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Electric Mini Cooper Has Rough Start
TopSpin writes "BMW's limited roll out of the electric version of its Mini has met with complaints from early adopters including less than advertised range, cold weather charging problems, bulky batteries and connection issues. Richard Steinburg, BMW's manager of electric vehicle operations, assures everyone that the manufacturer is 'learning quite a bit as we go.' Drivers are paying $850/month for the privilege of helping BMW learn how to build EVs, while also helping BMW meet alternative fuel mandates so that other models can continue to be sold in select markets."
Isn't it the car dealer who has to tell the client the charging specs? Then the client can have the right picture of how he is going to manage charging his car.
Also, when you "try" your car's acceleration, it's obvious that you will get a shorter range. It's true with a gas powered car, and so it is with an EV.
This confirms what I've always suspected: the green fashion is for rich suckers first, then for the rest of us when oil runs out anyway.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Cnosidering the plolution caused by bruning stuff, I don't think bio feuls will slove all your porblems.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
BMW initially had to learn about infrastructure of houses and electrical-regulatory agencies in introducing the electric Mini to the U.S., Steinberg said. A key problem was getting approval for the recharging plug, which was originally designed for the European market, according to the executive.
You Europeans and your superior plugs...you may have won this battle, but we will win the war.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
That was true ten years ago. But we do realize now that plant based fuels and recycled french fries oil can't power all the cars all over the planet. Unless you want to pay 45$ for your Mini Wheat or 75$ for your pop corn. And transform Central Park, the Bois-de-Boulogne and countless other urban parks into.... cornfields!
O RLY? The problem is solved? Exactly where can I buy these plant based fuels?
As the demand for biofuels causes competition with food production resources (land, water),
the cost of biofuels goes up. And they're not cheap now!
The previous attempt at practical EVs was GM's EV1. Apparently, their owners were mostly happy with the thing, despite its 1990s shortcomings and lack of charging stations, until GM decided to kill the program and take away all the vehicles, in typical GM-style idiotic managerial fashion. So maybe there's more to it than a craze or fad...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
But, I'm happy with my porblems, and I don't want them sloved!
Am I the only one who doesn't understand the craze for electric vehilces?
I work on my own vehicles, which makes me long for EVs. No more fuel-soaked hands, for one thing. Just moving pollution controls from the car to the power plant is a huge win, too. If you wouldn't rather have an EV than an ICE given similar performance characteristics, you don't understand the problem. With that said, we are going to need battery technologies that are more useful if we're going to make the switch.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Call it a beta!
Of course, BMW's demanding a lot of money, so maybe the Google example isn't the best.
Do the Microsoft! Shell out your hard-earned money to be part of their QC team!
Flameage and massive negative moderation in 3...2...1....
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Well, they get heavier (batteries), and weight is the enemy of handling, so I'd think they'd be underpowered and bad handling.
In other words, BMW has figured out how to make an electric "Big 3" car.
Outside of such radical solutions as living in walkable neighborhoods, bicycling, and using mass transit for daily trips, there is one advantage that electric has over other fuels.
Electric decouples the power source (be it coal, gas, nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, etc) from the vehicle.
So if we discover a practical cold fusion machine tomorrow, an electric vehicle infrastructure doesn't have to change. Instead we start replacing power plants.
The problem is not solved considering biofuels are neither cheap, nor can you manufacture enough of them even if you covered the entire world in corn/soy. Switchgrass ethanol is too expensive, the manufacturing processes have lousy efficiency. Algae biodiesel theoretically could do it, provided anyone could actually do it in a large scale on the cheap. You can use biofuels for military and aerospace requirements, but it is too expensive for people's cars.
Even palm oil biodiesel and sugar cane ethanol are not good enough.
There is enough spare electric capacity in off-peak times to power several dozen million vehicles in the US alone.
I'm still confused about this hybrid thing. Go to Europe, and you see the same Dodge minivan picking up kids in front of school, but with a turbodiesel. I know the market is manipulated there too, but I'd prefer the established 40- 45 mpg tech of a TD. The 335d is a great example. More Torque than the titans of Detroit of old. A Peugeot Diesel was my renta-car, and it feared no Berlin Taxi. I'd take a Jetta TDI over a Prius, etc.
