Posted on 09/25/2022 6:45:22 AM PDT by SmokingJoe
Elon Musk’s Tesla may have made electric vehicles popular, but the real revolution he brought to the industry is often—and unfairly—overlooked.
Normally, if the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) discovers a third of all the cars that an automaker has ever built has a flaw in it, that company would be face an enormous logistical challenge recalling all its products from the field.
Not so Tesla. At the push of a button, Musk can deploy a fix "over the air" to 1.1 million cars to ensure they all fully comply with NHTSA’s safety requirements.
“This is a tiny over-the-air software update,” Musk wrote on Thursday, following the mandatory fix imposed by NHTSA. When you can do that, the term "recall" doesn't really apply to fixing a car's design flaw, as that normally conveys literally bringing one's car to a mechanic for work.
That’s because Tesla designed its cars from the very beginning using a so-called “full stack” approach straight out of the tech industry. This consists of a base layer of code responsible for executing core functions, customer-facing applications that interact directly with the driver and middleware that sews the two ends together.
Collectively, they allow for every aspect of a car’s operation to be changed remotely, and more importantly without the need to alter any of its safety-relevant hardware.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
Now if Elon could just get that little spontaneously combusting battery bug ironed out......
Musk is a real-life Hank Rearden.
The power to fix is the power to break.
At government gunpoint ...
Think it over before you call it wonderful.
Software fix over the airwaves. Wonderful. But like a coin there is another side to it. What they can fix over the airwaves they or a hacker could cancel over the airwaves. Let’s imagine that for the sake of “the children” it is deemed anti-global warming if you drive on certain days of the week. Yes, it sounds absurd, but think of all the things going on now that sounded absurd a few years ago. Men can become women by “identifying” as women. Kids are taught at school that just by being white they are racist. I think that deciding on driverless Fridays is not any more absurd than those things.
$20,000 batteries good for five tears. Wow!
“A routine search of your credit card transactions reveals that you have donated money to a domestic terror organization, so we have remotely disabled your car. And your credit cards.”
Internal combustion engies won because they were BETTER.
And in the last century, physics has not changed.
Yup. The upside is also the downside.
"Out of Control" as in constantly monitored and modified in real time by an outside agency "at the touch of a button". If Tesla wanted to, say, shut down the heated bucket seats in its car (or the door locks or the engine), what prevents them? Do I really want such a feature?
Hey Elon, who actually owns these cars?
Tesla batteries take 8-12 hours on a home charger, an hour on a 50kW Tesla fast charger, and a half hour on a 120kW super charger.
But using the fast chargers will shorten battery life.
Also: What happens during a blizzard or hurricane evacuation, when thousands of cars are stuck between cities, and all the EVs go flat?
A “road ranger” truck on the shoulder can give a gallon or 2 of gas to the stopped ICE cars and they are on their way. What happens to the EVs with dead batteries?
This will not be amusing. It should be part of the discussion.
Yep. A short walk to having your vehicle disabled as punishment because big brother is displeased with you.
If the government does that, they can also close gas stations on specific days, designate specific allotments of gasoline for each of us. They can shut off your credit card when they want. They can have the IRS garnish your wages. They can even confiscate your property or empty your bank account.
That we even have to think about any of this is an indication of where the real problem is.
I wonder what the side-by-side-by-side comparison of a gallon of gas vs. the equivalent energy in batteries vs. the equivalent energy in hay would look like...
“Not so Tesla. At the push of a button, Musk can deploy a fix “over the air” to 1.1 million cars to ensure they all fully comply with NHTSA’s safety requirements.”
Or ATF, or FBI, or Southern Poverty Law Center orders.
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