That seems like a fundamental problem that Tesla is going to have with investors. Most concept car reveals strive to be exciting because they want consumers to fall in love with their product. A new Corvette, or Bronco, or Supra is going to attract a lot of attention, and consumers want to know what it looks like because it’s going to be in their own driveway.
Why is the Cybercab a “sleek” 2 door? I do not care what the taxi I get into looks like. Why is the Robovan (did you hear how Musk pronounced that BTW? Row-bo-ven?) a futuristic pillbox? I do not care what my bus looks like.
The underlying tech is quickly becoming a commodity. If a Model 3 has all the tech it needs to be an autonomous taxi (bear with me), then it’s going to be trivial for a company like Tesla to put a minivan shaped box on that tech. Boom, you have an autonomous Sienna, which is one of the more popular taxis I see. Stretch it out a bit and now you’ve got a boxy bus. The form factor is irrelevant.
But boxes on wheels won’t impress investors, so we get these goofy, impractical designs. Will the production models look the same? If so, the customers won’t be schools or cities or other budget-minded organizations that just need to move people. It will be high-end resorts trying to razzle-dazzle their customers.
This underlies a problem with Tesla’s approach to “saving the world” in general. Privately owned EVs are pretty terrible for the environment, consuming a large amount of scarce lithium for very little miles traveled. EVs were invented to save cars, not to save the planet. And the Robovan, if it comes to fruition, will exist to make rich snots feel less bad about their private transportation.
All of this time, money, and effort would be better spent fixing our city planning and infrastructure problems, something Tesla actively fights against.
I expect some unionized municipal transit drivers in big cities earn $100K or more, and of course, I agree that cutting workers’ salaries is always the goal of bosses and bean counters.
But some quick Googling suggests you’re way overstating school bus driver salaries, which seem to average no more than one-third to one-half of that. It is a part-time job, 5-6 hours a day, generally.
I live in one of the most expensive parts of the country and the total bus driver salaries for our district is around $500,000 for twelve buses (the same buses are used for middle, high and elementary school, with elementary requiring all 12 buses, middle and high have fewer buses.
On average there are almost 50 students per bus. There are no bus monitors.
Astonishingly special education transportation for 5% of students who are not in the district schools is almost $500k a year.
In South Africa, rich White schoolkids don’t take buses to school. The sports teams might take them to away games, but I somehow doubt Musk played team sports.
Agruably, Tesla was an amazing pioneer in car battery design. And maybe car production system design and design-for-production design. Maybe. Which innovations are now spreading rapidly to other car manufacturers. So Tesla’s 2018 secret sauce as the only practical pure EV family car (albeit kinda expensive family car) is rapidly waning. As a car company, their window of opportunity to become a huge player is waning. They may well survive and thrive as a niche player for a couple more decades. Setting aside any Musk personal insanity or meltdown.
OTOH, their self-driving tech IMO blows the doors off anyone else’s. As an IT innovator, they are way out ahead and (arguably) still pulling away from the pack.
They may end up, kind of like Qualcomm in mobile phones, being the secret sauce on the inside of everyone’s car while they (Tesla) live on the license fees all the car makers pay to them to have Tesla’s AI drive their cars.
I do not believe this outcome is a sure thing. But IMO it’s far more plausible than Tesla the car-maker outselling Ford or Nissan worldwide someday. And if the licensed AI scenario proves to be the winning one, then valuing Tesla stock as an IT innovation company in 20204 will prove to have been a good move.
@Gyrate just above. Note the growth percentages for each of those manufacturers are coming from very, very different bases. Totally made up numbers: Its a lot easier to chalk up a 60%-ish growth rate on 1,000 deliveries than on 50,000.
I’m not disputing the facts in your cite. But it would be interesting to see the corresponding absolute numbers to get another perspective on the comparison.
Regardless of any such quibbling, clearly Tesla is going in totally the other direction from the rest of the pack.
Depending on employee treatment these might be town employees with access to benefits (including state pension), which would gross that up; in our town the full multiplier for benefits etc. is 1.5 to 1.6.
Even if that’s the case, though, “$100K/year” would still be a gross exaggeration.
If 'Ell-NO is owned by Stephen King, why does King not write the ending? His stories usually denoue to some satisfying semi-happy ending (bloodshed notwithstanding), so we can hope for that for 'Ell-NO?
You all seem to misunderstand. This is the school bus of the future. You know, MUSK’S future where only those deserving of education will be getting it, so the seating number is just about right. You know, 10-11 pristinely white kids in matching school uniforms, possibly with a chaperone to make sure no one of the wrong color or social class bothers them, or to cater to their elevated needs!
If you’re just one of the people all you get is some vocational training from birth, probably at the factory you’ve been at since around age 12 or so.
I don’t get the “FUNNY” bit. If I were to choose a commonality between Pennywise and JWG, “funny” would not spring to mind. It’s not like “murderous” was unavailable.
And the commentary (on the DVD) is by Roger Ebert. It’s basically a film school on the history of Film Noir.
Oh, Roger agrees with me:
Fast-forward through the studio-mandated explanation at the beginning and start the movie when you get to the shot of the bathtub with the swinging lightbulb.
There is more lithium in the planet’s crust than lead, though it’s harder to extract so there is less of it available for industrial use. As technology improves the hope is that more will be available. It can also be extracted from seawater.
There’s no danger of it running out in the foreseeable future.
