Tesla Is So Sure Its Cars Are Safe That It Now Offers Insurance For Life (mashable.com) 171
In the self-driving future envisioned by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, car owners might be saying "goodbye" to a whole lot more than steering wheels. From a Mashable report: Musk is so sure of the safety features bundled into Tesla vehicles that his company has begun offering some customers a lifetime insurance and maintenance package at the time of purchase. No more monthly insurance bills. No more unexpected repair costs. "We've been doing it quietly," Tesla President of Global Sales and Service Jonathan McNeill explained on the call, "but in Asia in particular where we started this, now the majority of Tesla cars are sold with an insurance product that is customized to Tesla, that takes into account not only the Autopilot safety features but also the maintenance costs of the car." "It's our vision in the future that we'll be able to offer a single price for the car, maintenance and insurance in a really compelling offering for the consumer," added McNeill. "And we're currently doing that today."
Whose life? (Score:4, Insightful)
Insurance for life on Autopilot safety features? Whose life? Mine, or the car's?
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This was my first thought too.
I've seen "lifetime warranties" before that had tiny print saying the lifetime would end upon release of the next version.
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I've seen "lifetime warranties" before that had tiny print saying the lifetime would end upon release of the next version.
I'd like to see an example of that.
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There's quite a bit of software which pulls this stunt.
It's completely illegal for consumer sales just about everywhere but tends to be in B2B anyway - whilst still illegal in most countries the costs of pursuing it are usually higher than the benefits and regulators for the most part simply can't be bothered with this kind of misleading shit.
Then there's the lifetime warranty that's only valid if you keep paying the maintenance charges - and at the end of 5 years or so, those start increasing by 100%/year.
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Good thinking. No point taking chances when you know the regular insurers will never screw you over.
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No thanks, I'll pass. I let the first adopters take the chances.
Yeah, it's a shame there's not some way to mitigate that chance. Perhaps an insurance against it.
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Standard Auto loan terms are 3,5,and 6 year.
I would argue that the car is (should be) designed to last at least the duration of the terms of the loan, or more realistically 10 to 15 years...
Beyond that I would expect that there will be additional costs that the end owner is expected to pay? That's when the suspension is really due for an overhaul on most cars.
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I spent a large portion of my twenties going junkyarding for parts for my various cars. Sometimes I pulled parts of of cars that were arguably in better shape than my own (and no, I couldn't just but the junked car, the junkyards don't usually sell them back whole unless they decided to do so when they initially received them) and had very little really wrong, or if there were big issues, there were
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state minimum insurance? (Score:2)
What if you move?
Just Remember, Folks. (Score:2)
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Most people rich enough to afford a new Tesla trade their car in every 2 or 3 years. So yeah, not long at all.
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_Most_ people rich enough to afford a Tesla are also in the last 50% of their lifespan, probably the last 25% of their motoring lifespan. Now, how often they give their shiny bauble to the kids to play with is another problem.
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Most people rich enough to afford a new Tesla trade their car in every 2 or 3 years. So yeah, not long at all.
Many people who drive a Tesla trade their car in every 2 or 3 years, and from habits like that never become wealthy.
Most wealthy people who can afford a Tesla (just pay cash, not a big deal) got that way by not wasting money. The Model S seems to be setting down to having good reliability, finally. Seems like a reasonable car to keep for 20 years, with only the battery replacements as a significant expense.
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I doubt battery replacement will be a big expense in 20 years. In real life, we've seen those batteries perform such that they should still have 94% of their charge capacity after 100,000 miles. At 20 years in and 12,000 miles per year, 240,000 miles, they'll quite likely have 85% of their capacity--which means the 150 mile range is a 136 mile range. With high-voltage DC J1772 combined charge connectors, you can power that up in an hour (Tesla has supercharger stations boasting something ridiculous like
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Then don't charge your laptop to 100%. Charge it to 80% and try not to let it go below 20% charge and you'll have a laptop that has 94% of it's original capacity after 6 months, 12 months... probably 48 months.
It's when you charge it to 100% each time or drain it past 20% each time that the battery really starts to degrade.
