Let alone buy one. They’re over-engineered and clumsily designed, as we can see in the example of this stupid, poinless death.
Angela Chao, Sen. Mitch McConnell’s billionaire sister-in-law, spent her last minutes alive frantically calling her friends for help as her Tesla slowly sank in a pond on a remote Texas ranch, according to a report.
Chao, the billionaire former CEO of dry bulk shipping giant Foremost Group, tragically died at the age of 50 on Feb. 10 after accidentally backing her car into the pond while making a three-point turn.
When the car lost power, she couldn’t get out while the car filled with water.
The windows are made of laminated glass, which sounds like a plus, but they’re so hard they aren’t easily broken. The doors are opened electronically, with a clever little button. There is a manual switch for the front doors, but they’re not obvious and you need to have read the manual to know about them. The manual switches for the back doors are buried in a very nonintuitive place, and further, owners are warned that using them too much can damage the finish.
Apparently, changing gears is done with an LED touch screen. Why? Multiple generations of Americans have been trained on simple levers and buttons that are familiar and reliable. There is a virtue to simplicity and obvious controls.
Manual controls are probably cheaper, too, but not as flashy.
Humans are stupid and idiots rule the world. That’s Elon Musk’s recipe to success. Create stupid and pointlessly shiny things and make them look cool and people will crawl over each other to buy them. He’s not the first person to do it either. Ipod was a dumbass idea as well and lots of people bought the stupid shit, including myself.
Well, when any car is sinking, you can’t open the doors because you can’t push them open against the pressure of the water. You have to sit there until the car is completely filled with water, up to the top of the door, then you’ll be able to open the door. I want those manual handles that you roll the windows down with to come back!
To break a window, you need one of those little metal pointed things that you put that on a corner of a window and hit it hard, it’s supposed to shatter the window. But, how do you practice this procedure, so you’ll know how to do it when you need it?
If you open the window immediately, before you battery is underwater, you might be able to do it. But really, modern cars are death traps if you’re sinking.
Not to say that the Tesla isn’t horrific, it is, and I too would never step into one. And, I am damn sick and tired of those iPads cars have for controls, they’re useless and dangerous.
There is a manual switch for the front doors, but they’re not obvious and you need to have read the manual to know about them.
God’s death, Teslas are even worse than I’d thought. What rational thought-process could possibly lead to “…therefore it makes sense to: a) replace a perfectly simple mechanical door-opening mechanism with yet another newfangled electronic means; and b) have the manual door-handle out of sight.” ? Why would anyone in their right mind do something like that? Were plain old mechanical door-opening handles found to be inherently unsafe or unreliable? The only time a door-handle didn’t work in my car, was when I’d pushed the child-proofing button by mistake.
The most charitable thing I can say about this feature is that it gives unnecessary features a bad name. Oh, and that it proves (again) that unfettered business-owners don’t really make the most rational decisions.
Just wait until it catches fire and your kids are in the back seat and you have to explain how to dismantle the door handles and pop a switch hidden under the upholstery to escape.
Well, why didn’t she just…roll the windows down then?
It is not explicit but I think I know the answer.
The windows are power windows, operated by electricity from the battery.
The battery system must have shorted out early in this accident, before she could hit the down window button. (Or on a Tesla, maybe it is on the computer screen too.)
This does sound like a death trap design.
Cars go into the water all the time accidently. Sometimes it is driver error at a river or lake shore, maybe while launching a boat at a ramp. Or going off the road at the wrong place.
The other common way is getting caught in flooding. There are large floods everywhere in the USA, even in the desert.
The other thing is that Teslas apparently have this feature where they automatically set which gear to use based on objects in the environment. They ‘decide’ whether to go into forward or reverse gear by determining what is your most likely direction — they shift without using a gear stick.
Already, Tesla cars have a poor safety record. The self driving autopilot feature has killed a lot of people.
This source says so far it is 35 people.
I’ve also heard that Tesla cars have other problems.
The build and finish aren’t all that great, i.e. quality issues.
They aren’t all that reliable and often require expensive repairs.
There are a fair number of Tesla cars around where I live.
I find that their styling is pretty routine and mundane. If it wasn’t for the T logo on the back, I would never identify them as Teslas.
That is OK in a cheap family car but Tesla cars are expensive.
“Angela Chao, Sen. Mitch McConnell’s billionaire sister-in-law, spent her last minutes alive frantically calling her friends for help as her Tesla slowly sank in a pond on a remote Texas ranch, according to a report.”
Next do Moscow Mitch, although turtles CAN hold their breath a long time, I hear.
The best part of “simple levers and buttons” is that you can adjust them without looking at them.
A while back, we had a Prius, which had a touch screen for the sound system and for the A/C, heat, etc.
I hated it, because you have to take your eyes off the road and figure out where you need to push or something before you can look back at the road. I usually had to ask my passenger — if I had one — to do the adjustments.
My current car (Kia Soul) has knobs, which I can find by feel, and never take my eyes off the road.
PZ, the manual buttons and switches are actually more expensive, which is one reason for the proliferation of touchscreens. Want to add a button/function? Couple lines of code. Backlash regulation is already starting in Europe, as these things are deadly.
