Extruding aluminum tends to be stronger than cast aluminum. I imagine 3-D printed aluminum is not as strong not to mention it is a lot more expensive and much faster.
I think this should only apply when a patent is traded or sold. I think if someone goes and files a patent, even if they never implement it then it's reasonable to be able to collect royalties, assuming the patent isn't obvious and there's no prior art. It's a problem when the patent is no longer held by the original inventor or by somebody who can't make use of the patent that it's a problem. I think it's even reasonable for a company that uses one method to do something and buys a patent for another method of doing the same thing is reasonable. It's a problem when people just buy up patents and sit on them and collect royalties on those patents. I also think it's a problem when companies like Apple create shell patent trolls. The problem with the trolls is that there's no negotiating with them because they don't infringe on anyone else's patents unless there's a patent on patent trolling.
The big problem is that these patent trolls have nothing to lose. There's no way a company can reach a cross-licensing deal since the patent troll produces no products and is otherwise just a parasite with no redeeming qualities.
I think that if a patent is traded or sold that the recipient of the patent must either produce similar products that either use the same or a related technology to what the patent covers or if they don't produce anything they have a limited time, say 3 years, in which to produce a product otherwise the patent goes to the public domain.
Tesla has since announced that battery swapping stations will be operational within the next couple months between the Bay Area and LA so I don't think it's a hoax at all.
I think part of it is that Tesla is run by Elon Musk who thinks like a consumer. He decided not to do the whole dealership thing from his own experience with dealerships. When dealerships claim to offer consumers "protection" Elon hits back perfectly comparing their protection to the kind you get from organized crime. Dealership "protection" didn't really help most Fisker buyers when Fisker went under. The Karma owners must pay out of pocket for things that their warranty and pre-paid maintenance should have covered.
They're not designed for systems but for embedded devices like firewalls, VPNs, routers, NAS, etc. They're expensive and have some very nice engines in them as well, such as the gzip engine that's 100 times as fast as software implementations, hardware pattern matching (regex) engines and content addressable memory support for firewalls and anti-virus, RAID engines for NAS to do RAID 5/6 calculations in hardware, encryption and hashing instructions, not to mention built-in support for 10 and 40Gbps Ethernet with a lot of packet acceleration. The chip of course will run Linux (Debian) and applications that run directly on top of the cores without an OS underneath for bare metal performance. The single threaded performance is a fair bit lower than an X86 based system which is why there are so many cores running in parallel. There's also a lot of special support for synchronization between the cores and various atomic instructions that have been added.
While it is fully compatible with standard 64-bit MIPS there are a lot of additional instructions since MIPS allows you to do that (ARM does not allow manufacturers to add custom instructions).
Additionally the soil tends to be rather poor as you go further north. As someone else said, everything was scraped down to the bedrock from the glaciers of the last ice age. There's only a few inches of soil.
I can tell you that it is far from artificial. This year we received almost no rain or snow. Up until February there was virtually no rain. We have since only had a few storms and unseasonably warm weather. The snowpack is almost nonexistant this year. Last year was also rather dry as well. Even if they captured 100% of the water flowing from the Sierras this year it wouldn't help a whole lot.
Water in California is very carefully managed and the politicians can't really be faulted in this case. There just isn't any water to be had.
And you do realize that the farther north you go the shorter the growing season, i.e. the days get shorter faster as you go north. You can't just move all your farming north and expect similar yields.
I think it's unlikely. When news of FreeBSD not trusing Intel's random number generator I decided to look at the RTL of one of the CPUs my employer makes which is optimized for security applications. The random number generator works exactly as the documentation says it does using the jitter of 125 of 128 ring oscillators feeding into a SHA1 engine with other unique inputs.
There's definitely a shortage. I've been interviewing at least 1-2 people a week for a position we've had open for months. The problem is that we can't find any competent people. I give a basic C programming problem and 80% of the people fail, many miserably and it's something that anyone who has decent C experience should easily get.
If anyone knows anyone with experience with U-Boot we're looking for people. We're also looking for good Linux kernel developers. Experience with SMP is a major plus.
