Musk Says Tesla Cars Will Go 620 Miles per Charge in 2 Years, Autonomous in 3
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https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/3lc8hu/tesla_m...
My observation, based on the driver's comments and the Tesla efficiency chart, is that you could go close to 500 miles at 30 mph, which is almost a reasonable speed.
Note the context that the title comes with. Tesla cars will break 620 miles when driving slowly (under 30 mph), not 620 miles using the EPA rating which is commonly used when addressing this issue.
"As readers might recall, a new record was established last month by one enthusiastic Model S owner, who drove a painful 24-miles-per hour to make it a stunning 452.8 miles on a single charge. (The car is advertised as having a 265-mile range.)
Musk didn’t elaborate on whether someone would need to drive just as slowly to reach 620 miles in 2017. We’d guess that’s not what he had in mind, though."
That's commitment.
"1000 kilometers... hmm. Well, it depends under what circumstances for a thousand kilometers. As it is, the record right now for model s is 800 kilometers (496 miles). That's the furthest that anyone has driven a model s. ... Now, in order to do that, they did drive at a relatively slow speed, so, you know, we're talking, I think they drive at 40 or 50 kilometers an hour (25-30mph) or something like that. But I think, my guess, we could probably break a thousand kilometers within a year or two. ... 5 to 10% a year"
It seems, to me, slow driving ("circumstances") is what he had in mind.
Why in the world does it matter at all if you can drive many miles at an unrealistic average speed? You call that driving?
Same thing on a bicycle, over 25mph is much much harder than under because of air making a wall.
If driverless cars are a "thing" in the future then what is Uber's USP? Why would you use Uber rather than one of a dozen other companies? Is it just their capital advantage? Their network of now unemployed drivers? Just the name and nothing else?
What is it exactly that keeps Uber in business with driverless cars?
In rural areas, an autonomous vehicle would need to travel long distances to pick up and drop off folks. It could be prohibitively expensive or inconvenient. People also use vehicles for other things in these areas, both work and play, which do not fit into the taxi model.
In suburbia, the taxi idea could work, but there might be advantages to owning your own vehicle. Maybe a family will own one autonomous vehicle, just one, but it would be in constant use throughout the day: mom goes to work, dad picks up donuts for coworkers, son goes to school, daughter goes to soccer practice, son goes to track practice, dad goes to get groceries, mom goes to get dinner, son goes to friend's house, daughter goes to football game, mom goes out to gym, etc. You'd have your one family car zipping back and forth between all these events in the family, picking people up, dropping them off, going off to do something else, and coming back again. Having an autonomous car in the family could make sense depending upon the costs.
* Why not put it to work. It could transport people or packages during that time.
* Mostly, in such a future, you probably won't own a car. You'll rent or lease access, and the price to take a nice autonomous mini-bus will be super low while remaining convenient.
Others I'm sure there is a generic lower limit "clause".
I've never seen a state that didn't have a "at a speed safe with current rode conditions". So, that you can still get a ticket going 65 in a 65 but there happens to be a blizzard going on.
I doubt any state requires you to go exactly the posted speed limit.
The posted speed is usually an upper bound (though in some cases only a presumptive one, not a conclusive one, the way the law is actually written.)
> You could get a ticket for going slower if you are impeding traffic trying to safely go the posted speed.
You can get a ticket for impeding traffic, but usually going slower than the limit is not sufficient for that. (And may not even be necessary.)
> Are there roads in the US that specifically allow a range of speeds (beyond the variation seen because human drivers don't follow the law)?
Every highway (which is much broader than freeways) in California that doesn't have an expressly posted minimum speed limit, plus every one that does have an expressly posted minimum speed limit that isn't identical to the posted maximum limit. (California Vehicle Code Sec. 22400 allows a minimum speed limit to be established and posted -- which is still, where established, a soft limit -- and provides a violation for impeding traffic with or without such a limit, but does not set the posted maximum speed limit as a minimum speed limit, soft or otherwise, where no minimum speed limit is posted.)
