They already have the west coast, much of the east coast as well as a route across the country set up.
The west coast is already fairly well covered. I can drive from Vancouver to San Diego right now using only the superchargers. By the end of next year they should cover most of the country.
On top of that soon I'll be able to use the ChaDeMo chargers (which are a bit slower). I can also charge at most RV parks or if worse comes to worse a 110V outlet, a dryer outlet or any standard J1772 car charger which are showing up all over the place.
Fisker Automotive basically did a locomotive style drive train. In many cases the car was a failure. My father owns one. On gasoline it gets 20MPg, it weighs 5300LBs, has a small battery range and is a subcompact in size and a tiny trunk despite being a huge car. Then again, they really should have used a diesel engine and used better inverters and motors like Tesla did. A diesel engine can be made very efficient to run at a low range of RPMs and has a ton of torque which is ideal for generating electricity. Then again, the drivetrain in cars like the Prius is rather independent of the engine RPM.
The thing is is that it takes me around 5 seconds to plug in at night and every morning 5 seconds to unplug to a full tank in the morning, so I spend less time charging than the time I'd need to fill up my tank every week at a gas station.
I sold my Prius since I only needed it once in the last 10 months and that was to go on a camping trip out in the middle of nowhere over a bunch of dirt roads. For the few times I need a gas car it's cheaper to just rent something than it is to pay the registration on a second car. Then again, the Tesla Model S is not like other electric cars. I have decent range as well as supercharging capability which makes road trips practical. I have had no problems driving from the Bay Area up to Lake Tahoe and am currently planning a trip up to Seattle. While I have to stop every few hours to charge, it cost me nothing and gives me time to relax. When battery swapping is made available it will take me even less time than with a gas car since a battery swap takes only around 90 seconds and I never have to get out of the car.
There are a number of very promising battery technologies like the sulfur batteries and metal air batteries. It's only a matter of time until those drive down the cost further while increasing capacity. The rest of the car is a lot simpler. When people see me putting stuff in the frunk of my car people keep asking me where the engine is. I open the trunk, open the compartment under the trunk then show them where the watermelon sized electric motor sits. While the cooling system of the Model S is more complicated than an ICE car, mechanically it is far simpler with about a dozen moving components in the drive train.
With the superchargers, range is becoming less and less of an issue.
I don't have solar but a couple of hours ago I was reviewing my electricity usage. I have two meters on my house, one for my car (Tesla model S) and the other for my house. Now I have a couple computers running full-time and an electric stove, gas hot water, dryer and heat and my home electrical usage is significantly more than my car, and I'm doing over 1000 miles per month and I'm not the super efficient driver (the Tesla acceleration is addictive and it's too easy to exceed speed limits). During the summer months when the AC kicks in my home electricity usage is well over double what my car uses. All of my appliances are very energy efficient (except my old stove) and all of my lighting is LED or fluorescent.
Even with the high California rates through PG&E I'm averaging around $46/month for powering my car using the EV rate. If I could get a 7 KW solar setup it would mostly offset all of my electricity usage. The problem is that I have to replace my roof in order to install solar and I have a lot of trees that shade things.
With the Tesla model S the supercharger feature is optional with the 60KWh battery and can be enabled at any time by an over-the-air update but is a $2,000 feature, presumably to help offset the cost of electricity and building out the Supercharger network. The hardware is installed in every car.
It wasn't all that expensive in the end though now I have a bunch of fire alarm wire left over, enough to do several more houses at least since I ended up with 500' of it. The smoke detectors are actually cheaper than many of the off-the-shelf ones. I paid around $33 per smoke detector (with heat detector) except for the one that also does CO which was around $80, $150 for all the wire and under $20 for each heat detector where I put one in the attic, one in my kitchen and a couple in my garage. I already had an alarm system installed so it was just a matter of wiring it in. I added an alarm and strobe to each bedroom as well ($15). With three bedrooms and everything it works out to around $487. I'll make that back in a few years from the discount off of my homeowners insurance. I'm basically slowly upgrading my house to bring everything up to more modern standards.
Since everything is wired into the system if it gets set off even if I'm not home the service will be notified. Everything also is battery backed in case of an electrical fault from the central alarm and phone system.
