It does sound pretty bad, doesn't it? The guy certainly seems to have a problem with telling the truth. I think it's crazy to compare him to Musk, since Musk is actually extremely smart and knowledgeable about multiple areas of engineering. This other guy is just parotting the same lines, like "we are an advanced energy company that just happens to sell cars!". It's like the cargo-cult version of Tesla without any interesting technology or innovation. All that being said, I hope the author of this write-up has a good lawyer!
Musk has also had some interesting/uneasy relationship history with the truth. This guy does seem to be taking it quite a bit farther and leaving a lot more daylight visible between his statements and the truth.
Musk has a history of building and shipping successful products company after company in spite of a constant amount of people saying he would fail. (X.com, Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, Boring).
Nikola is a complete fraud that collected money from know-nothing investors riding on EVs and Tesla's name. They haven't shipped anything and probably never will. Bizarrely positively portrayed in the press alongside negative Tesla stories - I imagine because it's good for clicks?
I find it hard to believe the SPAC that brought them public wasn't solely for the purpose of allowing them to steal as much as they could from the public before they shut down. No idea how well they played it - I guess we'll see if anyone ends up in prison.
Honestly it's testament to the people in Musk's inner circle and his engineering departments more than the man himself. I'd say he is really good at associating with clever people and organizing collaborations. At the end of the day, he is a billionaire who makes headlines because of the irony of the fact that he probably has ADHD and trolls on twitter and seemingly doesn't care about his reputation, while also heading all these companies. He's a loudmouth cowboy, which is like the archetype American hero.
Some people are attracted to rich arrogance more than anything. It's why people pay money to read fluff piece autobiographies ghostwritten for billionaires. It's why people like martin shkreli still have strong fanbases on the internet. Tesla may be a good company, but good companies are not built by one person, and fanboys are usually blind to that fact.
> Doesn't the job of a CEO basically come down to:
> 1. Don't (permanently) run out of money
> 2. Get a bunch of capable people together and organized
> By those measures, he's killed it repeatedly.
The problem with fraud and lies is not that they don't work. They work great. That's the entire reason people do them.
The problem is that they stop working after a while.
The dream scenario for fraudulent fundraising is that you make so much money with your pitch that you can make your lies a reality before too many people catch on.
As anyone who is familiar with kickstarter knows, it rarely works out that way.
The question is when extreme risk becomes outright fraud.
So if any random startup with some guy/gal with some positive track record claims that they'll do X ... let's say Magic Leap claims they'll paint black, or Openwater claims they'll read minds without invasive surgery just with IR light and an ungodly amount of CT-like singal processing for image reconstruction (founded by Mary Lou Jepsen, who has pretty extensive "moonshot creds" by creating the Pixel Qi display, which I knew nothing about until recently), etc.
At what point this becomes fraud? Well, of course we know the moment the founder/employees/interested-parties start faking things that are not true. Yes, sure, but when does simply painting a rosy picture becomes Theranos-level scam? After all Theranos' founder convinced seemingly competent people when she was 19 old about something truly risky. How? Her father was a vice president at Enron. Also she had Stanford's name next to her. (She got Channing Robertson, her ex-advisor and dean of School of Engineering at Stanford, to back her idea in or before 2005.)
And all is well as long as the founder is truthful, even if he/she is extremely biased. (As in we'll make this work by next week. And next week they say they'll make it work next week. Repeat a thousand times. No problem, because being a maximally biased estimator is not in itself being untruthful. Even if it's an extreme sign of metacognitive defects.) The problem starts when the founder claims that something works in such and such way, but that's not actually the case.
I think even the very murky territory of not disclosing previous failures can be simply signs of bias. (As in I'm not telling you about how we fucked up the last twenty iterations of our magical product, because I think the tests were very bad, and you'd get a very unfair impression of our marvelous idea, so I'll just say we're working on it, and let you decide solely based on that.) Of course if you agree to report progress, you agree to keeping lab notes, but then you destroy them or purposefully stop writing notes, that's bad.
I don't know anything about Nikola, other than that they are pushing hydrogen fuel cells and battery powered vehicles, plus building their own water-splitter network along key routes.
Musk has history of building and shipping products, yes.
But he's also no stranger to fraud, lies and defrauding investors. Solar roof is best example of that ([1] and [2] talk about it, but there's more stories about it).
Solar roof was 100% fake product, that was shown only to justify fraudulently bailing out his other insolvent business. Years later, Tesla still doesn't have solar roof product (they do some solar roof installation, of roof made by Changzhou Almaden, Chinese company [3]).
Tesla buying Solar City was put to a shareholder vote (I voted yes along with the majority). Those shareholders should be happy now with the outcome of letting Musk do what he wants.
I'm not convinced any of this rises to fraud and none of it is close to what Nikola is doing here.
The solar roof also does exist and they install it, I'm not sure how that's fraud? https://www.tesla.com/solarroof because they buy parts from China?
> Tesla buying Solar City was put to a shareholder vote (I voted yes along with the majority).
Elon staged fake product presentation a month before the vote to gain support for the acquisition [1].
> Those shareholders should be happy now with the outcome of letting Musk do what he wants.
> I'm not convinced any of this rises to fraud and none of it is close to what Nikola is doing here.
It's not a fraud because it worked? Same as Nikola - if they end up delivering some products in the end and their stock will keep on going up, then they it doesn't matter that they lie now?
