That seems reasonable for a box truck or similar. I'm skeptical about a semi though. I'm sure there are some use cases, just not convinced it's a significant percentage.
It also rules out consecutive/night shifts with a second driver.
> It also rules out consecutive/night shifts with a second driver.
One of the things we're learning about electrical vehicles is that they do lead to a culture change in the way people operate them.
Trucker culture currently... blows. They often eat bad food, subsist on caffeine and often other stimulants, work excruciatingly long hours, and often have or cause accidents due to those long hours. They're away from home and their families for weeks of a month. They sit in unergonomic conditions and often sleep in cramped quarters aboard their trucks. Truck drivers in India are often seen as very low class people because of this kind of living situation.
One of the biggest cultural changes happening in truck driving in India are companies switching to relaying cargo - a driver may only go 100-300 miles from home, dropping off or switching their trailer for one heading back the opposite direction, and hauling back home for the night, where the next person goes the next distance, and so on. That allows the driver to have a somewhat normal home life outside of trucking. And as it happens, relay trucking is perfect for an electrically powered system, as it forces truckers to adopt the saner living situation by having to recharge after a run. So, not only healthier, it's safer for everyone on the road and better for the environment.
> Trucker culture currently... blows. They often eat bad food, subsist on caffeine and often other stimulants, work excruciatingly long hours, and often have or cause accidents due to those long hours. They're away from home and their families for weeks of a month. They sit in unergonomic conditions and often sleep in cramped quarters aboard their trucks. Truck drivers in India are often seen as very low class people because of this kind of living situation.
In the US, this depends entirely on the company culture. Where I worked, our road drivers were home every night. In the extreme minority of cases where there wasn't a service center close enough to drive to in <4 hours, we had drivers from each end meet in the middle, exchange trailers, and go back home.
Other carriers, especially those with mostly contractors and owner/operators, don't take this approach.
> That seems reasonable for a box truck or similar. I'm skeptical about a semi though. I'm sure there are some use cases, just not convinced it's a significant percentage.
TL;DR: pickup and delivery trucks don't go very far each day and pull lighter loads. There are more pickup and delivery trucks than long-haul trucks.
Full version:
I worked for the largest LTL carrier in the country for almost a decade, in process improvement. I'm not a trucker by any means but I do feel like I have a pretty good grasp of the business processes in that industry.
There are two types of trailers typically used in the US: 53', which are generally used to move things directly from point A to point B, and 28' - "pups" - which are typically used to move things that have to go through intermediate steps. Correspondingly, the freight market is divided into "truckload"/"TL" and "less-than-truckload"/"LTL" carriers.
Truckload carriers often drop off 53' trailers at customer locations. Customers fill them up, and the carrier picks them up and takes them to their destination. They also use pups for this purpose, but 53' trailers are more efficient due to the larger capacity.
Less-than-truckload carriers pick up and deliver things that are usually on pallets. Drivers run a delivery route in the morning and a pickup route in the afternoon, pulling a single pup. They bring their pup back to the terminal where its unloaded and shipments are loaded according to their destination.
LTL carriers differ substantially from TL carriers because they have to handle customer shipments, moving them from trailer to trailer. The general flow here is Pickup -> Terminal -> Hub -> Terminal -> Delivery. Shipments going long distances may move through multiple hubs over several days, each of which may handle the shipments to more efficiently use trailer capacity.
The process improvement part of LTL that I worked in was trying to reduce loss and damages by reducing the number of times a shipment is touched. If a terminal in California has a pup full of shipments that are destined for a single terminal in North Carolina, then that trailer should never be opened until it gets to North Carolina. If half of it is destined for Utah and half for North Carolina, then the Utah stuff should be in the back, and when the trailer gets to Salt Lake City the Utah stuff should be unloaded, more North Carolina stuff put on to fill it, and it shouldn't be opened again from that point to destination.
Whew. That's a lot of background information. I wrote all of that to say - for LTL carriers, most P&D trucks don't travel long distances in a single day, and are usually pulling half the load of a long-haul truck. From an operations standpoint I see no reason why the Tesla truck wouldn't be suitable for that role.
The form is not checked, you can enter any arbitrary nonsense and it will let you through. I recommend using an @example.com address which won't be routed.
They have always known that the first few months of production were going to be "production hell" for the model 3. While the model 3 production has been worse than they hoped for (elon musk always underestimates timelines so if you know how his companies normally operate, it's normal) but a 3 month delay for a massive hardware engineering project is not end of the world.
It seems like it will require a $5000 deposit (with a $50,000 "full deposit") and the truck will cost between $200,000 and $250,000, according to the page source.
