Slashdot Mirror
Tesla Model S: 0-60 In 4.5 Seconds
thecarchik writes "We already know a lot about the all-electric 2012 Tesla Model S sedan — but at a press event ahead of tonight's exclusive VIP event at the former Toyota NUMMI facility in Fremont, California, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced Tesla was making a faster Model S for those with a sporty side. Cutting the brisk 0-60 time of the standard Model S from 5.6 second to under 4.5 seconds, the sportier version features the same 85 kilowatt-hour, 300 miles-per-charge battery pack found in the 2012 Model S Signature series. 'That's quicker than a [Porsche] 911 [Carrera],' joked Musk. 'Not bad for an electric luxury sedan.' But if you thought 300 miles was the maximum range a Tesla Model S could do, you'd be wrong."
Summary cut off right where it got interesting, announcing 320 mile range. The Tesla is of course useless because a 320 mile range means I can only drive for 10 continuous hours without a brake in 32 MPH stop and go traffic and I love having a five hour commute each direction. In fact, everyone knows that not only does the average american watch TV 8 hours per day, they also commute 10 hours per day.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The Ford T cost $240 in 1925. That's $3000 in today's money. If you want a revolution, what you want is low prices.
doubt that would happen. Top Gear was sued by tesla for pointing out what is common sense (among other inconsistent claims). Having to wait hours to charge a car defeats the whole purpose of having a car, freedom to go where you want when you want.
Well, there were some problems with that review...
You actually trust top gear to make a fair review? They are there to entertain you, not be accurate.
You really need to get your facts somewhere else before you cast a judgement.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I remember all the claims Tesla motors made about the original sports car. Top Gear UK tested it and most of the performance claims turned out ot be less than 1/2. It was utter junk. I would like to see Top Gear (who I trust) test this new Tesla (who I no longer trust).
I love Top Gear, but you have to be pretty dumb to believe a review of an electric car done by someone who has on numerous occasions said he doesn't like them.
Rebuttal and video of the review
The Tesla Roadster has an expected battery life of 7 years, and you can pre-order a new one for $12,000 (it'll be delivered in 7 years).
No doubt the prices for new batteries will have gone down by 7 years from now, and the Model S has a swappable battery (for those who don't want to wait for it to charge).
Yes, this is an expensive car. But it's half the price of their previous car, and their next one is supposedly going to be cheaper again.
Top Gear has a record of out and out faking when "reviewing" Tesla cars. As an entertainment show, I am not sure how much credence I would give them for any brand, when it comes to Tesla they are on record as lying.
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2008-12-29/green_sheet/30080624_1_electric-car-drag-race-lotus-elise
Robert Llewellyn has pointed out that Top Gear's roadshows are sponsored by Shell (who are invested in hydrogen as the alternative fuel of the future) and that Top Gear has talked up the potential of hydrogen as superior to electric vehicles.
Robert Llewellyn is of course a very vocal electric car advocate. I recommend his web series Carpool: just as entertaining as Top Gear, but in a different way.
Where you've assumed constant acceleration throughout? And at the end of that time the car would be going 155mph - I highly doubt that acceleration is anything like constant from 0-60 and it certainly won't be at higher velocities, as drag is proportion at v^2. If it were, you could have one of these babies hit light speed in about a year and a half...
Top Gear purposefully devises tests to get a response the opposite of the useful truth. Note they got better mileage from an M3 than a Prius, mainly because of the test they devised. I expect that if the results were "expected" (the other way around with the Prius winning, they would never have aired it and nobody would know. Perhaps they even ran the test 100 times, changing the parameters every time until the more entertaining result was acheived. They don't independently test vehicles (like Car and Driver and other magazines claim to), but they have a vehicle-based entertainment show. I'm confused who someone would "trust" Top Gear. That's like trusting Rush Limbaugh for the news.
Learn to love Alaska
Top Gear lied on-air about the charge level, and extrapolated numbers that were provably false. But the lies weren't actionable because the right number of "might" and "would be" weasel words were added in to make it be an opinion presented as fact, and not an incorrect fact presented as fact.
