> Incorporation papers filed with the California secretary of state's office links Faraday to a Chinese media company operated by Jia Yueting, an entrepreneur who founded Leshi Internet Information & Technology.
interesting, just fyi their webmail is powered by aliyun, which is Alibaba's cloud and dropbox equivalent (or basically the Chinese version of corporate gmail or google apps)
Manufacturing high end tech in China isn't as cheap as one might think, when it comes to really high end electronics China/Taiwan is usually really cheaper only at extremly high volumes same goes for any other type of high end manufacturing where human labor isn't a factor anymore.
Other "over-seas" manufacturing cost reductions come mainly when you delegate the entire production operation to a sub-contractor this means that much of your engineering post the prototyping phase such as the "design for manufacturing", tooling, and assembly line engineering are delegated to local engineering firms which while are much more expensive now than even 10 years ago still considerably cheaper than US or European engineers.
If you can't or do not want to do it when the volume isn't huge, and when pretty much all of the work has to be done outside of china you won't see any real cost benefits to it.
So when you combine the already existing experience in both automotive and high tech engineering fields as well as government grants in the US for green/renewable energy and emerging technologies making a Tesla 2.0 in China will probably not cost you sufficiently less to justify the costs of having to build it in China and import it into the US.
And if you also going to replicate Tesla's artificial scarcity business model well then at that volume China might become even a more expensive place to produce in.
There's nothing to say they won't. The article says they're operating out of an old Nissan research facility right now, not that they've bought a factory in California. Everybody else doing autonomous and electric vehicle research also seems to be operating out of california right now as well. It's where the people who know that stuff are, so if a Chinese company wants to build an electric car, it makes sense that they'd set up shop in California too. When it comes time to move to manufacturing, they can do that anywhere.
> Everybody else doing autonomous and electric vehicle research also seems to be operating out of california right now as well
That is a particulary narrow set of blinders. Even in the US it is not true - MCity and U-M's research in Michigan is a good counter example. And when you look over the pond, there's a lot more going on in Stuttgart and Munich than in the Valley (with less breathless hype but more actual progress).
Of course for Chinese car builders it is easier to poach US engineers, research and know-how to build their own industry - less problems with the language than in Germany, less distrust given that Californian research is half run by Chinese grad students anyway.
Saab automobile went bankrupt after a lot of back and forth[0], and the estate was bought by NEVS[1], a Chinese owned company. They own the design for the old cars (Saab 9-3 was introduced in 2002), they use the same assembly plant in Sweden, but last I heard Saab AB (the owner of the Saab brand) did not want to license the brand to NEVS[2] again after their reconstruction. So even if they do start car production in the future, they won't be called Saab unless something change. NEVS also recently sold the rights to the 9-3 platform to Turkey [3], because they've had financial problems since the start. I would be very surprised if an electric car of any relevance came out from the old Saab factory any time soon unfortunately.
You know how if you're stopped at a light and clean the windshield, the washer fluid sprays, the wipers cycle, and then there's some drips of washer fluid at the top of the wiped area that then drips down the windshield so you have to manually trigger the wipers again? My old Saab had a delay built in to the call for wiper fluid so that it would automatically sweep the wipers a few seconds to get those last drips. It was but one of many thoughtful design elements.
Saabs had a character that was unique; regardless of how one felt personally about driving one, the auto world is poorer place without Saab.
From the rumor mill from people who moved from Tesla to Faraday. They're going for the mid market vs. Tesla's high-end market. Also, from the same source the quality and feel is no where near Tesla yet. So don't expect Tesla, but expect something 30-40% cheaper.
That makes the headline sound even worse. Something like "New company hopes to start selling electric cars in 2017" better reflects the content of the article (which hilariously talks about other attention the company has gotten as hype (I realize an editor probably wrote the headline, not the author)).
Fantastic, more competition is exactly what I need as a consumer. I really do think the self-driving car is around the corner, based on chatting with a guy on the Google team.
No idea why it would need to be secret, though? It could just be low publicity, rather than secrecy?
I think what is really needed is to get rid of the dealer protection racket/laws... That will do more to shake up auto buying/sales in terms of new cars into the market than anything else...
Tesla's biggest competitor is the established auto industry. The guys need to stop listening to the folks who say its easy to start a car company. If hile there is some truth to that, its not with the investment. A billion dollars is a new platform, not a new company.
The problem is still that in most regions of the world electric cars are still a gimmick with an environmental friendly marketing spin.