Apparently, their owners were mostly happy with the thing, despite its 1990s shortcomings and lack of charging stations, until GM decided to kill the program and take away all the vehicles, in typical GM-style idiotic managerial fashion
They were happy because GM leased the cars to them at a loss. If they were forced to pay retail rates for the vehicles I doubt many people would have kept them. Not to mention the expensive and frequent battery replacements (they used lead-acid batteries and given the EV discharge/recharge cycles, they weren't expected to last very long).
Only the most recent developments in Lithium Ion technology have made it possible to get good performance, life, and range out of the large battery packs you need in a vehicle.
GM's mistake wasn't killing the EV1, it was discontinuing the entire program after the EV1 phase was complete. If they had kept developing better batteries and EV technologies the entire time they would be much further ahead re: the Volt than they are now.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
$75 for popcorn? You mean the theatres will give us a discount? Awesome!
You just grow your fuel plants on land that food farms don't use. Algae farms are perfect for this.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
I don't imagine I'll be moving trading my Tundra in for an alternate fuel source vehicle any time soon.
Would you say the same thing when gas cost $12/gallon?
We are supposed to be in the worst economic recession in decades, and oil still costs $80/barrel. So where do you think oil price will be in a recovery?
I'd learn to say, "Make my hybrid a plug-in, please."
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
Theater isn't limited to security. There's a lot of "green theater" out there, searching for rich suckers. One of the rich that sometimes gets suckered is the government. I regard hybrids and the Prius somewhat skeptically. It's fuel economy isn't all that great, actually. Manufacturers are still ignoring a lot of low hanging fruit. They haven't smoothed the undersides of their cars. The rims are not aerodynamic. Car bodies are closer to teardrop shapes than bricks, but there's still plenty of room for improvement. They're getting better with weight, but they're still using too much steel where lightweight composites or aluminum or lighter alloys could go. Until fairly recently, they wouldn't even use lighter oils (for instance, 5w20 instead of 10w30), one of the cheapest, easiest ways to get a little more fuel economy.
Much better than the Prius is the Ford Fiesta Econetic, a turbodiesel that gets 65 MPG, and it still doesn't cover all the easy ways to increase fuel economy. It's not a hybrid. Proof that a lot more can be done, and that manufacturers have yet to get really serious about fuel economy.
So where is the 100 MPG vehicle? I've heard of quite a few prototype vehicles that get over 200 MPG. It can be done, what's the hold up? Not enough competition in the automobile market, I guess.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
One important problem of the electric car is the time you have to spend charging it.
However, this doesn't happen with an hydrogen car like the Honda FCX Clarity car.
And it is also cheaper than the electric Mini (600$ a month)
More info at:
http://automobiles.honda.com/fcx-clarity/
Think again. They drove the Prius as fast as they could on that track ending up with 17 mpg. No one in their right mind would drive that way in the real world. Sure BMW can make a car that can beat the Prius at 100+ mph but that isn't what the Prius was designed for. It was designed to drive at speeds commonly used by commuters. Under those conditions it does very well averaging somewhere in the 40's.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
For any interested- The article fails to mention that this is/was an evaluation program initiated by BMW. The electric Cooper is not available through standard channels. I received an invitation to evaluate one but because I rent an apartment I didn't meet the minimum requirements to participate. One of the stipulations was that you had to have an enclosed parking area (i.e. a garage) and were willing to have the required charging equipment installed in that garage. There were some other requirements as well, but that was the one that prevented me from considering it. FWIW the invitation was pretty explicit about the performance differences between the gas and electric models as well as your responsibility during the evaluation period. Anyway, I wound up leasing a 2009 Clubman and my only regret is that I didn't do it sooner- 'Fun to drive' is a huge understatement.
As far as all electrical or even hybrid vehicles all my experiences with them tell me a few things, they don't have the same sort of get up and go power to them that a regular vehicle has in most cases and they are terribly expensive to repair.
