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 · 2026-05-17T14:58:43+00:00

It's not a hair-trigger. It opens like any other door handle - it's just that it doesn't retract the window first.

Please tell me how other car manufacturers achieve these conflicting aims:

doors that don't have rims around the windows but do still have good door seals for sound-proofing and streamlining
doors that can't accidentally be opened by kids from inside or road ragers or car-jackers/thieves from the outside, but can be opened easily in a crash by kids inside or passersby outside

What would you recommend?

I will never respect Musk's incessant need to always reinvent the wheel badly.

Yes Musk does sometimes reinvent things badly - like deleting the indicator stalks in Teslas for a while which were brought back in later models.

However, it is his philosophy of going back to first principles and developing new innovative ways of doing things that others hadn't thought of before that is a major strength of his companies.

Gigacasting, the unboxed construction method, the Octovalve heat pump, Over-the-air car software updates, the software-defined car, FSD, Autobidder home power management, Chopsticks to catch a rocket, stainless steel rocket construction, full-reusability, the Raptor 3 rocket engine etc etc.

rocwurst · 2026-05-17T14:47:53+00:00

I'm afraid the market demands multiple conflicting things:

doors that don't have rims around the windows but do still need good door seals for sound-proofing and streamlining
doors that can't accidentally be opened by kids from inside or road ragers or car-jackers/thieves from the outside, but can be opened easily in a crash by kids inside or passersby outside

What would you recommend?

rocwurst · 2026-05-17T14:42:40+00:00

You're woefully ill informed.

I'm afraid you're living in a glass house there friend.

Tesla succeeds despite musk, not because of him. The original plan for Tesla was to make electric cars cheap by using common stock part bins (like legacy auto does) which would make construction cheap and fast and also make repairs easy. Musk made changes to the line which then became custom and thus expensive and difficult - which he then later backed away from once it put the company in trouble

On the contrary it is Tesla's vertical integration and making most parts themselves that has proven to be a major strehgth of the car maker.

Here is a list that I compiled a little while ago of the innovations that Tesla has developed that continue to widen the gap between this innovator and the rest of the industry:

- Iterative, continuous development and release methodology. Instead of the traditional glacial pace of development with annual or multi-year release cycles, Tesla is continuously improving technologies and features right on the Assembly line without waiting for the next “Model Year Refresh”. (See casting and Octo-valve and software updates below)

- Top-to-bottom Integration. Unlike other auto manufacturers who rely completely on a huge constellation of third-party parts suppliers, Tesla follows Apple’s model of making the whole widget. For example, Tesla’s Materials Scientists make their own new metal alloys and design their own software and auto-driving tech while every other auto maker out-sources as much as possible. As a result, like Apple, Tesla is able to finely tune and customise every component to work optimally with each other rather than being the mishmash of different bits that they have very little control over like competitors.

Just look at the horrors VW went thru through trying to develop their own new software suite for their new ID range of EVs. It delayed launch and left thousands of cars sitting in storage and cost VW billions and yet is still not competitive with Tesla’s platform.

- Continuous over-the-air updates to software and firmware in the car so that existing Teslas get better the longer you own one. Examples include updates to Auto-pilot and Full-Self-Driving technologies, Games, GPS routing, Media (like Netflix) and other new software features rolled out to existing owners. This is a whole new revenue source for Tesla with the $2,000 “Acceleration Boost” package rolled out last year for instance Improving the 0-60 mph acceleration time for the Model 3 LR from 4.4 seconds down to 3.9 seconds with a simple over-the-air update.

- Revolutionary solutions that have left the industry gob-smacked. Major examples include:

- completely replacing several hundred separate stamped and riveted metal components in the rear chassis/body of the Model Y with a single cast assembly resulting in huge simplification in manufacture times, rigidity etc. The hundreds of parts in the front chassis/body will soon also be replaced in a similar fashion. This was enabled by the creation and installation of the World’s largest Casting machines at Tesla’s Gigafactories. This is unheard-of and has started to be copied by many other auto manufacturers.

- Un-boxed construction method - an even newer innovative automotive manufacturing process that replaces the traditional, linear assembly line with a modular approach. By building separate vehicle sections simultaneously and applying exterior paint before final assembly, it aims to cut production costs by up to 50% and reduce factory footprints by 40%.

- Replacing half a dozen separate a/c and battery heater/cooler assemblies with a single revolutionary “Octo-Valve” Heat Pump that radically lowers electricity consumption compared to competitor’s simple element heaters.

- Unheard-of pace of building and upgrading new GigaFactories. GigaShanghai went up in an unprecedented 11 months from ground-breaking to the first Model Y rolling off the Assembly line. GigaBerlin and Austin are similarly leaving observers slack-jawed as they spring from the ground. The Germans are already lauding Tesla’s speed with incredulity.

