http://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/409903O/respiratory-prote...

Potential bio weapons such as smallpox, anthrax, influenza and the hemorrhagic viruses are far smaller than 2.5 microns.

Also, there are probably issues with the sensitivity of the detection equipment. If you look at the table on page 8 of

https://www.ll.mit.edu/publications/journal/pdf/vol12_no1/12...

And at the table at

http://www.siumed.edu/medicine/id/current_issues/bioTable2.p...

You will see that some of the biological agents can cause infection with as few as 10 particles. I doubt that the Tesla equipment could detect a concentration of 10 particles of these sizes.

This article is basically the biological equivalent of the I can't break my own crypto article.

>Bioweapon Defense Mode is not a marketing statement, it is real.

is false. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the evidence of Bioweapons Defense Mode working is entirely lacking.

At any rate, I suspect that if you're the kind of paranoid elite that worries about escaping a bioweapon attack in your Tesla, you'll have your own converted nuclear silo to use as a safe-house. Presumably with suitable decontamination showers (for vehicles and people) at the entry points.

Man I hate that guy.

If you breathed spores you're already infected. Your car can't help. And the spores on the outside get spread, plus the ones in your filter kill your automechanic and that starts the second wave.

You shouldn't be getting your information about the world from movies — that can get you killed — and you especially shouldn't be criticizing people who know more than you on the basis of movie plots.

My movie analogy doesn't change the fact that you're inciting other people to break quarantine based upon a laughably incorrect assertion that somehow an air filter makes you and your vehicle safe for other people. Talk about a criminally dangerous sense of entitlement.

Their filter does a good job cleaning particles out of the cabin air. Good on them.

Nevertheless, calling it "Bioweapon Defense Mode" is clearly a prize bit of marketing. A system designed to protect against an external bioagent wouldn't run huge amounts of outside air through the filter. That would just load the filter more quickly, impacting its performance (for chemical agents) and/or its energy requirement (for particles). Instead, you would cut the outside air intake as much as you could get away with, in order to buy the occupants time to drive clear of the plume.

Since they claim that the car is responsible for the decrease in the particle concentration in the test chamber, they must be running a pretty high flow of ambient air through the system. Of course, the ambient concentration would decrease even without the car's filter, due to particle deposition, and possibly due to losses in the sampling instrument. But then you only report those other loss rates if you're interested in science, rather than in marketing.

http://elbitsystems.com/Elbitmain/files/Kinetics_NBC-CBRN.pd...

[Edit - adding this] I can also say, that this creates a very uncomfortable sensation in your ears while the cabin is being over-pressurized (about 2 minutes)

It appears the tank commander needs to guide the driver on directions, though...

I guess that's German engineering for less-than-perfect road and maintenance conditions. I like the redundancy too!

It needs to filter the air from outside and get it into the car to quickly displace the air already inside the vehicle that is contaminated.

At the point where the air is clean though it would be a good idea to make the car it's own little safe haven and allow the occupants to drive to safety (hell it could even drive itself to safety if it can sense when the air is safe again outside)

In exactly the same way that recirculating air from inside the vehicle is easier on your air-conditioner, recirculating interior air is easier on the filter.

With the A/C, you want some minimum outside air to get rid of CO2 and whatever other effluents the passengers and materials in the car are generating. But if you were driving through a plume of toxic gas/particles, you wouldn't mind smelling your armpits and a little extra CO2 if it meant extra protection from whatever is out there.

Hence I believe that if you were really designing a Bioweapon Defense Mode, you would cut the intake of outside air to an absolute minimum. You might not go for zero flow, because you might want to pressurize the cabin a bit (in the U.S., most building mechanical systems are set up this way). But I wouldn't expect to cycle through enough outside air that you could halve the concentration in that bubble (which is probably 10-20 car volumes or more) in less than 15 minutes, as their graph shows.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/world/asia/air-pollution-l...

A gun is created to kill. A taser to incapacitate. A knife is created to cut/stab things - and since human flesh is highly cuttable substance even kitchen knives are considered weapons. A car is created to transport people but can be used to kill. Cars are not weapons because in their conception there is no intent to harm someone.

its not like its new technology. It doesn't say how long the filter lasts, and crucially the failure mode for the filter. (will it bypass when its full? do you get a warning? etc etc etc )

If you're in the vicinity of bioweapon aerosol, the particles will possibly still be present in air once you get out or will have coated your car. Also, for some of these organisms, you only need to inhale < 10 cells for it to cause disease [1], so the filter needs to be (literally?) 100%.

