Tesla has no moat

1. Batteries - BYD has them beat 2. Self Driving tech - other players are better 3. Luxury brands already provide the luxury aspect & even better built cars 4. in the US they're being saved by US protectionism. in Europe etc - we already see the chinese brands making inroads for EV sales

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energy123 34 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Protectionism on inputs kills manufacturing. Imagine having to pay 15% more for all inputs and trying to compete with someone who doesn't have pay that.

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pfannkuchen 26 minutes ago | parent [-]

Well, at least domestically you don’t have to compete with someone who doesn’t have to pay that because their product is probably tariffed directly.

Internationally, yes if you manufacture the international product in the home country, but AFAIK in auto at least there are usually satellite factories and have been for some time, and those wouldn’t be subject to home country tariffs would they?

	▲	energy123 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Precisely, you need to set up plants overseas to dodge the input tariffs instead of onshoring manufacturing for export. That causes reductions in manufacturing investment compared to the alternative.

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tensor 40 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I mostly agree on all points, but what self driving tech is better? I've periodically looked at the options, and nothing really seems to compare in North America. Maybe BYD and others have great tech, but stuff like Blue Cruise works hardly anywhere in Canada, and to me, that makes it virtually useless.

	▲	audunw 25 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		He’s probably thinking of robo taxi self driving. So that would be e.g. Waymo. I don’t think anyone has better self driving for consumers out atm, but you could argue that’s because other companies are not using their customers as beta testers. I’ve seen demos that may indicate Mobileye has tech that’s just as good if not better. But they don’t release it to end users until it’s fully ready. I don’t think Tesla has any special sauce, and that when the tech is actually ready for unattended full self driving in a consumer car, other car makers will come out with solutions around the same Tesla. One difference is maaaybe Tesla will be able to update old cars (probably with a hardware update). While I think others will only support it on new cars.
	▲	amanaplanacanal 35 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Certainly waymo is better, but you can't buy it. Yet, anyway.