Tesla, software and disruption
ben-evans.com
ben-evans.com
This may be unpopular but control knobs are silly. How often do you reach for that climate control knob? Why can't the car just do the right thing? Why does the knob need to exist?
My opinion is that doing away with knobs we don't need to be persistent is a good thing. Now, in a car today with no real self driving, we want the brakes to be accessible by a persistent control and it is in all cars. I just think tweaking climate control isn't that high in the list of priorities.
Theoretical way it could work; unsure how much of that applies to Tesla.
Lots of resistance => Lots of sun hitting the vehicle => Set the temperature a bit lower.
Also, the volume and radio controls are high on the list of "things I like to control without taking my eyes off the road"
Most modern cars use digital displays for AC now anyway and it requires you to look down to see what it is set to. My Audi looks like this:
https://cevpu.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/2018-Audi-A5-Ca...
The BMW 4 series was similar:
https://st.motortrend.com/uploads/sites/10/2016/05/2016-bmw-...
The Porche Macan I test drove was a UX atrocity:
https://www.autocar.co.uk/sites/autocar.co.uk/files/styles/g...
All digital displays.
In all of the cars I test drove, the controls for AC/Radio/etc were all very low, tiny text, and require me to take my eyes completely off the road. At least with the model 3 display I can kind of keep the road in my peripheral vision.
So my personal rule now is, don't touch the screen while the car is moving.
Saying that "one or two taps away" is in any way comparable in either usability or safety seems rather like saying that a coal-powered steam car form 100 years ago is as clean as that Tesla.
It's modular so additional features can be integrated by pure software so upgrades are possible.
Sure 90% touchscreen (some stuff is still manual) sounds crazy but Model3 owners don't seem to complain too much. I'd bet an 80% interface would work great today.
Enter a perfected voice control and L4 auto drive and we'll officially be living in the future.
> I understand you, but I can't do that task. Sorry.
Nothing is more frustrating than a computer telling you it understands what you want it to do, and that want you want to do is reasonable / authorized, but refusing to do it anyway.
That said you would think these projects would be profitable since they are billion dollars purchases made by governments.
Tesla got a ton of publicity out of it, though, so it was probably a win for all parties involved.
I'm really curious because claiming they lost money on that project is rather specific.
Also, claiming that Samsung could have done that is specific.
Was Samsung one of the 90 bidder on that project?
Did Samsung do any utility-scale storage installation.
Does Samsung even have a competing product? Contrary to what you seem to assume, Powerpacks involve a bit more than putting li-ion cells in a box.
http://www.samsungsdi.com/ess/energy-storage-system-applicat...
That’s only true if Tesla can build large grid-scale storage at a price and in a time frame competitive with other technologies. Tesla knows how to assemble lithium ion cells into packs at a good price point, and they have voltage-boosting rectifiers (aka battery chargers) that are compact and presumably cheap. One would imagine they have a decent inverter technology, seen in the Powerwall for example, but there’s no strong evidence it’s any better than anyone else’s.
The grid doesn’t need compact power electronics that have high energy-to-weight ratios, though. It needs reliable power electronics that work at high voltage as a good energy-to-coat ratio.
And SolarCity was heading to zero. It was acquired by Tesla because Elon had to bail himself out or the myth of Elon Musk as Tony Stark would have been undone. But also because he along with his cousins would have lost a lot of money. That's compounded by the fact that Elon is significantly personally leveraged and any loss of confidence in Elon Musk Inc. or a decline in his holdings would imperil his other companies [1].
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-supports-his-business...
[1] https://na.panasonic.com/us/energy-solutions/battery-storage...
Never heard of Pika before? Me neither.
Which is why they are not as much a threat to Tesla's Powerwall as you claim.
When you order from Tesla (https://www.tesla.com/powerwall) you get some inkling of how much it'll cost.
When you order from Pika (https://www.pika-energy.com/purchase/)? "Call us".
I yet have to see any serious competition to Tesla's Powerwall. BMW tried to compete and they folded (https://electrek.co/2018/04/30/mercedes-benz-kills-tesla-pow...).
