They built a network everywhere people were buying their cars. More to the point, the fact that it took a few years is misleading because for most of that time, Tesla was a smaller company. Nearly a third of the number of Supercharger stalls that exist today were built since the Model 3 launch last summer. And now that Tesla has decided to raise supercharger rates to fund a faster expansion, that construction rate should increase yet again.
The thing is, OTA updates can give you material improvements. For example, a while after Tesla started shipping dual motor Model S's, an engineer had the idea of "Torque Sleep", wherein you automatically sleep one of the two motors (which have different gear ratios) in low torque demand times, then instantly wake it when traction or accelerator pedal needs require it. Since you have three separate choices on motor operating conitions (double torque on the front motor, double torque on the rear motor (different RPM), or balanced torque between the two), you have three choices of efficiencies, and can choose the most efficient combination. When they pushed out this update, overnight people with dual motor configs got a dozen miles more range.
Here's another: when Model Ss started being rolled out, there obviously wasn't many years of data available about how all of these motors would hold up in the real world, so Tesla had to make conservative assumptions about power limits. Years later, once the data was available, Tesla used OTA updates to raise the limits on a lot of their slower models, improving their acceleration.
Autopilot of course has a huge amount of software development going into it every year. OTA updates deploy this to all owners. Trust me, owners *much* rather this situation than the alternative situation where nobody is allowed to have Autopilot until some unknown future date when it's "flawless" on all roads in all situations and never makes the driver take control. The reality is that there never will be some sort of date when it's "perfect"; there will always be continuous improvements, and you want those improvements in your vehicle.
Around here, the big differentiator is studded vs. non-studded tires. The latter rip up the road. We're having an increasing PM pollution problem, and it's almost exclusively due to studded tires grinding down the roads. They're actually illegal for half the year, but they're legal in the winter.
That's why I've always used gasoline-powered phones (the vibration on them isn't that loud, manufacturers have gotten good at muffling it). I just drive down to the store at regular intervals and wait outside while they fill it up, it doesn't take long. You'd think it'd be annoying having to go out of your way to fill it up your phone, but you get used to it. People say, "Oh, but you can't charge in the comfort of your home, like you can with a battery-powered phone", but I can't see why that's so appealing.
And Tesla usually has a ~25% margin on its vehicles (a bit lower right now because of the Model 3 production problems dragging it down). It only runs at a loss because of its huge capital expenses.
This has been studied extensively, yet the myth that "battery manufacturing energy means that EVs pollute more" just won't die. And even the current studies based on current data are way too pessimistic, as the energy used in manufacturing keeps dropping.
I have no clue what you mean from that. You can charge an EV from any source of power, delivered from any socket, anywhere. The comfort of your own home. A campsite. A farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. You name it.
Shorter Range.
Model 3 LR goes further in city driving than its performance and size equivalent from BMW, the 340i. Furthermore, unlike gasoline vehicles, EVs start every day "filled up". A gasoline vehicle at any point in time will average only slightly more than half a "charge", and some days you'll start out with very little "charge" remaining at all.
Tied to a credit card
Huh? One, every charging network has its own payment method, and two, how do you pay for gasoline? Are you still one of those cash people who walks into the station every time?
And they sound like vacuum cleaners.
Now I have to doubt that you've ever even been in an electric vehicle.
The US system is such a mess. Soon the credits will expire on Tesla and GM, but continue for other EV manufacturers (mostly foreign), so the US will be giving foreign competitors a significant tax advantage relative to domestic manufacturers.
I like our system here. There are no rebates or anything like that. Rather, we have high sales taxes on vehicles, but electric vehicles are exempt from the taxes. So nobody feels that EV buyers are getting "paid" to get an EV. One could argue that it's still cutting revenue from the government, but then comes the counterargument that a lot of these people wouldn't have bought a vehicle at all if not for the tax discount, and all of the side benefits such as reduced pollution benefit everyone.
