Range anxiety is a funny thing. You’d think that with today’s long-range EVs and the reliability of, say, Tesla’s Supercharger DC fast charging network, it would largely be a thing of the past, but it isn’t. In the case of Tesla, that’s partly because real-world driving often doesn’t measure up to the official range claims. So, how do you address something like this? By adjusting range ratings downward to better reflect reality and apologizing to owners? I mean, I would, but not everyone would do the same.
Welcome back to The Morning Dump, where we digest the news that’s often a bit short for standalone pieces but still too important to miss. Today, a report claims that Tesla’s been playing range games with customers, chrome plating might be getting banned in Europe, and a ship carrying cars catches fire with a possible electric cause.
Tesla Reportedly Manipulated Range, Hushed Customer Complaints
How far would you go to sweep complaints under the rug? Probably not as far as Tesla’s alleged to have. A Reuters investigative report claims that Tesla manipulated range readings and created a secret team to quash range complaints.
About a decade ago, Tesla rigged the dashboard readouts in its electric cars to provide “rosy” projections of how far owners can drive before needing to recharge, a source told Reuters. The automaker last year became so inundated with driving-range complaints that it created a special team to cancel owners’ service appointments.
First, let’s unpack those optimistic range estimates. According to the report, these were initially programmed into Model S and Roadster vehicles. Once the charge dropped below 50 percent, realistic range estimates were displayed on the onboard trip computer. Above that threshold? Figures were allegedly inflated. As for who commanded this directive, guess what a Reuters source said?
“Elon wanted to show good range numbers when fully charged,” the person said, adding: “When you buy a car off the lot seeing 350-mile, 400-mile range, it makes you feel good.”
You’d likely expect this approach to not go well, and guess what? It didn’t. As sales figures skyrocketed, so did the number of drivers who reported less driving range than Tesla claimed. Clearly, a solution was needed, but it was allegedly much different from the public apology and software fix you’d expect.
Advisers would normally run remote diagnostics on customers’ cars and try to call them, the people said. They were trained to tell customers that the EPA-approved range estimates were just a prediction, not an actual measurement, and that batteries degrade over time, which can reduce range. Advisors would offer tips on extending range by changing driving habits.
If the remote diagnostics found anything else wrong with the vehicle that was not related to driving range, advisors were instructed not to tell the customer, one of the sources said. Managers told them to close the cases.
Ah, so just sweep things under the rug, pull the old “your mileage may vary,” and keep an eye out for any actual range-related issues. Gotcha. However, Reuters reports that the last bit of that process didn’t last long.
In late 2022, managers aiming to quickly close cases told advisors to stop running remote diagnostic tests on the vehicles of owners who had reported range problems, according to one of the people familiar with the diversion team’s operations.
“Thousands of customers were told there is nothing wrong with their car” by advisors who had never run diagnostics, the person said.
Well, that’s one way to speed through concerns, but it’s not especially, um, good. Without diagnostics, it would be possible for a small number of people who actually needed battery replacement due to degradation to fall through the cracks.
The allegations contained within this report are serious, and perhaps the most damning is that Tesla apparently has a new Utah-based team to deal with customer range complaints. Although some deviation from official range estimates is to be expected, it’s usually standard corporate protocol that if issues pile up, it’s time to admit something’s wrong. Hubris typically doesn’t save face.
The Death Of Chrome Has Been Greatly Exaggerated
If you like your trim pieces particularly shiny, I may have bad news for you. British magazine Autocar reports that Europe is proposing a ban on hexavalent chrome from 2024. Wait, that’s next year! However, the ban isn’t without good reason, as hexavalent chrome used in automotive plating is particularly nasty stuff.
The ban has been proposed as a result of health issues associated with the creation of hexavalent chromium, which is a known carcinogen. In particular, it is a source of chronic lung cancer, with the airborne emissions given off during the plating process said to be 500 times more toxic than diesel.
