#electric car range issues

[motogadi]

Tata Motors Replaces Nexon EV Battery for Free After Customer Complains of Range Issues

In this article, we will discuss the Tata Nexon EV battery issues, the cost of battery replacement, and the ownership cost of electric cars after the warranty period. We will also provide tips for optimizing your Nexon EV for battery life. #Tatanexonev

Several Tata Nexon EV customers have recently reported a dramatic reduction in the state of charge (SOC) of their vehicles. One such event was reported on T-BHP by cool_dube, who had this problem after driving 15,000 kilometres in his 14-month-old Nexon EV Prime. The incident occurred twice in the last ten days, according to the owner. He said that the battery behaves flawlessly from 100% to…

[mikerickson]

Posting more for myself because for better or worse this Tumblr has become an online personal journal of my entire twenties and thirties. I've been driving my 2011 Mazda since I bought it new for about thirteen years now, and after a spate of issues in the past year I knew it's time was coming to an end:

My stereo system crapped out in the summer of 2016 and I've been driving in silence ever since

Perpetual leak in the rear passenger tire was giving me a low tire pressure warning about once every other week (more often in the winter) so I was constantly topping it off

The entire chassis rattled violently when I decelerated coming off of a highway and into an exit

A really loud screeching sound rang out whenever I accelerated uphill and was going between 40-50 mph

The rear driver side wheelwell had a gnarly rattle on anything but the smoothest of roads

Part of the dashboard literally melted and separated from the rest of the car

Rear-view mirror was warped

etc. etc.

A lot of this stemmed from an incident in late '22 when I went too long without getting an oil change, which seized the engine and led to a really long process to get a replacement engine installed. When I learned that full electric cars didn't need oil changes and had less maintenance overall, that got my attention and kinda guided my decision towards considering one for my next car.

After doing honestly about 6 months of research on EVs, numerous cost-benefit analyses across multiple spreadsheets, looking at future long-term plans of individual companies and agonizing over the options, I finally settled on a 2024 Hyundai Kona. I also lucked out with a helpful salesman who actually wanted to sell it to me (a lot of the dealers I'd previously went to during this process clam up and get weird about EVs), because he drives an Ioniq 5 for himself.

I dropped off my old car to pick up the new one tonight, and of course I got emotional on the last drive over, I mean I had that car for over a third of my life! Had to run to the bathroom and compose myself as soon as we got to the dealership, but writing that deposit check sobered me right up real quick.

Anyway, now I'm driving around a car that feels like a fucking spaceship. Let's see if I drive this one 'til the wheels fall off too.

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

AITA for calling the cops (twice, kind of) on someone in a car who swerved at me on the side of the road?

(Disclaimer: I hate cops. But I felt extremely threatened and wasn't going to let this go without something happening.)

I am a high school student and have not yet gotten my license, and therefore cannot drive alone. To get to school I ride an electric scooter, it looks a bit stupid as a high schooler but it is the only way possible for me to get to school on time. (I have a class before school in the morning, and both parents have work.) I've been doing this for over three years and have had no problems until recently.

Two or three weeks ago, I was on my way home from school. I noticed a car approaching from behind, and moved to the very edge of the road as I would normally. I was literally in the gutter on the side of the road, nowhere near where cars would be. This car, however, then sped up rapidly and swerved within 2-3 feet of hitting me. Probably not trying to actually hit me, but clearly trying to scare me or something of the sort. The person in the passenger seat was screaming the whole time.

The car sped off (I should mention that the speed limit on this road is 25 mph, and the car was going at least 50-60 mph) and after standing in shock for a moment I followed them home since they apparently lived in my neighborhood. I caught two teenage boys leaving the car, and asked if they had been in that car and had swerved at me on the road. They denied everything and went inside the house.

I went home and after a short while, came back with my father to back me up. Asshole move from me, I know, but he insisted on going in case the boys decided to get violent. I made him wait a short distance back, then rang the doorbell. Waited for a while, no answer. They were clearly still inside; the car was still parked on the road nearby and I hadn't been gone for long.

When they didn't answer, I then went home and called the police. I gave them the license plate number and the guy's address, and they said there had been reports of him speeding and being reckless before. The cops went to the house and yelled at them, and I thought it was over then. I most certainly did not want to press the issue any further, the shock and adrenaline was wearing off at this point and I just wanted to be done.

But several days later, I was sent screenshots of the driver of that car spreading hate about me on Snapchat for getting him in trouble. Now this is kind of difficult to explain, but I am unfortunately somewhat well known for riding an electric scooter to school. But up until this point, people just were aware of my existence. After the Snapchat posts and messages about me were spread, all of that turned into pure hate. Every time I was seen with that stupid scooter, people would scream that they wished I would fall and stuff like that. None of this had happened before, and I was (and am) miserable and scared. I don't feel safe anywhere around school because this is still ongoing.

I also tried to contact him via Instagram messages, to which he did not respond. That was three times that I attempted to contact him: first by following him as he was getting out of the car, second by ringing the doorbell, and third by messaging him.

Two days ago, I got my mom to pull me out of school early because I was feeling like crap after some particularly bad harassment in the morning. In the office as I was asking to sign out, I started crying in front of the school police officer, and she asked for the full story. I told her about the online posts and the catcalling and harassment I dealt with every day, and she took it very seriously. I didn't want her to do anything really, but she did anyway (I'm not upset about this honestly, it was probably a good thing). She said that the patrol officers usually didn't do much about stuff like this, but she could and would do a lot more.

She pulled the guy out of his class after I had left to go home, and in her words "put the fear of God in that kid"; telling him he should have lost his license and that since he was 18 he could face real consequences and go to jail for stuff like this. He has been told that he has to stay at least three feet away from me at all times.

Since then, he hasn't said anything to me in person, and hasn't posted anything publicly online. I still don't feel safe at school or anywhere in the area, but I've been taking an alternate route to try to avoid being seen and yelled at as much.

Am I the asshole? I honestly think we both might be, but I do feel somewhat justified by the fact that he at least got some sort of consequence for threatening my life like that and causing that level of problem.

What are these acronyms?

[odinsblog]

As cold weather sweeps across the U.S., some electric vehicle owners are learning a bitter truth: Low temperatures can stop the cars dead in their icy tracks.

The issue crystallized this week when some Tesla owners in Chicago discovered their EVs' batteries had died in sub-zero temperatures. Drivers also said some of Tesla charging stations weren't working, or if they did work that the stations were taking longer than usual to charge up their vehicles.

“I've been here for over five hours at this point, and I still have not gotten to charge my car,” Tesla driver Brandon Welbourne told CBS Chicago. “A charge that should take 45 minutes is taking two hours.”

What happens to electric vehicles in cold weather?

Here's what to know.

Electric vehicles are less efficient in cold weather, with Recurrent's research finding that below-freezing temperatures reduced driving range up to 30% on 18 popular EV models.

An EV with a 200 to 215 mile range may only go 150 to 175 miles in the cold, Recurrent's Case said, while noting even that reduced mileage is often sufficient for most drivers. “The average person with an EV drives 30 miles a day,” he said.

Still, a shorter range in cold weather could be an issue for some owners if their EV runs out of juice miles earlier than expected, potentially leaving to hunt for an available charger or, worse, stranded in dangerously frigid conditions.

(continue reading) ❄️ 🚗​ 🥶

[theladyofmanyfandomsfanfiction]

Imagine not liking the Doctor’s plan to work with Agent O...

“Oh! You’re here. Perfect!” You walked around the console, arms wrapped with multicoloured wires, and proceeded over to Ryan where you transferred the mess into his arms.  

“Uh, what’s all this then?” The young man asked with a frown. Yaz and Graham squinted at the odd behaviour and watched you grin with wide eyes. 

“I’ve finally created the Miniaturisation Materialiser out of some coat hangers and a car tyre in the basement.”

“We have a basement?” Ryan’s question fell on deaf ears as you led the trio to what looked like a toaster sitting on the console. The appliance was hooked up to several wires that ran along the TARDIS floor into Ryan’s arms before disappearing below the panels under their feet.

You grabbed two slices of toast from a little glove compartment and placed them in the toaster, pressing the small knob down. There was a small sizzle until the toaster sparked small white electricity for a second and the bell rang.

The toast popped up and Yaz, Ryan, and Graham leaned in to take a closer look. 

“They’ve shrunk to the size of a grape.” Yaz commented.

You nodded and spun around with excitement. “I know! Isn’t it great?” 

Ryan chuckled but Graham tilted his head.

“It’s wonderful Y/n, truly. But wouldn’t it make more sense to create something that makes food bigger?” 

You squinted curiously, pondering over the suggestion. You lifted the toaster and scanned its outer casing.

“Like an Enhanced Extrapolation Enlarger ... yes, I think we can manage this easily.” You reached back and opened your hand, palm facing up. “Graham, give me your shoe.”

“My what?”

“Y/n, I hope you’re powering that thing safely.” The Doctor parented as she entered her travelling vehicle. She often found that when she left you alone for a day, you had created something new.

Nodding, you lowered the device and took the wires back from Ryan. “Don’t get your sonic in a knot. I rerouted the comms through the swimming pool and the navigation systems are funnelling from the carousel. All temporary.”

“Huh.” The Doctor mused as she reached the satellite screen. “Maybe leave the carousel funnel, I’m getting some great readings. Points for innovation.”

You beamed with pride. Turning to your friends, you gestured for them to walk to an open panel by the stairs. 

“So, how was it? I thought you were going to be back later.”

“O found something on the aliens.” Yaz replied.

“O?” You wondered, dropping the wires into the floor. The TARDIS doors opened once more and a familiar face walked in. “Oh.” 

You shoulders slumped when the guest entered the TARDIS, his eyes filled with wonder and awe at the interior. Spotting you, O smiled as he made his way over to you and stuck out his hand.

You eyed the friendly expression and stared at the open handshake. Then you turned on your heel and called out to the woman behind the console. 

“Really?”

The Doctor’s head popped up quickly at the question, her furrowed brows quickly darting up when she realised what the issue was. 

“Y/n, play nice.”

“But-”

“We need all the help we can get.”

Laying down her expectations, the doctor disappeared once more. You exhaled loudly and looked back at O. One smile from him and you rolled your eyes before walking off in the opposite direction. 

Graham caught the tension flying from the pair and gently tapped O’s arm. “Why are they so mad at you?” 

O shook his head with a small smile. “You know, I don’t think they could quite figure me out.”

Masterlist here

[vomitdodger]

(LifeSiteNews) –– A 2022 study found that electric vehicles (EVs) which left-leaning governments in Canada, the United States, and elsewhere are pushing on the population, pollute at a rate far higher than their gasoline or diesel-powered counterparts.

The 2022 study from the U.K.-based Emissions Analytics group found that during a 1,000 mile journey, EVs release 1,850 times more pollutants into the surrounding environment than gas-powered vehicles, due to the heavier weight which eats through tires.

While many think of emissions from exhaust, tire wear plays a significant role in emitting pollutants. The synthetic rubber used to create tires include certain chemicals that get released into the air, and because EVs are significantly heavier than conventional cars due to massive lithium batteries.

Overall, EVs weigh about 30 percent more than gas-powered vehicles, and cost thousands more to make and buy. These issues are in addition to the fact that they are not suitable in colder climates (such as Canada and the northern U.S.), offer poor range and long charging times (especially in cold weather), and have batteries that take tremendous resources to make and are hard to recycle.

AND that does not include the “emissions” from whatever source provided the electricity to charge the battery…OR…the extreme damage done to the environment to obtain the components of the battery.

Then there’s the added cost of the vehicle and the home charging station.

The unreliability, the time to recharge, cold weather issues….the list goes on and on.

