Tesla cop car abandons chase after 10 miles ... LOW BATTERY!!!!

[Beetlegeuse]

I swear you couldn't make this shit up! This confirms what every serious electric car test has said since day 1. It DRAMATICALLY shortens range in battery-only electric vehicles when you drive the dog-shit out of them. Or turn up the subwoofer ... or the a/c ... or if it's a cold day ... or if ....

Fremont police Tesla runs low on juice during high-speed chase

...During the pursuit of a “felony vehicle” that started in Fremont and reached peak speeds of about 120 miles per hour on the highway, the officer driving the Tesla radioed in to dispatch that he might not be able to continue the chase he was leading.

“I am down to six miles of battery on the Tesla so I may lose it here in a sec,” Officer Jesse Hartman said....

...“I’ve got to try to find a charging station for the Tesla so I can make it back to the city,” Hartman said over the radio.

He eventually found a charger in San Jose to juice up his car, said Geneva Bosques, a Fremont police department spokeswoman."...



Glad these dumb fucks have their priorities straight. The FLEEING FELONS got away, but at least the cop didn't have to walk home. So there's that.

[BG]

Classic

[redz]

I’ll burn gas till the day I die! Nothing better than the explosive feeling of a combustion engine Reving up.

[i_SLAM_cougars]

I’ll burn gas till the day I die! Nothing better than the explosive feeling of a combustion engine Reving up.

I agree. Except possibly a Diesel engine.

[Proximal]

I’ll burn gas till the day I die! Nothing better than the explosive feeling of a combustion engine Reving up.

And, naturally aspirated to boot - no replacement for displacement.

Got to admit though, the torque on the electric tops mine & a stop light, won’t do a little quick/safe off the line challenge with a Tesla.

[BG]

Plus they are ugly, no dash, just a screen.......not my thing. The SUV's look pretty cool, but I saw an ugly as car yesterday, think it was the newest one, had paper dealer plates on it and the rims were small, looked weird.

[Beetlegeuse]

Trouble with Tesla: Couple sold damaged car but told they can’t sue

Dude bought a "new" Tesla. A while later he took it to the dealer for some updates and the dealer's mechanic discovered the car had evidence of having been wrecked and repaired.

Then he found out that the fine print in the sales contract said that he couldn't sue Tesla over anything to do with the car. Psych! Court of arbitration only.


The funniest part is that the dickhead who bought the car still thinks that Musk is da schiznit, it's only the company that sucks. Which is a lot like saying that that monster is a sonofabitch but Baron von Frankenstein is an okay dude.


The Tesla's only saving grace is that to this point they're only fucking over the well-financed. The trailer park gang is still safe from their evil clutches.


Oh yeah, and did I mention Teslas catch fire? A lot?

[Beetlegeuse]

Did I mention that Teslas catch fire? A lot?

Tesla’s Futuristic Door Handles Blamed for Death in Fiery Wreck

The futuristic door handles on Tesla Inc.’s Model S are being blamed for a fatal crash in which a police officer was unable to pull a man to safety from his burning car.

Omar Awan, a 48-year-old anesthesiologist, was driving his leased Tesla in February when he lost control on a south Florida parkway and the car slammed into a palm tree, according to a wrongful death lawsuit filed in state court in Broward County.

A police officer couldn’t open the doors because the handles were retracted and bystanders watched helplessly as the car filled with smoke and flames, according to the complaint, which alleges the fire originated with the car’s battery.

The door handles on the Model S are flush with the car and pop out -- “auto-present” in the words of Tesla -- when they detect that the key fob is nearby.

“Fire engulfed the car and burned Dr. Awan beyond recognition -- all because the Model S has inaccessible door handles, no other way to open the doors, and an unreasonably dangerous fire risk,” according to the Oct. 10 suit. The complaint lists the cause of death as smoke inhalation and states that Awan had sustained no internal injuries or broken bones in the crash.

