It’s not only market-driven. As often happens, governments get involved to kick-start initiatives that are in the public interest, like providing millions in grants to private operators to set up charging stations, and to individual EV owners to set up charging facilities at home.
What’s coming next is my biggest hesitation about going EV. They’re evolving at rates like computers, not like traditional cars. The EVs that come out in 5 years will be much better than the ones now, while the ICE cars that come out in 5 years may have new features like self/assisted driving, but the power trains won’t be much different than today’s.
I don’t agree on the home charging thing. For a typical free standing home, the installation of charging port is a one time expense. It will range from a few hundred to a few thousand, and some smart car company will figure out a way to roll the cost into the loans and leases. That charger will still be good for the next EV, and with some upgrades and electronics, for two EVs. It only has to be fast enough to recharge overnight. Apartment dwellers and renters might be out of luck, though.
One year of fuel and oil change savings should pay for my installation of a home charging unit. One year cost recovery is pretty reasonable.
I can also see restaurants and coffee shops getting into the charging business. Where do you want lunch, where you can charge, or where you can’t?
Tesla is in a self created grace period in the market. They have the best all around EV (available soon!), the most mind share, and are currently the in style brand. That will be gone in 5 years. By then there will probably be vehicles that are competitive with the mainstream Tesla vehicles (halo cars don’t count). If in 6 months Tesla is at 5000 cars/month and in 2 years can meet (a high) demand, then none of the production delays today matter. If demand drops off dramatically, or Tesla never meets production goals, then they’re dead.
If in 5 years Tesla has an entry level luxury car, a high end luxury car, a CUV, an SUV, a halo sports car, and a variety of commercial vehicles, and they can all be delivered within 4-6 weeks of ordering, then I think they will be set. That’s what all of the other car companies are promising, and not all of them will deliver, but enough will to give Tesla real competition.
I see.
I agree that if quick charge batteries become possible, gas stations will become charging stations and we won’t have chargers installed in 3/4ths of home garages. The path of least confusion and change for the public will run as you suggest.
Where we may differ, and at this point in history it’s purely a matter of opinion / WAG, is A) whether quick charge batteries are in the offing and B) whether they’re a necessary condition for widespread EV adoption. You seem to think “yes” & “yes”. I think “no” & “no, but it sure wouldn’t hurt”.
I’m thinking, as somebody upthread said, that soon enough chargers (not necessarily quick-) will become common at many retailers. Just as many restaurants and bars and malls now offer WiFi. At first they were deployed as pay-to-use, then quickly became something that people just demanded as a freebie. Pay-to-use WiFi started as an amenity to attract customers and quickly morphed into something that repelled customers.
As applied to chargers at malls, restaurants, etc., I have no expectation they’ll be giving out free electricity. But they’ll end up charging little to nothing over the raw cents/kwh the utility charges a homeowner.
We shall see. The next 5-10 years will be exciting.
Most public chargers I come across are free to the consumer now. I have rarely run into one that is a charge.
Thanks for that. ::shakes-hands::
If there is a market for it then I’m not seeing a need for any grant money . If you’re talking about trying to increase EV sales through government incentives that’s one way of doing it but they could just as easily fund battery research.
What I see as a function of government investment is an increase in electrical production to meet the increased consumption from EV’s. I can’t help but think we’re on the brink of a major problem.
If it were 1965 and everybody was flocking to Sears I could see an economic model that puts chargers at retail outlets. However, box stores are up against Amazon and Alibaba. Self driving vehicles/drones could alter shopping as we know it.
I agree. Things are changing quickly.
Well I expected them to make at least half their production numbers by now so I have no idea. I don’t see how they’re going to meet their pre-sale number of 455,000 next year.
If you want a handwaving prediction you’ll have to ask Musk.
Well, that sounds like a prediction: you think they’ll produce under 455k cars from now until the end of 2018.
People at the end of the queue haven’t been promised a car in 2018, so that’s kind of an irrelevant point, but still–if you take a fairly optimistic interpretation of Tesla’s projections, you get around 450k cars by then. That would be 50k in 2017 (which they clearly won’t hit) and 400k in 2018 (which is a rough average of 5k/week at the start and 10k/week at the end).
However, you’ve been proclaiming complete disaster for Tesla, so I would think you have in mind a more serious shortfall than just missing projections by a few units. Missing by 10% or whatever doesn’t scream disaster to me.
