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Tesla Motors Battles the New York Times
redletterdave writes "Days after the New York Times released a brutal review of Tesla's electric Model S sedan, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has fired back, claiming the Times article was completely bogus and misleading. In the article in question, Times writer John Broder took the Tesla Model S on a test drive from Washington to Boston, stopping at various service plazas in Delaware and Connecticut well within the projected 265-mile range of the car, as rated by the EPA. However, Broder's Tesla Model S, despite a heftier 85 kilowatt-hour battery for an extra 100 miles of range in 'ideal conditions,' died shortly before reaching its final destination. Broder blames the cold weather and heating issues for his abridged trip; Musk, however, claims the driver did not follow Tesla's instructions, which is why his trip was cut so short. 'We've taken great pains to ensure that the car works very well in the cold, which is why we're so incensed by this ridiculous article,' Musk said."
You're driving it wrong.
"You are holding it the wrong way..."
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
So, nobody can read NYT's article (without registering/logging in), but everyone can read Musk's rebuttal. That's going to make the debate fairly one-sided in the public's mind.
Maybe there was no problem with the car at all -- just a problem with the brown envelope.
WTF? Isn't it common sense to fully charge an electric car before embarking on a journey to test the car's range? This guy should be fired from the NYT.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
I hadn't read the review until Musk started talking about it. This alone made more news than the article. In the end I don't think there will be a large effect on sales; those who can afford to buy a Tesla will buy one whether or not it runs a little shorter in the cold. That said, if the logs reflect that the car wasn't fully charged, then Musk does have a valid reason to complain.
It's a ridiculous article for a ridiculous car.
This was on boing boing a few days ago and one conclusion was that the Tesla charging stations are spaced at almost the maximum range of the car but the car can't get that range in cold weather when the cabin heater is being used. In an electric car there is not enough parasitic heat loss to heat the cabin so the energy comes from the batteries.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The NYT review has now been seen by at least an order of magnitude more people than would have had any awareness of it had Tesla's CEO made no comment about it at all. The vast majority of Telsa's previous reviews have been of glowing, fanboy type. Now they've completely countered those reviews by causing this article to become the most prominent one on the Internet.
In the digital age, when the press gets something wrong (especially in an opinion piece) it's just usually better to walk away.
Another member of the media says that a Tesla is not perfect so Musk gets upset.
I am sure there is a vast conspiracy trying to keep Tesla down.
(Really, its not the fact that electric cars are very range-challenged, its not!)
Next time, they'll outright buy a good review on Slashdot, as opposed to leave in the hands of some 'journalist' at some fly-by-night organization where they say whatever they want about you.
A car (or any high tech product) designed and built by engineers is not suitable for the masses, at least on the first revision. You need a bunch of "real people" using it before you can figure out all the "user interface issues". And I'm not trying to be an elitist; it's just that everyone does "think different(ly)", so this needs to be taken into consideration, which doesn't usually happen when there's only a like-minded group of people working on the project.
A car company telling you how to drive it? I wonder what on earth the instructions were that the guy 'drove wrong,' What'd he do, gun it out of every red light....? Hahahahah he used the heat!? This is like when that city switched from Incandescent traffic lights to LED traffic lights, and wondered why the signals suddenly started getting covered in snow...never happened before. No heat from LED's, and no engine w/ water cooling. LOL
Have you ever read how EPA estimates are done? You put a car on a dyno and run it through some fanciful schedule for what a "trip" should consist of. Too many hills, some extra wind, or a heavy foot will heavily skew real-world numbers. If your car gets 50mpg, what sane person would pump one gallon of gas and set out across the desert for the next gas station, 50 miles away. I get the iPhone joke, but if you're trying to max the car's economy, you very well could be driving it the wrong way.
There are always at least two sides to every story... To wit: http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/the-charges-are-flying-over-a-test-of-teslas-charging-network/
Lithium batteries really don't handle cold temperatures very well at all -- one of the many reasons that aircraft have continued to use good old fashioned Nickel-cadmium or lead-acid batteries (until the Dreamliner came along).
When they're too cold, they neither take a full charge, nor do they deliver their rated capacity or maximum current.
I would say that, given the weather on the East Coast of the USA during the drive, this played a significant factor in the lack of range encountered -- but I acknowledge that it may not be the only factor.
Perhaps another factor is the enhanced need to heat the passenger compartment. Unlike a regular IC-powered car, there's very little "waste heat" in an EV so perhaps over-zealous use was made of the electric heating - thus producing further heavy drain on the battery and reducing range.
The problem (for Tesla) is that people don't want an EV that comes with a long list of "don'ts" and "cautions" in respect to power management and the effects of low/high temperatures on range. They just want a car they can unplug, jump in and drive -- with an unqualified guarantee of a known range. That's effectively what they get now with their IC-powered cars and that's what they want from any replacement.
The article sounds identical to the problems of charing a cell phone.
The car contains many lithium ion packs, right? Is this a parallel problem? ie, assuming you could get a massive amount of power to them, how fast would they charge? You would need to be using 1000's of volts (with all the dangers that entails), but surely you could get the charge time down to a reasonable time? Otherwise you could use 100's of volts with a 6" thick cable. Either way, people want to be 100% charged (real 100%, not pretend 100%) in 15 minutes.
Energy densities aren't there for the storage.
We're still going to rely on Coal to charge the silly things- until someone wises up and realizes that Wind and Solar isn't going to be filling the bulk of the power and decides that something like Liquid Salt Low-pressure Thorium reactors are the bees-knees in power.
So...they're less effective than internal combustion engine based vehicles AND they cause more carbon to be dumped into the environment. Great green move, gang!
When you can get higher energy densities and can honestly rid yourself of the coal fired and stupidly designed nuke reactors, THEN it'll be green and be "the" answer for things. Right now, not a single Hybrid or EV is even remotely green. They all contaminate the environment worse than the things they're supposed to replace.
He wasn't holding it right.
