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Elon Musk Slows Tesla Deliveries On 'Dangerous' Trucks (electrek.co)
An anonymous reader quotes Electrek:
Tesla is always very busy in Norway, its biggest market per capita, but it has recently been difficult for the automaker to deliver its vehicles as its shipments keep being taken off the road for using transporters with "dangerous" trucks that do not conform to the rules. The California-based automaker generally ships its vehicles to Norway through the port of Drammen, but it is experiencing capacity issues so they are instead going through Gothenburg port and having to use more trucks to move the cars to its stores and service centers.
According to several media reports in Norway, over half a dozen of those trucks have been stopped by the authorities for a variety of safety reasons during inspections and one of the trucks that wasn't stopped ended up in an accident. Two Model S vehicles were crushed on the trailer involved in the accident. Tesla says that it is having difficulties finding competent transporters that comply to Norway's road requirements. On top of the safety issues, Tesla is also using transporters operating Euro 3 class trucks, which are more polluting.
Elon Musk tweeted in response to the article that "I have just asked our team to slow down deliveries.
"It is clear that we are exceeding the local logistics capacity due to batch build and delivery. Customer happiness & safety matter more than a few extra cars this quarter."
According to several media reports in Norway, over half a dozen of those trucks have been stopped by the authorities for a variety of safety reasons during inspections and one of the trucks that wasn't stopped ended up in an accident. Two Model S vehicles were crushed on the trailer involved in the accident. Tesla says that it is having difficulties finding competent transporters that comply to Norway's road requirements. On top of the safety issues, Tesla is also using transporters operating Euro 3 class trucks, which are more polluting.
Elon Musk tweeted in response to the article that "I have just asked our team to slow down deliveries.
"It is clear that we are exceeding the local logistics capacity due to batch build and delivery. Customer happiness & safety matter more than a few extra cars this quarter."
This has nothing to do with manufacturing capacity problems. Nope. Nothing at all.
"Customer happiness & safety matter more than a few extra cars this quarter." Say what you will about Elon but he's good at this marketing thing.
Thatâ(TM)s why their rockets have the worst relaiability in the history of rocketry.
Show your math.
And state which ULA company you work for. :D
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
So this is an ideal test ground for these Musk vehicles. Better to get the kinks out in an area known for, frankly, lousy drivers and roads, to keep things out of the news.
Compare to Tempe, the middle of nowhere, and excellent roads and (male) drivers, where a single road fatality causes so much news.
" That’s why their rockets have the worst relaiability in the history of rocketry. " How many rockets land on their ass-end when they're done? You're a fucking idiot.
No, brand new rockets don't take human passengers yet. I think you should go first though, just because you're such an unrealistic cunt nobody could miss you.
50/51 flown missions successful on the primary payload, 49/51 on all payloads, plus one ground failure, doesn't even remotely resemble "the worst relaiability in the history of rocketry". The average failure rate is 5,8%. Not worst - average. And the reason that none are allowed to carry passengers, apart from the fact that qualification takes years, is that they don't have a manned capsule completed yet. What do you want them to do, launch people strapped to a chair on the side of a rocket like something out of Kerbal Space Program?
In somewhere around a billion miles, there has been one confirmed death (plus one "I think my son was using autopilot but I'm not going to let Tesla check the logs"). The normal rate of driving deaths is one per around 80 million miles. In the one death, the NTHSA investigated and found Tesla to not be at fault; the driver had ample time to react but did nothing (if I recall correctly, the semi was visible in his path for something like 7 seconds), and that Tesla's attempts to ensure that drivers paid attention were sufficient (that said, Tesla followed up with more driver pestering, and Model 3 has a driver-facing camera which is expected to be used for eye tracking).
Is your job to sit under bridges and jump out at unsuspecting travellers?
I'll take that 1 death over the 12 it prevented.
None of this is about Tesla or its products. Its about Norway having a shortage of competent delivery services.
Add to the list of myths that just won't die.
No, they had to sue the USAF to break ULA's monopoly. USAF was sued because they made endless delays in conducting their engineering analysis, which SpaceX accused of being due to the fact that ULA offers an effective revolving-door policy for former USAF officials involved in approvals. SpaceX had already turned over all of the data that was supposed to qualify them to launch. And you want to talk about the fact that some people in congress have supported SpaceX... far more people in congress have continually and consistently lined up behind ULA, which carefully spreads its jobs around various congressional districts and spends large amounts on lobbying.
