Um….the horse and buggy still exists. It’s the main transport in many (often poorer) places, even some in America (Amish country).

You’re insane if you think the internal combustion engine is dead. Even if that was the worldwide goal, it would take decades upon decades to pull off and tens-hundreds of trillions in subsidies….and even then there are hundreds of applications where electric doesn’t work for hundreds of reasons.
If you believe that, why do you support expanding oil exploration and offshore drilling? Why destroy the few places left unadulterated for a horrendous energy source you claim is phasing out soon. That’s incredibly short sighted and dumb.

Besides, you might be unaware, the electric car was more accepted than combustion engines before, at the turn of the last century. We’ve seen this movement before. It didn’t turn out as you predict.

Electric is great, but it’s not a panecea, and it’s not a painless switch.

On this one, Bob, assuming you are not being ironic, I totally agree with you. Most people drive about 11.5 miles each way to and from work--and most cars used for non-work go less distance. Range for at least one car in a family isn't really the hang up.

A Tesla Model X (just to pick one) goes 0-60 in around 3.8 seconds. 3.8 seconds is ridiculous fast. The Plaid variant does it in 2.5 seconds. The fastest internal combustion engine I've ever personally lived with did/does it in 5.9. Thus, moms hauling groceries can flatten the bags against the rear hatch about twice as fast as me. I am a poser lol.

The F-150 pick up is rumored to do it..4.4 seconds. Good grief. The load will fly out of the bed.

Those are FUN vehicles.

A Tesla has 18 moving parts in the drivetrain (so says quick a Google search)--and an internal combustion engine has thousands in the engine and drive (2,000?)-- That's a lot of skilled jobs in manufacturing and maintenance that aren't going to be the same as a change over happens.

Tesla is a good buy today even at 52 week highs. There is a growth path forward in which new factories are coming on line
Giga
Shanghai
Berlin
Texas

+ Giga Nevada battery factory adding lines.

Limiting factor is battery. Battery day should lay out the path forward.


Tesla is profitable , last 4 quarters, and believe this will continue.

I am looking long term. Min 5 years to 10 years.
I am looking for production to double approx every year.

600k this year goal
1.2mil min goal next year
2.4mil + in 3 rd year.

I've posted the 2020 NC transportation outlook on the Sift. It is really worth a look.



Also any one interested should look at Kathy Wood of ARC investment. Just look for her on you tube.
This is ARC investment link
https://ark-invest.com/analyst-research/tesla-price-target/

Sandy Monroe ( you tube) tore down a 2012 and a 2020 model and was astonished at not only in improvements but absolutely astonished in the technology lead of the produce. His group does this and sell reports to all. Evey Asian and Europe atuo manufacture has bought his report. Not 1 American Auto maker has.

Ford, GM are far behind.

Every ICE maker ( ICE Internal Combustion Engine) will have to not only continue that investment and also invest in EV. Dont think they have enough Research investment dollars on hand to do both.



Musk is a visionary Just look at what he is doing besides cars.

Space X . Few step into the space race and succeed like Musk.

Boring company . Fed up with traffic jams he look for solutions. Looked at boring machines and found then to be 15 times slower than a snail. Got a team together and designed a boring machine 15 times faster.

Supplemental storage energy for peak energy demands.

Solar panels. Redesigned and lower cost of ownership.

Musk salary /bonus ties to achievement goals, not just a set amount.


This a BUY time.
This is like buying Apple when Steve Jobs came back to Apple.


Over valuation is what people see Tesla to be worth.
Market forces, Technological improvements and Government regulations will push EV market to forefront over the next decade. There is no stopping this.

No, no, no, no, no.
Not the first car by 50 + years. Just the first internal combustion engine powered car. Electric and steam power both came well before this.
I love old school tech, but I can't upvote such incorrect information.

Um...but, again, before Ford made internal combustion viable, the electric car was center stage, almost alone on the stage....even with the horrible batteries they had in the 1800's. Granted, there weren't many other options besides steam.

It's well past time for it to return imo.

It's not just sad it's criminal that before it got a second shot it had to prove it could beat combustion engine vehicles in every way, not just ecologically and economically, but in every performance metric as well. Now that it has, I still expect major pushback from both car and oil companies and their lackeys. Fingers crossed that they fail this time to rig the system again.

PS, are you using speech to text, is there a problem with the Russian to English translation program you've been issued, or should we be worried about Wernicke's aphasia? ;-)

This is kind of annoying to me. The only grid this guy is living off of is the electrical grid. He's got guns and ammunition, vehicles, boats, internal combustion engines, gasoline, oil etc etc. Take away civilization and he will, of necessity, start to revert to pre industrial living fairly quickly. He's not some eco warrior or rugged individualist protecting nature, he's living off of everybody else's little corner of paradise.

They're using port injection, so without the engine turning there's nothing to pull the fuel into the cylinder.

I love all this technology though, I'm a real petrol head but I really do think this is the dying throws of the internal combustion engine. Electric motors just have so many advantages and the disadvantages are disappearing fast.

***update -- I was wrong about P-47 having a rotary engine, confused *radial* with rotary. Other than noting that mistake here, I'll leave my original comment unedited below (in which I draw erroneous conclusions based on that brain fart):

@eric3579 and @newtboy -

I was also quite interested in the "advantages" question. My grandfather was an armorer on P-47 "Thunderbolt" aircraft in WW2, and I knew that rotary engines were used in those.

Both of your answers tie in to the strengths of P-47s during the war. They were considered very reliable and resistant to damage (sorta like a WW2-era A-10; they could take a beating and make it back home). And of course, in internal combustion powered aircraft, power to weight ratio is even more important than in automobiles.

