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Ummm, hard-drawn copper has a lower resistance than 'soft' annealed copper. It's all about grain structure.

So much for my memory. I did a quick search, and found a description of the motor worth reading:

http://www.teslamotors.com/roadster/technology/motor "The Power Electronics Module supplies as much as 900 amps of current to the stator. To handle such high current levels, the stator coils in a Tesla motor employ significantly more copper than a traditional motor of its size. The copper is tightly packed in a proprietary winding pattern to optimize efficiency and power."

Sadly, arguing with an AC is the ultimate in futility, but I'll keep trying as you obviously are reading my posts!

Get an education and find out what the freaking thing actually is, like go to the website and read up on the motor. You claimed it was just like the motors in most modern consumer appliances. I'm claiming it isn't. I do admit that I'm being overly simplistic in my explanation here as I'm trying to give a short, pithy reply. I am claiming, however, that there is much more to this motor.

That is, of course, why I'm bothering to reply, as it sort of is "clarifying" what I intended to say. You've done wonders to bring this up to anybody who has been able to get to this point to bother reading up on it. A much better description for the technically inclined can look at the basics here:

http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/induction-versus-dc-brushless-motors

It also goes into how the Tesla motors are different from other EV manufactuers. I don't know if this information is still accurate as the article is from a couple of years ago, but the information is still relevant in terms of the Roadster.

LA to Detroit in a Tesla in Dec/January:

http://webarchive.teslamotors.com/roadtrip/

Tesla Model S can go 160 miles on a single charge with the default battery option. It could have at least be mentioned in the summary, even if it is not "competition/"

I think it's ironic that Tesla has a store in Menlo Park.

Too bad it's Menlo Park, CA and not in NJ...

This was Tesla's plan for a while now, and the article says nothing about their business model failing. The cannot use the government funds they were given to develop a sports car, it must be used for the Model S. Also they based the Roadster on the Elise Chassis, and Lotus has quit making them. This isn't reddit or I'd down vote for the horrific summary. There is lots of info in their IPO filing, and elsewhere..

Also the basis of the business model for the Roadster was to smash the image of the electric car being a hippie-green eco-shitbox, which most electric car's to date have been. That was a resounding success.

http://www.teslamotors.com/about/press/releases/tesla-gets-loan-approval-us-department-energy
http://www.allcarselectric.com/news/1042150_tesla-roadster-production-to-end-in-2011-new-version-expected-in-2013

#740..

I found it on teh Google!

(Oh, and here's what Tesla does). FYI: conventional li-ion cells (the type Tesla uses) are only mildly toxic, and the stable chemistries (like the type GM and pretty much everyone unconnected to Tesla uses) are nontoxic.

Only takes 45minutes to recharge the batteries in the Model S.
http://www.teslamotors.com/models/specs

Nothing to do with how engines work. More to do with physics, like how energy lost due to friction/drag etc increases with speed, how much energy is wasted in hard braking and hard acceleration. Given that the car is range constrained already, it is not a stretch that it would do even less well with spirited driving.

By the way, here is Tesla's own plot of range vs speed.

http://webarchive.teslamotors.com/display_data.php?data_name=range_blog5

Also, looking around the internet for actual experience, Top Gear's numbers sound a lot closer to accurate than Tesla's, even on Tesla's own message board:

http://www.teslamotors.com/forum/forums/milage-range-track-speeds

The last one states that he got 30 track miles and 30 road miles, an that the range said he had 35 miles left (based on the combined usage.) If you assume that the track miles use twice as much battery power as the road miles (and this is an estimate that is extremely in Tesla's favor, most cars are much worse,) the track range works out to just over 50 miles.

Air conditioning, lights, heater, radio all drain the battery faster. I'd bet on the right track with the lights, air con. and radio running, you could get a range in the 40s or 30s.

The brakes broke. The engine overheated. These aren't disputed by Tesla, they just want to redefine the term 'breakdown' to not include them (again, on every other car in the world, those are breakdowns.) They will be destroyed in court, they're just trying get some publicity by sow doubt in the largest review of their only, and significantly flawed, product.

