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Tesla CEO Says Gov't Loan Is 99% Sure and Deserved
N!NJA writes "Two major themes of our time — the desire to achieve energy independence and the furor over public bailouts — have collided in the drama surrounding swanky electric carmaker Tesla. Late last year, a New York Times column whipped Silicon Valley innovators and bailout-weary taxpayers into a frenzy. Valley professor and writer Randall Stross wrote that Tesla was hoping for government money to produce its cars, which only the very wealthy could afford. It wasn't exactly true, since the loan was intended to produce the $50,000 Model S sedan, not the $109,000 Roadster. Still, Stross called it a risky, waste of taxpayer money that would only benefit the wealthy and bailout VCs who'd sunk money into the money-losing company. Never mind, Tesla has developed two cars on less than $200 million — compared to the $1 billion General Motors spent developing the now-deceased EV1."
It's a LOAN, not a bailout. You have to pay back loans. College students get them all the time, but you don't see people complaining about them.
Sorry, the charger issue is fixed by trickle-charging not just your car overnight, but also a high-current, high-capacity battery pack in the garage (li-poly? NiMH? Lithium-iron-phosphate? Lithium-magnesium phosphate? Silver-zinc? Lead-acid? Anything but lithium-cobalt, basically) that can deliver the thick, chewy amps needed to fast-charge the car battery.
I'm sorry, but a $50,000 car is STILL just for the wealthy.
While I agree that only the wealthy can afford a Model S, Tesla is the only company that has demonstrated a viable business plan for producing electric cars. As they continue to produce them, they expect the price to come down.
they would still need a different vehicle for taking the kids to soccer games, camping, etc. where more passenger and cargo space are needed.
Actually, they wouldn't. The Model S seats 7, believe it or not. The electric drive train provides more space for storage. There is room for cargo under the hood (bonnet) because that space isn't needed for an engine.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
You do realize that Top Gear admits to having faked the episode, right? It's an entertainment show; quit taking it so seriously.
As for your particular example: No, it doesn't take 14 hours to charge. The *standard* Tesla charger takes about 3 hours to charge a fully dead battery, and that's only *if* you drove it about 240 miles that day on a drivecycle akin to the EPA combined numbers / 120-200 if you raced everywhere / 50-100 if you were sprinting on a track. How often do you drive 240 miles a day, or race 120-200 miles? Even if you only charge it on a standard garage NEMA 5-15 (they're usually on a 20A breaker, so 18A is a safe draw, and let's assume 117V): Wall to wheels on the Roadster is about 250Wh/mi, combined. The average person drives about 35 miles a day. 35mi*25kW/mi=8750Wh=8750VAh. 8750VAh / 117V / 18A = 4.15h. So even if you, for some reason, *don't* have the standard charger installed, you can easily handle your daily drive and then some just on an ordinary wall socket. And a dryer socket has 3 times the power as a garage socket, and a range or RV socket 5 times the power.
That's why we need something that can be refueled quickly, which the Tesla certainly is not
Tesla is working on 45 minute charging stations for the Roadster and Model S. Of course, that limitation is due to their particular, unusual choice of batteries. Most other li-ion variants being considered for automotive applications can charge far faster. The titanates, for example, can charge in 5 to 10 minutes. Oh, and Tesla is planning to offer pack swapping for the Model S.
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
I think you mis-read me. I think the Tesla looks GREAT...compared to other alternate energy cars out there, to me the Prius is about as fugly as they get.
No, I love the Lotus and the Tesla. I considered the Lotus for a bit, but, where I live, I couldn't well find any place to service it close by (New Orleans)...this was especially true in the couple years post Katrina (although I saw a couple of them around town here).
If they ever got the Tesla down to near Vette prices ($50-$60K range), AND I could get it serviced reasonably locally...I'd be very interested in one.
But, no, my comment was that the Tesla was about the first decent looking, sporty alternate energy car I've seen so far...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
They're not asking to be bailed out. If you didn't count the money they're spending on developing the Model S, Telsa would be profitable today -- and they're still scaling up Roadster production. They're asking for loans to speed up the creation of *new models* that are more affordable to a mass market. They don't need any sort of subsidy to keep on doing what they're already doing in making Roadsters.