Well shoot, if they can deliver full self driving capabilities, can I just buy one of these to live in instead of a house, cruising the freeways endlessly?
Huh, that’s pretty interesting. I guess if it’s smooth enough, doesn’t even need to spend all night cruising, can just get you to a campsite an hour out of town.
Unlike their cars, if they want to be successful they will need to release factory service manuals and sell parts to repair them. It's not going to be acceptable to send it to some far away service center to be repaired, at least for small outfits that heavily use all their equipment. When a critical piece of equipment is down, the mechanic is going to be working through the night hacking it together, possibly waiting on parts that are being overnighted. Diesel mechanics tend to be ridiculously intelligent and very resourceful.
>Diesel mechanics tend to be ridiculously intelligent and very resourceful.
I was just saying about maybe the driver being in the picture isn't something Tesla is going for. A prime argument Tesla has was about eventually eliminating the need for so many drivers. "If not that, then what else?" was what I wanted to say.
EDIT: They seem to have a range of 500 miles. Which is 1/3 the range of normal diesel semi's.
Don't have any particularly good story. They are just really good at understanding and fixing anything mechanical using the most basic of tools. I actually think that the type of brain that makes you good at programming is similar to being a good mechanic.
Absolutely, trouble shooting requires abstract thought and following long logical chains as to why something is failing. Cars are complex systems just like software can be, good knowledge of many different domains inside your main discipline is required to put the pieces together. I have always found good mechanics to be really switched on individuals.
Yep. I've found that my troubleshooting methodology and being able to break down complex systems is equally transferable in between software and mechanics. I think that systems and software people are the "modern" mechanics of the world. It explains a lot as to why my father and grandfather were both mechanics and tradesmen, and I'm now a systems guy.
I don't think they're talking about a backyard shed. More like a distribution business with a fleet of 50 trucks, a well-equipped garage and a full-time mechanic.
> Because the days of a service manual and a backyard shed are over
They really aren't, as much as the manufacturers like to tell you they are.
Sure, the sheer amount of sensors/vacuum systems/electronics/etc make it look too complex for the layman, but as long as you've got an OBD scanner and a laptop, you can make quick work of most things. The biggest issue is manufacturers currently having an obsession with inverse torx head bolts in unusual and frustrating places (i.e. pull the top end off the engine using only a 10mm, 14mm and 17mm, and then juuuust at the last step, there's a sudden 6.5mm inverse torx bit needed to be fetched from Narnia.). But you can always get parts.
Electric cars will be just the same - in fact, I think they'll be easier for the home electrician to work on. Most of the modular manufacturer-specific parts can be interchanged for other components (inverters, batteries, etc). It won't look as neat and clean, but considering that electric cars are fundamentally less complex than internal combustion engines I don't think people will struggle.
And I don't think anything sold in the US today, not to the Department of Defense, has anything that poses "an immediate and extreme health and safety hazard".
I don't know, an electric car seems like it would contain a few items you don't want to be poking at if you don't know what you're doing. Security screws could a pretty good job of keeping the casual DIYer from electrocuting himself, essentially a "can't open this? Maybe you shouldn't."
Most modern domestic smoke detectors are now photoelectric, rather than ionization based.
Not only do they not contain toxic Americum 241, photoelectric smoke detectors are also both more sensitive to real fires and less prone to false alarms.
(The later is actually really important, as people will often disable smoke detectors in response to a false alarm - and then forget about them)
We had a kitchen smoke detector in college that was kept swaddled in plastic wrap at all times because it went off every. time. we tried to cook something. Absolutely a safety hazard, yeah.
I'm mostly thinking of high-voltage capacitors. Basically, if sticking a screwdriver in the wrong place could maim or kill you, I'm okay with having security screws there. Otherwise, no.
I have a journeyman in mechanics, tractor/trailers are much easier to work on than most personal vehicles due to the amount of room there is. They are also quite easy to repair, very similar to a computer as in hard drive is bad, replace it, injectors bad, replace it.
Tesla will be selling into a very complicated industry. You think enterprise sales of software are hard, just wait.
Tesla say their system includes all the functions necessary. I haven't seen a list but I doubt it. Even if they do it will literally take enterprise integration projects to hook them up to the largely bespoke systems used by existing trucking company backends.
I don't know if the timing is right, but I think what you have to understand here is that all of this is the beginning of the end for the trucking company as you know it.
So if Tesla has trucks, and is developing self-driving capability, and the trucking industry is a mishmash of legacy systems, what pieces does Musk need to just go into the trucking business direct?
