Tesla – See Animals Wild

February 16, 2024February 8, 2024

Ford has made clear its aim to take on Tesla and BYD by launching cheap electric cars

Is this news to anyone? It is known that the car industry is in a race to move to electric. Given the vast saving for the end line consumer, the huge reduction in pollution, and the fact that many countries have already set dates where combustion engine car sales will be banned, surely the response to this news is ” why have you not made this move before?

What is clear, is that ford is developing a smaller and cheaper EV platform. Well this is great, but everyone is trying to create small affordable electric cars.

Now, how many of these small cars is ford aiming to sell? Currently, ford makes a $28,000 loss on each electric cars. Which means that they need to bring this down, or 2 million electric cars sold my ford would cause a huge loss.

Tesla is making progress on their own cheap model – the so called tesla model 2. This is aimed to hit the target of $25,000, or around £18,000, and they are expecting to make millions of this model, which does not seem unreasonable.

We need to remember, that while we look on ford as an old car company (and they are) at the current moment, they are not bigger than tesla. So in 2023 tesla sold 1.81 million vehicles, all electric, while ford sold 1.99 million, however only 72,000 of these were electric. If in the future, only electric cars count, then perhaps we should already be looking at ford as the minnow in a pond with a huge shark that is tesla. If we look at profit, this might make this clearer, Ford made profits of $4.3 billion, while Tesla made profits of 15 billion.

So, is Ford a tiny electric car maker, or not? Is it going to become one of the most profitable electric car makers, or is it going to become a small car maker? Time will tell, however, the problem is that the 2 million small electric cars that ford says its is targeting, is also the same number that Tesla is going to be targeting. Can the world demand sustain 2 million from each? Possibly, in the future, but Ford may well find that diving into the pond of small Electric cars is a hard place to make money, and finding enough demand for 2 million electric cars may well prove to be the harder part of the transition.

Time will tell, but they certainly have their work cut out for them.

September 10, 2023September 4, 2023

We need many Electric Semi makers, but why are all the others so far behind tesla?

These two trucks look very similar but one will cost you far more than the other.

Below I am including a table (compiled by nextbigfuture), It compares the efficiency of all electric semi lorries that are currently hitting the market. Unfortunately any significant look at the table below can only lead to one conclusion – Tesla is currently way ahead of anyone ehlse

April 29, 2023April 27, 2023

AA says charging is less per mile than petrol? when has it not been – only in very specific circumstances is this not true

So at the current time, tesla charges 50p per kwh (for almost everyone charging at home will account for most, so supercharging probably only accounts for about 10% but we will look at this later).

How does this compare? in the UK fuel is currently 165p for diesel and 147p for petrol.

Now one needs to compare like for like – it is unreasonable to compare a tesla s with a fiat punto, these are not comparable cars. So We will do it car by car. Please note, as teslas are only every electric, I will be comparing them to their nearest petrol BMW competitor – BMW does have electric cars in competition – though generally these get lower miles per kwh.

As such, I have compared the 4 main tesla cars to their nearest equivalent BMW (fair warning lots of numbers below

October 20, 2021June 30, 2022

A tesla plane? what impact would this have

Elon Musk has talked about creating an electric plane, I think that this is a fantastic idea, but not from a tesla fanboy point of view.

Electric planes are in their infancy. There are a range of extremely light weight aircraft for learning to fly. There are also an increasing number of island hopper jets, which can allow easy access for small communities – at prices that are affordable, and therefore long-term as well as the far more environmentally friendly setup.

The other big move in this arena, is Ryanair. They are a budget airline operating throughout Europe, but they are building an aircraft which should be able to carry 186 people (31 rows of 6 seats) that would cover 80% of their routes. My hope is that this is a move into them behaving in a more compassionate way – they have a reputation of treating people poorly (I have experienced that first hand but that is another story)

Elon Musk envisaged a vertical take off and landing aircraft, and one which would fly high enough to travel at supersonic speeds. He did state that he thought batteries needed to reach 400wh/kg and the batteries that run tesla cars are currently 260wh/kg, so were still some way off. Having said that, tesla has some of the best battery research going on, and they are confident that the batteries will be ready in the next 3 or so years.

So what impact would a tesla plane have? Well what Musk is describing is largely a private jet, not a passenger jet. Never-the-less Tesla cars started and high cost and came down. It is likely that a Tesla plane would do something similar. Certainly, with the weight Tesla can bring to bare, it is likely that any involvement by Tesla would push the electrical aviation market place to new heights.