So, Musk financed the making of a very expensive electric car, thus having almost no effect on climate change. He financed a rocket for celebrity tourism and eventually redoing NASA's voyages to a big rock. Very rich people finance things. They don't do the work. They can afford to overcome mistakes because they are using their own money…
So, Musk financed the making of a very expensive electric car, thus having almost no effect on climate change. He financed a rocket for celebrity tourism and eventually redoing NASA's voyages to a big rock. Very rich people finance things. They don't do the work. They can afford to overcome mistakes because they are using their own money and are answerable to no one. He's never been a genius anymore than the owner of an NFL team is a football player.
In all fairness the Tesla is really expensive and it will take a lot of effort to get people habituated to plugging your car in. They are really nice looking cars.
It takes no effort to get people to habituated to plugging in. You don't give it a second thought. It takes a few seconds once or twice a week. You cannot accidentally drive off with it connected, the way you can with a gasoline hose.
There are 36,000 electric cars in Atlanta, one of the highest concentrations in the U.S. city. They are everywhere. I know many people who have one. None of those people had to be habituated. I had a Leaf, which I gave to my daughter. Neither she nor I had any trouble getting habituated.
I must say, several people commenting here are imagining there are problems with electric cars, where no problems exist. There is no problem recharging them at night. The power grid can easily handle that. There is no habituation problem. Range is seldom a problem.
The Tesla not only looks nice; it is years ahead of most other cars in features such as automatic lane changes, radar, 360 degree display of traffic, and safety. I have only driven a Tesla once, but it was very impressive. I don't care about nice looking, but I love good engineering.
I don't see what kind of problems you have in mind. It does not take any smarts to drive one, or charge one. The Leaf is like a regular car. I suppose the Tesla takes more getting used to with things like the 360 degree radar display on the dashboard.
There are 36,000 ordinary folks in Atlanta driving electric cars. The ones I know, and the ones who talk to reporters and local gab groups on internet say they love the cars.
You are incorrect. If electric cars become widespread they will have a tremendous impact on climate change. More than any other technology other than electric power generation. Electric cars are 4 to 5 times more energy efficient than gasoline models, and their source of energy is more and more renewable, with no CO2 production.
Electric cars will also be far cheaper over the life of the car when the technology matures. Fuel costs are far lower, and maintenance and longevity is much better. They take less labor, and less raw materials over the life of the vehicle. Battery materials can be recycled.
The Tesla in particular is far more advanced technologically than other models, both electric and gasoline. It has safety features that will greatly reduce serious accidents and fatalities, which will lower the cost of insurance. Insurance is a major portion of the cost of ownership. There have been some fatal accidents with the semi-self driving features of the Tesla, but these problems will be fixed. Overall the safety record of the Tesla is better than other cars.
"What about electricity generated from coal and other fossil fuels????"
Coal produces only 22% of U.S. electricity, down from ~50% in 1990. It is falling rapidly, because it is so expensive. Natural gas produces energy with much less CO2 per joule than gasoline or coal. Wind, solar and nuclear produce 40% of electricity. During the night, when most cars are recharged, in states such as Texas and Georgia, most electricity comes from wind or nuclear plants.
Unless or until the energy that is used to power these vehicles comes from renewable and low-carbon sources, building tons of EVs and forcing people to replace their existing vehicle withy an EV will largely shift the carbon burden, not eliminate it.
The infrastructure for large scale EV usage doesn't exist.. and it is going to take time and investment for it to come into being.
The REAL auto manufacturers are going to eat Tesla alive with their EVs.. mostly because their vehicles will be more affordable, at least as good if not better, and Tesla (and Musk) won't have the cache it once had.
Tesla stock is going to continue its downward trend for a while. It will be interesting to see how long the company lasts and how long Musk remains associated with it.
"The infrastructure for large scale EV usage doesn't exist."
That is incorrect. Charging the average electric car takes about as much power as running an electric dryer for an hour. If every house did that, it would not strain the power grid as long as most did it overnight. Power consumption falls by half or two-thirds at night, so there is plenty of capacity. Power companies offer very low rates at night, especially for electric car owners (including me).
Electric power at night in Texas is free, because they have so much wind power. They charge a flat fee for the month. Electric cars are recharged with 100% renewable, carbon-free electricity.
