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Tesla Motors To Suspend Roadster Production
Wyatt Earp writes with news that a recent SEC filing from Tesla Motors revealed the company plans to stop production on its electric Roadster (and the Roadster Sport as well) in 2011. This will leave the automaker without any cars to sell until the launch of its Model S sedan (financed in part by $465 million in DoE loans) in 2012. Tesla plans to resume production of Roadster models "at least a year" after the Model S arrives. From Wired's Autopia blog:
"'As a result, we anticipate that we may generate limited, if any, revenue from selling electric vehicles after 2011 until the launch of the planned model S,' the company says in the SEC filing. That may not be a problem if S production starts on plan and goes off without a hitch, but if Tesla hits any snags, things could get ugly fast — a point it concedes in the filing. 'The launch of the Model S could be delayed for a number of reasons and any such delays may be significant and would extend the period in which we would generate limited, if any, revenues from sales of our electric vehicles.'"
Let's hope they don't screw the pooch... We need companies like Tesla to prove electric cars can be viable alternatives to prevalent gasoline vehicles...
That's a pretty crappy business model.
This is a sig. It is like every other sig in the world, except that it is mine, and it is different.
When Subaru came out with their 2010 Legacy model they brought out the big guns and re-engineered the body design completely. Subaru redesigns the Legacy on a five year timeline and instead of building on the tried and true Legacy platform, they designed the new Legacy around the WRX STi platform. The result is a car with a great engine, large interior, and aggressive styling.
The other result is terrible sales.
No one likes the new exterior. It resembles Honda's generic styling more than Subaru's conspicuously different styling. No one buys a Legacy because they want to drive an Accord.
You can't build a city by burning it to the ground. You need at the very least a Granary and a Marketplace so that you can grow your population while making income. This allows you to finance all the other fun stuff you want to do like developing war trolls or building sorcerer's guilds. Without the basic income stream, you're just going to get screwed when some bear rushes in and eats all your citizens because you don't have even a single halberdier around to guard the town.
This is a bad idea that will put Tesla out of business soon. I feel almost bad for all the people who prepaid.
The Tesla model S sedan will retail for $50,000+ which means that less than 20% (and that is being very generous) of Americans will be able to afford this car. Tesla is a niche and it will always be niche. The best that they (and the taxpayers) could hope for is for them to be bought by one of the major auto manufacturers. Why should the taxpayers be financing car production by boutique manufacturers for wealthy people? If the government subsidizes heavily so that average people can buy this particular car then you have to explain why the government should be in the business of picking winners and losers in the market for private automobiles. If Tesla is such a good investment then why cant they raise $450 million from the private equity market instead of from taxpayers; 99% of whom will never sit behind the wheel of a Tesla?
Or they need to retool their existing plants so they can start producing the model S.
Taxpayer bears the risk of default, Tesla execs get to keep any windfalls of development, all the while drawing their salary against the loan. Doesn't sound like the best deal for the taxpayer to me.
They better not share crucial suppliers with the big manufacturers.
Here's what's going to happen otherwise:
Launch gets delayed multiple time because components are not ready. Tesla skidding towards Chap 11. Daimler or another real player snatch up Tesla at a bargain.
This needs a car anaolgy!
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
You have to give 'em credit for courage. Moving away from the incremental change model transforms the consumer's unacknowledged secondary role of beta tester into that of alpha tester, so they either get it right the first time or they likely become a blip in automotive history.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Your assessment of utility might change at some point in the future. @$5/gal, $6/gal..
..don't panic
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that the Model S will fail not because Tesla Motors is staffed by idiots (it isn't), and not because the gubmint won't support electric vehicles, but because fully electric vehicles cannot be competitive with liquid-fuel vehicles.
Forget unit prices, horsepower, yadda yadda, here's the only statistic that matters:
Energy density of lithium batteries: 1 megajoule/kg
Energy density of gasoline: 45 megajoules/kg
Vehicles are unique among energy technologies in that they typically have to carry their energy source around with them. So energy stored per mass is the most important figure of merit for vehicle propulsion, and electric vehicles are inherently 45 times worse than their liquid-fuel competition.