Hmm, your Tundra can do 0-60 in under 4 seconds, and a quarter mile in under 13? A stock Tesla roadster can http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/video/3068-tesla-roadster-sport-nedra-record-12-643-1-4-mile.html
And a 1972 Datsun converted to pure electric is even faster. 0-60 in 2.9 seconds, quarter mile in 11.5 seconds. http://www.plasmaboyracing.com/whitezombie.php
That's an awful lot of get up and go power.
As for repairs, all indications are battery electric vehicles will be much cheaper to maintain and repair, due to the much simpler design of an electric motor vs a ICE. Time will tell on that one. But with no oil to change, no air filters, no timing belts, PCV valves or catalytic converters, and only one moving part in an electric motor -- it seems a good bet.
--Woof!
The theory behind biofuels is that they could be carbon neutral. While they would put C02 into the atmosphere when you burn them, the next crop would consume the same amount of C02
My beef with biofuels is that they compete with food for farmland.Call me crazy, but as much as I like driving, I prefer to eat.
Leave it to slashdotters to want to refactor our transportation infrastructure in order to make it more scalable :)
No surprise there. Corn is horrifyingly inefficient for producing Ethanol as a fuel. Ethanol is highly miscible with water making extraction of the fuel its self rather energy intensive to say nothing of the production of fertilizers etc being petroleum derived. Algae biodiesel and mycodiesel show much more promise. The mycodiesel can run off a cellulose feedstock which is handy because that's mostly what you have as a by-product of extracting the lipids from algae. The lipids are fairly hydrophobic so extraction from a liquid medium isn't that hard. The only real problem is efficiently breaking the cells and pressing the oils out of them. Another option is drying the algae and reforming the material using thermal depolymerization and fischer tropsch reactions to synthesize hydrocarbons among many other useful chemicals. There's even a patent on using a strain of bacteria that can produce ethanol from syngas which is a product of the thermal depolymerization. iofuels aren't dead, the important game changing ones are just ignored in favor of that failure named corn derived ethanol.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Corn biofuel is extremely inefficient, and, depending on where you get your numbers energy negative. But there are other crops with far higher potential efficiencies. Biofuel is definitely part of the solution, but not if we keep letting fucking politicians and their corn subsidies determine science.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Am I the only one who doesn't understand the craze for electric vehilces?
I work on my own vehicles, which makes me long for EVs. No more fuel-soaked hands, for one thing. Just moving pollution controls from the car to the power plant is a huge win, too. If you wouldn't rather have an EV than an ICE given similar performance characteristics, you don't understand the problem. With that said, we are going to need battery technologies that are more useful if we're going to make the switch.
I live in Canada. I would rather have an ICE over an EV because I understand all too well the problems of electronics and batteries when mixed with cold weather. Nobody heats with electricity, it's too expensive. Even if this came with an electric heating wand I can shove up my a$$ I still wouldn't want it.
Same could have been said for microwave ovens, computers. Somehow, demand causes all kinds of change. When gas hits a high enough cost, building an entirely new *anything* might be cheaper.
There's actually quite a bit of power generation capacity going to waste by virtue of not being able to store that power effectively between times of high and low demand. Actually if we made use of electric cars as temporary stores of power they could help stabilize the grid. Besides, we'll probably need to build more plants anyway considering that we need more capacity and cleaner more environmentally friendly plants in the near future. As for resources, if Copper becomes too scarce, the price rises and either we find a cheaper replacement or a new way to get more Copper.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Hey it's a good idea. Had we been on electric automobiles for the past 80 years the crossover between automobiles, portable computers, robotics, and space exploration would have been significant.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
So, you just watched Who Killed the Electric Car?, didn't you? =)
"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." ~1984 George Orwell
I watched the video and the BMW was driven BEHIND the Prius at "speeds as fast as possible".
I think that favors the BMW significantly considering the how close the BMW was driven behind the Prius, the Prius was doing most of the work pushing the air out of the way for it.
What a horrible test on so many levels, its completely useless to base anything on it.
Open Source Time and Attendance, Job Costing a
Somewhere along the line, someone didn't quite think this electric vehicle revolution through...
