So.... he didn't read the requirements before he started
Right, so you apparently think there was just some printed list sitting around of what NASA will and won't accept when you want to do something that's not been done before (propulsive crew landing)? As was made abundantly clear, what NASA will and won't accept came out of discussions with NASA. It became increasingly clear over time that they weren't going to allow it, so they cut it. I'm sure that you and your army of space psychics could have handled it better.
didn't look at previous NASA designs used successfully,
Yeah, let's just go back to Redstones. Because that will surely lead us to the future that SpaceX is working to achieve! The whole point is to innovate in ways that can make access to space cheaper and more routine, not to keep repeating what we know doesn't allow for cheap, routine access to space.
Even his cars are low-sales,
I love this double talk that you get from Slashdotters. On one hand, bringing a brand new mode of transportation from almost nothing to huge demand, to the degree that each new model is produced is in volumes an order of magnitude than the previous and yet accumulates even greater waiting lists, isn't happening nearly fast enough, that Tesla is "low sales" (actually, no, they're not, not when you take into account market segment). On the other hand, we're also always flooded with posts about how Tesla isn't paying dividends and keeps having to take capital rounds. So let me get this straight, Slashdot. Tesla is supposed to have, in a decade, gone from "design concept for an electric car" to "selling more cars than the major automakers", of an entirely different type of vehicle, while paying dividends and not raising capital. Am I understanding this correctly?
Tesla's rate of growth has been phenomenal. The fact that you find an automaker going from almost nothing to opening up factory lines to produce hundreds of thousands of $35k+ vehicles per year in under a decade to be way to slow, boggles the mind.
Sure, it's nice that he's throwing his money away so others don't have to, but as yet he hasn't really achieved much that couldn't have been done better, faster and more usefully than just giving that same money to NASA
For decades, US launch costs had stagnated. In the matter of a few years, SpaceX cut them to a small fraction of their former value - and they've only barely just started reuse. Again, the fact that you find this to be "not really achieving much" and that you think NASA would have done better (despite decades of distinctly not doing better) likewise boggles the mind.
beta testing his shitty half-assed autopilot junk on the buying public
Questions Answer: Yes (1) Have you ever used Autopilot before? 99 % (2) Are you familiar with the car warnings that Tesla provides about how Autopilot is to be properly used? 98 % (3) Are you aware that when you first enable the Autopilot, you have to do so through the Drivers Assistance section of Settings on the center screen? 93 % (4) Are you aware / Do you know that after enabling Autopilot, you had to agree to an acknowledgment box which stated that Autopilot “is an assist feature that requires you to keep your hands on the steering wheel at all times” and that “similar to the autopilot function in airplanes, you need to maintain control and responsibility for your vehicle” while using Autopilot? 99 % (5) Do you know that each time you activate Autopilot, a message appeares on the screen behind the steering wheel stating: “Please Keep Your Hands On The Wheel; Be Prepared To Take Over At Any Time“? 96 % (6) Based on these communications, have you understood that when using Autopilot, the driver is expected to maintain control of the vehicle at all times? 98 % (7) Has the name “Autopilot” caused you to believe that the car is fully autonomous, meaning that it does not require the driver to be supervising the car? 7 % (No : 93 %)
There was an interesting study done (unrelated to the German owners survey above) which showed that the minor autopilot failures (occasional lane drift, unexpected speed changes) are ironically improving consumer safety. Users were well aware of its ability to make mistakes specifically because they're common enough, and this keeps the vast majority of users from treating the vehicle like a tool you don't have to pay attention to it; instead they tend to treat it more like cruise control. As automation improves, the danger may counterintuitively increase as users get used to never having to do anything when the vehicle is driving and thus stop paying attention.
At the same time, despite the frequency of errors, the overwhelming majority of users felt that its failures presented either no risk, or little risk, as they tend to be things that any reasonable driver could react to (in the same way that we don't fear cruise control because if it's looking like it's going to drive us into the rear of the car ahead of us, we slow down). E.g. autopilot never just suddenly jerks the wheel to hard right in the middle of a road or whatnot. They also get quite used to what situations you use it in and what you don't use it in (just like people do with cruise control); the fact that the system won't let you use it when it perceives its ability to follow the road to be too poor doesn't even need to factor into the equation.
