Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

"It's A Brick" - Tesla Motors' Devastating Design Problem

theunderstatement.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 284 posts

Re: "It's A Brick" - Tesla Motors' Devastating Design Problem

#191

Post by krschultz »

jdietrich wrote: post #75

Tesla are a sideshow and we desperately need to stop talking about them, because they're harming efforts to improve energy efficiency. Nissan are now in full production of the Leaf, a practical electric car that's half the price of the Model S. Renault have the Fluence ZE on sale in Israel and ready to go internationally this year. Mitsubishi are selling the i-MiEV in quantity in Hong Kong and Japan. All of these big…

I think you are right about the major car companies - Nissan, GM, Mitsubishi, et al. They are definitely doing it right and aiming at a good segment.

I think you are wrong about Tesla's segment. I know a couple of Tesla owners. All of them have a stable of cars. I would bet the average Tesla owner has >2 sports cars, and absolutely has more cars than the number of drivers in the family.

The whole idea of 'range anxiety' is BS when applied to someone who owns a Tesla as a fun car they drive on the weekends.

I was at a racetrack a few years ago and there were quarter million dollars cars literally littered across the place. Ferraris, high end Porches, etc. You know what car had the most people standing around it? The Tesla roadster. At the time it was new, it was hard to get, and it was a prestige symbol.

Tesla is is getting car collectors to subsidize their R&D. And their R&D is going to be a big reason why in the future mainstream electric cars are succesful. Ultimately Tesla's tech is about batteries and efficient motors - the car itself is an afterthought.

That said, it makes this problem EVEN WORSE. If it is a daily driver, there is no way it will ever sit unused for 11 weeks. But as 1 of 10 cars in a collection, it absolutely can sit there for weeks on end without being charged. So I think this is a huge problem for Tesla and probably less so for a daily driver like the Leaf.

Re: "It's A Brick" - Tesla Motors' Devastating Design Problem

#192

Post by krschultz »

sek wrote: post #173
bane wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you and Tesla are not having the same conversation. They are doing it The Wrong Way if the conversation is efficient commuter/city cars. But tanks are doing it The Wrong Way if you're talking about space launch vehicles too. Tesla doesn't market or really care about efficiency -- and Tesla buyers don't really care about efficiency (or at least not as their #1 priority, if they did there are plenty of high eff…

These arrogant posts like OP really annoy me, they don't even try to understand why Tesla does things like it does. No, Elon Musk is stupid, he makes the wrong cars and we should stop talking about it. They have to create a totally new production chain and make high quality cars. This is impossible with low margins, there is no way they can compete on price against this gigantic industry.

I feel like you can answer nearly every post like the OP's with "Go read The Innovator's Dilemma and then come back and talk about what metrics this disruptive company is competiting on rather than talking about the old metrics of the industry". Every one of them is making the argument that hard drive makers made each time a newer size came out, except with miles of range instead of Gigabytes.

Re: "It's A Brick" - Tesla Motors' Devastating Design Problem

#193

Post by nandemo »

SeanLuke wrote: post #106
jdietrich wrote: post #75

Tesla are a sideshow and we desperately need to stop talking about them, because they're harming efforts to improve energy efficiency. Nissan are now in full production of the Leaf, a practical electric car that's half the price of the Model S. Renault have the Fluence ZE on sale in Israel and ready to go internationally this year. Mitsubishi are selling the i-MiEV in quantity in Hong Kong and Japan. All of these big…

> Tesla are a sideshow and we desperately need to stop talking about them, because they're harming efforts to improve energy efficiency. Completely disagree. Tesla is, I think, unquestionably the most impactful company in the game, including GE and Nissan. For two reasons. First, before Tesla people thought of electric vehicles as ridiculous DIY golf carts driven by treehuggers. They were utterly uncool and stupid. P…

> First, before Tesla people thought of electric vehicles as ridiculous DIY golf carts driven by treehuggers. They were utterly uncool and stupid. Post-Tesla, electric cars are among the very coolest cars in the world.

