Tesla Presses Its Case On Fuel Standards

An anonymous reader writes: Tesla is preparing their case to leave federal mileage and emissions regulations intact, or make them even more strict. In addition, the company is fighting other car makers from loosening more stringent regulations in California. The WSJ reports: "Tougher regulations could benefit Tesla, while challenging other auto makers that make bigger profits on higher-margin trucks and sport-utility vehicles. Tesla's vice president of development, Dairmuid O'Connell, plans to argue to auto executives and other industry experts attending a conference on the northern tip of Michigan that car companies can meet regulations as currently written. 'We are about to hear a lot of rhetoric that Americans don't want to buy electric vehicles,' Mr. O'Connell said in an interview ahead of a Tuesday presentation in Traverse City, Mich. 'From an empirical standpoint, the [regulations] are very weak, eminently achievable and the only thing missing is the will to put compelling products on the road.'"

Comments

Not surprising

[Registered Coward v2]

Every company likes regulations that limits competition or hurts competitors; while fighting any that impacts its profitability.

Re:Not surprising

[mc6809e]

And politicians enjoy the power to write regulation enabling law so as to extort campaign contributions from companies.

Re:Not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I don't benefit. Thanks to the EPA, car makers can't engineer diesels to run with significant reliability. If I go buy a diesel car, there is a good chance that the DPF may get plugged (which is a $3200 item), or many other issues.

Even though the piss tank (DEF) is for the exhaust, there is always the chance of the EPA-mandated DRM on the ECM saying that it is empty and disabling the vehicle. Nothing like getting the "5 more starts allowed" warning when low on fuel in the middle of nowhere, especially nowhere near a repair depot, even with the pee can is full.

Am I benefiting from the EPA's Draconian legislation? No. There are diminishing returns on high MPG, and any benefits I gain are lost due to the vehicle being in the repair shop.

In general, has the US benefited from the EPA in the past 15 years? No. Too many regulations too fast. The entire steel industry was shut down due to the EPA and now there are more resources consumed because the steel that was once made here in the US now has to travel by ship, which has made pollution worldwide worse.

Granted the EPA has done some good, but in the past 15 years, they have cost many Americans their jobs, while making vehicles less reliable, with the parts that break extremely expensive.

Re:Not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

In general, has the US benefited from the EPA in the past 15 years?

Yes, far more so than it would from the pollution that would have otherwise probably not been addressed.

Too many regulations too fast.

Let's see some data.

The entire steel industry was shut down due to the EPA and now there are more resources consumed because the steel that was once made here in the US now has to travel by ship, which has made pollution worldwide worse.

Are you sure about this? Production of steel in the US was ~100 million tons in 2000, it's now ~85 million, but much of that drop can be attributed to the faltering economy, and the job losses? Technology, as productivity increased, while demand did not.

That, and China feeding its own domestic markets, in order to cut down on that ship travel you dislike, but then exceeding its own domestic demand, so having excess to dispose of through export.

Granted the EPA has done some good, but in the past 15 years, they have cost many Americans their jobs, while making vehicles less reliable, with the parts that break extremely expensive.

If you want the EPA to require your car to be made reliable, I think that's a bit excessive, wouldn't there be some other means by which you can require that?

Regulating the pollution levels is enough, that's something harder to detect, as the effects are far more separated from their causes.

Re:Not surprising

[RingDev]

Actually, I don't benefit. Thanks to the EPA, car makers can't engineer diesels to run with significant reliability.

That's pure BS right there.

I've got an '06 VW Golf TDi that has been running on ULSD since '08 with over 160,000 miles on it. I haven't had a single drive train failure on it.

I've replaced the glow plugs (Wisconsin winters are brutal), the timing belt (at ~100k miles), and regular oil changes at 10k miles. And I still pull 44mpg highway.

No vehicles have required DEF since 2008. It was a short term solution to meet EPA bin requirements in 2007/2008 while still running on low sulfur diesel fuel. Ultra low sulfur diesel, ULSD, does not require DEF to meet EPA requirements.

The EPA hasn't cost any jobs. It increases costs insignificantly, but the quantity of jobs is entirely dependent on demand. The few bucks that EPA regs add to the price of a car do not meaningfully impact demand.

-Rick

Smart

[Gordo_1]

Hey I like Tesla as much as the next guy, but wake me up when a corporation lobbies government in a way that goes against their own self-interest.

The theory here is that if more stringent fuel mileage standards are maintained, it will force traditional automakers to either make more tiny, anemic 4 cylinder gas engines (early 1980s anyone?) or push further into hybrid and electric car territory in order to deliver meaningful power without as much (or any) gasoline. In either situation, Tesla stands to gain as either they compete with comparatively fast, powerful vehicles (Model S, X, 3) or they are competing apples to apples in electrics/plug-in hybrids for which they'll have significant control over lithium ion battery production with the Gigafactory, and a 5-10 year head start at building ground up purpose-built all-electrics.

