PepsiCo reserves one hundred of Tesla's new electric semi trucks. The future is here.

Courtesy of Reuters:  

PepsiCo Inc has reserved 100 of Tesla Inc’s new electric Semi trucks, the largest-known order of the big rig, as the maker of Mountain Dew soda and Doritos chips seeks to reduce fuel costs and fleet emissions, a company executive said on Tuesday. 

Tesla has been trying to convince the trucking community that it can build an affordable electric big rig with the range and cargo capacity to compete with relatively low-cost, time-tested diesel trucks. 

Early orders reflect uncertainty over how the market for electric commercial vehicles will develop. About 260,000 heavy-duty Class-8 trucks are produced in North America annually, according to FTR, an industry economics research firm. 

PepsiCo’s 100 trucks add to orders by more than a dozen companies such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc, fleet operator J.B. Hunt Transport Services Inc, and foodservice distribution company Sysco Corp. Reservations to date are at 267 Tesla trucks, according to a Reuters tally. 

PepsiCo intends to deploy Tesla Semis for shipments of snack foods and beverages between manufacturing and distribution facilities and direct to retailers within the 500-mile (800-km) range promised by Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk.

I know I must drive some of you crazy with my fixation on new technologies and the move to renewable energies, but what can I say, the future is indeed exciting.

Alternative energy sources, autonomous vehicles, Artificial Intelligence, the next decade or so is going to be amazing.

Now if only our humanity can catch up with our technologies.

And so marks the beginning of the end of the truck driver.

Courtesy of Teslarti:  

Elon Musk’s announcement that a Tesla Semi will be arriving as early as September is the first step to what will eventually be a reinvention of an entire industry. We’ve discussed before what, exactly, that means, but given that the man in charge of the Tesla truck program is Jerome Guillen who has a history with Daimler (specifically Freightliner) and large Class 8 semi-trucks, it’s not hard to see where Tesla plans to go with this. That leaves only the question of how far, literally, they plan to take it. In tractor-trailer operations, there are two basic types of freight moving: short-haul and long-haul.

Currently, the trucking industry is seeing a lot of change, internally, as technology improves the way that freight hauling operates. The Internet and faster communications, for example, has begun to erode the traditional consignee-broker-hauler paradigm in which someone with goods to haul contacted a freight broker who then contracted a freight hauler to move the goods, skimming a percentage off the top for the connection. The middleman is often cut out in today’s trucking, with many trucking companies having load brokers on staff.

Electronics and global positioning have also changed how trucks operate, with computers more efficiently organizing load and truck movements to minimize empty movement. The USDOT says that about 29 percent of all truck movement is pulling an empty trailer to or from a freight drop-off point, costing about $30 billion annually. That number, while high, has been dropping for some time and drops exponentially as networks of computers get more efficient at organizing trucking and trucking companies consolidate into larger and larger fleets.

Technology comes to trucking.

Soon the roads will be filled with self driving big rigs with only a token human on board to troubleshoot if something goes awry, but even that job will be short lived as the technology continues to improve.

I believe many of us will live to see the day when trucks transport goods across the country, that are loaded and unloaded by autonomous forklifts, and then distributed to various markets by smaller self driving vehicles.

If the machines themselves became the consumers of the goods, man's usefulness in this enterprise would disappear altogether.

As somebody whose father was a truck driver, and who was forced to listen to truck driving songs like  "Convoy," Eastbound and Down," and "On the Road Again," until my ears bled, I can barely wait.

Just another subset of jobs that Donald Trump can do nothing to save.

The Tesla Model S autopilot. The future is here. Well almost here. Update!

Courtesy of Jalopnik: 

The Tesla Model S isn’t the first truly autonomous car on the road and available for sale to the public. We’re not there yet, just as a society. But it is the first car with what Tesla’s calling its “Autopilot” system. And if this is the future not of driving, but of sitting in traffic, then please sign me up. 

Autopilot, if it isn’t a full autonomous system, is simple enough in execution. It won’t drive you to your ultimate destination, it won’t make navigational turns without your input, and it doesn’t know what the traffic light or the sign in front of you says. So think of it less like an autonomous system, and rather more like the ultimate execution of cruise control. It uses a forward-looking radar, a front-facing camera, 12 ultrasonic sensors, and GPS to make sure everything stays on the road, and it seems to work well enough using those. 

But even if it’s just the holy grail of cruise control, its execution is almost perfect.

The self driving car debate in my house is still ongoing and quite passionate.

Interestingly enough my daughter and I are not on the sides of the issue you might imagine.

I am all for self driving cars as I think they will be great for the elderly and awesome for long distance drives.

My daughter on the other hand does not like the idea of machines taking over yet another human responsibility and making us even more reliant on machines.

I see her point, and even agree with it to some degree, but then I think of the gee whiz factor and suddenly I'm like a kid in a toy store.

Besides let's face it, this WILL be the future someday whether we like it or not.

Update: In other car news Toyota has plans to virtually do away with all gas powered vehicles by 2050.

God I love the smell of progress in the morning.

If only we would have listened.

Car dealer associations across the country are lobbying hard to keep Tesla Motors from establishing dealerships. The answer as to why this is the case is one that we know all too well. Oil.

Courtesy of Wired:  

Car dealers fear Tesla. In states across the country, powerful car dealer associations have lobbied to ensure the electric car maker and its direct-sales model are kept out. This movement claimed another victory this week when New Jersey banned Tesla stores in the state. 

On the surface, the fear is hard to fathom. In New Jersey, for instance, sales of Tesla’s $70,000 Model S reportedly number in the hundreds. But if you dig a little deeper, it becomes obvious why dealers are worried. They don’t just fear Tesla’s cars. They fear Tesla’s plan to create a world where you never have to bring your car into the shop again. 

The first and most striking way Tesla kills the dealer service department cash cow is downloads. As part of its sales pitch, Tesla says you should think of its Model S sedan as “an app on four wheels.” That may sound like vacuous Silicon Valley marketing copy, but the company isn’t just being metaphorical. Software is at the heart of what keeps Teslas running. These internet-connected cars are designed to self-diagnose their problems. The vehicles can also download software fixes or updates — even new features — much like an iPhone when Apple puts out a new version of iOS. When fixes happen over the air, there’s no need for a shop in the first place. 

The ability to repair a car via software is especially important when the vehicle itself consists of so much new technology that traditional mechanics don’t know how to fix. The flip side is that without an internal combustion engine, there’s not as much to fix. I’ve written before that a Tesla without its outer shell looks like a cell phone on wheels. It’s basically just a big battery. That means no spark plugs, no air filters, no fuel pumps, no timing belts. In short, Teslas don’t have any of the parts that force you to take your car in for “regularly scheduled maintenance” — services that can cost dearly at the dealer. But it’s hard to charge for an oil change when there’s no oil to be changed.

As you can imagine a vehicle that requires no gasoline and no oil changes, would drive the oil companies into  a near panic.

And so it has. Enough so that it has a long history of working against the electric car industry.

I think there is little doubt that this is the wave of the future, and speaking just for myself, the idea of a car that can self diagnose and solve problems via the internet is incredibly attractive.

However, and I almost hate to bring this up, before this country puts all of its eggs in the electric car basket, we need to completely overhaul our electrical grid, beef up security, and move to more solar power to meet our energy needs.

Right now we are incredible vulnerable to sabotage, and before we dispense with fossil fuel powered cars altogether that must be addressed.

However in the meantime I am looking forward to helping my daughter purchase a car that will NOT leak oil all over my driveway, and one which I can plug into the wall to charge rather than to stand in the freezing cold at a gas station spending money to support oil producing countries in the Middle East.