But gO gReEn!!!!

[girlactionfigure]

🔴 SUNDAY  - ISRAEL REALTIME - Connecting to Israel in Realtime

 ❗️TERROR ATTACK - RAMLA.. car ramming attack followed by shooting, 4 hit and injured, 1 critical, 1 serious, 1 moderate, 1 lightly.  Terrorist was eliminated.  Nir Tzvi junction, next to an IDF base.  Police identify the assailant as an East Jerusalem Palestinian (meaning has a residency permit).

❗️STABBER STOPPED - MARAT HAMACHPELA.. soldiers at the Cave of the Patriarchs, Hebron, caught a female suspect with 2 children: the suspect was asked by one of the soldiers to open her case for inspection and in response she refused.  Search found a hidden knife.  At the time of their arrest, she stated to the forces that she is married to a Hamas activist who is serving a prison sentence in an Israeli prison and her goal was to carry out a stabbing attack.

🔸DEAL NEWS.. Hamas now denies the reports that it has suspended the negotiations.  Hamas is under increasing pressure. An assassination resounds at noon with dozens of dead, and Hamas hastens to announce that its door is open.

.. In a conflicting report - Hamas spokesman Jihad Taha: "Negotiations were stopped a few days ago as a result of Israeli intransigence and the insistence on placing new conditions outside of the agreed proposal"

♦️GAZA.. Rafah: forces attacked an anti-tank position, as well as a terrorist squad that posed a threat to them in the area, destroyed a number of underground shafts and terrorist infrastructure.  Gaza City: eliminated a number of terrorists during close-range battles, a terrorist squad was detected moving in the area and making an attempt to plant a bomb near the warriors, the forces attacked and eliminated the squad.

♦️MORE IN THE TARGETED ELIMINATION.. The Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Battalions in Gaza officially announced this morning that Izz al-Din Akhila, the commander of the Gaza City Brigade and a member of the General Staff of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Battalions in the Gaza Strip, was killed in yesterday’s attack.

▪️PA CALLS ON TERRORISTS TO ENROLL IN SECURITY.. Palestinian Prime Minister Muhammad Moztafa issued a call this week to the terrorists operating in Balata to surrender their weapons and receive a monthly salary from the Palestinian Authority.  Any of them who are interested can undergo training and join the security forces of the Palestinian Authority.  The terrorist organizations in Balata rejected his proposal.

▪️WATER AND ELECTRIC OUTAGES IN LEBANON.. Water and electricity outages in some of the villages in southern Lebanon following an Israeli attack that hit the "Ein Tanya station" in Marja'ion.

▪️RED ON RED - LEBANON.. A senior Hezbollah leader responsible for one of the districts of Beirut was shot when a local resident was blocked from reaching his home by Hezbollah security - which turned into an armed battle.

▪️PROTEST - FOR WAR WITH HEZBOLLAH.. many protesters demonstrated at the entrance to the government meeting in Jerusalem, opposing an agreement in the north and calling for war against Hezbollah. Evacuees from the north, activists of the "If You Want" movement and the Tikva Forum spoke with a number of ministers who stopped to talk with them, and declared that they will oppose the agreement with Hezbollah, and will push a position that "will lead to a long-term victory in the north and south." 

[st0rmyskies]

Renault Avantime

Acura Legend

Nissan Skyline

Renault Wind

Ford Ranger Wildtrack

Toyota FourRunner

Renault Twizy

Eagle Malon TSi

Rolls Royce Silver Shadow

Mitsubishi L200 Warriors

Ducati Diavel Dark

Range Roolie

This anon knows that I am secretly a Car Guy™.

Renault Avantime

Look at this thing. Look at this European-ass Ford Flex wannabe bullshit. It gets some points for being a coupe, somehow - Time would rather not drive around with a back door that someone could pop into at will - but even a sick set of tints isn't going to hide his embarrassment at this beaky profile. There's a nose joke in there somewhere. 3/10.

Acura Legend

Impeccable. Looks like someone's first car so that they can haul ass back and forth to college several times a year. Ravio and Legend rip out the back seats to make room for as much product as this shitty 2.5L can manage. The back is also positively PLASTERED in the most amazing sarcastic bumper stickers you can imagine (Bestie Please Let Me Merge, I Fucked Bigfoot, etc.). 10/10

Nissan Skyline

Some part of me hurts to think that Sky would be a Nissan driver, but that's my own personal bias. Does look like something he would take out for weekend track days or the odd drag strip competition and wipe the floor with others. When Groose pulls up he parks entirely too close and gets Sky's rare scowl for even joking about having scratched the paint. 8/10

Renault Wind

Look at this fuckin thing. Wind hates it. Daddy bought it for him as a "Sorry I missed your 16th birthday!" gift. The only saving grace is that it's not the powder blue version; Wind would have turned those keys right over to Aryll SO FAST. It's hardly big enough for him to bring a surfboard to the beach in. The convertible is a nice touch for sunset beach drives though. 5/10.

Ford Ranger Wildtrak

Can you imagine??? Can you imagine?????? Wild wakes up one morning after a night of hard partying to suddenly remember, "I have a car." He digs through his old belongings to produce a nondescript keychain - which he promptly switches out for a big sparkly white puffball - and wanders off into the world to find where he parked THIS truck of Champion's. The ENERGY of seeing tiny Wild with his long hair blowing out the side window as he rolls up in THIS THING is hysterical to me. He will literally never be able to double-park it and just pull it up over the sidewalk to leave it in Time's yard. 11/10.

Toyota FourRunner

If one person - if ONE PERSON - makes a short joke Four is gonna flip the fuck out. He'll need the version with side rails so he can actually get into the damn thing, probably, and the seat adjuster is aftermarket so that he can bring the driver's seat up high enough to see over the steering wheel. Bonus points, though, that he can drive right over all the haters. However, I would argue that this isn't the best city car for someone like Four. Yes it can haul lots of junk in the back for his work needs, but a pickup truck - and something older that he can service himself - would suit him a bit better. 7/10

Renault Twizy

Sure, let's put the anxious kid on the highway between two 18-wheelers in this little Fisher Price death trap. His shoulders wouldn't fit inside this thing, let alone his ass. 0/10

Eagle Malon TSi

Well if this isn't a divorcee car then I don't know what is. Does get some points since it looks like it would run badly forever, which is the solid basis of any good farmer's errand car. I do like to think, though, that Malon would have a bit more self respect than this. 1/10.

Rolls Royce Silver Shadow

I had to include the photo with the text because that's so something Shadow would make himself. Four loudly and vehemently disagrees; he's spent more time on his back beneath that engine bay fixing electrical issues nearly as quickly as Shadow can cause them. Perhaps the aftermarket tablet screen he had installed in the center console at some dubious backyard mechanic was a bad idea. Also I bet that engine is so fucking loud and puts out NO power. 7/10

Mitsubishi L200 Warriors

What the hell and fuck is this? What are all the antennae for, so he can be tuned in to the latest Sephora sale?? And the extra lighting, is that for his Instagram photoshoots??? Ew, do you think Wars is an Instagram influencer???? -0.5/10

Ducati Diavel Dark

Oh, this is canon. 15/10

Range Roolie

I just had a visceral reaction picturing our own Doctor Hyrule, MD, rolling around town in this thing hopelessly lost. He somehow keeps missing all the turns on his GPS. The OnStar dispatcher eventually gets to know him by name. They just talk while he's on his way to work in the morning. 10/10

[master-john-uk]

His Majesty King Charles has always enjoyed driving and has a fondness for high-performance motor cars. One might class him as a petrol head, if it were not was his strong views on environmental issues! Below are of some of His Majesty's most memorable cars.

The King's first two cars were more environmentally friendly than any he has driven since.

Charles acquired an Austin J40 when he was just two years old, and the Tri-ang Centurion Sunbeam Coupé shortly afterwards.

The Monarch's first petrol engine car was an MGC GT in 1968.

It had wire wheels, a heated rear windscreen. It probably caught a lot of attention while he was at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Possibly the most famous of the Sovereign's motors is the Aston Martin DB6 Volante Mk2, which was gifted to him by his mother for his 21st birthday in 1969.

This car was much faster than the MG. Charles enlisted F1 champion Graham Hill to give him a "confidence building" training day at Thruxton motor racing circuit, to learn how to handle high performance motors.

The King still has this Aston Martin. In 2008 it was converted to run on a bio-fuel made primarily from surplus English white wine and cheese (whey). The Princes William and Harry were both seen driving this car following their respective weddings.

The King has owned several other cars over the last 50 years, including a Range Rover, Aston Martins, a Vauxhall and Audis.

In 2018, Charles became the first member of The Royal Family to own an Electric Vehicle when he leased a Jaguar i-Pace. And in 2021 he was spotted driving a Tesla when he visited his father in hospital.

The Tesla was sold in 2022.

Unofficial sources tell me that King Charles may be ordering an all electric Range Rover, and is considering converting the iconic State limousines to run on bio-fuel.

[techmomma]

you know, I got an electric car and forgot to put my thoughts about it down here! so you know what, I'm gonna do just that.

So for the record, I have a 2012 Nissan Leaf. this is like a first or second gen pure electric car, so keep that in mind. newer electric cars are gonna have way better stats than mine will. mostly. (looking at you, tesla)

so, overall?

I genuinely love it. It's like the best car experience I've ever had. runs great, nothing's wrong with the car itself.

and yet I may still need to trade it in for a different car. which makes me very sad.

the reason?

there's no infrastructure for it. "but steph," you say, "maybe there isn't now, but it's supposed to be coming over the course of the next ten years."

yeah I thought so too. and yet, in the past eight months since I got my car, there are fewer electric charging stations. not more. maybe it's just my area, the south puget sound.

I'm going to go into more about owning an electric car under the read more. it's not too complicated, but it's definitely different than an internal combustion car, so there's a lot to take in.

so the biggest thing about owning an electric car is money's no longer really any issue. I can charge an entire tank, which can get me to work and a little farther (my car is an OLD electric car, newer ones can go much farther) for like, $2.50 at a fast charging station. plug into the wall? $0. pennies. my work lets me plug into a wall outlet so I essentially spend a big fat $0 on travel to work.

that part's fucking awesome. genuinely don't mind the short range for me because of that.

the thing about electric cars is you are replacing money with time. charging. takes. time. the newest, fastest cars, in ideal weather and temperature, still take about 20-30 minutes to go from an empty tank to full.

There's different levels of charging. It's basically slow, fast, and fastest.

Depending on the outlet strength and your battery capacity and weather outside, slow charging ("trickle charging") will take between 6-20 hours. Costs the least, takes the most time, but obviously if you're parking it and letting it charge over night, not a problem.

Medium charging will take between 2 and 6 hours, again depending on outlet strength, battery capacity, and weather outside.

Fastest charging ("supercharging," whatever) will take 30 minutes to 2 hours. Fastest time, but costs the most.

But again that's like. $2.50. The most I've ever been charged for a full tank was like... $6? Because it was a $2.50 flat hookup fee, and then the total charging time cost about $3.50, so all together $6. Again, for a full tank, that can charge while I'm working and be ready to go by the time I need to go home.

Now the other thing to keep in mind is weather WILL affect how fast your car charges, AND how fast it drains the charge. the colder the weather, the slower it will charge, and the faster it will drain. and this isn't like a "so small you can barely notice it" amount, it NOTICEABLY affects my mileage. this last winter, once the temps get under 40 degrees, I can lose like a quarter of a tank, and took about 3 times as long to charge at even the fastest charging station. keep in mind that this may be because my car is 11 years old, but just like with any electronics, weather and temperature will affect your car.

and the more things you have running, such as say wipers, or heat to keep your ass from freezing, those will also drain the battery faster/

aka absolutely do not get an older electric car if you live in a place that routinely snows or gets around freezing. maybe a newer one, but not an older one.

here is the kicker though:

I really would not mind all of this. it's a little bit more extra effort, but for the reward? god yeah it's awesome. combined with an absolutely wonderful driving experience (zero noise, SO smooth, great handling), there'd be no reason that I'd be considering trading in.