This is a huge question. It depends on so many things. We can make assumptions on viable strategies given Tesla's finances and past behavior. But that still leaves us with a lot of solution space.
First you have to accept that the trucking industry is conservative. The mom and pop distributors, the big guys, everyone. The people who own, lease and operate the trucks. There are all sorts of legislative hurdles to deal with.
I think a winning strategy is to start with city or county distributors. Lease out trucks at _very_ competitive rates. Do this with an agreement that your backend (accounting, maintenance, inventory) systems will replace _everything_ at the distributor. At first you'll probably have to compromise on this and integrate some things.
On top of that you pretty much have to integrate your onboard sensors/telematics with consumable manufacturers. Unless you're going to manufacture your own tires and such too.
I was thinking more along the lines of Musk setting up a trucking company with a fleet consisting of autonomous Tesla trucks. Obviously not something that can be done right now, but given the push towards self-driving vehicles, and things like Amazon's delivery drones, I'm wondering if the current trucking industry is really Tesla's target market in the long term.
> It's not going to be acceptable to send it to some far away service center to be repaired, at least for small outfits that heavily use all their equipment.
Hmmm. Doesn't Tesla usually offer a loaner car while a Tesla is in for repairs? If they did the same thing with semis, would shipping companies accept it?
If the math works there — could now or over time — then once L5 hits imagine the possibilities. L5 trucks towing broken L5 trucks with a third taking the cargo. I missed the video, but I’d bet huge that needed tech is probably prototyped already, at least in the elonoggin. Well done Elon!
Still kinda giddy about the Roadster, too. Guilty — can’t get enough of Elon’s disruption (personal life aside) —- sue me or grab the pitchforks.. i’ll serve you lemonade. :)
So sort of a subscription model for trucks? You buy (or more likely rent) "a truck" and Tesla supplies you with "a truck" but it's not necessarily always the same truck?
You might be pleased to learn that much of the sparsely-populated area of the US does its Tesla car repairs -- including minor stuff like replacing the engine -- with teams of 2 workers and a van -- and 4 hours for that engine swap.
Now imagine how that might work out for the truck industry.
This is true only if your product is designed to tinker. Or you generally have to replace plug and play parts.
When desktops came along many people wondered if they could be serviced as easily as TVs. The answer turns out to be simple, they don't have to be. If the repair + component costs turn out to be in the same ball park as replacing the plug and play part, you don't have to service individual PCBs. To give you a example, recently I had a broken Dell Monitor. Got it fixed in 20 mins at a local service store. Apparently the technician simply removed the whole PCB and put a new one in its place. And there were only 3-4 such PCBs.
You only need to be as intelligent as the abstract interface allows you to be.
This is 1,000% an unsolved problem, with an extra helping of fuck you Google and Facebook.
I browser without cookies and generally from Asian VPNs, and as far as I can tell, nobody is remotely respecting the browser’s language. Google have also recently started showing English language search results in Thailand with archaic Thai-language dates, which is also insane.
Yes. One requires attention to a huge number of details, to be certain that many systems work together flawlessly. The other, you can just reload if it screws up.
I really wish they'd just use Twitch. Twitch can handle tens of thousands of viewers on esports matches. I'm sure it can handle some thousands of nerds wanting to look at trucks.
doesn’t panasonic make tesla’s batteries? even if tesla does make their own batteries, their primary product is automobiles. are other car makers engine companies? (of course some car companies do sell their engines to other car companies, but i think the point i am making is still clear.)
I did emphasize the 'a', right? They are not a car company; not just any car company; not like any other car company on Earth (or Mars, come the day). Thank goodness, this shows in more or less all aspects of their marketing and PR.
Also, as someone says below, they're a battery company.
Does being a battery company make them more adept at streaming? gp's point was that streaming is not a Tesla core competency, not that they are particularly bad at it because they are a car company.
Since I can't see anything except a spinning wheel on the button and "Event in progress" here are my questions for others:
What is the payload (tongue) capacity?
What is the tow (pull) capacity?
Is there any mention of being able to pull a fifth wheel?
How are they doing this without triggering a browser prompt to allow my location to be sent by browser? The result for me was very accurate. Why wouldn't all the ecommerce sites use this method? I keep denying their prompts to access my location otherwise.
This live stream consistently causes the first crash I’ve noticed in ages: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1418059. Yes, when you use Firefox Nightly as your browser it does just occasionally cause trouble. But mostly it’s just awesome.
574 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 357 ms ] threadPresumably the email is to get a notification...
