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Test Driving the Tesla Roadster
stacybro writes "Wired has an article about the Tesla Roadster. It is similar to other electric cars that we have seen in that the electric engine's serious torque will allow it to do 0-60mph in about 3 seconds. Part of what is different about this is that they are using over 6,831 laptop-type lithium-ion batteries. They are claiming the range is about 250 miles. As the battery tech for laptops improves, so will the range of these cars. The car will run about $80,000, which is about par for an exotic two-seater. So who is doing the poll on which tech CEO will be seen driving one first? My guess is one of the Google or E-Bay guys, since they are investors. It is nice to see more companies serious about helping to getting rid of our oil dependency. It is odd that the big car companies aren't more on this track!"
I am left wondering if this car is involved in an accident if the batteries will vent like the recent /. articles suggest.
Exploding Dells, fires on planes, and soon at an intersection near you... cars venting more flame than the batmobile.
Orationem pulchram non habens, scribo ista linea in lingua Latina
Here in Texas, where I suspect temperatures exceed battery design, I think this idea will bomb spectacularly.
Seriously, though, Li-ion? I shudder to think of how those will get disposed of, eventually.
I consider our reliance on oil much more "evil" than our reliance on electronics. PDA's aren't killing the earth quite as fast as cars are ^_^
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Whoever comes up with a significant advance in battery technology will die a very rich person.
Li-Ion batteries have excellent amp-hour ratings for their size, but like all other batteries are still pretty limited.
Acceleration/Torque for electric cars is not a problem. High performance capabilities are there if you want them. However, you are playing battery energy against performance against distance, and all electrics, or fuel-electric hybrids have been designed to be "green" in their approach. (Any Hummer oweners want an environmentally aware vehicle?)
Right now the weakest link in many electronic systems is the energy source. A good solution there and you can be a very wealty person.
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal
I consider our reliance on oil much more "evil" than our reliance on electronics. PDA's aren't killing the earth quite as fast as cars are ^_^
Until something replaces Coal power plants as the main method of generating electricity, you're just replacing one evil for the other.
Yes, I'm aware of Nucular, Hydro, Wind, Tidal, Natrual Gas. Doesn't matter. Coal is the most popular choice today.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
yes, but it's a centralized problem.
Cleaning up the emmissions from a hundred plants is easier the cleaning up the emissions from a hundred million cars. Cheaper too.
evil is as evil does
Why would car companies supress innovations in vehicles? They'll gladly sell you anything that you're willing to pay them for, so long as what you're willing to pay is higher than their cost of producing it.
Maybe. And, I believe one of the founders of Greenpeace or Sierra Club has come out in favor of nuclear power, as you suggest.
Yes, he has. And for his trouble, the remaining members of Greenpeace shrilly scream that he's a traitor and shill for the oil industry, etc, blah blah.
The real problem is that the people who oppose nukes are bound together more by their general political loopiness than they are by actual, real, rational environmental/energy issues. So when they see one of their own taking up a different messages, they excommunicate them idealogically - never mind the practical issues at hand.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Could people maliciously misuse that kind of mobile power source to zap people they don't like?
... you think that this possibility is somehow more dangerous than the current situation, where everyone is driving around with a tank of explosives under them? Where anybody who doesn't like you could get a jerry can, a gallon of petrol, and a barbecue lighter, and melt your flesh off? Or burn your house down? Blow your car up?
Uh
Don't be ridiculous. Electric cars have enough problems without inventing inane ones for them.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
As far as I'm concerned supporting "domestic evil" would be better then "foreign evil". We don't import coal like oil, so using coal actually helps our economy. And for any problems that arise with coal, they will all be with bounds of US law and law enforcement. Also it's easier to clean up 100s of large coal power plants then it is to clean up millions of cars.
Yes there are better solutions then coal, but we have over 50% of our power coming from coal, so improving coal will happen quicker then scrapping the system and replacing it with other systems (solar concentrators, tidal, wind, or other low eviroment impact systems). The is no reason we can't do both and enjoy both short term and long term gains. They're not mutually exclusive.
Mike Scanlon
Has already happened in my home country, which generates 79% of its energy in nuclear power plants. Now can I get my electric car ? ;-)
Some claim petrol-electric hybrids, others hydrogen--be it combustion or via fuel cells...
...The most promising tech for the present is likely the plugable petrol-electric hybrid. It's not the most glamorous but it is far closer to the budget of the average person than any of the others and it's readily available today.
