Tesla to wind down Cybertruck production

My Ioniq 5 has been a godsend. No, it can't power the house without dorking around with my electrical panel. But we can run the fridge, dishwasher, a few standing lights and keep phones and computers full charged.

I used a similar setup to Alex's but with the outlet in the rear seat instead of the V2X connector. I will probably by the V2X connector since it supposedly hanldles higher power draw.

Best practice would be to build a separate structure and physically separate the battery from your house.

My experience with power outages (after big summer storms, not a hurricane thank goodness) has been that my neighborhood is impacted, but that places nearby have power. They tend to restore commercial first, so the supercharger near me is up and running before my house.

I am guessing that one of the use cases is a support unit to charge an EV just enough to get it to a charging station.

As an electrical generator, it's really not very good. The alternator is rated at 120 Amps (bigger than many, smaller than others).

At 13.8v, that's only 1,656 Watts -- on a good day, with the engine wound up. But the engine won't be wound up. It will instead be idling. The output will be less than 1656 Watts.

It burns right around 0.6 gallons of gasoline per hour (ie 22kW!) while idling and doing ~nothing else. It holds 21 gallons of gas.

So the unachievable best-case of idling-and-doing-no-real-work means that if it starts with a full tank of fuel, it will run out in 35 hours.

And in the real world, it will be doing work since that's the whole point of the exercise. It will therefore use somewhat more than its do-nothing 0.6 gallons per hour idle consumption.

We can ignore the longevity issues of treating a gas-fired vehicle as a stationary generator (these are expensive parts that are getting abnormally heat-soaked) because this is a temporary solution to a temporary problem, but as a practical matter: I'll still need to fill it up with gas, however I do that[1], about every day.

And, sure: That can be a way to solve some problems. With a decent inverter stashed out of the weather, connected with appropriately-big cables, I can probably use it to run the gas-fired furnace, the fridge and freezer, some lights, and some digital entertainment. Maybe it can't run all of that at the same time, but I'm smart and I'll manage.

The gas-fired car probably is useful, as long as I can drive somewhere and fill it back up.

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Or: I could just plug stuff into an appropriate EV. It can sit there quietly being the giant battery that it is, and I can drive it out every couple/three days, or maybe just once per week as some suggest, to fill it back up.

It won't have an idle baseload of anywhere near the equivalent of 0.6 gallons of gasoline and it will therefore respond well to intermittent, dynamic loads like heat and refrigeration.

The EV is probably more-useful, as long as I can drive somewhere and charge it back up.

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[1]: Sure, sure. I can carry a large quantity of gasoline to make the trips more-worthwhile. I can even store some locally (it's a pain to keep it fresh, but do-able).

If I were into that kind of prepping then what would be my practical limit? An extra 40 gallons, for ~60 overall? Great! Now I can run the car/house combo for 3 days before heading back out, and the EV still probably wins on this metric.

Regardless, the thing that’s really great for cost effectiveness is that the same large battery can be used everyday for driving and also used rarely for emergency home backup systems.

Ice storms/blizzards in the upper midwest can last days and make roads impassible to the point where they can't/don't fix the very many downed lines until the storm passes enough that they don't have to deprioritize rural roads and outages.

It's just not safe/possible to fix a line downed by ice when it's -30 out in blizzard conditions even if the trucks could navigate the roads.

This turns into the occasional several day outage for some folks.

I've also lived in parts of cities that essentially were impossible to have power failures absent very local equipment failures (like the power equipment attaching my building to the grid failing once) because the lines were underground and there was a power plant very close by.

It depends on a lot of things and lots of people assume everywhere else is just like where they are.

You can stockpile diesel for a generator (unlike electrons). That's what actual prepping looks like.

Take it from a Ukrainian.

Source: I've mucked up multiple small engines with bad stored gas.

I was remembering how critical infrastructure stays on. Most critical infrastructure is commercial.

However, a business park or an office block gets cut off with the homes.

And there's actually a good chance that PG&E is not being paid: most of the big tech companies have large solar installations covering the parking lot which power all the EV chargers, so they cut PG&E out of it entirely and produce their own power.

PG&E has special tariffs for meters that are used only for powering commercial EV chargers ("BEV1" and "BEV2"). They're about half of what a residential consumer would pay for an EV-only meter (the "EV-B" tariff).

