The traditional car making is a very stable business. All major efficiency breakthroughs have been achieved already. All the manufacturing improvements are mostly done. Prices are stable. Metrics are stable. Power/weight ratio of ICE, MPG vs curb weight,... all are stable and the improvemens are coming at the rate of a percent of two per year. They are used to 4 years cycles of design. One year of tooling. 5 years from drawing board to production. No unexpected breakthroughs expected in the five years.
Cell phones, laptops, Tesla are operating where you cant design for today's metrics. You need to predict the processor speed 18 months from now and design the phone. You need to anticipate the bandwidth increase expected in 12 months.
An EV's most critical metrics are energy density Kg/kWh of the battery and price $/kWh of the battery. Elon, in his famour 2006 "secret" master plan calculated a 7 year half life for these two critical metrics. The energy density will double, and the price wil halve every seven years. Sort of like Moore's law of batteries. Tesla is designing, building and pricing the cars based on that model. In 2012 for the Tesla Roadster, the battery cost was 270 $/kWh. Model 3, battery is 130 $/kWh (Tesla's claim) 140$/kWh Monroe's tear down. It is following the expected path. Tesla says it is going to hit 100 $/kWh sometime in 2019. That is the figure when the EV and ICEV will cost the same off the dealer's lot. Battery + motor cost = engine+transmission+emission control+fuel tank cost.
The legacy car makers are not used to engine manufacturing cost going down by 50% in 7 years. Nor the weight of the power train falling by 50% between drawing board and production.
The big automakers were waiting for Tesla to die so that can continue business as usual. They terribly underestimated the potential of the electric car.
He is making a profit. The first German tear down put the cost of Model 3 to be 28K in parts and labor at 10K/week production rate. That shocked the industry.
The Monroe teardown is pricing it at 33,500$ for the 49K car. Monroe is very critical, it says any other car company making the body using traditional methods would make it 2000$ cheaper. He says, despite squandering 2000$ on inefficient body design, Tesla is so far ahead on the electronics part, and the battery part, it is enjoying a positive gross margin of nearly 30%. He says the 35K version also will be profitable.
Tesla is also paying down enormous R&D cost, factory depreciation and loan payments. So the net margin is negative and the company is making loss because of that. But people casually say, "Tesla is losing money on every sale" indicating a negative gross margin. That is not true. All the cars, S, X and the 3 have positive gross margins.
I got mine for 50K. It is not a toy for the rich. It is a nice car for the moderately affluent. The median new car price is 35K. 50K is probably 80th percentile. 20% of all new car buyers can afford a Tesla model 3. He may not make too many 35 K model 3s. He will deliver enough for the original reservation holders. But the car being so hot, as long as people are willing to pay a premium he will, and he should sell the higher end versions.
It is an American car company giving run for their money to the Germans. Audi and BMW and MB are beaten in their performance car game.
He failed to deliver on his promises. True. The goal was so over the top, what he did deliver is way above other car companies delivered.
He showed what a no compromise electric car can do, how it will drive, how it would feel and how great it would be. That genie is out of the bottle. No body can put it back in. No ICEV can compete with a EV.
And the party is just starting. The batteries are getting cheaper, energy density is getting higher. While ICE is fully optimized and there is nothing more you could squeeze out of an internal combustion engine.
In an EV, you can have two or four motors mechanically decoupled and electronically controlled. What such a car can do, no way an ICE can do.
This is a dastardly trick by the short sellter to provoke a reaction from Elon!
Anytime now he is going to tween Tesla Model FU that will go 2000 mph and it will cost 20,000 $ and it will ship in 2020, reservation 2000$ starts tomorrow. "This is the next level of digital, not 1s and 0s, but 2s and 0s, because we are twice as good. 2000 mph, 20,000$ price, 2020 shipping, 2000 for preorder... See ? All 2s and 0s!"
Irony: And now I'm posting crap about people posting crap. DOH.
You seem to be depressed. Using the *I* language, expressing a lack of purpose in your activities, yet you seem to be irresistibly drawn to continuing the very same meaningless activity. Please do consult a psychiatrist.
I seem to be giving useless advice to strangers on slashdot. Heck, I seem to need one too.
