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00:00Hey what's up? MKBHD here. Ok, I'm going to have to oversimplify some things in this
00:07video, but I think it's necessary to get my point across. So, at this point in 2020,
00:13there are two types of electric vehicles. There's Teslas, and there's everything else.
00:21And I have messages for both. And I'm one of those people that honestly believes that
00:26electric cars are the future of cars, but they're just that. They're the future. And
00:32so there's a lot of work that both have to do to get there. Also, apparently Apple is
00:36also working on an electric car that could launch sometime in the next couple of years,
00:42likely with some sort of high-end battery tech. Sounds really interesting. Sounds very
00:48expensive too. Also, are we sure it's going to come with a charger? But seriously, jokes
00:53aside, let's say Apple is working on an electric car for the next, somewhere in the next decade,
00:58they won't be alone. A lot of people, a lot of companies, a lot of the biggest in the
01:02world are working on electric cars to be at the forefront of their innovations for the
01:07next little bit. So, as someone who's been driving a lot of electric cars, and who lives
01:11with one and all of its flaws and all of its upside, and feels strongly about the whole
01:16thing, I've got a lot of messages. So let's start off with this. Dear electric cars, if
01:22you're coming out today with a premium electric car, with 200 miles of range, you're already
01:29behind. So, range is of course super important, and to me it's the number one baseline indicator
01:34for just how good the electric car program is within a certain manufacturer. It's like
01:39a baseline metric. So, today, right now, the highest end electric cars are going, what,
01:45250 to 400 miles on a full battery, right? So the king of the hill right now is Tesla's
01:50long range Model S, that's a 100 kilowatt hour battery, 402 miles. And that's right
01:56now, today, in 2020. People are driving that car right now. So, when someone comes out
02:02and says, we're gonna launch a new electric car, sometime in the future, maybe in a year
02:09or two, and it'll have 200 miles of range, to some that number sounds pretty good, but
02:16to me, when I hear 200 miles, that's still pretty low. That's low enough that I still
02:20have to spend mental energy thinking about remembering where and when I'm gonna charge
02:25this thing. Think about this, the median range for a full tank of gas for a typical gas
02:30car is about 400 miles today, with the best ones getting about 600, 700 miles on a full
02:37tank of gas. That is what you eventually want electric cars to match. Maybe even do a little
02:43bit better since there's less gas stations. So that's why you see Tesla's already announced
02:47plans for a truck that'll do 500 plus miles next year, and then a triple motor Model S
02:52that'll go 520 miles and a two-door roadster that'll eventually do 620 miles when it eventually
02:59comes out, I'm guessing in 2022. All of that comes from years of R&D priority on battery
03:06tech, drivetrains, efficiency, all the tech in the cars, aero, weight reduction, all of
03:13that stuff, to ultimately achieve the same level of convenience as a gas car. And speaking
03:19of gas, dear electric cars, gas stations are pretty underrated. Like, the electric car
03:27is only half the story, the charging network to charge these cars is the other half the
03:33story, and it's arguably just as important as the car itself. It's something we kind
03:37of take for granted, but the confidence of being able to just run your car down to nearly
03:43zero and just know that there is going to be a gas station somewhere within a mile
03:47or two of you, probably, is kind of amazing. It's huge. And so in this world of electric
03:53cars, that obviously doesn't exist yet, so it's being built, and uniquely, it's being
03:58built often by the car maker themselves. So Tesla building and owning their supercharger
04:04network, and actually Electrify America is owned by Volkswagen Group, and so there's
04:10more popping up every day. And so my bold hot take is I think this part of it needs
04:16to be a collaborative effort. And look, I know that's a lot more complicated than it
04:20sounds, and I know that's easier said than done, but think about this. At this very moment
04:26in time, I find it pretty much impossible to recommend an electric car for daily use
04:32that is not a Tesla if you plan on doing any road trips. And this is a mostly U.S. perspective.
04:39That's because Tesla's large and growing supercharger network here is literally as important to
04:44the car as the range, or the build quality, or literally any other feature, honestly maybe
04:50even more so. Matter of fact, I've said this in the past, and I'll go ahead and say it
04:53on record in this video again, if the Porsche Taycan could use Tesla superchargers, I would
05:00rather have that than a Model S. To be honest, just because of my set of feature priorities,
05:05obviously build quality inside, but the way the car drives, it's still a four-door with
05:08plenty of space, and the software is good enough, I don't use autopilot all that much,
05:13I would rather have a Taycan if it could supercharge. But it can't. There was just a story recently
05:18about a couple who got their shiny new $100,000 electric Porsche, went for a road trip, and it
05:24took them nine hours to go 130 miles. Nine hours. Basically it came down to them having an unlucky
05:34streak of like a bunch of chargers in a row they visited, either being out of service, or slow,
05:39or full, or whatever, like they couldn't see that stuff on the map because there was no guarantee,
05:44you were just sort of going where you thought you could find a good one, and they even passed
05:47some shiny new Tesla superchargers and couldn't use them because the Porsche is not compatible.
