RealTesla

Hey everyone,

https://lemmy.world has upgraded to 0.18.1-rc4, which has fixed a number of old bugs, but introduced new ones.

1. Federation of posts to other servers seems to be more reliable now.

2. However, login issues are abound in this version. Clear your browser cache if you're having issues, especially a "spinning login" followed by seemingly no-login happening.

3. There are additional "automatic logout" issues that I haven't figured out yet. Even if you successfully log in, the server seems to log me out at random. I can't stay logged in for an extended period of time anymore.

EDIT: Lemmy users are likely already familiar with these bugs. But a number of lurkers are from /r/RealTesla subreddit and may be keeping an eye on the usability of Lemmy. Overall, I'll say that Lemmy is usable, but slow and a few annoying bugs. 18.1-rc4 has fixed most of the worst issues, this edition is mostly annoyances that hamper my focus, but at the end of the day isn't really that big of a deal.

Reading limits to Twitter: Verified accounts are 6000 posts/day reading limit, while unverified accounts are 600.

Twitter is basically unusable to new accounts, you will barely reach these limits in just 5 minutes of browsing.

So, start guessing: How much will it be?

My guess:

• Initial release will be a midrange model at around 80k
• there will also be a top model at about 100k, available later
• and of course E will promise a "working man's" edition sometime in the future. It will be said to be around 40k and will be postponed over&over again.

Meta: Imma try this "[fake tag]" thing. We don't have flairs but I can somewhat emulate the effect by putting [words] in front of the title.

This article is more about Silicon Valley culture and VCs current awful set of thinking, leading to companies that don't actually make things for the public good.

Editor's note: This is the 2nd of a 3-part Matt Levine opinion piece, just focusing on the EV/financing portion of his op-ed. There are many links (especially when Matt Levine says "this"), but I'm not going to bother copypasting the links, too much effort to just reformat this into Markdown as it is!

Oh Lordstown

In about 2020, a lot of electric-vehicle companies went public in the US and raised money by merging with special-purpose acquisition companies. Some general features of these de-SPAC deals were:

• The EV company was not all that far along in developing a commercially viable vehicle.
• But it gave shareholders projections saying that it would sell a zillion vehicles at huge profits by, like, 2023.
• It did not.

It is interesting to consider how that might end. Like, you raise a bunch of money from retail investors to build electric vehicles, you flail around for a while not building electric vehicles … then what? Some options:

1. You keep flailing until you run out of money, then stop. You file for bankruptcy, there’s no money left, there’s no debt (who would lend you money?), the shareholders get zero, it’s not great but it’s fairly straightforward.

2. You stop flailing at some point before you run out of money. You file for bankruptcy, there is money left, there’s no debt (who would lend you money?), you sell whatever assets there are, and you divide up whatever money is left among the shareholders. This is a better outcome than No. 1, though perhaps less likely. If you run a company, it hasn’t succeeded in making electric vehicles, and it hasn’t run out of money, you will be tempted to keep spending the money to try to make electric vehicles, even if your chances of success are slim. Quitting while there is money left and giving it back to the shareholders is better for them, but psychologically difficult for you.

3. Same as No. 2, but with a subtle distinction. You don’t have debt per se (who would lend you money?), but you do have some big liabilities. The liabilities are: The people who bought your stock in the de-SPAC deal, who believed your projections about selling a zillion vehicles at huge profits, probably sued you at some point after you started missing projections and the stock started dropping. There is a securities-fraud shareholder class action. The US Securities and Exchange Commission also probably took an interest in those projections. You file for bankruptcy, you have some assets, you sell them for some money, and then a court has to figure out (1) how much of the money goes to the SEC, (2) how much goes to the (current and former) shareholders who sued you for fraud and (3) how much is left over for your current shareholders.

So here is the August 2020 investor presentation from electric-pickup-truck company Lordstown Motors Corp.’s de-SPAC merger, projecting that it would be in “full production” by the second half of 2021, that it would deliver 31,600 vehicles in 2022 and 65,000 in 2023, and that it “has already received ~27k orders (average order size of ~300 trucks) before the first vehicle has been produced, representing potential revenue sufficient to cover 2021 production and into 2022.” In fact Lordstown has produced 65 trucks — not 65,000, just 65 — in its entire history through yesterday, and its former chief executive officer resigned in 2021 when it turned out that many of those pre-orders were fake.

