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Tesla Updates Model S With New Front-End, Air Filtration System, Faster Charging (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Model S has received several new features and improvements to help it stay relevant with the newer Model X crossover and recently released Model 3 electric vehicles from Tesla. It has a new-look fascia and adaptive LED headlights that hew closely to the design found on the Model X crossover which debuted late last year. In addition to a couple new interior finish choices, the Model S is receiving a version of the Model X's cabin air filtration system as an option, which promises to filter out "99.7 percent of particulate exhaust pollution and effectively all allergens, bacteria and other contaminants from cabin air." The Model S now has a 48-amp charger standard -- up from 40 amps -- which Tesla says will enable faster charging when connected to higher-amp outlets. Tesla's design language is trending toward a grille-less front end, possibly in an effort to squeeze as much aerodynamic efficiency out of the car as possible. What's missing in the update is the rumored 100kWh battery, which would improve the vehicle's range.
This EE still can't afford one.
Or else they will become the Duke Nukem Forever of the car world. A fate the Tesla roadster narrowly escaped
I wish they'd put that HEPA filter as a separate option; I don't need it but I'd like some of the other stuff in that package and I would hope they'd bundle the filter in places with really poor air quality such as Beijing.
Ah well, still too rich for me to buy new so it's either 2ndhand or wait for Model 3.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Telsa's happy days with the media will soon be coming to an end. Traditional car manufacturers are some of the biggest advertisers in pretty all forms of traditional media. They will soon do what Toyota did with the acceleration problem. They told the various outlets, keep blaming our shit software and we will stop advertising in your publication.
Now that Tesla is competing with products such as the Ford Fusion mid level products they aren't going to let Tesla continue with the free press. There will come a day when pretty much every old media article we read will be about a Tesla battery fire, or Telsa recall, or anyone killed in a Tesla will somehow be national news.
The good thing is that old media doesn't really matter as much anymore. The average age of a newspaper reader is advancing nearly 5 years for every year of real time. That is huge, 5 years is a massive demographic who just downed their newspapers.
This assumed ability they think they have to warp public perception won't change all the 20-30 somethings who are going to be driving their Teslas in 2 years.
Tesla's design language
Can we please stop using this pointless terminology. There's no such thing as a 'design language' unless you have an MBA in Marketing (aka The Coloring-In Degree).
Time for me to throw my older model S in the trash! I can't be seen with an older model! People will think I don't care about the environment enough!
Update your phone I mean car. Dont want to have the old model.
If Elon is looking for a low coefficient of drag, why don't we drop the side mirrors in favor of high resolution wide angle cameras? I've always thought we could replace the center mirror with a long full car width LED display monitor showing a 180 degree view behind and sides fed by 2 wide angle cameras on the back or sides.
I love Tesla. I wish I owned one. But we still have a long way to go towards cleaner energy, and Electric Vehicles are just playing a sly shell game with gas & particulate emission, shuffling it across town to the coal fired electric plant that's shoveling that juice into your wall charger.
Let me introduce you to the people most excited over the Tesla Model 3 pre-order:
http://imgur.com/FZJZZK8
We need a national energy policy that promotes a mesh of wind, solar, geothermal, tidal, hydro and nuclear on an epic scale. It needs to be half mandate, half significant financial incentive.
Exxon, BP, et al need to stop thinking of themselves as just "oil companies" and start thinking of themselves as "energy companies."
According to a 2012 article from Bloomberg, one new offshore oil platform cost $650 million dollars. What do the numbers look like if BP put a $650 million wind farm at sea, get the federal government to pay for the transmission lines back to shore to sell power to the local utility companies? According to a recent Purdue University study on Wind Turbines, typical 1.5 megawatt turbines by GE & Vestas have a 20 year service life.
When will household rooftop solar be mainstream? Not something used only by granola-munching superliberals like actor Ed Begley JR?
If Electric Vehicles are to replace the industrialized world's fleet of gas & diesel powered automobiles, these challenges need to be met:
1, Establish battery recycling programs on an industrial scale, comparable to the high-90 percentile rate at which current lead-acid car batteries are recycled.
2, Solve current Electric Vehicle range problems with a massive network of rapid chargers or modular automated battery module swap stations.
