Tesla Thread

[StrandedonEarth]

10 hours ago, tater said:

If the gov could enforce speed 100% of the time, easily (easier than current enforcement with no risk to police with stops)

Oh, but they can. Red light cameras are increasingly common in Greater Vancouver, due to the stupid number of accidents caused by red-light-runners. Recently another feature of the cameras has been activated at some locations: full-time speed cameras, active even when the light is green. Photo-tickets are mailed out. Some people complain that the actual driver isn't being ticketed, but IMO the vehicle's owner is responsible for who drives it.

So the tech is there, but the political will is not. AFAIK urban speed limits haven't changed in decades, while vehicle tech (not just the electronics) has evolved considerably. I see no reason why speed/red-light cameras cannot be installed at every traffic light, as long as traffic laws and speed limits are also revamped, and drivers have a clear understanding of what speed will trigger the cameras (atm they don't).  Highways would simply need speedcams at strategic, accident prone locations, again with realistic speed limits. Mass production of cams would keep costs down, and they'd pay for themselves with reduced accident frequency.

Driving in Alberta decades ago, I was told that sure, the police tolerate speeds 10-20kph above the speed limit on a certain highway. The province wouldn't raise the limit, because it's understood that people habitually speed over the posted limit, and the road wasn't safe at the speeds drivers would go if the limit was raised to the current normal speed of traffic. I imagine this logic is prevalent in many places.

I find it frustrating  trying to turn practically anywhere I go, since the speed of oncoming traffic can vary by as much as 50%. Naturally I err on the side of caution, and find myself missing many turning opportunities when traffic is moving slower than expected (only going the speed limit?!? What a rare concept!)

Which brings me back on topic, sort of: tests with self-driving cars have shown that they tend to hold up traffic while waiting for a perfect turning opportunity, assuming oncoming traffic maintains their current speed. V2X communications would be a huge assist with this, as vehicles could directly signal other vehicles to adjust their speed slightly to allow a turn, which would allow traffic to flow more smoothly. Which is why Tesla needs to adopt V2X ASAP.

And then traffic could flow like in India:

Spoiler

(I'm sure I once saw a video of the same sort of action but faster, but in hindsight that clip may have been sped up slightly to make it seem crazier)

Mods: my apologies for doing this to the thread (again)

Spoiler

 

Edited February 28, 2020 by StrandedonEarth

[magnemoe]

12 hours ago, tater said:

I wasn't saying I want that sort of tracking, I'm saying that such tracking would now be trivial to require, and if the government doesn't do it, they are not doing, well, due diligence on enforcing speed limits. It's sort of like (IMO) having to defend copyrights or lose them. If the gov could enforce speed 100% of the time, easily (easier than current enforcement with no risk to police with stops), and they chose not to, they are explicitly saying they don't care. Most cars speed much of the time, and they could be ticketed easily 100% of the time, but aren't. The police are training us to speed, then randomly (or not randomly) punishing a tiny fraction of speeders.

No it would not be trivial, you will need an gps receiver for one and an phone connection for updates. No you can not use car companies as they would be way less helpful than emission control and would simply make an system who is trivial to hack. 
It will not affect old cars who would increase in value making more people driving older cars with more emissions. 
And that give you an major problem, you have some weird speed limits, some rural places reduce speed to 60 km/h just because its an farm nearby, probably to show that the place is populated. One car is forced to follow this while another is not and will want to overtake the other. 
You want to reduce the numbers of overtakings on two lane roads as it require using the lane with opposing traffic. 

In will be an program who in short term would probably increase the numbers of accidents, kill the sales of new cars and the transition to electrical and be unpopular. 
Just imagine you think about buying an new Tesla  try one and find you can not break the low speed limit on industrial zoned area there car dealerships tend to be placed in, its an Saturday so most of the warehouses and factories have shut down. 
You drive it back, go back to your old diesel car and go to an  garage as you want serious rust protection but find that its an 6 month queue. 
Cars can live petty much forever is well maintained. You have B52 who grand kids of the first pilots are flying. Had something looking like an T-Ford or more likely A-Ford passing on the road next to my office every day for some weeks. 
My guess is that some guy used it to commute while his car was repaired. 
 

[steve_v]

8 hours ago, magnemoe said:

It will not affect old cars who would increase in value making more people driving older cars with more emissions. 

 

I for one would find take considerable glee in overtaking speed-limited teslas in an old banger, and I suspect I am not alone.

