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Tesla Motors May Be Having an iPhone Moment
pacopico writes "Telsa Motors has started churning out 500 of its all electric Model S sedans per week. Bloomberg Businessweek just did a cover story about the company, suggesting that Tesla is becoming more than just a fad of rich folks in California. According to the story, 75 percent of Tesla's sales now come from outside of California, and the company appears poised to raise its sales forecasts for the year. There's a lot of talk about Tesla's history and why it survived when Fisker and Better Place failed too."
See folks, this is how you troll.
Watch closely, and learn.
Because at one point in the history of technology there came a point when the sales of the iPhone absolutely skyrocketed and changed Apple as a company and it's position in the Consumer Electronics Industry, as well as the industry and customer expectations to a large degree.
By drawing an analogy to that moment, the author is suggesting that Tesla Motors is about to have an equally significant effect on the motoring industry as a whole, and people's expectations of cars.
Because Tesla is supposedly becoming successful.
If the iPhone is like Tesla, then the new Windows smartphones would be like a Yugo.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
For all the whining and moaning about rich people, that seems to be how society advances often. A rich person's fad then becomes a commodity.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
For all the whining and moaning about rich people, that seems to be how society advances often. A rich person's fad then becomes a commodity.
Yeah ... but I mean to call the Model S no longer a rich person's fad is stretching it. Their MSRPs for a 60 kWh car is $62,400. $72,400 for an 85 kWh and $87,400 for the 85 kWh with upgraded features. Is this really affordable? I thought I was living a pretty average lifestyle but I spent $6,600 on my current car ... Of course, if you're calling it the iPhone in that everyone else is buying it and I'm laughing at how much money they're spending on phones then, yes, it could be called the iPhone. Still very much a rich person's car though.
My work here is dung.
Is that, according to Bob Lutz, it pushed Chevy to make the far more practical Volt. I've had one for 2 years, and love it, it wasn't sooo pricey, and you could actually get one the day you wrote the check.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
No Tesla car is worthy of his name without it being able to generate 5 meter long arcs of electricity on demand.
Just about every morning on my way to work, I see two of the Tesla Model S on the road. I commute between Palm Beach Gardens and Jupiter, Florida. That's less than a 20-minute commute.
If you're looking for a conversation starter at the country club or marina, a BMW, Mercedes or even a Bentley isn't going to work nearly as well as a Tesla.
While $65,000 to $75,000 seems like a lot for a car (I cringe at paying half that), there are just as many cars in that price range rolling in Palm Beach County that aren't nearly as exotic or as head-turning as the Tesla. I pass dozens of $65k+ cars on the way to work and it isn't unusual to see $100k+ cars either. Those are mostly background noise because they are so common.
Cheers,
Matt
No Tesla car is worthy of his name without it being able to generate 5 meter long arcs of electricity on demand.
Think if it ... as a project.
Get one of these cars, wire a transformer into it and place a couple electrodes on the hood. While you are waiting at lights you could press a button and make arcs dance across the hood of your car and impress the homeboys with their pitiful flatulent exhausts and audio with something massively cool.
You could also work it into vehicle protection. (Please be neat and carry a whisk broom to sweep away the dust of those who attempted to break in.)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I'm sorry, I just don't care for battery cars, just like I don't care for iDevices -- perhaps the (dumb) analogy is more accurate than the author intended.
I've actually sat in a Tesla Model S at a electric vehicle show. I defy anyone to actually test drive one and claim that they "don't like battery cars". The Model S is obviously too pricey for most folks but it is an awesome car almost any way you care to measure it. It's fast, handles great, has range comparable to gas cars, looks nice, doesn't need gasoline, has a terrific interior and can even be recharged relatively quickly given the state of the art in recharge technology. Given it's range the recharge time problem is significantly mitigated. I'd buy one in a heartbeat if I had the money.
If the technology can be developed to get recharge times down to 5-10 minutes you had better start learning to like "battery cars" because that is really the only serious problem holding them back. Until we get to that point I think we're going to see a slow but steady migration through plug in hybrids. I've driven the Volt and the Ford Fusion Energi and I'm seriously considering buying one or the other. They're both genuinely good cars for reasonable prices (not cheap but competitive) and I can do much of my daily driving without needing to use gas.
"...Franz von Holzhausen, can barely contain himself as he talks about the design of the Model S. “It’s like the leap of faith Apple (AAPL) took with the iPhone,” he says, explaining why the car has a touchscreen instead of the usual physical buttons."
This is monumentally wrong. Touch screens succeed on a phone because a phone is a portable device and the touch screen is lighter and smaller. Physical controls are preferable for humans because they model the physical world to which we've adapted. In a car, you need to use the controls without taking your eyes off the road. This means location by feel is important. A touch screen can't provide that.
