Tesla is one part car company, one part battery company, and 5 parts marketing hype. The only reason people are seriously contemplating buying full electric cars today instead of the bullshit BMW produced is because Iron Man convinced enough people that electric cars will simultaneously fly to mars and cure world hunger. The stock reflects this.
In other words, there is no Tesla without Elon's meme machine. The graveyard of failed EV startups was chockful of more well meaning participants before Tesla came along. I'd go as far as to argue that the Elon's bullshit was the only thing that could stand up to big oil.
> The only reason people are seriously contemplating buying full electric cars today instead of the bullshit BMW produced is because Iron Man convinced enough people that electric cars will simultaneously fly to mars and cure world hunger.
Is this supposed to be ironic or do you actually believe this drivel?
Drive a modern EV and try again. Most Tesla owners will never go back to a noisy, smelly, crappy, slow ICE.
It's supposed to be ironic - if Tesla were "only better cars", then people wouldn't bend over backwards to give Elon every benefit of the doubt. A "nicer car" doesn't get you to the point where people worship your just born baby on Twitter. Teslas are amazing cars. However, Tesla is valued so much more than just delivering a better horse, and I don't think they could have scaled up as quickly had they not been financed by memes (I don't want to downplay Tesla's amazing execution up until this point, they have taken the opportunity they got and delivered, they could have easily squandered under the weight of Elon's promises).
I was all for it and in fact had even reserved a Model 3 when it was announced, but later cancelled after Tesla/Musk engaged in their pricing shenanigans.
And, then I had a conversation with a friend who has a Model X and driven from SJ to LA, and he mentioned that it needed 3 charges each way. Each Way... Yes, it can be argued that how often do people drive from SJ to LA, but still...
On top of that Musk acting like a dude who's permanently high on coke, quality issues with Tesla, the pedo affair, his fights with SEC, the drama he did regarding opening the Fremont plant during Covid-19 and so on and on ......
Anyway, long story short, I'm really not looking to buy a Tesla anymore..
FWIW your friend must have a very heavy foot. My brother-in-law has a Tesla and goes from SJ to LA a few times a year. They make one stop in the middle to supercharge, and use the time to go to the bathroom and have lunch. The car is usually charged before they are done eating.
When we caravan, the Tesla is never holding us up.
I really cannot comment on that. My friend I believe has the regular ~250 mile, or so, range Model X, so perhaps your brother-in-law has a longer range, but that still won't explain 3 times vs 1. So, don't know..
Edit: Now self-doubt is creeping in and I wonder if they had gone to Palm Springs and not just LA. The conversation was over a year ago.. Will that result in 3 charges each way? I've never driven to Palm Springs, so not sure if there is another mountain pass in that direction or not.
WLTP spec ranges favors city driving, in which Tesla has an edge because of the really aggressive recuperation braking. It also factors in highway driving at 90km/h IIRC, which no normal human being drives at. Highway it's actually not anywhere "light-years ahead" from other serious EV attempts like Taycan which does similar Autobahn range with wider tires than a model S.
I live in LA now, used to live in Sunnyvale (right next to San Jose), and have made that drive both directions.
In my Model 3, it takes 1 stop, for 25-30 minutes, at the Kettleman City Supercharger. Good time to grab a snack, use the restroom, and pretty much get back on the road.
Have you driven a modern ICE? I rented a new Honda Accord this weekend. Besides the Model 3's crazy acceleration, and automatic lane changing, I think the Accord matches or exceeds a Model 3 in every single way, and it's roughly half the price. This isn't to say Teslas aren't impressive, but I do think they're overhyped.
> Besides the Model 3's crazy acceleration, and automatic lane changing, I think the Accord matches or exceeds a Model 3 in every single way
Except noise, pollution, complexity/maintenance cost, OTA updates, large touchscreen navigation that gets updated continuously, having to visit gas stations etc. etc.
ICE is just obsolete technology. Half the performance at 10 times the noise and infinitely more pollution.
Not saying that Tesla makes bad cars or that electric vehicles are not the future, but you have to realise that the things you mention are not necessarily things everyone cares about or even appreciates. For many people all Tesla cars are way out of their budget for example, or not big enough, or they don't like the interior finish, or they actually enjoy the sound of a powerful ICE, or they don't like longer charging times and need/want longer range, or they like to be able to work on their own cars or take them to their preferred repair shop for maintenance, or they have a brand affinity and want to wait for an electric model of their favoured manufacturer, etc.