Re:Smart

[drinkypoo]

Hey I like Tesla as much as the next guy, but wake me up when a corporation lobbies government in a way that goes against their own self-interest.

Wake me up when they prove that they're actually performing battery swaps, which is required at this phase to get all the credits they're getting. There's no evidence that they can do it, let alone that they are doing it. (If anyone feels differently, let's see some photographic evidence of a swap actually taking place; I am not interested in seeing the pictures of the car sitting in the swap station with nothing happening.)

Re:Smart

[Gordo_1]

They *are* doing them, but there are several manual steps currently. Go to Teslamotorsclub.com if you don't believe it.

For what it's worth, battery swaps are a dead end. Few people need them with Supercharging becoming more ubiquitous by the day . Tesla won't be doing widespread swaps for privately owned cars any time soon, if ever. Maybe for commercial vehicles 5-10 years down the road...

Re:Smart

[Gordo_1]

Furthermore, why all the hate over the credits? Tesla collects government incentives, Oil and gas companies collect government incentives, other automobile manufacturers collect government incentives. Yet plenty of folks constantly point out how the first successful auto manufacturing upstart in 80 years in America, apparently reaps some mythical unfair advantage over everyone else.

Re:Smart

[drinkypoo]

They *are* doing them, but there are several manual steps currently. Go to Teslamotorsclub.com if you don't believe it.

I've been there, and what I saw was a bunch of people who don't own Teslas slapping each other on the back while looking at photos which don't provide any proof that swaps are occurring.

For what it's worth, battery swaps are a dead end.

Sure, I agree. But credit systems are bullshit, too, and Tesla is gaming the credit system on top of that.

Re:Smart

[jandersen]

... theory here is that if more stringent fuel mileage standards are maintained, it will force traditional automakers...

I'm no fan of cars in general, although I would probably go for an electric vehicle next time I need to change. It looks to me like they (Tesla) are pushing for a standard that only or predominantly looks at the emissions from the vehicle, whereas the obviously right thing would be to count in all the emissions required to produce and maintain vehicles.

Re:Smart

[Cyberax]

I have a Tesla Model S. And I've participated in the battery-swap beta.

It works, almost as on the video - except you have to carefully position your car and attendant manually blocks your car's wheels from rolling.

It doesn't make a lot of sense, though. The price ($85) is not worth it, it's just easier to wait 30 minutes for a supercharge.

Re:Smart

[msauve]

"Furthermore, why all the hate over the credits? Tesla collects government incentives, Oil and gas companies collect government incentives, other automobile manufacturers collect government incentives."

So, your argument is that multiple wrongs make it right? Incentives are driven by special interests with inequitable influence. Let the people decide in a free market.

Re:Smart

[msauve]

"the Republican party which has spent the last three decades doing everything they can to cut taxes on the wealthy."

They haven't been very successful at it. From the latest data I could find (2012), the top 5% of income earners paid 58.9% of all Federal taxes, and the top 1% paid 38.1%.

Re:Smart

[GrumpySteen]

That top 1% owns 40% of the wealth in the country. Only a fool would argue that they shouldn't be paying 40% of the taxes.

Let me guess, you're a card-carrying member of the Republican party and you really believe that Fox News is fair and balanced.

Re:Smart

[Zobeid]

CARB was convinced that Tesla demonstrated the ability to swap batteries, and CARB sets the rules for ZEV credits. Tesla have done exactly what they needed to do in order to meet CARB's bizarre diktats.

Now, can anybody explain to me why battery swapping is worth additional credits in the first place? CARB's mandate is supposed to be cleaner air. Swapping batteries doesn't make the air cleaner. They give three times the ZEV credits for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles as they do for battery electric vehicles -- even though both produce the same amount of pollutant emissions: none. Where's the logic?

Oh yeah. . . The logic is that Toyota -- by some measures the largest car company in the world (effectively tied with VW, last I heard) -- unloaded a truckload of cash to lobby CARB board members.

Re:Smart

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody counts the emissions to produce any other vehicles, so why would we hold electric cars to a different standard? The manufacturing processes are not particularly worse for one than for the other.

In fact, I would bet that the reduced metal machining from not having a solid-block engine under the hood probably saves overall manufacturing emissions, once you factor it all the way back to the metal foundry, refinery, and strip mine. Only the strip mine would be comparable for rare earths that go into batteries. The refinery is much smaller due to smaller volumes and the foundry isn't really necessary at all.

Other than that, you still have to have a metal frame, metal or plastic body panels, a finished interior, glass windows, and rubber for the tires and various other parts. This is identical for any car manufacturing process.

