Electric Vehicle Television - EVTV - a weekly video for custom electric car builders and conversions. Each week we review components and techniques you can use to convert any car to clean, quiet, powerful electric drive. EVTV has become THE weekly TV show for conversion shops, University build teams, design engineers, and custom electric car builders worldwide with viewers in 160 countries. Distributed on the global Amazon Cloudnet server system, each episode of EVTV brings you news, developments, the latest components, and techniques for building the future of electric vehicle transportation - in high definition video.

Tesla’s stock has been struggling a bit recently.  I personally think they have been “crushing it” on all fronts recently, but after last night’s Model Y Unveil event I’m not so certain.   The recent announcement that they really were going to offer a Model 3 at $35,000 and the upgrade to 250kW in the Supercharger Version3 are significant marks toward overkill in the electric vehicle space.  And as we say at EVTV, “Overkill is Always Appropriate“.  Kind of like the little black dress.  You can’t go wrong with it.

The $35,000 mark is a powerstroke.  The average price of a new car of any kind in the U.S. is now over $37,000.  The traditional automotive manufacturers are simply reeling in disbelief that the Tesla Model 3 has simply backseated the forever dominant BMW/Mercedes battle for dominance in the premium sedan market.  This battle has gone on for decades.  The market for $50-70,000 sedans is actually pretty small, but very prestigious and has a halo effect on everything.  So everyone has to play.  But BMW has particularly “owned” this segment by specializing in it.

In a single year, Tesla has just sent everyone else to the showers.  It’s over.  They own it.  The car has it all, performance, styling, safety, green cred, and it doesn’t burn gasoline.  And they’re very near to selling more Model 3’s than the next two contenders combined. The win is crushing and devastating and has sent ICE OEMs into an absolute PANIC.  After years of pooh poohing the whole idea and Must in particlar, they suddenly see the future, about the moment it arrives of course.

And then he announces that he actually IS going to sell a base version at a smooth $35,000.  The price of an Accura or a Camry.   Suddenly, a Model 3 with 220 miles of range enters the mom and dad market.

There’s a lot more going on here than I see signs of cognition of in the space.  In this video, all CAN aside, we go back in history to the March 31, 2016 announcement of the Model 3.  To quote Musk, “And the price?  … The price is $35,000.”

That was kind of a big fat flat statement.  And they signed up 115,000 reservations THAT day with lines at Tesla stores stretching for blocks.  In the ensuing days and weeks, 455,000 people put down deposits on that car.  But they put that down for a $35,000 car.  My Model 3, picked up February 19, 2018, almost two years later, cost me a slick $56,000.  Worse, $8,000 of that was for an autopilot that never has been delivered.

And so one of the struggles for Tesla is the sale of some 250,000 Model 3’s, when they had $1000 deposits for 455,000.  Leaving some 200,000 cars on the table.

I am always taken aback by the greed for subsidy evident among our viewers.  It is viewed as a universal public good that solar equipment installations and electric vehicle purchases should rightly be subsidized with tax credits and deductions. Somehow even excused as “levelling the playing field” given all the less direct subsidies enjoyed by status quo corporate interests.  And as most of us liberal libertarians are generally opposed to most taxes just in general, it seems to catch you guys by surprise that I’m not all over tax credits for EVs.  It’s not that I am unenthusiastic.  It’s that I oppose them ENTIRELY.  Now focus– focus here.   I OPPOSE them in their entirety.

I have said this repeatedly but our viewers have always viewed this as some sort of inside “Jack Joke”.  It never was.  Read my lips.  No new tax credits.

It is not that I don’t see the advantages they offer and the pump priming they can do.  I understand the allure of cocaine and methamphetamines as well.  The problem is they all result in the same thing.  Some really serious problems down the road.  Subsidies DISTORT markets in ways that can be harmful, and most often harmful to exactly the people and entities you are trying to encourage and jumpstart.

The adoption curve is neither smooth nor automatic and success is not assured.  Even today, I continue to be BESIEGED by those desperately seeking information and assistance with their Coda’s, their Azure Dynamics eTransit Connects, their Fiskers, and any of the other “orphans” out there.  Byron Izenbaard and I were recently offered THREE fully operational pristine eTransit Connects with a fourth that had a problem with the eDrive.  I’ve got a full drive train sitting across the room from me.  They were offered by a University at $500 each.  This is a $58,500 list price EV based on the Ford Transit Connect that were NOT failed, and indeed in perfect operating condition.  Byron is actually my goto guy for problems with this model. We both passed on the offer.  I’ve got two now.  And there is simply no future in mastering the intricacies of an orphan vehicle from a bankrupt company that made 286 of them in the U.S. ever.  I passed the info onto our recent visitor from New Jersey, Matt Foley.  This would give him a van to park down by the river in case he needed a place. And I think he put in a bid on his way home.

The EV subsidy was a spectacular exercise in  poor design.  It was an almost obscenely generous $7500 tax CREDIT.  Not a deduction.  You actually get a dollar for dollar reduction in taxes owed for the first $7500 spent on a new electric automobile.  But then it only applies to the FIRST 200,000 vehicles sold by THAT manufacturer.   And then it doesn’t end, but actually phases out in a brutalizing succession of six month “dates” designed to celebrate bankruptcy on particular days.

This is the HEART of my deep gut wrenching vomit tasting aversion to the whole “progressive” neo marxist alt left libtard mantra.  They’re like kids.  Dancing in the glow of enthusiasm for their own virtuous good intentions to save the world and celebrate utopia, they simply never think ANYTHING through.  They lack the fully formed cerebrum of adult humanoids.  They can’t follow a line of cause and effect further than the bathroom, which apparently they also suffer some apprehension and general confusion about.  And so we must all suffer the “unintended consequences.”

So picture this, in the next year or so, every recalcitrant oppositional conventional automotive manufacturer who bitterly and resentfully caves int o producing an electric model will be SUBSIDIZED to the tune of $7500 tax credit on THEIR first 200,000 sales, while Tesla will not.  Putting Tesla, the sole cheerleader for this entire revolution, at an artificially induced $7500 price disadvantage.  The only salve to this amazing insult is that the entire credit is about to expire anyway.

Along the way, Tesla itself was complicit urging potential customers to get their orders in by November 1 to be assured of delivery before the end of December so they could still get the full credit.  This pulled a lot of sales that were likely to happen anyway into December.  Well the party is over and it’s January.  What do YOU think happened to Model 3 sales then?  Actually ALL Tesla sales then. The inevitable hangover from the cocaine party.

And so my view of such subsidies and do gooding is that it causes people to make enormous investments and plans during the party period, leaving them vulnerable and besieged in the hangover.  It doesn’t create markets, it DISTORTS them.  And it is a central element of a belief system.  The only reason to offer a $7500 tax credit to someone who purchases the car is because you have a FAILURE OF VISION and a crisis of confidence that anyone would ever want one without the credit.

If the improved technical elegance and efficiency of electric drive is a true benefit, why wouldn’t people buy it anyway?  I happen to believe it IS not just a marginal benefit, but a completely DISRUPTIVE innovation.  And you are trying to kill one of the most brilliant innovators in the space with your “good intentions” and child-mind solutions.  And doing a pretty good job of it at that.

Yes, Tesla might have grown a bit more slowly without the tax credit.  It’s the story of the old bull, the young bull, and the herd of cows.  The young bull suggests to the old bull “Why don’t we run down the hill and have our way with one of them cows?!!!”  The old bull’s response of course: “Why don’t we walk down …and do em all.”

The magnetic drive, battery powered automobile IS going to take over ALL personal transportation and potentially most commercial transportation as well.  It is because it is simply a more elegant and efficient way of accomplishing the task and as Musk has proven emphatically, it involves NO compromise or sacrifice AT ALL. Indeed it is a markedly IMPROVED EXPERIENCE to own one.  I make this as a flat statement of fact.  You don’t get to have an “opinion” on it.  It is demonstrably so.

How soon that factoid promulgates among the vast body politic and is accultrated by it has been the sole mission of EVTV  for a decade and quite concurrent with the development of the Tesla.  The FIRST prototype of the Tesla Roadster to actually produce forward motion was in February 2008.  We drove our EVTV Porsche Speedster electric on Christmas day of 2008 and started our video series in May 2009.  We recognized IMMEDIATELY that if a 54 year old guy who knew nothing about cars, could build an electric car in three months working half days falling down drunk wearing yellow shoes, and it’s FIRST drive was at 94mph and it’s FIRST drive to empty was 110 miles in range, what we had here was a not precisely a technologyl problem.  But a potentially HUGE acculturation problem.  And so we enlisted and enabled 100,000 guys to go build their own and show it to their brother-in-law.  Take him for a ride so to speak.

Musk focused on building the Tesla and scaling it to volume production.  I don’t know which was the easy part.  Either way, it’s kind of like crawling through 40 miles of piss, blood, pus, broken glass and razor blades on your way to being an overnight success story.  But the benefit to our world is worth every painful step. And with just a bit of persistence by a handful of people, the outcome is inevitable.

So I think the early 2019 crash in Tesla sales is very real, although largely unrecognized.  A few analysts have picked up on this and for one time in a row have it correct.  But I had no idea how serious it was until last night’s Model Y unveil.

I used to be famously in love with Whitney Houston and it is bare coincidence that my wife looks just like her.  An innocent kid out of a gospel singing church, she was lovely and sang indeed like an angel. No wonder, Whitney’s mother, the gospel-trained vocalist, CissyHouston, is an aunt of Dionne Warwick.  I watched Kevin Costners THE BODYGUARD a dozen times.  The last time I saw her on stage, she was staggering around slurring every word, forgetting the lyrics to songs she had sung a hundred times, and obviously both drunk and high on stage.  I was in tears.

I very nearly was again last night watching Tesla’s Model Y Unveil.  Musk has taken a page from Steve Jobs in staging these “events”, part nightclub, part rock concert, and all celebration of Tesla by the cult, for product announcements. And despite a slight stutter, has always done a pretty masterful job of them.

The Model Y event was scheduled for 8:00PM Pacific time, which is a bit bizarre to begin with.   That’s 10:00 PM here and past my bedtime.  But I hung in there drowsily with my Dr. Pepper and Camels patiently waiting until it FINALLY started 20 minutes late.  All that was missing was a heroine sloshed Whitney Houston.

Musks stutter was indecipherable in places.  He was nervous and lost looking and emitted a bizarre halting mini history of Tesla rolling out each car in turn from the first prototype to the still non-existent new Roadster and Semi before finally rolling out the Model Y.  Which looked for all the world just like a Model 3 with a rear hatch, which the Model 3 kinda/sorta already has.  And then, they never showed the hatch.  But 7 people painfully climbed out of the Model 3/Y.  And so I guess it’s a crossover SUV?

