Well, Musk just fired the whole Supercharger team, including its senior executive team! Tesla conducting more layoffs, including entire Supercharger team | Electrek
Fired or laid off? BEV woes are now starting to get out into the news that 'norms' are consuming. Most of the views of my friends and neighbors are some variation of "THANK freekin' GOD!!" as they were afraid that petrol cars were becoming more and more expensive because of government putting their thumbs on the scale against petrol cars, instead of just a horrible economy. I'm thinking that Musk's technology transfer to the ChiComms is a good flex. They're not what you would call a litigious society, and camera festooned Johnny-Cabs are more of a plug-and play appliance for a dictatorial commie country than they are for people who view traveling hither and thither, at will to be one of the HALLMARKS of a free society. If you're going to experiment with live human Guinea pigs while perfecting L5 'autonomous' (or government controlled) driving then why not do this in a nation where human life is less precious a commodity than it is EVEN here in the US??? The ChiComs will have a built-in export luxury brand for their more well-heeled victims, and they will do what the UN's Ferengi do best! Steal tech. Undercut the competition. Sell BEVs throughout world market. China and the United States are comparable in size, with China being slightly bigger. That means that the ChiComms will be able to work on all of the time/distance/weather/chemistry problems that are currently plaguing BEV adoption.
Musk also just fired the entire new car development team in addition to the SC team on Monday. Heads are rolling, or will quit, which we have been seeing a lot of this last week. What the heck is Musk up to? Coupled with the Supreme Court decision against him on the very same day, could we be witnessing an immature emotional mood swing of epic proportions? Seems like Tesla is burning down.
Pretend you are the CEO of a company that has grown over a 5 year period but now is facing financial headwinds. You have a manager who basically refuses to follow your orders to reduce headcount. So you encourage them to go elsewhere or fire them. Seems sensible. But fire the entire group? No that sounds like petulance. You have a company whose manager is responsible for producing a component that is required for your latest high visibility product. The production of that component is not allowing your new shiny object to be produced in the volume you need. Firing seems sensible.
a lot of people have left tesla over the years. the media's hair is always on fire, but none of it ever makes a difference.
I stopped reading at 'Pretend you are the CEO of a company....' The last time I checked California is still an "Employment at will" state. If Musk is failing in his fiduciary responsibility to his shareholders then this is a 'board' problem. I do not keep track of Tesla's ups and downs, although I was wrong a few years ago about their ability to develop a robust industry standard parts infrastructure. Teslas in general suffer from hit and miss Q/A and engineering problems, but then so does GM. This is another 'them' problem, and it would appear that the ChiComms will probably be the answer. I'd rather see cars built here, but then we in the US benefited handsomely from the development of Apple products even though no apple phones were built in the US. Their fans chose to pretend that they didn't know that apples weren't being built by......um......'not quite' US Union workers. They also forgot what 'offshoring' is for profits.... In other words: 'meh.' The used EV car market isn't quite 'crashing' but you cannot expect to have to pay people something like $10k to drive a $40K car and then wonder why a used example is only worth $20K with a looming $15k battery replacement. (**) (**) According to the Googles: After labor charges, the total repair cost is about $20,000 to $22,000. For the Model 3, the replacement cost around $15,799.27, with the battery alone costing over $13,500 and labor costing $2,299.27 I personally think that this is a little on the high side, but the Googles are in the tank for BEVs. We don't have a lot of longitudinal data for 3's whose batteries really should not be failing at the 5 year point...... SO FAR batteries seem to be replaced as a whole unit -- meaning no cell replacement but that's according to the Googles. @bwilson4web has the most data that I've seen for T3 battery degradation. Sample size = 1. We still don't know what we don't know about fast DC recharging degradation, long term environmentals, and the difference between an 'adult driven' example and one that has been driven a little more enthusiastically. MARKETS have to decide these sorts of things and eventually? They get it right. The government kickbacks are exactly like the sugar-rush that they seem to be. AT PRESENT, the used BEV market seems to be carb crashing......
battery longevity is not an issue anymore, but there will always be manufacturing defects in every brand.
You may want to spread that around a little. I, for one, am a believer. The BEV fanboyz state an anticipated battery degradation of about 12% over a 200,000 life cycle, which is actually darned good considering that 200K is about the economic life expectancy for most cars - even if the data are probably 10% or so on the optimistic side. 12% of a standard T3 will drag it down to 244 miles (probably closer to 230 miles in the real world.) Of course, this doesn't factor in age, because the oldest T3's are what? 6 years old? It also doesn't factor in environmentals or fast DC charging cycles which seem to be the 'one pack a day smoking habit' for batteries. Some people out there are still insisting that it's 'not all that bad for the car's overall health.' Again! Well done Big T. A car with an almost useable range on the original battery after 200k is a pretty darn good deal!!!! Just remember...... People in the PC community still flinch when people mention $5,000 battery replacements.
