I find it unlikely he paid for much of the motors. The original S motors are known to be less reliable and many have been replaced under warranty. I wouldn’t be surprised if all of them were replaced under warranty.

Right, there are a bunch of Model 3/Y aftermarket wheels also and they don’t come with airbags either. You just reuse the existing one. The rest of the parts are direct swaps.

Yep, I see it as the same thing as the CC / AP speed limit. Here in California even 1 mph over the limit is “illegal”, but few people observe that strict limit, so 5mph over is very common.

I expected more too, but the “jam” lasted seconds. Seems like the bottleneck is simply the parking situation.

When the ID.3 came out, it was projected it would easily smash the Model 3 given it’s a body style that works far better for Europe, plus with the home advantage of VW being a German brand. I’m surprised the Model 3 was able to sell almost twice as much. Would be interesting to see next year how Model Y performs. That…

This whole article glosses over that fact that fuel cells have extremely low power density compared to batteries, and hydrogen ICE isn’t much better. The whole statement is extremely handwavy, but that is par for the course for most hydrogen discussions. There is nothing substantial that suggests they will use…

But that has nothing to do with swapping chips. An exploit on their firmware process can brick their fleet even if they stick to the same chips. When they decided to have OTA firmware that makes changes to drive systems, that risk is already inherent (while most automakers only allow updates to infotainment OTA and…

The USB ports are connected to the MCU which is isolated from the vehicle controls (the whole MCU can shut down and there would be no affect on vehicle controls). They are not connected on the same bus (no engineer would design it that way in the first place).

It was not consumer grade but industrial grade. I believe no supplier made a touch screen that large in automotive grade at that time, given no car used touch screens that big. So they did internal testing on an industrial grade panel and deemed it worthy. Industrial grade is just under automotive grade, so probably…

This is how they operated from the start, including other hardware changes unrelated to chips. They have versioning and depending on what hardware you have you have a different software release cycle (for example people with cars after the recent chip shortage have reported they are much slower in getting updates).…

Yes and a true capacity test requires at minimum a full charge/discharge cycle, which is not practical in a swap scheme unless you keep lots of stock (not to mention the extra wear on the pack, electricity costs, and the time it takes). It’s not like a propane tank where you can do a pressure test in minutes and the…

Putting aside that MOUs aren’t really worth much (BP signed a similar MOU with Nio in 2018 and it went nowhere), Sinopec is China state owned. As for Shell, they invested in similar greenwashing schemes like hydrogen stations, where they raked in plenty of California government money for stations that have done…

Except batteries are a lot more complicated than propane tanks to evaluate. And given packs are not standardized (not even in the above examples, they only work for one brand) it’ll be hard to build up enough volume and essentially you will only have one choice. The biggest problem is as pointed out elsewhere, there…

Yep, this idea only works when governments are subsidizing things, which is what China is doing. CARB pulled their support in favor of hydrogen, so the idea never went anywhere, plus they never gave upfront grants/loans like the Chinese local governments were doing. DC fast chargers are a far better investment for the…

It works in China because the local governments are willing to subsidize the stations. Here in the USA, not even California was willing to subsidize it. CARB gave some credits to Tesla, but they quickly removed it in favor of supporting hydrogen and the support was never anywhere near what Chinese local governments…

Given the report doesn’t say the Land Rover driver was injured, I’m not sure if this disproves SUVs are safer. They may be more susceptible to roll overs, but modern cars have side airbags, some with laminated glass to prevent you from being thrown from the compartment, so the probability of serious injury from roll…

That had me scratching my head also. AFAIK the mobile carriers announced years ago they were going to phase out 3G even with deadlines (which they have since extended) and the automakers still chose to stick with 3G when they obviously knew it would sunset while the car was still well under warranty?

The people shopping this car would likely be other Mercedes buyers that just got the electric itch and the pricing is in line with the S-Class which is its gasoline analog. Mercedes was never about value for the dollar and I imagine most of the cars are leased. Although things are different due to the distorted used…

I like that this is a hatch, but does the load floor/rear lip really need to be that high? Looks like in the rear part, pretty much all the height is below that lip, and it looks fairly shallow (not sure if this is a distortion from camera lens or dimensions of car).

I can’t believe I even have to point this out, but obviously what people are talking about is bringing Tesla cars to test too. This is not some unusual request and had been done before.