That's the thing I don't get. SpaceX is saving the US government huge amounts of money. Yet so many Slashdotters have this weird conception that they're a giant leach sucking government budgets dry. Their conception is precisely the opposite of reality. ULA has been getting an unbelievable sweetheart deal for government launches, getting paid even when they don't launch anything, and charging massive fees when they do, while also getting government subsidy to develop new craft. SpaceX paid back its COTS funding in spades versus what was being doled out to ULA.
It's like you didn't even read the article or pay attention to what he said. So I guess someone has to repeat it for you.
NASA's regulations for propulsive landing of a Dragon 2 capsule are too difficult to reasonably meet. So they're dropping propulsive landing from Dragon 2. Meaning it can't land on Mars either. At the same time, they've decided that there's a better approach to landing on Mars than Dragon 2's approach of a bottom-mounted heat shield and side-mounted thrusters.
And for the record, that better approach is what they're looking at with ITS - a side lifting body heat shield with base thrusters for landing. The latter spreads the heat out over a much larger area (Dragon 2 had no option for that because it had no giant, partially empty propellant tanks attached) and increases the length of time over which the heating occurs, slowing the rate.
It'll be interesting to see their changes to ITS. I'm glad to see that "smaller" is among them - I like ambition, but ITS was a step too far, IMHO.
Where I am, our code doesn't work with newer versions of a dependency library. Two developers have tried to work around the incompatibility, and failed. So until we can scrounge together enough time to redevelop the frontend from scratch, we're stuck installing old versions of the library, and just hoping that no OS changes render older versions of the library inoperable - otherwise we won't be able to upgrade OSes either.
That said, this doesn't fit the topic, because our boss knows all of this. We keep our boss well in the loop. He used to work as a programmer the software, and still does some work on it from time to time. That's IMHO how it should be.
Things work best when workers aren't afraid of their boss. I hate Machiavellian workplaces.
Autopilot is the best excuse for a driver getting into an accident that ever was invented. "No officer, it wasn't me! My car did it on its own!"
Thankfully, it's easy for Tesla to avoid legal liability for things like this because the car logs when autopilot is actually in use and what it's doing. Unfortunately, it doesn't help with the PR aspect, as the media just blindly reports that it was Autopilot before taking the time to find out if it actually was.
I'm in Iceland, yet won't be able to see it. In part because it's cloudy, but mainly because we don't get a real "night" at this time of the year. You'll have a better view of it in the states than up here by the Arctic Circle;)
You're interpreting "not being designed for the track" as "has bad handling", as if the two are at all the same thing. The Model S has superb handing, and reviews are almost uniformly in agreement on this. It's not a track car because it's not designed to handle track cooling loads, having nothing to do with handling.
The track car market is much smaller than the luxury sedan market, so obviously it isn't their target. That said, they do plan to make an actual track car, which will be their next generation Roadster (the first generation, like Tesla's other cars, was a road car, not a track car). It's also targeting a bone-crushing sub-2-second 0-60, too - they're calling the drive mode "Ultimate Plaid";) And that's stock, with stock tires, etc.
I don't know if that's the drivetrain I sampled. But from the back seat, on a short stretch of road closed off for the Tesla event, the Model 3 launched with ferocious grip and absolutely zero drama. It wasn't quite the chest-collapsing wallop of a Model S P90D in Ludicrous mode, but without a stopwatch, I'd say the Model 3 I rode in zipped from a dead stop to 75 mph a bit quicker than a Subaru WRX STI—silently.
Sadly, there was no place to get a good impression of the Model 3's steady-state handling or lateral grip, but our driver zig-zagged through a handful of quick slalom maneuvers. The Model 3 stayed nearly flat, with plenty of grip. Credit Tesla's low-slung platform, which puts the mass of the batteries (and in this case, the dual motors) as low as possible in the package.
From this, you apparently derive that it has horrible handling?
Expected to be 400-600 kilos lighter than a Cayenne in the baseline version, and similar to a Mustang. The center of mass is ridiculously low. It should stick to the roads like a dream.
If you're basing your expectations on the S, again, that's baffling, because the S has gotten superb reviews on its handling. Here's Jalopnik's, for example:
On an open, winding stretch of Skyline Road the P85D feels at home. It's a road I know, and the Tesla hunkers down and devours it. But underneath the sheer speed is that battery pack and extra motor, mounted oh-so-low in the car. Through high-speed sweepers and cambered corners is this thoroughly odd sensation of ample mass sliding underneath you, but it never feels cumbersome. There's a certain amount of security that comes with hurtling that amount of weight with such a lower center of gravity through corner after corner, and the tires and motors do their best to keep it in check. There's grip for days, more than I expected, and the only time the Tesla felt out of its element was in the tightest, single-lane switchbacks that vein out from Skyline. Good sports sedans shrink around you; the Model S doesn't, but that seems like a lowly demerit given everything else it's capable of.
