The US Department of Justice announced that it's suing eBay for selling 343,000+ "rolling coal" devices that enable automobiles to violate the Clean Air Act. Fines could reach $2 billion.
This is excellent reporting. Reuters somehow got their hands on seven years of internal #Tesla service records, as well as internal communications from service technicians and engineers.
What they found is pretty shocking to me. Repeated catastrophic failure of suspension parts. Power steering suddenly disabling itself. Evidence of denying warranty coverage. Failures that forced a recall in China that continued to be shipped in the US.
I’ve spent much of this year examining car bloat, the process through which smaller vehicles are being replaced by increasingly massive SUVs and trucks.
What I’ve learned: Huge cars are terrible for society, often in ways that are hidden.
Some basic facts:
◆ >80% of US car sales are now trucks/SUVs.
◆ Models keep expanding. For example, the F-150 is now ~800 lbs heavier and 7 inches taller than in 1991.
◆ EVs can make the problem worse due to huge batteries.
Norway has one of the lowest crash death rates in the world, with fatalities dropping ~50% in the last decade. I asked a senior Norwegian transportation official what role car technology has played enhancing safety.
“None,” she replied. “We focus on road design and enforcement."
I'm fine with the soft, whirring spaceship sounds that some EVs emit as a safety feature to alert people that they're moving. The new Dodge Charger EV comes with a deafening 126 dB roar, which is just plain obnoxious.
Fallacies of Distributed Computing: Automotive Edition
So our 2016 Subaru Outback has been having horrible battery drain issues for a couple years now. We got the attached service bulletin recently that explained the issue.
It turns out that the Data Communications Module that powers Subaru's Starlink service (emergency assistance/safety/etc. service) now causes a battery drain because it is trying to talk to a 3G network that is no longer there, and it just tries its little heart out.
You can bring the car in to get the DCM reprogrammed to not do this anymore which will fix the problem, and they will also cover batteries killed by the issue.
But my favorite part about this is that this happened because they didn't account for the first Fallacy of Distributed Computing:
"The network is reliable".
A bunch of vehicle computers each connecting to a home network sure sounds like distributed computing to me. 🤷🏻♀️
Is it time that we started fat-shaming unnecessarily large cars? Because it's ludicrous for this trend to continue - quite apart from the dangers, what a waste of materials, space and energy!
Just did some quick math and at my current rate of ~1100 miles per year on my eBike I'm spending ~$6/year to charge the battery. SIX. DOLLARS. PER. YEAR.
Dare to compare: When I had a car, if I were to drive it to the office every day and still had a car payment + car maintenance my annual cost would have been ~$3800
Just for comparison's sake, I've spent about $150 so far this year on replacement bits and bobs for my bike, which itself I paid for outright with proceeds from selling my car. Even if you include the cost of the bike I'm still up like $2200 this year and every year henceforth will be more like $3500. Plus I get exercise every day during my commute.
Only downside is America's wild aggression towards anything other than a car. Minor inconvenience.
Anne Hidalgo: "Cars Will Not Return To the Eiffel Tower" after the Olympic Games.
"The Trocadéro will be greened and the Pont d'Iéna pedestrianized, up to the Champ de Mars, which will be reforested. The whole thing will form a large park in the heart of Paris."
I keep thinking back to this Microlino at Fully Charged Live. Reusable water bottles became acceptable, being vegan is now cool, and so is wearing vintage clothes. So who is going to step up to the critical task of making small cars fashionable? The trend towards giant SUVs is ludicrous, incredibly wasteful and dangerous, and bad for our cities. If you must use a car, it should be as small as possible. Where are the micro-car visionaries/influencers? WE NEED YOU. #cars#SUV#climate
In Vox, I explained how federal policy encourages car bloat, making American vehicles more enormous, polluting, and dangerous than they'd otherwise be.
That's the exact opposite of what we should be doing.
The editors of Scientific American have written an opinion piece saying we need to move away from #cars to #activetransport because of local & carbon #pollution, road crash death & injury and how it restricts access to life for so many- the young, the elderly, the poor & disabled. #ClimateCrisis#ClimateChange
Mozilla study reveals that “modern cars are a privacy nightmare” (www.theverge.com)
All 25 car brands reviewed raised privacy concerns regarding customer data.