Could this really not be prevented by a $10 microcontroller and a big-ass relay to just disconnect the battery if it reaches a certain discharge state?
Even my iPhone can turn turtle to protect its battery when it gets too low.
Also how much power does it take to keep the damn thing plugged in? The article indicates that a 100 foot extension cord isn't enough just to break even and the car discharges even when plugged in. A 100 foot cord of cheap 16 gauge wire can still supply almost 900 watts before the voltage drops below 100v. So it uses a kilowatt just to stand-by without even charging? That's one hell of a power vampire.
I think maybe they should spend a bit more time on the fundamentals and a bit less time on fancy bird-wing doors if they want to have a real product. The real car of the future is just a big dumb tray full of indestructible nickle-iron batteries and 4 wheel-hub motors bolted to the corners.
The account of the Tesla discharging while plugged in to a 100-foot extension cord strikes me as suspect. It's anecdotal at best. Have a look at the Tesla Roadster "Charging" page:
Using 120V @ 15A, you get a charge rate of +5 miles (of range) per hour. Obviously not the optimal solution, but not a net negative either. Adding a 100 foot extension cord isn't going to diminish the available current enough to result in a net negative, so either the owner had additional electrical issues, or simply failed to plug it in and is making up excuses.
120v @ 15A is 1800 watts. As I said, I was able to measure the wattage being delivered at the end of my 100 foot 16 gauge "home depot" orange extension cord connected to a space heater and found less than 900 watts being delivered to a load that normally pulls 1750. The voltage had also dropped below 100 volts.
Its possible that the Tesla simply won't charge at all if the current or voltage on the line becomes too low. In this case, it would be "plugged in" but not charging.
Edit: Lets figure it out: Range=244mi. Battery capacity=58kWh. So: 5 miles takes 1.086kWh. 10% is lost in chemical conversion so we really need 1.207kWh for those miles. We pull at a rate of 1.8kWh/h from the plug. So 600 watts or so is lost elsewhere. We know the "always on" battery cooling system alone takes around 150 watts. Its not that far fetched.
Edit: I deleted my comment below where I calculated the cost of keeping the car on standby because I don't think I made clear enough (and didn't want to type it all twice) the difference between the actual discharge rate of the battery and the amount of power required at the charger to stop it. It just seems to take a lot of power at the charge port before any gets to the battery. The battery seems to discharge at an average rate of just 30 watts, but it seems to take a much, much greater amount of power input to prevent this and failing to provide this power has dire consequences. Why?
The pack is 53kWh according to wikipedia and discharges in 11 weeks from full according to the article. Unless I botched a decimal place, that is a 29 watt idle load. (53000 watt hours / (11 weeks * 7 days/week * 24 hours/day) ). In perspective, that is about the same as 4 night lights.
Clearly there is about 20 times that much power available at the end of a 100 foot extension cord in a standard household outlet.
Failure modes available:
• Was not actually plugged in.
• Was unplugged then plugged back in much later, possibly unbeknownst to owner. (Someone in my household unplugs my DVR to use an outlet. Grr.)
• Was on a switched outlet. (I once bought a new drill over that. Who knew one of the duplex outlets was switched and the other not? But the new drill wasn't $40k.)
• The Tesla charger could have a cutoff where it stops charging if unable to pull X amps where X is somewhere between 7 and 15. This could be either intentional or unintentional. Brown out protection circuitry, if needed by the design, could do this. They also might fear they are setting your house on fire by dropping 800+ watts somewhere in a wall and shut off.
A roadster that is plugged in, is not really "off". It will provide power for heating or cooling of the battery pack if the temps get too high or too cold. This would be much more than a small idle load.
That's because a 16 gauge extension cord isn't supposed to supply 120v @ 15A. A 16 gauge cord is only good for around 10 amps.
Which means you have a point. If the owner in question plugged the Tesla supplied 120v cord in to an additional 100-foot, 16 gauge cord, they might have a net loss situation on their hands.
A little OT, but I've found that it's better to make your own extension cables. I have a 1kW tank heater that is about 100' from the closest outlet. The cost of 100' of 12gauge house wiring and a plug, socket and outdoor outlet was much less than even a cheap 100' extension cord and has much less voltage drop.
That depends on your application. Extension cords are more expensive because they are made of stranded wire that remains flexible and resists breaking. Household wire is solid and not meant to be rolled and unrolled repeatedly. It will get kinks and weak spots. But if your application is for a relatively static run, left in place for a long time, the household wire is better.
The charge circuitry probably turns on at a high charge rate, senses the line voltage drop below 100v, and shuts down for a few seconds. Stuck in this loop, it might never deliver much charge.
Er, no, this is probably wrong. The voltage drop is due to resistive losses in the long (and skinny) cable, and the resistive losses depend on current flowing. So, unless there are some weird effects due to the car's electronics, you cannot stop the charging, only slow it down.
So the charger sees the 120 V, decides to begin charging, current flows, and the voltage drops. If the voltage drops out of range, the charger aborts because it's out of design spec and/or there's a significant amount of power being dissipated, probably by resistive heating (i.e., risk of fire).
Totally Agree. There are no names, only anecdotes and the science is suspect. This article is 100% B.S. and I wouldn't be surprised if it was planted by a competitor.
The bigger an industry is, the harder they fight for their existence. Elon Musk is not just taking on the second biggest industry, the auto industry. He's also taking on the biggest industry: oil.
It looks like they switched from ignore/mock to attack. He's getting somewhere.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. --Gandhi
Could this really not be prevented by a $10 microcontroller and a big-ass relay to just disconnect the battery if it reaches a certain discharge state?
Not necessarily. This might help, but the battery will also have self-discharge, meaning that it can lose charge without being connected to any load at all. If you get the charge down low enough, and then wait long enough, then even a full disconnect from the system won't help.
You could add a $100 mobile phone, which auto-calls a service center. If 1% of cars get "bricked", that's $10,000 per car saved, not including intervention costs. Even with some false positives, it would be worth it. Of course, that cost is carried by Tesla, not the customer.
"The Tesla manager called me to warn that my car was in trouble" is a much better customer experience than "my Tesla broke down, and cost $40k to fix".
Cars used to have the same problems with oil changes. This got better, as customers were educated (at the cost of a lot of cooked engines), and cars were able to warn their owners, and run for longer without oil.
That's exactly what Tesla do, even once having gone so far as tracking the car down via GPS and charging it themselves when the owner was unresponsive.
As a Model S reservation holder, it pegs my pocketbook meter. If I'm about to lose $40K on my car because of a battery, I have no problem with them showing up in my driveway to charge the vehicle if necessary.
Creepy? I'm more worried about the app-of-the-day sucking down my iPhone contacts. THAT I find to be more personal than my vehicle location.
IMO they're both creepy, and using one to justify the other isn't helpful. Apple has already come out and admitted that was a mistake and they will be rectifying it, so it doesn't really help your case much.
In both cases though it's not the action so much as it is the fact that you weren't able to opt out of it, or in many cases you aren't even aware of the possibility of it happening.
It's the same violation, and in both cases it's equally creepy. Apple got called out and did something about it. What will Tesla do?
Small portable gadgets using LiPoly batteries (which I assume the Tesla is using) can be left for months or years without charging, and then nursed back to life. If sufficient charge is left in them, and the circuitry is smart enough to recognise that the battery's about to die, the time before complete discharge could be extended to a much larger period of time.
The solution could even be a one-time use fuse, isolating the battery completely. Given the option, I think most owners would rather have to replace a fuse than a $40k battery.
Yes you woudl have though that this is not exactly rocket science. Or have a mechanical switch to isolate the batery coudl this be conected to the Parking Brake.
Jermy Clarkson must be pissing himself laughing over this
LiIon cells have virtually zero self-discharge. It is the battery management system that contributes nearly all of the self-discharge to a LiIon battery. You could have such a relay, but it would require some additional tools to recover from such a state (needs to get the BMS in a happy state, or the BMS itself must have the ability to charge the battery from an unknown state).
This all would seem to make sense to install though, it's far better to have a pack that needs a reset in the shop then a brick, esp. as the battery pack in the model S will make up nearly all of the resale value of the vehicle.
Perhaps the most straightforward fix would be to simply refrain from drawing any current at all from the vehicle's main battery while parked. The alarm and any other standby processes should run from a 12-volt motorcycle battery or something, which is recharged during driving, and can be jumped like any other car battery if allowed to go dead.
That wouldn't fix the Li-ion self-discharge problem completely, but it could provide as much as a few months' worth of margin.
In any case it's batshit insane to leave early adopters stuck with a $40,000 bill for your lack of engineering foresight. That was the real surprise in the article.
Tesla are a sideshow and we desperately need to stop talking about them, because they're harming efforts to improve energy efficiency.
Nissan are now in full production of the Leaf, a practical electric car that's half the price of the Model S. Renault have the Fluence ZE on sale in Israel and ready to go internationally this year. Mitsubishi are selling the i-MiEV in quantity in Hong Kong and Japan.
