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Tesla Model S Gets Titanium Underbody Shield, Aluminum Deflector Plates
An anonymous reader writes "Tesla Motors made headlines several times last year for a few Model S car fires. Elon Musk criticized all the attention at the time, pointing out that it was disproportionate to the 200,000 fires in gas-powered cars over the same period. Musk didn't stop there, though. He's announced that the Model S will now have a titanium underbody shield along with an aluminum bar and extrusion. He says this will prevent debris struck on the road from breaching the battery area. Musk offered this amusing example: 'We believe these changes will also help prevent a fire resulting from an extremely high speed impact that tears the wheels off the car, like the other Model S impact fire, which occurred last year in Mexico. This happened after the vehicle impacted a roundabout at 110 mph, shearing off 15 feet of concrete curbwall and tearing off the left front wheel, then smashing through an eight foot tall buttressed concrete wall on the other side of the road and tearing off the right front wheel, before crashing into a tree. The driver stepped out and walked away with no permanent injuries and a fire, again limited to the front section of the vehicle, started several minutes later. The underbody shields will help prevent a fire even in such a scenario.' Included with the article are several animated pictures of testing done with the new underbody, which survives running over a trailer hitch, a concrete block, and an alternator."
Is he saying they've upgraded safety to piloted weapon system levels?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
This happened after the vehicle impacted a roundabout at 110 mph, shearing off 15 feet of concrete curbwall and tearing off the left front wheel, then smashing through an eight foot tall buttressed concrete wall on the other side of the road and tearing off the right front wheel, before crashing into a tree. The driver stepped out and walked away with no permanent injuries
Sounds like a scene from "the A team", where I would have been saying "that's so unrealistic"!
Isn't titanium pyrophoric, sort of like those golf clubs?
Clearly Elon is underplaying this a bit. Yes maybe there isn't a large risk but if they went to the trouble of making an engineering change that adds significant expense and weight to the vehicle then obviously they themselves believe there is a risk.
Hilarious!
There's always something for lawyers to scream about, when searching to line their pockets.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
This is what the rest of the automotive industry will say, then: "This shows what we have said all along, these things are unsafe.". These (misleading) headlines will be quoted all over - "case proven, Tesla is not safe".
It would be amusing to see them held to the same standards - which the regulator could, nay - should, do.
for a $90k car...why not carbon fiber too?
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
This sounds like something yon might see if you're watching Road Runner
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the vehicle impacted a roundabout at 110 mph, shearing off 15 feet of concrete curbwall and tearing off the left front wheel, then smashing through an eight foot tall buttressed concrete wall on the other side of the road and tearing off the right front wheel, before crashing into a tree. The driver stepped out and walked away with no permanent injuries
I can't be the only one who finds this amazing. People survive these kinds of crashes, but to be able to get yourself out for the vehicle and walk away on your own is impressive.
If you have to ask, you weren't going to buy one anyways.
You know, I usually detest any sort of PR speak. That sort of bullshit where they desperately try to spin negative news to their advantage. It's just something I've come to expect from corporations and politicians.
But this?
We believe these changes will also help prevent a fire resulting from an extremely high speed impact that tears the wheels off the car, like the other Model S impact fire, which occurred last year in Mexico. This happened after the vehicle impacted a roundabout at 110 mph, shearing off 15 feet of concrete curbwall and tearing off the left front wheel, then smashing through an eight foot tall buttressed concrete wall on the other side of the road and tearing off the right front wheel, before crashing into a tree. The driver stepped out and walked away with no permanent injuries and a fire, again limited to the front section of the vehicle, started several minutes later. The underbody shields will help prevent a fire even in such a scenario.
That is some mighty fine PR smackdown.
Sure, there were other fires, but this one they got covered.
Can we please move to the post-bullshit era where authenticity is expected?
What happened to the 3D printing revolution?
It's more of an evolution than a revolution. Give it time. But it still won't be the right tool for every job.
You should see some of the cars people survived accidents from. You'd think there's no way they could have even lived.
The "cold weather energy cell" has been shown to be some bad 12V batteries in some cars (Tesla have the large li-ion battery pack and a more traditional 12V battery). AFAIK, those have been replace, problem solved. Elon tweeted about this about 3-4 months ago. Somebody will correct me in 1,2,3,4,5,...
