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HG Wells
Martian Embassy
As to the possible problems of making batteries at the giga factory (German Artical).
1. Utility power problems causing bad production. It is fairly common in factories to have backup power for only partitions of the assembly line. Since they make power packs this would be easy to fix.
2. Not getting enough batteries out of production. If this was the case we would see the availability of the short range pack. The short range pack uses one third less batteries than the long-range pack. This tells me it's not a battery production problem.
I suspect it's the automation for the pack. IE we know that they've been making battery packs by hand. They had a problem with the welds and had to replace packs. It's not battery production it's pack production that's giving the problem.
1. Utility power problems causing bad production. It is fairly common in factories to have backup power for only partitions of the assembly line. Since they make power packs this would be easy to fix.
2. Not getting enough batteries out of production. If this was the case we would see the availability of the short range pack. The short range pack uses one third less batteries than the long-range pack. This tells me it's not a battery production problem.
I suspect it's the automation for the pack. IE we know that they've been making battery packs by hand. They had a problem with the welds and had to replace packs. It's not battery production it's pack production that's giving the problem.
Update. Nothing back yet from IR about the Possible GF issues but I know FredL’s team is also investigating based on some email conversations with them
FredTMC
Model S VIN #4925
I agree it's more likely pack Assembly than low cell production.
But tesla was committed to selling high margin versions first. Hence big battery first. They never expected battery pack shortage so never intended to sell small pack first
Probably my final update on this subject: Nothing directly from IR. From trading emails with Electrek it seems this individual probably has an axe to grind/credibilty question.
Cheers to my virgin post!! Long time reader first time poster. Perma TSLA bull. Love the discussion on the forum and the weekly news letter.
Re the battery pack stabilizing the power source. I am not an engineer by profession. However based on past manufacturing experience in a developing country there was always a few millisecond delay for the UPS to kick in. Could this be a problem for such high precision high speed equipment. I am sure the technology has improved significantly, but would be interesting to learn how seamlessly the power switch over takes place.
Either way the slow ramp of the gigafactory is a bit concerning given where one would have expected to be on the S curve.
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
If it were that would seem to make the battery system useless. My guess is that for critical operations the packs are always in line and active doing voltage and frequency regulation for stable power at all times.
dc_h
Active Member
Apple and cars is too late. They could have bought Tesla 3 years ago, or bought a stake in uber or some other niche player.
At this point Apple should be partnering with a major hospital or buy a hospital and put a few billion into making the iOS systems a core of personal medical devices. Sorry for off track but medical is almost 20% of the economy and ripe for disruption.
Apple had the money to buy Tesla, but they would have had to get enough stockholders to go for a hostile takeover attempt to buy the company, and then they would have to deal with a large chunk of talent leaving after they did. Tesla's secret sauce is it's management and visionary director. Tim Cook is a decent manager, but he doesn't have the vision that Steve Jobs or Elon Musk has/had. If Apple wants to breath new life back into their products, they should give Elon Musk a big stake in Apple and have him run the company, but Elon wouldn't do it. Not only is he tapped out, but he also hates Apple.
The US medical field does need disruption, but Apple or any tech company is not the source needed. The basic problem is healthcare has become a major cash cow for a large segment of the US economy and lots of people depend on their slice of that pie to feed their families. The US pays more per capita for health care than any other developed country and gets less for their money than most countries.
The US does lead the world in cutting edge medical procedures, and some treatments of diseases, but the common, run of the mill healthcare most people need, the US is woefully behind everyone else in the developed world as far as bang for the buck.
Every other advanced economy in the world has developed some kind of socialized medicine. How it's done country to country varies quite a bit and every system has its pluses and minuses, but just about all of them work better for the average person and especially the poor than it does in the US. Some countries have retained private insurance companies, but the mandated insurance everyone must have is price regulated like a utility and the companies make their profits selling add ons to their basic insurance. Other countries have a single payer system everyone qualifies for, but those who want more can pay for private insurance that gets them away from the "riff raff" and gets quicker treatment.
