Cars

Interesting hire for Tesla

Former Red Bull Racing chief mechanic Kenny Handkammer has taken up a new role with Tesla Motors.After 25 years of F1 has become Global Director of Service Training for the electric car company, and will be based in the USA.

Takeaway for me is that Tesla seemingly has the ability to attract world class talent at will. Handkammer has 26 years of F1 experince, 13 World Championships and 97 race wins.

Presented at the 2015 Vail Global Energy Forum by JB Straubel, Chief Technology Officer, Tesla Motors Inc. Panel Discussion Moderated By: Stefan Heck. Panelists Include: Ned Curic, Sunil Paul, JB Straubel and Pete Trelenberg.

I found the slides and embedded below:

[slideshare id=46014724&doc=jb-16x9teslavailglobalenergy-150318201328-conversion-gate01]

I’m not going to lie. That Falcon Wing Door looks wonky and isn’t closed all the way. Hopefully this isn’t a problem. Also, that trailer hitch looks a bit old school. I was hoping Tesla could innovate the trailer hitch in some way.

I’ll wait to the official launch to pass judgement however

A good review without too many new items from the WSJ. It is starting to feel like the Tesla is becoming mainstream. Perhaps the most amusing and creative part of the article is the author’s attempts at negatives.

Here’s another problem: You can forget which of the enormous storage compartments you’ve put your groceries in: the front, where there is no occupying combustion motor; or the rear, where there is no evidence of a battery pack.

Dealbreaker right there.

Numbers keep climbing and with the Model X launching late summer Tesla should come close to doubling its 2014 totals. Oh, then there is the home battery division.

MIT Technology Review:

The true cost of lithium-ion batteries in electric cars is a secret closely held by manufacturers. And estimates of the cost vary widely, making it tough to determine just how much lower they must go before electric vehicles with long ranges can be affordable for most buyers. But a peer-reviewed study of more than 80 estimates reported between 2007 and 2014 determined that the costs of battery packs are “much lower” than widely assumed by energy-policy analysts.+

The authors of the new study concluded that the battery packs used by market-leading EV manufacturers like Tesla and Nissan cost as little as $300 per kilowatt-hour of energy in 2014. That’s lower than the most optimistic published projections for 2015, and even below the average published projection for 2020. The authors found that batteries appear on track to reach $230 per kilowatt-hour by 2018.

I think with the Gigafactory chugging along and Tesla claiming a 30%+reduction in costs from current, the $200/kilowatt-hour barrier isn’t far off.

No more parking tickets for Model S owners. Today we’re introducing: ticket-avoidance-mode. Here’s how it works:https://t.co/uPFF3J5XyS

— Tesla (@Tesla) April 1, 2015

I generally hate April Fool’s days jokes but Tesla’s “ticket avoidance” joke uses autonomous driving to avoid getting a ticket. Particularly “circling the block” I found like something that might come in handy in a dystopian future.

Tesla’s other joke was more standard fare

Announcing the Model W. http://t.co/7bHqIz7lm3 pic.twitter.com/Ne9vTSHzj6

— Tesla (@Tesla) April 1, 2015

Not a great recording (and will update if I find better) but obviously interesting subject matter

Remember when we’d heard that the Tesla P85D was testing below 3 second 0-60 before it was even announced (with its conservative 3.2S 0-60mph). Today in tweets to @zedd and @deadmau5, Musk teased that that time would be nice.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/582820527049342976

FYI: 2.8secs is the time I’d originally heard before the P85D announcement. I’ve subsequently heard that the tires necessary to move the car that fast are too soft for roadworthiness currently. But that’s “just a science problem.”

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/582823937962201088

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/582828306409492480

A Tesla Model S seen next to a charging station in Hong Kong. Photo: Edward Wong

The South China Morning Post has an interesting conversation with Telsa CEO Elon Musk who is in town for the Boao Forum in Hainan province.

Tesla had been “misled” by Chinese speculators into believing that demand for their vehicles was “extremely high”, leading to an excess of inventory. Many orders were not placed by genuine buyers, but resellers who cancelled when the cars arrived, the official news agency Xinhua reported, quoting Musk. “China is the only place on earth where we have excess inventory. We are essentially selling cars that speculators ordered but we were unable to deliver,” he said…

Despite the initial setbacks, Musk said the company has seen a steady increase in sales in Caina over the past three months and he is “quite optimistic about where things are headed”. “We have a strong long-term commitment to China, and we tend to establish both local production and local engineering in China,” he said. The California-based car maker began taking orders in China in mid-2013 for its Model S sedan and started delivering the first cars to Chinese consumers last April.

