SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
I don't understand why nerds like Tesla Motors at all. For instance there is Rich Repairs often called the rogue Tesla mechanic because he dare attempt something like repair a Tesla vehicle when Tesla corporate doesn't want that to happen. Tesla will not supply him with parts, they will not support repaired vehicles and they won't even give them access to the supercharger network. If you dare do significant repair to a Tesla they will cut you off and leave you hanging with an expensive machine that is essentially no longer vendor supported. Rich likes Tesla but hates this behavior because it makes what he does extremely difficult.
They take this to the extreme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okLgtYgnd7A. In that video Rich covers an email he got from a Tesla owner that bought a damaged Tesla at an auction. The damage was to body panels only and is cosmetic so he replaced the panels and got a nice Tesla for a reasonable price. He then went in with full faith and totally committed to Tesla and sold his other vehicle.
He took the car to a Tesla center for some service and then they noticed that someone dared to attempt to repair one of their vehicles. They then as a total surprise blackballed him from Tesla in the middle of a road trip which means not only is his vehicle now no longer supported by the vendor he also lost all supercharger access. With out supercharger access it is extremely difficult to reasonably use the machine.
He had to ditch the car because he could no longer actually move around on his roadtrip usefully because of charge time. He flew back home after cancelling the trip and now has to find a way to recover his vehicle and after that he has to live with being blackballed from Tesla.
Now nerds - why do you possibly accept this behavior? Don't you not use Windows because of concerns about who actually owns and controls your computer? But it is ok that Tesla owns and controls your means of transportation and will fuck you with in a heart beat?
What gives?
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Saturday October 13 2018, @03:48PM
Average satisfaction with telephone companies, airlines, car manufacturers and major retailers is less than 50%. Even if there is a good company within an industry, the industry average leans towards dissatisfaction. If a competitor emerges then, by default, it has more goodwill then many incumbants. However, competitors don't emerge often because these industries have high barriers to entry. A telco has a geographic monopoly and even if landlines are excluded, cell towers are becoming more numerous as bandwidth expectations rise, frequencies increase and radio signals work more like visible light.
Airlines? Read one of Richard Branson [wikipedia.org]'s authorized biographies and one of his unauthorized biographies. The whole industry is a clusterfuck and only works because aviation fuel is untaxed. Cars? Safety testing requires trashing a significant number of cars. The tests are increasingly stringent to the point that manufacturers [wikipedia.org] collude with their suppliers [wikipedia.org] to pass tests [wikipedia.org] and supply rigged cars to inspectors.
So, if anyone invests a stupid amount of money, they automatically get goodwill. But c'mon, we're discussing Elon Musk [wikiquote.org]. He started a company. Flipped it. Started another company. Reverse merged it into PayPal [paypalsucks.com] which survived because it is shiftier than the average credit card fraudster. After flipping that to EBay [wikipedia.org], he had serious money and never needed to work again. However, the guy is less trustworthy than Mark Shuttleworth [wikipedia.org] who flipped Thawte [wikipedia.org] to Verisign [wikipedia.org] so it could have both ends of the SSL certificate market. Mark Shuttleworth then took a trip to the International Space Station [wikipedia.org] before founding Ubuntu [wikipedia.org]. It was Mark Shuttleworth who approved features in a mainstream Linux distribution to share desktop search queries with Jeff Bezos [wikipedia.org]' Amazon [wikipedia.org] (that's the third mad rocketeer [wikipedia.org]), automatically upload people's private files without permission [wikipedia.org] and made a complete hash of the user interface [wikipedia.org]. ("Don't trust us? Erm, we have root. You do trust us with your data already. You trust us not to screw up on your machine with every update. You trust Debian, and you trust a large swathe of the open source community. [markshuttleworth.com]")
Unfortunately, Elon Musk makes Mark Shuttleworth look sane and reasonable. I've worked in hydroponics and I found it funny that Elon Musk said Tesla was going private at US$420 [wikipedia.org] per share and then appeared on a conference call smoking cannabis. Millions of dollars changed hands due to one message on Twitter.Com. However, market manipulation is strictly illegal whether it is for comedy value or not. The US$20 million fine could have been used much more productively.
Tesla is in the middle of a cluster of companies and each was founded on a back-of-an-envelope calculation. These companies have received more than US$5 billion of US Government funding and have produced very little. SpaceX is a relative success but only because the competing NASA programs didn't get funding. However, the cross-subsidies between companies is dodgy. Three days before Tesla announced disappointing financial results, SpaceX launched some space junk into solar orbit. SpaceX could have used concrete ballast. Instead, SpaceX launched a vechicle from Tesla, a dummy in a spacesuit and a camera. Apparently, this inspires people and this type of publicity stunt makes people compare Elon Musk to Tony Stark [wikipedia.org] from the Iron Man comics.
Tesla uses the GigaFactory which will supposedly run A/B testing [wikipedia.org] on 10 production lines and will supposedly raise its car production line speed from 0.05m/s to 1m/s using
unicorn dustrobots from the industrial supplier that was acquired [cringely.com]. It seems that when investors ask about a loose end, the answer is to found/acquire another company. The finished cars are supposed to travel in vacuum tubes made by the Boring Company and dud batteries are supposed to be used in banks supplied by PowerWall. The surface area of the vacuum tubes makes the project infeasible even if the tubes are made from mono-crystal diamond. But, hey, they sold US$1 million of flame-throwers! That's 5% of Elon Musk's SEC fine! PowerWall is little better. The supply of batteries has been hindered by improvements to the battery management software. Optimistically, PowerWall should be considered as a hedged bet against battery quality.Most investors are aware of infeasible linear extrapolation. However, Elon Musk's companies are a combination exponential extrapolation and companies which leverage each other but ultimately rely upon government subsidy. I wish these companies were feasible. Companies like General Motors knowingly put customers lives at risk to save a buck and companies like Volkswagen are fraudsters. However, an electric car from Tesla (or any other company) isn't currently feasible for mainstream production. They work as a rich person's toy and Tesla has skimmed surplus wealth accordingly. There is also the problem that the richest sources of lithium have been exhausted and subsequent lithium refinement will be increasingly polluting. It may not be possible to switch all vehicles to (lithium) electric batteries or (lithium tank) hydrogen. Good luck finding a suitable replacement for lithium batteries when the (arguably) smallest metal atom already holds two electrons.
The most worrying part came from reading Alleged ex-Tesla coder spills some beans [somethingawful.com] via JID3479 [soylentnews.org] by UID332 [soylentnews.org]. I am greatly concerned that Tesla has the typical spit-and-chicken-wire infrastructure of an investment bank. They use *every* technology and framework available. For example, C++, shell scripts, Perl, Python and Ruby communicating via temp files, MySQL, Postgres, Oracle and SQL Server. Add containers, cloud and appropriate management software. However, an investment bank can afford this because it can skim fees from the volume of transactions. Also, an investment bank doesn't have manufacturing costs.
There is a remote possibility that Tesla in its current form matches Ford's global output. There is a remote possibility that Tesla is first to make a safe self-driving car. There is a remote possibility that the Boring Company is feasible without vucuum tubes. SpaceX may survive as an independent company. However, it is much more likely that it all collapses.
Elon Musk is not Tony Stark. He's not even Henry Ford [wikipedia.org].
Full disclosure: I have an amateur understanding of fuel chemistry [soylentnews.org], I've seriously considered making one or more cars [soylentnews.org], I've offered to help someone on SoylentNews with automotive hardware and software [soylentnews.org] and I own one programmable micro-controller with a CANBus interface [soylentnews.org] which I am able to program without the patronizing GUI [soylentnews.org].
1702845791×2