HERE is why:

you cannot CHARGE at every charging station. you can only charge at charging stations that have your specific charging plug.

so sure, there could be twenty charging stations within a mile of you. but if none of them have the right plug, then all twenty of them are useless to you.

if you do not have a tesla, and all of the stations in your city are only tesla stations, then you have no charging stations.

now at first, it's easy to think "well I just need enough to get to my destination."

no, my friend. you need at least enough to get to your destination, and then get to a charging station. whether that's a wall outlet (you wanna wait there for 7-20 hours?) or a fast charging station.

because what happens if you run out of juice on the road? you can't walk to a gas station, buy a can of gas, and walk back to get yourself on the road again. there are portable chargers you can get to keep like an extra can of gas, but can you afford a $3300 portable charger?

did you also know that some electric cars cannot be put in Neutral if they have no charge at all? meaning that you have to have enough charge for the tow-truck ride to a charger, or else the they have to bring a special tow truck called a wrecker? which will cost more?

"but steph," you say, "some of them have solar panels! isn't that enough to recharge it?" yes, technically. my car has a solar panel. it would probably take about 24 hours to recharge it... about a 1/12 of the tank, so not really enough to even start my car again. it's enough to compensate for the ambient loss of charge while my car sits idle, but nothing else.

another thing to keep in mind with charging stations is most will have enough for about 4 cars to charge at the same time, max. in the entire puget sound, I have not seen a station that can charge more than 4, maybe 5 vehicles at once.

most of these, yes, do have two chargers! if a station has 4 charging... terminals, I guess you could call them, and they each have 2 plugs, then in theory, you should be able to charge 8 cars at once, right?

no, because at a vast majority of stations, you can only use one of those charging plugs at a time. if someone is using the other plug, you cannot charge your car at the same terminal, and have to find a different one.

so here comes the other infrastructure problem: a lot of the stations that have multiple kinds of charging plugs (remember how you have to find a station that has your kind of plug?) will share a terminal with another plug.

this wouldn't be a problem, except most of the time, it'll be a majority of one type of plug, and then like a single plug of a different kind.

so let's say you have a non-tesla. at this one station, there's 4 terminals. each has 2 plugs. 7 of those are tesla plugs, and 1 is a non-tesla, and that's the one you can use.

there's only 1 car, using 1 terminal. all the rest of the stations are free. they have a tesla, and they can use any station.

unfortunately, they got there when no one else was around, didn't think about it, and are using the stall that has the single plug you can use. despite them having a tesla and being able to use any of the stalls, they're using the one you need. maybe when they got there, all the rest were taken, who knows.

either way, you have to wait until they're done to charge your car.

remember back to the fact that it can take 30 minutes to 2 hours, depending on the temp?

you can ask them to please move.

assuming they're waiting in their car. most people, since it takes 30 minutes to 2 hours, will leave their car to go do some shopping or whatever. so if you didn't see them and have no idea what they look like, then good fucking luck trying to find them to ask them to move.

so now you have to wait for them to go back to their car once it's done charging. they're going to come back when it's done charging, right?

in theory, yes. most stations (most!) will accrue charges if your car is done and you're leaving it there still plugged in.

not everyone gives a damn about those charges though!

so say someone doesn't care, and leaves their car there for 6 hours. in the space that has a single charger that you can use. they're not even using their car, and you can't charge yours for 6 hours.

obviously, no one is going to wait six hours to START charging their car. so you go to find a different charging station.

I hope you can find another one within range, because you run out of charge.

yeaahhhh, remember the whole "there are now FEWER charging stations than there were when I first got my car"?

the piece de resistance?

not every charging station is in working order. sometimes they are broken or out of order when you get there.

there are apps to help you find ones that work, and work for your type of plug. one of the most popular is PlugShare. even with this, stations are not always updated, and sometimes stations just don't exist when there's supposed to be one. or it happens to be broken that day, and no one's been there that day to leave a comment that it's broken.

in addition, I have found stations that SAY they're superchargers, but in reality, they charge sometimes slower than a wall outlet. because the fun part is stations can say they charge UP TO so many kilowatts. but on average, it's only a fraction of that. so you're paying about $2.50 for what should be about $.30. ain't that fun and not at all sleazy and frustrating when you don't have enough charge to get to a different station, so you know you're going to be there for several hours when you thought you were only going to be there for a half-hour?

now, again, my car is 11 years old. the type of charging plug it has, ChadeMo, is being phased out. the newer charging plug types are CCS and tesla plugs. so that is absolutely a factor.

but I have also seen the same things being said with CCS and tesla plugs. fewer stations, even for the ones that work.

and... isn't that a problem too? if my type of plug can be phased out and become obsolete, then what will happen to the other plugs? who's to say that these newer plugs won't be phased out either?

there are... questionable adapters being made for charging plugs. it's not as easy as switching adapters for your computer though, and you're look at about $200 for an adapter, and for several thousand for a chademo adapter, which is still being tested.

You wanna carry around an adapter that you have to remember to take with you, every time your charge your car (and take it back with you, when you're done charging) that cost you a couple grand?

and so, to bring everything back around:

I love my car. best car experience I've ever had. it costs me so little to use my car, especially considering there's things I don't have to do anymore--like I don't have to worry about oil changes!

but because of mostly external factors? I am losing usability of my car. within an 8 month period, I went from like 5 or 6 stations I could charge my car at, to about... 2, within a 16 mile radius. 16 miles.

if there were just those 6 stations, like there were when I bought my car 8 months ago, this wouldn't really even be a problem. and I'm in a decent area for charging stations!

in the entirety of the Seattle area, there was a SINGLE charging station, that I could use. I had to leave the city before I could get to another one, miles outside of it.

my car is perfectly fine. it doesn't even have 100k miles on it yet, and could probably go another 100k before I have any problems. but I am, in all likelihood, probably going to have to find someplace to trade it in.

Because there's no infrastructure for it, and what infrastructure IS there seems to be getting actively worse.

So all in all, to finish things up.

How is driving an electric car? Is it worth it?

I love my car. Driving electric cars kicks ass. They're smooth and quiet and like, a dream for someone who likes quiet. When usable, they're cheap, you can do a lot with them, and newer electric cars will have much more range and versatility than mine!

But... does your area have the infrastructure for electric cars? Does it have the infrastructure for your car specifically?

And will it continue to have that infrastructure in the future?

And unfortunately, the only way you're going to know that is finding someone who's already been driving electric in your area, and has been driving a car similar to the one you want.

there's no real way, currently, to predict how feasible it will be for you without first or second-hand experience. you cannot predict it on paper. so unless you've got money to blow, it's going to be a very risky investment. but I suspect if you're reading this, you're not going to be one of those people who has money to blow.

for now? if you're really adamant on electric, go with a hybrid for now. I absolutely do not think, certainly for my area (which is pretty urban and honestly pretty great for electric cars. yeah, all things considered) the infrastructure is there for it. And if you don't live in a major urban area, you almost DEFINITELY do not have the infrastructure for purely electric vehicle.

I really hope all of this has been helpful for you! Feel free to ask questions, I am more than happy to offer my opinion!

[dailyunsolvedmysteries]

The Mysterious Canneto di Caronia Fires

Canneto di Caronia is a village in Sicily, home to roughly 150 people. Events began on December 23, 2003, at Antonino Pezzino's home on Via Mare; Pezzino's television reportedly exploded. Similar malfunctions reportedly affected fuse boxes, air conditioners, kitchen appliances, computers, and electronic car door locks. Fires were also said to have struck wedding presents and a piece of furniture. At least one person was said to have observed an unplugged electrical cable ignite while he was directly observing it. On February 9, 2004, two houses on Via Mare burned. In response, Mayor Spinnato issued an order evacuating the 39 residents of Via Mare from their homes to the town's only hotel. ENEL, the Italian power utility, cut power to the town, but fires continued. From January through to March, 92 fires were reported. On February 11, an investigation was announced by the local prosecutor. On March 16, fires resumed, and investigators reportedly witnessed malfunctions in compasses, electronic car locks, and cell phones. In April, the government formed an interdisciplinary research group, coordinated by Francesco Venerando Mantegna from the Sicilian Protezione Civile. That team reportedly had widespread cooperation from the nation's armed forces, police, as well as utilities. Venerando's team reported anomalous 'electromagnetic activity', unexplained lights, and a helicopter that experienced allegedly-anomalous rotor damage. Scientists from the National Research Institute (CNR), with the support of NASA physicists, were also involved in investigating the events In June 2004, residents were returned to their homes on Via Mare. Explanations for the events have ranged from the mundane to the paranormal. Public speculation attributed the events to poltergeists, demons, or UFOs. In 2007 it was proposed that the phenomena were caused by intermittent electromagnetic emissions. On 24 June 2008, following further investigation by the appointed experts, the case was dismissed by the prosecutor of Mistretta. The conclusion of the prosecutor was that the fires were arson cases, although no responsible persons for the arson were named by the prosecutor.

[wolfliving]

Will the entire car brick?

(...)

Fisker vehicle owners’ questions are mostly practical. Fisker began shipping the Ocean, its electric SUV—priced to start at $41,000 and ranging up to $70,0000—last year. Immediately, the vehicles were found to have serious build quality shortcomings and software issues, including a less-than-responsive central touchscreen. (WIRED’s reviewer declined to rate the vehicle entirely, calling it “just not ready yet.”)

Owners reported that some of the most serious issues, including a difficult-to-use brake hold and Bluetooth connectivity problems, were ironed out through software updates. But owners sometimes complained that it was tricky to get their vehicles serviced or repaired, because there weren’t enough certified Fisker repairers and technicians. Fisker initially launched with a Tesla-like “direct to consumer” model that eschewed the traditional “middleman” dealerships often seen in the US. But in January, the company began to sign dealerships to a new Fisker network, citing ballooning costs associated with the direct model.

Even now, as the carcass of Fisker gets picked over, the EVs still have niggling problems—window cracks, dysfunctional key fobs, sudden connectivity blackouts—and will unquestionably need servicing and spare parts to keep them running into the future. Without Fisker, the company, to provide that, what are owners to do?

The FOA is still in the early stages of figuring it out. A small band of volunteers have worked around the clock to define the problems owners might face down the road—legal questions about their vehicle financing; issues with the car’s app; finding parts—and start solving them. These people have full-time jobs, too. De Bardi, for example, who lives in the UK and has headed up the European owners’ efforts, is also the CTO of a telecommunications firm....

[dellsservicecenter]

From Engine to Electronics: Proper Diagnostic Techniques for Resolving Maserati Problems

Maserati, the epitome of Italian luxury and performance, is renowned for its stylish design and high-performance capabilities. However, like any high-end vehicle, Maserati can encounter a range of issues, from engine troubles to electronic malfunctions. Proper diagnostics is crucial in maintaining the health and performance of these sophisticated machines. This article will guide you through the common problems Maserati face and the proper diagnostic techniques to resolve them.

Common Maserati Problems

1. Engine Issues

Maserati engines are marvels of engineering, but they can develop problems over time. Common engine issues include:

    Misfires and Rough Idling: This can be caused by faulty spark plugs, ignition coils, or fuel injectors.

    Overheating: Often due to a malfunctioning cooling system, such as a failed water pump or a clogged radiator.

    Oil Leaks: These can originate from various seals and gaskets, leading to low oil levels and potential engine damage.

