They can at home (and third-party chargers), but not at Tesla superchargers. The internet access is needed not for charging, but for making a supercharger transaction.
Though I would have personally expected Tesla to set up supercharges in a way that would instead provide free charging when the supercharging internet access is down. The monetary loss from that would probably cost far less than this negative PR. And this is literally the first time I hear about their network going down in a way that supercharging is unavailable (maybe it happened before, but I haven't been paying much attention until 2019), so it isn't like they would be losing tons of money by providing that charging for free. And especially since filling up from around 20% to 90% at a supercharger typically costs me way less (somewhere between $16-26 total) than it would for a gas car.
I agree with everything you said but if I put my Elon hat on, aside from the itching sensation I can imagine their security team pointed out that people would find ways to DoS the terminal into being free. I'm not saying that would be logical, just probably how they were thinking. I'm taking that hat off now.
I would assume you can just DDoS either the central cerver or the entire charging location, not individual charging stalls. And in the latter case, who knows which out of many cars present near the charging location did it.
Keep in mind that a lot of supercharger stations are contained within much larger parking lots/garages. More specifically, they are simply just random stretches of parking spots in a garage, but with supercharger stalls installed.
As a real example, 3 closest supercharging stations to where I live are: a large office building multilevel garage, Trader Joe's multilevel garage, and a giant multilevel garage at a mall. Each one can fit bajillion cars (maybe not the trader joe's one, as it only has 2 or 3 floors, with about 25 parking spots on each).
If one of those cars did it once, then well, it's a spare change for you. Doesn't matter if the grand scheme of things.
If one of those cars is involved in its third DoS happening in the last quarter, you may be able to alert the authorities while it's still charging.
You can fail safe with your failsafes. You can react differently based on different kinds of failures. You can put limits to how generous you want your failsafe system to be. You can have an independent killswitch for your failsafe mechanism. You just need to put some effort into designing your system's failure modes.
You may also find out that DoSing the charging station in order to use it for free simply doesn't happen in the wild and that you can safely afford to only react once you notice it actually happening. That's why you pay all these security engineers that are able to reasonably assess these risks, you know.
You'd also have to consider threat models that include attackers other than Tesla owners trying to get free charges. Eg, Tesla competitors looking to cost them money, people that have twitter beef with Elon, ransom/extortion attacks, teens in it for the lulz, etc.
You always have to consider threat models like these. If you don't, you're not doing your job well.
If you're trying to imply that considering these threat models is a reason not to come up with a proper fail-safe system, then the very same argument applies to creating these charging stations and letting people use them in the first place.
> I can imagine their security team pointed out that people would find ways to DoS the terminal into being free.
Yeah, that's definitely a valid concern. I wonder how easy it would be to do so, given I haven't heard of it happening with superchargers before. But again, there was no incentive to do so without free charging, so who knows.
They could also have the supercharger locally store what car charged how much and when the system goes back up it charges the account. If there is no card on file then it'll be owed until that person connects a card. They could even send out a list of cars to each supercharger as a blocklist if they find abusers to help deter attacks and limit the downside.
It is less about having to do something pre-emptively, and more about having good default configs for fail-safes. Approving charging when there is no connection vs. blocking charging when there is no connection is just a bitflip.
You can, you just can't do billing on SuperChargers. Home charging works... cars work, but it's like credit cards didn't work at the gas station and there was nobody there to take cash.
Typically if a gas station isn't accepting payment, I can drive to the one next door. I've done that before, but it's very rare unless if Visa or Mastercard is having issues (which is pretty rare, but affects much more than just gas).
> Typically if a gas station isn't accepting payment, I can drive to the one next door.
You can do the same in Europe with EVs. Europe standardised on CCS Type 2 Combo for EV charging so you're not locked into one charging network. All brands of DC fast charger can charge all brands of EV, exactly as it should be.
That's some wild theory. In my experience as an BEV owner (Skoda Enyaq iv80) it is highly selective and having same plug means nothing if there are incompatible software stacks inside.
Some chargers are working fine. Ionity, BP (ironic)
Some will not initiate charging because registration email/login/payment in their app does not work. (Freshmile in France, some Swedish one in Greece whose name I forget did not sent an activation email)
Some chargers just straight out doesn't like your car, because reasons. "Find another charger" you will be told. (Fortiza)
Some chargers are just broken, but you can't tell until you arrive. (Another Freshmile in France)
In the old days when the card machine went down they'd pull out the manual machine that used carbon paper to pick up the embossed numbers on the card and you signed for it.
Of course there were lots of cases of fraud linked to those too.
