I remember a few years ago reading a article that promised a liquid 'fuel' that would recharge batteries. The idea being that you would pull into a gas station and expel your uncharged liquid and refill with charged liquid.
The liquid stuff might be a pipe dream, but I think the goal should be for electric cars to have a 'instant' fill up option shortly. Having a network of such stations greatly aleviates issues of trying to squeeze every last watt hour out of every battery and lets range anxiety be less important. I dont really care as much if my car only gets 200 miles range if I can fill up in 2 minutes at any existing gas station.
Filling up of course can mean anything from the liquid fuel meme idea above to a fast battery-swap to some megawatt based 'super fast' charger. It really doesnt matter
I’ve had one for a year and I’m at the point where I don’t think 2 minute fill-ups matter at all.
As long as you have reasonable range (~200mi) most people will never drive it in a day. All you have to do is charge it while you’re sleeping* and you’re golden.
That leaves road trips. A 45 minute charge gets kind of annoying. But vehicles/chargers are getting better. I’m pretty sure there are 20 minute or less vehicles. That’s a fine number, but every bit helps.
Unless you’re driving a long distance every day without stopping much home charging is 98% of your “fill-ups”. And as long as you have a Level 2 charger speed doesn’t matter too much.
* Can’t charge at home? Don’t buy an EV. Until we have apartment/street charging worked out so everyone can charge overnight EVs won’t be ready for everyone.
Drove from Houston to San Diego, using Electrify America chargers. My EV6 supports the fastest charging speeds, so most stops were less than 20 minutes.
There you go. I knew they Cayenne was fast, but it’s not exactly affordable.
I know my car, the Mach E, is one of the slowest. And it’s not terrible.
So it goes.
The bigger problem right now seems to be charger maintenance/reliability. But as more people use them and more stations get installed I’m hoping it will improve.
Yes, at almost every single stop there was at least one charging stall out of service. Many stations were small, in the little tiny towns along the freeway, with only 4 stalls. I did speak to an EA contractor at one - he said that EA will consider it an emergency, with a technician sent out immediately, only if every stall is out of service.
There was a drop, but it wasn't any worse that open freeways at full speed. Higher speeds mean more air resistance, and the mountains tended to be slower speeds. When I hit the steep declines, regen counteracted a lot of the lost efficiency from climbing. I was probably seeing 2.0-2.3M/KWh both on the freeway and the mountains (I get around 3.8-4.0 in typical Houston driving)
(Not the person you're replying to, but...) I don't yet have an EV, and I'll admit part of the reason is my expectation of charging anxiety.
For short-ish local trips, I agree that you just don't need to care, because you charge overnight, so pretty much any new day when you need the car, it's fully charged.
My concern has always been for longer trips. Part just the fear that I'd fail to plan properly and end up stranded somewhere without a charge (assuming the current world where charging is a lot harder to come by than gasoline refueling). But even in the case where I plan properly, the idea of having to sit for 45 minutes -- or even 20 -- while waiting for the car to charge seemed super annoying. But maybe it isn't so bad, considering that on a longer car trip it's often nice (and just a good idea in general) to take breaks every now and then. At a half-hour stop to charge, I could use the restroom, perhaps get a light snack to eat, or even just catch up on whatever dumb things had shown up on my phone while I'd been driving.
Most people don't drive more than the range of most EVs a day. Once we get chargers in homes, at parking garages, and on the street we'll have covered most use cases.
Trips will require fast chargers but people often stop for food or bathroom so there's an overlap in time
Will there be extra time for most people due to a few long trips a year? Yes, a bit but that's worth it.
Finally there is a percentage of people who this will not convenient for and they should continue to use gas or diesel.
> Trips will require fast chargers but people often stop for food or bathroom so there's an overlap in time
This right here. I'm no stranger to 6+-hour car rides, and my planning guideline has always been to assume 30 minutes of stops for every three hours driven. And even current battery and charging tech is good enough to satisfy that time budget.
