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Personally I wish Elon would focus on The Boring Company and SpaceX. Tesla just isn’t going to matter that much in the long run, it’s never going to solve our t
by paulsutter 8y ago
Personally I wish Elon would focus on The Boring Company and SpaceX. Tesla just isn’t going to matter that much in the long run, it’s never going to solve our transportation problems in the way TBC can.
I’d rather see 500,000 new homes in (or within 10 minutes of) San Francisco and cars just won’t make that possible.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoTesla does not exist to solve just transportation issues. It exists to drive down the cost of utility scale battery storage to allow for renewables alone to supply power to grids.
- paulcole 8y agoSo increasing Elon Musk’s wealth and power is just a nice side effect?
- toomuchtodo 8y agoPeople should be compensated for their results, no?
- paulcole 8y agoNever said he shouldn’t. The idea that Tesla’s purpose is primarily anything but a Musk power play is a testament to the brand and cult of personality he’s worked dutifully to create and maintain.
- dbasedweeb 8y agoPretty much every time I’ve tried to say anything negative about Musk someone comes along and tries to sell me a line about him not caring about money. Then I ask why he keeps demanding so much of it, and they claim he wants to live on Mars. Cult indeed. There’s faith that big rockets somehow are the missing link to living on Mars. Otherwise reasonable people hang up their skepticism in favor of ignoring the evidence that Musk craves money and power, in favor of believing that he has a master plan to save the world. It’s infuriating, and ironically in a few years they’ll be the first screaming bloody murder when he fails to live up to their impossible dreams. Of course by then he’ll have enough money that he won’t need to care, and rockets working LEO rather than Mars. I guess it’s easier praying that a billionaire has a vision to save us from ourselves without us having to make any sacrifices, than it is to do the hard work of saving ourselves.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoI’ve said previously he’s the least worst billionaire. If power, status, and wealth are side effects of positive influence on a global scale, why should that be discouraged? We are all flawed characters, some more than others. Yet, we all have our parts to play. I can appreciate his positive influences while admitting he’s probably terrible to work for and has a diasterous personal life.
- knuththetruth 8y agoHe’s rich from PayPal, a company notorious for closing their customers’ accounts using phony pretexts so they could steal the money. He turned around and used that fortune to live fat off government contracts and subsidies, dressing it up as “disruption” to his duped groupies. All of these billionaires are despicable crooks, but at least some of them don’t insist, like Musk, that we constantly applaud them.
- knuththetruth 8y agoMusk is tied up with all kinds of government contracts and subsidies that he uses Barnum-esque celebrity tactics to win. I find it amusing that his fans reach for these “law of the jungle, apex predator” metaphors to describe him. He’s like the villain of an Ayn Rand novel who has somehow passed himself off as John Galt.
- paulsutter 8y agoYou’re entirely right, but he’s taken the long path to get there due to overdesign and it’s just eating up too much of his time. The model X was a fiasco and the 3 isn’t looking much better. He’s solving too many minor design issues and not shipping enough cars.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoIt’s my understanding that the Model 3 ramp is the fastest cold ramp in auto production history. “Not looking much better” doesn’t describe the situation.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- shanghaiaway 8y agoIt's not.
- gamblor956 8y agoConsidering the QC on the Model 3 has been extremely subpar, being the "fastest cold ramp in auto production history" really just makes Tesla look like the prime example of why you don't do a fast cold ramp. If Musk had been willing to wait one more year to begin commercial production, the Model 3 could have been amazing. Instead, it's a 90s era Kia with a body and a better-looking body.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoBesides fit and finish, multiple sources have showered praise on the quality of the skateboard (battery, power components, motor, suspension, etc). Fit and finish will improve, and major issues can be corrected in the field post delivery. Tesla didn’t have a year to wait. That’s why you sell to fanatics and those passionate first. Early adopters are more forgiving. I’ll worry if quality isn’t high after the preorders are cleared out.
- 8y ago
- kmm 8y agoDid they openly state that as their goal? Because all Li-on batteries in the world can power the US for about an hour. EDIT: Can anyone of the downvoters please explain what I said wrong? Are we expecting a ten thousandfold increase in battery production? Or are they not going to use batteries like they would in cars?
- paulsutter 8y agoLi-Ion batteries are on a manufacturing learning curve like photovoltaic, but a few years behind. Remember the confident predictions a few years back that photovoltaic could never be cost effective? I do, because I was one of them and I was totally wrong. I even knew the trends but somehow felt confident they couldn’t continue.
- akvadrako 8y agoOn top of that, Tesla is not innovating on batteries; they aren't even making them themselves. The only thing I know of is replacing 18650 cells with 21700 cells, which are a few percent larger, but not as large as 26650 cells.
