Tesla Model 3 Sets New EV Cannonball Run Record
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
The performance curve - the instant power at any point is addicting. The seats were comfortable, and the trunk space was ample.
The build quality, at least on the unit I saw is _better_ then the S or the X right now. This is primarily due to the simplification of the assembly compared to the S and the X. Honestly, having driven both, I would buy a 3 before buying a S. The only killer feature I see missing is the air suspension, and we know that is coming for the 3.
They are going to sell a million of the 3s.
For the record, I’m not a EV or a green evangelist. I don’t have a snarky license plate, or solar on my roof. But I will be picking one of these up. It’s perfect for my use cases. People will compare it with the Bolt, but people forget that SUperchargers are Tesla only right now. Want to get from LA to NY? Easy in Tesla. With a Bolt, there are places that you just can’t go.
It looks like (judging by VIN allocations, which is not a great method, but also by drone videos) that Tesla hit 1k a week the last week or two of December. Assuming no huge bottlenecks remaining, that takes them solidly half way up their ramp, with one more huge jump - to 3-5k a week - remaining.
To be fair, you can charge any EV fairly quickly at any campground with 220V RV hookups. With adequate planning, I think you could drive a Bolt anywhere.
Personally, I have little interest in driving 600+ miles per day making fast charging minimally useful.
Also for car commuting in big metros, 40-60 mile one ways are common enough, which is 120mi round trip. The previous generation of affordable EVs had 80 mi ranges, which didn't work for those metros.
However, I still think ~300 miles as the practical minimum because I do take longer trips and know I would occasionally forget to charge sometimes.
The question is not "whether" but "when."
In other words “whether” and “when” aren’t different questions in this case.
I think the hardcore bears are just plain wrong, here. I don't know whether or not Tesla is over-valued (above my pay grade, and I'm not invested anyway), but it's hard to make the case that Tesla is worse off now than in 2008.
The big issue in scaling up is making enough battery packs. Which is a question of ‘when’.
Once they have a monopoly on cheapest battery packs and enough superchargers, a Tesla model 3 is cheaper to maintain, cheaper to run and similar price to an ICE auto, probably better performance.
Unless they fuck it up, BE battery electric is the way to go. Energy to motion, Tesla does more than 100MPG.
The misconception I think a lot of Tesla fans have is that great product = great business. How much do you think Tesla's business is worth? A billion dollars? A trillion? Probably not the latter, and if they depended on that valuation to continue to do business (by virtue of access to continued investment), it wouldn't matter how great their cars are.
Their actual market cap is 50 billion dollars, more than Ford, and they will need to raise more money to continue operations. Ford makes 500 times more cars than them (based on some quick Googling, .3% market share of cars vs 15% for Ford). So if you're thinking Tesla is not overvalued, you have to think that Tesla will acquire a truly massive chunk of the car market, at the expense of well funded incumbents who have a head start in many aspects of car manufacturing and branding.
My point is that whether or not Tesla is overvalued is as important as whether or not their cars are great. I think their cars are great, but I'm a Tesla bear because I think expecting them to justify even a tenth of their valuation is unlikely.
It's unusual for Nissan to screw up like that, but there you go.
This just isn't true, check plugshare.com. It is now possible to drive cross-country in any EV with fast charging.
Super chargers are available in all of those states, making any cross country driving in that area significantly faster and easier.
Add in winter conditions and driving at the usual ~75MPH and it gets worse than that. I wouldn't attempt any trip longer than ~200 miles in anything but a Tesla because even the superchargers at 130kW make it just ~bearable once the supercharger novelty wears off.
ChaDeMo could still catch up with the right gumption (the rest of the auto manufacturers teaming up, for instance), and there's still a lot of talk about how the two "standards" are easily interoperable with simple adapters (and Tesla has a Tesla-to-ChaDeMo adapter, but so far as I'm aware no one has yet to negotiate for a ChaDeMo-to-Tesla adapter to be sold; Tesla is in a position of strength for now so hard to blame Tesla on hedging that position a bit in the US).
At least it looks like the different "winners" in the US versus Europe might keep the game competitive in the current term.
Elon Musk has already succeeded big big time.
They could also have jumped in with the Supercharger network and profited from the global network that Tesla is building.
Well, lets see how they recover, by now Tesla is way ahead.
Same goes for SpaceX, if other's say that some competitor is going to beat SpaceX at its price or booster reuse. Well, again, that's the whole point - to make humans multi-planetry species, not to be a billionaire.
"The two completed the cross-country drive in 50 hours and 16 minutes, setting a new electric Cannonball Run record."
That's not quite the same as the headline...
It looks like petrol cars have done it in under 27 hours
http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2015/03/ny-la-26-hours-28-m...
Sorry if it's the latter..
Edit: Not to discount the idea that it is reckless to do it on public roads...