But how many times were entire divisions let go? I can only think of the public relations department previously being shut down.
All these posts of combining travel EV charging with lunch and dinner stops and biology breaks keeps me wondering: Do I live on a different planet? Or does my household just have a different travel and recreation pattern? When traveling, we normally pack picnic lunches, rather than stopping along the way. When making road distance, the passenger eats lunch, the driver waits until a shift change puts him/her in the passenger seat. When doing the tourist or hiking activities, lunch is normally eaten at a picnic bench at an overlook, or a good sitting log along a hiking trail, or similar. Today's EV charging availability at the parking lots and trailhead locations we use, rounded to the nearest whole percent, is 0%. So the "charge while eating" multitasking plan just isn't working for us. That is a rounded 0%, not exactly 0%, as Friday while doing some walks and hikes with an AVA event, I did score a recharge by parking three blocks away at a government office in our state capital of Olympia with six J1772s, of which only one was busy. But for the other trailheads and state and city parks we visited those couple days, the only 'nearby' thing marked on PlugShare was a single 120V wall outlet on a grocery store 8 blocks away from the far end of one city park trail. Biology breaks are somewhat similar. While we nearly always take a biology break when gassing up the gassers, at this age even male travelers need more frequent breaks than the car needs fuel. (Female householders have always needed more.) Our typical other biology stops rarely have any EV charging. Numerous don't even have electric service or running water, just vault toilets. Skiing this winter was significantly more successful. In not quite two dozen ski days, I was able to score 4 full charges at destination chargers, plus several minor additions at the end of the day while we were packing up and spotted EV spaces vacated by earlier customers. The pattern where we skied this year was: all free stations are oversubscribed, so you get a space only by arriving very early, or by luck just as someone else leaves, or by visiting on a very low turnout day; pay-by-the-kWh stations had plenty of open space, even when priced at half the cost of gasoline; 'free' charging inside $34-50 parking garages isn't worthwhile for PHEVs when outside parking is free. When walking for exercise on a break day from Colorado skiing, I was able to identify a riverfront trailhead with very good paid EV charging capacity. While several miles from where we would otherwise have started, it worked. We do buy some sit-down dinners more often than lunch, but only after settling in to lodging, as night driving has been sharply curtailed by aging eyes and bodies. But most dinners are in-room from the grocery store (purchased at same time as lunch and snack supplies) or left-over from the previous dinner out, so charging with lodging is much more important. Charging with or near lodging was by far the most successful during this winter's major ski trip. It was mostly overnight L1 charging, but a few places had real J1772s on site or within reasonable walking distance. Though several places had nada, one had padlocked its 120V outlets and refused access even to paying customers.
No, your pattern of driving is not much different than us. One of the joys of our trip out west through our beautiful country was stopping in out of the way places off the beaten path away from all the crowds and having a picnic and relaxing. Some of these stops where the highlights of the trip and it turned out a little bit better than some of the destinations.
Decades ago I did a trip like that. Typically though I prefer getting out of the car, be it a picnic or eating establishment. After my first long EV trip (5000+ miles). I discovered I wasn’t mentally tired nor physically fatigued after 10-12 hours of driving. Seems the advice I had been hearing for years, stop and stretch your legs every couple of hours, was very worthwhile
As already mentioned, those biology breaks are frequent, covering those 'stop-and-stretch' breaks. Typically every two hours. Very heavily weighted towards places still lacking EV charging. The vault outhouse locations typically don't even have electric service. The first biology break usually needs to be earlier. Not for me, just the spouse. Once we have moved out of distance mode and shifted to local multi-stop sightseeing or walking or hiking mode, the lunches are out of the car. But only rarely at eating establishments.
we also eat in the car, and a few biology breaks aren't enough to prevent adding a day to our florida trip. that's why we bought a 50 mpg hycam. i would prefer overnight hotel charging, but that's another logistical nightmare.
On our three week ski trip just after getting this PHEV, overnight lodgings were where I was most successful finding recharges, on-site or nearby. Most common were ordinary 120V outlets, enough to fill a PHEV overnight, but not an EV, which would have needed to be far more choosy about lodging choice. We spent two nights at places with J1772s on site or nearby, enough for EVs overnight, and two dinners near enough to J1772s to get a good boost on PHEVs. Two lodgings, covering the bulk of the trip, were near streetside single CCS/CHAdeMO superchargers (one of each, I don't think could power both at the same time), neither well placed for travelers catching just a meal while passing through. Though both were noticed getting some short term use.
