Right, but that’s a short-term price hike - EV prices have been coming down for decades, and are on track to continue to come down as battery designs continue to be cost optimized. The fact that right now Nickle prices are high due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupting supply lines isn’t a long-term issue -…

Nope - over the time that Tesla raised prices 20%, the average car sale price went up 24%. The only difference is that Tesla raised their list price, since they sell direct, and the legacy car companies’ sales prices are inflated by the dealers selling for over list price through markups.

Dealers on average add 15-20% to the cost of cars, in their overhead - marketing, sales commissions, SPIFs, etc. And these days, insane markups due to car shortages have tripled dealer profits year-over-year. That’s how Tesla can match the traditional car companies on price and still make over 3x the margin. And when…

Why? Combustion engines are only 25% efficient - they waste 75% of the energy in gasoline as noise, heat and pollution. There’s a reason that EVs cost 1/4 as much per mile to run.

There have been a series of radical innovations in battery technology, and there are a stream of improvements coming. The costs came down from $10,000/kWh in the 1970s to nearly $100/kWh now, and it’s continuing to come down - Tesla’s new 4680 batteries are cheaper to make, and much cheaper to assemble, than the…

EV costs, and battery costs, have been driven down consistently long term. The cost was $10,000/kWh in the 1970s and it’s nearly $100/kWh now, with constant innovation in battery chemistry and design continuing to drive down the cost of making batteries.

Yes, right now the increase in demand for raw materials has…

Interesting, different cultures value people very differently. In China, they value the elderly more because they’ve accumulated so much knowledge, while in the US we value the baby’s greater potential future life. (Simplifying...).

Legally the driver is responsible for the car, in any driver assist system - Autopilot, FSD, or GM Cruise all operate under the same regulatory domain, legally the same as basic “cruise control” or “automatic braking”.

Given that there are 60,000 FSD Beta users, it’s inevitable that eventually there would be an accident…

Yes, charging to 100% only makes sense for overnight charging before a long trip. On a road trip, it’s faster to charge to 80% twice than charging to 100% once. The Tesla route software (in the car) optimizes trip times, so you don’t need to figure it out yourself.

Tesla’s consistently said that they were shipping the tri-motor Cybertruck first, then dual-motor, then lastly single-motor. So in effect challenging Tesla to do what they said they weren’t going to do is a little odd...

Yes, this makes the new tax credit far more useful, since in general tax credits aren’t useful to people in the lower 50% of incomes - they don’t pay enough income tax to fully benefit from a tax credit, and they can’t afford to pay 100% of the price up front and then hope to get some money back next tax season. Of…

Historically Tesla has always delivered on their announced pricing. They start at the top trim, then as they optimize manufacturing they work their way down to the cheaper trims. They may not sell many of the cheapest model, just enough to deliver on pre-orders (e.g. the $35k Model 3). But given that the Cybertruck has…

Exactly! The vendor’s incentive is to cheat to maximize profits. The customer should never trust vendors at all, they should do independent testing to protect themselves. And whenever a vendor cheats, they should be massively penalized, replacing everything defective plus a huge penalty, so that vendors are so afraid…

Try mapping routes in ABetterRoutePlanner.com , and flip between Tesla and non-Tesla cars in settings. I find that road trips in a Tesla are a delight, while non-Teslas are highly stressful because their networks are less reliable.

That’s true for non-Tesla EVs, since they’re dependent on unreliable charge networks. Road trips in a Tesla are highly consistent, because their network is highly reliable.

Having driven both, I’d say that’s the case for non-Tesla EVs. The non-Tesla EV charge networks are a bad experience. But Tesla’s charge network is a delight, which may well be a large part of why Teslas are outselling all other EVs by a wide margin. It doesn’t matter how great a car the Mach-e is, for example, if…

Well, they viewed it as a money grab, not as a way to provide service to drivers. So they deployed hardware, but it’s not properly monitored or maintained. Same mindset that led car companies to make horrible EV “compliance cars” instead of doing what Tesla did, which is to make excellent cars that people are excited…

From my experience in Tesla and BMW EVs, Tesla cars know where the chargers are, know that the chargers are working (or not), and the car’s state of charge, so they automatically route you to chargers that are properly working to optimize travel time with no problems. In contrast, non-Tesla cars tend to depend on a…

The average daily drive is 37 miles, but of course people _also_ go for occasional road trips. So unless you want a car only for commuting and use another car for road trips, this is important.

There are more high speed EV chargers where there’s more demand for them - so they’re along highways and they’re in higher density areas. Compound onto that Tesla’s high speed charger network is much more built out than the non-Tesla high-speed charger networks, and this article was only about non-Tesla charging. An…