Tesla reveals Supercharger network, Free Fill Ups
engadget.com
engadget.com
I'm pretty sure cars during and before pre Henry Ford times were not very great in terms of their overall affordability, total cost of ownership and availability of fuel all around the country. You could trust your horse to drive you back home on any day more than a car. Similar to that, the IBM computers during their early days. You mobile phone is likely to have more computing power than all the computers IBM sold a few decades back, they were highly painful to use, maintain and use. Needless to say all these things had huge maintenance issues.
But these things have caught on. So have automation, productivity and so many other new things that eventually people show friction towards but later take them to be fate accompli and learn to move forward.
Electric cars, self driving cars, wearable computing(like Google glasses) well these really might look to be unfeasible at this time. But please, these are just ideas which are waiting for their time to come, with a little push they will eventually catch on.
- Better battery performance and lifespan. - Improved charging time and technology. - Distance cars can travel in a single charge. - Increased torque and horsepower. - Affordability and increases is mass production.
And most importantly, increases in the necessary infrastructure to support long-distance travel (exactly the topic at hand)
Your comment is very uninformed.
Let's say tomorrow some grad student gets fusion going at a very low price. The best way to use this to power cars would be to use it to create a fuel with a high energy density. If you had 'free energy' you'd extract C02 from the atmosphere and turn it into a hydrocarbon.
For more info look at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
and this interview with Nobel Prize winning Physicist Robert Laughlin
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2010/08/laughlin_on_the.htm...
the key quote is:
"The ones that are technically trained get it right away: hydrocarbons, which we burned today have the greatest energy density possible of all fuels. Things that have carbon in them. Will people fly airplanes? Usually people say yes for the same reasons. Well, how are you going to make the airplanes fly? Battery. Batteries are pretty heavy. Oh--you can't have airplanes unless you have hydrocarbon fuels. You could in theory do it with hydrogen, but it's highly dangerous, noxious fuel. Quantum-mechanically, we know the energy content of those fuels is optimal. There will never be anything that beats them."
A massive breakthrough in energy density for batteries might be possible but it's unlikely. Huge resources have been put into improving batteries and while they have improved it's not been enough to get near the energy density of hydrocarbons.
"Heavier than air flying machines are impossible"
-Lord Kevin.
Yet we have them today, thanks to a phenomenon in physics called Bernoulli's principle- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli%27s_principle
"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them" - Albert Einstein.
Why, O why do we think that problems have to, must be and will be solved at the same level and direction of thought the problems were framed in? Besides the whole point of a disruptive technology is that the solutions generally come as a bolt from the blue, completely surprising even the biggest experts in those areas. Directions from which those solutions come from are so radically different paths than originally they would come from. And this has not happened once, twice but many times.
Over confidence in science especially with regards to the negative aspects is not a good direction to begin with.
Basically, airplanes fly for three reasons:
1. The wing deflects air downwards. 2. Air moves faster over the top of the wing than over the bottom. Much faster than the equal-transit theory indicates. 3. Air pressure is higher on the bottom of the wing than on the top.
The important thing that few people seem to grasp is that all three are equivalent statements. They aren't additive. There aren't three different reasons airplanes fly, there's one reason airplanes fly, with three different ways to look at it.
Those are different reasons, or am I mistaken here?
Pressure is just a fancy way of saying force per area. The air pressure on the bottom of the wing is just the downward force exerted by the wing on the air, divided by the wing's area. The only way to deflect air is by applying a force to it, and the only thing applying a force to it is the wing.
You could get a huge win by offloading the power to ground stations and beaming it aboard. You'd still need some onboard power reserve for reliability and backup reasons, but you could offload most of it. This would let you lighten your airframe, which has a snowball effect, allowing even more lightening and more efficiency. Get the craft light enough, and VTOL becomes a possibility, meaning you could land these things on heliports downtown and not have a 1 hour trip to the airport.
Just think of it as "high speed rail" with lower infrastructure costs and fewer right-of-way problems.
But, yea then again by your estimation internal combustion cars have not improved either as they still use fire.
* Similar cost, adjusted for inflation (49k vs 48k)
* 1.6x range compared to Fritchle (160mi vs 100)
* At more than 2x the speed (25max vs 55(speed for quoted range))
* With climate control
But the part you should be focusing on is the first one, the positive one. Because that will change everything and to some people, the second part, the negative one, will be irrelevant just long enough for Tesla to work on improving it and years later making it "good enough" for most people.
Remember how the iPhone was awesome at user interface and interaction? But sucked at battery life (compared to other smartphones), had only a 2 MP camera, no video recording, only 2G connection and no MMS? That may not have been good enough for 90% of Nokia or Blackberry users back then, but the iPhone is good enough for almost everyone today, and the iPhone changed the entire industry. That's how disruptive innovations work, and I believe that's exactly how Tesla's new model will work.
