Musk et al

[Zel]

entao lark, apagaste?

bom o arranque eh 1s mais rapido, eh isso ?

[Lark]

entao lark, apagaste?

bom o arranque eh 1s mais rapido, eh isso ?

apaguei sem querer
ia modificar e puf
mas sim é o arranque - insane mode

L

[Incognitus]

entao lark, apagaste?

bom o arranque eh 1s mais rapido, eh isso ?

apaguei sem querer
ia modificar e puf
mas sim é o arranque - insane mode

L

Mas isso é algo intrínseco aos EVs pelo que não constituirá a prazo uma vantagem para a TSLA.

[vbm]

São interessantes as duas frases de Keynes:

«The classical theorists resemble Euclidean geometers in a non-Euclidean world
who, discovering that in experience straight lines apparently parallel often meet,
rebuke the lines for not keeping straight—as the only remedy
for the unfortunate collisions which are occurring.

Yet, in truth, there is no remedy except
to throw over the axiom of parallels and
to work out a non-Euclidean geometry.»


«Words ought to be a little wild, for they are
the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.»


John Maynard Keynes


É que não serve de nada a intuição antropomórfica
do que parece o mundo ser, se ele na verdade
não é como o supomos, mas sim regulado
pelo que o determina, apreciemo-lo ou não!

[Dilath Larath]

Rocket Man: The otherworldly ambitions of Elon Musk

Elon Musk reigns over an entrepreneurial landscape of epic proportions: With Tesla Motors, the cherub-faced CEO wants to wean us off fossil fuels with electric cars for the masses. With SolarCity, he envisions panels blooming on a million rooftops. And even as the fortunes of these two firms soared on the SV150, this newspaper's latest index of Silicon Valley's top public tech companies, Musk was laying the groundwork for the world's biggest battery factory.

Yet this 42-year-old planet-saving, big-dreaming engineer has his sights on a celestial prize:

Mars.

With SpaceX, the rocket company he founded in 2002, Musk hopes to employ recyclable rockets to save humanity, blasting earthlings into space to one day build settlements on the Red Planet.

"Mars is what drives him," said Louis Friedman, an astronautics engineer who has known Musk for a decade. "From a psychological point of view, if you're stuck on Earth, humankind has limits -- and Elon isn't the kind of guy who likes to live with limits."

Don't bet against him. Silicon Valley's most intrepid CEO already has employed his potent combination of vision, determination and attention to detail to accomplish two tasks widely thought impossible: creating a viable new American car company with Palo Alto-based Tesla, and a successful private space venture with Hawthorne-based SpaceX. His vision springs from a childhood in South Africa, where he devoured comics and science fiction and flew with his swashbuckling dad in a small plane over the African bush. Now, thanks to the fortune he amassed co-founding PayPal and the risk he took on rockets, Musk has a shot at opening up the universe.

"The moment he was out of PayPal and could do something else, it was 'Let's see if we can launch a rocket,' " said Errol Musk, Elon's 68-year-old father, in a rare interview. "The cars and solar power are side issues really -- though big ones! I have no doubt that he will get man to Mars in his lifetime."

Alexandra Musk, Elon's 20-year-old half sister, says he sees Mars as humanity's only viable refuge.

"With all the environmental problems on Earth, the next step is to move to a planet that we can live on," she said. "He wants to go up into space himself, but with his own kids being so young, he can't really do that. He'd be gone for a quite a while."

While he declined to comment for this story, Elon Musk has described Mars as a "fixer-upper" planet that over time could sustain human life. Mercury is too close to the sun; Venus is too hot.

But even to Friedman, Musk's initial proposal to launch his own rocket seemed ludicrous. "I said 'Are you crazy? Everybody who tries to get into the rocket business quickly learns that it costs a lot more money than they thought.' He said to me, 'I know, but I can do it.' "

Now Musk has proved that he can. Next month, the National Space Society, a nonprofit dedicated to creating a spacefaring civilization, will present Musk with its prestigious Robert A. Heinlein Memorial Award. It is honoring Musk for "doing the very hard task which no one else in the world has been willing and able to tackle: working to create a family of commercially successful and reusable rocket boosters and reusable spacecraft."

