The Burning Platform:
All electric cars come standard with range anxiety – having to think about how far you can go before the car comes to a stop . . . and what you’ll do while you wait for it to recharge.
If you can find a place to recharge.
But Elon Musk’s electric cars offer a unique “feature” their owners didn’t know they paid for:
Range reduction.
Not because the batteries are running low – but because Elon decided to reduce how far they can go.
Well, now they know!
To keep more Teslas from burning up while recharging -an embarrassing as well as fatal problem with Teslas – the company recently transmitted a “software update” to its Model S and X vehicles that limits how much charge the battery will accept. more here
I kinda like the idea of recharging electric cars with $30,000 diesel generators. S/off
Funny how sales of Teslas dropped off once governments stopped subsidizing their purchase.
Anybody taking bets on how long before somebody hacks into Tesla’s update server and bricks them all?
FWIW, Musk has come out in support of Yang.
Wonder what made him decide this way?
Roybean,
What we need is little miniature coal fired power plants, about the size of those little turtle trailers for compact cars, that can be towed along behind a Tesla to recharge it when it goes dead.
Remember when a big hurricane came through Florida a couple of years ago, and Tesla updated the software so they could go farther?
I understand with software, putting multiple versions on a single disc for simplicity, but with hardware it seems unfair to put something more robust in and not give the purchaser access to it.
@Judge
That recharge station hooked up to a very inefficient, dirty diesel generator is funny beyond belief.
Hell, why don’t they just burn the bird carcass from wind farms for the fuel?
This has to be the stoopidist environmentalist crap since Rachel “The Saint” Carson doomed half the world to malaria.
Range reduction is redundant, as it is also apropos of the mind of anyone that’d buy one.
♫ “Ohm, ohm on the range…” ♪
🙂
If you’ve never been in a Tesla, they’re AMAZING and gorgeous cars. It is a car to own if range is not an issue.
Consider it a luxury, to own if you own a second car that is gas operated.
Yeah Anon
They’re beautiful ,and always in the same place so you can look at them.
Stock price 1 year ago aprox. $356/share
Now $229/share.
Eventually you run out of handouts, rebates, and people giving you infrastructure for less than cost.
Quebec gives $5000 + $8000 for electric car rebates. $13G’s from people who didn’t buy one to someone who lectures the rest and uses the most expensive form of energy.
Tesla cars remind me of the “How could we be overdrawn?
We still have checks” scenario.
I thought Range Anxiety was when my drunk BIL visits and decides to make himself an omelet at 3am after everyone has gone to bed.
The company that decides to manufacture an “old-fashioned” mechanical vehicle with computer nothing is going to make a fortune.
I think the danger point for the Tesla side of Musk’s empire will be when hybrid cars can give the owner the option of only using the battery while driving in order to allow him/her to brag to all his friends who don’t want to listen that he is fully green except for emergencies when he sparingly uses the petrol side. Wait for BMW, Mercedes and the others to release this and advertise the hell out of that option. Use the electric alone in the city and the electric/petrol when traveling long distance. It may even be there now on early models but look for it to be advertised hard. Then look for the rebates to end (they’ve ended in Ontario except for a few where delivery had already been promised). A decent hybrid that functions well will bury Tesla.
There’s one born every minute.
-PT Barnum
Never give a suckered an even break.
-WC Fields
I have noticed that the last few cabs I have used were not even Hybrid Camry’s. They were the most popular but a few cabbies have told me that the reduced trunk capacity & extra cost (without rebates)are basically a wash since the higher paying airport runs cannot always fit the luggage in the reduced trunks. Their words not mine.
Electric cars have massive range reduction in sub zero temperatures. severe in many casses
These are still vanity cars for a niche market. I’d like one to just scoot back and forth to the store or out to dinner. One that I could park in a neighbors garage so it could burn down their house. But that’s a pretty penny and I’m kind of a miser.
Engineering wise, what they’ve done is pretty remarkable. If no one has seen the Youtube videos of the Tesla P100D’s racing everything under the sun:
https://youtu.be/iHRICKM03Sc
Similarly with their fit and finish:
https://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/a28008116/tesla-model-3-build-quality-bob-lutz/
This says nothing of corporate welfare or Musk’s seemingly cultivated flakiness. How anyone could support Yang after that fake crying bullshit last weekend is beyond me. I keep seeing these news reports talking about how he was crying. I didn’t see crying. I saw someone trying to squint and rub their eyes to give the appearance that they were upset or crying. Robots don’t cry.
Musk’s space program did with $500M what NASA hasn’t been able to do with billions for the last 30 years.
It is rare that you are going to find the idea guy, the plan execution guy and the guy that’s good with money all in the same person. When you do, there are still buildings and colleges named after them 100 years later.
BTW, I used to drive a late 70s Chevy C-10. It got about 9 mpg. 6 mpg with a fully loaded bed. All these Toyotas, Hondas and Hyundais have spoiled people with short memories.
You could drive 65 mph down the interstate and literally watch the gas gauge dropping. Too many fishing trips ran late and that 350 V8 range reduction kicked in. Pray no one popped your hood (since many didn’t have locks on them back then) and steal your battery or just unscrew your cap and siphon your gas.