I'll never get why you people love crazy-expensive monopolies run by defense giants so much.
Is your job to sit under bridges and jump out at unsuspecting travellers?
The capsule has always been designed as man-rated.
The one in China was the one where I wrote:
The family refused to turn over the logs, so the only thing we have to go on is the father's insistence (he wasn't in the car) that his son must have been using Autopilot. Given that most "Autopilot did it!" claims so far have turned out to not involve Autopilot at all (sometimes humorously involving cars that don't even have Autopilot)....
Is your job to sit under bridges and jump out at unsuspecting travellers?
The coffin has always been designed as man-rated.
Fixed that for you.
No, see, you don't understand Seeking Alpha logic. Tesla's cars are so terrible that just being in physical contact with one will make your truck crash! It's like a hex. Load a bunch of them on the back of your truck all at once, and you're just asking for disaster.
Is your job to sit under bridges and jump out at unsuspecting travellers?
Yeah, I mean, what cars has Tesla ever finished? Well, the Roadster, but apart from that. Well, the Model S, but apart from that. Well, the Model X, but apart from that. Well, the Model 3 is already the highest number of EV deliveries in the US for two months in a row, but because it's not up to full production yet, AHA! See, he never finishes anything! ;)
Is your job to sit under bridges and jump out at unsuspecting travellers?
You may have a poor sense of scale. Worldwide, an average of >3,000 people die in motor vehicle accidents every single day. Self-driving technology is improving rapidly and we have seen 3 deaths. Do you think aggressive development of this technology might be worthwhile? Considering I live in a democracy, I fear for our future.
China and Florida eh? You're making my point for me..
World wide statistics cover all driving conditions. Self driving only cover carefully selected conditions. When you limit human driving stats to just same carefully selected conditions humans come out light years ahead over self driving gimmicks.
AC doctors the truth by repeating the same assertion like an echo chamber, long on vitriol and short on citation.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I'm more and more convinced that Rei is Elon Musk himself.
Too realistic to be just a sock puppet.
Now back in reality:
SpaceX reliability is right on average for the space industry even if you take into account early experimental failures. If you only count payloads lost it's better than average. They are beaten only by ULA, and only because of one single failure to deliver a payload.
Telsa's Autopilot according to the NHSTA drops the highway accident rate of these vehicles by 40% making an autopilot driven Tesla currently the safest way to move on the highway. https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/i... (Figure 11)
Mind you if you did get into an accident you'll probably want to be in a Tesla given that most of the models are widely considered the safest cars on the road, and the Model S achieved a record high rating by the NHTSA and NCAP and the Model X was the only SUV to ever be awarded 5 stars by the NHTSA as well. https://www.nhtsa.gov/vehicle/...
As for the Boring company, no doubt its safety will be a story as boring as your lame post.
No Fucking Way,
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
You're still fretting over 3 deaths ever (from vehicles that are involved in development and data collection for further improving the technology) when there are 1.3 million per year. I've seen politics for long enough to know that this happens, but we're existing in very different realities.
That’s why their rockets have the worst relaiability in the history of rocketry.
Sorry but that is total BS. The Falcon 9 has had 51 launches of which only 2 failed giving it just over a 96% reliability. The Russian Soyuz series has had over 1700 launches with a 97.4% reliability. Hence, the Falcon 9 with far fewer launches has a reliability comparable to one of the most tried, tested and reliable launch vehicles there is (source).
https://www.statista.com/stati...
Ramping up sharply too. On track to ship 360,000 vehicles in 2018 even if there were no further production improvements.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The much-maligned Space Shuttle had a 98.5% record of success, and exactly the same number of fatal accidents as Soyuz. The Saturn 1B has a 100% record of success and no fatalities. So far, the Falcon is pretty good and in line with a lot of other launch vehicle records.
Well, Norway's got Slow TV, so don't worry, be happy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Clearly a lone wolf amongst entrenched automakers.
Ford's seatbelt that released on impact, Toyota's pedal entrapment, Honda's airbags with accessory shrapnel, GM's randomly detachable rear suspension... with barely a closing mention on the Ford Pinto and GM's side saddle gasoline tanks.
