8 ms·

Tesla’s Dangerous Sprint into the Future

84 points by fmihaila 9y ago

ChuckMcM 9y ago
From the article -- Imagine Tesla didn’t exist, Steve Jurvetson told me. “What would the world look like? I have this sinking suspicion it wouldn’t look that different than 10 years ago. A bunch of hybrid cars. A bunch of noise about hydrogen vehicles. You know, I don’t think the world would look anything like today — where entire nations are saying, ‘We’re going to stop making gas cars.’ ” The last thought is the really compelling one for me, what would the world look like if Elon Musk hadn't started SpaceX and Tesla?
- cconcepts 9y ago
  I think about that a lot and what an encouragement it is that having an idea that many think crazy is actually an opportunity to be a catalyst for change...or broke. Either way, its often worth a good shot, hence the need to try radically worthwhile stuff like space travel and transitioning to sustainable energy. If I were betting it all on disrupting the nail polish industry I doubt I would have the commitment to see it through. Being committed to something that will change the outcomes for my children's children will naturally gather a lot more effort from me.
- ams6110 9y ago
  For the vast majority of car buyers who are not buying electric cars, the world looks pretty much the same as it does today.
- colechristensen 9y ago
  There are other space launch companies and other electric car companies. The time was ripe for both. SpaceX and (less clearly) Tesla have just been executing best and earlier than others. Every car company is working on electrics, and they have been for quite a while. The limitations were battery technology and cost, and battery technology with laptops and cell phones made electric cars practical. NASA was talking about fostering commercial space launch companies before SpaceX was founded, and the two of them have been in close cooperation (other commercial companies too of course). If SpaceX didn't exist, that strong partnership would have existed with a different company but would likely look similar. There's a tendency to think that the world would be different without "revolutionary" people or companies, but usually what ends up happening is just being at the right place at the right time. Excellence is required to succeed, but take one specific revolutionary out of the picture and another would have taken their place. Einstein is a great example of this. A brilliant man, no doubt, but he is famous for discovering things which were ripe for discovery. The pieces were all in place waiting for someone to put them together. Doing so, and before anyone else, was an accomplishment, but he wasn't unique in his ability to make things happen, he was just first. Like a marathon, somebody always finishes first but there are many others running behind them.
  - ChuckMcM 9y ago
    I see it quite differently of course. If I understand your argument it is that the current state of affairs would exist with or without the key individuals we call out in history, because the environment would have created those changes anyway, and the individuals named would simply be other individuals who happened to be the ones to catalyze the change. If I have characterized your argument incorrectly please help me understand it better. The reason I disagree with that argument, as I see it, is that it implies a sort of 'fate' or destiny aspect of change and advancement. Which would be like saying that exhaust fumes from a car will eventually convert into water and co2 even without the platinum catalyst. Too often I have seen organizations and fields which were stably stagnant until an individual or group created a sea change that was, in hindsight, pretty obvious but it had resisted being detected for years.
    - colechristensen 9y ago
      For example: the discovery of the structure and function of DNA was absolutely going to happen in the decade or so when it did happen. Somebody had to go and do it, but the environment of tools, techniques, and general motivation were all there making it possible. You find all sorts of examples of people independently discovering things at the same time, and this isn't just coincidence. Maybe most famously is Leibniz vs Newton creating calculus. The pieces were all in place for the mathematical study of change. The outcome wasn't predestined, each man's creation was quite different in ways, but they accomplished something that was ready to be accomplished. Whether it's physics or technology, nature abhors a vacuum. Unexploited niches get filled. Sometimes in significantly different directions, but very often the outcome is strongly influenced by the opportunity. In biology, this is a bit like convergent evolution. The implementation details aren't predestined, but general solutions to environmental problems _are_. Eyes and legs are very useful things to have, and they're nearly ubiquitous. With Tesla, the deal is that we know we're going to run out of oil, and pollution sucks. Developing an alternative has been a big talking point since the 90s, and there are a whole lot of players in the game. Lots of companies are making lots of attempts and have been trying many different technologies. Lithium batteries are winning the technology race, they developed because of other consumer electronics and the environment is best for them. It's just evolution. Many other companies are trying different things and the same thing, it's not driven by copying Tesla (the competition helps though) it's driven by the niche need for a solution expanding and becoming more and more possible. The variables are implementation details (fuel cells? lithium batteries? something else?) and timing. There can be quite a lot of uncertainty with "how" and "when" but quite a lot less with "if".