Europe Is Requiring Physical Buttons For Cars To Get Top Safety Marks, And We Should, Too
Cybertruck Drivers Humiliating Themselves Are the Biggest Threat to Tesla’s Future
LED touch screens? Thats stupid. I often have to use a stylus on my touch screen mobile phone. Either that or repeatedly swipe or touch the screen to get it to work. Give me a stick shift every time. Sadly handles to wind down windows went literally out the door when they stopped making real cars. Thank goodness they still have door handles.
While Tesla is not blameless here, it wasn’t the only factor.
You can look at several Mythbusters episodes to see how hard it is to get out of a sinking car.
(If you manage to open the door before entering the water, it might be easier.)
That wouldn’t have made it easier for help to arrive in time.
If you have a pond deep enough to submerge a car in next to the driveway, it would seem common sense to me to have some safety feature that would stop a car.
They just need to put an ‘UNDO’ button in their software = problem solved!
How do these safety drawbacks to Teslas compare to other contemporary vehicles? Seems newer vehicles are doing away with mechanical door handles, locks, etc.
I’m not convinced how much lower EVs’ carbon footprints are. How many are charged on a coal based grid? On a social media site I’m on someone posts anti-EV memes. Not sure if they are trolling but often it’s charging stations served by gas or diesel generators or EVs stranded roadside being recharged by portable generators. Is that a thing or just propaganda?
My next car might be a hybrid but definitely not an EV!
That said from what I can tell the Tesla Plaid is probably one of the most badass muscle cars ever. EVs accelerate beastly. I’d still rather have a Hemi ‘Cuda or a Shelby Cobra.
Cybertrucks are fugly. I’d rather have an offroaded Porsche 911 mainly to piss off the yuppy purists. Those are sweet.
I would gladly ride in a Tesla. Chances are none of the horror stuff would happen. I just want to experience the acceleration in a Plaid.
I got a Tesla Model 3 in 2018. I’d say it’s the best vehicle I’ve ever owned, best money I’ve ever spent. But that’s anecdotal of course.
A minor problem is when you have new people in the car, you have to warn them NOT to use the big obvious door handle to manually open the door and use the tiny nondescript unlabeled button.
Strictly speaking, Teslas are not over-engineered. An over-engineered product is one which is more complex than a simpler solution which works just as well. The solution of “make normal, non-computerized cars” works better than what Tesla does. The word “over-engineered” is too generous for what they do.
Since nobody has mentioned it here: Teslas not only replace all mechanical controls with electronic (and almost always touchscreen-based) ones, they also replace all individual wiring systems (such as window controls) with a single, car-wide bus running a relatively high-level network, just to make sure that if your car’s wiring goes wrong anywhere the whole thing is likely to fail at once, and also to make every part have to be more complex than if each device had a minimal set of non-network-based wiring. (There’s also the fact that the interior of a car left in the sun can easily exceed the recommended operating temperature of touchscreens, and even the recommended storage temperature of touchscreens, but who needs to dot such a large i?)
(Also: it has been determined that if the self-driving algorithms detect that a crash is imminent, the system will shut off literally a second before impact so Tesla can claim the car was not being controlled by the self-driving algorithm at the time of the crash. And then there’s the scandal where they were caught gaming the battery reserve estimates to pretend the cars would travel further on a full battery than they actually could — after a certain distance, the remaining mileage would suddenly go from a deliberate overstatement to a realistic assessment, and Tesla dealers were told to tell customers that it was their (the customers’) fault that the battery was no longer holding a full charge, and refuse returns/service/refunds… Scumbag company.)
AFAIK, all modern car windows are laminated glass; that’s not specific to Tesla.
@Hemidactylus #16:
You should be. It’s not close.
It doesn’t matter. EVs are much more efficient than internal combustion engine cars, regardless of the source of the electricity.
But no, very few cars are purely running off coal these days. You don’t have to wonder; you can look it up. In Maryland, for example, only about half our electricity is generated from fossil sources.
Here’s one chart I find myself posting a lot, from the Union of Concerned Scientists:
I’m sure such things exist, somewhere, but yes, it’s just propaganda.
I bought my first EV (a 2012 model) in 2015, and my second one (a 2020 model) this year. (The first one still works fine, but it’s a bit short-range.) I don’t intend to ever buy a non-EV again.
But neither of my EVs is a Tesla. At first, that was just because Teslas were too expensive. Now, it’s more because Elon is an asshole. But, it would be a mistake to judge Tesla’s cars by Elon (I just don’t want him to get my money), and a bigger mistake to judge EVs by Teslas.
I want to time machine this back to the 80s to clean house on the gearheads in my high school with their Camaros, Firebirds, Mustangs, Chargers, Goats, and that badass AMX (RIP dude):
https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a38423992/2021-tesla-model-s-plaid-by-the-numbers/
Compared to these monsters:
https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/dodge-viper-versus-shelby-cobra/
Hmm, the chart didn’t work. Let’s try a different way:
https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/styles/original/public/2022-09/driving-cleaner-figure-2a.png
and if that fails, just see it here:
https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/driving-cleaner
Full of “engineering affectations” is how I would put it.
Just because we can control things with computers and touch screens doesn’t necessarily mean we should.
