On what drivecycle? Or is this time for "Fun With Anecdotes"?
it's call the diesel
A fuel denser than gasoline, emitting more CO2 per gallon, and far more of other pollutants on average when comparing the same model year.
The Diesel-electric concenpts are starting out at 70MPG and working towards 100MPG.
Oooh, concepts! On an unspecified drivecycle! Sign me up!
to run on a variety of biofuels, derrived from plants, algae or the fatty tissues of the dead from a war.
Ignoring the snark: Most oil crops store a couple percent of the sun's energy that hits them at best as usable oil -- low single digits. Cut this down to 1 or 2 percent after you factor in the energy to grow, harvest, transport, and ship the biofuel. Add in a few thousand gallons of water to produce the biodiesel, some of which may be provided by irrigation, depending on the region. Also add in the consequences of fertilizer and pesticide runoff. But back to the energy aspect. Then burn this diesel at an average of 25% efficiency in the engine (tank to wheels). Yes, diesel engines *peak* at much higher efficiencies (so do gasoline engines), but all ICEs fall off rapidly in terms of efficiency away from their optimal band, and even a CVT only lets you trade RPM for torque, not pick an optimal horsepower. So we're at a fraction of a percent efficiency sun to wheels.
Now, let's fill that field up with solar thermal power generation, with a 25% system efficiency. Near zero water consumption, no fertilizer/pesticides, etc, but let's forget about that for now and just focus on energy. Power transmission in the US averages 92.8% efficient, chargers are about 93% efficient, li-ions about 99% efficient at those charge rates, and the drivetrain averages 85-90% efficient or so. Net result, ~19% efficient.
Hmm, fraction of one percent efficiency or 19 efficiency, which to choose... power 50 cars from a given plot of land or 1 car, which to choose...
I'll sign up for an electric when more than half our power isn't coming from coal or nuclear
There's significantly *less* CO2 emissions from using electric cars our current grid, according to the DOE, since power plants are so efficient and since due to most EV charging being at night, they can up nighttime efficiency and utilize spinning standby.
when the grid is intelligent and can shift power where needed safelyand securely
Also according to the DOE, our current grid could handle a switchover of 84% of our vehicles.
and when it takes less than an hour to charge the vehicle
Congratulations! Witness the awesome firepower of commercially available titanate, phosphate, and spinel li-ion cells.
capable of over 700 miles between "fuelings."
Hey, while we're covering ridiculous, you'd-never-need-that-ever range requirements, why not just up the requirement to a cool 3,000 miles so you can drive coast to coast without stopping to eat or sleep? You should also add a requirement for an in-car toilet, though.
And my diesel can 'charge' in 1-2 minutes, even on the move
That's fascinating! So how does that work? Is there a refueling aircraft that approaches from at front, dangling a gas pump on a boom arm, and you maneuver the car to get the fill? The rest of us have to slow down, take an exit, drive to the gas station, pull up to a pump, stop the car, get out, take the gas cap off, hook up the pump, fill, remove the pump, pay, put the gas cap back on, get back in the car, start it back up, drive out of the station, back to the highway, and accelerate back up to speed, making the whole process set us back by 10-ish minutes on the freeway (for the equivalent situation in the city, perhaps 5-ish minutes).
Now, let's compare to rapid-charge electric with, say, AltairNano's titanate cells. Instead of 1-2 minutes for the "fill" step, it's 5-10 minutes for the "rapid charge" step. Everything else remains the same. Hence, on the freeway, the total fill time goes from 10 minutes to more like 15 minutes. Oooh, fear and surprise, whatever shall we do? And that's just the freeway case. In the city case, the time goes *down* to about 1 minute -- plugging your car in to a normal, non-rapid-charge outlet whenever you get home and unplugging it before you leave. And since the city case is far more common than the freeway case for most people (i.e., their everyday lives)...
gets 600 miles to the tank
Holy heck, how big is your fuel tank? Does it have its own zip code? Do you *seriously* drive for 10 hours on end without eating, using the restroom, stretching, picking up coffee, or anything of the sort? If so, please let me know when you'll be driving near Iowa City so I can stay *off* the road. Standard safety advice is to average 5-10 minutes of break per hour of driving.
