The Electric Car Thread

[demultiplexer]

Before I dive into actual topics, let me just show my investment in this topic as I just bought a used Leaf

Also, use Leafs are seriously tempting.

I test-drove one, and one word sprang to mind: "uncomfortable". I would rather go full-ebike after driving a Leaf.

You have to give me a bunch of context here, because that is... like the total opposite of what we experienced with our Leaf test-drives and buy (note: 2011 Leaf). It's the most comfortable, ridiculously luxurious car ever. Especially for the second hand prices around here. It's bordering on criminal. I know some people are discerning on certain issues, so I don't want to say you're wrong, so I'm curious: in what way is it uncomfortable?

Also, yes, e-bikes for life, although that's pretty much a given around here. Nobody doesn't have or ride a bike here. Lots of people don't have cars or rarely use it.

 

[demultiplexer]

holy depreciation, Batman.

Okay, this seems like a good place to start a bit of discussion on subsidies. Because holy shit, the USA is great at subsidizing everything. As a European (stereotyped generally by: everything green is subsidized here and taxed through the roof), I'm eternally amazed how much the other way around the stereotype really should be.

We just bought a 2011 Leaf for €9000, and that is considered extremely cheap, even for a 9 bar Leaf. You rarely get them cheaper anywhere on the mainland for less. Even junk Leafs sell for €4-5k, and those need to be recertified to even drive. Much of this is due to lack of incentives, at least realtively. We don't have any tax credits or subsidies on EVs - literally none. Even outside of my country (Netherlands), the largest direct subsidy or refundable tax credit you can get is about €2500 (in Germany). The real 'subsidy' on EVs is in the form of waived pollution taxes (which can amount to a lot) and - mostly for businesses - refunded value-added tax and an investment tax credit. Still, even if you combine all of this the effective 'subsidy' on a new Leaf would be about €2500 net, bringing the price to €27500ish. Literally the best you can do.

So people value used EVs very highly; good luck finding any second hand EV for under €8000, most 2011-2014s are between €12k and €18k depending on trim level.

Add to that the fact that a 'short' range EV is still very useful around here. I live in a country about as flat as Kansas with moderate temperatures all year round and 70% of the country lives within a circle about the size of the NYC metro area. I went to a buddy this week in a town considered on the outskirts of this area, and I could have easily done that on a single charge - about 50mi round trip. This also adds to the value of the car.

Now of course, can we slap a moral value onto this? IMO, the American way is the right way here: on a fundamental level, electrification is something we need to speed up as much as possible to wean off of oil products. Electrified vehicles have the potential of reducing overall emissions and pollution in general by very large amounts, almost an order of magnitude in the long run. There is a clear path to progress, and investing a minute part of the GDP to hasten this and cement the US car industry as world leaders in this respect is a good thing. I wish this were done in Europe more. Basically only Norway cares at this point, and they don't even have a car industry. They're just subsidizing Tesla. By the way, subsidies around there are about the same as in CA.

And IMO you can clearly see the fruits of this labor in consumer acceptance and sales numbers; Leafs are very popular in the States compared to here. Flipside of course is that they depreciate much faster, as somehow people were able to buy new Leafs for the price of what a low-trim second hand one would cost here after 6 years :s. I mean, just wow.

But the gist I want to get at is: when is it enough? Clearly, a whole fuckton of subsidies works great. But can we get a similar boost when reducing subsidies or even eliminating them completely, sticking like most of Europe to 'soft' advantages, like priority in carpooling lanes, ability to drive in city centers that are off-limits to ICEs, reduced taxing and subsidized charging infrastructure. At some point you're picking winners instead of incentivizing a budding industry, and it's pretty hard to call a 300k cars per year industry nascent. It's pretty mature at this point.

Edit: oh, right, almost forgot to just add an important point: subsidies can have devastating effects as well, just look at the solar industry. Through mostly a completely broken regulatory system temporarily boosted by subsidies, home solar installations in the USA are about double to triple the cost of installations in Europe, which have mostly not gotten any direct subsidies, but rather got de facto net metering. Combined with differences in energy usage between the regions, this makes a home solar installation affordable on a single month's salary in Europe, versus typically about an entire year's salary in the USA. So things can go the other way around. All else being equal, subsidies seem to be a good incentive, but you need to have regulatory support as well.

