Hasta La Gadget!

We liked Tesla’s Model S, but some of the other outlets didn’t feel the same way. The New York Times‘ John Broder, for one, described being stranded 25 miles away from the nearest supercharger station. However, after Tesla’s litigious run-in with Top Gear, the company keeps detailed vehicle data logs to ensure it gets a fair deal in reviews. Now, Tesla (and SpaceX) CEO Elon Musk has posted the data that, he says, proves Broder wasn’t being fair.

Musk accuses Broder of pulling the plug on a recharge with just 32 miles range in the tank, despite planning a route of 61 miles “in obvious violation of common sense.” He also says the reviewer drove past a public charge station, despite repeated warnings that it was running low, drove the car around at 81mph and “deliberately stopped charging” after shorter and shorter times. Musk finishes by saying that the company was wrong to offer Broder access to the vehicle, as it was “unaware of his outright disdain for electric cars” and asks the New York Times to investigate the review. We suspect this one’s going to run-and-run, but we’d better warn the NYT that their opponent does have access to rockets.

Filed under: Transportation

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Source: Tesla

Everyone who has driven with a GPS in a big city knows that there are spotty places where the GPS signal reception is difficult because the device loses line of sight, or because buildings are reflecting and bouncing  the GPS signal around. The end result is a dramatic loss of accuracy which can mean the missing a critical turn. Scientists from Spain have devised a way to improve the positioning accuracy by a wide margin. “We have managed to improve the determination of a vehicle’s position in critical cases by between 50 and 90%,” said researcher David Martin to BBC. (more…)

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Last September, Wahoo Fitness’ RFLKT iPhone bike computer appeared on our radar poised for a December release, but it’s only just gone up for sale. As of today, the iPhone 4S- and 5-compatible device is available for $130 from Wahoo’s website and is shipping out to door steps. If you’re in need of a refresher, the RFLKT (pronounced reflect, if you’re curious) sits on a bicycle’s handlebars and displays ride information slung to it over Bluetooth 4.0 from cycling apps running on a paired device. RFLKT is expected to support a number of apps in the future, but it currently plays nice with just two: its maker’s own Cyclemeter application and the Wahoo Fitness App, which monitors everything from speed to heart rate, with the help of another peripheral, of course. Cyclists can also push buttons on the contraption’s side to change tracks on their iDevice’s playlist. Ready to infuse your ride with at-a-glance stats? Check out the source link and the video after the break.

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Source: Wahoo Fitness

We recently had a chance to put a Tesla Model S through its paces and we had no problem getting where we were going — and back again — despite our testing happening in Upstate New York the middle of a rather chilly January. The New York Times, however, had a bit of a harder time of it. Over the weekend, Times reporter John M. Broder published what can only be called a rather negative report on a failed trip to one of Tesla’s fabled Superchargers. After a series of short charges and a series of drives in a Model S (the very same car we tested, we would add), Broder ultimately ran out of juice and was left stranded, having to tow the car from Brannford, CT to the nearest Supercharger, this one in Milford — about 25 miles away.

Broder blamed the temperature and, ultimately, the car for causing the disappointment — something Tesla CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter to rebut, saying:

NYTimes article about Tesla range in cold is fake. Vehicle logs tell true story that he didn’t actually charge to max & took a long detour.

The Times responded (via CNBC) that the report was “completely factual” and that “Any suggestion that the account was ‘fake’ is, of course, flatly untrue.” Musk then took to CNBC himself to talk about a “lengthy detour” Broder took through Manhattan — something not mentioned in his post.

In our own experiences, we definitely did notice a decreased indicated range immediately after turning on the car, but it quickly rose as they gradually rose to operating temperature. That said, we were never able to eke out the “indicated” range in the cold on either of our lengthy trips — even those that didn’t involve trips through Manhattan.

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Source: @elonmusk (Twitter), The New York Times

Google’s self-driving cars have been in testing since early 2011, although it experienced its first accident a few months later. Regardless of that, and we’re sure many more undocumented hiccups, Google feels its self-driving cars are improving steadily and expects them to be ready in three to five years.

Product manager of autonomous driving Anthony Levandowski recently spoke at a Society for Automotive Engineers conference, where he revealed Google’s plans to release its self-driving technology in the next three to five years. He also informed those attending the talk “what form it gets released is still to be determined” as a number of legal issues stand in the way for autonomous vehicles to be made available to the public.

As of right now, only California, Florida and Nevada allow for Google’s self-driving vehicles to be driven on roadways. The reason for their acceptance though is purely for testing purposes as a human driver needs to be present while it’s being driven. We’re not sure why an unmanned self-driving car would be needed, but maybe we’re just not thinking outside of the box.

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