The 169 slides from Tesla Investor Day are online.
Brad Templeton is an expert on robotaxis and has been advising other companies like Waymo provides a quite positive review of the Investor Day. He has criticism of the Tesla FSD safety numbers as being 3.6 million miles per airbag deployment. The 500,000 miles per ordinary car accident is per NHTSA data on accidents per police report. The Autopilot number is 6 million miles per airbag deployment. Brad believes that Autopilot is better than FSD. However, FSD is replacing Autopilot on highways with the latest version in Beta. Nextbigfuture believes that FSD would have to be passing the 6 million miles per airbag accident on highways.
Brad does not accept Tesla model 2 pricing as he writes at Forbes. However, Brad thinks getting close on that price with subsidies will give an electric car at under $20,000. This will be very disruptive.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
Neither will wind/solar replace gas. We are doomed then?
Calculating from the minerals in the ground, renewable energy cannot produce enough energy to reproduce itself renewably or sustainably. Levelized costs using phony EROEIs along with ignoring the costs of duplicate power production facilities and short-lived electric storage gimcracks beg the question in a logically fallacious manner.
This is the ugly side of Elon, the rent-seeking Elon taking advantage of government mandates and subsidies. It is dishonest to the core.
All the costly minerals from the dozens of unstable nations where they must be mined, cannot but be wasted in this mad scheme.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to make the world wait (even if it is just the rich world) for improved locomotion (EVs, etc) and all the benefits from rare-earth and related minerals in tech just because the majority of the world (the rest) has politically and socially stagnated. If they have any potential at all (in aggregate), for which I am doubtful, it will be through breakthrough tech provided by the rich world. The poor world has made it abundantly clear that they do not want to take on the rich world’s work and consumption ethic – such is the resulting poverty and violence.
One can only hope that the prevailing NIMBYism in NA and the EU (and lesser degree Australia) will wake up to the idea that these richer countries should mine, frack, and refine/smelt, etc., on their own. Better maybe that Globalization is dying.
You know that a consumer or biz-to-biz company or industry has ‘jumped the shark’ when they trot out sustainability or ‘save the planet’ or carbon reduction/neutrality as their main selling points. Yes, not destroying stuff would be nice.
But: People with money, ambition, and goals/dreams do not prioritize these things. Less is never More. They’re looking for advantage, lifestyle, improvement, a better future, something positive for their legacy, etc. These people and these purchases promote a cycle of growth and prosperity for everyone else, disproportionately.
There is pricing/ selling for the economy demographic and widespread adoption, then there is fire-sale desperation, ‘reduced earth impact’ headlines, and failure of the imagination in their technical department. We’re not there – but the cracks are apparent.
Apple nailed it around the turn of the century with: “..[computing] for the rest of us…” Appeals to more but still got away with charging PC premium for the interface.
Around the turn of the century is the time when the DOS interface became
perfectly equal to the Mac’s. That slogan is of 1985.
Ah Windows 98. The last PC OS that was robust and reliable without the visual fluff and microsoft insecurity that crashed that entire sector into the sub-mediocrity it ‘enjoys’ today.
Tesla needs to offer product and engineering support to integrate their systems into their’s or another company’s PHEVs (ideally a FCEV, but likely an ICE PEV) – a partial pivot, but a more realistic ‘majority’ market move for the late 2020s and on…
$10 Trillion? Smells like another Energiewende, probably with the same failed outcome.
Seriously just build some nuclear power plants for electricity, then build some HTRs for process heat. You could probably decarbonize for half the cost. Put the batteries in the cars and charge the cars with atoms.
I don’t think Elon Musk would disagree in principle. He has nothing in an engineering or safety sense against nuclear per se. Seriously he recognizes that it absolutely will not happen. There is no way to make it happen. There’s just no point in pretending.