Some high-impact reporting there from the BBC!
Also contains my favourite quote of the day:
"Westcombe Dairy's maturing cave is equipped with cheddar-turning robot, nicknamed Tina the Turner"
> I still struggle to see how this ends up favorable for Tesla in the long run.
They're expanding their customer-base by maybe 2x or more. Those new customers will be be giving recurring payments to Tesla. For vehicles that Tesla didn't build. How is that not favourable?
Tesla doesn't break out the details, but I think it's generally understood among investors that they just break even on Supercharger. Their profit comes from their cars, and the Supercharger network was a competitive advantage to get people to buy the cars.
I think they opened up the Supercharger network to ensure that the US didn't establish CCS as the standard and overtake Superchargers, such that Teslas have a competitive dis -advantage, but I don't think they're particularly thrilled to have all these other companies using their chargers.
People seem to think they're raking it in with the Superchargers, but distributing electricity is a low margin business. Same with gas stations where the money mostly comes from the convenience store part of it and such.
Gas is lower margin than the other things in a convenience store, but they sell enough more gas than anything else that much of the money is there. I haven't checked in 10 years, but at one time I did read the share holders information from a convenience store and for that brand it was about 1/3 gas, 1/3 tobacco, 1/3 everything else. Tobacco is very high margin but very few people buy it. The everything is is a nice high margin, and most people buy, but they don't buy every trip. Gas is what gets people in the doors and often is all people get.
This goes both ways -- historically the other charging networks were J1772 or CCS (with a few CHAdeMO to support Nissan Leafs), but now Electrify America, EVgo, etc. have been retrofitting or newly installing a mix of CCS and NACS cables onto their L3 chargers. This increases the available charger footprint for Teslas as well.
Where I’m located, Supercharger prices are ~4x business electric rates. That’s something like $15 profit per charge. No idea on infrastructure costs or usage though.
Tesla’s entire business revolves around batteries. They have a huge opportunity to install batteries onsite that spread usage over times when high demand charges don’t apply. There’s some loss in that, but still could make sense if demand charges are really high. I’ve been waiting to see Tesla roll something like this out, but presumably it’s not pressing right now.
Older Tesla chargers did not use CCS to communicate. My 2019 Model 3 doesn't support CCS at all. When I plug into a Supercharger, it's not using CCS to communicate with the charger, it's using Tesla's proprietary CAN bus protocol. Teslas made before 2021 need an ECU retrofit to support CCS.
Pretty much all the old Teslas in Norway have been retrofitted to allow them to connect to CCS only chargers as far as I can tell. Had mine (2015 S 70D) done years ago when it became clear that future Tesla chargers would be CCS only.
I think between 15 and 20% were build pre-2019. The number of non-CCS is actually on the higher end of this, as component shortages caused quite a few to be built without CCS support in 2020.
The downside is that when people are considering which car to buy, Tesla has enjoyed their charging network as a strong selling point that other automakers don't have
How much will owners of other manufacturers' cars pay for electricity at the Superchargers, compared to those who have Teslas? The article doesn't mention this (or I missed it). I'm curious to know what this adds up to over the life of a car.
Short term it will likely be the same - Telsa has the most chargers, but they do not have a monopoly and they will be forced to charge the same to all just to compete.
Most places it's not like gas stations where there's 3 on the same block and they all have exactly the same price all the time, people are going to stop at whatever charger is located where they need it and pay whatever the price is as long as it's within reason.
A quick search suggests there's around 145,000 gas stations. This article mentions Tesla has 17,800 supercharger stations. I didn't care enough to look up the station counts for the other EV charging companies. But that Tesla figure is around 12% of the gas station total, so let's say the total number of EV charging stations is somewhere between 15% and 20% of the gas station total.
I could easily see EV charging stations approach the level of saturation of gas stations in the next 10 years.
Yes, today people are going to stop wherever there's a nearby charging station. But that's going to change, and fairly quickly.
Did they mean 17,800 supercharger units or 17,800 locations with super charger units. Because I've seen those numbers interchanged before.
The problem with chargers (and I say this as an EV owner) is that many people mostly charge at home, so they aren't using them even weekly. However, everyone goes for a road trip say around memorial day, and the EV chargers are PACKED. It is just a huge disparity between normal and peak usage. Or you go on a road trip and you need one in the middle of nowhere Idaho on the way from Seattle to Yellowstone.
Thankfully L3 charger units at least are cheaper to buy/install/maintain (in theory, if people didn't think the coords had copper worth scrapping) and can be installed in more locations than gas station pumps (like super market parking lots).
Given the disparity in peak usage, it makes sense, at least, to compete on availability rather than price, since even if you are paying $60 to charge up, it is only a few times a year. It is much more important that the chargers be where you need them, and to have free units when you need them, oh, and they should be working! ... than to be the cheapest price.