Excuse me, an SUV is supposed to have mudders, a higher ground clearance, and the ability to dance across rugged terrain while the music plays in the video commercials.  No, nobody actually uses them that way, but that’s the image and that’s what they are supposed to be.  The reaction from the crowd was initial applause, but the swell dampened instead of swelling and there was this ghostly silence afterwords with this wierd series of “wooh- woohs” and “yays” kind of heroically trying to carry it in the background.  LAME is the word that pops to mind.

Fortunately, my east coast li’l buddy Galileo Russell was there for HyperChange TV and he’s always pumped up so tight and talking at 4x with his Tesla fanboyz enthusiasm that it is just infectious.  You must watch this.

Again, I was almost in tears.  He tried to get access to the Press Lounge by pronouncing he was streaming live to 600 people with his cell phone.  As luck would have it, can you believe it was the one night when he wasn’t the only one there with a cell phone and they absolutely rudely shoved him away.  He wound up sitting on a parking lot curb outside with his buddy, heroically trying to deliver a “breakdown” of the event, and it looked like they were both going to break down right there. Indeed, I was shocked to hear him speaking at 1X speed. I had never heard him speak normally before.  I felt so bad I wanted to give him a hug and tell him it was going to be alright.

BUT WAIT. It gets worse. Sean Mitchell got an invite and had a flight and a hotel reserved and wanted to be the OTHER guy there with a cell phone. Except all the Boeing 737 longs got grounded along with his flight. So he was heroically driving in his Tesla on the DAY of the event from Denver to Hawthorne.

Don’t know yet what happened to Mr Mitchell as his last video was from Jean Nevada and he apparently did NOT make it to livestream the event. Nothing from him since his last update in Nevada.

And the key part to the Jobs/Musk event model is that they always hold a little something in the back pocket.  The surprise announcement nobody knew was coming. It’s pat schtick at this point.  ANd actually everybody knows its coming and they love to speculate on what it’s going to be this time. You ALWAYS have the supersecret wow ’em announcement on top of the expected product unveil.

Only Musk didn’t have one this time.  He politely thanked everyone for coming and ran from the room.  Houston, we have a problem here.

Yes, the stock is down $20 this morning after.  And yes, Tesla could come perilously close to bankruptcy.  But it won’t.  Tesla sales are not going away.  But after a year of trying to get production to 5000 per week or even 7000 per week, the spectre of 7000 per month sales is indeed a disappointment.

But it’s a setback, not a head shot.  He’s making all the right moves.  He’s introducing the car into Europe and China, although economies there are maudlin at best.  Still some latent demand there.  And the drop to $35000 is going to work very well.  And selling a car at the numbers he is remains remarkable in all respects.  He can raise capital if he needs to in order to survive. Plenty will fund further adventures.

But don’t expect a big gush of Model Y orders such as enjoyed by the Model 3.  It’s an airpuffed Model 3. Those who stood in line to get their reservation in early in March of 2016 kind of got screwed. Their $35,000 car didn’t show up until the END of the delivery cycle of course and their early “position” meant absolutely nothing.  I mean less than nothing.  No reward for early support at all.

So you can walk down the hill with the old bull on the Model Y “reservation”.   Indeed, while they WERE taking reservations online during the event, Musk didn’t even mention it.

Why so lame? I might suggest the Osborne effect. That is where you announce a somewhat improved version of a currently selling product, that you cannot deliver for some time, but in the meantime kill sales of the current model, in this case Model 3, while people wait for the newer improved version. There is so much in common between the Model 3 and the Model Y, this could be a real concern and somewhat explain Musks tepid presentation. He may be all too keenly aware what this could do to Model 3 demand at a critical moment. The correct move would have been not to announce the Y until the end of the year.

With the expiration of the tax cuts, the dramatic drop in unit sales, and the heroically lame Model Y rollout, I remain enormously optimistic.  If you liked Tesla stock at $350 you’re going to love it at $270.  And he really is making all the right moves.  The Maxwell acquistion will allow him to expand a battery moat that  is already unassailable.  The V3 Superchargers similarly on the charging network moat.  And I can tell you the Model 3 remains the best car I have ever driven to excess.  It’s a safety design phenomenon.  ANd at $35,000 an entirely new market of buyers opens up.  I still think it’s going to be an incredible year.

I was personally a little wounded this week.  In this video we describe a CAN adapter for the ESP32 that is easy to install without tools at all and let’s you monitor the vehicle CAN bus on the Tesla Model 3. It has two CAN ports, and supports both WiFi and Bluetooth BLE and offers a great platform for smart phone and tablet apps to wirelessly access vehicle data in depth and ad nauseum.

I even demonstrated a tiny application I whippedd out that lets you view battery data on a laptop screen.  http://media3.evtv.me/Model3Battery102.zip

For me, it’s always about the batteries.   And a particular message on the vehicle bus, message ID 0x401 provides a series of messages giving the individual cell voltages you see here – all 96 of them.  It was curiously slow, with each message providing 3 voltages and the message timing was one message per second which seems slow to me compared to the 100ms 0x6F2 for the same thing on the Model S.

But it begs the question how often do you really NEED an individual cell voltage to update?  So I thought it was cute.  Very small program.  Anyone can understand it.  And it does a useful thing. Click on the screen image and you can download a zip file with the source code and the ESP32CAN library in it.

Speaking of useful things, we uploaded this video last Saturday and on Wednesday night I was pleasured to receive the latest software update from Tesla for the Model 3.  IT features a whoopi cushion easter egg you access by pressing the Tesla symbol and once activated, you can cause a stunningly accurate fart noise to emit from the passenger seat by simply pressing the left steering wheel control button unobtrusively.  The wife got in the car and we were soon in hysterics.

Unfortunately, it came at a price.  The bastards deleted message 0X401 from the vehicle CAN bus ENTIRELY.  It’s just no longer there.  Gone.   Saturday  to Wednesday.  These over the air updates allow you to do some marvelous things very quickly don’t they?

Remember, it is only paranoia if they are NOT out to get you.  I know you’re hurting Elon, but classless.  Just classless.  You’re a closet deplorable.

We’ll find a way around it of course.  And Musk will find away around his problems as well.  Its all for the good if I can just talk Gali out of that whole suicide thing.

But somebody needs to have a talk with Elon.  Closing stores. Not closing stores. Lowering prices.  Not lowering prices.  The stutter extends beyond his voice.  You’re crushing it big guy and these ARE the good old days.  The fight is a lot more fun than the win.

Tesla’s strongest moat is the 250,000 new owners from last year.  As they show the car to friends family and foes alike the adoption curve will grow.  In fits and starts, but grow it will.  By summer this car will be on fire and again most likely unobtainium. Never mind that we are always one camel sneeze away from gasoline disaster anyway.

Jack Rickard

The post Teslappointment in the Length of Our Skis appeared first on EVTV Motor Verks.

Electric Vehicle Television - EVTV - a weekly video for custom electric car builders and conversions. Each week we review components and techniques you can use to convert any car to clean, quiet, powerful electric drive. EVTV has become THE weekly TV show for conversion shops, University build teams, design engineers, and custom electric car builders worldwide with viewers in 160 countries. Distributed on the global Amazon Cloudnet server system, each episode of EVTV brings you news, developments, the latest components, and techniques for building the future of electric vehicle transportation - in high definition video.

I am simply astonished by the current level of discourse currently raging on the topic of economics at the PRECISE moment the U.S. Government is announcing the lowest unemployment rate since 1969 and the highest stock market levels EVER.

But evidence from wife and daughter and employees is that our entire education system is ACTIVELY campaigning for an understanding of economics that is entirely, egregiously, and without apology the most utter nonsense ever expressed by anyone, anywhere, in the history of the world. And apparently, a significant percentage of our population has actually accepted this belief system wholesale. And they are doing so in the FACE of the daily news proving unequivocally otherwise.

That it is being provisioned by teachers, from kindergarten to graduate studies, who are mostly noted economically for their almost celebrated and readily confessed impoverishment, makes this even more astonishing. We don’t HAVE any billionaire professors teaching at a university. Why would you eagerly seek to learn to prosper at the ready knee of a puffed up self-important pauper?

Now it IS true that if you take the AVERAGE intelligence of the AVERAGE American, you have to understand that about half the people you will meet today are NOT going to be that smart. That’s what average IS.

But it remains that the average 80 IQ professional dishwasher should still know viscerally that this is nonsense. But the evidence of my own eyes and my own ears persuades me. An entire generation is just lost, dazed, and clueless on this topic.

And the consequences of that level of ignorance among that large a percentage of our population are dire. In our constitutional representative republic, we actually CAN deliberately choose poverty, starvation, and violence as a way of life. A future of American’s, desperately trying to escape as refugees to fight their way INTO Mexico, could actually happen.

So with enormous embarrassment, I’m going to deign try to explain it WITHOUT resorting to the obvious comparison of reality in Venezuela, North Korea, the Soviet Union, and Maoist China. I don’t want you to simply observe the obvious, and then mindlessly act on it appropriately.

I want you rather to UNDERSTAND it with all the why’s, wherefores, and “how comes” entailed.

Matthew Chapter 25 King James Version 

14 For the kingdom of heaven is as a man travelling into a far country, who called his own servants, and delivered unto them his goods.

15 And unto one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one; to every man according to his several ability; and straightway took his journey.

16 Then he that had received the five talents went and traded with the same, and made them other five talents.

17 And likewise he that had received two, he also gained other two.

18 But he that had received one went and digged in the earth, and hid his lord’s money.

19 After a long time the lord of those servants cometh, and reckoneth with them.

20 And so he that had received five talents came and brought other five talents, saying, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me five talents: behold, I have gained beside them five talents more.

21 His lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.

22 He also that had received two talents came and said, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me two talents: behold, I have gained two other talents beside them.

23 His lord said unto him, Well done, good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.

24 Then he which had received the one talent came and said, Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where thou hast not strawed:

25 And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine.

26 His lord answered and said unto him, Thou wicked and slothful servant, thou knewest that I reap where I sowed not, and gather where I have not strawed:

27 Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the exchangers, and then at my coming I should have received mine own with usury.

28 Take therefore the talent from him, and give it unto him which hath ten talents.

29 For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.

30 And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

I confess I have struggled with this particular chapter in Matthew. With otherwise consistent admonishment toward charity and care for the poor, Jesus appears to take a pretty hard line in matters of business. Well he WAS Jewish after all.

