Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words… which never stopped anyone from writing the thousand words anyway. So it will be with this excellent chart, courtesy of J D Power. I’ll show it first, and then tell you why I think it is so brilliant.
Source: “The J.D. Power U.S. Automotive Performance, Execution and Layout (APEAL) StudySM series measures how well each new vehicle provides positive experiences with design, performance, safety, usability, comfort, perceived quality and beyond. The data comes directly from owner assessments of their new vehicle after 90 days of ownership.” Thanks for the chart, JDP!
This excerpted chart from a recent round of APEAL shows how Tesla EVs (left blue column) are holding up against non-Tesla EVs (right blue column). The non-Tesla crowd, after quite a few years of flailing around, has now caught up with and surpassed the Palo Alto Austin firm, though only by a few points (7), and with both performing very well on the 1,000-point APEAL scale. So I wouldn’t make any conclusions about the long-term relative standing of Tesla and the rest based on this one chart.
But check out the puts and takes within that 7-point gap. They almost perfectly reflect the strengths and weaknesses of two fundamentally different approaches to the design of a car. Silicon Valley denizens have long repeated that “the car is actually just a phone – on wheels.” Residents of Stuttgart and other automotive capitals would beg to differ, viewing the car as “wheels – that can also make calls.” And these two world views drive much of the competitive dynamic we see today.
If the car is a phone, then it competes with rivals as phones compete with rivals: exterior design hardly matters (they’re, almost all, black sleek rectangles), and software and silicon are all that do matter. If the car is a car first, then it competes with rivals as OEMs have always competed: on hardware primarily, including its looks and its physical (on the road) performance.
And you can see this theory playing out in the reality the chart represents: Tesla’s advantages (red segments) are primarily software- and silicon-driven, representing the digital world. The other EV brands’ advantages (green segments) are all hardware-driven (exterior and interior design, comfort, driving feel), competing in the physical, analog world. It’s all right there on the page.
Since Americans are all about winning and losing1, let’s now ask, “Which worldview will win?” Spoiler alert: IMHO, neither… and both.
A few years ago, the betting was on digital: let the Model S exterior design run for a decade or two, upgrade the software every month or so, rip out all those antique radio buttons, and replace them with screens and swipes.
But as the modern saying goes, maybe “the vibes have shifted.” Buttons seem to be making a comeback, some Tesla shoppers have been turned off by shoals of look-alike black white or gray Ys and 3s2, and even OTA (over-the-air) updates seem to be losing momentum. I mean, it’s nice that Tesla update 2024.26.1 included something called “Castle Doombad Classic,” but I’m not sure that’s going to sell a few thousand more units. Or any.
The EV entrants that have followed Tesla have to some extent resolved this analog/digital win/lose tension3 and adopted the best of both worlds. Lucid and Rivian exteriors (in my uncredentialed opinion) seem highly styled, and the interiors, while not on the “rich Corinthian leather”4 spectrum, are more lavish than the “youth hostel” minimalism of a Tesla.
So maybe, like so many things in the world of cars, equilibrium, a new normal as it were, will trump extrapolation. Digital? Analog? We’ll take some of both, please.
Closing analogy: Amazon introduced the Kindle in 2010, and 14 years later, despite many pronouncements about the end of the “dead trees” physical paper book, the American Publishers Association states that e-books are still less than 12% of total publishing revenue. We’ll take some of both, please.
1 Sometimes I think my fellow citizens consider tie scores an invention of Communism. The USA has a zero-sum view on life: for me to win, you must lose. For Mustang to win a car mag comparison test, the Camaro must lose. Even if the gap between them is just over whether the cup holder holds a Big Slurp or not.
2 Of course, we have to take note of the towering exception of the Cybertruck, which no one anywhere, at any time, will confuse with anything else.
3 So they’re probably Communists
4 Look it up!