> Did they mean 17,800 supercharger units or 17,800 locations with super charger units.
They mean 17,800 DC fast charging plugs open to GM cars (and say so in the article). Tesla has 2,397 DC fast charging sites (or stations) in the US and a total of 27,711 plugs.
You need a lot of things for a gas station, a giant tank under ground, a run off collection system for the spilled gas/oil, they have to be covered these days, I’m sure most of this is just environmental regulations. You only see them in the grocery store parking lot if they have all of that, it’s not just a few pumps put up at existing parking spaces (well, maybe in Thailand).
It’s not a great metric for comparison in any case. More than half of all drivers will only ever use C public chargers when on a road trip. And over time that fraction will approach ever closer to 100%.
The is true today. However EVs are becoming more common and chargers are being built. In a few years chargers will be more common and have to compete on price. Today Tesla can get away with charging more to some customers - those people will figure it out though and eventually they will have enough options that they can go elsewhere. It is hard enough to brand gasoline (you can have a brand specific additive package most don't but they do exist) electrons are even more identical.
Tesla has enough time to get brand recognition for cheap charging, even if it gets less relevant over time.
Even when chargers become more common in cities, there will always be some places like smaller villages or long roads where you only have one option; that option possibly being a Tesla charger.
So even if it loses significance, the difference will still be there. And maybe it will be sufficient to retain Tesla being known for being cheaper long-term (because of charging).
> Even when chargers become more common in cities, there will always be some places like smaller villages or long roads where you only have one option; that option possibly being a Tesla charger.
Sure, and that's exactly the case for gas stations today, and I'm sure the lone gas station on the long stretch of road has more pricing power than the one in the middle of a city with competition.
And yet gas stations don't charge based on what kind of car you drive. Tesla shouldn't be permitted to do so either, as this market develops more.
Something I hope is legislated away in the future. Can you imagine if the norm was that you got a different price for gas at gas stations depending on who owns the gas station and who manufactured your car?
Experienced software people are difficult to hire. Doubly so if your company has a bad reputation for not valuing software and the benefits it can provide; which GM certainly qualifies as.
This seems, on the surface, to be a pretty major own-goal. I wonder what the rationale for it is? I expect there's something going on that we havn't heard about yet.
Certifying a new electric aircraft is hard. There are several other startups who are trying to do this and they're all struggling.
Certifying a pilotless aircraft is really hard. There are no pilotless commercial aircraft because nobody has created one that can be trusted to never crash. I'm not sure that the FAA even knows HOW to certify such an aircraft.
So logically, certifying a new, pilotless, commercial electric aircraft is likely next to impossible. At least to a cynical bum like me.
Good luck Wisk; I hope you prove me wrong!
The first gen model came out in 2011 and that's probably where the FAA authorization process development started. I doubt they are just starting it now.
FAA doesn't know how, just as they didn't know how to certify the first jetliner or the first light sport aircraft. This is how new regulations are made. In my experience, the FAA is pretty open minded and sometimes excited by novel concepts and will work with planemakers to figure out a certification plan.
Boeing seems to have enough regulatory capture to do this with easily, kill people with impunity, and get the CEO raises and bonuses along the way. If Wisk has their lobbyists and FAA insiders as well it would certainly ease the path.
Oh dear, USA; you have a real problem with your Supreme Court enacting precedents for things that are clearly not in the interest of a succesful USA.
The Supreme Court is supposed to be the last-resort, the fail-safe, the watcher of the US legal system. But somehow it has become infected with partisan BS and now we have to wonder Who watches the watchers? How do we get out of this mess?
The Supreme Court’s job isn’t to enact precedents that are in the interest of a successful USA. Their job is to make rulings regarding whether laws are constitutional and interpreting what laws mean when there is a question regarding how a law should be interpreted.
Neither the constitution or enacted laws are always in the best interest of the USA. If that is the case it isn’t the job of the Supreme Court to change them. That is the job of the people either directly or through their elected representatives.
> If that is the case it isn’t the job of the Supreme Court to change them.
The Supreme Court changes laws all the time. Where is the line between "interpreting what laws mean" and "deciding what laws mean", i.e. changing law and making new law? The Supreme Court has been in the business of changing and making new law for a long time; this sitting court is just the worst example of it.
> If you think this, you need to severely re-examine your biases
My biases are in favor of processes, systems, and laws that produce outcomes that are long-term beneficial to the country and its people, rather than short-term beneficial for a corrupt few at the expense of everyone else. So in that sense, this court is the worst example in the last hundred years, at least. Yes, according to my biases.
RBG believed Roe v. Wade was incorrectly argued, and that the basis for that argument made it easier to attack (which she was correct about in hindsight.) She absolutely believed in abortion as a fundamental right, however, but would have preferred precedent be based on the Equal Protection clause.