gets better MPG than a typical hybrid
Complete nonsense, when you compare mass-market cars on the same drive cycle cars in the same class from the same year (i.e., same safety/pollution req's). And that's *ignoring* the fact that diesel is a denser fuel than gasoline, and hence a gallon of diesel actually contains more petroleum and emits more CO2 than a gallon of gasoline. And a *LOT* more of other pollutants. Yes, there exist diesels that are cleaner than gasoline cars that exist, but on a whole, even comparing only new cars, gasoline cars average a lot cleaner than diesels. For example, show me a single SULEV diesel on the market.
And that's vs. hybrids that we're talking about. Vs. electric cars, it's no contest, esp. with clean electricity.
and hosts about 1/5th as much.
As a hybrid or an electric? If you mean vs. a hybrid, you're living in a dream world. If vs. an electric, you're *still* living in a dream world, just not as much of one. The Aptera 2e I'm on a waiting list for, for example, starts at $25k.
Or other solutions, like the ACP Long Hauler range-extending trailer, battery swapping, or rapid-charging.
And the GP was wrong: there's not a limit from the grid when you *buffer the charge in your charger's battery banks*, like the highest-power rapid chargers do. That actually helps the grid, as your charger itself can smart-charge.
That is, of course, completely false. The Roadster is as much a conversion car as Nancy Pelosi is an evangelical. The percent of parts the Roadster shares with the Elise, by count or by mass, is in the single digits. It's the same basic layout and styling, and the body is built in the same factory, but it's a completely different car. It has to be, not only to extend performance, but also to deal with the radically different weight and volume distribution. And if anything, developing the battery pack is probably the most difficult aspect. You think it's easy to individually isolate thousands of laptop cells against fire or failure and to get them to last over half a decade? Not that pouring 200-ish kilowatts into an inverter and motor is a walk in the park either. Powertrain 1.5 took some serious work to make happen, and this was on top of their previous work of improving over the base AC-150 design. And need we even mention the whole transmission issue, in that there wasn't a *single* extant transmission on the market that could handle their engine, and the company that they hired to try and build one failed (the motor ripped the transmission to pieces in short order)? Major, major engineering challenges.
Elise: The Roadster shares fewer parts with the Elise than your average Lamborghini shares with your average Audi.
ACP: Tesla licenses the patents on the ACP drivetrain (AC-150), but they've extensively modified it in the process of creating even their first version, let alone Powertrain 1.5. Race an E-Box against a Roadster if you doubt it and think they're the same thing.
Li-ion 18650s: Tesla didn't invent the batteries, of course, but virtually no EV manufacturers do, either. They did, however, do some pretty impressive work with pack design and construction, which is something that a number of EV companies outsource. The fact that they're able to get by on traditional 18650s speaks volumes as to their cell regulation and pack construction.
You have to buy 2 according to Top Gear having one on charge
And what does The Simpsons have to say about it? Intelligent people always check what fiction television shows have to say about vehicles before they buy them.
I think the only bad impression I did get from it was the mileage on the battery. Sure, they were driving the car hard, but the life span didn't seem up to par.
Top Gear admitted that it didn't actually run out of charge. The entire "pushing it back" scene was staged.
They "estimated" that it would only last 55 miles sprinting at top speed... but you know what? A Bugatti Veyron will only go about 60 miles or so if you sprint *it* at top speed. Track driving ranges have nothing to do with normal city/highway driving ranges.
which subsequently overheated and then had some major subsystem failure....
The vehicle never heated; that was faked, too. The "system failure" was real, but way overplayed. In the process of thrashing it on the track, they blew one brake fuse (of several). It took a matter of minutes to swap out the fuse. At no point during the filming was Top Gear without a fully working Roadster.
