Jack Ricard has been building electric cars for long time, before Tesla even shipped the roadster. He has torn apart and reverse engineered many of the electric cars on the market.
Here is his take on Tesla:
http://evtv.me/2019/08/the-tesla-conspiracy-or-am-i-a-dead-whistleblower/
Here is just part of his post:
It is also arguably the SAFEST car ever built. There is actually a current imbroglio over this between Tesla and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. They test cars for safety in a number of categories and indeed assign a point score in each category. That then is translated to a “star” rating with 1 star being very minimal and 5 stars being the maximum that can be awarded. Not only did Tesla achieve a five star rating in ALL categories tested, but the point score was the highest ever achieved at NHTSA by any car.
Tesla proudly announced this fact to anyone who would listen. And NHTSA takes strong exception to this. Note that they don’t actually deny any of Tesla’s claims, but they are incensed that Tesla would divulge point scores or make any statements beyond the official number of stars awarded. This is some sort of governmental attempt to limit what you can SAY about a publicly funded and governmentally administered test.
So my claim is that Tesla makes the BEST automotive vehicle on the planet, barring none, in all respects, including SAFETY. It is just the best car ever built. And I would challenge anyone to demonstrate even partially that this is not so.
Let’s take a look at Tesla’s car production figures. They just finished their LARGEST production quarter with some 87048 vehicles produced. They DELIVERED over 95,000 vehicles in the quarter, also a record, but that is because 8000ish vehicles produced in the first quarter were not delivered until the second.
Let’s take a look at a couple of things. Q2 2015, two years AFTER the Model S became WIDELY available, they produced 12807 vehicles. That’s 679% growth in four years or 170% per year.
Part of the “short thesis” is that Tesla cannot produce enough cars to meet demand. And a second part of the short thesis is that there won’t be demand for the cars they produce. What am I supposed to do with this? Two mutually exclusive and totally unlikely factoids issuing from the same potato disposer simultaneously.
Again, Tesla doesn’t advertise for a very cunning reason. It doesn’t work at all. The public trust in commercial messaging has now broached zero and has gone into negative numbers. Mike’s Pillow really was NOT the best night’s sleep I ever had. And basically 100% of the public discounts ALL of 100% of the commercial messaging it sees.
But we do still largely trust our friends and associates. And so if you see a Tesla, better get to ride in a friends Tesla, better yet he lets you DRIVE their Tesla, you want one. Period. I’ve never HEARD of anyone riding in a Tesla who did not immediately conclude that they wanted the car.
Could they afford the car? Did they need a car? Did they already have a car? All open and valid questions. But they did WANT THAT ONE on contact.
Now there are any number of reasons why people buy the cars they buy. But few actually take aim at being the personal owner of the SECOND best car in the world. It’s like going on ALLRECIPES.COM and searching out the SECOND BEST lasagna recipe. For what???
You might well make the fifth most popular lasagna recipe, because you are vegan and don’t want any meat in your lasagna. But you KNOW you aren’t getting the best.
I have a couple of viewers who have advised me in the last week they were picking up a Model X and Model 3 respectively. They’ve known about Tesla for years. They have wanted a Tesla for years. They are both buying one this week.
So my claim from observation and intimate knowledge, is that Tesla can sell all they can make and they can do so at essentially any price they want. It is a growing demand and totally inelastic and agnostic. It grows by contact. The more they make and deliver, the more people have contact with the cars and the more demand is generated for all that they make.
How far does this extend? How LONG can you sustain 170% compounded growth?
You know, that SHOULD be the defining question. And I’m unusually pleased to note that it is not because it is one of those astonishing things that just tickle my sense of whimsey when I come across them.
EVTV has largely ceased to convert ICE cars to electric drive, which was long our only reason for life. It started in 2009 and while the Tesla Roadster was much discussed, not a single one had ever been actually delivered. If you wanted an electric car in the spring of 2009, you had to build one. There were ZERO models offered by the sum total of all automotive manufacturers worldwide. We defined, aided, abetted, and enabled the tinkerer/innovator stage of the adoption curve and noted numerous times that on achieving “early adopter” phase we were out of it.
I lied. The outcome was SO assured that by 2017 my mind, with the laser like focus and attention span of a four-year-old, just wandered away. This no longer requires my efforts. The outcome is assured.
And Tesla was largely the reason. Basically it costs between $20-40,000 to do a good build converting an ICE car to electric drive.
Tilt and tittle at that all you want, I did a lot of them and a lot of different ways and several were over $100k. Not really unusual among custom car enthusiasts and I expect those guys will be doing electric conversion show cars 50 years from now.
The Model 3 at $40k is a better car than I can do at $40k.
Worse, it is kind of a one sided launch. We covered the news of LOTS of different electric cars, and most notably HUNDREDS of VW press releases that never were actually cars. And the conclusion was that it just doesn’t matter. Porsche and BMW were the only ones that had the right stuff to compete with TEsla and they didn’t. All else didn’t matter and couldn’t matter. And yes, Porsche’s Taycan will launch this September 4th and they are going to sell 30,000 or 40,000 of them and THEY STILL WON’T MATTER.
Tesla just owns it. And at this point, the moats of its battery technology and costing, its Supercharger network, it’s online sales model, the Over the Air Software Updates, and much much more put it SO far out ahead, that the other manufacturers are still announcing the “coming Tesla killer” aimed at the 2013 Tesla Model S. Problem: It is 2019.
And so we basically got out of converting EV’s BEFORE we got to the early adopter stage. I lied. Because the outcome is not just assured, it is unstoppable.
But if all else fails, the commonly held marker for the BEGINNING of Everett Rogets adoption curve early adopter stage is 2.5% market penetration.
So where are we at? The current global market for automobiles is a little squishy on your definition of an automobile, but as a personal transportation device is currently widely regarded as 78 million units annually with about 15 million in the U.S.
The short thesis is that Tesla CANNOT POSSIBLY meet their projections of 360,000 units this year. Duh. That’s 0.0046 or 0.46%.
ALL electric cars from EVERYBODY all told don’t reach 1% of the market for cars. We aren’t even CLOSE to the “early adopter” stage.
I’m at the point where if you don’t have Tesla logo on your car you’re not electric and don’t matter. To the point that we are working furiously on things like an OBDII port adapter for the Model 3, or reverse engineering Tesla batteries, not EV batteries, TESLA batteries for solar energy storage. I have a half finished Cadillac Escalade conversion hanging in the air on a lift where it has hung for a year.
But the blue sky for Tesla is essentially UNLIMITED. They can sell all they make and make all they sell starting at 360,000 units and topping out at 78 million. They are 0.46% of a $2.3 TRILLION dollar market. And they appear to my biased eye to already own ALL of it.
It reminds me of Sandra Bullock and Sylvester Stallone, in the movie DEMOLITION MAN. In the future, ALL restaurants had consolidated under the brand name TACO BELL. If SOMEBODY doesn’t do SOMETHING pretty quickly, in the future ALL automobiles will be Tesla’s.
Hyperbole? I grow weak in the knees publicly repeating a prediction I have quietly been making for years. It is so unbelievable all I can harvest from it now is ridicule. But you are not going to BELIEVE the big names and huge corporations that face unavoidable and absolute bankruptcy and dismemberment, in the VERY NEAR future. No government can save them. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of jobs lost. Economic disruption and dislocation of unparalleled proportions. Office furniture available for 6 cents on the dollar. Not reorganization. But like Eastman Kodak. Sears. K-Mart. Companies that could not fail and are already gone. Picture GM, VW, Daimler. The biggest. The best.
