Tesla Model S Car-fuffle

A few years ago Tesla Motors, the American electric car maker sued the BBC’s Top Gear over faking the car ‘running out of battery’ (sic) during filming for the hit show. Tesla representatives present during the recording of this 2008 piece were rightly furious at the way the story was twisted, the car did not run out, the whole thing was a set up ‘for entertainment purposes.’

Anyway, it’s all boring and it’s been chewed over ad-nauseam , but now there’s a new story to get all frothy about.

Tesla launched the Model S seven seater sedan in 2012, it immediately won plaudits across the motoring press and eulogising from new owners across America. Everyone loves the Model S, including The New York Times reporter John Broder, who wrote an article about driving the car over long distances using Tesla’s supercharging system.

Tesla have installed numerous solar powered charging stations on key routes across the USA with the eventual intention of allowing drivers to cover huge distances.

John Broder managed to run out before he got to the last one, the Model S had to be towed. Yes, another electric car fail. Let me speculate just how long it took for this story to be seized upon by the screaming hoards of the ‘electric cars just don’t work’ brigade. No point, it was instant and deafening.

The New York Times had previously published glowing reviews of the car when driven in California, one journalist covered just over 300 miles on one charge. They loved it, it was ‘spectacular,’ ‘game changing’ and ‘pivotal technology.’

So what happened? It seems Mr Broder claims one thing, and now Elon Musk, founder and CEO of Tesla claims quite another.

The Model S, along with most modern cars, is fitted with a tracking device. New owners have to give specific permission for this to be turned on but after the debacle of the Top Gear test drive, the company now always enables tracking when they loan the cars to the media.

Interestingly when Top Gear’s old men in jeans reviewed the Nissan Leaf the tracking was turned on which revealed the car had been driven in circles for a couple of hours before filming to help drain the batteries so it would ‘run out’ at the required time. Bit embarrassing for the Top Gear team but they don’t mind, it’s just entertainment after all.

Elon Musk claims the tracking data shows that the NYT journalist drove over the speed limit and took detours on his 200+ mile drive from one charging point to the next. When he stopped overnight he didn’t plug the car in to trickle charge it and keep the batteries at optimal temperature as any regular EV driver would have done without a second thought. It seems to be implied that this would a) have been simple and b)

would have made an enormous difference.

The test took place in very cold weather which as any electric vehicle driver will tell you will reduce the car’s range by 10-15%. I just want to point out that when an ‘eco’ diesel with a 60+mpg rating is driven in cold weather, it’ll be realistically getting 40 mpg if you’re lucky.

Anyway, the point is, does a journalist driving an electric car for the first time and ‘running out’ prove anything anyway? The simple fact is that if you can afford to buy a Tesla Model S and you drive it 1,000 miles and only charge it from the Tesla super chargers, for one thing it will cost you not a penny for fuel, and the vehicle will release not 1 micro-gram of CO2 emissions. It’s an incredible achievement, for the regular drivers of these cars who have learned to judge distance, time and energy economy with a little more wisdom, those long journeys are very low stress.

I have never ‘run out of battery’ in driving over 44,000 miles in electric cars, I’ve got fairly close on a few occasions but it’s truly not that hard to work it out. You need to be used to the car and the way it behaves, it’s not the same as a fossil burner, it requires a slightly different mind-set from using an old fashioned car. But the advantages are enormous, the running costs are so low they don’t count, the extra hassle of having to remember to charge is no more arduous that plugging in your phone.

I’m personally not bothered that one journalist managed to run out of electricity on a very long drive, he still covered spectacular distances in a large, comfortable and very safe electric car in mid winter in the North Eastern USA. What is clear from his article is that with a bit more knowledge of the vehicle he could easily have made the entire trip without mishap. So we have to learn how to use a whole new technology? That’s scary, we just want to stick with the one we know, burning fossils and the immense strain that puts on our economy and environment is of course, of no consequence. Drill, baby, drill. 

Sailing Around the Harbour

After a wonderful few weeks in Australia visiting family and friends, I finally met up with Danny John Jules and Craig Charles in Melbourne where we attended a brilliant convention and met loads of wonderful Aussie fans. We then flew to Sydney, did another equally wonderful convention and on our last day in Australia met up with FX wizard and terribly nice chap, Mike Seymour, his wife and friends and went for a sail on his beautiful yacht around the even more spectacularly beautiful Sydney Harbour. We first met Mike when he worked the green screen shots and special effects on Red Dwarf Back to Earth.

 We each had a go on the steering wheel, or Capstan, or tiller, I truly don't know the correct nautical term, the thing you steer the boat with. Brilliant fun, tacking, shouting out commands to the crew (Mike's wife and a lovely chap and co-owner of the boat called Ken)

I think I look rather dashing and pirate like, this was hotly disputed by my fellow crewmates. And yes I am wearing a shirt emblazoned with Linux emblems having attended a Linux conference in Canberra the week before, yes, I've been busy.

Then, Danny did some steering

Danny was very cool, he got it in the slot and let that baby glide, cool as a cucumber, and while Danny was steering, Craig and I did some mildly erotic lounging on the port side, I think that's the side we were on..

And then we reached the critical stage of the day when Mike allowed Craig to do some steering. Being a highly responsible adult and father he wanted to set a good example so had a medicinal tot of rum.

"A tot Craig, ... a tot, don't swig it from the neck... you got no class guy!" was the quote from Dan

This was extraordinary rum, over 100 years old, very nice, Craig only took a little slug, I sipped a thimble full and started slurring and telling everyone I loved them. 

We had a great day, Danny and I are now in New Zealand and Craig is on the way back to blighty.