 

[demultiplexer]

What's the installed cost per watt over there?

Getting below $2/watt for a rooftop microinverter based system is doable out here, but not without either a lot of searching around or doing a lot of the work yourself.

And do you have something like the UL 1741-SA requirements for inverters, or are they still empty VARs with no stability services?

Depends a bit. Average installed cost for all small installations excluding incentives in 2016 was €1.22/Wp, expected to hit €1.10/Wp this year. Average installed cost with incentives, which here means you get your VAT back, has just crossed €1/Wp. This includes professional installation and electrician's services. Inverters are all TL inverters, i.e. non-islanding nonisolated inverters. Typically these are single MPPT single phase up to 2kWp, double MPPT single phase up to 4kWp and three-phase 2 MPPT above that (relatively rare for residential installations).

Your UL 1741-SA standard is a bit less strict than our IEC 6095x/2014 extensions required for CE certification of European inverters. Before 2014 (well, before the notice that went out in 2011 already) inverters were essentially just tied to IEC 60950-1, which has no special provisions for local islanding situations. I'm not familiar enough with non-international UL standards, so I can't say for sure exactly how much they differ in the details. I assume this is not available publically?

I myself obviously did everything myself and put up solar panels in 2014-15 for €0.68/Wp. Next week I'm expanding for €0.62/Wp.

US average in 2014-15 was over $4/Wp excluding taxes, and has dropped to, according to NREL, $3.22/Wp (AC) in 2017.

Edit: yeah, these posts should probably be moved. Sorry, mods!

 

[demultiplexer]

I thought I was going to be on topic and now suddenly I am about to go on a tangent...
I have wondered, what happens with your acceleration, if your gas car isn't actually running when you step on the go pedal? Is there a noticeable delay? Mustn't there be? Because how can the car know you're about to go if it's just sitting there, turned off? Surely there must be some amount of time needed for the engine to restart. I have never driven a car that does this so I really have no idea.

Hey, another difference between continents: everything's stick shift here. Auto start-stop systems generally stop the engine when you put your car in neutral and release the clutch, and the motor starts again when you push in the clutch pedal. ASS-optimized engines start within about 2 revolutions and are up to speed in 5, so that's about 0.3-0.5 seconds. About as long as it takes to push in the pedal, so it doesn't affect performance at the lights.

Apparently on automatics the same thing happens when releasing the brakes. Yeah, that's probably as good.

My experience with ASS is on a 2014 Mitsubishi Mirage.

 

[demultiplexer]

The Leaf's thermal management is just a terribly minor issue. The real issue is the size of the battery and subsequently its typical charge/discharge rates and frequency. Mind you, this comes from a 60mi range Leaf owner (in winter).

The Leaf is just fundamentally misengineered from the outset. You can't put a 24kWh battery in a car and expect it to last any significant amount of time. For a typical 200kmi car lifetime, which is not a lot for an electric car, that means even if you run it down flat every time you'll have to recharge it 3000 times. Add to that the fact that they're using straight LMO (IMR) tech pouch batteries which are fine at packing a decent punch but not so fine at lots of recharge cycles and this alone should obviously show the battery to be too small to last.

But then, they decided to put a ridiculous 80kW motor into it, and make the car feel like a sports car with front and rear sway bars, stiff suspension and really sporty controls. So people punch it, and if you put your foot down on a degraded battery, you're pulling 5C, maybe 6C out of the cells. That is about the point where LMO lasts 1000 charges before dying. Meaning you can't even break 100kmi on a battery, realistically, before having to replace it.

This is a $35k car. At the time this was being engineered, they got AESC's batteries for $400/kWh. Say you take a $15k chassis and electricals from a Prius and reserve the rest of the gross budget for batteries, they could have EASILY put in 30kWh, maybe even 40ish for that price. They must have known this, yet they engineered this car for early failure by systematically encouraging overstressing the battery.

