Poll: Do you have, or plan to get, an electric car?

Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum

Help Support Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Do you have an electric car or plan to get one?

  • Yes

  • No

  • I plan to

  • Over my dead body


Results are only viewable after voting.
The home amperage issue isn't that the home's electric panel couldn't be expanded, it is that the street feed doesn't have the capacity to provide the additional amperage to the house. Expensive, you bet. Replacing the entire electric grid to increase the capacity to what is needed, is going to be very expensive. It's hard enough to get electric companies to replace a damaged pole unless it comes all the way down. Try getting them to rip out all the poles and put in new ones with larger gauge wires. Copper is pretty expensive these days. Or more expensive, new infrastructure underground. The cities and towns won't want to re-pave all their roads either. They all know this has been coming since the 70s and still haven't made any effort to upgrade the grid. So it is not likely they will be in any hurry to fix it now either. You won't find it in the sales literature either that you are out of luck if it turns out your house and the local grid can't support the new fancy electric car you bought. It isn't a qualifying issue to return the car.

Except that most of the time EV's are charged at night when other loads in the house are minimal. This is also the case for the grid which is designed to handle peak usage times which means there is plenty of excess capacity for nightly car charging. I encourage you to look up a duck curve. Anyway this is also beneficial for the power companies enabling them to even out the load from peak to off peak times to keep base load operating longer which is more efficient. Basically there is a lot of free energy to be had/saved by making the grid and generation capacity more balanced by using TOU and EV charging. We have a long way to go before anyone needs to do anything to change a house service or tear up the street etc.
 
Last edited:
No, the two biggest issues with EVs are battery technology and the power grid. Scientists have recently reported they can only get around 10% more energy density out of existing battery technologies. A tank of gas is 500% more energy dense than a lead-acid battery. Lithium-based batteries are 10% less energy dense than lead-acid batteries. Lithium batteries are better because they don't lose capacity as they discharge, unlike lead-acid batteries. So, short of a battery technology revolution, increased range/capacity isn't on the horizon. That is why the recent industry focus is on charging station technology.

I'm wondering where you are getting your information from? Lithium batteries have more than 6X greater energy density than lead acid batteries. This efficiency keeps improving every year at a roughly 5-8% so I'm not sure who is telling you only 10% more is possible. Heck Tesla just announced their tabless 4680 packs which are approximately 50% more energy dense then than the current 2170 battery packs.

The sky is the limit on battery technology and things are changing fast!
 
Listening to some podcasts about the new F150 electric pickup has totally changed my mind. If they have a 4 wheel drive option I will buy one. If not, I probably won't. As a serious rockhound I spend a lot of time in 4WD driving on mine roads that were abandoned soon after WWII.
Looks like the Lightning is full time 4WD. Specs.

This is likely to be my next vehicle. I just traded my 10 yr old Sonata Turbo for a leased Sonata Hybrid. I figure in three years there will be many more all electric options. The new hybrid gets about twice the mileage of the turbo.

Brew on :mug:
 
Listening to some podcasts about the new F150 electric pickup has totally changed my mind. If they have a 4 wheel drive option I will buy one. If not, I probably won't. As a serious rockhound I spend a lot of time in 4WD driving on mine roads that were abandoned soon after WWII.
If I'm not mistaken, all four wheels have independent drive motors. Could be wrong about that, but I'm pretty sure all the "Lightning" F-150s are AWD.
 
If I'm not mistaken, all four wheels have independent drive motors. Could be wrong about that, but I'm pretty sure all the "Lightning" F-150s are AWD.
Spec specifically says two motors:

1623891109380.png


Brew on :mug:
 
Looks like the Lightning is full time 4WD. Specs.

This is likely to be my next vehicle. I just traded my 10 yr old Sonata Turbo for a leased Sonata Hybrid. I figure in three years there will be many more all electric options. The new hybrid gets about twice the mileage of the turbo.