 

[tater]

25 minutes ago, steve_v said:

I for one would find take considerable glee in overtaking speed-limited teslas in an old banger, and I suspect I am not alone.

Tesla would never do this, my point is that the government could enforce speed limits to nearly 100% with ease (all new cars have reporting—almost all new cars have GPS/nav anyway, I've not bought one without it for over a decade). GPS is cheap, any phone could do it, so anyone with an older car could be required to have, you know, a phone (which from watching people txt and drive, 100% have already). I don't want this, I want there to be a choice, enforce speed limits perfectly, or don't, but raise them to reasonable speeds.

I've never been passed by a VW anything (unless you count an Audi).

 

[steve_v]

14 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:

Highways would simply need speedcams at strategic, accident prone locations, again with realistic speed limits.

That's a lovely theory, but in my country at any rate, speed cameras are installed where people habitually speed rather than where it's dangerous to do so.

Die-straight low-traffic road, right at the bottom of a steep hill - there'll be a speed camera or a cop in the bushes. Blind reverse-camber corner that's prone to icing, not so much.

 

1 hour ago, tater said:

all new cars have reporting

One of the reasons I won't buy a new car.
 

1 hour ago, tater said:

anyone with an older car could be required to have, you know, a phone

And so you move the enforcement burden from speed-traps to phone checks or inspecting vehicles for tampering with the reporting system. Any of which are more work for the fuzz than radar or laser speed cameras. They won't buy it.

 

1 hour ago, tater said:

I want there to be a choice, enforce speed limits perfectly, or don't, but raise them to reasonable speeds.

Reasonable speed-limits I can agree with, vehicle handling has improved since speed limits were posted... But if you ask me, driver ability has gone the other way.
I want driver training to be improved and licence tests to be made more comprehensive, so we don't have so many idiots driving too fast for the conditions to begin with... That and young hoons barred from owning powerful cars unless they can prove their ability to operate them safely.

We assess people's driving ability with a 15-minute toodle around in city traffic, then they go out on the open road and have no idea what a sensible speed looks like, how to drive on challenging surfaces, or what the traction limits and stopping distances of their vehicle are in general.
We allow tourists with no experience of driving in local conditions to get behind the wheel with zero additional training, even when they're used to driving on the opposite side of the road... and apparently the answer is better speed-limit enforcement.

I don't know about the US, but over here we're seeing a drive to reduce speed limits, more and more enforcement of them, and a slow erosion of driver responsibility. Old roads with LSZ (100km/h when safe to do so, use your judgement) designations are rapidly disappearing.
It hasn't made the roads safer, as can be seen from it's negligible impact on accident rates. All it's really doing is gathering revenue by pinging people for doing 12km/h over the limit, and the vast majority of those in situations where it's perfectly appropriate. The overwhelming cause of motor accidents remains poor judgement and driver inattention.
Witness the sudden surge in driver indecisiveness and complete breakdown of traffic-flow when there's a cop a few cars ahead. It's not safer, it's just more annoying.

I don't see how 100% enforceable speed limits would help with this, or with safety in general - all tighter tolerance has done so far is to increase overtaking distances and thus time spent in the wrong lane, or make drivers so paranoid of tickets that they drive 20km/h below the limit and encourage risky maneuvers from those stuck behind them.

Automated speed-monitoring and ticketing will have both of those effects, as well as having people spend more time looking at their speedo than the road ahead. And it'll be impossible to enforce without mandating sealed tamper-proof black-boxes in vehicles, which a large number of drivers will loathe.

 

1 hour ago, tater said:

I've never been passed by a VW anything (unless you count an Audi).

You've not encountered one with the optional judson supercharger then

Edited February 29, 2020 by steve_v

[tater]

14 minutes ago, steve_v said:

You've not encountered one with the optional judson supercharger then

I haven't had anything slow enough to be passed by one in a while, and I drive sorta fast

Our slow car right now is an SUV that does 0-60 mph in ~6.5s. The BMW gets there in under 5. When I get my Cybertruck, lol.

I'm not actually advocating for nanny state controls, I just think that if they have the ability to enforce, and choose to do so selectively, then that's wrong, I'd rather have no speed limits anywhere as such, and if they want to slow it in school areas, etc, add speed bumps that physically constrain speeds (there are 25 mph bumps at my kids' school, and you can hit them at 25 if you know to hit ant an angle (with some clearance on the vehicle, obviously). You'd think all those SUVs would have ever taken them off road, lol. I hit them at 25, and sometimes an SUV is following me and hits with both front wheels at the same time and I can see in my mirror they had an exciting bump, lol.

