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Toyota Partners With Tesla To Make Electric Cars
An anonymous reader writes "Toyota just announced that it will invest $50 million in Tesla Motors and the two companies will partner to manufacture electric vehicles to meet California's growing demand for greener cars. Bay Area residents should be especially excited, as this venture is expected to create thousands of new jobs in the San Francisco Bay area, and is sure to be a boon to California's flagging economy. Tesla fans as well should rejoice as the new partnership will allow the EV startup to bring its highly coveted, iconic design to more affordable electric vehicles like the Model S sedan, which will sell for $49,900 and gets 300 miles on a 3- to 5-hour charge."
You missed the part where "more affordable" is a relative measure, and they're comparing it to their roadster with a 6-figure price tag.
It's the other way around, actually. 80 - 90% of a vehicle's lifetime energy use is in driving it around. You can google many versions of this calculation, but here's one from Slate.
You might be remembering the report from a few years ago that claimed a Hummer was more efficient than a Prius, but that's been pretty thoroughly debunked many times now.
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
you're joking right?
H2 is made by steam cracking CH4 (natural gas), thus is a carbon fuel.
Also, do me a favor:
Set your odometer trip meter to 0. Drive your normal drive for a day, what does it read? 10mi? 25? 50? most people have commutes that are under 50 miles, which means this car wouldn't have to "fill up" but once a week overnight. If you are not "most people" then don't buy this car. Bonus points, many employers will let you charge the car for free at work.
-nB
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Penn and Teller taught me that the only material that actually makes economic and environmental sense to recycle is aluminum, and the rest (plastic, paper, et al) is all feel-good BS and attempts to create jobs. A good idea that is flawed in practice and doesn't work out as well as one might hope... Just like hybrids.
Because that post deserves it. What a load of BS.
First off Top Gear isn't a source of factual information, they are an entertainment program. They have a massive anti-EV, anti-Hybrid bias. Do you remember Tesla story where they had to push the Tesla off because it ran out of power? Well it didn't actually run out of power, they just did that for dramatic effect. I love watching Top Gear as entertainment, but they are not credible source of anything.
So who knows what the actual facts of the M3 run where, but still you are just making the information up, because even top gear didn't make those claims.
They raced a Prius around a track at it's absolute limit, pedal to the metal 100% of the time, and followed it in a M3 which could match the Prius easily at part throttle and under those circumstances and claimed the M3 got better gas mileage. That is possible but given it is Top gear, in no way guaranteed.
But even Top gear didn't claim that an M3 got better highway MPG.
The rest of the post is just a reiteration of the debunked Hummer is better than a Prius FUD.
Pure FUD, no facts. If there isn't a mod for that, there should be.
You might be remembering the report from a few years ago that claimed a Hummer was more efficient than a Prius, but that's been pretty thoroughly debunked many times now.
Unfortunately, it's not actually well-debunked by your link, which claims that the report was well-debunked, but then goes on to quote only that report when giving any lifetime per-mile energy consumption figures. Do you have any useful links with which to debunk the report?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yes you missed something. Comparable cars to the Model S would be BMW's, Audi's, etc. Base model Audi's start at $32,000, base model BMW's start at $30,000. The original Roadster was $110,000 and the sport model is toping $140,000. So yeah the model S is more affordable, especially considering it will save you over $4,000 a year in oil and gas charges. And I'm basing that $4,000 a year off my 35 MPG Corolla, compared to maintenance on a comparable car I'm sure it would be more.
I've started saving for my model S. The Corolla is just to hold me over. I hope to have a Model S within 5 years.
I was trying to figure out what Toyota gets out of this. They have everything they need to build their own EVs. The Prius has electrical components for everything, it is nearly an EV already and they have had the Rav4 EV, and the FCHV test bed platforms. There is nothing in technology that they really need Tesla for.
