The Tesla 3 and “Shit Talkers” Like Me | Hacker News Reader

The Tesla 3 and “Shit Talkers” Like Me

ericpetersautos.com

15 pointscpr38 comments

Seems like the core complaint is with subsidies for electric vehicles.

I can see where he's coming from... 'course, without subsidies, I doubt wind and solar would be taking off the way they are, now, as those subsidies allowed economies of scale to develop which have led to significantly reduced costs. Sometimes government needs to subsidize technology in order to help it take off (and that includes the Internet, which allowed the author to broadcast their post to the world).

This also ignores the fact that existing gas powered vehicles are heavily subsidized thanks to a) subsidies to the petroleum industry, and b) negative externalities. So there's a bit of hypocrisy, here.

One major flaw with this article is the notion that supercharging takes 30 - 45 minutes. A typical stop duration at a supercharger is 15 minutes.

The author also fails to mention the most appealing aspect of the car for the performance oriented: instant torque. After getting a Model S, I could never go back to the days of gears (even manually controlled gear changes are sluggish in comparison).

Another is his math.

> I’m the “shit talker” for boggling at the idea that people are going to be happy about waiting around for half an hour to forty-five minutes to get back on the road again? We’re talking waits-to-get-going that are 150 times the typical 5 minute refuel with a gas-engined car.

Yeah I'd balk at a 12.5 hour wait time too.

Yeah, I was really confused by that line, too. Where did he get the 150 from?! Unless he takes 18 seconds to fill his car with gas?

If you just count time when the pump is pumping some of the really old pumps could definitely fill a compact with a small gas tank in 15-20sec. While that's not the norm but it's definitely possible.

May be he is talking L2 charging. On Bolt it is 9 hours, so Model 3 will be similar on 240V plug.

https://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger

Tesla claims 170 miles after 30-minutes of "super-charging". I think it is fair to say 30-minutes of super-charging is a fair amount. 40-minutes of charging goes from 0% to 80%, while it will take 75 minutes total to go all the way to 100%.

If you argue against these numbers, you're arguing against official Tesla marketing... so you better give me a good citation why supercharging is only 15-minutes.

Maybe the typical supercharging stop is only 15-minutes because that's all the patience people have. In any case, they're not getting a full charge in 15-minutes.

Which is odd, because supposedly a 30 minute stop will only get you 170 miles of range.

So 15 minutes gets you 85? 90?

Versus 3-4 minutes getting me 450 miles in my Audi, for example.

So the complaint is that the article implies that every 3-4 hours you might need to stop for 30-45 minutes, while the reality is that every 1.5-2h you might need to stop for 15 minutes? (assuming there's a supercharger there)?

Not sure that's better.

Also not sure that you can correlate "how long an average driver uses the Supercharger for" with use cases, as those are unknown. Do they need a boost to get home? Or are they more content with stopping every 90 minutes on a longer trip?

A 15min stop feels a lot longer when it's 1AM and you just want to be home already.

To be fair, the electric model assumes you have a home charger for your vehicle.

Unless you're driving cross country, the super-charger network isn't a major issue. Unfortunately, most people I know drive cross country at least once a year (beach trips across State lines, vacations, etc. etc). So its definitely a concern.

I think a pure electric vehicle makes for a great commuter car, since you charge at home and never have to go out to a gas station.

But for long trips, the lack of gas stations becomes a flaw, as opposed to an asset.

Apparently there are trade offs when using electric cars, which apparently makes them terrible. Inconvenience for certain types of driving means they're just awful.

There's no silencing of 'shit talkers' by 'control freaks', just push back to a poor argument.

Electric cars are good for commuting, and poor for long distance. There's nothing more to it than that. I commute on a bike and mostly want a car for long trips, so I won't buy an electric car. Somehow I can accept that fact without deciding people who want them are idiots.

This is my thinking of the article as well. Its extremely negative for reasons I can't really fathom.

The Tesla fanboys are definitely building up their own reality-distortion-field... ignoring some basic truths of the technology. But the overall benefits and pro/con tradeoffs are known at this point.

But countering that with your own reality-distortion-field is wrong.

