The car is too risky to purchase if it can brick. There is no way to ensure that a brick can't happen. Any charging source could malfunction (e.g., trip a circuit breaker) without you becoming aware. You have to plan your whole life around keeping the car charged. You can't lend it to friends (nor your spouse that doesn't care about tech) --- oops, sorry, I didn't plug it in after my several-hour drive. It's like having a dog that needs constant care. This sounds too fantastic to be true.
"It's A Brick" - Tesla Motors' Devastating Design Problem
121–130 of 284 posts
Re: "It's A Brick" - Tesla Motors' Devastating Design Problem
#122Tesla are a sideshow and we desperately need to stop talking about them, because they're harming efforts to improve energy efficiency. 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…
Tesla are targeting the customers willing to spend upwards of 50k on a car. The other people selling electric cars are targeting the people who would normally spend less than 20k on a car. An electric car is the features of a small city car, but not the price. There's something to be said for targeting both sets of potential customers.
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Re: "It's A Brick" - Tesla Motors' Devastating Design Problem
#123Let me tell you how to brick a top of the line 2009 BMW. 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…
This use pattern damages a lot more than just the battery. You can basically trash the engine if you keep up a 5-10min per day use pattern for long enough. At the very least, a car which would otherwise comfortably last 200-300k miles will probably be worth selling at 50-100k. Certain engines are affected more than others, but basically you are never letting the engine warm up to design temperature, so nothing fits w…
Meh. Modern oils are amazing, and engine wear is highly dependent upon load. Provided you're gentle, it's likely that the worst engine-related issue you'll experience from short drives is from moisture and acid accumulation in the oil.
Re: "It's A Brick" - Tesla Motors' Devastating Design Problem
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could add a $100 mobile phone, which auto-calls a service center. If 1% of cars get "bricked", that's $10,000 per car saved, not including intervention costs. Even with some false positives, it would be worth it. Of course, that cost is carried by Tesla, not the customer. "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…
That's exactly what Tesla do , even once having gone so far as tracking the car down via GPS and charging it themselves when the owner was unresponsive.
Certainly that's going to peg some people's creepy meters.
Re: "It's A Brick" - Tesla Motors' Devastating Design Problem
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tesla are targeting the customers willing to spend upwards of 50k on a car. The other people selling electric cars are targeting the people who would normally spend less than 20k on a car. An electric car is the features of a small city car, but not the price. There's something to be said for targeting both sets of potential customers.
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I think you missed his point.
The leaf is targetting people who would normally spend less than 20k on a car. However the leaf isn't hitting that price point.
Tesla targets people who spend more than 50k on a car, and hence aren't too worried about the price point of the Tesla. Rather they want things like performance and luxury.
Re: "It's A Brick" - Tesla Motors' Devastating Design Problem
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tesla are targeting the customers willing to spend upwards of 50k on a car. The other people selling electric cars are targeting the people who would normally spend less than 20k on a car. An electric car is the features of a small city car, but not the price. There's something to be said for targeting both sets of potential customers.
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That's what I'm saying. You can't assume that you can cater to the market just by making a city car, because you can't price it like a city car.
The two markets for electric cars are people who want a city car but could afford more, and the people who specifically want an expensive car. Tesla is serving an important segment of the market by embracing the fact that electic cars are expensive.
Re: "It's A Brick" - Tesla Motors' Devastating Design Problem
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could add a $100 mobile phone, which auto-calls a service center. If 1% of cars get "bricked", that's $10,000 per car saved, not including intervention costs. Even with some false positives, it would be worth it. Of course, that cost is carried by Tesla, not the customer. "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…
That's exactly what Tesla do , even once having gone so far as tracking the car down via GPS and charging it themselves when the owner was unresponsive.
According to the article they used to do that, but don't any longer.
Re: "It's A Brick" - Tesla Motors' Devastating Design Problem
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's exactly what Tesla do , even once having gone so far as tracking the car down via GPS and charging it themselves when the owner was unresponsive.
Certainly that's going to peg some people's creepy meters.
As a Model S reservation holder, it pegs my pocketbook meter. If I'm about to lose $40K on my car because of a battery, I have no problem with them showing up in my driveway to charge the vehicle if necessary.
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.
Re: "It's A Brick" - Tesla Motors' Devastating Design Problem
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The article indicates that a 100 foot cord connected to a standard outlet does not provide enough power to prevent a Tesla car from discharging..." Pretty sure they say that to make sure people don't just use any old cord. A 24 AWG cord with 66% voltage drop as the low end would change your cost analysis radically.
You probably meant 4 AWG, a 100' of 24 AWG cord has about 2.5 ohms of resistance in it. Since power dissipation is exponential with current pulling even 2 amps through it would have the wire trying to dissipate 10 watts and that would represent 100mW/foot, easily enough to raise the temperature of the copper to the point where it would be too soft and break. [1] http://www.cirris.com/testing/resistance/wire.html
Since power dissipation is exponential with current
Minor nitpick: power is proportional to the square of current (e.g. P=I^2), not exponentially proportional (which would be something like P=e^I).
Re: "It's A Brick" - Tesla Motors' Devastating Design Problem
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Tesla are a sideshow and we desperately need to stop talking about them, because they're harming efforts to improve energy efficiency. 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. P…
> 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 impactfu…
And that's the genius of it. You are not paying to change the narrative - but lots of other people are. Even if Tesla ends up a footnote in the history of automotives, their impact will be felt for decades, just like Sun.
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.