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
This is just plain stupid. Look, Tesla wants to be "alternative" but in reality it's just a sportscar with an electrical motors and a shitload of batteries. That's their vision. What the hell is innovative about that? You use the similar amount of energy as any car, but now in electrical form. Whooptey doo. All it has going for it is eyecandy.
Aptera is much better. Mostly because they're actually affordable from the get go ($30k) and actually redefine an efficient car. All Tesla really does is offload the environmental footprint to the electric generation station, it doesn't aim to be all that much more efficient aerodynamically, going for the conventional look and along with that, similiar conventional all-around amount of power to push it. Aptera aims to be efficient overall (and the hybrids look to be rather usable). That's important when batteries are nasty things with chemicals/elements that need to be mined, Tesla' second weakness.
And the hybrid small gas engine feeding an electrical motor and batteries is time tested (diesel-electric trains) and makes more (environmental/economic) sense than batteries alone atm.
http://www.aptera.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptera_Motors
I think the only bad impression I did get from it was the mileage on the battery. Sure, they were driving the car hard, but the life span didn't seem up to par.
Top Gear admitted that it didn't actually run out of charge. The entire "pushing it back" scene was staged.
They "estimated" that it would only last 55 miles sprinting at top speed... but you know what? A Bugatti Veyron will only go about 60 miles or so if you sprint *it* at top speed. Track driving ranges have nothing to do with normal city/highway driving ranges.
which subsequently overheated and then had some major subsystem failure....
The vehicle never heated; that was faked, too. The "system failure" was real, but way overplayed. In the process of thrashing it on the track, they blew one brake fuse (of several). It took a matter of minutes to swap out the fuse. At no point during the filming was Top Gear without a fully working Roadster.
Don't be surprised; they fake tons of things, and Clarkson is a huge hydrogen fanatic (he's admitted that he would have trashed the Roadster even if everything had been flawless because he sees hydrogen as being the future)
Don't trust everything you see on TV.
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
Right. And would you like to provide an example of a purely capitalist society that has survived without subsidies and regulations?
Like it or not, you have to have rules to keep greed in check. This basic principle has been understood since people have been able to communicate. You have to have government spending to soften the natural cycles of the market, or else you end up in a boom and bust period that will end in catastrophe. You have to socialize or heavily regulate infrastructure or you will end up with companies that wield too much power, or costs that start denying a majority of citizens basic needs, which leads to revolutions or totalitarian dictatorships.
No amount of shouting will fix this reality. And if you want some more information, READ the Wealth of Nations. You'll discover that he supported regulation, taxing the wealthy, tariffs, protectionism, and laws against high interest rates. I know this would conflict with your ideology, but that's the problem with ideology. It's based on anecdotal evidence and similar nonsense.
And my diesel can 'charge' in 1-2 minutes, even on the move
That's fascinating! So how does that work? Is there a refueling aircraft that approaches from at front, dangling a gas pump on a boom arm, and you maneuver the car to get the fill? The rest of us have to slow down, take an exit, drive to the gas station, pull up to a pump, stop the car, get out, take the gas cap off, hook up the pump, fill, remove the pump, pay, put the gas cap back on, get back in the car, start it back up, drive out of the station, back to the highway, and accelerate back up to speed, making the whole process set us back by 10-ish minutes on the freeway (for the equivalent situation in the city, perhaps 5-ish minutes).
Now, let's compare to rapid-charge electric with, say, AltairNano's titanate cells. Instead of 1-2 minutes for the "fill" step, it's 5-10 minutes for the "rapid charge" step. Everything else remains the same. Hence, on the freeway, the total fill time goes from 10 minutes to more like 15 minutes. Oooh, fear and surprise, whatever shall we do? And that's just the freeway case. In the city case, the time goes *down* to about 1 minute -- plugging your car in to a normal, non-rapid-charge outlet whenever you get home and unplugging it before you leave. And since the city case is far more common than the freeway case for most people (i.e., their everyday lives)...