05:53But imagine if it was. That would be, in my opinion, a game changer for that car. I could
05:58actually recommend cars like that way more often. So literally because of road trips,
06:04remember road trips, I eventually think we'll get back to that, but because I need to go
06:08to an ultimate tournament or go visit family in another state, I literally cannot recommend
06:14or buy for myself any electric car that's not a Tesla because the charging networks aren't quite
06:20there yet for any of them. So here's my question. Why aren't more electric cars compatible with
06:26Tesla's supercharging network? It seems like a win overall, right? It would be fast charging
06:32available for your car in a bunch more places, makes it way easier to recommend your car.
06:38Maybe there's some sort of licensing fees or some sort of hidden terms that Tesla's built in.
06:43They said they've made it available. Why hasn't anyone taken them up on that? I actually tweeted
06:47this last week wondering why it hadn't happened to which Elon casually responded that Tesla
06:52superchargers are being made available to other electric cars. But just the fact that this isn't
06:57common yet is fascinating to me. I'm not saying make your car dependent exclusively on superchargers.
07:04No, no, no, no, no, no. That's a bad idea. But just adding that compatibility on top of the existing
07:11compatibilities already, wouldn't that be great? But hey, this may never happen. Maybe this is like
07:16me asking Apple to add a USB-C port alongside the iPhone's lightning port just because, hey,
07:24it would make it compatible with way more things. It's only a benefit to your product, right?
07:29But they obviously have dreams of a lightning ecosystem. That's turned out pretty well. And I
07:34feel like in the car world, a lot of these manufacturers have dreams of their own
07:39lightning, their own charging network, their own secret sauce, which isn't built yet,
07:45but that's their dream. But look, if the long-term goal is to match the convenience of gas cars,
07:50then you want to eventually get the range all the way up to match the gas cars and then build up
07:54enough electric chargers to be as common as gas cars. Now, I can see the range getting there
07:59eventually, but to build up all these chargers to match how many gas stations we have is going to
08:05take a lot, and there's no way you do that all yourself. So you might as well make it compatible
08:10with the ones that are already the most built out. I'm just saying. Anyway. Okay. So there was an
08:15article on electric pretty recently about someone at Ford, pretty high up, sort of throwing some
08:22shade at Tesla, saying things like, the doors fit properly about Ford cars, the plastics and other
08:30materials color match, the bumpers don't fall off, the roof doesn't come off when you wash it.
08:36He's saying buyers will not have to make these compromises with Ford's electric vehicles. But
08:42see what he's obviously leaving out, and what I see so often when talking about the electric cars
08:47coming from these other big manufacturers, is there is still a compromise. It's not that
08:52compromise, but there is still a compromise. Because the Mustang Mach-E, which I've driven,
08:56and that I love, and that I think is great, I think it's one of the most user-friendly,
09:00and reasonable, and well-thought-out electric cars to come out so far. That Mach-E, the entry-level
09:06model, goes 210 miles on a charge. And the fully max spec, best version they can possibly make,
09:14$60,000 Mach-E, goes 300 miles on a full charge. And by the way, of course, none of them will do
09:22supercharging with Tesla's network. That is a compromise. And so guess what, Ford,
09:27and many of the others, people have been choosing the Tesla a lot lately, you might have noticed.
09:33And so that means you're right to use the word compromise, but people are often picking the one
09:38with the great battery, with the performance and fun to drive stuff, and the tech features
09:43over the one that's actually better built. It's just facts. There's a lot of people like me out
09:47there who would drive a super minimal, very plain car with not that many bells and whistles if it
09:53went a thousand miles on a charge over the best built thing you could possibly make if it only
09:59goes 200 miles. It's an exaggeration, obviously, but still, that's the priorities that a lot of
10:05electric car buyers have right now because there are no chargers everywhere. So for all those
10:10advantages the big automakers have of being able to mass produce quality cars at huge scale,
10:15with great materials, awesome designs, tight tolerances, and a ton of SKUs, they are still
10:21three or four years behind in the battery and drivetrain technology and the charger networks,
10:26which are enough for people to not really want to leave the gas cars that they know and love.
