Have Fun Staying Petroleum.

FSD is vapor ware. The cars are not.

Are you suggesting that the only two choices of cars to drive are a Tesla and and '72 Cadillac El Dorado?

I'm saying neither is ready for prime time.

You're the one saying that Waymo has a viable strategy and is way ahead of Tesla in every other dimension. Waymo can't even do the basics at the moment (unprotected lefts, highway merging, parking lots.)

Q3 should be good with Y model getting flooded with orders in China. However, I wouldn't touch option plays with a 10 foot pole.

The Solar City deposition read is amazing


@tslaq_snark did an amazing job if you want to read it

Ignoring fringe vegan options: hell f***ing yeah man!!!

It seems many people agree…

Tesla second-quarter profits top $1B even as it struggles to handle demand https://hn.premii.com/#/comments/27967528

nice job, if global car demand stays that way for a year that's a cheap 150x earnings for a car company.

and only 10 million new shares this quarter. just going to take 6 billion and change to buy those back.

In general computers are not great at functioning in an analog environment. It is only when people accept the new digital world that computers excel.

FSD will almost certainly never succeed in a 3D analog environment when there simply are far too many permutations to consider. When digital sensors are installed in roads, along with full featured V2V to eliminate traffic bottlenecks along with digital intersection signaling FSD will have a good chance at succeeding. But at that point, analog driving will likely cease to exist because human senses will no longer be useful to drive a car at the same efficiency as a digital FSD.

I always felt like FSD would only work if all other cars are FSD

That way, computers can predict other computers

Perhaps a revamp of all infrastructure to make that easier is necessary

Computers can't predict human elements of driving. One day the car goes right, another day it goes left. No way to predict such things as state of mind, driver competence, instinct, drunk or high drivers? How about malfunctions?

I also don't understand why people think buying a Tesla is an investment for the future should FSD arrive...Your car will be old and obsolete in a matter of years and nobody is going to care you have a robotaxi when...everyone else does too

Exactly. That plus integrating auto charging features into roadways will reduce/eliminate the need for charging stations, and provide close to infinite range.

Plus that will give govt more reason to increase road taxes.

Integrating charging in roads makes no sense. For one it's enormously expensive (who pays for that up-front cost? The tax fairy?).

At what percentage of road coverage would the first person actually buy a car that takes advantage of it? Would you buy a car while you can only go to 5% of the country with it? 10%? 20%? How many decades would it take to get at least 50% of highways ripped up and have this built in? And that on the off chance that battery tech doesn't improve (not that it needs to in order to cover most any use case you can dream of today)?

For another: who mandates that all automakers the world over build cars that take advantage of it? Auto makers are fully global players. Stuff they can sell only in one country (and initially only in a small part of it) isn't interesting to them. Besides: which world government mandates that all other countries rip up their roads?

It's like ethanol/flexfuel in Brazil. Do you see car makers building variants of all their cars for Brazil? Of course not.

As for FSD. I'm not sold on it. But the first company that can manage to have its cars drive themselves to a charging lot outside the city at night (i.e. in very low traffic conditions) and come pick you up in the morning. That company is going to win the auto market.

Costs for all of that will go down. Plus, roads are getting resurfaced all the time. It will take time to do it, and obv not all roads will have it. And not all EVs will have it either, but consumers who choose that option will obv pay a premium for the convenience of never wasting time charging. Plus, road usage aligns with sunlight, which makes generation of power cheaper as it is used without requiring storage.

EV charging roads are really far from widespread adoption. I think they'd have to start with cities that build them as part of a bus transit network (as a substitute for cable car buses, which btw are way more environmentally friendly than battery powered buses).

Yeah, cities with poor roads make sense for round 1. Again, not all roads will have it.

IMO rural interstates also make sense. Trucks out of range of charging stations can save a lot of time by skipping stops. And places like Utah/Nevada/Arizona/Texas, with a lot of sunshine but with no NIMBY concerns, solar panels can be installed either on the medians or off the shoulders so that power is generated off the grid.

If the govt is considering spending $3.5 trillion you might as well do something that is sustainable. Relying on hydro, nat gas, coal, and existing solar/wind farms takes away from the consumers those sites are dedicated to. And transmitting over long distance loses about 3% per 100 miles. Nuclear is an option but that will cost $ and NIMBYs will fight it. Dedicated solar powered charging stations in rural areas also makes sense where highway usage does not justify road wiring.

They can save a boatload of $ by using aluminum instead of copper ($2k per ton compared to $10k). Although aluminum does not conduct as well per unit volume, it is a better conductor per unit mass.

The thing is: the 'never waste time charging' is already a reality with EVs. You charge wgere you are (at home, at work, when you go shopping, when you head into town for a night out). The time you yourself spend in charging is zero. So I see no advantage there.
Even on long roadtrips. You have to charge to eat, pee, grab a coffe. Charging times today are already on the order that you're not waiting around for your car to be done charging. So I see no big advantage there either.

The humungous cost of putting this stuff in roads and paying upkeep for the system year over year from your (and mine) tax dollars just doesn't make any fiscal sense (much less ecological sense because it would take forever until this is rolled out)
Charging has the added advantage that it decouples supply from demand a bit (do I care if the windfarm produces the power I need at 10pm or at 4am? Not really.
With e-roads you would have to always have that directly coupled which doesn't really work because the sun doesn't always shine when you'd need it most
(and no: road use isn't even well aligned with PV because most road use is in the morning and in the evening while best PV output is during midday when most cars are parked at the place of work. That is the optimal time to charge them because you have 8 hours leeway to shift around demand and production)

BEVs are by far the cheapest solution when looking at tax dollars spent because the individual builds up most of the infrastructure on their own dime. Tax dollars shoudl go to stuff that can only be done state/nation-wide. Not to stuff that people will do by themselves anyhow.

