When the Snake-oil salesman loses charm and becomes seen as it should have always been seen.

I've never been an elon fan. I would actually not give a flying f$%# about the guy, had it not been his position to EXPLOIT human stupidity for profit, with a cocky attitude. And that's why I absolutely hate the guy. He profits out of people not really using the brain. Sure...a lot of people do that all over the world, stating by 99% of governments... 

...but this dude POLLUTES the environment in a very hard to reverse way (lithium contamination is BAD), then he flags his mediocre products as top-stuff (sure apple does the same, but if you crash your iphone it doesn't trap you inside while bursting to flames like a crematory)...

... not to talk about the impact on electricity cost for having EVERYONE charging cars off the already stressed power grid...

... not to get into the absolutely stupid marketing around his batteries that CLAIM to last twice as much as competitors (the reason is that they have twice the cells and as cells go bad the battery chains engages the backup cells, and that's why ludicrous mode voids your battery warranty as they juice them all at once... meanwhile, you accelerate, break and turn twice the weight you would actually need to, for... marketing purposes). 

Sure it makes me the exception, in a world that envisions him as the supreme lord of intelligence, but at the light of facts, this becomes more a fact of "in the world of the blind, the one-eyes is king" theory, rather then "the man is a messiah"... think a bit about it and take your own conclusions... oh meanwhile read https://www.tesla.com/pt_pt/blog/tesla-lithium-refinery-groundbreaking

The legion of musk lovers is such that it managed to shift a US election (sure WOKE stupidity helped a bit) towards the only US president with pending sentences from being convicted.

A Sieg Heil was the trigger

...but, in my opinion, the most damaging is the tremendously low quality of his teslas and the suing attitude to anyone voicing the tesla BS.

 It didn't help to voice his mind in CNBC and CNN interview: "I say what I want, and if the consequence of that is to loose some money, than be it"

... JEEEZ! If I was a tesla investor, I'd dump the stock at that moment... I mean, go play with your own money, you megalomaniac fool!

Still the charm is coming out, FINALLY, and the world can now see him as he is... a megalomaniac idiot with too much money in his hands to play god. But there is a plus to all this: His leach is getting pulled and all that cockiness is falling hard. 

HOW HAS THIS anything to do with a car blog? Well the guy is trying to ruin the car industry with electric cars claiming the internal combustion engine is a bad thing. Not only he deserves the bitch-slapping, he must be brought into light.

Tesla is bleeding sales TREMENDOUSLY (as one should expect from a bs product) and the Chinese, using more and more solid-state and sodium-carbon batteries (PLUS better conception and construction) are taking his business away. Plus all proper car manufacturers are turning to hydrogen and nitrogen as their fuel for the future, with hybrid drive car designs (what really makes sense).

Again, nothing I didn't warn about over and over, but people love hypes and the loud mouths always get every monkeys attention. 

Now? Now you have this and this 

...sort of gems to read and laugh, if your like me, at least, and didn't buy the hype. 

If you did, well, get books to read at gas stations while your bs car charges for hours... sure carrying books is dumb as they are heavy, but so does 50% of unused battery is, and don't use electronic reading as that requires juice you desperately will need to charge your bs car... because of massive adoption of electric cars form idiots like you, on an already stressed power grid.

all of this, form the agenda of this character:

Ahhhh the joy of thinking for your self. 

So why oh why is the tesla  product bad?

First thing : If your car had a limitation of life on the fuel tank, and replacing it once elapsed cost more than the car's worth, then you would build the rest of the car to last the same... it's a make to recycle market... like laptops or cellphones. Problem is that your laptop does not cost half the house value. 

Truth is that the teslas steel panels are "stamped" with little to no metal fatigue recover process to them. This makes the metal lose most of it's corrosion resistance, this would be minimized by galvanizing the chassis but then... they don't! They will rust away like an italian car.. but without the beautiful design and the charm of the italian car! oops

Second thing : STUPID design. A single motor tesla MAKES MORE SENSE than a dual motor! Weird thing to say... looks like saying that a mustang Inline4 is better than the V8. But then why? Electric motors generate torque instantly and without need for acceleration, unlike a diesel or petrol one. But there is always physics to take into account. 

The diesel engine is good generating LOW end toque, but they are nonexistent at high revs. Petrol engines are the opposite, High revs is their home and low revs is where they miss the torque... People have been turboing the cars to compensate but it then kills response! Electrics, are a bit like a steroid enhanced diesel: huge torque numbers down low, but tremendously inefficient HEAT and bearing stress at high speed. In truth, without having electronic throttling, the electric engine spins to destruction as it will burn out from bearing load and over spinning.  So how to you fix this?