- staunch 9y ago
  Elon Musk did with Tesla what Steve Jobs did with the iPhone. Musk had long wanted to solve renewable transport, and Jobs had spent his life creating personal computing devices. Their insight was based on observing that the underlying technology required had reached a transformational level. It became feasible to do what they had already dreamed of doing. Battery powered vehicles and fully featured pocket computers were inevitable due to the progress of technology. Musk and Jobs deserve a lot of credit for being the most responsible for birthing them, and for the revolutionary DNA they imparted.
  - stcredzero 9y ago
    Elon Musk did with Tesla what Steve Jobs did with the iPhone. In a way, both Elon Musk and Steve Jobs seem warp the social consensus reality -- by being willing to see through it and substitute a harder first-principles reality for it.
- gutnor 9y ago
  Difficult to say, but one of the big factor for everyone saying they will stop to make gas cars was the Dieselgate. The world may have decided to reluctantly drag itself to electric the "Nissan Leaf" way, leaving the rich people brags about their high power ice cars. Tesla has made electric car looks cool, so sure the bulk of the electrification will come from uncool car like the Leaf or the Bolt, but Tesla made people dream of going electric. Thanks Elon, probably sped up electric adoption by a decade.
  - ams6110 9y ago
    This is close to my view. I think electric vehicles would have started to get popular at some point anyway, because the battery technology is finally able to support a car that has practical power and range. But Musk had a vision, and the money, and the motivation to show the world what an electric car could be, at a time when most people's concept of an electric car was something closer to a golf cart than a real automobile. Speeding things up by a decade sounds about right to me. I disagree about dieselgate though. Much ado about nothing. There just aren't enough diesel cars in the USA for it to really make a difference. GM destroyed the US consumer interest in diesel cars in the 1970s with their abysmal offerings.
    - gutnor 9y ago
      From Europe, the dieselgate has had a lot of ripple effects. Diesel is king in Europe and that crisis shook the public trust in the technology. So the various other numerous complain about the diesel suddenly became more visible. Diesel-bashing became fashionable and it has had a visible effect on diesel car sales. This drop in popularity lead to various city banning diesel (in the future). The timing of it all makes me think that Germany saw the Dieselgate as the last drop marking the end of the golden age and rather than wait for the industry to figure it out, they decided to force them forward.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  It's also possible that other companies with better ideas got squashed by Tesla because Tesla had more money. You never know. I am starting to think like that about the iPhone. In 2007 it was an innovation but now it's probably suppressing new ideas with its dominance. In short, we don't know.
- justicezyx 9y ago
  So Chinese, Japanese companies making electrical car are not aware of the fact that you can build ev?...
  - mc32 9y ago
    What they have so far produced has been underwhelming with some unsuccessful forays into hydrogen. Without Tesla's competition incenting them to compete, we'd be at least 10 years behind. It reminds me of the stories of the half arsed efforts by American car MFGs to make compact gas economic cars during the 70s gas crisis. They could make them, did they give it a good effort? No, and it took them decades to reorient that ship.
    - justicezyx 9y ago
      > Without Tesla's competition incenting them to compete, we'd be at least 10 years behind. The EV adoption leader, China, was under Tesla's competition pressure. Hmm, don't know why Tesla did not get a AAPL valuation...
  - durkie 9y ago
    Japanese companies are still largely unaware of this, with Mazda having their head in the sand about EVs and Toyota/Honda continuing to push fuel cells.
- Urbanxassassin 9y ago
  That quote is confusing and contradicting.
ibero 9y ago
It is comments like these that exasperate me. As one Tesla executive involved in its design told me, the goal here was not only to minimize the movement of materials like lithium and cobalt but also to shorten the path of every molecule that moves through the plant. “Because the further a molecule needs to travel,” he said, “the more cost gets added into it. We actually think of it in terms of molecular distance.” It's things like these, where obvious truths are packaged as some sort of insight that really get my goat.
- cconcepts 9y ago
  I was cutting wood with my kids the other day and showing them how you have to pick the wood up as little as possible so you could get more done with less effort. No talk about molecules necessary - just don't do stuff you don't need to do. Sure it takes a lot of planning to achieve but its been a standard concept around getting the job done for, I would say, millennia...
  - jbob2000 9y ago