Electric vehicles excel at short-range driving (Leaf, Bolt, Model 3), but have issues for long road trips (even if the Supercharger network tries to solve the issue). Hybrids seem to strike a good balance (Volt / Prius Prime). ICE Vehicles are the status-quo and really you can't go wrong with old technology, since everyone knows the full scope of pros/cons of the status quo.

I am not sure what the point of this article is. He is essentially unhappy that Tesla is, in his opinion, deceptive about the reality of owning one of its cars. I disagree - I don't think anyone is really that surprised when they buy a laptop marketed as "Up to 12 hours of battery life" and then get 3 hours of battery life while playing a video game. I think people understand this is how electronics work, and I doubt anyone is spending $40k after taxes and fees on a car without, at some point, realizing or being told that the 300 mile depends on a lot of factors. A pretty basic search on the internet will tell you this in under 60 seconds of effort. And I don't think anyone buys this car under the impression they will fill it up in a couple minutes like an ICE.

If you read the comments, he's a hardcore libertarian whose problem is really the tax subsidies on Tesla. The rest of it is just weak reaches for additional justifications.

He might have a stroke if he sees how much oil companies get in subsidies.

He claims that he doesn't like that either, but that without those subsidies ICE cars are economically viable but Tesla would never sell cars. Anyway, I'm giving you the reasonable summary, don't go actually reading those comments, they're worse than the article.

The author doesn't seem to realize that electric power produced by even the dirtiest coal power plant is far less harmful (in terms of CO2 and particulates) than a gasoline engine per mile travelled.

Many normal ICE cars only get 350-450 miles of range which also drops significantly when driving is dominated by heavy acceleration or even highway driving > 70mph.

This "writer" has no room to criticize writers.

Yeah but you can refuel ICE in 5 minutes. Not half an hour to an hour, not counting the wait in line for the charger. He explained all that.

A typical stop duration at a supercharger is 15 minutes.

The typical supercharger stop doesn't recharge from 10 to 80% either.

Tesla's official marketing has a 10% to 80% charge at 40 minutes, and 10% to 100% at 75 minutes. https://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger

For a 90 kWh battery. I guess the Model 3 will have a smaller battery and less range, but practically speaking, filling up from empty is 5 minutes with Gasoline, and 75-minutes with the Supercharger (all the way to 100%)

You can get more efficient by filling up only to 80% charge over 40 minutes of charging... but that's still very far away from your claim of 15 minutes.

Right. So it tells you that typically even when superchargers are needed the driver doesn't need 100% to get where they're going. In order to need the 100% you have to be driving 400 miles in one trip.

The author acts like this is a huge deal. As if every Tesla driver will be filling up their Tesla at a supercharger as often as every other driver fills up their car at a gas station. It seems like a very minor point to most. 400 miles is about the limit of what I'll drive on a road trip, anything more than that I'll take a plane. So if I had a Tesla and I took a vacation once a year within 400 miles, it would mean spending 0 minutes filling up my car for 51 weeks out of the year, and adding an extra hour on each end of the trip. I'd probably be annoyed at the delay if it didn't coincide with a meal but it would probably just remind me how awesome it was that I never have to stop the other 51 weeks..

...in a warm climate, on level ground. Anywhere else and range drops, recharging happens routinely.

Range drops by how much? How do you know that recharging happens "routinely" and what frequency is "routinely"? I drive 35 miles to work, more than most anyone I know. Range could drop 50% from the stated 200 miles and I still wouldn't need to charge before I got home.

First off, I don't like the author's writing style. Its definitely too hyperbolic for my tastes. I think the benefits of charging an electric vehicle at home are great.

But I'm still concerned about this long-trip thing, especially because long-trips mean that I'm away from the infrastructure that I've built up myself. (Is there a 240V charger at the hotel I'm staying at? or is it only 110V which only charges ~20 miles overnight in 8 hours?? Reports are 3mi / hour charge times on 110V. https://forums.teslamotors.com/forum/forums/charging-110v-ou...)

It is a concern, but for me (which I'm extrapolating to "most" using this technique: https://xkcd.com/605/) it seems very minor. It's not a concern at all for the first car in a two-car household. It's a very slight concern if I was also buying a second Tesla for the wife. Some long trips we'd be able to take in the Tesla, and some road trips we'd have to rent a car to take. But I already have to do that when we take a vacation that involves a flight.

