Tesla Trolling

[paflyer]

California seems to be trying to get as much like Europe as possible when it comes to policy, though

To their detriment, and they have the national legislative seats and market power to impose their idiocy on the rest of the country.

 

[tspear]

AC is off at night? Where do you live? Mine runs 24 hrs when it's above 75 degrees.

My oven is natural gas.

What if you have to park in the street? What if you have 4 cars in the family?

If you A/C runs 24x7 then it is undersized and likely not able to keep up with the higher temps. When the temp is 105 with the sun shinning. the house has to disipate significantly more heat then when the temp is in the 80s at night.

Tim

 

[tspear]

Water pumps are a 60k mi item on most cars, CV boots are on condition, haven't seen too many oil pump failures, but most of that stuff is a easy fix, or a drop it off before work pick it up next day or after work item.

The older stuff seemed to need less, like the older 2.2 Subaru engine vs the 2.5.

Yeah, I do not keep/maintain a spare car to drop it off one day and get it the next. I also did not have the time to deal with it, or wait for the mechanic to fix it each time.

Now, sure. My wife and I carpool about three days a week, I also only do 20 miles round trip, it is easy to schedule. Back when I lived in the DC area with my wife and I going in separate directions and having a one plus hour commute in traffic (only 27 miles); reliability is king.

Tim

 

[Salty]

Keep in mind all Teslas have a hot-swappable packs and they tried this already. They placed a swapper right next to a SuperCharger for a year or two, halfway between LA and San Francisco and charged a small fee for it.

Almost nobody used it. People discovered that taking a 45 minute charge & lunch break in the middle of a 6 hour drive that you do a couple of times a year is just no big deal. Certainly wasn’t worth paying money to get out of it - even by people who could easily afford it.

Swapping becomes a bit more viable if this is for day to day driving - but I still maintain strongly that if you can’t charge at home, don’t buy an EV.

How long did a swap take to complete?

How much did it cost?

I'd be reluctant to pay to swap out what is probably the most valuable piece of equipment on my car, with one of unknown quality or treatment.

 

[deonb]

AC is off at night? Where do you live? Mine runs 24 hrs when it's above 75 degrees.

My oven is natural gas.

What if you have to park in the street? What if you have 4 cars in the family?

Me too, but even when you run an AC 24/7, when it runs at night it draws significantly less power than if it runs during the day. The cycles are much shorter. By definition it has to be - if it has to pull 100% cycles to keep up at night, it wouldn't work at all during the day.

You were talking about the grid though, which by nature is an 'on average' thing. It's not relevant if you have 4 cars, or a natural gas oven, unless you live in a pocket of people where everybody have that. (Even then, just having 4 cars doesn't mean you now drive 60'000 miles/year suddenly).

What does parking on the street have to do with the grid?

 

[Salty]

Me too, but even when you run an AC 24/7, when it runs at night it draws significantly less power than if it runs during the day. The cycles are much shorter. By definition it has to be - if it has to pull 100% cycles to keep up at night, it wouldn't work at all during the day.

You were talking about the grid though, which by nature is an 'on average' thing. It's not relevant if you have 4 cars, or a natural gas oven, unless you live in a pocket of people where everybody have that. (Even then, just having 4 cars doesn't mean you now drive 60'000 miles/year suddenly).

What does parking on the street have to do with the grid?

I'm guessing you guys don't live in florida.

 

[denverpilot]

I imagine that there were an awful lot of people like denverpilot and his acolytes writing similarly middle-school level condescending rants in newspapers a century ago about how this ridiculous internal combustion engine would never catch on, and if you wanted to get somewhere, nothing would ever replace a good old horse and wagon.

I have acolytes! Who knew?! LOL.

Almost nobody said that back then, by the way. The society was mostly agrarian and broke coming out of the Great Depression, mostly.

That being said, I do think my next car may be a plug-in hybrid. That makes sense to me. As long as I can get about 110 miles on a charge, I'd rarely use the gas engine. I could do all my day-to-day errands on electric. But I could also plan longer trips without having to factor in as much time sitting around en route waiting for the batteries to charge as I'll be spending driving.

Similar thoughts here. They need to make a GOOD AWD version of something as a plug-in hybrid first though. Roads are still dirt out here and none of these roller skate cars have the suspension to survive years of pounding on washboards.

My favorite solution looking for a problem that Elon is busy creating is the trip to Mars. Gotta love a guy that can market a plan to escape pollution by flying for years to a planet who’s atmosphere naturally is 1,000 times more polluted than we could ever make ours. He really is a genius.

LOL. He’s an ADD poster child.

