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Tesla is committing automotive suicide

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Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#431

Post by alterom »

panick21_ wrote: post #423
alterom wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in principle, mind you. It's just that the company has stalled every major project they started, and, so far, completed a rather shitty an uninspiring one in Vegas that has no reason to exist in the first place (it's subway but with Teslas instead of trains). Its only purpose is to prevent the money from being spent on viable public transportation projects, and in that sense, it's very interesting that it got so…

Their mistake was to go from tunnels to transportation systems. I'm sure there are some innovations possible in tunnel boring. But that's not going to be some massive growth market. But trying to reinvent transportation was stupid.

> But trying to reinvent transportation was stupid.

It's not stupid, it's weaponized incompetence to divert funding from actual transportation infrastructure to their non-solutions which are all about the company owner's biggest money-making product (cars).

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#432

Post by cucumber3732842 »

SR2Z wrote: post #390
tacon wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure about that? The sustainable operation of modern cars is in doubt, from very specialized parts and fully integrated modules, to critical software that will not be updated, to dealer keying required for most every substitute part, the era of anyone being able to run cars for 200,000 miles long after the warranty is over will soon be in the history books.

You say this like the average age and reliability of cars hasn't been skyrocketing for years. Toyota offers a 10-year warranty on new cars, which would have been unthinkable 20 years ago. You can't update the infotainment, but the engine controls have remained modular because it's simply too hard to convince people to buy truly unrepairable cars. Tesla did it, and once people realized that gently tapping a Model 3 wa…

~20yr ago the Koreans were offering 10/100k as a "we stand behind our product" signal.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#433

Post by _Tev »

Qwertious wrote: post #186
nailer wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's hard and Tesla think they can do it. See 'reusable rockets' and 'having paralysed people control things with their minds' for other examples. HN often seem to think there's Elon fans downmodding things but it seems more like a case of irrational hatred.

More examples, please! Reusable rockets is the load-bearing example, I don't think that argument works without it. You could maybe squeeze in "he kickstarted the EV market".

Starlink was also ridiculed. "Some upstart beating industry veteran at crewed spaceflight" was also treated as a ridiculous idea (see extra funding Boeing was able to extract from congress).

But all those massive successes are SpaceX . . .

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#434

Post by nextaccountic »

mrguyorama wrote: post #297
1970-01-01 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If GM killed it to keep it from succeeding, then there is massive precedent to never reuse the tech. In fact, their NiMH battery patents were sold to Texaco/Chevron who held them close and never let anyone use them. From that point, they couldn't follow-up without dumping even more cash into it, effectively burying it. Until new lithium battery tech matured, there was no way to do it again.

>If GM killed it to keep it from succeeding They didn't, and this is just absurd. Not only were electric cars available since the very beginning of cars , but they've always been available as niche options. There are tens of electric cars that postdate the EV1 and predate the Tesla. Do you even know their names? We have stupidly cheap gas. An electric car has only ever been a curiosity for America. Even now, the prim…

About compressed gas, they have so much cheaper fuel that they are the norm here in Brazil for Uber drivers. So, not a novelty

Brazil also pioneered flex engines that work with either alcohol and gasoline, and gasoline in Brazil is sold with high alcohol content

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#435

Post by array_key_first »

direwolf20 wrote: post #417
array_key_first wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are niche enough use cases I don't think they're worth bothering about. I wouldn't dump millions into a custom GPS solution for that 1 time out of 1 million someone drives a car without a smartphone. Especially when that GPS system is guaranteed to be worse than Google maps and not as well supported. If someone else drives your car they can connect their phone. Which is an improvement, because now they have THE…

It should be impossible to drive a car without a phone?

No it should definitely be possible, I just don't think it's worth while creating a subpar and poorly-supported GPS system when phones exist. Especially when said system is forced over phones, which often happens because companies want to promote their own shit. As if their shit don't stink, when really it's the smelliest.

We don't need 1 million different applications that we have to try to integrate together. Just let me connect my messages, my GPS, my music player, even my calendar. Personally, I could give a rat's ass how fancy Tesla's interface is or GM's. It will always, always be second best to what's available on modern smartphones.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#436

Post by godelski »

Nevermark wrote: post #402
godelski wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have. That's why I'm certain you're wrong. But if you're too lazy to do it yourself there's plenty of papers written on this stuff

Well then, use your math to address a point. Just one. In a vacuum, radiative heat loss per time hyper scales with temperature to the 4th power. In orbit large and complex heat transfer systems are not going to be practical. On a surface, specialized heat pumps can localize heat energy to very high intensity. With critical reliability advantages of stability, vibration control, complete sun shading, weaker size const…

  > In a vacuum, radiative heat loss per time hyper scales with temperature to the 4th power.
Correct, but you do know that the Stefan–Boltzmann Constant is 5.67e-8 W/(m^2K^4), right? And that emissivity blackbody is radiating in a vacuum.

This is how I know you don't understand the math. Because you didn't take the time to understand it. Plug in dummy numbers. I'll make it easy, 100^4=1e8.

You didn't think about how T works and the domain we're operating in. T's power isn't a huge factor when we're trying to dump lower levels of heat.

