In the next 5-10 years, we don't *need* a large percent of people, because we won't have the production capacity to make that many EVs. 1-3% of sales by 2015, 2-5% by 2020 is probably all we can support.
Just don't enjoy it too much. Way too many Roadsters have been totaled already. Often from people having too much fun with that accelerator pedal.;)
Survivability appears very good, however. You see the photos of the Roadster rear-ended by a Prius at 50mph (Most Fuel Efficient Accident Ever(TM))? Completely crushed the rear end and pushed it *under a Touareg*. The passenger compartment remained completely intact with the Touareg sitting on top of it.
Personally, I think that's the perfect solution. Too bad most upcoming EVs don't have trailer hitches. Why shove an engine into the vehicle when you only need it on long trips? Such trailers would be perfect for sharing and for rental, too.
So... you're saying that you could afford a $109k electric supercar (plus options and accessories), but not a $15k gasoline car for the four times a year you go elsewhere or 1.5$k/year on rentals?
Except I can easily refuel that and keep going. The trip to my folks' house is 365 miles.
The Roadster doesn't, but many upcoming EVs support some degree of rapid charge -- 10-30 minutes. The Roadster can't because of the type of cells that they use (the same ones found in laptops -- all that was readily and affordably available when they started developing it).
They got the wording wrong, but principle right. Force increases proportional to v^2, but since power = force * distance / time, and distance / time is v, power is proportional to v^3.
You're right about recycling, wrong about production. You're confusing NiMH with Li-ion. Most of the nickel sourced for NiMH battery packs comes from the Sudbury mine in Canada. However, it's a tiny fraction of the plant's output, and the plant is *way* cleaner than it was in the 1970s (which is where most of the "moonscape" comments trying to portray it as dirty come from). The plant and city have actually won a number of environmental awards for their cleanup efforts. Furthermore, *many* car parts and/or cars are shipped all over the world, so I don't see any reason to particularly harp on NiMH batteries for it.
As for lithium ion, the most important thing to realize is that, contrary to the name, lithium is only one of many components; it doesn't make up the majority of the mass or anything. In the Roadster, the cells have a cobalt-based cathode, but in almost all other upcoming EVs, it's either an iron phosphate-based cathode or a manganate cathode. Iron, phosphorus, and manganese are ridiculously easy raw materials to come by, as I'm sure you know (cobalt, not so much). The anodes are generally various forms of carbon (graphite, amorphous, etc). Tesla had to go with the cobalt-type cells (which are the same type as found in laptops) because that's all that was affordable and available in bulk when they started.
As for the lithium itself, it comes primarily from playas and salars (i.e., salt flats). The brine is pumped up to the surface into evaporation ponds, then precipitated to isolate the individual salts; the remaining brine is returned to the subsurface, minus whatever salts are of commercial viability. It's a very low impact production process -- much less than, say, iron mining and smelting for parts for internal combustion engines;). There are also some other types of lithium resources that are starting to reach commercial viability; ultimately, if needed, we can recover lithium straight from seawater.
No, it increases because they're going at lower speeds and thus getting less aero drag, like the GP said. The Tesla Roadster's optimal speed is about 18mph.
Good God people - think! I'm an electrical engineer who has been driving a gas-electric hybrid since 2002, and if regenerative breaking was able to recover even half the energy, I'd be amazed.
As was already mentioned to you, the Roadster recovers about 2/3rds of the energy on regen. The reason hybrids suck at regen is because of their weak regen system: a small DC motor, narrower conductors, and most importantly, a small NiMH battery pack that can't efficiently charge at high currents, and isn't too efficient to begin with anyway. Li-ion is nearly lossless in charge/discharge, while NiMH is usually around 80% or so (in each direction). And the small pack means a high charge rate (i.e., if braking on a 2kWh pack would be a 50% charge in 30 seconds, braking on a 50kWh pack would be a 2% charge in 30 seconds), meaning less efficiency (and more stress on the pack, too).
And also: why does it seem that almost nobody on this thread knows how to spell braking?
The best mileage in my Honda Insight doesn't come from stop and go. It comes from maintaining a constant speed of about 50 mph without stopping
Nothing is best in "stop and go", but many are best at low speeds, and often the low-speed advantage outweighs the stop and go losses. The reason your Insight's optimal speed is as high as it is is because Honda's IMA system sucks.