Brew on :mug:
It'll be hard to let go of my 2000 F250 powerstroke with 353,000 miles. But somehow, I think I can manage.
 
The thing I find most interesting about the new F-150 is the ability to power your home in the event of an outage with 9600 watts of continuous power. A lot of people, myself included, have spent a bunch of money on backup batteries to do the same thing when we could have done it for no extra cost with this truck. And it's a big battery, like 5X bigger, compared to what is affordable in stationary home packs. I'm a Tesla guy but hats off to Ford for thinking outside the box. That is just phenomenal to me.
 
The thing I find most interesting about the new F-150 is the ability to power your home in the event of an outage with 9600 watts of continuous power. A lot of people, myself included, have spent a bunch of money on backup batteries to do the same thing when we could have done it for no extra cost with this truck. And it's a big battery, like 5X bigger, compared to what is affordable in stationary home packs. I'm a Tesla guy but hats off to Ford for thinking outside the box. That is just phenomenal to me.

IMHO, the power-your-house feature is gimmicky. I'm not saying it can't be useful, but I wouldn't want to deplete the range on my vehicle, and leave it home to power the fridge, if the delay was long.
 
IMHO, the power-your-house feature is gimmicky. I'm not saying it can't be useful, but I wouldn't want to deplete the range on my vehicle, and leave it home to power the fridge, if the delay was long.

I completely disagree. To get a similar amount of continuous power battery backup for my house, I spent 15K on the batteries and inverter but with only about 1/8 the capacity of the Lightening battery. Comparatively you'd need 2 Tesla powerwalls to get a similar maximum power rating and that would cost 20K but still would only have 27KWH of capacity compared to the trucks 115 KWH. One of these trucks is equivalent to 8.5 Tesla Powerwalls! That is a whopping amount of battery for a house and would go for a really long time just powering critical loads. It might be a gimmick but it's a hell of a useful one when the lights go out.
 
With that much energy capacity I can't wait to see the Youtube videos of the first one of those "trucks" to experience an exothermic runaway from a separator failure (and you know that's going to happen)...

 
With that much energy capacity I can't wait to see the Youtube videos of the first one of those "trucks" to experience an exothermic runaway from a separator failure (and you know that's going to happen)...

Well since the average gas tank size contains roughly 540 KWH of energy and gas cars are 10 times more likely to burst into flames.. the numbers say you should be way more worried about the ICE car in your garage.
 
Lol! Yeah, you have a point there - even without a supporting cite.
Lots of power in gasoline, and as long as there's a GM there'll be cars blowing up in garages :D
 
Lol! Yeah, you have a point there - even without a supporting cite.

"From 2012 – 2020, there has been approximately one Tesla vehicle fire for every 205 million miles traveled. By comparison, data from the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) and U.S. Department of Transportation shows that in the United States there is a vehicle fire for every 19 million miles traveled."

https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport
Note: The data for ICE cars is from the NFPA. The data for the EV is from Tesla which would be the most accurate since they have by far the most EV's on the road. Granted this data is for driving since accurate numbers for incidences while sitting in a garage is harder to come by. However since I'm not sitting in my car in the garage, I'd still be happier about the 10x safer on the road thing. ;)
 
The thing I find most interesting about the new F-150 is the ability to power your home in the event of an outage with 9600 watts of continuous power. A lot of people, myself included, have spent a bunch of money on backup batteries to do the same thing when we could have done it for no extra cost with this truck. And it's a big battery, like 5X bigger, compared to what is affordable in stationary home packs. I'm a Tesla guy but hats off to Ford for thinking outside the box. That is just phenomenal to me.
Power failure is not my issue where I live. We've een here 3 years and our power has never blinked. Much more important is the range-gas stations can easily be 50 miles apart, I can only imagine charging stations are much farther apart.
 
