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@weirdo - You're completely mis-construing or intentionally mis-representing my viewpoint. I don't doubt that renewables are ramping up and will eventually be huge. But the infrastructure issues are going to take a lot more than a decade to fix; the design of our current electric grid can't handle everyone switching to EVs, and won't be able to any time soon.

And Tesla's current business trajectory is unsustainable regardless.

Glorious wrote:

Who hurt you?

Its a simple answer: Elon Musk, for failing to grow the company this year.

So we can chastise his naivete as long as they fail to grow.

I'm just concerned that he's seriously unbalanced beyond just the Tesla/Musk fixation.

Plenty of people are enamored of that whole mystique, but he's the first one I'm come across who seems to have serious issues with rural America.

What the heck happened?

Nice little interview with one of the more popular scientists in the EV field, working on battery development since 1978:
https://insideevs.com/news/363662/video ... interview/

- Electric bikes, electric buses, electric dump trucks, the trends around the world.
- Cool coulombic efficiency nerd talk. Cellphone market's lower coulombic efficiency vs EV market's higher coulombic efficiency etc.
- Talks about why the upcoming and much anticipated $100/kWh threshold is such a big deal (~8:00).
- Discusses advances in battery chemistry. The movement to further deminish the role of expensive Cobalt etc (~10:00). Many groups, including some in China, are making great strides in this area.
- The challenge legacy auto manufacturers have in controlling their means of production when it comes to EVs, and how Chinese giants are handling it by comparison (~14:00).
- The idea of a 500 mile EV and why it's possible but dumb outside of niche applications, lugging around all that unused weight. I half agree half disagree, but from a practical EV production angle I see the point.
- The energy density hitting levels making EV planes possible, the potential and limitations etc.
- Graphene, Solid state, Nano in advanced EV battery design. Promising but still limited to labs.

Pretty interesting interview for EV nerds.

ludi wrote:

I could see a pretty good use case for diesel-electric hybrid trucks where the diesel-electric drivetrain eliminates the complex and expensive transmission as is already done on train locomotives. The hybrid part then provides for a smaller overall engine, cold-start preheating of the engine and emissions-control hardware, Jake braking, and sleeper cabin power. Done at the right scale, it could reduce fuel costs and reduce or resolve a number of emissions-related downtime issues that are plaguing the industry now.

But all-electric truck fleets...not for long-haul.

I'm not at all an expert but AFAIK diesel electric is common in locos because the gearbox needed to directly drive the wheels from the engine would be too big to fit in the train. It's isn't a particularly efficient form of transmission hence most hybrid cars have a fancy super complex gearbox that takes drive from both the electric motor and IC engine at the same time. I can't imagine that is particularly efficient either but presumably it's better than a full electric transmission or they'd do it that way instead. It might be possible to replace Jake braking with electric braking with excess current the batteries can't absorb being dumped into a resistive load, AFAIK that is something diesel loco do and should work just as well on road vehicles assuming they have a nice big radiator somewhere.

Glorious wrote:

I'm just concerned that he's seriously unbalanced beyond just the Tesla/Musk fixation.

Plenty of people are enamored of that whole mystique, but he's the first one I'm come across who seems to have serious issues with rural America.

What the heck happened?

I left my shambling stagnant rural home state behind me a few years ago. I loved my state and miss my good friends and loved ones. I also often enjoyed the laid back lifestyle, people were friendly and down to earth. But there was a price for that laid back attitude, it was intellectually suffocating for the state's welfare, progress was slow, corruption was high, and people were apathetic to bettering things and voting out the bad apples, all empty talk but lots of resistance to actual change.

Left to the city because that's where things happen, education is rewarded and pay is doubled. It's a great place to be in when you're young and full of energy, but I look forward to returning to my home state for retirement, it's a good place to go when you're ready to pass on. Cheap land, slow lifestyle, perfect at an old age, I'm fine with living 20 years in the past by then.

It's tough love and allot of frustration for the young ones that have trouble finding good modern jobs. Unless they venture outside those rural states as well. Seeing your home state continue to be in such a limbo firsthand, and the people being so apathetic about it, is always disheartening.

Glorious wrote:

I'm just concerned that he's seriously unbalanced beyond just the Tesla/Musk fixation.

