If you want climate on (such as in the middle of a snow storm in that example), the answer is no, you can’t turn it off. There are some drivers that are smarter and turn the car off, turn it on occasionally to get heat again, rinse and repeat, but few people know to do this or it would be too much work for them. You…

People don’t buy cars based on need though, it’s more on wants and perhaps occasional need (for example that once a year trip). If everyone bought based on needs, we wouldn’t have cars without so many speakers, power locks, windows, infotainment, etc.

Just giving some very basic tips to extend range that costs little or nothing to implement. You could also just drive like normal and will likely do just fine, much like other instances where people get stuck in traffic for many hours. EVs in general outperform when in heavy traffic situations. There is no need to…

AC doesn’t actually consume much energy. With the compressor at its lowest setting, it consumes about 1kW (or about 4 miles of range per hour), at full board 6kW (about 24 miles per hour).

Yeah, whenever I get stuck in traffic, I always end up using less range than if I went full speed. So EVs actually perform better in evacuation situations (where traffic would be at a crawl) than they do in a regular commute with little or no traffic.

The fears are unfounded. Your colleague ran an article about a grid lock situation where cars got stuck for hours and the EV fared a lot better than gas cars that ran out of gas of the idling:

It downloads over wifi automatically but it is up to you to schedule the time to do it. It does display a nag for you to schedule a time, but you can easily close it. For critical updates, sometimes Tesla pushes the update over LTE, but still up to you to schedule the time.

What you describe are patches which are not viable at scale for cars because there’s too many components that are interlinked and it can have much more serious consequences than in normal computers (plus FMVSS needs to be met with any change). Tesla engineers have sometimes pushed out patches for individual people,…

They did, it seems NHTSA is taking issue with the amount of time it remained stopped. From the report:

3) this is not as big a deal as people make it out to be and will only be a relatively minor tweak to the software, same with the previous recall of FSD Beta when they removed rolling stops via an OTA update.

In addition to lines painting the pavement a different color (typically green) probably is more effective as it provides a visual separation. Just having lines makes things blend in for people and they don't feel like they are going into a separate space when they drive over it.

Who says anything about free? Other than parking meters, there’s also a thing called a residential parking permit, which is very much not free. I take it you haven’t owned a street parked car in a city.

Already explained, most self driving car companies choose SF as a testing location because it provides a very diverse driving environment in a small area: there’s downtown, suburb type roads, commercial/industrial areas, hills, plenty of traffic of all types (cars, pedestrians, bikes, double parking, trucks, buses,…

He’s talking about why the companies chose SF. Keep in mind it was not SF that chose them, it was the companies that chose SF because it was a complex environment, and SF does not have the power to ban them (SF would have if they did), that is up to the state.

You are assuming SF chose them instead of them choosing SF. If you read the actual article SF isn’t exactly welcoming them, only that SF doesn’t have jurisdiction to ban them (that’s up to CA which had been relatively lax in approving their operations).

The locks may disengage, but you don’t want the latches to open. That increases the chances of the passengers being thrown out in a crash.

This was the driver, not the passenger, so there’s no excuse.

Electronic door releases is fairly standard for modern frameless doors that drop down to open, it’s not a special Tesla design.

I'm just commenting because it misleading suggests there is no manual release. Perhaps they could have designed it in a mode obvious way (but it’s already very obvious, most people grab that by default when they first get the car, the door button actually people have a harder time finding, to the point they had to add…

“I, for one, really enjoy the mental image of firefighters dunking a burning car being craned into a tank of water. It has a sort of carnival game ring to it.”