But: you get hydrogen very inefficiently through the use of enormous amounts of electricity, which is currently being produced mostly through burning coal. Start using hydrogen in your car, you'll start burning that much more coal and natural gas at the electric plants. Your plug-in hybrids introduce the same problem.
They only viable solution is more nuclear power plants. A LOT more.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The motor is going to need a lot higher voltage than a laptop. This means that the batteries have to be organized in series/parallel banks. 6831 is a plausible number since it is 23 x 11 x 3 x 3 x 3. This gives you a lot of flexibility in arranging the banks. You could have 99 banks of 69 batteries in series, presumably giving you something like 345 volts. That sounds about right for a DC motor.
Today.
Today.
Today.
FUCKING Today.
You can see past today, can't you?
I'm so sick of people who can't see past today.
It does matter, if you can see past today.
So what do you do when you've done 100 or 200 discharge cycles, and you're left with a couple hundred pounds of useless lithium ions? Oh well. Time to buy a new car, right?
Maybe you could design a clever little nozzle to get a boost from your on-fire battery packs. That'd be AWESOME.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Battery power isn't about saving energy anyway, it's often about shifting the pollution to a big facility that can handle it instead of having heavy pollution control equipment to move about. The first hybrid car I saw, back in 1987, embodied this principle and was designed to work at an underground mine. Above ground it ran on fuel, but below ground you wanted to minimise the air pollution as much as possible so it ran on batteries.
Personally I think the compelling area for electric vehicles as technology improves is as farming equipment or transport in remote areas - charge things up on wind, solar or whatever is handy instead of trucking in a lot of fuel.
Just because this administration is unable to pass a law mandating cleaner emissions from power plants that does not mean others won't. Yes the republicans are very beholden to energy companies and this administration is doubly so. Furthermore this administration is openly hostile to any environmental legislation no matter how minor. Future administration will in all likelhood be more responsible then this one, not just for the environment but all around. I can't imagine any administration that could be more inept or stupid then this one.
evil is as evil does
Yeah, you tell 'em! Forget about pragmatism and we'll create our own reality. Feasability? Screw it. Net environmental effect of the technology? Who needs to analyze anything when we've got dreamers! There's no point in looking at our world for how it is when we can see it like we want it to be.
The analogy that you provided about abusive parents is exactly the kind of absolutism that I disagree with -- and there's plenty of it to go around. What about when the definition of child abuse gets murky? What about when you've got a kid in an otherwise 'good' home, where the parents (for example) are pot smokers? Does it make sense to subject the kid to 'the system' by sticking them in a foster home (at best)? In the United States, it's not uncommon for child services to consider parents like that unfit. Absolutes don't work so well in a dynamic world.
In any case, we've already got an idealistic executive administration in the US who tends to think in black-and-white. Frankly, I think that we would do well with a bit of measured analysis.
To get back to the discussion, there's nothing wrong with trying to innovate, and I'm not seeing that argument anywhere. You're using a straw-man argument. However, there are plenty of hurdles which must be overcome when talking about electric cars...and it's important to recgonize that the electric car is no panacea for our environmental/political/economic ills. It just moves the problem elsewhere, and would continue to for the forseeable future. If it were really economically feasible, every major auto manufacturer would be selling an electric car right now.
Personally, I'm more interested in diesel power (utilizing vegetable-based fuel). The technology is already 100% available, very well developed, mass produced, and it can utilize the existing distribution infrastructure without serious modifications (I think that oil pipelines would need some help, however). Burning vegetable-based fuel also releases zero net greenhouse gas, since all carbon released into the atmosphere was originally metabolized from the atmosphere. Are there drawbacks? Certainly -- among other things, there is a poor public perception of diesel engines power and torque charasteristic, of being smelly, and having hard-to-find fuel. The former two have been resolved though development: Diesel emissions (as well as the sulphur odor) have been greatly reduced, and an Audi diesel race car won Le Mans last year, partly by churning out massive amounts of torque while maintaining better fuel economy than every other car in its class.
Again, getting back to the point, there is nothing wrong with pragmatism. In fact, the best way to deal with idealogues is to share a bit of reality. If you really believe in this, and this is truly an engineering problem, why not embrace the naysayers? Why not help find a solution to the real problems with the technology in question rather than smugly berate them in public? Your attempts to berate aren't convincing anyone of anything (except for the people who already share your ideals).
