1x Tsla Discussion Threads

[cfb2] 16/5/2024 11:32

I agree with Dan Wang's view that China, with it's manufacturing base, would come out best. However, the distribution of technology between the countries is a better mix than the manufacturing.

Trump becoming president worries me but then again both candidates are extremely poor!

In the six months since your article was written, the Chinese EV market is showing signs of overheating. They are producing substantially more vehicles than their domestic demand allows and Biden has put up 100% tariffs to protect them from being dumped in the US. Whether the US policy of promoting friend-shoring is good long term for US inflation, as it forces Americans to buy more expensive items, is questionable.

What happens to China's manufacturing and housing over the next six months will be interesting.

[simon gordon] 14/5/2024 17:30

Superb FT podcast - 14/5/24:

China's race to tech supremacy: Shenzhen speed

How did China go from tech imitator to innovator? The FT’s James Kynge reports from Shenzhen, known as China’s Silicon Valley, where he explores the city’s vast electronics markets with inventor Noah Zerkin, an American who’s based himself in China, visits robot start-up Youibot and hears from DJI about how it became the world’s biggest drone manufacturer. Plus, Matt Sheehan, a China watcher focused on technology at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Qi Zhou, a venture capitalist based in Shenzhen, explain why China’s tech success stories are turning established narratives on democratic freedoms and innovation on their head.

[hosede] 14/5/2024 16:59

Tesla doing a meme stock today - no reason for any rise -in fact as Simon has just posted the News keeps getting worse

[simon gordon] 14/5/2024 15:29

Bloomberg - 14/5/24:

...The desire to disentangle the US from dependency on China is well-established, and bipartisan. Biden’s calibration of his tariffs to specific technologies is, apart from managing the blowback on favored sectors, designed to differentiate him from his likely opponent this November, former president Donald Trump, who threatens blanket measures.

Economists and environmentalists alike are aghast. Reshoring clean tech supply chains cannot help but be inflationary, regardless of the IRA’s branding. New tariffs on EV batteries and battery-parts, in particular, will be more meaningful, since the US took about a fifth of Chinese battery exports by value last year, second only to the European Union. EV makers in the US, including Tesla Inc., will face an additional headwind on cost for the most expensive part of the vehicle, even as IRA domestic-content measures ratchet up, too. This as they must also reignite slowing demand for their pricey cars in the US.

Meanwhile, Detroit’s halting progress on electrification, plus memories of its squandering of prior protectionism against Japanese automotive imports decades ago, raises the risk of a domestic industry that delivers only a dribble of uncompetitive EVs. Unlike China, the US strategic pivot to clean tech is patchy, partisan and competes with a legacy, truck-heavy vehicle industry that is fed by the biggest oil producing sector in the world.

Biden will nonetheless take the risk. US trade policy is inherently strategic. Remember that the IRA effectively seeks to replicate China’s industrial policy, complete with protectionism, that fostered Beijing’s lead in clean tech in the first place. The free-trade paradigm that is now crumbling was set up in the ruins of World War II; not out of altruism but in order to rebuild allies to make common cause in containing the USSR. Even at the height of paranoia about the Japanese competitive threat to Detroit, among other sectors, in the 1980s, Japan remained a critical Cold War ally — unlike China, now the Pentagon’s designated pacing threat.

Only a month ago, White House climate envoy John Podesta essentially called for the creation of a new trading system targeting China on another front; namely, “carbon dumping” via the emissions embedded in exports (see this). It remains to be seen whether the administration can persuade like-minded, generally lower carbon-intensity nations to join such an effort. The EU, with its attachment to the World Trade Organization and more ambitious green targets, is the key region in this regard.

In any case, the direction of travel in Washington is unmistakable. While the tariffs grab headlines, possibly more consequential measures are taking shape in the background, not least the Commerce Department’s inquiry into “connected vehicles,” launched in February. Given the growing overlap between data-rich driver-assistance systems and all vehicles, including EVs, this could provide a far-reaching, national security justification for targeting models merely connected with Chinese companies, regardless of where the factory is sited.

The tension between cutting emissions and cutting supply chains, always there, is now reaching the point where trade-offs are inevitable. The coming election plays a big part in where the emphasis falls in 2024, but this presents a chronic headwind to the US energy transition for years to come. This is a case where, even if you don’t take Biden literally, you should take him seriously.

[johnwise] 13/5/2024 22:30

The Govenments Global Warming SCAM Update:

VIDEO

Net Zero Watch: The wheels are coming off the narrative of fear



Video: Mark Levin sussed the government scam
The truth about global warming


If Zero CO2 was ever achieved every tree on the planet would die
VIDEO: A Dearth of Carbon Dr. Patrick Moore

[hosede] 12/5/2024 16:45

Farmer
Can't see them going bankrupt - they raised so much cash when they were the "in thing"! But I can see them losing a packet this year and maybe beyond

[simon gordon] 12/5/2024 10:43

Bloomberg - 9/5/24:

Hungary and China Are Fellow Travelers in a $10,000 Electric Car

Viktor Orbán is learning how to bring affordable EVs to the European Union. Democracies can meet the challenge, too.

