Monday, October 31, 2022

Mars, Bitches

It would be useful to have some published reflection about why, for years, Elon Musk's every technology promise was treated with minimal skepticism, if any, by most reporters covering him. Many of his claims were used to support defrauding the government in various ways (such frauds are often "forgotten" because it makes the politicians look bad).

Just one example.
And then Tesla started talking about battery swap. And it was very strange because Better Place’s business model was built around swap, and it made sense for them. With Tesla, it didn’t really make sense because if you own the car, and you own the battery, and you’ve taken care of that battery, do you want it swapped out with some battery whose provenance you’re not familiar with? Probably not. And so I became really intrigued by it. And I couldn’t find anybody describing actually using the station. They unveiled it. There was all this fanfare. Musk said it was all automated. But it was all happening behind a curtain. This was 2015. So there’s been a lot of water under the bridge now in Tesla world since then. And long story short, on a whim one Memorial Day weekend, I went down to the swap station, which is in a cow stockyard in the middle of the California Central Valley. And what I found there was that it was a busy holiday weekend, and Tesla had not opened it. It had not invited, as it claimed, the people who were using its vehicles to drive between LA and San Francisco. They said they were targeting the people with invites to use the station. There were long lines of people at the superchargers. People I was interviewing were saying, We would happily pay hundreds of dollars to just swap out our batteries and go now. Kids were crying in the backseat. What Tesla did do, instead of making that station open as it had told the public it was—and, by the way, they told the California Air Resources Board, which was subsidizing it quite heavily—was ship in some extra superchargers and hook them up to diesel generators. Instead of seeing this cutting edge future battery swap technology, I saw Tesla—literally the long tail pipe problem, as it’s called—become very, very short, as these diesel generators puffed out emissions and recharged these Teslas.
The fraud was using claims about battery swap technology to get tax credits.