Master Plan: Part Tres

Solar powered flying cars that will take you to Mars and beyond.

I really like this, but the laws of supply and demand still apply. If you live in a sparsely populated area there's not going to be much for your car to do.

Great for those in urban centres, but then if you lived there why bother owning at all when there will be more cabs to hail?

Sure, stuff sounds neat, but where are you going to get the capital from?

Another secondary share offering?

I guess the most concrete thing I saw was new factory for Model 3. Shouldn't that be your only priority?

Not designing an electric semi truck on paper to entice Joe Q Public into stepping up for another secondary share offer?

And this should be good enough for law enforcement to nail Tesla.

I think, like everyone else, that Musk is probably the smartest entrepreneurs of our time. In this case though, maybe he is over his head a bit:

- Getting Tesla 3 to production volume will not be easy.

- Autopilot is NOT good enough to be used in production. This can be fatal to Tesla if FCC catches up. Tesla needs to quit Autopilot and focus only on getting Tesla 3 out. Tesla 3 will face competition sooner rather than later and market dominance is not guaranteed.

- SolarCity has absolutely no synergies with this business. It should be sold off.

- SpaceX is again a distraction given how hard it will be for Tesla 3 to roll off.

Their product is very good.

"We'll never have reusable rockets, what a joke..."

So you're saying that, if I promise you I'll give you a thousand dollars in a week but then I give it to you in two years, I haven't broken a promise?

At least in terms of fatalities per mile.

This is the part I really want to see.

I can't picture the layout he's describing here - not sure if it's been discussed in more detail elsewhere - anyone got a better idea or a reference image?

"Starting a car company is idiotic and an electric car company is idiocy squared."

I have a lot of trouble understanding the public transportation part. The ideas presented fall apart when you remove the baffling assumption that traffic congestion decreases with the introduction of autonomous vehicles. Autonomous vehicles will expand the possible set of drivers. That will dramatically increase the amount of vehicles on the road. If anything our future with autonomous vehicles will be unbearable gridlock.

It's also very sloppy; it's not an actual plan, with goals and steps that logically follow each other. The last master plan had a clear logic to it: you used the margin of each successive step to fund research and development further down in order to increase the use of electric cars and limit global warming. This is more like a wish list than a plan. "We want to make semis." "It'd be great if we also provided the solar part of the stack because it dovetails with this other initiative we're doing." "Once we have solar, we can do this new thing." Etc, etc. Unlike the first master plan, I can't gauge how long any of this will take or whether it is feasible. I can't gauge what the actual strategy is any better than I could yesterday. And isn't that the point of a Master Plan?

Since the first master plan was published in 2006, Tesla Motors has raised money privately (during its near death experience in 2008), sold a 10% stake to Daimler (which was recently divested), went public which has a side effect of raising even more (though the main reason to IPO in most cases liquidity to existing investors), and since then have continually raised money from the public market every year or two. There's probably private and public capital raisings since 2006 that I'm forgetting too (and they raised other capital streams like debt, such as the DoE loan)

The very lofty stock price of Tesla in recent years has helped it fund Model S, Model X and Model 3 designs, development, manufacturing (at large scales) and delivery, as well as the building of a large battery factory which Tesla owns a stake in. This constant fund raising has kept Tesla alive and I don't argue that it was very good corporate governance by Elon Musk and team to get Tesla Motors to where it is now (approaching the delivery date for the first Model 3 shipments and having a huge capacity to manufacture battery packs).

However, it's still a failure in its attempt to bootstrap the funding of Model 3 based on sales of previous models.

Of course, Tesla and SpaceX has consistently ended up achieving great things, even if the timeline is optimistic and the budget ends up blowing out. But issuing stock and eventually debt can only stretch Tesla so far. Hopefully Tesla can become a more sustainable business before that happens.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/at-work/test-and-measurem...

http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1263107

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...

http://www.santafe.edu/research/working-papers/abstract/0650...

But I mean, he's Elon Musk. He could still pull it off.

His biggest problem by far (excepting, perhaps, Model 3 production targets) will be regulations. It makes a nice story when you talk about the relative risks rationally, but there's no chance whatsoever American politics will deal with the issue in a rational fashion. Autopilot may retroactively become illegal in places people currently get away with it; cars driving themselves around is a different and titanic can of worms. What if a terrorist gets their hands on a Tesla and stuffs it full of explosives?

