The "walled garden" is more coming from different national / multinational entities rather than anything else. The EU is trying to force everyone to use CCS/Type-2, China is trying to force everyone to use GB/T, Japan wanted everyone to use CHAdeMO (they may have to give up on that dream), the US is moving in the direction of CCS/Type-1, etc. Tesla wanted to have a single global standard. They had to give up on that when they moved to the EU, but at least managed to keep their charge port relatively similar by going with a modified Type-2 and reusing AC pins for DC. To accomodate the mandated GB/T port, however, they had to make an ugly hack to their China-spec cars.
Except for the fact that this article is wrong. While Tesla is under no obligation at all to give away free chargers for other manufacturers' charging standards, they're doing so regardless. If the company requests it, Tesla will provide up to one J1772 for every two Tesla chargers. There are also Tesla charger to J1772 adapters.
Tesla has, and continues to try, to get other manufacturers to agree to support their standard on their vehicles; Tesla wants the revenue from more vehicles supercharging at their stations, because capital costs don't pay for themselves. And IMHO Tesla is the only entity out there who has shown competence in designing a charge connector. Take a look at, for example, CHAdeMO (left) vs. Tesla (right) and realize that the Tesla connector will charge real-world EVs about three times faster at low SoCs, while being more reliable as well. CCS is better than CHAdeMO, but it's still a Frankenconnector with a needlessly excessive number of pins - to the point that Tesla was able to implement fast DC charging just over the Type-2 (AC) connector without having to bother with the tacked on DC combo pins at all. And meanwhile Tesla is the only one who's managed to have a properly maintained charge network (start clicking through CHAdeMO/CCS chargers on plugshare and note the disturbing frequency of them being down, often for long periods of time), which also happens to usually be the cheapest fast charge network wherever it is, as well as guaranteeing a sizeable number of chargers at each station so that there's no risk of "the charger being down" or "the charger being occupied" when you get there. Even on the general layout, they hit all of the right buttons in comparison to everyone else: separating cabinets from pedestals, so that they can be upgraded individually from each other and you have a clean-looking, quiet setup at each charging stall.
Competitors, however, tend to try to use legislation to force Tesla to adopt their half-baked standards. At least Tesla is now in CharIN. Hopefully they can help steer CCS in a proper direction.
It's more than SpaceX anticipated as well. Initially there were no plans to recover the fairings because, hey, it's a fairing, how much could it cost? Turns out, quite a bit actually.
- SpaceX is making a recovery boat with a big net to catch those new fairing that will come. For what I read, it's pretty similar to Of Course I Still Love You drone ship.
Already exists. Its name is "Mr. Steven". And it's actually quite different from Of Course I Still Love You; it's a relatively fast boat, since control on the fairing is limited (the drone ships just had to sit still and wait)
Just so you know - naturally everyone is using this as a chance to pile on Musk, but the Panasonic cells used in the Model S and X get their cobalt from the Philippines, and Tesla is setting up Gigafactory supply contracts with American and Canadian mines. Musk has a personal obsession with physically shortening supply chains.
You can get a sense of what the mines look like by doing an image search for "artisinal mining" (although of course that'll tend to self-select for the more dramatic). There's a wide range, from single families up to mass endeavours run illegally by overseas funders that recruit / ship in labour. Most common is somewhere in the middle. People spread the knowledge of what cobalt ore looks like, someone finds some on their or their village's land, the people are dirt poor and know that some of the less scrupulous small mines will buy it off-the-books and add it to their product stream, and the race is on to get it out of the ground by whatever the means they can. The people digging them are overwhelmingly not miners - but they know that if they can get it out of the ground, it means food, clothes, medicine, a chance for a better life. But their improvised mines are usually highly dangerous.
Right. Cobalt, mainly produced today as a byproduct of copper and nickel mining, which gets virtually 100% recycled at end of life, is terrible, but everything that goes into gasoline cars and everything that they burn straight into the air we breathe comes from puppies and rainbows. No, there has never been exploitation over oil production, nosirree! Cobalt (16kg per long-range Tesla Model 3) is mined at quantities up to 1% in the ore, but hey let's forget that the precious metals in your spark plugs and catalytic converters is mined at ~1 part per million quantities. Let's ignore the fact that modern ICE drivetrains are a mix of high-alloy steel (nickel and chromium in particular) and alumium alloys, a lot more than 16kg of them in a typical car, and that these don't just magically pop out of thin air either (not like the steel itself does either). No, no, only batteries are evil! We must not forget this!
Sometimes people will say, "But hey, the EV is heavier! That means it's more resource intensive." Have you checked EV weights lately? Model 3 SR is the same size as, and as fast as, a BMW 330i. Model 3 SR: 1609kg. BMW 330: 1588kg. There's a little more difference between the LR and the 340, but not that much.
