Cars are made by mechanical engineers and electrical is outsourced by other countries to mass produce. This stuff is rarely designed in the US. Mechanics want something electrical and electrical people make it for them. Success in innovation depends on great recruitment teams put together by (in this case) Elon Musk
What many have misunderstood is that Tesla's reduced wire concept is the complete Elimination of wiring harnesses! This will be achieved by controlling everything through their own local Ethernet controllers located close to the switched electrical parts. This means very short wires from the part to the local controller. They may also integrate the 24V power into a single PoE Bus for additional simplification! This leads into their next-gen modular parallel assembly concept where every module could be fully tested before final assembly!
Three kilometers of wiring down to 100 meters is astonishing. I guess that’s an understatement because the fact there was three kilometers to begin with is astonishing.
Electric vehicles are very complex indeed, so shortening the wiring harness to that extent is impressive, that is until you really think about what that means.
Thanks Jon, great job as always. The busbar concept is very cool, it becomes a "wire harness" that holds the proper shape, which makes assembly much easier.. And the (presumably) aluminum busbar should be lighter and cheaper than copper, which lowers electrical losses and cost. All around a great innovation!
There is an old saying, "where is a will, there is a way." Let's think about how many CEOs understand computers inside out, and how many know ethernet and electricity systems and the mutual benefits if looked at it from the other angles... I think the "competition" CEOs won't even go to these kinds of radical changes. And the wiring is only one of multitude of similarly frozen system upgrades in a car I guess.
Not so. Tesla has stated they will follow the other manufacturers and provide vehicle to load (VTL) "in 2 years". Why not now ? Get up to speed Tesla. Tesla should follow the other manuafacturers and switch from their 400v to an 800v architecture. 800v is way superiour. Tesla is following CATL and BYD and will make their own LFP cells next year. Most Tesla evs sold globally have Chinese made LFP cells fitted. Tesla has also followed the other home battery manufacturers, and have recently upgraded their powerwalls to LFP. and many other examples.
Most 12v loads in a car are lighting, and this is low current led. 12v is fine for these small loads. There isnt a current hungry starter motor in an ev, so 12v is fine
No way. AC/heat pump compressors, coolant pumps, windshield wipers, blower motors, window defrosters, heated seats and such all benefit from 48V. @@nordic5490
Hi, John yes the higher the voltage the less electrical resistance.I guess they are going use a 48:volt battery also.Tesla is working to full automation of there efficient advanced high tech factories 😮✔️🖖🌎
You actually did not explain how a "connection-less" power distribution system ... could actually distribute anything. Well, Bluetooth or laser optics might distribute information; maybe wireless power transfer works too. Another issue that comes to mind is "modular" factory assembly. Perhaps the "rigid busbar" is a part attached to the vehicle frame ... and all of the modules then have their own "touch points" (if not connectors) to that busbar part when they come together to form the car. This whole topic of 48v dc (and high voltage) wiring systems along with digital steer-by-wire and all the other IT bus/controller/sensor or actuator systems is very important. It would make an excellent "deep-dive" video. For instance, how reliable, vibration- and weather-resistant, and transmission "error-free" really is a 100 meter long Ethernet cable system out "in the wild".
Several years ago many building systems changed from each device having a pair of dedicated wires from the main panel to the device, to the devices being addressable and connected to a variation of ethernet. Sounds like Tesla was moving in that direction and the new model will expand it further. Each Tesla will have its own Internet of Things with Ai running rampant in the system.
Yes, it would be great to see it for both HV and LV, but I expect it will be a concern for HV connections wear. Want to see the packaging layout for wiring. Tesla keen to use the back wall of the cabin for electrical packages. But judgement reserved
Hi John, Will be very interesting to find out how electrical connections will be made from rigid buss “pipe” to power components, guessing insulation displacement blades, tin plated with reliable connection to all four conductors Ted
As they make many components in house - they may make components (controllers, motors etc.) that already contain the ID blades to connect to the busbar....potentially a quick reliable assembly method.....
I thought that legacy auto would have switched to a higher voltage about 20 years ago as more electronics started coming into cars. As someone who has studied and trained in electronic/microelectronic system design I have been waiting for this because the technology required is not new.
