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Tesla: Not so easily bricked

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Re: Tesla: Not so easily bricked

#131

Post by PotatoEngineer »

X-Istence wrote: post #96
abruzzi wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you run your ICE without oil, yes, you will kill it. And maybe these should be thought of in the same way, but people worry about this because draining a battery to zero seems like running out of gas, and most of us have run out of gas at some point or another. Granted it's not the same because in the short term the battery management system should reserve the bottom 5% for the health of the battery. But the secon…

I've been driving for 6 years now and I have never ran out of gas. Is this really so uncommon that you can safely say that at some point or another most of us have run out of gas? I keep an eye on my odometer and on the gas gauge and know when it is time to get gas. My car doesn't have a low fuel light warning so paying attention is definitely required.

I ran out of gas three times when I was first driving; the gas gauge was bad, and would show "half full" when it was dead empty. The odometer was reasonably reliable at telling me when I was about to run out of gas, but I was cheap and didn't want to spend money if I could get the car to go a little further.

And yes, I cede all claims of being a car genius.

Re: Tesla: Not so easily bricked

#132

Post by heyitsnick »

baddox wrote: post #110
Nelson69 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of the things that "brick" an ICE can be repaired at relatively low costs. And almost all of those things brick the car by using it, Teslas will brick when you don't use them, you lock it safely in the temperature controlled garage and go away for too long and it dies. It strikes me as a design problem of sorts, you've got a relatively expensive and sophisticated sports car with piles of electronics. I would thi…

> How many drivers have run out of gas when they are experienced and know better? Not many, right? I've certainly never even come close to running out of gas, and I can only think of one time in my life where anyone I knew ran out of gas (and that was only yards away from the gas station).

Pretty much everyone i know has a 'ran out of petrol' or at least a 'woh nearly ran out of petrol had to keep her at 55 all the way and rolled her in' story.

Re: Tesla: Not so easily bricked

#133

Post by davidhollander »

feralchimp wrote: post #125
quanticle wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Which, for many drivers, may as well be $40k. Did you really go ahead and conflate $7,000 and and $40,000? $7000 buys me a decent used car. $40,000 buys me a brand new Toyota Prius (MSRP $24,700) with almost enough change left over to buy a brand new Hyundai Elantra (MSRP $15,345). $7,000 is not a small chunk of change, by any means. It's a lot less, however, than $40,000. Conflating the two does no one any good.

I'm saying I put the same level of effort, as a consumer, into avoiding a $7k repair as I would a $40k repair. That is: maximum effort.

Unexpected maintenance costs can be factored into the consumer cost using expected value, similar to how one accounts for recurring costs such as fuel efficiency in the decision to purchase a vehicle.

Your reasoning is similar to a company computing the cost of web hosting using only the initial cost of one server, without accounting for the cost of downtime or multiple backup servers. Maximum effort does not imply a process with 99% reliability is 100% reliable, and that the cost of failure can be written off.

This is not making a claim in regards to Tesla or the accuracy of the $40k figure, merely that cost matters.

Re: Tesla: Not so easily bricked

#134

Post by wmf »

ljf wrote: post #129
durandal1 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did it say that? It acknowledges that deeply discharging may damage the cells, and it does not refute that it would cost $40,000 to fix. Even the owner's manual state this (except for the $40,000 cost of course).

quote from the article: Another error on the part of the blogger is the claim that if the cars discharge fully, the battery packs will be damaged. This is blatantly false. The battery management system of the Tesla Roadster keeps the battery from being discharged to a damagingly low state of charge under normal driving conditions. It's true that a full discharge to zero percent state of charge can potentially be dama…

However the battery management system of the Roadster won't allow the car to reach that low level of charge.

This is just plain wrong. If the car is not charging, self-discharge will happen and nothing can stop it.

Re: Tesla: Not so easily bricked

#135

Post by dkarl »

sephlietz wrote: post #72
Nelson69 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of the things that "brick" an ICE can be repaired at relatively low costs. And almost all of those things brick the car by using it, Teslas will brick when you don't use them, you lock it safely in the temperature controlled garage and go away for too long and it dies. It strikes me as a design problem of sorts, you've got a relatively expensive and sophisticated sports car with piles of electronics. I would thi…

From the article: "The battery management system of the Tesla Roadster keeps the battery from being discharged to a damagingly low state of charge under normal driving conditions. It's true that a full discharge to zero percent state of charge can potentially be damaging to a battery. However the battery management system of the Roadster won't allow the car to reach that low level of charge."

