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Master Plan, Part Deux

tesla.com

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Re: Master Plan, Part Deux

#261

Post by dingaling »

aerovistae wrote: post #240
ams6110 wrote: post #101

My points of skepticism: 1. Semis . A typical long haul semi gets well under 10MPG. In some cases not much more than half that. They are heavy and need a lot of energy to move. A Tesla Model S weighs 4650 lbs and has a range of a couple of hundred miles. A semi truck can weigh up to 80,000 lbs. That is a lot of weight to get rolling and a lot to pull up a grade. Semis spend a large part of their time driving at highw…

1. They'll be able to line the entire trailer with batteries. Elon's pretty good at physics and engineering: if he says this can be done better than existing gas-powered semis, you're not going to be able to prove him wrong with some back-of-the-envelope arithmetic, as if he hadn't considered this. Obviously he has and knows it will work. Tesla didn't get this far on vague conjecture. 2. Maybe so, but it will happen,…

> 1. They'll be able to line the entire trailer with batteries

But that's an enormous inversion of expense that falls on the trailer owners. The tractor-trailer model works so well because it concentrates complexity and cost in the tractor.

At present trailers are mechanically fairly simple and require only routine servicing with a basic toolkit. They draw power from their tractor. An owner can maintain a fleet of trailers to match their peak demand and are immediately available. Just charter a tractor and away they go.

Battery-equipped trailers will be much more complex, heavy and maintenance-intensive. More expensive but with a smaller payload and prolonged periods of unavailability whilst charging. The cost of haulage charters will have to reduce by magnitudes to make that an attractive preposition.

Re: Master Plan, Part Deux

#262

Post by dredmorbius »

rjdagost wrote: post #132
danhak wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ford can have fewer employees per car because they're at full scale, they've outsourced nearly all their engineering and have outsourced their sales as well via an antiquated dealer model. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf15nMnayXk

Say what you will about their "antiquated" business practices, but Ford consistently does one thing that Tesla never does: it turns a profit

Ford is subsidised by 100 million year-old bottled, well, barreled, sunlight.

(Tesla's subsidised by lithium salt concentrations in Bolivia, but that's a rather smaller overall subsidy.)

Re: Master Plan, Part Deux

#263

Post by pfranz »

pm90 wrote: post #158
clintonb wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla and SpaceX required a lot of startup capital (relative to most other technology startups). Yes, their ideas are simple, but few people have the capital to implement those ideas. Additionally, the existing players in the rocket market didn't have much incentive to innovate given how few players there were. Your guess is as good as mine on why the automobile industry didn't continue much EV research after the 90s…

Its the same reason why Kodak invented the first digital camera and didn't put it in the market. We see the same pattern over and over again and if you work at any of these huge corporations, you understand that the main duty of the executives is to protect their profit centers at all costs. Any product that is capable of cannibalizing on the profit centers will face a tough road to success and at the worst, get cull…

I think it's similar to companies needing a different kind of CEO to bootstrap a company than is needed to scale up and streamline one. It's also very difficult to know which area and how much to risk on something new when you already have a successful product.

Re: Master Plan, Part Deux

#264

Post by garyclarke27 »

intrasight wrote: post #229
8611m wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this was the only thing that mattered for businesses, we wouldn't have Amazon as Walmart has consistently produced more net profit over Amazon since the last 22 years. 1 1. http://revenuesandprofits.com/amazon-vs-walmart-revenues-and...

As Amazon looses money on every sale, and makes it up with funding from new shareholders, I'm going to call it a Ponzi scheme and not a business.

Reminds me of the old accounting joke. CFO -> CEO We have a major problem, recent price cuts mean that we are now making a loss per unit on our major product lines. CEO -> CFO Don't worry about that, We'll make it up on the volume!

Re: Master Plan, Part Deux

#265

Post by abalone »

rjdevereux wrote: post #212

Why is residential solar important to the plan? Aren't large solar installations a more cost effective way of switching houses already on the grid to solar energy.

Adoption. By offering a standalone solution that can be adopted at the grassroots level they hope to drive adoption faster than any other way.

This is why they're including batteries instead of telling customers to feed excess energy back into the grid. Feeding into the grid is technically more efficient and doesn't require all those batteries, but does require the headache of interfacing with your local utility.