Even in spite of all the good things about Tesla's, the list of reasons people could have to not want buy a Tesla is endless.
This is not even considering the fact that some people (myself included) won't even consider a Tesla just for Musk's antics alone.
The quality control within Tesla is quite poor though, especially considering the price of such cars. I've watched various Tesla videos after seeing some "tear down" videos of a Tesla Y. After that I regularly get various electric car video suggestions. There's a lot of channels/people covering and liking Tesla, while saying things like "ah yeah, they just restarted production so obviously quality is bad and you should not have ordered a car at that time". Then another person talks about the crazy amount of times he had to bring back his car because of issues that it had from once he got it. But instead of being angry, he's happy it's a "free fix", completely forgetting how much he paid for something which apparently wasn't checked that much. Also noticed loads of people mentioning that the Tesla paint department is known to be quite poor. That goes back many years.
I'm very happy people are buying electric cars. For Tesla the increase in experience and expanded production should bring down costs (learned this from an article about solar power costs; costs doesn't just go down because you build bigger, it's mostly the increased experience which brings down costs).
I like that people more drive electric. Tesla is building a factory in Germany, hopefully a with a better paint department. Various EU countries are pushing for more electric, so really hope the price goes down and the quality goes way up. Meanwhile, I'm happy with my bicycle.
> After about 20mph tire noise drowns out engine noise.
This has been claimed over and over and is possibly true in some test scenarios but not in any real situation. Noise is additive, the engine noise may not be clearly audible, but tire+engine noise is always louder than just tire noise. And any time an ICE actually revs up, it's clearly audible at any high speed.
My supercharged V8 5.0L Jaguar would be an absolute disappointment to anyone expecting much in the way of engine noise. The sound dampening in the engine compartment is far better than any car I've had before, and the cabin has adaptive noise canceling specifically for engine / road noise.
> Noise actually isn't a factor. After about 20mph tire noise drowns out engine noise.
I drove (passenger) in a friends electric car once. That car is significantly more quiet than a lot of cars I've been in. Some other people mention that noise dampening takes care of the noise, but that just proves above: an (ICE) engine is very noisy!
It's also very apparent in some hiking trips: any ICE is terribly noisy. You can easily determine which cars are electric though. Everyone driving electric would hugely cut down on road noise. I cannot wait until everyone can afford and uses one.
I can hammer the go pedal in my Tesla any time I want and not worry about trumpeting the intersection. It's pretty satisfying actually. Which is probably why ICE drivers are starting to hate Teslas. But you know what they say... if you can't beat 'em...
I like EVs but the biggest thing that prevents me from buying one is range anxiety. I say this because I think it's funny that you consider having to visit gas stations a weakness of ICE, when I consider it the only reason to still own an ICE.
I own a Tesla, and it’s really nice to never worry about “filling up” except on long distance trips. Gas stations are such an annoyance that some day will be a thing of the past.
The 50+- electric range is plenty for my commute or running a few errands; it's weird to think that when you have hundreds of miles of range, you're mostly lugging around 3+x the amount of batteries you need on average, "just in case", like that XKCD comic. Instead, I lug around a generator and 8 gallons of unleaded, "just in case".
I've got a Model 3 and a Model S. It took me about a week to get used to the central placement of the sole Model 3 screen and lack of a dashboard, but now I prefer it. The dashboard is always in my eye line yet frustrating blocked by the steering wheel. The Model 3 screen is off to the side where I can ignore it (most of the time), yet the information I need is close at hand when I want it. My impression is that it was initially a cost-saving measure, but I think it's a huge improvement over the Model S.
Hm, interesting, I appreciate your comment as someone who has regularly driven both. I've only driven the model 3 a bit, with much more time in the passenger seat and I feel like I have to look away from the road a lot.
I agree that EVs are the future, but plenty of companies have been working on them, but nobody gave a shit until Elon made them sexy. Also, most people will drive ICEs until EVs get cheaper and enough infrastructure is in place to support them.
