5 ms·

How good is tesla’s ip really? I am aware the battery tech is sophisticated but how hard it is to copy if you ignore regulatory capture?

mdorazio 7y ago
Quite hard, actually. There's a lot more that goes into it than people think. It's not just "slap a battery pack into the powertrain and away you go", there's a huge amount of engineering (both hardware and software) that goes into power cell load balancing, thermal management, fault detection, efficient wiring, charging safely, regenerative braking, integrating the pack itself into your frame, choosing the right components for alternators, converters, electric motors, etc. Anyone can make an electric go-kart. Making a performance electric car that will be on the road for 150,000 miles is hard.
- SomeOldThrow 7y ago
  Sure, but China has far more resources than Tesla does. This is gonna go commodity quickly.
  - simonh 7y ago
    That’s what people have been saying about the iPhone for 12 years now. I suspect it will be several decades before we get close to tapping out the technological improvements and engineering optimisation potential in EVs. We’ve really only just got started with them seriously in the last few years. There’s also plenty of scope for further advances in the manufacturing processes. Building EVs is incredibly complex. It’s not just another electric commodity like a washing machine.
    - semi-extrinsic 7y ago
      > That’s what people have been saying about the iPhone for 12 years now. And they've been correct for the past ~six of those years? The only reason people buy iPhones today is walled garden capture and brand identity. None of the technology is superior to what Huawei or Samsung or even Motorola is selling.
      - dodobirdlord 7y ago
        > None of the technology is superior to what Huawei or Samsung or even Motorola is selling. Can you expand on what you mean by "the technology"?
        semi-extrinsic 7y ago
        As an end user: are the things you can do with it the same as with anothet phone? Can you take equally good photos with another brand of phone? Yes. Can you run the same AAA games? Yes. Can you run the same apps (apart from ones Apple deliberately limits to iOS)? Yes. Do you get the same network speed? Yes. I'm not saying there aren't small differences. The secure enclave is very nice, and I understand that for audio creation it's significantly better than Android phones. But these advantages in some niches (and disadvantages in others, like cost, storage, display size etc) are not sufficient to say that "the technology is clearly superior". It's not, it's just different.
        mceachen 7y ago
        Agreed that the end experience is similar, but holy moly, the latest CPU benchmarks for the iPhone 11 are pretty amazing.
        semi-extrinsic 7y ago
        There's already benchmarks leaked from next year's Snapdragon 865 that beat the A13, FWIW.
      - simonh 7y ago
        The tech in iPhones is so ludicrously ahead of anything else, it's not even funny anymore. Their CPUs are 3 years ahead at least. They have proprietary low power, high reliability Flash memory tech. They have unique 3D scanning face identification tech and secure ID data storage. They have far superior battery life for the battery weight. The camera systems are best in class, I would agree several other phones have camera tech and software that is close enough for most people, but not for everyone. They have Samsung made screens that even Samsung can't use, some of the tech and QA process is proprietary to Apple. Also the sensor precision and calibration is considerably better on iPhones than Android phones and highly consistent across models. There's a photo of a bunch of phones showing their magnetometers, with all the iPhones pointing in the same direction, and the Android phones pointing all over the place.
    - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
      The iphone’s hardware is commodity or worse—they give you basically no choice for form factor or functionality beyond the disk size. You buy it for the software.
      - dodobirdlord 7y ago
        > The iphone’s hardware is commodity or worse The iphone has the best mobile processing chips and it's not even close. The intel modems they use are inferior to qualcomm's modems, but "commodity or worse" is a bizarre take.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
        SomeOldThrow 7y ago
        Better in a very limited sense. It’s a smartphone. Nobody cares about the chips. Everyone makes the same phone: screen, battery, antenna, camera. When it dies you buy another that is mostly the same. You’re browsing the web and taking photos; why would you care about who manufactured the cpu? Software, brand, and culture play much larger roles than a milquetoast smartphone offering. What’s this chip that customers are raving about? The only points of continually tweaking the hardware are to shorten the lifespan and remove the ability to customize and repair it with any real scale.

mdorazio 7y ago

Quite hard, actually. There's a lot more that goes into it than people think. It's not just "slap a battery pack into the powertrain and away you go", there's a huge amount of engineering (both hardware and software) that goes into power cell load balancing, thermal management, fault detection, efficient wiring, charging safely, regenerative braking, integrating the pack itself into your frame, choosing the right components for alternators, converters, electric motors, etc. Anyone can make an electric go-kart. Making a performance electric car that will be on the road for 150,000 miles is hard.