My car is recharged with nuclear power, in Georgia, at night.
Only about 20% of US power generation is renewable. Nuclear power has it's own associated problems (like infrastructure cost and waste disposal)--about which I know a fair bit having been in the nuclear navy and having associates working in civilian nuclear power.
Is a large scale shift to EVs an improvement? Yes. But there is no larger infrastructure currently in existence (like the equivalent of gas stations) which severely limits the range of EVs and their larger functionality. Much like the functionality of IC engines was originally constrained in the shift from animal power.
I can fill a gas tank in minutes. How long to charge an EV at current state of art?
If you live in a metro area where travel ranges are short and you can recharge every night at home, no real problems. What if you don't? What if you are traveling on vacation? What if you are a long-haul trucker?
It is far more complex and we are far less ready for it than most people understand.
"I can fill a gas tank in minutes. How long to charge an EV at current state of art?"
30 seconds. You come home, plug in the charger, and go in for supper. The charger works in the middle of the night when rates are low.
It takes you much longer to fill with gasoline because you have to stop off at a gas station and wait around while the tank fills. Obviously, gasoline fueling delivers more megajoules of potential energy per second, but recharging an EV at home takes less human operator time. Most EVs are charged at home.
You do not need to charge every night unless you drive ~150 miles a day. Once or twice a week is enough for most people.
Long range trips on the highway are a problem. They will be until range reaches about 600 miles, which is about how far a person can drive in one day.
Well, Joe Manchin would still have been a Senator.... and the current energy sector would still have had the political pull it does. I am thinking not that much different.
You wrote: "Unless or until the energy that is used to power these vehicles comes from renewable and low-carbon sources . . ."
It all does come from low-carbon sources. Compared to gasoline, electric power generation produces far less CO2 per joule of useful energy. More to the point, even if electricity were all generated with coal or oil, electric cars would use 4 times less primary energy than gasoline cars per passenger mile, so they would greatly reduce CO2. As it happens, coal is now used for only 22% of U.S. electricity, and that is falling rapidly. No oil is used to generate electricity.
Electric power increasingly comes from renewable sources. This year, U.S. power companies are installing far more new capacity in solar and wind than any other source
It's rational for people to be doing everything possible to migrate away from FF. Waiting for optimum efficiency in the tech would be catastrophic and Tesla did light a fire (no FF pun intended) under the industry's ass to roll this out much more rapidly. But way too much credit is being given to Elon for this and "his" cars are no longer the cutting edge of anything. They have some advantages still with their batteries but the pack will soon catch up to the leader and then... well... it'll be just another car (with many many shortcomings that their bullheaded CEO is unwilling to relent on).
Smart scheduling of battery recharging is done automatically. The power company remotely turns on or off the charger. This can be done with a modern electronic power meter. It is usually done at night.
No, you do not. All of the power meters in Atlanta have been changed over to smart meters. 65% of meters in the U.S. are now smart meters. The distribution grid is the same.
Smart meters are cheaper and easier for the power companies to poll, and they allow varying rates by time of day or season, which benefits customers.
Its specialized infrastructure. It is just already partly in place. Not fully.
See how there are all these little things that kind of have to come together for all of this to work? Including the things that people haven't discovered yet that we are going to discover going along this pathway?
This will include things like actual expansion and investment in power distribution and control systems. Expansion of non-home facilities for EV charging. People being both willing and able to pay more for a vehicle up front.
Can it be done? yes. Will it be done--most likely at some point... but I think you are more than a decade away from it at this point.
Change is hard and often fiercely resisted--no matter how logical or necessary it might seem to be. especially if the change is inconvenient and costs money.
The infrastructure is not not specialized. When they converted Atlanta to smart meters, they made no other changes to the infrastructure. They came by each house and changed out the meter. It took only a few minutes per house.
There is no need to expand the power distribution or control systems to accommodate electric cars. As I said, the average car uses as much electricity as running a clothes dryer for an hour, or an air conditioner for 2 hours. If every household in the U.S. did this mainly at night, it would not call for any change to the infrastructure, because power consumption at night is far lower than day. There is plenty of spare capacity. This would consume more natural gas, but far less primary energy than gasoline does.
