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Tesla Roadster Runs For 241 Miles In E-Rally
N!NJA writes with the mention of a recent alternative energies rally where the Tesla Roadster managed to cover 241 miles on a single charge, with another 38 miles of juice still left in the battery. "That would give the Roadster a theoretical maximum touring range of nearly 280 miles — 36 miles more than Tesla itself reckons the car will cover on a charge. If the numbers stand up to official scrutiny, Tesla will hold the world record for the longest distance traveled by a production electric car on a single charge. Of course, it should be pointed out that the Tesla was driven by a company staffer doubtless practiced in eking out every last mile from a charge, and that the speeds averaged on the run were hardly blistering — 90kph (56mph) on the motorways, 60kph (37mph) on trunk roads and 30kph (19) in the mountain roads. Tesla reckon the average speed for the entire journey was 45kph (28mph)."
Now make it affordable.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Does anyone know how likely the batteries are to catch fire or explode? Imagine a gigantic cell phone or laptop battery blowing up. Yikes!
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You can give just about *any* car dramatic improvements in fuel economy if you know how to drive them correctly. See HyperMilingA.
Just to see if it worked, I tried it with an ageing GMC Van (big, full sized, full of people) and measured an increase in fuel economy from about 20 MPG to over 30! Of course, there's something about driving on a freeway at 45 MPH and coasting to a stop from a half mile away that annoys the bajeezus out of other drivers.... I must have been flipped off half a dozen times!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
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Please see: EV1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1 It's not that they're "unable" but rather they're unwilling.
Have you been offworld the past year or so? The Tesla is probably a *lot* faster than what you drive now.
Caveat Utilitor
Amen, brother.
The Big Three undoubtedly saw the potential of Tesla and smaller companies (who buy a chassis, fit it with their gear, and profit), shit themselves, and immediately made it a necessity that Diesel fuel double in price, Saturn (who would be the GM arm to make it happen) forget what they are about and sell rebadged Opels, and thrusting on the public a prolonged (boring?) four-year introduction of the new Camaro.
What. The. Hell, indeed..
Something is seriously fucking fishy, if you ask me.
There are mandated requirements for safety that eliminate the ability for anyone (but them) to feasibly introduce a new American automobile, unless it has three wheels, in which case it's not an Auto at all, but a Motorcycle.
Q: Why did the minimum hood (bonnet) height of a typical sedan go from the super-aerodynamic, low drag Cd noses of the 90's to something akin to 1980's pickup trucks?
A: "Pededstrian safety".
If I accelerate to 97 km/h in 3.7 seconds, I most likely will hit the car in front of me and/or get a ticket for reckless driving.
If I go at 201 km/h, I'll also get a ticket for speeding.
Even though I'd like my next car to be an electric one, acceleration and top speed aren't the reasons for it.
Maybe you were attempting a joke, but this is a pure electric car. There's no fuel to be efficient with. Besides, no car has its "sweet spot" at 28 MPH, and if you read the summary you'd see that they drove at several different speeds over the course of the journey, which just happened to *average* 28MPH. They never actually drove any length of time at that speed.
You are aware that this is a car that could easily blow away almost all other cars on the road in terms of performance, right? It took this long because it was going *through narrow mountain roads in the Alps*. Are you going to drive 80mph on roads like this?
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
I am aware that I used the word "penetration." It's OK, I'm used to /. I know what's coming.
They're essentially not, essentially, yes, no. The phosphates and spinels most other auto makers are using, even moreso.
I'm not sure what you think is in li-ion batteries that you're picturing is so toxic. These aren't lead-acid or nickel-cadmium here. Want to know what goes into a lithium phosphate battery? Lithium salts (like you find in mineral water -- in fact, they're actually produced from salt flats where mineral waters evaporated), iron powder, phosphoric acid, sugar (for a carbon binding), porous polyethylene (separator), graphite or amorphous carbon (anode), any one of a variety corrosive but generally nontoxic electrolytes, casing, wiring, and so forth. You'll find worse stuff in a lot of bulk steels than you will in LFP cells.
