KentuckyX
Member
Just my thought and 2 cents worth, but I won't seriously consider any other brand as 'competition' until they also roll out a nationwide charging infrastructure.
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The final cut of the 9th episode of the Tesla Motors Club Podcast, featuring Chad Schwitters, the former president of Plug In America, is now available. You can watch it now on YouTube or listen to it on all major podcast networks.
Major 2021 Model X refresh pending [Update: Unveiled January 27, 2021]
- Thread starter Nuclear Fusion
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They also need to make more than 50k cars a year. A lot of people are dipping toes in the 10-50k cars a year club. Makes sense for a high end 200k car, but less so for “mass market” cars
I also don’t see a low slung $125k++ low mileage station wagon as competition for the X.
Maybe the Y, except, ya know, that you can buy 3 Y’s for the price with 75% more range ... each.
But they have and its called ionity. Not quite as good as Teslas network but still its there.
There is also quite a few options which have 150kw chargers like circle K etc.
Though in general, over time, the price is coming down, not going up. In 2018 I paid $116,500 for my X (112,500 + 4,000 for FSD). I can order a 2021 today, equipped exactly the same, for $92,990, even with FSD going for 10,000. Now I did collect the 7500 tax spiff, but the price has come down a lot more than that! My point is, that based upon history, Tesla is more likely to lower the price than raise it. Just sayin’
Thanks! Perhaps I will put down $100 nowThe risk is that the earlier you are in the queue, or closer to the end of quarter your car is built, the higher the probability of getting a mixed bag quality build
Are you only willing to consider brands with first party charging stations? If so, I think that's a bit of a myopic viewpoint. There are plenty of third party charging options across the country that work perfectly fine. They're not quite as prevalent as superchargers right now, but there's billions of dollars being invested in expanding them, so within a few years they will almost certainly be just as good as Tesla's network.
I haven't taken a fob with me for months. I can unlock and start my car with my iphone or iwatch in a number of ways, including an automated shortcut that unlocks the car and enables keyless driving whenever the phone connects to the car by Bluetooth as well as voice commands to do almost anything, When I used to walk out of the supermarket with hands full all I had to do was tell my watch to open the trunk. Now, of course, I tell the watch to have the food delivered....
I had a BMW 7 series before getting my first (of 2) MXs. That is a wonderful car, but the ONLY respect in which the BMW was superior to the MX was the seats, and that gulf has widened with my current X in which I lost the ventilation. The BMW seats were ventilated, had far more adjustments, including a sliding thigh support, which allowed you to achieve total adaptation to your shape and size.
They also had a massage function, so I am familiar with that as well. It's an interesting novelty, but I can honestly say that was not something I ended up using except to surprise someone in the passenger seat from time to time (a switch enabled the driver to use all of the seat controls to adjust the passenger side). I absolutely love my X. The Raven upgrade was a huge improvement in terms of suspension and ride, and the only two things I think are essential are greater sound deadening and better seats.... But massage? Nah.
Plan B
Active Member
Raven came out in 2019 and had two major improvements:
1) Adaptive suspension which considerably improves ride quality
2) Permanent magnet reluctance motors on the front wheels to improve efficiency and range. You can also regen to a full stop with these motors.
As far as I'm aware there are no external features that are different with Raven models, it's all in the suspension and drivetrain.
Sandy Munro is a good resource for not just what different companies are doing in the EV world, but also how their corporate cultures are dealing with the shift. He has been critical of Tesla's "dinosaur tech" ie bending metal, but he's very impressed with other areas of Tesla tech.
Traditional car companies farm out design and production of most subsystems and even those done in house are done by separate teams that never talk to one another. He found in his Tesla teardowns that that obviously isn't the case with Tesla. He pointed out a fluid bottle that is used by several different systems in the car and he said no other manufacturer would do that because no other manufacturer has that level of coordination between departments.
He also is very impressed with Tesla's electronics. He has pointed out that the design and manufacturing of the electronics in Tesla's cars is at least one generation ahead of the rest of the car industry. In many cases several generations. Tesla's electronics is on par with the latest electronics being developed for the Department of Defense.