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At 100,000 miles the consensus is that an 85KWh battery still has 95% of its capacity. The batteries are also designed for automotive use with active heating and cooling as necessary. Laptop batteries are not designed for longevity, nor do they have active temperature control. Laptop batteries (and other consumer device batteries) are usually designed primarily with cost and capacity in mind. As long as they last as long as the warranty that's all they care about. Furthermore, laptops don't treat their batt
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>> At 20 years in and 12,000 miles per year, 240,000 miles, they'll quite likely have 85% of their capacity
Not even close, especially in hot climates like CA and AZ. I used to work for one of the 3 big EV charging station companies and they also have a sister company that does EV battery testing for the government. I can tell you that no EV car battery lasts anything like 20 years. With a normal drive cycle its about 4 years max before you start noticing very significant amounts of dropoff (like 1/3)
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Then there must be a awful lot of abnormal drivers...bc there are battery packs out there at 4+ years old (and older tech ones at 8+) which still work just fine.
Time will tell ... but of course it already has and it disagrees with you.
Thanks for preaching!
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> there are battery packs out there at 4+ years old (and older tech ones at 8+) which still work just fine.
Sure they may still move, but you apparently intentionally missed my point.
Please cite a single CREDIBLE source that shows there are any EVs out there that after 4 or 8 years of a normal drive cycle are not experiencing massive range loss.
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I have a 4 year old Tesla model S with 50,000 miles on it. I have not noticed any loss of range or performance. The general consensus among owners is that there is a 5% loss of range at 100K miles. Now Tesla has a much better battery thermal management system and a better chemistry than a number of other manufacturers (i.e. Nissan, GM, etc.)
Degradation turns out to be around 23 miles per 100,000 miles driven [teslacentral.com].
Here's an excellent talk [youtube.com] by one of the foremost experts on lithium ion battery degradation.
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>> At 20 years in and 12,000 miles per year, 240,000 miles, they'll quite likely have 85% of their capacity
Not even close, especially in hot climates like CA and AZ. I used to work for one of the 3 big EV charging station companies and they also have a sister company that does EV battery testing for the government. I can tell you that no EV car battery lasts anything like 20 years. With a normal drive cycle its about 4 years max before you start noticing very significant amounts of dropoff (like 1/3) in max range, and depending on how determined to save money you are, it will be maybe 7-8 years max before even the most determined owner HAS to totally replace the battery.
Tesla is also using the same battery tech as everyone else so they are just as susceptible, no matter what their glossy advertising claims.
This is demonstrably false, as Teslas have been out for more than 4 years and are seeing minimal battery degradation. I have a 2012 Telsa (one of the first 2000 off the line) and the battery degradation is sitting at 96% of its original capacity. It has almost 100,000 miles on it. So I've lost 4% in 4 years and it's been holding steady for the past year at that rate. There are numerous other examples of this in the Tesla world. Do your research. Spewing false facts (ahem, I mean alternative facts) about EV
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>> Do your research.
Like I said, I worked for one of the big 3 car charging companies and they had a branch doing research for the government. I know what I'm saying. Good for you with your car but your anecdote certifiably doesn;t hold up when you look at more than your car.
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The plural of anecdote is data, and currently data from the deployed fleet of (very few) tens of thousands of Teslas demonstrates that loss at these levels is standard behavior and fully-expected of a Tesla battery in a Tesla car. Tesla's battery management system attempts to keep the battery at optimum temperature and avoid overcharge and undercharge.
Zero Motorcycles are similar. They recommend getting the Zero plugged into charging at a temperature above 0C, as extremely low temperatures will damage t
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Tesla is NOT using the same battery tech as everyone else. Here's a good talk about them. [youtube.com]. Dr. Jeff Dahn is one of the foremost experts on battery failure.
Tesla also has active battery thermal management using liquid cooling. The Nissan Leaf, by comparison, does not. Tesla's chemistry is also a lot better than the chemistry used in the Leaf.
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I guess it depends on your annual mileage and how carefully you look after the car, but cars in general just aren't planned or made to last 20 years any more. Even if the car still runs, the interior will be worn out etc.