Basically, I think it's a lot more "publically acceptable" approach than rebates. But regardless of what form incentives take, it's pretty stupid having incentives designed in a way that penalize your domestic industry vs. its competitors.
Almost makes me wonder if the taxes should be on tires, relative to their expected lifespan and predicted road damage. Then you're taxing the object that directly does the damage. If someone does something that will increase the road damage - driving aggressively, carrying large loads, etc - they'll correspondingly burn out their tires faster. Kind of silly that a person can drive around on studded tires (which are very popular here) but pay the same road taxes per unit distance as someone driving around in the same vehicle on soft tires.
Since the context of Slashdot is usually the US, and you seem to be assuming the US, I'll assume that as well:
Hint : it may come from coal, it may come from nukes, it may come from hydro, but virtually NONE of those sources are without serious issues.
Coal usage is plunging off a cliff. In the US in the past decade alone it's plunged from nearly 50% of the grid to around 30% of the grid. Coal is dying, and nothing is going to change that, because its killer is economics.
Nuclear power and hydro are relatively static in usage. The intended "nuclear renaissance" failed in a morass of cost overruns. Essentially all feasible large hydro capacity has already been deployed; remaining sites are too well protected (e.g. nobody is going to approve a dam that would flood the lower part of the Grand Canyon). If anything, increasing water shortages will force a reduction in large hydro.
What's actually growing rapidly in the US is the combination of natural gas, wind and solar.
Where do you think the electric power which is used to recharge your electric toy vehicle comes from ?
I don't know, how about you look it up? Choose a Model 3, punch in your zip code, and come tell us about all of the oh-so-horrible emission results you get compared to a gasoline vehicle. Let's ignore the fact that beyond CO2, traditional pollution emissions have finite (often short) lifespans in the atmosphere, and releasing them at altitude in less densely populated areas has a profoundly lower impact on human health (per unit mass) than releasing them at ground height in densely populated areas.
And I'll repeat: that's the results for today - but grids worldwide, including the US, are cleaning up at an incredibly rapid clip. Coal simply can't compete any more. Every day that goes by, EVs become increasingly vehicles fueled by a mix of wind, solar and natural gas.
(None of this applies for me here, mind you - an EV here runs on a mix of hydro and geothermal; coal doesn't even come into the picture)
Typical Tesla battery degradation is about 3-4% in the first year and 1/2 to 1% in each subsequent year. There are Teslas with hundreds of thousands of miles on them that still have over 90% capacity remaining.
Yes. The Kingdom of Jordan basically paid Tesla to build a network there. Sheetz gas stations are building out superchargers at their stations. There's quite a few cases.
Inconvenience? I'd call having to detour from your everyday life at seemingly random intervals to stand outside in whatever weather in order to pump volatile carcinogens into a tank "inconvenient", not "spending 5 seconds plugging in at home". Can you imagine your life if instead of recharging your phone at home, you had to make periodic visits to a local Apple Store and wait there while they charged your phone for you?
I'd also call "inconvenience" not being able to preheat/precool your car remotely on an app on grid power, particularly when it's in an enclosed space.
As for price, you're comparing the worst case - Tesla's high-consuming EVs (S and X) on superchargers (expensive power). The average Tesla owner will own a Model 3 (one of the most efficient EVs on the road) and charge it at home power rates (in the US, an average of about 13 cents per kWh).
Speak of the devil.... Sunnyvale opened, right near Mountain View. That should hopefully help take the load off, at least for long enough for more to be finished:)
Also, it's electric, meaning that range and payload are significant limitations. It's a two-seater. If they had had to include a pilot, it'd only be a 1-seater - or have to be modified to have less range to account for the pilot.
The significance of that depends on how quiet they've gotten it. If you can have a helipad in your neighborhood, there's no need to "drive down the road". Generally, however, noise, pollution and safety constraints render that prohibitive.