Learn to love Alaska
It doesn't take nearly as long as Top Gear pretended it does, and they knew that. On the standard Tesla charger, a *full* charge (not a daily commute charge, but a "I just drove 200 miles" charge) takes 3 1/2 hours.
Top Gear also pretended the vehicle overheated (it didn't), that they were without a working vehicle at one point (they weren't), that the vehicle ran out of charge (it didn't), and that it would run of charge abnormally earlier than comparable gasoline vehicles (it wouldn't; all-out with a Roadster on the track may only get you ~40 miles, but all-out with a Veyron will only get you ~60).
Top Gear is an entertainment show that doesn't care much for the truth.
As for your "transferring carbon production", the DOE has already extensively studied this (as have many, many other groups). In every case, the conclusion is that even on our current grid, EVs are notably cleaner than gasoline cars. Meanwhile, oil keeps getting dirtier (tar sands, deepwater, etc), while the grid gets cleaner (new power infrastructure in the US is primarily NG and wind).
Intergalactic Proton Powered Electrical Tentacled Advertising Droids!
So it doesn't take hours to recharge the batteries? Oh wait...
RTFA http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1066795_breaking-tesla-making-faster-2012-model-s-0-60-in-under-4-5-seconds
When the batteries are depleted, Tesla says even the 300-mile range Model S will be able to recharge from empty to full in under an hour thanks to its new direct current external charger. The 90 kilowatt units will be installed by Tesla at suitable rest-stop locations or hotels alongside arterial freeways such as I-5 between Canada and Mexico.
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
he also has a podcast called fully charged that's worth watching. it's about electric/hybrid technology.
http://www.youtube.com/user/fullychargedshow
Well, the Volt's pack is going to be *warrantied* for ten years, soo.... Plus, A) EV battery packs can often have parts of them replaced individually, and B) evne a reduced-capacity pack still has value (say, on grid load balancing)
Battery life is always going to be limited by *design*. You can have any sort of lifespan you want out of a battery, from nanoseconds to tens of thousands of years. It's all about tradeoffs. The better the chemistry, the better the temperature regulation. the gentler the charge/discharge curve, the better the charge management, and the lower the depth of discharge range, the longer the lifespan, by orders of magnitude. As for Tesla's design approach:
* Chemistry: nothing special -- same as in laptops
* Temperature regulation: top notch -- a far cry from an unregulated battery pack sitting right next to your CPU.
* Charge management: very good -- detailed computer monitoring and balancing of hundreds of individual subcomponents.
* Charge curve: The most common case (~3.5 hours per full charge) is a little gentler than an average laptop charge. The mild case (a 120V socket) is exceedingly gentle. The rare case (fast charging on a long trip, ~1 hour) is worse than for most laptops.
* Discharge curve: Unless the vehicle is being put through track duty, gentler than a laptop.
* Depth of discharge: It's hard to generalize between laptops. Telsa does not charge to 100%, nor allow down to 0%, and the most common discharge case usually only uses a few tens of percents charge before recharging. So in general, well gentler than for a laptop.
Different vehicles vary. The Leaf uses a better chemistry, but poorer temperature regulation. The Volt uses both a better chemistry and good temperature regulation.
Intergalactic Proton Powered Electrical Tentacled Advertising Droids!
When the batteries are depleted, Tesla says even the 300-mile range Model S will be able to recharge from empty to full in under an hour thanks to its new direct current external charger. The 90 kilowatt units will be installed by Tesla at suitable rest-stop locations or hotels alongside arterial freeways such as I-5 between Canada and Mexico.
Wow, I'll be able to recharge in under an hour every 300 miles, so long as I find the 'suitable' location where electricity will probably be priced at $1 a kWh because they know that I have no alternative other than to pay the price or pay for a tow.
I'll stick to my Civic, thanks, which can travel about twice as far, fill up in two minutes and do so at any gas station we pass.
Do you know how thin the Department of Sinister Conspiracies in Service of the Obama Regime is spread these days?
It's bad. Our unionized-coddled-public-sector employee mandatory augmented lunch break scheme, and general socialist hatred of efficiency don't help, of course; but they just keep dumping more work on us. It's even harder because half of the conspiracies directly contradict the other half(we've had to let three spin-doctors retire with generous disability pensions due to workplace-induced vertigo caused by keeping the media toeing the Party line...