- listenallyall 8y agoLet's be real, Tesla exists to make (or attempt to make) Elon Musk very very wealthy. He isn't hiding that fact, his recent compensation deal demonstrates exactly how he is treating the company like a "lottery ticket"-esque stock option play.
- kbenson 8y agoHe was already very wealthy. There are much easier ways to leverage your wealth when you have a lot that require less effort and certainly a lot less risk. Whatever his motivations, I find the idea that "get rich" is one of them sort of ridiculous.
- listenallyall 8y agoYou think "get rich" is not one of his motivations? At all? Why would he lobby for a compensation plan that could be worth $200 billion? "If the options fully vest, Musk could wind up owning a 28 percent stake of Tesla, which could be worth nearly $200 billion." Dude is a brilliant sleight-of-hand artist, he's got all his sycophants focused on the "saving the world" thing, meanwhile he's picking pockets and stealing watches right off their wrists. https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/21/17147678/elon-musk-tesla-ceo-compensation-award-plan https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/21/17147678/elon-musk-tesla-...
- fastball 8y agoI'm not sure he is as "open" about this apparent motivation as you seem to think. He literally tweeted[1] "Lori, this is ridiculous. Creating a rocket company has to be one of the dumbest and hardest ways to “make money”. If it was about money, I’d just do another Internet company." 1: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/976414452106055680?lang=en https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/976414452106055680?lang=...
- Firerouge 8y agoThe boring company and by extension hypertube are pipe dreams compared to Tesla.
- paulsutter 8y agoCare to bet a dollar on that? First tunnel nearing completion, will be open for demo rides. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2018-05-12/the-boring-company-s-first-tunnel-under-la-nearing-completion-video https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2018-05-12/the-boring-... (Pipe dreams, I see what you did there)
- gamblor956 8y agoMusk claims the tunnel is nearing completion. He hasn't made a deadline in several years at any of his companies, so its a good bet that "nearing completion" means "halfway done..."
- annerajb 8y agoHis been working on this one since August and back in August he have a rought 9 month estimstes.. it seems he is going to miss it by a month. Honestly Elon musk always missed but he also always delivers.
- thesausageking 8y agoThis is a 2 mile test tunnel. We've had the technology to drill tunnels and transport people in them on tracks for more than a century. The hard part is figuring out how to do it significantly cheaper (10x reduction) than current methods and they haven't presented any data on that yet.
- Jdam 8y agoThe first Maglev track for demo rides was completed 25 years ago.
- jcranmer 8y agoThe Boring Company is a sign of someone who doesn't understand the problem. Hyperloop and Loop both suffer from the same basic problem: high fixed infrastructure costs with very low throughputs. Higher speed naturally comes with a penalty to capacity [1], but since capacity (at high speeds) is generally invariant with respect to the size of the train and the number of people per car, you can recuperate a lot of capacity by stuffing as many people as you can. Except Hyperloop and Loop are envisioned with single-digit loading, which is basically PRT-level--trash tier in terms of capacity, particularly with regards to price of infrastructure. Okay, let's move to boring. The only suggestions for lowering prices are a) making tunnels smaller (i.e., make it incompatible with repurposing for other infrastructure, particularly if the venture turns out to be a white elephant) and b) maybe making the actual boring costs be lower. But boring the tunnels isn't the predominant cost of a tunnel--it only costs about $50 million or so to bore a mile of tunnel. That's about a third the cost of actually building a subway [2]. The big cost is the large underground stations. Okay, you say, you need smaller stations, so those would cost less--but because your capacity is so bad that you're going to need many more stations to make up for the throughput. Having run the numbers for single-occupant vehicles, you need about 100× the number of stations to match the capacity of a regular subway line, and the rounding there is flattering to Loop. If The Boring Company were serious about making tunneling cheaper, they should be bidding for the tunneling subcontracts of current public infrastructure projects. The fact that they're pitching a different transit system instead suggests a form of bait-and-switch. [1] Essentially, your problems grow with the square of velocity, so multiplied by the linear improvement with velocity, you end up with total throughput running proportional to O(1 / v). [2] The cost of building a subway is generally only about $300 million a mile. Some subways (cough MTA cough) cost up to $1 billion a mile, but making better TBMs isn't going to make a meaningful dent in those high prices.
- inopinatus 8y ago> The Boring Company is a sign of someone who doesn't understand the problem. That rather depends what problem you expect it to tackle. I reframe everything Elon Musk does as testing/developing technologies for interplanetary colonization, which don't forget is SpaceX's very specific vision statement (http://www.spacex.com/about http://www.spacex.com/about). Back in 2017 he specifically said "I do think getting good at digging tunnels could be really helpful for Mars" and went on to discuss the value of underground colonies in terms of access to ice, radiation protection etc.