S is much heavier than 3, because it's a larger vehicle and has a larger pack. The all-aluminum frame helps compensate (Model 3 is steel + aluminum), but the baseline 3 will almost certainly be sub-2 tonne, with a lot of the speculation in the 1,6 to 1,9 tonne range.
It's funny how much we've gotten used to these sort of performance figures being affordable (mid-5 figures). 5 seconds was supercar speeds back in the 1980s (e.g. 1985 Ferrari Testarossa). Nowadays, for an econobox you get figures like 8,3 sec (2016 Civic EX sedan); 8,0 sec (2017 Camry XSE); etc. And even the econoboxes have options to improve performance - for example for $35k you can get a Camry getting closer to a baseline Model 3's performance (XSE V6, 6,1 sec), and Honda has the sporty Civic Type R beating a baseline Model 3 (4,9 sec) for around the same price (although with less impressive standard features and much higher operating costs). By comparison, the 1973 Honda Civic had a 0-60 of 19,1 sec;)
5.6 seconds is the acceleration of a low-end Mustang (which also costs about the same as a baseline Model S). A typical econobox sedan these days does it in about 8 seconds, more like 9 for a typical crossover. On the opposite side of the spectrum, the fastest Veyron is 2.4, and the fastest Model S 2.34. The performance option for the Model 3 hasn't been announced (although it's been announced that there will be one); I'd expect it to be in the 3.5-5 second range, depending on a lot of factors. It won't be able to hit the top S speeds because it can't support as big of a pack; nor would Tesla want to make it be able to, as they want to have a reason for higher-end buyers to choose the higher-end vehicle class (Model S).
As for driving range: the more powerful you make an EV, the further it's range. It's the opposite of gasoline vehicles. In addition to needing a larger pack for more power, more power also means lower resistance conductors; this means lower energy loss at cruising speeds.
Now, if the GP meant "if you're constantly pushing a vehicle to its limits, you go a shorter distance with a more powerful vehicle", that's obviously true for both EV and gasoline. But range figures (for both EV and gasoline) are not for track duty, they're for normal road duty.
I understand how this might confuse people as I had the same misunderstanding of heat pumps myself.
I have no confusion about heat pumps. The standard for cold weather with a reversible heat pump is to combine it with resistive heating. Preferably high voltage resistive heating with PTC heating elements. Heat scavenging from the drivetrain further improves performance.
No, you don't. The batteries need to be protected from being frozen.
A cruising li-ion EV on the highway is putting 300-400W into its battery pack, a couple hundred into wiring, and perhaps 800W into each of the motor and inverter. You can take power from the latter three at will. The former you can take at a rate slower than it enters, assuming that it's preheated and that said rate is positive; if it's cold enough and poorly insulated enough, then heat loss is greater than incoming heat and you have to use resistive heating and/or scavenged heat from the drivetrain.
Not all EVs make good use of heat scavenging, but at least the Model S does a good job scavenging it. Which is why heating doesn't cut as much of the range as you'd expect. For example, at 120kph / -20C the 75's range drops from 328km to 293km by using the heater - 11% for nearly three hours of heating at a quite cold external temperature.
You realize that a commercial driver that stopped for only 15 minutes every several hours in the EU would be fined and potentially stripped of their license, don't you? Law requires 45 minutes per 4 1/2 of driving. Why? Because long stretches without having a legitimate break are not safe. The longer you drive for, the more likely you are to get into an accident.
Also, for that matter, do you not eat? Or do you eat behind the wheel also, further increasing your risk of an accident?
Apparently where you live a $16k car does 0-60 in 5.6 seconds (base model, not performance model), has front and side collision avoidance (standard), drives for 2-3 cents per mile and has 1/10th the moving parts of a normal car.
Hey, while you're at it, why not compare it to a Tata Nano? Or a used Yugo held together by duct tape?
Is it the bottom of the market? No, of course not. In fact, there's nothing about it that could be described as bottom of the market. But $35k is neither out of the ordinary for a car of its featureset / performance, nor some sort of unaffordable luxury cruiser or supercar. And they did this in half a decade from a small two-seat six-figure car. I mean, for crying out loud, how fast of a price reduction would make you happy? They've furthermore laid out clear plans to continue the price reduction trend, with Gigafactory and its successors. Even at the current price, their current preorders amount to over a year's wait at full production.