The trouble with confidently making such predictions is that although there are successful technologies that were initially pooh-poohed, there are also technologies that someone thought were sure to succeed but didn't pan out. So my reaction to all this is "maybe."

Reaction to Tesla or just reasonable uses of electric tech? Tesla is probably going to become a boutique car maker. Electric tech has some useful applications but it’s not the fix for a majority of problems automakers attempt to fix for people. It does fix some. Especially for those living in overcrowded urban hell holes.

That “nonsense” was one of the coolest things I’ve seen in my adult life. YMMV.

Shooting space junk into deep space holds little interest for me. Turning it into a car commercial even less so. But he needed a weight to put at the top of his rocket that he could blow up with a launch failure and Lloyd’s of London wouldn’t have to pay out on. So he used one of his first unprofitable cars.

I wonder if folks had a similar conversation about gas stations on internet forums at the beginning of the 20th century when most folks thought a horse was much more convenient and useful than some new fangled motor car.

Nope. No Internet forums.

But the real story was literally my grandfather’s. Farm kid. Bought first Model T used and broken. Replaced lower bearings with leather (!) and told anyone driving it not to push it too hard or they’d blow the engine right out of the thing. Someone eventually did. Nobody had money for fancy stuff like metal engine bearings.

The automobile taking over from the horse really happened when Ford started making the Model T. Tesla has zero chance of duplicating that but perhaps the legacy manufacturers might do it.

Henry Ford’s real legacy. Cheap debt for the masses. He bankrolled it. Numerous powerful bankers and political lobbyists of the day were so jealous that he came up with it, they tried to get Congress to take his company from him. Said his lack of formal business training and education were a threat to the country.

Sound familiar in this thread?

Interestingly this entwined Henry Ford in telecommunications history. When asked by Congresscritters who made him come before Congress and explain why he should keep his own company... how he would run it without said “proper” education, the short version is, he said he’d installed a massive multi-line phone system in his office and he would call any expert on any topic he needed by simply picking up the phone.

The power brokers of the day were mighty annoyed that he was practical. They were really annoyed he made a profit.

Pretending Musk is Ford is laughable.

Just read this in the WSJ.

“Tesla has given the first signals that it is giving up on its ambition to become a mass-market car maker. Prospective customers should be angry, and investors ought to be wary.
Over the weekend, Chief Executive Elon Musk announced a new, $78,000 version of Tesla’s car for the people, the Model 3. More important was his admission that his promised $35,000 version would cause the company to “lose money and die” if built right away.

Then there are the nearly 500,000 Tesla’s die-hards who put down $1,000 deposits for what they thought was a car that started at $35,000. How many can afford, or would be willing to pay for the higher-end models? These refundable deposits account for a third of the cash on Tesla’s rickety balance sheet.”

Cheers

I wonder if Kent @flyingcheesehead is still a buyer at $78,000. Ouch. Quite a bait and switch.

That’s more than a loaded Heavy Duty diesel pickup truck and those are heavily milked for profit margin.

Anyway, looks like Musk is setting up his narrative... the big auto makers killed him. Of course. It won’t play as well with Ford completely exiting his market space though. Ha. He’ll have to blame Korea.

You seem to be stuck in the past. The rest of us here are talking about how things will change going forwards. Don't you understand that or are you being deliberately obtuse?

Any idiot can see it's not going to change instantly but the tech is at the point where it's starting to swing that way fast.

Which tech is that? None of the tech for EVs has changed in well over a decade in batteries and that’s where their major problem lies. Toyota has been making the Prius for a “relatively” long time now.

Tesla came up with ways to manage and build a massive lithium pack, but none of it in the electronics world was particularly new. It’s standard 90s vintage tech driven (pun intended) by a false “green” movement.

Technical needs. Your point about the financial side is a good one. However, a lot of the people who'd consider buying a new car can also afford a new EV, I think that's a fairer comparison. Not used petrol/diesel vs new EV.

The market for used EVs is tiny, although as I said my friend bought a second hand Tesla S and it's excellent. It'll grow though. There are still uncertainties about battery longevity that need to be addressed before people will be confident so it'll be slow to start with.

It’s not an uncertainty. It’s a well known fact that these batteries die. It’s in the data sheet for the individual cells.

Almost no one pays cash. Cash flow, what is the monthly spend for the car, gas, and maintenance.

I pay cash. I even paid REAL cash and not electronic cash for the Dodge, mostly as a joke when the former owner said he wanted “$20s in unmarked bills”. He got $100s.

