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Tesla Unveils 500-Mile Range Semi Truck, 620-Mile Range Roadster 2.0
Rei writes: During a live reveal on Thursday, Tesla unveiled its new electric Class 8 Heavy Duty vehicle. As most people familiar with Tesla products would expect, the day cab truck features staggeringly fast acceleration for a vehicle of its size. It can accelerate 0-60 in 5 seconds without a trailer and 20 seconds with a 40-ton gross weight while being able to pull its maximum payload up a 5-degree grade at 65mph (versus a typical maximum of 45mph). The 500-mile range is for the vehicle at full load and highway speeds (80% of U.S. freight routes are 250 miles or less). Tesla also boasts a million mile no-breakdown guarantee; even losing two of its four motors it can out-accelerate a typical diesel truck. The total cost per mile is pegged at 83% of operating a diesel, but when convoying is utilized -- where multiple trucks mirror the action of a lead truck -- the costs drop to 57%, a price cheaper than rail. Tesla went a step further and stole the show from their own event by having the first prototype of the new Tesla Roadster drive out of the back of the truck. With the base model alone boasting a 620 mile range on a 200kWh battery pack with 10kN torque, providing a 1.9 second 0-60, 4.2 second 0-100, and 8.9 second quarter mile, the 2+2-seating convertible will easily be the fastest-accelerating production car in the world. Top speed is not disclosed, but said to be "at least 250mph." The vehicle's release date, however, is not scheduled until 2020.
...3 ... 2 ... 1
You're driving along the highway going "I'm just a truck, I'm just a truck, I'm just a..." but when the bad guys appear, the artificially intelligent car you have hidden away in the back of the truck comes out, with this music playing: https://youtu.be/mhxRBa7zaOI?t... Thanks to Elon Musk, YOU can be David Hasselhoff. =)
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
How many have they made, and how many can they make now? The only funding left for them is stock as they have billions in currently unpaid bank loans with payments due this quarter and no revenue stream to meet them.
At the same time, they're dependent on scale. It's estimated that a doubling of battery production rates equals a 17% reduction in battery costs. Hence it's in Tesla's interest to sell as many batteries as possible - whether in Model 3s, stationary energy storage, or Semis. It's also notable that Tesla is doing the exact same thing with drive units: Semi uses the exact same drive units as the Model 3 - just 4 of them.
Roadster 2.0, by contrast, is more of a halo car. Pricing hasn't been announced, but it's clearly the sort of vehicle where "if you have to ask, you can't afford it". Hence Tesla's target of 2020 (ages by Tesla's normally overly-aggressive timelines) seems to be "pushing capital expenses down the road".
We gotta go to a crappy town where I'm a hero.
Is "Model 3?" a question?
if you're asking how production is going: spyshots and VIN tracking currently suggests that they're up to about 100 per week. It got a bit weird because the VIN count stalled out for like a month in the lower 500s, but then suddenly leaped to nearly 1100, and then has been counting backward, filling in the gap. But there's been a real flurry of activity in the past week, week and a half. Multiple parking lots filling and emptying on a near-daily basis with Model 3s of differing VINs. So while it's not clear what exactly got uncorked, something clearly did.
We gotta go to a crappy town where I'm a hero.
I seriously doubt that strictly on a milage basis this is cheaper than rail. Rail is incredibly efficient. And for that matter you could electrify rail the same way.
Where rail breaks down is the last mile. Rail works out of depots. SO you need to offload these onto trucks in the end.
plus then there is the crew size. it take a couple people to drive an entire train. But it would take one driver per semi.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Tesla can dilute the stock, but that has a direct impact on the price, and given its existing price is based on enthusiasm more than financial merits there is a HUGE question of how stock holders would react to that. Would it prompt a large sell-off? Would it reduce future markets?
I have my Class A CDL and would love to get a chance to drive one of those. I'll bet the visibility is phenomenal when you're sitting centered in the cab. Furthermore, I'll bet the ride is much smoother due to the lower center of gravity when compared to conventional tractors. This thing would be a driver's dream because you don't have to worry so much about emission system failures and other breakdowns well-known to diesel. The only thing that the driver would still need to be concerned with would be the air brake system. Air brake systems these days are very reliable with the automatic slack adjusters and redundant air supplies. Hell, you could put a solar panel somewhere and make some serious mileage in the desert southwest. You might be able to run the entire truck off of the solar panel and just use the batteries for the night time. As it is right now, re-fueling takes about 15-30 minutes of time off of a driver's clock. By the time the tanks are filled, mirrors and windshields cleaned, and other miscellaneous activities, an appreciable amount of time gets burned. Truck drivers constantly race against their 14 hour drive window.
