That’s all just woo-woo nonsense. Change comes from EVs, from solar panels, wind turbines, from battery storage, and hydroelectric, nuclear, from grid upgrades, increased efficiency in LED lighting, and so on and on. Industrial stuff, produced by industrialists–though perhaps not the ones that have been lying about climate change.
Protesters should hold their breath if they want to reduce CO2 emissions.
…that isn’t change. Those are products. And where does the money come for these products? Much of it from the public purse. Meaningful strategies to mitigate climate change aren’t going to come from the tech bros. And these products alone aren’t going to be enough without strong government financing and intervention. The tech-bros won’t do it unless they can turn a profit. They don’t care.
And none of this is an excuse to have a racist, misogynistic abusive working environment. That isn’t an acceptable trade-off. It should be entirely possible to run a business without allowing racism, sexism and abuse to proliferate.
Profit is another name for efficiency. It’s a good thing when companies are profitable, because it means what they’re doing is sustainable without continued subsities.
Several years ago, Tesla really was depending on subsidies. Specifically, the $7500 Federal tax rebate, which they got for the first 200,000 cars sold. That was a decent chunk of cash that they really needed (well, technically it went to the consumers, but it meant Tesla could charge more for the same product).
But today, they are selling about a million cars a year, and without that Federal subsidy. And they’re doing it with around a 30% profit margin. All of that difference has come from countless improvements in production. Some from the top, like the “gigacasting” program, but undoubtedly many improvements from their workers, who have always been enabled to put improvements into production. All of these improvements added up have made Tesla vehicles both practical and profitable–a sustainable plan for EVs going forward.
We need more work to reduce costs further, into the $30k and then $20k range, but there’s been a lot of progress so far. Largely enabled by the pursuit of profit.
Bullshit. We’re off on a tangent here, but it’s outspoken climate scientists and activists who created both the political and commercial impetus for addressing climate change. That is, by raising public awareness, they’ve made it both palatable and indeed politically necessary for governments to start taking action, and on the commercial front, they’ve created demand for clean energy and environmentally friendly products.
The latter is what motivated self-serving entrepreneurs like Musk to see if they could make their next fortune in the EV business. If Musk truly wanted to “save the world” as he claims, he wouldn’t have focused on expensive high-end high-performance EVs with absurdly high-tech gadgetry and a limited market. Even the Model 3, touted as the mass-market Tesla, is overloaded with gadgetry and the price is beyond the reach of many car buyers. The estimated price of the Equinox EV at launch will be about half the price of the Model 3.
Musk only had around $100M to work with then, even excluding what he spent on SpaceX. There is absolutely no way, under any conditions, in any universe, to build a production system (from the design to the factory) for a mass market vehicle for $100M. It is just completely impossible–no one has even done it for an EV or anything else. Even $1B is not enough. And it’s doubly impossible given that Musk and the others had no experience then.
They had to start small. The $60Mish that Musk put into Tesla was just barely enough to put together some fairly shoddy sportscars. But it was enough to gain a little experience, and to wrangle enough funding to build the Model S, which was still pretty expensive, but a step forward in practicality. And finally, from the Model S to the Model 3.
There was no way to skip these steps. Musk was not a billionaire then and could not just throw money at the problem (maybe Jeff Bezos could have).
Your ire should be directed at the existing automakers, who had the factories, who had the experience, and in some cases even had early EV programs until they sabotaged them. But they were cowardly, and waited and waited, even after Tesla had demonstrated that EVs don’t have to suck.
In a rational world, it really shouldn’t have been Tesla that came out ahead. But we also know how Kodak came out with regards to film vs. digital, and Blockbuster vs. Netflix, and Sears vs. Amazon, and on and on.
I was being a little snarky, and think scientists should get more credit. But IMO, that period is over. It’s way past time to actually be making the improvements to industry to effect the change. All it takes is to stop listening to the denialists. The science is clear-cut; it’s an engineering and commercial problem now.
…profit isn’t another name for efficiency. Profit simply means “a financial gain, especially the difference between the amount earned and the amount spent in buying, operating, or producing something.”
Efficiency is an entirely different thing.
Do you think they deserve a medal or something? “Business finally turns a profit” shouldn’t exactly come as a surprise. That’s the entire point of running a business. The tech-bros seem to have forgotten that for the most part. Being profitable says nothing about a businesses contribution to the environment. It says nothing about efficency.
And you can’t pretend that things like this don’t exist.
Or this.
Those profits don’t exist in a vaccum.
