Status-Q

I shook Elon Musk warmly by the hand and told him I had enjoyed his talk about rockets.  That was more than twenty years ago, when we were both speaking at the same event. (Doesn’t that sound impressive?)  He was talking about future space tourism.  I was talking about creating IT for the developing world. (Doesn’t that sound virtuous?)

I would, of course, completely refuse to shake his hand now.  That’s partly because of, and partly despite, what’s happened since.

Alongside his discussion of space exploration — of which, as a broad generalisation, I am a fan — he also mentioned he was investing in a company that produced electric cars.  He was suggesting that they might one day actually be a really viable alternative to petrol-powered ones, although at the time the likelihood of my ever affording such a vehicle seemed roughly the same as my ever going in one of his rockets.

And yet, only a decade or so after that event, we bought our first electric car to replace our diesel Golf, and have never looked back.  And a little over four years ago, by shaking our piggy-bank very hard, we bought one of his Tesla Model 3s, which not long afterwards became the best-selling car in Europe.  Note that I didn’t say the best selling EV… there have been several months where it was literally the best-selling of all cars.  Nowadays Tesla models still regularly hit the top-10 lists even now they have a lot more EV competition, and despite the key Tesla numbers now being split between the Model 3 and the newer and more popular Model Y.

So Elon Musk, in my eyes, built up a huge store of credit, because I believe he has single-handedly done more than any other living person to combat climate change.  That’s quite a bank balance.

Though he neither founded Tesla nor designed the cars himself, his perseverance, vision, and willingness to spend his cash where others weren’t, has dragged an entire industry, mostly kicking and screaming, into a far better place, both technologically and for the planet.  I remember the shock of traditional car dealers in 2016, trying hard to sell a few more cars at discounts to fill their next quarter’s quota, when it was announced that quarter of a million people had put down a deposit for the recently-announced Model 3: a car they had never even seen.   It took that kind of major eathquake to rattle the enormous global inertia of the fossil-burning world and to kick investment in battery-production up to a whole new level.   I won’t pretend Musk was doing all of this for purely selfless reasons, or that he did it entirely on his own, but many thousands of Greta Thunbergs combined could not dream of having such an impact.  He changed the world.

Now, it also soon became apparent that Musk wasn’t, let’s say, an entirely reliable figure!  It’s funny now, looking back, to think my main criticism of him used to be his inability to hit his unrealistic deadlines, and the number of his announced products that never saw the light of day at all.  There are drivers now on their third or fourth Tesla who still can’t get the ‘Full Self-Driving’ feature they paid for with their first!

But since then, it won’t have escaped your notice that almost every day’s news has included some new and bigger reason to doubt, dislike, ridicule or fear him, and even the significant amount of slack I was willing to cut him has long since been exhausted.

But here’s the thing.  My Tesla is still an annoyingly wonderful car.  

It’s not perfect, of course. I bought the Model 3 after having tested several other cars, knowing that it was really too big for European roads, and that it was pretty foolish to buy any car that doesn’t have a hatchback, especially if you regularly transport things like dogs and outboard motors.    There wasn’t a dealer close to me. And I knew that, say, the Polestar 2, a similar price at the time, was a more sensible shape and probably much better mechanically.  (It’s basically a Volvo, after all.)  

But I also knew that Teslas had by far the best software, the best battery-management, and the best charging network, all substantially as a result of the headstart his investment gave them.  I wasn’t buying just a car, I realised, I was buying into an ecosystem.  So far, I’ve never regretted that choice.

What I didn’t know at the time was that the car would continue to get better during my ownership, as a result of those regular software updates which arrive every month or two.  Here are a couple of examples:

1. Lights

When I bought it, I was sad that the Model 3 didn’t have those smart matrix headlights some other expensive cars were getting.  Certain Audis, for example, would dim the sections of the headlight beam that were pointing at oncoming cars, to stop them dazzling other drivers. Ah well, I thought.  You can’t have everything.  

And then, about three years later, a software update turned them on.

Eh? What? I didn’t even know I had the hardware; I thought they were ordinary headlights!  

But no, the possibility of individual LED control was built-in, and so after I had already clocked up more than 20,000 miles, the car got a new feature. For free. Which works really well. And it’s smarter than many other systems because it’s based on the computer’s model of surrounding vehicles, rather than just on the detection of headlights, so it will try to avoid blinding cars in front of you in the same lane too, whose drivers might otherwise be dazzled in the rear-view mirror. And I’ve seen it do the same for cyclists.

