Here is the thing, you demand incredibly high amounts of capital cost for not actually achieving much. And that capital could be use for far, far, far, far more useful things the city actually needs. Like high capacity transports, like metros, trams or bike lanes.
The amount of goods that need to be transported to stores and such things isn't that big. And using literally free unused roads at night or early in the morning is just a great deal.
For individual transport last mile is regularly being done by cargo bike or small electric truck just fine.
But you are right, tunnels do make sense for some things. Like transporting garbage underground. Or transporting heat underground for district heating, or district cooling. Both would be better investments then trying to move logistics under-ground.
There is a reason, no serious attempt anywhere in the world is trying to move logistics under-ground. There are just so, so many better ways to invest in the city. Its literally not even in the Top 100 most needed things.
Specially in the US where the road network is so hilariously overbuilt that it could serve 10x the amount of people on the same area if public transport was just taken minimally serious. And in the US, underground cargo transport isn't even in the Top 1000 things a city should consider spending money on.
Their mistake was to go from tunnels to transportation systems. I'm sure there are some innovations possible in tunnel boring. But that's not going to be some massive growth market.
> Tesla + Panasonic has a built in advantage in terms of battery manufacturing. Tesla has a massive amount of capital, if they put it into reducing and scaling manufacturing of vehicles and batteries, I think they could probably win.
This is a very wrong way to tell the story.
Tesla + Panasonic were the first to commit to a massive factor car cells with very advanced chemistry. But this advantage didn't hold long as the model was soon copied.
And at that point, when that investment happened Tesla did actually not have 'a massive amount of capital'. And Panasonic also didn't, and even more so, Panasonic didn't want to go all in on batteries. As they were a company from Japan that still believed in the Hydrogen future.
By the time Tesla had serious capital, the other battery companies had long shot past Tesla+Panasonic and it wasn't even close.
Claiming that Panasonic and Tesla can win now is just silly and based on nothing.
Tesla was actually pretty clever on this and invested rather a large amount in their own battery supply chain. And they spun up a whole battery supply chain pretty quickly. But arguably they were a bit two ambitious. Musk really pushed the boundary with the cells, introducing or trying to introduce a lot of things that were hard to do and simply took time. They should have started more conservatively first and only tried to innovated once they could match the other companies on the standard process.
There was no chance for them to be a massive battery supplier to the outside, but making their own batteries for their own cars and getting better margin then all the other companies was well within the cards. And that by itself is a win.
But overall their battery strategy wasn't really the problem. They did a lot of good things there. And things that can pay off over time. The problem was to much investment in stuff other then batteries and their car models. The most important thing for them was to have growing volume every year. Work on manufacturing improvements and fight on margins.
But as you say, I agree the focus on driverless was a mistake.
The problem is just there is no concept of a car company where they only sell their standard mass market vehicles. Somewhat more expensive higher margin vehicles are in the lineup for almost all the other companies. Its kind of strange to suggest its not worth it when it is seemingly worth it for most other companies.
Maybe the wisdom of having a 'full lineup' is wrong and has to do with making dealers happy.
On the other hand, having 99% of your sales be 2 very similar vehicles seems questionable strategy.
It is worth it when it is done right, i.e when you do correct market differentiation (see my other comment here on Mercedes) to avoid your low end cannibalizing your higher end. This high margin really helps you, and this is why almost everybody does it. EVs are probably even better suited for it given that the platform itself is easier/cheaper to share between the low end and the high end - thus the current Teslas S/X story looks even more of a failure as by releasing 3/Y that similar to S/X (that probably helped a lot with 3/Y sales though) they forced themselves into the need for a very significant (expensive) redesign of S/X while having very low sales of it.
The big issue with S/X was that they were not luxury enough, in terms of performance they were fine. So the redesign was mostly needed in terms of interior quality, materials and so on. Not that crazy expensive and something all other car companies manage to do.
