford built the gigafactory"

Nissan "built the gigafactory" a decade ago and it didn't work out for them at all.

In 2007, Nissan and NEC entered into a joint venture just like Tesla/Panasonic's: they created AESC, Automotive Energy Supply Corporation, and built a $1.1 billion lithium ion battery factory near one of Nissan's manufacturing plants. Nissan committed to buying the plant's output for some years. These became the batteries and battery packs for the Nissan Leaf, of which they've sold more than 200,000 to date.

However, AESC eventually lagged at least a generation behind Panasonic (and now several others) in chemistry, process and price, which significantly worsened Nissan's position in the market. It took them some years to get out of that arrangement (relatively recently) so that they can buy batteries for the next-generation Leaf and other Nissan-Renault vehicles at less than 1/2 the price from other suppliers.

There's no guarantee that 10 years from now, we'll look back and say the Gigafactory was a wise investment for Tesla. They feared insufficient supply or being locked out of adequate supply for batteries, but now that everyone's seen the writing on the wall that EVs could become a big chunk of the new car market in the 2020s, it seems far less likely that battery supply will be a short-term issue.

Boston Power, BYD, Foxconn, SK Innovation, Samsung SDI, LG Chem, etc have built, broken ground or committed funds for over 150 GWh of annual vehicle battery production over the next 3-5 years. Tesla will not be the only major player in that market, and Panasonic is free to supply batteries to other car makers than Tesla from their other factories.

I get that that is the vision, and 10% of mobility or electricity would justify their valuation. I'm just not buying that they are going to achieve either. In fact, I'm of the opinion that they won't even exist as an independent company in five years time.