Comments by "Keit Hammleter" (@keithammleter3824) on "US Dept of Justice to investigate Tesla's \"misleading\" EV range claims | MGUY Australia" video.

@Seehart : You could be suffering from what I call the Beetle Effect. Back in the 1960's when VW Beetles were sold - they were shocking dreadful things - dim headlights, vague gearshift operation, noisy engine, overheating engine, etc. But Beetle owners nearly always reckoned they were the best car. It is a form of what psychologists call confirmation bias. When you have invested a lot of money in something, you only look at the positives (the Beetle did have light direct steering and was easy to park) and not the negatives (such as the Beetle's cheap and nasty 6 volt electrics). A friend of mine was driving his near new Tesla down the freeway at 110 km/hr. A car was in front of him, and a bus was front the car. The bus had advertising on the back, featuring a twice natural size photo of a person. The car changed lanes and when the Tesla got a sight of the bus, it automatically did a full on emergency stop, nearly causing a pile up crash. Really really stupid.
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@hobo1704 The market in Australia isn't typical or stable. Government departments have been buying EV's to trial. When each trial ends, they sell off the EV's. There was an item in the news media yesterday that said that car dealers expect the market to be flooded next year as government departments have significant numbers of EV's coming up for their scheduled sale time.
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@hobo1704 That's what the news item said. But purchasers will need to invest $15 - 18 K in a new battery fairly soon as these ex-govt fleet vehicles will have seen a lot of use.
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@vincenzodigrande2070 : Teslas are not sold by dealers here. You order one on their website and,, eventually,, a car turns up. Dealers buying cars themselves and registering them doesn't seem a thing that a dealer would want to do, as it straightaway incurs around 30% depreciation. And there is a precedent. Years ago in Australia, a local manufacturer bought out a car called the Leyland P76. Designed by an incompetent marketing team, It was a big ugly thing powered by a motor nobody wanted, and assembled with poor quality and without any care. So the public refused to buy it. The factory kept churning them out and shipping them to dealers who parked them in nearby vacant lots. Dealers did not buy or register them - they just dumped them in vacant lots. this kept going for months, until a Leyland senior executive flew out from the parent company, shut the whole factory down and sold all the parked unregistered cars as scrap. I remember driving past a dealer and there were hundred and hundreds of unplated P76's quietly rusting away in a nearby lot - and then a few weeks later they were all gone. There is a lot of conflicting information on EV's. The RAC group, which is one of the biggest car insurers, is actively promoting EV's. Either they don't think fires are much of a problem, or they are secretly planning to raise premiums enormously and make a big profit. Their magazine arrived in my mailbox yesterday. It has statistics on car sales and ownership. It says EV's still only account for 0.4% of cars owned and registered. Looks like, even after several years of sales, EV's are only being bought by early adopters - the famous marketing term for people who will buy anything as long it is new and different.
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The US authorities had to have a go at VW, because they had already jumped on US engine maker Caterpillar. If they hadn't, the US industry would have screamed blue murder. For those that don't know, certain Cat engines could not meet emission requirements when idling, as combustion temperatures were too low. So they programmed the engine management computer to shut down half the cylinders during idle, so that the operating cylinders worked harder and got up to temperature. The engines cycled in and out of this mode. After getting approval and selling the engines, owners complained about what they thought was misfiring, so Cat quietly instructed its dealers on how to defeat the cylinder shutdown. This of course meant the engines no longer met emissions standards. This was a very minor breach compared to what VW did.
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