Also, do you know how everyone says I wish I would've bought Apple stock when the iPhone first appeared? Well, if I was into stock, I'd probably start buying Tesla stock just about now.
To paraphrase Richard Hammond: "Forgetting something at home when I go to work would be a 2 day round-trip because it's so far no electric car has the range. I would have to spend one night recharging the car somewhere in the middle"
His problem has just been solved. Sure, it might take him 3.5 hours (random number) instead of just 3. But that's insanely better than having to stay the night to recharge your car.
But if you're commuting 3 hours a day total, you have bigger issues with your life, to be honest. Move closer to where you commute!
My commute here takes less time than my 30 mile (15 one way) commute in the Twin Cities.
I had a 130 mile commute in the 90s in Arkansas that took me.. 130ish minutes. Now I have a 32 mile commute that takes around 2 hours and is 15 miles driving, BART for 35ish minutes, and walking for 20 minutes.
This isn't a discussion of if. It's a discussion of when.
When all you do is pull out your cellphone, select a route and a car picks you up in 5 minutes, takes you to your destination, and leaves... you don't worry about range and electricity and recharge.
You just use it, and the system can intelligently maintain battery levels and recharging across the fleet, ensuring efficiency.
Heck, such a system could provide gasoline or hybrid cars for trips that required them.
Take a look into graphene-based supercapacitors. It _is_ possible to charge an electric car in a few minutes. It's just a matter of time. [and no, we're not talking EEStor. We're talking multiple research universities actively looking into the technology. Angstron Materials is one.]
Two malapropisms in a row, or an iOS autocorrect?
The precision manufacturing they learned with Space X is incorporated into the Tesla S. Their aim is to make the Model S the most reliable and problem-free vehicle due to this precision.
Now they are incorporating SolarCity technology into the entire system. This is absolutely brilliant!
I've said this before, but I think Mr. Musk is one of a handful of "altruistic capitalists" that, if we are to stay with capitalism as a system, we desperately need more of. His somewhat awkward but "gee I could imagine playing XBox with him" style goes well with that image.
Anyways, SpaceX is a huge endeavour as is Tesla motors and green energy project on the side. Most remarkable thing is a close loop those companies feed on each others achievements. That is without dispute. However, there is absolutely no widespread impact from all of this yet apart from PR waves. What it could be, and hopefully will be, is that either those group of companies have a widespread reach or (even more hopefully) those PR waves will incite similar movements across those industries it touches.
As for one of the greatest entrepreneur ever - competition is strong and large. While successful and visionary, his efforts are yet to come to full fruition where he might be among the greats. So far, it's all great business and great prospect. It could land among greatest entrepreneurs ever when/if those companies approach widespread impact of the likes of Ford, Dow, Siemens, Bell, etc...
- Pneumatic / maglev hybrid seems like the optimal choice. With magnetic levitation and no air resistance, extreme speeds are possible.
- Initially I thought that the ideal mass transit system would allow people to carry their cars with them. The idea is that people often have to choose between the benefits of mass transit and the loss of freedom that comes with not having their car once they reach their destination. But recent innovations lead me to think this won't be necessary. I can easily see a time when all cars are autonomous and you can call one up on demand (as others in this thread have pointed out as well). Therefore, it's easy to conceive of a time when you can hop on the HyperLoop, pull out your smartphone, pick the destination, and tell the system you want a (semi-)autonomous vehicle waiting for you when you arrive.
- To make this feasible, we HAVE to get the cost down. It shouldn't take a trillion dollars or more to build this network across the US. The rest of the points will be about that.
- The system should be built, as much as possible, out of a series of standardized components that "snap together". I'm envisioning a "series of tubes" sections that are straightforwardly snapped end to end with standard mounts to hang them or put them on pylons. There would be different lengths, curve radii, etc depending on how you needed to route the track.
- These "tubelets" themselves should be constructible on-site or close to it, similar to how concrete for roads is made on-site. The idea is to minimize shipping costs as much as possible.
- Ultimately, it would be nice if we could employ molecular nano-assembly and have the tubes build themselves, but as a compromise, many parts of the construction could be handled by autonomous or semi-autonomous moving construction rigs that can set themselves up, perform most of the construction work, then tear themselves down and drive off. Again, the more standardized and "Lego like" you can make the components, the easier this would be.
- Each section should have solar panels, a way of storing energy, and a way of giving or receiving energy to nearby sections. Ideally, this would all be connected with a "master bus" that would, when necessary, send power to sections of the loop that haven't had decent sunlight in a while, etc. In general, the idea would be to keep the system as self-sufficient as possible, but have full failover when needed.
- We'd also need to solve the cultural-political problems involved in getting all the landowners to agree to run elevated track over their property.
Thinking about the last two problems, an interesting solution presents itself:
- Why not partner with the power grid organizations and use the existing transmission line right-of-way to run much of the "long haul" routes? They already have the land, they have made wide "lanes" through brush and other unforgiving terrain to run the lines, and there's the power when you need it!
