How Tesla-Toyota Project Led to Culture Clash by Opposites
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
And just how did he decide to execute his grand electrified vision? By backporting electric propulsion onto an existing SUV platform. Yeah, this is exactly the moment where this particular piece of journalistic spin comes crashing down.
The RAV4 EV was sold only in California precisely because it was a compliance car. Toyota simply decided it was cheaper to leverage their existing investment into Tesla to produce an EV on the cheap that could get them the required environmental credits so they could continue to sell their actual vehicles without having to buy the credits at a (at the time) large cost from other manufacturers. It was a simple localized business decision, not some grand strategy.
Of course Musk doesn't just ridicule fuel cells, he affectionately calls them "fool cells". As someone who builds his businesses by reasoning from first principles, he justifiably doesn't understand the idea of swapping a 20% efficient (if you're very lucky) combustion engine with a 10% efficient, experimental fuel cell when you could instead use a dead simple, clean and 80%+ efficient electric motor.
That's almost an ironic statement, given that his whole game-plan with Tesla and SpaceX has been aggressively commercializing extremely efficient implementations of proven, well-understood technologies.
I love Elon Musk, but there's an additional wrinkle here. Fuel cells are much further from commercialization than lithium ion, and needs a lot more basic R&D, and Tesla doesn't have the time or resources to go down that road. Toyota does. This is not to say whose approach is right, but rather that there is a lot more in play than "first principles."
Examples: Apple: Nobody wants native apps, theywant the mobile web. Oracle: You don't need row locks (row level locking appears in Oracle 7, as a premium add-on called the Transaction Processing Option).
This is mainly driven home by the idea that hydrogen is very much in abundance in the universe, but here on earth it really only exists as hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons are a tricky thing to exploit without contributing to global warming.
Uh, water?
Another compound worth mentioning is ammonia. A lot of the current hydrogen harvesting research revolves around ammonia. Unfortunately, ammonia is very scarce in nature and certainly soon exhaustible as a global fuel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell#Theoretical_maximum_...
Comparing tank-to-wheel efficiency of the whole vehicle, fuel-cell vehicles average 36%, compared to 22% for diesel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell#In_practice
Could you explain how you got the 10% / 20% efficiency numbers you mentioned? Your combustion numbers are in the same ballpark, but you got a much different result for fuel cells.
Genuinely curious, thanks!
From a non-technical perspective, the battery capacity is what sets Tesla apart from every other EV available today. Musk seems to understand that quite well.
What I'm interested in is the efficiency of the whole process in the car that turns the fuel into motion. In the Tesla, the electricity is stored in batteries which have few losses and goes directly into a highly efficient electric motor, so it gets that 80% overall.
1: In practice, the setup electric engine for propulsion + combustion engine for electricity tends to be somewhat more efficient than just the combustion engine for propulsion, as you can run the combustion engine at a constant, efficient range of RPM.
Did you read your parent post? "What I'm interested in is the efficiency of the whole process"
“A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”
So, sure, right now, the energy density of gasoline makes terribly inefficient combustion engines practical. But their energy density isn't going up (while lithium batteries are improving and coming down in price), certainly gasoline isn't going to get cheaper, and as for the combustion engine, well thats pretty played out after 100 years of trying to improve it.
Lithium-Ion battery energy density has about doubled in the last 25 years: http://futurist.typepad.com/my_weblog/images/2008/03/11/batt.... Even if gas technology stops improving tomorrow, it'll take 100-200 years to catch up on the energy density front.
From my armchair perspective, the Tesla Model S would be equally useful to any gasoline car for all but a handful of edge use cases, with only the minor change of adding a metal-air battery as a range extender for excessively long trips. And that's today, not 100 years from now.
The saying also deserves an addendum: "... if you've got the time."
The strength of the battery+motor electric drivetrain is that it's modular. Come up with another energy storage method, build it into a power pack, then plug it right into existing Tesla S cars, get the over the air software update, and you're back in business. There's also all of that frunk space.
Energy density is what I meant. I found some graphs to look at. You are probably right about there being lots more room for improving energy density.
Can you elaborate on your reasoning?
Frankly, energy density is a bit of an distraction. If we go by energy density alone, we would presumably all be cruising on Uranium, which energy density is... well off the charts.
But there a plenty of good reasons we don't fuel transport with Uranium, and there are just as many good reasons why we shouldn't continue to use gasoline.
whereas upgrading both domestic and the grid to support widespread electric charging has a lot of cost and infrastructure issues.
Also My local small petrol station can fuel say 60 cars an hour have you any idea what sort of HVAC plant is needed to store and deliver that sort of power.
You can convert IC engines to burn hydrogen and they can just slot right into existing models.
You can also use intermittent wind and solar power to create Hydrogen for use later.
Most A/C and heat, dryer, range are 240V.
An electric car can charge at night when load is low, so the power infrastructure that is engineered for high demand due to cooling in the middle of the day in summer will work just fine if everyone is charging at night. In other words, the grid is already mostly robust enough to handle this load.
Also what happens when a large number of people put their cars on charge when they come home from work.
You're comparing apples and oranges. That electricity isn't generated via a particularly efficient mechanism after all.
If we consider a solar cell with top of the line 15% efficiency and use that to charge our electric car, of course the overall efficiency takes a sharp drop. But I don't think it is useful to include the efficiency of the solar cell in the calculation here. After all, the 85% that the solar cell couldn't convert into electricity aren't useable by any other way known to man either; the loss is neither here nor there because we can't do better utilizing the sun than with current gen solar panels.
If you consider, however, that oil refineries consume significant amounts of electricity (from the grid, no electricity equivalents here) to refine oil into something our cars can use, that is certainly a factor we need to include in the efficiency calculation for gasoline powered cars. That electricity could have been used to power an electric car, after all, so there was an actual loss here.
Unless you're talking about converting natural gas or coal directly to hydrogen, which is just as asinine.
Just because they didn't share code (since they were both doing it, it makes it a common mindset for both and not a difference in culture) and one thought the brakes should be less jerky isn't some massive difference in culture. Any complex engineering project will have many difference in opinion you can nitpick. But I saw nothing in the article that shows these differences were what led to the breakup.
That might explain why Tesla was so willing add said plate to the Model S.
[1] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/403/n...
This sentence, hurts, my brain.