Just use a one time pad. It's perfectly secure, even to quantum cryptography as long as the source is truly random. Creating a truly random number generator that takes advantage of quantum effects is not terribly difficult. Many modern CPUs now have this support built-in. The only weak point is how you get the one time pad to both locations and that it can only be used once. Even this is possible by having multiple pads sent via different methods and XORing them together at the destination. In order to crack it all copies would have to be intercepted and copied though additional security measures could be added to make even this difficult.
It's the same here. I have interviewed a number of qualified women and work with several excellent female engineers but I have never interviewed an African American. I don't care what a person's background is, if they're qualified for the position then they'll be hired. The best candidate I ever interviewed was a transgendered Russian. Everyone who interviewed her recommended her and we made an offer. Sadly she didn't join.
Sadly most candidates I interview are not qualified. When I ask basic questions that anyone with a decent CS or CE degree should be able to answer they fall flat on their face regardless of race and these are for more senior positions.
The only thing stopping more diversity is the lack of candidates with the right skill set. My company has made offers to a wide range of people and we don't care what their background is as long as they have the skills needed. One of the best candidates I interviewed was transgendered and we made her an offer but sadly she didn't join. Everyone who interviewed her recommended her. I have never seen discrimination with any of the tech companies I have worked for. I just have never seen any Latino or Black candidates, period. If I see a compelling resume I'll do a phone interview and if that goes well it leads to an in-person interview. I don't care what the color of their skin is, their sex, whether they're straight or gay, only that they have the skills we need.
If Jesse Jackson wants more diversity then he needs to look at the people graduating from college with computer science and computer engineering degrees and applying those degrees (not going in to IT).
Unfortunately most of the people I interview are not qualified regardless of their race or background. They exaggerate their skills on their resumes or their C coding skills are not up to snuff. I always give the same programming problem as well which I don't consider very difficult and there's more than one way to solve it though most use the simplest method. Sadly, 60% of the people I interview fail it utterly and another 30% miss key corner cases. If they say they've worked on the Linux kernel, I'll ask some basic Linux kernel questions. If they say they've worked on U-Boot, I'll ask some basic U-Boot questions.
Right now we're looking for people who can work on bootloader code for 64-bit embedded chips (U-Boot and/or UEFI). All we ask are that you have the skills and speak English (and even that doesn't have to be perfect if the skills are present). Most of the stuff we ask should be known by anyone with a decent computer science degree and an understanding of basic CPU architecture.
I tried setting up btrfs about a year ago on one of my servers running imap (which is continually backed up). I gave up in disgust since btrfs was insanely slow just untarring all of the files (Cyrus Imap stores each email as a separate file). This was on a relatively fast Intel SSD drive. As more and more files were added, the speed continued to drop.
The other problem I have is that I could not find an adequate answer with respect to free space. When files are deleted it sounds like they really aren't deleted. This being the case, what happens when the drive fills up?
I have since gone back to using XFS and EXT4 for my files. I have never had any issues with XFS (even when some nasty RAID issues occurred) and have been running it for years and love the tools available for it (xfs_fsr, xfsdump, etc.).
The random number generator in the chips my employer makes consists of around 125 free-running ring oscillators fed into a 512-bit sha-1 engine with a feedback loop. There's a way for software to disable the ring oscillator input to test the deterministic operation of it for FIPS compliance testing. Each chip also has a unique number that is programmed in to seed it even if the ring oscillators are not input. The FIPS testing is fairly extensive from what I heard. They took many days worth of samples looking for any patterns.
I think part of the problem has to do with charging standards. There is a standard for USB charging. The problem is Apple doesn't follow it and has their own standard. I can't count the number of adapters I have bought where my phone won't charge properly because they follow the Apple "standard" rather than the USB standard. I have had a hell of a time finding a car charger that follows the USB standard. Almost all of them follow the Apple standard. My phone has actually gone dead plugged in to these chargers. I have to open them up and modify them to follow the USB standard. This basically involves shorting the two data pins together and removing a couple resistors. About the only thing Apple has in common with USB charging is the connector since they do not follow the USB charging standard.
No, Tesla wants to open a showroom in New Jersey to show the cars. All Tesla cars are sold through their web site. I should know, I went through the process. The people at the showrooms do not make commissions. Their job is to show the car and answer questions. The only things they sell are things like accessories, shirts, hats, jackets, that sort of thing. They do arrange test drives however.
