https://fortune.com/2022/10/04/twitter-texts-released-court-...
Elon could have had his weapons program for $1B. He could have dominated defense spending for a decade for $25B. I don’t think the ROI of this $44B of very indirect investment will compare.
[0] https://www.investopedia.com/investing/which-industry-spends...
He needs more than lobbying, he needs to sway an election. But there were obviously other reasons as well, he probably thinks a hive mind is cool to own and he could finally build his everything app X, etc.. it's just the orbital weapons program is near the top of that list as he thinks it's necessary to save humanity from itself. From free-wheeling philosophy discussions, he seems to think this SkyNet system is actually a kind of Roko's Basilisk.
He bought Twitter because he was momentarily ego tripping, it was a bad idea, should have stuck with Tesla/Spacex.
Twitter seems to have some pretty shit tech given how slow the website has always been.
BMW i4 - 365 miles
Ford Mustang Mach-E - 379 miles
BMW iX - 380 miles
Mercedes EQE - 384 miles
Mercedes EQS 450+, 640km, €106,307
Tesla Model S Plaid, 540km, €140,995
Mercedes EQE 350+, 525km, € 79,850
Tesla Model 3 LR DM, 485km, € 60,995
BMW i4 eDrive40, 470km, € 60,630
VW ID.3 Pro S 5Seats 450km, € 43,720
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrify_America#History
VW only did this because they were forced to. It's no mystery why traditional ICE manufacturers would be dragging their feet to modernize.
https://ionity.eu/en/ionity/who-we-are
Europe has standardized on CCS Type 2 Combo for charging. Any CCS EV can charge on any CCS charging network. Teslas can charge on Ionity, BMWs can charge on Tesla chargers, charging networks like FastNed, BP, GridServe, EnBW, Circle K and friends can charge all brands, etc.:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y33AArvMUQ
If I want to go down to John Day national monument in eastern Oregon, things are even worse. Things will get better (oh, and we want to do a trip to Anchorage someday...).
The Mach-E and ix are both a little better than they look though. The ix actually does amazingly well on range tests.
and yet I know more female Tesla owners than male
Beyond that, comparisons get more complicated, but there are still perks to the 3/Y. For example, the Ioniq 5 and EV6 charge faster but have less real world range at highway speeds. In practice, this negates most of their charging advantage.
If you want the best EV sedan for road tripping in the US right now, there is nothing lower price and also better than the 3 LR.
Impressive engineering is always about details.
If you want to argue that there is really nothing superior about Tesla's engineering that's fine, but you can't shove implementation details under the rug when it suits you. For there to be nothing superior in their engineering there must also be no implementation detail that is superior.
Heck, even Audi A.G. that you've mentioned (not close to being the biggest car company) is comparable to Tesla numbers-wise.
In many industries it's not the first movers that get the market, it's the big mature market-friendly solutions (sort of how the iPod wasn't the first commercial mp3 player).
It's not like people want them to optimize for acceleration anyway...
Ten years ago Tesla was much better ride than any other premium segment car.
That said, even today Tesla EV sales dwarf Audi, so the figurative Tesla lunch remains uneaten. That's what you have for playing catch-up.
Right now EVs make up such a minimal percentage of the car market that they aren't making a meaningful dent in ICE demand, but once they hit 10% or more, car companies that don't have a slice of that segment are going to be feeling it financially. I expect there will be major casualties in the car business because of failure to get into the EV market fast enough.
I had a lecture about electric mobility last semester where a tech lead (don't want to dox them) from Daimler's electric truck program and a tech lead from Daimler's electric car program were invited. In regards to electric trucks things seem to be going great but the electric car program had massive problems with Tesla. The person in question was very hyped about the competition but admitted they got beat with the previous gen cars and that they had to completely redesign their processes to be quicker since Tesla is constantly updating their models. They were hoping to be slightly better than Tesla this gen and to get ahead next gen. So in summary I'd say that didn't turn out great for them.