Let's consider this...
NY Times has a flawless ride, everything goes well, the result? An article like all the rest...nothing noticeable. It's not like the Tesla S is unknown anymore.
NY Times can push things hard to try to make for a failure, now we have a controversial article on a new technology. That'll sell. And that's really all those old paper rags care about.
The fastest way to look overly-sensitive and closed minded is to blame the press. It's just about the worst PR move you can make.
What they should have done is issue a press release that they were working closely with the reporter to find out what anomolies may have occured so they can improve the design if needed. They are in serious need of a new PR firm.
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.
Elon Musk should be releasing range figures that are based on how people actually drive in everyday life, not the range that results from "following our driving instructions to the letter," because that is not real life.
Let's not forget that Tesla has already sunk $500M in taxpayer money down this rathole and still doesn't have a product.
It's only a matter of time before Tesla joins the ranks of A123, Solyndra, and Satcon.
Tesla got a copy of the script for Top Gear - written before they drove the car - and it had pre-planned a battery disaster. That was the major beef - it was a fix, a fraud. (Top Gear is not a auto review show - it is entertaiment) I think that on trial the matter of the fake-drained script simply wasn't considered. The judge simply ruled that the TV show was a known bender of facts and that the show, even doctored as it was, didn't hurt Tesla - no libel, no financial harm. He simply ruled that the audience knew it was fake, more or less.
And here's Jalopnik: http://goo.gl/AdRdN
From Treehugger: http://goo.gl/ILrHB
This is at least the second time Tesla got a poor review from the media and then went on the attack. Remember Top Gear? These guys are making a shitty product, and seem to attack every news outlet willing to let the public know.
Ok, so since when did Engineers start trusting users?
Last I checked, the user was the biggest point of failure in any system. Tesla has to account for the fact that people are not going to follow instructions. This is actually a better real-world test than you might think because people don't always read directions.
I'd rather have a yugo than one of your overpriced cuntmobiles.
After making arrangements to recharge at the Norwich station, I located the proper adapter in the trunk, plugged in and walked to the only warm place nearby, Butch’s Luncheonette and Breakfast Club, an establishment (smoking allowed) where only members can buy a cup of coffee or a plate of eggs. But the owners let me wait there while the Model S drank its juice. Tesla’s experts said that pumping in a little energy would help restore the power lost overnight as a result of the cold weather, and after an hour they cleared me to resume the trip to Milford.
Looking back, I should have bought a membership to Butch’s and spent a few hours there while the car charged. The displayed range never reached the number of miles remaining to Milford, and as I limped along at about 45 miles per hour I saw increasingly dire dashboard warnings to recharge immediately. Mr. Merendino, the product planner, found an E.V. charging station about five miles away.
My questions are:
Slipped on the pulldown menu and choose redundant by mistake :P
I used to have a 2005 BMW. Whenever I filled it up it would show 330 miles to empty. Yet after 200 city miles the tank would be dry. Amazingly the car was not able to see the future and know how many lights I'd have to stop at. What a crap car. I'll write a scathing article about it.
Whose fault it is is somewhat irrelevant. Do you want a car that you have to remember to plug-in overnight and which you have to carefully plan your trips to ensure that you can get to the next refuelling station? Even if you fully understand how they work and their limitations you can easily make a mistake by forgetting to plug it in and suddenly you can't drive to work the next day because it takes several hours to charge.
Conventional cars are so well evolved that people have very high expectations. I've had less than one breakdown per 100,000 miles. I can drive almost any car until the "low gas"light turns on, and then have >30 miles range to reach a gas station. When I fill my car at the pump it is filled. No fast fill / slow fill. No trickle-fill. If I somehow don't completely fill it, the gas gage doesn't read full and I can refill a few hours later. Most cars will drive ~400 miles on a tank, and its rare in this country to have to go more than 50 miles to find a gas station.
It sounds like the electric car works as designed when used by a knowledgeable person. The problem is that people don't need to be knowledgeable about conventional cars. If you buy a new car it just works.
So while I don't think the Tesla car is in any way bad, it just doesn't meet the exceptionally high expectations for usability that Americans have come to expect.
Drive the car in only the optimum temperature for the batteries and engine; preferably at a high enough altitude to minimize drag; have it driven by someone of the stature of a Thoroughbred jockey, who provides their own light weight thermal compensation to eliminate heater/AC use, and, of course, their own sound system; turn off the lights; always drive down hill and with the wind.
Using these techniques, it is likely you will achieve the advertised range, otherwise, much, much less. Top Gear had the same issue with the sports car (drive it "fun" and the range is nearly nothing) and prevailed.
These work as well for liquid-fueled (gasoline, diesel, alcohol) automobiles and motorcycles, but, for those, you can carry extra fuel in case you're really going to be a long way from one of the much more plentiful liquid fuel stations.
And Musk is the con artist who started PayPal which has screwed a lot of people.
The Tesla is not a vision of the future, it is a vision of how people can be conned
out of their money when they want to buy things they perceive to be fashionable.
The car costs $100K. This is so far from being relevant to the actual needs of the world
it is absurd. And anyone with a decent amount of intelligence knows this is true.
Manhattan, there's your problem right there. Maybe Kramer from "Seinfeld" got ahold of it and wanted the thrill of driving it with the charge gauge on "E."
Put a piece of electrical tape on the driver side quarter panel and it'll work right.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
First an initial ''charge complete,'' (the point, warned Tesla, where anything more shortens battery life), then a 2 mile detour to Manhattan.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/automobiles/stalled-on-the-ev-highway.html
http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/the-charges-are-flying-over-a-test-of-teslas-charging-network/
If people that review cars for a living cant figure how to drive it correctly what hope does the average user have.
Mr Musk. You have no where near the credibility to get away with "Your'e driving it wrong".
