Comment by philipallstar 4 days ago
> Everyone knew that was the future and that the big auto manufacturers were deliberately dragging.
Definitely not. Car electrification was definitely not obvious, and Tesla had to do many semi-impossible things to make it even slightly feasible.
> Yeah 10 years ago.
Tesla unveiled the Roadster 20 years ago. That's plenty of time for other companies to catch up. They made a bet that once the battery moat evaporated the millions of miles of driving footage, powering affordable fully autonomous driving, would be their next moat. They failed, not because camera-based FSD is a silly idea (we drive with our eyes after all), but because it's a really hard problem. If they had won that bet, Tesla would justify its valuation. They didn't, and so we're left with the flailing of a doomed company.
>Car electrification was definitely not obvious
The first electric car predates the 20th century. That seems pretty obvious.
The problem was always batteries and charging infrastructure. I wouldn't call these semi-impossible, but it's something Tesla definitely contributed significantly to.
> The first electric car predates the 20th century. That seems pretty obvious.
If you count remote control cars as well then you have an even weightier point.
But if you're serious about adapting technologies, countries and drivers to electric cars then you'll know that an electric car being made in the 19th century is totally irrelevent. Toyota even bet big on hydrogen rather than electric for a long time; that's how non-obvious it was.
>an electric car being made in the 19th century is totally irrelevent.
But then you strangely ignored why it was irrelevant, which I already pointed out and was the meat of the statement. The concept of an electric car is painfully simple. Way more so than an internal combustion engine, in fact.
> The first electric car predates the 20th century
Great, now do steam. Being produced in the past does not mean it will make a comeback, despite steam being quieter, with great torque, and the main ingredient for propulsion (water) being safer than gasoline for normal people to refuel
Yeah 10 years ago.
Good for them as a company, thats why they are still here.
And now? Everyone builds EVs, everyone is as far as Tesla or better.
Even the old school companies like BMW have now more models than Tesla and the Cybertruck was expensive to build, build badly and did not deliver what Elon the druggy and antidemocrat Musk promised.