That some people find this to be some sort of slow pace of advancement and scaleup boggles the mind. It's like having to wait 8 seconds to heat up some food and complaining, "Come on!!! Isn't there anything faster than a microwave?" And at the same time you see the same people complaining that Tesla has to keep doing financing rounds rather than paying dividends. So they're apparently supposed to take their current supermassive production scaleup / price scaledown curve, increase it severalfold, and do that without investor money.
Lol, just ran into two Google easter eggs that I'd never heard of before - searching for "blink tag" or "marquee tag" cause google to blink and marquee their respective search results;)
Right. Unicode shouldn't be allowed because there's (easily group-blockable) emoji in them. The same reason that HTML should be banned because of the MARQUEE tag.
Selinux failures commonly being interpreted as file permission failures, leading to misleading error reporting. Selinux failures on libraries or other files that programs don't expect to experience permissions failures on, leading to mysterious failures which you have to track down with strace.
Slashdot doesn't need to allow all of unicode (feel free to leave out emoji, for example), but at least allow common letters and symbols. Slashdot's current behavior - silently stripping them - is terrible. It can distort the meaning of text - when talking about foreign matters, when using math / science symbols, etc. It's made me look like an idiot several times - e.g. there's a world of difference between "My morning coffee is fine, but 10(DEGREE MARK) more would be perfect" and "My morning coffee is fine, but 10 more would be perfect". And thorn is a common letter where I live, so whenever I mention people or place names from where I am they get mangled. I've also had problems copy-pasting text from other sites that happened to have unicode symbols in them. On occasion, rather than silently stripping them, Slashdot has instead transformed them into gibberish.
And my reaction to the guy going the aforementioned 1836 miles in 24 hours on public roads: it's a shame he wasn't arrested for endangering the public. Sleep deprivation combined with high speeds is nothing to boast about.
Today's crop of electric vehicles lets you do cross country trips as fast as is safe to do. The charging "downtime" is roughly the same people are supposed to take (and commercial drivers are required to take in many countries). For example, in the EU it's "a break or breaks totalling at least 45 minutes after no more than 4 hours 30 minutes driving". A commercial driver doing more than that is breaking the law.
What about being able to drive for 3-4 hours straight without a break is insufficient to you? It's not even considered safe to drive for six hours straight, you're supposed to take a break every couple hours regardless.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, so you apparently think there was just some printed list sitting around of what NASA will and won't accept when you want to do something that's not been done before (propulsive crew landing)? As was made abundantly clear, what NASA will and won't accept came out of discussions with NASA. It became increasingly clear over time that they weren't going to allow it, so they cut it. I'm sure that you and your army of space psychics could have handled it better.
Yeah, let's just go back to Redstones. Because that will surely lead us to the future that SpaceX is working to achieve! The whole point is to innovate in ways that can make access to space cheaper and more routine, not to keep repeating what we know doesn't allow for cheap, routine access to space.
I love this double talk that you get from Slashdotters. On one hand, bringing a brand new mode of transportation from almost nothing to huge demand, to the degree that each new model is produced is in volumes an order of magnitude than the previous and yet accumulates even greater waiting lists, isn't happening nearly fast enough, that Tesla is "low sales" (actually, no, they're not, not when you take into account market segment). On the other hand, we're also always flooded with posts about how Tesla isn't paying dividends and keeps having to take capital rounds. So let me get this straight, Slashdot. Tesla is supposed to have, in a decade, gone from "design concept for an electric car" to "selling more cars than the major automakers", of an entirely different type of vehicle, while paying dividends and not raising capital. Am I understanding this correctly?
Tesla's rate of growth has been phenomenal. The fact that you find an automaker going from almost nothing to opening up factory lines to produce hundreds of thousands of $35k+ vehicles per year in under a decade to be way to slow, boggles the mind.
For decades, US launch costs had stagnated. In the matter of a few years, SpaceX cut them to a small fraction of their former value - and they've only barely just started reuse. Again, the fact that you find this to be "not really achieving much" and that you think NASA would have done better (despite decades of distinctly not doing better) likewise boggles the mind.
