The CHAdeMO charger takes nearly an additional half hour to get to 80%
Apparently you don't know the meaning of "top up".
Not to mention the 500 dollar adapter.
Right, because if you perceive a problem in your car, you wouldn't spend $500 to fix it? Most people perceive there to be no problem and thus don't buy a CHAdeMO adapter. You apparently perceive a problem. So enjoy the obvious solution.
But I see that you completely ignore that the challenge was about the Supercharger network
Yes, we all drive cars with the purpose of imposing artificial constraints on things!
It's worse than that. It's the Nth car from a given manufacturer. So buyers of popular EVs from popular manufacturers - people making EVs that people want - will cease getting the benefit. But people will get subsidized to buy unpopular EVs from manufacturers making a half-arsed attempt at them for years to come.
Leaf degradation is terrible. And everyone who saw the pack design knew it would be. Passive air cooling? Geez, if you're going to cool your car battery pack like a smartphone battery, expect it to last about as long as a smartphone battery.
This is what a proper EV pack looks like inside. This is not.
"Quick" is a relative term. Most CCS1 and CHAdeMOs are 50kW or less. Tesla's supercharger stalls are 120kW per vehicle. And the fact that there's so few chargers at most non-Tesla sites, and they're so poorly monitored, makes visiting one a risky proposition. Which is the reason why Tesla puts so many at each site - so that you can rely on them.
Honestly, I consider things like this to be a train wreck. Which one is the machine that goes "Ping!"?
If Audi, BMW and Mercedes designed smartphones they wouldn't even fit in your pocket due to all of the knobs, levers and buttons on the outside.
We don't use different peripherals for each program, we use multifunction screens and multifunction controls. It's about time the auto industry caught up (the controls in the latter case being steering wheel controls and voice commands for things you need to control while driving, and touchscreens for things that you don't, and/or things with large on-screen buttons that don't need precision presses so you don't have to take your eyes off the road).
Having a million and one controls means a million and one wiring connections (labour, weight, power draw), a million and one things that can break, and little upgradeability / patchability. Ignoring the aesthetics of clutter.
Over the course of a 20-degree weekend with minimal charging, one editor saw 134 miles of driving range disappear to warming the battery, heating the cabin
That will happen if you leave your car set to maintain cabin temperature when you're not in it. Or you could be like a normal person and just let your car get cold like everyone else. And honestly, that's a fast loss even for leaving the car preheated 24/7.
Most owners will tell you that Teslas are excellent cold-weather vehicles, particularly because you can preheat them remotely, on mains power, even if the car is in your garage, with the app. The cars also deliver instant heat, with no warmup period at all. 4WD is a relatively cheap upgrade, and actually extends your range. The cold weather range loss most affects you in start/stop city driving, which is the type of driving where range matters least and where the low speeds dramatically boost your range on their own. Etc.
Our coast-to-coast routine involved two or three hours of driving, followed by about 45 minutes of charging, rinse, repeat.
If he's spending up to 27% of his time supercharging, never better than 20%, he's doing things very wrong. Then again, he states that when he did this there were only 325 supercharger locations (there's 909 today, and they're tripling by the end of next year). The further apart, the slower you go because you need to charge to a higher level, and the last part of charging is significantly slower than the earlier part of charging. The P85D, from empty, can put on 212 miles range in half an hour from a supercharger (14% of your time charging if you're driving at around 70mph). However, that's from empty. While the first 80% is very fast (not constant speed, but close), there's a big slowdown from 80-90%, and bigger from 90-100%. So most people on roadtrips only charge to ~80% or so, unless they're out in some place with very distantly spread superchargers, say over 150mi (which there aren't many of anymore in the US).
*** Ed: Strange, his numbers don't match. His stated charge time of 15 hours 22 minutes versus a drive time of 57 hours is only 19% of his time charging. I wonder if he was exaggerating the "2-3 hours vs. 45 minutes" statement earlier.
** Ed2: Further down he indicates his charging routine. Sounds like he was mainly just suffering from how few superchargers there were back when that article was written.
We passed and drafted familiar trucks for days at a time through middle America, but the real inconvenience is that your meals are dictated by Supercharger locations. Some stops are so bereft of services that you’ll yearn for the chance to eat at a Cracker Barrel.