Many car companies have started doing stuff like not supporting even top end models that are over say 5 years old with any more software updates (nav system map updates, bluetooth compatibility updates etc). Also you start not being able to get replacement parts for them any more, at least
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Some high-end cars are built not to wear out in that way. Any part made of rubber will fail eventually and need replacement, of course, but high end cars with e.g. more than one layer of door seal just hold up better. One selling point of the Mercedes S-class is the the interior holds up well over time, even with kids and pets and whatnot.
The nice thing about an electric car is the minimal amount of drivetrain parts - there's so much less to fail due to age. No water lines or gaskets or vacuum hoses, bey
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If a car is mechanically sound after 10 years and not a repair $ pit then replacing or rennovating the interior is certainly an option. Tesla doesn't completely change their car every 3 years which helps immensely.
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I think the real point is that if you can afford to buy a new Tesla and use it as a daily driver, car manufacturers think that you probably don't care about buying a whole new one every 100,000 miles (in my case that would be every 7 years) either.
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>> The interior might not be nice after 10 years (but then, Tesla interiors don't start out nice IMO), but the car will be reliable and the interior serviceable.
I agree (especially about Tesla interiors being not nice) but the future problems with incresingly high-tech cars are going to be stuff like if you accidentally crack the screen, or if its backlight goes out or something, you wont be able to get a replacement for any money because they stopped making them 10 years ago, and without that screen
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if you accidentally crack the screen, or if its backlight goes out or something, you wont be able to get a replacement for any money because they stopped making them 10 years ago, and without that screen you can't control anything in the car.
Heh, that was a (potential) problem with my 2003 Infinity, where the HVAC and entertainment system were on the same board. Very few of these cars were made, so it was $2k to get a replacement. But there's always a replacement somewhere.
but I'd also keep a good ol supercharged V8 around for weekends
Does anyone even make them any more? Superchargers seem to have fallen by the wayside as the engineering on turbos got better for low-RPM power. All the fun sports cars are V6s or heavily-boosted 4-bangers anyhow. It's the high RPMs that make the drama, far more than act
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>> Does anyone even make them any more?
They are definately a dying breed but Jaguar do . My XKR is one (they stopped making them in 2015). The V8 Supercharged F-Type is still being made. I Haven;t checked but I'd guess that Aston Martin are still making the V8 Vantage S. I'd also be surprised if there isn't a factory V8 supercharged Mustang/Cobra or Corvette.
>> All the fun sports cars are V6s or heavily-boosted 4-bangers anyhow.
Debateable and probably VERY subjective, but a relatively small whi
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a P100D can probably accelerate faster but it's still about as emotionally sterile as a dentists waiting room.
Ah yes, if all else fails, insult the emotions of an inanimate object. It doesn't care, and you look like an emotional fool.
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Actually if there's one thing that cars aren't its inanimate.
OK take a look at this:
http://auto.ferrari.com/en_EN/... [ferrari.com]
If that picture leaves you emotionless then I truly pity you for your total lack of anything like a soul.
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Who's talking about cars from the 60's? I have a 1997 Toyota 4 runner, I bought it maybe 5 years ago for 4k, have put well over 50k miles on it including some fairly hardcore offroading, with never a single fault or problem. All I've ever done to it is oil and tyres. Its now got nearly 200k miles on it, still drives great and it still shows zero sign of anything about to break or otherwise be a problem. I think it has a very basic ECM but other than that, the most complex electronics in the car is the cass
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Based on what, exactly? Obviously there would be a battery pack replacement along the way, but electric motors don't exactly wear out quickly.
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For life, means for the life of the company. How long would that be with life time insurance, one successful botnet hack and a million crashes in one day, would pretty much do it. I can accept automated transit in an enclosed transport system but out in the open, no fucking way, just no, fuck off, seriously no, nup, nu uh. I am not having some stupid hacked car drive me straight off a cliff or into a train or into opposing traffic, all because some script kiddy, bought some software off a psychopath hacker
Supportive (Score:3)
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Actually, if he's doing a lifelong, pay-up-front insurance model, it will be a lot more expensive to stop providing it later. The rates have to increase with cost and inflation (which will be slower than income increases), and such an insurance model is essentially flow-through and uses new money to pay for current service. It's the same way Social Security works.
