Yuri_G
Member
He must have been manning Nikola's Twitter during the Semi reveal.
Behold, the epic (now deleted) meltdown Nikola Motor Company had on Twitter last night:
SHAME, SHAME, SHAME!
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He must have been manning Nikola's Twitter during the Semi reveal.
I hope SEC would look into the stock manipulation angle in Scott perry's actions. It is just outrageous how so many self-servings execs, while pushing their corrupt personal agendas, are harming shareholders of public companies.
Mike Smith
Active Member
Reuters should also be held to account. It took me a few minutes to discover that the single source of their information had already formed a partnership with Tesla's most ardent trucking competitor.
I wouldn’t mind autonomous launch mode at the drag strip with nearly zero second reaction time.
Has anyone looked at the economics of the Megachargers? Some rough calculations tells me they'll be sort of expensive, but workable.
- 8 MW four bay Megacharger: ~1M USD
- 20 MWh of batteries: ~4M USD
- 12 MW solar: ~8M USD
- 4 MW grid connection: 500k USD (?)
That's a 13.5 million USD investment, with these properties:
- Max ~195 charging sessions per day doing 0-80%, ~75 with solar, ~110 with grid power.
- ~60 MWh solar per day, 1/3 could be stored for night time. Most of the power could be supplied to the grid on low-demand days.
I'm assuming they'd target around 100 charging sessions per day to use up the solar, and add some cheap-ish off-peak grid power. And I'm thinking the highest charging demand would be during daytime, so much of the time the solar wouldn't be going through the batteries or be supplied to the grid.
The daily income would be around 5600 USD, or 2M USD per year. Assuming 10 cents/kWh for 25% of the consumed power, that would leave 1.27M USD for the Megacharger. At a 5% financing cost, the Megacharger would break even at around 15 years.
Does this make sense?
- 8 MW four bay Megacharger: ~1M USD
- 20 MWh of batteries: ~4M USD
- 12 MW solar: ~8M USD
- 4 MW grid connection: 500k USD (?)
That's a 13.5 million USD investment, with these properties:
- Max ~195 charging sessions per day doing 0-80%, ~75 with solar, ~110 with grid power.
- ~60 MWh solar per day, 1/3 could be stored for night time. Most of the power could be supplied to the grid on low-demand days.
I'm assuming they'd target around 100 charging sessions per day to use up the solar, and add some cheap-ish off-peak grid power. And I'm thinking the highest charging demand would be during daytime, so much of the time the solar wouldn't be going through the batteries or be supplied to the grid.
The daily income would be around 5600 USD, or 2M USD per year. Assuming 10 cents/kWh for 25% of the consumed power, that would leave 1.27M USD for the Megacharger. At a 5% financing cost, the Megacharger would break even at around 15 years.
Does this make sense?
mmd
Active Member
I estimate the cost will be 7 million dollars instead of 13.5. Initially the Megachargers will not use solar energy. As the number of trucks increase, they gradually add solar panels produced by their own Gigafactory 2.
They really should at least *plan* the solar from the start, so that they know they can do it, because I don't see how they could hit that 7 cent per kWh figure without (cheap) solar.
But to start off, they could just install the Megacharger and grid connection. For the barebones installation, 7M USD would be too much, 1.5M USD should be more in the right ballpark. This would mean charging with on-peak electricity, and they would probably lose more than 10 cents per kWh.
The next step would be to add batteries, so that they can use some off-peak electricity. They would still be losing money, but they might be able to reduce the losses somewhat. And the final step would be to add the solar. At that point they could hit that 7 cent per kWh pricing.
They are steering the same dubious course as Daimer and BMW. Can you provide a link? Thx.
jeewee3000
Active Member
Two things:
- Elon promised the coast to coast drive for end of the year, Q1 2018 at the latest and has repeated this goal in the last earnings call. Postponing this until Q2 2018 would not be good for the (already dropping) faith in Tesla's ability to pull off FSD.
- the coast to coast 'event' cannot go wrong imo. They will try the trip without telling anyone, and if it worked they'll post a video. If it didn't, they'll just try again later. I can't imagine they'd livestream such a feat, given that many things can go wrong, even because of other drivers.
here you go, its in German though: VW: Elektroauto-Architektur MEB hat „neben Tesla die geringste Komplexität“ - ecomento.de
Both valid points. I always assumed they would have any number of tests of various distances, working up to a few successful coast to coast dry runs. Then, when they were confident, a date for the attempt would be announced. I can't imagine they'd live stream this. Rather have a tweet or few each day marking their progress. Then likely live stream the east coast arrival. I suppose they could post a video of their first successful run after the fact, but wouldn't that be mediocre PR for FSD compared to a real public attempt?
As to first point, Elon promises many things with dates and most of them are missed and pushed out. That doesn't help Tesla with WS analysts but is easily survivable because there is abundant evidence he delivers what he's promised and it will be outstanding when it does arrive.
jeewee3000
Active Member
Serious reply: If they would announce such a drive would happen beforehand, and tweet the progress along the way, it would endanger the whole attempt i think. I might be paranoid about this, but I can imagine plenty of people/companies wanting such an attempt to fail, that they'd set up an ambush somewhere to make the car lose it (weird traffic pattern, road block) or just let a car drive into it for bad PR. If I were Tesla I'd want to do the whole thing on a low profile and brag about it after the fact. (This seems to be what Musk is aiming for, if I recall correctly he always talks about releasing a video after the coast to coast drive).
Goofy reply: Live streaming would be crazy (not using the car LTE, but a seperate data connection of course). A live drive-along for the world to see would be impressive and give an amazing boost to Tesla's FSD PR.
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
Off Shore
Off Topic Member
...are crack-smoking hydrogen huffers. Nikola isn't competition, it's theater.
Gerardf
Active Member
Thanks ! You can follow further to this article :
Volkswagen stellt Elektroauto-Zellfertigung in Frage - ecomento.de
One of the comments below it says :
Der Müller hat neulich erst gesagt, sie werden genau so viel E-Autos bauen, wie sie für das Erreichen der CO2 Grenzwerte ab 2021 brauchen. Nicht ein E-Auto mehr.
(freely translated) according to this commenter Muller recently stated VW will only build the minimum EV's as needed to reach the new 2021 CO2 numbers, and not a single car more.
I have not been able to find such a quote from him, still searching, but if correct that 'strategy' could be the end of VW.
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As you say, the coast-to-coast demo's primary goal is to convince the public that Tesla is making good progress on FSD. The more they hedge their bets on 'demo can't go wrong' by protecting themselves the more scripted it will seem (in the extreme : no live updates, just a video drop of highlights) and may miss its purpose because it would be too easy to dismiss (rightfully so) as a doctored demo. It's a damned if you do and a damned if you don't situation for Tesla and it is entirely self-inflicted.
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