You can have a small engine with a lot of torque - But then your customer will sell the car after the first highway trip not being able to drive fast.

You can have a big engine - But then the customer will sell the car after thrashing it on the highway for less then 10 minutes and then stop with a drained battery and a burned engine...like teslas

You can have the big engine coupled with a gearbox so the high rev engine is nit revving that much - but then the extra torque will make you smoke the wheels everywhere else outside the highway.

You can couple the big engine with gearbox with a ESC like you do with RC cars - But then the ESC dissipates the power into heat throwing battery life out the window... RCs allow you to change battery, your car... not!

The reason the hybrid hydrogen engine is the future lays here precisely. Hydrogen powers a fuel-cell to generate electricity for a low rev high torque electric motor that then transits to a hydrogen burning, high rev internal combustion engine. Same fuel, best of both worlds, no need for batteries except for starting the car.

So the low-end tesla, is more logic than any of the dual motors (claiming 1000hp out of a motor that only knows torque...marketing again).

Third thing : tesla is a marketing gig. The car looks futuristic and has all the electronic toys, but then:

-If you slam the door it dismantles the inside covers... worse in the cyber-truck as they get stuck in the seat and makes it impossible to open the door without breaking the door liner to pieces, something hard to do from the outside, and very hard to do from the inside. The modelY door liner speaker mount has a single screen holder... while a BMW, VW would have three and VOLVO 4 or 5.

-Most of the claimed features are a lie and will require you to spend money to use the software... apple style scam.

-Steering by wire is laggy as hell and not a real replacement for a direct steering drive.

-Cars are not water-proofed (most if not all manufactures waterproof their cars to around 1 meter)

-The entire car build is cheap, so they can maximize profit. It's like if FIAT or TATA would charge Porsche price for their cars... and then people brought them! it's mental.

Fourth thing : tesla has been towing their cars from crash sites, not allowing for investigations to happen and flaws to come to light. Some owners have been bullied by lawyers not to publicly complain against the company. 

Sure they are a new company and lack most of the experience of a heritage brand. However, they could have fixed this easily by purchasing a brand in need of help, and then revamping it. 

A lot of the car design was copied form other brands (and it's easy to show money and hire skilled people from other car brands in the USA after Detroit went to 5h!7), but then the tightening of profit first quality...NOT, ends up undermining a lot of the "power" that skilled employees and their knowledge brings in. 

In the end, economics is the best castration engine for engineering. Couple that with blind marketing orientation and you have the perfect storm to build bad product that look good.

So why is tesla loosing to China, the ones known for cheap quality?

There is a misconception that CHINA builds cheap. 

China builds to spec... spec cheap and you get cheap... spec well and you get a good product probably a bit less expensive than produced in Europe due to:

1 - Labor cost being lower

2 - Transportation cost being lower due to all the constant stream of LOW GRADE products that justify and then deliver good products on between them.

That being said, the size of the Asian market is so big on its own that they have been building knowledge for a long long time. This means that companies like BYD, SAIC, GWM, GAC and Geely can choose to produce the quality level to the market they aim for, at the price they aim for and in numbers they aim for. 

And then... as any good Asian, they don't really need to buy a marketing machine or sell bad products at high price! They capitalize on the sheer fact that, the ones doing that (tesla), and then failing to deliver, allows them to capitalize on that.

musk is loosing his "star dust" and tesla will be either PIVOTING HARD, or BYD'd to death. 
Still, pivoting, would you really buy a cheap car with a high price, or go for a Toyota or Honda with years for experience and incomparably better products? I know how I would choose, but then again, i never brought his snake-oil.

..and just to help him bed-in to his new position, the DOGE site got hacked.... I LOVE IT! Wasn't me... I promise I had nothing to do with that, in exception of applauding it.

Conclusions

Like any con-artist, he BS's people around a narrative that is based in lies and manipulation, then like a megalomaniac he gets inebriated with himself and starts abusing his new found "fairy dust" (brought by legions of followers, most with questionable sanity), and then... well then you overcook it in front of the camera and it all starts to crumble. 

After the collapse starts, you must find strong allies. So you copy'paste what your competitors (that don't invest solely in marketing) have been doing... the actual science... and you pivot towards them. 

It's just too bad that you've spent years deconstructing what you now see as your salvation. 

Well at least you can claim to be the one inventing the electric car, right?

1881... Gustave Trouve in his ELECTRIC CAR

...ok...ok... the first 4 wheeled electric car, then! right?

1888 Flocken Elektrowagen

...ok... ok... then... then first electric SPORTS car! right?