Thanks Nemo @23
That graphic with Gasoline MPG Equivalents makes sense to me. I still feel a bit antsy about running out of juice somewhere. The hybrid option is more comfortable to me in the near future. And I wonder about infrastructure and time charging vs gassing up. How much do you see it on your home power bill versus cost of gas over same time period for a hybrid? Or the cost of charging stations? How does the monthly budget compare gassing a hybrid versus charging an EV at home and elsewhere? Do charging stations get a cut that makes them much worse than home charging?
And living in Florida the one thing that stresses me is a week or so power outage due to a hurricane. Finding gas after a storm can be difficult but if your lines are down and transformers blown charging a cellphone is an issue. Hybrids are just more efficient gas vehicles. But I could see an EV as a second vehicle that gets from 0-60 much quicker. Maybe commute with an EV and do road trips, evacuations, and power outage times with a hybrid or traditional gas vehicle.
rsmith @14:
Yes, but you’re not a regulation-hating Texas billionaire.
@1: “Ipod was a dumbass idea”
LOL say what? iPod was one of the most important products of its time, and for better or worse the precursor to mobile phones in use today. Doesn’t mean it’s beyond criticism but by no means a “dumbass idea”.
@20 Nemo
All motor vehicle windshields are laminated glass, to prevent intrusion into the car or exit of people from inside the car, The rest of the glass is tempered and very tough to break. (Unless you’re not trying to break it.)
map61 @29
My decommissioned iPhone that I update and still can go online with is basically an iPod touch and hence the stupidest idea ever. I’m typing on a more current iPod touch which happens to have cellular network connectivity. As dumbass as it gets. Fucking thing keeps conning me into listening to Bluetooth enabled audiobooks in my car. And I’m able to stream music on non-Apple music apps. The horror. Steve Jobs cried, though he had to be convinced transitioning from iPods to iPhones was a good idea if Adam Grant in Think Again is on point. Blackberry ate their dust in the emerging smartphone market.
Oops my @30 was directed at drivenb4u @28 not map61 @29. Sorry.
I went to an AI conference here i Australia and one presenter said the fear of dying in a self driven Tesla is disproportionate to the danger. He cited the number of car accident deaths per year in the US vs Tesla deaths.
I had to point out to him that as a percentage of car trips Tesla deaths are WAY high.
@Hemidactylus #25:
Well, I never ran out of gas in a gas car, and I’ve never run out of charge in an EV. Both the level of charge and the estimated range remaining are reported on the dashboard of every EV I’ve seen.
The increment to the power bill is vastly less than the savings in gasoline, for the same miles travelled. I think I’ve paid about a quarter as much, overall, but YMMV.
DC fast charging stations are (usually) much more expensive than home charging. But I’ve used them only a handful of times over the last nine years. You only need them for longer road trips, or if you can’t charge at home or work.
Nemo@21–
Many EV charging stations have diesel generators. This is not propaganda. They are used for backup if the electricity grid blacks out.
The propaganda is the anti-EV lobby using this as a ‘gotcha’. Given the reliability of most grids, the diesel generators will be used for a few hours a year. Which means the petrochemical burden of these backup generators is a tiny fraction of the burden of petrol cars and the attendant infrastructure.
(And although they don’t like to mention it, a large, well-built diesel generator emits less CO2e per kWh than a coal-fired power plant.…not including the loss to transmission.)
Hemidactylus–
iPods and other mobile music devices were brilliant products that met a market need previously served by the tape-based Sony Walkman. iPods only became stupid once mobile phone technology got good enough to absorb and then surpass those music functions. Even now, if you’re venturing off-grid or don’t want to pay roaming fees, you can set your playlists to download at home so you can listen to music offline…and your phone is essentially an iPod.
Many of the features of the iPod were stupid, especially its obsessive DRM policing, but this was true of most of the competitor products as well.
Damn, I once saw a member of my atheist Toastmasters group, open the doors of his Tesla from his remote, and they open just far enough not to hit the car next to him, I was incredibly impressed (my minivan opens the sliding door, but not for the hinged doors). Now I’m sad.
Nobody ever died in a car until Elon Musk got into the automotive industry. It is known.
@drivenb4u:
The original ipod was a harddisk strapped to a battery advertised as a portable music player. It’s a terrible idea and the only reason it lasts is because apple had tried very hard to make the harddisk spin as little as possible. It also locked the user to the monopolistic iTunes store shit. It is my theory that after the death of Steve Jobs, the tech cum guzzlers who are desperate to suck off some wealthy white boy as “the savior” and the “techno genius of the century!!!!” moved on to give constant blow jobs to Elon Musk. Just like Elon, the college drop out Steve never actually designed shit, never coded, never did anything substantial but took the credit and the billions for all the shiny shit they managed to sell to gullible people.
@35 Missing the forest for the trees, I see.
You still need to get energy from the grid. So, if your country’s grid produces 50+% of the energy from coal powerplants, you got to fill your battery 50+% from coal. You might as well have highly efficient steam engine inside your car and shovel coal.
This is actually the other side’s point: diesel generators (we call them diesel engines when it comes to cars) are more efficient than coal. So, why not cut the middle man and just use one directly in a car and not be dependent on the coal-produced energy at all?
And this whole conversation is ignoring the cost of producing and recycling batteries. Just the ecological cost of producing (mining, refining) lithium alone is astronomical and extremely dirty. Areas in which it is done will be barren for thousands of years and cannot be cleaned up by any of the current cleanup techniques.
jo1storm, the “mining is dirty” argument is inherently flawed and disingenuous. It is a red herring.