You have to balance your route planning between weather, peak commuter hour, shortest route, fuel stops, speed traps, etc, across a few thousand miles and a few time zones.
The biggest risk to "others" is that when traveling much faster light traffic you have little margin for error if someone in that traffic does something dumb.
The speed limit exists partially because "dumb things" are inevitable. A driver who ignores this inevitability is at least as guilty as the driver who did the "dumb thing."
In an well maintained sedan there is no reason why one cannot drive at triple digit speeds on the vast majority of the US interstate highway system if traffic conditions are light enough to permit it. The biggest risk from traveling much faster than other traffic on limited access highways is rear ending someone who changes lanes without a signal.
Speed limits exit not because "dumb things are inevitable" but because dumb things are far less common when traffic is moving a close to uniform speed and providing a suggested speed that most drivers find reasonable most of the time helps traffic flow more uniformly and safely.
Furthermore, the rules of the road provide massive redundancy. That's why a margin for error exists. By going much faster or slower than other traffic you are getting rid of the margin. If you're going fast you're depending on other people to not move unexpectedly. If you're going too slow you're depending on other people to be driving slow enough and paying attention enough
The person who changes lanes without signaling while going 50 in a 60 where everyone goes 70 can only claim the moral high ground over the person who rear ends them because they were going 80 and couldn't compensate adequately so long as the latter party doesn't have a dash cam.
That's the main skill of the Iron Butt Rally (www.ironbutt.com), in which I have previously had a podium placing. Because of the structure of the rally (which is not how fast can you go from point-to-point), logistical considerations are your biggest enemy. Can I get from point A to point B, with optional out-of-the-way stops at points X, Y, and Z, and still get to B on time (with heavy penalties if you're late)? Get a ticket, and the organizers find out (and they will), you're out. The organizers try very hard to keep speed out of the rally. As they say, it's a rally and not a race.
But I'll tell you what, when it's just after sunrise in the Panhandle of Texas, there isn't a car on the road, and I need to be in L. A. in twelve hours, well, let's just say legality isn't at the top of my list. The harsh reality is that if time is a consideration at all, then pragmatism says that the faster you go, the more time you have to sleep, eat, or add Point W to your list of stops. That's largely why I quit participating in such events, because unless they want to do it timed rally style (IOW, you must be at fixed points neither early or late), all the platitudes in world aren't going to keep the speeds down.
With pretty insane modding though. The previous record (in 28:50) was done by "just" adding fuel tanks in the trunk and laser jammers: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/10/31/us/new-york-los-angeles-ca...
Also, there is the suitability of the car, I imagine a Tesla would be better than Rolls Royce luxury if you need to be in the thing for 50 hours.
Stock cars with speed limits may not sound like fun but it would be accessible. Maybe the 'golf ball run' where you have to take a set of golf clubs across the country to tee off into both oceans in record time could be the notional goal of such an event. It would also give an excuse for some faux golfing style in the fashion department.
Incidentally, in 1933 the petrol record was around today's EV time.
"We hoped for flying cars, but what we got was 140 characters"
(or something similar, I don't remember it verbatim)
Every time I think about Tesla, I am reminded of the thousands of brilliant engineers toiling away in Silicon Valley trying to optimize online advertising. Maybe we could be a bit more closer to Fusion energy, maybe we could be a bit more closer to lesser carbon footprints. That small bit really is crucial, especially when we are fighting a losing battle with mother earth. Perhaps the world has too much information. When information flow is cheap, the cost of propaganda is low enough to create legitimate confusion. Imagine a world without Google, FB or Twitter, perhaps there would be concerted efforts by governments towards educating the masses about global warming. Perhaps such efforts could not be subverted by foreign governments or fringe groups. Looking back, the true value addition by SV will be companies like Tesla, Solar City & SpaceX.
Here is a guy who is scarily close to being a real-life Iron Man, doing something that has shown verifiable results and actually progresses humanity far more than FB/Twitter and to some extent Google.
But all I feel is constant negativity. I really feel sorry for Musk. I sincerely admire him for what he is struggling for and I really wish he'd get more support.
Note : I do understand his background and that the seed money for SpaceX was from paypal and all, but even then, paypal was a different business than just online ads.
I really wish there is stronger support for him against these sorts of people. How can he be all talk when we see his rockets going up and coming back down.
Second, there are many promises he still hasn't delivered on: SpaceX targets not met, Tesla still running at a massive loss, Hyperloop being doomed to failure, etc etc. I can definitely see why people say he is mostly talk, even though admittedly he has achieved some successes.
Am I understanding this correctly, that the criticism of Elon Musk being all talk is because he didn't personally perform all the work in achievements like Falcon 9 and Model S?
