What that really means: Tesla is going to lose a ton of money per car on the Model 3, or raise the price, until at least 2022. That's realistic. His two top production guys quit when he announced 2018 as the delivery date for the Model 3. His new production head, from Audi, may have given Musk a reality check.
Tesla produced about 50,000 cars in 2015 with 13,000 employees, about 4 cars per employee. Ford produced 3.2 million cars in 2015 with 187,000 employees, about 17 cars per employee. Toyota produced about 9 million cars with 344,000 employees, about 26 cars per employee. So Tesla needs to get their productivity per employee up by 4x - 7x to play with the big guys. Clearly Musk has done the same calculation.
Now, though, he's admitting that they can't do it by 2018. This is prepping the stockholders for bad financial news. Tesla is going to burn a lot of cash through at least 2022.
There's no reason that Tesla can't get their productivity up to at least Ford levels in time. Ford has a much broader product line, and Tesla's car isn't that complicated mechanically. But it's not instant.
Number of employees per car output is one metric meant to be a proxy for something else. Use it in a TED Talk or a newspaper editorial to make some larger point, since it is a compelling takeaway, but it's actually pretty meaningless on its own.
Being boring, and looking at sustainable production costs and what consumers are willing to pay is far closer to what matters than the shorthand of looking at employees per car.
This is an awesome analysis. Do you happen to know the numbers for BMW, the most frequently compared "like" to Tesla that I've seen? (or a similar luxury company)
If you're an American, you're twice as likely to die with a steering wheel in your hands as you are to die at the hands of a murderer. Human-driven vehicle deaths cause grave second-order suffering for families and friends - and hurt the economy.
A shift to technologies safer than human-driven cars would dramatically reduce human suffering and should be welcomed.
I do wonder, though, how this would reshape our cities - if we're not careful. Besides direct costs for the car, fuel, and maintenance, the main disincentive to driving is how damn boring it is. What happens when we turn fully-autonomous vehicles into luxury entertainment centers? I suspect that, if we're not smart about this shift, we could see wild sprawl on a scale that would dwarf the mid-20th century sprawl we saw in Los Angeles and elsewhere.
On the whole, though, it's a beautiful thing.
If you're an American you're more likely to die from suicide than you are from motor vehicle related injuries. You're more likely to be poisoned than to die in a motor vehicle crash. You're 16 times more likely to die from heart disease or cancer.
Compared to 1950, motor vehicle death rates have more than halved.
I was just thinking about this today (and have been for a while now), but with regards to vehicle comfort.
I drive a small sedan, but have ridden in pickup trucks and SUVs. They are far more comfortable than the sedans the way they sit taller, have far more room, and feel like a small bubble protecting one from the rest of the world.
This is a danger on two fronts: safety, and comfort leading to more driving. If we continue to make cars more comfortable, we continue to abstract the idea that we are zipping around in 3,000 pound death machines, thus leading to more reckless or risky behavior.
As autonomous vehicles roll out to the public, no doubt people will expect computers, internet, and television to be front and center. Others may take naps during commutes. But with this, rather than curing the disease that is longer and longer commutes due to policy that encourages sprawl, entertainment will just treat the symptoms.
This future is interesting because both living way out in the suburbs AND living in a city both become more attractive.
Though many US city demographics are different to anywhere else in the world due to white flight - the "wealth donut" around a poor inner city rather rather than people getting poorer as you move further out in the suburbs.
Car-for-car I'd easily wager that manually-driven cars have been involved in far more accidents than the one or two Tesla accidents that have occurred over the same time period (not to dilute the terrible result of the most recent accident).
The problem is that a typical person doesn't care. Car accidents where a human is at fault are "normal." We live in a society where speeding, aggressive driving and/or DUI are routinely practiced. From personal experience: even when you dial the convenience factor to 11 (Uber/Lyft) people are still adamant that they are OK to drive. The driver is blamed, not the fact that the driver is doing something that evolution has never had to solve.
Additionally, the non-technical crowd are very used to machines breaking and doing the wrong thing. So when you come along with a story about how a machine killed a person in, what is very strictly, a motor vehicle accident everyone's built-in beliefs about machines are merely reinforced. Few step back and consider how embarrassingly incompetent humans are at driving, and how a machine that doesn't yet have the sensors required to properly perform the task still runs circles around our very rich set of senses.
Your concern about sprawl could come true, or vehicles could switch largely to on-demand access, where urbanization will provide the critical mass for on-demand vehicle use, making the exurbs relatively more expensive.