> The solar roof also does exist and they install it, I'm not sure how that's fraud? https://www.tesla.com/solarroof because they buy parts from China?
Tesla still doesn't produce any type of solar roof, that was suppose to be their huge technological advantage. It's same as if Nikola instead of producing their vehicles will become dealership for Nissan Leaf.
Main difference between Nikola and Tesla now is that Tesla did deliver some products so far, but both companies are using hype and lies to gather funds and generate more hype. Given how much founding Nikola gathered so far, unless the whole EV bubble explodes, they'll also likely deliver some products.
> Elon staged fake product presentation a month before the vote to gain support for the acquisition.
> It's not a fraud because it worked?
It's not fraud because I don't buy your claim that it was a fake product presentation solely to gain acquisition support and the article you link doesn't even support that.
> Main difference between Nikola and Tesla now is that Tesla did deliver some products so far
"Some products" - they've sold hundreds of thousands of cars, built out a supercharging network, and a battery factory, while also making progress on autonomous driving at the same time. They were the first to prove this market against enormous odds and constant negative press.
Nikola has produced nothing but bullshit. I think the Tesla stock is crazy right now and I also think Elon's timelines are often unrealistic, but the amount of anti-elon anti-tesla sentiment in the face of success after success against enormous odds is wild to me.
> It's not fraud because I don't buy your claim that it was a fake product presentation solely to gain acquisition support and the article you link doesn't even support that.
"Shareholders also allege in the suit that Musk planned the unveiling of a product that didn’t yet function"
This allegation is based on what they already admitted to:
"Still, the company does acknowledge that the demos Musk unveiled at Universal Studios were not functional" [1]
> "Some products" - they've sold hundreds of thousands of cars, built out a supercharging network, and a battery factory, while also making progress on autonomous driving at the same time. They were the first to prove this market against enormous odds and constant negative press.
Tesla did a lot of good stuff, I'm not denying it, and they've made EV cars desirable for certain people. But it doesn't change the fact, that their operating mode is "fake it till you make it". And they sometimes do, often don't. They also "had" coast to coast self driving car since 2017, battery changing, alien dreadnought factory, with robots speed limited only by air resistance, panel gaps that are snake chargers, 620 miles range in 2017, 500k model 3 per year in Fremont, ventilators production, etc, etc.
> Nikola has produced nothing but bullshit. I think the Tesla stock is crazy right now and I also think Elon's timelines are often unrealistic, but the amount of anti-elon anti-tesla sentiment in the face of success after success against enormous odds is wild to me.
Because Elon and Tesla is massively overpromising. To point, that they're straight up lies.
Do they deliver some good stuff in the end, and have areas where they actually have technology advantage? Often they do, yeah. But that doesn't make up for the fact, that their business is build on hype and overselling their abilities in all the areas.
When Dropbox was presented to the VCs, I think it was just a powerpoint. Does that mean that it was fake ( according to your logic). Musk is just using standard startup methods used in modern startups.
It all depends on what the actual claim is. If Dropbox said look we did the math, did some ghetto-testing with mockups and an IT guy up-downloading your stuff in the background using ssh and sftp and hardcoding the filenames into todd.html and jane.html, and we think it'll be amazing, give muniz kthxbai. That's okay.
If did a demo with that method while claiming that it's the real thing running on 100 servers already with thousands of users ... well, that would be fraud.
What Musk communicated (said, implied, gesticulated, telepathed) at that demo regarding Solar Roof? He mentions production process, implying that it's real. He talks a lot about an integrated future, blabla. Is it a concept unveiling like what automakers do each year that then becomes nothing? Well, not exactly after all they take deposits for it. But "obviously" it's dumb. Having so many small tiles just kills cost efficiency. (Because every tile basically has a panel and needs a small connector, makes roofing slower, etc.)
I'm fairly sympathetic to the claim that all these startups are big piles of BS .. but at the same time it's not like they are so different from what other companies pull off as business-as-usual. See Google's demos that then go nowhere. See how phone and laptop makers over-promise and then constantly under-deliver, let's say with regard to battery capacity and life. Or game companies releasing trailers and doing demos at E3 and then years later the product is nowhere near finished and eventually the finished looks much worse.
You don't need to manufacture a product to sell it. He might have been developing it, then someone beat him to it. Instead of spending on R&D, he gets to just buy it from a manufacturer and use his name to sell thousands.
This.
If you have done research and know that you can build it for sure, then you already have a product. It doesn't matter if it has not been manufactured.
They have a number of installations in California that were done for real clients and are fully functional. It may not be viable or scalable, but it is absolutely not fake. It is an actual product that works.
Would a business offering food replicators (the Trek kind that materialise energy into food) seem fraudulent to you? Would they be selling a fake product or just not have manufactured it yet?
The difference is intent. A company could be run by a crackpot who sincerely believes that he can create a food replicator and states irrelevant qualifications. His process involves spending day after day drawing paper schematics and putting it in a literal black box. It would never work and couldn't be manufactured but it wouldn't be fraud.
Making the same claims of goals and taking the money and running? Fraud.
Jeez, what will it take to convince the Musk haters that he's the real deal? I mean, what does a guy have to do to prove it? Launch his car into Mars orbit using his own rocket? Oh wait....
Aren't neuralink and boring private corporations? Aren't billionaires allowed to throw money at whatever they fancy, and these kind questions specific to only public corporations?
> Do neuralink or boring have successful products? or just demos of already existing tech?
Are complex, difficult, expensive products or services usually built and launched quickly? Do they occasionally require long cycles of iteration? Maybe the iPhone should have been thrown away at version one.
It's 2005, does the Falcon 9 exist yet? Geez, we're waiting. It's obviously all vaporware, a fraud, they could hardly launch the Falcon 1 without it exploding every time.
It's 2009, does the Model S exist yet? Geez, we're waiting. It's obviously all vaporware, a fraud, they'll never mass-manufacture electric vehicles.
The Boring company was also a fraud the way it was originally presented. Musk sold it as this unique new technology they were making, when in reality they had bought some 3rd party machines and flown them in from China.
How are you judging SpaceX, Neuralink, & Boring to be successes? They’re fine companies with good products, but none of them have fulfilled Musk’s original stated goals: going to Mars, transhumanism, and networks of tunnels for mass transit, respectively. When people say those companies will fail, I imagine the argument is that they won’t achieve these goals. Which, for the time being, is still true. Although it’s true that at least Musk actually builds things.
(Some bold takes? Level 5 self driving cars the way we commonly envision it won’t ever come to fruition, SpaceX will never go to Mars, transhumanism will never come to pass, and hyperloops won’t either. You can come back in 5 years and gloat if I’m wrong.)
SpaceX is an essentially unprecedented success by any reasonable definition of success in the modern space launch services market.
If you want to minimize their obvious accomplishments based on Musk's own incredibly ambitious long-term (decades out) goals, feel free, but that's pretty dumb because it's essentially meaningless relative to the rest of the market. If ULA were already sending colony ships to Mars, maybe you'd have a point, but they aren't.
> SpaceX is an essentially unprecedented success by any reasonable definition of success in the modern space launch services market.
Sure. I agree.
> minimize their obvious accomplishments based on Musk's own incredibly ambitious long-term (decades out) goals
Outside of the Silicon Valley bubble, that’s called “holding people accountable to the goals they set.” And I’m happy to give him decades, he still won’t achieve transhumanism, Mars travel, and the like.
You aren't "holding people accountable to the goals they set" in any useful way—and in return for the "Silicon Valley bubble" comment, which I suppose is meant as a slur against me for saying what I've said here, I'd like to invite you to get over yourself.
Setting extremely ambitious goals and trying your level best to achieve them is a virtue, not a vice. If you let some weird disdain for Silicon Valley (which is in fact a place/state of mind which I do not inhabit and whose culture I strongly dislike) rob you of your ability to get excited about great efforts toward building great things and/or solving great problems, that's nobody's problem but your own.
>Setting extremely ambitious goals and trying your level best to achieve them is a virtue, not a vice.
That only holds true up til the point where your loud (public) ambitious goals are the reason for ticket sales.
Once there is financial motive for setting ambitious goals, you lose credit for the ambition -- it becomes driven by profit.
SpaceX is literally taking queries for the sale of private Mars tickets[0].
I have a hard time considering the sale of tickets to a now-technologically-impossible-future-event that may be possibly hundreds of years away from our present time as altruistic.
If I made a website and sold tickets to the "Nicest place to sit and observe the apocalypse when it occurs." for hefty profits i'd be driven out of town. No way I could know where that might be or when it might occur; the entire premise is faulty.
A guy launches a rocket or two and suddenly his opinion, against the majority of the rest of science and engineering by the way, claims we're going to Mars soon.
Sure, he's more believable than some random person saying it, i'll give you that -- but the promise of Mars is something that I and many others consider to be so unlikely in the immediate future that we view the promise as akin to a lie or fraud; and Musk has done little to assuage the very real technical fears behind the mission other than with vagueties like "Well, it's an engineering challenge." or "We'll have to discover new ways of doing X".
Yes, that's true, new method and procedures will inevitably need to be developed -- but dismissing such feats as minor is not only in poor taste, but short-sighted when trying to plan a timeline for when these events may occur.
I think this shortsightedness is intentional, and for profit. He can claim the world, profit from it, and deliver very minimal results that are nothing compared to the promises.
You see this behavior over and over in the management of early Tesla, too.
Does SpaceX really have the common man lining up to be fleeced for vaporware Mars tickets? Not really, as far as I can tell. They may have taken money from some very rich people who presumably understand the speculative nature of what they're paying for, e.g. the "Dear Moon" thing, which is by the way entirely within the realm of current technological possibility. We already sent humans to the moon, several times. Fifty years ago. SpaceX has definitively proven that they know how to build things that go up and things that come down and things that keep people alive in space. You do the math.
Beyond that, I really just don't see the angle of Musk as a con man. He's a maniac—literally, manic—and that certainly comes through in the aggressive and sometimes unrealistic nature of the promises he makes, but accusing him of being somebody who would settle for delivering "very minimal results" just seems to ignore the reality of the man himself, both the personality traits he's clearly displayed (and I don't mean that in an entirely positive way) and more importantly the results he's already delivered. They are not "minimal". He's delivered unprecedented upstart success and unprecedented innovations at scale in two markets that have been dominated by incumbents essentially since their inception. That's not a man looking to spin a web of lies and hype and then cash out. In fact he seems to be in a very small class of extant business leaders who've actually done something worth talking about besides being very rich and overseeing incremental (valuable or not) progress.
You and "many others" are free to think whatever you want about the technology, and I'd probably agree with you to some extent on many points, but it kind of undermines your status as an impartial skeptic when you show so clearly that you have an axe to grind. And why? I really just don't get it. I would never work for Musk in his current form, and I don't own any products made by any of his companies, and I think he's guilty of treating some of his factory workers quite badly, but I give credit where credit's due and you should, too. It's not about endorsing him, what he stands for, how he treats workers, his opinions on COVID-19, or whatever else—it's simply about seeing the world clearly.
> SpaceX is literally taking queries for the sale of private Mars tickets[0].
The only thing close to 'private Mars tickets' is the footer which says: "For inquiries about our private passenger program, contact sales@spacex.com". That sounds like a very generic "If your problem is having too much money, we can help!" kind of sales pitch.
> If I made a website and sold tickets to the "Nicest place to sit and observe the apocalypse when it occurs." for hefty profits i'd be driven out of town.
If you're a company that sells private bunkers and you have a page on your website about a possible apocalypse, then no one will fault you for having a generic "For inquiries about our private bunker program, contact sales@bunkerx.com" footer.
They've already mass-produced orbital rockets which are the cheapest way to space, put a payload out past the orbit of Mars, landed multiple orbital boosters simultaneously and produced the first production full flow staged combustion engine. Alone those are incredible achievements but they also have a viable pathway to Mars, the Moon or other bodies in the solar system. I expect they'll land cargo around 2024 and send humans in the next few synods after that on a demo mission.
SpaceX is ridiculously successful. The Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are now as reliable as the best competitors and are so much cheaper than their competitors it's not even funny.
SpaceX didn't lower Falcon 9 launch prices because the market is willing to pay their current price, but they sell something that costs them about $20M for $70M (competition's price is at $100M) and they sell something that costs them about $40M for $150M (competition's price is at $400M).
ULA (Boeing and Lockheed Martin partnership that used to have US monopoly) only exists today because the US federal government needs dissimilar redundancy, so that if something bad happens on a launch, the other provider's system can launch stuff while the first one is investigating and fixing the issue. Without this requirement, ULA would have been closed. Same for Boeing's CST-100. Same for Northrop Grumman's Antares and Cygnus. Same for Orbital's Dream Chaser. Boeing's SLS and LockMart's Orion cash cows will be shut down if Starship proves reliable.
Starship is much more speculative/ambitious and will require a bunch more iterations before they make it work. There will definitely be failures along the way, hopefully without loss of human life but that's not guaranteed. If they don't go bankrupt before they make it work, a fully rapidly reusable Starship (150 tons to orbit for just a few million bucks) will make all other rocket technology completely antiquated, 100x cheaper is too much to bear for national pride reasons.
SpaceX is unquestionably a success at this point, although their end goal is probably something that will take longer than a single lifetime. Boring and Neuralink are still early, and Neuralink may also be one of those century-long things.
Tesla and SpaceX have both achieved their original nearer term vehicles, Dragon/ F9/FH plus Model S, X, and 3. Full reuse and full autonomy currently are still out of reach, but both of those are incredibly ambitious that no one else is super close to doing, either.
Both Tesla and SpaceX are very successful, but of course Musk keeps raising the bar on what he considers success.
Like I said, they’re fine companies. And they’re doing innovative things!
But you’ll have forgive me if I hold Musk to public promises he’s made, especially regarding self driving cars & Mars. At a certain point, what’s the difference between making a bold promise and telling a lie? It’s difficult to judge people’s intentions.
Is it a lie to set as a goal for your company something that will take longer than one lifetime?
It’d be a lie if they weren’t taking steps necessary for that goal. It’s not a lie to have a large, even an unlikely, goal.
Starship, in particular, isn’t really needed for a conventional space business case. Falcon 9 is sufficient for that. Starship (as envisioned) is either too big or too reusable. The only thing it makes sense for is the grand, multi-generational vision.
> His stated goal is to do this by 2050. That’s within his lifetime (I hope).
(Responding to your claim elsewhere since reply isn't allowed there)
Incorrect. That's not Musk's stated goal. What he said was:
"Building 100 Starships/year gets to 1000 in 10 years or 100 megatons/year or maybe around 100k people per Earth-Mars orbital sync" - [0]
Nothing at all about having a million people on Mars in 2050. To get a million people to Mars requires ten Earth-Mar orbital syncs, or 20 years. Adding 10 years to get to that 1000 Starships/year cadence. That means they have to achieve 100 Starship/years by 2022 to have a shot at sending a million people to Mars by 2052 (because the next orbital sync is 2022)
Starship hasn't flown yet with the first orbital flight hopefully some time next year. It will be well into 2020s, at the earliest, to get to 100 starships/year production rate. Musk knows that and he didn't state otherwise.
Reaching Mars in 4 years is the goal. He has always thought that was a stretch goal, as has been clear on every single presentation he has given on the topic. (BTW, NASA has a stretch goal of 2024 for landing people on the Moon; they acknowledge it is a stretch goal, and it probably also will be years later. Does that make NASA liars?)
But I'd say there's a greater than 50/50 chance of SpaceX landing people on Mars in Musk's lifetime. But that's not even THAT remarkable... Their actual goal (self-sustaining Mars civilization of at least a million people) is 5-6 orders of magnitude grander than that, and almost certainly won't occur in Musk's lifetime. Musk acknowledges that.
No. It makes them not-successful. Which also applies to SpaceX in that regard.
> Their actual goal (self-sustaining Mars civilization of at least a million people) is 5-6 orders of magnitude grander than that, and almost certainly won't occur in Musk's lifetime. Musk acknowledges that.
His stated goal is to do this by 2050. That’s within his lifetime (I hope).
It's a lie when they tell you you can buy a car ready for full self driving when that will take longer than one lifetime, yes.
SpaceX promises or goals or whatever are less egrigious. It's clearly providing a useful service (stuff to orbit for less money), but nobody is giving them a bunch of money today for a ride to Mars maybe later. Same with the Boring Company; it'll become egregious if they trick a municipality into paying for something, or leave an unfinished tunnel sitting around for years and years (but longer than the Seattle tunnel, cause even non-imaginary tunnel machines have problems)
Becoming an inter-planetary species doesn't happen in a year.
I want SpaceX to succeed and they have a track record of execution such that I now believe they really can. I was hopeful before (and if you listen to Musk talk about it he didn't think they'd be able to really pull it off early on either but figured they'd at least make progress towards it even if they failed), but now I think a mars colony is a real possible outcome.
It's not a bold take to just state something is impossible until it happens, that's pretty much the default.
The bold take is to look at what might be possible and execute goals in pursuit of that.
For SpaceX this means reusable rocket technology to bring costs down (massive success here has them ahead of everyone else). Starlink as a revenue source is also a really good approach.
For Tesla it's the 'master plan' of roadster -> model s -> model 3, reinvesting in infrastructure and battery technology with vertical integration to build out superchargers and drive costs down. This has been massively successful and their EVs (particularly the model3/y) have no equal at any price point EV or gas. The level 5 autonomy was really a bonus on top of that EV transition that they've added to, and if anyone can pull it off it will be Andrej Karpathy and the fleet of Tesla's they can train with (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hx7BXih7zx8).
Bullshit and really big ideas can sound similar, but that doesn't mean they are - there's a lot of value in being able to tell the difference.
In the case of Nikola, they're just lying to enrich themselves and taking advantage of those that can't see the difference between a person like Trevor Milton and a person like Elon Musk.
I agree with you that they’re working towards these goals. And there’s obviously a ton of daylight between Musk and Milton.
But the point I’m making is more specific than that: you can’t call them successes because they haven’t achieved their goals yet. (But they haven’t failed yet, either. The jury is still out.)
Nothing bold about saying people won’t achieve goals and then disclaiming it saying people can gloat in 5 years if you’re wrong. That’s cowardly, the opposite of bold.
Musk said the first passengers could go to Mars in 2024, which is 4 years from now. So I’m being generous. Hasn’t he repeatedly proved everyone wrong? Where does the quote “Never bet against Elon” come from? I’m being quite bold.
But you’re right on the other points —- I’m willing to extend the timeframe for self driving to 10 years and transhumanism to 20. And to be even bolder, I’ll let you pick a timeline for the Hyperloop.
Musk has been really bullish on AI. In 2015, he seemed pretty sure we’d have super intelligent AI in 5 years (ie now), and he worried about it which is why he started Neuralink. So he probably was hoping for transhumanism by 2021. That’s why I discount those who think Musk was scamming about self-driving being available soon. He was naive and he tricked himself. Don’t believe his time projections about anything like AI.
Doesn’t mean those goals won’t be achieved, even if they are late, tho.
Musk has actually delivered ground breaking tech in multiple fields though. He talks big but he usually (eventually) backs it up. No other company has managed to send rockets to space and then land them again. No other company has managed to sell fully electric cars en-masse like Tesla has done.
Yeah, he certainly invests in innovative high-tech industries and I like that a lot. But he also overpromises a lot, e.g. coast-to-coast tesla autopilot (probably not happening anytime soon) or something actually useful with the neurochip (also years ahead). some of his remarks on AI also tells me that he has a feeling that he knows everything about everything but that might not be exactly the case. he is a smart guy and he got rich basically by having a really good electronic payment system. but that does not make him a universal engineer/scientist/philosopher.
The Leaf came years after Tesla and was a cautious, follow-the-leader side bet by Nissan.
The Tesla Roadster was a radical re-thinking of the automobile -- an industry that had been stagnating for over 50 years -- and an all-in investment in electric vehicle future by an eccentric billionaire. Nowhere near as bold or life-or-death in either financial outlay or feature design.
Do a side-by-side feature comparison of the original Leaf and Roadster to see just how far apart the two were in thinking, design and ambition.
The Leaf was and is essentially the belief that Tesla's vehicles would be too expensive for the average customer so Nissan could ride Tesla's tailwind to sell a more affordable model. And they have, and that's fine.
But it boggles my mind when people imply that Nissan's efforts in electric vehicles are in any way a reasonable comparison to what Tesla has done.
> Not yet. The boosters don't reach orbital velocity, that's the second stage.
Fair enough.
I suppose typing the whole thing out:
"SpaceX is the first company to launch a rocket to orbit and land its first stage"
is the most accurate way to phrase it. I was just trying to acknowledge companies like Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, who have landed rockets or parts thereof before SpaceX.
The big difference, however, is that those efforts have been essentially economically meaningless, whereas SpaceX's efforts have been quite impactful.
That's valid from a certain perspective. Technologically, Shuttle was a tour de force, although economically extremely terrible. Once it was decided to retire Shuttle,p probably the most common perspective among industry experts was that Shuttle "proved" reuse was not economically feasible and expendable was the way to go. So while Shuttle pushed technology to the limit, in many ways it actually held back development of reusable rocket technology (at least from a national policy perspective, which might have actually been for the best as it created the space that SpaceX needed to develop their solution commercially).
So in practical terms, Shuttle might have actually held back reusable rocket use more than advanced it. Fantastic achievement, though, and really not too bad economically when you consider all of its capabilities (only a fraction of which were used for any given mission, though).
What argument do you think I am making? It was never my intention to make an argument. I'm just pointing out that the Shuttle was a reusable rocket. I'm certainly not talking about practicality or economics. I'm not detracting from anything SpaceX has done, though it seems like you have to walk on eggshells around some fanboys who perceive mere mention of the Shuttle as an attack I guess.
That's a shame. I've got nothing against people dragging Musk for indulging the same fantasies I grew out of around age fourteen, I just prefer they be good at it.
Mentioning the reusability of the shuttle is not "dragging Elon Musk", please get a grip. I am a fan of what SpaceX is doing. I would not drag on Elon Musk by criticizing the accomplishments of SpaceX, there are far better ways to do that.
???? who corralled those workers? I always see this argument, if Milton has the same ability to bring together talented people as Musk does, his bullshit will be gladly accepted - both have proven the ability to bullshit, but only one has brought together groundbreaking teams thus far
There’s always danger of “smelling your own farts” syndrome, though. Like the whole submarine thing: it didn’t work! No doubt that Musk is very smart and knowledgable in the areas he has excelled. But a few times now he seemed to have decided that this means he’s smart in a whole load of other areas too, without much evidence. Another example is almost any time he talks about AI.
Not to go threw this again but ... if you actually read in detail what was going on, the 'submarine' was developed as a contingency only for the smallest child. It was developed because expert at the scene were not sure they could get the kid out. It was a worst case contingency plan for 1 kid from the very beginning (that's what it was sized for).
Of course in the media it was all like 'Elon rides in on spaceship and promises to build submarine to save everybody'. And we don't know if it 'didn't work' as it was not tried, because the smallest kid was eventually brought threw with the same methods.
The whole point here is that Elon wanted to help but clearly he couldn't help with diving, so with a team of engineers they tried to work on a small part of the problem. Only to then get shit on relentlessly for working something out of the box.
It was similar to when everybody was shitting on Elon because apparently he delivered the wrong products to help with Covid. Later turned out that Tesla had excellent contact with doctors in China because of their production facilities in China and focused on delivering what doctors in China told them was useful.
All in all there is no way around it, Elon has started many successful companies and pretty much all of them have done some or many impressive things. Very often with the experts in the field claiming his plans were impossible or buissness suicide. He might say something wrong once in a while, but you better actually listen what exactly he is saying and why, before dismissing it claiming he is just smelling his farts.
I'm no Musk fanboy and this isn't meant to be a defense of Musk, but in my opinion, Musk exaggerates and over promises. He'll say intentionally vague things and let people fill in the blanks and not correct them when they are wrong. It's all a little slimy and grey, but there's usually at least a modicum of truth to the things he says or he at least believes what he's saying at the time he says it.
From what I've heard recently Nikola just seems like straight up lies and fraud from trying to piggy back on the success of Tesla.
Neither are good, but one is much worse in my opinion.
True. But he also delivers on most of them. What I find most optimistic about his statements are basically the timeframes. Self-driving is taking longer than initially thought, and so is Mars. But there's been major progress across multiple (difficult) industries.
We can't compare him with the copycat company (not even the name is original!)
I mean, if he gives a timeline and the timeline is wrong, he's still wrong. Obviously people deserve a bit of leeway because shit happens, but it seems to keep happening.
In my mind that either means he's stupid (not learning from his mistakes) or deceptive. Personally, I don't think he's stupid, so...
The FTC should look into Musk's statements about self-driving, how it's almost done, etc. All that does is trick Tesla owners into paying for the $8000 upgrade for a product that will never, ever come, guaranteed. It just won't happen and he keeps peddling the product like it's only a year away, for the last several years. It's outright fraud and he should be taken to task for it. And for the record, I'm a Tesla-owner.
If you set an unrealistic goal that you won't accomplish but try really hard to reach it, in most cases your end result and the progress you made along the way will be far far better than when you set a realistic goal and reach it.
I always set unrealistic bars for myself. And in the end I get more from not reaching my goal than I would from reaching a lower one.
You're pointing at exactly what allows a skilled conman to succeed: To a casual, or even non-expert observer, the difference between a genius and a skilled impersonation of a genius will appear very small. You might not be able to make the distinction, and erroneously consider them equivalent.
It sounds bad, but I thought of another way to look at it.
Nikola's product is the brand of being a hip, "with it" electric car company, like Tesla, but different, and they are selling it to GM. It's a simple straightforward win-win, and everything that looks like fakery is beside the point. It has solid value to GM precisely because of the inflated, arguably irrational value of Tesla.
Now, I'm not investing, but it did occur to me to look at it that way. They are not actually in the same business as Tesla or GM. They're laundering cool factor.
I really like the cargo cult note. There are a lot of people building runways in the jungle hoping planes will land and bring cargo, so to speak, in tech. These people can and do make it into public markets (see Nikola) but it’s even more prevalent in private markets. It’s more important than ever to have technical people in private equity, not just VC.
> The guy certainly seems to have a problem with telling the truth.
I actually disagree with this take but it gets close to the problem with Trevor Milton. Trevor is very unpolished. I'm skeptical of how detailed he gets with all the in's and out's with the technologies he's trying to innovate and make more efficient. What's going for him is a few things, he's partnering with many companies which means he's mitigating the company's risk. Now that Musk created the market, others want to join in and try whatever route that sticks.
Musk on the other hand, speaks in more precise words when describing a topic. Musk does sell vaporware but...eventually (behind 'schedule') Musk delivers. This lazy focus on manifesting a specific vision what what Musk is doing. He'll let the entire engineering department go, if they aren't willing to work hard at making the future a reality.
Going full circle, the energy density of hydrogen fuel cell is the future. I don't see how it's not. All you need now is for Toyota to join forces with them and you'll have an unstoppable force that will help reduce emission drastically and at a large scale. The technology is very close (1, maybe 2 iterations away) and I doubt they are far away from a breakthrough. I don't believe Milton could've focused on Hydrogen semi's prior to the success of Tesla, he doesn't have that skill but...he's making due with what he's after. He's also being wise at selling electric trucks too because the market is primed for it (read: Musk primed it).
In conclusion, there are a lot of investors deep into Nikola. If Milton gets in the way of bringing this realistic engineering challenge to market, the investors will change it up. I'm not certain of how much voting say that Milton has but...it's a good sign that he stepped back from CEO role. He's way too sloppy with his words but...he brings the hype and investors are still wanting his hype. It's messy but nothing worth doing is ever blameless.
P.S. I don't own either stock. Nor any energy/battery/car/electric stocks. I'm just interested in advancing our technology.
> Going full circle, the energy density of hydrogen fuel cell is the future.
Based on what? Just looking at the density is not enough. You have to look at the whole system from generation to actually driving.
The hydrogen system is even in the best case, assume multiple many, many improvements in mass manufacturing and so on, only half as efficient as an electric system.
Battery technology is improving at a far faster rate then hydrogen technology, its not even remotely close. By the time your predicted ' (1, maybe 2 iterations away)' happens, batteries will have made 5 iterations.
The DoD for example is already sponsoring a massive program that companies lots of universities and national labs to work on Lithium Sulfur batteries that could double or triple the density of current Li batteries while also being quite a bit cheaper.
Silicon anode batteries are already in the early stages of commercialisation and they will make commercial aviation feasible.
And even if you insist on using chemical fuel, why would you use hydrogen? If you want to drive a truck a long distance at a time, you could just use dimethyl ether, methnol or something like that. That would solve tons of problem with storage and so on.
I really don't understand why people are so fascinated with hydrogen, while it continue to disappoint for 30 years. Even in the space industry, where fuel cell used to be used all the time there use has fallen out of favor.
On the contrary, it should be the driving force about making long-term decisions to benefit society. Hell, I'd be all for mini-nuclear in vehicles but the ability to make it safe is such a high threshold that it's not even remotely feasible.
No one thought electric cars would be where they are today. Elon made this electric car market happen by making it sexy (and selling only premium cars) which helped him double down on the real vision. There is a ceiling for the battery and it's not as high as many think.
We'll see what Tesla battery day shows but my main point is this: That to improve society with long-term thinking, we need to be more innovative and it's my opinion that attacking Milton's weaknesses is a waste of the public's time/energy. Especially when short sellers get a lot more freedom in how they deal with the market. No one is being a fair arbiter of the facts. Hydrogen is better for hauling big loads, it just is. To bring that to market is Nikola's real challenge. The upside to hydrogen is greater than the upside of li-ion, full stop. Shouldn't we want the better solution for society?
> On the contrary, it should be the driving force about making long-term decisions to benefit society.
No. Because people don't drive cross country everyday. Making an overall system vastly less efficient to optimize on specific metric that most people don't car about in a product is nonsense.
For grid storage density is also totally irrelevant.
What matters is price and scalability, not density.
> Elon made this electric car market happen by making it sexy (and selling only premium cars)
They are selling premium cars because that really whats economically feasible. As they go down the cost curve the cars will get cheaper.
> There is a ceiling for the battery and it's not as high as many think.
Even with current battery just going to silicon anodes/single crystal cathodes can and will double density.
Go look what is possible with Li-Sulfer batteries that are already being worked on to get to the next level.
> No. Because people don't drive cross country everyday.
Do you like spending a non-insignificant amount of time driving to/from a gas station (or electric charging station) and then spending even more time to wait until your local energy (car's tank/battery cells) has recharged enough for you to go again for....non-insignificant amount of time...etc..etc.
How many people have done this? How many years? etc. It's a pretty important first principle to have a system where energy density is a maximum (or at least significantly higher theoretical maximum than existing trends [i.e. Li-ion]).
