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Tesla’s bioweapon mode is a stroke of genius for developing markets
- Raphmedia 11y agoI would buy a Tesla for this feature alone. Allergies in the summer are terrible, especially when driving through rural regions.
- ctdonath 11y agoWill this be the norm on the Model 3?
- collias 11y agoAlmost definitely not. The filter is currently part of a $3000 option package on the Model S and X. It may be an option, but I would be incredibly surprised if it came standard on the Model 3.
- jsingleton 11y agoIf they are successful in getting the world to switch to electric vehicles (and I hope they are) then they may not even need these in the future.
- mtgx 11y agoThis really should've been an ICE car feature: "Don't worry about all the pollution you're causing outside with your humongous SUV - you're safe inside."
- wolf550e 11y agoFossil-fuel power plants that charge a Tesla pollute quite a bit, so you need to switch to electric vehicles and non-polluting energy generation to fix air pollution.
- r00fus 11y agoThat's a red herring, unless you're going to do a full EROEI and compare the cost of petroleum extraction and delivery with the power generated from a power plant. Electric cars are simply cleaner - and by far. It gets far more interesting once you add in externalities like wars for oil or the nascent pervasiveness of solar power.
- seanp2k2 11y agoSomeone did: http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/electric-cars-green http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/electric-cars-green TL;DR right now EVs pollute about as much as a normal car getting 40MPG. There were ICE cars in the mid 80s doing better than that on combined mpg: http://www.motherearthnews.com/green-transportation/green-vehicles/miles-per-gallon-cars-zb0z11zblon.aspx http://www.motherearthnews.com/green-transportation/green-ve... Edit: solar was 0.6% of total power generated in the US in 2015 : https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=427&t=3 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=427&t=3 Solar panels aren't the easiest thing to manufacture. Consider how much energy mining and refining the toxic components and intermediaries of cells uses. http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/solar/solar-energy-isnt-always-as-green-as-you-think http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/solar/solar-energy-isnt-...
- jsingleton 11y agoWhile this is true, it depends on what you mean by pollution. Air quality (NO, PM etc.) is highly localised and simply walking or cycling on a quieter road is better for your health. So moving energy generation away from population centres helps a lot here. See Bankside and Battersea power stations in London for examples. Additionally, modern power stations have very strict air quality rules and heavily scrub their exhaust fumes to almost totally remove hazardous (to health) substances. This is much easier at industrial scale than on car exhausts. See SELCHP for an example. Obviously none of this is relevant to the separate issue of human induced climate change from CO2e emissions. However, EVs decouple the generation from the consumption, enabling more types of generation. The benefits of decoupling should be clear to anyone working in software.
- FreedomToCreate 11y agoOnly available to the rich. They have quite a bit of work to do to make this affordable enough to became a standard feature on sub 40K cars.
- joezydeco 11y agoWhat does it cost to replace the filters? Never seen that mentioned anywhere.
- knodi123 11y agoMe neither, even in the real world, and I have cabin air filters. They throw in a free air filter change when I get my oil changed.
- plorkyeran 11y agoA replacement HEPA filter for my room air filter is ~$10, so I'd be surprised if it was even $100 with labor.
- joezydeco 11y agoYour $10 filter is made by the millions. The Tesla one is going to be highly, highly custom and in low production quantities. It's also very large: http://i1.wp.com/evobsession.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Tesla-Model-X-air-filter.png http://i1.wp.com/evobsession.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/... I'd go a few Benjamins higher if I had to guess.
- maratd 11y ago> Only available to the rich. That's where new technology always starts? Eventually everything trickles down. That's how tech works.
- jimrandomh 11y agoI don't think they've said whether the Model 3 (which is sub-40K) will have it or not.
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- kosmic_k 11y agoI originally thought the bioweapon mode was a gimmick. Now that I think about China, India, and the air quality common there I feel that Tesla really is onto something very clever here.
- eklavya 11y agoThey really are, commerical diesel vehicles just got banned in Delhi by the supreme court. The situation is favorable to Tesla. An affordable electric vehicle could be an instant hit. Even in other cities there has been a drastic reduction in air quality with a booming middle class and the number of cars increasing. (In my city it increased to 1.5 times in a year!!). I am not holding my breath for Tesla to make an appearance here (with an affordable to middle class) offering but it would be awesome if they did.