Read More: What First Responders Don’t Know About Fiery Electric Vehicles

Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Consumer Reports said in 2015 that broken door handles were one of the most common problems with the Model S.

Awan’s Tesla continued to burn for hours, reigniting several times even after firefighters had extinguished the flames and the car had been towed, according to the complaint.

This isn’t the only case to fault the Model S’s lithium-ion batteries as flammable. The family of an 18-year-old who lost control of his Tesla at 116 miles per hour and crashed into a concrete wall last year blames an explosion of the battery for his death in an “entirely survivable” crash, according to a suit filed this month in state court in San Jose, California.

Awan’s case is Awan v. Tesla Inc., 19-021110, Circuit Court of Broward County, Florida.

[Fluidic Kimbo]

I've been driving petrol cars for 15 years, and in that time I've probably run out of petrol maybe 5-10 times.

I'm sure cops run out of fuel when driving petrol-powered cars as well. I'm pretty sure that this principle applies to anything that consumes fuel (e.g. lawnmowers, chainsaws).

[Beetlegeuse]

I've been driving petrol cars for 15 years, and in that time I've probably run out of petrol maybe 5-10 times.

I'm sure cops run out of fuel when driving petrol-powered cars as well. I'm pretty sure that this principle applies to anything that consumes fuel (e.g. lawnmowers, chainsaws).

You miss my points -- two of them -- entirely.

If you could have been bothered to stop reading Irish poetry long enough to léigh an post, you'd have noted that I wrote the the OP:

It DRAMATICALLY shortens range in battery-only electric vehicles when you drive the dog-shit out of them.

Jeremy Clarkson ran a Tesla out of juice in just 55 miles, a car that Musk claimed could be counted on for 200 miles (255, to be precise) on a full charge. And 55 < 200.

Note the operative word, DRAMATICALLY. And, I might add, un-FUCKING-predictably.

And the tendency gets worse as the battery ages. The Interwebs fair bristles with tales from battery-only EV owners who discovered that the range predicted by their on-board computers plummeted (by 75% ...or more) when they got onto the expressway and drove at 70 mph (112 kph).

The cop knew at the start of his shift he was being given a car with less than a full tank of electrons. Had it been just another Crown Vic he could have erred on the side of caution and topped off its tank with dead dinosaurs in five minutes and been on his merry way. But recharging the Tesla's battery would have meant missing half of his shift. Cops driving dinosaur-powered cars routinely stop to pee and take on coffee and they can top off their petrol tank in no more time than that.

Recharging your Tesla, OTOH, would take you off the street long enough you might as well duck into a nearby cinema and take in a double feature.



Giving police a battery-only EV is nothing but virtue-signaling done at the expense of public safety.

[i_SLAM_cougars]

You miss my points -- two of them -- entirely.

If you could have been bothered to stop reading Irish poetry long enough to léigh an post, you'd have noted that I wrote the the OP:



Jeremy Clarkson ran a Tesla out of juice in just 55 miles, a car that Musk claimed could be counted on for 200 miles (255, to be precise) on a full charge. And 55 < 200.

Note the operative word, DRAMATICALLY. And, I might add, un-FUCKING-predictably.

And the tendency gets worse as the battery ages. The Interwebs fair bristles with tales from battery-only EV owners who discovered that the range predicted by their on-board computers plummeted (by 75% ...or more) when they got onto the expressway and drove at 70 mph (112 kph).

The cop knew at the start of his shift he was being given a car with less than a full tank of electrons. Had it been just another Crown Vic he could have erred on the side of caution and topped off its tank with dead dinosaurs in five minutes and been on his merry way. But recharging the Tesla's battery would have meant missing half of his shift. Cops driving dinosaur-powered cars routinely stop to pee and take on coffee and they can top off their petrol tank in no more time than that.

Recharging your Tesla, OTOH, would take you off the street long enough you might as well duck into a nearby cinema and take in a double feature.