I completely disagree. To get a similar amount of continuous power battery backup for my house, I spent 15K on the batteries and inverter but with only about 1/8 the capacity of the Lightening battery. Comparatively you'd need 2 Tesla powerwalls to get a similar maximum power rating and that would cost 20K but still would only have 27KWH of capacity compared to the trucks 115 KWH. One of these trucks is equivalent to 8.5 Tesla Powerwalls! That is a whopping amount of battery for a house and would go for a really long time just powering critical loads. It might be a gimmick but it's a hell of a useful one when the lights go out.

I'm not saying that it isn't capable or can't be handy. I'm saying that the real world application isn't that straightforward.

When the power goes out, you often don't know how long it'll be out for. A few years back most of my home county suffered a power failure due to a blizzard. They didn't know how many days it would take to get power back. I believe the power was out for several days, in that time people needed to be able to go to the grocery store, check on loved ones, etc, after the snowplows went through. They needed their vehicles to travel several miles in order to do that. They also needed to be able to keep their houses warm enough the pipes wouldn't burst, keep their refrigerators running, medical devices needed to keep operating, etc.

Within the last few years my town lost power after a storm. We didn't know how long we'd be without power. We didn't know if we'd need to get out of town to grab some supplies. My wife took the car and went to work the next day.

When the power goes out, the common themes are that you probably don't know how long that problem will last, you need to keep some power going at your house, but you will also probably need to travel. Relying solely on something like the Lightning's feature to power your home is an interesting situation. One would need to assess how much range they might have (further complicated when you consider that the vehicle might not be completely charged anyway), what they might need to travel for, and how critical it is to keep power at the house.

It's a good option to have, but I think that backup power from a system of batteries, solar panels, and maybe a wind turbine makes a lot of sense.
 
When the power goes out, you often don't know how long it'll be out for. A few years back most of my home county suffered a power failure due to a blizzard. They didn't know how many days it would take to get power back. I believe the power was out for several days, in that time people needed to be able to go to the grocery store, check on loved ones, etc, after the snowplows went through. They needed their vehicles to travel several miles in order to do that. They also needed to be able to keep their houses warm enough the pipes wouldn't burst, keep their refrigerators running, medical devices needed to keep operating, etc.

Well you make some edge points I can't argue.
If the power goes off and your vehicle has low battery with no idea when the outage will end and you don't already have a second car.. Then it would probably have been best if you spent the 10-20K on a backup battery system.

If on the other hand you do have at least 20-30% battery in your F-150 and the wife can use the gas car to get where she needs to go, for the bargain price of FREE if you already have the truck, you can use your Lightening to keep the freezers going and or the house from freezing, run some lights etc. Also if the power is on elsewhere you could easily drive there, charge and tanker in some power for your house.

My point is a lot of people are already going to buy a truck. The electric Ford costs about the same as a gas Ford. The Lightening though will save you a lot of money in it's lifetime on fuel costs and maintenance costs and also be a big backup battery for who knows how many uses. Are their some people that would be better served by a gas version? Yes indeed. But for the bulk of truck owners who don't have extreme uses this thing is going to be a game changer. The funny thing is I thought I'd never be saying something like this about any auto maker much less one of the big three.
 
Last edited:
Well you make some edge points I can't argue.
If the power goes off and your vehicle has low battery with no idea when the outage will end and you don't already have a second car.. Then it would probably have been best if you spent the 10-20K on a backup battery system.

And one overhyped feature doesn't mean the whole truck is bad or that the feature is even bad. It just isn't what they're advertising it to be.

If on the other hand you do have at least 20-30% battery in your F-150 and the wife can use the gas car to get where she needs to go, for the bargain price of FREE if you already have the truck, you can use your Lightening to keep the freezers going and or the house from freezing, run some lights etc. Also if the power is on elsewhere you could easily drive there, charge and tanker in some power for your house.

The owner of the home and truck would really have to think about which circuits to power during an outage. Essentials only. But that's what it should be anyway. The ads are really annoying, they make it look so seamless, but unless you have a dedicated uninterrupted power supply that's sized for your entire house, power outages are always a hassle.

