Tesla Model 3

You just expertly made my case that they are great commuter/city cars, but not so much for long distance travel. And, no, electricity lines and infrastructure does NOT run everywhere. This is a huge country. And even where it exists not near enough capacity to service our 263 million vehicle fleet. And even today when there are very few users if you get just one car in front of you at the supercharging station might as well go have lunch. You aren't going anywhere.

billvon said:

raylo32 said:

I don't see how the charging infrastructure can ever be as ubiquitous as gasoline stations, especially here in the USA. Think of a busy Interstate highway with literally thousands and thousands of gas pumps and you still have to wait to access one sometimes.

Click to expand...

Right. Now count the number of outlets available in a typical mall - each capable of level 1 charging.

The big advantage of EV charging over gas usage is that power lines already run everywhere, so adding charging stations is easy (at least at first.) And no big excavation projects for tanks, or environmental hassles from spills, and much less risk of fire. No real estate needed; no land to buy or rent, no curbs to cut, no new asphalt to pour. Just existing parking spaces. And once you start to hit the limits of the grid infrastructure, the upgrades needed are well-understood and common.

So even if you were to replicate those thousands of pumps into charging outlets (utilities will have to seriously upgrade generating and distro lines for that), each fill takes at least 20x the time it takes to pump gas. How does that work? Lines will be into the next county.

Click to expand...

I am one of the EV coordinators for my company, and we solved most of the charging problems by putting a simple outlet at each EV parking spot. Outlets are $0.61 each. Even with the conduit, wiring, breaker additions etc the total cost was about $100 per parking spot. People get to work, plug in, and don't think about it until they leave - and they get ~40 miles of range during that time. So for the most part there won't be lines; there will be people looking for parking spots, which people are used to now. (There will still be lines for fast chargers for people taking long trips, but these are the exception rather than the rule.)

But thinking about how to put chargers along malls, highways, businesses etc in the same numbers as gas pumps sort of misses the point. Gas cars can't be refueled at your house. EV's can be. Most people are going to do most of their charging at home, using a grid system already set up to deliver ~20kW to each home. And they are going to tend to do this when power is cheap (at night) - which is the time that the grid is seeing the lowest load currently. So it will be a long time before any grid upgrades are needed for that.

Not to mention the vast empty stretches of our country... good luck electrifying that. These pure electrics cars are great and I do see a role for them as local commuters that can charge at home and/or workplace every day. But beyond that, not so much.

Click to expand...

Tesla has put a fast charging station every ~100 miles across most major highways in the US. (https://www.tesla.com/findus) That covers long trips. But again, most people won't use that sort of charging for their everyday driving.

Click to expand...

raylo32 said:

You just expertly made my case that they are great commuter/city cars, but not so much for long distance travel. And, no, electricity lines and infrastructure does NOT run everywhere. This is a huge country.

Click to expand...

Actually they do. Take a look at that map. Every 100 miles on most major highways in the continental US there's a supercharger. Which means you only need a range of ~150 miles or so.

If you want to buy a Model 3 today you can drive anywhere in the continental US.

And 2/3 of the country is not on or near a major highway. Have you ever done a road trip in flyover country or Utah, Wyoming, etc? And even one or a few supercharger stations are just fine when there are only a handful of users. If there were 263 million looking to recharge, well, not so much.

billvon said:

raylo32 said:

You just expertly made my case that they are great commuter/city cars, but not so much for long distance travel. And, no, electricity lines and infrastructure does NOT run everywhere. This is a huge country.

Click to expand...

Actually they do. Take a look at that map. Every 100 miles on most major highways in the continental US there's a supercharger. Which means you only need a range of ~150 miles or so.

If you want to buy a Model 3 today you can drive anywhere in the continental US.

Click to expand...

And 2/3 of the country is not on or near a major highway. Have you ever done a road trip in flyover country or Utah, Wyoming, etc? One or a few supercharger stations on "major highways" may seem to be just fine when there are only a handful of users. If there were 263 million looking to recharge, well, not so much. But even so, if you get one other user in front of you might as well go have lunch. You aren't going anywhere anytime soon. If you have 2 or 3 ahead of you might as well get a room for the night.

billvon said:

raylo32 said:

You just expertly made my case that they are great commuter/city cars, but not so much for long distance travel. And, no, electricity lines and infrastructure does NOT run everywhere. This is a huge country.

