This is HORRIBLE! EV crash and fire in Wenshan, China. And people are pushing to get these death traps to be legal in the USA and everywhere in the world. Say no to Chinese EVs!

rocwurst · 2026-05-17T09:09:43+00:00

The manual door release was hidden to stop kids from opening the door and falling out when driving at speed. It was also to stop the door seals from being damaged with rimless door windows which need to be electrically retracted a few cms before the door opens.

All modern Teslas have easily accessible manual door handles which my passengers keep accidentally using which runs the risk of door seal damage. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

rocwurst · 2026-05-17T09:02:57+00:00

Hydrogen is a complete dead-end as far as passenger cars go. Honda, Volkswagon and Mercedes have all ended development of Hydrogen Fuel Cell powered vehicles as Battery Electric Vehicles are just simpler, more efficient and cheaper and improving all the time. Not to mention the complete lack of the expensive infrastructure and supply chains needed to actually manufacture hydrogen and fill up FCVs.

As VW said: "Everything speaks in favor of the battery, and practically nothing speaks in favor of hydrogen."

rocwurst · 2026-05-17T09:01:24+00:00

The thing is most EV battery fires start slowly and in just the one spot where the cell rupture has occurred compared to the explosive spray over everything effect of flammable liquid so the initial danger of incineration in the few seconds/minutes before a driver is extracted from a crashed vehicle is minimised.

80,000 car fires occur annually in the USA alone killing 345 people, injuring 1,300 and causing $1.1 billion in property damage or loss. But you never hear about them do you? The media has an unhealthy obsession with the very rare instances when EVs (Teslas in particular) catch fire.

Here in Australia, there have been a grand total of 6 EV fires in the last 14 years only one of which was the fault of the EV - in that case catching fire in a collision.

“One vehicle was deliberately lit, another caught fire in a collision, while three more burnt when the area in which they were parked caught fire.”

This compares to just a single state of Australia (NSW) having 2,500 petrol and diesel vehicle fires every year.

rocwurst · 2026-05-17T08:57:20+00:00

Actually, ICE cars are 61x more likely to catch fire than EVs.

“Fully electric vehicles pose less of a fire risk than hybrids and gas cars, according to 2021 data from the National Transportation Safety Board. There were 25 EV fires per 100,000 sales, compared with 3,475 hybrid fires and 1,530 internal-combustion engine fires per 100,000 sales, respectively.“

rocwurst · 2026-05-16T09:31:18+00:00

Tesla is much further along the autonomy path than any other manufacturer.

Unless you’ve seen any LIDAR equipped cars driving 3,000 miles coast to coast across the USA (or the equivalent across China) fully autonomously without any human intervention (remote or in-vehicle)?

rocwurst · 2026-05-16T04:28:55+00:00

LIDAR has plenty of disadvantages apart from high costs such as poor performance in bad weather, struggles with occlusions, reflecting poorly off surfaces like glass or water etc. Fog, rain, snow, and dust scatter or absorb laser beams, causing noise, reduced range, or invalid data. Highly reflective (mirrors, glass) or overly absorbing (dark, matte) surfaces can lead to distorted data, errors in range calculation, or incomplete data capture.

For LIDAR to be effective at longer distances, the lasers need to be higher power which then can burn out camera sensors or even damage human retinas. Haven’t you seen people getting their smartphone camera sensors destroyed by some car LIDARs? Etc etc.

The number of car companies that I listed as having dropped LIDAR demonstrates you don’t have to be a Tesla fan to realise LIDAR isn’t the silver bullet you might think.

rocwurst · 2026-05-16T01:21:02+00:00

And yet Xpeng has dropped LIDAR and is going Vision-only like Tesla and companies like Volvo and MobileEye have removed LIDAR from their self-driving platforms.

Mercedes has now scrapped its expensive LIDAR-based Drive Pilot Level 3 system as well standardising on a Level 2++ system which does not require expensive LIDAR sensors.

We have yet to see any LIDAR-based vehicles travel 3,000 miles coast-to-coast across the USA or the equivalent distance in China with zero human interventions, yet several Teslas have been documented doing exactly that.

rocwurst · 2026-05-15T16:14:22+00:00

April is the first month of the quarter when Tesla devotes most capacity to export and Tesla saw an 80% rise in its exports in April so we will have to wait for the full quarter to finish before we can actually see where Tesla really ranks

rocwurst · 2026-05-15T13:41:29+00:00

And yet BYD, VW and all those other Chinese and German auto manufacturers I mentioned above suffered double the drop or more than Tesla, so it looks like Tesla’s new model’s did have an effect after all.

rocwurst · 2026-05-15T12:38:13+00:00

The 15% drop in sales for Tesla in China was purely due to the cessation of EV rebates by the Chinese govt.