“It is clear that we need to think of China in a very long-term way. We need to steadily boost the confidence of the Chinese consumers,” Musk said.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxP0Cu00sZs]

A very technical view of the technology being used in electric cars (and soon solar storage). If you are into lithium batteries like me, a lot of interesting stuff here.

Also you get a look at the back seat in this one. A few more of these videos and I don’t think Tesla will have any problems with China sales.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/197004056″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]

One of my favorite podcasts had a special guest this week.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXADb8gE9RU]

Thanks to Transport Evolved for the audio. Lots of great stuff in here. SamO provides a great list of notes:

• 99% of EU, North America, China, Japan and Southern Australia would be covered by the end of the year.
• Tesla cars and the network were designed with “convenience inflection points” in mind.
• “People who want to drive 10 hours and wear diapers . . . that’s . . . unusual.”
• Ratio of drive to charge is excellent.
• 7.0 coming in ~3 months.
• Car Summoning: #ComeFindMe #GoToBed #CloseGarageDoor
• Valet mode limits speed, torque and confidential information
• Changes in acceleration and brake “nuance”.
• Good sales in Australia so they are making a significant investment in the Supercharger network.
• Soon Sydney to Melbourne will be covered and eventually ALL of Australia.
• 20 hours of city driving at 20 mph.
• Max trip time to max wait time inflection point is coming.
• Extra range doesn’t make a difference for range anxiety.
• The Superchargers are queried in real time, every 30 seconds to ensure uptime and functionality.
• TM is “waking” the car by enabling software and sensor array.
• 400-500 mile range is pretty low use case + extra $ + extra weight.
• “Sweet spot is 250-350 miles.”
• New adapters have been sent to all Chinese customers allowing them to charge at any location in China.
• Superchargers are favored in routing above HPWCs (unless it’s at your destination).
• Any hotel or restaurant that requests a HPWC can get one for free as long as they place conspicuously.
• The network has several thousand HPWCs and growing rapidly.
• HPWC network should be a factor of 10 larger than the Supercharger network.
• The Model S is technically capable of parking lot to parking lot driving BUT won’t be enabled with CURRENT HARDWARE suite.
• Sonar can navigate the car safely, on it’s own, in pitch darkness.
• TM is sizing the Supercharger Network for peak use (Friday and Sunday afternoons).
• New major software release every 3-4 months.
• 1% accuracy in calculating energy needed on any drive.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbZTc4wk-y0]

This was captured in Palo Alto with its coverage on. Don’t say [Pontiac Aztek]

Updated with Tesla’s Press kit. Overall the update mirrored my predictions pretty well. I will post audio when available.

Expand
Expanding
Close

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZJICXB3qb8]

Bloomberg:

Where is Virgin going with this? “We have teams of people working on electric cars,” Branson said. “So you never know—you may find Virgin competing with the Tesla in the car business as we do in the space business. We will see what happens.”

If you want to get technical, and that’s why you are here, Tesla isn’t in the Space Business. Branson of course is talking about Elon Musk who I think he counts as a friend.

As far as Musk is concerned: This is what he publicly wants. Everybody building electric cars – the seas raising all boats. I personally like Branson’s viewpoint.

Expand
Expanding
Close

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDm6Snkle70]

Fascinating conversation between two heavyweights in the tech industry.

[tweet https://twitter.com/teslamotors/status/578262460689297408]

Frankly, Christie had no choice and countering the overwhelming public support would have been a bigger disaster that leaving some of the Auto Dealership lobby money on the table.

Let that be a lesson to the other US States artificially blocking free competition.

[tweet https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/577693835158949888 align=’center’]

Interesting set of tweets. Not because the Battery Swap Station was unexpected but because Musk sees Supercharging as the future and battery exchange as a stop gap. The philosophy makes some sense when you consider the future batteries will be cheaper and bigger and charge faster, while swap stations, while fast, are huge undertakings and require a lot of logistics to keep charged batteries in stock.

Last year, Tesla CTO JB Straubel told MIT Technology Review that Tesla was intent on cutting charge times in half and in half again. So a 40 minute full charge might just take 10 minutes in a few years.

If you can add 200 miles in a 10 minute stop, a 2 minute battery swap may not be as valuable.

Musk mentioned the commercial aspect of Battery Swap stations which would make sense for professions like taxi services that compile over 300 miles/day as well as long haul semis which won’t want long stops in the middle of their shifts.

Hiding on Tesla’s configurator are two new colors of Model.  So a guy from r/TeslaMotors:”Using a little technical wizardry gleaned from the Tesla Motor Club forums, I was able to recreate the image from the Model S Builder using an image file created from Tesla’s servers.”

Expand
Expanding
Close