Posts by mikeyw0

Tesla forums awash with spam as mods take an unscheduled holiday

Re: Tesla forums?

^^^ this

Fancy sitting in a Level 4 driverless car roaming London? Get in line

That's not what L4 Means

"In practice a level 4 vehicle is capable of handling "most" road scenarios it may encounter, though retains the capability to throw control back at the human if it can't cope."

Not true. L4 means that the car is capable of full autonomy (i.e. it NEVER needs to hand back control to a human) but only when driving within a particular constrained situation or scenario. In this case that limitation is geographic: they can only drive around one area of Greenwich presumably on roads that have been mapped for the project.

Electric cars to create new peak hour when they all need a charge

But EV owners charge their cars overnight when electricity is cheap, and because it's useful to delay the heating effect of charging the battery until shortly before you set off on your morning commute.

Yes there would be an issue IF all EV owners plugged in and charged at 7pm but they don't do that.

The end.

Re: This:

(facepalm)

When you return energy from your car back to the grid you get PAID for doing so. You don't 'give' it back!!

And the whole point is that you get paid more than it cost you to buy it in the first place. You charge up in the middle of the night when demand (and pricing) is low, and then your car returns some of that energy back to the grid during the 7pm peak for which you earn a much higher rate per kWh than you bought it for.

You Musk be joking: Tesla's zero to 60MPH in 2.8 SECONDS is literally 'ludicrous'

Re: Notice the ruse?

Of course TM as a company are not profitable - they're spending huge amounts on R&D, and building an enormous battery factory in Nevada.

I simply meant that the retail price of a Model S is greater than the cost of all its parts and the labour to assemble it - i.e. the gross margin on the car is positive (indeed it's quite large).

On the other hand the Mirai's components cost more than its sale price, so it's a loss making vehicle even before you start factoring in the R&D costs.

Re: Even so...

I own a P85, and I have a P85D on order. And our other car is a Renault Zoe.

You couldn't pay me to replace any of them with a petrol powered alternative.

Oh and I spend way less time fueling my current cars than I ever did filling up the old ones they replaced :-)

Re: Even so...

Firstly this was a roadster, not a Model S (which has a much more advanced anti-bricking protection built in - you'd literally have to leave the car standing idle for over a year to do this to a Model S).

Secondly as far as I'm concerned this qualifies as chronic abuse - in which case you get what you deserve. Ignoring your car for months on end (and ignoring the warnings it gives you that you need to charge it) is exactly like ignoring a low oil light until your engine seizes.

Re: 90kWh

Not sure I follow. I meant that since the car is already AWD, the only way to improve traction is by using racing tyres, or I guess by adding a third axle :-)

Re: 90kWh

Limiting factor from 0-30 is traction. Now that they've gone AWD then without going to racing compound tyres that's not going to get any faster.

Above that the limiting factor is power (i.e. the rate at which you can add kinetic energy to the car), and in practice for an Electric Car it's current.

The change they've just made is to replace the fuse in the battery so that it can safely operate at 1500A while still providing essential short circuit protection if the current goes higher. That's it - the only change to the entire car is a new fuse, and some firmware changes to the drive inverter to allow larger current flow.

Re: Even so...

The battery has an 8 year infinite mile warranty. So if it was "ruined" presumably this meant an insurance claim of some sort due to doing something stupid or being in an accident. In that case the insurance company pays, and that's what insurance premiums are for.

It's impossible for someone to have had an out of warranty claim on a Model S battery so far, on which basis there is by definition no data as to the cost of such a thing.

How much do Mercedes charge if you "ruin" the engine in an S63AMG by draining the oil out of it and then driving around a race track until it seizes? I bet it's more than $40k.

Re: One wonders ...

No question that today the internal combustion engine still has the electric car beaten if you want to do 150mph on an Autobahn.

Firstly the energy requirements are huge so the only way to get decent range is with 100l of dinosaur juice, and secondly the continuous power requirements are also very high which again is easier in a large ICE engine.

For any other driving situation, I'd take the Model S :-)

Re: Notice the ruse?

Hydrogen is a fundamentally stupid way of transporting energy for propulsion, for one simple reason:

https://g.foolcdn.com/editorial/images/168439/hydrogen-flow-chart_large.png

Also hydrogen cars are secretly battery powered cars anyway - they all have a small lithium ion battery in between the fuel cell and the motor.