So Tesla goes down momentarily, it's huge news. Meanwhile, try taking a road trip with a non-Tesla vehicle. You will quickly see that more than half the chargers are broken, and the other half charge at slow rates, and half the charger locations are off or not even there.
I have my popcorn ready. Watching the number of EVs increase exponentially faster than the number of chargers. I think right now in UK, where most people are unable to charge at home, there are regions with 1:50 charger to EV ratio which is just comical. Politicians are delusional with their plans to ban the sales of ICE cars in 2030, because it will take forever for the EV infrastructure to catch up.
Meanwhile, we're making dates for replacing current cars, and "total EV" and the advent of VR "meta" reality, and cryptocurrency, and GPT-<N> AI, when the reality for the average person is getting more like:
Of course. But how will the manufacturers handle this uncertainty? Seriously, by setting such dates politicians are acting straight up maliciously. If the EVs are so great, let them take over in the natural course.
As opposed to EVs that have considerably larger manufacturing carbon footprint compared to ICE cars? Also remind me what is the percentage of clean energy those EVs are consuming?
> As opposed to EVs that have considerably larger manufacturing carbon footprint compared to ICE cars?
Irrelevant except perhaps for collector cars. For cars that are actually used the manufacturing differences will be swamped by the operational differences.
> Also remind me what is the percentage of clean energy those EVs are consuming?
Again irrelevant, because even if in a particular place now not much electricity comes from clean energy as they shift to more and more clean energy that improves all the EVs in service there. The ICEs in service will be just as dirty then as they are now.
Also, if you do generate electricity from fossil fuels and use that to power cars it can be cleaner than using that fossil fuel directly to power cars. That's because burning it in the car greatly constrains how much equipment you can use to try to reduce or capture the emissions from that burning, because it all has to be small enough and light enough to include in a car.
Burning that fuel instead to power generators that feed the grid doesn't suffer that problem. You can put more elaborate emissions control there than you could on a car.
>Irrelevant except perhaps for collector cars. For cars that are actually used the manufacturing differences will be swamped by the operational differences.
You'd be surprised.
This electricity needs to be generated, and it will hardly be clean for decades. It also needs to be stored in car batteries. And if the energy is "green", in grid "batteries" - plus all the work needed to support the green energy generation, solar panels, huge grid changes, etc. Both of which are nowhere near available, and it's not even certain they can be supported if EVs go to 100% of cars, neither from a manufacturing capacity wise, nor materials wise. And those need to be disposed too. And they'll need replacement during the car's life.
> This is obviously ignoring that fossil fuel vehicles have strong externalities which aren't paid by the consumer.
> As do electric vehicles which requires three current grids worth of wires to power them.
Your response doesn't logically match your intended message. It seems like you intend to disagree with the GP, but your response seems to validate the GP's point.
> three current grids worth of wires
Even if we assume it is true (it likely will not be because of home storage), by definition "3 current grids worth of wires" would be paid for by consumers buying electricity.
Consumers buying electric cars are required to buy even more electricity.
As such, with electric cars the externality you're point out is gonna be "paid [disproportionately] by the consumer causing it".
The electric car owners are not thr ones paying the externalities for it either. You can make the case the externalities are smaller but they still exist.
If we do need to triple the grid's copper, that would indeed result in unpaid externalities because of poor mining practices.
Hopefully, the grid doesn't need to triple because of local storage. If it does, hopefully, the recyleability of copper makes the one time cost of mining and refining a smaller externality.
> The big difference is that most people can charge their EV’s at home
In EU 50% of people are living in apartments. With push on walkable cities this number will grow. So charging at home won't happen for most, it will be niche feature for rich few who has their own house with its own driveway.
The vagueness in your reply is intriguing. I will assume you’re not being obnoxious and referring to an ICE vehicle. Well, Tesla “existed” in 2004 and its first commercially available vehicle, the Roadster, predates the Nissan Leaf and Mitsubishi i-MiEV.
The Tesla Model S wasn’t the first EV, but it’s arguably the first commercially available product capable of a “road trip” by any reasonable definition of the term.
I don't think I am. I've never had a failure to charge, but I have seen dispensers out of service at several locations. I do see stations out of service on PlugShare, I just don't go to those. While I have gone on a few road trips, the vast amount of charging has happened at home, so we're really only talking a dozen or so fast charging times over a couple of years.
I did encounter a few people who had issues charging while I was on those road trips. It seemed like the BMW i3's were the ones most likely to have a charging issue from the cars I saw. A few people were confused about how to get it started. I saw a Tesla drive up to CCS charger trying to figure out how to get their J1772 adapter to work with the CCS cable (hint: it no work). But the vast majority of the people I encountered on my road trips managed to plug in, potentially negotiate payment if needed, charge their car, and go on their way without any issue.