But it pretty much describes Capitalism to a tee. And the result is that a very small percentage of the participants in a free economy inevitably and in all cases wind up with an inordinate amount of the free capital in that economy.

This follows almost exactly the distributions noted by Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto a noted liberal economist. In 1906, he made the famous observation that twenty percent of the population owned eighty percent of the property in Italy, later generalised by Joseph M. Juran into the Pareto principle (also termed the 80–20 rule).

In his book on the Pareto Distribution published in 1909 he showed how wealth is distributed. He believed this natural distribution applied “through any human society, in any age, or country”.

He maintained cordial personal relationships with individual socialists, but always thought their economic ideas were severely flawed. He later became suspicious of their humanitarian motives and denounced socialist leaders as an ‘aristocracy of brigands’ who threatened to despoil the country.

Winston Churchill, one of my personal heroes, noted in the House of Commons, October 22, 1945: “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”

In a speech in Perth, Scotland May 28 of 1948 he noted “Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.”

While interesting, none of that describes WHY it is naturally this way. Let’s explore that.

Every four years we elect a President of the United States and every two years a House of Representative. Capitalism is four orders of magnitude more “democratic” than either of those salutary events.

Each and every day of your life after about the age of 10, you make decisions on how to deploy the “cash money hard come-by” that you may have in your pocket. And I would guess you make eight or ten of these decisions EVERY day and one of them is usually non-trivial.

And people are generally QUITE good and QUITE savvy on how they spend those ducats – by necessity of want. There is never quite as much of this resource as we would like.

You might vote for a President for any number of reasons. You might say something flattering to almost anyone you meet. Both of those don’t cost much. But if you part with the ducats for a single cup of coffee, you are making the most deadly sincere act of your life. You have gaged the size of the cup, the smell of the coffee, the coffee quality, the reputation of the coffee shop, your trust in their ability to make a good cup of coffee, and your need and desire for a cup of coffee, against the weight and heft and future promise of that $4.29 and voted it UP or DOWN. And if you find that VALUE PROPOSITION persuasive, you will part with the moolah.  And you gage that down to the uttermost farthing. Weighing and judging.  If you have done it before, perhaps with less agony as you have already made the decision before and if nothing has changed, same result.

By the way, in doing so you have REJECTED all other coffee merchants ON THE PLANET – for whatever reason – usually mostly a matter of geography and location.

But worse, you have rejected ALL OTHER PRODUCTS on the planet that that particular $4.29 represented. The $4.29 is gone forever. And you will never have another opportunity to spend it again on anything else.

You have also forfeited the opportunity of charity and you can no longer send it to St. Judes Children’s Hospital.

You make tens of such decisions per day and perhaps more and perhaps less. And you are one of 323 MILLION Americans on point and ever alert for a cup of coffee.

And so this is not a democracy every four years. This is a much more serious democracy exercised at the MILLISECOND level and rate. Hundreds of such selections each millisecond, 24×7. And each one weighed and measured and parsed to the utmost ability of each of the 323 million voters, legal citizens or not.  EVERYBODY gets to vote in this election all the time.   Vote early and often.  As often as you like.

And the cumulative sum of 3 billion such value proposition evaluations per day becomes the FORCE of a kind of hyper rate super Darwinism guiding every tiny aspect and nuance of every product offered by every business in the country.

The ENTIRE population votes ten times a day on who wins, and who loses, in the U.S. economy.

That’s kind of a magic thing. It steers our economy in a sea of options in the direction based on the wisdom of crowds toward success. The better product wins. The better producer thrives. And the ultimate outcome is irrefutable. We all voted. All the time.

And as the pig noted, some producers are more equaller than others. Their products are just better received and weighed and evaluated by the public. And so they have higher sales. And so they have more income and resource to spend on developing OTHER products. Indeed this is where the concept of brand comes into play. You become biased in FAVOR of some brands or producers even without having much information on the product itself. And you have biases AGAINST others, no matter how alluring the adverstiment.  Fool me once….

And every day, some producers break all previous records in income. And EVERY SINGLE DAY, others admit defeat, declare bankruptcy, and close the doors forever.

Even THAT is a creative act. As in defeat, they sell off all their equipment, buildings, and office furniture for six cents on the dollar they acquired all that for. And small producers just starting out snap up those buildings, and file cabinets, and desks and presses and bandsaws et al in yet ANOTHER evaluation of the value proposition. And indeed many startups would never succeed if they had not gotten a leg up eating the debris that had fallen to the forest floor.

And so we see that those who succeed in developing and offering a better product at a lower price that is voted UP by the 323 million participants become the “hath”. They were entrusted with a little bit of resource, and they multiplied it. And we voluntarily keep giving them MORE resource yet.

And what do they do with that? Retire to the Caribbean? Buy a 10,000 sf mansion? Drink expensive wine and favor fancy women, faster horses, and older whiskey? Or did I get that wrong. It might have been faster whiskey, older women, and fancy horses.

Well actually they do – up to a point. But they usally did not achieve success by being a moron. And after a brief period of basking in the perquisites of success, they learn, the easy way or the hard way, that you can only wear one pair of pants at a time. If you try to put four pair on at the same time you simply cannot walk. And they can only eat so much rich food before they hit the 300 pound level and can barely stand – don’t ask me how I know. And after the incredible complexity of building a successful business and the competition involved, card games and horse races seem childlike and boring.

Leaving usually the last lesson to be mastered in personal life, the women. Pick one single one with good qualities to make you a better person and stick with her and you’ll be better off.  The fancy ones are generally expensive and useless and often a pain in the ass.

I’ll gingerly offer one strategy in this death defying perilous topic. Marry a fat black woman who is strongly religious and knows how to run a home successfully without a man, raise great children, and do it all on no money.  Marry her, then eat all her food and starve her until she’s drop dead gorgeous. Then kill anybody that comes within 50 feet of her without your permission.  Just a tip.  Again, don’t ask me where I learned these things.  It’s just not important.  Happy wife, happy life. Ignore at your peril.

But after all that, what you find is that beyond your basic needs, money is a tool to create reiteratively. And so you find the same entrepreneurs and entities continuously using “all that money” to create more and better products, and they become addicted to the game of “winning” in the market place.  If they are good, really good, eventually they turn their eyes on “how to make the world a better place.”  I would claim that among the natively wise, they would have done even better had they STARTED there.  But we each have our path and our own cross to bear,  the weight of which is usually all about us.

And those are the people that bring us better automobiles, smart phones, computers, air conditioners, refrigerators, televisions, electricity, the Internet, and an ever increasing abundance of things that make us smarter, stronger, faster, and better.

They produce that because we voted for it.

Of course along the way, the succeeding businesses grew and had to employ others to help make the coffee. One guy can only make so much coffee until he has to pay someone else to help him make it. And by the time he has 28,218 locations and has established himself as the Starbucks brand, he also has 238,000 such helpers and employees. It’s just what it TAKES to be that.

And you created it by voting with your $4.29. Which really is rather a lot for a cup of coffee.

So in a very huge way, you get what you pay for. Literally. We vote with the ducats we have for the products we like and need and use, and so we get more of that.  And this works on a mind boggling scale.

And the products we don’t like or need or use we get less of. And this dynamic magic engine runs every second of every day.  And wealth is created by taking dirt, making something useful of it, and selling it to someone who wants it.

And a very small percentage of the population consistently creates these products. And so we basically “entrust” them with more and more resource to do more and more things. And to he that hath, more will be given. And to he that hath not, even that which he hath will be taken away.

Succinct. Accurate. And true in all societies in all places in all times.  And as it so happens, genetics being as they are, you wind up with 20% of the population with 80% of the available resources.  And 20% of them have 80% of those resources.  And so on until you get to the much celebrated if entirely arbitrary 1%.  That’s not a problem.  That’s a world.

And in this background, you then have a 28-year old chick coming on television with the message that “I know better how we should deploy our resources for the good of our society than this sick system. Vote for me and we can end this travesty.”

In the event that King Soloman somehow had “congress” with Mother Theresa and produced Edwin the Brilliant But Good, Eddie can’t tell the future. He can’t make 3 billion good decisions each day. He has no idea what products will be needed eight years from now and any resource he commits to a particular area can’t be reversed and recommitted somewhere else in time to do anything of particular good note.  And it is guaranteed to be the WRONG thing 100% of the time.

It is not DOABLE with anything but the prospect of disaster. And communism and socialism do not fail because tyrants run them, the people who run them BECOME tyrants trying to make this nonsense work. You cannot issue Presidential decrees in an act of gravity defiance and enable everyone to fly. And if anyone notices that they are not flying, you pretty much have to shoot them  or give up the entire concept you have based your life on.  These aren’t evil people.  They are FAILED people.  And it is always the fault of the governed, as they should have never allowed this in the first place.

And so the way to “free national health care” is not to seize at the point of a gun the resources available to the innovators and entreprenuers, but rather to get government out of healthcare and out of the REGULATION of ALL healthcare and look for an Elon Musk of healthcare to get the cost of a heart attack down to $20.

Can’t be done? A 30 inch flat screen TV was $20,000 twenty years ago. It’s $189 in the aisle at Walmart today.

A $500,000 computer in 1979? You can get 600 of them for $4 today. But there was not a SINGLE LAW in the entire country and all 50 states regulating how many transistors you could legally put on a chip or who could do so. There really still isn’t.

But an Epi pen that was $35 is now $600 in our current regulated healthcare system. To make me safe?  Is this a joke? And the Socialist “solution” is to nationalize it and regulate IT ALL? Again, are you jacking me off?

These are children and severely mentally handicapped child minds at that.  And if you allow them power you destroy them and us as well.  For what?

Our economy, and I do very specifically mean OUR economy, has reduced the incidence of poverty WORLDWIDE from 90% of the world population to 6% in thirty years. But no one has told you that at your local university I suspect. Or on your telly either.

You want to fix it? Fix what? You don’t even know what it is or how it works.

Our “leaders” and those whom we vote for with our money, are Jeff Besos, and Elon Musk, and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. We give them ever MORE money because they create MORE innovation and MORE jobs, and MORE wealth.

The United States government in its entire history has never produced ANYTHING we consume. They enable us to produce and consume by virtue of their three basic responsibilities:

To defend us from marauding bands of outsiders who would take what we have and kill us.

To maintain a stable currency of exchange so we can technically vote with it for the products we want accurately.

To maintain civil order, to keep marauding bands of insiders who would take what we have and kill us.

Anything beyond those tasks is suspect.

Yes, a case can be made for infrastructure such as the Interstate Highway system. Of course that pretty much killed a much more energy efficient system of railroads. But we had really good intentions.  Does that count?