Don't be surprised; they fake tons of things, and Clarkson is a huge hydrogen fanatic (he's admitted that he would have trashed the Roadster even if everything had been flawless because he sees hydrogen as being the future)
What a distortion. I have to give Tesla kudos, though, for managing to give people the impression that there's only a $10k price difference between the two without outright lying;)
First off, the Volt is not "going to be $40k". GM has repeatedly stated that they don't know how much it's going to cost. The price estimates have ranged from $25k to $45k. Most recently, they've generally ranged in the $30-40k range, more often toward the upper end. These numbers are pre-tax credit. The tax credit is $7500.
The Tesla Model S base model (160 miles range, and without a lot of things many would consider necessary, like a higher power home charger) is $57,400. *After* the tax credit, it's $49,900, making it "under $50k". But that's only after the tax credit.
They're not asking to be bailed out. If you didn't count the money they're spending on developing the Model S, Telsa would be profitable today -- and they're still scaling up Roadster production. They're asking for loans to speed up the creation of *new models* that are more affordable to a mass market. They don't need any sort of subsidy to keep on doing what they're already doing in making Roadsters.
You do realize that Top Gear admits to having faked the episode, right? It's an entertainment show; quit taking it so seriously.
As for your particular example: No, it doesn't take 14 hours to charge. The *standard* Tesla charger takes about 3 hours to charge a fully dead battery, and that's only *if* you drove it about 240 miles that day on a drivecycle akin to the EPA combined numbers / 120-200 if you raced everywhere / 50-100 if you were sprinting on a track. How often do you drive 240 miles a day, or race 120-200 miles? Even if you only charge it on a standard garage NEMA 5-15 (they're usually on a 20A breaker, so 18A is a safe draw, and let's assume 117V): Wall to wheels on the Roadster is about 250Wh/mi, combined. The average person drives about 35 miles a day. 35mi*25kW/mi=8750Wh=8750VAh. 8750VAh / 117V / 18A = 4.15h. So even if you, for some reason, *don't* have the standard charger installed, you can easily handle your daily drive and then some just on an ordinary wall socket. And a dryer socket has 3 times the power as a garage socket, and a range or RV socket 5 times the power.
That's why we need something that can be refueled quickly, which the Tesla certainly is not
Tesla is working on 45 minute charging stations for the Roadster and Model S. Of course, that limitation is due to their particular, unusual choice of batteries. Most other li-ion variants being considered for automotive applications can charge far faster. The titanates, for example, can charge in 5 to 10 minutes. Oh, and Tesla is planning to offer pack swapping for the Model S.
And the radioactivity is really problematic for some of these tasks. For example, oil shale. That was studied a lot in the 70s, and last I saw, it was deemed infeasible because it'd leave the oil too radioactive to be usable.
Oh, and as for using any relevant amount of nuclear weapons on the surface at once -- say, the amount that would be exchanged between India and Pakistan in a nuclear war -- um, no. That would be a Bad Thing(TM).
No; Tesla babies the heck out of them. In addition to careful load balancing and charge controlling, they have a smaller depth of discharge and are highly climate controlled (some might say too much; some owners have complained that when they're not driving the car often, it can spend as much on refrigerating the pack as on driving!). Also, each cell effectively functions individually, unlike the cells in your laptop, where if one goes bad, the whole pack goes bad. Lastly, the inverter is less voltage sensitive than your laptop. It's sort of like how rechargeable NiMH batteries last for so much longer than normal alkaline AAs in a digital camera but not in a flashlight. It's not that they hold vastly more power; it's that the voltage stays higher longer. If you use normal alkaline AAs in many digital cameras, the voltage will quickly drop below what the camera can tolerate.
That battery replacement will not be neither cheap nor trivial I would assume?
Tesla offers a future replacement Roadster pack for $12,000 upfront. That's based on projected future pricing of cells, of course. For the Model S, that number is to be "well under $5,000".
I assume you know that Top Gear *admitted* to faking the ep -- not that this is something new for them. They're an entertainment show. They never ran out of electricity and were never without a working car. The only thing that actually did go wrong was with the brakes -- but it was merely a blown fuse from the abusive track duty they put it through, and the replacement was a nothing task. Their charge time statements were horribly misleading, too.