I suspect the meeting with Apple may have more to do with the Gigafactory since Apple is a huge consumer of batteries. I don't see Tesla moving to iOS for the car, though they might be able to add better integration with it. They already have a very good responsive UI based on Qt and Linux and I'm sure they have a lot of processes running under Linux. It would be a big job to port from Linux to iOS and probably not worth it.
As for the maps from two different vendors I have never had a problem. I'm not sure how they do it but they always seem to agree. You don't want to rely exclusively on Google since what happens when you don't have 3G connectivity?
I'm glad my car uses a combination of Google and Garmin for the GPS. On the main screen (Tesla Model S) it shows a satellite view of the map, with pinch-zoom and rotation support via the touch screen whereas next to the speedometer it shows a more traditional 3-D GPS view which I understand is supplied by Garmin (I could be wrong though). For voice recognition it uses Google's service. The next major update due out soon improves the time estimates in real-time using the live traffic information that is overlayed over the Google map. The main screen map caches data along the route (except satellite data) for when the 3G signal is lost and the other display relies entirely on in-car maps.
My car also runs Linux for the main screen using the Qt toolkit for the UI. The only complaints I have heard are that the radio doesn't handle the proprietary Apple audio files but it handles MP3, Ogg and Flac just fine (with my USB drive formatted EXT4). Now if only Waze were integrated.
I have to agree. My local grocery store actually carries many of the products that Whole Foods across the street does. The difference is that the prices are significantly lower at the grocery store (Raley's). While I do buy some organic food it's not for health reasons. It's more because I find it appealing to avoid using pesticides and inorganic fertilizerswhich often end up in our waterways or antibiotics (which promots antibiotic resistant bacteria). I won't pay significantly more for organic though. I don't believe that most organic food is healthier or safer than the alternatives. Hell, I would love to find irradiated salad since there is less chance of getting infected with salmanilla which often gets into salad no matter how much you wash it (after all, birds do fly over fields). I also like the idea of a lot of GMO crops since they often require less water, fertilizer or safer or reduced pesticides/herbacides. I DON'T like how companies like Monsanto operate however. If Whole Foods had good produce for a decent price I would shop there, but their prices are much higher than my grocery store so I don't shop there.
The thing is that there are more charging spots than gas stations. The car is quite good at telling you how much range is left. What happened to the NY Times reporter was due to his own stupidity. He charged the car for fewer miles than his destination. The car went 20 miles further than it said it could and he blamed the car for the fact that the car said it didn't have enough miles when he started.
In a pinch the Tesla can be charged any place there's an outlet, including all of the RV hookups which are typically NEMA 14-50 outlets or TT-30 outlets. I have adapters for virtually all 110 and 220 outlets including a 20A 110 adapter.
I have never once run out of gas in my 26 years of driving and none of the gas cars I've had told me the number of miles to empty. Only one time have I had to stop somewhere unexpectedly to charge. I knew well ahead of time I would have to do so and ended up having to stop in Monterey for an hour to charge for an hour.
Some trucks are starting to carry generators to charge electric cars in my area.
First of all, it doesn't take multiple hours of downtime for charging. Generally stops at the Superchargers are only around 30-40 minutes. In the next few months it will only take 90 seconds when battery swapping is added. The Superchargers are also free and guaranteed to be free forever. Battery swapping will cost about the same as filling up a similar luxury car. Besides, usually it doesn't matter how long charging takes. I always wake up each morning to a full tank (or in my case usually 60% charge to help extend the battery life), so to speak. It takes me 5 seconds to plug in at night and 5 seconds to unplug in the morning. In a typical week I spend far less time waiting for my car to charge than I do waiting to fill up my gas car, which I've sold since I drive it so rarely now. In the cross country trip Tesla spent 80% of their time driving and 20% charging while driving through some fairly nasty weather. If you stop for the night, as most drivers do, then you wake up in the morning with a full tank. Tesla's sales have been anything but a flop. They can't make them fast enough. They're outselling the gasoline cars in their class by a fair amount and they're making a decent profit from each one sold (over 25% margins).
Add to that that there's not much that can keep up with it, gasoline or electric. Most electric cars aren't selling all that well because they have poor range, poor battery life, or are just plain ugly. They're econoboxes that can't go 100 miles. For example the battery in the Leaf is only warrantied for 5 years and people are seeing significant degradation after only two years in hot climates.