Well, enjoy the fact that the number of Supercharger stops has tripled since then, and will triple again over the next year and a half.
Overall, though, the article seems to be generally positive. And Tingwall is no EV fanatic, he's a longtime petrolhead.
Here's what happens when you try to burn one of Tesla's batteries. What, you really didn't think that fire was given a second thought? Fire propagation is controlled by physical isolation, active (pumping) quench, passive quench (coolant thermal inertia), controlled venting, and many other means; they have over a hundred patents and have spent a huge amount on pack engineering to reach this point.
There have been fires in Tesla vehicles, but they've been at a significantly lower rate than in gasoline vehicles. Only two (out of all the vehicles they produced) have started in the battery pack, both from large pieces of metal road debris slicing into the pack (Tesla responded by putting a titanium debris shield on the pack; there have been no more incidents since then). There have been Model S's that burned to the ground without setting off the battery pack.
As for running out of electricity, here's how it actually plays out.
1) Your vehicle keeps an estimate of your available range. It knows where all of the chargers are, what's in use / in service, and has them on navigation. We'll assume that you plan to ignore this and run your car out.
2) Your battery gets low. Your car warns you. You could go to a charger. You decide not to. You could slow down - EVs can drastically increase their range (2-3 fold) by driving slower. You choose not to.
3) Your car hits zero - but you're still not out of battery, you've still got 10-20 miles left. It puts you into power restricted mode to maximize range.
4) If you ever give up your quest to run out of power, pull off at the nearest building of any type and ask if you can plug in. Practical experience from EV owners: you almost never will get a refusal, particularly once you tell them what the power costs (almost nothing) and/or offer to pay. Regular wall charging isn't fast, but you don't need to add a lot of range - just enough to get to the next charger (which for some reason you've been trying to avoid).
I've seen plenty of gas vehicles out of gas and stuck on the road. I've never seen an EV. 5% of our new vehicle sales where I am are EVs. Now, that may just be the luck of the draw (no question that gasoline cars are still much more common), but they're certainly not running out of power left and right like your conception of them. EVs start each day with a full charge; you never "forget to go to the gas station" like happens with gasoline vehicles.
The last time I ran out of gas I was stuck in the middle of a busy road on the way to work. Apparently someone had siphoned gas out of my tank. Eventually someone came with tow cables and dragged me to the nearest gas station. Interestingly enough, had my car been electric and out of electricity (by someone siphoning electrons?), I actually would have regeneratively charged on the way to the station.
$1B backlog? There's nearly half a million reservations on a $35k-base vehicle (average expected sale value after options (luxury, performance, extended range, etc) = $43k). The Model S has a profit margin of about 25% per sale and they expect similar on the 3. You're looking at nearly $20B in sales and $5B in profit just from the already accumulated waiting list, which is increasing by about 1800 new reservations net every day.
If Tesla manages the "production hell" ramp-up without any serious glitches that cause excessive delay / QA problems / expense, they've got it made.
Has been out for awhile and nobody is buying it. What's better about the Model 3?
Lol, okay, let's go down the list. Bolt vs. Model 3. Just the base models (Model 3 is much more upgradeable)
MSRP: $37500 vs $35000 0-60: 6,5s vs. 5,6s Top speed: 90mph vs. 130mph Handling: Read for yourself (start at "What's blanching...") EPA range: 238mi vs. 220mi Max charge speed: 90mph vs. 260mph Fast charge network: Poor (single stall, poorly monitored, big holes) vs. excellent (4-8+ stalls, widespread distribution on almost all major interstates) Dealership experience: Famously hard sell and uneducated about EVs, vs. almost humorously soft-sell, behaving instead like museum curators who just want to talk about their exhibit Automatic crash avoidance: Optional extra vs. standard Climate control: Single vs. dual zone Track record for safety: less-than-stellar vs. outright-insulted-if-they-score-less-than-perfect-in-any-test. And this. Standard warranty: 3yrs / 36k mi vs. 4yrs / 50k mi (both have the same battery warranty, 8 yrs / 100k mi) Company dedication: Makes EVs as a side project to their main business vs. fully invested in EVs. Efficiency: heavier & higher drag vs. lighter and lower drag Styling: Come on, is there any contest? Even remotely? Bolt vs. Model 3. The interior difference is even worse, with the Bolt being your typical econobox interior (yet at a nearly $40k price point). Depreciation of past models: Terrible vs. Low
I could keep going. I mean, there's just no contest. Unless you're seriously in a rush, or you think Musk is the devil, I can't imagine why anyone would pick the Bolt over the Model 3.