Wouldn't driving below the posted speed limit when there are no hazardous conditions fall under "as to impede or block the normal and reasonable movement of traffic"?
Not normally, driving below the posted maximum speed limit would not, in and of itself.
It might -- and, given the soft nature of upper limits, it might even without driving below the posted maximum -- in the presence of other traffic, depending on the road (what will impede traffic on a single-lane road is different than what will impede traffic on a multilane road) and particular traffic conditions.
Could/would they drive well below the speed limit without legal problem when no traffic is around? I imagine they could, but I'm less interested in that (but understand my question was ambiguous).
Could you, in the same situation, also get a ticket for following the traffic—i.e. breaking the speed limit?
Some speed limits in California are soft (it depends which of the provisions allowing speed limits they are adopted under, or whether they are the default limits.)
It is legally possible for traffic to exceed the speed limit where those limits are soft without necessarily being illegal, unreasonable, or safe.
It may, in some circumstances, therefore, possible to impede reasonable flow of traffic while driving at the speed limit in those cases, thus breaking the law.
> Could you, in the same situation, also get a ticket for following the traffic—i.e. breaking the speed limit?
Yes, but if the circumstances were such that someone could be impeding traffic at the speed limit, it would also necessarily be true that it would possible for you to exceed the speed limit and not be breaking the law. But the burden of proof would be on you to show that the driving was safe.
http://www.mit.edu/%7Ejfc/NMA/730CMR.html
Most of I-93 in NH has a posted minimum of 45.
http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub...
I don't know what, if anything, this implies for autonomous truck speeds, but it's something.
Freight trains in Europe are much faster[1] -- but that could be because they often need to fit in with the schedule of passenger trains using the same lines (which themselves require the track to be maintained to a high standard).
[1] Citation needed, I only have observations of them going at a decent pace through stations I'm waiting at.
Intuitively, I'd expect that once the train has accelerated, it will keep its momentum very nicely, and (if electric) can easily return energy if it does need to slow down.
I can't find a real-world coasting distance for a train on level track, only reports during accidents/near misses -- 5km under emergency braking on a slight downhill slope, for one! [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_resistance [2] https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...
Then to stop it will take t = v/.0004g which means that you will travel vt/2 in that time.
For example, if a train is cruising along at 30 mph (44 fps) then it takes 44 ft/s / .0004(32.2 ft/s^2) = 3416 seconds to stop which means that the train travels 14.2 miles under ideal conditions.
http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2008/02/european-vs-am...
That's probably exactly why freight trains are faster in Europe:
> In fact, the freight rail system is so efficient that to some extent we've obviated the need for the Panama Canal. Many Asian container ships bound for Europe actually make port in Seattle or Vancouver, offload their containers onto trains which shoot across the country to New York or another eastern port where they are reloaded on ships for the trip to Europe.
Though I suspect soon enough the Northwest Passage will be clear for enough of the year that most freighters will just sail through the Arctic. Perhaps both Panama's government and North America's railroads should be pushing hard for a carbon tax.
I also think truck drivers already adjust their speed depending on economic reality. If, say, you are transporting fresh flowers towards an airport, arriving in time is more important than when you are transporting furniture to a furniture shop.
That certainly is true at the extreme ends. Drivers who drive to be transplanted organs between hospitals get special training to drive fast, while drivers driving garbage to a landfill likely will not be pressed for a timely delivery (although I do not rule out that someone who knows the latter business will tell me that missing one's reserved spot for delivery at a landfill can cost a lot of money)
One of the difficulties I am having is that I’m not aware of another advanced technology that just popped into the consumer market overnight like we’ve been told to expect with self driving cars.
There’s always a gradual evolution of a technology over time. There’s very little of that evolution seen with this technology. There’s self-parallel parking cars, there’s autopilot-style cruise control systems, but we’re going to instantly leap from that to fully autonomous driving?
It's like aliens visiting and giving us some far-future tech overnight.
The cars may well be substantially better than that right now, but they don't have a million miles of experience in more challenging conditions.
