How about posting some articles about the voltage regulation algorithm, or leak testing of lithium batteries ?

Something actually interesting would be nice.

edit: Just to be clear I'm not attacking Tesla/Musk, I love them both. I'm peeved by everyone pretending or thinking EVs are solutions without any shortcomings whatsoever, and I'm peeved that we sometimes ignore/attack people who are in good faith just pointing out potential problems.

Elon Musk - superhero entrepreneur. Tackling big ideas (how often do you see comments in threads bitching how Silicon Valley doesn't tackle big ideas any more?). Addressing energy crisis problems. Building real, hard, technology.

Doing so in a way that is making money and beating an industry which has massive legislative protection, political support from all kinds of protectionist players, known lobbying organizations with a track record of killing innovation JUST like this.

Not sure that for this audience this is getting too carried away with Tesla. The Tesla story is the epitome of much that many many folks on here believe in, aspire to, and stand for.

The article seems very long-winded and stops short of facts sometimes. For example:

"Solar cells contain heavy metals, and their manufacturing releases greenhouse gases such as sulfur hexafluoride, which has 23 000 times as much global warming potential as CO2, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."

At this point I expect the article to tell me how much CO2 is produced in the lifetime of the vehicle and how much sulfur hexaflouride is produced while manufacturing photo-voltaics for a typical electric car. Instead the argument is left hanging.

There's not enough attention paid to the fact that cars and the sedentary lifestyle they encourage are a net-negative for most people. Many of the folks I talk to who'd like to move to an active form of transportation don't because they are scared of being hit by a car. We've effectively ceded huge swaths of public space to single occupancy vehicles, and made it off limits to humans. This is bad for the health of the people in those cars, but also bad for everyone else.

What I gathered from the text was that, with somewhat pessimistic input numbers, electric cars are more or less on par with gasoline cars. But this is assuming no changes in the power grid, which will be essential if we are really going to transit to a greener economy. Which means more nuclear, hopefully new nuclear, more solar, massively more wind and hopefully less coal during the transition. Note that the Tesla Model S uses few to no rare-earth metals (there are usually employed in the permanent magnet of the motor).

But this is sort of a moot point, since properly engineered electric cars appear to be better than their gasoline equivalent, and will eventually sell better regardless. I do agree that this is something which should show up on the HN front page.

Here is my problem with this cover. Just like the NYT picture with the Model S getting towed, it creates a bad image of the car and Tesla in peoples mind. Not just electric cars in general but Tesla. And I have a problem with this. Thats not because I have stock in Tesla, I don't and not because I'm a Musk, Tesla and SpaceX enthusiast, I am. I have a problem with this because, as it stands right now, Teslas goal and mission is aligned with progress and a brighter future for humanity and the planet. This is in opposition to most big car manufactures. Like you, I worked for one so I know that most employers there DON'T GIVE SHIT about humanity or the planet. The people at Tesla do and the results so far speak for them. You can argue whatever you want in your article. You can not deny that Tesla is trying to improve the status quo by pushing forward the state of the art. They are the bright side of the force and Detroit, Munich, Wolfsburg etc. are the dark side. After having read your article I will say that it is well written and researched and I agree with many points. However, this does not change my opinion about what I wrote above, which is about the picture of the Tesla car on the dirty coal hill. Seeing you and IEEE (which I'm now glad not to be a member of) attack Tesla in such a dirty way hurts.

Your main point seems to be that "Focusing only on greenhouse gases, however important, misses much of the picture."

And, I couldn't agree more. However, reducing greenhouse gas production is an important goal, and like destroying the rainforest or wiping out species, the damage is almost impossible to revert. We keep polluting the atmosphere with gasoline cars every day. Yes, mining for resources like metal does hurt our planet. However, I can not imagine how we can progress in the future without more mining. Can you? Software can't solve all our problems, neither can timber. We need those metals. Maybe, we can mine asteroids one day, but until then all we can do, is make sure that mining happens with minimum damage to the environment and miners and that no precious resources get lost. That is, we need to build products with a focus on long product life and ease of repair and recycle them once they die for good.