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, carrying its Dragon cargo spacecraft, is scheduled to launch Monday from Cape Canaveral for a fourth trip to the International Space Station.

African roots

Musk was born in June 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa, to Maye and Errol Musk, the oldest of three children. Maye's father, Joshua Haldeman, was born in Minnesota, grew up in Canada and emigrated to South Africa with his young family about 1950. A chiropractor and amateur archeologist, he took his family on extended trips to search for the lost city of the Kalahari in what is now Botswana.

Errol was born in South Africa to a British mother and a South African father. An avid pilot and sailor as well as an electrical and mechanical engineer, he made his money consulting and developing properties, then retired early.

After Maye and Errol divorced in 1980, Elon mostly lived with his father, who says he owned thoroughbred horses, a yacht, several houses and a Cessna. One of their homes was in Waterkloof, a leafy suburb of Pretoria that was popular with foreign diplomats.

Wanderlust ran on both sides of the family. On holidays, Errol and his kids would travel, he said: to Europe, Hong Kong, throughout the United States. Or they'd take the plane to Lake Tanganyika, where Errol had a stake in an emerald mine. Elon would later get his own pilot's license, but he no longer has time to fly.

While wealthy South Africans typically hired maids and gardeners, Errol decided that his children would do chores and cook their own food, taking shifts.

"I guess I was a bit of an autocratic father -- do this, do that," said Errol, who says he has been estranged from his oldest son for several years. "I was a single parent, and they simply had to help out."

Elon showed an early interest in computers, owning in sequence a Commodore Vic 20, a Spectravideo and an IBM. At the prestigious Pretoria Boys High School, where teachers wore black gowns, he played chess on the high school team but stopped when he concluded that humans were no match for the computers that had begun playing the game.

"I would see him frequently in or around the library," recalled Ewyn van den Aardweg, a former geography teacher at the school. "Elon had an above-average interest in matters outside the normal curriculum, and the library -- these were pre-Internet years -- was the place to gain further knowledge."

The former teacher noticed something else: The boys wore school uniforms, and Musk's was always neat. To van den Aardweg, this suggested that "despite his superior intellect, entrepreneurial mind set and obvious 'out-the-box thinking,' he respected the benefits of discipline and hard work."

Path to Silicon Valley

By the late 1980s, South Africa was in political turmoil over its apartheid system of racial segregation, and many of the nation's whites were fleeing the country for opportunities in Australia, England and North America. Musk briefly studied at the University of Pretoria in early 1989, then moved to Canada, where he studied at Queen's School of Business in Kingston, Ontario. His brother Kimbal soon followed.

Dominic Thompson, who met the Musk brothers at Queen's, was struck by Musk's breadth of knowledge.

"It's rare to have the mix of business knowledge with the understanding of physics and science, along with raw intelligence, and focus," Thompson said. "He's always known what he wanted to do."

Musk then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied finance and entrepreneurial management at the Wharton School as well as physics before heading to Silicon Valley in 1995. He had a summer internship at Pinnacle Research, a Los Gatos energy storage startup. He planned to pursue graduate work in applied physics at Stanford University but instead joined the Internet boom.

Entrepreneurial successes soon followed. Musk co-founded Zip2, which was sold to Compaq in 1999, then launched financial-services startup X.com, which morphed into PayPal.

The pay dirt from selling PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002 enabled a now-wealthy Musk to embrace his true love -- space travel. He left Silicon Valley for Los Angeles, long an epicenter of the aerospace industry, and started SpaceX, where he is both CEO and chief technology officer. He now shuttles back and forth between SpaceX and Tesla.

Aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin, president of Pioneer Astronautics, has watched Musk's passion for Mars grow since first meeting him in 2001 during a Mars Society fundraiser. Zubrin said that Musk's most striking qualities are a self-deprecating sense of humor and an uncanny ability to master arcane and complex subjects that accomplished aeronautical engineers have required decades to learn.