My bet is most of those smouldering wrecks are due to fires started by electrical faults in the car (the 12V car battery usually provides enough current when shorted to start an "electrical fire").
Even if that is the case, what exactly do you think it was that fuels the burn if not the gigajoule or so of chemical energy stored in the gas tank?
Secondly - the difference between laptop li-ion batteries and a car gas tank is the tank has a very very tough metal wall separating the reactants
Except when damaged -- say, in an accident, or once a fire starts elsewhere and the flames spread (such as a fuel or oil fire in the engine).
FYI: large li-ion battery packs like the Roadster's cost in the low *five* figures. Fuel cell** stacks sufficient to run a car cost in the low *six* figures. And the Roadster's pack is rated for 7 years, while fuel cell manufacturers are still going for that 5-year goal. And that's just Tesla's pack, which is based on babied laptop cells (chilled, individually isolated, lower DoD, etc). The more stable li-ion variants can last*** far longer. GM is looking at a 10 year warranty on the Volt's pack, for example. LG Chem thinks their packs can last up to 40 years. AltairNano titanate cell testing is up into the *tens of thousands* of full cycles. And so on down the line.
** -- By fuel cell, I mean PEMFC, obviously, since that's what's used in H2 cars. *** -- In general, a pack is considered "bad" when it goes down to below 80% of its rated capacity.
The Roadster uses about 200Wh/mi driving (about 250Wh/mi wall to wheels because of their pack cooling needs because of their unusual choice of cells; most wall to wheels numbers for li-ion EVs are much closer to the pack to wheels). US average household electricity rates are about a dime per kilowatt hour. 0.2kWh/mi * $0.10/kWh = $0.02/mi = 50mi/dollar. For an average running gas price of... oh, let's say $2.50/gal, that's the energy-cost-equivalent of 125mpg.
No, they really are traditional commodity laptop cells. They're LiCoO2+graphite 18650s purchased in bulk from the same companies that sell those cells to laptop pack manufacturers. They did that because they wanted cells that were already in mass production so as to keep costs down.
I don't know about you, but *I've* seen the smoldering wreckage of a burnt-out car sitting on the side of the highway before. I have no clue whether the occupants escaped alive, but car fires absolutely do still kill people.
And as I've mentioned elsewhere on this thread, FYI, the Roadster's cells are individually isolated and the packs are tested with multiple cell failures to make sure that fires are contained. And Tesla is near-unique in using laptop cells rather than the "automotive" li-ions which use different chemistries and don't have the fire risk. Oh, sure, the electrolyte in them is flammable, but that's no different from gas in a gas tank.; the big difference is that you can abuse the automotive variants to heck and back and not cause a fire. They pay for their safety in terms of an energy density hit, mind you.
And the Roadster and Model S are only limited to 45 minutes or so because of the type of cells they use (and they have to baby them to get what they do out of them). NiMHs can handle 30 minute charges, phosphates and spinels 15 minutes or so, and titanates 5-10. Assuming you have sufficient cooling in the packs and wire them appropriately, of course. Around a third to half of the announced mass-production EVs have a sub-30-minute charging option, and some (like Phoenix and LightningCar) have sub-10 minute charging options announced. And then there's Project Better Place, which is a whole different story....
Yeah, the chargers needed for delivering that power that fast are pretty impressive beasts (such as the 250kW Aerovironment PosiCharge or the 250kW Norvick MinitCharge), but that's really no more power than common industrial facilities use, except that they have to handle it nonstop, while the chargers only need to handle it in pulses. And no, it doesn't strain the grid when they use their own battery banks, and no, they're not unreasonably expensive (~$125k or so -- about the same as a gas station on a per-pump basis).
When you look at the amount of energy stored in a gallon of gasoline compared to a ton of batteries you'll see why.
