It is, but obviously Apple designed everything to be extremely easy for them to manufacture at high volumes. That’s the kind of thing that Tesla seems to be having a lot of problems with.
I work in automotive. One VP of a fairly large company I was having dinner with remarked “Tesla is about to find out just how difficult it is to build a car”
While I share some of those concerns, in all fairness it should be pointed out that this is literally what cell phone manufacturers said about the iPhone.
Remember that initially Apple sold the iPhone for $600 or something. The big revolution was that the initial buyer wasn't the carrier, but the end user, not only for the iOS ecosystem, but for the phone as well.
iPhone devalued the billions of capital investment that Verizon had made when high-end users ran to Cingular to get the iPhone in the face of a slower, less reliable and less available network, and took the best customers.
Tesla is a very different story. They have to balance the elitist cachet with the fact that relatively consumers actually want an electric car, and that they cannot meet demand of those who do.
Except that CLEARLY wasn't the case. Cell phone mfgs were making garbage, Apple came around and without question revolutionized the industry overnight.
Let's be honest that Tesla hasn't revolutionized the car, they have a clone of existing cars but with an electric powertrain.
Toyota's been developing their own battery management technologies for 21 years. Almost half of their cars & SUVs have a hybrid variant available today, each with 1-3 kWh of NiMH battery capacity and ~200 fl-lbs of additional torque.
There have definitely been news articles and press releases that talk about that. But that type of media is directly related to what someone wanted the stock price to do. Know that when you see it next.
Hard to say how much of that was legit. Maybe Tesla has designs that although Pana makes aren’t available to anyone else. Maybe they’re fairly normal components.
Both Toyota and Honda ventured into hybrids and battery technology long before Tesla was founded. Nearly a decade before, if you trace back to the Prius program initiation.
Tesla was formed to design hybrids to compete against the Prius and Insight and only later pivoted into pure EV. They were actually the market-follower at inception, not the innovator.
I don't see how those Japanese companies can be accused of sitting on technology.
> Both Toyota and Honda ventured into hybrids and battery technology long before Tesla was founded.
Exactly! So how come they are so far behind. If they had been serious about it, they could be far ahead of where Tesla is now, instead, the opposite is true.
> I don't see how those Japanese companies can be accused of sitting on technology
The 'sitting on it' was in reference to the post I was replied to which was talking about a hypothetical situation where these companies had Tesla's technology, and the thing is, they could have had it if they were serious about it.
They're not sitting on it in the nefarious sense, they're just not particularly interested in developing EV compared to the ICE side of their business.
> they're just not particularly interested in developing EV compared to the ICE side of their business.
The ICE business has a lot of cronies that come with it too. I'm sure they're getting kickback for going full-bore with ICE development: you've got the oil dependency, the gas dependency, and the ICE maintenance and component dependency (the more techy and hybrid drivetrains are just a promise for high maintenance costs once things start to break).
Throw in the fact that it's super cheap to develop a more efficient gas engine compared to an electric motor/battery combo; and it's pretty easy to see why none of these companies push for it like an outsider without these vested interests.
In fact, I could see these outside interests being all for an EV with minuscule range (35-50 miles or whatever the big manufacturers tote now) because they know all and well that the majority of US drivers can't hang with that as a daily driver.
Hybrid power trains are available up and down the product line. Both companies have an electric only vehicles that are real cars... not compliance cars.
They move in steps to get the process and supply chain built, and to maximize their capital investments. They also are giving customers what they want — few consumers want electric.
> They also are giving customers what they want — few consumers want electric.
In words often attributed to Henry Ford “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
And your comment proves my point. Existing manufacturers are more interested in their existing ICE business than in fully electric, and will be until it's too late. Yes they 'have' electric vehicles, in the same way the Microsoft had phones and has a search engine, but it's not where they are focusing their business engergies (compared to Tesla).
