There are any number of easy ways to 'brick' an internal combustion engine, and yet we're not all torches 'n' pitchforks over them. Partially because ICEs have been around so long that the relatively short list of "things to avoid" is burned indelibly into the popular consciousness. Partially because over a hundred-odd years of continuous engineering, a typical ICE can take a hell of a lot of abuse before it fails.
And note that the "shit that might happen to you" column still isn't trivially dismissed on the ICE side, even after 100+ years of safety engineering. We physically pump highly-flammable liquids into our gas tasks; people still occasionally get burned or even die doing that shit!
Let's assume the $40k figure is at all likely for a vehicle owner that RTFM'd. I'm pretty sure anyone ever burned in a gas-fueled vehicle fire would gladly go back in time to fork over $40k to avoid that experience.
Many of the things that "brick" an ICE can be repaired at relatively low costs. And almost all of those things brick the car by using it, Teslas will brick when you don't use them, you lock it safely in the temperature controlled garage and go away for too long and it dies.
It strikes me as a design problem of sorts, you've got a relatively expensive and sophisticated sports car with piles of electronics. I would think that maybe they could detect a certain critical level of energy is left in the batteries and flip a toggle that just shuts them off which wouldn't last forever but could buy you some more time maybe.
My grandfather's Buick has GM's onstar stuff in it, couldn't your roadster send a text message or something? Maybe they could have some sort of emergency mechanism to just plug a normal car battery in to gain a little charge from.
I like what Tesla is trying to do, they're changing the conversation and ultimately when I look at the auto industry I think more startups are needed. They're a startup though, the Top Gear story, I don't think it was bad or inaccurate, the Tesla just doesn't look like it's in the same league as many of the other sports cars they drive around and then this battery thing, rare as it might be they need a good story for it. How many drivers have run out of gas when they are experienced and know better? Stuff happens, it's more common than you might think, with an ICE it's just embarrassing and inconvenient, with a Tesla it might set you back some serious money.
From the article:
"The battery management system of the Tesla Roadster keeps the battery from being discharged to a damagingly low state of charge under normal driving conditions. It's true that a full discharge to zero percent state of charge can potentially be damaging to a battery. However the battery management system of the Roadster won't allow the car to reach that low level of charge."
"However the battery management system of the Roadster won't allow the car to reach that low level of charge."
I realize that you are quoting the article, but the owner's manual is simply not in agreement with this sentence.
From the Roadster 2/Roadster Sport owner's manual (italic emphasis is mine):
"Important! Caution: If the battery’s charge level falls to 0%, it must be plugged in immediately. Failure to do so can permanently damage the battery and this damage is not covered by the New Vehicle Limited Warranty. Also, if you allow the battery to fall to a critically low level it may not be possible to charge the vehicle. If you are unable to charge the vehicle, contact Tesla Motors."
[...]
"However, situations may arise in which you must leave the vehicle unplugged for an extended time (for example, at an airport when traveling for a couple of weeks). If this is the case, it is your responsibility to ensure that the battery does not become fully depleted."
[...]
"If for some reason, you are unable to keep the vehicle plugged in when it is not being used, it is up to you to preserve battery life by paying attention to the charge level and the temperature [...]"
The original article seemed to be stating or implying that the car's own on-board systems would continue to draw power well past the danger point, drastically reducing the time to destroy the battery.
This article seems to be stating that the car's systems will stop drawing power. The battery will continue to discharge in this situation, due to natural processes, but discharging to a point that destroys the battery takes much longer in that case.
This means there is still a risk that, if left unattended for extended periods (on the order of at least weeks, perhaps longer), the battery will become unusable. But this is not the same as the original claims which seemed to be arguing for design flaws which would hasten that process.
I don't think you are noticing how, if you read the wording closely, this is NOT a rebuttal of the bricking claims. The rebuttal talks about "normal driving conditions". This is non-responsive to the claim in question, which is that if you drive the Tesla for a while til the battery is somewhat low, and then don't plug the car in to charge properly, it can become completely disabled in as little as a week.