2. Transmission Problems

Maserati transmissions are designed for performance but can experience:

    Slipping Gears: This could indicate worn-out clutch plates or issues with the transmission fluid.

    Delayed Shifts: Often due to problems with the transmission control module or low fluid levels.

3. Electrical and Electronic Failures

Modern Maseratis are equipped with advanced electronics that can sometimes fail, including:

    Dashboard Warning Lights: These can indicate issues ranging from simple sensor failures to serious engine problems.

    Infotainment System Glitches: Problems with the touch screen, navigation, or audio system are not uncommon.

Diagnostic Techniques

1. OBD-II Scanner

The On-Board Diagnostics II (OBD-II) scanner is an essential tool for diagnosing Maserati problems. It can read error codes from the car's computer, providing insight into various issues.

    How to Use: Connect the OBD-II scanner to the port located under the dashboard. Turn on the ignition and follow the scanner’s instructions to retrieve the error codes.

    Interpreting Codes: Each code corresponds to a specific problem. For example, P0300 indicates a random/multiple cylinder misfire, while P0128 points to a coolant thermostat issue.

2. Visual Inspection

A thorough visual inspection can reveal obvious issues such as leaks, damaged components, or worn-out parts.

    Engine Bay: Check for oil leaks, loose connections, and the condition of belts and hoses.

    Undercarriage: Inspect for fluid leaks and damage to the exhaust system.

    Electrical Connections: Look for corroded or loose battery terminals and wiring issues.

3. Multimeter Testing

A multimeter is useful for diagnosing electrical issues in a Maserati.

    Battery Voltage: Measure the voltage across the battery terminals. A healthy battery should read around 12.6 volts when the car is off and around 14 volts when running.

    Sensor Checks: Test various sensors, such as the oxygen sensor or mass airflow sensor, to ensure they are functioning correctly.

4. Compression Test

A compression test helps diagnose internal engine problems such as worn piston rings or valves.

    Procedure: Remove the spark plugs and insert a compression gauge into each cylinder. Crank the engine and note the pressure readings. Low or uneven readings indicate internal engine issues.

5. Professional Diagnostic Tools

Maserati dealerships and specialized repair shops use advanced diagnostic tools that can access proprietary systems and provide more detailed information.

    SD2/SD3 Diagnostic Systems: These are specialized tools used by Maserati technicians to diagnose and program vehicle systems accurately.

    Diagnostic Software: Tools like Xentry or PIWIS can interface with Maserati's electronic systems for comprehensive diagnostics.

Addressing Common Issues

1. Engine Repairs

    Misfires and Rough Idling: Replace faulty spark plugs, ignition coils, or fuel injectors. Regular maintenance and using high-quality fuel can prevent these issues.

    Overheating: Ensure the cooling system is functioning correctly by checking the water pump, radiator, and thermostat. Flushing the coolant system periodically is also recommended.

    Oil Leaks: Identify the source of the leak and replace the necessary seals or gaskets. Regularly check oil levels and change the oil according to the manufacturer's recommendations.

2. Transmission Solutions

    Slipping Gears: Inspect and replace worn clutch plates and ensure the transmission fluid is at the correct level. Consider a fluid change if necessary.

    Delayed Shifts: Diagnose and repair issues with the transmission control module or solenoids. Regular transmission servicing can prevent many of these problems.

3. Electrical Fixes

    Dashboard Warning Lights: Use an OBD-II scanner to identify and address the underlying issue. Reset the warning lights after repairs are completed.

    Infotainment System Glitches: Perform software updates and check for any loose connections or faulty components. In some cases, a complete system reset may be required.

Conclusion

Proper diagnostics are essential for maintaining the performance and reliability of your Maserati. By using the right tools and techniques, you can identify and resolve issues promptly, ensuring your luxury car continues to deliver the driving experience it was designed for. Regular maintenance and timely repairs are key to keeping your Maserati in top condition, from the engine to the sophisticated electronics.

[rideboomindia]

Description of product/service offering; define value proposition; define competitive differentiation of RideBoom

RideBoom is a transportation service that aims to provide convenient and reliable rides for customers. Our product/service offering revolves around connecting riders with professional drivers through a user-friendly mobile app. Whether you need a ride to work, the airport, or any other destination, RideBoom strives to make your transportation experience seamless and efficient.

Value proposition: Our value proposition lies in the following key aspects:

Convenience: RideBoom offers a simple and intuitive mobile app that allows users to request rides with just a few taps on their smartphones. With our extensive network of drivers, we strive to provide quick pick-ups and drop-offs, reducing wait times and ensuring you reach your destination on time.

Reliability: We prioritize reliability by thoroughly vetting and training our drivers to ensure they meet our high standards. Our drivers are professional, courteous, and committed to passenger safety. Additionally, our advanced technology enables real-time tracking of rides, providing transparency and peace of mind to our customers.

Affordability: RideBoom offers competitive pricing, providing cost-effective transportation options for riders. With transparent fare structures and no hidden charges, we aim to deliver value for money.

Safety: Safety is a top priority at RideBoom. We employ rigorous driver screening processes, including background checks and vehicle inspections, to ensure passenger security. Furthermore, our app features emergency assistance buttons and the ability to share ride details with trusted contacts, enhancing user safety.

Competitive differentiation: RideBoom stands out from competitors through several competitive differentiators:

Diverse Vehicle Options: We offer a range of vehicle categories to suit different customer preferences and needs. From standard sedans to luxury cars and larger vehicles for group travel, RideBoom provides a variety of options to accommodate diverse passenger requirements.

Exceptional Customer Support: We pride ourselves on delivering excellent customer service. Our dedicated support team is available 24/7 to address any concerns or inquiries. We aim to resolve customer issues promptly and ensure a positive experience throughout the ride.

Focus on Sustainability: RideBoom is committed to environmental sustainability. We are actively working towards incorporating electric and hybrid vehicles into our fleet and exploring other eco-friendly initiatives. By providing greener transportation options, we strive to contribute to a cleaner and more sustainable future.

Seamless Integration: Our app integrates smoothly with popular third-party services and platforms, such as payment gateways and mapping systems. This integration enhances user convenience and provides a seamless experience when using RideBoom alongside other applications.

Overall, RideBoom aims to provide a reliable, convenient, and affordable transportation service that prioritizes customer satisfaction, safety, and sustainability, setting us apart from our competitors in the market.

[popit-solutions]

Overcoming the Major Challenges in the Automotive Industry: Practical Solutions for Everyday Drivers

Do you think having a car to be more expensive than your expectations? Are surprise breakdowns and costly repairs stressing you out? Struggling to find parking in busy city areas? If any of these questions resonated with you, you're at the right place.

The automotive industry, while crucial to our daily lives, poses several significant challenges for consumers. These problems range from financial burdens to logistical issues, affecting millions of drivers worldwide. In this blog post, we will highlight some of the most pressing problems faced by car owners and offer practical solutions to alleviate these challenges.

 

1. The Rising Cost of Vehicle Ownership

The overall cost of owning a vehicle, including purchase price, insurance, maintenance, fuel and related expenses can be overwhelming for many consumers.

Solutions:

Choose a Fuel-Efficient or Alternative Fuel Vehicle: Investing in a vehicle that is fuel-efficient or runs on alternative fuels like electric or hybrid models can lead to substantial savings on fuel costs in the long run. These vehicles tend to have lower fuel consumption and can reduce your overall expenditure on gasoline.

Insurance Discounts: Shop around for insurance and look for discounts related to good driving records, bundling with home insurance, or installing anti-theft devices.

Maintenance Tips: Regular maintenance can prevent costly repairs. Learn basic DIY maintenance, such as oil changes and tire rotations, to save money.

2. Maintenance and Repair Hassles

Unexpected breakdowns and regular maintenance can be both time-consuming and costly for vehicle owners. Sudden repairs often come with high costs, disrupting your budget and daily schedule.

Solutions:

Preventive Maintenance: Follow the manufacturer’s recommended maintenance schedule to keep your vehicle in good condition and prevent larger issues.

Extended Warranties: Consider purchasing an extended warranty for added protection against major repair costs.

Reliable Mechanics: Build a relationship with a trustworthy mechanics or dealers for fair pricing and honest advice.

3. Parking and Urban Congestion

Finding parking in busy city areas can be very frustrating, and heavy traffic often wastes time and adds to stress. Many drivers struggle with the challenge of locating a parking spot and dealing with congestion.

Solutions:

Parking Apps: Use apps that help find and reserve parking spots in advance.

Public Transport Alternatives: When possible, use public transportation or carpool to reduce the number of vehicles on the road.

Urban Planning Advocacy: Support initiatives and policies that aim to improve urban infrastructure and reduce congestion.

4. Fuel Prices and Environmental Impact

Changing fuel prices can put a strain on your budget, and cars that run on gasoline add to pollution and harm the environment. High fuel costs and environmental damage are common concerns for many drivers.

Solutions:

Fuel-Efficient Driving: Adopt fuel-saving driving habits, such as smooth acceleration, maintaining steady speeds, and reducing idling.

Alternative Fuels: Explore vehicles that use alternative fuels, such as electric or hybrid models, to reduce dependency on gasoline.

Carpooling and Ride-Sharing: These options not only save money but also reduce the environmental impact.

5. Vehicle Depreciation

Cars depreciate rapidly, which can be a significant concern for those looking to sell or trade in their vehicle. This depreciation can impact resale value and make it challenging to get a fair price when upgrading to a new model.

Solutions:

Choose Wisely: Some vehicles hold their value better than others. Research models known for strong resale value before purchasing.

Regular Maintenance and Care: Keep your car in good condition to maximize its resale value. Clean the interior and exterior regularly, and address any minor repairs promptly.

Consider Leasing: Leasing can be a good option if you prefer driving a new car every few years and want to avoid long-term depreciation.

Conclusion

Owning a vehicle comes with its set of challenges, but with the right strategies, these challenges can be managed effectively. By considering cost-saving measures, staying proactive with maintenance, and making informed choices, you can enjoy the benefits of vehicle ownership without the overwhelming burden.

For more tips and advice related to automotive industry, subscribe to our blog and if you need any IT related solutions visit our website. Share this post with your friends and family to help them make informed decisions about their vehicle ownership journey.

[surveillance-capitalism]

Link without paywall:

And a copypaste for good measure:

Last October, Colin Kahl, then the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy at the Pentagon, sat in a hotel in Paris and prepared to make a call to avert disaster in Ukraine. A staffer handed him an iPhone—in part to avoid inviting an onslaught of late-night texts and colorful emojis on Kahl’s own phone. Kahl had returned to his room, with its heavy drapery and distant view of the Eiffel Tower, after a day of meetings with officials from the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. A senior defense official told me that Kahl was surprised by whom he was about to contact: “He was, like, ‘Why am I calling Elon Musk?’ ”

The reason soon became apparent. “Even though Musk is not technically a diplomat or statesman, I felt it was important to treat him as such, given the influence he had on this issue,” Kahl told me. SpaceX, Musk’s space-exploration company, had for months been providing Internet access across Ukraine, allowing the country’s forces to plan attacks and to defend themselves. But, in recent days, the forces had found their connectivity severed as they entered territory contested by Russia. More alarmingly, SpaceX had recently given the Pentagon an ultimatum: if it didn’t assume the cost of providing service in Ukraine, which the company calculated at some four hundred million dollars annually, it would cut off access. “We started to get a little panicked,” the senior defense official, one of four who described the standoff to me, recalled. Musk “could turn it off at any given moment. And that would have real operational impact for the Ukrainians.”

