Comment on Elon Musk: your new Tesla will drive from the factory floor, to your house 'this year'
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 days agoIt’s not like it’s going to plug itself in
It could stop at Tesla “dealerships” along the way and have the staff plug them in, or have fancy robotic chargers at just those locations. Surely there are enough “dealerships” that this is feasible for most people.
theneverfox@pawb.social 2 days ago
Nah, there’s not that many. There’s large swaths of the US where you have to drive across multiple states to get to one, in part for legal restrictions on dealerships
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Yeah, I contemplated this idea, but you’d need a network of dealerships all within no more than about 450km of each other. Actually, a lot less than that if you want to deliver something like a cybertruck this way. And Tesla just doesn’t have that kind of infrastructure, especially in the Midwest and South. And that means there’s no good way to get a car from Fremont or Austin to anywhere on the East Coast either. At best you could maybe make this work in California.
But also consider the scale of what you’re talking about. Generally you’re looking at selling thousands of cars per day for a successful production model. Can their dealerships handle charging thousands of cars per day?
theneverfox@pawb.social 2 days ago
I think you replied to the wrong comment, but I agree
Granted, if they could actually make this work, they could probably do the robotaxi thing or even get into logistics. That would make it easily worth it to build dispatch centers basically everywhere
That is, if they could make it work
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I was chiming in with my agreement on your disagreement, if that makes sense.
The thing about the robotaxi thing is that it only really works as metro level infrastructure. Once you start trying to do that at a level where your vehicles can traverse whole states, the costs balloon like crazy.