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
Results vary. My 2000 Golf TDI automatic was rated 34/45mpg (original sticker, old EPA rating), which is 29/40 under the new EPA rating. In the 150,000 mile life of the car to date, I have averaged 44mpg, including town and highway. And I regularly travel at 70mph.
Acceleration is a damn good reason to go electric. Electric motors produce consistent torque independent of RPM, and the torque is applied instantaneously. The result is instant acceleration regardless of current speed, and is also why the newer Tesla only need one gear. Such acceleration is useful in many day-to-day driving situations.
Troll indeed!
When you look at the amount of energy stored in a gallon of gasoline compared to a ton of batteries you'll see why.
That's just silly, though. EVs are exactly the opposite paradigm as gasoline cars. In gasoline cars, the fuel is light while the engine is heavy. In electric cars, the motor is light while the batteries are heavy. The Roadster gets its performance with a motor the size of a small watermelon that weighs something like 40 pounds. In short, battery packs aren't competing with the gas tank for weight and space; they're competing with the gasoline car's engine for weight and space. If you crunch the numbers, you'll find that the two powertrains will be approximately the same when batteries hit 350Wh/kg or so. Commercial cells currently top out at about 200Wh/kg, but there are about two dozen different techs in the lab that can 50%-800% increase the energy density of their respective electrode (anode or cathode). The odds of every last one of them failing to make it to commercialization are vanishingly small. Li-ion still has a very long run ahead of it.
Don't you think if there was money to be made in this market someone would have tried when gas was over 4 bucks a gallon?
When do you think it was that several dozen different marques announced EV programs? Nowadays, it's easier to count the companies that *don't* have EVs they're planning to mass produce. For example, among the biggest sellers in the US, there's only one: Honda. And they've already announced plans to make an electric motorcycle, so even they may not count.
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
What are you talking about? Your average person is not traveling 4.3 hours every day. Indeed even you didn't travel 4.3 hours every day. and I severally doubt you averaged 80mph. Hook up a meter to your car. Stopping for gas and/or eating, pissing or whatever tanks your average. You probably averaged less than 50mph. Trust me.
The Tesla can easily keep up with your silly assed car. The only time wasters is if you have to recharge, which is generally done at night when you aren't billing any of those precious and expensive billable hours anyway!
Yes, with the key word here being "weighed". Comparing a long haul drive is not a fair comparison at all and it's not what you usually do. Most people drive 30 miles a day on average. You need to weigh for that heavily. Many people drive cars that are way underpowered compared to a Tesla. You sound like an idiot who doesn't know the first thing about what you are talking about!
And the Roadster and Model S are only limited to 45 minutes or so because of the type of cells they use (and they have to baby them to get what they do out of them). NiMHs can handle 30 minute charges, phosphates and spinels 15 minutes or so, and titanates 5-10. Assuming you have sufficient cooling in the packs and wire them appropriately, of course. Around a third to half of the announced mass-production EVs have a sub-30-minute charging option, and some (like Phoenix and LightningCar) have sub-10 minute charging options announced. And then there's Project Better Place, which is a whole different story....
Yeah, the chargers needed for delivering that power that fast are pretty impressive beasts (such as the 250kW Aerovironment PosiCharge or the 250kW Norvick MinitCharge), but that's really no more power than common industrial facilities use, except that they have to handle it nonstop, while the chargers only need to handle it in pulses. And no, it doesn't strain the grid when they use their own battery banks, and no, they're not unreasonably expensive (~$125k or so -- about the same as a gas station on a per-pump basis).
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
they measure them under ideal conditions which are hardly reflective of reality
You're right, 390km of winding mountain roads is hardly the reality most people will drive in.
Good luck getting anywhere near 24mpg in those conditions.
My Honda Civic refuels in about a minute and a half, and I can get well over 400 miles on a tank on the highway. Just sayin'.
