SoCal LEAF & EV Gathering, Y8 - GC - 5 May 2018

[tbleakne]

I Will not be at the breakfast this Saturday. I have flown to San Jose and for first time rented a BMW I3 from Turo.com. Boomer predicted I would not be too happy with the car. I had some scary moments starting out because I forgot to ask enough questions about the controls. The 85 miles of range seems awfully limited. Today I try to use the CCS charger it was a disaster. It was out of Whole Foods and it was getting continuous use and maybe it was worn. It wouldn’t take my RF ID card I called they got me started with some help from another driver. Then the car seem to show you incorrectly that I had enough charge and I stopped it but I couldn’t pull the plug out. I asked for help from a nearby young fellow and he worked for five minutes struggling and finally got a key in there and unleashed the jam. I was truly frightened wasted an hour to get only 10 miles of charge and don’t want to ever use CCS again I realized on the less heavily used unit experience might be better.

Tonight I am back at the motel which I selected because it has two Level two‘s but both tonight and last night there was competition for the chargers and tonight I have no place to plug-in. The whole concept of plugging in for the night doesn’t really work when chargepoint Keeps billing you as long as you’re plugged in. so you would have to get up in the middle of the night to unplug when full. The car next to me is displaying that it is 2/3 full while charging so it may fill up before I go to bed and the manager may be able to get the owner to move the cable. The charge point units will not even tell you whether they are supplying power. The Turo part of the experience seems to be working well but I needed to ask a lot more questions before driving off in the car. The rearview camera is so wide angle it’s very hard to park in backwards which is necessary for the charge cable to reach. At least I am home in the motel safe for the night.

Hi see BMW I3 a few LEAFS and a zillion teslas all over up here. The motel has both a model S and a model X.
I drove by the very spot in Mountain View where the Model X had the fatal crash. The collision damper had been replaced. I saw a report that the driver had actually reported to Tesla twice that the car was tending to pull into that barrier every time he drove by. So why was his hands not on the wheel when he came by that section? It is all crazy but the technology clearly has a long way to go.

[Boomer23]

Ah Tom. So sorry that you’re having a rough time with your i3/CCS experience. You have my sympathies. I wish I could be there to help.

On the issue of releasing the CCS handle, it’s important to stop the charging session at the CCS unit first before you try to remove the plug from the car. And the car needs to be unlocked also. If both of those things were already done, it sounds like a mechanical issue with the charge port on the car, but that’s rare.

Good luck on your second day with the i3, my friend. Remember, calm is your best friend.

[sparky]

Sounds like not much fun. My brother recently sold his 2016 VW e-Golf for similar issues. Once a month he had to drive ~100 miles R/T and the charging for the return trip was unreliable; i.e., not working, card reader problem, ICE'd etc etc.. He got stuck once and had to spend the night in a hotel. I visited him last week and saw he'd replaced the e-Golf with a Mini-Cooper. I think he was ashamed to tell me.

@Boomer23 : Will there be a red Model 3 at the GC meeting tomorrow?

[Boomer23]

Sparky, if there’s a red one, it won’t be mine.

I don’t have a VIN yet, let alone a delivery date. I’ll be calling my contacts at Tesla today to see if they have anything they can tell me. I just got back from a week away, so I had told them I wouldn’t be able to take delivery until today or later anyway, but I had hoped I might have a VIN by now.

My BMW lease ends on 4/19, so I’m still good for a couple weeks of transportation.

[Boomer23]

Update on my Tesla:

Delivery is scheduled for next Thursday, Apr 12 (probably good that I didn’t pick Friday, superstitions properly honored).

VIN is in the mid 10,000s, so a bit low compared to the most recently assigned VINs that are up around 13,000. Rep said the car is about 35 days old, so I’m guessing it might have needed something updated before passing final QC. I’ll certainly be checking it with a fine tooth comb before I accept delivery.

Hopefully I’ll bring it to breakfast on 4/21 at Santa Ana.

[Boomer23]

There WILL be (at least one) red Tesla Model 3 at the Santa Ana Meetup next Saturday.

[sparky]

There WILL be (at least one) red Tesla Model 3 at the Santa Ana Meetup next Saturday.

Congrats Boomer!
Sorry I can't make the SA meetup. Hopefully, next one.

[Boomer23]

Yep, Sparky, I’m planning to make it to the first May meetup in Industry.

See you then, I hope.

[JeremyW]

Should be able to make the May 5th meeting. Congrats!

[tbleakne]

Congratulations, Boomer, on your new Model 2. I hope to see it this Saturday, April 21.

Thanks for your suggestions regarding my CCS charging problem with the i3 I rented via Turo.com. Other folks at the CCS station (dual units, people coming and going constantly), had told me about the two conditions: power off, unlocked car. I met both of those, although getting the power off was not intuitively obvious. The woman who had just charged her Golf had used that unit many times, and she warned me that unplugging it would be difficult, so I think it was mechanical.

In my previous post, I mentioned

I drove by the very spot in Mountain View where the Model X had the fatal crash.

This serious crash has affected my own plan to trade-in my Model S for a Model 3. Unlike others, who have great reasons to get the Model 3, some to add the Model 3 as their second electric car, others to join the Tesla family for the first time, my primary reason has been to get Auto Pilot 2, since my 2013 Model S is too old even for Auto Pilot 1.

There are other threads devoted to this serious crash. Yes, the driver was irresponsible, and yes it was unfortunate that Caltrans had not yet replaced the collision damper. However, the fact that the Auto-pilot, which was engaged, made no attempt to stop really bothers me. My first-hand observations of the scene from my trip, along with posted photos, show that this obstruction was well-marked with high contrast symbols. The right-hand image is what it looked like the day before the crash:



Another Tesla driver recreated the same driving dilemma of a forking car-pool lane and posted a video. It clearly shows that AP made no response to the approaching barrier:

https://electrek.co/2018/04/02/tesla-fa ... ecreation/

This crash has brought home to me what Gary had been telling me, that even though Auto Pilot tracks the vehicle in front of you, Auto Pilot is currently not programmed to detect fixed objects as threats to the car. It has been about 1.5 years since the Auto-pilot hardware was first introduced as standard on all Teslas produced, up to and including Model 3. My goal is improved safety. Elon has stated that AP has reduced the overall probability of accidents by 40%, but for me its inability to help in this crash is unacceptable. I believe advanced narrow beam radar would help a lot, and one such prototype was displayed at CES 2018.

https://globenewswire.com/news-release/2018/01/30/1314450/0/en/Metawave-First-to-Demonstrate-77-GHz-Electronically-Scanned-Metamaterial-Array-for-Autonomous-Driving.html

I am deferring any replacement of my Model S until I see real progress in Auto Pilot for crashes such as this.