It’s also just an outright lie. But, I guess that doesn’t matter anymore.
It’s yahoo news. It’s pure clickbait. Idk why they do this they have some decent other services.
Yahoo! News is an aggregator like MSN (and has very few original articles), and thus the quality varies widely based on the source. Here it’s some outlet called TCD.
Just checked something and it makes me wonder if they struck different deals than MSN:
View, say, a Business Insider article on MSN, and use the share button, and it will share the article hosted on Business Insider. Do the same on Yahoo and it shares the same Yahoo News URL that you were reading it on.
I did a little digging and it seems like there’s a tiny kernel of fact at the core of this giant turd of a hype-piece, and that is the fact that they electrified this little spur line from Berlin to the new German Tesla factory by using a battery-electric trainset. Which is not a terrible solution for electrifying a very short branch line that presumably doesn’t need frequent all-day service, even if it’s a bit of a janky approach compared to overhead lines. But hand that off to the overworked, underpaid twenty-two-year old gig worker they’ve got doing “editing” at Yahoo for two bucks an article, and I guess it turns into “world-first electric wonder train amazes!”
For a second, though, I read the headline and wondered if Musk and co. had finally looped all the way around to reinventing commuter rail from first principles after all these years of trying to “disrupt” it with bullshit ideas like Hyperloop and Tunnels, But Dumber.
Yeah but it’s also far from new technology. Germany is mostly electrified rail, and having BE sets to bridge areas is not uncommon (in southern Germany you also get diesel electric combo units).
Honestly, I’d be more than happy if they just invented regular trains (even if their version would probably worse in ways not even imaginable as of now), because that would mean more money in train infrastructure.
So… yeah, you did it! You built something really cool and completely new! And don’t look over there, that’s just… copycats?
I laos looked into this and it seems you are right. This article is such a mess.
Laos mentioned! 🇱🇦
I guess if by a kernel of truth you mean an existing train was used on an existing track, then you could almost make it make sense? But since all of this existed before, it’s just a lie.
I’ll also point out that anybody introducing battery electric trains instead of just electrifying the remaining parts of rail is making an astoundingly bad choice, but that’s almost certainly Germany and not Tesla.
I don’t think you realise how expensive electrifying a line can be, it can be as expensive as building it in the first place. Whereas this technology can be used without modifying the track at all.
If the line only runs a few times a day, it’s an obvious choice.
I do realize. I also realize things like weight of the train, cost of the battery packs, the fact those packs will wear and need to be replaced faster than anything else in the system, and much more.
I could see why they would do it specifically in this case.
There’s been huge protests against building the Gigafactory in Brandenburg, and the main instrument of the opponents was using Germany’s strict environmental protection laws against it.
If they needed to cut down more trees along the tracks to electrify the line, the opponents could possibly delay that by suing in court, demanding studies be done, maybe finding an endangered ant species somewhere in the area.Running the train on batteries avoids that.
They could have just illegally cut down the trees like they illegally used too much water, or any of the other things they did against their agreement with the government.
it’s the Mireo Plus B from siemens. it’s already in use in the north of germany since march of this year.
https://www.nordbahn.de/blog/so-isses/der-norden-begruesst-die-akku-zuege/there’s nothing elon about this train, just that it’s driving to his factory.
they are great for short distances that are difficult to electrify.
Yeah, it’s not all electric, some of the train is just regular matter
So it does matter?
Wait until you learn how molecular bonds work…
Sure that part’s electric, but what about the bonds keeping the quarks of the train together?
Don’t respond to this @[email protected], he’s trying to get your grand unified theory before you publish.
this is the internet I don’t learn
The founding principle behind chatGPT.
You could learn this internet if you decided to.
dont make me tap the sign
It’s not a lie! It’s technically the first thing anybody was stupid enough to name “giga train”!
You and I both know someone somewhere was that stupid before Musk. He isn’t even original in what an idiot he is. 😆
The train also only runs between Erkner Station, and Tesla Sud, which is literally just the station right at the Tesla manufacturing facility in the area.
“It’s also free to not just Tesla employees, but regular passengers as well.”
That’s great and all, but are everyday people taking trains to go see the outside of a Tesla factory, then leaving again?
lol. They’re promoting their employee shuttle. Classic Felon.
Well I mean, it IS a step up from my current jobs policy which is “Yes you need a car to get here, no we arent providing one and if you don’t have one you don’t have a job”
What exactly are you taking issue with here? The train runs on batteries, and it’s the first one in the world deployed, though the manufacturer, I’m sure, is hoping to sell to more operators than Tesla Germany.
The headline says worlds first all-electric train rather than worlds first all-battery-powered train. There have been many all-electric trains before. So the headline as written is incorrect.
Electric trains actually predate diesel, noted as far back as the 30s. Subways kind of needed something that didn’t emit smoke and fumes
Volk’s electric railway, 1883. Only a narrow gague tourist type thing but still technically a passenger railway.
That’s a good point, fair enough.