A prominent vehicle manufacturer who places safety above product distribution... ready his stake, villagers.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Tesla is way above other EVa on US market by mileage alone.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Even if I didn't know the tech was going to improve (and that humans are often inattentive and dangerous), we both know that people wouldn't stand for such a thing. Uber's self-driving test cars are off the roads for now. Even though they're not known to be ethical, they can see a potential shitstorm brewing and they're stepping it back.
The logs on ANY car should not belong to the owner of the ar. It's not an iPhone, its a 4000 pounds killing machine.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
The space shuttle had 135 launches and only one launch failure giving it a 99.2% launch success rate.
That's odd. He's on track to ship about 0.66% of the cars for next year. (120,000 compared to 17 million)).
Perhaps your production numbers are out of date?
https://www.statista.com/stati...
https://www.statista.com/stati...
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I'll never get why you people love crazy-expensive monopolies run by defense giants so much.
It's not so much that they love monopolies; its just that they love to hate Musk.
Well,
we have to agree that that autopilot crash never should have happened.
A german or japanese car with "driver assistance" would have braked, without even activating "autopilot".
Driver assist, as in range detection, pedestrian detection, sign recognition, lane detection etc.is "always on".
You can not deliberately crash into the car or anything in front of you or deliberately run over a pedestrian.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
And every single launch ONE of his rockets has failed to land on its ass-end too, or taken out the landing platform on the way down.
SpaceX has attempted 29 landings, and succeeded 26 times. In what world does that equal a failure to land on every launch? Do you even math, bro?
prove it. Show us data that proves that.
Bet you can not.
over and over, all you say is 'ALMOST' kills owners. 'Nearly' decapitates.
Yet, what is interesting is that in every crash, the tesla owners thank tesla for having such a safe car.
Oh, as to the AP merge with the safety lane, that was the old eye, that is in heavy use by other car makers.
Get with it, cum breath. The Kock bros may be paying you, but you can not continue to lie over and over. And they say to clean up when moving from 1 brother to another.
Note your 17 mil is US and the Tesla number is worldwide. Given that china does around 30 mil, your .66 number is down to .12/47 or about .25% And we still have not included the eu, india, africa, australia, ... I'd guess tesla is around .05% or less of worldwide priduction.
The Saturn 1B has a 100% record of success and no fatalities
That's kinda meaningless. It flew 9 missions total. The Falcon 9 also had a 100% success rate at that point, with the exception of a "partial failure" on Flight #4 which prevented it from deploying a secondary payload (something which the Saturn 1B couldn't do at all). The first failure happened on mission 19.
It's not so much that they love monopolies; its just that they love to hate Musk.
Because Musk outruns their speed at creating regulations to protect the status quo. By the time they realize they need to, it is too late - doing so would too blatantly expose their motivation.
Ah fair point there.
On china, EV sales there are ramping up rapidly. Of course, it won't be teslas as they are too expensive for that market.
https://cleantechnica.com/2018...
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
None of this is about Tesla or its products. Its about Norway having a shortage of competent delivery services.
We don't, really. It's either that Tesla is cheaping out hiring other EEA-area drivers - we have a lot of foreigners coming to Norway poorly prepared, but we can't block them due to EU regulations - or they're trying to do a massive end-of-quarter batch to please the stock market which exceeds the peak capacity. Norway is not unique, but you'd better be ready for a Montana-style winter. If you're sending truck drivers from southern California or its equal, there will be trouble...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'll never get why you people love crazy-expensive monopolies run by defense giants so much.
Because articles like this bring out the sock puppets. ULA? Ford? Who knows?
Norway is also in parts extremely hilly.
And the roads do suck.
These cars are far from making him mainstream. How far behind target is he on Model 3?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Norwegian here. This is just how the transportation market seems to be overall these days, and a follow-on effect of the European open market. It has nothing to do with Tesla specifically. It is not their trucks, and it happens for all other kinds of transportation of goods and services. This really should not be a story that so strongly features Tesla.