It seems the entire design world has this backwards, include appliance manufacturers. I hate the buttons on my oven.
Don't blame the reporter, blame the Tesla chief designer:
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I am looking at an Audi also; I find the A6 perfectly droolworthy. I did drive a Telsa yesterday which is now easily my favorite car after only 20 minutes (my boss has one). He points out that if you get the high-end, there is a 8 year warranty on the car, and all he has done so far (7,000 miles in) is rotate the tires. Cost? $10.
They provided a garage charger and installed it at his house for free)
By the time you figure in 6 or 7 years of maintenance, gas, etc. on your Audi in Cali, you are not that far from what he paid upfront. Have the car charge automatically after midnight when the electric rates are low, and you begin to see the value. Over 8-10 years, buying a $60,000 car with gas prices shooting upwards, and replacing a zillion parts as they wear out, I will spend close to $87,000 on my car; my boss will only buy tires. It seems to boil down to whether you have the money upfront or not, the cars cost about the same.
Citation needed. Desperately. This doesn't jive with basic math.
What basic math are you using then?
A truck carrying 10,000 gallons of gasoline uses about 14.28 gallons to go 100 miles.
Transport loss is 0.14%
An electrical transmission line will lose about 0.75% over 100 miles at 1000MW (per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#Losses)
The energy density of gasoline is a huge factor when considering the cost of transport. The IT equivalent is the old story about the bandwidth of a stationwagon of data tapes travelling down the highway.
When dealing with transport of energy, the density matters, and chemical energy density is hard to beat.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
I got the impression "iPhone" was used deliberately. He's making a comparison to another product where others already existed in the space, but where some company managed to package it in a way that somehow caught the imagination of non-technical users and became wildly popular.
It's as if that New York Times hit-job on the Tesla had read:
"No instant refueling. Less range than a Ford Focus. Lame."
That's what I think when something is compared to an iPhone.
So say we all
That's a bit disingenuous. You can't pick out a single stage of the process and compare that while ignoring everything else if you want an honest assessment of the efficiency.
.28822
Let's make up an example. Let's say you have a source of fuel, a power plant that can burn that fuel, a testing ground that's 100 miles further away from the fuel source than the power plant, and two vehicles that can utilize the fuel. Internal combustion cars are generally about 15% efficient. Electric engine cars are 85-90% efficient. Fossil fuel power plants are about 33% efficient. Your transmission numbers are 99.86% for gasoline and 99.25% for electricity over 100 miles.
So overall efficiencies are:
Gas: 1 * 0.9986 * 0.15 = 0.14979
Electrical = 1 * 0.33 * 0.9925 * 0.88 =
So over a distance of 100 miles Electric cars are still almost twice as efficient, even with the extra losses in transmission. (Admittedly this is for "normal" internal combustion cars, i don't have the figures to hand for the average efficiency of hybrid cars.)
Doing a little quick math (it's been forever since i've had to solve for a variable, so i'm just plugging it into a spreadsheet) it looks like the break-even point is about 10,700 miles. So if the distance from the fuel source was over 10,700 miles, you'd be better shipping the fuel to the car rather than converting it to electricity on-site and transmitting it to the destination. Though obviously over such an extreme distance a lot of other factors would come into play and overwhelm the simple equation.
Sources:
http://consumerenergycenter.org/transportation/consumer_tips/vehicle_energy_losses.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil-fuel_power_station
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1273932
There may be more accurate numbers out there, so the exact outcome might differ, it's clear that better efficiency in just a single stage of the operation does not dictate an overall higher efficiency.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Oh, I don't doubt that it's a fine electric automobile, based on a Lotus Elise,
The Model S is not based on the Elise. The Tesla Roadster was but that no longer is in production. Try going to Tesla's web site before posting next time.
Personal prejudices and preferences aside, my biggest issue with electric cars is that you're really just shuffling the emissions around.
You're forgetting several important details. First is that you can power an electric vehicle with power from non-fossil fuel sources. Hydro, wind, solar, nuclear etc. You can actually reduce the emissions to a good approximation of zero. Second is that it is MUCH easier to control emission at the generating station than it is to try to do it on every tailpipe out there. Would you rather have one big filter or millions of small ones? Third is that the power efficiency of electric motors is significantly higher than for internal combustion engines. ICEs waste a huge amount of power in the form of heat. Fourth is that you have the option of powering an electric vehicle with fossil fuels that are potentially less polluting. Instead of coal you can power it with natural gas or even oil.
Until we get a point of 100% clean renewable energy, I'm not sure the trade-off is worth it.
So nothing is worth doing until it is perfect? That's a pretty tragically stupid argument.