Using a Cobb County Georgia as an example, stats posted awhile ago listed over a thousand school buses traveling almost seventy thousand miles a day. Seventy thousand miles a day! Since the buses have to load/unload at schools and such its easy to establish charging points to include fast top offs where five or six minutes of charging can extend enough to the next time. Then between major routes, elementary, middle, and high school, longer charge periods can be done.

Get kids and parents used to silent electric buses and you go a long way to establishing a generation on them. Get autopilot to work well in that environment and you get to sell them on two innovations at once

Doesn't Tesla charge a large fee to have autopilot enabled on your car? Isn't that equally morally reprehensible?

Solar-powered, autonomous spacecraft.

So he is essentially say, in at most five in a half years, they'll be ready for fully self driving cars?

It's a tall order, but can you set your sights on those "long life vehicles" presently used by the US Postal Service in urban and suburban areas, or maybe similar vehicles in Europe. Those machines return to base daily and usually are unused at least 8 hr/day. Massive buildings with large roofs.

Cop cars. Lots of slow speed cruising combined with a very occasional need for high speed and agility. Return to base every shift. Location awareness.

These sales cycles will be long, and probably a pain in the neck for your major account teams. But you're in it for the long haul.

From the owner of Model S #146761

But master plan part deux seems odd: what exactly does "One ordering experience, one installation, one service contact, one phone app" for solar have to do with the Tesla transportation part?

I think in the long run Google might be building the correct solution for greater number of people.

Where I'm from, we call that trains.

In cities, everyone needs their car at exactly the same time, that's why we have congestions. When I'm not using my car, no one else needs one (that's an exaggeration of course but not by much).

So in order to get to sustainability, we need to understand why remote working (for instance) hasn't happened yet.

[I'd still like to own a fully autonomous mobile home that drives me to work while I am eating breakfast in my bath robe or taking a shower and then moves me to a beach while I'm sleeping on Friday nights. Well, one can hope, right?]

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/05/tesl...

Tesla will require regular infusions of capital over, say, the next 5 years. The only source for that is more equity, and to do that you need to actually start meeting some of your self-declared profitability goals. Up to now, Tesla hasn't.

The tactic of diverting attention with "but look, here's this great awesome world-changing thing we'll do next" has worked so far but it's rapidly getting old. In general, the frequency with which sleights of hand are starting to be employed is concerning. Remember the "but don't just take my word on it — I myself will be buying $20M of new stock!" thing? Sure you will to reassure investors, given that loss of confidence will cost you personally far more than $20M.

SolarCity? "If Musk thought Tesla really needs a solar company, he might as well buy a good one. But it doesn't" [FT Lex]. Given how important it is that they are able to keep raising capital through equity offerings, taking the risk of freaking the investors out with SolarCity acquisition (otherwise expected to go into bankruptcy protection by next year) makes sense only if letting SC fail presents a bigger risk of the same. The Musk fairytale would certainly take a hit from a SC bankruptcy.

And Musk setting these crazy numbers goals practically guarantees he's setting TSLA shareholders up for disappointment.

Non-profit-making Amazon has been raised as a counterargument in the comments on this thread; the amount of trust the market has extended to Bezos for the time that it has is practically unprecedented; and Bezos has worked hard to make that happen by making investment/direction choices & providing information to earn the trust of the market. Musk, to the contrary, is doing everything to the opposite.

Now, what's the likelihood of a macro downturn within the next 2-5 years? Massive. That might trip up the availability of capital a bit—those refundable $1000 deposits too but who cares about them (by the way, much of T's capital has been raised during the period of literally historically unprecedented low cost of capital)

I didn't even begin to talk about competition. Or that Panasonic, T's critical gigafactory partner, isn't just sitting around twiddling thumbs (or the Chinese).

So, it'd be prudent to curb your enthusiasm. There might not be a part trois.

Is Tesla going to make this data freely available, to accelerate the development of safer autonomous driving software? Given that it's "morally reprehensible to delay release" of autopilot, it is also morally reprehensible not to publicly release such data if more groups working on the task will lead to safer software.

The world could be a better place for so many people, but somehow a bunch of other people think it's okay to continue doing them until they die.

An electric car with a solar roof that charges all day would be pretty cool.

I don't see how automation reduces the need to get on the bus.

