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Tesla to lay off everyone working on Superchargers, new vehicles
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2024
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This is a death sentence for Tesla. I have a Model 3 that I enjoy despite its shortcomings. One of the deciding factors was the supercharger network. It's the easiest system I've used for charging. It makes all other networks infuriating in comparison.
A lot of people get Teslas for the ease of charging alone. If the network starts to falter, people will leave the brand even faster than they already are.
Tesla really needs to vote this idiot out of the CEO position before he kills the company.
Not to mention the charging infrastructure is one of the reasons some people haven't made the switch yet. Anything holding back charging expansion is a disaster in my view.
I don't think that's it at all. The cost of a new car, any new car, is still out of reach for the vast majority of Americans, much less a dedicated daily commuter vehicle (because you need a gas car for long trips). PHEV is an imperfect compromise, but there simply aren't enough used PHEV models available on the market.
I bought a car last year, and I really wanted to get something electric, but the car I need just doesn't exist at the price I can afford. Chargers didn't factor into it.
You say "you need a gas car for long trips", and "Chargers didn't factor into it".
Isn't that directly contradicting? Why else do you feel like you need a gas car for long trips if it isn't related to either not enough chargers or chargers still not being fast enough for you? Chargers absolutely factor into that part of why you didn't buy electric yet.
But also, the notion that they can't do long trips is already pretty outdated. There are very few places left where you would even need to take a detour to take a long trip in an electric car. The only downside is that charging at max speed takes about 3x as long as filling with gas still, and not every charging station is max speed. As that continues to improve, it'll be less and less of a difference.
So, funding the R and D department of the charging network, as well as the construction of the charging network, are absolutely fundamental to more people adopting electric as their single vehicle choice. And not as their second vehicle only for one small purpose.
Right. If you put in enough chargers, ranges of 300 to 400mi are fine. You need to stop every 2 to 4 hours, anyway, so it's not a big deal in practice.
If I want to go anywhere out of my state, I now need to budget nearly an hour every 200 ish miles for charging. That turns what used to be a 6 hour trip into closer to 8 or 9.
It would take most of the charge range just for me to get to anything interesting, and now not only do I have hours of driving to do, but also hours of sitting around doing nothing.
A gas car can be fully refilled in 5 minutes and be ready for another 300 miles of driving. Electrics just don’t have the appeal to someone like me who makes somewhat regular trips over distances. I’d love to take trains, but that’s not viable in my area, so I’m sticking with gas cars for now.
Not an hour, I regularly go from STL to Chicago in my electric car and it adds 25 min if im driving right back. If I'm staying overnight and plug-in it only adds 15. That's also when I go to the bathroom and get a snack.
No, it isn't directly contradictory, because those advancements aren't available now and there is a directionality to the relationship between mass adoption and infrastructure. I wanted to buy one despite the lack of infrastructure, but there were too many barriers to entry.
I know where the chargers are, and I know that I can probably charge at home and at work and at the rest stops where we normally stop for gas. But I also frequently go to places where even gas stations are rare, and it still takes 3 times as long to charge, and I may not always have that kind of time. I may find myself on an unexpected trip where I need to gas up, and without that option, I don't really have a car I need.
Yes, I think we should be investing in research and development, and maybe one day there will be a charging network capable of replicating the speed and ubiquity of gas stations. But that's not going to happen until and unless there is mass adoption, and there won't be mass adoption until the cars are affordable and available. You need people everywhere demanding more charging stations, or the infrastructure won't happen. Business owners aren't ever going install more chargers than they need in the hope that it will sell more electric cars. That's backwards.
Even if that charging network existed today, the existing lineup of cars are still priced at a premium and are difficult to find in stock. I wanted one, and could not find something affordable near me. The additional cost wasn't something I could justify, regardless of whether the chargers were available.
Trying to decide if I agree or disagree, so I upvoted!
The problem is that more people feel that way than would be actually affected. Making numbers up here, but BEVs should handle the needs of 90% but 50% are convinced they can’t. There’s a huge mismatch of expectations.
Combine that with lack of availability, high prices, and manufacturer/dealer resistance to change, and it’s not going smoothly
But the other half of the argument is that things just don’t magically get “good enough”. It’s a progression where some aspect gets a little better or a few more are sold, prompting the need for more investment in another aspect. Any such huge change in something that affects everyone’s life, will be chaotic and take time. How do we smooth that out? Speed the process up?
US needs to regulate chargers.
Yes, yes, market and all. But look at printers. Or charger cables for small electronic devices (EU stepped in). Lock-in of customers is an incentive working against common chargers.
100%. This should have been addressed years ago, honestly. No one would tolerate VW only being able to gas up at Shell stations due to different nozzles. This is no different.
Did Tesla not make their charger an open standard that every new ev is shipping with?
Eventually, yeah.