So, unless Tesla plans on packing powered air purifying respirators [2] in their cars, this is a gimmick.

[1] http://www.asm.org/ccLibraryFiles/FILENAME/0000000660/nw1103... [2] http://www.legionsafety.com/msa-optimair-tl-papr-kit-for-hoo...

This system stops particles as small as ones that could be used in bio weapons. It's a theoretic comparison, not a warfare ad.

Did you even read the article? It literally says this:

"Bioweapon Defense Mode is not a marketing statement, it is real. You can literally survive a military grade bio attack by sitting in your car."

http://blog.caranddriver.com/now-you-can-spec-your-audi-a8-t...

Or cases that can literally survive a bowling ball:

http://www.yourtechreport.com/2011/04/16/protect-your-ipad-f...

You're not expected to test either one of those claims. They're just there for comparison of what the product is theoretically capable of. (or going the other way, one could complain that anything below 200mph is not ludicrous)

It has a built in "patented emergency exit system, a fire extinguishing system and an emergency fresh air system" [0] and the windows on the standard model can't even be opened/closed. And get this, that emergency exit system will blow the freaking doors off the car so you can exit.

"If the doors can no longer be opened normally, an Audi-patented pyrotechnic system simply blows apart the joins between the doors and the vehicle body and you walk out without even grabbing the door latch." [1]

This Tesla is being pushed as helping people deal with air pollution, but "it can withstand a bioweapon attack! For real!". That Audi is literally for people who might drive over an IED, or get pulled over by a jeep full of people with machine guns.

[0] https://www.audi-mediacenter.com/en/press-releases/audi-a8-l...

[1] http://www.autoblog.com/2007/03/05/a-685k-audi-a8-that-will-...

> Oh, and for even more money on top of all that, special battery and tank protection can be fitted.

So that is a statement that cannot be put to the test.

Incorrect. Racing your high-performance but street legal cars on tracks is a popular pastime among those who can afford it.

If a bomb goes off, no one would even care whether that one stupid bollard survived it. The major failure mode of a bollard will be due to buckling, shearing force at ground level, or cracking the foundation cylinder, as the force from impact is transmitted down the lever of the bollard into unyielding earth. And even if the bollard itself is destroyed, it is still partially successful if it can slow down or stop the truck. Does hiding behind a bollard protect you from a bomb? No. Bombs and bollards just don't ever meet in real life.

Bioweapon defense mode is something I would expect in a top-shelf building HVAC controller for hospitals or AAA office space. The bioweapon defense mode that already exists in my own car is "drive as fast as is prudent, away from the attack site, without stopping to refuel/recharge". The bioweapon defense mode for my own home is putting duct tape on the edges of the windows and doors. Anything more would be overkill--a waste of money, over something that will likely never happen.

What is the actual use case here? Pollen. If you're allergic to tree pollen, you will sneeze less on your way to work while driving the Tesla in the spring. Is that statement not exciting enough to sell those cars?

Unless you're being attacked with smog, this seems rather hyperbolic.

I can't imagine that two minutes breathing, say, aerosolized tweaked Spanish influenza, would be 'safe'. Maybe if you were in the car with the system running before the attack, though?

(And I'm as big a Tesla fan as there is, but that's an objective fact from a QA perspective.)

But then again, testing against smog is something a group of engineers can do on their own. Testing against lethal and highly contagious airborn pathogens is hardly something you can just up and do in your ordinary automotive lab. Doubt they're prepared to handle that. Even getting your hands on the pathogens in the first place is difficult, let alone handling them in a safe manner for testing.

But if they're going to advertise this, that's what they need to do.

"Well, there's clearly no real way to get anything dangerous through here without the metal detectors picking it up, so no need to test our systems with any realistic threats."

* Aerosols are really the only effective way to deliver biological weapons. This holds even with person-to-person transmission; "airborne" transmission almost always means "infected person coughs, spreading aerosolized fluids that contain infectious bodies".

* Aerosol droplets smaller than .5 um don't land on parts of the lungs that can absorb them and are re-exhaled relatively harmlessly. Aerosol droplets smaller than .5 um also lose stability (evaporate, chemical changes, solar irradiation) too quickly to be useful.

"Realistic Threats" are, in this case, particles between .5 um and 5 um. There is zero difference between a droplet with and without an infectious payload. If you really wanted to you could do this test with some completely harmless organism like a household micrococcus strain, but it wouldn't demonstrate anything new. If there are no particles of that size coming through the filter, you are safe, in the same way that the plane would be safe if it took off with no people in it.