 

[demultiplexer]

The calendar life thing has never really been a significantly scientifically tested thing though, and it's been mostly debunked as more and more new old stock LMO/LCO batteries turn up with basically 100% capacity left if stored properly and at half charge. I think the 'myth' (not really a myth, just a very nuanced issue) mostly stems from long-term storage at high SoC and/or high/low temperature.

High temperatures, sure. There's a limited calendar life to cells at high temps. But not at room temperature, at least not necessarily, and it seems like NCA/NMC is very resilient in particular.

 

[demultiplexer]

Considering there are now at least two very widely publicized and a few dozen lesser known full rebuilds of Tesla's on the web (most well-known is Car Guru on youtube)... no, parts are very interchangeable and findable. I'm pretty sure the VIN-locked electronics is a false or un-nuanced hypothesis.

Tesla is certainly the most restrictive car manufacturer aside from the luxury brands right now as far as spare parts go, but not being able to find a bunch of parts early in the lifespan of a car is not unique to them at all. Back before Nissan EPC, there was literally no other way to even know which part number corresponded to which kind of part without buying into their catalog and verified supplier network, something that cost you pretty much a year's salary if you were to do it for all of the cars in their catalog. As a regular Joe, you had to do the scrapyard dance to realistically get parts at a decent price.

Back when Nissan started their shared platform vehicles (e.g. with Suzuki on the Alto/Pixo), it took a good year or two before you could get less common replacement parts through EPC. And that's pretty much the most popular car they made.

There's a reason that for decades and decades, there used to be car parts hobby societies; it could be very tricky to get parts. In a sense, Tesla harkens back to those times; having to scrounge on craigslist and ebay to find replacements because Tesla won't catalogue them and give you full service manuals.

The real question is: is this going to change for the better? Is this an attitude problem, scarcity by design, or is it a capacity/teething problem? Considering they're in a fast-evolving market with lots of turnover and a quickly obsolete back catalog, I'd bet that this isn't going to get fixed anytime soon, if at all.

 

[demultiplexer]

Any permanent magnet motor almost by definition can be more efficient because you don't need to generate your own field. But at high power densities, this is much less of an issue as the real efficiency gains you get are tiny. Maybe a brushless DC or IM is 95% efficient where a PMDC would be 97%.

The main advantage of magnet-less motors is that you are not limited in your torque by the strength of the magnets (which is always capped at around 1T). So you can generally pack waaaaaaaaay more power into a small BLDC than you can in a PM motor.

The higher MPG rating is probably also due to the fact that you can regen much better with a permanent magnet motor. They are almost perfectly symmetrical machines, working about as efficiently as a generator as they are as a motor. This is much more asymmetrical (typically 95/70% efficiency as motor/generator) for induction motors and still a bit asymmetric for BLDC. Electric cars get a really big boost from city driving in the ratings that way.

 

[demultiplexer]

Supposedly it's intentional.

It sounds for all the world like an old straight cut gearbox to me. Or a subway train starting.

I own a leaf, yes it's required and it's just a speaker. You can turn off the noisemaker with a button on the old models (which I have), but it only turns off the ghostly reversing sound (not even a beep, it's a sound from purgatory, the lost souls of a thousand dead children), the whirr of the motor at low speed remains. You can only turn that off by physically detaching the speaker near the front-left wheel well.

 

[demultiplexer]

His post suggests almost conclusively that he drove the PHEV. Fuel cells don't rev.

The driveline differences between the Clarity and Mirai are actually significant. I was surprised to hear Toyota and Honda had really just made their entire own thing. The Mirai has a traction battery to give it good response, the Clarity doesn't have anything like that and just throttles the fuel cell directly (it's got energy spoilers to make the ramp a bit less obvious).

(also, there have only been something like 50 Clarity FCEVs made, I don't think they actually sell them to anyone)

 

[demultiplexer]

Take into account that the modern Leafs are a bit hamstrung, the 2011-2013 Leaf had a (considerably) higher torque motor, especially at low speed, and bit more aggressive pedal tuning. To the detriment of range of course. Hopefully the new Nismo version in 2019 will bring back the fun of the old Leaf.