Here’s my guess: at least 100k units from now until the end of 1H 2018, and 300k units total by the end of 2018. That would mean hitting a solid 5k per week pretty quickly, but taking longer to hit the 10k projections. Want to bet lower?
FWIW IMHO the advantages of avoiding the trip to a “charging station” with its gas station equal wait in line and wasting of time will have most still opting for the home overnight charging model except in circumstances which allow no other choice. That means the minority of car owners who have no garage or driveway or shared structure that can fairly easily put in a level 2 charger, and for trips that exceed the battery range between overnight charging opportunities. And once you can charge at home retail outlet charging is gravy at best.
In addition to the time inconvenience of “quick charge” there is the cost. Charging daytime from an electricity reseller is of necessity more costly than charging at trough demand times at night at home and would require fairly little, if any, major utility infrastructure changes. Adding the load of vehicle charging to peak electricity demand times would OTOH demand increased electricity plant capacity and major upgrades to delivery systems from the plants out.
The path of least resistance for the current white space for EV adoption is simply cost and while total cost of ownership should be the number that matters many won’t bite until the cost of purchase of EV + installing a level 2 charger is ≤ the cost of a comparably equipped ICE vehicle. Advantages in terms of lower total cost of ownership will have to be substantial before that drives the decision.
I haven’t predicted a compete disaster for Tesla. I’ve just pointed out what’s happened in the past and what is happening now. He’s never once met a deadline on a low production car. Not even close. He lost 6.7 million a day in the last quarter alone. He was supposed to be generating “something” from the model 3 at this point. Now he’s asking for cash from a non-existent car. This is after burning through the cash he asked for on the model 3. This is not a financially stable company and he isn’t missing projections by a few units. He’s missing projections by almost 100%. He’s burning through money and predicting a 6 month delay on production. So you tell me where I’ve been unfair of my criticism of Tesla. Even a tiny bit. He’s got real problems with the Model 3.
Even if I predict what Musk is predicting by March I’m not sure what that means at this point. He should be working on next year’s model at this point and he’s trying to produce the 2017 model. I predict that he will continue to over-promise on everything and another 10% will drop their order for the car and he will again go to the well of investors for money to stay afloat.
at it’s peak in 2006, NUMMI produced about 420,000 vehicles. But that’s inclusive of every model built there- Corolla, Tacoma, Vibe, and Voltz.
Tesla ain’t going to get 400,000+ model 3s out of there every year while still building the other models.
Have robotic systems improved sufficiently that greater plant productivity is possible if running and supplied optimally? Not assuming Tesla can accomplish that but wondering if the promised output capacity is predicated upon such.
I’m no car expert but it seems to me that in the traditional automotive world most commonly the next year’s model after release is the same as the current year’s model. The changes only come every several years.
Of course they are already looking ahead to what comes next, and after my initial skepticism I have become convinced that the Semi could be the biggest gamechanger they create. More so though is that their approach is less one of the 2017, the 2018, the 2019 model year releases, but of continuous improvement and revisions throughout, some accomplished through software upgrades.
SDVs are mostly orthogonal to EV vs. ICE. And yes they’re yet another wildcard in the deck. But IMO not one worth injecting into this particular thread. We’ve all got enough guesswork piled on conjecture already. 
Malls, sports arenas, theater complexes and all the rest are still trying to be destinations. And people, especially young people, still like to be out in public in large groups. Not everyone is like me, a ~60yo who likes small groups but abhors crowds.
So those venues are still trying to attract customers by whatever hooks they can think of. You’re right Amazon & Netflix aren’t helping. And may yet signal the death knell of the large indoor shopping mall or movie theater / restaurant cluster. But I suspect EVs will arrive in volume at least a few years before those retail clusters die. And during that interval charging will, like WiFi, be one of the attractants they try. And, like WiFi, within just a few more years it may be mostly obsolete.
It’s easy to forget that the installed fleet of cars turns over a lot more slowly than does the installed fleet of, say mobile phones. The pace of innovation will be slower on cars, the pace of uptake will be slower, and so there’s a much fatter tail in the middle years. There’s a lot larger percentage of 10-15yo cars on the road than there is percentage of 10-15 yo mobile handsets.
This is real perceptive.