"A Tesla agent brought the car to me in suburban Washington with a full charge"
Maybe you missed it.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
You can't blame the driver when the car can't preform. Basically what happened is the intelligence in the car failed and instead of correct the system Elon wants to blame the driver, to bad, fix the issue first.
I guess 1 person does ;) I think if I was the writer of the article, I would have probably waited for Tesla to review the driving history, to make sure I didn't do anything wrong. Because it will not look good if you have a list of things you did wrong.
The comment about Tesla needing a new PR firm is a good one.
Face the facts, folks (I mean you too, Elon)- electric cars are still, at this point, not suitable for a LOT of people in the US. The range limitation is a HUGE restriction and most folks can not AFFORD two cars, never mind one that costs 100k.
Many have trouble affording one for 25k.
Even those who typically drive less than 50 miles a day may require the ability to drive 300 miles or more once in a while (family visit, vacation, etcetera.)
If you can only afford one vehicle and do want to get away now and then- well, a severely range-limited electric is useless.
That being said, the work Tesla has done so far with all-electric cars IS tremendous and has helped move the industry forward. Kudos for that.
But really- keep Musk from commenting about situations like this- it makes Tesla look stupid and gets them more bad press than anything else they do.
There are few things harder on a car than a Northeast winter.
And what's with the parking brake not releasing without a charge? That's an amazing oversight.
I still don't understand why I see so much hatred towards the exciting advancements of electric cars on a technology web forum. Everyone is quick to point out that it can't make long distance trips, but the average person rarely does that. Hell, I own a car with an ICE and I still rent a car when going on long trips because I don't want the extra mileage put onto my car and I can rent a car with nearly double the fuel economy of my own car, so it practically pays for itself. Instead of looking at the limitations of electric cars, let's look at the advantages:
- Charging the car can be three times cheaper than refueling a car that runs on decaying fossils
- You don't need to go out of your way every few days to find a gas station and refuel (especially nice if you live in an area that has cold weather)
- In the near future, you will be able to get a wireless charger that precludes you from having to plug in anything
- The electric car is likely quieter inside and outside of the cabin
- Your car isn't constantly spitting out pollutants and ruining our air
Not to mention that many American families have two cars. Make your next car an electric car and keep the gas guzzler for those long trips you claim to be constantly taking.
I drive RC cars and fly RC helis and planes, both nitro powered ("gas") and electric. The electrics have much better power to weight ratios, require less maintenance, and are cheaper to run. But when it comes to endurance, forget it. You can't safely charge LiPos. The batteries have a C rating which tells you how fast you can charge them. There will always be this limit, and when you push it, even if within accepted limits for that cell, it still reduces cell life. LiPos tend to explode in a fireball that water can NOT put out. Pro RC pilots have had their hands horribly burned. I've had them go up. You don't want that inside and you sure don't want that strapped "under the cockpit" like the tesla has. Even high quality cells as they age, sustain damage from vibration, overcharging, over discharging, rapid charging, stop balancing properly and will eventually fail, hopefully not catastrophically.
The idea that you pay $100k for a car and then can't run the heater and have to run under the speed limit in hopes of getting to your destination should say something. In the world of RC - Nitro gives you endurance. You can fly all day on a nitro aircraft or drive all day w/nitro cars. You refuel instantly and you're good to go. Same w/gas cars. The battery technology simply is not ready and is not safe. Same issue you have in the 787's.
Someday we may have an appropriate battery technology (better yet fuel cells) (the #1 thing would be SAFE - can't explode in a fireball weeks after the damage to the cell has been done). But that time is not now. These are nothing but expensive toys for the rich "environmentally aware" elite.
Also - anyone looking to make one of these cars - you can't make ppl spend an hour refueling every 200 miles...
My respect for the NYTimes just went way down, and I look forward to the day I can afford a Tesla.
Has the guy posted rave reviews about every car except this one, or has he in the past found other cars that he didn't care for? I am going to guess the latter. The purpose of a review is to express your opinion about the car. It didn't live up to his expectations. Maybe his expectations were on the high side, but that doesn't matter. He was supposed to review it and write his opinion, and he did. Tesla didn't like it. Too bad. They didn't like it when Top Gear reviewed it either. Too bad. If you don't like that people find fault with the car, then fix the faults. You don't get an automatic break from poor reviews just because you made a "green" car.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
ALL Reporters. But especially those from the NYTs.
In both situations, the advocates for the tech proclaim its perfection and superior features... and when confronted with claims of its inferior performance/user-experience in the hands of a typical (non-advocate for the particular tech) user, the excuses and accusations about the user ensue. The user just did not use it right! The user is just an idiot! The user is too used to some inferior (but ubiquitous) tech. The user mislead people about his experience!
Every EE knows full-well the problems an electric car will have, most-particularly in a cold place. A proper electric car design will take these into account. This includes not only the fact the the cold batteries will under-perform, but also that the driver will want a toasty-warm cabin, may run the wipers, may use the headlights and the defroster, me use the heaters in the glass (if they exist) to melt ice accumulation, etc. It's also well-understood that, unlike a gas tank being re-filled, no car-sized battery pack will fully re-charge in a couple minutes in any climate. Why do I suspect all the "green energy" advocates would be ranting against "big oil" if they had to cool their jets for an hour or more every time they re-filled the gas tank of a car?
With both Linux and electric cars, the advocates need to drop all the defensiveness and learn from their critics.... and FIX the problems; the end-result will be a far better product that both the average user and the advocates like a lot better. There use to be a common phrase in American business: "The customer is always right". This was a very smart (in many ways) statement in a free-market economy. It was not just an admonition to employees that they should bend-over backwards to make customers happy (simultaneously keeping them from going to competitors AND creating positive word-of-mouth) but it also meant that when your customer complained about problems with your product/service you should pay attention and FIX IT. If something upsets/annoys one typical user then it will probably also affect other typical users similarly... and if you intend to sell to other typical users (who tend to be in the majority) then you are going to face the same opposition/anger/frustration/hostility over and over and over again if you insist on not fixing things and just blaming your critics.