1899 Le Jamais Contente

...hum...crap... ok, then the first electric car sent to space! Can't beat that! right?

1971 NASA Lunar rover

...ok...ok... the first mass production electric car with futuristic, aerodynamic looks then! Right?

1999 GM EV1

...errr... the first EVER BEAUTIFUL EV sports car? right?

Lotus Elise (design by Julian Thomson)

Tesla roadster based on the lotus Elise

...anything else you care to try!? no? ok... time for the :

wooops

Car engines and Golf... no not that VW thing... the sport!

What do Golf (the sport) and Car engines have in common?

Easy answer would be physics... duh... sure! But if you consider a simple design of the golf ball and the latest trend in engine head porting, things start to get more clear... and complex all at the same time.

Why? Well that is ways of the very tortuous world of : FLUID DYNAMICS (yes yes every mechanical engineer will have nightmares about flow calculations in Fluid Dynamics discipline and also thermodynamics applied to flow in fluid dynamics... I gather that bumps in suicide rates are probably related to these sort of calculations). 

Fluid Dynamics!

And this is what we must understand in order to understand the concept of dimpling porting of engine heads. Why? Well because the concept divides mechanics and most of them are right as most of them are wrong!

Wooops? Right and Wrong all at once!

Most will defend you should port the head like this:

They are partially wrong!

Some will defend you should port the head like that:

They are also partially wrong!

But before we get into the details, let's look into the first counter arguments of Using or not Dimple porting:

Argument 1 - F1 cars don't use them

Sure but there are SEVERAL reasons for that.

    1 - F1 engines run at VERY HIGH RPM, meaning that the CFM through the head is HUGE and the dimple designs work better for High and Low pressure areas. The F1 head channels have very little of those.

    There is a simple theory to explain the engine CFM importance and that is the principle behind the not very well known Torque oriented VTEC system from Honda. 

    The Low rev Vtec system consisted in a capping of the 16valve head to run almost 12valve mode, so that the air going into the engine, at Low engine speeds, would have a higher velocity and uneven geometry while entering the cylinder  

At low engine speeds, a smoother and spiraling flow of air an fuel optimizes torque.

To produce Power numbers, you favor High speed, High turbulent, high flow instead of this non-turbulent flow. F1 engines are made for High Revs and as such High RPM. Not really for torque at low engine speed. This means that all optimization goes towards Direct, high speed flow... as we can see on point 2

    2 - F1 engines have a HEAD design that is purposely made for high flow speed. While production cars consider space and compactness due to the valve train losses, the same principle does not exist in an F1 engine due to point nr 3. 

F1 Cosworth v10 engine head port design

     

    3 - F1 engines have Pneumatic Valve trains. F1 engines use a pneumatic valve train. This allows for a narrower angle on the valve train, and as such more direct port designs. 

    It also generated a valve lift time with a rather square wave, making the input of air FAR greater and and abrupt, making the acceleration and deceleration of air going in and out of the cylinder less progressive. Those are circumstances of a high rpm flow, and as such, the entire design considers flow and not particularly flow speed ant specific RPM's.... they are.. closer to forced induction than NA's in that manner.

Sprigged valves

Pneumatic Valves

Argument 2 - But then why aren't cars built like that? 

Mythbusters had a saying about this. They tested a car, then the same car with clay added dimple panel features. Even considering the weight, of the clay the same car made a run with 27 and 29 mpg proving the dimple works of the airflow.

But if that is not enough for you, NASCAR rules banned dimpling the hoods, roofs, and trunks of their racing cars!

Argument 3 - My turbo engine didn't see any improvement... actually it makes less power.

Same principle as the F1 engine. The FORCED induction engine has ALL AIR under high pressure, so the regions of lower and higher pressure that an NA engine would suffer from are minimized by the forced induction nature of things. You don't really look towards minimizing pressure zones and looking for air velocity there! just size of ducts to make the air into the engine. The larger the better... simple math... dimples reduce this in 2 different ways as we are about to understand.

OK... so back to Fluid Dynamics.

An NA engine, particularly with a high efficiency intake plenum, or ITB's , needs to Accelerate the air into the cylinder, then decelerate as the valve closes, then re-accelerate, etc etc etc... and the acceleration will be crucial to allow the dynamics of the air flow to pull more air into the engine by using the flow inertia. So the speed that the air goes into the engine if very important, particularly on specific regions of the intake tubing (this very important part will be revisited later.)

Back to the golf ball

A clean surfaced ball will not go longer than the dimpled ball. will go slower than the dimpled ball and will be more prone to deviation by wind than the dimpled one. 

