Is there really any reason to buy a Tesla if you want an EV other than as a status symbol? I bought a lightly used Chevy Bolt which, after rebates cost me $8000. Its range is around 230 miles. Why are people paying $40k for cars?
How did you get a Bolt for only $8k? What rebates are offered by whom on used cars?! When did they start doing that?
And as always, the number one reason to buy a Tesla is "best charging infra available". That's it. You still can't drive a non-Tesla across the country reliably. The other charging networks are in a terrible state of disrepair (far worse than Teslas!) and have significantly fewer locations which makes long distance travel in an EV impractical.
Americans don't need every car they own to be able to drive across the country, but they certainly want to. It's hard to get that out of people's heads.
That supercharger dominance is much less so in Europe. I'd even say, completely nonexistent. Therefore, much more even competition. And Tesla's competition at similar prices is just getting started - to me it seems that the technological gap (if there ever was such a thing) has been completely levelled, and the cars from all other factories are iterating faster and more efficiently. Turns out that if the big car companies really go for it, their ability to build good EVs isn't systematically worse than Tesla's. Not that any sane person ever really thought that, other than hype believers.
I'm in California. There's a $4k rebate from PG&E (electric utility) and a $4k rebate from the federal government if you buy a used electric car. It's income dependent too. The car itself cost $16k including taxes and registration fees. So, $8k after everything.
I can confirm the charging aspect. I've had a leaf since 2018 and we have a chademo fast charger, which only 1/10 stations have. It can be all but impossible to find a working, not in use chademo charger. I love, love the car, but can't recommend a leaf to anyone because of this problem. The only place chademo is even supported at this point is Japan.
In Europe, Tesla uses the CCS2 standard (like everyone else except the Leaf), and Tesla's network is just one of many. It doesn't have a significant advantage. European Teslas even suggest 3rd party chargers in the built-in nav.
In some places it may even be better to buy an 800V EV, and use the faster Ionity and Fastned networks.
In America, 100 years is a long time. In Europe, 100 miles is a long distance. Americans will very often take 500-mile drives, at least often enough to make it worth buying a car that can support it.
Why are people "always" comparing used things to new things -- of different feature and performance tiers, no less -- as if they're somehow NOT comparing apples to oranges?
"I bought a gently-used 29er for $300. Why are people paying $8k for cars?"
IMHO the reason for buying a Tesla, Beyond its utility, is to have a cultural piece. It’s the first electric car that was just about right.
You own piece of history and make a statement. These days though, that statement may mot be perceived as very positive if you’re not into chemtrails or something.
> Is there really any reason to buy a Tesla if you want an EV other than as a status symbol?
In most head-to-head comparisons between like models: Goes farther. Goes much faster. Holds more stuff. Seats more people. Charges at more spots. Vastly better charging experience ("plug in and walk away"). Vastly better infotainment system. Vastly better autopilot experience vs. mere "cruise control and lane keeping". New car prices are often cheaper, even.
Your Bolt may be a very useful vehicle but you're not going to road trip around the mountain west in it (though to be fair the linked article is about Europe). It'd be hard pressed just to take you skiing.
People who live in Tahoe would love to have a word with you about how terrible the typical Tesla driver is during ski season, but ok. For snow driving, you're going to want something more practical, and snow tires.
Stop it, it takes me into the cascades regularly. An AWD EV with 3MPSF tires is the best snow vehicle I've ever driven. Why do people do this? That's just trivially falsifiable.
The force (weight of a car in this case) and the material of the contact surfaces are the biggest (theoretically the only) factors affecting the friction. But the members of the US Summer Tire Club don’t get that.
You’re right, kind of. I got snow tires for my model Y and it has been great for ski trips or even down the hill during the rare PNW snow.
A Tesla with summer (maybe even all season) tires, its monstrous torque, and regenerative braking, is definitely not a good winter car for the uninitiated.
I don't think there's an offering from either vendor that wins any one of the criteria above, actually? Is there a specific model you're thinking of that e.g. beats the Model Y on more than one (or two-if-you-grant-a-subjective-call, maybe).
I don't own a Tesla, but that would be my choice if not for Musk's strange antics lately. As an apartment dweller who frequently goes on road trips, the ability to fast-charge on the road is important. I've rented EVs in the past and the third-party charger networks are TERRIBLE, even when they're available and working (which they often aren't).
My next car will probably be a plug-in hybrid for that reason. As much as I love EVs, the chargers are just... really, really bad. Unless you have a L2 at home or work (I have neither), that becomes a problem.
Model 3 and Y are best in class cars/EVs from a price, performance and feature perspective. Comparing to a used Chevy Bolt isn't going to be very meaningful against any new car.
