"It's A Brick" - Tesla Motors' Devastating Design Problem
theunderstatement.com
theunderstatement.com
Even my iPhone can turn turtle to protect its battery when it gets too low.
Also how much power does it take to keep the damn thing plugged in? The article indicates that a 100 foot extension cord isn't enough just to break even and the car discharges even when plugged in. A 100 foot cord of cheap 16 gauge wire can still supply almost 900 watts before the voltage drops below 100v. So it uses a kilowatt just to stand-by without even charging? That's one hell of a power vampire.
I think maybe they should spend a bit more time on the fundamentals and a bit less time on fancy bird-wing doors if they want to have a real product. The real car of the future is just a big dumb tray full of indestructible nickle-iron batteries and 4 wheel-hub motors bolted to the corners.
http://www.teslamotors.com/goelectric/charging
Using 120V @ 15A, you get a charge rate of +5 miles (of range) per hour. Obviously not the optimal solution, but not a net negative either. Adding a 100 foot extension cord isn't going to diminish the available current enough to result in a net negative, so either the owner had additional electrical issues, or simply failed to plug it in and is making up excuses.
Additionally they quote it's happened 5 times... by an un-named service manager.
It looks like they switched from ignore/mock to attack. He's getting somewhere.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. --Gandhi
Its possible that the Tesla simply won't charge at all if the current or voltage on the line becomes too low. In this case, it would be "plugged in" but not charging.
Edit: Lets figure it out: Range=244mi. Battery capacity=58kWh. So: 5 miles takes 1.086kWh. 10% is lost in chemical conversion so we really need 1.207kWh for those miles. We pull at a rate of 1.8kWh/h from the plug. So 600 watts or so is lost elsewhere. We know the "always on" battery cooling system alone takes around 150 watts. Its not that far fetched.
Edit: I deleted my comment below where I calculated the cost of keeping the car on standby because I don't think I made clear enough (and didn't want to type it all twice) the difference between the actual discharge rate of the battery and the amount of power required at the charger to stop it. It just seems to take a lot of power at the charge port before any gets to the battery. The battery seems to discharge at an average rate of just 30 watts, but it seems to take a much, much greater amount of power input to prevent this and failing to provide this power has dire consequences. Why?
Clearly there is about 20 times that much power available at the end of a 100 foot extension cord in a standard household outlet.
Failure modes available:
• Was not actually plugged in.
• Was unplugged then plugged back in much later, possibly unbeknownst to owner. (Someone in my household unplugs my DVR to use an outlet. Grr.)
• Was on a switched outlet. (I once bought a new drill over that. Who knew one of the duplex outlets was switched and the other not? But the new drill wasn't $40k.)
• The Tesla charger could have a cutoff where it stops charging if unable to pull X amps where X is somewhere between 7 and 15. This could be either intentional or unintentional. Brown out protection circuitry, if needed by the design, could do this. They also might fear they are setting your house on fire by dropping 800+ watts somewhere in a wall and shut off.
• Broken charger.
• Broken extension cord.
Which means you have a point. If the owner in question plugged the Tesla supplied 120v cord in to an additional 100-foot, 16 gauge cord, they might have a net loss situation on their hands.
This is probably necessary to achieve UL rating.
Not necessarily. This might help, but the battery will also have self-discharge, meaning that it can lose charge without being connected to any load at all. If you get the charge down low enough, and then wait long enough, then even a full disconnect from the system won't help.
"The Tesla manager called me to warn that my car was in trouble" is a much better customer experience than "my Tesla broke down, and cost $40k to fix".
Cars used to have the same problems with oil changes. This got better, as customers were educated (at the cost of a lot of cooked engines), and cars were able to warn their owners, and run for longer without oil.
Creepy? I'm more worried about the app-of-the-day sucking down my iPhone contacts. THAT I find to be more personal than my vehicle location.
In both cases though it's not the action so much as it is the fact that you weren't able to opt out of it, or in many cases you aren't even aware of the possibility of it happening.
It's the same violation, and in both cases it's equally creepy. Apple got called out and did something about it. What will Tesla do?
I don't know anybody in their right mind who would say no to that.
Small portable gadgets using LiPoly batteries (which I assume the Tesla is using) can be left for months or years without charging, and then nursed back to life. If sufficient charge is left in them, and the circuitry is smart enough to recognise that the battery's about to die, the time before complete discharge could be extended to a much larger period of time.
The solution could even be a one-time use fuse, isolating the battery completely. Given the option, I think most owners would rather have to replace a fuse than a $40k battery.
Jermy Clarkson must be pissing himself laughing over this
This all would seem to make sense to install though, it's far better to have a pack that needs a reset in the shop then a brick, esp. as the battery pack in the model S will make up nearly all of the resale value of the vehicle.
That wouldn't fix the Li-ion self-discharge problem completely, but it could provide as much as a few months' worth of margin.
In any case it's batshit insane to leave early adopters stuck with a $40,000 bill for your lack of engineering foresight. That was the real surprise in the article.