It would consume about ~4 times less primary energy and emit ~8 times less CO2 per passenger mile. You can do the numbers and see for yourself. Start here at the Lawrence Livermore flowchart, bottom right. Most of the 24.3 quads of petroleum transportation energy is for motor vehicles. Read the text box describing end use efficiency, 21% for transportation. Bear in mind that generators and electric cars are far more mechanically efficient than internal combustion engines.
This works as long as we don't force everyone to switch to electric heat for their homes. New York is trying to do that and it is one more reason why Zeldin might beat Hochul.
I believe this is no longer true (though it was for a couple of years).
I own a T3. It has many wildly incomplete and "buggy" behaviors which were all forgivable when this was the only game in town. Now I'm actively looking forward to an electric Audi or Merc or VW or Ford or... the list is growing rapidly.
Just the fact that there's no way to disable the car's insanely buggy (and almost always wrong) auto-steer feature which slams on the breaks or steers wildly left or right when the car (again - WRONGLY and NOT WHEN ON AUTOPILOT) decides (did I mention "WRONGLY") that there's some hazard that it (incorrectly) feels the need to (suddenly and without any obvious reason) needs to (spontaneously) avoid?
Oh, and don't get me started on how last winter the heat pump went out (on thousands and thousands of 3s) here in Quebec when the temperature dropped to -30º and the windows fogged over and froze and I was left stranded on the highway an hour from home and Elon Tweeted "we're working on it"... TWO WEEKS LATER and you know when they fixed it? Never. They implemented a kludge and now the car pumps luke warm air and it's sorta' kind'a driveable but still the temperature in the cabin is about 36Fº - which sure - it won't kill you but... you know... not very "luxury" feeling.
And you know what other E cars have this problem? None of them.
I don't mean to be dunking on you in any way... Just trying to keep things in perspective :)
There is plenty of electricity still produced from fossil fuels. I have an electric car, mostly because of the gas savings. But I know my carbon foot print is far from zero. There is very little electricity produced from renewable sources.
That's in part because there has been very little interest until recently. I have a design my dad developed and presented in 1957 to generate electricity using ocean waves to generate power to pump water into a reservoir in a closed system that would then generate electricity as conventional dams do. He died 55 years later with no one ever showing an interest.
Heat pumps have now replaced electric cars as the panacea of the left for climate change. They don't work well in really cold weather. Wait until the mandates kick in and Republicans get yet another item for their 30 second ads that resonate with voters.
I'm the founder of samizdatonline.org so I'm poking bears much more dangerous than Musk but yeah - given how he's reacting on Twitter - this would not be surprising.
Don't you just love being a beta tester for Musk? Of course the software never gets past the beta stage because he's probably always changing the specs to suit his own whims.
It really is infuriating. It's one thing to opt into his QA program to get a taste of what they've got cooking - but to be told that the slap-dash, half baked, frequently dangerous and obviously flawed behavior is production ready - and to not have the ability to disable it entirely so that I could just drive the fu**in' car without any extra "features" - is a level of arrogance that's very hard to swallow.
I don't speak for The Bulwark in *any way and hold no position therein, but speaking purely for myself, I'd like to observe that this kind of comment doesn't further the conversation in any way and just creates hostility where none is warranted.
JVL was super reluctant to launch any kind of comment section because they frequently rapidly devolve to this kind of "discourse". The person you're saying this to now has to come back with some ongoing nastiness and the thread turns into a place where most Bulwark-ers would rather not be.
That's my 1.5 cents. I offer it with nothing but good will.
Musk’s early success with bold maneuvers enabled him to over extend with irrational confidence, IMO. I recognize it, because I’ve experienced it on a much more modest scale. It’s an old story; flying too close to the sun, with wings of wax.
I think a *little credit is due in that he has the right ideas at the right time (though his batting average is about .300) and is able to push those ideas beyond the "wouldn't this be nice" stage that those of us who also have good ideas but lack the resources to found them have to settle for.
However, as far as I know, this is the first time he's taken something that already exists and come in to "fix" it.
He essentially just paid $44b for the Twitter brand. The tech, the culture, and the product are basically garbage. It would have cost him $10m/ $20m to just build the thing he claims to "want" from scratch (though now we see he's actually quite confused about what that actually is) and if it was good he'd have no problem enticing people to switch.