To compensate for that factor of 45, serious sacrifices have to be made: either you accept a huge reduction in vehicle range, a huge reduction in vehicle performance, or you spend ridiculous amounts of money reducing drag and friction -- spending that shows up in the final price of the vehicle.
I predict that electric vehicles will never be able to overcome the energy density barrier and become popular, until either liquid fuel is no longer a readily available competitor, or vehicles no longer have to carry their own energy supply (think electric trains.)
And if you think you'll be able to convince the public to stop using gasoline "for the good of the planet", or for any reason other than prohibitive cost, I think you're probably naive. I've been trying to think of times when humans gave up an energy source for any reason other than cost vs performance. The only example I can think of is human slavery, and we had to destroy half of a nation to convince them to give it up.
I hear you have these things called legs and feet.
Not everybody comes with those. See, for example, this video and this video.
The mileage seems nearly infinite
It's slow, it has no climate control, the carrying capacity is far lower than the trunk of a sedan, and food isn't free. A cheap bicycle is a distinct improvement; it quadruples my speed and range and roughly doubles food mileage, but it still lacks climate control so it's not so useful in the temperate areas of the northern hemisphere right now.
All the batteries, and placement, add too much weight to the Roadster.... And the recharge time is currently too long.
Both of these things would be solved if they used a hydrogen fuel cell, to generate the power for the electric car. Very efficient, will allow people to fuel as they go, and eventually the power source can be switched to a battery when one is produced that is competitive... Its win-win, and as an added plus would significantly decrease the cost of production, so more of us can afford it....
I can't get Jim Cramer's cameo on Iron Man out of my mind. "It's a car company... that doesn't make cars! Sell! Sell! Sell!"
You don't start by making a $2,000 car.
Unless you're Nicholas Negroponte and you launch the whole netbook fad by trying to get the cost of building a laptop down close to 100 USD.
until 2012 to see the S car go.
Energy density of lithium batteries: 1 megajoule/kg Energy density of gasoline: 45 megajoules/kg
Is that with or without lithium's fivefold advantage in how much of the energy actually gets to the wheels? When you recharge the lithium, all the thermodynamic inefficiencies of an Otto cycle heat engine are already paid for at the power plant. In addition, as Anonymous Coward pointed out, you don't need to lug around the heat engine itself.
i hope it comes with a duke nukem forever paint job.
So basically, here's the career guide for you. Take all the credit for PayPal at the right time, with the right partner, sell for a ton of money, build a car company that rarely makes any cars, a space ship company that can't launch anything, write a big check to Obama, and the next thing you, the Democrat's Bernie Madoff will wind up with a contract for all manned space flight.
What a joke!
This is my sig.
Add the fact that two wheels are impractical bordering on insane to drive on all that frozen Climate Change currently covering the a large fraction of the northern hemisphere. This day it was another 50cm of it in parts of Western Europe and we rather need snowmobiles or 6-wheelers right now to get anywhere.
"and practical sense to have an electric car for daily use, and rent a fuel car for longer trips"
And that doesn't really make sense for a huge part of the country where we go to the store once a week for food, and fill up a van. We have to haul stuff to our property to maintain buildings, fields, etc.
I said "city boy" and I'm joking a bit. But I'm doing that show you that the way you live and where you live is up to you and is neither right nor wrong. Please give everyone else the same benefit of freedom to choose where and how they want to live
By 'huge part of the country' I assume you mean by area, not population.
The population of the country, or the population of the United States Senate that wrote the paycheck of the DOE that made this loan? Representation in the Senate is biased toward states with smaller populations, especially the thinly populated plains states located between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River. Even a state with the minimum 60,000 people would get its representative, two senators, and three Presidential electors. That's one reason why these rural "other markets" have a voice in the first place. The other is anecdotal: a lot of us have relatives in these "other markets".
Most of the people that I know that own trucks only use them as a truck occasionally.
At what point do you draw the line between "occasionally" and "often"? Every two weeks?