- You might even consider slowly replacing many of the transmission lines with just the tunnels. These tunnels would transmit the power and also help generate it with solar panels, taking only what the need to run the line and giving back everything else. This SHOULD be a massive net positive gain. The only downside I can see would be people that consider two sections of elevated tubes to be a massively worse eye-sore than the existing wires. But surely that would be solvable?
It must be the other way around. If you want free power, design your car to use their connector standards.
If I were running Tesla, I'd let my competitors' cars come and charge at the station, then sell them lunch and snacks.
Though if these stations charge using solar power and store the power in a battery pack to discharge when a car hooks up, it could potentially cost them a lot less than $0.11/kWh, depending on the cost of building the station itself.
Also add maintenance of all those batteries and I bet you'd have a really hard time to motivate solar for economical reasons.
The argument about 'free solar' is almost an oxymoron. That electricity costs more per kwh than most any other source.
Tesla is attacking every single anti-EV argument in a very deliberate way and most of the attacks are strong successes.
And there is also a strong argument that the manufacturing and installation costs of solar farms has a long payback. They are a battery in that sense - energy invested in them slowly comes back out. PRobably petro-energy. So intially solar is a net negative in eco-impact. Same with wind.
So currently you do not have to worry about batteries or storage. You only have to worry about producing on average about as much as you use. The electric company does not have to worry about storage either because times of high sunshine always coincide with times of high electricity demand (due to air-conditioning).
So currently one can easily install and use solar without ever worrying about batteries or storage. If we ever get to the point where we rely exclusively on solar and wind, we will have to start worrying about storage, but this point is far off for now. Also, at that point the responsibility for storage will likely fall on the electric companies.
1 billion kw-h / day more is a nice big tick on that, but I'm not sure it would drive prices a whole lot.
http://www.consumerenergyreport.com/2012/03/21/what-makes-up...
It takes about $0.20 to refine a gallon of gas, so ~2kWh/gal. Except, It obviously actually takes less electricity than that, because there are other costs to refining. Not a bad investment in energy terms, when a gallon of gasoline contains ~36.6kWh worth of energy.
That is completely impossible. Maybe profit, but not revenue. Even my sedan with a 17 gallon tank costs more to fill up than even a pack-a-day smoker with a lottery addiction and a love of energy drinks is likely to spend at the shop.
Typically a gas station makes 1 or two cents per liter. A 17 gallon tank is approximately 68 liters so that's between $.68 and $1.36 or thereabouts in gross margin for the station. Of that they still have to operate and service the pumps, and deal with periodic mandatory environmental upgrades and inspections.
You have to do millions of liters per year to turn a profit on the gas. Gross profits on store goodies are on the order or 20 to 30%. If they're refrigerated then likely it is on the low end, if they are non-perishables then it is on the high end.
But at the most this is change in the revenue model for 'gas/electric' stations or whatever you would like to call it.
But at the present and things as they stay, no body is likely to compete with Tesla. They are only having this network so as to ensure people can roam around without having to worry about running out of fuel. Tesla itself may not offer free energy once their user base grows to a substantial amount.
This is a incentive to get users to buys their cars, not a free energy give away drive. Once they have substantial customer base, free market dynamics will take care of the energy supply.
Its not like they will be forced to buy whatever is in these stops - but the fact that the consumer can now actually CHOOSE what to spend those funds on is wonderful.
I HATE BUYING GAS
I currently don't drive at all (I bike to bart and bart to work) - and my car had its starter go out, so I haven't even been inside a car in more than a month.
I have always hated buying gas - I feel like I am being extorted every single time (and yes, I still harbor a grudge against bush/cheney whom I feel is largely responsible for this situation - whether this is unfounded blame or not, I still feel good about it :) )
1. Superchargers are already deployed in California. Nice work, Tesla, for building it out and proving it works.
2. The whole U.S. will be covered in a few years. Great for traveling cross country.
3. It's solar-powered. I wonder if they have a electricity backup... probably, my guess. But still impressive.
4. It will be FREE for Tesla owners. I don't know how they're pulling this off. To me, this was the most shocking part. How are they going to pay for construction, rent, etc, and still afford this? It's a great extra benefit for Tesla owners... to travel around the country for free (of course you need to buy the car and maintain the car, but still).
I wonder if the extra electricity generated from the solar panels will go into paying the rent for the spaces.
It's grid electric powered. The canopy doesn't do much.
Let's calculate:
Guess that the canopy for each bay is 7 by 4 meters, 28m^2
Sunny spots receive about 4kWhr of solar power per square meter per day.
Solar panels might be 25% efficient.
Total daily power: 28m^2 * 4kWhr/m^2/day * 0.25 = 28kWhr/day
Model S has an 85kWhr battery, half charge is 42kWhr.
