7 ms·

Chinese Tesla Clones

31 points by cryptoz 11y ago

vvanders 11y ago
One thing missing from this picture is the significant amount of software that Tesla has that's not open-source. It's not trivial to get an always-connected car working(as we've seen from other mfgrs). I think where you'll see Tesla succeed is using the aggregated data across it's whole fleet to make smart engineering/product decisions moving forward. We've already seen this when the bumped up the spec on the 85D from 5.2s to 3.9s 0-60 based on real-world motor usage.
- Menge 11y ago
  > an always-connected car Hmm, I actually find that very unsettling in the context of this article and the recent VW debacle. Detecting fraud and recall worthy software failures was already a scary prospect. But a random companies' random engineers tuning a few thousand cars here or there to see what happens in real time.. I feel like we are about to enter a horrible new world where computer forensics meets regular forensics.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    To each their own. A big part of it is faith. I'm willing to hand $100K to Tesla for a Model S, moreso because its connected to them all the time.
- sounds 11y ago
  The article is critically lacking in insight because it implies that open sourcing patents gave Chinese manufacturers an advantage. That's not how patents work. A patent includes the description of how the invention works right in the application. Consequently, if you live in a jurisdiction where you don't fear prosecution, you can immediately clone the idea. The only way Tesla could have kept their ideas "secret" would have been to not patent them at all! Tesla's patent pledge was just a public statement that, under certain conditions, they wouldn't sue.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    > A patent includes the description of how the invention works right in the application. Consequently, if you live in a jurisdiction where you don't fear prosecution, you can immediately clone the idea. The only way Tesla could have kept their ideas "secret" would have been to not patent them at all! That's exactly why SpaceX doesn't patent their technologies; the actors who would copy them are orgs they can't sue (nation states).
ck2 11y ago
Judging by the quality of every else made in china, the batteries will last a year and the flash memory used in the computers will fail after a few thousand cycles.
- goldenkey 11y ago
  That's a funny view considering that most semiconductor companies have manufacturing plants _in_ Asia. Intel: Fab 68 Dalian, Liaoning, China AMD: Fab 2 & Fab 7 Singapore
  - dogma1138 11y ago
    AMD doesn't have fabs anymore it had to sell all of them to GlobalFoundries. Fab 68 is a 65nm fab even tho it's their newest it's pretty much delegated for making non-vital parts. The only Fabs Intel has outside of the US that are manufacturing CPU's and high-value components are in Ireland(24, 14nm) and Israel(28, 22nm currently will be Intel's first 10nm fab by mid 2016). But anyhow no one doubts China has the capability to manufacture quality components, and they got better at developing internally as well many of the newer Chinese consumer electronics brands can quite easily compete with other Asian primarily Korean manufacturers quite well. The Chinese automotive industry on the other hand well didn't had much success as far as designing goes their best cars currently are probably the MG (or which ever brand SAIC Motor uses these days) ones which are based on existing designs and IP from the MG Rover buyout, and although they look very modern allot of them are based on quite old designs even the newer MG's can still be traced to the Rover 75 and the Streetwise which were well kinda outdated designs to begin with. I've drove the MG 6 when I was in China, it's not a bad car it looks quite nice the accessory pack of the leasing agency unlike in Western countries was probably couple of levels beyond what ever is normally sold in the local markets but it still felt like an older car, the steering, responsiveness breaking everything felt like a car from the late 90's early 2000's which under all the flare it kinda is.
    - goldenkey 11y ago
      I was referring to GlobalFoundries since yes, AMD no longer fabricates any of its own chips. The car note is interesting. I think it is less about tech and more about price probably. Because it shouldnt be difficult to do the ol' chinaroo dupe like they do with phones and handbags. Yes, a car is significantly harder but I dont doubt the ability to be copied
andrewtbham 11y ago
This is good news for Tesla. Elon Musk has often stated he welcomes the competition and his goal is to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles. Hopefully they will use the same charging standard so they can use super charger network. I suspect Tesla wouldn't mind just making drive trains and super chargers for all the world's vehichles. There is also talk of giga factory as a product, so that's another possibility.
- icc97 11y ago
  Indeed, as Tesla stated when open sourcing their patents [1]: > Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day. [1]: http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-yo...
rebootthesystem 11y ago
I've already stated in another thread my general paranoid state with anything related to China stemming from years in manufacturing. Please don't be dismissive of the threat to Tesla and the industry in general. It's very real. Look, electric cars are easy to build. I feel funny saying this but, well, it isn't rocket science. The vast majority of people have no need for the gizmos a Tesla has. They need to get from point A to point B and back in comfort and with reliability. Is that difficult to achieve? Well, considering an electric car has a thousand or more less parts than an internal combustion car, probably not. Is that enough? Is the lack of an IC engine enough? No. You have to know how to design a chassis and suspension. There are plenty of people who do that for a living. No rocket science there. You have to know how to make a good electric motor and controller. There are plenty of folks who do that too. Look at the electric forklift industry. Electric motors and their controls are solved problems, from switched reluctance through PM BM to AC motors, loads of people know how to design and build them. I'd venture to say a good number of them are made in China these days. Well, how about batteries and battery chargers? Panasonic probably has that covered pretty well. They'd throw an entire engineering team at you just to sell you batteries. I mean, an electric car is an overgrown RC car. Very, very simple at the core. The complexity comes in if you want to turn it into a computer on wheels. And, I would venture to say, a lot of that is probably not that difficult these days. Load it up with ChromeOS or something like that and go. I am not diminishing the amount of work it would be to design and build a new electric car. It's monumental. All I am saying is I don't think it is as much about inventing new technology as much as money and execution in a business where most of the moving parts are well known solved problems. I think Tesla --and the world-- needs to take this very seriously. The way the Chinese piss all over intellectual property and manipulate markets is despicable.
- 1971genocide 11y ago
  Its not despicable if you come from a country that is not in the western hemisphere. Tesla will never sell its cars - in africa. And lets not forget that america was built on blatant coping of IP from europe for over 100 years ! Paradoxically this blatant copying is actually going to lead to strong IP in china in the future. A country can go so far by copying others - they will always be behind america by 10-20 years. Anyway China is not a real threat to american interest - the american govt is.
suryon 11y ago
Grabbing popcorn. Waiting for all of these chinese lovers to tell you that it is not an IP theft but just a mere inspiration. On top of that there are not any problems in China and it is much safer and better place to be in than the USA.

