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NY Times' Broder Responds To Tesla's Elon Musk
DocJohn writes "NY Times' John Broder responded to Elon Musk's blog entry. Accused of driving around a parking lot for no reason, for instance, Broder notes he was simply looking for the poorly marked charging station. Worst of all, much of Broder's behavior can be attributed directly to advice he received from Tesla representatives — something Musk fails to mention."
There is another reporter duplicating this exact run.
Open the window and turn up the heater. Drive in circles in a parking lot.
Use the advise from Tesla motors in an odd way to maximize drain.
I await the other reporters story not this con job.
A charging station he had previously been to...which makes his claim seem pretty suspect to me.
Also, Musk did say this: "The final leg of his trip was 61 miles and yet he disconnected the charge cable when the range display stated 32 miles. He did so expressly against the advice of Tesla personnel and in obvious violation of common sense."
That was the most damning accusation, and on that note, Musk refutes the claim that he was told by Tesla employees to act as he did.
Is it so far fetched to imagine that there isn't a conspiracy, and his bias is just part of who he is? Humans are irrational. They form opinions and become entrenched in them. Millions of people are pretty biased in interpreting politics, not because they are part of some mass conspiracy, they are just stubborn and close minded.
They know exactly what Broder did with the car. It's like your son telling you he didn't visit that porn site when his laptop's IP address is logged by your router as having done so. Seriously, the guy didn't understand the technology he was fucking around with and his lack of credibility is about to be exposed in a big way.
Maybe because they're not yet ready for prime time? Seemed to me the biggest problem in the article was the battery charge dropping overnight in the cold weather. Elon Musk forgot to rebut that. Maybe if global warming is real, that won't be a problem. Eventually. Oh, and an hour and a half to refuel at supercharged station? I can't be the only one who sees a problem with that.
They clocked the speed he was driving at because the tires were a different size? There's some mysterious huge downhill on the new jersey turnpike that caused him to hit 80 despite setting his cruise control to 54? Really? Is that the best he can come up with?
The model S may or may not be a good car. It sure seems like it's a pain to charge up on long trips. But this guy Broder sounds like he's full of it.
Was there a GPS logging that could confirm one story or the other? 54 mph vs 60 is quite a big difference on this long of a journey...
What's most likely is that he's just sloppy and got caught fudging the data. It was a Fake, But Accurate moment, a firecracker in the gas tank moment, or, a Zimmerman tape edit moment
Reported fudge, lie, push the truth to fit their preconceived notions. What his was? Who knows. But he tried to make a stupid point and got caught.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
He's claiming Tesla representatives instructed him to purposefully drive past the reported range then lie about it? That does not sound credible.
They do not. However there have now been questions raised as to the analysis by Musk by other papers. http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2013/02/elon-musks-data-doesnt-back-his-claims-new-york-times-fakery/62149/
The log does show that rated range remaining dropped at the 400 mile mark very sharply. I wonder what happened. Did Broder just park the car and leave it on overnight? The battery charge did drain quite a bit without making any distance. Since the log's x-axis is distance based, it doesn't show how fast the battery charge is used up while the car is not moving.
I once had a signature.
Anyone who doesn't like electric cars clearly wants to destroy the planet. Broder probably goes to church too, and to Tea-party rallies, when he isn't shooting assault rifles. No wonder /.'ers hate him.
You are an idiot. Unfortunately, there is no law against it.
It is to be expected from someone who parrots Tea Party nonsense rather than exercising some original thought.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Just a bunch of Journalist Homers circling the wagons to protect Broder.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
BBBZZZZ You both lose. This transcends stupid comments about the Tea Party or saying he's a Lefty. He's a Reporter. He did what Reporters do, distort, mislead, lie. Probably to enhance his reputation and certainly to enhance revenue...look how many clicks NYTs is getting from this.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
You must be unaware of the fact that there are very clear instances where bending over for a customer is the worst thing a company can do. This "customer" is in the wrong, regardless if Musk has the personality of a rabid wolverine on PMS.
Something that Broder also failed to mention in his original article. In my opinion, if you are claiming to review A CAR, and THE CAR says it won't reach your destination, and someone one the phone says go anyway, and you go, and it fails to reach the destination, implying there's something wrong with the car by saying it should have but didn't is either being deliberately misleading or unforgivably stupid. There's no third option.
Clearly, tech support for computers with drivetrains is as stellar as tech support for computers in general, but if Broder is going to blame everything on bad advice, even if every single thing he says is true, it destroys his credibility as a technology reviewer of any kind. That would be no different than doing a review of an operating system and saying "it kept losing all my settings" when in fact what was happening was some tech support person kept telling you to reinstall it from scratch. That's a pretty important thing to mention explicitly. The Tesla didn't just "fail" by Broder's own words it failed because he was told to do dumb things and actually did those dumb things *against the advise of the car itself*.