In this case, Musk's defenders are missing the entire POINT: it's a CAR. It's advertized as a superior car. If the thing is a CAR, it ought to perform like a CAR (including being as tolerant of the imperfections of a typical human operator). If it's a superior car, then it should be even LESS demanding of its users and require FEWER specific instructions for how to use it to get from point A to point B. If you cannot use it in the same environment as a CAR to do the same things as a CAR with the same convenience as a CAR .... then it's an inferior product and should cost LESS than a CAR not 2X or 3X as much. PERIOD. Full-Stop.
The reported range dropped overnight because HE FAILED TO PLUG IT IN. Which the manual tells you do.
Screw what the manual tells you to do, if I have an electric thing, and I turn off the electric thing, I should have approximately the same power available when I turn it back on. Electric cars get no exception to this rule.
I can understand some reduced capacity from batteries getting cold but shouldn't they warm up again while driving, and the car knowing the be able to make an accurate revised prediction based on it knowing they would be warmed? Instead it seemed like power was simply gone.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Tesla's Elon Musk made the very same claims against Top Gear, a judge reviewed the case and threw it out. Twice.
Tesla didn't dispute anything of what went on in the Top Gear review, except the wheeling-it-back-into-the-shed, which they said was unnecessary. They don't dispute their technicians had to fix it (as it turned out it blew a fuse, but they couldn't have known that before wheeling it into the shed):
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/02/tesla-vs-top-gear/
Why Charliemopps was modded troll, he points out something that is well known and relevant. Tesla DID attack Top Gear over the bad review, Top Gear were correct, comedy show or not, the judge did review a case and the judge was not joking.
On the Top Gear track, exactly as Clarkson said, the Tesla WOULD have only gotten 55 miles, it DID break down, it WAS wheeled into the garage for the Tesla guys to fix. Everything Top Gear said about it, was unfunny and true.
Electric cars that need frequent recharging *could* work, if you can get about two hour's driving out of the battery for about as much charging time as it takes to drink a cup of coffee.
That does not work for the real world, coming or going.
No-one wants to sit that long to refill. Nor could everyone, because there would be a HUGE backlog of drivers waiting to plug in at peak times and it would be more like steak-dinner wait than coffee. Everyone has places they'd rather be than a gas station.
Two hours is also insufficient, between lets say 30-40 minute commute, and then random errands. It's too close to the margins and as we see in cold weather you aren't really going to get your two hours of driving at normal driving speeds, or with heated seats. If there's a surprise traffic jam because of a storm or accident your two hour window closes rapidly.
Electric cars are the future but not ones powered by battery. Hydrogen will win in the end simply because of convenience and it's a model everyone understands better, along with great range.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Tesla is a hybrid vehicle: half political prop, half toy for the rich.
It's designed to prove that an electric car can look great, ride well, and go fast (to mislead the public into imagining an easy affordable and comfortable path to a fossil-fuel-free future). Any good engineer knew full well that an electric car could be made (some of the earliest cars were electric) and knew that modern tech and materials would mean it could now be made fast, stylish, comfortable, etc. The problem is that even with today's tech, it cannot be made cost-effective and it cannot easily be made to be as convenient. It's also likely not very "green" given that a battery is not a power source... when you plug one of those babies into the grid, there's a fair chance it's being pumped up with power generated from burning coal. It deceives gullible people into thinking it is "emissions free" because it has no tail pipe; the tail pipe is actually the smokestack of a nearby power plant (the very same smokestack whose smoke they curse when they see it on TV or the web or in print depicted as an example of big evil corporate pollution).
It's also designed to be the good-looking show-piece 4th, 5th, 10th, or 20th car of a rich person; the car you use when you want to impress certain people but that you can bypass in your big garage as you step toward your Lexus, Hummer, etc when you really need to go somewhere and your Tesla is not fully-charged or unable to complete the entire trip without a re-charge. (people take trips in cars that need a re-fill during the trip because it's a very short minor interruption in the trip to re-fill)
It's NOT something an average middle-class person could afford (in many senses of the word) to buy and have as his/her only car.
The worst part is that each and every one that rolls off the line is so cost-ineffective that it carries a taxpayer subsidy. NOT the sort of "subsidy" that "big oil" is always accused of getting (tax deductions, which most businesses can get and Tesla is probably also able to get) but actual subsidy (cash taken by force from a taxpayer and given to a politically-connected and favored business). The tax money should have been left in the pockets of the taxpayers so they could afford to pay the nearly $2.00/gallon "Obama tax" (price hike largely driven by his energy policies and money-printing Fed) that they have been paying nearly the entire time the man's been in office an funneling their money to guys like Musk
Do you want a car that won't start just because you forgot to turn the headlights off overnight?
My car has an automatic headlight setting that I just leave it on - it turns on the headlights as needed.
So my car will never have that issue.
Do you want a car that won't start just because you lost your key?
Yes because I don't want other people to be able to start the car easily.
Do you want a car that won't drive sideways just because the rear wheels are fixed?
You aren't cornering aggressively enough.
Do you want a car that can only travel on the ground?
You also aren't driving fast enough.
Do you want a car that spews noxious nitrogenous and greenhouse-inducing exhaust? That even spews exhaust at all?
That part is irrelevant, especially given there are some pollutants from electricity too, so you really can't use "at all".
Do you want a car that stops just because you ran over some sharp detritus?
Sure don't which is why I leave the runflat tires on my car. Awesome technology, even if they do make the ride a little harsher. You are supposed to only go 50 miles/50MPH with them empty but the reality is they can go much farther and faster than that.
I could go on, but perhaps you get the point that we have learned to put up with a lot of bullshit from our cars.
