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SXSW: Elon Musk Talks Reusable Rockets, Tesla Controversy
Nerval's Lobster writes "Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, took the keynote stage at this year's SXSW to talk about everything from space exploration to electric cars. Joining him onstage to ask questions was Chris Anderson, the former Wired editor and co-founder of 3DRobotics. Musk used his keynote discussion to show off a video of a rocket test, which he said had taken place earlier that week. In the video, a ten-story rocket takes off from a launching pad and hovers several hundred feet in the air before landing in the same spot, upright. It's an early test of SpaceX's reusable-rocket project. 'Reusability is extremely important,' Musk told the audience. 'If you think it's important that humanity extends beyond Earth and becomes a multitenant species' then reusable rockets will prove essential. Musk also talked about the recent controversy involving his Tesla Motors, which started when a New York Times reporter claimed in a much-circulated column that his electric-powered Model S sedan had ground to a halt during a test drive up the East Coast. 'I have no problem with negative feedback,' he told Anderson, in response to the latter's question. 'There have been hundreds of negative articles, and yet I've only spoken out a few times. I don't have a problem with critical reviews, I have a problem with false reviews.'"
I think the biggest reason he gets so much flak is because no one can figure out how to make a quick buck off his businesses.
Ok, You sound very angry and I don't know why, but let's break down your points:
1. 550 miles over 2 days. If the NYT journalist had charged properly and as instructed, then it would have been 3 charges, but even with 4 charges, eating for 1-2 hours over a 2 day period isn't "not good" it's normal. If I stop at a charging point, plug in and go to a cafe for lunch, it's going to take 45mins to over and hour to complete lunch. I don't think Tesla were suggesting you eat solidly for 2 hours without a pause.
2. The temperature is irrelevant. The NYT journalist claimed he turn the heat down to extend range, the logs show he increased the temperature from 72F to 74F. The actual temperatures don't matter, it's the lie that matters.
3. Same with speed. The journalist claimed he had cruise control on at 55, logs show him travelling at 62-81MPH. Again, it's the lie that matters no the actual speeds.
4. It's well know batteries perform worse in low temperatures, if the journalist had used common sense and charged his battery sufficiently then there wouldn't have been an issue. Most cars, no matter the power source, get 10-20% less than the claimed economy figures. Is this right, no, but to single out one company seems to smack of double standards.
Admittedly I don't follow news columns that closely, but I'm not sure where he's ever appeared to want to be considered a god, and I have no idea what the Segway has to do with Elon Musk or the Tesla.
The video in question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=2Ivr6JF1K-8
This rocket (the Grasshopper RLV) is just a test article. It's a mass simulation of the first stage of a Falcon 9, which has been launched to orbit successfully 5 times in a row. The idea is to test and prove the re-usability concept on the Grasshopper RLV before adapting it to the first stage of the Falcon 9. They've only done small hops so far, but the plan is to continue launching the Grasshopper RLV with more and more fuel until it can replicate the trajectory of the Falcon 9's first stage and safely return, at which point they'd be ready to begin adapting the Falcon 9 first stage for a safe return and landing.
Broder deliberately charged it less than he needed. When he left the last charging station the car very clearly stated that it would not be able to reach the destination. This is not "non-optimal user behavior", but a complete driver failure, except that it almost certainly was intentional to make a "good" story. An ICE car would behave in the exact same way. This is not specific to EVs.
An EV generally gives a lot more warnings before it runs out of charge than an ICE car does before it runs out of gas. You are no more at risk of being stranded with an EV than with an ICE car and probably less. If he wanted to make a legitimate case against EVs he should criticize the charging times instead.
