Why do you think Tesla was first to market with their semi-autonomous features (beyond just primitive lane warning and radar cruise control features)?

Why are they able to release software updates so frequently to their cars?

I really think people need to wake up to the fact that cars aren’t the same price they were 20-30 years ago, and that when Automakers price their cars they do it against other new ones, not used ones. $30K puts it right into normal mid-sized sedan pricing. A Camry XLE Hybrid or Honda Accord Hybrid starts at about 30K,…

The average price of a new car in the US in 2015 was $34,428. I think 12% less than average is close enough to ‘affordable’.

$30,000 is very affordable. Have you seen how much a modern accord costs?

Right, but someone has to want to buy the Bolt, people will be lining up for the Tesla, or at least that’s what I think.

The NUMMI factory in its prime had somewhere between 400k-450k production a year. Tesla also has the Tilburg plant in Netherlands which has capacity for 1000 cars per week (so about 50k)

This isn’t a race on who makes the most profit. But Tesla sold what like 7X more cars than Ferrrari last year? And they continue to grow rapidly.

They could make money right now building cars, but then they would be stuck being a niche manufacturer. Which is not what they want. So they are spending money for rapid growth.

That is a myth. Even if you subtract the credits, Tesla still would make 21k per car in profit and still have the highest profit margins of any US automaker. ZEV + Carb credits were about 6% of revenue.

Considering he specifically says its 35k before tax credits.

The price of the car is 35k - 7.5k tax credit = 27.5k. Factor in savings on gas. That is pretty affordable.

Industry average price for a new car is somewhere in the low $30k range right? With a few incentives, I’m sure these models would become reasonable for anyone in the market for a new car. “Obtainable” is a better word but it probably doesn’t sound as good from a marketing perspective. It reinforces the idea that the…

There’s no backtracking, they’re going for Cafe Goals. It makes sense to go small displacement turbo as it can produce as much power as a bigger V8. People make the mistake all the time thinking the 3.5L EB was designed to be in the same league as the 5.0L V8. In reality, it should get similar fuel economy to the…

Intentional implementation of the Streisand effect.

Camoflage fail... if they didn’t have the dazzle camo on those quarter panels nobody would have paid any attention to that truck.

Well, it helps that you don’t have to line the pockets of the entire executive management staff at Lockheed-Martin.

Fuel will only remain cheap if we otherwise restrict its use. The true cost of using fossil fuels goes well beyond what we pay for the stuff at the pump - the externalities are huge. Carbon-based fuels will eventually be phased out, whether through market incentives/disincentives (carbon taxes) or other regulatory…

Certainly not cheap like we are seeing now. The Saudis are willing to flood the market to kill investment in new oil sources elsewhere, but probably not indefinitely. They just want to bankrupt current fracking/tar sand extraction projects, and scare investors with the idea that they could do so again in the future.…

I don’t know about that. Ford, Chevy, Ram, and GMC are already selling the equivalents of S-Classes (or at least E-Classes) in pickup form, so it’s not like there’s much new territory left to chart at the top end of the segment. And a lot of what sells trucks is the machismo image of looking like a blue collar tough…