There's been some good research in reducing prop noise, however. One of my favourites is the use of props with an even number of blades, with the number of pairs at least two (aka, at least 4 blades), where the pairs are balanced within themselves but not evenly spaced around the axis. Normally, a prop with perfectly spaced blades sets up a wave where pressure rises as a blade approaches and declines as the blade leaves, with each subsequent blade passing at the exact same rate and amplifying the signal in a resonant fashion. But when pairs of blades are unevenly spaced, you're adding power at two or more different frequencies, so you don't get that buildup, and to the contrary, the waveforms disrupt each other.
That's just an example (this craft doesn't appear to be using that specific one, as all of the props are just twin bladed - although they might achieve a similar net effect by offsetting the various props from each other). But there are a lot of different ways to reduce noise. It sure sounds quiet in the video. Obviously, since it lacks an ICE, that noise source is missing.
Pollution obviously doesn't apply to it, as it's electric.
As for the safety side, this craft looks to already be hitting all the right buttons. It could lose several motors / several props and keep flying just fine. It's battery powered (probably from multiple independent packs), too, so maintenance needs should be low and failure modes tame.
I'm not saying that it's ready for prime time as a vehicle that can take off and land in a neighborhood. But at least some of the checkboxes appear to have been ticked. If it really is as quiet as that video makes it sound (which could just be how they edited it), and they've tackled safety correctly, it might well have all the boxes checked.
(That said, I don't expect that, at least initially, to be their main market)
1) I don't know what the size of Iceland has to do with anything. 2) Iceland is about 325 miles by 220 miles. 3) The Ring Road around the country is around 790 miles long and is a 16 hour drive. 4) We're roughly tied (with Australia) for 2nd/3rd lowest population density in the world; population density is a major determining factor in how far you have to drive.
Slashdot Mirror
They built a network everywhere people were buying their cars. More to the point, the fact that it took a few years is misleading because for most of that time, Tesla was a smaller company. Nearly a third of the number of Supercharger stalls that exist today were built since the Model 3 launch last summer. And now that Tesla has decided to raise supercharger rates to fund a faster expansion, that construction rate should increase yet again.
West Virginia. They've started making cars now, didn't you know? Need to do something now that nobody's burning coal....
The thing is, OTA updates can give you material improvements. For example, a while after Tesla started shipping dual motor Model S's, an engineer had the idea of "Torque Sleep", wherein you automatically sleep one of the two motors (which have different gear ratios) in low torque demand times, then instantly wake it when traction or accelerator pedal needs require it. Since you have three separate choices on motor operating conitions (double torque on the front motor, double torque on the rear motor (different RPM), or balanced torque between the two), you have three choices of efficiencies, and can choose the most efficient combination. When they pushed out this update, overnight people with dual motor configs got a dozen miles more range.
Here's another: when Model Ss started being rolled out, there obviously wasn't many years of data available about how all of these motors would hold up in the real world, so Tesla had to make conservative assumptions about power limits. Years later, once the data was available, Tesla used OTA updates to raise the limits on a lot of their slower models, improving their acceleration.
Autopilot of course has a huge amount of software development going into it every year. OTA updates deploy this to all owners. Trust me, owners *much* rather this situation than the alternative situation where nobody is allowed to have Autopilot until some unknown future date when it's "flawless" on all roads in all situations and never makes the driver take control. The reality is that there never will be some sort of date when it's "perfect"; there will always be continuous improvements, and you want those improvements in your vehicle.
OTA updates are a good thing.
And they're designed for huge loads, and consequently expected to wear down the road significantly over the course of their lifespan.
I don't know about where you are, but around here, it's illegal to drive on bad tires, and the police do enforce.
Around here, the big differentiator is studded vs. non-studded tires. The latter rip up the road. We're having an increasing PM pollution problem, and it's almost exclusively due to studded tires grinding down the roads. They're actually illegal for half the year, but they're legal in the winter.
That's why I've always used gasoline-powered phones (the vibration on them isn't that loud, manufacturers have gotten good at muffling it). I just drive down to the store at regular intervals and wait outside while they fill it up, it doesn't take long. You'd think it'd be annoying having to go out of your way to fill it up your phone, but you get used to it. People say, "Oh, but you can't charge in the comfort of your home, like you can with a battery-powered phone", but I can't see why that's so appealing.