Any form of energy extraction and use, including fossil fuels and electricity, will damage the environment. The question is not whether producing and recycling batteries has an ecological cost. The question is, whether that cost is smaller than that of other alternatives.
And currently, the answer to that question is a resounding yes.
Safety-critical features should obviously be electricity-independent, or have big, manual backups.
Current hybrid cars are more expensive, but if they could design a compact Stirling engine to continuously charge a “buffer’ battery you could both charge the battery with cheap nughttime electricity and run the stirling engine with alcohol or whatever hydrocarbon liquid you want.
.
In France, several people died this week when they tried to cross bridges crossing flooded rivers.
If you want a complex solution to sinking cars, add very big inflatable air bags. Just make sure the car does not float upside down. I think NASA worked hard to make the capsules float right side up.
A horrible way to go, Aside from that, though, one less billionaire in the world is okay by me.
That flying car they had in an old Bond film was probably not very practical, but I bet you could get out of it if it sank in water.
@40 Charlie: Unless you live in a small country that has perfect conditions for producing food, hasn’t mined lithium so far and is about to start. Then the question isn’t whether that cost is smaller than that of other alternatives, but whether you and 6 million people would have to move from the country because the whole environment will be so poisoned that no food or drinkable water could be produced.
In short, it is easy to talk about the cost when you are not the one to bear it but some country far away.
https://balkaninsight.com/2022/04/13/its-not-over-the-past-and-present-of-lithium-mining-in-serbia/
But we can rely on Boeing… can’t we?
From BBC News https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-68488418
A passenger has described the moment people hit the roof of a plane travelling from Australia to New Zealand during what was described as a mid-air “technical event”.
Fifty were hurt and 12 were taken to hospital on landing in Auckland.
Emergency services said one was in a serious condition.
In total, New Zealand’s St John ambulance service said it had “assessed and treated approximately” 50 patients who had been travelling on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, which had taken off from Sydney.
There is a lot about Tesla and other “modern” cars that perplex me. What’s wrong with good-old mechanical instruments (i.e. speedometer, fuel gage, etc)? Why do you need electronic locks and windows? All these electronic toys have cheaper and more reliable mechanical alternatives that might help make their cars more affordable and less likely to kill their customers. Why doesn’t Elon use those?
I mean besides basic capitalist greed and arrogance.
Oh, and the iPod was a godsend for those of us who wanted to listen to the music we like on the go without needing to carry a CD library with us. My previous job wouldn’t let us have devices with wireless capability on the floor, but the “classic” iPod was perfectly fine. It may have been just a “hard drive strapped to a battery” but it worked great.
I can only assume lotharloo was a Zune owner.
I own a Tesla and you’re not wrong.
A passenger has described the moment people hit the roof of a plane travelling from Australia to New Zealand during what was described as a mid-air “technical event”.
This is what seatbelts are supposed to prevent. I’m sick of hearing morons saying they don’t wanna wear seatbelts ‘cuz “seatbelts won’t save you if the plane crashes.” Of course they won’t — they’re supposed to keep you in your seat when your plane hits turbulence or has to make a fast unplanned maneuver. Yet another perfectly sensible rule that people need to grow up and stop whining about. /OT_rantlet
The newest Tesla 3 models no longer have that pesky old stick to signal a turn. Just a couple of cool looking convenient buttons on the steering wheel, that evidently work fine once you get used to them. As long as you aren’t turning. If, say, you are driving around a curve in the road, or on a round-about, then you can’t reach them to signal.
I’m guessing that the “engineer” who came up with this idea has a name beginning with an M.
So someone backed into a pond with their Tesla.
– When you back up in a Tesla, the main screen turns on the backup and side cameras, so you use that to back up. To miss a pond behind you shows an amazing lack of awareness.
The car lost power.
– How? The battery units are sealed. There are plenty of online videos of Teslas driving through deep water up past their windshield, a level that would kill the engine on a gas car. You do realize that most gas cars have electronic windows too, which would also shut down if the car was completely flooded.
So essentially you are saying that the driver was so careless that they backed into a pond, and then did nothing (didn’t try to open a window or door) until eventually the electronics inside were flooded and shut down, and hadn’t read their owners manual to understand that there was a lever in the door handle to manually open the door. You then conclude this was the car’s fault.
Teslas actually have one of the highest safety ratings available. Your anecdote is not evidence of the contrary.
The fatal accident rate for regular driving is about 1.5 per hundred million miles. Tesla is way worse than that.
First I was “what fucking gears, it’s an EV!” (although Hyundai will offer you a model with a fake stick and motor sounds, but then I realised you mean the driving mode forward or backward.
Yeah, we got ourselves an EV, we didn’t want to join a religion, so it’s obviously not a Tesla.
+++
Not an issue in my (still limited) experience. Most people don’t drive 400km straight and if you do you should take a break anyway.
And I would never buy a hybrid, because why would I buy a vehicle where all the parts of a combustion engine can break and all the parts of an EV can break?
We pay for all our electricity as much as we used to pay for gas alone per month. In winter. In summer this will shift as we can use some of our own power from our solar panels.
@8 Well, it’s a crying shame Mitch and Elaine weren’t in the back seat.