Pollution, smog, limited fossil fuels, accidents, traffic jams, gas supply problems, getting oil from 3rd world countries.
Somewhere along the line, someone didn't think this combustion engine automobile revolution through... yet it happened anyway just as the electric vehicle revolution might.
Here's hoping that whatever will eventually replace electric vehicles (if they ever become dominant) will be absolutely problem free.
That was not a "mistake". The purpose of the "EV1 phase", as you call it, was to construct a demonstration designed to "prove" (or, at least, to create the impression) that the ZEV mandate in California could not practically be met, as part of GM's efforts to have that mandate altered. Once the mandate was altered, the overall purpose for which that program that the "EV1 phase" was part of had served its purpose, so naturally both the "EV1 phase" and the entire program were terminated.
Your mistake is thinking that the program was aimed at creating viable, production electric cars. It was a political maneuver that acheived its political aim, and then was terminated.
Shouldn't a beta program be free?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
They were happy because GM leased the cars to them at a loss. If they were forced to pay retail rates for the vehicles I doubt many people would have kept them.
At least some of them would have, and many wanted to buy the car from GM after their lease expired. Instead, GM destroyed them.
If they had offered the customers the option to buy it for retail price, and most declined, that would have been pretty strong support for your argument. As such one either has to suspect either they did self-sabotage, or that they were so stupid they crunched the numbers wrong, and even the EV1 would have been profitable.
But now that the US government owns a significant chunk of GM I'm SURE they won't make any more dumb decisions like that...
Awwww, not this shit again. The DOE has stated that almost 80% of a US fleet of electric vehicles could be charged from off-peak (night) power generation, without building any additional plants. Raw materials? It's going to be far easier to come up with those than more oil (which is slowly running out). The electrical revolution has already been thought out, and it's running full steam ahead.
You think they'd be underpowered and handling badly.
If you get the chance: drive one of those Mini-E's (I have). Underpowered? Not at all, the acceleration is excellent, and the electric version has more power than its combustion-based brother (204 hp vs. 175 hp for the Mini Cooper S).
The handling is not bad either: the batteries are where the rear seats used to be (yes, that's another consideration), just in front of the rear wheels. This results in a good weight distribution, giving the car mid-engine-like handling.
Front wheel drive is a bit of a downer, but its short wheelbase would make rear wheel drive quite a handful to keep on the road with that constant, maximum torque.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium
I don't want to spoil you ignorance but right now we make a lot more CO2 than there are plants to use it. PLUS we are burning up the plants and destroying the jungles faster than they can be replaced. End result? WAY more CO2, fewer plants, fucked planet.
More likely they'll just be plugged in when folks are home for the evening, increasing the demand for the "entertainment" hours. Drive it to the work parking lot/garage the next day so it can sit in the sun while businesses are using peak power.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
The issue is one of investment.
Making algae farms that you can harvest from efficiently requires a major investment. Buying corn from a farmer who's already harvesting corn doesn't require such an investment.
Corn is terrible for making Ethanol. But currently, the WORLD has a corn infrastructure in place. The farmer is going to sell his corn crop to someone. It doesn't matter to him who's buying it - someone making tortillas or someone making Ethanol.
Corn is popular, not because it's good or efficient, but because it requires no additional investment. Just a reallocating from the poor to the rich.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
I disagree. It's popular because our overnmen has a fairly substantial subsidy on Corn based Ethanol. Without it the industry would collapse as it isn't terribly profitable. If massive several billion a year subsidies don't count as additional "investment" what does?
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
When China has a monopoly on the lithium needed for the batteries, and is reportedly planning to reserve it for internal use?
Even if that were true (which it isn't) we're already working on developing batteries using different materials. Silver-zinc is one possibility. MIT's carbon-nanotube super-capacitor research is also pretty exciting. It's silly to assume that lithium-ion batteries are the best we'll ever be able to produce.
Ddi yuo cnosider all the pssobilts ob bio feuls?
i just want you to know, that if you divide the population of the planet into families of 4, and gave each family a house with a yard (suburbanite america style) that we would all fit into a city the size of Texas.
And we'd all have one hell of a commute!