There's an efficiency rating for EVs, basically best bang for buck per kWh. Tesla has ranked in the top consistently, thus saving you some more money on electric bill.
When I was shopping around for EVs at the time the Bolt was actually more efficient miles/kwh than a Tesla. Factoring that into the total cost of ownership further widened the price between them.
Cars are some of the most feature segmented products available. I don't believe that you have no understanding of the different features of cars outside of ability to drive.
They're like uber expensive phones, whatever you buy will be a piece of shit in 10 years anyways, why would you spend 50k on a piece of shit when you can buy another one for 5k
I recently rented a modern car and god damn besides being able to control the back windows from the front seat it was all gimmick tier gadgets
The #2 most sold car in europe is a shit box called Dacia Sandero, it's a cheap renault built in Romania using renault tech from 10 years ago and barely able to break 0-60 in like 15 seconds
It depends on whether you need these features, and this performance.
An M2 MBP may have best in class features and performance, but an RPi 3 may be sufficient for a particular computing task, even if it's way less advanced.
I don't understand the value of the charging network. Who drives 400 miles in a day? It's much more efficient to either have access to a gasoline car when that's necessary or just rent one for $50 a day.
I took my cybertruck on a beautiful road trip through eastern Washington just this past week. I needed nearly all of its advertised 320 mile range because charger coverage is sparse. Sure I may only make trips like that a few times a year but I’m sure glad for the range when I do. After owning EVs for a few years, I find it obnoxious to have to do constant trips to a gas station and expensive maintenance.
> Car manufacturers don’t really care what used buyers like you want. They don’t make money from a used sale.
That's not true. Someone buying a new cars pays attention to resale value, so car manufacturers want the resale value to be as high as possible to encourage someone to buy a new one.
My Model 3 got totaled in a crash last year. I did debate whether I should give Elon Musk more money, so I looked at what the competition was offering.
Competing cars were often more expensive for worse specs, did not have access to Superchargers and made decisions that were less efficient (for example, most did not have heat pumps and had weak regenerative braking so as not to be too “weird” for gas car users).
Had the exact same experience. One of the car dealerships told me that I still have to get a 6 month "service" where they move around battery packs (why?). And secondly, I remembered how I hated talking to car salesmen.
Much of the growth seems to be driven numerically speaking by the Spanish and German markets.
In Spain, that growth seems to be mostly caused by Tesla [0]. MG and Volvo XC30 (Geely) make a showing, but the Model Y sold more in a month than both combined.
Germany's seems to be driven by Mercedes-Benz and BMW [1]
It seems more like the Tesla is less popular in Germany than it used to be previously, but I'm reading mixed information that Germany has also phased out environmental bonuses [2] (German penny wise pound foolish thinking strikes again).
It seems the biggest hit to Tesla is France, where French companies like Puegot (Stellaris) and Renault have outcompeted the Tesla. Surprised by Renault because they are also a prominent EV seller in the Indian market.
As far as I know, there is no self-driving in Europe at all. No Tesla, no Waymo, no nothing.
Will Europe fall behind with self-driving like it did with the internet?
There are a similar number of cars on the road in Europe and the US. About 250 million. I wonder how much they are driven? Maybe one hour per day? That would be 250M*365 = 91B man hours per year. If we value an hour at $20, that is $1.8T per year which can be automated. That is about 10% of the European GDP. Plus many other benefits of self-driving cars, like more public space because fewer cars are needed, and they can park outside the center.
Europeans have already solved this problem without need for non-existent technology. It's called public transportation. That's why Americans spend 101 minutes per day driving on average while Germans spend 36.
Imagine how much more GDP the US would have had if they had done that...
edit: Of course, Europeans also use that extra time to enjoy life versus driving GDP that due to increasing wealth inequality won't benefit them in any tangible way.
There are 250M cars on the road in Europe. Clogging up public space and requiring human labor to be driven around. There are cars everywhere in Germany.
A self-driving car can take you exactly from where you are to where you want to go. Right now.
Public transport requires you to walk to an entry point, wait and then walk to your destination.
Self-driving cars will make things way more efficient. Similar how TCP/IP packets are more efficient than TV broadcasts, which required you to plan when to watch what and then wait for it.
So if you propose that Europe should try to achieve efficiency via more public transport, I think that is a losing battle. Electric self-driving cars are the future.
- A train will take you right into the city center, sometimes even where cars are not allowed. OTOH entering the city from suburbia can take an hour of being stuck in traffic.
- metro and trams can skip traffic. Bus lanes are common. There are no "stroads". Average car speed in London is 12mph. That's slower than a bike.
- Finding a parking place can easily take longer than waiting for public transport, and it will probably be an underground garage, far away from your destination. Bus stops are much denser than parking garages, so they usually involve less walking.
