I drove the Model 3 last week. It’s a properly good car in it’s own right - It reminded me of the MOdel 3 from BMS in how it handles, of course the performance curve is totally different. The rethinking of the dashboard is perfect for the cell phone age. It’s Apple Good (back when Apple was good).
The performance curve - the instant power at any point is addicting. The seats were comfortable, and the trunk space was ample.
The build quality, at least on the unit I saw is _better_ then the S or the X right now. This is primarily due to the simplification of the assembly compared to the S and the X. Honestly, having driven both, I would buy a 3 before buying a S. The only killer feature I see missing is the air suspension, and we know that is coming for the 3.
They are going to sell a million of the 3s.
For the record, I’m not a EV or a green evangelist. I don’t have a snarky license plate, or solar on my roof. But I will be picking one of these up. It’s perfect for my use cases. People will compare it with the Bolt, but people forget that SUperchargers are Tesla only right now. Want to get from LA to NY? Easy in Tesla. With a Bolt, there are places that you just can’t go.
It looks like (judging by VIN allocations, which is not a great method, but also by drone videos) that Tesla hit 1k a week the last week or two of December. Assuming no huge bottlenecks remaining, that takes them solidly half way up their ramp, with one more huge jump - to 3-5k a week - remaining.
I believe Bolt is capped at 50kW fast charging, whereas superchargers provide 120kW, so not so fast for Bolt ;) (probably at least an hour to fully charge it's 60kWh battery)
People had the same questions about the Model X, the Model S before that, and even the Roadster before that. In every case, Tesla eventually was able to get production up and deliver. Tesla has no problem producing enough S and Xes.
To be fair, Roadster production was never really "up". I'm not sure demand was at any point satisfied before the model was discontinued. Less than 2,500 were produced.
I think people are underestimating the runway Tesla has, here. Tesla didn't even die in 2008. Now, they have a huge customer base, two other high-end car lines that are themselves doing well, and an enormous amount of goodwill plus a big moat (for charging in particular, at least in the US). Not only that, but SpaceX is doing fantastically well unlike in 2008.
I think the hardcore bears are just plain wrong, here. I don't know whether or not Tesla is over-valued (above my pay grade, and I'm not invested anyway), but it's hard to make the case that Tesla is worse off now than in 2008.
>>I think the hardcore bears are just plain wrong, here. I don't know whether or not Tesla is over-valued
The misconception I think a lot of Tesla fans have is that great product = great business. How much do you think Tesla's business is worth? A billion dollars? A trillion? Probably not the latter, and if they depended on that valuation to continue to do business (by virtue of access to continued investment), it wouldn't matter how great their cars are.
Their actual market cap is 50 billion dollars, more than Ford, and they will need to raise more money to continue operations. Ford makes 500 times more cars than them (based on some quick Googling, .3% market share of cars vs 15% for Ford). So if you're thinking Tesla is not overvalued, you have to think that Tesla will acquire a truly massive chunk of the car market, at the expense of well funded incumbents who have a head start in many aspects of car manufacturing and branding.
My point is that whether or not Tesla is overvalued is as important as whether or not their cars are great. I think their cars are great, but I'm a Tesla bear because I think expecting them to justify even a tenth of their valuation is unlikely.
People also forget that a Tesla has a magnitude fewer moving parts than a ICE(internal combustion engine) car.
The big issue in scaling up is making enough battery packs. Which is a question of ‘when’.
Once they have a monopoly on cheapest battery packs and enough superchargers, a Tesla model 3 is cheaper to maintain, cheaper to run and similar price to an ICE auto, probably better performance.
Unless they fuck it up, BE battery electric is the way to go. Energy to motion, Tesla does more than 100MPG.
The Nissan Leaf is already the model T. It's been out 6 years, is affordable, and has DC fast charging. Besides my own, I see them every day here in Kansas City, along with the Model S.
Actually, because Nissan screwed up introducing the new model year of Leaf, in November there were twice as many Model 3s delivered in the US than Leafs.
It's unusual for Nissan to screw up like that, but there you go.
> With a Volt, there are places that you just can’t go.
To be fair, you can charge any EV fairly quickly at any campground with 220V RV hookups. With adequate planning, I think you could drive a Bolt anywhere.
I wouldn’t describe the ~30MPH you get from a 240V RV plug as “fairly quickly.” It’s fine for an overnight charge, but you’ll basically be limited to driving the car’s single-charge range each day. It’s possible but I wouldn’t want to try it.
You can go from east to west coast in the US in 10 days while limiting yourself to ~210 miles per day. For a retired person with little need to hurry that's reasonable even with only nightly charging.
Personally, I have little interest in driving 600+ miles per day making fast charging minimally useful.
The big long range use cases in California is San Jose-Tahoe (with its mountain climb reducing range), LA-SF, LA-NV & SF-SD. So you would want a supercharger for those trips.
Also for car commuting in big metros, 40-60 mile one ways are common enough, which is 120mi round trip. The previous generation of affordable EVs had 80 mi ranges, which didn't work for those metros.
~8 hours charging at work is a plenty to top off after a 60 mile trip. However, 80 mile EV's are not designed for people with long commutes. I live 4 miles from work and their are charging stations in the office parking lot. So, based on my habits an 80 mile EV would cover 99% of my driving just fine.
However, I still think ~300 miles as the practical minimum because I do take longer trips and know I would occasionally forget to charge sometimes.
A lot of people don't have charging at work, so they have to charge at home. Or they might want to visit a friend that is 40 miles away who also doesn't have a charger.
What coastal cities are 2100 miles away? Maybe for few that are retired, but 210 isn't the best for trips that far, and that's assuming the chargers are exactly at where you need them to be
There are non-Tesla DC superchargers in the US, but yes, the network of those chargers is much less reliable and less well planned in the US. (Versus Europe which maps show a much more thorough ChaDeMo network than the US, which is arguably accountable solely to relative population densities of the continents and Tesla's US-first market focus.)
ChaDeMo could still catch up with the right gumption (the rest of the auto manufacturers teaming up, for instance), and there's still a lot of talk about how the two "standards" are easily interoperable with simple adapters (and Tesla has a Tesla-to-ChaDeMo adapter, but so far as I'm aware no one has yet to negotiate for a ChaDeMo-to-Tesla adapter to be sold; Tesla is in a position of strength for now so hard to blame Tesla on hedging that position a bit in the US).
At least it looks like the different "winners" in the US versus Europe might keep the game competitive in the current term.
That's not entirely true. There are no CCS DC fast chargers (the type the bolt uses) in much of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and North/South Dakota. You might be able to drive from Seattle to NYC but you'd have to drive pretty far out of your way to do it.
Super chargers are available in all of those states, making any cross country driving in that area significantly faster and easier.
"Can't go" is probably the wrong term, but rather it's not very practical without a Tesla. "fast-charging" just isn't that fast in the US for non-tesla setups. 50kW max (which you don't normally get, usually it's something less) requires you to stop for at least an hour every 2-3 hours in a Bolt.
Add in winter conditions and driving at the usual ~75MPH and it gets worse than that. I wouldn't attempt any trip longer than ~200 miles in anything but a Tesla because even the superchargers at 130kW make it just ~bearable once the supercharger novelty wears off.
Arguably, Tesla & Elon Musk already achieved their goal of speeding up the adoption to EVs away from combustion engines: all car companies are working now on or have plans for electric vehicles.
And to add to it: the other car companies are ACTUALLY working on EMVs now, not just show some design study drenched in blue lights at some car expo once per year before going back to selling Diesel engines like they did in the past.
Without a doubt, It seems like everyone is playing catchup, I'm still shocked how far behind the German car manufacturers are. I recently switched from a BMW M5 to a model S. It's been a great switch for me. Slightly lacking in build quality but made up for in that 0-60 excitement!