As I said they use special wire for fire alarms. Also, by law it is now required that every bedroom must have a working smoke detector. The last time I had a building inspector come around to inspect having my main electrical panel replaced he had to verify that there were adequate smoke detectors and that there was also a CO detector installed.
You also can't just use any old wire for the signalling for smoke detectors. At least with the two wire smoke detector setup like I use the central alarm will detect if there is a wiring fault since modern alarm systems typically require a resistor be installed at the end of the chain. If the wire should be damaged, the alarm will be triggered. While wireless may be advantageous in some situations it all depends on how well the signals propagate. I've had enough problems with 802.11 going 20 feet between my router and a nearby bedroom (both 2.4 and 5.6GHz). What happens if there's interference? With 802.11 it's no big deal. With a fire system that must be reliable this isn't acceptable. With a wired connection there's little chance of getting interference or losing the signal. Oh, the fire alarm wire is also twisted in order to reduce interference picked up by it. It's not cheap either... I ended up paying a lot more for 2-wire fire alarm wire than if I just ran CAT6.
Having my fire integrated into my alarm system will lower my homeowner's insurance as well.
Many areas of the country, i.e. California, require that for new installations that all of the smoke detectors be wired together using special wire. In my case I just installed a bunch of 2-wire smoke detectors that tie into my monitored alarm system. I had to use special fire alarm wire and the 2 and 4-wire smoke detector hookups are at least somewhat standardized (you don't want to mix brands though) as are the hard-wired AC smoke detectors. Nest wireless smoke detectors can't interface with other smoke detectors or alarm systems and they don't meet the hard-wire connection requirement between detectors. Many people in the Nest forums have complained about this. While it's cool it will help the Nest thermostat keep track of if the house is occupied or not until they provide the proper hard-wired hookups they're not even legal for new installations or even replacing smoke detectors in existing installations.
I own a Nest thermostat and while it's a great and innovative device I don't see the company being worth $3.2B. There are also a lot of other new Internet enabled smoke detectors coming out. I looked at their smoke detectors but in many jurisdictions they can't be legally installed since smoke detectors are required to have a hard-wire connection such that if one goes off they all go off. Since Nest does this wirelessly it's not allowed. They're also incompatible with all the other smoke detectors and alarm systems and are quite expensive for what they are. I looked into this since I just wired in a bunch of 2-wire (12v) smoke detectors into my alarm system. I picked up a combination smoke/CO detector with heat sensor that integrates into my alarm system for $80.
Now what would be cool is for someone to integrate a good wireless AP with a smoke detector though I think the smoke detector signalling should remain separate (at least here in California they require using special fire alarm wire for hooking up fire related stuff).
I know many poor that could not garden if their life depended on it since their living situation does not provide any land to do so. Maybe out in the country, but certainly not in the city in high density housing where many of these people live. Some areas don't even have grocery stores. For example, most grocery stores have left many of the poor areas, leaving few choices for healthy food.
And what is to say that the person buying the wedding cake wasn't scrimping and saving a long time in order to get it. Just because someone is poor doesn't mean they should be punished. We seem to like to punish the poor as if it is all their fault when often the case it is not. Also, when you're trying to survive, junk food is often the cheapest means of high caloric food to keep you alive. Try and look at the cost of eating healthy. Junk processed food is cheap which is why they buy it.
I know a number of people who are working poor, often through no fault of their own. Try getting a job with full-time hours when you don't have any in-demand skills, in demand certifications or a college education. There's not a lot of choices out there. They often don't earn enough to feed themselves and keep a roof over their heads. They have to go through a lot of BS to get what services they can which basically try and screw you over. Try getting a job when you're 18 with nothing more than a high school diploma when you're kicked out of your parents house. I know people who were kicked out at 16 because they don't fall within their family's church's strict belief system. Social services are completely strained and they waste an inordinate amount of time to get anything done, often with those providing the social services being overwhelmed.
I just had to send money to a friend so he could buy basic groceries and pay his rent because a job that promised him a certain number of hours immediately caused his food stamps to disappear when he got the job. Turns out the job significantly overstated the number of hours he would be working to the point where it costs more for basic transportation for his job than he earned. On top of that he has constant medical expenses that the state does not provide for just to function. All these people want is a job with full-time hours so they can pay rent and buy food but they're always getting dicked about. People complain about them owning cell phones. Try and get a job without a phone.