Hi, I still don't understand how this bus bar cable can be "connector less". The diagram shows a number of connectors? The patent did talk about more controllers and an ethernet system but there would still have to be wiring ? Yes, this will be a major advantage and I hope Tesla can do it , Km of wiring is something that belongs in the past!
William Gibson is a supporter? You might find yourself in a cybersprawl novel :-) Appreciate the info on the new patent to help with automation for the wiring harness.
16x reduction in power loss over wires might also manifest as16x smaller wires at the same amount of loss, which is probably more helpful, as it reduces both cost and weight
I think the wire size is about 1/4, as is the weight and cost. Then there's the reduced amount of wire being used, and if installation can be automated the overall cost could be way lower for sure.
I have often wondered why they dont make more use of printed circuit boards. For example the door card could be one PC board with all the components mounted on it. It might be bigger, but it is highly automatable.
Thankyou, I've been looking for this info for a while now but it's not that clear yet. Does this mean that using the brakes, lights, horn, blinkers or windscreen washers & wipers will be controlled by wireless activation nodes? If I'm correct in that, how are these nodes protected from external interference?
In your upload of 2 weeks ago regarding Pepsi and Tesla, you made no mention of federal and state tax on diesel fuel pumped into semi-trucks. Federal tax is 24.3 cents per gallon and California tax is .441 per gallon - together $0.684 total diesel fuel tax per gallon. Now, electric semi-trucks don't pay fuel taxes, but they do use the same weight on the same roads. Therefore, eventually, Congress will have to get wise and somehow electric semi-trucks will have to pay the piper for road and bridge maintenance and construction.
I engineered 44 years world wide in big auto wiring harness build and test. Its clear 200A must be scaled back by 48v and it took a vertically integrated software biased engineer led company to make the shift 100%. Ethernet / buss bar allows robotised manufacture and assembly, never close enough to the costings to qualify the 10x claim but based on previous Tesla patent claims I would say they are right.......earth shattering for the wiring harness industries.
Sounds impressive. My only question is why isn't this busbar based 48 volt architecture being implemented across all vehicles, S, X, 3, & Y as well as CT and next gen models? Must be more difficult to develop and implement than it sounds.
Until all the controllers and low-voltage electronic devices can handle 48V (most are still 12-15V in S3XY), you can't switch to 48v and busbar. If you used busbar w/ 12v it would probably have to be too big/thick for the current needs?
He is doing two things simultaneously- 48 volts is one part of what he is doing. Making all components operate from a buss is the second part. Aircraft do this😀apparently some boats and large buildings also-but this is a major reinvention of how each part works. Maybe a local controller and some of the stuff is still activated by dc power. Think he will have some connectors as he plans to build car in subassemblies which are attached at a much higher level than at present.
on thhe point of the "Delimited", I think he may have been going to write deleted then changed his mind to limited, maybe there is still 1 or 2 existing.
In 4 or 5 years, I expect Tesla's factories to be overseen by a few highly-paid engineers, with all assembly automated. Experts on site who understand the gear can step in if needed to fix or adjust something. But ultimate efficiency is all robots. Maybe we'll all end up serving each other food in cafes, while robo-carpenters, robocops, robo-janitors and AI teachers do all the work.
If robots can do all of those other jobs, why not have robots serve food and drink? Next up. Robot doctors, robot nurses, robot caregivers in your home, robot gardeners and fence builders, robo Firefighters, robo Paramedics and RoboCops. Well, we saw that last one back in 1987. Why not robot engineers in the future? Tell it what you want and it designs what you desire.
The food server bit was a joke (sort of). That might be an arena in which people enjoy dealing with other people, a de-robotized sanctuary. In fact, I expect robot caregivers to be common, and accepted gratefully by folks who can't afford to pay a person to tend them. Robo-pets, definitely. But in a robotized world, a premium will be placed on settings free of them. Make sense?
I would think the accessories, computers, stereo, etc. in Tesla’s current cars use between 300 and 600 watts. So, if this is true, you would use about 8 miles worth of range on a 4 hour drive. This would amount to about 1 minute of Supercharging.
@@BenefitOfTheDoubtInquiry if it uses, let’s say 500 watts, that would be 2kWh in 4 hours (0.5kWh x 4). The cars go about 4 miles per kWh so 2kWh would be 8 miles. Supercharging does about 600 miles per hour on average which is about 10 miles per minute. Does this make help?