Each solar power system is designed to generate more energy from the sun over the course of a year than is consumed by Tesla vehicles using the Supercharger.
wtf?
They're sizing the installations in partnership with SolarCity, one of Musk's other start-ups. They claim they'll be sized such that it will generate as much energy over the course of the year as the vehicles consume. Meanwhile, you're estimating power output from a CG rendering on a marketing page.
You could argue whether or not they're lying, but they're certainly not incompetent. SolarCity's sizing calculators take these (and many more) variables into account.
generate as much energy over the course of the year as the
vehicles consume
jws guesses that each slot generates 28KWh/day. A ten slot charging station would only be able to charge three cars without going into the red. Tesla would have to build a lot of very oversized installations in a lot of sunny, rural locations to hit breakeven.
Perhaps solar in previously undeveloped areas would be better? I doubt that. Developing solar plants in undeveloped areas only to put the charging stations in urban areas (that is where the market demands them after all) hardly seems better than putting charging stations in urban areas and sticking some solar there too. What is there to be gained from not putting solar wherever you can?
That said, I think we should be plastering the land we already use with solar panels. Might as well put all those rooftops to use.
I also think there is likely a lot to see in the future of non-panel-type solar. That generally involves a much larger or smaller scope than panels though, "medium" sized doesn't work well.
Have you ever looked at satellite views of the US? There are massive deserts just begging for the shade of some solar panels or mirrors. No use in heating up all that sand.
It's not so hard to move the energy out of the desert either. Just run wires, or better, relocate an aluminum smelter from the grid to out near the solar array.
> Have you ever looked at satellite views of the US?
My thoughts exactly. I think looking at Europe could bring a new perspective into what does 'lacking space' mean.
It's tougher than you realise. Energy is lost when transmitting power over long distances - like from a desert to an urban area. I'm not an expert but as I understand it there are major challenges. A lot of solar installations tend to be located where the power is used (next to data centres, on people's roofs).
Considering all the infrastructure that goes into keeping a fossil or nuke plant fed and cleaned and its power output distributed, I think if a solar installation has a net payback time of similar period we ought to be willing to invest a little in the distribution as well.
Why aluminium smelters? I haven't heard this before.
> we ought to be willing to invest a little in the distribution as well.
I agree. I've read that's it's a huge challenge though, which is one of the factors holding up the development of large scale solar installations in the desert. Another challenge is the variance and relative unpredictability of power generation which means batteries are needed to smooth out the peaks and troughs to balance supply and demand.
Again, this is a guess based on a CG rendering on their website. That drawing doesn't constrain Tesla's engineering talent in any way – even without using extra land they could put up solar shade structures over adjacent parking spaces.
Assume you've got a couple dozen slots, charging 100 cars a day. (Far, far fewer than an equivalently-sized gas station. If we're going to transition to an electric-only transportation infrastructure, then car changing stations are going to become a common sight)
That's 9 megawatt-hours a day. A random solar panel calculator I found guesses that would need ~2000KW of solar panel capacity. So you'll need 8,000 250 watt panels. That'll cover 9,600 square metres, (2.6 acres-- if you're lying them flat, which you won't. A big dedicated solar generation station will use tilted one-axis tracking, which will use a lot more ground space) and cost you (at $410 a panel) a cool $2.4 million.
(Google's big solar installation at Mountain View, the one that got so much press, was only 1700KW. Our tiny electric car charging station has to be 17% bigger than it.)
Electric car charging uses a lot of power. Solar is great, I love solar, but it's not space-efficient, or cheap. Either Tesla is going to build a national solar generation network on the scale of Germany's move into solar power, all on their own dime, or they're lying through their teeth about charging draw/solar production breakeven.
I don't think Elon Musk would green-light the "100% solar power" line without doing the math. Again: you can argue about whether he's lying, but I can guarantee you he knew exactly the scale of what he was promising. That makes it all the more impressive, imo.
Re:lying, I'm imagining at some point they'll transition over to "we buy 100% solar power for SuperChargers", which is fine by me since it's functionally equivalent to what they're doing now.
A simpler explanation would be that he's not telling the whole story, and that perhaps they have dedicated solar farms in development/deployment or something to that effect. Don't afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.
You bet your ass he quadruple checked those numbers.
I'm guessing that the supply at these stations will be much higher than the demand for charging, so they'll make up the cost of "free" by selling wh's back to the grid.
And, at many locations, solar cells mounted on the weather canopy charge your Model S with solar energy.
I'm sure SolarCity projects will be supplying more power than Teslas use, but not from these charging stations. (Unless virtually no one uses the stations, which is probably not the plan. There'd be no reason to install 4 parallel charging stations if you were charging less than one car a day. Another possibility is that they build car ports that cover many parking spaces in a lot to support each charging bay. That's not what the picture shows, but it would work.)