Musk had become involved in the war in Ukraine soon after Russia invaded, in February, 2022. Along with conventional assaults, the Kremlin was conducting cyberattacks against Ukraine’s digital infrastructure. Ukrainian officials and a loose coalition of expatriates in the tech sector, brainstorming in group chats on WhatsApp and Signal, found a potential solution: SpaceX, which manufactures a line of mobile Internet terminals called Starlink. The tripod-mounted dishes, each about the size of a computer display and clad in white plastic reminiscent of the sleek design sensibility of Musk’s Tesla electric cars, connect with a network of satellites. The units have limited range, but in this situation that was an advantage: although a nationwide network of dishes was required, it would be difficult for Russia to completely dismantle Ukrainian connectivity. Of course, Musk could do so. Three people involved in bringing Starlink to Ukraine, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they worried that Musk, if upset, could withdraw his services, told me that they originally overlooked the significance of his personal control. “Nobody thought about it back then,” one of them, a Ukrainian tech executive, told me. “It was all about ‘Let’s fucking go, people are dying.’ ”

In the ensuing months, fund-raising in Silicon Valley’s Ukrainian community, contracts with the U.S. Agency for International Development and with European governments, and pro-bono contributions from SpaceX facilitated the transfer of thousands of Starlink units to Ukraine. A soldier in Ukraine’s signal corps who was responsible for maintaining Starlink access on the front lines, and who asked to be identified only by his first name, Mykola, told me, “It’s the essential backbone of communication on the battlefield.”

Initially, Musk showed unreserved support for the Ukrainian cause, responding encouragingly as Mykhailo Fedorov, the Ukrainian minister for digital transformation, tweeted pictures of equipment in the field. But, as the war ground on, SpaceX began to balk at the cost. “We are not in a position to further donate terminals to Ukraine, or fund the existing terminals for an indefinite period of time,” SpaceX’s director of government sales told the Pentagon in a letter, last September. (CNBC recently valued SpaceX at nearly a hundred and fifty billion dollars. Forbes estimated Musk’s personal net worth at two hundred and twenty billion dollars, making him the world’s richest man.)

Musk was also growing increasingly uneasy with the fact that his technology was being used for warfare. That month, at a conference in Aspen attended by business and political figures, Musk even appeared to express support for Vladimir Putin. “He was onstage, and he said, ‘We should be negotiating. Putin wants peace—we should be negotiating peace with Putin,’ ” Reid Hoffman, who helped start PayPal with Musk, recalled. Musk seemed, he said, to have “bought what Putin was selling, hook, line, and sinker.” A week later, Musk tweeted a proposal for his own peace plan, which called for new referendums to redraw the borders of Ukraine, and granted Russia control of Crimea, the semi-autonomous peninsula recognized by most nations, including the United States, as Ukrainian territory. In later tweets, Musk portrayed as inevitable an outcome favoring Russia and attached maps highlighting eastern Ukrainian territories, some of which, he argued, “prefer Russia.” Musk also polled his Twitter followers about the plan. Millions responded, with about sixty per cent rejecting the proposal. (Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s President, tweeted his own poll, asking users whether they preferred the Elon Musk who supported Ukraine or the one who now seemed to back Russia. The former won, though Zelensky’s poll had a smaller turnout: Musk has more than twenty times as many followers.)

By then, Musk’s sympathies appeared to be manifesting on the battlefield. One day, Ukrainian forces advancing into contested areas in the south found themselves suddenly unable to communicate. “We were very close to the front line,” Mykola, the signal-corps soldier, told me. “We crossed this border and the Starlink stopped working.” The consequences were immediate. “Communications became dead, units were isolated. When you’re on offense, especially for commanders, you need a constant stream of information from battalions. Commanders had to drive to the battlefield to be in radio range, risking themselves,” Mykola said. “It was chaos.” Ukrainian expats who had raised funds for the Starlink units began receiving frantic calls. The tech executive recalls a Ukrainian military official telling him, “We need Elon now.” “How now?” he replied. “Like fucking now,” the official said. “People are dying.” Another Ukrainian involved told me that he was “awoken by a dozen calls saying they’d lost connectivity and had to retreat.” The Financial Times reported that outages affected units in Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, Donetsk, and Luhansk. American and Ukrainian officials told me they believed that SpaceX had cut the connectivity via geofencing, cordoning off areas of access.

The senior defense official said, “We had a whole series of meetings internal to the department to try to figure out what we could do about this.” Musk’s singular role presented unfamiliar challenges, as did the government’s role as intermediary. “It wasn’t like we could hold him in breach of contract or something,” the official continued. The Pentagon would need to reach a contractual arrangement with SpaceX so that, at the very least, Musk “couldn’t wake up one morning and just decide, like, he didn’t want to do this anymore.” Kahl added, “It was kind of a way for us to lock in services across Ukraine. It could at least prevent Musk from turning off the switch altogether.”

Typically, such a negotiation would be handled by the Pentagon’s acquisitions department. But Musk had become more than just a vender like Boeing, Lockheed, or other defense-industry behemoths. On the phone with Musk from Paris, Kahl was deferential. According to unclassified talking points for the call, he thanked Musk for his efforts in Ukraine, acknowledged the steep costs he’d incurred, and pleaded for even a few weeks to devise a contract. “If you cut this off, it doesn’t end the war,” Kahl recalled telling Musk.

Musk wasn’t immediately convinced. “My inference was that he was getting nervous that Starlink’s involvement was increasingly seen in Russia as enabling the Ukrainian war effort, and was looking for a way to placate Russian concerns,” Kahl told me. To the dismay of Pentagon officials, Musk volunteered that he had spoken with Putin personally. Another individual told me that Musk had made the same assertion in the weeks before he tweeted his pro-Russia peace plan, and had said that his consultations with the Kremlin were regular. (Musk later denied having spoken with Putin about Ukraine.) On the phone, Musk said that he was looking at his laptop and could see “the entire war unfolding” through a map of Starlink activity. “This was, like, three minutes before he said, ‘Well, I had this great conversation with Putin,’ ” the senior defense official told me. “And we were, like, ‘Oh, dear, this is not good.’ ” Musk told Kahl that the vivid illustration of how technology he had designed for peaceful ends was being used to wage war gave him pause.

After a fifteen-minute call, Musk agreed to give the Pentagon more time. He also, after public blowback and with evident annoyance, walked back his threats to cut off service. “The hell with it,” he tweeted. “Even though Starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free.” This June, the Department of Defense announced that it had reached a deal with SpaceX.

The meddling of oligarchs and other monied interests in the fate of nations is not new. During the First World War, J. P. Morgan lent vast sums to the Allied powers; afterward, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., poured money into the fledgling League of Nations. The investor George Soros’s Open Society Foundations underwrote civil-society reform in post-Soviet Europe, and the casino mogul Sheldon Adelson funded right-wing media in Israel, as part of his support of Benjamin Netanyahu.

But Musk’s influence is more brazen and expansive. There is little precedent for a civilian’s becoming the arbiter of a war between nations in such a granular way, or for the degree of dependency that the U.S. now has on Musk in a variety of fields, from the future of energy and transportation to the exploration of space. SpaceX is currently the sole means by which NASA transports crew from U.S. soil into space, a situation that will persist for at least another year. The government’s plan to move the auto industry toward electric cars requires increasing access to charging stations along America’s highways. But this rests on the actions of another Musk enterprise, Tesla. The automaker has seeded so much of the country with its proprietary charging stations that the Biden Administration relaxed an early push for a universal charging standard disliked by Musk. His stations are eligible for billions of dollars in subsidies, so long as Tesla makes them compatible with the other charging standard.

In the past twenty years, against a backdrop of crumbling infrastructure and declining trust in institutions, Musk has sought out business opportunities in crucial areas where, after decades of privatization, the state has receded. The government is now reliant on him, but struggles to respond to his risk-taking, brinkmanship, and caprice. Current and former officials from NASA, the Department of Defense, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration told me that Musk’s influence had become inescapable in their work, and several of them said that they now treat him like a sort of unelected official. One Pentagon spokesman said that he was keeping Musk apprised of my inquiries about his role in Ukraine and would grant an interview with an official about the matter only with Musk’s permission. “We’ll talk to you if Elon wants us to,” he told me. In a podcast interview last year, Musk was asked whether he has more influence than the American government. He replied immediately, “In some ways.” Reid Hoffman told me that Musk’s attitude is “like Louis XIV: ‘L’état, c’est moi.’ ”

Musk’s power continues to grow. His takeover of Twitter, which he has rebranded “X,” gives him a critical forum for political discourse ahead of the next Presidential election. He recently launched an artificial-intelligence company, a move that follows years of involvement in the technology. Musk has become a hyper-exposed pop-culture figure, and his sharp turns from altruistic to vainglorious, strategic to impulsive, have been the subject of innumerable articles and at least seven major books, including a forthcoming biography by Walter Isaacson. But the nature and the scope of his power are less widely understood.

More than thirty of Musk’s current and former colleagues in various industries and a dozen individuals in his personal life spoke to me about their experiences with him. Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, with whom Musk has both worked and sparred, told me, “Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it.”

The terms of the Starlink deal have not been made public. Ukrainian officials say that they have not faced further service interruptions. But Musk has continued to express ambivalence about how the technology is being used, and where it can be deployed. In February, he tweeted, “We will not enable escalation of conflict that may lead to WW3.” He said, as he had told Kahl, that he was sincerely attempting to navigate the moral dilemmas of his role: “We’re trying hard to do the right thing, where the ‘right thing’ is an extremely difficult moral question.”

Musk’s hesitation aligns with his pragmatic interests. A facility in Shanghai produces half of all Tesla cars, and Musk depends on the good will of officials in China, which has lent support to Russia in the conflict. Musk recently acknowledged to the Financial Times that Beijing disapproves of his decision to provide Internet service to Ukraine and has sought assurances that he would not deploy similar technology in China. In the same interview, he responded to questions about China’s efforts to assert control over Taiwan by floating another peace plan. Taiwan, he suggested, could become a jointly controlled administrative zone, an outcome that Taiwanese leaders see as ending the country’s independence. During a trip to Beijing this spring, Musk was welcomed with what Reuters summarized as “flattery and feasts.” He met with senior officials, including China’s foreign minister, and posed for the kinds of awkwardly smiling formal photos that are more typical of world leaders.

National-security officials I spoke with had a range of views on the government’s balance of power with Musk. He maintains good relationships with some of them, including General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Since the two men met, several years ago, when Milley was the chief of staff of the Army, they have discussed “technology applications to warfare—artificial intelligence, electric vehicles, and autonomous machines,” Milley told me. “He has insight that helped shape my thoughts on the fundamental change in the character of war and the modernization of the U.S. military.” During the Starlink controversy, Musk called him for advice. But other officials expressed profound misgivings. “Living in the world we live in, in which Elon runs this company and it is a private business under his control, we are living off his good graces,” a Pentagon official told me. “That sucks.”

One summer evening in the mid-nineteen-eighties, Musk and his friend Theo Taoushiani took Taoushiani’s father’s car for an illicit drive. Musk and Taoushiani were both in their mid-teens, and lived about a mile apart in a suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa. Neither had a driver’s license, or permission from Taoushiani’s father. But they were passionate Dungeons & Dragons fans, and a new module—a fresh scenario in the game—had just been released. Taoushiani took the wheel for the twenty-minute drive to the Sandton City mall. “Elon was my co-pilot,” Taoushiani told me. “We went under the cover of darkness.” At the mall, they found that they didn’t have enough money. But Musk promised a salesperson that they would return the next day with the rest, and dropped the name of a well-known Greek restaurant owned by Taoushiani’s family. “Elon had the gift of the gab,” Taoushiani said. “He’s very persuasive, and he’s quite dogged in his determination.” The two went home with the module.