Nissan are now in full production of the Leaf, a practical electric car that's half the price of the Model S. Renault have the Fluence ZE on sale in Israel and ready to go internationally this year. Mitsubishi are selling the i-MiEV in quantity in Hong Kong and Japan.
All of these big, established car companies are doing it The Right Way - targeting customers who already drive highly efficient city cars. These are customers who predominantly drive short distances and who are used to driving a small car with few luxuries and a relatively low-powered engine. They understand the compromises necessary for efficiency. They're part of a car culture that sees nothing unusual about a 1.2 litre diesel engine or a turbocharged 900cc two-cylinder petrol engine. You can build these people a lightweight, efficient car that they can afford and that they'll be happy to drive.
Tesla are amongst the many upstarts who are doing it The Wrong Way. They're trying to skip the necessary evolutionary steps a customer needs to make before they will be happy with a battery electric car. They're trying to lure people straight from heavy midsize cars and SUV crossovers, which is doomed to failure. These customers just haven't entered the efficiency mentality. They don't realise that efficient cars are noisier because they're not carrying the weight of sound insulation. They're not ready to wind down the window on a hot day to save the energy that AC would use. Tesla are trying to engineer around culture and it's an expensive, flimsy mistake.
Sit it out, lobby congress to mandate improvements in diesel fuel quality and higher fleet efficiency standards, beg manufacturers to send over the clever little engines. Tax or shame SUV drivers into station wagons. Once you hear people describing the Ford Focus as a large family car, you'll know you're ready.
Tesla S seems to practically cost (with the large battery that still only gets you 300 miles) $70K after a $7.5k tax credit [1] and the Nissan leaf costs $35K but that seems to be before the $7.5k tax credit.
[1] http://www.teslamotors.com/models/options
[2] http://www.nissanusa.com/leaf-electric-car/index#/leaf-elect...
For base model it's $27,700 net value*, after tax savings; starting at MSRP $35,200, with federal tax savings from 0 to $7,500.
I don't think Nissan genuinely expects anyone to buy the base model Leaf. For $2,000, you give up the ability to charge your car in minutes rather than hours (and, apparently, to use any of the charging stations that are supposed to materialize in the near future).
Based on time in a Roadster, and what I've seen of the model s, I would be totally happy with the S in the bay area, and either rent or keep a second car for trips out of the bay. With a constant level of tech, sure, the city car makes more sense, but assuming you can afford the high tech batteries, the tesla seems like a great car for how Americans use cars.
If I weren't getting a model s, I'd probably get an Audi S5 or S7, so you are taking a 25mpg or less car off the road for an incremental cost of $30k. For me, the carpool benefits make it worthwhile alone (I wasted 1.5h driving to SF today, which would have been 30min in the carpool lane, but I only had one rather than 2 companions).
Making big trucks, SUVs, etc fuel efficient IS the low hanging fruit, followed by cars like taxis and police cars which drive lots of miles and idle a lot. Taking a 50mpg city car to 100mpg, driven 5 miles a day, isn't much savings by comparison.
Say you have your enlightened urban dweller, getting 50mpg. With the fancy new hybrids, let's say they double that and get 100mpg. Given 100K miles of driving, that saves 1000 gallons of fuel.
Now, take your suburbanite SUV driver getting 20mpg. You only have to get their mileage to 25mpg to save the same amount of fuel over 100K miles. Get them to 40mpg, and the improvement is 150% greater than the urbanite's.
Further, only electric vehicles are can realistically be 100% powered from renewables with current technology. Biofuels are in their infancy vs solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear.
Thank goodness for Tesla trying to push boundaries and for the early adopters that are buying them. Also, thank goodness for the Nissan Leaf, the Honda Civic GX, the Prius, and all the people making a difference and buying fuel efficient cars. It's a big problem and there's no "Wrong Way" to be helping.
The market likely maps onto the technology adoption life cycle, and the hardcore SUV petrolheads are likely the 'late majority' or 'laggards'. That leaves a lot of room for market development before even considering those people. They'll take years or decades to change, so ignore them and focus on the customers in the early majority. That includes SUV or sportscar drivers who would like to save money, who do care about the environment, who have moved to a city, etc.
Right, and Tesla's messaging is not about efficiency. Their messaging has overwhelmingly been "holy shit this thing is fast! And green! And exclusive and the crowning achievement of our conquering of science and technology!"
Which isn't that different from traditional sports car marketing, except the green part.
Getting people to be more efficient does not necessarily mean selling efficiency to them and rallying them around it. CFLs and energy-efficient lighting has essentially become commonly as a fashion, as opposed to any significant increase in people's desire to be green. But I couldn't care less - if people are installing CFLs in their homes I don't really care how much they care about their electrical footprint.
I don't think fashion was a big contributor to early adoption. It was mainly the perception of saved money and frustration. Early CFL packaging often had a comparison chart showing the $30 you'd save on electricity versus using incandescent bulbs, and the 6-10 fewer times you'd have to change a burned out bulb over the next 3-5 years. It's not specifically that people care about "being green", but they do care about saving money and effort.
