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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.
..until it's ion-propelled, RADAR navigated, coming complete with a charged particle beam and a death ray as standard safety features against enemy vehicles (eg: anyone who dares to race you at the traffic lights).
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
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.
Because sometimes when they try something new and exciting they get the Edsel
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
Are you from the french military ?
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
When will this ignorant meme die?
It doesn't die, it just keeps surrendering.
This can easily be proven, since one of the companies has even gone so far as to name themselves Shell.
This guy's the limit!
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.
Collector's Edition
I can give you 125 examples.
According to Wikipedia, Cobasys and ECD Ovonics hold 125 patents for battery technology, particularly NiMH battery technology. They produced the batteries that powered the ill fated EV1. In 2001, Texaco (now Chevron) bought Cobasys. Since then, they have refused to sell automotive batteries or license the technology to smaller players. Since the big players were not interested in electric cars (perhaps because of influence from Big Oil), this effectively killed electric cars.
They have also actively used their patents to prevent others from selling NiMH batteries for automotive purposes in the US. In 2001, same year as they were bought by Texaco, they sued Panasonic EV Energy for patent infringement. The results were that Panasonic is restricted from selling commercial quantities of some batteries in the North American market until 2010.