First they want to destroy capitalism by convincing the public that only the State can save them from greedy speculators and economic ruin: "No problem", I tap a couple of marxist academics(we were in the same anarcho-syndicalist squat when we were coasting through liberal arts college on our parent's money, old buddies), and they invent the notion of a "credit default swap" and our media puppetmasters fabricate the necessary backstory, while the economic wrecking squad does some penalizing of Wealth Creators just to make things extra believable.
Then, just as I was kicking back and enjoying some nice, family-values-destroying gay smut, my boss comes in all pissed off: "What the fuck are you doing? If you destabilize the EU, our One World Government will be set back by at least a decade! And how is Obama supposed to coast to an easy victory on strong economic news if you keep up like that?". The entire department had to work until 5pm that evening, coming up with a scheme to bail out GM and allocate 'stimulus' money away from small businesses and toward teachers unions. That sucked.
Worse, once we had GM on our hands, we had to simultaneously prop up their union makework projects and advance the progressive agenda of destroying the Freedom of the Open Road and forcibly implementing collectivist mass transit. We could hardly write grants fast enough to get our pet scientists to stop undercounting spotted owls for a minute and start re-classifying benign automobile emissions as dangerous pollutants.
Don't even start on what the guys in the Middle Eastern Affairs office have to put up with, trying to cast our Leader as strong on terrorism and get some good photo-ops, without getting too many of our Sharia brothers killed...
And now you say that we are going to have to track down every Model S released and ensure that nobody is able to take simple performance measurements? How many Black Helicopter kill teams do you think we have?
That's nothing! It'd run its 320 mile range in sqrt(320 miles * 2 / (19.6 ft/s^2)) = 6m 55s.
Too bad the braking will be a bit complicated at 6.92 minutes * 19.6 ft/s^2 = 5,548 mph.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
There are lots of cars that won't meet the needs of 100% of the population. This is one of them. It is also an expensive, niche vehicle that is not (I don't think) intended to be a drop-in replacement for your Oldsmobile.
This is the future of American manufacturing. They can make anything. It's almost 100% vertically integrated, which means everything from plastics and metals to batteries, electronics, motors and component assembly is done here, with flexible multi-purpose robots. Every car can be different, with no retooling, because the robots can do anything. It's just software.
>>On the standard Tesla charger, a *full* charge (not a daily commute charge, but a "I just drove 200 miles" charge) takes 3 1/2 hours.
So you have to spend between 2x and 4x as much time driving the car charging it? That's not a good selling point.
>>the DOE has already extensively studied this (as have many, many other groups). In every case, the conclusion is that even on our current grid, EVs are notably cleaner than gasoline cars.
I'd like to see a citation for this. But in lieu of one, let's run some numbers and figure it out for ourselves.
The Tesla holds 53 kWh on a full charge and gets 300 miles.
Therefore, a charge here in California will run you between $5 and $26 (depending how much energy you use a month - http://www.pge.com/tariffs/ERS.SHTML) If you're charging your car off the grid, you'll be in the $26/charge tier, but you'll probably be smart and running it off-peak, so we'll call it $13 or so. So you get about 23 miles per dollar.
A gallon of gas has 36.6 (call it 37) kWh in it. It's $3.90 a gallon right now in California. A 510 horsepower Jaguar XKR with the same 0 to 60 time gets around 20mpg, or 5 miles per dollar.
So the Tesla is cheaper as long as you charge it at night, and compare it against a gas guzzler. =)
In terms of CO2 output per kWh -
I'm using the data from here: http://www.stewartmarion.com/carbon-footprint/html/carbon-footprint-kilowatt-hour.html
Their data is wrong for PG&E - PG&E draws a lot of power from NG, but it lists it at 0%, which is obviously in error (Actual mix is 35% NG - http://www.pge.com/myhome/edusafety/systemworks/electric/energymix/). So we'll just use the national average instead, which is about 1 pound of CO2 per kWh.