They had every oppertunity to get on this. They have government friendly for green cars, they have the scale to build charging infrastructure, they have the programming knowlage and so on.
They could also have jumped in with the Supercharger network and profited from the global network that Tesla is building.
Well, lets see how they recover, by now Tesla is way ahead.
Agree with that, whenever others post how Tesla is dead because others caught up, I feel they miss the point. Musk did this not to be a billionaire but to actually switch earth to electric cars and renewable energy.
Same goes for SpaceX, if other's say that some competitor is going to beat SpaceX at its price or booster reuse. Well, again, that's the whole point - to make humans multi-planetry species, not to be a billionaire.
For people who don't follow this, records for the cannonball run are usually always a few years old (people wait to announce hoping the statue of limitations expires, or at least makes it less likely). That said, its unlikely to change too much, most recent records were done in wildly expensive cars (retrofitted with additional gas tanks, radar, police scanners, etc), and usually include aerial support for the entire trip to scan for speedtraps and the like.
In short, it's a bunch of reckless rich assholes who have no respect for other people on the road. Go on a proper racetrack and show what you can do there.
The main skill of Cannonball is to be more reckless than others and see what you can get away with. I don't want to meet some sleep deprived and probably drugged up "racers" on the road. If they want endurance they can do a 24 hour race. If they want a difficult track they can go to the Nuerburgring in Germany and do the 24 our race there. Or just try it in the wet.
No, the main skill is planning. Whether or not you're endangering other people it's hard to cover lots of miles quickly on roads with other people. Nobody who's serious about a good time is going to be on a crowded road. It's a waste of time.
You have to balance your route planning between weather, peak commuter hour, shortest route, fuel stops, speed traps, etc, across a few thousand miles and a few time zones.
The biggest risk to "others" is that when traveling much faster light traffic you have little margin for error if someone in that traffic does something dumb.
That's the main skill of the Iron Butt Rally (www.ironbutt.com), in which I have previously had a podium placing. Because of the structure of the rally (which is not how fast can you go from point-to-point), logistical considerations are your biggest enemy. Can I get from point A to point B, with optional out-of-the-way stops at points X, Y, and Z, and still get to B on time (with heavy penalties if you're late)? Get a ticket, and the organizers find out (and they will), you're out. The organizers try very hard to keep speed out of the rally. As they say, it's a rally and not a race.
But I'll tell you what, when it's just after sunrise in the Panhandle of Texas, there isn't a car on the road, and I need to be in L. A. in twelve hours, well, let's just say legality isn't at the top of my list. The harsh reality is that if time is a consideration at all, then pragmatism says that the faster you go, the more time you have to sleep, eat, or add Point W to your list of stops. That's largely why I quit participating in such events, because unless they want to do it timed rally style (IOW, you must be at fixed points neither early or late), all the platitudes in world aren't going to keep the speeds down.
That's like saying robbing a bank requires planning and the only risk is that one of the bank employees does something "dumb". They are endangering people and if they want to show their manhood they can go to a race track and show what they can do there. That's where the big boys go. Doing Cannonball is a pseudo achievement.
> The biggest risk to "others" is that when traveling much faster light traffic you have little margin for error if someone in that traffic does something dumb.
The speed limit exists partially because "dumb things" are inevitable. A driver who ignores this inevitability is at least as guilty as the driver who did the "dumb thing."
In a theoretical world that doesn't include ticket revenue and "think of the children" speed limit is a function of road design and some reasonable average vehicle/driver/conditions. They are an output rather than an input. You don't just assign a speed limit. It's based on the road and condition. In the real world US speed limits outside of urban areas are laughably low for reasonably attentive drivers in clear weather and light traffic.
In an well maintained sedan there is no reason why one cannot drive at triple digit speeds on the vast majority of the US interstate highway system if traffic conditions are light enough to permit it. The biggest risk from traveling much faster than other traffic on limited access highways is rear ending someone who changes lanes without a signal.
Speed limits exit not because "dumb things are inevitable" but because dumb things are far less common when traffic is moving a close to uniform speed and providing a suggested speed that most drivers find reasonable most of the time helps traffic flow more uniformly and safely.
Furthermore, the rules of the road provide massive redundancy. That's why a margin for error exists. By going much faster or slower than other traffic you are getting rid of the margin. If you're going fast you're depending on other people to not move unexpectedly. If you're going too slow you're depending on other people to be driving slow enough and paying attention enough
The person who changes lanes without signaling while going 50 in a 60 where everyone goes 70 can only claim the moral high ground over the person who rear ends them because they were going 80 and couldn't compensate adequately so long as the latter party doesn't have a dash cam.
I think it's important to remember that the national speed limit of 55 was put in as a fuel saving measure in the 1970s. Drag increases in a non-linear fashion with velocity, so you don't just use twice as much gas to go 110 than to go 55. In a world where we worry about carbon output (either from your ICE or the natural gas plant that makes your supercharger electricity), that's a very real reason why one should not drive at triple digit speeds on a highway.
That record of 26:28 was an April Fool's Day hoax by Alex Roy, intended to publish as silly of an article as possible with the intent of showing that automotive journalists don't fact check enough: http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2015/04/drove-2628-end-auto...
There needs to be a real race where everyone sticks to the speed limits with penalty times applied for every second above the speed limit, with proper driver breaks and everything else truckers obey. Simple rule set. Of course journey times would be nearer 50 than 28 hours but there could be other prizes for fuel efficiency, luck at the lights and so on.
Also, there is the suitability of the car, I imagine a Tesla would be better than Rolls Royce luxury if you need to be in the thing for 50 hours.
Stock cars with speed limits may not sound like fun but it would be accessible. Maybe the 'golf ball run' where you have to take a set of golf clubs across the country to tee off into both oceans in record time could be the notional goal of such an event. It would also give an excuse for some faux golfing style in the fashion department.
Incidentally, in 1933 the petrol record was around today's EV time.
While I appreciate the record, the GPS fast forward video shows frequent texting while driving. Is this legal in the US? Here in the Netherlands we have statistics showing car accidents up after a downward trends with texting while driving as the leading cause. It makes me wish people were back to using cellphones without carkits, at least people had more chance of eyes on the road.
It's not legal in most states. It's also possibly not legal to be driving at the speeds they were probably driving at for this record at various points (previous canonball run records for non-EVs went far over the speed limit and used police radars to avoid run-ins. I'm not sure if this attempt stuck to a more legal approach or not)
There is so much negativity about Tesla. Watching Tesla reminds of the the quote
"We hoped for flying cars, but what we got was 140 characters"
(or something similar, I don't remember it verbatim)
Every time I think about Tesla, I am reminded of the thousands of brilliant engineers toiling away in Silicon Valley trying to optimize online advertising. Maybe we could be a bit more closer to Fusion energy, maybe we could be a bit more closer to lesser carbon footprints. That small bit really is crucial, especially when we are fighting a losing battle with mother earth. Perhaps the world has too much information. When information flow is cheap, the cost of propaganda is low enough to create legitimate confusion. Imagine a world without Google, FB or Twitter, perhaps there would be concerted efforts by governments towards educating the masses about global warming. Perhaps such efforts could not be subverted by foreign governments or fringe groups. Looking back, the true value addition by SV will be companies like Tesla, Solar City & SpaceX.
Here is a guy who is scarily close to being a real-life Iron Man, doing something that has shown verifiable results and actually progresses humanity far more than FB/Twitter and to some extent Google.
But all I feel is constant negativity. I really feel sorry for Musk. I sincerely admire him for what he is struggling for and I really wish he'd get more support.