This method, in the form of swappable batteries, seems to be working well for electric scooters/mopeds. See Gogoro, whose battery swap stations will apparently outnumber gas stations in Taiwan soon.
Obviously there is a scale problem since an electric car battery is 50-100 kWh compared to 1.7 kWh for a scooter battery. It still seems like a promising technology though, especially if someone can figure out a form factor that makes the battery swap easier.
Ignoring everything else, it seems impractical to me unless all automakers get on the same standard.
Otherwise it’s similar to the original Tesla situation where each manufacturer has to build their own network of battery swapping stations all over the world at great cost. If you’re out if juice in your VW and the only thing near by is a Chevy station you’re doomed to get a tow.
Short of a government mandate, which will never happen in the US, I don’t think automakers would ever get on one standard.
Much like how it would be inconvenient to refuel my Ford Escape if I could only do it at Ford gas stations or with Ford fuel but that is a solved problem.
I believe pre-unleaded gas it was just a standard but the US Gov made some regulations in the 70s about it.
I think it would play out similarly, with companies coalescing on a standard on their own and regulation coming afterwards.
A hundred years ago, there were service stations that would swap out your electric car or truck's battery in a couple minutes so you could keep driving without recharging. Essential at the time because the range was far lower than today. Those companies lasted for about two decades. Eventually the price/performance of gas vehicles won out, and we know the story from there.
This has been trialled in modern EVs, but hasn't caught on for three reasons:
* There's no standard battery pack between makes and models.
* It is one of the more expensive components of the car, so operating a business around taking in and giving out extremely expensive equipment is a massive hurdle from a capital investment standpoint, not to mention the equipment to remove and install the batteries - you basically need the equivalent of a mechanic shop or oil-change setup
* Battery packs, as currently designed, are not always fully separable from the rest of the car- cooling systems etc. are not 100% self contained, but may pump heat elsewhere in the vehicle to be radiated off
You're basically asking a company to take on the ownership aspect of the most expensive part of an EV, to accept strangers' batteries and to give out yours in exchange.
To make this possible, major manufacturers would have to agree not only on a standard for their batteries, but also to make the batteries quickly removable.
You're asking consumers to buy a car with a brand new battery in it, then after a few hours of driving to take that battery to a third party service station and give it away for some stranger's battery that may not perform as well.
To be honest, I think if this were the present-day reality, it would eliminate pretty much all of the concerns of buying an electric car- you don't need to add a lot of time to long trips (no worries that super chargers aren't available or operating at peak efficiency), and you don't have to worry that the battery going dead due to a fault renders your vehicle worth less than the cost of a new battery- because the service station that swapped out the battery for you would be on the hook for the cost.
However, I struggle to believe it would be cost effective- your customers can charge their own batteries at home for cheaper than they can exchange them, so they aren't going to be exchanging nearly as frequently as an ICE fills up at a gas station.
The way they did it 100 years ago was as a subscription/contract. You agreed to pay X amount to be able to use the service consistently (again, works better with taxis and trucks due to their constant use) over a period of time. You would drive into a bay, they would lift the vehicle, remove the battery, replace it, test it, and on you went. Battery and vehicle design was simpler then, so this was a trivial procedure.
I think in order to make it practical today we would need a standard for "quick-replace" batteries. The thing that would make it practical would be that manufacturers would no longer need to go to crazy lengths with their battery design, because range wouldn't matter as much, because you could replace the battery so quickly at a service station. Another interesting benefit is that they could make the cars tell drivers to change out sooner, so fewer batteries get completely discharged, preserving battery efficiency. Like gas/diesel service stations do today, they could support a couple different chemistries and battery formats, with trucks having purpose-built bays and stations as they do today.
> your customers can charge their own batteries at home for cheaper than they can exchange them
This isn't strictly true. 40 million Americans live in apartments, and there is no way for most people in apartments to charge at home. And as we depend more on renewables, the time at which you use electricity will become more important; solar isn't available at night, wind can die down, hydro may be less useful during droughts. And this is all assuming we complete building the grid upgrades needed to charge 280 Million passenger vehicles overnight every night. Not to mention 1 in 4 chargers in the USA don't work.