Nothing in those videos indicated that they didn't have those at some point. Much like any vehicle, if you break it and you want it to work properly, you fix it... Or you deal with the brokeness. Secondly, the AC never specified what they wanted in a vehicle besides a vehicle that was under $50k and was over 300 miles to the gallon. For all we know, they expect that at a price point of $49,999.99 all the way down to free. If people post stupid comments, they will get stupid responses.
If they fail to repay the loan, that's about $1.45 per person. If Tesla wants $1.45 right now from me, I'm fairly sure I could afford it. Don't get me wrong. That's a lot of money when added up, but in the grand scheme of things, it won't be all bad if Tesla fails. They've done a lot of good ground work for a start-up.
Part of your problem is that you're viewing this as a bailout, as if Tesla had somehow ran their company into the ground. This isn't the case. What they've asked for, and any good business person will do this in lieu of using their own money, is ask for a loan to expand their operations to forge ahead with their plans.
We have actually subsidized a lot in this country. Some of it has been for the betterment of society, some of it hasn't. This subsidy has that potential for the betterment of society. Any technology that is developed can be expanded upon in the future. But hey, being short-sighted is all the rage with average Joe angry American.
By the way, the previous administration gave our taxes to the wealthy too. Looks like you're fucked on both side of the fence, aren't you?
Although I was interested in buying Tesla stock when their IPO occurs, I think I would rather short it or not even touch it now. This company feels like it has "Scam" written all over it. Don't get me wrong I think they make great products, but this company reminds me of a dotcom where its all PR and no actual progress.
"These guys are brilliant hypesters with good government management skills."
Some of the guys at Tesla also run SpaceX, the company that will soon begin providing commercial launch services for NASA.
Now, I'm all for commercialization of space... I think it's long overdue. But imagine if NASA cancels Ares and then these guys go "So yeah, we contracted some missions for you, but we've decided that our Falcon design isn't viable. Sorry about that".
It's a good thing Boeing and Lockheed have Delta and Atlas rockets.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
A little bit of a troll, but slashdotters need to get girlfriends to make this work ;-) Seriously though, what married couple doesn't have at least two cars? My Civic really fits my commute well, but it would certainly not fit my family comfortably for a long trip (we've tried). If we're going long, we can pile everybody and everything into the barge. A limited range electric car would replace my commuter pretty well.
I commute round trip 25 miles per day plus occasional errands. I don't trust what age and New England cold would do to mileage estimates, but if the manufacturer claims 100 miles, I'd buy that for my commute!
Of course up front cost is another issue, plus the approach taken by the Volt sounds like an excellent possibility, but we'll see in another 5+ years when I next need to replace a car.
The Feds need to recall the loans immediately. They were specifically made for the sedan, but their mere presence allowed Tesla to continute working on the roadster.
Recall them now. Immediate payment. If Tesla goes bankrupt because of it, so be it. Preston Tucker, what?
I'm sure someone, somewhere has asked this question: why can they just make the batteries swappable? The time to "refuel" wouldn't be the time spent on adding electricity to the battery, but instead changing the battery in the car. Sure...you'd need some sort of special equipment, and they're probably heavier than hell. But has anyone tried to sort this aspect of the electric car to get these off the ground?
---- Please be nice in case my Slashdot karma ~= my real life karma.
Energy density of lithium batteries: 1 megajoule/kg
Energy density of gasoline: 45 megajoules/kg
Vehicles are unique among energy technologies in that they typically have to carry their energy source around with them. So energy stored per mass is the most important figure of merit for vehicle propulsion, and electric vehicles are inherently 45 times worse than their liquid-fuel competition.
You are neglecting some pretty important facts. The first fact you are neglecting is energy conversion efficiency. Electric motors have FAR higher energy conversion efficiency - something like 90% versus 10-40%. The energy density of the fuels source itself is a factor but not meaningful by itself. Uranium has a far higher energy density than gasoline but we're not likely to put it in an automobile anytime soon.
