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Comment by Shivetya | Hacker News Reader

The reporter claims the car informed him that "charging complete". That is not the same thing as "you have full range". He also clearly states he was in contact with Tesla throughout the drive and they provided advice, sometimes wrong.

Plus the real negative part of the article that Musk is glossing over is, having to turn off heat in a vehicle just to get somewhere, got to be loads of fun in the summer too.

So what we have is possible confusion on part of the reporter or bad UI design. Either way it only points out that a 100k electric car is not a road trip car. Its a trip for suburbanites or similar. Sure you "can" do a long trip but you don't have the range of alternative a normally fueled vehicle has.

battery powered cars are an interesting technology, I am not quite in agreement they are ready for prime time. Considering the range limits of the top of the line I doubt many would be satisfied with the entry level model.

The big automakers are investigating many different fuel systems simply because they know any replacement to truly take hold has to be simple enough for anyone. It just has too work, there is no place for a list of "buts"

View on HN

> It just has too work, there is no place for a list of "buts"

Of course there is! Here are some example buts for ICEs:

  Gasoline is a dense energy source, but...
  it stinks.
  it's toxic.
  it's too noisy.
  its price is too determined by foreign politics.
  it puts high stress and heat on the car, requiring constant maintenance.
  it's not shelf stable.
  its performance is dependent on altitude.

And the list goes on!

But from an engineering point of view, I just don't find ICEs elegant. Too many moving pieces, and all that for about 30% efficiency (the remaining 70% is lost as waste heat). Good thing gasoline is so energy-dense, because when you're wasting 70% of your energy, you need that.

30% is roughly the peak efficiency of an ICE. Average efficiency throughout a driving cycle is more like 17%.

It turns out, however that when you're talking about transportation, energy density is much more important than efficiency generally speaking.

ICEs are, at their core, plenty elegant. The trouble is efficiency and low emissions are not their strong points.

I would argue that efficiency and low emissions do not preclude something from being elegant. Steam plants can also be elegant, and they can be extremely efficient and low-emissions, but a steam plant cannot be bolted onto a motor car or a small aeroplane for which a turbine would be inappropriate. All forms of heat engines have their upsides and downsides.

Anyway, at the end of the day, consumers don't care one iota about engineering elegance.

The biggest ongoing problem is going to be CO2 emissions. Given few alternatives to ICEs (EVs and hybrid vehicles are available, but unsubsidized TCO remains higher, and even accounting for carbon costs may be higher, I'd have to research that), we're going to have liquid-fueled vehicles for a long time.

The real question is where that fuel will be sourced.

CO2 emissions is coupled to gasoline, not ICEs. Hydrogen ICEs do not give off CO2.

The emissions are going to come from wherever the energy is made.

I'd like to see efforts at using energy sources to manufacture gasoline from environmental sources of carbon, making the fuel carbon-neutral. How does that compare to electric vehicles?

Ok, fine, if you burn coal to produce hydrogen, yes. Hydrogen fuel then indirectly produces CO2.

There have been efforts to do this; basically any form of biodiesel that is produced by bacteria can probably be considered carbon-neutral.

No kidding, I wonder where the poster thinks power on the east coast comes from.

CO2 emissions is coupled to fossil fuels, not necessarily gasoline, if you're talking about renewably-generated gasoline (say from biofuels, though I suspect biodiesel is more likely). And if you're getting hydrogen (an energy storage medium, not an energy source, and an awfully low-density one to boot on a volumetric basis, with significant storage and transport issues) from fossil-fuel generated electricity, you've mostly just transported the CO2 emissions problem (modulo carbon sequestering, which is presently and likely forever highly uneconomic).

I address issues of alternate fuels in a prior post, and suspect we'll see liquid hydrocarbons, of some stripe, for quite some time.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5204104

Edit: speling

I sort of figure your first block of text is self-evident. Apparently a lot of people don't think so; perhaps I need to be much more verbose in the future.

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. H.L. Menken.

A fair number of people can't put it together. The fact that we've extracted and re-released to the atmosphere a significant fraction of the hydrocarbons which have been sequestered via biological activity over a ~260 million year period, within a century, seems to escape a lot of folks.

As does the distinction between energy sources and energy media. And while technically fossil fuels are themselves a medium for sunlight, humans don't have to drive that particular conversion.

Besides, pedantism is one of the rare pleasures of old age.

But for all of that, liquid hydrocarbons offer among the best weight/volume energy storage capacity available to us. The alternatives: EVs, LNG, hydrogen, compressed air, flywheels, etc., just don't hack it. For an efficiency perspective, the next best bet is human-powered vehicles, but these aren't an option for all people. Transit and dense infrastructures are your next best bet.

While I see us moving from fossil fuel, I still see liquid fuels playing an important role in mechanized transit (ground, water, air) for as long as we're technologically capable of doing so.

I share your dislike of ICEs but you are being far too kind with that 30%. At best 20% is (high-end) typical. Which means that for every 5 gallons of fuel you feed it, it throws away 4. That is SUCH poor engineering that it's verging on insane that we've embraced these stinking, finicky beasts long enough to destroy most of the planet's (easy) fossil fuel reserves.

It sounded like the guy from the Times would have welcomed as much "waste heat" as he could get his hands on.

Spoken like an engineer: your points are technically quite correct, and yet, often irrelevant to the consumer!

For the average consumer of automobile technology, these are non-issues. Logistical and pricing issues are moderated and subsidized by governments and car manufacturers. From the consumer's point of view, you go to a gas station once a week, and the car "just works."

As superior as an electric system may be technically, economically, environmentally, etc, if you want it to take off, the UI and logistics need to be smoothed over until you get a similar level of "it just works" which matches the consumer's experience with gasoline.

Irrelevant to the consumer? Hardly:

> it stinks. > it's toxic. > it's too noisy.

These three points affect anyone who lives near heavy automobile traffic. Just because it's an externality doesn't mean it doesn't exist!

> its price is too determined by foreign politics.

When gasoline prices doubled from $2/gallon to $4/gallon, people certainly thought that was relevant. The price spike is partly responsible for the rise in hybrid vehicles.

> it puts high stress and heat on the car, requiring constant maintenance.

Oil changes every 5k miles and major services every 15k don't qualify as "just works" in my book.

> it's not shelf stable.

I'll grant you this one is irrelevant to consumers.

> this one is irrelevant to consumers.

Not if I want to put my car in long-term storage. Then this, too, becomes quite relevant.

Can we stop acting like this is a problem when $5 chemicals off the shelf at your local auto parts store fixes this problem?

Yes we can.

Well, the Tesla cars' batteries are permanently wrecked and have to be replaced - at a cost of about half the price of a new car! - if you put them into long-term storage without leaving them connected to a charger, or if the charger becomes unplugged or loses mains power. That's even worse!

> it stinks. > it's toxic. > it's too noisy. These three points affect anyone who lives near heavy automobile traffic. Just because it's an externality doesn't mean it doesn't exist!

I live near a heavily trafficked road. To be honest these aren't problems; the noise issue is far outweighed by a) people playing uber-loud music on their car stereo (not any different with electric cars) and the noise of the electric train (BART) that runs above the road.

Well, yes, if there's a train right by the road, of course it will be louder. A train is one of the noisiest things you can have around. That's hardly a point in favor of gas cars. This seems a bit like trying to demonstrate that eating a bucket of deep-fried twinkies isn't so bad for you by comparing it to a bottle of bleach.

As an example of the externalities of gasoline, living near a highway has been shown to have high correlation with the incidence of childhood asthma hospitalizations.

Fair enough about stink and noise, but personal experience really isn't good for judging toxicity. Automobile-related pollution is a pretty big deal, but it manifests as large-scale health changes, not immediate personal changes.

(too late to edit the parent) I didn't so much want to defend gasoline cars, as to observe that the externalities are much less of a burden nowadays than people might expect. I was surprised by this myself, but then vehicles in California are orders of magnitude cleaner than the cars I grew up with.

I don't know why people are writing off stinks/toxic/noisy. As someone who has at various times lived near large roadways, this is a huge concern. Car pollution is a really big problem

Because its a problem which affects the environment, not the consumer. You could buy an electric car and it wouldn't help one bit. You'd have to get everyone to buy one.

It's a problem of external effects. Now if we would make an effort to attribute the costs of these external effects to their originator, internal combustion engines would be wholly unavailable to anyone under 1M$ net worth almost instantly. We don't do so because a) it takes effort (and thereby generates costs all in itself) and b) we usually don't care about the plight of future generations and those around us and c) we want the economy not to crash.

And we don't even know about all the external effects that gasoline cars have; there was this article in Mother Jones [1] recently that correlated leaded gas to the crime rate, owing to the detrimental effects lead has on the human brain.

[1]: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-li...

Have you ever sat in traffic? I used to commute in Houston and even with a fairly decent filter on the A/C it stunk.

> Oil changes every 5k miles and major services every 15k don't qualify as "just works" in my book.

There are few items in this day and age that don't require owners to perform periodic maintenance. Tesla cars aren't immune from requiring annual inspections (http://www.teslamotors.com/service) either.

> These three points affect anyone who lives near heavy automobile traffic. Just because it's an externality doesn't mean it doesn't exist!

And the externalities of electric cars matter quite a bit to the people who live next to coal-fired power plants.

Good point, but it is a lot easier to get away from a power plant.

More concentrated, and more efficient, so it affects fewer people and creates less pollution overall. Additionally, we can power them with zero emissions power sources once we get there. People should really stop trotting out the coal power plant argument in trying to claim that this is somehow a relative weakness of EVs, because it's really not.

If you're changing your oil every 5,000 miles, you're wasting your money.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/11/your-money/11shortcuts.htm...

Unless you drive an older car. My 14 year old Saturn's oil was rough when I changed it at 3200. I can probably take it to 5000 now that it has synthetic blend in it, but I'm not going to take a chance with a 154,000 mile old engine.

"Oil changes every 5k miles and major services every 15k don't qualify as "just works" in my book."

Newer cars require oil change/service every 30000 km / 2 years. That would be ~20k miles.

>These three points affect anyone who lives near heavy automobile traffic. Just because it's an externality doesn't mean it doesn't exist!

However, it occurs over such a timespan that the immediate effects are a non-issue, just long-term. The average person does not take into serious consideration the 30+ year effect of a decision, but a more near-term one.

Obviously it has to match or surpass the experience with gasoline. This is what Tesla has done, surpassing that experience for some(rich) people.

The rest is mainly a cost issue. Conventional cars have 100 years of mass production advantage.

It will take some time until price goes down, and catch gasoline. Electronics, batteries and electric engines are way easier to mass produce than thermal engines.

I fail to see how tesla has surpassed the experience of an equivalently prices car.

Perhaps you should ask owners, many of whom I have heard state exactly that. It's big, comfortable, fast, quiet, clean, futuristic, high status, low maitenece and beautiful machine. Not hard to see its appeal.

Fast - most cars that cost that much are fast.

quiet - one of the selling points of expensive cars are how great their engines sound.

beautiful - I don't think it's look compare to an Aston Martin or Maserati. Maybe that's just me.

high status - mostly because they are so new and rare at this point.

I can't commen on the others because I honestly don't know.

It's much faster than other cars in its class. It has supercar worthy acceleration and handling (thanks to that low battery pack it hugs the ground like you have wings).

It's not a sports car, luxury cars pride themselves on what you can't hear.

"It's much faster than other cars in its class."

Well, the best performing option does have excellent acceleration (4.4s to 60) - but they aren't actually that fast in terms of top speed - 130mph. Of course, that is pretty irrelevant to most of us who don't have unrestricted Autobahns to drive on.

"It's not a sports car, luxury cars pride themselves on what you can't hear."

Are you saying people buy a maserati for what they can't hear?

I'm not arguing that it is a bad car. I just don't think we can say it blows away all cars on its luxury and performance.

In other words its not the end all be all of cars.

The original Tesla is a lotus with shed loads of batteries stuffed inside which destroys the handling.

And having to take extreme care to look after the battery is not low maintainance.

If you want a beautiful machine with US style handling buy a Shelby Mustang (though they have now seen sense and make them with a non live back Axel)

I do like the idea of Electric car as a fuel abstraction layer. Say a proper hybrid where it is fully electric motors but could be run completely on a fuel generator that could be any sorts of fuel.

None of which matters a bit if you just want to take the thing on a 200 mile road trip. People do care about the things on that list, but they care about being able to get where they're going more.

It is a source of energy that not every country has enough. Most countries in the world have different sources of energy(from coal to wood, going through nuclear).

The countries that do not have enough of it have to invent stupid excuses for invading the countries that do have, incurring in high costs while killing millions, because if not transportation halts and the economy nukes.

It is a highly pollutant for cities, specially diesel particles that are carcinogenic, while on electric generation plants you could use particle filters that are very efficient and cheap, and also far from where most people lives.

It is very complex and things breaks a lot. You need to change the oil frequently, drive belts and also the brakes while with regenerative braking they last forever.

All but two of these things have ceased to be a problem for many years. Gasoline cars of today are extremely reliable and generally very quiet. The primary source of wear is road abuse on the chassis, given you keep up on oil, and any engine requires lubrication. The primary source of noise on the freeway is wind and road noise.

Many of the other issues with gasoline- smell, toxicity, stability- have been largely addressed by the distribution infrastructure.

Oh, by the way, gasoline isn't all that toxic. It is more hazardous for its volatility rather than any poisonous properties for humans.

Last thought- one of the two things that are still an obstacle (performance at extreme altitude) is firstly always going to be an obstacle for any type of combustion engine and secondly addressable with a turbocharger if you care enough.

Just in case someone thinks drinking gasoline is OK to ingest after reading your comment:

"Inhaling or swallowing large amounts of gasoline can cause death." http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxfaqs/tf.asp?id=467&tid=83

Inhaling or swallowing large amounts of water can also cause death. :)

I challenge you to drink a glass of gasoline.

Anything for meaningless internet points! ;)

How long do I have to keep it down? ;)

1s should be long enough.

I find it amazing how when you throw out exploding millenia old dead plants in a box suddenly your motor and power train are about as complex as a RC matchbox car. Sure, replacing batteries is absurdly expensive, but that really is it. If you can just get the cost of the battery replacements down, you don't have to worry about belts or mufflers or the gear shift breaking due to complex machinery going on the fritz.

I'm sympathetic to electric vehicles, but they don't escape the problem of complexity. There's still power steering, brakes, gearboxes, differentials, a/c, and a million other things that can go wrong - little of which has the 100+ years of engineering development that ICE vehicles have.

I'm not saying don't buy one, but don't expect electric vehicles to be as reliable as ICE vehicles for at least another decade. Maybe two or three.

My Prius (which is almost guaranteed the worst of both worlds as it's both gas and electric) has had a stellar maintenance record - and I'm a very lazy oil changer and neglectful owner.

Electric vehicles using software "clutches" are to ICE-powered cars as SSD is to HDDs - at first, there will be downsides and only the adventurous will get to showboat, but in several generations the only reason you don't get an electric car (SSD) is if you really need the range (storage space using our analogy) or can't afford the upgrade.

I'm sorry, but your view on "extremely reliable and incredibly quiet" is idiotic. Gasoline cars are extremely reliable and incredibly quiet compared to OLDER GASOLINE CARS! Compared to Afghanistan, Iraq is an incredibly safe and quiet country to visit, but for some reason, I'm not planning a trip there anytime soon. Gasoline doesn't even come close to winning internal combusion category. Diesel blows it away in reliability.

Gasoline vehicles have gone from being absolute pains in the ass to maintain (I've worked on and rehabbed many an old vehicle, including mid 80's Oldsmobiles, 70's era air cooled VWs, and mid to late 90's GM vehicles) to significantly less pains in the ass, but still finicky creatures. 4 or 5 years in on modern ICE vehicles, you're going to start seeing problems that can often be expensive. If its not the electrical, it will be failed pump on the cooling system, or even a cracked impeller (now that they are made of plastic).

Can you prevent this all with regular maintenance? Of course, but let's not pretend like this isn't much more complicated than it needs to be. An electric vehicle isn't going to have tubes, pumps, fans, impellers, thermostats, spark plugs, valves,cylinders, ignition coils, injectors, oxygen sensors!!! ($10 part with several hours of labor to replace), catalytic converters... and my god how many other expensive, prone to breaking moving parts can I name.

And then you are sitting there talking about turbochargers? Really?? Do you have any idea what kind of maintenance is required, and oh wait, now we can up our octane to 93, pay out the ass for gasoline, and deal with all the extra wear an tear high compression turbo engines deal with......

but your view ... is idiotic

Thanks, glad to see we have a stage of mutual respect established.

Gasoline doesn't even come close to winning internal combusion category. Diesel blows it away in reliability

Ah, I see, only the most reliable thing can be considered reliable? More importantly, gasoline engines can be designed like diesels. We have direct injection for gas engines. We have low-rpm torquey gasoline engines (see the slant-6). A key reason diesel engines tend to be more reliable is because diesel engines are often used in applications that demand reliability, while gasoline engines are often used in applications that are willing to sacrifice some reliability for extra performance. Which, mind you, is not something electric vehicles will be immune from.

If its not the electrical, it will be failed pump on the cooling system

And I suppose you think electric vehicles don't have liquid cooling and heating systems? Cute.

Why exactly would an ELECTRIC VEHICLE be less prone to electrical failure, anyway?

talking about turbochargers ... do you have any idea what kind of maintenance is required...

No, I have no idea. In fact, I've never even heard of turbochargers before, I'm not sure why I said that word!

Turbochargers are a trade-off to handle a deficiency. Electric cars make trade-offs too, as they are not perfect either; their deficiencies are simply different.

high compression turbo engines

Who said anything about that?

From personal and anecdotal experience, ultra modern diesel engines are pretty sensitive little beasts.

I still prefer Diesels for my own transport.

Re turbochargers: For a sufficiently high fuel price, compression becomes a necessity. Atmospheric engines have more or less disappeared (100% for diesel since about 10 years) from the lineup of European manufacturers for example.

An (really?) "ICE" aka internal combustion engine isn't limited to gasoline it can also burn alcohol, natural gas, propane and I'm sure many other less smelly fuels.

Diesel is another but it's a bit smelly although I was behind a Mercedes diesel SUV and didn't realize it until I read the rear badge, no smell at all.

Although bio-diesel or even straight vegetable oil can be burned since Rudolph Diesel intended the diesel engine to run on peanut oil so farmers could afford the fuel.

Some of us like the noise.

Toxic? You should see how the batteries for electric cars are made, they are much more toxic than gas...

The "buts" that come with the ICEs don't tend to directly contradict the baseline purpose of the car, though.

I agree with the gist, but a modern car's performance won't degrade with altitude: the ECU controls the engine's air intake pressure, so you might get a bit of extra wear on the forced induction system from the extra compression needed, but I don't think you'll see a perforamcne drop.

Once the Supercharger network is in place, I'll be driving my Model S up to my parent's house next Thanksgiving from Atlanta. That's 1000 miles, without any concerns about heating or AC usage.

The reporter in this article both failed to charge his car as much as needed and took a large detour that took off some range of the car. If you want to drive recklessly, sure, you're going to run into issues. But there is a significant enough Level 2 charging infrastructure already and Tesla's Level 3-ish Supercharger network is going to supplement that entirely. As it is, I can already take long trips. I just have to wait longer for a full Level 2 charge than I will on a Supercharger in the very near future.

How long does it take to charge with a Supercharger?

30 minutes.

The gal at the Tesla store by me told me an hour.

30 minutes for 150 miles of range from a near-empty battery. Approx 60 minutes for a full charge from empty. It does slow down as it gets closer to full, but the timeframe is measured in minutes instead of hours.

That's good, so it's basically "stop a bit, have a cup of coffee while your car charges"? Still not compared to gasoline, but, hey, viable electric cars!

More like a lunch time meal and dinner, considering I've got 17 hours of driving in front of me at that point. That's about 3 meals, so most of my stops will be for longer periods of time anyways.

So add on about 12% onto a time estimate to account for the extra charging time. I'm estimating about 2.5 hours for 150 miles which isn't unreasonable for freeway driving.

If you're going < 300 miles, then it's really a moot point anyways. At that range, you'll have enough in the battery before leaving to get you there without a charge along the way.

And that's awesome until yo need to go beyond that single charge range. Then charging might be a problem where ever you wind up still, though it is getting much better I admit.

So for a 1000 mile trip, that is going to be about 6 charging stops.

3 hours added to the trip - and probably more like 4 hours when you consider that the Supercharger stations are not going to be located right on the main roadways all the time.

A 1000 mile trip in a gas vehicle would require 3, maybe 4 fuel ups. I've timed my fill-ups many times, 7 minutes from off the road to back on (assuming an en-route gas station) is about the average. So, figure 28 minutes lost to fueling, vs. 4 hours. The Tesla will take at least 3.5 hours longer to make the same trip.

1000 miles at an average of 50 mph (seems low, but I've driven 720 mile trips from NH to MI many times) is 20 hours if you drive straight through. 20.5 hours with gas, 24 hours with Superchargers.

I love the Tesla cars, I've seriously considered the Model S, but I don't see how (for me) it is really a viable long-distance driver yet. Yes, you have a better chance of not getting stranded vs. maybe a Nissan Leaf, but it's a suboptimal alternative to gasoline still.

To be fair, you're going to have to take rest stops of that kind of length for a 1000 mile drive.

True, but you may not want to leave your vehicle plugged in by itself for 30 ~ 60 minutes. I guess you could get food and eat it in/around the car while it charged...

Why wouldn't you want to do that? I leave my car parked in places that I'm not all the time.

I don't leave my car unattended while fuelling it. I realize that you would leave your car unattended for other things.

I assume that you don't leave it unattended since someone could start stealing the gas which you are paying for?

I think that is partially the idea with supercharger stations--that there will be amenities nearby within eyeshot of the cars.

I think it'd be cool to have coffee shops or a lounge setting where you can use your computer in a relaxed environment while you make sure nobody messes with your car.

But honestly, when on a road trip with family, I am lucky to have a stop as short as 1 hour if we are eating a meal.

The charger cable locks into the charging port while the car is locked, so no one is going to mess with it while you're gone.

> so no one is going to mess with it while you're gone.

Rrriiiiggght. No one would ever key the paint work, slash the tires, (attempt to) hack the onboard systems of, or vomit into an unattended luxury car.

A better argument would be that the car is being charged on camera at a human attended station that takes security seriously.

Rrriiiggght. People driving BMW's always stay in their cars or park them human attended parkinglots that take security seriously - if someone doesn't, then it usually results in keyed paint work, slashed tires or vomit in your car.

Everything you mentioned except the somewhat silly "attempt to hack the onboard systems [in a half hour]" is stuff that ICE luxury cars are just as subject to. Save for the possible novelty thrill of messing up an electric car vs. a combustion one, this risk isn't increased at all.

I said nothing about increased risk, I addressed the issue of the car being "safe" for the 30 minutes or longer that it takes to charge simply because "The charger cable locks into the charging port while the car is locked, so no one is going to mess with it while you're gone."

As for "novelty value and thrill" well, yes, it's stupid, pointless, and exactly the kind of dumb arse flash fad that has happened in the past and could well happen in the future - there's no logic to such things.

If there is no increased risk, then it is "safe" relative to the normal baseline for "safe" that most people would apply to a car. Pointing out that it is not safe in some unrealistic absolute sense is kind of pointless, don't you think?

It's like telling someone that a neighborhood he's thinking of moving into is unsafe without mentioning that your assessment based on the fact that the neighborhood is as likely as any other to get hit by a meteor. That doesn't qualify it as an "unsafe neighborhood" on the scale most people care about.

It depends on the journey, but you may also have an extra 2-3 year delay while you wait for the construction of an inland super charger network.

Your math is all wrong because you assume you're some sort of anaerobic being that doesn't consume food or produce waste :)

All those Supercharging stations are going to be located right next to places to eat. With about 4-5 hours between stops, that's right around when my stomach is going to start rumbling and I'll want to take a longer stop anyways.

150 mile range even at 50 mph is only 3 hours between stops, right?

We stop every 1.5 hours, when possible, for stretch/potty breaks, and every 3 hours or so for food. I think that planning your meals around charging isn't such a bad idea.

They'd likely need more charging ports, though, in the long term.

If McDonalds are smart, they'll install charging stations at their restaurants. Maybe even with solar panels.

I believe the one in Connecticut is in a highway rest stop with a McDonald's in it.

Actually my math is based on real world experience. I can easily drive for 12 hours straight without a major food break. Quick bio break at a gas station, sure. Turn a 7 minute fillip into a 12 minute fill up.

On a trip that long, my wife is generally along as we'll, so we can trade off shifts driving. We will usually bring some snacks to eat along the way as well.

So, my numbers are still pretty accurate. You can go farther between fill ups on gas, and you can refuel (you, and the car) in less than 30 minutes ( or 45-60 minutes of you need more than a top-off, based on accessories use in the vehicles).

That sounds like hell on wheels. If you're worried about your long-haul trip taking an extra 30 minutes every two hours, maybe you should be flying instead?

I would also be concerned about increasing travel time by 25%. That's hardly trivial.

To establish a frame of reference, this means SF <-> LA would take ~7 hours instead of 5.5. SF <-> San Diego would be just shy of 10 hours.

Just betting that you don't regularly travel with kids...

I just drove from San Francisco to San Jose yesterday with my family, had to stop twice along the way for near-emergency bathroom breaks. 45 minutes every 4 hours sounds like NO PROBLEM.

Your wife is a saint.

All of this going on the assumption that the charge station is not fully occupied at the time you want to recharge, which with 30 to 60 minute recharge times is going to get improbable pretty fast when electric cars become more popular. Imagine everyone at the local gas station leaving their car at the pump for 60 minutes...

I think we can safely conclude that unless there is going to be a huge breakthrough in battery technology really soon, EV's that run on batteries alone are not going to be a success for anything but short-distance commutes.

I'm still hoping for breakthroughs in other technologies that would make generating electricity so cheap that we can afford to waste a lot of it producing hydrogen. That would instantly obviate the need to lug around heavy batteries that take long to recharge, run out fast, require a lot of energy to produce, and are full of nasty chemicals that pollute the areas where they are mined.

Battery-powered EV's simply aren't all roses and sunshine, and I'm frankly quite amazed how easy the negatives are papered over.

I've stopped by one supercharger station (Tejon Ranch) and I believe they had 6 charging spots.

The big thing that you're not accounting for is that the majority of charging is probably going to be done at home just letting it charge overnight. Also, you don't need a huge, expensive, and maintenance intensive gas pump at every station, you just need a power cord and some way for someone to swipe a credit card. No more having huge gas tanks buried beneath the pavement, just have an extremely beefy electrical hookup and you're good to go. Everything is all solid state with no moving parts, heck you could even disable the car while it's being charged to prevent idiots from taking off without unhooking first.

The Model S won't move while plugged in, no need to worry about idiots.

You could do that with any car with a pressure sensor on the gas intake. Though thumbs up for Tesla adding that feature.

Superchargers are intended for on-the-road, long-haul recharge. While your local gas station is used by everyone in the neighborhood, most Tesla drivers, most of the time, will be charging overnight or during work hours at home, work, or a dedicated car park. Which should reduce demand somewhat.

From Google Maps, the Harris Ranch location is presently a single charging station. That is something which should be readily scalable as demand rises.

Your usage pattern at a given Supercharger station would be a factor of total traffic on nearby highways, Tesla ownership, and recharge needs. Present stations are at highway plazas -- not necessarily in high-ticket areas (hello, Harris Ranch and Barstow), but given the vehicle owner demographics and minimum 30 minute linger time, they'll likely offer typical captive-audience amenities, so the time won't be a total loss.