Iceland (part of Europe) is the size of Florida with 2/3 the population of Wyoming. 20% of Iceland’s population are 1st generation immigrants. Neither of those facts prevents Iceland from filling in, upgrading, and maintaining their infrastructure. The two week power blackout which GP’s friend experienced is unheard of in Iceland. And every population center, no matter how remote and low population (we are talking fewer then 100) still gets broadband internet via traditional infrastructure.

I also want to note that I did not compare America with Europe, you did that. And it is a determent to your argument (as if your racism didn’t do that already).

the thing all american states have in common is their american ideology, their american political economy, and their population of americans. it just so happens that these are almost always found, coincidentally or not, alongside extremely outdated and poorly-maintained infrastructure, and a class of ultra-rich parasites hoarding many of the resources. drawing connections between any of these phenomena is left as an exercise to the reader

Not a Cybertruck fan myself, but unless you are going to tow or take many long road trips, an EV truck will work great for anyone who can charge at home. And most people don't tow, or take long road trips, with their trucks.

I am not a fan of the truck, but let’s make some sense here

- the Cybertruck uses almost twice as much energy as your Niro EV

- the 40% efficient Prius uses about 2.5x as much energy as your 95% efficient Niro EV.

what seems off?

To get their equal ranges, a Ford Raptor would have a ~4 gallon tank. The fact that the cybertruck can go so far while not towing is the miracle. How far do you think you're going to get with 4 gallons?

I think in general, a country trying to become industrious and eco-friendly by saving energy is like a person trying to become a millionaire by pinching pennies. Once you have optimized an economic system to eliminate the major cost centers, you're going to have extremely hard time improving it through further cost savings.

For example, If my expenditure roughly matches my income, I would need to eliminate 100% of my expenses just to make enough surplus to match doubling my income. Once I have managed the major cost centers (rent, insurance, etc.) it's not going to be worth my time to further optimize my expendature, the time would be better spent improving my income

For EVs, the fuel cost is already low. The next cost centers are like maintainance, tires, battery life. It would be better to attack these other cost centers or somehow pursue functionality that increases utility of the car.

Also, if you factor in the construction, idk what the timeline to pay that off would be.

Yeah that's the exact post I saw. I didn't believe the video at the time but I suppose it's possible with enough battery paralellism and cooling.

https://www.thecooldown.com/green-tech/new-ev-technology-cha...

I will definitely try this again. If it works, that'd be great.

Only available on Tesla models ordered after October 1, 2026

Tesla models older than 6 weeks are SOL (for now? Maybe it just needs some backwards compatibility testing)

That's the point of V2H (or a residential battery, which it emulates). Although you still want a UPS for computers: I doubt "without any interruption" is at the scale of a UPS, and possibly not at the scale a desktop computer will require. Notably it depends how the grids cuts off, if it cuts off in one shot (like throwing the breaker) the failover should be almost instantaneous, but if it fluctuates before failing the battery might need a lot longer to engage.

In Australia, $10k would buy not only a ton of solar panels but also batteries. The US has decided to make solar and batteries at the home super expensive, unnecessarily.

That doesn't mean electric cars shouldn't be considered as power backup, or that buying a nice electric car vs a nice gas car doesn't come with the added benefit of "Don't need a 10k generator anymore".

See, your problem is assuming that the EV is 80-100K. Or that the ICE car is 30K. This is a contrived comparison. An average new car is well over 30K. And I bought a brand new Lightning for 50K. Being able to use 131kWh of battery for things other than driving is a pleasant bonus, and I prefer it to having a gas generator I have to keep maintained and store fuel for.

If there is a major outage most bosses understand that you won't be working normally because you need to deal with the emergency.

Like the storm surge walls at Fukushima, all infrastructure is designed with a certain size of storm or event in mind based on historical averages and outliers.

Climate change is throwing all that to shit.

Your comment says plain and clear you’ve never lived through a “once in 100 years” level event more than once in a decade, and you don’t realize how much it would cost to upgrade what we’ve spent ~100 years building.

It’s trillions, just to get started.

I also wonder if you’d be fine with increasing taxes to pay for all that, or if you already complain about “high taxes”

First time I’ve been compared to an AI agent.

This is a common enough occurrence in rural Louisiana, at least. And I think almost everyone I know has a 200gal or larger propane tank in their yard, specifically for multiday outages. My father-in-law doesn't have a single propane appliance, but he does have a 250gal tank, for his generac.

We don't we have a single 100lb tank, but that will run the little AC for 3 or 4 days.

