Tesla and Uber Unlikely to Survive...
Discussion
Record losses and struggling to expand model 3 production: https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/20...
If my experience of buying a new Model X is anything to go by, Tesla is doomed. They couldn’t organise a panic in a doomed submarine.
Unremitting clusterf
ks from start to finish. Rudeness, unreasonableness, zero attention to detail where it mattered.
The single worst car buying experience I’ve had in 30 years.
Right now, they are protected by a $50bn market cap. They can fund the current Model 3 to production. But if it is of the standard of the car given to me, they won’t sell many.
Unremitting clusterf
ks from start to finish. Rudeness, unreasonableness, zero attention to detail where it mattered. The single worst car buying experience I’ve had in 30 years.
Right now, they are protected by a $50bn market cap. They can fund the current Model 3 to production. But if it is of the standard of the car given to me, they won’t sell many.
AstonZagato said:
If my experience of buying a new Model X is anything to go by, Tesla is doomed. They couldn’t organise a panic in a doomed submarine.
Unremitting clusterfks from start to finish. Rudeness, unreasonableness, zero attention to detail where it mattered.
The single worst car buying experience I’ve had in 30 years.
Right now, they are protected by a $50bn market cap. They can fund the current Model 3 to production. But if it is of the standard of the car given to me, they won’t sell many.
I suggest you donate the tesla to me. that will show them! with the added bonus of forcing me into the misery that you have just avoided! Unremitting clusterf
ks from start to finish. Rudeness, unreasonableness, zero attention to detail where it mattered. The single worst car buying experience I’ve had in 30 years.
Right now, they are protected by a $50bn market cap. They can fund the current Model 3 to production. But if it is of the standard of the car given to me, they won’t sell many.
win win! :lol:
Yipper said:
Yes, this is the crux of the Economist article.
Tesla, Uber and similar others are just charismatic salespeople selling a distant vision while burning other people's money.
At the end of the day, Tesla is just a rebadged Merc or Lotus, while racking up billions in debt.
This is just an utterly nonsensical statement. There's some Mercedes switchgear in their cars, and they buy parts from tier 1 suppliers like Bosch, but to suggest the Model S is a rebadged Merc is ridiculous. The engineering that went into the powertrain and software is extremely impressive. Tesla, Uber and similar others are just charismatic salespeople selling a distant vision while burning other people's money.
At the end of the day, Tesla is just a rebadged Merc or Lotus, while racking up billions in debt.
I'm hardly Tesla's biggest cheerleader and while I'm not quite as pessimistic as the FT I do think they're going to be in big trouble once the other OEMs get their acts together. The Model 3 is proving that mass producing cars is really quite hard, and everyone else already has that down pat. (Which is why comparisons with SpaceX are foolish; hand-building a few rockets a year is not the same challenge as churning out half a million cars a year.)
WRT them never making any money, bear in mind that all their revenue gets ploughed back into R&D. That said, you can't defy the law of profit eventually.
I’ve always said that Tesla need to be able to learn how to build cars, infrastructure and customer loyalty before the mainstream manufacturers learn how to build electric cars. Certainly my experience so far is that the first and last of those is woefully lacking and their network still has to grow massively if they are going to compete in any sort of volume.
They are running out of time.
I also think they may have made a strategic mistake. They could have been like Apple. Apple don’t manufacture their phones. They are a technology company. They get others to build their products. They could have outsourced to someone like Magna Steyr. Instead they bought an 80’s automotive plant from Saturn.
So they might be the Apple of cars but the risk is that they might become the Nokia instead.
They are running out of time.
I also think they may have made a strategic mistake. They could have been like Apple. Apple don’t manufacture their phones. They are a technology company. They get others to build their products. They could have outsourced to someone like Magna Steyr. Instead they bought an 80’s automotive plant from Saturn.
So they might be the Apple of cars but the risk is that they might become the Nokia instead.
I can see Tesla the car company not the battery manufacturing side long term retreating back to the USA. Now that the European companies are investing in a charging network to rival the supercharging network. They could be about to take away the Tesla USP which for me was the charging network as it makes it truly usable.
If others have use of as good a network I see nothing that will put Tesla ahead of the pack. As someone earlier said my dealing with Tesla have also been totally unacceptable and I am looking to jump ship as soon as there is a viable competitor. I think there are quite a few like myself.
If others have use of as good a network I see nothing that will put Tesla ahead of the pack. As someone earlier said my dealing with Tesla have also been totally unacceptable and I am looking to jump ship as soon as there is a viable competitor. I think there are quite a few like myself.
AstonZagato said:
I’ve always said that Tesla need to be able to learn how to build cars, infrastructure and customer loyalty before the mainstream manufacturers learn how to build electric cars. Certainly my experience so far is that the first and last of those is woefully lacking and their network still has to grow massively if they are going to compete in any sort of volume.
They are running out of time.
I also think they may have made a strategic mistake. They could have been like Apple. Apple don’t manufacture their phones. They are a technology company. They get others to build their products. They could have outsourced to someone like Magna Steyr. Instead they bought an 80’s automotive plant from Saturn.
So they might be the Apple of cars but the risk is that they might become the Nokia instead.
Tesla have always stated that they don't want to own the EV market, but push mainstream manufacturers towards proper EVs it's a hard fact to grasp that profit isn't their main motivator, once you take this perspective on-board a lot of things make more sense like Gigafactory it's like the Internet, where applications that are "free" are better than those you pay for, which makes no traditional sense and many companies fail to understand or leverage it. So if they become Nokia but we all have EVs then they will still have succeeded They are running out of time.
I also think they may have made a strategic mistake. They could have been like Apple. Apple don’t manufacture their phones. They are a technology company. They get others to build their products. They could have outsourced to someone like Magna Steyr. Instead they bought an 80’s automotive plant from Saturn.
So they might be the Apple of cars but the risk is that they might become the Nokia instead.
The Model S & X were meant to appeal to rich "Techis" and environmentally aware buyers, from a value for money perspective they are still more expensive than going the S class route, thus their buyers are generally much more switched on and don't require hand-holding or leather seating with free coffee as you would get from Mercedes. Driving an EV requires a change of mindset, speed of charging etc, if you won't make that change even at the buying stage then you probably aren't a customer they want, above all, they are still a very young company in terms of car manufacturers and will have many many growing pains
babatunde said:
Tesla have always stated that they don't want to own the EV market, but push mainstream manufacturers towards proper EVs it's a hard fact to grasp that profit isn't their main motivator, once you take this perspective on-board a lot of things make more sense like Gigafactory it's like the Internet, where applications that are "free" are better than those you pay for, which makes no traditional sense and many companies fail to understand or leverage it. So if they become Nokia but we all have EVs then they will still have succeeded
The Model S & X were meant to appeal to rich "Techis" and environmentally aware buyers, from a value for money perspective they are still more expensive than going the S class route, thus their buyers are generally much more switched on and don't require hand-holding or leather seating with free coffee as you would get from Mercedes. Driving an EV requires a change of mindset, speed of charging etc, if you won't make that change even at the buying stage then you probably aren't a customer they want, above all, they are still a very young company in terms of car manufacturers and will have many many growing pains
An interesting perspective. But rather odd, if correct. To push mainstream manufacturers to produce EVs, you have to own the market. You have to be a real credible threat. Producing a handful of poorly put together cars is not going to challenge the mainstream manufacturers to do anything. Apple transformed the phone market without ever building a phone themselves. They did it with branding and tech that “just worked”. The Model S & X were meant to appeal to rich "Techis" and environmentally aware buyers, from a value for money perspective they are still more expensive than going the S class route, thus their buyers are generally much more switched on and don't require hand-holding or leather seating with free coffee as you would get from Mercedes. Driving an EV requires a change of mindset, speed of charging etc, if you won't make that change even at the buying stage then you probably aren't a customer they want, above all, they are still a very young company in terms of car manufacturers and will have many many growing pains
Even Tesla seems to get that they need to be mass-market - hence the Model 3. The reason their stock is off 20% in a few weeks is precisely because they are finding out how difficult it is to produce cars in big numbers.
And just to be clear, my dreadful buying experience had nothing to do with marble showrooms, leather sofas and free coffee (although actually Tesla has all of those for their buyers, by the way). It had everything to do with being being given a seriously substandard car and a total lack of any positive customer engagement to sort my issues out. Along the way, I have been, insulted, my concerns belittled, lied to, treated as if I’m an idiot, and effectively told I can f
k off (though in rather more words). Now, I accept that the mainstream motor trade do all these things at some time. But not all of them in a single transaction. Interestingly, I was also told that it was ok to try to rip me off as all the profits were to all go back into their mission of making all cars electric. So I can see that there are aspects of your thesis that are correct - they certainly care more about their mission than they care about their customers.