Second, you are ignoring the weight of the equipment required to convert that energy into motion. Internal combustion engines are heavy and gasoline isn't much use for transportation by itself without a vehicle. What you should be comparing is the weight of the *entire* vehicle and those weights are demonstrably comparable. The Telsa Roadster is pretty similar in weight and performance to the Lotus that shares the same frame. It is the power per weight for the whole vehicle that matters, not just for the fuel source.
Third, you are assuming that current battery technology will never be improved upon. While batteries are not improving as fast as we would like, that doesn't mean they won't continue to improve. A breakthrough is still a realistic possibility with batteries whereas gasoline engines are unlikely to get significantly more utility from a liter of gasoline than they currently do.
A 440-volt, 60-amp charger can refill the batteries in an hour. I read something last year about a restaurant chain looking into providing chargers for customers. On a cross-country trip you could recharge while eating.
Why do journalists try to reuse some annoying device over and over again? Can't they, you know, see how terrible it is?
If I knew I wouldn't be fucking reading your article, you know.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The vast majority. At my last job, out of ~200 people, we had one (me) who routinely rode a bike to work. And 80%+ of the employees lived within 5 miles.
Kinda tough to pick up 3 kids from day care / school and then run them to hockey / soccer practice with a bike. For that matter, the extra 30 miles of driving errands for all the kids is another hammer in the electric car.
Of course, you don't even have to say it - why do kids not just play in the neighborhoods?
This is my sig.
...or skis. Or something like this.
Oh fuck off you arrogant douche-bag. Wow you know of the existence of Fire Fox and can install a plug in. That's so clever!
Slashdot is experimenting with expanding their readership via social networking sites. I doubt it will work, but they would be stupid not to try. If you find the 200 pixels devoted to the Facebook and Twitter links annoying, you really need to take a hard look in the mirror and figure out what the hell is wrong with yourself.
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
All modern rail systems have more than solved, but actually reversed, the energy density issue.
A ground-level power supply could easily extend the range of electric cars well beyond all gasoline powered vehicles, such systems have already been deployed.
We need not incorporate the ground level power supply into surface streets either, just the major highways, because the electric cars have enough range for driving around town already. We might however find the funds for converting even major surface streets once enough people were driving electrics.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
So you think you need a new style of clothes every year?
No. You tell people that they are better/smarter/sexier because they have something. Or dumb/failure/loser because they don't.
You for instance are a failure because you don't have an electric car.
Deleted
Maybe the apartment could install charging outlets at their parking spaces.
I had a similar idea, but not all of us apartment dwellers have parking spaces. I'm in my apartment now and my car is parked on the side of the public road. Actually that's one of the things I hate about here, there is no off-street parking. I hope that changes, but I doubt it, by me moving.
I know, it sounds like an extremely complicated and expensive endeavor, but I think capitalism might just might just be able to work something out.
Unfortunately we don't have a capitalist, or freemarket, economy. What we have is a mixed economy. Yes, even in the US, we have a mixed economy.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
'Nuff said.
Maybe the AC was offtopic, but no need to slam him just because he doesn't like the icons and gives advice on how to remove them. I personally hate them too, slashdot looks more than ever like the cheap slut it has become.
This is what happens when your long term corporate strategy ends with being bought out by one of the Big 3. With GM, Ford, and Chrysler having their own problems (and being unable to buy upstarts like Tesla) it's only a matter of time before they implode. That's exactly what's going to happen if they don't get a cash infusion by external sources. Make no mistake here folks, on their own Tesla has a snowball's chance in hell of competing on the market as an independent entity.
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
all that frozen Climate Change
Someone needs to learn the difference between:
* "Global" and "Local"
* "Climate" and "Weather".
Noone ever goes walrus!
1) Modern automotive-style li-ion battery lifespans are similar to transmission lifespans or other vehicle component lifespans. Fuel cells, on the other hand, have about half the lifespan of said batteries.
2) It's not that li-ion batteries are difficult to recycle; it's that the automotive-style li-ions are nontoxic and the raw materials in them are cheap, so there's not much incentive to recycle them.
3) Hydrogen generally costs $3-$15/kg, with the lower end from natural gas and the upper end from electrolysis.
4) Hydrogen is *not* the solution if you want power; fuel cells are priced per watt, not per watt hour.