Instead he paid many orders of magnitude more for something that can't be fixed and he'll need to scrap anyway.
And then he proceeded to migrate his image (to the extent that there were many people who felt somewhat generously about him) from eccentric whiz-kid to erratic (and heartless) nincompoop.
I guess he's still the "richest" man on Earth though all that richness is tied up in the value of his properties and much of that value depends on his cult of personality. I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla stock started dropping precipitously over the next 6 months as a result of all this. I own a 3. It's a nice car - but all the other car makers are now playing in the E space and much of what they're making rivals or exceeds Tesla's product. Oh, and Autopilot is absolutely positively nowhere near ready for production release. At some point in the not too distant future - that fact is going to start catching up to their stock price as well.
Elon Musk did not started Tesla. He bought Tesla with money that he made from Paypal. Yes, he is the one who made Tesla as it is now (which I give him credit for), but he did not invent electric car or start Tesla.
Other than maybe PayPal, Musk has had no "right ideas at the right time".
What he's had is daddy South African blood emerald money combined with his PayPal money and used that to buy into already existing companies and get himself listed as a "founder", i.e. SpaceX and Tesla.
Hey, actually that sounds like Musk's Twitter certification strategy. Spend some money get the "Founder" label. Spend some money get "Twitter Certification".
It comes down to that Elon's big idea is just spending money.
It's a great question. I signed the various paperwork without reading it (as one does when buying a car and needing to sign 50 pages of boilerplate to get to leave the lot). Would I be surprised if something of that nature is buried in that language? Not even a little, now that you mention it.
His own money? Like all his endeavors he's leveraged to the hilt on this. And while federal, state and local governments would never let SpaceX (massive NASA/national security dependency) or Tesla (green cred and significant employment) go under, Twitter could (and probably will) default due to his foolishness.
Friend of mine had his Tesla battery fail and needed replacement. He turned the car over to them based on a $9,000 quote. Five months elapsed and he was not able to get even periodic updates - there is no human interaction but rather automated chat to tell him the car was not ready. $17,000 and five months later and he has his car back. No thanks...
Tesla should not be making cars. They will never be more than a niche player. Tesla should sell its carmaking business to a larger carmaker with a better support and service network, and concentrate on batteries!
Actually (ironically) - of all the cars I've bought at dealerships in my life (there have been 5 - and a lot of shopping so... oodles of experience) and Tesla's was a billion times better than any of the others. The price was posted on the website and there was no haggling or negotiation of any kind. No one tried to upsell me into anything and the entire experience was of going for a test-drive (without the sales person) and then coming back and having them help me fill out the form on the website (that I could have filled out on my own at home).
Granted I had to wait 3 months for the car - and now the wait is more like 6 months - but the point is that if there's one thing they got right - it's how to make the customer feel good about the buying experience.
It would be a shame if they were bought by [insert some major car maker here] and became yet another terrible place to go buy a car. I'd much rather that the rest of the industry adopted their practice and let the salesmen haggle over used vehicles where the price is much more variable and where they make most of their money anyway.
So, Musk financed the making of a very expensive electric car, thus having almost no effect on climate change. He financed a rocket for celebrity tourism and eventually redoing NASA's voyages to a big rock. Very rich people finance things. They don't do the work. They can afford to overcome mistakes because they are using their own money and are answerable to no one. He's never been a genius anymore than the owner of an NFL team is a football player.
In all fairness the Tesla is really expensive and it will take a lot of effort to get people habituated to plugging your car in. They are really nice looking cars.
It takes no effort to get people to habituated to plugging in. You don't give it a second thought. It takes a few seconds once or twice a week. You cannot accidentally drive off with it connected, the way you can with a gasoline hose.
There are 36,000 electric cars in Atlanta, one of the highest concentrations in the U.S. city. They are everywhere. I know many people who have one. None of those people had to be habituated. I had a Leaf, which I gave to my daughter. Neither she nor I had any trouble getting habituated.
I must say, several people commenting here are imagining there are problems with electric cars, where no problems exist. There is no problem recharging them at night. The power grid can easily handle that. There is no habituation problem. Range is seldom a problem.