The US experience of driving on an 8-lane highway and arriving at a mandatory-parking-quota asphalt desert in front of your destination is rare in Europe. The closest we get is a 3-lane motorway to an IKEA on the city outskirts.
So basically make the urban environment a sea of constant fast driving cars filling all available space. There's a reason a lot of cities are converting roads and urban centers into non-car area. Parking and car lanes replaced with bike paths and green areas. It's a much better quality of life. Which, oddly, some people prefer to a 1800s style corporate dystopia where most people's miserable lives are nothing but a means to drive ever more wealth to an elite minority.
> Self-driving cars will make things way more efficient.
Road capacity has a physical limit. Unlike data you cannot convert cars into light of various wavelengths to pack more into the same physical space. Well you can but that's called public transit. In other words, public transportation has a higher capacity per road/rail area than cars ever will. We don't live in the metaverse after all.
As a result more people using cars (self-driving or not) means you hit the road capacity much more often. That means more congestion and longer trips. Any efficiency you gain by going point-to-point is utterly lost in the increased congestion and traffic.
As the other person noted, European cities are much denser and have significantly less road area than US cities. Thus more cars means significantly less efficiency as you spend more time in traffic.
So what do you expect? That cars will continue to be manually operated and that the number of cars on the road will go down due to better public transport?
That's an odd straw man. I'd appreciate you not put words in my mouth. You're claiming that self-driving cars are better than public transit and will replace public transit in Europe (assuming they were available). I'm merely saying they won't because that is an inferior solution. I said nothing about manual cars or the shift of manual to self-driving for the segment that does drive cars.
How exactly will it reduce congestion? The cars are the same size. The trips are the same and are likely to go up in frequency with self-driving. The roads are the same as before. If anything you will have a ton more congestion. The vast majority of congestion is due to not enough capacity and too much demand. Right now that is caped due to the time you waste driving but if it's self-driving then the sky is the limit.
Public transportation increases the potential commuter density per area of road/rail while self-driving doesn't.
I think self driving and public transport are actually complimentary. The principal benefits of owning your own automobile are convenience, as it’s always available for your use, and range— it will go wherever you want. Enabling vast fleets of on demand taxis is already well underway, making owning your own vehicle less attractive. The next step imho is bundling rides together, making NOT owning your car cheaper still. For urban cores, I would expect shared self driving to crowd out private cars pretty quickly.
I will always argue that self-driving will increase congestions. There are so many behaviours that are on individual level superior, but on large scale worse. Send car to park somewhere cheaper doubling the number of trips. Have it circle around waiting to pick you up... And as felt cost of just sitting in car goes down, time spend in car can go up.
It will probably nearly eliminate individual car ownership which will free up a ton of real estate currently used for parking. Which will probably reduce congestion inside the cities. It may also reduce highway congestion because we can engineer it such that it knows how drive unlike most people on the roads today
I have seen nothing that indicates that Mercedes stands a chance to catch up with Tesla.
All I have seen Mercedes do could have been accomplished by manual programming. But manual programming does not scale. Look at the progress Tesla made from FSD 11 to FSD 12. Nothing indicates that Mercedes is capable of this type of progress.
I believe Mercedes takes full responsibility for its self driving cars while Tesla will still disengage autopilot like 1 second before impact and claim it's the drivers fault? Essentially, drivers legally have to be on full alert at all times in a Tesla while they can kick back and watch a movie during the ride in a Mercedes.
Right, even when FSD plows right into a solid object Tesla will try to pin 100% of the blame on the human driver. On top of all of the other reasons to not take Tesla's marketing BS seriously, their total lack of ownership of their own autonomous system should prevent anyone from taking their claims seriously.
That and the fact that Elon has spent the last decade saying they're 6-12 months from actual full self driving.
Yes, now it will no longer kill 40% of school children crossing the road, but only 39%.
LOOK AT THE PROGRESS!!!1
And with FSD 34 it will be able to take the easiest highway exit ramp there is on this planet, Mountain View on HWY101, without killing you.
And what does "manual programming" even mean? Do you REALLY believe the xbox360-grade hardware in the tesla is doing AI inferencing? It's not. It's a heuristic.
They are doing inferencing on the vehicle for lane keeping, traffic sign detection, emergency braking, etc.
The biggest problem is really how do you get to 10^n miles per disengagement, for n>=5. Waymo is kinda getting there, Tesla isn't anywhere near that today.
Getting there is really hard, because that's when you get all of the long tail events like bears, moose, wild turkeys, horse mounted police officers, costume conventions, pickup trucks carrying traffic cones and road signs, flooded streets, construction pilot cars, vehicles driving the wrong way on the highway, downed electric poles, NYC steam plumes, and tons of other scenarios. Highway driving in nice and sunny conditions is easy compared to that.