Things are gonna get real interesting in the auto world in the next few years, aren't they?

We're now going a step further and building a next-gen interface for that autonomous future. ‪#‎Asteria‬.

http://getasteria.com/

I suspect Tesla won't be alone in that space. Good luck to those who are.

The rates of accidents in manual vs current version of autopilot may work out to be favorable - (and that is still under debate) - but there certainly will be people who will die (and have died) due to a premature roll-out of Autopilot and their trust of it. This is some bloody cold calculation

This man is dreaming the future. Nay, he is building the future.

Does he really think that ?

Gives "pimp my ride" a whole new meaning.

Back of napkin, it looks like you get ~3*15 meters of roof which seems to translate to 10 kW of output under good conditions and then you need something like 150 kW to rumble up the highway.

https://spaceflightnow.com/launch-schedule/

Yeah, news about Tesla and SpaceX often do the trick for me. Those two companies seem to be hell-bent on pushing us into a brighter, better future.

Great idea. Would do wonders for marketing the capabilities too.

Let me also recommend popping-pills. It's not enough by itself, but it can help you do the yak-shaving that is needed for getting out of a dead-end job. At least speaking for myself, without medication, updating a resume, practicing interviewing skills, and researching job prospects (or alternatively doing market research, developing an MVP, filling out paperwork for a business, and seeking seed funding) could take years.

I wanted to give it a creative twist, sad it turned out dramatic. And I agree with you. Sometimes what motivates you brings you down due to the burden of expectations.

Why is that? That seems insane.

On the other hand about 1 million people die each year in driving accidents so if by winging it a bit you can stop that a year earlier it's a million lives saved vs maybe <10 autonomous deaths in the research phase.

Also, I would probably be evaluating a DI framework long before thinking of anything beyond an Industry. Even an EJB sounds great by that point.

So considering only car constructors employees is a pretty inaccurate estimation of man-hours/item in that scenario.

EDIT: comma <=> satan

Not sure but we might be having an apples-to-oranges comparison here:

If man hours pr item are significantly better for one but the other has much lower materials cost pr item (motors, sales etc) or enormously lower fixed costs then it is not so easy to say anymore.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/USA_annu...

fighter pilots make mistakes causing terrible accidents. and they're a group of humans that were pre-screened to ensure physical/mental/emotional fit, and had extensive training.

And in my opinion the only reason that can make you believe that is that there is, fortunately, few enough car crashes that you think those who had never crashed avoided it because of their skills.

Of course skills and training will allow you to behave well in a lots of situations that could have killed you otherwise but my conviction is that if you go through life without a big accident, a huge part of it is due to luck. Luck that you didn't encounter the situation in which training and skills couldn't have saved you.

I'm pretty sure that on contrary, autonomous car constructors are actually testing their cars in the worst possible conditions even some that are unlikely to ever happen to anyone. At least it's what Google is telling about their test process.

1. http://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings/ratings-info/front-crash-pr... 2. http://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings

Disclaimer - I work for GM, any opinions are my own.

They are in the business of making money, and if Uber offers to pay a premium or sign a contract, it would allow Tesla to grow much quicker, expand capacity, and make even MORE money.

A self driving car bought by Uber would pay for itself in under 2 years easy. I am sure Uber would pay quite a lot for THAT opportunity.

Next, the QA on a premium car has to me more stringent, simply because the expectations are higher.

So I can't imagine luxury car not taking more time to make than a budget car.

Oh, that and the fact that such cars can easily reach 300 km/h.

Tesla is a luxury product company. All of their products are either luxury or commercial. Their strategy scales well in that segment.

In Germany, solar power is much more widespread, and so it is more likely that a German electric vehicle user would be riding in a vehicle charged from solar power. This is not to say anything about solar power or Germany, but rather to speak to the flexibility of the electric vehicle. Electric vehicles can depend on an infrastructure running on nuclear energy, or anything else, making it extremely adaptive to the ecological and energy needs of the future.

On the other hand, traditional combustion engine vehicles absolutely depend on fossil fuels, and they depend on a massive infrastructure that is specific to supplying fossil fuels. For a traditional combustion vehicle to shed its utter dependence on fossil fuels would mean finding an alternative and abundant fuel source to combust, and even then it would require a highly specific infrastructure to deliver those alternative fuels.