It *doesn't* take 18 hours to charge a Roadster. It takes 3 1/2 hours from the normal charger it ships with. IIF you drain it completely dead.

4 hours, with the special 70A at 240V charge connector that you have to have installed by an electrician. Which may well mean having your house rewired or even a better feed put in from the electricity company - most houses here in the UK have a whole-house fuse of 100A or less that's owned by the electricity supplier and is illegal to tamper with, and getting full charging speed apparently requires a 90A breaker on the charging feed alone. Careless installation seems like a good way to blow the main fuse and end up with no power to your house.

What's more, Top Gear were talking about scenarios like a trip to Scotland, where you wouldn't have access to conveniently-placed Tesla charge sockets every hundred miles. In that scenario the best you can do is convince someone to let you use their electricity and get the rather slower 18 hour charge. Likewise, if you visit someone and need to recharge in order to get home, or run out of power some distance from home, it's the slower charge for you again. About the only time you can achieve the 4-hour charge time is on occasions when you'd better off recharging overnight anyway.

Its nice, yea, but really, the only way to save our butt from peak oil/global warming is to decrease energy consumption dramaticaly.
Like live next to work, use bicycles, etc...

There are many who have no vision. I suggest that you read Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The western world has a tendency to have entire industries disappear when new technology comes along.

There are a number of significant innovations under development that will make the oil industry (as we know it) obsolete.

I personally am expecting a Tesla-powered car:

Tesla also investigated harvesting energy that is present throughout space. He believed that it was merely a question of time when men would succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature, stating: "Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point of the universe."#56)

This is light-years beyond what's offered by the pretenders to Tesla's legacy.

I think I'll wait a year and see if it is as good in production as it is on paper. The roadster is living up to reasonable expectations, so I think its likely this will too.

Two links:

Link 1
Link 2

Here are the charging options:
http://www.teslamotors.com/goelectric/charging

I assume if one has 84000€+VAT to buy a sports car, then then they can manage to upgrade their electric cabling.

I'm from Hungary, and the standard connection you can get from the power company is 230V 32A, there is a one-time upgrade fee per amps over that.
Our house has 400V 3*25A three phase (because my father used to have a big-ass lathe). It can supply about 17320W of power. If I had a Roadster I could charge it and have a whole 520 Watts left :D

Tesla's drive motor is a copper squirrel.

On further reading it looks like the whole train including motor will be Tesla's design.

The new Tesla Roadster claims that it can do 245 miles on a single charge ... and it's a hell of a lot cooler than a volt! 100 miles on a charge, pfft! :)

The gearbox is even still there, but modified for only one set of transmission gears. Yes, the Roadster was supposed to have at least two sets of gears so it could in theory reach higher speeds, and I'm not entirely sure what the original top speed was supposed to be, but I think it was higher than the current 125 mph. Since this is well above the legal speed limit for any stretch of highway in America, it wasn't seen as a pressing concern for a production automobile trying to meet ordinary consumer demand.

This gearbox was also the major hang-up that nearly killed the Roadster and almost took out Telsa Motors as a company. It was also the final straw that got Martin Eberhard fired and kicked out of the company when the whole transmission endeavor was at least considered to be grossly mishandled by the Tesla board of directors. Lawsuits flew around for a while afterward and it got pretty ugly.

This blog entry by J.D. Straubel goes into the harry details about how the transmission and power train work, what some of the compromises they had to make to get it to work, and how it was brought "in-house" after being disasterously outsourced.

>It is simply the lightest sports car chassis available (the Lotus Elise) loaded with 7000 laptop batteries.

There's a bit more to it than that, at least according to Tesla motors:

  In fact, we recently counted how many parts the two cars shared and the total number was under 7% by parts count. If you were to analyze it by parts value, the number would be even smaller.

So you could say that the Tesla is similar to a Lotus Elise, except it has a totally different drivetrain , body panels, aluminum tub, rear sub-frame, brakes, ABS system, HVAC and rear suspension. The Tesla also neglects to carry over the gas tank, emissions equipment and exhaust. If you were to try to convert an Elise to a Tesla and started throwing away parts that aren't carried over what you would basically be left with a windshield, dashboard (complete with airbags!), front wishbones and a removable soft top.