SomeOldThrow 7y ago
Sure, but China has far more resources than Tesla does. This is gonna go commodity quickly.
- simonh 7y ago
  That’s what people have been saying about the iPhone for 12 years now. I suspect it will be several decades before we get close to tapping out the technological improvements and engineering optimisation potential in EVs. We’ve really only just got started with them seriously in the last few years. There’s also plenty of scope for further advances in the manufacturing processes. Building EVs is incredibly complex. It’s not just another electric commodity like a washing machine.
  - semi-extrinsic 7y ago
    > That’s what people have been saying about the iPhone for 12 years now. And they've been correct for the past ~six of those years? The only reason people buy iPhones today is walled garden capture and brand identity. None of the technology is superior to what Huawei or Samsung or even Motorola is selling.
    - dodobirdlord 7y ago
      > None of the technology is superior to what Huawei or Samsung or even Motorola is selling. Can you expand on what you mean by "the technology"?
      - semi-extrinsic 7y ago
        As an end user: are the things you can do with it the same as with anothet phone? Can you take equally good photos with another brand of phone? Yes. Can you run the same AAA games? Yes. Can you run the same apps (apart from ones Apple deliberately limits to iOS)? Yes. Do you get the same network speed? Yes. I'm not saying there aren't small differences. The secure enclave is very nice, and I understand that for audio creation it's significantly better than Android phones. But these advantages in some niches (and disadvantages in others, like cost, storage, display size etc) are not sufficient to say that "the technology is clearly superior". It's not, it's just different.
        mceachen 7y ago
        Agreed that the end experience is similar, but holy moly, the latest CPU benchmarks for the iPhone 11 are pretty amazing.
        semi-extrinsic 7y ago
        There's already benchmarks leaked from next year's Snapdragon 865 that beat the A13, FWIW.
    - simonh 7y ago
      The tech in iPhones is so ludicrously ahead of anything else, it's not even funny anymore. Their CPUs are 3 years ahead at least. They have proprietary low power, high reliability Flash memory tech. They have unique 3D scanning face identification tech and secure ID data storage. They have far superior battery life for the battery weight. The camera systems are best in class, I would agree several other phones have camera tech and software that is close enough for most people, but not for everyone. They have Samsung made screens that even Samsung can't use, some of the tech and QA process is proprietary to Apple. Also the sensor precision and calibration is considerably better on iPhones than Android phones and highly consistent across models. There's a photo of a bunch of phones showing their magnetometers, with all the iPhones pointing in the same direction, and the Android phones pointing all over the place.
  - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
    The iphone’s hardware is commodity or worse—they give you basically no choice for form factor or functionality beyond the disk size. You buy it for the software.
    - dodobirdlord 7y ago
      > The iphone’s hardware is commodity or worse The iphone has the best mobile processing chips and it's not even close. The intel modems they use are inferior to qualcomm's modems, but "commodity or worse" is a bizarre take.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
        Better in a very limited sense. It’s a smartphone. Nobody cares about the chips. Everyone makes the same phone: screen, battery, antenna, camera. When it dies you buy another that is mostly the same. You’re browsing the web and taking photos; why would you care about who manufactured the cpu? Software, brand, and culture play much larger roles than a milquetoast smartphone offering. What’s this chip that customers are raving about? The only points of continually tweaking the hardware are to shorten the lifespan and remove the ability to customize and repair it with any real scale.