I can't find an original source for the idea that the stations will produce more power than they consume, but it appears, attributed to Musk, in both Engadget and Huffington post. Most other articles on the event don't have it. It seems to have come from an oral presentation.
The good news is, if a Tesla S goes about 2 miles on 1 kWhr of power and if an average person drives about 10k miles per year, that is only 14kWhr/day. Each bay would supply the typical power requirements of two Tesla S cars.
Update: The press release is out now, http://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-motors-launches-revoluti...
It clearly says the stations will make more power than they consume. So either they are huge compared to the picture, or Tesla S drivers aren't much for road tripping.
The SunTech panels [1] produce a nominal 295W and are 2 x 1M so in your 6 x 4M square you can put 12 panels, nominal output 3.5Kw, my system is 90% "efficient" (5.2 kW Panel rating, 4.7kW delivered to the grid) assuming the same that is 3.15kW delivered to the grid. over a nominal 6 hr solar 'day' that is about 18kWhr/day. So the duty cycle on a power station would need to be one fill up every 3 days. If the travelling is mostly on weekends I could see the stations getting a couple of fillups on the weekend and having 5 days of no visitors. Time will tell. It is handy that Elon's the primary stockholder of Solar City :-) Good discount on panels.
[1] http://www.solarsystemsusa.net/solar-panels/by-brand/suntech...
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/08/solar-data-treas...
The article definitely made it sound like that would be the case. They might also be counting on charging people in cars other than Tesla ones.
1) Tesla isn't making money right now, so what's a little more money they don't have?
2) If Tesla goes bankrupt, what do they care about promises about free charging? If they don't go bankrupt, they will make it big, so what will they care about a few free charges? Practically zero-risk.
100 kilowatts good for three hours of driving
From the announcement video, it seems they are charging at 370V with a maximum of 225 amps = 83.25kW. So that 30 minute figure for half a charge is pretty real. The cost for one such charge would be approximately 3$ with industrial prices for electricity. Given that you can feed solar power back into the grid at rates above or equal to what normal customers pay for their electricity, I could see them making break-even on this when discounting the initial investment (which will pay back hundred-fold in adoption rate for their cars).
A supercharger is a mechanically driven air compressor which forces air into an engine. For a car company to take that name and redefine it into a marketing effort, well, it's annoying. Kind of like those 'turbo' buttons that used to be on the front of a PC.
A turbocharger, or turbo (colloquialism), from the Greek "τύρβη" (mixing/spinning)
Turbochargers were originally known as a turbosuperchargers when all forced induction devices were classified as superchargers
-- Wikipedia
In other words, the turbocharger was actually the origin of the concept of "turbo" meaning boosted speed/power.
I'm still looking for the origin of the "super" part.
"To charge" means "to load [a carriage]", "A charge" means "a [carriage] load" -- so while the metaphor is overloaded, it actually seems to applies better to charging a battery than to forcing air into a combustion engine.
So 'supercharge' is a term for 'bigger air charge'.
However, when you deconstruct it, it is a bit silly. I dislike the addition of 'super' to things anyway, it's a very lazy way of coining a term.
Maybe we should all just adopt Kompressor like the Germans. And leave supercharge, supercharger and supercharged for the marketing folk to devalue to oblivion.
Edit : I just thought of a much better name. Who wouldn't want to connect up their Tesla to the ... wait for it..:
Warpcharger
Yeah, Warpcharger stations. Much cooler, and probably able to be trademarked as well.
Nope, we'll need that after SpaceX develops FTL drives.
Just like Ducati with the "Streetfighter", using an existing name from the same industry just leads to confused customers and even more confused readers-of-articles.
This is a killer combination of rapidly falling prices in solar PV (thank you China/Kyoto protocol/Global warming), meeting the falling prices of Li-ion batteries (thank you astonishingly successful decade of laptops/smartphones/tablets), meets a cyclic economic boom (thank you GFC), meets rising gas prices (thank you OPEC/cheap oil/peak oil), meets anti-carbon incentives (thank you IPCC), meets autonomous cars (thank you Google), meets the development of nuclear fusion (thank you ITER) all combining into one massive tailwind for the one company just on the cusp of absolutely crushing it.
It's a complete clusterfuck of fortune, falling costs, converging secondary technologies and economic forces concentrated in one company protected with monopoly pricing, akin to those found by Apple, Google, YouTube, Intel, Cisco, Microsoft, Facebook and many other tech giants.
TSLA will go 10x within the next 20 years (or get bought out before it - unlikely) as it rides these convergent waves of progress.
Please for the love of capitalism short the crap out of it and don't buy it! I need to get as much of this stock as cheap as possible over the next 2-3 years of savings :D - you'd be doing me a favour!
Full disclosure: I have a significant amount of my net worth in TSLA stock and have done so on and off for 2 years (riding cycles for fun). I used to own AAPL - until relatively recently - whereupon I transferred all holdings to Google/Tesla. I may be exiting Google within the next 6 months due to rapid appreciation.