In the past Elon offered it as part of a bundle, with the deal being:
You get to use the Tesla connector and superchargers
Tesla still retains all rights and ownership of the standard and can revoke access whenever they wish
You agree agree not to use Tesla in the event they infringe on your parents
Unsurprisingly, nobody accepted that deal. I wonder what it was that prompted Tesla to have a change of heart? Were they expecting the government to step in and enforce a standard, a la EU, and they wanted to get ahead of it?
The part about not suing tesla over patent infringement was the true poison pill and why no one took them up on it. Ford has over 79000 patents alone and that's just one auto manufacture.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/02/15/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-announces-new-standards-and-major-progress-for-a-made-in-america-national-network-of-electric-vehicle-chargers/
Assuming it isn't strangled in the cradle by Red State infrastructure haters (like the HSR projects through the Midwest that Obama failed to implement), this could be a good thing.
But I've seen so many of these kinds of plans get a ton of money and produce vanishingly little in the way of material change. So we'll see where it all goes.
That was last year. It's too late now.
They can't because the Musk personality cult is pretty much the only thing keeping the company viable at this point. They are absolutely fucked.
I see this repeated a lot but can't see how it's possibly the case. Dude has burned so many bridges over the last few years and I can't say that I ever see anyone actually defend him personally. I think it's more that his "anti-fans" see any positive comment toward SpaceX, Tesla, Starlink, or anything else as someone defending/supporting him when that simply isn't the case.
My boss, who doesn't even have a Tesla but is a nutty conservative, loves talking about Musk like he's the modern day Henry Ford.
This comment is, in a nutshell, why Tesla is fucked. Conservatives will never buy electric until after Tesla is long dead so hitching your wagon to them is suicide.
Sure, but it’s not just Elmo’s NüFascist Clownshow Bonanza that’s the problem - he also makes horrible decisions and is a truly terrible “leader”.
Those horrible decisions are a minor contributor to the mass exodus by Democrats, who are the vast majority of Tesla owners.
Not an insane comparison.
I'm their prime demographic, currently car shopping to replace my wrecked Benz, and was leaning towards a Model 3 up until reading this headline lol. I guess I could still charge at home or if the network fails it could be purchased by another company?
Or I just avoid stressing about it altogether and get a normal car
Subarus are pretty awesome. Just sayin'
While I agree, steering someone looking at a Tesla to replace a Benz towards one feels off. Subaru currently doesn't have anything that I'd put in the performance luxury category that most Benz's fall into (and that Tesla is trying to go for). Closest you can get in that is the current WRX, and it's not even close to that. I say all of this as someone that loves his WRB STi hatch and plans on trying to keep it going until I die.
I love my Outback Wilderness, but I'd agree. It's Utilitarian-Plus, but no one will confuse it with a luxury brand. Honestly, as the designated kid- and lumber- and dog-hauler, I wouldn't want anything fancier anyway. The (largely unneeded for me) Wilderness package is already pushing it, but I do like it. :-)
EVs are awesome. I loved the two I had. The only reasons I don't have one now is I hardly drive anymore and am doing construction on my house that makes a truck become useful. If there were an EV truck that wasn't the size of the house I'm building or the cost of the house I'm building, I'd have gotten that. Instead I got the Maverick hybrid.
If you enjoy the luxury of the Benz, then the Model 3 would have been a step down. There are a lot of good EV options in the luxury range, but very few in the low end range. The Volvo XC40 was really fun to drive and pretty comfortable. My friend loved her Porsche Taycan (that might be too high end, not sure). My coworker just got an i4 and really likes it.
I do think someone would immediately buy the charging network if it were an option. I mean gas stations have all kinds of stuff spring up around them when anyone stopping there won't even be very long and only passengers will be bored with nothing to do for that short amount of time. At a charging station, you are taking a longer break and even the driver is participating in that break.
Owning the charge network is going to be a much bigger deal when it's common to use your EV for long trips. And whether people want to or not at this point, it's steadily becoming more and more normalized. It's certainly more enjoyable overall to take a long trip in an EV. The downtime is nice. And healthier than sitting down for hours straight. Even before electric cars, people were encouraged to stop every 2 hours on a road trip anyway.
The old advice was to plan recreational stops along the trip, to prevent embolisms or cramps. What if charge stations had electric scooters or bikes and maps to fun 15 minute activities in range. Not to mention meals of course.
I know many people don't take road trips in a healthy way currently, so gas cars seem like the better choice for them. You'll "make better time" if that is the only important thing. But for people that already followed best practices, a road trip in an electric car is already the same.
I used to drive a Benz, I hated it. Now I'm on my second Cadillac and I'm never going back. Cadillac makes a damn fine automobile tell ya what.
I bought a plug-in hybrid last week. I'd have gotten a pure EV, but I take road trips sometimes, and I don't want to rely on the patchy changing network in the US.
