That you think Tesla is solely a money making venture via automobiles is telling. It's a car company that could reduce our world's impact on the environment substantially over time. It is a vehicle (ha) for battery and charging technology, and for AI via their research in driver assist.
It isn't unreasonable for a tech billionaire with civilization defining aspirations to want to make better cars, build better batteries, and improve public transit all at once.
For sure Musk has an incredible carisma which seems at this point to have grown to rival the reality distortion field of Jobs. All the other claims remain to be proven.
That’s all very much not what I see when I look at Tesla, it’s just the marketing. The reality is someone getting another $2.6 billion, while desperate-to-believe people cheer him on because they think it’s part of a master plan to save them. I’m not part of the Church of Musk, sorry, I’m an empiricist.
> and a person not overly taken with his “charisma” wonders if his interest in mass transit is in scuttling it.
No, you’re just a run-of-the-mill conspiracist, and cynic.
To note, he actually hasn’t thrown in with hyperloop, he open sourced he idea for people to iterate. He literally just thinks he can build a cheaper tunnel, and I haven’t seen any serious proposals to run hyperloops through them.
>No, you’re just a run-of-the-mill conspiracist, and cynic.
May be those are not really bad. We are living in a time where stuff that conspiracist, and cynics have been saying for years turning out to be true...
Also, while you accuse them, are you sure you are just not being a true believer of the cult of Elon Musk
> No, you’re just a run-of-the-mill conspiracist, and cynic.
In a time where just being skeptical of Musk gets you attacked, I am not sure you have the authority to say anybody else is run-of-the-mill. He may be a cynic, but the mainstream sentiment towards Musk is almost church-like, so generally people outside of that are not in the majority.
Look, I get it, nobody else seems to be doing exciting tech lately and Musk is certainly not doing CRUD apps, so I see where the excitement is coming from, but I also see a lot of fanaticism and PR bullshit around Musk, so I'd say some amount of skepticism is well placed.
Read Bloomberg, WSJ, Fox, heck NYT, Washington Post for articles critical of him or his ventures. He got a lot of PR for sure, but he's hardly worshiped in the mainstream.
> Look, I get it, nobody else seems to be doing exciting tech lately and Musk is certainly not doing CRUD apps, so I see where the excitement is coming from, but I also see a lot of fanaticism and PR bullshit around Musk, so I'd say some amount of skepticism is well placed.
Skepticism is always healthy, but dropping false facts like this is not: "He making his money on cars with lithium batteries, and chemical rockets. That’s where he’s spending and making his billions. He’s dropping 3.8% of his recent $2.6 billion award on this project"
Also, aren't we getting infinite streams of what Google, Amazon, FB, Apple, Microsoft are up to? Count how many articles on HN about Tesla vs. Google?
Have you come across the idea that "All advertising is good advertising".
Even people blaming/skeptical or even hating on Elon Musk is doing good PR for Musk and his companies.
What something like Musk cannot afford is indifference from people. So the important task for something like Musk is to get people talk about them. It does not really matter if it good or bad.
> We are living in a time where stuff that conspiracist, and cynics have been saying for years turning out to be true..
We also live in a time where stuff that conspiracists and cynics have been saying for years is absolute bullshit. Don't fall victim to confirmation bias.
>We also live in a time where stuff that conspiracists and cynics have been saying for years is absolute bullshit.
We are also living in a time where things like ubeam and Theranos can get millions in funding..and various nefraious schems that intend to take the naive public for a ride...
Empirically, what other US car company is making as big of a difference in greening transport?
No car company, particularly in the US, is in even the same league as Tesla when it comes to advancing electric cars. “Oh, but it’s just a niche”... the Model 3 is already outselling the Bolt, and the Model 3 has a lower base price and is just at the beginning of the ramp up curve.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Other car makers are perfectly capable of building EVs & the associated infrastructure. Musk isn’t magic, but empirically no one else really seems to care. So of course people just tear down the only company actually doing something significant here, because modern intellectual discourse is primarily about “deconstruction” and cynicism.
> Empirically, what other US car company is making as big of a difference in greening transport?