And that's the best case scenario assuming I take it as a given every single factual statement made by Broder about the test drive is accurate. That doesn't account for why CNN's route replication appears to have been dramatically different.
For all intensive purposes
I try not to be a grammar Nazi, but man you even italicized it.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
How is this "Insightful"? Given the low regard that the general public have for reporters, why would they regard the reporter as a customer like them?
Personally, I don't think reporters get called enough on their BS. I am not a big Elon Musk fan (he came across like a baby after the "Top Gear" situation), but his response in this situation raised my opinion of him a couple of notches.
Anyway, in the past, I have observed a strong bias against particular cars in the Automobiles section in the NY Times. There are occasionally very good automotive-related articles there, but, for the most part, I take everything that I read in that section with a grain of salt. Given that NYC is one of the most car-unfriendly cities in the US, I have always wondered why the NY Times even has an Automobiles section.
look how many clicks NYTs is getting from this.
And I would imagine Tesla's website is getting a few extra clicks today. What a great game - create a bit of controversy and everyone wins.
Let me attempt to clear this up.
Those words you italicized? They don't mean what you think they do.
Yeah. Can you guess why?
Illiteracy, obviously.
So to start, I am totally down with the idea of electric cars; I think that the utility of them around town would outweigh for many people the range problems for longer trips*. I personally try to drive relatively little; I've put an average of well under 5,000 mi/year on my car. I probably shouldn't say this, but Tesla is the answer to "what's your dream car?" security question on some website. Believe me when I say I don't have a bias against electric cars.
(* There was some discussion about this in the previous thread which I almost participated in, but didn't. Ballpark figures for the Tesla seem to be an hour of charge for about every three hours of driving. Personally, this is enough of an increase in stopping time compared to what I currently do on long trips that I really wouldn't want to do a long trip in one.)
But... I've read Musk's comments and both responses on the NY Times blog (ironically I haven't actually read the original article), and to be honest I didn't really find Musk's blog post all that convincing. And this is after a bit of me wanting to see the NY Times review get nailed to the wall.
For instance, Musk claims that the logs show that the heat was turned up when the reporter said he turned it down. But within 20 minutes of the point at which Musk says proves his point, the temperature was turned down -- dramatically. The NY Times article doesn't really give a precise "I turned down the heat at milepost 182"; that's a mileage that Musk seems to have derived from the following quote from the original article:
But Musk doesn't say how he arrived at that number in his blog post; he just asserts that's the point at which the reviewer says. IMO it's not too much of a stretch to think that the above review is imprecise enough that skirting that arrow over just 20 miles to where the temperature was lowered could be what actually happened.
This point in particular sits very poorly with me on Musk's side; I really feel like he was looking for faults with the data hard enough that he was probably prone to find ones that weren't actually there.
Note that I'm not by any means absolving Broder. I think that this story still has a bit more to play out until it reaches its resolution (if it ever does, without phone calls). But I really do feel like the "oh the NY Times got served!" people are really jumping to conclusions, even given Musk's data. I've been burned too many times my assuming things when they looked so clear before.
Speaking as a person who provides support professionally...
Fuck you, fuck the horse you road in on, fuck your mother, your father, your sister, and your dog.
If Musk's people gave the right advice, and he's positive they did, major props to him for standing behind them. I wish more companies out there would be willing to tell off the "customers" who purposely act the fool.
How you treat those above you shows nothing. How you treat those "below" you shows everything.
Yeah. Can you guess why?
You don't read much?
http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/intensive.html
According to the Tesla data, Broder's charge percentages after leaving a charging station were 90%, 72%, and 28%. While 90% may be reasonable, and 3/4 of a tank a bit dicey, who in their right mind only fills up to just over 1/4 of a tank? If he were refueling a gasoline powered car in this manner, he'd be deemed a fool.
Like a good neighbor, fsck is there
pollution and carbon emissions - and possibly not even the best way. Someone can logically disagree with the concept of electric cars, but still want to reduce emissions. For my money, telecommuting and online education and online shopping could have far more beneficial environmental impacts than building a global army of several hundred million electric cars running on lithium batteries. If people can replace nearly all their daily driving activities with online interactions - then you would be getting somewhere. Of course, we've got quite a ways to go with bandwidth and interactive forms of media before people would start dumping their cars en masse.
Pack it in, because logs don't lie.
Perhaps not, but logs can be altered.
I'm not saying they were in this case, but just saying "logs don't lie" seems a bit naive when the only log data we have to go on are those provided by Tesla, hardly a disinterested party.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
"the conclusions of the original report -- that the car performs poorly in cold weather, that it takes longer to fill up and that much more careful planning is needed driving it -- stand."
Why the need to lie about it then?
I ate my sig.