All of these big, established car companies are doing it The Right Way - targeting customers who already drive highly efficient city cars. These are customers who predominantly drive short distances and who are used to driving a small car with few luxuries and a relatively low-powered engine. They understand the compromises necessary for efficiency. They're part of a car culture that sees nothing unusual about a 1.2 litre diesel engine or a turbocharged 900cc two-cylinder petrol engine. You can build these people a lightweight, efficient car that they can afford and that they'll be happy to drive.
Tesla are amongst the many upstarts who are doing it The Wrong Way. They're trying to skip the necessary evolutionary steps a customer needs to make before they will be happy with a battery electric car. They're trying to lure people straight from heavy midsize cars and SUV crossovers, which is doomed to failure. These customers just haven't entered the efficiency mentality. They don't realise that efficient cars are noisier because they're not carrying the weight of sound insulation. They're not ready to wind down the window on a hot day to save the energy that AC would use. Tesla are trying to engineer around culture and it's an expensive, flimsy mistake.
Sit it out, lobby congress to mandate improvements in diesel fuel quality and higher fleet efficiency standards, beg manufacturers to send over the clever little engines. Tax or shame SUV drivers into station wagons. Once you hear people describing the Ford Focus as a large family car, you'll know you're ready.
> Tesla are a sideshow and we desperately need to stop talking about them, because they're harming efforts to improve energy efficiency.
Completely disagree. Tesla is, I think, unquestionably the most impactful company in the game, including GE and Nissan. For two reasons.
First, before Tesla people thought of electric vehicles as ridiculous DIY golf carts driven by treehuggers. They were utterly uncool and stupid. Post-Tesla, electric cars are among the very coolest cars in the world. GE didn't do that. Nissan didn't do that. Toyota didn't do that. Tesla did. I think fundamentally changing people's perceptions of what an electric car is and what it can do is the single most impactful action in the industry so far.
Second, Tesla's critical product isn't their cars. Their critical product is their battery technology. It is second to none, in a business where the battery is everything. This is the reason that both Daimler and Toyota have invested in the company. I think you are seriously underestimating how important this is.
As to the article proper: it seems to me that running down your car is a pretty simple problem to engineer away. This might be an issue, perhaps a burp that Tesla has to get fixed pronto. But it's hardly, to use the breathless headline, devastating.
> First, before Tesla people thought of electric vehicles as ridiculous DIY golf carts driven by treehuggers. They were utterly uncool and stupid. Post-Tesla, electric cars are among the very coolest cars in the world. GE didn't do that. Nissan didn't do that. Toyota didn't do that. Tesla did. I think fundamentally changing people's perceptions of what an electric car is and what it can do is the single most impactful action in the industry so far.
Amongst technology enthusiasts in the US.
Here in The Soviet Republic of Yurop, gas is $8 a gallon and is only going up from there. If people know the name Tesla, it's probably because they've seen the Roadster lampooned on Top Gear. However, people are talking about Renault and Peugeot and Nissan's EVs. Not car enthusiasts, but ordinary people who've seen the cost of fuel more than double in 10 years. They're talking about Volkswagen Bluemotion, they're talking about Fiat Twinair. They're talking about fast charging and battery swaps and series hybrids. They're talking about folding bikes and multimodal commuting. They're talking about these things because they're being priced off the roads.
I have heard a middle-aged woman with no interest in cars or the environment say at a dinner party "I bought a Toyota iQ because it only emits 99g/km of CO2, so I don't have to pay road tax or the Congestion Charge.". For her, like many others, the efficiency of her car wasn't a side issue, but integral to whether she could afford to drive at all. Energy efficiency might not be on the agenda in the US, but it very much is in Europe.
Depending where in the US you look, the price of gas has done anything from less than doubling to increasing more than five-fold over the past decade.* It's not $8/gallon, but there are definitely places where you'd have to pay $4-6 per gallon, and it's only becoming more widespread. If there's one thing US citizens have shown, though, it's that they're perfectly willing to continue shelling out more and more money to drive ridiculously inefficient vehicles, even while they grumble about the spiraling price and (depending where you look) speak of mythical, massive reserves of oil the US supposedly has that could last the US anywhere from decades to centuries, depending who you ask.
Simply adding more costs onto gas is going to do nothing more to change what the average US citizen drives then what the past decade of price increases have.
* This is based on anecdote and recollection; I don't have any sources to back it up, but if it's wrong one way or the other, more than likely it's conservative.
This doesn't really match with the data collected in the 2007-2008 price spike. While the price of oil was peaking, US drivers demonstrated that they will change their behavior somewhere on the curve. Notably, miles driven started dropping well before the recession hit. I'm not sure what the breakpoint was, but I believe it was around $4/gallon. (Yes, gas cost much more in some places and is still above $4 now, but the relevant number is the national average, currently about $3.60).
So you're right that the rise in prices from ~$0.90 in 1999 to multiples of that do not impact demand significantly. However, there is a threshold above which American drivers will react.
I really wish the US would implement similar taxes. I know it'll hurt in the short term but it'll be great in the long term and would benefit the economy overall and help wean our huge car industry off of oil.
> First, before Tesla people thought of electric vehicles as ridiculous DIY golf carts driven by treehuggers. They were utterly uncool and stupid. Post-Tesla, electric cars are among the very coolest cars in the world. GE didn't do that. Nissan didn't do that. Toyota didn't do that. Tesla did. I think fundamentally changing people's perceptions of what an electric car is and what it can do is the single most impactful action in the industry so far.
Sure, but that's the same as saying that Sun Microsystems changed the world. Before Sun, people thought of C++ as the be all and end all of programming and we were stuck without decent typesystems and helpful compilers. Microsoft didn't change that. Nobody changed that. Sun did.
Look where they are now. Sure Tesla might have changed people's worldviews and I'm grateful for that. But moving forward, that counts for nothing. I just want the best damn electric car there can be. I'm not paying for changing the narrative.
And that's the genius of it. You are not paying to change the narrative - but lots of other people are. Even if Tesla ends up a footnote in the history of automotives, their impact will be felt for decades, just like Sun.
Whatever happens to Elon Musk's company, we are all better off, and for that I wouldn't consider the money wasted.
And I don't think Tesla's death is really that certain. Remember that Apple pioneered the unibody laptop chassis on the backs of wealthy early adopters with the (ludicrously priced) MacBook Air, and now this technology is available at commodity prices to everyone. The same model can very well work here.
It was priced closer to cost than most imagine (SSDs were still very expensive at the time and it used much more expensive parts that were underclocked to reduce heat buildup before Intel had good ULV processors) so a top of the line 1st generation MacBook Air ordered in the first three months of release would cost you $5500. I know because I bought one for someone.
It was very expensive, but it wasn't ludicrously priced. Pioneering that CNC technology wasn't cheap and if it didn't work out, that loss would have been all because of the Air. You can consider it putting the burden on early adopters, I see it as more people paying the actual product cost plus profit like Apple always prefers. They aren't ones to launch something at cost if they don't have to. They would rather move less units and instead make a profit from day one.
Even if all five or so became violent opponents of Tesla (which seems plausible enough, I guess), that would be greater than 99% approval among users. I don't mean to downplay the severity of that issue, but I feel like this comment is more of a cheap shot "zinger" than a legitimate attempt to show that Tesla's efforts are wasted (especially given that the problem seems to be endemic to modern battery technology, not specifically Tesla's line).
It's endemic to modern battery technology, but not modern battery implementations. Tesla's technology is unquestionably excellent. Consideration of use cases--or, you know, consideration of the customer forking over a ton of money for their vehicles--not so much.
If there is a case where you can, by design, cause somebody who just bought a ridiculously expensive car to incur a $40,000 battery replacement bill, you'd better have ways to counteract the problem. They apparently don't (aside from "stalk your car and charge it"); it doesn't sound like they even warn purchasers about the danger of flatlining the battery.
Uh, OK? Nobody's disagreeing with you that the battery situation sucks. I still don't understand what that has to do with what SeanLuke or potatolicious said. Are you seriously saying the company's efforts are all for naught because of a severe issue in early models experienced so far by a tiny minority of early (wealthy) purchasers that could be fixed to many people's satisfaction at any time by the company just deciding to cover it? I mean, Ford made cars so defective they killed people, but I don't hear people saying everything Henry Ford did is pointless.
All for naught? Certainly not. Significantly wasted, on the part of, y'know, the important people--the consumer? Hell, yes, I would.
If you go out of your way to shaft your customers--and deceiving them, as it really sounds like Tesla is doing, is certainly that--you're dirt. Tesla apparently qualifies.
Remember: the original question was whether Tesla was a sideshow; the comment you responded to argued that it wasn't, quite compellingly IMO. Similarly, Sun and Java certainly weren't sideshows either.
You're wondering about Tesla's commercial success, which is an interesting but very different question.
> First, before Tesla people thought of electric vehicles as ridiculous DIY golf carts driven by treehuggers. They were utterly uncool and stupid. Post-Tesla, electric cars are among the very coolest cars in the world.
Really? I never heard of Tesla outside of HN. I think a large proportion of the 10s of thousands who have bought electric cars in Japan don't know of Tesla either.
