Electric Vehicles

The highway has been very useful* with Tesla's FSD for the 4 years I've had it. That's actually at least a couple of orders of magnitude easier than city streets.Before (V11) it would work on surface streets but not all that well.Now it actually drives successfully and maybe will improve very fast. It's a guess but I'd now say that the other ADAS systems will never catch Tesla. Ford may well be the first to licence it.* but sure not something you can relax and ignore -- far from perfect. I'll be interested in how V12 does on the highway but don't get out of the city much.

I turned off Full Self Driving earlier today. For local driving it felt like I always had to be on the alert for potential wrong moves. I'm almost never on a highway where it seems like it would be pretty useful, but by the time we take our next trip my free month will be up. Forget if I already mentioned, but Tesla charges $12,000 or $199/month for FSD.--Percy

Not interested until there needs to be no-one behind the steering wheel.

I just today became aware that Tesla has started to make noise about introducing a fuel cell car in 2026. That's absurd. There will no more be practical fuel cell cars by 2026 than there will be practical fusion power. Nor by 2030. Nor by 2040. Perhaps not ever.There are three significant problems faced by fuel cell vehicles:

1. They require a couple precious metals, platinum and iridium.
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2. There is no source of hydrogen that is both cheap and clean. Breaking the chemical bond between hydrogen and oxygen in water is very expensive in terms of energy, and extracting hydrogen from natural gas emits a lot of carbon.
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3. Mobil hydrogen containment is a significant problem. The energy density of hydrogen is low, so the alternatives are expensive very high pressure containers, or expensive cryogenic gear. In either case, space requirements just wouldn't allow it.

As recently as 2019 Musk called fuel cell powered passenger vehicles "mind-bogglingly stupid", so this change of mind is just Musk talking through his hat again (like when he claims every year that Full Self Driving will be a reality by next year). The nearly insurmountable problems cannot be surmounted in mere years. We're talking decades.A neighbor's son is involved in a fuel cell research effort at school in conjunction with a commercial company. Their target is long haul trucks. They're large enough to handle the large footprint needed for hydrogen storage and for keeping it at a safe distance from fuel pumps, batteries, and so forth.--Percy

If we can harvest hydrogen from the ground then it would take away from the cost of production, but I still don't think we could harvest enough to make it a viable replacement for ICE. If it is going to be a niche product then there is no incentive to build out the infrastructure. Chicken and egg.However, mined hydrogen might be a good fuel source for energy production. That's an interesting option.

As a reasonable rule of thumb, don't believe anything published about Tesla.What is your source for this? It doesn't make any sense at all.But your comments on H2 have been supported many places.

Elon Musk won’t make any more Tesla electrics: This will be the new fuel via Google News. But I see that since I posted a few days ago that the debunking sites like Snopes are reporting that it's false: Snopes Fact Check: No Tesla 'Model H' Hydrogen Car, which says:

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Public Reaction and Misinformation: The claim has been met with mixed reactions on social media, with some users believing the news, while others recognized it as potentially false information or a misunderstanding, possibly fueled by AI-generated joke content.

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I actually had a different reaction. I thought it was just Musk again saying something outlandish to gain attention.--Percy

That site looks pretty crappy to me. I wouldn’t be surprised if the articles are AI generated, they’re that bad.If Musk has said it I still wouldn’t believe it, but it seems he hasn’t and it makes no sense anyway.

On the way back from the airport the other night a car obnoxiously got on my tail scarily close and turned on his brights. I moved over when I could to let him by, but then he just proceeded sedately by at a speed only a few miles an hour faster than me and didn't tailgate or turn his brights on anyone else.It took me a couple minutes to realize I'd just been Tesla'd, a victim of someone expressing their rage at Elon Musk. I'm thinking of buying a bumper sticker that says "I bought this before Musk went crazy". It's true, I purchased it in 2020 when Musk was merely weird.Sidestory: We'd left the Tesla in central parking while on vacation, and I thought it would be a good idea to turn on sentry mode, something we'd never used. Evidently it draws a bit more current than I thought it might because when we got back a week later there were only 50 miles of range left - when we left it had 190. The cold weather probably contributed.But no problem. There was a supercharger station five minutes up the road (it had 12 charging spaces and was jammed at 9 PM on a Saturday night). In 15 minutes it had added a hundred miles of range and we drove home.Nonetheless it was still a bit of a scare. What if there were no supercharger stations nearby? We would have had to use one of the level 2 charges in central parking, and it would have taken several hours to charge a hundred miles.And what if there were no chargers at all? The 190 miles of range when we parked it should have been plenty to get us home. In a week, even in frigid temperatures (single digits a couple nights), it still should not have lost 75% of its charge. 10-20% would be normal, but poking about on the Internet I found that you can expect lose as much as 75% of your charge in a week with sentry mode turned on. I won't make that mistake again.I was reading the news while away and saw that people were beginning to vandalize Tesla's and Tesla charging stations. I truly wasn't sure what state the car might be in when we returned. Getting egged was something I thought was possible until I remembered the price of eggs.--Percy

A quote attributed to him was verified through Yahoo News.

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'The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy'

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Tesla fell in value again today and has all but erased its gains since the presidential elections. I'm not empathetic about it.

I just stuck this on the back of my Y:"I bought this before we knew Elon was crazy"I feel better now