So in other words, the original blogger was not claiming that "normal driving" will brick the Tesla. So talking about how the battery management system won't let it brick itself while you are driving it is a misdirection tactic. It does not rebut the claim.
The "article" confirms that Teslas can be bricked in exactly the way reported:
There is a fundamental problem when any rechargeable battery is discharged and then left to sit for months. Any boat owner understands that that's why you plug in a trickle charger when the craft is put into storage. The same should be done for any electric vehicle. However, to imply that the Tesla Roadster has a fundamental design flaw because of the nature of electrochemistry....
The rest is the lovely art of spin. It reads like a rebuttal of the bricking claims and vindication for Tesla, doesn't it? In every superficial aspect, that's what it is, but the substance doesn't match the form and tone. Welcome to PR.
"However the battery management system of the Roadster won't allow the car to reach that low level of charge."
In that case, Homer Simpson would never want one in his house. Also, why are they in the car business? I what their battery management system. It, apparently, can make energy out of thin air, to counteract the losses in the batteries.
> How many drivers have run out of gas when they are experienced and know better?
Not many, right? I've certainly never even come close to running out of gas, and I can only think of one time in my life where anyone I knew ran out of gas (and that was only yards away from the gas station).
Pretty much everyone i know has a 'ran out of petrol' or at least a 'woh nearly ran out of petrol had to keep her at 55 all the way and rolled her in' story.
Maybe it's a function of where you live. I think I have witnessed it more often than that, relatively rare but with a $40k penalty just having it happen once is pretty extreme. Maybe running out of gas was the wrong analogy.
I still think you could design some better fail safes in and then if it is as rare as they say, why not cover it in the warranty?
When my grandfather was 85, he forgot to do all of the maitenance on his car. He drove like 40,000 miles without ever changing the oil and blew up the engine in his BMW 7 series. It wasn't exactly a cheap car.
Replacing the engine in the car was something like $7,000.
I see your point about safety - gas clearly isn't the safest substance in the world. But neither is electricity. My cousin is currently a police officer, and before that he was a first responder for car accidents. He has had specific official training to deal with hybrids becuase you have to avoid the battery cables after an accident when using the jaws of life and what not. And those batteries are more stable than lithium ion, in those cases they are simply concerned about compromising the battery cables. So it kind of cuts both ways.
This is a problem lithium ion powered electric cars. We shouldn't sweep it under the rug. It should be solved now while there are 10,000 electric cars and not 10,000,000 electric cars. It seems like the solution is a combination of educating/warning owners & notifying them by phone or email if the car starts to get too low. That isn't exactly the end of the world. But ignoring it is not the solution.
> Replacing the engine in the car was something like $7,000.
Which, for many drivers, may as well be $40k.
> the solution is a combination of educating/warning owners & notifying them by phone or email if the car starts to get too low
I never advocated ignoring anything. My point is not that "Tesla is great" or "boo ICE yay electric," it's that all the hysteria around "OMG car bricking" doesn't actually promote whatever communication/engineering solutions would actually make the product better or more consumable for people.
Did you really go ahead and conflate $7,000 and and $40,000? $7000 buys me a decent used car. $40,000 buys me a brand new Toyota Prius (MSRP $24,700) with almost enough change left over to buy a brand new Hyundai Elantra (MSRP $15,345).
$7,000 is not a small chunk of change, by any means. It's a lot less, however, than $40,000. Conflating the two does no one any good.
Unexpected maintenance costs can be factored into the consumer cost using expected value, similar to how one accounts for recurring costs such as fuel efficiency in the decision to purchase a vehicle.
Your reasoning is similar to a company computing the cost of web hosting using only the initial cost of one server, without accounting for the cost of downtime or multiple backup servers. Maximum effort does not imply a process with 99% reliability is 100% reliable, and that the cost of failure can be written off.
This is not making a claim in regards to Tesla or the accuracy of the $40k figure, merely that cost matters.