That's just silly, though. EVs are exactly the opposite paradigm as gasoline cars. In gasoline cars, the fuel is light while the engine is heavy. In electric cars, the motor is light while the batteries are heavy. The Roadster gets its performance with a motor the size of a small watermelon that weighs something like 40 pounds. In short, battery packs aren't competing with the gas tank for weight and space; they're competing with the gasoline car's engine for weight and space. If you crunch the numbers, you'll find that the two powertrains will be approximately the same when batteries hit 350Wh/kg or so. Commercial cells currently top out at about 200Wh/kg, but there are about two dozen different techs in the lab that can 50%-800% increase the energy density of their respective electrode (anode or cathode). The odds of every last one of them failing to make it to commercialization are vanishingly small. Li-ion still has a very long run ahead of it.
Don't you think if there was money to be made in this market someone would have tried when gas was over 4 bucks a gallon?
When do you think it was that several dozen different marques announced EV programs? Nowadays, it's easier to count the companies that *don't* have EVs they're planning to mass produce. For example, among the biggest sellers in the US, there's only one: Honda. And they've already announced plans to make an electric motorcycle, so even they may not count.
Slashdot Mirror
What part of "estimates have ranged" are you having trouble with? $30000 $35000 $40000 $45000. Here's my favorite: the price of the Volt will depend on the price of gas.
and fetches between 40 and 52mpg
On what drivecycle? Or is this time for "Fun With Anecdotes"?
it's call the diesel
A fuel denser than gasoline, emitting more CO2 per gallon, and far more of other pollutants on average when comparing the same model year.
The Diesel-electric concenpts are starting out at 70MPG and working towards 100MPG.
Oooh, concepts! On an unspecified drivecycle! Sign me up!
to run on a variety of biofuels, derrived from plants, algae or the fatty tissues of the dead from a war.
Ignoring the snark: Most oil crops store a couple percent of the sun's energy that hits them at best as usable oil -- low single digits. Cut this down to 1 or 2 percent after you factor in the energy to grow, harvest, transport, and ship the biofuel. Add in a few thousand gallons of water to produce the biodiesel, some of which may be provided by irrigation, depending on the region. Also add in the consequences of fertilizer and pesticide runoff. But back to the energy aspect. Then burn this diesel at an average of 25% efficiency in the engine (tank to wheels). Yes, diesel engines *peak* at much higher efficiencies (so do gasoline engines), but all ICEs fall off rapidly in terms of efficiency away from their optimal band, and even a CVT only lets you trade RPM for torque, not pick an optimal horsepower. So we're at a fraction of a percent efficiency sun to wheels.
Now, let's fill that field up with solar thermal power generation, with a 25% system efficiency. Near zero water consumption, no fertilizer/pesticides, etc, but let's forget about that for now and just focus on energy. Power transmission in the US averages 92.8% efficient, chargers are about 93% efficient, li-ions about 99% efficient at those charge rates, and the drivetrain averages 85-90% efficient or so. Net result, ~19% efficient.
Hmm, fraction of one percent efficiency or 19 efficiency, which to choose... power 50 cars from a given plot of land or 1 car, which to choose...
I'll sign up for an electric when more than half our power isn't coming from coal or nuclear
There's significantly *less* CO2 emissions from using electric cars our current grid, according to the DOE, since power plants are so efficient and since due to most EV charging being at night, they can up nighttime efficiency and utilize spinning standby.
when the grid is intelligent and can shift power where needed safelyand securely
Also according to the DOE, our current grid could handle a switchover of 84% of our vehicles.
and when it takes less than an hour to charge the vehicle
Congratulations! Witness the awesome firepower of commercially available titanate, phosphate, and spinel li-ion cells.
capable of over 700 miles between "fuelings."
Hey, while we're covering ridiculous, you'd-never-need-that-ever range requirements, why not just up the requirement to a cool 3,000 miles so you can drive coast to coast without stopping to eat or sleep? You should also add a requirement for an in-car toilet, though.
And my diesel can 'charge' in 1-2 minutes, even on the move
That's fascinating! So how does that work? Is there a refueling aircraft that approaches from at front, dangling a gas pump on a boom arm, and you maneuver the car to get the fill? The rest of us have to slow down, take an exit, drive to the gas station, pull up to a pump, stop the car, get out, take the gas cap off, hook up the pump, fill, remove the pump, pay, put the gas cap back on, get back in the car, start it back up, drive out of the station, back to the highway, and accelerate back up to speed, making the whole process set us back by 10-ish minutes on the freeway (for the equivalent situation in the city, perhaps 5-ish minutes).