You have some valid points but it's more a matter of changing your perceptions than a problem with the car. Your first point about charging 4 times to cover 550 miles is valid. However you'd only have to charge more than once while on your trip for a total of about 30 minutes if there was something strange going on. Maybe you ought to mention why you feel the need to charge 4 times? Why do you think 72F is too warm? You realize the cars are made to work in Southern California where he lives and where the temperatures routinely are over 100F. So what made you think 72F is too warm for the car? I share your driving speed preferences and perhaps like to drive a bit faster than you. The Tesla car gives amazing neck straining torqued out acceleration at any speed up to about 130mph. Because of it's low center of gravity due to the battery packs people end up looking for curves to take because it feels so good. So when you say 62 to 81mph is too fast I can only assume you left out a qualifier. Perhaps what you meant to say was too fast for optimal efficiency. Despite the Tesla being the best aerodynamic car on the market and second best in the history of cars you still must take into account how aerodynamic drag increasing exponentially as the speed goes up. Take a BMW out and drive it at 55 and then drive it at 155. You'll notice you get about 1/3rd the mileage or even less at 155. It's physics. As for needing to charge your car in a European winter every 50 to 100 miles. Sure. If you say parked it outside and only drove a mile to 3 miles per day you might have to charge it every 50 to 100 miles. The Tesla keeps the battery packs and such at a working temperature and this drains the batteries slowly. Unlike a gas vehicle. So this may make the car unacceptable in a few strange cases or to the luddites looking for reasons to avoid change. By the way the judge declared Top Gear manufactured the lies but threw out Tesla's lawsuit because it was unclear how much financial damage resulted in the outright lies. I don't know about you but I don't start out a long trip without feeling up my gas tank, especially when the gas light is on, like the NY Times author did. I think Tesla should have blasted the NY Times harder because there are still some nutters out there that apparently don't get what happened.
you installed blackboxes without telling ANYBODY
It was not necessary to read any further than this to discover that you are either too ignorant to read, or trolling. The car is a black box. Of course it has logging. And you can bet your bunghole that whatever they had to sign to get their hot, lying hands on the car included a clause about being tracked. You are either an idiot or a liar, or both.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You are no more at risk of being stranded with an EV than with an ICE car and probably less.
That is completely untrue. With an ICE, a handheld tank of fuel can be carried to any 'stranded' vehicle and it can be refueled and the vehicle can immediately proceed on it's way. There is no equivalent (yet) of a mobile recharging device that can be transported to an EV. This fact was shown by the reporter's experience. If anything, the reporter demonstrated that the typical impatient traveler, who might jet off at what they thought was the earliest point after a tediously long recharging period (compared the time to refuel an ICE vehicle) would get in this sort of trouble. In essence, doing all the early adopters a favor, so that everybody could hear about the experience early in a review article, instead of in anecdotes from their early adopter friends.
There is the potential for some really sucky 'stranded on the road' experiences with EVs at the present day, and the reporter did a good job of exploring them.
Flying a rocket like this doesn't make much sense.... Here on earth, but as you can't parachute down to the lunar surface, or rely on chutes on Mars for hopping from place to place, then a reusable VTOL rocket becomes really handy. But it does have to be test flown somewhere, and easier to test here than out there.
Almost all BMWs are top speed limited to less than 150 mph. It's policy.
You are going to quibble over 5 mph, when the limiter can be defeated by anyone with money? We call that prevarication.
By the way the judge declared Top Gear manufactured the lies
Do you have a reference? I can't find this by Googling, which is why I ask.
It is nigh-impossible to find a reference because the google results are packed with copies of the same story reprinted by various news outlets with no reason to exist. It's too bad Google won't let you block an arbitrary number of websites from your search results permanently, because it is rapidly becoming useless for actually finding any targeted information on anything which has ever been major news. But the judge ruled that no one would take Top Gear seriously, that factoid shows up in multiple articles. That's because they're known to be full of shit. It's an entertainment program, not education.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I talk about the risk of being stranded, not how to solve the problem when it happens. Even then, there are more possibilities than you are aware of. Look at this: http://news.aaa-calif.com/pr/aaa/PRN-first-electric-vehicle-charging-232337.aspx My point is that it is a lot harder to experience an unexpected stop in an EV than in a gas car since the EV tracks the remaining range more accurately and gives out a lot of warnings. Electricity is also more widely available than gas. Electric outlets are everywhere, gas pumps aren't. Even if you drive it until you hit "turtle mode" (or whatever it is called in a Tesla, I have a Leaf), you would most places be within range of an outlet.