Fair enough. I admit that $40k is mad spicy for a repair resulting from some basic user error, and even if the incidence for this problem is 10% (much higher than Tesla would claim, I'm sure), we're talking about raising the price of a Roadster from $100k to ~$104k to cover the amortization.
If you run your ICE without oil, yes, you will kill it. And maybe these should be thought of in the same way, but people worry about this because draining a battery to zero seems like running out of gas, and most of us have run out of gas at some point or another. Granted it's not the same because in the short term the battery management system should reserve the bottom 5% for the health of the battery.
But the second reason people are worried about this is killing that last 5% and bricking the battery happens by doing nothing. Bricking an ICE while it is unused, sitting in your driveway takes decades. With a replacement $50 battery and $30 oil change I've restarted engines that have been sitting unused in junkyards for 40 years.
I've been driving for 6 years now and I have never ran out of gas. Is this really so uncommon that you can safely say that at some point or another most of us have run out of gas?
I keep an eye on my odometer and on the gas gauge and know when it is time to get gas. My car doesn't have a low fuel light warning so paying attention is definitely required.
Where I drive, I am frequently 100 miles from the nearest gas station. Plus in small remote areas, gas stations can be out of gas, out of business, or just closed for unknown reasons.
I ran out of gas three times when I was first driving; the gas gauge was bad, and would show "half full" when it was dead empty. The odometer was reasonably reliable at telling me when I was about to run out of gas, but I was cheap and didn't want to spend money if I could get the car to go a little further.
"If you leave your $40k battery pack alone for months without a trickle charger, you will kill it" is no more challenging to communicate or implement than "if you run your ICE without oil, you will kill it."
It is not about communication, it is about function. "You have to constantly pay to keep your car alive. If you leave it alone for a few weeks, it will die". This is the way I read it.
PS. If the battery management system won't allow the car to reach dangerously low level of charge, if it is very unlikely that I will damage my battery by accident - why won't Tesla guarantee it and subsidize battery replacement? Make it a $1K repair, that's enough money to keep people from not plugging their vehicles out of pure carelessness, but don't make it a $40K event that in insurance terms would be a total loss.
There is a world of difference between overuse leading to failure, and non-use leading to failure. It's disingenuous to claim that the messages are similar because they have abOut the same number of words.
From a marketing and CRM perspective, the messages are identical: "Here is a simple and cheap routine maintenance behavior that will prevent a catastrophic repair bill: X".
In the ICE case, X is "maintain a minimum oil level while the engine is running." In the Tesla case, it's "maintain a minimum battery level, even during storage."
Given that the underlying drivetrain technologies actually are worlds-of-difference apart from each other, that strikes me as a pretty minimal difference in terms of routine maintenance. Unless it's somehow difficult to understand or costly to implement, we should assume Tesla customers aren't f'ing morons and go about our business.
Tesla: Park it out the back... plugged into a trickle-charger... which is a $2k specialist item you have to have installed... and you can't use a long extension cord... and you can't just have it in the street, it'll need to be undercover, protected from rain... and away from the public, even in a nice neighbourhood...
Might they take a while to visit someone who doesn't have undercover parking or a $2k power adaptor installed?
From the article, it seems that while the roadster owners aren't burger-flippers, they're also not so wealthy that they can take a $40k loss on the chin.
Fuel injected vehicles have a much higher pressure fuel pump than carbed vehicles. Some designs might have trouble with priming, but most these days are submerged pumps that are installed in the tank. This solves the priming problem, and cools the pump.
This is a perfect example of what is happening here--any new technology is going to have hiccups. Fuel injection had _lots_ of hiccups, that have mostly been resolved. EV is bound to have hiccups, and is bound to get resolved.
Restart, yeah. But I'd imagine that a car left unused for decades would require quite a lot of servicing before returning to the roads. Namely, there are many rubber parts, seals and so on.
Even so, bleed the brakes, look for leaks, check fluids, and at worst, you are out a couple of hundred. My current truck is a 1972, and had been sitting for 10 years when I bought it. It needed the above, plus new tires.