babatunde said:
Tesla have always stated that they don't want to own the EV market, but push mainstream manufacturers towards proper EVs it's a hard fact to grasp that profit isn't their main motivator, once you take this perspective on-board a lot of things make more sense like Gigafactory it's like the Internet, where applications that are "free" are better than those you pay for, which makes no traditional sense and many companies fail to understand or leverage it. So if they become Nokia but we all have EVs then they will still have succeeded
The Model S & X were meant to appeal to rich "Techis" and environmentally aware buyers, from a value for money perspective they are still more expensive than going the S class route, thus their buyers are generally much more switched on and don't require hand-holding or leather seating with free coffee as you would get from Mercedes. Driving an EV requires a change of mindset, speed of charging etc, if you won't make that change even at the buying stage then you probably aren't a customer they want, above all, they are still a very young company in terms of car manufacturers and will have many many growing pains
This would all be great if it was only Mr Musks money to have mission to lose loads of money to shake up the industry. But it's an awful lot of others people money who might not be so thrilled to lose it for the greater good. I believe that his mission was to shake up the industry and to be fair he has 100% succeeded but I don't buy that its all out of the goodness of his heart there is a long term strategy to make billions. The Model S & X were meant to appeal to rich "Techis" and environmentally aware buyers, from a value for money perspective they are still more expensive than going the S class route, thus their buyers are generally much more switched on and don't require hand-holding or leather seating with free coffee as you would get from Mercedes. Driving an EV requires a change of mindset, speed of charging etc, if you won't make that change even at the buying stage then you probably aren't a customer they want, above all, they are still a very young company in terms of car manufacturers and will have many many growing pains
All of this doesn't excuse the way they regularly p
s off people that have handed them 80K+ for a car and with that comes a certain expectation it's not the lack of a nice show room it's more things like taking your car from you to fix a problem and having it for 8 weeks before you even look at it to then go "oh yes sur you are right the battery is fked 6 months into ownership needs to go back the states" que me having a temporary battery in my car for just under a year. All of this done with a smug smile like aren't they doing such a wonderful job saving the world. It's got to the point now for me that I don't tell them about faults as I hate dealing with them so much. But I know people who get gold star service seemingly at random. Maybe i'm not the right sort I don't wet myself when they do an update to add a mars rover app, I think WOW how many thousands did that cost them when they could have made the rubber seals around the door fit properly.
Sorry for the rant and taking the thread off course but I feel the concept is actually very good the execution is the problem that might lead them to bankruptcy if not fixed. With the model 3 they are going to have normal BMW buyers walking in thinking they are superior who don't get the tech and just want the latest shiniest thing treat them like they do at the moment they will have a big problem.
AstonZagato said:
An interesting perspective. But rather odd, if correct. To push mainstream manufacturers to produce EVs, you have to own the market. You have to be a real credible threat. Producing a handful of poorly put together cars is not going to challenge the mainstream manufacturers to do anything. Apple transformed the phone market without ever building a phone themselves. They did it with branding and tech that “just worked”.
The only reason Mercedes, Jaguar, BMW Porsche etc are bringing EVs to the market is Tesla, they dominate the sales charts in the USA for premium saloon cars, if you didn't feel that they were a genuine contender you wouldn't be looking at one, there are 101 things they could do better but market share probably isn't one of them. 
Edited by babatunde on Thursday 9th November 20:30
babatunde said:
The only reason Mercedes, Jaguar, BMW Porsche etc are bringing EVs to the market is Tesla, they dominate the sales charts in the USA for premium saloon cars, if you didn't feel that they were a genuine contender you wouldn't be looking at one, there are 101 things they could do better
This is a really misleading data set. The Model S isn't a 7 Series/S-Class/A8 competitor, it's 5 Series sized. 
Dr Gitlin said:
babatunde said:
The only reason Mercedes, Jaguar, BMW Porsche etc are bringing EVs to the market is Tesla, they dominate the sales charts in the USA for premium saloon cars, if you didn't feel that they were a genuine contender you wouldn't be looking at one, there are 101 things they could do better
This is a really misleading data set. The Model S isn't a 7 Series/S-Class/A8 competitor, it's 5 Series sized. 
Yipper doesn’t understand that you need to examine why numbers are what they are. Stats only highlights areas of interest, they’re not the end point. Tesla are at near maximum capacity on the ms and mx production lines, take a growing market when you are fixed means your share will drop. What Tesla need is something like a new higher volume car... they might even call it the Model 3.