The model S does not have any of these compromises. The car handles beautifully and is very responsive with quality materials and it looks great, not like a frog, even though it has one of the lowest coefficients of drag of any car out there. It has tons of room since the battery is a flat skateboard under the car with an electric motor the size of a watermelon that delivers 445 ft/lbs of torque, 416HP with minimal transmission losses. The climate control works well as does the user interface which is extremely responsive (it's based on Qt and runs on Linux on a Tegra 3). Driving it is a blast, especially with 0-60 in 4.2 seconds (3.9 according to Car & Driver). While the range is typically around 240 miles of real-world driving that's not that different than many ICE cars I've driven. The response is instantaneous. There is no lag. There's very little maintenance required other than rotating the tires and replacing the cabin air filter and wiper blades. The brakes should last nearly forever due to regenerative braking. The one-pedal driving of the car is quite addictive. It lets you configure how it behaves as well, like if you want strong regeneration or not if you let off of the gas or if you want it to creep forward when you let off the brake.
The Superchargers are usually at locations where there's places to eat and stretch ones legs. On my last trip to Lake Tahoe I stopped in Folsom to charge. By the time I was done with my burger my car was charged and ready to go and there was plenty of range left when I got to my destination at 7200 feet near the summit of Kingsbury Grade.
In the next three months Tesla will have battery swapping between the Bay Area and LA. By the end of the year 80% of the country will be covered by charging. Already the West coast is pretty well covered as is much of the East coast. I can drive from San Diego to Vancouver without spending a dime on fuel and spend at least 75% of my time driving.
The car has a ton of space in it, far more than my Prius ever did. I have far more luggage space, not even counting the frunk, which I find quite useful.
Tesla's goal was to create the best car, not the best electric car. In many ways they succeeded. They've also done away with a lot of things that suck about buying a car like the dealerships and dealing with dealership service. Their warranty covers everything except the wheels and tires and I do me
I actually sold my other car. In 8 months I had only driven my other car once. I have no regrets. It just wasn't worth the hassle of having my other car constantly in my driveway and paying the registration on it. Since I sold it to a relative I can always borrow it if I need to.
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Extruding aluminum tends to be stronger than cast aluminum. I imagine 3-D printed aluminum is not as strong not to mention it is a lot more expensive and much faster.
I think this should only apply when a patent is traded or sold. I think if someone goes and files a patent, even if they never implement it then it's reasonable to be able to collect royalties, assuming the patent isn't obvious and there's no prior art. It's a problem when the patent is no longer held by the original inventor or by somebody who can't make use of the patent that it's a problem. I think it's even reasonable for a company that uses one method to do something and buys a patent for another method of doing the same thing is reasonable. It's a problem when people just buy up patents and sit on them and collect royalties on those patents. I also think it's a problem when companies like Apple create shell patent trolls. The problem with the trolls is that there's no negotiating with them because they don't infringe on anyone else's patents unless there's a patent on patent trolling.
The big problem is that these patent trolls have nothing to lose. There's no way a company can reach a cross-licensing deal since the patent troll produces no products and is otherwise just a parasite with no redeeming qualities.
I think that if a patent is traded or sold that the recipient of the patent must either produce similar products that either use the same or a related technology to what the patent covers or if they don't produce anything they have a limited time, say 3 years, in which to produce a product otherwise the patent goes to the public domain.
Hey, I should patent this idea!
Tesla has since announced that battery swapping stations will be operational within the next couple months between the Bay Area and LA so I don't think it's a hoax at all.
I think part of it is that Tesla is run by Elon Musk who thinks like a consumer. He decided not to do the whole dealership thing from his own experience with dealerships. When dealerships claim to offer consumers "protection" Elon hits back perfectly comparing their protection to the kind you get from organized crime. Dealership "protection" didn't really help most Fisker buyers when Fisker went under. The Karma owners must pay out of pocket for things that their warranty and pre-paid maintenance should have covered.
They're not designed for systems but for embedded devices like firewalls, VPNs, routers, NAS, etc. They're expensive and have some very nice engines in them as well, such as the gzip engine that's 100 times as fast as software implementations, hardware pattern matching (regex) engines and content addressable memory support for firewalls and anti-virus, RAID engines for NAS to do RAID 5/6 calculations in hardware, encryption and hashing instructions, not to mention built-in support for 10 and 40Gbps Ethernet with a lot of packet acceleration. The chip of course will run Linux (Debian) and applications that run directly on top of the cores without an OS underneath for bare metal performance. The single threaded performance is a fair bit lower than an X86 based system which is why there are so many cores running in parallel. There's also a lot of special support for synchronization between the cores and various atomic instructions that have been added.