I disagree. SUVs are a very common commodity in America, and there are many people whom acquired them for various practical reasons. I've had the same compact SUV since high school, over 10 years, and would love to 'upgrade' to an energy efficient electric car, I just can't afford it now, or any other car at this point in my career. Although I dream of the Model X, and think it's a great idea. I would rather take a train everywhere, but given America's infrastructure, currently a Model X is the next best thing.
Have you even noticed how many hybrid SUVs are on the market? Who do you think is buying them?
PS: It's not that far off though the US accounts for ~44% of the world’s gasoline consumption, but it's would take ~57% of the world's ethanol to switch every gas pump in the US to 10% ethanol.
The closest match is probably thermal depolymerization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization)
You're right, though, I should've said something like 'practical biofuels' are in their infancy. I was really more referring to algae oil based petroleum or butanol, as they seem like the most promising candidates for a net-energy positive and high energy density renewable fuel.
(also, it's very cool that you ran on that in the 80s, mind if I ask what kind of car it was, or if you'd had it customized?)
I'm not aware of any. Fertilizers?
> most current engines would need to all be retrofitted to run on anything much greater than E85 because of the greater corrosion
OTOH, once the engines get retrofitted (mostly a surface treatment, IIRC), ethanol burns much more cleanly, with much less combustion residue buildup. The early engines had corrosion problems, but once the surface treatment problem was solved, they enjoyed longer active life than their hydrocarbon-burning counterparts.
> mind if I ask what kind of car it was, or if you'd had it customized?
It was a stock Volkswagen Gol (a project derived from the 1st-gen Passat). You can see a couple pictures here: http://carros.uol.com.br/album/volkswagen_gol_historia_album.... At the time, my aunt worked at their engineering department and got one for me as a gift. Mine was a third-generation ethanol engine. She was involved in the ethanol vehicle project.
Most cars you can buy in Brazil today are bi-fuel and can run with any mix of ethanol and gasoline. It's often a good idea to run the car with ethanol from time to time to clean the engine, as ethanol actively removes residue buildup.
The problem is not the fuel itself, but the possibility to scale up production. Petroleum is available in vast quantities compared to all biofuel feedstocks. Most biofuels today compete with food production, or are not very developed, like cellulose. Even cellulose would have a hard time scale to the sufficient quantities if all the technical problems were solved.
They don't have time to "sit it out", or money to lobby, they need to become established in brand and sales as quickly as possible. If they wait till electric cars are mainstream, it'll be too late to break the stranglehold that large car companies have on the market.
Completely disagree. Tesla is, I think, unquestionably the most impactful company in the game, including GE and Nissan. For two reasons.
First, before Tesla people thought of electric vehicles as ridiculous DIY golf carts driven by treehuggers. They were utterly uncool and stupid. Post-Tesla, electric cars are among the very coolest cars in the world. GE didn't do that. Nissan didn't do that. Toyota didn't do that. Tesla did. I think fundamentally changing people's perceptions of what an electric car is and what it can do is the single most impactful action in the industry so far.
Second, Tesla's critical product isn't their cars. Their critical product is their battery technology. It is second to none, in a business where the battery is everything. This is the reason that both Daimler and Toyota have invested in the company. I think you are seriously underestimating how important this is.
As to the article proper: it seems to me that running down your car is a pretty simple problem to engineer away. This might be an issue, perhaps a burp that Tesla has to get fixed pronto. But it's hardly, to use the breathless headline, devastating.
Sure, but that's the same as saying that Sun Microsystems changed the world. Before Sun, people thought of C++ as the be all and end all of programming and we were stuck without decent typesystems and helpful compilers. Microsoft didn't change that. Nobody changed that. Sun did.
Look where they are now. Sure Tesla might have changed people's worldviews and I'm grateful for that. But moving forward, that counts for nothing. I just want the best damn electric car there can be. I'm not paying for changing the narrative.
Whatever happens to Elon Musk's company, we are all better off, and for that I wouldn't consider the money wasted.
And I don't think Tesla's death is really that certain. Remember that Apple pioneered the unibody laptop chassis on the backs of wealthy early adopters with the (ludicrously priced) MacBook Air, and now this technology is available at commodity prices to everyone. The same model can very well work here.
Wow, I don't know if that is a good comparison. It's not like they were $5k-$10k laptops or anything. "Ludicrously priced" seems a bit strong here..
It was priced closer to cost than most imagine (SSDs were still very expensive at the time and it used much more expensive parts that were underclocked to reduce heat buildup before Intel had good ULV processors) so a top of the line 1st generation MacBook Air ordered in the first three months of release would cost you $5500. I know because I bought one for someone.