For comparison, Lamborghini cars share upwards of ten percent of their parts content with Audi cars. I can only guess what the number is between Ford cars and their high end Aston Martin and Jaguar brands.

Rather than having to speed up and slow down the ICE to increase speed (Thus taking it away from it's peak performance area), the ICE stays fixed at it's peak performance level.

ICE "power" bands are typically a very rough parabola, with the peak area (For high-performance motors) being between 4,500-7,500 RPM. Outside of that area, they are more inefficient. An electric motor's peak power band (Using the Tesla as an example) is a flat line of maximum torque from 0-5,500 RPM, beyond which the available torque slopes off linearly until it breaks off completely at 15,000 RPM. That is 100% of available torque from 0-5,500RPM. So an electric motor has a "Power band" of 7,000 RPM, whereas an ICE has a "Power band" of 3,000 RPM. It's this limitation that requires ICE vehicles to have complicated gearboxes and clutching systems to ensure they utilise their power band as speed increases.

I'm not arguing that the Volt is not electric. I'm stating that it was originally sold as being "Pure electric drive", but it has since been found out to be "Mostly electric drive", which is a large difference. While it is an achievement, Toyota could do the exact same thing with a software change and a second battery pack, which shows just how small a step this really is.

Given the EV1's 100+ mile range and highway-capable driving speed (When using the 1st generation NiMh batteries they were fitted with), this is more of a step backwards, and a real disappointment for EV lovers everywhere.

http://www.teslamotors.com/models

300miles > 50-100miles.
45minute quick charge or 1minute battery swap > 6hour charge.
120mph>highway speed.

Any other concerns?

I found the blog post I wanted to bring into this discussions:

http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/engineering-update-powertrain-15

JB Straubel, the lead engineer at Tesla, goes into some of the problems and what they did to fix them for the transmission. This is a dated post and there has been some continued work on the transmission, but goes over most of the issues involved.

Previously, Tesla had contracted the part out to a conventional transmission manufacturing company that supplies transmissions for the major auto companies, but that company was unable to deliver anything that was able to last for more than a couple thousand miles. When the engineers had to start replacing transmissions on a regular basis with the engineering prototypes, they knew there was a problem.

What do you suggest I heat my house with? Solar? Yeah, that's going to work just *great* in the winter when I get six hours of sunlight.

Actually, sure. Why not? Read up on Passive Annual Solar Heating. Basically, it's an earth berm that stores the heat during the summer and releases it during the winter... keeping your house at a comfortable temperature all year 'round, without those pesky power bills. I know of a guy out in the midwest that does this, and his power bill is in the teens...

On the other hand, you could use a different system (I can't recall the name), that essentially consists of a big sheet of glass in front of a dark-colored wall, with vents at the top and bottom that can be used to either exhaust warm air from or cycle warm air into the area being climate-controlled.

Ideally, you could utilize some combination of the myriad solar heating/cooling systems available, after looking into which one(s) would be most suitable for your climate/terrain.

Oh, and here's a link about a company that does it. I'm not advocating this company, but they have some cool pictures. Guess I should throw in the obligatory wiki link about Passive Solar, too. Want more info? Try this link.

Here's a hint - you don't get hybrid tractors, and if you did they mostly wouldn't make sense. Neither would electric ones.

Why not? Seems to me that tractors and other farm equipment would be an awesome use for electric motors, since they have a vastly different power curve than combustion engines... Why, exactly, do electric tractors not make sense?

TL;DR: Learn to research before opening your mouth; Stop shoving your foot until you taste kneecap.

That, and I think Germany is actually doing pretty well in making renewable fuel an attractive option. For example, IIRC, biodiesel is excise-exempt and available at various pumps throughout Germany. Many German cars will run on it, and more can be made to run on it by replacing a few parts.

Also, with German gasoline prices as they are, they are actually not that far away from pure electric vehicles achieving price parity with gasoline-powered vehicles. Since the extra cost of electric vehicles is in the batteries, and you need less battery capacity if you have your own generator on board, plug-in biodiesel-electric hybrids are actually a very attractive proposition in Germany. Alas, I don't think there actually are any. On the other hand, the Chevrolet Volt, BYD F6DM, and Renault Fluence Z.E. are starting to look very attractive. And, of course, Tesla's upcoming Model S. This actually goes for other European countries as well, at least The Netherlands and Denmark.