Because it's dirt cheap, perhaps?
The Roadster uses about 200Wh/mi driving (about 250Wh/mi wall to wheels because of their pack cooling needs because of their unusual choice of cells; most wall to wheels numbers for li-ion EVs are much closer to the pack to wheels). US average household electricity rates are about a dime per kilowatt hour. 0.2kWh/mi * $0.10/kWh = $0.02/mi = 50mi/dollar. For an average running gas price of... oh, let's say $2.50/gal, that's the energy-cost-equivalent of 125mpg.
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
You must be Amerikin, since in English, reckon can mean what you infer it doesn't.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Lithium-oon polymer will take over soon enough. Compared to the good old Lithium-ion (not polymer), it packs more energy per weight and volume, does not enforce specific cell proximity and shape (semi-fluid?) and has lower risk of exploding. The price is already about the same.
Things are always improving :-)
Electricity is everywhere. Once electric cars start reaching significant numbers, you'll start seeing charging stations in parking lots, on streets, everywhere. They'll work like modern parking meters. Slide your credit card or drop in a few bucks and charge away.
If you need to charge quickly (less than 30 minutes), there are battery chemistries which can do that, too.
For people who are able to park their cars and charge them over night - essentially eliminating the need to stop and "fill up your tank" periodically, is a huge gain in convenience.
Hydrogen is a decent energy carrier which many people like because switching to it wouldn't require a significant change in behaviour. It also has the drawback of either requiring a significant amount of electricity (if using electrolysis) or natural gas to produce. Not to mention that all hydrogen fuel tanks leak a significant amount of their fuel within weeks. It's more efficient to use that electricity to charge batteries for electric cars, or if using natural gas, simply use the natural gas in a regular combustion engine.
I assume you know that Top Gear *admitted* to faking the ep -- not that this is something new for them. They're an entertainment show. They never ran out of electricity and were never without a working car. The only thing that actually did go wrong was with the brakes -- but it was merely a blown fuse from the abusive track duty they put it through, and the replacement was a nothing task. Their charge time statements were horribly misleading, too.
Clarkson stated that even if the Roadster had performed flawlessly, he still would have been hard on it because he believes that hydrogen is the future.
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
I'm sorry, did you come to slashdot expecting to find insightful commentary on an amazing piece of technology being developed? If so, you might want to go somewhere else, because this is the NEW slashdot, where if a new technology doesn't have the Apple logo on it and a friendly gui, noone gives a shit about it any more. "News for nerds, stuff that matters" has not been relevant here for about 10 years.
It's already affordable to people who are in the market for cars that go 0-60 in 3.7 seconds. They can afford it so well that Tesla is back-ordered. That's proof of a market that you can take to the bank (literally).
Once those people pay the early adopter tax, they fund the transition to higher-volume, lower-price cars like the Model S.
The Tesla is a brilliant piece of product positioning.
Electric outlets might be in a lot of places, but wiring for high power is not as ubiquitous as you'd like to think. The US power grid is already stretched pretty thin and widespread adoption of plugin vehicles would necessitate major infrastructure upgrades. The average home or even parking lot is certainly not going to be wired to refill a vehicle in 30-minutes.
Lets throw in a little basic energy math to show exactly how bad the situation is, eh? A gallon of gas is about 125 MJ or about 35 kilowatts*hours of power. Charging at a rate of "1-gallon-gas/hour" equates to 35 kilowatts (about 30 hairdryers all running at once for the blonds out there). Thus to put in "2-gallons" worth of electricity in 30 minutes requires delivering 140 kilowatts, or 583 amps on a 240 volt circuit. For comparison, pumping 4 gallons/minute at the gas station is just over 8-megawatts.
Plug-in at home vehicles are pointless if there isn't enough power available at the homes and/or enough hours in the day to get a significant charge into the vehicle.
They are using the high end market to drive the technology until it's cheap enough to work for everyday cars. This is a much better approach than the EV1 that started cheap.