No... it's really not. She said the way it was argued (privacy) was not a solid legal ground, which is correct. Roe v Wade the case was not about abortion as a whole (which is still legal in the United States as a whole, since there's no law banning it). Roe v Wade was a case that said the Constitution has a right to privacy that includes abortion, which it does not.
Maybe in the future, someone will attempt to argue an equal rights case. Maybe not.
Either way, that case will not be Roe v Wade. Supporting abortion is not the same as supporting Roe v Wade. Two separate things when it comes to law.
> Finding new constitutional rules in “emanations from penumbras” seems extremely over that line
There's a difference between "finding new constitutional rules," on the one hand, versus recognizing the logical implications of existing rules, on the other.
Mocking "emanations from penumbras" seems to hint at hostility to the Ninth Amendment's explicit rule that not every right and liberty must be explicitly spelled out in the Constitution.
For non-lawyer readers, the "emanations" quote is from Griswold v. Connecticut, recognizing a constitutionally-based privacy right to use contraception. The complete quote is:
<quote>
The foregoing cases suggest that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance. Various guarantees create zones of privacy.
The right of association contained in the penumbra of the First Amendment is one, as we have seen.
The Third Amendment in its prohibition against the quartering of soldiers "in any house" in time of peace without the consent of the owner is another facet of that privacy.
The Fourth Amendment explicitly affirms the 'right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.'
The Fifth Amendment in its Self-Incrimination Clause enables the citizen to create a zone of privacy which government may not force him to surrender to his detriment.
The Ninth Amendment provides: 'The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.'
> There's a difference between "finding new constitutional rules," on the one hand, versus recognizing the logical implications of existing rules, on the other.
A sweeping right to kill fetuses is not logically implied from a right to be secure against warrantless searches. Many legal systems have the latter protection, but the US is an aberration in interpreting it to create some right to bodily autonomy.
> Mocking "emanations from penumbras" seems to hint at hostility to the Ninth Amendment's explicit rule that not every right and liberty must be explicitly spelled out in the Constitution.
The Ninth Amendment is just a savings clause. It cannot support conjuring new rights into existence by spring boarding off enumerated ones. Put differently, the bill of rights isn’t a set of legal principles which can be invoked as the building blocks to divine previously non-existent rights to override democracy.
The quoted portion of Griswold is unpersuasive in the extreme. I’d call up and yell at any associate that handed me anything like that. People would be up in arms if the Court used similarly vacuous reasoning to, for example, divine a “right” that was economic or regulatory in nature.
But increasingly that's what the supreme court has been doing. They are vastly overstepping their authority in multiple regards. More recent examples include their stance on the ability of congress to delegate authority to various agencies (See: the EPA restrictions on carbon emissions). It's very easily for the court to subvert the authority of other branches by forcing them to 'redelegate' or re-litigate previously authorized agencies knowing full well that congress has been in deadlock for partisan reasons.
> that congress has been in deadlock for partisan reasons.
If Congress is in deadlock, that means that Americans cannot agree on the rules. In that case, yes... no rules ought to be made, because it's not going to represent American's interests writ large.
You are actually arguing that rules should be made up by unelected bureaucrats while admitting that the representatives substantially disagree on those rules and would not be able to legislate them themselves.
That means you are asking bureaucrats to go against the collective will of democratically elected representatives.
Is the Supreme Court elected now? When did I vote to have the Supreme Court stacked in such a way?
And if your argument is 'congress is in deadlock so no rules ought to be made' then fine. Except the Supreme Court is continuing to make up rules during that deadlock, many of which have a direct and measurable impact on my daily quality of life.
Problem is: At some point, someone has to make rules. The world changes, technology changes, new problems emerge that cannot magically solve themselves. Congress has been nonfunctional for my entire adult life. Consequently, with a few bipartisan exceptions, Federal law is stuck in 1993. Should it be stuck in 1993 forever? Think about it for a minute--should Congress simply stop doing anything from now on because we are perpetually split exactly 50-50 on every possible issue?
This is why, historically, Congress delegates duties to different agencies and empowers them with authority. Both so that experts in their respective fields can do their job, and so that they can continue to make decisions in the wake of congress being nonfunctional.
So what happens when the Supreme Court steps in and says that delegated authority is no longer valid? The answer is that we become more nonfunctional and the intention is clear, because the court has partisan objectives.
> So what happens when the Supreme Court steps in and says that delegated authority is no longer valid? The answer is that we become more nonfunctional and the intention is clear, because the court has partisan objectives.
Given that the overwhelming majority of government workers are themselves partisan in one direction (DC is by far majority democrat, and government workers the same), one can easily argue the opposite: that allowing bureaucratic rule making is itself partisan.
“Congress can’t bring themselves to exercise their powers under the Constitution, so the Supreme Court should allow the President to exercise those powers instead” is a pretty scary argument.
