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The Tesla Semi from an Insider's View After One Year: "Hot Mess"

bradmunchen.substack.com

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Re: The Tesla Semi from an Insider's View After One Year: "Hot Mess"

#11

Post by ouiouibaguette »

candiddevmike wrote: post #2

> The constant use of the battery pack is unprecedented and is causing reliability problems for Tesla and other EV truck makers I don't understand why this is a surprise and why they think they can muscle through it. I didn't think our current battery technology is built for this scenario. > During the installation process, the Megachargers took down the power grid for a good chunk of the city This is my fear with ev…

It was "during the installation process", probably due to mucking with high voltage mains and not actual use?

BTW my car charges at midnight. Super easy to set up that way. I override if I have to but 99% of the time midnight is just great.

Re: The Tesla Semi from an Insider's View After One Year: "Hot Mess"

#12

Post by thsksbd »

Batteries on semis dont make much sense to me.

Hybrid systems on heavy inner city vehicles make a lot of sense. As do hybrids in mountainous areas.

But long distance hauling? BS. Semi engines are large with very low power to displacement ratio -> they are very fuel efficient. Truck builders' customers are very sensitive to fuel consumption.

I find it very hard to believe that marginal grid power (ie thermal plant), through all the transformer and transmission losses can beat a semi's diesel.

EDIT: even if the semi's electricity came from magic, the opportunity cost of putting so many batteries on a EV semi vs. a small fleet of hybrid commercial vans more than blows the comparison in favor of hybrids.

Re: The Tesla Semi from an Insider's View After One Year: "Hot Mess"

#14

Post by ajross »

[Edit: I shouldn't have bothered. The whole blog is a TSLA short seller! They clearly aren't vetting this info, they're trying to drive clicks from forums like this one.]

The sourcing here is a bit spun. "An insider" turns out to be a random driver someone found at a truck stop?

> This is why it was with great fortune to receive the details below, which were told to a trusted automotive source of mine by a PepsiCo employee who happened to have time for my friend’s questions about the Semi at a charging station the other day

Note carefully the weasel phrasing: the actual source is not trusted, just the intermediary!

I mean, the details given seem plausible. But would you trust your cab driver as an authoritative source for the business value of their employers rolling stock?

Re: The Tesla Semi from an Insider's View After One Year: "Hot Mess"

#15

Post by kcb »

xbmcuser wrote: post #9

Looks like the design requirement for a heavy duty vehicle were not properly followed. Though that's how tesla builds something like software build find faults then itteriate. For light duty if you can get chinese $2000 truck with a hydraulic lift I think china is going to takeover the world's vehicle manufacturing markets. https://electrek.co/2023/11/14/two-years-after-buying-a-2000...

That's something that's basically equivalent to a golf cart with a bed on it. Hardly an example of anything useful except transporting some stuff around your own property.

Re: The Tesla Semi from an Insider's View After One Year: "Hot Mess"

#16

Post by pdq »

candiddevmike wrote: post #2

> The constant use of the battery pack is unprecedented and is causing reliability problems for Tesla and other EV truck makers I don't understand why this is a surprise and why they think they can muscle through it. I didn't think our current battery technology is built for this scenario. > During the installation process, the Megachargers took down the power grid for a good chunk of the city This is my fear with ev…

1 MW charger per truck, if you need to super charge. Equivalent to approximately 1000 homes.

This is a huge burden on the electrical grids, and Tesla or EV's get to hand that problem to someone else.

The only way this makes sense at scale is if we had nuclear power, and charging was done at night.

Re: The Tesla Semi from an Insider's View After One Year: "Hot Mess"

#17

Post by _ea1k »

candiddevmike wrote: post #2

> The constant use of the battery pack is unprecedented and is causing reliability problems for Tesla and other EV truck makers I don't understand why this is a surprise and why they think they can muscle through it. I didn't think our current battery technology is built for this scenario. > During the installation process, the Megachargers took down the power grid for a good chunk of the city This is my fear with ev…

> This is my fear with everyone eventually plugging in their electric vehicles at 5pm

First off, it said during the install. So evidently it wasn't load related anyway.

Second, I used to live in a little town of well under 50k people. The local coop gave a couple hundred dollars in rebates for the installation of load management on their water heaters. I'd expect this would get solved in basically the same way. The total gwh isn't a problem, the gw is, and that's fairly easy to solve problem.

Re: The Tesla Semi from an Insider's View After One Year: "Hot Mess"

#19

Post by tonmoy »

thsksbd wrote: post #12

Batteries on semis dont make much sense to me. Hybrid systems on heavy inner city vehicles make a lot of sense. As do hybrids in mountainous areas. But long distance hauling? BS. Semi engines are large with very low power to displacement ratio -> they are very fuel efficient. Truck builders' customers are very sensitive to fuel consumption. I find it very hard to believe that marginal grid power (ie thermal plant), t…

We need to go to net zero somehow. With carbon capture or carbon offset technologies near non existing, we have to make the switch sooner or later
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