Given that Elaine Chao was described by the Washington Post as “running away from the requirements of her job” (when she was Secretary of Labor, under Dubya) I wonder how she feels about safety requirements now.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-elaine-chaos-labor-department-failed-to-protect-low-wage-workers_n_583f1c56e4b09e21702c1862
Never mind. Apparently she doesn’t drive if she can fly–on someone else’s dime.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/chao-used-government-plane-seven-times-when-cheaper-flights-would-not-work/2017/10/05/c2eeec7c-a7a9-11e7-b3aa-c0e2e1d41e38_story.html
@16,2, 25, 33 I have a hybrid, some of my friends have EVs. The EVs are really amazing but unless you own a house, they are not terribly practical. If you have to recharge at commercial charging stations, they are just as expensive as gas. One friend got around the problem by installing solar panels so he really only pays electricity for his EV6 months out of the year. That said, I love my Honda Accord hybrid because it routinely gets 50 mpg (the best mileage to date was 68 mpg) and if I ever get stuck on the side of a highway, I can just come back with 5 gallons of gas. You can’t come back with 5 gallons of electricity and go. There have been reported problems with the fast chargers too; I would not want one in an attached garage, given the risk of a battery fire starting a house fire. It’s also worth noting that I live in an area with hurricanes; going a week or two without electricity is a pain in the ass as it is; I don’t want my car grounded at the same time.
…and hadn’t read their owners manual to understand that there was a lever in the door handle to manually open the door. You then conclude this was the car’s fault.
I have never been in any kind of car where the door-opening lever was anywhere other than the obvious, near-to-hand place it’s always been. Nor have I ever had to read the owners’ manual to find out where it was. If this driver bought the Tesla expecting it to have a working electronic door-opening button, and had to read the owners’ manual to find where the manual lever (which had been advertized as a backup, mind you) was located, then yes, that is definitely the fault of the manufacturer and designers, NOT the owner (and not “the car’s fault” either — why would you imply something that stupid?).
Why are you so desperate to defend #QElon, BACON boy? Is he paying you to spout such ignorant rubbish?
@52
Buy a car from a reliable auto maker. Honda has a pretty solid reputation for being relatively trouble-free. I test drove a Prius before reluctantly increasing my budget to buy a car–the Prius has miserable acceleration and I can definitely confirm the gear shift is just weird–the one I test drove had a small lever on the dashboard (I know–wtf?!) and an ambiguous resting position that made it difficult to tell what gear the car was in, especially with park and neutral. I did not like the UX at all and had the disquieting feeling that one day I was going to leave the car in neutral thinking it was in park, exit the vehicle and watch it roll away and crash.
Also (in the blue states at least) the hybrid cars come with a lifetime warranty for the rechargeable battery, by law. The battery is made up of a series of smaller cells, so as the individual cells go bad, they are replaced by the manufacturer for recycling (the lithium and rare earth materials alone makes it worth it to recycle) so you don’t have to suddenly come up with 5-10K USD for a new hybrid battery at the 10 year mark.
The other reason to get a hybrid is that below certain temperatures, they either don’t work well or work at all. I rolled out one morning in subzero (Fahrenheit) temperatures only to get a “Low Temperature Power Reduced” warning from my dashboard. Once the gasoline engine kicked in, the engine & battery warmed sufficiently for normal functioning.
The hybrid also dropped my auto costs like a stone. Even when gas hit peak prices over $6/gal, my gas costs never really went above $40/month, with regular commuting/driving
That is approximately 250 miles, which is like 4 hours of a road trip on an interstate highway, and then you have to wait several hours to recharge at a recharge station. I agree that you should take a break at that point, just not a 2-4 hour one.
@55 silvrhalide
Long distance drives plus the hurricane thing.
What’s the jump start situation with a hybrid or is that generalizable across brands. Is there a starter battery for the gas engine and a drivetrain battery? Can the latter charge the former? Can jumper cables routed from a different car enter the picture. Someone who had a hybrid told me jumpstarting was a no go but that may have been brand specific or she may have been confused.
BTW F1 cars are hybrid and can get boosted at certain times by battery reserve.
https://us.motorsport.com/f1/news/insiders-guide-f1-engine-rules/7221311/
This is FUD
we bought a 2023 Tesla Model 3
we watched videos before we bought it
we know about the special release
Tesla vehicles are very safe;
Jan 31, 2023CNN — A California father has been charged with three counts of attempted murder after he allegedly drove a car off an oceanside cliff with his wife and two children inside
The family survived; look it up.
i have seen video of the resting place of a Tesla that was t-boned;
the battery saved him; batteries contribute to frame strength.
https://drivemag.com/news/how-safe-are-tesla-cars-5-facts-and-myths-explained/
Fact – Tesla cars are among the safest in all categories
Myth – Teslas and other electric cars catch fire more often than internal combustion cars
Fact – some Tesla drivers are confused by the
AutopilotnameProbably a myth – are Tesla cars on Autopilot more dangerous than ones driven by people?