Besides the first all electric train bit, which is nonsense, it also touts the capacity of the train. It has 120 seats, which may be mind blowing to car heads, but for a train is rather on the low side. Regular passenger trains often have over 200 seats and many have more seats for the same length. For busy pieces of track 600 seats per train aren’t unusual.
It really is like the author has never heard of trains before and has his mind blown by the concept.
Personally I think putting in batteries is kinda dumb, trains need so much infrastructure already and it’s fixed in location. Adding a power delivery system (like overhead power lines like most electric trains have) is really easy. That way a lot of weight is saved, thus making the whole thing more efficient. You also don’t need any special materials to make it, compared with huge batteries. And the wear components are a lot less expensive to replace.
Trains are quite good at carrying weight though, why do you think so much bulk material goes by rail?
There’s room for batteries in the rail industry.
Diesel electrics rely primarily on dynamic braking. To save wear and tear on friction brakes, they convert kinetic energy to electrical, and then to heat in a giant resistor bank.
Add a couple battery cars, and dynamic braking becomes regenerative braking.
Theoretically, you could back feed the grid with that electrical energy, but if you do that, the train’s primary braking system is now dependent on a connection to the grid, and that doesn’t seem like a particularly good idea to me. All of the “stop” systems need to be far more reliable than the “go” systems.
The article states 500 passengers…
So I’d say still hardly “MiNDbLoWINg”
That is probably in reference to the tech used, it is exceptional for a battery powered train. This just seems like negativity directed at tesla/musk (they do such for myriad reasons), even though they aren’t the manufacturer, just the operator.
Nope. UK already has battery powered trains in operation. Trust me, I’m a full blown train nerd. The only remotely interesting things is that it happened in the US, and even then the better option was electrification.
This is in Germany.
So then it’s even less interesting.
Because the headline literally says “world’s first all electric train”, which it very much is not.
Nor is it the first battery powered train in the world or even first in Germany where this giga-train operates.
We copied 1960 technology, declared it revolutionary and act as if we invented it all
The Apple Way.
even Amtrak beat tesla
And that sadness says it all
Hype over fake news like this is one major reason how tesla’s stock price has gotten as high as it has.
Wait til they learn about twin story trains. Twice the capacity!
Edit: And the first gen, a bit less comfortable tho but more reliable.
It doesn’t double the capacity. It’s more a 30% increase. And, double-deckers are actually old. They date from the 19th century. In 1855, the Chemin de fer de l’Ouest introduced double-deckers on suburban lines of Paris.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiture_Ouest_à_impériale
Modern double-deckers date from the 1930s, with the Voiture à étage Etat:
WOW, what will the incredible Elon come up with next!? Dude comes up with all the great stuff we should have invented like ~50-100 years ago.
/s
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If i remember right, they had multiple issues (forgot accessibility for one) and defects at first too. Though i quite like them.
edit: it was Bombardier?
https://www.nau.ch/news/schweiz/sbb-verargert-uber-verzogerungen-bei-bombardier-65462450
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NO WAY! Did they just copy the Siemens Mireo and made it a double decker
It looks even more obvious in the German version of the site where the first picture is literally this one:
Edit:
Now that I have taken a closer look I question if the “Tesla” train is even a double decker or actually the Mireo
Edit 2:
And I am unsure if Yahoo just used a random train as their cover or if this is the Tesla train in question. I am so confused O.o
Edit 3:
Soo it’s not a double decker and it is “Tesla’s train” sooo… If I was Tesla I’d get back to the drawing board because I doubt Siemens will be happy with what they did here
From the industry journal I linked in another comment – it’s literally just an off-the-shelf Mireo Plus B. That’s it. The only thing Tesla about it is that it’s serving a spur line connecting Tesla’s factory to the existing Berlin light rail network, and was presumably financed by them for the PR benefit of not having the workers at an electric car factory arrive by diesel train.
Yeah, I didn’t expect much more of this, and then a bunch of those bored Yahoo Tech Bros think Elon would really make a train :')
That’s literally the train I use everything I get to uni (and back).
I think I see you in the window there, mate.
Sharp observation
The logo on the front is from the NEB, Niederbarnimer Eisenbahn AG, which runs in German province’s of Berlin and Brandenburg. No way in hell the Muskrat MAGAT is going to build trains.
Apparently it runs from his battery factory and they provided batteries because the overhead line doesn’t run that far. That’s it. Everything else is normal German electric train.
🎶 “I’m a connnnnn mann, or maybe I’m a god? Zoomin‘ round the planet, in my hyper loopin‘ pod…” 🎶
The train itself isn’t plastered with logos and tesla has no way to manufacture trains. What is this screenshot from?
Yahoo, the cowboys of journalism.
Hilarious they used ‘giga’ train. Rob and Elon just did that Diablo 4 stream the other day and Rob says ‘giga’ 6x per video. Clearly rubbed off on old Elon.
Is this like how Apple invented the headphones?
And tablets
And touchscreens
And Mp3 players
And Bluetooth earbuds
And small form factor PC stacks
God the list just keeps going. At least with them the marketing is annoying but the products are usually good. Instead of Elon promising the moon and delivering a pile of dog shit.
tesla launches train
hey ive seen this episode before; the ending sucked