Well, to be fair, a malicious person could just as easily shine a beam into the optical sensors on my face.
If someone really wants to cause an accident, it's kind of hard to stop them, regardless of whether you're in a self-driving car or not.
2,672 karma · joined May 4, 2009
If someone really wants to cause an accident, it's kind of hard to stop them, regardless of whether you're in a self-driving car or not.
But, just to play devil's advocate, it seems plausible that sunlight might activate some kind of defense mechanism in the eye that protects it from the effects of the higher energy part of the spectrum.
If nothing else, the overall brightness levels would cause your pupil to shrink more in sunlight than under LED lighting.
Tesla's sales last quarter were 24.5k cars, hardly "barely 15,000". Q4 is expected to meet or exceed that, despite being a shorter quarter.
If you pick the biggest car manufacturer in the world to compare them to, then of course they're going to look small. There are plenty of well-established, profitable car manufacturers that build far fewer cars than Toyota.
I don't want to argue semantics, so I'll leave it open for debate as to whether or not they're "at scale", but comparing them to a startup that hasn't figured out how to turn a profit yet seems highly disingenuous.
> They've been "profitable" for a single quarter by selling Tesla's at a deep discount.
If they can sell cars at a deep discount and still be profitable, then clearly the margins must be pretty good.
This does mean that you can see the capacity very slowly decrease over months and years, but I would personally prefer to know what's actually happening and be able to get the maximum range out of my car that I can.
This is a gross overgeneralization. There are many different lithium-based battery chemistries available, with wildly differing lifespans.
The voltage at which you stop charging also makes a huge difference in lifespan. Charge a li-ion battery 10% less full and it can make an order of magnitude difference in its lifespan. When you charge a li-ion battery to full, it's not really truly "full"; the charging system just stops you from charging any further past a certain point, in order to stop you from degrading the battery too much. It's up to the device manufacturer to decide exactly when the battery is "full", based on what kind of tradeoffs they're willing to make on capacity vs lifespan.
High temperatures can also really increase the degradation rate for li-ion batteries, and Tesla employs a sophisticated cooling system to prevent the batteries from getting too hot while they're charging or discharging. The original Nissan LEAF had no active cooling, and their batteries degraded quite quickly, especially in hot climates. This was partially addressed in later model years, but it's now clear that this makes a huge difference.
Like most people, you're probably used to seeing heavy degradation over time in your cell phone or laptop battery. Just bear in mind that it's much easier for companies like Apple or Samsung to advertise "our phone gets 20% longer battery life!" than "our battery capacity degrades 5% less per year than our competitor!" Add to the fact that many people replace their cell phone every few years anyway, and the incentives are clearly aligned to keep pushing higher charge voltages, leading to greater short-term capacity at the expense of longevity. It's also a hell of a lot harder to fit a good battery cooling system in a smartphone than a car.
They have already reached scale, and are already profitable. They're just pouring their profits back into further growth. Yes, they're spending a lot on R&D, but that's not sending money into a vacuum, that's investing in the future expansion of the company. The article you link even admits this: "Would it be fair to include the billion-plus dollars spent to bring the Model 3 to fruition in a few tens of thousands of Model X and Model S gross margins? Probably not."
Incidentally, I would take anything from Seeking Alpha with a huge grain of salt. Anyone can post an article on there, and people often try to use that site to skew investor perceptions in their own favor. In fact, the author of the very article you link openly confesses at the bottom that he "may initiate a short position in TSLA over the next 72 hours." Conflict of interest, anyone? If you want to see how profitable Tesla is, I would recommend the GAAP numbers from their last quarterly report, rather than some Seeking Alpha author's selective reinterpretation of the facts.
There's no need to add a transmission for this: many electric cars automatically apply regenerative braking when you let up on the accelerator, which provides similar benefits. It actually provides a really similar feel to driving a manual in low gear already.
Right now, the best solution in most cases is probably renewables and batteries. But this could be a useful solution for something like air travel, where batteries are currently too big and heavy to allow for a good zero-carbon approach.
Not so bizarre when you consider that student loans are very difficult to get discharged via bankruptcy. The loan issuers don't need to worry so much about whether you'll be able to pay it back or not, because it's more a question of "when" than "if".
Because of this, they'll sometimes replace the whole drivetrain for something as minor as an odd sound. A drivetrain replacement doesn't mean the same thing that it does with your typical gas car.