And they're so slow - in a pure electric car you put your foot down and the power delivery is instantaneous - electrons move down a wire and you're away. In a petrol car it can be pretty quick too - robotic gearboxes can change in fractions of a second, variable geometry turbos can spin up fast, and fuel is injected into the cylinders. But a hyrdogen fuel cell is really slow to respond to changes in demand, so when you put your foot down your acceleration is limited to the power you can draw from the tiny lithium ion battery. The only way to make a hydrogen car quicker is to put a bigger battery in it!

The Toyota Mirai is supposed to represent the pinnacle of what a hydrogen car can do today. It costs about £100k to make (Toyota make a £40k loss on each one at the £60k list price) and takes NINE SECONDS to get to 60. On the other hand an entry level Model S costs £50k (on which Tesla make a profit) and gets to 60 in 5.5s

ROTFLMAO

Re: Even so...

I save about £500 a month on running costs with the Model S compared to my previous car.

Even with my pretty aggressive driving style it returns the cost equivalent of 220mpg (i.e. I can go 220 miles for the same cost as buying 1 gallon of unleaded), it has no car tax, and it doesn't even need to be serviced.

£6k a year rapidly adds up to having quite a lot in the "possible future repair bills" pot :-)

Re: Even so...

All the evidence from the US fleet (where there are cars with heading towards 200k miles on them already) suggests that the life expectancy of the battery is well in excess of the life expectancy of the car. It already has an 8 year infinite mile warranty, and Tesla have batteries in their labs that have gone through the equivalent of a million miles' of usage*

A battery pack might cost $40k to buy new, but that's not the replacement cost, because the old battery still has a huge value when recycled, or repurposed as static energy storage.

* in fact that's what led to this "ludicrous" upgrade on the P90D - their R&D guys are working on how to make the powertrain have a million mile lifetime, so they needed to come up with a new kind of fuse that isn't gradually degraded by the repetitive thermal cycling. The result is a new fuse design that not only has a longer life but which also can handle much higher currents safely, hence they've been able to improve the performance of the car in the 30-60mph range (0-30 is limited by tyre grip).

Re: 90kWh

LOL.

The larger the battery, the higher peak power levels it can operate at.

Double the size of the battery and you double the power of the car without doubling its mass (because while the battery is heavier the rest of the car's weight is unchanged).

So the quickest 0-60 time will always be the from the car with the biggest battery.

Same is true for charging - the bigger the battery, the higher the power you can pump into it to charge.

So the 90kWh car will acclerate fastest, travel the furthest, and charge the quickest.

The electric propulsion model totally turns the ICE concept of either performance OR practicality on its head - the most practical cars also have the best performance.

Of course doing 0-60 runs uses more energy than driving gently, but the difference is way smaller in an EV than in a petrol car, and in the electric car once you're up to 60mph you can use regenerative braking to recover about 50% of the energy back into the battery. I'm pretty sure a 911 Turbo S can't turn CO2 back into petrol while it decelerates.

Swap your keyless key for keyless key-less key. You'll need: a Tesla S and Apple Watch

Tesla do not publish any API and certainly don't support third party app developers. Third party apps that connect to TM's servers do so through reverse engineering of the protocols and retrieval of access tokens by decompiling the official android app.

One very popular app has recently been broken by changes to TM's API and the guy who wrote it has decided it's not worth maintaining it any further.

This watch app is cute but it's 100% vaporware. Nobody will be able to build an app with remote ignition start in it without Tesla's support.

FTR the ability to locate, unlock and remote start the car is in the current iPhone app. You need to re-enter your Tesla password before the car will start.

Also remote unlock/start is an emergency use feature, not a replacement for carring the key. For a start it only works if the car has decent 3G signal. If you try to use this to replace the keyfob then the first time you park it in an underground car park (or indeed anywhere in Suffolk) you are screwed.

Tesla S P85+: Smiling all the way to the next charging point

Re: Not bad but still no cigar, methinks!

In the spirit of balance and honesty, as a Model S owner, I should just say that any claims of 300 mile range are total nonsense, and I have no idea why TM would tell him that a "press car" would get less range - one of the great strengths of the car is that the battery degradation is extremely slow so the press car would be going every bit as far as a new one.

In the real world in the UK a Model S will go 225 miles on a full charge. 250 is pretty easy if you are careful, and monastic drivers can get even morem, but 300 is not realistic. Personally I drive it without any consideration to energy efficiency and get 200 ;-)

There is an obvious tradeoff then compared to a German Diesel Exec car which can go 500 or more, and which more importantly can re-fill in 10 minutes.

But the reality after 6 months and 10k miles in a Model S is that it is genuinely *more convenient to fill with fuel than a conventional car*.

