Or super great for EV’s in urban environments.

Uh… no? Nobody drives at 5mph for more than a few hundred yards in a parking structure. That’s my point in that sentence, and why I went on to speculate on a possible real-wold use case, using many assumptions that may turn out to be wildly unrealistic.

The photo shows the car getting a 16kW charge rate while driving at 5mph. So you could get 16kWh of energy if you drove on this kind of road for an entire hour, at 5mph. Pretty worthless.

I’d love to know what sort of charge rate you’d get while driving at 35 mph, the standard speed on surface streets. Based on what little I know about inductive charging, I’d guess that the charge rate will be dramatically slower.

But if you get even 5kW while driving at 35 mph, I think that’d actually be pretty useful. Assuming that you get a significant efficiency increase at such a speed (5 mi/kWh seems reasonable), then going 35mph would use up 7KwH of energy per hour of driving. If you can restore 5 of those kWh from the roadway itself, you’re getting back over 70% of your energy usage while you drive.

The question then, however, is “How efficient is the energy transfer?” Because I doubt it’ll be very good. It’ll be rather expensive to pay for that “charge while you drive” power if you’re only getting 30-40% efficiency (at a guess). Some folks might be willing to pay that premium, but by the time this tech is ready to go to market, I imagine most people won’t really feel the need to “charge while you drive”.

I’ve owned Teslas for almost five and a half years, and the service I’ve received has been near-universally exemplary. And my 2018 Model 3 needed a lot of service.

Over my 5-year ownership of that Model 3, it had 12 unscheduled service visits, including Mobile Service. Every single one was an entirely positive experience. The sole complaint I would lodge is that it took longer than I would have liked to get my car fixed after the inverter blew early last year. It would have taken 10 days, but the replacement inverter my local service center got from Tesla was also bad, so they had to wait to get a second one in. Overall it took 22 days to get back into my car. During the first week I got around on free Uber credits from Tesla, but they eventually managed to get me loaner, which I used for the other two weeks.

I now own a 2023 Model Y, and it’s needed service once, for a rattle triggered by particular frequencies coming from the sound system. The reason I only said “near-universally exemplary” in my opening paragraph is that they actually failed to fix the problem on the first service visit. Shortly after I got back in my car, I heard the rattle again. I texted my service rep and she said to put in another service request, which I did, and scheduled it for two days later. That time, she and another tech worked closely with me to come up with a perfectly reliable method of repeating the rattle, and also helped me discover that it wasn’t actually coming directly from the speaker, but rather from the trim near the speaker.

The problem ended up being some broken clips that were resonating at those frequencies. Replacing those clips with intact ones fixed the rattle.

Every interaction I’ve had with Tesla service staff has been positive. They’ve all been gracious and helpful, never rude. They’re generally quite prompt to respond to texts sent through the Tesla app (which is your primary point of contact with service if you’re not physically present at the service center), and they’ve kept me up to date on essential progress during longer service visits (which is how I know they got a bad inverter 10 days into the repair of my Model 3). And note that this has been at three different Tesla Service Centers in the LA area: Burbank, Costa Mesa, and West Covina.

That’s my point. What if a minority of the workers at the hospital were striking. Say, the x-ray technicians. Would you be OK with PostNord not delivering essential materials to the hospital because the x-ray techs are striking?

I’m against this policy because the entire concept of sympathy strikes is bullshit. If you go on strike, you don’t work. That’s what a strike is.

Basically everywhere in the world except Sweden, it’s super illegal to keep working but just screw over a single company when you work for some other company like a postal service.

Imagine if Postnord’s union workers decided that they didn’t like something about the biggest hospital company in Sweden, and “sympathy striked” to prevent their medicine from being delivered. Would you be OK with that?

My econobox Prius C had scheduled six-month maintenance, too. That said, it was free for the first three years as a factory standard, and I paid (probably too much) for the extended warranty that upped that to five years.

I got the same treatment you got at Mercedes when my Model 3 shit the bed early last year. Inverter malfunction blew the pyro fuse, and I had to get towed to the Tesla service center across town. They profusely apologized that they had no loaners at the time, but would get me one as soon as possible.

They gave me free Uber credits for the week it took them to round up a loaner, which I drove for the next two weeks while they waited to get a good replacement inverter (the first one they got also went bad during their testing).

It’s been a common saying in the Tesla community for years that “test drives make wallets cry”.

Musk hasn’t been the richest in a while. His Tesla stock lost too much value and he spent $40 billion on Twitter.

Don’t count on it.

Idle fees at Superchargers have been the same for almost a decade.

How to say “I have no idea what I’m talking about” without actually using those words.

This is straight up wrong. It’s completely safe to charge to 100% occasionally. What you need to avoid is leaving your battery at 100% frequently or for extended periods. What matters is time spent at 100%.

Don’t charge to 100% every night, and don’t charge to 100% and then leave the car alone for a week. Feel free to charge to 100% before leaving on a road trip, and overnight at your hotels on said road trip, though. And the occasional 100% charge at a DCFC is also fine, if the charger’s not busy and it’ll help you skip a charging stop later.

How in the world did you interpret this announcement that way?

…what? Everyone pays per kWh at Superchargers, outside of places where that’s illegal and Tesla charges everyone by the minute. How did you get in in your head that different cars pay for charging in different ways?

If you need to go above 90% to get to your destination, the likelihood of there not being an online Supercharger on the way to your destination is almost 0% these days. The network is extremely dense, and also extremely reliable.

And in those exceptionally rare circumstances where that’s not the case, you just have to spend a few extra bucks.

No Tesla owner is going to just park on Supercharger spot just to be an asshole, when they could park anywhere else in the lot. Superchargers are almost always placed in undesirable parking locations in the lots they’re in, specifically to avoid this.

Won’t work, 'cause that’d completely screw over working class people who still rely on gas cars to get to work and such.

Or just… make compelling EVs that are priced right? Nobody who’s doing that is having any trouble selling their EVs.

Didn’t they only deliver like 25 cars at the Model S Plaid delivery event, too? This seems like a non-story.