Google (as well as some auto manufacturers) have made impressive progress. I'm actually encouraged that full autonomy (as in I can legally read a book) on a subset of limited access highways in appropriate weather conditions is something we might see within 10 years on a mainstream luxury car.
I am sadly far more skeptical about the general case.
If you had lived and owned a car in Mountain View, you would have been used to driving alongside fully autonomous cars for years now, and the move wouldn't seem nearly as instant.
As a side-note, I love that I can't tell if a comment is true or sarcastic-faux-science-fiction, and it ends up being true. We live in a really cool time.
I'm surprised there aren't more videos like this, though.
That said, not quite sure what else he could really do. Car production cycle are long and capital heavy. The buying cost is also very large, so to maintain a media presence you can't really iterate every year like with other tech widgets.
Other manufacturers make prototypes between model refreshes and go to various car shows, so far Musk is able to that by just talking to the press. Good for him, saves Tesla a bunch of money until the competition in electric car market really picks up !
Yup, very much like a politician. You get the sense that he is playing their game. They'll give him a hand but he has to speak their language. Promises made to the public are more like optimistic goals in which potential complications aren't accounted for and instead reserved as explanations for revised promises.
I'm a Musk fan, don't get me wrong, but there is a level of dream fuelling manipulation behind his approach that feels political.
That whole [i]warning the public about dangerous AI thing[/i] actually felt like a big political money push to me. Designed to overwork the imaginations of the public and get government more interested in throwing money at the tech.
These cars are going to be scanning constantly in nice weather, it shouldn't be a stretch to then figure out relative position with GPS and then use the distance to 'known' trees / signs / landmarks from previous trips to determine lane position.
I'm sure there are barren areas where this would be tough (I've driven I-80 through snowy Nebraska about a dozen times en route to ski vacations in Colorado) but "stay between the snow banks" should be a decent start for autonomous driving.
There's a mostly straight street on my very ordinary and safe commute home. When it's raining at night and the road is wet and reflecting street lights, it's actually very difficult to see the lane markings and make sure you're sticking to your lane. And in those conditions, it's not always safe to be constantly checking your blind spot for a car beside you. This is in an urban environment, no snow, no crests or crazy curves, no risk of fallen trees, and I find that a stressful drive despite having driven that road thousands of times.
I now wonder if you will just pay $199 for the "blizzard package" or something. I suspect Tesla wouldn't do something like this, but just like Mosaic, they get to shape a lot of the early thought behind this.
If we assume that either all cars have the software priced in, a "good actor" would allow you to pay less for "blizzard navigation software" if you lived in S. California.
At this point, Tesla is so new that they will make it as attractive as possible and push all of their updates for free. I also have a high degree of trust, at least relative to other auto companies, in Tesla. One would imagine GM, or another less scrupulous company would try to do something like this if they were the front runners.
edit: Point taken though. I am also not keen on some of the other car and boat manufacturers producing identical engines, and then having you "pay" to unlock more horepower.
Have any manufacturers even fixed cruise control for icy roads? That should be trivial, but no car I've ever driven has handled it.
My biggest gripe about hearing about the invention of the automobile is the lack of mechanics and gas stations.
My biggest gripe about hearing about the invention of the internet is the lack of home computer ownership.
etc. etc.
As an historic note with little relevance to your point, this wasn't solved until the US entered the second world war and the government built a bunch of them for heavy bombers, which were later converted into civilian use.
That's why the flying boats, like the Boeing 314 Clipper, were the go-to plane for long distance travel pre-war. There's no need for a runway when you can land and take off on water.
"lack of mechanics"
This isn't really true. The early cars could be fixed by most any mechanic or blacksmith. Remember, farm equipment was already pretty mechanically complicated.
The lack of gas stations was much more critical.
The point is that you must give new technology time to grow and become mainstream before you can expect them to be everything for everyone.
