#Why yes I did make Ferris Elon

[thelastranger]

[morganbelarus]

What to expect at the Tesla Model 3 delivery event

Tesla Motors Inc. CEO Elon Musk will speak as 30 lucky customers get their Model 3 cars.

Image: Mori/AP/REX/Shutterstock

Elon Musk has been talking and tweeting about the Model 3 for years, but on Friday night the talking ends and the first 30 Tesla Model 3 all-electric cars roll off the assembly line and into customers' (who are also employees) hands.

Oh, and the talking doesnt stop. Musk will mark the occasion with a speech that you can watch via live stream. He may answer many lingering questions about the all-electric, 4-door sedan like: Why only one dashboard screen? And how does this car differ from the Tesla Model S? Is the Model 3 a sequel?

SEE ALSO: Why Teslas Model 3 will be the most important electric car of our time

Of course, if youve been paying attention to Musks Twitter feed, you already have answers to your most pressing Model 3 questions. Possibly no tweet sums up the new electric car and its place in the Tesla world better than this one.

Model 3 is just a smaller, more affordable version of Model S w less range & power & fewer features. Model S has more advanced technology.

Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 24, 2017

Its unusual for an automotive company CEO to put such a fine point on his product lineup, but ever since Musk started talking publicly about the Model 3 (somewhere around 2014), hes taken pains to position it and its capabilities in the Tesla ecosystem. Musk wants to level set expectations, a task that now grows more urgent as actual customers are about to take possession of the car.

As the deadline for production ramp up neared, Musk reminded Tesla fans that, while his is a different kind of car company, he's not building gadgets, rolling out new versions each year. He's building an electric car line.

Am noticing that many people think Model 3 is the "next version" of a Tesla, like iPhone 2 vs 3. This is not true.

Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 24, 2017

There has never been a car company like Tesla or CEO quite like Musk. His transparency is remarkable, regularly hopping on Twitter answer random questions about still-under-development products like the Model 3, and his technical acumen, often on display on Twitter (and in countless interviews and talks) is impressive.

First approximation of CO2 is production cost, factoring in energy source, so Model 3 obv less CO2 to produce than $35k gas car by a lot

Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 20, 2017

Of course, Musk does the same for his other ventures, enthusiastically live-tweeting SpaceX launches and sharing tunnel-level construction images from his Boring Company.

People joke that Musk is like Iron Mans Tony Stark and I dont think they realize how right they are. Yes, he can be Stark-level cocky, but I think its his willingness to pull back the curtain on almost everything that makes Musk the most Stark-like CEO on the planet.

Musk was more than willing to tell us in 2015, that the Model 3 couldnt really happen without the completion of his Gigafactory, the massive battery-building complex he built in Nevada.

@WillOremus That has been my goal from the beginning. Need the Gigafactory for Model 3.

Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 25, 2014

You know he wasn't trying to distract anyone from, say, Model 3 development woes, because the factory is built and started producing batteries in January, just in time for the start of Model 3 production. It will ramp up production over the coming months.

@WillOremus That has been my goal from the beginning. Need the Gigafactory for Model 3.

Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 25, 2014

Musk has even gone so far as to outline how hell ramp up Model 3 production. Starting with 30 now, 100 by the end of August, 1,500 by September and, he claims, 20,000 Model 3 cars a month by December.

Looks like we can reach 20,000 Model 3 cars per month in Dec

Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 3, 2017

Granted, that does sound like crazy-talk, but then so did a private space company ferrying supplies to the International Space Station by 2012.

There is, of course, another side to TonyerElon Musk. He can be, shall we say, withholding.

For all the detail Musk has given us about the Model 3 (and there is a lot on Twitter and on the Tesla site), there are some holes. The biggest is a detailed description of the cars interior. Aside from that somewhat-concerning single dashboard screen and the fact that it seats five adults, we have no idea what it looks like or how it feels.

Starting Friday night, though, that may change. After Musk finishes giving his presentation at the back of his Tesla Factory, 30 employee/customers will accept vehicle delivery.

Its unclear if they will drive them right off the lot or accept keys for pickup at a latter date. Im hopeful, though, that well witness a parade of people driving off in freshly minted Model 3s with Elon Musk standing on stage waving wistfully, maybe with a tear in his eye.

Soon after, these drivers will start posting their first impressions unless Musk made them all sign a strict NDA lifting the last bit of mystery shrouding these cars.

That moment will also mark the beginning of a new kind of race.

Teslas Model 3 should be the most performant $35,000 electric car on the market (215-mile range, 0-to-60 in 5.6 seconds, All Wheel Drive by 2018) with 373,000 pre-order customers eagerly awaiting delivery (that could literally take months, if not years to happen). In the nine years since Teslas been selling electric cars, its put roughly 230,000, give or take a few thousand, Roadster, Model S and Model X Teslas on the road.

Fulfilling all these Model 3 orders could help Tesla and electric cars achieve a kind of ubiquity never seen before in the automotive market. Perhaps more importantly, all of them will have built-in autonomy (starting at Level 3, where the driver is still needed, but upgradeable through software to fully-autonomous Level 5). There just arent that many self-driving-capable cars on the road today. Sure, many of the autonomous features will not be enabled and most of states (and national regulations) still dont permit autonomous driving, but that will change in the coming years and hundreds of thousands of Tesla drivers will be ready.

There is a chance that something could go wrong.