Using the EPA and IPCC estimates of CO2 per gallon of gas, we see it's about 20 pounds per gallon (http://www.epa.gov/oms/climate/420f05001.htm). The BlueSkyModel.org website estimates it at 14 pounds per gallon, but we'll take the word of the EPA on this one, since they fucked up pretty badly on PG&E's numbers above.
The Tesla generates 53 pounds of CO2 per 300 miles, or about 6 miles per pound of CO2 generated.
The Jaguar XKR drives 20 miles on a gallon of gas, so it gets a nice even 1 mile per pound of CO2 generated.
Conclusion: If you are contrasting the Tesla against a similar price and performance Jaguar, then it's about 6x better at CO2 emissions than the Jag, and costs about 4x less to "fill up". The Jag will have a much longer range, can "fill up" faster, and looks a bit more manly, but on these two stats alone, the Tesla has the advantage.
They also showed the crew pushing it into the garage by hand implying that the batteries were totally flat, when the car's systems never recorded the battery dropping below 20% with a voice over saying "we wanted to do more shots, but... look what happened".
The script was pre written (literally) - they knew how they were going to shoot the piece, and they told some massive porkies at the end for no good reason, since it was a pretty decent review up to that point.
If America is to compete with other country sponsored industries - i.e. China massively funding most of their new technologies, then it's not unreasonable.
Yes it is unreasonable. If there are truly worthwhile investments to be made in these technologies then the private sector will make them at the time when it's most appropriate.
Just like the Big Three built reliable, safe cars with good emissions, while the Japanese were eating their lunch? Oh wait, the free market failed to keep up in this country, and we had to raise federal crash test standards to the point where only massive pieces of steel or expensively engineered ones (e.g. Smart ForTwo) can pass them, in order to disqualify most of those vehicles. In the end, we got government intervention specifically BECAUSE the Big Three automakers are incapable of keeping up. So no, the private sector will fall on its ass and the government will bail it out with legislation, AGAIN. And we'll see the car companies getting money AGAIN, but we won't call it a bailout, it will be used to bring them into the modern age.
Electricity is MUCH cheaper than gas
Except that it's not because current battery technologies do not store as much energy in as easily usable a form as liquid fuels.
That has only limited repercussions for ongoing cost. It affects range and initial cost in batteries, which cost more than a fuel tank. Further, the massively superior efficiency of electric motors (the motors used in cars are typically over 90% efficient both as a motor and a generator) lets you use more of the power you have stored. Since they're more than three times as efficient as gas, you only about one third the energy density to get the same results.
If green energy was economically superior, it would be kicking the butts of all of the established energy companies and the private sector would be rushing in to invest without the need for any government subsidies. In case you haven't been paying attention; that hasn't happened
Uh, no. You are either totally uninformed or an industry shill. Chevron owns the NiMH battery technology needed to make effective cheap EVs, but they want to sell you oil products because it's where they can make the most money. DuPont and BP together own a company called Butamax, which owns a rather obvious patent that should never have been granted which applies to the practical production of Butanol, a direct 1:1 replacement for gasoline which can be made from any organic material and which burns cleaner. And the US DOE performed a study concluded in the 1980s at Sandia NREL which indicated that producing biodiesel from algae grown on dirty water (salt or fresh, makes no difference) is profitable when prices reach $3/gallon, which we've been beyond for many years. Most of the land suitable for this purpose is BLM land, and you can get a permit to drill for oil or mine coal, but if you want to build a solar plant or an algae plant, the government tells you that you need to do an environmental study! Indeed, Bush himself rang in on this issue while his administration was denying a permit for just one such solar plant -- which can power the EVs you so malign.
To suggest that the "free market" (which simply does not exist, especially in this nation of subsidies and tariffs) will fix the problem is to not only ignore the lessons of history, but also the lessons of the present. You are either an idiot (on the basis of being willing to make declarative statements when their opposite is true) or a troll. Are you on the auto industry payroll?
The US government is drowning in a sea of red ink right now and subsidizing "green" energy is like throwing more good money after bad.
The US government is drowning in precisely two things; needless war, and undertaxing the rich. The most wealthy among us have access to classes of in
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"