The Lincoln was a loan for three months. Did it so the poor sales guy got more commission. They wanted to sell it through Ford finance and Ford had a minimum pay off time for the small dealership to get their kickback. So we paid it off three months after buying it. Pretty sad that when the paperwork was slow the “threat” was that we’d write a check if they’d didn’t hurry up. LOL.

It helped that a storage facility across from the dealership literally blew up. Gave us something to do while we waited on the mountain of paperwork to get the “loan”.

It makes me actually pay attention to what I’m spending and why. Also forces a real budget.

12 years? Ive never sold a car because I "drove it into the ground", with a decent car and proper MX the car should outlast the driver.

No not really. In salty climates the vehicle will rust out from under you no matter how good your maintenance is. Not that I haven’t owned a van that I could see the road going by through the floorboards, but there’s limits to your assertion that a vehicle should last for “life”. 15 years, maybe 20 in those conditions. Longer here since we have little water.

There’s also the depreciation problem, spending more on a repair than the vehicle is worth is dumb unless there’s a specific reason to do so.

Water pumps are a 60k mi item on most cars, CV boots are on condition, haven't seen too many oil pump failures, but most of that stuff is a easy fix, or a drop it off before work pick it up next day or after work item.

The older stuff seemed to need less, like the older 2.2 Subaru engine vs the 2.5.

Owning an 18 year old Subaru, the problem with all of them is head and valve cover gaskets. There’s also a mandatory timing belt replacement cycle and they’re interference engines, so you don’t do that one “on condition” unless you like replacing engines.

My mechanic is on the way to work. If the vehicle is driveable I just drop it off and he hands me the keys to a first gen Honda CRV that has almost 300,000 miles on it and has been his loaner for ten years. If he can’t get your vehicle done by the end of the day, he doesn’t care if you drive the CRV to the boonies and back. Runs great.

 

[denverpilot]

AC is off at night? Where do you live? Mine runs 24 hrs when it's above 75 degrees.

My oven is natural gas.

What if you have to park in the street? What if you have 4 cars in the family?

LOL. Don’t you know you’re supposed to be in a proper ticky-tacky suburban home with multiple car garage complete with your own chargers installed in both bays? Get with the program man, you’re the reason America is dying! LOL.

Just think, the chargers will have to be smart about it when there’s his and hers EVs in the garage — or you’ll need more than 200A service for your suburban dream house so you can run the dishwasher and the laundry while both cars are charging. Heh. Maybe do a little welding in the shop.

My previous suburban house only had 150A service and a garage so small that cars wouldn’t fit in it so it had a garage added in the back yard down a long side driveway that wouldn’t comfortably hold two cars.

If it snowed you’d spend a lot of time snowblowing to get a single EV back to that garage/workshop. Two wouldn’t fit.

Maybe I’d go out at 1AM and swap the EVs so the other one could charge up? LOL. No. Eff that.

My vehicle “fleet” is now four vehicles (finally “sold” the radio van to someone else in the radio club for $1 since it was a “donation” to them anyway) and two of them sit parked outside all the time at the current rural house. The tractor also sometimes is in, sometimes is out.

Oh, and my oven is propane. (Along with the forced air heat, and water heater. With a pellet stove as backup for the heat. We do have regular power outages in blizzards. But that’s okay for an EV. None of them could get to the county road in those conditions anyway.)

 

[tspear]

@denverpilot

Me too, paid cash for the last three cars. Each time, got a better deal if willing to finance for a couple of months. Ranged between two and four months before I could pay it off.

Tim

 

[deonb]

How long did a swap take to complete?

How much did it cost?

I'd be reluctant to pay to swap out what is probably the most valuable piece of equipment on my car, with one of unknown quality or treatment.

90 seconds. It's actually kind'a cool to see in action:
https://www.tesla.com/videos/battery-swap-event

They basically tied it to the equivalent cost of gas for an equivalent car. So whatever ~10 gallons of gasoline cost at the time in California I suppose. ($40?).

Keep in mind that if you didn't swap, you most likely would have stopped and paid for food and coffee at the stop, which would have been more than that. And considering this was on $100k vehicles, I seriously doubt cost sensitivity had anything to do with it failing. Tesla charged just enough to weed out people who wanted to use it just for the heck of it, to see if any people remaining find value in it.

Yes, it was definitely a big concern that people didn't want to leave a $12'000 battery for an unknown one. For the specific swapper that was tested though, you had to swap back to your original battery within something like a month.

So I don't think the system would have worked on a larger scale with multiple stops and asymmetrical routes, but even in the most ideal case where you essentially had people who weren't cost-sensitive, driving the same 400 mile stretch back and could easily swap the pack back, the experiment didn't work.