 

[demultiplexer]

I'm not quite up to date on the newest model, it could well have higher torque again. But it's not just the actual motor torque; it's the pedal response as well. The old one, which coincidentally I drive and thus is the best car ever, has a really stupid pedal mapping that just seems to map pedal position to current. You can slam it at a traffic light and if it wouldn't have ESP it would almost certainly just chew up your tires before it started moving. It's really aggressive, its nose-up almost feels Tesla-like.

The 2013+ is a lot... like, objectively better. Yes, electric cars are fun with their torque-iness and all, but it's really hard on the roads and the car itself to have that much torque from a luxury people carrier. It's not just gone down ~10% in max torque, it also made the pedal response more like you'd expect. Sane and useful. Much easier to keep a constant speed. It's a better car for it.

But in order to accommodate the Nismo version, I guess they do need to segregate their products. People have been modding the Leaf ('11-'12) motor to about 130kW peak and much higher peak torque already, even without materially changing the cooling (just running the coolant pump continuously). The Japanese model even has Nismo body kits available for $10k. So you could already have one if you wanted with the old one. So they hamstrung the consumer Leaf and bring out an all-option Nismo. Fine, we'll stop having fun then.

Keep in mind: all of this is from the perspective of a universe where Tesla doesn't exist. If you want performance at a decent price, get a Model 3, wait for the dual motor version. If you want decent range, get a Tesla. If you want good charging, get a Tesla. There's no real contest. I just like the Leaf for no detectable rational reason.

 

[demultiplexer]

Not just burning rubber, probably added tire smoke. You can order smoke kits to make your tires smoke a certain color and much more intensely. Normally tires don't smoke until you get a couple revolutions of slip in or until they're really hot.

 

[demultiplexer]

I find the underlying reason people don't know about or care about EVs is that people generally just take stuff by first impressions. Five years ago they saw a program about electric cars and they were crap then, well, they're probably crap now too.

I'm massively frustrated on this point by my father of all people. Almost four years ago now I, the poorest and youngest person in my family, put up solar panels because net metering would possibly be phased out by 2017-2020, so in order to fully recoup the cost that was the perfect timing. It made complete financial sense, we'd have them paid back in three years. I said so to my dad. No, he saw a program on TV that said it still took 8 years to pay back for your solar panels. I know what program he talked about, it's a program from fucking 2011. This is not relevant information anymore. To this day, my parents don't have solar and net metering has been extended to 2023. Panels only got cheaper. Now is the time. Yet the same thinking still applies.

This goes for EVs much the same. People still, for some unfathomable reason, think they're slow and only go 30 miles. Yeah, in 2006 they did, but my 2011 Leaf, a shitty old first generation car, is currently the fastest accelerating car in my entire family and even it goes more than 60 mi on a worn-out battery. You can now buy, for around 30k including incentives, a BEV that goes 300mi, well over the entire size of my country. The game is up. Still, to my eternal frustration, my dad keeps saying he's waiting for hydrogen cars because at least they go more than 50 miles and you can fill up so fast....

 

[demultiplexer]

Absolutely; with short-range EVs that you kind of have to fill up every trip, you need the home charging. This, at least in Europe, makes it a car for the wealthier people and/or people outside of city centers. That being said, at least in the Netherlands you can apply for a new street charger spot if there's not a public charging spot (that is sized to the amount of EVs in the neighborhood) within short walking distance. I mean, there are some solutions, but it's not ideal.

As 60kWh+ BEVs become commonplace, it's simply not necessary to charge that often anymore and even people in condos and crowded street parking situations will be able to drive a BEV like ICEs work now. This is a development that is coming really, really soon.

Also, aside from the supply-side issue, right now I think the largest barrier to adoption among people willing to drive BEVs is the poor selection of makes/models and strangely enough the speed of progress. People don't want to step into the game early, getting something that's outdated next year and spending a fortune doing so.

 

[demultiplexer]

On another forum a lot of people were commenting on the pathetic charger options. Only single phase AC charging (i.e. unusable shite in Europe) and a 50kW DC charger. It's fine to only get 50kW DC charging on a low-end EV, but you really expect car manufacturers to *at least* implement 150kW DC charging on new models, and for these high-end models you really expect 350kW DC charging to become standard. People with a Jaguar aren't willing to wait two fucking hours to charge their car at a gas station, that is ridiculous.