Now, let's compare to rapid-charge electric with, say, AltairNano's titanate cells. Instead of 1-2 minutes for the "fill" step, it's 5-10 minutes for the "rapid charge" step. Everything else remains the same. Hence, on the freeway, the total fill time goes from 10 minutes to more like 15 minutes. Oooh, fear and surprise, whatever shall we do? And that's just the freeway case. In the city case, the time goes *down* to about 1 minute -- plugging your car in to a normal, non-rapid-charge outlet whenever you get home and unplugging it before you leave. And since the city case is far more common than the freeway case for most people (i.e., their everyday lives)...
gets 600 miles to the tank
Holy heck, how big is your fuel tank? Does it have its own zip code? Do you *seriously* drive for 10 hours on end without eating, using the restroom, stretching, picking up coffee, or anything of the sort? If so, please let me know when you'll be driving near Iowa City so I can stay *off* the road. Standard safety advice is to average 5-10 minutes of break per hour of driving.
gets better MPG than a typical hybrid
Complete nonsense, when you compare mass-market cars on the same drive cycle cars in the same class from the same year (i.e., same safety/pollution req's). And that's *ignoring* the fact that diesel is a denser fuel than gasoline, and hence a gallon of diesel actually contains more petroleum and emits more CO2 than a gallon of gasoline. And a *LOT* more of other pollutants. Yes, there exist diesels that are cleaner than gasoline cars that exist, but on a whole, even comparing only new cars, gasoline cars average a lot cleaner than diesels. For example, show me a single SULEV diesel on the market.
And that's vs. hybrids that we're talking about. Vs. electric cars, it's no contest, esp. with clean electricity.
and hosts about 1/5th as much.
As a hybrid or an electric? If you mean vs. a hybrid, you're living in a dream world. If vs. an electric, you're *still* living in a dream world, just not as much of one. The Aptera 2e I'm on a waiting list for, for example, starts at $25k.
Or other solutions, like the ACP Long Hauler range-extending trailer, battery swapping, or rapid-charging.
And the GP was wrong: there's not a limit from the grid when you *buffer the charge in your charger's battery banks*, like the highest-power rapid chargers do. That actually helps the grid, as your charger itself can smart-charge.
That is, of course, completely false. The Roadster is as much a conversion car as Nancy Pelosi is an evangelical. The percent of parts the Roadster shares with the Elise, by count or by mass, is in the single digits. It's the same basic layout and styling, and the body is built in the same factory, but it's a completely different car. It has to be, not only to extend performance, but also to deal with the radically different weight and volume distribution. And if anything, developing the battery pack is probably the most difficult aspect. You think it's easy to individually isolate thousands of laptop cells against fire or failure and to get them to last over half a decade? Not that pouring 200-ish kilowatts into an inverter and motor is a walk in the park either. Powertrain 1.5 took some serious work to make happen, and this was on top of their previous work of improving over the base AC-150 design. And need we even mention the whole transmission issue, in that there wasn't a *single* extant transmission on the market that could handle their engine, and the company that they hired to try and build one failed (the motor ripped the transmission to pieces in short order)? Major, major engineering challenges.
Elise: The Roadster shares fewer parts with the Elise than your average Lamborghini shares with your average Audi.
ACP: Tesla licenses the patents on the ACP drivetrain (AC-150), but they've extensively modified it in the process of creating even their first version, let alone Powertrain 1.5. Race an E-Box against a Roadster if you doubt it and think they're the same thing.
Li-ion 18650s: Tesla didn't invent the batteries, of course, but virtually no EV manufacturers do, either. They did, however, do some pretty impressive work with pack design and construction, which is something that a number of EV companies outsource. The fact that they're able to get by on traditional 18650s speaks volumes as to their cell regulation and pack construction.
You have to buy 2 according to Top Gear having one on charge
And what does The Simpsons have to say about it? Intelligent people always check what fiction television shows have to say about vehicles before they buy them.
