In the UK that kind of range week mean charging every couple of hours for about half an hour.
Could you parse this sentence for me? Thanks:)
in the UK there aren't many journeys where you would charge more than twice anyway.
What car are you talking about? London to Inverness, for example, is 568 miles. What's your comfort level for a buffer in a Leaf upon arriving? 20mi? What percent do you charge up to? 80%, to minimize the current rampdown? So 100mi per leg, except 130 for the first leg? That's 4 charging stops. If you're getting an average of... oh, say 43kW out of the CHAdeMO?... then that's 48 minutes per stop... 192 minutes charging. Plus a per-stop overhead of 3 minutes (including acceleration / deceleration time) that's 204 minutes.
Model 3 LR, same 20mi buffer... now the optimal cutoff SoC is more personal opinion. Let's go with 60%. You get about 116kW up to about 45% SoC, then a roughly linear rampdown thereafter. That's 15 minutes up to 45%, and then with, say, an average of 100kW to 60%, that's another 7 minutes. So 22 minutes per stop. 319 real-world miles on a full charge, so subtracting the to , 299 miles on the first leg, 171 on each subsequent leg. So 2 stops - 44 minutes charge time, 6 minutes overhead = 50 minutes (under an hour). Vs. 204 (2 1/2 hours).
For Model 3 SR, same 20mi buffer, and let's go with a 65% SoC to charge to for convenience. We can't properly evaluate the rampdown SoC yet. It's probably lower than LR, but it's an open question as to how much lower. Let's say 35%. Now we're 7 minutes to 35%, and then with an average of say 90kW to 65%, that's 10 1/2 minutes, so 17 1/2 minutes total. Expected real-world range for the SR, given the battery ratio and a small bonus (~1 1/2%) for the reduced weight, 220mi, so 200mi on the first leg, then 123mi on each subsequent leg, so 3 stops (coming in right at the 20mi safety buffer, mind you), so 52,5 minutes charging plus 9 minutes overhead = 61,5 minutes. 1 hour vs. 2 1/2 hours.
I mean, you can tweak the numbers in various ways, maybe cut the Leaf's last charge shut to come in closer to the limit, things like that. But there's a massive difference in charge rates.
The thing is, I just don't get why someone would pick the Leaf. Is $5k MSRP really worth the difference? Getting far higher depreciation? An econobox plasticky interior and more mundane appearance? Significantly slower acceleration and handing not nearly as well rated by testers? Far more limited options selection? 2/3rds the range? Drastically slower charging, at less reliable charging stations, which generally charge significantly more (at least in most places)? Missing all that gorgeous tinted glass? A battery pack that degrades significantly faster (Tesla average = ~3-4% the first year, 1/2% each subsequent year)? Far more limited standard features? I mean, I just simply don't get it. Is $5k worth all that to you? I'm trying to understand why anyone would choose the Leaf, and I just can't.
I find that I want to stop for a break to eat and rest anyway by the time I need to charge.
It takes you 40 theoretical / 75 real world minutes to eat? You have to eat every 1 2/3 hours?
. But then again, neither is the Model 3.
Huh? Model 3 is the fastest road tripping EV in the world. A Model 3 recently drove from LA to NYC in 50 hours 16 minutes. Unlike your "40 theoretical / 75 real world minutes every 1 2/3 hour" meal/break schedule, Model 3 LR has a "25 minutes every 2 1/4 hours" meal/break schedule (real world). Which is perfectly reasonable. Model 3 SR is more like "30 minutes every 1 2/3 hours".
There is plenty of reliable CHAdeMO
I don't know where you are in Europe, but I just now did the same experiment I've done many times with CHAdeMOs in London - I clicked the closest 10 CHAdeMOs to downtown London in Plugshare and looked at the reviews. One was down. Another had been down in the second-to-last review but was up in the most recent review.
Is that the sort of reliability you consider acceptable for a road trip - 80-90%? 10-20% chance of getting stranded?
There's a reason that Tesla never has only a single charger per station (most common is 4x chargers feeding 8x stations, but that seems to be growing). Why they're all on the same network. Why they're all closely monitored with fast response times. Etc. When it comes to transportation infrastructure, you just can't be having people get stranded due to downed chargers. It's just not tolerable.
Also, CHAdeMOs are most commonly 1x per site (click around with PlugShare). How much you want to bet a road trip on a charger happening to be free when you get there?
The fast charging situation between "Tesla" and "Everyone else" is just night and day. I've watched some CHAdeMOs on Plugshare be down for *years*. Meanwhile I watched Hurricane Irma, with its widespread flooding, only take down one supercharger, and only for a few hours. Maria, the US's largest power system disaster in history, managed to take many down, but only for a couple days; the only one that was down for more than a couple days was on Marathon key, and that whole island went under. They got it back up a couple weeks later, before the gas stations even reopened.
A lot of people have said that the touch screen is janky, e.g. having to go through multiple menus to change basic settings like the windscreen wipers or headlights.
Windshield wipers and headlights are both auto, so I'm not sure why you'd want to change them. No, it's not multiple menus in, they're each one menu in - and that menu pops up when you do a related activity. For example, if you do a single wiper flick with the stick, the wiper menu comes up (otherwise it's just a swipe on the screen to bring it up). Note that your high beams / blinker are still controlled with the stick, as is normal (although if you have the autopilot option then you get auto hi-beams too).
