Is this the beginning of the end for Tesla - Mercedes EQC

Sabre Man

Are there any other cars that offer the following:
PIN to drive to prevent relay attacks
Sentry mode using 8 cameras to record acts of vandalism and accidents
Dash cam
Dog mode
Automatic lane change while on Autopilot (not available in Iread at the moment)
A constant stream of UI updates and improvements

creedp

Sabre Man wrote: »

Are there any other cars that offer the following:
PIN to drive to prevent relay attacks
Sentry mode using 8 cameras to record acts of vandalism and accidents
Dash cam
Dog mode
Automatic lane change while on Autopilot (not available in Iread at the moment)
A constant stream of UI updates and improvements

Don't now but am not particularly taken by any of these features.

Gumbo

creedp wrote: »

Don't now but am not particularly taken by any of these features.

No one manufacture will be able to cater for everybody.
You don't want these features, so you buy something else, simple.

There is probably not one car out there that does everything for everybody.

Sabre Man

I forgot to add that Tesla and Elon listen to and communicate with their customers on Twitter and frequently add features or change their UI based on customer feedback.

creedp

kceire wrote: »

No one manufacture will be able to cater for everybody.
You don't want these features, so you buy something else, simple.

There is probably not one car out there that does everything for everybody.

I don't have any problem with these or any other features found in Tesla's and their existence wouldn't stop me buying a Tesla nor would they be a deciding factor in buying a Tesla over any other car. As I see it many pretty basic features found in current cars are ignored by many .. nice to have but rarely used .. not to mind the features now to be found in the likes of Tesla's. Techie's will fawn all over them but a large proportion of the car buying public will be oblivious they even exist not to mind know how to use them.

zep

Ohhh, finally a valid thread, no wait scratch that, started by someone who has nothing but negative views in relation to Tesla.
Why bother, surely you have something better to do with your time?

ToxicPaddy

I see Tesla as being like the iPhone 10 -15 years ago. They set the standard for smart phones that everyone else had to live up to and try to catch up with.

Tesla do make very good cars at the high end of the market for people with deep pockets. Pretty to look at, decent range, nice features (ludicrous mode etc).

However making an EV for the everyday man at a reasonable price is where they are struggling. Apple still are struggling to do this with their iPhone. They wanted to be a luxury market brand but realised they need to sell volume to fund their research and grow their company. They only get this from mass consumption.

The big brands were watching and learning. Watching how the market is evolving, observing the back lash from the diesel gate scandal, watching how countries are banning diesels from their cities and putting low emissions zones in place and how people want the convenience of an EV or at least a decent hybrid. Now they are starting to make their move. Testing the markets with different models, seeing what demand is like and what the consumer wants.

I have a friend who works in market research, trust me, the big brands are watching and learning, very very quickly.

Yes it may be a few years until they catch up to Teslas S range and they might even bypass the 3 range in the short term but what matters is that they have the market share, financial power and research divisions to ease into the market while still selling standard petrol and diesel models to keep their balance sheet comfortably in the black. Something Tesla doesn't have and they know this.

Bigger brands are in it for the long term, the very long term and are not looking to be first to market, they want to be the market leader without breaking the bank.

They want to bring to the market relatively low priced models that sell to the masses with shared technology across the range so they cab benefit from economies of scale. A lot of bigger brands have customer loyalty to keep too, so instead of rushing a badly made model to the market, they are drip feeding them to their existing customers knowing that rushing something badly built with reliability issues will alienate their customer base and affect attracting new customers.

The VAG group used their racing divisions for a huge amount of research into battery powered vehicles, hybrids, aero dynamics, power storage and reclamation of power from the vehicle.

Now their parent company, Porsche has switched its focus from endurance GT racing to Formula E. Do you think this is a coincidence? This is merely a way of furthering their research.

So yes, maybe Tesla are leading the ways in some areas but the others are catching up fast.

Anteayer

I don't really think you can compare Apple and Tesla.
Apple isn't a disrupter in the same sense. It's an old tech company that's been around since the 1970s - predates Microsoft and a lot of others and happened to hit a level of cool in the 2000s. Their products are extremely different to Tesla and they've 40+ years of experience in the sector.

Also Apple's absolutely hugely profitable and sitting on a giant cash pile, Tesla is neither of those things.