To demonstrate the mathematical & context point further, would elect for open heart surgery at a hospital with a 5% mortality rate or one with a 20% mortality rate? What if I said the hospital with the higher rate was Papworth which took on the highest and riskiest operations and had the greatest experts in the world? The high mortality being linked to their case load not their capability. If you relied purely on statistics you could ask your dentist to do the operation, they’re likely to routinely perform medical procedures and have a zero mortality rate.
To demonstrate the mathematical & context point further, would elect for open heart surgery at a hospital with a 5% mortality rate or one with a 20% mortality rate? What if I said the hospital with the higher rate was Papworth which took on the highest and riskiest operations and had the greatest experts in the world? The high mortality being linked to their case load not their capability. If you relied purely on statistics you could ask your dentist to do the operation, they’re likely to routinely perform medical procedures and have a zero mortality rate.
Dr Gitlin said:
This is a really misleading data set. The Model S isn't a 7 Series/S-Class/A8 competitor, it's 5 Series sized.
Really, have you actually ever seen a Model S? https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/compare?trims=...
7 series
S class
Model S
Dimensions
Wheelbase(in)
120.9
124.6
116.5
Length, Overall (in)
199.8
206.5
196.0
Width, Max w/o mirrors (in)
74.9
73.7
77.3
Height, Overall (in)
58.3
58.0
56.5
babatunde said:
Really, have you actually ever seen a Model S?
https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/compare?trims=...
7 series
S class
Model S
Dimensions
Wheelbase(in)
120.9
124.6
116.5
Length, Overall (in)
199.8
206.5
196.0
Width, Max w/o mirrors (in)
74.9
73.7
77.3
Height, Overall (in)
58.3
58.0
56.5
Seen one? Yes. I've driven several of them, too. I do this for a living...https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/compare?trims=...
7 series
S class
Model S
Dimensions
Wheelbase(in)
120.9
124.6
116.5
Length, Overall (in)
199.8
206.5
196.0
Width, Max w/o mirrors (in)
74.9
73.7
77.3
Height, Overall (in)
58.3
58.0
56.5
The most important stat you pasted there is the wheelbase. You'll notice that the Model S's wheelbase is five inches shorter than the 7 series that you have listed there; I'll also note that here in the US the 7 Series only comes in LWB form and that one is actually 126.4".
It's also half an inch shorter than the current 5 series (117.1").
Dr Gitlin said:
babatunde said:
Really, have you actually ever seen a Model S?
https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/compare?trims=...
7 series
S class
Model S
Dimensions
Wheelbase(in)
120.9
124.6
116.5
Length, Overall (in)
199.8
206.5
196.0
Width, Max w/o mirrors (in)
74.9
73.7
77.3
Height, Overall (in)
58.3
58.0
56.5
Seen one? Yes. I've driven several of them, too. I do this for a living...https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/compare?trims=...
7 series
S class
Model S
Dimensions
Wheelbase(in)
120.9
124.6
116.5
Length, Overall (in)
199.8
206.5
196.0
Width, Max w/o mirrors (in)
74.9
73.7
77.3
Height, Overall (in)
58.3
58.0
56.5
The most important stat you pasted there is the wheelbase. You'll notice that the Model S's wheelbase is five inches shorter than the 7 series that you have listed there; I'll also note that here in the US the 7 Series only comes in LWB form and that one is actually 126.4".
It's also half an inch shorter than the current 5 series (117.1").
I'm surprised that anyone would seriously compare an S with a similarly priced S Class, 7, A8 etc
Dr Gitlin said:
Seen one? Yes. I've driven several of them, too. I do this for a living...
The most important stat you pasted there is the wheelbase. You'll notice that the Model S's wheelbase is five inches shorter than the 7 series that you have listed there; I'll also note that here in the US the 7 Series only comes in LWB form and that one is actually 126.4".
It's also half an inch shorter than the current 5 series (117.1").
I would say interior space is the most important thing, end of the day Tesla market the S as a Luxury sedan competitor and it's generally reviewed as such.The most important stat you pasted there is the wheelbase. You'll notice that the Model S's wheelbase is five inches shorter than the 7 series that you have listed there; I'll also note that here in the US the 7 Series only comes in LWB form and that one is actually 126.4".
It's also half an inch shorter than the current 5 series (117.1").
Having said that I concede the point.
Tesla will not only survive, but remain the benchmark for at least another 5 years
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