Live data from Hacker News

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

bradmunchen.substack.com

71–80 of 279 posts

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

#71
post #23
post #3

Why does anybody in the entire world want a semi with a 5 second 0-60?

You dont need a fast 0-60 in a family car either but people buy Tesla sedans for that purpose all the time.

Most family cars don't have limiters installed to deliberately limit performance.

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

#72
As the article mentions the program might have been a little smoke & mirrors for the stock price, it reminded me the roadster they drove out from inside the semi during the launch took preorders and still has very little chance of ever seeing production.

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

#73
> During the installation process, the Megachargers took down the power grid for a good chunk of the city [imagine what happens when 100% of ICE vehicles have switched over to BEV in California by 2035].

A little bit tangential, but 2035 marks the ban on new passenger ICE vehicles. Given the average age of cars in the US, California probably won't even be at 50% passenger BEVs by 2035, let alone 100% of ALL vehicles. Kind of a troubling oversight for an automotive long/short manager seemingly specializing in EV companies.

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

#74
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

Back in the day everybody watched the same TV programs, there used to be the "simultaneous flush at break time" problem (real or imagined), e.g. https://medium.com/nycwater/the-big-flush-on-super-bowl-sund...

And the "TV Pickup" in the UK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup

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

#75
post #15
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.

That seems reductive. Ideally it’d be a little bit bigger and I’m not sure what the range is but I could totally see myself using one of those.

Even just being able to pickup appliances and furniture + run stuff to the dump would be enough to justify it at that price. Of course… they’d have to get it licensed in the US which would probably raise the cost a bunch

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

#76
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trains.

The vast majority of trains in the US are diesel-powered, although they're about 4x more efficient than trucks. It's tempting to imagine they could all run on electricity, but it's probably hard, as many routes go through hundreds of miles of rugged nothingness. This is quite different from rail transport in Europe.

There are very few places in the US that don't have 115kV+ lines somewhere nearby.

http://www.geni.org/globalenergy/library/national_energy_gri...

They follow the same valleys around heavy terrain etc. Feel free to superimpose the grid map and the rail map.

So it's a matter of electric locomotives, poles, contact wires and transformers, no small feat but what can you do.

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

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compounded by getting rid of natural gas for cooking and heating. It's fine to say that electric is simpler to deliver and more efficient in theory, but our grid is not even a fraction ready for that, and heat pumps and induction ranges are a whole order of magnitude up the tech ladder from boilers and gas stoves, and by going all electric you lose the multiple sources redundancy which is literally a life saver. I do…

That's why a carbon tax (pollution tax, I hate calling pollution carbon) would be better than straight outlawing natural gas fuel. Too bad voters hate prices being anything but uniform and cheap. So much backlash even against demand pricing.

This is happening in Canada. It's a huge boogie man from the opposition, even if it's revenue neutral.

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

#78

This seems kind of par for the course. What I find strange is that there are busses[1] operating economically with similar time of use (but not top speed) requirements. The whole "car parts scaled up to truck size" is super on brand for their chief technologist. I'm also seeing a bunch of Rivian trucks and Ford E150 lightnings on the roads around the Bay Area which, for me, doesn't bode well for the launch of the Tes…

Tesla just makes the biggest headlines. Freightliner had an electric class 8 truck in production before the Tesla. And they're not the only other company doing it. I trust Freightliner to make a big truck a lot more than I'd trust Tesla.

The thing with Tesla's semi truck is the extreme range. Easy to swap in some batteries and make a electric truck. Electric motors and batteries have plenty of power (and gearing can turn that into whatever torque you'd like). It's range, without undue payload reduction.

That was always the challenging part. Still is. Freightliner is nowhere near the 450-500 mile range you'd need. They're half that.

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

#79
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trains.

Ideally, yes - but the US is lacking in rail infrastructure, so the US *needs* zero-emission, road-based, logistics solutions. (Disclaimer: Non-expert, but Tesla owner since Q1 2018) I think EV trucks, as a concept is fine, but battery-swapping makes much more sense than using a nonremovable battery-pack that's 5-10x the size of a sedan-sized battery-pack.

This article is about semi trucks. The US already has pretty much the best freight rail infrastructure in the world. Some further expansion is possible. But freight trains can't run everywhere, or handle highly perishable cargo, so the need for semi trucks can't be reduced much.

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

#80

> During the installation process, the Megachargers took down the power grid for a good chunk of the city [imagine what happens when 100% of ICE vehicles have switched over to BEV in California by 2035]. A little bit tangential, but 2035 marks the ban on new passenger ICE vehicles. Given the average age of cars in the US, California probably won't even be at 50% passenger BEVs by 2035, let alone 100% of ALL vehicles.…

Why is it troubling?
Post reply on HN