#VW cancels plans to build a dedicated #EV factory. #Volkswagen has been racing to cut costs after falling behind #Tesla and China in the electric car market.
🍋#Tesla launched its own car insurance. These drivers say it's a lemon
#Musk promised cheaper, better, even “revolutionary” auto insurance after Tesla started losing sales because of high premiums. But understaffing left some customers waiting weeks or months for compensation as they continued making payments on crashed cars. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-insurance/
Ok, Let’s talk about #hydrogen Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles (#FCEV) as an alternative to Battery Electric Vehicles (#BEV).
A FCEV uses the same electric motors as BEVs but gets its power from chemically reacting H₂ with O₂ from the air in a way that produces an electric current - a fuel cell. None of this is new technology Fuel Cells were a mature and reliable power source by the time the Apollo program was landing people on the moon. The issue with fuel cells is the same as with Enteral Combustion Engines(ICE) they are most efficient in a very narrow energy band great if the goal is to power the life support on a space craft, but not for the extremely variable loads needed to drive a car.
For this reason, FCEVs are hybrids with the same Li batteries as BEVs and ICE Hybrids like the Prius. Like ICE Hybrids they use the battery to accelerate and as storage for regenerative breaking with the fuel cell providing a constant recharge.
Why I’m skeptical of FCEVs
Greenwashing Hydrogen. FCEV advocates will point out that the only tailpipe emission is water vapor. The question is where does the hydrogen come from. By far the least expensive way to produce hydrogen gas is to crack the hydrogen atoms off of petrochemical hydrocarbons. As a mater of basic chemistry it takes far less energy to crack hydrocarbons than it does to electrolize water. And unlike the electrical grid where technologies like solar, wind and nuclear are already deployed and becoming an increasing share of our electric grid. Processes to produce hydrogen from water at anything close the the cost to strip it off fossil fuels is in the same development stage as cold fusion. at least for the next decade green hydrogen will be a premium product only available to the wealthiest buyers.
Hydrogen storage is hard. To fit enough hydrogen on a moving passenger car for it to have a 300 mile range requires pressures of 10,000psi (700 bar). The kinds of pressure vessels that can safely handle that pressure are expensive, and need regular inspection. Having had to keep a compressed air tank of just 200 psi in a fixed certified, I can tell you that there will be significant costs to regularly inspecting a 10,000 psi tank full of flammable gas that needs to survive a collision with one of the 2023 lineup of full sized puck up trucks.
But that is just the start. Hydrogen leaks. No matter how good you think your valves and fittings are the smallest molecule in the universe stored under huge pressure will find a way out. Ask anyone who has experience in the space industry where hydrogen is already the fuel of choice and they will tell you that hydrogen leaks are just a fact that has to be engineered around. On a vehicle this will be a small annoyance but at a fueling station this will be significant. The farther Hydrogen is transported and the longer it must be stored the higher the losses. There is also the energy factor of compressing that gas. To the best of my knowledge the prodigious amount of work done to pressurize the fuel is never recovered
FCEVs and BEVs both started to be produced about a decade ago, and while Tesla has scaled out its supercharger network world wide in that time. Hydrogen has less than 100 filling stations all in California. While these stations can fill a car in 5 minutes, they can only fill 2 to 5 vehicles before spending an hour refilling their high pressure storage tanks. One could argue that all Hydrogen needs is an eccentric billionaire ready to lose money for a decade building out infrastructure, however I think the infrastructure challenges with hydrogen exceed even Musk levels of ambition.
Cost. My M3 already costs noticeably less per mile that the equivalent ICE vehicle. Baring a huge technological leap, hydrogen will always be more expensive. because the least expensive hydrogen is processed out of the same fuel that runs ICE cars and provides less energy per molecule than those hydrocarbons when reacted with O₂ hydrogen cannot help but be a more expensive fuel.
So why are hydrogen FCEV still a thing? Well the vehicles are lighter, fueling times are comparable to gasoline, and the petrochemical industry is desperate for them to succeed. The oil industry can see the writing on the wall as states like California will ban new ICE vehicle sales in 2030. While holding out hope for a green hydrogen future a generation away, they can continue to have a market for their product as gasoline and diesel phase out. “Hydrogen will become the green fuel of the future” explain their sock puppets knowing that dirty hydrogen from their product will always have a price advantage. And to be fair, turning a mobile source into a point source of emissions does provide the opportunity for carbon capture (so called Blue Hydrogen), but all this still add even more cost while BEVs already have a price advantage in their fuel - not to mention that every home in the developed world has the infrastructure to charge BEVs.