It was very expensive, but it wasn't ludicrously priced. Pioneering that CNC technology wasn't cheap and if it didn't work out, that loss would have been all because of the Air. You can consider it putting the burden on early adopters, I see it as more people paying the actual product cost plus profit like Apple always prefers. They aren't ones to launch something at cost if they don't have to. They would rather move less units and instead make a profit from day one.
I wonder if the people shelling out $40,000 for a battery replacement agree with you.
If there is a case where you can, by design, cause somebody who just bought a ridiculously expensive car to incur a $40,000 battery replacement bill, you'd better have ways to counteract the problem. They apparently don't (aside from "stalk your car and charge it"); it doesn't sound like they even warn purchasers about the danger of flatlining the battery.
If you go out of your way to shaft your customers--and deceiving them, as it really sounds like Tesla is doing, is certainly that--you're dirt. Tesla apparently qualifies.
You're wondering about Tesla's commercial success, which is an interesting but very different question.
Sure it does count when you have patents over a new technology. Real patents of physical objects that work.
"I just want the best damn electric car there can be. I'm not paying for changing the narrative."
So? People want to benefit over things they do not contribute with. People want a pill that gives them everything they want without effort and NOW!!
It does not works this way.
GE -> GM
It's late at night. :-)
Interesting documentary - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F
vs
As to the article proper: it seems to me that running down your car is a pretty simple problem to engineer away.
So, on the one hand you say that their battery technology is in advance of everyone else... and on the other hand, you say that these fine engineering minds... haven't been able to come up with a 'pretty simple' solution yet.
Really? I never heard of Tesla outside of HN. I think a large proportion of the 10s of thousands who have bought electric cars in Japan don't know of Tesla either.
No doubt the very existence of Tesla might have accelerated the development and actual production of electric cars by other makers. But I suspect they aren't that well-known by the general public.
There are many successful companies that never achieve the kind of brand awareness that you are identifying. It's generally not a condition for success.
I am an auto enthusiast and Tesla is very well known among enthusiasts. Appealing to enthusiasts (Early Adopters) is an acceptable business strategy. Tesla doesn't need to market to a wider audience yet.
I fail to see the issues that others are claiming here. Assuming they can meet demand (last I heard there is significant demand for the Model S, I don't have data to cite at the moment) and are profitable with at that volume their risks seem to me to be more of the typical manufacturer's risk. Quality and warranty issues, aftermarket support, production costs, etc. Not so much from weak market demand.
EDIT: HN won't let me reply to your comment yet so I'll do it here.
I'm disagreeing with what I feel you're implying with this:
I think a large proportion of the 10s of thousands who have bought electric cars in Japan don't know of Tesla either.
But I suspect they aren't that well-known by the general public.
I read that as "This is Tesla's market, they're not known in this market, this is a risk to their business". I disagree with that. That is not their market and that market (general public, 10s of thousands of electric car buyers in Japan) is unimportant at this time because they're very well known within their target market.
(except that I don't get your example of Aston Martin as not well-known brand. It's James Bond's car!)
Amongst technology enthusiasts in the US.
Here in The Soviet Republic of Yurop, gas is $8 a gallon and is only going up from there. If people know the name Tesla, it's probably because they've seen the Roadster lampooned on Top Gear. However, people are talking about Renault and Peugeot and Nissan's EVs. Not car enthusiasts, but ordinary people who've seen the cost of fuel more than double in 10 years. They're talking about Volkswagen Bluemotion, they're talking about Fiat Twinair. They're talking about fast charging and battery swaps and series hybrids. They're talking about folding bikes and multimodal commuting. They're talking about these things because they're being priced off the roads.
I have heard a middle-aged woman with no interest in cars or the environment say at a dinner party "I bought a Toyota iQ because it only emits 99g/km of CO2, so I don't have to pay road tax or the Congestion Charge.". For her, like many others, the efficiency of her car wasn't a side issue, but integral to whether she could afford to drive at all. Energy efficiency might not be on the agenda in the US, but it very much is in Europe.
Simply adding more costs onto gas is going to do nothing more to change what the average US citizen drives then what the past decade of price increases have.
* This is based on anecdote and recollection; I don't have any sources to back it up, but if it's wrong one way or the other, more than likely it's conservative.
So you're right that the rise in prices from ~$0.90 in 1999 to multiples of that do not impact demand significantly. However, there is a threshold above which American drivers will react.
Absolutely not.
http://www.gizmag.com/go/3889/
Tesla just had the Silicon Valley hype machine on its side since inception, a super-wealthy owner proclaimed the next Henry Ford, and hundreds of millions of dollars from American taxpayers.
The same goes for the 18-wheelers, as we often see quite a few accidents involving those on the highways. Sometimes people even walk away from these accidents when they are driving the bigger cars. The smaller ones... not so much. The fact remains that the larger, heavier cars are much safer when involved in accidents with cars even larger and heavier than they are - in most cases. There exist very well engineered and safe smaller vehicles, but that will only get you so far. I hope it gets better over time.