 

[demultiplexer]

Hey, who guessed that different people have different tastes

I personally find the whole aesthetics discussion really... weird. They obviously didn't put any serious effort into the design of almost all EVs, or they wouldn't put useless grilles on a fucking electric car. Or spoilers. Or external antennae. Or open rear wheel wells. Or... or... like, cars are so badly designed, I can't even get past that, let alone appreciate something as secondary as aesthetics. I feel like it's worshipping a pile of shit for how shiny it is.

 

[demultiplexer]

I’m looking to buy.

No lounge, but used leaf with a head unit upgrade?

Given the Leaf's awful styling and awful battery degradation and range...it is the *worst* EV out there IMO.

The Bolt looks like it is in a sweet spot for price right now. With the tax credit expiring for GE this year, you won't be able to get one this cheap for a while.

Leafs are plentiful and by far the cheapest EV, which is why they're still on people's radars. But I find it a bit offensive that the SoH meter on the dash still reads 11/12 when the battery is technically, according to any othe definition, finished. 80% SoH is usually defined as end of life. So it's really hard to judge without using Leafspy whether you're buying a lemon.

That being said, really - why ever buy a 24kWh car in 2018? Even if it's super cheap. I find the 28kWh of the Bolt to be similarly limited honestly, although it is the best value for money by far on the market now.

 

[demultiplexer]

The thing that blows my mind is how either incompetent they are (unlikely) or just so far behind on features/bugs they have no time for anything useful.

The 3 has rear heated seats, but no way to turn them on. It will be added to the touchscreen "At some point". Someone wrote all the code, UI, etc for the front seats, and never got around to the rears.

So I don't mean to be a Tesla apologist, but you are falling victim a little bit to anti-Tesla propaganda. Don't get me wrong, this is stupid. But it's also not at all unique - every single car has weird shit like this. Very, VERY obvious stuff that is installed but inoperable, not installed but listed, barely functional as designed, obviously missing, etc. It's just that Tesla, for some reason that I still don't quite understand, gets scrutinized on every little detail much harder than the rest. By all means point out their flaws, but don't generalize this out to say Tesla don't know what they're doing. Nobody knows what they're doing.

Teslas are just cars. Cars are generally really stupidly designed, with a very bad fit for purpose and lots of unnecessary fluff that somehow has become absolutely necessary to sell units. Bringing a >$30k SUV onto the market and not having a sunroof is somehow a massive detriment to the point that sales halve, but not having adaptive cruise control on the hybrid/gasoline version of a car but having it as standard on the electric is totally overlooked. Not having a light in the charge door of an electric car that you are going to plug in every night in the dark is overlooked. 12V batteries going dead while fucking charging a car is overlooked. Big stupid design errors are everywhere.

 

[demultiplexer]

This thread is now just a deMuro quirks and features section

 

[demultiplexer]

I'd also like to know what Tesla has done that traditional auto-makers would never get away with.

I may be able to shed some light on that. The thing that annoys me about Tesla is the lack of detailed specs on their cars.

Last time I bought a car was 10 years ago, and I'll probably buy another in 1-2 years; I've already started doing the research.

Both then and now every single car company puts out a ~20 page detailed brochure on every model, giving every technical & functional detail on the car, including full measurements, a list of offered features, and exactly which are included in every trim level. (...)

So.. I can actually talk about this, because I have family working at a very, VERY specific company in this area. What you are saying is simply untrue to a very annoying extent. Car companies are actually traditionally pretty coy and... well, bad at providing information on what's on their car trim levels. This is the entire reason for the existence of companies like Autodisk, who compile car information and make it easily searchable and accessible to leasing agents, consumers, hell even car dealerships. All that great information on car comparison websites is NOT courtesy of the manufacturers - it's companies like Autodisk and Carwise compiling and selling subscriptions to backend databases with this information, carefully compiled from many sources including original research.

Stupid, eh? Tesla is really no different.

And exactly the same goes for parts lists, service manuals, product change notices, VIN cross-reference databases, etc. etc. These are all published (or often: not published) in different outlets, sometimes with paid access and DRM (e.g. VAG erWin), limiting the usability of your own property. It's almost like car companies are really scummy cottage industries.