 

[denverpilot]

@denverpilot

Me too, paid cash for the last three cars. Each time, got a better deal if willing to finance for a couple of months. Ranged between two and four months before I could pay it off.

The dealerships really sell cars, which they make almost nothing on, extended warranties which are usually a bad idea for the buyer, financing which they get a cut on, and maintenance which they’re almost always much more expensive to use than a good private mechanic who doesn’t have to maintain a fleet of nice new loaners and a lounge with free foo-foo frapachino coffee makers.

You can usually tell by how grandiose the lobby is, how much they have to pay out on their building, that’ll be coming directly from your pocket.

The latest thing here is all the dealers have installed awnings over all the cars so the poor suburban dears don’t have to stand in the sun to look at them. I suspect it was driven by a number of hailstorms that wiped out entire dealer lots, but they’re sure milking it as a way to provide “comfort” while car shopping. Haha.

I don’t have time for that crap. I pick the vehicle before I get there, call to make sure it’s really on the lot, and the point of going there is to inspect it. Not shop like I’m at a freaking mall. (Which I also avoid. My god, the consumerism. We know people who spend every other weekend at malls. I always wonder what the hell they’re buying.)

 

[Salty]

90 seconds. It's actually kind'a cool to see in action:
https://www.tesla.com/videos/battery-swap-event

They basically tied it to the equivalent cost of gas for an equivalent car. So whatever ~10 gallons of gasoline cost at the time in California I suppose. ($40?).

Keep in mind that if you didn't swap, you most likely would have stopped and paid for food and coffee at the stop, which would have been more than that. And considering this was on $100k vehicles, I seriously doubt cost sensitivity had anything to do with it failing. Tesla charged just enough to weed out people who wanted to use it just for the heck of it, to see if any people remaining find value in it.

Yes, it was definitely a big concern that people didn't want to leave a $12'000 battery for an unknown one. For the specific swapper that was tested though, you had to swap back to your original battery within something like a month.

So I don't think the system would have worked on a larger scale with multiple stops and asymmetrical routes, but even in the most ideal case where you essentially had people who weren't cost-sensitive, driving the same 400 mile stretch back and could easily swap the pack back, the experiment didn't work.

Uh, no kidding. No wonder it failed.

 

[SoonerAviator]

I personally wouldn't mind driving an EV for my ~40mi round trip daily commute. However, I want something that looks like the Tesla S/Karma and not like a Leaf/Bolt/i3. I don't need it to compete with an Audi R8 or BMW 7-series for interior/fit-n-finish. Something akin to an EV-Nissan Maxima would be fine. I'll keep a ICE truck on-hand for towing and an ICE mid-size SUV for the wife to daily drive and take on longer trips. The EV need only be a DD, and range can stay in the ~200mi area.

 

[DaleB]

I'm not that old, but I don't recall taking 4 screws out, unplugging a IDE and power line, verifying jumpers and putting 4 screws in being that hard, compared to swapping a yuuuge battery out of a car where they'd rather you just buy a new car from them.

Not that old is right. If you were old you'd remember TWO data cables. You kids...

 

[deonb]

I wonder if Kent @flyingcheesehead is still a buyer at $78,000. Ouch. Quite a bait and switch.

Something that Tesla said over 2 years ago that they would do (make a performance version of the 3), and Tesla selling cars like they always have (higher value cars first until production can keep up with demand), is hardly a bait and switch.

If you have an order for 100'000 of high-margin items that will take you a year to fill, would you instead switch your assembly line to manufacture low-margin items instead? (Considering the low-margin and high-margin items take essentially the same time and resources to make). That would be beyond stupid. Gross mismanagement even.

Which tech is that? None of the tech for EVs has changed in well over a decade in batteries and that’s where their major problem lies.

That's not true. The cells that go into the Model 3 today has 80% higher energy density than the Roadsters from 10 years ago. The price also dropped from around $1000/kWh to $180/kWh.

 

[Salty]

If you have an order for 100'000 of high-margin items that will take you a year to fill, would you instead switch your assembly line to manufacture low-margin items instead? (Considering the low-margin and high-margin items take essentially the same time and resources to make). That would be beyond stupid. Gross mismanagement even.

One might say that about producing the losing low-margin item in the first place, might one not?

 

[deonb]

One might say that about producing the losing low-margin item in the first place, might one not?

By that logic the only car ever manufactured would be the Bugatti Veyron. However, when you want to go after volume, you need lower price items as well.

 

[Salty]

By that logic the only car ever manufactured would be the Bugatti Veyron. However, when you want to go after volume, you need lower price items as well.