My point is a lot of people are already going to buy a truck. The electric Ford costs about the same as a gas Ford. The Lightening though will save you a lot of money in it's lifetime on fuel costs and maintenance costs and also be a big backup battery for who knows how many uses. Are their some people that would be better served by a gas version? Yes indeed. But for the bulk of truck owners who don't have extreme uses this thing is going to be a game changer. The funny thing is I thought I'd never be saying something like this about any auto maker much less one of the big three.

I may not be a Ford fan, and it sounds like you aren't either, but I'm actually really happy to see this truck on the market and I'm really looking forward to the EV Silverado due in a couple years.
 
Back in the early 80s I designed a non-volatile PCI bus memory card that could hold up to 16MB of static ram and could ride through a power failure for a month using a 2032 coin cell. It was specifically designed for a very large customer with a bazillion of our (Digital Equipment Corp) servers running a world-wide reservation system - they used it for after-image logging of their database (per-record thing) and the minimum hold-up time was specified by them (2 weeks) based on studies IBM had done on the distribution of power outage durations across their world.

2 weeks was nearly the tail of the dragon wrt duration - if power was still out customers would have fired up off-site systems in powered environments by then and relocated the work. I wish I still had the plots from that study as they really could aid infrastructure decisions wrt batteries and gensets and the like...

Cheers!
 
Hah! That's nothing! In 1973 I installed the first ever solid state 1 Megabyte memory system on an IBM System370/145. The cabinet was 30" deep x 5 feet tall and 6 feet long and it needed eighteen 2500 watt DC power supplies to do its thing. It was installed at Sprague Electric's plant in North Adams, Massachusetts, and the facilities management there brilliantly fabricated a duct system that would direct the heat from that box either into the plant's HVAC system or straight outdoors.

And it was hella toasty, too, as the memory elements were 256 bit bipolar static rams :D

Cheers!
 
Hah! That's nothing! In 1973 I installed the first ever solid state 1 Megabyte memory system on an IBM System370/145. The cabinet was 30" deep x 5 feet tall and 6 feet long and it needed eighteen 2500 watt DC power supplies to do its thing. It was installed at Sprague Electric's plant in North Adams, Massachusetts, and the facilities management there brilliantly fabricated a duct system that would direct the heat from that box either into the plant's HVAC system or straight outdoors.

And it was hella toasty, too, as the memory elements were 256 bit bipolar static rams :D

Cheers!
When I started at "Big Blue" in 1978, they sold 1M byte of dynamic ram memory for the S/370 for ~$100K. My how things have changed.

Brew on :mug:
 
I'm not saying that it isn't capable or can't be handy. I'm saying that the real world application isn't that straightforward.

When the power goes out, you often don't know how long it'll be out for. A few years back most of my home county suffered a power failure due to a blizzard. They didn't know how many days it would take to get power back. I believe the power was out for several days, in that time people needed to be able to go to the grocery store, check on loved ones, etc, after the snowplows went through. They needed their vehicles to travel several miles in order to do that. They also needed to be able to keep their houses warm enough the pipes wouldn't burst, keep their refrigerators running, medical devices needed to keep operating, etc.

Within the last few years my town lost power after a storm. We didn't know how long we'd be without power. We didn't know if we'd need to get out of town to grab some supplies. My wife took the car and went to work the next day.

When the power goes out, the common themes are that you probably don't know how long that problem will last, you need to keep some power going at your house, but you will also probably need to travel. Relying solely on something like the Lightning's feature to power your home is an interesting situation. One would need to assess how much range they might have (further complicated when you consider that the vehicle might not be completely charged anyway), what they might need to travel for, and how critical it is to keep power at the house.

