Tag Archives: tesla

Tesla vs. Ford

BBC says Tesla’s market value is now greater than Ford’s.

At the close of trading Tesla had a market value of $49bn (£38bn), compared with Ford’s value of $46bn…

The firm delivered more than 25,000 cars in the first quarter, up 70% on the same quarter last year.

While Tesla’s sales are growing fast they are still a fraction of Ford’s, which sold almost 6.7 million vehicles in 2016.

Tesla delivered 76,000 electric cars last year.

The legacy Detroit car companies could be embracing the new technologies, but instead they are allowing themselves to be creatively destroyed. Their business model, I believe, is to keep cramming pickup trucks into developing countries until they burst at the seams. Meanwhile, Tesla and Google and Uber will pass them by and become the new face of the U.S. auto industry. Then next time Ford, GM, and Chrysler tell us they need a taxpayer bailout or the U.S. auto industry will disappear, we may not have to listen.

more on Tesla and buttock thrusting

Mr. Money Mustache has taken a ride in a Tesla. He says a number of things that were news to me. First, he says the car in question, the $75,000 Tesla S, was the best-selling luxury car in the United States in 2015, claiming over 25% of market share. It’s electric, powered by a rechargeable battery. You can drive about 3 hours and then have to stop to charge for 30 minutes. Tesla has built a network of thousands of free, solar-powered chargers “in the U.S. Europe, China, and elsewhere”. And this car is self-driving right now on the highway, although a person has to take control in the city. All these were things I expected to see commercially widespread in maybe 5-10 years, with skeptics saying 20+ years, but I had no idea they were widespread and commercially available (okay, to be honest, available to the rich) right now. Prices will come down.

He goes on to talk about how self-driving, solar-powered cars could change cities:

Although only multimillionaires should even consider buying a car this expensive, there’s nothing inherently expensive about electric car technology in general. Almost half of the cost of this car is in the battery, and the price of that technology has been dropping like a stone – down by over 80% in just the last 10 years. Tesla just announced their next car, the Model 3, which is almost as good by any reasonable standard and will sell for $35,000. General Motors has a competing model called the Bolt that will be ready much sooner, and all the other car companies are scrambling to catch up…

But the real way to win the car game is not to play it. The best life is spent not sitting on your buttocks within the confines of a car, but using the fine muscles within that curvaceous piece of engineering to thrust your legs downward as you provide your own propulsion. And that’s why I’m excited about what Tesla is doing.

They started deliberately at the top of the market by making prestigious and fun toys for rich people, because we’ll buy anything. But in the long run, the cars are destined to become ever-cheaper, and to be bought by the million by fleet companies like Uber. With cheap autonomous driving at our fingertips, you can summon a car for the time you need it, and then it can promptly go off and serve somebody else. Thus, won’t need to consume our cities with large parking lots, and we won’t need huge garages at home. It might even replace the expensive hassle of local-scale public transportation that we’ve struggled with for so long.

I for one am looking forward to hearing friends and neighbors fret less about parking, get out there and thrust those buttocks!

Tesla

The other day I was talking about Steven Johnson and how he says most new ideas come about by people connecting older ideas, rather than a lone genius coming up with a brilliant idea in isolation. Well, there are exceptions to that, like Nikola Tesla. He was a weird dude apparently, but he sat around thinking up things like wireless communications a century before they had any right to exist. Here is a novel based on the life of Tesla:

From Amazon:

Drawn from the life of Nikola Tesla, one of the greatest inventors of his time,
Lightning is a captivating tale of one man’s curious fascination with the marvels of science.

Hailed by the Washington Post as “the most distinctive voice of his generation,” Echenoz traces the notable career of Gregor, a precocious young engineer from Eastern Europe, who travels across the Atlantic at the age of twenty-eight to work alongside Thomas Edison, with whom he later holds a long-lasting rivalry. After his discovery of alternating current, Gregor quickly begins to astound the world with his other brilliant inventions, including everything from radio, radar, and wireless communication to cellular technology, remote control, and the electron microscope.

Echenoz gradually reveals the eccentric inner world of a solitary man who holds
a rare gift for imagining devices well before they come into existence. Gregor is a recluse—an odd and enigmatic intellect who avoids women and instead prefers spending hours a day courting pigeons in Central Park.