I think battery swaps are going to be an important mitigation, but obviously not a panacea.
Tesla had a single station somewhere in California I think that would drop your battery and replace it with a spare on your trip. One your way back, you were required to swap out for your old one again or be charged a major fee. I think it was a stunt more than anything but I always liked the idea. Seemed really cool.
> Tesla claimed the credits between 2012 and mid-2014 — part of a program designed to encourage the carmaker to promote its new battery-swap technology. The program did not require evidence the company actually provided the service.
Sounds like 300M isn't the total just for the battery swap tech, but I might be wrong.
By my recollection these are called Flow batteries. The power density is still not great, and I think we still need better technology to “wash” dentrites out of these batteries.
They are effectively a cousin to fuel cells and I wonder if someone needs to think of them that way to make it work.
> Democratic Republic of Congo produces more than 70 percent of the world’s cobalt...
The article talks about where certain raw materials are currently being produced (cobalt, nickel, lithium, etc.) without discussing where those materials could be produced (reserves). There might be vast reserves of those same materials in areas where it is forbidden to mine or where things like permits and regulations make it unprofitable to refine. Does the DRC really have 70 percent of all cobalt on the Earth, or is it just cheap to mine there due to slave labor and lax environmental laws?
To add, this is the entire point of the EV tax credit that goes into effect this year, with a requirement for 50% of the raw battery material to come from North America, with it increasing 10% every year until it hits 80%.
Only problem is the Biden admin decided to ignore Congress and say nah, forget about that requirement, we'll get to it later. And if you lease the car, just forget about it completely.
Are you referring to how the credit temporarily applies to more vehicles for the next few months? It can take a bit to implement new laws, especially complicated ones. I don't see anyone "ignoring congress".
It's so weird that the USA keeps saying "yeah we need to reopen Mountain Pass" and then never does it for years and years. There's lots of places you could mine in the USA, it's a big country.
Generally speaking the type of nickel Indonesia produces is not suitable for EV batteries. From my understanding they mainly have laterite deposits which do not produce class-1 nickel, which is the purity required for most EV batteries. For that you're generally looking for nickel sulphide deposits.
You're more right than wrong in that thinking. Usually land area correlates well to mineral wealth. But without a lot of knowledge of the situation, Indonesia's islands probably exist because of volcanism and plate tectonics and that makes a difference in having unusual geology.
Quick google search mostly shows low effort articles citing one paper from 2021. Here’s to hoping, but manufacturing has always been the main obstacle in the path to any graphene based technology.
How easily does it catch fire? There are two aspects of current battery tech that scare me: fire and high voltage. There's not much to be done about the second, but it would be nice if I didn't have to worry about my car burning my house down.
edit: I'm aware of the statistics about gasoline vehicle fires, guys.
edit2: does anybody have an answer to the question I asked?
> edit: I'm aware of the statistics about gasoline vehicle fires, guys.
It doesn't matter. You'll be lectured none the less.
I had someone ask me about electric vehicle fires just before the holiday. She is worried because her son has a preorder deposit on a Tesla Cybertruck. I told her they were safe; fires are unlikely, and ICE cars burn too. That won't stop the worry; you can't tell people anything.
Bottom line is people believe they're dangerous. I knew that would happen and said so: Telsa et al. needed to do the necessary education before the inevitable headlines hit. They didn't, so here we are. Got modded into the dirt for predicting this.
Go ahead, smash that down button. You can't tell people anything.
I usually point out Paul Walker's gas Porsche bursting into flames immediately on impact, one of worst-looking EV crashes I've seen was Richard Hammond, who rolled down a hill in a questionably built car, but was still pulled out prior to the flames. Anecdotal, but gasoline cars on fire are basically bombs.
"Bottom line is people believe they're dangerous. I knew that would happen and said so: Telsa et al. needed to do the necessary education before the inevitable headlines hit. They didn't, so here we are. Got modded into the dirt for predicting this."