There's a lot of misinformation about the interface. For example, I've seen claims that you have to control the dome lights from it. Not true; you simply press them to turn them on and off. I've seen people on Youtube complaining about how you'd have to adjust the volume or change tracks/stations from the screen. Again, not true; that's what the steering wheel controls are for. Etc.
Tesla does software updates which is nice, but their system also doesn't work as well as ProPilot.
I've never used ProPilot, but I doubt this. But I am curious; have you used the most recent versions of each? Googling comparison reviews between people driving the two of them generally gets articles that sum up as, "It's good, but it's no Autopilot". To pick one of many examples:
In comparison to Tesla’s system which features obstacle detection, speed li
The current battery is good for about 150 miles of real range
Followed by at best 40 minutes of charging to get 120 more miles (but in the real world in general, expect over an hour). Aka, on long trips, 1/3rd to 2/5ths of your time to be spent charging. That's terrible. And CCS/CHAdeMO networks are terrible, too - the poor reliability, the generally low numbers of chargers at a given site, the super-high density in some places and then absolutely nothing elsewhere, etc. The new Leaf maxes out at 180mph in theory, generally 100-ish in practice. Model 3s charge at up to 450mph at low SOCs. And according to EPA testing it's capable of even more; the chargers are the limit.
The primary difference between "Teslas" and "Everyone else" is that Teslas are suitable to roadtrips, while others aren't. Beyond all issues of style, performance, the far better option list (e.g. mine will have AWD + air suspension), better standard features, the comparably high degradation rate of Leaf's primitive battery pack, Leafs' demonstrable high depreciation rate vs. Teslas, etc... the state of fast charging just kills it for non-Tesla vehicles. Just utterly kills it.
Has Tesla announced a battery size for the normal Model 3? 40kWh sounds about right for the price they are selling it at.
Guess again;) Model 3 LR ($44k) = 80,5 kWh total, 78,2kWh usable. Model 3 SR ($35k), based on the disclosed 31 cells per bricks vs. the LR's 46, should be 52,5 kWh. Also, Model 3 is more efficient than Leaf. Real-world highway numbers are coming in at around 240-245 Wh/mi with the aero wheels (flat ground, California winter conditions, 70-75mph average speed) and around 270 with the 19" "sport" wheels, for long trips. The EPA puts the Model 3 as the most efficient 5-seat EV on US roads, and more efficient than a number of 4-seaters; only the 4-seat Ioniq is more efficient. SR will be even slightly more efficient than LR (should be about 1-2% more efficient due to the reduced weight).
Surprised? You shouldn't be. The cost to produce a vehicle is heavily affected by your capital investments. The more capital you pour into tech and production systems, the lower your unit costs. Tesla has been investing far more than everyone else. It's a pretty simple equation. You can try to cheat the equation by lowering your margins (or going negative), but if you do that then you'll have to try to disincentivize sales and just use the vehicle for PR (a lot of manufacturers do this, sadly).
Again, read the bloody report. The average margin in their automotive products is 18,9%. And it's only that low because Model 3 is dragging it down due to its production being so far below the design level.
Actually, they had an engine control computer called KORD. While simple, it was an electronic computer. It was fed 4 types of measurements from each of the engines, and based on a simple algorithm would decide if they were out of acceptable operating parameters, and if so issue a command to shut down the offending engine (in theory, before a catastrophic failure) and its opposing counterpart. It would then ramp up the good engines to compensate for the loss of the dead engines (they defaulted to operating at 75% throttle to allow for this, as well as to reduce stress on the poorly tested engines).
Computer controls based on sensors was a new thing for the team, and the difficulties in filtering out bad data came back to haunt them in the first flight; it misinterpreted pyro noise as a turbopump spinning out of control and shut down a pair of engines, then interpreted pogo and a different engine failure as all of the engines going bad - and shut down the engines for all of the stages, so they couldn't even test the upper stages.
KORD also turned out to have too long of a response time to prevent catastrophic failures in engines, which was one of the things the design team was counting on to overcome the known poor reliability of the engines. KORD's rushed schedule also left it with poor debugging and too few safety checks. On flight two, in addition to still being too overaggressive on engine shutdowns in general (in response to very real engine failures), it caused its widespread shutdowns while the rocket was still over the pad, rather than trying to keep it going long enough to clear the pad. The pad explosion was one of the largest manmade non-nuclear explosions in history and set the N1 project back a year and a half.
A lot of the Soviet plans were based around the expectation of failures. All of their (numerous) Venus missions, for example, were launched in pairs. The idea was that the incremental cost was low but the initial costs high, so you might as well send two. And if both work, you collect two separate datasets, from different locations. Usually when one failed they pretended it was an experimental or military launch - for example, Venera 4's twin was Kosmos-167, while Venera 7's was Kosmos-359.
It's hard to call one approach the right approach and one the wrong approach. The Soviet approach certainly paid dividends on Venus, but their Mars programme was a miserable failure compared to the US.
