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Comment by OstiaAntica | Hacker News Reader

A wealthy "investor" in a rigged game-- a company backed by half a billion dollars in taxpayer loan guarantees-- gets a new toy car. A car for which there is no market and is worse for the environment than regular cars, as it relies on toxic batteries and an inefficient power grid that is majority coal burning.

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It's strange to say there is no market for a car that has a 10,000 person waiting list (with a $5,000 down payment to be on it) before anyone had actually gotten behind the wheel. I'd say that's pretty damn good and already close to a billion dollar market.

Mercedes "only" sold 9,804 S-Class models in the US last year. Maybe they'll step it up.

Doesn't stop me from wanting to buy one (badly). If only they exported to Europe (hey, we send you our cars, so why not return the love?).

Actually, Daimler-Mercedes bought 10% of Tesla a month before the U.S. government announced the loan. U.S. taxpayers are going to get the downside if the company fails but the European automaker gets the upside if it makes it. Well played.

Out of interest, what appeals to you about the Tesla S? It's clearly a lovely bit of technology but personally I can't get past the idea of the limited range (maximum of 300 miles) and obvious potential difficulties around recharging.

[NB I'm in no way implying that anyone has to justify their tastes in cars (or anything else) - I'm just interested!]

I think 300 miles is plenty for most people (for me definitely). Most people drive less than 30 miles a day. I could even drive from DC to Pittsburgh without having to recharge (about 240 miles).

How often do you actually drive 200+ miles in a single day? Personally I have averaged 8k miles per year over the last 5 years and renting a car for the single long trip 340 miles I have made over that time period is not exactly a big deal.

PS: People talk about how long it takes to get a full charge but if you can add 100 miles to the range in an hour while your stopped for lunch that bumps the daily range to 400 which would have more than covered me, but they can apparently get close to a full charge in 45 minutes.

"How often do you actually drive 200+ miles in a single day?"

I'm probably not an average driver - I don't drive at all during the week (walk to work and pretty much everywhere else, taxi to airport) but when I do drive to go walking/cycling/skiing the total I drive in a weekend is probably close to 300 miles - either in one day or parking car where recharging won't be available.

There is an episode of Top Gear where Clarkson shows off his newly purchased Ford Blow-job (or something). And the other presenters move in for the kill. Clarkson clearly knew what was coming ...

  - How many miles per gallon do you get?
  - Errr..
  - Is it 4 miles per gallon?
  - And how big is the tank?
  - Errr
  - Only enough room for 19 gallons?
  - Err, yes.
  - So thats 76 miles on one tank?
  - Err Yes
  - And how far away from the office do you live?
  - Err, 77 miles.

Yes, Clarkson was willing to buy a car that would need refilling every time he drove to or from the office.

Seriously, do not worry about "only 300 miles and I will need to charge it". People will buy it, and then go look for a plug in station.

Not the best example to pick - didn't he return his Ford GT for quality problems and describe the short time he had it as "The most miserable month’s motoring it is possible to imagine."?

While this is hilarious. It's important to remember that charging EV cars isn't as fast as refueling at the moment. Maybe eventually though.

Any chance you're from Europe? A saying that I appreciate having spent a large chunk of last year in Europe: "Australians/Americans think that 100 years is a long time, while Europeans think that 100 km is a long distance"

> How often do you actually drive 200+ miles in a single day?

At least once a week we're close enough that 200 miles is our "with a reasonable safety margin" number.

BTW - when I'm driving 400 miles in a day, I don't spend an hour eating lunch on the way. (It's very hard to average 50 miles an hour, so 400 miles is around 8 hours. I've actually done far more, and you can't do that if you're off the road.) And, why are you assuming that the lunch place will have the relevant charging station?

It sounds like this car would not be a good fit for you. I would recommend that you not purchase one.

I was responding to the insinuation that needing to drive 200+ miles regularly is almost unknown and the claim that an hour-long charge is acceptable for long distance trips.

In other words "nobody needs what it doesn't do" is wrong as is "it can handle that situation".

As a data point, I'm about to get rid of a car that has a range of about 240 miles or so (12 mpg). I drove it infrequently and for shortish distances so it didn't bother me at all.

You don't need to drive 200+ miles a day often to make it a requirement for a car. Emergencies, spontaneous road trips, trips to relatives, etc, are all unusual but crucial.

For one thing, that limited range is much less a concern in densely populated Western Europe. I'm Dutch and from my home town, I can drive not just to the nearest border but literally anywhere in the country. Admittedly that's only one way but also without charging at all along the way.

Second, the fuel prices are much higher. Petrol is $8.21 / gallon, so the fuel economics are very different.

Third, road taxes, VAT, car registration, etc. all offer steep discounts or zero-rates for electric vehicles.

I think natural gas electrical generation + electric cars is a lot more likely to happen than natural gas vehicles (CNG or LNG). To the extent that NG displaces coal (which is already happening due to cost of NG being so low, at least in the US; we could accelerate it with regulation or long-term fuel contracts when building new plants), it's a big win.

From a security (vs. environmental) perspective, burning US coal is superior to importing oil.

Not exactly streaming out of the showrooms are they?

They remain very much a toy but maybe one day someone will be able to build one that will work on a practical day to day basis.

I feel there is a lot of mileage (pun intended) in the "diesel electric" combination where the juice is generated by an internal combustion engine that can be run very efficiently and then fed to the electric drive (with a small battery back-up for peak demands).