I am not sure how much really is done via inferencing, if at all. Just the way how "Tesla Vision" behaves in a parking garage does simply not look like what I would expect to come out of inferencing. It looks very, very, very much like a pretty bad heuristic. Just look what it makes out of blind spots, the parts the cameras can't see. There is absolutely nothing like "according to my model, there should be X on this spot". The same goes for their distancing sensing in these situations. "Oh, there is a pipe on that wall, which likely has difference distance to me than the wall. I might not wanna crash into that" is trivial on a level that nobody would even use that as a Captcha these days. A model that does not "know" what the third dimension is?
Do you know of any reverse engineering that proves that there really is running anything in regards of inferencing on the NPUs?
Also, just as you said - there are tons of corner cases in the real world, especially once you aren't on a 10-lane US highway which has been designed for monster trucks driven by 16 year olds (no offence) but one of the roundabouts of hell in Paris.
Where would the training data been coming from?
So, I have my doubts.
During summer, there is a red flower growing near the entrance of my parking garage. It constantly is seen as a red light, and the entrance of my garage is often mistaken for a huge truck suddenly magically appearing. Again: Nobody would use a Captcha these days: "Is this a red flower or a traffic light?".
Again, smells like heuristic. "Amount of red pixels in a certain form and spot".
Typically, inference in a machine learning context means feeding a model some input and looking at its output. I'm pretty sure that they are running some model on the vehicle that takes pixels as input and says this part of the image is a car/truck/traffic sign/lane line/etc. It might be misclassifying things (eg. the flower as a red light), but would still be running some kind of model.
As you point out though, the model only seems to do some simple object detection, but doesn't have much of an understanding of what it sees (eg. does it make sense that there would be a traffic light at this location). There are plenty of videos of it getting confused by all kinds of situations (eg this one from a few years ago https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-fsd-full-self-driving-... ).
Self-driving in Europe is more problematic in a couple of ways.
Firstly the road structure is very different to the US, streets are much narrower and less car-centric so models are harder to train; secondly regulating it is much harder because the EU is a collection of countries, which is very different to a collection of states.
Thirdly non-car alternatives like trains and ebikes are a lot more viable due to a higher population density, many big cities (such as Paris) are pushing for better cycling infrastructure rather than better layouts for cars.
> As far as I know, there is no self-driving in Europe at all.
Mercedes' "level 3" thing has been around for a couple of years in, at least, Germany. I'm not sure that there's all that much to "fall behind on", though.
> If we value an hour at $20, that is $1.8T per year which can be automated.
Can it, tho? Like, the last 10 years of promises about self-driving cars would indicate no, at least not any time soon.
But this feature simply does not exist. It's a myth spread by Tesla fan boys who do not want to admit they got screwed over.
To be clear: If I drive a very easy street through my town, which is near a school, my Tesla - just like EVERY Tesla - is able to detect about 90% of trash bins on the side of the road (impressive detection rate), but only about 60% of pupils crossing the road.
If I would use Tesla's "full self driving" feature, I would be on average killing about 20 school children EVERY SINGLE MORNING.
And yet billions of miles have been driven on FSD, there is no epidemic of mowing down school children, and Tesla is ranked as having the best automatic emergency braking in the industry ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2022/09/07/tesla-m... )
There is absolutely no actual data to verify this claim. How would you know how many "billions" of miles have been driven with "FSD"?
Tesla isn't publishing any data. They just have been caught actually hiding crash report data to the NHTSA.
"My" anecdotical data is simply watching the amount of trash bins vs kids vs other objects the Tesla I am driving is able to detect. But that is still better linking to an unrelated Forbes article talking about damage done to a car when crashing it into a wall, which does not have anything to do with "FSD" in any car.
It's not. Mercedes just follows the car in front and even that in very limited scenarios. It's just used as an anti-Tesla talking point on the internet, so lots of people believe what you said.
When I bought my model 3 three years ago, I was amongst the first to have a Tesla in my (small) city. I bought it because I wanted an EV, and Tesla was the only one you could actually buy instead of having to wait for your car being delivered months or years later.
Then, for a long time when I stopped at a Supercharger, every conversation went like this: "TeslateslateslateslaTesla!".
If I stop at a charger today, where both Teslas and other EVs are parking, you typically hear the Tesla people apologize in shame. "I bought it before Elon became crazy", "Yes, I have looked at the hyundai, too!" etc.
In the US I think it is very common these days to deal with very powerful people who are VERY crazy. So it has become normalized and no longer appears to be a concern.
I'm also part of a very big fan German Tesla online fan forum. Mentioning Elon is now banned there. And "In MY tesla the windscreen wipers really work now!" these days will get you a request for a video proof.
