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“The Tesla Model S is our top-scoring car”

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Re: “The Tesla Model S is our top-scoring car”

#231

Post by CamperBob2 »

jfb wrote: post #123
freyr wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong. By that logic, you wouldn't have considered cell phones as disruptive because they initially cost around $9,000 (inflation adjusted). The same for PCs, and pretty much any disruptive technology. That's one of the central points in the aforementioned book Innovator's Dilemma. Disruptive technologies often start out as expensive products that only attract a small segment of early adopters. This leads established…

Yeah, the $100k is a red herring. The issue is not how much it costs, but what it does, and I don't see the Model S as doing anything that incumbents already don't.

Yeah, the $100k is a red herring. The issue is not how much it costs, but what it does, and I don't see the Model S as doing anything that incumbents already don't.

You don't skate toward the puck, you skate where the puck is going. This kind of thinking is why, for example, Toyota was able to build the Prius and GM wasn't.

Japanese manufacturers started earlier, building up the necessary experience, technology, and culture at a time when nobody could sell hybrids without heavy subsidies. They took losses for years, learned the hard lessons early, and kept the disasters small. Then, when the market was finally ready, they were, too.

That's what Tesla is doing... but despite countless historical examples of market disruption, the incumbents will react with great surprise when they get their asses kicked. Today the car costs $100K. Tomorrow they will know how to build one that costs $10K.

Re: “The Tesla Model S is our top-scoring car”

#232

Post by ChuckMcM »

bane wrote: post #8

There's something that's been bothering me about this whole thing. Not the Tesla, but the rest of the market. Is that it? Is it that easy? A guy who made his money selling a phonebook and then an online payment processor can read a few books, hire a few people out of the same industry he's disrupting and build a goddamn amazing car (electric or not)? Why can't the existing industry do this? Why all the mediocre produ…

Why can't the existing industry do this?

It's pretty classic "innovator's dilemma" material but a more interesting comparison here is Fisker (probably going out of business) vs Tesla (currently making a small bit of money).

Fisker did exactly what you suggest, they took a bunch of 'off the shelf' components and bolted them together into a nicely shaped car body. They 'designed' an electric car where "car" was the most significant bit and "electric" was the least significant bit. Since existing off the shelf electric gear couldn't get the range they wanted they added a gas powered generator.

Tesla (and I put all of this on Elon) appear to have ripped up history and started from how do we build something you can drive around based on electricity. They seem to have started with what properties do the batteries have to have, what capacity, what weight does that impose etc. They took that very expensive engineering and thinking about power trains and then slapped a Lotus brand body on it to appeal to the elite geek crowd. And they instrumented the hell out of it.

Then they took all of that knowledge and said, ok, given what we know about how this stuff worked, what did and didn't work? Now lets incorporate that into what comes next.

I found that engineering focused direction very appealing, work from zero, develop an expertise, test that understanding, iterate and improve. Now at rev 2.0 they have a much better product than rev 1.0. Their X series should be really something to behold.

Elon also bet big on being able to create an electric drive train with range. Had he started a couple of years earlier he might have missed out by building with Nickel based batteries rather than Lithium based ones. So there is a timing component as well. The larger companies have all put their toes into the water (the EV-1 for example) but hadn't yet committed to jumping. They don't have to commit since they have a working business, building the equivalent to the Roadster or the Model S would have been merely incremental to their business rather than whether they lived or died. So I expect they were waiting for a bit more clarity on this stuff. They always have the option of buying Tesla later and they take no risk in the meantime. Clearly that was on Toyota's mind when they invested.

You can see the same forces at work in SpaceX so it suggests to me it's a management style that Elon expresses.

Re: “The Tesla Model S is our top-scoring car”

#233

Post by khuey »

pbreit wrote: post #199
khuey wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Virgin America is certainly not having great success.

Here's but one data point, albeit, a big one: Airline Quality Rating, the premier statistical study of major airline performance in the United States, ranked it #1 in 2012.

And yet Virgin America still can't turn a profit.

Southwest was incredibly successful and disruptive to the airline industry (to the point where today's legacy carriers look much more like Southwest than like the flagship carriers of the 70s and 80s). Virgin America has yet to do anything that significant, and there's a good chance it never will.

Re: “The Tesla Model S is our top-scoring car”

#234

Post by dalke »

ericd wrote: post #227
dalke wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that case, the Apple Store significantly disrupted the archaic music and retail software product sales model.

They don't sell music and they don't sell much software... Do you mean iTunes and the Apple App store? In that case, yes, it really did.

Sorry, not much of a purchaser using Apple's services. To me the store to buy hardware, the store to by music, and the store to buy apps have the same password and are from the same company, so I think of them as the same.

Re: “The Tesla Model S is our top-scoring car”

#235

Post by bch »

calinet6 wrote: post #210
rsync wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You're only focusing on the "electric car" part. By all accounts, the rest of the car is an amazing package, even without the electric motor. I think the question is why was Tesla able to push the Model S so far ahead of the current industry in those other respects?" This cannot be overstated. I don't like a lot of the Tesla S design - both interior and exterior. Further, my use case(s) don't necessarily lend themse…

It's worth nothing that the only reason they're able to add that feature is because they don't need space for a gas engine and the associated tanks and parts.