The way to the future is to convince people that new technology is better for them. If the message instead is "you need to give up things you like for the greater good," people will oppose you at every move, and rightly so; do you really want to live in a world where computer screens are just barely bright enough to see, where buildings are sweltering on hot days, freezing on cold days, showers are cold, and the speed limit is never higher than 55mph?
While I agree in principle, ...
> do you really want to live in a world where computer screens are just barely bright enough to see, where buildings are sweltering on hot days, freezing on cold days, showers are cold, and the speed limit is never higher than 55mph?
Alternative is unfortunately having no computers, no air conditioning and no cars at all. Current energy consumption is too high to sustain even if we go all electric and switch to nuclear + renewables[1]. We need to think about energy efficiency at least a little bit more than we do now.
[1] - this book works out all the numbers: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/
Unless I'm missing something (always a possibility, of course) their later comparisons are all to a "green stack" that doesn't include nuclear.
The final comparisons of stacks were against electrified and reduced consumption (author started by pointing out how to reduce overall energy use to little more than 50% of the base value). There are many easy tricks that can help with this reduction - like better home insulation, keeping heating few degrees lower, using heat pumps for air conditioning, etc. - that don't mean one has to live without hot water & computers. But people need to start implementing those measures if we are to have any chance in transitioning to a sustainable energy economy.
Convincing people to pay for the switchover is going to be a long, slow process though. And in most cases it boils down to major building renovation; people are famously reluctant to try that sort of thing.
Manufacturing cars requires a tremendous amount of energy and natural resources. Everything we manufacture and consume punishes the earth.
Myself, I've decided to eschew driving. Our perceived dependence on automobiles is insane. The roads are insane. No car is going to make me cool. I want no part of it.
Tesla doesn't market or really care about efficiency -- and Tesla buyers don't really care about efficiency (or at least not as their #1 priority, if they did there are plenty of high efficiency 3 wheel'd electric solar powered bio-diesel gold carts sitting in junk yards that they could have been buying).
Tesla cars are about instant torque and speed, offered only by electric motors, without all the baggage and compromise that comes from an efficiency econobox (read: nerdmobile).
Nobody else is doing that. People who buy Teslas, and who are interested in Teslas, don't want 0-60 in 14 seconds but great gas mileage, they want it in 2 seconds and great gas mileage.
Now if you want to talk about a family sedan that can smoke a Ferrari, has room for golf clubs, and is practical enough to take to the beach, grocery shopping and carry 3 or 4 of my friends to a movie, regardless of the how it spins the tires? Then you are in the right conversation.
They have to create a totally new production chain and make high quality cars. This is impossible with low margins, there is no way they can compete on price against this gigantic industry.
The problem is that Tesla isn't trying to make a green box for the masses. They're making luxury cars, and charging luxury prices for it. That puts them in direct competition with companies like Porche, Mercedes, BMW, etc. It's not an easy market to get into, considering the competition, and the fact that the customers who can afford their products, by and large, aren't concerned about efficiency as much as they're concerned with luxury or power.
You make the same mistake, you think in a feature spreadsheet category. Efficiency, Luxury, Price and Power.
In these categories was the first iPhone a joke and every competitor made fun of it.
Get the book and then you understand why many people here are talking about Tesla and not Nissan.
Tesla is targeting existing markets, making a product that looks pretty damned similar to other available products. They're not targeting the general public(like Apple). To compete on this level, their features are exactly what people talk about.
Also, the Roadster IS disruptive in one of those. Efficiency.
The Leaf and other small commuter cars are fantastic for people who don't give a shit about cars, and really care about the environment / gas prices. That's a great market, but it's a completely different market than the one Tesla is going after.
The Roadster is basically an electric Lotus. And there's no-one that's going to say to themselves, "You know what would make good financial sense? Replacing my Civic with a goddamn electric race car." It's not about price or energy or the planet, it's about something unique and fun, a luxury good. I expect that there is close to zero overlap between potential Tesla Roadster and potential Leaf buyers.
The Model S changes the dynamic a bit, but it's still not competing with the Leaf and other city cars. And most importantly, it will appeal to people (like me) who love cars. It's unsual, but extends beyond sports-car novelty into something that could easily be the primary vehicle for a family of 4 - or even more with the rear-facing 3rd row seat. Hell, if I was in the market for a high-end sedan, the Model S would be far and away my first choice. For about the price of a 7-series, you get something entirely new and unique in the automotive world.
Both Nissan and Tesla's attempts at popularizing electric vehicles have sensible business models behind them, they're just very different vehicles aimed at very different demographics.
Tesla is doing what it knows to do best, innovate and take risks. This is what startups are for. Once it is proven that works the big companies will follow.
Car makers have long had hybrid cars well before Tesla even existed. Some even had prototype pure electrical cars before them too. After all, Tesla was only founded in 2003!
The only technology link is back to AC Propulsion who's founder made the controller that went into the first GM pure electrical vehicle. However, Tesla stopped using AC Propulsion technology long ago (it may even have been during the year of their founding).