A system of free and public education. Currently graduating learned apostles with $150,000 in debt and no clue how our economy actually works or how they can succeed in it. Best strategy: get a job with the government. Or become a lawyer. We need more of those.

Currently we have marauding bands of outsiders streaming through our southern border quite willing to kill us and take our stuff.

The stability of our currency is threated by our $22 trilllion of debt.

And in the streets, they are now shooting people en masse in our CHURCHES, for Christ’s sake, literally and excuse the pun. People are being attacked in the street for their HATS. Our constabulary is powerless to investigate any crimes unless it shows up on TV.

Elon Musk arrived in the U.S. without sufficient funds to rent an apartment. He’s now personally worth over $27 billion 25 years later. Along the way, we got Paypal, SpaceX, Tesla, Solar City and soon SkyNet and a global photovoltaic energy storage solution.

That revitalizes the concept of space travel and exploration, leads ultimately to the replacement of gasoline cars with electric cars, establishes a global gigabit to the phone Internet, and could enable the transition of half of our electricity production to clean quiet photovoltaic panels. I vote for all of that with my ducats.

Why would I resent his house? He sleeps on a couch at the factory where he directly employs 47000 people at a median wage of $56,000.

Why would I resent his car? He BUILT his car. As it so happens he built mine too. And I “voted” him $56,000 for it, which was a HUGE improvement over his LAST car which I voted $107,500 for just six years ago. It just isn’t as good as the new one.

Capitalism is based on the fact that we cumulatively as a group make wiser and more carefully considered choices when it is about each ducat of OUR personal money. We weigh every value proposition on its merits. And no government office or leader can even APPROACH the accuracy of our net cummulative judgements on these matters.

Try this experiment:

I have a recipe I have developed over 40 years to make the best iced tea on the planet. Anyone who has ever tried it agreed emphatically. I’ve never had an exception. Accept no substitutes.

1. Go make two gallons of it.
2. Go out on the street and offer people a taste of the tea from one gallon. The other gallon is priced at $5. If you want to grow faster, take a cooler of ice with you and some red Solo cups.
3. See how many had to taste before one of them parted with the $5.
4. Take the $5 and use it to make 5 gallons of tea.
5. Back to the street. Tastes from one gallon. Sell the other four at $5.
6. Rinse and repeat.

First person to a net ONE MILLION DOLLARS after taxes and product expenses wins. If you work at it every day, I fail to see how it could take two full years.  And it’s not like shoveling gravel.  You’re making tea.

Here’s the recipe.

1. Use a standard 12 cup drip grind coffee maker. Place in the 12 cup glass pot the following: One two inch long stick of cinnamon. You have to use a stick, not ground cinnamon. Four bags of Twinings Earl Grey tea. ONE whole clove. If you are tempted to put two, put one in your mouth to sweeten your breath and put the other ONE in the pot. Do NOT    put two.
2. Fill the coffee maker tank with clear cold water and turn it on. Make sure there is NOTHING in the basket that normally holds coffee.
3. Fill a 64 ounce pitcher with ice.
4. Add 1 full cup of Splenda sweetner to the pitcher on TOP of the ice.
5. Let the coffee pot steep for five minutes with the burner/heater off.
6. Pour the tea in the coffee pot over the ice in the pitcher and stir vigorously.
7. Pour into glass over ice and taste.

Now if you calculate the cost of the tea bags, the very finest cloves, the most eggregiously overpriced sticks of cinammon, the cost of a one gallno plastic jug, a richly illustrated adhesive LABEL for the jug, the cost of water, of electricity to make the ice and heat the coffee pot, the life of the pot, EVERYTHING, you will find that you just can’t cram a full dollar into that jug.  It just won’t fit. And everyone who gives you $5 KNOWS that.

In fact, I would find it unusual for you to be ABLE to sell one of these to anyone who doesn’t already like iced tea and has indeed made it themselves many times.  So why would they vote you up at $5 ducats??  They will only do so if it TASTES better.  And your value add is the expertise with which you make the tea – largely thanks to me. But whatever. I’ve made a fortune several times already and I can only wear one pair of pants.

And truth to tell, one out of a hundred readers will actually make the tea.  And truth to tell, one of a 100 of THOSE readers will actually make two gallons and go into the street and  present it to people.  And of THOSE who do one out of 1000 will actually put in the work to finding places to present it and people to try it every day for a week.

Competition?  There isn’t any.  It’s an illusion.  But this explains why the 1% are so few.  How many people have the physical and mental ability to perform this act?  Everybody.  How many will actually do it?  Almost nobody. They just don’t BELIEVE in tea and cannot conceive in their minds that such a small thing could become a big thing.  And to get to the million dollars, you kind of have to eat tea, drink tea, breath tea, sleep tea and shower in tea 24 hours per day for the next 2 years. You have to commit your LIFE to tea for a time.  Total commitment.  War to the death.  Tea or die. Bitch.

On January 29, 2018, Keurig Green Mountain announced it was acquiring the Dr Pepper Snapple Group in an $18.7 billion deal. Snapple is an iced tea that started in exactly the way I have described.  Their tea isn’t as good as mine, but they have years of growth from their start at a table in a farmers market.  And after very carefully weighing the value proposition of the deal, to the uttermost farthing, Green Mountain paid it.

I myself now “vote”  Dr. Pepper UP eight times a day.

So can you look at a one gallon jug of tea and see $18.7 billion dollars?  If you can’t, don’t apologize.  We all need employees and underlings to make all this happen.  Welcome to the 80% club.  Or even better company – the 99%.  Either way, you’ll make a better living than a vaguely homosexual effete socialist college professor with pretensions to be considered “intellectually elite” as he depends for his existence on screwing children out of their lunch money.

I consider this now an “open source” recipe. I would be interested in feedback on the TASTE of the tea. I don’t really care about your position on Splenda, the history of the British tea trade, your opinion on cinnamon, or the working conditions of the poor enslaved children who are forced to pick cloves in the hot sun. This is an up/down thing. You like the tea or you don’t like the freakin tea.

If you do like the tea, consider that I might know something about tea.  Then reread the rest of this article with the brand bias that I might know something else.  Then send me $4.29 – but only if you find it worthwhile. And while considering the value proposition I present here, note that I’m 71 cents cheaper than a gallon of tea.  And these hard won lessons of six decades weigh less and are easier to carry home.

The post 71 Cents Cheaper Than Tea appeared first on EVTV Motor Verks.

Electric Vehicle Television - EVTV - a weekly video for custom electric car builders and conversions. Each week we review components and techniques you can use to convert any car to clean, quiet, powerful electric drive. EVTV has become THE weekly TV show for conversion shops, University build teams, design engineers, and custom electric car builders worldwide with viewers in 160 countries. Distributed on the global Amazon Cloudnet server system, each episode of EVTV brings you news, developments, the latest components, and techniques for building the future of electric vehicle transportation - in high definition video.

The oddities and ironies encountered in the march of technology forward are legion.

EVTV videos are consistently about “how”. But once or twice per year, we try to share a bit of the “why” behind our sometimes perplexing wanderings from one apparently random project to another. It is true that I can obsess on the details wherein God resides, but believe it or not, I’m really more about the why than the how.

I’ve been waiting for something to load, something to save, or something to print since 1979. And the vagaries of what technology ideas are adopted for advancement and which are abandoned on the side of the road is really what intrigues. I’m more about the internal workings of adoption curves than of inverters or motors. Of the motives and drivers of the people doing it, than of what they are doing. And across the forty years, I’ve become quite enamored of the concept that the evolution of technology is less about what can be done on the shoulders of what has come before, and more about how badly we want to do it. Technology is not a function of what people CAN do, it is more a function of how intently they WANT to do it.

Technological progress appears to be a DESIRE driven event.

Out of the spiteful, often vicious expressions of all that and intense competition between and among us with many differing visions of the future and the past there does emerge an almost hidden sense of consensus moving us forward as a species.

In this episode we examine what appears to be a basic conflict of interest between two groups involved in the question of electric power. The conflict isn’t actually real. But it doesn’t matter. We must engage in this war because such conflict is perceived. And so like any war, it is not important in what it is about. It is only important that we win it.

This one is curiously important. Actually our success as a species is and has always been a direct function of how well we can manipulate energy. Electricity is the most fungible form of energy developed thus far. And while the widespread distribution of electrical power is a scant 140 years old, that just happens to correspond perfectly to the most incredible expansion of human wealth and standard of living in the history of the species. It represents the greatest advance in our ability to manipulate energy to our will, and thus the creation of wealth itself.

We are on the cusp of a fantastic new leap in that ability to manipulate energy. To this point, virtually all of our energy use has derived from the ability to “burn” the stored energy of our photosynthetic species. Plants can take the energy of the sun, the hydrogen from water, and the carbon from CO2 in the atmosphere, and “synthesize” carbohydrate. Depending on point of view, you might refer to this as hydrocarbon with roughly equal accuracy.

And so we gain caloric energy by eating plant produce, or other animals who have eaten plant produce. And we learned to do a controlled “burn” of the dead fallen carcass of these plants as firewood. And then coal. And then petroleum. And then refined and concentrated petroleum products such as gasoline and kerosene. And natural gas given off by deposits of these hydrocarbons.

Post World War II there was great promise in an entirely new source of electrical energy – the atom itself. And “atomic energy” was described in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s as an unlimited source of clean energy resulting in “electricity TOO CHEAP TO METER”. That sounded good. We actually envisioned a future where you paid a flat rate of a few dollars per month for UNLIMITED electricity that was basically free.

It not only didn’t pan out, but the perceived “dangers” of the nuclear fission process led to such ever increasing regulation that it ultimately became our most expensive form of energy. Today it remains the obvious choice but there are so many loud but clueless voices in any discussion of it that it is effectively off the table. Bill Gates currently has a project to develop a circa 2019 design of a fission plant.It will actually use the stored nuclear waste of past plants as fuel.

But the regulations and restrictions in place based on the ever popular 1965 technology and design prevent it here. So he’s going to go build it in China, basically bequeathing this new design to them and with it the technological leadership that entails – lost to America forever because of our propensity to pander to Wiccans and Gaeins and other religious primitives all busily trying to conjure up fairies in the forest with wooden flutes.

But I am quite beyond optimism over a very separate form of electrical energy generation and manipulation. That offered by the evolving development of two magic rocks. The photovoltaic cell can DIRECTLY convert the energy from the sun, photon packets, to electron flow. And the lithium battery can store that energy allowing its use and further manipulation despite the cyclic availability of sunlight driven by the rotation of our orb.