Whatever data is embedded in the created media file needs to survive going through a re-encoding process. For music is ridiculously simple to take a high quality analog output and to re-encode it. For digital, there is supposedly some mild protection in HDMI to stop casual pirating boot legging. But one can always buy a legitimate devices or hack a recorder to identify itself as a TV and download the stream for processing. It can be re-encoded with controlled biases and that can thwart any steganography in the video stream or picture files.
It is very hard to stop pirating. Pirating and boot legging is rampant in India. One film director was bemoaning that he got a congratulatory call from Dubai on his new movie on the day of the release. The company had not even begun movie distribution talks with any Dubai distributor at that time. But Bollywood thrives, they know they are going to get the money in the first week and that is all. Then the content is essentially public domain. People take clips and interpolate with some politician's speech and create funny sequences. They play the sound track and record themselves lip synching (called dub-mash) and redistribute. No one pays any royalty or digital rights. Even if a dub-mash goes viral it does not top the charts because it gets immediately boot legged into hundred you tube videos and the viewer count gets fragmented.
Through it all it some how thrives and makes some money for the creators.
New Tesla roadster is coming up with a three motor configuration, two motors for each rear wheel, a single motor for the front axle, and vectored torque. It is going to blow the minds of people what can be done with electric motors in driving dynamics.
There is an enthusiast, Tesla fan who is putting 1000 hp motors in each wheel, built into the hub. ICE is dead.
Tesla model 3, with creep mode off, will automatically apply parking brakes when the car comes to rest. You don't need heavy hydraulics and disk brakes. Simple chain and hold the drive shaft tight, that is enough.
My BMW X3 (ICEV) also has automatic parking brakes. It quite easy to implement.
Twenty dollars a year. Read and learn the basics. Stop after about 10 years, they keep repeating the same thing. Paying more does not get you any better advice.
Dont watch any financial news channels, There is not enough info to fill 24x7. They fill it with fluff, speculation and misinformation. Makes you trigger happy, second guess yourself and trade. You lose time and money.
Most retirement planning advice is bullshit. They assume you will spend in retirement as much as you are spending when you were earning and have no flexibility in spending. Estimate you expenses into a four categories: Essential (food, shelter, clothing, medicine) Discretionary (travel, entertainment, charity), Indulgence, Principle Protection (money to be reinvested on good years). First goal, save enough for essential without touching the principle, then discretionary. Then for Principle protection. Then for indulgence. Spend less on lean years. Spend more on good years. Reinvest in good years to hedge against inflation.
We are still not 100% reliant on cell phones. Most businesses and homes still use land lines. A very significant chunk of people are cutting the cord. But they are not even the majority yet.
It does not need rack and pinion steering. Differential rotation can steer the car at any speed and extremely tight turn radius. Even zero turn radius!
It does not need disk brakes. The motors can brake the car all the way to stand still, and can even hold it there, even on inclines with an active battery. It would need just a parking brake to hold it when the main computer is shut down.
No steering, no brakes. So no hydraulics! No engine oil. No transmission fluid. No radiator fluid. What you have is a skate board of a battery as the floor, four wheels and motors and a computer. Thats it. Motors have one rotor and one stator, and no grinding sliding friction component, no piston rings to wear out. The only thing that will wear out are the bearings. Most expensive thing is the battery and it can be designed to be replaced. If the coach work is bolted on, this thing can last a century! Replace pieces at a time, and in 100 years your great grand child can ponder philosophically is it still the same car great grandpa bought.
Tesla and Elon might not be the ones who take us to that future. But... Moses never reached the promised land either.
Elon was naive. His mistake was tweeting the deal before it was inked and written up solid.
Right now I don't care about Elon.
Some low level concern about Tesla. But on the long run, Elon will for ever be remembered for unleashing the genie out of the bottle. He may or may not benefit from the windfall that is going to generate. Heck, even Tesla might not get a significant chunk of that gold strike. But, the fact remains, the genie is out and the ICEV is a dead thing walking. Chicken that had its head chopped off, still running around without realizing it.
No Elon did not invent the battery, nor the electric car, nor manufacturing, not any one serious component of Tesla. He defied the industry and proved one thing.
A no compromise electric car can be built. That is what he showed. Can out accelerate 200K gasoline cars. Can handle better than any 100K car. Can go as far as you want, 300 miles in one charge, 30 minutes to recharge another 150 miles. Can be done. Proved. On the road. This is just the start. You ain't seen nothin' yet.