People (and many businesses) are terrible about comparing upfront costs with ROI. From LED lightbulbs to high R insulation in building walls, people will gladly sign up to spend $10 per month extra for a lifetime to avoid spending $20 once upfront on something that’s not immediately gratifying or sexy.
As applied to EV chargers, the smart move would be for the car manufacturers to bundle the charger and installation into the price of the vehicle and make it eligible to be paid for by the car loan. With a price break for folks (e.g. apartment dwellers) who can’t take a charger home.
Pretty quickly that will push a lot of incremental chargers into a lot of houses. Then, just as we do with other semi-builtin appliances like refrigerators, dishwashers, and clothes washers, we’ll develop a common expectation of which machines stay behind when you sell and which machines don’t.
Pretty quickly, having an EV charger in the garage will be one of the selling plus points for houses.
Obviously this depends crucially on the EV manufacturers developing one universal and efficiently upgradable standard. As I wrote a couple pages ago, having a standards war over chargers is probably the single best way the EV manufacturers can shoot themselves in the foot/tire.
keep in mind that the average auto plant is already pretty highly automated. For ex, the body and paint shops at Dearborn Truck are almost completely automated; practically zero humans have to touch bare sheet metal. The stuff that isn’t automated (e.g. trim and chassis final assembly) uses a lot of ergo assists so the human operators can get parts and subassemblies into proper position quickly. The days of having to “Finesse” something into the proper position while also trying to fasten it down are pretty much gone.
Tesla automates a few more things like glass placement (and has been trying to do seats that way) but there’s still a limit to how fast you can sling stuff around. I suspect there may be some small gains in automating later steps, but it’s not a silver bullet for doubling production rate.
edit: I’ve seen similar videos of Fremont assembling the Model S, and it’s pretty much the same other than a few more automated steps. doesn’t really seem to go much faster.
and believe me, if there’s any vehicle Ford would want to crank out as rapidly as possible, it’s the F-Series.
Tesla doesn’t have model years. The Model 3 will be around for a long time, with only the incremental tweaks that Tesla does in general. They have zero need to hit model year targets.
Tesla can and should keep going back to that well as long as investors don’t push back. Even if the Model 3 tap magically turned on tomorrow, they should still reinvest to the point of losing money to pull in Semi and Model Y development.
maybe not from a marketing perspective, but for VIN purposes they do.
and nobody sets “model year targets” for production except perhaps for launch timing. everything else is fiscal year targets (e.g. how many vehicles did we sell this month/quarter?)
Remember that a big chunk of the Model 3–the pack–is built at a different (and large) factory. I don’t know how much floor space of the Gigafactory is dedicated to pack assembly but I get the impression that it’s a decent chunk.
They’re also massively expanding the Fremont facilities (almost doubling the floor space). It’s not quite clear how much progress they’ve made on these additions, aside from the big automated warehouse, but it seems like they will have at least some of it ready by the end of 2018.
so? the most automakers build their powertrains in different plants and ship them as modules to the final assembly plant. Toyota built the engines for NUMMI products in Alabama and Japan, and transmissions in West Virginia. The F-150 gets engines from Romeo, Essex, and Cleveland mated to transmissions from Sterling Heights and Livonia, and axles from Sterling Heights. All come in to Dearborn as modules ready to drop in; just like Tesla’s battery pack.
That’s all I’m talking about. Tesla doesn’t launch new model years they way other automakers do. So it’s nonsense (for Magiver) to talk about “working on next year’s model”. They only ever work on one model, the current one. They aren’t setting up a new line or scheduling a transition for the current one.
It sorta surprises me how slow the robots go (not from that video specifically, but in general). I realize there’s a tradeoff between precision, speed, and other things, but it sure seems like that could be improved a lot. Maybe some stuff is limited by the fragility of the product, but clearly a lot of stuff isn’t.
I wonder why there isn’t more carbon fiber in the robots. They all seem to be made of bulky steel. Cheap, but heavy. Carbon fiber is strong and stiff per unit weight, and by my reckoning lightness is everything in a robot, because it affects how much power the motors need, how much deflection you get from gravity and movement, and so on. Basically everything gets better if you can do the same thing lighter.
Clearly, CF isn’t cheap but it’s getting cheaper. There seems to be some research into using it for robotics but not a lot.