Tipping point? No, I don't think so. It's progress, and it's good news, but 30 minutes to recharge is still a LONG time compared to the two minutes a petroleum-fueled vehicle takes, and the best of those can go several multiples of the Teslas range between fuelings.
My tipping point is not a "singular moment" or "lightbulb" - but merely the slow agglomeration over the next decade of multiple convergent waves that just happen to put wind in the sails of the only company able to execute on this plan at this point in time.
Diversification is overrated. When crises happen - all correlations go to one - everything goes down simultaneously. Also my returns are cut in half :D.
Sorry you are just flat out wrong. But if you're OK with it, I'm OK with it.
I would still love to see hydrogen cars instead. I think Honda has it right.
Seems to me that the Supercharger stations are getting the time down to 30 minutes through parallelism. If one could bring component costs down even more, one could have more parallelism. What about 15 or 10 minute charging times? I'm going to guess that plans are in place to exploit some serious economics of scale when they start building $30,000 cars.
Once you have autonomous cars, this opens up the possibility of "battery trucks" once can rendezvous with on the highway to recharge without stopping.
It also cuts your returns in half and brings you down along with everyone else - and gives you a false sense of security - nothing is safe - not even shorting the world (end of the world/counter party/regulatory risks).
As an investor you must think long and hard about the future/companies/investments make very few super high signal, super high impact trades/positions/companies that you know inside and out (financials/GDP winds etc).
I'd rather invest in 20 companies I know inside and out than 500 mediocre ones that I know nothing about. But that's me - most people don't know anything and they SHOULD diversify.
If you don't know anything - the best thing you could do is assume no better than random.
I like to think of it in terms of car crashes and catastrophes.
Companies are represented by cars - I pick good cars, with good people driving them, surrounded by a safe environment and hope they don't crash - it's how risk works.
Hurricanes destroy everyone - no matter how good the driver is - no exceptions.
The whole point of investing is to make above and beyond the S&P 500 benchmark over the long term - and that requires taking concentrated risks where one must bet on the right drivers with the right cars in awesome environments (most critical) and watching the horizon warily for distant hurricanes (debt crisis/nuclear war/WWIII/currency devaluations/governmental collapse).
I really can't do any more than that. It's a trade off obviously.
I understand local failures quite well - I rely on my ability to make decisions to mitigate that risk and the fact that I'm still young (older people should not do this).
This is an incremental development and nothing more.
When I go from the SF bay area down to LA, I get gas at kettleman city (because of the in-n-out :) and I go to the chevron station there. From google street view, it looks like that station can fuel 12 cars at a time. And when I'm there, there's often a line for a pump.
A gas stop takes, say, 2 minutes. A tesla charging stop takes 30 minutes. So serving the same peak flow of cars would take 15 times as many car spots: 180. Land looks cheap in that part of the central valley, so it might be feasible to have that much space. But 180 chargers, peak, each using 100 kilowatts would use 18 megawatts.
Great scott! That's a lot of power. So it looks like this is still in the range of luxury-car, low-volume stuff. I can't imagine what it would look like as a mass-market thing.
But with charging stations every grocery store could have them in the first few rows of parking. They could waive the charing fee if you spend X amount on food (I already get gas waivers from my grocery store). As this type of thing proliferated you wouldn't charge your battery when it was almost empty but rather be continually topping it off. Only on long trips would you consciously time things like stopping for lunch so they give you enough time to charge.
You can drive without paying the congestion charge so they are quite popular.
Hmm, I think you mean 18MW, not 18GW... sure, it's still a huge amount of energy, but your typical data centre can easily consume 10MW or more. And 18 megawatt-hours is equivalent to... just under 500 gallons of gasoline.
Furthermore, the range on even the Tesla Model S is half that of your typical car, so fillups are even more frequent. This could mean that highway stops have twice as many people needing to recharge.
Their solution was to partner with a restaurant operator, supplying his restaurants with fresh produce & refrigerated meat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Harvey_Company#History
If McDonalds was smart, they'd sponsor charging stations at their restaurants. Park your electric car, swipe a credit card, go get your McMeal, use the bathroom, etc.
If this type of electric car becomes a mass-market thing, there would be less of a need for gas stations near home (as you say). But the number of cars needing fill-ups on long haul routes would be just as large, so the gas stations on those routes would have to be much larger if the occupancy time at them is that much higher.
EDIT: Actually, even more interestingly, I wonder if this will get people to synch up their long-distance travel plans - ie everyone will plan to leave such that they're running low around lunchtime so that they can stop and eat while they're charging. This could create big traffic jams...
The only reason gas station exists is because one needs to store a great amount of gasoline in a container, but power lines are pretty much everywhere. Gas stations of tomorrow will be like the coin operated telephones of today. Most will become toxic barren shells, but few will be converted into toxic waste storage units.