And both are basically magic rocks. No moving parts. No chemical process. No splitting or fusing of atoms. No real wear. No smells. No outgassing. No emissions. Mammalian humanoid’s creative inventive response to photosynthesis.

Our current model of electrical power transmission was realized in October 1896 by the Niagra Falls Power Company when they completed a 26 mile AC power transmission line from their hydroelectric generator at Niagra Falls to the city of Buffalo New York.
That was just 123 years ago. But there had been a couple of CENTURIES of discovery and experimentation with the magic of “electricity” predating this feat.

Similarly, we have had a somewhat shorter period of experimentation with photovoltaics leading to today’s situation where anyone in the country can purchase and install photovoltaic panels.

And they have. In California alone there is now 8000 MW of rooftop solar installed. Over half has been installed in less than the last three years so this is a very NOW kind of thing. And 97% of it is grid-interactive with NO battery storage capacity of any kind. Increasingly, this is moving to grid-tied microinverters actually installed on each panel, producing 240vac at the panel and routed very simply down from the roof and into an ordinary loads panel. It automatically synchronizes with the grid.

But there are several “dark sides” to solar photovoltaic power, most stemming from the apparent conflict between this very disruptive new technology and the entrenched power structures of the status quo utility grid who view ANY incursion by rooftop solar as an inherent threat to their business model.

And so over the last twenty years they have steadfastly sought to neuter this new technology with regulated technical requirements for any interconnection with the grid – no matter how unnecessary or ridiculous. Baffling and bewildering political oversight with absolute nonsense, they have managed to incorporate some cunning limitations to rooftop solar that actually make no sense in any rational way.

Obviously it IS appropriate to have some standard specification for interoperability and this is published as the Underwriter Laboratories Specification 1741 Standard for Inverters, Converters, Controllers and Interconnection System Equipment for Use With Distributed Energy Resources

But as this specification has evolved, they have worked in some sly limitations that rather kneecap the entire concept of rooftop solar. The first of these was “anti-islanding” provisions that were never necessary in any conceivable scenario. Rooftop solar disconnect on loss of grid was already accomplished using automatic disconnect switches which are STILL mandated for use with generator devices. But with essentially no rational explanation, anti-islanding was mandated to be installed INSIDE all inverters connected to the grid purportedly to ensure the safety of grid workers while working on downed power lines.

There is apparently no recorded case of any injury anywhere to a grid worker from a solar installation. But the entire situation was already covered with the transfer switch anyway.

The effect of this is that anytime you lose grid power, your rooftop solar system produces NOTHING. Not enough power to charge your cell phone. Zip. Nada. And so in the event of wildfire, flood, hurricane, earthquake, or the ever present threat of Zombie apocalypse, the person with a $70,000 investment in solar power is just as helpless as everyone else with no power available at all. This is often much to the SURPRISE of the homeowner learning of this AFTER the grid goes out.

Last year, an enormous wildfire in California was blamed specifically on Pacific Gas and Electric company and so the State of California has entered an agreement with them mostly limiting their liability to an agreed $1 BILLION – basically a forced settlement. And so last week, PG&E actually shut down power to tens of thousands of subscribers because Santa Anna winds represented the conditions where a PG&E caused fire event MIGHT HAPPEN. The entire scenario is frenetically irrational.

The latest sly incursion is included in the “Supplemental Annex” phase II which just went into effect last February. And I am fascinated by the provisions of the Frequency Watt requirement which is now in our Enphase microinverters.
AEE Solar has a fairly well done webinar presentation on UL 1741 latest changes and Hawaii Electric has a somewhat more detailed explanation of Frequency Watt that gives us a bit of insight into their thinking on this.

The entire purpose of FREQUENCY/WATT feature is termed CURTAILMENT and it specifies giving the grid operators the ability to shut off your rooftop solar system. The purported problem addressed by this is notoriously known as the DUCK CURVE. This is a kind of strained look at the minor difference in time between peak demand at 6:00 PM and the peak solar production at 3:00 PM. The duck curve was originally devised by a coalition of grid operators in Calfornia and rather ignores the fact that 1/3 of the power used in California has to be purchased from out of state.

Nonetheless, if the duck is a bit overinflated at the moment, increasing rooftop solar installations will make it more or less real soon enough. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden Colorado has prepared a reasonably reliable report on this.

So the bottom line is that all grid-interactive, grid-adaptive, or grid-tied inverters (they keep changing the nomenclature in their frenzied effort to obfuscate) now include the feature of allowing grid operators to “curtail” their operation while the grid continues to operate.

In other words, they can shut your rooftop solar output off at will, without your permission or even awareness, at their unsupervised and unregulated whim.

And if you ARE curtailed, you will of course still need electricity from THEM at the standard rate to operate your own washing machine.

In truth, I am actually in AWE of the elegance of this solution. Picture tens of thousands of proud rooftop solar owners, happily producing NOTHING and paying the full freight to buy electricity from the grid they innately should be producing themselves.

But wait, it gets better. By simply shifting to a 61Hz system, not only are all rooftop solar installations reduced to 10% of their native output, but ANY sudden increase of load would NATURALLY cause a decrease in frequency. But if the frequency decreases the slightest, the rooftop solar output would go UP essentially instantly, supplying the additional load and bringing the frequency back up to whatever is currently considered normal by the grid operator.

And so while grid-tied inverters have tended to treat the grid as a sort of convenient battery, suddenly the tables are reversed and the grid is treating the installed base of rooftop solar as a battery instead. You simply have to admire it. Evil? Perhaps. Elegant? Very.

And so the war between the solar advocates and the utility grid is heating up. That California is the location of the most intense battles is only appropriate. This is all happening WHILE California is mandating that ALL NEW residential construction is now REQUIRED by law to have rooftop solar. And as noted, PG&E is now NOT producing power because it MIGHT cause a forest fire. It’s all sort of a special kind of stupid that we just don’t really quite understand here in the heartland.

I proposed the not very memorable concept of SELFISH SOLAR a couple of years ago. This is a kind of battery/solar installation where you do all your power more or less independently. And instead of using solar and batteries as a backup to a grid power system, you invert all that and use the grid as a backup to your solar/battery installation.

That sounded a bit crazy a couple of years ago and I understand that. But I knew then that as the future unfolds it would look less and less so and indeed it is the model for the future. You see, BOTH the solar power generation AND the battery should be distributed in a granular, independent, and robust fashion. We should both generate AND store power as close to the point of use as we can get it.

If we do so, we minimize the transport of electrical power and the inherent line losses (9.5-10.0%) inherent. But more importantly we harden our entire system to be more resistant to fire, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, cats climbing into transformers, Zombies, earthquakes, nuclear war, conventional war, and fear of fire shutdowns.

Actually, any part of the system becomes MORE prone to breakage and need of maintenance, and indeed some percentage is ALWAYS down needing battery cell replacement, inverter maintenance, new transient suppressors or the exchange of the odd light bulb. But the system as a whole becomes ENORMOUSLY more robust and everything proof.

And ironically, the frequency/watt provisions of Supplemental Annex phase II are really quite useful for us in modeling a functional home power plant. Since we are disconnected entirely from the grid most of the time, we don’t really care about grid curtailment of our solar. But the summer solstice showed up here a couple of days ago and our 38kW photovoltaic array is overpowering everything in the shop. If we can get Sigineer to give us high resolution frequency output control in their next generation inverter, we too can thoroughly control the output of our micro-inverters without actually shutting them DOWN for 300 seconds. That level of control is actually a key element we’ve been seeking.

The battle between the disruptive magic rocks of direct conversion of sunlight to fungible electric energy, and the entrenched status quo utility power hierarchies is probably predictable. But the battle is not quite as one sided as most of you fear. With the installation of each additional panel, the outcome of that conflict becomes more certain as well.

In the meantime, we offer Selfish Solar as the best way to participate with the least damage. You basically want to drop off the radar screen of the utility companies and use the least bit of power you can from a basic connection. But ultimately, both the solar power generation and the battery storage should be under control of the individual homeowner, shop owner or small business owner and ultimately much larger scale industrial customers as well.

On a larger view, the adoption of photovoltaics and battery storage represents an ENORMOUS leap in our ability to manipulate energy more directly. Money, food, houses, cars, everything we view as wealth contributing to our standard of living is actually a one-off proxy for our ability to manipulate energy. Consequently, I see an enormously optimistic future with much higher levels of both wealth and population.

The very sudden increase in both of the past 140 years will go exponential in just the next twenty years. I would predict solar photovoltaic efficiencies nearly doubling to 35-40% in that period and battery capacities doing the same at 500 Wh/kg or more by 2040. The COSTS of both will be halved in that period. And we will finally have electricity “too cheap to meter” because almost al of it will be produced on THIS side of the meter.

Jack Rickard

The post Grid Wars appeared first on EVTV Motor Verks.

Electric Vehicle Television - EVTV - a weekly video for custom electric car builders and conversions. Each week we review components and techniques you can use to convert any car to clean, quiet, powerful electric drive. EVTV has become THE weekly TV show for conversion shops, University build teams, design engineers, and custom electric car builders worldwide with viewers in 160 countries. Distributed on the global Amazon Cloudnet server system, each episode of EVTV brings you news, developments, the latest components, and techniques for building the future of electric vehicle transportation - in high definition video.

I generally eschew conspiracy theories under the rubric that little explained by conspiracy cannot as well be explained by incompetence and that the occurrence of stupid is vastly more common than the occurrence of evil in the hearts and minds of men.

But it is also true that it can only be a conspiracy theory if there is NOT an underlying conspiracy. And it is only paranoia if they are NOT all out to get you.

In the case of Tesla, the car and the company, if you eliminate all other possible causes, what remains is the answer. And I have the increasingly uncomfortable feeling that not all is right with the world.

Let’s start with the car. I suppose it’s a matter of opinion, and I’m certainly given to having one, but what is emerging is a stunning lack of challenge to the premise that the Tesla, in all its variants, is the most advanced automobile ever designed and manufactured on purpose, and the best car ever made in all respects. Basically ALL voices and opinions to the contrary have simply disappeared from the scene – poof – gone.

I presume you are aware that the Model 3 won Detroit News Magazines 2018 Car of the Year award. As it happens, it was also named car of the year by Popular Mechanics March 2018 Automotive Excellence awards. AutoExpress Car of the Year 2019: Tesla Model 3
Automobile Magazine 2018 Design of the Year: Tesla Model 3.

The grandfather of ALL automotive magazines is MOTOR TREND. Motor Trend started publication in September 1949 with the Kurtis Sportscar on the cover. A car so beloved they later acquired one of the 16 ever built for display in their publishing offices.
This magazine has from 1949 existed by the hand of car lovers for car lovers and represents the largest collection of photographic automotive pornography ever assembled by man.

Also in 1949, they named their first CAR OF THE YEAR – THE 1949 CADILLAC SERIES 62 SEDANETTE.

In 2013 they rather shockingly named the Tesla Model S CAR OF THE YEAR with the astonishing admission that since 1949, there was NEVER A CAR LIKE THIS.

And in 2019 they have named the 2013 Tesla Model S as the ULTIMATE CAR OF THE YEAR – the top CAR OF THE YEAR in seven decades of publication and naming a car of the year every year.

It is refreshing and encouraging that in a world where all our long trusted television news shows, and institutions such as the Department of Justice, the State Department, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been exposed as deeply corrupt rotten to the core partisan organizations infested with dishonesty and corruption, to contemplate for just a moment the integrity of Motor Trend Magazine. This is an enterprise that derives almost all their income from printed advertisements carried in the publication. And overwhelmingly those ads are from the automotive industry touting their newest and greatest models. And they have awarded the ultimate car of the year of all cars of the year to a car and a company that has never in its history ever spent a dime on advertising of any kind, and whom if it DID advertise it would be highly unlikely to do so in a print magazine.

It is also arguably the SAFEST car ever built. There is actually a current imbroglio over this between Tesla and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. They test cars for safety in a number of categories and indeed assign a point score in each category. That then is translated to a “star” rating with 1 star being very minimal and 5 stars being the maximum that can be awarded. Not only did Tesla achieve a five star rating in ALL categories tested, but the point score was the highest ever achieved at NHTSA by any car.

Tesla proudly announced this fact to anyone who would listen. And NHTSA takes strong exception to this. Note that they don’t actually deny any of Tesla’s claims, but they are incensed that Tesla would divulge point scores or make any statements beyond the official number of stars awarded. This is some sort of governmental attempt to limit what you can SAY about a publicly funded and governmentally administered test.

So my claim is that Tesla makes the BEST automotive vehicle on the planet, barring none, in all respects, including SAFETY. It is just the best car ever built. And I would challenge anyone to demonstrate even partially that this is not so.

Now there are any number of reasons why people buy the cars they buy. But few actually take aim at being the personal owner of the SECOND best car in the world. It’s like going on ALLRECIPES.COM and searching out the SECOND BEST lasagna recipe. For what???
You might well make the fifth most popular lasagna recipe, because you are vegan and don’t want any meat in your lasagna. But you KNOW you aren’t getting the best.

Let’s take a look at Tesla’s car production figures. They just finished their LARGEST production quarter with some 87048 vehicles produced. They DELIVERED over 95,000 vehicles in the quarter, also a record, but that is because 8000ish vehicles produced in the first quarter were not delivered until the second.

Let’s take a look at a couple of things. Q2 2015, two years AFTER the Model S became WIDELY available, they produced 12807 vehicles. That’s 679% growth in four years or 170% per year.

Part of the “short thesis” is that Tesla cannot produce enough cars to meet demand. And a second part of the short thesis is that there won’t be demand for the cars they produce. What am I supposed to do with this? Two mutually exclusive and totally unlikely factoids issuing from the same potato disposer simultaneously.

Again, Tesla doesn’t advertise for a very cunning reason. It doesn’t work at all. The public trust in commercial messaging has now broached zero and has gone into negative numbers. Mike’s Pillow really was NOT the best night’s sleep I ever had. And basically 100% of the public discounts ALL of 100% of the commercial messaging it sees.

But we do still largely trust our friends and associates. And so if you see a Tesla, better get to ride in a friends Tesla, better yet he lets you DRIVE their Tesla, you want one. Period. I’ve never HEARD of anyone riding in a Tesla who did not immediately conclude that they wanted the car.

Could they afford the car? Did they need a car? Did they already have a car? All open and valid questions. But they did WANT THAT ONE on contact.

I have a couple of viewers who have advised me in the last week they were picking up a Model X and Model 3 respectively. They’ve known about Tesla for years. They have wanted a Tesla for years. They are both buying one this week.

So my claim from observation and intimate knowledge, is that Tesla can sell all they can make and they can do so at essentially any price they want. It is a growing demand and totally inelastic and agnostic. It grows by contact. The more they make and deliver, the more people have contact with the cars and the more demand is generated for all that they make.

How far does this extend? How LONG can you sustain 170% compounded growth?

You know, that SHOULD be the defining question. And I’m unusually pleased to note that it is not because it is one of those astonishing things that just tickle my sense of whimsey when I come across them.

EVTV has largely ceased to convert ICE cars to electric drive, which was long our only reason for life. It started in 2009 and while the Tesla Roadster was much discussed, not a single one had ever been actually delivered. If you wanted an electric car in the spring of 2009, you had to build one. There were ZERO models offered by the sum total of all automotive manufacturers worldwide. We defined, aided, abetted, and enabled the tinkerer/innovator stage of the adoption curve and noted numerous times that on achieving “early adopter” phase we were out of it.

I lied. The outcome was SO assured that by 2017 my mind, with the laser like focus and attention span of a four-year-old, just wandered away. This no longer requires my efforts. The outcome is assured.

And Tesla was largely the reason. Basically it costs between $20-40,000 to do a good build converting an ICE car to electric drive.
Tilt and tittle at that all you want, I did a lot of them and a lot of different ways and several were over $100k. Not really unusual among custom car enthusiasts and I expect those guys will be doing electric conversion show cars 50 years from now.

The Model 3 at $40k is a better car than I can do at $40k.

Worse, it is kind of a one sided launch. We covered the news of LOTS of different electric cars, and most notably HUNDREDS of VW press releases that never were actually cars. And the conclusion was that it just doesn’t matter. Porsche and BMW were the only ones that had the right stuff to compete with TEsla and they didn’t. All else didn’t matter and couldn’t matter. And yes, Porsche’s Taycan will launch this September 4th and they are going to sell 30,000 or 40,000 of them and THEY STILL WON’T MATTER.

Tesla just owns it. And at this point, the moats of its battery technology and costing, its Supercharger network, it’s online sales model, the Over the Air Software Updates, and much much more put it SO far out ahead, that the other manufacturers are still announcing the “coming Tesla killer” aimed at the 2013 Tesla Model S. Problem: It is 2019.

And so we basically got out of converting EV’s BEFORE we got to the early adopter stage. I lied. Because the outcome is not just assured, it is unstoppable.

But if all else fails, the commonly held marker for the BEGINNING of Everett Rogets adoption curve early adopter stage is 2.5% market penetration.

So where are we at? The current global market for automobiles is a little squishy on your definition of an automobile, but as a personal transportation device is currently widely regarded as 78 million units annually with about 15 million in the U.S.

The short thesis is that Tesla CANNOT POSSIBLY meet their projections of 360,000 units this year. Duh. That’s 0.0046 or 0.46%.
ALL electric cars from EVERYBODY all told don’t reach 1% of the market for cars. We aren’t even CLOSE to the “early adopter” stage.

I’m at the point where if you don’t have Tesla logo on your car you’re not electric and don’t matter. To the point that we are working furiously on things like an OBDII port adapter for the Model 3, or reverse engineering Tesla batteries, not EV batteries, TESLA batteries for solar energy storage. I have a half finished Cadillac Escalade conversion hanging in the air on a lift where it has hung for a year.

But the blue sky for Tesla is essentially UNLIMITED. They can sell all they make and make all they sell starting at 360,000 units and topping out at 78 million. They are 0.46% of a $2.3 TRILLION dollar market. And they appear to my biased eye to already own ALL of it.

It reminds me of Sandra Bullock and Sylvester Stallone, in the movie DEMOLITION MAN. In the future, ALL restaurants had consolidated under the brand name TACO BELL. If SOMEBODY doesn’t do SOMETHING pretty quickly, in the future ALL automobiles will be Tesla’s.

Hyperbole? I grow weak in the knees publicly repeating a prediction I have quietly been making for years. It is so unbelievable all I can harvest from it now is ridicule. But you are not going to BELIEVE the big names and huge corporations that face unavoidable and absolute bankruptcy and dismemberment, in the VERY NEAR future. No government can save them. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of jobs lost. Economic disruption and dislocation of unparalleled proportions. Office furniture available for 6 cents on the dollar. Not reorganization. But like Eastman Kodak. Sears. K-Mart. Companies that could not fail and are already gone. Picture GM, VW, Daimler. The biggest. The best.

Let’s take a look at the awl bidness. Currently we are at 100 million barrels of oil used each day worldwide – 20 million here in the U.S. At $55 per barrel, that’s about $5.5 billion per day. That’s another $2 TRILLION world market business. As the percentage of all automobiles that are electric grows, the demand for oil will diminish. Fully 50% of all oil goes to road transport. That is $2.75 billion per day. And for every day that future is delayed, is another $2.75 billion. It would be a $2.75 billion win if the adoption of the electric car could be forestalled for ONE DAY. The incremental growth of the automotive market is as I stated, inevitable and unstoppable. But for every day it is delayed, there are BILLIONS of dollars at stake. Literally the clock is running at $1,909,722 per minute on just that part of oil used by automobiles.

And it would be unlikely they would find that beneath them. Texaco bought the entire Ovonics nickel-metal hydride battery business from General Motors, with the patents of course. They allowed this battery chemistry for camera and laptop batteries, but specifically REFUSED to license it to anyone in larger sizes suitable for electric cars and that continued until the patents ran out. By then it didn’t matter, the lithium battery was ascendant. But it absolutely delayed the development of electric vehicles by many years.

Stanford Ovshinsky, inventor of this nickel-metal-hydride battery died in 2012 at the age of 89 still deeply embittered by what General Motors and Texaco, later acquired by Chevron, had done to his baby. It’s greatest potential use and the use Ovshinsky specifically developed it for was never realized. They simply bought it and shelved it.

Does that make sense? To spend hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire a promising technology and then shelve it and not worry AT ALL about selling any products from it? Just park it?

HOLD THAT THOUGHT.

Now let’s take a look at Tesla Short Interest. These are people who ostensibly SELL a stock they don’t own, and hold it until the price goes down, and then buy shares on the open market to pay back the stock they borrowed to sell in the first place. The concept is of course sell high and buy low. But kind of in reverse. You sell it before you own it. And you buy it when it is discovered that you don’t and you have to pay it back. But if you sell at $360 and the stock drops to $175, you get to buy back at less money and you keep the difference.