What does a 16X reduction in power loss mean? What is the reduction in power that you’re multiplying 16 by to get your power saved? Reminds me of the urinal at work that has a sticker that says “Saves 2x more water than a 1gpf urinals.”
It means if you use a current 4th the size of the 12 v system the power lost in the wiring will be a 16th of what was lost. There may be savings in the components as well but that would depend on their design and cannot be assumed to match the ratio perfectly.
@@alanrickett2537 Ah, that makes sense. Thanks. If they had said the power loss is 1/16th that of a 12v, that would have cleared it up for me. As they stated it, it is still a convoluted to get to what they meant. Thanks again for bringing clarity.
In my opinion, shortening a wiring harness in an automobile to this extent is a bad idea. In order to get three kilometers down to just 100 meters in automobiles as complex as those that Tesla makes, a really large chunk of it will have to be in series. That means that if one thing goes wrong in a majority of different places in the vehicle, the whole thing is bricked.
The big benefit for ridgid busbar, is for easier robotic *installation* of the wiring in the car... besides MUCH easier/cheaper/automatable manufacturing of the wiring/"harness" itself. Robots can't "push" floppy wire harness around, that needs humans, connecting all the little clips and spaghetti wires/connectors. A rigid busbar can just be pushed & snapped into place by robot, like a piece of sheet metal. Now, connectorless? THAT is an interesting aspect of the patent..?? no clips/connectors? Does it just tap the busbar like thick coaxial network did or??
This is nothing. GM has a patent on using the windshield as a sort of fiber optic connection rather than using wires at all. More specifically it relates to automotive data communication and telematics, and particularly to using a glass panel (e.g., windshield glass) as a high-speed optical interconnect by leveraging the lightguide properties of glass. In particular, the wiring harness can be greatly simplified as only power would need to be gated (e.g., to the roof) via the wiring harness.
I disagree. At 1:26:53 of Tesla's recording of the Investor Day presentation, posted on Tesla's UA-cam channel, Pete Bannon can be heard to say "deliminated" not "delimited" as both your comment and the transcript Jon quoted say. This appears to me to be an error in the transcript, likely due to "deliminated" not being a word, but rather a slip of Pete's tongue. I agree with Jon's edit, and that Pete Bannon meant to say "eliminated."
Another disappointing video. You either don't understand or don't manage to convey to the viewer the fundamental difference between a traditional hand-built wiring harness using tons of controllers from third party suppliers and a streamlined bus communication system.
*Ya, probably 48v data over power, capability to use 1/4 current capacity and use only 2 wires to feed all lights and accessories power and data, common data buss, each node is addressed by the central PC, EASY, EFFICIENT.*
Tesla has made more improvements/technology in their short existence than legacy has made in over 100 years! Good one Jon, thanks!
Agreed! It is amazing how "stuck in the past" Legacy Auto has been.
What, me worry?
Mmm not sure you are right there over the last 80 for certain.
Cars are made by mechanical engineers and electrical is outsourced by other countries to mass produce. This stuff is rarely designed in the US.
Mechanics want something electrical and electrical people make it for them.
Success in innovation depends on great recruitment teams put together by (in this case) Elon Musk
That’s because legacy car makers sand bag features each year.
What many have misunderstood is that Tesla's reduced wire concept is the complete Elimination of wiring harnesses!
This will be achieved by controlling everything through their own local Ethernet controllers located close to the switched electrical parts. This means very short wires from the part to the local controller.
They may also integrate the 24V power into a single PoE Bus for additional simplification!
This leads into their next-gen modular parallel assembly concept where every module could be fully tested before final assembly!
Three kilometers of wiring down to 100 meters is astonishing. I guess that’s an understatement because the fact there was three kilometers to begin with is astonishing.
Electric vehicles are very complex indeed, so shortening the wiring harness to that extent is impressive, that is until you really think about what that means.
*Nice dive into this revolutionary change for Tesla's EV industry !* HIGHLY UNDERRATED! Wall street has yet to get it.
Thanks Jon, great job as always.
The busbar concept is very cool, it becomes a "wire harness" that holds the proper shape, which makes assembly much easier.. And the (presumably) aluminum busbar should be lighter and cheaper than copper, which lowers electrical losses and cost. All around a great innovation!