Re:Supportive (Score:4, Informative)
As far as I know they offered free supercharging for five years, and anyone who bought a car in that time period still has it, hardly bait and switch.
Do you expect a company to continue offering an option in perpetuity once it's been introduced, regardless of how the scale and economics change?
Re:Supportive (Score:4, Insightful)
Its not free. The price of the insurance is added to the purchase price of the car if you select it. And it probably isn't cheap.
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Not free, but, contractually, the price can't be jacked up on you later - reduces uncertainty for buyers, should transition some potential buyers from "maybe, in the future" to "yes, today."
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Depending on the price, you could just be swapping "possibly ripped-off sometime in the future" for "definately ripped-off today".
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But the difference is that you buy certainty - you check that you have the money now, today, and you pay it, and no nasty surprises get sprung on you in five years when you've already dug into your savings for other reasons.
Peace of mind is very, very valuable.
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If you live in some places where you get totally ripped off today (Lower NY for example) then this sounds like a great deal.
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Maybe but no-one's heard the price yet. You can bet it will vary based on where you live.
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Insurance is, by definition, not worth the price. Anytime insurance is "a good deal", the insurance company loses money. The last company you want to buy insurance from is an insolvent one.
Insurance is all about removing uncertainty, there's a premium for that, and people, especially people with little money, are often willing to pay the premium.
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I bet it doesn't include high risk insurance for the drunk and stupid drivers.
I've got decades with no tickets or accidents. My insurance is about 1/10 the price of insurance for someone with a DUI.
Suppose someone buys the lifetime insurance then acts really stupid. Do you really think the insurance company is going to continue covering them under the initial insurance coverage?
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>> Suppose someone buys the lifetime insurance then acts really stupid.
You already know there will be tons of new get-out clauses in the small print.
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In other words you are buying insurance from someone who has never admitted a single time that autopilot was "properly engaged" at the time of an accident.
http://abc7news.com/automotive/tesla-self-driving-car-fails-to-detect-truck-in-fatal-crash/1410042/ Oops, caught you in a lie. But then, everything you said was a lie.
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Its not free. The price of the insurance is added to the purchase price of the car if you select it. And it probably isn't cheap.
TFA says, "It's unclear how much the lifetime insurance and maintenance bundle costs. We reached out to Tesla for clarification, but have yet to hear back." So cost unknown, but probably comparable to what you'd pay for a standard policy. The fact that it's added to the price of the car at purchase means that if you're financing the car, you're also financing the insurance and maintenance.
Although the TFA doesn't specify, it's a pretty safe guess that this insurance is liability only, at state-mandated mini
lifetime warranty? (Score:3, Funny)
More Disruption? (Score:3)
In 1920s, before Elon Musk's dad was born. Psychic (Score:2)
>Dealers were upset at being cut out of the loop by Telsa (to the point of getting state legislatures to draft laws blocking Telsa's stores)
The laws prohibiting manufacturers from owning dealerships were passed in the 1920s-1950s. (Before Elon Musk's father, Errol Musk, was born, and 60 years before 18 year-old Elon first came to North America). I guess those dealers must have psychic! Also very concerned about their great-grandchildren, since everyone involved in passing those laws are dead now.
If you
All-In-One likely to be the future norm (Score:5, Insightful)
If you bought a chauffeur service you would expect the service to pay the chauffeur, maintain the car, and maintain the insurance. This isn’t much different (other than you own the car). Tesla is large enough to create the shared risk pool that insurance is founded on. Better yet, by also being the insurance it incentives them to make their cars as safe as possible. I don’t image regular insurance companies are too happy about this and will propose various strawman arguments in an attempt to keep Tesla and others from doing this once self-driving cars really get popular. In fact this all in one model is about the only way self-driving cars will be able to work. Self driving cars will only be safe as long as they are always maintained in top condition. Sensors have to be functioning and calibrated. Brakes have to be in good working order to maintain the cars safe expected stopping distance. Software upgrades are needed. Etc...