But I think I know what they get out of this: ZEV credits in California. 50 Million is pocket change compared to the cost of bringing their own new EV to market. This lets them cover their ZEV requirements in California on the cheap if they don't really believe a full EV is practical (money making) for them at this time.
The actual California State pages on ZEV program seem to be down for me right now, but this is what I am talking about:
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/mar/28/business/fi-zev28
"Under the new standards, passed unanimously, the board will require the largest companies selling cars in the state to produce 7,500 electric and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles for sale, lease or loan in California from 2012 to 2014 -- down from the 25,000 required in the period under the previous rules.
In addition, carmakers will be called upon to make about 58,000 plug-in hybrid electric vehicles in the same period. The previous regulation, passed in 2003, made no provisions for plug-in hybrids because they were not considered viable at the time."
Not even lose to accurate. Manufacture of a car is about 50,000 miles worth of gasoline for the average vehicle. So if a car lasts 300,000 miles (500,000 for diesels) then we're looking at just 14% of total energy expenditure, not 75%.
Of course this is why the Cash for Clunkers idea was ridiculous. If people had been required to upgrade to 40mpg or higher, then it would have been good, but going from 20 to 25mpg is nothing. The increased fuel efficiency does NOT make up for the ~50,000 miles worth of manufacturing energy wasted to destroy a perfectly working vehicle.
It's the equivalent of me going round smashing windows in order to try to boost the economy. (Or starting a war.) It's destruction not production
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
That's already taken care of. The rolling blackouts in California were frauds, perpetrated by Enron, which was gaming the California electricity tariff system for money. A fair number of those responsible are in prison now.
Typical myopia of a city-dweller. Try looking at numbers before talking. Cities in the US haven't changed appreciably in population since the '50s. Nearly all the population migration in the past half century was into suburbs. Where a whopping 52% of the country now lives. One of the major distinguishing factors of suburbs vs. urban areas is the high availability of both garages and private driveways. Add to that the entire rural population, another 25% of the country as of 2000. They can do practically anything they like on their property, with no homeowner's associations to worry about. So slightly more than 75% of the country is trivially able to charge an electric vehicle right now, and that ignores numerous garages in cities.
There is a potential market for a street-side charging station, but it's much smaller than you imagine.
How exactly is burning fuel that was transferred to the plant by burning fuel in order to produce steam to produce kinetic energy to produce electricity that's transferred hundreds of miles that produces a charge in a battery that's used to produce kinetic energy again..... more efficient?
does your car have a smokestack scrubber?
and a full-time staff of engineers to make sure your plant is in good working order (one poorly tuned combustion engine can throw out more pollution than the next hundred)?
and a massive thermally efficient turbine that is an order of magnitude more efficient than any piston engine?
You're missing a couple of additional points.
The cost of living in San Francisco is 70% above the national average. So flagging to them still makes that car affordable.
Second the model S is competing for the $40,000 - $60,000 Sedan market. Audi has a great filter where you can set the price and see all their cars in that price range. That is what the model S is competing against.
If you keep up with Tesla you know they also are working on a car that would be at or under $30,000 for their next model. They are going from luxury cars down to consumer cars for everyone. They are hoping that early adopters will finance the cars for everyone else. They are after all a tech company turned automaker, not the other way around.
That's interesting to me. I was shopping for a hybrid at the time. Guess what? You might not like how the Prius looks, but it's interior design is superior to the Civic and the Insight. There's ROOM in the car. A normal adult male can actually feel comfortable in the driver seat. Hell - they can feel comfortable in all four seats - at the same time! No scrunched knees! And if that's not enough, the interior console is easy to read and understand, and I can fit eight foot long pieces of lumber in the car.
Why'd I pick the Prius over the other alternatives? It drives better, looks fine, and has a superior design for the shit I actually care about. Looking like a "regular car" isn't on the list. I find that people who are upset that my car doesn't look like theirs have a lot of other personal "peculiarities" and opinions that I find equally as irrelevant - though often more dangerous.