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Just an aside. One thing I do to monitor the entire investors forum is to "watch forum" the entire forum. Click the "TSLA investors discussion" link at top, and click the "watch forum" option on the upper right.
If you watch a whole forum (e.g.--investors or SpaceX or Model S), you can click on the "Forums" header which will drop down a list of options. One of which is the "Watched Forums" option. Then if you click on that it will bring up all the forums you are watching. There are a multitude of discussions in the investors thread which pertain to many of the things you talk about in the general thread. The ones you have not viewed will be in black. The ones you have read through are in gray.
If and when someone starts a new thread in the forum, it will pop up in your alerts as:
Quote: @jhm started a new thread "Tesla Semi"...End quote.
This will allow you to be notified of new threads that will be pertinent to your discussions.
Hopefully that helps.
Havelaar Canada Unveils Electric Pickup Truck Called The “Bison”
This is nice, a BEV pickup truck with 186 mile range.
This is nice, a BEV pickup truck with 186 mile range.
I worked there. Their leadership is good, but I disagree with Tom's comment, "hybrid and battery technologies are starting to become economically viable." They are already economically viable. I fear CMI is not going to be ready for the S-curve adoption of electric powertrains.
Cummins CEO Sees Opportunity in Electric Vehicles
Reciprocity
Active Member
Anytime I see some new EV announced, car, truck or semi, I first say "that's great the more the better for everyone as competition breads better products and accelerates the main goal." Then I say, "where are they going to get the batteries." I mean there must be 20+ EVs scheduled for 2020 or even a bit earlier. Where are all the gigafactories to support that? I have been watching pretty closely, but have not seen anything substantial from any of the big players like Panasonic (aside from Gigafactory), Samsung and LG. LG announced what amounted to a tiny expansion compared to a Gigafactory. I am not looking at China at all because that is a different beast, but I am just not able to figure out where the batteries will come for mass market cars. Sure, they can make some limited run cars for CARB compliance, but how are they going to get batteries for what would be millions of cars, trucks, buses and semis. I hope they do, I just dont see it yet. I also know for a fact that this capacity will at some point happen, but I would expect a lot of very large factory ground breaking events from major players.
dhanson865
Well-Known Member
You are so right to be looking for battery contracts or plant expansions to back those vehicles.
Of those 20 cars maybe 2 will have any volume to be worth a major contract or expansion. The rest will be show pieces for compliance or PR purposes.
AZ Desert Driver
Rare combination
I suspect that the Tesla Semi will be powered by Tesla batteries..The trucking companies that are in partnership with Tesla will have no problem getting the batteries they need - they may have to stand in line with the M3, powerwall and other demands, but I think it will be quite awhile before Tesla sells batteries to any other car/truck company.
Reciprocity
Active Member
We are talking about the non-Tesla based products, but I thought that was obvious since Tesla is building the largest factory on the planet to do nothing but build batteries.
I posted this in the Shorting Oil thread, but I think it is helpful here, especially in light of the Cummins announcement.
Here is an idea about how to account for high utilization uses going electric first.
Suppose a trucking fleet operator has 100 trucks. The daily routes can be broken out into three bucks: long, medium and short. The long routes require 1.5 b/d, medium 0.75 b/d, and short 0.5 b/d. Further if we assume 10% long, 60% medium, and 30% short, the fleet average is 0.75b/d.
Now suppose that a certain EV truck maker brings a product to market with a short range that is only suitable for short routes. This may provide a nice savings on fuel, it only address 30% of what this fleet operator needs. So even if this operator buys 30 of these, they offset just 15b/d for the fleet.
But Tesla comes out with trucks that are fully capable of long routes as well as shorter range options. So now the operator can buy 10 long haul Teslas to offset 15b/d plus another 20 medium haul Teslas to offset another 15b/d. So for the same number of EV trucks, 30b/d can be offset, twice as much as the competitor. Moreover, Tesla has products to address the fuel range of needs for this operator. So if the Teslas save the operator a substantial amount of total operating costs, then that client will be inclined to swap out the fleet quickly.