Musk was born in 1971 in Pretoria, the country’s administrative capital, and he and his younger brother, Kimbal, and his younger sister, Tosca, grew up under apartheid. Musk’s mother, Maye, a Canadian model and dietitian, and his father, Errol, an engineer, divorced when he was young, and the children initially stayed with Maye. She has said that Errol was physically abusive toward her. “He would hit me when the kids were around,” she wrote in her memoir. “I remember that Tosca and Kimbal, who were two and four, respectively, would cry in the corner, and Elon, who was five, would hit him on the backs of his knees to try to stop him.” By the mid-eighties, Musk had moved in with his father—a decision that he has said was motivated by concern for his father’s loneliness, and which he came to regret. Musk, usually impassive in interviews, cried openly when he told Rolling Stone about the years that followed, in which, he said, his father psychologically tortured him, in ways that he declined to specify. “You have no idea about how bad,” he said. “Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done. Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done.” Taoushiani recalled witnessing Errol “chastise Elon a lot. Maybe belittle him.” (Errol Musk has denied allegations that he was abusive to Maye or to his children.) Musk has also said that he was violently bullied at school. Though he is now six feet one, with a broad-shouldered build, he was “much, much smaller back in school,” Taoushiani told me. “He wasn’t very social.”

Musk has said that he has Asperger’s syndrome, a form of what is now known as autism-spectrum disorder, which is characterized by difficulty with social interactions. As a child, he would sometimes fall into trancelike states of deep thought, during which he was so unresponsive that his mother eventually took him to a doctor to check his hearing. Musk’s quiet side persists—in my own interactions with him, I have found him to be thoughtful and measured. (Musk declined to answer questions for this story.) He can also be, as he joked during a stilted “Saturday Night Live” monologue, “pretty good at running human, in emulation mode.”

Musk escaped into science fiction and video games. “One of the reasons I got into technology, maybe the reason, was video games,” he said at a gaming-industry convention several years ago. In his early teens, Musk coded an eight-bit shooter game in the style of Space Invaders called Blastar, whose title screen, in a novelistic flourish, credits him as “E. R. Musk.” The premise was basic: “MISSION: DESTROY ALIEN FREIGHTER CARRYING DEADLY HYDROGEN BOMBS AND STATUS BEAM MACHINES.” But it won recognition from a South African trade magazine, which published the game’s hundred and sixty-seven lines of code and paid Musk a small sum.

Musk often talks about his science-fiction influences. Some have manifested in straightforward ways: he has connected his love of Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” novels, whose characters grapple with a mathematically precise prediction of their civilization’s collapse, to his obsession with insuring human survival beyond Earth. But some of Musk’s touchstones present ironies. He has said that his hero is Douglas Adams, the writer who skewered both the hyper-rich and the progress-at-any-cost ethos that Musk has come to embody. In the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” novels and radio plays, the latter of which were broadcast in South Africa during Musk’s childhood, a narcissistic playboy becomes the president of the galaxy, and Earth is demolished to make way for a space transit route. Musk is also an avowed fan of Deus Ex, a role-playing first-person-shooter video game that he has brought up when discussing his company Neuralink, which aspires to invent ability-enhancing body modifications like those featured in the game. During the pandemic, Musk seemed to embrace Covid denialism, and for a while he changed his Twitter profile picture to an image of the protagonist of the game, which turns on a manufactured plague designed to control the masses. But Deus Ex, like “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” is a fundamentally anti-capitalist text, in which the plague is the culmination of unrestrained corporate power, and the villain is the world’s richest man, a media-darling tech entrepreneur with global aspirations and political leaders under his control.

In 1999, Musk stood outside his Bay Area home to accept the delivery of a million-dollar McLaren F1 sports car. He was in his late twenties, and wearing an oversized brown blazer. “Some could interpret purchasing this car as behavior characteristic of an imperialist brat,” he told a CNN news crew. Then he beamed, saying that there were only about sixty such cars in the world. “My values may have changed,” he added, “but I’m not consciously aware of my values having changed.” Musk’s fiancée, a Canadian writer named Justine Wilson, seemed more aware. “It’s a million-dollar car. It’s decadent,” she said. “My fear is that we become spoiled brats. That we lose a sense of appreciation and perspective.” The McLaren, she observed, was “the perfect car for Silicon Valley.”

Musk had moved to Canada when he was in his late teens, and met Wilson when they both attended Queen’s University, in Ontario. He later transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, graduating with degrees in economics and physics. In 1995, the early days of the World Wide Web, he and Kimbal founded a company that came to be called Zip2, an online city directory that they sold to newspapers. Musk has often described the company’s humble origins, saying that he and his brother lived and worked in a small studio apartment, showering at a nearby Y.M.C.A. and eating at Jack in the Box. (Errol at one point gave his sons twenty-eight thousand dollars. Musk, who has a tendency to fuss over questions of credit, has stated that his father’s contribution came “much later,” in a round of funding that “would’ve happened anyway.”) At Zip2, Musk developed what he describes as his “hard-core” work style; even after he had his own apartment, he often slept on a beanbag at the office. But, in the end, the company’s investors stripped him of his leadership role and installed a more experienced chief executive. Musk believed that the startup should have been targeting not just newspapers but consumers. Investors pursued a more modest vision instead. In 1999, Zip2 was sold to Compaq for three hundred and seven million dollars, earning Musk more than twenty million dollars.

Justine and Musk married the following year. After their first child died at ten weeks, from sudden infant death syndrome, the couple dealt with the tragedy in very different ways. Justine, by her account, grieved openly; Musk later told one of his biographers, Ashlee Vance, that “wallowing in sadness does no good for anyone around you.” After pursuing I.V.F. treatment, the couple had twins, then triplets. (Musk now has at least nine children with three different women, and has said that he is doing his part to address one of his pet issues, the risk of population collapse; demographers are skeptical about the matter.) Justine wrote in an essay for Marie Claire that their relationship eventually buckled under the weight of Musk’s obsession with work and his controlling tendencies, which began with him insisting, as they danced at their wedding, “I am the alpha in this relationship.” A messy divorce ensued, leading to a legal dispute over their postnuptial financial agreement, which was settled years later. “He had grown up in the male-dominated culture of South Africa,” Justine wrote. “The will to compete and dominate that made him so successful in business did not magically shut off when he came home.” (Musk wrote a response to Justine’s account in Business Insider, discussing the financial dispute, but he did not address Justine’s characterizations of his behavior.)

After Musk left Zip2, he poured some twelve million dollars, a majority of his wealth, into another startup, an online bank called X.com. It was the first instance of his obsession with the letter “X,” which has now appeared in the names of his companies, his products, and his son with the artist Grimes: X Æ A-12. The bank also marked the beginning of a long and so far unfulfilled quest—recently revived in his effort to reinvent Twitter—to create an “everything app,” incorporating a payment system. In 2000, X.com merged with a competing online-payments startup, Confinity, co-founded by the entrepreneur Peter Thiel. In events that have since become Silicon Valley lore, Musk and Thiel battled for control of the company. Various accounts apportion blame differently. Hoffman told me, citing the story as an example of Musk’s disingenuousness, that Musk had pushed for the merger by highlighting the leadership of his company’s seasoned executive, only to force out the executive and place himself in the top role. “A merger like this, you’re doing a marriage,” Hoffman said. “And it’s, like, ‘I was lying to you intensely while we were dating. Now that we’re married, let me tell you about the herpes.’ ” People who have worked with Musk often describe him as controlling. One said, “In the areas he wants to compete in, he has a very hard time sharing the spotlight, or not being the center of attention.” In the fall of 2000, another coup, executed while Musk was on a long-delayed honeymoon with Justine, overthrew Musk and installed Thiel as the company’s head. Two years later, eBay acquired the company, by then called PayPal, for $1.5 billion, making Musk, who remained the largest shareholder, fabulously wealthy.

Perhaps the most revealing moment in the PayPal saga happened at its outset. In March, 2000, as the merger was under way, Musk was driving his new McLaren, with Thiel in the passenger seat. The two were on Sand Hill Road, an artery that cuts through Silicon Valley. Thiel asked Musk, “So what can this do?” Musk replied, “Watch this,” then floored the gas pedal, hit an embankment, and sent the car airborne and spinning before it slammed back onto the pavement, blowing out its suspension and its windows. “This isn’t insured,” Musk told Thiel. Musk’s critics have used the story to illustrate his reckless showboating, but it also underscores how often Musk has been rewarded for that behavior: he repaired the McLaren, drove it for several more years, then reportedly sold it at a profit. Musk delights in telling the story, lingering on the risk to his life. In one interview, asked whether there were parallels with his approach to building companies, Musk said, “I hope not.” Appearing to consider the idea, he added, “Watch this. Yeah, that could be awkward with a rocket launch.”

Of all Musk’s enterprises, SpaceX may be the one that most fundamentally reflects his appetite for risk. Staff at SpaceX’s Starship facility, in Boca Chica, Texas, spent December of 2020 preparing for the launch of a rocket known as SN8, then the newest prototype in the company’s Starship program, which it hopes will eventually transport humans to orbit, to the moon, and, in the mission Musk speaks about with the most passion, to Mars. The F.A.A. had approved an initial launch date for the rocket. But an engine issue forced SpaceX to delay by a day. By then, the weather had shifted. On the new day, the F.A.A. told SpaceX that, according to its model of the wind’s speed and direction, if the rocket exploded it could create a blast wave that risked damaging the windows of nearby houses. A series of tense meetings followed, with SpaceX presenting its own modelling to establish that the launch was safe, and the F.A.A. refusing to grant permission. Wayne Monteith, then the head of the agency’s space division, was leaving an event at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station when he received a frustrated call from Musk. “Look, you cannot launch,” Monteith told him. “You’re not cleared to launch.” Musk acknowledged the order.

Musk was on site in Boca Chica when SpaceX launched anyway. The rocket achieved liftoff and successfully performed several maneuvers intended to rehearse those of an eventual manned Starship. But, on landing, the SN8 came in too fast, and exploded on impact. (No windows were damaged.) The next day, Musk visited the crash site. In a picture taken that day, Musk stands next to the twisted steel of the rocket, dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans, looking determined, his arms crossed and his eyes narrowed. His tweets about the explosion were celebratory, not apologetic. “He has a long history of launching and blowing up rockets. And then he puts out videos of all the rockets that he’s blown up. And like half of America thinks it’s really cool,” the former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine told me. “He has a different set of rules.”

Hans Koenigsmann, then SpaceX’s vice-president for flight reliability, started working on a customary report to the F.A.A. about the launch. Koenigsmann told me that he felt pressure to minimize focus on the launch process and Musk’s role in it. “I sensed that he wanted it taken out,” Koenigsmann said. “I disagreed, and in the end we wound up with a very different version from what was originally intended.” Eventually, Koenigsmann was told not to write a report at all, and a letter was sent to the F.A.A. instead. The agency, meanwhile, opened its own investigation. Monteith told me that he agreed with Musk that the F.A.A. had been conservative about a situation that presented little statistical risk of casualties, but he was nevertheless troubled. “We had safety folks who were very upset about it,” Monteith recalled. In a series of letters to SpaceX, Monteith accused the company of relying on data “hastily developed to meet a launch window,” launching “based on ‘impressions’ and ‘assumptions,’ ” and exhibiting “a concerning lack of operational control and process discipline that is inconsistent with a strong safety culture.” In its responses, SpaceX proposed various safety reforms, but also pushed back, complaining that the F.A.A.’s weather model was unreliable and suggesting that the agency had been resistant to discussions about improving it. (SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.)