31 points by cryptoz 11y ago

One thing missing from this picture is the significant amount of software that Tesla has that's not open-source. It's not trivial to get an always-connected car working(as we've seen from other mfgrs). I think where you'll see Tesla succeed is using the aggregated data across it's whole fleet to make smart engineering/product decisions moving forward. We've already seen this when the bumped up the spec on the 85D from 5.2s to 3.9s 0-60 based on real-world motor usage.

Menge 11y ago
> an always-connected car Hmm, I actually find that very unsettling in the context of this article and the recent VW debacle. Detecting fraud and recall worthy software failures was already a scary prospect. But a random companies' random engineers tuning a few thousand cars here or there to see what happens in real time.. I feel like we are about to enter a horrible new world where computer forensics meets regular forensics.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  To each their own. A big part of it is faith. I'm willing to hand $100K to Tesla for a Model S, moreso because its connected to them all the time.
sounds 11y ago
The article is critically lacking in insight because it implies that open sourcing patents gave Chinese manufacturers an advantage. That's not how patents work. A patent includes the description of how the invention works right in the application. Consequently, if you live in a jurisdiction where you don't fear prosecution, you can immediately clone the idea. The only way Tesla could have kept their ideas "secret" would have been to not patent them at all! Tesla's patent pledge was just a public statement that, under certain conditions, they wouldn't sue.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  > A patent includes the description of how the invention works right in the application. Consequently, if you live in a jurisdiction where you don't fear prosecution, you can immediately clone the idea. The only way Tesla could have kept their ideas "secret" would have been to not patent them at all! That's exactly why SpaceX doesn't patent their technologies; the actors who would copy them are orgs they can't sue (nation states).

ck2 11y ago

Judging by the quality of every else made in china, the batteries will last a year and the flash memory used in the computers will fail after a few thousand cycles.