Click to expand...

Actually they do. Take a look at that map. Every 100 miles on most major highways in the continental US there's a supercharger. Which means you only need a range of ~150 miles or so.

If you want to buy a Model 3 today you can drive anywhere in the continental US.

Click to expand...

[/quote]

raylo32 said:

And 2/3 of the country is not on or near a major highway. Have you ever done a road trip in flyover country or Utah, Wyoming, etc?

Click to expand...

Yep. Every year my wife and I used to go to Lost Prairie, Montana for a skydiving boogie. Take a look at where it is on a map; it's 40 miles from the nearest town (Kalispell.) It's 124 miles from the nearest fast charger.

Which means you could drive there with a Model 3 with no problem, even if you didn't want to charge at Lost Prairie itself (which is quite doable since they have power.)

You _might_ find a place in the continental US that is more than 300 miles from any supercharger. But you won't find a place in the continental US that is more than 300 miles from an outlet.

One or a few supercharger stations on "major highways" may seem to be just fine when there are only a handful of users. If there were 263 million looking to recharge, well, not so much.

Click to expand...

Do you believe that 263 million people are going to take long road trips in EV's at any given time?

The existing US refinery/delivery/gas station system could not handle 263 million people taking long road trips at the same time, so I am not sure why an electrical system should try to handle that.

No, I don't believe 263 million vehicles will be on the road at once. The point is that being a rare Tesla or EV owner now might seem fine but this glosses over the infrastructure generating and transmission scaling issues to go full scale electric. Not to mention in any scenario it still takes ~20x times to fill an EV as a petrol vehicle. So in theory you'd need 20x times the charging points as gasoline pumps to reach equivalency to service the fleet as we do today(on interstate and other routes away from home). I know these are hard things to swallow for advocates but I have yet to see any really convincing argument as to how this will work satisfactorily or any cogent strategy how we can get there. But today is probably the golden age to enjoy your Tesla without mind numbing lines for the chargers... as long as you don't mind a little 124 mile run out for fuel.

billvon said:

raylo32 said:

And 2/3 of the country is not on or near a major highway. Have you ever done a road trip in flyover country or Utah, Wyoming, etc?

Click to expand...

Yep. Every year my wife and I used to go to Lost Prairie, Montana for a skydiving boogie. Take a look at where it is on a map; it's 40 miles from the nearest town (Kalispell.) It's 124 miles from the nearest fast charger.

Which means you could drive there with a Model 3 with no problem, even if you didn't want to charge at Lost Prairie itself (which is quite doable since they have power.)

You _might_ find a place in the continental US that is more than 300 miles from any supercharger. But you won't find a place in the continental US that is more than 300 miles from an outlet.

One or a few supercharger stations on "major highways" may seem to be just fine when there are only a handful of users. If there were 263 million looking to recharge, well, not so much.

Click to expand...

Do you believe that 263 million people are going to take long road trips in EV's at any given time?

The existing US refinery/delivery/gas station system could not handle 263 million people taking long road trips at the same time, so I am not sure why an electrical system should try to handle that.

Click to expand...

raylo32 said:

No, I don't believe 263 million vehicles will be on the road at once. The point is that being a rare Tesla or EV owner now might seem fine but this glosses over the infrastructure generating and transmission scaling issues to go full scale electric.

Click to expand...

I don't think there's any glossing over. To switch to all or mostly EV's you'd need to do a tremendous amount of work, similar in scope to what we went through to put gas stations on every corner. However, that point is at least a decade away. In the interim there's enough capacity built into the system. For example, here in CA you could replace 10% of the vehicles with EV's with no significant changes in infrastructure, and replace 30% with minor changes.

Not to mention in any scenario it still takes ~20x times to fill an EV as a petrol vehicle. So in theory you'd need 20x times the charging points as gasoline pumps to reach equivalency to service the fleet as we do today(on interstate and other routes away from home).

Click to expand...