But Lordstown did manage to raise about $780 million from investors in the SPAC and from institutional investors in a parallel private investment in public equity deal. It spent a surprisingly large amount of that money — and of other cash that it raised, including by selling a factory to Foxconn Technology Group and getting some equity investment from Foxconn — on building its 65 trucks; its losses from operations over the last three years total $890 million, or about $13.7 million per truck. (“Anticipated [bill of materials] costs were approximately $42,000 per vehicle for manufacturing in 2021,” says Lordstown, which “compared favorably to the Company’s anticipated selling price of $52,500 for the Endurance.”) But it still has money left: As of yesterday, it “has approximately $136 million in cash on hand” and no funded debt.

But yesterday Lordstown filed for bankruptcy, and I have been quoting from the first-day declaration in that case. There is no debt to restructure, so the bankruptcy is not about that. There are some assets to sell — its December 2022 balance sheet shows $194 million of property, plant and equipment — and Lordstown plans to run a sale process for its business, but don’t get too excited:

The Company does not believe that capital from other sources is available. In September 2021, the Company retained Jefferies LLC (“Jefferies”) to explore all market alternatives. Through that process, the Company and Jefferies, in consultation with Foxconn, prepared a list of more than 50 potential investors and strategic OEM partners across the globe to be contacted. Jefferies, the Company and Foxconn allocated responsibility to contact the potential investors and strategic OEM partners based upon who had the best relationship with the most relevant person at those companies. While the Company, its advisors, and potential partners held numerous meetings and in-person evaluations of the Endurance, as of the Petition Date, the Company has not received any actionable indications of interest.

There is some operating business left, but it loses money, so Lordstown plans to stop:

Recognizing that it would still require substantial additional funding to execute its business plan, including scaling the Endurance program and developing new vehicle programs, the Company has continued to take steps to reduce its cash burn and preserve its assets for the benefit of stakeholders. Given the Company’s current prospects—including Foxconn’s unwillingness to honor its funding and product development commitments and the extremely limited ability to raise capital in the current market environment—continuing production of the Endurance would only eat away at the Company’s resources. …

The Company is currently in the process of finalizing a limited number of Endurances still in production. Once that process is complete, the Company intends to halt production of the Endurance until a value-maximizing transaction is identified in order to preserve its assets and turn its focus entirely to maximizing recoveries through the chapter 11 cases.

Schematically this is a company with about $136 million of cash, some equipment and inventory to sell, no debt, and no operating business. It can just stop, send the shareholders their pro rata share of the cash, and go home.

Well, no, there are two real issues in the bankruptcy. One is that yesterday Lordstown also sued Foxconn, in the bankruptcy court, essentially blaming Foxconn for its failure. In 2021 Lordstown sold its factory to Foxconn and entered into a series of agreements to work together to make electric trucks; Foxconn would supply the components, while Lordstown would supply “cross-functional expertise in designing, engineering and developing electric vehicles from concept through launch” and “additional capabilities in sales, marketing.” Lordstown’s current complaint accuses Foxconn of slow-walking and breaching those agreements. 1 (Foxconn vehemently disagrees.)

There is also an investment agreement in which Foxconn agreed to buy about $170 million of Lordstown stock; it bought some but not all of that stock, and honestly I am sympathetic? I also would not want to buy stock in a company that was sliding into bankruptcy; if I had an agreement to buy that stock, I would look very carefully at the agreement to see if I could find an escape hatch. 2 But arguably Foxconn's failure to buy the stock is what tipped Lordstown into bankruptcy. Anyway Lordstown is suing over all of this, and I suppose if it wins then it will get either (1) a pile of money to give to shareholders or (2) a better business deal with Foxconn that it can leverage to sell itself for more money to give to shareholders.