Over here, people have shame. They don't want that anyone associates them with a psychopath.
I still like my M3. Not because it does what was advertised (it does not), but because I like the nerd humor in it and the acceleration.
But: I have a M3 because I bought it before Elon turned bat shit crazy, so next car will be a Hyundai. There I don't know anything about the founder or CEO, and he probably will never push himself into my daily newsfeed, and I like that idea.
> In the US I think it is very common these days to deal with very powerful people who are VERY crazy. So it has become normalized and no longer appears to be a concern.
I think a lot of potential Tesla customers in the US have been put off by Musk's behavior. There are even bumper stickers for Tesla owners that say something to the effect of "I bought it before I knew he was crazy".
I don’t think it’s a shame thing. It’s just that some of us don’t care to partake in the American culture wars. Especially us Asians. We don’t tend to use Reddit or X or read that much Western news media, which relentlessly push the anti-Elon opinions. That’s why almost every Asian family I know drives an X or Y, and will continue doing so as long as the cars are still good.
They don't have to push "Anti-Elon" opinions. It's more than enough, FAR more than enough to simply quote what Elon is writing on "X" in verbatim.
But where I agree: Tesla's image and stock sure would be in better shape if nobody would publish what Elon says at all. But here is the problem: He bought a social media company due to his narcissism.
Again, I'm from Germany. Yes, it's relevant to the news here if the (ex) richest person on the planet is spewing conspiracy theories and bullshit that quite often in some form or another feels like praise for the Nazis, and support for the Neo-Nazis.
Those in my country who may actually like his positions typically are not able to afford a Tesla, so at least when it comes to Germany and a couple of our neighboring countries who also aren't exactly in the Hitler fan camp, all in all that's just not a very good marketing strategy when it comes to Europe.
This really doesn't get expressed enough IMHO: Musk is a liability to Tesla at this point, and obviously unfit to lead the company.
Of course if he gets fired and the drama/fanboyism stops, what's left is a car company that is losing market share, with shitty cars rapidly becoming obsolete compared to the competition. So I don't expect shareholders to act.
To cut them some slack: There are German car manufacturers who have the nerve to in 2024 release new models that do not even have a heat pump build in.
When it came to the actual EV technology, Tesla really had the lead. But they stopped innovating in this area, sadly. Now you are seeing the first 800V vehicles driving around, and suddenly charging at a Supercharger does no longer feel Super.
If they'd change direction and immediately focus on what they are good at, they might stand a chance. But thanks to Elon it's become a huge circus of one distraction after another.
In Europe for a complex set of reasons car manufacturers tend to put out SUV designs only, while most potential EV buyers want SMALL cars. The "model 2" (or whatever it would have been called) would have beat German car manufacturers here easily.
Cancelling this project and to instead launch the Cybertruck... lunacy.
> There are German car manufacturers who have the nerve to in 2024 release new models that do not even have a heat pump build in.
I mean, yeah, you can get a trim without a heat pump. And if you live somewhere with mild weather, then you should probably do that, as the heat pump's contribution to range will not be significant, and it's extra cost and maintenance vs resistive heating.
> In Europe for a complex set of reasons car manufacturers tend to put out SUV designs only
It’s interesting to see the interplay of cultures here. On the one hand you have the ultra conformist German (die welt says elon musk is bad now so you must apologise for driving his cars) and the ultra individualist American (musk).
"The carmaker registered just 13,951 vehicles in April, the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association said Wednesday, down 2.3% from a year ago and its worst tally since January 2023. Tesla’s result was an exception in an otherwise encouraging month for battery-electric vehicle sales, which rose 14% industrywide."
So Tesla is down 2.3% in Europe compared to 14% up industrywide.
The much more interesting comparison would be battery-electric vehicle sales in Europe in the same time frame for Tesla vs all other manufacturers. I'd be surprised if they did not both trend in the same direction.
One thing I'm surprised that no-one mentions is the fact that, at least in Europe, buyers aren't stupid. They hear the news coming out from China about 1000km range EVs at decent prices, and they're waiting for the improved battery tech which everyone knows is coming.
CATL and BYD are already shipping some cool battery tech right now, and it's only getting better.
I know I'm going to get kicked in the dirt here for saying it. But there is evidence.
Yes, the market for pure EV is saturated. It's saturated because appealing hybrid designs have emerged and solve all the problems the rest of the (price sensitive, non-luxury) market cares about, and they're near price parity with pure ICE as well: i.e. cheaper than available EVs (as opposed to whatever Chinese EVs you have in mind.)