I think EVs need to be more strictly regulated in their mileage claims. Let them go on the same treadmill as they gasoline/diesel cars must ride.
That's part of the problem, actually. They *do* go on the same treadmill that gasoline/diesel cars must ride. However, gasoline cars are most efficient at around 55mph. On the contrary, the Tesla Roadster, like most EVs, is most efficient at low speeds -- in its case, about 18 miles per hour. Plus, it regens from stop and start, while conventional gasoline cars don't. The net result is that they ace their city mileage, and due to the fact that the US06 highway cycle still has lower speed sections and stops and starts, they do better than they would if you're driving long distances on an interstate (the US06 cycle is more like taking a highway from your home to work than driving from state to state). So out of pure coincidence, our current cycles tend to overstate EV ranges.
Some EVs are even worse than Tesla. The Nissan Leaf's 100 miles range is on the LA-4 city cycle, which is even gentler than the FTP-75 cycle that our cars' city mpg rating is based on. And the Mitsubishi MiEV's 100 mile range is based on the Japanese 10-15 cycle, which is also exceedingly gentle.
I like Aptera's approach for stating range. The Aptera 2e is a composite 2-seater with a large payload area and a ridiculously low drag coefficient. They only give their vehicle a 100 mile range, but that's for 75mph, two passengers, a full payload, and AC and headlights on.
As an example, here's what *today's* Babelfish thinks of the article:
To be fed up: ' 2012' is just over two centuries By: At Keulemans
In the film 2012 that this month in premiere, fall the cities and continents go at small woods, if the world fares. Toch moan that research has shown exactly that it ' end of the tijden' of 21 December 2012 there probably clears two centuries beside zit.
...was that I got halfway through the article before I realized I was viewing it through Google Translate. Yeah, I wasn't paying much attention. And yeah, I had noticed some errors -- but my mind just dismissed them as poor proofreading before publishing. I'm still impressed by how far online translation services have come from the early days of AltaVista Babelfish.
I just don't get how these numbers make any sense. I mean, a goldfish, that small a fraction the footprint of a hamster? Hamsters don't have air stones (and sometimes lights and heaters) running for hour after hour.
The Edwards design calls for launching a reel that weighs several hundred tonnes up to GEO and lowering it down. The initial tether would be tiny, feather-light. You'd then have a series of increasingly large climbers that "glue" additional strips onto the side of the ribbon, carrying the ribbon up with them instead of payload, and very slowly expanding it. After a couple years, it's ready for cargo.
Obviously whether that's even possible depends strongly on what the mystical elevator material is like.
That's not a Space Elevator. That's a Space Fountain. And the power requirements of actively-suspended structures don't need to be high -- you only need to "pay" for any initial increase in gravitational potential and kinetic energy, and from there on, any leakage.
"The IT Center reminds you that the Beige IPv6 Router cannot speak. In the event that the Beige IPv6 Router does speak, the IT Center urges you to disregard it's advice."
1) I was generous and assumed a cylinder for the cable rather than a ribbon, as most designs call for, for easier climbing. If you go with a ribbon, you'll get a lot more resistance. 2) If your solution is "superconductors", that'll help, but they break down at high currents, so it's still not a solution. 3) If your solution is "extremely high voltages", you get coronal discharge (which occurs even in the partial vacuum of near-space).
Let's say you're looking at a 100GPa cable (I can show you why you need a cable this strong later if you need me to). That's 14.5 million pounds per square inch. Let's give it a two-fold safety margin, so we have 7.25 million psi to work with. Let's say we want to carry a payload of 10 tons. That means we need a cross-section of 0.00275790291 square inches. Don't think that makes our cable super-light, mind you -- it must thicken as you go up, and will weigh hundreds or thousands of tons in net weight.