- coherentpony 11y agoWhy the focus on China and India? By their own graphic, the Republic of Korea is the country that features the largest number of polluted cities, yet it isn't mentioned once in the article text.
- anu_gupta 11y agoFrom the article "India is also struggling tremendously; the country has the dubious honor of claiming 13 of the 20 slots in the top most-polluted cities in the world. "
- duskwuff 11y agoThe large dark blue segment in the top left, labeled "17.5%", is "other countries". The slices of that pie chart are labeled in clockwise order; Korea is one of the tiny unlabeled slices in the lower left.
- coherentpony 11y agoOh wow. I am an idiot. Thanks for pointing that out. I withdraw my previous criticism, but I'll leave it there so people can rightfully downvote it.
- stellar678 11y agoNah, it's a terrible graph. I had exactly the same understanding as you did.
- xoa 11y agoI wonder if Tesla is considering a potential regulatory advantage as well, which though by nature more iffy (since it's down to the whims of leadership) could still be a very potent marketing point. One technique for pollution reduction that China at least as implemented is to simply brute force reduce the number of allowed cars on the road (though even for them it's hard to enforce), for example by having odd/even license plate days. However, an electric car obviously contributes nothing, and it seems like a number of genuine interests would exist to exempt them from any road restrictions. To a lot of people a guaranteed license to legitimately drive when a traditional vehicle would be banned could be worth a major premium. It could make a lot of sense for Tesla to go very, very hard on a full package environmental protection (both internal and external) offering, because a lot of favorables line up for them. The most polluted places simultaneously make their advantages far more important and also contain higher percentages of people with the money to pay for a Tesla, even in countries that are lower on the average nationwide GDP/capita or HDI scales.
- optforfon 11y ago- the license plate thing as far as I know is only in Beijing where they're really desperate to do anything - The cars in general are pretty new (people are heavily in debt to finance their cars and iPhones). In the big cities you never see the typical eastern european thing where someone put their foot down on the gas and a plum of exhaust comes out. Every car seems to run clean. Taxis are old, but they run on natural gas. - All scooters are electrics. This is actually amazing to see for the first time b/c you never hear about it in the west. But 99% of the scooters are electric and silent. It's amazing. And we're talking about like half the traffic is on scooters. So this is big!. Funny enough I wouldn't even know where to buy one in the west. - the reality is that the pollution is almost entirely from the factories and powerplants. It really looks different from what you see from cars. It's like a haze.. sorta like fog, but more gray. But it's very uniform and everywhere. Electric power is very very cheap in China. They're scared of the price ever going up b/c it's take a toll on manufacturing.
- kbenson 11y ago> It really looks different from what you see from cars. It's like a haze.. sorta like fog, but more gray. But it's very uniform and everywhere. Cars can cause it too. Long time Los Angeles residents can attest to that. The fuel efficiency and smog requirements in recent decades have made it much less likely though[1]. 1: https://www.google.com/search?q=la+smog&tbm=isch#tbm=isch&q=la+smog+now+and+then https://www.google.com/search?q=la+smog&tbm=isch#tbm=isch&q=...
- 27182818284 11y agoI feel like the bioweapon filter is going to go down as one of those features Engineers were like "Why not, haha?!" about that ends up being ubiquitous. Akin to 20% time projects that end up growing into actual projects
- LoSboccacc 11y agoUnsubstantiated claim can result in lawsuit in developed markets tho.
- Analemma_ 11y agoIt's not totally unsubstantiated, Tesla did post this: https://www.teslamotors.com/blog/putting-tesla-hepa-filter-and-bioweapon-defense-mode-to-the-test https://www.teslamotors.com/blog/putting-tesla-hepa-filter-a.... Of course you should have a healthy degree of skepticism regarding tests Tesla did itself and maybe the numbers are massaged a little, but I doubt they'd straight-up lie. It seems like this test would be pretty easy to replicate by an independent source too, if someone wanted to try. Edit: I did not see that there's already an entire HN discussion thread about this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11617945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11617945 which discuss other possible weaknesses. Still, even with the usual HN nitpicking, I think it comes out pretty good.