And Tesla usually has a ~25% margin on its vehicles (a bit lower right now because of the Model 3 production problems dragging it down). It only runs at a loss because of its huge capital expenses.
Just ignoring that most manufacturers are installing or already have installed solar roofs to power their operations..
link
This has been studied extensively, yet the myth that "battery manufacturing energy means that EVs pollute more" just won't die. And even the current studies based on current data are way too pessimistic, as the energy used in manufacturing keeps dropping.
I have no clue what you mean from that. You can charge an EV from any source of power, delivered from any socket, anywhere. The comfort of your own home. A campsite. A farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. You name it.
Model 3 LR goes further in city driving than its performance and size equivalent from BMW, the 340i. Furthermore, unlike gasoline vehicles, EVs start every day "filled up". A gasoline vehicle at any point in time will average only slightly more than half a "charge", and some days you'll start out with very little "charge" remaining at all.
Huh? One, every charging network has its own payment method, and two, how do you pay for gasoline? Are you still one of those cash people who walks into the station every time?
Now I have to doubt that you've ever even been in an electric vehicle.
Right. Power generators are idiots and you, who don't work in the power industry, know oh so much better than them.
Electric utilities have idle capacity at night. Being able to sell more power without having to build more infrastructure is a massive boon for them.
And FYI, you're confusing "solar" with "all renewables". Wind tends to be strongest in the night.
That's because it's fictional. They're not mentioning the risk of Winnie the Pooh mauling campers either, for the same reason.
The US system is such a mess. Soon the credits will expire on Tesla and GM, but continue for other EV manufacturers (mostly foreign), so the US will be giving foreign competitors a significant tax advantage relative to domestic manufacturers.
I like our system here. There are no rebates or anything like that. Rather, we have high sales taxes on vehicles, but electric vehicles are exempt from the taxes. So nobody feels that EV buyers are getting "paid" to get an EV. One could argue that it's still cutting revenue from the government, but then comes the counterargument that a lot of these people wouldn't have bought a vehicle at all if not for the tax discount, and all of the side benefits such as reduced pollution benefit everyone.
Basically, I think it's a lot more "publically acceptable" approach than rebates. But regardless of what form incentives take, it's pretty stupid having incentives designed in a way that penalize your domestic industry vs. its competitors.
Almost makes me wonder if the taxes should be on tires, relative to their expected lifespan and predicted road damage. Then you're taxing the object that directly does the damage. If someone does something that will increase the road damage - driving aggressively, carrying large loads, etc - they'll correspondingly burn out their tires faster. Kind of silly that a person can drive around on studded tires (which are very popular here) but pay the same road taxes per unit distance as someone driving around in the same vehicle on soft tires.
Yes, but nobody is going to read an article about a QA problem on a Camry.
Since the context of Slashdot is usually the US, and you seem to be assuming the US, I'll assume that as well:
Coal usage is plunging off a cliff. In the US in the past decade alone it's plunged from nearly 50% of the grid to around 30% of the grid. Coal is dying, and nothing is going to change that, because its killer is economics.
Nuclear power and hydro are relatively static in usage. The intended "nuclear renaissance" failed in a morass of cost overruns. Essentially all feasible large hydro capacity has already been deployed; remaining sites are too well protected (e.g. nobody is going to approve a dam that would flood the lower part of the Grand Canyon). If anything, increasing water shortages will force a reduction in large hydro.
What's actually growing rapidly in the US is the combination of natural gas, wind and solar.
I don't know, how about you look it up? Choose a Model 3, punch in your zip code, and come tell us about all of the oh-so-horrible emission results you get compared to a gasoline vehicle. Let's ignore the fact that beyond CO2, traditional pollution emissions have finite (often short) lifespans in the atmosphere, and releasing them at altitude in less densely populated areas has a profoundly lower impact on human health (per unit mass) than releasing them at ground height in densely populated areas.
