I’d rather see 500,000 new homes in (or within 10 minutes of) San Francisco and cars just won’t make that possible.
The idea that Tesla’s purpose is primarily anything but a Musk power play is a testament to the brand and cult of personality he’s worked dutifully to create and maintain.
There’s faith that big rockets somehow are the missing link to living on Mars. Otherwise reasonable people hang up their skepticism in favor of ignoring the evidence that Musk craves money and power, in favor of believing that he has a master plan to save the world. It’s infuriating, and ironically in a few years they’ll be the first screaming bloody murder when he fails to live up to their impossible dreams. Of course by then he’ll have enough money that he won’t need to care, and rockets working LEO rather than Mars.
I guess it’s easier praying that a billionaire has a vision to save us from ourselves without us having to make any sacrifices, than it is to do the hard work of saving ourselves.
We are all flawed characters, some more than others. Yet, we all have our parts to play. I can appreciate his positive influences while admitting he’s probably terrible to work for and has a diasterous personal life.
All of these billionaires are despicable crooks, but at least some of them don’t insist, like Musk, that we constantly applaud them.
I find it amusing that his fans reach for these “law of the jungle, apex predator” metaphors to describe him. He’s like the villain of an Ayn Rand novel who has somehow passed himself off as John Galt.
If Musk had been willing to wait one more year to begin commercial production, the Model 3 could have been amazing. Instead, it's a 90s era Kia with a body and a better-looking body.
Tesla didn’t have a year to wait. That’s why you sell to fanatics and those passionate first. Early adopters are more forgiving. I’ll worry if quality isn’t high after the preorders are cleared out.
Fit and finish is also the most important elements to most buyers. Nobody cares if the skateboard has oodles of praise if the dashboard panels are misaligned and the window makes a squeaking noise and Bob next door has a much cheaper car with a much nicer interior.
Why? It's wasn't because Elon was dicking around with design details, it was hubris.
Keep in mind, this is a company that is _fifteen years old_ now, and still has huge trouble in their bread and butter, manufacturing and logistics. These are all issues that should have been sorted out 5+ years ago _before_ they built out at break-neck speed. But, hey, Elon and the other leaders thought they were smarter than everyone. They thought they, unlike every other car company in history, could just wing it.
EDIT: Can anyone of the downvoters please explain what I said wrong? Are we expecting a ten thousandfold increase in battery production? Or are they not going to use batteries like they would in cars?
Remember the confident predictions a few years back that photovoltaic could never be cost effective? I do, because I was one of them and I was totally wrong. I even knew the trends but somehow felt confident they couldn’t continue.
"If the options fully vest, Musk could wind up owning a 28 percent stake of Tesla, which could be worth nearly $200 billion."
Dude is a brilliant sleight-of-hand artist, he's got all his sycophants focused on the "saving the world" thing, meanwhile he's picking pockets and stealing watches right off their wrists.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/21/17147678/elon-musk-tesla-...
1: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/976414452106055680?lang=...
Hyperloop and Loop both suffer from the same basic problem: high fixed infrastructure costs with very low throughputs. Higher speed naturally comes with a penalty to capacity [1], but since capacity (at high speeds) is generally invariant with respect to the size of the train and the number of people per car, you can recuperate a lot of capacity by stuffing as many people as you can. Except Hyperloop and Loop are envisioned with single-digit loading, which is basically PRT-level--trash tier in terms of capacity, particularly with regards to price of infrastructure.
Okay, let's move to boring. The only suggestions for lowering prices are a) making tunnels smaller (i.e., make it incompatible with repurposing for other infrastructure, particularly if the venture turns out to be a white elephant) and b) maybe making the actual boring costs be lower. But boring the tunnels isn't the predominant cost of a tunnel--it only costs about $50 million or so to bore a mile of tunnel. That's about a third the cost of actually building a subway [2]. The big cost is the large underground stations. Okay, you say, you need smaller stations, so those would cost less--but because your capacity is so bad that you're going to need many more stations to make up for the throughput. Having run the numbers for single-occupant vehicles, you need about 100× the number of stations to match the capacity of a regular subway line, and the rounding there is flattering to Loop.
If The Boring Company were serious about making tunneling cheaper, they should be bidding for the tunneling subcontracts of current public infrastructure projects. The fact that they're pitching a different transit system instead suggests a form of bait-and-switch.
[1] Essentially, your problems grow with the square of velocity, so multiplied by the linear improvement with velocity, you end up with total throughput running proportional to O(1 / v).
[2] The cost of building a subway is generally only about $300 million a mile. Some subways (cough MTA cough) cost up to $1 billion a mile, but making better TBMs isn't going to make a meaningful dent in those high prices.
That rather depends what problem you expect it to tackle. I reframe everything Elon Musk does as testing/developing technologies for interplanetary colonization, which don't forget is SpaceX's very specific vision statement (http://www.spacex.com/about). Back in 2017 he specifically said "I do think getting good at digging tunnels could be really helpful for Mars" and went on to discuss the value of underground colonies in terms of access to ice, radiation protection etc.
Did you miss this one?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/04/16/bor...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2018-05-12/the-boring-...
(Pipe dreams, I see what you did there)
The hard part is figuring out how to do it significantly cheaper (10x reduction) than current methods and they haven't presented any data on that yet.