Consumer Products Innovation 2007 - Tesla, Ideo, Dash, Sling…
On Tuesday, I attended the MIT-Stanford Venture Lab panel discussion Consumer Products Innovation 2007. The Panel featured Martin Eberhard, CEO of Tesla Motors, and included Robert Acker of Dash Navigation, Dave Blakely of Ideo and Dave Mathews of Sling Media.
Before the panel was food and networking, where you always meet some very interesting people. Among the notable contacts was Jeff Schwartz of Disruptive Strategies (great name!). Check out his blog. We had a very interesting discussion about mobi.tv and the future of mobile video.
The panel started with a powerpoint presentation by Martin. He had some compelling things to say, including:
- A comparison of the efficiencies of various methods of car propulsion (gas/diesel, ethanol, hybrid, hydrogen fuel cell, electric, etc.). His main point was that if you compare miles driven per unit of resource consumed (land, etc), his electric vehicle always came out on top - and by a significant margin.
- When Clinton & Gore had the big-3 auto manufacturers over to the White House, Gore promoted the hybrid. The Big-3 had a sour look on their collective face, whereas Toyota saw that they were behind, and invested heavily in hybrids.
- Even with the Prius, Toyota’s CAFE (corporate average fuel economy) is less now than it was 10 years ago. Legislation, etc., can’t stop people from buying what they want.
- Using multiple small cells (battieries) has significant safety advantages, including dealing with failure of cells and fires.
- If they hit their goal of 10K cars/year in 5 or so years, they’ll be the largest purchaser of LiPo cells (70M/year) and will have significant buyer power.
- Standard battery power/density has been increasing approximately 8%/year for the last 10-15 years, and will continue to do so for the next 10-15 years. Thus, while they have only a 250 mile range today, Tesla will get approx. 600 miles in 10 years, which will be more than most people drive in a day. At that point, the car will be like the cell phone for most people. Just use it during the day without worrying about the charge, and then recharge overnight (when it’s cheapest).
- Standard cells are designed for consumer electronics, and support about 500 charging cycles. At 250 miles, 500 charges, the cells have a lifetime of over 100K miles. This was compared to the Chevy Volt, which is designed to go 40 miles on a charge. At 500 charges, they have a lifetime of only 20K miles. So Chevy needs to wait until they can push battery technology to 2500 charges in order to get 100K mile lifetimes.
Unfortunately, Martin didn’t address one key point, which was the amount of additional grid power that would be needed to support his fleet of cars, and how we’re going to produce it (new power plants, distribution lines and facilities, etc.) My personal take is that without additional infrastructure support, we’ll be right back where we were in California during the summer of 2004, with power shortages and brownouts/blackouts.
Also, Unfortunately, Martin’s speech was not only the highlight of the evening, it was the only thing worth noting. After Martin’s speech, there was a panel discussion, moderated by Robert Scoble (PodTech, Scobleizer). Robert was very unprepared, did a very poor job of moderating, and the discussion sufferred appropriately. You can find my comments to Robert about his unprofessionalism on his blog.