The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has taken the view that those absurdly gigantic and distracting central touchscreens on almost 160,000 Teslas are defective - mainly because they randomly just go blank after about five years of ordinary driving.  

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Yet another example of Genius Elon’s amazingly cutting-edge technology. The defect this time causes the reversing camera not to work and the windscreen defrosters likewise to fail.  Chimes and other alerts that form part of Tesla’s ‘not really an autopilot’ system also fail to work when this happens.   It’s all somewhat inconvenient if that happens when you’re asleep on the Interstate at 75mph because you put your faith in Electric Elon, and (for whatever reason) you actually thought the term ‘AutoPilot’ was loosely related to what those two words actually mean.  The Feds have taken the inconvenient (for Tesla) view that this is a safety issue - because they say - using what we in the real world might call ‘facts’ and ‘reasoning’ - that the failure of the screen increases the risk of death and/or carnage - and therefore it is deserving of a recall.  The Feds say the defect occurs because the processors driving the fat screens are designed for early obsolescence. Apparently they have a finite number of program-and-erase cycles, after which they simply decline to function any more - a process which takes about five years of ordinary driving. The Feds say this is insufficient for safety-critical features.

Fiat Chrysler has merged with PSA Group and the new entity will be called Stellantis.  Stellantis will become the fourth largest carmaker on Earth, behind Toyota, Volkswagen and Hyundai - but it will be a challenge for Stellantis to survive because it has no sales in China (world's largest car market) as well as massive over-production capacity and commitments with the French Government not to close factories or reduce head count.  

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If you’re in that terrible position - you’ve got a hundred grand in used, unmarked, non-sequential bills, and you need to dispose of it hurriedly … perhaps the BMW 430i could help you out with that.  

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The grille could be a confidence trick, right? Like, the Emperor’s New Grille. Perhaps it’s a mass psychology experiment, designed to test the limits of human attraction.   Anyway - that 430i is an awesome car to drive - in part because it exists in that rare sweet spot between being too hard-edged and performance-oriented to live with daily, and too soft and luxurious to have a real crack in, occasionally.   You can really throw it around. It’s extremely balanced and responsive, but it doesn’t feel like 12 rounds with Madam Lash when you’re just getting from A to B in traffic with everyone else. So, that’s nice.  Just to detain you with the range, and decompiling its DNA: The base model 420i is about $70k, plus on-roads. It’s $19,000-ish more for the 430i that I spent a week test-driving. And it’s another $28k to step up from the 430 to the range topping M 440i xDrive.  Don’t get me wrong here: The 420i is not ‘poverty’ - all 4 Series vehicles get an M Sport body kit and 19-inch alloys. There’s a wireless charging pad for your phone, and faux leather plus alcantara in the 420. 12.3-inch flatscreen instrument cluster. 10.5-inch multimedia screen - nicely integrated - plus voice commands and wireless Apple and Android phone apps.   Wireless. Yesssssss!  However, the powertrain in the 420i … while it’s essentially the same as the 430i, inasmuch as it’s a 2.0-litre turbo four, with an eight-speed auto and rear drive … the engine in the 420 is significantly de-tuned.  It’s pumping out just 135kW and 300Nm, which is good for about 7.5 seconds to 100 - not totally disgraceful, but just for perspective, the dude next to you at a red light, in his Kia Cerato GT, costing half as much … he’s gunna carve you up.   This frown of 420i straight-line mediocrity is of course turned completely upside-down in the 430i, which ups the performance ante to 190kW and 400Nm. Meaning, you’ll definitely consign Cerato-boy to the rear-view mirror if push comes to shove.  With the 430i you also get a clever adaptive damper system, keyless entry, a surround view camera system, and adaptive cruise control.   And of course if you have cash to burn, the M 440i xDrive is quite nice indeed. You get sunroof, premium audio … stuff like that. You also get (standard) those miraculous Laser headlamps.   With the 440i, you also get xDrive, which is BMW-speak for all-wheel drive. It’s hugely rear-drive biased, in line with BMW’s core sporty driving ethos, but I guess the big trick there is its latent ability to engage the front drive to drag you the hell out of a bend if you drive one day as if late for an important job interview after knocking over a bank…  Of course, a certifiably insane M4 is also in the wings, and it’s hard not to cherish the underlying excess at the core of every M car.    Incidentally, the M 440i xDrive gets a straight six with 285 kW and 500 Nm - and if there’s one thing BMW has done brilliantly since approximately the age of the dinosaurs, it’s straight sixes.

