Hopefully it's a 4 door sedan with regular doors. Like a Corolla.

Why does aluminium have to be painted?

@thelimitingfactor . Hey Jordan. Let's have another try..... I still think there are a fundamental misconceptions regarding the "compact car" (vehicle) . 1) "Compact" doesn't necessarily mean "small" in terms of passenger space. . 2) The general consensus seems to be (on and off) that the Compact and the Taxi are based on the same *platform* ? . Why not take that further and say the same *vehicle* ? . That makes perfect sense for both ease of production and economy of scale.... Leading to "Cheap" (profitable) . 3) Use case: There's a popular opinion that the TAXI would be a 2 seat vehicle..... But, consider the use case. At least where I live (London) we have *regulations* for Black Cabs which stipulate the requirements of easy access for the "less able" in society (who arguably require the service more that the "able"?) This includes provision for *easy access* of service animals and Wheelchairs. . A 2 seater, as presented *WOULD NOT* succeed. ..... HOWEVER. Applying what I hope may be seen as "logic" and revisiting my first point.... A "COMPACT" (SHORT) vehicle, with wide, *flat* access, (automated sliding door? 1 side?) and ample seating in the same footprint as a 2 seater? . That's perfect for a Taxi. . Imagine what some consider the best of the bunch (so far) the London Black Cab. . A "Box" behind the driver, with wide doors, and good access. Now, remove the front end, then, the driver. Replace the area vacated by the driver with luggage space. Add 4 wheel steering. . THAT is an efficient, general purpose (AND legal!)TAXI. . My conclusion? The "box like" car shown was (is) the basis for: The Taxi and other variants INCLUDING the cheap "compact" car which, incidentally (?) Sandy Munro once described as "a brick for the kids to drive"...... I believe he's thinking the same as me. ....... Structure? *Not* "Cybertruck" based. .... Materials? Jordan, I'm sure you noticed the comment by Tom at the end of the Munro CT battery video regarding the fibre based structural components? . I wonder if Tesla has been experimenting with a rapid production system for other components? . They didn't look like Carbon to me ... How about a woven natural fibre with a resin, or other binder? (🤔 Maybe a crop which mid west farmers might provide?? Untapped customers?) . Maybe a whole battery box from that material? . A metal casting bolted to the front? Metal crash cans on the front of that? . Various rear end frames and panels in metal, or the same material? . Panels designed to hang "over" structural beams, similar to those in the pack, fixed on the inside face with quick release trim fasteners? Not visible on the outside, but easy removal for repair, just shred the old panel as raw material for other components? If recyclers had a shredder on site, they'd be sending a tub of raw material back on the same truck taking battery packs for recycling! The modern equivalent to "crushing" a car? . There may not be paint..... Self coloured? Possibly a wrap? 🤔Was the "wrap your Cybertruck" service a "toe in the water" for that idea? . Imagine a line of Optimus workers with a semi automated wrap line, the component on a conveyor, a roll of wrap extends over, then lowers onto the panel (vacuum formed?) . Optimus trims the panel. (Wait for the "Robot with knife" FUD!) . THIS is how they get to the "20 million" figure. . Nearly forgot. "The car on the right" Jordan. Same presentation. Slide... 58(?) "Powertrain" . Copy and enlarge "the car under the sheet". . Tesla website. . Menu Vehicles Roadster. 5th picture down (removable roof"?). Look at the lines. Tell me it's not the same car. . Question. What might be a good test for a new production process? You might want to start with a "hands on" supervisory approach? Workers hand fitting and "fettling" to refine the system? Maybe making a low volume product with enough profit margin to allow that extra work? . What if they were building 2 lines and the project which has been mothballed is the "slow build, test vehicle" the Roadster, not the Compact/ Taxi? Maybe "Unboxed" is working better than anticipated? . Food for thought?

An unpainted corrosion resistant aluminium alloy makes more sense than steel imo., from a cost perspective at least.

@@SkepticalCaveman Most alloys pick up a pretty drab patina, and certain atmospheres attack aluminum aggressively. I.e. salt fog with smog mixed in.

Shame GM didn’t simply make Saturn an Electric brand- complete with the no haggle process.