There are lots of ways to do it, but true overhaul would mean those getting rich off the current system would get a big pay cut, and a lot of people may lose their jobs. Health care is 20% of the US economy, but around 10% of the US workforce works in healthcare one way or another.
The problems with healthcare aren't so much the tech (though there are some areas like the VA's record keeping that could be fixed with new tech), but systemic problems with the way that healthcare in the US came about. During WW II wages were fixed by the government to prevent defense contractors from stealing workers from one another. Companies began to offer benefits like health insurance to lure in workers. The system we have today evolved from that.
Back when a high percentage of the workforce worked for a large company and healthcare was a benefit of employment, the system worked OK. But in the last few decades a lot of the manufacturing has left the country and those jobs have been replaced by lower paying jobs, often with no health benefits. That leaves a higher percentage of the country's population stuck buying their own insurance in a market with shrinking participation because fewer people can afford it. Hence prices for insurance skyrocket. Those who don't have insurance end up in the ER with serious conditions that could have been treated cheaply with a doctor's office visit if they could afford the office visit, but instead they end up with ER bills they can't pay, have to declare bankruptcy, and the hospital needs to pay that bill by raising prices on everyone else.
Apple is incapable of solving this problem. It's not a problem we can innovate out of, it requires coming up with some system that gets a basic level of health care coverage to everyone, regardless of their financial situation.
But that's a major digression. In short, a fair number of the world's problems can be completely, or at least partially solved with new tech or applying existing tech in new ways. But there are some problems that no level of tech currently in existence or on the near horizon is going to solve. In health care new tech might help the richest people, but it won't do much for the poorest people who need the most help.
I am wondering how much the continuous integration of new changes in their hardware platform contributes to the issues in service and maintenance where some customers mention multiple weeks or even months wait times for seemingly simple parts. But it makes sense : if that part was already obsoleted through a few significant change cycles, manufacturing a one-off may not be an easy process.
I'm totally unfamiliar with the maintenance process. Why would there be a wait if the new part is available? Or, are changes sometimes so substantial other parts are likely affected as well?
Correct. When you do so many changes, there are bound to be dependencies. Or a new part may use different points of attachment which aren't available on an older car. Or it may simply be that a technician lacks the information and knowledge to know that one part can safely be substituted by another. Really any kind of reason.
Ulmo
Active Member
Thus stagnated innovation. Socialism destroys innovation. Medical field needs innovation, and innovation can solve it. I'm talking about huge amounts of innovation all over, not just a few minutes armchair engineering. Something that can be done by youth without connections, without degrees and certificates. By older people who do have connections and encumberments. Not the horrible non-innovative situation we have today.
There are many forms of socialism. Chinese leaders, for example, despite the lack of citizen participation as we know it, are more forward thinking about the environment than we here after they screwed up monumentally with coal. IMHO opinion that is because the top guys often are educated in engineering or science rather than law, finance, and dare I say real estate or TV/Hollywood branding. There is a stunning quote on another thread about President's Xi's respect for the environment. Hardline communist's could never put value in the environment because of the labor theory of value so imbedded in Marx's thinking and prevalent in economics at the time. The old Soviet Union also created quick wealth by exploiting the environment but put no value on it since they mistakenly believed it had no value.
Capitalists, today, who exploit resources without calculating the environmental costs of the consequences, make the same mistake without the intellectual garbage of Marxism. I'm of the old fashioned belief of my youth that we can learn from anyone, especially from their mistakes. We don't have to own them. In many countries where so-called socialized medicine exists there is also the option of private practitioners, hospitals, and researchers, sometimes the use of acupuncture in lieu of anesthetic for surgery. Here such practices are limited by the rigid approach we sometimes have to alternative practices. Now, learning from others, there's a place even for leeches in modern medicine.
But bear in mind I'm not a "real" doctor. Rand Paul and Tom Price certainly agree about socialized medicine.