A. If the petroleum companies repurposed the drive-through car wash at their filling stations into automated battery pack changeout systems, that solves both massive water waste and range anxiety in one stroke. The changeout system sockets and supercharges the depleted packs in the storage basement below the drive-through floor. Drivers pay a petrol-competitive fee for the battery swap.
B. Destination locations - Shopping malls, strip malls, theme parks, large restaurants, parking garages, highway rest plazas - Install rapid charging stations. This acts as a draw, which will be popular with the merchants clustered around the charging stations. Tap to pay, loyalty card discount programs, various incentive programs to draw consumers to X mall vs Y mall across town, etc. - Everyone wins. Again, range anxiety is solved. Thirty minute supercharge time - idle time- becomes "I'm going to get a sandwich at that deli" time, or "I'm taking the kids into the Disney Store" time. What retailer wouldn't love having a parking lot full of rapid charge stations in a world full of Electric Vehicles.
3, Solve future Electric Vehicle range anxiety with improved battery chemistries.
A. Longer runtime between charges
B. Faster charge times
C. Chemistry must support battery module rebuild-ability, recycle-ability, lowest possible eco footprint
4, Understand and accept the slow adoption curve, balance against petro fuels
EV adoption can't happen overnight no matter how quickly the recharge, range and consumer price picture changes. We still need petrochemical fuels for the foreseeable future. Think of it as a teeter-totter. On one side, EV's are at the bottom, inching up slowly. High on the other side are petrochem powered internal combustion engines - Gasoline cars, diesel Semi Tractor-Trailers, commercial equipment - Bulldozers, farm tractors. Specialty kerosene vehicles - Aviation fuels. Passenger jets, military jets & rotorcraft.
It will be a slow shift over many decades as the EV side of the seesaw comes up and the petrochemi
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
It makes me wonder how much further they'd go without any air filtration at all.
...the ones that have to pay for electricity?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
What are you talking about? Why would Exxon invest in battery swap systems? There isn't a single electric car that can use them right now. There are plenty of retail places that have rapid charge systems already in my area. They are all empty. You know why? Because only 0.0001% of all the cars in the area are electric. Thanks for the expert analysis Scot.
A Tesla charged with electricity solely generated by coal is still cleaner than a petrol car. However, average electricity from coal in the US is only 33% (and dropping) so not an issue.
Tesla has already solved your four challenges with battery recycling, supercharging, longer runtime. I can drive my Tesla anywhere with stops at convenient superchargers.
There is already sufficient electric infrastructure to charge more electric cars than will be produced in the next 5 years. Electric utilities currently have a problem with too much electricity at night (in Texas they give away free electricity at night)... precisely the time when most people charge their electric cars. This may change in 5-10 years but that's plenty of time to make the necessary investments.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Filters create allergies. Live in a sterile environment for too long you will die the moment you step outside the door.
No, actually that is incorrect. As of 2015, 31% of all electrical power generated in the USA was generated by zero emission sources (nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, and geothermal). Another 33% was from natural gas, which generates very little particulate emissions, substantially reduced CO2, and reduced NOX. Only 34% was from coal and petroleum.
Petroleum's share is actually down to a minuscule 1%, and coal is shrinking all the time.
So gas and particulate emissions are greatly cut for every car converted from gasoline or diesel to battery-electric.
Thank you, you save me some typing.
Another point to remember, it is far easier to clean the air coming out of a few hundred generators than it is to clean the air coming out of a few million cars.
If I improve a generator's exhaust by 20%, it might be worthwhile, but if I proposed doing that for all the cars in a city, the retrofitting costs would dwarf any cost at the generator, and odds are you wouldn't have half of them done in a year.
Electric Vehicles are just playing a sly shell game with gas & particulate emission, shuffling it across town to the coal fired electric plant that's shoveling that juice into your wall charger.
The province of Ontario, for one has no coal powered electric plants, not one, zero, zilch, ... but heck don't let get that in the way of your anti e-vehicle rant.
...[e]lectric Vehicles are just playing a sly shell game with gas & particulate emission, shuffling it across town to the coal fired electric plant that's shoveling that juice into your wall charger.
