There’s always more to the story.
https://twitter.com/petteri_bergius/status/14384521225263104...
Look, cars are complicated. Manufacturers write repair manuals and stock parts based on expected failures. Not every conceivable failure is going to be in those manuals. In this case there was a valve that was part of "The Battery Pack" as far as the manual was concerned, but that had a localized failure more that could have been repaired with a targetted replacement of a single part.
And it wasn't in the manual. And yeah, that's sort of an engineering failure. They should have anticipated this low-hanging-fruit kind of repair (just as they do for other very common stuff like brake calipers or shocks or whatnot). And they didn't. Shame on them.
But that's not a systemic failure. They just didn't write it up.
What are you really asking for here? That Tesla empower its local service centers to do their own engineering work on a 400V electrical system and decide for themselves how to disassemble and reassemble the battery pack in a safe way just to save a handful[1] of battery replacements? Does that sound like a good idea? Seems like we'd be right back here with entirely different (and IMHO more justified) anti-Tesla safety flame wars.
[1] So far as anyone can tell, this is in fact the only such valve that has failed on a wild Tesla. It's not like these things are dropping everywhere.
Yes. This is what certifications are for.
> and decide for themselves how to disassemble and reassemble the battery pack in a safe way just to save a handful[1] of battery replacements?
No. See above.
The Tesla fleet is aging every day. This type of repair is going to become much more common and the lack of recourse is going to start to decimate the used car value. If Telsa's long game is to sell trips and not cars it might not be a terrible plan.
No... no, it's not. Manufacturer certifications are designed to provide liability protection for repairs done by people given training on how to make specific repairs to specific systems. What you're asking for here is for someone to independently determine that this valve can be replaced in isolation from the battery it's attached to. That's not the same problem at all, and good luck getting an insurer to cover that kind of nonsense under a "certification" contract.
> This type of repair is going to become much more common and the lack of recourse
Again, that's just simply wrong. Small part repairs are routine and common in the Tesla world just as they are everywhere else. The overwhelming majority of repairs don't involve replacing the battery pack! This controversy was about a very specific small part that happens not to have an individual part number nor disassembly spec.
And maybe it should! But your generalization is just silly. Tesla doesn't treat repairs any differently from any other manufacturer, period. You got sold a line that matched your priors.
Anything that deals with the high-voltage (HV) systems need to be certified for obvious safety and liability reasons.
Tesla Parts Catalog https://epc.tesla.com/en
Service and Diagnostic website https://service.tesla.com/
You can access "Service and Repair Information" and even "Diagnostic Software" and pay by the hour, day, month or year...
Some manufacturers won't even provide some of these to individuals and only makes them available to dealerships.
My friend and I just performed maintenance on our Model 3s. We changed the A/C filter and cleaned the condenser and serviced the brakes. I just ordered the parts from the Tesla app and did everything in my garage.
Here is an example of an owner ordering a 2021 center console from Tesla so he can upgrade his older model year car.
I’ve done many other retrofit upgrades and repairs to my Teslas.
The engine compartments are smaller, and the engines have more parts which means it takes longer. However if you can hook up and read the OBD2 system codes you get a lot of diagnostic info that was never previously available. This can mean you send a lot less time redoing work. The real limiting factor is space. If you're not averse to Quora, there's a nice discussion here https://www.quora.com/Why-are-modern-vehicles-so-difficult-t....
By the mid 90s things settled down and were much simplified, thanks to the computers and electrification of most actuators. You just treat the engine control module as a black box, with a small handful of easily tested sensors.
I'd take any 90s car over most post-smog ~pre-obd era vehicles, your father's complaint strikes me as more an irrational fear of computers. There's a definite sweet spot in the 90s where computerized cars still have throttle cables but extremely simple and minimalist computerized engine control systems vs. years prior.
Yes, cars got a lot more complicated. Yes, there are a few parts on them that the shadetree mechanic has no chance of fixing on their own, such as an automatic transmission or the car's security system. (Those parts, you either replace the whole modular unit, or pay a specialist/dealership to repair.)
But for the most part, they are still _systems_ and they are still _understandable_ and repairable. The key is that you have to have the willingness to learn how these newfangled systems work. To make it a computer analogy, it's like an old COBOL programmer complaining that you can't fix modern computer programmers because everything is Javascript now.
It's my observation that over the decades, the mechanical components of cars (the engine and transmission) have gotten extremely reliable while the electrical and computer systems are where most problems occur. That means you have to understand the basics of electronics and electricity in order to troubleshoot these kinds of issues. I know a few motorcycle guys who can rebuild a whole engine for fun on a lazy Sunday afternoon, but the moment there's a slight electrical problem with the bike, they throw their hands up and trailer it into a shop.