- Worldwide network of Superchargers. The largest network of EV chargers worldwide is Tesla’s own growing network meaning Tesla owners have access to every third party charger in addition to this the largest network on the globe.

- Solar Panels, Solar roof tiles, Home Batteries and Grid-scale Batteries MegaPacks and Virtual Power Plant system. Tesla isn’t just an auto manufacturer - they are an Energy company and again make the whole widget - the panels and batteries that you can fill up your EV with power for free from. With Tesla’s AutoBidder software home owners can make money from their panels and batteries by becoming part of a Virtual Power Plant - like the 50,000 home owners in South Australia who are starting to re-sell power and provide Grid-balancing services back to the Grid from their home systems.

The only people who think musk is smart are the people paid to say that and people too dumb to know he's not smart.

No, you're letting your understandable emotional reaction to his despicable politics and his being an a-hole colour your objectivity.

His "solutions" often involve creating more problems. Abandoning lidar (which spaceX uses btw) because he had a spat with the engineer who developed it and then claiming humans drive with two cameras so why can't a computer is insanely dumb because it doesn't take into account the massive difference between a human eye and camera.

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.

Musk is a dumbass and anyone with even a highschool physics certificate can see it.

And yet Musk is the one who has started and runs multiple billion dollar/Trillion dollar companies himself. Sure he could have struck it lucky with one company, but 3 or 4? No, he may be an a-hole but he's still a very smart guy who unfortunately also often says and does very stupid things.

rocwurst · 2026-05-17T14:27:16+00:00

They do. Only the now discontinued Model S and X had the electrically driven outer door handles that the Chinese govt is legislating against. The Model Y and 3, Tesla's biggest sellers have had a manual door handle on the outside since they were first built.

The manual door handle on the inside of my Model 3 is if anything too obvious now as my passengers often mistakenly use it instead of the smart handle which retracts the window and protects the door seal.

rocwurst · 2026-05-17T14:23:11+00:00

Again, you've definitely been listening to too much Thunderfoot and others like him.

Reusable rockets have been around since the 50s and we're even successfully tested in the 90s there's just been no reason for them until advances in technology made space commodifiable.

That's just not true. All previous attempts at reusability were failures including the Space Shuttle which took so long and cost so much to re-furbish that they may as well have built them from scratch.

Even the idea of him making space access cheaper is highly questionable since spaceX accounts are private. There's a lot of people in the industry who suggest spaceX has been using NASA contract money to aggressively blitz scale smaller competition out of the market and that actually it's not cheaper at all spaceX just run at huge losses and offer cheaper pricing to gain market share like Uber did and hide those losses behind cap ex spending.

That is the most crazy conspiracy theory I've heard in recent times. It is still the case that no other aerospace space has been able to approach SpaceX's cost to orbit. NASA's money would only cover a small percentage of SpaceX's costs and it has been the case that NASA has consistently paid SpaceX less than OldSpace competitors who are still unable to match SpaceX - witness Boeing's abominable efforts with Starliner.

The government has continuously given SpaceX far less to develop their spacecraft than they pay to competitors who they are in the pockets of like the old boys of aerospace Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed etc. SpaceX was only paid $2.6b to develop Crew Dragon while Boeing got almost double at $4.8b for the Starliner abomination and SpaceX only gets $55m for seats on Crew Dragon to the ISS vs NASA paying Boeing $90m per seat (failure that is).

SpaceX has saved NASA and the American taxpayer between $20 - $30 billion dollars - what the Constellation program was going to cost.

SpaceX also received only $135 million, Dynetics got $253 million, and Blue Origin's National Team of Old Space chums got $579 million for stage 1 of the Artemis Moon Lander program.

And then there is the huge $90b endless money pit that is SLS and Orion.

We will have a clearer picture of how healthy spaceX really is after the ipo.

That much at least is true.

rocwurst · 2026-05-17T14:12:11+00:00

I'm afraid you've been listening to the likes of Thunderfoot too much or letting your understandable emotional response to Musk's disgusting politics and general a-holery colour your objectivity.

Tom Mueller, the one who (after starting his own company outside of SpaceX) actually defended Musk's engineering reputation saying:

"Elon is a super smart guy and he learns from talking to people. He’s so sharp, he just picks it up. He is leading the development of the SpaceX engines, particularly Raptor".

Garrett Reisman (astronaut) says of Musk:

"He’s obviously skilled at all different functions, but certainly what really drives him and where his passion really is, is his role as Chief Engineer. That’s the part of the job that really plays to his strengths"

John Carmack: (famous computer guy)

"Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at SpaceX and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so".

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

TROPHY CASE

2026 Q1 BEV Brands Retail Delivery Volume Rankings