No doubt the very existence of Tesla might have accelerated the development and actual production of electric cars by other makers. But I suspect they aren't that well-known by the general public.
Neither is Aston Martin, but they're a profitable and successful UK based auto manufacturer.
There are many successful companies that never achieve the kind of brand awareness that you are identifying. It's generally not a condition for success.
I am an auto enthusiast and Tesla is very well known among enthusiasts. Appealing to enthusiasts (Early Adopters) is an acceptable business strategy. Tesla doesn't need to market to a wider audience yet.
I fail to see the issues that others are claiming here. Assuming they can meet demand (last I heard there is significant demand for the Model S, I don't have data to cite at the moment) and are profitable with at that volume their risks seem to me to be more of the typical manufacturer's risk. Quality and warranty issues, aftermarket support, production costs, etc. Not so much from weak market demand.
EDIT: HN won't let me reply to your comment yet so I'll do it here.
I'm disagreeing with what I feel you're implying with this:
I think a large proportion of the 10s of thousands who have bought electric cars in Japan don't know of Tesla either.
But I suspect they aren't that well-known by the general public.
I read that as "This is Tesla's market, they're not known in this market, this is a risk to their business". I disagree with that. That is not their market and that market (general public, 10s of thousands of electric car buyers in Japan) is unimportant at this time because they're very well known within their target market.
Sure, I agree with you. What part of my comment are you disagreeing with? Previous comment says that Tesla changed the image of the electric car, I'm skeptical of that.
(except that I don't get your example of Aston Martin as not well-known brand. It's James Bond's car!)
Tesla just had the Silicon Valley hype machine on its side since inception, a super-wealthy owner proclaimed the next Henry Ford, and hundreds of millions of dollars from American taxpayers.
Their critical product is their battery technology. It is second to none, in a business where the battery is everything.
vs
As to the article proper: it seems to me that running down your car is a pretty simple problem to engineer away.
So, on the one hand you say that their battery technology is in advance of everyone else... and on the other hand, you say that these fine engineering minds... haven't been able to come up with a 'pretty simple' solution yet.
That doesn't necessarily mean their technology isn't second to none. Say, I built a instantaneous teleportation device but it sucks because I haven't figured out a simple solution of how to jump more than one person at a time.
You are precisely wrong. Targeting people that already buy into energy efficiency has low payoff.
Say you have your enlightened urban dweller, getting 50mpg. With the fancy new hybrids, let's say they double that and get 100mpg. Given 100K miles of driving, that saves 1000 gallons of fuel.
Now, take your suburbanite SUV driver getting 20mpg. You only have to get their mileage to 25mpg to save the same amount of fuel over 100K miles. Get them to 40mpg, and the improvement is 150% greater than the urbanite's.
Further, only electric vehicles are can realistically be 100% powered from renewables with current technology. Biofuels are in their infancy vs solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear.
Thank goodness for Tesla trying to push boundaries and for the early adopters that are buying them. Also, thank goodness for the Nissan Leaf, the Honda Civic GX, the Prius, and all the people making a difference and buying fuel efficient cars. It's a big problem and there's no "Wrong Way" to be helping.
The point OP is making is that these SUV people fundamentally do not care about efficiency - if they do not care, they have no interest in optimising their milage. The messaging is mostly wasted.
> " if they do not care, they have no interest in optimising their milage. The messaging is mostly wasted."
Right, and Tesla's messaging is not about efficiency. Their messaging has overwhelmingly been "holy shit this thing is fast! And green! And exclusive and the crowning achievement of our conquering of science and technology!"
Which isn't that different from traditional sports car marketing, except the green part.
Getting people to be more efficient does not necessarily mean selling efficiency to them and rallying them around it. CFLs and energy-efficient lighting has essentially become commonly as a fashion, as opposed to any significant increase in people's desire to be green. But I couldn't care less - if people are installing CFLs in their homes I don't really care how much they care about their electrical footprint.
> "CFLs and energy-efficient lighting has essentially become commonly as a fashion"
I don't think fashion was a big contributor to early adoption. It was mainly the perception of saved money and frustration. Early CFL packaging often had a comparison chart showing the $30 you'd save on electricity versus using incandescent bulbs, and the 6-10 fewer times you'd have to change a burned out bulb over the next 3-5 years. It's not specifically that people care about "being green", but they do care about saving money and effort.
I strongly suspect it's not a binary market with people that care about efficiency on the left and those that don't on the right. There'll be those that care, but prioritize higher performance. Those that want a bigger car due to safety reasons. Combinations thereof.
The market likely maps onto the technology adoption life cycle, and the hardcore SUV petrolheads are likely the 'late majority' or 'laggards'. That leaves a lot of room for market development before even considering those people. They'll take years or decades to change, so ignore them and focus on the customers in the early majority. That includes SUV or sportscar drivers who would like to save money, who do care about the environment, who have moved to a city, etc.
This is a fallacy that is perpetuated all over the place, not just on HN. It's not that many SUV drivers don't care about efficiency; rather it's not a primary concern. The primary concern is having a vehicle large and powerful enough to do what they need to get done. Sure, for a percentage, that's just hauling their single fat ass to the mall. But for many more they need to haul a boat, or a pack of kids and all the associated stuff without tying it to the roof of the car, etc.
Have you even noticed how many hybrid SUVs are on the market? Who do you think is buying them?
>The point OP is making is that these SUV people fundamentally do not care about efficiency - if they do not care, they have no interest in optimising their milage. The messaging is mostly wasted.
I disagree. SUVs are a very common commodity in America, and there are many people whom acquired them for various practical reasons. I've had the same compact SUV since high school, over 10 years, and would love to 'upgrade' to an energy efficient electric car, I just can't afford it now, or any other car at this point in my career. Although I dream of the Model X, and think it's a great idea. I would rather take a train everywhere, but given America's infrastructure, currently a Model X is the next best thing.
But most ethanol is net energy negative. Brazilian sugarcane is an exception, but it loses some of its advantage when it's shipped to the US in tankers. Even then, sugarcane requires non-renewable inputs (just not as much as corn). Cellulosic ethanol (from plants that can grow well on marginal farmland, like switchgrass) _is_ still in its infancy. Also, most current engines would need to all be retrofitted to run on anything much greater than E85 because of the greater corrosion.
You're right, though, I should've said something like 'practical biofuels' are in their infancy. I was really more referring to algae oil based petroleum or butanol, as they seem like the most promising candidates for a net-energy positive and high energy density renewable fuel.
(also, it's very cool that you ran on that in the 80s, mind if I ask what kind of car it was, or if you'd had it customized?)
> Even then, sugarcane requires non-renewable inputs (just not as much as corn)
I'm not aware of any. Fertilizers?
> most current engines would need to all be retrofitted to run on anything much greater than E85 because of the greater corrosion
OTOH, once the engines get retrofitted (mostly a surface treatment, IIRC), ethanol burns much more cleanly, with much less combustion residue buildup. The early engines had corrosion problems, but once the surface treatment problem was solved, they enjoyed longer active life than their hydrocarbon-burning counterparts.
> mind if I ask what kind of car it was, or if you'd had it customized?
It was a stock Volkswagen Gol (a project derived from the 1st-gen Passat). You can see a couple pictures here: http://carros.uol.com.br/album/volkswagen_gol_historia_album.... At the time, my aunt worked at their engineering department and got one for me as a gift. Mine was a third-generation ethanol engine. She was involved in the ethanol vehicle project.
Most cars you can buy in Brazil today are bi-fuel and can run with any mix of ethanol and gasoline. It's often a good idea to run the car with ethanol from time to time to clean the engine, as ethanol actively removes residue buildup.
That is very, very cool. Thank you for posting the link and for the details on retrofitting the engines. I don't know if you're in Brazil, but my understanding is that they are way ahead of the US in renewable fuel usage. Most of our ethanol is corn based for technical and political reasons, and corn is a worse feedstock because it's more difficult for yeast to metabolize and it requires more fertilizer. So it's not nearly as economical here. And you are right, fertilizer is the non-renewable input. Most of the N (nitrogen) in NPK (nitrogen/phosphorus/potassium) is ammonia or urea derived from natural gas via something called the Haber Process.
It's the fuels that are in their infancy not the car's. Design a cheap energy efficient way to to turn cellulose into something close to gasoline and you will be able to make more money than Bill Gates. Theoretically it's possible, but nobody has gotten there yet.
After driving ethanol-running cars for more than 25 years, I must disagree. If you can't drive ethanol-running cars in your country, be assured it's not really a technical issue.
I often fill up with 10% ethanol gas which most cars can burn just fine, but the entire world's supply of ethanol is not enough to replace 10% of total demand with ethanol. We throw away enough feed-stock in the US to double world wide ethanol production, but it's simply not cost effective process it yet.
PS: It's not that far off though the US accounts for ~44% of the world’s gasoline consumption, but it's would take ~57% of the world's ethanol to switch every gas pump in the US to 10% ethanol.
