This is a death sentence for Tesla. I have a Model 3 that I enjoy despite its shortcomings. One of the deciding factors was the supercharger network. It’s the easiest system I’ve used for charging. It makes all other networks infuriating in comparison.
A lot of people get Teslas for the ease of charging alone. If the network starts to falter, people will leave the brand even faster than they already are.
Tesla really needs to vote this idiot out of the CEO position before he kills the company.
Not to mention the charging infrastructure is one of the reasons some people haven’t made the switch yet. Anything holding back charging expansion is a disaster in my view.
I don’t think that’s it at all. The cost of a new car, any new car, is still out of reach for the vast majority of Americans, much less a dedicated daily commuter vehicle (because you need a gas car for long trips). PHEV is an imperfect compromise, but there simply aren’t enough used PHEV models available on the market.
I bought a car last year, and I really wanted to get something electric, but the car I need just doesn’t exist at the price I can afford. Chargers didn’t factor into it.
You say “you need a gas car for long trips”, and “Chargers didn’t factor into it”.
Isn’t that directly contradicting? Why else do you feel like you need a gas car for long trips if it isn’t related to either not enough chargers or chargers still not being fast enough for you? Chargers absolutely factor into that part of why you didn’t buy electric yet.
But also, the notion that they can’t do long trips is already pretty outdated. There are very few places left where you would even need to take a detour to take a long trip in an electric car. The only downside is that charging at max speed takes about 3x as long as filling with gas still, and not every charging station is max speed. As that continues to improve, it’ll be less and less of a difference.
So, funding the R and D department of the charging network, as well as the construction of the charging network, are absolutely fundamental to more people adopting electric as their single vehicle choice. And not as their second vehicle only for one small purpose.
If I want to go anywhere out of my state, I now need to budget nearly an hour every 200 ish miles for charging. That turns what used to be a 6 hour trip into closer to 8 or 9.
It would take most of the charge range just for me to get to anything interesting, and now not only do I have hours of driving to do, but also hours of sitting around doing nothing.
A gas car can be fully refilled in 5 minutes and be ready for another 300 miles of driving. Electrics just don’t have the appeal to someone like me who makes somewhat regular trips over distances. I’d love to take trains, but that’s not viable in my area, so I’m sticking with gas cars for now.
Wow, that sucks. I guess Canada is further ahead in that. Electric car charging is 20 minutes per 3 hours here. I can see why it would make a big difference if it’s an hour for your chargers.
It could also be the software for your car isn’t well optimized, they should ideally be having you stop around 25% battery and charging up to around 75% if you are trying to make the best time. The software should inject the stops as close as possible to that ideal if you tell it to prioritize speed.
But if the only chargers you have on your route are that slow, then I guess there isn’t much you can do but hope companies don’t stop funding the R and D and contsruction of more up to date ones.
I don’t think it’s the chargers, but the vehicles. Someone correct me if I’m wrong since I’m only familiar with Tesla, but enroute chargers do tend to be super/fast chargers already, and destination chargers really don’t need to be.
A fast charger is theoretically fast enough but vehicles only use its full power for a short time. each vehicle has a curve of the power it can use, where it’s usually not using the full capacity of the charger. I really think we mostly just need improved vehicles, and they have been improving over time
I was mostly being facetious, I don’t think it’s any different in Canada. The guy was just wrong about it taking an hour every 2 hours of driving.
No, it isn’t directly contradictory, because those advancements aren’t available now and there is a directionality to the relationship between mass adoption and infrastructure. I wanted to buy one despite the lack of infrastructure, but there were too many barriers to entry.
I know where the chargers are, and I know that I can probably charge at home and at work and at the rest stops where we normally stop for gas. But I also frequently go to places where even gas stations are rare, and it still takes 3 times as long to charge, and I may not always have that kind of time. I may find myself on an unexpected trip where I need to gas up, and without that option, I don’t really have a car I need.
Yes, I think we should be investing in research and development, and maybe one day there will be a charging network capable of replicating the speed and ubiquity of gas stations. But that’s not going to happen until and unless there is mass adoption, and there won’t be mass adoption until the cars are affordable and available. You need people everywhere demanding more charging stations, or the infrastructure won’t happen. Business owners aren’t ever going install more chargers than they need in the hope that it will sell more electric cars. That’s backwards.