I agree Tesla is taking a better approach than GM did with the EV1. However GM didn't sell the EV1, it was available only for lease and only in California, Arizona, and Georgia for employees of GM.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
The Tesla cells are kept at a much saner temperature level through the use of a coolant/heating system in the battery pack itself. This is something you couldn't afford to put onto your laptop.... and I dare say that a typical laptop will subject the batteries to much higher (and lower) temperatures and operating environments that cause much of the damage to laptop batteries.
Read the PDF file in the link above with the GP post. It covers all of this information and much more, including expected lifetime (which is on the order of about 7-10 years).
The only real problem I've heard about the Roadster is the issue with the battery pack not shutting down the coolant system when the vehicle is parked.... which causes a power drain on the battery and sucks power from the recharging unit even if you haven't driven it for awhile.
No; Tesla babies the heck out of them. In addition to careful load balancing and charge controlling, they have a smaller depth of discharge and are highly climate controlled (some might say too much; some owners have complained that when they're not driving the car often, it can spend as much on refrigerating the pack as on driving!). Also, each cell effectively functions individually, unlike the cells in your laptop, where if one goes bad, the whole pack goes bad. Lastly, the inverter is less voltage sensitive than your laptop. It's sort of like how rechargeable NiMH batteries last for so much longer than normal alkaline AAs in a digital camera but not in a flashlight. It's not that they hold vastly more power; it's that the voltage stays higher longer. If you use normal alkaline AAs in many digital cameras, the voltage will quickly drop below what the camera can tolerate.
That battery replacement will not be neither cheap nor trivial I would assume?
Tesla offers a future replacement Roadster pack for $12,000 upfront. That's based on projected future pricing of cells, of course. For the Model S, that number is to be "well under $5,000".
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
Tesla decided to dump the multi-speed transmission, as the manufacturer of the tranny couldn't meet the torque and RPM specifications in the production vehicles. All sorts of finger pointing went with the issue, and it nearly took the whole company (Tesla) down with the lack of a quality transmission.
Oh, a two-speed transmission was built, but it only got a couple thousand miles on it before it had to be replaced. This blog entry goes into details on how the problem was finally "fixed", with what was a single-speed transmission.
When you build tens of thousands of cars you have to sell what the market wants and clearly in the US that is large cars or SUVs.
The thing is is Detroit, that is Chrysler, Ford, and GM, have a record of NOT making what the market wants. This was amply demonstrated in the '70s. For years after the oil crisis people were demanding fuel efficient autos but the big 3 wouldn't offer them. So the Japanese auto makers ate their lunch by making more efficient cars. That was when Japanese cars had to be imported and weren't made in the US. Eventually Detroit started importing Japanese cars but rebranded them. I once bought a Chevy branded truck but when I opened it up to work on the engine it was a Japanese company that made it.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Well the Japanese and European car makers have good, profitable markets for their small cars. GM and Ford have narrower markets and are more exposed to changes in market conditions.
I don't know about GM but Ford makes more fuel efficient vehicles in Europe. Here's a "Business Week" article about "The 65 mpg Ford the U.S. Can't Have". TFA says it's not available in the US because it runs on diesel and that the fuel has a bad rep. As biodiesel is getting more popular in the US I say this is BS as an excuse.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I don't have that problem with my bike so I have an advantage when accelerating from zero.
Actually, that's only because they didn't know you were racing. Yeah, you're That Guy. Congrats.
What might be a stupid maneuver in a low performance car, is often NOT a reckless one in a performance car with someone that knows the power and limitations of it.
If you're in a Yugo on a two lane highway, you have a lot of trouble passing people, and have to wait till there is a LONG stretch of clear road you can see. In a performance car, you can often easily pass multiple people in a shorter distance and get back over safely with a lot of room to spare.
If you are in a car that can move faster and stop quicker, you can safely do things other cars cannot do.
An unsafe idiot can drive stupidly in either car, but, a good driver knows his and the vehicles limitations...and can quite safely drive accordingly.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........