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EPA Confirms Tesla's Model 3 Has a Range of 310 Miles (theverge.com)
Tesla's Model 3 has a confirmed range of 310 miles, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. "That figure applies to the long-range version of the Model 3, and echoes the vehicle specs released by Tesla back in July," reports The Verge. "It also makes the Model 3 one of the most efficient passenger electric vehicles on the market." From the report: The EPA's range is used as the advertised figure for electric vehicles that are sold in the US. The 310-mile range is an estimate of the number of miles the vehicle should be able to travel in combined city and highway driving from a full charge. That's 131 miles per gallon gasoline equivalent (MPGe) for city driving, 120 MPGe on the highway, and 126 MPGe combined. You'll have to pay more to get that extended range, though. Tesla said it would be selling a standard version of the Model 3, with just 220 miles of range, for $35,000. The long-range version will start at $44,000, the automaker says. Production on the standard version isn't expected to begin until 2018.
I don't care what the range is, until there are charging stations everywhere and a full charge happens in 10 minutes I would have range anxiety. You're totally going to say I'm being irrational, and I know I am, but it is what it is. I am just as bad with my phone,if it goes past 50% I have to plug it in.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
But like everyone I need to drive 311 miles per day. I'll wait for the Model 4.
The newer range is really great, about as much as most cars.
But the thing you'd want to larger range for is really road trips, which per day would usually be composed of at least two 300 mile segments. So you have to figure out at least two charging points per day of trip, as well as overnight.
Now they have done a great job of bringing superchargers online where a lot of trips I could probably plot a path that included enough superchargers. Evening is still an issue though, lots of places it is hard to find somewhere to plug in. But with that kind of range, maybe it would be enough just to find one in the city I was staying in and charge up before I went to the hotel.
I think it's close enough it would work for most road trips, except for some remote areas.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
MPGe is stupid. There, I said it.
Wild guess: you're in the UK.
(if not, more details about the vehicle, please)
Pinkypants -- my favorite!
The myth that just won't die.
Pinkypants -- my favorite!
I'll wait a few more years. I know a few folks who love love love their Teslas, but they keep having to bring them in for service once a month for various problems (albeit minor in the grand scheme of things). You'd think for a car this expensive, the kinks would be all worked out.
Reminds me of Delorean's issues when they started out.
Have any actually gone that distance without needing service?
So how much actual coal is that per mile?
Probably takes 2000 pounds of coal to make the electricity to charge it up once?
Especially the coal electricity California imports from Utah.
The math's pretty easy: according to http://www.coaleducation.org/lessons/twe/ctele.htm, it takes about one pound of coal to generate one kilowatt hour of electricity. The long range battery has a capacity of 75kWh, so that'd be about 75 pounds of coal. Assuming a gas vehicle gets 50mpg, the gasoline needed to travel 310 miles weighs 39 pounds, a far cry from your 2000 pounds claim. Either way, a centrally-located power plant would be able to more readily control its emissions than a smaller, mobile gasoline engine.
Depending on your power mix, that's a worst-case scenario. In California, which you mention, PG&E generates ~70% of its power from renewable and greenhouse gas-free sources, like nuclear, hydro, and unspecified "renewable" sources. 17% is from natural gas, which is very much cleaner than gasoline or coal, and "unspecified" other sources. Sounds much less polluting than gasoline.
EVs have the advantage that the source of the power feeding the grid can be changed without requiring all users to switch to something else: switching all gasoline cars to something that's compatible with their engines and fuel systems but is less polluting and damaging to the environment would be quite difficult. Replacing aging coal power plants with cleaner-burning natural gas plants dramatically reduces emissions while still pushing the same electrons through wires. Adding nuclear, wind, solar, etc. can further improve the cleanliness of electricity supply without any change from consumers.
tesla owns the epa but uh you already knew that.
I've done 24-hour trips with three drivers myself. Two sleep/relax while one drives.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Which "isn't that great"? Lithium is an element. Nothing happens to it over time. It's intercalated into the anodes and cathodes. This is the main place where degradation occurs in modern li-ion batteries. The reference to graphene (not graphite) batteries is an anode tech (normal anodes are graphite).
Regardless, typical degradation on Tesla packs is 4% in the first year, then under 1% in each subsequent year.
Pinkypants -- my favorite!
A bunch of groups did tests and putting a really good gas generator in the back can get you more than triple that range. It's not exactly efficient money or energy-wise but it does work in actual tests.
I rode in a Honda Hybrid. With the little dinky drive and charge motor. That thing flew! And it easily gets 60mpg if you are easy on it. Tesla can do better than that. Maybe double the gas mileage. He's got the brains for it!
Hell I'm in Canada and my old '96 Saturn SW2 that finally gave up with a subframe failure after hitting a cumbling chunk of overpass a few years ago, would still get around 38-42mpg on most trips. When it was newerish back in '96/97 I'd once gotten 51mpg(460mi on 9US gallons oh the joy of filling the tank for $5 in Indianapolis no less), most of the time it was right around 40mpg(which was common for the SL/SW series), even when I drove cross-country from southern ontario through the US, through N.Dakota, to northern alberta I managed to get around 43mpg which was still amazing in 2010. Minus mountain driving of course, which really sucked down the performance right around 28mpg through Banff National park.
Om, nomnomnom...