Hyundai Palisade - you can see it from space. But, two weeks in - I’m still struggling to figure it out. I’m deeply conflicted here, in the domain of love and hate.

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Top 10 things I love  

LOVE: 

Top 10 criticisms

DISLIKE:

CONCLUSION 

I don’t know that I’ve solved my deep inner conflict here, but I do hope I’ve at least crystallised the cases for and against buying a Palisade - the better to help you make the right choice with a serious wad of cash. 

Internal combustion, dudes: It’s going to underpin transportation for decades to come. If you think internal combustion is dead, it’s time to get on the plane, leave Fantasy Island, and return to the real world.  

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Many fan-boys use that term ‘Legacy carmakers’. (To describe the manufacturers of internal combustion vehicles.)   Legacy: Like EVs have won the battle. And the dinosaurs are dead - they just don’t know it yet.   ‘Legacy’ means (as an adjective): superseded but difficult to replace because of its wide use. I’m not seeing that, in respect of internal combustion.   There is a giant industry operating worldwide - the oil industry. It produces roughly 100 million barrels of oil per day. That’s 16 billion litres per day. 16 million cubic metres. That’s a box of crude oil 40 metres by 40 metres at the base, and stretching 10 kilometres into the air, which is 10 or 12 per cent taller than Mt Everest. And about half of that oil becomes gasoline. Eight billion cubic metres of gasoline - per day.  And it’s cheap. Now, I know climate change is real, but when you look at the sheer size of the oil industry, and the incredible economic edge - combustion versus electric - tht top is not going off, nor being throttled back any time soon. It’s just not.  In fact, the Coronavirus has done more to reduce oil consumption than Tesla could conceivably hope to. (Between 2019 and 2020, crude oil production dropped roughly nine million barrels per day.) These oil data are according to the US Energy Information Administration.  And that alone should convince you of the security of internal combustion as the fundamental means of transportation for decades to come. Here’s another reason, if one’s not enough.  Also in the pesky domain of ontology: Global vehicle production in 2019 was 92.8 million vehicles. That’s global vehicle production, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers Association.  That’s a lot of cars. If you parked them all in a conga line, it would encircle the planet. Twelve lanes wide...  Global EV production 2019: 2.1 million EVs. That’s according to the International Energy Agency. Of those EVs, roughly one in six was a Tesla. (365,300 Teslas were produced in 2019.)  Therefore, total EVs were about 2.3 per cent of global automobile production. That’s not the proportion of EVs actually on the road, in service, which is far less. It’s the latest full-year new vehicle production data. 2.3 per cent of new cars are EVs.  Tesla makes roughly four cars for every thousand cars currently produced globally. This is a very curious position from which even a devoted advocate for the brand could hope to declare dominance.  If, over the next 10 years, EVs grow 10-fold, they’ll represent a quarter of global vehicle production. We might actually see that. And in cities, this would be a really good thing.   What we will certainly see is: increasing choice in the energy mix of cars available new. More hybrids and plug-in hybrids, more full battery EVs, and a smattering of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles also. Underpinned by a foundation of internal combustion vehicles.

Tesla fan-boys routinely claim these cars are superior, technically. Vastly so. Unfortunately, the facts don’t concur.  