-Turkey
There are some excellent points here. People get all excited because some electric car is now faster that some car the author thinks is defined purely by its acceleration from 0-60. And most slashdotters, I would bargain, are persuaded by such arguments because they are similarly uneducated. Sports cars like the Porsche Carerra and the Bugatti Veyron (mentioned in a related article) are consummate sports cars - they exemplify not only speed but styling, handling and quality expected of a car with their price tag. Cars such as the Corvette, especially the most recent incarnation, do so relatively inexpensively. But regardless, 0-60 acceleration is not the most important statistic, and often isn't an important statistic at all EXCEPT to people who don't know better (I refer the undereducated to the more useful 0-100-0 or 0-150-0 tests, as well as relevant agility tests such as emergency lane change, slalom and skid pad.) Electric cars will be desirable when they meet the following conditions met by existing cars - price (under 30k), features (styling, interior, gizmos), convenience (fueling in under 5 minutes.) This car does not appear to meet any of those.
Wind? No. Not enough land to do it effeciently.
Of course there is. It's not like the land between windmills suddenly becomes useless for farming. Winds largest problem is that it's unreliable, so there will be times of low production, but that would not be a big issue for cars. Cars are standing still most of the time, so they can basically charge when there is wind.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
i think it's obvious, that they can't be talking about 6341 laptop batterypacks, but about 6341 laptop battery cells. at which point you can get these bulk for about 50 eurocents each.
howie
Since the US more or less uses 100% of the total oil it gets, if the Middle East oil went away, you'd immediately have a huge shortfall. This would make fuel prices in the US rocket - until the price causes a reduction in demand by 20%.
I suspect that a loss of 20% of the oil and the consequent increase in fuel prices would cause a very severe economic impact - so yes, the US *is* reliant on that oil. Unless the US can do without 20% of its oil tomorrow with no consequences, then it's reliant on it.
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I'm not sure that's right. Let's look at the Wright Brothers first flight shall we. Well, that's obviously such a useless machine. Range measured in hundreds of yards? Only carry one person. Likely to die.
The 250 mile range is perhaps too short for many people, but I bet the majority of car journeys are well within this range. If people started purchasing such vehicles as second/third cars then the technology would improve. As the number of units sold increased, the unit price would come down. Competition would be encouraged, inovation would be rewarded and some of the bigger players would start looking into it. It's already happening because Toyota/Honda have decided it will happen and want to be first with the hybrids. They are expensive, but some people are buying them. It happens in all new technology. Mobile phones, digital cameras, everything new - they start off really pricey and the early adopters buy 'em. Soon though, economies of scale bring the prices down, and the technology improves as the market expands.
I don't think anyone expects everyone to immediatly chop in their beloved gas-guzzlers for some electric golf cart and start hugging trees, but this vehicle probably does have a market. If the Gov could give tax breaks - such as allowing tax free re-charging whilst at work, it could further encourage the take-up of the technology by reducing the cost of ownership.
This might even mean that in a few years when you have to get new batteries for your Tesla, the new ones will be cheaper, lighter, and provide a greater range because the tech has moved on.
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
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Yeah, you tell 'em! Forget about pragmatism and we'll create our own reality. Feasability? Screw it. Net environmental effect of the technology? Who needs to analyze anything when we've got dreamers! There's no point in looking at our world for how it is when we can see it like we want it to be.
Well, I don't see a necessary conflict between looking forward and pragatism. It's helpful sometimes to "assume" the existence of a thing, in a tentative way, because it allows you to think about the potential value of searching for that thing. Where it becomes unpragmatic is when you assume that thing is going to spring into existence because you wish it to be. Yet is equally dangerous to dismiss all change becuase we don't know the details in advance.
I think we are approaching a shift in the world's energy use. It's like waiting for an earthquake to generate a tsunami; inevitably it's going to come, but nobody can say precisely when. Uncertainties, such as whether a technology will be developed to extract heavy crude deposits, introduce decades of uncertainty into when the shift will occur. Thinking about, and planning for this shift takes resources away from current needs, and so it is easy to think of it as unpragmatic. However, I suspect that when a shift comes, it won't be a surprise that it came, but it will be a surprise when it came and how quickly.
WRT electric power, the key is that electricty isn't an energy source. It's a medium for transmitting energy. The great benefit of this is that it can come from many sources and put to many uses. It's helpful to "assume" a replacement for coal fired plants, because while we know no such replacement exists yet, there is no reason in physics why such a thing could not be. In fact, there may be no single satisfactory replacment for coal. As there may be no single satisfactory replacement for petroleum either. If that is the case, electricity is going to be a key part of the strategy for dealing with that. Even if we were to put in hydrogen pipelines to everybody's house, it doesn't fundamentally change things. Hydrogen is a method of storing and transmitting energy.