But you don't have to, and we should not be adding to the car bullshit list.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Well, you can argue all day about this, or simply run the test again with a different reporter. There are a lot of motoring journalists who would jump at the chance, I'd bet.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
I have come to detest the people Bill Clinton brought to power in the government (by appointment) when he was elected and ripple-effect their proclamations and policies have had in the popular culture and mainstream media (who loved him and took cues from his administration) and the resulting destruction of intelligent dialog in America. Before "Bubba" elevated Donna Shalala from the PC hell hole that is the University of Wisconsin, Americans were free to speak their minds on any subject; people who heard what you said might not LIKE it... but everybody had been raised on the old rhyme "sticks and stones" and you were free to say it. NOW in post-Clinton America we have the "political correctness" of the UW speech codes. If you say something a leftist/liberal/progressive disagrees with he/she/it reverts to some infantile state and accuses you of "hate". like some 3-year-old, they say "why do you HATE me so much?" or they scream "you're just a HATER!" The nation has become a place where half the population seems to need diapers and pacifiers and cannot tolerate exposure to grown-up dialog.
GROW UP.
There are still some adults around. If somebody says something you do not like or that you disagree with, DEAL WITH IT. Grow up. Learn to tolerate disagreement. You are not a fountain of perfect knowledge and wisdom. Sometimes you are wrong, and there is NO HATRED INVOLVED when somebody disagrees with you. Wanna see actual "hatred"? Go to a holocaust museum and spend a few hours looking at what the NAZIS did to the Jews. Go look-up some of the grainy old photos of the innocent black men who were lynched by the Democrats in their KKK sheets. If you MUST see things in color, go back and review the video of people leaping from the WTC towers and the ghastly video of Palestinians and Iraqis celebrating.
Somebody being critical of Elon Musk's wunder car (rightly or wrongly) has NOTHING to do with HATE
Wow. just, wow. My respect fro you just went way down... (kidding)
Right. You're missing the point entirely.
Top Gear didn't misrepresent anything of substance. What they did was drive the car for a few laps, and then pretend that they had run it several more laps and that it ran out of charge.
They used the figures from Tesla (which, apparently, are *highly idealized* range figures..) to say how far they got before it died. A couple laps more than they took it.
How is that deceptive? All they did was trust that Tesla's numbers were accurate, and rather than ACTUALLY run the car dry on the track they drove it back and assumed it would have run out of when Tesla said it would run out.
The point was not to test the range of the Tesla, but rather to viscerally demonstrate to the audience one of the problems with electrics. Their range isn't as great as a petrochem engine, although it can be very close -- but more than that, if they die out on the road YOU ARE FUCKED MAN, YOU'RE JUST TOTALLY FUCKED.
You can't grab a jerrycan and walk enough fuel back to your car to get *anywhere*. You're fucked. You run your car dry, and it's out of commission for no short period of time while it recharges.
Yeah. That's a shortcoming of the vehicle, and the PRIMARY shortcoming of the vehicle in fact. Do you, uh, expect them to pretend that doesn't exist? That it's all fucking roses and cherries on top? C'mon man. You're being disingenuous. Top Gear showed what would have *actually happened*, had they run a few more laps with the car. The only deception was that they didn't actually run those laps -- because they didn't want to have to actually push the goddamned car through half the fucking track!
Tesla was throwing a temper tantrum because Top Gear didn't kiss their car's ass. Period. That's the entire story. The rest of the details are pretty easily understood by anyone who doesn't have their nose buried somewhere around Tesla's appendix.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
An idiot user can put just enough gas in a conventional car to get to his destination, and probably will get there (because gas indicators are generally accurate, unlike software-run progress-meters and battery-drain meters) and should the guy in a gas-powered car underestimate, he can fill up in a couple of minutes at any of a number of the ubiquitous gas stations along his path. An idiot user in a gas car can crank-up the heater on a cold day with minimal impact on driving range but the production of heat in an electric car (essentially shorting the battery through a resistor over which cabin air will be passed) is an almost pure waste of battery charge with a huge impact on driving range. An idiot user of a gas car need do nothing to it overnight at the motel in order to make it work the next day. An idiot user of a gas car has no need to follow any special instructions. For Musk to complain that the driver took a short detour... wow. Most idiots with gas cars take detours, make unplanned stops, etc. NOBODY plans their car trips like a rocket launch with checklists and procedures than must be followed carefully to avoid mission failure; maybe Musk's been spending too much mental energy at Space-X and got a few things mixed-up.
If Tesla has to put special warnings for "idiots" into their cars then they have already failed. Either their target audience consists of idiots (by their actions in installing said special warnings) OR they are so small-minded and such fanboys of their own stuff that they think anybody who thinks differently is an idiot. This is okay if you are a rich guy burning your own money but its a catastrophic error if you are a business operating in a market economy.
This is why you have The Stig write your review.
put away the foil hat
The NTSB did not start bashing Toyota and certainly not as part of some political action. I dislike most of our big bloated over-reaching power-mad control-freak dysfunctional federal government but the NTSB is probably the best part. They are the engineers and scientists that the government calls-in to explore the causes of transportation failures and EVERYBODY in the field of transportation recognizes them as unbiased and strictly facts-and-numbers. Both the NTSB AND NASA got involved in the Toyota car acceleration thing (Toyota, to its credit, actually was involved in asking for NASA's help in the investigations... so they were hardly victims of a plot) and the NTSB did not "finally admit" anything; They took the time they needed to fully-investigate (they sometimes take years on plane crashes, going right-down to metallurgical studies of the materials used in parts) and their investigation exonerated Toyota (whose position will now be rock-solid in any court). Without that lengthy investigation, it's likely that every drunk, sleepy or otherwise distracted driver who crashes a Toyota would be adding to the list of lawsuits claiming the car mysteriously went crazy and accelerated out of control.
Tesla may not be using the govt to beat-down any competitor, BUT they ARE using government money to compete against the other car companies, one of which (Ford) did not take a bailout and therefore deserved to be free of government-subsidized competitors
However, Broder's Tesla Model S, despite a heftier 85 kilowatt-hour battery for an extra 100 miles of range in 'ideal conditions,' died shortly before reaching its final destination.
