Tesla Cybertruck

[TinWing]

Even if the pedestrian is at fault, anyone driving a car should at all times be aware of the vehicle's sheer mass - 1 ton for a small car, all the way up beyond three tons for a loaded big one. Looking at my fellow drivers, not all of them act accordingly. At times, with lethal results - even at 10 km/h, getting hit by three tonnes of steel can kill you.

All a driver can do is to be attentive and try to anticipate trouble ahead. There’s nothing especially daunting about the mass or size of vehicles. In North America, most men who can afford to drive trucks that weigh at least 3 metric tonnes and are roughly 6 meters long. Women tend to drive crossovers that are between 1.8 and 2.5 tonnes and probably between 4.6 and 5.5 meters long. Truly small cars are virtually extinct. But there again so is public transit as ridership has never recovered post COVID. We live in world of mammoth vehicles and an underclass of pedestrians.

Technology is not the answer. Automatic emergency braking with pedestrian protection is a potentially problematic solution. There are class action suits over AEB systems slamming on the brakes on interstates for absolutely no reason, causing tailenders and pileups. I’m proud to say I recently found a vehicle without any of the faulty and useless safety rubbish such as AEB, blindspot, lane keeping, cross traffic or rear occupant warning. And it is a bit shorter than 6 meters because my garage was designed for comparatively tiny Cadillacs of the 1960s. In America we really have to thank the government fuel economy regulation for giant trucks replacing the much smaller and lighter gas guzzlers of yesteryear. And the electric future promises even heavier vehicles. The Tesla Cybertruck is comparatively lighter than the GM and Ford EV truck competition but the sharp stainless body will be a bit hard on pedestrians and other unwary humans. The power closing frunk has proven to be an excellent potential finger guillotine.

View: https://youtube.com/watch?v=bh597cnnNY4

 

[zevets]

I saw one visiting LA and broke out in a fit of giggles. The thing managed to be simultaneously massive while the interior seems shockingly cramped.

 

[WatcherZero]

Tesla has laid off its entire Supercharger division (500 staff) along with its entire Public Policy Team (they were responsible for environmental policies and lobbying government for beneficial legislation), it says it will reduce efforts to expand existing charging point locations to a trickle and instead focus on maintaining existing sites.

Tesla staff say firm's entire Supercharger team fired

The division responsible for the car-maker's huge fast-charging network is being axed to cut costs.

www.bbc.co.uk

On the one hand this makes some sense as they have recently managed to get their charger format accepted as the US national standard, on the other they are surrendering a market lead as the largest charging network in the US just as 7 of its competitors have ganged up to form their own rival charging station network. It also means they will be unable to push for Teslas charging tech to be adopted widely in the rest of the world. I wonder if this was another condition of the deal he did a couple of days ago in China to legalise Tesla self parking and limited self driving in China in return for giving a 50% stake in his China operations to Baidu (Chinese mapper), that Tesla also stepped aside to make way for Chinese manufacturers in the charging space.

 

[TinWing]

Tesla has laid off its entire Supercharger division (500 staff) along with its entire Public Policy Team (they were responsible for environmental policies and lobbying government for beneficial legislation), it says it will reduce efforts to expand existing charging point locations to a trickle and instead focus on maintaining existing sites.

Tesla staff say firm's entire Supercharger team fired

The division responsible for the car-maker's huge fast-charging network is being axed to cut costs.

www.bbc.co.uk

On the one hand this makes some sense as they have recently managed to get their charger format accepted as the US national standard, on the other they are surrendering a market lead as the largest charging network in the US just as 7 of its competitors have ganged up to form their own rival charging station network. It also means they will be unable to push for Teslas charging tech to be adopted widely in the rest of the world. I wonder if this was another condition of the deal he did a couple of days ago in China to legalise Tesla self parking and limited self driving in China in return for giving a 50% stake in his China operations to Baidu (Chinese mapper), that Tesla also stepped aside to make way for Chinese manufacturers in the charging space.

I think there was a very real threat of anti-trust lawsuits in another few years over Tesla’s horizontally integrated monopoly on both viable electric cars and charging infrastructure. This also explains Tesla’s generous licensing of their charging standard. Imagine if Henry Ford had had the capital to build a network of proprietary, company owned gas stations to accompany the direct sales of the Model T? He would have fallen afoul of the progressive “Trust Busters” of the early 20s century. As it was, Ford resorted to franchised distribution because capital was scarce, which pretty much screwed the American automotive consumer into the present day. It’s also worth remembering that the early Model T was multifuel, if only because gasoline was initially only distributed in metal tins for home lighting purposes. It wasn’t entirely clear that petrol was going to be the future of small internal combustion engines.

We can’t blame the Chinese for the slow buildout of charging stations in the USA. Or even Tesla. The reality is that there is no more public rapid charging infrastructure in my area than a decade ago. The state talks a good game about going green but doesn’t even require 220v charging points at newly built gas stations. New built restaurants, stores and apartment buildings don’t need to have them either. The reality is that going all-electric in 10 years isn’t going to happen, unless the only people buying cars in 2035 are affluent homeowners with garages and the means to install their own 220v and higher stations.

Electric car adoption rates have slowed because Tesla is the only real choice and has a terrible product development plan. Basically you can chose between dated sedans and crossovers (with baffling touchscreen controls) and an insanely idiosyncratic and inefficient truck. The other car companies are making complete rubbish EVs. It really says something when the cheapest Tesla has a longer range that German EVs that cost 3 to 5 times as much. I’m not even touching on Musk’s public persona.

Adopting Uber style pricing and halting the growth of the Superacharger network make a perfect business and legal sense. When Teslas are selling at such huge discounts, a Gillette business model is the way to go - sell the razors cheap and make money on the blades.

 

[WatcherZero]

I thought selling cheap electric cars and making money on the chargers would be the Gillette business model, they were taking $7.4bn in charger sales in 2022 and making a $700m annual profit, in 2023 charger sales were up to $8.3bn and they invested to expand the network by 27% (including foreign). Making a 10% net profit margin on charger sales is far better than the gross 16% margin they were making on their cars which also experienced a 56% drop in revenue in Q1 2024.

Model T being multifuel was a myth. There was no fabled toggle on the dashboard to switch between gasoline and ethanol and of the 13 carburetors from 4 different manufacturers used in the Model T, none was rated to run on fuels other than gasoline. Yes the engine was basic enough that it could run on anything flammable if you manually adjusted the air ratio. Ford tractors however did have secondary fuel tanks and a switch for changing which tank fuel was drawn from so that farmers could use whichever fuel was cheapest. Diesel engines at the time would also happily run on peanut oil.

 

[shin_getter]

I don't think it is right to think of elon as profit maximizing. No one who is merely interested in money would invest in spacex back then.

Elon is about making history, and penny and dime-ing with CATL and BYD is as interesting as maytag vs whirlpool (well, you could be a fan of appliances) as the EV ecosystem has technological momentum after the barrier to new entry from interlocking incumbents was broken. The rest is noise and cost curves hammering reality.

Some people talk about Elon appealing to tech investors to hold up the stock price. I think that is wrong, Elon is the tech instigator and the reason why he even still have tesla is because of robo taxi into skynet (but done "right") pipeline, as the alternative to microsoft-openai Sam Altman (elon got kicked) and google deepmind Demis Hassabis.

If you are a poor person with no power or ambition you maybe thinking about making more money. If you are rich and have ambition you should be thinking about immortality (neurolink) and the focal point of future power (AI). What else can you spend money on, feeding the Africans or put in a trust that future generations with different values will certainly consume for causes alien to yourself? Oh there is also marketing your own values to the public, and there is twitter.