Lots of new tech will never be everything for everyone
At best, treat it as comment about how hard it is to think what detractors to X might have said before X became wide-spread. I believe your example of 'lack of mechanics' is poorly chosen; akin to saying 'My biggest gripe with hearing about fully autonomous cars is that they will be so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe would own them.'
As a real-world examples I think are better, 'My biggest gripe with hearing about telephony is there won't be enough operators to handle the number of calls.' 'My biggest gripe with hearing about computers is that they are too bulky.' 'My biggest gripe with television is I'm at work when my favorite show is on.'
I wonder just what he means by "full autonomy" though. When he refers to "autonomous driving...for highways" that means that the car manages the steering and acceleration but the driver is alert and involved at all times, and ready to take over any time the car can't handle something. I wonder if he's referring to a similar concept that works in more situations, rather than a car that can drive with nobody in it.
Or he might just be optimistic and mean full automatic driving. Hard to tell.
Self driving cars have been driven up and down various parts of the SF bay region for several years now. Google's self driving cars have driven over 1 million miless. They report that their vehicles have been involved in 12 accidents, none of which are the fault of the vehicle's self driving capabilities.
The only reason they will appear to 'pop' into the consumer market overnight is because this technology is politically charged and simultaneously so important to society that it is being overengineered to improve success and safety. The moment self driving cars has its first accident after being released to consumers, the media will likely flip, ignoring mountains of data demonstrating how much more safe these vehicles are to provide a sensationalized report on the dangers of self driving cars. The safer they are and the more data backing this up, the less likely this will derail the technology.
1 million miles: https://plus.google.com/+SelfDrivingCar/posts/iMHEMH9crJb
12 accidents: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-google-cars-20150603-s...
CMU ALV: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/alv/www/index.html
What do these cars (with no steering wheel) do, if involved in an accident?
How would the owner / police move the car to the side of the road?
2009, humans in US:
185 crashes per 100 million VMT
1.13 deaths per 100 million VMT
all weather, incl. intoxication, bad luck, etc.
current google car tech relies on brute forcing visual mapping, breaks down in snow.
self-driving cars are controlled by software, written by humans, riddled with bugs. see Nest on how awesome this works for physical stuff. the aircraft industry has the correct coding practices, NONE of which are being applied by the current research teams. multi-redundant systems in play, with even more training for the operator. competing with human drivers is really hard. a shit ton of signal processing, etc. going on. all this techy-BS is belittling the awesomeness of the human brain and central nervous system.
1. Autonomous google crashes have been entirely small rear end fender benders. It might be 10x or more safer when accounting for this. You must look at the speeds and types of crashes and account for this in the safety calculation.
2. For safety it's less relevant but for insurance purposes Google has yet to (technically/legally) cause a crash so already it's cheaper for your wallet than a human driver. Progress =)
Do you have any other information?
but i guess even this will get downvoted, rather than PROVEN wrong. why even bother debating anything on HN anymore?
This should be included in the safety comparison as looking at raw crash number is not enough.
It's also important to take note where the driving is. In densely populated regions, you are more likely to have minor accidents such as fender benders than on the open road. However, the open road is more likely to get you killed if you are involved in an accident due to speed.
All this "techy-BS" is not belittling humans by creating self driving cars. I strongly believe the opposite is true, humans are amazing because we can build artificial intelligent systems to handle these kinds of tasks for us and let us focus on bigger and better problems than steering a car. Your same argument falls flat with other technologies. Why have a computer add numbers when we have a wonderful brain that can do the same? I argue that it is because we build systems to augment and work around our deficiencies. One of those deficiencies is our driving skill. Over 30,000 in the US alone die due to auto accidents. Self driving cars has the potential to eliminate most of these deaths. Ideally, we'll get to a point where a death on the road makes national news because of its rarity.
In addition to cars that park themselves and cruise control that handles full stop/start, modern cars also keep you in the lane, prevent imminent collisions, monitor blindspots, detect pedestrians and more. If you can't see autonomous vehicles coming in the near future you aren't looking.
