A) Iâm ashamed to say I clicked on this.
B) Technically we used a ârocket engineâ to spin a person in an office chair when I was in high school physical science class by releasing some pressure on a fire extinguisherâŚ
Well itâs no more sci-fi than anything else about yet another one of Teslaâs nonexistent cars.
Non-existent cars? Iâm not sure I follow.
The Roadster doesnât exist yet, for all the performance claims theyâve made. Neither does the Model Y, either version of their semi, or the $35,000 mainstream Model 3- every 3 theyâve sold to date has been the upgraded $50,000 version. Failing to meet these goals really does a number on investor confidence.
Thereâs a reason the rest of the automotive industry doesnât talk price or performance until they have a car to sell.
I was hoping to get discussion about the practical, technical or legal aspects.
Thrusters can help make a car start, stop or turn faster.
But are they street-legal without a change in the laws?
Does the propellant tank have to be refilled or can the car refill it with a compressor?
As far as I know, thereâr no laws against venting compressed air in the road code. Vehicles with air brakes do it as course.
Musk appears to be suggesting the COPV will be refilled by [the car] during âless than full powerâ moments. I mean, we already use KERS and its ilk (including regenerative braking versions in hybrid cars) and, honestly, using compressed air for a KERS-like energy recovery system is not new idea. I suppose planning to vent it through a nozzle to directly provide thrust is⌠color me skeptical of the whole idea, made more so by the fact that itâs Musk trying to cover his ass for lack of Teslaâs meeting strategic goals in the last 2 or so years by distracting people with a shiny bauble (can you say Amazon Drone Delivery, folks?).
If itâs stupid but it works moves the stock favorably is it really all that stupid?
I didnât say it was stupid. Or if I did, I didnât mean to. Musk doesnât generally do stupid. Disingenuous, perhaps. Hyperbolic. But he certainly knows how line his pockets. And itâs not by being stupidâŚbut that doesnât make me impressed, necessarily, either.
Donât expect you to be impressed by the hand-wavery. Iâm not. Desinging and manufacturing cars is hard, and while there are some opportunities the big entrenched players leave on the table - be they market niches, technologies, production methods, whatnot - thereâs no combination of opportunities that equate to the kind of groundswell that Silicon Valley would have themselves thinking is prime for disruption. Indeed, huge capital requirements, enormous workforces, lingering commitments, rigid definitions of success/failure (unlike software, hitting 65% of scope at 200% of original timeline and 300% of budget isnât a success) and fairly intense regulation are all inherent to the industry and conveniently things Silicon Valley is allergic to.
Donât have a dog in the fight - donât play the markets thus own no stock (unless one of my 401k funds is frisky) - and Iâm too cheap/accustomed to reliability to purchase an example of their product. Iâd like to own a long-range BEV someday, but doubt it will be a Tesla at the rate things are going.
Eventually the halo will wear off and Muskâs Twitter stunts will stop moving the news coverage/distracting analysts/bumping the stock price. Or maybe theyâll start delivering without trying to reinvent auto manufacturing on a (relative) shoestring budget and a celebrity Twitter account.
Self-driving cars is one area in which Silicon Valley will make a difference.
Personal transportation may be very different in the future and big auto may have no part of it.
I donât expect Silicon Valley to involve themselves in production of automobiles for the reasons I cited; their investors wonât tolerate such low margins. I can forsee them as suppliers of sorts selling software, sensors, turnkey autonomous systems; however licensing those to traditional suppliers seems more likely. Or they might operate fleets.
To that end, I forsee a similar business model in Teslaâs future. In 10 years, Tesla wonât be making cars, theyâll be using that ridiculously large building in Nevada to crank out batteries for companies that are good at making cars. Iâll be honest, I donât know if Elon Musk has even realized that at this point- the endless stream of nonsense from his twitter feed really make me wonder if heâs capable of thinking more than 2 weeks into the future- but itâs the only long-term model that makes sense for them. The rest of the industry is investing hard in EV and self-driving technologies, the only niches Tesla ever had, and they have the scale and engineering talent pool to make it cheap and profitable. Thatâs gonna knock little Tesla and their refurbished Toyota factory right off the map as a volume carmaker.
Their best long term move is to leverage their great gains in battery manufacturing efficiency (in theory; but the size of the factory will probably help in any case) and supply batteries, controls, and charging systems to the likes of GM and Ford.
But, as ever, I suspect this latest tweet from Ol Musky is just another inane blathering to get the eccentric billionaire Iron Man cult of personality hyped back up after the recent love lost to stockholders loudly calling his ability to run the company into question, and his meltdown over media criticism of his company. And in keeping with every time Musky Boy says heâs gonna do something absurd, heâll have someone build him something that isnât really the thing he said he was building, and the fanboys will gush.
Kinda like that $500 weed burner torch thatâs âtechnically not a flamethrowerâ and also actually not a flamethrower.
A plausible scenario, for sure. Teslaâs failure to get Model 3 production to their stated goal nearly a year on borders on abject; Musk may soon run out of publicity stunts to distract the media, analysts, and shareholders. The Model Y was looking to be their first true mass production vehicle. The Semi has turned out to be a publicity stunt (as an added bonus, the companies that âpre-orderedâ those units got some nice press out of the deal). Havenât kept up on the Roadster - but seems like they could make something Model S plus-esque in small numbers sold at astronomical sums to generate some cash and claim a win.
The next few months may well be telling. Silicon Valley can move fast and break things because most of those things are software that can be patched overnight. And Tesla has taken some of this to their cars with OTA updates and some other trickery allowing for feature differentiation without having to produce different SKUs. But there are hard limits to this; OTA updates wonât fix bad assembly techniques and other hardware defects nor can they address enough failure modes to compensate for pushing a beta product out into consumersâ laps.
If Tesla is going to make it, they might need to adopt a more disciplined approach like, well, other automakers - along with setting the expectation of more reasonable margins.
I donât expect Teslaâs autonomous driving projects to amount to much. Last I read up on their efforts, theyâre still trying to achieve parity with what they were able to achieve with their former supplier MobilEye. GM and Google are way ahead of what Tesla was able to achieve - likely because theyâre using LADAR to get granular geometry as opposed to the fuzzier situational awareness that radar, cameras, and ultrasound produces.
Tesla was arguably able to launch the initial Roadster and Model S because they broke with convention and used commodity cells - use existing production capabilities and supply lines then scale with volume. The conventional industry approach would be to sink tremendous capital and engineering effort into bespoke large-format cells which are more efficient, provided one can avoid Boeing-like problems with thermal runaway and other liabilities associated with serial design vs parallel design.
But they also seem to be all in on battery packs utilizing commodity 18650 / 21700 cylindrical cells (at least for their cars; not so sure about their utility-scale batteries). These make granular scaling simpler, provide a degree of redundancy in case of cell degradation/failure, and also help with thermal management. But they will always cost a bit more per unit of performance and will also perform a bit worse per unit of volume/mass than large-format cells.
The personality cult is indeed breathtaking to behold.
Boring Companyâs first product. Wasnât at all related to what they did, but it did at least produce ⌠vapor ⌠in operation. But perhaps Musk should focus more on the business of running two companies and drop said vanity project / hobby.
Everything this guy does is a vanity project. Letâs bear in mind, in 12 years, Tesla have posted 2 quarterly profits. And thatâs his practical venture.