What he doesn't have the right to do is demand that people waste away their lives for him
Yes, because he's pointing a gun at their heads and making them work for Tesla.
Musk's companies generally have people lining up to work at them. If you don't like the culture or environment there, there's plenty more who would like your job, so move aside. And so far, almost all of the criticism of Tesla is coming from UAW and the random couple UAW supporters at Tesla that they trot out every time.
given the numerous complaints about awful conditions for the workers.
All coming from the union that's trying to unionize them, and a tiny number of workers supporting the unionization. Funny that.
Where's your actual statistics that Tesla's rate of accidents is higher than average? Because Tesla cites OSHA data saying that their accident rate is a little over 2/3rds that of the industry average.
"We have received calls from multiple journalists at different publications, all around the same time," the company wrote on Sunday, "with similar allegations from seemingly similar sources about safety in the Tesla factory."
"Safety is an issue the UAW frequently raises in campaigns it runs against companies, and a topic its organizers have been promoting on social media about Tesla."
Tesla went on to says that such reports ignore safety data from 2017, which it outlined in a handful of data points.
Those points proclaim a 52-percent reduction in “lost time incidents” and 30-percent reduction in “recordable incidents” during the first quarter.
Additionally, the automaker's “total recordable incident rate,” a workplace-safety metric tracked by OSHA, sits at 4.6, while the industry average hovers around 6.7.
Hours worked per employee also fell, according to Tesla's data, with a 60-percent reduction in overtime.
And, concerning pay:
To counter that claim, Musk told employees in a leaked memo that production workers actually earn far more in total compensation—when the value of stock options are included—compared to other automakers.
He pegged that difference at $70,000 to $100,000 per year.
Tesla stock prices are now close to all-time highs, and the company's market capitalization now exceeds those of GM and Ford.
Both sides claims should of course be taken with a big grain of salt. For example, Tesla's argument of stock options is great, and yes, the workers could end up quite well off if Tesla does well. But they don't pay the rent until they vest, and UAW is right that local housing prices are killer. On the other hand, UAW doesn't bother to mention in their overwork claims that during crunch times Musk has been known to sleep in a sleeping bag at the factory, and has pledged (and at least so far, upheld) to work on any line where any employee gets injured.
Most of the work of planetary protection is just the opposite, preventing Earth microbes from contaminating other worlds. It's just a fancy word for sterilization of spacecraft, and it's stupid that Slashdot is trying to play it up like this. It's like someone who knows nothing about computers writing an article about Google posting an ad for a webmaster, with the headline "Google Seeks Man To Rule The Web!"
You can repeat that a billion times if you like, but it still doesn't answer the question why they should specifically be built by car manufacturers.
Because it shows *they don't plan on their vehicles being a hair shirt for hippies*. How many times and ways do I need to state this? It means "I'm not content for it to take half a century to scale up". It means "I want this to be a mass market vehicle". And on and on and on.
This is simply not true. High-power charging stations (aka, meaningful ones for road trips - 120+kW) are thusfar overwhelmingly only being built by Tesla.
Ah, you're moving goalposts to high-power charging stations
No, you apparently can't read. "I have trouble taking seriously any EV manufacturer who's not willing to put forth serious money into making a fast charging network"
which are only now starting to be built in significant numbers.
Wrong. Tesla has been making them for years, and now has thousands. They're on V2 of their superchargers and will soon be releasing V3. The only thing that's happening now is - and once again back to my original point which you apparently didn't read but appear to be agreeing with in this statement: it's nice to finally see other manufacturers building a serious fast charging network as well.
Can you explain how using a charging station along the way is somehow only possible if it was built by a car manufacturer?
If it's not built by a car manufacturer then there are none. Because random private entities don't pour capital into making charging stations for vehicles that don't yet exist in sufficient numbers to justify their investment, and the vehicles don't come to exist in large numbers unless there are charging stations for them to charge at. It's a very simple equation.