But even if we want to pretend that recycling doesn't exist, this is all dancing around the fact that the vast majority of the pollution of a vehicle accrues during its usage, not its production. The comparison isn't even close. And the higher the degree of mass production of EV components, the more efficient their production gets.
The three suppliers who spoke to Bloomberg estimated Congo’s artisanal output at 10,000 to 20,000 tons last year.
Congo’s Ministry of Mines estimates 86,923 tons of cobalt was produced last year. There are no exact data on how much of that cobalt is produced at artisanal mines, but the figure is about 13,000 tons higher than the output reported by the country’s industrial operators and published by the chamber of mines this month.
Two-thirds of the world’s supply comes from Congo
Math: ((10000 + 20000) / 2) / (86923 / (2/3)) = 11,5% of the world supply from artisinal mines.
Most artisinal mines are just villages digging their own land to try to get some extra income to lift themselves out of the country's crippling poverty (as the wealth from the big mines has failed to trickle down to ordinary people). But some percentage of artisinal mines will be abusive; call that fraction P. So P * 0,115 = will be the fraction of the global supply that is troublesome and needs to be dealt with. Dealing with it, however, is difficult when there's so much profit to be had by unscrupulous suppliers slipping artisinal cobalt into their supply streams.
Of course, it's not present production that matters. It's future production. Where's that coming from? In the short term, there will be even more from the DRC - albeit in new large mines. Katanga just reopened. 2018 production is anticipated at 11k tonnes per year, and 34k tonnes per year in 2019. Also, Metalkol will start production late this year, ramping up to 14k tonnes per year by 2019.
In the longer term, however production looks to be moving away from the DRC. While cobalt deposits are crazy-abundant in the DRC (cobalt prices could fall to near zero and they'd still produce it as a byproduct of their copper production), today's prices support production all over the world. Eg., in Australia the Skoni project will start in the 2020s, while among the many plays in Canada, First Cobalt is the most interest (near the aptly named town of Cobalt). But it's not just new mines; a lot will be from adding secondary recovery streams to existing mines, like the $500M Vale nickel mine at Voisey’s Bay. Cobalt can be found pretty much everywhere that nickel and copper can be found , but most mines haven't bothered recovering it because of how cheaply it's been coming out of the DRC. But while that will meet short-term demand, the long term is to focus more on mining "cobalt for cobalt's sake", rather than simply as a byproduct. And that'll be the case until the supply curve catches up with the demand curve and prices slack off.
Even mines right "next door" to the Tesla Gigafactory, like Lovelock mine in Nevada, may be opening in a couple years. It's a boom time for the cobalt market.
They're arguing that you're not limited by fairing sizes if you build in space, which is true. But then again, there's lots of ways to get around fairing size limitations. Here's one of my favourites: rollable composite trusses. You can even have wiring, plumbing, flexible solar, etc rolled up with it. There's also self-deploying booms, retractable booms, etc. Whatever you have all is stored flat during launch, no thicker than the material's outer wall.
The interesting thing when you look through the dataset is how high of a portion of the tweets are "@Name", particularly "@InfluentialName". They weren't just putting things out in the ether - they were taking steps to make sure that they got seen.
Nope, they're still not here:P Unfortunately. The last big expansion was announced last summer, so hopefully there will be a new expansion plan announced this summer. Last time it was at the Model 3 unveiling; the Model Y unveiling in "3-6 months" would be perfect. Crossing my fingers:)
The pricing on batteries for Semi are super-low; Tesla may well be able to pull off a good economy-priced EV after the Y. One of the great things about li-ions is, even with currently inflated raw material costs, raw materials are still under $50/kWh. Which is just a couple thousand dollars per vehicle. It's all about scaling production, and mass producing the hardware that does the mass production of cells. Gee, what company has been working the hardest toward this... hmm....;)
Here's a clue to the clueless: phased arrays are (effectively) instantly steered, steering can be up to 35 degrees, and there's always many satellites in the sky from every location (aka, the reason that there are so many satellites in the constellation)
The Chevy Bolt starts at $37,495 (vs the Model 3's $36,200)
MSRP on Chevy Bolt is indeed $37495, but on Model 3 it's $35k. In fact, I'm struggling to see where $36200 came from. Doc and delivery (which you have to pay for on Bolt too) is $1k, not $1,2k.
Beyond that, Model 3 is easily superior on a stat-by-stat and feature-by-feature comparison, and has a much more interesting options list. Heck, even DC charging is an optional extra on Bolt, and it's a third the power with a much worse network.
Don't get me wrong, Bolt would be a good choice if Model 3 didn't exist. But it's just not competitive versus it.