It's a good option to have, but I think that backup power from a system of batteries, solar panels, and maybe a wind turbine makes a lot of sense.
When the power goes out at you home, it often goes out at the gas station. No juice, no gas pump. A 6000W portable genset and a couple of 5 gallon gas cans will give you 10-12 hours of charge time, which would give you some "emergency mileage" in a "Lightning F-150" even if you have been using its traction batteries for emergency home use. And of course, you could opt for a built-in genset for the F-150, which has proven to be a popular option for tradesmen who use it as a work truck.

Totally agree that solar roof panels or even a small wind turbine would be better if you have special needs or experience frequent power outages. That said, either would be a special application device at a large investment cost. A Lightning would provide transportation, battery bank backup, and emergency generator power.
 
Totally agree that solar roof panels or even a small wind turbine would be better if you have special needs or experience frequent power outages. That said, either would be a special application device at a large investment cost. A Lightning would provide transportation, battery bank backup, and emergency generator power.

There are tradeoffs to having your emergency power source being either your truck or a system of solar panels, wind turbines, and a battery bank.

It seems like the Lightning truck is about as expensive as the standard ICE F150, so you aren't buying extra equipment for your emergency power, but you're forced to take it with you if you need to go to work or get supplies. If your power outage doesn't happen towards the end of a weekend you've been staying in for, or at 5am, you probably aren't going to have a full battery.

A properly sized solar, wind, and battery backup system involves more cost up front, which can vary depending on the method you're using. I would just be trying to power my refrigerators/freezers, furnace/AC (AC would be adjusted to keep the house below 90F, heat would probably be set to keep us from freezing to death and keep the pipes warm), water heater, an outlet in the garage so I could slow-charge my car, lights in my utility room, modem/router, radio, and an outlet to charge my phone. I'd be trying to size my system so that the solar panels alone could comfortably power all that, and then throw in a turbine for nighttime and cloudy days. Battery backup would handle nighttime when there isn't enough wind. If we had a few weeks of really cloudy weather with no wind, I would set the battery system to charge from the grid. I'd be able to power those things all the time, without much coming from the grid, and would eventually reach a point where I have a return on my investment. It would stay at the house all the time, regardless of where my vehicles are. If I had an all-electric vehicle, instead of my hybrid Volt, I would have to go find a public fast charger.

For someone like me who has two refrigerators, a large chest freezer, a kegerator, and lives in a climate where daytime highs in the summer can get in the 90s or even 100s, and lows in the winter can get well below 0F, and we can experience tornados in the summer and blizzards in the winter, I'd rather have the latter option, but it would be a lot cheaper to get the truck. I think the big takeaway here is I want to set my house up so it can be powered by a generator.
 
There are tradeoffs to having your emergency power source being either your truck or a system of solar panels, wind turbines, and a battery bank.

It seems like the Lightning truck is about as expensive as the standard ICE F150, so you aren't buying extra equipment for your emergency power, but you're forced to take it with you if you need to go to work or get supplies. If your power outage doesn't happen towards the end of a weekend you've been staying in for, or at 5am, you probably aren't going to have a full battery.

A properly sized solar, wind, and battery backup system involves more cost up front, which can vary depending on the method you're using. I would just be trying to power my refrigerators/freezers, furnace/AC (AC would be adjusted to keep the house below 90F, heat would probably be set to keep us from freezing to death and keep the pipes warm), water heater, an outlet in the garage so I could slow-charge my car, lights in my utility room, modem/router, radio, and an outlet to charge my phone. I'd be trying to size my system so that the solar panels alone could comfortably power all that, and then throw in a turbine for nighttime and cloudy days. Battery backup would handle nighttime when there isn't enough wind. If we had a few weeks of really cloudy weather with no wind, I would set the battery system to charge from the grid. I'd be able to power those things all the time, without much coming from the grid, and would eventually reach a point where I have a return on my investment. It would stay at the house all the time, regardless of where my vehicles are. If I had an all-electric vehicle, instead of my hybrid Volt, I would have to go find a public fast charger.