They also haven't really got the same strategies at all. Apple doesn't need to go full market, rather it just needs to maintain its insanely profitable segment and it seems to be managing to do that very effectively. It's also a consumer products company with relatively much lower costs at point of entry i.e. a few hundred €/$ vs tens of thousands. It also has revenue streams from selling software (App Store and others) and media sales (iTunes Music Store / movies etc)

bk

Anteayer wrote: »

Nokia and Ericsson went back to their core business : network infrastructure. It's actually a very, very different sector. Ericsson has been around for over a hundred years and is hugely dominant in telecoms infrastructure. You've been making calls on Ericsson switching equipment all your life and so was your granny in the 1950s. Nokia absorbed Alcatel which included Bell Labs.

Both companies are anything but 'gone'.

The problem was neither were consumer product companies by origin and when the technology shifted to basically being a mobile touch screen computer, two old infrastructure companies didn't have the knowledge of user interfaces and computer technology to compete and the emphasis for handsets shifted to Silicon Valley.

Other than it contains the word phone and can make calls, a smart phone is not primarily a phone. It's very advanced computer. An iPhone has everything in common with a Mac and almost nothing in common with a Nokia 5110. It would be like comparing a PC to a 1990s VCR. They can both record television programmes but they've nothing in common beyond that one function.

In the car industry the older players are finely honed consumer oriented manufacturing outfits that are extremely good at what they do and the shift of technology is only the drive train. The fundamental of design, manufacturing, supply chain and marketing haven't changed.

Tesla would have had to have made a breakthrough like flying cars that had some element of teleportation to be compared to the dawn of the smartphone Vs the telephone.

Nokia actually had great experience with making smartphones. They had Smartphones, even touchscreen ones, far before iPhone, Symbian OS, etc. and they knew perfectly well that the future of mobile phones was portable computers, etc. and were working in that direction far before Apple.

The problem was they got caught flat footed by the introduction of the iPhone, it was very powerful and it used a very intuitive interface on a capacitive touchscreen.

They thought it looked cool, but didn't feel it was a threat. Nokia was the world leader by far, iPhones were too expensive for most people, it would take years for Apple to scale up production to match the 100's of million of mobile phones Nokia made every year. Nokia would have plenty of time to make their own touchscreen smart phone and use their massive manufacturing capacity and great brand name to crush Apple.....

Well we all know how that worked out and doesn't it sound sort of familiar?

If you ever read the great book, "The Innovators Dilemma", you'd know that all the companies who have failed to keep up with disruptive innovations over the years, all knew these disruptions were the future and were working towards their own versions, but what just too slow in changing.

The issue is that they often have massive levels of debt invested in the old technology, big factories producing the old product, they don't want to Osbourne effect their old products and investment by releasing a sexy new product too soon. Ideally they want to VERY slowly ramp up the new product, drip feeding it out, while they still sell much more of the old product.

Sound familiar?

Also their can be massive internal fights within these companies between conservatives who want to produce the old product and innovators who see the danger and want to move forward. Fighting between these groups can often slow them down by years (see BMW's boards arguments about EV's as an example).

The new companies don't have these problems, they don't have an old product to sell. They have just one very clear goal, scale up and sell as much of the new product that they can, grab as much marketshare as they can, as quickly as they can.

This is where the old companies fail, people see the new product, from the new company and decide they want that, rather the the old one and stop buying the old one much faster then the old company planned for, leaving them with massive amounts of unsold stock and old factories tooled to make the wrong product and most importantly mountains of debt that they can't repay and thus go into bankruptcy.

Working in the the tech industry, I've seen this happen over and over again. It isn't anything new.

And I have to say, I'm seeing this written all over the car industry. It is laughable how obvious it is.

I'm not saying for certain if Tesla will survive or not, but I will say I'm certain some of the traditional car companies will definitely collapse under their mountains of debt invested in old technology like diesel engines factories and being too slow to change.

And yes, some new companies will raise up to take their place. Maybe Tesla, maybe some Chinese companies, etc.

BTW It wasn't really Apple that killed Nokia, it was Google, Samsung and the other Asian companies. When Apple released the iPhone, Google was working on Android, but it was designed to compete with Blackberry. On seeing the iPhone, they knew that was the future and they quickly re-wrote it for touch screens and then their Asian partners swamped the market with Android phones at all price points. That is what really killed Nokia. Nokia could have survived Apple taking the top 15% of the market from them. But they couldn't survive losing all the other markets segments to Samsung, etc.

Nokia were simply too slow to react and they thought they were too big to fail...

And I wouldn't be surprised if we see that happen again with cars. I suspect Tesla are here to say, but like Apple they won't be the biggest company, they will just end up with a very nice marketshare. The interesting question to me, is who will be the Samsung of the EV industry, the existing company who quickly switches to EV's before the rest and ends up taking the majority of the market at lower price segments. VAG look like a possibility here, but we might get surprised by Toyota, Nissan, etc.