On the other hand, there is one interesting, unique aspect to the approach that Tesla is taking: their cars all have internet access, and could potentially learn from each other. Within a year they're going to have partial autonomous driving on over 100k cars in the wild, which is going to allow Tesla to generate an enormous amount of training data very quickly.
I'm no expert, so I don't really know how valuable this kind of data would be for building new autonomous driving systems, but it seems like it could have the potential to dramatically accelerate their progress in this area.
A new 2x battery technology seems unlikely. There's nothing that good coming on line within three years. Panasonic is already setting up Tesla's battery cell plant, so that decision has been made. (Panasonic makes the cells, Tesla packages them; many of the employees at Tesla's "superfactory" work for Panasonic.)
On my EV, I can drastically change the battery's range (from 80 to 120 predicted miles) based on driving behavior, much of which could be "shaped" by software. "Softwareing" 50% more distance out of that stored energy matters.
There's more potential for various optimization in an internal combustion engine.
EVs have been designed from the get go with most of the possible software optimizations...
i'd say giving the amount of money on the table, not only 2x, more like 10x is very likely. If you look at the actual amount of the lithium ions and actually participating oxidizer in the battery - it is 5% at best out of the total battery weight. So even modest progress at the decreasing of the weight of the "non-active" components would lead to multiple "x" of capacity/weight improve. And this is without even getting into metal-air territory.
http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/battery_statistic...
(I'd be interested to see a graph that includes the last ten years....)
I'd call that a considerable improvement, albeit nowhere near 10x.
It would be fantastic if this was a problem where solutions are accelerated significantly (ie. 10x jump in a few years) by throwing more money at it, but I am not sure it's the case.
Here is a relevant Quora thread:
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-battery-energy-density...
Compare to a similarly magic CPU. That would be cool, but it wouldn't change the world. (Until somebody figures out how to run superhuman AI on it, anyway.)
1MWh is 3600000000 or 3.6GJ. 3.6GJ/L is twice the energy density of Uranium, and 3.6GJ/kg is 40 times the specific energy (energy/mass). We wouldn't need a power grid anymore because we could just charge batteries on the moon and lob them to earth.
If we're in dreamland, we can just think about what'd happen with instantaneous subspace energy transmission. We could get rid of batteries and electrical grids altogether and we'd just turn the moon, mars and mercury into giant solar arrays. I'd wager that's more likely to happen than a 1L/1kg 3.6GJ battery too.
>1MWh is 3600000000 or 3.6GJ. 3.6GJ/L is twice the energy density of Uranium, and 3.6GJ/kg is 40 times the specific energy (energy/mass). We wouldn't need a power grid anymore because we could just charge batteries on the moon and lob them to earth.
well, these densities is fusion energy. No need to charge at all. Just scoop up some He-3 on the moon :)
The problem with reducing the mass of the non-Li portion of the battery is that all of the practical candidates for the anode are metal oxides (e.g. Co, Fe, Mn oxides). Unless the whole metal oxide motif is replaced, you can't really achieve significant mass savings. There are research groups and startups working on alternate anode and cathode materials but there are tradeoffs in power density and safety. Also given that these approaches are still in the research phase, it'll take at least a couple of years before they reach commercial testing.
Aerodynamic resistance is key, and it goes up with the square of your speed, so driving slowly lets you go much farther. If you want to set a distance record in an EV, you want to drive around 25-30MPH.
The current record in a Tesla is over 500 miles, while the official range is under 300. Musk's comment was about how ongoing small battery improvements will allow the record distance, driven at 25-30MPH, to break 1000km in the next couple of years.
But all the idiot news organizations out there either misunderstood it entirely or saw it as an opportunity to drum up page views, and are either outright presenting it as a practical range, or are at least not trying very hard to present the real context, as is happening with this article.
Quoted from http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-lif... :
Right now, Musk says Tesla could make their cars with a 500 mile range—they don’t do it because it would increase the cost of the car.
How can they pack more cells into the already-crammed, heavy underbody battery pack, unless they also raise battery efficiency?...
Perhaps Tesla is transitioning into a battery manufacturer that makes cars on the side.