No it didn't. Without reading the article, I can tell you definitively that it did NOT die shortly before reaching its final destination.
I'm not quibbling about whether it died, or even where or after how many miles driven. I merely object to the way that the place where it died is being characterized. You see, where it died WAS its final destination. Because it died there.
"All destinations are final. That's what it means, destiny, FINAL. If you haven't gotten where you're going, you aren't THERE yet." ~ G. Carlin.
if you work all day away from home and plug-in over-night then your car is most-definitely NOT charging from your solar panels. And while some people have little windmills making some electricity in rural areas, I've never seen an urban home with a massive commercial-grade windmill generator. So, no, not many people charge their electric cars on their own "clean energy" sources. As for spending extra on your electric bill for the assurance that your power company bought "your" electricity from windmills or solar panels, well you can probably count on those corporations to make you a variable-interest "ninja" home loan with balloon payment that's been chopped-up and merged into derivative financial instruments and ended-up in credit default swaps......
Let me guess: you believe this eco-marketing and you think Al Gore is fine flying on corporate jets while buying "carbon offsets" (from himself, of course) ... but you thing "big oil" and "big banks" are evil and corrupt?
First, there are significant losses in the transmission of electricity over long distances; we'd be far better-off if our power plants were closer to where the power is used. The losses are likely higher than you suspect. Second, most petroleum is transported in pipes by pumps (with remarkable efficiency) for most of the distances covered over land (or in ships over water of course) This is all quite efficient. As for people using significant amounts of gas to get to gas stations? Not so much. Most people "fill up along the way". The common scenario is not to make a dedicated trip to an out-of-the-way gas station, but rather to pull-into the gas station that's right along the way (often just 30 or 40 feet detour off the path that would have been taken anyway)
Have gnu, will travel.
Find a few pictures from security cameras. Show that the reporter lied.
If your testing maximum millage you have to follow the route. It's plain and simple that you can't race up and down hills. No different than any other vehicle be it electric, gasoline, diesel, natural gas, or compressed air. And if you don't fill up the tank then your an idiot and slandering if you claim the machine didn't meet expectations.
Between this and the other incident I really wonder how many accurate these publication and reviewers are or wonder if they are being paid to lie. Being critical or saying something different certainly makes your article more likely to be read and cited even if it is being slanderous.
The Tesla is a PoS - electric vehicles will never work as long as they use batteries. If they used fuel-cells, they might have a chance - but there goes the zero emission dream up in smoke. And let's not even talk about how much energy actually has to be produced to charge those batteries - it would make the demand for power sky-rocket... Just another pipe dream - brought to you by the people who have been "smoking it" for years and don't have enough brains to look at reality.
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Firstly, you are talking about trickle charge.
To recharge for 300-400 miles of road use.
Each day? Five hours driving a day???
So, alternatively, if your daily trip is an hour, your trickle charge is a smidgeon over 8 hours.
Or you can charge up at full rate which cuts that to a third.
Or get an electrical power point that works and not your piss-poor 120V stuff and reduce that 8-10 hours to 1 hour.
Top Gear admitted that the car that they "pushed home" on camera still had 50 miles range left.
The car is keeping a log of where you've been.
Is Tesla partially funded by the state Security Organs? Nah; probably just insurance companies.
Most gas gages on conventional cars are rather conservative - I assume their lawyers to tell them to do this. Maybe Tesla needs to fuzz the range numbers and recalcuations downwards.
"So in summation: You'll have to re-buy 1/3 of your car before too many years are up"
That was made up.
My midsize "typical passenger sedan" has a 20-gallon tank and gives me over 30MPG. 600+ miles for under $20K is a hell of an argument still, especially when it comes to independence. It's gonna take a full day to "fill" half a Tesla tank at your house unless you feel like opting for that 3-phase service, which I'm certain will be offered, but likely at a premium from your local electric provider.
The irony is when you'll find your 4-hour "quick-charge" 3-phase hookup in the end costs you....about $3.50 a "gallon" in electric costs.
Why do I feel the electric companies will become this century's oil sheiks, and we as consumers will merely see greed shift from one hand to the next, with little or no impact to our wallets...
Oh yeah, a little guy named "History" told me...that's right.
Tesla got a copy of the script for Top Gear - written before they drove the car - and it had pre-planned a battery disaster.
Top Gear always has stupid crap like that in it. Its one of the reasons why I stopped watching it, they assume everyone is as thick as Clarkson.
I remember watching one of the pointless car v whatever races they were doing where it was posh sportscar car v light aircraft from somewhere in france to the UK. Obviously a light aircraft would win this since it can take a far straighter path and maintain a speed that would get you arrested in most places on the ground (100-120km/h). They came up with the idea of using a halfwit pilot (James May) who was not allowed to fly at night over the channel or something though so that the car won.
Everyone knows that if you had to go between southern france and london a plane would be the quickest choice if you could afford it. The plane winning would be dull TV so to make it interesting and also to appeal the braindead petrol heads who watch Top Gear marvelling over cars they will never afford they come up with a way for the car to win. Every episode where they did similar races was the same from what I remember.
I dont read
All of the behaviours you list are normal driving behaviours, they are not unreasonable. Not spending 2 addional hours to top off a battery when the estimated range showed was 50% greater than the remaining trip mileage. Taking a slightly different route out of the city that added a small distance (2 miles) to the trip. Driving within a few mph above the speed limit for a short time; then drving 10mph below the speed limit. None of these things should radically affect how far you can drive.
There are drivers who go for hyper-mileage with vw diesels, they can often get above 65 mpg with their cars. They do this by tailgating trucks or driving at the optimum speed for mileage (42 I think) or otherwise drive very, very carefully. Only a fool would promote the car based on 65mpg because these are not real world driving habits. Yet that is what Elon Musk does.