A ICEV four wheel drive is a complex contraption with a transfer case and locking differentials and limited slip clutches. A real symphony of mechanical parts. As an Aero engineer I marvel that they could do this. But in an EV, there can be two motors, one per axle mechanically disconnected. The regenerative braking can be applied with milliseconds apart between front and rear axles. Torque can be applied with a time lag. No mechanical car even come close.
Then it gets better, they can have four motors, one per wheel, mechanically disconnected. The differential rotational speed can turn the car at high speeds. In fact a four motor electric car does not need a rack and pinion steering, no hydraulics. Just plain differential rotational speed can do it. Have you seen what four rotors can do to a drone? Flying like an insect in 3D space? Well, a four motor electric car can do it on the race track, turn radius is limited only by the coefficient of friction between the tires and the track. Instantaneous response on the wheel to the throttle and steering inputs. No ICEV can even come close.
Will Tesla make it? I don't know. Will Elon be involved in such a car? I don't know.
But that car is coming. When that car is running, people will credit Elon for breaking through the log jam created by the perfect storm of vested interests, unimaginative engineers, engineers who could do it but lacked the ability to articulate that vision, bean counters, short term fundings from the capital markets, and showing what an electric can do.
May be he is crazy, may be he is unfit to be a CEO with twitter happy fingers, but that level of crazyness is the only thing that could have broken the log jam.
Not because they invest in Silicon Valley. But because they are Saudi.
They way jerked the rag under Elon Musk shows they are not to be trusted. Tell him, "I am the final authority, I approve, let us do the deal at 419$", Elon, "what about 420?". "OK deal". The idiot tweeting prematurely was probably not part of the plan, just an additional unexpected bonus.
Sports channels are obsessed with statistics. They constantly project before every field goal attempt, every extra point kick, the stats about the kicker. 28th attempt this season, 62% success rate, life time 433 attempts, 73% success, league average 75%....
Being exposed to so much of this statistics, do sports fans use these in their real life? When they buy a car and they read a review, "10% chance of major repair in five years" do they think as often as "that kicker misses extra point"?
If you cripple your own products to avoid cannibalizing your existing products, your competition would do it for you.
If it is possible to synthesize a smallpox vaccine, someone would do it. For every one publishing there are perhaps a few hundred who have had the idea occur to them. If you stigmatize it and drive it underground, when some one unleashes it, we would not even know what hit us.
To borrow a phrase from our second amendment friends, if you outlaw synthesized smallpox only outlaws will have synthesized small pox.
It is true Tesla Model 3 sales, year over year, have gone up by 18000% in Q3 of 2018.
That is because last year this quarter they sold some 300 cars, and this quarter they sold 53000. Percentage growth year over year could be very misleading when you start from very small base.
Yeah, sure chromebook might become the personal device of choice for many outselling windows by numbers.
But most people have moved on to tiny screens with very high resolutions already. A docking station clamshell [*] might outsell both.
It really irks me almost all the sites have gone to optimizing their site for the 5 inch screen. I visit banking sites and they show the same minimal, flat, inscrutable icons (plus inside a circle, pencil, matrix, ham sandwich, kebab) without any indication or explanation on 24 inch screens.
[*] I define docking station clamshell as a chromebook formfactor clamshell, with keyboard, trackpad and a high resolution screen. It will have niche or a port where one can snap in or slide in the regular mobile phone. It will connect to the USB port, charge the phone. Phone takes care of all connectivity and computation. The clamshell is simply a convenient additional display keyboard mouse extension. One can think of docking pads too. You carry the phone everywhere, depending on the situation you connect to the larger screen.
When the Criminal Executive Officer is a sociopath,...
And it is argued that it is the CEO's fiduciary responsibility to be a sociopath,...
Every request for the corporations is answered with, "it is not a charity, they have to make money, that is their only job, make it a law, if it is not illegal they will do it, and they should do it"...
Every human right in the constitution is usurped by corporations, claiming, "corporations are people my friend", including religious liberties and freedom of speech, while simulataneously accepting no responsibility...
it would be insane and suicidal for the employees not to play by the same rules.