Most major medical developments in recent decades have come from countries outside the US, all of which have "socialized medicine". The cutting-edge research into gut microbiota is mostly done in Europe; the cutting-edge research in robotic surgical techniques is mostly done in Japan; I can find plenty of other examples.
So stop spewing your antiquated dogma. It's just not true.
Those countries actually fund "blue-sky" fundamental university research, which is what creates true innovation.
Unlike the US, which leaves everything to "private" industry and government-granted monopoly patents -- and as a result gets tiny tweaks on a 100-year-old medicine designed to make it patentable, but not making it much more useful, and huge ad campaigns for said tweaked medicines.
I would also like to add that innovation doesn't happen much in natural monopolies. A "free market" natural monopoly is just free to rip off the customers for whatever they want to charge because there are no choices. Up until recently things like electric power to your house was a natural monopoly, so was cable TV.
Natural gas service, water, sewer, and trash pretty much still is. There are alternatives, but they are either much more expensive, a lot more hassle, or both. Some are banned like getting your own water and sewage disposal in a city.
For the type of medicine most people use beyond going to their GP, it's a natural monopoly. If you need an appendix operation, you're not going to call around to all the hospitals in the area and compare prices. In most cases, they can't tell you, they don't even know until they tally up the bill.
With all the patents on medicine and the lack of regulation, you get situations like what Turing pharmaceuticals did buying the patent for a drug that cost $13.50 a pill and immediately jacking the price to $750 with no reason other than rob the patients who need it. There was a lot of outrage in the media about it, but it's being done on a smaller scale all the time.
As @neroden pointed out, most of the breakthroughs in medicine are happening in other countries because the governments realize that letting the free market decide in medicine is just going to result in high prices and low quality health care. They can create artificial demand for change by funding research. Ultimately they will get that money back because a healthier population is more productive and pays more taxes.
In industries where there isn't a monopoly, competition can push innovation as long as the players don't agree among themselves to not compete. In some industries, there isn't a whole lot of innovation left to do. But where there is competition, innovation can happen.
Elon Musk got into the rocketry business because he realized there were a number of innovations that could be applied to rockets that hadn't because innovation had been stifled for decades. Tesla saw that the major car companies weren't going to make the leap into the EV world unless either forced by the government or a new competitor came along from the outside, or both. And that is what's happening.
In the case of rocketry, little innovation had happened because the customer base was small and they weren't demanding anything different. In the case of cars, the car companies had pretty much decided among themselves to do as little as possible in the EV arena because all of them had huge investments in ICE technology they didn't want to have to get rid of.
Some people seem to think the same solution is right for every industry. Allowing markets to be free to innovate is great if leaving them free does not result in abuse of customers and there really is innovation going on. However if there are abuses and/or dangers with low regulation and/or little or no innovation, other approaches work far, far better.
Trying to deregulate everything is like only having a hammer in your toolbox. If you need to pound some nails, it's a great tool, but it's the wrong tool for the job in a lot of other areas.
Natural gas service, water, sewer, and trash pretty much still is. There are alternatives, but they are either much more expensive, a lot more hassle, or both. Some are banned like getting your own water and sewage disposal in a city.
For the type of medicine most people use beyond going to their GP, it's a natural monopoly. If you need an appendix operation, you're not going to call around to all the hospitals in the area and compare prices. In most cases, they can't tell you, they don't even know until they tally up the bill.
With all the patents on medicine and the lack of regulation, you get situations like what Turing pharmaceuticals did buying the patent for a drug that cost $13.50 a pill and immediately jacking the price to $750 with no reason other than rob the patients who need it. There was a lot of outrage in the media about it, but it's being done on a smaller scale all the time.
As @neroden pointed out, most of the breakthroughs in medicine are happening in other countries because the governments realize that letting the free market decide in medicine is just going to result in high prices and low quality health care. They can create artificial demand for change by funding research. Ultimately they will get that money back because a healthier population is more productive and pays more taxes.
