The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (2006) • Hacker News Board

Re: The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (2006)

#111

Post by arethuza » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 12:53 PM UTC

jzwinck wrote: post #107

arethuza wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biggest problem for me with electric cars is the simple fact that I live in a flat - a very nice flat in a very nice European city [1]. Our car lives on the quiet street outside - so how, in the foreseeable future, would I get an electric car charged? NB Is anyone looking into solving this particular problem - because it's one that a lot of people will face. 1 - I mention this as it is inconceivable to me that I woul…

In London I had a neighbor with an electric car. It was parked on the street and plugged in using a long cord to its owner's building. Seemed to work ok, though it wasn't pretty. Plenty of street crime and vandals around, somehow they didn't seem to bother.

That approach could work, but we're on the 2nd floor and with parking spaces being tight we usually don't get to park immediately outside the front door.

I'm assuming that the council will install charging stands at some point - if these had dedicated parking (and no residents parking charge!) then that would encourage people to use them.

Some properties in the street have coal holes in the road - that might an interesting place to install charging paraphernalia.

Re: The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (2006)

#112

Post by diskcat » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 12:59 PM UTC

agf wrote: post #24

dionidium wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One minor counter to this is that you shouldn't get too caught up in the hype about this being a mass-produced car. HN and tech journalism is a bit of a bubble. Normal people do not spend $35-40k on a car. We're still talking about a high-end vehicle. Nobody driving a Model 3 is going to be devastated when it needs to go in the shop.

The average new car price in March 2016 was $33,666. There are plenty of "mass-produced" cars in this price range. http://mediaroom.kbb.com/new-car-transaction-prices-up-2-per...

When I was at university my roommate was a rich mainlander chinese whose dad bought him an AMG mercedes. So the average car for that household was in the 100k's needless to say i wasn't driving anything near that.

Re: The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (2006)

#113

Post by jzwinck » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 1:03 PM UTC

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #81

JayHost wrote: post #5

I remember their plan is basically how Ford operated. It's just crazy to see them beat the competition so badly. I remember seeing the concept car for the Chevy Volt a few years ago and thinking how cool it was. Then they released it and made it aerodynamic and thus BORING. It's pretty nuts this car is 35k and the list of advantages to disadvantages can be summed as. There's no reason to buy any other car.

> It's just crazy to see them beat the competition so badly. There's a video talk on youtube by one of the original Tesla co-founders, Marc Tarpenning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf15nMnayXk and his take on it (in amongst lots of other cool info), learned from later consulting for those same companies, was that the car companies outsourced everything but the engine. Then tesla came along, bought all the standard…

Outsourcing everything but the engine is an interesting concept and I'm sure it applies to some cars. But I have a striking counterexample. The Ford Taurus SHO from the 90s had a Yamaha engine and a Mazda transmission. This was a flagship car, and from its inception Ford outsourced design and manufacture of the main thing that made it unique.

Re: The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (2006)

#114

Post by seanmcdirmid » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 1:03 PM UTC

Reason077 wrote: post #79

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is an artificial market constraint, Chinese aren't buying Teslas because they want clean air even if they should (debatable: perhaps the electricity for charging comes from coal that is dirtier than gasoline engines, at least the cars are checked for air quality, the coal plants aren't!). But I also agree it's a valid way of making the air cleaner if it would have an effect. BYD already produces electric cars that…

the people in Beijing buying Teslas would rather buy a BMW or Audi anyways if they could get the license plates for them Really? I can't imagine anyone who's actually driven a Tesla wanting to go back to an ICE vehicle. People aren't buying Teslas because they're greener or cheaper to operate or even because of government incentives (although those are additional, feel-good benefits). They're buying them because they…

I'm sure that is true in the USA and the west. In China it's not...yet. Charging is a pain when even the richest guy doesn't have a parking spot, and brand recognition of tesla in China is virtually nil, for brand conscious Chinese, they are afraid that someone will look at the tesla symbol and think "knock off Mercedes" or something. That tesla is getting market share right now is purely because of the lottery allocation.

Once they get used to it, I think Tesla will be a hit. It's just not that way yet.

Re: The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (2006)

#115

Post by infogulch » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 1:06 PM UTC

mabbo wrote: post #96

harwoodleon wrote: post #25

Elon Musk is the brand investors invest in, not tesla, not spacex. As he says, he is the pot of money - he is the core driver. I personally applaud his bravery, changing the established order is hard and carries great risk. He is the real consortium of products and can shift money between these industries at will. The risk here for all of his companies is that he is building a house of cards, one company collapse cou…

He actually gambled the house of cards early on. SpaceX needed money, he bet Tesla, and they got lucky. It's not simply that he's a great entrepreneur, it's that his goals seem to be slightly different from others. Every business owner wants to make a lot of money, but Musk has decided to do that via pushing humanity into a Sci-fi future as soon as possible.

Musk is definitely going for the Science victory.

Re: The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (2006)

#116

Post by anexprogrammer » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 1:11 PM UTC

_ph_ wrote: post #29

jedmeyers wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The is no practical way to service a Tesla yourself or in a 3rd party repair shop, like you can a 15 year old Civic. Therefore used Teslas would quickly become financially disadvantageous to service and their price would approach zero on a secondary market.

