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Forsaken-throwaway t1_ja0pn5o wrote

Reply to comment by Weesar in Ford’s EVs are getting faster charging and more affordable batteries thanks to new chemistry by Ssider69

I believe the prices for the Mach-E were recently lowered.

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Ftpini t1_ja1aq0p wrote

They had no fucking choice. Tesla forced everybody lower with those price cuts. It looks like they finally decided they didn’t need to maintain industry leading margin rates forever.

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Thac t1_ja1twx0 wrote

No, Tesla was charging more than the market would bare and people stopped buying them. There was a hot minute there where you could buy a Tesla and have it in a week.

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TbonerT t1_ja34uxc wrote

Which is it? Did they price themselves out of the market or can they not keep up with demand?

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Thac t1_ja35wy1 wrote

They have never been able to keep up with demand, that’s a constant.

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TbonerT t1_ja3ghrk wrote

Then clearly the market will bear what they are charging.

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Thac t1_ja42plq wrote

The only thing clear is your lack of reading comprehension. The fact that you could get one inside a week and not 6 months to a year indicates they priced themselves out and had to lower their price.

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KickBassColonyDrop t1_ja9wxua wrote

Uh, no. Tesla priced down significantly because the IRS started playing musical chairs with qualification for the IRA tax credit across various models. Tesla just summarily slashed prices so just about every model qualified for the credit. In doing so, it forced the rest of the industry to squander all of their margins heavily in order to stay competitive with Tesla's pricing power.

Tesla sells every single car it makes, and since it doesn't use the dealership model, there's no fuzziness between cars made and sold to dealers vs cars sold by dealers to customers. Further, Tesla's demand is considerable despite the significant increases in price.

However, it can be agreed, based on words made by Elon and Zach Kirkhorn that their vehicle prices have been on the higher side for too long and that's been painful to the larger market capture potential.

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Thac t1_jaa9bum wrote

Yeah no. I was on the market for an BEV for 6 months. People were canceling their Tesla orders left and right due to Elons twitter bullshit. Due to the high price no new orders were coming in. You could have had a M3 in a week if you wanted during this time period. Tesla has no plans to slash prices until their market share started dropping. If the federal tax credit mattered at all they would have only selectively cut prices, instead of across the board like they have.

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KickBassColonyDrop t1_jaabrmc wrote

Elon's "Twitter" bullshit had a microcosmic impact on Tesla's sales.

> Tesla has no plans to slash prices until their market share started dropping.

There is zero logical sense to give up margin in business when you don't need to. Especially when you dominate in the market at scale, and your top "competitor", Ford produced 1/30th the amount of EVs you made for the fiscal year.

> If the federal tax credit mattered at all they would have only selectively cut prices, instead of across the board like they have.

No, they cut prices across the board because they didn't want to play bullshit games with the IRS with random qualifications on how to get access to the tax credit. When NTSB and NHTSA both qualified the 5-seater Model Y as an SUV, but the IRS didn't and then qualified the 7-seater as one, Tesla opted to summarily slash costs at the loss of around 10% margin so that all their models would qualify for the $7500 tax credit. In addition to this, when this was done, their Model Y inventory stock pile overnight disappeared.

The data on this doesn't lie, no matter what creative gymnastics you're trying to posit on the failure of the brand. Further, Elon's "Twitter bullshit" is limited to places like here and Twitter.

The market largely does not give a fuck about Elon or who he is. This is especially true with the latest Superbowl again. When, Tesla had not a single commercial they made for it and all the other players made EV announcements and subsequently Tesla orders and Google search interest spiked.

NoA markets may be significant to some, but they don't qualify nor quantify the entire world market, and people outside of the US, largely dgaf what Elon does on Twitter. Finally, when you're about to drop 40-60k on a luxury brand, if you put a CEO shitposting on Twitter above the material value of the vehicle, it's utility, and long term impact to your day to day activities, you're insane.

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Thac t1_jaacg0j wrote

You’re fucking hilariously blind if you seriously don’t see that Tesla’s stock performance is directly related to the shit Elon does.

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KickBassColonyDrop t1_jaad9uj wrote

Stock value and a company's execution are two separate things. Trying to claim they're the same thing is peak clown show.

The execution profile of Tesla is rock solid. But, suuuuure, it's all tumbling down according to you.

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Thac t1_jaaec34 wrote

Bro your head is so stuck in sand you must live in Egypt.

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KickBassColonyDrop t1_jaaemx0 wrote

Bro, your inability to differentiate what a company does vs what its stock does is comedy gold. Don't stop. I can't stop laughing.

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TbonerT t1_ja4bfip wrote

Are you really that dense? It’s not like there are tons of Teslas sitting around that no one wants to buy.