In fact it is so mature that what we today call biofuels was what e.g Rudolf Diesel envisioned that his engines would run on, and the prototypes used for fuel. (He also thought of coal dust)
The problem is not the fuel itself, but the possibility to scale up production. Petroleum is available in vast quantities compared to all biofuel feedstocks. Most biofuels today compete with food production, or are not very developed, like cellulose. Even cellulose would have a hard time scale to the sufficient quantities if all the technical problems were solved.
I think you and Tesla are not having the same conversation. They are doing it The Wrong Way if the conversation is efficient commuter/city cars. But tanks are doing it The Wrong Way if you're talking about space launch vehicles too.
Tesla doesn't market or really care about efficiency -- and Tesla buyers don't really care about efficiency (or at least not as their #1 priority, if they did there are plenty of high efficiency 3 wheel'd electric solar powered bio-diesel gold carts sitting in junk yards that they could have been buying).
Tesla cars are about instant torque and speed, offered only by electric motors, without all the baggage and compromise that comes from an efficiency econobox (read: nerdmobile).
Nobody else is doing that. People who buy Teslas, and who are interested in Teslas, don't want 0-60 in 14 seconds but great gas mileage, they want it in 2 seconds and great gas mileage.
Now if you want to talk about a family sedan that can smoke a Ferrari, has room for golf clubs, and is practical enough to take to the beach, grocery shopping and carry 3 or 4 of my friends to a movie, regardless of the how it spins the tires? Then you are in the right conversation.
The Leaf and other small commuter cars are fantastic for people who don't give a shit about cars, and really care about the environment / gas prices. That's a great market, but it's a completely different market than the one Tesla is going after.
The Roadster is basically an electric Lotus. And there's no-one that's going to say to themselves, "You know what would make good financial sense? Replacing my Civic with a goddamn electric race car." It's not about price or energy or the planet, it's about something unique and fun, a luxury good. I expect that there is close to zero overlap between potential Tesla Roadster and potential Leaf buyers.
The Model S changes the dynamic a bit, but it's still not competing with the Leaf and other city cars. And most importantly, it will appeal to people (like me) who love cars. It's unsual, but extends beyond sports-car novelty into something that could easily be the primary vehicle for a family of 4 - or even more with the rear-facing 3rd row seat. Hell, if I was in the market for a high-end sedan, the Model S would be far and away my first choice. For about the price of a 7-series, you get something entirely new and unique in the automotive world.
Both Nissan and Tesla's attempts at popularizing electric vehicles have sensible business models behind them, they're just very different vehicles aimed at very different demographics.
These arrogant posts like OP really annoy me, they don't even try to understand why Tesla does things like it does. No, Elon Musk is stupid, he makes the wrong cars and we should stop talking about it.
They have to create a totally new production chain and make high quality cars. This is impossible with low margins, there is no way they can compete on price against this gigantic industry.
I feel like you can answer nearly every post like the OP's with "Go read The Innovator's Dilemma and then come back and talk about what metrics this disruptive company is competiting on rather than talking about the old metrics of the industry". Every one of them is making the argument that hard drive makers made each time a newer size came out, except with miles of range instead of Gigabytes.
The model S is somewhat disruptive. It's closer to almost affordable(around $50,000 base price after US tax breaks) than the Roadster(which was $109,000 base). Very few people could afford roadsters. More people can afford Model S', but it's still out of reach for the vast majority. I would argue that the Nisan Leaf is MUCH more of a disruptive force, because it's relatively affordable(starts at $27,700), and is available everywhere.
The problem is that Tesla isn't trying to make a green box for the masses. They're making luxury cars, and charging luxury prices for it. That puts them in direct competition with companies like Porche, Mercedes, BMW, etc. It's not an easy market to get into, considering the competition, and the fact that the customers who can afford their products, by and large, aren't concerned about efficiency as much as they're concerned with luxury or power.
The iPhone, when it was released, was something completely new, though. There was literally nothing like it on the market at all. Almost nobody had multitouch functionality. Nobody integrated a content market in the same way Apple did. And nobody made a smartphone as easy to use as Apple.
Tesla is targeting existing markets, making a product that looks pretty damned similar to other available products. They're not targeting the general public(like Apple). To compete on this level, their features are exactly what people talk about.
Also, the Roadster IS disruptive in one of those. Efficiency.
Exactly right. To get that performance from a gas powered car would not only cost a lot more than a tesla, but you'd easily drop $40k of value on the car by driving it out of the lot, let alone by killing the battery.
Based on time in a Roadster, and what I've seen of the model s, I would be totally happy with the S in the bay area, and either rent or keep a second car for trips out of the bay. With a constant level of tech, sure, the city car makes more sense, but assuming you can afford the high tech batteries, the tesla seems like a great car for how Americans use cars.
If I weren't getting a model s, I'd probably get an Audi S5 or S7, so you are taking a 25mpg or less car off the road for an incremental cost of $30k. For me, the carpool benefits make it worthwhile alone (I wasted 1.5h driving to SF today, which would have been 30min in the carpool lane, but I only had one rather than 2 companions).
Making big trucks, SUVs, etc fuel efficient IS the low hanging fruit, followed by cars like taxis and police cars which drive lots of miles and idle a lot. Taking a 50mpg city car to 100mpg, driven 5 miles a day, isn't much savings by comparison.
Regarding the taxis, just about every taxi in Australia runs on LNG these days. It's widely available, and aside from the benefits on somewhat cleaner emissions, you can easily make the money back on the conversion for the number miles they rack up.
I'm surprised this is not subsidized in the USA, especially now that the reserves of gas have been revised up so much.
You're off by a carbon atom. The taxis here run on LPG not LNG. In other words - propane rather than methane. Australia still produces more LNG than pretty much anywhere, but it's all shipped off to China, Korea and Japan.
Tesla is trying to run and end around on the entire auto industry while trying to turn a profit as a car manufacturer startup. I can't imagine many more difficult markets to break into. Can you blame them if they're trying something different? By aiming for the luxury market, they're going for lower-volume, higher-margin products, building a coveted brand, and are able to offer longer ranges than Nissan. Sounds like a good strategy to me.
They don't have time to "sit it out", or money to lobby, they need to become established in brand and sales as quickly as possible. If they wait till electric cars are mainstream, it'll be too late to break the stranglehold that large car companies have on the market.
I think you are right about the major car companies - Nissan, GM, Mitsubishi, et al. They are definitely doing it right and aiming at a good segment.
I think you are wrong about Tesla's segment. I know a couple of Tesla owners. All of them have a stable of cars. I would bet the average Tesla owner has >2 sports cars, and absolutely has more cars than the number of drivers in the family.
The whole idea of 'range anxiety' is BS when applied to someone who owns a Tesla as a fun car they drive on the weekends.
I was at a racetrack a few years ago and there were quarter million dollars cars literally littered across the place. Ferraris, high end Porches, etc. You know what car had the most people standing around it? The Tesla roadster. At the time it was new, it was hard to get, and it was a prestige symbol.
Tesla is is getting car collectors to subsidize their R&D. And their R&D is going to be a big reason why in the future mainstream electric cars are succesful. Ultimately Tesla's tech is about batteries and efficient motors - the car itself is an afterthought.
That said, it makes this problem EVEN WORSE. If it is a daily driver, there is no way it will ever sit unused for 11 weeks. But as 1 of 10 cars in a collection, it absolutely can sit there for weeks on end without being charged. So I think this is a huge problem for Tesla and probably less so for a daily driver like the Leaf.
If it's sitting there for weeks why not just leave it plugged into an extension cord? In a collection a Tesla can sit plugged in for longer than a combustion engine can sit with a full tank of gas so it's really a question of slightly different needs for long term storage.
That's certainly true, there is not reason the cars can't be properly stored. I'm just saying it's easy to forget about it. A lot of people don't touch the sports cars during the winter and if you forget to plug it in, you won't notice for months (and at that point it is too late). A daily driver will never be forgotten about for months on end.
Who said that electric cars have to be about energy efficiency? To me the primary reason to move to electric are to ditch petroleum and its associated problems (pollution, oil spills, foreign energy dependence).
The way to the future is to convince people that new technology is better for them. If the message instead is "you need to give up things you like for the greater good," people will oppose you at every move, and rightly so; do you really want to live in a world where computer screens are just barely bright enough to see, where buildings are sweltering on hot days, freezing on cold days, showers are cold, and the speed limit is never higher than 55mph?
> The way to the future is to convince people that new technology is better for them. If the message instead is "you need to give up things you like for the greater good," people will oppose you at every move, and rightly so;
While I agree in principle, ...
> do you really want to live in a world where computer screens are just barely bright enough to see, where buildings are sweltering on hot days, freezing on cold days, showers are cold, and the speed limit is never higher than 55mph?
Alternative is unfortunately having no computers, no air conditioning and no cars at all. Current energy consumption is too high to sustain even if we go all electric and switch to nuclear + renewables[1]. We need to think about energy efficiency at least a little bit more than we do now.
Reading their analysis of nuclear power (which is, by the by, about as renewable as solar power; we'll run out of fissionables around the time the Sun goes out), I'm not seeing any reason you couldn't run things just on that if you solved the political problems.
Unless I'm missing something (always a possibility, of course) their later comparisons are all to a "green stack" that doesn't include nuclear.
