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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!"
It is nice to see more companies serious about helping to getting rid of our oil dependency.
Now all we have to do is get rid of our electronics, consumer products and innovations dependencies, and we can tell the rest of the world to take a hike!
If only all countries could have such a lack of inter-relatedness with their neighbors, imagine what a beautiful world it would be...
Lies about crimes
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.
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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.
It is nice to see more companies serious about helping to getting rid of our oil dependency.
Oil isn't the problem, ENERGY is. So instead of burning oil everwhere, we'll be burning more coal in a few places. Maybe this is the kind of thing we need to turn public sentiment away from the greenies and get some more nuclear power plants built.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
There have been some great inovations in vehicles over the years which have been supressed and even shut down by the big auto companies in the past, but with current technology its hard to keep information and good innovation down. Perhaps with the help of the internet this company has a chance of not going the way of the Tucker.
You can get used to a lower range, easily. My Honda motorcycle has a range of about 150 miles. It doesn't bother me one bit. Every one of those miles is 1000x more fun than any car-driven mile, even if I do have to fuel up once per week instead of once every other week.
Fuel economy could be better though. 35 MPG isn't much better than many cars.
Now THAT's a car that'll hit the market with a bang! Not only do you have the instant response of electric motors and full torque from a dead stop, but you will also get rocket assist when you put a heavy load on the Li-ion batteries!
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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.
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Which is to say we are still in the same world, in which low volumes and other issues cause electric cars to be 50%-100$ higher than traditional cars. All that seems to have happened here is that an electric car has been targeted to the high end market and priced accordingly. It is kind of like taking the hummer, putting a cheap truck base on it, calling it an H2, and pretending that it still has the dubious value of the original.
Oh well, I suppose if they can build a sedan for 35K I would be impressed. We would also have to look at maintenance cost of the vehicle, which would be dominated by the battery replacement. A sports car car easily run 20 cents/mile in maintenance. Knowing that laptop batteries can only handle a couple hundred charge cycles, one can image where the long term maintenance cost could approach three or four time that amount.
I wish we had electric cars. I think the technology is there, and the pricing could be reasonable. But even companies that could be using the electric car to revive themselves, for instance Mazda and Ford, still seem to be married to the antiquated internal combustion engine.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
After a year or two of serious use my laptop batteries last about 1/2 as long as they originally did... And those things are pretty damn expensive to replace.. i would guess that a large percentage of the price is going to pay for all the batteries. What happens when they don't hold their charge anymore?
You know what's odd about this -- that's roughly $10/battery.
I saw we buy one and part it out on ebay...
But if i had a car with a range of 250 miles, then i would have to stop on my trip, and it had better not make a 5 hour trip 12 hrs longer, due to recharging time.
:)
Easy... just plug the car's charger into the cigarette lighter and charge as you go!
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Li-ion batteries have a limited number of charge cycles on them, somewhere around 300, before their capacity starts to decrease. You would have to replace all of the batteries at some point after this when your car's range is decreased to the point where you can't stand it. This means, what, most of the value of the car after 100000 miles? Is it worth it?
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
If the batteries are damaged, how does one shut them down? Once you short a lithium battery there is no stopping the reaction - no practical way, anyhow. Almost 7,000 of them in a confined space will lead to an interesting chain reaction if just one in that cluster gets damaged. It'd be a fun fire to watch at night though, especially if firefighters douse the burning vehicle with water.
As much as I dislike NiMH due to their rapid self-discharge rate, they look like a safer bet for automobiles.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
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.
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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.
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!