Selling EVs without also making a fast charging network is like selling cell phones without a cell network. Nobody is going to buy them. If you're making an X that also needs Y to exist to be profitable, you either make both X and Y yourself, or simultaneously partner with a partner to make Y at the same time. (If you're curious about cell phones, it's the exact same case - phone manufacturers worked in very close cooperation with telecoms to roll out the devices at the same time as rolling out towers, starting in specific regions and expanding outwards. The NTT/Motorola partnership was the first of these).
Thanks to this big investment from Tesla having established the market, we may finally start to see private entities building their own networks.the Bay Area and some other places are starting to get full supercharger stations, making it easy to amortize the capital costs of new stations; with 500k new EVs per year coming online with the Model 3, it's easy to see the potential for profit. But it never would have gotten to this point of full, economically viable superchargers without that investment because only a small fraction as many people would have bought Model S and X vehicles without them. There would be no Model 3 because Tesla wouldn't have gotten the investment in such a large scale production plant because their sales would have been too low to make such grandiose plans realistic.
Really, I have no clue why this concept is difficult for you.
Petrol stations were built by oil companies because there was demand. Car manufacturers never built petrol stations in any significant numbers, if at all.
Yes, and partly because of that it took half a century (1880s to 1920/1930s) before car ownership became widespread. Gas stations weren't the only problem, but they were a major one, particularly early on. Gasoline was originally unpredictable, in different formulations that may or may not work with a given vehicle, dispensed slowly and manually, sold from random corner shops in unpredictable locations, often far apart. Sound like anything being faced by the EV industry at present? The world's first custom filling station wasn't even built until 1905. The first drive-in station, not until 1913.
I'll repeat: "How many people would buy petrol cars if there were no gas stations to fill at?" Because that's the situation being faced by EV buyers today. And we don't want to wait half a century for the chicken-and-egg problem to resolve itself.
Lots of companies are building charging stations, usually energy companies, for which that is a logical step
This is simply not true. High-power charging stations (aka, meaningful ones for road trips - 120+kW) are thusfar overwhelmingly only being built by Tesla. Nissan has a decent-sized network of CHAdeMOs, but they're only about 50kW and too slow for most people to consider for road trips.
but it is by no means a necessary condition for electric cars to become succesful.
Right, EVs are totally going to take over from gasoline cars if people can't take long trips in them. Totally.
Why would a manufacturer of electric cars be any more interested in building and exploiting an electric charger network than a manufacturer of cars with internal combustion engines is in building and exploiting a network of petrol stations?
How many people would buy petrol cars if there were no gas stations to fill at?
Building a charging network means that you actually think that EVs are / will shortly be a mainstream thing for normal people, including people that actually go places, rather than just a hair shirt for hippies who are willing to put up with any inconvenience no matter how great for the benefit of Mother Earth.
Unfortunately, the current is capped. So for example, if you have a 500V charger and connect a 350V vehicle, the maximum deliverable power would be 70% of what the charger could theoretically provide. Contrarily, if you had a 350V charger, and a 500V vehice showed up, it wouldn't be able to charge at all. So there is some balance involved.
Adapters can themselves be capped, too. For example, Tesla's CHAdeMO adapters appear to cap at around 43kW, regardless of what the charger is theoretically capable of.
The mix of standards isn't a disaster, but it is a problem that I hope gets ironed out sooner rather than later. And I really hope it's not a "one standard for Europe, one for Japan, one for the US...." situation that's terrible for people moving overseas and slows down overseas deliveries of new vehicles. Even Tesla, which has their own standard in the US, can't ship its US vehicles to Europe because in Europe they use Type 2 connectors.
Indeed. And chargers already do that. They're not simple plugs, there's negotiation with the vehicle over charge rates before the charge begins.
I was reading over VW's plan... and I have to say, while it's not quite as ambitious as Tesla's, it's a lot more substantial than I expected. 450 stations with 2500 chargers in the US, a mix of 150kW and 350kW chargers, over the next two years. Tesla is currently at 140kW per charger, with plans to unveil an "over 350kW" charger soon. Tesla has 909 stations with 6118 superchargers in the US either present or in permitting/construction.