Getting gas is an extraneous hassle that people in the future won't need to do anymore. Brick and mortar stores will all advertise "free charging" the same way they advertise free wifi today.
Things are likely to change in the future. Better mileage, more space for batteries and faster charging times might mean you charge fewer number of times for more mileage.
If they can make it so that each cell can get charged in only a couple of minutes then one of the major hurdles of electric cars will be gone.
[1] I'm assuming that the smaller the cell the faster that it can be charged. Anybody knows if this is true?
Tesla could offer free covered parking spaces to the building owner-operators and free (or metered) charging to the customers.
The owner-operators get free 'green' PR, and could see increased business as customers have an incentive to stay in the stores longer.
Tesla sees a real-estate free way to offer more charging stations, a marketing cost for their vehicles that also adds value to their product.
I have a feeling that would be very dangerous for some reason, but I'm not an EE so who knows. Certainly would be pretty inefficient though.
Fast-food chains, Super markets, Offices, Malls, Any parking lot!!
So if they tie up with a dine-in restaurant chain to offer 10 charging spots at every highway restaurant - BOOM - you just got recharge facility with a 3min wait [30m/10] all across the country.
Cost of this compared to setting up a gas station would be minimal - only capital cost of charging station - looks like one-time $15K or so per station.
For example, instead of bus routes, you can have a car come to pick you up at or near home at a scheduled time, or on demand, to take you to the train station to make a scheduled train on time. When the train arrives in the city you can have a similar car take you to the office. The cars can manage stopping to recharge by itself. The car routes can be updated and optimised based on demand or congestion, new routes can be added easier than bus routes. Software can manage your individual trips so you only have to make decisions based on time and cost. Deliveries can be done with automated cars and flying drones, and this can be adapted much quicker based on demand.
Could we charge electric vehicles while driving? Could we bury, say, some coils under the highways and have cars have a transformer on board to draw power from the road? That would remove the need for charging stations on a long-distance trips almost completely.
Quicker may be true, but "better"? Swap stations are more expensive, they constrain vehicle design, battery shape, and battery technology upgradeability. This makes the vehicle some combination of heavier, less safe, or more expensive (pick your poison).
People don't seem to realize that the limiting factor for charge rate isn't current. It's cooling. A far simpler solution would just pump coolant through the charging port so that a large off-board cooler can be used. The cells in the Leaf and Volt could be fully charged in 20 minutes with adequate cooling. Independent (though amateur) tests by RC hobbyists have demonstrated hundreds of cycles at that charge rate with little loss in capacity.
cooling
The Roadster has a water-cooled battery pack, and I assume the Model S does too.
What makes you think this is not a viable solution?
This seems to be a perfect use case for Israel.If you are a regular office goer, charge once and may be use it for a whole week and half.
In any event, New Jersey would make a really small country. I know of people in this country who have to drive further to do their shopping.
video: Drive Switch Go - Better Place
short video http://youtu.be/VR3oLV4fdcE longer video http://youtu.be/S3Os25gP4yA
//edited to add video links
While I think the battery swap idea is a good one, it has many problems, not the least of which is getting all the manufacturers to agree to a myriad of standards. And agreeing to many of those standards means delegating part of your design process.
It also seems as thought there should be more partnerships involved in reaching the type of scale there going to to want to achieve. It seems like there would be a perfect opportunity to team up with Better Place to scale there infrastructure. Tesla should focus on building the best cars possible while letting Better Place handle the charging and/or battery switching infrastructure. I love the idea of Solar City getting involved as well. Those three companies are on my list of the few companies to watch in clean tech.
That would be covered under warranty like any defect on any car.
or mis-charging them
As long as you don't let them get completely empty, this is impossible.
This however, is really cool.
Facebook's IPO bled much more money out to bankers than all Tesla has spent so far, it's not like they are doing bad. Tesla has the potential to take over a sizeable slice of the (huge) automobile industry.
That goes a long way in todays world.
Fist it was it couldn't be done. An electric car? No way.
Then Telsa Motors comes out with an electric sports car. No way! Too expensive! Top Gear made a mockery of the car. Not feasible, what happens when you run out of charge?
Then Tesla Motors figures out a way to create "re-fueling" stations for their cars. No way! 30 minutes to charge my car? WAY too long! Stupid.
Whether you know it or not, each step this company takes, it's answering every one of the doubts people have about this technology. Affordable completely electric cars are a lot closer than most people think.
I suspect the problem is no where isolated enough that they won't have to worry about large numbers of local residents choosing to just go to Supercharger station rather than charging at home. As an occasional use to make people comfortable with a Tesla (long trips are possible), this is probably well worth the money. But it's unlikely to sustainable if owners choose to forgo the home charger.
0: http://www.edmunds.com/honda/civic/2012/road-test-specs.html
You could compare the 0-60 times of the Civic and say it's unacceptable that it takes the Civic twice as long to get to 60 mph, or that it only seats a measly 5 people, uncomfortably at that, or that it only has one trunk.