I woke up this morning feeling sullen (many factors involved). I didn't feel like going to work. I could hardly get out of bed. I just sat for a few minutes staring in the vacuumn. Something told me to check Hacker News (I am trying to avoid it in morning), and the top link was this. I went through it twice. It instilled hope and enthusiasm in me. I woke up in an instant and rushed to work to do great stuff.
Thanks for the article I am typing this at work, else would have wasted the day filled with self-loathing and despair. Hang in there guys, it gets better. Do Great Stuff.
Yeah, news about Tesla and SpaceX often do the trick for me. Those two companies seem to be hell-bent on pushing us into a brighter, better future.
As much as the Internet transformed society, I also can't help but feel like we were on the track to have achieved these things and got distracted by our global communications and selfie-cat picture delivery network and are only now starting to come to our senses as the ubiquity has occurred and the ecosystem of necessary applications has become fleshed out, matured and developed a commercial angle.
If you look at his pre-hardware days, he built basically a e-phonebook when paper phonebooks were still all the rage and a couple payment companies. Both no-duh companies in hindsight.
Musk's plans feel like he's taking a derailed train, applying some common sense grease (solar panels on electric cars? MADNESS! Reusable rocket stages instead of throwing away the entire ship? ~~CRAZY!~~) and getting our civilization going again.
He's also really really public about his plans and telegraphs his moves years in advance...and yet very few seem able to execute anywhere near his league.
I sometimes feel if things had shaken out differently and Steve Jobs was younger than Musk and was running a successful Apple, Musk might try to recruit him with a "do you want to sell cat picture delivery boxes for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?"
I don't know if Musk is going to succeed in the long run, and I hope serious competition finally shows up (because that makes each of his industries healthier), but seriously,
it's about fucking time.
Additionally, the existing players in the rocket market didn't have much incentive to innovate given how few players there were. Your guess is as good as mine on why the automobile industry didn't continue much EV research after the 90s.
I don't think this is the correct comparison. A car used correctly is safe. We have huge numbers of road accidents because most people are unable to reliably use a car correctly. The value of an 'autopilot' functionality is that it should be much better at using the car correctly in the real world than a human.
What matters is not how many accidents result when using autopilot 'correctly', but how many accidents result from using autopilot in the real world.
Also, because autopilot is primarily used on particular road profiles, it's not fair to compare accidents per autopilot mile directly with accidents per human driver mile. You need to adjust for the fact that autopilot is not used during more complex driving anyway.
I'd be very interested to know what the statistics are for those, since the recent press has given me a (potentially incorrect) impression that autopilot has lead to a relatively large number of serious accidents compared to the number of cars deployed.
It's probably why so much people keep resisting evolution like autopilot, they can't admit that even them can someday fail and crash. They believe that if they are good drivers they will avoid it.
Sadly very good drivers die every day and not only because of someone else's mistake.
Of course a computer or a machine can fail too, but in comparison it will never fail as often as human do. Because we can be careless, sleepy, drunk, unskilled,...
Now the real problem we will face (what scares me even though I'm pro-autopilot) is to accept to hand our lives to machines that will have to make choices in emergency situations (should it saves its owner or the kids in front of it ?, who is responsible in case of a crash ?,...)
Which would you prefer? Going at 100 km/h with autopilot on today's highways, sharing the road with people without autopilot, or going at 250 km/h with autopilot on a highway where everyone else is also on autopilot?
We will have to follow a likely tortuous path to get from now to then, but I am totally convinced we will get there.
A car is safe when it's used correctly, and all the other cars on the road are used correctly, and all the people and animals near the road behave correctly, and the weather behaves correctly.
But now that he's confirmed it all officially: this NUTS. This is so awesome. The press is going to go crazy with this.
I wonder what will happen to Uber...seems like it will be hard for them to compete with the rates of cars that don't have to pay their driver a living wage, nor pay for gas.
Electric semis-- THANK GOD. I live in Chicago and I can't tell you how sick I am of the massive exhaust plumes billowing over me as they pass by, and the roaring of their engines on the street outside my apartment.
The Tesla Autopilot crash in Florida has led directly to the Missouri governor's veto of a bill to allow big rig platooning--a semi-autonomous technology that lets trucks travel in close pairs (or more) for aero/fuel efficiency and safety benefits.
The backlash is going to get worse before broad public acceptance gets better. The rest of the US ain't SV.