However, plating with hexavalent chromium isn’t the only way to make car parts shiny. Physical vapor deposition, or PVD, allows part markers to avoid the use of hexavalent chromium and still get comparable shine and hardness. So, how does PVD work? There are a variety of methods that can be used, but it all boils down to one of two processes, the most popular of which is evaporation — a solid (trivalent chrome, in this case) is evaporated into gas while under vacuum, deposited on a surface, and then re-solidifies. Of course, you get some overspray with this method so it isn’t perfect, but it’s far more environmentally sensible than plating, provided the right equipment is used.
The bottom line? Even if this proposal gets through, expect chrome to stick around in some form for quite a while. Although it won’t be quite the same as plating, most people won’t be able to tell the difference, and once UV-coated, PVD chrome plastic pieces shouldn’t have major durability concerns.
Another Ship Full Of Cars Has Caught Fire
With so many cars being transported across the world’s oceans every single day, it shouldn’t be horribly surprising that incidents can happen. Reuters reports that one person has died after a cargo ship transporting 2,857 vehicles including 300 Mercedes-Benzes burst into flames off the Dutch coast on Wednesday, and it may have started around an electric vehicle.
The fire might last for several days, Dutch news agency ANP reported, citing the coastguard. Smoke continued to billow from the vessel near the northern Dutch island of Ameland.
“The fire is most definitely still not controlled. It’s a very hard fire to extinguish, possibly because of the cargo the ship was transporting,” said Edwin Versteeg, a spokesperson for the Dutch Department of Waterways and Public Works.
As for the cause of the fire, it hasn’t been firmly established yet, but reports suggest that it could have something to do with thermal runaway.
The coastguard said on its website the cause of the fire was unknown, but a coastguard spokesperson had earlier told Reuters it began near an electric car. Roughly 25 out of 2,857 vehicles on the ship were electric.
This isn’t the first time that a ship containing electric vehicles has gone up in smoke. Back in early 2022, a ship carrying various cars including EVs caught fire and sank. As NPR reports, the Felicity Ace was carrying 4,000 vehicles, among which included Porsches, Bentleys, and Lamborghinis. While something as simple as flammable material in a heating vent could cause a ship fire, electric vehicles onboard complicate extinguishment as thermal runaway can lead to lithium-ion cells self-igniting days, sometimes weeks, after the initial fire. According to established procedures, electric vehicle fires require huge quantities of water to put out, which may risk destabilizing ships. As it stands, there are no easy answers for dealing with electric vehicle fires on ships.
Your Turn
With all the hubbub about a potential chrome ban, I’d like to do an informal poll: Do you like chrome on cars? Obviously, chrome trim doesn’t work on many cars, but an excess of black trim can simply feel boring. What are your limits when it comes to chrome.
Badges? Trim? Wheels? I’d love to know.
(Photo credits: Tesla, BMW, Mercedes-Benz)
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My love of chrome depends entirely on context. Looks good on so many classics, but forced on a lot of cars, and not just modern. There were some gaudy in the worst ways Imperial trim Chryslers…
I love chrome!
Chrome? The way modern cars use -almost exclusively on plastic- it looks terrible to me.
I honestly don’t know why people accept it
The “Electric Version” of the VW DieselGate Scandal……
I’d say it’s a little different.
VW (and the other companies doing the same) were actively hiding the fact that their cars were ruining the environment that we live in and the air we breathe.
Teslas are not achieving quite the range they were advertised to get.
That’s not great, but it’s hardly comparable.
The death of chrome has been greatly exaggerated? Not as greatly as the BMW’s grille.
I’ve never liked chrome, I prefer it to blued steel but stainless is much better than chromed metal.
What I really hate though is the fake chrome that gets all wrinkly after a few years. I’ve dubbed it “Scrotal Chrome”
Polished aluminum is shiny like chrome. More renewable electricity powered aluminum! There’s a reason aluminum smelters and their arc furnaces are often located nearby hydroelectric dams or by power plants.