In Texas trucks can go up to 85mph on freeways. In Nevada, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming it's up to 80mph. Only about a third of US states have separate speed limits for trucks vs. cars on interstates. 55mph is the slowest of these speed limits, and only in California and Puerto Rico. See here.
We gotta go to a crappy town where I'm a hero.
Does it need to be pretty? Or better - does it need to be pretty for everyone? Because, in all honesty, it's not only a matter of taste (like the Model S and X were) and it's also completely OK by contrast (all semis are horrible IMHO), and I doubt drivers really care. After all, the part everyone sees the most on a semi is their trailer's back and sides...
The Bugatti Chiron can do 250 now, and they claim that after eventual fettling and tuning they will get it to do 300.
It might be the quickest production car, though, which is not the same as fastest.
Bugatti - Spends two years and thousands of man-hours on developing an internal combustion engine and transmission to squeeze a gain of 25MPH faster than the previous model. Eventually becomes a not-so-useful one-seater that runs out of gas in 3 minutes at top speed.
Tesla - Slaps in a bigger battery. Tells customers to hold on tight.
Yeah, I think we know how this race is gonna end...
(FYI, Koenigsegg Agera RS tops out at over 280MPH, so Bugatti already has some catching up to do.)
Whenever there has been too much bad news for a while, they announce some pie-in-the-sky plan or they 'launch' a product that probably won't ever exist, just to get some positive buzz and to deflect attention from their major problems.
Give me a fucking break. I've lost count of the number of "concept" vehicles that have been paraded around by every other auto manufacturer for the last half-century that never made it to an assembly line, and often served as nothing more than marketing hype.
This concept is hardly new or unique to Tesla.
It's really hideous. Couldn't they come up with something watchable?
How much time do you spend staring at trucks?
I think the point is that it can accelerate like mad, not that it needs to. This is demonstrating that it is technically superior in almost every way.
Therefore, it should nearly always be running well within its performance envelope, which I imagine has benefits in terms of longevity of the components etc.
Pricing I've seen is $200k base price for the Roadster, with a $50k reservation fee. The founder edition is $250k.
Not cheap but not expensive for a car with that kind of performance.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Not according to this.
At top speed, a Bugatti Veyron would drain its 26 gallon fuel tank in 12 minutes, having covered only 51 miles.
Does it need to be pretty? Or better - does it need to be pretty for everyone? Because, in all honesty, it's not only a matter of taste (like the Model S and X were) and it's also completely OK by contrast (all semis are horrible IMHO), and I doubt drivers really care. After all, the part everyone sees the most on a semi is their trailer's back and sides...
It's a matter of appealing to the buyer of trucks. Truckers are very passionate about what a truck should look like. However, I'm guessing fleet sales are the initial target and economics will overcome "it doesn't look like a truck" in the end. Even for owner operators the ability to save on operating costs, if big enough to cover buying a new rig, the economics would win over being a Mack/Peterbuilt/Freightliner person. 17% savings on the per mile operating costs is significant, in addition if you get older trucks off the road not only would the savings be greater since operating costs go up as tucks age but you'd cut down on the pollutants they emit.
Since an electric truck doesn't have to have the same cooling system an ICE requires they can be more aerodynamic, if you could combine that with trailers designed for improved aerodynamics the savings could be increased. For a set of driverless trucks yo could draft to cut down on drag with the first and last ruck designed for improving overall aerodynamics of the truck train.
I'd like to see Tesla enter this in the semi truck racing circuit. It would be like the turbine car at Ind, without the breakdown.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
It's fueled by millennials? Do they have a big furnace in the basement or something?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Where it gets important is when you have a trailer with 60,000 pounds of cargo in the back, and you need to go from 0-60 up a hill. That takes a Diesel tractor minutes to do, where this thing could keep traffic flowing reasonably.
That's the point.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
It could be. Or it could just be that they had a chasis surplus but were missing parts to fit them out.
There's no single problem that's hit them; it's been a number of different problems. They had a supplier which fell behind on supply. They had a couple mechanical and electrical problems in vehicles which they had to go back and repair. Automated battery manufacture took them a long time to get right because the tooling they'd been given didn't work properly. There were some paint shop delays, although they don't appear to have been serious. They've had overheating problems when they try to ramp up the speed on the automated welding (they use ultra high strength steel (in addition to high strength and mild steel) for part of the frame, and UHS steel can be very finicky about welding). Etc. Just all around growing pains. But either way, it's good to see that production rate finally starting to angle up.