If some employer is dumb enough not to realize the job is 100% automatable, why should the employee tell the manager otherwise?
It is my job, as the manager of my team, to identify and automate every job that can be automated. If the manager is dumb it is his/her fault. If the company hires dumb managers, the company deserves to lose money. Unless the company comes up with a formula and says, "this job costs the company 120K a year indefinitely. At our capital cost, it is worth 4 million (or 6 million or whatever) to eliminate it. You give me a script to do that, I pay you 50 to 80% of the capital saved" the employee should keep quiet.
The Criminal Executive Officer shows vague calculations of capital saved and takes 80% of the alleged savings as his bonus. Why shouldn't the employee play catch me if you can?
It has 15 inch and 17 inch screens and a user manual remotely updated and is always up to date.
In a Tesla you can turn its A/C on, while it is in the garage and peacefully read the manual without any fear of carbon monoxide poisoning. Actually the sound system and acoustics are very good, there is no engine noise, so it is not a bad place to listen to music or to banish your kids to so that their "music" does not disturb you....
Slashdot Mirror
Cell phones, laptops, Tesla are operating where you cant design for today's metrics. You need to predict the processor speed 18 months from now and design the phone. You need to anticipate the bandwidth increase expected in 12 months.
An EV's most critical metrics are energy density Kg/kWh of the battery and price $/kWh of the battery. Elon, in his famour 2006 "secret" master plan calculated a 7 year half life for these two critical metrics. The energy density will double, and the price wil halve every seven years. Sort of like Moore's law of batteries. Tesla is designing, building and pricing the cars based on that model. In 2012 for the Tesla Roadster, the battery cost was 270 $/kWh. Model 3, battery is 130 $/kWh (Tesla's claim) 140$/kWh Monroe's tear down. It is following the expected path. Tesla says it is going to hit 100 $/kWh sometime in 2019. That is the figure when the EV and ICEV will cost the same off the dealer's lot. Battery + motor cost = engine+transmission+emission control+fuel tank cost.
The legacy car makers are not used to engine manufacturing cost going down by 50% in 7 years. Nor the weight of the power train falling by 50% between drawing board and production.
The big automakers were waiting for Tesla to die so that can continue business as usual. They terribly underestimated the potential of the electric car.
The Monroe teardown is pricing it at 33,500$ for the 49K car. Monroe is very critical, it says any other car company making the body using traditional methods would make it 2000$ cheaper. He says, despite squandering 2000$ on inefficient body design, Tesla is so far ahead on the electronics part, and the battery part, it is enjoying a positive gross margin of nearly 30%. He says the 35K version also will be profitable.
Tesla is also paying down enormous R&D cost, factory depreciation and loan payments. So the net margin is negative and the company is making loss because of that. But people casually say, "Tesla is losing money on every sale" indicating a negative gross margin. That is not true. All the cars, S, X and the 3 have positive gross margins.
I got mine for 50K. It is not a toy for the rich. It is a nice car for the moderately affluent. The median new car price is 35K. 50K is probably 80th percentile. 20% of all new car buyers can afford a Tesla model 3. He may not make too many 35 K model 3s. He will deliver enough for the original reservation holders. But the car being so hot, as long as people are willing to pay a premium he will, and he should sell the higher end versions.
He failed to deliver on his promises. True. The goal was so over the top, what he did deliver is way above other car companies delivered.
He showed what a no compromise electric car can do, how it will drive, how it would feel and how great it would be. That genie is out of the bottle. No body can put it back in. No ICEV can compete with a EV.
And the party is just starting. The batteries are getting cheaper, energy density is getting higher. While ICE is fully optimized and there is nothing more you could squeeze out of an internal combustion engine.
In an EV, you can have two or four motors mechanically decoupled and electronically controlled. What such a car can do, no way an ICE can do.
Anytime now he is going to tween Tesla Model FU that will go 2000 mph and it will cost 20,000 $ and it will ship in 2020, reservation 2000$ starts tomorrow. "This is the next level of digital, not 1s and 0s, but 2s and 0s, because we are twice as good. 2000 mph, 20,000$ price, 2020 shipping, 2000 for preorder... See ? All 2s and 0s!"
The results of the computation depends on the observer
And it is a QA nightmare, none of the computations are repeatable.