Note : I do understand his background and that the seed money for SpaceX was from paypal and all, but even then, paypal was a different business than just online ads.
It's always been my sincere opinion that even if Musk fails miserably I'll still admire him more than most other "tech idols". There are people that say he's all talk, but I don't care. Even if he's 75% talk and delivers on the rest, whatever he does achieve is still better than a face-detecting smartphone or a social network that makes money by profiling your personality for advertisers. I don't care about the money, I like his vision and in the end that's what makes a leader.
Musk isn't a PR guy, and I think a lot of people respect and like him for that.
He makes crazy "moonshots", he has a vision and doesn't tone it down nearly as much as others do, and he's not afraid to be "wrong".
The SpaceX community has a running joke about "elon time" being set to mars time, because his predictions and goals are almost always late (and are often under delivering), but I honestly respect that. Him and his companies aren't taking the "easy way out" of making easily achievable goals and then making them again and again. They are shooting for unlikely and in some cases almost impossible goals, and getting 70-90% of the way there, and they aren't exactly ashamed of it. IIRC there was a reddit thread a while back that was "bashing" Elon and Tesla and SpaceX about only hitting something like 70% of the goals they set, but I read it differently. They set out to revolutionize 3 different industries (cars, space, and now "boring" and public transport), and even if they can only get to "70% revolutionized", it's still a massive win in my opinion!
He's not perfect, I hear lots of bad things from many employees about the work environment, but overall I really respect the man and the companies he has created, and I think he has and will continue to do a lot for humanity.
I think they meant PR-only guy. His PR genius is in using his fan following for free PR. Tesla or SpaceX hardly need to spend any marketing dollars.
No other tech leader is as charismatic (Steve Jobs came close, but Musk seems more genuine whereas Jobs felt like a salesman) and very few are as personally intelligent and accomplished.
Steve Jobs was basically a salesman. A brilliant one. Nothing bad in that; I just wouldn't call him a "tech leader" - he was involved with technology only incidentally.
Steve Jobs was hacking on electronics in the 1970s and building the most advanced personal computing devices from then until his death.
He was not a programmer but he knew more about computers than most programmers do. There's absolutely no way to call him non-technical accurately. Bill Gates giving up programming did not make him non-technical.
Elon Musk wouldn't make this mistake. He's very openly trying to emulate Steve Jobs' entire skillset.
Maybe the cause of this confusion is that most people only saw Steve Jobs when he went up on stage for an hour every year. Try asking yourself what he was doing the rest of the time. Elon Musk did.
I might be mistaken, but I was under the impression that in the early days of Apple, it was Wozniak who was the tech guy and did most of the tech stuff.
As far as I know, you're right: "Jobs never did a lick of engineering in his life. He had me snowed," Alcorn later recalled. "It took years before I figured out that he was getting Woz to 'come in the back door' and do all the work while he got the credit."
No one would look very technical next to Woz. And it's not surprising Jobs farmed out the work to his badass friend.
> "At night the two would collaborate on building it at Atari: Wozniak as engineer, Jobs as breadboarder and tester...."
But this is a very biased way of describing two people working on a technical project. To call one an "engineer" and the other a "breadboarder" as if he sat quietly contributing nothing.
Just because one person is playing second fiddle to a truly gifted technical genius doesn't magically make them non-technical.
If you want to argue Steve Jobs isn't technical, you'll have to set the bar lower than "as good as Woz" or almost none of us will make the cut!
They created the Apple II together. Woz did most of the hard engineering but it was Jobs that shaped it into a product for regular people through a thousand technical decisions.
You cannot create the company or products that Steve Jobs did without being technical. That doesn't mean you have to write the firmware on the wifi chip. It does mean you have to understand thousands of deeply technical concepts about computers.
He isn't a PR guy in the traditional sense at all.
He has been anointed as a neo-PR guy now because his style of doing things (like responding to requests on Twitter with "Done,") is breathtakingly refreshing compared to PR from actual trained PR agencies
His back of hand calculations on the viability of self-landing rockets, while coming back from a trip to Russia after a failed attempt to purchase a launch vehicle certainly wasn't moonshot.
He is a technology man in and out and knows the capabilities and limits of technology. I remember reading a book about Tesla and I always felt like he saw opportunities in the gaps existing between what is available and what is possible.
Indeed. Musk is a tech guy. The real tech guy, not the usual CEO of a tech company, who really does mostly marketing and management. He knows his physics and is involved in engineering decisions. For me personally, it's Musk who defines what does it mean to be a "tech CEO", and most companies we discuss here every day don't even qualify.
> I remember reading a book about Tesla and I always felt like he saw opportunities in the gaps existing between what is available and what is possible.
My view is that he focuses on what should be possible from first principles, ignoring whether or not our short-sighted markets find it desirable at the moment. It's a good strategy if you have a non-monetary goal in mind and resources to bankroll the efforts at forcing the markets into accepting your work.
I really wish there is stronger support for him against these sorts of people. How can he be all talk when we see his rockets going up and coming back down.
How can you look at the valuation of Tesla and think that Musk lacks public support? The company is worth more than Ford, while delivering a fraction of the cars. The difference in output is made up by faith in his promises.
Why does Elon Musk need popular support? He's not a politician who relies on popular support for his very job. He's not an actor who relies on popular support to bring money to his films.
He's a CEO. All the support he needs is to deliver on his promises. From my exceptionally limited point of view, he's at about 35% there:
Space X: 100% (Reusable, self-landing rockets. Fuck yeah!)
Tesla: 40% (Prototype in decent shape, promised production capabilities of model 3 still seems a long ways off)
He doesn't technically need it to run companies day to day, but he needs it to realize his visions. Two main reasons:
- More popular support means his visions resonate, and more people will start pursuing them too.
- More popular support means the market will be more receptive towards those visions.
Note that Musk doesn't care if it's SpaceX or Tesla that are the market leaders long-term. He cares that we go to Mars and get off fossil fuels in transportation, however that happens. Hence e.g. opening up Tesla patents.
RE your % score, I'd give a different breakdown, based on what are Elon's actual goals:
SpaceX: 40% (reusable, self-landing first stage done; Falcon Heavy yet to launch, BFR in the works)
Tesla: 80% (their latest cars might have problems, but they successfully cracked the car market and started a wave of electrification that's unlikely to stop now; Chinese companies alone will carry it forward)
WRT Tesla: The company has started a revolution, but to all intents and purposes it feels like its falling behind. The Model 3 was supposed to be in full production already, but it's not. It's also not profitable, which is a major problem for Tesla (and Musk by extension) in the long run.
Not to mention, all of the pre-orders for Model 3's that aren't fulfilled in a timely manner are going to hurt the population's opinions of Elon Musk - and rightly so.
As far as following a vision: history is full of failed visionaries, and vision alone is not enough to propel mankind forward. Execution is.
People are making way to much of a drama about Model 3. You can go 2 years back and find information that they hope to get mass production going by end of 2017.
Sure the might have fallen short 30-40% but given the scale of their plan, this seems like a extremly miner problem.
The buissness reality is that there are 100000s of people who want these cars and they have essentially a proven market for years to come. The waste majority of these people are not gone start hating elon because their car is a bit late.
> As far as following a vision: history is full of failed visionaries, and vision alone is not enough to propel mankind forward. Execution is.
Like building a reusable rocket or massivly improving the price and production capacity of batteries?
People need to stop listening to Elon own prediction of things and consider where things would be without him. He has already revolutionised the space and the car industry, that is just a fact.
Paypal: 75% (Much hate, still good option for many things.)
Solar City: 75% (Over expanded, not sure if that was a bad thing and was bought by Tesla. Still it installed 870 MW of solar in 2015 alone.)