Awkward reality:
In a regular car you can refuel in 5 minutes at any gas station. If you do run out, all you need is a jerrycan of fuel (unless you stupid enough to run a diesel or fuel injection engine bone dry - assuming a modern engine-management system will let you do that).
In an electric car, even with fast charging, you need to plan your journey around meal breaks - if not overnight stays - at service stations with charging points. If you run out, the car is bricked and has to be towed.
Even if NYT, Top Gear etc. may (or may not) have used a bit of journalistic license to make this point, it doesn't change the reality.
What's needed is a standard battery pack - when its empty you turn up at a service station and some sort of automated forklift system unhooks the flat battery and slots in a freshly charged one. The system then checks the battery's built in status indicator and works out how much you owe based on remaining charge level and the amount of 'wear' on the battery since it was last changed. Solves the slow recharge problem, and also allows you to spread the cost of the battery pack over time.
(Basically, the business model used for propane tanks for boats & camping - you don't sit around at the store while they refill your tank).
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Your company lies about your cool car, which I intend to buy, just like EVERY laptop manufacturer LIES about their battery life.
Ten hours battery life! Except that it never really lasts longer than six and that's only with the good ones. It seems that all battery based devices over promise and under deliver on battery life.
So the reality is that the 300 mile range is more realistically around 200 and that's likely to decline rapidly after the first year in use.
My fear is what it will cost me to replace the battery after five years. "Well sir, with your prorated warranty, the total comes to $20,000.00" OMFG!
I hate myself because I still want a Telsa S, even if it does under deliver.
Mod this UP!
It is precisely right.
In Britain, I remember a remarkable comment, during autumn, by a train company spokesman trying to excuse all the cancelled trains, and the failure to clear the slippery tracks, with a comment "They were the wrong sort of leaves".
This sounds awfully familiar.
The wrong sort of journey perhaps?
What they need to start doing is sell electric cars with a small, removable, high-efficiency, gas turbine generator for charging.
Build an easy-attach mounting point inside the trunk, with hooks for intake, exhaust, and connection to the battery.
You could leave the thing sitting in your garage 3/4 of the year... and plop in it there when you need to go on a trip. Then you've got the best of both worlds (outside of losing some trunk space).
I suspect (IANA engineer) that you'd have a bunch of weight savings from an engine dedicated to charging the car rather than having the power to push the car directly. Also, the engine could be optimized to always run at it's most efficient RPM, rather than going all over the place during stop-n-go traffic.
I made a similar trip in my Model S on MLK weekend a few weeks ago. 200 miles round trip in ~30 degree weather with a two-day, unplugged, dwell in single digit overnight temps. We knew the sit in the cold was going to be rough on the car so starting with a full max range charge we drove 65mph to our destination 100 miles away. We arrived with an estimated 150 miles left to go. Getting back to the car two days later it was now estimated at exactly 100 miles left. We made plans to stop a charge point halfway home and drove 60mph. We didn't stop to recharge and made it home with an estimated 20 miles left to go.
I did the same trip in a day a week ago and was able to get a full regular charge while I attended to business at the halfway point. That enabled me to drive above the speed limit and show off the awesome acceleration for the gawkers with the heat blasting.
The reporter made some rookie mistakes and also got some bad advice from people at Tesla (this really annoys me). He could have put a max range charge on at Delaware and had a comfortable ride. He took a break in Manhattan. Why not plan ahead and find one of the many charge points? He then ate dinner and slept overnight unplugged. If he'd even found a common house plug it would have kept the batteries warm and added a few miles. Again planning, especially in winter.
He also seems to always quote the "rated range" indicator in the instrument cluster. One quickly learns to look at the energy consumption graph where you can change the timescale of the moving average range estimate between 5-30miles based on what you might think the future holds.
Why a Tesla employee told him not to use cruise control I will never know. I would call that a fireable offense for any customer-facing employee. It's also not clear what sitting in the car with the heat on will do over just driving it conservatively while the battery gets warm.
In my opinion the article proves that the car will outlast your backside sitting in it. Being at the forefront of a new way of traveling requires a little extra thinking. In the future, charge points will be more prevalent so it will be easier. We don't fully appreciate that we've spent our whole lives being trained to use fuel-driven vehicles. The gas price spikes of a few years ago seems to have taught a lot of people that buying an SUV for that one-in-a-hundred big load or wilderness trip might not be worth it. I'm happy that I now have the choice to take it further to the one-in-a-hundred long drive requiring a little extra thought while having it cheap and clean 99% of the time.
Hey New York Times why don't you oversee another test drive with another ofyour writers to see who is really telling the truth???Take it from and owner of a Signature Model S who has now driven almost10,000 miles. This vehicle is exactly what Tesla claims and every time mywife and I drive in it we are still in awe at the performance, feel andsheer pleasure of driving it.The NYT should really examine the facts in the logs before defending theirwriter since they in fact show something other than what was written in thearticle.At minimum Tesla deserves that the NYT commission another article andoversee the results. Then and only then can we know who is really beingtruthful about what the vehicle can and can't do.Whoever is not telling the truth they should be the ones to put a full pagearticle in the NYT apologizing to the other.
I listened to the cnbc interview with Elon Musk, and he said the reporter drove 10mph or more above the speedlimits. I'm really wondering how much more, and if the cops will take action if they see the logs.
First, Musk has to understand that most people these days are functional retards. People are never going to drive the "correct" way, so you got to make a car that is going to work ideally when driven by a functional retard. You can't win an argument against a functional retard so why try.
Second, I am incensed by the idea of paying up to $100k for basically a commuter vehicle. Lets face it, unless you live along that one highway system in California, the "fast" charge stations are not going to be available anywhere else on the planet, which means that you can only drive about 200 miles in any direction before you have to return home, or find a place to sleep for the night with a power plug.
It's the reason why electric cars suck, they are overpriced pretentious commuter vehicles driving by functional retards.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
The NYT and Musk are both missing the point. EVs aren't well suited to road trips, and it doesn't matter because that kind of driving represents a tiny fraction of the driving we humans do. (Save your personal anecdotes to the contrary--they have no bearing on the facts.)