Chrome is even more outdated than wood dashboards. Fine for an era that’s long past. If I had to pick a reflective metal finish, it’s either low maintenance, less nasty stainless or classier nickel (though chrome is harder, which is why it replaced it). I hope vapor deposition encourages more creative finishes. Maybe titanium could be a thing, for example.
I miss chrome bumpers.
Elon should chrome plate all of the supercharges in Europe just to stick it to them.
Interesting unit of measure. Something like an LD50 might be better.
I wanna know how many packs of cigarettes that is, or bags of Cheetos.
It sounds like the “chrome ban” is simply on one specific plating technology. Not only is there another one described but there’s also stainless steel, polished aluminum and vacuum-“plated” plastichrome.
Chrome looks decent on classic cars. What they need to stop using is black piano trims, looks awful after a few months.
But CSIs love it.
COTD
I agree, but to be fair, with so many overstyled futzy interiors these days, many of them look pretty bad after a few months of accumulating dust and normal use grime anyway. The problem is they are all crevices that are a pain to clean and keep clean. I’d hate to see what’s lurking behind all those ‘floating’ tablets. Probably some sort of ass crack stuff…
Seriously, piano black is just shiny plastic, one of the cheapest, crappiest materials available. If it was actual black laquerwork or ebony, sure, fine, but it’s really cheap plastic that scratches if you glance at it
I’m not saying that what Tesla did is OK, but the article is kind of written to allow a reader to conclude that this is still a thing. They did it a decade ago on Model S and Roadsters. If they’re still rigging range values, this piece of journalism didn’t exactly help clarify the situation
They’re not actually “rigging” anything. They’re reporting approximately the official EPA rated range on the main screen.
If you plug something into the nav or go to the energy screen, it will estimate based on current conditions/speed/etc.
It’s not a secret, or new information that this is how Teslas work.
Should they TRY to better estimate the range on the main screen rather than use EPA numbers? Probably, but the claim that this is all new reporting is silly when Tesla owners and anyone even remotely knowledgeable about Tesla has known this for years.
thank you for satisfying my schadenfreude quota for the day
This is July. right?
No, This is Sparta!
No, this is Patrick!
(sorry… couldn’t resist it!)
Just curious, but how would we know whether the range-fudging stopped? If there are allegations that this is something that Tesla did in the past, it would be naïve to assume that they have stopped doing it.
I see some parallels to the dieselgate scandal in this kind of allegation (assuming there’s some truth to it); regardless of how damaging the actual behavior is, the bigger issue is the discovery of a deliberate effort on the part of the manufacturer to mislead customers and/or regulators.
Every company probably cheats to some extent, but the only deterrent to this kind of deception is to make sure that if they get caught they should expect to pay a hefty price.
Shiny and Chrome! My favorite of the automotive trim options. Sometimes its use may be questionable such as some of the cars of the late 50’s which had lots of interior pieces chromed. For example, the first time I drove a ’59 Cadillac at night, I thought I was getting pulled over out on the interstate as there was so much light bouncing around the inside of that car due to headlight reflections when other cars would go by in the passing lane.
And yesterday, with a heat index of a 105, I discovered chrome may have not been the best way to accent the door handles of my XK8 considering it felt like I burnt my finger-prints clean off trying to get in the car.
So, it may not be the best accent material for all occasions, but I don’t care – as a slave to certain ascetics, I will happily put up with a remarkable amount of inconvenience if something makes me smile when I look at it. And chrome pretty-much always has that effect.
Agreed!
Ditch the chrome. Let’s go back to Nickel and Brass!
And ivory!
Polished nickel does tend to look a bit richer than chrome
I fuckin love it. No such thing as too much. I will ride eternal, shiny and chrome!
That Mercedes is making me squirm. I think it’s the combination of the wheels and face that give me a “centipede about to eat your favorite organs” vibe. I’m okay if every single one of those in existence spontaneously combusts.
It was a soft poop day at the extraction end of the factory.
But tell me again how Tesla is the future and they shouldn’t be given an absolute death sentence of permanent de-certification by NHTSA and EPA for a reckless disregard for safety, repeated proven safety defects, emissions warranty fraud, emissions fraud, and good old warranty fraud.
