The legacy car makers have flirted with 48V components for decades but haven't been willing to do the hard work to realize all the benefits it brings. The germans in particular are stuck in limbo. For their PHEV and BEV cars they are shipping 12V for all traditional functions, 48V for advanced functions like active suspension and anti-roll bars, and high voltage systems for the traction motor. Complete mess.
It's frustrating to be a Tesla owner. For every great engineering choice they make like going all in on 48V they make a user hostile choice like removing stalks and selling "full self driving" that is downright dangerous.
The problem is for the whole industry to go 48V costs money and whoever pays will also benefit the competition because everyone has the same suppliers. There needs to be some kind of industry regulation that says by so and so date everything had to be 48V.
The single most frustrating thing Tesla did re: Power was not allowing me to plug an appliance in. We lose power somewhat regularly where I live due to storms, and the tesla has 6-10 days of my household power budget sitting in its banks. Just let me plug in a deep freezer and coffee maker, please.
INB4 the 12V terminals: They are hard to access, have limited amps, and are a separate crappy battery.
For sure, but the economics don’t work out for the earlier Bev battery chemistry’s. The additional cycle where from v2x don’t justify it, getting a power wall just makes more sense in the long run.
But I still agree the option should be there for emergencies
The thing is, Tesla is the only large battery I can put in my house, according to local regulations (I can get solar+battery, but the solar provider terms in my area are garbage, and I can only sell power to local company and get credits for later use. I can't actually store it).
In my homebrew BEV I've started just using AC for most smaller things. It's easier than finding 48v components, the connectors are nicer than 12v (I've really come to hate cigarette lighter plugs) the high voltage means the conductors can be small and the zero crossing means the switches can be much cheaper too.
And being able to find replacement parts at the dollar store no matter where you are is really great.
> selling "full self driving" that is downright dangerous.
Is there evidence of this, at this point?
I haven't looked into it in several years, but back then, Teslas were getting in fewer accidents per driver mile than average. I would think given that there's a faction of the public, and especially of the activist public, who are hostile to Tesla/Musk, that if FSD is in fact more dangerous (which would mean more accidents per driver mile), there would be a good URL you could provide us which makes that case using the available statistics on the subject.
Because it's an entirely empirical question. Anyone can argue from first principles in either direction, but one of two things are the reality: either FSD driver miles are less prone to accident than average, or they're more so. I suppose it could be precisely at 50%, as well.
either FSD driver miles are less prone to accident than average, or they're more so. I suppose it could be precisely at 50%, as well.
This has been proven false by Tesla's own data released to the NHTSA. Teslas have more accidents per vehicle than any other cars with advanced cruise control from every other automaker in the world combined. And that doesn't even include the far worse accident statistics for 2023 and 2024.
There were three Tesla-related fatalities in the past week in the U.S. alone, including one in which the design of the Cybertruck is thought to have contributed directly to the death of its driver. Teslas get into so many accidents that news media don't even bother to report on Tesla-related accidents anymore unless someone dies.
You are confusing a claim - specifically that “Teslas are dangerous” or “FSD is dangerous” with a much broader reality; that all Cars are dangerous.
You assert that 3 people died this week due to Tesla related fatalities in the US alone. That adds up to more than 150 per year! But considering that Tesla’s comprise 5% of the car market, that 150 is a drop in the bucket compared to the 43000 that die in car accidents in the US every single year.
Tesla’s fully autonomous self driving is about as safe as a regular person. Many of it’s “accidents” as shown by the various investigations have shown that “drivers” in the plurality of cases had several(>5) seconds to react but failed to do so.
The curious case of Tesla’s safety record will one day be a case study in every undergraduate business class. The naysayers want to see the company fail, the CEO fail, or the technology fail. But the problem is not the technology, but rather the people using it. It’s been long known that increasing protective equipment in sport decreases minor injury but paradoxically increase the likelihood of severe ones.
Why? Because people are lulled into a false sense of security. Individuals take risks they would not otherwise due to the inhibition of the natural feedback mechanism that would otherwise deter them from continuing to push the bounds. Since they keep getting away with it, they continue to push, only to discover that the failure mode has gone from mild to extreme.