Steve Jobs had close ties to fewer companies, Pixar, Apple, NeXT and did a similar purchase of NeXT by Apple. However, while dubious Apple greatly benefited from NeXt. So, I am willing to bet Solar City could be a similar net benefit.
The boring company is still to early to judge. Hyperloop is not yet a failure and considering it was simply a short paper I think 0% is overly harsh.
As someone who has lost money to PayPal, I have a hard time agreeing with the 75%, especially when you consider all the caveats associated with it. That said, I won't argue the point.
I could swear that the rush for solar via Solar City has dropped precipitously. It seems like those who want it have it at this point. Its business model is also heavily dependent on US grants, and has seen some major downturns in terms of litigation and has been operating at a net loss for its lifetime. Let's put it closer to 50%
The boring company is simply trying to make underground highways - a task which makes very little practical sense in a world where highways already exist, and their downsides are well known. Not to mention, no execution or proof of concept exists.
As for the Hyperloop, again with the lack of execution or proof of concept. Anybody can make a whitepaper, but Elon Musk has put his weight behind the concept, to no practical end. But sure, let's remove it because you're right, he made no promises behind it; didn't start a company around it.
The boring company includes the idea of ~140MPH electric sleds that carry cars. This is part of their goal for 1/10th the price. It may or may not be implemented long term, but it is a novel concept and they are actually digging right now to gain expertise.
I would call it similar to Space X before they started landing the rockets. Just making digging cheaper much like making rockets cheaper is a basis for a profitable company. A long term goal of 1/10th the price really would be game changing.
PS: Picture even a one way toll road that goes 20 miles under I-66 into DC they could easily charge 10$/ trip an get 100,000+ riders each way per day. So, the real question is how much that tunnel costs. At 20 billion $ that's 20 billion * 6% ~= 1.2 billion per year vs 2 * 10 * 100,000 * 5 * 48 = 480 million so not a win. But, at 1/10th the price or 2 billion that's ~120 million per year break-even vs 480 million and highly profitable. How many places could a 5 mile segment be able to charge say 3 dollars and have 100,000 people per workday?
Consider this comparison: buses carrying 50 people each on I-66 going 60mph. Which is going to carry more people into DC, at what cost? Think of the station wagon filled with hard drives vs. gigabit internet.
Cars, unless going ungodly fast (140mph is not enough), are inefficient at throughput.
You can design a bus for these tunnels fairly easily. However, 140mph under a city vs 3 mph at street level and buses lose unless they have 47+ passengers but a 50 passenger bus costs 2-3 car slots easily so it's a wash.
PS: I-66 really does have 3mph traffic as it will take 30+ minutes to travel 10 miles. As in I was happy if that part was under 30 minutes, and not surprised if it took 40 minutes as the average was well over 30.
Well first of all they're not his rockets. The engineers and scientists did it, he supplies the money, arguably a meritless in ck prison.
Second, there are many promises he still hasn't delivered on: SpaceX targets not met, Tesla still running at a massive loss, Hyperloop being doomed to failure, etc etc. I can definitely see why people say he is mostly talk, even though admittedly he has achieved some successes.
Am I understanding this correctly, that the criticism of Elon Musk being all talk is because he didn't personally perform all the work in achievements like Falcon 9 and Model S?
He is a brilliant business man and gave all of the engineers at spacex the opportunity and freedom to achieve great things. For that he should be commended - we need more business leaders like him in this world! I think at the end of the day though in idolizing Musk you are taking away from the hard work and brilliance of all the other employees at his companies. America has this iron man style obsession with one guy changing the world by himself. But at the end of the day we achieve greatness by working together as a team.
I think most Elon fanbois implicitly understand that each rocket SpaceX launches involves blood, sweat and tears of hundreds of skilled people.
Ultimately, focusing on a leader is a shorthand used in everything. We talk about famous generals, and not about their lieutenants. We talk about presidents and kings, omitting the low-level administrative staff that actually does the work and keeps everything from falling apart. Often it's a bad generalization leading to bad conclusions (e.g. most presidents have little influence on the direction of their countries), but I think it's fair in case of Elon Musk, since it's his strong vision that defines the direction of SpaceX and Tesla.
Consider this: if SpaceX went public and Elon decided to step down, the company would lose most of its fanbase for very simple reason - it would most likely turn into a regular company and stop being just the vehicle to get humanity to settle Mars.
What a ridiculous strawman. Do you want him to insert every last rivet and weld every last joint in his cars and rockets before they become 'his' cars and 'his' rockets?
Tesla I could still grant but you do him great injustice by simply ignoring how much of his personal resolve is responsible for SpaceX even existing.
Feel free to list the number of times a group of engineers have spontaneously teamed up to form a rocket company.
Your assume that
A) big things can only ever get done by companies.
B)A CEO 'owns' a company's assets.
I'll give credit to him for creating and acquiring funding for the organization. I'll give him credit for publicizing his vision. Each and every rocket/car however, was massively subsidized by taxpayer dollars, and made feasible by hundreds of people WORKING TOWARD A COMMON GOAL.
The practice of abstracting away hundreds to thousands of people's hard work and financial support, involuntary or not, is disingenuous at best and downright dishonest at worst.
Abstraction is evil. Abstraction is what turns "people" into "human resources".
And before the inevitable "That's not practical!" or "That's unreasonable!": It really isn't. Most people have just gotten so used to credit for their own work being sacrificed to someone else that nobody points out how incredibly screwed up the practice is.
It is a strawman because it is reliant on a literalist interpretation that no one is actually arguing for. Of course the rockets are not literally his just as Obamacare wasn't literally Obama's.
> B)A CEO 'owns' a company's assets.
Never made the claim nor does it seem relevant here. No one is talking of actual ownership. When it comes to ownership and accounting of a company, there are already well-established metrics and practices to figure that stuff out.
Yes, the rocket is designed by engineers and put together by technicians and mechanics and thousands of souls have come together to achieve this task, and no one is denying their contributions.
But none of that would have existed without Elon. And he is being praised for that vision and steely resolve while others work on their PhDs from Armchair University.
This leadership is not trivial and it is central to something like SpaceX even existing.
You make valid criticisms. However, you have to bear in mind that nothing in this world is perfect. Not even Linux. I bet every sports person gets on the field intending to win but they don't always win. That doesn't mean that sportsperson is a failure. They just lost some matches.
I do not think that Musk should get a free pass. His companies have taken on some pretty impressive projects. One day someone will make a better electronic car but much like the Wright brothers and Henry Ford, Musk did lead the way.
Armstrong made his way up meritocratically on the strength of his piloting skills, to fighter pilot then carrier pilot then test pilot then astronaut. Many reckoned they wouldn't've been able to pull Gemini 8 out of the spin he got it out of, or successfully find a landing spot for Apollo 11 in the boulder field they descended on.
Maybe Musk really is as skilled as all that. Or maybe he was lucky enough to make a lot of money once (with x.com) and hire good people. It's hard to tell since so few people ever get to try having that much money to play with.
Whatever are his contributions to the rocket design these days (it's obviously a SpaceX secret), one can't deny that his ideas for future of humanity are the raison d'être and the driving force behind the company. He obviously hires engineers smarter than himself to do the work; his own engineering skills only add to the credibility of the company and its goals.
It's really his push, his vision and his risk. NASA had tremendous resources for decades, with some of the best minds of 21st century working there. They didn't produce self landing rockets, and on top of that, it makes complete business and economic sense too.
My understanding is that he personally learned a ton about rocket science and actively contributed to the design, as well as providing business context, which is itself no mean feat.
That is just false. Elon is one of the lead engineers of the Falcon 9 rocket, he knows as much about it as anybody. He also came up with the idea, he gathred the people, he gathered the investors and did about 100 other things needed for the success of SpaceX.
