While it is theoretically possible to use overhead electric lines to power vehicles on highways, there are a few challenges that would need to be overcome in order to make this a practical solution. For one, the infrastructure required to support such a system would be quite extensive, and would likely be expensive to install and maintain. Furthermore, the system would only be able to provide power to vehicles while they are on the highway, so they would still need some form of on-board power source for use when they are off the road. Overall, while this idea has some potential, there are currently more practical and cost-effective solutions for reducing the weight of vehicles, such as the use of lightweight materials and more efficient batteries.
> I wonder if they did some studies to convince themselves that it's a good idea.
They explicitly call out the research they did in collaboration with the industry and the drivers that informed this decision. All in the presentation.
The best metric I can think of is expected lifetime miles driven over total cost of ownership.
But I don't get why you think it's backwards! You want kwh/mile to be low. Basically, you want to use as little amount of energy stored in your battery to drive a mile. That's what that is.
You’re assuming that range is actually useful. There’s a reason Tesla is also producing a 300 mile semi, EV’s really only work for short haul trips anyway so a big battery is pointless for many users.
Ideally you have charging infrastructure at a loading dock between shore trips not along the highway at which point a 250 mile Escadia vs a hypothetically faster charging 300 mile Tesla isn’t really worth much without a much larger investment in charging infrastructure.
I'm not assuming that. The entire trucking industry keeps talking about how they won't buy low range stuff. Also, while batteries are still slow to charge, any extra minute spent waiting to charge multiple times on a trip is money lost.
EDIT: instead of speculating, get hold of someone in those companies that put order down for Tesla Semi and ask them why in their right mind they would do that. Then come back and enlighten us with their response.
Not quite, the long haul industry has ~zero interest in the 500 mile Tesla Semi, but that’s hardly the only market for semi’s.
Safeway, Walmart, etc are using semi’s for relatively short daily deliveries from regional warehouses. That model is very different from companies picking up random freight from LA’s port and shipping it to arbitrary locations across the US.
PS: As to your edit the list of buyers was exactly the kind of companies I described with long haul trucking companies ordering token amounts. Walmart, Pepsi, Anheuser-Busch, etc took a bigger bite.
Sysco: The food distributor has reserved 50 Semis.
while
Flexport: Ryan Peterson, the freight company's CEO, announced the company has ordered one Semi.
As a strawman, it should just possible to have a kind of "B-train" with a smaller, detachable battery unit just behind the tractor (apologies to truckers if I am using the wrong terminology). This way it would be possible to swap this out super fast. Maybe it could be at the back for faster swap.
Assume an average delivery truck driver's job is 10 hours a day. Assuming no time for unloading, that would be 50 miles an hour at the 500 mile range.
50 miles an hour is probably high for the average speed of an in-town deliver truck. And even if all it is doing is dropping off trailers and picking up new ones, that would be adequate for quite a bit.
And if the truck is stopping and the driver is unloading pallets, etc, then 500 miles is way more than enough; 300 comes into play.
You just assumed a brand new battery, fully charged, and then taken to empty in optimal conditions.
Nobody would actually use a truck like that day to day, you need slack for every thing from aging batteries to making it to charging infrastructure and running the AC.
Many trucks do only short hauls anyway. It is easier and less risky to develop a truck whose main usage do not already need a wide and extensive charger network.
I think it is more about opportunity than capability.
These trucks can all be charged with 240V whereas the Tesla semi requires a 1000V (mega charger) which isn't available anywhere yet. So these trucks are all contending with being far more practical.
There's a difference between AC and DC charging. All current Tesla's accept 240 volt AC and there's no reason to expect that the semi won't either but with the such a giant battery pack 240V will simply not be fast enough. The 1000 volt is for DC fast charging. Tesla's current models use 350-375 volt battery packs. 1000 volt will just allow them to charge faster for DC fast charging, and more efficiently.
