Exactly. Which is why there is no such thing as a tool rental store for example - everyone has a 30" concrete cutoff saw in their storage space for that one time in their life they need it.
The US is 85% urban, and the vast majority of driving is within the urban/suburban/exurban zone. There are also ~225,000 gas stations in the US and somewhere between 10 billion and 100 billion electric outlets.
- - - - - Not saying there isn't demand - there very well could be. But we'll never know exactly how much real demand there is because the law manipulates market forces to make the tail wag the dog (forces automakers to lower the price until a certain level of demand is attained). - - - -
Thoughtful and informative post. There are two factors that might be added to the list:
* Having driven an electric car (Volt) for six months now IMHO electrics are superior to ICE for 80% of USian use cases (and to me more enjoyable, but that's a matter of preference) * The US alone spends about a a half-trillion dollars of taxpayer money per year subsidizing the oil industry with everything from drilling credits to Superfund cleanups to military garrisoning of the major oil producing regions of the world, so the market for ICE vehicles is not exactly undistorted.
Tesla's cars are real and do work. Some idiosyncratic design choices but that's between the seller and the potential customer.
What it is not clear that Tesla has is a successful business model sustainable for more than... about the amount of time it has been in business. Historically it has always been possible to launch a new luxury brand, but having satisfied the demand from their intial customers it has also been very easy for the new luxury brand to go out of business and most have. GM, Nissan, and some other established makers are now selling electric vehicles that might eventually reach price points affordable by the masses, but Tesla does not seem able to do that.
No worries really: corporations will self-regulate and not only obey all published laws but go above and beyond the letter of the law to improvements based on the spirit thereof - it is in their best interest to do so after all.
Workloads ebb and flow in almost every organization - if all workers are gigged (so to speak) then all the knowledge and experience walks out the door at the first ebb. Paying regular salary and benefits smooths out the ups and downs of labor requirements.
Your point is cogent, but universities overall are down to about 20% tenure track vs 80% adjunct (gig worker) faculty, and NYU in particular has whole categories of non-permanent faculty positions that even the adjunct-heavy schools don't use.
"Vulnerable" to being "coerced" into not breaking the law - that's a good one. Perhaps Facebook has been hiring spinmeisters from Uber to place this kind of propaganda for them.
Can't agree with that. First layoff is designed by existing management to "clean house", "take us to the next level", etc. First layoff does not achieve those goals and usually takes the organization in the opposite direction, so existing management panics and does a second round of layoffs (actually touching a few of their friends). This makes things really worse, so finally the board of directors fires existing management and brings in new management, but by that time the situation is so bad that the new management has to cut down whole sections of the forest to have any hope of saving the rest (although they may just enjoy firing people and closing divisions too).
- - - - - - A senior Uber source has confirmed the existence of Surfcam, saying it was developed by a staff member in the Sydney head office who modified off-the-shelf data scraping software. "They said the Sydney employee did it under his own authority, and that once Uber discovered this, they requested he stop," the report says. - - - - -
Odd coincidence how things like this just seem to keep happening to Uber. Darn shame that there are so many rogues in their organization; you'd think the world's largest monitoring and tracking system could identify and root out that sort of stuff.
There are approximately 225,000 gas stations in the US. I tried to estimate the number of 120V outlets available in the US; I usually try to bracket Fermi estimates but have trouble with this one because my first cut of 11 billion is clearly too low but I'm not certain that 110 billion is too high. Probably fewer 240V outlets generally available; say 500 million. So for me it is the scarcity of gas stations that makes me uncomfortable.
You didn't, exactly, but you did imply that the "we drive from San Diego to Maine to see Grandma every year" use case is governing for US vehicle driving patterns. 80% or more of USians live in urban/exurban areas and drive less than 50 miles/day. Most households now have more than one vehicle, and one of those is going to be an older ICE vehicle that can be used for longer trips. And on questioning it turns out the last time they actually drove to Maine was 7 years ago; the kids are teens now and would rather fly. So replacing one of family vehicles with an electric would be perfectly feasible. But the "3000 mile trip" scenario is thrown into every discussion of electric vehicles as if it trumps all other usage patterns.
I do take longer trips 5-6 times a year so I bought a Volt. It is working exactly as expected and I'm currently at 85% electric miles.
- - - - - The single biggest problem for hybrids is all the maintenance that's still required due to the ICE, plus complexity of adding the battery/EV side. - - - - -
All what maintenance? Current plug-in hybrids have longer maintenance intervals than current ICE cars, which themselves require virtually zero maintenance as we thought of it for 60s/70s/80s era cars. The dealership service department will tell you otherwise but if you read the recommended maintenance intervals in the manual for a post-2010 vehicle you will see that there is very little routine maintenance up to 24,000 miles and not much after that - even oil changes are now handled by the usage monitor not on-interval. And the plug-in hybrids put a very light load on the ICE engine in typical usage patterns.
