Those novel things only matter if there's a large enough, visible, positive difference to the customer. I'm not convinced they have anything like that.
I feel like Apple as a company is great at coming up with those novel things that tend to blow right past the competition. (I don't like the locked-down, walled-garden result of many of those products, but I can't deny they have that special sauce.)
But a car? Computer -> laptop -> music player -> smartphone -> tablet -> smart watch... -> ... car? Not sure I buy it.
It matters if it makes it cheaper for the manufacturer. Teslas are best selling cars in many places (e.g. Model Y is the best selling car in EU) at the same time while Tesla maintains rather high margins compared to the industry standard.
If the competition forces them to, they have buffer to lower their prices.
> Teslas are best selling cars in many places (e.g. Model Y is the best selling car in EU)
You made me look this up and this is slightly misleading. I couldn't find the full numbers for 2023, but I did find H1 2023.
Yes, Model Y is the best selling car in the EU, but for H1 2023 Tesla is barely the 16th best selling car brand in the EU. The other brands just sell a lot more models, on average.
> at the same time while Tesla maintains rather high margins compared to the industry standard.
I looked this up yesterday, Tesla has similar margins to BMW and Mercedes, because they sell upscale models, just like those. Tesla margins will drop once Tesla starts making cheaper models. For reference, cheaper models in Europe = cars costing 20k€. Not 40k€+ like the cars Tesla is selling right now.
I didn’t get it but I recently did a couple of things that changed my mind. Drove an EV and switched to an iPhone. EVs are not cars as we know them, they are scaled up phones whose only real traditional car bits (tyres, brakes, Air conditioner) the major manufacturers already outsource. Once the engine and gearbox are gone you are only left with one point of differentiation and that is styling/user experience.
Apple kills it at those things. All the stuff you don’t see will be outsourced. All the stuff you do see could be amazing. I am no Apple fanboy but get in a Tesla and think how good it could be if fancy stylists and designers made it.
I am a car guy but really, now you can’t differentiate on power trains the EV market is ripe for an Apple style product.
> think how good it could be if fancy stylists and designers made it
I'm thinking about how bad it would be, actually. That's the kind of thing that brings you the infamous steering yoke because it "looks cool". Or touch controls everywhere instead of physical knobs, because the latter are "ugly".
When it comes to cars, I want function over form, especially when it comes to UX.
For fast-charging, the Cybertruck battery is an incremental improvement, not the leap everyone wanted. For longevity and cost? The rest of the market can't come close. Tesla's secret sauce is being willing to do things nobody else will do, change the paradigm, all that stuff MBAs want to do but don't know how to do.
However, more people are making EVs, so Tesla is using its biggest advantage (supercharger network) to essentially force every other EV buyer to witness what competence looks like. Great move.
Cybertruck uses the 2.4 4680 without dry coating. We've already seen the CT has amazing thermals, great charging curve, and we haven't even seen the 800v charging yet. We also have a floor on the cost with the range extender, which is the cheapest 50kwh battery I've seen first-party.
Tesla is becoming a commodity and you don't see an advantage?
Tesla is still doing thing in a novel way, things that others follow on. Take e.g. the battery design or gigapresses.
I'm not claiming they will keep that edge.