First of all, it was a joke. Lighten up a little.

Came across more as dismissal; but ok, if you say so.

Second: Yes, today it's fantasy. 5 years from now? Maybe not. But as you said, under 50k. The base price of the model S (which won't start shipping until 2012) is still above your own price line by a few thousand.

The Tesla web site says base price is 49k (though they are including a tax credit, which seems fair to me. As long as I end up putting out less than 50k, then that was effectively the price.) Where did you get your number?

The half-assed solution that cost me 30k 6 months ago is worth more than the whole-assed solution years down the road that will cost me double that.

Hmmm. Well, my experience with technology - especially electrical tech - is that the price drops very quickly as volume scales up. So I'm thinking that the solution down the road will be significantly better, and less expensive, than prices and feature sets as presented to us today.

The electric vehicles that are going into production have a conventional power train with an ordinary differential on the wheels. There are multiple reasons for this, and significantly it applies to the handling of the vehicle. When you mount an electric motor to individuals wheels, you get all kinds of problems with the torque, balancing the power load on each wheel, and trying to cope with rotational inertia on the wheels as well.

This blog post from Tesla Motors does a pretty good job of explaining the situation:

http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/nikola-tesla-everywhere

It describes why hub motors is a bad thing for electric motors and why a conventional power train really is better.

Just where do you think some of these quick charge stations are going to be located? In some National Forest Service campground bordering a federally designated wilderness?

This would be something that would presumably be installed together with other kinds of energy sources at a convenience store where you currently can buy gasoline, natural gas, propane, and other sorts of fuels. Where I live at, the building permit alone to perform a remodel would be about $15k+, and $100k for a simple remodel to change the facade of the store would be comparable.

Seriously, I don't think this would be a huge problem in terms of somebody willing to invest that kind of money, other than it would be tough to convince an owner of such a business that they would be able to recover the investment for that kind of service. On the positive side, there are a fairly large number of electric vehicles that are starting to be produced by multiple companies (Nissan Leaf, GM Volt, Tesla Model S... to name a few right off the top of my head) where infrastructure is already starting to be put into place.

For an interesting blog entry on how this is already happening at least on a smaller scale, I would suggest reading this:

http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/oh-canada-our-tesla-roadster-arrives-british-columbia

It will be interesting to see how Tesla deals with this situation. They have a number of local offices, including full automotive repair shops that are there to perform annual maintenance, and for those places where they have established these offices I believe they have dealership licenses to operate there. Tesla is certainly large enough to have their own corporate lawyers that are working to make whatever it is that they do legal, and I'm sure they are not getting their legal advise off of slashdot.

Tesla stores are located in a number of places both within the USA and in Europe. All of these are 100% owned by Tesla, although I'm sure they may be set up as separate LLC corporations or something along those lines to be legal. There may be problems with individual states but I don't think it will be a major issue. The largest markets in America certainly are well covered and have a local service center.

Not very good examples. Lexus is the luxury brand created by Toyota. BMW and Mercedes aren't inherently toys for the rich. They are common cars in Europe.

Nothing you said invalidates they are good examples. The simple fact is, they are who Tesla is targeting. They are the price point they will be competing against. As such, they are spot on good examples.

Why would anyone want just another run of the mill "family car".

This question is just hilarious. Run of the mill? First of all the simple fact that it's all electric means it's not "run of the mill."

Furthermore, have you seen the Model S? Maybe you ought to take a look at the car first: Model S

That car looks cool. If you've seen it and read the specs and are still calling it run of the mill, then I guess we're just not on the same wavelength.

I'd call the car groundbreaking as the first serious potentially viable consumer electric car (not hybrid) that is going to be competing with the likes of BMW, and Audi.

Base price $50K. what about that Ferrari? http://www.teslamotors.com/models/index.php

These graphs might interest you: http://www.teslamotors.com/blog4/?p=70

In particular, take a look at the range graph.

That's something called "proof of concept".

