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Saudi Arabia Invests $1 Billion In Potential Tesla Rival (cnn.com)
Saudi Arabia is investing more than $1 billion in Lucid Motors, an electric car startup that may give Tesla a run for their money. CNN reports: Lucid is planning a new high-performance electric car. It said the investment from Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund announced Monday will allow it to finish engineering on its first car, the Lucid Air, as well as build a factory in Casa Grande, Arizona, and begin to sell the car by 2020. Saudi Arabia is already a big investor in Tesla. Last month Tesla CEO Elon Musk disclosed that the Saudis had taken nearly a 5% stake in his electric car company.
Musk said that the Saudis had been urging him for almost two years to take Tesla private, offering to provide funds necessary to do so. (Musk announced the plan to go private in August but quickly dropped the idea.) Saudi Arabia is investing in electric vehicles to diversify away from its dependence on oil. Lucid's Chief Technology Officer, Peter Rawlinson, was formerly a vice president and chief vehicle engineer at Tesla. He helped design the Model S, the company's breakthrough car. He left Tesla in 2012, shortly after the Model S went into production.
Musk said that the Saudis had been urging him for almost two years to take Tesla private, offering to provide funds necessary to do so. (Musk announced the plan to go private in August but quickly dropped the idea.) Saudi Arabia is investing in electric vehicles to diversify away from its dependence on oil. Lucid's Chief Technology Officer, Peter Rawlinson, was formerly a vice president and chief vehicle engineer at Tesla. He helped design the Model S, the company's breakthrough car. He left Tesla in 2012, shortly after the Model S went into production.
Isn't every car manufacturer, and every would be "entrepreneur" out there building their own electric car?
Yes. Jaguar and Mercedes are both bringing out electric cars, for instance. The Jaguar I-PACE looks to be a better car than the equivalent Tesla.
They are all way too expensive. Anyone can build a really expensive EV, those aren't very interesting.
It's the affordable end of the market that is exciting. Kia and Hyundai both have really strong offerings (Niro and Kona) with 250-300 mile range and a lot of value for money. Nissan may have a decent Leaf out this year, Tesla may one day get to $35k but that's looking expensive for a very basic, stripped down car now...
Kona/Niro are both really impressive. Range, tech (including auto-steering), quality and performance are all there.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Unlike the early days of cars there are many established car companies in the game. It takes a lot of expertise and supply chain management to build a car. You need to know a lot about robots, labour, etc.
Ossified management has allowed startups to dominate when technology changes if the barrier is not too high. So all the newspapers ceded their classified adds to ebay et. al. Nokia to Apple. Big retailers to Amazon. TV networks to Netflix. None of those things should have happened, the established players should have dominated, but did not.
On the other hand, Webvan died for delivering groceries ordered on line, here in Oz they are delivered by the big supermarket chains, Coles and Woolworths. It was easier to add a web site to a supermarket than to add a supermarket to a web site.
I'd bet pennies to pounds that electric cars will be like supermarkets. The established players will dominate. It is an incremental improvement for them. And many are already there, e.g. the Leaf, Prius.
Telsa is toast.
OTOH self driving car AI is likely to come from someone other than the big car manufacturers. But they will buy it from the third party. Might be Google. If Apple try to build the cars rather than just the software, they will become irrelevant.
What's electric cars being the future has to do with TSLA's viability as a company? VAG, BMW, etc have literally tens of billions of money sitting waiting to convert their shit over if it becomes financially a good proposition to do it - they have tens of gigafactories - their ENTIRE EXPERTISE that has enabled them to remain viable car companies is based around production and logistics around it - the Tesla gigafactory seems puny in comparison and indeed it is, it's just called giga for marketing reasons - vag doesn't need to "market" it's factories, so they don't, but there's a reason why they're still alive and not bailed out for the tenth time.
The thing with Tesla is that.. they don't really have any special technology. They just sold it at a price that didn't make any fucking sense for them to be doing, since they were selling all production(supposedly) and still losing money(even after one time book shenigans). The reason Musk is under enermous pressure is that now is the time the company has to start making profit, not another 10 years into the future because electric cars are the future. Basically his promises that his supermodernhyper Gigafactory can churn out production cheaper than VAG etc's factories can need to be kept right now.
Lucid motors also however, a shit grade investment. Their car? a fucking 1000hp sedan. good luck selling that 20 000 - 130 000 units in a year. They're not sitting on any technology unique to them and they don't have decades of expertise in manufacturing.
So yeah, Saudis putting money into it - whatever. Call the market up when they have some special sauce to make 20 000 dollar cars people want to buy.
And of course teslas are nice cars, they cost an arm and a leg and still are sold for too cheap so they better well should be, but the technology really isn't all that special, whats special is putting them into a product and selling it at the price.
Why do american car companies insist on building stuff people can't afford anyways en masse? don't they realize that 80 000 dollar + cars are an extreme luxury, just because they live rich themselves? is it because they can't optimize their production for worth shit? because Musk sure as fuck sold the cheapo model of the 3 but can't deliver.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Nope.
Tesla are making about 30% on their cars: https://electrek.co/2018/07/16...
That's a much higher margin than gasoline car makers are getting and shows that Tesla has a huge start on everybody, "special technology" or not.
Why do american car companies insist on building stuff people can't afford anyways en masse? don't they realize that 80 000 dollar + cars are an extreme luxury, just because they live rich themselves? is it because they can't optimize their production for worth shit?
They have years of back-orders right now, why would they sell for less?
(and they aren't even taking orders in all countries yet!)
because Musk sure as fuck sold the cheapo model of the 3 but can't deliver.
Targets are being met, production is on schedule.
No sig today...