The overstepping of authority argument is brought up by both sides depending on whether the court is deciding how they like or not. It isn’t even a recent phenomenon.
What exactly do you think the supreme court’s job even is? You seem to have it exactly backwards. The framers spent enormous amounts of time and ink creating this system of separation of powers. Obviously it’s the job of the Supreme Court to police that. Much more so than finding new “rights” in emanations from penumbras.
If the Supreme Court continues to get ever more partisan, I wonder if there will ever be a challenge to Marbury v. Madison. Certainly Congress has the power to strip jurisdiction from the court for anything that isn't covered by Article III. They may not have the will, though, given the deep partisan divide and evenly split party representation.
> I wonder if there will ever be a challenge to Marbury v. Madison.
An excellent question. Marbury isn't itself so much a problem as how courts — and the All-Writs Act — have implemented the basic principle. But people have gone along with expansive judicial review for two centuries now, so it's pretty much locked in as "how things are done."
Congress could still limit the reach of Marbury without a constitutional amendment, I think: Under the Exceptions and Regulations Clause, Congress could pass a law saying, for example, some or all of the following:
1. Only SCOTUS has the power to declare an act of Congress (and/or a federal regulation) unconstitutional; a lower court's declaration of unconstitutionality is simply an advisory opinion that has the effect of putting the case in question on hold. (The latter part would need more thought as to the operational details.)
2. A SCOTUS declaration of unconstitutionality has no effect unless agreed to by at least a 7-2 vote.
3. A SCOTUS declaration of unconstitutionality can be overridden by, say, a 3/5 vote of each of the House and Senate, subject to the usual rules about presidential vetoes and pocket vetoes.
Is Congress likely to do any of the foregoing? Probably not — but there might be at least some bipartisan support for cautiously shifting more power back to the elected political branches.
I’m not sure Congress can regulate the Supreme Court’s voting rules, but I agree with your first point. We should’ve done that during the Warren court and stripped the Court of jurisdiction to challenge law on social and moral issues.
> We should’ve done that during the Warren court and stripped the Court of jurisdiction to challenge law on social and moral issues.
Without the Warren Court's decisions in Brown v. Board or Cooper v. Aaron ("separate but equal" schools), we likely would have had even more race-related social upheaval in the 60s than we actually did. Robert Caro's books on LBJ recount how he (LBJ) had to work very hard and skillfully to get civil- and voting-rights legislation past decades-long Southern congressional blockades — Southern committee chairman, plus Senate filibusters — and even then it was a near-run thing.
Without SCOTUS- and Fifth-Circuit intervention — back then, the "Mighty Fifth" was far more liberal than today — desegregation would have taken years longer, maybe even decades. The race riots and other violence we saw in the 60s (which I remember very well from childhood, including living in a Washington D.C. suburb during the riots after MLK's assassination) would likely have been even worse.
> I’m not sure Congress can regulate the Supreme Court’s voting rules
For its internal purposes the Court can certainly make any voting rules it wants. But I'd submit that Congress has the power (under the Exceptions and Regulations Clause) to limit what external effect is to be given to Court votes that don't rise to a congressionally-specified threshold.
> Certainly Congress has the power to strip jurisdiction from the court for anything that isn't covered by Article III.
You don't need the "for anything ...." part of your sentence: The Exceptions and Regulations Clause is part of Article III and explicitly gives Congress the power to limit the Supreme Court's appellate jurisdiction in pretty much all (federal) cases:
<quote>
In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. [That is, the Supreme Court is the trial court; in those cases, SCOTUS practice is to appoint a "special master" — typically, a former SCOTUS clerk — to hear the case and submit findings of fact and conclusions of law for the Court's consideration.]
In all the other Cases before mentioned [i.e., all cases where federal courts have any jurisdiction at all], the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.
</quote>
(Emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)
Moreover, because all lower (federal) courts are creatures of Congress from the get-go, there's no reason to think Congress can't limit the jurisdiction of those courts. Congress has repeatedly done this in the past by creating specialty courts, e.g., the Court of Federal Claims and the former Court of Customs and Patent Appeals (merged into the Federal Circuit in 1982).
The constitution sets forth the structure of government with great specificity in a legal document. It’s quite reasonable to conclude that the Supreme Court, which is expressly conferred the “judicial power,” can decide compliance with the terms of that legal document. It’s not enumerated but it’s within the scope of the architecture of the constitution. Not everything needs to be “enumerated.” What is an “unreasonable search or seizure,” what is “cruel and unusual punishment?” The Supreme Court can decide that.
That’s completely different from “emanations from penumbras”—which is just pulling stuff out of your butt. Nothing in the Constitution makes the Supreme Court an Iran-style Guardian Council, the final arbiter on social and moral issues.