Again, no. You will not need 20x the number of charging points because for most people their charging point will be in their garage or place of work - and it will be a parking spot, not a dedicated charging location. If 5% of the time you need a fast charger for a long trip (which is generous) then you need the same number of fast chargers as you need gas pumps.

I know these are hard things to swallow for advocates but I have yet to see any really convincing argumentas to how this will work satisfactorily or any cogent strategy how we can get there. But today is probably the golden age to enjoy your Tesla without mind numbing lines for the chargers... as long as you don't mind a little 124 mile run out for fuel.

Click to expand...

Why would you "run" 124 miles for fuel when there is an outlet in your garage? I think you may have some very basic misunderstandings about EV's.

You keep ignoring my point about interstate and other travel AWAY from your home charging point. You would need 20x the charging points to service the same traffic we have now on those routes if it were to go all electric. I totally agree that EVs make great commuter vehicles... if you can afford to have a single purpose vehicle for that. But most of us can't afford that luxury, we need all purpose vehicles that can go anywhere anytime. But Cali is the perfect place where you can maybe get along mostly with an EV. High population lots of infrastructure. But I still think if you are away from your home charging point you are going to really struggle, even in Cali.

Then there is the issue of trucks, buses, work vans, RVs, etc. Hard to imagine much of that going EV. Take even a lowly work van that gets redirected from planned schedule to do an extra or more distant job. Oops, how do we recharge to get there and home?

billvon said:

Again, no. You will not need 20x the number of charging points because for most people their charging point will be in their garage or place of work - and it will be a parking spot, not a dedicated charging location. If 5% of the time you need a fast charger for a long trip (which is generous) then you need the same number of fast chargers as you need gas pumps.

I know these are hard things to swallow for advocates but I have yet to see any really convincing argumentas to how this will work satisfactorily or any cogent strategy how we can get there. But today is probably the golden age to enjoy your Tesla without mind numbing lines for the chargers... as long as you don't mind a little 124 mile run out for fuel.

Click to expand...

Why would you "run" 124 miles for fuel when there is an outlet in your garage? I think you may have some very basic misunderstandings about EV's.

Click to expand...

raylo32 said:

I don't see how the charging infrastructure can ever be as ubiquitous as gasoline stations, especially here in the USA. Think of a busy Interstate highway with literally thousands and thousands of gas pumps and you still have to wait to access one sometimes. So even if you were to replicate those thousands of pumps into charging outlets (utilities will have to seriously upgrade generating and distro lines for that), each fill takes at least 20x the time it takes to pump gas. How does that work? Lines will be into the next county. Not to mention the vast empty stretches of our country... good luck electrifying that. These pure electrics cars are great and I do see a role for them as local commuters that can charge at home and/or workplace every day. But beyond that, not so much.

Click to expand...

It doesn't work like that. You charge at home removing 99.9% of all needed Charging while on the interstate.
~1/2hr will give you enough to get to the next super charger. It takes ~ 5min to get fuel in an ICE so 30/5= 6x not 20x
Most of the time you stop after 200-300 miles of driving you take a piss or grab a snack making your stop 15min or longer now your charging stop is not much longer then your stop with an ICE.

Tesla and others are working on battery tech and improving each day. They are making ~7% gains a year and Tesla just bought Maxwell which is likely for the dry cathode process which will bring the price down and increase cycle life by 2x and increase range by ~ 30% while increasing C rates for both faster charging and discharging!

I think where this will head is cars that go ~ 600 miles a charge and you will only need 1/2hr - 1hr to charge them. At this point Driving an ICE will be utterly pointless. We are almost there now. Its easy to look at what is available today and say its never going to work but when you look at ICE development and how its taken 120 years to get here then you realize in less then 1 decade electrics have made amazing strides and only a few more years until there is no advantage at all for an ICE!

raylo32 said:

I totally agree. Tesla makes some nice vehicles but they have a long way to go to catch up to the major manufacturers in being able to build cars efficiently and economically. And Tesla doesn't have any really special proprietary technology that the majors can't at least equal. I don't see Tesla's cult status holding up long term.