Or these women with children. If the child is over 5 years old that child was born when the economy was good and the parent likely could afford the child. When the meltdown hit what do you do? You can't stop taking care of the kid until they're 18. People like to blame mothers who are poor when often when they had their child they were in a much better situation. It may be their husband became abusive when the economy tanked or they lost their full-time job. It's easy to blame someone who's poor for their own problems when you don't actually know all the BS they have to put up with and go through.
The whole cutting food stamps is disgusting. Almost all of the people getting them need them to survive, and for the amount they get they're far from eating healthy, causing lost productivity and medical expenses. Try living on what food stamps provide, especially if you live in one of the less generous states. If Walmart or McDonalds doesn't want to pay their employees a living wage or give them regular full-time hours, why should I, the taxpayer, have to subsidize their employees just to put food on the table. As far as I'm concerned, companies should be fined to pay for the food stamps their employees use rather than me subsidizing their degrading employment practices.
Food stamps and unemployment payments are one of the best stimulant programs out there. The people who receive these basically spend every penny they get and put it back into the economy. A tax cut is a very poor stimulus by comparison, especially when used as an excuse to cut food stamps and other programs people need to survive. Also, the poor generally don't pay income taxes so the tax breaks do them no good whatsoever unless they affect sales taxes, which they almost never do. Also, tax cuts rarely lower fees, which tend to affect the poor far more than the middle class.
The poor I know would love to work full time and get off of welfare if they could. The sad part is that they're in a vicious cycle. They have no savings, so things like a car breaking down or a medical issue can be catestrophic as an employer may use that as an excuse to fire someone because they didn't show up on time. They're often abused by management who knows they can treat them like shit since there are enough other desparate people willing to take any job they can get. Without skills in demand it's just a race to the bottom. Companies like Walmart give bonuses to managers who cut hours and employees which just makes life worse.
I rarely have a problem with KDE. Most applications open back up exactly where I left them and the same size. The only program that gives me trouble is Chrome.
I tend to do that a lot too. I always use focus follows mouse since I have so many windows open. It's just easier to have a partially obscured window and only bring it forward when needed. I also use keyboard shortcuts to bring windows forward and back and learned to really like the Sun "Front" key (other than the keyboard I hated just about everything else using Sun for a desktop workstation).
I still use my netbook but some programs (Thunderbird, I'm looking at you!) seem to thing that screen real-estate is free. For programming though I'm always short of real-estate. I could easily go for a 4K monitor at work but as it is I use two monitors and had to supply one of them myself. Oh, and I try and keep my code limited to 80 columns since the applications I work on (U-Boot and Linux Kernel) require it.
The thing is that though the charger may not have initiated the house fire there have been a number of documented cases where the connector to the adapter on the UMC cable has overheated and in some cases melted. I have had intermittent connection problems with the 30A adapter I was using. The connector is not that great at making a solid connection and the conductors seem rather small considering that they could be carrying upwards of 40A.
I look forward to getting a new UMC cable though I hope they also replace all of the additional adapters I own. The car normally comes with the NEMA 14-50 and standard 120V adapters. I have all of the other adapters they make.
Now there have also been a number of fires caused by faulty home wiring with other cars as well such as the Leaf and Volt which draw far less current than the Tesla is capable of.
As the owner of a Tesla I think this is the right thing to do. Tesla has generally been very proactive at dealing with issues before some government agency tells them to and without fighting it. They generally treat the owners well.
They've been pretty good about fixing the early problems. They've gone back and fixed all of the issues I've had with my 5K VIN number with their current cars and now offer a few features that were not available when I got mine (i.e. parking sensors). They've also raised their prices and a lot of options on my car now cost extra (i.e. $500 for fog lights).
I found a number of issues in my own house. Splices with no box, boxes buried inside the wall, missing boxes, romex run outside the wall, 20A breakers used for 15A circuits (14 gauge wire), shared neutral circuits without tying the breakers together, etc. I have gone back and fixed all the issues. I have basically gone back and had to fix just about everything that the previous owners of my house had done electrically.