It’s no different than any other written legal document. I have a lease agreement with Toyota. That document can be interpreted—it doesn’t need to expressly enumerate everything. But that doesn’t mean you can read it to govern say how I raise my children. Just because everything doesn’t need to be enumerated doesn’t mean that some things aren’t outside the scope of the document.
I think it's farcical that this Court will hold the other branches to the strictly enumerated powers granted by the Constitution and yet restrains itself in no similar manner. "Emanations and penumbras" are just a mid-century aristocratic articulation of the idea that if you exercise multiple protected rights simultaneously, it follows that the sum of that conduct would also be constitutionally protected. People may disagree with the verbiage, or the outcome, but it is in fact quite easy to understand.
The Court isn’t holding Congress to “strictly enumerated powers.” The constitution doesn’t say anything about the federal government being able to enact environmental legislation, but the Supreme Court has widely interpreted the Commerce Clause to allow it.
The non-delegation cases are about whether the elaborate and explicit separation of powers in the Constitution even means anything at all. The notion that you can have executive agencies making “regulations” with the force of law, and adjudicating cases through administrative judges, is already inconsistent with the idea of having three separate branches of government with clearly differentiated powers. The only question is whether that constitutional separation is mostly meaningless, or completely meaningless.
And the “emanations and penumbras” has nothing to do with “multiple protected rights.” If you are carrying a gun while protesting, that’s covered by the second and first amendments and you don’t need anything on top of that. “Emanations and penumbras” is a way to pull “rights” out of your ass that aren’t in the document. It’s classic mid-20th century white guy pontificating.
Isn't it implied by the fact that the Constitution provides mechanisms to amend the Constitution? Why even have these mechanisms if an ordinary law couldn't be struck down on the grounds that the law is unconstitutional?
> The Supreme Court is supposed to be the last-resort, the fail-safe, the watcher of the US legal system. But somehow it has become infected with partisan BS and now we have to wonder Who watches the watchers? How do we get out of this mess?
That's a lot of words for "the court doesn't lean my way, so let us act like the entire system has failed". Extremely low quality bait.
There is open corruption of sitting supreme court justices and our collective response is to yawn. This is not, or should not be, a partisan issue. Corruption is bad, full stop.
> Star Liner has all the same problems that the Space Shuttle had. In an emergency, how do you get the crew out safely?
Starliner has a launch abort system; the Shuttle did not.
From what I understand, they use a very powerful rocket (much more powerful than Crew Dragon) to get the capsule far away from the booster. I guess it can get far enough away that NASA is satisfied that falling bits of burning SRB aren't a danger to the parachutes.
During the Starline abort test only 2 of the 3 parachutes opened, and that was a pad abort test - no SRBs!! NASA not only calling that a "success", but a sufficient success to move onto crewed testing was about the moment I lost all faith in Bridenstine being different. Immediately after leaving office he picked up a cushy consulting type gigs for various aerospace/defense companies (aka Boeing et al). Shocker.
For those who might not know SRB = solid rocket booster. Boeing uses them, SpaceX doesn't. An SRB is basically like a giant firecracker. You light it and it starts burning and doesn't stop until its done. It poses substantial safety concerns in the case of an accident where you need to abort the flight. But they're cheap, extremely powerful, and relatively simple contrasted against liquid fuel engines.
While I share your reservations with solid rockets as a main propulsion system on a manned rocket, it turns out they are well suited for launch escape systems themselves for some of the same exact reasons: they’re simple and powerful.
> While I share your reservations with solid rockets as a main propulsion system on a manned rocket, it turns out they are well suited for launch escape systems themselves for some of the same exact reasons: they’re simple and powerful.
Interestingly, both Crew Dragon and Starliner have eschewed SRB based LES/LAS systems for liquid fueled hypergolic ones. You can tell this because neither capsule has a "puller" on the nose like Apollo/Orion does.
Yeah, that is an interesting decision, especially since hypergolics represent a completely different set of risks. But they are extremely reliable for this application.
Well we shall see I suppose. SRB's go back to the Apollo era and NASA safety qualifications often come down to 'are you doing what we've done before'? Hence them refusing to even consider SpaceX retropulsive crew landings, even though that would be a huge step forward.
I would also observe that NASA has a relatively poor safety record contrasted against the Soyuz (which has not lost crew since 1971 in spite of flying more manned missions), and one of the few completely catastrophic crashes we have had, Challenger, was directly related to the SRB. In either case, I expect variance is playing a much larger role than most might appreciate.
Didn't the shuttle have this harebrained thing where the crew were supposed to climb all the way to the exit hatch in their pressure suits, extend a boom along the wing in full flight and then parachute out along it?
I thought I read about that. Of course that's effectively no actual escape system lol. They'd be long dead by the time they managed all that in an out of control shuttle.
Yep. That's supposedly for them to ditch in the event that the main engines fail but the shuttle is controllable - they don't have enough energy for a trans-atlantic abort, so they glide and bail out over the ocean.