Edit: Turns out you actually have to enter a email... thankfully it doesn't verify anything.
I'm sure there are niche uses, but it isn't any sort of enormous breakthrough.
Edit: Product page says 300/500 range, so some option I guess: https://www.tesla.com/semi/?new
No idea what their source is though.
It also rules out consecutive/night shifts with a second driver.
Edit: Product page says 300 miles standard, but a 500 mile option: https://www.tesla.com/semi/?new
Regional haul tractors are decent market, but much smaller than long haul.
Utility and refuse better play to the strengths of electric vehicles, but I suppose garbage trucks aren't sexy enough for Tesla.
One of the things we're learning about electrical vehicles is that they do lead to a culture change in the way people operate them.
Trucker culture currently... blows. They often eat bad food, subsist on caffeine and often other stimulants, work excruciatingly long hours, and often have or cause accidents due to those long hours. They're away from home and their families for weeks of a month. They sit in unergonomic conditions and often sleep in cramped quarters aboard their trucks. Truck drivers in India are often seen as very low class people because of this kind of living situation.
One of the biggest cultural changes happening in truck driving in India are companies switching to relaying cargo - a driver may only go 100-300 miles from home, dropping off or switching their trailer for one heading back the opposite direction, and hauling back home for the night, where the next person goes the next distance, and so on. That allows the driver to have a somewhat normal home life outside of trucking. And as it happens, relay trucking is perfect for an electrically powered system, as it forces truckers to adopt the saner living situation by having to recharge after a run. So, not only healthier, it's safer for everyone on the road and better for the environment.
In the US, this depends entirely on the company culture. Where I worked, our road drivers were home every night. In the extreme minority of cases where there wasn't a service center close enough to drive to in <4 hours, we had drivers from each end meet in the middle, exchange trailers, and go back home.
Other carriers, especially those with mostly contractors and owner/operators, don't take this approach.
TL;DR: pickup and delivery trucks don't go very far each day and pull lighter loads. There are more pickup and delivery trucks than long-haul trucks.
Full version:
I worked for the largest LTL carrier in the country for almost a decade, in process improvement. I'm not a trucker by any means but I do feel like I have a pretty good grasp of the business processes in that industry.
There are two types of trailers typically used in the US: 53', which are generally used to move things directly from point A to point B, and 28' - "pups" - which are typically used to move things that have to go through intermediate steps. Correspondingly, the freight market is divided into "truckload"/"TL" and "less-than-truckload"/"LTL" carriers.
Truckload carriers often drop off 53' trailers at customer locations. Customers fill them up, and the carrier picks them up and takes them to their destination. They also use pups for this purpose, but 53' trailers are more efficient due to the larger capacity.
Less-than-truckload carriers pick up and deliver things that are usually on pallets. Drivers run a delivery route in the morning and a pickup route in the afternoon, pulling a single pup. They bring their pup back to the terminal where its unloaded and shipments are loaded according to their destination.
LTL carriers differ substantially from TL carriers because they have to handle customer shipments, moving them from trailer to trailer. The general flow here is Pickup -> Terminal -> Hub -> Terminal -> Delivery. Shipments going long distances may move through multiple hubs over several days, each of which may handle the shipments to more efficiently use trailer capacity.
The process improvement part of LTL that I worked in was trying to reduce loss and damages by reducing the number of times a shipment is touched. If a terminal in California has a pup full of shipments that are destined for a single terminal in North Carolina, then that trailer should never be opened until it gets to North Carolina. If half of it is destined for Utah and half for North Carolina, then the Utah stuff should be in the back, and when the trailer gets to Salt Lake City the Utah stuff should be unloaded, more North Carolina stuff put on to fill it, and it shouldn't be opened again from that point to destination.
Whew. That's a lot of background information. I wrote all of that to say - for LTL carriers, most P&D trucks don't travel long distances in a single day, and are usually pulling half the load of a long-haul truck. From an operations standpoint I see no reason why the Tesla truck wouldn't be suitable for that role.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/930875739397791744
Is the listed US prices
product: "HAMSTER",
I also wonder why they try to push multiple models and niches when they can't even build enough Model 3s as they had expected.
Someone pair up with a tiny house company or a prefab design/build architecture company and start making some housing trailers for Tesla Semis.
The easiest way is to use AAA who will handle all the DMV work for the conversion of title from commercial vehicle to something else.
So who is in on this? If that is the price this will work well.
> cruising the freeways endlessly
How about "cruising on sunlight."
I'm not saying have a kid on there, but what angle do they have if not for self-driving? Poor range, unrepairability?