If people "believe" and forgive me for translating that to "feel" they are dangerous what education would Tesla have to do and why would it have worked. Especially with an entire political spectrum dumping EV fears.
> what education would Tesla have to do and why would it have worked
I'd have started with fire departments. We're now replete with horror stories of un-extinguishable fires and re-igniting cars, new headlines appearing routinely with juicy quotes from unprepared fire fighters. That's unnecessary and could have been avoided, obviating the bulk of those headlines. Instead fire fighters could have been advocates. Advocates people listen to.
Most humans are emotion/feeling based, even those that believe they are not. You (pretend you’re a car manufacturer person) can Carl Sagan it for yourself all you want, but you’re selling to the broad base of people who vote for very flawed politicians, go to church to worship imaginary sky demons, etc.
tl;dr: Your allies and word of mouth do it for you. This is literally why car manufacturers have press and PR offices. You have to not only respond to media, you have to proactively engage politicians, journalists, influencers, etc. What you cannot do is throw up your hands and say “no one will believe us so why bother. Our fanbois get it!”
how about that tesla owner that had to kick out his own window to escape a battery fire because the manual latch wouldn't open the door? tesla makes garbage quality cars, go talk to longer term tesla owners and they will tell you themselves.
A vehicle fire with an EV is much more dangerous than an ICE. They burn hotter, re-ignite, and take a massive amount of water to put out (like, a pools worth of water)
> A vehicle fire with an EV is much more dangerous than an ICE.
No, sorry. A blanket statement likely that isn't meaningful. The failure modes you're comparing are very different and both have aspects that are either more or less "dangerous" than the other.
Liquid fuel can spread and ignite very rapidly, whereas damaged batteries tend to smolder for a time before erupting into a large fire. Lithium Ion cells produce large quantities of toxic gases (hydrogen fluoride, in particular, which attacks mucous membranes.) Liquid fuel can be ignited by static electricity from clothing and whatnot. Battery cells can conceal damage from both manufacturing and later events that lead to ignition at unexpected moments.
I could go on and on. And for everything I claimed someone else can find an analogous risk with the other. There is no definitive analysis here. Anyone that claims otherwise is talking out of their ass. We won't have answers until there is a fleet full of 20+ year old, neglected electric cars running around getting into wrecks. Even then we'll have to parse the truth from whatever agenda driven narratives prevail at that time.
The linked article does a nice job of citing their sources, despite trying to skew them. The top handful of recalls are from electrical fires, 1 ABS (electrical) issue, a handful of battery issues, then at the bottom 1 issue with fuel leaks.
Go ask a firefighter which they think is more dangerous.
Gasoline cars can catch fire too, but the EV problem is that the fires do not go out using traditional techniques and the fire can re-ignite over and over even several days after being put off.
Gasoline cars don't catch themselves on fire overnight while you're sleeping. They do it while you're standing there, usually within reach of a fire extinguisher. And, yes, they're easier to put out.
They are still very difficult to put out. I've been to several vehicle fires (I'm on the volunteer fire department here) and they burn very thoroughly and quickly and hot. And if the magnesium catches on fire you can't use water on it.
This link seems highly suspect. In one graph they seem to be comparing number of vehicles recalled due to a potential fire hazard. That is not the same as actual number of vehicles that caught fire. You might have a model with 500,000 vehicles recalled because a faulty switch caused a fire in 5 cars.
It also tries to combine data with hybrid vehicles with ICE vehicles because they also have a gas component. They don't do the same with EV, even though hybrids also have an battery component. There is no attempt to distinguish if the fires were caused by the gas or the battery in those cases.
When I see a study fudge the numbers in one area, I am suspect of all the numbers it presents.
