Featured Why the auto industry is in trouble

The Electric me - Very well written ..... worthy of being an editorial in an auto magazine.

 

And beyond the gas mileage and utility, the construction of the vehicle mattered greatly. As one example, tapered pin bearings were a huge advantage over ball bearings. I recall my father clearly disparaging a certain brand based on that one feature alone.

All these Teslas running around today, does anyone look at the construction? There are many stories of faulty tie rods and other mechanical defects that possibly wouldn't be so common in an established carmaker's product. technology matters now, but a car is still a mechanical object, transporting precious cargo. structural integrity and reliability is more important to me than any technology. or what the car looks like - that's all just sheet metal anyway.

 

the only negatives i've heard about tesla seem to come from people shorting the stock. same with hillary, they're two peas in a pod.

 

My brother has nothing but positive things to say about his Tesla ....He is a NASA Engineer (Ret), and his hobby has been finding and rebuilding automobiles, and most recently .... clocks of all descriptions. I believe he is a credible evaluator.

 

wow who knew - good .... thank you for the heads up, worrying about the precious cargo inside of cars. And thanks for the warning ..... all those faulty tie rods. Never heard of it. You made me do my homework and look stuff up. My faulty tie rod research led me here - to 2011.

GM - refusing to replace faulty tie rods claiming, "too bad - that was the old, pre-bankruptcy GM - so take a hike and get out of here" .
GM claims not responsible for Impala problems from before bankruptcy - Autoblog
Refusing to take care of a safety issues on their own cars. Great PR. That sure built some Goodwill. Maybe THAT's why the OP sees a problem. Stodgy mentality not even concerned over people safety. Oh wait you said Tesla ... sorry .... maybe you meant these tie rods?
Westlaw Signon
Oops sorry that was Chrysler denying any responsibility. Dang - seems i did it again.
Ok, now i'll get it right. You must mean THIS faulty tie rod fiasco then ....
Toyota Expected to Announce Recall for Rear Suspension Failure | 877-FL-INJURY
Whoops! That seems to be Toyota. Well at least the Toyota didn't wait to have forced calls
It sure took me a while to find anything out about Tesla though. The research shows so many other companies and yet you seem to focus on Tesla. Gee that's odd. I wonder why you're not worried about the precious cargo in those other companies. But yes - tesla too had bad rods (one year only). You know , "all those Tesla's running around" as you say . And that one year only - was years ago and they quickly took care of it, and the percentages of bad tie rods were significantly less than the other manufacturers. Yet some of the other manufacturers thought replacements wasn't so important as tesla - yet they had over a 100 thousand more. Still scratching my head why your precious cargo thing doesn't apply there.
You sure you don't want to bring up the one and only one loose seat belt bolt that Tesla discovered, do you? Oh probably not since the company voluntarily required all the Model S's to come in to be checked (no others found) . Don't see other manufacturers doing that, do you - it's all about those Tesla's running around.
Keep up the good work - stamping out those bad teslas .... running around.

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The Electric Me captured the core point. Autos are going to be around for a long time. The trouble is the legacy automakers may not be around for as long. What happens when China makes a high quality car line? I'm old enough to remember when Japanese autos were laughed at...till they were not.

 

hillary will step in the new targeted tariffs.

 

China and Wall Street already bought her, good luck with that wish.

 

There's probably other factors as well as to why millennials may not be buying cars like everyone else used to. The rise of ride-sharing programs, many of them are laden with school loans, and enough of them can't find a decent paying job that they're forced to go with a cheap car and then run it until it falls apart on them on the road.

That's not to say it's the sole reason, or that none of them are buying cars at all. But it might be influencing a lot of their decisions when it comes to making a high ticket purchase like a car. And with the way the political winds are currently blowing, it doesn't look like they'll get much help or relief from the government. Thankfully the "low" gas prices are relieving some of the burden, but we all know it'll go back up sooner or later.

I've tried to convince some of my younger friends that a used Chevy Volt would fit their needs very well, and is pretty cheap at the moment due to a combination of factors affecting all plug-in vehicles. Sadly, they still think $10-16k is too much to spend on a car, and will instead only look at $3-5k cars that'll probably cost them double that in gas and maintenance as well down the road.

Or if they're spending that much, they want a new econocar instead, like a Nissan Versa or Mitsubishi Mirage. You definitely get what you pay for, but at least they can say it's a new car.

 

what are their responses/reactions after driving your car?

 

Great post , and probably true.
But for me personally the content was also hilarious as we bought our Prius as a cheap 2012 leftover and the the infotainment system is never used. Even with the nav system, I am controlling vehicle only while DW does navigation and barks out immediate commands and briefs the future course. Similarly, some airplane pilots use an autopilot system but others of us enjoy the flying experience itself and would not think of using one. Different strokes for different generations, I guess!

 

even if MB was secretly working on their ev project for a year or more - won't it still take at least 3 or 4 more years to bring something to market? THEN - there's one more little detail . iduno about how good or bad MB's long distant ev('s) will turn out - (much less gm's or nissan's or whomever) BUT ... something just dawned on me. chargers? Outside of Tesla's Supercharger Network, typically the CHADdeMO tetwork (in USA) runs at what.... may be only 50kW's? They might want to think about stepping it up - either that, or stepping up the SAE network & seriously get some quantity going - VERY few of those suckers dotting the nation right now.
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Car sales aren't bad. 2015 was a record year for US car sales at 17.5 million with 2016 on track to be the same or slightly lower.

Chinese auto sales were up 26% year over year in July.

 

You will see Mercedes's new EV at the Paris Auto Show this year. It will go on sale in 2018 as a 2019 model year.

Chargers aren't quite as big a deal as you may think. Most EVs charge at home and people that buy $200K cars generally have more than one.

The Mercedes will use a SAE combo connector. Today they are limited to 50 kW but that is a limitation of the car not the connector. The current connector is capable of handling 200 kW. CharIN is working on bumping that to 150 kW but it takes a bit longer as they have to get more than a dozen companies to agree on a standard.

 

Haven't read the article yet but...

Let's see. Tesla has racked up cumulative net losses over north of $2 billion now. Some recent reports say $2.5 billion (I need to put together my own spreadsheet w/all the URLs of the financials as I'd been manually doing it before and adding up the losses). They had Tesla posts 13th straight quarterly loss| Reuters. I recall only a single profitable quarter so far. I believe they still are shy of shipping 200K units since inception.

OTOH, major global automakers like Toyota, GM, and VW each do about 9.x to 10.x million vehicles each, per year. And, they're usually profitable at it too, esp. Toyota.

Toyota in the US for 2015 sold 2.499 million vehicles per December 2015 Sales Chart | Corporate. Per Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC) Announces Financial Results for Fiscal Year Ended March 31, 2016 | Corporate, net income (aka profit) for the most recent fiscal year was $19.271 billion.

 

I don't remember Priuschat being this full of Tesla haters. Shouldn't Prius lovers have every reason in the world to love Tesla? Would love to know what the real reasons are.

Does no one remember that Amazon went almost 20 years without profit? Now look at them!

 

you're just seeing a 'vocal minority'.

 

Probably because Elon Musk had a long Prius hate...