Elon is still in control of SpaceX, so the Falcon 9 and FH rockets are his by any reasonable definition.
> Second, there are many promises he still hasn't delivered on:
What matters is overall progress and not progress relative to elons timelines. Also, most of those were not promises but rather announcments.
> SpaceX targets not met
Yeah, he only took like 15 years to launch more rockets then China or Russia. Build the largests commercial launch buissness.
But of course what we should focus on is that he is such a failure because he said 5 years ago that the FH would fly a bit sooner.
You really need learn to evaluate things on its own terms.
> Tesla still running at a massive loss
Poor Elon, 500000 reservations that any other company would kill for. Revenue stream for 1-2 years even without new reservations. What a failure.
> Hyperloop being doomed to failure,
Whitepaper without company behind it not successful. More big news at 8pm.
> I can definitely see why people say he is mostly talk, even though admittedly he has achieved some successes.
Yeah, the guy who revolutionised space launch, landed fucking rockets and created reusable rockets is 'mostly talk, with some success'. Honstly people can't see the trees because of the forest. This is so fucking bizar.
I don't really care either way for the man but something he said to the effect of "Technology doesn't just get better, it takes hard work and will and money" and the general building the future you want to live in.
I mean sentiments like that. It's just right in the feels ya know? It's a reason to go even read the news in the morning.
He's arguably already had legitimate and impactful successes. Building a business even remotely capable of commercial spaceflight is a huge deal. What Tesla has done, both in batteries and in getting the major auto makers to put focus on EVs is a huge deal.
Musk arguably does significantly more talking than doing, but his goals are lofty enough that even failing to make it halfway still means significant advancement.
Even stranger to me: I'm French and we're world-class haters. Like, culturally conditioned to be dismissive of success, always seeing something negative when people achieve big things (they must have been crooked in some shape or form along the way, they exploited others, etc).
There used to be a time where American people were different in that regard. Celebrating success, entrepreneurs, daring mavericks, etc.
Now all I see is jealousy, smirk, poo-pooing. Have you guys turned French?
Postmodernism has been en vogue in the USA since the late 1950's. You only need to look to American literature since then and you'll notice much of what is considered the "most important" fiction is Postmodern. Which means it is cynical, ironic and skeptical of all the things you associate with the French.
This is not a fringe philosophical concept bound to popular novel's either. Look to the background of villains in mainstream super hero movies, to our politics (many call Trump the first Postmodern president), and the drive to be "authentic" in every aspect of the self for reasons of self promotion in some kind recursive cynical loop which other view as a perfect specimen of our contemporary irony, nearly perfected!
I'm not an expert on French culture or any culture per-se, but perhaps Americans (of which I'm one) do have a more superficial embrace of sentimentalism and a less critical approach to hero worship and "getting rich" and maybe it isn't driven by cynicism as much as naiveté but that's only one aspect of the culture as a whole. Even still, I'd argue most people are driven by the Postmodern philosophy wether they know it or not; are more cynical then they even know and skeptical of our institutions (universities, churches, etc) on one side or another.
> Look to the background of villains in mainstream super hero movies
This. I sometimes wonder if I'm the only one to notice that villains in popular movies/TV shows increasingly present reasonable positions (even if crooked methods), while it's the protagonists who seem to live by simplistic, populistic, feelings-based morality.
Musk DOES have a lot of support. I personally suspect much of the negativity comes from backlash caused by him having a legion of fanboys. Whenever someone gets idolized like I have often seen Musk as, haters come out in reaction.
Tesla's marketing is always misleading. That irks people and from there comes the "negativity". When the Model S came out, they tried to claim that they had "solved EVs". When they introduced their self driving tech, they pretty much implied that keeping your hands on the wheel was only a legal technicality. They are always trying to claim they are two more steps ahead than they really are. I understand that it is their job to do just that, but we don't have to believe them, and if we don't, that is not really "negativity". For example with the Model 3, they achieved just about what what Chevy did with the Bolt, in terms of price and range, which is good, but if you believed their marketing, you'd expect them to be far ahead of their competition.
I think Model S solved electric driving. Car reviewers seem to think so, the industry seem to think so (most manufacturers announced electrical models). Range, comfort, charging locations, safety, all solved problems.
How is Tesla's supposed claim they solved electrical driving misleading?
For the past 15 years people had been trying to make the mass market EV. The envisioned future was that the every day man would be driving this basic EV instead of their $15k ICE commuter car. That was the goal, obviously influenced to a great extent by both fuel prices and climate change concerns. All EV car models before the Tesla Roadster were trying to target this market.
The Model S targeted a new market entirely. Nobody had tried to do a luxury sedan EV and kodus to Tesla for spotting that niche, but that was not the goal that everyone else was chasing. It was something else entirely.
From an economics and from a technology point of view, building an $80k EV with decent range is insanely easier than building a $15k EV. Even if it has to be a luxury car and look good. It still gives you that $20k leeway to equip you car with a massive battery.
The misleading part was trying to claim that they had solved the problem that everyone else was working on, when in fact they had not. And they still have not today as evidenced by the $35k price tag of the Model 3.
Perhaps everyone was chasing the wrong goal. Just about all "new" technologies start off being expensive. This is true of the telephone, cellphone, car ... In time when manufacturing processes catch up they become available to the masses. I presume the first devices are expensive to cover the R&D costs.
Not so much: The actual Cannonball record is a bit over half the EV one -- 28 hours and 50 minutes -- and Roy himself drove it in 31 hours and 4 minutes. I'll be curious how much of their journey was charging time, a figure someone will probably extract from their GPS track soon.
>They are always trying to claim they are two more steps ahead than they really are.
Sounds like Google, Microsoft, and pretty much every tech startup between Palo Alto and Vancouver.
The difference is that Musk actually does something. Creates something. 90% of the other "tech" companies are just shoving around bits of other people's information and calling it innovation.
To quote 'natural219 from what I just linked, the words I 100% support:
"Godspeed, Musk. (...) I'm behind you 100%. I just hope you can finish your work before our shitty, myopic, destructive society tears you down. Here's to faith."
Inside that negativity there is some truth too. Tesla for one is leveraged 7:1 and that too in a time of easy and near zero interest rate credit. With Feds changing rates they might be painted into a tight box.
I am sure situation is same for SpaceX too.
And then the whole SolarCity acquisition which didn't go down well.
That said, yes you have to hand it to Musk. Even if these companies go belly up, they have brought in lot of new technology.
Elon Musk always plays pretty close to the line. If Tesla wasn't so leveraged, doubtless Musk would immediately start trying to expand to more and more Gigafactories until it was.
The situation for SpaceX is different. SpaceX got 18 successful launches last year, several of them with reused rockets and most of them recovered afterward (no unsuccessful landing attempts, though a few were intentionally expended for performance reasons).
Their only real domestic competitor ULA which launches Atlas and Delta, long held as the giants in American space launch, only had a total of 8 launches, all expended of course.
Not only does SpaceX have a huge technological moat in the form of operational space launch reuse, but operationally their Falcon 9 (which had complete success in 2017) is out-launching everything else, including both the Chinese DF-5 (which had a failure) and the Russian R7/Soyuz (which also had a failure).
And their future products build tremendously on this already sizable lead:
1) Falcon Heavy, completed pad fit checks by the end of the year and now getting ready for a static fire and launch in a couple weeks, is even MORE reusable (3 cores recovered, counting for 27 out of 28 of the engines) and MORE powerful than any other rocket launching today. Dragon Crew also nearing completion and will be the first (of 3 total vehicles nearing completion) to return Americans to orbit on a domestic vehicle, likely this year.
