Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

And also, Apple users are a cult, and Android is superior. 

Amen!

EV drivers and Apple cultists and Crossfit people are all basically the same people.

EV drivers and Apple cultists and Crossfit people are all basically the same people.

Reminds of a joke I heard:

A vegan, an atheist, a crossfitter, and a Texan walk into a bar.  I know this because they all told me within 5 minutes.  

I only know one EV owner.  Wife's ex has a Tesla, which I don't think he uses very much.  He is by most metrics "wealthy" and like much of what he owns, he bought a Tesla because he can, and because he thought it would be cool.  No idea how he likes it, but again, I don't think he uses it much.  If the battery gets damaged and he had to buy another one or just total it and move on, he wouldn't care. 

Thus, in my little sphere, that's who can have an EV.  Sure ain't me. 

When I visit Austin, I see quite a few Teslas on the road.  Of course, there are quite a few wealthy people in Austin, but I suspect not all the drivers I see are wealthy, but rather people who for one reason or another decided that's what they needed.  But I will say that in my experience, many, many, many people don't manage their money wisely and a lot of those people who aren't wealthy, it wouldn't surprise me to learn they shouldn't be driving Teslas, but in a place like Austin you're going to get more people ideologically attached to that whether they can reasonably afford it or not. 

And also, Apple users are a cult, and Android is superior. 

Yeah, a lot of people shouldn't be driving Lexus or BMW or Mercs either... As I've mentioned, in TOO many cases you have people leasing these cars because they want to drive a nicer car than they can legitimately afford. 

Oh and agree with you on Android. 

"Early adopters" tend usually to be missionaries for their product.  I've talked to a few EV owners and they get a bit over the top, I think, with their praise of it.  The acceleration is often noted as "great", which is nice of course.

We here know the downsides, and apparently GM and Ford and others lose heavily on every one they sell.  Then you have the $7500, which really is a gift to the car makers.  If I lived in CA, I'd be more interested sooner.  But the math really doesn't work well for most of us, and I don't know what insurance is going to end up being.

Agreed re: early adopters. It's like converts to anything, be it religion, lifestyle (i.e. veganism), politics, etc. It's easy to have the rose-colored glasses on. And I'm not surprised by losses... You're making large fixed investments in your infrastructure to support BEV and you (in early segments) have to amortize the investments against very limited sales. OF COURSE you're going to lose money, at least net, for a while. The real question is what is the gross profit on any given vehicle if you're only counting actual direct input costs, and not overhead? 

I do think the people here overstate the downsides. That doesn't mean the math works out for individual use cases, of course. But I think a lot of people here take a blanket negative approach to EVs that I don't understand the justification.

I've rented them - Hertz has a push for that. I'd never buy one as the result of my 3 experiences. 3 strikes, ya know?

Last rental I did I hybrid and came away pleased. It was a small Toyota SUV.

This coming rental (in December) will be the same, or equal.

I've never driven a Tesla. Like you, I think of them as a wannabe luxury brand (due to EV price point) with the fit & finish and quality control of a Yugo. It's the reason I don't really see myself considering a Tesla if I go BEV in a couple years. I think Musk is a charlatan and they're a disruptor but still not all that great of an automaker. I also wouldn't touch Rivian, or Lucid (not that I can afford Lucid). 

I want to see what the real automakers actually have come up with by then. They're all a little behind Tesla on the technology learning curve IMHO, but I think once they get there they'll put out better products than Tesla is capable of. 

One of my pet peeves was seeing drivers in some BMW driving it like they would a Honda Accord.

I had an Android phone, which was fine.  My step son works for Apple and got me an iPhone, which also works fine.

My wife is an iPhone 14 and its camera is quite good.  I think it works fine also.

I never answer a phone call unless the caller is on my list.

Elsewhere you wrote that Tesla is ahead of other EVs in most areas, so I'm curious why you think Musk/Tesla are hucksters. 

Good question. I can see why it seems contradictory. 

First, it's not so much Tesla. It's Musk. Some of what I see as Tesla's issues are partly due to Musk's leadership, but overall I think Tesla has a bunch of fine engineers who are working hard. And it's based on their work that Tesla has the first-mover advantage in EVs that they have, despite Musk getting the credit. And I think it's some of the things Musk has been doing that could squander that first-mover advantage once the big boys enter the chat. 

I'd say the biggest thing with Musk is that you never know whether what comes out of his mouth will happen. What you DO know is that it won't happen on the timeline he's promising. Or that it'll live up to his billing (i.e. full self driving, which is still a pipe dream). All I have to do is count the number of Tesla robotaxis on the road (hint: it's zero) to point that out. And how are those solar roofs going? Hyperloop anyone? 

And then there's the fact that he's basically a little boy with a billionaire's budget, and some of his decisions are screwing up the first-mover advantage. I.e. who in their right mind wants a Cybertruck? It's like he's an 8 year old who drew it on a napkin with the Delorean (not a model for successful automaking lol) as inspiration. If he wanted to make a truck, focus on a truck you can actually manufacture, and put it on a timeline that will actually beat the alternative instead of being years behind Rivian and falling behind Ford of all companies. 

From a business perspective, Musk seemingly started with the idea that everything legacy automakers do is stupid, and he was going to reinvent the wheel. A lot of the issues with Teslas from a repair/insurability standpoint IMHO has to do with the fact that he took a completely different approach to supply chain than other automakers. "Move fast and break stuff" is great in tech--it's not so great when you have to get parts for a car that you built 4 years ago that you chose lowest-cost suppliers who didn't have the embedded/industrial supply chain mentality and would commit to long product life cycles. So now you have a car you can't repair because you changed things every 3 months. That was fine in startup mode, but eventually you have to grow up and realize that a lot of the stuff legacy automakers do is not because they're stupid, or obsolete, or aren't thinking right--they do it because they know their business model. And some of it is BS too. "Look everyone, we have a tablet in our car!" Great, something that you can't control anything in the car w/o *looking* at a touchscreen and navigating menus. That's safe to do when driving! Touchscreens are one of my pet peeves in cars lol...

I will give Musk credit. I don't think the EV market would be where it is if not for him. He built that first-mover advantage by attacking a market before it was really viable, and just brute-forcing his way in. He pushed to not only high volume manufacturing, but profitability. Which was questionable whether they'd get there a few years ago. Heck, at one point on this very board (~2019 IIRC) I spoke of them having a liquidity crisis and needing a capital raise just a few months after saying they had plenty of capital--and the way you could tell it was a crisis was the terms they had to meet to get the money. And they weathered the storm and they're viable right now. 

But for all the ways he bills Tesla as a tech company and not an automaker, he doesn't have a defensible technology moat. He's not vertically integrated in batteries, and most of the tech seems to be Panasonic's, not Tesla's. Full self driving doesn't appear to be on a timeline where he's going to win there. He's late on a truck. His semi tractor is still a prototype. He's full of a lot of promises, and promises are great when you have no competition. But the competition has come to the party, and they're starting to replace his vaporware with actual products. 

Tesla has a lead because they have good people, and because they had a head start. But without a defensible technology moat, better-capitalized companies that REALLY know how to make cars are going to quickly close that lead. And what happens to Tesla at that point?