Bob Lutz has no faith in Tesla

He hasn't had any faith in Tesla for a very long time. At least he's consistently disappointed me. Bob Lutz on the Future - Page 2

I'd like to hear from him what he thinks of GM's efforts to make a Bolt that competes with Tesla on electric range in a lower price bracket...

His closing line captures the general problem:

Boy, I don't see it.

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Mr. Lutz comes from the "old guard" at GM, which assisted in helping to bring GM to bankruptcy, and has rarely done anything visionary since the 1920s. What do you expect him to say? It's like asking a buggy manufacturer, what do you think of this new Model T? Will Henry Ford be successful with this risky new venture?

brianman said:

His closing line captures the general problem: Boy, I don't see it.

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Clearly- old school thinking.

Lutz is a straight shooter and a smart guy. I'd be reluctant to dismiss his opinions lightly. Gm failed for lots of reasons but he's not one of them. I have confidence in Tesla's future but long term independent success is far from a surety.

AB4EJ said:

Mr. Lutz comes from the "old guard" at GM, which assisted in helping to bring GM to bankruptcy, and has rarely done anything visionary since the 1920s. What do you expect him to say? It's like asking a buggy manufacturer, what do you think of this new Model T? Will Henry Ford be successful with this risky new venture?

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And he conveniently ignores the fact that gasoline is a finite resource which will eventually become so expensive that ICE cars will also go the way of the dinosaur. It takes a visionary to break the paradigm, and a thorough altruist to do it with profit as a secondary motive.

SteveS0353 said:

And he conveniently ignores the fact that gasoline is a finite resource which will eventually become so expensive that ICE cars will also go the way of the dinosaur. It takes a visionary to break the paradigm, and a thorough altruist to do it with profit as a secondary motive.

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It's going to take a long time for gasoline to become really expensive, and any significant shift to BEVs would have the effect of lowering petroleum prices, because so much petroleum is used for transportation. Also, at any high price there would be lots of methods of synthesis that would become economical.

eye.surgeon said:

Lutz is a straight shooter and a smart guy. I'd be reluctant to dismiss his opinions lightly. Gm failed for lots of reasons but he's not one of them. I have confidence in Tesla's future but long term independent success is far from a surety.

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Which is why I expected better from him in Seattle than talking about global warming being a myth and radically overstating the Model S price and understating the performance/range. So that left me with he is either deliberately doing those things OR he has a blind spot on this issue, his mind is made up, and he's not open to new input.

Bob Lutz is a smart business man, who was probably paid a nice amount to give his "thoughts on Tesla". My guess is he was brought on to say some silly things about his views on Tesla, because he generates buzz. I have to believe he wasn't reading from a script. His comments were barely coherent.

In a way, his comments are sort of a positive for Tesla, since every time Lutz says something illogical about Tesla, or Electric Vehicles, every company and project Lutz has worked with loses face. There are a lot of them. I'm surprised he isn't being paid to not speak on TV. Lutz is to Electric Vehicles what the "Situation" was to Abercrombie.

I'm still not sure what these three comments are supposed to mean.

"It doesn't matter is the battery is stationary. The cheapest and most efficient backup batteries are lead acid because you don't need to carry it."

"I think the battery is greatly overvalued because having batteries as backup storage has been around for hundreds of years. I can't understand the fascination with this."

"If Elon says he's bought up every Country (Company?) that controls lithium and now controls the global supply of lithium, maybe there is a chance"

Plenty of Lithium in the world

America finds massive source of lithium in Wyoming | MINING.com



Even based on this very outdated website, Lutz is wrong.

A Comparison of Lead Acid to Lithium-ion in Stationary Storage Applications | AltEnergyMag

brianman said:

His closing line captures the general problem:

Boy, I don't see it.

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he is sexist?

or blind?

maybe just a negative person?

Zextraterrestrial said:

he is sexist?

or blind?

maybe just a negative person?

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I didn't read anything into "Boy". It's the rest of it that I was focused on.

I don't know if he's being truthful or not but what he's saying on camera clearly reflects that either (a) he just doesn't see it (like people that didn't "get" the value of supercharging) or (b) he does see it and is lying (like a lot of the old guard of the automotive industry).

bonnie said:

Which is why I expected better from him in Seattle than talking about global warming being a myth and radically overstating the Model S price and understating the performance/range. So that left me with he is either deliberately doing those things OR he has a blind spot on this issue, his mind is made up, and he's not open to new input.

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His whole "green period" that he had just makes him that much more credible now as he turns back to his old ways (ICEs rules, global warming schwarming, batteries schmatteries) etc.). Now people are going to listen more: "Wasn't he the guy who went from GM, then was optimistic about EVs? And now he's sceptical again. Hmm, I better listen carefully to his arguments now that he's shedding doubt on global warming and if it's not best after all to let my next car be an ICE..."

He's always been on the oil mens side and has always benefited from from the fossil fuel industry interests (probably a lot directly in his pockets during his working life). Now he's just squeezing out the maximum $$$ per year. This is the most value he can get out of the last working years of an old, starting-to-be-a-hasbeen auto CEO who again turns fossiul fuel conservative after having been green for a while.

I worked at GM when young, and have been around some of the most senior people like Bob. These senior managers are smart, hardworking and truly tough. But Silicon Valley will "eat their lunch".

Tesla Energy is about distributed grid services, not selling batteries. Both the transportation business and the energy business are "in play" now for new companies. Meanwhile, Bob is talking about lead acid batteries.

A hundred years is a good long life for a company.

bonnie said:

Which is why I expected better from him in Seattle than talking about global warming being a myth and radically overstating the Model S price and understating the performance/range. So that left me with he is either deliberately doing those things OR he has a blind spot on this issue, his mind is made up, and he's not open to new input.

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Yes, at that event where you and I met, Bonnie, I was profoundly disappointed by him. I was SO prepared to like and respect him, and I came away feeling that the leading edge of the world has just passed him by. It is a measure of the inertia of conventional thinking that he still gets these talking head gigs.

People who are smart are also frequently wrong, and are blind to change they don't champion.
People who are not smart, are wrong more, and nobody is right all the time.

Kodak was full of smart people who knew how to make and sell film.
Mainframe & minicomputer makers were full of smart people who knew how to make and sell mainframes and minicomputers.
Nokia was full of smart people who knew how to make and sell cellphones.

Several of the things he said in that interview are trivial to prove as incorrect.

First thing that came to mind.

richkae said:

Kodak was full of smart people who knew how to make and sell film.

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Many people don't know that Kodak tried hard to make a digital camera, and had some major commercial imagers. They just never had the electrical engineering skills of the Japanese.
Most large automakers outsource most of their electrical engineering and software. The heart of car manufacturing culture is engine and drivetrain. ICE engines have achieved far more in price/performance than any engineer would have believed forty years ago. This success lays the foundation for failure.

electracity said:

Many people don't know that Kodak tried hard to make a digital camera, and had some major commercial imagers. They just never had the electrical engineering skills of the Japanese.
Most large automakers outsource most of their electrical engineering and software. The heart of car manufacturing culture is engine and drivetrain. ICE engines have achieved far more in price/performance than any engineer would have believed forty years ago. This success lays the foundation for failure.

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This is very perceptive of you. It's a good analogy when you think like that: Kodak-Canon is like GM-Tesla in a way. Canon had then what Tesla has now: the engineering edge in the distruptive technology's field, not in the old technology's.