Plenty of people are enamored of that whole mystique, but he's the first one I'm come across who seems to have serious issues with rural America.

What the heck happened?

Ehh, I called him a cult member a lot. Its probably edging him out a bit. I'm guessing he's trying to find an insult that gets under my skin, but... I don't live in rural America sooooo.....

@Wierdo: just stop acting like a cult member, and I'll stop calling you a cult member. Its that simple.

wierdo wrote:

I left my shambling stagnant rural home state behind me a few years ago. I loved my state and miss my good friends and loved ones. I also often enjoyed the laid back lifestyle, people were friendly and down to earth. But there was a price for that laid back attitude, it was intellectually suffocating for the state's welfare, progress was slow, corruption was high, and people were apathetic to bettering things and voting out the bag apples, all empty talk but lots of resistance to actual change.

Left to the city because that's where things happen, education is rewarded and pay is doubled. It's a great place to be in when you're young and full of energy, but I look forward to returning to my home state for retirement, it's a good place to go when you're ready to pass on. Cheap land, slow lifestyle, perfect at an old age, I'm fine with living 20 years in the past by then.

It's tough love and allot of frustration for the young ones that have trouble finding good modern jobs. Unless they venture outside those rural states as well. Seeing your home state continue to be in such a limbo firsthand, and the people being so apathetic about it, is always disheartening.

Cool story bro,

what does it have to do with EVs?

WHAT DOES IT HAVE TO DO WITH US?

Glorious wrote:

Cool story bro,
what does it have to do with EVs?

You wondered about my issue with rural simpletons, I answered. That catchy one liner was creative, good job old man, you're so hip!

It's not a Tesla thing, it's an EV thing, I would cheer for Tesla or BYD, I don't care who leads the progress, I would just prefer it if we had a piece of that pie.

ludi wrote:

I could see a pretty good use case for diesel-electric hybrid trucks where the diesel-electric drivetrain eliminates the complex and expensive transmission as is already done on train locomotives. The hybrid part then provides for a smaller overall engine, cold-start preheating of the engine and emissions-control hardware, Jake braking, and sleeper cabin power. Done at the right scale, it could reduce fuel costs and reduce or resolve a number of emissions-related downtime issues that are plaguing the industry now.

Perhaps, but that largely depends on your battery utilization for periods of heavy loads. If you need to pull from batteries to climb a hill, that's no bueno. You'll probably need that diesel generator to provide current directly to motors, and the output has to match what's available today. There are two additional concerns, though. First, what does the weight-to-power look like? Battery packs are heavy already, but the capacity needed even for a hybrid could be substantial. Second, battery fires are a big deal if things go wrong in passenger vehicles. These packs could be considerably larger, AND you have a tank of diesel fuel for the generator. Even without a transmission, you're adding new challenges and risks.

The diesel-electric locomotives work well because it's really easy to move things on rail. Takes a bit to get going, but once you're moving, you don't usually stop, and you don't have to climb anything steep. The generator can basically run constantly at the ideal RPM, without any real load changes.

But all-electric truck fleets...not for long-haul.

Probably not for local work, either. Tesla's best chargers claim ~30 minutes to 90% charge? Something like that? But that's a small battery pack, relative to these hypothetical vehicles. Whatever charging concerns we have with passenger vehicles are multiplied, and the owners of those trucks are unlikely to accept long downtime to recharge. If they aren't moving, they aren't making money.

wierdo wrote:

Glorious wrote:

I'm just concerned that he's seriously unbalanced beyond just the Tesla/Musk fixation.

Plenty of people are enamored of that whole mystique, but he's the first one I'm come across who seems to have serious issues with rural America.

What the heck happened?

I left my shambling stagnant rural home state behind me a few years ago. I loved my state and miss my good friends and loved ones. I also often enjoyed the laid back lifestyle, people were friendly and down to earth. But there was a price for that laid back attitude, it was intellectually suffocating for the state's welfare, progress was slow, corruption was high, and people were apathetic to bettering things and voting out the bag apples, all empty talk but lots of resistance to actual change.