The Tesla not only looks nice; it is years ahead of most other cars in features such as automatic lane changes, radar, 360 degree display of traffic, and safety. I have only driven a Tesla once, but it was very impressive. I don't care about nice looking, but I love good engineering.
I have no problem with electric cars, I just think there will be for the average driver. I'd love a Tesla. But I have a hybrid.
I don't see what kind of problems you have in mind. It does not take any smarts to drive one, or charge one. The Leaf is like a regular car. I suppose the Tesla takes more getting used to with things like the 360 degree radar display on the dashboard.
There are 36,000 ordinary folks in Atlanta driving electric cars. The ones I know, and the ones who talk to reporters and local gab groups on internet say they love the cars.
I have a Prius.
You are incorrect. If electric cars become widespread they will have a tremendous impact on climate change. More than any other technology other than electric power generation. Electric cars are 4 to 5 times more energy efficient than gasoline models, and their source of energy is more and more renewable, with no CO2 production.
Electric cars will also be far cheaper over the life of the car when the technology matures. Fuel costs are far lower, and maintenance and longevity is much better. They take less labor, and less raw materials over the life of the vehicle. Battery materials can be recycled.
The Tesla in particular is far more advanced technologically than other models, both electric and gasoline. It has safety features that will greatly reduce serious accidents and fatalities, which will lower the cost of insurance. Insurance is a major portion of the cost of ownership. There have been some fatal accidents with the semi-self driving features of the Tesla, but these problems will be fixed. Overall the safety record of the Tesla is better than other cars.
What about electricity generated from coal and other fossil fuels????
LOL you started your comment with "what about "
"What about electricity generated from coal and other fossil fuels????"
Coal produces only 22% of U.S. electricity, down from ~50% in 1990. It is falling rapidly, because it is so expensive. Natural gas produces energy with much less CO2 per joule than gasoline or coal. Wind, solar and nuclear produce 40% of electricity. During the night, when most cars are recharged, in states such as Texas and Georgia, most electricity comes from wind or nuclear plants.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us.php#
Wind and solar are much cheaper than coal or nuclear power, so they are rapidly replacing them. Most new capacity is wind or solar.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50818
https://www.lazard.com/media/451905/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-150-vf.pdf
Unless or until the energy that is used to power these vehicles comes from renewable and low-carbon sources, building tons of EVs and forcing people to replace their existing vehicle withy an EV will largely shift the carbon burden, not eliminate it.
The infrastructure for large scale EV usage doesn't exist.. and it is going to take time and investment for it to come into being.
The REAL auto manufacturers are going to eat Tesla alive with their EVs.. mostly because their vehicles will be more affordable, at least as good if not better, and Tesla (and Musk) won't have the cache it once had.
Tesla stock is going to continue its downward trend for a while. It will be interesting to see how long the company lasts and how long Musk remains associated with it.
"The infrastructure for large scale EV usage doesn't exist."
That is incorrect. Charging the average electric car takes about as much power as running an electric dryer for an hour. If every house did that, it would not strain the power grid as long as most did it overnight. Power consumption falls by half or two-thirds at night, so there is plenty of capacity. Power companies offer very low rates at night, especially for electric car owners (including me).
Electric power at night in Texas is free, because they have so much wind power. They charge a flat fee for the month. Electric cars are recharged with 100% renewable, carbon-free electricity.
My car is recharged with nuclear power, in Georgia, at night.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us.php
Only about 20% of US power generation is renewable. Nuclear power has it's own associated problems (like infrastructure cost and waste disposal)--about which I know a fair bit having been in the nuclear navy and having associates working in civilian nuclear power.
Is a large scale shift to EVs an improvement? Yes. But there is no larger infrastructure currently in existence (like the equivalent of gas stations) which severely limits the range of EVs and their larger functionality. Much like the functionality of IC engines was originally constrained in the shift from animal power.
I can fill a gas tank in minutes. How long to charge an EV at current state of art?
If you live in a metro area where travel ranges are short and you can recharge every night at home, no real problems. What if you don't? What if you are traveling on vacation? What if you are a long-haul trucker?
It is far more complex and we are far less ready for it than most people understand.
"I can fill a gas tank in minutes. How long to charge an EV at current state of art?"