So, I'm sure that some of those strengths were at least partially due to the use of a radial engine. Not entirely, because other things in the design played a big role also -- like the fact that the P-47 engine was air cooled, so it didn't need a radiator system. As I understand it, comparatively light damage to a liquid-cooled aircraft like a P-51 that happened to damage the cooling system could disable or force them down for repairs... Not to knock the amazing piece of engineering that the Mustang was, but for sheer ability to take a beating and stay in the air, the Thunderbolt may have been the best US fighter in the war.

5.38 second quarter mile...fast ride---
Oddly, the top fuel dragsters (internal combustion engines) can run it faster (4.5 seconds, with a trap speed of 332 mph...)

Bugatti Veyron around 10.1 seconds at 139 mph
Corvette Z06 runs 11.2 to 11.6 seconds...
VW GTE runs 15.2
and a 2013 Prius about 18 seconds...

One more thought that I had:

Before Tesla, electric cars were niche marketed as adequate. In the sense that if you were a person very highly motivated to be "green", you could get one, drive around short distances, and in general enjoy a small subset of the versatility of an internal combustion gas guzzling car. You could get by, but in general life with an electric car was a step back from life with a gas car.

The reason Tesla is amazing is that it flipped that on its head. You're not sacrificing anything, you don't need an attitude of "I can use a bit less and take one for the team" for a Tesla to appeal to you. Everything I watch about the Model S says it is a fast, high-performance, fun to drive, luxurious car -- objectively BETTER than a similarly priced gas-powered car to most users (who can afford one, but that will include more and more people over time).


Same thing goes for home solar and other "green energy". Adoption rates are NEVER going to soar when solar is "adequate". And then only adequate if you make very big lifestyle changes like cutting back on heating and cooling, using low-draw appliances, etc. etc.

But as Tesla is doing to cars, maybe this can do to energy. Musk is saying NO, you don't have to cut back. You don't have to settle for less. You don't have to take one for the team. Install some (currently fairly expensive) solar panels and 1, 2, or however many of our power packs, and you can have a BETTER experience than being on the grid, paying high bills every month and dealing with the occasional outage, etc.

I guarantee that pitch will do more to push the adoption of green energy than 10 years of Al Gore living in a mansion and flying around constantly on a private jet to give $100,000 lectures explaining why everybody else needs to cut back or we're all going to melt...

Thank you very much for your answers -- here's a couple more questions maybe you can give thoughts on if you have time:

Quick googling says the average US home uses a bit under 12,000 kWh per year. Divide that by 365 and get ~33 kWh per day, divide that by 24 and get ~1.4 kW per hour (rounding up in all instances). Of course, that's going to be higher in the day and lower at night, but one of the points of the batteries is to help smooth out that usage curve and make it transparent to the homeowner / user.

Anyway, questions related to those figures:
*Do those numbers sound ballpark to your experience?

*You've got 1kWh of lead acid batteries. Ignoring the fact that night usage would tend to be lower than daytime, an "average home" draw of 1.4 kW per hour would give you about 40 minutes of off-the-grid power (without help from the solar). That would probably require lifestyle changes to deal with; it seems like an average home couldn't get through a night without fully draining the batteries. True?

A 10 kWh pack like shown in the video would give 7+ hours, not accounting for lower drain at night. Seems like an average US house might well be able to go a whole night with that kind of battery without any lifestyle adjustments (assuming solar can handle 100% of the load during daytime PLUS charge up the batteries).

* Could your existing solar cells handle daytime load and charging of 1 or 2 of these 10 kWh packs so that you could be comfortably 100% off-grid?

* How much area do your solar cells cover?


I'm been very impressed with Tesla as a car company, even though I've never driven or even seen one in person (only a very few super-rich people have imported Teslas to Thailand). I thought that electric cars were going to be impractical toys for really out-there tree huggers, but everything I read about the Model S and other Tesla cars tells me that they are the real deal, actually superior to internal combustion for MOST use cases.

Hopefully without sounding too much like Howard Hughes, I believe that baseline practicality will let economy of scale take over and make Tesla and other electrics the way of the future. And this makes me likewise optimistic that Musk can similarly revolutionize the future of energy in general. Pretty exciting stuff!

2 more comments have been lost in the ether at this killed duplicate.

Revolutionize, probably not. Be an improved option over 'regular' internal combustion in (apparently) weight, size and efficiency, maybe. This seems to be a great option for a hybrid. Being smaller and lighter is what you want in an energy efficient vehicle, as is fuel efficiency. Since fossil fueled vehicles will be the norm for the foreseeable future, any step towards making them more efficient is a good thing (although not the end goal, true enough). This seemed to have many advantages of Wankel motors (rotaries) without the efficiency problem due to low compression/incomplete combustion. 14:1 on pump gas is INSANE! My offroad race motor is only 12:1 and it needs trick racing fuel.
Also, as far as simplicity, this had no valves and assorted crap, just inlet and outlet ports (from what I understood anyway) like Wankels. That's a HUGE jump in simplicity, with an entire system eliminated, so there's far less to break/wear out/need tuning. IF manufacturing cost can be reasonable, I see this as a great step forward possibly making hybrids more acceptable to many more people.

If a large percentage, or at least a majority of cars were now electric, I would agree. But they are not. Because internal combustion engines are still the norm, even in hybrids, making one that's more efficient and lighter with fewer parts is a great idea.
Don't let the great be the enemy of the good.
I wonder how they deal with centrifugal force when it runs at high speeds, it seems like the piston would ride the cylinder wall, creating major friction and heat. Maybe I missed something.