#Elon: Sheriff Tells Tesla to Halt Fremont Production

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Yes, Even You, Elon: Sheriff Tells Tesla to Halt Fremont Production

Propping up your $900 stock price and cranking out the new Tesla Model Y is not “essential business.” And so the Alameda County Sheriff told Tesla Tuesday to cease operations at its massive Fremont, California, plant outside San Francisco. This a day after Bay Area counties told employers to shut down non-essential businesses and have employees shelter at home for three weeks in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak.

Tesla’s largest factory is in Fremont. It had just begun producing, and shipping, the first Model Y compact SUVs in a manner previously unheard of for Tesla: ahead of schedule.

Tesla: @Tesla is not an essential business as defined in the Alameda County Health Order. Tesla can maintain minimum basic operations per the Alameda County Health Order.

— Alameda County Sheriff (@ACSOSheriffs) March 17, 2020

Per the tweet Tuesday from Alameda County Sheriff’s office, “Tesla can maintain minimum basic operations.” That would certainly include security at the 370-acre site with 5.3 million square feet of manufacturing and office space – think 50 Home Depots or 100 football fields – plus maintenance staff, and plus a skeleton office staff if they can’t work from home. But it doesn’t include the 10,000-plus workers at the facility, many of whom ride crowded shuttles to remote parking sites. The Los Angeles Times described this scene Tuesday morning at daybreak:

The parking lot was packed to capacity with about 3,000 cars, as dozens of morning-shift workers searched for overlooked spaces. Workers even parked in fire lanes. Dozens of shuttles and full-size buses ferried morning workers to the factory and took night-shift workers away. Departing workers packed shoulder to shoulder at the door of each bus, waiting to get on. The buses take workers to offsite lots and as far away as Tracy and Stockton.

There had been confusion Monday night when Alameda County spokesman Ray Kelly said Tesla qualified as an “essential business.” Twenty-four hours later, Kelly flipped and said while he believed that to be true Monday – probably meaning someone above him believed that to be the case – “Tesla is not an essential business as defined in the Alameda County health order.”

Replying to the Sheriff’s closure order: the wit and wisdom of the twitterverse.

Naturally, this wouldn’t be Tesla without drama and virtual fistfights online. Above is a selection of comments on the stop-production order, saying, for instance, that some vocal proponents of stopping Fremont production are short-sellers of Tesla stock (who make money if it goes down) … that it’s not clear what’s a basic minimum operation (see below) … and that Tesla workers are left in the dark.

As in many areas that have either ordered or urged non-essential businesses to close, the exceptions include, per the Alameda County order:

Healthcare operations (obviously)

Businesses provide food, shelter (as opposed to a tax shelter), social services

“Necessities of life” for the poor or needy

Sellers of both fresh and non-perishable foods including 7-Eleven type stores

Gas stations, banks, cleaners

“Businesses and services necessary for maintaining the safety, sanitation and essential operation of a residence.”

What other car-related businesses are exempted? “Gas stations and auto-supply, auto-repair, and related facilities.” Automobile manufacturing is not. The Fremont plant makes the Model 3, Model X, Model S, and now the Model Y compact SUV.

Tesla shocked the world by announcing that not only it would ship the Model Y on time but that the first cars were being delivered to the first-in-line customers (Tesla employees) this week, almost a half-year ahead of schedule. The company was obviously hoping to produce more of everything but especially the Model Y. Tesla has been hoping to produce a half-million cars in 2020.

Easy come, easy go: Tesla stock this week is trading at 40% of its peak value, $969, a month ago when the company was worth $140 billion (chart: NASDAQ/Google)

Tesla is mostly about cars, electrification, and the triumph of technology. But it’s also about stock price. Tesla earlier this soared to as much as $969 a share last month and a market cap (capitalization, the stock price multiplied by the number of shares held by investors) of more than $175 billion, more than the value of GM, Ford, and the USA parts of Fiat Chrysler.

Even as the stock market as a whole suffered the fastest major correction (read: precipitous fall) in history in the span of a few days, things have been even tougher if you held TSLA. Shares are down about 60 percent from their peak in February 2020. Anyone who bought Tesla stock before late December (at around $400) is still above water. People who bought since then have problems.

In spite of this, Tesla’s future seems bright: In the US where 70 percent of new car sales are non-sedans, the Model Y could become Tesla’s biggest seller, since it’s an SUV where the current best-seller Model 3 is a sedan. Additionally, investors who want the purest stock market play on battery electric vehicles have turned to Tesla, since that’s all they make: EVs.

Or this week, EVs are all they’re not making.

