eatporktoo

https://electrek.co/2017/08/24/tesla-model-3-exclusive-batte...

Relevant article from today referencing a recent MIT study.

As someone who owns multiple EVs, it's about the fact that you are much more likely to go to a business within probably 1000ft of the charger. The chargers are also frequently very busy. I 100% go to a ton a businesses that I wouldn't otherwise simply because they are located near the charger. Convenience is king

So you're essentially encoding in groups of 24 bits at a time. Once the data ends, you pad out the remainder of the 24 bits with = instead of A because A represents 000000 as data.

For the record, I had to read the whole thing twice to understand that too.

1. The range is set by the EPA. They are the ones that do the testing and validate the claims. The EPA should fix their range guidelines for EVs. Maybe a summer and winter range would be more appropriate?

2. Tesla should have a better UI for range, but really they should just show the percentage. Acting like it is a conspiracy is a bit extreme. They are just doing EPA Range * SOC. Without knowing all of the variables of a drive, the estimated range is going to be wrong no matter what you do. People think that their way of being wrong is better than Tesla's. Maybe they're right but the best estimate is still when navigating to a destination, and this estimate Tesla does quite well.

3. Tesla is cancelling the service appointments because there is nothing they can do to "fix" it. So why waste the time with a service appointment? They are just going to run the same diagnostics they ran remotely. Their software does a fantastic job explaining where your range is going. (https://www.teslaoracle.com/2022/09/26/tesla-new-energy-cons...)

Assuming super expensive fuel and terrible efficiency...

Gas car - 20 miles/gallon, $4.00/gallon ($4.00/20 = $0.20/mile. $10,000/$0.20 = 50,000 miles)

Electric car - 200 miles/74kWh [Tesla M3], $0.25/kWh (74 * $0.25 = $18.50. $18.50/200 miles = $0.0925/mile. $10,000/$0.0925 = 108,108 miles)

So assuming a gas car since the miles are the most expensive there, you would be looking at 50,000 miles for $10,000 in fuel. That checks out for me.

Using that assumption.

Uber charges $0.78/mile and $0.27/minute.

Assume only 75% of driving is charged to the customer (going to a fare, going to a charger, etc), that gives you 37,500 miles.

Assuming 45 miles per hour (probably too high) at $0.27/minute = (37,500/45)60 = 50,000 minutes of driving $0.27 = $13,500

37,500 miles * $0.78 = $29,250

So $42,750 in rev. - $30,000 in fuel, insurance, maintenance, and depreciation, you're still $12,750 in profit. Again, is pretty much giving every disadvantage possible. In an electric car scenario you could easily drive 200,000 miles on $10,000 in electricity. Which would multiply all numbers by 4.

I'm not trying to take your numbers too specifically, just illustrating for the sake of discussion.

As far as fueling/charging- Even if you had to pay a few people in the short-term to do the work, it isn't a high-skill job. Being generous, I can't fathom a situation where it could cost more than $2 per car in physical labor. Assuming you could drive more than 200 miles on a charge, that is less than a penny per mile in cost. Also, there are already gas stations in some states with people that will fill your gas tank for you. I am also sure an autonomous solution would be devised if that became a limiting factor. You could pretty easily design a purpose-built system for it.

I agree that regular maintenance needs to be performed, but I don't agree that the companies themselves need to solve the problem on their own. This seems like it would be something to easily contract out to a local company to handle. For standard maintenance and cleaning, there are plenty of companies that clean cars and plenty of companies that perform maintenance on cars already. It should just be a matter of getting contracts in place and making sure that they have software to do their jobs.

I didn't do the math to figure out the cost of a human driver vs the total taxi cost, but even if true the cost isn't trivial. Truckers, for example, can make upwards of $80k per year and that's not even at 50% utilization for the vehicle. If you assume a taxi driver would make $40k/year and they have 50% utilization of the car (I'm making up numbers for the sake of discussion), that is still a significant amount of cost. I would be surprised if maintenance and fuel would be $40k per year regardless of vehicle.

I wish Tesla was more open about the way the actually test their Autopilot software.

This is the exact quote: “On Honeycomb we cheated, we cut the corner of all that smaller device support. That’s the sole reason we haven’t open sourced it.”

I am working on the maximum amount idea... Assuming it takes me a while to test it, it should only take about a week of my evenings to get the changes he wants completed and tested to my liking.

He isn't getting the source code, just the executable. I also don't want to have to deal with licensing since that could complicate everything.

I really don't think it will save them much money, just aggravation. That's why I am having trouble pricing it. It is difficult to put a price on aggravation...