Tesla - US employees fighting for us all

Who is the largest manufacturer in the USA state of California. Tesla.  After a four month Cal-OSHA investigation on safety, Tesla was found to have two minor safety reporting issues.

Tesla one-year-in-tesla-update

Remember the NPR/Reveal hit piece on Tesla safety? Tesla sources claimed it was a UAW + a disgruntled employee hit piece. Now I believe that unions have gained many victories for labor - but big unions simply have political agendas. Musk has held off the bad side of unionization by offering great security and rewards for his employees. Now he can offer tremendous safety benefits.

US Jobs, highly compensated and safer. Safest cars in the world.

Profitable company making the cleanest and safest cars in the world. Outcompeting all luxury cars and SUVs, competing (#4) in regular cars, a regular SUV just ahead, and a truck in the wings.

I am not a stock advisor and therefore can't give stock advice, but for me my long Tesla stock purchase is very satisfying.  I own a piece of a company trying to save children. Your children. Our future. Not in a greenwash way but in a concrete here and now.

Tesla has many enemies - Oil and gas companies, the Koch brothers, the UAW, parts and maintenance shops,  gas stations, auto dealers, and old line auto companies.

This is nothing less then a battle for the survival of our descendants and humankind.

From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be rememberèd—
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

The hour seems dark before the US midterms. Foolish men think they can roll back the clock to a smoggy paradise run by the privileged.

Your choice doesn't have to be Tesla which is pricey. A used Volt for $12K can drop your gas use into the basement and involves no compromise. The Bolt is a good electric. If you drive only in the city or local a Leaf can meet short driving needs.

Join us.

Climate Change - Does anyone have kids?

The dull look I get from 3/4 of people discussing global warming ( screw 'change') show the incredible crime the oil companies and their owners have purposefully committed.  A new UN report details time is short by even human civilization's timespan - 22 years to make earth moving change. I believe one day this purposeful genocide will result in a very ugly justice to the fossil fuel barrons involved, their minions, political rulers that went along, and all their descendants. Look at the conservatives rough populist movement and then imagine them without food as the breadbasket of the US bakes in drought. This is in twenty years - not a century.

No amount of science seems to be able move people to leaders who will push renewable energy, carbon taxed economics, smaller families, and sustainable ecological practices. People just can't bring themselves to spend a little more for solar at home or an Electric Vehicle instead of a polluting diesel. One child instead of four. Instead we all paste pictures of our good looking descendents to Facebook. My young men won't be fifty before they are struggling for survival with their families.

Patton Oswalt sounds the alarm better than I:

https://twitter.com/pattonoswalt/status/1049529720503586816

I'm all for human space exploration and even colonization. However even with hundreds of years no other planet exists to make into a paradise - Mars may one day support colonies but it's improbable that it will approach Earth's habitability. So space is great insurance to guard against an asteroid and encouraging a spirit of exploration but don't kid yourself - science has no 'Planet B' for us for centuries if ever. Even a Science Fiction guy can tell you, the vast majority humankind's masses will always be dependent on the good Earth. We stand or fall here.

Apparently we have twenty years to get our shit together.  The time for waiting, crying about the cost to business for survival, is over. Grab your pitchforks.

A nice confirmation from NHTSA - SAFETY !

Hey where was the data on Tesla safety? After all this blog has been big on specs for everything else. I claimed that electrics in general are safer and they are. In particular my latest brand of EV - Tesla.

Basically NHTSA has given the Tesla Model 3 it's best crash rating ever by probability of injury.  Electrek and Tesla have the figures below.

electrek.co tesla-model-3-lowest-probability-of-injury-nhtsa

Tesla - Model 3 lowest probability injury...

