Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Tesla Semi: Delivers FAILURE!" video.

You've hit the most important thing too many engineers forget on too many projects. WHAT IS ITS PRIMARY TASK and HOW DOES IT NEED TO DO THAT TASK. A truck needs to RELIABLY HAUL CARGO. By far the most successful engineering project in history was the Apollo program. Disclosure - Yes I am an aerospace engineer, so I am a bit biased. But If you look at its basic task "Put a man on the moon and return him safely to the Earth." It was that simple and after the Apollo 1 tragedy they got back to that task of SAFELY RETURN. You can't safely return if you die on the launch pad! They ended up going to the moon 9 times and landing 6 times and did it in less than 10 years from the start. Go look at most of Musk's fantasies. He's always off task. The things his companies do get right they get right because he's fortunate enough to have a few people who DO KEEP THINGS ON TASK.
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I am an engineer and we live that precariously in almost EVERY business we work for. After 30+ years I have very little to recommend that anyone go into any form of engineering right now and yet in some ways its never looked more promising. The amount of infrastructure that needs upgrading (roads, bridges, power stations, power grids, water (both clean and waste), etc. is staggering. Forget the energy transition just go and look at how many rapidly ageing (as in how close they are to end of life) power stations there are across the developed world. That's the actual cause of the energy crisis under supply, but trying to get the economists who lead us to this point is damn difficult.
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@Fetidaf WTF are you trying to say? Go read what you wrote and see if it makes sense. WTF does "less than 5% less" mean?
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@Fetidaf Where the fark are you pulling this stuff from? Cos if your using Elon Musk data then out of luck because not even people who work for Elon Musk believe Elon Musk's data. Gwynne Shotwell (CEO at SpaceX) refers to things like "Elon Time" whenever he says something will get done by a certain date.
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@Fetidaf I all agree with that except for the general maintenance. Outside of the engine & drivetrain there's not difference between electric, diesel, gas, hydrogen, LPG there's no difference between vehicle types. That's one of the bullshit things regarding the push to electric vehicles. The cost of chassis, wheels, suspension, BRAKES, windscreens, door, lights,.. etc wont change. The Greenies also don't take into consideration the CO2 emissions regarding all those raw materials in a car or the production of components from those raw materials. And before you ask I used to build automated manufacturing cells for car parts in the supply chain. If we really want to go electrical then the main push has to be in CONVERTING existing vehicles NOT replacing them. We also need to be less concerned with trucks, power walls and mega batteries because we just don't have enough Lithium supply to do it all. We need to be looking at other batter technologies for stationary applications. Things like the Sadoway battery or the other batteries that don't use Lithium. In heavy vehicles like trucks and the giant dump trucks & diggers used in mining there's work underway in just changing the fuel over to hydrogen. Fortescue Metals in Australia is already testing that on dump trucks. Rolls Royce can supply stationary generators based based on existing diesel engines that use hydrogen as their fuel. It probably wont work for boats and ships because of the range they need. But I can see nuclear reactors taking over for the shipping industry.
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@Fetidaf I don't why you think that the energy offset for a truck is a few 1000 miles. Its little understood outside the manufacturing industries but in general your average family car consumes more energy and creates more pollution being made than it does in 20-25 years of normal driving. I'll be honest the first time I heard that I called BS and the person telling me was actually a mechanic. He told me to FK-OFF and go look at how much goes into just making the raw steel, aluminum, plastic and glass. Its why I say if the Greenies knew their stuff they campaign against new cars. People forget that the car industry is the biggest manufacturing industry in the world by raw materials and energy, because its doesn't just include the cars it includes all the stuff needed to make the cars. There's entire industries like industrial robots that primarily exist for car manufacturing. I know I used to program them. Tesla's are full of metals that aren't found as much in other cars. There's a lot more copper and copper is incredibly energy intensive to refine it to where you can use it the way its used in a Tesla. And before you ask, I have spent most of the last 20 years on mine sites. I have worked in the iron, ore, cocking coal, copper, aluminum, uranium and gold industries to name a few. One of the first mines I worked on was a copper mine that produced 99.999% pure copper. After getting it out of the ore with sulphuric acid they eventually got it into a near pure copper solution from which they electroplated it onto stainless steel sheets. That electroplating system used a lot of power. Copper will be the next big issue in the energy transition. Like Lithium we don't produce enough. Its why people strip it out of old houses, factories and anywhere else they can.
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