The "article" confirms that Teslas can be bricked in exactly the way reported:

There is a fundamental problem when any rechargeable battery is discharged and then left to sit for months. Any boat owner understands that that's why you plug in a trickle charger when the craft is put into storage. The same should be done for any electric vehicle. However, to imply that the Tesla Roadster has a fundamental design flaw because of the nature of electrochemistry....

The rest is the lovely art of spin. It reads like a rebuttal of the bricking claims and vindication for Tesla, doesn't it? In every superficial aspect, that's what it is, but the substance doesn't match the form and tone. Welcome to PR.

Re: Tesla: Not so easily bricked

#136

Post by ericd »

notJim wrote: post #67
swombat wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it seems to me the article doesn't really contradict the accusation at all. There is a fundamental problem when any rechargeable battery is discharged and then left to sit for months. Any boat owner understands that that's why you plug in a trickle charger when the craft is put into storage. The line above indicates, on the contrary, that yes, if you don't drive it for a while and it wasn't plugged in to a…

> This is the most likely explanation for the five "bricks" that the blogger claims to have heard about. They probably aren't actually bricks, but cars in need of servicing. Your attack on this point is spot on. The point of the original post this one fails to rebut is that the cars are in need of servicing! Maybe that posts use of the word “bricked” is imprecise, but the real thrust of it was that it costs $40,000 t…

It would cost $40k to replace the batteries, it would obviously not cost $40k to recharge a battery that had shut itself down for safety. I doubt every instance in the original post actually required a replacement, though it was implied.

Re: Tesla: Not so easily bricked

#137

Post by thewisedude »

The op does not state whether the claim that replacing all cells will cost $40K! In many cars today... replacing the engine or any single major component(because of mechanical failure) would hardly cost $40K unless you are talking about super cars! So for people who want to drive cars that cost less than $100K, $40K is a big chunk of money!

Re: Tesla: Not so easily bricked

#138

Post by ericd »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #16
Pelayo wrote: post #2

Though I could easily believe that there was a coordinated attack against electric vehicles (I can think of a few groups), the response doesn't refute the previous article but tries to defend through vocabulary. If you leave the car unplugged for a long period of time the battery will be ruined. If the battery is one huge battery pack or 8000 smaller batteries doesn't matter. Also, having a car plugged in for months…

As someone who "bricked" his Jetta in college by forgetting to replace the oil, I can also point out that the replacement engine cost around $6k, a (hefty) fraction of the car's then value, but nowhere close to its total original retail price .

The Tesla Roadster costs in the neighborhood of $130,000, so $40k is a fraction of its price.

Re: Tesla: Not so easily bricked

#139

Post by eridius »

ams6110 wrote: post #100
feralchimp wrote: post #51

This whole bricking story is a little ridiculous. There are any number of easy ways to 'brick' an internal combustion engine, and yet we're not all torches 'n' pitchforks over them. Partially because ICEs have been around so long that the relatively short list of "things to avoid" is burned indelibly into the popular consciousness. Partially because over a hundred-odd years of continuous engineering, a typical ICE ca…

I'm pretty sure anyone ever burned in a gas-fueled vehicle fire would gladly go back in time to fork over $40k to avoid that experience. The reason gasoline is dangerous is that it stores a lot of energy. You need a lot of energy to move a heavy car a couple of hundred miles, and keep the occupants comfortable with heat and/or air conditioning. A battery in a Tesla contains a lot of energy. The dangers compared to a…

A glass of water has a lot of energy stored in its atoms. The sudden and uncontrolled release of that energy could be catastrophic. The question isn't how much energy is in the system, but how hard is it for that energy to be released in an uncontrolled fashion.

Re: Tesla: Not so easily bricked

#140

Post by replax »

outworlder wrote: post #80
abruzzi wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you run your ICE without oil, yes, you will kill it. And maybe these should be thought of in the same way, but people worry about this because draining a battery to zero seems like running out of gas, and most of us have run out of gas at some point or another. Granted it's not the same because in the short term the battery management system should reserve the bottom 5% for the health of the battery. But the secon…

Restart, yeah. But I'd imagine that a car left unused for decades would require quite a lot of servicing before returning to the roads. Namely, there are many rubber parts, seals and so on. It might run, but you really shouldn't.

Well, the sole fact that it will run is already assuring. Store your Tesla in a garage for a month unplugged and then get it serviced how? Have four guys come and let them pull it out of the garage taking hours, just to be able to even load it on a truck...

IMO, there are two things Tesla could do, one is an automated notification when your battery runs low, presenting you the options to a) let it just sit, b) turn off all electronics to preserve a little more battery and c) to let a Tesla service guy come to save your battery.

The other thing is, that you should be able to enter tow mode just from an external power supply, so it will be trivial to pull it out of your garage.

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