TheBeastie said:

I was just browsing around on Youtube and checked out CNBC's Youtube Channel, lots of videos frequently uploaded on Tesla which often gets views..

This video was just uploaded to CNBC's Youtube Channel hours ago, what I couldn't believe what this fund manager believes Tesla's share price will be worth..
She says it will be worth about $700 a share in a bear case in 5 years, and about $4,000 a share in 5 years in a bullish case..
LOL, I think that's just crazy. Good luck with your investment everybody. :thumb:
Now people can't say I didn't post something positive on Tesla/Elon Musk.

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

You know we have been hearing this for something like 10 years on how Tesla will fail.... But still they are growing fast and not have the best selling Luxury car in North America! It won't be long until the have the best selling truck although Rivian might beet them but Rivian is awesome as well. And how long until the best selling Semi? Super car? Its all coming. They are also more then a car company.. How many grid tied storage systems does Ford or GM offer? The Big 3 are in BIG trouble! Why do you think Ford GM and Honda are all closing plants?

raylo32 said:

You just expertly made my case that they are great commuter/city cars, but not so much for long distance travel. And, no, electricity lines and infrastructure does NOT run everywhere. This is a huge country. And even where it exists not near enough capacity to service our 263 million vehicle fleet. And even today when there are very few users if you get just one car in front of you at the supercharging station might as well go have lunch. You aren't going anywhere.

Click to expand...

You clearly have not driven a Tesla far or at all.

Just starting off with a full tank from your own house is a HUGE advantage!
Yes Electricity runs everywhere there is a fuel station in fact WAY more places!
If you plan a long road trip how many miles do you drive in 1 day?
How many stops?
How many times do you do that in 1 year?

raylo32 said:

No, I don't believe 263 million vehicles will be on the road at once. The point is that being a rare Tesla or EV owner now might seem fine but this glosses over the infrastructure generating and transmission scaling issues to go full scale electric. Not to mention in any scenario it still takes ~20x times to fill an EV as a petrol vehicle. So in theory you'd need 20x times the charging points as gasoline pumps to reach equivalency to service the fleet as we do today(on interstate and other routes away from home). I know these are hard things to swallow for advocates but I have yet to see any really convincing argument as to how this will work satisfactorily or any cogent strategy how we can get there. But today is probably the golden age to enjoy your Tesla without mind numbing lines for the chargers... as long as you don't mind a little 124 mile run out for fuel.

Click to expand...

Again its not 20x. Its like 1x-6x max!

Again you start with 310 miles range and you need a stop for at least 20 min at that point and in 20 min of supercharging you have another 200 miles or range!

You don't need 20x the charging points but don't worry every house has electricity so you actually have like 1000x the charging points because you will charge before leaving your house.

Most people will not even go 310 miles in 1 day so its a non issue!
The very few people who do will have supercharging and the supercharging infrastructure was doubled in the last 12 months!!
Also V3 which will be faster is coming out right away. That combined with what will be ever increasing battery specs and V4 then v5 and so on of the superchargers means its not the issue you think it is.

Also look at how many Tesla's have been added to the road in the last 12 months in the last 12 months Tesla has doubled their fleet on the road! This thing is a S curve and its just starting to take off.

A lot of people pooh pooh electric cars based on current technology, assuming it won't change.

I've been hearing the 'electric cars won't work because x' argument since i got interested in them in 2006. The number of reasons why they can never work keeps getting shorter.

I wonder what the reasons will be once the next generation of battery technology comes about in the early 2020's or maybe even this year.

The technology that's backed into a corner is internal combustion. After over a century, the best we can do in an ultra expensive gas engine is 50% efficiency. A Prius barely cracks 40%. All of them pollute and there is still no feasible way to produce a pollution free internal combustion fuel.

Electric motors are at 97% and there is still room to improve. Batteries are just getting started.

neptronix said:

Electric motors are at 97% and there is still room to improve. Batteries are just getting started.

Click to expand...

I agree with your points and i drive a ice car but not a defender of them, but I would say current electric cars are not as good as made out, efficiency on the motor can be upto 93% at its full speed and can be as low as 20% at start up.

Most cars are drove at low speeds of 50mph or less so in a traffic jam start stopping you can expect the efficiency to be low on a direct drive single speed unit.