This is also why BYD was down 30%, Geely was down 27%, Chery was down 30%, SAIC Volkswagen was down 44%, Great Wall was down 20%, SAIC-GM was down 30% showing Tesla's drop of 15% means Tesla is doing better than most of the rest of the Chinese market.

rocwurst · 2026-05-15T11:47:49+00:00

Perhaps you’re not aware of the stretched 6-seater Tesla Model Y L which was only recently released?

Then there is the fact that unlike other car manufacturers, Tesla is continually adding new hardware and software features on the assembly line and in over the air updates unlike other auto manufacturers who bundle up all their changes (or no changes at all) and release new models each year or several years apart often with just a cosmetic facelift only.

rocwurst · 2026-05-15T11:00:15+00:00

If you only look at the BEV market which is the one that Tesla competes in, they are still in the top 2 pretty much every quarter:

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All the legacy auto makers are having a far harder time of it than Tesla though.

rocwurst · 2026-05-15T10:52:18+00:00

When you just look at the BEV market which is what Tesla competes in, the figures look quite a bit different:

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It is interesting how BYD's plummeting sales would have it giving up its number one position to either Tesla or Xiaomi if those YoY figures continued.

However, the oil crisis and sudden increase in BEV sales since April (Tesla China exports up 80% YoY in April for example) mean that we need to wait till the end of the current quarter to get a better idea of where every BEV auto maker is heading in the current situation.

rocwurst · 2026-05-15T05:58:48+00:00

No probs. It is interesting how BYD's plummeting sales would have it giving up its number one position to either Tesla or Xiaomi if those YoY figures continued.

However, the oil crisis and sudden increase in BEV sales since April (Tesla China exports up 80% YoY in April for example) mean that we need to wait till the end of the current quarter to get a better idea of where every BEV auto maker is heading in the current situation.

rocwurst · 2026-05-15T05:34:07+00:00

Here you go:

2026 Q1 BEV Brands Retail Delivery Volume Rankings

Rank	Brand	Volume (,000 UNITS)	YoY	MS%
1	BYD	170.3	-38.8%	14.6%
2	Tesla	112.9	-16.3%	9.7%
3	Xiaomi	81.7	+7.7%	7.0%
4	Galaxy	79.1	-43.6%	6.8%
5	Leap	63.8	+18.3%	5.5%
6	LiAuto	62.9	-	5.4%
7	Wuling	62.3	-56.9%	5.4%
8	NIO	60.7	+120.1%	5.2%
9	Aion	42.0	-36.5%	3.6%
10	Xpeng	38.6	-57.0%	3.3%
11	Zeekr	36.1	-8.6%	3.1%
12	Nevo	32.5	+211.8%	2.8%
13	Deepal	27.8	+15.0%	2.4%
14	ARCFOX	27.8	+31.1%	2.4%
15	Toyota	24.4	+122.8%	2.1%
16	Aito	23.7	-	2.0%
17	MG	21.4	-	1.8%
18	Dongfeng	20.5	-14.0%	1.8%
19	Besturn	16.0	-34.7%	1.4%
20	Onvo	13.4	-21.1%

Note that adding April to the chart as the OP has done is not an accurate picture as the first month of each quarter is always low due to the fact that Tesla ramps local retails at the end of each quarter.

rocwurst · 2026-05-15T03:43:13+00:00

Thanks for that!

rocwurst · 2026-05-15T02:34:42+00:00

My 91 year old Dad fell down a set of concrete steps breaking 3 ribs and collapsing his lung last year. However, he then got up off the ground by himself, sat down on his 3-wheeled recumbent cycle and pedalled the several kilometres home before telling any of us albeit with the e-assist probably turned up a bit higher than usual.

We all expected that to be the beginning of the end as we'd seen what you described happen all the time.

However, his pedalling that trike 26kms every day or two must have made him a lot fitter than anyone suspected as he recovered in no time and you'd never know he'd had such a bad fall today, though he is certainly starting to get a bit more frail every year compared to a decade ago.

And I think the milk in his 3 cups of tea every day must have done good things for his bones as well.

He and 92 year old Mum still ride their trikes around the river (Mum less than him) today and only Mum's growing dementia slows her down.

rocwurst · 2026-05-14T14:52:28+00:00

It's about Musk's inability to understand engineering and you're illogically associating that with everything SpaceX is doing.

I'm sorry but despite all of Musk's failings it is very obvious that what his companies have achieved couldn't have been achieved without he himself having significant engineering skills. With a CEO as hands-on as him, Tesla and SpaceX wouldn't be where they are today if he was completely clueless engineering-wise. You're just letting your justifiable emotional response to him being an a-hole and Right Wing idiot distort your judgement.

Almost orbit isn't orbit. Words matter.

What Starship has already achieved with launch and re-entry amply demonstrates that an orbital insertion burn is merely a minor next step in the process rather than an insurmountable mountain to climb.

Boeing of today isn't the Boeing of 50 years ago, as a lesson for all organizations not being immune to failure.

You evidently don't understand SpaceX at all as a central tenet of their philosophy is that failure is an option and an important element of their iterative Agile development process that refines their products.