Let’s look at short interest in the stock of Tesla. First, this is not usual. This is not normal ALL stocks have people hedging and shorting. Even people LONG on a stock will hedge with some short bets. Indeed, at one point I had 50,000 shares of a company called Keynote Systems that were not really tradable. I had invested in the company long before it went public and so faced a “lockup” period where I couldn’t sell the shares. So I sold them “short against the box” before the expiry of the lockup period. When it expired, everybody was unlocked and a lot of the early investers sold the stock, plummeting it from $140 a share to $60. Netting me $80 per share AND I STILL OWNED the original 50,000 shares. Unfortunately, the stock never recovered and I think I later sold it out at about $40 per share.

Tesla hit a high of about $379 last year on rumors they were taking it private. I was astonished to see MULTIPLE news stories this month, CELEBRATING the news that Elon Musk had been caught in a lie regarding FUNDING SECURED on his move to privatize the company.

This is astonishing on several levels. First, if all true, WHY would we be seeing news stories a year later reminding us of something unimportant from a year ago. But second, it never was true in the FIRST round. It’s kind of like Trump’s Charlottsville massacre. It never was true AT ALL, but if you repeat it enough times enough people will be fooled to be effective?

The Saudi prince HEAD of a national investment fund DEVOTED to alternate energy investments is LOBBYING Elon Musk to take the company private. He is DEMANDING it. And he has a hundred billion to spend on the project. What part of “funding secured” am I missing here? If you have a Saudi Prince with $100 billion burning a hole in his pocket standing on your desk stomping his little Saudi foot insisting that you do it his way, how much more strain do you want to put on the term “secured”?

Tesla did not fail to take the company private because it didn’t have funding. Elon is not precisely a genius on the byzantine world of public stocks. A large percentage of Tesla investors are institutional “funds” and by their fund charters are severely limited on how much of their holdings can be illiquid. That means typically that no more than 10% of their holdings could be in private companies. And as Elon owned 25% of the company at the time, he couldn’t get the votes from these funds to do the deal. It would mean the funds had to get out, and they didn’t WANT out.

It wasn’t that he couldn’t get the FUNDING to do the deal. He couldn’t get 50% shareholder approval even with his 25%. Oh, he MIGHT have but a large segment would have voted against, including me, and it would have been an ugly fight. So the idea died. But it never died from lack of funding. So understand this ALL REPORTING ON THIS MATTER fully qualifies under the Trump definition of FAKE NEWS. That is not incorrect news. Or inaccurate news. FAKE NEWS means it is developed entirely against all known facts for nefarious and partisan reasons by design. And Musk’s “funding secured” is entirely FAKE NEWS. And if it were real news, why would they repeat it a year later? It only makes sense if it is FAKE NEWS, has a nefarious purpose, and so any opportunity to repeat it is to the original purpose – to mislead the public.

So Tesla reached $379. And had you been short, and held on, you would be delighted to learn that Tesla’s Q1 2019 featured a plunge in sales and a huge loss, after reporting a profit in Q4 previous. And indeed we see that of short holdings dropped from 26,268,029 to 24,783,245 as shorts cashed in. 1484784 shares were covered. They bought at the lower price and pocketed the savings.

I can get with that. It seems like an UNUSUAL number are betting things will get worse and hanging in there. Indeed an entirely unnatural number. But it is worse than that. Over the next two months, short interest actually ROSE to 37925793. What?

In May, the stock dipped to its lowest value in years, a great opportunity to cover and take your victory lap. Barely 400,000 shares did just that. But out of 37 million. Indeed they shorted AGAIN to 43,664,833. This is 34% of the tradable shares. Understand that NO company in the HISTORY of the stock market has ever carried 34% short sale. It’s not unusual. It just doesn’t happen at all.

In June, Tesla announced an all time high water market for auto deliveries of over 95,000 cars. And the shorts remaining got out. Well down to 41,459,952. Where it has held steady for over a month while Tesla crushes it on one announcement after another. They have now introduced a 3MWh 1.5Mw battery pack aimed directly at competing with natural gas peaker plants that basically cannot ever lose a cost comparison.

Shorts don’t behave this way. They sell high, buy low, and pocket the difference. That is if they are in it to make money. These shorts keep doubling down and they INCREASE their sales AS TESLA succeeds. At this point you have a company that is growing its production at an exponential rate, growing its revenues at an exponential rate, has the best product in the entire market, with unlimited demand in a market it owns outright just 0.46% of. It is the ultimate growth stock in the ultimate market with UNLIMITED BLUE SKY – room to grow.

Oh, and did I mention they can raise ANY amount of money they like, at any time, on three days notice? There last three calls for capital have taken less than a week and were oversubscribed in all cases. They raised MORE money than they asked for.

So we have exponential growth, into an unlimited market, with unlimited capital ready and waiting to invest. What kind of moron bets against that?

Well the concept of them BEING a moron implies the assumption they are trying to make money in the first place. What if they had NO desire to make money at all?

The entire 41 milion short interest represents an investment at the current $235 per share of $9.635 billion.

What if it’s not an investment at all? What if it’s an expense?

Elon Musk has since upped his stake to 38.6 million. Why? Did he need more shares? The cash was clogging up the vacuum cleaners in his house?

The company can’t BE bought. And Musk doesn’t want to die a bitter old man at 89. But the SEC CAN be bought apparently. And while they investigate, fulminate, and litigate Musk’s tweeting style, what starts to look like the largest stock manipulation in the history of the United States of America is going on as we speak. Is it POSSIBLE they don’t know about it? In a word, NO. It is not possible that a stock swindle of this proportion could be going on without the express and direct participation of the Securities and Exchange Commission charged by law with preventing it. Absolute corruption corrupts absolutely, to misquote a phrase.

The nickle metal-hydride battery was purchased in an asset purchase between two publicly traded corporations. Tesla is itself plublicly traded and Musk owns enough of it that purchasing it and dismembering it is just not conceptually feasible. But this level of stock manipulation, coupled with a funded and directed disinformation campaign, could conceivably drive it to failure.

And at $5.5 billion dollars per day, simply delaying the inevitable is very profitable on a total expense of $10 billion dollars. The payback period on that is less than two days.

I still see articles explaining why batteries feature more emissions than gasoline cars. All funded by industry groups and advocacies that one off, two off, or sometimes three off lead directly to oil companies. So paid for disinformation campaigns are an absolutely established mode of operation for these companies. Why would they hesitate at stock manipulation to foster fear, uncertainty, and doubt? And who in the auto industry would call them out on it? GM and Texaco conspired. There were no questions or unforeseens. It was a conspiracy to defeat the concept of electric cars.

I was shocked to learn that Jeffery Epstein had a regular contributor to Forbes Magazine submit a story on him so laudatory as to be creepy. What was shocking was not that he did it or that the writer agreed to do it, but how CHEAPLY he sold his soul. A couple grand goes a long way with today’s writers.

And so I am also a bit naive about online comments. I assume that they are all the true beliefs of the writers. So how does Seeking Alpha have 100% negative articles on Tesla with amazing collections of preposterous facts? There’s actually a very easy explanation. They get paid. And they get paid TRULY TRIVIAL amounts of money. A soul today goes for less than $5 per pound. You can’t buy ribeye for that.

$4.3 TRILLION combined annual market between autos and oil. A puny $10 billion in “expense” – not investment. And a 32% short interest suddenly makes all the sense in the world. There can’t be that many crackpots that will bet against a company with superb execution, unlimited capital, and unlimited opportunity growing on an exponential curve. But if you are just investing in their failure, with that kind of real markets at stake, the stock market looks like penny ante poker.

I have no interest in tracking the money or reading the chicken entrails. I already know how this comes out. The irony is double. It looks like the oil companies and automakers have no possibility of losing this one. In reality, they have no way to win it. One man has them totally surrounded, outnumbered, and outgunned.

Elon Musk.

Bite it bitch.
And bury me next to Seth Rich.

Jack Rickard
jack@evtv.me

The post The Tesla Conspiracy… or Am I a Dead Whistleblower? appeared first on EVTV Motor Verks.

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November 21, 2019. The night of the broken glass for Tesla Motors. We think it may be one of those strange seminal inflection points usually unrecognized at the time, but hailed in arrears as THE moment in time. On this night, Tesla Motors transitioned from challenger to the status quo automobile industry to DOMINANCE and heir apparent to the throne of the automobile industry.

Many anticipated a Tesla pickup truck model for many months after Tesla head Elon Musk alluded to it a couple of years ago. At the Q3 earnings call in 2019 he actually characterized it as the one project he was most personally excited about at Tesla. And finally, on November 21, with laser light shows and fog machines akimbo, they finally rolled out the Tesla CyberTruck – pickup truck from the future. The excitement among the crowd of Fanboyz on hand was palpable.

The vehicle rolled out on stage to gasps of astonishment, wails of angst, and tearful fanboyz tearing their hair out in horror. The immediate and universal reaction was that this could not BE the Tesla pickup truck – it was HORRIFICALLY UGLY. The hunchback of Notre Dame in a romantic closeup scene with elephant man. And several thousand attendees EYES WIDE with shock and disbelief.

But wait, there’s more. It gets better.

Franz Holzhauser stepped up to the plate and delivered several manly blows to the truck with a 12 lb sledge hammer. Not a dent in the gleaming 301 stainless steel side of the vehicle. A brief but bizarre demonstration of chrome balls sliding down a gerbil tube to bounce off of a glass science project. Demonstrating a new kind of windshield glass? And Franz heaving a 1 pound chromium ball into the drivers side glass window of the CyberTruck, shattering it catastrophically.

Mystified confusion descended on the room. Was this on purpose? An accident? Franz looked confused. Musk clearly furious. Do it again he orders.

Franz dutifully heaved it at the rear drivers side window with EXACTLY the same results, a pie pan sized bash in the window. “Well at least it didn’t go through” mugged Musk.

The remainder of the unveil was clearly hurried, rushed, and designed to get Elon Musk off stage and beyond the image of him framed by the two broken windows and the direct side-on view of the truck.

It was the ultimate wardrobe malfunction. Janet Jackson should have been on stage with Musk instead of the girl android/robot.

WHITHER THE PICKUP TRUCK

The U.S. automobile market for 2018 was up 0.3% from 2017 levels to 17,274,250 units. Truck and SUV sales for the full year were up 8.0% to 11,786,069 units, while passenger car sales were down 13.1% to 5,488,181 units for 2018. Tesla has thus far offered ONLY passenger cars with no SUV or truck available at all, with the possible exception of the $125k Model X.

Tesla Model Y, a crossover SUV, has been announced and hopefully available summer of 2020. But the remarkable thing about the U.S. automotive market is that THE TOP THREE sellers in 2018 were the big three pickup trucks. America is all about pickup trucks.