Essentially dirty methods of producing electricity and converting that electricity back into mechanical energy are less efficient than gasoline engines. So yes - we do need electric cars and it's great companies are making them but that won't have a significant impact until the industrial-scale energy problems are addressed.
You assert that electric is less efficient. Can you share any data (or even back of the envelope math) to support?
Small gasoline engines are pretty damned inefficient, and I think it's only reasonable to compare full lifecycle costs of our energy sources. For coal, that includes mining. For gasoline, that includes refining (and military defense of oil?). For all, it includes transportation, etc.
It's not obvious to me that gasoline is more efficient than electric. (Nor is it obvious to me that the converse is true, either.)
In countries that have electricity coming from fossil fuels, it's inherently less efficient. In countries like Norway where everything mostly comes from hydro power, this is completely different.
That's slightly better than the typical maximum efficiency of an internal combustion gasoline engine (and way better than the average, including idling and other inefficient operating conditions).
Electric cars suffer from two additional conversions, each of which adds inefficiency, but it's not obvious to me that this overcomes the efficiency benefit from having a central power plant using fossil fuels more efficiently than in the auto. To me, it seems close enough that it takes actual analysis to determine the winner.
> In countries that have electricity coming from fossil fuels, it's inherently less efficient
"Inherently" less efficient? As in, "electric cars are inherently less efficient that gasoline cars in fossil-fuel countries?" What a claim! And untrue! Unless you meant "electric cars in fossil-fuel regions are less efficient than electric cars in nuclear regions" then sure. But that's obvious.
Even in India, which has the worst carbon emissions coming from coal in the world, electric cars are about on par with gasoline ICEs. In India, it costs about 350 grams of CO2 emissions per kilometer of EV travel. That's roughly equivalent to a 25-30 MPG gasoline vehicle when you look at well-to-wheel for both.
In every other country in the world, coal emissions are better, which means that categorically electric vehicles are better for emissions than gasoline vehicles, even if the power source is coal.
In general electric cars, even from fossil fuel derived sources, are more efficient then internal-combustion engine vehicles when comparing "well to wheel" numbers.
They are also definitely cleaner for local environments - it is easier to regulate emissions from a couple dozen central powerplants then millions of individual engines.
>Essentially dirty methods of producing electricity and converting that electricity back into mechanical energy are less efficient than gasoline engines. So yes - we do need electric cars and it's great companies are making them but that won't have a significant impact until the industrial-scale energy problems are addressed.
In America; and really, most of the wealthy bits of the world, this is purely a political choice. fission is a real answer that we can use right now, one that pretty provably kills fewer people than coal. But coal kills people very slowly in a way that isn't very dramatic, while when a nuclear problem gets that bad, it's very scary and dramatic.
We burn coal for the same reason that we heavily regulate airlines, while we let just about any yahoo drive just about any car, no matter how unsafe.
But, the point about electric cars is just that if the left actually starts to believe in global warming like they say they do, and actually decides to solve the problem, like they say they want to, rather than just opposing cheap energy on the principle of "you shouldn't waste things" (e.g. "I can afford less mature energy sources, so why shouldn't you?") - the technology of fission is there, and building more nuclear power plants is only half the solution, the other half is converting our transportation network to run on electricity rather than oil.
I mean, yeah. For now? electric cars are largely signs of wealth that rich people can buy. But the point is that having the technology out there, working with it, improving it, gets us more ready for the day that we do decide to get serious about our energy problems.
Other things being equal, I'd rather have the smelly stuff burned in a big dedicated building with several tons of filters and 24×7 dedicated monitoring than outside my bedroom window by small engines whose only virtue is portability.
Once transport goes electric we'll be trying explain to our grand kids how we tolerated people blowing carcinogens right at us. Were so used to gasoline cars having exhaust pipes that blow out on the pedestrian sidewalk that, I think well grow to appreciate how stupid that is when we don't.
Do you have a source for the claim of lower efficiency? My understanding was that the Karnot efficiency of internal combustion engines was so low (like 15%) that it was not difficult for electric cars to beat them.
Not quite true - gasoline engine efficiency is roughly 25% while a power plant could go to 50-sh. The efficiency of transporting the power back to the electric car wheels is probably in the high 80-s low/90s. So you are ahead. Just not by that much.
Only on very new generation plants (for coal national average is cited as 32% - it may be slightly higher now)[1]. A 2016 Toyota Prius is advertised as being at 40%[2]. I remember reading a 70% ballpark for Tesla's but it might have gotten better (I can't seem to find the article now).