For someone like me who has two refrigerators, a large chest freezer, a kegerator, and lives in a climate where daytime highs in the summer can get in the 90s or even 100s, and lows in the winter can get well below 0F, and we can experience tornados in the summer and blizzards in the winter, I'd rather have the latter option, but it would be a lot cheaper to get the truck. I think the big takeaway here is I want to set my house up so it can be powered by a generator.

A dedicated generator is a good backup. A few years ago I came close to pulling the trigger on a solar array and battery bank. I also looked at an automatic LP generator. Either option even for minimal service backup would run about $20 grand, including an automatic transfer relay and sub box for essential circuits.

In 35 years we've had maybe a dozen outages, only 2 of which lasted more than a few hours, but one was over three days in the dead of winter. I'd likely never "need" a backup system, and certainly never amortize the expense. I settled on a 7000W generator with four 20 amp outlets that can provide power to a man cave "survival" room with a Vermont stove (heat, cooking), 1/2 bath, power the well pump, and power the radio, router and TV. If I can eat, crap watch the news and have a cold beer occasionally, I'll survive.
 
For someone like me who has two refrigerators, a large chest freezer, a kegerator, and lives in a climate where daytime highs in the summer can get in the 90s or even 100s, and lows in the winter can get well below 0F, and we can experience tornados in the summer and blizzards in the winter, I'd rather have the latter option, but it would be a lot cheaper to get the truck. I think the big takeaway here is I want to set my house up so it can be powered by a generator.

Spend the money and move someplace that doesn't suck, Kent! ;)
 
Spend the money and move someplace that doesn't suck, Kent! ;)

No, no, it's fine, I wouldn't want to take up space somewhere with a more pleasant, stable climate. Y'all aren't really going to do much with this part of the world anyways, so I'll just stick around here.
 
I'm not saying that it isn't capable or can't be handy. I'm saying that the real world application isn't that straightforward.

When the power goes out, you often don't know how long it'll be out for. A few years back most of my home county suffered a power failure due to a blizzard. They didn't know how many days it would take to get power back. I believe the power was out for several days, in that time people needed to be able to go to the grocery store, check on loved ones, etc, after the snowplows went through. They needed their vehicles to travel several miles in order to do that. They also needed to be able to keep their houses warm enough the pipes wouldn't burst, keep their refrigerators running, medical devices needed to keep operating, etc.

Within the last few years my town lost power after a storm. We didn't know how long we'd be without power. We didn't know if we'd need to get out of town to grab some supplies. My wife took the car and went to work the next day.

When the power goes out, the common themes are that you probably don't know how long that problem will last, you need to keep some power going at your house, but you will also probably need to travel. Relying solely on something like the Lightning's feature to power your home is an interesting situation. One would need to assess how much range they might have (further complicated when you consider that the vehicle might not be completely charged anyway), what they might need to travel for, and how critical it is to keep power at the house.

It's a good option to have, but I think that backup power from a system of batteries, solar panels, and maybe a wind turbine makes a lot of sense.
My wife and I recently had a zoom meeting with a solar consultant to review their estimate on solar panels. Initially, I had inquired about a battery bank similar to Tesla's power wall. The consultant told us of a bi-directional charger that is coming to the US in a year or so. Its basically a charger that can reverse the flow of electricity from your car to power your house. Essentially turning every ev car into a power wall and acting similar to the F150. Apparently this charger is being used in other countries.
In the event of a power outage, the solar panels could charge the car and power the house during the day. At night the car could power the house. Since battery banks or power walls are not cheap. It makes a lot more sense to buy an ev and essentially have a battery bank with wheels. This meeting took place just a few days ago so I haven't had a chance to do any of my own research.
 
Essentially turning every ev car into a power wall and acting similar to the F150. Apparently this charger is being used in other countries.
In the event of a power outage, the solar panels could charge the car and power the house during the day. At night the car could power the house. Since battery banks or power walls are not cheap. It makes a lot more sense to buy an ev and essentially have a battery bank with wheels. This meeting took place just a few days ago so I haven't had a chance to do any of my own research.