The following March, Steve Dickson, then the F.A.A.’s administrator, called Musk. The two men spoke for thirty minutes. Like Kahl, Dickson was deferential, thanking Musk for his role in transforming the commercial space sector and acknowledging that SpaceX was taking steps to make its launches less risky. But Dickson, an F.A.A. spokesperson said in a statement, “made it clear that the FAA expects SpaceX to develop and foster a robust safety culture that stresses adherence to FAA rules.” Dickson had navigated such conversations before, including with Boeing after two 737 max aircraft crashed. But this situation presented a thornier challenge. “It’s not every day that the F.A.A. administrator releases a statement about a phone call that they have with the C.E.O. or the head of an aerospace company,” an official at the agency told me. “That kind of gets into the soft pressure, public pressure that you don’t do unless you are trying to change the incentive structure.”

The F.A.A. issued no fine, though it grounded SpaceX for two months. “I didn’t see that a fine would make any difference,” Monteith told me. “He could pull that out of his pocket. However, not allowing launches, that would get the attention of a company that prides itself on being able to iterate and go fast.” Musk has continued to complain about the agency. After it postponed another launch, he tweeted, “The FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure.” He added, “Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars.”

Musk has been fixated on space since his childhood. The idea for SpaceX came about after his exile from PayPal. “I went to the NASA website so I could see the schedule of when we’re supposed to go” to Mars, Musk told Wired, in 2012. “At first I thought, jeez, maybe I’m just looking in the wrong place! Why was there no plan, no schedule? There was nothing.” In 2001, he connected with space-exploration enthusiasts, and even travelled to Russia in an unsuccessful bid to buy missiles to use as rockets. The next year, he moved to Los Angeles, closer to California’s aerospace industry, and ultimately he pulled together a team of engineers and entrepreneurs and founded SpaceX, to make his own rockets. Private rocket launches date back to the eighties, but no one had attempted anything on the scale that Musk envisioned, and it proved to be more difficult and expensive than he had anticipated. Musk has said that, by 2008, the company was nearly bankrupt, and that, after putting much of his wealth into SpaceX and Tesla, he wasn’t far behind. “That was definitely the worst year of my life,” he said in an interview on “60 Minutes.” SpaceX’s first three launches had failed, and there was no budget for another. “I had no more money left,” Musk told Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, years later. “We managed to put together enough spare parts to do a fourth launch.” Had that failed, he added, “SpaceX would have died.” The launch was successful, and NASA soon awarded SpaceX a $1.6-billion contract to resupply the International Space Station. In 2020, the company flew its first manned mission there—ending nearly a decade of American reliance on Russian craft for the task. SpaceX now launches more satellites than any other private company, with four thousand five hundred and nineteen in orbit as of July, occupying many of Earth’s orbital routes. “Once the carrying capacity of an orbit is maxed out, you’ve basically blocked everyone from trying to compete in that market,” Bridenstine told me.

There are competitors in the field, including Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, but none yet rival SpaceX. The new space race has the potential to shape the global balance of power. Satellites enable the navigation of drones and missiles and generate imagery used for intelligence, and they are mostly under the control of private companies. “The U.S. government is in massive catch-up to build a more resilient space architecture,” Kahl, the former Pentagon Under-Secretary, told me. “And that only works if you can leverage the explosion of commercial space.” Several officials told me that they were alarmed by NASA’s reliance on SpaceX for essential services. “There is only one thing worse than a government monopoly. And that is a private monopoly that the government is dependent on,” Bridenstine said. “I do worry that we have put all of our eggs into one basket, and it’s the SpaceX basket.”

Even Musk’s critics concede that his tendency to push against constraints has helped catalyze SpaceX’s success. A number of officials suggested to me that, despite the tensions related to the company, it has made government bureaucracies nimbler. “When SpaceX and NASA work together, we work closer to optimal speed,” Kenneth Bowersox, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, told me. Still, some figures in the aerospace world, even ones who think that Musk’s rockets are basically safe, fear that concentrating so much power in private companies, with so few restraints, invites tragedy. “At some point, with new competitors emerging, progress will be thwarted when there’s an accident, and people won’t be confident in the capabilities commercial companies have,” Bridenstine said. “I mean, we just saw this submersible going down to visit the Titanic implode. I think we have to think about the non-regulatory environment as sometimes hurting the industry more than the regulatory environment.”

In early 2022, Steven Cliff, then the deputy administrator of the Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, learned that potentially tens of thousands of Tesla vehicles had a feature that he found concerning. For years, Tesla has been working to create a totally self-driving car, a long-standing ambition of Musk’s. Now Cliff was told that a version of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software, an experimental feature that lets the cars navigate with little intervention from a driver, permitted cars to roll through stop signs, at up to about six miles an hour. This was clearly illegal. Cliff’s enforcement team contacted Tesla, and, in several meetings, a surprising conversation about safety and artificial intelligence played out. Representatives for Tesla seemed confused. Their response, as Cliff recalled, was “That’s what humans do all the time. Show us the data, why it’s unsafe.” N.H.T.S.A. officials told Tesla that, regardless of human compliance, “you should not be able to program a computer to break the law for you.” They demanded that Tesla update all the affected cars, removing the feature—a recall, in industry terms, albeit a digital one. “There was a lot of back-and-forth,” Cliff told me. “Like, at midnight on the very last day, they blinked and ended up recalling the rolling-stop feature.” (Tesla did not respond to requests for comment.)

Musk joined Tesla as an investor in 2004, a year after it was incorporated. (He has spent years defending the formative nature of his role and was eventually, in a legal settlement, one of several people granted permission to use the term “co-founder.”) Musk was again entering a market bound by entrenched private interests and stringent regulation, which opened him up to more clashes with regulators. Some of the skirmishes were trivial. Tesla for a time included in its vehicles the ability to replace the humming noises that electric cars must emit—since their engines make little sound—with goat bleats, farting, or a sound of the owner’s choice. “We’re, like, ‘No, that’s not compliant with the regulations, don’t be stupid,’ ” Cliff told me. Tesla argued with regulators for more than a year, according to an N.H.T.S.A. safety report. Nine days after the rolling-stop recall, the company pulled the noises, too. On Twitter, Musk wrote, “The fun police made us do it (sigh).”

“It’s a little like Mom and Dad and children. Like, How far can I push Mom and Dad until they push back?” Cliff said. “And that’s not a recipe for a strong safety culture.”

The fart debate had low stakes; the over-all safety of the cars is a far greater matter. Tesla has repeatedly said that Autopilot, a more limited technology than Full Self-Driving, is safer than a human driver. Last year, Musk added that he would be “shocked” if Full Self-Driving didn’t become safer than human drivers by the end of the year. But he has never made public the data needed to fully corroborate those claims. In recent months, new crash numbers from the N.H.T.S.A., which were first reported by the Washington Post, have shown an uptick in accidents—and fatalities—involving Autopilot and Full Self-Driving. Tesla has been secretive about the specifics. A person at the N.H.T.S.A. told me that the company instructed the agency to redact specifics about whether driver-assistance software was in use during crashes. (By law, regulators must abide by such requests for confidentiality, unless they decide to contest them in court.) Pete Buttigieg, the Secretary of Transportation, recently said that there were “concerns” about the marketing of Autopilot. Cliff told me he had seen data that showed Teslas were involved in “a disproportionate number of crashes involving emergency vehicles,” though he said that the agency had not yet determined whether the technology or the human drivers was the cause. In a statement, a spokesperson for the agency said, “Multiple investigations remain open.”

Officials who have worked at OSHA and at an equivalent California agency told me that Musk’s influence, and his attitude about regulation, had made their jobs difficult. The Biden Administration, which is urgently trying to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, has concluded that it needs to work with Musk, because of his dominant position in the electric-car market. And Musk’s personal wealth dwarfs the entire budget of OSHA, which is tasked with monitoring the conditions in his workplaces. “You add on the fact that he considers himself to be a master of the universe and these rules just don’t apply to people like him,” Jordan Barab, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor at OSHA, told me. “There’s a lot of underreporting in industry in general. And Elon Musk kind of seems to raise that to an art form.” Garrett Brown, a former field-compliance inspector at California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health, added, “We have a bad health-and-safety situation throughout the country. And it’s worse in companies run by people like Elon Musk, who was ideologically opposed to the idea of government enforcement of public-health regulations.”

In March, 2020, as pandemic lockdowns began, Musk e-mailed Tesla employees, telling them that he intended to violate orders and show up at work, and downplaying the significance of COVID-19. Soon after, he lost an initial fight to keep a factory in Alameda County—Tesla’s most productive in the U.S.—open. That April, after county officials extended shelter-in-place orders, Musk was on a conference call with outside financial analysts. His rhetoric became nakedly political, to an extent that would have been uncharacteristic just a few years earlier. “I would call it forcibly imprisoning people in their homes against all of their constitutional rights,” he told the analysts, speaking of the lockdowns. “What the fuck?” he added. “It’s an outrage. An outrage. . . . This is fascist. This is not democratic. This is not freedom. Give people back their goddam freedom.” The pandemic seems to have sparked a pronounced shift in Musk. The lockdowns represented an example of what Hoffman told me Musk considered to be a cardinal sin: “getting in the way of the mission.”

The following month, Musk sent a series of vitriolic tweets, threatening to file suit against Alameda County, to move Tesla’s headquarters, and to flout the rules and reopen his factory, all of which he eventually did. The county essentially rubber-stamped the reopening soon afterward—a far cry from what Musk had invited. “I will be on the line with everyone else,” he had tweeted, at the height of his frustration. “If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.”

Musk has, for much of his public life, presented himself as a centrist. “I’m socially very liberal,” he told the technology reporter Kara Swisher in 2020. “And then economically right of center, maybe, or center.” He has said that he donated to Hillary Clinton, and voted for both her and Joe Biden. But, in recent years, the more radical perspective that characterized his diatribes about Covid has come to the fore. In March, 2022, Twitter restricted the account of the satirical Web site the Babylon Bee, after the site misgendered a government official. The next day, in texts later disclosed during the Twitter-acquisition process, Musk’s contact “TJ” (identified by Bloomberg as his ex-wife Talulah Riley) expressed frustration with the development and urged him to purchase Twitter to “fight woke-ism.” The following week, Musk polled his followers about whether Twitter respected free speech and, in a phone call to the Babylon Bee’s C.E.O., joked about buying the platform. Finally, in April, 2022, he offered forty-four billion dollars for the company. Almost immediately, he tried to back out of the deal, prompting Twitter to sue. After months of legal proceedings, Musk resumed the acquisition process, and in October he assumed control of the company.

“Given unprovoked attacks by leading Democrats against me & a very cold shoulder to Tesla & SpaceX, I intend to vote Republican in November,” he tweeted last year. By the time he bought Twitter, he was urging his followers to vote along similar lines, and appearing to back Ron DeSantis, whose candidacy he helped launch in a technically disastrous Twitter live event. Although Musk’s teen-age daughter, Vivian, has come out as trans, he has embraced anti-trans sentiment, saying that he would lobby to criminalize “irreversible” gender-affirming care for children. (Vivian recently changed her last name, saying in a legal filing, “I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.”) Musk started spreading misinformation on the platform: he shared theories that the physical attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of the former Speaker of the House, had followed a meeting with a male prostitute, and retweeted suggestions that reports accurately identifying a mass shooter as a white supremacist were a “psyop.” Some people who know Musk well still struggle to make sense of his political shift. “There was nothing political about him ever,” a close associate told me. “I’ve been around him for a long time, and had lots of deep conversations with the man, at all hours of the day—never heard a fucking word about this.”