"When I first met him, he knew absolutely nothing about rockets, though he clearly had a scientific mind," Zubrin said. "By 2004, he had learned a fair amount, and by 2007 he knew everything. This guy had gone and educated himself in this entire art. If you sat down with him and asked a bunch of technical questions about rocket engineering, he could answer them all."

Risks pay off

But Musk didn't stop with rockets. As an early investor in Tesla Motors, which last year saw a 387 percent increase in sales, he risked his newly acquired fortune to keep the company afloat. As CEO and product architect (his signature is on the sun visors of the first Model S sedans), Musk oversees more than 6,000 employees.

Next up was San Mateo-based SolarCity, a solar installation and financing company that Musk dreamed up with his cousins on a road trip to Burning Man in 2004. Musk is chairman of the company, whose market valuation soared 303 percent last year.

As Musk's success has grown, so has his philanthropy. He joined Warren Buffett and other billionaires in signing The Giving Pledge, a commitment to give away most of their wealth. And even before he was rich, he promised an uncle that he would pay for the educational costs of the man's three children.

"He said that he would keep an amount aside for this purpose even if he lost the bulk of his money," Mike Musk, a dermatologist in South Africa, said in an email from South Africa. "He has gambled his entire fortune on SpaceX and Tesla and at times has almost lost it. He's a generous, kind individual, but ruthlessly determined in business."

The Musk Foundation awards grants for renewable energy, human space exploration, pediatric research, and science and engineering education. Among the grantees: the SETI Institute in Mountain View, which seeks evidence of life on other planets, and the Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland.

The Musk Foundation also gave $10,000 to SafetyBeltSafe U.S.A., a nonprofit dedicated to child passenger safety. Stephanie Tombrello, the group's executive director, came to know Musk through their overlapping efforts to make Tesla vehicles safer for children. Musk, who's married to British actress Talulah Riley, has five young sons -- a set of twins and a set of triplets -- from his first marriage.

Tombrello thinks Musk is driven in part by the loss of his first child, a baby boy who died unexpectedly at 10 weeks.

"Once you've lost a child, you sort of want to protect all people from whatever danger is out there," she said. "If we don't come up with brilliant ideas, like the electric car or reliable and affordable solar energy, we may lose it all. He really does believe that we'll go to space eventually, and he wants to make it easier. More than anything, he cares what happens to humanity. He wants to make sure it carries on."

fonte

[itg00022289]

Google Ventures and the Search for Immortality

Bill Maris has $425 million to invest this year, and the freedom to invest it however he wants. He's looking for companies that will slow aging, reverse disease, and extend life.


by Katrina Brooker
4:01 AM WET
March 9, 2015
   

“If you ask me today, is it possible to live to be 500? The answer is yes,” Bill Maris says one January afternoon in Mountain View, California. The president and managing partner of Google Ventures just turned 40, but he looks more like a 19-year-old college kid at midterm. He’s wearing sneakers and a gray denim shirt over a T-shirt; it looks like he hasn’t shaved in a few days.
Behind him, sun is streaming through a large wall of windows. Beyond is the leafy expanse of the main Google campus. Inside his office, there’s not much that gives any indication of the work Maris does here, Bloomberg Markets will report in its April 2015 issue. The room is sparse—clean white walls, a few chairs, a table. On this day, his desk has no papers, no notepads or Post-its, not even a computer.