On the diagnostic front, the good news is that auto makers have standardized on a lot of things that actually make it _easier_ for independent shops and home-gamers to work on modern cars. For instance, all cars have an ODBII port and CAN bus through which you can (at a minimum) read diagnostic codes and read live data through with a dirt-cheap reader. More advanced scan tools can graph live data from every sensor on the car, communicate with the car's various modules, perform diagnostics, and other fun things. These cost more of course (hundreds of dollars) but can still cost under one trip to the repair shop depending on the issue if you're willing to put in the effort and time.
Other companies apply this as well, it's an economics of scale thing. It's not worthwhile (ie: profitable) for them to have every technician in every service location educated to a high enough level to do low level troubleshooting on every model and every part, it's much cheaper to hire people that can swap out modules and ship those back to a central facility. There you have people that do nothing all day then troubleshoot all parts they have been specifically trained for, repair them and sell them as refurbished. A lot would probably still end up on the landfill. And whether the customer sees any discount in repairs due to this "optimisation" is debatable. But right now you hardly have a choice, I hope that will be changing.
There was that lemon law lawyer as well trying to go after tesla - also a scam.
I think one difference - Tesla doesn't seem to rollover for these scams as much as others do. Ie, they went after that lawyer, who'd pulled the same stunt on LOTS of other car companies. And won.
And the whole Rich Rebuilds stuff - I used to follow him, but it just devolved into a Tesla gripe fest. Ironically, while folks like Rich says Tesla is not opening stuff up enough they are going to have regulators breathing down their neck for every fire they have (most are things like household not car electrical wiring when clueless homeowner runs a high resistance socket onto their house wiring).
With 500K vehicles, the last thing they need to be focusing on is making these type of clickbait folks happy (Rich Rebuilds etc).
In terms of making frankenstein battery packs the way Rich says they should be made.
1) The BMS for these things has pretty tight tolerance.
2) The swap certain cells out is a disaster waiting to happen.
"No, the "remove a cell" thing is not a "fix" either. The result is the same, it just takes longer. Removing a cell is literally creating an SoC imbalance on purpose and it's idiotic that people who don't understand the Tesla BMS push this."
https://twitter.com/wk057/status/1437607772959428608
"I can't believe this is being touted as a fix. You can't replace individual modules in an S/X pack. There's no way to match them well enough for a long term fix. Might last a few months, but will invariably die again. Have tried it a half-dozen times. Best run was about a year. "
So we have folks pushing straight scam repairs here on HN as a way to tarnish Tesla.
EDIT: i'm being downvoted but these manufacturers build machines capable of extreme performance, and have interest in maintaining their reputation. If you think i'm exaggerating, there are repairs where you are required to ship your car to the McLaren or Ferrari factory. The Ferrari FXX is not allowed to leave the track ever.
Daily Driver ferraris and mclarens are also laughably expensive to maintain as /the norm/ Unlike this defective battery which is /an exception/
also the "going to landfills" bit is really FUD. Tesla repairs your vehicle by installing a new battery, and tesla recycles the old battery themselves. The loop is as small as possible and there is no landfill in it.
Ferrari and McLaren cars are a very exclusive club. Ferrari, to my understanding, explicitly limits production capacity to maintain that exclusivity. The practices of these two companies are in no way comparable to the practices of a large-volume automaker.
After almost a complete decade I'm down to 78-84% of the original battery capacity. Before buying a tesla, i investigated the cost of replacing the battery out of warranty though Nissan. The cost estimate i got on the phone was over $14k.
That's for a battery about 1/3 the capacity of a tesla battery.
Tesla has a reputation for their batteries catching fire less than their competitors... not letting people hack up their batteries has a large part of that. Allowing 0.5% or however many people ruin their battery risk their own safety for cash would impact the perception of tesla battery safety far more than 0.5% so it is obviously a smart move to preserve their reputation, in a manner consistent with mclaren insisting on applying their own special glue in Woking to preserve the reputation of mclaren roofs not coming off.
Yes, the pollution from cars is terrible. I lived by a major freeway for three years. No, the solution is not to give up all their benefits. For one thing, SF could actually enforce air quality standards inside apartment buildings, especially those near the freeways. Also future storm drain systems could be designed to settle out microplastics (many storm systems do have settling/collection ponds anyway).
The choice is to legalize other forms of mobility beyond a car.
People in the US are so car-addled that when I suggest something like this, they can't even imagine a life where they can buy groceries without using a car. It's quite shocking!
Apologies for reading too much into your comment, then. Many in SF seemed to espouse just such a dichotomy.
People in the US are so car-addled that when I suggest something like this, they can't even imagine a life where they can buy groceries without using a car. It's quite shocking!