"Compounds such as lithium, copper, and nickel must be coaxed from the earth and processed in ways that demand energy and can release toxic wastes. And in regions with poor regulations, mineral extraction can extend risks beyond just the workers directly involved. Surrounding populations may be exposed to toxic substances through air and groundwater contamination."

Yes, so how about we work on solving these problems, which relate to pretty much every product we produce? Should be very doable. But, why pick out electric cars?

I also have a problem with the general tenor of the article: "Are electric cars a sleight of hand that allows peace of mind for those who are already comfortable at the expense of intensifying asthma, heart problems, and radiation risks among the poor and politically disconnected?"

Im sorry to say, but many of the arguments remind me of the well meaning 'environmentalists' who killed the maglev train in Germany, arguing that it was too expensive, needed too many resources like copper and was incompatible with the existing rail network. These people fail to see, that real progress requires heavy investment and does not immediately lead to a new optimum but takes time to mature.

Given things as they are and likely will be for long time, that is many people want cars, Tesla improves the status quo by leading us away from fossil fuels. They do so by starting with luxury cars, simply because it seems to be the only viable option to finance such an expensive investment in R&D. Weather the problem of pollution during production can be significantly improved in the future might be debatable. But personally, I'm sure that Tesla will do much better than what the paper estimates for 2030.

"As for greenhouse-gas emissions and their influence on future climate, the researchers didn’t ignore those either. The investigators, like many others who have probed this issue, found that electric vehicles generally produce fewer of these emissions than their gasoline- or diesel-fueled counterparts—but only marginally so when full life-cycle effects are accounted for. The lifetime difference in greenhouse-gas emissions between vehicles powered by batteries and those powered by low-sulfur diesel, for example, was hardly discernible."

Does this take into account that todays cars are designed to have a artificial short life time in order to increase profit? Yes, the battery life time of a Tesla is short despite best efforts. But is it naive to believe that their life time and especially ease of refurbishing and recycling will improve?

"At the end of their useful lives, batteries can also pose a problem. If recycled properly, the compounds are rather benign—although not something you’d want to spread on a bagel. But handled improperly, disposed batteries can release toxic chemicals. Such factors are difficult to measure, though, which is why they are often left out of studies on electric-car impacts."

How about we make sure this won't happen then? How can this be a sensible argument against electric cars? You can make the same argument against cell phones vs landlines or laptops vs PCs. How can we progress if every new technology has to face such arguments? It's not like old batteries are not nuclear waste.

"All of the aforementioned studies compare electric vehicles with petroleum-powered ones. In doing so, their findings draw attention away from the broad array of transportation options available—such as walking, bicycling, and using mass transit."

No. This simply won't work in the foreseeable future. Unless we radically change our way of living, especially in the US, people won't be able to do away with their car. I don't speak for myself. I've never owned a car. Almost all my transportation is walking, biking and trains. I have a year pass for the Swiss railway, even avoid buses when possible and haven't been on an airplane in years. But for most people in the world this is not an option.

If we want to solve the transportation and other efficiency problems we need to live in ever denser places. I am all for that, especially if we return the freed space to nature and don't use it to farm more plants and meat. Fortunately, there is a world wide trend towards urbanization. Meat production however is an increasing problem. Anyway, we can not force it! That would be inhuman. Clearly the best way to heal the planet is to wipe out humanity. Otherwise, there is a trade off between peoples freedom and opportunities versus environmental protection. And if we don't want to make a 'big leap forward' like Mao, it will take very, very long until the average human lives as dense as, say, a Swiss today. And even that doesn't lead to the required efficiency with todays technology and standard of living. So, changing our way of life alone won't do it, we need technological progress.

I agree that Tesla does not solve the most important environmental problems of today. But I would say that it is one of the most shining examples of progress in the field of transportation and of how much can be achieved by being bold, ignoring the naysayers and fighting big mega corps which have anything in mind but the betterment of our world. Please, support them, even if you have objections!

I think your thesis is an important one and yes we need to figure out how to best save our environment. I believe for instance, that preserving the rain forest, wild life areas in general and finding alternatives to todays meat production are more important. If anyone has new ideas on how to tackles those, I would love to hear them! I'm also keen to hear arguments what the most pressing environmental issues of our time are.

