[Efthreeoh]

Originally Posted by Tracus

Originally Posted by Efthreeoh View Post

.... a finite level of technology needed to have automobiles meet safety and environmental regulations,...

Which they don't really met.
I wish people know how much damage we produce to the enironment by manufacturing these EVs....
Second, there are some issues like EMF but each with its own...

I agree with you, but you took my comment to a totally different place. I was pointing out that a Tesla is not a giant cell phone subject to rapid enhancement and advancement because cell phones have far less restrictions on using available engineering dollars to meet industry standards (mostly self imposed by the telecom industry) for safety and ("tail pipe emissions") environmental regulations. Car design involves meeting very stringent safety and emissions regulations, which with each design change have to be tested and adhered to. For instance, if a manufacturer changes the engine in a car, or the transmission, even without significant change to the chassis, the car has to be recertified to meeting safety crash standards. These types of tests are very expensive and must be amortized over the expected sales volume of the vehicle, which keeps rapid change within the automotive industry at a far lower pace than for products of the electronics industry. A cell phone must meet RF emissions safety requirements, which are far far less costly to test for and design around.

Additionally, the infrastructure (physical plant and production equipment) to manufacture automobiles is far more expensive than it is for the electronic industry. This also dictates the speed at which product change is introduced into automotive products. Manufacturers must recoup very expensive production equipment and tooling costs though sales of each different product family (i.e. all the variations of the 3-series), which is why the industry shares so much platform design between different models. VW is the industry leader of this technique being that it builds 45 or so different models off of a high-level-shared common platform. Cell phones and TVs don't involve automotive-levels of platform cost and can make far more rapid changes to their products at little (relative) cost. - dtwyim's analogy wasn't very good. If his analogy were somewhat true Tesla would have already introduced the Tesla X (it's been delayed at least 18 months by my count) and the Tesla 3 would be in low-rate initial production.