EnergySage does give you some insight to the price before you buy though.
Basically, you don't buy the battery from Pika energy, you buy it from a local dealer.
SolarCity was a totally different business (installing traditional solar panels but mostly the business was financing those installation) and Tesla is winding it down.
The future of energy in Tesla is Solar Roof, Powerwalls (residential storage) and Powerpacks (utility-scale storage).
In storage Tesla has significant advantages on cost because of scale. Battery cell production is a Joint Venture with Panasonic (so I'm sure they get them cheaper than anyone else) and they have greater scale than all non-Panasonic cells and the batteries involve lots more components (and cost) that just cells and Tesla makes that, at scale.
Powerwall is significantly better looking than the competition I could find (LG Chem RESU and Pika Harbor are plain ugly, Sonnen eco looks decent).
Tesla has superior marketing and distribution (all those people buying Teslas are exposed to Solar Roof and Powerwalls and can order online).
Solar Roof looks like a product without the competitor.
Both Powerwall and Solar Roof are sold out a year in advance.
I'm less versed in utility storage business but based on headlines Tesla is killing there as well, breaking size records one after another, doubling the size of the business YoY, which is a crazy growth.
If you claim competition then name names and provide data that shows that they are actually doing better than Tesla on some reasonable metric like revenue.
Sure, there's plenty of things tesla could do better, like make reliable production targets, not have to kill themselves. But they do keep growing their production and sales. They make generally excellent products, their customers like them. Their stock is crazily highly valued, but at the same time their company is leading a market, crushing basically the entire automotive industry. There's no need for a conspiracy of financial chicanery to explain how they got here - smart financing, use of incentives that were available to any other company (look how much Nissan got) that were intended to grow a new market. And look, there's a new market for evs.
In Australia and elsewhere governments have to navigate some political minefields to roll out these large scale renewable projects. And having Musk be a liability instead of an asset would definitely tip some of these projects into the unpalatable region. It's that much of a knife edge at least here in Australia.
Which is all a shame because Tesla has been extremely successful in the Australian domestic power market and the system has intervened on many occasions now to help stabilise the grid.
[1] https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/tesla-model-s-vs...
Maybe a second generation of it will be competitive.
I think that's a bit strong. People don't replace their cars all that often, and no massive increase in demand for Tesla's cars is going to cause their production numbers to jump.
If they get full autonomy out five years ahead of Waymo and Cruise (good luck), they still probably won't win a dominant share of the market longer-term.
> If Tesla doesn't crack autonomy they're likely to go under
Shrugs, I think autonomy could seriously hurt them, whoever invents it. Tesla builds "a better car" -- nice acceleration, clean interface, more reliable -- and autonomous ride-hailing in cities essentially leads to the cars themselves not being an important point of differentiation.
6-years after the release of the Model S, Telsa has yet to turn a profit. And instead, is facing bankruptcy within the next two years unless it can roll over its debt or otherwise raise yet a few more billion $$$$.
Compare and contrast: the iPhone was released in 2007. The Tesla Model S was released in 2012. Steve Jobs died in 2011 (4-years after the iPhone). You can tell that that Apple was a successful company by the time Steve Jobs died.
Furthermore, Apple accomplished its iPhone launch during the 2007 to 2008 financial crisis. In contrast, Tesla's rampup is during the cheapest money ever to be seen in modern history: low interest rates and a grand bull market.
The political, environmental, and financial headwinds Apple faced during its time to create the iPhone were exponentially more difficult than Tesla's. And yet, Apple turned a profit and became a lasting company. The same cannot be said yet of Tesla.
I get that you might not be bullish on Tesla, but do you seriously believe this?
Major US banks were literally going bankrupt, credit dried up. There was almost no opportunity to borrow money, the stock market was crashing, no opportunity to IPO or perform a secondary offering.
Tesla is operating under one of the greatest, and longest, bull markets the US has ever seen. The great 2011 to 2018 (maybe longer??) boom. Tesla has been able to either secondary-offering, or borrow, roughly billion+ each year, every year, since its IPO.
