It’s also just an outright lie. But, I guess that doesn’t matter anymore.
Sure that part’s electric, but what about the bonds keeping the quarks of the train together?
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.
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.
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 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.
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 laos looked into this and it seems you are right. This article is such a mess.
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?
It’s not a lie! It’s technically the first thing anybody was stupid enough to name “giga train”!
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
Because the headline literally says “world’s first all electric train”, which it very much is not.
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.
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 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?
I am amazed at how people ate still surpised…
Tesla paid about 15k for this article and money like that gets you a cute headline.
This is “journalism” 101, this is part of their business model.
The far more important question however is:
Why tf did they use the color scheme of bwegt?
I may be an idiot, but I’m 99% certain that this color scheme is only used in Baden-Württemberg - a state that’s like 500km away from the Tesla factory.
The train in the picture is the test train of Siemens that first ran between Herrenberg and Eutingen im Gäu in 2022 for the Land BaWü.