Anteayer

Well, Google actually acquired Android Inc in 2005. I suspect that's what's going to happen with Tesla ultimately - just by a car marker, not Nokia.

Also with regard to Nokia and computers. Yes, they had Symbian which they acquired in 2008. It was a company that had developed a touch interface from the old Psion's EPOC OS in the 90s.

Nokia also developed Maemo which is largely just GNU/Linux and based around GNOME UI components.
Then they crashed that into something Intel were developing and you got Meego.

I still do not agree that Nokia had any significant experience with UIs. They had developed early touch phones but that's all they'd done. Their UI for the OS was very poor compared to what Apple did and I remember it well. They also had a fixation on non-capacitive touch screens which were really clunky.

The other thing that was a bit of an issue was Nokia never marketed to consumers, it marketed to telcos. Which is reflected very much in their origins. They were a supplier to those companies and they controlled the marketing channels and often heavy customisation of the phones.

Apple did the complete opposite and made networks beg for iPhones.

Nokia had all sorts of internal issues with competing business units and teams. They also had multiple OS platforms being developed in parallel for no reason and then the cellular operators showed them little loyalty when Android came along and Nokia had no control over its own marketing channels as they were being sold by operators.

So, the likes of HTC, Samsung and so on were fed into the same channels.

Then the final kiss of death was shunning Android and pushing out Windows mobile.

bk

Anteayer wrote: »

Well, Google actually acquired Android Inc in 2005. I suspect that's what's going to happen with Tesla ultimately.

The iPhone was launched in 2007...

It really isn't the same at all. Android, Inc. never did sell any products to any consumers. They created an OS, that they tried to get other companies to buy, that was their goal.

It was late 2008 when the first Android phone was ever sold.

It is a poor comparison.

Maybe Google buying Motorola is a better comparison, but still poor. Motorola were one of the traditional companies who were too slow to react to the market changes and ended up a very bad buy for Google too.

Anteayer

The entire comparison with the mobile phone industry is poor as the parallels don't really exist. There's a massive difference between producing relatively cheap (sub $1000 cost) electronics units in mass production that's almost printed and making cars.

Shefwedfan

Tesla and Apple should not be compared.....

Both have fan boys and that is about the only comparison that should be made

bk

It is laughable to argue that Nokia didn't market to consumers and were just a "Networking company".

At their height, they were one the largest consumer companies in the world and the Nokia brand was loved by people and they had absolutely rabid fanboys.

I agree that Nokia's early attempts at making smartphones were poor and Apple absolutely knocked it out of the park. But really this is all repeating in the EV market.

Nokia were brilliant at making relatively cheap, highly memory and CPU constrained phones. They didn't see it coming that people would be willing to pay hundreds if not thousands to have powerful computers in their pockets. They thought enterprise might be willing to (thus the Communicator brand), but not consumers. The rest, was them reacting and changing too slowly.

bk

Shefwedfan wrote: »

Tesla and Apple should not be compared.....

Both have fan boys and that is about the only comparison that should be made

And so do VAG and Nokia had.

I'm trying to point out the very real effect of disruptive changes on traditional companies.

Anteayer

I'd suggest you read a marketing journal on it. Nokia had very poor control of own sales channels. They effectively were marking via Vodafone, Orange, AT&T, Verizon, etc etc.
The huge difference with Apple was they didn't go that route. They did sell through those companies but they gave them no control.

There's no equivalent in the motor industry as there's no tradition of car markers selling through service providers. It would be almost like if car sales channels were controlled by petrol retailers.

bk

Anteayer wrote: »

The entire comparison with the mobile phone industry is poor as the parallels don't really exist. There's a massive difference between producing relatively cheap (sub $1000 cost) electronics units in mass production that's almost printed and making cars.

It really isn't that different. Disruptive changes impact every industry. That is the point I'm making.

Sega, NEC, Compaq, HP, Toy's R Us, Motorola, Yahoo, MySpace, Kodak, AOL, Blockbuster, I could go on all day.

Even the car industry isn't immune to disruptive changes.

The US car companies nearly went under multiple times with the rise of the Japanense Companies and also recession and oil crises. The only reason they are around still because they got bailed out by the government.

VW, Audi and Porsche had to merge in order to survive. Nissan and Renault.

We will see lots more of these sort of mergers over the next few years as the disruptions of EV's, environmental restrictions and self driving hit hard.

bk

Anteayer wrote: »

There's no equivalent in the motor industry as there's no tradition of car markers selling through service providers. It would be almost like if car sales channels were controlled by petrol retailers.