During recent years, its borrowed or otherwise raised over $2 billion / year.
The iPhone actually launched in 2007, the same year in which Apple generated over $24B in revenue and was sitting on $15B in cash at the end of the fiscal year. In 2008, they did $37B in revenue and ended the fiscal year sitting on about $25B in cash.
The claim that Apple's financial challenges with launching a smartphone were "exponentially" greater than Tesla's, is laughable.
I'm not comparing Apple to Tesla. The parent article is. And I'm trying to point out how utterly silly the comparison is.
Quote the first paragraph:
> When Nokia people looked at the first iPhone, they saw a not-great phone with some cool features that they were going to build too, being produced at a small fraction of the volumes they were selling. They shrugged. “No 3G, and just look at the camera!”
> When many car company people look at a Tesla, they see a not-great car with some cool features that they’re going to build too, being produced at a small fraction of the volumes they’re selling. “Look at the fit and finish, and the panel gaps, and the tent!”
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This comparison is fundamentally insane, and shouldn't be the starting point of any serious discussion.
I brought attention to this and showed how ridiculous of an assertion it was.
And now you're saying: "I'm not comparing Apple to Tesla. The parent article is. And I'm trying to point out how utterly silly the comparison is."
The other quotes you've added are all irrelevant. You're all over the place. Give it a rest and come back when you have a properly thought out point to make with some evidence to support it.
Consumer confidence was at all time lows and disposable income saw the biggest drop since the great depression. People were more concerned about whether they'd still have a job and savings rates upticked dramatically while salaries fell.
All your talk about the economic environment during the recession is irrelevant because Apple had $25B cash in the bank and the iPhone was a hit, even though it was a luxury item being sold during the recession. The massive scale of their business and their overall success insulated them from the larger ramifications of the economic downturn. Tesla is operating in the opposite economic environment today, but they are not as financially surefooted as Apple was during the launch of the iPhone. So, to get back to the point, to claim that the financial challenges Apple faced bringing the iPhone to market were exponentially more difficult than Tesla's, just isn't true.
Nobody is saying Apple couldn't afford the R&D to build the physical phones.
Any way you look at it, launching the iPhone, given Apple's cash, marketing muscle, and hw/sw expertise, wasn't as challenging (even in a recession)as bringing an electric vehicle to market and it by no means was "exponentially more difficult" – in the words of the OP.
I don't have anything more to add to this discussion. I think it's clear that the OP's claim is incredibly uninformed and wildly inaccurate.
Come on. Its Mr. Musk's decision to make a company take advantage of debt markets instead of waiting for a few years for the Roadster or Model S to make some profits. Tesla's current financial situation is 100% the decision of Musk.
Musk chose debt and stock offerings because he wanted to take advantage of bull market conditions. He's received something on the order of ~$10 Billion from investors, either from the debt market or the stock market (IPOs or Secondary offerings).
If Tesla were to try its strategy of "IPO to get a ton of money each year, every year" during any other time in US history, it would have literally come across a recession and run out of money.
The Gigafactory was literally built on top of debt and stock offerings. Tesla never had that money to begin with.
Tesla has received $1+ BILLION a year over the past few years from the stock market, and roughly $3.8 Billion from the debt / bond market so far.
A lot of companies would be able to survive if the market magically came up with $2 Billion / year for that company to spend every year.
You might say that its Musk's advantage that he's cultivated the cult of personality. And you'd be correct about that. But I wouldn't call Tesla's financial situation to be "suffering", not by a long shot.
The correct description is "wasted". Musk WASTED the tons, and tons, and tons of money he received from investors. He's not cash flow positive, even after all of these billions of dollars have come in.
$0.813 Billion in 2013: https://www.thestreet.com/story/11924981/1/elon-musk-invests...
$2 Billion in 2014: https://www.ft.com/content/2f2387a0-a00a-11e3-9c65-00144feab...
