EV Competitor 3

(cont'd from last Friday's post)

Cars made in China are not banned in the U.S. But the last administration placed a 100% tariff on them in 2024, meaning the price of the car for an American buyer would in effect double. They also created software and technology restrictions. The two factors keep China-manufactured cars out of the U.S. market.

But Mexico seems to welcome them. BYD had plans to build an EV factory there, plans which are now on hold until they know what the current U.S. administration will do about trade policies. 

If BYD goes ahead with the plant, Mexico will gain 10,000 new jobs. But BYD will do more than that. The country has only ~3,000 public charging stations for electric vehicles. BYD's car sales will increase by a factor of 6, and Mexico has some serious catching up to do if those EV's are going to be charged.

Chinese firms know how to do it. They are already working with in-country firms to build renewable energy infrastructure, and have already invested a total of about a billion dollars.

China has gotten its foot in the door. We'll follow the story of the BYD plant in Mexico.

from USNews and Atlantic Council

EV Competitor 2

Follow up to this post

Ford Motors' CEO is worried about their market share: "We are in a global competition with China. And if we lose this, we do not have a future at Ford." It's not just Ford, but the whole car industry in America.

Those are strong words, very similar to Elon Musk's: “Frankly, if there are not trade barriers established, they will pretty much demolish most other car companies in the world.”

Chinese electric car makers (about 130 companies) are a growing threat to American car makers. They've "studied American inventions, replicated them, and arguably surpassed them, selling them at scarily-cheap prices around the world." In the U.S., that price would be roughly $10k lower than Tesla.

Their EV leader, BYD, overtook Tesla in global sales in Q4 of 2023 (image). A writer for InsideEV's likes BYD's interior and software integration better than Tesla's, and says they're quieter too.

Some governments, including the U.S., worry that Chinese EV's cameras and sensors may collect data to pass on to their military. 

From "China Is Overtaking America. In an Electric Car."

Robotaxi

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Elon is sometimes unrealistically optimistic about when those big goals will happen. But he was right that Tesla's robotaxi would launch finally in Austin, Texas, in June (or just sort of right, because it was limited).

Robotaxi is a driverless ride hailing service that is geofenced, limited by the city to an approved area. 

It's not just Tesla's concept. Waymo has been operating with 100 vehicles in Austin since last year, with a bigger approved area than Tesla has so far. 

Eventually Elon plans that Tesla owners can use their full self-driving cars for this service, and he sees it bringing in huge profit for both owners and for the company. Ark Invest thinks it likely, predicting a possible future trillion dollar enterprise.

This science blogger (video) thinks Tesla's "first trillion" will come from China, where robotaxis are already active.

Elon interview

Big thinker Elon Musk goes after exciting goals. No, that's an understatement. Make that "impossible" or "near-impossible" goals. 

He wants to be inspired. As he's said before, "life can't just be about solving one miserable problem after another." He chuckles a bit as he mentions that he and staff acknowledge a "giggle factor" when they talk about these ideas that make you excited to get up in the morning.

Catching the "biggest flying object ever made" out of the air was one of those goals. Enabling space travel for colonization of Mars will be another (assuming that one is not actually impossible). Starship will need to be fully and rapidly reusable, able to be refueled in space at an orbital re-filling depot.

But there's much more than space. He sees a huge future for Tesla's robotaxi service, Optimus robots, Neuralink, Grok AI. 

Big ideas, all addressed in this video.

 

Tesla Diner

With seating for 250 guests and a retro-futuristic menu, the Tesla Diner opened last week in Hollywood CA. 

Diner food is available, yes, and more than food. On the top floor you can view movies or Starship launches on very big screens, and of course you can charge your EV at the same time. There's an Optimus robot to observe under glass and an Optimus to serve popcorn.

"When you recharge your Rivian, does a girl on roller skates deliver free ice cream to you??"

Tesla did it

Tesla is celebrating something else in addition to the Fourth of July this week: its first delivery of a new car driven to the purchaser entirely by what they call "full self-driving," meaning no driver even in the car. 

It certainly drove itself completely and you can see it below. (Just not completely sure I understand their definition of FSD yet.)  

This weekend my son rented one, and it took the family home from church unaided by a driver. Looks like we're in a new car era, all right.

Congratulations to Team Tesla!  

Crash test

Organized demonstrations against Tesla are designed to put pressure on Elon Musk to back off on cleaning up the federal spending mess. Protests have been part of American life for a very long time and they're considered legitimate free speech.

Keying, protests and firebombing take their toll on their target, as they're intended to do. Though still the world's biggest maker of EV's, deliveries of cars dropped in the first quarter (Q1 2025) by 13% compared to last year's first quarter.

Model Y was the most popular passenger car in the world in 2024. It's safety rating is outstanding. It was "near-perfect" in crash tests conducted by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Hopefully, not everyone interested in EV's will be intimidated by the "Tesla Takedown."

Teslas tend to do well in crash tests. Here's a Model X from six years ago, not rolling over as many SUV's tend to do:

 from Electrek

Robo taxi

Would you like to put your health and safety in the "hands" of a robotic car, a car with no human driver? Many are already doing that. "Robo taxis" are no longer just a cool theory. They are operating in a number of big cities. 