This is absolutely false. Lithium is not toxic to mine at all. It isn't even "mined".

http://cleantechnica.com/2016/05/12/lithium-mining-vs-oil-sa...

> Electric cars cause pollution

They cause zero pollution when you have solar panels on your roof and the car is properly scrapped after you're done with it.

> The way to "save the planet" is to not drive.

This is silly and impractical.

There's also a ton of energy going into the cracking of crude into its constitutions parts before it even enters the supply chain for use in ICE vehicle.

Further, centralized power generation does a much better job at filtering and removing toxic elements from its discharge stream than gasoline/diesel vehicles filtering mechanisms do.

Notwithstanding the above, fossil fuel electric plants can be removed from the grid and replaced by cleaner energy solutions without having to replace or modify the consuming vehicle.

There's public transport, there's biking, even segways and hoverboards and those motorised skateboards everyone loves, and the list goes on. All of which are technologies which themselves can be improved too.

Taking bikes as an example, since I'm most familiar with those: Dutch infrastructure is practically built around it[0] and for the vast majority of trips, which are short-distance, it is a far better solution than cars. (of course the Netherlands is unfairly advantaged here, being compact and flat, but that does not make bikes useless elsewhere). For long distance trips a combination of public transport and a locally rented bike is usually all you need to get around. Amsterdam is a famously bike friendly capital, but all our cities are, really, and especially in smaller ones like Groningen it is the de-facto mode of transportation[1][2].

As for your Kenya example, in most contexts bikes are arguably a better solution in developing countries than cars: it needs no fuel, is simple enough to fix yourself, possible to make from local materials even (see Ghana's bamboo bikes[4] for example), less dependent on roads and existing infrastructure and still enough of a time and energy saver that it brings a lot of wealth to the people who own one.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/user/markenlei/videos

[1] https://vimeo.com/76207227

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jul/29/how-groningen...

[4] http://ghanabamboobikes.org/en/

Consider this anecdote: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/756004029239472132

Then rethink if you really believe that this pedestrian deserves to be dead because you don't trust the data and the world-class engineers for which this is literally their job everyday.

There are also legal questions about self driving. For example if my theoretical fully self driving hits a passenger on the zebras that hasn't dresses up for the liking of radars, who is guilty? Certainly there needs to be put in place a big infrastructure for interautomobile communication to effectively avoid crashes. Infrastrutture is unavoidable.

This is like saying: if the electric infrastructure is not good and widely available, then give everyone a generator.

Just because we're not living in an impossible utopia doesn't mean the situation is dire. We haven't had great leadership since the Hawke/Keating years (over 20 years ago), yet still the country is going grand - not having great leadership doesn't mean we must be having the polar opposite.

> Honestly enterprise is enterprise.

What I like about Tesla and SpaceX is that they're honest, plain companies. They exist as means to an end. Vehicles to achieve material goals - in this case, sustainable transport and making humanity multiplanetary. This is how all companies should work, and yet somehow we got lost on the way and most companies exist to make money, without giving much shit about how exactly they're making this money.

An ISO container that could fit on a truck trailer is typically 40'x8'. Solar panels are, on the sunniest of days, making 10-14 watts per square foot. This gives us:

40x8=320sqft assuming panels with no borders.

Assuming 14 watts per sqft (optimal conditions) we'd end up with 4,480 watts. Assuming 100% efficiency converting this into usable motion, we'd get 6 BHP. A normal semi truck has 350-600HP, so this is a drop in the bucket compared to their normal output power. As far as how much of that they use while cruising, I'd wager that it's much more than the 1-2% boost which solar-powered electric would provide (again remember that my calculations assume cloudless sky, no dust on panels, no weight or aerodynamic penalty, no maintenance costs, 100% conversion efficiency, etc).

They reason you don't see them is because it's not worth it. The aero mods under and behind the trailer on the other hand ARE worth it, and this claims that a specific version of a "trailer tail" gives a 6.6% boost to fuel economy at 65MPH: http://realtruckdriver.com/what-do-i-think-about-semi-truck-...

Actually it would be a lot more efficient if your friend charged at home or at work rather than drive all the way to a supercharger station.

You would do well to point your friend to this PSA [1] by Elon Musk and J B Straubel during the Q&A at Tesla's shareholder meeting some months ago.