The IEEE Spectrum print version has a big coal dump with a half covered Tesla Models S on top of it.

This is not to say that such articles are uninteresting for hackers. Many of us here root for Tesla, not only because Elon Musk is one of us but also because the technology his cars use is useful and cool. That is why you see these articles on the front page.

I will also say that I was clearly wrong in my prediction, and Tesla has been a great success (I guess the virtue of having political opinions but not political office is that one can actually admit they were wrong and change their mind).

I will state a view that (sadly) may very well be heresy on both sides of the political aisle: the success of Tesla is not a blanket validation of government intervention in green industry any more than the failure of, say, Solyndra is a blanket indictment of it.

Politics aside, I'd like to ask the question: why was the Tesla investment successful where others were not? Was there any pre-investment indicator that Tesla was more likely to succeed? Did it have something that others didn't?

There were several:

* The business argument for electric cars has been there for a long time. It's obvious to anyone who looks at it that there's an efficiency to using electricity instead of gasoline, as evidenced now by Tesla's incredibly low cost-per-mile. That of course doesn't explain Fisker....

* Many of us started believing in Tesla almost immediately after hearing the 3-part business plan: Build a ridiculously fast, desireable sports car (which they did, and brought it to market long before the DOE loan), then build a luxury car, then build a mass market car. I had a sense Tesla would do well with this plan, for the same reason I think Square will do well where others will fail: You need more than a viable destination, you also need a viable stepping stone at every point between zero and profitability. Tesla always had this plan. It was a good one. It's proving itself to be a good one.

* Did I mention they already had built, brought to market, and made real revenue off a car? You can't say that about Fisker.

* Musk had a track record as a successful CEO.

"Fisker thinks the most important thing in the world is design, so he outsourced the engineering and manufacturing. But the fact is that's the crux of the problem. And he's outsourcing to people who don't know how to solve the problem. So he came up with a product – it's a mediocre product at a high price. It looks good. Particularly from the side it looks good. I don't love the front. It looks too much like a caricature of a Mexican Bandito, the grille. The car looks very big, it's bigger than the Model S, but it has no trunk space and it's cramped inside, particularly in the rear seats. The mark of a good design is something that has great aesthetics and great functionality."

The DoE actually has a better record than most venture capitalists and angels, but in reality, you need a pile of failures to get a success. Failure is the engine of success, and the demand from the right that the government not do anything that might fail actually acts to increase government failure and expense, by making agencies so risk-averse that they spend way way more money on analysis and over engineering to avoid failures. That's one reason why SpaceX can beat NASA military contractors because they design and test to try to reduce failure to zero.

If you care about small, effective, cheap government, it would be paradoxically better IMHO, to let the government dole out cash like a VC with the expectation of 40 failures for every 1 mammoth success.

What I don't get is, people on the right never complain about all of the government failures on military spending. X-Ray lasers, planes and tanks that don't work, crazy and kooky DARPA projects. Hundreds of billions are flushed down the toilet, trillions if you look at the disaster that is the F-35/JSF, and here they are whining about Solyndra.

Isn't the huge military industrial complex a ginormous distortion of the market? Why is it so much more terrible for the government to fund early stage industry (which is relatively cheap), but perfectly ok to give huge incentives to oil companies in taxes, regulations, military and state department support, or to spend hundreds of billions on weapon systems that never get deployed or used?

I wonder if it has has more to do with cultural conservatism than fiscal conservatism. The kind of George Will "Fossil fuel Cars are American/Apple Pie, and Trains, electric cars, are squishy European stuff" feeling. Green energy = hippies, latte sipping coastal elites, not real 'mericans who drive gas guzzling SUVs across the plains.

Crazy and kooky DARPA projects... like the internet?

Joking aside, some people on the right do complain, especially those with libertarian leanings. You are correct that mainstream politicians (in both parties) do not, they are in bed with these industries and you will never see anything but occasional feigned outrage over something absurd and irrelevant like a $300 toilet seat.

I actually think the question is, would Tesla have succeeded anyway? I think the answer is yes. The people buying them now are not people who could not afford them absent the tax incentives. Musk did all the right things, he was an established success story to start with, he started his company in California, home of large numbers of wealthy environmentally concerned people who will overlook practicality if they can make a fashion statement. On the other hand you don't see very many middle class people who can afford a Tesla even with the tax breaks, or whose needs in a car match what a Tesla offers.