Veto: http://trucker.com/blog/autonomous-tech-honeymoon-over
Platooning: http://peloton-tech.com
[0]: http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1098997_uber-ceo-to-tesl...
1. Semis. A typical long haul semi gets well under 10MPG. In some cases not much more than half that. They are heavy and need a lot of energy to move. A Tesla Model S weighs 4650 lbs and has a range of a couple of hundred miles. A semi truck can weigh up to 80,000 lbs. That is a lot of weight to get rolling and a lot to pull up a grade. Semis spend a large part of their time driving at highway speeds where air resistance is at a maximum. To achieve useful performance an electric semi will need a lot of batteries which will reduce its cargo capacity (Federal law regulates the maximum gross weight), which reduces its value to freight companies.
2. Autonomy. I think this will take a lot longer to achieve than planned, both technically and socially.
3. Enable your car to make money for you. I don't want anyone using my car. Legal liability is one reason. As owner of the car, I am liable for damage it causes. So legal liability laws will have to change. If I need to go somewhere, and my car is not here, I don't want to wait for another one. I don't want to get my car back from another user and find food wrappers strewn about and used condoms under the seat. I feel that my car is an extension of my home. It's personal space that I don't want to share with random strangers.
YMMV.
This, at least in most of the United States, is not a correct statement of the law. Absent something like Negligent Entrustment[1] or Vicarious Liability[2], one's ownership of a vehicle does not determine if one is liable if damage is caused while another is operating the vehicle. Some might be under this impression because we tend to purchase insurance "for a vehicle", however liability is placed upon a negligent driver (not owner). Somewhat of a discussion of this is found here: http://www.claimsjournal.com/news/national/2014/06/05/249762...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negligent_entrustment [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicarious_liability
2. Maybe so, but it will happen, and the delay won't really hinder Tesla. They're not dependent on it. It's not like they can't sell cars without it. It's just another tier of advancement to be reached in time.
3. Maybe you don't want anyone using your car (nor would I), but that's why it's optional. A lot of people will love this. Owning a car of that level of quality for a greatly reduced price thanks to earned revenue. I assume the app will let you monitor its location, and you can anticipate when you'll need it back again and call it back before that time arrives. Or....just take someone else's car if you're in such a rush :) Sharing is caring.
Why would a self-driving cargo vehicle drive at highway speeds? A human truck driver can only drive 11 hours/day, an autonomous vehicle can be on the move 24/7 and so could travel at slower, more efficient speeds while completing trips on similar time scales.
> To achieve useful performance an electric semi will need a lot of batteries which will reduce its cargo capacity (Federal law regulates the maximum gross weight), which reduces its value to freight companies.
Don't forget about the solar roof unit. There is a lot of surface area on a trailer. This could offset some of the energy requirements along with other technology such as regenerative breaking. Also consider that a supercharger network might be constructed.
> Autonomy. I think this will take a lot longer to achieve than planned, both technically and socially.
I disagree. The evidence is to the contrary technically speaking. The matter is more subjective on the social front, but we've seen how popular attitudes change to technology. It might be a fatuous example but consider how it was once uncool to be online and then MySpace happened, and consider how it was anathema to be anywhere near online dating, the archetypal hallmark of a loser, then Tinder happened and now it's almost de rigueur in the mainstream.
> Enable your car to make money for you. I don't want anyone using my car. Legal liability is one reason. As owner of the car, I am liable for damage it causes.
Insurance (including public liability insurance) is already a thing. Insurance is priced according to risk, so when autonomous vehicles are here and much safer than human drivers the insurance will be priced as such.
> If I need to go somewhere, and my car is not here, I don't want to wait for another one.
The post alluded to making your car available when you're at work etc. I expect the intention is ensure it has returned to you by the time you want to go home.
> I don't want to get my car back from another user and find food wrappers strewn about and used condoms under the seat.
These are valid concerns I share too.
This can probably only work when the car is old such that its value has already been depreciated significantly.
Ummm... Where the hell do you live where this is the case?
Whatever counter Tesla might have in store to prevent this, it would have to involve them analyzing/monitoring/recording the behavior of people in the vehicle, which would be a huge privacy nightmare that nobody wants to be a party to.
I think that highways in the future will become electrified and then teslas semis will be able to charge as they go on the highways.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-23603751
https://www.scania.com/group/en/worlds-first-electric-road-o...
I agree that the power densities for long-haul, BEV trucking simply don't make sense, even with platooning technologies. Intermittent fast-charge stations plus catenaries, with off-grid battery capabilities, would be a possibility however.
