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!  

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.

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from Business Insider

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.

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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 charging 4

Charging electric vehicles is important to our current U.S. government. Money is being directed to a national system of charging stations - a way to put a finger on the scales, as it were, because this administration likes EV's and wants to favor them over conventional gas-powered vehicles.  

But there are different technologies among builders of the stations as well as among car manufacturers. Which will the government choose as the standard for the country?

Tesla has the largest private network (over 40,000) and the best charging technology. But a feud exists between the President's administration and Elon Musk on various issues. So . . the government picked an inferior system to be the national standard.

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Never one to stand down from a fight, it looks like Elon won this battle: 

A deal was just announced that both General Motors and Ford are going to make electric vehicles using Tesla's charging technology, as opposed to all others. Together, these three manufacture 70% of American EV's. Rivian followed with the same choice. Hyundai and Toyota are considering it.

Musk said Tesla “is not going to do anything to prefer Tesla [cars charging]” as more rival brands access [Tesla's] Supercharger network. “It will be an even playing field … The most important thing is we advance the electric vehicle revolution.”

Giga Berlin

A couple of weeks before Giga Texas opened, Tesla's first European manufacturing facility opened on March 22 in Germany: Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg.

Keeping up with consumer demand for their cars is a challenge for this company. Delays and waiting lists are the rule while they work to ramp up their output. Back in 2017, CEO Elon Musk famously predicted a period of "production hell."  

As many as 500,000 vehicles annually will come out of this factory, mostly Model Y. Up until now, cars were shipped from the Shanghai plant to fulfill demand in Europe while buyers waited 5-6 months. Giga Berlin will be a huge strategic asset for Tesla. No wonder Elon danced at the grand opening.

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Giga Texas

Gigafactory is a good term for it: the largest factory building in the world by volume, it's fifteen city blocks long with 70,000 solar panels on the roof. This is the new Tesla factory in Austin, Texas, and it just opened.

As Elon puts it, raw materials go in one end of the building, a lot of stuff happens, and then new cars come out the other end. He calls it the "most advanced car factory the world has ever seen," and it's packed with energy-saving and water-saving technology.

Half a million Model Y's will be produced here annually, and the brand new cyber truck will be made here next year.

Fifteen thousand were expected at the big celebration, "Cyber Rodeo," and Elon (wearing a black cowboy hat) drove himself onto the stage to deliver the keynote.

from Fortune

Battery range+

Number of miles you can drive an electric vehicle on a single charge has always been a concern for EV enthusiasts. New EV models have a range of 100-500 miles, while Tesla's Model S currently stands at 350-400 miles.

Battery technology innovation, critical to the future of EV's, is intensely pursued by a number of companies.

Our Next Energy (ONE) just tried its system in a Model S and had great results, what they think is a world record for EV range on one charging. 

Tesla bot 2

 (cont'd from yesterday's post)

This author is an R&D software engineer and textbook author who follows AI and electric vehicles. He says, "Nobody is taking Tesla AI seriously anymore . . . Musk has, again, promised vaporware" (software that doesn't exist yet).

Back when Tesla was gearing up for the Model 3, he promised a very high level of automation which would make his factory look like an "alien dreadnaught" when up and operating. But it proved undoable, and the somewhat-automated factory's workflow is instead mostly manual.

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"It is unclear how Musk, who was unable to get robotic automation to work in his own factory doing highly-specific tasks, expects to build a “general-purpose” robot for general tasks."

When you read something about AI, always remember that there are two kinds. "Narrow" AI is common now, the kind that can compute tremendous amounts of data or be programmed to do certain tasks. "General" is the kind that scares people, possessing independent consciousness and creativity. Many believe that will never be achieved. 

From MindMatters 

Tesla bot

Inflated optimism and exaggeration have long accompanied the predictions of Elon Musk, but this time media is calling him on it.

AI Day on August 19 set the stage to introduce the newly developed D1 chip that will power the artificial intelligence (AI) that enables its autopilot system. He called it "the best chip in the world." Motley Fool thinks it impressive.

Then the intention to build a humanoid robot was announced. A breakdancing actor in a robot costume entertained the audience. "But Musk gave no indication of having made concrete progress on actually building such a machine," says The Guardian. 

Musk claims the robot should be able to do general tasks, as opposed to merely specific tasks (think of manufacturing robots). He claimed that their expertise in AI will enable Tesla to do this, though their "full self-driving" is far from level 5.

So Ars Technica concludes, "Tesla Bot is the company’s troubled Autopilot system in humanoid form."

From a Forbes writer, "Is Tesla a serious company? Sure it is. [But] is the Tesla Bot at all serious?" This time it's harder to take Elon seriously.

Tesla AI claims

 For several years now Tesla has been assuring us that "full self-driving" was right around the corner. Back in 2016, an optimistic Elon Musk thought that by 2018 you would be able to summon your (Tesla) car from across the country, and it would navigate any road safely on its way to you including charging itself at stations. 

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Later that year he claimed that their hardware was complete which would enable Level 5 self driving -  which means you can sleep in the back seat because the car is totally autonomous, that they were only waiting for regulations to catch up. 

Now, not so much. Current claims are more realistic and less exciting.

A report Tesla gave to the SEC recently says that they are "developing self-driving and driver assist technologies" that they cannot guarantee will work. Those former over-optimistic claims are being walked back.

EV is backup

Texas was unexpectedly hit hard with bitterly cold temperatures last month. Intense winter weather happens here in Minnesota too. But since we get it every single winter, we're always ready with routine snow removal and emergency plans. 

It's a little different in Texas. Their largest electricity provider warned that there would be power outages. Record-setting demand for power far out-stripped what the utility companies could do. Over four million customers lost all power. Some had no heat, no water, no lights for hours or for days. And no hot food. 