- Caprinicus 11y agoThe good thing about developed markets is that they generally don't get hit with bioweapons
- CptJamesCook 11y agoYou can get the equivalent of this inside your home with the IQAir HealthPro Plus Air Purifier.
- bryanlarsen 11y agoExcept you don't get positive pressure, which would require a really big fan or very tight seals.
- CptJamesCook 11y agoThat doesn't stop it from removing 97% of the pollutants from the air.
- bryanlarsen 11y agoAccording to the linked article, the Tesla hits 97% in less than 2 minutes, and hits unmeasurable after 3, which is 99.9% or better.
- Unklejoe 11y agoIs there some fundamental difference between this feature and the built-in in-cabin air filter that my 2002 Nissan Maxima had? It seems like it's the same exact thing, but maybe the Tesla has a better filter and a more air tight cabin? I bet my 2011 BMW 335i would probably perform just as well since that cabin is much more air tight. All air passes through a massive filter which I believe contains a normal paper element as well as a charcoal element for odor. Cars have had cabin filters for a long time now. The primary purpose is to reduce dust an allergies. I have a hard time believing that the car is air tight enough to prevent actual bioweapon particles from entering after any extended period of time. Of course, the amount of particles required to be harmful plays a big role in the overall effectiveness of this. Is there some other aspect that I am missing? [EDIT]: It seems like HEPA specifications are more strict than that of the average cabin filter in terms of particle size. This clearly separates the Telsa from other implementations.
- bryanlarsen 11y agoThe Tesla in bioweapons mode maintains positive pressure -- ie, the air inside the car is pressurized to a higher pressure than the outside air.
- Unklejoe 11y agoMakes sense. That should help keep outside air (other than through the main filter) out of the car. However, there's also positive pressure inside my BMW when the HVAC system is running. This is one of the reasons that the windows slide down ~1cm when you open the door and slide back up after you close it. It makes it easier to close the door. Even with that, it takes a considerable amount more force to close the door when the HVAC system is running. The HVAC system in the BMW was probably not designed with the intent of stopping bioweapons, but what I'm alluding to is that I'd be curious to see the same air quality tests performed on other cars which include in-cabin air filters. Maybe they all work that well? I don't think the BMW has a HEPA filter though. However, it should be good enough. I found the following online (though not from the best of sources): ----- Cabin air filters are very efficient and have electrostatically charged fibers that can trap particles smaller than 1 micron in size. Most quality cabin air filters will stop 100% of all particles that are 3 microns or larger in size and 95-99% of particles in the 1-3 micron size range. ---- http://www.underhoodservice.com/tech-tip-cabin-air-filter-q-a/ http://www.underhoodservice.com/tech-tip-cabin-air-filter-q-...
- Aelinsaar 11y agoThe "Bioweapons" pitch is a little laughable, but as someone with allergies I'm still totally on board for the actual product and what it actually can do.
- jd20 11y agoAgreed, this has good potential for developed countries as well. Makes me wonder what the home equivalent of "bioweapon mode" is too, looking at the main filter in my home's HVAC system, it's certainly far from advanced...
- extrapickles 11y agoYou would also need to mod your homes HVAC system to pull in air from the outside so it can positively pressurize the house with filtered air as houses are very leaky[1], especially when doors are opened. [1]: https://www.energycodes.gov/sites/default/files/documents/BECP_Buidling%20Energy%20Code%20Resource%20Guide%20Air%20Leakage%20Guide_Sept2011_v00_lores.pdf https://www.energycodes.gov/sites/default/files/documents/BE...
- Aelinsaar 11y agoExactly, in most cases it's basically just enough to keep the motors from being fouled with dust and debris. You could probably imagine an Uber driver, or similar livery driver offering hypoallergenic rides during the height of allergy seasons in various cities. Japan in particular might be all over this; they have a monstrous allergy season with people wearing full face gear!
- Allower 11y agoits no genius - just, most people are morons
- sickbeard 11y agoDoes nothing for the common man. Are you gonna hide in your car all day?
- mmaunder 11y agoTesla will take the pain of innovation and China will just copy the IP and do it themselves. There is simply no way the Chinese market (and it's authorities) would let a foreign company come in and become the dominant incumbent in a nascent market like electric cars.
- dang 11y agoThe original announcement is discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11617945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11617945.