Ultimately, focusing on a leader is a shorthand used in everything. We talk about famous generals, and not about their lieutenants. We talk about presidents and kings, omitting the low-level administrative staff that actually does the work and keeps everything from falling apart. Often it's a bad generalization leading to bad conclusions (e.g. most presidents have little influence on the direction of their countries), but I think it's fair in case of Elon Musk, since it's his strong vision that defines the direction of SpaceX and Tesla.
Consider this: if SpaceX went public and Elon decided to step down, the company would lose most of its fanbase for very simple reason - it would most likely turn into a regular company and stop being just the vehicle to get humanity to settle Mars.
I do not think that Musk should get a free pass. His companies have taken on some pretty impressive projects. One day someone will make a better electronic car but much like the Wright brothers and Henry Ford, Musk did lead the way.
Maybe Musk really is as skilled as all that. Or maybe he was lucky enough to make a lot of money once (with x.com) and hire good people. It's hard to tell since so few people ever get to try having that much money to play with.
Whatever are his contributions to the rocket design these days (it's obviously a SpaceX secret), one can't deny that his ideas for future of humanity are the raison d'être and the driving force behind the company. He obviously hires engineers smarter than himself to do the work; his own engineering skills only add to the credibility of the company and its goals.
Tesla I could still grant but you do him great injustice by simply ignoring how much of his personal resolve is responsible for SpaceX even existing.
Feel free to list the number of times a group of engineers have spontaneously teamed up to form a rocket company.
Your assume that A) big things can only ever get done by companies. B)A CEO 'owns' a company's assets.
I'll give credit to him for creating and acquiring funding for the organization. I'll give him credit for publicizing his vision. Each and every rocket/car however, was massively subsidized by taxpayer dollars, and made feasible by hundreds of people WORKING TOWARD A COMMON GOAL.
The practice of abstracting away hundreds to thousands of people's hard work and financial support, involuntary or not, is disingenuous at best and downright dishonest at worst.
Abstraction is evil. Abstraction is what turns "people" into "human resources".
And before the inevitable "That's not practical!" or "That's unreasonable!": It really isn't. Most people have just gotten so used to credit for their own work being sacrificed to someone else that nobody points out how incredibly screwed up the practice is.
> B)A CEO 'owns' a company's assets.
Never made the claim nor does it seem relevant here. No one is talking of actual ownership. When it comes to ownership and accounting of a company, there are already well-established metrics and practices to figure that stuff out.
Yes, the rocket is designed by engineers and put together by technicians and mechanics and thousands of souls have come together to achieve this task, and no one is denying their contributions.
But none of that would have existed without Elon. And he is being praised for that vision and steely resolve while others work on their PhDs from Armchair University.
This leadership is not trivial and it is central to something like SpaceX even existing.
Elon is still in control of SpaceX, so the Falcon 9 and FH rockets are his by any reasonable definition.
> Second, there are many promises he still hasn't delivered on:
What matters is overall progress and not progress relative to elons timelines. Also, most of those were not promises but rather announcments.
> SpaceX targets not met
Yeah, he only took like 15 years to launch more rockets then China or Russia. Build the largests commercial launch buissness.
But of course what we should focus on is that he is such a failure because he said 5 years ago that the FH would fly a bit sooner.
You really need learn to evaluate things on its own terms.
> Tesla still running at a massive loss
Poor Elon, 500000 reservations that any other company would kill for. Revenue stream for 1-2 years even without new reservations. What a failure.
> Hyperloop being doomed to failure,
Whitepaper without company behind it not successful. More big news at 8pm.
> I can definitely see why people say he is mostly talk, even though admittedly he has achieved some successes.
Yeah, the guy who revolutionised space launch, landed fucking rockets and created reusable rockets is 'mostly talk, with some success'. Honstly people can't see the trees because of the forest. This is so fucking bizar.
He's a CEO. All the support he needs is to deliver on his promises. From my exceptionally limited point of view, he's at about 35% there:
Space X: 100% (Reusable, self-landing rockets. Fuck yeah!)
Tesla: 40% (Prototype in decent shape, promised production capabilities of model 3 still seems a long ways off)
The Boring Company: 0%
Hyperloop: 0%
Paypal: 75% (Much hate, still good option for many things.)
Solar City: 75% (Over expanded, not sure if that was a bad thing and was bought by Tesla. Still it installed 870 MW of solar in 2015 alone.)
Steve Jobs had close ties to fewer companies, Pixar, Apple, NeXT and did a similar purchase of NeXT by Apple. However, while dubious Apple greatly benefited from NeXt. So, I am willing to bet Solar City could be a similar net benefit.
The boring company is still to early to judge. Hyperloop is not yet a failure and considering it was simply a short paper I think 0% is overly harsh.
