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Last week Monday VW opened up its pre-orders list for the ID.3, its first all-electric car built on its MEB platform. A week later, and 37,000 customers have put €1000 [~1,176 USD] in advance already.
There are a couple of reasons for the apparent enthusiasm. First the range, going from an official 330 km [~200 mi] (45kWh battery) standard range over 420 km [~250 mi] (58kWh) medium to 550 km [~330 mi] (77kWh) for the long range battery. Practical range is estimated at 260, 330 and 430 km. [~156, ~200, and ~260 mi],
Second the price. The standard version comes in at €21,000 [~24,700 USD] in Germany (€30,000 [~35,300 USD] list price, €9,000 [~10,600 USD] subsidy). Medium range has a list price of €36,000 [~42,300 USD], for the maximum range the price is not yet known, but below €50,000 [~58,800 USD].
The car is rear-wheel driven by an 150kW motor, with top speed limited at 160 km/h [~100 mph]. Torque is 310Nm, delivering 0-60 kph [~37 mph] in 3.7 seconds (1st version; the standard version 9 seconds).
No talk about autonomous driving though: only lane assist and adaptive cruise control are provided.
Delivery of the car starts in September. There are no plans to bring the ID.3 to the US. Volkswagen said it is on track to deliver 70,000 ID.3's by year's end, and an additional 30,000 upcoming ID.4 SUVs along with that. Tesla, in contrast, sold more than 90,000 of its cars last quarter alone.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Wednesday July 29 2020, @01:16PM
Unfortunately, the problem of Tesla is infrastructure. Nobody has enough charging ports or capacity. My (Greater London) shows 12 available charging slots in a town of 100,000 people. 12. Only 2 of those are "fast charge", the rest are just ordinary wall-plugs.
The number of places in my town/city/country where you can't even install a charging ports are huge too. You're reliant on communal ones and certain homeowners installing their own. You've gone from "a handful of small petrol stations in town with 6 pumps is enough to serve the entire town and commuters and outsiders" to "we need tens of thousands of communal charging ports, tied up for hours, where they can't leave their car safely, or for homeowners to install them." Renters have no choice. I simply cannot rely on owning an electric car until my landlord or their management agent (who basically owns the whole street) puts in a charger for each household. That's not gonna happen. They won't install an outside light so people don't trip over the dark pathway, let alone a 30KW+ fast charger. The alternative is having to drive into town, leave the car there charging for hours and walk home, and then pick it back up in the morning.
To use your analogy, it's like Nokia bringing out a smartphone that only runs on 5G and isn't backward compatible, and they're pretty much the only people pushing out 5G network equipment too. But it's like doing that 2-3 years ago. In time it may work but all that's going to happen is those devices that can take advantage of both new and old will be around for decades, the transition products will take priority, and all Tesla's investments will be lost the second it becomes commodity and they'll never claw it back. All to sell a car that Ford could make tomorrow.
Let's be honest: At any point, a big manufacturer can step up and wipe out Tesla's market in seconds with a superior (and more established-branded) alternative. Maybe a year of R&D at best. They haven't because it's just not profitable on their scales.
And come 2030/2040, the ICE manufacturers won't be able to sell their current product anyway - there are bans coming in on sales of ICE engines. They're not just twiddling their thumbs and cawing about the end of their entire business. They're just using up their tooling, expertise, patents, products, stock, factories, etc. and getting the most of out the thing that 99% of people actually want to buy still. When the tide-turns, Tesla's investments, innovations and side-ventures don't really mean anything. And places like VW can literally just suck up the loss of an entire year's profit without much ado - aren't they still paying billions for the emissions scandal? If they made Tesla's money for a year, they'd be having their worst year on record. They can squish them like an ant any time they like. But the others will then come out and the competition hets up very quickly. Tesla will be nothing more than a stain on the battlefield. They're holding off, not quite colluding, but just waiting for one of them to make the move so they can all pile on. Until then, Tesla is just stuck in the middle and completely disregarded.
Tesla has no patents of value, no tech of value, no manufacturing of value, no market-share of value, no infrastructure of value, no customer base of value. Not on these scales. Hell, it wouldn't be surprising to see the name or the whole company bought out just to ride on it. Picking Nokia out of the myriad phone manufacturers over the years who didn't "see" smartphones (they did... they just went with Microsoft, which is the wrong crowd in all respects) is a poor analogy. Maybe one of the traditional manufacturers will die off. But there are 20+ behemoths in that industry, all of which consider Tesla's entire historical budgets just a smudge on their financial reports.
They'll be a Kodak. But they'll also be an entire market of Canon and everyone else. And it's not a radically different product. If anything, it's far simpler. It's not like cars vs personal teleportation devices. It's not even as big a gap as petrol vs diesel engines, really. It's just another engine type, with a change of the drivetrain.
If anything, I reckon they're holding off for a battery tech. And whoever owns that takes the market and will profit from all their competitors licensing it, Tesla along with them. And if Tesla are the ones to find it (incredibly unlikely)? The best they'll be able to do is patent it out to the others, because on their own it wouldn't be enough to overturn the giants. If a new tech does come, all Tesla's investment in their batteries is worthless. If it doesn't, hell, maybe Ford will ask Tesla to make batteries for them. No skin off their nose, any more than a Japanese company making an airbag for them. But you're not going to see a world of Tesla's and everyone else in the industry going "Oh, what happened?"