Once driver error is not the major factor in accidents it just doesn't make sense to keep the old insurance structure as the fault will almost always be with the manufacturer. This does of course reduce the insurance company's incentive (in this case the manufacture) to really go after claims due to negligence, though that will still be a private legal suit option. Let make sure providing the insurance doesn't also take away your right to sue.
Re:All-In-One likely to be the future norm (Score:4, Insightful)
The change will have an interesting effect: Over time, fewer drivers will have their own insurance which is going to shrink the risk pool. I don't know where the tipping point is, but some day the premiums for individual car insurance will skyrocket. What happens when the liability coverage for an individual driver with a good record costs $3,000? $8,000 / year? That's really going to increase the sales/use of self-driving cars. Manufacturers like Tesla might as well get ahead of the curve.
So when my kid (Score:2)
turns 16 and starts driving the shiny tesla, is he covered when he tosses it into ludicrous mode and slams into someone?
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What if I am really rich and buy the 16 year old his own Tesla? I've seen benz's at the wealthy district high school. My point was just car insurance is based on a number of factors beyond the car like age, prior accidents/tickets... I'm not sure Tesla wants to do a standard rate and if they do, I certainly do not want to pay for it as I get a very good rate with no ticks/accs. As an example, the add for a friend's 16 year old son on a old car with no comp/coll was more than I pay for full coverage on a ver
It makes sense (Score:2)
Given the current regulatory climate [slashdot.org] governments are going to hold manufacturers' feet to the fire for failures caused by their software. Better to keep the risk cost in house where decisions can best be made about how to cover them than get third parties involved.
This could prove to be very beneficial to Tesla (Score:2)
Tesla
Lifetime assurance (Score:2)
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Do you also stand at the door at parties to offer couples the odds of them remaining together long-term?
Relax dude, most human beings understand that if the company they get insurance from stops existing, they no longer have insurance from that company. If you don't trust that company, then um don't buy insurance from them?
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I think this is probably Tesla's way of varnishing over the fact that most insurance companies aren't going to insure SDC's or aren't going to ensure them at rates people want to pay.
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Not at all, SDCs are massively safer on average and therefore massively cheaper to insure. This is a smart move into the auto insurance industry just as the old guard is about to suffer a nasty famine...you don't need sprawling insurance companies to handle the rare autonomous car crash, just a glorified legal department at an auto manufacturer. In the future, individual car crashes will be newsworthy because of their rarity, like plane crashes today.
Re:Yeah, with a fucking asterisk (Score:4)
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You are assuming that existing owners spend time checking out their car.
Internal sensors can detect a number of defects, and you can greatly reduce the cost of service if you can nuke all of the booking and other work, and instead get the car notifying you that if you pop in for a free service as you're about to drive past it, you get a free pizza (or whatever), so they can correct what's wrong with the car, and do whatever quick preventive maintainance would reduce their costs, that may greatly improve the
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In the context of a lifetime warranty, the company will want to reduce their costs as much as possible - this includes doing preventive maintenance on the vehicle that your average owner won't do.
If you're not able to drive it without cleaning off the snow, then that's a different issue from something breaking due to a fault, or lack of maintainance.
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The existing lidar in my 15 year old car has heaters in it specifically to deal with that kind of instance (funnily enough, so do the wing mirrors and they're hot enough to not just melt ice but to cause noticeble water evaporation if the vehicle is stationary.)
Yes, you need to brush the snow off, but running for five minutes take care of the rest - and in those kind of environments you're a bit of a tool if you don't have your car garaged/covered/ plugged into power to preheat overnight and if you can't do
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Re: Yeah, with a fucking asterisk (Score:2)
Re:Yeah, with a fucking asterisk (Score:5, Informative)
Things are rather different for airplanes than cars. Airplanes are far more complex in terms of what can go wrong, however for the most part autopilot is simpler. My model S already checks the tire pressure. If the car is iced up it likely won't drive itself either, since obviously all the cameras need to work as well as the ultrasonic sensors and radar.
