hefferbub

I know most people don’t believe this, but it is likely that electric cars have a good chance of becoming far cheaper than ICE cars over the coming 5-10 years.

EVs are complex, but in ways that are much more subject to economies of scale.

For example, much of their value is in the software, which replicates for nearly zero marginal cost. Electric motor assembly is highly automatable and a fraction of the cost of assembling engines. There are no emission control systems, fuel systems, exhaust systems.

That leaves battery materials and construction, and these are dropping fast. Goldman Sachs just predicted pack-level prices will be below $100 KWh by 2025 and continue dropping by 11% per year throughout the decade.

In fact, BYD already sells a perfectly-reasonable EV in China for around $11,000 US equivalent.

There will, of course, always be premium priced EVs in the market, but I believe the lower bound of the market will be much lower than the Corollas, Tercels and Honda Fits of today.

Look at the work of Tony Seba, who has analyzed the properties of a possible fully-renewable grid.

In his models, you over-provision PV and wind (doable because it is so cheap, and getting cheaper) so it can cover peak loads. Then during the 90+ percent of non-peak time there is super-cheap excess power available which he dubs “super power”.

Using pricing signals, this can be used to enable activities which would normally be cost-prohibitive under current models. When power is cheap, crank up the desalinators, electric steel and aluminum mills, pumped storage, hydrogen converters, bitcoin miners, and anything else smart people can devise to do with inexhaustible, inexpensive clean power on a somewhat intermittent basis.

His model also shows that you can choose trade offs between how much battery you invest in and how much generation you build, allowing you to optimize costs depending on how much or little of this “super power” you want to generate. More batteries = less generation and less excess power, and vice versa.

I think many find this unintuitive because they formed their opinions of renewable energy during the early, high cost parts of its ramp and have not adjusted their thinking to the current part of the S-curve.

But renewable energy is already the least expensive source of electricity in most markets. It is our amazing good fortune that it is also environmentally fairly benign, extremely safe, has very low maintenance costs, can be geographically distributed to reduce grid distribution costs, and is able to scale with few limits aside from simple land availability. And its Wright’s law cost declines appear unconstrained for the foreseeable future.

Wow, so much willful misinformation. Let’s cover a few!

- Steering: indeed the CT uses an innovative, triple-redundant steer by wire system. The steering wheel, which is a squared circle, not a yoke, turns 380 degrees lock to lock, so you never need to reposition your hands. It adjusts steering ratios dynamically according to speed and other factors.

- Crash safety: The 4 other Tesla models all had record-breaking safety scores, each the highest ever tested at the time of release on both European and U.S. standards. CT will undoubtedly continue and likely exceed that record. In any case, it would not be on the road if it had not passed U.S. safety standards.

- Pedestrian safety: This one is Bizarre. The CT front profile is about 2 feet lower than every other full size pickup sold in the U.S., yet not a peep heard about any of them being dangerous to pedestrians. “But no crumple zones!!” —- pedestrian safety is not primarily achieved through crumple zones, rather by the shape of the vehicle and how impact is likely to move someone who was hit. The CT is infinitely better on this metric.

- No crumple zones: See the crash test videos of the CT to see what an absurd assumption this is. The front deforms beautifully and the passenger compartment is fully intact. Same for the 30 MPH side impact test.

- Not mentioned: the first full-car 48 volt architecture in history, which paves the way for this much-needed innovation for the rest of the industry.

- Further extension of Tesla’s astonishing electrical architecture, where all functions in the car are performed by a few high-density PC boards running industrial PowerPC processors rather than having 100+ “ECUs” bought off the shelf. This architecture is what makes it possible to control (and fix and refine) nearly all aspects of the vehicle THROUGH SOFTWARE (and explains why no other car makers can do this).

- The CT pushes this forward by making nearly every electrical device a peer on a redundant gigabit ethernet bus (greatly enhanced CANBus). Each device then has a single power lead—-as short as possible from any convenient location—and activates itself by commands on the bus. 48 volts plus this reduced the weight of the wiring harness by 80% over a typical vehicle.

- Looks: I thought this site audience was made up of engineers or those who appreciate engineering. The look of the CT follows its function. Using castings, a structural battery pack and durable, paint-free stainless steel, it makes one of the toughest, most durable and most structurally rigid vehicles ever made. Yet, compared to an F150 Lightning, it has more interior space, a bigger bed while weighing significantly less.