This story appears in the April 2015 issue of Bloomberg Markets.
Here’s where you really figure out who Bill Maris is: on his bookshelf. There’s a fat text called Molecular Biotechnology: Principles and Applications of Recombinant DNA. There’s a well-read copy of Biotechnology: Applying the Genetic Revolution. And a collection of illustrations by Fritz Kahn, a German physician who was among the first to depict the human body as a machine. Wedged among these is a book that particularly stands out to anyone interested in living to 500. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, published in 2005, is the seminal work by futurist Ray Kurzweil. He famously predicted that in 2045, humankind will have its Terminator moment: The rise of computers will outpace our ability to control them. To keep up, we will radically transform our biology via nanobots and other machines that will enhance our anatomy and our DNA, changing everything about how we live and die.
“It will liberate us from our own limitations,” says Maris, who studied neuroscience at Middlebury College and once worked in a biomedical lab at Duke University. Kurzweil is a friend. Google hired him to help Maris and other Googlers understand a world in which machines surpass human biology. This might be a terrifying, dystopian future to some. To Maris, it’s business.
This is where he hopes to find, and fund, the next generation of companies that will change the world, or possibly save it. “We actually have the tools in the life sciences to achieve anything that you have the audacity to envision,” he says. “I just hope to live long enough not to die.”
***
Maris is an unusual guy with an unusual job. Seven years ago, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google, tapped him to start a venture capital fund, putting him smack between those tech titans and the sea of ambitious entrepreneurs trying to be just like them. At the time, he was a young entrepreneur himself, with limited investing experience and no clout in Silicon Valley. He’d sold his Vermont-based Web-hosting company and was working at a nonprofit, developing technology for cataract blindness in India. This made him exactly the kind of outsider Google was looking for. “Bill was ready to come at this from an entirely new perspective,” says David Drummond, who, as Google’s chief legal officer and senior vice president of corporate development, oversees Google Ventures as well as the company’s other investment vehicles.
Google Ventures has close to $2 billion in assets under management, with stakes in more than 280 startups. Each year, Google gives Maris $300 million in new capital, and this year he’ll have an extra $125 million to invest in a new European fund. That puts Google Ventures on a financial par with Silicon Valley’s biggest venture firms, which typically put to work $300 million to $500 million a year. According to data compiled by CB Insights, a research firm that tracks venture capital activity, Google Ventures was the fourth-most-active venture firm in the U.S. last year, participating in 87 deals.
A company with $66 billion in annual revenue isn’t doing this for the money. What Google needs is entrepreneurs. “It needs to know where the puck is heading,” says Robert Peck, an analyst at the investment bank SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, who published a report in February examining Google’s outside investment units, including Google Ventures. “Look at what happened to BlackBerry when it missed the advent of smartphones. And Yahoo! missed Facebook.”
Google puts huge resources into looking for what’s coming next. It spends millions on projects like Google X, the internal lab that developed Google Glass and is working on driverless cars. In January, the company made a $900 million investment in Elon Musk’s SpaceX. In 2014, it started Google Capital to invest in later-stage technology companies. Maris’s views on the intersection of technology and medicine fit in well here: Google has spent hundreds of millions of dollars backing a research center, called Calico, to study how to reverse aging, and Google X is working on a pill that would insert nanoparticles into our bloodstream to detect disease and cancer mutations.

