Featured Lordstown Releases Specs On EV P/U

i'd give this one 10 years of proof of concept before purchasing

 

Yep... Most people don't realize that Tesla's greatest strength in the market is how far their refinement of the vehicles software really is... The circuit board the Tesla runs on isn't much different than the circuit boards they use in rockets and fighter jets, which means the software and circuity are optimized for each beyond anything that exists in the consumer market...

Meanwhile over at VW: Volkswagen ID3 has massive software problems, as company begins year of EV introductions - Electrek: "Thousands of ID3 cars will be parked in dedicated rented spaces until the spring when service teams will be deployed with mobile computer stations. New software will be manually installed in this manner for the first 10,000 or so ID3s. A total of 20,000 ID3 vehicles will need to be reworked until the second wave of production begins in May. At that time, further software updates can be deployed over-the-air."

Meanwhile, Tesla just announced a $2K over the air software upgrade to boost Model 3 vehicle performance on a very large scale....

 

Eh, OTA update capability just gives you different problems. There are specific advantages to it but in similar situations elsewhere I don't see it adding up to a general advantage.

 

With everything there are trade-offs. I think Tesla is finding there are more advantages than disadvantages.
This customer thinks so

 

not even 4yrs - if all it gets is typical one-zee - two-zee spotty chargers around this major metropolis or that. Buy into the supercharger - & it may have a snowball's chance .... even tho it 'only' gets 200 miles.
.

 

I'm curious to see how they do with those hub drive things. They've got a reputation for leading to a bone-shaker suspension, but this is a pickup. It might not feel that different.

 

ya, i've read they're not ready for primetime yet

 

They've got plenty of time, given that the website says they're looking forward to moving into that factory.

 

LOL !! Massive software problems - sorry - this gave me a massive VW dieselgate deja-vu.
Does this mean they only hit their EPA goals when they are running on a Dyno?

.

 

That is because Tesla uses a secure vpn connection. The other manufacturers have already demonstrated they do not care about security for communication that can control a vehicle remotely.

 

240 miles
50 grand
towing miles
have to wait for the prototype in Jan.

is tesla giving a hint what the hit will be while towing

 

same variable formula as any other ice or EV. Turns on temperature, altitude, weather, angle of ascent, & weight & CD of the load being towed.
.

 

Towing's going to be a big deal for at least a few.

Here's what I've been thinking about:

I don't currently envisage anyone looking to use an electric pickup for commercial long haul duty. Nothing is ready for that yet. So I'm ignoring commercial use for now.

Some owners are going to tow recreationally. This means they need to haul the camper/boat/ATV sled out to the lake/mountain etc. For this to be successful, they need the same trip-time they've got now. If that falls within the band of onboard battery power, that's great, nothing to worry about at all.

But if it requires a recharge, that's game-changing for the worse. Nobody is going to put up with having to add two room-nights in a motel just to charge up at the halfway point, there and back. Just losing that much time out of a hard earned vacation is already a disaster. Heck, even a 90-minute L3 session is inconvenient, even when a scheduling system is used to guarantee its availability the moment you roll up to it.

Tricky problem, when at least some of the buyers will regard this as their favorite way to use the truck: tow some toys a couple hundred miles out there, stay unplugged for 4-5 days out of necessity, then drag it all back without sacrificing vacation time or their work availability.

 

In other words, it's complicated and a bit of mafhs foo to run the numbers before a trip.

 

Tesla has been offering it since the earliest days... It way easier to get the bugs out after many, many years of using it... They didn't even create a key fob until recently because OTA as well as vehicle access via Tesla App is more secure... People do get caught in dead zones where they can't get in the car, which is one of the reasons they have the little car like FOB now.

 

I'm not suggesting that OTA is a bad way to go per se, just that it isn't automatically better. Earlier in my career I operated and maintained equipment driven by software that was delivered on silicon. You were changing ROM chips to upgrade. Because that's non-trivial, the publisher went to extraordinary lengths to test and validate updated software before release. By and large they were successful. We would typically run millions of dollars worth of production through the system between software updates, and we suffered from very few bugs.

Now that's rare. The attitude changed. Software updates are vastly easier, but because everyone knows this, the testing and validation seems much less rigorous. Far more bugs make it out into live systems, and we get the downtime to prove it. Some of my clients have staff dedicated to circumventing auto-update systems just to maintain order within the enterprise.

I'm not a software developer, I'm not at all current on modern SQA methods. But I've spent my career adjacent to that, and for something like the self-driving Autopilot feature I know I would not want code that had not been through (at least) hundreds of thousands of hours of real-world tests. I know enough about software to know that there are no small changes from one version to another. Change the color of a button in the UI? I would insist on complete re-qualification and I'd be suspicious of any lesser effort.

I kind of doubt they can afford to do it properly.

 

I would suggest their SQA methods are more stringent than the ones you were acquainted with, not less.
The number of variables involved in the ROM chips were likely tiny in comparison to the number of variables involved in a car.

I would not attribute the rare occurrences that are blamed on software to a bad attitude of SQA. Instead, IMO, it is a sign of the huge complexity of the task.

 

Hun motors have been around a long time and are fully understood.

they just don’t belong in any consumer vehicle driving on public roads.

ride quality aside they tend to break when placed on steer axles.

 

The engineering priority in Tesla is same as yours... And making auto-pilot elements available years ago they quickly got millions of hours of error free run time that remains in legally defensible range of acceptable fatalities per year...

As for changing the color of a button in UI, we still live in the wild west! As in there's a special place in hell for UI designers who "improve" on what didn't need improving. As someone who has helped many an elderly person learn a website & social media UI, I can assure you that whenever the UI looked different than before, they'd get upset and want to quit...