Tesla and Tesloop: The Truth at High Voltage
There are few sources of energy more potent than an excitable nerd who has found a new technology. If you could find a way of harnessing all that fast burning obsessive chatter you could probably run a small electric car off it. Which funnily enough, some of them seem to be actually attempting. You see, despite the on-going hyperbole, nothing terribly dramatic is happening in the world of electric cars. Of course, developments are progressing and refinements are being made, even some market share is expanding, but the electric car revolution is mostly fueled by high octane talk. Just sample the latest report from RethinkX.
The future is inevitable when you are already there. Looking back you see the one clear route that got you there, not the many that disappeared into the wilderness. There is no list of names for those that failed to reach the summit of Mt Everest, no monuments to those who survived the battlefield. World records are recorded for posterity, also-rans are not even pencilled into the margins of history.
When it comes to new technologies it always pays to jump on the latest bandwagon because if you reach your destination it is sure to be Eldorado and if the wheels fall off on the way then, hey, who the heck is going to know? So speculate all you like because you might just become a soothsayer of legendary foresight.
The wheels are looking decidedly dodgy on a couple of technologies that have been around for a while, such as 3D printing and video phones, but driverless cars are just having their wheels fitted. If you are really canny you will be jumping on that bandwagon right now. Even so you will be one step behind RethinkX.
This is the name of a think tank that claims to be independent and certainly makes some bold statements about the future of transportation, the kind that will be hailed as brilliant if they become true and utterly forgotten if not. Their report Rethinking Transportation 2020-2030 is argued with such power as to almost force the future to come into existence by the will of the words alone. It seems to be their first report and they want to make the biggest splash they can.
To be fair, much of it is persuasive. They paint a picture of a world where driverless electric vehicles ferry countless people to their destinations all day long, thereby completely obviating the need for the users to own the vehicle they are riding in. Since the cars will be shared across large fleets the demand for new vehicles amongst private buyers will collapse. Many of the largest manufacturers will disappear down the plughole of history. Without individual owners there will be no need for dealerships, just direct deals with the manufacturers. Since the cars will be electric there will be no more need for oil and the members of OPEC will vanish like water into sand.
The enabling technology for this is that which makes vehicles autonomous and driverless. The vehicles do not have to be electric but it is in that form that autonomous vehicles reach technical perfection. This, though, is not what makes their future inevitable. According to RethinkX it is the extraordinary cheapness of electric vehicles that will sweep away the oil era.
This is not a concept we are used to. Electric vehicles have their supporters but no one has ever tried to argue that they are cheap. Battery packs cost several thousand dollars when new so need government subsidies to bring the vehicle’s price down to one that is competitive with conventional vehicles. Then there is the fact that battery replacement costs in later years will be enough to consign the ageing electric car to the scrap heap. We are already experiencing the pre-shocks in the used vehicle market, some sources in the UK claiming that electric car prices can fall by up to two thirds in the first year alone. Even worse, the market for older electric vehicles is probably non-existent. As a consequence electric vehicles appear to be suffering a market inversion, the highest selling models being the more exotic ones bought by the rich while the common-or-garden varieties are consigned to the margins.
It is in the upper market strata where Tesla like to operate, far above the humble Nissan Leaf, and as it happens RethinkX has based its entire forecast on Tesla’s high priced offerings. To make these vehicles look cheap RethinkX has to bring out some pretty big numbers and it is not shy in doing so. The data is sourced from Tesloop, a company that runs a fleet of Tesla models in a kind of pre-autonomous state, which is another way of saying they are taxis. Indeed, they don’t seem to be doing anything different to Uber except that they focus solely on electric vehicles.
What Tesloop have discovered is that Teslas can run for 200,000 miles with less than 10% loss of battery capacity. This is fantastic news, far in excess of what a Nissan Leaf can achieve with the same technology. Tesloop is a start-up so in order to reach these mileages the cars have undergone some fabulous utilisation rates, the first car attaining 280,000 miles in 20 months, or 14,000 miles per month. Tesloop are aiming for monthly averages of 30,000 miles which, at around 1,000 miles per day, would require average driving speeds of more than 60mph. This might even be possible when the Teslas fulfill their autonomous destiny, though it might also depend on the driverless revolution ridding the roads of those antiquated driven machines.
As far as one can tell there are no formal links between the Tesla troika of RethinkX, Tesloop and Tesla itself. It might seem odd that Elon Musk would allow Tesloop to merge the names of two of his brands, Tesla and Hyperloop, but maybe he just wanted to indulge the teenage prodigy, Haydn (no first name), who suggested the idea in the first place. If Tesla put in any seed funding it was as one of several investors. Either way, no one is stating that Tesla controls Tesloop.
Nor is there any suggestion that Tesla has funded the research by RethinkX, although the think-tank’s hyperventilated deadline for the start of the driverless revolution converges nicely with Tesla’s own forecast of reaching genuine mass production output in 2020. Perversely, the surest sign that the report really is independent comes from the two rather lukewarm quotes that RethinkX provide on their website:
“It is, of course, just one of many visions of the future, but it’s a thoughtful one, and quite a bit of it rings true.” — The Car Connection, May 2017
“[The RethinkX authors] really nailed it…Whether all that can happen as fast as they say is another matter. But it might.” — Professor Ugo Bardi of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Florence
You can find the report here – try not to get too excited, you might do yourself an injury.
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