Maris has a peculiar position in the Googlesphere. He’s a part of it, but also free from it. Google Ventures is set up differently than most other in-house corporate venture funds—Intel Capital, Verizon Ventures, and the like. The firm makes its investments independent of its parent’s corporate strategy. It can back any company it wants, whether or not it fits with Google’s plans. The fund also can sell its stakes to whomever it wants, including Google competitors. Facebook and Yahoo have bought startups funded by Google Ventures.
With Google’s money and clout behind him, Maris has a huge amount of freedom. He can, and does, go after Silicon Valley’s most-sought-after startups. Uber, Nest, and Cloudera are among the firm’s big wins. Maris doesn’t intend to stop pursuing these kinds of deals. But he has other ambitions, too. “There are plenty of people, including us, that want to invest in consumer Internet, but we can do more than that,” he says. He now has 36 percent of the fund’s assets invested in life sciences, up from 6 percent in 2013.
“There are a lot of billionaires in Silicon Valley, but in the end, we are all heading to the same place,” Maris says. “If given the choice between making a lot of money or finding a way to make people live longer, what do you choose?”
***
Maris is standing at the front of Joshua Tree, Google Ventures’ large conference room. Each room at headquarters is named after a national park. “OK, we have a lot to get through today,” he tells his staff. The group meets here biweekly to talk about prospects and strategy.
Maris has a team of 70, most of whom are in the room this day or patched in by phone or video. The group includes the fund’s 17 investing partners, who are in charge of finding startups. Among the investing partners are Joe Kraus, co-founder of Excite; Rich Miner, co-founder of Android; and David Krane, employee No. 84 at Google.
The mood in the room is casual. Some staffers sit cross-legged on the floor; others curl up on soft felt couches. There are a lot of jokes. One partner starts his presentation with a slide entitled “Secret Project”—which most people in the room already know about—and concludes it with a doctored-up photo of Maris’s head superimposed on the body of someone playing tambourine. It’s a jab at the boss, who married the singer-songwriter Tristan Prettyman last August and recently went on tour with her. Everyone laughs. Maris smiles, but immediately he’s back to business. “Time is the one thing I can’t get back and can’t give back to you,” he says, turning to an agenda on the screen behind him.
“I know you’re all aware of the conference happening this week,” Maris says. An hour away in San Francisco, JPMorgan Chase is hosting its annual health-care confab, nicknamed the Super Bowl of Health Care. Thousands of pharmaceutical executives and investors have gathered for what has become a huge part of the industry’s dealmaking. Most of Google Ventures’ life sciences startups are attending. One, Foundation Medicine, which uses genetic data to create diagnostic oncology tools, is generating huge buzz this year. In January, Roche Holding announced plans to take a majority stake in the company, in a transaction valued at $1 billion. The stock more than doubled the next day. Google Ventures has a 4 percent stake in the company.
For Maris, Foundation Medicine represents the beginning of a revolution. “The analogy I use is this,” he says, holding up his iPhone 6. “Even five years ago, this would have been unimaginable. Twenty years ago, you wouldn’t have been able to talk to anyone on this.”

A group from Slack goes through a design sprint with the Google Ventures design team. In the orange pants is Jake Knapp, who runs the sprints.
Cody Pickens/Bloomberg Markets
When Google Ventures invested in Foundation in 2011, the company’s promise was mostly theoretical. The world was still waiting for the breakthroughs that have seemed inevitable ever since scientists first mapped the human genome in 2003. Foundation’s team included eminent geneticists, including Eric Lander, one of the leaders of the Human Genome Project. Still, the company had no viable commercial product.
Technology has made huge strides since then, allowing Foundation to create products like its Interactive Cancer Explorer, which is a kind of Google for oncologists, allowing them to do research and devise treatments for their patients. “We had a lot to learn from the experts in Silicon Valley,” says Foundation’s CEO, Dr. Michael Pellini, who sought out Google Ventures as an investor for help with designing his company’s technology. “Think about Google search. We never think about all the algorithms that go behind what we see on the screen. They were able to do the same for us with genetic information.”
“Twenty years ago, without genomics, you could only treat cancer with a poison,” Maris says. “That’s really different from, ‘We can cure your cancer by reverse-engineering a stem cell.’ You can now legitimately invest in a company that could cure cancer.”
Identifying promising life sciences companies isn’t like hunting around Silicon Valley for coders with a cool app. Biotech companies are built around complicated science. They require millions of dollars in investments, partnerships with big pharma companies, and lengthy clinical trials. To help with his hunt, Maris has brought in scientists as partners. One, Dr. Krishna Yeshwant, a Harvard- and Stanford-trained doctor, still works in a clinic twice a week in Boston, where he is based. Last year, he led the firm’s biggest bet in life sciences, an investment in Flatiron Health, which is building a cloud platform to analyze cancer data.
This is just the beginning. “In 20 years,” Maris says, “chemo will seem so primitive it will be like using a telegraph.”
***
At the age of 22, just out of college, Maris met the friend who would lead him to Google. It was 1997: Yahoo was search, AOL was e-mail, Google was called BackRub. Maris was in New York, working at Investor AB, a Swedish investing firm. He didn’t care for Wall Street, but he did like the smart Yale grad sitting next to him. She told him about a company that was going to change the world. “I remember telling him about this new search engine my sister was working on, and he said, ‘Oh, Yahoo is good enough,’” recalls Anne Wojcicki, who would become the wife of Sergey Brin. Her sister Susan, one of Google’s earliest employees, is now CEO of YouTube. Anne Wojcicki went on to co-found 23andMe, a genetics testing company that is part of Google Ventures’ portfolio.
Maris quit Investor AB after six months and went to Burlington, Vermont, to start a Web-hosting company. He was so green that he read Netscape and the World Wide Web for Dummies. He funded his company, Burlee, with his credit cards and by convincing the operators of the Lake Champlain ferry to invest. Maris sold Burlee to a company that became Web.com for an undisclosed sum in 2002. It wasn’t Google-level money, but it was enough for him to live on in Vermont with no job.
He would have stayed there except that his old friend, Wojcicki, kept calling him West. Maris started visiting her and Brin, staying at their home in California. He increasingly became drawn into their sphere. “He and Larry and Sergey would be at dinner and start talking about, I don’t know, flying cars,” recalls Wojcicki.
In 2008, Google’s chiefs tapped Maris to start a venture fund, an idea they’d been kicking around for a while. They gave him a desk at Google and instructions to figure out how he would invest Google’s money. In an only-at-Google twist, his neighbor was Kevin Systrom, who was working on a photo app called Burbn, later Instagram. (“Everyone I sit next to ends up becoming a billionaire,’’ Maris jokes.)

