Tesla EV discussion

Amazing colour. Would have deserved black interior. 2300 kgs …

We need a thread for ICE fun cars, I think.

The only EV aiming at that is the Caterham Project V which aims at 1’190 kg and 268 HPs.

For the moment it’s a dream, no defined production date and only 2 seats.

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That’s pretty cool. And 2+1 seats …

The weight is quite impressive. I heard that Mazda is working on an electric version of the Miata, but the battery weight screws up the concept of a simple, nimble and light car.

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Ahhh, 2 +1 seats? Maybe no one will ever seat there, but it makes the car a whole lot more practical as daily driver. So, this Caterham is the only EV that gets my attention.

Well, also saw the Pininfarina Battista once at an autoshow, but let’s keep the feet on the floor.

The pedal to the metal, I hope you mean.

The purest and most exciting car I’ve ever driven was powered by a 1.6 Honda engine, and looked like it was built in a shed.

https://youtube.com/shorts/33AAt7-qWBI?si=7oXBUCozQ8RDZzTP

However I don’t think electrifying it would make it any better since for an equivalent range the battery would be too heavy robbing it of acceleration and agility. The petrol Atom hits the sweet spot of weight to hp ratio.

What da’ ya’ think of this lady?

Still Elon’s fans? :slight_smile:

There seems to be a lot more to this story than meets the eye, and claiming that curling carpets constitutes a major safety issue is stretching it, compared to exploding Pinto tanks, dieselgate and other industry cover ups. I’m not accusing her of malicious litigation, but it does sound like she was fairly compensated for her initial dismissal.

Balan had no illusions about him or Tesla saving the world. On the contrary, the engineer described him as a “difficult personality” and with a “detestable person” synonym that is NSFW. Despite that, she gave him the benefit of the doubt and wrote him an email in April 2014 saying she wanted to tell him all the problems she had found. Some days later, Balan was taken to a room believing she would have a meeting with the CEO. Musk was not there, and she said she was forced to resign.

A while later, Balan filed an arbitration case, which she won in 2017. It awarded her $320,000, and Tesla paid it in full. In the same year, Tesla had the Huffington Post publish a right of reply in one of its articles that accused Balan of embezzlement and kickback. Since then, she has been trying to sue Tesla for defamation in federal courts. As a former employee, she could be forced to take her case into arbitration again, but she wants the discussion to be as public as Tesla’s accusations were.

The knives always seem to be out for Teslas and their drivers, but coming from BMW I do understand The Hate.

No, it doesn’t sound like a fair compensation to me, quite the contrary. I am not an automotive engineer neither a Tesla fan, so I would prefer to hear opinions from her peers.
There were other whistleblowers who were treated in a similar way, which says a lot about Elon Musk. I mean you can be a fan, fine by me, but safety concerns should be taken seriously not swept under the carpet and then have the person who raised them accused of things they didn’t do as to destroy their credibility. And then deny them justice. (justice delayed is justice denied)
She was not just another employee, she made history at Tesla…

Engineer Cristina Balan was once such a rising star at Tesla in the US that her initials were engraved on the batteries inside every Model S electric car.

But after raising a safety concern about a design flaw which could affect the cars’ braking in 2014, she claims management turned hostile, and she lost her job.

More about this story here

Defamation is the main claim in Balan’s suit against Tesla — the company accused her of criminal behavior on a popular online news site but provided no evidence to back up the charge. Balan says her professional reputation suffered damage so severe she can’t find a company willing to hire her. “They tell me, ‘We’d like to hire you, but we can’t afford to be on Musk’s blacklist,’” she said.

One rule for the rich and another for the poor.

Tesla will ask shareholders to again approve Musk massive pay package

After reporting dismal first-quarter sales, Tesla is planning to lay off about a tenth of its workforce as it tries to cut costs, multiple media outlets reported Monday. CEO Elon Musk detailed the plans in a memo sent to employees.

Well, some numbers to understand current brand goodwill destruction process:

Tesla Demographic Segmentation

The average Tesla customer profile has a median age of 54 years, mainly male customers, though there is a smaller target demographic of females that are interested in Tesla cars. The Tesla target demographic is largely established families with kids, including younger children or teenagers, and they are mostly professionals, executives, senior managers or hold other high-income positions.

The average income of a Tesla owner for the entire household is $143,177 for the Model X and a slightly lower $128,140 for the Tesla Model 3.

The comedy here will be the teenagers shouting “dad I hate you” while dad goes full Skinner and blames TikTok for spreading “misinformation”.

Its not a pay package, its seed capital for a new start-up to send a dog called Pluto to Pluto.

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Make sure you’re not in the car when you update it. :crazy_face:

Since the windows on a Tesla are frameless, it used to be the case that the manual release lever could damage the window seals as they wouldn’t lower the glass first. It was corrected with a s/w update and a sensor, so it should be fine for occasional use.

Idiot. “Despite the ability to manually open a door in an emergency, Brianna feared damaging the system by doing so and preferred to endure the stifling heat.”

This is stuff no one should have to deal with. Unless people are mechanics working on the car or enthusiasts that take working in cars as hobbie.

Recent models are machines that you refuel them, drive and every once in a while clean them or take them to service. Any effort beyond that is a step down from the service offered by modern cars. Why a new car should give you any issues at all?

I doubt anyone here owns one but just in case

" Tesla has been ordered to recall nearly 4,000 of its Cybertrucks due to an accelerator pedal that can stick in place when pressed down."

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Slight correction, they weren’t ordered but decided on a “voluntary recall” according to the NHTSA chronology.

It’s about ten years later now. In how many cases did that “simple but potentially lethal design flaw” (according to the sensationalist BBC article above) actually result in an accident?

There are always (at least) two sides to every story. Here’s an archived article on the entire affair, it’s well worth the read since you care about that so much:
“Additionally, with respect to complaints she made about the fabric headliners we were using, when some of them did not perfectly fit into vehicles, Tesla modified the headliner and the B-pillar sill by inserting a piece of foam to ensure a proper fit.”

Also note that
“She also admitted that the “issue” did not impact vehicle safety in any way. Rather than working on her assignments, Ms. Balan spent company time working on a “secret project” without her manager’s approval and booked an unapproved trip to New York at Tesla’s expense to visit a potential supplier for her own personally-created project. She also illegally recorded internal conversations within Tesla without anyone’s permission, which is clearly criminal conduct.”

She sure sounds full of herself, the below is only one week old. Remember that the cybertruck was announced in 2019 (presumably after years of development and design), five years after she left. Yet she apparently knows all about it there is to know despite not without owning one:

These are heavy accusations and unproved by Tesla btw. They were already dismantled, you didn’t read the article I quoted. It turned out the secret project wasn’t secret at all, and the trip to NY was approved by her manager. If the accusations were true, they wouldn’t have taken down that article after her reply in that newspaper ( I think it was in the Huffington Post) and Tesla management would have pursued further accusations.
This is exactly why she wanted her anti-defamation case heard in a court all along, but the arbitrations legislation is clearly in favour of the employer.
This case is a tad more muddy than Tesla wants you to believe. Let her have her anti-defamation case heard in a court of law, not judged by people on the internet.
Maybe some people believe that employees should just be shushed away and accept any deal that is thrown at them, but then we argue from entirely different world views.