The pattern is pretty much this, that we keep reading about trucks that were stopped or investigated following an accident, that seem to 95% of the time come from Eastern Europe (the Baltic countries, Poland, and Rumania are typically the points of origin), due to non-functional brakes, tires that are wore down, cargo that is not secured, or whatever. Plus zombie drivers who have skipped the mandatory sleep.
This is particularly prominent in Winter, when we get typical Norwegian weather and some idiot truck driver halts all traffic on a clogged main road due to losing traction on a main road and somehow ending up blocking every lane. And afterwards you read that "the truck had summer tires".
A problem that really needs fixing. These drivers and truck companies ought to start getting something more than a little slap on the wrist for these issues. Super heavy fines and some jail time ought to be a good motivation to follow European safety standards. I see zero reason to cut those crooks any slack.
https://www.statista.com/stati...
Ramping up sharply too. On track to ship 360,000 vehicles in 2018 even if there were no further production improvements.
There's not a chance in hell Tesla will make 360,000 vehicles this year and it was be disastrous for them to try.
If they get close to 200k of well-built cars, that would be an achievement in itself
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
because ditching is cheaper, safer, easier and you could re-use them from the ocean if you could be bothered to do so
How's that saying? You're not even wrong.
Ezekiel 23:20
Right, and those dufuses at the NHTSA just haven't caught on yet!
Sneaky, sneaky Tesla!
Foolish, foolish NHTSA!
Is your job to sit under bridges and jump out at unsuspecting travellers?
Go here. Let's pick a relatively recent year, so it reflects relatively modern manufacturing, but not so modern that there won't be time for problems to come up. Say, 2015? So punch in, say, "2015 Tesla" in one year, then pick some other manufacture and do the same thing - I'll do "2015 BMW" or "2015 Mercedes". Let's see how many recalls come up for each of the models that come up.
Tesla: 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1
BMW: 2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 1, 1, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 0, 0, 0, 3, 1, 0, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2...
Mercedes: 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 4, 1, 8, 8, 8, 8, 0, 0, 3, 3, 3, 3, 8, 8, 7, 7, 1, 1, 2, 2, 4, 4, 6, 6....
My god, look at that horrible Tesla build quality!
Furthermore, Tesla has - very unusually - never had a mandatory recall forced on them by the NHTSA, or one that started from a NHTSA investigation. Every single recall Tesla has ever had has come internally.
Is your job to sit under bridges and jump out at unsuspecting travellers?
The Gothenburg harbor is being actively sabotaged by a small union which has weaponized going on strike.
These people are threatening the harbor as a whole and shipping companies are already rerouting shipments through other harbors.
So the problems of transporting will only increase.
Even back in 2014 when the tech wasn't as mature as it is today, rates of EV fires, including rates of Tesla fires, were much lower than they are for gasoline vehicles. Yes, it's possible to burn a battery pack, but you have to really mess it up to do so. As an example of how fire resistant they are, this Model S was entirely gutted in an unrelated fire, to the point of leaving a pool of molten alumium on the ground, and still didn't manage to burn the battery pack. Here's the results of what happens when you deliberately try to burn a Powerpack (same basic tech).
Gee, who'dathunkit that filling a pack with fire barriers and surrounding every cell with a non-flammable coolant might mean something?
OMG, a car got in a nonfatal accident at highway speeds and protects its occupant! Quick, ring the New York Times, have them dispatch an autogyro to the scene, post haste!
OMG, another highway-speed crash with an astoundingly small amount of damage (" minor cuts and bruises from the accident but was otherwise unharmed"), caused due to a fire truck stopped on a highway causing traffic to have to swerve out of its way, causing minimal damage to the fire truck, with the Tesla driver openly stating that the accident was his fault? WORLD NEWS MEDIA, WHERE ARE YOU? This is the story of the century! Cars never crash, and yet... twice!
Dear Lord, a vehicle with a manufacturing defect, from a company making a hundred thousand vehicles per year? I've never heard of such a thing! That's never happened before in history! What's next... two? Three even? Oh, precious God in heaven above! They've even fooled new owners picking up their vehicles on the Tesla forums into not finding defects on their cars. What sort of sorcery are they playing here? They even got Consumer Reports to rank Model S above average in reliability. Witchcraft!
