Electric cars, hybrids, and related vehicles

Forgot to post on this thread (and it’s awkwardly timed now) but I wanted to say that I picked up a used 2016 Nissan Leaf with 33k miles for $12k and I love it. It’s awesome not going to the gas station.

Seems like the sort of thing Tesla should also have told its shareholders about.

All this stuff is driving Musk insane. He’s well on his way to becoming a James Bond villain.

I know. It’s cool. None of that smelly gas for me!

That’s awesome. Way to go.

Do you ever feel limited by the Leaf? Do you have to carefully plan around charging times and stations, or has it been pretty painless to adjust?

It’s limiting. I wouldn’t say I have to carefully plan, but if it’s getting low on charge I try to charge it that evening.

For us it works as a second car, a commute car to work and back and running errands on the weekend. We have a gas-powered Kia as our main car.

I could see it working as a lone car for someone living alone with a relatively short commute to work. The problem is if you want to drive it 50+ miles one way and then back again. You will need to charge it while out, at least for the older models. The newest model has an expanded range, something like 150 miles.

So if you had a modest commute it might work as a sole car. You could just rent a car for longer drives, like driving to go on vacation or to visit a relative in another city.

WRONG THREAD

Down at our local mini Maker Faire today, I came across this awesome thing:

New photo by Skip Franklin
(Bigger version)

I’m not a motorcycle guy, but that looks pretty sweet. Was originally a regular gas-engine bike, stripped it down to the frame and retrofitted it with the electric motor.

That’s an incredibly ugly “supercar”, folks.

Neal Stephenson described this perfectly:

Shaftoe and Root haul the mortar and a boxload of bombs down onto the beach, where they can take cover behind a stone retaining wall a good five feet high. But the surf makes it impossible to hear anything, so Root goes up and hides in the trees along the road, and leaves Shaftoe to fiddle with the Soviet mortar.

There turns out to be not much fiddling necessary. An unlettered tundra farmer with bilateral frostbite could get this thing up and running in 10 minutes. If he’d stayed up late the night before - celebrating the fulfillment of the last five-year plan with a jug of wood alcohol - maybe fifteen minutes.

Shaftoe consults the instructions. It does not matter that these are printed in Russian, because they are made for illiterates anyway. A series of parabolas is plotted out, the mortar supporting one leg and exploding Germans supporting the opposite. Ask a Soviet engineer to design a pair of shoes and he’ll come up with something that looks like the boxes that the shoes came in; ask him to make something that will massacre Germans, and he turns into Thomas Fucking Edison.

I’ll take “Things rich people will spend their money on, for $500,000, please Alex”

I’ve heard of a few others that do this. Here’s one for old VW and Porche bodies:
https://www.zelectricmotors.com/videos/

And another doing a little bit of everything:

I really want to see DeLorean they have pictured running electric only. Dr. Emmett Brown eat your heart out.

But will it run on garbage?

Baby steps. :)

Besides, I mean, it would be 0-88MPH in only half the parking lot, now.

They’re making progress toward what I would consider mass-market pricing. Of course, they have to actually deliver the cars.

Yeah, that’s the key. They have to actually deliver the cars in volume.

Really the Chevy Volt is probably the best solution I’ve seen, given my own experience with a Nissan Leaf. The new 2019 Volt has 53 miles of range but has the hybrid gas engine that kicks in to charge the batteries. With a full tank of gas the range is now extended to 420 miles. The list is $33k.

The 53 electric range is good enough for most urban driving. If you can plug it into a three-prong outlet you can have a full charge every morning. That extra range with the gas means you can use it for vacations, etc.

It is a small car, though. Two parents and two teens would be a tight fit.

Tesla also has to learn to actually manufacture cars. Their interiors are generally not assembled well enough for the price, and the overall construction quality is inconsistent. Combine that with the difficulty of getting parts and service out of warranty, and they may well be pushing themselves into a subscription model by default (which may well be what they want).

I really think and have always thought that Tesla’s big contribution would be to jump-start the EV market so that the big automakers would finally devote the resources to competing there. Which is exactly what is happening. The Audi EV SUV coming up, the stuff BMW is working on, as well as VW and Mercedes from Germans, and of course all the work Detroit is doing, plus the Japanese and Koreans…that’s where mainstream EV success is going to happen. Those companies already know how to make good cars, so electrification as a new thing is less difficult for them than actual car making is for Tesla, IMO.