You're contradicting yourself. You just said they both take the same time to build, so you're not getting more volume by building the cheaper one.

 

[deonb]

You're contradicting yourself. You just said they both take the same time to build, so you're not getting more volume by building the cheaper one.

Yes, but they actually HAVE the orders in hand to build 100'000+ high-margin cars. If they had an order to build 100'000 Bugatti Veyrons equivalents at $3.5m each, they should absolutely build those instead.

But at some point they're going to run out of high-margin orders though. Or maybe not. Maybe even if they make 500'000 cars per year, it will still all be $50k+ cars and they still can't keep up. If that's the case, I'd be very, very happy with my investment.

Somehow I don't think it will happen though. And I don't think you do either.

They're going to need to make $35k cars in the future to be able to have high enough demand. Just... no need to do it quite yet.

 

[denverpilot]

That's not true. The cells that go into the Model 3 today has 80% higher energy density than the Roadsters from 10 years ago. The price also dropped from around $1000/kWh to $180/kWh.

That’s not new tech. That’s packaging and ramp up of plants to make them.

Battery chemistry hasn’t changed.

 

[EppyGA]

I wonder a bit about the resale market. Would most folks keep one until the battery pack has seen better days? Then what? Who's going to pay for the new battery pack? If someone goes to trade one in is there a way for the dealer to judge remaining battery life and adjust trade-in value based on that?

My son had a Kia Soul that his wife drove as a daily driver. When the lease was up he didn't want to keep it and bought a Bolt.

 

[James331]

I have acolytes! Who knew?! LOL.

Almost nobody said that back then, by the way. The society was mostly agrarian and broke coming out of the Great Depression, mostly.



Similar thoughts here. They need to make a GOOD AWD version of something as a plug-in hybrid first though. Roads are still dirt out here and none of these roller skate cars have the suspension to survive years of pounding on washboards.



LOL. He’s an ADD poster child.



Reaction to Tesla or just reasonable uses of electric tech? Tesla is probably going to become a boutique car maker. Electric tech has some useful applications but it’s not the fix for a majority of problems automakers attempt to fix for people. It does fix some. Especially for those living in overcrowded urban hell holes.



Shooting space junk into deep space holds little interest for me. Turning it into a car commercial even less so. But he needed a weight to put at the top of his rocket that he could blow up with a launch failure and Lloyd’s of London wouldn’t have to pay out on. So he used one of his first unprofitable cars.



Nope. No Internet forums.

But the real story was literally my grandfather’s. Farm kid. Bought first Model T used and broken. Replaced lower bearings with leather (!) and told anyone driving it not to push it too hard or they’d blow the engine right out of the thing. Someone eventually did. Nobody had money for fancy stuff like metal engine bearings.



Henry Ford’s real legacy. Cheap debt for the masses. He bankrolled it. Numerous powerful bankers and political lobbyists of the day were so jealous that he came up with it, they tried to get Congress to take his company from him. Said his lack of formal business training and education were a threat to the country.

Sound familiar in this thread?

Interestingly this entwined Henry Ford in telecommunications history. When asked by Congresscritters who made him come before Congress and explain why he should keep his own company... how he would run it without said “proper” education, the short version is, he said he’d installed a massive multi-line phone system in his office and he would call any expert on any topic he needed by simply picking up the phone.

The power brokers of the day were mighty annoyed that he was practical. They were really annoyed he made a profit.

Pretending Musk is Ford is laughable.



I wonder if Kent @flyingcheesehead is still a buyer at $78,000. Ouch. Quite a bait and switch.

That’s more than a loaded Heavy Duty diesel pickup truck and those are heavily milked for profit margin.

Anyway, looks like Musk is setting up his narrative... the big auto makers killed him. Of course. It won’t play as well with Ford completely exiting his market space though. Ha. He’ll have to blame Korea.



Which tech is that? None of the tech for EVs has changed in well over a decade in batteries and that’s where their major problem lies. Toyota has been making the Prius for a “relatively” long time now.

Tesla came up with ways to manage and build a massive lithium pack, but none of it in the electronics world was particularly new. It’s standard 90s vintage tech driven (pun intended) by a false “green” movement.



It’s not an uncertainty. It’s a well known fact that these batteries die. It’s in the data sheet for the individual cells.



I pay cash. I even paid REAL cash and not electronic cash for the Dodge, mostly as a joke when the former owner said he wanted “$20s in unmarked bills”. He got $100s.

The Lincoln was a loan for three months. Did it so the poor sales guy got more commission. They wanted to sell it through Ford finance and Ford had a minimum pay off time for the small dealership to get their kickback. So we paid it off three months after buying it. Pretty sad that when the paperwork was slow the “threat” was that we’d write a check if they’d didn’t hurry up. LOL.

