Many of these cars don't pass western safety standards and can never be sold in Europe.
There are some that are Tesla competitors, but it is widely believed (there is not enough evidence to show conclusively) that none of the Chinese manufacturers make money on selling EVs.
The situation is similar to that of Rivian or VW. The Rivian is a spectacular car but it is expensive to make that Rivian loses 10s of thousands everytime they sell a car. VW is also losing money on every EV they sell. If you buy one you're getting a good deal, but edging the company closer to bankruptcy at the same time. Buy the car avoid the stock.
BYD refuses to give financials on their pure EV profit numbers. They sell a ton of hybrids and ICE cars and eek out a very small profit. Anyone who pays attention to the space must ask themselves why they don't boast about their pure EV margins? It's likely because they are losing money.
Tesla on the other hand has positive gross margins on their cars and have since the day they started selling the Model S. That is the reason why the stock value is so high, because Tesla is the most efficient EV maker on earth by a significant margin. They can lower prices further than any competition and remain profitable.
If you're a deeptech founder Y Combinator is not for you.
Recommend something like an NSF Activate grant instead. Commercialization of hardware takes an average of 15 years. If you can't get dilution free funding for the first 5 or so, you'll end up giving up so much equity that you'll be an employee of your own company.
Most successful hardware founders have deep pockets or huge grant supports.
As someone who worked on advanced solar in the 2008-2014 timeframe and later did a PhD in photonic materials, I have learned to heed the old adage "Never bet against silicon".
The cost of silicon solar modules is projected to drop below 10cents/Watt this year and will keep dropping. The major cost of solar is now the installation and grid interconnect. Since these cells have serious problems with lifetime (years at best vs decades for silicon), all indications are that they will be much more expensive at the system level.
In my opinion the major barrier to solar adoption is not efficiency but integrated operation. For instance, my roof has enough area to support a 20kW system, but the utility will only let me put up a 4kW array due because they can't accept the extra energy and stay profitable. This business model problem is not related to efficiency but the result of resistance to distributed energy strategies from utilities who can't understand how to avoid bankruptcy and move away from a centralized power plant based grid.
> the utility will only let me put up a 4kW array due because they can't accept the extra energy and stay profitable.
Transmission congestion might be a more important issue than profitability:
"Avoiding the congestion is essential for a competitive electricity market and is one of the toughest problems of its design." [1]
The course of Damien Ernst [2] gives an excellent overview of all the challenges related to decentralized electricity markets.
Yes this is major component of what I mean by profitability. The utilities spend vast sums on grid equipment and transmission lines that they pay for over decades through bond offerings. The grid is designed to distribute electricity from centralized generation stations to distributed customers (a "mainframe" like model). They support the capital cost of this infrastructure (debt payments) and maintenance on the equipment through their per kWH rates.
An example of this is that, where I live, some depreciated hydro assets produce power at $0.0025/kWh but the electricity rate is $0.11-0.14/kWh. It is not unusual for the majority of the cost of electricity be in debt and equipment maintenance rather than generation.
If I generate electricity on my roof then the utility is screwed from both ends, they must credit me way more than it costs them to generate their own electricity, and feeding electricity into a grid not designed for it adds further wear and tear to the components. Their revenue goes down and their costs go up.
Unsurprisingly, given their sunk costs and the prospect of defaulting on huge bond obligations, they will not permit me to install a rooftop array that will generate more than 40% of my usage, even if paired with large battery systems.
This. I worked for what in our deregulated market is called a "distribution company" (owning the transmission from the HV lines to the meter at your home), and can absolutely attest to what enslavedrobot has said. The funding model for getting electricity from A to B was predicated on assumptions that you could amortize the high capital costs over multi-decades. Which is all fine until distributed generation (rooftop solar) exploded in a time-frame much smaller than expected. Tbh my personal view is that the writing was on the wall large enough for anyone with eyes willing to see to start planning accordingly, but true to form, most companies just tried resisting the change.
I thought infeed limits were all about protecting the grid from power surges; what can an enlightened utility do differently? Battery storage would double the cost of community-generated solar, so even an enlightened utility might be unprofitable taking non-dispatchable power from homeowners, no?
Prices per panel may be dropping but that’s didn’t stop a major panel installer to quote me over $100k for 18kW system with two Tesla batteries. (The installer was not Tesla).
How can one take advantage of cheap panels and have quality work done on the roof?
A lot of it has to do with permitting, building codes, and lack of competition. In Australia deregulation has led to pricing well below 1AU$/W installed. If we could adapt what worked there prices would come down like crazy.
In Australia an 18kW system.installed with two 10kW/h Tesla batteries should run under $30,000 AUD installed. That's somewhere in the vicinity of $23,000 USD.
I've been looking at upgrading my rooftop solar in Australia, since we have had 5kW on the roof for close to 15 years now. Ill put away the pennies for a few more years and pull the trigger at a similar time to when we get our first EV / PHEV with V2G.
Two of those is $27,200 minus installation and some solar panels to feed them (but the PW3 does have 3x 6.6kW solar MPPTs built-in unlike previous ones, so all you need to do is connect the panels directly to the PW3 and then the PW3 to your home).
