My AIntern is available the moment I start my day (not normal for off-shore in a different time zone) _and_ is available after the end of my day when I want it to work after I've gone home (useful for work using scarce resources). It even keeps the context across that time span.
I think a lot of the cost comparisons to employees are off by a factor of 2 or more. AI is the ultimate contractor. Available instantly. Doesn't charge during idle periods. Pre-vetted and pre-trained. No contract negotiations or complex accounting.
That is worth a small multiple of the fully-loaded employee cost. So AI might be easily worth more than $200 per human-equivalent hour. With high utilization, that might be $8000-10000 a month.
With that kind of spend, AI provider financials looks less frightening.
Bed length is a silly metric to use. It's single dimensional and doesn't capture any of the other important metrics. Such as width, air-volume, cubed-volume, or weight capacity.
Slate's 5 foot bed is on the shorter end of common bed sizes. Certainly shorter and worse on every other metric than the F-150/Silverado/1500 'short bed' so commonly seen hauling air in the US.
That presentation doesn't support your claim. The closest it gets is that solar attached to 4 hours of batteries is, ignoring tax credits, about (it's hard to read accurately from the graph) ~8% more expensive than combined-cycle plants.
But 4 hours isn't near a full night. At least 12 hours of battery storage would be necessary for that, possibly more depending on light angles and the relative supply-versus-demand loading at different times of day.
Roughly from the graph on page 8, that 4 hours of battery costs $22/MWh over solar alone. Presuming no further solar panels were needed, extending that 4 hours to 12 to cover the night would cost around $44/MWh more, bringing the total cost of 24h-reliable solar+battery to around $97/MWh -- WITH tax credits. Without tax credits it would be $20-$30 higher, but the graph is too low resolution to be precise. That compares poorly to the $65/MWh for combined-cycle for one single night -- which gets no tax credits accounted for in that graph.
A big part of it is the industry standard for using the Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCoE) as the benchmark metric. By that metric, solar IS the lowest cost power source.
But that definition doesn't take into account availability. This wasn't a problem when all electricity sources were highly available by default. You can burn coal or run the hydro turbines any minute of the year. With the rise of often-unavailable renewable sources like solar and wind that definition is now insufficient and under counts the true like-for-like cost of solar.
By any metric which takes into account minor availability requirements (eg. supplies electricity at night) solar badly loses its cost advantage. It gets even worse if the metric is the still important "deepest winter night" scenario.
Using mandated breaks for recharging heavy trucks isn't actually helpful in much of the world. Maybe it is in parts of Western Europe.
The problem is that those mandated breaks are mandated and happen (with a small amount of wiggle room) wherever the truck happens to be at that moment. Rolling out enough charging infrastructure to make that work is an even more immense challenge than the already massive challenge of adding sufficient charging infrastructure to places like existing truck stops.
Imagine the cost of installing 1MW chargers on, say, half the wide spots on every highway.
I think both Slate and Telos will be failures. They will be too expensive to make economic sense for people, as opposed to businesses, to buy over a more conventional full-size half ton pickup.
In some ways the massive online interest is proof, because most people outside of pickup truck forums who would talk it up have neither experience nor use for pickups. They are simply never going to buy any pickup truck-shaped vehicle and so are irrelevant to commercial success.
All the participants in those pilot programs *know* they are in a time-limited pilot programs and that in a handful of years the money will dry up. This is a major flaw in all UBI studies which make them all but useless.
It will take 15 or 20 years before any UBI could be considered permanent enough for a majority of people to change their work habits.
In most cases every residential system is getting payment rates at least that good.
The problem is that wH-for-wH doesn't take into account distribution costs, which is most of the residential cost of electricity, and that a wH at noon in July doesn't cost the same to generate as a wH at 2am in February.
For most jurisdictions you can look up the large industrial rates to find the wholesale energy rates. Residential solar is worth about half of that 'reliable' electricity rate.
My AIntern is available the moment I start my day (not normal for off-shore in a different time zone) _and_ is available after the end of my day when I want it to work after I've gone home (useful for work using scarce resources). It even keeps the context across that time span.