Tesla Update 06.12.2020
Occasionally it’s worthwhile to step back and gather one’s thoughts regarding Tesla, its business environment, and its progress. This week, Tesla’s stock hit an all-time high, breaking the $1,000 a share mark for the first (but certainly not the last) time. Part of the reason for this is Tesla’s stock, as a high “beta” market […]
Eye Catcher Update 06.10.2020
These matters caught my eye recently: Tesla Job Description Tells a Lot … Germany Outdoing California in Promoting EVs … Tesla’s 2019 Impact Report is Out **** Tesla Job Description Tells a Lot About Musk and Tesla It’s amazing what a management job description can reveal about a company and its leader. A recent CleanTechnica […]
Eye Catcher Update 06.03.2020
These matters caught my eye recently: Tesla Superchargers … California’s electric vehicle “promotions”… A powered airplane with no moving propulsion parts … Nuro’s delivery robots **** No more lifetime free Supercharging for buyers of new Tesla Model S and Xs. With its recent round of price reductions Tesla giveth and taketh away. On the one […]
EV Economics and the Transition to Transportation-as-a-Service (TaaS) – Part 2
Future Vehicle Ownership Options: It is a foregone conclusion that for economic reasons alone battery-powered electric vehicles will replace conventional ICE-powered vehicles within the next 5 to 10 years. This change also provides the additional benefit of helping to ameliorate our current environmental problems as ICE-created smog will increasingly vanish. One of the current COVID-19 […]
Amazon Needs a Jumpstart On Its Electric Robo Delivery Vans
Readers of my recent blog regarding Tesla’s potential competitors already know that Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and CEO, had high expectations for his $700 million investment in Rivian, a startup in the electric truck market. Not only would Amazon be in on the rapidly growing electric vehicle marketplace, but Amazon’s capital would help enable the […]
Part Ways with Your Parts (Part 2)
In judging the impact of sku or parts count reduction on a manufacturing company, it’s the sku count that is the organizational killer. Each newly created sku has to be designed by either in-house or a supplier’s engineers, or perhaps it can be selected by a design engineer from a supplier catalog if it is […]
Eye Catcher Update 05.25.2020
****Masks and Social Distancing. We all have had to become familiar with social distancing during the past few months as the COVID-19 pandemic runs its course through the US and the world. But isn’t that what traditional US and rest of world auto OEMs have been doing forever? As I mentioned briefly in a previous […]
Part Ways with Your Parts (Part 1)
In a previous blog, we mentioned one of Elon Musk’s credos: “The best part is no part.” Or, why utilize several separate parts when one integrated part, say a metal casting or plastic molding, is better. Minimizing parts counts is one of the keys to the continual improvement (kaizen) effort that Musk has established as […]
Eye Catcher Update 05.20.2020
**** Most Big Box store corporations like Wal-Mart, IKEA, Target, Costco, Sam’s Club and others have had programs underway for several years to put their massive store and distribution center rooftops and store parking lot areas to work as bases for solar power panels. A CleanTechnica May 3rd, 2020 article highlights IKEA’s efforts to do […]
EV Economics and the Transition to Transportation-as-a-Service (TaaS)
Part 1 of 5 In this series, we will be looking at the economics of vehicle ownership and how that is changing due to a convergence of several exponentially accelerating technologies and new business models. Examples of these rapidly evolving technological changes are those from the fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI), neural nets and machine […]