I see it differently - they needed to redesign everything except the power train. I.e. in addition to the interior, externally it should have been looking way upscale from 3/Y. Giving that their design language is already almost 2 decades old, they needed (and actually would still need it for 3/Y max 5 years down the road) to have a full redesign for S/X similar to how BMW did with 2002 7-series trickling down that design into 2004 5-series and 2006 3-series (or like Mercedes did with S-class in 1996 and trickling down that to E and C later)
Except of course the Ariane chockhold never existed for small rockets. Because Vega exists. And for large rockets the "chokehold" very much continues to exist and shows absolutely zero evidence of going away in the next decade.
So far the support for these small launchers has been mostly for new missions and nowhere near in the volume to support even two of these small launch companies. Specially if Vega also survives as a rocket.
Europe simply does not produce enough launches for these companies. And all of them will suffer from very low launch rates and non will be able to seriously compete for international payloads.
There were once about 300 small rocket companies. About 250 of them are dead by by now.
The Europeans were late to the game, and their companies got some late investment.
Out of those 300 companies basically 0 of them have actually made money with rockets. Companies like RocketLab pivoted to in-space stuff and that's where they actually make money.
Pretty much every single small rocket company has lost money with small rockets and pivots to larger rockets where there is more demand because of constellations. But in Europe, that will be near impossible because of the Ariane monopoly.
And closing the case on reuse for small rockets is even more difficult.
I really think calling companies that have barley done a test-launch 'spacex competitors' is a silly. At best its a luxury competitor to SpaceX ride-share launches.
Can you show some actual evidence of that? Because evidence actually shows that commercial growth in the US outpaces Europe by a gigantic degree. The traditional European companies like Airbus has made lots of loses. European companies are not even competing in the LEO race to any serious degree.
Their 'compete with SpaceX' Ariane 6 rocket has been an unmitigated disaster. And in order to 'compete with SpaceX' they are giving billions in subsidies to Amazon instead, I guess that is better. And its exactly what they didn't want to do when they designed the Ariane 6 program in the first place.
> companies like ISAR Aerospace (SpaceX competitor)
If anything they are a far, far, far inferior competitor of RocketLab. SpaceX isn't even in the same universe as ISAR.
The simple fact is, small rocket companies are not viable, and pretty much all of them are not profitable and/or go bust. RocketLab itself basically never made money from rockets, the pivoted mostly to in-space stuff.
Maybe one of the small European rocket companies can survive if it gets enough support from ESA, but then moving on to anything beyond that is going to be hard.
> NASA, and is heavily investing there
If we look at ESA and EU space budget, we can see that it goes up a bit, but nowhere near close to anything in the US.
So yes, there is some energy in the European space sector, but its very easy to overestimate, and specially if you look at it compared to the US.
Cybertruck was supposed to be for the masses. The just weren't able to hit the price point required because of overly optimistic engineering assessments. I think the whole stainless steel construction concept didn't work as first designed.
And of course, Cybertruck design might not have been mass compatible buy being ugly. But that is subjective, if it was cheap and functional and without the political connotations it might have been different.
- have a body that's not literally duck taped together in some places and can easily snap in others
- use steel (which bends) for body construction
- be suitable for towing hauls
- not be ridiculously overpowered (...to the extent where engine can overpower the breaks)
- have good visibility with a windshield that isn't at a sharp angle to the ground and body geometry which doesn't maximize blind spots
- not have sharp corners that the cut you or doors that can decapitate your dog
- have door handles that make doors openable in case of emergencies/no power situations/electric shorts
- not have bulletproof glass (WTF, "for the masses"?) which makes makes it harder to rescue people when accidents happen
- be easily repairable, or at least amenable to repairs in local non-Tesla shops, with customers being confident it their warranty won't go poof (as the law requires)
- be easily customizeable for different applications (particularly when it comes to the bed)
- not look so different from other trucks without any reason other than "Elon Musk wants to be edgy": ugly is subjective, being a billionaire's fashion statement isn't
...to start. That's off the top of my head.
And, of course, being priced for the masses, which doesn't just happen. It's a design requirement.
As it stands, the Cybertruck is, and has always been, a rich boy's luxury toy — and it was designed as one.