So I think this is Tesla's basic semi strategy, a no compromise full range truck. Fleets want to save the most money quickly. This coincides with giving the highest duty to Teslas first which minimizes fleet consumption of fuel.
Curiously, Tesla is avoiding the EV bus market. Perhaps this is because this is a much smaller market and there are already lots of competitors making serious advances. The strategy of many of these is to make due with a small battery, under 100kWh, by charging it multiple times per day. This is workable for transit buses with short routes. But Tesla is under no constraint to enter the market from the small battery side. Motorcoaches may be a worthy challenge for Tesla, but then we are still limited to a small market.
The heavy truck market seems wide open for Tesla, and they can make a big difference fast.
Here is an idea about how to account for high utilization uses going electric first.
Suppose a trucking fleet operator has 100 trucks. The daily routes can be broken out into three bucks: long, medium and short. The long routes require 1.5 b/d, medium 0.75 b/d, and short 0.5 b/d. Further if we assume 10% long, 60% medium, and 30% short, the fleet average is 0.75b/d.
Now suppose that a certain EV truck maker brings a product to market with a short range that is only suitable for short routes. This may provide a nice savings on fuel, it only address 30% of what this fleet operator needs. So even if this operator buys 30 of these, they offset just 15b/d for the fleet.
But Tesla comes out with trucks that are fully capable of long routes as well as shorter range options. So now the operator can buy 10 long haul Teslas to offset 15b/d plus another 20 medium haul Teslas to offset another 15b/d. So for the same number of EV trucks, 30b/d can be offset, twice as much as the competitor. Moreover, Tesla has products to address the fuel range of needs for this operator. So if the Teslas save the operator a substantial amount of total operating costs, then that client will be inclined to swap out the fleet quickly.
So I think this is Tesla's basic semi strategy, a no compromise full range truck. Fleets want to save the most money quickly. This coincides with giving the highest duty to Teslas first which minimizes fleet consumption of fuel.
Curiously, Tesla is avoiding the EV bus market. Perhaps this is because this is a much smaller market and there are already lots of competitors making serious advances. The strategy of many of these is to make due with a small battery, under 100kWh, by charging it multiple times per day. This is workable for transit buses with short routes. But Tesla is under no constraint to enter the market from the small battery side. Motorcoaches may be a worthy challenge for Tesla, but then we are still limited to a small market.
The heavy truck market seems wide open for Tesla, and they can make a big difference fast.
To expand on your "b/d" which I assume is barrels per day, on highway long haul application (which I am most knowledgeable on) fuel consumption (mpg) is 5 (meh), 7 (great), and 10 (fantastic). Typical mileage per year is around 100K miles. On highway powertrains have a standard 250K mile/2 yr. warranty.
"In 2016, refineries in the United States produced an average of about 20 gallons of motor gasoline and about 11 gallons of ultra-low sulfur distillate fuel oil (most of which is sold as diesel fuel and in several states as heating oil) from one 42-gallon barrel of crude oil." How many gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel are made from one barrel of oil? - FAQ - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)
This might give a better idea how many barrels get offset by replacing on highway ICE trucks with Tesla semis.
"In 2016, refineries in the United States produced an average of about 20 gallons of motor gasoline and about 11 gallons of ultra-low sulfur distillate fuel oil (most of which is sold as diesel fuel and in several states as heating oil) from one 42-gallon barrel of crude oil." How many gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel are made from one barrel of oil? - FAQ - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)
This might give a better idea how many barrels get offset by replacing on highway ICE trucks with Tesla semis.
What's amazing here is how fast Tesla can ramp up. Suppose Tesla Semi is well received because it substantially cuts operating costs. So fleet managers order up trucks as fast as Tesla can build them. The heavy truck market is about 3.6M per year. I suspect that Tesla has the capability to ramp up production to 1.2M or more within 5 years. Thus, Tesla could walk away with a third of the market while players like Cummins are still experimenting hybrids and paying more than $300/kWh for small batches of battery packs.