Unfortunately some EV manufacturers (Tesla) won’t let you do that. Which means I have 150kwh of batteries sitting in my garage I sadly can’t use in an outage for home power. :(
 
Unfortunately some EV manufacturers (Tesla) won’t let you do that. Which means I have 150kwh of batteries sitting in my garage I sadly can’t use in an outage for home power. :(
If Lightning's ability to become a mobile storage battery catches on, Elon will change that paradigm and adjust to improve on the idea. Even an innovator has to adapt or disappear.
 
If Lightning's ability to become a mobile storage battery catches on, Elon will change that paradigm and adjust to improve on the idea. Even an innovator has to adapt or disappear.
I think Elon's days of being the Proprietary King are coming to an end. With Ford and others stepping up their ev game, he no longer has the luxury of being unwilling to go mainstream.

A year ago, if I were in the market for an ev, Tesla would have been my only pick. The e-mustang is looking pretty sweet. Hopefully the rumors are true of the new Maverick being available in all electric in a couple of years. For me that makes more sense than the F150 ev. I could put 80-90% of all my miles on that and still keep my gas guzzler tow vehicle.
 
Same here. Three years ago I wanted to put panels on the roof and a Power Wall in the garage to charge a Tesla. Now I've got a Volvo, a Prius and a Mercedes. Two gas bangers and a hybrid I plug into a 20 amp/120V outlet that charges in 5 hours and serves my daily needs for a week. The only time I worry about gasoline is when I have to add fresh fuel once a year to keep the ICE happy.

Elon is focused too much on outer space right now, but if the corporation he started can produce a breakthrough in battery tech, he'll still be the premier player in the marketplace. The other manufacturers will benefit from the technology and its increasing acceptance, but Tesla will likely remain the leader in the near term.
 
Elon is focused too much on outer space right now, but if the corporation he started can produce a breakthrough in battery tech, he'll still be the premier player in the marketplace. The other manufacturers will benefit from the technology and its increasing acceptance, but Tesla will likely remain the leader in the near term.

I think the future is rosy for EV, but I'm not sure it's all that rosy for Tesla as a company. I've seen too many instances where an upstart gets first mover advantage in a marketplace, but just doesn't have the scope to scale when the much larger entrenched players start taking that market seriously.

The market I'm familiar with is data storage. It's similar to transportation in that the underlying goal (building cars to get from point A to B / building data storage products that attach to computers) is not as tied to the technology (battery vs ICE / HDD vs SSD) as you'd think. Throughout the late 200x / early 201x years, there were TONS of companies in the SSD market that were darlings of the media and some of them of Wall Street.

Those companies are almost 100% owned by players much larger than they ever were, because they couldn't scale once the big boys started paying attention.

First mover advantage only exists when you're ahead in technology. If you're not ahead in technology, you need the logistical excellence of being able to build cars... And that's something that everyone else is better at than Tesla.
 
I think the future is rosy for EV, but I'm not sure it's all that rosy for Tesla as a company. I've seen too many instances where an upstart gets first mover advantage in a marketplace, but just doesn't have the scope to scale when the much larger entrenched players start taking that market seriously.

First mover advantage only exists when you're ahead in technology. If you're not ahead in technology, you need the logistical excellence of being able to build cars... And that's something that everyone else is better at than Tesla.

Don't forget that Tesla is not just a car manufacturer but also grid scale battery and solar panel maker. Additionally they have the super charging network with brings income. And if they figure out the autonomous driving thing then Tesla will make Apple look small by comparison.

As far as other companies being better at making cars I would agree they are better at making ICE cars but not EV's. Auto companies are specialists at making engines and transmissions and chassis made from hundreds of welded parts. Unfortunately none of that will translate into producing electric cars and especially not cells or battery packs and that is where the big three will choke. There isn't a fraction of the capacity that will be required currently in existence so unless they start breaking ground on several Gigafactory size battery plants yesterday, they are screwed. That and they are legally tied to and constrained by their dealer network which refuses to sell EV's because it cuts into their prime source of income which is fixing and maintaining prone to breaking gas cars.