This is important enough to me that I researched slow start AC units ~8 years ago when replacing my AC. I learned that almost any heat pump will do, so that's what I have.

https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/heat-waves-and-annual-death-ra...

the iphone is an outlier imho, and i dont think EV will replicate this.

The manufacturing capacity of batteries in china will continue to be a dominant force, and prevent competition in other countries from really setting up properly.

Not to mention the chinese EV giants have the R&D budget to be the ones to discover new chemistry.

They are surviving because of massive scale but they are losing ground.

> The only thing Toyota would need to wholeheartedly jump into EV is the supply chain and production capability for big battery packs.

So the only thing they need is the hardest part of the supply chain. At Toyota scale building that supply-chain is fucking gigantic. It takes a decade to build that.

All the battery companies already have large multi-year of-take agreements. And they are not building massive new capacity without new demand.

> but don't discount the possibility that batteries are not at the end of their evolution and early entrants might get burned by some new chemistry or form factor.

We haven't seen new form factors in many decades.

As for chemistry, everybody is working on that. Toyota has burned billions and achieved nothing.

Yes new chemistry are constantly coming in, but the reality is, each new chemistry innovation needs a decade or so to scale. And it mostly builds on existing supply chains and suppliers.

Take a look at things like silicon additives, they have been talked about for a long time, and it has been increasing. And it will continue to increase, but its not a magical pill that makes all existing battery factories obsolete.

Battery companies sell their new state of the art batteries to their long term partners first. And those partners are the first to learn of new innovations.

It is genuinely insane how divorced SV is from actual people and reality.

    > It's a shame __________ didn't lean harder into EVs 

Nissan seems to be scaling back their EV push in the US, though — but not in Europe, as far as I know.

Nissan is also making EVs for the Chinese market, which are not being exported anywhere else.

Lower labour costs per hour can be balanced against lower cost of living for workers.

Industrial Policy Spending for China’s EV Sector (subsidies) have dropped from $13,800 USD per vehicle in 2018 to $4,700 USD in 2023 and are less today in 2026.

How do these subsidies compare to US subsidies to the fossil fuel oil and gas industry?

Koreans look competitive. It's interesting that the later the entrant to the market, the faster they are to adapt.

Cool, build rail and solar.

But they aren't really. In terms of efficiency, a 2x increase is a lot yes but the thing that has finally made them really viable is simply the cost dropping like a rock.

I don't care if I have to buy 2x as many solar panels when they cost as much as a fence post.

That cost reduction was entirely investment into production capacity. None of that couldn't have been accomplished decades ago.

That's the saddest part. If we had been adults in the 70s, we could already be done the green revolution basically. We could have seriously prevented global warming.

But a bunch of idiots rejected that and instead voted for people who doubled down on fucking up the middle east and burning liquids.

Correction: the European Union imposed additional tariffs (up to 35%) on Chinese-made battery-electric vehicles, while conventional hybrids and plug-in hybrids were exempt from those additional tariffs, giving Chinese manufacturers an incentive to shift toward hybrid sales.

And even if you do keep cars indefinitely, it can still be an important consideration because it affects how things work out when you need to make an insurance claim. It means your car is both more likely to be declared a total loss and more likely to be worth less than what you still owe for it when it does get totaled.

If my car (an asset) has more resale value, I’m more likely to sell it to buy a new one. They should be trying to protect my resale value — if they want me as a repeat customer. Even if I want to buy another Tesla, if my resale value isn’t high, I’d wait longer to buy a new one.

Or, what I’m leasing the car (reasonable for an EV and used to have better tax incentives)? If the end of lease value is low, I have to spend more on the depreciation over the lease. That makes my monthly payment higher. Instead, if the end of lease value is higher, I have a lower monthly payment and I’m more likely to buy the car.

Either way, Tesla was good at selling one car. They need to get better at selling the second or third one.

Speaking as someone who mostly drives 20 year old cars.

Personally I'm with you. I love my car because its exactly enough car for my needs. I bought it new (in 2016) and I never want to sell it. I'd get so much less (or more to the point I can't buy a new car) for the same money I spent on it.

I don't know if robotaxi will take off, but if it does, it massively undercuts Waymo because the vehicles are just so much cheaper to make and are made in house.

So let me guess, fully unsupervised self driving is rolling out "next year" right?

https://www.tesla.com/robotaxi/safety

It looked like it might happen for a bit! And it is quite bad of course that that could have happened! But it didn't.