Fact – if you drive your Tesla, in the end, it’s up to you how safe you’d be
many people appear to enjoy hating Tesla
for me, best car i ever bought;
i am age 76, so i have bought a lot of cars
#2 favourite was my 1974.5 Datsun Z
@silvrhalide #55:
I dunno where you’re getting that. That kind of time would only make sense if you were doing AC charging… which you wouldn’t do on a road trip, unless it was during an overnight stop. At a DC fast charging station, it will vary depending on the station and your car; but for instance, I could charge from 20-80% in 20 minutes with my old (small battery, but also relatively slow-charging) car. Expect under an hour, in any case.
@Hemidactylus #56:
Not only hybrids, but even most full EVs, still use a standard 12 volt starter battery. It just works a bit differently in these cars — basically, it lets you start the computer, which then starts the main battery and/or engine as needed. So, it sees less stress than an ICE starter battery. But yes, it’s charged by the main battery (when the car is on); and yes, it can be jumped (at least with the hybrids and EVs I’m familiar with).
@56 You can jump start the standard car battery as per normal jumper cable protocols in the event that the 12 volt dies. You can’t jump start the hybrid battery (which, btw, takes up a large amount of trunk space but not as much as the original hybrid batteries–progress!) and you definitely should not try. I was told, emphatically, by the Honda salesperson that if there was any issue with the hybrid battery to just bring it back and get a new one. Given that there does not appear to be any kind of interface for exterior charging, any attempt at charging the hybrid battery would be a jury-rigged affair at best and considering the potential for disaster, not a risk I am willing to take.
@57 I got those numbers from my friends who own EVs. There was some fairly intense discussion about which charger to install in one particular home (a bunch of engineers and physicists to debating the pros and cons of different chargers including the potential of recharger fires is not a short discussion). The general consensus was that as the recharge time dropped, the incidence of battery fires went up. (It’s the rapid charge rate that is the issue.) So sure, you can recharge at a commercial rapid recharging station in about a half hour or so but there is also the question of how often the owner of said recharge station performs maintenance & upkeep (also a factor in battery fires). So sure, you can choose to always use rapid rechargers (my EV friends tend to use the ones they own, which are slower) but there is a question about how it affects the battery and the battery life as well.
Regardless, you still can’t fully recharge in under a half hour. (Partial recharges obviously take less time.) With a hybrid, I can just roll up to the gas pump and be done in under ten minutes. And then not visit the gas pump until next month.
jo1storm:
Your argument falsely assumes an electricity grid powered 100% by coal and still manages to be wrong on its own merits. No country in the world is 100% powered by coal and most countries are phasing out coal and other fossil fuel power as fast as they can (my own country, Australia, is currently sitting terribly at second in the world for coal-powered kWh per capita due to a decade of regulatory capture by our idiot conservative politicians, but has recently moved up the date to phase out all coal generation to 2038). Charging a car from the grid now, even in Australia, results in a dramatic reduction in overall emissions, and this is only getting to get more dramatic as renewables take over more of the electricity load.
But remember how I said that your argument was wrong even on its own merits? Even in a 100% coal-powered grid, a Tesla 3 will generate fewer greenhouse emissions than a Toyota Camry over its lifetime.
As for the environmental impacts of lithium mining, you are correct that they are significant and should not be ignored, but they pale in comparison to the harms of oil and gas extraction which you seem to think are non-existent rather than biome-threatening.
Finally your comment about ‘cutting out the middleman’ is completely asinine. Unless you are extracting and refining your own fuel at home, you are just using a different middleman.
@chrislawson
“Finally your comment about ‘cutting out the middleman’ is completely asinine. Unless you are extracting and refining your own fuel at home, you are just using a different middleman.” Well, of course it was asinine, because it was a (tongue-in-cheek) joke. I am just telling you that your clean energy is not as clean as you want to display it as.
Unless you live in a country that does lithium mining, then they are biome-threatening (and life threatening) for you. Which I am currently living in and which, if it passes, will influence my whole life one way or another. I’ll either stay here to be poisoned or move to a different country. Just so some other country, far away, can reduce THEIR emissions a little bit while still keeping THEIR standard of living and car-centric infrastructure. See my problem here?
@jo1storml, so you are saying that X people being displaced and Y acres of biomes being destroyed due to lithium mining is not OK because it might in your country. But X times Z people being displaced and Y times Z acres of biomes being destroyed due to coal/oil mining and climate change are perfectly OK, because it happened and continues to happen in other countries.
Whether you admit it to yourself or not, that is exactly what you are saying.
And whilst I am not particularly bothered by it, you could try to spell my nym properly. It would even cause you to type one letter less.
@Nemo – Thank you for your comment (s). I’m glad everyone on here isn’t either mind-numbingly ignorant or a complete moron.
@Charly my country is already doing coal mining. I’d rather not add lithium mining into the list.
Of course I care more about myself and people around me than some people I’ve never met. There’s no shame in admitting that.
But the main issue for me is that I honestly believe and most people actually agree that lithium and lithium ion is not the solution for climate change. Not even as a stopgap measure. So, to be more specific, my issue is that even if we ruin our local environment to mine lithium it won’t fix the problem and we would have done it for nothing. If it were a solution, EU countries like Germany, Portugal and France would have done that already IN THEIR countries. Not try to act like colonizers and do it in mine. I can’t even have “sacrifice for the common good of mankind” as an excuse for that!
