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Tesla Motors Is Delivering Cars
jamie found the news that Tesla Motors is delivering roadsters in California. (We've been following developments on the Tesla front for a couple of years now.) According to a letter from the CEO, "9 production Roadsters have arrived in California, another 3 arrive this weekend, and they will keep arriving at the rate of 4 per week... In fact, currently there are 27 Roadsters in various stages of assembly." The early owners must be proud, but there could be complications.
Despite any flaws, I think they're an absolute breakthrough and a sign of things to come in the next decade.
Not only do they have performance, but they also go the distance and I believe they're also astoundingly cheap. If I had a spare $100,000 laying around and they were shipping to Australia, I'd buy one in a heartbeat!
The price of carbon fibre is declining faster than predicted and battery production is ramping up in line with Toyota's ramp-up of hybrid powertain cars and GM's announcement to mass-produce an electric car so hopefully the price of batteries will come down a lot as well.
Things are definitely looking good. Now we just need to start building a bunch of nuclear power plants so they'll be ready in time for when the plug-in hybrids and pure-electric vehicles hit critical mass.
This Tesla should at least be easy to push to the next available power point. Probably a lot easier to find one of those in the country than a petrol station, even today.
Our electricity infrastructure needs to have a service a bit like USB. You plug in and get 100mA or so. Then your hardware negotiates with the network and arranges to pay for a full feed of charging current.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
don't blame them. Blame GM, Ford, VW, BMW, PSA, Toyota. I don't find it surprising that, all of a sudden, various car-makers are developping electric cars and fuel-cell cars, ... why couldn't they do that 10 years ago? I am waiting for those a long time now.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
I've always wondered (and not really seen stated anywhere) how an electric vehicle's performance varies from the point of being fully charged to fully flat. i.e. does the performance (speed, acceleration, etc.) gradually get worse as the car's charge dwindles or does it suddenly just stop when the batteries are exhausted? A petrol or diesel car performs just as well (if not better due to less weight) when the tank is almost empty. Does a Tesla that has only 5 miles worth of charge left perform like a milk-float?
I'd say that the infestation of Earth with the "parasitic" cyanobacteria 2.5 billion years ago was bad for almost everything else. By poisoning the atmosphere with a deadly chemical (oxygen) that they carelessly released as a byproduct of their energy system, they killed off most of the dominant life on earth. :p
I don't think the recharging infrastructure is as technically difficult as we tend to think. The problem is the way we tend to envision solving the issue, which is stuck in the gasoline mindset.
We imagine pulling into a filling station and attaching a cable to our car and filling the battery; the problem is that you need to either (a) deal with dangerously high currents or (b) deal with dangerously high voltage. However, I think it would make sense to swap the entire battery. If we got to the point where an electric vehicle recharging infrastructure were needed, it would make sense to standardize battery formats so you can swap it out. Since the batteries are heavy, it'd be done robotically. You could be in and out of the filling station faster than with gasoline.
The batteries would have microprocessor monitors on them that estimate remaining capacity and efficiency; you'd only pay for the energy the battery has the capacity to deliver within certain parameters, and you'd get a credit for the remaining energy in the battery you swap out. If you needed extra range, you could ask for a fresh battery and pay a bit more. If you wanted to save money, maybe you'd get a discount for using a partially charged battery from a busy charging queue.
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If they are anything like laptop batteries, after a year they will get down to 50% charged and then suddenly pop up the low battery warning, and the shut off before you can do anything about it. My biggest problem is when are battery charge indicators ever close to being correct. At least with a floating meter in the gas tank, I can count on it to tell me how much further I can go.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Prove it. Find 5 patents that are owned by "Big Oil". Also, define "Big Oil".
http://www.uspto.gov/patft/index.html
-- Humans, because the hardware IS the software.
Didn't Boeing say they won't be testing carbon fiber wings to the point of failure because they'd need to call in the hazmat team? Is this the same type of problem we'll see when carbon fiber vehicles crash? I'm just asking.
"Greenies don't ... like any form of power generation."
Really? I haven't heard many people advocating that. Sounds like a load of crap to me, most likely written by someone who hasn't got the faintest idea what they're talking about.
As someone who considers themselves a 'greenie', I'll list the power generation methods in my preferred order.
1. A tie between solar and wind. Both can be diffuse, and can be built right where they're needed, reducing transmission costs and inefficiencies.
2. Tidal. Can be used to supply base-load, and add consistency.
3. Hydro. yeah, you lose a valley, but it's better than those lower in the list. You at least get reliable power as long as you continue to get rain.
4. Nuclear. There is a case to be made for _some_ nuclear power plants. Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to think it's a silver bullet that will solve all our problems, conveniently forgetting that it still needs to be mined, refined, distributed. disposal of nuclear waste remains an unsolved problem, and it is linked with weapons production capacity.