In a normal car you have to go and buy petrol say once a week, which is a 15 minute detour from your journey, and which inevitably sometimes has to happen at an inconvenient moment when you are in a hurry.

But in a Model S every morning you get in and it has charged up overnight. You never have to go unexpectedly to get fuel, and because the range is so high, if you cover say 50 miles a day typically then you literally could not care less about "range anxiety" or even driving efficiency or anything else. And then on those occasional days when you want to drive 300 miles you of course need to have a plan, and a charging strategy, and a Plan B in case the charger is out of service. That is less convenient than buying petrol, of course, but it's not much of a hardship, especially when you remember that charging at a Tesla Supercharger only takes 30 minutes or so and is FREE.

Saving 15 minutes a week by not buying petrol and instead having to stop for 30 minutes once every 8 weeks to charge on the road is a pretty easy tradeoff for me. And why are you trying to go 300 miles without stopping for a rest break anyway?

But don't kid yourself you could ever drive 300 miles non-stop in one :-)

Re: A few downsides

There's no denying that repair costs on the Model S are currently very high (though not really any higher than equivalent cars like the Audi RS7).

The same effect was seen with the Prius - when it was new, and different, and low volume, it was very expensive to repair, but as volumes have increased and the world has become familiar with hybrids, the maintenance costs have come back into line with those for petrol/diesel equivalents.

Tesla don't do bodywork repairs; they have a network of approved bodyshops and will only sell parts that form part of the safety structure of the carto those bodyshops. Porsche do the exact same thing. If your car is damaged but none of the damaged parts are structural (i.e. you just have a dented door panel, or a broken headlight, etc) you can take it anywhere you like to be repaired.

Re: A few downsides

LOL - the only thing under the bonnet of a Model S is a second boot space. I assume they were just getting out their luggage. The entire drivetrain (motor, single speed gearbox, drive inverter, etc) sits beteen the rear wheels underneath the floor of the car.

Go test drive one. You will never experience a smoother drivetrain. I'll never go back to driving an internal combustion car again.

And as someone previously said, making it less powerful doesn't improve the range at all. You might naturally assume that this is the case because internal combustion engines have this shortcoming, but the electric drivetrain really does not.

Ultimately the reason they're making powerful luxury cars is so that they can sell into a segment where there is a large profit margin available, so that in turn they can fund the development of their "everyday" car.

£2k burning a hole in your pocket? Let this 'advanced' DRONE relieve you

Re: Awesome Toy

4500m refers to absolute altitude, not how far above ground it can go.

If you started at sea level and send it up that far then yes bad things would happen. At full throttle you'd probably only get 15 minutes battery life so it would reach max altitude and then come back down considerably more quickly.

We got behind the wheel of a Tesla S electric car. We didn't hate it

Re: Yes, but ...

Yes, the system that runs the two interior displays is linux based.

Instantaneous power consumption (i.e. the "rev meter") is in kW.

Charging rate can be configured to show in kW or in mph (i.e. number of miles range added per hour assuming typical driving).

Trip consumption figures are in Wh/mi. Lower is better obviously, with 300Wh/mi being regarded as pretty economical driving.

Re: Keyless

No, if you're worried about whether the car is locked you just fire up the iPhone app and it tells you.

Re: Wait, the screen is used for what?

The large screen is definitely a lot lower than other screens I'm used to (my previous car is an Audi A8). But then the instrument display directly in front of me is also an LCD and all the important info is there (speed etc obviously, but also nav stuff) and that's the one whose height/position is critical.

I think if the main screen were any higher it would start to become more intrusive (it is large after all!) - there's nothing critical on it that you *must* look at while driving so that's OK with me.

Were you watching a different video?

There are Model S's in the US that have covered 50k miles already. They're seeing battery capacity drop by around 1% per 10k miles. A petrol car loses range at least that fast (as the engine gets less efficient). So with 200k miles on the clock you might expect 80% of delivery range. I don't know what the average mileage on a car at the time it's scrapped is, but I bet it's less than that.

And why would Tesla be selling my battery? It's mine. I bought it.

Also where are you getting your battery swap pricing? The only battery sales going on at the moment are a) when owners want to upgrade to the large battery and b) to repair cars that have been damaged in major accidents. No owner is looking to replace their battery with a new one just to recover the 2% range they've lost!

Re: Keyless

big_D it's not a particularly big deal to be honest. Though in the Tesla there isn't even a start stop button, or a lock button. The car unlocks as you walk towards it, the engine is "on" as soon as you press the brake pedal, and when you arrive somewhere you put it in park, get out and walk away and it locks and shuts down behind you. But no this isn't really something to get excited about compared to other features of the car.

