Elon Musk Vs. John Broder of NYTimes

[The Oi]

What's wrong with charging the thing for an hour and stopping to get a bite to eat? Other then that, piss in a bottle.

In a car you have to stop and fill anyways. And how many people travel its max amount of miles in a single day (excluding truck drivers, taxi & deliverers)?



That car is ugly as sin.

What's wrong with it is that you're beholden to it for that entire hour or two. You have no choice but to sit there and wait. What if you have an appointment and forgot to charge it?

Are you sure we're a society that as a whole wouldn't rather be in control of how quickly they're back on the road. And exactly how much real estate will these charging stations need? At a gas station, each car is in and out in 2minutes. Owner gets paid every couple minutes, people fill up and head on down the road. Here, each car is gonna need at least an hour during which no other car can use it?

 

[RTrees]

When they make the batteries smaller, if that's ever possible, the solution will be to carry multiple batteries. Then you don't have to wait, just switch batteries. Charge them all over night. Maybe have a rotation, 3 charging at the house during the day and 3 in your car, so you're never without charge even at night.

I think the batteries are too big and heavy at the moment to make this efficient. I assume they're pretty expensive too. I believe they're working on it. The costs are just too high I think. These gas companies wanting to make money in the electric industry are used to much bigger profits. Good luck talking them down to more humble profits in order to curb gas consumption, which happens to be their industry already.

When people start buying more electric cars, people will start making more electric cars. It will be up to consumers to freeze out gas consumption imo. Who knows what that would take? A thousand hurricane Sandy's, mass flooding, high scale catastrophic global warming or so? Probably more.

 

[Giambiwannabe7]

Pretty surprised by many of the responses on here. First off, the concept of driving this or any electric vehicle on this long of a road trip is absolutely idiotic. These cars have not reached that potential yet. They are getting closer than they were at the inception of this thing, but still miles away from any sane person or family deciding to pack the thing up and heading out for a week's vacation. Tesla was only setting themselves up for some sort of disappointment. Like Jig said, who the fuck wants to wait that long every few hours? And these inflated mileage ranges(and don't fool yourself denying they aren't) will never be reached in a car like this. Who the hell wants to drive a car that gets to 60mph in 3 seconds like they're in a god damned yugo or some shit turd car?

Tesla is a car that prides itself on performance. This version is an attempt to delve into the fairly unknown territory of combining performance and alternate energy. On that note, it is not a fucking Prius and was never intended as such. It is born of supercar ideology in a conservationist mentality. I'm not trying to take this for an excursion down the entire fucking Coast. I want to pull it out of my 6 car garage, whomp the shit out of it, with its mind blowing torque you can only get out of a transmission-less electric motor, and get a bunch of hot bitches to drop their jaws as I roll on by. I'm driving it to the Club down the street on a Saturday night or wherever the fuck else I can see a bunch of sweet ass that is gonna satiate my growing mid life crisis needs.

I think both these guys are full of shit, honestly. RTrees is right. If Tesla gives me a phone number of someone to call when I need tech assistance on this thing, I'm pretty sure the person on the other end is going to be competent enough to understand how regenerative braking works. I'm not going to go from 60 to 50 on a constant teeter totter trying to gain some theoretical mileage. That's ridiculous. Regen braking is a great thing for city driving, where you have natural stop and go driving, not some knuckleheaded contrived dream to get to the next recharge station. When Broder said that, he immediately lost all cred with me and brought all the rest of his findings into high question. OTOH, Musk was naive as all get out putting himself/car out there in a test like this, under these conditions, with this knucklehead from the Times. The explanations given by Broder on the tire sizes affecting the mph readouts is 100% accurate. I'm assuming Tesla sent the car outfitted that way because of the weather conditions(why else???). But,that brings us to the other questionable decision by Musk....why the hell would you do this test in such extremely cold conditions? Hello, idiot. You were setting yourself up for disaster. That car was never going to maximize efficiency in such conditions.

What a fucking disaster of an idea. Musk looks like an idiot for setting it up the way he did. Broder comes off as a puppet with questionable motives and some sort of agenda(despite his attempt at damage control).

 

[Giambiwannabe7]

**I got a bit off track typing like an ADD kid on a gram of coke, but it seems to me that changing the tire sizes by 2 inches would completely throw this car's entire tracking system out of whack. It's going to throw the speedo off, which in turn causes a falling domino effect on the rest of the computer. Without accurate mph, you lose accuracy of mileage prediction. Good God. What an absolute nightmare. Someone should have walked right up to Musk after all this BS and just smacked his dumb ass right in the face. Missteps galore.

 

[The Oi]

SmknJoe with a killer analysis. Good stuff.

 

[Maximus]

When people start buying more electric cars, people will start making more electric cars. It will be up to consumers to freeze out gas consumption imo. Who knows what that would take?

To get people to buy them...
-can't be $70K+.
-has to take 10mins or less to recharge or have a battery small enough that it could be swapped in a couple minutes.
-Charging stations can't be every 60 miles.
-Can't look like a golf cart...has to be a normal looking car.
-Can't tell me i have to limit the temperature, accelerate and brake or any other annoying rules to hold a charge.
-Have to be able to get it serviced quickly, easily and cheaply.