5. Fossil. We're not yet ready to put these completely behind us, but we need to very soon.
Of course, this list represents my own views only. I wouldn't do something as stupid as try to speak for all greenies.
BS... just last week I was reading an analysis on new tech being developed by Nissan along with Ford and a few others, a Variable Compression Ratio (VCR) system.
This tech would would dramatically improve the performance of turbo charged engines not just in terms of power output but also in terms of fuel effective, and it would make the engine run much much smoother.
I guess I don't understand how combustion engines are supposedly tapped out. Keep in mind that most of the engine's performance characteristics are still very much mechanical and are basically "hard coded" for a good median of power output and fuel economy since they don't have the technology to dynamically change the characteristics when one is needed over the other.
Even Variable Valve Timing is in it's infancy and the current methods for that are crude at best, there are alternative methods under development that could theoretically give you a Corvette when you stuff your foot into it and a Prius when you're just cruising on the highway or around town.
Even the engineering techniques are just starting to get interesting... engines developed completely new in the last decade mark the first engines completely prototyped in a virtual environment as opposed to the old method of just building something similar to what's been done before and making slight improvements through real world testing. Chevy's LS series motor (found in the late 90s Camaro, Firebird, and Corvettes) marks one of the first of such motors and with a 6-speed sees an impressive 31MPG with 330HP. And even over the last decade they've been able to make small tweaks to that power plant in terms of both power output and fuel economy. And there's still a world of possibilities that can be done to improve things still.
In short... If you're just looking at the explosion in the chamber and the resulting torque then yes, combustion engines are already "pretty good" in terms of effency. However that neglects the fact that conditions change mili-second to mili-second in terms of air-pressure, air-temperature, load on the engine, and numerous other things. Engines aren't dynamic enough to work as good as they could in every possible scenario so they're built for a best average across the board.
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The battery makers...While people who didn't have to buy them LOVED them, anyone who was forced to pay for them balked (with a very low percentage of exceptions).
The batteries were to expensive and gas was too cheap. Plus the range was still low.
Now things are much different...batteries are MUCH cheaper, gas is Much more expensive and the range is getting comparable.
I cant name 5 patents but I CAN name one very important one. Try making and selling Nickel Metal Hydride batteries suitable for electric cars and see how far you get. You will likely be sued by a company you haven't heard of called Cobasys for violation of their patent on NiMH battery tech. What the lawyers probably WONT tell you is that Cobasys (and the NiMH battery patent) is actually controlled by Chevron (not the largest oil company but big enough).
Chevron makes a lot of noise about how they aren't just an oil company any more, they are an "energy company" but all the work they are doing is just replacing one fuel source (crude oil) with another fuel source (hydrogen, tar sands, oil shale, coal liquefaction/gasification, gas-to-liquids etc)
Big Oil doesn't care if its gasoline, diesel, LPG, natural gas, corn ethanol, biodiesel, hydrogen, liquid coal or whatever else. They just care that the worlds cars continue to run on fuel of some kind (fuel that they can continue to sell from their station forecourts). Plug-in vehicles threaten that monopoly as the provider of the source of energy for our cars.
I agree with your list, in general; however I'd like to make three points.
Minor nit-pick, Tidal can not be used as base-load. Because of it's cyclic nature there are two points during the day when tidal produces zero energy; so, you'd have to have stored energy or another source to fill the hole.
There are things you can do to make nuclear more palatable. We are still using, what is effectively, a 50 year old reactor design. There are currently available, more modern designs which are safer and "burn" a higher percentage of the available fuel. There is research being done which could lead to significantly higher percentage "burn", reducing the waste to something with half-life of decades instead of millenium, which would resolve most of the storage issues. Finally, there are techniques which can effectively poison the fuel for weapons use.
If we look at the sum total of all energy usage (including transportation), based on what I have read, I don't believe there's enough wind, solar, and hydro power to replace all of the fossil fuels. We will still need a mix of fossil (or bio-fuel) and/or other forms of stored energy for peak usage and will have to have nuclear plants for base-load.
Exactly. GM was busily working to undermine and kill off the CARB mandate as fast as they could. The fact that they sold off their battery rights should speak volumes to how much they actually wanted to be in the business of building EVs. They had already shut down the lines at that point.
GM never wanted to be building EVs, and was all to happy to ditch the program and shuttle it down into the memory hole, only bringing it up in passing to spin it as a "failure" so that they wouldn't be pushed into doing it again. Their timing was impeccable... impeccably bad. Whether it's fears of global warming, fears of "running out of oil", high gas prices, a distaste for shipping oil overseas, a strengthening green movement, rapidly advancing battery tech, or just outright trends, virtually everything has been moving in the direction of EVs and PHEVs. And with hybrids reaching US shores from Japanese automakers, GM ensured that they had the worst image possible as they steadily lost market share from falling SUV sales.
Such horrible management.
No, she's fine. My associate is vomiting for a totally unrelated reason.