They actually did this. The software in the car tries to detect if there are voltage fluctuations caused by home wiring and to reduce the current if they're detected. They rolled out these changes within 48 hours of the house fire, presumably after going through the extensive logs that the car keeps.
Actually as the owner of a Tesla, Tesla has been very proactive at fixing problems and treating their customers well. Unlike a lot of car manufacturers, Tesla tends to be proactive about things. I had a number of minor issues due to my car being one of the earlier VINs and they have always fixed the issues without giving me the run-around like I've gotten at other dealerships.
The fact that Elon talks before consulting his lawyers is a breath of fresh air.
I own a Tesla model S and was never very fond of how the adapters connect to the UMC cable. The UMC cable has a 5-pin connector on the end that plugs into the wall where it plugs into one of numerous adapters. The adapters contain pins for ground and the two 240V legs (not neutral) or the hot, neutral and ground for the 115V adapters. There's also a resistor in it that signals the amount of current that can be drawn between one of the pins and ground. I don't recall what the last pin is for.
The connector between the adapter and the cable is a weak link. I myself have had intermittent issues with my NEMA 14-30 adapter and the cable where just wiggling it causes a fault to show up. The adapter connector is not all that tight nor is it particularly secure. The pins are also rather small considering how much current they can be carrying (up to 40A).
A number of owners have reported that this connection between the UMC cable and the plug adapter has overheated or melted. While it sounds like in the case of the garage fire it was likely the fault of substandard wiring of the NEMA 14-50 outlet the UMC cables have been a known problem.
About a foot from this adapter cable is a small box that has a relay, GFI and some signalling circuitry to interface with the Model S.
I've only used the NEMA 14-50 adapter a couple of times since I have a separate high power wall connector that's hard-wired into my home (100A feed). I'm a lot more comfortable using that over the UMC cable but Tesla has to fix the early HPWCs as well. The resettable fuses are too sensitive so they recommend not charging at the full 80A. I myself have not had any problems at 80A but normally they reduce it to 60 until they send someone out to replace the fuses.
I don't think this will be a major setback for Tesla. The retail price of the UMC is $600 which means it probably costs a lot less to manufacture. I just hope that if they change that connector that they replace all of my adapters since I bought a number of additional ones (at $45 each) to handle NEMA 14-30, 10-30, 6-50 and 120v/20A.
The UMC is basically the equivalent of a normal J1772 EV charger but with a switchable plug and in a much smaller form factor. Hell, my HPWC charger is a fraction the size of most J1772 EV chargers yet it handles a lot more power than most J1772 adapters (and it doesn't even get warm when pumping 80A through it).
The UMC is nice since it means I can charge my car at any RV park that has a 240V hookup or that an owner just needs to install a NEMA 14-50 outlet which is a lot less expensive than either a high-power wall connector ($1200) or a standard EV charger.
There have been a number of problems with the UMC (cable in question). The cable has an adapter on the end to choose from a variety of plugs, i.e. NUMA 14-50, NUMA 14-30 standard 120v, NEMA 10-30, 6-50, etc.
I myself have seen issues where my NEMA 14-30 adapter would give a fault if the cable was bumped. The connection between the adapter and the cable is not all that solid and a number of owners have had issues with this.
About a foot away from this connector is a control box that contains a GFI and a relay and the circuitry to interface to the car.
The adapter has 5 pins on it. One for ground, one for each 240V leg (neutral is not used) and a pin that appears to go to a resistor to signal the amount of current supported by the adapter. I don't remember what the last pin does. Anyway, for the amount of current the NEMA 14-50 and 6-50 adapters carry the pins are rather small. The adapter also doesn't always securely latch to the cable which can lead to a bad connection causing the adapter and/or cable to melt.
I don't think this will be a big setback for Tesla. Tesla's retail price for this cable is $600.
Tesla actually slowly ramps up the current draw. When I hook my car up to the 80A charger it will slowly ramp up to 40A, pause, then slowly ramp up to 80A (there are two chargers in the car, each rated at 40A). It monitors the change in voltage as it does this.
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They're building them out pretty quickly. A map is visible at http://www.teslamotors.com/sup...