Maris spent six months researching venture capital around Silicon Valley. He traveled up and down Sand Hill Road, home to many of the Valley’s most prestigious VC firms, asking top investors for advice. At first, he had a hard time getting anyone to take him seriously. During one meeting, a VC started laughing at his idea for Google Ventures.
Maris was told his fund would never work: VCs wouldn’t want Google looking over their shoulders. “There were some in the venture world who weren’t particularly welcoming to Bill or Google Ventures,” recalls John Doerr, a legendary partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of the most important first-generation California VC firms. Doerr, who sits on Google’s corporate board, advised Maris on setting up the venture fund.
Around Silicon Valley, corporate venture funds have a bad reputation. “There is an inherent paradox to the notion of corporate venture,” says Bill Gurley, a general partner at the VC firm Benchmark Capital. The conflict is, do the fund’s loyalties lie with the startup or with the parent? Just about every independent venture capitalist in tech has stories of being burned by corporate funds. Either the company uses its venture investments to gather intelligence and ends up competing with the companies it funds or company management loses interest at some point and pulls out.
Entrepreneurs were skeptical, too. “I told him, this is never going to work,” says Joe Kraus, who, in addition to co-founding Excite, co-founded a wiki software company called JotSpot, which was sold to Google. Maris asked him early on to join as a partner in Google Ventures. “From the entrepreneur’s perspective, the idea of tying myself to Google would have been scary.” Kraus says. “The fear would be, if you raised money from Google, would Apple hate you?”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-09/google-ventures-bill-maris-investing-in-idea-of-living-to-500

[Incognitus]

Bem, para quem estiver interessado em saber como aumentar a duração de vida, existem 2 pedaços de conhecimento interessantes:
1) Uma coisa que parece aumentar a duração de vida em humanos é a restrição calórica. Ou seja, comer pouco, no limite das calorias necessárias;
2) Uma coisa aumenta substancialmente a duração de vida em ratos, moscas, etc é a Rapamicina (Rapamune, Sirolimus) -- um medicamento imunosupressor usado em transplantes.

(exemplo de research sobre a Rapamicina)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2824086/

(de referir que neste estudo da mosca, a sua vida foi estendida mesmo em moscas já sujeitas a restrição alimentar ... isto promete para humanos, tb)

[Dilath Larath]

Elon Musk Boosts Tesla With 'Major' New Product Tweet Tease


Elon Musk is in a class all by himself when it comes to teasing new products.