I think the only bad impression I did get from it was the mileage on the battery. Sure, they were driving the car hard, but the life span didn't seem up to par.
Top Gear admitted that it didn't actually run out of charge. The entire "pushing it back" scene was staged.
They "estimated" that it would only last 55 miles sprinting at top speed... but you know what? A Bugatti Veyron will only go about 60 miles or so if you sprint *it* at top speed. Track driving ranges have nothing to do with normal city/highway driving ranges.
which subsequently overheated and then had some major subsystem failure....
The vehicle never heated; that was faked, too. The "system failure" was real, but way overplayed. In the process of thrashing it on the track, they blew one brake fuse (of several). It took a matter of minutes to swap out the fuse. At no point during the filming was Top Gear without a fully working Roadster.
Don't be surprised; they fake tons of things, and Clarkson is a huge hydrogen fanatic (he's admitted that he would have trashed the Roadster even if everything had been flawless because he sees hydrogen as being the future)
Don't trust everything you see on TV.
What a distortion. I have to give Tesla kudos, though, for managing to give people the impression that there's only a $10k price difference between the two without outright lying ;)
First off, the Volt is not "going to be $40k". GM has repeatedly stated that they don't know how much it's going to cost. The price estimates have ranged from $25k to $45k. Most recently, they've generally ranged in the $30-40k range, more often toward the upper end. These numbers are pre-tax credit. The tax credit is $7500.
The Tesla Model S base model (160 miles range, and without a lot of things many would consider necessary, like a higher power home charger) is $57,400. *After* the tax credit, it's $49,900, making it "under $50k". But that's only after the tax credit.
They're not asking to be bailed out. If you didn't count the money they're spending on developing the Model S, Telsa would be profitable today -- and they're still scaling up Roadster production. They're asking for loans to speed up the creation of *new models* that are more affordable to a mass market. They don't need any sort of subsidy to keep on doing what they're already doing in making Roadsters.
You do realize that Top Gear admits to having faked the episode, right? It's an entertainment show; quit taking it so seriously.
As for your particular example: No, it doesn't take 14 hours to charge. The *standard* Tesla charger takes about 3 hours to charge a fully dead battery, and that's only *if* you drove it about 240 miles that day on a drivecycle akin to the EPA combined numbers / 120-200 if you raced everywhere / 50-100 if you were sprinting on a track. How often do you drive 240 miles a day, or race 120-200 miles? Even if you only charge it on a standard garage NEMA 5-15 (they're usually on a 20A breaker, so 18A is a safe draw, and let's assume 117V): Wall to wheels on the Roadster is about 250Wh/mi, combined. The average person drives about 35 miles a day. 35mi*25kW/mi=8750Wh=8750VAh. 8750VAh / 117V / 18A = 4.15h. So even if you, for some reason, *don't* have the standard charger installed, you can easily handle your daily drive and then some just on an ordinary wall socket. And a dryer socket has 3 times the power as a garage socket, and a range or RV socket 5 times the power.
That's why we need something that can be refueled quickly, which the Tesla certainly is not
Tesla is working on 45 minute charging stations for the Roadster and Model S. Of course, that limitation is due to their particular, unusual choice of batteries. Most other li-ion variants being considered for automotive applications can charge far faster. The titanates, for example, can charge in 5 to 10 minutes. Oh, and Tesla is planning to offer pack swapping for the Model S.
And the radioactivity is really problematic for some of these tasks. For example, oil shale. That was studied a lot in the 70s, and last I saw, it was deemed infeasible because it'd leave the oil too radioactive to be usable.
Oh, and as for using any relevant amount of nuclear weapons on the surface at once -- say, the amount that would be exchanged between India and Pakistan in a nuclear war -- um, no. That would be a Bad Thing(TM).
I'm sure he's rolling in his grave.
That's what I said.