"All you have to do is replace the batteries, probably once a year." From the summary, the car runs on 6,831 laptop style lithium ion batteries. A quick froogle search reveals that a replacement lithium ion laptop battery runs around $90 - $150. Let's assume $100/battery. Since you'd be buying in bulk and using batteries designed for this purpose, I'll give you a 90% reduction in cost (overly generous) which puts you at $10/battery. That means your annual battery replacement is almost $70,000 (I.E. most of the price of the car.) And we haven't even charged the batteries yet. Most people I know with anything approaching a reasonable car fill up maybe once a week for under $50.00/tank. That puts you at $2,500 annual fuel cost, add in a quite generous $1,000 for maintenance and repairs, and $1,000 a month for insurance and loan payment brings you to a little over $15,000 annual cost of driving a relatively decent newish car. So, assuming a lithium ion battery pack lasts four years, it would still be cheaper to own and operate, and insure a gasoline powered internal combustion vehicle than to simply change the batteries on this car. And I'd be willing to place a decent size wager that trying to outfit any significant portion of U.S. vehicles (Let's say... 10%) with lithium ion batteries will cause a tremendous surge in demand for lithium, driving prices sky high. In fact, I'll do the math. Lithium has a specific energy density of up to about 200 Wh/Kg. Many major electric vehicles use around 300 Wh/mile, so I'll be generous and say 1 Kg of lithium storage will get a driver 1 mile before recharging. American passenger vehicles drive around 2.5 trillion miles per year, which works out to around 6 billion miles a day driven by americans (An average day's driving being the absolute minimum charge you would want in a car) which means we would need 600 million Kg lithium to make enough batteries to replace 10% of passenger cars. That works out to a bit over half a million tons of lithium. In the year 2005, only 18,000 tons of lithium were mined WORLDWIDE. That means we would need over 25 times the current annual worldwide lithium production just to make enough lithium batteries to give ten percent of U.S. passenger vehicles (cars, light trucks, SUVs) enough charge to drive for one average day, with pretty generous rounding in favor of lithium storage at almost every step I took. That's not even touching the semis, construction equipment, mass transit, airlines and ocean liners that actually keep our society running. And then there's the issue REPLACING the batteries, although I assume there would be large scale lithium recycling implemented.
So I don't foresee lithium being a long-term cost effective material for energy storage in our transportaion system.
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This car is not a true Tesla Car.
If it were, it would have no batteries at all. Instead it would gets it energy from some kind of wireless source like microwave power transmission or even the Earth's magnetic field.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
That's gotta be the simplest thing to resolve. Bung a subwoofer in the vehicle somewhere and a bunch of little speakers and before you set off decide what you want your car to sound like. I think I'll drive a Cobra today. Lovely.
Even more fun than downloading ringtones to your 'phone, downloading car sounds. It could be made to sound like anything!
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
You make a good point, but there are maybe a few qualifications to the calculations. The lithium metal in a lithium-ion battery is only a small part of the mass of the battery. A typical electrolyte component might be LiPF_6. Only about 4% of the mass of this compound is lithium metal. Then there's the mass of the solvent, the electrodes, casing, et cetera -- all of which contribute to that 200 W-h/kg figure. Probably your final figure of lithium required for a 10% fleet replacement is 60-100 times too high.
Of course, that doesn't change your point that batteries generally are an expensive and inefficient way to store energy. Storing energy in chemical fuels is far cheaper and more efficient, and that's why it became the preferred energy-storage method for automobiles. It's not that way because our engineer ancestors were idiots, didn't understand batteries and electric motors, or because gasoline at the turn of the 20th century was as cheap and widely-available as it is now.
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 was going to mod you insightful, but then I realized that some may not realize why.
They are not using laptop batteries, as you said, but instead using batteries that use lithium cells. They say they are the same cells, but they probably actually mean that they are the same kind of cells used in laptop batteries.
Anyhow, good call. I'm hoping others will read my post and rate yours insightful.
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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
handmadehands.co.uk
the electricity to charge them would require a huge investment in nuclear power plants and a corresponding huge increase in nuclear waste.
But the amount of waste that comes out of an efficient reactor is tiny that even a "huge increase" would be easily manageable. (Note practically all of the old reactors currently operating are not terrible efficient.) It is simply incorrect to suggest that relying on nuclear energy as a primary energy source would be impractical.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
OK -- here's some basic terminology:
a "cell" is the fundimental unit of a battery. A "D" battery contains one cell -- and indeed, in old books was just called a "D cell" and never a "D battery". The "cell" is the fundimental battery unit because of chemistry.
A "battery" contains a bunch of cells. The actual word "battery" means "a bunch of identical things" -- so that a bunch of cannon all grouped together (for example) is a "battery" -- hence the existance of "Battery Park" in New York.
Thanks to the average person's inability to keep these concepts seperate (and the lack of a reason why they should be seperate), "battery" is now used to mean either a battery in the old-fashioned sense OR a cell in the old fashioned sense (but only if the cell is, as it were, individually wrapped). Once again crystal clear tech language is subverted. (Note to self: don't go on a wild tangent about dumb terminals)
The "battery" in your laptop contains a bunch of cells -- I see from Google that at least some laptops use batteries of 12 cells. The "batteries" in the Tesla contains exactly one cell and would be better termed "cells", except that (per above) language is changing.
A big chunk of the cost of buying batteries for your laptop are:
1. You aren't buying in bulk. Bulk is lots cheaper.
2. You are also buying specialized circuitry that inside of the
3. Expensive plastic
I would expect that your 90%-off-in-bulk isn't high enough. Add in another by-twelve factor, and the price-per-year drops even more.
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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.