Yes, they do, but the traditional car manufacturers have to learn to innovate to the level Tesla does, which is no small feat. A tesla is an iPhone on wheels, the model 3 in particular. The software updates, coupled with the single ipad-like interface, give you that feeling of a brand new car every few months. That and the supercharger network, making an already long range car capable of cross country trips, are the reasons that tesla will succeed or fail, not faux leather interiors. I think they understand that people spend on luxury not so much for how it actually feels (e.g., the grain of the leather) but rather the way it makes you, and others, feel. Teslas succeed on that front in spades—they are viewed as luxury cars, rather than just being quirky.

Would Tesla be better off if they had better fit-and-finish? Of course. But to the extent resources are constrained (and when aren’t they?), I think they’re focusing on the right things, in the classic Silicon Valley way: innovate, seize market share, get the first-mover advantage in ways that stand out.

Well, I’d argue that innovation is only valuable only to the extent it creates sustainable and profitable products or processes. So far, Tesla has indeed been very innovative and has created some desirable products. I seriously doubt how sustainable that is. Innovation can get you noticed and spark a surge of interest, but you eventually have to deliver the goods reliably over time in sufficient quantity and sufficient quality to satisfy a large enough market to keep the ball rolling. I don’t think Tesla has demonstrated their ability to do that.

True enough. My point would be that a phone is not a car. Musk is banking on their being essentially no difference between the two in terms of consumer behavior, and I think that is dead wrong. People don’t buy new cars every year, they don’t expect them to become obsolete in two years with software changes, and they don’t consider them relatively disposable.

Whether software updates are going to be a good thing or a bad thing remains to be seen. Given the mixed reactions people have to updates on their phones, I’m skeptical. And I’m also skeptical that software updates will make anyone feel they are getting a new car, but we’ll be able to tell over time I suppose. The whole charging situation has been a strength for Tesla, no doubt, but it’s also limited their market niche even more, as areas where there is not a real supercharger presence are probably not going to generate that much demand for the cars. More importantly, the whole e-vehicle infrastructure setup, for all companies, right now is skewed super heavy towards the upper end of the market, if only because you pretty much have to have your own house with a garage to reliably have access to charging. This freezes out, well, probably the bulk of the car buying public. And as Tesla has made no secret that the key to their profitability lies in going more mass market, this is a problem. [/quote]

This is debatable, or at least, open to interpretation. The reasons Tesla customers buy Teslas, I’d agree, has less to do with the interior fit and finish and more with the technology. But that’s a very narrow market niche, far narrower than the broader luxury car niche. I’d argue there are far, far more people with the money to buy a Tesla who won’t because they can get a Benz or an Audi that feels and looks better and makes them feel like they spent their money more wisely. Unless you are really into tech, for its own sake, or are solely interested in the physical dynamics of the cars when flogged hard, Teslas don’t offer much to the traditional luxury car buyer I’d argue, when you consider not only the price but dealer networks, service and parts, ease of ownership, leasing, trades, etc.

Oh, they got the innovator’s advantage, no doubt. But the question is whether they can convert that to something sustainable over the long haul. Apple started with niche, then discovered they could go mainstream by leveraging not just tech but style, performance, and quality. While they’ve sometimes fallen short in one or more areas, they’ve been able to both deliver products that have a lot of appeal that transcends their actual function, and deliver solid, reliable, well-built and attractive products that actually do what they are supposed to do. They also do this with really good margins. Tesla’s margins, as far as I can tell, are not good. The products satisfy in terms of cachet and image, but for anyone just as interested in prosaic function and a standard of quality commensurate with the price, they often fall short. What’s more, there’s nothing I see that indicates they can really address the margins issue. They might need to partner with someone in the way Porsche does by being part of VAG; they are that behemoth’s most profitable units AFAIK, with amazing margins. Tesla doesn’t have the sort of profit adding options structure that the Germans are able to field, and over time their technical, innovative advantage will erode as other big players jump in. I am very curious to see what they do, though.