All the memory states of a quantum computers can be 1 or 0 till you read it your would not know. Once you read it the memory is destroyed.
Irony: And now I'm posting crap about people posting crap. DOH.
You seem to be depressed. Using the *I* language, expressing a lack of purpose in your activities, yet you seem to be irresistibly drawn to continuing the very same meaningless activity. Please do consult a psychiatrist.
I seem to be giving useless advice to strangers on slashdot. Heck, I seem to need one too.
They dont have to deal with some captain who is armed.
It is very hard to stop pirating. Pirating and boot legging is rampant in India. One film director was bemoaning that he got a congratulatory call from Dubai on his new movie on the day of the release. The company had not even begun movie distribution talks with any Dubai distributor at that time. But Bollywood thrives, they know they are going to get the money in the first week and that is all. Then the content is essentially public domain. People take clips and interpolate with some politician's speech and create funny sequences. They play the sound track and record themselves lip synching (called dub-mash) and redistribute. No one pays any royalty or digital rights. Even if a dub-mash goes viral it does not top the charts because it gets immediately boot legged into hundred you tube videos and the viewer count gets fragmented.
Through it all it some how thrives and makes some money for the creators.
There is an enthusiast, Tesla fan who is putting 1000 hp motors in each wheel, built into the hub. ICE is dead.
My BMW X3 (ICEV) also has automatic parking brakes. It quite easy to implement.
Dont watch any financial news channels, There is not enough info to fill 24x7. They fill it with fluff, speculation and misinformation. Makes you trigger happy, second guess yourself and trade. You lose time and money.
Most retirement planning advice is bullshit. They assume you will spend in retirement as much as you are spending when you were earning and have no flexibility in spending. Estimate you expenses into a four categories: Essential (food, shelter, clothing, medicine) Discretionary (travel, entertainment, charity), Indulgence, Principle Protection (money to be reinvested on good years). First goal, save enough for essential without touching the principle, then discretionary. Then for Principle protection. Then for indulgence. Spend less on lean years. Spend more on good years. Reinvest in good years to hedge against inflation.
We are still not 100% reliant on cell phones. Most businesses and homes still use land lines. A very significant chunk of people are cutting the cord. But they are not even the majority yet.
It does not need rack and pinion steering. Differential rotation can steer the car at any speed and extremely tight turn radius. Even zero turn radius!
It does not need disk brakes. The motors can brake the car all the way to stand still, and can even hold it there, even on inclines with an active battery. It would need just a parking brake to hold it when the main computer is shut down.
No steering, no brakes. So no hydraulics! No engine oil. No transmission fluid. No radiator fluid. What you have is a skate board of a battery as the floor, four wheels and motors and a computer. Thats it. Motors have one rotor and one stator, and no grinding sliding friction component, no piston rings to wear out. The only thing that will wear out are the bearings. Most expensive thing is the battery and it can be designed to be replaced. If the coach work is bolted on, this thing can last a century! Replace pieces at a time, and in 100 years your great grand child can ponder philosophically is it still the same car great grandpa bought.
Tesla and Elon might not be the ones who take us to that future. But... Moses never reached the promised land either.
Right now I don't care about Elon.
Some low level concern about Tesla. But on the long run, Elon will for ever be remembered for unleashing the genie out of the bottle. He may or may not benefit from the windfall that is going to generate. Heck, even Tesla might not get a significant chunk of that gold strike. But, the fact remains, the genie is out and the ICEV is a dead thing walking. Chicken that had its head chopped off, still running around without realizing it.
No Elon did not invent the battery, nor the electric car, nor manufacturing, not any one serious component of Tesla. He defied the industry and proved one thing. A no compromise electric car can be built. That is what he showed. Can out accelerate 200K gasoline cars. Can handle better than any 100K car. Can go as far as you want, 300 miles in one charge, 30 minutes to recharge another 150 miles. Can be done. Proved. On the road. This is just the start. You ain't seen nothin' yet.
A ICEV four wheel drive is a complex contraption with a transfer case and locking differentials and limited slip clutches. A real symphony of mechanical parts. As an Aero engineer I marvel that they could do this. But in an EV, there can be two motors, one per axle mechanically disconnected. The regenerative braking can be applied with milliseconds apart between front and rear axles. Torque can be applied with a time lag. No mechanical car even come close.