>It's not like people want them to optimize for acceleration anyway...
The many YouTube views of teslas beating sports cars would beg to differ. If people didn't want acceleration everyone would be driving an 80HP hatchback or a 120-160HP SUV.
If they started earlier they would have been able to earn some of that money that went to Tesla, could have ironed out the issues while EVs were still considered in something like an open beta where owners had a lot more tolerance for issues and their processes would have become more agile naturally due to the competition with Tesla. Not to mention they could have improved their image as a luxury EV manufacturer by being one of the first.
You can even see the panic about being late to the game on Daimler's part. Their first gen EVs was made using ICE chassis which logically could not compete with cars designed from the ground up to be electric.
The only one that I dislike within Audi is the Q4 etron. Its too close to the id4, IMO.
Think about all the Chinese manufacturers, that for years were churning out the butts of jokes. How many of those would have survived in an actual competitive market?
I'm not a musk fan boy, but what he did with Tesla is impressive.
Compared to the company they were buying chassis from (lotus). If someone took lotus to the size of Tesla in less than 2 decades, would you not say that's impressive?
Starting a boutique sports car manufacturer is 'relatively' easy. Making a global car company, not so much.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...
Compare that with VW, how many electric cars they are making, and how long did the biggest auto-manufacter in Germany (not a bad country for Engineering standards) took to get factories ready for EVs?
I personally don't like Teslas that much, I think they got a lot of things wrong, but the manufacturing process engineering really is leading the whole car industry by quite a ways.
Check out MunroLive's teardown videos on YouTube where they talk about the changes to part counts, castings, fasteners, and all the internal details that consumers don't notice.
I’d prefer to buy a Toyota
Tesla may or may not succeed in appealing to the late majority and laggards, but if they don’t, the Toyota you buy in 15 years will still have benefitted from the industry changes Tesla is leading today.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations
For example, both Lucid and Rivian use round cells for batteries. BMW is exploring the 4680 form factor. Most other manufacturers still do not use round cells.
Tesla is using large castings for major parts of the frame. I think Volvo is starting to do this? Its not entirely a new trend, but again, Tesla was the first in the auto industry to do it this way.
The way Tesla does the structural pack for the 4680 is unique as well at the moment.
Having said that, I think Tesla people overstate the customer significance of all of these things. The real impact is technically interesting, but isn't really making a big difference in the outcome of the vehicles.
There are other EVs that charge faster and are significantly cheaper too, now that Tesla keeps raising prices.
But sure, how about:
- Model years. Have you seen the 2022 Tesla Model 3? No, because it doesn't exist. Teslas evolve over time. Other manufacturers still have days where the next model year starts being produced and the cars are very different than the previous day.
- Greatly simplified cabin. I hate this, but I think it's the future.
- OTA software updates. Some other makers are doing small updates a bit, but nobody (let alone everybody) is doing what Tesla is here
-
People who like Tesla and people who hate it both seem prone to making declarations about how different it is that seem unfounded to me.
The auto industry underwent a long evolution to regimented model years, and they still make changes in between to this day. Framing a lack of model years as progress rather than regress by ~a half century seems arbitrary to me.
When cars are recalled, it isn't uncommon for the population to be defined as a range of serial numbers. The fact that recalls aren't always based on model years seems like pretty good evidence that changes are made in between, doesn't it?
So, no tactile buttons.
>OTA software updates
So Tesla has revolutionized two things that I think should be illegal in a vehicle. Awesome.
I'll add a very cavalier and dangerous "self-driving" that can't actually drive itself to the list of Tesla counter-innovations.
I appreciate the direction they pushed the industry towards, but I feel like the innovation has finished and I'd expect a lot of the problems to be ironed out.
Toyota on the other hand have produced a car which runs on hydrogen, it is in production and for sale in the USA right now. They also do hybrids and I'm sure if they wanted to, they'd do electric no problems.