    "Don't move it twice" was a common saying when I had a summer job contracting. Don't move the wood off the truck, cut it in the bed of the truck, bring cut pieces in. Save all the dinky, random cuts for last, do them all in one go, instead of running back and forth to the truck every time. Clean from the top down, from the back to the front, so you don't have to clean something twice. There's a lot of wisdom in the trades! I guess you care more for efficiency when it's your own energy you're spending, instead of some random computer's.
- ojm 9y ago
  It’s a bit of a flamboyant way to say we want to move our parts as little as possible. But that is a massive difference from traditional manufacturing and many assembly plants. So it is an insight in terms of Tesla manufacturing philosophy.
  - hackerguy99 9y ago
    >But that is a massive difference from traditional manufacturing and many assembly plants. Where do people get this stuff from? Have you ever been in a modern manufacturing facility?
MarkMMullin 9y ago
As for Elon being one of the driving forces behind the transition to electric - Rock on Elon, nice damn job - as far as L5 AV - umm, you're so full of it you need to drag a septic tank - I'm just a little fella, and I do admire the primarily visual approach, but this all really boils down to 'You look, but you do not see' - I've been in an out of machine vision for a long time, and the one thing that's always been true is that we fail, and fail again, when we ignore the gigantic cognitive stack that is processing that visual data and making decisions based on it (and if we don't ignore it, we are forced to admit we can't handle it) . L1,L2, L3... yeah, sure, it's not that hard -I think 'Logan' got the freight trucks in 10 years spot on. L5 - I'll believe it when Elon and the Times author leave NYC for a late fall drive to check out a VT ski home, say about mid October - storm gone thru, cloudy/foggy night, poor visibility, and the only brains you got are in that car - better hope it knows that leaves get ripped down then and piled up in the twists and turns of backcountry VT roads - my guess is there will be a funeral, or it's gonna be a multi-day trip - the ability of a machine to go 'I have seen this before' has nothing at all to do with 'I understand what I am seeing and can draw rational inferences' My 2c, admittedly playing with midget systems, but the failure modes are pretty much the same
- aquadrop 9y ago
  I think viable L5 somewhere in Arizona is different from L5 in New York, so autonomous vehicles will start spreading from places with good weather. But I don't think L5 is required for successful start of autonomous fleets. Advanced L4 with an option of remote 'driver' connecting for special cases driving (like car stuck or something), should be enough.
  - MarkMMullin 9y ago
    L5 is L5 - if the system can't tell, then it ain't L5 - and the driver 'connecting' won't work - it's basically 'please doze for three hours and then deal with a crisis within the blink of an eye' Pilots have enough trouble with this and they have 6DOF in a mostly isolated space - I do believe, but all my fun comes from learning about the spectacular levels of failure and hubris in much smaller systems :-) Think of it this way - if it's AZ, OK, I pick Flagstaff when the snows have just started to come and grease the road
ggm 9y ago
I feel like the AV aspect distracts from the far more immediate EV aspect. AV disrupts more, in as much as it alters the dynamics of moving on roads. EV disrupts faster, as it displaces ICE. AV takes longer, has higher legislative barriers and is an almost unbounded problem (recognize all <x> which are a threat to your vehicle, recognize all <y> you are a threat to, from everything, all the time) I think if the AV part had been cast more clearly into the future, we could have seen more energy and capital behind fixing the EV problems. For instane, we didn't get battery swap. Why? Its obviously the most immediate path to faster charge problems. Relying on future chemistry of batteries to make it possible to fix the charge time problem is praying for rain. Relying on altering out perceptions of what travel time is, by making the stop "fun" is yanking my chain. Making the batteries ephemeral and swapping them out would have made charge delay a non-problem. EV alters more immediate problems. batteries are more immediately interesting. AV is being tackled in the mining industry and other restricted vehicle contexts.
- ctdonath 9y ago
  The problem with battery swaps was that you're exchanging a big heavy $20,000 box with minimal assurance of its integrity. I'd rather wait for my battery to charge in 20 minutes rather than swap one for another, never knowing if I'm getting bad hardware in the process. A recurring overlooked point of EVs: minimal exceptions aside, you begin every day with a full charge, and with 300+ mile batteries you're unlikely to run out most days. You almost never have to "fill up" like with gasoline; a 5 minute gas "recharge" every few days loses to never having to "recharge" at all (park for the night, plug in, charged by morning). In this context, swapping the entire battery seems distressing overkill. Trying to explain this paradigm shift to people who never drove EVs is...difficult.
  - mikestew 9y ago
    I never realized what a pain the ass it is to drive a gas car until we got the Leaf, while keeping the gas car. It’s a first-world problem for sure, but having to go out of my way to “recharge” now seems so...primitive. As you say, it’s difficult to explain to the unwashed.