Oh, precious Heaven above, a car gets in an accident because he wasn't paying attention and praises how well it protected him, writing "“Everyone from the paramedics to the tow truck driver said that people don’t usually walk away from this. Had this been a regular ICE vehicle, I would be dead or in a lot worse condition." WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE STOP TESLA BEFORE THEY KILL AGAIN????
Also: clearly, NOBODY has EVER before in the history of time made a car with a central speedometer. It's just never happened! Certainly not completely>/i> centred ones, let alone "right beside the wheel" like in Model 3. Nope, never happened! Because it's so much safer to have to look "down and then through an obstruction" to see your speed, vs. "down and slightly right with no obstructions". Obviously!
Is your job to sit under bridges and jump out at unsuspecting travellers?
What "capsule"? Dragon 1 was never designed for humans. It has no crew compartment. Here's what it looks like on the inside. Dragon 2 is designed for humans. It is not complete yet.
Is your job to sit under bridges and jump out at unsuspecting travellers?
Might want to think again.
Is your job to sit under bridges and jump out at unsuspecting travellers?
yes, it's quarterly numbers on statista that I thought were monthly. I had tried to post a correction but slashdot said too soon.
I couldn't edit it to correct it, started working on the patio and just got back to it.
Slashdot is dumb for not letting you correct posts *and* not letting you post for several minutes after a post.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
But I've caught Rei posting some really fucking stupid shit on here from time to time. Hey, I guess no one's perfect.
I think it does have something to do with Tesla: NRK (Norwegian State broadcaster, for those joining us from outside the Nordic countries) reports on this: https://www.nrk.no/ostfold/tes... Google Translate works OK if you don't read Norwegian.
It says that the vehicles were mostly Lithuanian and apart from the overloading and bad tyre maintenance, they were also EURO III standard vehicles, so at least 13 years old (EURO III was superceded in 2005). That's quite old for a commercial vehicle. I'm sure there are companies with newer vehicles that could have been contracted to do this job, and I'm sure this company was cheap.
Tesla decided to use a cheap contractor rather than a quality contractor. Their attitude of trying to pay their workers and contractors less and treating them badly led to this.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
It all over Scandinavia, and it is part of the curse that the EU has become.
Truck drivers have been replaced with cheap labour from eastern Europe with the blessing of the EU.
- None of them cares about, or have time to cover their load. I see trucks every day that breaks the law and peppers the freeway with debris. On my way to work, I now avoid the main corridors where they drive and no longer do I need to have my windshield replaced every other year. The police of course are quite understaffed to take on all the problems the EU are bringing with it, so they can pretty much to as they please and these truck drivers don't give a fuck about all the damage they cause.
-To keep the price town they live in their trucks, often parked between jobs in places not equipped to handle overnight guests. One place across the street from my office comes to mind, where the shrubbery between roads have become a toilet filled with human feces.
- There are some laws put in place to limit foreign drivers basically living in the trucks and doing only work inside the country but it has not effect it seems.
- Also rest stops along the freeways are having problems with the massive amount of foreign trucks parked/camping. Some drive just south to germany only to return again across the border. And the rest stop down there have had problems with truckers camping, drinking, fighting.
I suppose it's a shitty life, enabled and approved by the EU.
L'Idiot
If Tesla's system hasn't tracked you down and turned you into a nondescript splat on the pavement, it is indeed too shitty to be used.
Actually all "self driving" cars have logged about 20 million miles total, so 2 deaths in 20 million miles for autonomous cars is far worse than the human average of 1 death every 80 million miles.
Six months. That's nothing compared to the Model X delays.
Also, that six months is behind the accelerated schedule that they moved to when they saw how many people were ordering. They're at or ahead of the original, unaccelerated schedule.
Is your job to sit under bridges and jump out at unsuspecting travellers?
You need to be disappeared nuttershit
Hopefully norway will soon realize why so much over regulation hurts consumers and do something to limit or eliminate all the excessive regulation of the shipping industry they have. If not, I think President Trump should go after them because there regulation is hurting OUR industrys ability to compete in europe and that is a clear unfare trade practice that either needs to end or be punished harshly.
and Telsa is selling more Model S in the US than BMW and Mercedes for their traditional luxury cars, see
https://www.teslarati.com/bmw-...
Telsa is impacting BMW and Mercedes sales in the US, it is not just an EV fight but a luxury car fight as well.