And charging is possible from other outlets, though at 5 miles/hour from 110AC, that's a good (or bad) 60 hours to recover full range. More likely you're getting sufficient charge to get to a higher-rated output.

Further though: so long as queuing depth is one vehicle (that is, you arrive, all chargers are filled, and there are no vehicles in front of you), the mean wait time assuming a 50% charge is 30/n, where n is the number of stations. So, 6 stations, queue depth of 1, you'll wait on average 5 minutes for someone to pull out, extending your total recharge time to 35 minutes. If Tesla strives for this as a 95%+ level of service, it should be tolerable, though high-travel periods (holiday weekends in particular) would tend to be worst-case scenarios.

Correcting myself: mean wait time would be 30/(2*n). As on average you'll arrive when another car is halfway through its charging period. So for a 6-charger station, 2.5 minutes wait time. On average.

> unless there is going to be a huge breakthrough in battery technology really soon, EV's that run on batteries alone are not going to be a success for anything but short-distance commutes

I don't think that's the only option, battery swapping springs to mind as an alternative to beat the problem.

I would also take the cost of refueling in to consideration. Superchargers are free.

When Google's self-driving cars get off the ground, maybe we'll one day have a network of on-the-road recharging bots.

When Zipcar gets a hold of Google's self-driving cars, then you won't even have to wait around at the recharging stations. You can just jump into the next available fully-charged car, and off you go. With a reservation, the entire route could be automatically planned ahead of time with railroad-esque precision. You heard it here first!

Depends on where you're going and what you're carrying.

Family of four with a baby or two, and a trunk / roof rack full of luggage? Transferring between cars would be a bit of a PITA. I'd opt for the swappable battery in that case (or a liquid-fueled vehicle).

If you want to do long trips you could change the battery. The battery of the Tesla S is flat and on the floor, attached with a few screws..

Changing it takes seconds, the entire operation more or less like going to the gas station to fuel a conventional car.

Do you mean carry an extra battery, or do an exchange? While you "could" do an exchange, similar to how propane tank exchanges work, do you really want to be trading your pampered battery in for some random battery with an unknown history?

Yeah, because you will exchange it again later that day anyway.

Battery swap almost necessitates leasing the battery. You cannot reasonably own a $10,000 thing you swap multiple times a week. But leasing it works extremely well.

I assume that such a lease approach would have to carry insurance to cover battery damage, similar to buying coverage for car rentals. At least with car rentals, the insurance isn't very affordable, and leads to some people being irresponsible with the property.

The insurance for a car lease is totally affordable. And that's what it would be -- a long-term lease.

You would lease a battery for 3 or 5 years from a company, and then swap at that company's swap stations. They would bill you on something like total miles put on the vehicle or total miles delta put on at swap stations. You would have exactly one entity with which you would interact in case of battery issues: the company.

That's a much more scalable approach. Supercharging stations, etc, seem like an insufficient band-aid. Imagine a gas station with each pump occupied for 30 minutes a piece.

That was basically the business idea of Better Place. Last I heard though they hadn't gained much traction.

They had the dumb idea of using renewable energy for the charging stations and, here's the dumb part, BUILDING THEIR OWN CARS instead of licensing out the battery tech to all the car companies for cheap. It was pretty clear for all the glowing profiles that came out when the company was forming that the guy running it was charismatic but a flaker.

That makes the most sense. Imagine a Jiffy Lube style setup: you drive on to a station, robotic arms automatically remove your battery and install a new one, and you're on your way. Total time: under 2 minutes. Boom!

Where is eat and sleep in this equation? In a gasoline car, it's just sitting around doing nothing while you stop for lunch or sleep.

All of what you said is true, but what people who buy these cars read is

"Only a four hour difference for not using gas? Sign me up!"

I see what you mean about convenience, but a lot of people will forgo that. Besides, if you're traveling 1000 miles, why does 4 hours matter unless you have a hard deadline and need to travel straight through?

I tend to measure long drives in terms of how long it will be until I don't have to get back in the car. That probably isn't the right mindset for a 1,000 mile trip, but there you go.

Anyway, the whole discussion is silly, no one buys a $45,000 car with a less than 200 mile range for the practicality of it.

On the other hand: you'll be shelling out about $60 for each gas station stop; and $0 for each Supercharger stop. That adds up too, you know.

> So for a 1000 mile trip, that is going to be about 6 charging stops.

> 3 hours added to the trip - and probably more like 4 hours when you consider that the Supercharger stations are not going to be located right on the main roadways all the time.

On the other hand, with normal commuting patterns you have to refuel your gasoline car about once every two weeks or month depending on the car and your driving habits. With an electric car, you just plug in every night and never stop at a smelly gross gas station again.

I don't know why people complain that when you use a product for what it's not designed for, it's bad at it. Electric cars are bad for road trips. If you're going 1,000 miles, use an airplane or at least a train.

Why don't they rent (instead of selling) the batteries, and have stations to swap your battery for a full one before recharging the empty one at their leisure? That could take the "refuel" time down to a minute!

The batteries are huge and, in the case of the Model S, are built into the chassis of the car.

an image: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AnwyDQUET2I/T6dyawydsqI/AAAAAAAAAG...

The batteries weigh about half a ton. It's not like swapping the AA's in your Wiimote.

There's a company based in Israel that's taking that exact approach:

http://www.betterplace.com/How-it-Works

unfortunately - I'm not sure how much longer Better Place will be around: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place

"In early October 2012, Agassi resigned from his role as worldwide Better Place CEO, and was replaced by Evan Thornley, CEO of Better Place-Australia. Briefly, Agassi remained on the company board, but a week later he resigned from that position as well. A few days after Thornley's appointment, Better Place asked its investors for a round of emergency funding, totaling about $150 million.[8][9] On October 11, 2012, Haaretz reported that Better Place might lay off up to half its staff of several hundred employees.[10] On October 29, 2012, Ynet reported that Better Place would that week lay off 150 to 200 people out of its 400-person staff in Israel as it seeks financing to combat its cash-flow problems.[11] In late January 2013, Thornley resigned, and Dan Cohen was named acting CEO by the board.[12]"

I find it funny that 2 out of 3 replies to your comment are explaining why it is impossible, and the third is a link to the company that made it work.

How much strain does that place on the battery?

You would be better off flying or renting a gasoline/diesel powered car. You cannot be assured the charging stations will work, not be in use, or situations change which prevent you from getting to one.

1000 miles on a single tank of diesel are possible with the right car (BMW/Audi/VW).

> Plus the real negative part of the article that Musk is glossing over is, having to turn off heat in a vehicle just to get somewhere, got to be loads of fun in the summer too.

You "have" to do the same thing in a gas powered car if you don't fill up the tank when given the chance.

What? Using the heater does not affect range in a gas powered car.

> got to be loads of fun in the summer too.

This part of the quote was added after I replied

The cooler does, though (parent might be referring to the "in the summer" part).

Sure, but using the A/C certainly does.

As I mentioned, this was added in an edit - but even the A/C doesn't affect range as much as you might think. It is roughly ~8% in your typical ICE, which is less than rolling your windows down at highway speeds. No idea what the effect of running AC on a Tesla's range is though.

www.sae.org/events/aars/presentations/2004-hill.pdf

When I first heard the A/C vs. windows-down comparison it struck me as non-intuitive. I eventually reasoned that having windows down at speed results in moving much more air through the cabin than the A/C does. It takes work to move air, but it also takes work to run the compressor. There would have to be a break-even point at which having e.g. the driver's window and the rear passenger's window down a couple of inches each is cheaper than the A/C.

Interestingly, the graphs on pages 14 and 15 of the linked report don't appear to support your point. That is, the green curve is strictly less than the blue curve at all investigated speeds.

> Using the heater does not affect range in a gas powered car.

It typically does (though not as much as the chiller would).

There's two costs to using the heater:

1. The electricity to power the fan comes from the engine. I'm not sure how much of an impact this actually is (depends on the power the fan needs) but there's something there.

2. The heat from the heater comes from the engine block, which cools the engine. On cold days (<15 F) this can have a huge impact on the engine's temperature and will often cool the engine well below it's most efficient operating temperature.

Isn't it using electricity that is already being generated by the alternator whether the heat is on or off?

Not exactly... the alternator provides "up to" a certain amount of electricity, but as more of that electricity is actually used for things it gets harder for the engine to spin the alternator and so you end up using (slightly) more gas.

The alternator (or really any electric generator) has a magnetic field, and a lot of coiled up wire. Moving the wire thru the field generates electricity, the faster the wire moves the higher the voltage is. But the more current is moving thru the wire (more load, more things using the electricity), the more it pushes back against the magnetic field (because that current in the wire generates its own field) and so the harder it is to make it move.

No. The greater the electrical load placed on the alternator, the greater the parasitic load on the accessory belt.

That being said the amount of electricity, and thus the load on the belt, to run the fan is very very tiny compared to the energy required to heat the air. In an ICE, the heat energy is literally free. You were going to dump it anyway, might as well be into the cabin.

I agree with siblings that we're not talking about a significant effect on mileage, but technically there is still an effect. When the ventilation fan kicks on, this will be an additional current draw. Since the voltage regulator is an analog device, it will respond to the resulting slight dip in system voltage by increasing the alternator field strength slightly. The engine will then have to apply slightly more torque to the alternator, which will burn slightly more fuel.

Since engine speeds vary greatly, having a dumb alternator that provided power scaled in proportion to RPM would be a disaster.

That's not how a generator works. Take a DC motor and spin it with your hand and it'll generate a bit of a voltage potential across the terminals on the motor. If you short those together and then try to turn the motor you'll notice that it's significantly harder to turn.

Look, electric cars are great, and I'm looking forward to the day when I can buy one, but this is BS.

First, the power the run the fan is minuscule. On the order of a few Watts. Maybe a few tens of Watts at most. It's an order of magnitude less than what is needed to run seat heaters (and those have almost no measurable effect on a Model S's range, which is why "range mode" uses seat heat in favor of air conditioning). The energy use you're talking about is enough to move the car an extra few hundred feet after a multi-hundred mile drive.

Second, every ICE has a thermostat on the radiator. It greatly reduces coolant flow to the radiator when the car is warming up, or any other time that the coolant is below optimal temperature. I spent many years in the northern (continental) United States and never encountered a situation where the coolant temperature gauge on an ICE car failed to show normal operating temperature after 10-20 minutes of warm-up time.

The cold-weather fuel economy difference in a conventional car mostly comes down to greater air density.

Wouldn't colder air, and thus higher air density, be more efficient, not less efficient?

Drag goes up proportional to the density of the fluid. Having more oxygen to run your engine will give you more energy, but I suspect that it won't keep up with increases in drag.

Oxygen density is also proportional to the density of the fluid, so this should be a wash.

Yeah I suspect this is it. The density is inversely proportional to temperature and drag is proportional to to density. Even if the engine is more efficient (in a steady state) with denser air, the relationship is probably sub-linear.

I think lower ICE fuel economy comes at higher altitudes, not necessarily colder climates -- though there is a correlation.

The sparse atmosphere robs the engine of power, just as it reduces your body's ability to gather oxygen.