 

[steve_v]

53 minutes ago, tater said:

Our slow car right now is an SUV that does 0-60 mph in ~6.5s. The BMW gets there in under 5. When I get my Cybertruck, lol.

My "slow" Sport Utility Vehicle(s) (3) in The Queen's units:

Mass: 2976lb unladen.
Approach/departure angle: 49°/32°.
Max side-slope: 45°
Ground clearance: 9 7/8"
Max power: 74bhp @ 4250RPM.
Max torque: 115lbf @ 2500RPM.
Acceleration: 0-60mph in 29s.
Top speed: 65mph.
Economy @ 60mph: 18mpg (tail wind).

60mph is plenty fast enough for me TBH, any faster and I'd need hearing protection. I'm about the journey not the destination, and I always take the back roads, the less sealed the better. Some of them don't have speed limits.

As for the cybertruck, I'll buy just as soon as I can get one that I can repair with a few bits of string and some ingenuity.

 

53 minutes ago, tater said:

You'd think all those SUVs would have ever taken them off road, lol.

I know, right? Why people buy SUVs to drive their kids to school is beyond me. Most of them never even get dirty, and many have winches that have never been used. I'm sure we'll see posers in polished cybertrucks soon enough too.
Has 4WD SUV, doesn't know how to approach an obstacle, doesn't carry shovel or tire-deflator:

 

53 minutes ago, tater said:

I hit them at 25, and sometimes an SUV is following me and hits with both front wheels at the same time and I can see in my mirror they had an exciting bump, lol.

I slow for speed bumps. Because leaf-springs, and stopping to pick up the parts that fall off is annoying. I'm not adverse to driving over curbs, traffic islands, roundabouts, or any other obstacles in my way though, I just do it slowly.
 

 

Edited February 29, 2020 by steve_v

[SuperFastJellyfish]

I hit speed bumps head on as(in my mind) the chassis handles the load better than the shearing that happens when you hit them at an angle.  I'm sure it depends on the type of suspension, but vehicles are made to go forward for a reason.   

[steve_v]

9 minutes ago, SuperFastJellyfish said:

I'm sure it depends on the type of suspension

Indeed, also hitting them at an appropriate speed for your spring-rate and damping, and how stiff (or existent) your anti-roll bars are. In general though, hitting an obstacle head-on is going to result in a larger instantaneous load on the vehicle as a whole, and a harsher bump for the occupants.

For live axles, lifting one wheel before the other means considerably reducing the acceleration of unsprung mass, and therefore lower loadings on those parts. With fully independent suspension, it's probably more complicated.

Edited February 29, 2020 by steve_v

[wumpus]

20 hours ago, steve_v said:

I for one would find take considerable glee in overtaking speed-limited teslas in an old banger, and I suspect I am not alone.

I worked with a tech that claimed to have been in a VW (bug)/Corvair race.  Somebody who knew about it made a prank call (as the cops) to one of the participants homes claiming the police were aware of it.  They were going to be charged with street racing (a serious offense) as it was almost certain that neither car exceeded the speed limit the entire "race" (it wasn't a "turbo" Corvair).  - no idea which car the tech was driving.

[tater]

Tangentially related.

[StrandedonEarth]

If you can't beat'em, join'em!

Or perhaps I should say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery...

 

[wumpus]

3 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:

If you can't beat'em, join'em!

Wasn't the Volt supposed to be on such a "versatile EV skateboard"?  It still turned out fairly well, at least until canceled.

I can't imagine GM really following the "gigafactory" strategy.  GM would need a battery plant on a scale they couldn't imagine (and would have to pioneer* how to build one).  Then they would need a crash program to expand it.

"One of the problems of being a pioneer is you always make mistakes and I never, never want to be a pioneer. It’s always best to come second when you can look at the mistakes the pioneers made."  - Seymour Cray (a guy who maintained the position of "designer of the world's most powerful computer" for multiple decades, back when that required designing a machine so fast your competitors couldn't build anything faster even with several years of technology improvements, and then doing the same thing all over again several times over).