(Just kidding of course. I think SpaceX is great and they'll get there eventually, although I seriously doubt their BFR timeline, and expect plenty of fireworks en route to their desired reliability level)
Of course, it has to be actual redundancy. The Soviet N1 moon rocket had a problem that when its engines failed, they tended to take out adjacent engines. You have to be absolutely sure that failures aren't going to spread (pieces of shattering turbopumps, fires, backpressure, etc), or you're actually making the problem worse.
Of course, everyone working on rockets today knows the lessons of the N1 and it'd be incompetence not to exhaustively test for resilience against cascading failures.
Beyond redundancy, one neat thing about engine clusters is that you can create a virtual aerospike effect to some degree.
How on Earth did you get a new Nissan Leaf already? Last person I heard from who went into a Nissan dealership to ask about it was told that there was a 9 month waiting list. Now, that could have just been a lying dealership, but...
Anyway, take it on a long road trip and let me know how much time you spend charging;)
Company doesn't see a dime of the money your friends are making.
The fact that there are huge numbers of people out there who want to "buy low" - the reason Tesla's stock has held its value through the Model 3 delays - means that they can raise money through stock if they ever need to. Easily. The only time Tesla will not be able to raise money from stock is if the market suddenly decides that it has no future - aka, customers stop having interest in their products and/or they show signs of sustained negative margins on their products. Neither are even close to reality. Interest is sky high, and Tesla - despite all the capex from scaleup - has solid margins.
Tesla is burning through money it has on hand rapidly,
Try reading a post next time before commenting: "Despite all the hyperventilating last fall, Tesla finished Q4 with their third highest (nearly second highest) cash-on-hand, $3,4B (#2 was $3,5B in Q3, #1 was 4B in Q1). And now they're actually getting meaningful revenue from Model 3s, and that will only increase throughout 2018. The guidance is now to become GAAP-profitable on a more or less permanent basis later this year."
There is a difference with Amazon in that their expenses were largely fixed (building out their infrastructure)
Same with Tesla.
and their per-transaction cost was very low.
And so was their per-transaction profit.
Tesla's problem is that building a car is still really expensive,
Tesla has historically had around 25% margin on S and X, and should get the same on 3 when production is up to speed (due to the low Model 3 rate their current overall automotive margin is 18,9%). There's nothing bad at all about a 25% margin in the automotive industry.
No you are wrong. Tesla loses money on every car it sells. Cite: Tesla cash flow statements - see cash flows
I'm looking at it right now. Automotive gross margin, GAAP: 18,9%. It's dropped since 2016 when it was 22,6% because the margins on Model 3 are currently poor (actually slightly negative) due to its currently low rate of production, but will be positive in Q2 and should be similar to S and X by the end of 2018.
When will people learn to distinguish between margins and capex? Seriously people...
Yeah, here's a fun exercise for you. Calculate how long it takes to drive LA to NY in any of Tesla's "competitors" and compare that time to a Model 3. We'll just ignore how much slower they are, how much dorkier they look, how much they lack in standard and optional features relative to Model 3, and all of that. Just do the calculation and report back your findings.
There's a reason why the Model 3 has a half-million-long waiting list and its competitors don't.
Tesla is the top selling EV brand in the US, despite their sales historically having been to a much smaller market (nearly 6 figures) than its econobox-selling competitors. If that's not a damning indictment of the poor state of its supposed "competition", I don't know what is.
Says someone who clearly didn't read the quarterly report. The difference between end-of-Q4 cash on hand and end-of-Q3 cash on hand is $100M ($3,4B vs. $3,5B). Except now they're starting to get significant revenue from Model 3.
Check out the articles. The supposed $3B (for all manufacturers, not just Tesla) in the latter article didn't pass, and of the former $4,9B, half of it applies to all EV or solar manufacturers (mainly solar), and the other half is your standard "incentives for you to build your factory in our state" game that all major companies play ($1,3B incentives for the battery gigafactory, $1B for the solar gigafactory). For comparison, for Amazon's new headquarters, Atlanta offered over $1B, Chicago offered $2B, Newark offered a freaking $7B incentive, etc. But hey, let's pretend that Tesla is the only company that plays this came because, ooooh, evil Tesla!
Tesla Motors Inc., SolarCity Corp. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, together have benefited from an estimated $4.9 billion in government support, according to data compiled by The Times.
So you start off by pretending that SpaceX and Tesla are the same company. Clever move! What is this "government support"?
New York state is spending $750 million to build a solar panel factory in Buffalo for SolarCity. The San Mateo, Calif.-based company will lease the plant for $1 a year. It will not pay property taxes for a decade, which would otherwise total an estimated $260 million.
Wow, OMG, a state government gave financial incentives for a large company to build a factory in their state. This has never happened before in the history of business! Except bloody always, but apart from that, OMG!
Nevada has agreed to provide Tesla with $1.3 billion in incentives to help build a massive battery factory near Reno.
Stop the presses again!
That's nearly half of the $4,9B in the article, and it's just your standard "incentives to get a large company to move to your state" game that all large companies play.
The federal government also provides grants or tax credits to cover 30% of the cost of solar installations. SolarCity reported receiving $497.5 million in direct grants from the Treasury Department.
All solar installers received this; it is nothing SolarCity specific. You could start a solar installation company yourself today and receive tax credits.
The Palo Alto company has also collected more than $517 million from competing automakers by selling environmental credits.
