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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."
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.
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.
60 kWh car is $62,400. $72,400 for an 85 kWh and $87,400 with upgraded features
Have you seen what a Lexus LS Hybrid costs? It's easy to walk out of an Acura dealer with a mass produced gasoline vehicle for $60K. Tesla is right in there at a reasonable price (US wages relative to the international market are a separate issue). Consider some places in the US you can buy a tiny ranch for $600K and average annual salaries are $130K or so, and a $60K car isn't outside of the realm of typical.
I thought I was living a pretty average lifestyle but I spent $6,600 on my current car
Nah, you're pretty far to the low side there. 75% of car sales are used, at about $9K on average. 25% of car sales are new, with the latest average at $31K. That puts the overall average at $14.5K, which puts you at, what, the 20th percentile or so?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
"...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.
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
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.
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