😂🎯

@@thelimitingfactor IIRC the way accountants work, 1. They ignore the factory-capital cost/(probably)water-consumption/water-treatment etc which get lumped into overheads & distributed across all elements of vehicle cost (paint has a big foot print). 2. Defects and remedial are also likely to be treated the same way, so paint damage further down the line say during installation of a door will get assigned to door costs or over heads. 3. the time the vehicle is in the build process gets picked up in over heads. Me, I’d quite believe paint costs 25% of a vehicle, but others, like Munro & Associates could tell you for sure

I agree with you, but the plastic problem isn't just about initial quality. I used to sell the machines used to make lego molds, and the key is extremely tight tolerances for the mold and injection molding process. The problem with plastic, at least according to Bob Lutz, is that no matter how precisely you make the part, it has a lot of thermal expansion. I just don't think it's an issue for a taxi.

Plastic could be molded with colors, no paint required

If Tesla figures out a great plastic formula, and it gets the price and weight down, I'd totally buy the car. In a taxi I also wouldn't car of course.

Corvette anyone?

@@dont_hit_trees Fiberglass ...

The Smart car used them, and they had numerous advantages. Weight and cost, and the ability to easily remove them and replace them changing the colour of the car. They were also easy for companies to put branding on and it was easy to replace that later. I've no idea what kind of plastic or composite they were made from but the basic principal works fine.

When Sandy Monroe suggested to Elon he mix Aluminum and Carbon Fibre Elon was dead against it. Elon trained as a materials scientist at University.

Corvette has been fiberglass for 70 years

​@@jamesengland7461 And fiberglass is dramatically harder to work with than injection molded plastics.

iPhone 5 to 7 and earlier are made with anodized aluminium so the available colours might be similar.

Great comment, great ideas!

Would a steel car cabin heat up slower in the sun than a aluminium cabin?

Under-rated comment. Smart-style city cars are the way. (Who needs rear wheel steering to go get a bag of oranges?)

@@nickfosterxx you don't but I would happily drive mine all over the UK, up to about three hundred miles, with no comfort issues or safety concerns. Admittedly, I'm not an abject coward as a lot of people who scream that small car are unsafe clearly are but they were great cars for the time.

Yes, the Smarts automatic gearbox wasn't as fast as it could have been, although it did apparently improve over the one I had. It was really fast compared to every single car I ever raced off the lights though due to the weight. And boy did people get annoyed that I could overtake them on the motorway because they weren't actually doing 70 anyway. Lots of bruised egos. The panels were great and while I never modded mine, knowing I could was a bonus. If only they'd made their electric one a ground up vehicle and done it properly it would have been as good as the Chinese versions with a much larger range. Sadly that's not the Mercedes mindset, they're much more comfortable designing out of date technology and the original Smart guy wasn't around to push them any more so they stabbed it in the back like the traitors to humanity and engineering they are at heart. If Tesla put more than two seats in their budget car I will not be surprised but I'll know they were never serious about the idea at that point.

The BMW i3 was constructed as a carbon fiber monocoque on top of a aluminium frame with abs body panels and seems to be extremely durable.

Ford's hemp vehicle was also designed to run on hemp alcohol.

That checks out with a cost to paint of 420.

@@TheUToobBoob UBoob University educated, I know, you know hemp is not used as the " big bad Drug" It's fantastic materials ability being in direct competition with other popular building, materials at the time of weeds first political ban was why weed was also banned .

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soybean_car

The hemp body was also so hard that when it would hit a pedestrian or biker they would be toast.

Chromed would be cool. Then I will buy one and chrome my teeth to match 🙂

Real futuristic. Dig the fins!

Wraps

They always have in bumpers, etc. But not the body.

​@@thelimitingfactor Bumpers, the entire fascia, kicker plates and wheel arches on off-road type vehciles. All of the protruding bits like mirrors and spoilers, the entire exterior of those fancy light clusters. Take a good look at a modern vehicle. At least 30% if not 40% of that surface area is plastic.

Pontiac Fiero was introduced 41 years ago.

Your ideas sound good and seem practicable. The RT doesn't have to look good, it just has to work well. The RT could be used to check public opinion and to optimise appearance, materials and production processes for the compact.

Good point!

A lot of motorcycles use anodized aluminum.

That is intriguing.

Good colour ranges possible but I’m unsure about resistance to coastal conditions. Having said that, all our bus panels in Africa are from rolled aluminium

Afik aluminum is a lot harder to stamp into complex shapes. But a hot-stamping process like Tesla is already using on CyberTruck might change the numbers? An alloy which age hardens at room temperature (like 2024) stamped and quenched by cold dies would be interesting.

Horses for courses

Yeah, I was trying to give the devil his due

My revivifier says, “when a taxi rolls up, I’ve NEVER checked panel gaps!”

Good points and thanks for the feedback!

It also has more disadvantages than I listed.

@@thelimitingfactor But if the body and panels were all 'plastic' (e.g. carbon fiber?) then the thermal expansion difference between frame and body panel issue would be minimized.