Yes, you're right, my mistake. I expressed myself wrong (thought one think, wrote another...). We can live on renewables + nuclear (if we get there, which would be a monumental task - both politically and in terms of building necessary infrastructure, not to mention electrifying pretty much everything that now burns fuel), but definitely not on renewables alone. And this transition needs to be started ASAP.
The final comparisons of stacks were against electrified and reduced consumption (author started by pointing out how to reduce overall energy use to little more than 50% of the base value). There are many easy tricks that can help with this reduction - like better home insulation, keeping heating few degrees lower, using heat pumps for air conditioning, etc. - that don't mean one has to live without hot water & computers. But people need to start implementing those measures if we are to have any chance in transitioning to a sustainable energy economy.
Sure. Efficiency is important, not to mention cheaper in the long run. And if nothing else, we should at least be saving the hydrocarbons for industrial chemistry where they're actually hard to replace.
Convincing people to pay for the switchover is going to be a long, slow process though. And in most cases it boils down to major building renovation; people are famously reluctant to try that sort of thing.
I might have to read that at some point. Offhand, it would seem that carpeting Sahara and comparable areas would give quite sufficient yields of solar energy, especially combined with nuclear. Feasibility is another matter, naturally.
If someone really wants to stop contributing to pollution, oil spills, energy dependence etc - don't buy a car. Any car.
Manufacturing cars requires a tremendous amount of energy and natural resources. Everything we manufacture and consume punishes the earth.
Myself, I've decided to eschew driving. Our perceived dependence on automobiles is insane. The roads are insane. No car is going to make me cool. I want no part of it.
Tesla are targeting the customers willing to spend upwards of 50k on a car. The other people selling electric cars are targeting the people who would normally spend less than 20k on a car. An electric car is the features of a small city car, but not the price. There's something to be said for targeting both sets of potential customers.
That's what I'm saying. You can't assume that you can cater to the market just by making a city car, because you can't price it like a city car.
The two markets for electric cars are people who want a city car but could afford more, and the people who specifically want an expensive car. Tesla is serving an important segment of the market by embracing the fact that electic cars are expensive.
The leaf is targetting people who would normally spend less than 20k on a car. However the leaf isn't hitting that price point.
Tesla targets people who spend more than 50k on a car, and hence aren't too worried about the price point of the Tesla. Rather they want things like performance and luxury.
We would not be talking about the Leaf, the Fluence or the iMiev if there was not for Tesla. Remember that some of these companies use technology from Tesla(Tesla is licensing it to major players).
Tesla is doing what it knows to do best, innovate and take risks. This is what startups are for. Once it is proven that works the big companies will follow.
I am not aware of a single car or even motor manufacturer for car makers who licenses Tesla technology.
Car makers have long had hybrid cars well before Tesla even existed. Some even had prototype pure electrical cars before them too. After all, Tesla was only founded in 2003!
The only technology link is back to AC Propulsion who's founder made the controller that went into the first GM pure electrical vehicle. However, Tesla stopped using AC Propulsion technology long ago (it may even have been during the year of their founding).
So, who exactly are you talking about? It is highly unlikely to be any Japanese manufacturer, for example, due to their existing leadership in hybrid technology...
How is Tesla trying to engineer around culture? If anything, they are engineering for our culture that is fascinated with high speed performance cars(Lamborghinis and Ferraris an example) and luxury cars(Bentleys and Lexus an example). Their models are giving what the customer wants. An electric car that is still fashionable in today's taste of cars. Of course the early models will have a few problems, but their widespread popularity after such a limited existence as a car company shows that Tesla is exactly what the consumer wants.
Automotive PR departments have been engineering around culture for decades - why do you think you associate "luxury" with Bentley and especially Lexus?
I think you're looking at this the wrong way. Let me make an analogy to a different market - hobby r/c aircraft. 10 Years ago, the only practical way to get certain sizes of aircraft was to use gas powered engines. Nowadays most people use brushless motors for everything, not because they think "hey these are better for the environment" or "these are more efficient", but because they are much more convenient and much more powerful. That is what Tesla is going after - more powerful. Their target market is people that have tiny sports cars and saying "electric motors have an insane amount of torque at low rpms", and then as this other thing, way over there - by the way, they don't use as much fuel too.
There is a whole another ideology that the "green" movement is, which is saying we need to get people to drive less, and when they drive, they should use the most fuel efficient car they should, because you know, the environment and stuff. Generating power at a central power plant (which can happen to be solar/wind/other renewable method rather than coal) and using that energy to power cars is much more efficient than having thousands of miniature power plants burning gasoline/diesel carrying people around town. However, most people don't care about the environment the way that people that want to push everyone to drive electric vehicles. I certainly don't.
A year or two ago, I wanted to get a new car, from my 1998 ford mustang. I had two desires, one was to get a more powerful car. The other was to spend less money on gas. My friend had bought a Prius recently and I liked the features of it, so I went to the Toyota dealership and took one for a test drive. When I finally got to do it (I would not recommend the Rosevilla Toyota to anyone, for the record), the power was completely unacceptable to me and there was no way I was buying that car. I ended up buying a Mini Cooper S, which was more powerful, and had better gas mileage. I think that is the goal of Tesla, to get cars which are more powerful than the gasoline cars, and cheaper to operate.
Do you really think that the customer needs to adapt to the car, rather than the car adapting to the person? Isn't that like the opposite of everything Hacker News stands for?
Generating power at a central power plant (which can happen to be solar/wind/other renewable method rather than coal) and using that energy to power cars is much more efficient than having thousands of miniature power plants burning gasoline/diesel carrying people around town.
Here's the thing: this is bullshit.
Did you know that only about a third of the electricity produced at an electrical plant ends up making it to our wall sockets? (And that's not even calculating the efficiency of the appliances that use that electricity!) Compare that to an internal combustion engine (~1/4 of the energy getting converted into a mechanical form) and we're not really looking at much of an efficiency gain.
Proponents of electrical vehicles have simply not done the math.
Well, electricity is certainly cheaper to charge a car battery than it is to buy gasoline to travel the same amount, and cheaper price for a commodity generally implies uses less energy. Does your gallon of gas take in to account the cost of driving it around the country instead of being transmitted over power lines? A quick google search found that there's only a 6-8% loss in power in transmitting the energy across the power grid, but only 30-40% of the energy contained in coal can be turned into electricity. That is more telling of coal power plants than the general principle of charging cars off the grid.
I'd go even further and say that energy efficiency fundamentally can't be reached by carrying individual 100-300 pound humans around in 1000-2000 pound vehicles.
In the city I live there have been a number of high-profile accidents involving buses and trains, buses and other buses, and buses and other traffic. The drivers may get an extra couple week course, but they are still driving a giant vehicle, and I don't even think many of the drivers are necessarily 'better' - if your entire population drives pretty much every day, then they are all effectively 'professional'.
The same goes for the 18-wheelers, as we often see quite a few accidents involving those on the highways. Sometimes people even walk away from these accidents when they are driving the bigger cars. The smaller ones... not so much. The fact remains that the larger, heavier cars are much safer when involved in accidents with cars even larger and heavier than they are - in most cases. There exist very well engineered and safe smaller vehicles, but that will only get you so far. I hope it gets better over time.
And I think you're all wasting your time on a useless tangent--there's no reason commuters should have to share the roads with larger vehicles anyway, if some streets are more or less reserved for bicycles or mass transit is used.
So your argument boils down to: Tesla would be a true innovator if they only tried to convince us hedonist Americans that we should drive loud, uncomfortable vehicles?
Gotcha.
Count me on the other side. Tesla is slowly moving down market, and at the same time (hopefully) the technology will improve so that we can easily convert over to electric without compromise.
I do grant you your point on range though. If the average person drives 10 miles, then I don't think our goal should be a 300 mile range car. That's pointless engineering. I do not grant quietness or AC or build quality or style or safety.
I don't see how anything you said indicates that they are harming efforts to improve energy efficiency. How is what they are doing harming what others do?
They're hardly a side show. They produced an all electric vehicle that costs over $100,000 to purchase. In decent quantities. With great reviews. And they're still in business.
I see your point about the SUV mentality but it's perfectly reasonable to have some businesses working against that mentality while other businesses try to work within that mentality. I don't think you can call either way The Wrong Way unless you can show persistent failure (or any failure at all).
Tesla S seems to practically cost (with the large battery that still only gets you 300 miles) $70K after a $7.5k tax credit [1] and the Nissan leaf costs $35K but that seems to be before the $7.5k tax credit.
The Leaf claims 100 miles on a charge, making its range a little less than the base Model S. That means that the Tesla costs about $19k more in practice. Considering it's supposed to be a "nicer" car in general, that doesn't seem too unreasonable.
I don't think Nissan genuinely expects anyone to buy the base model Leaf. For $2,000, you give up the ability to charge your car in minutes rather than hours (and, apparently, to use any of the charging stations that are supposed to materialize in the near future).