84 points by fmihaila 9y ago

From the article -- Imagine Tesla didn’t exist, Steve Jurvetson told me. “What would the world look like? I have this sinking suspicion it wouldn’t look that different than 10 years ago. A bunch of hybrid cars. A bunch of noise about hydrogen vehicles. You know, I don’t think the world would look anything like today — where entire nations are saying, ‘We’re going to stop making gas cars.’ ” The last thought is the really compelling one for me, what would the world look like if Elon Musk hadn't started SpaceX and Tesla?

cconcepts 9y ago
I think about that a lot and what an encouragement it is that having an idea that many think crazy is actually an opportunity to be a catalyst for change...or broke. Either way, its often worth a good shot, hence the need to try radically worthwhile stuff like space travel and transitioning to sustainable energy. If I were betting it all on disrupting the nail polish industry I doubt I would have the commitment to see it through. Being committed to something that will change the outcomes for my children's children will naturally gather a lot more effort from me.
ams6110 9y ago
For the vast majority of car buyers who are not buying electric cars, the world looks pretty much the same as it does today.
colechristensen 9y ago
There are other space launch companies and other electric car companies. The time was ripe for both. SpaceX and (less clearly) Tesla have just been executing best and earlier than others. Every car company is working on electrics, and they have been for quite a while. The limitations were battery technology and cost, and battery technology with laptops and cell phones made electric cars practical. NASA was talking about fostering commercial space launch companies before SpaceX was founded, and the two of them have been in close cooperation (other commercial companies too of course). If SpaceX didn't exist, that strong partnership would have existed with a different company but would likely look similar. There's a tendency to think that the world would be different without "revolutionary" people or companies, but usually what ends up happening is just being at the right place at the right time. Excellence is required to succeed, but take one specific revolutionary out of the picture and another would have taken their place. Einstein is a great example of this. A brilliant man, no doubt, but he is famous for discovering things which were ripe for discovery. The pieces were all in place waiting for someone to put them together. Doing so, and before anyone else, was an accomplishment, but he wasn't unique in his ability to make things happen, he was just first. Like a marathon, somebody always finishes first but there are many others running behind them.
- ChuckMcM 9y ago
  I see it quite differently of course. If I understand your argument it is that the current state of affairs would exist with or without the key individuals we call out in history, because the environment would have created those changes anyway, and the individuals named would simply be other individuals who happened to be the ones to catalyze the change. If I have characterized your argument incorrectly please help me understand it better. The reason I disagree with that argument, as I see it, is that it implies a sort of 'fate' or destiny aspect of change and advancement. Which would be like saying that exhaust fumes from a car will eventually convert into water and co2 even without the platinum catalyst. Too often I have seen organizations and fields which were stably stagnant until an individual or group created a sea change that was, in hindsight, pretty obvious but it had resisted being detected for years.
  - colechristensen 9y ago
    For example: the discovery of the structure and function of DNA was absolutely going to happen in the decade or so when it did happen. Somebody had to go and do it, but the environment of tools, techniques, and general motivation were all there making it possible. You find all sorts of examples of people independently discovering things at the same time, and this isn't just coincidence. Maybe most famously is Leibniz vs Newton creating calculus. The pieces were all in place for the mathematical study of change. The outcome wasn't predestined, each man's creation was quite different in ways, but they accomplished something that was ready to be accomplished. Whether it's physics or technology, nature abhors a vacuum. Unexploited niches get filled. Sometimes in significantly different directions, but very often the outcome is strongly influenced by the opportunity. In biology, this is a bit like convergent evolution. The implementation details aren't predestined, but general solutions to environmental problems _are_. Eyes and legs are very useful things to have, and they're nearly ubiquitous. With Tesla, the deal is that we know we're going to run out of oil, and pollution sucks. Developing an alternative has been a big talking point since the 90s, and there are a whole lot of players in the game. Lots of companies are making lots of attempts and have been trying many different technologies. Lithium batteries are winning the technology race, they developed because of other consumer electronics and the environment is best for them. It's just evolution. Many other companies are trying different things and the same thing, it's not driven by copying Tesla (the competition helps though) it's driven by the niche need for a solution expanding and becoming more and more possible. The variables are implementation details (fuel cells? lithium batteries? something else?) and timing. There can be quite a lot of uncertainty with "how" and "when" but quite a lot less with "if".
staunch 9y ago
Elon Musk did with Tesla what Steve Jobs did with the iPhone. Musk had long wanted to solve renewable transport, and Jobs had spent his life creating personal computing devices. Their insight was based on observing that the underlying technology required had reached a transformational level. It became feasible to do what they had already dreamed of doing. Battery powered vehicles and fully featured pocket computers were inevitable due to the progress of technology. Musk and Jobs deserve a lot of credit for being the most responsible for birthing them, and for the revolutionary DNA they imparted.
- stcredzero 9y ago
  Elon Musk did with Tesla what Steve Jobs did with the iPhone. In a way, both Elon Musk and Steve Jobs seem warp the social consensus reality -- by being willing to see through it and substitute a harder first-principles reality for it.
gutnor 9y ago
Difficult to say, but one of the big factor for everyone saying they will stop to make gas cars was the Dieselgate. The world may have decided to reluctantly drag itself to electric the "Nissan Leaf" way, leaving the rich people brags about their high power ice cars. Tesla has made electric car looks cool, so sure the bulk of the electrification will come from uncool car like the Leaf or the Bolt, but Tesla made people dream of going electric. Thanks Elon, probably sped up electric adoption by a decade.
- ams6110 9y ago
  This is close to my view. I think electric vehicles would have started to get popular at some point anyway, because the battery technology is finally able to support a car that has practical power and range. But Musk had a vision, and the money, and the motivation to show the world what an electric car could be, at a time when most people's concept of an electric car was something closer to a golf cart than a real automobile. Speeding things up by a decade sounds about right to me. I disagree about dieselgate though. Much ado about nothing. There just aren't enough diesel cars in the USA for it to really make a difference. GM destroyed the US consumer interest in diesel cars in the 1970s with their abysmal offerings.
  - gutnor 9y ago
    From Europe, the dieselgate has had a lot of ripple effects. Diesel is king in Europe and that crisis shook the public trust in the technology. So the various other numerous complain about the diesel suddenly became more visible. Diesel-bashing became fashionable and it has had a visible effect on diesel car sales. This drop in popularity lead to various city banning diesel (in the future). The timing of it all makes me think that Germany saw the Dieselgate as the last drop marking the end of the golden age and rather than wait for the industry to figure it out, they decided to force them forward.
maxxxxx 9y ago
It's also possible that other companies with better ideas got squashed by Tesla because Tesla had more money. You never know. I am starting to think like that about the iPhone. In 2007 it was an innovation but now it's probably suppressing new ideas with its dominance. In short, we don't know.
justicezyx 9y ago
So Chinese, Japanese companies making electrical car are not aware of the fact that you can build ev?...
- mc32 9y ago
  What they have so far produced has been underwhelming with some unsuccessful forays into hydrogen. Without Tesla's competition incenting them to compete, we'd be at least 10 years behind. It reminds me of the stories of the half arsed efforts by American car MFGs to make compact gas economic cars during the 70s gas crisis. They could make them, did they give it a good effort? No, and it took them decades to reorient that ship.
  - justicezyx 9y ago
    > Without Tesla's competition incenting them to compete, we'd be at least 10 years behind. The EV adoption leader, China, was under Tesla's competition pressure. Hmm, don't know why Tesla did not get a AAPL valuation...
- durkie 9y ago
  Japanese companies are still largely unaware of this, with Mazda having their head in the sand about EVs and Toyota/Honda continuing to push fuel cells.
Urbanxassassin 9y ago
That quote is confusing and contradicting.