Now one thing about the best 50 cars NHSTA injury graph shown in the articles is the Y axis for percentage of injuries across the 50 best cars is blown up a bit ranging from best - Tesla Model 3 at ~5.8% up to  ~ 8.1 % The mean of the worst 40 in the graph appears to be around 8%. These are the top performers but only Tesla in the top 3 positions for safety is broken out by name.  Still a 25% reduction in injury over the pack of safest cars #11-50 is pretty impressive considering the first 3 of the ten are Tesla and then I would guess Volvo + some very high end cars for #4-10.

Now let's look at the figures from Tesla on crashes per mile.

Tesla q3-2018-vehicle-safety-report

Here's the meat:

Here’s a look at the data we’re able to report for Q3:

• Over the past quarter, we’ve registered one accident or crash-like event for every 3.34 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged.
• For those driving without Autopilot, we registered one accident or crash-like event for every 1.92 million miles driven. By comparison, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) most recent data shows that in the United States, there is an automobile crash every 492,000 miles. While NHTSA’s data includes accidents that have occurred, our records include accidents as well as near misses (what we are calling crash-like events).

Basically a Tesla has a 25% chance of crash without autopilot vs the overall rate of crash per mile of all US cars for Q3 2018.  We'll see if these figures hold up for Winter....
So 1 (Tesla US) in 4 (All US) crashes for the same mileage. Cool eh? That's WITHOUT autopilot.
With autopilot that goes down further 1 Tesla crash vs 7 general crashes for the same miles driven.
Then if you are in a crash, injury rate is under 6% vs 8% for the safest cars as shown.

My choice of car is an Electric Vehicle rated best for safety on the planet.  If my health was half as good.

Slippery Tesla

Ok I purposefully made the title sound like a stock shorter's hit piece for a little excitement - I cheated there...

This one is about aerodynamics - which I find fascinating. Again recognizing my betters out there I'm going provide a link to an in depth video way better than my writing can inform you - but first a testimonial.

Many folks care little for efficiency.  I care a great deal for it and Circe my Tesla Model 3 has delivered in spades. Having had a Leaf where I labored to get the watt hour per mile metric under 400 for five plus years I really appreciate the TM3 on efficiency these first 10k miles.

I know you can barely see it but my Trip B is for the whole 10K+ miles I have on the car over 6 months and three road trips - 260 wh/mile.  Now I like to accelerate fast at least a couple of times per short trip in certain places and as needed on long highway trips.  I'm also a steady driver during highway portions when I am not accelerating up to speed so my Trip B down to North Carolina shore - 259 wh/mile.

This is because Tesla has out engineered everyone on coefficient of drag - if you will recall from my statistics blog it's 0.23. That's up there with the slickest vehicles ever made. The hubcap/wheels are particularly amazing which is why when others cry about the aero's not looking like a metallic spider I grin and tell them they are the most beautiful wheels ever made. You can keep all the others.

These wheels in particular are very important for the critical band of 70-75 mph I like on the highway. The Leaf could run this easily but the efficiency dropped like a rock.  Sadly I can't give you exact numbers but I can tell I still ran 300+ with a few miles to spare pushing that first leg of a road trip in the seventies and I love making that first supercharger with 3% and getting back that first half at 120kw Supercharging in 15 minutes for 160 miles of range or so.  We had stopped for lunch and basically got a full charge but we could have easily pulled out after 20 minutes and made it home.

The whole body/chassis design of the Tesla Model 3 is basically this cleverly aerodynamic but you just don't know it. Yet beautiful too - anyone sees that. Well now you can learn in depth - check out this series of two videos by Youtuber Matt Shumaker at Tech Forum. The first is 23 minutes and the second is 12 minutes. Well worth your time on the fine details of auto aerodynamics and the Model 3:

Model 3 Aerodynamics #1 

Model 3 Aerodynamics #2

Tech Forum is really worth a subscribe. I love that Matt mentions the old Honda Insight - a pioneer in efficiency. I really recommend his videos on Tesla. All in all it means I can drive faster and yet be in a fun car that performs way better than the first generation of electrics. So glad Tesla and Franz did such an incredible job!