I could swear that the rush for solar via Solar City has dropped precipitously. It seems like those who want it have it at this point. Its business model is also heavily dependent on US grants, and has seen some major downturns in terms of litigation and has been operating at a net loss for its lifetime. Let's put it closer to 50%
The boring company is simply trying to make underground highways - a task which makes very little practical sense in a world where highways already exist, and their downsides are well known. Not to mention, no execution or proof of concept exists.
As for the Hyperloop, again with the lack of execution or proof of concept. Anybody can make a whitepaper, but Elon Musk has put his weight behind the concept, to no practical end. But sure, let's remove it because you're right, he made no promises behind it; didn't start a company around it.
We're still only around 40%.
I would call it similar to Space X before they started landing the rockets. Just making digging cheaper much like making rockets cheaper is a basis for a profitable company. A long term goal of 1/10th the price really would be game changing.
PS: Picture even a one way toll road that goes 20 miles under I-66 into DC they could easily charge 10$/ trip an get 100,000+ riders each way per day. So, the real question is how much that tunnel costs. At 20 billion $ that's 20 billion * 6% ~= 1.2 billion per year vs 2 * 10 * 100,000 * 5 * 48 = 480 million so not a win. But, at 1/10th the price or 2 billion that's ~120 million per year break-even vs 480 million and highly profitable. How many places could a 5 mile segment be able to charge say 3 dollars and have 100,000 people per workday?
Cars, unless going ungodly fast (140mph is not enough), are inefficient at throughput.
PS: I-66 really does have 3mph traffic as it will take 30+ minutes to travel 10 miles. As in I was happy if that part was under 30 minutes, and not surprised if it took 40 minutes as the average was well over 30.
Rendered moot by the fact that large numbers of people prefer the privacy and convenience of a car.
Musk's solution takes the human condition in to account.
- More popular support means his visions resonate, and more people will start pursuing them too.
- More popular support means the market will be more receptive towards those visions.
Note that Musk doesn't care if it's SpaceX or Tesla that are the market leaders long-term. He cares that we go to Mars and get off fossil fuels in transportation, however that happens. Hence e.g. opening up Tesla patents.
RE your % score, I'd give a different breakdown, based on what are Elon's actual goals:
SpaceX: 40% (reusable, self-landing first stage done; Falcon Heavy yet to launch, BFR in the works)
Tesla: 80% (their latest cars might have problems, but they successfully cracked the car market and started a wave of electrification that's unlikely to stop now; Chinese companies alone will carry it forward)
WRT Tesla: The company has started a revolution, but to all intents and purposes it feels like its falling behind. The Model 3 was supposed to be in full production already, but it's not. It's also not profitable, which is a major problem for Tesla (and Musk by extension) in the long run.
Not to mention, all of the pre-orders for Model 3's that aren't fulfilled in a timely manner are going to hurt the population's opinions of Elon Musk - and rightly so.
As far as following a vision: history is full of failed visionaries, and vision alone is not enough to propel mankind forward. Execution is.
Sure the might have fallen short 30-40% but given the scale of their plan, this seems like a extremly miner problem.
The buissness reality is that there are 100000s of people who want these cars and they have essentially a proven market for years to come. The waste majority of these people are not gone start hating elon because their car is a bit late.
> As far as following a vision: history is full of failed visionaries, and vision alone is not enough to propel mankind forward. Execution is.
Like building a reusable rocket or massivly improving the price and production capacity of batteries?
People need to stop listening to Elon own prediction of things and consider where things would be without him. He has already revolutionised the space and the car industry, that is just a fact.
He makes crazy "moonshots", he has a vision and doesn't tone it down nearly as much as others do, and he's not afraid to be "wrong".
The SpaceX community has a running joke about "elon time" being set to mars time, because his predictions and goals are almost always late (and are often under delivering), but I honestly respect that. Him and his companies aren't taking the "easy way out" of making easily achievable goals and then making them again and again. They are shooting for unlikely and in some cases almost impossible goals, and getting 70-90% of the way there, and they aren't exactly ashamed of it. IIRC there was a reddit thread a while back that was "bashing" Elon and Tesla and SpaceX about only hitting something like 70% of the goals they set, but I read it differently. They set out to revolutionize 3 different industries (cars, space, and now "boring" and public transport), and even if they can only get to "70% revolutionized", it's still a massive win in my opinion!
He's not perfect, I hear lots of bad things from many employees about the work environment, but overall I really respect the man and the companies he has created, and I think he has and will continue to do a lot for humanity.
His back of hand calculations on the viability of self-landing rockets, while coming back from a trip to Russia after a failed attempt to purchase a launch vehicle certainly wasn't moonshot.
He is a technology man in and out and knows the capabilities and limits of technology. I remember reading a book about Tesla and I always felt like he saw opportunities in the gaps existing between what is available and what is possible.
