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Tesla teardown finds electronics 6 years ahead of Toyota and VW

asia.nikkei.com

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Re: Tesla teardown finds electronics 6 years ahead of Toyota and VW

#191

Post by t0mas88 »

This feels very much like a marketing fluff piece pushed by Tesla PR.

Take this gem: "Young companies like Tesla, on the other hand, are not shackled to suppliers and are free to pursue the best technologies available."

Try the automated windscreen wipers on any big car brand, they're mostly made by Bosch and they work, even on a 15 year old car. Then Tesla came along with their own approach, guess what, they didn't work for more than a year on any second generation model S because they switched from buying a working module to creating their own in software.

After having driven a model S for a while I'm very much a Tesla sceptic. Because I noticed I was accepting a lot of things from them that I would never have from BMW or Audi. When the "this is a cool innovation" feeling goes away, you're looking at a very mediocre car that can't compete in the price range that it's in.

Re: Tesla teardown finds electronics 6 years ahead of Toyota and VW

#192

Post by jungturk »

James_Henry wrote: post #42
bovermyer wrote: post #24

Note that the "we cannot do it" quote is not referring to the technology itself, but rather to the fact that to adopt Tesla's pattern, the legacy auto companies would need to ditch their supply chains. That's not something they can do without pissing off a lot of people.

The answer to this, I would think, would be to have a small part of the company whose soul purpose is to disrupt the larger company. Then Toyota and VW might have built Tesla in house without supply chain worries. When their in-house Tesla-like company proved a success, they could reasonably afford to upend their old supply chain: self-disruption.

Toyota has this with Toyota Connected, a wholly-owned subsidiary that's pushing software/mobility/advanced applications across the Toyota product lines.

They make it quite clear in their public conversations that Tesla-style innovation rates are the goal, but in private conversations lament that they're stuck working in a 3-year product cycle due to the innovation rates in their supply chains (as most of the specs and hardware are generated in collaboration with external suppliers).

As a sibling comment mentions, this structure also creates lots of resentment in some of the traditional Toyota departments who are being disrupted by this.

Re: Tesla teardown finds electronics 6 years ahead of Toyota and VW

#193

Post by smileysteve »

SEJeff wrote: post #142
rebelde wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, the article gives numbers! Tesla: $158/kWh Competitors: "more than" $200/kWh Model 3 SR+ has a 54 kWh battery. Tesla advantage = (200 - 158) * 54 = $2268 per car. Yes, an advantage today, but not too bad.

The Maxwell Technologies battery technology is allegedly 10x cheaper to manufacture due to no oven or liquids and as a result, and also lighter. Elon says the "holy grail" of batteries is being able to develop an automotive grade battery at <= $100/kWh. The Maxwell tech looks to be below that, but we'll find out specifics on the upcoming Battery Investor day.

Just the super capacitor allows for much better durability of all battery technology, especially in normal driving conditions.

Re: Tesla teardown finds electronics 6 years ahead of Toyota and VW

#194

Post by mmaurizi »

soygul wrote: post #120
aguyfromnb wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tesla's real advantage is their battery production Battery pack production. Tesla purchases batteries from Panasonic and LG (and thus is susceptible to that supply).

They also produce the cells (though it might be Panasonic's tech): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giga_Nevada > the production rate of battery cells in the Gigafactory had reached 3.5 million '2170' cells per day.

The gigafactory is a joint venture with Panasonic. There is literally a line on the floor that denotes the Tesla side and the Panasonic side.

Re: Tesla teardown finds electronics 6 years ahead of Toyota and VW

#195

Post by James_Henry »

earthboundkid wrote: post #119
James_Henry wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer to this, I would think, would be to have a small part of the company whose soul purpose is to disrupt the larger company. Then Toyota and VW might have built Tesla in house without supply chain worries. When their in-house Tesla-like company proved a success, they could reasonably afford to upend their old supply chain: self-disruption.