> For grid storage density is also totally irrelevant.
I'm not discussing this. I'm talking about high power demands needed for semi's/trucks. The above (in this comment) is also considering the consumer market efficiency to be had.
> Go look what is possible
I'm aware but many of the efficiencies that are implemented for Li-ion [and it's variants] could theoretically compound the limit with hydrogen based. Abundance of essential compounds is a better by product than a scarce quantity of essential compounds.
P.S. This is about moving the goal posts. We're talking about innovation in a specific market. But ultimately the end goal is improving all aspects that affect society. (less destructive to the earth, doing more with less, etc)
> Do you like spending a non-insignificant amount of time driving to/from a gas station
More then 95% of EV charging happens at home. For most people a 300 miles way beyond plenty. In Europe the avg will likely be half of that.
Its seems you focus on the problems with batteries but ignore the many problems in scaling hydrogen and fuel cells. Two gigantic new industries that need to be bootstrapped and both have very significant technical and cost challenges to even get on track.
Batteries are in full ramp with 100 billions of investment in scale and 10s of billions in research. I just think they will win for the waste majority of situations.
> Battery technology is improving at a far faster rate then hydrogen technology, its not even remotely close. By the time your predicted ' (1, maybe 2 iterations away)' happens, batteries will have made 5 iterations.
I'm curious what this is based on. Last I checked, the li-ion batteries of today are basically the same from the ones we had 10-15 years ago. Sure, a little more silicon, a little less cobalt, but ultimately the same chemistry.
The biggest change for fuel cells is that they're moving from science project to mass production. There will be easily orders of magnitude reduction in cost. While this won't go forever, for the foreseeable future we should see a much faster rate of change for fuel cells and not batteries.
> I'm curious what this is based on. Last I checked, the li-ion batteries of today are basically the same from the ones we had 10-15 years ago. Sure, a little more silicon, a little less cobalt, but ultimately the same chemistry.
The batteries chemistry has not improved that much but the density still improved. We were in a period where cost and manufacturing improved far faster then chemistry. But thanks to the investment in batteries there are improvements to the chemistry coming down the pipe.
Tesla is gone have DBE technology that should improve density by 10-20% at least. Full silicon anodes are being commercialized right now. Single Cristal Cathodes are gone come pretty soon. Thicker anodes are being increasingly worked on.
I think we are going to continue to go down the cost curve, both because of engineering and chemical improvements.
> The biggest change for fuel cells is that they're moving from science project to mass production. T
Where is that happening exactly? In all the fuel cell cars Toyota isn't selling very well?
Battery energy density hasn't moved much at all. At best, we're at around 270-280 Wh/kg, and that requires a huge departure from our early understanding of battery safety. The early BEVs were relatively safe, even in a severe accident where the cells are damaged. In modern BEVs, any puncture or damage to the cell is a fire hazard. We've pretty much accepted that all BEVs are extremely flammable. Tesla has nothing of note, and ultimately they're lying or greatly exaggerating what they have.
> Where is that happening exactly?
It is happening everywhere simultaneously. Right now, tens of billions of dollars are being invested in hydrogen and fuel cell technologies. Anyone who pays attention knows that the revolution is happening as we speak.
What possibly could they have to offer for Toyota? It doesn't look like they did any work or even had anyone capable of researching hydrogen cells working for them.
Instead of advancing technology, they might have taken funding and credibility actual companies could have used.
The founder has so far answered just one real question on twitter, about what they were going to bring to the GM produced car:
"100% a badger. We will use common parts for example; tires, window regulators, hvac, brakes & batteries to drive down cost, but the badger is completely a badger. The infotainment, displays, software, ota, app, cab, interior, user experience, sales, service, warranty etc is ours"
That's a long way to say they'll use their software and sales team.
I don't see it as very different from Tesla, since when they started there was no real technology to talk about. The CEO of Tesla is also well known to be untrustworthy with his promises, having even being formally investigated by the SEC for stock price manipulation. I don't know the future, but there is a possibility that they will also develop the needed technology to make it all work.
I have met people like Nikola's CEO, and I bet my dear life that nothing will ever be delivered, except if the technology exists to completely - I mean exactly 100% - outsource it using the cash given by others and slap a logo on the result, failing in the end anyway. When you see a company so hell bent and putting so much effort in tricking investors AND actively avoiding doing any real work, you know what's happening. If you, and more importantly people with money to invest, are persuaded that "it's not different from Tesla", that's a victory for Nikola, and their sole source of income.
> since when they started there was no real technology to talk about
That is flat false, making a automotive battery out of laptop batteries was quite a technology development. They also made their own engines and inverters from the beginning.
> The CEO of Tesla is also well known to be untrustworthy with his promises
Actually the opposite, it is well known that when he says something its very likely going to happen. As most of the things he say, no matter how crazy to turn out to actually happen.
Arguable there is no other human alive in the world today, that when he say 'We are gone do X' that more people believe could actually do it.
> having even being formally investigated by the SEC for stock price manipulation.
He wasn't investigated for stock price manipulation, he was investigated for improper communication to stock holders.
> I don't know the future, but there is a possibility that they will also develop the needed technology to make it all work.
So even after 10 years of consistently laying every year, announcing dozens of technologies that all turn out to be totally fake you still think they can do it. That seems beyond utterly blue-eye to me.