How far did this plan go? Just because it was discussed and documented and thought through does not mean it was something that was actually going to happen. Was this actually developed and the parts&pieces put into place with procedures written up in the flight manual?
> Did the astronauts believe that it's likely that the system would save them? Probably not.
Yeah personally I would have taken my chances ditching the craft, tbh. It would probably ditch pretty well considering it doesn't have huge engine pods under the wings.
The home-computer wars of the 1990s have always confused me. There's seems to be a kind of tribal-allegiance that computer-buyers participated in when they became computer-owners. I've never understood why it had to be PC vs Amiga or Nintendo vs Sega or whatever.
My best guess is that a lot of the buyers were young kids who did'nt have the maturity yet to see the world in a more flexible way. I was certainly guilty of that back when I was a teen.
It was because there was a lot of difference between the systems then, unlike today where they are all the same technology with a different sticker on the front of the case.
If you cared about games, the system you bought would be completely different than if you cared about business.
In the 8-bit era, if you wanted business you got a CP/M system with 80x24 text. If you wanted games, you got an Atari 800 or Commodore 64 with colors, hardware scrolling and sprites.
In the 16-bit era, there was the IBM PC for business, the Mac for people who wanted ease of use, the Amiga for games, 4096 color graphics and stereo sound, and the Atari ST (512 colors, mono sound) if you couldn't afford an Amiga. That said, they could all do games but obviously some were better than others, and they could all do business, but the perception was that game systems weren't good at business so business apps weren't made available.
Many things were platform specific at that time. You didn't have major game titles or business applications widely available across platforms. Folks who used PCs/Apple/etc at work/school were more likely to buy similar for the family at home etc.
In my family I get the impression we chose our home computers based on merit/value. That meant starting with the commodore 128 in the mid 80s and led to my brother buying an Amiga 1000 [with his hard earned teenage burger king min wage $] in 1987.
In the 90s the advent of Windows 3.1 running on cheap PC clones left Commodore in the dust. The value for the money shifted to PC, even if it was inferior at first.
It was really sad that Amiga did not continue to innovate - the hardware was astonishing which can be seen by looking at the demo scene output and games front he time relative to what was possible on other platforms.
I think it was mostly because $1000 items were a bit harder to come by back then so kids would do a lot of reading and day dreaming before getting enough cash to pull the trigger. By the time they could actually afford a computer/monitor/printer/software they had talked themselves into how great the product was.
"But in June 2023, Musk said at an energy conference that "there just weren't enough batteries" for Tesla to reach "volume production" of the truck."
It looks like battery production is the major constraint on Teslas endeavours. Someone at Tesla clearly did the math on ROI-per-cell and decided that Semis just don't pay as well as Cybertrucks or Powerwalls. That's why they're starving the Semi operation until they can spin up more battery production.
I expect this news to have a positive effect. I wonder if an individual might own so much stock that they can overwhelm the short market for small durations. The price jump yesterday made no sense to me.
Vendors missing deadlines on contracts is a valid reason for contracts being terminated, renewals being cancelled, and even litigation over breach of contract or even misrepresentation (depending on how angry the customer is).
There's a reason why PepsiCo partners are moving to Daimler now.
The argument that it's just "missing deadlines" which as true as it is, is also a strawman.
Musk hasn't just "missed deadlines". He's outright lied.
For example, in 2016 he claimed Tesla already had self driving capabilities it hasn't shown today, 8 years later.
He lied about bulletproof windows on the CyberTruck. His own demo disproved this.
He lied about the solar roofs. The entire demo was false and staged and the tiles on the roofs were not solar tiles as the demo strongly implied. And testimony showed that he personally knew that it was a lie.
Musk doesn't just miss deadlines. He blatantly lies. And that raises the legitimate concern that a lot of "missed deadlines" weren't just deadlines that were missed, but deadlines that were never feasible and he just lied about.
I do think it's amusing what the other guy says. Forums like this will be full of "Why software estimates are so hard and we shouldn't be forced to stick to deadlines" and the explanation will be "because each React form is like brand new R&D - more akin to Marie Curie's discoveries than a surgeon's work" and then suddenly a brand new kind of vehicle that has never been mass produced before has to hit deadlines or it's sign of obvious incompetence.
I think this is a pretty clear misrepresentation. The entire point of those forum posts is that software engineers are angry at managers promising timelines that aren't connected to reality: they want the unpredictability of the task to be transparent. That is actually entirely consistent, and arguably the exact same frustration, that they have with Musk -- a manager-type promising outrageous deadlines, repeatedly, with apparently zero ability to learn from past misses. The anger is with continuing to promise these outrageous deadlines, and furthermore the frustration of being called out if you are skeptical of them, not with the fact that he misses them. It's a one-to-one, 100%, absolutely identical complaint.
