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[PA Comic] Friday, February 15, 2013 - Blackbox
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Some of the other problems they had were times when Top Gear made it look like the car had completely died, when some minor adjustments were being made but it was still a fully functional vehicle. They seem to have dramatized things a bit, which Tesla had beef with and Top Gear said was all part of the tv magic.
This seems like more effort than it is worth to prove someone wrong.
Right now I can't even buy a tenth of that car though
Minor adjustments like spending hours recharging a flat battery?
Isn't that the core of the dispute? Tesla contend that the battery never went flat.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
For the Top Gear show? No, I don't remember exactly what it was. The Tesla guys wanted to adjust a sensor or something, so the Top Gear guys staged it like the thing had completely died. Something like that. Again, I don't really care and am not defending the car. All of these events are Tesla being waaay too defensive over getting reviewed and pretending that they're owed a good review for their kinda crap car, while clashing with terrible media doing a poor job actually doing anything in an honest manner.
Seems like in both cases the end result was, "Car is kinda crap as a car, therefore I'm going to significantly overstate the problems with the car so I can trash it for an exciting article/show."
And this is really was I was getting at with my initial post. A compelling argument exists for Broder having decided the "end" of his story as early as his first recharge, if not before even stepping foot in the car. Even if we take his telling of the events, his actions are of a man who is playing with fire. He knows from the first stop that the car is receiving less mileage than the estimate, and yet each recharge thereafter he fills to what "should" get him to his next destination. Well, he already knows that he has no reliable way of telling what "should" get him there, and he can continue to test the mileage on a full charge. The reason he doesn't, one might suggest, is because it's far more spectacular to write about the car's under-performance leading to a complete failure than it is to write hypotheticals, i.e., I WOULD have been stranded had I trusted the mileage estimate. The fact that it feeds into the primary fear most people have regarding electric cars just makes it that much more of a compelling situation.
In fairness the Top Gear review was pretty much "this is an awesome car (for an electric car) and a technological marvel.... right up until it stops working", which seems to be a fair and accurate description of Tesla cars.
I can believe the Tesla ran out of juice on the test track, it happens all the time to petrol cars with much higher ranges, thrashing them full throttle round a track for half a day does that. They say it themselves, the test track is a thirsty place. MPG's routinely plummet to single figures.
But it does take at least half an hour to charge your phone to the point it can stay on for a day and you can still get stranded in an internal combustion engine car if you started your trip into wilderness without taking 10 minutes (or more depending on where you live) to drive to a gas station and fill up your tank. Would the same people just blame their phones/cars/whatever?
Part of being qualified to operate any device is to understand its capabilities and limitations to the reasonable point where you can plan ahead so that it won't fail on you in a predictable manner; failures while attempting to operate them while disregarding these precautions are admittedly common to every device ever made but hardly the fault of the device's design itself.
Most people would call them user errors.
In light of all the available information, the NYT review arguably looks like a willful user error and misdirection in blaming the weather instead of his own poor planning/decision-making, and I'll leave it at that IMHO, it doesn't look bad of Musk to call Broder out with his data in this case. If anything, it makes him look passionate, confident of his products and clearly a much smarter man than a journalist who doesn't seem to understand that it's not even about the car and that he can't bs his way out of this one even if the whole industry circles the wagons.
But hey, that's what my flavor of confirmation bias gets me.
YMMV or something. =P
1: Oil is a finite resource. It is going to run out, no matter what. Period. The Earth has finite matter in it. Oil is a small fraction of that.
2: every reputable (peer reviewed) scientist in the field confirms that the era of cheap oil has come and gone and you and I are on the shitty end of the Production Bell-Curve: Your expensive gas bills are evidence of this.