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A Model S P100D - the Tesla flagship - weighs 2241 kilos, has an EPA range of 507 kilometres and uses a 100kWh battery. These are called facts. We can all agree on them.

A Hyundai Kona Electric weighs 1685 kilos, has a 64kWh battery and offers an EPA range of 415 kilometres. Also, facts.

So, when you do physics - like, just above basic high school physics - you might ask yourself: ‘What does a technological advantage actually look like?’

Because there really should be some numbers that shine like a beacon, illuminating just how smart and advantageous a Tesla is, because of its alleged incredible technical edge, right? Otherwise it’s all just empty rhetoric.

If something exists ontologically, you can measure it, right? So this alleged superior tech should manifest in a measurable way, by virtue of its objective performance.

Devices with superior tech typically do more with less. A more efficient refrigerator consumes less electricity and yet still keeps the champagne equally cold.

We can measure this kind of thing with epistemological objectivity. (I’m imagining every Tesla fan boy in the universe scratching his head, at this point. Like, what’s that? It’s how science rolls, dudes - with epistemological objectivity. Look it up. Watch the John Searle tech talk at Google HQ, on artificial intelligence.)

I’d suggest that a deep, fundamental Tesla technological advantage would be demonstrated if the Tesla flagship, for example, used substantially fewer watt-hours of electrical energy to transport a tonne of mass over a given range measured against a laboratory controlled test standard.

If it did, we could prove its superiority, objectively. All we’d need are those three previously quoted data points, about which there is no dispute that I know of. We’d just need to calculate watt-hours stored in the battery, per tonne of vehicle, per kilometre of range.

And if you ‘interesting’ fan-boys are right, Tesla should shine like a beacon of technical superiority. And the claim of superiority to which fan-boys adhere would thus be impervious to dispute.

Get a calculator and crunch the numbers for yourself: Model S P100D: uses 88 watt-hours to take one tonne, one kilometre. Hyundai Kona Electric: 86 watt-hours per tonne, per kilometre.

Conclusion: Pretty similar technology. But the Hyundai Kona is slightly ahead on energy efficiency fundamentals. The numbers do not lie. They’re called ‘facts’ and you Electric Jesus fan boys are not required to like this result. However you feel about the numbers, they remain facts. And they say Tesla lacks a measurable technical edge.

So, three parts down - one to go. Internal combustion: not dead, and not dying any time soon. Hate away in the comments, but save your best work for tomorrow, because you Tesla nut-jobs are really going to hate Part Four.

Ahh yes, Tesla makes a profit. Technically. Five quarters in a row, now. I said they sold their cars at a loss, which they do.  Back in July Tesla hit the milestone of four quarters of consecutive profit, which allowed it to join the S&P 500. But Tesla cannot post a profit from the sales of its cars. If Tesla just made money selling cars, Tesla would be routinely losing money.  

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Tesla is only profitable because it sells hundreds of millions of dollars of artificial regulatory clean air credits to other carmakers. Tesla cars get sold at a loss. Tesla turns that around by selling totally artificial bullshit green financial derivatives.  June quarter of 2020 (that’s the fourth consecutive profit one, which allowed it to join the S&P): Tesla made US$428-million selling bullshit regulatory credits. That’s about four times the $104 million in net profit they declared that quarter. In other words, without selling these fake clean air credits to other carmakers, they would have been roughly $300 million in the red.   And that’s a typical recent result for them.  These bullshit regulatory credits are the most high performance financial product Tesla sells. And it works like this: In California, and at least 13 other US states (so, roughly a quarter of the union) carmakers which want to sell cars into those states must sell a certain number of notionally ‘green’ vehicles - EVs, hybrids, like that. Or they face big fines. If they sell more notionally zero emission vehicles than their quota, they get these fake credits.  And the only way to sidestep the fines for failing to sell sufficient green vehicles is to buy bullshit zero-emission vehicle credits from a carmaker which is exceeding its quotas for ZEVs. Since Tesla sells only EVs, it’s got fake credits to burn, so it sells them to carmakers that need them, for less than the fines they would otherwise pay. Kerr-friggin’ ching. There’s the Tesla profit centre. It’s completely artificial.  Selling these credits to other carmakers is the only reason Tesla is profitable, five quarters in a row. And demand for those credits will increase in 2021, until major competition steps in. Without the revenue from the sale of bullshit enviro-credits, Tesla remains wholly unprofitable. Ergo, Tesla cars get sold at a loss. This is very basic.