2) A satellite constellation which is readying satellite prototype launch in the next month or two, has the potential of making SpaceX a telecomm giant. The scale of this constellation would not be feasible without the reusability tech they've developed.
3) And BFR, which will further cement their space launch tech moat, make launching the full version of the potentially-extremely-profitable satellite constellation WAY cheaper, and potentially open several new markets.
SpaceX is like Tesla after a full ramp-up of the Model 3 selling as many cars as Toyota does but in a world where no one else has an electric car for sale. So understandably (for Musk), he's leveraging this position to make things like BFR a reality.
Both companies are in extremely good positions compared to 2008 when both companies nearly went under. SpaceX in particular. And given the fact that Elon was able to save both, it means a market down-turn is something he has seen before and he has some powerful strings to pull in case the market has some major problems.
The negativity is because Tesla has some truly abhorrent business practices. For me, it's out of love, not hate. Of course, there's a lot of people who stand to gain from Tesla failing.
I’ve heard he doesn’t pay well. It would be a lot easier to support a “visionary” if they believed in treating their employees well. Henry Ford did it a century ago. We probably got a golden age (of sorts) out of that.
And it might sound callous but plenty of companies have similar practices (and are not creating anything of earth-shattering value), so judging Tesla more than the others is a bit unfair.
$TSLA will sell a lot of cars this year, irrevocably altering the EV game. Price target $350 by Jan 2019.
But it pales in comparison to the watershed moment SpaceX and the entire spaceflight community will have. There is a real possibility for 28 launches, including two Falcon Heavy's. NASA TESS on track to discover an explosion in habitable zone exoplanets. Vector, Electron, TechShot and other private space data leading a push for commercial apps in space, including pharma, stem cells and materials foundries. And there is decent chance of someone landing on the moon for the first time in 45 years ;)
The GP meant to say "it doesn't matter for SpaceX that we find new planets, since no rocket company will send anything there in the forseeable future". The GGP was pointing out that TESS itself is launched by SpaceX.
A lot of negativity towards Elon comes from the fact he has taken on a lot of deeply entrenched interests and conventional wisdom. I know a "car guy" who deeply hates Elon and hopes for Tesla's collapse, because he has invested his whole life learning about the "beauty" of the Internal Combustion Engine, how to tune it, how to improve it etc. And here comes a guy who wants to disrupt all of that with an engine that is much much simpler and challenging 100 years of research and development. Then there are people who believe electric and solar are for "greenies" and have been trained to viscerally react against anything that is related to renewable energy. He has also taken on the dealership model, the fossil fuel industry, utilities, launch companies etc. You get the picture.
We must live on different planets, because I can't go a single day without hearing about some product they may or may not build at some point in the future. This is one of the most hyped up companies I've ever seen (mostly deservedly).
>Here is a guy who is scarily close to being a real-life Iron Man
Really? Scary close? I'd say not remotely close.
>I really feel sorry for Musk.
Really?
>Looking back, the true value addition by SV will be companies like Tesla, Solar City & SpaceX
SpaceX for sure. Tesla, maybe. SolarCity? What did they do except destroy a bunch of investor's money?
Edit: Downvoted before I could even fix a typo. This place is embarrassing to read sometimes..."Real life Iron Man", "feel sorry for Elon Musk".
everytime someone says that to me I say.. He's the dude that landed a freakin rocket back to earth and then again! most other things he's done can be termed as ruthless execution but to attempt stuff he's doing with SpaceX requires real vision and strong faith in that vision. This is real engineering.
I do feel that his critics often lose perspective. for instance he gets a lot of heat for not ramping up M3 production as fast as promised but in the grand scheme of things I fail to see what impact that has whether EVs ramp up to a million cars a year a few quarters earlier or later. only thing that matters is tesla/spacex/etc lives to fight another day.
That said I would never invest my money in tesla stock. Its simply because I dont think its His ultimate goal to make money & that will always reflect in the decisions he make.
You are sort of getting into "we would be better off without the internet" territory, which is a very difficult argument to make for either side. Tesla and Space X engineers would not have been able to achieve what they have without Google. The Arab Spring might not have happened without Twitter. But yeah we can just throw FB in the trash...
One thing that put me off about tesla, if you overlook all of the manufacturing issues that pretty much every analyst says will doom the company, is that for some bizarre reason the models were intentionally named in order to spell out S3XY. After Harvey Weinstein I think we all need to take a good hard look at the men who are in charge of things and ask, "why?" People don't get a free pass on being creeps just because they are blowing a lot of money anymore.
Yes, if you overtly sexualize something for which there is no real reason to take the conversation in that direction then you are very likely a creep. They could have been cool cars but I just don't like that.
Incidentally I was responding the comment that mentioned there is a lot of hate for Tesla. What I mostly don't like about Tesla, aside from that stupid naming convention, is that they missed all of their manufacturing targets and are about to hit a brick wall with investors, regardless of how "sexy" one thinks the car design is.
I don't know where you are from, but it worth remembering that the use of the term "sexy" is much more commonplace for inanimate objects and has different connotations in the English speaking world outside the United States. And the CEO of the company in question was raised outside the US.
"Sexy" has long been used to describe something visually attractive, not remotely related to sex. Here's Jonathan Ive talking about sexy computers: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/sexy-design/. Do you think they're actually sexually attracted to these machines? Or implying other people will be? I think you need to revise your word connotations.
What you just said is far more creepy than "S3XY".
>informal
exciting; appealing.
"I've climbed most of the really sexy west coast mountains"
synonyms: exciting, stimulating, interesting, appealing, intriguing, slick, red-hot
"a sexy sales promotion"
Did they? This is the first I've heard of it, and when I click models on their site, I see "S, X, 3, Roadster" (on mobile site), so I guess I never made any connection there.
He's the last technology patriarch. Practically a dinosaur from the age where women were not allowed to study STEM.
AND HE MARRIES ONLY SUPERMODELS, how's that for a smoking gun of oppression?
The President (i.e. the highest position other than Elon himself) of SpaceX is Gwynne Shotwell; please tell me how Elon is all about oppression of women.
Please don't undermine the (very real) fight against sexual harassment by conflating it with such nonsense issues.
It only gives ammunition to the chauvinists claiming that sex will be outlawed, or the idiots calling for politicians to resign for having sex out of wedlock.
It's interesting what would be the equivalent result for Chevrolet Bolt, as it's pretty much an equivalent car, but without the advantage of Tesla's supercharger network.
I don’t think it would be possible in anything like a reasonable amount of time. Non-Tesla fast chargers have huge gaps for a cross-country run. You’d have to spend days waiting for 6kW commercial chargers or 240V RV plugs charging you at 25-35MPH.
That doesn’t really address what I’m saying. The ability to use a DC fast charger doesn’t help if there aren’t any to use. Last I looked, there were no cross-country routes available using non-Tesla fast chargers. You’d need to cross large gaps on 240V charging alone.
Edit: just to show what I'm talking about, here's what plugshare.com shows for CCS chargers in the middle of the US:
That gap in the Nebraska is 336 miles long. Utah to Colorado is likely to be quite challenging with the mountains. East of St. Louis is another tough area.
I think you could do the trip entirely on DC chargers if you took some of the legs really slow to extend range.
The Bolt is EPA rated at 238 miles but on a long highway trip with not-terrible-weather it's trivial to drive and get 300 miles of range without resorting to hypermilling. A Level 2 charger would cover the 36 mile gap.
You'd expect to use a mix of DC chargers and Level 2 chargers. I think it's doable in both cars but I'd personally never take that trip in either of them. I don't know how often people are doing LA to NY trips that they'd ever decide between cars over their ability to do that vs just renting a car (or flying).