So, who exactly are you talking about? It is highly unlikely to be any Japanese manufacturer, for example, due to their existing leadership in hybrid technology...
I think you are wrong about Tesla's segment. I know a couple of Tesla owners. All of them have a stable of cars. I would bet the average Tesla owner has >2 sports cars, and absolutely has more cars than the number of drivers in the family.
The whole idea of 'range anxiety' is BS when applied to someone who owns a Tesla as a fun car they drive on the weekends.
I was at a racetrack a few years ago and there were quarter million dollars cars literally littered across the place. Ferraris, high end Porches, etc. You know what car had the most people standing around it? The Tesla roadster. At the time it was new, it was hard to get, and it was a prestige symbol.
Tesla is is getting car collectors to subsidize their R&D. And their R&D is going to be a big reason why in the future mainstream electric cars are succesful. Ultimately Tesla's tech is about batteries and efficient motors - the car itself is an afterthought.
That said, it makes this problem EVEN WORSE. If it is a daily driver, there is no way it will ever sit unused for 11 weeks. But as 1 of 10 cars in a collection, it absolutely can sit there for weeks on end without being charged. So I think this is a huge problem for Tesla and probably less so for a daily driver like the Leaf.
Good or bad, this creates a market for someone selling them the same massive cars americans like, but with an electric engine.
Gotcha.
Count me on the other side. Tesla is slowly moving down market, and at the same time (hopefully) the technology will improve so that we can easily convert over to electric without compromise.
I do grant you your point on range though. If the average person drives 10 miles, then I don't think our goal should be a 300 mile range car. That's pointless engineering. I do not grant quietness or AC or build quality or style or safety.
There is a whole another ideology that the "green" movement is, which is saying we need to get people to drive less, and when they drive, they should use the most fuel efficient car they should, because you know, the environment and stuff. Generating power at a central power plant (which can happen to be solar/wind/other renewable method rather than coal) and using that energy to power cars is much more efficient than having thousands of miniature power plants burning gasoline/diesel carrying people around town. However, most people don't care about the environment the way that people that want to push everyone to drive electric vehicles. I certainly don't.
A year or two ago, I wanted to get a new car, from my 1998 ford mustang. I had two desires, one was to get a more powerful car. The other was to spend less money on gas. My friend had bought a Prius recently and I liked the features of it, so I went to the Toyota dealership and took one for a test drive. When I finally got to do it (I would not recommend the Rosevilla Toyota to anyone, for the record), the power was completely unacceptable to me and there was no way I was buying that car. I ended up buying a Mini Cooper S, which was more powerful, and had better gas mileage. I think that is the goal of Tesla, to get cars which are more powerful than the gasoline cars, and cheaper to operate.
Do you really think that the customer needs to adapt to the car, rather than the car adapting to the person? Isn't that like the opposite of everything Hacker News stands for?
Here's the thing: this is bullshit.
Did you know that only about a third of the electricity produced at an electrical plant ends up making it to our wall sockets? (And that's not even calculating the efficiency of the appliances that use that electricity!) Compare that to an internal combustion engine (~1/4 of the energy getting converted into a mechanical form) and we're not really looking at much of an efficiency gain.
Proponents of electrical vehicles have simply not done the math.
They're hardly a side show. They produced an all electric vehicle that costs over $100,000 to purchase. In decent quantities. With great reviews. And they're still in business.
I see your point about the SUV mentality but it's perfectly reasonable to have some businesses working against that mentality while other businesses try to work within that mentality. I don't think you can call either way The Wrong Way unless you can show persistent failure (or any failure at all).
Modern charging and power conversion systems are designed to operate under specific use cases. When the Tesla charger first sees line voltage, it likely does some quick testing to see what kind of supply it's hooked up to, for example by trying to take 15 Amps and monitoring the line voltage. If the voltage sags too much, then it might back off to 12 Amps; after that, it probably just shuts off. The reason is that all of the AC/DC conversion circuitry is designed to operate with maximum efficiency at a certain input power; if the system can't deliver that power, then it's just going to shut down and assume that there's something wrong with the line.
Note, this does not mean that the battery requires 1kW continuous power to stay charged. In plugged mode, the car will switch the charger on and off every few minutes (if it's at all like a laptop or phone) and draw down the battery ever so slightly in between. This is the most efficient way to operate, and is much better for the battery than constantly stuffing it with a trickle of current.
If you want to see this in action on a consumer electronics scale, try plugging your iPad into the USB extension port on an iMac keyboard -- it will kindly let you know that it's not charging, and it will happily sit there and run its battery down to the cut-off point while plugged in.
The point is "optimal charge" or "complete destruction of the battery without warning" might not be the only two, or best choices available. "The best we can do with 500 watts" might be a better choice.
I bought a new laptop, so closed down my old Macbook, and stuck it away.
A few months later, I found I wanted to grab file from the old macbook, and noticed it wouldn't run from battery. It'll work fine plugged in, but the battery is registered as full discharged, and the Apple page says "Buy a new battery".
