OT Why do so few people appreciate the importance of Tesla's work

Somehow I think it's not that simple. For example, with virtually any car battery, the drain when it's parked from the minimal running systems, eg alarm, door locks radio receiver, etc is very small. You can park them for a couple weeks and they start. The Tesla has a battery at least an order of magnitude larger. In the article, it states that the Tesla manual says a fully charged battery can lose 50% of it's power in a week just sitting there. So, I suspect some kind of self-discharge process is the real culprit and even disconnecting it totally would not make a big difference in the outcome. I'm sure it would help, but it may only extend the ultimate outcome by a few more days.

Reply to
trader4
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Yes, it is an amazing position for a company. Kind of like a restaurant employee arguing with a customer that the drink they just served them was made right instead of just giving them a new one. Result is you wind up with

8 people who won't come back. Those at the table, next to it, watching, etc.

It would seem business 101 would suggest that if Tesla doesn't want to foot the $40K cost of a new battery, they should just raise the price of the cars $500, $1000 whatever it would take to cover the cost.

Reply to
trader4

Lithium-ion doesn't really self-discharge any faster than lead-acid, so I think that the Roadster must have a hefty parasitic load.

This page from the Tesla website

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has this to say about the Model S:

"The Model S battery will not lose a significant amount of charge when parked for long periods of time. For example, Model S owners can park at the airport for extended vacations without plugging in."

So maybe Tesla has quietly addressed the bricking issue. (The Roadster has been discontinued.)

Reply to
Smitty Two

On Monday, September 10, 2012 4:28:34 PM UTC, Metspitzer wrote:

ps. I have just started taking topics and try to fit them into the few grou= ps I frequent. Tesla=3Delectricity home repair=3Delectricity. Close enough.=

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Fans have rallied to buy the l= ab of inventor and electricity pioneer Nikola Tesla to turn it into a museu= m. But why do so few people appreciate the importance of Tesla's work? Lots= of people don't know who Nikola Tesla was. He's less famous than Einstein.= He's less famous than Leonardo. He's arguably less famous than Stephen Haw= king. Most gallingly for his fans, he's considerably less famous than his a= rch-rival Thomas Edison. But his work helped deliver the power for the devi= ce on which you are reading this. His invention of the induction motor that= would work with alternating current (AC) was a milestone in modern electri= cal systems. Mark Twain, whom he later befriended, described his invention = as "the most valuable patent since the telephone". Nikola Tesla Nikola Tesl= a was increasingly eccentric in his later years Tesla was on the winning si= de in the War of the Currents - the battle between George Westinghouse and = Thomas Edison to establish whether AC or direct current (DC) would be used = for electricity transmission. But as far as posterity goes, time has not be= en kind to Tesla. Born in what is now Croatia to Serbian parents, he moved = to New York in 1884 and developed radio controlled vehicles, wireless energ= y and the first hydro-electric plant at Niagara Falls. But he was an eccent= ric. He believed celibacy spurred on the brain, thought he had communicated= with extraterrestrials, and fell in love with a pigeon. Over recent decade= s he has drifted into relative obscurity, while Edison is lauded as one of = the world's greatest inventors. But his memory is kept alive by legions of = "geeks" and science historians. A Tesla museum on the site of his former la= boratory is being planned after a crowdfunding project orchestrated by The = Oatmeal cartoon site. It raised more than its target of $850,000 - which wi= ll be matched by the New York state authorities - in the first week. The to= tal is now well over $1m. ----------------- Except for the Tesla coil, I ha= d never heard of Tesla. I finished High School in 77 and went through 2 yea= rs tech school studying electricity and never heard of the guy. It was only= when I started using the Internet did I discover what an amazing man he wa= s. I am pretty sure that he was left out of history because he went insane.= Wanting to marry a pigeon and keeping a distance from women was part of it= too. His claims of UFOs and death rays didn't help his credibility either.

You got it, most of his peers thought he was just nuts and they had good re= ason to think this as you pointed out. He took the principals of AC current= to an impractical and unrealist level. Tesla's goal was transmitting power= without wires. Westinghouse was able to see that there were practical appl= ication of his ideas inside the extremes.

Jimmie

Reply to
JIMMIE

You got it, most of his peers thought he was just nuts and they had good reason to think this as you pointed out. He took the principals of AC current to an impractical and unrealist level. Tesla's goal was transmitting power without wires. Westinghouse was able to see that there were practical application of his ideas inside the extremes.

Jimmie

The general public may not be as familiar with Tesla and his work as they are with Edison, but Tesla is far from unknown in the electrical engineering community. I was reading about him in the 1960s as part of my EE work, in fact.

Edison was a master of PR and he also had a major lamp company (GE) to carry on the Edison name and traditions long after he was gone -- the "Edison Mazda" trademark, for example. Too bad that Westinghouse didn't do the same with Tesla. But history does level things out and Tesla's fame is growing.

Tomsic

Reply to
Tomsic

-> NDA's saying the owner would have to reimburse Tesla for the cost if they

Reply to
Robert Green

It's hard to believe a lithium battery could self-discharge that much in just a week but anything's possible, I guess. It seems to me like buying a car with a leaky gas tank. I'd love to know if Tesla knew about the bricking problem from the design phase or they got ambushed by it themselves.

Still, if a low voltage disconnect would buy me even a few days before my car got bricked (costing me $40K!) I'd want every second of those days to count. I suspect you're right about the discharge being fast because they appear to have tried to solve it with a GPS system that dispatches an emergency charging crew. That kind of fix leads me to believe that time is very much of the essence in dealing with a dying Tesla Roadster battery. Maybe the problem's been mitigated somewhat in the newer versions. Given how often people run their cars out of gas, it seems pretty strange to design a car that dies so spectacularly when it runs out of battery charge. My roommate once did over $1000 worth of damage to his fuel-injected Volvo running it out of gas (he was notorious for driving on E), or so the dealer told him.

-- Bobby G.

Reply to
Robert Green

You really think another $500 on a $100,000 auto is going to make much difference?

I think that is true of large companies. But this isn't GM, it's a small startup.

Reply to
trader4

I found another discussion about the BBC article on Tesla at Reddit. It wasn't very interesting but one of the messages had a link to this:

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One of my favorite stories about Tesla was when one of his experiments burned up a generator at the power company causing him to lose his "free power" privileges.

If I recall that it was in Colorado Springs , Colorado. WW

Reply to
WW

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