This thread is such an excellent example in motivated reasoning. Lots of people who don’t want an EV and the come up with reasons why that’s rational.
silvrhalide
Now, I’ll give you the lack of practicality unless you can charge at home, since fast chargers are not common yet, but the pricing would very much depend on your local prices. I pay about 45ct for a kwh at a commercial charging station. At my “worst driving” in the thick of winter, that’s less than 10 bucks per 100km. Even at my best driving, I haven’t gotten fuel for 100km for 10 bucks in a very long time.
Uhm, how often do you run out of fuel at the side of the road? Because I’ve put a girdle around the earth once a year since I was 18 and the times is never.
Nobody puts a fast charger (more than 22 kw) in a garage. The power grid usually can’t sustain that with a normal type home.
How long does the fuel last? Is your tank always full? Can you refuel your car from your roof? Can you use the fuel from your car to keep your fridge running? If you can charge at home, your EV is probably a much safer bet than your combustion car since it’s almost always charged while you don’t fill your gas tank every day.
Don’t mind me gently crying. Our second to last car was a Toyota, who had like THE best reputation. Only the car had a construction error that made it break down every time we pulled the caravan. So much for that. Anyway, with time, things break down, no matter the manufacturer. One reason why car manufacturers refused to develop EVs for so long is exactly because an EV has so few parts that move.
Thank goodness that the countries with a high number of EVs (and heat pumps) in Scandinavia noticably never get cold weather. Has it occurred to you that the issue is due to not having a full EV with a full EV technology?
First you didn’t want a fast charger in your garage, now you deny their existence. Last time I used one my pretty big 78kwh battery took 20 minutes to go from 15 to 80%. Not worth getting a coffee.
we bought a 2023 Tesla Model 3…we watched videos before we bought it…we know about the special release
The point being made here is: why was it necessary to turn a NORMAL door-opening handle into a “special release?” And if you had to “watch videos” to learn where they’d moved that NORMAL feature to, that proves our point that they’d “fixed” something that wasn’t broke, with disastrous results and no visible benefit.
@jo1storm, whoa If you want to move the goalposts without me noticing, you must be more subtle about it. Who argued that lithium will stop climate change? I certainly did not. My argument was that the ecological cost of lithium mining and recycling is smaller than that of mining fossil fuels. You completely neglected to actually address that point. Instead, you try to deflect from that to other issues. Whether or not those issues are right or true is irrelevant to the point I made.
@Charly I have, mate. Its not going to help (that’s what stopgap measure means), its not going to solve the problem permanently and the ecological cost for mining lithium is much higher for me, personally, and the people around me than any other energy source, even counting coal. Or didn’t you notice?
@jo1storm, no, “mate”, you did not address that point, you just continue to ignore it. chrislawson in #60 was even so kind to provide you with a link containing evidence that an EVs environmental impact with regard to CO2 emissions is smaller than that of ICEVs. You completely ignored that too.
Thus I am going to ignore you going forward completely, there is no point arguing with people who argue in bad faith and lie. Cheers, have the last word:
@65 Wow. You really like your strawperson arguments don’t you?
So apparently you think you are the only rational person on this thread?
I have nothing against EVs, they are simply not practical for where I live.
I bought my hybrid in 2019. The closest recharging station was 5 miles away. It had a whopping 3 spaces. Either get in line or choose your times carefully.
My apartment complex just added ONE recharging station THIS YEAR. It can recharge two cars at a time and they charge an arm and a leg for the electricity.
No, because I rent. Check your privilege at the door.
I am also not going to run an electrical cord out my window and down six city blocks to where my car is parked.
If I flipped a switch to run off of only the hybrid battery, I would get about 200 miles. Naturally that is variable dependent on travel conditions, road conditions, temperature, etc. With a full tank of gas and the battery, I would get a little less than a thousand miles if I drained the tank and the battery. Note that fully discharging the hybrid battery is categorically not recommended as you apparently can damage it if you do completely discharge it.
Yes, actually. Although it should be noted that you can do the same thing with a conventional gas engine car and an inverter and a heavy duty extension cord.
More to the point, if I am out of electricity, I can run the gas engine to both run my refrigerator and recharge the hybrid battery. Also the wifi hotspot in the car.
You would be amazed at the stupid things people do. Things like getting aftermarket or cheap rechargers or modding the slower ones that they bought. Usually with bad results. It never ceases to amaze me how many people buy expensive things, including electronics, and put zero maintenance or regular inspection into them.
I won’t.
What metric was used to determine “the best reputation”? Social media? A selective number of people in your socioeconomic class and immediate vicinity whose views agreed with your own?
Before I bought my car, I did some basic online research (Consumer Reports, etc), checked for known problems (hello, online forums), talked to my friends who owned hybrids and EVs, checked with my mechanic and my insurance agent. Some of the friends included engineers (including one electrical engineer, masters degree) and physicists (including a nanotech physics professor for the local state university). Getting your friends’ opinions is nice; getting the informed opinion of people with real world experience and who know how the things actually work is better.
You might want to keep an eye on the max torque the engine is capable of if you want a vehicle for hauling things around. Reading the specs and doing actual research might have helped with that.
Has it occurred to you that the entirety of Scandinavia has approximately the same square mileage as California and Texas combined? If you include Finland, the equivalent square mileage is approximately equal to Alaska. It’s easy to upgrade an entire country’s infrastructure if that country is the size of a postage stamp.