Questions Answer: Yes
(1) Have you ever used Autopilot before? 99 %
(2) Are you familiar with the car warnings that Tesla provides about how Autopilot is to be properly used? 98 %
(3) Are you aware that when you first enable the Autopilot, you have to do so through the Drivers Assistance section of Settings on
the center screen? 93 %
(4) Are you aware / Do you know that after enabling Autopilot, you had to agree to an acknowledgment box which stated that
Autopilot “is an assist feature that requires you to keep your hands on the steering wheel at all times” and that “similar to the
autopilot function in airplanes, you need to maintain control and responsibility for your vehicle” while using Autopilot? 99 %
(5) Do you know that each time you activate Autopilot, a message appeares on the screen behind the steering wheel stating:
“Please Keep Your Hands On The Wheel; Be Prepared To Take Over At Any Time“? 96 %
(6) Based on these communications, have you understood that when using Autopilot, the driver is expected to maintain control of the
vehicle at all times? 98 %
(7) Has the name “Autopilot” caused you to believe that the car is fully autonomous, meaning that it does not require the driver to be
supervising the car? 7 % (No : 93 %)
There was an interesting study done (unrelated to the German owners survey above) which showed that the minor autopilot failures (occasional lane drift, unexpected speed changes) are ironically improving consumer safety. Users were well aware of its ability to make mistakes specifically because they're common enough, and this keeps the vast majority of users from treating the vehicle like a tool you don't have to pay attention to it; instead they tend to treat it more like cruise control. As automation improves, the danger may counterintuitively increase as users get used to never having to do anything when the vehicle is driving and thus stop paying attention.
At the same time, despite the frequency of errors, the overwhelming majority of users felt that its failures presented either no risk, or little risk, as they tend to be things that any reasonable driver could react to (in the same way that we don't fear cruise control because if it's looking like it's going to drive us into the rear of the car ahead of us, we slow down). E.g. autopilot never just suddenly jerks the wheel to hard right in the middle of a road or whatnot. They also get quite used to what situations you use it in and what you don't use it in (just like people do with cruise control); the fact that the system won't let you use it when it perceives its ability to follow the road to be too poor doesn't even need to factor into the equation.
That's the thing I don't get. SpaceX is saving the US government huge amounts of money. Yet so many Slashdotters have this weird conception that they're a giant leach sucking government budgets dry. Their conception is precisely the opposite of reality. ULA has been getting an unbelievable sweetheart deal for government launches, getting paid even when they don't launch anything, and charging massive fees when they do, while also getting government subsidy to develop new craft. SpaceX paid back its COTS funding in spades versus what was being doled out to ULA.
It's like you didn't even read the article or pay attention to what he said. So I guess someone has to repeat it for you.
NASA's regulations for propulsive landing of a Dragon 2 capsule are too difficult to reasonably meet. So they're dropping propulsive landing from Dragon 2. Meaning it can't land on Mars either. At the same time, they've decided that there's a better approach to landing on Mars than Dragon 2's approach of a bottom-mounted heat shield and side-mounted thrusters.
And for the record, that better approach is what they're looking at with ITS - a side lifting body heat shield with base thrusters for landing. The latter spreads the heat out over a much larger area (Dragon 2 had no option for that because it had no giant, partially empty propellant tanks attached) and increases the length of time over which the heating occurs, slowing the rate.
It'll be interesting to see their changes to ITS. I'm glad to see that "smaller" is among them - I like ambition, but ITS was a step too far, IMHO.
Wow... this wins the thread.
Just... bravo.
Where I am, our code doesn't work with newer versions of a dependency library. Two developers have tried to work around the incompatibility, and failed. So until we can scrounge together enough time to redevelop the frontend from scratch, we're stuck installing old versions of the library, and just hoping that no OS changes render older versions of the library inoperable - otherwise we won't be able to upgrade OSes either.
That said, this doesn't fit the topic, because our boss knows all of this. We keep our boss well in the loop. He used to work as a programmer the software, and still does some work on it from time to time. That's IMHO how it should be.
Things work best when workers aren't afraid of their boss. I hate Machiavellian workplaces.
Which, IMHO, is a good thing.
If I did nothing wrong, I want my car to exonerate me.
If it was my fault, then I deserve what I have coming.
He said / she said is a terrible system.
Autopilot is the best excuse for a driver getting into an accident that ever was invented. "No officer, it wasn't me! My car did it on its own!"