Reducing weight is a very difficult issue here, all manufacturers try to reduce the weight of their cars and lugging a thousand pounds of batteries doesn't help. Frankly I think all electrics are not ready for prime time, improved REX solutions are better. Traditional engines perform badly accelerating from a stop but can be very efficient one speed improves. So some combination similar to the Volt but with more base EV is probably going to be a sweet spot. (figure 100 EV/300REX).
Plus this doesn't even touch the elephant in the room, long distance trucking where weight is always an issue and range. Neither of which favor batteries.
I would much prefer Elon solve a more constant problem that would start the next generation off on the right track, Tesla needs to lead the industry in electrifying school buses.
It wasn't like Elon made a special announcement to tell the world about this. The press picks up anything he says and makes it into a big "announcement". I saw several headlines that made it seem like an official announcement. I guess he should be more careful when he's thinking out loud.
He was asked about 1,000km range:
1,000 kilometers... hmm...
Well, it depends under what circumstances for
a thousand kilometers. As it is, the record right
now for Model S is 800 kilometers (496 miles).
That's the furthest that anyone has driven a Model S.
Now, in order to do that, they did drive at a relatively
slow speed, so, you know, we're talking, I think they
drive at 40 or 50 kilometers an hour (25-30mph) or
something like that.
But I think, my guess, we could probably break
a thousand kilometers within a year or two..
5% - 10% per year.With a price drop due to the gigafactory, they might even be able to do it for the same cost of the current models.
Perhaps someone more knowledgeable could chime in about whether or not that'd be possible. It seems like there could be enough room for another layer of batteries, with only a modest change to the shape of the car.
Even if you could, if you add 1200 pounds, power usage will go up.
So, you will have to change the design of the car to accommodate the larger battery weight. It is unlikely that you can do that without adding further weight, increasing power usage further, or tremendously increasing the price of the car.
Of course, I do not forsee this being a cost effective approach, even without the regularty hurdles of highway speed docking.
It makes as much sense as calculating Delta-V of a car.
It's going to give you something like the equation for max velocity/altitude from a rocket, even if not precisely the same.
When every pound of fuel requires 5 pounds to lift it, things go one way. When every pound of fuel requires a tenth of a pound to push it, things go another way.
I am serious about the self driving 4 wheeled trailer full of batteries. Given the irrational claim that an electric car is useless to (all) Americans unless it can drive over 1000 miles per day, the best way to fight that irrational claim is to provide an equally irrational solution. So the proper way to fight an irrational thought experiment of needing to drive over existing electric car range, is provide the irrational solution of something like "mid-air refueling" but mid-highway instead of mid-air and electrical power instead of Jet-A. I've toyed with the idea of patenting it and publicizing it to make a political statement, but I generate good ideas a lot faster than I implement them, so ....
No need to own the self driving battery trailer, just pop up a smartphone app and your GPS talks to the closest charger's GPS and nature takes its course. With advanced enough communications it can drive in formation with a semi-autonomous car, tailgating is perfectly safe at 85 if your reflexes are faster than a couple nanoseconds and the existing wireless charging systems means the charger trailer doesn't need to actually touch your car.
Its amusing to think of a charge cart like this rolling around a parking lot as a public service to attract shoppers. No need to pull ultra high current charge cables to every lamp post or embed chargers in asphalt.
With a battery-powered sedan, you could go much further without bothering to detach the trailer, because it wouldn't contribute much to the air resistance.
You need to be driving in near-vacuum if you want it to be about fuel pushing fuel.
You can make something very sleek, slow, ultra-high-distance and invoke the rocket equation... but it's not a sedan.
Sure you could dump an extra 1200lbs on the Tesla but you'd have to strategically dump another 300lb of metal at the vehicle itself if you want the chassis to last.
I couldn't find part numbers for any wearable suspension/steering parts so I can't compare t to other vehicles but I'd bet that the chassis is very finely tuned to the weight that it has to carry and that there's not much wiggle room for extra while maintaining a the designed life expectancy.