Assuming you're not fixated on "car company" per se (because why should corporate form matter), then Janette Sadik-Khan and NYCDoT have probably made a bigger difference in greening US transport than Tesla to date. And worldwide, of course, there are countless contenders.
"Greening" is only half the battle: the other half is liveable cities and streets. Personal motor transport makes that worse, whether electric or internal combustion. If Musk delivers on better public transport then Tesla can claim some credit there, but as yet there's nothing to show.
Prius proves my point. It ain’t electric (and therefore it’s only a marginal improvement, not one with the potential for utter decarbonization...), but it has everything needed. It proves that traditional automakers could be making EVs left and right, but they aren’t. Oh, and Toyota isn’t US.
Seriously, put a bigger battery in an old Prius, add a charger, and hack the firmware to keep the engine off (and enable higher speed electric), and you have a full EV at even highway speeds. So why didn’t they do it but Tesla has? It’s amazing how much crap Tesla gets even though they’re the only ones with the guts to go full electric (and thus potentially zero emissions... already better than Priuses without being, you know, Priuses).
> Seriously, put a bigger battery in an old Prius, add a charger, and hack the firmware to keep the engine off (and enable higher speed electric), and you have a full EV at even highway speeds. So why didn’t they do it but Tesla has?
Because fanboys don't buy vehicles if somebody else sells it, just look at Chevy bolt. They need the futuristic hype of full self driving and the patented saving the planet. And also, Tesla can afford selling at a loss, nobody else can.
I drive an EV not made by Tesla. GM barely markets the Bolt/Volt (which are great cars) at all, mostly just trying to reach other EV buyers. GM also lobbies against any fuel economy standards.
But suppose you’re right, that the only way Tesla has been able to sell so many EVs is by fanboyism, by Musk’s hype machine. But that then deserves your praise not derision, as Musk has been able to make EVs cool to the masses. If EVs must be hyped to gain traction, and Musk successfully hyped them, then Musk deserves the credit even more.
For lies about self driving, for horrible working conditions, for the endless stupid statements about v automation/ai in general, and for causing an obnoxious fan base, there is criticism.
Just because Tesla made cars cool doesn't mean they get to create the narrative that no one else wants to make electric cars
> Just because Tesla made cars cool doesn't mean they get to create the narrative that no one else wants to make electric cars.
Tesla isn't creating that narrative, their competitors are. None of the major US car makers really do want to make electric cars, that's just a fact. And few others do, with the exception of maybe BMW, chinese firms, and nissan, but even there you have slow-rolled updating to EV. Porsche is serious about it, but also are not trying to make a mass market anything.
My point was that making EV vehicles that aren't susbstandard in their features (interior materials) and sell at a good price wasn't profitable. Batteries+Motors were too costly. Tesla managed as their fanboys would buy costly cars of substandard quality.
Now you'll see that dozens of electric cars will roll out in 2018-2022. But you'll come out and tell me that Tesla showed these guys that electric cars were possible.
Ever wonder why Nissan leaf always had a small range and wasn't "fun" to drive? because batteries and motors are costly.
And Telsa, whilst more innovate than a Prius seems to have created latest generation of smugness (at least it seems that way on Twitter and their new model 3).
The CO2 impact of your car driving is much less than impact from heating-cooling, and probably also from your diet. Cars are efficient machines. Houses are rarely built well, especially in the US, and the production of common US diet ingredients is ridiculously inefficient but heavily subsidized.
The overall consuming emissions contribution of the transport sector is at around 20%. The building sector (hvac) seems to be similar.
Cars are not efficient machines. The engine is limited to around 50% efficiency, the heat is wasted. And you're typically propelling 1600+kg of mass which is almost purely overhead.
Heating and cooling trumps the transport sector with 30%+. Globally, stuff does skew a lot from our first worldly habits.
If you do the calculations similar to those done in http://withouthotair.com/ you'd see your first worldly habits put your heating and cooling at the top, and probably your diet at the second place.
Energy use is not the same as CO2 production. Cars produce a lot of CO2 in the oil extraction, transport, and refining stages. Heating and AC use wind, solar, electric, nuclear, etc not just fossil fuels.
It isn't unreasonable for a tech billionaire with civilization defining aspirations to want to make better cars, build better batteries, and improve public transit all at once.