The attitude of other manufacturers has always felt like, "Meh, those dirty hippies will buy electric cars either way; charging infrastructure is someone else's problem. And fast charging is pointless - for road trips, you buy a real car".
I know there's lots of good people working for the major automakers who are strong believers in an electric future. But the attitudes from the top have been... underwhelming.
The good news is that Tesla is about to open a massive supercharger station in Cambridge, ON. I drove past it a few days ago and counted at least 15 charging stations and that's right off the main 401 highway between London and Toronto so prime spot.
Supercharge.info says it opened on February 2nd - are you sure it's not open?:) And yeah, it's a 16 stall station.
The Trans-Canada highway should be interesting. They're up to Sudbury now on the east (opened 21 dec), and they're building another Calgary one on the west (not sure if that is to count as part of the highway or not). I look forward to seeing more sites going into permitting, even though I don't live in Canada. What's really neat is seeing Western Europe finish up in Spain / Portugal. Still waiting for them to come to Iceland...
Also it's worth noting that when you do a manual wiper flick with the lever, that pops up the wiper context on the screen. It can also be opened with a drag on the screen.
Tesla's margins on S and X have long been around 25%, which is very reasonable. Tesla's automotive margins currently are down to around 18% now because of the Model 3 problems dragging them down (when you're building cars at a far lower rate than the lines were designed for, using more labour than the lines were designed for at max volume, of course that's going to hurt your margins). But it's simply not accurate to claim that they lose money on their vehicles. Tesla's cash burn has been driven by capex.
And as for the Bolt, from your article: "mainly due to a lack of scale". It doesn't help that GM purchases a lot of major components on the Bolt from LG rather than making them inhouse - aka, LG is guaranteed proper margins on their sales, but GM isn't.
Also, your comment on the CARB credits only applies to the Bolt:
“But the CARB credits are only effective at a production rate of about 20,000 to 30,000 vehicles a year. So that’s why you’ll see, mark my words, it’s not going to be any higher than that for the Chevy Bolt. That’s on order of 25,000 units a year,”
I'll note that I don't say the above criticisms to be harsh to other manfuacturers vehicles in absolute terms, only relative ones. E.g. most reviewers are in agreement that the Bolt is a good (albeit econobox-y) car - speed, handling, etc; it's nothing to be laughed at. But the reviewers also agree that it just doesn't match against a Model 3. If Tesla didn't exist, I think people would be flocking to Bolts, Leafs, etc instead.
Then again, if Tesla didn't exist, I don't think these other manufacturers would have put anywhere near as much investment into making EVs as they have.
And once it's working they plan to duplicate the whole line for 10k, finishing by the end of Q4. They're currently at 10% of the production design spec.
Just to explain better (because I expect a lot of bad information on this thread): the bottleneck is battery packs. Not battery cells, but the assembly of the packs themselves. Tesla contracted the construction of two of the four zones of the pack assembly process out to an engineering firm, and discovered that not only did they not work, but it wasn't even possible to make them work; they were fundamentally broken.
Tesla purchased a German engineering firm last year, Grohmann, which is now Tesla-Grohmann. When the broken line was discovered, Tesla dispatched Grohmann to rush together a replacement, and apparently they pulled it off. But the line is still in Germany. They'll be moving it to the US and installing it over the next several months. Apparently the new line is much faster and more efficient than the old design specs, too (Grohmann has been quickly becoming Tesla's "Skunk Works")
In the meantime, Tesla has implemented and is expanding a semi-manual stopgap. Robots do all of the welding, cell connections, etc, but they have to use people to move the parts from one stage to the next, and in some cases place parts for the robots. They're dealing with the slowdown by parallelizing the process.
Musk has owned up to hubris on this one. Tesla's attitude had been, "Meh, we know battery packs"; they put most of their effort on systems that were new, and not nearly enough holding contractors to the fire and making sure well enough in advance that their hardware could actually deliver. It's come back to bite them hard. Musk has talked about how much this has been "lesson learned", and how they're planning a lot of new steps on the Y to make sure that it's not delayed as well. Well, I'll believe it when I see it. No matter how ambitious the project, Musk almost always delivers - but he almost always delivers late. It would be out of character to do otherwise.;)
Model 3 reservation counts have been holding steady through the delays, and actually started growing again now that Tesla has started providing Model 3s to showrooms. That said, this was before they announced the delay on the SR version (which should be expected given the LR delays, but...); that might have a negative impact. But probably not a profound one. Tesla is fortunate that the competition is... well, absent (at least from the perspective of most reservation holders); most see the only real competition to the 3 to be other Tesla models. CCS/CHAdeMO networks are a joke compared to the Supercharger network (~43kW real-world on most vs. ~117kW, much lower reliability, less even spacing, far fewer chargers per station, usually much higher prices, etc). Teslas are faster, better handling, longer range, have more interesting options (AWD, air suspension, performance package, etc), over-the-air updates, don't look like econoboxes, have properly climate-managed battery packs with low degradation, have far lower depreciation than competitors, etc and are built by a company they know will never abandon EVs. So while you may get some grumbling, few people are giving up their spot in line.
You of course hear other manufacturers shouting "But wait, we'll have the coolest thing since sliced bread soon!", but they've been saying that for the past decade, and continually delivered lacklustre offerings in comparison to Tesla, to the point that Model S and X frequently outsell vehicles a third to a quarter of their price (a market 1 1/2 orders of magnitude smaller)
I watched that video yesterday. He seems to confirm what I was saying - it's not as capable as autopilot, in that it works on fewer roads and doesn't have things like semi auto lane changing, but what it does do it does extremely well.
Maybe you were watching a different video? He certainly didn't say anything like "but what it does do it does extremely well". He said, and I quote (11:15):
"... self driving abilities in other cars. The ProPilot system in Nissan Leaf is actually pretty good, but you have to push the steering wheel too often. After just five seconds. And also the ProPilot, it was, I mean, I could handle the turns 'okay', but, well, the ProPilot is designed for motorways only..." (stops to pay attention to the road) "... But you know, the ProPilot system in the Nissan Leaf, for some reason, when we're doing like a right turn like this, it tends to go too much to the centre dots. But when it does a left turn like this, a left bend, then it does it pretty nice. But, um... again, you know, it was only designed for motorways, not for like two lane highways like Tesla can. So... overall, I mean, I've tested the systems - I haven't tested the systems for BMW or Mercedes or Infinity or whatever... but at least the systems I've tested, Tesla is the best. And I've read reviews of other people testing the other systems from Mercedes and whatever, and.... very consistent, you know, every time, Tesla wins the Autopilot tests. So, Tesla is considered to be the, Autopilot... I mean, Autonomy level 2.5, whereas the other ones, like the Leaf, or Ionic, is like... level 2. Or maybe even a weak level 2, it depends on which car it is.
How did you get "it does things extremely well" (or even more, that it's better than Tesla) from that? You're of the view that Autopilot wavers in its lane; Björn found just the opposite, e.g. when the road curved right, ProPilot tracked poorly (and consistently poorly), while Autopilot tracked correctly.
(If I remember right, later in the video he also started talking about ProPilot again, and faulted it for two more things - not disengaging immediately upon user steering input, and for not making disengagement as clear as Autopilot.)
Zero ping-ponging, no "will it won't it" worries coming up to corners.
Heh, you know what I get zero ping-ponging, no "will it won't it" worries with? Autopilot;) Again, I'm confused by your experience. I can't deny your experience, because it was yours, but it doesn't match with mine - or apparently that of most reviewers.:)
But anyway, I just thought of this conversation when I watched the review:)
As for the interface, I fully agree with you that there are some changes they should make, and the TACC target speed is #1. They're not even close to fully utilizing the steering wheel controls, so it's an easy fix. They've been rolling out the updates pretty quickly, so I hope to see that one on the change list of an update soon. If they don't, that's a huge missed opportunity.
Wipers by contrast, I have no issue with, and neither does almost everyone I've talked with who has their Model 3 - particularly now that they've pushed out the autowipers update. Because with auto you just don't have to mess with it at all (unless you're in the minority who doesn't like autowipers), and even without autowipers, it's so easy to get into the menu - the left stick triggers it when you do a single wipe or cleaning, and you can do a screen swipe to access it rather than a click on the screen as well.
Hey, I'll give the Leaf credit on the 360 degree view - that is a neat feature Tesla lacks:) Although to be fair, I like how Tesla gives precise distances to vehicles near you.
There've been a number of interviews given about the design. While a number of changes surely do reduce the cost, having such a large, responsive touchscreen is certainly not a co
BTW: Björn Nyland just did a lot of comparisons between his experience with ProPilot and Autopilot in this new video, chatting while driving the Model 3. The short of it: he wasn't very impressed with ProPilot vs. Autopilot (and there's few people with more Autopilot experience than him, outside of Tesla... while he had just finished road tripping with a ProPilot vehicle before is US trip to drive the Model 3)
Obviously, the service is only meaningful in places that are remotely livable. But it'll at least be nice to have service on mountains, oceans, cabins and Antarctica.
Be careful about applying numbers from any one network to any other, particularly older networks in comparison to new ones. Satellite communications technology is anything but static, and specific implementation details matter greatly.
Don't just inform SpaceX - inform OneWeb, Qualcomm, Samsung and Lockheed; I'm sure they'd love to hear your lecture on how you know more than them.
