What the fuck
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-03-02/tesla-autopilot-crash-caught-dashcam
there’s a thread on the Tesla forum where they’re all blaming the driver lol. ‘He doesn’t have his hands on his wheel…he’s not using it properly’
so if your hands are off the wheel the car crashes? Nope. If the autopilot system is poorly designed the car crashes and him having his hands off the wheel was to make sure you can see that the autopilot is causing the problem, not the driver trying to make Tesla look bad (because the last time someone posted a video like this with his hands on the wheel, they all jumped on the conspiracy theory bandwagon and said he was an undercover operative from one of the big car companies who are scared of Tesla)
The human cannot be the secondary operator of the vehicle at this early stage of AI and self driving. The robot is not equipped to handle things, and cannot “tag in” the driver quickly enough. That is the root cause of all of these accidents.
The human must be the driver for the next 20+ years, with computers providing assistance for the inattentive. These are safety systems.
The problem with Elon is he wants to build a machine learning transportation network, and he’s willing to sacrifice customer lives to get there.
Darwinism for Tesla drivers…Collateral Damage for everyone else.
So yeah, customers will have pay $1 billion a year in charging fees.
I spoke with people at two tesla dealerships last week. Both said they were getting a huge push from corporate all month (march) to get deliveries done in time for the quarter. Sounded like window dressing to make their quarter and I was betting pretty hard thye’d miss but they beat (on deliveries).
The toronto store set a record for most deliveries in one day by any store in the company , ever , on Friday March 31st.
For the most part though, they are selling cars in China. Not a lot of people noticed this last few quarters but the China numbers were off the charts and the Europe/North America numbers were a bit weaker.
The China numbers have been lumpy. It’s unclear to me if a second factory is making Model S yet. But typically it has been one line that switches back and forth between US, EU, and APAC production. So a late boat can make them miss a quarter, or 6 weeks of China production can make it look like that is generating YoY or quarterly sales growth.
If you test drive a car, the store usually emails you monthly for the next 120 days. If you engage, they start a conversation.
I’ve been seeing a lot of loaded Model X P100D in SF on the streets. Many of them are repeat buyers or two Tesla households in some cases.
Also, I’d like credit for correctly calling that Tesla would have the largest market cap of any auto maker. They just beat out Ford today. I realize they still lag VW group slightly, though their stock supply is distorted by the families who own the company and the Porsche family shareholders.
so…no credit then
You’ll have to wait for your credit just like I will have to wait for my own credit (for when I predicted that when we have a market correction, tesla and the other dream stocks will get hammered).
You have to admit, Tesla stock is holding up even though Trump is going to rollback the fuel economy mandates. That effectively ends the transfer payments from big auto makers to Tesla for EV credits, or whatever.
yes, but the people who own the stock aren’t too concerned about facts. It’s more of a fantasy story that might work out.
Having spent some time in one recently I have to say they’re pretty impressive. There are virtually zero shortcomings vs. a gasoline car. They’re smooth riding, luxurious, loaded with gadgetry, fast as fuck, and feel fine to drive. The AWD is pretty impressive too. They’re still quite unreliable which would be annoying since they seem to have 1 service centre every 200 miles at this stage.
As far as charging vs. gas, certainly gas is more convenient to an extent thanks to the abundance of gas stations, but I think it’s different. On short drives or your normal commute cycle, electric is more convenient because you charge at home, no gas station stop required. If you have a nema 14-50 plug at home, you can go from 0 to full in a night. The long distance driving thing isn’t really a big deal with the superchargers…it’s just different. It’s a 20 minute stop for electricity/food/washroom every 2hrs instead of a 20 minute stop for gas/food/washroom every 4 hrs. If you’re good at it, on a 1000 mile trip you just stop for 20 minutes every 120 miles or so when you hit a supercharger and keep working the middle of the battery where it charges quickest. That adds up, timewise, and you have to plan the route so it’s not nearly as easy as gasoline but it’s also not nearly as annoying as you might have anticipated. It was tempting to overcharge driving one for a week (always staying too long at the supercharger just to be sure) but if you owned one, I’m sure you’d be more confident and adept at managing that. I saw a few guys on major highway stops in the middle of nowhere who came in, charged, and left while I was sitting there staring at the screen.
Anyway, they’ve built a ‘good enough’ car to be a real force. The business is still shit unfortunately and the only way they can fund it is with hype/stock price. If the stock market cools off and they can’t come to it to raise capital (their debt is for shit so issuing bonds is waste) the business is dead or is sold to someone huge like a major automaker or google. In that situation, the cars are suddenly not so cool to own.
The other thing is…what happens when Audi’s electric Q7 comes out for $90,000 next year…are you really going to spend $90,000 for a Tesla Model X and it’s disastrous reliability? The thing that’s neat is the Tesla superchargers…it’s MUCH easier to drive an electric Tesla across the province I live in than any other electric car thanks to the superchargers…however the Ontario govenrment is adding 500 charging stalls across the province in 200 towns (remember though…our province makes california look like the size of a small farm). So the big companies aren’t dumb…they’ve had electric like tesla for 5 years. They just aren’t launching it until the governments build thousands of charging stations for them (rather than tesla spending billions on their own).