However, there are plenty of hurdles which must be overcome when talking about electric cars...and it's important to recgonize that the electric car is no panacea for our environmental/political/economic ills
Yes, but I'm deeply suspicious of the phrase "no panacea", because it's often trotted out in a way that suggests that if some form of progress doesn't solve all our problems, it is worthless.
This bears on your point of net environmental effects. What we need is a rational framework to think about them. But it's harder than it sounds. I once worked for an organization trying to help universities teach this. "Systems" thinking really isn't anything special. It's just broadening the scope of your reasoning to include effects you hadn't considered or intended. When you do this you tend to find that nothing is as good as you might hope, but on the other side few things are as bad as you might fear.
People point out the fact that electric cars just shift emissions from tailpipes to distant smokestacks. This is true. But it's not a conclusive argument. You have to crunch the numbers. And even after you've done that, you don't have the entire story. the importance of the electric car is that it creates options. It has been remarked that the definition of a bad policy is that it leaves you with no good options. It seems to me a good policy is one that leaves open many options. That is why electricity is so important; it is the most versatile and adaptable medium we have.
I agree that biodiesel is an intriguing option. It is, in effect, a method of storing and transmitting solar energy. The carbon molecules are recycled. But I'm not prepared to pin all our hopes on it.
A key point to remember is that scale is a big part of assessiong enviornmental impact. The second gigawatt of tidal power
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American coal is not clean-burning enough (low in sulfur) to use in industrial power generation, as far as I'm aware.
You're right and wrong. It's not clean burning, and we DO use it for industrial power generation. I lived right next to two power plants that burned lignite. When the parent says it's easier to clean a couple powerplants than a bunch of cars, I'm not sure he's completenly aware of the issues with burning dirty coal on a large scale. Now if we could get our energy out of coal in a few other ways I've heard of, it seams plausible, but just burning it I would think would be a wash.
I don't think sucking power from the climat is a big issue right now since we're already dumping tons of energy into it. In fact right now that might be the best thing to reduce some of that energy. You also have to consider that trees also absorbe a large ammount of energy from wind, but with global deforistation windmills will probably not even offset a fraction of the energy trees traditionally absorbed.
15 minutes on the charger might get you another 15-20 miles. And 220 volts at 70 amps is a pretty hefty 15 kilowatts, so to have a dozen cars sitting at the local McDonalds charging is going to be draining about 180 kW from their coinpurse. That is a serious amount of juice. Also, I'm skeptical that you'll be getting 250 miles at 70 mph. If I remember right, electric motor efficiency and power typically increase with load, but fall off with speed, which makes them awesome for say, a 0-60 run in 3 seconds, but marginal at best for high speed cruising. That 250 mile range estimate is probably at significantly lower speeds.
Big rigs generally run around 5 mpg, but it varies quite a bit around that number depending on the truck, the load, and the speed. Few truckers drive at the most efficient speed because it increases the labor costs significantly.
If you're suggesting running commercial trucks on electricity, forget it for the foreseeable future. It's definitely been considered. Not only is there the conflicting speed issues I mentioned above, but you run up against the energy density limitations of batteries fast. Assuming the numbers from the article are correct (I doubt it...something isn't quite adding up according to my gut) and unrealistically taking the charge/discharge at 100% efficiency, it's storing up 194 MJ. Gasoline holds about 120 MJ/gallon, so the 1000 pounds of batteries (according to the Tesla website) are equivalent to about 1.5 gallons of gas (6.3 pounds/gal). Divide that by an efficiency of around 30% and you've got a 32:1 energy density ratio in favor of gasoline. For a truck to haul the equivalent of 150 gallons of fuel (actually diesel, not gas, but close enough), it would need about 30,000 pounds of batteries. But then you have to go farther and take into account that 2/3's of its cargo capacity has been replaced by fuel, so you need to make 3 times the number of trips. And you've got a lot of trucks either sitting idle recharging or having their 30,000 pounds of batteries swapped out every few hundred miles.
Obviously these are really rough numbers, but other engineers have already looked at the idea in more detail and rejected it.
I'm not trash-talking the Tesla. It looks like a lot of fun, but like all sports cars, it's a toy and not a good comparison for commercial trucking. Most of a car's weight is itself, be it gas or electric. Most of a truck's weight is it's cargo.
For the record, I think electric can work extremely well for short range commuting (5-10 miles on city streets), but if you travel far, you'll realistically be looking at gas.