> How can one take advantage of cheap panels and have quality work done on the roof?
Teach your kids how the blue collar trades are a better deal than a college degree, wait a decade or two, and contractor labor prices should be reasonable again.
The 4Kw limit should be on the infeed and not the solar panel capacity.
You could put 10Kw worth of panels up just limit the output to 4Kw. Now you have a more stable 4Kw feed.
Yeah, my dad has that setup. Over provisioned panels so he still can get max output more of the year. Not to the amount you suggest, but his inverter can safely have about 20% more input than output.
He bought used panels so the actual input may be a little lower than rated (though it doesn’t seem much lower), but he says he sees some ads for new panels nearly as cheap as he paid for used ones 5 years ago.
Is it or is it becoming profitable to have more power on the roof, but dedicated to local use? What local use? Local battery? Bitcoin mining? Aluminum plant (jk)?
With solid state batteries finally hitting production, I'm betting we'll see just that. The more common materials alone will make huge strides once scale-up pains are over
Do you have suggestions for the utilities on how to move away from a centralized grid, avoiding bankruptcy and also providing the same level of reliability as the last few decades?
The only supply side outage that comes to my mind is the Texas cold snap messing with the gas plants.
Perhaps neighborhood level energy storage and an increase in energy transmission costs.
It's very unlikely that a centralized grid will go away, society wants 100% energy availability 100% of the time. So like everything else, people are just going to have to pay for it. The same way you pay for schools even if you don't have kids or pay for roads even if you don't have a car.
It's a tough problem. Trillions of dollars of utilities bonds (mostly owned by pension funds) and a century of regulatory barriers make change hard. The problem is similar to the task of reforming the medical system.
The strategy that I like is to build out distributed systems in "non-integrated areas". These are locations that are not served by the grid and often have a tiny local grid that provides high cost electricity (~1$/kWh). These areas represent test beds for distributed energy tech and might be a place where de-costing and scaling strategies could be developed.
Another strategy is to wait for baby boomers to die. :)
With 4-5 MW batteries in the shape of shipping containers are already now available and rated for 6-10k cycles before much degradation. I think local neighborhood storage near consumption should become common in the near future. Of course electricity distribution companies etc will drag their feet specially in the US with their captured markets and near monopolies.
I'm a Tesla investor. It's not about a cult. Tesla is the fastest growing manufacturing company in the history of the world. They are the only profitable EV company and deploy the most stationary storage. They are leaders in distributed energy services and are positioning themselves well to earn ARR from every battery and car they sell.
I used to wonder why anyone who wasn't part of the Steve Jobs cult would buy Apple since they sold overpriced junk. Then I wondered why anyone would invest in Amazon because nobody trusts online sales, they want to look at things before they buy. After I went to business school and learned financial modelling I decided I would never miss another category winner in a nascent large market again. Now I'm a millionaire.
> Tesla is the fastest growing manufacturing company in the history of the world
Is it? BYD was founded the same year and is producing nearly 2x as many cars as Tesla. NIO sold it's 500,000th car within 9 years of its founding, it took Tesla 15 years to do the same. We don't even need to look outside of car manufacturers to find counterexamples. Tell me again about it not being a cult.
I'm anywhere between indifferent and disgusted by Musks political views, depending on the issue.
Does that make me bearish on Tesla? Absolutely not. On the contrary I'm more bullish now than ever. I see so many people lose all objectivity and reason when they look at any Musk enterprise because they don't like the man
New Tesla's have a lithium battery. The reason for the 12V is that the low voltage electrical system can periodically need to deliver and control ~100A @ 12V. To do this with DC to DC conversion from the ~400V main pack is complex and expensive. The legacy auto industry supply chain won't switch from 12V further complicating the economics of a better design.
If your Tesla senses a fault in the low voltage system it will cut the connection to the high voltage pack and send you a message saying "pull over your car may not restart" depending on the fault, this message will stay up for hours or even days. At this point your 12V batter is no longer being recharged. Once the battery gets really low the warning messages get more intense and the car will literally not move. At this point the doors still work, usually for hours. There is a ton of warning before your doors won't open.
This is for the lead acid case of older cars. Newer cars have a 12V lithium ion battery with higher capacity that may behave differently.
Next gen Tesla's (starting with the cybertruck) use 48V low voltage architecture that is 4x lower current. Tesla now has the scale to develop the 48V automotive supply chain internally in spite of the resistance from incumbent OEMs.
My wife was spending 300$ a month on gas with her commute. Now that costs us 30$ a month. Basically our total cost of ownership is the same, but we upgraded from a Yaris so well worth it in our case.
Works for us because we have a garage and can charge at home. Ours is old so we got FSD back in the day when it was a lot cheaper. FSD has vastly improved over the past 5 years, the car routinely drives 45 minutes to work with zero interventions and the latest update greatly improved park assist. The screen now visualizes all the nearby spots and you just touch the screen to select where you want it to park. Works well for me.
How is it that big negative news about Tesla gets monstrous engagement and positive news is met with disinterest? I think there is probably another emotion going through the heads of those who love to slam Tesla.