Software estimates also need to be hit, but Sales, Product, and Engineering leadership will fight to prevent the brunt of that from hitting ICs, but at some point if a large contract does churn, plenty of IC engineers will have their head on the chopping board.
I've been on both sides so I get it, and the only solution is to have blunt and honest communication from all sides - Field Facing teams need to not overcommit, and Internal teams actually need to execute and COMMUNICATE why they cannot.
As an employee, we are all working to make the company more money. That's the only goal.
That doesn't absolve them of the fact that they underdelivered on a 8-9 figure deal by 66% over 7 years.
The fact that PepsiCo leaked this to Reuters itself means they are on the warpath right now (eg. probably trying to strong-arm a significant refund and cost reduction, or setting up the paper trail needed to begin litigation over breach of contract).
> doesn't absolve them of the fact that they underdelivered on a 8-9 figure deal by 66% over 7 years
I mean, it almost might. The problem isn't the underdelivery. It's Musk's loss of credibility. When he says it's about battery production, it might be about battery production, or it might be that he randomly changed the design at the last minute.
That's a good point, but leaking this tidbit to Reuters seems like a nuclear option (like Tesla's customer retention program failed and PepsiCo is trying to break out of the contract now).
Like I've had customers pissed off about missed deadlines, but they didn't leak or churn because we tried to keep them happy.
As is usually the case with these things, I think the key to reading them is buried at the end of the article:
> PepsiCo investor Green Century Capital Management has reservations about the company's time table for rolling out the Semis.
>
> "The fact they're running behind schedule is concerning," said Andrea Ranger, a shareholder advocate at Green Century. The investment firm has followed PepsiCo's use of electric vehicles and is pushing the company to consider its impacts on biodiversity at its annual meeting in May.
Green Century (as its name implies) has a "three-pronged approach combines a fossil fuel free sustainable investing strategy with award-winning shareholder advocacy and support of environmental nonprofits to deliver impact in a way other mutual fund families can't" (quote is from their homepage). My guess is that Green Century are the ones feeling the heat here -- they need to have their fund's emmission figures come out right yesterday, and Pepsi can't make them right unless they get their EV fleet, whether via Tesla or someone else.
If you read between the lines, you'll notice that no one at PepsiCo says anything bad about Tesla per se, only that they're committed to deploying more EVs and a bunch of other green systems. The rest of the article is other supply & logistics companies pointing out that they're having good results with trucks from other manufacturers and/or that they're also unhappy with Tesla's timeline, then someone from GC saying they don't think Tesla can hit their schedule. With the review coming up in May ("the investment firm has followed PepsiCo's use of electric vehicles and is pushing the company to consider its impacts on biodiversity at its annual meeting in May.") this is probably GC trying to convince Pepsi to stop waiting for the bloody Teslas and just get whatever EVs will get their fleet going this year.
> I keep hearing about competitors, but I never see any of their EVs, new or used. I see Teslas everywhere.
Around these parts, we see a lot of non-Tesla electrics. Many of them are not obvious at all, until you realize that an SUV has a Clean Pass sticker, and no tailpipes.
But there are also many 3s and Ys. I think, for a time, Tesla was the biggest-selling brand in the US.
Ford lost money because they went all in too fast for how late they were to the game.
And frankly it seems to be greed. They have proven hybrid and PHEV tech yet deny the US market the hybrid ranger, 'because US buyers can get the maverick'.
> I wonder how many deadlines that people miss here, and that's usually just pure software
That's not the flex you think it is. Software is pretty unique in delivering products that the companies don't want to stand behind--think of every software license that basically says "if this software doesn't work, it's YOUR FAULT".
In most industries, missing deadlines is generally grounds for your customers to get very cross with you, especially when your customers are businesses and not consumers.
> Man the critics here about deadlines is astounding.
> I wonder how many deadlines that people miss here, and that's usually just pure software, no materials.
Look... I'm an investor in the Tesla IPO ($4k -> $200k+). I own a Tesla vehicle.
Current Elon has run off the deep end into conspiracy theories and utter nonsense. Buying Twitter because he was butt-hurt over some of his tweets being punished is just asinine. It is also a massive distraction on something utterly trivial.
There was absolutely a massive whisper campaign to say that EVs would never work. Elon did a lot of great things in the beginning. Some of those things include making lofty promises even though delivering on those promises took a lot longer than he thought. The most important thing in the beginning was proving EVs could work to the early adopters, ensuring Tesla could survive long enough to reach volume ramp-up. Volume means parts suppliers start returning your calls and economies of scale improve everything. Doing things differently got them noticed. Making cars fun was a brilliant marketing strategy... does anyone really need the Toy Box stuff Teslas can do? No... but it makes a lot of people (me included) smile. (My kids think Emissions mode is hilarious on our drive to school drop-off and now consider all other cars to be inferior because those cars can't make fart sounds. That's mind share you can't fucking buy even with unlimited money.)