I joke about this to myself, but my 1972 VW Type 3 (eg: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1966_Volkswagen_1600_Squar...) actually has a lot of similarities with the Tesla;

  1) [X] no radiator
  2) [X] grill-less front end (see also (1))
  3) [X] smooth underbody
  4) [X] "frunk" (front trunk)
  5) [X] storage in rear, in addition to frunk.
I guess the point is, in some ways, we've been "living in the future" for a long time; it's just that we haven't been marketed-to enough to realize it. Tesla is interesting to me, and I'm not trying to diminish what they've accomplished, but at least some of the little things that "fell out" of the design that people seem to impressed by are 50 years old.

It's just interesting, that's all.

======

Interesting fact: 1968 VW Type 3 is the first volume produced auto to ship electronic fuel injection. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_air-cooled_engine#Ty...)

Re: “The Tesla Model S is our top-scoring car”

#236

Post by akandiah »

cbr wrote: post #122
obviouslygreen wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Cool," perhaps, but not even vaguely innovative. It doesn't change any business models, it doesn't bypass anything or make any real changes , it's just a big iPhone (or, really, an iPod Touch). It hasn't "changed the computing industry." It's introduced a new line of the same products we had before. "Let's make a bigger one" was a really great idea, but it's not really in the same league.

The Model S is "Cool", perhaps, but not even vaguely innovative. It doesn't change any business models, it doesn't bypass anything or make any real changes , it's just a new kind of car that doesn't use gas (really, a big golf cart). It won't "change the automotive industry." It's introducing a new line of the same products we had before. With the Model S you still have roads, parking, large upfront costs, a driver,…

It's a bit worrying that some people can't seem to see through what you've written.

Re: “The Tesla Model S is our top-scoring car”

#237

Post by lh7777 »

dublinben wrote: post #153
lh7777 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much exactly what I was thinking. The points about charging apply to any electric vehicle, though, and that's where I have trouble seeing electric cars really taking off. The Tesla approach seems great if your only use case is up to 100 mile drives from home to somewhere else and back again the same day to a home where you can easily plug the car in (essentially the typical car commuter). That's got to be a re…

>That's got to be a reasonable market now According to NHTS data, the mean Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) per day for Americans is 33 miles. The median is 22 miles. With numbers this low, and steadily decreasing, electric vehicles are viable for nearly all drivers. When small electric cars are comparable priced (taking into account lower cost of ownership) to their gas-burning competitors, things will really start to c…

> With numbers this low, and steadily decreasing, electric vehicles are viable for nearly all drivers.

I guess I should go look at the actual NHTS data, but mean and median might not actually support this assertion. They're way too generalized. As an example: over the past few years, I've driven 4000-5000 miles per year. You could express that as 11-14 miles per day, but that's pretty misleading. I might only drive 40 or 50 days a year, so in reality I'm driving an average of 80-125 miles per day. Not a good fit at all for today's electrics.

Re: “The Tesla Model S is our top-scoring car”

#238

Post by aetherson »

MSM wrote: post #218
aetherson wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Natural gas is invisible. Guess what isn't?

They're both invisible to a blind person.

So are knives, a clearly dangerous object! Knives should be regulated to emit constant noise.

No, seriously, I think you do the blind a disservice. I don't think that blind people rely on, "Hey, did I hear something" to mean, "I can blithely cross the street without danger."

Re: “The Tesla Model S is our top-scoring car”

#239

Post by lttlrck »

enraged_camel wrote: post #186
jfb wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might be underestimating the technological sophistication of a twin-turbo V8 that develops 550bhp at 7000rpm, in a cabin so quiet that they have to pipe artificial engine noise in -- but set that aside. The Model S doesn't do anything that an M5 can't, save charge from the mains. That's not insignificant, by any stretch, but it also seems to me less like a different class of thing than a serious, big-time…

I'm not underestimating the technology used in the M5. If anything, though, the M5's technology is the one that I would describe as "incremental." They took an internal combustion engine, the mechanics of which have been well-understood for over a century now, and improved it incrementally until it became a twin-turbo V8 that has a ton of horsepower. Contrast that to the Tesla, which has been engineered from the grou…

Batteries and electric motors predate ICE. How is the Tesla not incremental?

Re: “The Tesla Model S is our top-scoring car”

#240

Post by aetherson »

redacted wrote: post #224
aetherson wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Natural gas is invisible. Guess what isn't?

In Dublin, the operators of our light tram system (the Luas) were forced to add bells after several collisions and near misses with drivers and pedestrians. Cars are smaller than trains.

Here in the SF Bay Area, we routinely have collisions between our (loud, and belled) train and drivers and pedestrians. It turns out, sometimes people run into trains. Even noisy ones.
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