> I remember reading a book about Tesla and I always felt like he saw opportunities in the gaps existing between what is available and what is possible.
My view is that he focuses on what should be possible from first principles, ignoring whether or not our short-sighted markets find it desirable at the moment. It's a good strategy if you have a non-monetary goal in mind and resources to bankroll the efforts at forcing the markets into accepting your work.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/945712432416137217
Saw this yesterday when someone threw together a quick article on all of the gushing responses from customers to this tweet.
How can you say someone nicknamed "the real world Iron Man" is bad at PR?
No other tech leader is as charismatic (Steve Jobs came close, but Musk seems more genuine whereas Jobs felt like a salesman) and very few are as personally intelligent and accomplished.
He was not a programmer but he knew more about computers than most programmers do. There's absolutely no way to call him non-technical accurately. Bill Gates giving up programming did not make him non-technical.
Elon Musk wouldn't make this mistake. He's very openly trying to emulate Steve Jobs' entire skillset.
Maybe the cause of this confusion is that most people only saw Steve Jobs when he went up on stage for an hour every year. Try asking yourself what he was doing the rest of the time. Elon Musk did.
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/127537/Steve_Jobs_Atari_...
> "At night the two would collaborate on building it at Atari: Wozniak as engineer, Jobs as breadboarder and tester...."
But this is a very biased way of describing two people working on a technical project. To call one an "engineer" and the other a "breadboarder" as if he sat quietly contributing nothing.
Just because one person is playing second fiddle to a truly gifted technical genius doesn't magically make them non-technical.
If you want to argue Steve Jobs isn't technical, you'll have to set the bar lower than "as good as Woz" or almost none of us will make the cut!
You cannot create the company or products that Steve Jobs did without being technical. That doesn't mean you have to write the firmware on the wifi chip. It does mean you have to understand thousands of deeply technical concepts about computers.
"Move far enough up in any career, and you are essentially doing sales".
Thought that was very true.
He has been anointed as a neo-PR guy now because his style of doing things (like responding to requests on Twitter with "Done,") is breathtakingly refreshing compared to PR from actual trained PR agencies
I mean sentiments like that. It's just right in the feels ya know? It's a reason to go even read the news in the morning.
Musk arguably does significantly more talking than doing, but his goals are lofty enough that even failing to make it halfway still means significant advancement.
And it might sound callous but plenty of companies have similar practices (and are not creating anything of earth-shattering value), so judging Tesla more than the others is a bit unfair.
How is Tesla's supposed claim they solved electrical driving misleading?
The Model S targeted a new market entirely. Nobody had tried to do a luxury sedan EV and kodus to Tesla for spotting that niche, but that was not the goal that everyone else was chasing. It was something else entirely.
From an economics and from a technology point of view, building an $80k EV with decent range is insanely easier than building a $15k EV. Even if it has to be a luxury car and look good. It still gives you that $20k leeway to equip you car with a massive battery.
The misleading part was trying to claim that they had solved the problem that everyone else was working on, when in fact they had not. And they still have not today as evidenced by the $35k price tag of the Model 3.
Not so much: The actual Cannonball record is a bit over half the EV one -- 28 hours and 50 minutes -- and Roy himself drove it in 31 hours and 4 minutes. I'll be curious how much of their journey was charging time, a figure someone will probably extract from their GPS track soon.
Sounds like Google, Microsoft, and pretty much every tech startup between Palo Alto and Vancouver.
The difference is that Musk actually does something. Creates something. 90% of the other "tech" companies are just shoving around bits of other people's information and calling it innovation.
The man wants his car designs to evoke an image of being sexy and you consider him a creep? That's a way over-dramatic interpretation.
Incidentally I was responding the comment that mentioned there is a lot of hate for Tesla. What I mostly don't like about Tesla, aside from that stupid naming convention, is that they missed all of their manufacturing targets and are about to hit a brick wall with investors, regardless of how "sexy" one thinks the car design is.
The vehicles are sexy... to me at least.
It only gives ammunition to the chauvinists claiming that sex will be outlawed, or the idiots calling for politicians to resign for having sex out of wedlock.
>informal exciting; appealing. "I've climbed most of the really sexy west coast mountains" synonyms: exciting, stimulating, interesting, appealing, intriguing, slick, red-hot "a sexy sales promotion"
(Also, is there a model Y in the works?)
There used to be a time where American people were different in that regard. Celebrating success, entrepreneurs, daring mavericks, etc.
Now all I see is jealousy, smirk, poo-pooing. Have you guys turned French?
This is not a fringe philosophical concept bound to popular novel's either. Look to the background of villains in mainstream super hero movies, to our politics (many call Trump the first Postmodern president), and the drive to be "authentic" in every aspect of the self for reasons of self promotion in some kind recursive cynical loop which other view as a perfect specimen of our contemporary irony, nearly perfected!