5) The hydrogen cycle in a fuel cell vehicle with electricity as a source is 1/4 to 1/2 as efficient as that in a BEV. So no matter what your power source, you'll be requiring 2-4 times as much of it. Even if natural gas is the source, EVs are still usually 20-50% more efficient.
6) If you want to talk about resources, unlike EVs, fuel cells *do* use rare elements (in particular platinum).
7) FCVs cost about an order of magnitude more than EVs. For example, there's only one FCV available today that's not subsidized, and that's Toyota's FCHV-adv. It's by all standards a seemingly normal SUV, in terms of power, range, etc. But it costs over $8k a month to lease. One year of leasing of it would nearly pay for a Tesla Roadster outright -- a carbon fiber supercar that does 0-60 in under 4 seconds.
8) FCVs *require* infrastructure to do anything. EVs only require new infrastructure for away-from-home recharging, and a heck of a lot less of it.
I can keep going if you'd like. There's a reason why our Secretary of Energy tried to kill off our fuel cell programs. Tried. Congress forced him to keep them going, mainly due to amendments from people in districts who had been receiving the fuel cell research money.
Noone ever goes walrus!
http://www.renault-ze.com/ i still think Tesla might survive. Even big automakers are dipping into EV market, and not lightly.
I'm not sure what you're talking about, I don't see any facebook or twitter icons/banners anywhere. Just plain text comments.
It's probably due to my settings, but I haven't changed anything for the last six months or so... It's not because of a plugin either since I'm using Safari.
Even better than car sharing, IMHO, is a towable generator like the AC Propulsion Long Ranger. Why rent or exchange a whole car when you could just rent or exchange a generator?
Actually it makes sense for many people to share cars. I don't myself but a few blocks from me a Coop I am a member of has some cars parked there as part of car sharing, Hourcar. Online Hourcar members can reserve a car for specific tyme periods then go and pick it up. There is no insurance premium, maintenance, and they only ask the person to fill up if the car is less than 1/4 full. However drivers are given a gas card for that.
If a person only needs a car once or twice a week and only for a few hours at a tyme they can save a lot of money by sharing a car. Even over regular car rentals.
Why rent or exchange a whole car when you could just rent or exchange a generator?
I haven't done it for myself but I used to work in construction and we'd occasionally rent a generator. It's cheaper just to buy the generator, unless it's rarely used. However you have to have someplace to keep it. Where I live there have been 2 bikes stolen from the lot, one was mine, since I've lived here. Both were locked up too. Even left out for a few hours to charge an EV a generator would disappear from here.
Heck last spring I had someone come and rip out all of the plants from a section of my garden I spend days working on, more than 60 peppers, tomatoes, and tomatilloes, in the middle of the night. And I was planning on making jars and jars of salsas and sauces from them.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
The range problem has been long solved for electric cars, until such a time as a cheaper and better battery system is developed. It's a non issue, a red herring against electric cars. And it doesn't require exotic battery swap out stations and all that nonsense, which *don't* exist and would cost hundreds of billions in unnecessary infrastructure cost to create, money we just don't have right now for that, when we already have enough regular gas stations.
Now, look at this short video, see the thing on the back of that pure electric car? That's a rigidly attached range extender generator trailer. Not only does it give you unlimited range, just stop and fill up with gas as you would normally, but being a two point hitch instead of one, it doesn't flex, and even trailer noobs can use it, and back up easy, etc.
You can have your shorter range electric commuter car, and still be able to do just as long of trips on the highway as any other pure fuel burning car.
That can be taken any way you want it to go (I'd prefer a larger trailer that also had some cargo space to it), but that's the gist of it. A range extender turns your pure electric commuter into a "modular hybrid"** on demand, for those odd times you need a lot more range. You could buy one, use it also at your house for when the grid goes down in storms, etc, as is common now in suburbia or the country to have, the home backup genny, or just rent one for those longer trips.