I don't think mine sucks. I love it. Chevy Volt. Has a fanboy webpage, not GM sponsored. gmvolt.com. We talk about the others, many of us either wish we had a Tesla - or DO. Funny thing - the least little thing wrong with any of our cars gets discussed. And we here almost nothing bad about Tesla, even though we're not his fan-group. What cold hard facts? People who, unlike this reporter, have some brains, and enough money to buy an electric almost universally love them. I prefer the mixed-hybrid Volt, as it can be an only car even if you do like to take long trips, and don't want to wait for even a super-charger to fill it back up. Guess what Bob Lutz (the guy who influenced GM to make the Volt) says? They'd never have made this great car if Elon hadn't prodded them in the ass with his.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Is there anyone outside of Tesla that can independently verify that the logs actually recorded what Musk says they recorded? Why is there an automatic assumption by some that what Musk is publishing is what the logs actually recorded? How would we know if Musk is falsifying what's in the logs?
This comment makes me wish there was a simple "like" button, I have mod points, but don't k.ow how to.mod this :(.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I try not to be a grammar Nazi, but man you even italicized it.
The Italicians weren't Nazis, just allied to them. Grammar fascist would be more accurate.
Less so for Tesla. Their site doesn't have any external ads, so they're not making anything from ad revenue, and most people can't afford their cars.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
To be honest, I knew next to nothing about Tesla cars and had never been to their website before this story hit. I'm sure I'm far from the only one. Those are some awesome looking cars - for $52K, I'm sure their base model fits squarely within the luxury-car-budget of Infiniti, Lexus, Mercedes, etc buyers, which is a huge market now.
Considering two other reporters from Consumer Reports and Motor Trends drove essentially the same route without any of the problems Broder had, combined with Broder's history of electric car bias and oil friendly articles, I'm much more inclined to believe Musk over Broder.
Admit it, you were caught being a New York Times reporter.
Pack it in, because logs don't lie.
The logs clearly show a story closer to the reporter's account than Tesla's.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
"And I would imagine Tesla's website is getting a few extra clicks today. What a great game - create a bit of controversy and everyone wins."
Huh? You think they benefit from creating negative publicity concerning the quality of an expensive car? Really? Someone is going to go "oh, there's that car I read is impractical, let me buy it!"?
The only real issue in this whole debacle is the large loss in battery charge while the car was parked overnight. Looking at the graph that Musk posted here I can see the battery charge taking a steep dip right as the car is supposedly parked. The graph of remaining miles shows it even more clearly - obviously the computer was extrapolating from the sudden battery charge drop.
So, what caused the sudden drop? The speed graph isn't fine enough to determine of the car was driven, and although there is a cabin temperature spike, the reporter says that happened the next morning when he was told to run the heater for a while. The engineers were obviously thinking it was temperature related, and thought that with a bit of "conditioning" it would all be ok. Thus the suggestion to run the heater, and to slow-charge. Finally the assumed the computer had it wrong and told him it was ok to drive - and were probably wrong.
So, the only real conclusion left is that the battery actually lost charge overnight. Did Broder sabotage the result by running the heater longer than claimed, or drove around in circles (again) to run it down, or maybe he just left the headlights on overnight?. We'll probably never know.
The alternative is that the Tesla batteries discharge substantially when not being used in cold weather. That should actually be pretty easy for someone else to test.
Even bad PR can be good PR. You've got to build "Q Score" with the public, and the lowest level on Q Score is "Never heard of it".
In this case, I'm way more inclined to trust Tesla. Why? Well they have data, the reporter doesn't. I figure both sides have a reason to make shit up.
Reporters are not someone I truest with facts these days, it is stories. They like to have the big story, and that often means scandal, be it true or false. We have have, many, many times, seen the press neglect evidence in their haste to get a story, omit things that don't fit with their narrative, frame things (pictures in particular) to show what they want, and sometimes outright make shit up.
Now I also figure Tesla has a reason to lie since, after all, they want to sell cars and as such want their cars portrayed in the best possible light. Companies don't want to admit faults of their products if they don't have to.
So given that both sources can be suspect, who do we believe? Well the one with the more credible data. The reporter has nothing but "ummm, the tires were the wrong size" which is a very half-assed explanation. Tesla appears to have rather extensive data logging. Given the choice between data and assertion, I'm inclined to trust the data. Give me some proof it is wrong if you wish to convince me otherwise.
This guy has no credibility, particularly in light of his half-assed response. To me it sounds like he was trying to gin up a sensationalized story, got caught, and now is doing a poor job covering.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiot -- "In several U.S. states, 'idiots' do not have the right to vote: Kentucky Section 145; Mississippi Article 12, Section 241; New Mexico Article VII, section 1; Ohio (Article V, Section 6)".
Stunningly bad.
...
Claiming that a reporter for a major newspaper is blatantly lying is absolutely not the right way to go about this.
