> He later learned a separate 12-volt battery in his Tesla Model Y died after he opened the door, and he said he was trapped inside on a 100º day for 20 minutes. The low-voltage battery powers what’s inside a Tesla including the doors, computer display, and windows.
I won't speak to the usability of the "emergency latch". But, it certainly sounds odd that there's a separate low-voltage battery in addition to the main battery.
Correct me if I'm wrong but, if I understand things correctly... at this point we're wondering if manual locking hubs are a better (or worse) solution than electrically isolating the motor(s). Right?
And, off the top of my head I'm going to say the manual locking hubs will be better overall. Better from an energy efficiency perspective as well as overall convenience and simplicity of design. They might be worse for Tesla's P&L though since anyone with a tire jack and a standard parts dealer nearby could work on the car.
Then again, besides the fact that I'm a cynic... what the heck do I really know!??!
Yeah, that's a fair point but isn't it true that a mostly discharged battery will still have enough charge to perform some limited functions. E.g. even in a normal car I think a dead battery can power the lights even though the starter only "clicks".
Nonetheless, I'm a rather conservative type of person and see your point so in my "dream car" I might want a way to manually put the car in neutral (or free-roll mode, whatever you want to call it). That's why locking hubs came to my mind in a prior reply.
> Most EVs either don't have neutral or a poor implementation of it,
I'm sorry, do you mean that neutral and "car wash/freeroll mode" are not 100% equivalent?
This really confounds me... if my car has a problem while driving down the road, I'd really like to have a chance of pushing it onto the shoulder if necessary.
A car that you can't do this with sounds very poorly designed to me.
> Is it...not just going into neutral via disconecting a drive shaft?
Very good point and although IDK how it's done I completely agree with you regarding the terminology. In other words, I don't see new internal combustion cars renaming neutral to be "car wash mode"... lol.
Cars should have neutral. And, if yours does then it should be named as such.
Making sure I've got "car was mode" is not what I want to do when I'm in the market for a new car. Nor do I want to start reading through the owners manual should I have to push my car onto the shoulder of the road in an emergency.
Perhaps my age and crotchety grumpiness is starting to show.
Others have mentioned that there is indeed a "free roll" mode and I'm prone to think your hypothesis regarding the implementation may be correct. The specifics, however, do not matter to me.
What I'm wondering now is, if "free roll" mode is activated while I'm at a red light... is there a chance I start rolling as I do in my manual when I take my foot off the brake?
Maybe I should just reach out to Tesla at this point though (-:
Fair enough, I was thinking back to the time something similar happened to me "mid-mountain".
This Tesla must've been in one heck of a stop where "hiking wasn’t an option as it was pretty hot and we had no water", lol. Does Tesla make a motocross bike?
> able to get a tow truck capable of transporting my car (turns out you need one that has a full bed because of the regenerative breaking
Sounds incredibly short-sighted that the regenerative braking can't be temporarily disabled by the driver... two people can push a "regular" car to a nearby gas station in a pinch. Even one person can push a smaller car around a parking lot if necessary.
That said, they often send out full/flat bed tow trucks these days for almost any reason.
Alone it doesn't at all, but when you couple the tagline "Turn your audience into a business" along with the blog's more literary narrative style, the whole piece strikes me as entertainment meant for a particular cohort instead of a rigorous analysis.
In addition, the tone of the article seems overly condescending to me. I certainly don't want to minimize accountability and the severity of security holes, but in the real world where startups are trying to hastily bring products to market, they are often understaffed and there is a certain reality that can't be denied.
The author may have indeed found flagrant problems but, in even moderately complex systems, there are big struggles with a diffusion of responsibility and a lot that can be lost in translation; for many reasons besides technical ineptitude.
Ultimately there was too much punditry and not enough of a clinical postmortem for my taste. Of course I don't seem to hold the popular opinion here given that my comment got down-voted rather severely, which seems unjustified. Oh well.
> Ya know the worst part? After explaining all this, my chips were cold. Oh, the humanity.
The worst part for me is that the blog reads like a short story instead of a technical analysis. And, given that it's published via ghost.org, makes me think there's just a bunch of scams and meta-scams going on... one layered on top of the other.