On Monday afternoon, shortly after tweeting about a trip to China, Musk teased fans with the prospect of a new, “major” non-car product to be unveiled in one month on April 30:

Musk’s tweets have the ability to move markets by themselves. Tesla stock, which was slightly down on the day, immediately jumped more than 3% to over $190 per share. The stock is still down from all-time high price last September of about $280 per share. It’s not obvious what product Tesla will launch next month, although Musk has previously hinted the company would sell a home battery that would store energy people generate with their own solar panels:

“We are going to unveil the Tesla home battery, the consumer battery that would be for use in people’s houses or businesses fairly soon,” Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said during an earnings conference call with analysts Wednesday.

That hasn’t stopped the (light-hearted) guessing from Tesla-watchers on Twitter.

#TeslaNewProductGuesses

forbes

[Dilath Larath]

suspeito que seja isto, mas com o Musk, you never know.

Tesla Wants to Build a Battery for Your House

(Bloomberg) -- Tesla Motors Inc., best known for making the all-electric Model S sedan, is using its lithium-ion battery technology to position itself as a frontrunner in the emerging energy-storage market that supplements and may ultimately threaten the traditional electric grid.
“We are going to unveil the Tesla home battery, the consumer battery that would be for use in people’s houses or businesses fairly soon,” Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said during an earnings conference call with analysts Wednesday.
Combining solar panels with large, efficient batteries could allow some homeowners to avoid buying electricity from utilities. Morgan Stanley said last year that Tesla’s energy-storage product could be “disruptive” in the U.S. and in Europe as customers seek to avoid utility fees by going “off-grid.” Musk said the product unveiling would occur within the next month or two.
“We have the design done, and it should start going into production in about six months or so,” Musk said. “It’s really great.”
Tesla already offers residential energy-storage units to select customers through SolarCity Corp., the solar-power company that lists Musk as its chairman and biggest shareholder. Tesla’s Fremont, California, factory is also making larger stationary storage systems for businesses and utility clients. The Palo Alto, California-based automaker has installed a storage unit at its Tejon Ranch Supercharger station off Interstate 5 in Southern California and has several other commercial installations in the field.
Utility Clients
But the even larger market may be utility clients.
“A lot of utilities are working in this space and we are talking to almost all of them,” Chief Technology Officer JB Straubel said on the earnings call Wednesday. “This is a business that is gaining an increasing amount of our attention.”
California sees energy storage as a critical tool to better manage the electric grid, integrate a growing amount of solar and wind power, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Utilities like PG&E Corp. are now required to procure about 1.3 gigawatts of energy storage by 2020, enough to supply roughly 1 million homes.

bloomberg

[Dilath Larath]

Elon Musk has a great idea for curing traffic congestion in big cities

Elon Musk has a simple, fairly obvious solution for curing traffic congestion in cities: "More tunnels."

The way Musk sees it, we have dense cities with big buildings that extend into the sky, taking full advantage of our three-dimensional world. But when it comes to transportation, we are stuck in two dimensions. We drive only at the surface level.

Musk talked about this during an interview with Neil DeGrasse Tyson on Tyson's radio show, StarTalk.

Tyson asked Musk about flying cars. Musk thinks flying cars are problematic. He said they increased the chance of something falling on your head. He said they would be loud. He said they would have to deal with bad weather. And, "of course," they would have to run using autopilot.

"Essentially with a flying car you're talking about 3D," Musk said. "There's a fundamental flaw with cities where you've got dense office buildings and duplexes and they're operating on three dimensions, but then you go to the street and you're two dimensional."

DeGrasse pointed out that New York City subway system was based on underground tunnels that are built atop one other.

"If you were to extrapolate that to cars, and have more car tunnels, then you would alleviate congestion completely. You would not need a flying car in that case," Musk said. "And it would always work, even if the weather is bad. It would never ice up, and it would never fall on your head."

While it seems far-fetched to think about a massive project like digging tunnels in big cities, it seems much more feasible than flying cars.


business insider

[Incognitus]

Não só seria extraordinariamente caro, como tem todo um conjunto de potenciais problemas. Funcionaria melhor com EVs devido a esses problemas (produção de poluição em ambientes restrictos, possibilidade de incêndios ou acidentes com incêndios,  etc).