If you think you can keep burning fossil fuel infinitely for your own convenience, you are a blatant fucking idiot. You are making the argument that a single harvest can feed a town forever or that a single wax candle can never be extiguished. If you think this, you never should have made it to college. (wild guess: you didn't... unless it was an Art Institute or something where they just take your money and run)
This is sadly a case of ideology and politics, by nessesity: The assessment of the physical materials that compile our planet (Surprise: there's only so much of any given thing to go around.... and out of everything that's available, oil is way-rare.) affects, quite literally: everything and everyone. WIth personal transport being one of the top reasons (if SCIENCE is to be believed? THE SINGULAR reason) to why we are running out of oil, and why it's so expensive now and why our environment is so fucked up. (unless anyone here on this form wants to go head-to-head against Neil DeGrasse Tyson or Bill Nye?)
SO, here comes this company that says "hey! lets make personal transport somewhat sustainable, regardless if it's a politically charged question!" and our world is captivated: I dig it, my friends dig it.. it seems that the first strike into Sustainable Electric transportation might be on the horizion and they take a Top-Down approach: fancy sports cars, then a sedan, then a minivan and eventually a compact and a hatchback and an econobox. Tesla gets the funding one would need to stand a chance against established industry whilst making things more efficient as they drop down to their target efficiency.
Sounds good, right? well.. until John Q. Public gets involved. There's the question of the NYT article being valid... and honestly? NYT Writer Guy made solid claims that were debunked by HARD EVIDENCE supplied by a Black Box!
So, are we men of science, or not?! If you want to be the kind of person that is held in place by his personal assumptions on a subject? sure. fine. go nuts. just as long as you are willing to admit your shortcomings and irrationality on the subject and can remove yourself from the discussion as needed.
Jerry seems to speak this tone on his episode about politics where he claims to "care" and claims he can't make political cartoons because you either have to "take a side" or "come off as you don't care" and he states that he actually does care, and can't partake... but now here we are: facing down one of the most important, politically charged decisions our society seems to be making: "do we admit that a finite resource is a poor long-term method of dependency"... and here is Jerry putting his stamp of approval on a comic where he comes off as "not caring either way."
That is bullshit.
I'm calling it.
Maybe when your post is spam queued quit mashing the button.
While they are the future, we have a long way to go before they are viable and the only people who buy them currently are rich people, in order to show off to their dumber, poorer friends.
Satans..... hints.....
He wrote a comic about journalistic integrity. I don't see how that's chiming in on oil.
Still, there's a part of the story I can't wrap my head around. When he stopped overnight in Grotton, CT the car lost over half of its remaining miles. I assume he didn't leave the car running overnight, this loss of charge sounds pretty normal for a battery in the cold. (We can debate if he knew that was the case.) Then he says Tesla told him that he would regain miles if he warmed up the battery by sitting around in the car with the heat on. After he did it, surprise, the battery had fewer miles left than before he sat around using energy.
I get that the battery can regain some lost miles as it warms up (the electrons are easier to shake out of a warm battery?) but why wasn't the advice to get on the road and start driving. Maybe he would have made it all the way to the supercharge station, or one of the dozens of other charging stations on the way (PlugShare shows a ton of them on 95).
The other question is why he didn't just drive an extra twenty-ish miles the night before and stay at the Old Saybrook Inn which PlugShare says has two EV plugs that he could have used to charge his car overnight.
It's not even really a comic about journalistic integrity, it's more a comic making fun of how the entire affair is now just a largely pointless internet shit-flinging match which ought to be kind of embarrassing for everybody involved.
Sources please.
For the Model S the batteries are usable beyond their useful lif ein the car, and they are recyclable after that. They are not user disposable. No doubt, the battery, motor/inverter, charger and related management systems (battery thermal management, etc) make up a large part of the car, but the rest of the car is made out of normal car stuff.
Tesla is a new company just now starting to manufacture cars at a pace of 20,000+ a year, where as other car manufacturers are producing millions a year. No doubt, the giant manufacturers are probably more efficient in some ways.