Lastly, junk is, by definition something that is useless. A satellite constellation providing internet services to the entire globe is pretty much the opposite of "junk". Furthermore, unlike "space junk", the constellation's satellites are all designed for deorbit procedures at end-of-life. Lastly, even if they didn't deorbit, they're LEO; "junk" doesn't persist at LEO for protracted periods of time like it does at GEO. ISS loses up to a tenth of a kilometer altitude per day (although it's an exceptional case because of its large cross sectional area)
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The "walled garden" is more coming from different national / multinational entities rather than anything else. The EU is trying to force everyone to use CCS/Type-2, China is trying to force everyone to use GB/T, Japan wanted everyone to use CHAdeMO (they may have to give up on that dream), the US is moving in the direction of CCS/Type-1, etc. Tesla wanted to have a single global standard. They had to give up on that when they moved to the EU, but at least managed to keep their charge port relatively similar by going with a modified Type-2 and reusing AC pins for DC. To accomodate the mandated GB/T port, however, they had to make an ugly hack to their China-spec cars.
Except for the fact that this article is wrong. While Tesla is under no obligation at all to give away free chargers for other manufacturers' charging standards, they're doing so regardless. If the company requests it, Tesla will provide up to one J1772 for every two Tesla chargers. There are also Tesla charger to J1772 adapters.
Tesla has, and continues to try, to get other manufacturers to agree to support their standard on their vehicles; Tesla wants the revenue from more vehicles supercharging at their stations, because capital costs don't pay for themselves. And IMHO Tesla is the only entity out there who has shown competence in designing a charge connector. Take a look at, for example, CHAdeMO (left) vs. Tesla (right) and realize that the Tesla connector will charge real-world EVs about three times faster at low SoCs, while being more reliable as well. CCS is better than CHAdeMO, but it's still a Frankenconnector with a needlessly excessive number of pins - to the point that Tesla was able to implement fast DC charging just over the Type-2 (AC) connector without having to bother with the tacked on DC combo pins at all. And meanwhile Tesla is the only one who's managed to have a properly maintained charge network (start clicking through CHAdeMO/CCS chargers on plugshare and note the disturbing frequency of them being down, often for long periods of time), which also happens to usually be the cheapest fast charge network wherever it is, as well as guaranteeing a sizeable number of chargers at each station so that there's no risk of "the charger being down" or "the charger being occupied" when you get there. Even on the general layout, they hit all of the right buttons in comparison to everyone else: separating cabinets from pedestals, so that they can be upgraded individually from each other and you have a clean-looking, quiet setup at each charging stall.
Competitors, however, tend to try to use legislation to force Tesla to adopt their half-baked standards. At least Tesla is now in CharIN. Hopefully they can help steer CCS in a proper direction.
It's more than SpaceX anticipated as well. Initially there were no plans to recover the fairings because, hey, it's a fairing, how much could it cost? Turns out, quite a bit actually.
Already exists. Its name is "Mr. Steven". And it's actually quite different from Of Course I Still Love You; it's a relatively fast boat, since control on the fairing is limited (the drone ships just had to sit still and wait)
Just so you know - naturally everyone is using this as a chance to pile on Musk, but the Panasonic cells used in the Model S and X get their cobalt from the Philippines, and Tesla is setting up Gigafactory supply contracts with American and Canadian mines. Musk has a personal obsession with physically shortening supply chains.
You can get a sense of what the mines look like by doing an image search for "artisinal mining" (although of course that'll tend to self-select for the more dramatic). There's a wide range, from single families up to mass endeavours run illegally by overseas funders that recruit / ship in labour. Most common is somewhere in the middle. People spread the knowledge of what cobalt ore looks like, someone finds some on their or their village's land, the people are dirt poor and know that some of the less scrupulous small mines will buy it off-the-books and add it to their product stream, and the race is on to get it out of the ground by whatever the means they can. The people digging them are overwhelmingly not miners - but they know that if they can get it out of the ground, it means food, clothes, medicine, a chance for a better life. But their improvised mines are usually highly dangerous.
Right. Cobalt, mainly produced today as a byproduct of copper and nickel mining, which gets virtually 100% recycled at end of life, is terrible, but everything that goes into gasoline cars and everything that they burn straight into the air we breathe comes from puppies and rainbows. No, there has never been exploitation over oil production, nosirree! Cobalt (16kg per long-range Tesla Model 3) is mined at quantities up to 1% in the ore, but hey let's forget that the precious metals in your spark plugs and catalytic converters is mined at ~1 part per million quantities. Let's ignore the fact that modern ICE drivetrains are a mix of high-alloy steel (nickel and chromium in particular) and alumium alloys, a lot more than 16kg of them in a typical car, and that these don't just magically pop out of thin air either (not like the steel itself does either). No, no, only batteries are evil! We must not forget this!