[1] https://youtu.be/O1aPRKSuXr0?t=650

Sustained _due_ to motor vehicles. The base statistics also include pedestrian deaths. There's also a skew due to vehicles being multi-passenger.

Interestingly, it _is_ the leading cause of deaths for Americans between 15 to 29 years old. For females 15-24 the motor vehicle related death rate is 8.7. For males 15-24 the death rate is 21.5. From 24-75 the rates drop a few points for both sexes and then increase again after 75.

> In the medium term, fully-autonomous vehicles will eventually cut both of those numbers to virtually zero.

My point is, the statistics may be painting a different picture when viewed in the whole. Even if this specific case is true, we may just be trading one cause of death for another. There's no guarantee overall injury or "suffering" will be reduced.

> When they're available worldwide, fully-autonomous vehicles will be a public health victory on the scale of vaccines or antibiotics.

Maybe, and maybe when everyone can afford them. Yet still, even today in America, more likely to die to the Flu than you are to motor vehicle related injuries.

I'm all for automated cars, but I'm skeptical of the rhetoric that gets tossed around.

Also, you can sleep in the car, which would greatly solve our sleep deprivation problem, which would boost productivity massively.

Commuting is the worst part of my day by a big margin. If I can get 2 hours of extra sleep instead, I'd be way more productive

While autonomy is great and will definitely save many lives, it is absolutely not on the scale of vaccines or antibiotics. Not even close.

You're comparing the deaths of millions to thousands.

There is a huge assumption underlying this: That computer systems would be more intelligent than humans.

I believe the opposite: Computer systems will be much dumber than humans, and increase the number of accidents if ever adopted on large scale.

2) In most cases, "formality" and "rigor" only works to mask unfortunate realities and incompetence. Being plain spoken need not imply ignorance nor thoughtlessness. I may not be a sophisticated investor, but Musk's ability to so clearly outline the plan (and proven track record of executing such plans!) gives me great confidence.

3) I view the entertainment and excitement that Musk provides is a small, but welcome dividend that I'm happy to share with non-investors alike. I feel sad for you that you can't or won't appreciate it.

This is the same guy joking about smoking crack and listening to Tupac while writing this plan, I don't think he really cares about making a good impression to anyone

So unless you do a more thorough analysis comparing the two strategies regarding this particular article of communication, your criticism is just quick opinion without "sufficient"[1] effort to limit any prior biases[2].

[1] Quoted because I have no quantification measure.

[2] If you are a communications expert then of-course this particular criticism against your quick opinion is not justified.

But... I quite like the theory that a developer has spent time (whilst not under much pressure) analysing crashes and potential crash scenarios, and programming to accommodate; rather than me trying to make a good-and-safe decision in milliseconds in the heat of the moment.

Instead of 100 people owning 100 cars they drive 5% of the time, they could own 10 summonable cars that drive them around 50% of the time.

The first scenario requires 95 parking spots. The second only 5. There is still as much traffic on the roads, and as much transport work being done, but most of the space now needed for parking can be put to other use.

Here's a question for you. If suburbs are "the least optimal configuration", then why did urban sprawl occur in the first place? Why did so many people leave the cities and sought bigger homes on wider lots?

This would have benefits today, but still rarely happens. A very small fraction of massive businesses have shift workers do this to more efficiently handle the volume that transitions between shifts would otherwise cause, but the vast majority of businesses do not. I don't think self-driving cars would change this.

> Also add in more home offices.

This would help today as well, but I don't think self-driving cars will change this either. (And if they do, it might not be in the direction you'd hope: self-driving cars might cause people to tolerate longer commutes.)

So why not several autonomous subsystems that use specialized purpose-built cameras and don't need annotators? I'm not saying that like it's easy - obviously it's not. Just seems scalable.

In a car oriented suburb where you have to drive to literally every location you have to try extra hard to get even a basic level of exercise.

Remind me again: this is Hacker News run by Y Combinator, right?

The ship has been righted for now, but it was pretty good in 2000 as well.

[1] http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE70R0S420110128

[2] http://www.factcheck.org/2011/09/ford-motor-co-does-u-turn-o...

1. http://revenuesandprofits.com/amazon-vs-walmart-revenues-and...

(Tesla's subsidised by lithium salt concentrations in Bolivia, but that's a rather smaller overall subsidy.)

What the company does is reinvest the profits, instead of giving it back to shareholders. It makes a lot of sense in a growing market.