People consider their time valuable and don't want to be inconvenienced. They want to get in a car and go without thinking. If you need gas, there's always a gas station within a few miles and it takes a couple minutes to fill up. The batteries are the problem. As you said, you need to be able to have multiple batteries. As Jigo said, people are going to forget to charge them. Or what if it's 10 degrees out over night and you wake up to hit a meeting and most of your charge is gone. The tech just isn't there yet for people to buy them en masse.

You have the Tesla which is a luxury toy and you have the ugly ass golf cart types for the Ed Begley Jr's of the world for $25K...niether is as convenient as a car. There's not one legit option for the average American let alone average American family.

 

[Damage]

Could my post have been any more benign? All i did was post Broder's reply and said after reading both sides that it doesn't sound as sinister as your original post. I didn't take either article as fact. You clearly took Musk's side as fact based on the way you pounced on Broder. There's three sides to every story. I'm guessing they're both fibbing to a certain extent and the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

What's undeniable is that Musk has always been a prick....a smart rich prick, but a prick. He reinforced that in his reponses to the article. The car underperformed by 20% after every charge. It lost it's charge overnight. It obviously has software issues that don't compensate for cold temps. An electric parking brake in an electric car? Musk should have stepped up and admitted his product's shortcomings and addressed the data issue with Broder. Instead he got upset like he always does and yelled sabotage. As a result all he is getting is bad publicity....stupid, stupid, stupid.

I love technology and I love alternative energy....i just hate when every person that owns a company with a green product thinks that a market should be gift wrapped(WITH MY TAX DOLLARS) and handed to them before the product is ready. Electric motors are very reliable and efficient. Unfortunately no batteries exist that are reliable and efficient.


On a side note, I'd like to see our government offer rewards for certain accomplishments.
Offer a massive reward to the first company to come up with a mass producable alternative energy solutions, efficient batteries, cure for cancer/diabetes, etc.

I didn't take either article as fact. You clearly took Musk's side as fact based on the way you pounced on Broder.

then...

What's undeniable is that Musk has always been a prick....a smart rich prick, but a prick

 

[Damage]

To get people to buy them...
-can't be $70K+.
-has to take 10mins or less to recharge or have a battery small enough that it could be swapped in a couple minutes.
-Charging stations can't be every 60 miles.
-Can't look like a golf cart...has to be a normal looking car.
-Can't tell me i have to limit the temperature, accelerate and brake or any other annoying rules to hold a charge.
-Have to be able to get it serviced quickly, easily and cheaply.

People consider their time valuable and don't want to be inconvenienced. They want to get in a car and go without thinking. If you need gas, there's always a gas station within a few miles and it takes a couple minutes to fill up. The batteries are the problem. As you said, you need to be able to have multiple batteries. As Jigo said, people are going to forget to charge them. Or what if it's 10 degrees out over night and you wake up to hit a meeting and most of your charge is gone. The tech just isn't there yet for people to buy them en masse.

You have the Tesla which is a luxury toy and you have the ugly ass golf cart types for the Ed Begley Jr's of the world for $25K...niether is as convenient as a car. There's not one legit option for the average American let alone average American family.

Hypocrite.

 

[KI4MVP]

I agree with your approach, but that thing right there is a death trap. I wouldn't let anyone i care about drive that thing. It would have a hard time winning a collision with a golf cart. :chuckles:

perhaps, but they do claim this

Safety: it's in our genes.
The electric drive shares smart’s entire innovative safety concept designed by the forward-thinking safety pioneers at Mercedes-Benz. Active and passive safety systems offer maximum protection. And, the positioning of the battery in the vehicle underbody offers the best possible protection in the event of a collision.

either way, the idea is sound, though. Enough range for typical daily driving, charges overnight, reasonably cheap. Certainly a better place to start than trying to tackle cross country drives.

 

[QuadrupleDouble]

tl dr

Electric cars are for pussies

 

[The Oi]

Damage has this hang up where if anyone questions, critiques or criticizes an alternative energy objectively, they're standing in the way of progress, hypocrites and dinosaurs.

 

[Maximus]

Hypocrite.

Don't drink and post...

 

[Maximus]

perhaps, but they do claim this



either way, the idea is sound, though. Enough range for typical daily driving, charges overnight, reasonably cheap. Certainly a better place to start than trying to tackle cross country drives.

I don't care who they have trying to make this thing safe...the ONLY way to make it safe is if all the cars on the road are the same size/weight.

Honestly, would you ever give one of these to your kids? You could give it to me for free and i wouldn't let someone i care about drive it.

 

[MattyFos.]

I don't care who they have trying to make this thing safe...the ONLY way to make it safe is if all the cars on the road are the same size/weight.

Honestly, would you ever give one of these to your kids? You could give it to me for free and i wouldn't let someone i care about drive it.

Me versus that car one on one, I win everytime... As long as I get a running start.

 

[The Voice]

What's wrong with it is that you're beholden to it for that entire hour or two. You have no choice but to sit there and wait. What if you have an appointment and forgot to charge it?

Are you sure we're a society that as a whole wouldn't rather be in control of how quickly they're back on the road. And exactly how much real estate will these charging stations need? At a gas station, each car is in and out in 2minutes. Owner gets paid every couple minutes, people fill up and head on down the road. Here, each car is gonna need at least an hour during which no other car can use it?

Parking garages with charging stations would make it take minimal real estate.