Then it gets better, they can have four motors, one per wheel, mechanically disconnected. The differential rotational speed can turn the car at high speeds. In fact a four motor electric car does not need a rack and pinion steering, no hydraulics. Just plain differential rotational speed can do it. Have you seen what four rotors can do to a drone? Flying like an insect in 3D space? Well, a four motor electric car can do it on the race track, turn radius is limited only by the coefficient of friction between the tires and the track. Instantaneous response on the wheel to the throttle and steering inputs. No ICEV can even come close.
Will Tesla make it? I don't know. Will Elon be involved in such a car? I don't know.
But that car is coming. When that car is running, people will credit Elon for breaking through the log jam created by the perfect storm of vested interests, unimaginative engineers, engineers who could do it but lacked the ability to articulate that vision, bean counters, short term fundings from the capital markets, and showing what an electric can do.
May be he is crazy, may be he is unfit to be a CEO with twitter happy fingers, but that level of crazyness is the only thing that could have broken the log jam.
They way jerked the rag under Elon Musk shows they are not to be trusted. Tell him, "I am the final authority, I approve, let us do the deal at 419$", Elon, "what about 420?". "OK deal". The idiot tweeting prematurely was probably not part of the plan, just an additional unexpected bonus.
Being exposed to so much of this statistics, do sports fans use these in their real life? When they buy a car and they read a review, "10% chance of major repair in five years" do they think as often as "that kicker misses extra point"?
If it is possible to synthesize a smallpox vaccine, someone would do it. For every one publishing there are perhaps a few hundred who have had the idea occur to them. If you stigmatize it and drive it underground, when some one unleashes it, we would not even know what hit us.
To borrow a phrase from our second amendment friends, if you outlaw synthesized smallpox only outlaws will have synthesized small pox.
It took only 25 frames in total. And looks like each frame is a low res pic of about 100 x 100 pixels, as far as I can tell.
That is because last year this quarter they sold some 300 cars, and this quarter they sold 53000. Percentage growth year over year could be very misleading when you start from very small base.
The docking clamshell should let the phone be docked where the trackpad is and allow it to be used as a touch interface.
But most people have moved on to tiny screens with very high resolutions already. A docking station clamshell [*] might outsell both.
It really irks me almost all the sites have gone to optimizing their site for the 5 inch screen. I visit banking sites and they show the same minimal, flat, inscrutable icons (plus inside a circle, pencil, matrix, ham sandwich, kebab) without any indication or explanation on 24 inch screens.
[*] I define docking station clamshell as a chromebook formfactor clamshell, with keyboard, trackpad and a high resolution screen. It will have niche or a port where one can snap in or slide in the regular mobile phone. It will connect to the USB port, charge the phone. Phone takes care of all connectivity and computation. The clamshell is simply a convenient additional display keyboard mouse extension. One can think of docking pads too. You carry the phone everywhere, depending on the situation you connect to the larger screen.
And it is argued that it is the CEO's fiduciary responsibility to be a sociopath, ...
Every request for the corporations is answered with, "it is not a charity, they have to make money, that is their only job, make it a law, if it is not illegal they will do it, and they should do it" ...
Every human right in the constitution is usurped by corporations, claiming, "corporations are people my friend", including religious liberties and freedom of speech, while simulataneously accepting no responsibility...
it would be insane and suicidal for the employees not to play by the same rules.
It is my job, as the manager of my team, to identify and automate every job that can be automated. If the manager is dumb it is his/her fault. If the company hires dumb managers, the company deserves to lose money. Unless the company comes up with a formula and says, "this job costs the company 120K a year indefinitely. At our capital cost, it is worth 4 million (or 6 million or whatever) to eliminate it. You give me a script to do that, I pay you 50 to 80% of the capital saved" the employee should keep quiet.
The Criminal Executive Officer shows vague calculations of capital saved and takes 80% of the alleged savings as his bonus. Why shouldn't the employee play catch me if you can?
In a Tesla you can turn its A/C on, while it is in the garage and peacefully read the manual without any fear of carbon monoxide poisoning. Actually the sound system and acoustics are very good, there is no engine noise, so it is not a bad place to listen to music or to banish your kids to so that their "music" does not disturb you....