Investments in companies like Solyndra failed because those companies would have failed anyway, they either had a bad business plan or were trying to enter markets that didn't really exist.

Regarding military waste- there are many conservatives who are just as upset about that. I don't think the media pays as much attention to it, for one reason or another, and thus it is not part of the day to day rhetoric.

Also, defense is also generally considered by conservatives to be the Federal Government's primary reason for existence. ("To provide for the common defense"). Spending a large percentage of the Federal budget on Defense initiatives therefore makes sense within this paradigm.

Lastly, there is a major problem in our society, both right and left, conservative and liberal, that believes that throwing money at any problem will automatically fix it. Is Education lagging? Spend more money on it! Need a next generation airplane and it isn't getting here fast enough? Throw some more money at it! Etc.

The purpose of the DoE isn't to invest to get monetary award, it's to invest to drive basic engineering forward. The government isn't as business and isn't supposed to derive a profit, that's the basic fallacy of the idea that the government's budget should reflect how CEOs run corporations.

Throwing money at research, science, and technology is pretty much how you get breakthroughs. As a said, there's no formula, breakthroughs are often serendipitous, unpredictable, and happen over long time scales.

I view technological advancements as exploring an infinitely large landscape of possibility. There are mountains of opportunity, but you don't know if a given mountain is worthwhile until you scale it, and you may fine nothing, or a local optima, in which you see a better mountain farther away. From the ground level, most of the mountains look the same, and the landscape is always shifting.

What is the best strategy for finding the successful mountains? Hire as many teams of climbers as possible and distribute them around the landscape far and wide. That's what capitalism is, that's what the startup economy is, it's lots and lots of people doing local hill climbing.

There are some mountains that are too big to climb, the gear is too expensive, and the time horizon to summit, too long. That's the government's role in basic R&D, to fund research and development at an early stage that is not economic, has little chance for ROI in the short or near term, stuff that even VC's won't touch.

Could any private company have built the GPS system all our phones used, if the government hadn't funded rocketry, satellites (most for military reasons?) You've talking from the 1950s until the 2000s when practical consumer GPS became a viable business. What company could have stomached 50 years of spending for ROI?

Much of the technology we have today is the result of government spending in the military, national labs, the space program, and state funded academic research. Often, the private companies are successful in taking the basic advancements and figuring out how to manufacture them, but it is usually the government that proved the basic design first.

"the meaning of all reform-movement, electing and electioneering, of popular agitation, parliamentary eloquence, and all political effort whatsoever, is that you may get the ten Ablest Men in England put to preside over your ten principal departments of affairs. "

Government isn't bad because it is government. Government is bad when it sets up systems with incentives built in to keep good men away, and to hamper the few that choose to join it anyway.

In this case, the stopped clock of government told its daily truth - it picked a winner.

[1] If Carlyle is too dense for you, Moldbug is his modern prophet

I don't know why you think it would be heretical to say this.

Government intervention in and of itself is neither good nor bad. It can be used well, and it can be used badly. But at the end of the day, it is just a tool.

In the case of emerging technology players going up against incumbents, the government should absolutely intervene and help the newcomers.

In the case of established markets such as agriculture, the government should stay the fuck away and refuse to subsidize anything.

I mean, seriously... when it comes to spending taxpayer money, the thought process should be purely pragmatic. We should think about the result we want to achieve, and then determine whether we need government intervention to achieve it.

Where do you draw the line on this? Should all newcomers be subsidized? Every YC startup that wants to enter the automobile sector should be federally subsidized? What about newcomers in other industries like healthcare, banking, and mining? Should those be subsidized too?

Wherever the elected officials want to. Generally it is a big hammer and is applied to sectors, so there is an expectation of low success rates. That is why the government is doing it, and not private investors. This time they supported the "green" technology sector through allowing companies to apply for low interest loans, and giving consumers tax credits for those items. The next elected administration / congress might try to encourage the airline industry with fewer fuel taxes, the clothing industry with import tariffs, or support USPS by taxing the internet. You never quite know what they might do, you just hope they don't do it for very long.