Go ahead. Tell me.
Physics: NOT JUST A SUGGESTION.
Guess what? All the cultists and outright dishonest yellow-journos at various ‘everything must be EV now’ sites have been lying to you, and continue to lie, and will not stop lying.
Thermal runaway can occur through dozens of mechanisms. Most of them don’t require an ‘impossible’ collision, like driving into the back of a fire truck at 70MPH because Autopilot. Rough seas jostling internals violently on a well secured car, a bad solder joint, the 12V battery dumping amps, an electrical short, damage to the casing, and the list goes on. It is extremely not hard to cause a fire in a battery pack. It’s not trivial, but it’s not some mythical outlier.
And guess what kiddos? The firefighters are not idiots like these yellow ‘journalists’ keep saying. Firefighters are not incompetent. They are not untrained. They do not require the manufacturer tell them how to do their job. They’ve been putting out far worse fires for many decades.
Except those worse fires? They occur in large factories, which have on-site equipment specifically to fight those fires, because you can’t load 50 tons of sand onto a fire truck. And just like you see in ICE fires, putting water onto magnesium? Not a good time. (See also: catalytic converter explosions during extinguishing efforts. That’s why they stay well back. Water is not magic and there are many compounds that react explosively to it when fire is also involved.)
The first part of putting out any fire is to reduce or preferably eliminate sources to feed the flame, like oxygen. Well guess what? You can’t immerse a BEV or flood it with Cardox or Halon because there’s an entire complicated (and also full of flammable bits) car body and interior in the way. So you’re pretty much screwed there.
Which reduces you to trying to cool it down to reduce the chain reaction. Except you still have an entire car body in the way. So water isn’t getting there. Foam doesn’t remove heat effectively. And neither mixes well with electricity. Which leads to – you guessed it – more shorts, more non-battery ignition sources, and more cells entering runaway. Meanwhile, those cells are inside a sealed, thermally insulated case (they have to be. Nissan Leafs with air cooled batteries are the outlier here.) Which means the cooling effect of the water is reduced. While you’re shorting out every wire in the car.
All you can do is sit there pouring in water until the battery pack burns out. You can’t stop it. You can’t extinguish it. And then you have to keep cooling it pretty much indefinitely with full submersion. Otherwise, it will reignite. And see above, re: thermally insulated housings. That’s why you have to chuck the BEV car into a literal dumpster full of water for a month plus. It’s constantly trying to reignite that whole time, because you can’t extract the heat effectively, so the thermal chain reaction doesn’t stop.
And it doesn’t even have to be in the battery pack itself. A fire underneath it will have the same effect. That’s why it’s called thermal runaway; that’s what it is. Things literally cooking off. And unless the car’s running, the internals of the case have no cooling – it requires coolant be circulated by the water pump. So it can get very, very hot inside. And you have no way to remove any of that heat.
And the fact is that by the time you smell it, see smoke, or see flames? It’s already too late with a lithium-ion or similar battery. Thermal excursion inside the pack was 5, 10, 30 minutes ago, and you’re looking at a box of grenades with the pins pulled. Small stuff, you might be able to chuck it somewhere it can burn off safely. Inside a ship? You have no hope at all.
Understanding this stuff is why I don’t mess around with this crap, I have zero tolerance for shills posing as journalists (they absolutely are not,) and why I have ABC and D extinguishers, and sand in my garage.. I handle magnesium and alloys frequently, and in very large pieces. And I machine them. This is barely less dangerous than these batteries.
You cannot extinguish magnesium fires – especially high Mg content ones – other than by completely burying it in sand. Including underneath. It will burn through asphalt, cement, and concrete. And you cannot cool it; it reacts extremely explosively to water once ignited.
Plus I’ve been in computers for over 30 years. Lithium-ion battery fires? I’ve probably seen more than you. What do you think goes in laptops? None of them were enjoyable. None of them extinguishable. And more than a few occurred in batteries that were completely disconnected and isolated. So no. Unplugging the batteries doesn’t help. If the chemicals are exposed to atmosphere, you have fire.