When companies try to do this, the other divisions attempt to smoother the new division in the crib and typically succeed. If you had good internal politics, they wouldn't do this, but if you had good internal politics, you wouldn't need a new division either.

> but if you had good internal politics, you wouldn't need a new division either.

I don't know if I agree with this unless you mean to define "good internal politics" as internal politics that drives a company to self-disrupt.

As shown by the article, self-disruption isn't possible as a big company because the friction of changing things like supply chains and other capital. You really need to start another company that, in a sense, competes (and sometimes at least for a time complements) the larger company. Good internal politics would help to not squash internal competition, but it isn't, I think, enough to purposefully set up that competition.

Re: Tesla teardown finds electronics 6 years ahead of Toyota and VW

#196

Post by CrazyStat »

leoedin wrote: post #182
xiphias2 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been burned, but the solution was to control the temperature of the car, not be behind by 10 years. Both have pros and cons. It just usually sucks to pay a lot of money for a car that's so far behind all the cheap devices that I have.

You can't control the temperature in a car all the time. A car left outside in the south-west US will get very hot . Often up to 80 degrees C (170F). It's a greenhouse. Likewise a car parked outside in Montreal in winter might reach -40 degrees C (-40F) inside. Your electronics need to work through that entire temperature range, cope with repeatedly thermally cycling between extreme and room temperature and then keep…

I spent a summer in Texas where my car would hit 185F if parked in the sun during the day. Light tan Corolla with tinted rear windows, so not even near optimal in terms of retaining heat.

I baked cookies on the dash one day. Not hot enough for caramelization though so the flavor was lacking.

Surely I had covered parking most of the time.

Re: Tesla teardown finds electronics 6 years ahead of Toyota and VW

#198

Post by marvin »

soygul wrote: post #137
onepremise wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they could have used off-the-shelf components for the same task. They did use off-the-shelf components. They performed poorly and they resulted to developing a custom die with the right components to handle the task of computer vision. They explicitly stated this in multiple interviews. The off-the-shelf solution was crap.

AI/ML components change rapidly. What happens if they decide to use an entirely different approach. They develop a new chip? Still seems excessive to develop custom chips for unfinished/experimental tech like self-driving: https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/24/18514308/tesla-full-self-...

This is less of a risk than it might appear. To be sure, it would be expensive to replace the computer part of the entire installed fleet. But the (potentially) full self-driving option is very richly priced, and sells with an incremental margin of 100% when component replacements are excluded. The sensor & computer package are included with all production cars, regardless of whether the FSD option is purchased.

Additionally, Tesla still grows their sales and customer base exponentially. This means that most significant changes in strategy during the production ramp-up will require (in the form of deprecation of now-obsolete production resources) only a small fraction of the investments required to achieve their full, steady-state production capacity.

The same argument holds for the potential case of major changes in battery technology. (Replacements of current fleet excluded, which would not happen for batteries). If Tesla's current battery technology is obsolete in 5-10 years, that's not a very big deal as their sales are expected to be a multiple of today's by then, and the new technology would be phased in during the expected production ramp. (If Tesla fails to grow by a multiple of today's sales, they have largely failed).

Re: Tesla teardown finds electronics 6 years ahead of Toyota and VW

#199

Post by caconym_ »

claudeganon wrote: post #92

Realistically though, Tesla will got bought out by one of these larger companies, so they can integrate (while undoubtedly making worse) the underlying tech. Tesla hasn’t show any capacity to deliver quality cars at scale, nor provide service to them, whatever their ambitions. Combined with all their SEC problems, it’s reminiscent of Preston Tucker’s car company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preston_Tucker

> Tesla hasn’t show any capacity to deliver quality cars at scale, nor provide service to them, whatever their ambitions. Combined with all their SEC problems, it’s reminiscent of Preston Tucker’s car company

What universe are you living in? Can't be the same one I'm in ... pretty cool, though, that HN has implemented a multiverse-spanning internet forum.

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