We gotta go to a crappy town where I'm a hero.
.... which was unveiled on 19 october 2016. And delivered in its basic form, although the updates for the "upcoming" expanded capabilities certainly have been well behind schedule. But most certainly not something from "more than a couple years ago".
That said: I'm actually very much a doubter about full self driving, and if there's anything I think Tesla will fail on, it will be this.
We gotta go to a crappy town where I'm a hero.
I remember back when the Tesla Roadster had just been released, and certain parts of the Slashdot crowd were boldly predicting that Tesla would be bankrupt in months. And then Musk borrowed a bunch of money from the US government, and they boldly predicted Tesla would be bankrupt before it paid back a penny. Then Tesla paid it all back and released the S model, and the same crew (with additions) predicted Tesla would be bankrupt in months, and Elon Musk would be begging on street corners with a cup. Then the SUV, and Space X safely landed a bunch of first stage boosters, and the Model 3. Then Tesla open-sourced quite a lot of its patents, and the shrieks of rage could be heard for miles. How DARE they!
And at every stage, growing ever larger as the alt right decided Slashdot would be a worthwhile acquisition, the same group confidently predicted the ruin of Space X, Tesla, and anything else Elon Musk did. And every time they've been proved wrong. It appears they now have been moved to redefine "success" as "anything Elon Musk does not do".
So now Tesla proposes to produce and sell a full-on long-range tractor, and once again, a significant percentage of the comments here are all about how it will fail, and it's ugly and people will die and the world will end when electric trucks take over...and they will, though not for a few years yet.
So I'll just head off to the office now, expecting to get modded down because it's 8:30 EST, and that usually means people without jobs (cough...alt right...cough) will be hanging around. And I'll smile because I know I'll be seeing a fair number of electric trucks on the road before I retire.
Life is good.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Still it strikes me as odd that we all drive from the left seat in America and on the right side of the road. It would seem to increase the chances of the drivers being killed
While in a partial head-on accident (the most dangerous sort for a given speed) driver survivability is probably reduced by being on that side of the vehicle, the greater visibility afford to the driver by being nearer to the centre of the road greatly reduces the likelihood of an accident at all.
It nets out at fewer deaths per mile, even if individual outcomes per crash suffer slightly.
There is a difference between making a profit and investing it (what Amazon actually did) and not generating adequate revenue to cover costs even before research (what Tesla is doing now),
The key term here is cash flow. Profit is a choice a business can make, cash flow keeps them in business.
Apparently they didn't get of the naggers since you keep bitching about them. =P
Arguably, the real limit for responsible drivers is the speed rating of the tires. With some ad-hoc Google research I find no tires for heavy trucks that are rated more than speed class "M", which is 81 mph or 130 km/h.
This said, if you look on old forum threads like http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=97985, you can find statements like this:
No, it's not a myth. A company I worked for had trucks that would go that fast. We had several tractors with Caterpillar 3406B engines set at 425 horsepower. One was always getting worse fuel mileage then the others. We had the local Cat dealer check out the tractor. They went into the computerized fuel system on the engine and were able to show how fast the driver had been running with it. He had been hitting 118 out on I-10 through Arizona pretty regularly. With a few keystrokes they cut his top end back to 85 MPH and the fuel mileage improved a lot. A lot of the tractors on the road have Detoit Diesel 60 series engines set at 500 horsepower and they will also easily run over a hundered if they are geared right and haven't had the top speed set down. Is it smart to run that fast? No way. It takes a lot more distance to stop as you get rolling faster. Trucks running close together to "draft" are just an accident waiting to happen.
But I guess in 2001, speed limiters were not as widespread as today...
C - the footgun of programming languages
The fastest production car is a koenigsegg that goes 277 MPH, the astounding numbers are the 1.9sec 0-60 time and the sub 9 quarter mile. No electric race car, that's not a dragster, has made a sub 9 second quarter mile run. I am very skeptical of these numbers as it is a huge jump in performance. Being faster in a 1/4 mile then a purpose built race car is the biggest red flag to me. If this is true then Tesla is king of the mountain as far as cars go.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
Not a solid line; they leave a gap between each truck, and are designed to deal with vehicles moving in and out between them.