Like lots of things, I think its mostly just that you hear about people sharing their horror stories instead of everyone chirping in every time saying "yup, worked as advertised!" How many people are going to watch and share a video of someone driving up to a CCS dispenser, plug it in, have it charge for ten minutes, and then drive off? Probably not very many. How many people are going to share someone's story about how a charging failure ruined their Christmas?
How many videos do people share of people pulling up to a gas station, pumping gas, putting the handle back, and driving off? How many people share videos of people starting fires at gas stations? I tend to see way more videos of fires at gas stations and crazy collisions with the pumps, I guess that's just what everyone's experiences are at gas stations every day!
Seriously, while YouTube series like OutOfSpec Reviews shares some of the recent failures and challenges with charging infrastructure, they have tons of videos where you see lots of people pulling up to chargers, charging their cars, and going on their way. They even talk about how they go on lots of road trips with their non-Teslas, and seem to have generally good experiences on average. And they're constantly driving and charging their cars at public chargers, most drivers probably will only use DCFC a handful of times a year.
So they can combine the known geolocation of every charging station with the acceleration+steering data stored in the car to re-create any Tesla's exact journey if need be:
“The NFI said the decrypted data showed Tesla vehicles store information about the operation of its driver assistance system, known as Autopilot. The vehicles also record speed, accelerator pedal position, steering wheel angle and brake usage, and depending on how the vehicle is used, that data can be stored for over a year.”
The UK's motorway charging network lose their connections all the time, but they tend to fail open, i.e. charge for free as long as it's not an electrical fault. It seems like a very petty upside to change that.
The problem is that 'failing free' would incentivize people to disrupt charger communications; if you doubt that this is a real issue, look at the article posted earlier on HN, about people stealing Kias and Hyundais.
Ha, surely someone who has driven a £20,000+ car to a surveilled remote location isn't going to bring ... what, a 4G radio jammer? Wire cutters? Risking electrocution? To save £5-20 on a top-up? While they wait 30-60 minutes for the charge to complete?
I had assumed they failed open because the installers have more of an incentive to build trust with drivers than to avoid a little extra revenue loss for a few days?
> The problem is that 'failing free' would incentivize people to disrupt charger communications
Can’t you just log locally on the charger the transactions? Once the connection is restored and if there are dishonest charges you can just pursue them the same way a petrol station would pursue those who fill-and-dash.
Or even better. Can’t the car download a certificate from the central server when it is still up which is signed with the private key of tesla and it contains what level of service the vehicle is subscribed to and an expiry date? And then the charger can check the validity even without a network connection.
> Can’t the car download a certificate from the central server when it is still up which is signed with the private key of tesla and it contains what level of service the vehicle is subscribed to and an expiry date?
There is no "service" for charging, it is just like with ICE cars at a gas station. You fill up your car, and then you get charged for however much you filled up.
> There is no "service" for charging, it is just like with ICE cars at a gas station. You fill up your car, and then you get charged for however much you filled up.
It sounds like you don’t need to swipe your card every time. The system has your payment details on file to pay. That is what the certificate would attest to.
Credit card systems have offline authentication, where a payment terminal can be configured to accept payments under some threshold for a while and send them in a batch later. It's far from perfect, there's lots of reasons online authentication is preferred; but it allows for business to continue with less friction than requiring cash and someone or something to handle it.
It would make sense to do something similar for a charging network. Worst case, it can't be too hard to track down the owner of a vehicle by its VIN.
Hard to relate those issues.
Most charging ports are in public areas and in the time it takes for the connection to restore and billing to kick in probably isn't going to be long enough to charge your vehicle up much.
While the Kia issue boils down to the US failing to follow the UK, Canada and other regions in using regulation to make immobilisers mandatory. The subsequent penny pinching that took place producing cars with security features that have been around since the early 90s, as they were treated as a premium feature in the US. That combined with them opting for a cheap ignition column gave them their current predicament as even basic steering lock functionality is dead.
It's funny the next article under "new" is about europe banning gas vehicles.
I personally have a long list of problems with banning gas vehicles (I'd say it's insane really), but something that could easily be addressed is how manufacturers are using the shift to electric to enforce vendor lock in and steal personal data.
There is absolutely no reason why a precondition of driving an electric car should be having an app, sharing data with the manufacturer, or any of that nonsense. And this "outage" is one of the more obvious consequences. Before we even consider trying to make electric cars more popular, there needs to be open infrastructure and maintenance that doesn't depend on any proprietary crap manufacturers are trying to shove down our throats.