It's a good shell game, though. The benefit here is that by moving the energy conversion from a bunch of individual moving cars to a central location is moving a nonpoint pollution source to a point source. That's a huge improvement. You can do a much better job of filtering on a point source. I can build a large electrostatic filter and put it on a coal plant. I could even - as the government - force all plant owners to add expensive filtering to their plant. But it's much harder to do that to a million cars. Besides which, the fixed plant doesn't have to move - you have to carry all that equipment around with you while you drive. It doesn't weigh nothing, and reduces efficiency somewhat.
A lot of things get easier if you can do them in large scale in one place, than on small scale in a lot of places.
Just my $0.55 (US inflation, 1774-2008, for $0.02)
Decent starting point, but you stopped thinking far too quickly.
Centralizing power generation (moving from millions of small gasoline engines to hundreds of big oil/coal turbine generators) allows for greater efficiency. Most things work better at scale - you get more power extracted per unit fuel. And it allows you to cost-effectively install better pollution-reducing devices - big scrubbers on the exhaust, to keep particulates and such down. So even if the power grid were 100% fossil fuels, it would still be a gain.
But the grid isn't 100% fossil fuels. In some places those are a minority already - where hydro or geothermal or nuclear dominate. And it decouples the generators from the infrastructure - if all cars ran off batteries, we could switch over to whatever new power method works best, as we invent it. If we had cheap, efficient, clean nuclear fusion, switching to it would be easy if we were on electric cars. Switching from gasoline/diesel engines to fusion engines would require a lot more change to the infrastructure - new fueling stations built, new pipelines for deuterium run, new mechanics trained on new engine types.
I once computed the amount of battery power that would be needed to replace the 4000 gallons of diesel fuel in a 4400 HP Locomotive (which fully loaded weighs 200 tons). To store an equal amount of energy (and discounting the energy gain from regenerative braking, a no idling) you'd need about 800 tons of batteries. Or the average two Locomotive train, would need 10 battery cars behind it to power it.
Now, when that number drops to 100 tons, we can swap out the giant diesel generator and fuel tank and rock on. Until then, weight is a big issue for large vehicles.
Outside of California and a few other states, never. The utility companies have been fighting hard against net metering. Nevada stopped net metering and the solar companies shut down all activity in Nevada the next day.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
In my area, the fast DC chargers are mostly busy. If they are not busy, it's probably because they are broken. One charging network has a very high failure rate on their chargers.
Level2 chargers are also likely to be in use. Level2 isn't very useful at a retail site because they charge at about 25 miles/hour (25 miles of range added for each hour of charging, in comparison, fast DC chargers will deliver an 80% charge in 30 minutes).
But I live in a different area to you. If I look at my neighbors' cars, probably about one in 20 is a Nissan LEAF.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Electric Vehicles are just playing a sly shell game with gas & particulate emission, shuffling it across town to the coal fired electric plant that's shoveling that juice into your wall charger.
This is a well worn myth as demonstrated by others here already.
It's a shame you wrote so much and I didn't read it because you lost me in the first paragraph...
The Model S and presumably Model X have swappable batteries and Renualt built & demonstrated 100s of battery-swap capable Fluence ZE for Better Place years ago.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Catalytic converters also tend to be quite inefficient until the engine warms up so while the converter does a pretty good job once you're on the road, it's accomplishing bugger-all when you start up and for several minutes after.
Also, replacing most or all ICEs with EVs in cities mean delicate lungs aren't breathing CO and other pollutants and there's no ground-level ozone or nitrogen oxides to form smog.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
That is what I like most about electric cars. Any time there is a massive improvement in electric generation (or even shifts), it is far easier to upgrade or change it at the electric plant than in the hundreds of millions of cars. Electric cars can effectively use the best energy generation method available at any given time and can switch in months rather than the decades it takes to "upgrade" gas cars today (as they eventually completely die and get replaced).
Perhaps you need to open your eyes a bit more. This is happening already. Perhaps it is happening in my area because we have a relatively high concentration of electric vehicles, but it is happening. Many destinations (shopping malls, strip malls, parking garages, theme parks, sports venues, office parks, etc..), have charging stations already.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
You don't need equal amounts of energy, and electric motors are significantly more efficient in converting stored energy to movement, and you can easily swap the locomotive engine out at multiple stops along a long path while one recharges if necessary.