Thankfully, it's easy for Tesla to avoid legal liability for things like this because the car logs when autopilot is actually in use and what it's doing. Unfortunately, it doesn't help with the PR aspect, as the media just blindly reports that it was Autopilot before taking the time to find out if it actually was.
I'm in Iceland, yet won't be able to see it. In part because it's cloudy, but mainly because we don't get a real "night" at this time of the year. You'll have a better view of it in the states than up here by the Arctic Circle ;)
You're interpreting "not being designed for the track" as "has bad handling", as if the two are at all the same thing. The Model S has superb handing, and reviews are almost uniformly in agreement on this. It's not a track car because it's not designed to handle track cooling loads, having nothing to do with handling.
The track car market is much smaller than the luxury sedan market, so obviously it isn't their target. That said, they do plan to make an actual track car, which will be their next generation Roadster (the first generation, like Tesla's other cars, was a road car, not a track car). It's also targeting a bone-crushing sub-2-second 0-60, too - they're calling the drive mode "Ultimate Plaid" ;) And that's stock, with stock tires, etc.
This is about the closest you'll get
From this, you apparently derive that it has horrible handling?
Expected to be 400-600 kilos lighter than a Cayenne in the baseline version, and similar to a Mustang. The center of mass is ridiculously low. It should stick to the roads like a dream.
If you're basing your expectations on the S, again, that's baffling, because the S has gotten superb reviews on its handling. Here's Jalopnik's, for example:
S is much heavier than 3, because it's a larger vehicle and has a larger pack. The all-aluminum frame helps compensate (Model 3 is steel + aluminum), but the baseline 3 will almost certainly be sub-2 tonne, with a lot of the speculation in the 1,6 to 1,9 tonne range.
Amazing statement about the handling of a vehicle that's not even on the roads yet.
You know, you could try to at least appear unbiased.
For some more figures....
Porsche Cayenne: Baseline (2012 and earlier) 7,3sec; Diesel V6 (2013) 6,8 sec; Diesel V8 (2013) 5,3 sec; S (2011) 5,6 sec; S (2015) 5.1 sec; S hybrid (2011) 6,2 sec; S E-hybrid (2016) 5,2 sec; Turbo (2015 and earlier) 4,2-4,3 sec; Turbo S (2016) 3,8 sec.
Ford Mustang: Ecoboost (2015, various): 5,3-6,0 sec; V6 (2016): 5,3 sec; GT (2015, various) 4,3-4,7 sec
It's funny how much we've gotten used to these sort of performance figures being affordable (mid-5 figures). 5 seconds was supercar speeds back in the 1980s (e.g. 1985 Ferrari Testarossa). Nowadays, for an econobox you get figures like 8,3 sec (2016 Civic EX sedan); 8,0 sec (2017 Camry XSE); etc. And even the econoboxes have options to improve performance - for example for $35k you can get a Camry getting closer to a baseline Model 3's performance (XSE V6, 6,1 sec), and Honda has the sporty Civic Type R beating a baseline Model 3 (4,9 sec) for around the same price (although with less impressive standard features and much higher operating costs). By comparison, the 1973 Honda Civic had a 0-60 of 19,1 sec ;)
I don't understand either of the above posts.
5.6 seconds is the acceleration of a low-end Mustang (which also costs about the same as a baseline Model S). A typical econobox sedan these days does it in about 8 seconds, more like 9 for a typical crossover. On the opposite side of the spectrum, the fastest Veyron is 2.4, and the fastest Model S 2.34. The performance option for the Model 3 hasn't been announced (although it's been announced that there will be one); I'd expect it to be in the 3.5-5 second range, depending on a lot of factors. It won't be able to hit the top S speeds because it can't support as big of a pack; nor would Tesla want to make it be able to, as they want to have a reason for higher-end buyers to choose the higher-end vehicle class (Model S).
As for driving range: the more powerful you make an EV, the further it's range. It's the opposite of gasoline vehicles. In addition to needing a larger pack for more power, more power also means lower resistance conductors; this means lower energy loss at cruising speeds.
Now, if the GP meant "if you're constantly pushing a vehicle to its limits, you go a shorter distance with a more powerful vehicle", that's obviously true for both EV and gasoline. But range figures (for both EV and gasoline) are not for track duty, they're for normal road duty.
And when they grab you with those metal claws, you can't break free. Because they're made of metal. And robots are strong.
I have no confusion about heat pumps. The standard for cold weather with a reversible heat pump is to combine it with resistive heating. Preferably high voltage resistive heating with PTC heating elements. Heat scavenging from the drivetrain further improves performance.