Even if that charging network existed today, the existing lineup of cars are still priced at a premium and are difficult to find in stock. I wanted one, and could not find something affordable near me. The additional cost wasn’t something I could justify, regardless of whether the chargers were available.
Trying to decide if I agree or disagree, so I upvoted!
The problem is that more people feel that way than would be actually affected. Making numbers up here, but BEVs should handle the needs of 90% but 50% are convinced they can’t. There’s a huge mismatch of expectations.
Combine that with lack of availability, high prices, and manufacturer/dealer resistance to change, and it’s not going smoothly
But the other half of the argument is that things just don’t magically get “good enough”. It’s a progression where some aspect gets a little better or a few more are sold, prompting the need for more investment in another aspect. Any such huge change in something that affects everyone’s life, will be chaotic and take time. How do we smooth that out? Speed the process up?
Tesla really needs to vote this idiot out of the CEO position before he kills the company.
That was last year. It’s too late now.
I’m their prime demographic, currently car shopping to replace my wrecked Benz, and was leaning towards a Model 3 up until reading this headline lol. I guess I could still charge at home or if the network fails it could be purchased by another company?
Or I just avoid stressing about it altogether and get a normal car
EVs are awesome. I loved the two I had. The only reasons I don’t have one now is I hardly drive anymore and am doing construction on my house that makes a truck become useful. If there were an EV truck that wasn’t the size of the house I’m building or the cost of the house I’m building, I’d have gotten that. Instead I got the Maverick hybrid.
If you enjoy the luxury of the Benz, then the Model 3 would have been a step down. There are a lot of good EV options in the luxury range, but very few in the low end range. The Volvo XC40 was really fun to drive and pretty comfortable. My friend loved her Porsche Taycan (that might be too high end, not sure). My coworker just got an i4 and really likes it.
I do think someone would immediately buy the charging network if it were an option. I mean gas stations have all kinds of stuff spring up around them when anyone stopping there won’t even be very long and only passengers will be bored with nothing to do for that short amount of time. At a charging station, you are taking a longer break and even the driver is participating in that break.
Owning the charge network is going to be a much bigger deal when it’s common to use your EV for long trips. And whether people want to or not at this point, it’s steadily becoming more and more normalized. It’s certainly more enjoyable overall to take a long trip in an EV. The downtime is nice. And healthier than sitting down for hours straight. Even before electric cars, people were encouraged to stop every 2 hours on a road trip anyway.
The old advice was to plan recreational stops along the trip, to prevent embolisms or cramps. What if charge stations had electric scooters or bikes and maps to fun 15 minute activities in range. Not to mention meals of course.
I know many people don’t take road trips in a healthy way currently, so gas cars seem like the better choice for them. You’ll “make better time” if that is the only important thing. But for people that already followed best practices, a road trip in an electric car is already the same.
Investors should build charging stations with infrastructure (ie restaurants, game rooms, etc) halfway between big cities that are 5 hours away from each other. 2.5 hours (~150 miles) is about the distance you can drive an EV before needing to charge. This would create tremendous bidirectional business for people traveling from big cities.
I used to drive a Benz, I hated it. Now I’m on my second Cadillac and I’m never going back. Cadillac makes a damn fine automobile tell ya what.
GM makes Cadillac. GM does not make damn fine automobiles.
All the brands make good and bad vehicles. Doesn’t really matter what company owns which other company. Loyalty to one word instead of a different word is a terrible way to make a decision at this price point.
I’m just speaking from first hand experience on how awful and costly GM vehicles are to own. But I guess they’re fine as throwaway cars, which is all they know how to produce. Just get rid of it before the warranty runs out.
Clearly said by someone who does not drive a Cadillac.
Nope I sure don’t. And wouldn’t, as I know first hand how bad GM vehicles have gotten.
Just get a better EV.
- you could still charge at home
- teslas include a free adapter to the other us standard, so you could still charge at any other charging network
Charging at home is the way to go. You may be able to refinance your home if you haven’t paid it off, and rope in upgrades for new charging circuits.
Plus, there are programs being developed - note none have been finalized - to allow EVs to give power back to the grid and so you could one day make money back from keeping your car plugged in over night. There are already time of use rates too for many markets in the US and EU. Plus there’s peace of mind knowing that your car will always be fully topped off every morning.