Giving police a battery-only EV is nothing but virtue-signaling done at the expense of public safety.

If you don’t write for a newspaper or a magazine somewhere the world is missing out

[Fluidic Kimbo]

You miss my points -- two of them -- entirely.

The role of Devil's Advocate is an important one.

Had it been just another Crown Vic he could have erred on the side of caution and topped off its tank with dead dinosaurs in five minutes and been on his merry way.

I had a proposal for making new dinosaurs.

[Beetlegeuse]

Oopsie.

Tesla’s U.S. Sales Drop 39% in Third Quarter

CNBC reports that Tesla’s third-quarter revenue dropped by 39 percent in the United States this week, its first major drop in over two years. Sales in the United States, which accounts for the company’s largest share of total revenue, dropped from $5.13 billion last year to $3.13 this year.

And did I mention that Teslas catch fire? A lot?

[Beetlegeuse]

Alarming video shows driverless Tesla car cruising down a road the wrong way after being automatically ‘summoned’ by owner using smartphone app

* Footage of the dodgy driving was captured in Richmond, British Columbia
* The Model 3 car stops and starts as it tentatively tries to reach its owner
* Smart Summon was rolled out to supported Tesla cars on September 26, 2019
* It has been met with a very mixed reception from Tesla users and pedestrians

Lots more details in the article linked to in the headline.

[Beetlegeuse]

I've been predicting this for years. Americans love to take holidays in the fambly car. Which is always going to be a nightmare in an electric car because most EV owners will do the lion's share of their charging at home.

And that becomes a problem of the EV owners' own making because commercial charging stations cost about $50,000, whereas a Slumberger pump head only costs $2000. Plus electric cars take longer to "refill," so you need more of these 25x more expensive charging stations to prevent drivers having to wait in line to "gas up." And you can't just have more charging stations, you also have to have more real estate and more asphalt for the additional chargers.

So it would be a YUGE investment to buy the land and install enough charging stations to handle the additional holiday EV traffic, but none of that is going to earn its keep except on those five big "driving" holiday weekends (Memorial Day, 4th of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas). The other 350 days of the year, they're a white elephant.

So commercial charging stations won't invest the money to be able to handle all the added holiday traffic. Ever.


Video: Tesla Drivers Wait Up to an Hour to Charge Electric Vehicles

Footage shows drivers queued up back-to-back in lines stretching over a half mile long

Adan Salazar | Infowars.com - December 2, 2019

Tesla owners in California waited in long lines to charge their electric vehicles over the holiday weekend.

Footage out of Kettleman City, the location of one of the largest supercharging sites boasting up to 40 chargers, shows drivers queued up back-to-back in a line about a half mile long.

Testy drivers attempting to juice up after Black Friday sounded off on social media, claiming the wait time was anywhere from thirty minutes to well over an hour....

[Nephets]

I love my 6.3L V8 sedan. I could drive it all day with the radio off just listening to the sound of it.

[Beetlegeuse]

Tesla on autopilot rear-ended Connecticut cop car as driver checked on dog: police

A Tesla on autopilot rear-ended a Connecticut trooper’s vehicle early Saturday as the driver was checking on his dog in the back seat, state police said.

Police said they had responded to a disabled vehicle that was stopped in the middle of Interstate 95. While waiting for a tow, the self-driving Tesla came down the road.

After striking the trooper's vehicle, the driver in the Tesla then rear-ended the disabled vehicle before stopping...


Click to embiggen.

More story at the link in the headline.


I hope the dog wasn't hurt.

[Beetlegeuse]

This won't do much for stock prices

U.S. agency probes 12th Tesla crash tied to possible Autopilot use

December 13, 2019

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. auto safety agency said Friday it will investigate a 12th Tesla crash that may be tied to the vehicle’s advanced Autopilot driver assistance system after a Tesla Model 3 rear-ended a parked police car in Connecticut on Saturday.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration special crash investigation program will investigate the Dec. 7 crash of a 2018 Tesla Model 3 on Interstate 95 in Norwalk, Connecticut, the agency confirmed.