Why write all this? Because when you get down to it most of the #FUD being spread around #EV s is coming from FCEV advocates who are trying not to let hydrogen become the betamax of the transition away from ICE transportation. In doing so they are making it harder than necessary for the world to move away from ICE transportation.
🚨Elon Musk just lost $28bn as Tesla took a beating🚨
Toyota’s chairman Akio Toyoda, tells the EV market "I told you so", as sales slow dramatically.
Toyoda has long advised the industry to hedge its bets on EVs by continuing to invest in hybrids, hydrogen-powered cars, & other alternative eco-friendly vehicles.
UK insurers have hiked premiums to unaffordable levels because of the high cost of EV repairs.
“#Tesla blamed drivers for failures of parts it long knew were defective
Wheels falling off cars at speed. Suspensions collapsing on brand-new vehicles. Axles breaking under acceleration. Tens of thousands of customers told Tesla about a host of part failures on low-mileage cars. The automaker sought to blame drivers for vehicle ‘abuse,’ but Tesla documents show it had tracked the chronic ‘flaws’ and ‘failures’ for years.” https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-musk-steering-suspension/
I was at #Chicago Pride all weekend while visiting with my wife (videos and photos soon!), so I missed this #Tesla Drama concerning #FSDBeta that erupted.
Ok.
Let us, again, all put on our #SystemsSafety hats and take a look at the situation here as I understand it.
Below is the video that kicked the beehive between Tesla defenders and detractors on "what really happened?".
This clearly chaotic video was taken from a larger drive sequence in which FSD Beta was active.
I didn't know that #Tesla cars could fart-on-demand. Today I proved to my son Jake that I'm still a very big kid at heart, but I have absolutely 0 shame.
Warning: Do not drink and drive. Especially do not drink and listen to this at the same time.
The writer of this piece is marvelous. Just a total joy to read someone tear into an outrageous & dangerous thing like the #Tesla biz model the way it actually deserves
Jetzt, nachdem ich den neuesten Prototypen des #Tesla Cybertruck gesehen habe, will ich umfangreich zurueckrudern & mich bei den Designer:innen entschuldigen.
Solche Dinger entwirfst du nicht, wenn du den Planeten retten willst... so ein Design zeigt der Erde und allen Lebewesen den fetten Mittelfinger!
Hackers from TU Berlin managed to jailbreak #Tesla cars, unlocking software-locked features worth up to $15,000 🪓🪓🪓
They used a known (unpatchable) voltage fault injection attack against the AMD Secure Processor to glitch the boot process, got root, and retrieved the car's RSA private key 👌
About a decade ago, Tesla rigged the dashboard readouts in its electric cars to provide “rosy” projections of how far owners can drive before needing to recharge, a source told Reuters. The automaker last year became so inundated with driving-range complaints that it created a special team to cancel owners’ service...
Elizabeth Warren is raising concerns to Tesla Board Chairman Robyn Denholm that its Board of Directors failed to meet its legal responsibility to protect Tesla and uphold its fiduciary duty to shareholders from Elon Musk's actions after he bought Twitter.
Let's explore why a system capable of partial driving automation (like FSD Beta) and automated driving systems more broadly are decidedly not at all like ChatGPT.
“‘Tesla years ago began exaggerating its vehicles' potential driving distance—by rigging their range-estimating software,’ the article published today said. ‘The company decided about a decade ago, for marketing purposes, to write algorithms for its range meter that would show drivers “rosy” projections for the distance it could travel on a full battery, according to a person familiar with an early design of the software for its in-dash readouts.’”
Here we have another #Tesla#FSDBeta clip showing some highly-questionable automated vehicle behavior (the automated vehicle proceeds through a marked crosswalk where a pedestrian has already entered).
Let's put our #SystemsSafety caps on and take a look here...
Tesla’s secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints (www.reuters.com)
About a decade ago, Tesla rigged the dashboard readouts in its electric cars to provide “rosy” projections of how far owners can drive before needing to recharge, a source told Reuters. The automaker last year became so inundated with driving-range complaints that it created a special team to cancel owners’ service...