goldenkey 11y ago
That's a funny view considering that most semiconductor companies have manufacturing plants _in_ Asia. Intel: Fab 68 Dalian, Liaoning, China AMD: Fab 2 & Fab 7 Singapore
- dogma1138 11y ago
  AMD doesn't have fabs anymore it had to sell all of them to GlobalFoundries. Fab 68 is a 65nm fab even tho it's their newest it's pretty much delegated for making non-vital parts. The only Fabs Intel has outside of the US that are manufacturing CPU's and high-value components are in Ireland(24, 14nm) and Israel(28, 22nm currently will be Intel's first 10nm fab by mid 2016). But anyhow no one doubts China has the capability to manufacture quality components, and they got better at developing internally as well many of the newer Chinese consumer electronics brands can quite easily compete with other Asian primarily Korean manufacturers quite well. The Chinese automotive industry on the other hand well didn't had much success as far as designing goes their best cars currently are probably the MG (or which ever brand SAIC Motor uses these days) ones which are based on existing designs and IP from the MG Rover buyout, and although they look very modern allot of them are based on quite old designs even the newer MG's can still be traced to the Rover 75 and the Streetwise which were well kinda outdated designs to begin with. I've drove the MG 6 when I was in China, it's not a bad car it looks quite nice the accessory pack of the leasing agency unlike in Western countries was probably couple of levels beyond what ever is normally sold in the local markets but it still felt like an older car, the steering, responsiveness breaking everything felt like a car from the late 90's early 2000's which under all the flare it kinda is.
  - goldenkey 11y ago
    I was referring to GlobalFoundries since yes, AMD no longer fabricates any of its own chips. The car note is interesting. I think it is less about tech and more about price probably. Because it shouldnt be difficult to do the ol' chinaroo dupe like they do with phones and handbags. Yes, a car is significantly harder but I dont doubt the ability to be copied

andrewtbham 11y ago

This is good news for Tesla. Elon Musk has often stated he welcomes the competition and his goal is to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles. Hopefully they will use the same charging standard so they can use super charger network. I suspect Tesla wouldn't mind just making drive trains and super chargers for all the world's vehichles. There is also talk of giga factory as a product, so that's another possibility.

icc97 11y ago
Indeed, as Tesla stated when open sourcing their patents [1]: > Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day. [1]: http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-yo...

rebootthesystem 11y ago

I've already stated in another thread my general paranoid state with anything related to China stemming from years in manufacturing. Please don't be dismissive of the threat to Tesla and the industry in general. It's very real. Look, electric cars are easy to build. I feel funny saying this but, well, it isn't rocket science. The vast majority of people have no need for the gizmos a Tesla has. They need to get from point A to point B and back in comfort and with reliability. Is that difficult to achieve? Well, considering an electric car has a thousand or more less parts than an internal combustion car, probably not. Is that enough? Is the lack of an IC engine enough? No. You have to know how to design a chassis and suspension. There are plenty of people who do that for a living. No rocket science there. You have to know how to make a good electric motor and controller. There are plenty of folks who do that too. Look at the electric forklift industry. Electric motors and their controls are solved problems, from switched reluctance through PM BM to AC motors, loads of people know how to design and build them. I'd venture to say a good number of them are made in China these days. Well, how about batteries and battery chargers? Panasonic probably has that covered pretty well. They'd throw an entire engineering team at you just to sell you batteries. I mean, an electric car is an overgrown RC car. Very, very simple at the core. The complexity comes in if you want to turn it into a computer on wheels. And, I would venture to say, a lot of that is probably not that difficult these days. Load it up with ChromeOS or something like that and go. I am not diminishing the amount of work it would be to design and build a new electric car. It's monumental. All I am saying is I don't think it is as much about inventing new technology as much as money and execution in a business where most of the moving parts are well known solved problems. I think Tesla --and the world-- needs to take this very seriously. The way the Chinese piss all over intellectual property and manipulate markets is despicable.

1971genocide 11y ago
Its not despicable if you come from a country that is not in the western hemisphere. Tesla will never sell its cars - in africa. And lets not forget that america was built on blatant coping of IP from europe for over 100 years ! Paradoxically this blatant copying is actually going to lead to strong IP in china in the future. A country can go so far by copying others - they will always be behind america by 10-20 years. Anyway China is not a real threat to american interest - the american govt is.

suryon 11y ago

Grabbing popcorn. Waiting for all of these chinese lovers to tell you that it is not an IP theft but just a mere inspiration. On top of that there are not any problems in China and it is much safer and better place to be in than the USA.