Posted on 10/28/2023 10:36:48 AM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion
I’m, quite possibly, the last person anyone would want to write to about how great Musk is. I think he’s a snake oil salesman, nothing more.
I don’t care about his cars...the first of which went to the rich, who also enjoyed some generous tax breaks from the rest of the taxpayers, so they could enjoy a Sunday driver to brag about to their rich friends.
As for his factories, it’s nice to see him building in the US. However, if what Peter Schweizer says is true, when China built a factory for him in China, he was required to give them access to the technology. So, time will tell if China can’t figure out a way to undercut him.
I’m not trying to argue with you, just sharing some thoughts. The recent ship fire on The Freemantle Highway destroyed three thousand cars. From the ship insurance perspective an electric car is an electric car. It may turn out the Teslaas don’t catch fire. But I can’t see an insurance company taking the risk, especially when the car can be damaged while loading or unloading. The cars are heavy, and the battery is on the bottom. A slightly buckled loading ramp that represents no risk to an ICE car might ding the battery on an electric car and cause millions of dollars’ worth of damage. Also, a rogue wave or an accidental water release due to a malfunctioning fire suppression system could flood a deck. An improperly secured cargo could cause damage that could result in a fire. The problem of an electric vehicle fire is far more problematic than any other fire. Lithium car batteries burn at 3500 degrees. During the recent car park fire in London that destroyed 1600 cars a battery car burned through the building’s floor. It was hot enough to burn the concrete and the steel the building was constructed from. I just don’t see an insurance company risking letting a carrier they insure take the risk. Why should they?
As far as individuals go, it doesn’t matter how many ordinary plebs like us get hurt or killed. But the first time someone important, like a politician or an actress gets killed by a vehicle fire, it will be the death knell of electric cars.
https://tonyseba.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/RethinkingEnergy2020-2030-LRR.pdf
If you download that PDF and scroll down to page 8, you’ll see a graph which purports to tell you how much (or from your perspective, how little) battery is needed to back up a solar/wind electric power source. Tony Seba’s trick (if he is indeed its author, rather than simply promoter) is to propose a big-to-enormous overbuilding of solar power capacity. Depending on geography.
According to the theory, less sunlight can be compensated with more solar panels and more batteries, but nowhere in the inhabited world are the quantities of solar and wind prohibitive.
Again, the definition of “prohibitive” depends on the price of the solar panels and the price of the batteries - and according to Wright’s Law as Seba interprets it, time and mass production of such will drive the prices down into the “not prohibitive” range.
Seba’s bottom line is that “going green” will be less expensive than continuing to rely on steam power for electrical power generation. I don’t have his supporting numbers, and I can’t check his work. But it is, at the very least, an interesting thesis.
Ping.
Not sure who wrote it, but the woman's name is Cathie Wood, rather than Cathy. That's my nitpicking for today. ;^)
Anyway, thanks. There should be a 'law' regarding the velocity of management adaptation to changing technology and market conditions. Musk would be the marble model, until such time as we switch from marble to carbon fiber. ;^)
I don’t care about his cars...the first of which went to the rich, who also enjoyed some generous tax breaks from the rest of the taxpayers, so they could enjoy a Sunday driver to brag about to their rich friends.
Tesla started at the very top of the market, making (inefficiently) very few, very expensiveAs for his factories, it’s nice to see him building in the US. However, if what Peter Schweizer says is true, when China built a factory for him in China, he was required to give them access to the technology. So, time will tell if China can’t figure out a way to undercut him.carstoys. Tesla was able to learn at high-price, low volume production and transitioned successfully to the segment of the market gradually closer to the median price market. Make no mistake, Musk himself believes in the goal of net zero CO2, and Tesla’s customers have predominantly been high-income liberals.The change is that now the cheapest Tesla is priced just below the median sale price of a new car bought in America. And on top of that, watt-hours to run a Tesla a given distance are less expensive than the gasoline it would take to propel a traditional car of similar size the same distance. And maintenance/degradation of Teslas - not excluding battery degradation over years of use is lower than that of traditional cars. Which means that the numbers favor buying the cheapest Tesla over buying a similar traditional car.
But of course, convenience of charging an EV is a different proposition to the convenience of filling a gas tank. In typical use, the typical car doesn’t travel far enough in the typical day to warrant recharging an EV at a stand-alone charging station rather than just plugging your car into house current in your garage at night. Even if you do need additional charge during the day, the cost per watt-hour is still favorable - and, depending on factors including not necessarily needing to charge fully at the stand-alone station before returning to base and plugging in your car overnight, the time at the charging station might or might not be tolerable. If you’re doing that much driving, you might be able to take a lunch break while charging your car.
Musk gets a hero’s welcome in China when he shows up there. It has to be said that the Chinese government was far-sighted when it gave Tesla the deal it did for the Shanghai factory; EVs are coming to dominate in China - and also in Scandinavia. Even in the face of tariffs, Europeans buy a lot of Shanghai-made Teslas. Tesla’s Model Y is currently the largest selling vehicle in China, in Europe, and worldwide. Not in the US overall, but in California and other liberal bastions.Much as the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” is fraudulently labeled and actually inflationary overall, it subsidizes batteries and EVs made in the Western Hemisphere, and prevents China - including Tesla Shanghai - from penetrating the US market. Teslas sold in the US are more America-made than an awful lot of competitive vehicles. If not all of them. All such Teslas are made in USA, and Musk likes his suppliers to be sited close to his factories. And likes vertical integration even better.