I couldn't find anyone talking about replacing long-term wear items (I didn't look hard) which does seem to indicate that they're overbuilt. I can see why Tesla may want to give people a good impression of EVs and not want to take the risk of using anything but an overbuild chassis on which to make that point (the Chevy volt on the other hand...)
Seeing that reaction from him helps explain in my mind how he's been able to accomplish as much as he has. It really feels like he's a man on a mission and that he's going to run through walls to accomplish it.
Other comments have compared him to a politician. I think that's laughable. He has a consistent track record of 'doing.' Politicians have not earned that reputation.
Why rush out to buy a Tesla today when you can get a far better Tesla in 2 or 3 years?
Watch the video, this question is addressed in the last few minutes. Transcript: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10299634
On a side note; you are basing your expensive decision on an arguably click-bait title!?
I want to pay for "battery as a service", I don't need to own a battery, I don't want to charge it, just bill me by the KWh used (which should better be competitive to gas).
http://fortune.com/2015/06/10/teslas-battery-swap-is-dead/
(Although the business model didn't work as you describe it.)
It seems as though, for now, the supercharger network is good enough.
As long as all Teslas come pre-equipped with a very expensive battery, it makes little economic sense to let it depreciate while you are paying to use another battery.
What Tesla discovered is that bootstrapping the battery swap infrastructure off of battery owners doesn't work, since owners are reluctant to pay for swapping out their battery over recharging the one they own.
(Although, arguably, it was also launched too early from a technology perspective.)
Renault in Europe are part-way there with their EVs ( the Fluence, Zoë and Twizy ) You buy the car but pay a battery-lease to Renault each month, when the battery capacity falls below 80% they call you in to a garage and swap-out the pack.
You still have to pay for charging, though.
The Renault approach appears to be appreciated by people who are dabbling in EVs as a hobby ( e.g. wealthy folk in leafy areas of London ) but is offputting to people looking to replace their internal-combustion cars. £70 minimum per month for rental + cost of charging quickly exceeds the cost of diesel in the UK.
We'll need to start short selling car insurance companies soon.
By this flow, the US will be the last country with them.
In my country, car insurence is mandatory and I don't see it being removed with autonomous cars. So the income for insurance companies remains similar. Crashes will be reduced however, so the expenses for the insurance companies will go down and thus profit margins will go up.
It's medical stuff that actually costs the insurance companies money. Look at modern cars. The engineers aren't the ones drooling over 10+ airbags. Setting of 10 explosions close to people in a safe way is a PITA and the hardware takes up precious weight and space that could be used for something else. Consumers aren't demanding cars that get crushed like a tin can totaled out when you get rear ended at 10mph or back into a pole. The "safety at the cost of all else" designs that have been creeping into cars do keep people out of the (expensive) hospital but at a highly increased cost of ownership and with sacrificed performance in other areas (including efficiency).
The first I in IIHS doesn't stand for consumer. That's not who they're trying to protect.
How much do insurance companies make from meteor insurance or air plane crash insurance? Very little. These events are so rare that overhead costs cut into profit margins.
During this first decade, most cars on the roads will still be human-driven. I don't see the insurance end-user cost being decreased much for the autonomy-capable car owners. If anything, I see it costing more during the very first years until there's more statistics & operational experience. So even if there's some price reduction during the later years of the first decade, I think it will probably only even out with the initial premium, at best.
As for new overhead costs, I guess during the initial years there could be a learning period of how to handle crash drama where the car owners don't agree as easily to what happened and who's at fault. Those same first years the A.I. will probably be pretty buggy as well, with some surprising crashes.
However I think the insurance companies will account for these new overheads and raise the price accordingly.
Overall, I don't think investing in car insurance is a goldmine opportunity. I do think that they will continue to make nice profits and definitely shouldn't be sold short. At least not for the reason of autonomous cars by themselves, maybe sell short a selection of companies whose management you think will be unable to adapt.