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Thac t1_ja4kkzl wrote

You’re quite literally like talking to a brick wall. I bet it’s not the first time you’ve been told this either.

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TbonerT t1_ja4o9ot wrote

You don’t even know which direction you’re pointed. You contradicted yourself and called me stupid for pointing it out instead of clarifying or admitting you were wrong.

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brucecaboose t1_ja363h6 wrote

Huh? There was never any confusion in the post you're replying to.

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TbonerT t1_ja3gdaz wrote

You don’t find the ideas that they charged more than the market would bear and they can’t keep up with demand to be mutually exclusive? How does that work?

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brucecaboose t1_ja3gujq wrote

Who said they couldn't keep up with demand at that time?

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TbonerT t1_ja3hbqr wrote

Have you seen the lead times? A week is a short lead time and hasn’t been seen in years. Last year, I went to a Tesla showroom and they had 0 vehicles on display and a Model Y had a lead time of about 8 months. They clearly can’t keep up with demand, so the must not be charging more than the market will bear.

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brucecaboose t1_ja3icu9 wrote

My friend bought 2 and had to wait overnight lol that was before the price drop.

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SeaworthinessLeft88 t1_ja3xkkl wrote

I just bought an EV a couple of months ago, and I reached out to Tesla just out of curiosity. They were low on my list for a few reasons, but they were lowering prices and offering deals for the M3. Wait times (if any) are under a month unless you’re trying to buy a model x. Seeing as that’s a $100k car, I can’t imagine it has that many people actually waiting for a model x.

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choomba20 t1_ja6lmo4 wrote

Lmao. Tesla nerds acting as if this was done to make it more affordable and less along the lines that nobody will buy them at the previous rates

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atonyatlaw t1_ja0zfb2 wrote

Yes, but that's unrelated and merely a market share theft attempt.

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the_jungle_awaits t1_ja1hydv wrote

> market share theft attempt.

Musk fanboys are calling corporations competing for market share, theft?!

The mental gymnastics are real!

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eluna303 t1_ja1k0r0 wrote

"Capitalism is only good when I'm winning"

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Gagarin1961 t1_ja3sr29 wrote

Lol I agree it’s ridiculous, but it’s also ridiculous to assume he even liked Tesla/Musk.

It sounded like idiotic liberal BS to me more than support for Musk. Liberals are the ones constantly trying to make markets seem immoral.

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atonyatlaw t1_ja1me8n wrote

Dude. I own a '21 Mach E and a '98 Cobra SVT. I hate Tesla. You read too much into my wording.

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Forsaken-throwaway t1_ja13xbe wrote

You think the product pipeline isn't calculated into the pricing of the vehicle? Odd.

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atonyatlaw t1_ja16t4k wrote

I think this happened as a reaction to Tesla adjusting pricing and nothing more.

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lebastss t1_ja140xb wrote

Yes, they are operating at a loss and signaling what they want their price point to be. Now they are tooling their car in a more affordable way to make that price point profitable. The manufacturing cost cut follows the price reduction not the other way around. That's how free market drives innovation.

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KickBassColonyDrop t1_ja9yo50 wrote

It also bears mentioning that Sandy Munro and his company pointed out that the lightning was using over a mile of cabling to the point of ridiculous excess. Which made the vehicle way more expensive to manufacture. This question then came up during the most recent Ford investment call and Jim Farley himself was flabbergasted that his own company was doing this, and that he'd direct more actively to ensure this doesn't happen in the future.

I surmise that this reduction in cost with Ford is him taking that more active approach and asking wtf is going on to engineers and project managers that they're wasting that much capital on their trucks. Tesla I believe currenty uses around 150-200m of wiring and are trying to reduce that down to <100m. If Ford can simplify their wiring harnesses, figure out a super bottle or heat pump solution like Tesla, vastly reduce the wiring usage per truck, and move to Gigacasting rather than body on frame with their trucks. The COGS should drop considerably and their margins will improve.

All of these are growing pains. However, Farley has the right mindset and is beginning to understand how Elon leads at Tesla and has begun to emulate that mindset. It's not an easy task, but Farley has already gone on record that they won't catch Tesla, but they will fight with all their might to become 2nd place in the EV market.

Once their Blue Oval Gigafactory in Kentucky comes online and they can start scaling that out along with similar advancements as Tesla with the aforementioned changes above, I expect that their growth curve will explode with a strong probability of reaching the 500k run rate around 2025.

I'm hopeful for Ford under Farley's changes and willingness to be honest about his company's weaknesses and how to correct them. It also helps immensely that Ford managed to capture one of Tesla's Supercharger Network VPs a while back to help establish the entire energy and charging infra ecosystem for the company; from sourcing batteries and setting up the material science division to handle battery chemistry to eventually what might lead to the development of a brand specific supercharger network just for their F-150 and like BEV products.

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