Two young millennial women recorded their experience renting and riding in a Waymo robo taxi for the first time in the video below for Kia-Hyundai. They called for the taxi on a phone app. 

It's not just a matter of telling the taxi where to go. Some features they discovered that helped or surprised them:

• real time ETA (expected time of arrival) of when the requested taxi would come 
•  an app button to unlock the doors when the taxi arrived
•  a digital display map of their location in both front and back seats
• an app button command option was available to "pull over"
• choice of music

Attacking Elon 1

Our current government administration is "all-in" for policies that promote the trend away from internal combustion cars and toward electric vehicles. They sponsored a "summit" meeting in 2021 to celebrate EV's in America, inviting legacy car makers . . but snubbing Tesla.

Why would they leave out "the company that sells more electric cars [image] in the US than all competitors combined?" (Clue: unlike Tesla, those legacy car makers are all unionized and the union has advocated for the current president's political party for many years.)

 

In 2020 about $900 million in federal funding for rural broadband internet was designated to Elon Musk's Starlink after they competed for it. But the FCC withdrew the funding when the current administration took over, saying they didn't meet the requirements. SpaceX was “deeply disappointed and perplexed," and claimed "Starlink is demonstrably one of the best options—likely the best option—to accomplish the goals" of the program. 

And there's more: "The White House is attacking Musk’s business empire . . throwing everything it can find at Musk, hoping that the endless barrage of regulatory, reputational and legal attacks will cause the world’s wealthiest man to kneel." 

"The viciousness of the investigations being conducted by the DOJ, the FAA, the FTC, the SEC, the NLRB . . against a successful American business leader is unprecedented."

(cont'd tomorrow)

EV's in Norway 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

A wireless charging road in Oslo, Norway, is their first for electric vehicles. Built by a tech firm in Israel, Electreon Wireless, the pilot program is being tested on the city's bus routes.

Copper coils draw power from the electric grid and are positioned right beneath the asphalt. Electric busses charge automatically while being driven on the road. Durability will be an issue, considering Norway's severe winters.

In an interesting twist, government officials now question their strategy of promoting EV's. What they want more is to get people out of their cars and onto public transportation.

EV's in Norway

Norway leads the world in adopting the electric vehicle model with 87% of its new car sales being EV's (for comparison, in the US it's 7%). So they've earned the approval of the NYT, the World Economic Forum, and of course Elon Musk.

photo

With declining popularity in the US, you could wonder why Norway's embrace of EV's is all-in. In fact, some in my family suspect that cold weather like Norway's would seriously impact the usefulness of a battery-run car.

It turns out that government policy is the answer to the puzzle. "Eye-popping EV subsidies have flowed largely to the affluent." Well, that explains it. EV owners were exempted from paying big tax on car sales (averaging $27k today) and from paying for tolls, parking, and ferries.

Abundant hydropower is Norway's clean source of electricity, and it's relatively cheap. But climate change fear motivates them to reduce use of fossil fuels, as the prime minister said in 2019, “We want people to buy electric cars. It is the most important thing you can do personally and privately to help reduce climate emissions.”

from Vox

(cont'd tomorrow)

Compensate

Elon Musk is one of the richest people on earth, having been wealthy since he was young. So when it looked like Tesla was going to pay him up to $56 billion, some people were outraged.

Yes, it's a huge sum, and it would go to someone who's already rich. A judge struck down that payout agreement between Musk and Tesla shareholders, agreeing with the critics. 

But there's more to the story. 

His personal wealth helped make Tesla possible in this way: Elon took no compensation from Tesla until 2019, apparently living on his own resources until he could somehow make Tesla a success. He worked extraordinarily hard, to the point of sleeping on a mattress in the factory at times.

Shareholders voluntarily chose to make this agreement to pay him that sum if he could multiply the company's value by ten times, from $60 billion to $650 billion--and he did that. After the judge's ruling, in fact, they reinstated the plan.

Before judging a story, it's good to get all the relevant information. You might have heard only the "bias framing" version of the story.

EV competitor

Do you own a BYD? If you live in the US, you might not even know what it is. This Chinese car maker just surpassed Tesla's production of electric vehicles in the final quarter of 2023. 

Tesla far out-sells all other manufacturers of EV's in the US, and the same held for global sales up until now. But BYD is on track to take the leader position in 2024. Elon Musk has a warning for the auto industry:

“Frankly, if there are not trade barriers established, they will pretty much demolish most other car companies in the world.” 

Low priced models are part of BYD's soaring success, and they can put out new models in as little as 18 months. Tesla took four years to put out the hyped cybertruck. 

But Tesla has plans for a new "baby Tesla" to compete in the lower price range, expected to cost the consumer under $30,000.

from Yahoo

EV charging 5

Follow-up to this post

Most EV (electric vehicle) car manufacturers have decided to build Tesla's charging technology (NACS) right into their new cars, starting in 2025. Here's the list so far: Ford, GM, Rivian, Toyota, Volvo, Polestar, Mercedes, Nissan, Fisker, Honda, Acura, Jaguar, Hyundai, Kia, BMW, Lexus.