Running low power components on 48V will only require extremely small gauge wiring. HUGE material savings with higher efficiency.
Thank you for clear a explanation of both what the changes are and their many implications and applications.
John, REALLY good report...you do a very nice and credible job.
Ukraine was a major wiring harness originator for traditional ICE autos. But the war there caused a rush to find other harness makers.
Very interested in how they manage this transformation. I've Always thought there were big improvements to be made in vehicle wiring.
And huge transition costs for legacy automakers... But tesla just does what makes (obvious) sense.
There is an old saying, "where is a will, there is a way." Let's think about how many CEOs understand computers inside out, and how many know ethernet and electricity systems and the mutual benefits if looked at it from the other angles...
I think the "competition" CEOs won't even go to these kinds of radical changes. And the wiring is only one of multitude of similarly frozen system upgrades in a car I guess.
Hi Jon, an awesome video... Tesla will always be one step ahead of all other manufacturers, with their continual improvement of all products.
Not so.
Tesla has stated they will follow the other manufacturers and provide vehicle to load (VTL) "in 2 years". Why not now ? Get up to speed Tesla.
Tesla should follow the other manuafacturers and switch from their 400v to an 800v architecture. 800v is way superiour.
Tesla is following CATL and BYD and will make their own LFP cells next year. Most Tesla evs sold globally have Chinese made LFP cells fitted.
Tesla has also followed the other home battery manufacturers, and have recently upgraded their powerwalls to LFP.
and many other examples.
Going to a 48 Volt system alone allows for far lighter and less expensive wiring.
True!
Most 12v loads in a car are lighting, and this is low current led. 12v is fine for these small loads. There isnt a current hungry starter motor in an ev, so 12v is fine
No way. AC/heat pump compressors, coolant pumps, windshield wipers, blower motors, window defrosters, heated seats and such all benefit from 48V. @@nordic5490
Hi, John yes the higher the voltage the less electrical resistance.I guess they are going use a 48:volt battery also.Tesla is working to full automation of there efficient advanced high tech factories 😮✔️🖖🌎
You actually did not explain how a "connection-less" power distribution system ... could actually distribute anything. Well, Bluetooth or laser optics might distribute information; maybe wireless power transfer works too. Another issue that comes to mind is "modular" factory assembly. Perhaps the "rigid busbar" is a part attached to the vehicle frame ... and all of the modules then have their own "touch points" (if not connectors) to that busbar part when they come together to form the car. This whole topic of 48v dc (and high voltage) wiring systems along with digital steer-by-wire and all the other IT bus/controller/sensor or actuator systems is very important. It would make an excellent "deep-dive" video. For instance, how reliable, vibration- and weather-resistant, and transmission "error-free" really is a 100 meter long Ethernet cable system out "in the wild".
Several years ago many building systems changed from each device having a pair of dedicated wires from the main panel to the device, to the devices being addressable and connected to a variation of ethernet. Sounds like Tesla was moving in that direction and the new model will expand it further. Each Tesla will have its own Internet of Things with Ai running rampant in the system.
Very similar to what I think they are doing 👍
If you have many local controllers on a simple PoE 24V loop you don't need wiring harnesses!
Thank you Jon for the link to the patent application.
Yes, it would be great to see it for both HV and LV, but I expect it will be a concern for HV connections wear. Want to see the packaging layout for wiring. Tesla keen to use the back wall of the cabin for electrical packages. But judgement reserved
Hi John,
Will be very interesting to find out how electrical connections will be made from rigid buss “pipe” to power components, guessing insulation displacement blades, tin plated with reliable connection to all four conductors
Ted
As they make many components in house - they may make components (controllers, motors etc.) that already contain the ID blades to connect to the busbar....potentially a quick reliable assembly method.....
Idk, aluminum started a lot of house fires at that junction...
@@jack-wl8uj And found its way OUT of building code approvals. Hmmmmm.
Brilliant! Great job! Best wishes form switzerland!
I thought that legacy auto would have switched to a higher voltage about 20 years ago as more electronics started coming into cars. As someone who has studied and trained in electronic/microelectronic system design I have been waiting for this because the technology required is not new.