I drive a 2008 Kia Rio which gets 40mpg (100,000+ miles). The 2012 gets 30/40 and cost $12K. I am waiting for a hybrid that beats the Rio by a amount needed to justify the price difference. I look at the all electrics, but I cannot buy one because I live in an apartment with no plug-ins (kinda annoying in the winter) and travel 34 miles to work (one way).
A lot of people have picked at the "it won't charge through a 100-foot extension cord" statement. While I have no idea if this particular statement is true or not, it certainly wouldn't be unexpected behavior for a power management system.
Modern charging and power conversion systems are designed to operate under specific use cases. When the Tesla charger first sees line voltage, it likely does some quick testing to see what kind of supply it's hooked up to, for example by trying to take 15 Amps and monitoring the line voltage. If the voltage sags too much, then it might back off to 12 Amps; after that, it probably just shuts off. The reason is that all of the AC/DC conversion circuitry is designed to operate with maximum efficiency at a certain input power; if the system can't deliver that power, then it's just going to shut down and assume that there's something wrong with the line.
Note, this does not mean that the battery requires 1kW continuous power to stay charged. In plugged mode, the car will switch the charger on and off every few minutes (if it's at all like a laptop or phone) and draw down the battery ever so slightly in between. This is the most efficient way to operate, and is much better for the battery than constantly stuffing it with a trickle of current.
If you want to see this in action on a consumer electronics scale, try plugging your iPad into the USB extension port on an iMac keyboard -- it will kindly let you know that it's not charging, and it will happily sit there and run its battery down to the cut-off point while plugged in.
This is a good point, but to use the iPad as an example, "not charging" actually does in most cases charge very slowly. It takes what it can and provided its in standby, this is usually enough to ever so slightly charge. In the on position, it will discharge more slowly than battery alone.
The point is "optimal charge" or "complete destruction of the battery without warning" might not be the only two, or best choices available. "The best we can do with 500 watts" might be a better choice.
Every laptop that uses a lithium ion battery should have this problem. Oddly enough every laptop manufacture has included circuitry that cuts battery power when it reaches 5% (when the OS reports 0% it's actually ~1-5%). Tesla should have no problem fixing this, the onboard electronics will die anyway when the battery dies so why not have them die a few hours earlier and allow 'recovery' by charging the vehicle.
Yes. If you completely discharge your laptop and then stick it in a closet for a couple of months without charging it, the battery will likely be completely unrecoverable. The exact amount of time it takes will depend on the battery of course (and the ambient temperature).
Yes, and I've done that. Took longer than a couple of weeks though. Brand new battery in a MacBook that discharged then went in storage for a while (a half-year I think). The next time I opened it the battery was completely dead and wouldn't hold a charge.
Yes, I've bricked my old Macbook by doing that (for several months).
I bought a new laptop, so closed down my old Macbook, and stuck it away.
A few months later, I found I wanted to grab file from the old macbook, and noticed it wouldn't run from battery. It'll work fine plugged in, but the battery is registered as full discharged, and the Apple page says "Buy a new battery".
Which is what the Nissan Leaf does(pretty nifty idea, I'd say). But its not really a solution in the sense that it wouldn't work for cars parked inside.
My confusion with Tesla is this: around the rest of the world - outside of USA - there are already very fuel efficient automobiles. 60, 80, even 90 miles per gallon are common and applauded in Europe.
America has the opposite approach and appears to optimise for size, comfort and perceived safety. (SUVs, Trucks, large saloons.)
None of the things American consumers appear to value are correlated in the Tesla. When I look at the Tesla brand, product and marketing, all I can think is how popular this car would be in Europe. Just me? Why USA first?
The market is a few types of rich person. The nerd (who just loves the tech), the guy who genuinely cares about the environment (but is either required to drive long distances, or is irrational), the person who wants a sportscar or luxury car but also wants to socialize with or date leftist/environmentalists, someone who wants a california hov lane sticker but doesn't want to ride a motorcycle every day, ...
This won't sell a few million cars a year, but I think in the USA, the market for the above is 50-100k cars per year, easy.
Euro testing cycles are more generous, MPG figures are quoted in Imperial gallons (which are larger), and probably because of less dense cities they tend to be more tolerant of smog belching diesels. Diesels are fuel efficient but it's expensive to make them pollution efficient enough to pass American regulations.
Many cars are the same in both countries. There isn't anything about America that makes them less efficient. The exceptions are those tiny city cars that Americans would never drive, and diesels.
Diesel cars are very clean these days. The problem is that until recently in the US the standard of diesel typically found was of a lower quality than EuroDiesel. Now it has tighter regulations, but diesel cars still carry the stigma.
Not only that, but diesel is rare in North America. You cannot guarantee that the next gas station you pass will serve diesel. That alone is enough to put people off buying them.
Ford, General Motors and all the Japanese brands offer diesel models of their fleet in Europe but they don't tend to sell them here.
I think that this is a very regional thing. Perhaps limited to the coastal cities? I have no problem finding diesel in the Midwest. In fact, we took a road trip a few months ago in our diesel pickup and every gas station we stopped at had diesel: it's not even something you need to look for.
"In at least one case, Tesla went even further. The Tesla service manager admitted that, unable to contact an owner by phone, Tesla remotely activated a dying vehicle’s GPS to determine its location and then dispatched Tesla staff to go there. It is not clear if Tesla had obtained this owner’s consent to allow this tracking5, or if the owner is even aware that his vehicle had been tracked. Further, the service manager acknowledged that this use of tracking was not something they generally tell customers about."
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That screams class-action to me if Tesla can really track without knowledge of the owner AND will mean that I have absolutely zero interest in purchasing one till this is addressed.
Class action my ass; OnStar can kill a car remotely whether you have the service or not. Why would I be shocked my $109K luxury electric sports car can report its location back with the rest of its remote telemetry?
I'm pretty sure they have been open about this. At least I remember reading this somewhere on their website. I think it was part of their 'product testing' program or something, where you would allow Tesla to track everything to gather data for their purposes to make the car better.
Yes, true, read it now - I usually always read the comments first to know whether an article is worth reading, but commenting before reading is not smart...
I'm more impressed by people that spend $100k on a car and then don't know how to take care of it.
Do you know what happens when an ICE engine is left to sit for months? First the oil runs out to the pain and slowly evaporates. The cylinders might suffer some sticktion and possibly rust. And you've probably got small animals that have made a home in your engine block. The rubber in the tires will have deformed and even if you get it running it will be a very bumpy ride to the tire shop. Also the gas tank absorbs water if you live in a humid region like Florida.
All of this is covered in the manual of every car I've ever owned. Drive it 5 minutes, at least, every few weeks to keep the lubricants lubricating or you end up with a very expensive rebuild.
You can't get anymore minimal maintenance than an electric car. If you're not using it leave it plugged in...and make sure your electric bill is paid up.
While a lot of this accurate and something to consider, the author of this article fails to mention anything about Tesla's unique service/support model that they plan to roll out with the Model S. Tesla also mentions a "five-minute battery swap" available on their upcoming vehicles as well as "Tesla Rangers" that will come to your vehicle in the event that it dies. It seems to me like this is a small problem that the author is blowing out of proportion.
It seems this would be a small problem if Tesla informed their owners about it clearly (and adding a decent status display to the car to warn when it's not charging enough/how long until full battery depletion). As it seems now, Tesla owners are liable to the tune of $40K for doing something they don't know is bad.
Five known cases out of 2,200 sales is a quarter of a percent. As a conservative estimate, let's say it's more like 1%. At $40,000 per replacement, adding $400 to the cost of the car (a 0.4-0.7% increase depending on model) seems nominal to then offer full coverage.
Granted, the problem gets worse as more "consumer-level" customers purchase their cars and don't take as good care of them.
Which then raises the question of why this is even possible. Why on earth will the car's systems happily destroy itself? Where's the "if BATTERY_LEVEL < CRITICAL: shutDown()" line?
Did you try measuring the power at the wall end of the cord while the heater was running? Most space heaters aren't very smart, and it wouldn't surprise me if the draw varied wildly depending on the power supply and how warmed up the heater is (I know mine will go between 1 and 1.5kW plugged straight into the wall as it warms up).
I'd be surprised if a 100-foot extension always consumed 850 watts.
Elsewhere in the thread I calculate the life support draw at 29 watts from available data (53kWh battery, 11 weeks to idle to empty). I think you can afford the $100 if you have a Tesla.
This is based on a wrong premise, that 900 watts is needed to keep the thing from losing charge, derived from vague anecdotal evidence and not supported in any way by technical fundamentals. If it was true, the 85 kwhr battery pack would last less than 3 days when the car was unplugged.
The actual number is probably more than an order of magnitude smaller.
"The article indicates that a 100 foot cord connected to a standard outlet does not provide enough power to prevent a Tesla car from discharging..."
Pretty sure they say that to make sure people don't just use any old cord. A 24 AWG cord with 66% voltage drop as the low end would change your cost analysis radically.
You probably meant 4 AWG, a 100' of 24 AWG cord has about 2.5 ohms of resistance in it. Since power dissipation is exponential with current pulling even 2 amps through it would have the wire trying to dissipate 10 watts and that would represent 100mW/foot, easily enough to raise the temperature of the copper to the point where it would be too soft and break.