Have you driven a Model 3? It's like night and day. Everything that burns gasoline feels like a dinosaur to me now after driving a Model 3. I can't stand renting cars, they are all complete junk compared to my Model 3 at home. I said this to a Hertz in Denver, they gave me their best Jaguar. It stinks, it is slow, it is pathetic. It's basically game over for ICE, and they know it. They have 10-15 years maybe but at that point, nobody will be buying a gas car, because they're disgusting, expensive, unsafe, and slow compared to an EV, and everyone will know it by that time.
ICE is rapidly going obsolete, and Tesla is making money digging the grave.
Replying here because your other comment hit the depth limit.
For decades ICE cars have been designed to drop off the mounts and go under the cabin while absorbing energy in a frontal crass. There's not some dramatically higher risk of the engine crushing your legs vs a BEV.
There are many reasons to prefer the BEV, but please don't spread FUD.
I don't see why it's FUD. Having the engine go under the mount pushes the car... up in the air, where it can roll over. The fact is that mass distributed at the nose and tail (gas tank) is worse for dynamics than having the mass evenly distributed along the bottom of the vehicle.
I took my BMW i3 in for service recently and got a high end 2019 BMW SUV loaner..worth 50% more. I was expecting to be impressed. Instead I was amazed how much I disliked it - clumsy tech, loud, needs fill ups...it seems ICE tech is at a dead end. I truly wouldn't want that vehicle if it was free.
Almost everything unsafe about gas cars applies regardless of the power train. The only exception is leaving it running in a closed room (and even there it isn't nearly as bad for a modern car)
Every car I've ever owned had no problem reaching freeway speeds. Even my geo metro which is rightly considered underpowered at best (and mine had a misfire problem). I'm not going to a track so I don't need more speed than is legal.
EVs are much safer than gasoline cars because of how the mass in the car is distributed. Gasoline cars have a giant brick in the front (engine and transmission) which moves back into the passenger compartment in a frontal collision. Automotive engineers have to work all kinds of magic to stop the engine from smashing passengers. In an EV, the big sled of batteries in the bottom causes the car to rotate away from the crash energy, and makes it almost impossible to flip. Plus EVs can use that frontal space for energy absorption.
I couldn’t find any after a quick search, but are you aware of any studies that compare EV to ICE safety normalized for model year? It would be an interesting comparison given the assumption that there are a lot more older (and this less safe) ICE vehicles on the road
It would be. I also can't find any. One of the challenges here is that in many cases Teslas (the pre-eminent EV of course) aren't even considered "cars" that qualify to be in a safety survey, because (just as an anecdotal example) "they don't crash enough": https://insideevs.com/news/370539/tesla-safest-list-didnt-cr... or in other cases, they simply aren't a qualifying car (not enough market share.) So while actual studies seem to be impossible to come by, commercial studies that sell magazines are completely unreliable due to mostly just not including EVs.
So eventually we will get the data; after all, in some places Teslas were the #1 selling car in the second quarter of 2020. It's hard to ignore the #1 selling car. For now, engineering principles and crash test results are all we have to go on.
Model 3s drive great for a practical sedan, but for getting to point A to point B, I'd slightly prefer a regular economy car. Tesla's UI doesn't quite make up for physical knobs and buttons yet, and gasoline makes road trips a lot easier. I'm really looking forward to the Rav4 Prime and plan on getting that after I move to a place with charging.
> I can't stand renting cars, they are all complete junk compared to my Model 3 at home. I said this to a Hertz in Denver, they gave me their best Jaguar.
I can't stand meat. I've asked McDonalds to give me their best BigMac and it was horrible.
No one can take you serious when you write drivel like this. I have driven many cars more silent than a Tesla. Even my own Alfa Romeo makes as little noise and way less for people outside. Hell even my neighbor's Ford Mondeo is harder for me to hear than a Tesla driving by on the 50km/t limited street outside my garden. It is so so easy to find the Tesla and Musk fans in threads like these. Owning both types (ice + ev) makes it even easier.
I have, and I also adore the cars, my next car will likely be a Tesla and I own the stock. I've spent a lot of time researching the company so I didn't come to this conclusion by being bitter over the company.