When Musk arrived at Twitter, he immediately gutted the company’s staff, reducing the number of employees by about fifty per cent. One person who kept his job was Yoel Roth, the company’s head of trust and safety. Roth, who is in his mid-thirties, is gay, Jewish, and liberal. His department was responsible for determining Twitter’s rules; during the Trump Administration, he became embroiled in the culture wars. After the company began rolling out a new fact-checking policy that labelled two of Trump’s tweets as misinformation, Kellyanne Conway, President Trump’s aide, went on “Fox & Friends” and read out Roth’s full name and spelled his username, adding, “He’s about to get more followers.” Trump then held up a New York Post cover mocking Roth, and Twitter users began recirculating tweets that Roth had written criticizing conservative candidates.

But when Musk took over he resisted calls to fire Roth. “We’ve all made some questionable tweets, me more than most, but I want to be clear that I support Yoel,” he tweeted in October, 2022. “My sense is that he has high integrity, and we are all entitled to our political beliefs.” That evening, Roth messaged Musk on Signal, thanking him. Musk responded, “You have my full support,” and, the next day, he followed up with a screenshot of a tweet from Roth that described Mitch McConnell as “a bag of farts.” Musk added, “Haha, I totally agree.”

But the cuts that Musk had instituted quickly took a toll on the company. Employees had been informed of their termination via brusque, impersonal e-mails—Musk is now being sued for hundreds of millions of dollars by employees who say that they are owed additional severance pay—and the remaining staffers were abruptly ordered to return to work in person. Twitter’s business model was also in question, since Musk had alienated advertisers and invited a flood of fake accounts by reinventing the platform’s verification process. On November 10th, Roth sent a brief resignation e-mail. When his departure became public, Musk texted, asking to talk. “I[t] would mean a lot if you would consider remaining at Twitter,” he wrote. The two spoke that night, and Roth declined to return. Days later, he published an Op-Ed in the Times, questioning the future of user safety on the platform. (Twitter did not respond to requests for comment.)

Soon afterward, Musk replied to a Twitter user surfacing a 2010 tweet from Roth, in which he’d shared a link to a Salon article about a teacher’s being charged with having sex with an eighteen-year-old student and asked, “Can high school students ever meaningfully consent to sex with their teachers?”

“That explains a lot,” Musk tweeted in reply. Minutes later, he posted an image showing a portion of Roth’s doctoral dissertation, which focussed on the gay-hookup app Grindr and its user data. In the excerpt, Roth argued that such platforms will inevitably be used by people under eighteen, so they should do more to keep those individuals safe. “Looks like Yoel is in favor of children being able to access adult internet services,” Musk wrote.

The attack fit a pattern: Musk’s trolling has increasingly taken on the vernacular of hard-right social media, in which grooming, pedophilia, and human trafficking are associated with liberalism. In 2018, when a Thai youth soccer team was trapped in a cave, Musk travelled to Thailand to offer a custom-made miniature submarine to rescuers. The head of the rescue operation declined, and Musk lashed out on Twitter, questioning the expertise of the rescuers. After one of them, Vernon Unsworth, referred to the offer as a “P.R. stunt,” Musk called him a “pedo guy.” (Unsworth sued Musk for defamation, characterizing the harassment he received from Musk’s followers as “a life sentence without parole.” A judge ruled in favor of Musk, who argued that he hadn’t been accusing Unsworth of actual pedophilia, just trying to insult him.)

Musk’s tweet about Roth got nearly seventeen thousand quote tweets and retweets. “The moment that it went from being a moderation conversation to being a Pizzagate conversation, the risk level changed,” Roth told me. “I spent my career looking at the absolute worst things that the Internet could do to people. Certainly, worse things have happened to people. But this is probably up there.” Roth and his husband were forced to flee their house, a two-bedroom in El Cerrito, California, that they’d purchased just two years earlier. “And then as we are, like, packing our stuff and leaving and getting the dog loaded into the car and whatever, like, the Daily Mail publishes an article that gives people more or less a map to my house,” Roth said. “At that point, we’re, like, ‘Oh, we’re leaving this house potentially for the last time.’ ”

This summer, Twitter’s cheerful blue bird logo came down from the roof of the company’s headquarters, in San Francisco, and was replaced with a strobing “X.” The new entity is a marriage between two parts of Musk. There’s his career-long quest to create an everything app—integrating services ranging from communication to banking and shopping, and emulating products, like WeChat, that are popular in Asia. Sitting alongside that pragmatic goal is a newer, more confusing side of Musk, embodied by his desire to take back the town square from what he sees as woke discourse. Twitter has become a private company, so it’s difficult to assess its finances, but numerous prominent advertisers have departed, and Meta recently launched Threads, a competitor that shamelessly emulates the old Twitter, and broke records for downloads. Musk threatened to sue, then challenged Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder and C.E.O., to a cage match, pledging to live-stream it and donate the proceeds to charity. (Zuckerberg has accepted. Musk has delayed committing to a date, citing a back injury.) The illuminated sign atop X’s headquarters, after complaints to the Department of Building Inspection, came down as quickly as it had gone up.

Some of Musk’s associates connected his erratic behavior to efforts to self-medicate. Musk, who says he now spends much of his time in a modest house in the wetlands of South Texas, near a SpaceX facility, confessed, in an interview last year, “I feel quite lonely.” He has said that his career consists of “great highs, terrible lows and unrelenting stress.” One close colleague told me, “His life just sucks. It’s so stressful. He’s just so dedicated to these companies. He goes to sleep and wakes up answering e-mails. Ninety-nine per cent of people will never know someone that obsessed, and with that high a tolerance for sacrifice in their personal life.”

In 2018, the Times reported that members of the Tesla board had grown concerned about Musk’s use of the prescription sleep aid Ambien, which can cause hallucinations. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that he uses ketamine, which has gained popularity both as a depression treatment and as a party drug, and several people familiar with his habits have confirmed this. Musk, who smoked pot on Joe Rogan’s podcast, prompting a NASA safety review of SpaceX, has, perhaps understandably, declined to comment on the reporting that he uses ketamine, but he has not disputed it. “Zombifying people with SSRIs for sure happens way too much,” he tweeted, referring to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, another category of depression treatment. “From what I’ve seen with friends, ketamine taken occasionally is a better option.” Associates suggested that Musk’s use has escalated in recent years, and that the drug, alongside his isolation and his increasingly embattled relationship with the press, might contribute to his tendency to make chaotic and impulsive statements and decisions. Amit Anand, a leading ketamine researcher, told me that it can contribute to unpredictable behavior. “A little bit of ketamine has an effect similar to alcohol. It can cause disinhibition, where you do and say things you otherwise would not,” he said. “At higher doses, it has another effect, which is dissociation: you feel detached from your body and surroundings.” He added, “You can feel grandiose and like you have special powers or special talents. People do impulsive things, they could do inadvisable things at work. The impact depends on the kind of work. For a librarian, there’s less risk. If you’re a pilot, it can cause big problems.”

On July 12th, Musk announced xAI, his entry into a field that promises to alter much about life as we know it. He tweeted an image of the new company’s Web site, featuring a characteristically theatrical mission statement: the firm’s goal, he said, was “to understand the true nature of the universe.” In the image, Musk highlighted the date and explained its significance. “7 + 12 + 23 = 42,” the text read. “42 is the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” It was a reference to “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” In the series, an immensely complex artificial intelligence is asked to answer that question and, after computing for millions of years, answers with Adams’s most famous punch line: 42. “I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is,” the computer says. Earth itself, and all the organisms on it, are ultimately revealed to be a still larger computer, built to clarify the question. Adams does not portray this satirical vision as positive. Musk’s announcement suggested more optimism: “Once you know the right question to ask, the answer is often the easy part.”

Musk has been involved in artificial intelligence for years. In 2015, he was one of a handful of tech leaders, including Hoffman and Thiel, who funded OpenAI, then a nonprofit initiative. (It now has a for-profit subsidiary.) OpenAI had a less grandiose and more cautious mission statement than xAI’s: to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity.” In the first few years of OpenAI, Musk grew unhappy with the company. He said that his efforts at Tesla to incorporate A.I. created a conflict of interest, and several people involved told me that this was true. However, they also said that Musk was frustrated by his lack of control and, as Semafor reported earlier this year, that he had attempted to take over OpenAI. Musk still defends his centrality to the company’s origins, stressing his financial contributions in its fledgling days. (The exact figures are unclear: Musk has given estimates that range from fifty million to a hundred million dollars.) Throughout his involvement, Musk seemed preoccupied with control, credit, and rivalries. He made incendiary remarks about Demis Hassabis, the head of Google’s DeepMind A.I. initiative, and, later, about Microsoft’s competing effort. He thought that OpenAI wasn’t sufficiently competitive, at one point telling colleagues that it had a “0%” chance of “being relevant.” Musk left the company in 2018, reneging on a commitment to further fund OpenAI, one of the individuals involved told me. “Basically, he goes, ‘You’re all a bunch of jackasses,’ and he leaves,” Hoffman said. The withdrawal was devastating. “It was very tough,” Altman, the head of OpenAI, said. “I had to reorient a lot of my life and time to make sure we had enough funding.” OpenAI went on to become a leader in the field, introducing ChatGPT last year. Musk has made a habit of trashing the company, wondering repeatedly, in public interviews, why he hasn’t received a return on his investment, given the company’s for-profit arm. “If this is legal, why doesn’t everyone do it?” he tweeted recently.

It is difficult to say whether Musk’s interest in A.I. is driven by scientific wonder and altruism or by a desire to dominate a new and potentially powerful industry. Several entrepreneurs who have co-founded businesses with Musk suggested that the arrival of Google and Microsoft in the field had made it a new brass ring, as space and electric vehicles had been earlier. Musk has maintained that he is motivated by his fear of the technology’s destructive potential. In a podcast earlier this year, Ari Emanuel, the head of the Hollywood agency W.M.E., recalled Musk joking about an A.I.-dominated future. “Ari, do you have dogs?” Musk asked him. “Well, here’s what A.I. is to you. You’re the dog.” In March, Musk, along with dozens of tech leaders, signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause in the development of advanced A.I. technology. “Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks, and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth?” the letter said. “Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us?”

Yet in the period during which Musk endorsed a pause, he was working to build xAI, recruiting from major competitors, including OpenAI, and even, according to someone with knowledge of the conversation, contacting leadership at Nvidia, the dominant maker of chips used in A.I. The month the letter was distributed, Musk completed the registrations for xAI. He has said little about how the company will differ from preëxisting A.I. initiatives, but generally has framed it in terms of competition. “I will create a third option, although starting very late in the game of course,” he told the Washington Post. “That third option hopefully does more good than harm.” Through A.I. research and development already under way at Tesla, and the trove of data he now commands through Twitter (which he recently barred OpenAI from scraping in order to train its chatbots), he may have some advantage, as he applies his sensibilities and his world view to that race. Hoffman told me, “His whole approach to A.I. is: A.I. can only be saved if I deliver, if I build it.” As humanity creates A.I. in its own image, Hoffman argued, the principles and priorities of the leaders in the field will matter: “We want the construction of this to be not people with Messiah complexes.”

At one point in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide,” Adams introduces the architects of the Earth supercomputer. They’re powerful beings who have been living among us, disguised as mice. At first, they were motivated by simple curiosity. But seeking the question made them famous, and they began considering talk-show and lecture deals. In the end, Earth is demolished in the name of commerce, and their path to existential clarity along with it. The mice greet this with a shrug, mouth vague platitudes, and go on the talk-show circuit anyway. Musk isn’t peddling pabulum. His initiatives have real substance. But he also wants to be on the show—or, better yet, to be the show himself.

In the open letter, alongside questions about the apocalyptic potential of artificial intelligence was one that reflects on the sectors of government and industry that Musk has come to shape. “Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?” he and his fellow-entrepreneurs wrote. “Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders.” Published in the print edition of the August 28, 2023, issue.