Eh, I'm a skeptical of how Eletrek is interpreting the data; they're talking a very broad approach of total fires in ICE vs EV, which leaves next to no room for understanding why. The National Fire Prevention Association published analysis that's more nuanced to me:
-------------------------------------
Figure 10 shows that roughly three-quarters of the highway vehicle fires reported in the US in 2017 that were caused by mechanical or electrical failures (77 percent) involved cars with model years of 2007 or earlier. This was true for only 54 percent of the fires resulting from collisions or overturns. As vehicles age, parts wear out, extended maintenance plans expire, and maintenance can be overlooked. Consequently, it is not surprising that vehicles that are at least 10 years old are at greater risk of a fire started by a mechanical or electrical failure or malfunction.
On EV's, their opinion was mostly summed up as such: "Mechanical and electrical fires, the most common fires in ICEVs, become more common as the vehicles age. EVs have not yet reached the ages where these conditions are more commonly seen."
So at least for me, I'd be somewhat hesitant to take Electrek claim's at face value.
I am not sure what's your point? There's far less EVs now, and a negligible percentage of them are over 10 years and badly maintained. Also, the nature of fires is still very different.
With gasoline you can put it off using water, while for EVs water will actually make the fire worse and you'll need special compounds to turn it off.
> With gasoline you can put it off using water, while for EVs water will actually make the fire worse
Water is perfectly fine to use on lithium-ion battery fires. It cools down the battery eventually stopping thermal runaway. A strategy I've seen is to submerge the battery pack in water. There's also water additives that help dissolve some of the chemicals in lithium-ion batteries.
Note that lithium-ion (and similar) batteries only contain a small amount of polymerized lithium, unlike lithium batteries which contain raw lithium and thus react with water.
It appears you can contain EVs fires with a special blanket. Youtube "bridgehill fire blanket". It does reignite if the blanket is removed but containment will protect property. I should stop as I'm not an expert I just saw the video and report.
As for probability, why are you assuming they'll be more dangerous?
This data is per 100,000 vehicles, which takes into account the proportional number of vehicles sold.
An analogy: if a Cessna is more survivable in a crash than a jumbo jet but the jumbo jet crashes 100x less, you still want to be flying on the jumbo jet.
The point you're missing is that even after normalizing for the number of vehicles, you still need to also normalize for the age of the vehicles: the rapid growth of EV sales means most EVs on the road are relatively new.
Just an anecdote, but my friend's dad's jaguar spontaneously combusted one night and they had to call the fire department. He swore off jaguars after that lol
Ford had some fire-related recalls recently[1]. Interestingly one of them was for hybrids, but not due to the battery. It was due to the heat shielding placement and that there was a decent chance of fire in the event of an engine failure from combustible fluids hitting hot parts.
Also I wouldn't say the car being in motion is a convenient time to have a fire. You're often not just standing there with a fire extinguisher handy.
We had a gas-powered bmw self-immolate in the parking garage under one of my buildings at cmu. Made for a slightly exciting afternoon and the most horrible smoke I've ever smelled. Don't think they ever learned why it burned.
EVs are being sold all over. Even if this blanket actually works, it needs to be cheap and easy enough to deploy to everywhere with EVs, or become mandatory to include with EV purchases, otherwise it becomes another gimmick nobody can benefit from.
Two questions: severity of fire and ease of putting out. Are those measured as well? Because, yeah, actually 100% of gas cars catch fire, given that there is active combustion in the engine. 'Catching fire' (i.e., the fire escaping from the gas engine) is a common cause of breakdown for a gas car, but the fire is easy to put out. Electric battery fires are more difficult from my understanding.
Moreover, in the data you cited, of the nine recalls listed, only 1/9 is caused by a part of the gasoline system, and 8/9 are caused by batteries. Thus, all the fires in gas cars that are cited here are caused by the electrical components, which are scaled up in EVs.
Might that be related to the fact that the average ICE vehicle is much older than the average EV? What if you compared ICE vehicles of similar age and price to EVs? Do late-model ICE Mercedes catch fire as often as Teslas, for example?
Liquids are harder to keep contained than solids. That's mostly it, but also, all the extra complexity of ICEs adds risks too (e.g. lubricant fire are quite common too).