Known fact for years that are easy to explain. The dimples "catch air" and create tiny swirls around the surface of the ball, as it goes through the air, the swirls become sort of a cushion of air. See how hovercrafts move? lookalike principle. Ever tried to move 2 glass sheets stacked together? Hard right?But if you add water or air between them, you can't make them stop!

Air is a fluid and as such it has a viscosity element to it. It sticks better to smooth surfaces and it slips better on fluids. So if you can make the layer slide to the surface swirl back and generate a cushion, the next layer of air slips through this cushion much faster than it would if in contact with the surface.

Not only that, but the drag that the swirl of the back side of the ball generates, also tends to break apart and not pull back on the ball as much, reducing the area exposed to back pull... Even cooler then!

Cool principle right? Right! So it must work with in any other situation... err no!

1 -First of all, the ball move through the air, not the air thought the ball so the principle is not exactly the same

2 -The ball is round and the main pressure point faces the wind... the inlet manifold tubing have bends and curves and features that can generate low or high pressures... it's not homogenized at all unlike the golf ball.

3 - The ball spins through the air. The engine inlet manifold doesn't. 

4 - As you add dimples to a flow pipe, you are generating an invisible layer of air around the surface effectively REDUCING THE bore size! And the dimples alone, if surfaced clean, it would mean 1 to 2 more millimeters in bore size! AND THIS IS WHY ladies and gentlemen that:

    - The turbo guy hates this because it produces less power

    - The High speed engine hates this because it reduces intake tubing diameter.

HUM.. ok you're mean. You show me something cool and then it's is not applicable.

No... I'm not mean. Physics is thought... get a grip!

So so far we can conclude that dimpling can solve the drag problem.

That under pressured flow this is not really important, and that under NA flow this can be the result to more air speed and as inertia shows, quite more air into the engine. 

We've also understood that the dimples will reduce physically and then in flow terms, the usable diameter. 

So you are wrong! Dimples are bad and the smooth fellas are right.

Nooooo I told you physics is tough and fluid dynamics is even worse... so suck it up and let's continue our roller-coaster ride.

As usual, engineers base a lot of technology in studying, testing and resulting data. 

The Intake ports have the following naming:

Different areas have different drag and high/low pressure zones:

It also has different types of design, called Tangential port or Helical port.

Tangential ports are straight and very good for high speed flow. They product better high end power and are the preferred design for high performance engines. 

Helical ports twist the air before the entrance of the cylinder, making the air enter the cylinder in a swirl movement.

Some cylinder designs used to have one Tangential port and a Helical one to generate a sort of compromise, sacrificing high end power over low end torque and usable mid range.

The Honda Low-rpm vtec explained earlier combined manages the best of both worlds, by allowing the low speed valve to open slightly, while the other opened fully, inducing and uneven air entry and resulting in a swirl, and then fully opening both valves at top end RPM with 2 Tangential ports providing the best flow. 

Different port designs favor not only different engine applications, but also generate different low pressure zones. 

Let's look at high pressure images of an intake side of an engine:

Hum... so if we where to see the same thing on a Golf ball, The High pressure would be at the front at it impacts air, and the low pressure at the back as it has less pull of drag.

Now, for the proud of my physics teachers, 

let's look and solve the problem on this very well designed intake:

This thing is a piece of art from HONDA.  The design show zones that will naturally generate small low pressure swirls and allow for the fast air to pass by! Here represented in green.

The only places where the design would benefit from dimples would be the places shown in red. 

Summing up:

    - Large, flat, PARALLEL surfaces. 

    - Pre- high pressure "squeeze" areas, generating pre squeeze and air speed increase.

Conclusions:

Good one! Flow Proven to gain over 5CFM / port over engine mid-range without losses on top range!

Bad One! Lost 2 to 5CFM over the entire engine range.

 Fair.. could do a little less on the shoulders and a bit of a strip of triangular shaped dimples right through that division

No!If softened with epoxy and left on the division and bottom middle,  would flow more!

Same...soften with epoxy EXCEPT in the middle and division and see gains.

Hell no! Lose the shoulders dimples, add right down the end of the port where you have a smooth fully dragging surface before a squeeze!

The first 2 examples should be clear enough. Do it right and gain, to it all over the place like a maniac and lose. 

This is why people do not like the Dimple porting. Easy to fail, at a high cost / not that easy to gain little for a high cost.

Turning up the pressure on the turbo sure is easier, but then again, fine engineering is not about easy, now is it?

Hope you've enjoyed this.. tried not to deviate a lot into the nightmares of Fluid Dynamic calculations... I still have PTSD on that one my self.