Car Dealers Are Terrified of Tesla’s Plan to Eliminate Oil Changes

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The Tesla Roadster 2.5. Image: Tesla

http://www.wired.com/business/2014/03/car-dealers-fear-teslas-plan-end-oil-changes-forever/ 

Car dealers fear Tesla. In states across the country, powerful car dealer associations have lobbied to ensure the electric car maker and its direct-sales model are kept out. This movement claimed another victory this week when New Jersey banned Tesla stores in the state.
On the surface, the fear is hard to fathom. In New Jersey, for instance, sales of Tesla’s $70,000 Model S reportedly number in the hundreds. But if you dig a little deeper, it becomes obvious why dealers are worried. They don’t just fear Tesla’s cars. They fear Tesla’s plan to create a world where you never have to bring your car into the shop again.
The first and most striking way Tesla kills the dealer service department cash cow is downloads. As part of its sales pitch, Tesla says you should think of its Model S sedan as “an app on four wheels.” That may sound like vacuous Silicon Valley marketing copy, but the company isn’t just being metaphorical. Software is at the heart of what keeps Teslas running. These internet-connected cars are designed to self-diagnose their problems. The vehicles can also download software fixes or updates — even new features — much like an iPhone when Apple puts out a new version of iOS. When fixes happen over the air, there’s no need for a shop in the first place.

It’s hard to charge for an oil change when there’s no oil to be changed.

The ability to repair a car via software is especially important when the vehicle itself consists of so much new technology that traditional mechanics don’t know how to fix. The flip side is that without an internal combustion engine, there’s not as much to fix. I’ve written before that a Tesla without its outer shell looks like a cell phone on wheels. It’s basically just a big battery. That means no spark plugs, no air filters, no fuel pumps, no timing belts. In short, Teslas don’t have any of the parts that force you to take your car in for “regularly scheduled maintenance” — services that can cost dearly at the dealer. But it’s hard to charge for an oil change when there’s no oil to be changed.
To be fair, Tesla isn’t doing away entirely with bringing your car in. The company recommends an inspection once a year or every 12,500 miles. Its service plans start at $600 per year^* (Update 9:40 a.m. EDT 3/14/14: This story has been updated to correct the price of Tesla’s annual service plan. It is $600 per year, not per month.) or less if you buy multiple years at once. The plans include replacement of standard parts like brake pads and windshield wipers. The company will monitor your car remotely and tell you when there are problems, such as faulty batteries. In theory, there are pitfalls in an arrangement where the company that makes your car is the only one that can fix it. But Tesla would seem to alleviate that concern with its flat-rate plans, rather than fee-for-service gouging for every fix. What’s more, the company says your warranty is still valid regardless of whether you get your car serviced at all.
Yes, these all sound like grand promises. And for all we know, Tesla won’t be able to deliver on them in the end. But Consumer Reports’ decision to name the Model S the country’s best overall car suggests otherwise.
Even the fact that Tesla is making these promises at all must strike horror in the hearts of dealers. Once presented with the possibility that most of the costly headaches of owning a car aren’t necessary, car buyers might start asking dealers why they don’t change, too. The answer, of course, is that all those headaches are exactly what keep us coming back to the shop and putting more money in their pockets.
At Tesla’s most recent annual meeting, one shareholder asked founder and CEO Elon Musk about whether challenges to the company from traditional auto dealers hurt the company’s business outlook. Musk argued that consumer desire for a better way of buying and owning cars would win out. He said the traditional franchise model that dominates auto-selling in the U.S. wouldn’t work for Tesla for several reasons, including its reliance on maintenance to make money. “Our philosophy with respect to service is not to make a profit on service,” Musk said. “I think it’s terrible to make a profit on service.”
The shareholders applauded — the same shareholders that have sent Tesla’s stock price up nearly 650 percent over the past year. Yes, for now, Tesla only makes luxury cars, and its approach to service might seem like a luxury. But if it starts making cars regular people can afford, that applause for car dealers could be the sound of money spiraling down the drain.

Tesla could help customers go off the grid (??)

Originally published on RenewEconomy.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/03/26/tesla-could-help-customers-go-off-the-grid/ 

Morgan Stanley’s investigation into the potential of consumers to go off-grid in a major way in the US depends on a number of factors.

The falling cost of solar we know about, and the rising cost of poles and wires is also well understood. The new element is the falling cost of battery storage. This has been mooted and debated for some years, but the most recent announcement by Tesla, the electric vehicle manufacturer, that it plans a $5 billion “gigawatt” scale battery manufacturing facility that will bring down the cost of batteries by more than half – brings it much closer to reality.

Morgan Stanley says this could be enough to make it economically advantageous for customers to go off-grid by 2018, if that is what they wanted to do.

It’s not that Morgan Stanley is recommending this course of action, but it makes the point that if utilities continue to resist the “distribution” model for delivering electricity, and hang on instead to the centralised model, then the smart idea of using the grid as a back up battery will no longer be attractive. Customers will simply take matters into their own hands.

The broad numbers are these: If California prices keep going the way they are headed, then the average customer will be paying around 26c/kWh for their electricity in 2020. But a solar storage/off grid approach, according to Morgan Stanley, would only cost $.10-$.12/kWh.

Here’s how.

Morgan Stanley notes that historically, power storage costs have been too high to realistically allow customers to disconnect from the utility power grid – apart from those early adopters and those who do it as a matter of principal.

However, the Tesla Gigafactory has the potential to reduce battery production costs from around $US300/kWh to as low as $125-$150 per kilowatt-hour of storage capacity. Morgan Stanley says every $US25/kWh fall in battery costs translates into a 1c-2c/kWh saving in electricity costs for customers, or up to one third of the grid fees in many US states.

Morgan Stanley notes that the fixed grid costs for Californian customers was around $US500 a year in 2012, and is forecast to rise to around $750 a year by 2018, almost exclusively as a result of the cost of poles and wires.

This is where it gets interesting, as Morgan Stanley explains:

“If customers sought to have two days’ worth of power storage (to protect against poor solar output), they would install 38 kWh of batteries. At a capital cost of $125/kWh, the capital cost of the batteries would be $4,700. Including an additional $300 in costs for software and hardware that can manage the interface between solar panels, household power demand and the storage system, the total storage cost would be $5,000.
“Applying a cost of capital for this system of 7% (a proxy for a weighted cost of capital including both debt and equity components), the annual cost of the system would be $350 – which would be competitive with the $750 annual grid cost.
“In our Levelized Cost of Energy analysis, we also include the cost to replace the battery system in 12 years. If Tesla were able to reduce the size of the home battery to one day of power – for example, by installing sensors that can determine the risk that the battery is at risk of running out of power, and scheduling the delivery of a “battery change out” at the home to avoid this risk – then an off-grid approach could be increasingly competitive.
“Given solar customers in California are already required to pay a portion of the fixed grid fee, a storage system will need to be more cost-effective because a solar customer could effectively use the utility grid as a battery at a competitive cost.
“For example, at a 50% charge (more than the current 20%) of fixed grid fees to solar customers, the total cost of solar power in 2018, supported in many ways by the utility grid, would be $.117/kWh, and an off-grid storage system using 1 day or 2 days of storage would have an all-in cost of $.098/kWh or $.122, respectively.”

Here’ a couple of interesting points Morgan Stanley makes about the Tesla battery

- Just one Tesla Model S (85 kWh) can store enough energy to power the average US household for 3.5 days.

- By 2020, a Tesla fleet of 690,000 units will contain the stored energy capacity to provide one full hour of electricity to 1.6 per cent of US households.

- By 2028, Tesla’s 3.9 million unit US fleet will contain the stored energy capacity to provide 1 hour of electricity to 8 per cent of US households.

- And, by 2028, Morgan Stanley estimates that Tesla’s global 7.2 million fleet will contain the stored energy capacity of 443 GW, an amount exceeding the entire daily electricity consumption of Mexico, or more than 50% than the Kingdom of Spain.

Why Apple Could Win Big With Tesla’s Giant New Battery Factory

Tesla says it wants the Gigafactory, shown here in a mock-up released by the company, to be powered by solar and wind. Image: Tesla

The first Tesla I ever saw was stripped down to the chassis, a bare-metal incarnation of the company’s flagship electric Roadster on display at an event in Silicon Valley. Without the need for an internal combustion engine, the two-seater’s petite frame was dominated by a huge battery. My first thought: “This looks like a giant cell phone on wheels.”
As it turns out, I was more right than I realized.
This week, years after that first sighting, Tesla announced plans for what it calls the “Gigafactory,” a 10-million-square-foot plant for making car batteries. The company hopes that the sheer scale of the operation, combined with the inventiveness of its engineers, will bring battery prices down far enough to finally bring its electric cars into the mainstream.
But it’s not just the prospect of a gasoline-free future that has sparked such excitement about the Gigafactory. The same basic lithium-ion tech that fuels Tesla’s cars also runs most of today’s other mobile gadgets, large and small. If Tesla really produces batteries at the scale it’s promising, cars could become just one part of what the company does. One day, Tesla could be a company that powers just about everything, from the phone in your pocket to the electrical grid itself.
Earlier this month, as rumors swirled that Apple might want to buy Tesla, San Francisco Chronicle reported that Tesla CEO Elon Musk had indeed met with the iPhone maker. Musk later confirmed that Tesla and Apple had talked, but he wouldn’t say what about.
Now that Tesla has announced the Gigafactory, Gartner auto industry analyst Thilo Koslowski thinks it would make more sense for Tesla to talk with Apple about something other than an acquisition. “Depending on the capacity of the factory and who the other investors will be, Tesla could start selling its batteries for other products besides cars,” Koslowski tells WIRED. “This could actually mean Tesla might build batteries for Apple.”

Better Batteries for Less Money

To begin erecting its factory, Tesla said it would seek $1.6 billion in debt financing — money that Apple itself could easily supply from its massive cash reserves. In fact, the world’s biggest company could easily put up the money for the entire Gigafactory, which Tesla estimates will ultimately cost between $4 billion and $5 billion. Though industry analysts say the global manufacturing capacity for consumer electronics batteries is already considerable, the economies of scale that Tesla is promising could give Apple access to a whole different level of efficiency, sophistication, and control.
Unlike many parts of the consumer electronics industry, battery-making factories are, in general, highly automated, which means that labor doesn’t factor significantly into production costs. As anyone who has seen Tesla’s car-making robots in action can attest, factory automation is something the company does really, really well. Deep involvement in the project from the start — say, as an investor — could give Apple exactly the kind of intimate involvement with a key supplier that it relishes. This sort of control defines its approach to products. For consumers, that could mean Apple getting better batteries for its devices for less money, just like Tesla wants to do for its cars.
Even if the Gigafactory never makes a battery for a single iPhone, however, its impact on the future of energy storage could be huge. The company says that, once fully operational, the plant will more than double the volume of lithium ion batteries produced in the world today. Sam Jaffe, a battery industry analyst with Navigant Research, says the price drops predicted by Tesla are in line with his firm’s forecasts, and that the cheaper batteries will bring Tesla closer to achieving its primary mission of making a widely affordable electric car, what Tesla is calling its “Gen III” mass market vehicle, or Model E. “The whole point of that model and the whole point of the company was to make that car,” Jaffe says. “It wasn’t to make sports cars or luxury cars. It was to make a family car comparable in price to a gasoline model.”
To reach that mass market, Tesla hopes to be cranking out batteries for 500,000 cars per year by 2020, supported by the Gigafactory. That’s compared to the 35,000 Model S sedans Tesla expects to make this year. Reaching that goal would mean not only a lot more electric cars on the road but a lot more batteries that would need to be replaced. The batteries that power Teslas are a lot like smartphone batteries: Eventually, they start losing their strength. Unlike smartphone batteries, getting down to 60 or 70 percent of their full capacity isn’t just inconvenient. It could leave drivers stranded. Tesla says it plans to fully integrate battery recycling into the Gigafactory’s operations, which could add to the cost savings.

Powering the Grid

But Koslowski says those old batteries could also become part of a robust secondary market. They could, for instance, store energy generated by home solar grids, which can make use of less-than-full strength cells because they don’t have to go anywhere. Already Tesla is supplying battery packs to SolarCity, the solar installer of which Musk serves as chairman, and the company believes that one day its batteries could even serve as backup energy sources for utilities themselves. Bullish Wall Street analysts even predict that, in addition to buttressing the renewable energy grid, Tesla could combine its expertise in cars, batteries, and digital technology to become a leading maker of self-driving vehicles.
Any of this coming to pass, of course, depends on whether the Gigafactory will actually accomplish what Tesla says it will. To bring prices down, battery industry consultant K.M. Abraham says, Tesla will have to figure out how to make its batteries without pushing up costs for component suppliers who would have to increase their output to meet the car maker’s demands. “Unless you come out with new low-cost materials, the battery prices will remain pretty much the same,” says Abraham, who is also a professor of renewable technology at Northeastern University.
Though details from Tesla are scant, a diagram released by the company suggests it does plan to bring as much of the battery making process as possible within the Gigafactory’s walls. Tesla is also pledging to power much of the plant with its own wind and solar energy, a potential testing ground for using its batteries as part of the electrical grid. Diversifying into different uses could be especially crucial if demand for Tesla’s cars doesn’t hit the company’s own projections. Building a factory on such a massive scale is a huge risk if it only makes one thing, but that risk diminishes if Tesla has the ability to use its expertise to make batteries for many uses. If nothing else, Tesla is creating an unprecedented space just to see what’s possible when energy becomes mobile.
“It’s breathtaking, just the sheer size of it,” Jaffe says of the Gigafactory. “This is so beyond anything by comparison.”
http://www.wired.com/business/2014/02/teslas-giant-battery-factory-save-apple/

Free Atmospheric Electricity Powers Small Motor - Tesla Radiant Energy

From lasersaber

Published on Nov 25, 2013

I have always wanted to test a radiant energy motor. This little motor is the beginning of my research in that direction. In the near future I will be making larger more powerful motors. The precision required will probably require my 3D printer. Stay tuned for future updates.
Links to books and website: http://laserhacker.com/?p=332
Video correction: The 2000+ watt device was built by Jules Guillot.