Featured Others losing the Federal Tax Credit after Tesla

What are you talking about john.

Its 2018. The incentives were put out in 2010 to have cars in a good generation by 2017, which GM and Tesla have. Last month The tesla model 3 was the highest grossing passenger car in the US. How is that low volume? Sure if you wait until you are a generation behind and the incentives stay well its not really an incentive for technology or car sales with that technology, its an incentive for the laggards. Toyota and VW if they worked at it could easily be at the 200K level in the US at the end of 2019, instead they pushed fuel cells and diesels, and dragged there feet saying no one wants plug ins.

So if the goal is to work against the government goal, and get rewarded, I guess your goals and mine are different.

 

Well someone has to buy the Teslas.

Bob Wilson

 

I am quite happy to take the one for the team!
I know, I know, driving a Tesla for the last eight years has been such a hardship, but I am willing so others can get used Teslas

 

Well....Tesla is (still) a 'luxury' brand...at least until they can lower the price on the Model 3. Luxury brands typically fare better on depreciation. Point is that maybe depreciation won't affect Tesla as much? Again....I guess we'll see.

 

Point well taken. I suspect you are correct, that Tesla's will take less of a hit.
But time will tell, as you said.

 

I'd read that they were doing well. But they're just one manufacturer, and a luxury niche one at that. Your very next post mentions less-good results from a mass market manufacturer. The meat and potatoes of the business.

What I'm getting at is a little more cultural I suppose. Automakers are often portrayed negatively for their handling of technology- can't update this, poor mechanism to update that. I'm worried about the converse: auto manufacturers working more like software & consumer electronics makers where a product enjoys full support for a year or two, but by the 4th or 5th year it's forgotten with all future support abandoned.

 

The usual, big picture verses small... a complete waste of time if the difference is not recognized & understood. That's why I ask the question... to verify perspective. Remember audience?

 

Most of them leased under good to great terms.

The gen2 Volt's starting MSRP dropped at least $6000 under the gen1. I expect another price cut when GM loses the credit.

The Leaf has a poor cooling system that Nissan adopted to keep the costs down. It is a passive air cooled battery; there isn't even a fan. No body else uses such a system. They at least have fans, if not a liquid cooling and heating system for the battery. I am a little surprised that they continued this corner cutting on the gen2 with its larger battery pack. This will be an example of a BEV that bucks the reliability trend in the future.

As I said, traditional cars have already suffered such software related problems, and they supported the fixes just as well as the hardware ones. Many people probably don't know that the recall, service campaign, or other issue they brought their car in for only involved making an update the car's software with nothing else touched. There are multiple computers 'under the hood' that just keep the car running.

The infotainment and nav systems are the only software the customer sees. Those could be clunky and hard to update from the customer side, but those aren't involved in keeping the car road worthy.