It really seems like something got to Musk's head that he thought the world has so many edgy rich boys.
You want to see a modern truck "for the masses"? That's Toyota IMV 0, aka Hilux Champ [1]. Ticks all the above boxes.
And hits the $10,000 price point [2]. A literal order of magnitude cheaper than the Cybertruck.
Speaking of which: a car "for the masses" isn't a truck. It's a minivan (gets the entire family from one place to another), it's a small sedan/hatchback (commuter vehicle), a crossover/small SUV to throw things, kids, and dogs into without having to play 3D Tetris in hard mode.
But not a pickup truck, which is a specialized work vehicle.
The masses aren't farmers and construction workers (most people live in the cities, and only a small number needs such a work vehicle).
The popularity of The Truck in the US is, in a large part, a byproduct of regulation which gives certain exemptions to specialized work vehicles.[3]
That's not even getting to the infrastructure part: trucks shine in remote, rural areas. And while one can always have a canister of gas in the truck bed, power stations can be hard to find in the middle of the field or a remote desert highway.
But again, it's not impossible to make a truck for the masses (at least for certain markets). That's the $10K Hilux Champ.
For all the luxury aspects of the Tesla sedan, it's been one of the most (if not the most) practical electric vehicles on account of range alone. It also looked like a normal car at a time when EVs screamed "look at me, I'm so greeeeeen!" from a mile away (remember 1st gen Nissan Leaf or BMW i3?). It was conformal and utilitarian, while also being futuristic and luxurious enough for the high price point was fair for what was offered.
The public image of having a Tesla was good: you are affluent, future-forward, and caring for the environment.
The Cybertruck went back on everything that made Tesla a success: it's conspicuous, impractical, overpriced, and currently having publicity rivaling that of the recent Melania documentary.
It was not a risky bet. It was an a-priori losing bet. The world simply never needed as many edgy toys as Musk wanted to sell.
And driving a car shaped as an "I'm a Musk fanboy" banner really lost its appeal after a few Roman salutes and the dear leader's DOGE stint.
Overly optimistic engineering assessments? Perhaps, but they are much further down on the list of reasons of Cybertruck's failure.
I was talking about mass market for an electric truck.
- F150 is big
- Its perfectly usable, claim otherwise are nonsense. Arguable depending on your workload it has advantages. Not being as good for side-loading is a downside, but many people can't side-load F150 either. But having a cover that locks safely is clearly an upside. In terms of what people actually use these trucks for, like shopping or picking up a few things from Home Depot the bed is useful. Secondly, beds are empty 99% of time anyway.
- All electric trucks are not perfect at towing loads over long distances. For short distances its very good. And again 99.99% of time people are not towing loads long distances. The issue is really only if you want to tow loads long distances as fast as possible.
- Visibility is better then F150
Most of the rest is just nit-picking or looking at the issue only from one side.
And you completely ignore that F150 is already a truck for the masses, as it is literally the most sold vehicle in the US, and it doesn't have to cost 10k. Comparing the Cybertruck to something like Toyota IMV 0 makes no sense when F150 was the target.
> The popularity of The Truck in the US is, in a large part, a byproduct of regulation which gives certain exemptions to specialized work vehicles.[3]
Something that is often claimed but isn't true. That's a contributing factor but by no means the only reason.
The amount of goods that need to be transported to stores and such things isn't that big. And using literally free unused roads at night or early in the morning is just a great deal.
For individual transport last mile is regularly being done by cargo bike or small electric truck just fine.
But you are right, tunnels do make sense for some things. Like transporting garbage underground. Or transporting heat underground for district heating, or district cooling. Both would be better investments then trying to move logistics under-ground.
There is a reason, no serious attempt anywhere in the world is trying to move logistics under-ground. There are just so, so many better ways to invest in the city. Its literally not even in the Top 100 most needed things.
Specially in the US where the road network is so hilariously overbuilt that it could serve 10x the amount of people on the same area if public transport was just taken minimally serious. And in the US, underground cargo transport isn't even in the Top 1000 things a city should consider spending money on.
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