They already have the west coast, much of the east coast as well as a route across the country set up.
The west coast is already fairly well covered. I can drive from Vancouver to San Diego right now using only the superchargers. By the end of next year they should cover most of the country.
On top of that soon I'll be able to use the ChaDeMo chargers (which are a bit slower). I can also charge at most RV parks or if worse comes to worse a 110V outlet, a dryer outlet or any standard J1772 car charger which are showing up all over the place.
That's where a battery swap comes in. It will take around 90 seconds and you never have to leave the car.
Fisker Automotive basically did a locomotive style drive train. In many cases the car was a failure. My father owns one. On gasoline it gets 20MPg, it weighs 5300LBs, has a small battery range and is a subcompact in size and a tiny trunk despite being a huge car. Then again, they really should have used a diesel engine and used better inverters and motors like Tesla did. A diesel engine can be made very efficient to run at a low range of RPMs and has a ton of torque which is ideal for generating electricity. Then again, the drivetrain in cars like the Prius is rather independent of the engine RPM.
The thing is is that it takes me around 5 seconds to plug in at night and every morning 5 seconds to unplug to a full tank in the morning, so I spend less time charging than the time I'd need to fill up my tank every week at a gas station.
I sold my Prius since I only needed it once in the last 10 months and that was to go on a camping trip out in the middle of nowhere over a bunch of dirt roads. For the few times I need a gas car it's cheaper to just rent something than it is to pay the registration on a second car. Then again, the Tesla Model S is not like other electric cars. I have decent range as well as supercharging capability which makes road trips practical. I have had no problems driving from the Bay Area up to Lake Tahoe and am currently planning a trip up to Seattle. While I have to stop every few hours to charge, it cost me nothing and gives me time to relax. When battery swapping is made available it will take me even less time than with a gas car since a battery swap takes only around 90 seconds and I never have to get out of the car.
There are a number of very promising battery technologies like the sulfur batteries and metal air batteries. It's only a matter of time until those drive down the cost further while increasing capacity. The rest of the car is a lot simpler. When people see me putting stuff in the frunk of my car people keep asking me where the engine is. I open the trunk, open the compartment under the trunk then show them where the watermelon sized electric motor sits. While the cooling system of the Model S is more complicated than an ICE car, mechanically it is far simpler with about a dozen moving components in the drive train.
With the superchargers, range is becoming less and less of an issue.
I don't have solar but a couple of hours ago I was reviewing my electricity usage. I have two meters on my house, one for my car (Tesla model S) and the other for my house. Now I have a couple computers running full-time and an electric stove, gas hot water, dryer and heat and my home electrical usage is significantly more than my car, and I'm doing over 1000 miles per month and I'm not the super efficient driver (the Tesla acceleration is addictive and it's too easy to exceed speed limits). During the summer months when the AC kicks in my home electricity usage is well over double what my car uses. All of my appliances are very energy efficient (except my old stove) and all of my lighting is LED or fluorescent.
Even with the high California rates through PG&E I'm averaging around $46/month for powering my car using the EV rate. If I could get a 7 KW solar setup it would mostly offset all of my electricity usage. The problem is that I have to replace my roof in order to install solar and I have a lot of trees that shade things.
With the Tesla model S the supercharger feature is optional with the 60KWh battery and can be enabled at any time by an over-the-air update but is a $2,000 feature, presumably to help offset the cost of electricity and building out the Supercharger network. The hardware is installed in every car.
It wasn't all that expensive in the end though now I have a bunch of fire alarm wire left over, enough to do several more houses at least since I ended up with 500' of it. The smoke detectors are actually cheaper than many of the off-the-shelf ones. I paid around $33 per smoke detector (with heat detector) except for the one that also does CO which was around $80, $150 for all the wire and under $20 for each heat detector where I put one in the attic, one in my kitchen and a couple in my garage. I already had an alarm system installed so it was just a matter of wiring it in. I added an alarm and strobe to each bedroom as well ($15). With three bedrooms and everything it works out to around $487. I'll make that back in a few years from the discount off of my homeowners insurance. I'm basically slowly upgrading my house to bring everything up to more modern standards.