Oh bullshit. SpaceX just plain DIDN'T DO the rigorous engineering. Thjey half-assed it. You can prove anything in court if you have lawyers and your opponent's lawyers have been told to cave.
Technically, it was the poorly designed US tractor trailer that killed the Tesla driver by ripping off the car's roof thereby defeating the emergency systems that the car had. European trailers have side-impact protection to help prevent cars from going under the trailer. This has been a mandatory law in Europe since 1989.
The US trailer prevented the following systems being triggered on the Tesla (independent of auto-pilot):
1. The car's radar radiated under the trailer because the trailer's lower edge was above the radar beam. Therefore, the emergency braking system was not activated.
2. The front crumple zone of the Tesla had nothing to hit on the trailer and therefore, the car was not decelerated and the air-bags were not fired.
Even with side impact protection on the trailer, an impact at 70 MPH would still likely to be fatal but there would of been a chance for the emergency systems like brakes and air-bags to have been activated.
The US should look at the design of European trailers and learn lessons from it.
That said, it's not really out of the ballpark. Assuming Q2 Model 3 production averages 2500/wk, Q3 averages 5000/wk, and Q4 averages 7500/wk, plus maybe 11k delivered so far, that's nearly 210k. If they do 90k S+X, that would be 300k, vs. your 360k.
Targets, BTW, are 2500/wk at the end of Q1, 5000/wk at the end of Q2, and building line 2 for 10k/wk in Q3/Q4 - so those are actually somewhat pessimistic figures. Model S+X targets are ~100k, the maximum number of 18650 battery packs they can make per year; realistically they'll adjust pricing and options to ensure that all get sold, even if it means cutting into their (healthy) margins. If Tesla did very well, they could plausibly hit 360k this year. But ~300k is IMHO more realistic. And that's assuming that the Grohmann line works as it's supposed to - something we'll find out over the course of Q2.
Is your job to sit under bridges and jump out at unsuspecting travellers?
You're well adjusted.
I'm not so sure. The much publicized recent collision with a stopped firetruck at 65mph resulted in only cuts and bruises.
And yes, US vehicle safety laws are absurdly lax.
Is your job to sit under bridges and jump out at unsuspecting travellers?
A german or japanese car with "driver assistance" would have braked, without even activating "autopilot".
In the Florida Tesla crash, the US semi-trailer has no side-impact protection to help prevent cars from going under the trailer. However, in Europe side-impact protection for trailers is mandatory.
I highly doubt that a European car or Japanese car would be able to detect the presence of the US trailer via their use of their forward radar emergency braking systems due to the big gap between the ground and the lower edge of the trailer.
I have a suggestion, please add side-impact protection to all US semi-trailers. This will allow the car's safety systems a better chance of detecting the trailer and to hit the trailer using the car's front crumple zone which will deploy the air-bags.
Extraordinary claim? Zero evidence? Gotcha.
I have a friend who owns one (the SUV) and I have a friend who is on the list to get one.
I have three other friends who have non-tesla hybrid electric/i.c.e. cars.
Oil is back up to 70. It only makes the case for electric cars better. Non-Tesla electric car sales are very strong in China.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
That isn't what they said on a tour of spacex back around 2011; I know the Dragon 1 will never fly with people, but it was apparently intended to be the man-rated framework.
The cause of the 2014 Tesla fires was a cooling fan in the left front corner of the car. Believe it or not, it was the same fan used in the 5 series BMW. The number of burndowns between Tesla and BMW was the same.
First if all: the radar would pick up the rest of the truck/trailer. Why would it not?
Secondly on simple driver assist systems, the truck/trailer is picked up by camera.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Considering that the design was at least an order of magnitude ore complex, more than twice as capable, and it was done at a time 60 years ago when no one had any idea if it would work or not, it's an impressive achievement.
My point was a little different, anyway, but part of it was "ha-ha look at the stupid americans/NASA!" and the old bullcrap about Soyuz and how Russian steam-locomotive engineering is superior. When in fact we have made VASTLY more complex and capable systems, right from the beginning, and the Shuttle in particular is pointed to as a failure. By the standards posited, the Shuttle is quite superior to anything the Russians have ever. or ever likely will do.