I'm not an expert on French culture or any culture per-se, but perhaps Americans (of which I'm one) do have a more superficial embrace of sentimentalism and a less critical approach to hero worship and "getting rich" and maybe it isn't driven by cynicism as much as naiveté but that's only one aspect of the culture as a whole. Even still, I'd argue most people are driven by the Postmodern philosophy wether they know it or not; are more cynical then they even know and skeptical of our institutions (universities, churches, etc) on one side or another.
This. I sometimes wonder if I'm the only one to notice that villains in popular movies/TV shows increasingly present reasonable positions (even if crooked methods), while it's the protagonists who seem to live by simplistic, populistic, feelings-based morality.
Sounds like HN: "Check out my cool new web app/hardware gizmo!" Army of critics arrive to poop on it
The negativity is so bad, his car company is worth more than Ford, with a minuscule fraction of the sales.
Elon will be just fine.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7885128
Nothing has changed.
To quote 'natural219 from what I just linked, the words I 100% support:
"Godspeed, Musk. (...) I'm behind you 100%. I just hope you can finish your work before our shitty, myopic, destructive society tears you down. Here's to faith."
I am sure situation is same for SpaceX too.
And then the whole SolarCity acquisition which didn't go down well.
That said, yes you have to hand it to Musk. Even if these companies go belly up, they have brought in lot of new technology.
The situation for SpaceX is different. SpaceX got 18 successful launches last year, several of them with reused rockets and most of them recovered afterward (no unsuccessful landing attempts, though a few were intentionally expended for performance reasons).
Their only real domestic competitor ULA which launches Atlas and Delta, long held as the giants in American space launch, only had a total of 8 launches, all expended of course.
Not only does SpaceX have a huge technological moat in the form of operational space launch reuse, but operationally their Falcon 9 (which had complete success in 2017) is out-launching everything else, including both the Chinese DF-5 (which had a failure) and the Russian R7/Soyuz (which also had a failure).
And their future products build tremendously on this already sizable lead:
1) Falcon Heavy, completed pad fit checks by the end of the year and now getting ready for a static fire and launch in a couple weeks, is even MORE reusable (3 cores recovered, counting for 27 out of 28 of the engines) and MORE powerful than any other rocket launching today. Dragon Crew also nearing completion and will be the first (of 3 total vehicles nearing completion) to return Americans to orbit on a domestic vehicle, likely this year.
2) A satellite constellation which is readying satellite prototype launch in the next month or two, has the potential of making SpaceX a telecomm giant. The scale of this constellation would not be feasible without the reusability tech they've developed.
3) And BFR, which will further cement their space launch tech moat, make launching the full version of the potentially-extremely-profitable satellite constellation WAY cheaper, and potentially open several new markets.
SpaceX is like Tesla after a full ramp-up of the Model 3 selling as many cars as Toyota does but in a world where no one else has an electric car for sale. So understandably (for Musk), he's leveraging this position to make things like BFR a reality.
Both companies are in extremely good positions compared to 2008 when both companies nearly went under. SpaceX in particular. And given the fact that Elon was able to save both, it means a market down-turn is something he has seen before and he has some powerful strings to pull in case the market has some major problems.
But it pales in comparison to the watershed moment SpaceX and the entire spaceflight community will have. There is a real possibility for 28 launches, including two Falcon Heavy's. NASA TESS on track to discover an explosion in habitable zone exoplanets. Vector, Electron, TechShot and other private space data leading a push for commercial apps in space, including pharma, stem cells and materials foundries. And there is decent chance of someone landing on the moon for the first time in 45 years ;)
Will we Go Back to the Moon in 2018?
https://audioboom.com/posts/6573043-dec-29-2017-will-we-go-b...
69TH International Astronautical Congress Bremen 1-5 OCT 2018
Not a factor. Until we can travel many multiples faster than light, it doesn't matter how many things we can see far, far away.
You and I will both be centuries dead before that happens.
Why does it "not matter" since we can't land on them in our lifetimes? It's still interesting.
We must live on different planets, because I can't go a single day without hearing about some product they may or may not build at some point in the future. This is one of the most hyped up companies I've ever seen (mostly deservedly).
>Here is a guy who is scarily close to being a real-life Iron Man
Really? Scary close? I'd say not remotely close.
>I really feel sorry for Musk.
Really?
>Looking back, the true value addition by SV will be companies like Tesla, Solar City & SpaceX
SpaceX for sure. Tesla, maybe. SolarCity? What did they do except destroy a bunch of investor's money?
Edit: Downvoted before I could even fix a typo. This place is embarrassing to read sometimes..."Real life Iron Man", "feel sorry for Elon Musk".