I don't know the resistivity of 5,5 armchair CNTs, but let's just go with copper for now. As we all know:
Resistivity = (Resistance * Cross-Sectional Area ) / Length
If we only care about the craft climbing up to GEO (42,164km), that means we have:
"a few extra tonnes"? First off, space elevators aren't exactly high payload devices; the margins in most designs are generally tiny compared to the elevator's mass. But the big problem with what you wrote is that geosynchronous orbit is 26,199 miles up; a space elevator must be *at least* that long. You're looking at something like one ton per 10,000 miles, or one pound per five miles, or 17 milligrams of conductor per foot. Do you really think that's going to power anything? Even if you only provide power for part of the way up, it's still just not going to happen.
Yeah, even if you use ridiculous voltages, it's just not going to happen.
Plus, these competitions always seem like putting the cart before the horse. The elephant in the room is that we have no material close in terms of properties to what is needed to make a remotely feasible space elevator on Earth (at least 100GPa at the density of graphite), and it may not even be physically possible. Some people have theorized that SWNTs could be that strong, but the strongest SWNTs measured so far are about 60GPa -- and that's for *individual nanotubes*, let alone nanotube bundles, let alone composites made out of nanotube bundles many thousands of miles long. MWNTs have been measured somewhat stronger, but they're a lot denser, so that doesn't help. I mean, even if you ignore the other issues that have been shown to be huge stumbling blocks with space elevators, such as oscillations, that's really a killer.
These competitions come across as though someone started promoting their new "Levitation Shoes" with the following exciting announcement:
"Good news, Levitation Shoe engineers! We will be hosing a Levitation Shoe shoelace-development contest. As you all know, we need to solve the issue of shoelaces being able to withstand the wearer getting buffeted around by high altitude winds without breaking or becoming untied, so we've reserved a site with a huge fan that you can test your shoelace prototypes on! This will bring us one step closer to the dream of Levitation Shoes."
Honestly, much more realistic than a space elevator appears to be a Launch Loop. No nonexistent (and possibly even impossible) materials required.
Slashdot Mirror
In the next 5-10 years, we don't *need* a large percent of people, because we won't have the production capacity to make that many EVs. 1-3% of sales by 2015, 2-5% by 2020 is probably all we can support.
Just don't enjoy it too much. Way too many Roadsters have been totaled already. Often from people having too much fun with that accelerator pedal. ;)
Survivability appears very good, however. You see the photos of the Roadster rear-ended by a Prius at 50mph (Most Fuel Efficient Accident Ever(TM))? Completely crushed the rear end and pushed it *under a Touareg*. The passenger compartment remained completely intact with the Touareg sitting on top of it.
You mean like the Long Ranger?
Personally, I think that's the perfect solution. Too bad most upcoming EVs don't have trailer hitches. Why shove an engine into the vehicle when you only need it on long trips? Such trailers would be perfect for sharing and for rental, too.
So... you're saying that you could afford a $109k electric supercar (plus options and accessories), but not a $15k gasoline car for the four times a year you go elsewhere or 1.5$k/year on rentals?
Except I can easily refuel that and keep going. The trip to my folks' house is 365 miles.
The Roadster doesn't, but many upcoming EVs support some degree of rapid charge -- 10-30 minutes. The Roadster can't because of the type of cells that they use (the same ones found in laptops -- all that was readily and affordably available when they started developing it).
Yeah, show me a new $65k Vette that does 0-60 in 3.9 seconds ;)
Do note that it's a tax credit, though. You have to earn enough to make the deduction worthwhile. You have five years to claim it.
They got the wording wrong, but principle right. Force increases proportional to v^2, but since power = force * distance / time, and distance / time is v, power is proportional to v^3.
You're right about recycling, wrong about production. You're confusing NiMH with Li-ion. Most of the nickel sourced for NiMH battery packs comes from the Sudbury mine in Canada. However, it's a tiny fraction of the plant's output, and the plant is *way* cleaner than it was in the 1970s (which is where most of the "moonscape" comments trying to portray it as dirty come from). The plant and city have actually won a number of environmental awards for their cleanup efforts. Furthermore, *many* car parts and/or cars are shipped all over the world, so I don't see any reason to particularly harp on NiMH batteries for it.
As for lithium ion, the most important thing to realize is that, contrary to the name, lithium is only one of many components; it doesn't make up the majority of the mass or anything. In the Roadster, the cells have a cobalt-based cathode, but in almost all other upcoming EVs, it's either an iron phosphate-based cathode or a manganate cathode. Iron, phosphorus, and manganese are ridiculously easy raw materials to come by, as I'm sure you know (cobalt, not so much). The anodes are generally various forms of carbon (graphite, amorphous, etc). Tesla had to go with the cobalt-type cells (which are the same type as found in laptops) because that's all that was affordable and available in bulk when they started.