To add to this, for AC, there is a conversion stage (ie inverter) that needs to convert it to DC to charge the batteries. This unit, at the currents that the Semi requires to be charged in a reasonable amount of time will be wasting too much energy in conversion losses.
Due to its inpracticality, AC charging is unlikely to be an option, but maybe they include it for those exceptional circumstances.
Existing Teslas can accept various voltage for charging. Obviously, the lower the longer to charge. Pretty sure the Tesla Semi CAN charge at up to 1000V, but doesn’t require it, while the competitors CANNOT charge at 1000V.
I read it as "requires 1000v to get the charge speeds advertised" - at 240v the trucks would all charge at about the same rate, and 240v may be what everyone goes with (though I doubt it, might as well install a dedicated charger if you're buying a truck).
In the presentation, Musk stated that the drivetrain is guaranteed for 1 million miles. I have no data on what sort of guarantees Diesel Semi manufacturers offer. Would be good to work that out. There is battery life and degradation as well to take into account.
Anyone who's visited TSMC can tell you drive unit failures have been happening before 100k miles let alone a entire million.
People have had back to back drive unit failures on new cars.
I recall a MS owner getting the run around about an impending DU failure (which manifests as a whine under acceleration) as their warranty was about to expire, only to have it fail out of warranty.
Now people are trying to DIY DU whine on cars that haven't even made it to 100k.
Running a DU in a simulated 1 million mile test is nowhere near the same as actually lasting 1 million miles in the real world over as many years as that would take.
The only thing that matters is the percentage of those failures before the 1mil miles. And that'll be a while.
If Teslas had nearly any concerningly significant number of drivetrain failures, nobody would buy them and they've been around long enough for people to catch up. I did plenty of research before buying mine and I follow Tesla quite closely. Haven't heard any concerns in this regard.
I expect Tesla to only get better for the time being.
We need to stop pretending like replacing one powerplant with another will change that. An entire generation of drive units are failing because of an issue the same boring issue that kills so many ICEs: Coolant getting where it's not supposed to because of a failed seal, causing lubricants to fail.
If you want a car that will go a million miles today, a "boring" base model Lexus is probably a safer bet than a Model 3.
> When people have to resort to this as the leading example of their argument, it's clear they've got nothing of substance left to argue with
Tesla and SpaceX are dependent on D.C. Elon was historically Teflon. Denying a gift to an opposition is delusional. It’s not going to tank the company. But it takes the good-natured response to his timeline optimism, and potentially re-frames it.
Tesla offered a discount in order to that people do not wait until buying in January when a new credit becomes available to people. And this is in a tiny part of the global market as well.
To jump from 'company offers discount' to 'company is dead' is literally the dumbest fucking argument I have ever heard. Seriously wtf.
Also they literally made record profit last quarter and are expected to make record profit this quarter all while still growing rapidly for a company this large.
Claiming Tesla is a dead company is really the height of idiocy. Like if you don't like Musk that fine, but really just denying reality because of that makes you look like very foolish.
Yes. This incentive applies only to the US. Only for December. Only on certain variants of Model 3 and Y. All thanks to people unwilling to take delivery in December due to IRA kicking in on January 1, 2023.
Superb! Thank you! This is exactly what I was after. Reading now.
Edit: The first one:
“Short via long dated put options” …
Is it not a conflict of interest for someone who is shorting Tesla to maintain an “elonmusklies.com” website? Or is the disclosure of their short position enough to excuse their bias?
Do you realize that claims about how the future will unfold are speculative? Why is Elon held to such an impossibly high standard when he makes obviously-speculative projections about what he thinks will happen in the future? Everyone knows he's over-ambitious and over-optimistic about deadlines, but why are we framing that "failure to accurately predict the future" or "failure to estimate a correct timeline" as broken promises and lies? What if we held all of us engineers, tech managers, etc, to the same impossibly high standard?