Autopilot has been engaged in at least three fatal U.S. Tesla crashes since 2016. The agency’s special crash investigation team has inspected 12 crashes involving Tesla vehicles where it was believed Autopilot was engaged at the time of the incident. To date, the agency has completed reports on two of them: a 2016 fatal crash in Florida in which Autopilot was engaged and a prior crash where Autopilot was ruled out as a factor.

[Obs]

Just my uneducated thoughts on the self driving cars....
Even if you gps routed it to the smallest millimeter per nanosecond of error... How do they handle things like a small dose of EMP or minor programming ghost during an update etc?

Thats why we get updates.
Not just to wart off hackers. Its because of anomalies that surface and have to be corrected at the regular.

Its the same priciple as your xbox freezing for no known explainable reason or this page locking up a second for totally random coding glitches.

Might be one in a million times it happens but it happens on all devices at some point.

Except in this case the xbox weighs 3500 lbs and is going fast enough to kill 100 people in the right spot.

Uh.... We havent quite progressed in tech enogh to be having these yet.

Not saying scrap the idea but they cant create enough fail safes at this time.

[Obs]

Other considerations... Hackers.

Shit the best security systems on the planet get hacked constantly such as experian credit and the IRS.


But tesla is different because?

Eventually a terrorist state would find a virus to wreck them all at once.

Allegedly a group of high schoolers cracked through half the exit nodes on tors circuit just to prove they could.

So give that kid thirty years of study and a 10 million dollar incentive... Yeah it will get cracked.

[Beetlegeuse]

If they're so damn good, why do they need government charity in the first place?

Congress Quietly Considers A De Facto Bailout For Tesla And GM

<< redacted >>

...Put in plain English, what Congress is considering is a bailout for Tesla and GM, one that overtly discriminates against these other automakers. Setting aside the fact that the last government bailout of GM wound up costing taxpayers $11.2 billion, Congress’s current bailout plan seems incredibly short-sighted since data shows the EV payout system is deeply flawed.

For starters, the vast majority of these tax breaks are going to the top 20 percent of income earners. About 80 percent of federal EV tax credits went to those earning $100,000 or more, according to a Congressional Research Service study. These are individuals who can and should buy an electric vehicle with their own money, not yours and mine.

About half of all EV sales in the United States take place in California, where additional government funding and perks like free parking and HOV-lane access are often added on top of the federal payout. A complicated Zero Emissions Vehicle (ZEV) mandate which “requires that EVs be a certain percentage of sales” in California also helps to drive that percentage up.

A recent Maryland study found that most of its state’s EV owners are white (85%), male (75%), well-educated, and affluent, according to Morgan State University Professor Andrew Farkas, who serves as director of the Baltimore school’s National Transportation Center and Urban Mobility & Equity Center.

Unfortunately, the problems with the EV payout system don’t end there. Because these vehicles rely on electricity for fuel rather than gasoline, their drivers don’t pay the gas tax, which is the mechanism by which we fund road and transportation infrastructure repairs and upgrades across the country. With no equivalent tax for EVs, these drivers are using our roads and bridges and not paying for their upkeep. As more of these vehicles appear on our roads, less and less money is going into the Federal Highway Trust Fund, and our crumbling transportation infrastructure will continue to deteriorate.

Meanwhile, the EV tax credit program itself is being badly mismanaged and abused. A recent Treasury Department Inspector General’s report indicated that there’s significant waste and possible fraud involved in the EV tax credit program. The IRS simply doesn’t have the ability to verify that each EV payout claimed is legitimate.

Electrification may very well be the future of transportation, or it may wind up being the Betamax of the automotive industry. A cheaper, more efficient, developing technology could supplant the lithium ion battery and all of this may become moot. But until we fix the inherent problems in our system today – payouts going to the wealthy and those trying to game the tax code, and zero contributions to transportation infrastructure from EV drivers – Congress should not pour good money after bad into this program.