No; Tesla babies the heck out of them. In addition to careful load balancing and charge controlling, they have a smaller depth of discharge and are highly climate controlled (some might say too much; some owners have complained that when they're not driving the car often, it can spend as much on refrigerating the pack as on driving!). Also, each cell effectively functions individually, unlike the cells in your laptop, where if one goes bad, the whole pack goes bad. Lastly, the inverter is less voltage sensitive than your laptop. It's sort of like how rechargeable NiMH batteries last for so much longer than normal alkaline AAs in a digital camera but not in a flashlight. It's not that they hold vastly more power; it's that the voltage stays higher longer. If you use normal alkaline AAs in many digital cameras, the voltage will quickly drop below what the camera can tolerate.
That battery replacement will not be neither cheap nor trivial I would assume?
Tesla offers a future replacement Roadster pack for $12,000 upfront. That's based on projected future pricing of cells, of course. For the Model S, that number is to be "well under $5,000".
What part of "driving through the Alps" are you having trouble with? The "Alps" part?
I assume you know that Top Gear *admitted* to faking the ep -- not that this is something new for them. They're an entertainment show. They never ran out of electricity and were never without a working car. The only thing that actually did go wrong was with the brakes -- but it was merely a blown fuse from the abusive track duty they put it through, and the replacement was a nothing task. Their charge time statements were horribly misleading, too.
Clarkson stated that even if the Roadster had performed flawlessly, he still would have been hard on it because he believes that hydrogen is the future.
My bet is most of those smouldering wrecks are due to fires started by electrical faults in the car (the 12V car battery usually provides enough current when shorted to start an "electrical fire").
Even if that is the case, what exactly do you think it was that fuels the burn if not the gigajoule or so of chemical energy stored in the gas tank?
Secondly - the difference between laptop li-ion batteries and a car gas tank is the tank has a very very tough metal wall separating the reactants
Except when damaged -- say, in an accident, or once a fire starts elsewhere and the flames spread (such as a fuel or oil fire in the engine).
I think I'll stick with/change to Hydrogen
Hahahahaa.... oh, that's rich.
FYI: large li-ion battery packs like the Roadster's cost in the low *five* figures. Fuel cell** stacks sufficient to run a car cost in the low *six* figures. And the Roadster's pack is rated for 7 years, while fuel cell manufacturers are still going for that 5-year goal. And that's just Tesla's pack, which is based on babied laptop cells (chilled, individually isolated, lower DoD, etc). The more stable li-ion variants can last*** far longer. GM is looking at a 10 year warranty on the Volt's pack, for example. LG Chem thinks their packs can last up to 40 years. AltairNano titanate cell testing is up into the *tens of thousands* of full cycles. And so on down the line.
** -- By fuel cell, I mean PEMFC, obviously, since that's what's used in H2 cars.
*** -- In general, a pack is considered "bad" when it goes down to below 80% of its rated capacity.
Erm, that should be 0.25Wh/mi * $0.10/kg = $0.025/mi = 40mi/dollar = 100mpg. Accidentally used pack-to-wheels instead of wall-to-wheels.
Because it's dirt cheap, perhaps?
The Roadster uses about 200Wh/mi driving (about 250Wh/mi wall to wheels because of their pack cooling needs because of their unusual choice of cells; most wall to wheels numbers for li-ion EVs are much closer to the pack to wheels). US average household electricity rates are about a dime per kilowatt hour. 0.2kWh/mi * $0.10/kWh = $0.02/mi = 50mi/dollar. For an average running gas price of... oh, let's say $2.50/gal, that's the energy-cost-equivalent of 125mpg.
No, they really are traditional commodity laptop cells. They're LiCoO2+graphite 18650s purchased in bulk from the same companies that sell those cells to laptop pack manufacturers. They did that because they wanted cells that were already in mass production so as to keep costs down.
I don't know about you, but *I've* seen the smoldering wreckage of a burnt-out car sitting on the side of the highway before. I have no clue whether the occupants escaped alive, but car fires absolutely do still kill people.
And as I've mentioned elsewhere on this thread, FYI, the Roadster's cells are individually isolated and the packs are tested with multiple cell failures to make sure that fires are contained. And Tesla is near-unique in using laptop cells rather than the "automotive" li-ions which use different chemistries and don't have the fire risk. