2013 Automobile of the Year: Tesla Model S

I can use a physical control without looking. It isn't confused by wind noise if my window is down. It doesn't bother a sleeping passenger.

The only disadvantage to physical controls is mapping them to an ever-larger number of functions. The early iPods did that well with their scroll wheels and single button, but there are limits.

Then again, maybe the large number of functions is the problem, not the controls.

Because the batteries wouldn't have to be tested while you wait. Like laptop batteries, they could have their own embedded controllers that would keep track of each individual unit's charge state and condition. (Actually it's almost certain that they already do.)

The analogy I like to use is swapping out propane cylinders for a gas grill. It should take less time to refuel an EV than a gasoline-powered vehicle, not more.

This is also important for power management, if Musk's prediction comes true and half of all cars sold by 2025 are indeed electric. Swappable batteries can be charged when/where the power is available, using industrial rates and infrastructure. Instead of seeing gasoline tankers driving around, you would see trucks delivering and picking up batteries from service stations.

People will understand why hardwired batteries are a bad idea as soon as half their neighborhood tries to charge their EVs every night the way we currently charge our smartphones.

You can also charge the battery on your own. I'd sign up for it even if they billed me the same for charge I supply or they supply.

tesla S is impressive for the technological hipster crowd, yet it's the kind of ride you won't notice in the parking lot in a few years, and you won't fool anybody - those cars aren't exactly pussy-magnets.

Sounds a little less efficient than the electricity thing when you look at the full sequence. And this is even in the case where electricity comes from dirty sources; some states, like California, have an energy mix where electricity comes mostly from renewables. (And this is something that can be improved as time goes on).

ICE engines are ~15% efficient at converting energy to movement. You must also include the cost of transporting, refining and drilling for the oil (coal is cheaper to get). This should push it down to ~10% burn to road.

Main stream coal power plants are ~30-39% efficient, electric transmission lines are ~95% efficient, battery charging is ~88% efficient and electric engines are ~92% efficient. That's burn to road of ~20-30%. Even without taking into account the extra costs of doing stuff with the oil to put it into your car, and having that priced with electric - electric is still better. There's a reason we electrified our trains, and a reason that diesel trains actually use their diesel engines to run electric motors.

Here are Tesla's calculations:

http://www.teslamotors.com/goelectric/efficiency (look at the final well-to-wheel efficiency - you'll notice it's a little more than double ICE engines).

We're also ignoring the cost of pollution that ICE vehicles bring (it's a lot more than power plants - which because they are centralized, can economically mitigate the release of pollution). If you price that into ICE, they lose pretty badly - because pollution is not, and never should have been free.

It's a resource you use and abuse to the detriment of everyone else.

Fundamentally you must understand this and this only:

Electric vehicles are 2x as efficient as ICE vehicles and cost less on a total cost of ownership basis.

They have won so badly that only willful ignorance can stop one from avoiding such an obvious conclusion (Innovator's dilemma).

I do think that "I don't have a garage / dedicated place to park my car" is in fact the only current anti-EV argument that has any basis in reality. But it's addressable.

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

Getting electricity out to a parking spot is not a problem, and hasn't been a problem for the last 40 years or so that people have had block heaters.

It'll take a few more years for mainstream adoption - but it'll hit. Tesla Model S is like the Apple I - only rich smart people own them.

The Apple II is when things get really crazy - that's when middle-class smart people own them.

See plan here: http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-p...

source: http://www.autoweek.com/article/20090714/carnews/907149994

Is this a fact, expensive battery replacements after 10 years and all?

I really have no idea, but I took a few minutes to try and look it up.

At a glance, it looks likes replacing a Prius battery today runs about half a much today as it did 10 years ago. Folks on the Tesla forums claim that you can pre-pay for a an eventual replacement to the tune of about $12K or 11% of the price of a new Roadster. That's a bit less half of of the current Tesla battery replacement cost I've seen thrown around and in line observed reduction in price of Prius batteries.

Spending 11% of a car's new price on a such a major repair, 10 years down the road is not bad at all. In fact, in my experience that's right in line with a basic import and cheap for anything could be considering sporting or luxury.

Unless I'm way off, this doesn't seem like a big issue at all.

My guess is that Tesla license the technology out, and road stops on common long-distance corridors start offering the charging stations in their parking lots to dominate the competition, you stop at their place for lunch, and then others will have to install too to compete. Job done: superchargers everywhere.

It looks like this is already happening in San Francisco (albeit with the city bootstrapping it): there are parking garages with EV spots and those without. Given a higher EV usage, those garages are going to do better, and the others will need to install in order to win that custom.

I am signed up for PG&E's variable time-of-day rate plan, so between 9PM-9AM, my power is 9.8 cents/kWh. So the Volt costs roughly $1.10/40 miles.

Maybe that would be a good thing. Most people don't know jack about economics, physics, finance, engineering, artificial intelligence, the future, technology or pretty much anything outside of their day to day job.

You'll notice that whenever someone like that does open their mouth in your field without knowing jack about it - you immediately understand that he has no idea what he is talking about.

The real problem comes when he's talking about an industry you don't know - because for all intents and purposes you won't know either.

> You can bullshit all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot bullshit all the people all the time.

This is how MBAs (or Master Bullshit Artists) can exist. If you don't know much about tech, he can say pretty much whatever he wants and you will have no idea as to whether he is telling the truth unless you yourself have knowledge of the relevant area.

> Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know.

-- Tao Te Ching

Remember that the next time you are listening to a discussion of a complex field - where none of the participants have degrees, industry experience or in depth on the ground knowledge of said fields. Bullshit is everywhere.

> According to former U.S. Department of Energy official Joseph Romm, "A hydrogen car is one of the least efficient, most expensive ways to reduce greenhouse gases." Asked when hydrogen cars will be broadly available, Romm replied: "Not in our lifetime, and very possibly never." The Los Angeles Times wrote, in February 2009, "Hydrogen fuel-cell technology won't work in cars. ... Any way you look at it, hydrogen is a lousy way to move cars." A 2007 article in Technology Review stated, "In the context of the overall energy economy, a car like the BMW Hydrogen 7 would probably produce far more carbon dioxide emissions than gasoline-powered cars available today. And changing this calculation would take multiple breakthroughs – which study after study has predicted will take decades, if they arrive at all. In fact, the Hydrogen 7 and its hydrogen-fuel-cell cousins are, in many ways, simply flashy distractions produced by automakers who should be taking stronger immediate action to reduce the greenhouse-gas emissions of their cars."

The Wall Street Journal reported in 2008 that "Top executives from General Motors Corp. and Toyota Motor Corp. Tuesday expressed doubts about the viability of hydrogen fuel cells for mass-market production in the near term and suggested their companies are now betting that electric cars will prove to be a better way to reduce fuel consumption and cut tailpipe emissions on a large scale." The Economist magazine, in September 2008, quoted Robert Zubrin, the author of Energy Victory, as saying: "Hydrogen is 'just about the worst possible vehicle fuel'". The magazine noted the withdrawal of California from earlier goals: "In March [2008] the California Air Resources Board, an agency of California's state government and a bellwether for state governments across America, changed its requirement for the number of zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) to be built and sold in California between 2012 and 2014. The revised mandate allows manufacturers to comply with the rules by building more battery-electric cars instead of fuel-cell vehicles." The magazine also noted that most hydrogen is produced through steam reformation, which creates at least as much emission of carbon per mile as some of today's gasoline cars. On the other hand, if the hydrogen could be produced using renewable energy, "it would surely be easier simply to use this energy to charge the batteries of all-electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles."

The Washington Post asked in November 2009, "But why would you want to store energy in the form of hydrogen and then use that hydrogen to produce electricity for a motor, when electrical energy is already waiting to be sucked out of sockets all over America and stored in auto batteries"? The paper concluded that commercializing hydrogen cars is "stupendously difficult and probably pointless. That's why, for the foreseeable future, the hydrogen car will remain a tailpipe dream". A December 2009 study at UC Davis, published in the Journal of Power Sources, found that, over their lifetimes, hydrogen vehicles will emit more carbon than gasoline vehicles. In July 2011, the Chairman and CEO of General Motors, Daniel Akerson, stated that while the cost of hydrogen fuel cell cars is decreasing: "The car is still too expensive and probably won't be practical until the 2020-plus period, I don't know." GM's Vauxhall Motors spokesman Bill Parfitt expects the HydroGen4 in 2016.

The Obama Administration sought to reduce funding for the development of fuel cell vehicles, concluding that other vehicle technologies will lead to quicker reduction in emissions in a shorter time. Steven Chu, the US Secretary of Energy, stated in 2009 that hydrogen vehicles "will not be practical over the next 10 to 20 years". In 2012, however, Chu stated that he sees fuel cell cars as more economically feasible as natural gas prices have fallen and hydrogen reforming technologies have improved.

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_vehicle#Criticism

Boom headshot. Hydrogen/fuel cells were and are DOA.

Part of EV infrastructure is already built, too, and you know this. Yes, we do have to build 9 megashitloads of charging stations, over time. But we may see a model where lots of that charging occurs at home, and the consumer upgrades their own infrastructure, or the power companies offer a free or cheap charging station in return for selling lots more electricity to the customer. I don't see this as an insurmountable issue at all.

Yes, the cost is currently higher, but the obvious point is that it's coming down rapidly per unit of vehicle range. Shelf life of the Prius batteries has proven very very good so far, although that's a hybrid and not a pure electric.

Yes, power is down to an extent not seen since the 19th century. But gas deliveries are affected in a major way, too. Anecdotally, I have tons of friends telling me how hard it is to find gas.

The use case for charging at night already encompasses most drivers in most situations. And with a range of 250-300mi with one-hour recharge at free Tesla stations for longer trips...the use case is getting broader all the time.

What's the deal? Did you buy $1M of Hummer stock and lose your Charles Schwab password? This tech is clearly valid right now and getting more attractive by the year.

It's clear that today's EVs have drawbacks, but many of those drawbacks are non-issues for a lot of consumers out there already. As the technology and infrastructure improve, people will switch.

Subconsciously, most of us feel electric is the way to go. There's just something right about it, maybe because all top consumer technology in the 21st century has a battery inside. Or simply because electricity has been the force driving change in society the last 150 years.

For a long time to come we'll depend on fuel, for hybrids and traditional cars, be it a jeep in the middle of the Amazon or John Doe's, who loves the sound of his V8 Mustang in the morning.

And it works very well: for gasoline. Hydrogen cannot be contained in a rubber hose. Ammonia will eat away copper pipes (see http://encyclopedia.airliquide.com/Encyclopedia.asp?GasID=2#... ). CNG works fine, under pressure, which requires retrofitting everything, but natural gas is a fossil fuel. Biofuels come with a whole host of other problems.

The simple fact is, whatever we use, we're going to have to rebuild stuff. There's no way to reuse the gas infrastructure for any fuel that isn't a non-oxidizing hydrophobic liquid, which rules out approximately everything. Hydrogen fueling stations aren't retrofitted gas stations: they're a totally new thing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_fuel_station#Hydrogen_...

>However, this does not begin to replace the existing extensive gasoline fuel station infrastructure, which would cost a half trillion U.S. dollars in the United States alone.

This is not cheap.

For internal consistency, the argument should have read "batteries will continue to be too heavy and take too long to charge".

Fast charging is faster than that, you just need special power feed, but that can even be included in every home, which is not the case for a gas station.

> Yes, that was my point. Look at all the people in NJ/NY/CT without power.

The actual problem is that the US infrastructure is in bad shape. Also by looking at the news, the places which have issues with electric power seem to also have oil delivery problems as well.

Actually it does, and all of your arguments sound like:

> The gas infrastructure has already been built. [...] EV infrastructure most certainly is not.

which misses the point you're trying to make, which is (emphasis mine):

> I still don't see electric cars as being the future.

Of course things are not ready, because now is not the future.

This kind of things doesn't happen overnight. It's not like Carnot and Otto woke up a morning and everyone sold their horses and were suddenly busy building infrastructure for cars that didn't even exist.

> Given a fairly narrow use case, sure.

Here in France, more than 90% of (non-truck) traffic drives less than 2x10km per day. It is ludicrous to have people drive 160kph+-able 1'000km-ranged seven-seaters alone in a ICE car and spend 30min to drive 5km at 10kph mean. Yes I acknowledge that there exist people who do need longer range vehicles, but numbers demonstrate that many simply don't. (they could statistically almost drive a plug-in Prius in full electric all year round). (The situation is actually even more ludicrous as they're talked into buying mostly diesel cars, whose engines by design constraints completely hate being driven short distances, being started and stopped endlessly, and highly varying rpms, which results in higher fuel consumption, pollution, running costs, and failure rates).

The "running-out-of-energy" argument is for most, a classic case of psychologically biased risk assessment (similar to how people assess the terrorism risk, or planes crashing, while at the same time they smoke, drive recklessly and dry their hair in the bathtub). And you fell for it right there:

> Yes, that was my point. Look at all the people in NJ/NY/CT without power.

Seriously, how often does that happen? I live in comparatively small cities (500k, and 300k before that) and the grid went down on me like three times in twenty years, the longer being a few hours. Also, I don't know how fuel pumps work but I bet they're electric with no fallback so you could very well be unable to refuel a gas car either. And then, what? tomorrow may bring in different habits, and as the dependency on electricity grows the grid will be made more reliable in a way or another (including possible fallbacks like generators in buildings, especially those who already burn some form of fuel to heat water).

The irony is that they could actually have power were their car electric, as some electric cars are designed to be able to power demanding external devices, or even a whole house from the battery (not exactly relevant here, since we're talking about whole buildings).

So, why do they buy such cars around here? Because once a year they go on vacation to the beach for a week or three with family, luggage, dog and cat. They completely overestimate the exceptional need. And contrary to the enthusiast minority, they don't even care what car they own (the logo being a domestic one is often the main - yet untold - argument), so they might as well rent a bigger, longer ranged car for the vacation duration and run on the cheaper car otherwise. Even smarter, take the train and rent the car on arrival. And when they go at Ikea they get delivered or rent a van.

My own brother bought a huge station wagon so that he can lug around bed and fridge when he moves in. Which happens once in ten years (at best). Which is basically the lifetime of the car, or the fridge. Seriously when you move in, you just rent a damn van(which has the advantage of even being able to fit everything at once instead of going back and forth filling the comparatively small SW).

As for energy consumption, it's not even like people will be charging from empty to full every single day, at once (remember 20km per day). And it's not like every single people will move to electric cars at once. So the current network will be able to grow as people slowly migrate to other sources of energy, and we might just even be able to analyse growth and identify the better way to enhance the infrastructure.

Again, we're talking, as you mentioned, about the future. Ten years ago the Internet in your pocket was for the nerdiest of nerds, xDSL was emerging and FTTH was unthinkable. All of that came in gradually, and EV infrastructure will certainly come the same way, just not the same rate.

Back in the day countries had a huge infrastructure for horse-based transport (stables, travellers inns, places to buy food). That was also a sunk cost.

Just a thought.

EV infrastructure, unlike gasoline, can be piggy backed onto existing facilities - service stations, restaurants, hotels... It is much simpler to deploy and maintain - no tanks to install, no gas to deliver, no hazmat, etc. - just a connection to existing electrical infrastructure at those facilites. Adding EV charging to existing businesses also has potential to increase sales as drivers shop, eat and purchase goods etc during the wait. As EV marketshare increases, this will provide motivation to existing businesses to add EV charging capabilities on their own dime and thus stimulate the build out of such infrastructure. Tesla has finally built a practical EV that people want, which can kick start this whole process.

Tesla just released a really big car with a heavy battery that goes 265 miles on a charge (under the very strict new EPA rating; at older methods of measuring range this number would be much higher). So I ask the batteries are too heavy for what exactly?

Also, if you are paying attention, you know that Tesla has just opened to the public a number of Supercharger stations that will charge the Model S battery 50% of the way in about 20 minutes. So your complaint of "wait hours for a charge" is already solved, today, in 2012, at least if you live in California (and Tesla plans to expand the Supercharger network rapidly).

There have been anti-EV arguments for years, but the arguments keep changing, which is how you know that EVs have won. The main argument used to be that EVs would never go far enough, that people would have too much range anxiety. That has been solved. Then the argument was that the cars are too expensive. That is in the process of being solved right now, as you see from Roadster->Model S. There are other problems but they are much smaller. "I park on the street so I don't have a place to charge my car" is not very hard to solve: it is obviously just a matter of will.

If we were to wait for things to get perfectly ready. 90% of the things in this world would never get ready at all.

I beg to differ:

> The Tesla Model S is a great-looking car but, unlike some, I still don't see electric cars as being the future.

The comment is arguing that electric cars are not the future because batteries and energy delivery and what not is not ready now. Guess what, now is not the future. It would be like arguing that ICE cars were not the future in the 19th century.

Regarding energy density - definitely agree, my own research showed me a 2 fold increase in consumption compared to LPG, which in turn increases consumption by 15% over regular petrol (note that these were estimates based on my data).

The lab had a "Hydrogen maker" - obviously it ran off electricity and in about 6 hours provided roughly 500 milliliters of compressed hydrogen (kept at 350 bar if I remember correctly) literally from air.

My concept was to be able to have a clean water tank (pure H2O) and electrolysis providing the Hydrogen to run the engine, and continue on in a closed loop; literally a car running on water. Obviously energy transfer, efficiencies etc make this almost impossible - but one can dream.

When you're racing, you rev your engine before the light turns green and pop the clutch when it turns green.

You don't do that when you're not racing, because it's hard on clutches, and the vast majority of daily drivers are automatics.

When you're racing an electric car, you mash the accelerator when the light turns green, the same way you start the car moving when you're normally driving. So you get race-track start feeling every time you drive your car.

If you exceed the margin requirements because the stock price rises i.e. you owe more than you have capital and credit on hand, your brokerage may force you to "cover" or buy the underlying stock at the current market price. They do this to "call in" your debt to them. This is referred to as a "margin call."

When a lot of short margin calls happen all at once, this is called a "short squeeze" because it squeezes more short sellers into covering by buying the stock at the current market price, which in turn causes the price to rise and squeeze other investors.

In the case of Tesla, the stock is not very liquid. At the current volume, it would take thirty days for all short investors to find enough shares to cover their debts. This means a short squeeze can result in dramatic hikes in the stock price and even small hikes in the price can amplify short seller losses.

Folks' politics and their beliefs about the world are all tied up together.

Even Mitt Romney claims to believe it, but Texas Governor Rick Perry drives a Volt. When I mention that Volts are outselling the original Prius by over 2-to-1, conservatives argue that it's purely government buyers who are forced to buy them by President Obama.

Try explaining to Romney backers that the backlog on the Tesla Model S is in the billions and that their candidate is wrong about the company.