What? I've been following the market and Tesla has not brought no new innovation in any aspect of the car (engine, battery technology etc). They've just hired some great designers and invested a lot in marketing. You can't even say that their cars are competitively priced. I've seen way more innovation from Chinese electric car builders.

Also, wrt to software, Teslas are basically hacked together, according to multiple reports and analyses, teardowns.

I wouldn't say that. ICE has improved a lot in the last 50 years and so have other elements of a car, from structural integrity to braking systems. The ICE car we have today is an amazing machine compared to the ones we drove in the 50s or 60s.

It is true that traditional car companies have not done enough to push the electric car forward but a lot of innovation has happened, and some of it will benefit electric cars directly (regenerative braking, for example).

I'm with you, though. I hope Tesla comes out of this as a powerful car company because they deserve to be an example for the rest of the industry.

You're talking past my point. I didn't say they were innovative, I said they showed they could build electric cars that match ICE ones and even surpass them in some regards. That doesn't require that much innovation, just putting very well together existing technology. It's the iPod all over again. Not innovative but it actually put the technology in a usable state for the mass market.

I currently drive a BMW 3 series. It has size/features/range that are enough (and often exceed) what I need. No one except Tesla offers anything I can reasonably replace that car with. Not even BMW themselves who offer the quirky i3 but nothing like the Model 3. While all the carmakers were fumbling around making hybrids a little bit better Tesla went and jumped ahead with getting an electric sedan built. There's no point in me getting a hybrid, I already average exactly 50mpg (4.7 l/100km) with the current diesel, a hybrid wouldn't add much if anything. Switching to an electric can be a 2-4x step for cost and CO2 depending on electricity costs and share of renewables in the grid at your location.

No, many governments have imposed requirements on manufacturers to produce a certain number of low emission vehicles.

> But it will likely be the highest selling car in the world next year, replacing Toyota.

I don't know about that.

> And isn't having the wealthy and people with expendable income fund that transition what we want?

Yes and no. Should they fund it? Sure. But the transition has to expand far beyond their personal vehicle ownership, as the wealthy are only a minority. Tesla gives the impression of wanting to cater exclusively to a certain class of people. Which is fine for a luxury auto maker, but Porsche, Lexus, etc., don't offer the pretense that they're saving the Earth.

We don't really have any time to wait. It may be too late already. Global warming has arrived in force. We're blowing through all the numbers that scientists warned about.

I'm not sure if this is the right way to frame this. It would probably be better to say something like Tesla proved that EVs are practical and people will buy them.

> Tesla still sells very few cars (~3%). The giants sell a lot more cars

Sure, at the moment. But now you're conflating manufacturer market share with fuel type market share. A better way to think about this in the context of ICE vs EV is to look at the efforts underway by all manufacturers to ramp up EV production. It takes time to do. New companies (Lucid, Rivian, Tesa, etc.) take time to ramp up production. And then if you want to just compare manufacturers against each other with all fuel types combined, you can do that separately, to which I'd say this is not at all surprising given EV makers are new and take time to get market penetration.

> but nothing stopped the car giants from making them decades ago

All of the profit incentives in the world stopped them basically. Everyone was fat and happy with oil for cars, why bother changing anything or doing anything different?

This is exactly my point. Tesla didn't happen because of Musk's intelligence, or talent, or ingenuity, or genius. It happened because of Musk's drive. Before Tesla/Musk, electric cars weren't even part of the public consciousness (even though they were completely technically feasible, as you agree). It was a revolutionary idea.

What are those? I'm fond of Tesla, but they don't have an insurmountable moat around their technology. There's nothing intrinsically novel about their approach (especially outside the US where direct to consumer is a common model), they just had the benefit of a clean slate to build it out, rather than incrementally changing systems, platforms and procedures like other car manufacturers.

The halo of an eccentric billionaire genius wears off pretty quickly if they can't continue to compete on price, design, safety, and other areas of public perception.

It remains to be seen if Tesla engineers are objectively "better" than those at other car manufacturers, because very few directly compete at present. The number of "ground up" electric cars is quite small, compared with ones hamstrung by retrofitting electric powertrains into existing platforms.

> Elon Musk's PR stunts and Twitter feed are a much more effective method of advertising than the TV and Internet ads other car companies use.

Elon Musk's PR stunts and Twitter feed are a much more effective method of advertising to the ahead-of-the-curve, switched on audience who're interested in Tesla's current offering than the TV and Internet ads other car companies use. Again, there's nothing yet showing you can extrapolate this out once other manufacturers are truly competing in the same space.

I think they're great, and I want one - but we do need to be a little pragmatic about their position in the industry.

Tesla is American; this perhaps isn't the best choice of words.

> ultimately is only doing so to sell units on what they perceive as a new niche.

I don't think I'm cynical to believe that every corporation (including Tesla, etc.) that intends on making profits is trying to sell units in a popular niche.

> it's going to be the one committing to the broad goals of bettering humanity, not just capitalizing on someone else proving the existence of a market.