And none of this is an excuse to have a racist, misogynistic abusive working environment. That isn’t an acceptable trade-off. It should be entirely possible to run a business without allowing racism, sexism and abuse to proliferate.
I acknowledge that you have a point, and I do understand that an expensive limited-production model may be the only rational way to launch a new car company. My point, though, is that Musk has taken it to extremes, and appears to be doing as much or more to indulge his personal car fantasies as he is to building practical vehicles. Do we need this apparently dangerous attempt at “full self-driving”? Did we really need “ludicrous” and “ludicrous plus” modes?
Hey, Muskie, if I might dare to make a suggestion, instead of spending $44 billion so you could play with Twitter, how about trying to compete with GM to produce a practical, low-cost EV that almost anyone could afford? Not sexy enough for you? If the Chevy Equinox EV is successful, it’s going to price the Model 3 right out of the market. Who wants a tiny sedan when you can have a decent SUV for half the price.
No, because the brutal, toxic culture is not a prerequisite for electric cars.
I’m with Dr. Strangelove here. Wolfpup, you are arguing a technicality.
No, because we can have electric cars without Musk. We still have iPhones without Steve Jobs. Maybe Musk was important to kicking off the electric car revolution. He may be a hindrance to furthering it, if the environment he fosters drives away the workers and engineers who could make better, more efficient cars.
Maybe he would have because he needed the margins those vehicles offer to develop the next models. Of course, if he wanted to save the world, he wouldn’t focus for an instant on building giant rockets to abandon the hellscape Earth he envisions.
Yeah, profits can also be the product of monopolization and economic rents, which are inefficiencies. Tesla isn’t a monopolist, though. Tesla’s profits come from efficiently producing cars that they can sell for high margins. I think they also still make some money from selling clean air credits, which is profiting from efficiency in another way.
The truth is, building an electric car shouldn’t be that hard. If Tesla is going to distinguish itself in the future and keeps it lead as a premium electric car maker, offering technology like self-driving that no one else has is a great way to do it. Having Ludicrous mode on a car doesn’t really hurt its energy efficiency in ordinary use in any significant way. However, selling a Model S to someone instead of a McLaren because the Model S is faster helps the environment. Tesla made electric cars desirable. GM or Ford did not and would not have bothered to do that without Tesla.
It certainly would be nice if Tesla did this and, frankly, I’m not sure why they haven’t. But they are leaving space in the EV market for competitors and competition will improve the breed.
…efficiently producing a statistically handful of cars that are sold for a high margin aren’t going to save the world from climate change.
Nobody is that lucky.
Agreed, but it’s a start.
It’s really not. To the extent that we can practically do anything to avert the coming existential crisis of climate change, producing electric vehicles that have a significant carbon footprint in their materials and manufacture, and cannot be produced in sufficient quantity to displace petroleum-burning cars, trucks, aircraft, container ships, et cetera, is a rounding error in global carbon emissions and does nothing to preserve the natural carbon sequestering and absorbing systems of the global ecosystem. If Musk were genuine in his concern about global climate change he would be taking some portion of that vastly inflated fortune and putting it into protecting boreal and Amazonian forests, research on preserving corals and crucial marine carbon sinks, et cetera. Instead, he is focused on manipulating economic markets and pitching cryptocurrencies for personal gain, sending billionaires to Mars in some fanciful plan to make a ‘second home for humanity’, buying a social media platform and then burning it to the ground because he doesn’t know how to run it, making appearances on SNL and “The Joe Rogen Experience” for the yucks, engaging in one-sided and petty feuds with former minor functionaries of toothless government regulatory agencies, and generally being a creepy person who gets great enjoyment in showing how he can do whatever he wants and fuck you for saying anything vaguely critical about him because free speech is only for Musk and the people he adores.
Let’s please stop with the idea that Musk is in any way motivated by altruism or a greater view of humankind. His behavior and language has shown him to be a venal, self-absorbed man-child who uses his wealth and celebrity to rewrite his personal history to suit the image he wants to present (i.e. as a “real life Tony Stark”) and who regularly claims responsibility for the work done by any others while fumbling his way through even a basic comprehension of what employees at ‘his’ companies do. That he has been successful (insomuch as he has) is due largely to the hard work of others and his ability to get fellow rich people to invest in his ideas, often without any clear strategy or plan on how to execute them other than to hire smart people to work it all out for him.
Stranger
I never said Musk was motivated by altruism and that’s not something I believe. That’s some straw man you built there. Where do you buy his pants?