Another option would be for always (or nearly-always) tracked operation, with what's effectively a cargo-streetcar function within cities and suburbs, and traditional rail off.
Functions such as field-to-depot transport would almost certainly still require fueled vehicles.
As for power density... going to a turbine engine feeding electric power systems is a sufficiently big win compared to straight-up diesel ICE. There's a big industry group looking into this:
http://corporate.walmart.com/_news_/news-archive/2014/03/26/...
That's a hell of a statement and I want to see much better stats than that. Just looking at the total distance per death in human driven cars and comparing it to the autopilot total distance is a gross simplification. At an absolute minimum you have to start by only comparing driving on similar roads. Tesla simply keeps hiding behind 'if used correctly' which includes the driver being alert and ready to take over - if we restrict human driving stats to similarly ideal conditions the accident rate will also drop. Additionally driver demographics is a big deal as is the safety features of the car itself.
Who knows, but if Tesla feels they have a moral duty to leave on autopilot if it is safer, they equally have one if it is more dangerous. It seems they are pretty happy to be in dark about which it is while they test their system.
Musk misreads the public's attitude about vehicle safety. Human error is understandable, mechanical failure is unacceptable. Society can live with 10 people driving themselves off a cliff (and blame the drivers, road conditions, or poor signage) but they will not accept a car driving its trusting passengers off a cliff.
If the public genuinely thought that way they wouldn't exist already. Tesla is just bringing more scale to what we already have in parts of Europe and I'm sure the US too.
I don't think Musk has misread public attitude towards safety but rather hit the nail on the head. Such vehicles don't need to be perfect just significantly safer than people.
Meanwhile SolarCity has been burning cash on a consistent basis [1], and is sitting in a hyper competitive solar panel industry, where I don't see their competitive advantage. It seems foolish to bring that business inside of Tesla, as if it failed, the debt risk would now affect Tesla's future. As many others have mentioned, a long term licensing deal or partnership avoids those risks.
[1] http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/musk-says-solarcity...
People who buy electric cars are far more likely to buy solar panels. And storage batteries. And wiring they would need for the electric car. It's all directly related.
So when I buy a Tesla ... I have to hire a 3rd party to install the wiring to charge it. I can buy the storage battery from Tesla, but again, need to hire someone else to install it. And if I want solar panels for that storage battery, again 3rd party.
SolarCity has a fleet of professionals ready to do all of that. They also have a plant to manufacture their own panels, which hopefully they'll be able to differentiate on. Combining the two companies will enable Tesla to service that whole loop with the equipment and installation.
Now, you can argue that Tesla may have been better off starting their own division from scratch or buying someone else ... but from what I heard, they're getting a hell of a bargain for SolarCity.
We're lucky right now that the government's promotion of PV is putting the burden of power storage on the power-grid operators. Without net metering, this stage of PV would never happen. But net metering is essentially bad for the grid operators; they get paid nothing for storing power or sending it from a net producer to a net consumer. They will eventually prevail like they tried to do in Nevada earlier this year and buy power cheaper than they sell it.
But in the meantime the power grid companies haven't got a chance without competition. My home electric meter is as dumb as a box of hammers, even though I spend a lot of money with it and rely on it to keep my family safe in the winter. If that meter were capable of telling me when the power I used was coming from a peak-load diesel generator, I would happily turn off my electric stuff. But they can't do that now.
PV needs to use this window of opportunity to get going, and to get other power-storage solutions working. A Model S is one of those solutions: a gigantic battery with wheels and cruise control. To my way of thinking, systemwide integration is an electropolitical move worth making.
From a personal point of view, I can say that Solar City's sales and engineering teams are smarter and more committed than the people at other PV companies I spoke to. They are trying to build a scalable business rather than bopping from town to town installing stuff and moving on.
Will this work long term? Who knows? But it's worth trying.
What if you also have a massive deployment of solar panels on top of existing real estate, that you essentially don't have to pay rent for?
When Teslas are autonomous, and owners are using them to make money by giving other people rides. How are these cars getting charged? And that energy doesn't come for free. Tesla will have their hand in every piece of transportation.
Oh, and I've heard Tesla described as "a battery company that makes cars." Solar is also tightly coupled with battery tech since without it they're a lot less useful. Maybe that's the synergy?
And once you're in the business of selling solar storage batteries it makes some sense to integrate with a solar provider.
But I think you're right in your second paragraph and it might make more sense for Solar City to just be a re-seller of Tesla batteries without Tesla buying them.