Same story. The other automakers wouldn't have sold credits had they actually made the ZEVs that the legislation was intended to make them produce. And any automaker could get the credits.
Meanwhile, everyone shoulders the huge financial costs of air pollution from fossil fuel power (the healthcare costs alone from the worst coal plants can be up to 45 cents per kWh). But I know you want to slap down renewables with everything and give fossil fuels a pass for everything, so let's keep going!
Since 2006, SolarCity has installed systems for 217,595 customers, according to a corporate filing. If each paid the current average price for a residential system — about $23,000, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists — the cost to the government would total about $1.5 billion, which would include the Treasury grants paid to SolarCity.
Oh, so now we're taking in subsidies to consumers and pretending that they're subsidies to SolarCity? Clever girl! But okay!
But wait, that article was just for $4,9B (and that includes SpaceX). Where did your other $3B come from? Oh right, this:
The California state Assembly passed a $3-billion subsidy program for electric vehicles, dwarfing the existing program.
So we can now play the game where we pretend that Tesla gets all of that! But of course, we know that there are other other EV manufacturers; again, any company cam make EVs and get incentives. But let's go with it. How much money does Tesla
Pick a brand. Now google phrases like "problems with my X" or "problems with my new X", where X is the brand. You'll find tons and tons of pages of people complaining about it. And of course you will, because you're deliberately imparting selection bias to your search.
It's amazing the difference I see reading these "Tesla build quality is terrible!" articles / vids people share, versus the reports over on the Model 3 forum of random people documenting their delivery processes as they happen and going over their car with a fine-toothed comb afterwards. From the former, you'd think that they're held together by gaffer tape and carpenter's glue. From the latter, it's nothing even remotely resembling that.
There is a measurement of how satisfied customers are with their cars overall, and that's... wait for it... customer satisfaction. If you don't want a statistical bias, that's your measure. And of course, Consumer Reports tracks it. Guess what? Tesla is almost always at the top of the list. The question you should be asking yourself is not "Why are 10% of Tesla owners unsatisfied", it's "Why are 38% of BMW owners unsatisfied"? "Why are 24% of Audi owners unsatisfied?" "Why are 30% of Lexus owners unsatisfied?" "Why are 40% of Infiniti owners unsatisfied?" "Why are 36% of Cadillac owners unsatisfied?" Etc. And it's worth pointing out that most Tesla customers came from other luxury brands.
Re your "no safe exit from the back" remark:
1) Model 3 unlocks the doors automatically in the event of an accident. P. 33 of the manual. Listed in the crash events alongside the airbags going off, hazard lights going on, interior lights going on, and HV disabled. Note that it takes 12V to trigger the airbags as well, so if your airbags are going off, your rear doors are getting unlocked.
2) Depending on how the rear latch mechanism works (I don't know this), it may well *default* to unlatched upon loss of 12V. Has anyone actually checked what type of electronc latch it has? (or for that matter, checked for an emergency release under trim, like the X)? I'd wager it probably stays latched, but without checking, it's not something you can flatly assert.
3) Even if it did not auto-unlock, even if it did not passive fail to unlocked... how would it be any worse than a coupe? How would it be any worse than child safety locks on most cars (most cars, not Teslas - child safety locks are disabled in the event of an accident in a Tesla)? Where is your doom-and-gloom public safety campaign against coupes and child safety locks?
Just the other day I stood in the parking lot to count panel gaps on a Model S.
Funny, because for me finding a panel gap on a Tesla has been somewhat of a unicorn. I keep hearing about this supposed problem of widespread panel gaps, and yet I'm yet to find one in real life - despite trying. I don't doubt that they exist somewhere, but as of yet? I'll keep hunting for them;)
FYI, Consumer Reports ranks the current Model S as "above average" reliability.
No, it is true. Despite all the hyperventilating last fall, Tesla finished Q4 with their third highest (nearly second highest) cash-on-hand, $3,4B (#2 was $3,5B in Q3, #1 was 4B in Q1). And now they're actually getting meaningful revenue from Model 3s, and that will only increase throughout 2018. The guidance is now to become GAAP-profitable on a more or less permanent basis later this year.
It doesn't matter how high the stock price is
The stock price is a reflection of the fact that - whether you do or not - people believe in the future of Tesla, regardless of short-term hiccups. There's a huge number of people who want to buy low to ride what they see as its huge long-term growth potential (again, whether you do or not). And helping drive that is public enthusiasm for their products. There's a half million people on the waiting list for the Model 3 alone - the waiting list. Many of whom have been waiting for nearly two years. Again, regardless of whether you personally are enthusiastic for them.
I don't know if you've ever hung out with any TSLA investors (I'm not an investor, but I know quite a few). These are people who've profitted hand-over-fist betting on the company while listening to people like you talk about how the company is doomed for the past decade, and laughed their arses off at people shorting the company while shouting doom and gloom about some sort of imminent bankruptcy, and then losing their shirts. They see each quarterly report as win-win. If the stock goes up after the quarterly report, they make a ton of money. If it goes down, they get to buy on the low.
In the press conference today he said he's hoping that the cameras on the drone ship turn out to be intact, he expects there to be some good explosion footage on them;) I love how it always gets posted.