EVs can accomplish long distance travel if you're patient and determined, and Tesla's supercharger network has dramatically lowered the bar, but it still sucks, and fixating on it ignores all the aspects of EVs that are so much better than the alternatives.
Chelsea says it better than I can.
We just need some standardization of battery packs and infrastructure "swapping stations". There are a few companies working on this and one has actually been doing it for a while. http://www.betterplace.com/How-it-Works/battery-switch-stations
You clearly completely misunderstood.
The idiotic misuse of the word "hate" is an act of political correctness; pointing out the idiocy of it, and opposing this childish and political act is not equivalent (not an attempt to suppress a cogent counter-argument) but rather a call to return to rational dialog. The earlier poster was not criticized for defending Musk but rather for trying to equate opinions he/she disliked with "hate" (a tactic to used to stop debate by declaring any opposing opinion as invalid)
Love my Jeep. Approx 20Mpg (when not if 4WD), big tank for long range, change the oil 2/year, smog check every 2yrs (CA) it's fully paid for (bought it used for cash years ago) ..... I just don't see where you think it's problematic or a pain in the butt. It was absolutely affordable, it's cheap to insure, it's 100% reliable, very capable in all weather, with and without assorted cargo, it works perfectly (even when the local power grid is down) so I can depend on it if I ever need to evacuate my family from a wildfire or something. Gas-powered automobiles are a very stable, very mature technology with excellent infrastructure (that, aside from the actual roads (which ANY type of car including Teslas are free to use) was put there by businesses, rather than tax dollars). As a result, the Gas-powered car is the established champion in the marketplace. As is often the case, the product with the market share is not there because of a conspiracy.... it's there because it's the best solution at the time, in the judgement of the consumers (who vote with their money)
You talk about an "old and broken market". What's wrong with "old"? "old" can also indicate "proven","reliable", etc. As for the market being "broken"... how? What's broken about a free market where consumers choose the best vehicle (generally gas-powered) and choose to use the best portable power source (gasoline or diesel)? One may dislike petroleum because it's "icky" or one has been propagandized into thinking we're about to run out of it or that it kills the planet.... but the simple fact is that it is a reasonably stable, easily transported, easily used, highly-concentrated source of energy produced using very affordable and well-understood industrial-scale methods. There's nothing "broken" about any of this... it has the market because it's the best. I would argue that Musk and his allies are trying to create a broken market; a market that only works with government subsidies (artificial market manipulation) and that his cars will ultimately be no better environmentally or geopolitically. His cars require many rare/exotic/dangerous materials (rare-Earth magnets, Lithium, etc) and if they ever were the primary vehicle type the world could become as dependent on tyrants for these materials as it currently is on tyrants for oil
We all know Tesla is a new thing, and all high-tech and shiny.... this is Slashdot (grin). But Tesla does not get some special new rules. In a market economy, it's their job to bring their best to market and compete. The car did not replace the horse buy going to government and getting the government to institute a horse slaughter program to "save the world from global horse s**t" ..... the car won by being more convenient, more capable, less trouble, etc. If the first cars had been much worse than a horse and their advocates had spent all their time denouncing critics and bad-mouthing horses (rather than making their cars better and better) we probably would all be driving cars today that would be far worse than what we have. Musk and his Tesla team can either curse the critics, OR they can buckle-down and absorb the criticism as an indicator of where they can do even better.... and then silence their critics with products that REALLY perform. If they can make a gas car look like junk while being affordable, then they won't need govt subsidies; the public will naturally move to their products
Gas (in CA for example) went over the $2.00/gallon line in 2001 in the immediate aftermath on 9-11( with all the impending uncertainty over a possible war in the middle-east). During the Bush years with 2 wars underway in the mid-east gas mostly bounced-around at about $2.60/gallon. The price spiked in the midst of the financial meltdown in 2008 (your graph shows this well) then plummeted to pre-9-11 levels (lower than even the wars had re-baselined it to be, due to the slowdown in economic activity and resulting brief supply glut). In the spring of 2009 as Obama-Reid-Pelosi went into one-party-rule legislative overdrive the price leaped back up (even without increased economic activity) and it has been on a rising trend (with obvious and normal fluctuations) ever since... for a number of reasons but one major reason: Oil is commodity traded on international markets in dollar units. When the Federal Reserve Bank prints lots of new dollars without any underlying increase in economic value/activity to justify them the the total number of dollars in worldwide circulation rises while representing the same total value.... which means each dollar represents less "value". This means that, all other things being equal, the global markets will want more of those less-valuable dollars in exchange for the same product or service.
Obama's Fed has been printing money at a rate never before seen in US History and the non-partisan CBO has projected that his proposed spending will put us over $20,000,000,000,000 in debt by the end of his 2nd term (probably far worse given that is 1st term took us from about $10Trill to over $16Trill and at that rate $22Trill seems more likely) Things will get much worse if the interest rates (currently abnormally VERY low) rise; we currently spend over $200,000,000,000/year in interest on that debt (about 10x the NASA budget). Oil traders know all this. The Opec oil ministers know all this, and they have more palaces in need of new gold-plating...
The difference is, with a gas car, once a week. With an all electric, every day.
No, the key difference is that one I can fix in a couple of minutes the other takes an hour or so. Given I will forget to fill or charge the car from time to time regardless of power source what matters is how easily can I fix that mistake when I make it. A 5 minute trip to a garage is a lot easier to accommodate than a 1 hour one if I need to get to work in the morning.
because they are a newspaper company and tesla is a technology company, and this is a technology argument.
I initially had your reaction as well, but I've sat in one of these cars in a dealership before. It is a technological wonderland. So no, just sitting in traffic doesn't mean the electrons stop flowing. Yes the motor is the big consumer, but not the only one by a long shot.