As an electrical engineer that has studied the idea of Plug-in Hybrid EVs (PHEVs) and Battery EVs (BEVs), personally I always try to persuade people to look into PHEVs for personal and societal reasons, but even if you don’t go with Tesla for your BEV purchase I think it’s still worth it to go electric. Maybe consider the Chevy Bolt EUV, Nissan Leaf, or Volkswagen ID.4. On the PHEV side, there’s the Ford Escape Plug-in Hybrid and Jeep Grand Cherokee 4xe. Lots of tax credits out there too for new ($7,500) and used ($4,000) so EVs are definitely still an opportunity!
I don’t have a Tesla and have not used supercharger network but I can verify that other charging networks are infuriating and not just by comparison. I have half a dozen different apps with my credit card info on them and various old paid credits on them, not to mention committing to a good 5-10 min of fuck around time each time I park at a random charger and try to figure out what the hell this new system is.
I had a Volt (loved it for what it was) and I gave up charging it anywhere but at home. I had the same experience as you, had to have a dozen apps, use the stupid tap to pay, only to find out the network was down and you couldn’t use it. For a plug in hybrid, it was an inconvenience, for a pure EV that may be arriving with less than 10% battery, it would be a disaster.
Can I ask - what’s the best app you found so far?
Best? I dunno, using these has never been a very pleasant experience. Nothing sticks out as a particularly pleasant experience. I don’t particularly care for being tracked as I travel either. It would be both faster, easier, and more secure if I could just put a five dollar bill in one and buy a few hours of charge or a $10 bill and buy the charge and parking spot for the night.
For me, ChargePoint chargers are the easiest to use and consistently work best, but usually the most expensive.
Blink chargers are the worst. The app is clunky, slow, and the experience just never feels like they actually vetted the process. Also, it feels like they have a hard time keeping their chargers maintained.
What used to be Volta, now Shell (yeah the oil company) is a hit or miss depending on their charger actually working. Nice thing about Volta is that free is free (for now).
For actually finding working chargers, I use PlugShare.
That’s interesting. Always found EVGo more reliable than Chargepoint. There’s a lot of variation I’m sure regardless. Instead of Plugshare you should consider using Presto. It allows you to also start sessions within the app.
Tesla really needs to vote this idiot out of the CEO position before he kills the company.
I was holding shares specifically so I could vote Musk out when a vote would come up. These changes listed in the article are too much. I just sold my entire position in TSLA.
Down in flames it is then.
Is this clown trying to tank the company because he didn’t get his payout?
I think he’s trying to tank the company because he sees Sundar doing the same shit at Google and assumes it will lead to a big payout.
No he’s simply an arrogant, incompetent yutz.
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And herein lies the danger of Billionaires. Who stops them when they want to impose their tyrannical agendas on the vulnerable. Who prevents him from buying an atomic weapon and setting it off for a meme stunt or internet points ?
If only us lowly workers had more rights.
Who prevents him from buying an atomic weapon and setting it off for a meme stunt or internet points ?
You have to be joking.
Nearly every military in the world. Countless regulatory agencies. Intelligence agencies the world over. It’s pretty much known that the US made stuxnet to kill one country’s nuclear program. Do you seriously fucking think they wouldn’t stop a single billionaire?
There’s also the fact that even he’s not that insane, and any other billionaire out there who wouldn’t want the effects of a nuke going off to get in the way of their own shit.
If you were talking a dirty bomb, that might be within his reach. Buy some mines in third world countries, mine up some material, strap it to a conventional bomb. That’s also many orders of magnitude less severe (while still horrific). Also, most mining rights in areas with worthwhile radioactive material available have already been bought up by other entities with similar financial levels of backing.
Actual nukes require quite a bit more than just an explosive and some radioactive material to build anyway, and things like nuclear material refinement facilities are quite easily visible from satelite imagery. They also require specialized hardware that is closely monitored. Sure he could pay to reverse engineer and/or get it built. Good luck keeping that secret for as long as it would take.
The man’s a living embodiment of a chode with a diamond studded piercing. There’s plenty of shit to be upset at him about, or worried about, without getting anywhere close to this absurd. I sincerely hope that you weren’t being serious.
