Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:I think you said it (Score 4, Interesting) 117

I've seen several companies (in Europe, so it might not relate to what is common in the US) which will pay for a full training if it is deemed useful for the company provided you stay with the company. They will pay, but you'll have to repay a sliding percentage of the costs when you leave the company soon after the training. This system seems to work pretty well, the employee gets his training and the company protects it's investment.

Comment Re:CO-OP (Score 3, Funny) 884

That coupled with naming and shaming. Sniff everything, wait for an email to pass by, print it and stick it to every lamppost in the neighborhood. Or log all URLs visited and print those. That will get the point across and on top of that provides some entrainment to your neighbors.

Comment Re:iPad has a "break" key? (Score 1) 95

It's mainly a good system because the car responds to user input exactly the same regardless of the cruise control. This makes it easy to explain, but more importantly it means all those reflexes you've developed will still be useful in an emergency situation. When shit happens on the road you don't want your response to be different depending on the state of the cruise control.

As a side note, I've found my car also unsets the cruise control when the ESP gets activated (which makes sense) and when accelerating to speeds above 200kmh (which is kinda lame).

Comment Re:Problem with egos really (Score 0) 525

Elon Musk seems to be the new Steve Job, he can't possible do anything wrong in the eyes of some people. Don't get me wrong, the Model S is a cool car, its fast, luxurious and looks good. But, like any other car, it does have some disadvantages. Somehow mentioning those brings out an army of people claiming to car, or Elon Musk, can't be faulted in any way. And often supported by all sorts of contradicting arguments. Right here on this topic people have claimed it's a know fact the range reading is to low when the battery is cold and people claiming Broder was insane because he tried to drive more then the advertised range. It doesn't seem to occur to anybody that the truth might be somewhere in between, even though thats what the facts which where not disputed by either party are telling. Broder drove well beyond the displayed range, but not nearly as far as the range he was supposed to have when he parked the car.

Comment Re:Problem with egos really (Score 2, Interesting) 525

Broder had two main complaints. The first one was 'loosing' range during the cold night. The range lost there is what caused the problems for him, it all went downhill from there. CNN didn't park the car overnight and drove it in slightly better weather. Batteries tend to respond pretty badly to low temperatures so this might well be enough of a difference to explain the different outcome. His second problem seems to be bad advise from Tesla. Tesla wouldn't be making the same mistakes during a follow up test. Needing advice to complete a trip is bad enough though and CNN called Tesla during the trip as well.

So when done properly the system seems to work, but when stuff goes wrong it goes wrong badly. You either and up spending a long time a a slow charging point, or you ended being towed away. Even if Broder was being stupid, it still shows the system isn't as idiot proof as you'd hope. But that will hopefully improve over time.

Comment Re:Well, the article proofed the car has plenty of (Score 1) 609

Those who NEED to drive really long distances regularly, they are very few and to be pitied, really if you have to commute +300miles even once per week, you are doing something wrong with your life.

Or you are a sales representative, a service engineer or, like me, a software engineer who actually visits it's customers. There are all sorts of legitimate reasons to travel more then 300 miles (and the Top Gear story was about the 200 mile roadster) regularly. And even when only doing this occasionally for holidays and family visits it is something to consider. (Yeah, you can rent a car, but it's still inconvenient).

It is only in the minds of Top Gear and the likes that people look forward to driving all the way from London to Paris to attend a business meeting. It might even be faster but a SMART person knows the train/plane passenger will arrive more rested then the driver.

Both planes and trains are often inconvenient because they never arrive where you need to be. On top of that, if you can't drive from London to Paris comfortably in a car that price it's not worth its money. It recently did an 800 miles trip (twice) in a car half the price without being broken when I arrived, a 280 miles drive should be a walk in the park in any decent modern car, and certainly in a car in that price bracket.

That said, if range isn't an issue for you the Model S seems to be a really nice car.

Comment Re:The fiasco was what Top Gear did, not Musk (Score 1) 609

Please stop repeating that BS, this is what the judge actually wrote in the verdict:

"In my judgment, the words complained of are wholly incapable of conveying any meaning at all to the effect that the claimant [Tesla] misled anyone.
...
"This is because there is a contrast between the style of driving and the nature of the track as compared with the conditions on a public road [] are so great that no reasonable person could understand that the performance on the [Top Gear] track is capable of a direct comparison with a public road."

They said it would run out after 55 miles on their track. Nobody ever proved that claim to be wrong. It makes all sorts of sense to expect a dramatically lower range when pushing a car to it's limits on a track. It makes all sort of sense to not draw conclusions about the range during everyday usage. And (certainly in the context of Top Gear) it makes a lots of sense to mention the range of a sports car when it's actually being driven like a sports car. It is something to take into account when buying an electric sports car, especially since the acceleration provided by the car probably is rather addictive. I definitely would be tempted to drive it in ways which would affect the range pretty badly.

Comment Re:Pathetic. (Score 1) 841

According to Wikipedia the Model S can top up 31 miles an hour using a 40 A / 240v charger. 31 miles an hour would be what you need to charge overnight, but 40 A (at 240v!) can hardly be considered 'trickle charging'. 10 of those cars in the same block added on top of even the nightly usage will cause issues in most places.
My (european, so 240v) house is 4 years old an equipped with a 42 A main breaker. The grid behind that is relatively new, 35 A main breakers are more common and older house generally have 25A main breakers. So adding a constant 40A for a few hours is going to have an impact. Upgrading the infrastructure wouldn't be extreme hard, but it would be expensive as there is quite a lot of it.

Comment Re:Pathetic. (Score 1) 841

As much as I'd like to see emission free cars, there are huge issues with electrical cars. Range, charge times and even politics are actually just the smaller issues. The big issue is scaling it up. Imagine what will happen when everybody in your street starts power charging his/her car when they get home from work. There is no way the current electrical infrastructure is going to cope with that, and making it cope is going to be very expensive. Distributing electricity is not quite as easy as distributing petrol. That, and we still haven't got a clean sustainable way of producing electricity which actually scales to that kind of demand.

Comment Re:Read a few articles, not seeing it. (Score 1) 841

Broder is not trying to duck those logs, as seen in his follow-up:

Mr. Musk promised on Monday to write a blog post critiquing my drive and to publish the logs he says he has of how I drove and why the battery pack drained. We will link to those when they appear.

And he actually did link to TFA when it became available, while Musk never even mentions the follow-up.

Comment Re:Good News / Bad News (Score 1) 841

Pre scripted result == Having done your homework

Any car with a range of 244 miles in an EPA cycle will run empty before the day is over when driven hard on an track, you don't need to test anything to expect that outcome. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to write a script towards an expected outcome. And lets not forget, they where right, a Tesla won't reach it's mileage when driven hard on a track. In TFA Musk is actually complaining Broder drove the car to fast, which is an interesting statement about a car marketed as 'a new standard for premium performance'.

Slashdot Top Deals

For God's sake, stop researching for a while and begin to think!

Working...