And I'll repeat: that's the results for today - but grids worldwide, including the US, are cleaning up at an incredibly rapid clip. Coal simply can't compete any more. Every day that goes by, EVs become increasingly vehicles fueled by a mix of wind, solar and natural gas.
(None of this applies for me here, mind you - an EV here runs on a mix of hydro and geothermal; coal doesn't even come into the picture)
Typical Tesla battery degradation is about 3-4% in the first year and 1/2 to 1% in each subsequent year. There are Teslas with hundreds of thousands of miles on them that still have over 90% capacity remaining.
Yes. The Kingdom of Jordan basically paid Tesla to build a network there. Sheetz gas stations are building out superchargers at their stations. There's quite a few cases.
Inconvenience? I'd call having to detour from your everyday life at seemingly random intervals to stand outside in whatever weather in order to pump volatile carcinogens into a tank "inconvenient", not "spending 5 seconds plugging in at home". Can you imagine your life if instead of recharging your phone at home, you had to make periodic visits to a local Apple Store and wait there while they charged your phone for you?
I'd also call "inconvenience" not being able to preheat/precool your car remotely on an app on grid power, particularly when it's in an enclosed space.
As for price, you're comparing the worst case - Tesla's high-consuming EVs (S and X) on superchargers (expensive power). The average Tesla owner will own a Model 3 (one of the most efficient EVs on the road) and charge it at home power rates (in the US, an average of about 13 cents per kWh).
Speak of the devil.... Sunnyvale opened, right near Mountain View. That should hopefully help take the load off, at least for long enough for more to be finished :)
Lift, yes. But land? In the right conditions they can actually gain power when landing.
Note that VTOL is only used for takeoff; in level flight, the wing props stow aligned with the airflow and only the pusher prop drives the vehicle.
Also, it's electric, meaning that range and payload are significant limitations. It's a two-seater. If they had had to include a pilot, it'd only be a 1-seater - or have to be modified to have less range to account for the pilot.
I don't think they'll play nice with the drone taxis.
The significance of that depends on how quiet they've gotten it. If you can have a helipad in your neighborhood, there's no need to "drive down the road". Generally, however, noise, pollution and safety constraints render that prohibitive.
There's been some good research in reducing prop noise, however. One of my favourites is the use of props with an even number of blades, with the number of pairs at least two (aka, at least 4 blades), where the pairs are balanced within themselves but not evenly spaced around the axis. Normally, a prop with perfectly spaced blades sets up a wave where pressure rises as a blade approaches and declines as the blade leaves, with each subsequent blade passing at the exact same rate and amplifying the signal in a resonant fashion. But when pairs of blades are unevenly spaced, you're adding power at two or more different frequencies, so you don't get that buildup, and to the contrary, the waveforms disrupt each other.
That's just an example (this craft doesn't appear to be using that specific one, as all of the props are just twin bladed - although they might achieve a similar net effect by offsetting the various props from each other). But there are a lot of different ways to reduce noise. It sure sounds quiet in the video. Obviously, since it lacks an ICE, that noise source is missing.
Pollution obviously doesn't apply to it, as it's electric.
As for the safety side, this craft looks to already be hitting all the right buttons. It could lose several motors / several props and keep flying just fine. It's battery powered (probably from multiple independent packs), too, so maintenance needs should be low and failure modes tame.
I'm not saying that it's ready for prime time as a vehicle that can take off and land in a neighborhood. But at least some of the checkboxes appear to have been ticked. If it really is as quiet as that video makes it sound (which could just be how they edited it), and they've tackled safety correctly, it might well have all the boxes checked.
(That said, I don't expect that, at least initially, to be their main market)
1) I don't know what the size of Iceland has to do with anything.
2) Iceland is about 325 miles by 220 miles.
3) The Ring Road around the country is around 790 miles long and is a 16 hour drive.
4) We're roughly tied (with Australia) for 2nd/3rd lowest population density in the world; population density is a major determining factor in how far you have to drive.