If you listen to Chinese President Xi Jinping and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, you might think that cheap electric cars and authoritarianism are joined at the hip. It’s up to rich democracies to prove them wrong.

Xi is visiting Hungary on the last day of his trip to Europe. In doing so, he’s returning a compliment Budapest has paid Beijing in recent years, copying China’s developmentalist model and disdain for democracy to build a burgeoning green technology supply chain in the heart of the European Union.

“On the path of Chinese-style modernization and development, we see Hungary as a traveling companion,” Xi wrote in an op-ed in Magyar Nemzet, the newspaper of the ruling Fidesz party.

Since 2019, first South Korean and then Chinese lithium-ion battery companies have flocked to Eastern Europe, taking advantage of low costs, access to the EU’s single market, and proximity to existing car factories in southern Germany and Slovakia.

Punching Above Its Weight

China is far and away the biggest battery producer. But Hungary is at number four.

Hungary alone has received about €20 billion ($21 billion) in electric vehicle investments. Factories run by Samsung SDI Co., SK On Co., and Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. have made the country of 10 million people the fourth-largest producer of lithium-ion cells after China, South Korea, and the US. BYD Co., vying with Tesla Inc. for the crown of world’s biggest EV producer, has chosen it as the location for its first European plant.

Most remarkable of all, in a world where a coming flood of cheap Chinese clean technology is being treated as an existential threat justifying tariffs, investigations, and bans, Hungary is competing on cost. If you want to be able to buy a $10,000 electric car like BYD’s Seagull outside of China, that’s going to be essential.

The average lithium-ion battery pack produced in Hungary right now comes to about $105.7 per kilowatt-hour, according to a BloombergNEF cost model. That’s only a sliver above $104.5/kWh from Chinese plants, and likely well below it after accounting for the sum a European purchaser would have to spend on transport. By contrast, Canada, Germany, the UK and US are all north of $120/kWh.

Pile 'em High

Hungary's battery prices are the only ones in the rich world that compete with China

The cost edge is crucial because some 40% of what you’re paying for when buying an electric vehicle is the battery pack. If European and US carmakers want to be able to compete with Chinese rivals on price as well as trade restrictions, they’re going to have to learn from what Hungary has done to make its power cells so cheap.

What’s the trick? The key insight is something Elon Musk recognized a decade ago in announcing the site that has become synonymous with colossal battery plants, Gigafactory One in Nevada. Mass production cuts costs by operating at epic magnitudes. If your new factory covers less than 100 hectares (247 acres) — roughly a third the size of New York’s Central Park — it’s not going to pass muster.

To play in that game, you need cheap land and excellent connections to electricity, water, and transport networks. It’s not easy to find such sites in the richer countries of Western Europe and North America, where permitting and red tape means it can take $1.7 million and several years to build (or even fail to build) a San Francisco public toilet. Giant new chemicals plants are rarely popular with the neighbors, including in Hungary. Protests, regulations, and exhaustive environmental impact reviews can prevent green technology from getting built for years, or even decades.

A cheap workforce is even more decisive. About 80% of the additional cost for batteries made in Germany over Hungary is the labor expense, according to BloombergNEF’s data. Orbán’s failure to close the income gap with Western Europe gives Hungary a potent cost advantage.

Kraftwerk

Hungary's cost advantage over Germany is mostly about land, labor, and power.

The last element is cash. Hungary’s 9% corporate tax rate is the lowest in Europe, and Orbán has also been able to use EU funds earmarked for regional development and energy transition to provide sweeteners and encourage foreign manufacturers to set up shop.

This policy mix is almost identical to what’s driven China’s industrial development for two decades. For all the rhetoric about predatory overcapacity and lavish state subsidies, the core innovation in China’s model is the Special Economic Zone: a designated region where the government provides investors with cheap land, labor, infrastructure, and modest tax breaks, and then lets them get on with things.

If Europe and North America are serious about decarbonization, they can repeat that pattern without any of the authoritarianism so precious to Xi and Orbán. Land and labor costs are also pretty low in Poland, Mexico, Romania and Bulgaria. Governments are free to offer tax and investment incentives for green technology, and should be doing so wherever possible.

Get a supply chain going, moreover, and you can establish the sort of industrial cluster that’s sprouting up now in Hungary, and develop the kind of process innovations that make China such a formidable competitor.

That’s a much more hopeful future than one where rich countries fall short on decarbonization and drift ever closer to conflict because tariffs and trade wars are cutting them off from cheap Chinese technology. On a planet heading for net zero, there is more than enough green investment needed to ensure that every part of the world gets its share.

[iceagefarmer] 12/5/2024 10:31

some are saying tesla not far off from bankruptcy..ive placed a short on them

[pierre oreilly] 12/5/2024 10:16

cfb212 May '24 - 00:10 - 10833 of 10834
0 0 0
Pierre: It says in 2024 NASA's X-43A achieved 5,000mph:


That is way short of the 25,000 mph orbital escape velocity SpaceX need.

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Weel, yes, but not sure of your point. You don't go from Mach 2 to Mach 25 in one jump. Looks like serious funding restarted about 8 years ago, after a 35 year break. Maybe, with continuous funding, they'd be launching stuff into space today - much more cheaply then any rocket can.