Now read:

Tesla Begins Shipping Model Y Electric Vehicles 6 Months Early

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At Last: Driver-Assist Terms Will Be Common Across All Cars

from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/307826-sheriff-tells-tesla-to-halt-fremont-production from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2020/03/yes-even-you-elon-sheriff-tells-tesla.html

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Yes, Even You, Elon: Sheriff Tells Tesla to Halt Fremont Production

Propping up your $900 stock price and cranking out the new Tesla Model Y is not “essential business.” And so the Alameda County Sheriff told Tesla Tuesday to cease operations at its massive Fremont, California, plant outside San Francisco. This a day after Bay Area counties told employers to shut down non-essential businesses and have employees shelter at home for three weeks in the wake…

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Tesla May Deploy ‘Million-Mile’ Batteries in China Later This Year

Tesla’s lithium-ion battery technology is already the envy of the automotive industry, and the company may be moving even further into the lead soon. A new report from Reuters claims Tesla will begin deploying its new “million-mile” battery in late 2020 or early 2021. That’s not the official name, of course, but it’s a reference to how much longer the cells can operate before failing. That’s about twice the average lifespan of current lithium-ion batteries. 

Tesla has been working with Chinese battery giant Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd (CATL). Reuters reports the first cars with the new battery will be released in China, which is a market in which Tesla wants to gain a foothold. The company may confirm the basics of the Reuters report in several weeks at its “Battery Day” for investors. That was supposed to happen in April, but Tesla delayed the event due to the coronavirus pandemic. 

CEO Elon Musk has spent the last few years hiring battery experts, buying small firms, and forging partnerships with both universities and other companies to make this battery a reality. Most of what we know about the probable technology comes from the expertise of the new hires and studies released by Tesla’s partners. For example, Dalhousie University has detailed a manganese cobalt oxide (NMC) crystal structure for battery cathodes that can resist wear over time. Tesla has an exclusive licensing arrangement with the university. Reuters also says the new batteries will rely on low-cobalt components and chemical additives that reduce stress over time. 

The Tesla Model S’s battery pack is that big flat area in the middle, protected by ‘ballistic-grade’ aluminum.

The new battery technology should reduce manufacturing costs dramatically. Some experts believe Tesla will drop below $100 per kilowatt-hour of battery capacity. That could mean cheaper vehicles that are more in line with comparable gasoline-powered cars. That’s sure to help the company become a major player in China, which is already the world’s leading consumer of electric vehicles. Tesla even opened a Gigafactory to manufacture batteries in Shanghai recently, becoming the first foreign automaker to own and operate its own factory in China. 

While the new batteries will start in China, sources claim Tesla will roll them out to other regions, but that might not happen until there are improved versions with better capacity and stability. This comes as Tesla’s relationship with Panasonic is winding down. The Japanese battery giant has worked with Tesla at several US factories, but it’s planning to pull out of at least one project in the next few weeks. CATL could pick up the slack and deliver even better components.

Now read:

Tesla Tech Leak: This Autopilot Car Stops for Red Lights

Yes, Even You, Elon: Sheriff Tells Tesla to Halt Fremont Production

GM Unveils New Lithium-Ion Battery Tech, Vows 400-Mile Cars

from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/310631-tesla-may-deploy-million-mile-batteries-in-china-later-this-year from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2020/05/tesla-may-deploy-million-mile-batteries.html

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IBM Supercomputer Identifies 77 Compounds That Could Fight Coronavirus

The Summit supercomputer came online several years ago with more computing power than any other non-distributed system. The US Department of Energy announced earlier this month that it would turn the system’s massive computing power toward the COVID-19 pandemic. The machine has been crunching the numbers, and it has now identified 77 chemical compounds that could help stop coronavirus. 

Summit is the most powerful supercomputer on Earth by a wide margin, and it’s also the third most energy-efficient. It uses 10MW of power to keep its 9,216 POWER9 22-core CPUs and 27,648 Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs humming. It has a theoretical peak performance of over 200 petaflops and has demonstrated 148.6 petaflops in practice while operating at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. 

The target of Summit’s massive computing power is a specific protein on the surface of the virus particle. Like other viruses, SARS-CoV-2 needs to infect cells to make copies of itself, and it does that with the help of the Spike protein. These molecules on the surface of the virus link to angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptors on human cells, allowing the virus to inject its genome and hijack cellular machinery. 

Summit has run simulations on more than 8,000 compounds, searching for molecules that could inactivate the virus. Early results from Summit have identified 77 compounds that could bind to the Spike protein, preventing it from binding to human cells. 

The Summit supercomputer covers about as much space as two basketball courts. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, CC BY 2.0

Unfortunately, Summit can’t devise a treatment all by itself. All that processing power is great at simulating molecular interactions, but not ideal for the nuanced process of clinical analysis. All we know right now is these 77 molecules stand a good chance of blocking the Spike protein from attaching to cells. We don’t even know if the compounds Summit has identified are safe for use in humans. 

Medical authorities will need to evaluate the compounds and conduct laboratory testing, which may eventually lead to clinical tests with human subjects. This is just part of our efforts to slow the spread of COVID-19. Work on a vaccine is separate from this. A vaccine could stop infections from taking place at all, but a treatment based on Summit’s work could help alleviate the symptoms of COVID-19 and increase survival rates. Unfortunately, vaccines are much harder to develop.

Now read:

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Yes, Even You, Elon: Sheriff Tells Tesla to Halt Fremont Production

GOG Offers 27 Free Games to Help You Pass the Time at Home

from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/307998-ibm-supercomputer-identifies-77-compounds-that-could-fight-coronavirus from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2020/03/ibm-supercomputer-identifies-77.html