Another factor is that I rent a house, and there's already one EV to charge at 120V. The wiring can't really handle a second charger, and I didn't want to always be fighting over it.
Just get a better EV.
I don't have a Tesla and have not used supercharger network but I can verify that other charging networks are infuriating and not just by comparison. I have half a dozen different apps with my credit card info on them and various old paid credits on them, not to mention committing to a good 5-10 min of fuck around time each time I park at a random charger and try to figure out what the hell this new system is.
I had a Volt (loved it for what it was) and I gave up charging it anywhere but at home. I had the same experience as you, had to have a dozen apps, use the stupid tap to pay, only to find out the network was down and you couldn't use it. For a plug in hybrid, it was an inconvenience, for a pure EV that may be arriving with less than 10% battery, it would be a disaster.
Can I ask - what's the best app you found so far?
For me, ChargePoint chargers are the easiest to use and consistently work best, but usually the most expensive.
Blink chargers are the worst. The app is clunky, slow, and the experience just never feels like they actually vetted the process. Also, it feels like they have a hard time keeping their chargers maintained.
What used to be Volta, now Shell (yeah the oil company) is a hit or miss depending on their charger actually working. Nice thing about Volta is that free is free (for now).
For actually finding working chargers, I use PlugShare.
Best? I dunno, using these has never been a very pleasant experience. Nothing sticks out as a particularly pleasant experience. I don't particularly care for being tracked as I travel either. It would be both faster, easier, and more secure if I could just put a five dollar bill in one and buy a few hours of charge or a $10 bill and buy the charge and parking spot for the night.
Didnt this fucking jackass just like less than a week ago in the quarterly earnings report say they were going to release an affordable EV in a year, and now they just announced aha just fucking kidding on that one?
And the latest FHD still has insane bugs that try to murder you and those around you?
I wonder how long it will take thunderfoot or common sense skeptic to do a vid on this. Amazing.
Ok so, Tesla, shitting itself.
Twitter, shitting itself.
Boring Company... have they actually started any new projects?
Hyperloop companies have now all, I think, either gone bankrupt, dissolved, or switched to doing something else.
SolarCity? Actual Scam and Fraud.
Neuralink?
They recently claim to have made some progress with an actual human recipient of something like a seizure mediation device, but basically Neuralink is run by a bunch of students of an actual ground breaker in the realm of neural implants, and this actual ground breaker has been extremely critical of the company, and I believe threatened a lawsuit as they are basically using his research.
Theres been a whole bunch of top level staff leaving and drama. Hey they managed to unspeakably torture some pigs and monkeys though!
What they have with thesuccessfull human implant is neat, assuming its being reported on accurately, but its nothing new or groundbreaking.
Only thing left is SpaceX, and the only thing they've got going is Falcon 9 and Heavy.
Falcon 9 and Heavy are legitimately good rockets, problem is Musk and Shotwell have said for about a decade now they would get the launch costs down to around 5 million and a turn around time down to 24 hours or less.
So far the fastest turnaround on a Falcon re-use is a bit less than a month. And launch costs are competitive, but theyre 10 to 15 times what's been promised.
Starliner, BFR, whatever, has so far cost taxpayers about 2 billion dollars, is about half a decade behind the contracted schedule, would require something like 12+ launches including refueling to be capable of getting ONE vessel to Mars, or being able to get to the Moon and back.
Theyve launched three of the things and now have to redesign a 2nd and 3rd version. And the 3 launches have basically been failures.
I was surprised the third launch managed to actually get suborbital at all, but the ascent half impacted the ocean at about mach 1 or 2, and the actual starship developed an uncontrollable spin early on and burned up in the atmosphere.
In terms of the NASA contract, SpaceX is supposed to have made an uncrewed lunar landing as of... Q1 2024. Oops. Yeah thats about 12 launches and a moon landing and presumably return of the lunar lander... and so far they cannot even get one into orbit.
As far as orbit goes, Musk was originally saying Starship would be taking people to orbit in 2020. The thing is not even orbit capable yet, muchless human rated.
I dunno if SpaceX will go completely tits up as is/have most of Musk's other companies, its possible they'll remain significant with 9 and Heavy, but it should be obvious that with everything else Musk has lied about and mismanaged and his insane public appearances of late, and lawsuits... Starliner doesn't have a future.
They'll run out of their current funding contract from NASA, and NASA will realize that Lockheed or ULA or maybe Blue Origin is a better bet for their plans for the Moon.
SpaceX also has Starlink. I don't know how it's doing financially, but I do know it's quite popular in places where wired internet isn't available, and for people who are mobile. I've even seen pictures of cruise ships using it for internet access.
I was holding shares specifically so I could vote Musk out when a vote would come up. These changes listed in the article are too much. I just sold my entire position in TSLA.