[Lark]

quase....

CRS-6 First Stage Landing

L

[Lark]

up close


L

[Zel]

muito fixe

[purehawk]

quase....


CRS-6 First Stage Landing

L

Aposto no sucesso da aterragem do terceiro!

Só me pergunto porque é que não existe um sistema auxiliar de apoio na aterragem, do género de haver uma espécie de aro que se levantava e apoiava o topo do foguete não permitindo uma inclinação excessiva... o aro podia ser elevado por 3 ou 4 apoios na base (um em cada canto) que transitavam da horizontal para a vertical.


     

[Lark]

Musk on fuel cells aos 10m e 20s
o Musk gosta de dizer fool cells e que é bullshit...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_e7rA4fBAo

Mirai: running on bulllshit

Fueled by Bullsh*t | Presented by Toyota Mirai

continuo a achar que o Musk tem razão.
vê-se a produção de metano a partir de estrume de vaca. porque não utilizá-lo tal como está e gastar mais energia para extrair o hidrogénio?
de qualquer forma o video da toyota está espectacular

L

[Incognitus]

Eu também acho que tem razão quanto às fuel cells.

Mas a Tesla em si tem uma probabilidade baixa de se dar bem, apesar de também achar que os EVs em geral se vão dar bem.

[Lark]

Eu também acho que tem razão quanto às fuel cells.

Mas a Tesla em si tem uma probabilidade baixa de se dar bem, apesar de também achar que os EVs em geral se vão dar bem.

mesmo com a produção das baterias domésticas e com a produção em massa na gigafactory?

L

[Incognitus]

Eu também acho que tem razão quanto às fuel cells.

Mas a Tesla em si tem uma probabilidade baixa de se dar bem, apesar de também achar que os EVs em geral se vão dar bem.

mesmo com a produção das baterias domésticas e com a produção em massa na gigafactory?

L

As baterias domésticas são overrated e venderão bem apenas na Califórnia porque existe um subsídio gigante para as mesmas.

A gigafactory:
1) Não altera nada - se fosse possível ter custos muito mais baixos os outros também os teriam e a tecnologia da bateria nem sequer é da Tesla (é da panasonic);
2) Além de não alterar nada aumenta brutalmente o risco da Tesla falir, quer devido ao seu custo, quer devido à possibilidade da fábrica se tornar obsoleta rapidamente. Imagina que um fabricante de PCs no meio da revolução dos PCs resolvia fazer uma fábrica para os seus próprios CPUs - já viste o risco que isso lhe traria?

[Lark]

Eu também acho que tem razão quanto às fuel cells.

Mas a Tesla em si tem uma probabilidade baixa de se dar bem, apesar de também achar que os EVs em geral se vão dar bem.

mesmo com a produção das baterias domésticas e com a produção em massa na gigafactory?

L

As baterias domésticas são overrated e venderão bem apenas na Califórnia porque existe um subsídio gigante para as mesmas.

A gigafactory:
1) Não altera nada - se fosse possível ter custos muito mais baixos os outros também os teriam e a tecnologia da bateria nem sequer é da Tesla (é da panasonic);
2) Além de não alterar nada aumenta brutalmente o risco da Tesla falir, quer devido ao seu custo, quer devido à possibilidade da fábrica se tornar obsoleta rapidamente. Imagina que um fabricante de PCs no meio da revolução dos PCs resolvia fazer uma fábrica para os seus próprios CPUs - já viste o risco que isso lhe traria?

não sei. não percebo nada de análise fundamental.
mas sei que o conceito de off grid é muito poderoso no US. não estou a contar com ajudas estatais. o solar vai ser brevemente mais barato que qualquer outra forma de energia. mas para ter alguma efectividade é necessário uma bateria adequada. à partida estou a ver uma grande adesão, mas lá está, se isso se vai traduzir em lucros monstros ou numa falência brutal, não faço ideia.

L