 

[demultiplexer]

Sure, but those places are not going to comprise anything close to a significant proportion of vehicle sales. The vast, vast majority of personal vehicles can be electrified without issue.

 

[demultiplexer]

There's really little risk in holding cobalt inventories - cobalt-based electrodes are still capable of the highest gravimetric energy densities right now, so if cobalt suddenly becomes cheap, you can take advantage of that. The only risk that you really face, namely some other battery tech revolutionizing the market in a short amount of time, will affect every single battery manufacturer.

 

[demultiplexer]

One of the biggest factors in greenhouse gas emissions and electric cars, is whether in the bigger picture that purchase leaves a larger carbon footprint. Sure, you are not spewing out carbon dioxide so much in your day to day life. But many of the batteries used to power those cars are produced by highly toxic mining operations, with few to no pollution regulations, which leaves a large carbon footprint. (Ignorance is bliss.)

In many cases that completely green electric car has left behind a ton a carbon emissions and toxic waste at a mining site in China. It is then recharged on the US electric grid that may be fueled by burning natural gas or coal.

This is just one of the articles I pulled up on the topic to support what I've previously read.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/11/ ... er-energy/

The answer is not as simple as just buying an electric car.

Please don't linkdrop some bullshit forum or article and spew some obvious, old and tired talking points. This is a topic for in-depth technical discussion, not the Daily Mail website. Come with actual arguments, facts, figures, sound and valid reasoning.

 

[demultiplexer]

I think that's largely just a way to try to piss off as little people as little as possible given their very lackluster production. They probably had a more amenable schedule up until they found out their production in Q1 2018 would be a third of what they were hoping for two years ago. Better not piss off existing owners than to not piss off still-excited new owners...

 

[demultiplexer]

Products in a competitive commodity market will reduce their margins to essentially zero to even compete, and will then make their profits on accessories. This is not a new market dynamic, it's been around since antiquity. If you want to make sure your customers will buy YOUR accessories and not some kind of third party accessory, you lock them in and deny the competition the chance to develop better or cheaper accessories by renewing your products often, deprecating the old one and limiting the viable market for competitors.

And this is exactly what happens with phones, cameras, laptops, cars, etc.

 

[demultiplexer]

As much as I like speculation just as much as the next person, we don't know anything about this crash. The only reason anyone is even contemplating autopilot error is because it's a Tesla, and Teslas have autopilot. These accidents happen daily all over the world with dozens of makes and models of other cars. Until there's some more evidence, it's hard to know.

This isn't like the Uber fatal accident where we actually have video of it happening, and some really solid evidence that Uber fucked up with their hardware/software.

 

[demultiplexer]

This story is, much like all of Tesla-related news, more overblown hype. Don't get me wrong, I like Tesla hype, I like the company and I participate just as much by typing this comment. But it's still an overhyped mess motivated by a LOT of financial interests. Stock is tanking almost solely based on an unfortunate string of, by themselves, not terribly relevant or interesting occurrences. Many of which are developing stories with very little actual hard data to back them up; see Model 3 ramp-up and this X crash story.

I completely agree that the made-up story of a driver in an X on autopilot, having reported this exact scenario before and not paying attention this time around, ploughing into the divider at 70MPH fits the evidence we have. So does the equally made-up story of the driver seeing God for the first time and sacrificing himself at his great mercy. Or him being a stereotypical Tesla asshole driver not paying attention and cutting everyone off, misjudging the off-ramp. A stroke while driving. It all fits. Accidents happen literally thousands of times a day and full-speed collisions are not rare, they happen daily in the US alone. They almost never happen due to Autopilot, I can tell you that with 100% certainty.

Despite the annoyed tone of this post, don't take this as an attack on anyone in particular and certainly don't construe this as saying you can't speculate freely. Who am I to tell you what you can talk about. Just putting another perspective on the matter out there.

 

[demultiplexer]

Fair enough...but a week?

Personally, I think there should either be a next-day crew, or a callout contract to get it fixed by the next day.

However, the budget is probably not allocated for that.