Anyway, I did some quick math, and I figure with a 30x30 meter lot (that's about 90 feet on a side, if you're non-metric), you would have about 745 million lots in Texas. Given that there are upwards of 6.5 billion of us on this planet, you wouldn't even have enough homes for HALF of the worlds population.
Of course, my math might be wrong, so if you'd show me your calculations that would be great!
You must love 'up to 50% off' sales.
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
At the time I believe a significant reason for the cars not being sold was the environmental regulations concerning the batteries. They contained lead. A pollutant that is tightly regulated in California. I do not believe any of the cars were disposed of in California because of this reason.
There were so many batteries in the EV1 that California called it a rolling toxic waste dump. GM wasn't allowed to sell any of them and I have no idea why this was never brought out in that documentary.
A lot of electric power plants sit idle most of the time. They exist only for peak power demands. If most of those cars recharge overnight, you might not have to build a single extra plant.
I don't know stats. It may be that some would be needed. It may be that the peak power plants are the most inefficient and dirtiest. But it's not nearly as bad as you imply.
Infuriate left and right
Let's see ... GM lost a bundle building them and leased them below cost. They could have sold them, you know, in exchange for money, to the drivers .... or they could have junked them, at cost. One way would have made some money, the other did cost some money.
No wonder the government likes them enough to bail them out. BFF when it comes to fiscal common sense.
Infuriate left and right
I think that an electric heating wand that goes up your ass would tend to decrease the cars popularity rather sharply, except perhaps in San Francisco.
Actually, in BC electric baseboard heaters are fairly common. The advantages are that you can independently control each room and don't need to have a duct system. Thus you can heat only the bedroom at night, and turn the rest of the house down. Most newer houses are going with forced air heat pumps though as they're much more efficient when the temperature difference between inside and outside is relatively small (most of the year on the coast). The heat pumps are electric powered but move substantially more heat than they consume. Some of the more expensive houses are going with heat recovery ventilation too.
Why do you need the cabin to be above freezing?
Defrosting of the windshield (and preventing the water vapor from your breath to freeze on it again) is an important duty of the climate control system.
Openning the window may help with that.
I'm unsure how should I respond to that :-) May I ask, have you driven a car in Canada, in winter? I suspect not, because you need an ice scraper to remove the *thick* ice from the glass (outside) before you can hope that the heat from the heater will melt the rest. Without the heater all the windows will be opaque in, say, 10 seconds after you get in.
But yes, opening a window is a popular way to look outside, and I did that more than once. That assumes that you *can* lower the window - and that is not always true. And in any case, driving with window(s) open in winter, when it is snowing, is not my standard of comfort. Note that in the car comfort often translates into safety.
Complete bullshit. Owners of EV1's liked them so much many offered to pay full value, even more then the original sticker price. As with any product the initial purchasers lower the cost for the next round, it wouldnt always cost 80,000-100,000 to produce.
Production can be built anywhere.
Perhaps walkable is a stretch, but public transit makes it easier to do without a car for work commutes. Walkable neighborhoods do a great job of providing the rest of your needs. Nobody I know in this city without a car has moved due to changing jobs, they just switch train/bus routes or stops. Cars are rare enough that not much space is wasted with empty parking spaces, so within 15 minutes walk there are hundreds of restaurants, several major grocery stores, among other things. Rent is a bit more expensive, but the savings on car expenses and the cost of my time to maintain a car more than make up for it.
There are certainly some jobs where non-car transit methods simply won't work, but that's in the minority. Walkable neighborhoods do work and are actually quite nice to live in.
No oil changes, no air filters, no greasy parts, no visit to a gas station, less moving parts, it only consumes energy (stored) when its providing power, its quieter and can be very powerful with great torque. Much cheaper to power down the road.
More then one reason to switch already, throw in the kicker for me personally: I would get better parking at work, and they would supply the electricity.
According to TFA, this electric mini does not seem to be related to the one built by PML 3 years ago. The four in-wheel motors was an interesting approach. 640 bhp (477 kW), 60mph in 4.5s. With an integrated 250cc 2-cylinder four-stroke gas engine for long trips. (charging the batteries as you go).
