Elon thought that the name “Saruman the White” automatically made him the good guy
I’ve enjoyed it.
Another story on Jeep’s EV plans.
ETA:
Here’s a little more on the recon. It looks good. No details on number of motors or really any specs. The serious off road vehicle should really be an EV engineer’s dream (selective power to wheels with traction being an age old and as yet partially solved problem). My guess would be eventually there’ll be a motor/wheel on some. Also glad the Bronco is there to push jeep and vice versa.
Tesla is sending machines and techs from Germany to Texas to increase production of 4680 battery cells at the Austin location. Has to be a move to take advantage of the new tax incentive which, essentially, requires the battery pack to be made in the US.
They will steal a march on all other manufacturers by having more of their vehicles qualify for the incentive. They will have inventory to sell that is compliant with the incentive, while everyone else is struggling to ramp production and has to buy batteries from China.
Had to look up what “steal a march” meant. Kudos on the idiom. Does Tesla have significant manufacturing capacity in Germany? I did not know that. I hope it works for them. I hope, for them, that the germans that come over to help not only increase their delivery velocity but their delivery quality as well. That’ll be a first for Tesla.
For me personally, at this point, I’ll just be happy to have a delivery date that does not keep shifting into the ether.
Tesla has a recently-completed gigafactory in Berlin. It was formally opened before the Austin factory.
The interesting thing about the Austin location is that they have been building Model Ys with the old 2170 batteries, in order to keep units coming off the line, as they had trouble ramping up production of the 4680. Separately, however, they have been stockpiling 4680 structural battery packs at the factory.
Musk is up to something. It could be that he’s getting ready to charge a premium price for models with the new battery pack in order to trouser some of the tax credit, so he’s stockpiling battery packs to release into the supply chain for deliveries after Jan 1.
That’s just my uninformed guess, but the “standard range” 4680 Model Ys from Austin that were released previously to employees and some lucky customers are widely assumed to have a software lock on the range. The new pack was expected to give the Y a substantial range boost, so these few 4680 units having less range than the current LR is likely just to protect current sales until they are ready to flood the market with high-performance, 400-mile capable Model Ys at (probably) $79,999.
What happens when you build your EV first, and add the software as an afterthought.
So I have to buy a Cadillac now? Fuck!
The actual repair seems like a relatively minor issue but I’m curious what happens if you live far from any type of service center the company sets up to deal with this or future problems?
W…T…F?
The thing with all these pick-up trucks is the battery size. Even at 350kW charging stations (which are very few and far between currently) it’s going to take over an hour to charge on a road trip.
Now, as a work truck, this shouldn’t a problem because they should be able to be fully charged with an overnight plug in to a Level 2 charger. But taking one hunting/fishing - if there isn’t a Level 2 charger at the destination - is going to be a chore. And if you plan to use the truck to provide power at the destination, you’re going to need a Level 3 charger nearby, say within 50 miles.
This is fine.
Business genius.
Musk’s acquisition of Twitter involved taking on $13 billion in debt. The interest on that debt is round about $1 billion annually. Twitter’s gross revenue in 2021 was $650 million.
For a wannabe genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist, he’s terrible at math.
Great at hair implants.
Yeah, I want this genius giving me foreign policy advice.
[Or maybe he is just looking for Russian (and Chinese) oligarchic capital.]
Mercurial Man
Iron Pyrite Man
Perhaps he’s planning on using the Trump Method to pay that debt: you simply don’t.