Sometimes people will say, "But hey, the EV is heavier! That means it's more resource intensive." Have you checked EV weights lately? Model 3 SR is the same size as, and as fast as, a BMW 330i. Model 3 SR: 1609kg. BMW 330: 1588kg. There's a little more difference between the LR and the 340, but not that much.
But even if we want to pretend that recycling doesn't exist, this is all dancing around the fact that the vast majority of the pollution of a vehicle accrues during its usage, not its production. The comparison isn't even close. And the higher the degree of mass production of EV components, the more efficient their production gets.
Math: ((10000 + 20000) / 2) / (86923 / (2/3)) = 11,5% of the world supply from artisinal mines.
Most artisinal mines are just villages digging their own land to try to get some extra income to lift themselves out of the country's crippling poverty (as the wealth from the big mines has failed to trickle down to ordinary people). But some percentage of artisinal mines will be abusive; call that fraction P. So P * 0,115 = will be the fraction of the global supply that is troublesome and needs to be dealt with. Dealing with it, however, is difficult when there's so much profit to be had by unscrupulous suppliers slipping artisinal cobalt into their supply streams.
Of course, it's not present production that matters. It's future production. Where's that coming from? In the short term, there will be even more from the DRC - albeit in new large mines. Katanga just reopened. 2018 production is anticipated at 11k tonnes per year, and 34k tonnes per year in 2019. Also, Metalkol will start production late this year, ramping up to 14k tonnes per year by 2019.
In the longer term, however production looks to be moving away from the DRC. While cobalt deposits are crazy-abundant in the DRC (cobalt prices could fall to near zero and they'd still produce it as a byproduct of their copper production), today's prices support production all over the world. Eg., in Australia the Skoni project will start in the 2020s, while among the many plays in Canada, First Cobalt is the most interest (near the aptly named town of Cobalt). But it's not just new mines; a lot will be from adding secondary recovery streams to existing mines, like the $500M Vale nickel mine at Voisey’s Bay. Cobalt can be found pretty much everywhere that nickel and copper can be found , but most mines haven't bothered recovering it because of how cheaply it's been coming out of the DRC. But while that will meet short-term demand, the long term is to focus more on mining "cobalt for cobalt's sake", rather than simply as a byproduct. And that'll be the case until the supply curve catches up with the demand curve and prices slack off.
Even mines right "next door" to the Tesla Gigafactory, like Lovelock mine in Nevada, may be opening in a couple years. It's a boom time for the cobalt market.
They're arguing that you're not limited by fairing sizes if you build in space, which is true. But then again, there's lots of ways to get around fairing size limitations. Here's one of my favourites: rollable composite trusses. You can even have wiring, plumbing, flexible solar, etc rolled up with it. There's also self-deploying booms, retractable booms, etc. Whatever you have all is stored flat during launch, no thicker than the material's outer wall.
The interesting thing when you look through the dataset is how high of a portion of the tweets are "@Name", particularly "@InfluentialName". They weren't just putting things out in the ether - they were taking steps to make sure that they got seen.
Nope, they're still not here :P Unfortunately. The last big expansion was announced last summer, so hopefully there will be a new expansion plan announced this summer. Last time it was at the Model 3 unveiling; the Model Y unveiling in "3-6 months" would be perfect. Crossing my fingers :)
The pricing on batteries for Semi are super-low; Tesla may well be able to pull off a good economy-priced EV after the Y. One of the great things about li-ions is, even with currently inflated raw material costs, raw materials are still under $50/kWh. Which is just a couple thousand dollars per vehicle. It's all about scaling production, and mass producing the hardware that does the mass production of cells. Gee, what company has been working the hardest toward this... hmm.... ;)
Here's a clue to the clueless: phased arrays are (effectively) instantly steered, steering can be up to 35 degrees, and there's always many satellites in the sky from every location (aka, the reason that there are so many satellites in the constellation)
MSRP on Chevy Bolt is indeed $37495, but on Model 3 it's $35k. In fact, I'm struggling to see where $36200 came from. Doc and delivery (which you have to pay for on Bolt too) is $1k, not $1,2k.
Beyond that, Model 3 is easily superior on a stat-by-stat and feature-by-feature comparison, and has a much more interesting options list. Heck, even DC charging is an optional extra on Bolt, and it's a third the power with a much worse network.
Don't get me wrong, Bolt would be a good choice if Model 3 didn't exist. But it's just not competitive versus it.
The attitude of other manufacturers has always felt like, "Meh, those dirty hippies will buy electric cars either way; charging infrastructure is someone else's problem. And fast charging is pointless - for road trips, you buy a real car".
I know there's lots of good people working for the major automakers who are strong believers in an electric future. But the attitudes from the top have been... underwhelming.
Supercharge.info says it opened on February 2nd - are you sure it's not open? :) And yeah, it's a 16 stall station.
The Trans-Canada highway should be interesting. They're up to Sudbury now on the east (opened 21 dec), and they're building another Calgary one on the west (not sure if that is to count as part of the highway or not). I look forward to seeing more sites going into permitting, even though I don't live in Canada. What's really neat is seeing Western Europe finish up in Spain / Portugal. Still waiting for them to come to Iceland...
The autowiper update has indeed been rolled out.
Also it's worth noting that when you do a manual wiper flick with the lever, that pops up the wiper context on the screen. It can also be opened with a drag on the screen.
Need to equip charging stalls with spike strips that retract when an EV arrives ;) Or license plate cameras fed to the police.
At least supercharger stations have many stalls total, unlike the vast majority of CHAdeMO/CCS sites.
Tesla's margins on S and X have long been around 25%, which is very reasonable. Tesla's automotive margins currently are down to around 18% now because of the Model 3 problems dragging them down (when you're building cars at a far lower rate than the lines were designed for, using more labour than the lines were designed for at max volume, of course that's going to hurt your margins). But it's simply not accurate to claim that they lose money on their vehicles. Tesla's cash burn has been driven by capex.
And as for the Bolt, from your article: "mainly due to a lack of scale". It doesn't help that GM purchases a lot of major components on the Bolt from LG rather than making them inhouse - aka, LG is guaranteed proper margins on their sales, but GM isn't.
Also, your comment on the CARB credits only applies to the Bolt:
25k per year (Bolt) vs. 500k per year (Model 3).
Right. Because in the middle of a battery manufacturing problem, they should totally start making a second type of battery.
The LR battery should be delayed by six months, but the SR battery should suffer no delays whatsoever.
Do you see a problem with this logic here?
I'll note that I don't say the above criticisms to be harsh to other manfuacturers vehicles in absolute terms, only relative ones. E.g. most reviewers are in agreement that the Bolt is a good (albeit econobox-y) car - speed, handling, etc; it's nothing to be laughed at. But the reviewers also agree that it just doesn't match against a Model 3. If Tesla didn't exist, I think people would be flocking to Bolts, Leafs, etc instead.
Then again, if Tesla didn't exist, I don't think these other manufacturers would have put anywhere near as much investment into making EVs as they have.
And once it's working they plan to duplicate the whole line for 10k, finishing by the end of Q4. They're currently at 10% of the production design spec.
Just to explain better (because I expect a lot of bad information on this thread): the bottleneck is battery packs. Not battery cells, but the assembly of the packs themselves. Tesla contracted the construction of two of the four zones of the pack assembly process out to an engineering firm, and discovered that not only did they not work, but it wasn't even possible to make them work; they were fundamentally broken.
Tesla purchased a German engineering firm last year, Grohmann, which is now Tesla-Grohmann. When the broken line was discovered, Tesla dispatched Grohmann to rush together a replacement, and apparently they pulled it off. But the line is still in Germany. They'll be moving it to the US and installing it over the next several months. Apparently the new line is much faster and more efficient than the old design specs, too (Grohmann has been quickly becoming Tesla's "Skunk Works")
In the meantime, Tesla has implemented and is expanding a semi-manual stopgap. Robots do all of the welding, cell connections, etc, but they have to use people to move the parts from one stage to the next, and in some cases place parts for the robots. They're dealing with the slowdown by parallelizing the process.
Musk has owned up to hubris on this one. Tesla's attitude had been, "Meh, we know battery packs"; they put most of their effort on systems that were new, and not nearly enough holding contractors to the fire and making sure well enough in advance that their hardware could actually deliver. It's come back to bite them hard. Musk has talked about how much this has been "lesson learned", and how they're planning a lot of new steps on the Y to make sure that it's not delayed as well. Well, I'll believe it when I see it. No matter how ambitious the project, Musk almost always delivers - but he almost always delivers late. It would be out of character to do otherwise. ;)
Model 3 reservation counts have been holding steady through the delays, and actually started growing again now that Tesla has started providing Model 3s to showrooms. That said, this was before they announced the delay on the SR version (which should be expected given the LR delays, but...); that might have a negative impact. But probably not a profound one. Tesla is fortunate that the competition is... well, absent (at least from the perspective of most reservation holders); most see the only real competition to the 3 to be other Tesla models. CCS/CHAdeMO networks are a joke compared to the Supercharger network (~43kW real-world on most vs. ~117kW, much lower reliability, less even spacing, far fewer chargers per station, usually much higher prices, etc). Teslas are faster, better handling, longer range, have more interesting options (AWD, air suspension, performance package, etc), over-the-air updates, don't look like econoboxes, have properly climate-managed battery packs with low degradation, have far lower depreciation than competitors, etc and are built by a company they know will never abandon EVs. So while you may get some grumbling, few people are giving up their spot in line.