Re: Master Plan, Part Deux

#266

Post by JoshTriplett »

intrasight wrote: post #237
mahyarm wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No because you have to account for peak usage and have the capacity for it. There will be car savings, but the math wont be as simple as you say it is.

Have staggered work start and end times and "peak usage" will be a less pronounced peak. Also add in more home offices. I've no doubt that in 20 years car ownership will be a fraction of what it is today. Everything points in that direction and nothing opposes it.

> Have staggered work start and end times and "peak usage" will be a less pronounced peak.

This would have benefits today, but still rarely happens. A very small fraction of massive businesses have shift workers do this to more efficiently handle the volume that transitions between shifts would otherwise cause, but the vast majority of businesses do not. I don't think self-driving cars would change this.

> Also add in more home offices.

This would help today as well, but I don't think self-driving cars will change this either. (And if they do, it might not be in the direction you'd hope: self-driving cars might cause people to tolerate longer commutes.)

Re: Master Plan, Part Deux

#267

Post by astrange »

argonaut wrote: post #164
paulsutter wrote: post #15

> We expect that worldwide regulatory approval will require something on the order of 6 billion miles (10 billion km). Current fleet learning is happening at just over 3 million miles (5 million km) per day. This seems very significant for Tesla vs competitors. Yes Google has a strong technology lead today, but how long will that last when Tesla is collecting more miles of data every day than Google has collected in…

What does that data give you? Raw sensor data + steering angle + acceleration/braking is not particularly useful in of itself. Nobody is trying to shove large amounts of data through a blackbox model and directly trying to predict car controls from images. This is not MobileEye's approach and almost certainly isn't Tesla's approach. The bottleneck is data that is decomposed and labeled in greater detail (lane marking…

Geohot is pretty much claiming to do that!

http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/6/11866868/comma-ai-george-ho...

Re: Master Plan, Part Deux

#268

Post by jasonlingx »

intrasight wrote: post #229
8611m wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this was the only thing that mattered for businesses, we wouldn't have Amazon as Walmart has consistently produced more net profit over Amazon since the last 22 years. 1 1. http://revenuesandprofits.com/amazon-vs-walmart-revenues-and...

As Amazon looses money on every sale, and makes it up with funding from new shareholders, I'm going to call it a Ponzi scheme and not a business.

What funding from new shareholders?

Re: Master Plan, Part Deux

#269

Post by ams6110 »

sidcool wrote: post #256

A digression from the mainstream discussion. I woke up this morning feeling sullen (many factors involved). I didn't feel like going to work. I could hardly get out of bed. I just sat for a few minutes staring in the vacuumn. Something told me to check Hacker News (I am trying to avoid it in morning), and the top link was this. I went through it twice. It instilled hope and enthusiasm in me. I woke up in an instant a…

You might want to seek some help. Unless you're just being dramatic here for effect, there are some red flags in your post such as not being able to get out of bed, being filled with self-loathing and despair, etc.

Re: Master Plan, Part Deux

#270

Post by dredmorbius »

akira2501 wrote: post #136
thucydides wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are 30,000 motor vehicle deaths in America each year. In perhaps 30 years, fully autonomous vehicles could cut all of that needless carnage to nearly nothing. And what about the hundreds of thousands of injuries we'll be spared? Worldwide, fully-autonomous vehicles will be a public health victory on the scale of vaccines or antibiotics.

> Americans spend a million days each year in the hospital due to injuries sustained in motor vehicles. Sustained _due_ to motor vehicles. The base statistics also include pedestrian deaths. There's also a skew due to vehicles being multi-passenger. Interestingly, it _is_ the leading cause of deaths for Americans between 15 to 29 years old. For females 15-24 the motor vehicle related death rate is 8.7. For males 15-2…

Blind "cause of death" stats are fairly meaningless.

I believe a better standard is to look at QALY -- quality-adjusted life years. That deducts relatively little for, say, a heart-attack at age 85 (you're already at your maximum life expectancy), but would put a heavy weight to, say, a pre-teen girl crippled by an auto accident, but surviving for life.

https://plus.google.com/+MarlaCaldwell/posts/BUZH36tmjso

http://www.cbs46.com/story/31596864/two-children-hospitalize...

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