Please tell me if there's some reliable source explaining how electric cars in general take more energy to produce and are more toxic than ICE cars. And if it is more, how much more energy, how much more toxic? Electric cars and their charging systems operate at a much higher efficiency than ICE cars, and producing and distributing electricity is currently more energy efficient than the producing and distributing gasoline. Gasoline is much more energy dense, but that doesn't mean it's efficient (or more to the point, that we use it efficiently). So even if producing an EV uses more energy than a comparable ICE car, is it so much more that it overtakes the lifetime operating efficiency?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2012/oct/05/electric-cars-emissions-bad-environment
A million and a half articles based on the report cited. I am not overly familiar with the information they're referencing, but I've seen this floated several times before too. I think the idea is that electric cars use recycled components far less than current cars, and don't seem to continue to be used as used cars for as long. The benefits of continuing to use a car for a very, very long lifespan are somewhat important because of the cost of creating them in the first place.
The traditional auto industry is well over 100 years old with a great number of sophistication and specializations among many different companies involved. I think what the report is saying about recycled materials and what not makes a lot of sense.
However, I still have problems with statements that seem to say that unless we go to something fully carbon free, then we might as well not bother with EVs:
"However, it is counterproductive to promote EVs in regions where electricity is produced from oil, coal, and lignite combustion."
If we produce electricity in centralized locations, then the pollution is easier to manage and it's easier to make improvements/replacements at power plants for effiency and pollution reduction over time, and the EVs don't need to be replaced. We are going to continue to need electrical power plants anyway. If people start using more electricity, then there both be more money and more political will for improving the power grid.
[switching to EVs] will fail completely if the electricity grid is not fully decarbonized.
Again, I can't understand a statement like this. So staying with ICE forever is the way to go? By switching to EVs, you make consumers dependent on electricity, which can come from a vareity of sources, and they can be improved over time. With ICE cars, you'll always be dependent on creating a bunch of explosions from a combustible fuel. Just because China builds a bunch of dirty power plants, that doesn't mean we have to. Being "fully decarbonized" is not a realistic goal short term, if ever. You can't convert energy from the environment without having some effect on it. Even "green" hydropower harms the ecosystem of a river. Perhaps solar and wind has a minimal effect, I dunno, but we don't yet have the technology or money to power everything that way.
ICE cars have had well over 100 years to improve their game, continually improving efficiency, pollution, all while delivering better performance and other quality. The same will happen for EVs too.
With gas cars, you put in X gallons of gasoline you can be fairly confident that you will get Y miles in distance as long as you aren't a lead foot. With electric, there are other factors like temperature, heaters, etc. so it's easy to criticize when the car estimates you'll get Y miles but you only get Y-50 miles instead.
However, the review in question seems a tad flawed in that the reviewer seemed to go out of his way to create a scenario where the car might fail. Not fully charging the car, not charging enough to get to your next destination, etc. If he had reviewed a gasoline car and only put $20 in the tank and hoped to drive on it all day, people would brand him an idiot. Yet somehow this kind of behavior with an electric car is a fair estimate of "real-world use".
The real challenge is this: there are lots of drivers out there who would do the same thing as Broder and blame Tesla when they ran out of juice. With a new technology, people are quick to blame the product instead of their own ignorance. They will ignore the limitations of the new technology and be angry that it "doesn't work". It's the biggest battle for electric car makers. They have a public which doesn't want to understand electric cars, they just want it to work.
And that is one of the main reasons why Tesla started with luxury vehicles. If someone can afford a niche automobile, and own it based almost entirely on the newness factor of the technology, you can reasonably expect that the owner will take into account how to drive and maintain the vehicle. The general public would just blame the maker for making a bad car.
And this is why Musk has to publicly defend his cars anytime they are maligned. He has to create a perception that the cars "just work" and he can't let bad reviews, whether they be benign or sinister, to take down that perception.
I don't think Musk/Tesla is out to defend every possibly negative remark or review, they seem mostly interested in fairness. They're also not blind to the limitations of their cars or their charging network.
For example, this pair of articles appeared on CNN over the weekend, and there hasn't been the reaction like there was with the Broder article.
http://money.cnn.com/2013/02/15/autos/tesla-model-s/index.html
http://www.money.cnn.com/2013/02/15/autos/tesla-model-s-lessons/index.html