FYI, in the Netherlands there is a dedicated accident response team that fixes any potentially dangerous situations, including asphalt damage, spills, attenuator damage, guardrail damage, lighting fixture and overhead installation damage, IMMEDIATELY. If the situation is deemed non-critical, the repair may be deferred to the next 24 hours, not later.

An attenuator like the one involved in the accident would have been repaired within hours here.

 

[demultiplexer]

As someone who has done some kind of software dev for many years, this is the kind of stuff that just furthers my belief they are so overworked on this it isn't even funny.

Did nobody test this? If it causes physical damage the computer shouldn't let you do both at the same time.

Just tested and my Leaf has the same issue.

My parent's second car (Mitsu Mirage) also does this. (Edit: they have different aftermarket wipers, so not sure if this is true for the stock wipers)

Seems to be absolutely ubiquitous.

 

[demultiplexer]

I don't get where this myth comes from that batteries are expensive and heavy.

An ICE is expensive and heavy. The entire battery in my 3300lb electric car is 500lbs. The pack cost, including BMS, wiring and everything, is about $5k. Yet the car was $35k new.

The cost and weight of an EV isn't in the batteries, that's only true for the really massive ones (and even then, prices are not proportional at all). The price and weight difference almost exclusively stems from the low sales numbers and overengineering.

 

[demultiplexer]

I've been heavily charting the performance of my own EV in the past week, and weight just doesn't matter *at all*. It only matters when the battery is completely full and regen is limited or disabled. Once you get decent regen, if I add 500lbs to the car I get less than the error margin in efficiency difference. You're talking about less than a percent difference on 20% weight change.

 

[demultiplexer]

It’s Dr. Gitlin to you.

Nah, I'll pass on that.

Don’t feel so special. It’s Dr. Gitlin to everyone. Not just you. It’s his title. Literally. He has a doctorate.

I realize that, but I don’t generally pander to the sort of fragile egos who insist that others use their various titles outside of academic or professional contexts. That goes double in cases like this where the doctorate is so far removed from the subject as to be generally worthless. In any case, I should probably stop contributing to off-topic conversation, so that’s all from me about it.

The same mentality that insists on calling Caitlyn Jenner a dude.

Yes, if job titles were as closely associated to identity as gender identity were. But in the general social context, it's very unlikely. Nobody calls me demultiplexer, aerospace and electronic design engineer, B.Sc., nor do I see the job title of pretty much anyone anywhere in the English-speaking world. Now, if you would like to discuss the cultural implications of this and compare it to, say, Germany, where titles like these are much more socially mandatory, that's fine. But the argument you are putting forth here, considering the social context of this forum, is a false analogy and thereby easily dismissed.

Likewise, in a more literal sense, you are committing a false analogy in the sense that (purposefully or accidentally) misgendering, which is lying, is in any way equivalent to omitting a title. Again, in context the job title adds nothing to the conversaion, so omitting it does not meaningfully alter the tone, appearance or content.

Deconstruct your arguments and see if they hold up, yo!

 

[demultiplexer]

Now that is a good argument.

Also, Happysin, I wasn't the person misgendering Dr. Gitlin, I was just pointing out that your argument was flawed.

 

[demultiplexer]

Yes, from a technical perspective, urban buses are horrible. But with sufficient utilization, suddenly they become awesome.

In the Netherlands we have a couple of cities that use mostly buses (and trains ofc) for mass transit, and they have some of the busiest lines in the world. Most notably numbers 12/12s in Utrecht are known (notorious) for their sardine-like internal feeling even though they run on a 2- to 3-minute schedule. Even at half utilization on average, they're some of the cleanest and most space-efficient transit, beating even bikes by some margin.

But for the most part, buses aren't about efficient transit. They're about access and economic opportunity. Without buses, in 90%+ of cities around the world there would simply be no mass transit at all. Then you get favela-type situations, where apparently proximate parts of the city suffer tens of thousands of dollars per year per household lost economic productivity because of a lack of access to amenities and the economy as a whole. At the point where you lose access, even the most expensive, 1-passanger-average bus will be profitable for society as a whole.

 

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Oh yeah, I kinda assumed that was the case elsewhere to. We have everything from 7-seater converted minitrucks in the most rural areas to 191-passenger articulated buses in Utrecht, with everything in between. We do have some standardization as of late, because almost all companies do co-op buys via an institution called R.NET, so even across cities and transit companies you see the same buses over and over again.