Part one of my response to your most entertaining feedback. Thank you sincerely for hating my recent ‘Tesla is doomed’ video. Currently hated by 21.2 per cent of you, as I present this package. My near-term hate target is 25 per cent hates...  

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Battery Day - September 22, 2020 - yet another ‘nothing announcement’ from Electric Jesus. Only EJ could hold a battery day and deploy no actual, existing battery, and get away with it. He announced the mythical 4680 battery - which, let’s not forget, does not actually exist. Perhaps in the future, but not now.   There’s a video about the tabless 4680 battery, promises about chemistry, packaging and thermal performance improvements, and some vague tweet from the messiah (after battery day) that he’s got a few prototypes up and running. (But, let’s face it, his track record with the truth is poor.)   But as for actual production of the 4680 battery … it doesn’t exist. It’s just another promise at this point. Sounds great - but I’ll wait until I see one mass produced.  In the domain of actual evidence, Musk did not show a physical example of the 4680 battery on the overly prick-teased Battery Day in September. If one actually existed, don’t you think he would have rolled one out and given the world a look? Like, you would expect to see a new battery on Battery Day, would you not?  One thing I really admire about Electric Jesus is he’s never afraid to announce the latest hunt for the Electric Unicorn. One day he might well return with its head on a stick, and doubters like me will have to eat our words. And I’ll be happy to. But this will not happen any time soon.  On battery Day, Mr Musk also promised to mine lithium from clay deposits after securing a 10,000-acre lithium clay mining lease in nearby Nevada. But, unfortunately:   “There has never been any commercial production of lithium from clay sources.” - Chris Berry  Don’t take my word for this. I don’t know very much about mining. But Chris Berry, president of Mountain House Partners and an analyst who specialises in energy metals exploitation, quoted there from The verge in a feature on Battery Day, and how ultimately disappointing it actually was - he knows a thing or two about lithium mining.  Mr Berry went on to point out that most of the world’s lithium is actually exploited from lithium brine deposits in the so-called ‘lithium triangle’ of Argentina, Bolivia and Chile. And from hard rock deposits here in Shitsville.   Why go to all that trouble, mining lithium so far afield, when you can just suck it out of clay, virtually next door to Gigafactory One? Mr Berry explained:  “Well geez, if it was this easy to find a domestic source of clay-based lithium, and just use everyday materials like water and salt to produce commercial battery-grade quantities [of lithium] at scale, why haven’t we been doing this all along?’”  Pro tip: a typical lithium mine takes about 10 years to get full regulatory approval in ‘Murica. So, don’t hold your breath for Electric Jesus to go 100 per cent ‘loaves and fishes’ with vertical integration on lithium battery production. Or if you do, make it a deep one.

This episode: airing (and responding to) your representative feedback on trailer sway and heavy towing and general heavy hauling highway mayhem. 

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OLIGHT FLASHLIGHT DISCOUNT OFFER 

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I got a heap of interesting comments from you on that dude who threw his boat into the weeds.

