Tuesday, 4 July 2017
2017 Ford Edge 3.5L V-6 AWD
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First Tesla Model 3 Built This Week, Deliveries Start This Month
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All the Tesla naysayers who’ve accused the electric-vehicle maker’s mass-market compact sedan, the Model 3, of being vaporware—or who’ve predicted that it will be vastly more expensive or arrive late to market—now have a reality to face: Tesla announced that it’s producing the first Model 3 this week and that deliveries will start this month.
According to CEO Elon Musk, the Model 3 has passed all regulatory requirements, and the first production car will be completed on Friday, July 7. The automaker also has scheduled a handover party for the first 30 Model 3 customers at its Fremont, California, assembly plant three weeks later, on July 28.
It will be slow going at first: Tesla will produce 100 cars in August, Musk said, but 1500 cars are anticipated in September, and by December, Musk said, the Model 3 will reach a production rate of 20,000 per month.
The car isn’t just a make-or-break vehicle for Tesla but a litmus test for whether the electric-vehicle market can go mainstream at more than niche sales levels. Tesla has gathered more than 400,000 refundable deposits for the Model 3, at $1000 per car.
Development of the Model 3 appears to have moved along at a rate unprecedented for the auto industry—and even faster than what Musk and company said they expected. It’s been just over 16 months since March 2016, when the Model 3 was given a splashy debut as a rolling concept car with a newly conceived body structure. Even as of March 2017, Tesla reported that it hadn’t yet moved to the final “beta prototype” stage; and Musk had said at an earlier point that Tesla wouldn’t actually meet the July 1 production start.
An Uptick for Tesla’s Other Models
Also this week, Tesla revealed that it delivered just over 22,000 vehicles globally in the second quarter of 2017, with its Model S fastback sedan selling slightly better than the Model X SUV, for a total of about 47,000 deliveries in the first half of 2017. That’s a lot better than last year, when Tesla missed its forecast numbers and delivered some 29,000 vehicles globally in the first half of 2016.
Deliveries would have been stronger, the automaker said, if it weren’t for battery-supply issues with the 100-kWh pack in the Model S and Model X—not associated at all with the Model 3’s pack, which will use a different cell format. Tesla also added, curiously, in its quarterly update that “it is now rare for a newly produced Model X to have initial-quality problems”—a nod to the early issues, especially centered around the complicated Falcon Wing doors, that plagued early examples of the mid-size SUV.
Citing the Model X’s complexity and initial difficulties, Musk said Tesla has intentionally kept initial builds of the Model 3 very simple—and much closer to the model’s claimed $35,000 base price than earlier suspected. Versions with all-wheel drive and higher-performance variants are expected to follow some months (or years) later.
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Fine Print: 3D-Printed Replacement Car Parts Are Coming
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From the July 2017 issue
In the bad old days when you busted one plastic switch on a Pontiac Bonneville, your dealer forced you to buy an entire set. Now you can pay a Russian who builds replica Star Wars guns a couple of bucks to ship you a brand-new, OEM-quality part for your old Bonnie. And soon you may want to just make it yourself in your garage.
At this point, an aftermarket car part made by a 3-D printer could save you hours and hundreds of dollars, or it might simply snap in half. But just as computer-aided design rewrote automotive engineering in the 1980s, 3-D printing is looking to revolutionize the replacement-parts business, allowing car owners to create precise copies in their own garages, albeit with varying degrees of success at this early stage.
A high-six-figure price puts Shapeways’ printer well beyond what the average diy user would buy. Its laser-sintering process shoots a laser into a tray of plastic powder, fusing it layer by layer. Other forms of 3-D printing deposit new material, as if from a big tube of glue. Laser sintering allows multiple parts to be “cast” from a single tray of powder.
“There’s no physical barrier anymore for people to start mass-producing parts,” says Peter Weijmarshausen, CEO of Shapeways. A contract printer based in New York City, Shapeways can make any cosmetic part out of fused-filament plastic, steel, and even platinum. While many of its 1 million users hawk scale models and jewelry, a savvy seller can create a custom car part from scratch once the design work has been done. That includes Weijmarshausen himself, who crafted a pair of headrest brackets for his E36 BMW M3. “Only one person needs to solve a problem, and anybody can benefit from it,” he says.
Websites such as Yeggi and Thingiverse host CAD files of everything from Ford F-150 fuel-door hinge pins to Donald Trump shift knobs. At 3D Hubs, you upload these files to receive instant quotes from people with 3-D printers near you who’ll fabricate any job, no matter how small. With a copy of Autodesk 123D, you can render your own file from a few dozen photographs of the original part, or input numerical measurements into open-source software such as FreeCAD. If you’re a true DIYer, you can piece together a $500 printer or drop $3000 for a fully assembled unit from Airwolf 3D, which celebrated Mustang tuner Saleen Automotive uses to make shift-knob parts.