You're correct to be sceptical to what bb posters post as in 10828 et el ....
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Pierre: Combinations of engines doubles the complexity and mass. Having anything other than just a rocket engine will stop you putting anything heavier than Richard Branson's thong into orbit.
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Hopefully, after the link you posted, you'll see these are rational and imv pragmatic real solutions to launching payloads into space.

To get to Mach 24 at the edge of the atmosphere would need further development in materials, and cooling with the hydrogen fuel. Cooling with the fuel pre ignition itself would provide substantial thrust even before it burnt. (I did the calcs for that contribution plus other scramjet stuff as my undergrad final year project - an interesting bit of fluids and thermodynamics.)

[cfb2] 12/5/2024 00:10

Pierre: It says in 2024 NASA's X-43A achieved 5,000mph:


That is way short of the 25,000 mph orbital escape velocity SpaceX need.

[pierre oreilly] 11/5/2024 21:26

cfb2 - no, scramjets and some ramjets don't add weight because they can be external with only the shape of the body to do the compression. Ramjets (for the Mach 1 to Mach 6 regime) can be just some fuel injectors pumping avgas into the high pressure subsonic airflow caused by the body shape. For the Scramjets (Mach 6 to Mach 24), the compression would again come from the body shape, but this time the airlow would be supersonic and high pressure, with Hydrogen pumped into that airflow. (Hydrogen because it's the only fuel which releases heat fast enough in the supersonic airstream and doesn't suffer from chemical disassociation).

I don't understand about your payroll comment - you simply have more hydrogen injectors (effectively each set an 'engine' if you want to carry more. Rockets of course have tiny payloads since most of the fuel is used to propel the rest of fuel and oxygen so it can get into orbit. The total weight on lift off is only just under the thrust of the rockets - you can see this, the acceleration on full thrust is very small to start with, but as fuel and oxygen (or equivalent) are burnt the weight lowers and the acceleration increases. In other words, airbreathing engines need orders of magnitude less thrust that a rocket for the same payload. So your thrust argument is incorrect.

Scramjets (that is, ramjets where the air after compression is supersonic) have flown in some form (i.e. non burning) on the x15 hypersonic research aircraft 40/50 years ago, and only a lack of funding stopped them. At that time,a scramjet was a lump of metal, and not just a body shape. Plans were to have a reusable airbreathing launch vehicle with a bank of 6 turbojets which could adjust to become ramjets, then a bank of 6 scramjets. There's nothing magical or impossible about it. I would have had a very different career if the US hadn't killed it off.

[cfb2] 11/5/2024 20:50

hpcg: As I've already said, I'm not smart enough to time the market and I can't see the chart telling me anything other than historical trading data. I'm not doing candlesticks, gaps, technical analysis, figures, Elliot waves, harmonic patterns, trends, wedges and if I see a crab, bat or shark in the data I'll seek psychiatric help and please keep your entrails to yourself!

Seriously, I know you mean well and I've tried some of the above but my attempts to time my investments are no better than chance and the stress isn't worth it for me. I have my models, I adjust them as news comes in and I vary my holdings accordingly and I've been holding some shares for over a decade. I've taken this approach over almost 20 years and it's the only thing that works reliably for me.

With that in mind, if Musk's robotaxi estimate is a couple of years too early it's not going to make much difference to me.

[simon gordon] 11/5/2024 18:18

Dave Karpf - 5/5/24:

What Elon Musk's favorite game tells us about him

A review, of sorts, of Polytopia.

[hpcg] 11/5/2024 15:58

cfb2 - knowing what you do about taxis, why would the smallest vehicle be the robotaxi test bed? I deliberatly did not say the M2 has been canned, which implies a permanent cessation. I can quite see how Musk can very honestly say that information is false. Musk said this in 2018 so his words on autonomy are no longer taken as realistic, investors are in show-me mode.

The chart is telling you what investors think right now, and very clearly big money is moving out. You can bet against them if you like, but any one PI's 5 or 6 figure holding is a straw on the ocean. Why not wait for a clear consolidation and bottom formation? If you are right you make more money.

[cfb2] 11/5/2024 14:40

Pierre: Combinations of engines doubles the complexity and mass. Having anything other than just a rocket engine will stop you putting anything heavier than Richard Branson's thong into orbit.

Have a look at Reactive Engine's Skylon or Virgin Galactic's Spaceship III for combined engine technology. You'll note that both of these companies were founded before SpaceX and neither have put anything into orbit yet or likely to for the foreseeable future.

If you know how to successfully make a ramjet engine suitable for getting something into orbit then most governments would like to talk to you. Bear in mind your craft would also require a technology to get your craft moving sufficiently fast for ramjet to work. And the impulse of ramjet will be a fraction of what you get from a rocket.

[blusteradjuster] 11/5/2024 13:24

Simon,

It was always going to be the case that complacent/coddled Western automakers would be disrupted by EV upstarts.

The surprise being that it is no longer Tesla* that is doing the disrupting.



*Is this an own-goal by TSLA? If the cybertruck and Xwitter are anything to go by, yes.