For the actual question: you probably leave the filter in place until it's clogged, at which point you replace it as normal except you're wearing a hazard suit. Those filters basically don't let anything go. However, note that the filter will be exactly as contaminated as anything else on the outside of the car is; a persistent weapon will have covered every surface in the attacked area with hazardous numbers of spores or similar, not just the filters. If it's not a persistent weapon - that is, it's designed to kill or incap everybody and then dissipate so your soldiers can walk in two days later and take over - then you just wait those two days.

And, possibly, illegal. I mean, it seems to me that asserting that the car provides a "bioweapons defense mode" (and, a fortiori, the marketing claim that "You can literally survive a military grade bio attack by sitting in your car") is clearly promoting the car with a claim that is a "machine...intended for use in the...prevention of disease, in man", and, as such, a medical device subject to premarket and postmarket regulatory control by the FDA: http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/DeviceRegulationandGuidanc...

(2 minutes isn't that long to hold your breath for)

Electrical Grid attack = Telsa doesn't charge

Likeliness deaths from either < Deaths from negligence of bureaucracy, lack of personal responsibility

/me chamber-checks Kalashnikov, takes drag of hand-rolled cigarette, checks internet conspiracy messageboard, and mentally catalogues MRE supply.

1. get people worried about something they previously didn't care about;

2. as a solution, add a new part to the car that will need frequent replacement and maintenance, thereby increasing the CLV.

And your comment reminds me of the discussions about DPF(diesel particulate filters) - they are installed in diesel cars to reduce the soot emissions, but of course, instead of being happy, people complain that there is yet another part that can break down and which will need replacing("why can't cars be as simple as they were 10/20/30/40 years ago" - pick your own decade depending on the age of the person talking).

The one hour you spend in your car daily probably isn't going to mitigate what you're breathing in every day outside the car, if that's something you care about.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/15/nearly-95...

> Nearly 9,500 people die early each year in London due to long-term exposure to air pollution, more than twice as many as previously thought, according to new research.

> The premature deaths are due to two key pollutants, fine particulates known as PM2.5s and the toxic gas nitrogen dioxide (NO2), according to a study carried out by researchers at King’s College London.

> The study – which was commissioned by the Greater London Authority and Transport for London – is believed to be the first by any city in the world to attempt to quantify how many people are being harmed by NO2. The gas is largely created by diesel cars, lorries and buses, and affects lung capacity and growth.

There is a strange expectation that you can't have a good laugh about your products if they are not otherwise perfect. I'm not a sociologist, but something tell me that when the discussion shifts on non-essential elements like the HEPA filter, people assume the rest of the car just works.

I'm asthmatic and I've been told people in a car are more exposed to polluants than cyclists. Should I consider a Tesla ;)?

in all seriousness, just buy any car and install the optional hepa filter. no American car install them by default, saving them some $0.50 in production costs. but you can then buy the filters for $10 and install yourself in under two hours. you can even add the active carbon polymer sheet to prevent outside smell.

If that's good or not depends on if the "something" is a real problem, right? So in this case .... https://www.google.com/search?q=human+cost+of+air+pollution

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hn-CTSKmeo

Thankyou Tesla for delivering a car that the 1989 version of me would have been pretty keen on acquiring!

The average person in China right now need this. Let's hope that the USA doesn't get to the point where this level of pollution is in the air because people who are well-off and control industry all have these cars to drive and be driven around in that filter the air so heavily for them, so it doesn't matter to them.

Do you really think that "rich people" will disregard air pollution because their car provides filtered, clean air?

(With the notable exception of Hollywood celebrities desperately searching for a purpose in life)

Schools are particularly nasty because bad public schools make private schools more effective at giving an advantage in life.

Looking at the graph, there is something wrong. According to the graph (measurement) there is a reduction of the pollution from about 1.000 µg/m3 (minute -3) to 800 µg/m3 (minute 0) before the doors have been closed and before the system has been activated. That is a 20% reduction by nothing has changed.

With some other manufacturers, especially legacy models, you'll usually have little to no intake filtering, and probably minimal cabin filtering. Combined with moisture retention inside the heater core due to design flaws such as insufficient fin spacing or an absent/inactive afterblow module, it can be very bad. For example: toxigenic fungii thriving on the excess moisture, contaminating the passenger compartment every time the blower fan is turned on.

Aaah. Now I getcha.

I'm very sceptical that this is the case outside of an enclosed bubble.

No, EVs aren't perfect and may not be for years to come, but they offer flexibility to make up for that. Sitting and waiting for the perfect replacement for ICEs is fruitless; alternatives must first be embraced if they're to ever develop sufficiently.