American automotive manufacturing became hyper-conservative over time. A willingness to let (non-safety-critical (1)) bugs get to market with the tradeoff of making products you otherwise wouldn't is a market-distinguishing tradeoff.
(1) But my larger concern is that I can't say about Tesla that only non-safety-critical bugs are making it out the door, so I also won't buy one. Because unlike a buggy phone or buggy smart watch, a buggy car with safety-critical bugs can kill other people, so there's wisdom in disallowing it.
Why... unions. Japanese Manufacturers have evaded the UAW problem, where Ford and GM have had to flee the nation to get out from under decades of sunk costs
Tesla was not the first EV sold in the US. Earlier attempts by the established manufacturers were curiosities at best. And now that Tesla proved that EVs can actually be good, and can be made profitable, those established manufacturers are willing to move into that market.
So, no, it's not about engineering, it's about taking the risk and committing to expanding the market.
The iMiev preceded the Tesla and sold better in many part of the world because it was a more decent proposal.
What Tesla did was making greenwashing and wasting energy with electricity dfast and cool. It is probably better than wasting with ICE in nuclear powered countries but that is not what the world need right now or ever.
But he actually did change the narrative today. Yesterday, he had to make Twitter better.
Now IF Twitter doesn't crash and the World Cup goes by without a hitch, it's going to be the biggest win EVER. IF.
I won't be surprised if he churns through a bunch of different ideas: Subscriptions, Deals with news companies, short form videos + creator tools, different kinds of ad experiences, the edit button, better spam filtering etc.
There's a lot of potential things Twitter could be doing if they didn't limit themselves to their core product.
I don't think (b) is unlikely. Their current product is already highly valuable. You don't need their short form video product to succeed in a way TikTok did but there's enough of an audience to capture there to improve the company's valuation.
On the other hand, exactly that development towards super-apps makes it even more important that we push for decentralization.
Not to mention that the US is already reigned by mono- and oligopolies in many markets, it is also a privacy disaster.
Many nations, especially in Asia, have little awareness of the concept of privacy. and thus its consequences, so it isn't surprising such offers took off so swiftly there.
I’m not sure anything Elon says about the current or future state of Twitter has any credibility. It seems like the company is now being directed via stream of consciousness at this point.
Giant, bloated organizations (and projects, and other things) can often be helped by reduced-size, highly-directed streams of consciousness suddenly making unilateral changes to them.
One way to term it— and there are many— is crisis restructuring. Whether Twitter was actually in crisis, and whether the unilateral stream of consciousness doing the restructuring is ”divinely inspired,” remains to be seen.
Certainly paid enough for the privilege
Even if Musk somehow learns to stop live-tweeting his trial-by-fire, the damage might be done: natural iterations on business plans and features will play into a by now near-universal stereotype of Musk as some sort of shoot-from-the-hip madman, which will deter business partners from committing.
(Like, if I'm Fox News or the NY Times, do I want to commit to publish on Musk's new platform when tomorrow he might get stoned and decide to offer hosting to the Daily Stormer? Or, if I'm Bank of America, do I want to commit to consumer payments when tomorrow Musk might pivot his "super app" to offering video shorts instead?)
Again, maybe I'm living in a bubble, but Musk's reputation seems like a huge impediment to, like, doing this. At all. Ever.
If you look at Ariane V, Atlas V or Delta IV, they all have some peculiarities and operational warts. Large solid rockets, Russian engine, hydrogen. In some sense, Falcon 9 is the most "ordinary" of the launchers available now.
Bingo. Hard-core engineering has been the lynchpin of Tesla and SpaceX's success -- they literally won via designing and manufacturing superior physical things.
It makes sense that EM would blunder by attempting to reproduce that type of success at Twitter. And it will be a blunder, unless: (a) he plans to build one or more new products (or drastically change the nature of the existing product), and (b) those new or drastically changed products will somehow "win" in a big way that Twitter isn't winning now.
But at least to me, (a) doesn't seem likely and (b) seems even less likely.