Left to the city because that's where things happen, education is rewarded and pay is doubled. It's a great place to be in when you're young and full of energy, but I look forward to returning to my home state for retirement, it's a good place to go when you're ready to pass on. Cheap land, slow lifestyle, perfect at an old age, I'm fine with living 20 years in the past by then.

It's tough love and allot of frustration for the young ones that have trouble finding good modern jobs. Unless they venture outside those rural states as well. Seeing your home state continue to be in such a limbo firsthand, and the people being so apathetic about it, is always disheartening.

I do appreciate the insight into your personal life actually. I'm not from a rural area, so its always interesting to see the perspective of people who came from there.

I've got relatives in rural areas, and I've visited them sometimes. Its still America, but life is slower. More independent, fewer services (drive to the dump and manually put the trash there, no collections, etc. etc.) I'm sure it fully depends on where you are, but the way of life is certainly different.

superjawes wrote:

Probably not for local work, either. Tesla's best chargers claim ~30 minutes to 90% charge? Something like that? But that's a small battery pack, relative to these hypothetical vehicles. Whatever charging concerns we have with passenger vehicles are multiplied, and the owners of those trucks are unlikely to accept long downtime to recharge. If they aren't moving, they aren't making money.

There's talk about gigawatt level chargers for heavy duty Semis and such. Batteries may be limited by pack level in terms of charging, but they can be charged in parallel. Instead of a gas tank, think of each pack as its own smaller tank, the nozzle limitation in that case is alleviated by multiple hoses, or in the case of EVs a more industrial connector.

You can add more parallelism and send more juice if you like, that shifts the limitation to the power supplier's ability to provide it, which is why allot of the high capacity charging stations add buffers in the form of industrial battery storage units leveling out the charge/discharge load during peak periods.

Also, the charging rate is not a constant line, but rather a graph that gradually falls off as the cell fills up, something like this:


https://www.greencarreports.com/news/11 ... ts-suggest

You can see that the first half is quite rapid, but then it goes down, the last 20 percent takes as long as the first 80 percent. Think of it as a bar that starts off empty and then gets harder to get into at night when traffic is packed for a football game and everyone's in line for wings lol.

So if you want faster charging there are different tricks to achieve that, for example a larger reserve area, that's usually used for wear-leveling the cells but a secondary benefit is concealing the slower charging at the upper end of the cell's capacity. The other way is for the driver to change their charging habits so they stay close to the ideal charging range whenever possible, so instead of stopping for an hour at one charge station, try to take two fifteen minute stops on a long trip instead, you'll actually be charging faster that way.

wierdo wrote:

It's not a Tesla thing, it's an EV thing, I would cheer for Tesla or BYD, I don't care who leads the progress, I would just prefer it if we had a piece of that pie.

Too late, Tesla is already moving production to China! (And, just a hint: It isn't because we're somehow "against" EVs. It's the cheap labor. It's always the cheap labor.)

just brew it! wrote:

wierdo wrote:

It's not a Tesla thing, it's an EV thing, I would cheer for Tesla or BYD, I don't care who leads the progress, I would just prefer it if we had a piece of that pie.

Too late, Tesla is already moving production to China! (And, just a hint: It isn't because we're somehow "against" EVs. It's the cheap labor. It's always the cheap labor.)

Well, of course, we are going to sell cars in China too. Pretty much every other major car company under the sun is building up their manufacturing capabilities in China as well, Ford, GM, VW, BMW, Nissan, Toyota, Hyundai etc, in fact China is GM's biggest market. They're still not Chinese companies though... Yet.

China is the world's biggest auto market already, and very high growth compared to mature western markets - although that's going to be challenging now that they shifted to mandating EVs - and is expected to grow in significance as their middle class grows from that giant 1.2B pool of consumers.

Also, as a side note, Tesla's business model is different from legacy manufacturers, they push hard toward vertically integrate their production - more in-house manufacturing and assembly and less reliance on third party vendors - so that each factory addresses each continent's needs more independently.

Next factory will be in Europe, they're going to announce the location in the upcoming year supposedly.

wierdo wrote:

They're still not Chinese companies though... Yet.

They will be once China requires them to transfer all their IP as a condition of staying in China.

Captain Ned wrote:

wierdo wrote:

They're still not Chinese companies though... Yet.