The detail here as to where Musk went astray was in assuming bad faith on the part of Broder. All of the raw data that Musk described was good; if he had stated the facts he knew and then asked the question "How can we explain the discrepency?", that would have been a lot better PR.
Unfortunately this is the kind of thing that I don't usually see managers or marketers do well; the people that "stick to the facts" and know when they've strayed outside of what they know for sure tend to be engineers. Elon Musk has a PhD in Applied Physics so he obviously has a scientific background, but he's currently acting as the CEO which is a management position, and the transition from being a technical designer to manager unfortunately comes with a change of focus. That's my best guess as to why he drew an assuming conclusion here.
I try not to be a grammar Nazi,
And yet.... You are.
Try harder. Nobody likes a pedantic ass. Technically correct or not.
I lied. I don't really try.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
Is there anyone outside of Tesla that can independently verify that the logs actually recorded what Musk says they recorded? Why is there an automatic assumption by some that what Musk is publishing is what the logs actually recorded? How would we know if Musk is falsifying what's in the logs?
Well, Broder didn't dispute anything in the log in his response other than his driving speeds (and he doesn't even disagree with all of it, admitting to reaching 80 at one point). Everything else he corroborates.
The only thing I found to be misleading with regards to Musk's interpretation of the log is when he said that Broder raised the cabin temperature instead of lowering. Before Broder's response, when looking at the plots the first time, I did notice that a few miles after Broder raised the temperature, he did lower it significantly. So he was slightly off the exact time at which he started doing that, not a big deal, it still looks as if he tried it.
The biggest discrepancy between the stories as told by Broder and Musk are related to the conversations between Broder and the Tesla support guys. Musk claims that Broder disconnected the car from the charger with 32 miles remaining "expressly against the advice of Tesla Personnel." Broder instead claims he was told by Tesla personnel to charge for one hour and leave, regardless of what the range display said, because as the battery heated up during driving, the car would update the range to restore what appeared to be a range loss overnight. The fact that car proceeded to drive for 51 miles after that indicates the story was plausible and that when the battery is cold, the range estimate is inaccurate. Still, I agree with Musk that it's a violation of common sense to go anywhere that the car is telling you it can't make it there, regardless of what anyone, even Tesla personnel, would tell you.
Finally, Broder claims some horrible advice from the Tesla guys to maximize battery range, which includes alternating speeding up and slowing down, to let the regenerative breaking recover energy while slowing down. That anyone would fail to grasp basic physics badly enough to think this is a valid strategy astounds me. Really, I think this is where the crux of the matter lies. I now don't think Broder was trying to sabotage the drive, but I also don't believe his claims about the problems with Model S in the cold. I think the Model S is a fine car, and either the Tesla personnel really screwed up in their advice to Broder, or more likely, Broder completely misinterpreted them, due to a lack of understanding of how batteries work (and a complete lack of understanding of basic physics, since he actually did try the speeding up and slowing down approach). I'm thinking he was probably told that regenerative breaking would extend the range shown, and not to worry about it, and took that to mean he should try to force the regenerative breaking to occur more often. I'm thinking he was told that the once he started driving and the batteries warmed up, that the range would update to show more miles than displayed, and took that to mean he could trust their charge estimate of 1 hour literally, over what was shown in the display.
Basically, this is a communication and tech support problem, that turned into accusations being flung back and forth. I'd really like to see a transcript of those conversations with Tesla to be sure.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Is there anyone outside of Tesla that can independently verify that the logs actually recorded what Musk says they recorded? Why is there an automatic assumption by some that what Musk is publishing is what the logs actually recorded? How would we know if Musk is falsifying what's in the logs?
How would we know if Musk is falsifying what's in the logs?
Because it is a HUGE risk to take. What if the reporter had Google Tracks running on his phone? What if he made phone calls that disproved his location according to Musk? What if he stopped at a McDonalds and has the receipt and it disagrees with Musk's data? What if he drove by a security camera...
All Broder would need to do to destroy Musk's claims is prove that any bit of his data is wrong, because then Musk would only have two options: Admit his data had errors and thus make him look like a fool, or admit that he was lying, and thus slandering/libeling the hell out of this guy.
Because there are so many ways to show that just one bit of his data was faked, it would be an astounding risk to take given all the ways I outlined above.
Considering two other reporters from Consumer Reports and Motor Trends drove essentially the same route without any of the problems Broder had, ...
Actually that's not entirely true. The drop in battery charge overnight that doomed Broder by his account happened to the Consumer Reports author as well, and that was in slightly warmer conditions.
What part of releasing the raw logs from the vehicle to dispute a biased at best - outright fabrication at worst - is shooting the messenger?
The guy wrote an outright hit piece against the car. It would have been a damning piece of news, if only it were true.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
And people who love tech enough to build their own computers universally love them. While this reporter may not have had brains, I think his experience more accurately reflects what would happen if you put an electric car in the hands of a non-enthusiast tech-illiterate driver. I've had to do enough tech support for family and friends to know that they'll do all sorts of stupid stuff which is quite obvious to me that they shouldn't do.