I have yet to see a Tesla in my town, but I have seen Nissan Leafs ("Leaves"?) literally every day for the past fortnight when travelling across town. If I had to guess, perhaps 1 in 50 cars I see at the moment is a Leaf.
That blows my mind.
Many have been of different colours and some had signwriting for small businesses. Either we've had a massive rise in their popularity or it's a very persistent and dedicated marketing campaign.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
? Ethanol... E85 and flex fuel cars already exist, most modern cars are already E10 or more compatible.
All modern cars are E10 compatible, because you can and will get E10 out of the pump in California during part of the year whether you like it or not. As it turns out, though, any car that isn't sitting can pretty much handle E10. Seriously traditional parts like leather accelerator pump diaphragms would probably wear out quicker, if there were any left intact today. There was one in my 1960 Dodge Dart's 650 Carter...
However, ethanol is crap. Cellulosic ethanol production has never met up with its promises, and the majority of fuel ethanol feedstock is corn. Virtually all of that is grown continuously, meaning without crop rotation or even permitting fields to lie fallow. This requires heavy fertilization, which means that ethanol is barely energy-positive. The argument in its favor was always free energy from the sun, but much of the energy in ethanol fuel actually comes from synthetic (petrochemical-based) fertilizer.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
From that 75 pounds of coal, only 55.2kwh make it to the battery.
Fair enough. Of course, the well-to-wheel costs for gasoline is non-trivial either. In California, for example, coal only makes up a fraction of the total power supply, at least from PG&E, so the electricity is relatively clean.
" "unspecified" other sources. Sounds much less polluting than gasoline."
Such sources include bagasse or other crop waste, sewage and landfill gas, sawdust/wood waste (from wood manufacturing) and black liquor (paper production). Don't confuse renewable with clean.
True, but renewable stuff is generally closer to CO2-neutral than gasoline production and use: crops will still get harvested, sewage and landfills will still get used, wood products and paper will still get manufactured, etc., so using the waste streams from those things as fuel for power generation makes a lot of sense. Additionally, power plants can be built or refitted with pollution controls that wouldn't be effective on millions of small, mobile engines and, as I mentioned before, electrons are fungible and it's possible to incrementally improve the cleanliness of the power generated for the grid without having to make wholesale changes on the consumer side once EVs are more widely used.
To me, that latter part is the key advantage of EVs: even in areas that generate power from relatively polluting sources now, the deployment of EVs will centralize emissions at large power plants with better pollution controls and that are typically relatively far from populated areas rather than right at in areas where people live. Over time, those polluting sources can be upgraded or replaced and all EVs on the road would immediately benefit.
"switching all gasoline cars to something that's compatible with their engines and fuel systems but is less polluting and damaging to the environment would be quite difficult."
? Ethanol... E85 and flex fuel cars already exist, most modern cars are already E10 or more compatible.
Sure, but E85 sucks for reasons that "drinkypoo" mentions in this thread. I like the idea of biodiesel that's drop-in compatible with existing engines, but that doesn't seem to have panned out as expected, plus it does little for the particulate emissions from diesel engines. Liquid fuels have many advantages for cars (e.g. fast fill-ups, high energy density, etc.), and gasoline has the advantage of essentially-universal availability in terms of gas stations being available in every little town across the country, but that also means there's a lot of inertia to switching to other fuels that becomes problematic.
As battery tech improves and the grid becomes cleaner in more areas, EVs look to be more and more practical for more and more users. That has a big appeal to me.
He writes with an American accent, so I don't think he's in the UK.
My (Euro model) 2007 Honda Civic uses 5.5L/100km which is >50 Imperial MPG while having a large interior (fold the seats back and it makes a good compact van, it's a hatchback and a lot more space efficient than the US models - I have no idea why Honda doesn't sell the good version of the Civic over there).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
In the UK at least (and many European countries), 0 lbs of coal. The UK has had increasing numbers of days where no coal fired power station has been running at all. Coal is on the way out and will be gone completely within the next 20 years. An average of something like 50% of the UK's power is from low/no CO2 generation (nuclear, wind). The rest is CCGT (combined cycle gas turbine) which is very thermodynamically efficient especially when compared to a petrol engine in a car.
So at least here, you should be thinking of uranium and natual gas per mile, not coal.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
There are two issues at play that I was trying to dig into.
1) European mileages are measured with the NEDC, a joke of a cycle that yields MPG figures about 15% greater than EPA figures on the same car.
2) In the UK, not only is the NEDC used, but on top of that they use imperial gallons, which are 20% larger than US gallons.
Pinkypants -- my favorite!
And there was me thinking that trains and trams were the most efficient electric vehicles on the market. They can carry more than 5 people, plus they don't need expensive batteries and chargers, you don't have to pay insurance or even have to buy them, they don't run out of electricity, and you just pay a minimal fee for a pass that lets you ride on any of them any time you want, and best of all, you don't have to drive! :)
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
I'm in the US. I'm not using EPA estimates, but my odometer and the flow meter on the gas pump. The car is a hatchback from a major manufacturer.
Why? Is their gas tank empty? I had the heated seat on in my Volt the other morning, I think I ended the day with one less mile remaining than normal. I have noticed more difference in the past month due to the headlights being on in both the morning and evening commute with the days being shorter. During the summer the ac probably reduced my miles remaining by 3 or 4 on my daily 28 mile round trip.