It helped that a storage facility across from the dealership literally blew up. Gave us something to do while we waited on the mountain of paperwork to get the “loan”.

It makes me actually pay attention to what I’m spending and why. Also forces a real budget.



No not really. In salty climates the vehicle will rust out from under you no matter how good your maintenance is. Not that I haven’t owned a van that I could see the road going by through the floorboards, but there’s limits to your assertion that a vehicle should last for “life”. 15 years, maybe 20 in those conditions. Longer here since we have little water.

There’s also the depreciation problem, spending more on a repair than the vehicle is worth is dumb unless there’s a specific reason to do so.



Owning an 18 year old Subaru, the problem with all of them is head and valve cover gaskets. There’s also a mandatory timing belt replacement cycle and they’re interference engines, so you don’t do that one “on condition” unless you like replacing engines.

My mechanic is on the way to work. If the vehicle is driveable I just drop it off and he hands me the keys to a first gen Honda CRV that has almost 300,000 miles on it and has been his loaner for ten years. If he can’t get your vehicle done by the end of the day, he doesn’t care if you drive the CRV to the boonies and back. Runs great.

I don't drive my nice stuff in the salt, and by the way talk about a scam salting roads in the first place vs just sanding, but by doing through a good drive through wash with underspray once or twice a week, so far not real rust.

The biggest issue in the east is its not a car culture and people don't care about their cars like out west.

Yeah, I do not keep/maintain a spare car to drop it off one day and get it the next. I also did not have the time to deal with it, or wait for the mechanic to fix it each time.

Now, sure. My wife and I carpool about three days a week, I also only do 20 miles round trip, it is easy to schedule. Back when I lived in the DC area with my wife and I going in separate directions and having a one plus hour commute in traffic (only 27 miles); reliability is king.

Tim

How is that any different than waiting for warranty work or a recall on a new car?

 

[Bill]

We know people who spend every other weekend at malls. I always wonder what the hell they’re buying.)

Yet they’re shocked that you can afford a plane!

 

[denverpilot]

I wonder a bit about the resale market. Would most folks keep one until the battery pack has seen better days? Then what? Who's going to pay for the new battery pack? If someone goes to trade one in is there a way for the dealer to judge remaining battery life and adjust trade-in value based on that?

My son had a Kia Soul that his wife drove as a daily driver. When the lease was up he didn't want to keep it and bought a Bolt.

On the Prius front anyway, since they’ve been around longer, there’s replacements for the packs that run about $3000 plus labor through Toyota and quite a bit cheaper if you go third party or even have the ability to assemble your own.

You just factor it into the sales price like any other depreciable item, just like hours on an airplane engine. At some point it’s not worth putting $3000 into a vehicle worth less than $3000.

There’s also, not kidding, a modding community slowly starting up around the old Priuses and people are hot rodding (hot volting?) them with third party components. They’re so light, making them have more power to the wheels is utterly hilarious.

Torque steer, anyone? In a Prius? LOL.

 

[deonb]

That’s not new tech. That’s packaging and ramp up of plants to make them.

Battery chemistry hasn’t changed.

Packaging and ramp-up can bring cost down, not energy density up.

Sure, it's all NCA, and Tesla's chemistry is fairly secret so hard to know what's going on, but I know of at least two changes - the Model S 90 added silicon anodes in 2015, and the Model 3 dropped cobalt % significantly in 2017.

I'm not sure what they did between the Roadster and Model S in 2012 but they managed to get 40% more power in an identical form factor cell (an 18650 cell). Hard to believe it wasn't some sort of chemistry change.

 

[denverpilot]

Yet they’re shocked that you can afford a plane!

Yeah. That. LOL.

And I only own half of a plane. I could probably own a whole plane but that’d be wasteful.

Technically I own half of an LLC that owns a plane. And a third of a hangar.

 

[denverpilot]

Packaging and ramp-up can bring cost down, not energy density up.

Sure, it's all NCA, and Tesla's chemistry is fairly secret so hard to know what's going on, but I know of at least two changes - the Model S 90 added silicon anodes in 2015, and the Model 3 dropped cobalt % significantly in 2017.

I'm not sure what they did between the Roadster and Model S in 2012 but they managed to get 40% more power in an identical form factor cell (an 18650 cell). Hard to believe it wasn't some sort of chemistry change.

They didn’t use more cells? I’ll state flatly that I don’t go looking for Tesla articles (not even the video that started this thread, I watch those guys for their truck coverage) but everything I’ve read they mostly just added cells and made packs bigger.