Yes, I can guarantee you that the layman doesn't give two shits about electric cars. Until it's cheaper and/or more convenient for him than gas cars, he won't switch. And until laymen switch, you won't get the economies of scale necessary for a vast charging network.
> assuming the chargers are well distributed.
That's a pretty big assumption. First of all, Musk said there are charging stations in several cities in California, but exactly how many are there in each city? Do you have to go to one particular location in each city for charging? Because that's DOA. There's no such thing as one convenient location for everyone.
And don't forget that right now all the testing is being done in California and Nevada, both of which are well known for their plentiful sunlight. But how much energy will the solar panels be able to contribute back to the grid when installed in a place like Seattle? Far less, I'm guessing.
For places without plentiful solar, hydro, or wind, we know the solution (the n-word) but we just lack the political will to implement it.
One of Musk's arguments for the supercharger was that it doesn't use non-renewable sources of energy. If you're charging at home, you're doing just that, since you're relying on the power plant for energy.
Once the car fleet is fuel-agnostic, it becomes much easier to shift into whatever clean power source ends up working well, or whatever mix of clean and dirty works well. In terms of dirtiness, it's not hard to make the average impact of a car on the environment better... I think even pure coal might be cleaner with these things due to efficiency gains. In any case, I don't particularly care if their solar proposal ends up panning out overall - it's more or less irrelevant to the feasibility of the plan, other than for PR and making the people who implement them look good.
Not necessarily. In Seattle, where solar is less effective, the electricity comes from almost entirely hydroelectric, with a little wind and a little nuclear.
For those too lazy to click the link:
Hydro 92.39%
Wind 4.07%
Nuclear 2.52%
Coal 0.52%
All other categories are 0.25% and below.
In which case you're just pushing the negative environmental effects to the power plant.
You keep changing your argument. It's fuckload more convient to almost never have to go to the gas station, change oil, coolant, transmission fluid. Fuckload cheaper too.
Fail, go back to troll school.
Strawman, I never changed my argument.
> Fuckload cheaper too.
Oh really? Have you seen how much a Model S costs?
You need to work on your reading comprehension and math, go back to school.
Depends on the driver I guess. When I'm driving I want to get where I'm going. I stop only for fuel and bathroom breaks (ideally these are combined). If I'm driving more than 8 hours I might stop for a meal. Stopping for 30 minutes ever three hours is not something I'd find acceptable on a long trip.
That said, it does seem that Tesla are getting ever closer to making a practical (if not affordable) commuter electric car (for reasonably short commutes).
Fueleconomy.gov says it costs $3,550/year to fuel my 2008 Infiniti G37 (at $4.75/gal, premium), and $400/year to fuel my Model S (assuming 15K miles/year). That's a savings of over $15750 over 5 years (assuming the price of petroleum-based fuels doesn't go up, which it will).
The end of oil is near, not just because we're running out, but because we can do better.
Don't be absurd. Getting either an Infiniti or a Model S makes absolutely no sense if you're interested in saving money. The base model MSRP for a 2013 G37 is $36,900, and for the Model S it's $49,900. The MSRP for a base Civic Sedan? $15,955. This debate was never about what's the most economic option.
At some point, comparing a luxury car with an cheap base brand is an apples to oranges comparison. If I didn't buy my Prius I sure as hell wouldn't have bought a Civic or Corolla... more likely a luxury vehicle.
You're not going to get the same luxuries from electric vehicles as you've gotten from internal combustion engine vehicles, at least not in the beginning. People won't have much option though when its either an electric vehicle or $5/gallon gas.
That is true for this product. The expectation I bet is that the technology will continue to evolve, and will over time improve to the point of overtaking the incumbents on more and more key metrics until gas cars just won't be able to compete any more. Tesla is betting on the fact that their value proposition is good enough today (or within 3-5 years) to allow them to gain enough market share in whatever vertical they're starting with (e.g. luxury every-day sport vehicles) to really cause a major disruption -- and expand from there.
Key reference from: The Innovators Dilemma
Add to that an engine that requires /a magnitude/ less maintenance than a gas one.
The oil industry should rethink its business model. And we should buy Tesla's stock right about now.
http://www.treehugger.com/cars/tesla-unveils-its-supercharge...
These are exciting times to live in.
I agree. This is the first time I actually believe we may become oil independent in the not so distant future (i.e. decades, maybe even in our lifetimes). As soon as the market realizes that a credible replacement to oil is here I expect oil prices to crash. I wonder what will oil companies do when they realize that their markets are about to evaporate?
Exciting times indeed.
As for making Supercharger compatible with the SAE J1772, somehow I doubt Tesla wants a plug-in Prius lazily charging its battery for hours while a fast-charge compatible vehicle waits its turn.