The reason they're pushing to measure emissions is because that's the only meaningful difference between electric and ICE cars.

Re:Smart

[Zobeid]

The top range Tesla now is 270 miles per charge. How often do you drive more than 270 miles in a day? Be honest now. . . Because most of us rarely do that.

Recharging time. . . It takes 20 seconds to plug in your car in the evening. In the morning you have a full charge. That's way more convenient than going to the gas station.

If you're on the highway, taking that epic road trip, then yeah. . . You're screwed. It's gonna kill your soul when you have to stop for a 20 or 30 minute quick charge a couple of times during the long day's driving. And you totally weren't going to stop like that in your gas car, because you are a superhuman who never needs to rest, eat or use the bathroom.

I have no idea what "shitty little cars with no cargo" you are referring to. I thought the topic was Tesla? The Model S is a full-sized car with enormous cargo space, front and back. You can haul your drum kit in it.

Re:Smart

[babybird]

That's perfectly valid-- you're among the 1-5% of the population that the current Tesla isn't an ideal fit for at least several times a year. For everyone else's use case, it's way more than adequate. It may even be adequate for you, depending on how many of those trips you make. If you save enough gas during the rest of your year, the difference may be enough to rent a vehicle for those trips to your mom's house and still leave you break even or profitable relative to driving something else all year long (ignoring whether or not you can afford a Tesla right now in the first place of course).

It's not ideal in every possible situation today, and it likely never will be, but that's not a true negative because neither will any other vehicle be. But it's beneficial when it's ideal or close enough to ideal in enough situations, and for most people, Tesla has already surpassed that point (again, save for the current initial cost of the vehicle). It's already better than all of its most direct competition on most, but not all metrics, and most of its competition on several other metrics, and that was the purpose in making them in the first place-- demonstrating that it can actually be done in the real world.

So there's really very little reason for the auto industry to try to argue an opposing position if that position is already demonstrably false.

Re:Smart

[swillden]

Any system which allows for refuelability/battery swapping has a much better chance of competing with current transportation fuel methods.

Nice assertion. I'll counter with one of my own: Battery swapping has negligible effect on the ability of EVs to compete with ICEVs for consumer travel. The only case where it's of use is in long-distance, non-stop travel, which is a miniscule percentage of road miles and which can in most cases be done with a rental vehicle. As long as the people in the car need to refuel every few hours, all you need is enough range to go as far as the people can, and a sufficiently-fast recharge time that by the time the people eat the car is ready to go again.

What's needed for EVs to compete isn't battery swapping, it's lower prices for vehicles with adequate range. The Model S has the range required, now. The Nissan LEAF and similar cars are in the ballpark on price. When we get a $25K (new) EV sedan with a 250-mile range, they'll sell like hotcakes in suburban middle-class America, and pollution levels in places like LA will decline dramatically in just a few years.

This isn't to say that battery swapping never makes sense, or that better highway and home charging infrastructure (particularly for apartment dwellers) doesn't matter, but solving the price/range problem will put EVs over the hump and the rest will follow naturally.

4-bangers less anemic than they used to be

[swb]

As much as I dislike the NY Times trend towards posting videos, it was interesting to see their review of the new Volvo XC90 with a 4 cylinder engine that's supercharged AND turbocharged. IIRC the review says its rated at nearly 300 HP.

It's a large and fairly heavy car, so I don't think combined mileage was more than 25 MPG but it's definitely an improvement over the 4.4L V8 (my S80 with the same engine gets about 17 combined).

The only thing I'd worry about is if they're extracting Fast and Furious style horsepower from 4 cylinder engines is that they'll get Fast and Furious levels of engine life.

Frankly, I don't think Tesla needs to play the bootlegger-and-baptist game with fuel economy regulations to be competitive with ICE carmakers, they just need to be price and performance competitive within their model segments. At the oligarch country club where I do some work, I've seen a lot more Teslas and a lot fewer new S550s and my guess is that most of the drivers don't give a shit about the fuel cost or environmental impact of what they drive. They want performance and look-at-me status, and if it gives them an environmental cachet with their daughters' bohemian ivy league friends, so much the better,

The bigger challenge will be providing a car the plebes find competitive at the $30k mark. For tofu-eating yoga types, this won't be hard. They would drive a Prius or a Fit anyway. It's the Honda Pilot or Santa Fe buyers they need to appeal to and provide a competitive alternative.

How polite

[sjbe]

"I'm an advantaged rich prick". Sorry. There's no gentle way to say it.

Maybe not, but there is a way to say it like an asshole which you just proved.

Re:Compelling products from Detroit? unlikely

[Zak3056]

I don't have a dog in this fight, but I'm curious what relevance your "when I was a young man" story has to the GPs statement about the current corvette? Stating that something was not good in the past, and thus will never be good in the present, or the future, is not really a good argument.