If they figured out some chemical magic, as someone else and you have pointed out, their secrecy and patents aren’t helping save the planet like their proponents think they’re doing.

They’re just making more obstacles to other engineers who could take their work and expand on it.

At one time @flyingcheesehead said here long ago that they were sharing all that tech. If sharing means licensing, I know that game. That’s how we would mess with competitors in telecom. “Here’s a free codec if you sign up for our free licensing...” so then we’d be able to list all the users and get ITU to call it a “standard” before our competitor got theirs approved. Hahahaha.

No, I had no say in those corporate reindeer games. That was the Israel office where literally the competition’s coders sat in a building right across the street. Israeli engineering companies love to screw with each other. Most modern telecom codecs and chip designs come from Israel. Not California as many Americans believe.

 

[Axtel4]

Tesla Model 3 falls short of a CR recommendation. https://www.consumerreports.org/hyb...lls-short-of-consumer-reports-recommendation/

 

[denverpilot]

Tesla Model 3 falls short of a CR recommendation. https://www.consumerreports.org/hyb...lls-short-of-consumer-reports-recommendation/

LOL.

I love the Baghdad Bob style response from their PR person about the braking test and then the follow up paragraph about how CR has been doing braking tests for decades and exactly how they control the variables.

And then the little dig of a quote from the Car and Driver editor.

The follow up was, of course, “We’ll upload some more code to the car.”

Ugh. Modern software engineers suck. We need to take away their Internet connectivity to their broken products for a year so they can feel the heat of angry customers for much longer like mistakes did to us back in the day.

“No, you can’t push a code update to it for a year. Code the important stuff like braking first and THINK about it harder.”

Continuous updates aren’t a feature. They’re a sign you can’t code.

 

[deonb]

I wonder a bit about the resale market. Would most folks keep one until the battery pack has seen better days? Then what? Who's going to pay for the new battery pack? If someone goes to trade one in is there a way for the dealer to judge remaining battery life and adjust trade-in value based on that?

My son had a Kia Soul that his wife drove as a daily driver. When the lease was up he didn't want to keep it and bought a Bolt.

It's hard to know how long a Tesla battery will last. The best indication so far is the Tesloop car (a daily taxi service from LA to Vegas) which had a battery at 200'000 miles at 6% degradation before Tesla replaced it since the range estimates went all haywire.

After replacing Tesla found out that it was a software error that was not compensating for the chemistry state of the 200k mile battery, so it's quite possible that it would have still been useful. Tesla has a simulated 500'000 mile battery in the lab that still has 80% of capacity.

If that's the case there is no conceivable scenario where it's useful to replace the battery. At 500k miles the rest of your car will be worth less than the labor to replace the battery.


A lot of "measurements" you see from people you have to take with a grain of salt to the point of it being almost meaningless. It's very very hard to measure battery pack capacity accurately. You have to fully charge it and fully discharge it (by driving it) a bunch of times in a row to get the range estimator calibrated again. It can easily be off by 5% otherwise. When selling and trading, new buyers always want to see what the "fully charged range" is, but the number is almost meaningless when you're talking about a couple of percentage points. This is why the Tesloop number is more of an indicator, since they do that pretty much daily.

My Model S is now reporting a 3% loss (after 5 years). 2 years ago it reported 5% loss for a while. Grain of salt.

 

[FastEddieB]

Continuous updates aren’t a feature. They’re a sign you can’t code.

That seems absurd on its face.

Care to elaborate?

 

[deonb]

They didn’t use more cells? I’ll state flatly that I don’t go looking for Tesla articles (not even the video that started this thread, I watch those guys for their truck coverage) but everything I’ve read they mostly just added cells and made packs bigger.

No, not just add more cells. They changed the individual cells as well:

• The original Roadster cells were 2200 mah, 3.7v and weighed 44g each.
• The original Model S cells were 3100 mah, 3.6V and weighed 44.5g each.
• The 2015 updated Model S cells are 3400 mah, 3.6V and weighs 46g each.

All the of those are 18650 cells. (18mm x 65mm).

The Model 3 cells are 5175 mah, but it's a different form factor as well - 21700 (21mm x 70mm). If you theoretically scale it down proportionally to a 18650 they would be 4118 mah each.

 

[EppyGA]

It's hard to know how long a Tesla battery will last. The best indication so far is the Tesloop car (a daily taxi service from LA to Vegas) which had a battery at 200'000 miles at 6% degradation before Tesla replaced it since the range estimates went all haywire.