[Beetlegeuse]

Police Wasted £1.5 Million on Electric Cars That Can’t Chase Criminals

This is in London and the cars are BMW I3s and Nissan Leafs but they and the Tesla all suffer from one common problem. They take longer to recharge than Bill Klinton's balls.

And the replacement batteries are insanely expensive.

The costly reality of owning an electric car: How customers are being slugged $33,000 to repair cars only worth a fraction of the price - and why they can't travel long journeys

If you bought the old Lotus Elise-based Tesla Roadster, by the time you'd driven it 250,000 miles you'd have spent enough on the car and replacement batteries to buy FIVE new Lotus Elises. Buy a new Lotus, drive it 50,000 miles, throw it away and buy another new one. For the same money.

[Beetlegeuse]

If you believe "Any news is good news," I doubt Elon Musk agrees.

From Car & Driver magazine:

Our Tesla Model 3 Suffered a Catastrophic Failure While Parked

That's a first for any of our long-term cars—as is being alerted to our stranding by a push notification from a mobile app.

... Not only is this the first time we've ever had a long-term car suffer a catastrophic failure while parked, it's also an extraordinarily rare case of any car leaving us stranded, something unacceptable for any new vehicle, particularly one that costs $57,690 and with merely 5286 miles on the odometer. Even our problem-prone Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio was at least able to limp to the dealer following each one of its numerous issues....

When your cars' reliability isn't even on par with the Itey's cars, you've got problemi seri because that puts you the same reliability level as the Communist-era East European manufacturers like Trabant, Zastava and Lada.

[Beetlegeuse]

Feds Will Review Tesla ‘Sudden Unintended Acceleration’ Complaints

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said Friday it will review a petition asking the agency to formally investigate 500,000 Tesla Inc vehicles over sudden unintended acceleration reports.

The petition covers 2012 through 2019 model year Tesla Model S, 2016 through 2019 Tesla Model X, and 2018 through 2019 Tesla Model 3 vehicles, the agency said. The petition cites “127 consumer complaints to NHTSA involving 123 unique vehicles. The reports include 110 crashes and 52 injuries,” the agency added.

Tesla did not immediately comment Friday. ...

Reminds me of the Audi unintended acceleration problem back in the '80s. Nobody could ever reproduce the problem under controlled conditions and no one ever found a single Audi whose engine could overpower its brakes (meaning whatever the problem was, the driver should have been able to prevent it by applying the brake). The only explanation that fits all the facts is that the drivers were inadvertently stepping on the gas when they thought they had their foot on the brake. 60 Minutes did a chop job on them anyway, to include testing on camera with a car that had been "gimmicked" to reproduce the condition.

Audi sales fell 84% and it damn near killed the company.

Audi's only real fault was having the brake pedal so close to the gas pedal, as is the European fashion so the driver can "heel-and-toe" when downshifting a manual gearbox. Every Lotus built before Colin Chapman died was so tiny there was too little room in the driver's footwell for normal pedal spacing so every Lotus driver knew you had to wear the narrowest, hardest-soled shoes you owned.

The late, great Ayrton Senna giving a master class on heel-and-toe shifting in a Honda NSX:

[Beetlegeuse]

Tesla: cars built by dicks, for dicks.

Driver in fatal Tesla crash was playing video game, NTSB says

...The National Transportation Safety Board says the driver of a Tesla SUV who died in a Silicon Valley crash two years ago was playing a video game on his smartphone at the time.

Chairman Robert Sumwalt said at the start of a hearing Tuesday that partially automated driving systems like Tesla’s Autopilot cannot drive themselves. Yet he says drivers continue to use them without paying attention. He says the board made recommendations to six automakers in 2017 to stop the problem and only Tesla has failed to respond....

I bet he won't do that again!