I was just saying about maybe the driver being in the picture isn't something Tesla is going for. A prime argument Tesla has was about eventually eliminating the need for so many drivers. "If not that, then what else?" was what I wanted to say.
EDIT: They seem to have a range of 500 miles. Which is 1/3 the range of normal diesel semi's.
Cooool! Can we have a story about this?
Tell me, have you actually worked on a new model truck? Because the days of a service manual and a backyard shed are over
I didn't mean a literal backyard shed :), but a more general mechanic.
A lot of things are this way today.
They really aren't, as much as the manufacturers like to tell you they are.
Sure, the sheer amount of sensors/vacuum systems/electronics/etc make it look too complex for the layman, but as long as you've got an OBD scanner and a laptop, you can make quick work of most things. The biggest issue is manufacturers currently having an obsession with inverse torx head bolts in unusual and frustrating places (i.e. pull the top end off the engine using only a 10mm, 14mm and 17mm, and then juuuust at the last step, there's a sudden 6.5mm inverse torx bit needed to be fetched from Narnia.). But you can always get parts.
Electric cars will be just the same - in fact, I think they'll be easier for the home electrician to work on. Most of the modular manufacturer-specific parts can be interchanged for other components (inverters, batteries, etc). It won't look as neat and clean, but considering that electric cars are fundamentally less complex than internal combustion engines I don't think people will struggle.
> possibly waiting on parts that are being overnighted.
I can not manufacture at home the parts I need for my 2003 petrol engine, my 1986 - I can.
Not only do they not contain toxic Americum 241, photoelectric smoke detectors are also both more sensitive to real fires and less prone to false alarms.
(The later is actually really important, as people will often disable smoke detectors in response to a false alarm - and then forget about them)
Tesla say their system includes all the functions necessary. I haven't seen a list but I doubt it. Even if they do it will literally take enterprise integration projects to hook them up to the largely bespoke systems used by existing trucking company backends.
(E.g. 20 year old ADP systems)
Go look at Volvo concept trucks over the last few years.
First you have to accept that the trucking industry is conservative. The mom and pop distributors, the big guys, everyone. The people who own, lease and operate the trucks. There are all sorts of legislative hurdles to deal with.
I think a winning strategy is to start with city or county distributors. Lease out trucks at _very_ competitive rates. Do this with an agreement that your backend (accounting, maintenance, inventory) systems will replace _everything_ at the distributor. At first you'll probably have to compromise on this and integrate some things.
On top of that you pretty much have to integrate your onboard sensors/telematics with consumable manufacturers. Unless you're going to manufacture your own tires and such too.
Hmmm. Doesn't Tesla usually offer a loaner car while a Tesla is in for repairs? If they did the same thing with semis, would shipping companies accept it?
You got a little doo doo on your nose.
elonoggin? Really??!
Now imagine how that might work out for the truck industry.
When desktops came along many people wondered if they could be serviced as easily as TVs. The answer turns out to be simple, they don't have to be. If the repair + component costs turn out to be in the same ball park as replacing the plug and play part, you don't have to service individual PCBs. To give you a example, recently I had a broken Dell Monitor. Got it fixed in 20 mins at a local service store. Apparently the technician simply removed the whole PCB and put a new one in its place. And there were only 3-4 such PCBs.
You only need to be as intelligent as the abstract interface allows you to be.
I browser without cookies and generally from Asian VPNs, and as far as I can tell, nobody is remotely respecting the browser’s language. Google have also recently started showing English language search results in Thailand with archaic Thai-language dates, which is also insane.
They keep requesting https://livestream.tesla.com/haveReservationsStarted every 30 seconds. Most of the requests are failing with 502 HTTP errors.
a23-56-119-116.deploy.static.akamaitechnologies.com
Fail, using an old version of NGINX 1.10.2 and no HTTP/2 support enabled.
Kudos to Tesla for trying.
I need to stream something. I'm a car company. What's the point of making extra work for myself?
Greater control, perhaps, but for a press conference do I need this?
No, you do not need it for a press conference. But you earn credit points from me when I see you trying. Google is evil, remember?
what does this even mean?
Also, as someone says below, they're a battery company.
Should have let the Department of Redundancy Department do their capacity planning.
They have a lot of custom audio for bits and pieces like this. It's a neat little loop though, and I want it.
Given it's short loop I'd guess it's either a royalty-free piece they purchased or it was commissioned.
That said, if you like the style, give Ronald Jenkees a try:
https://ronaldjenkees.bandcamp.com/
https://location.teslamotors.com/geoip/v1.0.3/city/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvJV1AqRd8g