Great coverage
Hi, I still don't understand how this bus bar cable can be "connector less". The diagram shows a number of connectors? The patent did talk about more controllers and an ethernet system but there would still have to be wiring ? Yes, this will be a major advantage and I hope Tesla can do it , Km of wiring is something that belongs in the past!
William Gibson is a supporter? You might find yourself in a cybersprawl novel :-) Appreciate the info on the new patent to help with automation for the wiring harness.
16x reduction in power loss over wires might also manifest as16x smaller wires at the same amount of loss, which is probably more helpful, as it reduces both cost and weight
I think the wire size is about 1/4, as is the weight and cost. Then there's the reduced amount of wire being used, and if installation can be automated the overall cost could be way lower for sure.
Nicely presented
These are great videos. Thx!
The car industry has been talking about the 48V system for quite a long time. Glad to see Tesla getting on the bandwagon.
Thanks Jon. I’m really curious as to when we will see the next nonTesla car with 48 volts.
Ford, if koreans dont get there first. Hyundai had some issues with their 12battery, im pretty sure they want to make an upgrade.
I have often wondered why they dont make more use of printed circuit boards. For example the door card could be one PC board with all the components mounted on it. It might be bigger, but it is highly automatable.
Electronic control removes the problem of mechanical connector, switch, and fuse arcing wear and corrosion associated with higher DC voltages.
Thanks for this. I was wondering why 12 volts was used in the first place
Just like that, just 3 wires to each item. Positive, negative and communication.
Thankyou, I've been looking for this info for a while now but it's not that clear yet. Does this mean that using the brakes, lights, horn, blinkers or windscreen washers & wipers will be controlled by wireless activation nodes? If I'm correct in that, how are these nodes protected from external interference?
Cyber truck harness is 48VDC, Fact!
In your upload of 2 weeks ago regarding Pepsi and Tesla, you made no mention of federal and state tax on diesel fuel pumped into semi-trucks. Federal tax is 24.3 cents per gallon and California tax is .441 per gallon - together $0.684 total diesel fuel tax per gallon. Now, electric semi-trucks don't pay fuel taxes, but they do use the same weight on the same roads. Therefore, eventually, Congress will have to get wise and somehow electric semi-trucks will have to pay the piper for road and bridge maintenance and construction.
I engineered 44 years world wide in big auto wiring harness build and test. Its clear 200A must be scaled back by 48v and it took a vertically integrated software biased engineer led company to make the shift 100%. Ethernet / buss bar allows robotised manufacture and assembly, never close enough to the costings to qualify the 10x claim but based on previous Tesla patent claims I would say they are right.......earth shattering for the wiring harness industries.
Sounds impressive. My only question is why isn't this busbar based 48 volt architecture being implemented across all vehicles, S, X, 3, & Y as well as CT and next gen models? Must be more difficult to develop and implement than it sounds.
Thats the plan
Until all the controllers and low-voltage electronic devices can handle 48V (most are still 12-15V in S3XY), you can't switch to 48v and busbar. If you used busbar w/ 12v it would probably have to be too big/thick for the current needs?
He is doing two things simultaneously- 48 volts is one part of what he is doing. Making all components operate from a buss is the second part. Aircraft do this😀apparently some boats and large buildings also-but this is a major reinvention of how each part works. Maybe a local controller and some of the stuff is still activated by dc power. Think he will have some connectors as he plans to build car in subassemblies which are attached at a much higher level than at present.
on thhe point of the "Delimited", I think he may have been going to write deleted then changed his mind to limited, maybe there is still 1 or 2 existing.
In 4 or 5 years, I expect Tesla's factories to be overseen by a few highly-paid engineers, with all assembly automated. Experts on site who understand the gear can step in if needed to fix or adjust something. But ultimate efficiency is all robots. Maybe we'll all end up serving each other food in cafes, while robo-carpenters, robocops, robo-janitors and AI teachers do all the work.
If robots can do all of those other jobs, why not have robots serve food and drink?
Next up. Robot doctors, robot nurses, robot caregivers in your home, robot gardeners and fence builders, robo Firefighters, robo Paramedics and RoboCops. Well, we saw that last one back in 1987.
Why not robot engineers in the future? Tell it what you want and it designs what you desire.