I lived in downtown SF, walked to the grocery store, etc. I do miss being able to take BART and not having to have a DD, but otherwise I prefer the unscheduled nature of car life for all the quotidian practical needs. Even in SF, transit wouldn't get me to the beach or to hiking, etc. unless maybe I wanted to wait for an hour and have to walk way too far at both ends.
See what he means. There is no reason transport needs to force a schedule life on you. Good transit is frequent enough that when you decide to go you just walk out the front door to the station and wait for the ride to show up - it will be soon enough.
But you have never seen that so it hasn't occurred to you that it is possible.
I don't believe it is possible, no. Even in places with frequent trains during the day, they typically stop at night. Say I need to take someone to a doctor and fill a prescription at 3AM. The usual pharmacy and urgent care are closed. Is there a city on earth that has trains to exactly where I need to go, every five minutes, at 3AM? Will the train get me there as fast as, or faster than, a car?
IMO transit is incredibly useful for situations where everyone is doing the same things at the same times. But it forces you onto a schedule and a destination, with little flexibility.
Privacy, for one thing -- I don't think I'd ever want an unknown third party in the vehicle with me when I'm taking someone or myself to or from an unscheduled medical visit.
The reasons I own and drive a car would be impossible to meet by anything except self-driving personal transit pods that can link up with other pods to form dynamic trains. That's the sci-fi future I'd like to live in, where I have a private pod, but if I want I can connect to a train for a long distance ride, use the dining car, meet other people along the way, etc. Kind of like how ferries work now, except you could stay in your car if you want, and faster.
I suspect it would push the cost of driving out of the reach of your average person though.
You often see this (in the UK) where people living in London assume that everyone else has 24 hour bus services.
There are problems sharing the road with vehicles that can't keep up with the flow of traffic. Apart from those, what isn't legal?
BUT it doesn't look like there will be much in the way of hitting emitters. In fact it looks like we'll be giving the incumbents money to 'green' which I don't trust at all.
Albeit with some penalties attached for accountability which is kind of a potential tax.
I find the utility industry weird in that it's so regulated yet they are allowed to make profits sanctioned by govt agencies. Just nationalize it or regionalize it.
Someone once retorted to me, "well won't some businesses go bust?" - to which I do not reply glibly since job losses are overreported but still important, but simply "That is the whole point".
No you want an emissions trading scheme instead of a carbon tax. Only this way the government can actually enforce strict upper limits on CO2 emissions („cap“) and allow economic subjects to sell their emission rights for profit („trade“). Compared to a carbon tax „cap and trade“ makes the regulation of carbon emissions more efficient both for all market participants and the government.
With ZEV credits, the polluters, for now, keep on polluting, but they have to subsidize the development of clean automotive tech, and fund their own competition. This is definitely a good thing, and give them a big incentive to stop polluting (as much) so they can stop paying for those ZEVs.
More like they subsidize bitcoin-created pollution.
You can trade them! Like a stock market!
If /wallstreetbets started buying all these up (not sure of the supply right now), they could fleece dirty industries.
Now, if the WallStreetBets folks want to go into clean mobility, I'll pop the popcorn and watch that show for a few days.
Would you mind pointing me in the way? Even if there is a cap, as long as the current price is below it, there's a market.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkobayashisolomon/2020/03/13...
So, if these carbon credits exist, is it possible to coinify them and boost their value? Because it would seem the more valuable they are, the more financial incentive there would be to reduce carbon emissions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2IKCdnzl5k
The verdict appears to be that the answer to this question is a bit more complicated then a blanket "Its better to buy a new car for the environment" but its highly dependent on gas milage and time of ownership, as well as new gas car vs new hybrid car vs new electric car. He does take into account carbon needed to build the cars too. It seems that in most cases a new EV will be better for the environment then your 10 year old honda in roughly 4 years. Skip to 6 minutes in the video for when he starts showing compiled data of when its better to buy a new car vs keep old.
Next, moving on to the pollution and externalises (besides emissions) required to produce a tesla - he correctly points out that acquiring several of the metals involves human trafficking, pollution, release of toxic chemicals, etc (he gives no useful numbers). He then moves on to state that's not a big deal because the relative weight of these metals in one car is much smaller than the total weight of the car? What a bizarre argument.
> It seems that in most cases a new EV will be better for the environment then your 10 year old honda in roughly 4 years.
2011, manual, 10 year old civic, gets 29mpg not 25mpg, which even based on the bullshit numbers from tesla's marketing pamphlet means it's better for the environment to buy a 10 year old civic and drive it for 5 years. If we use more realistic numbers you can probably buy 90% of 5-10 year old car models to drive to 5 years and emit less CO2 than a new tesla.
Also, people buying 10 year old civics generally already have economy and frugality in mind and aren't loaded with cash, they often don't have the option of buying a tesla. Trying to economically punish them for this is just counterproductive.