ibero 9y ago

It is comments like these that exasperate me. As one Tesla executive involved in its design told me, the goal here was not only to minimize the movement of materials like lithium and cobalt but also to shorten the path of every molecule that moves through the plant. “Because the further a molecule needs to travel,” he said, “the more cost gets added into it. We actually think of it in terms of molecular distance.” It's things like these, where obvious truths are packaged as some sort of insight that really get my goat.

cconcepts 9y ago
I was cutting wood with my kids the other day and showing them how you have to pick the wood up as little as possible so you could get more done with less effort. No talk about molecules necessary - just don't do stuff you don't need to do. Sure it takes a lot of planning to achieve but its been a standard concept around getting the job done for, I would say, millennia...
- jbob2000 9y ago
  "Don't move it twice" was a common saying when I had a summer job contracting. Don't move the wood off the truck, cut it in the bed of the truck, bring cut pieces in. Save all the dinky, random cuts for last, do them all in one go, instead of running back and forth to the truck every time. Clean from the top down, from the back to the front, so you don't have to clean something twice. There's a lot of wisdom in the trades! I guess you care more for efficiency when it's your own energy you're spending, instead of some random computer's.
ojm 9y ago
It’s a bit of a flamboyant way to say we want to move our parts as little as possible. But that is a massive difference from traditional manufacturing and many assembly plants. So it is an insight in terms of Tesla manufacturing philosophy.
- hackerguy99 9y ago
  >But that is a massive difference from traditional manufacturing and many assembly plants. Where do people get this stuff from? Have you ever been in a modern manufacturing facility?