While it is fully compatible with standard 64-bit MIPS there are a lot of additional instructions since MIPS allows you to do that (ARM does not allow manufacturers to add custom instructions).
Additionally the soil tends to be rather poor as you go further north. As someone else said, everything was scraped down to the bedrock from the glaciers of the last ice age. There's only a few inches of soil.
I can tell you that it is far from artificial. This year we received almost no rain or snow. Up until February there was virtually no rain. We have since only had a few storms and unseasonably warm weather. The snowpack is almost nonexistant this year. Last year was also rather dry as well. Even if they captured 100% of the water flowing from the Sierras this year it wouldn't help a whole lot.
Water in California is very carefully managed and the politicians can't really be faulted in this case. There just isn't any water to be had.
And you do realize that the farther north you go the shorter the growing season, i.e. the days get shorter faster as you go north. You can't just move all your farming north and expect similar yields.
Cavium OCTEON series of CPUs. http://www.cavium.com/OCTEON-I...
I think it's unlikely. When news of FreeBSD not trusing Intel's random number generator I decided to look at the RTL of one of the CPUs my employer makes which is optimized for security applications. The random number generator works exactly as the documentation says it does using the jitter of 125 of 128 ring oscillators feeding into a SHA1 engine with other unique inputs.
There's definitely a shortage. I've been interviewing at least 1-2 people a week for a position we've had open for months. The problem is that we can't find any competent people. I give a basic C programming problem and 80% of the people fail, many miserably and it's something that anyone who has decent C experience should easily get.
If anyone knows anyone with experience with U-Boot we're looking for people. We're also looking for good Linux kernel developers. Experience with SMP is a major plus.
-Aaron
Just use a one time pad. It's perfectly secure, even to quantum cryptography as long as the source is truly random. Creating a truly random number generator that takes advantage of quantum effects is not terribly difficult. Many modern CPUs now have this support built-in. The only weak point is how you get the one time pad to both locations and that it can only be used once. Even this is possible by having multiple pads sent via different methods and XORing them together at the destination. In order to crack it all copies would have to be intercepted and copied though additional security measures could be added to make even this difficult.
It's the same here. I have interviewed a number of qualified women and work with several excellent female engineers but I have never interviewed an African American. I don't care what a person's background is, if they're qualified for the position then they'll be hired. The best candidate I ever interviewed was a transgendered Russian. Everyone who interviewed her recommended her and we made an offer. Sadly she didn't join.
Sadly most candidates I interview are not qualified. When I ask basic questions that anyone with a decent CS or CE degree should be able to answer they fall flat on their face regardless of race and these are for more senior positions.
The only thing stopping more diversity is the lack of candidates with the right skill set. My company has made offers to a wide range of people and we don't care what their background is as long as they have the skills needed. One of the best candidates I interviewed was transgendered and we made her an offer but sadly she didn't join. Everyone who interviewed her recommended her. I have never seen discrimination with any of the tech companies I have worked for. I just have never seen any Latino or Black candidates, period. If I see a compelling resume I'll do a phone interview and if that goes well it leads to an in-person interview. I don't care what the color of their skin is, their sex, whether they're straight or gay, only that they have the skills we need.
If Jesse Jackson wants more diversity then he needs to look at the people graduating from college with computer science and computer engineering degrees and applying those degrees (not going in to IT).
Unfortunately most of the people I interview are not qualified regardless of their race or background. They exaggerate their skills on their resumes or their C coding skills are not up to snuff. I always give the same programming problem as well which I don't consider very difficult and there's more than one way to solve it though most use the simplest method. Sadly, 60% of the people I interview fail it utterly and another 30% miss key corner cases. If they say they've worked on the Linux kernel, I'll ask some basic Linux kernel questions. If they say they've worked on U-Boot, I'll ask some basic U-Boot questions.
Right now we're looking for people who can work on bootloader code for 64-bit embedded chips (U-Boot and/or UEFI). All we ask are that you have the skills and speak English (and even that doesn't have to be perfect if the skills are present). Most of the stuff we ask should be known by anyone with a decent computer science degree and an understanding of basic CPU architecture.