1. Ford F-Series – 909,330
2. Chevrolet Silverado – 585,581
3. Dodge Ram – 536,980

Together, just these THREE pickup trucks comprise 2,031,891 unit sales or 11.76% of the entire U.S. automotive market. The Ford F series has been the top selling passenger vehicle worldwide for nearly 40 years. The pickup truck market was UP about 2.1% in 2018.

Tesla produced 350,000 total cars in 2018 among three models – about 2% of the U.S market. But that’s about 6.4% of the PASSENGER CAR sales in the U.S. for 2018 which is actually a pretty impressive number little discussed.

The average price of a new full-size pickup truck checked in at $48,369. And so we see that just the numbers of the top 3 at that average price looks like sounds like a $98,280,535,779 market just for the top three trucks. That’s 98 BILLION with a B.

Assuming Tesla could knock down 10% of that, $9.8 billion per year in annual revenue. More implies better.

And Tesla already has that.  Musk has announced 200,000 orders as of November 24th, which is a smooth $10 BILLION in orders.  10% market share in the first 3 days after unveil.

In the weeks leading up to the Tesla CyberTruck unveil, we noted several announcements from other manufacturers that we can only interpret as pickup panic. Ford, which had earlier announced they were getting out of passenger cars entirely, suddenly rolled out the all electric Ford Mustang Mach E SUV. This was a comically derivative knockoff of the Tesla Model Y, and they noted an equally preposterous availability at the end of 2020, corresponding to the model Y. Despite similarities, it most likely features lower specifications at a higher price.

And while they had previously announced a $500 million investment in Rivian with their RT-1, Ford also announced just a few days before the November 21 rollout that they too were going to introduce a Ford F-150 all electric.

The DAY of the announcement, GM chimed in with their own press release regarding the electric Silverado, and would you believe, again available in 2021.

It would appear that Tesla has gained at least two big believers in their new CyberTruck, General Motors and Ford who are terrified at the prospect of losing any market share at all to the upstart.

In this episode, we of course make mirth at the Kristalnacht Wardrobe Malfunction and the even more hilarious reaction of the usual bevy of Tesla Fanboy YouTube Personages.

BUT….. we feel relatively safe in pronouncing CyberTruck the most brilliant thing Musk has ever done and the most brilliant design Holfhausen has ever issued. We think it will be ASTONISHINGLY successful. And we think so because the Tesloids have so accurately went for the jugular – hitting ALL the things that actually drive the desire to own a pickup – an almost entirely male sport.

We can enumerate this:

1. Toughness/durablity.
2. Power/Towing
3. Large spacious interior.
4. Off Road Capability.
6. Price

TOUGHNESS

It’s a bit of a male testosterone event, oddly mixed with a practical requirement. None of this is lost in pickup truck advertisements. All three leaders LEAD with this image in every single advertisement they fund. A truck should be tough and the Marlborough man should be tough and he belongs in a pickup truck.

All vehicles have an unnatural aspect in America in that they serve as an on-road avatar for the personality and image and ego of the driver. Actually and directly, part of our personal IDENTITY is wrapped up in what we drive. And pickups are tough and manly. And if you are tough and manly, obviously you drive a pickup truck – even if your day job is tax accountant or interior designer.

But as a practical matter, tough is also a factor. Truck owners tend to own their vehicles for longer periods and often they ARE used for construction work and in the trades and on the farm and in offroad situations. Since some of the larger more tricked out trucks can run $60-$80k, you don’t want to be squeamish about taking it offroad. But the gentle brush of a few branches and that stunning paint job turns to a scratched up mess. Not good. Fords move to ecofriendly aluminum bodies has been controversial. Steal is tougher.

Tesla keyed on this “toughness” thing and hit it out of the park. The oragami XY design using Ultrahardened 301 stainless represents a huge savings in the costs of manufacture, and of course total elimination of the paint shop. But it also produces a “finish” that you literally cannot mark with a sledge hammer. If something does somehow mark it, you can touch it up with a $1 piece of Scotchbrite at home. So offroading and brick hauling and lumber work just don’t pose the threat to the paint job that it did.

And despite the epic fail in the unveil, Musk’s ire will irrevocably lead to the toughest glass on planet, if it wasn’t prior to the event. The CyberTruck winds up with actually BEING a bulletproof vehicle, which feeds right into the whole Marlborough man image.

This goes to ANOTHER element onroad – intimidation. Few Hummer drivers ever got muscled out of their lane and indeed few people atually cut in in front of a Hummer. Who would have thought. Both in looks and design and build, the CyberTruck picks up where the H1 Hummer left off.

The current offerings of pickup trucks BEG the addition of all sorts of guards, brush guards and headlight guards and taillight guards and light bars.  All unnecessary with the CyberTruck.  You can’t bash out a headlight or a tail light as they have been replaced by a polymer resin lightbar that’s hard to hit anyway and if you do, it won’t do much damage.

The real basis for all this toughness is a manufacturing technique long hailed and predicted but rarely or never actually used.  XY design describes working on flat plate stainless steel with an X and Y axis NC machine to layout the design and prescore the folds – with the odd corner cutout if necessary.  This is then FOLDED into shape actually after the fashion of Japanese Oragami art.  Tack welding or seam welding the finished result is almost trivial.

And all of that eliminates stamping machines.  All car manufacturers tout their stamping machines as marvels as they accomplish all those compound curves in an  instant.  It IS a faster process than XY design. But the stamps and forms are horrifically expensive and they do not last as long as the man on the street thinks.  All that stretching and compressing and forming has the effect of very quickly wearing out the dies themselves and the resulting parts hold specification for a remarkably short period of time before the dies have to be replaced – again.

Eliminating this, along with the paint booth, knocks tens of thousands off the cost of the production of the car.  Which leads to another CyberTruck advantage, the base unit with the small battery and single motor is slated at $39,000.  This astonished the crowd who expected $49,995.  It will also panic the legacy OEMs.

We think this base trim will basically be powered by the Tesla Model S drive train and battery.  The Model S is a 4900 lb vehicle that can go 275 miles and 0-60 in less than 4 seconds.  Can it do 0-60 in 6.5 in a heavier CyberTruck and still get 250 miles – add a lead lead angle on the battery tech between now and 2021 – probably.

POWER/TOWING

The mid range trim at $49,995 features the Model 3 275HP rear wheel drive on the FRONT of the vehicle and the Model S unit on the rear.  Motor Trend estimates this at 690 HP and 824 foot-pounds of torque – available from 0 RPM.  The vehicle is rated for 10,000 lbs towing.

Electric vehicles are just better at towing than ICE vehicles because their torque is applicable across a wide RPM range. They typically make the same 824 ft lbs at 100 rpm as they do at 3500 rpm.  The large size of the vehicle combined with the usual low center of gravity from the low placement of the battery and obviously this vehicle can’t be tossed around by even extremely large multiaxle trailers.

So we think even at 10,000 lbs compared with an ICE truck of 10,000 lbs, you will find that Apples just don’t taste very much like oranges.  The CyberTruck will accelerate batter, maintain speed up hills better while pulling, and behave better in all respects on the road pulling the same trailer.

That said, it is well known that the MPG rating of all pickup trucks goes out the window once the boat is on back.  They can claim 16 on the sticker, but picture 6 with the big boat.  Similarly, the range of the electric CyberTruck will plummet in the face of the weight of the toy towed.

Speaking of which, the event did include some video of the CyberTruck in a tug of war with a Ford F-150

INTERIOR SPACE

The pickup market has been in a prolonged and pronounced shift toward ever larger more spacious “super” crew cabs with four doors.

But at the center of the very concept of the pickup truck is entry dimensions and interior space.  Some guys are just big.  Like 6 feet 4.  Or 300 pounds.  Or both.

It is actually rare to find a midsized or larger sedan they can’t sit in comfortably.  The problem is getting there.  Entering the car and getting out of the car can be an event for a large man and even shorter overweights such as myself prefer the Cadillac Escalade entry to the Model S.  The Model 3 believe it or not is just a smidge easier than the S.  But walking up to and into the Escalade is effortless.

And so many men select the pickup truck simply because of ease of entry and interior space.  The supersized Quarter Pounder and the Big Gulp hasn’t helped. But growing obesity in America is just a fact of life.  So XXX shirts and pickup trucks just go together.

The CyberTruck again put it OUT OF THE PARK on this one.  Six full sized seats.  A 75 inch roof peak.  And the center front seat folds down into the largest center console I’ve ever seen.  DOZENS of videos by fanboyz at the event receiving the 1 minute test ride made it very clear than anyone can get into any seat in the vehicle WITH camera gear without any strain at all.

OFF ROAD CAPABILITY

It doesn’t matter if you actually USE a truck to go offroad or not. You buy a 4×4 for whatever reason you like, snow, ice, or fantasy. But it has to actually BE an off road vehicle.

The CyberTruck excels to Hummer H1 levels. It features 35 x 12.5 inch off road tires and a full 16 inches of ground clearance. This is what the H1 had for clearance and compares RATHER favorably to the 9.6 inches of the F-150 4×4.

Better, it is reported that the battery and motors are shielded by a full shield covering the entire underneath of the truck.

Combined with the impervious non-paint job, this may be the most capable off-road truck in the world.

SUMMARY

On essentially every single reason we can think of why anyone would ever purchase a pickup truck, Tesla has hit this one out of the park and no matter how many times you run the replay, it’s still a home run.

What does it LOOK like? Well I’m not at all certain. Form does follow function and beauty is not only in the eye of the beholder, but very much subject to revision under the “acquired taste” rubric. I didn’t like licorice, peat in Scotch, Guiness beer, mushrooms, liver and onions, root beer, and any number of other things that later became favorites after I became acclimated to them or “acquired” the taste for them.

The angular oregami shape is not initially appealing. But all the reasons for it are very much appealing. Lower cost. Higher durability. Safety. No paint. So my past experience is that it is a matter of time for that conflict to resolve itself internally to where I come to view it as the most beautiful design ever contrived. I can tell you that a scant three days has improved the look immensely for me.

But how much does fashion count in pickup trucks? Like “Honey, does this truck make my ass look fat?” You just don’t hear guys talk that way.

But eventually I believe it will be viewed as seminal and iconic. Indeed I would predict you won’t be able to shoot a successful movie in the future without rolling one through somewhere during the film and there may well be films done with it as the centerpiece.

One thing is certain, it has ALREADY garnered for Tesla an immense amount of unpaid exposure on all media everywhere.

His claim to genius remains unassailable, even in the face of broken glass and failed unveils.

I fully expect General Motors, Ford, Dodge, and probably VW to all start bashing the shit out of their windshields in response.

Jack Rickard

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