[Listy]

29 minutes ago, wumpus said:

Wasn't the Volt supposed to be on such a "versatile EV skateboard"?  It still turned out fairly well, at least until canceled.

https://jalopnik.com/gm-debuts-new-ev-platform-it-pioneered-two-decades-ago-1842094994

Indeed, they came up with a skateboard platform dubbed 'Autonomy' about 20 years ago and then promptly shelved the idea. Realistically, battery tech was not ready for widespread use in vehicles at that point, but it feels like they (and the whole  auto industry really) have allowed Tesla way too much of an EV head start now

[tater]

 

Elon doesn't care at all about "consistent styling language."

Ie: they will make what seems to work best, don;t care about stuff looking similar (hence Cybertruck not looking like Model 3/Y).

[mikegarrison]

Musk is raving again today about the shutdown orders. He is now saying he's going to move Tesla manufacturing out of the state of California.

Seems like yet another megalomaniac CEO incensed that communities, counties, states, and countries won't bow to his will.

 

[tater]

The actual complaint:

https://wholemars.com/alameda-lawsuit.pdf

A lawyer buddy will look at it and tell me if it makes any sense.

The claim seems to be that the County closed them contrary to the State's order if I read the legalese right. Another CA county has automobile mfg progressing.

[kerbiloid]

He will build SPH next to SpaceX VAB?

[tater]

It's also a public company, seems like he should do whatever possible to increase value for the shareholders.

[mikegarrison]

3 hours ago, tater said:

It's also a public company, seems like he should do whatever possible to increase value for the shareholders.

OMG. I hope we are *not* going to have the conversation about "shareholder value". Suffice to say that it may have been the most idiotic and destructive economic philosophy in the history of capitalism.

[MinimumSky5]

I've seen comments on the Ars Technica news article, saying that his main bone of contention is that the other US OEM's are able to continue manufacturing, but that the Alameda county officials have put in place a much stricter lock down, shuttering the plant. I can get the frustration with that, but IMO, it's misguided. Get angry at the federal goverment for not locking down the whole country, not the local officials doing what they can to save lives.

[Nightside]

21 hours ago, MinimumSky5 said:

I've seen comments on the Ars Technica news article, saying that his main bone of contention is that the other US OEM's are able to continue manufacturing, but that the Alameda county officials have put in place a much stricter lock down, shuttering the plant. I can get the frustration with that, but IMO, it's misguided. Get angry at the federal goverment for not locking down the whole country, not the local officials doing what they can to save lives.

Tesla is a tiny drop in the diverse industries of Alameda County. It hardly makes sense to give them special treatment based on the type of nonessential product they make. 
In other regions automakers are the cornerstone industry and likely have outsized political control.
Anyway, I’m sure he’s kicking himself for not doubling down on the full robot factory at this point.

[MinimumSky5]

I'm not saying he's right, just that there is a legitimate reason for him to be frustrated. Like I said, he's taking it out on the wrong people.

[tater]

Value doesn't have to be to increase stock value/price, I was imprecise. Was thinking of value in the broader sense of the word, not share price—the company's worth to its stakeholders. The owners of the company (stockholders) have an interest in the continued success of the company, regardless of share price. To have value/worth to them, it can't fail, for example, or be hobbled in a way no competitors are by a county official invalidating State rules. Being shuttered, when literally all the other car plants are not is contrary to the interest of the shareholders, regardless of how you'd like to frame it.

 

[mikegarrison]

I tend to favor the broader and older "stakeholder" philosophy. I think that a company is something people create in order to achieve things and build value through many people working together, because the task is too large for a single person to accomplish. Bringing capital (monetary or intellectual) to the project is important and deserves to be rewarded if the company prospers, but the idea that shareholders are the only stakeholders that matter is rapacious. And the idea of optimizing on "shareholder value" is particularly damaging when the timescales are made too short. In the extreme it means that almost all companies that have built up any equity should be stripped clean and sold off because the most value for the shareholder *today* is to cash out all the equity that people in the past built up, take the money, and run.

Anyway, the point here is not that Musk is acting in the interests of shareholder value. I mean, this is the same guy that just triggered a loss of 10% of the market value in one day by tweeting that he thought the stock price was too high. The point is that he was acting like a petulant child. "This is *my* ball, and if we don't play the game like I want to, then I'll take my ball and go over to Sally's house."

Musk obviously has no problem flying around the country and (possibly) "owning no house", but the threat to move the factory is telling all his current workers that he sees them as interchangeable widgets that he can replace with other widgets in other states. Not my favorite look for executive management.

It appears as if the plant is about to get legal permission to open up. I don't know whether this was already in work or how much it is related to Musk's threats. Either way, however, it's not a good look for him.