gets 600 miles to the tank
Holy heck, how big is your fuel tank? Does it have its own zip code? Do you *seriously* drive for 10 hours on end without eating, using the restroom, stretching, picking up coffee, or anything of the sort? If so, please let me know when you'll be driving near Iowa City so I can stay *off* the road. Standard safety advice is to average 5-10 minutes of break per hour of driving.
gets better MPG than a typical hybrid
Complete nonsense, when you compare mass-market cars on the same drive cycle cars in the same class from the same year (i.e., same safety/pollution req's). And that's *ignoring* the fact that diesel is a denser fuel than gasoline, and hence a gallon of diesel actually contains more petroleum and emits more CO2 than a gallon of gasoline. And a *LOT* more of other pollutants. Yes, there exist diesels that are cleaner than gasoline cars that exist, but on a whole, even comparing only new cars, gasoline cars average a lot cleaner than diesels. For example, show me a single SULEV diesel on the market.
And that's vs. hybrids that we're talking about. Vs. electric cars, it's no contest, esp. with clean electricity.
and hosts about 1/5th as much.
As a hybrid or an electric? If you mean vs. a hybrid, you're living in a dream world. If vs. an electric, you're *still* living in a dream world, just not as much of one. The Aptera 2e I'm on a waiting list for, for example, starts at $25k.
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
he's admitted that he would have trashed the Roadster even if everything had been flawless because he sees hydrogen as being the future
That is so fucking ignorant it's not even funny. Unless he's talking about hydrogen combustion which everyone agrees is a just a stepping stone to fuel cells and not the end goal, then hydrogen cars ARE electric cars. The fuel cell generates power, which gets stored in batteries and large capacitors, which get used in the same way as an all-electric car would use the power.
Do you know what the difference is? The difference is that everyone already has electricity available in their homes, but hydrogen requires a whole new infrastructure to be built. That and the added inefficiency of using electricity to produce the hydrogen that will be transported to the fueling stations only to be converted back into electricity in the car. I never understood why anyone would even consider hydrogen for fueling cars, much less prefer it.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
"Buy American" is essentially a racist statement.
Eh, last I checked, "American" isn't a race...
Fine, but my issue with this is: It's NOT government's job to issue business loans!
We've gotten into that mentality with all the "exceptions" created like Fannie Mae and Sallie Mae, but look where those have gotten us? Skyrocketing costs for college tuition and the housing crisis!
If Tesla Motors wants a loan, they should pursue normal channels of venture capital or a bank loan. If the current economy makes those too difficult? I'm sorry about that -- but that's no excuse for trying to bypass the current system we have in place. I needed to buy a new car and got stuck paying way too high of an interest rate myself, thanks to banks being exceptionally "tight" with lending right now. I wasn't able to just run to the federal government and receive a more favorable loan. Why should a business like Tesla Motors get special treatment either?
Ah, but if you are going to do that kind of calculation you then have to factor in the costs of exploration, drilling, refining, transporting, storing, and pumping fossil fuels. Plus the intangibles like the economic impact of gas stations to a local economy; etc. You also need to factor in the costs of locating, mining, and processing battery materials vs their real world life span. One could also include the cost of shipping, storing, and recycling the batteries.
Then you get into the maintenance costs. A modern internal combustion engine and its necessary ancillary components comprise hundreds (if not thousands) of components. Many of them moving, in a caustic environment, and subject to wear. Compare that to a BEV where there are a couple dozen drive components with only two moving parts and MTBF ratings. Switch to electric vehicles and suddenly you are only getting the brakes, tires, and transmission/differential serviced. And with regenerative braking your period between maintenance is greatly extended.
The main advantages of electric vehicles are:
1) 90-95% efficient drive train.
2) Can use any energy storage medium that can be converted into electricity. (flywheels, fuel cells, gasoline powered generators, turbines, batteries; etc).
3) More torque at lower (zero) RPM.
4) Less components to wear out.
5) With BEVs you have a centralized fuel delivery system with a pre-built infrastructure that allows you to increase efficiency/environmental impact for millions of vehicles (assuming everyone is driving one) with a single upgrade over a very short period of time.
6) BEVs can actually help balance a power grid by acting as local storage systems for neighborhood power during periods of peak load and consuming poer at off-peak when that power is otherwise wasted.