In industries where there isn't a monopoly, competition can push innovation as long as the players don't agree among themselves to not compete. In some industries, there isn't a whole lot of innovation left to do. But where there is competition, innovation can happen.
Elon Musk got into the rocketry business because he realized there were a number of innovations that could be applied to rockets that hadn't because innovation had been stifled for decades. Tesla saw that the major car companies weren't going to make the leap into the EV world unless either forced by the government or a new competitor came along from the outside, or both. And that is what's happening.
In the case of rocketry, little innovation had happened because the customer base was small and they weren't demanding anything different. In the case of cars, the car companies had pretty much decided among themselves to do as little as possible in the EV arena because all of them had huge investments in ICE technology they didn't want to have to get rid of.
Some people seem to think the same solution is right for every industry. Allowing markets to be free to innovate is great if leaving them free does not result in abuse of customers and there really is innovation going on. However if there are abuses and/or dangers with low regulation and/or little or no innovation, other approaches work far, far better.
Trying to deregulate everything is like only having a hammer in your toolbox. If you need to pound some nails, it's a great tool, but it's the wrong tool for the job in a lot of other areas.
Russian Innovation Under Communism
This is just an N of one and insignificant in light of the wonderful generic statements above by wdolson and neroden.
A decade or so ago I taught fluids for civil engineers for a few semesters. Some of my engineering students had just toured Aerojet which is just up Route 50 from Sacramento. There they encountered some Russian engineers who had been hired by Aerojet to teach their American counterparts how to make cheaper rockets.
Another N. In 1961-62 I taught part time at Pomona College while working toward the Ph.D. The office next to mine was occupied by an Oxford Don who was an exchange professor. (The one, many years later who said of Bill Clinton, "yes, he will be governor of a state some time, but it won't be an important state.") Early as we got to know each other, Maurice Shock told me he met another colleague going the other direction when he first arrived at JFK. His colleague greeted him with this: "You will find out why the U.S. is so opposed to socialism. Their civil service is so inferior!" Shock is now Sir Maurice. Used to be, I don't know if it is today, the best students at British Universities aspired to service in the public sector.
Edit: A few presidents in the last century did aspire to public service, though profiting on their last names. The first names of two were Franklin and John, if I remember correctly, and they were undistinguished as students at Harvard. One is reported to have his senior thesis ghost written by James "Scotty" Reston.
This is just an N of one and insignificant in light of the wonderful generic statements above by wdolson and neroden.
A decade or so ago I taught fluids for civil engineers for a few semesters. Some of my engineering students had just toured Aerojet which is just up Route 50 from Sacramento. There they encountered some Russian engineers who had been hired by Aerojet to teach their American counterparts how to make cheaper rockets.
Another N. In 1961-62 I taught part time at Pomona College while working toward the Ph.D. The office next to mine was occupied by an Oxford Don who was an exchange professor. (The one, many years later who said of Bill Clinton, "yes, he will be governor of a state some time, but it won't be an important state.") Early as we got to know each other, Maurice Shock told me he met another colleague going the other direction when he first arrived at JFK. His colleague greeted him with this: "You will find out why the U.S. is so opposed to socialism. Their civil service is so inferior!" Shock is now Sir Maurice. Used to be, I don't know if it is today, the best students at British Universities aspired to service in the public sector.
Edit: A few presidents in the last century did aspire to public service, though profiting on their last names. The first names of two were Franklin and John, if I remember correctly, and they were undistinguished as students at Harvard. One is reported to have his senior thesis ghost written by James "Scotty" Reston.
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I'm feeling guilty about bogarting DaveT's thread. Let's move on and corrupt another. It won't do to blame it on Ulmo. I've been called a left wing terrorist or even accused by a colleague, of "being a crude Stalinist."
Any battery experts on this forum?
Q: Does the charge status of a battery impact how aggressive the fire is if damaged.
Q: Does the charge status of a battery impact how aggressive the fire is if damaged.
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