Since everything is wired into the system if it gets set off even if I'm not home the service will be notified. Everything also is battery backed in case of an electrical fault from the central alarm and phone system.
As I said they use special wire for fire alarms. Also, by law it is now required that every bedroom must have a working smoke detector. The last time I had a building inspector come around to inspect having my main electrical panel replaced he had to verify that there were adequate smoke detectors and that there was also a CO detector installed.
You also can't just use any old wire for the signalling for smoke detectors. At least with the two wire smoke detector setup like I use the central alarm will detect if there is a wiring fault since modern alarm systems typically require a resistor be installed at the end of the chain. If the wire should be damaged, the alarm will be triggered. While wireless may be advantageous in some situations it all depends on how well the signals propagate. I've had enough problems with 802.11 going 20 feet between my router and a nearby bedroom (both 2.4 and 5.6GHz). What happens if there's interference? With 802.11 it's no big deal. With a fire system that must be reliable this isn't acceptable. With a wired connection there's little chance of getting interference or losing the signal. Oh, the fire alarm wire is also twisted in order to reduce interference picked up by it. It's not cheap either... I ended up paying a lot more for 2-wire fire alarm wire than if I just ran CAT6.
Having my fire integrated into my alarm system will lower my homeowner's insurance as well.
Many areas of the country, i.e. California, require that for new installations that all of the smoke detectors be wired together using special wire. In my case I just installed a bunch of 2-wire smoke detectors that tie into my monitored alarm system. I had to use special fire alarm wire and the 2 and 4-wire smoke detector hookups are at least somewhat standardized (you don't want to mix brands though) as are the hard-wired AC smoke detectors. Nest wireless smoke detectors can't interface with other smoke detectors or alarm systems and they don't meet the hard-wire connection requirement between detectors. Many people in the Nest forums have complained about this. While it's cool it will help the Nest thermostat keep track of if the house is occupied or not until they provide the proper hard-wired hookups they're not even legal for new installations or even replacing smoke detectors in existing installations.
I own a Nest thermostat and while it's a great and innovative device I don't see the company being worth $3.2B. There are also a lot of other new Internet enabled smoke detectors coming out. I looked at their smoke detectors but in many jurisdictions they can't be legally installed since smoke detectors are required to have a hard-wire connection such that if one goes off they all go off. Since Nest does this wirelessly it's not allowed. They're also incompatible with all the other smoke detectors and alarm systems and are quite expensive for what they are. I looked into this since I just wired in a bunch of 2-wire (12v) smoke detectors into my alarm system. I picked up a combination smoke/CO detector with heat sensor that integrates into my alarm system for $80.
Now what would be cool is for someone to integrate a good wireless AP with a smoke detector though I think the smoke detector signalling should remain separate (at least here in California they require using special fire alarm wire for hooking up fire related stuff).
I know many poor that could not garden if their life depended on it since their living situation does not provide any land to do so. Maybe out in the country, but certainly not in the city in high density housing where many of these people live. Some areas don't even have grocery stores. For example, most grocery stores have left many of the poor areas, leaving few choices for healthy food.
And what is to say that the person buying the wedding cake wasn't scrimping and saving a long time in order to get it. Just because someone is poor doesn't mean they should be punished. We seem to like to punish the poor as if it is all their fault when often the case it is not. Also, when you're trying to survive, junk food is often the cheapest means of high caloric food to keep you alive. Try and look at the cost of eating healthy. Junk processed food is cheap which is why they buy it.
I know a number of people who are working poor, often through no fault of their own. Try getting a job with full-time hours when you don't have any in-demand skills, in demand certifications or a college education. There's not a lot of choices out there. They often don't earn enough to feed themselves and keep a roof over their heads. They have to go through a lot of BS to get what services they can which basically try and screw you over. Try getting a job when you're 18 with nothing more than a high school diploma when you're kicked out of your parents house. I know people who were kicked out at 16 because they don't fall within their family's church's strict belief system. Social services are completely strained and they waste an inordinate amount of time to get anything done, often with those providing the social services being overwhelmed.