If you want shock factor, talk about the slave mines his family wealth comes from, and the slave mines where we source lithium from for EV batteries. Talk about the high frequency of using child soldiers as security for said mines, in addition to the child slave labor.
Talk about the highly likely intentional killing of Twitter by Saudi Arabian government’s investment into Musk as a retaliation for the Arab Spring and as a way to further control rapid information dissemination during crisises.
There’s real reasons to despise him, going for such extremely ridiculous exaggerations only hurts the point you’re trying to make.
Im making a valid point while you’re trying to tell me what I should be saying instead
Propagandists always try to control the narrative
That’s not how validity works
Oh it’s valid whether you want to believe it or not.
I think “Valid” just isn’t the word you’re looking for here. Valid requires verification, and since your point was verifyably false, valid isn’t what you were going for. Scary hypothesis, nightmare fuel, anything where it doesn’t have to actually be possible, to still cause a fear response would be terms that fit better.
It is becoming easier to spot A.I. posters. They’ll have a coherent argument yet will constantly misspell words a person of their supposed intelligence should know. It’ll look and sound about right, but not 100%. I’ve read traffic is about 50% bots, starting to add up
Speculative bullshit.
There have always been a ridiculous number (and variety) of misspellers on the 'net.
What, why would misspellings make you more likely to assume something is AI generated? They would have to intentionally add misspellings to what the AI wrote. People using AI to post stuff would be doing it to avoid having to make effort. Not going out of their way to put effort into trying to cover up that it was written by AI.
Are you ok? You’ve doubled down on nonsense. Seriously, take a breath. Look into some treatment for anxiety.
The whole danger is that AI text generation doesn’t misspell, and comes across highly confidently.
There’s actual research out there on spotting AI generated text. Most of it is based off tone, frequency of some specific phrases, and sentence structure.
If you’re mixing this with the idea that spam emails and scamming comments are often misspelled, that’s done in an attempt to avoid word filters, and also to help ensure that people who fall for them are dumb enough not to notice, making them easy marks more likely to overlook other warning signs. If they aren’t trying to get you to take an action, or a coordinated push to manufacture consent, the chance of AI is low.
Also, the statistics about internet traffic you’re thinking about is about bots. That’s largely scripts and web scrapers, less so automated posters making arguments multiple levels down incredibly quiet threads on low user count social media like lemmy.
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All from the first page of results for laws preventing private ownership of nuclear weapons.
Changed my mind and took 30 seconds to spoonfeed you. Enjoy. I’m blocking your ass as to prevent the hazard to my own mental health.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/2122
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/832
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/669/text
https://www.acq.osd.mil/ncbdp/nm/NMHB2020rev/chapters/chapter12.html
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1961-1968/npt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Prohibition_of_Nuclear_Weapons
You are not making a valid argument, as evidenced by your argument being torn to shreds in the comments here.
Let me be crystal fucking clear here.
You were not making a valid point.
Your hypothetical is so amazingly absurd that I did not fully believe you were being serious until I saw your response.
I’m still wondering if this isn’t some sort of weird ass false flag attempt to make people who dislike Musk look like absolute raving loonies.
I tried to give you places to begin looking into things yourself so you (and anyone else as delusional as you) wouldn’t be worried about something so unlikely as to be effectively impossible.
I’m not doing that work for you, I’ve already had to sit through countless discussions of this shit in my lifetime. Multiple nuclear engineers in the (extended) family, have met members of the regulatory orgs through them, and that’s what my parents wanted me to grow up to be (I fucked off into computers though).
Beyond that, I tried to give you some stuff against Musk that’s far more rooted in reality than the wildest speculation.
But I really couldn’t give a shit what you talk about. I just dislike seeing people undermining legitimate points by throwing around absurd exageration. Especially when there’s plenty of legitimate criticisms and concerns out there about Musk.
Please, do go on about how he’s going to somehow outsmart intelligence agencies that took out an entire country’s nuclear program with a single goddamn computer virus. At this point it’s just entertaining.
I think you mean job creators! \s
Who prevents him from buying an atomic weapon and setting it off for a meme stunt or internet points
The army I would suppose. You had a point to start and, yes, the billionaire class is allowed to do almost anything they want but only an absolute moron could honestly believe he would be allowed nuclear weapons.