Obviously these comments orbit my recent report on this disaster and how to prevent it, which (if you’ve not seen it) you can detain yourself with here: 

https://anchor.fm/autoexpert/episodes/Inside-a-holiday-towing-disaster-----and-how-you-can-prevent-one-enp12v

https://youtu.be/P7-rcSE7s6k

Most interesting comment - just this morning - from Douglas Miller:

"I was one of two tow truck drivers who recovered that boat. The boat had moved back on the trailer. (The winch support had come loose, and slid back.) The owner had said every time he got to 100km/h the car would start to wobble. The vehicle combo was also not weight balanced correctly." - Douglas Miller

Thank you very much, Douglas Miller. Audiences are a fantastic brains trust. Just awesome. See, that’s a really interesting piece of previously unknown information. Boat moves back. Trailer gets less and less stable in yaw. Makes complete sense. Driver even notices this increased propensity to sway … and yet (and this really does my head in):

There’s no evidence that he stopped and investigated the problem. Maybe he did, and he found nothing. But (I’m really trying to be charitable here) if he noticed sway starting at 100 … why not just remain below 100? You know, get back home safely and take steps to get a mechanic or a trailer joint to sort this out.

Noticing sway - which is rock-solid evidence of instability - and then driving like that is … words fail me. It’s not logical. It’s certainly not responsible behaviour.

If the trailer’s not properly load balanced, any external influence, like the Bernoulli/venturi effect on overtaking, the transverse crown - whatever - well, you’ve seen the result.

Pressing on, in the face of this evidence of a major problem, if what Mr Miller says is correct, is incomprehensible to me.

I know Tesla stock is sky high. Higher even than Electric Jesus himself thinks is reasonable. But the world’s leading EV kit car company is doomed, ultimately. Here are the top reasons why.

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Tesla has had essentially zero competition for six or seven years now. 

Next year, however, (2021) just here in Shitsville: Three-pronged Suppository EQ-whatever (five of six of them). Porsche Taycan. Mazda MX-30. XC40 Recharge and Polestar 2. BMW iX and iX3. Lexus UX300e. Volkswagen ID.4. Hyundai Ioniq 5, Kia e-Niro and e-Soul.

These are all proper EVs from proper carmakers - meaning companies, unlike Tesla, which understand how to make cars. Tesla almost knows how to make cars, and they do EV tech pretty well, but the cars and the support are third-rate, at best. 

Viable competition is going to be a new thing for Tesla.

You’ve gotta remember Tesla lacks anything unique - in terms of tech. They use the same battery tech and electric tech as everyone else. The only thing Tesla has, in the domain of uniqueness is...

...when you buy a Tesla you’re also buying a little piece of Electric Jesus. The real world’s Tony Stark. I think this is a fundamental motivator for many Tesla owners. But, clearly, not everyone wants that. Some people just want an electric car - they don’t want to sip the Kool-Aid and join the cult.

So, there will be actual choice, of EVs, with 400-450km range, in 2021. Proper competition. Tesla has never had to operate in a market with actual competition before, and this will place them under additional pressure, for a change.

2021 will see Tesla come up against actual competition from hardcore carmakers, which it is ill-equipped to endure. Tesla seems to have nothing new to deploy in the face of this real commercial assault.

Once the bubble bursts - and it might take until 2022 - and all the hot air leaks out, you’ve got a couple of cool concepts and some poorly made, ageing EVs with a tenuous philosophical link to Electric Jesus … and frankly not all that much else.

So, if you’re Daimler, or Volkswagen, or GM or Ford - would you wait for Tesla to make like the Hindenburg, and swoop in for pennies on the dollar? Or is it just not even worth picking through the ashes? That’ll be interesting to watch. Like, who would buy Tesla after the inevitable purge? Who would want it?

Tesla has only one medium-term trajectory: Failure. Which the market has not yet factored in. Many of you will let me have it in the comments, I know. And you will cite the share price - the market capitalization - as your key repudiation of my position on this.

I’d respectfully retort: Is that the best you’ve got? Markets are famous for ignoring this kind of thing - look at October 19, 1987 and October 6, 2008. Rationality has very little to do with these kinds of inevitable corrections.

It’s certainly been emotional watching EJ and the faithful dance in this (disconnected from reality) way, but at least the entertainment is not yet over. It might even ramp up in 2021.