What is the 'proof of concept' here? That if you make a bigger fuel tank you'll be able to go further? Sorry, but electric cars have been around for years. You can buy your own from Tesla Motors.

The base model for US$50K has only 160mi range ( http://www.teslamotors.com/models/# and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Model_S ).
Should be still enough for the vast majority of commuters and for daily use.

Home charging stations are available for the Roadster that run off your home 240V service. It can also be plugged in to a typical 110V outlet. You could also get some solar panels+wind turbine for your home and skip the whole power station argument.

My point is that access to cheap energy can help remove one of the barriers to electric cars, which would reduce dependence on oil.

How is the cost of electricity a barrier? Current prices are already far cheaper than gas on a cost per mile basis.

As an example, from the Tesla Roadster faq page, it costs about $5 to fill up the car, which gets you about 244 miles of real world driving.

If electricity comes down enough in price, perhaps a commercial building heated in the winter by kerosene could be heated electrically.

There's a much better argument here. All the new houses being built around where I live come with natural gas for air and water heating and often cooking. I doubt that wind power is so much cheaper than coal and nuclear that the situation will change. But anyway, we get our natural gas domestically and from Canada, so that doesn't count as much as foreign dependence.

Where are you getting those figures from, the ones I can find on teslas site ( http://www.teslamotors.com/electric/charging.php ) say that a 240V 20A hookup with thier larger portable cable gives a 19 hour charge time.

To get 3.5 hours you need to use the home connector station which charges 240V 70A. EEK!

I find it dissapointing that other than changing which plug adaptor is used on the large portable cable or using a different cable there doesn't seem to be a way to select a lower charge current. Nor is there any easy way to make the charger stop when other heavy loads are in use in the house.

Oh and the charge connections are expensive ranging from $600 for the most basic slow charge cable to $2000 for the 70A home station! According to their website only the slow charge cable is included.

I'm sorry but 15 minutes? That is complete and utter crap. It takes hours to fully recharge. In fact it takes "about 3.5 hours" http://www.teslamotors.com/performance/perf_specs.php to recharge a tesla motors roadster.

But I just noticed that the article says nothing about that... DAMN YOU EDITORS!

Or, better yet, you could just use a skimmer to buy yourself one of these.

The advent of the all-electric car is a huge step forward for transportation.

for the rich: Tesla Motors

for the rest of us (end of year 2010): Nissan Leaf

6831 cells, form factor 18650-common industry standard for small devices, slightly larger than an AA, more storage and higher voltage (just for reference)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_battery_sizes#18650

Tesla roadster battery pack system

http://www.teslamotors.com/display_data/TeslaRoadsterBatterySystem.pdf

So it almost is being done with cars like that..close enough. They use some fancy wiring and cooling for the Tesla though...

You have good points on trash and packing though. That's a big price people pay for a lot of things today, then it just turns to junk instantly. My non favorite is blisterpacks. I keep aviation snips handy just for dealing with those things. They *are* good packaging, but a pain to open and then how to dispose of them cleanly?

  Sometimes I wish they had an area right outside the checkout lanes where you could open your purchases, and they had a recycle bin sitting there for the packaging junk. Or just have lockable generic packages with clear covers to see what is in there. You pay for the item, it gets unlocked right then after ring up, they retain the packaging and it goes to the back where the next item-whatever that item might be that could fit in it, gets placed in there, then back out to the shelf.

Specific power of an IC engine: around 2 kW/kg
Specific power of an electric motor: around 2 kW/kg

And where exactly on that page are you getting those numbers? Those particular figures don't appear anywhere, and the actual values vary wildly based on type and application.

Anyway, in practice electric motors are smaller because they give peak torque throughout the majority of their rpm range, while ices only give it in a narrow band.

Your one remaining point, that what matters is the *total* power system mass, not just the weight of fuel, also doesn't make a big difference. The Chevy Volt's motor mass is negligible compared to the mass of its batteries.

So, I said batteries are 45 times worse than gasoline, with your correction it's only 15 times worse, but I think my point still stands.

No, jeeze, you have to look at total mass, as in all of it. Like, including the transmission and exhaust system and fuel system and environmental controls and all that. Yes, you're right that the batteries are the biggest portion of weight in an EV, but that is exactly why things don't turn out how you expect.