30 seconds. You come home, plug in the charger, and go in for supper. The charger works in the middle of the night when rates are low.
It takes you much longer to fill with gasoline because you have to stop off at a gas station and wait around while the tank fills. Obviously, gasoline fueling delivers more megajoules of potential energy per second, but recharging an EV at home takes less human operator time. Most EVs are charged at home.
You do not need to charge every night unless you drive ~150 miles a day. Once or twice a week is enough for most people.
Long range trips on the highway are a problem. They will be until range reaches about 600 miles, which is about how far a person can drive in one day.
Also:
https://insideevs.com/news/549267/manufacturing-evs-70percent-more-emissions/
https://insideevs.com/news/444542/evs-45-percent-more-expensive-make-ice/#:~:text=The%20E-drive%20adds%20%E2%82%AC2%2C000%20to%20the%20production%20expenses%2C,is%20pursuing%20new%20ways%20to%20manufacture%20a%20car.
Well, Joe Manchin would still have been a Senator.... and the current energy sector would still have had the political pull it does. I am thinking not that much different.
You wrote: "Unless or until the energy that is used to power these vehicles comes from renewable and low-carbon sources . . ."
It all does come from low-carbon sources. Compared to gasoline, electric power generation produces far less CO2 per joule of useful energy. More to the point, even if electricity were all generated with coal or oil, electric cars would use 4 times less primary energy than gasoline cars per passenger mile, so they would greatly reduce CO2. As it happens, coal is now used for only 22% of U.S. electricity, and that is falling rapidly. No oil is used to generate electricity.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us.php
Electric power increasingly comes from renewable sources. This year, U.S. power companies are installing far more new capacity in solar and wind than any other source
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50818
It's rational for people to be doing everything possible to migrate away from FF. Waiting for optimum efficiency in the tech would be catastrophic and Tesla did light a fire (no FF pun intended) under the industry's ass to roll this out much more rapidly. But way too much credit is being given to Elon for this and "his" cars are no longer the cutting edge of anything. They have some advantages still with their batteries but the pack will soon catch up to the leader and then... well... it'll be just another car (with many many shortcomings that their bullheaded CEO is unwilling to relent on).
With "smart" scheduling of battery recharging, intermittent power generators like wind and solar are much more useful.
Expecting people to be smart is a bit of a stretch.
Smart scheduling of battery recharging is done automatically. The power company remotely turns on or off the charger. This can be done with a modern electronic power meter. It is usually done at night.
And you need specialized infrastructure for that.
The specialized infrastructure is a new meter. Big deal.
No, you do not. All of the power meters in Atlanta have been changed over to smart meters. 65% of meters in the U.S. are now smart meters. The distribution grid is the same.
Smart meters are cheaper and easier for the power companies to poll, and they allow varying rates by time of day or season, which benefits customers.
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/us-smart-meter-penetration-hits-65-expanding-utility-demand-response-reso/611690/
Its specialized infrastructure. It is just already partly in place. Not fully.
See how there are all these little things that kind of have to come together for all of this to work? Including the things that people haven't discovered yet that we are going to discover going along this pathway?
This will include things like actual expansion and investment in power distribution and control systems. Expansion of non-home facilities for EV charging. People being both willing and able to pay more for a vehicle up front.
Can it be done? yes. Will it be done--most likely at some point... but I think you are more than a decade away from it at this point.
Change is hard and often fiercely resisted--no matter how logical or necessary it might seem to be. especially if the change is inconvenient and costs money.
The infrastructure is not not specialized. When they converted Atlanta to smart meters, they made no other changes to the infrastructure. They came by each house and changed out the meter. It took only a few minutes per house.
There is no need to expand the power distribution or control systems to accommodate electric cars. As I said, the average car uses as much electricity as running a clothes dryer for an hour, or an air conditioner for 2 hours. If every household in the U.S. did this mainly at night, it would not call for any change to the infrastructure, because power consumption at night is far lower than day. There is plenty of spare capacity. This would consume more natural gas, but far less primary energy than gasoline does.
