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

news.consumerreports.org

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

#241

Post by ericd »

threeseed wrote: post #208
acheron wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a con for the car, that's a con for living in a condo. The list of things that are impractical for someone living in a condo building could fill a warehouse.

No. That's a con for the car. As the population of the world increases housing density will also increase. Hence it is important that Tesla find a way to accommodate people like condos as well as people who rent.

As electric cars become more popular, it will become less of a special request and more of a foregone conclusion that parking will have electric charging capability. It's not terribly expensive to add, as long as the building's wiring is capable of serving it.

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

#242

Post by ericd »

masklinn wrote: post #101
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…

> There's a few Model S's in my area, and they're beautiful. They're also luxury (the base Model S is twice an Audi S4) and on limited runs (the yearly production of Tesla is the same as AMG . Not Mercedes, the subsidiary which takes standard Mercedes cars and refits them with custom hand-built engines ) I mean I could make the same complaint wondering why the rest of the industry can't be Ferrari (7000 cars/year[0])…

They're just ramping up mass manufacturing. They have an enormous factory, and they're currently occupying a small corner of it.

They're not hand-building the cars, so I wouldn't compare them to the small run hand-build manufacturers. They're building the company for scale. Hand-building is much easier to ramp up and change, but then you get no economies of scale.

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

#243

Post by bane »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #232
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 mos…

> Now at rev 2.0 they have a much better product than rev 1.0.

But really, what's amazing to me is that rev 2.0 is better than most cars on the road today which are at rev double digits, having developed in one of the more competitive markets in the world.

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

#245

Post by bdamm »

deelowe wrote: post #212
parfe wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People seem to really want the electric car to fail to the point of irrational investing. You don't short McDonald's because you dislike the Big Mac.

Investors don't work that way. They only care about making money(I know I don't care if tesla succeeds or not, but I'm certainly bearish on it). People are shorting it because it's an impractical car from an ROI perspective. Albeit a very sexy and cool one. Like others have said, you can get a BMW with more features and all the gas you want for less than a tesla(minus the wizbang PC interface) It's yet to be seen if…

The gasoline powered car was impractical once, before there were gasoline stations everywhere. That didn't stop the automobile revolution.

Electricity is everywhere. It just has to get into the car. This is not a hard problem to solve if people are willing to pay to get it. And the cost of electricity substantially favors this business model.

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

#246

Post by brianpan »

spodek wrote: post #7

I have learned cynicism and skepticism about a lot of media, but Consumer Reports remains one of the few sources -- the only one I can think of offhand -- that I trust without a second thought. I like their business plan and focus on doing what they do well. Their reviews mean something (even to someone like me who lives in Manhattan and doesn't drive).

Even their reviews of Apple products?

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/01/11/consumer-repo...

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

#247

Post by mrfairladyz »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #232
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 mos…

I think this is an underlying strength of Elon's success and the success of innovators in general (there were a few pages on this in Salman Khan's The One World Schoolhouse) -- starting from first principles. When you have an old model, it's come about due to whatever the situation in the industry was like at the time, and it's evolved due to past forces acting on the old model. To take a basic idea that seems figured out and "fine" (education, or a car) and get rid of any preexisting notions or ideas of how it should work, and start from first principles and think from the very start how it should be given modern advancements, is a difficult and powerful thing.

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

#248

Post by jpatokal »

orangethirty wrote: post #189
jquery wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like Optimus Prime farting. I think you're projecting your own emotional attachment to speed onto a very unpleasant sound.

Have you ever been to a Formula 1 race? Or even any auto race?

I lived a stone's throw from the Singapore GP for several years. The racket was godawful and basically made the neighborhood unlivable for the three days the circus lasted.

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

#249

Post by pkroll »

jchrisa wrote: post #169
cbr wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I'd rather have no cars than electric cars.

Alright someone cover me: I'm going in...

Why on earth would you say that?

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

#250

Post by justin66 »

codex wrote: post #13
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…

My theory: it all comes down to the maturation of the underlying technology. Tesla has been around for ten years. Why is their mainstream car only coming to market now, after all that time? Part of it is that creating a new car company takes a lot of time, but most of it is that the battery and other technologies have only recently matured enough to make EVs practical. Tesla has been waiting and waiting until this oc…

> Take out the $70M from selling ZEV credits and Tesla's gross margin is only 6%--much less than other luxury manufacturers.

Meh. If they avoid the volatility of other luxury manufacturers that's an accomplishment in and of itself and something that makes them an interesting investment, even if their margins aren't phenomenal.

Who owns Jaguar or Lotus right now? Or Aston Martin, or whoever? These aren't stable companies we're talking about.

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