So while VW is not being quite as ambitious as Tesla, it's still a serious effort. And it makes me take VW's future EV offerings more seriously. I have trouble taking seriously any EV manufacturer who's not willing to put forth serious money into making a fast charging network; it shows that they don't actually believe that their vehicles are the future, that they just want to make a non-mass-market hair shirt to get the hippies to stop complaining.
The radiators on Tesla vehicles are located on the front, using air ducted underneath the vehicle. They're most active when the vehicle is stationary: when supercharging. Tesla uses a somewhat complex but very efficient system for balancing the varying heating and cooling needs between different parts of the vehicle. Heat can be shunted into or out of the battery pack, motor/inverter heat is captured, heat can be shunted into or out of the cabin, etc.
Speed has more of an influence than temperature. Low temperature may cut your range ~20% on a Model 3, but you can increase or decrease it by 3x by changing how fast you drive.
Also, worth mentioning: you can preheat an EV (with the app) on mains power.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently you don't know the meaning of "top up".
Right, because if you perceive a problem in your car, you wouldn't spend $500 to fix it? Most people perceive there to be no problem and thus don't buy a CHAdeMO adapter. You apparently perceive a problem. So enjoy the obvious solution.
Yes, we all drive cars with the purpose of imposing artificial constraints on things!
It's worse than that. It's the Nth car from a given manufacturer. So buyers of popular EVs from popular manufacturers - people making EVs that people want - will cease getting the benefit. But people will get subsidized to buy unpopular EVs from manufacturers making a half-arsed attempt at them for years to come.
Leaf degradation is terrible. And everyone who saw the pack design knew it would be. Passive air cooling? Geez, if you're going to cool your car battery pack like a smartphone battery, expect it to last about as long as a smartphone battery.
This is what a proper EV pack looks like inside. This is not.
Tesla's buyback program was a horrible deal for customers. You could always get a much better deal on the open market.
"Quick" is a relative term. Most CCS1 and CHAdeMOs are 50kW or less. Tesla's supercharger stalls are 120kW per vehicle. And the fact that there's so few chargers at most non-Tesla sites, and they're so poorly monitored, makes visiting one a risky proposition. Which is the reason why Tesla puts so many at each site - so that you can rely on them.
Honestly, I consider things like this to be a train wreck. Which one is the machine that goes "Ping!"?
If Audi, BMW and Mercedes designed smartphones they wouldn't even fit in your pocket due to all of the knobs, levers and buttons on the outside.
We don't use different peripherals for each program, we use multifunction screens and multifunction controls. It's about time the auto industry caught up (the controls in the latter case being steering wheel controls and voice commands for things you need to control while driving, and touchscreens for things that you don't, and/or things with large on-screen buttons that don't need precision presses so you don't have to take your eyes off the road).
Having a million and one controls means a million and one wiring connections (labour, weight, power draw), a million and one things that can break, and little upgradeability / patchability. Ignoring the aesthetics of clutter.
AC apparently thinks that the only chargers that exist in the US show up on the supercharger map.
So you might have had to stop at a CHAdeMO to top up a bit. Waaah.
AC apparently thinks that Tesla superchargers are single-stall locations.
From your article:
That will happen if you leave your car set to maintain cabin temperature when you're not in it. Or you could be like a normal person and just let your car get cold like everyone else. And honestly, that's a fast loss even for leaving the car preheated 24/7.
Most owners will tell you that Teslas are excellent cold-weather vehicles, particularly because you can preheat them remotely, on mains power, even if the car is in your garage, with the app. The cars also deliver instant heat, with no warmup period at all. 4WD is a relatively cheap upgrade, and actually extends your range. The cold weather range loss most affects you in start/stop city driving, which is the type of driving where range matters least and where the low speeds dramatically boost your range on their own. Etc.
If he's spending up to 27% of his time supercharging, never better than 20%, he's doing things very wrong. Then again, he states that when he did this there were only 325 supercharger locations (there's 909 today, and they're tripling by the end of next year). The further apart, the slower you go because you need to charge to a higher level, and the last part of charging is significantly slower than the earlier part of charging. The P85D, from empty, can put on 212 miles range in half an hour from a supercharger (14% of your time charging if you're driving at around 70mph). However, that's from empty. While the first 80% is very fast (not constant speed, but close), there's a big slowdown from 80-90%, and bigger from 90-100%. So most people on roadtrips only charge to ~80% or so, unless they're out in some place with very distantly spread superchargers, say over 150mi (which there aren't many of anymore in the US).