However, in the grand scheme of things, this really does seem like I am watching history unfold. I don't know if I've ever truly believed the "grand mission statement" of a company before so much as I do Tesla's. Mostly because, when it has come down to it, Musk has proved that he really means it. Silicon Valley has made the joke a billion times of start-ups saying they're trying "To make the world a better place." The difference with Tesla (and probably also SpaceX) is that if they succeed, it seems they really will make the world a better place. ..and probably cement Musk a pretty good paragraph in the history books, it seems.
There are many things to take from Musk's master plan part deux, but the most important for me is the intent and aspiration.
I live in Australia, the leadership here is absolutely dire both political and economic. A relentless cycle of vested mining interests and climate change deniers espousing at length on the cattle exports to Asia suffering if marriage equality is passed.
Maybe Musk succeeds, maybe not, but here's someone with vision, a plan, and he's going to have a fair swing at it.
The leadership here isn't dire, it's just boring (in global terms) and a bit of a soap opera. The country is still a great place to live. If you look beyond the media, there is leadership - for example, in Gillard's tenure, more articles of legislation were passed than in any previous government, including some key items, despite the media loudly claiming (with plenty of misogyny) that the minority government was hamstrung and paralysed.
Turnbull is not the guy I want in right now, but his leadership is hardly 'dire'. Besides, if you use 'dire' for something as beige as Turnbull, what have you got left for something like Erdogan's latest activities in Turkey?
This seems very significant for Tesla vs competitors. Yes Google has a strong technology lead today, but how long will that last when Tesla is collecting more miles of data every day than Google has collected in 5 years? (Sincere question) Not to mention Apple and existing car vendors, who each have 0 million miles of experience.
Tesla should reach 6 billion miles very quickly once the model 3 is out.
With deliberately chosen conditions, scenarios, and routes, it seems to me Google could be collecting data that are just as useful although maybe covering much a smaller number of miles.
Not sure how they came up with 6 billion as the magic number, but if that's accurate, that's very soon. It also helps that there are no real government stakeholders in preventing the proliferation of self-driving cars. People just need to generally believe that they are much safer than human drivers, which of course is not true yet.
I feel like Musk's actions are a great example of McLuhan's "The Medium is the Message". Tesla is not a car company. They're doing cars because it's a way into their actual business. He wants them to invest in solar power because it's another way that ties into a general plan.
Tesla is building the vehicles and energy source for the vehicles, and building the autonomy in to them, but it's betting on a user-base acquisition via hardware (vehicle) ownership and/or eventually some form of subscription to the "Tesla" club.
Carbon-based fuel(s) will eventually run out. Tesla via SolarCity will be in an incredible position of offering energy, so I'll be looking at how well their plan of putting Solar on every roof works rather than autonomy / vehicle manufacturing / sales. I think this is likely going to be their make or break asset.
Also, four entities have launched rockets into space: the US, China, the Soviet Union (Russia) and Elon Musk.
This guy is thinking and planning on a scale I find it hard to even imagine, to fit in my brain.
France [1], Japan [2], India [3], Israel [4], Iran [5], and even North Korea [6] have developed and launched rockets that successfully put satellites in orbit.
I like Elon as much as the next guy, but this mythologizing is just too much.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamant
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_(rocket_family)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_Launch_Vehicle
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavit
We can't do this well if Tesla and SolarCity are different companies, which is why we need to combine and break down the barriers inherent to being separate companies. That they are separate at all, despite similar origins and pursuit of the same overarching goal of sustainable energy, is largely an accident of history. Now that Tesla is ready to scale Powerwall and SolarCity is ready to provide highly differentiated solar, the time has come to bring them together."
I don't really see how this answers the question as to why they need to merge? Why can't their just be a partnership?
(Anecdotal evidence, based on working in an energy startup in Australia for a few years).
Should autonomous vehicles be identified as such (special lights or label) so that real humans can know not to be erratic around it?
Cars we considered the new weird thing that needed to take special steps to not spook horses or their riders/drivers.
Now, of course, the situation is reversed and horses often are required to have special visibility gear to be seen more clearly by cars.
So, perhaps in the future there will be some sort of indicator light that turns on when the idiot driver turns on manual driving mode so you (edit, or your car!) can give them a wide berth.
Historically yes, if you cause problems your licence is revoked and in some cases your vehicle is seized.
I look forward to the rise of the machines, with humans losing driving privileges for simple things like wandering across lanes without signalling, running red lights, hitting pedestrians or bumping other vehicles in the parking lot.