10:31And it's the reason I don't drive a Taycan or a Mach-E or an e-tron right now. And it's the reason
10:37that a Tesla feels like the only financially responsible version of a premium electric car
10:44as far as convenience goes. Which brings me to Tesla. Oh, you probably thought you were safe
10:48from this video, Tesla, but no, I drive one, which means I have to deal with all the upside and all
10:53the downside that comes with them. And I have some messages for you too. Dear Tesla, this one
10:59advantage that you have that's very real that we've talked about is eventually going to go away.
11:05Right? Eventually. Tesla has gone all in on their battery technology and their drive trains and
11:12their efficiency, and they're years ahead on that. Right? So they've been building their
11:17battery, their gigafactories, they've been building their electric motors and slapping
11:22a car on top. And that's almost like the least important part of the car itself,
11:25because when you drive it, it's so fun and it goes so far and you can plug it in so easily.
11:30So a lot of people out there buying their first electric car, getting a Tesla that have never
11:33owned a Porsche or an Audi or a BMW or a Ford, aren't really super used to super high quality
11:41interiors. They're fine with the interior of a Tesla because it matches their priorities.
11:45And that's great. But eventually there's the other half of people who, when they spend 50,
11:5170, $90,000 on a car, expect a certain level of interior quality. Eventually Tesla,
11:57you're going to have to match and invest in matching that quality of build and fit and
12:02finish. You know, I've had a lot of little random quirks with my Model S, things like wind noise,
12:07things like water in the taillights. Of course, there's that one drive train failure I had years
12:12ago. And then that Model Y that I reviewed here a little while ago this year has some weird quirks,
12:16some strange build quality flaws in a review car. But it's not just about me. Lots of people have
12:21had way more severe issues than me. And the rate of these issues with Tesla is still currently high
12:26enough that you eventually got to address it. Now, when is that point? When should that focus
12:32shift? And it's hard to say, you know, obviously Tesla's doing super well right now. Their
12:38investors are really happy. They continue to make big strides in battery. They're about to
12:43drop eventually a roadster that'll do zero to 60 in 1.9 seconds with 620 miles of range. Like
12:50that take money to create. And it's crazy. I'm looking forward to that car so much,
12:55but it's also kind of a shame that I feel like I already know that that car is going to have some
13:01build quality shortcomings, or at least some quirks, or some plastics, or some panel gaps,
13:08as much as I hate saying it, just because that's what we expect from every new production line
13:14from that Californian car company at this point. So here's my take. See this graph here?
13:22This graph is a little old. It's from 2016, but it still applies here. It's showing the minimum,
13:27maximum, and median range of electric cars out. Plug-in hybrids and gas cars. So electric cars
13:33are way lower than gas cars, as you can see, but they bump up a little bit every year as the
13:38technology improves. In 2020, the max is around 400. So maybe in a few years, when the roadster
13:44finally drops with the max around 600, and the median is coming up with it because the tech
13:50lowers in price, I think when we eventually get to the point where the median range for an
13:55electric car at a certain price matches the median range of a gas car for the same price,
14:03that's when I would love to see Tesla take a little more investing in fit and finish and hit
14:09that last whack-a-mole of just build quality. Just finally focus on build quality. Like you
14:15obviously still continue to invest in battery technology, and drivetrains, and all the stuff
14:19that makes Tesla, Tesla. But yeah, eventually the others are going to start to catch up in
14:25that department, and you're going to want to catch up in the department you're lacking in,
14:30which would hopefully put everyone on the same playing field in both respects.
14:34So there you have it. Now there's a lot of other things I could rant about in the electric car
14:38world, from the naming schemes of these things, to the software updates that they should all
14:44definitely get, to all the grills that they can definitely slowly get rid of,
14:49to these weird door handles they all feel the need to do. There's a lot happening in electric
14:53cars. But the bottom line is, electric cars are coming, and they're coming fast, and they all,
14:58if they're going to make it, they ought to all get better together in all the ways where they
15:03struggle. That's basically it. Hope this helps. That's how I feel about it. Let me know in the
15:08comments below if you're into the idea of this electric future, and do you think your next car
15:13will be electric or not? I think that's a fun question. Either way, that's been it.
15:19Thanks for watching. Catch you guys in the next one. Peace.