It would consume about ~4 times less primary energy and emit ~8 times less CO2 per passenger mile. You can do the numbers and see for yourself. Start here at the Lawrence Livermore flowchart, bottom right. Most of the 24.3 quads of petroleum transportation energy is for motor vehicles. Read the text box describing end use efficiency, 21% for transportation. Bear in mind that generators and electric cars are far more mechanically efficient than internal combustion engines.
https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2022-04/Energy_2021_United-States_0.png
This works as long as we don't force everyone to switch to electric heat for their homes. New York is trying to do that and it is one more reason why Zeldin might beat Hochul.
I believe this is no longer true (though it was for a couple of years).
I own a T3. It has many wildly incomplete and "buggy" behaviors which were all forgivable when this was the only game in town. Now I'm actively looking forward to an electric Audi or Merc or VW or Ford or... the list is growing rapidly.
Just the fact that there's no way to disable the car's insanely buggy (and almost always wrong) auto-steer feature which slams on the breaks or steers wildly left or right when the car (again - WRONGLY and NOT WHEN ON AUTOPILOT) decides (did I mention "WRONGLY") that there's some hazard that it (incorrectly) feels the need to (suddenly and without any obvious reason) needs to (spontaneously) avoid?
Oh, and don't get me started on how last winter the heat pump went out (on thousands and thousands of 3s) here in Quebec when the temperature dropped to -30º and the windows fogged over and froze and I was left stranded on the highway an hour from home and Elon Tweeted "we're working on it"... TWO WEEKS LATER and you know when they fixed it? Never. They implemented a kludge and now the car pumps luke warm air and it's sorta' kind'a driveable but still the temperature in the cabin is about 36Fº - which sure - it won't kill you but... you know... not very "luxury" feeling.
And you know what other E cars have this problem? None of them.
I don't mean to be dunking on you in any way... Just trying to keep things in perspective :)
There is plenty of electricity still produced from fossil fuels. I have an electric car, mostly because of the gas savings. But I know my carbon foot print is far from zero. There is very little electricity produced from renewable sources.
That's in part because there has been very little interest until recently. I have a design my dad developed and presented in 1957 to generate electricity using ocean waves to generate power to pump water into a reservoir in a closed system that would then generate electricity as conventional dams do. He died 55 years later with no one ever showing an interest.
Heat pumps have now replaced electric cars as the panacea of the left for climate change. They don't work well in really cold weather. Wait until the mandates kick in and Republicans get yet another item for their 30 second ads that resonate with voters.
Many people are saying that if you bad talk Elon while driving your Tesla it tries to drive you into a bridge.
I've heard that. Many people are saying it.
I'm the founder of samizdatonline.org so I'm poking bears much more dangerous than Musk but yeah - given how he's reacting on Twitter - this would not be surprising.
Wow, no kidding. Thanks for this link.
no no... thank you! :)
Don't you just love being a beta tester for Musk? Of course the software never gets past the beta stage because he's probably always changing the specs to suit his own whims.
It really is infuriating. It's one thing to opt into his QA program to get a taste of what they've got cooking - but to be told that the slap-dash, half baked, frequently dangerous and obviously flawed behavior is production ready - and to not have the ability to disable it entirely so that I could just drive the fu**in' car without any extra "features" - is a level of arrogance that's very hard to swallow.
And for the low, low price of $8/month your key fob will continue to work.
Eight dollars a month will let anyone buy a key fob for any car.
If you don't like it, you're obviously part of that old key fob elite.
Good one! Should be an absurd idea . . . but wait!
I don't speak for The Bulwark in *any way and hold no position therein, but speaking purely for myself, I'd like to observe that this kind of comment doesn't further the conversation in any way and just creates hostility where none is warranted.
JVL was super reluctant to launch any kind of comment section because they frequently rapidly devolve to this kind of "discourse". The person you're saying this to now has to come back with some ongoing nastiness and the thread turns into a place where most Bulwark-ers would rather not be.
That's my 1.5 cents. I offer it with nothing but good will.
Musk’s early success with bold maneuvers enabled him to over extend with irrational confidence, IMO. I recognize it, because I’ve experienced it on a much more modest scale. It’s an old story; flying too close to the sun, with wings of wax.
I think a *little credit is due in that he has the right ideas at the right time (though his batting average is about .300) and is able to push those ideas beyond the "wouldn't this be nice" stage that those of us who also have good ideas but lack the resources to found them have to settle for.
