491–500 of 542 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair though, Tesla cars are an expensive luxury brand and have no real revolutionary potential at the moment. The revolution is to make affordable electric cars and the infrastructure to build them, and there are serious doubts about how much Tesla can scale to that. It's similar to electric bicycles, in that there are some masterfully engineered, high tech ones out there...at the cost of a decent used motorcyc…
But Tesla's goal is exactly that: to make electric cars affordable and create the necessary infrastructure for them. And he does that by starting with the market segment where it's easiest to get started: high margin sports cars and luxury cars, and working his way down from there. It'll be a while before his electric cars can really compete with cheap cars, but I'm sure he'll get there. He's making good progress.
Probably the same way Ferrari is, no point to make wide acceptance of that brand.
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That is mostly because those "types" as you call them didn't take math courses or slept through them, or don't use the math tools in everyday work - because it's not needed. In other words, they're not Computer Scientists. They are Computer Programmers instead. (or maybe Computer System Engineers)
I believe that the comment you are responding to was speaking to the asymmetry that people with experience in computational biology have an easier time moving to general data science problems than do people with experience in general data science working on computational biology problems. I agree that the asymmetry exists: there is a tremendous baseline of scientific knowledge and experience that is needed to make si…
Not much CS can help with right now - the most useful tools (mass fuzzy searches and molecular simulations) are already there.
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It seemed to me the question was asked in the context of some closing small talk, and got a very Musk answer :) as far as I know, the Tesla assembly lines have nowhere near the amount of robotics of the much larger volume lines of for instance Honda, so very slow by those standards.
I toured the GM Lansing Delta Township assembly plant a few years ago where they make mid-size SUVs like the GMC Acadia, Buick Enclave, and Chevy Traverse. At the time, with a ton of robotic welders, sleds, etc. they were running 3 shifts and turning out 60 cars/hour. Last year, Tesla sold 50,000 cars. It would take the Delta plant roughly a month to make that many. GM has ~15 equivalent plants worldwide. I love Tesl…
[1] http://ww.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyI...
What's interesting about a savant is how they can end up defined by what they don't see. I have nothing but respect for Elon, however I think he is working on the wrong problems. That's not his fault and he is most definitely making his best effort. However he's the paragon of a paradigm of a European culture which is as unsustainable as it is powerful.
So what are the right problems to work on, and what paradigms are more sustainable than European culture?
However none of what I say makes sense if you've been stuffed with all the typical narratives and have not developed your imagination or your sense of history.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I toured the GM Lansing Delta Township assembly plant a few years ago where they make mid-size SUVs like the GMC Acadia, Buick Enclave, and Chevy Traverse. At the time, with a ton of robotic welders, sleds, etc. they were running 3 shifts and turning out 60 cars/hour. Last year, Tesla sold 50,000 cars. It would take the Delta plant roughly a month to make that many. GM has ~15 equivalent plants worldwide. I love Tesl…
A better comparison might have been NUMMI's production capacity in it's prime as a joint GM/Toyota plant. They were producing about 26k vehicles/month (312k/year) until May 2010. [1] Apples to oranges - a Carolla is not a Model X - but interesting datum nonetheless. [1] http://ww.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyI...
The Delta plant employs ~4,000 employees so you get about 70 cars/employee/year.
If NUMMI was making 310k vehicles per year with 4,700 employees according to Wiki, that would be about 66 cars/employee/year -- which is much closer than I expected.
Last year Tesla turned out 50,000 vehicles and they currently have ~6,000 employees in Fremont -- or about 8 cars/employee/year.
Obviously an unfair comparison since Tesla is ramping production and NUMMI / Delta are both final assembly plants and Tesla is doing a lot of stamping and component production in Fremont but interesting nonetheless.
I am surprised that YC would make this page so remarkably mobile-unfriendly. I don't have the time to listen to the interview, I just want to read the transcript. They could have just pasted it in a reader-friendly format, but instead it's in an annoying Scribd applet. I don't want to sign up for their service or download the app, not to mention that it's a terrible mobile reader anyway. This was very disappointing.
He looks fat
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Tesla's energy storage enables people to use solar energy at night, without the process being a big hassle. If it gets cheap enough, it will make solar power competitive with fossil power in most scenarios. Currently, the battery installations are a cost-competitive alternative to fossil ways of covering peak load. Calling it useless is probably a stretch. Ditto with Tesla's cars; they aren't a drop-in replacement fo…
So what happens to the batteries when they go bad or old?
The good news is that batteries are getting about 8% more efficient every year (price per kwh) [2]. So 10 years from now batteries will be 1.08^10 = ~2.15x as efficient [3].
So when you replace them, they'll cost half as much for the same amount of energy storage (and probably half the space too). It's basically Moore's law for batteries except slower.
[1] https://www.tesla.com/powerwall
[2] https://cleantechnica.com/2015/03/26/ev-battery-costs-alread...
[3] or is it 1/(.92^10)? That would be 2.3x