- Economics: Ford in recent quarters is losing around $36,000 per EV they sell, despite the prices charged being quite high. CT is designed for manufacturing simplicity and architectural efficiency. This difference means that Ford is stuck at high prices and big losses while Tesla has ample price flexibility. As they have with their other vehicles, they can bring down prices as market conditions warrant and as materials and economies of scale make possible. No other EV maker has ever been profitable, and none have ever dropped prices as aggressively as Tesla has this last year or so. There is every reason to assume this will continue with the CT, once the first early-adopter wave subsides.

I get that Elon Musk infuriates many people (as he frequently does me). But it’s just dumb to disparage the achievements of the most talented and innovative team of automotive engineers since Henry Ford just because you don’t like the boss.

So having memory on-die is revolutionary? Better tell Apple who has been doing it for years.

And Tesla’s Dojo is already running processors and memory together at wafer scale, as are a number of startups.

I love it when uninformed writers just regurgitate the press release rather than do research to give context.

I think something missed in this discussion is the fact that an EV is so much simpler than an ICE vehicle* that costs will inevitably come down.

Many people believe that decent models will be considerably cheaper than today’s Tercels, Civics, Corollas, etc. in as little as 2-3 years.

Today you can buy a brand new Tesla Model 3 for $39,000 and with the U.S. tax credits that drops to $31,500. If you are in states like NY with additional credits, $26,500.

So it is already around the price levels of Accords, Camrys, etc. on the existing Tesla platform.

Tesla’s goal in their next platform is to cut the price to manufacture in HALF, and there is good reason to believe they will achieve that. The aspirational goals Toyota is claiming in this article, if achieved, will help them get closer to Tesla’s current architecture, which will be a great step forward.

As manufacturing becomes more efficient and prices drop, it will indeed make less and less sense to do major repairs, which are only getting more expensive.

* EVs are simpler when they have a proper hardware/software integration and over-the-air updates. Continuing the current industry practice of stringing together 150 off-the-shelf ECUs is one reason why most companies are losing money on their EVs and will never keep up with those who understand the software-defined car.

For a great deep dive on how Tesla has created their software-defined car architecture check out https://youtu.be/fUCgLCbX_18?si=X9-s_aNLyrunmGHi

SpaceX is well underway building their second orbital launch platform and tower at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

My understanding is that Boca Chica will be a factory and development/testing site and Florida the primary launch location. They are also building a rocket factory at Cape Canaveral.

Nearly all of the breathless doom mongering has been from one or two small environmental groups who opposed the plant from the start and who keep inventing objections to attempt to support their foregone conclusion. They use every possible opportunity to slow down progress irrespective of the merits of their complaints, and judges have rejected most of them.

For example, water use. Tesla has built a complete onsite water reclamation plant that will allow it to build twice as many cars using the same water allocation they are already granted.

Also “they are killing the forests!”. What is not said is that this so-called forest is actual one of many vast tree farms located throughout Germany which are planted with quick-growing monocultures of identical trees and harvested regularly. Tesla is planting an identical size plot of new trees elsewhere, and that effort was 62% complete as of May 2021

13 years is immediate?

Let’s please not have our future depend on building giant, fragile things that are obsolete technologically and financially before they are even completed.

Wind and PV have some challenges, but they get online fast. Plus they are both riding down a steep cost S-curve, so (for the foreseeable future) the more you build, the cheaper the next one gets.

No one could say that about Nuclear with a straight face…

And don’t forget, this was the “revolutionary” AP1 design that was supposed to fix all the bad things about the previous revolutionary designs.

Great work Kody! Thanks.

One thing I was hoping to see—-remove MS Word induced junk like “Smart quotes” and “smart apostrophes” and whatever else tends to blow up web text when importing or displaying.

I live in a multi-unit residential coop community, and we have managed to install a 240v outlet in each of our 90 carports, and are adding more outlets in open parking areas by mounting them on simple fence-like structures. We use 240v chargers that plug in rather than being hardwired so that we can easily move them around.

We have found that a 100 AMP service can effectively serve up to about 20 EVs, so long as the chargers can communicate among themselves to manage peaks. We use all EnelX Juicebox 40A networked chargers and they have that capability.

So how can you charge so many cars effectively with a small service? It is based on load factors.

The average commute length in the US is around 15 miles one way. So most nights for most cars they only need to replenish 30 miles worth of charge overnight. So there are plenty of hours and plenty of amps to cover that.

Of course, some folks come home from a long trip and need a full 300 mile charge, while some didn’t even drive that day and need no charge—basically it all comes out in the wash.

There are other considerations, but the takeaway is that you CAN support a lot of EVs charging for modest investments if you do it smart.

I wrote a white paper on this in case anyone is hoping to do this where you live: https://localforce.io/misc/Cost_Effective_EV_Charging_for_Mu...

I too wonder about the way good drivers anticipate circumstances and prepare themselves to respond. That might indeed be hard to replicate.

But then I realized that detecting these kinds of patterns (kid chasing ball, car next to you that is stuck behind a slow driver, bumper to bumper with a merge approaching, etc.) are precisely what machine learning is good at.

Arguably it could get better at it than any human because it draws not just on the situations one person happens to have encountered in their lifetime. Rather the model that gets uploaded to each car is built from the experiences of millions of cars on billions of miles of driving taking place (eventually) over decades.

Perhaps at some point the quantity of relevant data more than compensates for the greater reasoning and fluidity of a human brain.

It’s hard to know until someone’s tech actually gets there…

I always find it amusing when the people who deify capitalism and claim the freedom of businesses to do whatever they damn well please start telling private businesses what they must or must not allow on their privately developed platforms.

I have never seen a public school that teaches firearm safety (aside from a coach teaching a marksmanship team), and never heard anyone try to claim (until today) it is some kind of historical core curriculum under siege.

But setting that aside, until recent decades schools were not routinely attacked by gun-wielding misfits, so as that circumstance changed perhaps celebrating gun culture in schools seemed like a poor idea—at least to those who don’t buy the NRA’s gun industry sponsored propaganda that the solution to gun violence is to make sure every fool is carrying one…

I wrote my first production program in COBOL back in 1983 at Hewlett-Packard.

It basically took reports formatted for the multi-carbon “greenbar” paper that normally went to the big dot matrix printers and sent them instead to print on the then-new HP2680a desk size laser printer.

They made me emulate the look of greenbar paper on the white fanfold laser prints because that was what people were used to.

Good times…

Like most engineering problems, smart design and rigorous execution make a huge difference.

Tesla understood that heat management is key to an EV, so they invested in designing a compact and elegant system (Google “octovalve”) to move heat wherever it was helpful to send it.

They also use intelligence to allow the car to optimize itself for charging. For example, you can use the Tesla smartphone app to have your car wake itself up and warm or cool both the battery and cabin while still plugged in. And if you use navigation to plan your charging stops, it will automatically precondition the battery pack as you are getting close for optimal charging speed.

Most of the cars that performed poorly on that graph were because of shoddy engineering by people who don’t understand the problem space.

That’s not a problem with EVs, it’s a problem with bad engineers and management who care about the wrong things.

I use this service for my whole family (5 adults) so to continue would cost me $30 per month forever. Sux.

Moving email service is not such a big deal, but we have hundreds of Google Docs files to try to transfer. My research indicates this is a laborious process.

There’s a level of detail frequently missed when discussing this topic.

Most manufacturers fill their cars with dozens of ECUs (electronic control unit) distributed throughout. Each of these needs a separate microcontroller and runs it’s own custom firmware. As they come from multiple suppliers, these are very hard to integrate and it is nearly impossible to upgrade the firmware.

Teslas’s approach is different. They have 2-3 Large PCBs, each with a single PowerPC master controller and a ton of discrete components which drive the various functions of the car directly.

For example, instead of having an ECU controlling the wiper motor, they drive it directly with a 3-phase circuit right from the main controller board.

This is why Tesla can alter the functionality of nearly anything in their cars with a software update—-all they need to do is rewrite the code for their few PowerPC microcontrollers.

It is brilliant and very unlike the mess the OEMs have, with over 100 separate ECUs all running black box firmware.

This YouTube channel, Ingineerix (https://youtu.be/AVCHC2cw0v0) covers this in great detail. It’s inspiring…