Really? I never heard of Tesla outside of HN. I think a large proportion of the 10s of thousands who have bought electric cars in Japan don't know of Tesla either.

No doubt the very existence of Tesla might have accelerated the development and actual production of electric cars by other makers. But I suspect they aren't that well-known by the general public.

Re: "It's A Brick" - Tesla Motors' Devastating Design Problem

#194

Post by basseq »

Five known cases out of 2,200 sales is a quarter of a percent. As a conservative estimate, let's say it's more like 1%. At $40,000 per replacement, adding $400 to the cost of the car (a 0.4-0.7% increase depending on model) seems nominal to then offer full coverage.

Granted, the problem gets worse as more "consumer-level" customers purchase their cars and don't take as good care of them.

Which then raises the question of why this is even possible. Why on earth will the car's systems happily destroy itself? Where's the "if BATTERY_LEVEL < CRITICAL: shutDown()" line?

Re: "It's A Brick" - Tesla Motors' Devastating Design Problem

#195

Post by yew »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #157
haberman wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who said that electric cars have to be about energy efficiency? To me the primary reason to move to electric are to ditch petroleum and its associated problems (pollution, oil spills, foreign energy dependence). The way to the future is to convince people that new technology is better for them. If the message instead is "you need to give up things you like for the greater good," people will oppose you at every move,…

> The way to the future is to convince people that new technology is better for them. If the message instead is "you need to give up things you like for the greater good," people will oppose you at every move, and rightly so; While I agree in principle, ... > do you really want to live in a world where computer screens are just barely bright enough to see, where buildings are sweltering on hot days, freezing on cold…

Reading their analysis of nuclear power (which is, by the by, about as renewable as solar power; we'll run out of fissionables around the time the Sun goes out), I'm not seeing any reason you couldn't run things just on that if you solved the political problems.

Unless I'm missing something (always a possibility, of course) their later comparisons are all to a "green stack" that doesn't include nuclear.

Re: "It's A Brick" - Tesla Motors' Devastating Design Problem

#196

Post by jdietrich »

SeanLuke wrote: post #106
jdietrich wrote: post #75

Tesla are a sideshow and we desperately need to stop talking about them, because they're harming efforts to improve energy efficiency. Nissan are now in full production of the Leaf, a practical electric car that's half the price of the Model S. Renault have the Fluence ZE on sale in Israel and ready to go internationally this year. Mitsubishi are selling the i-MiEV in quantity in Hong Kong and Japan. All of these big…

> Tesla are a sideshow and we desperately need to stop talking about them, because they're harming efforts to improve energy efficiency. Completely disagree. Tesla is, I think, unquestionably the most impactful company in the game, including GE and Nissan. For two reasons. First, before Tesla people thought of electric vehicles as ridiculous DIY golf carts driven by treehuggers. They were utterly uncool and stupid. P…

> First, before Tesla people thought of electric vehicles as ridiculous DIY golf carts driven by treehuggers. They were utterly uncool and stupid. Post-Tesla, electric cars are among the very coolest cars in the world. GE didn't do that. Nissan didn't do that. Toyota didn't do that. Tesla did. I think fundamentally changing people's perceptions of what an electric car is and what it can do is the single most impactful action in the industry so far.

Amongst technology enthusiasts in the US.

Here in The Soviet Republic of Yurop, gas is $8 a gallon and is only going up from there. If people know the name Tesla, it's probably because they've seen the Roadster lampooned on Top Gear. However, people are talking about Renault and Peugeot and Nissan's EVs. Not car enthusiasts, but ordinary people who've seen the cost of fuel more than double in 10 years. They're talking about Volkswagen Bluemotion, they're talking about Fiat Twinair. They're talking about fast charging and battery swaps and series hybrids. They're talking about folding bikes and multimodal commuting. They're talking about these things because they're being priced off the roads.