The reason Apple is so successful is because they dumb down the tech to the point where those non-enthusiast tech-illiterate users have no problems using it. That's what needs to happen to electric cars before they'll be widely accepted. If the experience of enthusiasts mattered as much as you seem to think, your grandmother would be using Linux on the desktop today. And just like Linux, if you're going to blame problems in using the tech solely on the stupidity of users, it's going to languish at 1% market share.
Personally, I think Broder is a tool who set out to jeopardize the test drive if he could. But at the same time I can't fault him for sensationalizing the problem with charge times and charge rates. That's a huge difference between EVs and ICE vehicles, and it needs to be stressed over and over to the public until it becomes "common sense" that you can't just fill 'er up in 5 minutes like you can with gasoline. The sooner everyone is made aware of that drawback, the sooner it will cease becoming a problem.
Not necessarily really *wants* to destroy... probably more along the lines of thinking that the inconvenience (limited range, long recharge time, and drastically increased initial expense) isn't worth the benefit. At worst, they are shortsighted... not necessarily actively wanting to see the end of the world.
If electric cars had a comparable range and recharge time to gasoline cars, you'd see increased adoption. If EV's cost about 10% of what they do right now, you'd see *overwhelming* adoption... within a decade, it would probably be the norm that families would typically have one or more EV's for daily commuting, and probably own no more than one gasoline powered car that they would use only for rarer and much longer trips.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I try not to be a grammar Nazi, but man you even italicized it.
The Italicians weren't Nazis, just allied to them. Grammar fascist would be more accurate.
roflmao
Broder's response makes no sense. What rep would EVER suggest
. I was given battery-conservation advice at that time (turn off the cruise control; alternately slow down and speed up to take advantage of regenerative braking)
since both of those are very obviously bad for the battery? What person would believe that advice?
And his explanation for how he came up with 45mph and frigid cabin temperatures when the logs utterly contradict that are lame at best.
You can look at the other points any which way, but this smells of furiously trying to come up with an excuse for a smear attempt.
Yes, and then three months later the same reporter pulls the same stunt with the same results using a car gained from another source. Then what do you do? Come back and claim it wasn't actually your support staff, but the reporter the whole time?
The best thing Musk can do is get some high-profile neutral third party to come in, look at the raw data, and publicly report that the NYT reporter is full of shit. The NYT would then likely throw the reporter under the bus to save the credibility of the brand (essentially doing what you're saying Tesla should do) and the whole thing ends up a huge, HUGE PR boost for Tesla and Musk.
Musk designed the first all-electric vehicle that's worth a damn and he sends freaking rockets into outer space. The fact that his cars actually work (Tesla Roadster has gotten great praise and Model S is winning all kinds of awards) and that his rockets actually go to outer space tells me the guy is in a better position to know what's going on than some idiot reporter.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Telling people they are ignorant yahoo buffoons is not pedantic. It may be rude.
Really? He said he drove at 45mph with little to no heat. The car says he drove at 81 with the heat cranked up to over 70F in freezing temperatures where you'd be comfortable in the low to mid 60s.
Sounds like a real asshole to me.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
I knew enough about Tesla cars, or so I thought. I always figured they were impractical for me because their price puts them at a sole-car position for a person, and for long trips there was nothing that could be done about not being able to reach places > 300 miles away.
The scandal actually gave me a second or third look at them and let me see that the supercharger network is coming along. I also thought that the supercharger network was dumb, reasoning that I wouldn't want to wait 50 minutes to recharge my car in the middle of a trip. The article made me rethink that as well. On a drive of >300 miles I almost always stop somewhere for lunch. Basically the cars range just enforces a break every few hundred miles.. not that bad a thing.
There are still problems unspoken by this article. What if multiple cars are ahead of you and it takes 2 hours to charge? You can't really plan those delays into a trip, not a business one at least.
I'm still a big fan of the Chevy Volt for being 100% electric, with the backup gas engine if needed. And it doesn't look completely ridiculous like the nissan leaf, nor does it require new infrastructure like the Tesla.
Well, the article proofed the car has plenty of range for people in say my country, where that range even in cold weather is more then enough to drive across the entire country.
The whole electric car debate roughly has three parties.
Those who NEED to drive really long distances regullarly, they are very few and to be pitied, really if you have to commute +300miles even once per week, you are doing something wrong with your life.
Those who really don't need to and know their normal car usage is below 50 miles a day and would rather suck the exhaust pipe then drive for 300 miles in one go.
And those who really have no need for long distance driving either but want to believe that they could at any time pack it all in, hit the highway and cross a continent. They never will but if they have up that dream they would have to commit suicide because they got nothing else left in life.