Cost and strength. You can extrude something for a fraction of the cost of 3D printing or milling. You can even extrude titanium if you have a big enough press. (google "heavy press program" if you want to see some MONSTER presses.) Both extrusion and milling still have strength advantages over 3D printing. Where 3D printing shines is prototyping, small run, or fancy designs that are too difficult to extrude or cast or mill. But give it a few more years. The other methods have been around far longer, so we know how to do things well.
Indeed it does; it makes me wonder why they don't make the Tesla S look more like a badass car and less like a family sedan.Wouldn't take much revision to have, say, a Tesla Se, that's got minor revisions ala body panels.
I have to wonder if they are going to do a "Mad Max" version of the Tesla :-) Driving through massive potholes, smashing concrete blocks in the street, deflecting steel rods. Perfect for driving in NYC :-).
I don't understand why people see every new bit of technology like it's some magical panacea, ready for mass consumption the instant they learn of its existence.
You wouldn't try to print 100,000 books on an ink jet printer. While you might do mockups on that ink jet, you'd have the actual run output on a printing press. 3D printing is the same exact thing. Great for prototyping, but too slow, inefficient and expensive for mass production. That may change some day, but currently were a ways away from that being feasible.
I think I know the accident you speak of - it wasn't so much a 'metal spike' as a caltrop in the form of a trailer hitch on the road - One of those 3-ball types from some reports. I don't think it really weighed 50 pounds as I think it was a hitch like this one, putting it closer to 40 pounds(or less), given the shipping weight of 44 pounds.
As for mild steel - not unless it was bought from some shady chinese store.
That's basically what it amounts to. If you see a rusty trailer hitch in the road, try not to hit it so hard that it lifts your car up into the air.
I'd tend to say 'try not to drive over stuff, especially big bits of metal'.
I don't read AC A human right
Did anyone else notice those seem to be successive tests on the same car? In the alternator test you see a fastener toward the back of the belly plate gets loosened, in the trailer hitch test you see the fastener actually come out, then in the concrete block test you see the belly plate actually flap under impact, and you can see what appears to be the hole that fastener came from.
I am fairly impressed that, not only did they do real world tests (which do fall short of shearing off wheels and battering through concrete walls) but they apparently did not put the car on a lift and return it to perfect condition between successive tests.
That makes the test a bit more real world like, cars get driven and accumulate wear and tear, so they are not necessarily going to be in factory mint condition when they hit something.
You get the feeling, regardless of what you think of Musk or the car, that he is very proud of that car, and it appears justifiably so. Yes, he is defensive when the press screams disaster and trumpets doom and gloom about the car, but he doesn't ever try to hide from the press or try to spin the reports, instead he makes a change to improve the car, then does his spin on his own terms.
Obviously titanium might be a bit pricey for the "cheap" Tesla when it arrives, but I bet the anti-penetration armor design will be there, even if it ends up being constructed of less expensive materials.
In this way the response to the overhyped Tesla accidents and fires will help us all in the long run, just like the German automakers pioneered crash simulation in the 80s and 90s, and now all cars have crumple zones.
"Proximity to wonder has blunted our perception and appreciation of it" --Tim Hartnell in 'Exploring ARTIFICIAL INTELLI
It is Tesla's indifference to the customer's safety that makes this car a death trap. Somone ever so gentily nudges a barrier (an old one that crumbled for 15 feet) at a relatively slow speed of 110 MPH and the two front wheels fly off and the car is flung in to a tree. All we hear from Telsa is "Save the batteries, save the poor batteries". What about the driver? Who is looking out for him?
The safest car ever built was the Yugo. A 200 pound car with a top speed of 15 MPH; how much damage can you do?
Our subject here is safety, so the better question is "Relative to car miles driven [to account for more gas powered cars], how many people have been injured or killed by gasoline car fires caused by hitting road debris." The answer for Tesla is zero.
Also remember that fire due to road debris is not the only kind of injury. People are actually hurt directly by the debris. That is common for cars, and that trailer hitch the Tesla hit would have ended up in the passenger compartment of a regular car. The answer for Tesla is still zero.
That's not exactly right. Nobody corrected you that quickly.
Nothing? People are just using the correct tool for the job. 3D printing isn't some end-all be-all technology. It has some very useful niches with prototypes and small production run objects, but for mass producing a hunk of metal to bolt on a car it's the wrong solution.