Plug-in hybrids are a thing now, so if your commute is reasonable you can burn zero gas for most driving, and long drives work the same as ICE: fill up and go. The rest is academic for the mass market. A Prius Prime, for example, gets up to 70 km on a full charge, and charging requires only a common 120V/15A circuit (11h). Soccer mom hauls the neighborhood around town in an eight passenger Chrysler Pacifica, and the kids plug it in when they get home. Cold weather doesn't matter either: the ICE just kicks in earlier and solves that.
There is a EIA graph over here[1] that shows (right hand side) what I'm talking about. Sum the hybrid and plug-in hybrid lines and the drop in the EV line is explained. IBD writes on this further here[2].
I think a big problem with their business model of minimalism and putting everything into the software is that their new models aren’t particularly more compelling than their old ones.
Contrast that to what Hyundai/Kia does, they basically blast features at you and ensure that every one of their cars gives you more for your money than competitors.
Are you serious? In Norway maybe. EV has just started in most places. Most people still drive gasoline / hybrid cars. It's just that most car manufactures have EV cars right now and infrastructure is getting better for non-Tesla, so much better deals out there. Tesla doesn't even look good anymore compare to a lot of the new EVs our there from Rivian, Hyndai, Volvo, Honda, Lucid, etc. Tesla keep lowering prices cause they have no other choice.
I agree with the comment parent to yours that the market is saturated under the condition that the size and quality of the US charging network doesn’t increase greatly.
Only EV early adopters want to sit in Walmart parking lots for half an hour charging. The rest of us want to see mainstream truck stops have chargers that have us in and out in 15 minutes.
> Only EV early adopters want to sit in Walmart parking lots for half an hour charging.
You only need to do that on road trips, which aren't all that frequent for most people. It's not a reason to avoid buying an EV. At home, you just charge it overnight at your wall outlet. Yes, I know, not everyone has access to a wall outlet overnight, but lots of people do. EVs are ready for them right now.
Road trips are important. If it’s my only car it needs to be able to do them even if I’m only doing a few of them every year.
If you have a family with kids and your other family members are a few hundred miles away the range matters. Nobody’s going to buy four plane tickets and a rental car just to take a 400 mile trip.
That sort of trip in an EV is going to be two or three charging stops especially in winter temperatures adding up to close to an extra hour to the travel time.
In Europe a trip of that length can be done on a train or a dirt cheap flight and you might not need a car at your destination. Or it won’t happen at all because your family is likely to be physically closer in a smaller country where language and culture borders are closer in.
> That sort of trip in an EV is going to be two or three charging stops especially in winter temperatures adding up to close to an extra hour to the travel time.
Less than one hour of extra travel time, three times a year, doesn't strike me as a dealbreaker. You'll save more time than that every month by never going to a gas station.
It is not a good idea to buy a car in most European cities if you only use it for commuting. We have working public transportation for that.
So, you buy a car if you want road trips. There are exactly two fast charging networks in Europe: Tesla Superchargers and Ionity. The latter is two times more expensive (yes, you can use Superchargers with other car brands, but it costs more). Which is why I bought a Tesla, and from what I see here in Switzerland, many people share this reasoning.
Also, many people in Europe tend to live in _apartments_, where you can’t plug a car overnight. So, access to a fast charging network is essential. Once again, Tesla wins.
The thing to note about EVs is that car manufacturers fought tooth and nail to avoid having to sell them[0]. Ergo, for a while Tesla was the only option. Other car manufacturers were selling EVs either because Tesla successfully embarrassed them into looking old, or because California literally mandated they sell a certain number of EVs. Hell, for some car brands they were literally paying Tesla money because they didn't have a compliance car to sell.
And then Musk goes and completely trashes his own reputation. First by calling rescue divers in Thailand pedos, then by lying about FSD, wasting a bunch of money buying Twitter[1], and most crucially, surrounding himself with a bunch of far-right nutjobs. The thing is, the far-right doesn't buy EVs, they want cars that command respect by frightening everyone else. The kinds of people actually buying EVs live in or near a city, in suburban housing that can support a dedicated overnight charging circuit. Which makes them far more likely to be progressive or left-leaning.
In other words, Musk sunk his own company so he could go play Twitter culture warrior against his own customers. While not all of the culture war nonsense in the US transposes 1:1 to Europe, it's analogous enough that I suspect a lot of European Tesla buyers are feeling just as shy about their car purchase as American ones.
[0] My personal conspiracy theory was that they were too durable to sell. Everyone but Tesla sells through dealers - in some cases, they HAVE TO - and dealers only make money when you take the car in for service. And EVs simply have fewer things to break, so moving to EVs means less maintenance money.
The way Tesla gets around this is with parts pairing.
[1] It is always moral and ethical to deadname corporations.
> Countries including Germany and Sweden have ceased or dialed back EV subsidies in recent months, which has put a damper on Europe’s sales growth.
