Electric Vehicles (Cars, Planes, and Ships)

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Of all the things, flooring it can get things sruck?

Another reason I'd never buy anything by Tesla. Sounds like they are the epitome of the phrases "half-ass" and "eh, it'll do."

This also gave us a number of Cybertrucks they sold, 4000. For comparison’s sake Ford sells 2100 F-150 models a day.

That's hardly a fair comparison. Cybertruck is a brand new vehicle and still hasn't gotten all the bugs worked out. It would be fairer to compare it to the F-150 Lightning, and we don't yet have any solid numbers with which to do that.

Remember when the Toyota bZ4X (and Subaru Solterra, which is basically the same design) was recalled because its wheels could fall off? Let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 19th 2024 at 6:18:07 AM

I mean, hard to say which is worse, but I think "accelerator gets stuck if you push real hard" should be easier to test for than "wheels fall off". Though not catching that one is also impressive.

In either case, it's an amazing ability to miss something that should be part of normal use.

Okay, they sold 24,000 Lightning’s in the U.S in 2023, that’s 2000 a month. Cybertruck started being delivered in November/December so let’s say 4-5 months now. If they stayed on that pace they’d achieve half the rate as the Lightnings sold, but that’s before you remember that Ford is also beginning to sell in other countries.

Obviously Ford had an advantage by having gotten to the release first, but the Cybertruck’s aren’t looking good by multiple metrics. You’ve had Trucks break literally seconds after delivery, you can’t take it through a car wash without voiding the warranty, it’s starting to rust already, and the thing still hasn’t been crash tested.

Edited by Shaoken on Apr 19th 2024 at 9:04:59 PM

To be specific, the problem with the accelerator is that the rubber sleeve on the lever can slide off due to the pressure of your foot, then the sleeve gets wedged into a gap behind the pedal while half-way on the lever, keeping it pressed down.

That should be an easy fix, just make it so that the rubber sleeve can't slide off the accelerator pedal. It's just weird that even happened. Hope nothing else on the Cybertruck just falls off after a mild amount of use.

Having a complete recall so soon out of the gate on top of a string of bad press (the trucks rust quickly, you're not supposed to wash them in direct sunlight, a number of accidents have seen the front two wheels become completely detached from the rest of the vehicle, concerns over the lack of crumple zones, etc.) and that something as serious as this wasn't found out during the internal testing is concerning.

The Guardian has a good article on the woes of the Cybertruck. It's a good read, and raises how the Cybertruck's release and recall has wiped away all of the gains in stock price Tesla made over the last year, on top of the company's existing legal battles over Musk's pay package and FSD software accidents and deaths, with the prospect of something coming up over the Cybertruck. We have a first quarter earnings report coming up which should be interesting to see, especially for any investors in the company.

Not sure I fully trust The Guardian with Tesla stories given its history, but Cybertruck is definitely having a rough start.

Q1 results for Tesla are dropping in about an hour. Considering all that's going on, this is likely to be heavily watched by markets, so I'll provide a summary below.

We already know the company had a sales decline from Q1 of the prior year for the first time, and this is obviously expected to weigh on revenue. I'm mainly curious about margins. Operating margin was 8.2% in Q4 and 9.2% for the full year of 2023. This plus free cash flow are good metrics of overall health.

Cybertruck may weigh on margins but should be trivial in terms of its net impact simply due to its low volume. Gross margin will be another valuable metric to answer the question of whether price cuts were offset by cost reductions. We also expect some very good numbers from the energy business.

Edit: I was off on the timing. Here's the update

• Gross revenue down 9% YoY, gross margin down very slightly but stable.
• Operating margin down to 5.5%. That'll make markets grumpy... or not. The stock price jumped after market close; I guess the weakness was priced in.
• EBITDA margin slightly up QoQ, down YoY.
• $1.2B operating income, down 56% YoY, ($2.5B) free cash flow.

• Decline in vehicle deliveries is attributed to the Fremont Model 3 refresh and the Red Sea crisis, plus the arson attack in Germany.
• Cybertruck output at 1,000 per week.
• Energy revenue is up sequentially at over $1.6B, with 24.6% gross margin.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 23rd 2024 at 4:14:32 AM

Tesla to lay off everyone working on Superchargers, new vehicles

So that doesn't sound good. Especially considering the Supercharger network is kind of Tesla's flagship at this point.

Ugh. For the first time in a while, I'm genuinely wondering what he's doing with the company.

Ditching the team in charge of the supercharger network is especially bizarre.