I just had to send money to a friend so he could buy basic groceries and pay his rent because a job that promised him a certain number of hours immediately caused his food stamps to disappear when he got the job. Turns out the job significantly overstated the number of hours he would be working to the point where it costs more for basic transportation for his job than he earned. On top of that he has constant medical expenses that the state does not provide for just to function. All these people want is a job with full-time hours so they can pay rent and buy food but they're always getting dicked about. People complain about them owning cell phones. Try and get a job without a phone.
Or these women with children. If the child is over 5 years old that child was born when the economy was good and the parent likely could afford the child. When the meltdown hit what do you do? You can't stop taking care of the kid until they're 18. People like to blame mothers who are poor when often when they had their child they were in a much better situation. It may be their husband became abusive when the economy tanked or they lost their full-time job. It's easy to blame someone who's poor for their own problems when you don't actually know all the BS they have to put up with and go through.
The whole cutting food stamps is disgusting. Almost all of the people getting them need them to survive, and for the amount they get they're far from eating healthy, causing lost productivity and medical expenses. Try living on what food stamps provide, especially if you live in one of the less generous states. If Walmart or McDonalds doesn't want to pay their employees a living wage or give them regular full-time hours, why should I, the taxpayer, have to subsidize their employees just to put food on the table. As far as I'm concerned, companies should be fined to pay for the food stamps their employees use rather than me subsidizing their degrading employment practices.
Food stamps and unemployment payments are one of the best stimulant programs out there. The people who receive these basically spend every penny they get and put it back into the economy. A tax cut is a very poor stimulus by comparison, especially when used as an excuse to cut food stamps and other programs people need to survive. Also, the poor generally don't pay income taxes so the tax breaks do them no good whatsoever unless they affect sales taxes, which they almost never do. Also, tax cuts rarely lower fees, which tend to affect the poor far more than the middle class.
The poor I know would love to work full time and get off of welfare if they could. The sad part is that they're in a vicious cycle. They have no savings, so things like a car breaking down or a medical issue can be catestrophic as an employer may use that as an excuse to fire someone because they didn't show up on time. They're often abused by management who knows they can treat them like shit since there are enough other desparate people willing to take any job they can get. Without skills in demand it's just a race to the bottom. Companies like Walmart give bonuses to managers who cut hours and employees which just makes life worse.
I rarely have a problem with KDE. Most applications open back up exactly where I left them and the same size. The only program that gives me trouble is Chrome.
I tend to do that a lot too. I always use focus follows mouse since I have so many windows open. It's just easier to have a partially obscured window and only bring it forward when needed. I also use keyboard shortcuts to bring windows forward and back and learned to really like the Sun "Front" key (other than the keyboard I hated just about everything else using Sun for a desktop workstation).
I still use my netbook but some programs (Thunderbird, I'm looking at you!) seem to thing that screen real-estate is free. For programming though I'm always short of real-estate. I could easily go for a 4K monitor at work but as it is I use two monitors and had to supply one of them myself. Oh, and I try and keep my code limited to 80 columns since the applications I work on (U-Boot and Linux Kernel) require it.
The thing is that though the charger may not have initiated the house fire there have been a number of documented cases where the connector to the adapter on the UMC cable has overheated and in some cases melted. I have had intermittent connection problems with the 30A adapter I was using. The connector is not that great at making a solid connection and the conductors seem rather small considering that they could be carrying upwards of 40A.
I look forward to getting a new UMC cable though I hope they also replace all of the additional adapters I own. The car normally comes with the NEMA 14-50 and standard 120V adapters. I have all of the other adapters they make.
Now there have also been a number of fires caused by faulty home wiring with other cars as well such as the Leaf and Volt which draw far less current than the Tesla is capable of.
As the owner of a Tesla I think this is the right thing to do. Tesla has generally been very proactive at dealing with issues before some government agency tells them to and without fighting it. They generally treat the owners well.
They've been pretty good about fixing the early problems. They've gone back and fixed all of the issues I've had with my 5K VIN number with their current cars and now offer a few features that were not available when I got mine (i.e. parking sensors). They've also raised their prices and a lot of options on my car now cost extra (i.e. $500 for fog lights).
I found a number of issues in my own house. Splices with no box, boxes buried inside the wall, missing boxes, romex run outside the wall, 20A breakers used for 15A circuits (14 gauge wire), shared neutral circuits without tying the breakers together, etc. I have gone back and fixed all the issues. I have basically gone back and had to fix just about everything that the previous owners of my house had done electrically.
