141–150 of 173 posts
Having a "Tesla battery pack" at your home is more than just handling grid fluctuations. What if the battery pack can act as a supercharger for your car? It's like having a tank of gas in your garage all the time.
And how many people care to have a tank of gas in their garage all the time, even though the idea is completely feasible today?
I don't think this is a revelation to anyone who has been paying attention? This seems to have been the dominant hypothesis for a long, long time, and is always what justified Tesla's early (very) red activities. They were a battery company using luxury automobiles to fund battery R&D.
I'm sort of curious how the economics of this will end up working out from a consumer's perspective. Lithium ion's big advantage was energy density -- you can store a lot of juice for not much mass or volume, which is a really big deal for portable electronics or cars... for a stationary home installation, though, much less so. Having a giant thing sitting in your backyard might be okay if it was high-capacity and ch…
> Having a giant thing sitting in your backyard might be okay if it was high-capacity and cheap There are also walls you could embed batteries in. A house has a lot of surface area that could be used to store energy.
If Tesla executes, they are going to be the leading company in a number of industries, of which battery technology and manufacturing is one of them. They are also leaders in direct sales, JIT manufacturing, motor design, any one of which is a disruptive innovation channel they could monetize, all in the service of building electric cars. Tesla is an energy company, a battery company, a car company, etc, just as GE or…
In what sense is Tesla a leader in JIT manufacturing? Do you know how manufacturing takes place at all those other car companies in Germany, Japan, and South Korea? I can not talk about the Asian-based companies, but I know for sure that the manufacturing plants in Germany are very ahead. Because they produce different models at same time on the same track. Each and every car is different in every aspect. In Europe i…
I can confirm, I bought a Mercedes and they had 10-20 options, which I could customize however I wanted.
I don't think this is a revelation to anyone who has been paying attention? This seems to have been the dominant hypothesis for a long, long time, and is always what justified Tesla's early (very) red activities. They were a battery company using luxury automobiles to fund battery R&D.
>They were a battery company using luxury automobiles to fund battery R&D. This seems questionable to me. I just don't see lithium-ion powering electric cars in an affordable or usable fashion. The density isn't great and after 4-5 years the battery pack wears out, making your $30-50k battery investment disappear. There's no resale value on a battery that can't even hold 30% of its original charge. Musk's solar city…
Can you show me where you have seen hard evidence of battery packs "wearing out" after 4-5 years? Also, please define wearing out as there are different meanings to that.
Contrary to what you have said in this thread the battery life has actually been significantly better than expected (http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/In-Gear/2015/0219/How-much...)
Also, saying the only incentive of buying an electric car to save money is ignoring a lot of other factors in the word.
B is required to perfect the product -- which serves A better than anything else.
I think the 'Apple way' is most efficient: selling the whole package and making it so good, that people happily pay a lot.
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The claim about leading JIT does seem a bit ridiculous, given JIT manufactoring grew out of the Toyata Production System[1] which encompases Kaizen, Kanban and similar. All of which was pioneered decades before Tesla existed. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System
I learned that as Toyotism. EDIT: Another therm for that is "Lean manufacturing" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_manufacturing
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I learned that as Toyotism. EDIT: Another therm for that is "Lean manufacturing" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_manufacturing
Lean manufacturing works right up to the point where one of your vendors gives you a bad part. Your choice is to either shut down a line or have excess backup supplies at which point there's no need to have been lean.
It should be obvious that quality control across the entire supply chain is vital to make lean work -- and indeed that is how Toyota and others does it: They work very closely with suppliers.
If Tesla executes, they are going to be the leading company in a number of industries, of which battery technology and manufacturing is one of them. They are also leaders in direct sales, JIT manufacturing, motor design, any one of which is a disruptive innovation channel they could monetize, all in the service of building electric cars. Tesla is an energy company, a battery company, a car company, etc, just as GE or…
I remember trying this strategy in Civilization. While trying to dominate the long term macro quickly, short-term micro-specialists obliterated parts of my network which caused the entire long term strategy to fail. (Yes I did just make that comparison :). I hope Tesla succeed though. We need someone out there to run this opportunity and encourage competitors in this space.
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You use "Gigafactory" as if it was an established word. It isn't. It it the name of Tesla's battery factory being built in Nevada.
It's so named because its planned capacity is measured in gigawatt-hours of batteries per year. "A gigafactory" to refer to any factory of that size is a reasonable term to use.