Broder knew very well that he would not reach his destination and he left anyway just to make a "better" story. If he wanted to make a case against EVs he could have focused on having to stay 10 mins longer than he wanted at the last Supercharger. Or he he could have insisted of driving somewhere where there are no Superchargers. These are the real drawbacks of an EV today.
My family has driven a Leaf as our only car for the past year and we know very well how it behaves. We have never feared being stranded anywhere or having the car unexpectedly stop. However we do have to spend more time charging on longer trips than we would have wanted ideally.
The logs don't lie. The logs of that trip have been published. As the Wannabe King has already posted, Broder deliberately undercharged the car, repeatedly. The logs indicate that he intentionally sabotaged the test, so that the car would fail the tests. Broder used the test to "prove" that the car doesn't work as advertised. Broder had an agenda, and dishonestly used the car to promote his agenda.
As I recall, my telephone had an instruction manual, that suggested that I charge it for an hour before initial use. Had I only charged it for thirty minutes, then complained that it doesn't hold a charge very long, would that be honest? Hell no, it wouldn't. If subsequent charges were only permitted to half-charge the batteries, would I have a legitimate complaint that my phone doesn't hold a charge? Again, hell no.
Read the logs.
In a gasoline powered car, you can't put ten gallons into a sixteen gallon tank of a car that gets 12 mpg, then expect to drive it 180 miles. It just doesn't work that way. You WILL run out of gas!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Who said anything about stealing? Just ask! Offer to pay! I have had to do that a couple of times and have never been turned down. Then, I live in Norway, perhaps people are nicer here than in the US?
What is more important, to get the tube back down very slowly without damaging it (and burning up a huge amount of fuel while doing it and obviously making the entire flight much less efficient) or putting more cargo into orbit? I think he can achieve partial reusability by bringing down the rocket on parachutes (or at least the engines, which are probably the most intricate and expensive part) while using all the fuel in the rocket for its actual purpose - launch cargo.
Have you tried building a parachute to land 25 tons? NASA has for Ares I and it is very heavy and complex, more than a ton in itself. Alternatively you could do just the engines that are about 5-6 tons but then you'd need some kind of detachment system as well and you'll be throwing away a lot of expensive sensors and electronics not just a big tube. The bigger downside is that they're uncontrolled, you need to clear a big sea area, recover them then transport them back to base - not to mention they're drenched in salt water. If you just land there's not any added costs. The empty shell is only 7-8% of the launch weight and you're only slowing the decent so how do you need? Fuel is still only about $200k on a $50 million launch so even if you have to increase that by 10% you're probably shaving many millions off each launch. I think they know what they're doing.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
All true but I don't know why rebuttals have to be so complicated:
Broder didn't charge the car to full, charged it less at each charging opportunity, and didn't bother plugging in overnight, cold night or not. Then he hit the road when the car told him he would not make it.
No one that owns a smartphone can say what he did wasn't moronic or malicious.
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." George HW Bush
If you're going to be a physics pedant, at least get it right.
Drag is approximated by a Taylor series truncated at n=2 for low velocities. In reality, drag is more complicated than that.
That's news to me. Tesla can't make them fast enough for the demand. In their last quarterly report they said that if no new orders came in that there are enough on the books now for the rest of the year, and that's without any advertizing other than their show rooms.
As a new owner of a Tesla model S all I can say is that it is an amazing car. The problem has been that most of the EVs in the past had very limited range or were otherwise serious compromises. Many were converting a conventional ICE body to an electric drive train. Tesla built the car from the ground up around an EV drive train and were able to leverage the advantages of it. I have a 416HP motor with 495 ft-lbs of torque the size of a large water melon hidden underneath my large rear trunk, a large interior and another trunk in the front. The fact that the battery is entirely underneath the car makes for a very low center of gravity so the car handles beautifully.
Right now their problem is supply. They're running at near full-capacity making 450 cars per week. They can't make them fast enough. Once they sell enough cars to improve their finances they'll be able to invest in increasing their production.
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