I think it's important to point out that the success of the company is largely built on the mythos of the man rather than the objective success of the cars. Tesla, earlier this week reached a market cap exceeding Toyota, and is larger than every other American auto manufacturer combined, despite having a fraction of the revenue. A lot of that is predicated on the "fibs" that
* All the "data" being collected by Tesla cars will be used to create full autonomous driving
* The battery technology will be so desirable that Tesla will sell batteries to everyone
* SpaceX will put a colony on mars, and they will only drive Teslas on mars
You remove Musk from the equation, and its doubtful that any other person could convince investors, fans, and potential customers that Tesla will ever accomplish of these things and tank the value of the company. If that happens it's clear that Musk will not only lose a ton of money, but ,depending on how profitable they are, they will lose their cash cow that allows Tesla to aggressively grow.
I personally think the stock market is bonkers about Tesla. It's a local effect over the possibility of entering the S&P, maybe some short squeeze and possibly expectations about new tech on battery day. Having said that, I think the relative valuation can be supported without any of those outlandish claims.
Tesla produces about 300k vehicles a year. Toyota produces 30x that. However, the demand over Teslas meant they almost did not feel any demand impact because of Covid, while Toyota saw a 30% demand drop. There is a huge room for growth on EVs, and EV today means Tesla.
If Tesla has a 5 year lead, and if Toyota continues to fumble the technology transition, an actual revenue overtake in 10 years is imaginable. Hugely optimistic, but within the realm of possibility, with no need for Mars dreams.
>However, the demand over Teslas meant they almost did not feel any demand impact because of Covid, while Toyota saw a 30% demand drop.
Tesla doesn't even define what a "delivery" is (remember factory-gated?), nor do I believe any numbers that come out of China, so I'm skeptical that they weren't affected by Covid-19. Personally, I think they "delivered" a number to ensure the stock analysts are appeased.
If demand is through the roof, and profits are negligent, what have they cut Model Y prices already?
>if Toyota continues to fumble the technology transition
Toyota pioneered, and continues to sell, hybrid electric vehicles (fuel cell, too). Pure BEVs have many issues (including cost), so it isn't like the market has 100% decided on the technology yet.
I believe tesla's numbers. When you have a backlog of sales a few cancled orders just changes the queue. Toyota didn't have that. Tesla also had customers in industry least affected (engineers and other upper class) who didn't need to adjust their life as much as waiters did.
Toyota (and subsidiaries like Lexus) serve a wide array of customers and demographics. Even with decreasing sales, they should drive net income that will match net revenues for Tesla this year.
You can also drive Toyota's cars through puddles, whereas Tesla's may encounter issues that are "acts of God", which are not covered by warranty:
I believe they "delivered" 90k vehicles too, by whatever definition they choose as "delivered".
I mentioned "factory-gated" in the OP because back when the metric of choice was cars "produced", Tesla had a quarter in which it claimed to have "produced" a certain number of "factory-gated" cars, and touted that number. It turned out, some of these cars were not complete. Some didn't even have seats. So exaggerating relevant metrics isn't new for Tesla (or other companies for that matter).
This isn't a comment on the advertising but I am struck by how Tesla and Elon Musk remind me of Apple and Steve Jobs. Both very divisive companies and leaders prone to downright emotional attacks from one side and staunch defense by the other. While has been quite a bit of hyperbole, overselling, and straight up failure to deliver, you can't dispute that both pushed their respective industries forward almost singlehandedly and consequently reap the financial success.
Steve Jobs didn't go off talking about how the stock is overvalued and go off producing short shorts as a joke. He had numerous notes of how he didn't care about what the competitors or nay-sayers said. Job's jabs at others (flash, app store rejections) were generally marketing, breif, and thought through. He almost never talked about future products and would often say 'let's see what the future holds'.
Both are product minded people who were interested in going into the weeds of the product but Jobs was focused on the UX but Musk is incredibly focused on being impressed by technical details for either the cool factor or some other detail.
These two both were micromanagers and outspoken leaders but thats where the similarities end. Musk is about his own interests of humor, cool factor, or impression. Jobs was focused on 'best' to a fault. I think the biggest difference between the two is that Jobs had a lot of time to get beat down by failure so he could become humble and learn how to lead people and care. (Not to say he is an insane example of it, I simply mean that early Jobs acted closer to Elon and leadership risk factor. Next changed that.)
A thought comes to mind: Twitter wasn't a thing for most of Steve Jobs's career. (Looking at Wiki pages, Jobs's time at Apple was 1976-1985, then 1997-2011; Twitter was created in 2006.) Meanwhile, my impression is that most of Musk's antics occur on Twitter. If Steve Jobs grew up in the Twitter age, would he have done that kind of stuff too?