Several car companies are beginning to spool up battery production and they can copy some of Tesla's ideas learned from teardowns of Teslas, which does speed up their time to production. However, they are also slowed down by developmental processes that have been evolving for 100+ years. Large, well established companies don't move very quickly. Before the current era of large, established companies eliminating competition by buying them, medium sized companies that are still young enough to innovate, but big enough to take on large projects had an advantage over the old dinosaur.
Some companies have slipped past the old behemoths and managed to become big companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc. Tesla is the next of these. They survived the early stages when they might have been bought out by a legacy car maker to become a medium sized nimble company with the newest tech at a time the industry is about to go through some massive changes.
Tesla also has some advantages in ways the legacy car makers have not figured out yet. Supercharging being the biggest of these. Legacy car makers consider "fuel" to be somebody else's problem and they don't want to deal with it. They are involved in charging standards, but letting governments and the market settle the details. The result has been a balkanized charging environment that is hopelessly confusing to most consumers used to every gas station basically being the same.
Tesla has made supercharging convenient and painless. If you're on the road, the only concern you have with supercharging is what you're going to do while the car charges and the occasional problems with crowded superchargers or dead superchargers. And they try to give you some information to plan ahead with supercharger problems.
With other charge networks you usually don't know until you get there if it's in use or down. And paying for charging can be a hassle because each network does it differently.
Other car makers will make compelling EVs and some will sell quite well, but I think Tesla is going to remain the top of the pack for some time to come. There may come a day when they get complacent and lazy and a competitor catches them out, but it will be a while.
Yes, Tesla currently has the lead, there's no denying that. There's also no denying that Tesla has many talented engineers, so I'm sure they will continue to improve their technology.
My point is that the major players are coming at this with way more resources than Tesla has, and Tesla has already done the hard work for them. They don't have to figure out how to build a profitable car with battery prices at $500/kWh, because prices are ~$100/kWh now. And things like the octovalve are cool engineering tricks but aren't game changers in their own right. VW could build a competitive car without ever designing an octovalve of their own.
Then on top of that, players like VW have scale way beyond Tesla. That will help them from an efficiency standpoint. VW group as an example sells about 20x the cars Tesla does on a worldwide basis. They might not have all of the cool engineering that Teslas have, but they will put out millions of quality EV's at a competitive price over the coming years. IMO it's naive to think that Tesla will maintain its EV market dominance for more than a few more years.
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I think that's exactly the opposite of the reality. Octovalve especially is THE magic in the Model Y. It's what drives the efficiency and drives what gives it twice the range of any other electric SUV.
VW can't even build a car with downloadable firmware. They needed to send someone out with tens of thousands of USB sticks to update cars that were bricked in a parking lot.
You really think the octovalve is the reason for the Model Y's energy efficiency? Not the motors, aerodynamics, or BMS? The octovalve is cool but it's a marginal increase in energy efficiency at best - its value is more in production efficiency and reducing the size and components of the heat pump. It allows Tesla to have a heat pump in a much smaller space with fewer components, which is great - but hardly game changing.
VW is building its software from scratch. There are going to be issues on that front, especially in the beginning. Let's not forget the Tesla OS had a lot of issues in the beginning (and still has issues - have you tried using Spotify at all?). In 3-4 years VW's software will be much more mature. And that's just VW - can't forget all the other majors players investing billions in the EV game.
motors - nope
aerodynamics - nope
BMS - nope
Motors and BMS are same as Model 3... Aero is marginally worse. So yeah - it's the octovalve & heat pump that delivered the next-level efficiency of Y.
And let's bookmark this post for 3 years from now and see how far advanced VW is.
Tesla's first 30,000 cars didn't need this -- I can tell you that much:
This is how VW installs the software on ID.3
This is quite risky. If your car does not have cell service, you are stuck. Also, the Tesla network itself has been known to have been down for more than a day. It is very rare, but it has happened. I consider the fob to be my friend.
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