Another historical example that comes to mind were some train companies lobbying to end segregation because they didn't want to run separate cars/routes for different groups.
Another thing that isn't really an example of this are the bodegas in DC (often run by immigrants) selling both trump and hillary hats (or whatever current political battle is going on) to the public - arguably that could incentivize divisiveness, but for some reason seeing those stands meeting demand without caring about tribalism makes me smile.
Tesla is kind of an outlier here though, in that Musk's motives were in the public interest more than the private interest at the start (accelerating adoption of alternative fuels) - so in this case the private interest is in service to the public one and not incidental.
[Edit]: I know it's poor form to complain about downvotes, but what I assume must be politically motivated downvotes on this are lame.
We need effective coordination (regulation) to get outcomes that are best for both individuals and the group, but that doesn't make it easy. Risks of regulatory capture, bad regulations, and such are still there and a problem.
Policy and good incentives are hard to get right. That's why I'm happy to see them when they happen. At least in the common case capitalism allows for markets to get this right a lot of the time through company success and failure. Even with negatives there's still massive wealth creation that has risen all boats on net.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
"Will the financial interests of this business align with or oppose the public's?"
I don't see how Tesla is "pro-society". Tesla batteries are very costly to the environment. For every x amount of batteries they need to blow up y amounts of mountain tops. We don't have infinite amount of those.
The same could be said for solar as well. AFAIK panels are a net negative until their efficiency outweighs the cost of making them.
It's all a means to a noble end. Rather this than continuing to burn and release carbon?
Yes but we're talking about Tesla now, not solar.
>> iterations on battery tech
So at one point in time, Tesla _will_ be "good for society"? They are not there yet. But they pinky-swear that they _will_ be?
Now, how does that make Tesla "good for society"?
I'm not saying they aren't. I'm simply asking, how is mining rare earth minerals (by blowing up one mountain top after the other) to produce solar panels or batteries "good for society"?
Any conversation we have in this realm is relative and we're basing that relative qualification against fossil fuels.
According to what model?
For the sake of what's best for humanity, according to what model is what Tesla is doing "better"?
Do you know what will happen once we run out of rare earth minerals? Will we launch a space ship and mine Mars? Do you know that Mars contains those minerals that we need in order for Tesla to truly pursue their goal?
Is there science behind this belief, or simply a yearning for your stock to become the next GameStop?
Pretty sure buying an average used ICE car will net MUCH less emissions than what's required for building and using a brand new tesla.
I wonder if Tesla would be as into the government imposing penalties for exaggerating the range of their vehicles. Tesla seems to under-perform their range estimates pretty consistently across models while every other vehicle exceeds the estimate except for the Polestar. Sometimes Tesla is only under-performing the estimate by a small amount, but they're claiming 15.7% more range for their "Model 3 Long Range" than a "Mustang Mach-E CA Route 1" while only achieving 1 mile more in tested range.
Tesla has often also pushed its own estimates over EPA cycle estimates claiming that their estimates (which are more generous to their cars) are better. Should a car company be able to make public claims about range based on their own models?
As you noted, this is simply Tesla having a financial incentive. If competing manufacturers need to pay large penalties for prior years, it gives them less money to compete against Tesla.
In some ways, this doesn't provide a pro-society incentive. Penalizing past bad acts doesn't alter a car company's incentives for the future beyond proving that you're serious about enforcing rules. A better incentive could be to announce that you will penalize companies for past failures, but allow them to get that penalty rebated back to them if they exceed requirements going forward. In the first case, you're penalizing them and getting a small amount of money while taking from the companies resources that they could use to invest in electric vehicles (or lobby against fuel economy standards). In the second case, you're proving that you're serious by imposing the penalty, but also providing a very strong incentive to exceed targets going forward.
I think that many automakers like Hyundai/Kia, Ford, BMW, Mercedes, GM, VW, and Renault/Nissan are looking to make major investments in electric vehicles. I would rather incentivize them about the future (and punish them about the past if they don't reform). Maybe set a standard like getting 50% of the penalty back if X% of their cars sold in 2025 are electric with an MPGe of 100+ and getting back the other half of the penalty if Y% of their cars sold in 2028 are electric (with MPGe over 100). That would give them a concrete incentive to create efficient and popular models.
It would also likely be palatable to them. GM has announced ambitious plans for its conversion to electric. If they're able to convert the majority of their car sales to electric in a short period of time, it seems less important to apply a retroactive penalty. If their plans are a green-washing campaign to keep getting sales for their ICE vehicles, they can say so-long to that cash. In the meantime, they can take out a loan to cover what they need for R&D if they're confident they'll meet their targets.
Would be nice to see more companies lobbying against pollution and other negative externalities.