But if 3-D printing sounds complex and geeky—not unlike Mercedes diesel owners recycling McDonald’s cooking oil—it is. We’re not at that point where 3-D printing is turning automakers, suppliers, or eBay upside down. Even using high-quality plastics such as ABS, polypropylene, and polycarbonate, parts made with layers of melted plastic aren’t as strong as those that are injection molded. Printer resolution, which dictates the fineness of the part being created, varies widely with the printer and the chosen material. Even the experts don’t recommend building load-bearing parts from a 3-D printer, and without a laser scanner that costs as much as a Ford Focus, you couldn’t replicate that broken control arm anyway.
But thanks to amateur support on car forums, you don’t need to own any equipment to reproduce basic plastic parts. Anybody need cheap dash trim for a VW Vanagon?
I Am Aluminum Man
When plastic wasn’t fantastic enough, Joshua Pearce, a professor of materials science and electrical engineering at Michigan Technological University, built a 3-D metal printer by cobbling MIG weld guns onto a CNC routing table for less than $4000. Pearce says his finished aluminum products have “remarkably high strength” compared with traditional casting and stamping methods. “There is a learning curve, but anybody who can rebuild a car can handle it,” he says.
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Monday, 3 July 2017
2017 Jaguar F-Pace 20d Diesel – Instrumented Test
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Need More Parking? How to Make an Airport Hangar Your Garage
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You’ve run out of garage space and cars are stacked three deep in your driveway. Time to get more real estate! Know where there’s lots of room, often cheap? Airports. A hangar usually comes with security, heat, and electricity, making it the perfect place for your collection. Hangars near big cities can rent for less than $400 per month. Half that at smaller airports gets you 1000 private square feet for automotive hootenanny.
But be careful how you go about your business. Responding to a wave of people using airport hangars as personal workshops and garages, the Federal Aviation Administration rewrote the rules to shove out non-aeronautical users. The FAA wants airplanes in hangars, and anything that gets in the way of aeronautical purposes will raise a red flag as of the first of this month. Still, general aviation is in the depths of a 30-year slump. Airports need tenants. Abide by the spirit of the law, and you can still make an airport hangar your cheap garage. Here’s how:
Moonlight as an Aircraft Support Shed An FAA spokeswoman we talked with says a hangar must house an aircraft, but the specific wording of the policy leaves room for interpretation. Using a hangar as a workspace or for storage of aircraft-handling equipment satisfies one of the federal administration’s definitions of “aeronautical use.” Workbenches and tools can be shared for car maintenance, but you might also want to store your buddies’ skydiving gear or flying paraphernalia, such as wheel chocks, dollies, and tow bars for dragging aircraft out of hangars.
Petition the FAA If you want to drop the flyboy façade, the airport can request—on your behalf—that the FAA approve non-aeronautical use for a period of three to five years. If that fails, petition for a month-to-month lease. Be aware that the FAA policy states that airports must charge a fair-market rate for non-aeronautical use, which likely means this approach will cost more. And written into either short-term contract is a clause stating that the airport can kick you out with 30 days’ notice if it gets an offer from an aviation tenant.
Rent a Non-FAA Hangar Even a privately owned hangar at an airport that accepts federal grants has to follow the new standards. The exceptions are hangars at airports that have no federal obligations, where you’re only held to the facility’s own rules. They’re usually regional or grass-strip airports, and a lot of them need the money. They’ll be happy to rent you a vacant hangar for your car collection. It may not be in the middle of a major city, but that could be a good thing, too.
Make Friends with a Flyer Outside the rows of hangars at most airports, you’ll see Pipers, Cessnas, and Mooneys tied to anchors in the pavement, kept outside permanently. Sun eats into their paint, and their owners are unable to keep gear or tools nearby. But a tie-down is cheaper than a hangar. If you trust a tie-down lessee, offer to split a hangar. His or her payment won’t change, and you can pick up the difference. Or find a hangar tenant who’ll trade floor space for help with the bill. Just keep your cars and motorcycles out of the plane’s way.
Build a Plane Then you’ll have more toys. As long as you’re using a hangar to build a kit plane or glider or to refurbish an airplane, the FAA is satisfied. Keeping an inactive aircraft inside indefinitely doesn’t count, though. The FAA doesn’t specify a hard deadline for getting an aircraft operational but gives airport managers the leeway to boot tenants in favor of someone with an immediate need.
Front and Center
The FAA policy states that anything else in a hangar must “not interfere with movement of aircraft in or out of the hangar, or impede access to other aeronautical contents of the hangar.” so keep a path clear.
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