The reliability of a car also does not need to match that of an airplane since with a car you can usually just pull over. With an airplane carrying a lot of passengers it's a whole different story. It's not like it can just pull over and stop at 30,000 feet.
Mechanically they're night and day. The number of moving parts in a Tesla's drivetrain is a small fraction of what it is in a gasoline or hybrid vehicle which is a lot simpler than an airplane. The car already monitors just about everything as it is such as battery temperature, current/voltage, coolant temperature, air temperature, tire pressure, traction control, stability control, etc. There's even a rain/snow sensor. The autopilot feature also won't work if the car can't see the road clearly and it's not supported if it's raining or snowing. The car even monitors the state of the 12v battery. In my model S it warned me before it failed, and my car is a first generation model.
The car also is paying attention to a lot more than a driver can, since with 8 cameras and other sensors it is constantly looking all around the vehicle. It doesn't get distracted either by kids in the back seat, changing radio stations, or cell phones. The software will continue to improve as time goes on.
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There's a very simple reason they'll be cheaper than taxis: Drivers are the single most expensive part of the package.
Plus, drivers working longer hours make more mistakes and put cars off the road as a result.
SDCs will pretty much come to dominate the market in a very short time thanks to hefty insurance premiums for manually driven ones - and whilst with child seats you might be a corner case the end result is likely to be a 80-90% reduction in urban vehicle ownership _especially_ in Europe.
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Re: Yeah, with a fucking asterisk (Score:2)
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Because there are already some SDCs with optional manual controls on the market, from Tesla.
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Tesla's cars are not SDCs by any stretch of the imagination. They're level 2 automation at best.
Whilst that's a LOT better than most humans most of the time it's not better than most humans all of the time.
Re:Yeah, with a fucking asterisk (Score:5, Funny)
Do you also stand at the door at parties to offer couples the odds of them remaining together long-term?
Hell, most of the parties I went to, predictions would've been, "Tomorrow morning, tomorrow morning, tomorrow evening, Sunday morning, Tonight at 11:03pm following two minutes of strong apologies..."
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Relax dude, most human beings understand that if the company they get insurance from stops existing, they no longer have insurance from that company.
Ummm, no!
In most civilized countries, you can't sell insurance without being regulated. Govt regulations require that insurers have adequate reserves to pay out their insurance claims. Insurers have to reasonably invest the premiums to get an adequate return.
Otherwise people will buy insurance and the companies will quickly go out of business leaving customers high & dry.
Yeah, just like AIG [wikipedia.org], which was regulated so well they needed the largest government bailout in US history.
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There are 2 kinds of insurance (more than 2 but I'm keeping it simple)
1: Liability insurance for poor driving
2: Insurance for damage from any other cause.
You're still going to need insurance to cover repairs after the asshole down the street keys your car and you can't get charges pressed (actually the insurance company will get its pound of flesh, but that's not your concern if they pay for the repairs) etc, but this kind of insurance is quite cheap.
It's the first type that's expensive, and that's mostly d
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There's no such thing as for life. If Tesla wants to bail, they can change their name to Tesla Motors 2 and get out of it.
They could, I won't completely contradict you on that, but in recent history both GM and Chrysler went through bankruptcies essentially launching new companies, but they did not use that as an opportunity to drop warranty promises that they made. Chrylser in particular had offered lifetime warranties on vehicles in the mid Noughties and they still acknowledge their coverage even though this could have been an easy way to get out of commitments to several million vehicles that were far past what a normal wa
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Like GM did when they crashed, burned and were revived a few years ago - they got to wipe all their old debt and recall liabilities off the books.
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There's no such thing as for life. If Tesla wants to bail, they can change their name to Tesla Motors 2 and get out of it.
They mean the life of the vehicle.
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Like being born in Finland?
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How about this be the way for more items? Charge 10-15% more for something across the board, and not nickel and dime after the sale. It means more money overall anyway.
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I don't know what you pay for full coverage, for most people it's almost as much as the car payment. Plus it doesn't end until the car is cheap enough that people drop to liability only, does get cheaper as the car value goes down.