When did we both get so reasonable?
The Tesla stock price clearly has something built into it other than a car company. The auto maker part might only be worth a fraction. You have to believe some kind of other network development will occur from one of the product lines. That could be supercharger network, solar network, storage network (standard and licensing), transportation network, autonomous network, etc. It may take until 2027 for it to become apparent which one of these is going to take off like the cars eventually did.
Google’s 3rd most valuable business after AdWords and YouTube is probably going to be autonomous driving patent licensing. Could be worth tens of billions in revenue. They have the earliest patents.
Interestingly Elon Musk went to Google when he thought Tesla might not survive, and had a deal in place. Of course he didn’t need to pull the trigger but it was there. Good to see he’s not an egomaniac who would kill this thing rather than see it flourish in the hands of another.
I started to think maybe he’s not so crazy when the solar roof tile came out, as stupid as that sounds. It was fucking genius…a solar roof that doesn’t make your house look like shit, and that doesn’t make you an anorak. Of course it’s still miles from making financial sense.
but if you have a solar slate tile roof, a powerwall and an electric car, now we’re getting somewhere. Problem is that we’re about 25 years away from that making any financial sense so these endeavours are all of the heart. People who are buying new Teslas off the showroom floor are making a donation to the progress of this concept, and that’s incredible becuase it’s a big donation…about $30,000 I reckon. Some of them aren’t so noble, they just want the cool thing. Others are dumb and think they’re ‘saving money’. But there’s a few who are taking one for the team and that’s pretty cool.
My theory on these cars that makes them interesting is that they won’t really depreciate the way a regular car will. I often buy somewhat rare cars knowing that the true cost of ownerhsip is how much it depreciates while I own it. My Rs4 depreciated the equivalent of about 20,000 US dollars in 6 years. My cost of ownership is peanuts. People lease new Civics for more money. When I bought a Tesla, I was able to get one at a great price, and anticipate the ownership costs are going to be similar to my RS4, even less thanks to no gasoline and minimal maintenance. While I will certainly use up electricity to power it, our rates here are a quite modest 8.9 cents per KWh, in CAD, which is about 7 US cents per. Will be interesting to see how it goes.
Pics of Tesla? Specs and options?
I crack up on TV whenever some douche says solar creates 6x more jobs than [carbon]. Yeah, financial engineering and sales jobs. It takes very few people to actually manufacture the panels. The problem is all of the scammy companies that have sprung up to sell subprime loans for shit solar equipment. Your average slob doesn’t know that he needs Bosch panels from Germany with parallel circuitry and transformers on each node. He buys the shit panels they make in Buffalo or China and wires them up in series, so they’re not all that efficient. That’s because it’s cheap - $40k for a system instead of $80k. They’re also worthless in 10 years.
The solar loans are like double digit APR with teaser rates for the first 5 years. If you fuck up and default, they’re recourse loans so they take your house. The door to door salespeople prey on lower middle class neighborhoods and convince people they’ll save money. Yeah, it cash flows for the first 5 years and then balloons on the back end.
The Tesla tiles are supposed to be of comparable cost to a slate or terracotta roof. Like what you’d put on a McMansion. Seems like a win/win if you can get big homebuilders to offer it as an option.
that’s typical of …everything. Same for LED light retrofits. People are getting hosed on those too, paying a fortune up front to get a lower electric bill for 10 years. On finance. At horrible terms. Awful.
I had heard the Tesla roof would cost about $80,000 for a good sized house. Not a monster, not a small one. What’s a normal slate roof…$40,000? Asphalt around $20,000?
and there are 175 more for sale from $39-69K right now in 2017
that one you linked…loser debadges it (but only the battery badge, not the Model S badge lol), and then sells it without mentioning what battery it has
lame
Like an A4 2.0T owner who debadges for 2.0T shame but leaves the quattro badge. “I did it for looks” (sure you did)
That’s probably a 40kw. I believe the 40 is actually a sofware limited 60, so you could conceivably upgrade that to a 60 kw battery for a fee.
http://images.autotrader.com/hn/c/98e4e2424a014a25a706ad5a4ac9e0d4.jpg
EDit: looks like a 60 based on the max range of about 185 miles
Also looks like someone has been BEATING on that car for joyrides/test drives while it’s at the dealership.
The last 30 miles driven are showing an average of about 750 watt hours used per mile. in other words, that car that could normally get about 175 miles on a full charge would only get about 80 miles at that rate! The harder you drive it, the worse your range is (like gasoline cars).
Whoever was driving that was driving like a retard though and doing full bore launches.
http://images.autotrader.com/hn/c/5f74dd85b74740fc8ba6155bf7ce22d2.jpg
Ya, Saki that was just the first one …I should have linked the many 85kw ones for sale under $60k. All electric tech has a LONG way to go before i consider it.
I love the idea of the hybrid performance for the huge initial torque. I’d like to add an electric motor to my rear wheels if it was feasible.
I want to see liquid hydrogen technology developed.