$0.738 Billion in 2015: http://fortune.com/2015/08/20/tesla-stock-sale-cash/
$1.45 Billion in 2016: https://www.cnbc.com/2016/05/20/tesla-raises-146b-in-stock-s...
$262 Million Stocks + $850 Million Bonds in 2017: https://www.investopedia.com/news/what-market-thinks-about-t...
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Etc. Etc. The financial markets have been very, very kind to Tesla. Any failures on Tesla is 100% Musk's fault at this point. No other company raises billions of dollars every year under normal situations (where "normal" is defined as, any period outside of the 2011 to 2018 bull-run of the current market)
To be more specific, how about the words "Cash Flow Positive" ?? In any case, Tesla has only had ONE profitable quarter since its IPO, and has never had a profitable year.
Which is why the point about margins is so crucial. No one anticipated such great margins on an electric car. The tear down analysis demonstrates that the $35k standard-range Model 3 is not a unicorn, but will be profitable to make and sell once the production lines have any slack at all at the higher price points.
What definition of "long term" do we have here?
How many years did it take for Apple to become profitable from the iPod? The iPad? The iPhone? It was profitable throughout all of those years.
That's the very point of technology gadgets: they don't require huge upfront costs like Tesla. Apple does have innovations (see their custom ARM chip, which is consistently superior to Snapdragon in benchmarks every year). But even with the billions of dollars needed to custom-make an uncore from scratch, Apple remains profitable.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/267728/apples-net-income...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSLA/tesla/net-inc...
Since 2005 (and maybe earlier), Apple has made a profit every quarter. Since 2009 (before Tesla's IPO), Tesla has NEVER made a profit.
Its completely insane to compare these two companies. They're run completely differently, aside from both being California based.
Tesla cannot be compared to the 2000-era Apple company. There are simply too many differences.
Aren't they already licensing the second generation from Nvidia on Nvidia hardware?
> Autopilot 2 cars into self driving cars overnight.
That's presuming that the current sensor arrays, computing power and their arrangements will be compatible with the new technology.
One thing I think that is missing, although it mentioned people love their Tesla and so is other thing in life. It is the fact that I felt that this is derived from the way Tesla designed the car, it is intuitive just like when the first Iphone introduced. There is no whistle and bells like the traditional car. Just like iphone compare to Nokia.
My big take away is harder for the car company to become a software company than a software company become a car company. Not to mentioned as a car company, it has lots of 'legacy' or baggage that they have to deal with.
The works is two times harder I think for an incumbent to become a software company as a compare software company to become a hardware company. First: As an incumbent they have to unlearned the old way of doing or thinking about what a car company is. Second: If they are successful at the first one, then they have to learn how to do the software.
While for Tesla, is only 1 step which is to learn how to make car (about the hardware). Tesla does not need to unlearn about things because it has no legacy.
In my experience it is harder to unlearn about things rather than learning about things. I might be wrong :)
Yeah, all "legacy" is bad. What could they possibly have learned in 100 years of building cars? Nothing that Tesla can't replicate in less than a decade! Meanwhile, Tesla owners are recommending a checklist of possible defects to look for when you go to pick up your vehicle. Non-super-fans will never tolerate that.
No bells and whistles? Simpler than the tactile interface of legacy cars? This is simply not true.
caveat: I don't do vision.
I beg to differ. The iPhone was intuitive in that all the (built-in) apps were nicely laid out so you could easily interact with them while you are looking at the phone and giving it most of your attention. Kind of like a Tesla is nicely laid out so that you can mostly easily figure out how to, say, adjust the ventilation while looking at the big display and giving it a decent amount of attention.
This is far better than the car I grew up with that made you press the totally unintuitive recirculate button when you wanted recirculation.
</sarcasm>
To Tesla’s credit, their on/off/drive/reverse control is vastly superior to anyone else’s. Heck, several brands still screw up their “off” button badly enough that it kills people by CO poisoning.
They got it from Mercedes, as well as all the other steering wheel stalks (lights, window washers, cruise control), as well as the driver door window and mirrors control pad.