I am going to assume that your first comment is directed at a "lack of interest" from buyers in "Showrooms". I am pretty sure all the 2013 models have been pre-sold, and the waiting list for the next year is 1500 deep.

> "...it relies on toxic batteries..."

http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/teslas-closed-loop-battery-r...

So many citations needed

Tesla gets crony capitalist, Solyndra-type loan with the worst terms possible for taxpayers: http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=53001...

http://techcrunch.com/2009/06/23/the-government-comes-throug...

Coal is majority of the U.S. power grid: http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/coalvswind/c01.html

Tesla batteries are cleaner than older versions, but they contain some Cobalt, and Lithium has many impacts and risks for humans.

I can't find the half billion figure for Tesla in that article (only for Fisker).

Also, Tesla is a public company and therefore discloses their finantials. Their total debt is 270M, and they have 280M in cash (therefore, negative net debt).

Here's some more info:

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-05-11/tesla-to-begin-r...

I think they've just announced that they will be the first EV company to start paying their debt to the Government by the end of the year or something. If there's a good side to Government funding at all, it's this - investing in future technology that starts being useful right away, and can become mainstream within 10 years, which is a much better investment than subsidizing something like the oil industry for many decades, even though they keep scoring record profits.

If it can become useful and mainstream right away, why do they need government funding?

And to point out the obvious, the Federal government extracts far more money from the oil companies (and hence oil consumers) by way of gas taxes than it pays out in subsidies.

As I see it, the government's real pay-off isn't Tesla paying back it's loans, but rather is the increase in energy policy flexibility that is gained if EVs become popular. If it's easier to provide energy security, that reduces military burden and also reduces our need to be involved in some unfriendly parts of the world.

This payoff can't be captured by a private investor, so the government has incentive to invest earlier (and at higher risk levels) than private investors.

Probably once LFTRs come in or we find other ways to get away from coal for energy this would stop being a toy and get rid of our reliance on gasoline for ever.

By that standard, we should never develop any new technology, because in the process of developing ANY new technology (including wind power and solar power) you're going to generate some level of pollution, including most likely using fossil fuels. By your standard, we can never progress at all, and must eventually regress to a primitive state. If that had been followed, we could have NEVER developed solar panels, and so many other important, cleaner technologies.

Look, Tesla is billed as being greener than traditional autos but it is not. Drawing power from the grid is amazingly wasteful, and is often COAL. Trading oil for coal is not an environmental win-- Tesla's basic premise is a fraud. It reminds me of ethanol, another big government effort for the "environment" which makes things worse.

Unlike traditional vehicles, Tesla's cars have the potential to be run on nuclear, solar, or other future green energy sources as more and more of those options come online. One would think this goes without saying.

Come drive in Washington State, where our grid is powered by the water which falls from our sky, as it flows back to the ocean.

Also WSDOT just installed 7 EV charging stations along Interstate 5: http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/News/2012/05/30_newevstations.htm

AIUI coal is still cleaner per mile than gasoline.

I just switched one of my electric bills (Maine) to 100% wind power, and at the same rate (actually less for 1 year with promo discount, then the same).

Millions of toxic batteries are a problem, but I wouldn't be surprised if some future scientist/entrepeneur figures out something smart to do with them. It's not exactly nuclear waste.

Ethanol is indeed a scam at the moment, but when it can be harvested and processed by electric combines and new plants, it will be an effective way to store other clean energy.

> It's not exactly nuclear waste.

I have strong faith that eventually we'll figure how to use even nuclear waste productively.

They've already solved that one, at least partially. And it certainly seems likely to continue to progress in the right direction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor

Send me a car to Germany.

(Yeah, we have arguably too much coal here as well, but .. it's changing and the renewable energy changes are a relevant subject in elections)

1: http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/05/26/us-climate-germany-... 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4028019 (the discussion regarding [1])

Electric vehicles are far more efficient than ordinary cars, over 80% including both the charging/uncharging of the batteries and the electric motor. Compare that with the 25% of ordinary cars. Even if all the electricity comes from coal, it is no worse than ordinary cars, since coal fired power plants also are more efficient than gas engines. That means that it is no worse than ordinary cars even in the worst case.

You can argue that to get more people to use public trasport is a bigger win, but to say electric vehicles is a fraud is just wrong.

The top end Model S has a 85kWh battery pack and can get 265 miles on that charge according to the 5-point standard for MPGe set by the EPA. That's equivalent to just under 3 gallons of gas using the GGE conversion mechanism.

That's an amazing efficiency win.

So far, the biggest downside is the extended charge time. To fully recharge the car using the fastest charger, it's about 4-5 hours.

Trading oil for coal is not an environmental win

It certainly is! Burning enough gas in a small engine to power a car is much more polluting than generating the same energy in a commercial-scale coal-power plant.

I'll say this as a person who used to work for an electric utility that generated MOST of its power via coal.

It is MUCH, MUCH easier to control pollution at a point-source (like, say, a power plant) than it is to control pollution on a moving platform.

If you only knew the kinds of engineering efforts that have been devised to make the gasoline engine more efficient and less polluting, you might consider how much better electricity generation via fossil fuels will get if we were really serious about having an energy policy in the US.

SO far, there isn't a mechanism known yet for generating energy from a concentrated source that doesn't involve some form of pollution. Coal, nuclear, solar all have their by-products.

Once you account for externalities, there are very very few options that look great.

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