Did it start in the BEV? I don’t know. Nor has the Kustwacht said that.
What I do see is the fact that the Kustwacht has accurately stated that there are BEVs onboard – an obvious fact, they cannot safely fight the fire as a result of the smoke and fumes, and that they have had to discontinue continuous cooling (constant water flooding) because this would cause the ship to sink.
The crew attempted to fight the fire, and unfortunately, one crewmember lost their life as a result.
Their liveblog is here. Anything else is unofficial at best, but more likely pure bullshit.
I am not a chemist – I know (some) metallurgy stuff. Different thing. What I do know about hexavalent chromium is that I won’t go near that shit. Ever. If you need something chrome plated, call somebody else. Maybe China, they like poisoning things.
But in lieu of chrome? Hyundai is king there. Black everything is so beyond stupid, and it looks horrible. Fake chrome a la PVD lasts about as long as a promise from Melon Husk, and does nearly as much damage. But Hyundai, when they launched Genesis, got it so right it’s criminal that they haven’t done it again.
I give you: the 2018 Genesis G80 Sport with copper accents
The only chrome is on the G80 and 3.3T badges. Even the Genesis badges and the wheels are copper colored. And these pictures don’t even remotely do it justice. It is beyond stunning.
Take a chill pill dude. Your comment is as long as the article itself.
Dude it’s like getting a free article IN YOUR ARTICLE!
Yeah, it was informative & a big reason (out of many) not to get a damn EV
I think RootWyrm might be the angriest man on the internet. My dude won’t be dying in any magnesium fires, but his blood pressure must be higher than his turbo boost. This is the price he pays to bring us hot takes this spicy every day.
Take it easy big guy, the sun’s getting real low.
Sure. Tesla won’t ever get decertified for any of this, and the other automakers will lead the charge to defend them. Linear fuel indicators? Since when are *any* of them linear? Safety? Try taking any other brand off of a cliff. Sniping customers who complain isn’t okay either, but deceritfy? Dude, you really need to relax and turn off the ‘net for a while.
Let’s all take a big breath together. In. And let it out with a sigh.
******************** ahhhhhh ******************
Okay, now that we are all feeling a little calmer, let’s discuss battery fires. Battery thermal events are scary. Extinguishment methods are more cumbersome. However, you are taking really far here. Your statement that “[i]t is extremely not hard to cause a fire in a battery pack” is true, but so is the statement that “it is extremely not hard to light gasoline on fire.”
It’s a lot easier to ship a car with an empty tank than a battery without lithium though.
A lot of electronics that have large batteries need to send the batteries in seperate shipments and there is a limit to how many batteries packed together in a shipment. This mostly applies to air cargo, but it might point in the direction that will need to be taken.
Perhaps the manufacturers will have to ship the skateboards on one boat and the bodies on another? Assemble them in market. At least there will be less extra combustible material around the batteries.
Not sure what that will do to battery prices though. Imagine other companies insisting their stuff not be shipped on the same ship as car batteries because they’re fed up with having to write off shipments due to container ships sinking because of battery fires. Imagine countries implementing laws for safely shipping large amounts of lithium batteries. Imagine shipping companies realizing they can now charge a premium. Imagine their insurance realizing THEY can now charge a premium. Suddenly shipping batteries is going to be damn expensive and guess who’s going to be paying for that?
Until we have BEVs that don’t use lithium-ion or other highly reactive chemistries, that is ultimately the way it’s going to have to be. Understand, we have battery fires on RoRo ships all the fucking time. Because once your car gets loaded? The next thing they do is disconnect the battery. Yes, seriously. Because shorts in things like ABS systems have caused vessels to sink when the firefighting went wrong. Electricity and water do not mix.
And because people are imperfect, fires happen. All the time. Except 99% of the time, nobody knows or cares other than the owner. The crew hits it with the handheld extinguisher or seals the deck and hit the Cardox (CO2,) fire goes out, and that’s the whole of it.