Great idea. Would do wonders for marketing the capabilities too.
- Create stunning solar roofs with seamlessly integrated battery storage - Expand the electric vehicle product line to address all major segments - Develop a self-driving capability that is 10X safer than manual via massive fleet learning - Enable your car to make money for you when you aren't using it"
I take this as...
Having solar powered superchargers power autonomous semitrucks transporting cargo across america.
Having solar powered superchargers power autonomous public buses transporting people around a city.
Have my car join a fleet of uber-like autonomous teslas while i'm not using it.
How does one calculate this? Does there exist some canonical Productivity-Equation?
This is the part I really want to see.
I can't picture the layout he's describing here - not sure if it's been discussed in more detail elsewhere - anyone got a better idea or a reference image?
"Starting a car company is idiotic and an electric car company is idiocy squared."
I have a lot of trouble understanding the public transportation part. The ideas presented fall apart when you remove the baffling assumption that traffic congestion decreases with the introduction of autonomous vehicles. Autonomous vehicles will expand the possible set of drivers. That will dramatically increase the amount of vehicles on the road. If anything our future with autonomous vehicles will be unbearable gridlock.
It's also very sloppy; it's not an actual plan, with goals and steps that logically follow each other. The last master plan had a clear logic to it: you used the margin of each successive step to fund research and development further down in order to increase the use of electric cars and limit global warming. This is more like a wish list than a plan. "We want to make semis." "It'd be great if we also provided the solar part of the stack because it dovetails with this other initiative we're doing." "Once we have solar, we can do this new thing." Etc, etc. Unlike the first master plan, I can't gauge how long any of this will take or whether it is feasible. I can't gauge what the actual strategy is any better than I could yesterday. And isn't that the point of a Master Plan?
Since the first master plan was published in 2006, Tesla Motors has raised money privately (during its near death experience in 2008), sold a 10% stake to Daimler (which was recently divested), went public which has a side effect of raising even more (though the main reason to IPO in most cases liquidity to existing investors), and since then have continually raised money from the public market every year or two. There's probably private and public capital raisings since 2006 that I'm forgetting too (and they raised other capital streams like debt, such as the DoE loan)
The very lofty stock price of Tesla in recent years has helped it fund Model S, Model X and Model 3 designs, development, manufacturing (at large scales) and delivery, as well as the building of a large battery factory which Tesla owns a stake in. This constant fund raising has kept Tesla alive and I don't argue that it was very good corporate governance by Elon Musk and team to get Tesla Motors to where it is now (approaching the delivery date for the first Model 3 shipments and having a huge capacity to manufacture battery packs).
However, it's still a failure in its attempt to bootstrap the funding of Model 3 based on sales of previous models.
Of course, Tesla and SpaceX has consistently ended up achieving great things, even if the timeline is optimistic and the budget ends up blowing out. But issuing stock and eventually debt can only stretch Tesla so far. Hopefully Tesla can become a more sustainable business before that happens.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/at-work/test-and-measurem...
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1263107
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...
http://www.santafe.edu/research/working-papers/abstract/0650...
But I mean, he's Elon Musk. He could still pull it off.
His biggest problem by far (excepting, perhaps, Model 3 production targets) will be regulations. It makes a nice story when you talk about the relative risks rationally, but there's no chance whatsoever American politics will deal with the issue in a rational fashion. Autopilot may retroactively become illegal in places people currently get away with it; cars driving themselves around is a different and titanic can of worms. What if a terrorist gets their hands on a Tesla and stuffs it full of explosives?
IIRC he originally saw three major fields to move forward on: the Internet, Transportation/Energy, and Space. By the sounds of it he was thinking of these as early as high school, to at the latest some time after he sold his first company (Zip2). He did the Internet thing pretty well, now he's working on the other two. This is someone who does think on these scales. Keep in mind, as the article itself points out, that you're an idiot if you think starting a car company is a good idea. Energy was the whole point all along. A company for its own sake isn't in Elon's DNA. That would probably just be too boring for him.
Whether this specific merger is a good idea or not is a different question. And I also don't think the emergence of cheap supercomputers in the form of geek-subsidized graphics cards and their applicability to a particularly effective machine learning genre would have been predicted by anyone.
I think SolarCity is part 2, now that cars are running on electricity, it's time to make the electricity clean.