Most post-2010 vehicles now state to change the oil when the oil use monitor says to do so, which could be a long time for all-highway driving in moderate weather. Longer than 6 months in any case. Those of us who grew up with dinosaur-era vehicles that were lucky to make it to 3000 miles without leaking or burning 3 quarts of oil have a hard time accepting this, but modern engine designers don't think that short oil change intervals are needed.
As for the gas, the Chevy Volt at least keeps track of when you buy gasoline and if it calculates the gas is getting stale (at a minimum every 360 days) it will turn on the ICE engine and use up the tank.
Depends on your use case. More than 80% of USians live in urban or exurban areas and their driving pattern will follow a 95/5 pattern of short commutes vs long trips. Based on that pattern a plug-in hybrid will need a service visit once ever 18 months or so, although the owner may want to take it in a little more often to have it checked for minor software updates (the manufacturers only notify the owner for major updates, so there could be minors queued up).
These doom--and-gloom scenarios are based on taking the worst characteristics of ICE engines from the 1970s and the worst characteristics of electric cars from 1910 and combining them into one great imaginary Vehicle of Horrors that doesn't actually exist. Owners of actual plug-in hybrids such as the Volt report that they work exactly as described, when used in typical metropolitan driving are a great improvement, and don't have any more maintenance problems or lemons than any other model line.
- - - - - -That's more than half of the USA. - - - - - -
In terms of population density, no, and that's pure cartography. In terms of estimation I'd personally estimate that 85% of the population of the US will never drive on anything rougher than a paved county road. Let's see, 0.85 * 400 million =...
- - - - - nd the Volt simply died due to the colder weather fucking over their expected driving range by about 80 miles ("It was charged this morning!" Yea, welcome to battery physics, n00b!) - - - - -
TheVolt has 300-400 miles gasoline range, and both the electric and gas gauges work exactly as on a pure ICE vehicle, along with a Total Range Remaining display and the same set of "low fuel" DIC warnings as any car built since 1980, so I'm not sure why the Volt would be considered at fault in this case.
The Volt does have very low ground clearance, as do many cars (ICE, hybrid, and electric) designed for maximum fuel economy, and I personally would not drive it on anything rougher than a groomed gravel road, but that's not unusual. Buy a Subaru if you want a car (not a Jeep) that can take a bumpy Forest Service road.
- - - - - - They actually could do a coast to coast demo now and have had that capability for about a year. Their current difficulties are the same that Waymo is having - you have to trust that other drivers will actually obey red lights and stop signs - thus ignoring that the other drivers current velocity will cause a crash if they don't slow down or stop when you make a left turn. Similarly aggressive behavior required for merging, etc. that will cause an accident if the other driver ignores you trying to merge, etc. - - - - -
Other than the minor point that a coast-to-coast drive on I-80 is pretty easy and autonomous vehicles capable of doing that have existed for a long time (longer than I-80, which wasn't a complete interstate until about 1985), what you are saying here is that Telsa's autonomous system can do everything except the parts that make driving hard. Human drivers assess their fellow drivers, the trustworthiness of signals, the need to break laws to keep traffic flow every minute if not every second and take action based on that analysis. If everything must be perfect for AI-based autonomous vehicles to work outside of benign environments such as Phoenix boulevards and I-80 then they will never work.
- - - - - Well a trip coast-to-coast is 2500-3000 miles and for last year Waymo reported one disengagement per 11017 [9to5google.com] miles driven. - - - - -
A trip coast-to-coast on I-80 is probably the 2nd easiest autonomous vehicle test imaginable, right behind driving the wide dry boulevards of Phoenix. I worked for a company that could have built a vehicle capable of doing that in 1980 (although it would have been towing a trailer full of electronics and cooling equipment). Call me when an autonomous vehicle can navigate the streets of a major city 3 days after a large snowfall.
If the designers of "Aliens" could conceive of and depict realistic automated weapons in 1986, does anyone think the major players (and some of the medium sizes players) do not have automated lethal weapons now that the technology to build them is readily available?
The person who made the decision to disable the base vehicle's collision detection/automatic braking system was supposed to be paying attention to his job. Whether it would be reasonable to expect a person to sit and do nothing while a colossally stupid design decision was made that deliberately put the non-Uber-stockholder public at risk is another question that ought to be addressed.
The thing is, Tesla has really accomplished a lot in advancing the design and adoption of electric vehicles, and in forcing the historic auto manufacturers to improve their offerings and speed up their timelines The unrealism of Musk and his fanatic supporters and the string of phony promises might well destroy all that has been done to date.