You may not have a dog in this fight, but these two websites are a little dishonest about how they frame things. Also there's a clear conflict of interest, because they're disclosing a short interest in the stock.
> Why is Elon held to such an impossibly high standard when he makes obviously-speculative projections about what he thinks will happen in the future?
It's because he actually makes these projections while all the other CEOs are tight lipped. Elon is also right on Twitter, loud and center. It takes rational thinking to understand that what he says are speculative projections.
If you've never seen the Sea Lioning comic, I recommend it:
"Sealioning refers to the disingenuous action by a commenter of making an ostensible effort to engage in sincere and serious civil debate, usually by asking persistent questions of the other commenter."
It’s sad that you think cliche tropes are a way to engage in civil discourse.
I’m not even slightly “attached” to Elon. That’s nonsensical. I just asked a polite question. He is as “hateful” as anyone else who has accumulated enough success to have a few enemies along the way. This thread was meant to be about the Tesla Semi truck a superb milestone and you felt the need to attack the CEO of the unquestionably successful company personally. Who’s being hateful?
Sealioning, indeed.
I have 20:20 vision, thanks. Not even slightly “blind” ... anyone can see that Elon is far from perfect. Has made many mistakes in public…
Anyway, as you say, “you choose not to listen”.
I chose to believe in a better future; because the alternative is grim. Elon is _building_ the future whether you and the Haters like it or not.
@daguava Next time your company puts astronauts on the ISS and safely lands reusable rockets on earth, talk to me about Elon not keeping his word.
If you are referring to current twitter moderation, this characterization is untrue. Twitter is currently banning, permanently banning (and then unbanning) accounts that did not broke the law at all.
IMO, this is Elon not understanding the market he's talking to. This type of warranty sounds great to general consumers.
In commercial trucking, it's more about the downtime. Making it to 1 million miles doesn't really matter if the maintenance along the way isn't easier. These trucks will still require tire changes plus maintenance to shocks/struts/control arms/air pressure systems/etc. Stays might be shorter, but commercial trucks already have processes for maintenance.
How do you know they didn't take any of that into account?
In every single field lots of studies have been done on electric vehicles of all kinds, including cars, trucks, vans and planes. And every single time, electric vehicles show that they are cheaper to maintain.
> but commercial trucks already have processes for maintenance.
And I'm sure they would like to get ride of as many of those processes as possible.
The standard warranty on a semi-truck engine is 4 years and 400,000-600,000 miles. A million miles isn't impressive, it screams "we're so far behind, we need to distract them with flashier incentives."
Maybe they can build up their reputation in time to pay for all the warranties. I guess it worked for Kia? IIRC that's around the time that all those "cash back" incentives became popular with the other manufacturers, before they jumped on the 10k bandwagon too.
Yeah - if I were signing a contract for these semis, I would want the '1 million miles' warranty to mean 'if the truck stops working and can't be repaired by Tesla within a week, then Tesla will buy back the truck for the purchase price * miles driven/1 million.'
I'd define 'stops working' as 'stops being road legal or able to drive at the speed limit with the rated load for at least half the advertised range'.
So a broken cab heater or faulty app wouldn't be reason for a warranty return.
I would obviously expect to pay a higher ticket price to get this warranty.
A new semi truck starts at about $100k on the low end. You can get the same level of service by spending $5k on a coffee machine meant for coffee shops.
Intrigued so did a bunch of searches for commercial machines and can't find any mention of "fix it or take it back and pay me for my time" terms anywhere.
In general, if you want this you'd lease the machine. Fairly common for independent cafes and restaurants (and those bean-to-cup machines in offices).
Though, also, the heavy-duty commercial machines are pretty reliable and service-able; you wouldn't generally expect to be out of order for a _week_ even if you owned it.
The promise of EVs is basically less downtime and lower cost. You'll still have to swap tires of course. Brakes will last a lot longer because they are not used a lot. There is no diesel engine to service. The drive train is the bit that is supposedly going to last a long time without efficiency decrease. All the rest is going to be similar. But it looks like some of the more expensive maintenance is going to be easier.