One interesting thing from the press conference: of all of the parts of the rocket, he's most pleased to get the titanium grid fins on the boosters back. The central core didn't have the new grid fins, but the boosters did - and they're very expensive, and currently a production bottleneck for them.
Confirmed at the news conference. Not enough fuel left on the central core; only one of the three engines managed to relight, and the stage hit the water at 300mph. However, SpaceX not only didn't plan not to use the central core again, but doesn't plan to use the side boosters either; they're not Block 5, and SpaceX only plans to re-launch Block 5 from now on. That said, the side boosters appear to be in good shape.
The main concern right now is on the upper stage. They've never had a stage dwell so long in such a high radiation flux. It should re-light, but they won't know until they try.
Slashdot Mirror
Purple elephants are flying.
I'm not talking about regular tinted windows, I'm talking about the panoramic "glass atrium" effect (side). Which also does this in the rain.
I wouldn't count on £7500 discounts on a car with a 9 month waiting list (2018 Leaf). That's an abnormally deep discount, for any car.
Could you parse this sentence for me? Thanks :)
What car are you talking about? London to Inverness, for example, is 568 miles. What's your comfort level for a buffer in a Leaf upon arriving? 20mi? What percent do you charge up to? 80%, to minimize the current rampdown? So 100mi per leg, except 130 for the first leg? That's 4 charging stops. If you're getting an average of... oh, say 43kW out of the CHAdeMO?... then that's 48 minutes per stop... 192 minutes charging. Plus a per-stop overhead of 3 minutes (including acceleration / deceleration time) that's 204 minutes.
Model 3 LR, same 20mi buffer... now the optimal cutoff SoC is more personal opinion. Let's go with 60%. You get about 116kW up to about 45% SoC, then a roughly linear rampdown thereafter. That's 15 minutes up to 45%, and then with, say, an average of 100kW to 60%, that's another 7 minutes. So 22 minutes per stop. 319 real-world miles on a full charge, so subtracting the to , 299 miles on the first leg, 171 on each subsequent leg. So 2 stops - 44 minutes charge time, 6 minutes overhead = 50 minutes (under an hour). Vs. 204 (2 1/2 hours).
For Model 3 SR, same 20mi buffer, and let's go with a 65% SoC to charge to for convenience. We can't properly evaluate the rampdown SoC yet. It's probably lower than LR, but it's an open question as to how much lower. Let's say 35%. Now we're 7 minutes to 35%, and then with an average of say 90kW to 65%, that's 10 1/2 minutes, so 17 1/2 minutes total. Expected real-world range for the SR, given the battery ratio and a small bonus (~1 1/2%) for the reduced weight, 220mi, so 200mi on the first leg, then 123mi on each subsequent leg, so 3 stops (coming in right at the 20mi safety buffer, mind you), so 52,5 minutes charging plus 9 minutes overhead = 61,5 minutes. 1 hour vs. 2 1/2 hours.
I mean, you can tweak the numbers in various ways, maybe cut the Leaf's last charge shut to come in closer to the limit, things like that. But there's a massive difference in charge rates.
The thing is, I just don't get why someone would pick the Leaf. Is $5k MSRP really worth the difference? Getting far higher depreciation? An econobox plasticky interior and more mundane appearance? Significantly slower acceleration and handing not nearly as well rated by testers? Far more limited options selection? 2/3rds the range? Drastically slower charging, at less reliable charging stations, which generally charge significantly more (at least in most places)? Missing all that gorgeous tinted glass? A battery pack that degrades significantly faster (Tesla average = ~3-4% the first year, 1/2% each subsequent year)? Far more limited standard features? I mean, I just simply don't get it. Is $5k worth all that to you? I'm trying to understand why anyone would choose the Leaf, and I just can't.
It takes you 40 theoretical / 75 real world minutes to eat? You have to eat every 1 2/3 hours?
Huh? Model 3 is the fastest road tripping EV in the world. A Model 3 recently drove from LA to NYC in 50 hours 16 minutes. Unlike your "40 theoretical / 75 real world minutes every 1 2/3 hour" meal/break schedule, Model 3 LR has a "25 minutes every 2 1/4 hours" meal/break schedule (real world). Which is perfectly reasonable. Model 3 SR is more like "30 minutes every 1 2/3 hours".
I don't know where you are in Europe, but I just now did the same experiment I've done many times with CHAdeMOs in London - I clicked the closest 10 CHAdeMOs to downtown London in Plugshare and looked at the reviews. One was down. Another had been down in the second-to-last review but was up in the most recent review.
Is that the sort of reliability you consider acceptable for a road trip - 80-90%? 10-20% chance of getting stranded?
There's a reason that Tesla never has only a single charger per station (most common is 4x chargers feeding 8x stations, but that seems to be growing). Why they're all on the same network. Why they're all closely monitored with fast response times. Etc. When it comes to transportation infrastructure, you just can't be having people get stranded due to downed chargers. It's just not tolerable.
Also, CHAdeMOs are most commonly 1x per site (click around with PlugShare). How much you want to bet a road trip on a charger happening to be free when you get there?
The fast charging situation between "Tesla" and "Everyone else" is just night and day. I've watched some CHAdeMOs on Plugshare be down for *years*. Meanwhile I watched Hurricane Irma, with its widespread flooding, only take down one supercharger, and only for a few hours. Maria, the US's largest power system disaster in history, managed to take many down, but only for a couple days; the only one that was down for more than a couple days was on Marathon key, and that whole island went under. They got it back up a couple weeks later, before the gas stations even reopened.