I tried setting up btrfs about a year ago on one of my servers running imap (which is continually backed up). I gave up in disgust since btrfs was insanely slow just untarring all of the files (Cyrus Imap stores each email as a separate file). This was on a relatively fast Intel SSD drive. As more and more files were added, the speed continued to drop.
The other problem I have is that I could not find an adequate answer with respect to free space. When files are deleted it sounds like they really aren't deleted. This being the case, what happens when the drive fills up?
I have since gone back to using XFS and EXT4 for my files. I have never had any issues with XFS (even when some nasty RAID issues occurred) and have been running it for years and love the tools available for it (xfs_fsr, xfsdump, etc.).
The random number generator in the chips my employer makes consists of around 125 free-running ring oscillators fed into a 512-bit sha-1 engine with a feedback loop. There's a way for software to disable the ring oscillator input to test the deterministic operation of it for FIPS compliance testing. Each chip also has a unique number that is programmed in to seed it even if the ring oscillators are not input. The FIPS testing is fairly extensive from what I heard. They took many days worth of samples looking for any patterns.
I think part of the problem has to do with charging standards. There is a standard for USB charging. The problem is Apple doesn't follow it and has their own standard. I can't count the number of adapters I have bought where my phone won't charge properly because they follow the Apple "standard" rather than the USB standard. I have had a hell of a time finding a car charger that follows the USB standard. Almost all of them follow the Apple standard. My phone has actually gone dead plugged in to these chargers. I have to open them up and modify them to follow the USB standard. This basically involves shorting the two data pins together and removing a couple resistors. About the only thing Apple has in common with USB charging is the connector since they do not follow the USB charging standard.
No, Tesla wants to open a showroom in New Jersey to show the cars. All Tesla cars are sold through their web site. I should know, I went through the process. The people at the showrooms do not make commissions. Their job is to show the car and answer questions. The only things they sell are things like accessories, shirts, hats, jackets, that sort of thing. They do arrange test drives however.
I suspect the meeting with Apple may have more to do with the Gigafactory since Apple is a huge consumer of batteries. I don't see Tesla moving to iOS for the car, though they might be able to add better integration with it. They already have a very good responsive UI based on Qt and Linux and I'm sure they have a lot of processes running under Linux. It would be a big job to port from Linux to iOS and probably not worth it.
As for the maps from two different vendors I have never had a problem. I'm not sure how they do it but they always seem to agree. You don't want to rely exclusively on Google since what happens when you don't have 3G connectivity?
I'm glad my car uses a combination of Google and Garmin for the GPS. On the main screen (Tesla Model S) it shows a satellite view of the map, with pinch-zoom and rotation support via the touch screen whereas next to the speedometer it shows a more traditional 3-D GPS view which I understand is supplied by Garmin (I could be wrong though). For voice recognition it uses Google's service. The next major update due out soon improves the time estimates in real-time using the live traffic information that is overlayed over the Google map. The main screen map caches data along the route (except satellite data) for when the 3G signal is lost and the other display relies entirely on in-car maps.
My car also runs Linux for the main screen using the Qt toolkit for the UI. The only complaints I have heard are that the radio doesn't handle the proprietary Apple audio files but it handles MP3, Ogg and Flac just fine (with my USB drive formatted EXT4). Now if only Waze were integrated.
I have to agree. My local grocery store actually carries many of the products that Whole Foods across the street does. The difference is that the prices are significantly lower at the grocery store (Raley's). While I do buy some organic food it's not for health reasons. It's more because I find it appealing to avoid using pesticides and inorganic fertilizerswhich often end up in our waterways or antibiotics (which promots antibiotic resistant bacteria). I won't pay significantly more for organic though. I don't believe that most organic food is healthier or safer than the alternatives. Hell, I would love to find irradiated salad since there is less chance of getting infected with salmanilla which often gets into salad no matter how much you wash it (after all, birds do fly over fields). I also like the idea of a lot of GMO crops since they often require less water, fertilizer or safer or reduced pesticides/herbacides. I DON'T like how companies like Monsanto operate however. If Whole Foods had good produce for a decent price I would shop there, but their prices are much higher than my grocery store so I don't shop there.