When oil reaches $100 again, what other new technologies will be viable? What about $200, $300? This could easily happen due to decreasing oil reserves and increasing demand for a carbon tax due to climate change. Many assume that the path from here is EV.
But at $200, $300, the technologies to make oil may become viable. There are technologies right now (I think Audi demonstrated something last year) to take CO2 from the air and combine with hydrogen to make oil. This kind of technology also goes very well with renewable power like wind and solar. The big issue with wind and solar is storing excess electric generation. Most think batteries are the solution. But what about just making oil instead?
All of this works directly with the huge current infrastructure and investment in oil and cars. It even provides a much easier solution to reducing climate change than EV. Just create a government regulation that requires all gas to be at least 10% from carbon neutral source. They already did it with ethanol (E10). And if more CO2 reduction is required, they can just keep increasing the percentage mix.
When all of these technologies are viable, gas will probably be very expensive. I don't know what the number will be, but let's imagine it's $10 per gallon. That's very expensive, but is it enough for everyone to throw away their cars and buy EV? Is it enough to pay the premium for EV?
Poe's law.
Nature won't wait for us to upgrade and change our infrastructure to be EV friendly. So what if there's a way to keep the current system but reduce CO2 at the same time? Fracking was once laughed at as not economically viable. Then it suddenly was. Technologies to make oil is now laughed at. Will it still be when oil is at $200 or $300?
Obviously opinions will vary from person to person, but a lot of people already consider Tesla's Model S to be the best car out there, not as an environmentally-friendly EV, but just as a plain EV.
If gasoline magically became 50 cents/gallon tomorrow and was sourced entirely from carbon-neutral and environmentally-friendly places, I certainly would not trade in my Tesla for a gas car just because of that.
The problems with EVs at this point are range, cost, and charging infrastructure. Range and infrastructure are negligible problems for Tesla for many people right now, and are being improved constantly. Cost is not negligible for most, but that's being addressed, slowly.
This is how new approaches enter. They start off with something that's very expensive but clearly better, then work their way down. For some reason it took Tesla to do this, rather than one of the existing car makers.
An aside regarding ethanol: this is widely regarded as a complete boondoggle in the US with no environmental benefit whatsoever, because ethanol takes about as much energy to produce as you get out of it. It's only carbon neutral if you completely ignore all the industry that goes into agriculture.
http://www.streetinsider.com/Corporate+News/Tesla+%28TSLA%29...
http://www.rgj.com/story/money/economy/reno-rebirth/2015/09/...
Very recently Tesla agreed to start buying lithium in Nevada[1] which is also where the new battery factory will be.
[0] http://www.thestreet.com/story/12758999/1/2013-top-8-lithium... [1] http://fortune.com/2015/09/16/tesla-lithium-gigafactory-neva...
Sure, they'll test it on snow. And I'll probably trust it on snow, eventually. But I'll trust it on snow later than I'll trust it on dry roads.
Uber's map system can't even correctly get me from my house to my work without leading the driver into an alley.
I think we'll get 95% of the way to autonomous, but I sort of doubt we'll have a car that you can, for example, sleep in while it's driving you around.
I hope I'm wrong. I'd love to buy one in 3-6 years.
He did say regulators would take another 1-3 years. So 4-6 before, you can "operate" an autonomous car.
> Musk didn’t elaborate on whether someone would need to drive just as slowly to reach 620 miles in 2017. We’d guess that’s not what he had in mind, though.
He is saying that by 2017 he believes Tesla cars will be able to drive 620 miles under normal driving conditions.
Given that 620 miles is roughly triple a Tesla's current everyday range and it's unlikely that battery performance will triple in the next two years, it seems a lot more plausible that he's thinking of extending the current hypermiling techniques -- add a special software mode, tuck in a few extra battery packs around the edges, etc. -- than about some fundamental innovation that would yield 620 miles from typical driving habits. If he really meant the latter, he could have said so, but keeping it vague allows him to make an ambitious-sounding prediction that is, strictly speaking, still pretty straightforward for Tesla engineers to fulfill.