I do feel that his critics often lose perspective. for instance he gets a lot of heat for not ramping up M3 production as fast as promised but in the grand scheme of things I fail to see what impact that has whether EVs ramp up to a million cars a year a few quarters earlier or later. only thing that matters is tesla/spacex/etc lives to fight another day.
That said I would never invest my money in tesla stock. Its simply because I dont think its His ultimate goal to make money & that will always reflect in the decisions he make.
Edit: just to show what I'm talking about, here's what plugshare.com shows for CCS chargers in the middle of the US:
http://mikeash.com/tmp/screenshot_F67FD9DD-D048-43EC-8DDF-9E...
That gap in the Nebraska is 336 miles long. Utah to Colorado is likely to be quite challenging with the mountains. East of St. Louis is another tough area.
I think you could do the trip entirely on DC chargers if you took some of the legs really slow to extend range.
You'd expect to use a mix of DC chargers and Level 2 chargers. I think it's doable in both cars but I'd personally never take that trip in either of them. I don't know how often people are doing LA to NY trips that they'd ever decide between cars over their ability to do that vs just renting a car (or flying).
LA to NYC is a pretty unusual trip. The Bolt is still a difficult sell for more typical long car trips, though. I've done a dozen thousand-mile legs in my Model S without a problem, but they'd be really tough in a Bolt. The chargers do exist for the routes I've taken, but they're not very conveniently located and often are single units, leaving you vulnerable to being blocked, broken, or in use.
I think the Supercharger network is adequate for road trips, but it's the bare minimum to make it reasonable.
Charging time is what make petrol win. Drive 500 miles, take 5mn to charge up and you're good for 500 more miles.
Until EV can do this (surely through charging stations like petrol cars) they won't good at anything more than daily commute if you can plug your car at at home and at work.
So battery technology is where the interest should be. We already know how to make efficient electric motors, we know how to make small vehicles. All wee need is fast charging energy stores. All some kind of electrical rails available on highways EV could use. Maybe setup specific separated lanes with no speed limit, EV rail but only if using some autonav which responds to the highway command to optimize the flow. Yes, you'd get something like trains for individuals.
9 hours is (in my opinion) the max amount of driving you can seriously do without at least a couple hours of resting.
That'd be about 540 miles total, maybe a bit less if you could make those 30 minutes of rest stops at a fast charger.
Right now, EV's are clearly the future. I'd say that when they have a 500 mile range with an MSRP that matches ICE vehicles, they'll go from being "exciting new technology" to "the obvious choice for most people."
A proliferation of decent, non "ev looking" cars with 200 miles of range will be all it takes for people to realize that they only really drive 50 miles a day, and paying for gas is for suckers.
The standard EV-evangelist response to this is “take the train” or “rent a car for the weekend”, but I’m sorry, those just aren’t comfortable for me – the train lacks the freedom and sense of adventure, and rentals usually smell funny, among other things. Altering my lifestyle to suit the car’s limitations means it was the wrong car in the first place: The car should serve me, not the other way around. The Tesla’s longer range and presence of Supercharger stations along the routes are totally irrelevant for my daily commute, but they completely change the game when you include the other driving I consider important.
With any other EV, I would need a second car to address the other part of my usage, and that means twice the insurance, twice the registration cost, twice the driveway-space, and the chance of forgetting something important in the one car while I’m using the other. And feeling like a glutton for owning an “extra” vehicle.
With a long-range and fast-charging EV, I can finally have a single car that handles my daily commute and my road-trip habit, and that's been the main thing keeping me out of EVs so far. I've saved my place in line and I'm looking forward to the day they call my name.
On the flipside, I know that my limit before wanting to murder people and/or feeling bone-weary exhaustion is somewhere between 4-5 hours cumulative in a day, regardless of the number and length of breaks, but overall better with at least one >30-minute break every two hours and/or 15-minute every hour. (For me, EV's are clearly the present. I'm pretty happy within their travel limits.)
There's such a huge range of extremes with what people are comfortable with.
I've also met a lot of people that need more breaks than they actually take, but don't realize that self-care advantage yet. It's possible that forced, longer recharge breaks with an EV could be a good thing for overall road health. More drivers overall with slightly more opportunities to stretch and rest could be an amazingly useful thing for US traffic and calming some long distance road rage, given the chance.
The trips where I have plenty of time and can stop and go for a jog, or hike up some scenic terrain and take some photos, feel a lot safer than the ones where I'm nose-to-the-grindstone the whole time. I'm simply more focused when I get back in the car because I've had those minutes to let my mind and body wander.
I do feel like 15-20 minutes every 4-5 hours is a good and comfy amount of rest on a roadtrip. I've tried to do the 5-minute fuel stops and it just adds more stress than it's worth. Now, if more Supercharger stations happened to have a park or a gym nearby...