That's just the engine efficiency. They estimate that refining a gallon of gasoline uses 4kw/h of energy, that energy by itself can power a Tesla for 12 miles, and you're not even accounting for fuel transport, storage and handling yet.
Refining a gallon of gasoline uses 6kWh of heat. Turning that heat into electricity involves great inefficiency. You can only convert that amount directly to miles if the heat comes from electricity, but my understanding is that no refinery does anything so wasteful, since they have stuff they can burn on site.
That refineries produce the heat by burning raw crude oil doesn't make the process sound any better for the environment.
I'm not sure how much oil needs to be burned to produce 6 kWh, but since a GGE is 33.4 kWh, I'd assume it's at least 1/6th of a gallon. Gasoline emissions need to account for the oil burned to produce that heat and all energy consumed in the gasoline's storage and distribution.
Certainly, it's not great. But it's not the case that you can run an electric car off the energy needed simply to refine gasoline for a normal car. I'm all for a full accounting of all the energy used in the whole process, certainly.
Running a Tesla on pure coal power is still more efficient than running a normal car on gas. And how many places in the world have nothing but coal power?
2lbs/kWh * 0.3kWh/mile = 0.6lbs of CO2 per mile. However, that's before transmission losses and inefficiency in the charger and battery. Transmission is about 94% efficient (from http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=105&t=3), charging is about 92% efficient, and the battery is about 90% efficient. That's about 78% efficiency in total, so divide that 0.6lbs by 0.78 to get 0.77lbs of CO2 per mile.
Burning gallon of gasoline emits about 20 pounds of CO2. Dividing by 0.77lbs of CO2 per mile gives us an equivalent of 26MPG, approximately.
Not spectacular, but not bad. The Model S is a big and powerful car, and similar gas cars have similar or worse efficiency. You'd be better off driving a Prius in this contrived situation, but then the "no real-world grid is 100% coal" thing comes in. For example, my local grid is about one-third coal, one-third natural gas, one-third nuclear. That cuts CO2 in about half compared to 100% coal, so now it's more like 52MPG. And coal's share is constantly sliding downwards, so over the lifetime of the car that number will improve.
I don't know as much about other emissions, but I'm confident the coal version will easily be better there. Big power plants are easier to run cleanly (they're easier to monitor, they don't care about weight nor much about space, and there's a single stationary point to install scrubbers, filters, and whatever else) and they tend to be far away from people.
Edit: I forgot to mention losses in the system from before the act of combustion. For a proper accounting, you need to account for emissions for the whole chain, from getting the stuff out of the ground to moving the car. Coal is much more efficient at getting out of the ground and into the combustion chamber, since it's already in burnable form, and then gets shipped in huge bulk by freight train. Efficiency losses there are single-digit percentages. Gasoline needs to be refined which alone takes something like 15% of the energy in the gasoline, plus transportation involves lots of small quantities being trucked all over the place. Total losses are about 20%.
I also want to say that I'm not really defending coal here, and I'd be quite happy if we could just stop burning it entirely. But the reality is that it's there, and it sucks, but even sucking as much as it does, it's still better than burning gas in hundreds of millions of little motors.
I'm from germany and I hope that our automotive's starts to waking up. especially after the vw scandal. fuel filled motors aren't the future.
please american companies. create electric vehicles, lower the prices and start attacking our foolish overpriced german car manufacterers.
a hybrid will change nothing and 14k€ for a car is fucking expensive, especially since the innovation there is nearly nothing. in over 20 years cars didn't get much love.
and the design? cars looking more and more the same.
Maybe because it's not in Silicon Valley and thus less well known but Detroit Electric has created a lot of PR locally about its plan to take on Tesla with a car out in 2016:
It is a polarising design but it's been quite popular.
The reason for its popularity is a combination of two markets: (a) families where the wife wants wants a SUV but the husband wants something more sporty/aggressive and (b) inner city workers who just want more ride height.
Really doesn't. Apple has never actively released who works for them except their leadership team, they never put up fake web pages, they never prerelease products.
This would be a complete 180 in terms of their style and behaviour.
One thing that's likely to attract downvotes are comments to the tune of "+1", "I agree", or in this case, "good one!". The sentiment can be expressed with the little up-arrow next to the comment you like, and then it doesn't clutter up the thread. HN tries to keep a high signal to noise ratio, and part of that is greying out comments that really don't add anything. FWIW, I didn't downvote you, but that's probably the reason that people did.
Now I'm picturing the latest in automobile technology: the Benjabug Franklin! It designs ambitious hats, runs off of lightning, and modifies the timezone it's in dynamically for +/- hours of fun!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3307660/Myste...