Let's actually look at this:

A Lotus Elise -- a car made by a company whose whole design philosophy is to minimize weight, and make much lighter cars than competing sports cars -- weighs 1984lbs at the curb. A Roadster weighs 2723. The roadster has a range of 240 miles. The Elise gets 27mpg, which would give comparable range with an 8 gallon tank. Slightly less, but let's call it the same.

The weight ratio here is only 1.37.

So, does your point still stand? To the extent that it is "gasoline has higher energy density", sure. To the extent that it is "batteries can never compete with gasoline for practical vehicles", then no, that's garbage. It doesn't take a fifteen-fold increase in battery density to erase the Lotus' weight advantage. Maybe a doubling?

As for the potential for future improvement, energy density of batteries has improved by a factor of 4 from lead-acid to lithium-ion ... and it only took a century to get there!

Yeah because people were really trying to improve battery density for all those years. It's really more like a 4x improvement in 40 years. The very fact that it's becoming so important, and because of advances made in material science only in the last couple decades, means battery's future is looking good technology wise. You may feel differently, but I apologize if I decide not to take my technology development prognostications from someone who can't even figure out the proper metrics.

So then the Tesla Model S is a great deal!

I'm saving for mine already. I just bought a 2009 Corolla knowing that is was in the works. I hope to get one in about 5 years.

300 miles between service stations is perfect acceptable for most people. Few are actually willing to drive more than that at a stretch anyway. Most cars running on gas won't make it more than around 400ish anyway. There are some exceptions (particularly with large trucks), but then you've got a nice $60 or $80 bill to pay at the next service station. There's no consumer vehicle in existence that goes 12 or 16 hours of driving without stopping. Nothing goes a "full day of driving". And if you're going more than 300 miles in a day all that often, perhaps you should just invest in a conventional hybrid and go from there? For the other 99.999% of the population not doing 300+ mile trips all the time, all-electric vehicles can handle all their needs without gasoline.

In terms of charging times, their FAQ says: Standard charging times will vary depending on battery capacity, ranging from approximately 3 to 5 hours. 5 Hours is for the long range (300 mile) battery.

With regards to battery life, "How long will the battery last?
a. Battery life is dependent on many factors, including; mileage, age, temperature extremes, and charge cycles. In general you should expect a Model S battery to have a useful life between 5 and 7 years, but proper care can result in a 10-year life."

My question is, what's the batter life on that Volt? You seem to have issues with batteries, but if Volt's battery life drops off, you've got a Prius that costs nearly twice as much. Since we don't have more details on how battery swaps will work, it's difficult to say what'll happen with service station batteries. What we do know is that they've bent over backwards for their Roadster customers, so they seem to be geared toward not doing stupid PR moves. Will that mean some sort of indicator on batteries? Some kind of tester? I don't know, but I'll bet Tesla would entertain questions. They've got at least 5 years after launch to figure it out. In the meantime, you know the infrastructure that's available in your area when you buy the car. If you're going on 300+ mile trips all the time and there aren't quickcharge stations near your destination, this probably isn't the car for you and it's likely no electric will be until the infrastructure is in place. But most people travelling 300 miles+ are flying anyway.

And a network of quickcharge stations already exists; just in California. In fact, they're even powered by solar installations. Solar's pretty lousy for power at the moment, so if those work, one has to wonder why the existing grid couldn't handle a few tens of thousands of these cars on the road. It's not like this or any other car will replace everything else overnight. There are still many cars on the road from 20 and 30 years ago for personal financial reasons and collector reasons.

And did you seriously just compare a touchscreen used to change the [i]radio[/i] station to the [i]gasoline combustion engine[/i], its moving parts, its exhaust system, etc strapped on to the electric motor in the Volt? Why does a car need a 17" fully configurable control panel for its functions? It doesn't. Neither does a car need a radio, a windshield, headlights, a trunk, a roof, doors, airbags, or seats. It'll still move back and forth. Those things were added as conveniences which drivers were willing to pay a little extra to get. If having a fully configurable 17" touchscreen for all your dash controls adds $1000 to a $50,000 car, virtually anyone will be thrilled to have it. Especially since the car includes the ability for 3G wireless connectivity for remote monitoring and such.

