Government and Tesla

self

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

There are several points related to Tesla vis a vis the government(s) and Tesla.

Firstly, let it be noted and dismissed as a mostly, not exclusively by any means, past evil that the government has been promoting BEVs by laws which have advantaged BEV makers - and the only highly profitable BEV maker is Tesla. (even the biggest Chinese BEV maker, BYD, doesn’t make all that much profit, and isn’t yet a factor in the US market - and likely won’t be until it starts producing in Mexico to evade laws designed against it). I write as someone who has never bought a car priced above the median new car, and thus has never considered buying a Tesla. If you want to see where Teslas are most popular, you would look at the blue states on the map.

But the salient fact is that history has pushed rechargeable battery tech up the learning curve in a big way. To the extent that Tesla’s products, none priced much below the median of cars bought in the US, are competitively priced for their quality in their target, expensive, market (and it is also a fact that the government will make that price significantly more attractive, in some cases).

All that aside, there are important practical considerations. One is the availability of charging stations and the speed, or slowness, of charging. Tesla makes charging stations, mostly Tesla-branded but generally available to drivers of competitive products now, which are highly reliable and economical. These are far from as ubiquitous as gas stations, but they are quite numerous and that doesn’t take into account the prevalence of home charging. Although 110 V home charging is a thing, it’s not highly useful, so you’d want a 220V supply in your garage to power a BEV routinely. But in anything like typical usage, home charging is sufficient except for road trips. So you only care if chargers are where you actually need them. And any Tesla comes with a computer to tell you what chargers locally are available and functioning, and how to navigate to them. Granted that gas stations are more prevalent, gas cars don’t typically know how to keep you from running out of fuel.

And electricity is “100% available” energy - with the result that altho juice costs more than gasoline on a BTU basis, a BTU of juice is more useful than a BTU of gasoline (or diesel). The upshot is that operational cost of driving a Tesla is less than that of a gas car. And if your use case is typical and you have a garage and install 220 V in it, stopping for “gas” is not a routine chore. You just want to plug your car in after the day’s last use. Tesla’s computers will time your use of home current to your specifications. Since your battery delivers “100% available” energy, your car’s “electric motor(s)” are actually more analogous to transmissions than to gas motors. The analogy is to the diesel-electric locomotive - which employs a diesel engine and a generator to create “100% available” electric power to drive the “traction motors” which actually drive the wheels of the locomotive. The battery of the BEV replaces the fuel tank and the engine which converts BTUs of heat from fuel into “100% available” energy - leaving the delivery of torque at the RPM dictated by the vehicle's speed to the electric motor.

If you’re a guy who likes acceleration, mention the Tesla’s outstanding crashworthiness to your wife, and how smoothly it accelerates. Don’t mention how hot Teslas can be. Nor do you need to mention the low center of gravity of a BEV, whose heaviest component - the battery - can be, and is, located under the floor of the vehicle. The whole front of the vehicle is nothing but crumple zone to protect the passenger compartment in a crash. That, and storage space . . .

OK. I have made a pitch why you should test drive a Tesla if you’re in the market for a car. Here’s some reasons to be cautious. One is that advertised “EPA” range is optimistic, as EPA range for gas cars has always seemed to be to me. And that, depending on the battery chemistry you get in a particular model, it’s recommended to mostly keep the battery charge above 20% and below 80%. So there’s that. But the one thing to be wary of, if you’re accustomed to trading in frequently, is that Tesla aggressively and effectively improves the efficiency of their manufacture - and wants to aggressively increase the number of BEVs on the road. Meaning, all other things equal, Tesla will be willing and able to give you a better deal on, possibly, a better product if you wait. It’s a bit like the issue of Moore’s Law driving down computer costs with time - so that the trade-in value of a year-old computer has always been suppressed by the low cost of a newer computer.

Now for the “Government and Tesla” subject. For one thing, ever since Musk took over Twitter and made an honest web site of it, Biden has had no use for Musk and Tesla, notwithstanding the fact that Tesla in effect is BEVs in America. And since Tesla buys no TV or other media ads - and all gas car companies advertise heavily - Musk and Tesla are treated by the MSM and the government as if they were Republicans.

The court in Delaware invalidated the agreement between Musk and Tesla - agreed to by the Tesla board and the shareholders - under which Musk would be paid nothing unless Tesla not only survived (contrary to conventional wisdom expectations, including my own) but thrived dramatically. The agreement nullified by the court calls for Musk to be awarded stock nominally worth over $50 billion for performance as Tesla CEO which conventional wisdom said was inconceivable.

Musk has been investigated because “SpaceX didn’t hire enough aliens” - when aerospace companies aren’t allowed to hire such people.

And some states won’t allow new car sales to be made except through dealers. Dealers who are notorious for creating a hostile environment for purchasers to deal with.

But the huge factor on the horizon is the need for a paradigm shift in regulation of automobile driving. Regulation of driving is inherently arbitrary in the sense that the speed limit is arbitrary based on conditions which vary, and enforcement is capricious. The requirement of coming to a complete stop at a stop sign is observed mostly in the breach. That would be bad enough, but the trend to declining traffic accident deaths has reversed, possibly due to smart phones distracting drivers. If casualties in the military were comparable to civilian casualties due to traffic accidents, it would be a cause celebre.