Single-car house, whatever I get I'm going to have to use for all purposes in my life.

Or turning on the heater?

And the Supercharger that refuels your Tesla in 5 minutes is ... where?

The funny thing about the wait time that everyone keeps talking about is that, apparently, no one actually cares about waiting.

Tesla piloted their battery swap program over a year ago, where you could swap out your battery for a fully charged one in under 2 minutes. You'd get all your range back faster than you could refuel a gas car.

Want to know what happened? No one used it. Because no one cares about refueling in under 5 minutes if a supercharge station takes 15 - 30 or you can just plug in at home. It's literally not a thing people (in general) care about.

I don't know how to phrase this any other way. NO. ONE. CARES.

Haha. Yes. You could swap your battery in under two minutes.

If: you had pre-made an appointment, first.

And: you paid to use it.

And: you ignored the fact that the pilot program was only in one location, and that location was meant solely to service SF-LA drivers on I-5, but was 15 miles from the freeway, so 2 minutes, plus a 45 minute round trip).

And: you ignored the chargers across the street from the battery swap program.

This is pretty disingenuous. If I was Elon Musk and I wanted to prove how little people "cared" about the time of a "2 minute battery swap", all of the above variables are pretty much how I'd set my pilot program for guaranteed failure.

Source: http://fortune.com/2015/06/10/teslas-battery-swap-is-dead/

Were the batteries brand new? Were the battery swap stations everywhere that had a supercharger? Did everyone know about it? It seems like there are possibly some other explanations than people didn't care about the recharge wait. I know I wouldn't swap out my known good batteries for some dodgy unknown batteries from the last Tesla that went through here just for convenience, but that wouldn't mean that I didn't care about the inconvenience..

See my comments. It almost seems designed to fail, to "prove" how preferable supercharging is.

The only cars that get that kind of range are boxy compacts being driven at 80+mph and mostly because they place such a premium on space that the gas tank winds up being 10gal or smaller. Those cars also have an out the door price of under 20k even when moderately optioned. Nothing that's remotely like the 3 gets that kind of range.

>Elon Musk’s latest four-wheeled exercise in rent-seeking

How is selling a car rent-seeking? It's pretty much the opposite extreme as far as I can tell, unless he's making the argument that Elon is rent seeking by buying up the raw resources for making lithium batteries (and even that is pretty weak).

I think because Tesla sells carbon credits to other auto manufacturers, or something along that lines.

I often drive to Denver or Galveston several times a year. 600 and 500 miles. So if the initial charge holds 300 miles, I would need probably 2 20 minute stop for Galveston and 2 30 minute stops for Denver (if I could find super charging stations on the way to Denver).

Given that I often stop for far longer than that, far more often, just to stretch my legs, I could easily work around the Model 3's charging requirements.

However, the supercharger spots aren't everywhere like a gas station. You have to plan your trips to stop exactly at a supercharger.

I drove several hundred miles away to North Carolina without any planning, knowing that any ol' gas station could fill me up. But there are only 7 superchargers in North Carolina, and only 5 superchargers on my projected path (including the superchargers from the other states I passed through on the highways)

I'm still leaning towards the Volt, which would be effectively electric but the gas-generator is a good idea IMO. The one time a year I drive outside of my city will be gas-based, but that's a lot better than a 100% gas vehicle.

I will say that I stop for 30+ minutes to sitdown and eat with my family... no where close to a supercharger. We have a few restaurants that we as a family meet up at on these long trips as a family tradition. I dunno about the excuse "Hey guys, lets meet somewhere else because the current location isn't close to a Supercharger, and my 90k+ Car demands that we stop there for our trip".

Plenty of gas stations in these random small towns across America, but still very few superchargers.

The one point that I think worries me that the author makes is about how much the electric car revolution will really cost in terms of raw materials and lifetime CO2 and environmental issues.

Is there anything accurate on the actual pollution cost vs a say a VWs (irony intended) lifetime emissions; it seems incredibly hard to calculate!

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