My other signature is a car
Really, then how come Brazil was able to make the change? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil
And their point was absolutely true. If people stopped driving like their lives depended on getting to the next red light 3s sooner, overall, it would make a much bigger difference than going from a normal car to a Prius.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Your 60 month monthly payment on the Prius, at a 0% interest loan, is $366. You drive the typical 12,000 miles a year, which is 250 gallons of gas, or 21 gallons a month.. In your old car, that's 545 gallons of gas or 45 a month. . At a current price of $3/gallon...
Prius: 63
Old car: $135 a month.
Total monthly cost of Prius at current gas prices: 429 Total monthly cost of Old Car at current: 135
Now let's look at your theoretical $12/15*/20 /gallon:
Prius at $12/gallon: $618 / 681 / 786
Old car: $540 / 675 / 900 That means the break-even gas pricing of the car you purchased explicitly to save gas e is somewhere between $15-20 a gallon.
Alternatively, let's say you paid cash up front. In order for your new car purchase to pay for itself in gas savings (again, based on 12k a year):
$3/gallon: 309 months
$12/gallon: 76 months
$15/gallon: 61 months
Now, if you actually need a new car anyway, and you absolutely must have a brand new car instead of one that's a couple of years old (and much less expensive), it's definitely worth it. But if there's nothing wrong with your car... well, personally, I'll be sticking with the car I've already paid for (21mpg highway) for a good long time.
* If you got 4000 for your trade in, that would lower the break-even point to around $14/gallon.
Most apartment car parks here don't have power sockets nearby.
That's a small problem, I just bought a generator. I can even take it with me for long trips.
Another day, another update to a Google android app.
Making algae farms that you can harvest from efficiently requires a major investment. Buying corn from a farmer who's already harvesting corn doesn't require such an investment.
Soybeans would have been a better direction. Just about anyone who can grow corn could grow soybeans instead. Many farmers already have the equipment necessary so they can rotate their fields. Corn is very hard on the soil.
It doesn't matter to him who's buying it - someone making tortillas or someone making Ethanol.
Corn used for food is a different variety than corn used for ethanol or animal feed. They would of course compete for the same land, so the farmer would have to make the decision of who to sell to at seeding time.
But if your argument is infrastructure, then ethanol still loses to soybeans. To use more than ~10% ethanol a gasoline engine needs considerable modifications. Other than the new smog equipment on 'clean' diesels, a diesel engine can use any percentage of biodiesel. (although research does need to be done on lowering the cloud point)
If we had pushed Biodiesel instead of ethanol, we could have tackled large fuel users (fuel per engine), such as trains and OTR trucks first, while the average consumer slowly migrated to diesel cars at their own pace. Which would have allowed time for algae infrastructure to mature.
Another day, another update to a Google android app.
Does that directly correlate to the number of people who have garages or electrical service where they park their car. What if I live in a condo or townhouse with a garage?
No, it is not.
Except the Tesla charger is 70 Amps. Simple math: 240V @ 70Amps = 16,800 Watts. The Tesla battery capacity is 53kWh. 53,000Wh / 16,800W = 3.15 hours in an ideal world. Makes their claim of a 3.5hour full charge using the high power connector reasonable.
The average main service in the US is 240V @ 200A, not "less than 100 amp." My heat pump is on a 60A breaker.
You fail math. 9.6kW for 24 hours is 230.4kWh. You could charge the Tesla over 4 times with that. In the real world 240V @ 70A for 3.5 Hours is 58.8 kWh x 12 cents a kWh national average = 7.05 dollars to charge the battery from full dead. With an average 244 miles a charge that's 34.6 miles per dollar. Unless gas gets back down to a dollar a gallon you won't beat that. Also I pay 3.5c a kWh in my nuclear and hydro powered state so it would be 2.06 dollars a charge for me or 118 miles per dollar.
Also, perhaps the most important thing to remember is that the Tesla was not designed as an economy car but as a high performance sports car. Show me any car that can match the 0-60mph time (which is faster than many Ferraris and Lamborghinis) that costs less to drive per mile than a Honda Civic.