To me it seems clear that Tesla is converging on a solution. They’ve worked on “Full Self Driving” software for many years, and they have recently switched from the paradigm of digitally iplementing the rules of the road, to “end to end neural net” as the solution. Meaning, the computer in the car implements a neural net “brain” which was programmed not by IF THEN ELSE rules, but - in a fashion comparable to the champion “GO” game computer champion, actual safe behavior by safe drivers is fed to the (hugely expensive) stationary computer, which then “learns” to mimic driver behavior in response to the video fed to the computer. It is as if the computer were playing a video game - but the result is a “neural net” style program to be executed by the computer which comes with every Tesla.

The import is that Tesla can synthesize a driver for your car “who” learned only how to act like it has seen good drivers act. Now the paradigm needs to shift. Instead of licensing novice drivers to drive based on a textual test and a desultory evaluation of the applicant’s technique in handling a vehicle while perfectly avoiding the breaking of any explicit rule of the road, Tesla needs to ask state driver’s license regulation to extensively evaluate the safety of the behavior of “Full Self Driving” software. But not with respect to the (all too arbitrary) written rules. The evaluation must be oriented strictly towards guaranteeing that the “driver” is safe and predictable, such that its behavior is (almost perfectly) unexceptional. Absolute perfection can never be guaranteed, of course - but it can be converged on, and lives can be saved in the meanwhile even if there are some (deeply regrettable) casualties along the way.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Tesla actually offers insurance to owners of its cars in some states.

To me, the issue of safe transportation is ultimately an issue for regulation by civil tort law. It seems to me that when Tesla concludes that its “FSD” software, unsupervised by humans, is safer than the preponderance of human drivers, Tesla should make a push in one or a very few low-population states to get “licenses” for unsupervised computerized driving with Tesla insuring the concomitant risks.

And when that results in a tort, and the cry is raised to ban “cars without drivers,” that opposition would logically be answered by pointing to any accidents unambiguously caused by human error, and asking for proof that FSD would not have prevented it. It being unanswerable either way.

That appears to be the solution to highway carnage in the long run. This approach would lead to casualties, but we are already suffering casualties now.

[Carriage Hill]

BEV = Battery Electric Vehicle,
HEV = Hybrid Electric Vehicle,
PHEG = Pluin Hybrid Electric Vehicle,
OR...
SEV = Shitbox Electric Vehicle

[IndispensableDestiny]

electricity is “100% available” energy

Although much more than an ICE, electric motors are not 100 percent efficient. Chargers are not 100 percent efficient. Batteries do not take up the charge, nor discharge at 100 percent efficiency. Nor is the entire drivetrain 100 percent efficient.

[Sirius Lee]

Of course, missing from that laundry list is the fact that the transmission of electricity is not at all 100% efficient.

And at the end of the day, that electricity probably came from the burning of a "fossil" fuel. And if it did somehow come from wind or solar - those are not at all 100% efficient, nor anything nearly reliable.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

electricity is “100% available” energy

Although much more than an ICE, electric motors are not 100 percent efficient. Chargers are not 100 percent efficient. Batteries do not take up the charge, nor discharge at 100 percent efficiency. Nor is the entire drivetrain 100 percent efficient.

All true, in the real world. In an ideal, lab bench, world, I make no doubt that conversion of electrical energy to mechanical work could (e.g., using superconductors in the motor) be done with awfully close to 100% efficiency. And I did use scare quotes around the expression “100%” available.

But I must quibble about “drive train” efficiency - in that no transmission is required for the EV. One less (mechanically complex) part of the drive train . . .

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

missing from that laundry list is the fact that the transmission of electricity is not at all 100% efficient.

And at the end of the day, that electricity probably came from the burning of a "fossil" fuel. And if it did somehow come from wind or solar - those are not at all 100% efficient, nor anything nearly reliable.

I’m not married to the idea that we must stop burning oil, natural gas, and coal yesterday. Even Elon Musk doesn't think that.

When we’re talking about solar and wind power, “efficiency” is a flawed concept. We’d like to turn vast amounts of solar energy into electric power available when and where we want it. Viewed from that overall perspective, our “efficiency” of converting solar energy into electric power is basically zero because we have hardly any of the earth covered with solar panels. ‘Way more solar panels would be valuable, but no one is putting them on my roof, or yours, for free.

The question isn’t “efficiency,” it’s bang for the buck. The learning curve and economies of scale are changing the bang for the buck equation in favor of solar and batteries. And in favor of “more than enough” solar panels, allowing the use of fewer stationary batteries. And less or even no fossil fuel consumption.

Efficiency becomes crucial at “the tip of the spear,” - ie, where the rubber hits the road. There, efficiency plays into lower requirements everywhere up the supply chain.

[IndispensableDestiny]

in that no transmission is required for the EV

Tesla's still have a gear box, albeit a single-speed fixed one. With AWD, there are two.