However, as far as I know, this is the first time he's taken something that already exists and come in to "fix" it.
He essentially just paid $44b for the Twitter brand. The tech, the culture, and the product are basically garbage. It would have cost him $10m/ $20m to just build the thing he claims to "want" from scratch (though now we see he's actually quite confused about what that actually is) and if it was good he'd have no problem enticing people to switch.
Instead he paid many orders of magnitude more for something that can't be fixed and he'll need to scrap anyway.
And then he proceeded to migrate his image (to the extent that there were many people who felt somewhat generously about him) from eccentric whiz-kid to erratic (and heartless) nincompoop.
I guess he's still the "richest" man on Earth though all that richness is tied up in the value of his properties and much of that value depends on his cult of personality. I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla stock started dropping precipitously over the next 6 months as a result of all this. I own a 3. It's a nice car - but all the other car makers are now playing in the E space and much of what they're making rivals or exceeds Tesla's product. Oh, and Autopilot is absolutely positively nowhere near ready for production release. At some point in the not too distant future - that fact is going to start catching up to their stock price as well.
Elon Musk did not start Tesla or invent electric cars. Electric cars were invented a long time ago, granted they were not good. (https://www.energy.gov/articles/history-electric-car)
Elon Musk did not started Tesla. He bought Tesla with money that he made from Paypal. Yes, he is the one who made Tesla as it is now (which I give him credit for), but he did not invent electric car or start Tesla.
Other than maybe PayPal, Musk has had no "right ideas at the right time".
What he's had is daddy South African blood emerald money combined with his PayPal money and used that to buy into already existing companies and get himself listed as a "founder", i.e. SpaceX and Tesla.
Hey, actually that sounds like Musk's Twitter certification strategy. Spend some money get the "Founder" label. Spend some money get "Twitter Certification".
It comes down to that Elon's big idea is just spending money.
Money he never earned.
It was either gifted or gained from investors.
Now he's simply pissing away other people's money.
It's a great question. I signed the various paperwork without reading it (as one does when buying a car and needing to sign 50 pages of boilerplate to get to leave the lot). Would I be surprised if something of that nature is buried in that language? Not even a little, now that you mention it.
His own money? Like all his endeavors he's leveraged to the hilt on this. And while federal, state and local governments would never let SpaceX (massive NASA/national security dependency) or Tesla (green cred and significant employment) go under, Twitter could (and probably will) default due to his foolishness.
Right, but he gets the financing because he is rich and can pay his debt service.
Does turning dollars make one a brilliant billionaire?
Could . . . pay his debt service. Not so much anymore.
Friend of mine had his Tesla battery fail and needed replacement. He turned the car over to them based on a $9,000 quote. Five months elapsed and he was not able to get even periodic updates - there is no human interaction but rather automated chat to tell him the car was not ready. $17,000 and five months later and he has his car back. No thanks...
Woah 😮
Tesla should not be making cars. They will never be more than a niche player. Tesla should sell its carmaking business to a larger carmaker with a better support and service network, and concentrate on batteries!
Actually (ironically) - of all the cars I've bought at dealerships in my life (there have been 5 - and a lot of shopping so... oodles of experience) and Tesla's was a billion times better than any of the others. The price was posted on the website and there was no haggling or negotiation of any kind. No one tried to upsell me into anything and the entire experience was of going for a test-drive (without the sales person) and then coming back and having them help me fill out the form on the website (that I could have filled out on my own at home).
Granted I had to wait 3 months for the car - and now the wait is more like 6 months - but the point is that if there's one thing they got right - it's how to make the customer feel good about the buying experience.
It would be a shame if they were bought by [insert some major car maker here] and became yet another terrible place to go buy a car. I'd much rather that the rest of the industry adopted their practice and let the salesmen haggle over used vehicles where the price is much more variable and where they make most of their money anyway.
"money he got from his family"
Like a certain other immature rich guy, who lived in the White House for a while.
What's the old saying. They were born on 3rd base and go thru life thinking they hit a triple.
Except the consequences aren't just his own. Thousands of newly fired Twitter employees for example.
Jobs are for little people.
Or not for little people, ymmv. ;)