 

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http://bgr.com/2018/04/30/tesla-cash-finances-2018-broke/

Yeah, that's all over the news today.

Jeez, has the news become a subreddit now? Re-hashing the same old shit literally every week. This isn't even a new conjecture, the financials have been predicting this for two quarters already.

 

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If their underlying valuation were much lower than their debts and they had no growth potential, then sure, they'll run out of cash. So far it doesn't look even remotely possible. Anybody worth their salt in business will not consider Tesla to be a brand in danger of going bankrupt anytime soon.

Now, what they CAN do is try their hardest to ruin the brand, which is not unheard of. There have been 'billion dollar speeches' in the past, where companies lost pretty much all of their market cap just by some executive running his mouth and exposing some irreconcilable underlying issue. And there have been plenty of companies that were effectively ruined by 'marketing efforts' by their competitors. If that happens, Tesla loses growth potential and market cap, then it would be much more reasonable to start talking seriously about bankruptcy.

As of now, they should have no trouble raising another dozen billion dollars or so before anybody should get worried about debt to equity ratios. And as far as any public communication is concerned, they're not going to raise significant capital soon, so apparently their internal accounting doesn't think they have to.

Of course, this could be insiders drinking the kool-aid and going down partying, but so far Tesla has been fairly logical and consistent, both with their financials and their business direction. A lot of new information would have to come out, probably to a conspiracy-like degree, to change that perception.

Disclaimer: I don't agree with how Tesla runs its business, I'm a bootstrap kind of person. But I understand some very basic principles of business econ, and that should be enough to write what I just did.

 

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But a valid counterargument to that is falling deliveries for S and X because Tesla is purposely delaying these deliveries for Model 3 federal tax credit reasons. Add to that the fact that the S and X now have very healthy per-unit profit margins whereas the 3 only has a small nominal profit margin and still a big fat negative marginal profit because of investments. So revenue from M3 may increase a lot and through sheer volume their net revenue may significantly increase over Q2, but their profitability is unlikely to become positive due to that.

Also known as revenue =/= profit for a TL;DR.

(Not being a naysayer, obviously considering my earlier comment, but I felt this nuance was necessary to put things into perspective)

 

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There isn't really a decision between blue or red state per se, it's pretty much all about economics.

You can't get high-skill design labor in Mississippi or Kansas, at least not in the quantities an operation like the Fremont or Gigafactory needs unless you start aggressively poaching from the big cities and paying a lot to move those people over. What sets Tesla's operations - at least right now - apart from other auto manufacturers is that they rely HEAVILY on the tight interconnectivity between their design and production environments. Other manufacturers have separate R&D and preproduction facilities, do all their hard work there, and then only pawn off - essentially - final assembly and other relatively low-skilled work in the big production lines. You can get by with any labor at that point, and don't need to consider labor availability in your operation location.

Next, Tesla isn't delivering over the country very evenly. The vast, vast majority of deliveries are in CA, with Norway and China next. It makes sense as an auto manufacturer to put your plant smack-bang in the middle of a country if that minimizes your logistics lines - this is why airlines put their big hubs in Kansas and such. Logistics is by far the most time-consuming part of your operations, so this is generally a big concern for location.

Last, and probably most important for this discussion, is tax and regulatory environment. CA and NV are really nice states for business, especially heavy industry. CA is known for requiring pretty much no rules and no taxes for agriculture and oil businesses, but enjoys some of the highest oil/ag revenue exactly for this environment. NV is great at not taxing its big business yet still being prosperous enough to provide good infrastructure. Not to say there aren't other good states, most notably TX, but these are a worse overlap with their other requirements I'd imagine. And some states just don't have very stable regulatory situations, e.g. KS. It's possibly okay for an easy-to-move business to move to KS and enjoy zero state taxes for a bit, but in the long term they're going to heavily suffer from the worse education and infrastructure that brings. Even if all that does is stifle growth a couple percentage points, that's billions down the drain in the long run. Infrastructure in particular is this thing that costs almost nothing, yet makes all the difference in how your business succeeds.