I'd say Elon Musk has a good product here that will likely sell very well.
I also own a Tesla. Over the 6 years I have owned it my automotive costs have decreased by some 80% compared to the ICE vehicles I owned prior. Significantly, the “no oil changes/no weekly fill up” costs immediately saved me around $2800/year. Maintenance costs have dropped to next to nothing, primarily being around tires and windshield wiper fluid.
There’s also no risk of getting a catalytic converter stolen.
What are your expenses that are so dramatically above the norm?
>What are your expenses that are so dramatically above the norm?
My comment about cost was in relation to purchase price, not ongoing cost.
I recently bought a 2022 Model S Plaid, and while there are certainly cheaper Teslas out there (namely, all of them), Tesla doesn't come close to competing with ICE vehicles on cost of acquisition.
I don't know what your situation is, but here's mine:
Got a Model 3 back in 2020. The service I've had to get done to date has been what's in the user manual: tire rotation, cabin air filter replacement and brake fluid check. That's it! No down time other than the few hours per service visit (for which they paid me equivalent of $50 USD to travel from and to the service center on each visit).
And I've used 90% Superchargers to charge and despite that, saved a lot on gas.
I'm glad that you haven't had any issues. I bought a new Model S Plaid a few months ago. Since then, it has been in for service three times, nearly all of which was for work that can be accurately categorized as "Tesla didn't finish putting the car together."
Examples:
There was a very large, very obvious gap between the charge port cover and the adjacent brake lamp assembly. Easily over a half-inch. I was dreading the possibility of getting 'in spec'-ed by Tesla, but my concern was misplaced. Turns out, Tesla hadn't finished installing the brake lamp assembly. It wasn't fully seated.
Rattling from under the frunk? Multiple clips were missing from the plastic trim, and of the clips that were present, many weren't actually clipped in.
Thunking sound from the driver side front tire on bumpy roads? The hub bolts and upper shock bolts were all loose.
Rattling from the center console? Tesla hadn't torqued down the fasteners that attach it to the car.
The hood ornament on the front comes with protective plastic that is supposed to be removed at installation. It wasn't. And it's not the kind of plastic that you can just tear or peel off. Tesla had to do that.
Did I mention that I found out - at delivery - that the new car needed a new windshield?
I have another service appointment coming up soon. The trunk floor was slightly crushed in (about an inch) where the floor meets the rear passenger seat. They would have replaced the trunk floor a while ago, but they couldn't due to parts availability. Also, some of the weather stripping is separating from the car, and it can't just be pushed back in place.
Oh yeah, here's one: after my most recent service appointment - for the suspension issue - my driver profile no longer existed. Good times.
There's more.
Somehow, I still like the car — mostly because it's insanely fast. But this is totally bonkers for any new car, let alone one with a $145,000 price tag.
It’s not eligible in my state, though I wouldn’t pursue a claim if it was.
I totally agree on the insane comment.
I also own a 2018 4Runner. It has around 180,000 miles, has been driven over some of the roughest backcountry routes in the United States, and has had no quality or performance issues. Ever. Just routine maintenance.
We need Elon to drop by HN next and clean up these mess of BS submissions that continue to amass 100+ points and not flagged to oblivion despite them being non-news.
EDIT: and maybe we should penalize users on HN who post these stuff too
I'm amazed by how HN just takes every piece of data at face value and starts reacting to it like it's gospel. News story after news story. This place is no different than Twitter, Youtube comments, etc. It's very sad to watch.
I agree that it would be good to have more than one source for this story, and some independent confirmation. It's true that often these things turn out quite differently than was initially reported, and of course the correction never gets the same coverage.
On the other hand, many true stories also first circulate online in this format.
