Comment by shiroiuma | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shiroiuma | Hacker News Reader

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>It is possible the internal combustion engine+drivetrain is cheaper but it is unlikely to be lighter than the fuel cell and electric motor, and quite unlikely to be as reliable.

Probably not, but it's hard to say really: Teslas haven't been very reliable at all and have had to have their drive motors replaced, whereas modern gasoline engines by Toyota seem to be ridiculously reliable. Reciprocating engines may seem quaint, but with so many decades of work and development, they (or at least some manufacturers) seem to have made them some of the most reliable mechanical machines ever devised. (Of course, this doesn't apply to all manufacturers; I wouldn't count anything by Chrysler here.)

What does seem quite clear is that using hydrogen in an ICE necessarily means a huge hit in efficiency because of the thermal cycle. Why anyone would want to waste time on this solution instead of just jumping straight to the fuel cell + motor drivetrain, I don't know. It's like having a cellphone company and making a fancy new flip-phone when everyone else is moving to smartphones.

> Teslas haven't been very reliable at all and have had to have their drive motors replaced

That's news to me. Actually, I was impressed, given how new Tesla was as a company: several car executives have dismissed them as unlikely to make good enough cars "for a few decades."

Something I’ve noticed as a Tesla owner is that the impression one gets from reading about Teslas online and the impression one gets from actually owning one are almost completely different. I believe there are people with bad Tesla experiences, but I think the severity and frequency of such experiences is magnified by the way the media spins it.

I agree there's a gap, but I've heard both people dramatically insist it's one way, and the other. I don't have a good model of why that might be (other than a coordinated campaign at least one way).

The quality of Tesla varies a lot depending on the factory in which it was built. The ones that came from the USA are probably the worst, especially at the beginning of a model. The ones that came from China are surprisingly better built. We own a Tesla Model 3 built in China, and I could compare the quality to what we drove during our multiple test drives, to what our friends got (built in the USA), and what I saw online. Our car had none of the issues reported by people with cars built in the USA. That explains, in my opinion, the different experiences you see online.

Media distorts the negative experiences, but there are a lot of Tesla owners for which Tesla was the first car. And those people tend not to report issues because they don't have something to compare. I heard about people who could not take delivery of the car because the trunk was not closing and opening properly, and they had to wait for the service to re-align it on the delivery date. For someone who bought a car before, this is hard to accept as "normal".

The quality is probably improving daily, but I would not dismiss any complaints as exaggerated by the media.

I’m not doubting individual complaints, but I’ve noticed for basically every product that the people who are heard in public forums tend to be people who have a complaint while people who are content are often relatively under-represented in such places. And so, if your views of something are formed by reading reviews, you almost always form a more negative review of the thing than you would have if you experience it yourself. Add in various partisan attitudes about Teslas, and I’ve consistently found that the impression I got from reading about Tesla, Autopilot and FSD was significantly worse than the experience of using them.

What gets me is that Tesla seems to have nailed the hard parts about making BEVs (battery/engine management) but struggles with things like interior fittings and vibration noise and some other minor design issues.

Here in Dublin (the one in Ireland) there are a number of Teslas operating as taxis and you can see some of that as plastic parts break off or start making vibration noises as the car ages (and taxis age faster because they have higher duty cycles).

> Teslas haven't been very reliable at all and have had to have their drive motors replaced

Any source for this? Electric motors are supposed to be more stable than ICE.

Have you ever owned a Tesla?

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