Any billing system will have problems when there is an outage. Gas pump credit card processing goes down too. This is a minor hiccup in the electric transition.
If you were charging at a non Supercharger with its own auth and billing mechanism, you most likely didn’t notice. I noticed in the US, but only because I emit my Tesla API call logs from teslamate into a monitoring tool catching the non 200s.
If you don’t want to enable data sharing, you can disable it. If you don’t want to enable mobile app functionality or OTA updates, you can remove the cellular module (Tesla specific, I can’t speak to other brands).
By 2035 (the new EU combustion vehicle ban agreed upon you mention), an entire generation will have grown up with EVs as the new normal. Right to repair should still be a thing, but that is a distinct issue, not something that should slow the electrification transition until perfect (passenger vehicles are responsible for 61% of CO2 (EDIT: transport) emissions in Europe).
> This is a minor hiccup in the electric transition.
It portends much worse outcomes if we don't address it.
> Right to repair should still be a thing, but that is a distinct issue
So, we're going to use the power of government to force a markets hand, but we're going to delay the consumer issues that it is going to generate, until when? And our plan is to use something other than government force to repair that issue?
It makes no sense to process these as distinct issues, in particular, because you've failed to articulate how removing right to repair is necessary to achieve "the transition." Why would that be a requirement? We _must_ acquiesce to corporate greed or they won't let us have nice things otherwise?
So.. why use the power of government to force the market, then?
More importantly every gas station is a stand alone billing platform. You're unlikely to have one outage lock out all users in an area - yes they might have to pay cash, but thats it.
After hurricane Fiona only one gas station brand was operating. They had generators but the thing that caused problems was their computer. They had to keep rebooting it for the pumps to work. It was great to get gas but standing in line for an hour for gas was not fun. All the other stations were closed due to no power or no way to get the pumps to operate if they had power.
In general, we're trying to use the power of the government to force the market to shift away from gas vehicles and towards electric vehicles because climate change, caused in part by combustion engine vehicles, is real and present, and is such a huge, expensive danger that it's clearly worthwhile to make the move. Whatever the payment/repairability downsides that bad actors fit into the electric transition are, they are absolutely nothing compared to worldwide food shortages, mass migration from losing earth to rising sea levels, water shortages, etc.
Nobody wants the businesses to take this as a chance to once again hurt consumers and squeeze consumers for ever more money and ever less power. But the businesses are still trying to pull it off anyway. You're right, action against those terrible business practices is warranted.
Giving up on avoiding further climate change is not warranted.
Most people agree something should be done about climate change. Using it as an excuse for other stuff, for political and business gain, is one of the main reasons climate change is not being taken seriously. Fix the problem directly, don't use it as a boogeyman to tell people how to live or what to buy, and we could be way more successful at avoiding opposition. Unfortunately, the most vocal people see climate change almost solely as a means of getting power rather than something to actually try and overcome. Equating not wanting freedom to use something you buy with giving up on climate change does not help, it makes people more entrenched in their views
What if I told you "climate do nothingism" chicanery of the last 40-50 years was almost entirely driven by business interests and political silly buggers with reams of evidence from internal company memos proving as such?
> Road transport constitutes the highest proportion of overall transport emissions — in 2020 it emitted 77% of all EU transport GHGs (including domestic transport and international bunkers).
Just wondering but what is the lifespan of an EV? How much does it cost to replace the batteries after 10 years? I ask because I fear only the rich will be able to afford cars with such a ban. My first car cost $2k and was a clunker but it was all I could afford to get to school.
Even now, in the US, Tesla's get perks like using the car pool lane. Great deal for the rich.
We don’t know because the batteries last so long [1]. All data points to batteries lasting longer than 10 years, even accounting for degradation.
It’s a great deal for the rich because that’s what drives the market, the poor don’t have purchasing power. That’s why margins on tiny econoboxes is garbage compared to other, higher margin vehicles (and why Ford mostly makes trucks and SUVs now). Hand out incentives to those of lesser means to afford lower cost EVs when they arrive in the marketplace.
> My first car cost $2k and was a clunker but it was all I could afford to get to school.
These days are long gone and aren't coming back, regardless of EV or combustion vehicle. Average price of a used car in the US is ~$29k [2].
> These days are long gone and aren't coming back.
No they aren't. I live relatively near a major metropolitan area (not an inexpensive one), and there are dozens of sub-$2000 cars for sale at this very instant.
Not fearmongering, just not suggesting broad policy based on local craigslist or Facebook Marketplace listings. I'm sure you can find an example based on the number of economic transactions that happen every day in a country, I'm suggesting it isn't scalable and that there simply aren’t that many $2k-$5k used cars in reasonable condition. Most of those vehicles get shipped to developing countries when they hit someone like Carmax or another volume dealer (happens in Europe too with these vehicles going to Africa).