**modular hybrids like this setup in the video make more sense to me than the "everything on board all the time" models like you have with the dual gasoline engine plus electric motor, plus batteries, plus fuel tank rube goldberg traditional hybrids like the prius or the upcoming volt. And heck, as to a generator trailer, you could DIY in one day with all off the shelf stuff from home depot, today, right now. Small trailer, appropriate sized generator, some u-bolt clamps, etc, and then build your charging plug and cable.
We just need the affordable electric cars out there on the dealers lots, and small trucks. And we could have them, if they just picked one steenking closed factory and retooled and just built the damn things, like a Model A electric car, just do it, in mass quantities rather than fooling around with more studies and only coming up with exotic sportscar high performance expensive electric cars, and with wasting time on those dual everything hybrids, which are the worst of both worlds, hauling around all the dual weight and taking up space when you don't have to most of the time.
30-40 mile range is plenty for like the bulk of commuting in the US, not all, but the bulk of it, potentially tens of millions of customers right there, with the affordable, non real exotic, battery tech we already have.
I had to look for them myself, I hadn't noticed them previously. They're at the bottom of the summary, before the comments, same line as the story tags. I guess those icons have entered the range of 'ignore by default' by web readers. Also kudos to slashdot to have them available but so unobtrusive.
300 Miles per charge
Quick charge in 45 minutes
0-60 Mph in 5.6 seconds
Seats 5 adults and 2 children.
Half the price of the roadstar, 50,000
.
All that and it still has a funky looking shape.
Given much lower price and the better performance it seem worth cancelling the roadstar. Telsa cars are still to expensive though, $20,000 is a good price for a high range, family car, and Telsa's model S is two and a half times that. I hope they are sucessful, then the economies of scale with move the price of there cars, down to the price of ordinary cars. Replace petrol in cars, is the key step to reducing global warming.
---
Electric Vehicles Feed @ Feed Distiller
wow out of all the issues on slashdot, from ICANN manipulations to human rights, I've never seen someone so outraged as you are, and over a facebook sharing link nonetheless LOL. Get out of your basement and get some sunlight.
Blocking the icons is the proper method to remove these unwanted images. Anyone blocking them would not be using them. I and others are reducing Slashdot's bandwidth usage and our IT footprint. I did this within a minute of seeing them a few days ago (Adblock Plus as well). That must make me intolerant. No doubt, I'd find you to be a real motherfucker offline.
(...)you arrogant douche-bag.
Um, from what I see, the entire slashdot community is made up of arrogant douche bags.
My air+steam Wind Engine is a canned tornado explosion and will travel 465 million miles before it needs a tune-up... and they got $465,000,000.00 for a measly crap few miles?! What a crying dang shame. Stupid damn Dept. of Energy nuthin' better to do than sling cash like it's Waffle House hash browns. In my enginewow.htm engine design the hot steam cancels out the liquid supercold air so the metal doesn't suffer wear from expand/contract (plus the oil never suffers heat breakdown viscosity. OK, I give up, I give up here. Hush Percy. Stupid Stupid Stupid D.O.E. eat my grits fools.
Didn't notice them before either, but yeah they're below the summary now that you mention it.
Gee, I noticed that, too. For politically correct reasons, here is the prescribed terminology:
Rule 1
a) Severe cold is weather.
b) Severe heat is climate change.
c) Rule 1 overrides all other rules.
Rule 2
a) Local temperatures are unimportant weather.
b) Global temperatures are evidence for climate change.
c) Rule 2 is overridden by Rule 1.
Rule 3
a) Decrease in temperature or sea level are isolated, shortlived or anomalous events.
b) Increase in temperature or sea level are climate change.
Rule 4
a) IPCC selects the temperature stations to include in global averages.
b) IPCC selects the trees to include in tree ring proxy data.
c) IPCC selects the sea level reading stations to include in global averages.
Rule 5
a) Temperature stations in the middle of dense and growing cities are preferred.
b) Temperature readings from nations with a high degree of Internet connectivity are suboptimal.
Rule 6
a) IPCC calculates the global average and presents the results.
b) Only IPCC-accredited personell is allowed for verification.
Rule 7
a) IPCC is allowed to "hide the decline".
I take exception to that. I'm a moronic douche bag.