I have heard a middle-aged woman with no interest in cars or the environment say at a dinner party "I bought a Toyota iQ because it only emits 99g/km of CO2, so I don't have to pay road tax or the Congestion Charge.". For her, like many others, the efficiency of her car wasn't a side issue, but integral to whether she could afford to drive at all. Energy efficiency might not be on the agenda in the US, but it very much is in Europe.

Re: "It's A Brick" - Tesla Motors' Devastating Design Problem

#197

Post by talmand »

vacri wrote: post #178
SeanLuke wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tesla are a sideshow and we desperately need to stop talking about them, because they're harming efforts to improve energy efficiency. Completely disagree. Tesla is, I think, unquestionably the most impactful company in the game, including GE and Nissan. For two reasons. First, before Tesla people thought of electric vehicles as ridiculous DIY golf carts driven by treehuggers. They were utterly uncool and stupid. P…

Their critical product is their battery technology. It is second to none, in a business where the battery is everything. vs As to the article proper: it seems to me that running down your car is a pretty simple problem to engineer away. So, on the one hand you say that their battery technology is in advance of everyone else... and on the other hand, you say that these fine engineering minds... haven't been able to co…

That doesn't necessarily mean their technology isn't second to none. Say, I built a instantaneous teleportation device but it sucks because I haven't figured out a simple solution of how to jump more than one person at a time.

Re: "It's A Brick" - Tesla Motors' Devastating Design Problem

#198

Post by riffraff »

jdietrich wrote: post #75

Tesla are a sideshow and we desperately need to stop talking about them, because they're harming efforts to improve energy efficiency. Nissan are now in full production of the Leaf, a practical electric car that's half the price of the Model S. Renault have the Fluence ZE on sale in Israel and ready to go internationally this year. Mitsubishi are selling the i-MiEV in quantity in Hong Kong and Japan. All of these big…

I guess the problem is that the target you envision (people conscious of car consumption who drive small cars) does not exist in the united states.

Good or bad, this creates a market for someone selling them the same massive cars americans like, but with an electric engine.

Re: "It's A Brick" - Tesla Motors' Devastating Design Problem

#199

Post by riffraff »

salem wrote: post #154
rdl wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Based on time in a Roadster, and what I've seen of the model s, I would be totally happy with the S in the bay area, and either rent or keep a second car for trips out of the bay. With a constant level of tech, sure, the city car makes more sense, but assuming you can afford the high tech batteries, the tesla seems like a great car for how Americans use cars. If I weren't getting a model s, I'd probably g…

Regarding the taxis, just about every taxi in Australia runs on LNG these days. It's widely available, and aside from the benefits on somewhat cleaner emissions, you can easily make the money back on the conversion for the number miles they rack up. I'm surprised this is not subsidized in the USA, especially now that the reserves of gas have been revised up so much.

FWIW, taxis in italy have massively migrated to hybrid cars (noticeably, prius)

Re: "It's A Brick" - Tesla Motors' Devastating Design Problem

#200

Post by onemoreact »

rbanffy wrote: post #170
3am wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are precisely wrong. Targeting people that already buy into energy efficiency has low payoff. Say you have your enlightened urban dweller, getting 50mpg. With the fancy new hybrids, let's say they double that and get 100mpg. Given 100K miles of driving, that saves 1000 gallons of fuel. Now, take your suburbanite SUV driver getting 20mpg. You only have to get their mileage to 25mpg to save the same amount of fuel…

Biofuels are definitely not in their infancy. My first car ran on ethanol and it was in the mid 80's. The technology in very mature.

It's the fuels that are in their infancy not the car's. Design a cheap energy efficient way to to turn cellulose into something close to gasoline and you will be able to make more money than Bill Gates. Theoretically it's possible, but nobody has gotten there yet.
Post reply on HN