Re: I was going to buy one of these...

You joke, but one of the changes expected in the next software release (V6.0) is to change to using chrome as the in-car brower. ABP may not be that far away ;-)

Re: Wait, the screen is used for what?

The wipers and headlights are both automatic (like in any car costing £50k or more).

And the wiper controls are on a control stalk on the steering wheel, as is the full beam headlight control, just like in every car.

Tesla have sold around 30,000 of these cars (mostly in the US). You can be pretty sure that all the crass usability issues were ironed out at the prototype stage, and most of the minor ones have also been fixed based on feedback from those early owners.

The car updates itself automatically like an iPhone - you get in one morning and it tells you there's been a software update and that new features are now available.

Re: how are they likely to be in Winter?

Matthew 17 are you seriously trying to argue that the fact that petrol/diesel cars waste huge amounts of fuel in the form of heat is a good thing?

A few comments on comments so far... (from someone who has owned his Model S for 4 days so far)

1. Tesla are opening "superchargers" inside central London precisely to deal with the fact that on-street parking is so common here. 20 minutes will half charge the battery, i.e. 150 miles of range. I've already met a few people who have ordered the Model S even though they won't be able to charge at home. But yes of course there is a huge challenge around building a charging infrastructure for long journeys, just like there was when the petrol car was invented 120 years ago. There will be fast chargers at every UK motorway service station by the end of the year.

2. The battery is reckoned to have around a 20 year life (8-10 years in the car, then another decade or so helping to load balance the grid) and at the end of that process it's still 97% recyclable. How is this "environmentally atrocious"? Watch Robert Llewellyn talking about this at the end of his review at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bv2UE7sNBfA

3. Having driven my Model S for about 500 miles now I can tell you that the display isn't the slightest bit distracting. Like anything else you just have to get used to it. Go test drive one and see for yourself. Also I'd love to see a side-by-side comparison of someone programming a sat nav destination in say a VW Golf vs The Model S. When I collected my car last week I wanted to drive into London to show the car to my colleagues. I just pressed a button on the steering wheel, said "navigate to Duncannon St, Central London", and off it went.

4. Of course the satnav works offline. If you are out of range of 3G you don't get to see full google map or satellite view tiles but you still get turn by turn nav, with maps, in the instrument display, voice prompts etc, just like any car. And the 3G service is included and free anyway, including pan-European roaming.

How practical is an electric car in London?

Re: On Street Parking

Not sure what marketing materials you've been reading, but a Tesla 135kW supercharger (they opened the first of these last weekend in London to coincide with delivery of the first vehicles, and are rolling them out nationwide) will add 150 miles of range to the Model S in 20 minutes. That's less time than it takes me to go to the loo and buy and drink a Starbucks coffee, and a short stop to get out and stretch your legs every 2.5 hours of driving makes for a very pleasant experience...

Texan parks quadcopter atop Dallas Cowboys stadium

DropBear it's not possible for the system to retrace its flight path to return home, because

a) while it is GPS enabled (and GPS stabilised) a satellite lock isn't required for it to fly, so it may not have complete path data

b) to reliably return by retracing its footsteps it would need at least 50% battery remaining.

Commercial unmanned aerial photography in the UK requires a Permission for Aerial Work from the CAA, who in turn will insist the pilot has a BNUC-S qualification before they give permission.

http://www.eurousc.com/pilot-qualification-(bnuc-std).html

For recreational use in the UK the law roughly boils down to:

* don't do anything stupid (various things about due care and attention, etc)

* maintain line of sight with the UAV at all times

* do not fly within 50m of a person or vessel not under your control (i.e. who is not known to you and aware of what you are doing).

There are of course other general laws that apply as well (such as those relating to privacy, trespass etc).

In the US I think unmanned surveillance vehicles are basically illegal, but the FAA haven't yet figured out what to do about them and how to proceed so have said they are not going to bring any prosecutions... yet.

I certainly do. Can't speak for anyone else.

Rules are quite different US vs UK I think. In the UK if you want to sell your photos or videos you really do need a CAA flight qualification, so "pilot" is indeed the right word.

There is no altitude limit on a DJI Phantom Vision. I've taken mine up hundreds of metres into the air.

I expect the 20m reference is confusion on the part of the author - the auto-return feature (which makes it come back if it loses control signal) brings the copter back to the point of launch where it hovers 20m in the air for a couple of minutes before finally landing itself.