You of course hear other manufacturers shouting "But wait, we'll have the coolest thing since sliced bread soon!", but they've been saying that for the past decade, and continually delivered lacklustre offerings in comparison to Tesla, to the point that Model S and X frequently outsell vehicles a third to a quarter of their price (a market 1 1/2 orders of magnitude smaller)
Maybe you were watching a different video? He certainly didn't say anything like "but what it does do it does extremely well". He said, and I quote (11:15):
"... self driving abilities in other cars. The ProPilot system in Nissan Leaf is actually pretty good, but you have to push the steering wheel too often. After just five seconds. And also the ProPilot, it was, I mean, I could handle the turns 'okay', but, well, the ProPilot is designed for motorways only..." (stops to pay attention to the road) "... But you know, the ProPilot system in the Nissan Leaf, for some reason, when we're doing like a right turn like this, it tends to go too much to the centre dots. But when it does a left turn like this, a left bend, then it does it pretty nice. But, um... again, you know, it was only designed for motorways, not for like two lane highways like Tesla can. So... overall, I mean, I've tested the systems - I haven't tested the systems for BMW or Mercedes or Infinity or whatever... but at least the systems I've tested, Tesla is the best. And I've read reviews of other people testing the other systems from Mercedes and whatever, and.... very consistent, you know, every time, Tesla wins the Autopilot tests. So, Tesla is considered to be the, Autopilot... I mean, Autonomy level 2.5, whereas the other ones, like the Leaf, or Ionic, is like... level 2. Or maybe even a weak level 2, it depends on which car it is.
How did you get "it does things extremely well" (or even more, that it's better than Tesla) from that? You're of the view that Autopilot wavers in its lane; Björn found just the opposite, e.g. when the road curved right, ProPilot tracked poorly (and consistently poorly), while Autopilot tracked correctly.
(If I remember right, later in the video he also started talking about ProPilot again, and faulted it for two more things - not disengaging immediately upon user steering input, and for not making disengagement as clear as Autopilot.)
Heh, you know what I get zero ping-ponging, no "will it won't it" worries with? Autopilot ;) Again, I'm confused by your experience. I can't deny your experience, because it was yours, but it doesn't match with mine - or apparently that of most reviewers. :)
But anyway, I just thought of this conversation when I watched the review :)
As for the interface, I fully agree with you that there are some changes they should make, and the TACC target speed is #1. They're not even close to fully utilizing the steering wheel controls, so it's an easy fix. They've been rolling out the updates pretty quickly, so I hope to see that one on the change list of an update soon. If they don't, that's a huge missed opportunity.
Wipers by contrast, I have no issue with, and neither does almost everyone I've talked with who has their Model 3 - particularly now that they've pushed out the autowipers update. Because with auto you just don't have to mess with it at all (unless you're in the minority who doesn't like autowipers), and even without autowipers, it's so easy to get into the menu - the left stick triggers it when you do a single wipe or cleaning, and you can do a screen swipe to access it rather than a click on the screen as well.
Hey, I'll give the Leaf credit on the 360 degree view - that is a neat feature Tesla lacks :) Although to be fair, I like how Tesla gives precise distances to vehicles near you.
There've been a number of interviews given about the design. While a number of changes surely do reduce the cost, having such a large, responsive touchscreen is certainly not a co
What on Earth are you talking about? None of them have launched their constellations yet.
BTW: Björn Nyland just did a lot of comparisons between his experience with ProPilot and Autopilot in this new video, chatting while driving the Model 3. The short of it: he wasn't very impressed with ProPilot vs. Autopilot (and there's few people with more Autopilot experience than him, outside of Tesla... while he had just finished road tripping with a ProPilot vehicle before is US trip to drive the Model 3)
Obviously, the service is only meaningful in places that are remotely livable. But it'll at least be nice to have service on mountains, oceans, cabins and Antarctica.
Be careful about applying numbers from any one network to any other, particularly older networks in comparison to new ones. Satellite communications technology is anything but static, and specific implementation details matter greatly.
Don't just inform SpaceX - inform OneWeb, Qualcomm, Samsung and Lockheed; I'm sure they'd love to hear your lecture on how you know more than them.
Lastly, junk is, by definition something that is useless. A satellite constellation providing internet services to the entire globe is pretty much the opposite of "junk". Furthermore, unlike "space junk", the constellation's satellites are all designed for deorbit procedures at end-of-life. Lastly, even if they didn't deorbit, they're LEO; "junk" doesn't persist at LEO for protracted periods of time like it does at GEO. ISS loses up to a tenth of a kilometer altitude per day (although it's an exceptional case because of its large cross sectional area)