Don’t bring Canada into it. We already apologized for Celine Dion and Bryan Adams. Elon’s Canada connection is so tenuous as to make its mere mention seem suspiciously like misdirection.
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Elon Musk is an immigrant from South Africa. He’s not eligible to be President.
What Musk showed was that funding wasn’t the main problem. SpaceX managed to design and build reliable rockets for a lot less money than anyone else. The usual NASA contractors had gotten fat and lazy. They worked in a world of their own where everything was expensive, custom built, while Musk realized that in many cases off the shelf components were good enough for a fraction of the price.
Oh, wait, that is actually where he’s from right?
I took @anon72705028’s comment to be aimed at the USA.
South Africa may still contain a lot of white supremacists but the country at least is trying to make things right, they made (litteral) reparations for example. If I have to label one of those two countries as white supremacist countries my vote is on his current home country, sorry guys…
The taxi drivers here love the Leaf. There’s loads of them.
Elon Musk has been, up until recently, good at throwing money at things that work and marketing. Remove him from the picture and nothing changes; the people who make the things he sells will still make it for someone else’s money (Maybe even NASA so the profiteer middleman can be cut out). As for the cars, he bought all that tech and all the best engineers have left the company.
Don’t worry, our bright future will be better without Musk trying so desperately to be king of it.
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Or if fuel is expensive or if the country offers incentives (like Oslo’s right to drive your EV in the bus lane). Musk is not at all responsible for this growth in Norway:
When I lived in Oslo there were Leafs everywhere and I never saw a Tesla.
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The quote was in reference to the quality of technology, the integration and sophistication of components. You know, the stuff you get when you put a lot of money into R&D.
I guess you don’t like the full wing doors or handles that pop out. Fine, I don’t like features in some vehicles too. A Jucerio it does not make or are you going to lump other successful luxury products in with a device that was created to fool the customer?
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Holy shit man. I’m not saying the guy is the second coming or something, he is clearly a flawed human with a problem exercising healthy social media use.
I do think that the mark he has made on Tesla and the mark SpaceX has made on the launch industry is enormous and worthy of admiration.
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No, I was being serious for once.
It’d be a lot easier to admire his achievements if he’d, for example, stop being a bellend on Twitter.
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Jeez man,
Do you think this guy runs Amazon or something? They might have Panasonic for a partner to manufacture the individual battery cells but who do you think drove that requirement? Who do you think will very soon be the largest single consumer of battery cells in the world?
I’m not sure what to say about your comment about NASA. SpaceX is hugely vertically integrated. That means that they make in house a far higher percentage of their parts than their competitors do. The stuff they do use is generally commercial stuff that would have no home in Aerospace if SpaceX hadn’t come along. SpaceX is about as far from a profiteering middle man as you can get. They save the American taxpayer money with each contract they get awarded compared to the competition. Most of their business is on the commercial launch side of things where they now have more launches than anybody for cheaper than everyone.
Do you maybe feel like the way things were before was better? An effective monopoly on gov launches by ULA? No alternative to $20billion rocket development via congressional fiat?
edit to fix quote.
I don’t disagree with you here.
Is this surprising coming from a successful financier/rentier and failed business manager, raised by a professional narcissist and the kind of man who has sex with his own stepdaughter, raised in a racist nation built on caucasian supremacy?
You are right, government can do the most to spur this industry forward but let’s be frank, the EV needs to be able to stand over the traditional ICE vehicle on its own merits as quickly as possible because politically those measures won’t fly in most of the world. I live in Alberta and I would be shocked to ever see an EV incentive in my province. I have only seen one EV in my city and it’s a Tesla - not a coincidence I think.
Norway is a huge success story for EVs but not one currently being replicated anywhere else which says to me that EVs on the market don’t stand for themselves yet. Great for Norway but the rest of us still need people like Elon Musk to make an EV that will sell everywhere.
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They are in terms of the consumer market, but as with most things Musk does it’s equal parts marketing and technology. Which is fine if it gets more solar out there.
I’ve been saying for a while now that the battery business is the tail that wags the dog with Tesla (the drivetrain is apparently good, too, but that could easily be a licensing business). If I were someone who needed to buy a car I wouldn’t buy a Tesla but I am taking a serious look at the company’s Powerwall and Solarcity products as options for my home.
The issue from a business and shareholder viewpoint is that batteries and solar panels, profitable though they may be, are a commodity business in a way that cars are not. Tesla is going to be facing lots of competitors with battery and solar products that are as good if not better than theirs.
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Next gen military grade tech is pure undiluted marketing garbage. The drivetrain efficiency of the Tesla is comparable to the Leaf, and both are comparable to other newer electric motors. As far as their role in the grid scale storage market, they are a bit player. You just don’t hear about them because they aren’t riding the hype train as well. https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2017/01/f34/Deployment%20of%20Grid-Scale%20Batteries%20in%20the%20United%20States.pdf
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That’s the thing though right? Without marketing, would there even be a sugary beverage market or designer clothes market?
I agree that solar panels will be commodity items but their move with the solar tiles fits nicely with the rest of the company’s products (if only they would start producing them en masse). The home battery product is one that depends 100% on the local conditions and will also be a commodity item. I think it’s more of a linchpin product that ties everything together rather than something that differentiates Tesla.
My conclusion is actually the opposite of yours in this case. If I needed to buy a car, even if I wasn’t specifically in the market for an EV, I’d take a really hard look at the model 3. Unfortunately I live well north of the entire Tesla supercharger network which would make this a daily driver at best and wouldn’t fly at all if we weren’t a two car household.
Well, the quote was from engineers hired bu UBS to perform a teardown. I guess the best marketing is impressing third parties?
Nissan has been a leader in W/km efficiency but there are also other factors in play here such as energy density, modularity, cost of production, reliability, charge speed, discharge current, thermal management and many others I’m sure.
I’m the last person to discount the power and importance of marketing but with Musk too many of his fanbois think his tech could stand alone in and dominate the market without it. Also, as we’ve seen lately, he can undermine his own marketing prowess with arrogance and a lack of impulse control.
The Solarcity product depends on local conditions. The Powerwall battery can draw from the grid as a storage or peak-offset device without the panels, so it can work pretty much anywhere. But big players like LG and Mercedes are already giving Tesla a run for their money there.
If I were looking for an EV I’d probably be looking at the Leaf or Bolt or Spark first. I could probably afford a Tesla, but putting money into a sexy luxury car of any sort that sits idle and depreciating away for 90% of the time makes less sense for me than doing so with a non-luxury car that does the same.
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