They are called car dealerships and they end up having a very big say it what gets sold.

Many past EV's not taking off like the Volt, etc. has been blamed on car dealerships not knowing how to sell them or wanting to sell them as they require less maintenance, which car dealerships make so much of their money on from their service centers.

There really are lots of parallels, I'm seeing it written all over the car industry. The car industry of course has it's own unique challenges, but it certainly ain't immune to disruption.

Anteayer

I'm not saying that the car market's free from disrupters, what I'm saying is that the comparisons with the mobile sector aren't that relevant.

Even the Google vs Apple vs Samsung comparison that gets trotted out makes no sense given

Apple : A 70s / 80s IT company morphed into what's increasingly a luxe/lifestyle consumer brand.
Google : Primarily an advertising and software company that's in a space it more or less developed itself in a sector that didn't exist until the internet went mass market.
Samsung : Traditional almost conglomerate that makes everything from ships to phones to biopharmaceuticals.

Tesla is in a position that quite a few companies have been in over the years i.e. trying to crack the car industry and the track record with those has not been great.

I'd suspect the next huge disruption of the car production market won't be Tesla, it will be Chinese companies doing much like what the Japanese companies did in the 70s.

bk

While I definitely agree that the Chinese have to be the ones to watch, given their expertise in battery manufacturing.

But the next disruption after EV is self driving cars. And software and sensors plays a massive part in that disruption. A Californian based car company, from the heart of silicon valley, seems to be a company very well placed for this disruption.

You made the point that Nokia had poor UI and software dev skills. Well guess which companies have terrible software and UI in their cars, yep the traditional car companies. I mean, unless you count them writing software to cheat at tests!

I'm not sure these companies are really up for the changes in mindset that software driven cars involve.

Of course the dark horse here is Google who are also working on self driving tech. Could they be the saviours of the old companies by doing Andrioid 2.0 by selling their self driving tech to the trad companies.

It is certainly going to be interesting to watch.

If I had the money to buy shares in "new company a" every time I heard fanboys say "old company b" would kill "new company a", well I'd be a very rich man now!

unkel

BKtje wrote: »

Drive train efficiency and weight differences also play a huge part i'd say. The Merc I think is 2400kg while a model 3 is 1600kg.

The EQC shouldn't be compared with the Model 3, it's competing with the Model X! And that's also a 2400kg car. Big difference is that it has a Cd of just 0.24 vs the Mercedes, what, 0.28 or so? That will have a huge impact on motorway range. The Mercedes will be found far short of people's expectations (based on WLTP)

kirving

Anteayer wrote: »

The problem was neither were consumer product companies by origin and when the technology shifted to basically being a mobile touch screen computer, two old infrastructure companies didn't have the knowledge of user interfaces and computer technology to compete and the emphasis for handsets shifted to Silicon Valley.

Very good post, plenty of parallels there alright.

In my view Nokia were only probably a year or so behind Apple at the start, but culture (from their original core business) slowed their ability to change. They were well able to innovate, just not quickly enough in Finland when compared to the melting pot of Silicon Valley as you say. The N95 was a far more capable device in 2006 than the iPhone on release in 2007, but a focus on robustness and reliability (slow development schedules & lots of testing) meant that Nokia couldn't keep up.

When it comes to automotive, the big players have reliability all but mastered. It takes time to bring new tech such as FSD to that level of reliability, but once they do, it will be a nigh on infallible product that will sweep across the market very quickly. There's an assumption amongst some that the big players have their head in the sand and were happy with status quo, but that couldn't be further from the truth.

Anteayer wrote: »

In the car industry the older players are finely honed consumer oriented manufacturing outfits that are extremely good at what they do and the shift of technology is only the drive train. The fundamental of design, manufacturing, supply chain and marketing haven't changed.

Agreed. Tesla have had a great headstart in terms of engineering as their design is relatively simple in comparison to building a reliable ICE vehicle. The bigger players will catch up soon though, and when they do, they have an extremely strong supply chain and vast experience in reliability behind them.

ELM327 wrote: »

This headline is nonsensical.
The amount of doom sayers (dare I say, shorts) around here is ridiculous.
You know who you are and you should be ashamed. Without Tesla there would be no mainstream EVs.

You can be skeptical of Tesla's abilities without being badged a doom sayer. Without Tesla disrupting the market we would be a few years behind alright, but there would be EV's, but Teslas have a long way to come.

The manufactured in the region of 250k vehicles last year, VW built 11M. Still, Tesla have hit 10% of Mercedes production numbers in a few short years, but they have a long way to go still.