I think we will see more ipm motors that will have a low kv with high inductance so at take off efficiency can be brought on fast then field weakening applied to alter the effective KV of the motor and speed up to highway or slow down for start stop, there maybe some other advanced way of achieving adjustable KV on the fly to get max efficiency to the speed being traveled at then range will be increased where it's needed start stopping and hill climbing at slow speeds etc.

raylo32 said:

You keep ignoring my point about interstate and other travel AWAY from your home charging point. You would need 20x the charging points to service the same traffic we have now on those routes if it were to go all electric.

Click to expand...

No, we don't.

We would need 20x the charging points if you could not charge at home. Then charging would be just like getting gas in a gas car. But you can charge at home. And you keep your car at home. So you don't need 20x the charging points.

It's like saying that gasoline cars will never replace horses because there could never be enough water troughs to water them all. Horses need water troughs; cars need much, much less water, so the comparison isn't really valid. Sure, they need water sometimes. But like on-road charging of EVs, that's the exception, not the rule.

I have two EVs's. One is a pure EV (a Tesla S.) The other is a Prius Prime, which also has a gas engine as backup. We take the Tesla when we have to drive long distances, because it can go anywhere, anytime - and it has a longer range than I do.

t Cali is the perfect place where you can maybe get along mostly with an EV. High population lots of infrastructure. But I still think if you are away from your home charging point you are going to really struggle, even in Cali.

Click to expand...

I am in Cali. And we don't struggle even when we are away from home charging.

The only time I've done regular, long distance driving is when I lived in New York, then went to school in Boston. Those were regular 240 mile trips. And again, the Model S would have had no problem with that - even without on-road charging.

Then there is the issue of trucks, buses, work vans, RVs, etc. Hard to imagine much of that going EV.

Click to expand...

That's because no one makes them yet. Note that RV's - even now - generally spend their nights in RV parks with dedicated 50 amp electrical service. So that's not much of a problem. Eventually, of course, as E-RV's become more commonplace, RV parks will have to upgrade their service. But that's a ways off.

https://www.curbed.com/2018/12/14/18141140/electric-rv-for-sale-camper-motorhome-iridium

Also, buses are sort of ideal for replacing with EV's, because they have very well defined routes and they stop often - which means that they can be recharged at the stops if you don't want to dedicate a battery capable of handling the entire route.

https://electrek.co/2018/04/19/200-kw-wireless-charging-system-electric-buses/

Take even a lowly work van that gets redirected from planned schedule to do an extra or more distant job. Oops, how do we recharge to get there and home?

Click to expand...

You stop at a charger if you need to. Pretty simple.

There will definitely be changes to the ways we use EVs compared to gas cars - the way we plan routes, the way we think about "getting gas," the way we use gas stations as places to get snacks and necessities. But those are just changes, not impossibilities. Again, it's like saying that cars will never replace horses because you can't just put a car out to stud and get a few new cars in a year or so. That's definitely true. But people adapt.

While there is plenty of "negative news/information" on Twitter from small unknown people/groups, the bigger media companies tend to be very careful about saying anything negative on Tesla because not only could Elon possibly sue them but more importantly their viewers/consumers of their media product might ditch them accusing them of being "Tesla haters"

I saw this put together by Yahoo Finance today and I was surprised, they are still a pretty big company their Twitter account has 839,000 followers.

https://twitter.com/YahooFinance/status/1098399585087688709
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dz5MmfdWsAEAOFW.jpg


https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-layoffs-execs-leaving-133852528.html?ncid=twitter_yfsocialtw_l1gbd0noiom
Interesting quote from the article "Executives are defined as director level or above; the list would be significantly longer if we included managers."

Executive departures is a serious article allegation to make, because to the business world it indicates a "sinking ship".

There are "professional" Tesla shorters who say that the Tesla company really is Enron version 2 (but of course they would ) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal
One of the key parts of the Enron collapse was that there were a few "smarter dodgy executives" who were getting huge salaries/bonuses and deliberately "departed" the company about 6-12months before Enron collapsed on the stock market and because these executives left early they never went to jail but the folks at the very top who did stay till the very end did go to jail for a fair while.