Tesla by the way is now die casting the whole front and rear aluminum frame assemblies of the model Y in a huge press. This eliminates hundreds of parts that previously needed to be formed or stamped then assembled in jigs and welded together in a time consuming process. Now in a couple minutes the whole part is spit out of a gigantic molding press.


Just some of the many reasons Detroit is far behind and falling even farther as every day goes by. I hope though they finally kick it into gear but it just isn't that easy nor cheap to transition into making a completely different product. Especially when you really don't want to but instead have to.
 
Last edited:
Don't forget that Tesla is not just a car manufacturer but also grid scale battery and solar panel maker. Additionally they have the super charging network with brings income. And if they figure out the autonomous driving thing then Tesla will make Apple look small by comparison.

As far as other companies being better at making cars I would agree they are better at making ICE cars but not EV's. Auto companies are specialists at making engines and transmissions and chassis made from hundreds of welded parts. Unfortunately none of that will translate into producing electric cars and especially not cells or battery packs and that is where the big three will choke. There isn't a fraction of the capacity that will be required currently in existence so unless they start breaking ground on several Gigafactory size battery plants yesterday, they are screwed. That and they are legally tied to and constrained by their dealer network which refuses to sell EV's because it cuts into their prime source of income which is fixing and maintaining prone to breaking gas cars.

Tesla by the way is now die casting the whole front and rear aluminum frame assemblies of the model Y in a huge press. This eliminates hundreds of parts that previously needed to be formed or stamped then assembled in jigs and welded together in a time consuming process. Now in a couple minutes the whole part is spit out of a gigantic molding press.


Just some of the many reasons Detroit is far behind and falling even farther as every day goes by. I hope though they finally kick it into gear but it just isn't that easy nor cheap to transition into making a completely different product. Especially when you really don't want too but instead have too.


Don't want to sound like a sycophantic fanboy for Tesla, but:

^^^^THAT^^^^

100% Spot On.
 
If Lightning's ability to become a mobile storage battery catches on, Elon will change that paradigm and adjust to improve on the idea. Even an innovator has to adapt or disappear.
My big takeaway is that Ford has opened a door that can't be shut, and other manufacturers will have to quickly come up with something comparable just to stay in the game. The F150 is already the best selling vehicle in the US, so others will really have to step up their game just to not get overwhelmed completely. As you mention about batteries, it will be about more than just vehicles. It's an exciting development.
 
What IS really interesting is that all of this comes down to batteries, and batteries are a huge portion of the cost of an EV. That will become an enormous driver of what happens.

Again, I saw this in data storage. NAND is the biggest cost component of an SSD, and there are a limited number of companies in the world that produce it. Samsung, Western Digital + Kioxia/Toshiba by joint venture, SK Hynix (who just acquired Intel's NAND group as well) and Micron. That's 4 companies or 5 depending how you account for the WD/Kioxia joint venture.

All those exciting SSD vendors that I mentioned? Subsumed into those companies because they weren't vertically integrated in NAND. 2 of the 3 worldwide HDD vendors (Western Digital and Kioxia/Toshiba, but not Seagate) are now vertically integrated in NAND as well. It's a necessary component to success. You can't compete at the largest customers without vertical integration. It's why Samsung / WD / Kioxia / Micron are the biggest names in SSD.

Tesla keeps CLAIMING they are going to be vertically integrated in battery technology, but they're still purchasing from Panasonic. And Tesla's MO is claiming things that may or may not ever happen, so I don't trust anything they say they'll do until they actually prove it.

If Tesla does become vertically integrated in batteries, then they are going to be set up for long-term success. If not--and despite their claims, they are not today--then I don't see how they can compete long-term with companies that are FAR better capitalized and far more logistically capable than they are.
 
Back
Top