Let's say we're trying to discharge our power draw of 300W at 100C, that's still going to take a 0.5m^2 black body radiator sitting in perfect darkness PER CPU!!! A data center has hundreds of thousands!

You realize how much fucking surface area that is?

And this is before we consider all the other heat generated from the datacenter and the fact that you're dumping heat back to the moon's surface which will radiate it right back at your radiator making it much less efficient. Add the sun and you're fucked.

  > You have no knowledge of how effectively I use my time.
Of course I do. You made a statement so preposterous I know you don't use it to do math or physics. Maybe you watch some math YouTube but that's not the same. I don't have to know everything you do do to know what you don't do.

You know how I know this stuff? It's because I've put things into space. Yet you were even too arrogant to check NASA's website

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#437

Post by panick21_ »

hinkley wrote: post #428
panick21_ wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is the thing, you demand incredibly high amounts of capital cost for not actually achieving much. And that capital could be use for far, far, far, far more useful things the city actually needs. Like high capacity transports, like metros, trams or bike lanes. The amount of goods that need to be transported to stores and such things isn't that big. And using literally free unused roads at night or early in the mo…

Metros are in tunnels. There’s only so much gridlock you can avoid without going above or below grade. I was shocked when I moved to Seattle and they had no subway system. It was made even worse by being crammed up against a tall hill with a ridiculously deep lake behind it. They are finally changing it now but I’d spent time in Tokyo before, and time in London and Paris shortly after and it was a real head scratcher…

Yes, WHEN you build tunnel you need to make it the highest possible capacity. And not some low capacity tax system.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#438

Post by ben_w »

netsharc wrote: post #29
z2 wrote: post #7

Tesla also announced they will be discontinuing the basic lane keep + adaptive speed cruise control they helped pioneer in cars sold going forward. But this is now a standard (free) feature even in basic vehicles like the Toyota Corolla. Why would they intentionally cripple their vehicles to the point hat they would be inferior to most cars today? Then I learned that Musk's incentive pay has a 10 million full self-dr…

> Musk's incentive pay has a 10 million full self-driving subscription. Step 1: > discontinu[e] the basic lane keep + adaptive speed cruise control Step 2: Redefine "Full Self-Driving" to be those things. Charge 50 cents per month subscription or whatever. Step 3: Get 10 million subscribers. Step 4: 100 billion dollar payout! (Number pulled out of my butt)

Step 5: Buy Hasbro

Step 6: Count sales of Transformer toy Optimus Prime units towards "Sell 1 million Optimus robots"

etc.

Re: Tesla is committing automotive suicide

#439

Post by ben_w »

panick21_ wrote: post #421
Nevermark wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You seem to not even understand the very basics of heat transfer. Basic physics: The moon is very cold in surface shadows and below the surface. It is an enormous pre-chilled heat sink. The surface is also the support structure for any scale of radiative cooling with the same heat physics as orbit, but much better for larger and enhanced radiative engineering. For example, heat pumps can centralize waste heat energ…

> Only downsides are .... Yeah the only downsides are those you listed, and about 1000 others. Anybody that is serious about data centers on the moon should have their brain examined.

IMO, they're bad, but not so bad as "have their brain examined".

While they absolutely do have huge problems at current costs, and I don't trust Musk's estimates for future costs.

It's not implausible that collectively humanity (well, China: it's not like the ESA appears to value cheap launches yet) is going to get launch costs down a lot further, something that makes the question of "how cheap is cheap enough?" worth asking.

Then you can take a look at the existing constellations and their combined power throughput, look at whatever fraction of that power budget is not radiated by RF/laser output for comms, and trivially that's the power budget with minimal redesign for compute.

IMO all of space is still not good enough to be worth caring about: the moon is about twice the difficulty of LEO, and LEO now getting to the point that we're seriously asking about Kessler cascades; but also in space the waste heat is currently only a problem with no currently-useful side-effects, whereas down here on Earth we have possibilities for using the waste heat as an industrial input, e.g. using DCs as the heat source for district heating, or combining with ocean water to become evaporative desalination (which is otherwise pointlessly energy-intensive).

That, and the arguments about space-based power is as yet still marginal given how hostile an environment space itself is to PV. And PV on the moon doesn't even get the advantages (launch cost or ~24h light) of PV in a sun-synchronous orbit around Earth.*

But it's close enough to not be insane to do a real engineering analysis. Even if the answer turns out to still be 10x more expensive than the ground, which is what I'm expecting it to be.

* Side note: for a while I've noticed that China has production and money to afford to build a global power grid on Earth with 1 Ω resistance the long way around. This would allow 24h PV everywhere from deserts on the other side of the world including across seasons. Less material would be required to do this on the Moon because it's smaller, and also you don't really need to go across the equator so it can be much shorter, but also this would need someone to put an aluminium plant onto the moon that has negligible consumables and IIRC we don't have one of those yet.

Still, if moon-base design were up to me, I'd suggest sending up 1000 km of HVDC cable on some early missions and put a ring around one of the poles, with some PV every 60° or so.

This is still not a sensible design for moon-based compute.

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