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Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Musk seems to be this generation's Howard Hughes, and out of the complete pantheon of internet-famous technical folk, he's the one guy I could consider a hero.

Having said all of that, I sincerely hope we keep some sort of sense of detachment about all of this. Having Tesla play the role of Apple while fanboys and an fawing press cover each move does not help the rest of the startup community.

We have a million other problems to solve, not just electric cars and cheaper access to space. It's important to see past the fluff pieces to the underlying business decisions in order to harvest tactics than can be used by all.

tl;dr: big Musk fan, but let's be careful with the hype. It can obscure important lessons.

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I think the interesting thing about electric cars is that they can contribute to the solution of several other issues. They are much cleaner technology, so they would help reduce air pollution as well as slow down global warming. The former also means fewer pollution-related problems like lung cancer and asthma.

I know this sounds like grasping at straws, but I'm speaking in the long run (~50 years). I think the effects will be noticeable then.

I think you're jumping ahead a least a few decades. Most electricity in the USA is generated from coal, though increasingly, natural gas. And we simply do not have the residential electrical infrastructure in place to support significant numbers of households charging one or two cars at night.

Coals and natural gas power plants are still a more efficient source of energy than gasoline.

Yeah, Musk talked about this in several interviews. Basically, the average efficiency for energy generation at the power plant is 60%, because the power plant is able to capture a lot of waste and reuse it. Whereas the efficiency of energy generation in an internal combustion engine is about 20%. Therefore, if all cars switched to electric, we would be looking at a 200% increase in efficiency in car transportation.

The 60% was specifically about a good, big GE combined cycle natural gas plant. I was under the impression that for a purely steam powered generator, such as you have in a coal or nuclear plant, significantly less than 60% of the heat turns into electricity.

I thought he was also saying that an internal combustion engine burning natural gas is about 20% efficient, with the implication that if you are absolutely determined to power a vehicle with natural gas, burning the gas in a big turbine and using it to charge batteries is going to be significantly more energy efficient than burning the natural gas directly in the vehicle.

You sure about that? Overnight is off-peak time. I'm highly suspect of the idea that we can run central air conditioning in every house all day -- plus normal usage -- but we don't have the grid capacity to charge 1-2 cars overnight.

And on your coal point, so called "clean coal", while not really clean, is a helluva lot cleaner than a gasoline burning ICE.

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