At current gas prices around or a little over $3/gal, I get about $0.06 per mile. Far better than the price of a commercial recharge station.
It’s a ridiculous metric in any event. European countries heavily subsidize the cost of infrastructure whereas the US heavily subsidizes fossil fuels. It’s an apples to oranges comparison, which would require the analysis of an individual cost-benefit ratio for an individual based on personal income, taxes paid and how financially useful it is to you personally to have government subsidized recharging stations vs. government subsidized fossil fuels.
I never did either. You might want to work on that reading comprehension.
I don’t know where you are getting your coffee but even Starbucks doesn’t take 20 minutes to buy coffee.
I also see that you aren’t concerned about premature aging of your rechargeable battery. Even lithium ion batteries have a max number of times you can recharge them. When you repeatedly don’t charge them to max capacity, you will eventually reduce charge capacity and shorten their useful working life. Lithium ions are miles better than the Ni-Cads or lead rechargeable batteries but they do have a definite lifespan.
Do you actually drive the EV? I didn’t get a car to have it perpetually parked. For the record, I generally fill my gas tank somewhere between the quarter and halfway mark, about once a month. That said, in storm season, I make sure the tank is full before a predicted storm is going to hit. The same as making sure all the rechargeable batteries and flashlights are recharged and that I have enough food, water, cat food, medications, etc. before a predicted dangerous storm.
As for getting stuck on the side of the road, I have never run out of gas but all it takes is one idiot on a on/off ramp from the highway to get stuck and then everyone else is trapped on the highway too. If that happens in a winter storm, I don’t want to be reliant on only a battery which might not operate at all in low temperatures.
Have you considered mass transit for any of it? That kind of travel is the reason the polar ice caps are melting.
@69 Charly
I have addressed your point quite succinctly actually.
“chrislawson in #60 was even so kind to provide you with a link containing evidence that an EVs environmental impact with regard to CO2 emissions is smaller than that of ICEVs. You completely ignored that too.”
I didn’t ignore it. On average, yes, that might be true. On specific part of the world where I currently live at, no. It’s future ecological disaster.
To quote myself:
The fact that “It lowers CO2 emissions on average and is cleaner than oil” means nothing to me because it will very concretely (not just on average, but very specifically where I live) make the place unfit for human habitation. Do you get it? It might be common good for you, it might have all the advantages in the world for you, but it has nothing but disadvantages for me and people around me specifically.
@Charly
I mean, I get it. We are having two different arguments here. You are having a theoretical and hypothetical argument. “If we do this hypothetical policy, we get to replace cars and busses with slightly more ecological and efficient cars and buses. Huge victory!”
But what that practically, directly, in real world means for me and 6 million of my countrymen is ecocide, death and extinction in 5 to 30 years. Because guess what? Our president went on national television and said the following
“It is hard to ballance corporate interests with the needs of populace. We aren’t allowed to destroy more lives than initially planned”. Imagine your president saying that when they plan they are planning destroying lives! Would you want to be unlucky enough to be part of their initial plans?!
For me, it is life and death issue. For you, it is “Save the rainforests” issue. A far away cause you might donate towards.
@70
Nah, plenty of rational people here, you’re just not one of them.
See, that’s a perfectly reasonable argument. “Fast chargers are too dangerous for my non existent garage and they also don’t exist” isn’t.
If you can talk about your non-existent garage, I can talk about your non-existent roof. Check your cake having and eating abilities at the door.
That’s incredible! As in “I don’t believe it” A 200 miles battery would put you into the range of a full EV, especially in an older model.Even assuming the most generously low energy use, that would at least mean a 40 to 50 kw/h battery. And then you add another 800 miles just on gas! Even with an incredibly low 6l/100 km that would add another 80l gas tank… All in one car!
I know, this may be hard for you to believe, but there’s people old enough to have bought cars before social media and, this may be even harder for you to believe, coming from where you stand, there are people who are able to read statistics.
Damn, you mean when I bought a car that was specified to be able and allowed to pull 1300kg I shouldn’t have believed that the car was able to pull 1300 kg? Because unlike you, I do live in a place with regulations. Please, your condescension isn’t just oozing, it’s also no match for mine.
Please, oh wise one, tell me what the size has to do with the temperatures? My goodness, your attempt at moving the goalpost is insulting.Did you believe that I was that stupid so I wouldn’t notice? Or are you so stupid that you don’t notice?
OK, yes, you are that stupid. People usually don’t just buy coffee, they also drink it. I don’t consider 20 minutes enough to get a coffee and drink it in peace. Your mileage may wary, but hey, you probably even drink Starbucks.
At 6$ per gallon you never spent more than 40 bucks a month. Means you bought about 12 gallons. At your best 78 mils per gallon, that’s 936 miles a month, that’s 1400km. I drive 500 km a week, so I drive about 2000-2200km a month. Looks like it’s your car that is parked a lot more than mine. Also, I sleep at night. The EV doesn’t need me to hold the charging cable.
Suddenly you got a power line that is long enough…
Now, I’m absolutely willing to believe that the USA lack any sensible regulation. What they don’t lack is physics. Even if you install a 50 kw fast charger at home, it’s unlikely that the power line running to your house will be able to run it and the local power gird is likely to break down. You can also install a fire hose on your water tap, but it won’t fill the pool. Didn’t you try to lecture me on reading the specifics?