Bioweapon Defense Mode is not a marketing statement, it is real.
Their filter does a good job cleaning particles out of the cabin air. Good on them.
Nevertheless, calling it "Bioweapon Defense Mode" is clearly a prize bit of marketing. A system designed to protect against an external bioagent wouldn't run huge amounts of outside air through the filter. That would just load the filter more quickly, impacting its performance (for chemical agents) and/or its energy requirement (for particles). Instead, you would cut the outside air intake as much as you could get away with, in order to buy the occupants time to drive clear of the plume.
Since they claim that the car is responsible for the decrease in the particle concentration in the test chamber, they must be running a pretty high flow of ambient air through the system. Of course, the ambient concentration would decrease even without the car's filter, due to particle deposition, and possibly due to losses in the sampling instrument. But then you only report those other loss rates if you're interested in science, rather than in marketing.
Why couldn't they have just left it as "it's a really good air filter"?
If you're in the vicinity of bioweapon aerosol, the particles will possibly still be present in air once you get out or will have coated your car. Also, for some of these organisms, you only need to inhale < 10 cells for it to cause disease [1], so the filter needs to be (literally?) 100%.
So, unless Tesla plans on packing powered air purifying respirators [2] in their cars, this is a gimmick.
[1] http://www.asm.org/ccLibraryFiles/FILENAME/0000000660/nw1103... [2] http://www.legionsafety.com/msa-optimair-tl-papr-kit-for-hoo...
> You can literally survive a military grade bio attack by sitting in your car.
Unless you're being attacked with smog, this seems rather hyperbolic.
I can't imagine that two minutes breathing, say, aerosolized tweaked Spanish influenza, would be 'safe'. Maybe if you were in the car with the system running before the attack, though?
Biological weapon attack = Hide in Telsa for air filtration
Electrical Grid attack = Telsa doesn't charge
Likeliness deaths from either < Deaths from negligence of bureaucracy, lack of personal responsibility
/me chamber-checks Kalashnikov, takes drag of hand-rolled cigarette, checks internet conspiracy messageboard, and mentally catalogues MRE supply.
Brilliant marketing:
1. get people worried about something they previously didn't care about;
2. as a solution, add a new part to the car that will need frequent replacement and maintenance, thereby increasing the CLV.
Maybe it's just all the Prince nostalgia speaking, but ever since watching the classic 1989 version of Batman, I've wondered how long you'd really be safe inside of a car during a terrorist chemical weapon attack.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hn-CTSKmeo
Thankyou Tesla for delivering a car that the 1989 version of me would have been pretty keen on acquiring!
This is so cool. My bosch vacuum cleaner has a hepa filter, I'm going to duct tape my RC car to it, turn it on and call it a "Bio-weapon defense drone"
I hope this is an option on Model 3, too. I'd probably pay $2-5k premium for "really good air filter" if I lived in or frequently travelled through cities with bad air (I'd pay $10k for it in Beijing).
This is impressive but worries me that one day this will be used as excuse to allow excessive pollution.
The average person in China right now need this. Let's hope that the USA doesn't get to the point where this level of pollution is in the air because people who are well-off and control industry all have these cars to drive and be driven around in that filter the air so heavily for them, so it doesn't matter to them.
Sorry, but that article has something fishy.
Looking at the graph, there is something wrong. According to the graph (measurement) there is a reduction of the pollution from about 1.000 µg/m3 (minute -3) to 800 µg/m3 (minute 0) before the doors have been closed and before the system has been activated. That is a 20% reduction by nothing has changed.
I understand that the article is mostly PR, but to demonstrate effectiveness of the filter, why not also present null hypothesis, where no A/C is activated in the car and/or a common car A/C filter.
With both exterior and interior filters, it really goes a long way towards keeping the interior of the HVAC system clean. I'm curious how good a job they do with moisture management though (i.e. keeping the heater core and rest of the HVAC system dry). Considering it's Tesla, I'd wager they're on point.
With some other manufacturers, especially legacy models, you'll usually have little to no intake filtering, and probably minimal cabin filtering. Combined with moisture retention inside the heater core due to design flaws such as insufficient fin spacing or an absent/inactive afterblow module, it can be very bad. For example: toxigenic fungii thriving on the excess moisture, contaminating the passenger compartment every time the blower fan is turned on.
> to major cities in China.
Aaah. Now I getcha.
everyone - this is the button you press when someone farts in the car, nothing more...
> Moreover, it will also clean the air outside your car, making things better for those around you.
I'm very sceptical that this is the case outside of an enclosed bubble.
What TFA doesn't mention is where the actual pollution happens - at the factories producing batteries with dangerous chemical such as lithium, and where the electricity is produced - coal power stations, or if renewables are used, where the renewables are manufactured - for example rare earth minerals such as gallium needed for solar panels being mined in conflict zones with no environment regulation. Yes sometimes the pollution is many levels removed, but in the end Earth is a closed system and as far as I can tell, at least for now, an electric car supply chain produces more pollution over its lifespan than a regular car. It's just that the pollution doesn't happen inside the owners bubble, which the bioweapon experiment so ironically exemplifies.
Man my car's rear hatch seal leaks exhaust fumes into the body, start to have trips if you sit around too long. Maybe its the straight pipes....
Curious on when they plan to transition to tesla.com
Running an ICE car in a garage will harm you (and kill you pretty quickly), running an electric car will heal you.
It sounds cheesy but it true.
The real question is whether or not it'll pull a fart out of the air before the other passengers smell it...
Has any other manufacturer tried selling cars with this angle? Not really, although claims for car ventilation and air conditioning have been made before. It seems that because Tesla are 'part of the solution' they can take this marketing angle wholeheartedly. I also believe Elon Musk really wants the air quality, he has pushed for this feature.
"You are what you breathe..."
...is my marketing statement for Tesla.
Was air moving around the vehicle to simulate typical driving speeds?
I wonder if the real objective of this is to protect passengers from the hazardous fumes of damaged lithium-ion batteries? I'm not sure though if this could protect against those.
By BioWeapon, I thought they were adding some sort of "pepper-spray" theft deterrent or "defense" feature.
Now make one for my house. :-)
Tesla - not just another cool car. Bioweapon Defense Mode. Ftw!
What is the point of wasting precious resources and taxpapyer money on this ?
I think they are not testing with small enough particles. In the article, they test with PM 2.5 particles which would be around 2.5 micro meters. However, if you look at the table on page 11 of
http://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/409903O/respiratory-prote...
Potential bio weapons such as smallpox, anthrax, influenza and the hemorrhagic viruses are far smaller than 2.5 microns.
Also, there are probably issues with the sensitivity of the detection equipment. If you look at the table on page 8 of
https://www.ll.mit.edu/publications/journal/pdf/vol12_no1/12...
And at the table at
http://www.siumed.edu/medicine/id/current_issues/bioTable2.p...
You will see that some of the biological agents can cause infection with as few as 10 particles. I doubt that the Tesla equipment could detect a concentration of 10 particles of these sizes.
This article is basically the biological equivalent of the I can't break my own crypto article.
>Bioweapon Defense Mode is not a marketing statement, it is real.
is false. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the evidence of Bioweapons Defense Mode working is entirely lacking.