The title on The Verge talks about the new "Front End" of the Tesla S, yet in the story the cosmetic surface of the front fascia is the topic. In North American car jargon, the term "front end" means the steering and suspension apparatus of the front wheels. Going back many, many years, it was common to book one's car into a repair shop for a "front end alignment", and some mechanics were "front end" specialists. I just had an Abe Simpson moment there...
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
WTF?
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Let's sum this up in two choices:
Choice A: Buy a gas/diesel/LPG/NG car. To run it, you must burn fossil fuels, no choice. Forever the car will do this.
Choice B: Buy an electric car. To source the energy, you may be burning fossil fuels. But it doesn't have to be that, and it doesn't have to stay that way.
Which choice is the future?
Maybe that is why the vast majority of trains are powered by electric overhead lines.
It may surprise you, but there is more than one country in the world. Solar panels on roofs are very common in some European countries.
Telsa's happy days with the media will soon be coming to an end.
Next up, Elon Musk announces his plans to build a global media empire!
How is that relevant when buying a car today? A normal car lasts around twenty years; a Tesla probably ten or so if you're lucky. The first owner will probably keep it for around five years. How energy will be generated in the far future is utterly irrelevant when choosing a car right now. Meanwhile, option A will probably be more efficient, it is better for the environment when everything is considered, it is more convenient and there are far more options to choose from.
"Centralizing power generation (moving from millions of small gasoline engines to hundreds of big oil/coal turbine generators) allows for greater efficiency."
You tend to lose most of those efficiency gains on the distribution side of the coin.
Where I live the grid is powered by 100% renewables, mostly hydro and wind.
Apparently YMMV.
I suspect the DOA rate for Dell is substantially higher than for Tesla. And Dell doesn't have to do safety recalls.
"Petroleum's share is actually down to a minuscule 1%, and coal is shrinking all the time."
That is why it is so annoying when people talk about solar and wind replacing oil. They do not compete. Natural gas does and frankly beats the pants off solar and wind in cost. Of course cheap natural gas actually helps out solar and wind because it is used in peaking plants that can spin up quickly to help when solar and wind drop.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"Centralizing power generation (moving from millions of small gasoline engines to hundreds of big oil/coal turbine generators) allows for greater efficiency."
You tend to lose most of those efficiency gains on the distribution side of the coin.
No you don't. The electricity distribution system is highly efficient. When we transmit electricity at 1 million volts over long distances, we minimize the current through the wires. The power losses in the wires are equal to I^2 * R. By keeping current low, the losses in the wires are almost always less than 10%, and likely less than 5%. The process of stepping the voltages up and down is also highly efficient, thanks to the design of AC transformers. If the AC transformers weren't so efficient, they would explode due to the heat buildup. This only happens rarely when they break. Overall, the efficiency of the transmission system from generation to your house is almost certainly better than 90%.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Why would Exxon invest in battery swap systems?
Because the first mover advantage gives you an incredible amount of power to lock out competitors?
You're thinking too small.
Their competitor's aren't. Look at BP's Castrol who are pushing the adoption of an oil chamber that is swappable in the vehicle. Clean, instant oil changes with a self filtering system, offers few benefits to customers, great benefits to service centres (who would love the ability to charge a customer the same amount of money for 1/10th of the work and zero mess), great for vehicles (standard oil delivery methods), and best of all for Castrol themselves who lock out the ability for competitors to sell oil.
If someone could get their foot in first and create the standard they would have a license to print money unless unseated.
Nikola Tesla also invented the AC electricity distribution system.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Well, now that plugin cars are an option, oil does compete with solar/wind, directly in the case of plugin hybrids, and indirectly (in terms of what sort of car a person chooses to buy) for gas vs. pure electric vehicles. Kind of the whole point of electric cars; they can change power sources without ripping out the engine, so as the grid electricity gets cleaner, the cars become cleaner "for free".
which is .0? percent of the cars? And is 0% of the trucks, aircraft, and ships.
Still does not amount to a hill of beans.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Hopefully electricity will someday be "free" as part of basic national infrastructures and it is entirely possible that this could happen if we harness green/renewable power funded by taxes so that you can plug in anywhere and everywhere, at least during peak power production hours (daylight).
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Well, I'm on board for your hopes, but I'm afraid I left all my confidence at home for the ride.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Why? Is there some content inside the lithium batteries which is valuable enough to make this worthwhile? Lead batteries are recycled because lead is expensive and easy to recycle.