@dang is there any way the title could be a bit more clear that this is not a settled matter of fact? As it stands now, the submission's title summarizes the tweet and presents it as truth without any caveats, but in fact the tweet itself is simply hearsay ("Chinese social media users report" etc).
I know we're all expected to click through all links and make informed judgments, but like it or not, the title on HN is very powerful in guiding the conversation. Claims like this need an appropriate level of skepticism until corroborated...
Yeah, this is bonkers. At one time I thought the collective HN BS detector was calibrated a bit better, but the willingness to accept this tweet at face value is troublesome. This is similar to the debacle recently where Apple was supposedly scanning for QR codes and opening canary URLs clandestinely, which turned out to be simple user error.
I'm flagging this submission, I encourage everybody to do the same. A tweet suggesting that "some users report" some ambiguous behavior is not news. Perhaps some corroboration will emerge and this tweet will eventually be proven correct, but the onus of proof should always be on those who are making the exceptional claims.
Well, although I tend to agree with the point you are making, in this case it is not completely out of the blue, single data point..
CCP is ruthless and has been repeatedly shown to have no qualms oppressing and killing people and abusing technology in similar ways. So the data point is not far fetched.
It would be good to have this either confirmed or proven false. Until then I find it a perfectly valid discussion.
> in this case it is not completely out of the blue, single data point..
It kind of is a single data point with a vague "users report"
Also, extraordinary claims like this still require more than vague anecdotal proof. If this is on device, can we see the request packet that caused the video to be deleted? Can we see the decompiled code that allows for such a thing to happen?
Right, and the tweet even has the disclaimer "Not sure if it’s from the cloud or device level". If it's deleted from the cloud, which I consider more likely, it has nothing to do with Huawei phones.
Agreed - I think there should be a huge asterisk over the source of data. Twitter reports are not inherently accurate - they need 3rd party verification.
If this is true - it is a concerning but not surprising maneuver.
The author of the tweet is entirely aware she is spreading unproven rumors, just glancing through her articles she's penned it's mostly propaganda pieces meant to support more aggression towards China (note: she does not live in China).
Here's a few choice quotes:
"And then came the laughable claim in Xi’s speech that China does not ‘carry aggressive or hegemonic traits in its genes’"
"The idea that Trump’s ‘China virus’ rhetoric is xenophobic is puzzling. "
Humans are stupid, buddy, it doesn't matter what forum you're on. Same dumb meat sacks, same heuristics, bias, emotions. We're even dumber in groups. Thinking you're smarter than the rest is proof that you're not.
This could be mostly rectified by having a free press in China. Another way to say it - the sole entity that could solve the problem of needing to rely on random internet claims about things happening in China is the Chinese government.
On the other hand, a lot of claims about China that are very easy to disprove - even with limited media freedom - are still widely believed in the West.
I'm thinking of two huge examples from recent times:
* The widespread belief that people in China have social credit scores.
* The belief that zero-CoVID was fake, and that CoVID was actually spreading like crazy in China, but was somehow covered up.
These are claims that can be disproven just by knowing people in China and asking them about their lives. Given how many millions of Chinese people live abroad, how many expats live in China, and how many cross-border connections there are in general, it's crazy that so many people still believe the above theories.
There's very little knowledge about China among the Western public, and there's a strong tendency towards conspiratorial interpretations of everything regarding China.
We are all here reading the comments. There is always at least one comment investigating or questioning the authenticity. I love HN because of that discourse.
With stories like these where I have known bias, I always come to the comments before reading the article.
Wether or not they can actually do this is debatable, but I wouldn't be surprised they did this if they could. I don't immediately accept it, but in terms of technology it seems plausible.
> The easiest way is to start by putting everything into one file. You can start simple, defer some decisions, and evolve your project with time.
This is something that most even senior developers don’t grok. Default so called project starter scripts of the node world don’t help either.
The more structure you build before you know wth you’re doing, the more difficult you’ll make life for yourself down the line when you inevitably have to refactor code.