But the other issue is the liabilities: Lordstown has no debt, but oh does it have lawsuits. Shareholders who believed Lordstown’s hype in 2020 had started suing for securities fraud by 2021, and the SEC started an investigation. 3 “The excitement about [Lordstown’s] innovative technology and EV aspirations drove its equity market capitalization to reach $5.3 billion,” says the bankruptcy filing, somewhat euphemistically; its market cap yesterday was about $36 million. If you got excited about Lordstown’s innovative technology and EV aspirations because of its optimistic manufacturing plans and fake pre-orders, so you bought the stock at a $5.3 billion valuation and then saw it go down 99%, you might sue for fraud, and a class of Lordstown shareholders did.

The bankruptcy declaration says:

The purpose of these Chapter 11 Cases is for the Company to maximize value by conducting a robust sale process, reducing its cash burn to preserve resources, and centralizing the claims asserted against the Company to efficiently resolve those claims and provide meaningful recoveries to its creditors and, if sufficient, its shareholders.

As in any bankruptcy, one goal is to maximize the value of assets, by selling the company for as much as it can get and by suing Foxconn for damages. And as in any bankruptcy, the other goal is to figure out who has a claim to the assets, and divide the assets fairly among those claimants. Here the claims are fairly simple, with no debt and limited operations. The question is how much of the money Lordstown has to pay to its former shareholders (or the SEC) for getting their hopes up, and how much money it will have left to pay its current shareholders.

Note: Subscripts make post too long. Read subscripts in this followup comment: https://lemmy.world/comment/608642

Another crash where a Tesla is responsible for. We at RealTesla know that Teslas seem to hit these concrete barriers more-and-more often (and seemingly correlated to autopilot).

I'm not sure if we'll get to the bottom of this one, but autopilot Teslas crashing into median strips is the classic way to die in a Tesla. I don't think autopilot can always tell where the center of the road is.

As Lemmy is a different beast than Reddit, I feel the need to summarize the Lemmy situation for everyone. Especially with how it affects this community.

1. Federation vs Defederation -- This is turning out to be more important than I recognized initially. But not "too important". As long as Federation works, we're not supposed to think about it. But... when things don't work... well... we gotta start talking specifics. The long-story short is that https://lemmy.world is where !realtesla exists, and thus any federation and/or defederation issue that affects lemmy.world will be affecting this community. Keeping track of this will be a pain, but hopefully the lemmy community figures these things out in the long term.

2. https://beehaw.org -- Defederated with https://lemmy.world for internet drama/political reasons. In particular, beehaw.org does not want open signups, not until more moderation tools become available. https://lemmy.world is aiming at a Reddit-like open signup scheme, so its fundamentally conflicting with https://beehaw.org's philosophies. The expectation is for better moderation tools to be invented and eventually allow the two servers to federate again.

3. .18 vs .17 -- https://lemmy.world has been hit with a huge number of bot-accounts, so the admins around here have enabled CAPTCHA-enrollment. However, CAPTCHA was broken in .18, so https://lemmy.world has decided to stay on .17. This seems to have broken federation to some extent (not fully decoupled like Beehaw.org... but there's a HUGE number of glitches occurring right now with .18 instances).

You lemmy.ca users? (I know you exist, we talked on Discord, lol), you're on .18. You're gonna get glitches with a .17 instance like Lemmy.world. But Lemmy.world will not upgrade until the promised .18.1 CAPTCHA release.

4. kbin -- kbin, especially kbin.social, is entirely different software from Lemmy. There is only one glitch I'm aware of: the Lemmy-post will break if you forget to select a language (ex: "English") when you write a response to kbin users and/or kbin.social.

5. Search to bring in a community -- An interesting "Lemmyism", is that communities in the Federation don't exist until a user searches for it. For example, if there is a [email protected] that https://lemmy.world is unaware of, "someone" on the server needs to search for it before the https://lemmy.world server is aware of its existence. This sets off some kind of backend process where the https://lemmy.world server begins to download all the posts / history that makes it possible to subscribe to that community. Eventually, the user needs to subscribe to fully bring the community into lemmy.world. This process can take a long time, minutes or even hours. I don't know. If anyone is having issues finding a community across the federation, you can message me to help bring it into the https://lemmy.world server. Or message me if you wanna learn how to do it on your own server. I'm still learning the details myself, but its obviously not the easiest process.