A Quora answer says Jobs didn't make any social media accounts at all, using only phone and email for communication (although it doesn't cite sources), and another article supports the idea that he never made a Twitter account. So that's a point against that theory. Though not against the underlying theory: "If you're a CEO with a certain kind of personality, you should stay the hell away from Twitter".
Musk isn't some young kid but a 49 year old. 2 years ago he baselessly accused a rescue diver as a pedophile and doubled down on it in court. For some reason, I doubt Steve Jobs would have done that. I don't know what "kind of personality" this is but if you have that kind of personality (CEO or not), yes, stay away from Twitter and all social media. Though that wouldn't be your biggest problem anyways.
For what it's worth, Musk's defense on that one is that, where he grew up, "pedo guy" was generally used as an insult not to be taken literally, any more than "idiot" seriously means "IQ between 0 and 25". He does seem to be telling the truth on that one; his judgment is questionable on multiple counts, but it's not a case of deliberately making up an accusation.
"Elon Musk is right, it seems: in the 1980s the phrase "pedo guy" was used as an insult in Pretoria, where he grew up – and it was a generic reference that did not necessarily mean someone was a pedophile. But telling a court in the United States that the slang was "common" in South Africa may be stretching the truth, according to other people's recollections."
He did then hire a private investigator, who apparently produced some suggestive reports: "that Unsworth had met his wife when she was eleven or twelve, and that he had been unpopular in the cave rescue team because he was "creepy"". Apparently on the basis of this, Musk made further accustions in a later email to a third party—one prefaced "off the record", but that wasn't legally binding:
"“I suggest that you call people you know in Thailand, find out what’s actually going on and stop defending child rapists, you fucking asshole,” Musk wrote in the email, according to BuzzFeed News. “He’s an old, single white guy from England who’s been traveling to or living in Thailand for 30 to 40 years, mostly Pattaya Beach, until moving to Chiang Rai for a child bride who was about 12 years old at the time," the email continued." http://web.archive.org/web/20200605035828/https://www.busine...
Clearly impulsive, and he seems to have leapt to conclusions from the PI's report (I don't know exactly what was in it and how much was Musk reading between the lines) that seem to be false. But at that time, the accusation didn't seem baseless to him.
I think I prefer not to look at stock / market cap too much in this climate of excess money sloshing around. It's just a popularity vote.
What I really have to give Tesla is: they have cars; they actually make them in factories they built; they built their own battery factory; they also invest into software side of things. And lastly they invested a ton into the charger network, which initially helped them get off the ground.
Other companies may have EVs but I feel they are not as invested / well matched to IC car manufacturer culture. But again, time and numbers will tell - who is actually making them, how many, and how well do they work.
Car companies have always been build engines and assembly of body organizations, buying other parts from whoever. Each is a bit different but nothing new about not owning all the technology. If it isn't a competitive advantage why bother?
I appreciate your comment on competitive advantage. What would it be in Tesla's case? It's not really the car design or assembly. I know they tried to play "disrupt" games with throwing software at the production line but I understand it didn't go well.
Couple things that come to mind:
1) SV software culture, kinda coming from Musk. This helps with battery pack management (important), electric motor control (important) and fancy car UI (less important perhaps but a "cool" factor. I think I count autopilot here)
2) Skin in the game. This is a bit meta, but some of the things they've done take some real guts and leadership. In their case it was do-or-die. Things like charger network, or getting the cars sold without dealerships, or building their own battery factory, or maybe the very idea of a production EV. I don't see this with incumbents - even if they have EV lines they could probably shut them down without much impact. Maybe this will not last long, I guess VW promised to switch to all electric new platforms? At that point they are kinda committed.
I think it partly is the car design. They were the first manufacturer trying to make a mainstream car which was designed from the ground up to take advantage of being a BEV (for example with batteries flat under the floor). Others always based their electric car upon an existing ICE design despite the ensuing compromises.
This is super important. Most ICE vendors tried to take an existing vehicle, remove the ICE components and shoehorn in an electric motor. Tesla really nailed the “ground up” design (a drag coefficient of 0.24 was almost unbelievable when the model S debuted) and even now the other makers haven’t really caught up.