You’re assuming.
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No, we really, truly are not.
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… What does this random conjecture have to do with anything?
- Fired the Supercharger head and the entire department
- Fired the lead of new vehicle development
- Previously fired head of battery development
- Constantly “one year away” from Tesla full self driving, whilst Mercedes just launched geofenced FSD, with Mercedes assuming 100% liability during FSD
- Elon just had a out of the blue trip to China, appears to have ‘kissed the ring’ of Beijing, and hyping TaaS robotaxis
What’s Tesla’s USP to an investor now? The supercharger ‘lock in’ and early head start at the EV game are Tesla’s biggest boons, but the former appears to have been gutted and the latter has been squandered on a slow model release schedule
If the Tesla Board had any responsibilities at all, it was to prevent this by ejecting Elmo. They chose to not.
It is now time to stick a fork in it. Billionaires - Away!
Are they going to give him his $60B bonus now?
Mercedes fsd is pretty bad tho, it’s full self driving basically for marketing reasons. Following one geofenced highway without a problems is not close to full self driving. It does basically what tesla autopilot does but a little better. Not even better in some cases because if I recall correctly it can’t change lanes automatically. Sooo just a marketing from their side
Worldwide food shortages are pretty likely this year, but sure, care about “investors”
I actually don’t care about individual investors, beyond the implications for the broader ‘economy’ if the Tesla bubble bursts. But given how absurd the market cap for Tesla is compared to the traditional automakers, when this hype train stops picking up
speedmore rubes, the rest of us need it to coast down gradually, not crash and burn.Got it, investing in food.
But definitely make sure to approve that $53 billion pay package, cuz musk is cleaaaarly doing such an amazing job!
All of which makes the decision to get rid of senior director of EV charging Rebecca Tinucci—along with her entire team—a bit of a head-scratcher. . . . Musk told workers that Tesla “will continue to build out some new Supercharger locations, where critical, and finish those currently under construction.”
Many Tesla fans had been holding out hope that Musk would debut a cheap Model 2 EV in recent weeks. Instead, the tycoon promised that robotaxis would save the business . . .
Delivering on that goal is more than just a technical challenge, and it will require the cooperation and approval of state and federal authorities. However, Musk is also dissolving the company’s public policy team in this latest cull.
Yeah that’s the ballgame.
He realised electric cars are popular with libs so in a masterful gambit is destroying his company to own them.
Musk also told staff that he would ask for the resignation of any executive “who retains more than three people who don’t obviously pass the excellent, necessary and trustworthy test.”
What a complete fuckup of a human. Sad to see so many trusted him. I guess we don’t have direct evidence of him being a serial killer at least.
We can be pretty sure he’s a pedophile though based on his connections to Epstein.
Unless you count his choice to buy cobalt from child slavery mines. That’s serial killer by proxy, I guess.
Well Musk already has one strike against him for retaining himself. Just need to find two flunky exec yesmen he’s keeping on and he would be fired by his own standard.
I’m glad I turned down an offer from them back in the day.
The death spiral begins.
Begins? It’s been slowly getting worse for years
Yeah, I think this is the event horizon.
Anyone really shocked? Everything he owns is the greatest thing on earth until it isnt. Then he tries to sink it further
That’s one way to stop a union.
Musk has been reading about all the layoffs happening at other companies who are now floundering due to the loss of institutional competence and memory, and goes “we need some of that shiat STAT!”
When you have a narcissistic sociopath for a boss don’t expect job security. All these layoffs and his insane letter will do is cultivate toadying, fear, distrust, cliques and a culture of backstabbing within Tesla.
If they go down… Will the vehicles even work after that? Can they drive offline? Or will Muskrat shut down everything, even the vehicles?
Though it’s unlikely, I hope Tesla going down bricks their car software. We might collectively learn something about leasing rights to products vs owning them
I don’t think that would change anything in the grand scheme of things, just make problems for owners of the affected devices. I still think he should sit on the next Starship.
Remember the time Sony literally put malware on their CDs that hacked your computer?
I haven’t bought Sony products since then, and it continues to amaze me that we collectively didn’t learn anything. What kind of idiot would buy anything from a company that booby-traps its products?