An electric car is a tool for the commuter. It is perfectly suited for small distances and for instance at my office there is a free charging station. FREE fuel! And if you can afford a car in the Tesla range, you are REALLY just NOT the type to drive 300 miles. There are no rich hillbillies living in the wild and rich people take a plane or train. It is only in the minds of Top Gear and the likes that people look forward to driving all the way from London to Paris to attend a business meeting. It might even be faster but a SMART person knows the train/plane passenger will arrive more rested then the driver.
So... all this story has done is convince all the sides that they are right after all. The car has enough range for daily usage for normal people even in cold weather and electric cars ain't for long range travel in single hauls.
Whats new?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Tesla has the benefit of being the first ones out there with a real EV that works, so they have an opportunity to set the standard. They need to put as much as they possibly can into getting supercharging stations at every rest stop, restaurant, and hotel in and around population centers. You're going to spend 45 minutes eating at Denny's (or wherever) anyway. If you can plug in your Tesla and charge to nearly full while you do it? That's brilliant.
Once they have critical mass of infrastructure in place, they can charge a very small licensing fee to other EV manufacturers for the interface technology and set the major standard for the next couple decades while practically printing money along the way.
As for the Volt, it can't be "100% electric" if it has a gasoline engine. Just like the Prius and others, it's an EV until it isn't. That entire time, it's an overcomplicated bit of machinery trying to be all things to all people. I just hope Tesla manages to get their next model out soon since it's targeting under $30,000 with specs comparable to the Model S. That, I think, is where they have the opportunity to get huge.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
After reading the Musk analysis and the Broder rebuttal, I have to come to the conclusion that Mr. Broder's assessment is honest an accurate. I think there are two critical points that he brings up. These points do not paint Musk as a conniver, but simply as a proud engineer. He is trying to defend the engineering of the vehicle, but the problem was not with the engineering. The problems were purely operational in nature. First:
"I was given battery-conservation advice at that time (turn off the cruise control; alternately slow down and speed up to take advantage of regenerative braking) that was later contradicted by other Tesla personnel."
There are multiple references like this in the article, but I will address them all with this statement. Mr. Broder's account shows an all too common problem: a support organization that does not provide consistent or specifically correct answers to customer's questions. Guess what? Good support is hard. For a company of Tesla's age, with a product that has very little "gamma testing" to it's name right now, it is not the least bit surprising that Mr. Broder received conflicting and ultimately counterproductive support advice. Second:
"it may be the result of the car being delivered with 19-inch wheels and all-season tires, not the specified 21-inch wheels and summer tires. That just might have affected the recorded speed, range, rate of battery depletion or any number of other parameters."
A change in the overall tire/wheel diameter generally requires having your speedometer re-calibrated if you want it to give you an accurate reading. It is entirely reasonable to expect that there is a lot of calculation going on inside the vehicle that is dependent on being able to correctly correlate RPMs to distance traveled. It's also reasonable to expect that differences in the rolling resistance between the stock tires and the AW tires would also have some impact.
These are not engineering problems. These are operational problems with process, knowledge, and execution. Musk should be rightly proud of the car his company is built, and should be rightly terrified that his post-purchase support could potentially burn a lot of goodwill once he runs out of early-adopting fanboys and geeks who will cut him slack and are motivated to fix their own problems. The I Just Want It To Work crowd will be a tougher audience.
Personally, I don't think reporters get called enough on their BS. I am not a big Elon Musk fan (he came across like a baby after the "Top Gear" situation), but his response in this situation raised my opinion of him a couple of notches.
Hmm. FWIW I was up until the Tesla event, a very casual Top Gear watcher. I enjoyed watching it - I know nothing about cars at all - but took it as an entertaining, fact-based car show. I assumed that everything that they did, while very funny, was done in a relatively factual way - but from what I've heard the Tesla thing was basically outright deceptive.
Maybe it becomes more obvious if you watch a lot of Top Gear but I would have watched that episode casually and assumed the car ran out of juice and was rubbish as a result. It wouldn't have crossed my mind that it was just entertainment, which is (as I understand) what the judge said in the case - everyone KNOWS it's just for fun so who gives a shit what they say?
I never really watched it for real information - I'm not going to be dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars on a car, ever - but I assumed the stuff they said was based on reality at least in some way. Knowing the Tesla thing was basically a total fabrication has made me much less interested in watching the show.
I think it's quite possible that neither is being entirely dishonest.
The main disagreement is about not fully charging the car. But it's pretty critical to remember that charging, even at a supercharger, takes a long time.
If you're on a roadtrip would you really want to wait around at a supercharger station for an hour? I think it's fairly reasonable to assume that if the person is 150 miles from their destination they're going to wait till the range estimator reads 155 then take off.
Also one thing not quite clear from the NYT article:
"It was also Tesla that told me that an hour of charging (at a lower power level) at a public utility in Norwich, Conn., would give me adequate range to reach the Supercharger 61 miles away, even though the car’s range estimator read 32 miles – because, again, I was told that moderate-speed driving would “restore” the battery power lost overnight."