Colder weather reduces fuel efficiency because during warmup, extra fuel is injected into the cylinders to maintain performance, since it's harder to get ignition when the air is colder. In other words, better to waste some fuel than to hit the gas and have a lot less acceleration than usual.

My car is markedly less efficient in winter on short trips, even though England doesn't moves vertically with the seasons. Over longer journeys this phenomenon is much less of a problem.

The engine's preferred operating temperature is much higher than any reasonable air temperature, and until that point is reached the engine oil will be less lubricative and the fuel (particularly in the case of diesel) less inclined to combust. It will naturally take longer to reach that preferred temperature when it is cold outside, because not only is the air cold but the engine is also this big lump of cold metal, absorbing the heat of combustion and pulling it away from the cylinder where it is needed.

In a modern car, the ECU controls the air intake pressure, so all higher altitude would mean is that the turbo system would spin a bit faster.

The sparse atmosphere robs the engine of power, but that doesn't mean that it is less efficient, I think that matters on the car/driver.

Personally, high altitude driving helps my fuel economy -- I would speculate that it's due to decreased air resistance and the lack of power forcing me to drive a little more conservatively.

No. There's a reason why racers love cold air intakes, and it's not for efficiency, it's because you get to burn more fuel and thus make more power!

The extra fuel comes automatically because modern EFI (electronic fuel injection) motors use several sensors in a feedback loop to ensure that the air:fuel ratio is 14.7:1

There is an air temp sensor and compensation that adds roughly 1% fuel for every 10F drop in temperature. Then the oxygen sensor in the exhaust system measures whether combustion is hitting the 14.7:1 target and adds or subtracts fuel accordingly.

> I spent many years in the northern (continental) United States and never encountered a situation where the coolant temperature gauge on an ICE car failed to show normal operating temperature after 10-20 minutes of warm-up time.

Go further North. I have not seen the temperature gauge on my car move since about October, and I have a huge piece of cardboard blocking the entire radiator to stop air flow.

I have a huge piece of cardboard blocking the entire radiator to stop air flow.

This won't make any difference unless the thermostat is open. If your temperature gauge is on "cold", you're not even close to the point where the thermostat will open if it's operating normally. Which raises the question: have you had your thermostat checked to make sure it's not stuck open?

> This won't make any difference unless the thermostat is open

Actually, it makes a huge difference as it stops an enormous amount of very cold air going through/around the radiator onto the engine. Everyone up here does it, else cars would not be warm enough to run properly.

> Have you had your thermostat checked to make sure it's not stuck open?

Of course. Everything works great in summer when it's ~+25C

To give you a better understanding of how cold -50C actually is, I can drive for an hour, get out and put my hand directly on the exhaust manifold of my 4-cyl East-West engine (exhaust at front for cooling) and it's only just warm to the touch.

It's cold. Very cold.

-50C

Ah, that explains it. :-) I used to do cold weather testing when I worked as an automotive engineer; the coldest we ever tested at was -30 C, and there were plenty of test vehicles that didn't fully warm up at that temperature.

Check your thermostat, if it's too cold it should block off the radiator completely meaning that your piece of cardboard would do nothing if it was working properly.

More to the point: the energy-intensive aspect of heating an ICE car, the heat itself, is a waste product of the engine and needs to be removed regardless. Even in cold weather.

In an EV, heat must be generated at a very high energy expense. You can play with the mileage range estimator on Tesla's website. For the largest capacity (85 kWh) batter, heat knocks range down by about 50 miles. Depending on conditions, at 55 MPH, you're talking 350 to 300 or so with heat at 32F. A gasoline powered ICE will likely actually get slightly higher performance due to greater thermal gas expansion at low temperatures, and lower overall cooling demand: while running the cab heater doesn't consume much power, spinning the radiator fan does, and can usually be avoided in cold weather.

Source: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/autos/gasoline-faq/part3/

This is reaching a bit.

1) The nominal amount of electricity used by a heater blower motor is not going to measurably affect the range of your trip (this is most likely the same for the Tesla)

2) The heat from the engine block is waste heat from the relatively inefficient combustion process. This heat has to be actively dissipated in most driving conditions (typically even in winter). It is essentially free to pipe this heat into the cabin. Now contrast this with the Tesla's 400 electrical resistance heater, which has to directly compromise range to generate cabin heat.

I'm mildly curious why they use direct electrical resistance. It's not like you can't make heat pumps that operate down past 0F.

My mitsubishi mini-split: 1. Can produce it's full BTU load all the way down to 5F, and 75% BTU load down to -13F. 2. Doesn't bother to blow air until it's warm :)

They aren't even that much larger than a resistance based coil system (though I could imagine the model S may not be able to fit them)

The electricity to power the fan comes from the engine. I'm not sure how much of an impact this actually is

The fan practically never runs in cold weather. The only time it's needed is in hot weather, when you're stopped or at low speed and there's not enough airflow over the radiator and/or condenser. In cold weather the thermostat controls engine temperature, not the radiator, so the fan never gets told to turn on.

Not the radiator/cooling fan(s), the climate control system/vent fan(s.

Ah, ok. That actually does draw a significant fraction of the available power on the 12V electrical system (in my car the interior lights dim perceptibly when the climate control blower is on high), but by the standards of the engine it's still not much.

On several occasions I've had to judiciously use A/C in hot weather in my petrol powered car, so that sort of power/thermal management seems to be a "real negative" of cars in general.

"Plus the real negative part of the article that Musk is glossing over is, having to turn off heat in a vehicle just to get somewhere, got to be loads of fun in the summer too."

If that is the negative part then write an article about that and see how many views it gets. Fabricating a bunch of stuff will get more hits.

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