Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tesla responds to "bricking" issue

teslamotors.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 249 posts

Re: Tesla responds to "bricking" issue

#51

Post by tfb »

shock-value wrote: post #42
Geee wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course you have to pay if you are stupid. Same thing if you destroy your gas-powered car on purpose using some other method. It is not a 'fail', which implies a manufacturing error or similar.

Except in this case you wouldn't be destroying the battery "on purpose" obviously, but rather through neglect or ignorance. It's a fail in the sense that this technology has been exposed to be clearly unready for wide-scale adoption, and the company in question has barely even acknowledged the issue, let alone outlined steps it is taking to fix it or improve the design.

You can neglect and ignore maintenance of gas-powered engines too. Stop getting oil changes and never check/refill it and see what happens to your engine.

It will eventually be "bricked".

Just like gas-powered vehicles need to be maintained, so do electric ones. EVs actually happen to require less maintenance. Simpler too. I would say that the EV equivalent of oil changes is to keep it charged above some minimum.

Re: Tesla responds to "bricking" issue

#52

Post by randomdata »

Mvandenbergh wrote: post #14
mef wrote: post #10

Incidentally, does anyone know why the wheels of a 'bricked' car would be locked up, preventing towing?

Yes, because the systems for disengaging the wheels from the drive train won't work without power.

Does it require more power than a tow vehicle can supply to provide that disengagement?

Re: Tesla responds to "bricking" issue

#53

Post by ghaff »

revelation wrote: post #37
burgreblast wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um, because maintaining a gas/diesel/lpg vehicle (or a laptop) doesn't include keeping it continuously fueled up at the risk of $30K damage. You don't keep your laptop or phone charged on penalty of battery replacement, so why pretend that you're not surprised at the Tesla result?

If you completely discharge a battery, it will take damage. Also, quite obviously, the batteries used in the Tesla are the same kind used in your laptop or phone, just a vastly greater number of them. So yes, maintaining a laptop means keeping it charged. (How do people not know this? Battery 101)

Raises hand.

I did know that it's not good for the life of a battery to continuously deep discharge it. (Though I've seen so much different advice over the years about various battery technologies that someone might easily think it was better for batteries to run them down now and then, a belief that had at least some relevance to NiCads.)

However, I confess to not knowing that running down, say, a laptop and then letting it sit uncharged for a long period was a very bad thing.

Re: Tesla responds to "bricking" issue

#54

Post by [deleted] »

revelation wrote: post #37
burgreblast wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um, because maintaining a gas/diesel/lpg vehicle (or a laptop) doesn't include keeping it continuously fueled up at the risk of $30K damage. You don't keep your laptop or phone charged on penalty of battery replacement, so why pretend that you're not surprised at the Tesla result?

If you completely discharge a battery, it will take damage. Also, quite obviously, the batteries used in the Tesla are the same kind used in your laptop or phone, just a vastly greater number of them. So yes, maintaining a laptop means keeping it charged. (How do people not know this? Battery 101)

[deleted]

Re: Tesla responds to "bricking" issue

#56

Post by sbov »

bittermang wrote: post #35
ceejayoz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's really no different than early fuel-injected cars being damaged by running out of gas. Barring a fuel leak, your car won't run out of gas sitting in your garage while you're on a long business trip.

Non sequitur. While the circumstances surrounding the different engines and technology are wildly different, it doesn't change the root issue: if you neglect your car, it will break, and it will be a very expensive fix.

Sorry, but circumstances matter a lot in life, and you can't just brush them off because you don't like them. Try telling your insurance company that the circumstances don't matter. Or the hospital. Or the police. Or your boss. Or your customers.

Re: Tesla responds to "bricking" issue

#57

Post by tfb »

nuclear_eclipse wrote: post #24
ssharp wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say it was significantly worse under gasoline. Then, if you ran out of gas, the car was bricked. Tesla is saying that even if you drain your battery driving, it would still take 30 days of failing to charge it to brick it. While the infrastructure for just "filling up real quick" may not exist for electric cars, the infrastructure certainly exists at a person's home, otherwise, they wouldn't buy an electric car.…

Running out of gas doesn't "brick" a car. You can either push or tow it to a gas station, or you can deliver more fuel to it, and it will continue working without missing a beat. Letting a Li-ion battery discharge completely damages the battery, which means you have to replace the entire battery, not just fill it back up. This is physics; Tesla can't change the laws of chemical reactions.

What about not keeping enough fresh oil? I believe keeping a minimum charge on an EV is analogous to the common knowledge of maintaining a gas-powered vehicle's oil. The problem is that people don't have experience with EVs.

I'm sure in the early days of gas-powered vehicles, plenty of engines seized up because people were unaware they had to change the oil and keep it at a certain level. And it certainly still happens on occasion.

See my other post in this submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3630466

Re: Tesla responds to "bricking" issue

#58

Post by jilebedev »

URSpider94 wrote: post #2

This is PR mastery. Nowhere in the release does Tesla refute that owners have "bricked" their batteries. Nowhere in the release do they say that the battery can not be bricked by leaving it for a long period without a recharge. All they say is that it would take a period of weeks for a Tesla roadster to reach 0% charge, and that the Model S has battery disconnect technology that can extend this to several months. The…

> Don't get me wrong, I'm still very enamored by Teslas, and I don't think that this is any different than the owner of a gas-powered car letting it run out of oil and seizing the engine

Unfortunately, that's exactly the issue: many uninformed people are getting people like you wrong simply because they lack perspective on the Tesla "bricking" issue. Electrical cars are a new technology and people don't have the perspective to shrug off serious but very unlikely problems.

This is why Tesla's post isn't simply "PR bullshit" -- it provides context for the discussion and perspective. As others have pointed out, perspective exists with ICE vehicles today: we know that there are potential bricking issues, but we keep perspective and shrug them off because we understand how unlikely they are.

It's fair to over-focus on the Tesla bricking issue, but it's more fair to place this discussion in a context: how likely is this problem to occur, and what can be done to prevent it, to spot it before it occurs.

Re: Tesla responds to "bricking" issue

#59

Post by andylei »

blhack wrote: post #36

Here's one of the problems that I have with this whole thing: My iPod goes dead all the time, so does my phone, so does my laptop, my camera, my remote, my everything. I think that every single battery-powered device I've ever owned has, at some point, gone "dead" (as in it won't power on). NONE of these things have ever been completely incapacitated because of this. I've never had to replace my laptop because I let…

> NONE of these things have ever been completely incapacitated because of this. I've never had to replace my laptop because I let it go flat.

Maybe you're fortunate, but I've definitely had to replace laptop batteries because they got bricked. If you leave your battery discharged for a long enough time, you can never charge it again.

Re: Tesla responds to "bricking" issue

#60

Post by [deleted] »

blhack wrote: post #36

Here's one of the problems that I have with this whole thing: My iPod goes dead all the time, so does my phone, so does my laptop, my camera, my remote, my everything. I think that every single battery-powered device I've ever owned has, at some point, gone "dead" (as in it won't power on). NONE of these things have ever been completely incapacitated because of this. I've never had to replace my laptop because I let…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN