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That Tesla Data: What It Says and What It Doesn’t

wheels.blogs.nytimes.com

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Re: That Tesla Data: What It Says and What It Doesn’t

#171

Post by taproot »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #136
vacri wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'turning it only on for X' is the same philosophy as having a back door in your software. "Oh, don't worry, only we will use it, and only for legitimate reasons. Trust us!"

I assume it has to be enabled with physical access to the vehicle, though I don't know this for certain. If they can turn it on remotely, then yeah, that's definitely bad.

I am still unclear, were these diagnostics being sent to a tesla server somewhere or was this information hardlined post review? Source?

Also, how is this bad anyway? Google probably has this information already, if not google, your phone's carrier definitely does.

Re: That Tesla Data: What It Says and What It Doesn’t

#172

Post by stcredzero »

inopinatus wrote: post #157
stcredzero wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a group, journalists simply get a great number of things wrong and cannot be relied on for detail oriented work. Something is very wrong here. If the way you conduct business has nearly equal probability of pissing off innocent people unjustly as it has of making wrongdoers hot under the collar, isn't it time to revisit how you do things?

Nonetheless it confirms my experience of journalists also: as a class, they often play fast and loose with the truth and frequently misattribute statements, misinterpret facts and quote misleadingly out of context. Take everything you read in the press with a huge grain of salt.

Maybe the death of newspapers and magazines is generally well deserved?

Re: That Tesla Data: What It Says and What It Doesn’t

#173

Post by slantyyz »

niggler wrote: post #79
kdsudac wrote: post #57

I get why Musk feels like he needs to defend his company but I think he may be doing more harm than good on the PR front. Do you think the average Tesla customer is going to want to wade through a bunch of plots of battery charge vs distance, etc? I think the takeaway for the average Tesla customer might be along the lines of "hmm, this seems really complicated.... am I going to have to keep the heat down while I dri…

"To me, Musk comes across as an out-of-touch engineer who keeps trying to argue the technical case and insists it's the customer's fault--it couldn't possibly be a faulty design, confusing U.I., or marketing not realizing a common (mis)use case. " Fully agree. This is a great case study for other startups on what not to do.

For some reason this story reminds me a lot of Steve Jobs and the response to the Antennagate fiasco.

Re: That Tesla Data: What It Says and What It Doesn’t

#174

Post by 127001brewer »

hype7 wrote: post #65
codex wrote: post #38

The tit-for-tat details here don't matter. The story is simply, "The Tesla lost a ton of range overnight, unexpectedly. Tesla said it would come back after an hour of low-power charging." Is that true? Clearly the former statement is true but the latter is not. The only question is whether Tesla gave the reporter bad advice, or whether the reporter lied because he wanted to sabotage the test. Given Tesla's focus on t…

I agree with you that the tit-for-tat details don't matter; I don't agree with you that the only question is whether Tesla gave the reporter bad advice. This is a textbook example of how not to solve a PR problem — to get in a public, internet-driven slanging match with a journalist. Instead of "publicly refuting", Musk should have called up and got a full account of what went wrong; put the journalist on side, and g…

... that these EVs aren't ready for primetime.

“No new product does absolutely everything in exactly the same way as the product its replacing,” [Chelsea Sexton] says. "And yet when it comes to electric cars that’s the expectation."

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/whod-win-fight-te...

Personally, after reading these tit-for-tat spats, I'm more inclined in considering EVs. (It's worth listening to Marketplace's reporting on this.)

Re: That Tesla Data: What It Says and What It Doesn’t

#175

Post by jusben1369 »

"It's like wrestling with a pig in mud. Pretty soon, you realize the pig is enjoying it"

- I think the pig here is the NY Times. But Musk didn't get to where he is by knowing when to take his foot off the accelerator (pardon the pun) and going less than 110% when he sees an obstacle to winning. So can't really expect him to handle this with restraint or reserve.

Re: That Tesla Data: What It Says and What It Doesn’t

#176

Post by jusben1369 »

nirvana wrote: post #34
jacquesm wrote: post #3

Two bits are completely non-sensical to me, is there any battery technician or otherwise knowledgeable person that can indicate in what conditions this makes any sense? > Beginning early in the morning of my second day with the car, after the projected range had dropped precipitously while parked overnight, I spoke numerous times with Christina Ra, Tesla’s spokeswoman at the time, and Ted Merendino, a Tesla product p…

The answer is very simple: Brody is lying about what Tesla told him, just like he's told many other lies in his article and in the rebuttal. Putting it into a "he said / she said" is a smokescreen. The car might be a lemon but the idea that Tesla told him to run the heater to charge the battery is beyond credulity. This is not exactly the first time the NYT has told lies for ideological reasons. The paper does it reg…

They'll have a good chuckle at the NY Times (and even Fox would have a laugh) when they see you're accusing them of attacking alternative energy for ideological reasons.