Appreciate the info. Like another commenter, I worry about a fire that starts when my EV is charging, which would burn my house down. I have never worried about a turned-off ICE vehicle burning down my house.
Are the odds of an in-garage, turned-off fire greater for ICE vehicles also, or is that risk mostly on the EV side? I realize it is not a huge risk either way, but I have actually considered parking our EV in our driveway to eliminate small, but non-zero risk of house-burning catastrophe.
Oh, I may have replied to the wrong comment. I was sure it was asking why EVs can be safer, not how things go in practice.
On practice, I have no idea how well built your options of vehicle are. Either one can be dangerous or safe, it's just easier to make an EV safer (even though yes, once a fire starts the EV is almost always worse to deal with.)
Gasoline fires are different than a battery fire. Battery fires are class 2 or self oxidizing. They require substantially more resources to mitigate. A gasoline fire can be extinguished with traditional fire fighting methods. Battery fires basically need to be babysat for a day while they cook off.
I really don't understand why everyone does this, Elon has pointed out, he designed one of the original cars for Tesla. He was in fact a founding member of the company. One could say, since he was a founding Engineer, he was one of the real people to do some of the real work at Tesla. He also didn't exactly inherit Tesla in a successful time, he had to bring it up to where it is today, and every year people say its doing the worst it'll shut down, and this and that. I just don't get the hate he's gotten for decades. Does someone have some context?
My understanding is when he took it over, it wasn't anywhere near where it was, and he has in fact placed it as a competing company that mass produces cars, and is a leader in its respective space in the industry.
I was a fan of Musk until only recently with the dealings with Twitter. Right off the bat treating peoples livelihoods as a joke was wrong and cruel. This isn't some sensationalized political story, he literally started off the acquisition carrying a sink into the Twitter HQ and thought it was hilarious.
But I still totally agree, arguments to downplay his role in Tesla are totally illogical. Founder or whatever, he took control of a company that was totally irrelevant and led it to 1+ million vehicle per year, 10s of billion revenue, and pretty undeniably caused a huge momentum shift in the industry.
he's had a similar attitude with employees at TSLA for over a decade now - the difference is everyone who joined Tesla knew what they were getting into.
But literally his first act as CEO of Tesla in 2008 was to lay off 20% of the company. He's always been very fire-happy.
He value truth more that the jobs of the former employees at Twitter.
The Twitter files tell us about the level of corruption going on with real implication on the live of way more people that the select few that worked at Twitter.
Alternatively: Because he literally is not a founder and is often portrayed as one (such as in GP’s comment)
But also yeah, generally he gets a lot of hate for a long and increasingly public track record of being a jerk.
For example, big jerk move to announce he’s “switching parties” to try to frontrun a story about him sexually harassing an employee. Dragging 300MM people already in a lot of stress and cultural tension into your own sexual misconduct issues is really bad form IMO.
They do it because the narrative is that all good people are smart and all bad people are stupid. Everyone must do everything that good smart people say and ignore everything bad stupid people say.
When Elon changed his political opinions, articles were generated to tell people he's stupid so he could then be called a bad person without violating the narrative.
I'm not sure that even remotely tracks if you're trying to imply that the American left claims that everyone that agrees with them is the only smart people. If anything a lot of their narrative is that they're oppressed by people who are smart and better at politics and business than they are.
Did Elon ever really change his political opinions? Or just become more clear about them? Either way, I think a lot of it was the Twitter takeover just going full "he's either taking this 0% seriously, or doing the most insane maneuver ever" and I'm not sure the evidence has come down on the side of him being all that serious about it.
You can debate if it'll ultimately work out better for him/Tesla/Twitter, but it certainly seems like he's playing pretty loose with his money, Tesla's future, and a lot of other things.
There's a lot of articles about how he maybe is doing something dumb because he may be doing something dumb. It's not the first time he's done it, and most of the things I've seen have included a caveat that this could very well work out.
Think about the number of times that Donald Trump got called stupid starting from when he launched his presidential campaign. You may hate the guy's politics, but he is objectively not dumb, but the "bad people are dumb, smart people are good" narrative must be reinforced relentlessly. It's the golden hammer of political propaganda because IT WORKS!
The counter for Donald Trump being stupid is that Greta Thurnberg is smart and good and everyone must listen to her and do what she says when she is at best very average.
Trump historically hasn’t been stupid, but that doesn’t mean much in the present. Age gets everyone and his frontal cortex doesn’t exactly seem in shape.
Beyond his usual behavior of believing the last thing anyone told him, when you let him in front of kids he tells them Santa isn’t real, he gave a bunch of Boy Scouts an unrehearsed speech mostly anecdotes about high society parties he went to as a kid in NYC… is that “smart”?
(Also, after he got hospitalized for covid, it was notable he kept bragging in public that he’d passed a dementia test.)
Both Bush Jr and Trump actively played dumb as political theater. That is not the same as the narrative switching to Elon being dumb (and totally not even an engineer, can’t even code lol) the second it became clear he held right wing opinions and planned to act on them.
Elon is a litmus test for nerds. You can tell a lot about an engineer by when they decide(d) Elon is a clown. No doubts the insanity started long before the cave diver defamation incident (although this was the turning point for me personally as well)
If you're a techie that is still holding onto Elon as a hero, good businessman or otherwise decent human being after the Twitter fiasco I'm not sure there is much left to save (or the horse incident, or the time he had secret children with an employee, and the time he stole Grimes' eggs to have a child with a surrogate, and the time he.... )
Yeah, he's kind of went down the Q-anon route if you watch his increasingly deranged tweets. He's always been a troll but he's increasingly spouting dangerous thoughts. I knew something was up when my family from the southeast US started supporting him.
I think assuming any white guy living in Thailand is a sex tourist was pretty common up through the 2000s. It’s like the kind of joke you’d expect South Park to make.
As a Christian, I find Elon to be an immoral man, but I still think that he is an objectively successful entrepreneur and an engineer who's extremely skilled in execution. Why does his viewpoint on things irrelevant to business and engineering matter in this discussion?
Just look at what people said about Steve Jobs and Wozniak. There's no point in replying to these people, there are thousands of them and I don't think they care to be fair.
> Just look at what people said about Steve Jobs and Wozniak
People have said negative things about Jobs etc, yes. People also said negative things about Bernie Madoff, Hitler, and other people who inarguably were not changing the world for the better.
Having "haters" is not proof of success or how right you are, it's a measure of fame, and is probably closer to value-neutral than a sign of good or bad.
This dynamic is also why it is worth continually pointing out the badness of bad people. It’s not good for our society if we allow people to build this idea that “negative feedback from everyone around you is a good thing, actually.”
It’s very often not! It’s very often evidence that you’re an asshole, liar, or cheat!
Musk was definitely instrumental to Tesla's early success, but my understanding is that's mostly due to his deep pockets, his fundraising connections, and his ability to attract and motivate real engineering talent. his direct design and engineering contributions are marginal, and he continues to inflate his role in those areas as part of his decades-long project to portray himself as an engineer or designer (which he definitely isn't).
Elon says he "led the design of the original Roadster"[1]. However, Elon is often loose with the truth - and even by his own admission in 2006[2], his role at Tesla mostly involved business and product strategy.
Really, the visual design of the Roadster is a highly modified Lotus shell. It was designed by a group of people, notably Barney Hatt[3]. Musk had strong opinions about how the car should look, and participated in key meetings with designers. You can think of him as the product owner for the visual styling of the Tesla's shell (but not the designer). This is impressive on its own, as he was also running a fledgling SpaceX at the same time.
Building a really nice version of the Lotus Elise shell is not what makes Tesla unique, though: their all-electric drivetrain and battery systems were revolutionary at the time, and they designed by a bunch of brilliant people like JB Straubel[4] -- not Elon Musk. Ze'ev Drori also deserves credit for bringing the Roadster from prototype to production and bringing the discipline needed to solve their early manufacturing issues.