Which current production car is easily serviceable at third party repair shops? They are pretty much all closed down computers. Also, most services required on the engine and support for older cars are just not required on a Tesla. So it is not obvious that it would be more expensive to maintain than any other car, most likely the opposite.

Most of them.

The little third party garage I've used for years has enough of the diagnostic computer kit to handle most problems. When something unusual pops up they have a good relationship with at least some of the main dealers to proceed - without me having to pay main dealer prices on anything.

They have the added advantage that I trust them to have done the work they say they have.

They're not unusual as far as independents go, just a couple of guys doing a good job.

I don't think many independents can support electric vehicles, but I'm sure specialists will spring up as the market continues to mature.

Re: The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (2006)

#117

Post by sickpig » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 1:13 PM UTC

maratd wrote: post #110

dionidium wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you've left this comment a couple times I'll just point out that that wasn't at all my point.

I think rather than going back and forth, perhaps someone should explain the difference between average and median?

average is skewed towards distribution outliers, the more asymmetric the distribution the more pronounced will be such effect.

On the other hand median just gives you the value that split the distribution in two exact parts.

Price/Income distributions are the perfect match if you want to see avg bias taken to its extreme.

e.g.

median of [2,2,2,2,2,2,2,100] = 2 average of [2,2,2,2,2,2,2,100] = 14.25

Re: The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (2006)

#118

Post by seanmcdirmid » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 1:13 PM UTC

pluma wrote: post #92

Reason077 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the people in Beijing buying Teslas would rather buy a BMW or Audi anyways if they could get the license plates for them Really? I can't imagine anyone who's actually driven a Tesla wanting to go back to an ICE vehicle. People aren't buying Teslas because they're greener or cheaper to operate or even because of government incentives (although those are additional, feel-good benefits). They're buying them because they…

Let's not kid ourselves: right now people are buying Teslas for the same reason they're buying high-end Apple products. They're well-made, sure, but they're foremost a luxury and status symbol. They're better than other status symbols because they actually have functional value that comes close to their market value, but they're still a status symbol. However it seems that Tesla is actually trying to reduce its price…

That doesn't apply yet in China.

Re: The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (2006)

#119

Post by _asummers » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 1:19 PM UTC

maratd wrote: post #110

dionidium wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you've left this comment a couple times I'll just point out that that wasn't at all my point.

I think rather than going back and forth, perhaps someone should explain the difference between average and median?

That shouldn't be necessary on this site, but since you asked.

Average (or mean) is the sum of the values divided by the number of values. Because of the way it is calculated, it is more likely to skew when the data includes extremely large or extremely small values. Median on the other hand is a way to measure the "middle value". For data sets of odd cardinality, it is simply the middle value, and for even cardinality, it is the mean of the two middlemost values. You can have a large number of extreme values with no effect on the median value, depending on the data.

As an example let us look at a hypothetical neighborhood. We have a family making 50k, another 100k, another 150k. Their average salary is 100k with the same median. Assume some super rich guy making 10 million. Our average goes up to several million dollars, but the median sits at 125k, more representative of where the data is clumped.

None of this to say that median is a good measurement in what I'll call malicious data sets. Imagine a data set with 1000 entries of negative 10m and 1000 of positive 10m. If I add a new data point of 5000, this is my median but doesn't represent my data at all.

Bonus: there's also "mode" which measure the value that has the most entries. E.g. in a set of 1 2 2 2 3 4 5, mode is 2.

Re: The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (2006)

#120

Post by Reason077 » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 1:19 PM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #98

jacquesm wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're buying them because they're better cars. Faster, quieter, more fun to drive, filled with the latest technology. EV's are great for a number of use cases but they are not even close to a viable option for many uses of ICE's at the present. No doubt this will change but even if a Tesla is a 'better car' than my daily driver 'Faster', 'Quieter', 'more fun to drive' and 'filled with the latest technology' do no…

Biggest problem for me with electric cars is the simple fact that I live in a flat - a very nice flat in a very nice European city [1]. Our car lives on the quiet street outside - so how, in the foreseeable future, would I get an electric car charged? NB Is anyone looking into solving this particular problem - because it's one that a lot of people will face. 1 - I mention this as it is inconceivable to me that I woul…

Kerbside charging points are already becoming common in many cities, although a lot more are going to be needed. Look to cities like Oslo or Amsterdam for examples of best practice here.

Some boroughs of London are quite well covered, with charging points every 1-2 blocks or so (Westminster), where as other parts are pretty useless (Camden). Because the charge point spots are reserved for EVs only, and can only be used while charging, you can usually find an available one pretty easily.

There's talk of designing charge points that can easily be attached to existing street light poles, so in terms of infrastructure the cost to implement charging points on every street should not be unreasonable, once the demand is there.

I see Teslas and BMW i3's parked on the street near me regularly in London with no obvious access to a nearby charging point, so it's certainly possible to use an EV this way at the moment - if not entirely as convenient as having your own charge point. If you're only driving around the city then you probably don't actually need to charge all that often (maybe once a week or so), and for long-distance trips you can stop at a fast charger or supercharger.