Using a Cobb County Georgia as an example, stats posted awhile ago listed over a thousand school buses traveling almost seventy thousand miles a day. Seventy thousand miles a day! Since the buses have to load/unload at schools and such its easy to establish charging points to include fast top offs where five or six minutes of charging can extend enough to the next time. Then between major routes, elementary, middle, and high school, longer charge periods can be done.
Get kids and parents used to silent electric buses and you go a long way to establishing a generation on them. Get autopilot to work well in that environment and you get to sell them on two innovations at once
Doesn't Tesla charge a large fee to have autopilot enabled on your car? Isn't that equally morally reprehensible?
Solar-powered, autonomous spacecraft.
So he is essentially say, in at most five in a half years, they'll be ready for fully self driving cars?
It's a tall order, but can you set your sights on those "long life vehicles" presently used by the US Postal Service in urban and suburban areas, or maybe similar vehicles in Europe. Those machines return to base daily and usually are unused at least 8 hr/day. Massive buildings with large roofs.
Cop cars. Lots of slow speed cruising combined with a very occasional need for high speed and agility. Return to base every shift. Location awareness.
These sales cycles will be long, and probably a pain in the neck for your major account teams. But you're in it for the long haul.
From the owner of Model S #146761
But master plan part deux seems odd: what exactly does "One ordering experience, one installation, one service contact, one phone app" for solar have to do with the Tesla transportation part?
I think in the long run Google might be building the correct solution for greater number of people.
Musk said Tesla has always planned to provide solar energy. SolarCity provides solar energy. The odd part to outsiders is, why now?
I think Musk's investment in SolarCity was being threatened by the end of subsidized net metering. He needed to speed up the time table for energy storage to keep the company in business. SolarCity had the solar panels, but Tesla had the batteries. It would be a poor customer experience for SolarCity to have to negotiate with Tesla for the Powerwall, and it would be a waste of time and money for SolarCity to start its own battery sourcing.
If Musk could get the market valuation and accelerate the world's weaning from fossil fuels this way, it's a big bonus, but all this leveraging is pretty risky.
Do note that it was only a proposal and nothing has been accepted yet with the deal, so it's an offer only - in fact, if you look at SolarCity's stock price, it's weighted toward investors believing that the deal does not happen.
Where I'm from, we call that trains.
This is why they're including batteries instead of telling customers to feed excess energy back into the grid. Feeding into the grid is technically more efficient and doesn't require all those batteries, but does require the headache of interfacing with your local utility.
In cities, everyone needs their car at exactly the same time, that's why we have congestions. When I'm not using my car, no one else needs one (that's an exaggeration of course but not by much).
So in order to get to sustainability, we need to understand why remote working (for instance) hasn't happened yet.
[I'd still like to own a fully autonomous mobile home that drives me to work while I am eating breakfast in my bath robe or taking a shower and then moves me to a beach while I'm sleeping on Friday nights. Well, one can hope, right?]
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/05/tesl...
Tesla will require regular infusions of capital over, say, the next 5 years. The only source for that is more equity, and to do that you need to actually start meeting some of your self-declared profitability goals. Up to now, Tesla hasn't.
The tactic of diverting attention with "but look, here's this great awesome world-changing thing we'll do next" has worked so far but it's rapidly getting old. In general, the frequency with which sleights of hand are starting to be employed is concerning. Remember the "but don't just take my word on it — I myself will be buying $20M of new stock!" thing? Sure you will to reassure investors, given that loss of confidence will cost you personally far more than $20M.
SolarCity? "If Musk thought Tesla really needs a solar company, he might as well buy a good one. But it doesn't" [FT Lex]. Given how important it is that they are able to keep raising capital through equity offerings, taking the risk of freaking the investors out with SolarCity acquisition (otherwise expected to go into bankruptcy protection by next year) makes sense only if letting SC fail presents a bigger risk of the same. The Musk fairytale would certainly take a hit from a SC bankruptcy.
And Musk setting these crazy numbers goals practically guarantees he's setting TSLA shareholders up for disappointment.
Non-profit-making Amazon has been raised as a counterargument in the comments on this thread; the amount of trust the market has extended to Bezos for the time that it has is practically unprecedented; and Bezos has worked hard to make that happen by making investment/direction choices & providing information to earn the trust of the market. Musk, to the contrary, is doing everything to the opposite.
Now, what's the likelihood of a macro downturn within the next 2-5 years? Massive. That might trip up the availability of capital a bit—those refundable $1000 deposits too but who cares about them (by the way, much of T's capital has been raised during the period of literally historically unprecedented low cost of capital)
I didn't even begin to talk about competition. Or that Panasonic, T's critical gigafactory partner, isn't just sitting around twiddling thumbs (or the Chinese).
