Are Teslas any good?

[tintin]

Originally Posted by moltuae

Found this video quite interesting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nreXNspBHgQ

They make some good points about why the Osborne Effect is making the transition to EVs very difficult, if not impossible, for the big ICE car manufacturers.

Yup, these guys are right (when they finally get to the point ), and I've been saying the same thing for years. It's now just the same for "Big Auto" as it has been with other sectors before/currently (hitech, retail, etc, etc). In all these cases old, established players have got fat, lazy, and arrogant, and have then been blindsided by an upstart whom they should have seen coming, who turns the sector on its head, and makes it much more focussed on what the customer wants and values.

Sadly, this often ends in massive restructuring (or complete erasure ), and the size and scale of that is always in direct proportion to the degree of fatness, laziness and arrogance of the existing players. I've seen this all too often in lots of "world class" organisations in the past (e.g. Kodak, Polaroid, Motorola, Ericcson, etc, etc), many of who were my clients at the time.

What's really sad is that often this failure to see this coming isn't for logical/economic reasons, but for human/emotional reasons (e.g. ego and arrogance - ). JLR's CEO is a classic example of this, in his initial "arrogant denial" mode (see here: https://europe.autonews.com/article/...uggles-for-evs ) - a view he espoused after Tesla had been successfully selling the Model S for several years) and consequently resulted in them wasting billions in new diesel engine investment. At about the same time, VAG were proclaiming even bigger investments in similar existing technology - also now effectively a write-off, with the concomitant impact on the livelihood of thousands of VAG employees.

The trouble is that often it's the size of these established organisations that is both the cause of this blindness to the need for change, and also of their inability to react quickly ("like turning a supertanker" to quote a rather cliched phrase). At least the new Audi CEO sort of gets this ("Tesla is 2 years ahead of the industry in critical areas, Audi CEO says": https://electrek.co/2020/07/27/tesla...reas-audi-ceo/ ), and recognises that he can't wait for the supertanker, so has to build a something new - a leaner, more agile organisation in order to try to catch up.

Until all of the major existing players in Big Auto both (a) recognise they need to do this and (b) succeed in making this happen, they'll continue to fail, sadly. But I hope they do manage it & it's fascinating to watch them try!