I'd been considering for some time that if I were McDonald's corporate right now, I'd be examining EV chargers right now for a potential amenity to sell to franchisees (or possibly even to require from franchisees ahead of demand curves to create favorable headwinds).
I hadn't thought about gym chains, but that's also a great idea. "EV charging at any of our gyms around the country" / "Stop in on your next road trip" just might be an amenity that could sell some gym memberships.
It's funny because it could be evolutionary pressure back away from the drive-through model. You could even imagine the classic Drive-In model making a big comeback. A Sonic restaurant already looks like a modern EV charger facility from a distance. (Though personally, I don't ever eat in my car, so that has less appeal to me.)
The Model S 100D can almost do that already: start in your garage with a 100% charge, drive 300 miles, recharge 80% in 40 minutes, drive another 240 miles. Under ideal conditions it can even achieve it (the EPA range being 335 miles).
Current Superchargers can put out 145 kW, but the cars can only accept 120 kW. So the network already has some future-proofing for when the chemistry catches up.
Of course the old goalpost used to be 300 miles without charging. I have no doubt it will move yet again, and "24 hours of driving with only 5 minutes of charging" will become the new benchmark for practicality. :p
Hopefully Tesla would start leasing car batteries so we could drive over a ramp and get our depleted battery replaced by a fully charged one in minutes and drive off for another 300+ miles.
But waiting might not be an option if you want to be the first!
It's an awesome record for Model 3 that has only 310 mile range which is less than Model S with 335 mile range!
https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/2/16842816/tesla-model-3-la-...
The relevant quote reads:
Not only did the time best what Roy and a team did in 2016 when they did the run using a Model S and Autopilot by about 5 hours, but it also beat a record set just last summer by friends Jordan Hart and Bradly D'Souza in a Model S 85D by more than an hour.
("Roy" refers to Alex Roy, editor-at-large for the Drive, who was on the trip.)
Model 3 production is way behind and currently does not look like it progressing. Musk is blaming Panasonic on the problems with batteries, while reports from the Model 3 factory tell about a lot of manual work.
So yes it is easier to announce a Pickup some years ahead than fix Model 3 production.
Side note: if you know anyone with a Tesla and are in the Bay Area, owners can take three friends with them on a tour of the factory. It's fantastic and I highly recommend it.
The "old" Tesla factory was bought from a joint GM-Toyota venture that achieved average production of 25 000 vehicles per month running those lines for 25 years. Then that venture failed, Tesla bought the factory and repurposed the existing infrastructure.
It's like if SpaceX started by buying an old working NASA rocket design and repurposed it for the Falcon, but for Falcon Heavy they started entirely from scratch developing rocket fuels, engines, materials etc. without ever having done so before.
How much further can they ramp up? That is the pertinent question.
Tesla needs to announce them far in advance so they get funding. They can’t just create another Model, start mass production and delivery without anyone noticing and caring to post it online. So they capitalize on the hype and sell as man as they can.
Furthermore there is no Tesla Model 3 from any other company. There is not even a Model S or X from any company. There are some products that are close but lack some desirable features such as being purely electric or being “techy”. For the Model X there is the Volvo XC 90 plug-in with 19 miles of range which wouldn’t get many people to work in the winter. The screen is a bit Tesla like but from what I have heard is that Tesla’s screen (and infotainment system) is much better.
For the Model 3, the only true competitors are the i3 and Chevy Bolt. The i3 is selling ok but does not have a lot of range and is a small vehicle. For its price, it is not really a good deal unless you are looking for any ev. The Bolt is a much better choice but many do not like its style. It is also not really available because it is often seen as a complicance vehicle. I have heard that people were laughed out of the store when they wanted to buy it. It is also not available in Norway where it is anticipated the most. My guess is that the 2018 Nissan Leaf will be the best choice this year but compared to a Model 3 still a compromise because it lacks (amongst all non Tesla) a proper quick charging network.
So the real question should be: when will the other manufactures start delivering?
More like the Chevy Bolt / Opel Ampera e, the i3 has very limited range while the Chevy/Opel offers between 300 and 500km of range thanks to its much bigger 60kWh battery. The BMW i3 only has a 33kWh battery in the newer version, previous one was even less than that... The Leaf 2018 goes in the right direction, but 40kWh is still no enough to do 3h+ road trips.
Also, you make a very good point by saying that the Chevy Bolt/Opel Ampera E is a much better choice (ignoring the design). Same pricing as the Model 3 but the range seems much better. Given the experience of Chevy, I think that they can reduce the price and mass produce the Bolt much faster than Tesla can do with the model 3.
The Nissan Leaf isn't new in 2018, it's been around since 2011 and is (I think) still the most popular pure electric car. I'm aware that the 2018 should have some significant improvements, but I'm confused why you don't count either the current models or the 2018 as a competitor to the Model 3?