The thing is that there are more charging spots than gas stations. The car is quite good at telling you how much range is left. What happened to the NY Times reporter was due to his own stupidity. He charged the car for fewer miles than his destination. The car went 20 miles further than it said it could and he blamed the car for the fact that the car said it didn't have enough miles when he started.
In a pinch the Tesla can be charged any place there's an outlet, including all of the RV hookups which are typically NEMA 14-50 outlets or TT-30 outlets. I have adapters for virtually all 110 and 220 outlets including a 20A 110 adapter.
I have never once run out of gas in my 26 years of driving and none of the gas cars I've had told me the number of miles to empty. Only one time have I had to stop somewhere unexpectedly to charge. I knew well ahead of time I would have to do so and ended up having to stop in Monterey for an hour to charge for an hour.
Some trucks are starting to carry generators to charge electric cars in my area.
First of all, it doesn't take multiple hours of downtime for charging. Generally stops at the Superchargers are only around 30-40 minutes. In the next few months it will only take 90 seconds when battery swapping is added. The Superchargers are also free and guaranteed to be free forever. Battery swapping will cost about the same as filling up a similar luxury car. Besides, usually it doesn't matter how long charging takes. I always wake up each morning to a full tank (or in my case usually 60% charge to help extend the battery life), so to speak. It takes me 5 seconds to plug in at night and 5 seconds to unplug in the morning. In a typical week I spend far less time waiting for my car to charge than I do waiting to fill up my gas car, which I've sold since I drive it so rarely now. In the cross country trip Tesla spent 80% of their time driving and 20% charging while driving through some fairly nasty weather. If you stop for the night, as most drivers do, then you wake up in the morning with a full tank. Tesla's sales have been anything but a flop. They can't make them fast enough. They're outselling the gasoline cars in their class by a fair amount and they're making a decent profit from each one sold (over 25% margins).
Add to that that there's not much that can keep up with it, gasoline or electric. Most electric cars aren't selling all that well because they have poor range, poor battery life, or are just plain ugly. They're econoboxes that can't go 100 miles. For example the battery in the Leaf is only warrantied for 5 years and people are seeing significant degradation after only two years in hot climates.
The model S does not have any of these compromises. The car handles beautifully and is very responsive with quality materials and it looks great, not like a frog, even though it has one of the lowest coefficients of drag of any car out there. It has tons of room since the battery is a flat skateboard under the car with an electric motor the size of a watermelon that delivers 445 ft/lbs of torque, 416HP with minimal transmission losses. The climate control works well as does the user interface which is extremely responsive (it's based on Qt and runs on Linux on a Tegra 3). Driving it is a blast, especially with 0-60 in 4.2 seconds (3.9 according to Car & Driver). While the range is typically around 240 miles of real-world driving that's not that different than many ICE cars I've driven. The response is instantaneous. There is no lag. There's very little maintenance required other than rotating the tires and replacing the cabin air filter and wiper blades. The brakes should last nearly forever due to regenerative braking. The one-pedal driving of the car is quite addictive. It lets you configure how it behaves as well, like if you want strong regeneration or not if you let off of the gas or if you want it to creep forward when you let off the brake.
The Superchargers are usually at locations where there's places to eat and stretch ones legs. On my last trip to Lake Tahoe I stopped in Folsom to charge. By the time I was done with my burger my car was charged and ready to go and there was plenty of range left when I got to my destination at 7200 feet near the summit of Kingsbury Grade.
In the next three months Tesla will have battery swapping between the Bay Area and LA. By the end of the year 80% of the country will be covered by charging. Already the West coast is pretty well covered as is much of the East coast. I can drive from San Diego to Vancouver without spending a dime on fuel and spend at least 75% of my time driving.
The car has a ton of space in it, far more than my Prius ever did. I have far more luggage space, not even counting the frunk, which I find quite useful.
Tesla's goal was to create the best car, not the best electric car. In many ways they succeeded. They've also done away with a lot of things that suck about buying a car like the dealerships and dealing with dealership service. Their warranty covers everything except the wheels and tires and I do me
I actually sold my other car. In 8 months I had only driven my other car once. I have no regrets. It just wasn't worth the hassle of having my other car constantly in my driveway and paying the registration on it. Since I sold it to a relative I can always borrow it if I need to.