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

Fact Checking Tesla's “Impact Report”

thedrive.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 50 posts

Re: Fact Checking Tesla's “Impact Report”

#31

Post by goshx »

m463 wrote: post #23
robertAngst wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You've got a good product They have a product their buyers like, but the car doesnt have buttons or a center console. "Good" is in the eye of the beholder. Tesla has a weird situation that despite a product that breaks often and doesn't have niceties, their customers have a high satisfaction.

> They have a product their buyers like, but the car doesnt have buttons or a center console. You're not the target market. Really it's for people who don't have money for a model s/x who don't care about touchscreens and want to control the car from an app. (fwiw: I'm not the market either, I want a dashboard) What's kind of interesting is looking at older model S cars and searching back for what the UI looked like…

The Model 3 has a large touch screen.

I recommend both of you to just go visit a Tesla store and do a test drive. At least it will help preventing the spread of misinformation.

Re: Fact Checking Tesla's “Impact Report”

#32

Post by slg »

7e wrote: post #27
slg wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but The Drive's counter-argument makes an apples vs. oranges comparison. I will go one step further, The Drive's number is just straight dishonest. It lists that number as "the average fuel economy of all vehicles in the US hit 24.9 MPG in 2017". If you click through to the EPA report it list that 24.9 number as for "all new vehicles". It also says the number was 23.6 in 2012. The average car on the road is roughly…

It's fair to compare Tesla's new cars with others' new cars. That's the benchmark. If someone didn't buy a Tesla, they would have bought another type of new car (though probably a new hybrid or plug in hybrid, which have even higher average MPG). Tesla is disingenuous here.

Except they aren’t comparing their cars. They are trying to quantify the total carbon saved from their cars and other ventures like solar panels. People have no idea what a “ton of carbon” equates to, but saying it is the equivalent of taking 500k cars off the road is meaningful to the general population.

Re: Fact Checking Tesla's “Impact Report”

#33

Post by justinclift »

tdhz77 wrote: post #7

I’m not stating anything other than this website is owned by Time, inc. Time, inc owners is currently on several boards for the oil and gas industry. https://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.a...

"The Drive" website... doesn't seem to mention "Time, Inc." anywhere, and your link is to an overview of "True Multimedia Co. Ltd.", described on that page as:

`True Multimedia Company Limited provides high-speed multimedia network services in Thailand. `

... which seems completely irrelevant.

Maybe provide better references? :)

Re: Fact Checking Tesla's “Impact Report”

#34

Post by basetop »

dbasedweeb wrote: post #14
tdhz77 wrote: post #7

I’m not stating anything other than this website is owned by Time, inc. Time, inc owners is currently on several boards for the oil and gas industry. https://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.a...

At least the conspiracy theories have moved on from “the shorts” to a more typical group.

I don't think pointing out a potential conflict of interest is the same thing as a conspiracy theory.

Re: Fact Checking Tesla's “Impact Report”

#36

Post by SECProto »

tedivm wrote: post #18
SECProto wrote: post #5

> Fact Checking Tesla's "Impact Report" > It's no surprise that the electric automaker is having a positive environmental impact, so why does it need to exaggerate the good and gloss over the bad? I have a similar view of this article as this article has of Tesla: Why does it need to exaggerate the bad and gloss over the good? The only hard number it criticizes is the number Tesla used for the average mileage of the…

> The only hard number it criticizes is the number Tesla used for the average mileage of the US fleet (25.4 vs 22) - nevermind that the higher efficiency would work in their favour: it would mean that the same number of Tesla vehicles displaces a larger number of ICE-vehicles. I don't think your math is right on that- higher efficiency in ICE vehicles would mean that the Tesla vehicles displaces fewer ICE vehicles, w…

> I don't think your math is right on that- higher efficiency in ICE vehicles would mean that the Tesla vehicles displaces fewer ICE vehicles, would it not?

Hard to tell - the report doesn't show all it's math so there are two ways to interpret. But I'll post the relevant paragraph from the report here:

> Over 550K Tesla vehicles have been sold, and they have driven over 10B miles to date, resulting in a combined savings of over 4M metric tons of CO2. This is the equivalent of saving emissions from being released into the environment from over 500K ICE vehicles with a fuel economy of 22 miles per gallon (MPG).