Re: That Tesla Data: What It Says and What It Doesn’t

#177

Post by stcredzero »

erichocean wrote: post #146
jacquesm wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So this all comes down to what customer service might or might have not said over the phone. Exactly, that is what I get out of it too. And that is probably conveniently unverifiable. Tesla really should repeat the trip with the same parameters as much as possible. Common sense dictates that if they waste power the way indicated that they should run out of juice and if they are conservative and follow the normal pr…

We don't need to know what was said, just that a call was made . Broder claims that he was "cleared to drive" after an hour of charging with 32 miles of range on the car for a 61 mile trip. But I don't think that actually happened (note how delicately Broder discusses this now). Tesla certainly denies it. And this is the reason the review was "bad", so this gets to the crux of the issue. What at least happened, accor…

> So Broder found his angle, thinking: I'll plug it in for an hour, then just leave, no matter what the range says. Hopefully it'll die on me this time.

This is how most "journalists" operate. They're story-tellers who know what sells to their audience, and they gravitate towards that. Not the truth, but what their audience wants to hear.

Re: That Tesla Data: What It Says and What It Doesn’t

#178

Post by surrealize »

rz2k wrote: post #107
surrealize wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at the plots from Musk's blog post, the battery state of charge diminishes a bit overnight, but the estimated range diminishes much more. Presumably because a cold battery has a shorter range. As the battery warms up, the estimated range should go up as well. How much the range goes up probably depends on how much the battery warms up; in the cold morning weather in Norwich, the battery may have warmed up les…

This is not my area of expertise at all, but that sounds backwards. As I understand it a given number of molecules' bonds can be broken at any point to generate current. In colder ambient temperature the propensity to generate current decreases. However, the quantity does not. In other words, the apparatus for measuring what "charge" is available will incorrectly judge how much is left, but an intelligent system on t…

I was speaking informally earlier, but if we make things more precise then I think we're pretty much on the same page.

I think you're right when you say:

>In colder ambient temperature the propensity to generate current decreases. However, the quantity does not.

Presumably, the car stops running when the battery's propensity to generate current ("voltage") falls below a certain threshold. If that propensity to generate current does decrease when it's cold, then a cold battery will hit that car-stopping threshold earlier, right? Assuming the battery stays cold.

That's all I meant when I said "a cold battery has a shorter range".

And when the battery warms up, its chemical reactions speed up, increasing the voltage and pushing the car-stop threshold into the future. That's what I meant by "As the battery warms up, the estimated range should go up as well."

The battery's "state of charge" in the plot from Musk's blog post does go down overnight. Whether that's due to self-discharge, some system in the car that used a bit of energy overnight, or some temperature-related measurement effect (or a combination of those things), I don't know. I just thought it was striking that the "estimated range" dropped so much more than the "state of charge" (at the 400 mile mark in Musk's plots).

Does that put us on the same page?

Re: That Tesla Data: What It Says and What It Doesn’t

#179

Post by DeepDuh »

niggler wrote: post #81
smsm42 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems to be plausible explanation, but I don't see how you give such advice to somebody on the road. You have two potential situations: 1. Battery has lost some charge for unknown reason, and has to be recharged. 2. Battery has proper charge, but the estimate is wrong. If you act according to true scenario, client is happy in both cases. If true scenario is 2 but you act like it's 1, the client wastes and hour t…

"If the support person gave different advice, he was setting himself and his company for the mess up, and the mess up ensued." This is why we need the call logs. And I fully suspect Tesla records them, so the fact that it wasn't released may suggest that Broder's account was indeed correct

While the whole discussion makes me skeptical of both Broder and Tesla's customer service, I'd like to add here that Tesla most probably would need permission to do that. Even releasing GPS data is already a questionable move - IANAL, but I believe in Europe this would be pretty much unthinkable, except if he gave explicit permission on paper first (general agreement terms probably wouldn't be enough, because of the surprising nature of such a term).

Re: That Tesla Data: What It Says and What It Doesn’t

#180

Post by waterlesscloud »

gamblor956 wrote: post #55
nirvana wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer is very simple: Brody is lying about what Tesla told him, just like he's told many other lies in his article and in the rebuttal. Putting it into a "he said / she said" is a smokescreen. The car might be a lemon but the idea that Tesla told him to run the heater to charge the battery is beyond credulity. This is not exactly the first time the NYT has told lies for ideological reasons. The paper does it reg…

Elon Musk has a billion dollars riding on calling the NY Times a liar and discrediting them. Here's the thing though: the problem with the Tesla battery is the same problem that every other EV to date has had in sub-zero weather: they lose their charge and the charging meter gets decalibrated. Tesla's bane is not a biased NY Times reporter. Their fundamental mistake was giving an EV to the NY Times to test drive in t…

"Elon Musk has a billion dollars riding on calling the NY Times a liar and discrediting them."

No, he doesn't. It's one review out of many, the vast majority of which are far more favorable to the car.

There's some cost to Tesla to letting the review stand, but it's certainly not a billion dollars, or even hundreds of millions.

What is certain to happen now is that some credible auto review magazine is going to take a closer look at the way the car runs in cold weather.

If Musk is lying, he's going to get nailed. That's going to hurt a lot more than the one review.

The reporter, on the other hand, has no choice but to stick with his story now.

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