Are you sure that's part of the hype? I've never heard that one. People definitely have positive associations because of SpaceX, but associations don't need a weird justification like that.
Anecdotally, it's been a meme for years that everything Elon Musk does is about getting to Mars. Solar City? Mars needs solar. Tesla? ICE cars don't work on Mars. Hyperloop? Big vacuum chambers like that don't make sense on earth, but on Mars they might. Personally I'm highly skeptical of this narrative, but I've seen it expressed many times by different people going back years. I think a tweet like the above is Elon Musk playing into it, throwing some red meat to his most ardent fans.
Are you saying people see Musk as a necessary "evil" to fight off a bigger evil (in the form of oil companies) and so they forgive his misgivings in a sort of utilitarian calculus?
No. I'm saying Tesla is successful because of Elon's hype. They are not "forgiving" his misgivings, they fully believe Elon will solve world hunger and invent FTL space travel. If you ask anyone who's bought into Tesla, they will tell you the "Auto Pilot on airplanes" lie, but they also believe Elon will deliver on Level 5 Autonomous driving. No cares about electric cars, they care about the guy's company who is using electric cars as a platform to save the world.
I want to address this because in spite of Elon (whether punching down with Twitter or COVIDiocy, etc) burning up a lot of the goodwill he had accumulated in the past, these things remain:
The reason people think Elon may do level 5 autonomy is because his companies have accomplished several things that industry experts said were either infeasible or impossible. Fast charging, large-battery electric cars that are faster than almost all conventional cars.
Remember, pre-Tesla, electric cars were looked at as pathetic toys, like golf carts or, AT BEST, green bling like Priuses which are pretty slow and kinda ugly.
And not only has Tesla ramped up to mass production of these desirable vehicles, but they’ve also done it during the ending of EV credits (which almost all their competitors still have access to!) AND crazy low gas prices. And every time, the media plays up this or that “Tesla killer” that never ends up living up to the name and often completely tanks. Every time media or experts say Tesla will fail and they don’t reinforces the view in many that Tesla is somehow special.
And even SpaceX’s early successes like Falcon 1, Falcon 9, and Dragon Cargo were unprecedented for a private company and at those extremely low costs (at the time, Aerospace was a money pit for cost-inflating defense contractors, not nimble rocket startups). Then when they proposed propulsive landing, some NASA experts in the field thought it’d fail. I know one NASA GNC guy who said droneship landing is impossible. Clearly not, as we see now that it’s routine! Then Falcon Heavy, And now Dragon Crew... beating out Boeing, who had long been favored by old guard experts to beat SpaceX to ISS. Similar experts were certain SpaceX would be beat by OneWeb to launching the initial constellation... and we know how that has turns out (OneWeb went bankrupt). Then experts said that SpaceX had no Starlink terminals... until of course pictures emerged of sites they’ve had user terminals testing for months already.
So while I share the skepticism for level 5 autonomy, you should keep in mind That Musk’s companies keep accomplishing what many folks (who should know what they’re talking about) said couldn’t be done. And the more those experts say it’s impossible, the greater that Musk’s reputation soars after the task is completed nonetheless.
What exactly did his companies deliver, that experts said was impossible, in the technological sense I mean? Reusable rockets, deemed possible but not economic due to the low number of launches. SpaceX delivered amazing stuff, so, but nothing impossible. EVs were a thing already 100 years ago, so technically totally feasible, as is mass production. And the battery tech is to large part Panasonic. Still impressive what Tesla did, but again nothing technologically impossible.
Not feasible is a different thing. A lot of people said that about EVs and reusable rockets. With EVs he pushed the industry in zzhe right direction, at enormous costs. Funding seems to be directly linked to Elon, so. And whether or not reusable rockets are feasible is hard to tell, since SpaceX isn't publishing any results.
I think that the moment Elon runs out of stuff to hype and sell to investors, or just fails to sell, is the moment his companies go down. Which would be a pity.
This is some serious revisionist history right here.
No one was talking about technically possible. We're not discussing space elevators.
The key point is combining economic feasibility with the prevailing cultural will.
Of course electric cars exist. GM made a bunch of them in the 90s and literally forcibly recalled them and crushed them into tiny cubes in front of their owners. They held a candle light vigil. The documentary about this is what inspired Musk to get involved with Tesla in the first place.