They actually did this. The software in the car tries to detect if there are voltage fluctuations caused by home wiring and to reduce the current if they're detected. They rolled out these changes within 48 hours of the house fire, presumably after going through the extensive logs that the car keeps.
Actually as the owner of a Tesla, Tesla has been very proactive at fixing problems and treating their customers well. Unlike a lot of car manufacturers, Tesla tends to be proactive about things. I had a number of minor issues due to my car being one of the earlier VINs and they have always fixed the issues without giving me the run-around like I've gotten at other dealerships.
The fact that Elon talks before consulting his lawyers is a breath of fresh air.
I own a Tesla model S and was never very fond of how the adapters connect to the UMC cable. The UMC cable has a 5-pin connector on the end that plugs into the wall where it plugs into one of numerous adapters. The adapters contain pins for ground and the two 240V legs (not neutral) or the hot, neutral and ground for the 115V adapters. There's also a resistor in it that signals the amount of current that can be drawn between one of the pins and ground. I don't recall what the last pin is for.
The connector between the adapter and the cable is a weak link. I myself have had intermittent issues with my NEMA 14-30 adapter and the cable where just wiggling it causes a fault to show up. The adapter connector is not all that tight nor is it particularly secure. The pins are also rather small considering how much current they can be carrying (up to 40A).
A number of owners have reported that this connection between the UMC cable and the plug adapter has overheated or melted. While it sounds like in the case of the garage fire it was likely the fault of substandard wiring of the NEMA 14-50 outlet the UMC cables have been a known problem.
About a foot from this adapter cable is a small box that has a relay, GFI and some signalling circuitry to interface with the Model S.
I've only used the NEMA 14-50 adapter a couple of times since I have a separate high power wall connector that's hard-wired into my home (100A feed). I'm a lot more comfortable using that over the UMC cable but Tesla has to fix the early HPWCs as well. The resettable fuses are too sensitive so they recommend not charging at the full 80A. I myself have not had any problems at 80A but normally they reduce it to 60 until they send someone out to replace the fuses.
I don't think this will be a major setback for Tesla. The retail price of the UMC is $600 which means it probably costs a lot less to manufacture. I just hope that if they change that connector that they replace all of my adapters since I bought a number of additional ones (at $45 each) to handle NEMA 14-30, 10-30, 6-50 and 120v/20A.
The UMC is basically the equivalent of a normal J1772 EV charger but with a switchable plug and in a much smaller form factor. Hell, my HPWC charger is a fraction the size of most J1772 EV chargers yet it handles a lot more power than most J1772 adapters (and it doesn't even get warm when pumping 80A through it).
The UMC is nice since it means I can charge my car at any RV park that has a 240V hookup or that an owner just needs to install a NEMA 14-50 outlet which is a lot less expensive than either a high-power wall connector ($1200) or a standard EV charger.
There have been a number of problems with the UMC (cable in question). The cable has an adapter on the end to choose from a variety of plugs, i.e. NUMA 14-50, NUMA 14-30 standard 120v, NEMA 10-30, 6-50, etc.
I myself have seen issues where my NEMA 14-30 adapter would give a fault if the cable was bumped. The connection between the adapter and the cable is not all that solid and a number of owners have had issues with this.
About a foot away from this connector is a control box that contains a GFI and a relay and the circuitry to interface to the car.
The adapter has 5 pins on it. One for ground, one for each 240V leg (neutral is not used) and a pin that appears to go to a resistor to signal the amount of current supported by the adapter. I don't remember what the last pin does. Anyway, for the amount of current the NEMA 14-50 and 6-50 adapters carry the pins are rather small. The adapter also doesn't always securely latch to the cable which can lead to a bad connection causing the adapter and/or cable to melt.
I don't think this will be a big setback for Tesla. Tesla's retail price for this cable is $600.
Tesla actually slowly ramps up the current draw. When I hook my car up to the 80A charger it will slowly ramp up to 40A, pause, then slowly ramp up to 80A (there are two chargers in the car, each rated at 40A). It monitors the change in voltage as it does this.