I'm surprised you can get so much additional range. My Tesla typically gets the EPA rated range in good weather at 65-70MPH. A 25% increase in range would require driving significantly slower than the speed of traffic. Is the Bolt's range really so understated?
LA to NYC is a pretty unusual trip. The Bolt is still a difficult sell for more typical long car trips, though. I've done a dozen thousand-mile legs in my Model S without a problem, but they'd be really tough in a Bolt. The chargers do exist for the routes I've taken, but they're not very conveniently located and often are single units, leaving you vulnerable to being blocked, broken, or in use.
I think the Supercharger network is adequate for road trips, but it's the bare minimum to make it reasonable.
Charging time is what make petrol win. Drive 500 miles, take 5mn to charge up and you're good for 500 more miles.
Until EV can do this (surely through charging stations like petrol cars) they won't good at anything more than daily commute if you can plug your car at at home and at work.
So battery technology is where the interest should be. We already know how to make efficient electric motors, we know how to make small vehicles. All wee need is fast charging energy stores. All some kind of electrical rails available on highways EV could use. Maybe setup specific separated lanes with no speed limit, EV rail but only if using some autonav which responds to the highway command to optimize the flow. Yes, you'd get something like trains for individuals.
Yes, refuling will always be faster than recharging. That is physics. The question rather is: at which point (and for which driver profile) is it no longer a practical problem? Elektric cars already save you a lot of refuling stops in day-to-day driving, if you plug them in over night. And the Tesla supercharger network is basically almost fast enough, that it reasonably fits with the breaks one would take on long trips when not racing for time. And of course, electric cars give you all the benefits of electric cars, like no exhaust, no noise and better torque, no gear shifts.
Personally, I think it's when an EV can make a 9-hour drive without needing more than about 30 minutes of total charging.
9 hours is (in my opinion) the max amount of driving you can seriously do without at least a couple hours of resting.
That'd be about 540 miles total, maybe a bit less if you could make those 30 minutes of rest stops at a fast charger.
Right now, EV's are clearly the future. I'd say that when they have a 500 mile range with an MSRP that matches ICE vehicles, they'll go from being "exciting new technology" to "the obvious choice for most people."
> Personally, I think it's when an EV can make a 9-hour drive without needing more than about 30 minutes of total charging.
The Model S 100D can almost do that already: start in your garage with a 100% charge, drive 300 miles, recharge 80% in 40 minutes, drive another 240 miles. Under ideal conditions it can even achieve it (the EPA range being 335 miles).
Current Superchargers can put out 145 kW, but the cars can only accept 120 kW. So the network already has some future-proofing for when the chemistry catches up.
Of course the old goalpost used to be 300 miles without charging. I have no doubt it will move yet again, and "24 hours of driving with only 5 minutes of charging" will become the new benchmark for practicality. :p
A problem here is everyone's personal anecdotes are different. I have an uncle that has driven 10-12 hour hauls between Kentucky and Louisiana enough that he doesn't blink at doing it all in one day, with as minimal a break as possible.
On the flipside, I know that my limit before wanting to murder people and/or feeling bone-weary exhaustion is somewhere between 4-5 hours cumulative in a day, regardless of the number and length of breaks, but overall better with at least one >30-minute break every two hours and/or 15-minute every hour. (For me, EV's are clearly the present. I'm pretty happy within their travel limits.)
There's such a huge range of extremes with what people are comfortable with.
I've also met a lot of people that need more breaks than they actually take, but don't realize that self-care advantage yet. It's possible that forced, longer recharge breaks with an EV could be a good thing for overall road health. More drivers overall with slightly more opportunities to stretch and rest could be an amazingly useful thing for US traffic and calming some long distance road rage, given the chance.
You make some really good points here. I'm no stranger to long roadtrips; I do Detroit-to-NYC at least every few years, and I've gotten pretty comfy with Detroit-to-Orlando with an overnight stop. It's been a few years since doing Vegas straight-through with a co-driver, but I've done that a few times too.
The trips where I have plenty of time and can stop and go for a jog, or hike up some scenic terrain and take some photos, feel a lot safer than the ones where I'm nose-to-the-grindstone the whole time. I'm simply more focused when I get back in the car because I've had those minutes to let my mind and body wander.
I do feel like 15-20 minutes every 4-5 hours is a good and comfy amount of rest on a roadtrip. I've tried to do the 5-minute fuel stops and it just adds more stress than it's worth. Now, if more Supercharger stations happened to have a park or a gym nearby...
I would think EV chargers should be a tourism gold mine in the near-ish future. A 20 to 30-minute-ish semi-captive audience should be making a lot of business owners drool right now.
I'd been considering for some time that if I were McDonald's corporate right now, I'd be examining EV chargers right now for a potential amenity to sell to franchisees (or possibly even to require from franchisees ahead of demand curves to create favorable headwinds).
I hadn't thought about gym chains, but that's also a great idea. "EV charging at any of our gyms around the country" / "Stop in on your next road trip" just might be an amenity that could sell some gym memberships.
Thinking about McDonald's comment a bit more: McDonald's optimized for fast turnover, so maybe they aren't the best fit. Instead you might want a sit-down restaurant chain like one of Darden's, such as Olive Garden. Picture "Unlimited soup, salad, breadsticks, and EV charging."
It's funny because it could be evolutionary pressure back away from the drive-through model. You could even imagine the classic Drive-In model making a big comeback. A Sonic restaurant already looks like a modern EV charger facility from a distance. (Though personally, I don't ever eat in my car, so that has less appeal to me.)
I don't think 500 miles of range is what will trigger it as the obvious choice.
A proliferation of decent, non "ev looking" cars with 200 miles of range will be all it takes for people to realize that they only really drive 50 miles a day, and paying for gas is for suckers.
Yeah, 50 miles a day, most days. My daily commute is quite normal, easily within the range of a Leaf or whatever, but I also enjoy frequent roadtrips to Chicago, Cleveland, Dayton, Toronto, occasionally Kansas City or Washington DC. Most of those are weekend jaunts, but there are longer trips too – I drove to Eagle Harbor last summer and Orlando over the holidays. I’ll probably drive to NYC this summer, as I have in 4 of the last 10 years. I love roadtrips and consider them a wonderful part of the American experience. (Following Route 66 with a few friends from school is an adventure everyone should have, and I simply don’t know if there’s a European equivalent. This is very hard to explain to folks who didn't grow up in the US.)
The standard EV-evangelist response to this is “take the train” or “rent a car for the weekend”, but I’m sorry, those just aren’t comfortable for me – the train lacks the freedom and sense of adventure, and rentals usually smell funny, among other things. Altering my lifestyle to suit the car’s limitations means it was the wrong car in the first place: The car should serve me, not the other way around. The Tesla’s longer range and presence of Supercharger stations along the routes are totally irrelevant for my daily commute, but they completely change the game when you include the other driving I consider important.
With any other EV, I would need a second car to address the other part of my usage, and that means twice the insurance, twice the registration cost, twice the driveway-space, and the chance of forgetting something important in the one car while I’m using the other. And feeling like a glutton for owning an “extra” vehicle.
With a long-range and fast-charging EV, I can finally have a single car that handles my daily commute and my road-trip habit, and that's been the main thing keeping me out of EVs so far. I've saved my place in line and I'm looking forward to the day they call my name.
Maybe I'm crazy, but it seems to me that the solution is standardizing power cell size/shape, and simply swapping them out at stations loaded with pre-charged cells. It seems then you could use a lot more technology to recharge those cells in a single location with a huge power hookup (and cooling).
