First Ride in Tesla Model S
translogic.aolautos.com
translogic.aolautos.com
[http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/10/breaking-tesla-...]
You're not stopping for gas. You're plugging your car in while shopping and at night or whenever. The only use case where this stuff doesn't work is on long hauls or roadtrips. In that case you are acting like a gas car owner. You stop at the rest stop, wait 20 minutes for the battery to get to 80% and go on your way. Or if you're a long distance driver, stick with gas or a hybrid.
However the previous Tesla (the roadster) did not support that standard. Lets hope this one does.
Batteries are made from hard to mine and produce minerals, and unless we start reducing our reliance on cars, we'll have replaced one problem with another.
Hydrogen is a dead end IMHO. Fuel cells are expensive and have many limitations, plus containment and transfer are still unsolved problems. Batteries are improving fast enough now (notwithstanding popular sentiment from people wanting Moore's Law speeds) that hydrogen will never catch up.
A turbocharger may also be used to increase fuel efficiency without any attempt to increase power. It does this by recovering waste energy in the exhaust and feeding it back into the engine intake. By using this otherwise wasted energy to increase the mass of air, it becomes easier to ensure that all fuel is burned before being vented at the start of the exhaust stage. The increased temperature from the higher pressure gives a higher Carnot efficiency.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbocharger
You're probably right that most cars aren't tuned to do that, though.
There have been many studies done on the effective MPG of a tesla roadster, and of course they differ based on their assumptions, but all of the ones I have seen show the roadster getting over 100 effective mpg.
The hydrogen technology has one big problem. It does not exist. Well to be fair to them, it does exist but not in a consumer product. You cannot buy an ordinary street legal hydrogen car now. But you can get an electric one.
If hydrogen ever takes off it will still have a similar issue as the electric -- the hydrogen would still have to be generated somewhere (usually by taking it from water) and that would require electric power.
Hydrogen does have some theoretical benefits over electric (such as more high density energy storage), but currently electric technology is advancing much faster. It is widely suspected that some of the proponents of hydrogen support hydrogen only as a way to remove support from electric.
Napkin calculuation:
A Tesla Roadster has a 53 kwh battery. Assuming 1kg lithium per kwh (a Chevy Volt uses 1.4kg of lithium per kwh [1]) that's 50kg of lithium per car. Assuming that we need around 1 billion cars in the world [2], that's 50 million tonnes of lithium. The total lithium reserve of the world is less that 10 million tonnes [3].
Note that this is not even counting trucks, buses, motorcycles, scooters and all the cars that people in developing countries are going to want, and assuming that we can perfectly recover lithium from old cars.
The researcher recommended power lines on all big roads, and bicycles for the rest.
[1] http://gigaom.com/cleantech/what-the-looming-lithium-squeeze...
It's more a question of price, how quickly it rises, and what the alternatives are.
Sure, it's not a fixed reserve but a smooth price curve. That doesn't mean a lot in practice; people aren't going to pay millions to extract every last bit of lithium from the earth. The point is that lithium-ion batteries for cars are most likely not going to be the long term solution. The same applies to solar panels and fuel cells that have rare materials in them by the way.
Also, sea water is 1-2ppm lithium -- expensive but plenty of it to extract.
The white ones are for CNG, plug-in hybrid, or battery electric, and are good until the end of the world (or 2015, whichever comes first)
But what I really mean is that no one is likely to be happy with JUST a battery electric vehicle; they will want access to a refuelable car for longer trips. And, personally, I don't want to put 1500 mile trips on an $80k new car; I'd rather keep my NPV $12k 2006 audi for that kind of thing, and keep the miles on that.
For a daily driver around the bay area, though, the model s looks perfect.
This may be a little off-topic, and it's not a dig at the Tesla which looks like a great car, I was just struck by how silent it was (I haven't seen a fully electric car in person here in Australia yet)
I once got to drive an EV1. It included an electronic noisemaker for exactly that purpose, to keep pedestrians alive. Expect government regulations if Tesla doesn't do something first.
We need less noise pollution.
Did their price point stay on target?
Tesla is just a game for financial speculators to make a lot of money of the tech bubble.
Actually, in some countries, like Norway, Tesla Model S is actually really cheap compared to similar fuel drinking cars because of the way lower taxes.
If you are paying $80k for a car, you don't care about fuel taxes.
Sounds like a luxury car to me.
Seriously? What cars, in your opinion, do look good?
> It's not faster or better than other cars
0-60 in 5.5sec
400Nm torque
Those numbers are nothing to sneeze at. Yes it is expensive. It is a low-volume exotic all-electric car. what are you expecting?
The Roadster is a sports car. It's 30k more than a 911 Carerra and slower in 0-60.
That said its torque curve is amazing which means you don't have to stamp on the gas pedal, and handle the transmission like a race car driver to get that 0-60 time.
Also, the S is a four-door sport sedan that seats up to 7, not a two-seat sports car.
I assumed he was too because of the 0-60 time, but I see I was wrong.
So my point is invalidated. Oops.