*** Ed: Strange, his numbers don't match. His stated charge time of 15 hours 22 minutes versus a drive time of 57 hours is only 19% of his time charging. I wonder if he was exaggerating the "2-3 hours vs. 45 minutes" statement earlier.
** Ed2: Further down he indicates his charging routine. Sounds like he was mainly just suffering from how few superchargers there were back when that article was written.
Well, enjoy the fact that the number of Supercharger stops has tripled since then, and will triple again over the next year and a half.
Overall, though, the article seems to be generally positive. And Tingwall is no EV fanatic, he's a longtime petrolhead.
Here's what happens when you try to burn one of Tesla's batteries. What, you really didn't think that fire was given a second thought? Fire propagation is controlled by physical isolation, active (pumping) quench, passive quench (coolant thermal inertia), controlled venting, and many other means; they have over a hundred patents and have spent a huge amount on pack engineering to reach this point.
There have been fires in Tesla vehicles, but they've been at a significantly lower rate than in gasoline vehicles. Only two (out of all the vehicles they produced) have started in the battery pack, both from large pieces of metal road debris slicing into the pack (Tesla responded by putting a titanium debris shield on the pack; there have been no more incidents since then). There have been Model S's that burned to the ground without setting off the battery pack.
As for running out of electricity, here's how it actually plays out.
1) Your vehicle keeps an estimate of your available range. It knows where all of the chargers are, what's in use / in service, and has them on navigation. We'll assume that you plan to ignore this and run your car out.
2) Your battery gets low. Your car warns you. You could go to a charger. You decide not to. You could slow down - EVs can drastically increase their range (2-3 fold) by driving slower. You choose not to.
3) Your car hits zero - but you're still not out of battery, you've still got 10-20 miles left. It puts you into power restricted mode to maximize range.
4) If you ever give up your quest to run out of power, pull off at the nearest building of any type and ask if you can plug in. Practical experience from EV owners: you almost never will get a refusal, particularly once you tell them what the power costs (almost nothing) and/or offer to pay. Regular wall charging isn't fast, but you don't need to add a lot of range - just enough to get to the next charger (which for some reason you've been trying to avoid).
I've seen plenty of gas vehicles out of gas and stuck on the road. I've never seen an EV. 5% of our new vehicle sales where I am are EVs. Now, that may just be the luck of the draw (no question that gasoline cars are still much more common), but they're certainly not running out of power left and right like your conception of them. EVs start each day with a full charge; you never "forget to go to the gas station" like happens with gasoline vehicles.
The last time I ran out of gas I was stuck in the middle of a busy road on the way to work. Apparently someone had siphoned gas out of my tank. Eventually someone came with tow cables and dragged me to the nearest gas station. Interestingly enough, had my car been electric and out of electricity (by someone siphoning electrons?), I actually would have regeneratively charged on the way to the station.
$1B backlog? There's nearly half a million reservations on a $35k-base vehicle (average expected sale value after options (luxury, performance, extended range, etc) = $43k). The Model S has a profit margin of about 25% per sale and they expect similar on the 3. You're looking at nearly $20B in sales and $5B in profit just from the already accumulated waiting list, which is increasing by about 1800 new reservations net every day.
If Tesla manages the "production hell" ramp-up without any serious glitches that cause excessive delay / QA problems / expense, they've got it made.
Lol, okay, let's go down the list. Bolt vs. Model 3. Just the base models (Model 3 is much more upgradeable)
MSRP: $37500 vs $35000
0-60: 6,5s vs. 5,6s
Top speed: 90mph vs. 130mph
Handling: Read for yourself (start at "What's blanching...")
EPA range: 238mi vs. 220mi
Max charge speed: 90mph vs. 260mph
Fast charge network: Poor (single stall, poorly monitored, big holes) vs. excellent (4-8+ stalls, widespread distribution on almost all major interstates)
Dealership experience: Famously hard sell and uneducated about EVs, vs. almost humorously soft-sell, behaving instead like museum curators who just want to talk about their exhibit
Automatic crash avoidance: Optional extra vs. standard
Climate control: Single vs. dual zone
Track record for safety: less-than-stellar vs. outright-insulted-if-they-score-less-than-perfect-in-any-test. And this.