The technology would be completely obsolete by the time you implemented it at any scale.

Assuming people are doing things to not waste time is not efficient, nor is it realistic.
The environmental impact would be minor. (see below) Integrating those features into road sensors and other road improvements that need to be done for true FSD should be a no brainer.
Unless you get power from a solar farm, then you do care.
You don't need it "directly coupled." In rural areas where solar collection is easy and NIMBY averse, it adds to the power available.
Most trucking fleets operate when solar power can be generated. Postal service, UPS, Amazon, etc. operate the majority of their hours when solar is widely available.
The ecological damage done to producing 100x batteries will be enormous. In addition, prices for these battery components will go sky high due to unprecedented demand. The best solution is generating the power when it is needed. Storage, if not necessary, does not make sense.

There is no reason that above ground electrical utility grid cannot be put underground and serve the purpose of both routing electricity and generating power to EVs. This also reduces fire risk, which has been a huge issue of late, costing utilities 10s of billions. In that regard there is virtually no additional materials required other than perhaps concrete/asphalt, which is done right now anyways.

Do the calculations on the costs and time this would take. The numbers are staggering (particularly when compared to how cheaply and quickly you can create charging infarstructure)
That's an order of magnitude in time (time is a luxury we no longer have, BTW) and nearly 2 orders of magnitude(!) in cost if you only electrify interstate roads. For the same utility.
That makes zero fiscal and ecological sense.

Power is from the grid. You're not hooked up to a particular powerplant (or does your power go out every night?). The majority of future powerplants will be PV and wind. Particularly for wind we need a consumer at night to avoid having to shut them down or building costly storage infrastructure. Cars with batteries are an ideal match for this (and could, with V2G, even be used in reverse as partial grid storage. Further decreasing the cost of grid decarbonisation).

Passenger miles driven are an order of magnitude(!) larger than trucking miles.
And what do you do when you have an outage/road damage? Close down an interstate for a week? Leave all cars stranded?

What ecological damage? (particularly compared to oil). And please don't say 'Bolivia' - because they don't export any lithium at all (and haven't done so for many years). That's just FUD.

Batteries can be recycled to a good degree. Once market saturation is reached the annual added demand is quite low.

And no - you wouldn't be producing 100x batteries, because the cars on e-roads would need quite substantial batteries, anyhow, for all travel off interstate roads. At best you could cut the needed battery capacity in half. Unless you want to electrify all roads in which case we're not talking two orders of magnitude more cost but four (and 2 orders of magnitude in time not just one)

E-Roads is one of those concepts that looks really good on paper (similar to kinetic energy storage). But once you crunch the numbers you quickly find out how ludicrously inefficient and unworkable it is compared to a much more readily available approach.

It should be obvious that scaling up batteries to the order you are implying will simply not work, not environmentally, not economically. Simply not possible. What I proposed will alleviate most of that concern. Unless you go with hydrogen cells or some other technology to reduce battery development you are asking for a nightmare scenario.
Wind is unreliable, and damaging to the environment. NIMBYs don't want them. In some places they make sense, but reliance on wind is folly.

Work out the numbers, it doesn't add up.

Trucking and delivery take up per unit much more wattage than passenger cars. And the trend is to rely less on passenger vehicles with rail, electric buses, HOV, etc. Aggregate, commercial freight vehicles consume almost half the energy of passenger vehicles.
Underground utility electrical wiring has been in place for decades. It is safe and reliable, probably an order of magnitude more safe and reliable compared to overhead lines.

You realize there are limits to battery resources, right? And the resources are from troubled places, right?

So you recycle 1% of the needed demand for the next 30 years. How does that help?

Development will take time, probably on the order of 20-30 years. The need for batteries will not grow nearly as much as what your model requires. 10% of the roads cover 80-90% of road mileage. And that is without weighting large trucks, which use about 1% of the roads but consume about 25% of the aggregate energy. Simply improving I-15 from LA-Vegas and I-10 from LA-Phoenix would take a huge bite off of energy consumption for those areas.

Roads as they are used today have functional limits for several reasons. With FSD and direct power many of those functional limits are removed. Wherever you are getting your numbers (and environmental info) seem to be ways off, such as passenger vehicle and commercial freight energy consumed. You need to consider how new roads will be able to be used, societal benefits of safe utility wiring, technological benefits of reliable power, health benefits of safer driving, time benefits of getting products sooner and cheaper, and environmental benefits of using resources more efficiently.

Engineers are now working on the best ways to incorporate required features into new road construction. Adding features such as underground utility routing, road sensors, and other FSD requirements will add significant economic and functional benefits that will last past their useful lives.

TSLA still showing cracks?

When we start talking about such mass adoption of charging roads, and charging equipment on cars, we might as well just electrify all the roads with railroad wires and turn cars into train cars on wheels.

Would be cheaper than laying down magnetic charging pads and still installing batteries in cars.

Quick article:
https://futurism.com/ev-charging-roads-sweden
$1.2 million/km.

I think the article is wrong about the total cost to electrify US roads=$4.8 trillion. The length of US roads multiplied with 1.2million/km they used is "road miles" but they should have used "lane miles", which is a much bigger number.

Electrified roads are nonsense.
It's silly to think about it, doing a bit of research is fine but anything beyond is silly.

Range is not even a problem.

Qft

Just pre-ordered my Tesla bot with dojo chip (feature complete in 2022) feelsgoodman.