Starting later this year, 2024, owners of these EV's may use some of Tesla's supercharger stations, but they will have to use an adapter that will be available.

Stellantis (Jeep) and Lucid haven't decided yet. You have to wonder what's holding them back. Tesla's charging stations are both more plentiful and more reliable than any other. Researchers at University of California/Berkley found that rival CCS stations were often not functional.

The EV market relies on a charging network that is easy to find and works well. The US government wants EV's to dominate. All car manufacturers are working on it. To Elon Musk and others, it's a moral imperative. But, is it really? For me, the jury is still out.

image

from Business Insider

Level 4

A Level 5 autonomous, self-driving vehicle would drive safely and reliably anywhere and under any conditions without human intervention. That exciting idea was promised by some researchers (Ford, Tesla), but nobody's gotten there yet and it doesn't look like any car company will attain it any time soon. 

But some companies are focused on Level 4 instead of Level 5. Waymo is having some success with it, describing itself as "The world's first autonomous ride-hailing service," operating now in San Francisco and Phoenix. Like Level 5, their electric vehicle needs no human intervention; but it only operates in defined areas under defined conditions.

photo

Cruise tried to do the same thing but with perhaps a little less focus on safety. California revoked their permit for autonomous driving vehicles.

Waymo is still losing an estimated billion dollars per year. Eventually they must turn a profit. Neither investors nor employees will be able to keep the company going without it. 

from Mind Matters

EV materials 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Nobody is ready to dispense with modern technology, in spite of problems with their components. Rare earth metals are essential in the motor (not the battery) of electric vehicles, as well as in lots of modern devices like smartphones and wind turbines. They can be both toxic to people and the  environment, and radioactive. 

Most global production of these elements is controlled by China which is moving to increase their hold on the global market. They can use their dominance to achieve political goals.

What's a company to do? They sure won't quit manufacturing modern tech.

General Motors says they are "deeply committed to an all-electric future," so last month they announced a plan to solve the dilemma of rare earths, replacing them with magnets from Niron Magnetics which are not toxic, cost less, and are US-made. Their "Clean Air Magnet" appears on TIME's list of 2023 best inventions.

EV materials 1

As of 2023's third quarter, electric vehicles took 7.9% of the market, a new record. Tesla Motors still leads the field while other companies take an increasing share. EV's are exciting because of their benefits (like in traffic), but problems still exist. Some relate to the materials used in production.

Years ago Tesla set a goal to use less cobalt in its batteries. It's very expensive, the global supply may be declining, and children work the mines to get it in Africa. All good reasons to find an alternative. They've been working on solutions for at least six years.

photo

Cobalt contributes to the driving distance range of an EV battery (obviously important to the electric vehicle market) so results started in the standard-range models which use less.

As of a report on the first quarter of 2022, "nearly half of Tesla vehicles produced in Q1 were equipped with a lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery containing no nickel or cobalt." It's progress.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Note: SpaceX has delayed the launch of USSF-52 to a date TBA

EV mandate

Our government is solidly behind electric vehicles, probably for the climate connection. (The climate argument for EV's is not clear to me yet, since swapping gas for electricity will not eliminate fossil fuel use when electric power plants still use fossil fuels. Am I missing something? I welcome your comment.)

In fact, the current administration wants to force the issue. They mandated (an order, a command) what type of car citizens should drive and car companies should manufacture in the future.

                                       

photo

But the House of Representatives rejected it two days ago.

According to its sponsor, the "Choice in Automobile Retail Sales Act of 2023" will:

"put a stop to this executive overreach, allowing consumers to have the freedom to decide what car works best for them and their families and preventing auto manufacturers from being forced to meet unrealistic mandates driven by the President’s Green New Deal agenda.”

Traffic jams 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Japanese physicists set up an experiment in 2008 to study traffic. Even with every driver trying to drive a consistent speed, "jamitons" occurred - waves of slowing traffic, though there is no obstacle. Watch the pattern:

Recently researchers re-created the experiment . . but with one difference. An autonomous car was included. After jamitons started forming, the self-driving feature was activated on the one autonomous car, and it changed the pattern.

"What this means in reality is that the presence of just one autonomous car can reduce congestion for all drivers . . "

Practical improvements? According to researchers' calculations, reducing excessive braking will result in a 40% reduction in fuel consumption, and the throughput of the road goes up by about 14%.

Traffic jams 1

 2017 Re-post

When you're in a traffic jam, you guess there's a crash or an obstacle ahead. But then traffic starts moving normally again, you see no crash, and you may be a little annoyed as you think, "wait, so nothing caused this delay??"

There's a term for it: phantom traffic jam. It's caused by one car slowing for any reason, resulting in everyone behind him/her having to slow down even more, then speed up to catch the traffic again, etc., etc., resulting in a wave of slow downs. Call them jamitons.

The maker of this video says the solution to jams is for every driver to keep an equal distance from the cars in front and behind. But can we drivers actually do that? Not really. So the ultimate solution suggested is . . NO humans driving!

And that means autonomous cars, or self-driving cars.