Comment by jchw
3 years ago
Obviously, negativity regarding Tesla has hit a fever pitch. It's a bit of a shame in some regards, though it's easy to see how it is justified; no matter how cool the cars are, Tesla as a company has a leadership issue.
What Tesla did for the world, in my opinion, was make electric cars a desirable product. Before Tesla, the image of an electric car was that of a compromise, a vehicle for "hippies" and not people who love cars. In that regard, they got some things right. I really doubt the F150 Lightning would have happened if not for Tesla's successes in the market, for example.
And even still, it does seem like the market has a lot of catching up to do. While I'm not an expert, it seems like the Model Y heat pump is still state of the art electric vehicle engineering. Hopefully in the future, all electric cars will have high performance heat pumps and sophisticated temperature management for the battery system, as it would definitely alleviate winter range concerns. I think right now a lot of people believe that it is impossible to have an electric car that performs well in cold environments, but it seems like it is possible to maintain almost all of the range with enough engineering.
It's sad to see Tesla in the dumps like this. It's easy to meme on it, but the truth is that behind the many issues, the team did accomplish something pretty incredible. It really isn't every other day that a new car manufacturer pops up and manages to swipe significant marketshare. When I first moved to the California bay area, it was pretty novel seeing just how many Tesla's there were. But back here in the Midwest again, it's getting to be kind of uncommon to not see one on a drive nowadays, too.
>It's sad to see Tesla in the dumps like this.
Why is it "sad to see" potentially fraudulent goings-on brought to light?
> Why is it "sad to see" potentially fraudulent goings-on brought to light?
Good question, to be honest, I have no idea since that's not what I said.
You are absolutely right. Yes, Tesla did introduce a seismic shift into the automotive industry.
Their stock was an appreciation and acknowledgement of that? They were valued more than all of their ( major) competitors' market cap aggregated together at one point. Many argue that it still is overvalued.
The incident cited above is on the same slippery slope as the Nikola demo, just more nuanced. It is well worth a discourse.
Whatever good things Tesla has done in the past doesn't give it a pass on the bad things it's done.
It may have cracked open the market for electric cars, but now it's recklessly playing with people lives. If for this and other reasons it goes out of business that's perfectly fine. Other companies will produce breakthroughs and Tesla doesn't matter is the greater scheme of progress.
Agreed. Still, I find it sad given that it all seems senseless. Seems like they produced enough actual value to not need to go down this path.
> I think right now a lot of people believe that it is impossible to have an electric car that performs well in cold environments, but it seems like it is possible to maintain almost all of the range with enough engineering.
You'll never have all the range because you're going to have to spend some amount of energy on heat, and even with heat pumps it's often more energy heating a space than cooling when it's hot. Where humans mostly are, it gets way colder than room temperature than it gets hotter. Sure it might get to 110F in Phoenix (+38F from 72), but it'll get to -40 in the cold areas of the US (-112F from 72F). That bigger temperature differential means more energy.
Don't get me wrong I imagine there's some improvements to be made out there, but with current battery chemistries and needing to warm a cabin you're gonna spend a lot of energy on heating no matter what.
Most electric cars do have heat pumps, and have had for some time; the Leaf had once since 2012, for instance. In some, it's an upsell option (VW, for instance, justifies charging an extra 1k or something on the basis that they don't provide interesting efficiency boosts in places where it's rarely <0C.