Standard warranty: 3yrs / 36k mi vs. 4yrs / 50k mi (both have the same battery warranty, 8 yrs / 100k mi)
Company dedication: Makes EVs as a side project to their main business vs. fully invested in EVs.
Efficiency: heavier & higher drag vs. lighter and lower drag
Styling: Come on, is there any contest? Even remotely? Bolt vs. Model 3. The interior difference is even worse, with the Bolt being your typical econobox interior (yet at a nearly $40k price point).
Depreciation of past models: Terrible vs. Low
I could keep going. I mean, there's just no contest. Unless you're seriously in a rush, or you think Musk is the devil, I can't imagine why anyone would pick the Bolt over the Model 3.
Now it all makes sense... Musk being on Trump's committee.... his investment in boring machines.... he's planning to tunnel underneath the wall!
Yes, because he's pointing a gun at their heads and making them work for Tesla.
Musk's companies generally have people lining up to work at them. If you don't like the culture or environment there, there's plenty more who would like your job, so move aside. And so far, almost all of the criticism of Tesla is coming from UAW and the random couple UAW supporters at Tesla that they trot out every time.
All coming from the union that's trying to unionize them, and a tiny number of workers supporting the unionization. Funny that.
Where's your actual statistics that Tesla's rate of accidents is higher than average? Because Tesla cites OSHA data saying that their accident rate is a little over 2/3rds that of the industry average.
Anyone? Okay, fine, I will.
And, concerning pay:
Both sides claims should of course be taken with a big grain of salt. For example, Tesla's argument of stock options is great, and yes, the workers could end up quite well off if Tesla does well. But they don't pay the rent until they vest, and UAW is right that local housing prices are killer. On the other hand, UAW doesn't bother to mention in their overwork claims that during crunch times Musk has been known to sleep in a sleeping bag at the factory, and has pledged (and at least so far, upheld) to work on any line where any employee gets injured.
Most of the work of planetary protection is just the opposite, preventing Earth microbes from contaminating other worlds. It's just a fancy word for sterilization of spacecraft, and it's stupid that Slashdot is trying to play it up like this. It's like someone who knows nothing about computers writing an article about Google posting an ad for a webmaster, with the headline "Google Seeks Man To Rule The Web!"
Well, at least this particular fiasco is over. Now Scaramucci can go home to spend more time with his fam... ... oh. :(
Immediately after making the bad one to put him in the role in the first place.
Again and again I can't help but be reminded of this video. "If we screw up your vetting process, the next one is FREE!!!!!!"
Because it shows *they don't plan on their vehicles being a hair shirt for hippies*. How many times and ways do I need to state this? It means "I'm not content for it to take half a century to scale up". It means "I want this to be a mass market vehicle". And on and on and on.
This is simply not true. High-power charging stations (aka, meaningful ones for road trips - 120+kW) are thusfar overwhelmingly only being built by Tesla.
No, you apparently can't read. "I have trouble taking seriously any EV manufacturer who's not willing to put forth serious money into making a fast charging network"
Wrong. Tesla has been making them for years, and now has thousands. They're on V2 of their superchargers and will soon be releasing V3. The only thing that's happening now is - and once again back to my original point which you apparently didn't read but appear to be agreeing with in this statement: it's nice to finally see other manufacturers building a serious fast charging network as well.
If it's not built by a car manufacturer then there are none. Because random private entities don't pour capital into making charging stations for vehicles that don't yet exist in sufficient numbers to justify their investment, and the vehicles don't come to exist in large numbers unless there are charging stations for them to charge at. It's a very simple equation.
Selling EVs without also making a fast charging network is like selling cell phones without a cell network. Nobody is going to buy them. If you're making an X that also needs Y to exist to be profitable, you either make both X and Y yourself, or simultaneously partner with a partner to make Y at the same time. (If you're curious about cell phones, it's the exact same case - phone manufacturers worked in very close cooperation with telecoms to roll out the devices at the same time as rolling out towers, starting in specific regions and expanding outwards. The NTT/Motorola partnership was the first of these).