MarkMMullin 9y ago

As for Elon being one of the driving forces behind the transition to electric - Rock on Elon, nice damn job - as far as L5 AV - umm, you're so full of it you need to drag a septic tank - I'm just a little fella, and I do admire the primarily visual approach, but this all really boils down to 'You look, but you do not see' - I've been in an out of machine vision for a long time, and the one thing that's always been true is that we fail, and fail again, when we ignore the gigantic cognitive stack that is processing that visual data and making decisions based on it (and if we don't ignore it, we are forced to admit we can't handle it) . L1,L2, L3... yeah, sure, it's not that hard -I think 'Logan' got the freight trucks in 10 years spot on. L5 - I'll believe it when Elon and the Times author leave NYC for a late fall drive to check out a VT ski home, say about mid October - storm gone thru, cloudy/foggy night, poor visibility, and the only brains you got are in that car - better hope it knows that leaves get ripped down then and piled up in the twists and turns of backcountry VT roads - my guess is there will be a funeral, or it's gonna be a multi-day trip - the ability of a machine to go 'I have seen this before' has nothing at all to do with 'I understand what I am seeing and can draw rational inferences' My 2c, admittedly playing with midget systems, but the failure modes are pretty much the same

aquadrop 9y ago
I think viable L5 somewhere in Arizona is different from L5 in New York, so autonomous vehicles will start spreading from places with good weather. But I don't think L5 is required for successful start of autonomous fleets. Advanced L4 with an option of remote 'driver' connecting for special cases driving (like car stuck or something), should be enough.
- MarkMMullin 9y ago
  L5 is L5 - if the system can't tell, then it ain't L5 - and the driver 'connecting' won't work - it's basically 'please doze for three hours and then deal with a crisis within the blink of an eye' Pilots have enough trouble with this and they have 6DOF in a mostly isolated space - I do believe, but all my fun comes from learning about the spectacular levels of failure and hubris in much smaller systems :-) Think of it this way - if it's AZ, OK, I pick Flagstaff when the snows have just started to come and grease the road

ggm 9y ago

I feel like the AV aspect distracts from the far more immediate EV aspect. AV disrupts more, in as much as it alters the dynamics of moving on roads. EV disrupts faster, as it displaces ICE. AV takes longer, has higher legislative barriers and is an almost unbounded problem (recognize all <x> which are a threat to your vehicle, recognize all <y> you are a threat to, from everything, all the time) I think if the AV part had been cast more clearly into the future, we could have seen more energy and capital behind fixing the EV problems. For instane, we didn't get battery swap. Why? Its obviously the most immediate path to faster charge problems. Relying on future chemistry of batteries to make it possible to fix the charge time problem is praying for rain. Relying on altering out perceptions of what travel time is, by making the stop "fun" is yanking my chain. Making the batteries ephemeral and swapping them out would have made charge delay a non-problem. EV alters more immediate problems. batteries are more immediately interesting. AV is being tackled in the mining industry and other restricted vehicle contexts.

ctdonath 9y ago
The problem with battery swaps was that you're exchanging a big heavy $20,000 box with minimal assurance of its integrity. I'd rather wait for my battery to charge in 20 minutes rather than swap one for another, never knowing if I'm getting bad hardware in the process. A recurring overlooked point of EVs: minimal exceptions aside, you begin every day with a full charge, and with 300+ mile batteries you're unlikely to run out most days. You almost never have to "fill up" like with gasoline; a 5 minute gas "recharge" every few days loses to never having to "recharge" at all (park for the night, plug in, charged by morning). In this context, swapping the entire battery seems distressing overkill. Trying to explain this paradigm shift to people who never drove EVs is...difficult.
- mikestew 9y ago
  I never realized what a pain the ass it is to drive a gas car until we got the Leaf, while keeping the gas car. It’s a first-world problem for sure, but having to go out of my way to “recharge” now seems so...primitive. As you say, it’s difficult to explain to the unwashed.