Fact Checking Tesla's “Impact Report”
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
But these aren't the same thing.
The set "all vehicles in the US" contains both ICE vehicles _and_ hybrid/battery-powered EVs. But Tesla is explicitly only talking about ICE vehicles, and Tesla doesn't specifically indicate whether they're talking only about US ICE vehicles or all ICE vehicles worldwide.
I'm not sure what the source is for Tesla's number, and it's entirely possible it's inaccurate, but The Drive's counter-argument makes an apples vs. oranges comparison.
"In one recent report about police vehicle fuel consumption, the cruiser studied was found to idle 60% of the time during normal operation and used 21% of its total fuel while parked. While the engine provided 250 horsepower (hp), together all of the accessories needed less than 2 hp. (Air conditioning consumed the most power, followed by external lighting.)"
https://afdc.energy.gov/files/u/publication/idling_emergency...
I will go one step further, The Drive's number is just straight dishonest. It lists that number as "the average fuel economy of all vehicles in the US hit 24.9 MPG in 2017". If you click through to the EPA report it list that 24.9 number as for "all new vehicles". It also says the number was 23.6 in 2012. The average car on the road is roughly 10 years old so that 23.6 number is still too modern to apply to "all vehicles in the US". So if you subtract non-ICE vehicles and factor in that MPG has been improving, the 22 MPG number from the original report seems perfectly reasonable.
Is this meant to be an off the cuff remark, or is a ton of carbon and 500,000 cars meaningfully linked?
(Is that worse or better? Worse, because lying on purpose would be more obvious, even without fact-checking. Well, that's the hope — can't say for sure...)
> It's no surprise that the electric automaker is having a positive environmental impact, so why does it need to exaggerate the good and gloss over the bad?
I have a similar view of this article as this article has of Tesla: Why does it need to exaggerate the bad and gloss over the good?
The only hard number it criticizes is the number Tesla used for the average mileage of the US fleet (25.4 vs 22) - nevermind that the higher efficiency would work in their favour: it would mean that the same number of Tesla vehicles displaces a larger number of ICE-vehicles.
Oh, and the author doesn't like that the report includes both the to-date solar electricity generated by Solarcity (13.25 TWh) and the to-date electricity used to charge Tesla fleet (5.26 TWh).
There's lots to criticize about Tesla, but this article doesn't do a great job of it, in my personal opinion.
I don't think your math is right on that- higher efficiency in ICE vehicles would mean that the Tesla vehicles displaces fewer ICE vehicles, would it not? It would make their claim that Tesla is "the equivalent of saving emissions from being released into the environment from over 500K ICE vehicles" closer to 425K ICE vehicles.
Hard to tell - the report doesn't show all it's math so there are two ways to interpret. But I'll post the relevant paragraph from the report here:
> Over 550K Tesla vehicles have been sold, and they have driven over 10B miles to date, resulting in a combined savings of over 4M metric tons of CO2. This is the equivalent of saving emissions from being released into the environment from over 500K ICE vehicles with a fuel economy of 22 miles per gallon (MPG).
The way I read that, the hard number is 4 million metric tonnes of CO2 (which they determined is equivalent to 500000 vehicles at 22MPG, given average distances driven and CO2 output from that amount of gasoline). If my interpretation is correct, it would be equivalent to (500000*25/22=) 568 thousand cars at 25 MPG (the more efficient cars put out less co2 per mile, so the same amount of co2 reduction is equivalent to more cars).
But it may just be worded poorly, and they know how many cars it kept off the road, and calculated their emissions savings based on an equivalent average of 22 MPG. In which case, your calculation would be correct.
Car enthusiasts & journalists have a storied history of being biased against electric and/or self-driving vehicles.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2008/dec/24/jeremy-clarkso...
They have a product their buyers like, but the car doesnt have buttons or a center console. "Good" is in the eye of the beholder.
Tesla has a weird situation that despite a product that breaks often and doesn't have niceties, their customers have a high satisfaction.
It doesn't matter what you personally think.
You're not the target market. Really it's for people who don't have money for a model s/x who don't care about touchscreens and want to control the car from an app.
(fwiw: I'm not the market either, I want a dashboard)
What's kind of interesting is looking at older model S cars and searching back for what the UI looked like in the early years vs what it looks like now. Looks loads more modern now. These folks have upgraded their cars like their iphones throughout the years. The "niceties" are software and have just appeared over time.
I recommend both of you to just go visit a Tesla store and do a test drive. At least it will help preventing the spread of misinformation.
How many people do you really think are going to read their claims, then read that their claims are not fully backed up, and then decide to boycott the company?
Versus how many people read their claims, and have been reading their previous claims, and are already sucked into Tesla's "Saving the world" narrative.
For those people, stuff like this "Impact Report" aren't deciding factors, but are a part of a larger effort at Tesla to imbue a sense of 'higher purpose' or something along those lines.
There's little downside to this kind of fluff.
...and which claims can't be backed up? If you look at average existing ICE vehicle mpg (not counting hybrids and electrics), Tesla used the correct numbers.
This guy can’t get over the fact that Tesla hasn’t failed. Makes me wonder how much he lost shorting the stock.
This statement about Autopilot is flatly incorrect. AP has worked on every road and street I have driven on for at least a year without caveat. I’m not sure where he gets the “supposed to” from, but I have never seen such warning, nor does the car itself seem to have any significant problems navigating non-divided roads.
This is a terrible article that smacks of fear-lingering.
He's been anti-PHE/EV for over a decade at this point.
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/opinion/30neidermeyer.htm...
He's been focusing on Tesla recently, but that's only because they're pushing EV production more than anyone else.
But its 2019, if you still believe Tesla doesn't have ethics problems, you haven't paid attention or don't care.
Get ready for the dated South Park reference. There is enough smug people who like to smell their own farts.
https://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.a...
eg it does look like Time, Inc owns it, and the new owner of Time, Inc does sit on the board of both a Thai Gas company and some other (Thai?) energy company.
`True Multimedia Company Limited provides high-speed multimedia network services in Thailand. `
... which seems completely irrelevant.
Maybe provide better references? :)
http://fortune.com/2018/11/09/fortune-sale-chatchaval-jiarav...
(tl;dr : 'very very very few' is entirely relative )
I don't know if comparing frequencies is such a hot idea with regards to a paradigm shift.
If that's the comparison you want to make, the few AP accidents that have happened are infinitely more than came before Tesla.
Since there is no A/B comparison to make in order to judge severity, maybe we should treat every AP accident as important and research worthy until there is a standard to compare against -- unless of course you want to compare AP to non-AP crashes, but that metric is mostly only useful for marketing AP towards people, not improving the system itself.