Note that this wasn't a supercharger station, this was just somewhere he could plug in so charging was slow. It's not quite clear to me whether he was told the car would be fine with the estimator at 32 miles, or the car would be fine after being plugged in for an hour. But I'm pretty sure there are a lot of people who could do some magical thinking to convince themselves that the guy on the phone said it was enough so it must be so!
The speed discrepancy is hard to account for (unless it was a dumb thing like the wrong tire size), but as for the 80 mph spike, maybe he just floored it to pass someone, and even though the logs show he wasn't at 45 mph for the limping stage he did reduce his speed, which suggests he was trying to extend the range and not run it dry like Elon Musk suggested. As for all the charging stations along the final route there's no evidence Broder had access to this info.
As for the cabin temperature the data definitely shows he drops it quite a bit, Elon Musk is definitely fudging the interpretation when he suggests it was always around 72.
In short Broder tried to use the car like a lot of people would, spending the absolute minimal amount of time waiting at a charging station, and due to some misunderstandings and bad breaks that tend to happen when you're pushing the limits, got burned.
I stole this Sig
There are some fishy things though. When he's presented with logs, all of a sudden everything he did is because of tech support. Very convenient. And then there's tech advice like this: I was given battery-conservation advice at that time (turn off the cruise control; alternately slow down and speed up to take advantage of regenerative braking).
Why would such a thing work unless you believe in perpetuum mobiles? I mean, seriously, the world needs more BS detectors. It's possible some nitwit gave hime that advice, or the reporter misunderstood, or he lied.
Unless the phone logs are kept, we'll probably never know. The only thing remaining is to repeat the test, or continue argueing untill the sun turns into a red giant.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
CNN Link: http://money.cnn.com/2013/02/15/autos/tesla-model-s/index.html Any decent driver (read: Probably your grandma) should be able to make that drive with range to spare. Regardless of the motivation of John Broder, this pretty much proves it can be done. I'm surprised Tesla let him try it! However, the first time you drive a Model S you aren't going to take it easy, I can tell you that much! (So fun!!!)
The Chevy Volt is a series hybrid. It's the same idea as a diesel-electric. You run an engine to run a generator to run a motor. That may sound wasteful, but the conversion losses are low (~5%/conversion) and (in heavy machinery, at least) you do away with gear boxes, which is a big win, and you get the engine running on the Atkinson cycle, which is a big efficiency win.
The new thing for the Chevy Volt is to throw a battery in the mix to get you regenerative braking (another big win).
So while the Chevy Volt is partially an EV, it's no more so than a plug-in Prius. It's a plug-in series Hybrid.
Not that this is a bad thing, but the question to ask is whether it's a better idea to put in a gas tank, engine, and generator, or to put in a bigger battery. It's an awful lot of weight to carry around for a "backup."
If it's speed of charge you're concerned about, check out Project Better Place. Their model is swappable batteries. A full "recharge" takes under 60s.
The part where the graphs (not raw logs!) basically confirm everything he said, especially the part that's most damaging to Tesla - the drop in range remaining from 90 miles to 25 miles overnight, unexpectedly leaving him without enough range to reach the nearest Supercharger. (Look at the vertical drop in range at the 400-mile mark. It's hard to see what actually happened because Tesla have carefully avoided releasing any graphs of range against time, or any raw logs of the same.)
In fact, Elon Musk is being really disingenous here when he accuses Broder of lying about the car falling short of its predicted range. Yes, it did predict 31 miles - after it'd already lost most of its predicted range overnight, forcing him to delay his journey and use a far slower Level 2 charger. (Which probably has rather more to do with why he charged to 28% rather than the full 90% than Elon's conspiracy theories. A full 90% charge would have taken around 10 hours - not that you could figure that out from Elon's blog post - adding a whole additional day to his two-day trip. Does Elon Musk really think that having to stand around in the cold for 10 long freezing hours and turn a two-day trip into a three-day one would really paint his $100,000 car in a good light? I honestly doubt it - if he had fully charged, we'd be seeing a blog post from Elon about how if he'd just charged enough to get to the Supercharger the article was meant to be about he could've made the trip in far less time, and how the journalist was intentionally trying to discredit Tesla by charging fully at a slower charger.)
Well, I guess trying to smear a car company to get a story of the year award would count as an intensive purpose.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Errrrm, try reading his original article again - not Elon Musk's blog post about it, but what he actually wrote . He said the same things about the advice he'd got from Tesla then as he's saying now - this obviously isn't just something he came up with after Tesla released their interpretation of the logs.
To help GP understand why he is being ridiculed, the phrase you are looking for is "for all intents and purposes".