If Musk and company had managed to screw up, with the benefit of the absolutely *vast* amount of nearly-free-for-anyone information from NASA and others, it would have been embarrassing. They are solving a much simpler problem, and only their own arrogance has made it even slightly challenging.
"Assuming Q2 Model 3 production averages 2500/wk, Q3 averages 5000/wk, and Q4 averages 7500/wk, plus maybe 11k delivered so far, that's nearly 210k. If they do 90k S+X, that would be 300k, vs. your 360k."
There's are several limiting factors that will put the brakes on that. From what I've been told by people in the know, exceeding 5000/wk for Model 3 will require a 2nd assembly line & Fremont (allegedly) doesn't have enough space to accommodate that.
It's also require *another* upgrade of the paint shop and they'll have to petition CA to allow them to emit more VOCs. Painting the cars outside CA would mean transporting the bodies-in-white to Sparks and then back for the rest of the assembly.
It would make more sense to build a Model 3 line AND new paint shop at the Gigafactory.
But all those options take a lot of money and Tesla is bleeding a lot of cash.
"Targets, BTW, are 2500/wk at the end of Q1, 5000/wk at the end of Q2, and building line 2 for 10k/wk in Q3/Q4 - so those are actually somewhat pessimistic figures"
Q1 ends in 6 days and it's not clear if Tesla has reached a steady 1000+ per week yet. I see you're aware that exceeding 5k/wk would need a 2nd line - that's not going to come cheap and they don't have the space.
Elon has no reason to listen to people like me but if he did I would tell him to just get to 5000/wk as smoothly as possible with a focus on getting the build right the 1st time and not need to "remanufacture" in significant numbers, as was recently reported. The Model 3 was touted as being "easy to manufacture" but that has yet to be shown to be true.
Perhaps *easier* than the X or S but easier is not the same as easy.
And let's not forget that achieving those goals all depend on - at a minimum - of doubling or tripling battery cell production at the Gigafactory.
Tesla had to turn to Samsung for cells to build that massive battery in Australia; that must have cost them a lot more than making their own.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Considering that the design was at least an order of magnitude ore complex,
How do you figure? It seems rather less complex to me.
more than twice as capable
This is just sheer nonsense. The falcon 9 can lift more in expendable mode. It can be reused if you want to lift less. It's cheaper, can carry multiple payloads, and is now capable of being retrofitted into a "heavy" configuration. So by what possible metric is the Saturn 1B even comparably capable, let alone twice as capable?
and it was done at a time 60 years ago when no one had any idea if it would work or not, it's an impressive achievement.
Yes, it absolutely was. But if you made it today of would be a mediocre achievement.
My point was a little different, anyway, but part of it was "ha-ha look at the stupid americans/NASA!" and the old bullcrap about Soyuz and how Russian steam-locomotive engineering is superior. When in fact we have made VASTLY more complex and capable systems, right from the beginning, and the Shuttle in particular is pointed to as a failure. By the standards posited, the Shuttle is quite superior to anything the Russians have ever. or ever likely will do.
Agreed. The Buran may have been comparable, but they scrapped it before it could do much.
If Musk and company had managed to screw up, with the benefit of the absolutely *vast* amount of nearly-free-for-anyone information from NASA and others, it would have been embarrassing. They are solving a much simpler problem, and only their own arrogance has made it even slightly challenging.
They massively reduced costs and improved capability by making novel use of composites; something no one else was really looking at. That, on it's own, was a huge gamble, and a major improvement, but they didn't stop there. They went on to champion, develop, and bring to fruition an idea which everyone else had written off as impractical: recovering rockets. Not only did they manage to recover them, they made it simple and cheap by figuring out how to land the damn things in a convenient location.
Is that what you're referring to when you use the word "arrogance"? If so, then I agree that they made it hard on themselves. And I agree that it was pretty arrogant to think that they could reduce costs, improve capability, and actually recover their launch vehicles. But goddamn did they ever deliver on that arrogance.
I'm as big a fan of Elon as anyone, but he doesn't need us to tell whoppers for him. I have the latest issue of Consumer Reports right in front of me, and it says (page 96),
Model S Reliability
2012: Average
2013: Much Worse Than Average
2014: Worse Than Average
2015: Better Than Average
2016: Average
2017: Average