Fair enough, but for me it comes down to supporting the product that best fits my needs and desires, which I think on a societal level can do a better job of solving the most immediate problems. I would strongly consider any vehicle that fits what I'm looking for when I next shop for a car.

Are they really though ? You don't see Tesla being much more efficient than any other EVs so far ?

I saw a fair amount of that but it seemed to be more a reflection of Musk’s success at building an online fan club than sober analysis. The car people I know were bearish, noting that electric cars are relatively easy to build. The outlier was FSD, which would have been much harder to match if it hadn’t been at least a decade premature.

But Tesla was super successful even though ICE cars still aren't banned.

What real innovations has Tesla brought to the market? And I mean real innovations which benefit the consumer, not stuff like electrification that is something that needs to be done for the sake of ìstopping climate change'.

Driving a Tesla is essentially the same experience as driving a 1996 Mercedes, actually the Mercedes interior are higher quality.

You have to start somewhere. Tesla is increasing their manufacturing capacity about as fast as you can reasonably expect any company to do it. Just because high-volume manufacturers like Ford or Honda or Volkswagen can have more impact on CO2 emissions by reducing fuel consumption slightly on many more vehicles is no reason to disdain what Tesla is doing on a smaller scale.

I would say that the advance in battery technology, the laws introduced by state of California and north european countries did more than Tesla ever did.

Also the Renault Zoe, still top selling EV cars in europe, had her first concept car showed in 2005 and was on sale only 5 months after the Model S in 2012. The Leaf also predates the Model S.The 1st generation Tesla Roadster sold poorly like most other contemporary EVs and most of the sales happened in her last year in 2012. It was as niche as all other EVs in the market in its first 3 years of commercial life. The Mitsubishi i-Miev and its Citroën and Peugeot variant outsold the Tesla Roadster by more than a factor of 10. Almost 30000 cars between 2008 and 2014.

What Tesla achieved was showing the wealthy people they could greenwash their way to the same energy wasting life by going EV. A good publicity stunt.

I wouldn't be so confident. Right now, Tesla addresses a small portion of the expensive sports sedans segment in a few lucky parts of the world. Even then, Tesla cannot make enough cars to fulfill demand. The grid as it is, cannot handle a sudden and drastic increase in demand for electricity and the additional infrastructure needed will be neither cheap nor easily obtained.

I do think the internal combustion engine (w.r.t. to cars) will be relegated to history, but I won't think the transformation will be quick or easy.

I am aware of their plans. But still Tesla has a significant lead as both were still sceptic in full embrace of electric until Tesla outsold them in USA. Also it takes time to master running an electric motor by Software and constantly improve along with battery. Tesla has much longer experience of running a car on electrical motors.

BMW and Benz can sale cars based on strong brand. But to make really good electrical car with a decent range will take some time.

I am pragmatist not a fan of specific brand. More competition the better it is. I will be more than happy to see a real good electric car from established brand. But I don't think BMW i8 and i3 can come close to Tesla's current line up. So is the case with Jaguar and Audi with their new luxury EV. You can't go easy with legs in two boats. So if there is a real evidence of change I will change my views.

You mean largely trouble-free engines that run on ultra-cheap gas?

ICE has environmental issues, of course, but the idea that electric is universally superior is questionable. There's no range anxiety with gas and any backyard mechanic can fix most issues. Your locked down $100,000 IoT car is a completely different beast.

>Much of this will be of zero value in the near future.

Says who? If anything everyone is bearish on electric since gas prices have fallen and how range and recharge times will always be less convenient. Electric might replace gas but it won't be in the near future and nothing stops Ford from launching an electric line of its own. Electric cars are a solved problem if you can convince people to pay the premium and deal with the range anxiety and long recharge times. Ford has already announced an electric Mustang and F-150 on top of the $30,000, pre-rebate, 2017 Focus you can buy today. Tesla has no monopoly on electric tech. The barrier to entry is non-existant for other car companies.

edit: saying that the government will ban ICE isn't a market statement its a regulatory hope and for most nations a far off proposal. The idea that Tesla can only succeed with the government literally making their competitors illegal isn't actually a pro-Tesla argument. You guys are much less convincing than you think you are.

What are they doing that makes them so much more? Are they really that different than Toyota,GM,Ford,VW? I'm sure they have some differences but at the end of the day there is no wide moat that any of these other manufacturers can't cross.

They all make vehicles and Tesla certainly got a jump on the others with EV's. With that said, I hope they keep innovating and are super successful and drag the rest of the Industry forward.

I am very skeptical that this is ever going to happen, at least in any meaningful way. It's been pretty well established over the past couple of decades that corporations cannot steer away from their core profit centers, and thus far the auto manufacturers have done nothing to disprove this theory. So far, they have almost exclusively done nothing other than announcing future plans, but have not been able to pivot away from their core competencies.

There is a widespread belief that it is inevitable that Detroit, etc., will start producing EVs, and once they do so that Tesla will be crushed in very short order. I have seen no evidence to support this belief, despite Tesla having been in the market for over a decade.