It seems like it's an inherent in this sort of battery. I'm not sure what Tesla could do to offset this. Computer makers mostly don't offer warranties in the case of negligence or intentional damage. The same seems to apply here.
It's a bug in the same sense that internal combustion engines will begin to have problems if their motor oil is not changed. It's inherent to this kind of battery.
Rather than brick the battery, if it is parked and below a certain level, release a normally open relay that completely disconnects the BMS from the cells. Recovering from this state would require special charging and recalibrating of the BMS (possibly done at a shop) but it would be better than bricking the pack.
Disconnecting the BMS does not eliminate self-discharge, only the parasitic load. Draining your batteries to the point of being functionally dead, and then leaving them in that state for an extended period, will still "brick" them just as badly.
Switch does not solve the problem, "backup battery"? You're just delaying the inevitable, why not just demand that they make the batteries bigger in the first place?
What good does a "mini engine" do? You can't turn it on automatically, that's an enormous safety risk and would never make it past insurers or the government, and it can only last as long as its fuel holds out, again you're just delaying the inevitable. Solar panels don't help if you're parked in a garage, which is where most people park their fancy roadsters, and they'd have to be huge to maintain the charge anyway.
And absolutely none of this contradicts my original point: It's a technological limitation. This is how batteries work. You're not proposing a solution, you're proposing unworkable band-aids.
It's inherent to any lithium ion battery design which is why every laptop, iphone, etc that uses a lithium ion battery has circuitry that cuts power when the batter reaches 1% to 5% it can occur in your laptop if you discharge the battery entirely and then leave your battery uncharged for months (or less if stored cold).
Some kind of chemical change occurs in Li batteries when completely discharged.
Good answer. In case anyone wants more detail, wikipedia is a little vague, but has the basic idea right:
"Overdischarge supersaturates lithium cobalt oxide, leading to the production of lithium oxide...deep discharge may short-circuit the cell, in which case recharging would be unsafe."
and
"Overcharge up to 5.2 Volts leads to the synthesis of cobalt(IV) oxide...if overheated or overcharged, Li-ion batteries may suffer thermal runaway and cell rupture. In extreme cases this can lead to combustion."
The possibilitiy of thermal runaway or fire from overcharging is actually fairly likely with Li+ ions, since they will react with any non-inert substance.
The short circuit caused by undercharging can affect other cells in the pack, leading to overheating and combustion.
maximum lifetime is obtained when you store them at around 66% charge at 4C, which is the temperature of your fridge, take them out ever few months and charge them, you can get less than 1% capacity degradation a year.
> A service manager then informed him that “it’s a brick” and that the battery would cost approximately $40,000 to replace. He was further told that this was a special “friends and family” price, strongly implying that Tesla generally charges more.
> $40,000 (or more) to fix his car
> full $40,000-plus cost
> At the same time, the Model S pricing starts at $49,900 (after US tax incentives), broadening the market to households of far more modest means than the owners of the $109,000 and up Roadster. This in turn makes it even less likely that Tesla buyers will have the necessary tens of thousands of dollars to spare if they ever allow their battery to fully discharge.
("Implying that battery cost will be the same as for Roadster, car that costs 2.5 times more")
Statements like this are generally bad for an article that tries to operate with facts.
I would like to see Tesla's response to this. I was going to pre-order a model X, i won't be now, until I know I won't be tracked and the car won't brick itself.
I'm much more in favor of hundreds of millions of govt money going towards 50-100MPG+ electric/gas hybrids than all electric at this point.
Limited range, hard to "refuel", and now the very real possibility of bricking. I think we are still a long long ways away from practical all electrics.
I'd prefer the government stay out of it all together. Producing vehicles isn't what the government is for.
Second, using a 2500 pound car to transport a 150 pound person 15-20 miles to work every day is incredibly inefficient any way you look at it. If the government is going to be involved at all, it should be to promote walking, cycling, and public transportation. Researching more efficient cars is like trying to replace arsenic in drinking water with mercury - maybe it's not as bad, but it's still bad.
Third, if people were serious about saving the environment and reducing pollution then they'd start living closer to the places they need to go, and stop driving so much altogether. They're not doing that, so I don't think the interest is there.
We'd be far better off if government weren't subsidizing the automobile at all. Subsidizing mass transit to ameliorate the effects of subsidizing the automobile makes no sense.
I don't think it needs to promote walking either. Most people are perfectly capable of understanding their own situations if we don't hide the costs and if they are allowed to learn from their own mistakes.
It would be proper to tax things that have negative effects that aren't paid for, such as pollution.
The main government subsidy for efficient automakers that I'd like to see is a commitment to purchase certain numbers of vehicles for federal fleets if they meet specific performance goals (including price). Same thing with state/local (possibly with some federal subsidy of local purchases of more efficient vehicles).
Ideally without specifying how to make them more efficient, just overall cost per expected miles/yr (which would probably give natural gas vehicles the best pricing right now).
And I'd be opposed to that. The federal government is so bloated, they probably have enough vehicles for the next ten years if they were to stop doing all the things not authorized by the Constitution.
Efficiency is not the only consideration when buying a vehicle. I, personally, don't want a vehicle that sacrifices safety for efficiency.
The government shouldn't be using pork or other inducements to bias the market towards one consideration. Consumers knows their own needs.
If government wants to promote efficient, it should start by being less wasteful itself. Right now its the worst example in human history.
The real solution to this problem would be for tesla to setup "anti-brick" charging stations, install google's self-drive system on their cars, and program them to drive themselves to the nearest station and charge themselves if there is a risk of bricking ;P
Let me tell you how to brick a top of the line 2009 BMW.
Easy-peasy. Lots of small trips, under 5 km, for 9 months. That's it. Apparently the discharge caused by starting the car and a draw from all the packages that are strapped to it are not offset by the charge received while driving unless the distance is at least 10 km per engine start. The only warning that the car gives is an "excessive battery discharge" and when it pops up the battery can no longer be fully recharged. Not covered by the warranty, because apparently there's a one-liner in manual that says "20 minute a day continuous drive minimum". Unlike Tesla's though the battery is "only" $700 to replace, not $40k.
This use pattern damages a lot more than just the battery. You can basically trash the engine if you keep up a 5-10min per day use pattern for long enough. At the very least, a car which would otherwise comfortably last 200-300k miles will probably be worth selling at 50-100k. Certain engines are affected more than others, but basically you are never letting the engine warm up to design temperature, so nothing fits well, accelerating wear. It is particularly bad to do this from mile 0 with a new engine.
Meh. Modern oils are amazing, and engine wear is highly dependent upon load. Provided you're gentle, it's likely that the worst engine-related issue you'll experience from short drives is from moisture and acid accumulation in the oil.
Any car needs to recharge the battery after cranking. Higher compression engines require more energy to crank. The "top of the line" performance of your bimmer is inexorably linked to the time it takes to recharge the battery.
As a BMW owner with a roughly 5km commute to work, I would suggest doing what I do: bicycle to work and save the car for dates and weekend cruises.
20 min per DAY? And a $700 battery? To hell with that, I'll slap a Duralast in the trunk and wire the damned thing up. But then again, I am not buying BMWs...
It's hard to imagine that, after all the hundreds of millions of dollars poured into this company, they would choose to charge the customer > $30K for a new battery in the few cases where this occurred. Is it really worth a few hundred thousand dollars to get the PR this article implies?
And, why isn't there a failsafe mechanism that simply stops draining the battery completely before this happens? Then at least you can tow it home and recharge it -- inconvenient, but not $30K inconvenient.
If you leave a gasoline engine car unattended for a while, it becomes a brick, too -- you need to flush the fuel, replace the seals, etc. True, it takes more than 11 weeks, and you can usually put the transmission in neutral to tow it.
This is a big problem, though. If anyone has a spare Tesla and would like someone to take care of it, I'd be happy to keep your car garaged and energized, and will only drive it 200 miles a week. :)
Yeah -- probably tires go first, and that still doesn't make it inoperative, just worse performance. And you could buy several new cars for the cost of the Tesla battery pack.
Don't forget the battery, leave a 'normal' battery through a few months and it's dead. What happens to a normal car once all the fuel is drained? Coolant? Oil?
How did these design flaws make it out of engineering?!
You can comfortably leave a regular car alone for 6 months and when you return at worst the battery will be flat and there'll be some rust on the brake pads. I regularly do this to my poor old diesel SEAT. Even if the battery is flat I can either bump start it, or worst comes to worst, buy a new $50 battery.
Diesels are a fair bit more tolerant, and low end cars are actually much more robust than performance cars. Try leaving a dodge viper unattended for 6mo.
I drove a diesel land cruiser (lm78) which had been sitting on an airfield unused for years. Aside from needing tires and a battery (and wiper blades) no problem. Even the fuel was ok.
Can someone explain why Tesla can't throw in a hibernation mode to dial down the idle power-drain? I mean, what are the "always on subsystems" doing that they're draining 50% charge in 7 days? Surely those systems and that level are drain aren't inherent in lithium-ion tech.