= = = AC: Rei, are you telling us that by the end of calendar year 2019, Tesla will have level 4 cars for sale? And the ONLY thing keeping those cars from being full level 5 is legislation and government restrictions, but the cars are otherwise fully level 5 capable? Please respond yes or no. Anything else is bullshit. They will or will not be capable of full level 5 autonomy by 12/31/2019? = = =
I believe you meant 2019, not 2029. And your direct question is quite on point.
Since the beginning of Tesla experienced transportation people have observed that it has always been possible to carefully build premium automobiles (and buggies, and chariots, and oxcarts) and sell them at low volume for a premium price at a decent profit to the founders. The difficulty comes when the seller fills its premium market and tries to expand to volume. Daimler-Benz and Cadillac managed to do that successfully; 10,000 competitors from 1895 forward did not. And Tesla? Still to be seen.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. Which is why there is no such thing as a tool rental store for example - everyone has a 30" concrete cutoff saw in their storage space for that one time in their life they need it.
The US is 85% urban, and the vast majority of driving is within the urban/suburban/exurban zone. There are also ~225,000 gas stations in the US and somewhere between 10 billion and 100 billion electric outlets.
Thoughtful and informative post. There are two factors that might be added to the list:
* Having driven an electric car (Volt) for six months now IMHO electrics are superior to ICE for 80% of USian use cases (and to me more enjoyable, but that's a matter of preference)
* The US alone spends about a a half-trillion dollars of taxpayer money per year subsidizing the oil industry with everything from drilling credits to Superfund cleanups to military garrisoning of the major oil producing regions of the world, so the market for ICE vehicles is not exactly undistorted.
Tesla's cars are real and do work. Some idiosyncratic design choices but that's between the seller and the potential customer.
What it is not clear that Tesla has is a successful business model sustainable for more than... about the amount of time it has been in business. Historically it has always been possible to launch a new luxury brand, but having satisfied the demand from their intial customers it has also been very easy for the new luxury brand to go out of business and most have. GM, Nissan, and some other established makers are now selling electric vehicles that might eventually reach price points affordable by the masses, but Tesla does not seem able to do that.
No worries really: corporations will self-regulate and not only obey all published laws but go above and beyond the letter of the law to improvements based on the spirit thereof - it is in their best interest to do so after all.
Workloads ebb and flow in almost every organization - if all workers are gigged (so to speak) then all the knowledge and experience walks out the door at the first ebb. Paying regular salary and benefits smooths out the ups and downs of labor requirements.
Your point is cogent, but universities overall are down to about 20% tenure track vs 80% adjunct (gig worker) faculty, and NYU in particular has whole categories of non-permanent faculty positions that even the adjunct-heavy schools don't use.
"Vulnerable" to being "coerced" into not breaking the law - that's a good one. Perhaps Facebook has been hiring spinmeisters from Uber to place this kind of propaganda for them.
Can't agree with that. First layoff is designed by existing management to "clean house", "take us to the next level", etc. First layoff does not achieve those goals and usually takes the organization in the opposite direction, so existing management panics and does a second round of layoffs (actually touching a few of their friends). This makes things really worse, so finally the board of directors fires existing management and brings in new management, but by that time the situation is so bad that the new management has to cut down whole sections of the forest to have any hope of saving the rest (although they may just enjoy firing people and closing divisions too).
Odd coincidence how things like this just seem to keep happening to Uber. Darn shame that there are so many rogues in their organization; you'd think the world's largest monitoring and tracking system could identify and root out that sort of stuff.
There are approximately 225,000 gas stations in the US. I tried to estimate the number of 120V outlets available in the US; I usually try to bracket Fermi estimates but have trouble with this one because my first cut of 11 billion is clearly too low but I'm not certain that 110 billion is too high. Probably fewer 240V outlets generally available; say 500 million. So for me it is the scarcity of gas stations that makes me uncomfortable.
You didn't, exactly, but you did imply that the "we drive from San Diego to Maine to see Grandma every year" use case is governing for US vehicle driving patterns. 80% or more of USians live in urban/exurban areas and drive less than 50 miles/day. Most households now have more than one vehicle, and one of those is going to be an older ICE vehicle that can be used for longer trips. And on questioning it turns out the last time they actually drove to Maine was 7 years ago; the kids are teens now and would rather fly. So replacing one of family vehicles with an electric would be perfectly feasible. But the "3000 mile trip" scenario is thrown into every discussion of electric vehicles as if it trumps all other usage patterns.
I do take longer trips 5-6 times a year so I bought a Volt. It is working exactly as expected and I'm currently at 85% electric miles.