That was my first thought and preconception, but Top Gear UK are some dumbasses that are fun to watch spout ideas about what makes a "good" car. They carp about the "fit and finish" of US cars, "ooo look it has a squeeky plastic dashboard" "leafsprings!" then go on about how great an Earl Shribe baby blue painted Austin looks fabulous. Then Jeremy shreds some multi thousand dollar tires on a custom AMG Merc and blames the car. That's Top Gear.
I was going to argue, but you're pretty much spot on. Top Gear UK - at the leading edge of cocking about.
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
When you've consumed your 40 miles...it's an engine that's under powered, it'll feel like a lawnmower engine powering a sedan...It'll feel anemic on the highway. It's problematic, neither fish nor fowl.
-- Elon Musk, on the Chevrolet Volt.
'Cadillacs are overpriced barges.' - Henry Ford.
OK, I made it up, but it's just as applicable.
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
As noted by many, those words raised a LOT of red flags. Basic lessons in physics would suggest to anyone that perpetual motion does not exist. That means slowing down and speeding up isn't going to magically charge the battery. So either reporter is lying or exceptionally stupid.
Considering that he reports on cars and has done so for a while, one would assume that he is familiar enough with physics not to be exceptionally stupid.
Try, " he's a journalist",
As an ex-journalist, I can tell you, being an asshole is what gets you the story. No one cares if Mary Sunshine writes about marshmallows and lollipops.
If there is no controversy, there is no story, certainly no front page, and then no paycheck. Musk is just job fodder, it's got nothing to do with anything relevant, just Broder notching his belt.
It's a hard thing to shake, as many of you can attest over the years, I still play in the threads with a similar writing style adapted to forums. Amazing assertion, conflicting response, bring out the facts and pound,pound,pound. Before you know it, you've been sucked in and are part of the sickness. It's so funny, people are suckers for "news" and take propaganda like medicine. It's not about news, it's about careers and selling ads.
Although there is freedom of the press, you'll note, Jefferson is always quoted saying that there is nothing to be learned from the "News papers". It's always been the same, but now digital and faster, speeding the lies to your frontal lobes in HD and stereo surround.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Do it on your own gasoline car. Follow this principle:
1. Clutch to the floor, gear in first.
2. Clutch up, accelerator pedal into the floor until you hit yellow line on tahometer
3. Hard brake, clutch to the floor.
Come back and tell us how you burned tens of kilometers worth of fuel in that one kilometer of testing.
roflmao
I think you mean Honorable Chairman ROFLMAO.
Justin Bieber has a lot of fanboy webpages too. That doesn't make him a great singer.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
I also thought that the supercharger network was dumb, reasoning that I wouldn't want to wait 50 minutes to recharge my car in the middle of a trip. The article made me rethink that as well. On a drive of >300 miles I almost always stop somewhere for lunch. Basically the cars range just enforces a break every few hundred miles.. not that bad a thing.
If it takes 5 minutes to fill up a gas vehicle, and 50 minutes to fill up an EV, it takes 10 times the charging stations to service the same number of vehicles. And when *everyone* wants to charge their EV at "lunchtime", that's only going to increase contention.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
the proper term was extended range EV. the drive train is all electric, and you can use a battery pack as primary power source.
you simply have the option or capability to use a gasoline engine to directly generate electricity. this allows gasoline type energy density, but electric type efficincies, and you eliminate the weight and space taken up by a gasoline drivetrain. eventually such systems will even be plug and swap: 1 primary battery pack always present, and then either a 2ndary one, or a generator module.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
But on a highway, typically you will get FAR better milage on cruise control rather than trying to manage yourself. It is possible to beat cruise control, but people just arent perfect and nowhere near as consistent as CC is.
And the idea that somehow breaking --> regenerative breaking nets you more energy than simply not breaking at all? In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics....
Look, the most efficient way to move is at constant speed. There is no way on earth that speeding up/slowing down is going to be more efficient. You need energy to speed up, at less than 100% efficiency, and you recuperate energy from slowing down, at less than 100% efficiency. How can that ever prolong battery life? That's basic highschool stuff. If the reporter has a highschool degree, yet is unaware of that, then that's quite embarrasing for the educational system.
It's true that accusing the reporter to lie is a serious one, but so is accusing the technical support staff of such incompetence. That leaves that there was a misunderstanding between the two: maybe support wanted to explain how to optimally slow down to maximize energy recuperation, and the dumb reporter didn't understand. Or maybe Tesla hired a moron for tech support. All are possible. With all results being possible, that is equivalent to saying that no conclusion can be made. So: do the test again, better this time.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
You need to read what you're replying to. You're talking about minimizing losses from having to run on increased power (climb) by engine braking on direct injection engine. This will not actually save you fuel when driving on even terrain, as energy consumption from accelerating is significantly higher then energy savings when engine braking.
Same applies to electric and regenerative braking. This is simply because efficiency is always 100% alone, without adding any other factors in.