ELM327 wrote: »

And there isnt anything out there that matches Tesla now.

As much as I have respect for Tesla, and would love one, I wouldn't buy one over an S-Class, and can't see that changing for a few years yet.

catharsis

Sabre Man wrote: »

Are there any other cars that offer the following:
PIN to drive to prevent relay attacks
Sentry mode using 8 cameras to record acts of vandalism and accidents
Dash cam
Dog mode
Automatic lane change while on Autopilot (not available in Iread at the moment)
A constant stream of UI updates and improvements

1. (pin-to-dive) yes (bmw put that into their cars in Russia as far back as 2006 in response to the rise of fingerprint readers being bypassed by cutting off fingers!)

this is trivial, just not a priority for the manufacturers.

2. (sentry mode) no - but did anyone really say I want a big flashing red screen instead of a small flashing red LED in the mirror to tell people my alarm is on? (admittedly the recording is handy, but fundamentally useless if stored on a usb drive inside the car which can be taken by any criminal who breaks into the car - if going to cloud would have made sense)

3. (dashcam) yes. many manufacturers offer including audi.

4. dog mode - I think many manufacturers (mostly american/larger cars) offer a mode to keep the car ventilated for kids/dogs. None of them to my knowledge advertise this on the screen as yet, but that is hardly 'genius' nor difficult to deliver - they don't do it because no one ever really thought it was a good idea.

5. not available so does not exist. (Also I thought the A8 and latest 7-series was L3+ autonomy and CAN actually do this is a legally compliant manner unlike Tesla?)

6. UI updates and improvements are certainly the key differentiator (until one of the big players decides they want to offer the same, the only restriction is inertia& legal/liability concerns - the devices are now all networked, which as you may realise is leading to all sorts of interesting hack attacks on modern cars.)- but specifically I believe JLR have released OTA in the iPace and VW ID is also claiming to offer OTA, so the answer once again is yes.

Incidentally when the great new updates to a car are atari games and fart mode you start to see why not everyone takes that all that seriously.

On the other hand a software update which increased braking performance as happened some time ago is seriously good news (even it it does beg the question of why it was bad in the first place, it beats the hell out of going back for a recall).

Sabre Man

Shefwedfan wrote: »

Tesla do a lot of shouting with the smallest update, none of the big cars will shout until the product is ready....

You mean excluding all those concept cars we've been seeing for years?

Shefwedfan

Sabre Man wrote: »

You mean excluding all those concept cars we've been seeing for years?

Do you have an issue with concept cars now? because as far as I am aware car manufacturers have been doing that for many many years.....

Mike9832

Sabre Man wrote: »

You mean excluding all those concept cars we've been seeing for years?

Haha

I just call them " coming soon " now

TCP/IP

Some really interesting views but I have to agree that Tesla is in the wrong business they should not be in the car business but the technology business.
They should concentrate on battery and automation technology and license it to car companies they would increase their profitability and EBITA by a huge amount and in turn cut out having to deal with the end user and all that comes with that.
Why would any of the other car manufacturers spend all the money on R+D when they could buy from Tesla the necessary technology.

Shefwedfan

TCP/IP wrote: »

Some really interesting views but I have to agree that Tesla is in the wrong business they should not be in the car business but the technology business.
They should concentrate on battery and automation technology and license it to car companies they would increase their profitability and EBITA by a huge amount and in turn cut out having to deal with the end user and all that comes with that.
Why would any of the other car manufacturers spend all the money on R+D when they could buy from Tesla the necessary technology.

They should and have tried. They have tried to sell off the tech to other car manufacturers and they have turned them down. They had a relationship with merc and merc closed it down

They have offered the charging network to other and they turned it down....

KCross

TCP/IP wrote: »

Why would any of the other car manufacturers spend all the money on R+D when they could buy from Tesla the necessary technology.

Because they dont have interest in developing EV's.

Tesla would be long gone if all they had to offer was a drivetrain.

Sabre Man

Thanks for your answers.

catharsis wrote: »

2. (sentry mode) no - but did anyone really say I want a big flashing red screen instead of a small flashing red LED in the mirror to tell people my alarm is on? (admittedly the recording is handy, but fundamentally useless if stored on a usb drive inside the car which can be taken by any criminal who breaks into the car - if going to cloud would have made sense)

The recordings are uploaded to Tesla.

catharsis wrote: »

Incidentally when the great new updates to a car are atari games and fart mode you start to see why not everyone takes that all that seriously.

Kids love them though. It makes Teslas cool and different.