261–270 of 284 posts
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No it's not. There are a variety of ways to engineer around this property of the batteries.
Then perhaps you'd care to share one? Or maybe just start cranking out magic batteries and become uber-wealthy? Since you haven't done that, I find it more likely you have no clue what you're talking about.
Tesla 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 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…
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.
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It's endemic to modern battery technology, but not modern battery implementations. Tesla's technology is unquestionably excellent. Consideration of use cases--or, you know, consideration of the customer forking over a ton of money for their vehicles --not so much. 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'…
Uh, OK? Nobody's disagreeing with you that the battery situation sucks. I still don't understand what that has to do with what SeanLuke or potatolicious said. Are you seriously saying the company's efforts are all for naught because of a severe issue in early models experienced so far by a tiny minority of early (wealthy) purchasers that could be fixed to many people's satisfaction at any time by the company just dec…
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.
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Huge swaths of 80 and 880 are three-person HOV lanes. Take a look at the interactive map here: http://rideshare.511.org/
Well, I'd quibble about 'huge swaths', but I was in the wrong, so my mistake. I guess this is what I get for going to Oakland once per year.
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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 pionee…
> Remember that Apple pioneered the unibody laptop chassis on > the backs of wealthy early adopters with the (ludicrously > > priced) MacBook Air... 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.
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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.
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?
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> 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…
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Then perhaps you'd care to share one? Or maybe just start cranking out magic batteries and become uber-wealthy? Since you haven't done that, I find it more likely you have no clue what you're talking about.
Here are 4: switch, backup battery, mini engine, solar panel.
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.
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> 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…
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.
I'm more impressed by people that spend $100k on a car and then don't know how to take care of it. 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 ev…
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.