There was clearly passionate market demand that was being suffocated and purposefully ignored by bloated incumbents who couldn't see anything past their bottom line and they lost track of the market.
Americans are sick of excuses for space travel. The USA is made entirely out of a culture of optimism and all the aerospace companies have nothing to show for meaningful progress as they collect their massive government checks.
SpaceX is the first group to ever over promise and then also over deliver. They don't give excuses, they get results.
There is hype because these are the first companies since the post war utopia that are actually making things again that are fundamentally changing our transportation reality with technology.
So you are saying that before Tesla EVs were not a thing. They were, already during the early day of automobiles. Funny how better electric motors enabled ICE cars and killed EVs.
Before SpaceX, humanity travelled to the moon, shot probes out of the solar system, landed on other planets and moons. We got multiple space stations into orbit. We didn't have reusable rockets so.
And aerospace companies did, in fact, change transportation fundamentally post WWII. Jet engines, passenger jets, the 747, ever decreasing fuel consumption per passenger, ever quieter aircraft.
And the parent was talking about technical impossible. Which clearly it isn't. Never argued against incumbents being unwilling to do certain things. But please stop putting Musk, and people in general, on podests like that.
> What exactly did his companies deliver, that experts said was impossible, in the technological sense I mean?
Landing the Falcon 9 booster on a droneship. As a physicist, I never believed it was impossible (the bar for “impossible” is rather high in physics) and yet an expert in the field told me it was!
I mean, people had demonstrated VTOL rocket landings before SpaceX came along. It was obviously just a matter of scaling it up and throwing tons of engineering man hours and test money at it, as SpaceX did.
Oh, absolutely. And yet... the consensus among most of the oldguard was that that approach wouldn't work. Many in the industry thought that reuse had effectively failed due to the lessons of Shuttle and the real future lie in expendables. Additionally, the old guard at NASA that WERE into reuse were generally for single-stage, horizontal landing architectures. In the specific case of the GNC specialist that told me it was impossible, he actually said this AFTER SpaceX had proved Falcon 9 VTVL on land! He thought the relative motion of the droneship would make the landing effectively impossible... I disagreed.
The phrase "hindsight is 2020" applies to Elon's accomplishments in spades... anything he hasn't achieved yet is an "obvious con" and "impossible" while past achievements were "merely a matter of throwing engineers at the problem"...
One of the reasons nobody tries seriously before was economics. They came to the conclusion that it was simply cheaper to not reuse boosters due to the overall low number of launches. And whether that is true or not cannot be evaluated without SpaceX results being published.
100 $ / kWh battery packs. Or the range of the Semi, deemed 'physically impossible' by a Daimler exec. Let's see how that goes.
Musk's whole point is this: much more things are technologically feasible, but most people / companies limit themselves within apparent constraints.
As mentioned: he's a physicist. From a physics standpoint, only a small amount of things are actually impossible. Only the deepest fundamentals give rise to constraints, and only those are the constraints he accepts. Everything else is debatable. At least. Sure, money so that he can throw army of talented engineers at problems helps. But it's his whole point! If it's your goal and it's possible in principle, reach for it.
Be it batteries, reusable rockets, autopilot.
That's why he says that it's possible in principle to achieve level 5 autonomy without lidar (having worked with lidar as chief engineer at SpaceX) and that it's possible in principle to do brain-machine-brain communication of language or complex ideas within a decade.
It might not work eventually. If so, it might be very well delayed for years.
But there is a reason that ppl like Thiel or Palihapitiya say: never bet against Elon.
Imagine Tesla actually rolling out level 5 autonomy within a year or two...
We are waiting for Level 5 for way longer than 2 years by now. And you don't have to pull the physical impossible argument. EVs were among the first cars built 100 years ago. Reusable boosters were deemed possible but not economic by EASA before SpaceX talked about them.
Musk is constantly moving the goal post, so when he ultimately delivers something one day, people tend to forget how often he didn't deliver in the past. He seems to be the only one to get away with that.
> hen when they proposed propulsive landing, some NASA experts in the field thought it’d fail. I know one NASA GNC guy who said drone ship landing is impossible.
Propulsive landing was not a spacex innovation. They simply picked back up the research agenda of Delta Clipper.
There is one aspect that SpaceX absolutely pioneered: supersonic retropropulsion. NASA was actually planning on testing it as it's needed for landing heavy payloads on Mars, but SpaceX figured it out for "free."
To be honest, SpaceX got a ton of VC money on top of a ton of NASA money on top of a ton of government launch money.
Not saying SpaceX isn't impressive, but without published results it is impossible to tell how economic their tech is, how expensive development and so on.
> The reason people think Elon may do level 5 autonomy is because his companies have accomplished several things that industry experts said were either infeasible or impossible.
That is all well and good, but what is at issue here and in many of these comments is the deceptive/dangerous marketing around Tesla's current offerings and, implicitly, the potential dangers it presents to the public roadways.
There is no progress if said "progress" is achieved unethically at any stage of its development.
I think we all, deep down, know this to be true.
I think Musk does not believe in that or marginalizes it (to cynically achieve business objectives) given some of his public statements and actions (snubbing the NTSB during the Mountain View investigation, taking his own hands off the wheel for a considerable period of time during an early 60 Minutes interview, several questionable statements on Twitter, glossing over the hundreds of abuses on YouTube and other social media platforms) with respect to Tesla - particularly in the past year or so.
Furthermore, let us consider that developing a highly desirable electric vehicle and the technical bar to clear to achieve that pales in comparison technologically to what Musk and Tesla are promising in Level 5 autonomous driving several times (wrongly) in the past and in the near future. Level 5 Autonomy presents several unpredictable engineering unknowns that may require similarly unpredictable breakthroughs while the development of say, the Model 3, was an iterative improvement upon what was already available in the market at the time - impressive improvement though it may be.
> they fully believe Elon will solve world hunger and invent FTL space travel
Well, maybe not fully believe, but certainly believe that Elon will move the needle materially in the right direction. I'd much rather spend my money on a product that supports a billionaire who is determined to save the world (Elon) than I would spend my money on a product that supports a billionaire who seems determined to take it over at any cost (Page, Brin, etc)
Remove autopilot from a Model S and it's still a hell of a car. Just from a pure driving dynamics a mechanical engine can't touch a VFD in terms of power dynamics and range(which is also why Diesel-Electric locomotives use them).
Don't disagree on the autopilot, the killer app has always been for me stop-and-go traffic where the speeds are lower and the sensors need to do less vision and more radar based.
Short of range issues, you should drive a Taycan to see just how much better it can get. The Car lacks the infotainment tech of Tesla, the network, and the autopilot tech but from a driving dynamics and quality standpoint makes the Model S feel poor.
Diesel-Electric locomotives do it that way because there's no clutch mechanism that would sustain the load being put on it, they have to use the magnetism for load coupling.
The man on the Clapham omnibus [1] thinks aeroplane autopilot pretty much flies the plane, with the pilot just watching. That's what is relevant to Tesla's marketing material, and they are surely fully aware of this.
It's not telling the whole truth, because the average person doesn't fly planes and has no firm grasp on how extensive a plane's autopilot is, or what the difference in situations is. What they do see is the Tesla marketing videos that hype it up to be better than it actually is.
In the context of someone using airplane autopilot as a defense of Tesla, they're not omitting anything. So I don't think that's a full answer to my question.
Musk is a great hype man in an industry where hype is the difference between success and failure. If he'd started out in a different field, he could've been the next Tom Ford or Zaha Hadid. That's not necessarily a statement about the quality of his or his companies' work - Zaha Hadid does not make nice buildings, and I wouldn't buy a Tesla - but it's difficult to say whether Tesla would've succeeded if not for Musk's hype... and the point of great hype men is that people buy into the hype.
On balance, having a hype man for [PayPal Mafia voice] innovation in the world of atoms seems like a good thing. Musk may not be the best person for the role, but you probably have to be a little crazy to want to be a celebrity in the first place.
I think people have a warped view of what a hero is. Simplistic morality stories in our entertainment have primed us to think of heroes as better than regular people, and see anyone larger than life who isn't better than regular people as a villain.
In actual fact though, heroes are both better and worse than regular people. The ancient Greeks understood this, which is why their myths are still compelling today.
In other words, there is no Tesla without Elon's meme machine. The graveyard of failed EV startups was chockful of more well meaning participants before Tesla came along. I'd go as far as to argue that the Elon's bullshit was the only thing that could stand up to big oil.