We gotta go to a crappy town where I'm a hero.
Yes, fast acceleration in a semi would be a game changer. Trucks could mix freely with cars in urban metroplexes without blocking traffic.
It sounds like Convoying has huge % benefits to costs, so companies will definitely want to use it and maximize the size of their convoys for greatest efficiency.
Convoying will definitely affect traffic; Think of having to wait for a tightly-locked convoy of 150 trucks to pass in order to merge onto the highway. This causes what in networking what is referred to as Head-of-Line Blocking Your BULK movement lands in the same path across the road network as your desired short transactions (Just get a small car through); Once the CONVOY is going it generates a continuous stream of LONG vehicles that completely fills all the capacity along the path, significantly increasing the amount of time to get that one small car onto the road and greatly increasing latency delays and trip times across individual vehicles (Even though it's definitely more efficient in the aggregate in regards to amount of Stuff being transported down the road).
Their margin on each S and X is approximately 25%, but don't let that stop you from making things up.
We gotta go to a crappy town where I'm a hero.
Pricing I've seen is $200k base price for the Roadster, with a $50k reservation fee. The founder edition is $250k.
Not cheap but not expensive for a car with that kind of performance.
0-100 mph in 4.2 seconds and "at least" 250 mph top speed is pretty much Formula 1 racing car performance or as fast as a $2million+ Bugati.
So, yeah, relatively inexpensive.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
So what products has Tesla announced more than a couple years ago that haven't since come to exist?
Off the top of my head? I'm sure this is only a small sample of the many missed targets:
- Hands free on-ramp to off-ramp driving (announced as coming through software within the next few months in 2014)
- The car picking you up anywhere you happen to be on private property (announced as coming through software within the next few months in 2014)
- Car meeting you at your front door on private property based on reading your calendar (announced as coming through software within the next few months in 2014)
- Car automatically parking itself in your garage after dropping you off at your front door (announced as coming through software within the next few months in 2014)
- Ultrasonic sensors that work at all speeds (announced in 2014, but the sensors actually have a lower top speed than the car)
- Automatic Emergency Braking that brings the vehicle to a complete stop (Announced in 2014 as coming through software within the next few months, current version only reduces the impact of an already unavoidable collision, and actually releases the brake pedal once shedding a certain amount of speed)
- 85kwh battery packs (they never released one, despite claiming to in 2012 and continuing to sell it until 2015, it was always only 81kwh and then software limited to 77kwh)
- retractable sunshades in the Model S (announced approximately 2010)
- Lighted vanity mirrors in the model S (announced approximately 2010)
- Model S centre console retrofits in all interior colours
- Charge cable that automatically connects to the car without human intervention (Announced in 2014)
- "full self driving" capable hardware (they claim they're already shipping this, but mark my words, this hardware will NEVER be full self driving, it's simply incapable of it)
- A vehicle with lower maintenance than internal combustion vehicles (announced repeatedly since 2012, but they continue to have among the highest shop rates and parts prices in the industry, coupled with extreme delays on getting any parts, and only mediocre reliability)
- Seamless service experience where a valet picks up your car, replaces it with a loaner car that is a fully loaded top of the line car, and you don't have to go anywhere or do anything. If you prefer the loaner car to your own you can keep it and pay the difference.
- $50,000 Model S
- $35,000 Model 3
- Free unlimited supercharging for life (unlimited now has limits, even for people who bought the car when it was marketed as unlimited)
- A car that gets better over time through over the air software updates (the vast majority of updates actually remove functionality, not add new functionality)
Tesla has a reputation for always delivering, though late. But the truth is that they only ever deliver a small fraction of the things they promise. They always over promise and under deliver.
I don't want to belittle what they have accomplished, it's nothing short of amazing, and almost 10 years after they first announced the Model S, there still isn't a single other competing vehicle on the market, that says something right there. That said, I won't give them a free pass on their continual blatant lies and revisionist history. Tesla is an EXTREMELY scummy company, and the absolute slimiest I've ever had the misfortune of buying anything from (which says a LOT!)
I will be the first person in line when a competitor to Tesla finally emerges, and I only hope that I can keep my S from losing too much more functionality than it already has in the interim.
...You in no way want a semi truck that accelerates like that, you want something that can have an enormous amount of TORQUE...
F=ma. Acceleration is directly proportional to torque.
Actually it is something you can make up in volume if you understand where they're losing money vs where they're making it.