Good on them for selecting the best on the market, but it's not their invention.
I've made this mistake myself, although not in a garage, and I've noticed it before I actually exited the car. But a surprising number of people have actually died due to this UI failure.
edit: I think if it is possible to do SLAM without LIDAR waymo will definitely beat TESLA to the punch since waymo has an absurd amount of vision data labelled with the lidar-measured-depth.
In this scenario there still may be an upside for Tesla. For Waymo to cover the world in LIDAR-equipped cars will take decades. Tesla already sells cars all over the world. The Tesla car sharing network may scale extremely quickly as a result. Even if Waymo takes some markets first, once Tesla has autonomy working, they can be in most markets at the flip of a switch.
Since the cars participating in the sharing network would be from Tesla purchasers, people may purchase the cars as an investment, meaning there would be no capital cost to Tesla in scaling their network. They just need to be able to produce enough Model 3s and get autonomy working. Then they can take profits from both the sale of the car and the clip of the car sharing network.
But I'm not a practitioner, so educate me. How does LIDAR beat video?
My understanding is that the main reason Tesla would choose video instead is that cameras are super-cheap in comparison to LIDAR, and theoretically good enough if you have AI that can understand what the cameras are seeing. I have a feeling that Musk is pushing OpenAI toward researching the technology that Tesla will need to make their approach work. I hope they are successful; it is probably the fastest path toward ubiquitous autonomous vehicles. It's likely that Waymo can get theirs working faster, but they can't scale the distribution side as fast as Tesla could.
So, Conway's Law then! Can anyone tell us more about this car industry adage?
You might as well ask, if batteries are getting cheap, why isn't anybody making cordless drills?
Also, battery powered chainsaws (husqvarna is well regarded for their chainsaws): https://www.husqvarna.com/us/products/chainsaws/536li-xp/966...
battery powered riding lawnmowers (ryobi not well known for ride-on mowers): https://www.homedepot.com/p/Ryobi-38-in-75-Ah-Battery-Electr...
There are riding electric mowers but the cost keeps most off of them and honestly unless it has thermal management I am not soaking money into one.
If anything shows how far they need to go is motorcycles. Yeah there are a few decent ones out there but if you do highway speeds their mileage plummets.
and finally comes charging, it is silly enough with phone, table, head sets, and more. now I will need a garage full of at minimum 20a 240v plugs if not higher rated. homes just are not designed around that yet
Electric chainsaws have been a thing for years and have moved from the trimmer size space to the prosumer/light pro space (see the Husqvarna 536Li XP).
Hoover make a full sized appearance canister/upright hybrid vacuum (Air Cordless Lift). In this space, though, I think the prevalence of smaller stick-style cordless vacuums is because the technology enables them rather than because the technology can't be scaled up. The Dyson V6/V7/V8/V10 models aren't great in terms of quality IMO but are very convenient and popular and the V10 is more than sufficient for home vacuuming tasks.
They are. The fire department I volunteer at has put the dewalt battery powered chainsaw in service on our engines (which is significant as we deal with a lot of downed trees, etc.)
I am personally (slowly) switching to battery operated tools for lighter duty mowing and trimming at my ranch (dewalt and bosch).
Further, I see that while the big brands (Polaris, Kawasaki, Yamaha) do not yet have electric quads, you can find them on alibaba, etc., to be shipped to the US.
Heavier duty use-cased - like very large chainsaws and mowers - will still have people like me using IC engines but regular homeowners and even contractors/pros will be switched over to battery for almost everything landscaping/mowing related in the next ten years. It couldn't happen too soon.
The main unknown for me is how durable the tools will be over time, and how the batteries will hold up.
Just like trying to make fully automated assembly plants.
Whatever edge it may give on sensor cost savings in the long run, it has a steep penalty in time to market.
Even if eventually they make it without LIDARs, guess what? The competitors with successful fleets won’t be too far behind.
Is this the basis of the article?
The earliest Tesla car is rodster right? THAT IS A GREAT CAR in every aspect, right?...