Tesla's incredible marketing, though? The thing that let them hire best-in-class engineering talent and inspire those folks to work for long hours on changing the auto industry? The thing that let them raise money from Google and eBay founders? The thing that continues to inflate their share price to massive P/Es, even today? That's all Musk. He's the best marketer in the world, bar none.
It irks me that Musk is not satisfied with his incredible level of accomplishment and needs to also obscure the work of the people around him who made important contributions. It's been a successful strategy for him so far though, as evinced by the wide acceptance of his version of events and the resulting positive effect on the companies he's involved with.
I'll write a blog post about this with more research if people are interested.
A big turning point for me with Elon was actually listening to him talk. In countless interviews he's asked some variation of the question "how do you do it all" and every single time it's the most obvious softball question begging for an answer that praises all the amazing and dedicated engineers that worked on these products and every single time his answer is is some variation of "I'm just that amazing" -- "I only sleep 4 hours a night" -- "I work really hard"
Decoding the Gurus pod nailed it with their most recent episode on a Musk interview where he hammers this point home. He's the techno-shaman — by demonstrating how different he is to the rest of us mortals and how he has unique knowledge of beyond the cutting edge of tech, he gives people license to believe in whatever he's selling. Just like a traditional shaman does but it's work 120 hours a week sleeping on the factory floor + intimately familiar with every aspect of design, engineering and production (and routinely solve problems none of his brilliant engineers can), instead of going into trances with a direct line to a deity.
Tesla was incorporated in 2003 after years of engineering research and experimentation. Musk first got involved in 2004 by becoming the largest shareholder. He became CEO in 2008 and in 2009 he settled a lawsuit that allowed him to be legally called a "cofounder" of the company and has liberally used the title ever since
From what I remember of the early blog posts on the site, his side of the story is that when he invested in it, the only thing the company had was an electric motor design, and that the funding round was in an effort to turn the motor into an EV instead of selling off the surrounding IP and patents.
Even if you don't take his word, it's tough to suggest that he isn't effectively responsible for all of Tesla's success, at least in terms of knowing when the technology was ready to be turned into serious cars and hiring the right people to achieve that, both in terms of design and getting the production lines to scale (which was the prerequisite for the 2018 stock bonus that is now responsible for a large portion of his stake in TSLA/net worth).
Eh, idk I guess I'd like to see some sources for that. Even the Wikipedia's entry on the Roadster calls out that:
> Elon Musk took an active role within the company and oversaw Roadster product design at a detailed level, but was not deeply involved in day-to-day business operations
He was certainly the primary person keeping them afloat financially. By January of 2009 the company had raised $187 million and $70 million of that was Musk. That was just before Tesla finally caught it's big break in June of that same year when it got $465 million from the US DoE, by far its biggest investment
But even on the financial side of things he's caused many headaches for the company. Like in 2016 when he made Tesla buy his cousins' (failing) solar company, SolarCity. Of course he neglected to mention to Tesla shareholders that it was failing
As always with the EV industry the non-Tesla entities are following such a weird strategy it almost seems like fraud.
GM sells two EVs, one that spontaneously combusts (bolt) and one that is the least efficient EV sold (hummer).
How about they fix their efficiency and reliability before trying to make a different battery chemistry work.
Likewise the new EV credit prioritizes inefficient vehicles by having a higher limit for large suvs and trucks.
We should just stick to technology that works, and focus on efficiency and scaling. Any new chemistry will still be a science experiment in 2030 (when allegedly gas vehicles will stop being produced)
The liquid stuff might be a pipe dream, but I think the goal should be for electric cars to have a 'instant' fill up option shortly. Having a network of such stations greatly aleviates issues of trying to squeeze every last watt hour out of every battery and lets range anxiety be less important. I dont really care as much if my car only gets 200 miles range if I can fill up in 2 minutes at any existing gas station.
Filling up of course can mean anything from the liquid fuel meme idea above to a fast battery-swap to some megawatt based 'super fast' charger. It really doesnt matter