Those small injuries are the warnings that keep you safe and prevent you from taking greater and greater risks.
Technology is like that. Cars are safer now than ever. Seat belts, crumple zones, air bags - and yet looking at the statistics you would never know it. This has led to urban legend like cars in the 1940s being “safer” due to their all steel construction. But this is not true.
What is true is that people drove slower in the 1940s. Most highway traversal occurred at a mere 40 miles per hour. A far cry from the 80 everyone does on the way to work today. As safety increases so too does our tolerance for risk.
Ultimately, that is the problem with self driving cars. They work too well. They unintentionally encourage drivers to take greater and greater risks. And they get away with it. Until suddenly. They don’t.
No, I think you're trying to obfuscate the fact that Teslas are objectively more dangerous than their competitors' cars by claiming that all cars are dangerous, when that is not true, at all.
Teslas get into more accidents than competitors' cars on a per mileage basis, ona per capita basis, and on a per vehicle basis and that's even though Tesla buyers come from the group with the lowest rate of accidents...when driving non-Tesla vehicles.
This cannot be repeated enough. Even though Tesla drivers come from the safest group of drivers when they drive non-Tesla vehicles, these same drivers have far more accidents when driving Teslas. What's more likely, that thousands of people suddenly became dangerous drivers when they bought a Tesla, or that the common vehicle they all bought is dangerous?
> Tesla’s fully autonomous self driving is about as safe as a regular person. Many of it’s “accidents” as shown by the various investigations have shown that “drivers” in the plurality of cases had several(>5) seconds to react but failed to do so.
It's not fully autonomous if the drivers have to react. No idea if it's safer or not but the naming is terrible.
And that’s honestly a fair critique. I think Elon is definitely an optimist in his technological ambitions. The whole naming of the drive assistance features from Tesla is kind of convoluted and confusing. I think Autopilot, Fully-Self Driving, all of them could have been termed better. I think he sold a dream before it’s time. And I think the pivot away from using LiDAR was probably a mistake as well.
The maxim of make it work and then make it work better probably applies. He has repeatedly said that since humans only need 2 eyes to drive, AI should too - but that completely ignores the neurological differences between a camera outputting a flat 2d image and the complex make up of our eyes. There is a lot happening there behind the scenes, abstracted away by our brain, that he discounts.
Anyways, yeah, I agree. My only concern is people turning against self-driving because of implementation failures in the short term. Self-driving is going to save lives. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water and discount the work being done by people who aren’t Elon. If you seperate FSD from the politics, the business, the fandom, it is an amazing piece of technology. A computer is now driving as well as a person. Like that’s insane. In a different circumstance we would be applauding it in amazement. That team has done amazing work.
To do proper statistical analysis, you'd need to compare miles driven with FSD to miles driven by humans in similar conditions. That's not the easiest thing to do. Tesla had occasionaly released statistics with their earlier driver assistance technology, but without enough detail to form informative comparisons. Based on past experience, I don't expect Tesla to provide meaningful statistical data or to allow outside access to their raw data (which fwiw, seems like a huge privacy risk to collect), so I don't think we'll have an empirical result unless there's discovery for a lawsuit.
Extensive analysis of Tesla and NHTSA crash reporting (some by NHTSA themselves) shows that autopilot and fsd do not have significantly better safety outcomes than manual drivers or drivers aided by other non-tesla assistance systems.
This NHTSA report is pretty damning about Tesla's cavalier attitude towards the design of safe systems.
> The legacy car makers have flirted with 48V components for decades but haven't been willing to do the hard work to realize all the benefits it brings
Can you name some benefits ? ICs working at 48 V are expensive and hard to find.
Power ICs operating at 48V are common and cheap, because things like telco have been using 48V DC for decades.
In terms of things like digital ICs, well they have never worked at 12V either. You have a step down converter to produce the 3.3 V, 1.8 V etc. rails they need.
It's frustrating to be a Tesla owner. For every great engineering choice they make like going all in on 48V they make a user hostile choice like removing stalks and selling "full self driving" that is downright dangerous.