I read the internet for the articles.
Love the mis-quote dude!
Star Trek Tek.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
The Formula 1 titanium skid plates let them run very low ground clearance. They would bottom out frequently, generating a shower of sparks.
So the folks in the other involved vehicle(s) will be quickly torched by leaking gasoline ignited by the long-lasting sparks from the shield designed to protect the rich man's batteries. Aces.
That's right. I suck at being funny !
If you can get the price/durability/speed down by 95% it would be virtually indistinguishable from one of those star trek things that makes your food for you.
moox. for a new generation.
Printing presses are also increasingly under pressure (no pun intended) by start ups like Lulu that essentially print books on demand.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
3d printing is good for small runs of things. Think 1-2 items. If you want to make 10k of something? You build a machine to do it or change an existing press.
The cost of input material for 3d printing is not at the same point of 200 years of manufacturing knowhow.
It may get there some day. But not today :)
Extrusion *IS* "3D printed" with a massively parallel head that can print the entire cross-section all at once. It has been optimized to "print" something with an uniform cross-sectional area. Same can be said about pasta machine. :)
Welcome to Tomorrow done yesterday.
Yeah, cos that never happens with petrol cars. Never at all. Not even once.
Sorry, I'm not a Tesla nut. I hate current generations of electric cars. We had milk-delivery "floats" since the 1960's in my country that used lead-acid batteries and were entirely electric, they were great for what they were. The top-end models are now viable all-electric cars. And cost ridiculous prices. And have some serious flaws (limited range, etc. that can't even come close to competing with my 15-year-old cheap second-hand petrol car).
But we haven't saved the planet. In fact, we've probably broke it a little more (lithium, power generation infrastructure, etc.).
So, no, I'm not a Tesla fan by any stretch of the imagination. The closest I get is that I once priced up an all-electric moped now that my job is ten minutes away rather than 2 hours. But even that was only because I already have a 32A charging socket on the outside of my house (for a kiln), could plug it into a 13A socket and - just in my lunch hour -charge it enough to get home. And I get free road tax. And no congestion charge. And cheaper insurance. And even then, I can't really justify the purchase price compared to an old clunker of a huge second hand petrol car that I can put a 12ft shed in (plus a complete replacement once a year or so).
But, actually, electric cars are just the same as petrol cars here. When you have something of that energy density contained in a metal box, that's tinkered with by random garages and amateur enthusiasts, that's parked up by the side of the road or driving over speed bumps at 50mph... eventually, statistically, enough of them will blow to provide a news story or two. And the automotive testing and recall process has been in place for decades now and you can be pretty sure that it's hard to get such products through the testing, especially with new technologies, if they are really that dangerous.
Fact is, you can cherry-pick any story you like and fudge the statistics as much as you want... an electric battery of just about any kind of this power is safer than the equivalent of sloshy, leaky, fumey explosive that your ordinary cars run off at the moment. In fact, it's one of the reasons that fuel cells just haven't taken off... as soon as you get back to putting sloshy leaky explosive stuff in a can, people go "No, thanks, I'll use a battery".
Extruding aluminum tends to be stronger than cast aluminum. I imagine 3-D printed aluminum is not as strong not to mention it is a lot more expensive and much faster.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Can we get slashdot off Musk's nutsack please? This nutswinging on Musk and Tesla is the greatest car ever is horseshit is getting old. Now he's changing the design great, work the problem Elon. Let us all know when your cars don't catch fire from just sitting there.
What? Like a Porsche GT3? You speak as if gas powered vehicles don't randomly catch fire all the time, and nobody says boo. Troll.
Next up: CowCatchers on the Tesla X!
Confirmation bias. You hang around someone intelligent people, you fail to recognize the rest of the country is bat-shit stupid.
50k tons is indeed huge, the presses that extrude the entire side of a full sized van are only around 2k tons and they shake the ground for a hundred acres around them even though they sit on huge shock absorbers and isolators. I should see if my dad has any contacts at the Cleveland Alcoa site with two of those mega presses.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
50k tons is indeed huge,
Huge isn't the word. The battleship USS New Jersey is 58,000 tons, Empty its 48K tons. Can you imagine bench pressing a battleship?