As for the lithium itself, it comes primarily from playas and salars (i.e., salt flats). The brine is pumped up to the surface into evaporation ponds, then precipitated to isolate the individual salts; the remaining brine is returned to the subsurface, minus whatever salts are of commercial viability. It's a very low impact production process -- much less than, say, iron mining and smelting for parts for internal combustion engines ;). There are also some other types of lithium resources that are starting to reach commercial viability; ultimately, if needed, we can recover lithium straight from seawater.
No, it increases because they're going at lower speeds and thus getting less aero drag, like the GP said. The Tesla Roadster's optimal speed is about 18mph.
Good God people - think! I'm an electrical engineer who has been driving a gas-electric hybrid since 2002, and if regenerative breaking was able to recover even half the energy, I'd be amazed.
As was already mentioned to you, the Roadster recovers about 2/3rds of the energy on regen. The reason hybrids suck at regen is because of their weak regen system: a small DC motor, narrower conductors, and most importantly, a small NiMH battery pack that can't efficiently charge at high currents, and isn't too efficient to begin with anyway. Li-ion is nearly lossless in charge/discharge, while NiMH is usually around 80% or so (in each direction). And the small pack means a high charge rate (i.e., if braking on a 2kWh pack would be a 50% charge in 30 seconds, braking on a 50kWh pack would be a 2% charge in 30 seconds), meaning less efficiency (and more stress on the pack, too).
And also: why does it seem that almost nobody on this thread knows how to spell braking?
The best mileage in my Honda Insight doesn't come from stop and go. It comes from maintaining a constant speed of about 50 mph without stopping
Nothing is best in "stop and go", but many are best at low speeds, and often the low-speed advantage outweighs the stop and go losses. The reason your Insight's optimal speed is as high as it is is because Honda's IMA system sucks.
I think EVs need to be more strictly regulated in their mileage claims. Let them go on the same treadmill as they gasoline/diesel cars must ride.
That's part of the problem, actually. They *do* go on the same treadmill that gasoline/diesel cars must ride. However, gasoline cars are most efficient at around 55mph. On the contrary, the Tesla Roadster, like most EVs, is most efficient at low speeds -- in its case, about 18 miles per hour. Plus, it regens from stop and start, while conventional gasoline cars don't. The net result is that they ace their city mileage, and due to the fact that the US06 highway cycle still has lower speed sections and stops and starts, they do better than they would if you're driving long distances on an interstate (the US06 cycle is more like taking a highway from your home to work than driving from state to state). So out of pure coincidence, our current cycles tend to overstate EV ranges.
Some EVs are even worse than Tesla. The Nissan Leaf's 100 miles range is on the LA-4 city cycle, which is even gentler than the FTP-75 cycle that our cars' city mpg rating is based on. And the Mitsubishi MiEV's 100 mile range is based on the Japanese 10-15 cycle, which is also exceedingly gentle.
I like Aptera's approach for stating range. The Aptera 2e is a composite 2-seater with a large payload area and a ridiculously low drag coefficient. They only give their vehicle a 100 mile range, but that's for 75mph, two passengers, a full payload, and AC and headlights on.
As an example, here's what *today's* Babelfish thinks of the article:
To be fed up: ' 2012' is just over two centuries
By: At Keulemans
In the film 2012 that this month in premiere, fall the cities and continents go at small woods, if the world fares. Toch moan that research has shown exactly that it ' end of the tijden' of 21 December 2012 there probably clears two centuries beside zit.
...was that I got halfway through the article before I realized I was viewing it through Google Translate. Yeah, I wasn't paying much attention. And yeah, I had noticed some errors -- but my mind just dismissed them as poor proofreading before publishing. I'm still impressed by how far online translation services have come from the early days of AltaVista Babelfish.
There at least was one when I was in Japan in 2005...
(Honest to YHVH, that's not a photoshop. I have no idea what it was for, but I was glad when my train started moving again!)