Tesla learned this hard lesson with Model S. You've got to build up the battery supply chain. Sort on batteries, players like Cummins will try to ration batteries putting small packs in trucks and extending them with engines. This will not work in the commercial fleet space. This has been demonstrated in the Chinese electric bus market. At first nonplugin hybrid buses were leading sales among BEV and PHEV buses. But there was a jump one year when fleet operators realized that plugging in was much cheaper than diesel or CCNG. So plugging surged and HEV buses fell out of favor. Then the next year fleet operators realized that the maintenance costs of BEV buses were a lot lower than PHEV buses. So BEVs tripled two years in a row while PHEVs fell out of favor. The market share of BEVs went from 0.2% of the total Chinese bus market to 20% in just 5 years. The lesson here is that fleet operators learn pretty fast what saves them money. In just a few years second best will get wedded out of the market.
So Tesla will hit the ground running, and big fleet operators can be flipped in just a few years. Experimenting with range extenders are a huge waste of time. A fleet operator already have a large number of long range diesel trucks. What they need is an electric truck that saves on both fuel cost and maintenace. So even a few short range BEVs can complement a fleet of mostly diesel. By the time traditional truck makers figure this out, Tesla will be selling over 1M trucks per year.
Tesla learned this hard lesson with Model S. You've got to build up the battery supply chain. Sort on batteries, players like Cummins will try to ration batteries putting small packs in trucks and extending them with engines. This will not work in the commercial fleet space. This has been demonstrated in the Chinese electric bus market. At first nonplugin hybrid buses were leading sales among BEV and PHEV buses. But there was a jump one year when fleet operators realized that plugging in was much cheaper than diesel or CCNG. So plugging surged and HEV buses fell out of favor. Then the next year fleet operators realized that the maintenance costs of BEV buses were a lot lower than PHEV buses. So BEVs tripled two years in a row while PHEVs fell out of favor. The market share of BEVs went from 0.2% of the total Chinese bus market to 20% in just 5 years. The lesson here is that fleet operators learn pretty fast what saves them money. In just a few years second best will get wedded out of the market.
So Tesla will hit the ground running, and big fleet operators can be flipped in just a few years. Experimenting with range extenders are a huge waste of time. A fleet operator already have a large number of long range diesel trucks. What they need is an electric truck that saves on both fuel cost and maintenace. So even a few short range BEVs can complement a fleet of mostly diesel. By the time traditional truck makers figure this out, Tesla will be selling over 1M trucks per year.
Alternative Fuels Data Center: Maps and Data - Average Annual Fuel Use of Major Vehicle Categories
Here's my source on average consumption. It is in gasoline gallon equivalents, converting this to diesel, I get 11,340 gallons of diesel annual average consumption per truck. This is 31gal/d = 0.74 b/d of diesel. This of course is just an average. Some trucks will be more heavily utilized than others.
The issue of product fractions of a crude is interesting. But the added complexity is not particularly illuminating. In the US, jet fuel is the marginal product, and diesel is produced in excess to be exported for premium price. Less developed countries use more diesel than gasoline. For example, India consumes 3 times more distillates than gasoline. So cutting demand for diesel will go along ways for curbing oil demand growth in developing countries. It will be cheaper for diesel importing countries to buy electric trucks and source domestic renewable electricity. This will reduce the volume imported and the cost of those imports. So as diesel export prices fall, gasoline in the US could become relatively more expensive. This move may also depress refinery profits. Ultimately the way to disrupt the oil industry is to cut the profit out of their most profitable products. Deprived of profits, investment in supply will fall and production decline. Right now, I think displacing diesel is more important than displacing gasoline.
(1) The oil demand curve is elastic now, because of the microeconomic phenomenon of substitution by other forms of energy. This is the critical point. And oil execs still haven't figured this out. If you hang out on oil forums, 90% of oilmen act like oil has completely inelastic demand, and even when you point out that substitutes are cheaper, they never bother to draw a demand curve, and only look at supply curves. It's *weird*, frankly. They have blinders on.
(2) Cash flow is bad.
(3) Leverage is high and getting higher. Have you been following them? Borrowing to pay dividends.
(4) The oil companies really do have their heads in the sand, with the exception of Total. Now that some of the internal documents are coming out from the Exxon fraud investigation, we're discovering that they published one set of scenarios to the investors, but were internally using much rosier "everything is great for oil" scenarios. They believe their own bullshit. This is a good recipe for bankruptcy.
I disagree on both points. (I think China causes #1 to be false within 5 years by policy alone; I think we are pretty close to "peak car" in the developed world; and I think the underdeveloped world will leapfrog straight past ICE. On #2, the financials of most of the major oil companies are a disaster; they don't actually have much cash, they have loads of debt, they have very low profits, and their assets turn into environmental cleanup liabilities when they're decommissioned.) But we've discussed this endlessly over on the "shorting oil" thread.
Reciprocity
Active Member
I agree with all your semi assessments.
From my best recollection, Elon had started that he believes smaller busses that are autonomous with routes that adapt to the riders, more like a ride sharing fleet of buses. One issue he seemed too have with buses is how much they clog up traffic and slow acceleration compounds that issue. We all know Elon hates traffic. I also believe they want to solve autonomous first because a Tesla network could lower the total amount of busses needed by dropping the cost of ride pooling on the Tesla network. Also, Tesla has to pick a problem and solve it before moving on to ten new problems. With model 3 virtually solved, semi if huge chunk of emissions and fuel consumption. Truck and Y would probably be next. Then the mini busses. I could see a truck platform that's flexible enough to go from personal work trucks up to box trucks and delivery vans like UPS uses.
At first the semi seems out of place, but the sheer amount of pollution from surreal. Diesel semis that drive 150k miles a year at 6-7mpg. You also have to take into consideration that Tesla can only make x number of units. That number will grow every year, but they can do the most good making a single semi vs three future model T trucks. Each semi would be worth 25-30 trucks. So given that, the semi makes sense.
Daimler vs Tesla: The Electric Truck War | OilPrice.com
Daimler, owner of Freightliner with 40% of the heavy truck market, says they're not worried about Tesla Semi. They've got the eCanter which can go 60 miles on a single charge! Ready for full production in 2019. I'm sure the eCanter will look real impressive after Tesla has rolled out a heavy duty semi with 600+ mile range. But Daimler does have a lot of infrastructure going for it.
Daimler has nothing to worry about. Maintaining a healthy self-image is the key.
Daimler, owner of Freightliner with 40% of the heavy truck market, says they're not worried about Tesla Semi. They've got the eCanter which can go 60 miles on a single charge! Ready for full production in 2019. I'm sure the eCanter will look real impressive after Tesla has rolled out a heavy duty semi with 600+ mile range. But Daimler does have a lot of infrastructure going for it.
Daimler has nothing to worry about. Maintaining a healthy self-image is the key.
This is helpful for understanding the high utilization impact of Tesla Semis. Suppose the initial use is to displace 100k/yr trucks at 5mpg. That is where the fuel savings will be greatest. So that is 20k gal/year or 1.3 b/d diesel. Displacing more efficient trucks will come later as the supply of Teslas ramps up.
So suppose Tesla ramps up to 10% of the heavy truck market, or 360k semis per year. This is a 470 kb/d reduction in diesel demand per year. This would be a huge impact on oil demand. To reduce gasoline demand by 470 kb/d would require about 15 million Model 3 in a market of about 70M passenger cars.
So a 10% EV penetration of the heavy truck market could have a bigger impact on oil demand than 21% penetration of the passenger car market. This, of course, is premised on the idea that trucks consuming the most fuel per year are displaced first by electrics, but it is fair to assume that fleet operators are going to want to maximize the economic benefit of bringing electrics into their fleet. Moreover, if Tesla had, say, a 1M mile/8 year warrantee, that would also push fleet operators to try to maximize the mileage on Teslas.
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