Once more unto the breach dear friends...
What? GTFO of here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUhPaxvhJCI
Well, the one advantage of hydrogen is refilling times. It is very straightforward to refill a hydrogen tank quickly and be off on your way (though some safety issues do exist).
Do you know how long it takes to refill, for example, the Fuel Cell Equinox (GM's hydrogen showpiece)? 25-30 minutes for a full tank. Phosphate and spinel batteries charge in 10-20 minutes, and titanate batteries in under 10 minutes from quick chargers. GM is looking at doing what Honda does, which is store the hydrogen in bulk at the station at the same sort of massive pressures used in the vehicle tanks, but that's a nightmare waiting to happen, IMHO, as well as a major increase to the already-way-to-expensive price of hydrogen fuelling stations.
1. Simply recharnging most conventional battery chemistries is just out of the question. Most take hours. Apparently some exotic ones can take 10 mins, but I'm not sure what the tradeoffs are.
Wrong. Recharging most batteries in *common consumer devices* takes hours, but that's not due to a limitation of the chemistry. It's due to two things: one, most consumer devices are very high-C in discharge, which means they have to their batteries during charge to increase longevity; and two, there's simply no space or budget for the kind of cooling and charge balancing systems used in electric vehicle packs that enable such fast charges. NiMHs can be charged in 20-30 minutes (see the Hawaii Electric Vehicle Demonstration Program, which has been doing this for a decade), lead acid in 15-20 minutes (see fast-charge forklifts), etc.
There are three leading contenders for electric vehicle battery packs (not counting Tesla's near-unique approach of using laptop cells): titanates, phosphates, and manganese spinels. Phosphates are generally limited to about 15 minutes. Spinels are similar, 10 to 20 minutes. The titanate packs can be charged pretty much as fast as you can cool them -- most go for 10 minutes or less. There are two main disadvantages of titanates over phosphates and spinels, though: they hold less energy per kilogram and they cost about four times as much. Two examples of their usage are Phoenix, whose SUT uses them in order to qualify for the top tier of California's ZEV credits, which they sell; and the Lightning GT, a fast-charge sports car.
This is current, on-the-market tech. However, there are about two dozen in-the-lab techs that offer some pretty astounding increases in density *and* charge times. The odds of every last one of them failing are near zero percent.
It's kind of funny, and not what you'd expect, but do you know the prime impediments right now to manufacturers including fast-charge battery packs? 1) A lack of standardized hookups for high-power charging (unlike charging at up to 19kW, which is standardized at the SAE J1772 Yazaki connector), and 2) the need to have sufficient cooling for the battery pack. The latter is an extra expense that is hard to justify given the former. It has little to do with the cells themselves at this point.
2. There are things like supercapacitors which do solve the recharging problem, but those are a very new technology and I suspect there are downsides.
Huge downsides: they have horrible energy density. They're still struggling to merely try to get up to the energy density of lead-acid.
3. Any technology based on actually putting electricity into the battery has to contend with very high power draws. A "gas station" might need 300kV supply lines and look more like an electrical substation.
Not true. First off, instead of "gas stations", most chargers thusfar have just been at random local businesses, especially places who want EV customers to spend time there (grocery stores, restaurants, etc). But just ignoring that, any large charging centers, as well as very high power rapid chargers, will share a common battery bank that is trickle charged from the grid.
I agree with you about swapping, mind you.
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
Someone needs to write a bot to post a response every time someone blames the financial crisis on the CRA or in some other way largely on the GSE's.
"Federal Reserve Board data shows that:
* More than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions.
* Private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year.
* Only one of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006 was directly subject to the housing law that's being lambasted by conservative critics."
- http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/53802.html
Here's a few other links:
http://www.ptmortgage.com/blog/2008/10/01/pointing-fingers-was-it-cra-and-minority-lending-that-caused-the-mortgage-mess/
http://debatebothsides.com/showthread.php?t=73500
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=did_liberals_cause_the_subprime_crisis
http://www.frbsf.org/news/speeches/2008/0331.html
There is also a summary at Wikipedia.
Tweet, tweet.