Windshield wipers and headlights are both auto, so I'm not sure why you'd want to change them. No, it's not multiple menus in, they're each one menu in - and that menu pops up when you do a related activity. For example, if you do a single wiper flick with the stick, the wiper menu comes up (otherwise it's just a swipe on the screen to bring it up). Note that your high beams / blinker are still controlled with the stick, as is normal (although if you have the autopilot option then you get auto hi-beams too).
There's a lot of misinformation about the interface. For example, I've seen claims that you have to control the dome lights from it. Not true; you simply press them to turn them on and off. I've seen people on Youtube complaining about how you'd have to adjust the volume or change tracks/stations from the screen. Again, not true; that's what the steering wheel controls are for. Etc.
I've never used ProPilot, but I doubt this. But I am curious; have you used the most recent versions of each? Googling comparison reviews between people driving the two of them generally gets articles that sum up as, "It's good, but it's no Autopilot". To pick one of many examples:
Followed by at best 40 minutes of charging to get 120 more miles (but in the real world in general, expect over an hour). Aka, on long trips, 1/3rd to 2/5ths of your time to be spent charging. That's terrible. And CCS/CHAdeMO networks are terrible, too - the poor reliability, the generally low numbers of chargers at a given site, the super-high density in some places and then absolutely nothing elsewhere, etc. The new Leaf maxes out at 180mph in theory, generally 100-ish in practice. Model 3s charge at up to 450mph at low SOCs. And according to EPA testing it's capable of even more; the chargers are the limit.
The primary difference between "Teslas" and "Everyone else" is that Teslas are suitable to roadtrips, while others aren't. Beyond all issues of style, performance, the far better option list (e.g. mine will have AWD + air suspension), better standard features, the comparably high degradation rate of Leaf's primitive battery pack, Leafs' demonstrable high depreciation rate vs. Teslas, etc... the state of fast charging just kills it for non-Tesla vehicles. Just utterly kills it.
Guess again ;) Model 3 LR ($44k) = 80,5 kWh total, 78,2kWh usable. Model 3 SR ($35k), based on the disclosed 31 cells per bricks vs. the LR's 46, should be 52,5 kWh. Also, Model 3 is more efficient than Leaf. Real-world highway numbers are coming in at around 240-245 Wh/mi with the aero wheels (flat ground, California winter conditions, 70-75mph average speed) and around 270 with the 19" "sport" wheels, for long trips. The EPA puts the Model 3 as the most efficient 5-seat EV on US roads, and more efficient than a number of 4-seaters; only the 4-seat Ioniq is more efficient. SR will be even slightly more efficient than LR (should be about 1-2% more efficient due to the reduced weight).
Surprised? You shouldn't be. The cost to produce a vehicle is heavily affected by your capital investments. The more capital you pour into tech and production systems, the lower your unit costs. Tesla has been investing far more than everyone else. It's a pretty simple equation. You can try to cheat the equation by lowering your margins (or going negative), but if you do that then you'll have to try to disincentivize sales and just use the vehicle for PR (a lot of manufacturers do this, sadly).
Again, read the bloody report. The average margin in their automotive products is 18,9%. And it's only that low because Model 3 is dragging it down due to its production being so far below the design level.
Quit confusing capex with margins.
Actually, they had an engine control computer called KORD. While simple, it was an electronic computer. It was fed 4 types of measurements from each of the engines, and based on a simple algorithm would decide if they were out of acceptable operating parameters, and if so issue a command to shut down the offending engine (in theory, before a catastrophic failure) and its opposing counterpart. It would then ramp up the good engines to compensate for the loss of the dead engines (they defaulted to operating at 75% throttle to allow for this, as well as to reduce stress on the poorly tested engines).
Computer controls based on sensors was a new thing for the team, and the difficulties in filtering out bad data came back to haunt them in the first flight; it misinterpreted pyro noise as a turbopump spinning out of control and shut down a pair of engines, then interpreted pogo and a different engine failure as all of the engines going bad - and shut down the engines for all of the stages, so they couldn't even test the upper stages.
KORD also turned out to have too long of a response time to prevent catastrophic failures in engines, which was one of the things the design team was counting on to overcome the known poor reliability of the engines. KORD's rushed schedule also left it with poor debugging and too few safety checks. On flight two, in addition to still being too overaggressive on engine shutdowns in general (in response to very real engine failures), it caused its widespread shutdowns while the rocket was still over the pad, rather than trying to keep it going long enough to clear the pad. The pad explosion was one of the largest manmade non-nuclear explosions in history and set the N1 project back a year and a half.
A lot of the Soviet plans were based around the expectation of failures. All of their (numerous) Venus missions, for example, were launched in pairs. The idea was that the incremental cost was low but the initial costs high, so you might as well send two. And if both work, you collect two separate datasets, from different locations. Usually when one failed they pretended it was an experimental or military launch - for example, Venera 4's twin was Kosmos-167, while Venera 7's was Kosmos-359.
It's hard to call one approach the right approach and one the wrong approach. The Soviet approach certainly paid dividends on Venus, but their Mars programme was a miserable failure compared to the US.
