Probably not necessarily on topic - but I really want to give a shout out to Mr. Fowler. It’s really hard to find anyone in contemporary and practical software engineering who has been as impactful as he has been. A lot of modern concepts that improve software development has a seminal article authored or made visible by him.
The only way to be successful with EVs is to have substantial scale and that scale needs 10’s of billions of dollars, which means public markets or huge private rounds which also means dilution. Many things that are probably unpalatable to Mr.Dyson.
Sadly, I think in trying to make an EV fit into a market full of ICE cars has blinded the public, designers, and engineers that a sedan is not the only form factor an EV can take. Something like the Renault Twizy[0] is an excellent use of EV tech. And it's technically classified as a moped or scooter.
For now we're constructing 2000kg wagons to move 200kg of cargo and that just doesn't seem efficient.
ALL the early green cars looked stupid like this or ultra futuristic and no-one wants them. Tesla came a long and made one that just made a good looking car.
And people have also stupidly convinced themselves that what they need is a petrol powered 4WD SUV that can climb mountains, ford rivers, carry groceries and commute to work. It must also be capable of doing the weekly cross country road trip, apparently. This can all be yours for 84 payments of $500/month.
No one wants EVs because of the same stupid question that gets asked and answered repeatedly, "this would be great, but what do I do when the battery runs out?"
I think the UK press would compare anything like that to the Sinclair C5, thus forming public opinion, and thus leaving the whole project dead in the water in the UK:
I have been following Tesla closely for the last 5 years. The amount of FUD has been astounding considering no other car manufacturer has managed to launch a mass market electric car. Analysis after analysis say that competition is right around the corner or NIO is going to beat Tesla. Question is If these misleading articles/statements are ethical?
I don't understand how hn can praise tesla for selling cars on one hand and then condemn uber for being unprofitable on the other... neither of them have any evidence of doing anything other than funneling investor money into the hands of their customers.
Where does your number come from? You should also be more specific about those "some EU countries".
Kona sales in Europe in 2019 so far is 77,641 [0], but the electric version is likely tiny because Hyundai only sold 2,424 fully electric cars in June 2019. Across all models! Less than one percent of their total number [1]
And the Kona would be selling more if they could make it faster.
How do I know this? Because I would have bought one (so technically they've have sold at least one more!) but it's a 12 month lead time right now. They even briefly removed the option a few months ago to order from their website - it may be back now but I think it doesn't mention the delay in getting the car.
The turning point really is here for a lot of us with driveways.
EDIT - nope it's still un-orderable. Just the link to join the waiting list.
Sugar industry mirrors the approach that the oil industry has taken. Both should be addressed aggressively by introducing real education, researching and developing worthwhile alternatives. Both have unprecedented costs to humanity.
A better spin on this question is probably along the lines of:
Does SpaceX still need Elon? As a figure head, maybe. As a leader? More complicated, there's probably still some risky path-finding left but the biggest moon-shots are now out of the way and as long as it doesn't become a quarterly returns focused company anyone slightly bullish could probably do a good enough job.
Does SpaceX still need Elon - compared to what - for what?
Does SpaceX still need Elon to control ownership of the company as opposed to selling to "average" investors in order to colonize mars? Almost certainly.
Does SpaceX still need Elon as the CEO as opposed to the "average" other CEO they could hire, to profitably launch satellites into space? Almost certainly not.
At least we reach theoretically answerable questions with this sort of construction, but I don't think we have enough information to answer any but the most obvious versions such as those above.
SpaceX's biggest moonshots, if they keep succeeding and Elon keeps leading, are yet to come.
SpaceX has accomplished only a few percent of their stated mission: "SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft. The company was founded in 2002 to revolutionize space technology, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets"
Success works on an inverse veto system, where everyone has to perform right for anything to happen at all. That includes Elon, who invested a lot of his own funds in the beginning, and as I have heard manages actively.
Eventually some other investor would be convinced boosters could be reused multiple times and that it'd be a huge competitive advantage and a qualitative change in the launch and space operations marketplace.
There is no way to tell accurately when that would happen.
If Microsoft does well, it's because of Satya Nadella's brilliant leadership. If Space X or Tesla does well, it's definitely not because of Elon...because he tweeted a bad thing once?
Unfortunately, evidence [1] suggests that the rate of bug detection by reviewers does not scale linearly with the number of reviewers, adding more than 4 reviewers uncovers bugs at a much lower rate [2].
However I absolutely agree that better / more extensive / diligent code reviews are part of the solution to improve code quality and eliminate these kinds of defects. It's tough to create the right kind of incentive structures for reviewers internally at a company; maybe the future will have specialist firms that provide review-as-a-service for a fee, or perhaps firms could trade review-hours (all under strict NDAs I'd imagine).
Well usually the difference between open source and proprietary is that the proprietary vendors are slow to fix security issues because it doesn't increase their profit. In some cases they even try to hide the fact that the software is insecure or even sue the person who reported the vulnerability. Meanwhile most OSS software gets fixed as soon as the vulnerability is found.
In the case of aircraft though a company could find a bug and do their best to fix it quickly. But if the plan is already flying any changes to the software require a re-certification of the software which can take months.
