On Sun, 16 May 2021 06:35:28 -0700 (PDT), DerbyDad03
wrote:

On Saturday, May 15, 2021 at 8:39:08 PM UTC-4, wrote:
On Sat, 15 May 2021 14:45:02 -0700 (PDT), DerbyDad03
wrote:

On Saturday, May 15, 2021 at 5:36:11 PM UTC-4, wrote:
On Sat, 15 May 2021 13:55:35 -0700 (PDT), DerbyDad03
wrote:

On Saturday, May 15, 2021 at 3:30:11 PM UTC-4, Leon wrote:
On 5/14/2021 10:27 PM, wrote:
On Fri, 14 May 2021 08:31:14 -0700 (PDT), DerbyDad03
wrote:

On Friday, May 14, 2021 at 10:43:46 AM UTC-4, Leon wrote:
On 5/13/2021 10:52 PM, DerbyDad03 wrote:
On Thursday, May 13, 2021 at 9:54:44 PM UTC-4, Leon wrote:
On 5/13/2021 7:59 PM, Markem618 wrote:
On Thu, 13 May 2021 20:48:15 -0400, wrote:

On Thu, 13 May 2021 10:46:59 -0400, knuttle
wrote:


As you sit in the gas line or are looking for a station with gas, DON"T
you wish your car was powered by on of the small nuclear reactor like
those they have use to power satellites for decades?

I'm not sure I want to be driving around on several pounds of
plutonium.

Yes but they do want you driving around with a load of Lithium. Safer
by a pretty good margin but.

For some maybe. LOL. Take the doctor and his attorney buddy in Houston
a few weeks ago. Left the doctors house in his Tesla with his buddy.
Leaving home and 800 feet later a firey crash into some trees, going 30
mph. The fire department had a difficult time putting those batteries
out once the caught fire.

And an odd side note, no on was in the drivers seat. They found 2
unidentifiable, not even enough for dental records, bodies in the back seat.

From: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...marshal-report

"Tesla’s vice president of vehicle engineering, Lars Moravy, said Monday on an
earnings call that the company found the steering wheel of the vehicle to be
deformed, leading to the likelihood that someone was in the driver’s seat at
the time of the crash.
And yet no body was found in the drivers seat.... The front seat could
have been holding the doctors bag and or the attorneys brief case to
fool the vehicle into believing some one was in the front drivers seat...

I'm not saying that you're wrong, but *something* deformed the steering
wheel and I'm pretty sure that a doctor's bag [do doctors actually carry
bags anymore ;-) ] and/or an attorney's briefcase would not:

1 - Be heavy enough to convince the car that a human was sitting in the seat
2 - Be strong enough or positioned correctly to deform the steering wheel

A 1000F for an hour or two won't deform the steering wheel?

On my Hondas, the weight range to turn on the "Passenger Air Bag Off"
light is somewhere 0 up to 65 lbs. I am assuming (I know, dangerous) that
the Tesla has a higher threshold to determine if a passenger is in the driver's
seat. Heck, I don't even know if it checks, but if it does, I'd bet it's higher than
the weight of the average 10 YO. i.e. much heavier than your average brief case.

If this had happened on NCIS or CSI, there would have been a multiple perfectly
situated security cameras to determine where the occupants were sitting. ;-)
Or they'd build a scale (or maybe even full-sized) model and recreate the
crash to see if the driver could have been knocked into the rear seat by the
impact.

Don't laugh. We're working on cockpit vision to do all sorts of
things, from setting the mirrors (finding the eyes and move the
mirrors accordingly), to distracted/impaired driving (eye-lid
recognition), to adjusting the EQ for your tunes based on where your
ears are. Big brother is watching.

The authorities (or probably Tesla) may even be doing that in this case.

Not just Tesla. The "authorities" will be followers, rather like
back-up cameras.

Actually 40 years ago one of our car salesmen rolled a new Toronado 1
mile from the dealership. It burned after he got out, the steering
wheel was not a normal shape.

The deformation of a steering wheel caused by heat would not be the same
deformation as caused by impact.

We don't know what type of deformation Moravy was referring to. For all we
know, once the investigation is complete, we may hear that the steering wheel
was deformed in 2 different manners. There could be deformation by impact
with the driver and then by heat once the fire started.

Deform a plastic cup with a hammer. Now deform a plastic cup with a heat
gun. I'll bet that the difference will be very clear even to those untrained
in forensic investigations.

Now take a third plastic cup and beat it with hammer before you heat it up.
I'll bet that it will look different than the other two. That's the type of detail
the investigators will (hopefully) be looking for. e.g. a melted steering wheel
that is also cracked/bent.
My bet is that if you take a plastic cup and subject it to 1000F for
an hour, you _won't_ be able to tell the difference.

Please tell that I don't need to explain how ridiculously irrelevant that comment is.

You're the one who brought up the plastic cup simile. I was just
pointing out that it wasn't a very good one.

It's actually is a very good simile to use as an example of impact deformation, heat
deformation and a combination of both.

The problem with your "1000F for an hour" statement is twofold:

1 - The material used to make a Tesla steering wheel has a much higher melting
point than a plastic cup. Therefore, if you are going to use a proxy to prove a
concept, the conditions have to match the materials. i.e. if the melting point of
a plastic cup is 500 times lower than that of a Tesla steering wheel, then the
experiment should be performed with 500 times less heat.

You just proved my point.

500 times less heat? That would be 1.5K, give or take a phase change
or two. I don't think so.

If you were building a 1/16 scale model Tomahawk missile, would you power it
with a full size engine or would you scale it back a bit?

Once again, you prove my point. If you were going to scale a Tomahawk
missile (how do they get away with that name, today), you'd scale the
engine's thrust appropriately. It would still have to get nearly as
hot to prop ell it, though. Not 16x less heat. 300K/56C exhaust
isn't going to prop ell much. You also wouldn't expect a 1/16 scale
missile to fly the same as the full size model (Reynolds number, and
all that).

2 - As I stated in an earlier post, the reports of an hours long 1000° fire were
misleading. The authorities stated that the initial blaze was extinguished in 10
minutes. The "hours" was the time spent putting out the small flareups in hard
to reach locations.

Subjecting a plastic cup to *any* amount of heat for an hour would not be an
accurate recreation of the original incident.

Actually, it would. Temperature is not heat.