I’m not convinced of that. I agree that it appears pretty certain that almost nobody can be that lucky. But among all the hundreds of thousands of extremely wealthy people constantly churning the waters of highly unpredictable financial success, I don’t think it’s impossible (or even that unlikely) that literally one or two of them might become superlatively wealthy partly or mostly due to luck.
Insisting that that’s not possible is a bit like all the “Jeanne Calment skeptics” who keep insisting that the 122-year lifespan of the late Jeanne Calment, which was longer by several years than that of the second-oldest documented human, had to be some kind of mistake or fake. Because, they argue, it was too much of an outlier to have happened by random chance.
Nah. Very occasional individual outliers, even extreme outliers, do in fact occur due to random chance. Definitely not often, but it happens.
I won’t argue at all that the $44B could have been better spent. However, at the scale Tesla is at, it’s not actually that easy to spend more money on production.
As a concrete example, one of Tesla’s cost advantages come from their “gigacastings”. Basically, cast large sections of the car (from aluminum) instead of welding/gluing together hundreds of sheet metal sections.
The only manufacturer of the casting presses is a fairly small company in Italy (Idra). They can only produce a few per year, and now that other manufacturers have seen the benefits, there is increased demand from others.
Really cost-reducing the cars will require far more of these machines, and larger ones to boot (that can handle larger sections at a time). The ultimate goal being to cast nearly the whole car at a time, like a Hot Wheels.
I’m sure Idra is growing as fast as they can. And perhaps Musk should have invested some money into them, so they can scale their gigapress factory and make the machines faster. But there’s a limit to how fast they can go, and no matter how much money you dumped on them, it would likely still be years before you could ramp up their production rate. And that just gets you the machines: you still have to produce the car factory itself. Plus it ignores all the other stuff, like semiconductors and other supply chain stuff.
Tesla has been growing by about 50% per year and continues to do so. In the past several years, they went from occupying a tiny corner of their Fremont factory, to filling out the entire factory, to having another factory in Shanghai, to adding Berlin and Austin as well (all large factories). It’s not quite an unprecedented growth rate (for that scale), but it’s probably not far off.
Tesla’s profitability means that when they experience real competition–that is, when demand really starts to tail off, and there’s no longer a waiting list–they have a lot of room to cut prices. There’s no need for them to do this today, but it’ll probably come eventually. In the meantime, they have plenty of cash to reinvest.
Not once have I denied or even implied that Tesla does not get some subsidies or other credits. There was a time when they were only profitable if you counted these, but that time is long past: they’d still be profitable even without anything of this nature.
That said, you are engaging in the same tactics that right-wingers have for ages: basically, subsidies are good when they go to people I like, and bad when they go to people I don’t like.
What’s incredible to me is how the function of the subsidy gets entirely forgotten about. The entire point of a subsidy is to bias industry toward a specific desired end: in this case, producing more electric cars, and fewer ICE cars.
Other manufacturers pay Tesla for regulatory credits because they are still producing ICE cars. They wouldn’t have to pay a single dime if they simply produced enough EVs. That would be the ideal outcome, and they have a financial interest in doing so. But some of them are handling the EV transition badly, and so they have to buy credits from a manufacturer that has no need for them: namely, Tesla. Therefore, Tesla gets money that they can use to expand their factories or otherwise.
It’s exactly the outcome that you should want, if you think a transition away from fossil fuels is desirable.
No. But at the moment you have two choices for an EV:
I’m not aware of any legitimate manufacturer that doesn’t fit at least one of these. In a few cases, you get both.
…I literally haven’t done that. This isn’t my position, I support the clean car rebate. What are you even going on about here?
The clean car rebate is government action being used to combat climate change. Tesla is profiting from this: as is their right as a business in business.
Except I haven’t forgotten about that at all.
I’ll take this as a concession that even though Tesla is no longer recieving that particular Federal subsidy you were talking about, they are still receiving plenty of dollars from governments (from subsidies, etc) all around the world.
And none of this is an excuse to have a racist, misogynistic abusive working environment. That isn’t an acceptable trade-off. It should be entirely possible to run a business without allowing racism, sexism and abuse to proliferate.
Your information is out of date. Tesla is no longer a niche manufacturer. The top two cars sold in California are the Model Y and the Model 3, ahead of such niche vehicles as the RAV4 and Camry.
Is California an outlier? Perhaps, but the Model Y is also the top selling car in Europe.
The future is not evenly distributed, and obviously the same is not true everywhere in the world. But calling these a “statistical handful” is nonsense.
…I didn’t say they were a “niche manufacturer.” I said they were “producing a statistically handful of cars” and globally that is the case now, and will always be the case.