Unpowered Fright....Flight

Yesterday I experienced unpowered flight for the first time. A truly wonderful experience and a great privilege supplied by the ebullient and extremely kind Mr Simon Hackett of Adelaide, South Australia.
We drove down to the airfield in Simon's Tesla Roadster Sport, I 'helped' him prepare the glider, a German built Stemme S10-VT which, as you may notice has a discreet engine and propeller. This means you can take off in the glider like a conventional powered light plane, get up to gliding height (in our case about 8,000 feet, turn the engine off (gulp) and become a glider. It was breathtaking and wonderful, peaceful and very smooth. Okay, there was one moment where I suffered a very brief attack of 'airborne Tourette's' when we pulled a very mild amount of G, but other than that, I loved every minute of it.

Getting Real about Numbers

I’ve had a few tweets recently reminding me that I am getting close to 100,000 followers on Twitter. I’m sure we can all agree that in the grand, cosmic scheme of events this is to say the very least, a fairly miniscule shift in the space-time continuum.

From experience what this figure really means is at some time, probably 80,000 people have made a conscious decision to follow @bobbyllew on Twitter. The other 20,000 are probably some kind of spam bot wibbly-wobbly code error sub-ether phenomenon only understood by a species with access to technology far in advance of our own.

So, out of that 80,000 I would say maybe 20,000 might be regular twitter users, of that 20,000, more like 10,000 have ever directly communicated with me, and of that 10,000, maybe 5 or 600 are regular commenters on my waffle.

I will admit there have been times when far more tweeters have got in touch, obviously after the first transmission of Red Dwarf X in 2012, I remember I received over 8,000 tweets in the first few minutes after the show. That makes it rather hard to keep up, be polite and respond individually.

It’s also important to remember that I joined Twitter back in 2007, fairly early in the history of the Twitterverse.

In many ways this slow but steady increase in numbers is representative of my life/career experience. I have never been fashionable which means very simply that I have also never been post-fashionable.  I’ve always been a bit unfashionable even when I’ve made an effort.

I have seen some of my comedy contemporaries join Twitter many years after I did, I chatted with them at the time about how Twitter really works when you have a few thousand followers, to notice a couple of months later that they had 1.2 million followers or, in the case of the venerable Mr S. Fry, 5,274,113. Yes, I just checked.

However, I’m very pleased, flattered and charmed that I’ve nearly got 100,000 followers, I think it’s wonderful and I am going to try and give a prize to the 100,000^th follower. Yes, a prize. I know, it’s tragic and revealing of an inner hollowness but it makes me happy.

I have just activated the e-mail setting informing me when I get a new follower, (I had to uncheck that a few years back) so hopefully I will get it right.

The prize? No big surprises, an autographed picture of Kryten 2X4B 523P, a signed copy of ‘News from Gardenia’ and a signed copy of the newly updated, soon to be released ‘The Man in the Rubber Mask’ paperback, with 43.17% more smeg.

If not now..... When?

I imagine most people, particularly parents, where once again brutally shaken by the truly appalling news from Connecticut yesterday. 
One morning during my first visit to America in the mid 1980's I accompanied a friend and her young children to a local elementary school in upstate New York, I have wonderful memories of that visit, seeing the delight and excitement of her children as they met their friends, the general feeling of community among the teachers and parents.

Yesterday, seeing the images from Newtown of the children, their parents and the police in such a calm, suburban environment was beyond description.
I knew I shouldn't but I was so upset I tweeted some randomly picked statistics about the horrific level of gun deaths in the USA. 
"Last year Handguns Killed: 48 in Japan, 8 in Great Britain, 34 in Switzerland, 52 in Canada, 58 in Israel, 21 in Sweden, 10,728 in the United States.
I was criticised for reaction too soon and that now isn't the time for such discussion but surely,

If not now, America, when?

I was criticised and accused of making up the figures, continually asked for the source by the ever-aggressive pro-gun lobby. All figures are nonsense.

There are dozens of contradictory figures from all manner of sources, but they all add up to the same thing no matter where they are from. Every table points out a massive discrepancy, the number of gun related deaths in America is off the scale. It is an epidemic, nowhere else on earth, including Mexico are as many people killed year after year by handguns.
I also shouldn't have done it because all such rational, fact based, bloody obvious arguments are immediately picked up by gun nuts. The yawn inducing 'more people are killed by drunk drivers' or 'what about the man who stabbed children in China' or the mind numbingly stupid and intellectually illiterate 'guns don't kill people, people....' oh, I can't even be bothered to write it.
I've lived in the UK for 56 years, I've known criminals, drug dealers, crazy bikers, angry husbands, charming vicars, hippy gardeners, extreme cyclists and civil servants. I have never met anyone who owns a handgun other than Craig Charles, but his are replica guns he used to use on stage. No one I know owns a handgun, some of my rural neighbours own shot guns, kept in locked cabinets and incredibly tightly controlled. I have never owned, wanted to own or for one brief moment considered owning a handgun. 
A handgun is a weapon; it’s no good for anything else, it’s manufactured to shoot people at close range. I have fired handguns in gun clubs in America. You need to be very close to your target, they would be useless for 'hunting,' they have absolutely no other purpose than to shoot people. 
The perverse twisting of the intention of the founding fathers to defend their country against my moronic, colonialist forefathers has gone beyond anything they could have imagined. As many people have said, it’s the mind-set of many American people who have been taught; in fact the idea has been hammered into them from childhood. It is your basic human right to carry a firearm, some blokes said so back in the 1700’s so it must be true.

No, it’s not a basic human right, in fact it’s a plain and simple basic human wrong.