IMO, charging time is a non issue for people with personal garages. I have owned a Model S for a year, and the only time charging time is a factor is when I am doing long road trips. For everyday use, my car gets charged overnight in my garage. I am actually very happy that I have to never make that weekly drive to the gas station.
good point. I would like to see battery swapping and I believe Tesla had plans for that but was temporarily suspended to focus on super chargers.
Hopefully Tesla would start leasing car batteries so we could drive over a ramp and get our depleted battery replaced by a fully charged one in minutes and drive off for another 300+ miles.
It will be interesting to see how the next Roadster is able to do once it actually becomes available. With a 600 mile range and likely the ability to charge significantly faster, it should be able to smash this number. Eventually.
Not only did the time best what Roy and a team did in 2016 when they did the run using a Model S and Autopilot by about 5 hours, but it also beat a record set just last summer by friends Jordan Hart and Bradly D'Souza in a Model S 85D by more than an hour.
("Roy" refers to Alex Roy, editor-at-large for the Drive, who was on the trip.)
They are getting started. Mass producing a vehicle is not an easy task and takes a lot of expierence, equipment. Every manufacturer starts slowly but we don’t notice it as drastically because there is usually less demand. If Model A is not available, most customers choose Model B or Model A-like from company B. Or chances are they have not even heard of that Model and just don’t look for it. For Tesla it is different.
Tesla needs to announce them far in advance so they get funding. They can’t just create another Model, start mass production and delivery without anyone noticing and caring to post it online. So they capitalize on the hype and sell as man as they can.
Furthermore there is no Tesla Model 3 from any other company. There is not even a Model S or X from any company. There are some products that are close but lack some desirable features such as being purely electric or being “techy”. For the Model X there is the Volvo XC 90 plug-in with 19 miles of range which wouldn’t get many people to work in the winter. The screen is a bit Tesla like but from what I have heard is that Tesla’s screen (and infotainment system) is much better.
For the Model 3, the only true competitors are the i3 and Chevy Bolt. The i3 is selling ok but does not have a lot of range and is a small vehicle. For its price, it is not really a good deal unless you are looking for any ev. The Bolt is a much better choice but many do not like its style. It is also not really available because it is often seen as a complicance vehicle. I have heard that people were laughed out of the store when they wanted to buy it. It is also not available in Norway where it is anticipated the most. My guess is that the 2018 Nissan Leaf will be the best choice this year but compared to a Model 3 still a compromise because it lacks (amongst all non Tesla) a proper quick charging network.
So the real question should be: when will the other manufactures start delivering?
>For the Model 3, the only true competitors are the i3 and Chevy Bolt
More like the Chevy Bolt / Opel Ampera e, the i3 has very limited range while the Chevy/Opel offers between 300 and 500km of range thanks to its much bigger 60kWh battery. The BMW i3 only has a 33kWh battery in the newer version, previous one was even less than that... The Leaf 2018 goes in the right direction, but 40kWh is still no enough to do 3h+ road trips.
Also, you make a very good point by saying that the Chevy Bolt/Opel Ampera E is a much better choice (ignoring the design). Same pricing as the Model 3 but the range seems much better. Given the experience of Chevy, I think that they can reduce the price and mass produce the Bolt much faster than Tesla can do with the model 3.
The Tesla 3s that are currently getting delivered to customers are up to $20k more expensive than the Bolt. That people see the two cars as more or less equivalent is a massive success for GM.
Yeah for $35k before any options. They currently only sell it with the premium package and only the range version. The premium package has improved audio (premium audio), USB ports for each passanger, powered seats and steering wheel, a glass roof, better build materials, rear heated seats as well as improved front heated seats. The long range version gets you 310 instead of 220 miles, improved 0-60 (0-100) times and fast supercharging, but sets you back another $9k. There is also the option to have autopilot for $5k (or less I don’t the correct price) but you can always buy that later over the air (at a premium). They also plan to add an option for white interior, air suspension, an AWD, and a performance version. So the model 3 can cost anything from 35k to 100k, though I don’t expect many to choose the performance version of the model 3. I personally believe that the standard battery, non premium version, and white interior will be available in a few months. The AWD and air suspension will probably be available by the end of the year. I don’t expect the performance version to be available until late next year. Tesla has given many timelines when we can expect what but that moves forth and back all the time.
> For the Model 3, the only true competitors are the i3 and Chevy Bolt. ... My guess is that the 2018 Nissan Leaf will be the best choice this year...
The Nissan Leaf isn't new in 2018, it's been around since 2011 and is (I think) still the most popular pure electric car. I'm aware that the 2018 should have some significant improvements, but I'm confused why you don't count either the current models or the 2018 as a competitor to the Model 3?
The pre-2018 LEAF has around an 80 mile range with a passsively cooled battery that does very poorly in the long term. The new version is better but still not in the same league as the Model 3 or Bolt.
The argument is not that "it's unfair to compare". The argument is that everything else being roughly equal, people prefer to wait for the Tesla because of its style.
As far as anyone can tell, this is the first non-employee who's received his Model 3 and he took delivery on the 26th of December, two days before starting this drive - so presumably he's not exactly your average customer.
Only if they stay at that rate. I think what he means is that they were able to double production in a relatively short period of time. Perhaps they can do that again a few more times.
Side note: if you know anyone with a Tesla and are in the Bay Area, owners can take three friends with them on a tour of the factory. It's fantastic and I highly recommend it.
Per month. But given how much faster they are with the other models and how bad their estimates have been for the Model 3, it just means we don't know how many vehicles they will average per day this year.
It's worth noting, though, that for the Model S and X the assembly lines were not built by Tesla. The Model 3 assembly line is the first one Tesla's ever made themselves.
The "old" Tesla factory was bought from a joint GM-Toyota venture that achieved average production of 25 000 vehicles per month running those lines for 25 years. Then that venture failed, Tesla bought the factory and repurposed the existing infrastructure.
It's like if SpaceX started by buying an old working NASA rocket design and repurposed it for the Falcon, but for Falcon Heavy they started entirely from scratch developing rocket fuels, engines, materials etc. without ever having done so before.
It's not really like that at all. To begin with, a Roadster / model S is not a repurposed Toyota - and that is exactly why Tesla has succeeded so far. Further, they completely reworked those lines with a huge amount of new equipment, to the point that is was worth it to them to buy the robotics manufacturer. It is closer to a technicality than starting from scratch. And as far as anyone knows, a huge part of the bottleneck hasn't even been in Fremont, but at the gigafactory (which they also built prior to the 3) - with a supplier who they have since removed from the equation.
My fail, I forgot it's sacrilege to critizize Musk here.
Model 3 production is way behind and currently does not look like it progressing. Musk is blaming Panasonic on the problems with batteries, while reports from the Model 3 factory tell about a lot of manual work.
So yes it is easier to announce a Pickup some years ahead than fix Model 3 production.
The performance curve - the instant power at any point is addicting. The seats were comfortable, and the trunk space was ample.
The build quality, at least on the unit I saw is _better_ then the S or the X right now. This is primarily due to the simplification of the assembly compared to the S and the X. Honestly, having driven both, I would buy a 3 before buying a S. The only killer feature I see missing is the air suspension, and we know that is coming for the 3.
They are going to sell a million of the 3s.
For the record, I’m not a EV or a green evangelist. I don’t have a snarky license plate, or solar on my roof. But I will be picking one of these up. It’s perfect for my use cases. People will compare it with the Bolt, but people forget that SUperchargers are Tesla only right now. Want to get from LA to NY? Easy in Tesla. With a Bolt, there are places that you just can’t go.
It looks like (judging by VIN allocations, which is not a great method, but also by drone videos) that Tesla hit 1k a week the last week or two of December. Assuming no huge bottlenecks remaining, that takes them solidly half way up their ramp, with one more huge jump - to 3-5k a week - remaining.