The food server bit was a joke (sort of). That might be an arena in which people enjoy dealing with other people, a de-robotized sanctuary. In fact, I expect robot caregivers to be common, and accepted gratefully by folks who can't afford to pay a person to tend them. Robo-pets, definitely. But in a robotized world, a premium will be placed on settings free of them. Make sense?
I would think the accessories, computers, stereo, etc. in Tesla’s current cars use between 300 and 600 watts. So, if this is true, you would use about 8 miles worth of range on a 4 hour drive. This would amount to about 1 minute of Supercharging.
Show your math....
@@BenefitOfTheDoubtInquiry if it uses, let’s say 500 watts, that would be 2kWh in 4 hours (0.5kWh x 4). The cars go about 4 miles per kWh so 2kWh would be 8 miles. Supercharging does about 600 miles per hour on average which is about 10 miles per minute. Does this make help?
@@lemongavine thanks!
Their whole effort though is likely a large scale plan to reduce wasted raw material in construction.
Does anyone else think these wiring changes will be included in project Highland?
I doubt it, but likely in a future refresh in a few years.
What does a 16X reduction in power loss mean? What is the reduction in power that you’re multiplying 16 by to get your power saved? Reminds me of the urinal at work that has a sticker that says “Saves 2x more water than a 1gpf urinals.”
It means if you use a current 4th the size of the 12 v system the power lost in the wiring will be a 16th of what was lost. There may be savings in the components as well but that would depend on their design and cannot be assumed to match the ratio perfectly.
@@alanrickett2537 Ah, that makes sense. Thanks. If they had said the power loss is 1/16th that of a 12v, that would have cleared it up for me. As they stated it, it is still a convoluted to get to what they meant. Thanks again for bringing clarity.
So you are sure about this? I suggest that Tesla patients all kinds of future design options but they never appear in production?
The big issues are repairability after rodent damage and wires that break due to stress.
The major thing in going to 48V ist the amount of copper used. Copper availability is looked as a major bottleneck for electric cars.
In my opinion, shortening a wiring harness in an automobile to this extent is a bad idea. In order to get three kilometers down to just 100 meters in automobiles as complex as those that Tesla makes, a really large chunk of it will have to be in series. That means that if one thing goes wrong in a majority of different places in the vehicle, the whole thing is bricked.
The big benefit for ridgid busbar, is for easier robotic *installation* of the wiring in the car... besides MUCH easier/cheaper/automatable manufacturing of the wiring/"harness" itself.
Robots can't "push" floppy wire harness around, that needs humans, connecting all the little clips and spaghetti wires/connectors.
A rigid busbar can just be pushed & snapped into place by robot, like a piece of sheet metal.
Now, connectorless? THAT is an interesting aspect of the patent..?? no clips/connectors? Does it just tap the busbar like thick coaxial network did or??
This is nothing. GM has a patent on using the windshield as a sort of fiber optic connection rather than using wires at all. More specifically it relates to automotive data communication and telematics, and particularly to using a glass panel (e.g., windshield glass) as a high-speed optical interconnect by leveraging the lightguide properties of glass. In particular, the wiring harness can be greatly simplified as only power would need to be gated (e.g., to the roof) via the wiring harness.
You should NOT have changed the word "delimited" to "eliminated" based on the full context of what was stated.
I agree that delimited is the better word.
I disagree. At 1:26:53 of Tesla's recording of the Investor Day presentation, posted on Tesla's UA-cam channel, Pete Bannon can be heard to say "deliminated" not "delimited" as both your comment and the transcript Jon quoted say. This appears to me to be an error in the transcript, likely due to "deliminated" not being a word, but rather a slip of Pete's tongue. I agree with Jon's edit, and that Pete Bannon meant to say "eliminated."
48v ??? Electric vehicle’s don’t have a starter motor
i like your videos but please get to the point more quickly and shorten your videos
Another disappointing video. You either don't understand or don't manage to convey to the viewer the fundamental difference between a traditional hand-built wiring harness using tons of controllers from third party suppliers and a streamlined bus communication system.
Well, this will not happen for another 10 years. This is Tesla, talks big, delivers very slowly
*Ya, probably 48v data over power, capability to use 1/4 current capacity and use only 2 wires to feed all lights and accessories power and data, common data buss, each node is addressed by the central PC, EASY, EFFICIENT.*