So, it'd be prudent to curb your enthusiasm. There might not be a part trois.
Is Tesla going to make this data freely available, to accelerate the development of safer autonomous driving software? Given that it's "morally reprehensible to delay release" of autopilot, it is also morally reprehensible not to publicly release such data if more groups working on the task will lead to safer software.
The world could be a better place for so many people, but somehow a bunch of other people think it's okay to continue doing them until they die.
The other day I came across an article in which a school prohibited their students clapping when cheering, instead making the cheer in quiet with a fistpump or something like that.
The stated reason for this was that some of their pupils were noise sensitive and it made them feel bad/anxious/terrified.
Now, regardless of whether this particular story is true like that, it illustrates something interesting.
There is a whole bag of human behavior that has the possibility to affect their environment negatively. I would go so far to say
> Being alive is an interruption to your environment
You can't not be a nuisance. Nor should you strive to be. That doesn't mean you should be as annoying as possible to everyone you meet, but it means to recognize that we live in a society in which people are different, and specifically to your point, have different trade-offs when it comes to acceptable risk and freedom.
That you have different trade-offs doesn't give you a moral high-ground, over people "thinking it's ok until they die". And I'm not totally relativist here, I think there should be limits and that some trade-offs are wrong.
It's just that that goes both ways between recklessly irresponsible and fascist government limiting everything dangerous, and there is a lot of space in between the two.
An electric car with a solar roof that charges all day would be pretty cool.
I don't see how automation reduces the need to get on the bus.
Things are gonna get real interesting in the auto world in the next few years, aren't they?
Solar harvesting in space sounds really cool, but how do you get that power back to earth? Even if there were a way, it's not necessary or effective. He's said very clearly that you could just have a giant square of solar panels in the desert and it would power the whole country. Why bother putting them in space? No advantage.
However, SolarCity IS likely to provide the panels for SpaceX's satellites, of course. So there is that form of solar harvesting in space.
Come to think of it, if you can transfer the energy... Just put the reactors in space?
We're now going a step further and building a next-gen interface for that autonomous future. #Asteria.
I suspect Tesla won't be alone in that space. Good luck to those who are.
The rates of accidents in manual vs current version of autopilot may work out to be favorable - (and that is still under debate) - but there certainly will be people who will die (and have died) due to a premature roll-out of Autopilot and their trust of it. This is some bloody cold calculation
There are 1.5 million heart attacks and strokes in the US every year. Self driving cars might end up being safer even if we were all perfect drivers.
So if they tout the idea of people not owning cars too much that is will only antagonize people in the short term.
If the ownership model changes they can easily adapt. I think they are very aware of the car ownership statistics and how cars being shared is a fundamentally better model in most cases.
This man is dreaming the future. Nay, he is building the future.
Does he really think that ?
- on time performance (I'm yet to leave bus stop in the morning on-time after about 10 years -- bus is always late); - less traffic in the bus terminal, where drives always make wrong assumption and create traffic where it could have been avoided; - safer commute (not that it isn't safe enough now, but there are drivers who prefer driving way too fast).
Oh well, this is only dreams.
Gives "pimp my ride" a whole new meaning.
Master Plan: Part Tres
Solar powered flying cars that will take you to Mars and beyond.
I really like this, but the laws of supply and demand still apply. If you live in a sparsely populated area there's not going to be much for your car to do.
Great for those in urban centres, but then if you lived there why bother owning at all when there will be more cabs to hail?
Sure, stuff sounds neat, but where are you going to get the capital from?
Another secondary share offering?
I guess the most concrete thing I saw was new factory for Model 3. Shouldn't that be your only priority?
Not designing an electric semi truck on paper to entice Joe Q Public into stepping up for another secondary share offer?
And this should be good enough for law enforcement to nail Tesla.
I think, like everyone else, that Musk is probably the smartest entrepreneurs of our time. In this case though, maybe he is over his head a bit:
- Getting Tesla 3 to production volume will not be easy.
- Autopilot is NOT good enough to be used in production. This can be fatal to Tesla if FCC catches up. Tesla needs to quit Autopilot and focus only on getting Tesla 3 out. Tesla 3 will face competition sooner rather than later and market dominance is not guaranteed.
- SolarCity has absolutely no synergies with this business. It should be sold off.
- SpaceX is again a distraction given how hard it will be for Tesla 3 to roll off.