And if Tesla can notify itself of a battery in danger of bricking, why can't they notify the driver well in advance of the emergency?
Honestly, these cares look great and are all electric. Two things that i want in my next car. When i think electric car, i don't think of Ford, Nisan or any other generic (GM) brand. These guys pulled us from the dark ages of fuel (and the slightly brighter yet still dark ages of Hybrid cars) into the 21st century with a car that runs on electricity alone.
With that in mind, the issue of a "Brick" isn't something I want...but if it can be solved then I'm all up for this being my next car. Is there any evidence that this same issue cant occur in the other main stream electric cars coming onto the market anyway?
I've bricked a number of MacBook Pro batteries this way but (A) Scale is obviously different - only $100, and (B) Genius Bar came to the rescue - even though it really was my fault, they covered it under warranty.
Yeah, I've been told it falls under the standard AppleCare warranty if this happens to anyone. (Likewise with fraying of charger cords).
Personally, I don't see why it's "your fault". I've seen it happen many times, all you need to do is let your computer drain completely and leave it for a few days (not months as some people have stated in this post). Although I'm sure it says something about it in the manual somewhere, it's hardly common knowledge that this is something you need to be careful of.
This strikes me as extraordinarily foolish. It's not that hard to have a hard shutdown mode in which most of those parasitic loads are gone and trigger it if the battery charge drops bellow a certain level. We've had that technology in laptops for quite a while. This is not a hard problem to solve, and it is obvious enough that it should have occurred to someone. Also, monitoring the current it is getting for charging and displaying a warning if it is insufficient and perhaps a projected charging time would be a good feature.
This article didn't sit well with me either. All the examples were completely anecdotal, came from an anonymous source (a "regional service manager"), and there are no citations. Footnote 1 references a "written Tesla report" but that's hardly a citation.
It may be that there is a real issue here, but I would like to see it corroborated by some actual evidence.
The car is too risky to purchase if it can brick. There is no way to ensure that a brick can't happen. Any charging source could malfunction (e.g., trip a circuit breaker) without you becoming aware. You have to plan your whole life around keeping the car charged. You can't lend it to friends (nor your spouse that doesn't care about tech) --- oops, sorry, I didn't plug it in after my several-hour drive. It's like having a dog that needs constant care. This sounds too fantastic to be true.
You put a $1 chip directly on the battery itself that if it ever drops below "x" volts, it breaks the circuit. Even if the owner has to take it back to the dealer to get it "reset" at least the battery will be saved.
My $500 LiFePo4 battery for my bicycle has something like this to prevent cell reversal. They can certainly do it for a car unless they are just doing it on purpose.
A disconnected lithium based battery can hold a base charge for YEARS.
Tesla uses apparently Li-ion battery. I wonder why I han't experienced the same problem with other electronics using that same type of battery. For example, I had my fully-charged mobile stored away for approx 5 months without charging. When I needed it again, the battery was still usable.
A side-question: can somebody explain what happens to a Li-ion battery when it fully discharges? Why does it become a "brick"?
5 cars out of 2200 doesn't really qualify as a devastating problem. The insurance for this for the fleet would probably run about $200/car based on a 100% profit for the insurer. Instead, charge $10/month per car and you are probably way ahead. If you have a Tesla and I get at least 100 people responding, I will do it for $20/month at my much smaller scale than a normal insurance company.
Funny, I saw the Tesla problem and immediately thought to myself that there might be an interesting arbitrage oppty. If your car's been bricked and you don't want to fork out $40k, is it possible you'd sell the car for some $$ to a person willing to buy the new battery and get a discount to retail?
It will be interesting to see if Tesla will do the right thing and replace the battery packs at a reasonable price or create a PR disaster and then have to replace the packs anyway. So far HN and theunderstatement.com have the scoop. A search of the San Jose Mercury News doesn't show it yet. But there was mention of Tesla doing powertrains for Mercedes.
I don't think this affects Model S as much as it does the roadster - reason being - Model S is a car that you intend to use, not keep it in a garage as a collectors item - so it's probably going to be recharged on a regular basis. Stressing that it should be plugged if you intend to leave it for weeks is still important.
I would point out that both the Model S and X may very well have the circuitry to completely disconnect the cell pack at something below 10% actual charge (not displayed charge). I'm also really wondering how much of this is self discharge, and how much of this is poor load control of the standby electronics.
Tesla are crony capitalists building a car that is worse for the environment (toxic battery, power waste across the grid, majority power from coal powerplants) than traditional combustion engine machines.
It would be interesting if they (or we) were to do a service that for say, £20 a month, they would register if your car was about to flatline, go find it using the GPS, and attempt to recharge it for you.
Kind of crazy that for the price of just a new battery, you could get a lower class Audi or BMW. Really put the overall "electric" technology in perspective for me.
The article explains that it doesn't have power to turn on "tow mode" - so the wheels remain engaged to the now dead electrical system, effectively locking them in place.
Why can't you plug the car in, and switch on tow mode?
Even a laptop with a dead battery works fine when plugged in. I'd venture to say that a tow truck's alternator should be enough to disengage the wheels. Sorry, but this is just crappy engineering.
Unlike a laptop, the Tesla was never designed to be run while plugged in. Combined with the fact that they arent designed to hit zero battery. This is an easy oversight of design, where the laptop can run directly off of wall power not due to fix the problem of a dead battery, but to provide less stress on the battery while being used and plugged in. A usage case that does not exist under normal usage of a tesla.
Additionally. Do we know that it is actually impossible to engage tow mode while plugged in? That still doesn't solve all cases of having to manually move it.
Failing open would be bad, a "unscrew this small panel and pull this switch" would be fine.
My car is old Saab and there are places to move aside bits of trim to manually operate the sunroof and fuel tank cover if the battery is completely gone.
They may have them, I'm not rich enough to buy a brick that big. But from what I've noticed in friends and family, most younger people don't even realize they're there. "Isn't that what P is for?". It makes me feel old driving a manual transmission and knowing what all of those things are for.
It's probably around the same in "normal" cars today. If you just have a car in park it won't move until you move it out of park, the catch is in gas powered cars, even if the battery is dead you should be able to put it in neutral to get it towed. In electric cars when the battery is dead, well that's all you have, so you can't get the gear into neutral to make it at least rollable.
Towing shouldn't be a problem, tow trucks carry dollies that can be manually inserted under tires. It takes like 5 minutes. I guess there are probably some limits on speed and range.
Sounds like a design failure with what little transmission the roadster has, at least with the parking prawl not having some sort of mechanical deactivation.
I am actually curious that if it is a fundamental design issue with battery, how are major car makers like Nissan handling its Leaf car?
If everyone bricks their car needs to pay 40K for the replacement, it would be outrageous and all over the news. Personally, I do think that Tesla could have done more to make sure drivers are fully aware of this issue before making their purchase. Otherwise, I wouldn't put my money in Tesla stock, as they are sitting dock and waiting for class action lawsuits
At least in the case of the Tesla Roadster, it’s not even possible to enable tow mode, meaning the wheels will not turn and the vehicle cannot be pushed nor transported to a repair facility by traditional means.
Well, that's completely false. A flatbed, which seems to be pretty standard for towing these days, will have now problem at all winching that vehicle onto the platform, whether the wheels turn or not.
> a regional service manager for Tesla stated he was personally aware of at least five cases of Tesla Roadsters being “bricked” due to battery depletion.
This regional service manager has been sacked.
The correct answer here was, "I'm not sure, I'll see if I can look that up for you," evasively answering ugly questions 101.
There are too many rich shits in this world who have never known responsibility. If you want nice things you have to maintain them. I hope they never have pets or kids. You have to give them water, feed them and clean them all the time. It is inherent in the nature of some things that they screw up really quickly if you stop caring. It isn't a technology problem.
This is akin to leaving the headlights on when the car is turned off in a regular car. You're asking for trouble. (though not to the tune of $40,000)
When the car is turned off, there should be some kind of indication of how long it will take to brick the thing. If that indication is days rather than weeks, it should yell at you. Loudly. At least that way all owners will know of the threat. The car will educate them. (important, because they probably won't RTFM)
Although I'm sure you could still end up with the odd user who leaves the car with a three week brick time, receives no loud warning because of the significant charge remaining , comes back five weeks later and curses Tesla.
They are comparable in that they both have to do with batteries and something you have to think about when you leave your car. In one case the consequences are much worse, but the general idea is the same. When you leave your car, you could mess up your battery if you aren't thinking.
Even my iPhone can turn turtle to protect its battery when it gets too low.
Also how much power does it take to keep the damn thing plugged in? The article indicates that a 100 foot extension cord isn't enough just to break even and the car discharges even when plugged in. A 100 foot cord of cheap 16 gauge wire can still supply almost 900 watts before the voltage drops below 100v. So it uses a kilowatt just to stand-by without even charging? That's one hell of a power vampire.
I think maybe they should spend a bit more time on the fundamentals and a bit less time on fancy bird-wing doors if they want to have a real product. The real car of the future is just a big dumb tray full of indestructible nickle-iron batteries and 4 wheel-hub motors bolted to the corners.