Fictional?
Fake?
Faux?
Fishy?
Farcical?
Fanciful?
Fantasy?
Far-fetched?
Folly?
Fruitless?
Frustrating?
Fireball?
Firebomb?
Firework?
Flack?
Fragmenting?
Flameout?
Failing?
Falling?
Free-falling?
Flipping?
Flopping?
Floppy?
Flawed?
Fiasco?
Finicky?
Faulty?
-Fatalities?
Funerary?
Fanart?
Fanservice?
Fuckup?
(Just kidding of course. I think SpaceX is great and they'll get there eventually, although I seriously doubt their BFR timeline, and expect plenty of fireworks en route to their desired reliability level)
Of course, it has to be actual redundancy. The Soviet N1 moon rocket had a problem that when its engines failed, they tended to take out adjacent engines. You have to be absolutely sure that failures aren't going to spread (pieces of shattering turbopumps, fires, backpressure, etc), or you're actually making the problem worse.
Of course, everyone working on rockets today knows the lessons of the N1 and it'd be incompetence not to exhaustively test for resilience against cascading failures.
Beyond redundancy, one neat thing about engine clusters is that you can create a virtual aerospike effect to some degree.
How on Earth did you get a new Nissan Leaf already? Last person I heard from who went into a Nissan dealership to ask about it was told that there was a 9 month waiting list. Now, that could have just been a lying dealership, but...
Anyway, take it on a long road trip and let me know how much time you spend charging ;)
The fact that there are huge numbers of people out there who want to "buy low" - the reason Tesla's stock has held its value through the Model 3 delays - means that they can raise money through stock if they ever need to. Easily. The only time Tesla will not be able to raise money from stock is if the market suddenly decides that it has no future - aka, customers stop having interest in their products and/or they show signs of sustained negative margins on their products. Neither are even close to reality. Interest is sky high, and Tesla - despite all the capex from scaleup - has solid margins.
Try reading a post next time before commenting: "Despite all the hyperventilating last fall, Tesla finished Q4 with their third highest (nearly second highest) cash-on-hand, $3,4B (#2 was $3,5B in Q3, #1 was 4B in Q1). And now they're actually getting meaningful revenue from Model 3s, and that will only increase throughout 2018. The guidance is now to become GAAP-profitable on a more or less permanent basis later this year."
Same with Tesla.
And so was their per-transaction profit.
Tesla has historically had around 25% margin on S and X, and should get the same on 3 when production is up to speed (due to the low Model 3 rate their current overall automotive margin is 18,9%). There's nothing bad at all about a 25% margin in the automotive industry.
I'm looking at it right now. Automotive gross margin, GAAP: 18,9%. It's dropped since 2016 when it was 22,6% because the margins on Model 3 are currently poor (actually slightly negative) due to its currently low rate of production, but will be positive in Q2 and should be similar to S and X by the end of 2018.
When will people learn to distinguish between margins and capex? Seriously people...
Yeah, here's a fun exercise for you. Calculate how long it takes to drive LA to NY in any of Tesla's "competitors" and compare that time to a Model 3. We'll just ignore how much slower they are, how much dorkier they look, how much they lack in standard and optional features relative to Model 3, and all of that. Just do the calculation and report back your findings.
There's a reason why the Model 3 has a half-million-long waiting list and its competitors don't.
Tesla is the top selling EV brand in the US, despite their sales historically having been to a much smaller market (nearly 6 figures) than its econobox-selling competitors. If that's not a damning indictment of the poor state of its supposed "competition", I don't know what is.
Says someone who clearly didn't read the quarterly report. The difference between end-of-Q4 cash on hand and end-of-Q3 cash on hand is $100M ($3,4B vs. $3,5B). Except now they're starting to get significant revenue from Model 3.
Check out the articles. The supposed $3B (for all manufacturers, not just Tesla) in the latter article didn't pass, and of the former $4,9B, half of it applies to all EV or solar manufacturers (mainly solar), and the other half is your standard "incentives for you to build your factory in our state" game that all major companies play ($1,3B incentives for the battery gigafactory, $1B for the solar gigafactory). For comparison, for Amazon's new headquarters, Atlanta offered over $1B, Chicago offered $2B, Newark offered a freaking $7B incentive, etc. But hey, let's pretend that Tesla is the only company that plays this came because, ooooh, evil Tesla!
Let's parse.
So you start off by pretending that SpaceX and Tesla are the same company. Clever move! What is this "government support"?
Wow, OMG, a state government gave financial incentives for a large company to build a factory in their state. This has never happened before in the history of business! Except bloody always, but apart from that, OMG!
Stop the presses again!
That's nearly half of the $4,9B in the article, and it's just your standard "incentives to get a large company to move to your state" game that all large companies play.
All solar installers received this; it is nothing SolarCity specific. You could start a solar installation company yourself today and receive tax credits.
Same story. The other automakers wouldn't have sold credits had they actually made the ZEVs that the legislation was intended to make them produce. And any automaker could get the credits.
Meanwhile, everyone shoulders the huge financial costs of air pollution from fossil fuel power (the healthcare costs alone from the worst coal plants can be up to 45 cents per kWh). But I know you want to slap down renewables with everything and give fossil fuels a pass for everything, so let's keep going!