Many of the visible updates are small and incremental. But this was a really nice big present, and completely unexpected.

2. Brakes

Just before Christmas, I was reversing off a shop’s forecourt into a side-road.   I pulled out promptly, turning as I did so, because I needed to get into a gap in the traffic.  At the same time, a woman who had been pushing her bike along the pavement suddenly turned it out and crossed the road right behind me.  I had no way of knowing she would do that — I was already moving but she was looking the other way — and, though I wasn’t going very fast, it could have been a very bad morning for both of us. I’m pretty sure she would at least have gone to hospital with a broken leg.

But the car saw her, and reacted much quicker than I could, slamming on the brakes so hard that I thought I had hit something solid.  I worked out what had happened (and later verified it on the car’s automatic camera recordings).  Meanwhile, the cyclist walked merrily across and then cycled off, unaware of her really quite narrow escape.  Perhaps she was wearing headphones.

Only a few months ago, a software update introduced an enhancement to the emergency braking which tracks the trajectory of surrounding objects and pedestrians, and works out not just whether they are right in your path, but whether they will be when you get there. I suspect it was probably that which allowed her to walk away oblivious and unharmed.  But it wasn’t part of the car when I purchased it, and it didn’t cost me a penny.

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So yes, I do love this car, and especially the associated ecosystem.  It cost us a lot of money, and it’s depreciated a significant amount since then, but it’s been completely reliable so far and the running costs have been very low.  For all of these reasons, I expect to keep it a long time.  

Which is good, because, since the US election, in which one member of our household voted, I don’t think I’ll be allowed to buy another Tesla in future unless something pretty drastic changes!

Hopefully we can keep this one long enough for some of the competition to catch up a bit more.   There’s now a really good choice of other vehicles, and their battery management is getting a great deal better.   Personally, I think the local Kia dealer would be my first point of call if I had to change.  But a lot of them are more expensive than Teslas now, and have neither the same charging capabilites nor such good and regular software updates.

Still, Elon set the bar high, and Tesla keeps providing the competitive stick driving much of the rest of the industry forward in the hope of those “Could this be a Tesla-beater?” reviews. So I have high hopes for the future.  

In the meantime, we feel a bit better from having one of these stickers in the window!

Regular readers will know that I like electrifying things.  Our car has been electric for nearly a decade now, and we also have a lawnmower, a strimmer, two hedge-trimmers, two bicycles and a range of other devices powered by batteries. We also generate most of our own electricity, and buy the rest overnight at cheap rates from renewable sources.  All very satisfying.

Perhaps my favourite such purchase, though, is our electric outboard motor, which makes powered boating as pleasant as sailing, and has provided us with no end of peaceful enjoyment.  

Larger boats, however, are a problem, when it comes to electrification.  

Though there are some bigger ships and even some car ferries powered by batteries, they tend not to cover very great distances.  Meanwhile, traditional shipping burns vast amounts of fuel, and typically very dirty fuel, because the big diesel engines can make use of far less refined oils than the stuff we use on land.  (And, ironically, something like 40% of all global shipping consists of the transport of fossil fuels themselves to other places that want to burn them!)

I can’t help wondering whether more shipping could be powered by nuclear reactors.  This is, of course, already used for submarines, primarily because nuclear reactors don’t depend on oxygen.  But suppose you want propulsion that doesn’t depend on carbon either?  Still, nuclear fission does have some challenges of its own.

So I think many people are hoping that the big cargo ships of the future will carry hydrogen tanks instead of diesel tanks, and that will be the eventual answer to how we make them cleaner, at least until we have mobile fusion reactors that can extract deuterium from the sea water en route…

But there may be another important option, which comes not so much from the future, as from the past.

Last month, for the first time in nearly a century, a large cargo ship set off across the Atlantic powered almost entirely by sail.  (See this Fast Company post for the details.)  These are sailing ships for the modern age, taking advantage of carbon-fibre masts, meteorological forecasts tied to the routing software, and automations that allow them to be sailed by a very modest crew.  Winds are easier to predict than in the past, and spars and sails can be bigger while still being manageable.  TOWT, the French company behind the ships, has two in operation now, and six more on order.

I’ve no idea how significant a part of our future shipping needs could be met this way, but I really hope they can play a substantial part, because, quite apart from everything else, aren’t they beautiful?

Rory Sutherland has a nice piece with this title in The Spectator.  Excerpt:

As you are reading this, thousands of the world’s cleverest people are spending billions to increase the range of electric car batteries. The reason for this is to reduce a phenomenon called ‘range anxiety’. I suggest that it might be a lot cheaper to reduce anxiety than it is to increase range.

The truth is there is no such thing as range anxiety…

I’ll let you read the rest.

This also reminds me that if you missed Geoff Greer’s review of a gasoline-powered car last year, do go on to read that afterwards!

Many thanks to Peter Robinson for the link to Rory’s piece.

The idea that electric cars are a serious fire risk is one that has established itself in people’s minds, chiefly because such headlines increase advertising revenue for newspaper editors.   If you can’t get a scare story with ‘Elon Musk’ in the title, at least try to include some reference to ‘Tesla’! When a big fire occurred in the car park at Luton airport recently, there were immediate reports suggesting it might have been started by an EV. This was pure speculation, and later, of course, when it turned out to have been a diesel, this wasn’t worthy of any headlines.

Yes, it is the case that EV batteries can catch fire due to thermal runaway, but this is also so rare that there has been very little data on the actual details.  So the Australia-based organisation EV FireSafe has been working to put together some proper statistics, by gathering as much information about EV fires around the world as they can, and their website is a great reference. They also train firefighters on how to deal with such incidents.

First a few basics:

• All cars can catch fire, for a variety of reasons.  EVs are much less likely to do so than other vehicles, though to some degree this is because they are generally newer.
• The difference between EVs and ICE vehicles is that, if the main traction battery is involved in the fire — which is certainly not always the case — the fire will be of a different sort, and generally much harder to extinguish, especially by fire crews who don’t yet have much experience of them.
• It’s very rare that the battery or charging system is the independent cause of a vehicle fire.
• EV batteries tend to burn very hot and for a long time.  They don’t tend to explode.
• You can’t put out such fires with foam, and what you really want to do is just to cool everything down with lots and lots and lots of water. Some fire crews have been nervous about dangers of electrocution from pouring water onto high-voltage batteries, but the risks of this turn out to be exceedingly small and there have been no known incidents with any such problems.
• A few past reports have been dramatically skewed by including e-bikes and e-scooters in a general report on ‘EVs’.  Bikes and scooters have a much higher risk: they are not subject to the same kinds of regulation, there are third-party and counterfeit batteries on the market, batteries are often used after they are dropped or damaged, and so on.  
• Here we are only concerned with cars and other large EVs, and in fires involving the traction battery, which is the thing that distinguishes them from vehicles which carry, say, a tank of highly-flammable liquid instead.

So how common are these fires involving the battery itself?

Well, after gathering as much data as they can about such fires since 2010, they have identified about 400 incidents, from something like 40 million EVs on the road.   They acknowledge that the data is far from complete — they gather what they can from academic surveys, reports by firefighting organisations, and so on — but it’s also better than most other analyses. And it’s worth remembering that a lot of fires involving the battery are not caused by the battery – they’re caused by things like arson, or the car being in a building which caught fire and burned down around it, and so on.

In other words, the risk is tiny.  If you have an e-scooter charging in your garage, you should be more worried about that than the EV sitting on your drive.

If you’d like to know more about the subject, I recommend the Fully Charged podcast episode 244, which has an interview with Emma Sutcliffe of EV Firesafe – available from all good podcast apps, or on the Fully Charged website.

A wonderful review by Geoff Greer compares one of these gasoline-powered cars to the experience of driving a normal electric one.

Here’s an excerpt:

Refueling was a mixed bag. Whenever I parked in my garage, I had to suppress the urge to plug the car in. Gasoline is only available at special stations, and it is prohibitively expensive to get a gasoline line installed in your home. So unlike a normal car, you don’t wake up every morning with full range. The only way to add range is to go to gas stations. These are similar to fast charging stations, but smelly and more dangerous.

I’ve been driving electric cars for over seven years now, so the very rare occasions when I visit a petrol station — a couple of months ago to buy some screen wash liquid, for example — definitely do remind me of what I’m (not) missing!

Anyway, do read the whole thing.  

Thanks to John for the link.