Musks team is refining the production Model 3s right up until the moment of delivery. He knows this isnt a luxury car like the Model S, but that isnt stopping him from seeking perfection.

Going over the small nuances of Model 3 production. Very important that nothing sounds tinny. https://t.co/q3Aj3Yq8J8

Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 12, 2017

Hes right to do so, obviously.

If Musk achieves his goal of delivering 20,000 Tesla Model 3s a month (or more), he must have an error-free and unstoppable production line and cannot afford an early-stage defect that leads to a recall.

That could happen, but Im betting that this small, private event will be remembered as the moment when Tesla matured as a car company and the rest of the auto industry quaked in its shoes.

WATCH: Elon Musk's vision for traffic-skipping underground tunnels looks pretty incredible

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What to expect at the Tesla Model 3 delivery event was originally posted by 16 MP Just news

[thesnhuup]

Board Meeting update from Palo Alto: A Foray into the Future

The SNHU Board of Trustees sets aside one of its three annual meetings as a “learning meeting,” travelling somewhere to learn more about some aspect of the work we do. We did D.C. a couple of years ago, doing a deep dive into higher education policy. Earlier this year we met in Palo Alto, making a foray into the future – or at least whatever good sense we could create of it. We had the help of the good folks at Singularity University and the Institute for the Future (IFTF), both intensely focused on the opportunities and challenges of a being rapidly transformed by technology.

At one point, we were asked, “Does the world feel like it is moving faster than it ever has in your life?” and everyone nodded emphatically. The follow up? “This is as slow as it will ever feel.” Yikes.

Palo Alto is ground zero for our increasingly digital world and it was nice to spend a couple of days immersed in a culture that feels so optimistic, a place that generally feels like it can solve the world’s big, thorny problems, at a time when some of those problems seem bigger and thornier than ever. Harnessing solar energy and getting us off carbon within 20 years, bio-reactors producing protein and food products that no longer require the raising and killing of animals, off-earth (yes, off earth) mining and manufacturing, autonomous cars safely ferrying around our kids and elderly parents. It felt like the stuff of science fiction, but fiction becoming reality at a rapid pace.

I subsequently made a visit to SpaceX, which is dramatically reinventing the aerospace industry. Processes that previously took legacy manufacturers 8 weeks or even 8 months are accomplished in 8 hours in the SpaceX world, where engineers can produce new parts almost instantaneously with 3D titanium printers, it’s an audacious place that reflects the genius of its founder, Elon Musk. Throw in our forays into virtual and augmented reality (we recently produced our first AR view book), machine learning for assessment in our CBE offerings, our new VR Lab on campus, the millions we are spending on reinventing our IT platform with class leading solutions, and our new early stage investment fund with Rethink Education, and it feels like we are dipping our toes well into that future world so enthusiastically envisioned in Palo Alto.

What no one is doing is keeping up with the dramatic impacts and disruptions that our technological advancements are causing. Autonomous cars and trucks have great promise for improving roadway safety, preserving mobility for those no longer able to drive, and more – but is also poised to put 3.1m truck drivers out of work (the leading middle class job for non-degreed white men in 31 states). AI and machine learning will vastly improve human performance, but might spell the end of whatever privacy to which we cling and is also given to algorithmic bias and Big Brother visions of state (or corporate) control. If the folks at Singularity U can envision a world of abundance with no need to work, how do we reimagine a society in which so much derives from the work we do – status, meaning, income, connections, and more? Philosophers and sociologists might raise existential questions of meaning and mattering.

Digital Natives, that young generation under the age of 20, who have known no world in which technology is not ubiquitous (if unevenly distributed across socio-economic class) are not waiting for us to figure it out. They don’t rush to get their license or to drive, because the device glued to their hand gives them instant access to every person they know in a way that a car never can. Indeed, one study shows that they would overwhelmingly support a ban on human driving as soon as it can be shown that autonomous cars are safer than human driven cars. They will not only navigate the world differently than we do, but that world itself will be quite different than the one we have known, for good and/or bad. Maybe that’s why when the topic of mentoring comes up, digital natives assume we want their help, not vice versa. Yet we are asked to educate them, which raises endless questions. For example, around what they need to know and how they need to know, important questions when they have a digital assistant like Siri or Alexa at their side and all the world’s information (and misinformation) instantly available. It is exciting as hell and scary as hell at the same time.

I’ve sent to our Trustees a copy of Jean Twenge’s new book, iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy – And Completely Unprepared For Adulthood. We need to understand the new wave of technology that is washing over society and education, but we need to think ever harder about its implications for the students who will be in our class. They will never log on with us, because they are never logged off. Their world is a hybrid one that blends realities – physical and digital, increasingly seamless and powerful and mysterious to us still. While a technology driven world valorizes those who code, we never needed more our ethicists, philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and others who inhabit the Arts and Sciences.

Bob Johansen, a Senior Fellow at IFTF, says the new world in which we are entering has enormous potential for good and enormous potential for bad and the difference will be ambitious, super-connected young people who have hope versus ambitious, super-connected young people who are hopeless. Whether we are educating a recent high school graduate with her whole world ahead of her and her dreams unsullied, a working father trying to take better care of his family, or a refugee languishing in a camp and waiting for the chance to return home, we are in the business of hope. That’s why our efforts to understand the new technologies and the new learners is so important.

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