The stock chart of Enron was all pretty happy and rosy almost 20 years ago but it fell apart fast enough, the thing is with today's internet and the speed of news if Tesla is anything like Enron then the Tesla stock price chart is probably going to drop a lot faster.
https://www.begintoinvest.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/enron-stock-chart.gif


Putting Yahoo Finance aside there are actually at the same time some more negative reports about Tesla on CNBC, but I think Yahoo putting all those executives in a single image/meme really helps push the message through compared to CNBC's little recent chat hours ago on the situation.
https://youtu.be/06XrXsOR2Uw
[youtube]06XrXsOR2Uw[/youtube]

I was wondering for a while if everything negative I saw on Tesla was being "overly engineered" by Tesla haters/shorters etc but I didn't really believe that could be true, but it was possible.
Then when I saw this pretty famous/big Youtuber get his Tesla Model 3 and receive the majority of little defective issues that most anti-Tesla people argue frequently happens, I then felt my personal overall view of Tesla was reinforced.
Overall I think this Youtuber got a decent Tesla M3, there are ones out there on Twitter/social-media where the paint job is simply terrible and the panel gapping was so bad you would have to believe the people/robots making their particular car were stoned out of their mind, the big question is how frequently does it happen, I don't think most people make a big deal of it if they get a bad M3 because they are fans of Elon.

https://youtu.be/FSLTNjGI8hw
[youtube]FSLTNjGI8hw[/youtube]
^All up I think this is a fantastic real-world video that is also unbiased.

So there is a MASSIVE divide in which direction Tesla will be in probably 1-5 years time, some people think it will go bankrupt and its assets sold off to other car companies, while others like that fund manager/Tesla lover on CNBC yesterday believe Tesla share price will go to $4000 a share in 5 years and take over the world.

TheBeastie said:

So there is a MASSIVE divide in which direction Tesla will be in probably 1-5 years time, some people think it will go bankrupt and its assets sold off to other car companies, while others like that fund manager/Tesla lover on CNBC yesterday believe Tesla share price will go to $4000 a share in 5 years and take over the world.

Click to expand...

Been hearing that for 8 years now. Most likely neither will happen; they will continue to make cars and grow at a moderate rate, without failing like the shorts want or taking over the world like the Tesla lovers imagine. Eventually someone will come along and make better EVs and their market share will stop growing.

In this executives leaving fiasco, are there any explanations as to why people left?

There has been so much smoke and mirrors on the bull and bear side of this company that i never know what to think. Ive just been buying their stock when people freak out and selling it when they get overjoyed. Buying and selling the emotional rollercoaster has made me a lot of money. All i hope is that tesla investors don't suddenly get rational on me :lol:

neptronix said:

are there any explanations as to why people left?

Click to expand...

Have you checked Glassdoor ?

https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Tesla-Reviews-E43129.htm

Here's an interesting snippet..

If you look at the SEC filings, you can see that the top people are basically compensated the same as the other employees, which is a pleasant surprise.

Click to expand...

Right, so just what i expected. You work for Tesla because you bought the hype about an early company but figured out that it's long hours and less than stellar pay that barely makes any money at the moment. Eventually this enthusiasm starts to wane.

This is no surprise to me, and it's why i turned down the path to working for Tesla. If i am going to work for cheap, it'll be building *my* own dream, not someone else's.

Tesla may not be the highest payer in the country, but i am sure someone with a "VP" , CFO, or Director, title, would not be on the same pay scale as an assembly line worker !

Hillhater said:

Tesla may not be the highest payer in the country, but i am sure someone with a "VP" , CFO, or Director, title, would not be on the same pay scale as an assembly line worker !

Click to expand...

+1

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/28/tesla-suspends-online-orders-ahead-of-announcement-redirects-website.html

This is what it looks like from the ordering page.

Yeah apparently they are going to shut down all bricks and mortar shopfronts and go completely online. That will save a fortune in costs and allow them to get the Model 3 down to $35k. It's a bit of a risky move - the car itself is clearly still costing them that much to make, so the margins will be thin at that end of the spectrum.