Granted that anything is possible, that looks like an extremely unlikely scenario when you are setting up to load many hundreds of cars on a ship. I would expect extreme caution to prevent that.
You mean Musk was behind DeSantis courting RINOs to back him? Did Musk trick Ron into making that “listless vessels” comment?
Well, I found it curious that nobody put the blame on Twitter for the screw up with the audio/video/connections - whatever it was.
Musk could see that DeSantis was not match for Trump, so perhaps to please Trump without directly doing so, he let the technical project fail for the DeSantis launch.
But this is mere conjecture on my part. I have not evidence to support it. Just a hunch.
It also depends on what I’d call a little bit of genius. When Henry Ford was producing his Model Ts on the assembly line he had the transmissions shipped in wooden crates in which he had the suppliers cut certain holes. Parts of those crates became floorboards for the Model T. Genius.
I spent an entire career working with scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs who were largely smarter than me. This gave me a view of the world that left me confused when I read about or encountered mind-numbing stupidity that had gotten good people hurt or even killed.
In my retired life I have taken a twenty-six-year-old man under my wing as he is clearly on a path that will lead him to dark places if he doesn’t perform a course correction. He has never had a job before and has zero skills. I mean, zero. But due to demographics his generation could have one hundred percent employment simply because there are so few workers in his age group. The term “full employment” means, to economists, an unemployment of between three to four percent.
The reason for this is that, assuming a normal IQ distribution and the mean at one hundred, that the several percent at the far end are functionally unemployable. That demographic is overrepresented in the homeless and prisons. As a matter of fact, it is against US law to induct anyone in the military with an IQ under, if memory serves, seventy. (Although I’ve recently seen the number 83 used.) The reason is these people can’t be trained and they represent a danger to themselves and others.
I’m trying to teach this young man some skills and I had demonstrated a chainsaw. He goes to start the chainsaw by holding down the trigger while the blade rested on top of his foot. I barely intervened in time to stop him from cutting his foot in half. An insurance company must assume that someone loading the cars on a ship might be this young man or his equivalent. Having witnessed the best safety procedures in the world waved aside by stupid people to cause massive losses, I know that simply having good procedures and a great environment does not make you proof against stupidity. The stupidity isn’t even malicious. It’s just there and must be weighed as a constant risk.
I am not a fan of Musk either.
When you do a deep dive on his companies and wealth what you find is a good old fashioned welfare mom.
bttt
-——Biden policy has accelerated humanity’s learning, specifically in the electric vehicle space-——
That is a false statement. Elon Musk came along before President Biden. Elon Musk and his fantastic teams of mechanical and electronic engineers are responsible for the acceleration of electric vehicles.
Having said that, the rest of the article is spot on. The ongoing UAW pathetic attempt to capture stock holder profits spells doom for the Big Three. The UAW is Big Labor and is also the Democrat/Biden party. The Biden money give aways have produced inflation that is being challenged by a Fed raising interest rate that make car payments too high.
Then again, the sheer brilliance of the Tesla engineering teams under the guidance of Elon Musk have disrupted the auto industry beyond ever regaining what is remembered as the status quo
——Tesla does not sell through a dealer network——
Mary Barry the CEO of GM announced in the last day or so that GM was going to sell direct thus bypassing the traditional dealer network.
She is so screwed
Hats off to your comment.
When it comes to musk, I do not care one bit. He makes cars. That’s it. Nothing more.
That being said I look forward to similar and lengthy comments about the CEOs of Ford, Chevy/GM, Dodge/Chrysler, Mercedes, BMW, Hyundai, and the rest.
His Teslas....he makes cars.
His rockets and satellites and Starlink...great. My nephew has one and he says it works fine.
X/Twitter:
Free speech and I won’t censor - but they do censor
brings in a bona fide Leftist to run the thing
comes out and shows that, YES, the government colluded with the Twitter to censor “conservatives” and anyone that had a counter narrative to the covid BS, but..
Said that the FBI did this and that ... the FBI can’t do anything ... someone or a group in the FBI did this or that, and we don’t know who ... so, just like Strzok, Page, McCabe, Baker getting away with “lacking candor”(lying in violation of 18 USC 1001), while any of us would be going to prison for the same.
Or wait...did Musk, in all the excitement over his purchase of Twitter, put out a statement to lure even more people to his side by making broad statements about how he’ll expose it all, working folks into a frenzy and then not delivering.
But if you make the point to Tesla about any unacceptable uninsured risk, it is pretty certain that Tesla will find a way to make the probability commensurately minuscule. What is pretty certain is that none of their engineers fit the low IQ mold - it’s easier for a HS senior to get accepted into Harvard than it is for a graduating engineer to get hired by Tesla. That’s because SpaceX and Tesla are #1 and #2 as companies that engineering students want to work for.
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