> Manufacturers including Volkswagen AG and Mercedes-Benz Group AG have meanwhile been rethinking product plans, with VW preparing more plug-in hybrids and Mercedes keeping combustion cars in production well into the 2030s.
Seems like max demand for EVs have been hit in Western Europe much like the US.
I'd be curious what is going on in the mind of an EV PM targeting the European market.
Edit: Was wrong. It grew 14% as bryanlarsen below mentioned
Much of the growth seems to be driven numerically speaking by the Spanish and German markets.
In Spain, that growth seems to be mostly caused by Tesla [0]. MG and Volvo XC30 (Geely) make a showing, but the Model Y sold more in a month than both combined.
A few years ago Teslas were common but pretty much the only electric cars you’d see on the Swedish roads.
And their build quality reputation wasn’t stellar.
Nowadays there are far more other brands of electric car on the roads. Kia are perhaps the most common, and not-previously-heard-of Chinese brands are starting to appear.
I think Elons own not-a-nice-person story also hurts Tesla.
Volvo too. I've been seeing the Volvo EX30 a lot recently, possibly because it offers 337 km of range and whatever people see in crossovers for 36 900€ whereas Tesla will charge you about 9100€ more for the cheapest Model Y. And if you go for the extended range model, you still get it for less than the Model Y, with like 20 km more to boot.
I suspect also a _lot_ of id.3s and 4s, and Hyundais. Anecdotally, in Dublin, when I see a newly-registered electric car these days (Irish number plates have the year of registration as part of the number), nine times out of 10 it's either a Hyundai/Kia, or some sort of VW.
That said, I think BYD was pretty late to get a right-hand drive model on the market, so they may be underrepresented here.
It seems like other manufacturers have caught up to Tesla. There’s a lot of choice in EVs in Europe and Tesla doesn’t really outshine them in any way I can see. And the Chinese cars have not really arrived yet which will be a huge change in price
Based on the numbers I found, it looks like the slowdown happened somewhat in Germany because EV bonuses have ended, so people are migrated towards cheaper Mercedes or BMW PHEVs versus how pricy a Tesla is in Germany.
> Seems like max demand for EVs have been hit in Western Europe much like the US.
* Based on current prices / range / charging infra rollout, etc. I think range has gotten to an acceptable place for most people's anxieties (still progress to make of course), price is coming down with the cars coming out in the next year or two but infra investment feels like it's dragging things down a bit. Particularly where I live in the north of the UK anyway.
The biggest problems for me (and I suspect a large number of people) are charging rate and battery endurance. On long drives, waiting 30 minutes at a supercharger is not my idea of fun. At the same time, losing battery capacity from parking in the cold or using the aforementioned supercharger will also make things bad. I live in the Northeast US, which has a very high density of EV chargers per unit area, so actual charger availability is pretty damn good.
In other words, I wouldn't put a lot of hopes on more infrastructure adding more adopters.
It's good to see that many manufacturers are reconsidering their views on plugin hybrids. There are tons of people who like the idea of EVS but who won't by them because they're not practical based on range limitations or charging infrastructure that isn't sufficient for their needs. PHEVs are ideal for a lot of these folks, and I think the industry realized they tried to "skip over" that option too quickly.
> There are tons of people who like the idea of EVS but who won't by them because they're not practical based on range limitations or charging infrastructure that isn't sufficient for their needs.
Anyone thinking like that is using outdated information. Current EVs have sufficient range for effectively all but the very most extreme use cases. Charging infrastructure could be better, and will rapidly become better, but it is sufficient now if you have access to a plug overnight and don't go on weekly long-distance road trips, which covers a lot of people.
> Anyone thinking like that is using outdated information.
No, it just means people have different personal situations. I have a friend who was excited to get an F-150 Lightning, and ended up selling it because it was not practical - he needed to take it places in rural areas where he lived where there wasn't sufficient charging infrastructure.
I'm a huge EV fan, but I hate it when people say that an EV won't work for them and the response from other people is essentially "you're holding it wrong". For a lot of folks, even if they only take a trip, say, every 3 months where an EV wouldn't be a good option, it still means they would never consider getting an EV. As for charging infrastructure getting better all the time, I agree, but that's not something I would factor into a buying decision today, especially if I travel places that would be in the "long tail" of getting sufficient charging stations.
The average commute in this country is ~40 miles which is easily covered with weekly charging on 60-70 mWh battery packs. A typical $30,000 EV (matching the average price of US ICE sedans and hatchbacks) with those sized batteries today gets 260 miles on a full charge or about 200 miles driving it down to 20%.
So half the country today could charge weekly or less and commute just fine with an EV that costs the same as an ICE, even if they live in apartments with no charging infrastructure, even if their town or city has little to no public charging infrastructure, and it's cheaper than ICE for most of them who have some access to cheap charging, like home charging or work charging.