This is where electric vehicles (EV) came to the rescue for some. 

Tesla owners in San Antonio had charged their car to 90% just the day before the storm. They charged their phones and slept in their Model S:

"When the temperature inside the house dipped below 50F, my wife and I put our six cats in their carriers and stacked them in the back seat . . .

"The temperature in the garage was 33F. We ran the heater for eight hours in Camp mode one night and we were able to sleep in comfort at 69 degrees. We only used 17% of the battery charge for those eight hours. We did this for three nights on one charge. We were able to keep our phones charged which allowed us to keep in contact with our families. Thank God for the Tesla."

Tesla rising 2

 (cont'd from yesterday's post)

Tesla had a spectacular 2020. Quarter 3 (July-September) produced new company records for manufacture and delivery of new cars, and then Q4 topped Q3 and set brand new records.

Year 2020 in summary: 499,550 new Teslas were delivered to customers. Half a million is the goal they set for 2018 and Elon Musk is famous for over-promising - but now it's done. It was done despite a pandemic forcing the weeks-long closure of two of its four factories.

Big numbers like these drove up market capitalization. To grasp how big this is, combine the values of oil companies ExxonMobil, Chevron and BP with car manufacturers General Motors, Volkswagen, Ford, and Nissan. Tesla's market cap is bigger.

But the enormous market cap of $780 billion is evidence that investors expect much, much more productivity growth. Elon Musk hopes for a million deliveries this year. Maybe it'll take a couple of years.

Tesla rising 1

For Tesla, 2020 was an amazing year. You may remember that it did a 5-for-1 stock split in late August, meaning that whatever number of shares you owned at the time was multiplied by five. The value of a share also was divided by five. 

"Market cap" shows the astonishing rise of the company over twelve months. This metric is calculated by multiplying the number of shares by the current stock price. A year ago Tesla was valued at just over $100 billion, but this month the market cap is $780 billion.

It's a reflection of investors' confidence in the company's future success making and selling cars. At least some of that confidence now seems well-placed . . because Tesla in 2020, despite the pandemic, set impressive new records.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Dumb thieves

Owner Annabelle Brett's phone sounded the alarm when her Tesla Model 3 was stolen from her garage early one morning as she was getting ready for work as a radio host in Australia. She kept her head, used her Tesla apps, and now has a great story.

She was able to track her Model 3 and, after calling police, follow it in a friend's car. Sentry Mode already had photos. “My phone app has the ability to slow down the car and also mess with it a bit, so I was able to put the windows down, beep the horn and basically screw with them as they were driving it,” explained Brett.

When the thieves knew they were beaten, they abandoned the car . . but left a driver license in it.

from Teslarati

Future $25k EV

 (cont'd from 9-25 post)

That same author who wrote the first Forbes article (linked in 9-25 post) has a prediction to make. Investors apparently were under-whelmed by Tesla's "Battery Day" report, but he sees an indication of the future in it. 

Some investors were not impressed by the incremental technical innovations. "But the tail end of the Battery Day presentation was incredibly significant and foretells the final nail in the coffin of the traditional car industry based around fossil fuel propulsion."

The battery makes an electrical vehicle (EV) more expensive to purchase than a traditional car. But that will change because of all the cost-savings Elon unveiled on Battery Day. He expects to deliver the $25k model within three years.

So . . "When you can buy an EV with over 300 miles of range that is faster and equipped with better technology than an internal combustion engine VW Golf, as well as being much cheaper to run, only groundless anti-electric prejudice will stop you."

from Forbes, "Tesla's $25,000 Electric Car Means Game Over for Gas and Oil"

Tesla value 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Over three years according to yesterday's chart, the BMW lost 44% of its original value. Those fourteen depreciated cars in the chart each lost 39-53% of their value over three years. Tesla Model 3 depreciated too . . but only 10.2%.

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There's the difference in the business model: Tesla customers retain much more value in their new car than other car buyers do. Customers retain tens of thousands of dollars of value over the years when they buy a Tesla.

Happy customers make for a successful business. That's one solid reason for a soaring market cap. How is value retained? Updates and improvements are available to Tesla customers free of charge, year after year. 

How do you get the newest improvements as an owner of any of the other cars? You buy the newest model. Again. And again.

from Clean Technica

Tesla value 1

Tesla stock continues to soar far above all other car stocks and will split today, despite all the doubts of detractors. Some think investors value Tesla's future because of its advancing battery technology or the charisma of its CEO.

But there's a different theory relating to its business model, a theory that makes good sense to me. There's more going on than just technology and charisma.

Look at this analysis of the depreciation of other makes of cars compared to Tesla cars:

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(cont'd tomorrow)

No cobalt

Three years ago I posted that Tesla was going to find a new source for the cobalt required in electric vehicle (EV) batteries. Most of the world's supply came from mines in the Congo, where children worked under dangerous conditions.

Now they've gone beyond re-sourcing the cobalt . . to eliminating cobalt altogether. And that is going to give Tesla another leg-up in the EV car business.

Big electric batteries put EV's out of the reach of many car buyers. They make EV's roughly 30% more expensive than internal combustion engine (ICE) cars to purchase (though they're cheaper to run). Cobalt made the price so high, but no longer.

Tesla's new cobalt-free lithium iron phosphate battery is already being used, with the Chinese government's approval, at the new factory in Shanghai. Purchase price of a new Tesla is going to go down. 

Traditional cars are going to lose some of their advantage. Let's see what happens.

from Forbes

Tesla way up

Back in February of this year, you learned that Tesla stock was rising fast. The rise continued to the point that Tesla is now the most valuable car company, even beyond Toyota.