Similar deal with the battery pack. It just drops right out of the bottom of the car, so it makes for a better service experience if they can just replace it and give the car straight back rather than leaving the owner without a car while they embark on a potentially lengthy repair process.
I get where you're coming from, but I think you're ignoring the utilitarian argument that can be made in this kind of situation.
That's exactly right. The whole drive unit can drop right out of the bottom of the car, so when there are any issues, Tesla will just replace the whole thing so that you don't have to wait for the unit to be repaired. They can then refurbish the broken drivetrain on their own time and then use it to replace someone else's failed unit in the future.
My own Model S is only about two years old with a bit over 20k miles on it, so I don't know how things will go once the car gets older, but so far it's lost <1% of its range.
Maglev trains have been proposed before; there's nothing particular new or novel about the idea. One of the bigger problems with maglev is that the tracks are very expensive. One of the exciting things about the Hyperloop concept was that the tracks should be much cheaper, since all you need is a steel tube.
Is it really right to call it a Hyperloop if it eschews the original concept in favor of building a maglev train in an evacuated tube? Feels like they're taking a totally different idea and just using the Hyperloop name to generate hype.
Without faster charging, you can't do long-distance travel (nobody wants to stop for 4-8 hours in the middle of a road trip to recharge), so the only value they offer is for longer charging sessions while the driver is already in the area for work/shopping/etc. However, even then, you can't really rely on their availability, since it's always possible someone will already be there tying up the station for an 8-hour stretch...so they really aren't terribly useful or convenient for the vast majority of EV owners.
I would argue that the only charging network out there that really makes sense is Tesla's Supercharger network: it actually charges fast enough to make road trips practical, is generally quite reliable, and typically includes at least 6-8 stalls per station to avoid congestion during peak travel times. This gives Tesla a huge competitive advantage over other EV manufacturers, and I think it'll be a long time before anyone catches up to them in this regard.
I'm not sure if the vision system is smart enough to be used for collision detection. The radar and ultrasonics are used to detect vehicles, but I believe the camera is just used to help follow the lines painted on the road.
The article tries to make it sound like a miracle technology that concentrates light "up to 10,000x", but that doesn't mean you get 10,000x more energy out of it, it just means that you can use a much smaller panel since the light is concentrated on a smaller spot by a comparatively large, bulky piece of hardware.
Panels are already pretty cheap, so it's not clear if the cost of a giant glass sphere, plus heavy-duty steel frame, plus tracking hardware will beat just blanketing your roof with stationary panels. It looks cool, sure, and maybe it's a bit more efficient at converting sunlight to electrical energy, but the real figure that's going to matter is the $/kW ratio.
I think you may need to rethink your use of the word "easily" there.
There are some good comments here, which explain why satisfying current demand for helium via fusion is nowhere near practical: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/12r2s7/helium_i...
That's okay! They're already vegan, so clearly they've already found a way to eat a meat-free diet that works for them.
Carnivores are a much bigger market to chase than vegans. These new meat substitutes are targeted at converting more carnivores, not making existing vegans happier.
I think that assertion deserves to be examined a bit more closely.
We are already effectively subsidizing the fossil fuel industry to the tune of 5+ trillion USD per year [1]. This is a figure from the IMF that includes direct monetary subsidies as well as externalities like public health, environmental damage, etc.
So the question now becomes this: would switching to renewables cost more than that? If we started dumping that same amount of money into renewables and corresponding infrastructure, how quickly could we switch away from fossil fuels? If we do some impromptu calculations based on current cost of solar panels, batteries, etc., it seems like it might take maybe 20 years.
Obviously it's not that simple in practice, but I think this demonstrates that humanity could theoretically switch away from fossil fuels without enduring any severe hardships. This isn't a problem of the technology not being good enough[2], or renewables being too expensive: it's just a political/organizational problem.
[1] http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=42940.0 [2] With the possible exception of jet planes, for which batteries aren't good enough to provide a compelling alternative yet. But I would guess that when the electric car market really starts to take off, battery tech will start improving a lot faster.
It's not as flashy as some magical new tech that comes along and doubles battery capacities overnight, but on the flip side li-ion is already good enough for most applications. We'll need some pretty big improvements before we can have electric passenger jets, but other than that we're already in pretty good shape.
This kind of thinking mirrors Musk's strategy at Tesla: it's much easier to get people to step outside the box if doing so seems novel and exciting. Thus, we have cars with motorized door handles that extend and retract on command, and space capsules with big shiny touch screens.