They make money on every single car sold, actually among the highest profit margin in the industry. They just happen to spend even more on expanding their business. If Tesla slowed down their rate of expansion their profitability would go up. They could be profitable right now if they wanted to, but they're more focused on growing than on profitability.
I personally think that Tesla are making a lot of very stupid decisions, and that they should focus a bit more on profitability than they are. I also think they're a slimy unethical company (see my other posts on that subject) but the one thing they aren't doing is losing money on a per-car basis, (even if they are losing money every single year, and even though some people chose to divide the losses by the cars sold to try to make a (false) point).
No, the whole reason that they're convoying is so they don't have to pay a driver for each vehicle.
They showed pictures of the convoying. The space between vehicles was quite large.
Further, even if they did close up tight, there's no reason the self-driving systems couldn't see your turn signal and open a space for you to get in / through. Unlike human drivers, computers don't become inattentive or annoyed.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
That is in fact why this truck exists. See, the U.S. is weird in that it measures fuel efficiency in MPG. That's actually the inverse of fuel efficiency (which would be GPM, or how many gallons does it take to drive 100 miles). Because MPG is the inverse, it leads to a numerical inversion which tricks a lot of people into thinking what's small is big. (The rest of the world uses liters per 100 km to avoid this problem.) Say you needed to drive 100 miles. How many gallons of gas do you need?
Notice how every time MPG doubles, the amount of fuel saved is only half that of the previous doubling? In other words, the majority of the fuel savings comes at smaller MPG. The +25 MPG jump from a sedan to a Prius only saves you 2 gallons. While the +12.5 MPG jump from a SUV to a sedan saves you 4 gallons. Even though the 12.5 MPG delta seems smaller than the 25 MPG delta, it saves twice as much fuel. How? Because MPG is the inverse of fuel efficiency. Bigger is smaller, smaller is bigger.
So econoboxes like the Prius are actually the worst possible place to put a hybrid or electric motor. The car is already very fuel efficient. You're adding a lot of complexity and cost for very little fuel savings. The best place to put these technologies is in the gas guzzlers - SUVs and tractor trailers. Raising that 6.125 MPG tractor trailer's MPG to 6.67 MPG (a 9% increase in MPG) yields just as much fuel savings per mile as doubling a Prius' MPG to 100 MPG (a 100% increase in MPG).
This whole obsession with high MPG vehicles like the Prius is misguided at best, a terrible waste of money and resources at worst. Musk has done the math and knows this, and knows that the best way to really cut the country's fuel consumption is by improving the efficiency of gas guzzling vehicles like tractor trailers. Which is why he made this electric truck.
HP = constant * Torque * RPM. That's right, the HP and torque curves for an engine are one and the same, just both axes are scaled differently. (The value of the constant depends on what units you're using.)
Also, an electric motor deals much better with the huge range of power output that a truck needs. From low power at cruise speed, to high power during acceleration. Electric motors are so much better at this than transmissions that pretty much every modern train locomotive is electric. Even if the train still uses fossil fuels, it's energy isn't sent directly to the wheels via a mechanical linkage. It's converted into electricity, which then powers an electric motor which drives the wheels. AKA the diesel-electric locomotive.
They'll probably have to run special courses for all the BMW drivers who don't even know their cars have them.
Is it important that a truck - presumably intended for long hauls rather than Tom-Slick-style racing - be able to accelerate like mad?
One of the most dangerous things modern trucks often do is allow themselves to accelerate downhill and decelerate up hills - partly to capture energy as momentum that would otherwise be lost to braking - but also because they are often underpowered and couldn't maintain speed all the way to the top of a hill without the running head start. Ultimately, the inability of diesel trucks to efficiently maintain a constant speed is a major contributing factor to the lowering of their speed limits relative to other vehicles in most states. How many times have you had to go to the fast lane to pass a semi going uphill only to have to dash out of the fast lane to not be plowed over by the same semi on the next downhill? All of those speed changes and lane changes increase accident likelihood.
Electric trucks will be able to maintain constant speed using regenerative braking on the downhills and the extra torque of the motors to power up the hills fully loaded without loss of speed (due to that ability to "accelerate like mad". This is a huge gain in safety. Hopefully, they will have a decent capacitor bank so that you won't have myths arise about this practice causing a reduction in battery life.
When enough diesels are displaced, it is likely that this normalization of highway behavior will result in the restoration of speed equality with other vehicles. After all, it is generally safer when all vehicles are traveling at the same consistent speed.