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/fact-checking-go...

So in this case, Tesla is one of the many many successes. The others you don't hear about because they're not suddenly disrupting consumer-facing businesses like car companies.

http://energy.gov/articles/moniz-tesla-repayment-shows-stren...

Petroleum and defense? Wall Street? Pork, regulatory capture, and lobbying are part and parcel of American business practice now. Government finagled with business, which does the same to government.

I suspect that you dislike as much of that as I do.

Ten years from now when people look back they will definitely say that the government played a critical role in Tesla's success. And that's a very good thing.

Where did the DOE say this?

As for California being the "best place," my guess is that it has nothing to do with being the best - it just happens to be be the spot where Musk said, "Well, we need to sell cars in states that won't allow us to sell things. Let's collect all of the infrastructure to serve these people in a place that's already selling a lot of cars. Let's choose California!"

I really don't understand this. This is like saying... I make a product and I can't sell the product that I've made myself. Someone else is required to sell it for me. This law seems unfair and ridiculous. Is there a reasoning/history behind this and how it came to be?

This is where dealerships came from. Manufacturers, especially when they were smaller, didn't want to deal with establishing such a presence in every town in America, so they left it to private business.

This brings us to the existing franchise laws. I'm told the rationale goes like this; if a manufacturer were to suddenly decide to sell its own vehicles and cut out the middleman, said middleman would be completely and utterly screwed for obvious reasons. The laws, thus, are a form of guarantee for the prospective middleman. He knows his extremely capitol-intensive venture cannot be toppled two years later when the manufacturer decides to sell direct. If such protections were not in place, (so the story goes) entrepreneurs would be hesitant to start a dealership, the absence of which would have been a negative for everybody.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/02/19/172402376/why-buyi...

Second, dealerships make their money off of the maintenance as well as the sale. Allowing the manufacturer to dip into that maintenance revenue stream will create perverse incentives that hurt consumers.

The first one doesn't really apply, as Tesla has the capital to start all of the dealerships they need and that's basically what they want; they don't want 3rd party dealerships popping up at all. The second one applies to Tesla, but I don't think it really matters. They are The Experts in electric cars right now, so any significant maintenance will probably just get shipped back to their factory anyway.

4714 out of 850712 cars

http://www.cncda.org/secure/GetFile.aspx?ID=2583

For comparison, Toyota is #1: 157,035

In that segment, they had a 12% market share YTD.

Yes, which is what the article is about. This article is not about a specific segment. This article is about Tesla selling more vehicles than Volvo, Chrysler, and 8 other manufacturers.

Today it's the reverse, Android is 80% while iOS is about 13% (IIRC).

We need to realize that the trends are much more important than the current market share. Also that markets grow (and also shrink sometimes). We also need to realize that all products have a end-of-life, which means existing customers can switch after their vehicles become old after a couple of years.

In California. Not in the world, or the US.

Edit: oops I see that the link in the GP was referencing California not the overall market.

Would still take one of course. ;)

Now, Tesla is trying to sell vehicles around the traditional car dealer system. This system was setup to prevent the manufacturer from holding a monopoly on price and protect the local car dealer's investment in both inventory and services. So, Tesla is now seen as disrupting and depriving local businesses of potential sales and investment.

But, in reality, most people hate the car buying process and think it needs disruption.

Source: http://www.automobilemag.com/features/awards/1301_2013_autom...

Huh? No. For sale by owner is a thing, and plenty of people buy without agent help. The only reason to use an agent is to have someone else handle your paperwork and if you're selling, market your home. There is no law requiring you to use an agent.

In contrast, many states have franchise laws forbidding a car manufacturer from selling its own cars to the public.

Without enough cash, what are the odds of Tesla pulling an iPhone 5C to tap others with six-figure incomes?

[1] http://www.rmi.org/Amory+B.+Lovins

[2] http://blog.rmi.org/blog_the_electric_car_lighter_less_costl...

> In the quest for zero emissions - we are creating the Electric Cars

The point of using electricity is the flexibility, and choice, of fuel sources. Reducing emissions from consumer vehicles is a wonderful side effect.