They will be once China requires them to transfer all their IP as a condition of staying in China.

It's possible. China may corner the EV market, which would do for future transport what Solar did to Coal.

It's a major disruption in the making, and industrial nations are competing fiercely for it, setting policies and making major investments toward the goal of capturing their share, and we're just getting started. We can't afford to stay out of the ring.

wierdo wrote:

Captain Ned wrote:

wierdo wrote:

They're still not Chinese companies though... Yet.

They will be once China requires them to transfer all their IP as a condition of staying in China.

It's possible. China may corner the EV market.

So, you're OK with Chinese IP theft from US companies as long as it hastens your EV nirvana? You don't think for a moment that China plans on paying any US company market value for the IP they require to be forcibly transferred as a condition of doing business in China, do you?

Captain Ned wrote:

So, you're OK with Chinese IP theft from US companies as long as it hastens your EV nirvana? You don't think for a moment that China plans on paying any US company market value for the IP they require to be forcibly transferred as a condition of doing business in China, do you?

Am I ok with saving the world but we don't stay on top because of being lazy? Yeah you snooze you lose, but at least our kids have better odds at a good life in nation number two or three. Look, this industrial revolution is happening with or without us, we're not the center of the world.

The best way to stay ahead is to continue to innovate, IP theft just leads to cheap copycat products, will always be a step behind until we stop leading. China already leads in battery production ability, BYD is - or was last time I was checking - double Tesla's size, and they're one of over 400 Chinese companies in the game. For now we have the technological advantage on our side, just need to ramp up production.

Why not try for both? Make a better world for our kids AND lead the new industrial revolution instead? It's really up to us, luckily Tesla is attracting the brightest minds in the industry from allover the world, so we have the chance to stay ahead in technology.

wierdo wrote:

Am I ok with saving the world but we don't stay on top because of being lazy? Yeah you snooze you lose, but at least our kids have better odds at a good life in nation number two or three.

OK, Turing-bot.

Captain Ned wrote:

OK, Turing-bot.

Insightful, Bubba.

superjawes wrote:

The diesel-electric locomotives work well because it's really easy to move things on rail. Takes a bit to get going, but once you're moving, you don't usually stop, and you don't have to climb anything steep. The generator can basically run constantly at the ideal RPM, without any real load changes.

On the scale of a long-haul truck, though, you might be able to work with a TDI-type diesel and an inverter generator with a much wider RPM range. Run it low and slow for average loads and then briefly run it at much higher speeds when the power is needed. Crossing the Rocky Mountain states will definitely be challenging (the start of I-70's 6% grades is literally only a couple miles behind my back door), but even then it's rarely all uphill; you go uphill, then you go down, then back up again, etc. There's still quite a bit of opportunity for load leveling on a hybrid powertrain. Crossing the Great Plains states and stretches of the southwest? 15+ hours of nearly level grades, pretty much the same load profile as the train other than the rest stops.

Also, in terms of accident performance, I would probably feel safer with big batteries in long-haul trucks rather than cars, because long-haul trucks have a far better safety record on account of both physics and driver training requirements.

Probably not for local work, either. Tesla's best chargers claim ~30 minutes to 90% charge? Something like that? But that's a small battery pack, relative to these hypothetical vehicles. Whatever charging concerns we have with passenger vehicles are multiplied, and the owners of those trucks are unlikely to accept long downtime to recharge. If they aren't moving, they aren't making money.

Urban truck fleets would be more amenable to some sort of standard battery pack swap or even just rotating a fleet of cabs through the chargers, though. A grocery distributor, for example, might be fine replacing one diesel cab that normally runs trailers out of the warehouse all day with two or three cabs that run in rotating shifts, if it means they no longer have to pull cabs out of service for diesel and emissions systems maintenance. Especially the kind that results when you're running a big diesel through stop-and-go city traffic all day long.

Hmm, what's wrong with this picture (bloody Aussies):

Captain Ned wrote:

Hmm, what's wrong with this picture (bloody Aussies):

Huh, I thought the German brands were getting out of diesels.

ludi wrote:

Huh, I thought the German brands were getting out of diesels.

BMW is struggling to figure out their business plan, they're under allot of pressure from both stricter government regulations as well as competition from companies like Tesla that offer products directly in their 3 series market niche.

