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.'"

Comments

Re:Uh oh

[clang_jangle]

If electric cars were a viable alternative to conventional, internal combustion engined vehicles, they wouldn't need hundreds of millions of dollars of tax money to keep them in business.

Oh, then by that standard there are damn few companies worldwide (and none in the US) producing viable ICE-powered cars.

Re:I don't get it.

[clang_jangle]

Correct.

Re:Killing yourself with good intentions

[mpyne]

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 may be the best Master of Magic analogy I've ever seen. (btw if you've never played it, get DOSBox and a second-hand copy of the game pronto)

Hydrogen nonsense

[Rei]

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.