Yesterday, I stopped in at the Tesla store to see if they had any plans for 3/31 (not yet). I ended up talking with a guy who loves German cars and his reason for not wanting to buy a Tesla was that they were only good at EVs, he was mildly interested in EVs, but wanted to buy one from a company who really knows about all kinds of cars. Blew me away - I was stunned. I just looked at him in shock and said "you have to drive one. Just take a test drive." So I am afraid Lutz is not alone. And this guy was probably in his early 40s.
Early adopters and early mainstream people are open to new brands and look at the qualities. The other end of the bell curve with the late adopters are people who want a proven track record. There is no way those people are going to jump on board yet because Tesla just hasn't been around long enough for their tastes.
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Tesla continues to be different enough to confuse dyed in the wool car people like Lutz.
Tesla is selling a car with a integrated coordinated infrastructure to cover all parts of driving, including long distance.
It sells performance, style and class. Enough to outsell its ICE based competitors.
So, Lutz doesn't understand that :-
* Tesla isn't competing against other BEVs, its competing against ICE as well
* Tesla sells a fully integrated system, unlike all the other manufacturers
* Tesla is making its own market, and that market is growing.
Lastly and most importantly Bob Lutz is assuming that folks will buy BMW, Audi, Nissan instead of Tesla because of price.
This is where he is most wrong. Tesla will never compete on price, it competes because its a better car when compared to BEV or ICE.
All the other manufacturers are protecting their investment in ICE and make sure their BEV never competes with their own ICE - which is why they fail.
This is a good point. Mainstream automakers are making EVs and even hybrids for a segment of the car buying public who want that kind of car either because they care about conservation and ecology or there are some incentive they want to take advantage of. Even the Prius falls into this category. The Prius is one of the most popular cars in Portland, but that's because Portland has a tremendous number of eco buyers. The next county to the north has fewer eco buyers and more than half the vehicles you see are trucks and SUVs.
This is probably why the performance of EVs from mainstream car companies is so poor. They are making a car for a segment of the population who believes they should be sacrificing something to save the Earth (or to get an incentive). Tesla has taken a completely different approach and made an EV that out performs ICE cars. Their sales pitch is basically: not only good for the environment, but better too! In my world I hear all the time we need to make sacrifices if we're going to save the earth (debatable, the Earth has survived a lot worse than humanity, but I digress), and then comes along a car that meets that goal with few compromises.
All the Model 3 has to do is have performance which is in the ballpark and maybe just a tad better than comparable ICE and look decent. If that happens Tesla will have achieved its goal of completely disrupting the car market.
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I don't think so. The EV market is so small currently that it's unlikely to displace ICE within his lifetime. This brings me back to a quote from Elon and Kimbal's Zip2 days, when a man came into the office, threw a yellow pages book down and exclaimed, "Do you really think you can replace THIS?". Years later, look at how the world has changed. The same thing will happen, but it's going to take a lot of time in such a capital intensive industry. Until the time that it's obvious he's wrong, he won't admit it. If the Model 3 numbers are going to be as large as my own personal estimate, it's still a fun kick to the balls to all the naysayers though.
It will take a lot longer for new car technology to kill off ICE than it did for the internet to kill paper phone books. With the latter, all it took was writing the software and setting up the servers. With cars, it takes building 200 more Gigafactory equivalents just to supply the batteries needed. That is orders of magnitude more difficult.
500,000 EVs a year will be enough to disrupt the industry and get car companies to take EVs seriously. It is also enough that consumer demand for good performance EVs will start to take off, but when it does happen, demand will exceed supply for a decade or more. Probably more like 2 decades.