I just don't get how these numbers make any sense. I mean, a goldfish, that small a fraction the footprint of a hamster? Hamsters don't have air stones (and sometimes lights and heaters) running for hour after hour.
The Edwards design calls for launching a reel that weighs several hundred tonnes up to GEO and lowering it down. The initial tether would be tiny, feather-light. You'd then have a series of increasingly large climbers that "glue" additional strips onto the side of the ribbon, carrying the ribbon up with them instead of payload, and very slowly expanding it. After a couple years, it's ready for cargo.
Obviously whether that's even possible depends strongly on what the mystical elevator material is like.
That's not a Space Elevator. That's a Space Fountain. And the power requirements of actively-suspended structures don't need to be high -- you only need to "pay" for any initial increase in gravitational potential and kinetic energy, and from there on, any leakage.
"The IT Center reminds you that the Beige IPv6 Router cannot speak. In the event that the Beige IPv6 Router does speak, the IT Center urges you to disregard it's advice."
Oh, and a couple more things:
1) I was generous and assumed a cylinder for the cable rather than a ribbon, as most designs call for, for easier climbing. If you go with a ribbon, you'll get a lot more resistance.
2) If your solution is "superconductors", that'll help, but they break down at high currents, so it's still not a solution.
3) If your solution is "extremely high voltages", you get coronal discharge (which occurs even in the partial vacuum of near-space).
Let's say you're looking at a 100GPa cable (I can show you why you need a cable this strong later if you need me to). That's 14.5 million pounds per square inch. Let's give it a two-fold safety margin, so we have 7.25 million psi to work with. Let's say we want to carry a payload of 10 tons. That means we need a cross-section of 0.00275790291 square inches. Don't think that makes our cable super-light, mind you -- it must thicken as you go up, and will weigh hundreds or thousands of tons in net weight.
I don't know the resistivity of 5,5 armchair CNTs, but let's just go with copper for now. As we all know:
Resistivity = (Resistance * Cross-Sectional Area ) / Length
If we only care about the craft climbing up to GEO (42,164km), that means we have:
0.0000000168 = Resistance * 0.0000017792886414156 / 42164000
Resistance = ~400,000 ohms
Good luck with that. :P
"a few extra tonnes"? First off, space elevators aren't exactly high payload devices; the margins in most designs are generally tiny compared to the elevator's mass. But the big problem with what you wrote is that geosynchronous orbit is 26,199 miles up; a space elevator must be *at least* that long. You're looking at something like one ton per 10,000 miles, or one pound per five miles, or 17 milligrams of conductor per foot. Do you really think that's going to power anything? Even if you only provide power for part of the way up, it's still just not going to happen.
Yeah, even if you use ridiculous voltages, it's just not going to happen.
Plus, these competitions always seem like putting the cart before the horse. The elephant in the room is that we have no material close in terms of properties to what is needed to make a remotely feasible space elevator on Earth (at least 100GPa at the density of graphite), and it may not even be physically possible. Some people have theorized that SWNTs could be that strong, but the strongest SWNTs measured so far are about 60GPa -- and that's for *individual nanotubes*, let alone nanotube bundles, let alone composites made out of nanotube bundles many thousands of miles long. MWNTs have been measured somewhat stronger, but they're a lot denser, so that doesn't help. I mean, even if you ignore the other issues that have been shown to be huge stumbling blocks with space elevators, such as oscillations, that's really a killer.
These competitions come across as though someone started promoting their new "Levitation Shoes" with the following exciting announcement:
"Good news, Levitation Shoe engineers! We will be hosing a Levitation Shoe shoelace-development contest. As you all know, we need to solve the issue of shoelaces being able to withstand the wearer getting buffeted around by high altitude winds without breaking or becoming untied, so we've reserved a site with a huge fan that you can test your shoelace prototypes on! This will bring us one step closer to the dream of Levitation Shoes."
Honestly, much more realistic than a space elevator appears to be a Launch Loop. No nonexistent (and possibly even impossible) materials required.
Implanted? Just like that? Are you one of these people? ;)
Erm, "get the image out of my head".
I shuold porffraed mroe.
Great, now I can't get the image of people sticking to my hood, screaming and kicking as I barrel through bushes and street lamps ;)