When Tesla examined the car, they found the fire had not touched the battery, the charging system, or the electrical connectors. In other words, all of the parts of a Tesla that could cause a fire weren't involved in the fire.
Something is fishy about the owner's claim of the fire starting spontaneously in the car.
"Elon Musk criticized all the attention at the time, pointing out that it was disproportionate to the 200,000 fires in gas-powered cars over the same period."
Really,
And just how many Mercedes Benz S class cars of similar age caught fire ??
How many Porsche 911 GT3s have been involved in fires?
I worked on this:
http://www.csmonitor.com/1980/...
It was a hacked GM X-car with batteries in what was the transmission tunnel, and most of the rest of the underside of the car. And, in fact, it had a full under-pan.
I don't recall it being touted as a safety feature, but instead, it was there to help reduce wind resistance.
I think the major hazard was the potential for chlorine leaks. It leaked on The Today Show. "Oh, that? It's just chlorine, just like in your swimming pool..."
Tell that to the Madison Height, Mi. fire department! (We had them out a few times...)
I think I've seen her on Plenty of Fish.
Mostly random stuff.
Wow and here I thought the 1900 ton Minster at work was monstorous :O
No. You don't get to re-define every single century-old manufacturing process as "3D printing". You 3D nutcases have plenty of hype and overpromised enough now. Enough already.
Mostly random stuff.
Surely you mean that drag increases quadratically with spead, not exponentially. (And at lower speeds (before the air flow becomes turbulent), it's linear.) If it really were exponential, planes and rockets wouldn't be going anywhere fast.
To illustrate: With quadratic drag, drag is four times greater at 100 km/h than at 50 km/h, and 16 times greater at 200 km/h, and so on, to 400 times greater at 1000 km/h. But if it were exponential, then the progression that matches the first two points would be one which quadruples for every 50 km/h increase in speed. So one would have: 100 km/h: 4 times, 150 km/h: 16 times, 200 km/h: 32 times, 1000 km/h: 1,099,511,627,776 times greater!
I think you might have written the best advertising material for the car so far.
We had a couple of 700-ton presses around here. They looked like they were very precisely designed to fit in a semi trailer and not have room left over (and that's probably how they were designed). Scale up by a factor of 70.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Tesla Model S Gets Titanium Underbody Shield, Aluminum Deflector Plates
This sounds more like a starship upgrade than a car upgrade.
Not really. Casting is a LOT more like 3D printing than extruding is. Both casting and 3D printing are additive and arbitrary shaping. Extruding (and forging) is neither additive nor subtractive, and is only 2D. Machining is subtractive, but it is 3D.
Yes, basically the poor guy's house caught fire and a Tesla happened to be parked inside.
Error, invalid question? I didn't describe any fatalities. Matter of fact, I specifically mentioned non-fatal accidents, just ones where the car ended up being mangled beyond recognition. I did so because that's what swb was talking about: horrific looking accidents where you wouldn't expect survivors. Those are NOT typical accidents, survival or otherwise. Neither is 100+mph through two concrete barriers and a tree, much less with the driver surviving, being able to exit the vehicle under his own power elevates it to 'astonishing'.
As for the Tesla, to date that I'm aware of there have been NO fatalities(knock on wood) to the occupants of a Tesla in an accident. There have been fatalities to people HIT by a Tesla, but the occupants in those cases were fine*.
*Alive and relatively unharmed, though I understand a couple of them are facing serious legal consequences to their actions.
I don't read AC A human right
Catalytic converters are notorious for starting fires, especially in dry grassy areas.
Imagine what could happen if they reverse the polarity of the deflector shield!
Sure. You can't extrude a honeycomb. You need a "constant" cross section that's not too big, instead using the length of the extruded section to get the size you want. So you can extrude a beam easily enough. A honeycomb like the one you saw, not so much. (Doing it the "other way" would work though, and likewise wouldn't work on a CNC. You can't mill to those depths.).
Stefan Axelsson
Right from the linked article (I know, you would have had to RTFA):
Tesla service will also retrofit the shields, free of charge, to existing cars upon request or as part of a normally scheduled service.
Sam
There are other articles indicating that they won't fix it so the message is confused. If it were under a recall then Tesla would be compelled to fix it not just wait for a customer to ask for it especially since the shielding is for safety reasons.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"