Right now the reason why EV sales seem to have hit a ceiling is probably in part because of limited charging infrastructure. Heck I'll even say that concerns over limited charging infrastructure was a big reason why I bought a PHEV instead of a full EV for my recent car.

So establishing more charging stations is going to help vehicle sales. To the point where it arguably makes sense to build charging stations that aren't expected to turn a profit in a reasonable period of time. Just having visible charging stations that aren't super busy is going to help move vehicles.

Laying off the executive and the team in charge of all of this seems like a terrible business decision.

This is the most baffling decision I’ve read Tesla make in a long time.

Saw the article earlier, especially noted how Musk - after firing a lot of people already - said he's going to ask even more people to quit if they don't pass the arbitrary tests he's talking about. Which is ludicrous given that he fired the executive and team responsible for the fompany's most valuable asset, if that team isn't safe from termination

And after the objectively poor roll-out of the Cybertruck so far and lack of a new EV model to replace the older ones you'd think he would want to have a new safe model right to roll out, but instead he's talking about robo taxis to save that business.

They are also getting rid of the whole public policy team.

The article also notes that earlier last month they fired the executive in charge of battery development.

Guess Tesla is getting the Twitter treatment.

Edited by M84 on Apr 30th 2024 at 7:58:48 PM

I wonder how long it will take Musk to have a Spotify moment and realize that, you know, big companies kinda need workers to operate properly.

Tesla is pivoting towards robo taxis. Clearly human employees are not considered essential.

Battery development is incidentally another really important aspect of getting more market share for E Vs.

My speculation is that an EV actually needs to have about a 600 mile range for consumers that have no inherent preference for E Vs. That's far beyond what a gas vehicle needs for the same consumer, but with fast charging taking considerably longer than filling up a gas tank and fewer available chargers means that people are going to want longer ranges to compensate.

A lot of this is a problem of perception, since it's not really a huge deal for most people to make a planned 10-15 minute stop every 250 miles or so, but perception matters regardless of how grounded in reality it is.

Some of the more experimental solid state batteries seem to be getting close to that range, and if Tesla cedes that line of innovation to the competition they could get buried.

Edited by Falrinn on Apr 30th 2024 at 5:26:44 AM

My guess is that the Q1 earnings are why this is all happening.

Natrona Energy starts commercial production of Sodium-Ion batteries.

While this particular round of production isn't meant for E Vs, instead intended for stationary battery backups, and I'm not too familiar with Natron Energy as a company if this is the real deal it does bode well for the future of E Vs. There's a big difference in someone cooking up an interesting battery chemistry in the lab and batteries being produced at a commercial scale.

Sodium Ion batteries have the potential to be dirt cheap compared to Lithium batteries, and not able to catch fire. Which should bring down the costs associated with E Vs.

Edited by Falrinn on May 1st 2024 at 7:35:22 AM

Sodium is pretty bad for EV's. IIRC the capacity is way lower. Not great for vehicles, or consumer electronics where capacity is more important than price. But for availability and scale? Yeah.

4x From personal experience, I can say that a large part of range anxiety is that the estimated range display on most (if not all) EVs is wildly inaccurate. How would you like to start a road trip with 300 miles on the battery icon, then 50 miles later it's down to 150, and 50 miles after that the car goes into limp-home mode and it's 100 miles to the next charger?

Yeah, that happened to me. Three times. For comparison, my dino-powered car, motorcycle, and airplane have very consistent, predictable fuel burns (mpg for the car and bike, gph for the plane) in all conditions. 600 miles estimated range on a BEV is extremely unlikely to actually achieve that.

Edited by coinneach on May 1st 2024 at 8:57:15 AM

Remember all the You Tube and social media videos of people testing how dangerous the Cybertrucks trunk closing was on carrots? Well someone finally tested with their finger and it hurts as much as you think it does.

According to a Tesla engineer the tester was doing it wrong as every time the CT detects resistance on the trunk and aborts it applies more pressure the next time it attempts it.

So they programmed it to become MORE dangerous with repeat attempts.

Fucking hell.

The Engineer's logic is that if you failed to close the trunk then it was probably a bag blocking it, so the trunk door should come down harder to force it out of the way.

There are supposed to be sensors to prevent damaging something it shouldn't and there was a software update to make them safer. However, this test was done with the update and was worse.

To me this is engineers trying to engineer a solution to something that wasn't that big of a problem. And yes I know other car models both EV and ICE do have automated trunk closing, but there was no need to make the trunk close with more pressure if it was blocked the first time.