Passing into the volume phase has killed a lot of companies. There are many more opportunities for things to go wrong and mistakes cost you a lot more. Your company also transitions from "we need exposure at any cost" to "we are a brand leader who has set expectations".
During this critical time Elon has failed to change his messaging. He is still in "we need exposure" mode, making outlandish promises and starting too many projects at once. In the end it is all a self-own. There was no need to get into semi-trucks. They have enough trouble scaling up Model Y and even shipping the Cyber Truck. They still haven't really delivered on FSD, despite charging for it and continuously increasing the price. It was 100% unnecessary. Focus on execution, leave the semi-truck idea for a few years down the road. You have enough irons in the fire. Your #1 focus should be a Model Y refresh since it is by far your top seller and is what is generating all that cash making Tesla an ongoing concern.
tl;dr: Tesla is no longer in survival mode but it is in a critical phase of its growth. Elon should have stopped making outlandish promises some time ago and focused on execution. His thin-skin about Twitter, resulting in trying to get a board seat, on a whim turning into buying the company has been a massive distraction that hurts Tesla at a time when it needs strong leadership and the traditional automakers are still fumbling on EVs.
The craziest thing is, regardless how people feel about politics, Musk has achieved a lot for technology yet people in technology forums disparage him. I guess politics trumps technology.
I wouldn't call it crazy to point to someone with a documented history of lying and say that their word can't be trusted. Rather, that's called basic pattern recognition.
He successfully marketed and monetized an industry that already existed and would continue to exist without him, then reinvested in that industry to make himself more money. The way you and some others talk about him you would think he invented batteries and was the first one to discover you can use electricity to make a car move.
The parroted introduction has me reading this comment in bad faith, but I'll bite anyway. What are some of his personal tech achievements? Emphasis on personal.
both are true. he's achieved amazing things, seriously pushing technology forwards
he also makes outlandish public claims which are ridiculous at the time and get worse with age. you can appreciate what he's done while simultaneously believing 0% of what leaves his mouth
He has a notorious habit of overpromising and underdelivering. I thought that habit of his was well established even before he became so vocally political.
You have to wonder if working for four or five different companies while, allegedly, being on _all the drugs_ has an impact on his performance.
If Musk ran Apple we'd still be waiting on the iPhone XS, though he'd insist it'll be ready by "end of year", a phone that launched around the time Musk was crowing about these trucks.
It was, but it was the politics that swung the opinion pendulum from pathological "admire wins, ignore losses" to pathological "ignore wins, disparage losses."
But Musk himself has said that American EV makers can't compete against Chinese EVs without trade barriers. Barriers that western governments have been more than happy to establish.
> "If there are no trade barriers established, they will pretty much demolish most other car companies in the world," he said. "They're extremely good."
Or maybe, just maybe, it’s that the dude spews whatever out of his mouth and the broader public and media take him at his word when time again its been seen that his word doesn’t mean shit.
As a counterpoint, we tried to get a tesla roof. Their repeated broken promises meant that we went with competitors (you can only delay installing a roof for so long...), and we simply don't trust Tesla to do anything at this point.
Most people I know are buying LG (small system) or Enphase (large system) batteries instead, or going with other competitors (Anker announced something that looks pretty sweet).
Also, Powerwalls are notoriously unreliable compared to those other brands; our local Tesla installer said they refuse to install them except when they are acting as a Tesla subcontractor, and pushed us to enphase or generac.
For semis, they took deposits then didn't deliver, so marquee customers are complaining publicly and buying semis from competitors.
For solar roofs, we talked to their competitors, and they were all backlogged because they were absorbing cancelled tesla contracts.
Tesla is great at marketing and making the sale, but then letting their competitors close out the deal.
Yes and: Perhaps the Semi uses cells which are supply constrained. The Limiting Factor does updates on which models use which cells, where those cells are made, their current chemistry, and how cell supply might impact vehicle production numbers. Analysis based on data gleaned from public data, so uncertainty is stated as needed.
What batteries are in the semi-trucks? I would assume it isn't even Tesla's battery but the LFP batteries from BYD and CATL for faster charging, and longevity. Powerwalls are LFP batteries.
Tesla fans are like horses with blinders. In this submission alone you have multiple people acting like commercial-sized electric vehicles are something the world has never seen, let alone mass produced, so we need to cut Tesla and Musk some slack (some even feel free to throw in a puerile, childish, "feel free to do better yourself or show us what you've done").
200 bucks for an e-scooter is really really cheap. Don't expect to get anything worthwhile for that price unless it's some kind of sale. The realistic price for a basic, entry level one is more like $500. A decent one is $1000 and a good, dual-motor one will be $1500.