Oh, so now we're taking in subsidies to consumers and pretending that they're subsidies to SolarCity? Clever girl! But okay!
But wait, that article was just for $4,9B (and that includes SpaceX). Where did your other $3B come from? Oh right, this:
So we can now play the game where we pretend that Tesla gets all of that! But of course, we know that there are other other EV manufacturers; again, any company cam make EVs and get incentives. But let's go with it. How much money does Tesla
Pick a brand. Now google phrases like "problems with my X" or "problems with my new X", where X is the brand. You'll find tons and tons of pages of people complaining about it. And of course you will, because you're deliberately imparting selection bias to your search.
It's amazing the difference I see reading these "Tesla build quality is terrible!" articles / vids people share, versus the reports over on the Model 3 forum of random people documenting their delivery processes as they happen and going over their car with a fine-toothed comb afterwards. From the former, you'd think that they're held together by gaffer tape and carpenter's glue. From the latter, it's nothing even remotely resembling that.
There is a measurement of how satisfied customers are with their cars overall, and that's... wait for it... customer satisfaction. If you don't want a statistical bias, that's your measure. And of course, Consumer Reports tracks it. Guess what? Tesla is almost always at the top of the list. The question you should be asking yourself is not "Why are 10% of Tesla owners unsatisfied", it's "Why are 38% of BMW owners unsatisfied"? "Why are 24% of Audi owners unsatisfied?" "Why are 30% of Lexus owners unsatisfied?" "Why are 40% of Infiniti owners unsatisfied?" "Why are 36% of Cadillac owners unsatisfied?" Etc. And it's worth pointing out that most Tesla customers came from other luxury brands.
Re your "no safe exit from the back" remark:
1) Model 3 unlocks the doors automatically in the event of an accident. P. 33 of the manual. Listed in the crash events alongside the airbags going off, hazard lights going on, interior lights going on, and HV disabled. Note that it takes 12V to trigger the airbags as well, so if your airbags are going off, your rear doors are getting unlocked.
2) Depending on how the rear latch mechanism works (I don't know this), it may well *default* to unlatched upon loss of 12V. Has anyone actually checked what type of electronc latch it has? (or for that matter, checked for an emergency release under trim, like the X)? I'd wager it probably stays latched, but without checking, it's not something you can flatly assert.
3) Even if it did not auto-unlock, even if it did not passive fail to unlocked... how would it be any worse than a coupe? How would it be any worse than child safety locks on most cars (most cars, not Teslas - child safety locks are disabled in the event of an accident in a Tesla)? Where is your doom-and-gloom public safety campaign against coupes and child safety locks?
Funny, because for me finding a panel gap on a Tesla has been somewhat of a unicorn. I keep hearing about this supposed problem of widespread panel gaps, and yet I'm yet to find one in real life - despite trying. I don't doubt that they exist somewhere, but as of yet? I'll keep hunting for them ;)
FYI, Consumer Reports ranks the current Model S as "above average" reliability.
No, it is true. Despite all the hyperventilating last fall, Tesla finished Q4 with their third highest (nearly second highest) cash-on-hand, $3,4B (#2 was $3,5B in Q3, #1 was 4B in Q1). And now they're actually getting meaningful revenue from Model 3s, and that will only increase throughout 2018. The guidance is now to become GAAP-profitable on a more or less permanent basis later this year.
The stock price is a reflection of the fact that - whether you do or not - people believe in the future of Tesla, regardless of short-term hiccups. There's a huge number of people who want to buy low to ride what they see as its huge long-term growth potential (again, whether you do or not). And helping drive that is public enthusiasm for their products. There's a half million people on the waiting list for the Model 3 alone - the waiting list. Many of whom have been waiting for nearly two years. Again, regardless of whether you personally are enthusiastic for them.
I don't know if you've ever hung out with any TSLA investors (I'm not an investor, but I know quite a few). These are people who've profitted hand-over-fist betting on the company while listening to people like you talk about how the company is doomed for the past decade, and laughed their arses off at people shorting the company while shouting doom and gloom about some sort of imminent bankruptcy, and then losing their shirts. They see each quarterly report as win-win. If the stock goes up after the quarterly report, they make a ton of money. If it goes down, they get to buy on the low.
The fact that it doesn't take nearly 1% of the GDP of the world's wealthiest nation to do so?
In the press conference today he said he's hoping that the cameras on the drone ship turn out to be intact, he expects there to be some good explosion footage on them ;) I love how it always gets posted.
One interesting thing from the press conference: of all of the parts of the rocket, he's most pleased to get the titanium grid fins on the boosters back. The central core didn't have the new grid fins, but the boosters did - and they're very expensive, and currently a production bottleneck for them.
Confirmed at the news conference. Not enough fuel left on the central core; only one of the three engines managed to relight, and the stage hit the water at 300mph. However, SpaceX not only didn't plan not to use the central core again, but doesn't plan to use the side boosters either; they're not Block 5, and SpaceX only plans to re-launch Block 5 from now on. That said, the side boosters appear to be in good shape.
The main concern right now is on the upper stage. They've never had a stage dwell so long in such a high radiation flux. It should re-light, but they won't know until they try.
You can actually see the plume from the other rocket during the landing burn if you watch closely.