That should cover it for now. This federation thing will be a pain to keep track of, but it offers benefits. Lets hope the benefits outweigh the downsides.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36453633

Hacker news got a good discussion going on this one here.

Seems like yet another brand new Model Y has stopped in its tracks on the road. No doubt the army will be out in force telling the owner they drove it wrong, or baselessly claiming they hit something, or even just claiming it's fake.

Either way, the excuse generator is kicking into overdrive.

Looks like Twitter has more former employees suing them than they have employees remaining.

I saw an advertisement for IONIQ 5 EV having augmented reality HUDs, so I looked up this video. Seems like its working.

Augmented Reality HUDs have to be one of the dumbest things I want in my next car.

Hmmm, while China is a manufacturing powerhouse, its inefficiencies like this that make me worried about their industry and sustainability.

That's a lot of BEVs that are rotting in the fields. Hopefully someone managed to recycle the batteries (or otherwise use them).

In the electric-vehicle business, the quandary is known as the nickel pickle. To make batteries for EVs, companies need to mine and refine large amounts of nickel. The process of getting the mineral out of the ground and turning it into battery-ready substances, though, is particularly environmentally unfriendly. Reaching the nickel means cutting down swaths of rainforest. Refining it is a carbon-intensive process that involves extreme heat and high pressure, producing waste slurry that’s hard to dispose of. The nickel issue reflects a larger contradiction within the EV industry: Though electric vehicles are designed to be less damaging to the environment in the long term than conventional cars, the process of building them carries substantial environmental harm. The challenge is playing out across Indonesia’s mineral-rich islands, by far the world’s largest source of nickel. These deposits aren’t deep underground but lie close to the surface, under stretches of overlapping forests. Getting to the nickel is easy and inexpensive, but only after the forests are cleared. One Indonesian mine, known as Hengjaya, obtained permits five years ago to expand its operations into a forested area nearly three times the size of New York City’s Central Park. The mine’s Australian owner, Nickel Industries, said that rainforest clearing in 2021 caused greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 56,000 tons of carbon-dioxide. That’s roughly equal to driving 12,000 conventional cars for a year, according to calculations by The Wall Street Journal based on U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data. Nickel Industries says that forestland it cleared had previously been degraded by illegal logging, which is why the Indonesian government allowed mining there. The company says it works hard to rehabilitate land, including planting over two million trees, and notes that its efforts have received environmental stewardship awards from Indonesia’s government. “Unfortunately, land clearing is required for all open-cast mining processes, including our operations,” said the firm’s sustainability manager, Muchtazar, who, like many Indonesians goes by one name. The negative impact is offset, he said, by nickel’s use in environmentally friendly batteries. A worker at a Harita processing facility. Tesla said in an April report that EVs cause more emissions during the manufacturing phase than conventional vehicles, due in part to the process of extracting and refining minerals. The company said it takes less than two years of driving for an EV’s total emissions to fall below that of a comparable internal combustion engine vehicle, however. Nickel is responsible for more than a third of the carbon emissions generated from making a common type of battery cell—more than any other mineral or production process—the report said. A new source Before 2018, most of the nickel used in EVs was the type generally found in non-equatorial countries, including Canada and Russia. The sulfide nickel found there is generally of a higher grade and easier to process than other varieties. The mines, often located deep underground, are expensive and time-consuming to develop. Auto executives worried about having enough nickel to meet rapidly growing demand for EVs. They had moved away from cobalt, another battery component, after human-rights groups and journalists reported on widespread child labor in cobalt operations and dangerous conditions faced by miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Automakers tweaked their batteries to reduce cobalt by adding more nickel. Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk said in a 2020 earnings call: “Any mining companies out there, please mine more nickel, OK?” Nickel prices soared on growing demand. By then, Chinese companies had begun working to unlock an expansive, albeit tricky, source. Millions of years ago, tectonic plates converged in what is now eastern Indonesia, lifting the ocean’s mineral-rich seafloor to the surface and creating today’s nickel bounty. The region is covered in rainforest, filled with flora especially adapted to the nickel-rich soil. Many of the creatures here don’t live anywhere else, like the maleo, a pink-breasted bird that buries its eggs underground, where they are heated by geothermal energy, and the anoa, the world’s smallest wild cattle species. But the laterite nickel found here wasn’t particularly suitable for EVs. Chinese companies focused on a process that turns that type of nickel into materials for EV batteries, known as high-pressure acid leach, or HPAL. The technique had been around for decades, but had proved glitchy. If Chinese scientists and engineers could develop facilities at scale, they could power the shift to electric vehicles. That was the pitch China’s Lygend Resources and Technology made to Indonesian miner Harita Group in 2018, when the two companies discussed setting up what would become Indonesia’s first HPAL facility. Investments such as these were encouraged by an Indonesian policy that in 2020 banned the export of raw nickel and required companies to process domestically. By 2021, at least two other Chinese companies had announced plans to construct billion-dollar nickel facilities, and more were drawing up proposals. The projects ramped up quickly. Indonesia produced around half of all nickel used in EV batteries made last year, up from somewhere between zero and 5% in 2017, according to CRU, a London-based firm specializing in commodities business intelligence. That’s expected to exceed 80% by 2027, CRU says. The nickel rush has created pressing new environmental concerns. The HPAL process involves dousing nickel ore in sulfuric acid and heating it to more than 400 degrees Fahrenheit at enormous pressures. Producing nickel this way is nearly twice as carbon-intensive as mining and processing sulfide nickel found in Canada and Russia. Another way of processing laterite ore that often uses coal-powered furnaces is six times as carbon-intensive, according to the International Energy Agency. A nickel-mining site on Obi Island. Companies also face questions about how to get rid of the processing waste. It is difficult to safely sequester in tropical countries because frequent earthquakes and heavy rains destabilize soil, which can cause waste dams to collapse. A 2018 Indonesian law allowed companies to obtain permits to discard mineral processing waste into the ocean. Environmentalists campaigned against the practice, which they said could pollute eastern Indonesia’s seas. A Maritime and Investment Affairs Ministry official, Septian Hario Seto, said authorities hadn’t approved any requests for deep-sea tailings disposal for HPAL plants and wouldn’t do so, as the contents of the waste didn’t meet criteria for being dumped into the ocean. Indonesia’s government says it is committed to enforcing environmental law and prosecutes companies it alleges have illegally mined in forests. Earlier this year, officials told nickel-industry executives to facilitate building military and police posts near their operations to ensure better oversight, according to an official presentation seen by the Journal. Competing with China China’s domination of Indonesian nickel processing poses risks for Western electric-vehicle companies at a time of fraying relations between Washington and Beijing. Last year, the U.S. government declared nickel a critical mineral whose supply is vulnerable to disruption, with very limited nickel production operations in the U.S. In March, Ford Motor announced that it was investing in a nickel-processing operation on Indonesia’s nickel-rich Sulawesi island. The company said the investment will help it hit its target of producing approximately two million electric vehicles in 2026. A Chinese company is at the center of that operation. For years, the the Indonesian unit of Brazilian miner Vale worked with Japan’s Sumitomo Metal Mining to develop the project. But the partnership hit snags. Sumitomo withdrew last year, and Vale signed an agreement with Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, a Chinese firm, to develop a nickel HPAL facility that Vale says will be larger than any that exist today.
A Sumitomo spokesman said the venture was scrapped because of differences in scheduling. A Vale spokeswoman said the company partnered with Zhejiang Huayou because that project was larger. “This framework gives Ford direct control to source the nickel we need—in one of the industry’s lowest-cost ways—and allows us to ensure the nickel is mined in line with our company’s sustainability targets” said Lisa Drake, a senior Ford executive. French miner Eramet is also in the early stages of developing a nickel facility alongside German chemical giant BASF. It isn’t seeking a Chinese partner, but its model takes advantage of “what has been unlocked by the Chinese engineering companies,” said Geoff Streeton, Eramet’s chief development officer. The ore for its potential plant will be sourced from a mine in which a Chinese company holds the largest stake. Clearing land in order to mine is inevitable, said Mr. Streeton. “Our intent is to rehabilitate back to a biodiverse outcome,” he said.