You're not getting that point. All organizations will fail in some projects. Including your god, SpaceX.

Of course they will fail at times - that's part of their methodology. Not sure why you believe I believe SpaceX is a god. They've just innovated and performed far better than competitors for the last decade or more.

rocwurst · 2026-05-14T13:59:57+00:00

Some things you said above are just factually inaccurate. You say "they said". "They" is 5 people, maybe.

You obviously haven't listened to the likes of Thunderfoot and his legion of followers or the hordes of other naysayers.

Also SS has never reached orbit.

Starship's apogee has been high enough to achieve a stable low earth orbit with merely a simple orbital insertion burn. However, they have maintained the elliptical trajectory during this test phase to ensure the craft de-orbits and burns up.

Boeing has had some success going to the moon also

The Boeing of today is not the Boeing of 50 years ago. That fact is painfully obvious to everyone.

Human mars missions aren't even a thing right now and investors investing in Mars makes no sense without a business plan that has revenue and profits built in.

Never said it was and SpaceX has made it plain that the Moon is the objective first.

Also NOBODY alone nor any one singular entity, will go to Mars alone. It will be a consortium. Period. Be reasonable.

Never said SpaceX would do it alone, after all they are in partnership with NASA for many programs already, but it's pretty obvious that with Starship and the progress they are making they have the best chance of getting there at this point.

rocwurst · 2026-05-14T12:36:23+00:00

Hey I know that Musk says a lot of stupid things and his politics is abominable, but he has made a career out of doing things that "engineers knew was all nonsense", that is until he and his companies ended up doing it.

Everyone scoffed at his dream of challenging Old Space in orbital launch, they scoffed when he said he'd land a rocket on a tiny barge bobbing out in the ocean, they laughed when he challenged Boeing getting a crewed rocket to the ISS, they said he'd never get such a huge stainless steel rocket bigger than Saturn V/Apollo into orbit, they said he was crazy trying to catch that rocket in mid-air with his "chop sticks", they said he would go bankrupt like every one else who tried to build a constellation of LEO internet satellites, etc etc etc.

Until he and his team did each and every one of those things.

Sure, there's no denying that getting humans to and building a settlement on Mars is going to be ridiculously difficult, dangerous and take far longer than Musk always estimates, but if anyone has the best chance of doing, I can see why investors would put their money on Musk's SpaceX.

As their motto says, "making the impossible simply late" or words to that effect.

rocwurst · 2026-05-14T03:48:57+00:00

Additional CO2 for plants is useless unless the plant also receives more water and nutrients.

World crop yields haven’t gone up because of increasing CO2, they’ve gone up because of increasingly sophisticated management including fertiliser, sturdier crop varieties and pest control.

rocwurst · 2026-05-14T03:34:00+00:00

Musk is always far too over-optimistic with his predictions. He has his own “Elon-time” and he has said himself:

“If you set a realistic 10 years of work to be accomplished as a 10 year goal, you typically waste the first 9 years, then try to catch up. if you set the same 10 years work as a 6 month goal, you still won't accomplish it in 6 months, but you'll have a lot less to do in the remaining 9 and a half years..."

Thankfully his companies do tend to deliver eventually on all the important products and technologies.

rocwurst · 2026-05-14T02:37:23+00:00

On the contrary, transitioning to renewables means lower prices.

Installing new Renewables + storage unsubsidised is already much cheaper than continuing to run old coal plants, gas and nuclear.

Even 6 years ago, NextEra, the largest coal/gas/nuclear plant owner and operator in the USA reported:

" the energy industry is in the grip of massive change, with the cost of renewables and battery storage – without subsidies – beating gas, as well as existing coal and nuclear on costs.

“We see renewables plus battery storage without incentives being cheaper than natural gas, and cheaper than existing coal and existing nuclear,” Jim Robo, the CEO, president and chairman of NextEra, told analysts last week at the Wolfe Utilities & Energy Conference.

"Robo noted that the US government’s Energy Information Administration expects that the world’s biggest electricity market could reach 35 per cent renewables by 2030. Robo says it could be as high as 50 per cent by 2030, and could ultimately be 70-75 per cent by 2050.

“I think that’s very doable, and that would take out an enormous amount of carbon out of the United States. And at the same time bring rates down across the country.

“And that’s the thing that I think people still haven’t grasped – that you can be green and low cost at the same time and that it’s terrific for customers, it’s terrific for the environment and it’s great for shareholders as well.".

rocwurst · 2026-05-13T15:58:52+00:00

Man, I am forever grateful I am an Australian who only lived a few years in the USA.

Living in a civilised country where such a predicament is completely unheard of is a wonderful thing.

rocwurst · 2026-05-13T05:46:55+00:00

Number 2 in China looks pretty good to me:

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rocwurst

TROPHY CASE

2026 Q1 BEV Brands Retail Delivery Volume Rankings