@@logoschristianacademy6044 That will likely be the case with Roadster but not in a segment where every penny is scrutinized.

@@thelimitingfactor Saturn midigated the expansion issues by using rubber plugs to affix the plastic panels to a steel monocoque. Those issues however have been minimized since then by improving both plastic chemistries as well as molding techniques. There isn’t much alignment shift in the current mating of plastic bumpers to metal fenders, for example. What I’m proposing is just the elimination of the metal fender panels in favor of plastic bumpers that extend around the sides to cover the areas currently covered by the metal fenders. That eliminates joints between bumpers and fenders entirely. The point is to eliminate tolerance stackup and final fitment processes by using large structural castings along with large injection molded plastic castings and a minimal amount of high strength steel stampings and other molded parts like laminated glass. This minimizes the part count while simultaneously minimizing assembly cost and complexity. Remember Elons montra, “The best part is no part, the best process is no process!” Very large front and rear impact absorbing close out panels eliminates stamped metal fenders along with all the handling, coating and installation processes. That’s right down Elons alley. Not to mention opening up the small car platform for use by other manufacturers by simply molding a different set of plastic outer skins to reflect different design languages of other brands. It’s interesting that GM is bringing back the Bolt around 2025 when they never were able to be profitable in that segment. It’s also interesting that VW has delayed production of their ID Golf until 2025 and that Ford has announced a skunkworks team secretly working on a new compact for 2025… When is Teslas new unboxed compact car coming out? 2025? I say that all these upcoming small EVs will be built on the same platform, because only Tesla has figured out how to do it profitably with its unboxed method.

Other GM divisions worked to sabotage Saturn, Olds, Pontiac. And Bob kLutz was Chief Saboteur. Do not believe the world’s oldest office boy.

I owned a 2008 Saturn Aura. It had painted metal panels, no plastic ones.

Glad to hear it! 🙏🏼

Aptera is ludicrously expensive, solving a non-existing problem. it's a gadget. Great idea, though.

Will be an app for sure , where you will control who can use your robotaxi and when, ,if the customer has bad feedback you can refuse him to use your taxi

@@gaborkevlar2821 I see that kind of micromanagement work for the kind of amount and duration of Airbnb stays but not for taxies. Plus, how to be sure who exactly is responsible for trashing the outside paint? Could be a rock thrown sideways by a passing vehicle, a cart in a shopping center, another door opening, a passerby and so on. My main point was: considering electric vehicles at first required to look more at the TCO than the buying price only. For Robotaxi, you could consider durability being more important than the cost of manufacturing, ultimately to have also a lower TCO.

Makes for a “sharp” looking car❤

Most city journeys are short. Or very short. And slow. Weight is more important than aero.

Thanks for the insights!

@@thelimitingfactor There is the e.Go manufactured in Aachen but not very successful. The Smart seems plastic but with good painting. The Saturn, yes. And the BMW i3. Carbon as the Rimac. Aluminum would need a protection at the outside (e.g. the large models or the Audi A2 (2000..2005)). It could be a sandwich of Aluminum sheetmetal and a hot temperature glued plastic foil. Maybe we come to a foil that can produce electricity through sunlight if they really challenge their developers to make something extraordinary new. Just strange ideas.

Fair point!

It's a good point! There were at least 3 other options I could have covered. I covered the one that have been raised the most.

Yup, that's why I worded it carefully

There's ways to make each work

(It might also reduce repair costs because I guess that wrapping a single door panel is cheaper than repainting.)

So many options! that's another good one.

What about the inside face of the panel? That can be subject to MORE corrosion in many cases. Would you wrap both sides?

@@rogerstarkey5390 wrapping would not be enough for corrosion protection, there would still need to be some coating, I think

Thanks for the insights!

It will be in the long term for sure

No clue, if there's nothing public, then I don't know about it.

I thought it was lead acid batteries that are the most recycled common use mass produced item globally speaking?

I've seen it done with a fiber laser on a small scale.

That doesn't solve the cost problem. If it's not work hardened, it'll have to be thicker. Lots of variables, not just one or two.

@@thelimitingfactor I think it removes the need for laser cutting and press brakes and opens up the styling options. I'd also expect Tesla wouldn't bother with any finishing steps for a taxi which they'd likely be wrapping. Since you're responding, can you tell me how, as a contributor, I could have accessed this story when it first appeared on X? I was unable to find it anywhere a week ago.

They could do, but it would still be expensive. Non hardened would probably have to be thicker than I suggested.

So many options! I'll be interested to see what they come up with.