I don't see how this is an argument against electrical vehicles. In fact electric vehicles should increase the incentive to reduce the carbon emissions of electricity production since now at least improvements there will have a material effect on the carbon efficiency of transportation.

(Norway built out most of its energy grid before the oil industry got started, by the way -- but we do maintain out grid partly using tax money from the oil sector, just like all parts of our public sector).

Would countries use less energy if not for Norway's oil exports?

Coal is certainly polluting, but "where the renewables are manufactured" doesn't make any sense — where are sunlight, rainfall, and wind "manufactured"?

Gallium is not a mineral at all or a rare-earth element, most solar panels don't contain either gallium or rare-earth elements.

Rare-earth elements are almost entirely mined in China, except for a recently reopened mine in the US, which are not usually considered "conflict zones".

Gallium is nearly half recycled, but as for mining, it's mostly mined in China, Germany, Kazakhstan, and the Ukraine, of which only Ukraine is a "conflict zone" — although Nazarbayev is guilty of many human-rights abuses, there is no real insurgency there. Germany has some of the most stringent "environment regulation" in the world. Gallium primary production is actually mostly a product of aluminum production.

Earth is not a closed system: we're mostly concerned about energy here, and Earth constantly receives energy from the Sun at a rate of ten thousand times world marketed energy consumption, almost all of which is either reflected or reradiated into space as heat.

As far as I can tell, you just put a bunch of words into your comment with no concern whatsoever as to what they meant or whether any of them were true. Maybe you meant to satirize ignorant pseudo-environmentalism, but environmental damage is a real problem that needs careful discussion. Posting paragraphs of lies, as you did here, is a bad thing to do, because it effectively reduces the intelligence of the people who read your comments — it confuses them to the point that they are less able to make effective decisions.

Please don't post things like this any more.

The LCA literature shows the main contributor to GHG emissions of EVs is the use, and the most important factors in estimating those emissions are the electricity mix, vehicle lifetime, and driver behavior. Battery manufacturing and battery end of life are still being developed and researched, and manufacturing batteries is a large contributor to the manufacturing emissions of EVs.[1]

[1] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40518-015-0033-x

It sounds cheesy but it true.

"You are what you breathe..."

...is my marketing statement for Tesla.

I don't really have any lung issues (that I know of) - but if I forget to bring a mask, and walk for any distance, I start coughing and gagging after a while to clear my lungs.

It gets so bad, that at times people are not only told to stay indoors (where they hopefully have filtered air), but are in extreme cases, evacuated.

Can you imagine how wonderful having this mode of air-cleaning would be during those months if you had asthma (or young children?)

http://www.factcheck.org/2011/09/ford-motor-co-does-u-turn-o...

Sold equity for it.

It's a great function for the home, and I think most drivers would be well served - and in the case of drivers with Asthma, or other ailments impacted by particulate pollution) critically served.

I guess you mean the cost to the environment to manufacture large HEPA filters and the government subsidies to Tesla.

In my mind the environmental cost of adding the feature is trivial compared to adding a gimmick to get rich people who like gadgets to purchase electric cars so that we can:

1. Use the high-end of the market to fuel the production of cheaper electric cars on the medium-low end

2. Ween ourselves off of fossil fuels

Definitely not a waste of money if it means that they can offload inventory...

If Chinese people want clean air let Chinese government fund it.

Okay, I'll bite - where's your evidence?

The fallacy is in believing the forums you participate in are, for some reason, not "second-tier".

A lot of this money seems to be wasted to adding swag to this car that gets Musk some positive PR if nothing else. It is stupid to point out that this might help China or some other polluted country, why should Americans pay for it ?

Very likely China will ban Tesla and some Chinese company would make similar cars only if Musk could ever make this does-not-run-200miles car.

Yes, China is "into" electric personal transportation.

http://qz.com/137518/consumers-the-world-over-love-electric-...

Yes, China has 200 million electric bicycles. At that adoption rate, I would have expected 50 million electric vehicles on the road in the US.

But, the USA appears to be in love with the car. China has 128 cars/1000, USA has 809 cars/1000.

For a great many people, the electric bike would be a great transportation option -- cheap and clean. However, there is no way to compete with China in manufacturing these.

The only hope the USA has is Tesla.

For this reason, I would expect subsidies! USA manufacturing, possible exports, and a cleaner environment.

I personally use an electric bike, for which I received no government rebate... but, I don't have to pay for gasoline, or insurance, so I come out ahead anyway.

Can I pay less for a Tesla which _lacks_ this level of filtration?