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Comment by Alex_Butters | Hacker News Reader

I don't think of tesla as a "car and battery" company but as a "portable battery (the supposed car) and a home battery" company.

They already partner with (or own) SolarCity so really their overarching business is as an energy company. They collect it, they store it, and they transport it.

All they need is a logistically easier way to transport it than traditional power lines which I'm guessing would step on some toes. So their next step might be something like WiTricity. That way, they can bypass physical infrastructure.

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> I don't think of tesla as a "car and battery" company but as a "portable battery (the supposed car) and a home battery" company.

If they really want to be in the business of making batteries, they should get out of the business of making cars as quickly as possible. It's an expensive distraction.

It's extremely difficult, the R&D costs are enormous, scaling up is difficult, thousands of little things can sink you, and once you sell a product, you will be on the hook for it for the next decade.

To me, it seems that they are a car company with a battery side business - it makes a hell of lot more sense then being a battery company with a car side business - for the same reason that Exxon-Mobil isn't an oil company with a jumbo-jet-manufacturing side business.

I think they're a vertically integrated Energy company - Think if ExxonMobil merged with GM.

Which would be a terrible idea. since both energy, and energy storage is a commodity. GM may as well merge with United Fruit Company.

The only two gains I could see would be diversification (But then why not merge with Bank of America? Or Google?), and an integrated logistics system (Except that logistics for electricity and gasoline are long-solved non-problems - and have nothing to do with auto manufacturing.)

It's a brilliant idea if you consider that all of this knowledge work is reusable and necessary on Mars.

The IP for this tech will be only minimally encumbered through a relationship with a friendly entity.

It's worth noting that in practice, the management of GM and EM coordinate so closely that they might as well be a single entity.

There's a concept called "grid parity", where solar PV can deliver energy for the same cost as your utility would charge you for it's provision. This is considered a tipping point, where the economics starts pushing things along harder rather than relying on idealism. It got talked about for years as a goal, but now we've passed it in various parts of the world (starting in those with the combination of lots of sun and high priced utilities).

There's another concept that builds on this called "god parity", which points out that simply distributing energy via a grid has a cost (sometimes more than half of the cost you pay), so if you imagine that you had a tame god that could generate infinite energy for free, but you still had to pay the distribution costs, then if current trends continue, then PV plus batteries would still be cheaper than paying for a grid to deliver "free" energy to your home. It's perhaps not a coincidence that Tesla provides both of the items needed to make this happen, PV and home energy storage.

http://tonyseba.com/how-to-lose-40-trillion/#attachment_1567

>All they need is a logistically easier way to transport it than traditional power lines

what flaws of traditional power lines are holding Tesla back right now? It's not a subject i've ever really thought about, but i was under the impression that high-voltage cabling was a pretty efficient way to transport power.

Actually it's around 6% loss in lines and transformers: 2% in transmission and 4% in distribution.[1] This works out to be quite a lot. In some high-intensity areas, Ohm's law losses can use more energy than refrigerating a superconductor over the same length. I'm not sure that there exist ways of increasing efficiency here, but getting another percent or two of global energy production for "free" would be amazing.

But I'm not really sure that the distribution network is holding Tesla back right now. With some SolarCity and a PowerWall, you're going to be able to go off-grid. In theory. The idea is to be a total alternative to traditional energy companies and utilities.

[1]: http://insideenergy.org/2015/11/06/lost-in-transmission-how-...

WiTricity is not for transportation. It's very inefficient even over close (~10 feet) distances, which is it's intended use

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