Road and Track mention

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The new issue has Dennis Seminitas talking about battery futures.

I thought, that's good, a diehard car magazine looking at battery technology and how it fits into the car scene. Seems like a good way to 'break them in".

To be honest I was just riffing though at the newsstand but I stopped when he described the Roadster's wiring with the term "rat's nest"

Maybe someone else here can do a summery.

Honestly, if I were Tesla, I would have a tough time giving them a car...

 

[TEG]

At the moment I am trying to diagnose why my Lexus is throwing a check-engine light code... It appears something with the charcoal canister and various vacuum test valves isn't working right. Talk about RAT'S NEST. It is a complete spaghetti of vacuum hoses, solenoids and test valves to control the fuel vapors. The ECU runs various self-test features while you drive.

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I hope Tesla stays away from any kind of infernal combusion engine. Emissions control systems are a whole other engineering challenge I hope they never have to work on.

Example of something similar which is one piece of the system:

 

[TEG]

Yep, my Lexus has a charcoal canister (evaporative emissions control system) just like in that picture. The dealer wanted $800 to replace it because of the error code. I pulled it all apart and found that a spider had built a little "trap/door" web in the "open to the air" exhaust port on the vapor pressure sensor outlet. The vapor pressure sensor hooks into that "rats nest" of tubes and checks to make sure that the fuel tank can hold a vacuum. (While you drive, the control computer re-routes the vacuum at various times to self diagnose any possible leaks or blockages in the various tubing).

As it turns out, the pesky spiders that like to make webs inside auto tubing had caused me another problem 2 years ago. Back then I noticed dripping water in the passenger foot-well whenever I ran the air conditioner. It turned out that there is a condensation drop line under the hood that is supposed to drip water onto the ground when the A/C runs. Since a spider plugged up that line, the overflow "plan B" backup line dumps the water in the passenger compartment instead (I guess the idea is it is less likely that a spider would be inside the car and block that one too!). The fact that there is a second ("backup") drain line suggests to me that they know this is a design limitation so they engineered in a way to keep the A/C working even when the main line gets blocked. (Making the passenger foot-well carpet get wet wasn't a very nice design though!)

In both cases the dealer wanted to replace expensive components, but all it really needed was to use a Q-tip to clean the blockage from the vent lines.

This is a general problem with cars... Anything open to the air can get plugged-up/clogged by insects, dust, dirt, etc.

 

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New Mention

The new (Nov.?) issue has tiny Tesla mention.

I just read it at the grocery store but it went something like this:

In the letters section a reader writes that they (R&T) were making a mistake by not listing the Tesla Roadster in their list of top 20 cars coming in 2008. He also described the specs of the car.

R&T's response was that had mentioned Tesla recently (see my above post) and look forward to getting their hands on one.

Again, I'm a bit fuzzy so if anyone has the issue next to them....