All what maintenance? Current plug-in hybrids have longer maintenance intervals than current ICE cars, which themselves require virtually zero maintenance as we thought of it for 60s/70s/80s era cars. The dealership service department will tell you otherwise but if you read the recommended maintenance intervals in the manual for a post-2010 vehicle you will see that there is very little routine maintenance up to 24,000 miles and not much after that - even oil changes are now handled by the usage monitor not on-interval. And the plug-in hybrids put a very light load on the ICE engine in typical usage patterns.
Most post-2010 vehicles now state to change the oil when the oil use monitor says to do so, which could be a long time for all-highway driving in moderate weather. Longer than 6 months in any case. Those of us who grew up with dinosaur-era vehicles that were lucky to make it to 3000 miles without leaking or burning 3 quarts of oil have a hard time accepting this, but modern engine designers don't think that short oil change intervals are needed.
As for the gas, the Chevy Volt at least keeps track of when you buy gasoline and if it calculates the gas is getting stale (at a minimum every 360 days) it will turn on the ICE engine and use up the tank.
Depends on your use case. More than 80% of USians live in urban or exurban areas and their driving pattern will follow a 95/5 pattern of short commutes vs long trips. Based on that pattern a plug-in hybrid will need a service visit once ever 18 months or so, although the owner may want to take it in a little more often to have it checked for minor software updates (the manufacturers only notify the owner for major updates, so there could be minors queued up).
These doom--and-gloom scenarios are based on taking the worst characteristics of ICE engines from the 1970s and the worst characteristics of electric cars from 1910 and combining them into one great imaginary Vehicle of Horrors that doesn't actually exist. Owners of actual plug-in hybrids such as the Volt report that they work exactly as described, when used in typical metropolitan driving are a great improvement, and don't have any more maintenance problems or lemons than any other model line.
In terms of population density, no, and that's pure cartography. In terms of estimation I'd personally estimate that 85% of the population of the US will never drive on anything rougher than a paved county road. Let's see, 0.85 * 400 million = ...
TheVolt has 300-400 miles gasoline range, and both the electric and gas gauges work exactly as on a pure ICE vehicle, along with a Total Range Remaining display and the same set of "low fuel" DIC warnings as any car built since 1980, so I'm not sure why the Volt would be considered at fault in this case.
The Volt does have very low ground clearance, as do many cars (ICE, hybrid, and electric) designed for maximum fuel economy, and I personally would not drive it on anything rougher than a groomed gravel road, but that's not unusual. Buy a Subaru if you want a car (not a Jeep) that can take a bumpy Forest Service road.
Other than the minor point that a coast-to-coast drive on I-80 is pretty easy and autonomous vehicles capable of doing that have existed for a long time (longer than I-80, which wasn't a complete interstate until about 1985), what you are saying here is that Telsa's autonomous system can do everything except the parts that make driving hard. Human drivers assess their fellow drivers, the trustworthiness of signals, the need to break laws to keep traffic flow every minute if not every second and take action based on that analysis. If everything must be perfect for AI-based autonomous vehicles to work outside of benign environments such as Phoenix boulevards and I-80 then they will never work.
A trip coast-to-coast on I-80 is probably the 2nd easiest autonomous vehicle test imaginable, right behind driving the wide dry boulevards of Phoenix. I worked for a company that could have built a vehicle capable of doing that in 1980 (although it would have been towing a trailer full of electronics and cooling equipment). Call me when an autonomous vehicle can navigate the streets of a major city 3 days after a large snowfall.
If the designers of "Aliens" could conceive of and depict realistic automated weapons in 1986, does anyone think the major players (and some of the medium sizes players) do not have automated lethal weapons now that the technology to build them is readily available?
The person who made the decision to disable the base vehicle's collision detection/automatic braking system was supposed to be paying attention to his job. Whether it would be reasonable to expect a person to sit and do nothing while a colossally stupid design decision was made that deliberately put the non-Uber-stockholder public at risk is another question that ought to be addressed.
Musk doesn't mind taking risks, [with other people's lives]
FTFY
The thing is, Tesla has really accomplished a lot in advancing the design and adoption of electric vehicles, and in forcing the historic auto manufacturers to improve their offerings and speed up their timelines The unrealism of Musk and his fanatic supporters and the string of phony promises might well destroy all that has been done to date.
I believe you meant 2019, not 2029. And your direct question is quite on point.
Since the beginning of Tesla experienced transportation people have observed that it has always been possible to carefully build premium automobiles (and buggies, and chariots, and oxcarts) and sell them at low volume for a premium price at a decent profit to the founders. The difficulty comes when the seller fills its premium market and tries to expand to volume. Daimler-Benz and Cadillac managed to do that successfully; 10,000 competitors from 1895 forward did not. And Tesla? Still to be seen.