Thanks to this big investment from Tesla having established the market, we may finally start to see private entities building their own networks.the Bay Area and some other places are starting to get full supercharger stations, making it easy to amortize the capital costs of new stations; with 500k new EVs per year coming online with the Model 3, it's easy to see the potential for profit. But it never would have gotten to this point of full, economically viable superchargers without that investment because only a small fraction as many people would have bought Model S and X vehicles without them. There would be no Model 3 because Tesla wouldn't have gotten the investment in such a large scale production plant because their sales would have been too low to make such grandiose plans realistic.
Really, I have no clue why this concept is difficult for you.
Yes, and partly because of that it took half a century (1880s to 1920/1930s) before car ownership became widespread. Gas stations weren't the only problem, but they were a major one, particularly early on. Gasoline was originally unpredictable, in different formulations that may or may not work with a given vehicle, dispensed slowly and manually, sold from random corner shops in unpredictable locations, often far apart. Sound like anything being faced by the EV industry at present? The world's first custom filling station wasn't even built until 1905. The first drive-in station, not until 1913.
I'll repeat: "How many people would buy petrol cars if there were no gas stations to fill at?" Because that's the situation being faced by EV buyers today. And we don't want to wait half a century for the chicken-and-egg problem to resolve itself.
This is simply not true. High-power charging stations (aka, meaningful ones for road trips - 120+kW) are thusfar overwhelmingly only being built by Tesla. Nissan has a decent-sized network of CHAdeMOs, but they're only about 50kW and too slow for most people to consider for road trips.
Right, EVs are totally going to take over from gasoline cars if people can't take long trips in them. Totally.
How many people would buy petrol cars if there were no gas stations to fill at?
Building a charging network means that you actually think that EVs are / will shortly be a mainstream thing for normal people, including people that actually go places, rather than just a hair shirt for hippies who are willing to put up with any inconvenience no matter how great for the benefit of Mother Earth.
Unfortunately, the current is capped. So for example, if you have a 500V charger and connect a 350V vehicle, the maximum deliverable power would be 70% of what the charger could theoretically provide. Contrarily, if you had a 350V charger, and a 500V vehice showed up, it wouldn't be able to charge at all. So there is some balance involved.
Adapters can themselves be capped, too. For example, Tesla's CHAdeMO adapters appear to cap at around 43kW, regardless of what the charger is theoretically capable of.
The mix of standards isn't a disaster, but it is a problem that I hope gets ironed out sooner rather than later. And I really hope it's not a "one standard for Europe, one for Japan, one for the US...." situation that's terrible for people moving overseas and slows down overseas deliveries of new vehicles. Even Tesla, which has their own standard in the US, can't ship its US vehicles to Europe because in Europe they use Type 2 connectors.
Indeed. And chargers already do that. They're not simple plugs, there's negotiation with the vehicle over charge rates before the charge begins.
I was reading over VW's plan... and I have to say, while it's not quite as ambitious as Tesla's, it's a lot more substantial than I expected. 450 stations with 2500 chargers in the US, a mix of 150kW and 350kW chargers, over the next two years. Tesla is currently at 140kW per charger, with plans to unveil an "over 350kW" charger soon. Tesla has 909 stations with 6118 superchargers in the US either present or in permitting/construction.
So while VW is not being quite as ambitious as Tesla, it's still a serious effort. And it makes me take VW's future EV offerings more seriously. I have trouble taking seriously any EV manufacturer who's not willing to put forth serious money into making a fast charging network; it shows that they don't actually believe that their vehicles are the future, that they just want to make a non-mass-market hair shirt to get the hippies to stop complaining.
The radiators on Tesla vehicles are located on the front, using air ducted underneath the vehicle. They're most active when the vehicle is stationary: when supercharging. Tesla uses a somewhat complex but very efficient system for balancing the varying heating and cooling needs between different parts of the vehicle. Heat can be shunted into or out of the battery pack, motor/inverter heat is captured, heat can be shunted into or out of the cabin, etc.
Speed has more of an influence than temperature. Low temperature may cut your range ~20% on a Model 3, but you can increase or decrease it by 3x by changing how fast you drive.
Also, worth mentioning: you can preheat an EV (with the app) on mains power.