The CEO resigned recently due to failure to respond to the challenges and come up with a proper roadmap toward modernizing to EVs as investors demanded, the new CEO was a champion of EVs within the company, too early to tell but he may potentially help them regain their focus in this regard, but they got their work cut out for them.

Interesting new wiring changes to cars in the near future:

Tesla's Developed a New Revolutionary Automotive Wiring Loom. Here's Y You Should Get Excited
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygSp-vSzyN8

Switching away from the old CANbus system to one more similar to computer networking, which means dropping wiring lengths from miles to hundreds of feet.

This may also introduce the concept of "plug and play" in cars where you can upgrade parts individually and stick them on the car's network through standardized connectors ala Ethernet and USB. Should make performing repairs much easier as well.

Hopefully this can become a common design approach for the whole industry, CANus is an archaic pain in the butt to work with sometimes.

wierdo wrote:

ludi wrote:

Huh, I thought the German brands were getting out of diesels.

BMW is struggling to figure out their business plan, they're under allot of pressure from both stricter government regulations as well as competition from companies like Tesla that offer products directly in their 3 series market niche.

Definitely Turing-bot, as you're completely immune to sarcasm.

wierdo wrote:

You wondered about my issue with rural simpletons, I answered. That catchy one liner was creative, good job old man, you're so hip!

It's only funny because, after like 10 pages or more of you pointedly ignoring everything I've said about the actual subject of EVs, the moment I asked about your denigration of rural folks, you responded immediately and at length.

But that's not funny in a good way, it's funny as in "Why is the guy who can't shut-up about Camaro versus Mustang ranting about ex-wives when *his* ex-wife neither drove nor cared about either and when the actual people he's yelling at are all married and never divorced?"

It goes to show your lack of reasoning: If your advocacy of something is ultimately built upon a fictitious relationship between it and some intensely personal animosity over extraordinarily broad and deeply abstracted impersonal concepts (like rural vs. urban, ffs), good grief. That's a hallmark of mental instability, not technical or financial acumen.

wierdo wrote:

Interesting new wiring changes to cars in the near future:

Tesla's Developed a New Revolutionary Automotive Wiring Loom. Here's Y You Should Get Excited
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygSp-vSzyN8

Switching away from the old CANbus system to one more similar to computer networking, which means dropping wiring lengths from miles to hundreds of feet.

This may also introduce the concept of "plug and play" in cars where you can upgrade parts individually and stick them on the car's network through standardized connectors ala Ethernet and USB. Should make performing repairs much easier as well.

Hopefully this can become a common design approach for the whole industry, CANus is an archaic pain in the butt to work with sometimes.

Tesla's "new" design is just a modular power system and flex harnesses. Not that revolutionary, and flex harnesses carry their own issues. They're harder to repair, they're harder to troubleshoot, and you basically lose the entire thing if once trace goes bad, not just a wire.

The video also completely ignores things like AUTOSAR, as if automotive engineers don't tackle their own challenges...

So it looks like Tesla overstated the meaning of the NHSTA's safety rating and the NHSTA both sent them a cease-and-desist letter last year and referred the matter to the FTC:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/07/tesla-s ... laims.html

ludi wrote:

So it looks like Tesla overstated the meaning of the NHSTA's safety rating and the NHSTA both sent them a cease-and-desist letter last year and referred the matter to the FTC:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/07/tesla-s ... laims.html

The NHSTA doesn't like companies using their test data for advertising. Tesla's lawyers claim they did their own work combining NHSTA's overwhelmingly positive results along with other public data, so should be fun to watch how this plays out. The competition obviously didn't like the 5.4 star rating being used literally, the NHSTA drops it to five stars to avoid being a marketing tool.

Edit: More related details from this recent article:
https://cleantechnica.com/2019/08/07/br ... next-week/

The real problems are the tests and the reporting are designed to let everyone have something good to say about their cars so they can sell them. Tesla wants to disrupt the apple cart and show that it has cars that are safer than anything ever sold.

Edit2: Curiously the mainstream media doesn't say anything about Tesla's response or that the agency dropped their complaint after receiving it, strange no?

https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-3 ... deep-dive/