A cruising li-ion EV on the highway is putting 300-400W into its battery pack, a couple hundred into wiring, and perhaps 800W into each of the motor and inverter. You can take power from the latter three at will. The former you can take at a rate slower than it enters, assuming that it's preheated and that said rate is positive; if it's cold enough and poorly insulated enough, then heat loss is greater than incoming heat and you have to use resistive heating and/or scavenged heat from the drivetrain.
Not all EVs make good use of heat scavenging, but at least the Model S does a good job scavenging it. Which is why heating doesn't cut as much of the range as you'd expect. For example, at 120kph / -20C the 75's range drops from 328km to 293km by using the heater - 11% for nearly three hours of heating at a quite cold external temperature.
You realize that a commercial driver that stopped for only 15 minutes every several hours in the EU would be fined and potentially stripped of their license, don't you? Law requires 45 minutes per 4 1/2 of driving. Why? Because long stretches without having a legitimate break are not safe. The longer you drive for, the more likely you are to get into an accident.
Also, for that matter, do you not eat? Or do you eat behind the wheel also, further increasing your risk of an accident?
Apparently where you live a $16k car does 0-60 in 5.6 seconds (base model, not performance model), has front and side collision avoidance (standard), drives for 2-3 cents per mile and has 1/10th the moving parts of a normal car.
Hey, while you're at it, why not compare it to a Tata Nano? Or a used Yugo held together by duct tape?
Is it the bottom of the market? No, of course not. In fact, there's nothing about it that could be described as bottom of the market. But $35k is neither out of the ordinary for a car of its featureset / performance, nor some sort of unaffordable luxury cruiser or supercar. And they did this in half a decade from a small two-seat six-figure car. I mean, for crying out loud, how fast of a price reduction would make you happy? They've furthermore laid out clear plans to continue the price reduction trend, with Gigafactory and its successors. Even at the current price, their current preorders amount to over a year's wait at full production.
That some people find this to be some sort of slow pace of advancement and scaleup boggles the mind. It's like having to wait 8 seconds to heat up some food and complaining, "Come on!!! Isn't there anything faster than a microwave?" And at the same time you see the same people complaining that Tesla has to keep doing financing rounds rather than paying dividends. So they're apparently supposed to take their current supermassive production scaleup / price scaledown curve, increase it severalfold, and do that without investor money.
New conspiracy theory: Elon Musk is a follower of Roko's Basilisk.
Lol, just ran into two Google easter eggs that I'd never heard of before - searching for "blink tag" or "marquee tag" cause google to blink and marquee their respective search results ;)
Right. Unicode shouldn't be allowed because there's (easily group-blockable) emoji in them. The same reason that HTML should be banned because of the MARQUEE tag.
Selinux failures commonly being interpreted as file permission failures, leading to misleading error reporting.
Selinux failures on libraries or other files that programs don't expect to experience permissions failures on, leading to mysterious failures which you have to track down with strace.
Exactly what I've been asking for for ages!
Slashdot doesn't need to allow all of unicode (feel free to leave out emoji, for example), but at least allow common letters and symbols. Slashdot's current behavior - silently stripping them - is terrible. It can distort the meaning of text - when talking about foreign matters, when using math / science symbols, etc. It's made me look like an idiot several times - e.g. there's a world of difference between "My morning coffee is fine, but 10(DEGREE MARK) more would be perfect" and "My morning coffee is fine, but 10 more would be perfect". And thorn is a common letter where I live, so whenever I mention people or place names from where I am they get mangled. I've also had problems copy-pasting text from other sites that happened to have unicode symbols in them. On occasion, rather than silently stripping them, Slashdot has instead transformed them into gibberish.
And my reaction to the guy going the aforementioned 1836 miles in 24 hours on public roads: it's a shame he wasn't arrested for endangering the public. Sleep deprivation combined with high speeds is nothing to boast about.
Today's crop of electric vehicles lets you do cross country trips as fast as is safe to do. The charging "downtime" is roughly the same people are supposed to take (and commercial drivers are required to take in many countries). For example, in the EU it's "a break or breaks totalling at least 45 minutes after no more than 4 hours 30 minutes driving". A commercial driver doing more than that is breaking the law.
What about being able to drive for 3-4 hours straight without a break is insufficient to you? It's not even considered safe to drive for six hours straight, you're supposed to take a break every couple hours regardless.