The Model 3 (Tesla's cheapest option) starts at $35,000, which means average price point is well above your link's cited $35,000 (remember, those prices in the link are after upgrades, very few people buy a completely stock vehicle).

> Tesla Motors was incorporated in July 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning who financed the company until the Series A round of funding.[37] Both men played active roles in the company's early development prior to and after Elon Musk's involvement, with Eberhard the original CEO of Tesla until he was asked to resign in August 2007 by the board of directors.

Musk didn't found Tesla. That's from wikipedia.

http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0135.html

Tesla could stop ALL R&D they're doing and they will still be an unprofitable company.

In what world is a Jaguar a "medium" end car? The high end Jaguars extend into Maserati territory.

If Tesla wants to be better than a Maserati or Jaguar, they need to observe how much nicer the interiors of those cars are. Consumer Reports doesn't care about that above a certain level of basic competence, but a Maserati or Jaguar buyer does.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_automobile_man...

The only real difference is that they have higher bootstrapping costs due to the type of product they make. i.e a physical object with a complex production pipeline. The only way to ever get profitable is to heavily and intentionally reinvest in R&D. Musk is doing the only thing that a startup in this space can do and expect to succeed outside of getting acquired which would be pretty much directly counter to the stated goals of the company.

How is this not investing in their future?

There are certainly implicit subsidies for oil, in the form of the externalities like health and environmental damage from the pollution emitted when using it. But it makes no sense to me to account for the work that went into creating the oil. Hordes of microbes already did that work millions or billions of years ago. It's done, it's there, and the cost of taking advantage of that work is just the cost of extraction and use.

Are you going to account for the cost of making water? Not the bill you pay to the utility for use, but the actual cost of formulating water?

What about air?

How about the cost of creating a sun if you rely on solar power?

We've had biofuel for quite a while now.

Note: I'd still like to believe in Tesla's world improving ambitions

I mean, sure, but you have to be awfully fanatical to put up with just how uncomfortable the cars are right now.

I love it when people champion entities like Tesla benefiting from incentive structures when it's conveniently aligned with their personal beliefs about the superiority of the tech industry, their political agendas, and/or the idolzation of people like Musk, but forget that there's a far broader and more insidious reality here.

Reply to Below: Not libertarian. I believe strongly in government regulations where appropriate and that limiting our personal liberties in certain ways is essential to guaranteeing economic and physical security. I happen to agree with the sustainability agenda as well. I disagree with the mechanism being employed to advance it. USG should instead focus on taxing/penalizing for carbon emissions as a negative externality, which would have an ancillary benefit of making alternative energy companies overall more competitive. Asking the government to make decisions about structuring incentives, by contrast, is positively asinine (you get things like ethanol). Furthermore, I have a serious problem with the government deploying tax dollars to directly benefit corporations when there is no immediate and tangible return, regardless of the context.

Does Tesla price in the health and climate externalities of the lithium cycle and the reset of their raw materials?

Edit: I feel like I have to clarify this everywhere perhaps because it's an unorthodox viewpoint: of course companies need to be regulated; I'm arguing against government-sponsored incentives and subsidies. Stick to making it more expensive to burn fossil fuels, thereby increasing receipts (use it to fund alternatives research, studies, etc similar to how Big Tobacco has to pay for anti-smoking ads) instead of less expensive to buy someone's product, at the cost of taxpayer dollars.

The alternative would be making petrol-car drivers paying for the actual costs of cars including healthcare for diseases related with pollution, possibly at any level of the production chain and so on.

Hidden costs are often cut away and offloaded on community (I couldn't find anything specifically related with cars (didn't have time to look for), but for comparison here's a short video that shows the real costs of meat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZDsSnpYZrw). Incentives make it a little bit more explicit. While it may be true claiming that Teslas cost would be higher without incentives, for sure Ford's car would be way more expensive if everything had been taken into account.

And if we don't invade country X, it may come back to bite us some day, right? And if we don't prop up the auto industry buying clunkers and robbing shareholders to pay union reps top dollar, people will have to start riding bikes and millions will be out of work, right?

If you're hoping for miracles, the government would be the last place to go looking for them. Necessity is the mother of invention, and while one could argue that our society "needs" this technology just like it "needs" to invade other countries, centralized decision making never leads to optimal outcomes, let alone "miracles".