Never mistaken for cool!
-1 Moron
A range extender turns your pure electric commuter into a "modular hybrid"
That is exactly what the volt does, except without a trailer lugging behind. Unlike the Prius it is not as you say, a "traditional hybrid".
Nah, the science is settled and the time for debate is over. (Always has been, now get back in line!)
It still has a gas engine, a fuel tank, an electric motor, and batteries, all crammed in the same package, this time with more weight than current hybrids. It's a traditional hybrid, albeit with more battery storage so it has some useful range on batteries alone, so they call it a "plug in", but that has been an aftermarket mod option guys have done to their priuses already. The potential was always there, just the cost shoots up fast (also the priusus have wimpy electrics, they need to go to a larger motor there). Anyway, did you really look at that genny trailer thing? It's tiny, you wouldn't even notice it for trips when you really needed that extra range, it isn't like it would be some huge chore to tow it, and the two point hitch is a spiffy idea.
One of the promises of pure electric, once made in mass quantities and not in limited production runs of exotic high performance sportscars, or "sports sedans", is a cheaper vehicle, plus more dependable and less maintenance. With the modular hybrid approach, if you just need to rent the generator trailer a few times a year at most, you eliminate all that maintenance, cost, etc, and stuff to break down, at least for yourself, the shop maintains those with pro mechanics. Just depends how much you really need to go beyond 40 miles (which I think is supposed to be the volt's range on batts). The volt is going to come in high, in the high end sedan class price wise, like 40-50 grand I bet once it stops being "coming soon" and they really sell the things. Glad some folks will be able to afford it, but I couldn't now. Or, they will sell it at a loss and hide the fact, just to sell them and justify their big loan to keep from going really bankrupt.
I used to work for those guys..I am not a huge fan of GM. I have one of their old vans, it was swell, but have seen too many other really not so hot rides come from there, and they all are overpriced (IMO, that's subjective..I don't like the management there, and being in the UAW..echhh).
Different strokes. I think there's a decent market for pure electrics, especially if they can hit around 20 grand, with grade B batteries and not top of the line. I know eventually I would like one, a small truck, as long as it has about a 40 mile range, that would suit my needs OK, that's the round trip to town for me, without completely depleting the batteries (it is really a bit over 30 miles in actual distance, so a 40 mile range is a nice cushion all around). That would help make the batts last longer. Or quite a bit of cruising around the farm here, I can get by there just a couple miles a day (800 acre farm). Most of the time, I would never need to burn any fuel at all then, could go all year and never burn any fuel, just charge it, and I have some solar panels already, and would get some more if I needed them. That would be full transportation independence, and no worries about either the grid being up, or price/availability of fuel *at all*, which to me is the ultimate goal, I dig on independence in things. right now, we are very close on food, real close.
Already went through that opec embargo and so on, actually lost my job at the time because I simply could not get to work at all, huge lines at the stations, two gallons max, ten bucks a gallon. It went from normal to that almost overnight. And if anything, the US imports a lot more than it did back then, (30% then, 60% now, around there) so any global oil availability "issues" would be worse than back then..say all those dummies decide to light up Iran, then Iran lights up all sorts of other interesting places, then the straits of hormuz go down, and etc. and this is not a wild improbability either. Oil is a global fungible, so the market would..take yer pick, I could see it hitting 3-400 a barrel within days. Because they could get it. When they got ya by the short and curlys, you squeal.
For a ride, I make do now with a small four cylinder diesel truck, gets around 40 MPG highway, 35 or so on secondary roads or going in a lower gear, etc.
If nothing else, the apartment complex will start getting annoyed by the ugly orange cords draped out of everyone's window
I used to do that, I used to maintain the grounds and I'd have one of those orange cords hanging out of a window, or door, for my electric trimmer/edger.
Actually as I type this I'll looking out of one of those windows where I see a sidewalk that has not had the snow shoveled off it. I was getting paid for it but after 8 months of not being paid I stopped. So the owners started paying someone else to do it, but he does not do it. I suppose I could file a complaint with the city but hardly anyone else is shoveling this year either.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?