But I do find it strange that you don't want to pay an extra $10k - $15k to get rid of gasoline completely when you're perfectly willing to pay nearly double for a Prius made by Chevy. Something to think about while you're (apparently) driving around for 5+ hours every day going more than 300 miles to who knows where. In the meantime, thank God Tesla came along to show everyone else how to make a great all-electric vehicle with decent range. I hope they sell a ton of them so I can pick up a more affordable Bluestar.

Really? Does this belong on /.? Where is all the fanfare for Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Plymouth & Saturn? Companies come and go. New ones will come along and replace them.

I've got an idea... how about everybody who liked Saabs go out and order a Fisker Karma or the Tesla Model S!

Bill

According to the recent census, only 60% of folks live in single family dwellings.

Does that directly correlate to the number of people who have garages or electrical service where they park their car. What if I live in a condo or townhouse with a garage?

Your time estimate is about 1/2 of what Telsa claims.

No, it is not.

You need a 240-volt 40-amp draw for 8 hours for a full charge.

Except the Tesla charger is 70 Amps. Simple math: 240V @ 70Amps = 16,800 Watts. The Tesla battery capacity is 53kWh. 53,000Wh / 16,800W = 3.15 hours in an ideal world. Makes their claim of a 3.5hour full charge using the high power connector reasonable.

Most older homes have less than a 100-amp main panel, so 40-amps would be a stretch.

The average main service in the US is 240V @ 200A, not "less than 100 amp." My heat pump is on a 60A breaker.

To put that in perspective, that's a 9.6 kW load or the equivalent of running an electric dryer 24 hours. At the national average of 12cents/kwhr that's around $9.

You fail math. 9.6kW for 24 hours is 230.4kWh. You could charge the Tesla over 4 times with that. In the real world 240V @ 70A for 3.5 Hours is 58.8 kWh x 12 cents a kWh national average = 7.05 dollars to charge the battery from full dead. With an average 244 miles a charge that's 34.6 miles per dollar. Unless gas gets back down to a dollar a gallon you won't beat that. Also I pay 3.5c a kWh in my nuclear and hydro powered state so it would be 2.06 dollars a charge for me or 118 miles per dollar.

Also, perhaps the most important thing to remember is that the Tesla was not designed as an economy car but as a high performance sports car. Show me any car that can match the 0-60mph time (which is faster than many Ferraris and Lamborghinis) that costs less to drive per mile than a Honda Civic.

It's 8-12 hours for 120V service.

I really, really wish people wouldn't get this wrong. Or get this purposely wrong. Whichever.
It's a nice car. Let's not distort the facts.

The standard 120V charge time is 30+ hours. Anything faster is $1000+ for the charging module, and pretty much requires 30A circuit and a garage (sorry apartment dwellers).

http://www.teslamotors.com/performance/well_to_wheel.php

It's hard to go through life *without* spending money here or there lining the pockets of "bad" people, just because of how money filters through the economy. But with regards to this issue, I believe we've made the correct choice.

Looking at the issue of generating power, there are several choices available, and coal is one of those, but so also is nuclear, wind and solar. They're more expensive, and any tiny amount more expensive than oil means they wont be used right now, but they're not *massively* more expensive, its not like ten times or even a hundred times, it's like, well here is one view of coal vs nuclear which evalutes it as 30 dollars per megawatt hour instead of 29.1 ...

Next, you discussed distribution of power, specifically I felt you feel that using coal to generate power means that it's no longer possible to power machinery on farms, or to power transport.

Even today, we have electric powered:

• trains
• subways
• cars
• bicyles
• ... I'm going to stop this list, because it looks like spam ;-)

It seems reasonable to suppose that if we wished to, we could make electrically powered farm machinery too. Sure, there may be issues, like disposing of old batteries, but they are not I feel insurmountable issues, and I feel they are not issues that will push our civilisation back to the dawn of the 1900s are you are proposing...

No, it increases because they're going at lower speeds and thus getting less aero drag, like the GP said. The Tesla Roadster's optimal speed is about 18mph.