The way I read that, the hard number is 4 million metric tonnes of CO2 (which they determined is equivalent to 500000 vehicles at 22MPG, given average distances driven and CO2 output from that amount of gasoline). If my interpretation is correct, it would be equivalent to (500000*25/22=) 568 thousand cars at 25 MPG (the more efficient cars put out less co2 per mile, so the same amount of co2 reduction is equivalent to more cars).

But it may just be worded poorly, and they know how many cars it kept off the road, and calculated their emissions savings based on an equivalent average of 22 MPG. In which case, your calculation would be correct.

Re: Fact Checking Tesla's “Impact Report”

#37

Post by dbasedweeb »

basetop wrote: post #34
dbasedweeb wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least the conspiracy theories have moved on from “the shorts” to a more typical group.

I don't think pointing out a potential conflict of interest is the same thing as a conspiracy theory.

It is when they’re not even owned by Time!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19678982

Re: Fact Checking Tesla's “Impact Report”

#38

Post by dbasedweeb »

mr_toad wrote: post #24
SECProto wrote: post #5

> Fact Checking Tesla's "Impact Report" > It's no surprise that the electric automaker is having a positive environmental impact, so why does it need to exaggerate the good and gloss over the bad? I have a similar view of this article as this article has of Tesla: Why does it need to exaggerate the bad and gloss over the good? The only hard number it criticizes is the number Tesla used for the average mileage of the…

> Why does it need to exaggerate the bad and gloss over the good? Car enthusiasts & journalists have a storied history of being biased against electric and/or self-driving vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2008/dec/24/jeremy-clarkso... https://www.tesla.com/blog/most-peculiar-test-drive

Jeremy Clarkson really really doesn’t represent the world of “car enthusiasts” or journalists in general. He’s an entertainer, part of a latter day Three Stooges and tarring an entire branch of journalism with his brush is like saying that because Sean Hannity is a fuckwit, so was Walter Cronkite.

Re: Fact Checking Tesla's “Impact Report”

#39

Post by geomark »

xfitm3 wrote: post #15
rgrove wrote: post #6

The article claims Tesla is incorrect when they say that "the average ICE vehicle gets around 22 MPG", and counters with EPA stats showing that the average fuel economy of all vehicles in the US is 24.9 MPG. But these aren't the same thing. The set "all vehicles in the US" contains both ICE vehicles _and_ hybrid/battery-powered EVs. But Tesla is explicitly only talking about ICE vehicles, and Tesla doesn't specifical…

Don't forget that a substantial amount of fuel is burned while parked. Lights and other electronic equipment consume a lot of energy. "In one recent report about police vehicle fuel consumption, the cruiser studied was found to idle 60% of the time during normal operation and used 21% of its total fuel while parked. While the engine provided 250 horsepower (hp), together all of the accessories needed less than 2 hp.…

Didn't read the article, but the engine doesn't provide 250 hp while parked and idling, that's for sure. Certainly it is inefficient compared to an engine sized to provide 2 hp but that's not the same as running it at max rated power.

Re: Fact Checking Tesla's “Impact Report”

#40

Post by danso »

mr_toad wrote: post #24
SECProto wrote: post #5

> Fact Checking Tesla's "Impact Report" > It's no surprise that the electric automaker is having a positive environmental impact, so why does it need to exaggerate the good and gloss over the bad? I have a similar view of this article as this article has of Tesla: Why does it need to exaggerate the bad and gloss over the good? The only hard number it criticizes is the number Tesla used for the average mileage of the…

> Why does it need to exaggerate the bad and gloss over the good? Car enthusiasts & journalists have a storied history of being biased against electric and/or self-driving vehicles. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2008/dec/24/jeremy-clarkso... https://www.tesla.com/blog/most-peculiar-test-drive

They have a far, far more storied history of being positive. Which is why Tesla, quite rightly, says in its 10Qs that it doesn’t need to pay for advertising because it expects to generate positive media coverage.
Post reply on HN