That's the tipping point, half can have their needs met with today's tech at today's prices. Most others could get by but they might have some slightly higher burden in charge times or vehicle price, especially outliers with very long commutes to and from locations with no good infrastructure.
For example a truck driving construction contractor in a rural home commuting to a new subdivision under development also in a rural area but 65 miles away has a 130 mile daily commute and his truck has a 150 mile range from 80% to 20% so he has to charge daily, either at home, or at the construction site. Hopefully being rural he's in a house and not an apartment building so can charge overnight, but if he lives in a suburb that's pretty rural and has no charging at home, he's kinda screwed. Or, if he's gotta carry 20 bags of cement mix in the bed or tow a trailer, then he's gotta charge at home and maybe also at the construction site to even finish the commute. So, for some rural construction workers, EVs may not quite be the optimal solution (yet.)
But most people, yes, they're holding it wrong. They're holding their 20th century car notions in 2024, where we're now decade before ICE cars get phased out in the US and as we're on a clear trajectory toward enough range and infra for no one to care just like no one cares about ICE cars and the gas stations they visit weekly.
In my case, Tesla just don't make the car I want. If they made a hatchback variant of the Model 3 and gave it physical controls, I'd probably buy it. But I don't want a Model Y - it's ugly, I really don't want an SUV, and I'm not a fan of touchscreens in cars. But I've also heard from friends that they don't want to buy a car associated with Elon Musk, so perhaps that is also hurting their sales.
Entering a highly-politically-polarized market category, where one tribe sees "hating your product" as central to their personal identity, then loudly aligning with that tribe and going out of your way to antagonize the other one which actually likes what you make, is going to be taught in business schools for decades as a What Not to Do example. What an absolute fucking moron.
Scary headlines are misleading. Being first meant that Tesla captured nearly 100% of EV sales. Now that there are reasonable competitors in the mix, it's only natural that its sales volumes will regress to the mean over time.
This comment is the misleading one. This article isn't talking about marketshare, its talking about actual number of cars delivered. Registration of new Teslas were down 32% in one month. That's not losing marketshare, that's losing sales entirely.
The market value (stock price) assumes a lot more growth, so the idea that volumes are dropping is pretty bad if your wealth is based on that stock price.
Markets also aren't zero sum- if the overall volume of EVs keeps rising then competitors entering the market don't necessarily mean your volume drops, as they could be taking a slice of the increase in overall sales.
When Tesla shows triple digit growth in a market that didn't exist, that's genius. When competitors effectively start to eat up its lunch that's misleading, not newsworthy.
I also find the headline and tone very catchy, perhaps biased. But this company has been so over hyped, even Musk himself recognizes its market valuation is ridiculous and that he would advise holders to sell.
EV will continue to grow as a hyper competitive market, as Elon said there is Tesla and 9 other makers, all Chinese, in the top 10. I wish Tesla the best but century old car makers are also in the race and aren't just retarded business aristocrates employing sub-par engineers.
Tesla's figures may continue to show poor results, car makers opex are massive, we may not see Tesla deliver any vehicle ever again by 2025 end. Not a wish, but those figures are a disaster for a company that should rather see healthy spikes in the expanding European EV markets.
It is news worthy because TSLA’s current P/E is 45 even after the stock is down 28% YTD.
For comparison GM’s PE is 5 and Ford’s is 12.
So when the company, whose stock is so expensive compared to others in the industry, and is predicated on taking the world over with their cars, doesn’t grow as expected then yes it is indeed scary.
That's of little consolation to the people who bought Tesla stock when it was far more overvalued than the still grossly overvalued price that it has today. The quality of their products is bad. The quality of their leadership is even worse. People have taken notice and are voting with their wallets.
Even if I could buy a Tesla for $19K and it did 800 miles per charge, I wouldn't, because the control system alone is beyond terrible.
my comment has nothing to do with Tesla's overinflated stock price
I don't like Tesla's leadership (Elon) but I disagree that the product is bad; everyone I know who owns one (including myself), is happy with it, and it's still far more popular than other EVs. Not my favorite EV, but they got a lot of things right.
> That's of little consolation to the people who bought Tesla stock when it was far more overvalued than the still grossly overvalued price that it has today.
You make it sound like HN is a forum for Tesla shareholders. Or Tesla short sellers. If you think Tesla is overvalued then short it instead of adding contentless noise and rants.
Turning the question around, what are you talking about? Firstly, why did you choose an article from 1.5 years ago?
Secondly, if you scroll down, Tesla is #1 and #2 from January to October 2022. Chances are they were not delivering many vehicles in October 2022 due to the nature of the import cycle at the time, hence the numbers in the month of October-only were low.