It feels like we're off track though from any meaningful discussion considering the TAM for sub $5k vehicles.
I love when people point to metrics on barely used "used" cars.
The average for used car is no where fucking enar $29k. That is complete and utter batshit lunacy unless your idea of "used" is "5 yers old or newer" or something insane like that.
I can still go buy a clunker for $1000 tomorrow.
I do often run into people who think 100k miles is "super high mileage" and couldn't change a tire if a gun was held to their head. So I guess I can see those people being utterly out of the $2k clunker market.
Wow. Sorry for all the typos. I was juggling two kids when I typed that and apparently I am blind to autocorrect and autocomplete fails when my attention is so divided :)
Even if electric vehicle manufacturers like Tesla have been "innovating" here, it's obviously creeping into more traditionally fueled vehicles as well, with DLC, connected features, etc showing up starting with the higher end and working down to cheaper models and brands. From their perspective, it's an untapped market to both charge more money and monetize personal data, although I'd personally like to see it regulated into oblivion.
Yes I agree, almost every car
electric or not that you buy now is laden with crap that's only there to benefit the manufacturer and screw the buyer. But it's clear that electric represents a chance to screw people from the ground up, cutting out things like independent garages and even gas stations, and giving cover to computerize and log everything. Regulation is necessary, but it's going to be whack a mole trying to prevent vendors ripping off customers, and the automotive already basically has regulatory captured their way into preventing competition. In some respects I think there needs to be less, or at least more sensible regulation, to encourage competition that might actually provide options to people (unfortunately I think most people don't value freedom and are happy to give it up for something shiny, it may be a lost cause)
> ... and giving cover to computerize and log everything.
I worry that the interests of car companies and government are well-aligned here and any regulation will be in the direction of making logging of everything mandatory for the benefit of law enforcement.
Either facial recognition or license plate recognition (or logging all data about a car) at scale is roughly a similar problem and should be solved together with a constitutional amendment to the Right to Privacy (or something - I'm not a lawyer).
Meanwhile, no need to have the data leave the car "for the benefit of law enforcement". I would love if cars' would be GPS connected, or use "smart roads", and have the car self-regulate the speed limit. We have the technology to get rid of speeding tickets, lets just automate this and lets debate better road policies instead.
No need to reduce the number of police officers, just get them to instead work on finding my stolen bike! They can also continue to patrol the roads for unsafe driving, for people who mod their cars to no longer respect the speed limit, etc.
> There is absolutely no reason why a precondition of driving an electric car should be having an app
Aside from the motor/inverter/charge/battery control, I don't see why an electric car needs a computer any more than a gasoline car. In fact, the gasoline car is probably seeing a better uplift from having computerized aids around its prime mover (i.e. EFI makes a massive difference compared to purely-mechanical alternatives).
There is absolutely no reason why a precondition of driving an electric car should be having an app, sharing data with the manufacturer, or any of that nonsense.
I agree, and it is even getting bad with gas cars. GM, Ford, and non-domestics just snarf data, with build in cellular modems, and more.
The CEO of Ford was bragging about the revenue, at an earnings meeting, from selling this data.
All tracking, data gathering, needs to be made 100% illegal. It is constantly abused, and literally weaponized against consumers, and their democracies.
I agree that it's likely the future, but right _now_ you can buy any number of ICE cars that don't require permission from the manufacturer (in the form of account creation, app usage, and a permanent connection to the cloud) to drive/own, but I'm not aware of any full electric cars that don't.
I don't know the current status of any particular brand, but I was assuming there are still new ICE cars being made in 2023 that don't require a permanent cloud connection, app, or website in order to own, use, or maintain. If that is not the case, please let me know.
But I know for sure that there are no electric cars you can buy that don't require the owner/drive to be a "user" of various IT systems run by the car maker. Which effectively means you can buy the car, but never actually own it.
I personally want a modern car that won't gravely injure me in even the most modest of car accidents but one that doesn't have inane software-controlled lockout features.
That was the logic we used, bought an Explorer ST instead of a BMW since they've shown the desire to charge to unlock stuff already in the car. I'm sure Ford will do it at some point if it takes off but so far they haven't. Now the connected features on the car I'm not a huge fan of but they're not limiting thankfully.
I have a '46 Dodge WC that can be fixed with an adjustable wrench and a hammer & will run on even the crappiest fuel (5.1:1 compression ratio). I can crank start it, too. It's an old farm truck, and cost less than $2500 (albeit over a decade ago).
