Summary via ChatGPT
A Delaware judge invalidated Elon Musk’s $56 billion Tesla pay package for a second time, citing undue influence and unfair terms set by Musk. Despite shareholder approval earlier this year, the court ruled the process failed to address governance concerns and transparency. The judge emphasized the board’s failure to prove the compensation plan’s fairness, suggesting alternative, reasonable payment options were possible. Tesla may appeal the decision or propose a new compensation plan.
18650’s existed. But nobody was putting them in cars. All the prototype cars automakers were showing off used large format pouch cells. These had various issues with heat and longevity and safety and thermal expansion. Using 18650’s in a car was a Tesla invention.
Teslas today no longer use 18650s, they use 2170s and 4680s, both cell formats brought into mainstream by Tesla.
The bigger issue is nobody was building electric cars!! All the pieces of tech existed but nobody was bothering to put them together. A big part of Tesla’s mission (which they accomplished) was basically to embarrass mainstream automakers into building EVs. That’s worked.
That’s what I credit Tesla/Elon with doing- actually building a damn EV and selling it.
Martin Eberhard et al built Tesla. They hacked a
PorscheLotus Elise apart and used laptop cells to make it scary fast, and inexpensive. Musk never founded the company, nor did he contribute to the engineering in a meaningful way.Melon isn’t an engineer, he’s a fuckin dead weight clown who is damn good at convincing people he matters.
Lotus Elise
Primarily, yes.
I can’t find it now, but there was a talk with Eberhard about doing a lot of initial work on a salvaged 911… can’t find the source though, so never mind.
I was literally watching it happen.
Musk, Eberhard, and a few others came together to build an electric sports car. The only reason Musk isn’t listed as a ‘founder’ is because one of them already had an LLC registered and it saved them some paperwork to reuse that.
I understand you dislike him and that’s fine, but calling him names just makes you look like an uneducated buffoon.
Your uneducated opinion is observed and discarded.
What does a thoroughly inane statement like “watching it happen” mean to you?
Closely following the company during that time period and their various development efforts.
Watching Eberhard repeatedly go down the tech tree of a gearbox, and having it repeatedly fail. Switching designs, switching manufacturers, two or three times doing this and ending up with a result that would not be reliable.
Then Elon steps in with an obvious, simple solution of just put a single gear and a larger electric motor and suddenly development moves forward.
I also note with interest that nobody of any real acclaim wanted to work with Eberhard after he left Tesla. Ex Tesla employees are generally in high regard, Eberhard was not.
I enjoy your calmly delivered flimflam.
Such as: having direct visibility into the proprietary developments that are negative to the company in its infancy.
That musky actually understands why use of a ‘bigger motor’ would solve the problems associated with gearboxes. For that matter, that you understand the technical choices made in the matter are funny as well.
What kind of motors were picked, and why? I further love that your messiah still went for a gearbox design in the earlier model s that failed very very loudly as they drive around.
You’ve helped further cement how embarrassing his engineering skills are to professional mechanical engineers in the midst of your proselytizing.
I’d say Tesla and other companies are succeeding in spite of, not because of, musky. Cheerio.
You’ve proven yourself uneducated and closed-minded. I’m not saying that because we disagree, I’m saying that because you are asserting a position without evidence and an ad hominem attack (making fun of me personally rather than attacking the position I have).
For example- a bigger motor solves the problem of shifting by removing the shifter. Eberhard was hung up on the shifting problem for over a year, let that issue stall Tesla’s development. You don’t have to be an engineering genius or pro-Musk to read the history on that. And I was literally watching it happen- reading the Tesla blog where they were talking about the engineering problems with making the gearbox shift at high RPM and switching from one design to another, one supplier to another, etc.
You don’t have to be a professional engineer or pro-Musk to understand the logic behind ‘the best part is no part’.
And you don’t have to be an auto expert or pro-Musk to see that most automakers were stuck in a constant ‘10 years away’ cycle of EVs. You just have to follow a little history or be alive longer than Tesla (that’s not an age insult, just pointing out that for automakers EVs were essentially a pipe dream. For reference watch “Who killed the electric car?”).
I’d encourage you to open your mind, set aside your personal political biases and recognize that there are few absolute black and white / angels or devils in the world. Good people are imperfect, bad people sometimes do good things. Taking an ‘absolutist’ view on almost any issue leaves you blind to the nuance of the world and that leaves you uninformed.
Best of luck.
Yawn. Hello ad hominem, early on. Lots of unnecessary verbiage.
The rest of your argument is both trite & false, and again reveals a lack of engineering prowess/understanding. It’s not always intuitive, so I don’t blame you much. Quick example: gears add contact friction, but also significantly reduce bearing loads on the motors, among other things. You trade some efficiency for better lifetimes on the parts experiencing the most pressure. Further, Teslas still have a gearbox, and even as a single stage system, they still experience failures. “No part” eh?
If there was anything to learn from reading a carefully manicured blog where honesty isn’t guaranteed, it’s that there wasn’t enough of a commitment to getting it right, iterating takes time, which is still why I won’t buy one of those styrofoam-padded shitboxes. Still buying an EV, just one that was actually well designed.
That you feel attacked by my laughing at your conclusions, well… Cry about it.
I don’t feel attacked. You’re just another internet person. I’m concerned that there’s an awful lot of people like you these days, who take some position and then mock anyone who disagrees. It shows a serious lack of critical thinking.
Quite true. Electric motors want high RPM, so you NEED a reduction gear to turn a motor’s high-RPM output into a car’s low-RPM wheel rotation speed.
But the problem isn’t gears, the problem is SHIFTING. At highway speed an electric motor can be going at 15,000-20,000 RPM and is quite happy in that situation. A gearbox is too. But SHIFTING at that speed, even with a synchromesh, puts extreme stress on the system. THAT is the problem. Eberhard was focused on getting shifting to work, and for over a year was trying various designs of two-speed shifting gearbox from various manufacturers. This wasn’t something that existed, that anybody had bothered to design. And Tesla had working specimens, they just didn’t last long at all because the extreme stress of shifting at highway speed would shred the gears. Eberhard was letting that technical problem hold up delivery of the car.
Elon then said ‘scrap the shifting, put a simple one speed reduction gear and increase the motor torque to provide whatever we lose by not having a 1st gear’. And I’d say that is objectively the correct answer, proven by the fact that now EVERY EV from EVERY automaker uses that design.