The other thing to consider is that as the voltage drops, so does the leakage current.
Really, this whole thing could be solved by putting a tiny solar panel on the back dash.
America has the opposite approach and appears to optimise for size, comfort and perceived safety. (SUVs, Trucks, large saloons.)
None of the things American consumers appear to value are correlated in the Tesla. When I look at the Tesla brand, product and marketing, all I can think is how popular this car would be in Europe. Just me? Why USA first?
This won't sell a few million cars a year, but I think in the USA, the market for the above is 50-100k cars per year, easy.
Many cars are the same in both countries. There isn't anything about America that makes them less efficient. The exceptions are those tiny city cars that Americans would never drive, and diesels.
Euro testing cycles are more generous, MPG figures are quoted in Imperial gallons
Car efficiency is quoted by liters / 100 km just about everywhere around here.
Or am I missing something?
Not only that, but diesel is rare in North America. You cannot guarantee that the next gas station you pass will serve diesel. That alone is enough to put people off buying them.
Ford, General Motors and all the Japanese brands offer diesel models of their fleet in Europe but they don't tend to sell them here.
I think that this is a very regional thing. Perhaps limited to the coastal cities? I have no problem finding diesel in the Midwest. In fact, we took a road trip a few months ago in our diesel pickup and every gas station we stopped at had diesel: it's not even something you need to look for.
Here are a few: Fashion, Thrill, Exclusivity, Pride, Vanity, Technology.
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That screams class-action to me if Tesla can really track without knowledge of the owner AND will mean that I have absolutely zero interest in purchasing one till this is addressed.
If a service manager could access the location information I'd imagine quite a few other staff at Tesla could too ...
Do you know what happens when an ICE engine is left to sit for months? First the oil runs out to the pain and slowly evaporates. The cylinders might suffer some sticktion and possibly rust. And you've probably got small animals that have made a home in your engine block. The rubber in the tires will have deformed and even if you get it running it will be a very bumpy ride to the tire shop. Also the gas tank absorbs water if you live in a humid region like Florida.
All of this is covered in the manual of every car I've ever owned. Drive it 5 minutes, at least, every few weeks to keep the lubricants lubricating or you end up with a very expensive rebuild.
People who spend that kind of money generally don't expect to have to do anything for themselves. That is why they pay 10x more.
Granted, the problem gets worse as more "consumer-level" customers purchase their cars and don't take as good care of them.
Which then raises the question of why this is even possible. Why on earth will the car's systems happily destroy itself? Where's the "if BATTERY_LEVEL < CRITICAL: shutDown()" line?
Since you haven't done that, I find it more likely you have no clue what you're talking about.
Rather than brick the battery, if it is parked and below a certain level, release a normally open relay that completely disconnects the BMS from the cells. Recovering from this state would require special charging and recalibrating of the BMS (possibly done at a shop) but it would be better than bricking the pack.
What good does a "mini engine" do? You can't turn it on automatically, that's an enormous safety risk and would never make it past insurers or the government, and it can only last as long as its fuel holds out, again you're just delaying the inevitable. Solar panels don't help if you're parked in a garage, which is where most people park their fancy roadsters, and they'd have to be huge to maintain the charge anyway.
And absolutely none of this contradicts my original point: It's a technological limitation. This is how batteries work. You're not proposing a solution, you're proposing unworkable band-aids.
Some kind of chemical change occurs in Li batteries when completely discharged.
"Overdischarge supersaturates lithium cobalt oxide, leading to the production of lithium oxide...deep discharge may short-circuit the cell, in which case recharging would be unsafe."
and
"Overcharge up to 5.2 Volts leads to the synthesis of cobalt(IV) oxide...if overheated or overcharged, Li-ion batteries may suffer thermal runaway and cell rupture. In extreme cases this can lead to combustion."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery
The possibilitiy of thermal runaway or fire from overcharging is actually fairly likely with Li+ ions, since they will react with any non-inert substance.
The short circuit caused by undercharging can affect other cells in the pack, leading to overheating and combustion.
> $40,000 (or more) to fix his car
> full $40,000-plus cost
> At the same time, the Model S pricing starts at $49,900 (after US tax incentives), broadening the market to households of far more modest means than the owners of the $109,000 and up Roadster. This in turn makes it even less likely that Tesla buyers will have the necessary tens of thousands of dollars to spare if they ever allow their battery to fully discharge. ("Implying that battery cost will be the same as for Roadster, car that costs 2.5 times more")
Statements like this are generally bad for an article that tries to operate with facts.
Limited range, hard to "refuel", and now the very real possibility of bricking. I think we are still a long long ways away from practical all electrics.
Second, using a 2500 pound car to transport a 150 pound person 15-20 miles to work every day is incredibly inefficient any way you look at it. If the government is going to be involved at all, it should be to promote walking, cycling, and public transportation. Researching more efficient cars is like trying to replace arsenic in drinking water with mercury - maybe it's not as bad, but it's still bad.
Third, if people were serious about saving the environment and reducing pollution then they'd start living closer to the places they need to go, and stop driving so much altogether. They're not doing that, so I don't think the interest is there.
I don't think it needs to promote walking either. Most people are perfectly capable of understanding their own situations if we don't hide the costs and if they are allowed to learn from their own mistakes.
It would be proper to tax things that have negative effects that aren't paid for, such as pollution.
Ideally without specifying how to make them more efficient, just overall cost per expected miles/yr (which would probably give natural gas vehicles the best pricing right now).
Efficiency is not the only consideration when buying a vehicle. I, personally, don't want a vehicle that sacrifices safety for efficiency.
The government shouldn't be using pork or other inducements to bias the market towards one consideration. Consumers knows their own needs.
If government wants to promote efficient, it should start by being less wasteful itself. Right now its the worst example in human history.
Easy-peasy. Lots of small trips, under 5 km, for 9 months. That's it. Apparently the discharge caused by starting the car and a draw from all the packages that are strapped to it are not offset by the charge received while driving unless the distance is at least 10 km per engine start. The only warning that the car gives is an "excessive battery discharge" and when it pops up the battery can no longer be fully recharged. Not covered by the warranty, because apparently there's a one-liner in manual that says "20 minute a day continuous drive minimum". Unlike Tesla's though the battery is "only" $700 to replace, not $40k.
As a BMW owner with a roughly 5km commute to work, I would suggest doing what I do: bicycle to work and save the car for dates and weekend cruises.
And, why isn't there a failsafe mechanism that simply stops draining the battery completely before this happens? Then at least you can tow it home and recharge it -- inconvenient, but not $30K inconvenient.
This is a big problem, though. If anyone has a spare Tesla and would like someone to take care of it, I'd be happy to keep your car garaged and energized, and will only drive it 200 miles a week. :)
How did these design flaws make it out of engineering?!
I drove a diesel land cruiser (lm78) which had been sitting on an airfield unused for years. Aside from needing tires and a battery (and wiper blades) no problem. Even the fuel was ok.
And if Tesla can notify itself of a battery in danger of bricking, why can't they notify the driver well in advance of the emergency?
With that in mind, the issue of a "Brick" isn't something I want...but if it can be solved then I'm all up for this being my next car. Is there any evidence that this same issue cant occur in the other main stream electric cars coming onto the market anyway?
Personally, I don't see why it's "your fault". I've seen it happen many times, all you need to do is let your computer drain completely and leave it for a few days (not months as some people have stated in this post). Although I'm sure it says something about it in the manual somewhere, it's hardly common knowledge that this is something you need to be careful of.
With many of these vehicles in California, I shudder to think how many might brick just because the grid gets broken by an earthquake.
It may be that there is a real issue here, but I would like to see it corroborated by some actual evidence.
You put a $1 chip directly on the battery itself that if it ever drops below "x" volts, it breaks the circuit. Even if the owner has to take it back to the dealer to get it "reset" at least the battery will be saved.
My $500 LiFePo4 battery for my bicycle has something like this to prevent cell reversal. They can certainly do it for a car unless they are just doing it on purpose.
A disconnected lithium based battery can hold a base charge for YEARS.
A side-question: can somebody explain what happens to a Li-ion battery when it fully discharges? Why does it become a "brick"?
Not buying a buggy piece of crap to start with is the better solution.
Also, a car that smart should be able to alert you in some way.
"One Brick at a time"
But yes, $40k is a lot of money and there are many options--including electric drive.
Additionally. Do we know that it is actually impossible to engage tow mode while plugged in? That still doesn't solve all cases of having to manually move it.
Which is actually an amusing thought. Perhaps they could ship them with really long extension chords, just enough for a city-commute...
Also, it'd be neat if you could attach to the wires for buses that are in many major cities.
My car is old Saab and there are places to move aside bits of trim to manually operate the sunroof and fuel tank cover if the battery is completely gone.
Elon has a bit more work to do.
There are also flatbed trucks.
If everyone bricks their car needs to pay 40K for the replacement, it would be outrageous and all over the news. Personally, I do think that Tesla could have done more to make sure drivers are fully aware of this issue before making their purchase. Otherwise, I wouldn't put my money in Tesla stock, as they are sitting dock and waiting for class action lawsuits
Well, that's completely false. A flatbed, which seems to be pretty standard for towing these days, will have now problem at all winching that vehicle onto the platform, whether the wheels turn or not.
This regional service manager has been sacked.
The correct answer here was, "I'm not sure, I'll see if I can look that up for you," evasively answering ugly questions 101.
When the car is turned off, there should be some kind of indication of how long it will take to brick the thing. If that indication is days rather than weeks, it should yell at you. Loudly. At least that way all owners will know of the threat. The car will educate them. (important, because they probably won't RTFM)
Although I'm sure you could still end up with the odd user who leaves the car with a three week brick time, receives no loud warning because of the significant charge remaining , comes back five weeks later and curses Tesla.
The two situations are not at all comparable.