After replacing Tesla found out that it was a software error that was not compensating for the chemistry state of the 200k mile battery, so it's quite possible that it would have still been useful. Tesla has a simulated 500'000 mile battery in the lab that still has 80% of capacity.

If that's the case there is no conceivable scenario where it's useful to replace the battery. At 500k miles the rest of your car will be worth less than the labor to replace the battery.


A lot of "measurements" you see from people you have to take with a grain of salt to the point of it being almost meaningless. It's very very hard to measure battery pack capacity accurately. You have to fully charge it and fully discharge it (by driving it) a bunch of times in a row to get the range estimator calibrated again. It can easily be off by 5% otherwise. When selling and trading, new buyers always want to see what the "fully charged range" is, but the number is almost meaningless when you're talking about a couple of percentage points. This is why the Tesloop number is more of an indicator, since they do that pretty much daily.

My Model S is now reporting a 3% loss (after 5 years). 2 years ago it reported 5% loss for a while. Grain of salt.

Thanks for the info.

 

[Salty]

LOL.

I love the Baghdad Bob style response from their PR person about the braking test and then the follow up paragraph about how CR has been doing braking tests for decades and exactly how they control the variables.

And then the little dig of a quote from the Car and Driver editor.

The follow up was, of course, “We’ll upload some more code to the car.”

Ugh. Modern software engineers suck. We need to take away their Internet connectivity to their broken products for a year so they can feel the heat of angry customers for much longer like mistakes did to us back in the day.

“No, you can’t push a code update to it for a year. Code the important stuff like braking first and THINK about it harder.”

Continuous updates aren’t a feature. They’re a sign you can’t code.

It comes from the tech companies (amazon, google, Facebook, Netflix) new mantra “fail fast”. It works great for shopping carts, social media sites, and watching movies, but for real time car control (or moving money like I do) it’s a pretty terrible way to do things. But our leadership latches on to the buzz word and expects us to deliver like Facebook does. Trust me, you don’t want me delivering features in my system like Facebook does.

 

[X3 Skier]

That seems absurd on its face.

Care to elaborate?

Basically means you can’t ever get it right the first thru n times. Continuous updating to fix errors that should have never been released is Pi** Poor Coding.

Cheers

 

[tspear]

How is that any different than waiting for warranty work or a recall on a new car?

In fourteen years of Subaru ownership, I can recall no warranty that was not done on a regular maintenance schedule. And back in the DC area, it was a major pain in logistics to schedule maintenance, often managed to get it done on Saturdays.
Now for the Mercedes, I am not going to even try and recall how many recalls they had.

Lastly, the warranty work and regular maintenance is not unscheduled. It was when other stuff gets to be a hassle that I get rid of the car.

Tim

 

[tspear]

No, not just add more cells. They changed the individual cells as well:

• The original Roadster cells were 2200 mah, 3.7v and weighed 44g each.
• The original Model S cells were 3100 mah, 3.6V and weighed 44.5g each.
• The 2015 updated Model S cells are 3400 mah, 3.6V and weighs 46g each.

All the of those are 18650 cells. (18mm x 65mm).

The Model 3 cells are 5175 mah, but it's a different form factor as well - 21700 (21mm x 70mm). If you theoretically scale it down proportionally to a 18650 they would be 4118 mah each.

No chemistry changes from published information. Manufacturing changes, mostly around the electrolyte tolerances and internal shielding. This has had two effects: 1. lower manufacturing costs by reducing material, and second increasing batter energy density.

Tim

 

[FastEddieB]

Basically means you can’t ever get it right the first thru n times. Continuous updating to fix errors that should have never been released is Pi** Poor Coding.

Cheers

That seems to expect perfection on version 1, or even version 1+n. And unchanging goals. Just seems unreasonable in the real world.

 

[zaitcev]

For that reason I think they'll always be able to raise the cash as long as people have faith in electric cars, and there's no sign of that running out just yet.

I don't think it is a question faith, or at least not necessarily. Elon Musk made an argument, which can be boiled down to: every other energy storage or transfer agent incurs significant inefficiencies (more significant than the 30% that are required for the electric grid to function). If you review the numbers, look at various EROI calculations, and agree, then electric cars are inevitable and hydrogen is a hoax (to borrow from Robert Zubrin). If you do not review the numbers, you have to rely on faith, of course.

 

[zaitcev]

Close your eyes and imagine the future. Does anyone with more than two brain cells talking to each other NOT think all cars will be electric?

Of course. Many smart people realize that all cars will not be electric under a foreseeable horizon, such as 100 years. Maybe just 90% or 95%. And that's just in CONUS. Worldwide - 15% electric at best. Although, of course, the world will catch up asymptotically to that 90..95%.