Which doesn’t work with huge bundles of batteries or huge batteries. Whether they’re in a car or in a container. I expect at some point soon, there’s going to be new limits and rules on how many batteries one can put in a container, how batteries and BEVs can be shipped, and what fire suppression systems are required. And to be clear; this isn’t just about BEVs either. 10,000 iPads in a container are just as dangerous.
Except… well. Reactive chemistry appear to have the greatest energy storage per kg or ltr. You can try to bind it up into a solid (which might be viable, but what’s being mass produced and what are the densities?) or you can use solvents, but things that give us lots of energy go bang. You rightly point out that we need better process for dealing with Li fires and I agree. If you ship this stuff, the extinguishing system needs to be tailored and ready.
honestly, maybe just store the lithium batteries in a location where they can easily be dumped if they start burning. How hard can it be to build a ship where a handful of containers gets a special little pedestal on a trapdoor or a tilting ramp or something? Doesn’t work in a harbour but in the middle of the Pacific? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Ding ding ding.
When a car is loaded onto these ships, be it containerized or RoRo, it is required to have no more than a quarter tank of fuel, may not exceed 250L for any reason, and must not have any leaks of liquid or vapor.
Could the manufacturers have an easily accessible port to the cooling loop ?
That’s a good question, to which the answer is unfortunately, “it’s basically impossible.”
The cooling loop in a BEV’s battery pack is operating at anywhere from 0psi (basically open loop) to maybe 14-30, maybe 40psi (typical pressurized system.) It depends there on the cooling requirements of the pack, the heat exchangers, the pump, etcetera. And operates at maybe a few tens of gallons per minute peak, typically. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s actually quite a lot. Your ICE does the same, just with a mechanical pump.
Fire hose nozzles operate at anywhere from 50psi to hundreds of psi. Standpipe connections are in hundreds of gallons per minute. Adapting 2″+ threaded high pressure connections to quarter-inch hose barbs is really not something you can do in the middle of an emergency.
It also, unfortunately, could potentially increase the risk drastically. If the cooling loop is compromised – a common thing in accidents with any car – then you could be dumping water onto the ground instead, or potentially straight onto live battery terminals.
“Well, they have an electrical pump, so just apply power there?” Which is, in theory, a good idea. Except not, for the same reasons above, plus now you’re introducing live high current into an area with both fire and water. Unless you can verify the coolant system’s intact – which takes time – you really can’t be sure it wouldn’t be making it worse.
Thanks for the reply.
Will solid state batteries solve this ?
Probably, just like every other battery related complaint they are supposed to solve.
But I had a professor who worked on commercial adaptation of reliable solid state cells for their PhD, and that was like 35 years ago. Currently, solid state batteries are expensive and do not scale well, and there is not a whole lot of real world testing to verify their allegedly greater performance or resilience.
Just remember, we’ve been promised batteries “better than Li-ion” for something like a quarter century now, and yet we still use Li-ion cells for basically all heavy-duty applications.
“And guess what kiddos? The firefighters are not idiots like these yellow ‘journalists’ keep saying. Firefighters are not incompetent. They are not untrained. They do not require the manufacturer tell them how to do their job. They’ve been putting out far worse fires for many decades.
Except those worse fires? They occur in large factories, which have on-site equipment specifically to fight those fires, because you can’t load 50 tons of sand onto a fire truck. And just like you see in ICE fires, putting water onto magnesium? Not a good time. (See also: catalytic converter explosions during extinguishing efforts. That’s why they stay well back. Water is not magic and there are many compounds that react explosively to it when fire is also involved.)”
I used to work at an IBM facility that manufactured hard drives. One of my co-workers had a great picture of a large mushroom cloud rising over the facility. The story was a dumpster full of HD metal shavings had caught fire and the IBM fire crew had just hit it with a hose.
BOOM!
As you say hitting a pile of burning magnesium and aluminum alloy isn’t good.