Well, the sole fact that it will run is already assuring. Store your Tesla in a garage for a month unplugged and then get it serviced how? Have four guys come and let them pull it out of the garage taking hours, just to be able to even load it on a truck...
IMO, there are two things Tesla could do, one is an automated notification when your battery runs low, presenting you the options to a) let it just sit, b) turn off all electronics to preserve a little more battery and c) to let a Tesla service guy come to save your battery.
The other thing is, that you should be able to enter tow mode just from an external power supply, so it will be trivial to pull it out of your garage.
I'm pretty sure anyone ever burned in a gas-fueled vehicle fire would gladly go back in time to fork over $40k to avoid that experience.
The reason gasoline is dangerous is that it stores a lot of energy. You need a lot of energy to move a heavy car a couple of hundred miles, and keep the occupants comfortable with heat and/or air conditioning. A battery in a Tesla contains a lot of energy. The dangers compared to a tank of gasoline are different, but in either case, the sudden and uncontrolled release of that energy can do a lot of damage.
A glass of water has a lot of energy stored in its atoms. The sudden and uncontrolled release of that energy could be catastrophic. The question isn't how much energy is in the system, but how hard is it for that energy to be released in an uncontrolled fashion.
The real issue is that those events are extremely rare given the intensely frequent use of ICE vehicles. Replace all the ICE with electric vehicles, and you'd see just as many electrocuted people. It's simply not a real argument.
I think the fact that you are agreeing with an article either written directly by Tesla PR or paid for by Tesla PR, which has a minority opinion on the matter, which is backed up by statements which are in disagreement to both knowledgeable parties and the Tesla owner's manual, is frankly unflattering.
I bet I can find some blogger who can make a better argument about the holocaust never happening, then this lousy excuse for a journalist. Then again, that individual would still be a minority among the knowledgeable populace.
Hey, lets give it a go here. Electric is the new comer to the party. They have to prove themselves. ICE proved itself. ICE isn't on trial here.
I stated an opinion and my reasons for holding it. I don't owe you a disclaimer about whether the linked article (which I didn't reference, btw) happens to be full of shit.
If you form all of your opinions worrying about all the idiots or evil people who might happen to agree with you, or use your arguments to further their own nefarious ends, you're destined to lead a very quiet life.
> ICE proved itself. ICE isn't on trial here.
The usability and cost/benefit of electric drivetrains versus the status quo is relevant. My point was not "we should distrust ICE," so much as "we should discuss cost/benefit tradeoffs of technology like reasonable people instead of resorting to ZOMG BRICKING".
I agree cost benefit analysis is relevant. Instead your argument stated how unreliable ICE is by comparison. Ice isn't on trial. Ice is proven to be reasonably safe/reliable ect.
Secondly, my argument is not that you should worry about who also supports your argument, -but if you are going to agree with an article, find a better poster child. Otherwise, your argument holds little value as the original article refuses to support itself with research or references. I am certain that there is an article that accomplishes your opinion AND supports itself with evidence of some kind. Instead it sounds like before you even read the article you had your opinion, found the first article that agreed with your opinion, and called it a day.
There are any number of easy ways to 'brick' an internal combustion engine, and yet we're not all torches 'n' pitchforks over them. Partially because ICEs have been around so long that the relatively short list of "things to avoid" is burned indelibly into the popular consciousness. Partially because over a hundred-odd years of continuous engineering, a typical ICE can take a hell of a lot of abuse before it fails.
And note that the "shit that might happen to you" column still isn't trivially dismissed on the ICE side, even after 100+ years of safety engineering. We physically pump highly-flammable liquids into our gas tasks; people still occasionally get burned or even die doing that shit!
Couldn't find many stats, but this is interesting: http://www.nfpa.org/assets/files/PDF/Research/FireSafetyVehi...
Let's assume the $40k figure is at all likely for a vehicle owner that RTFM'd. I'm pretty sure anyone ever burned in a gas-fueled vehicle fire would gladly go back in time to fork over $40k to avoid that experience.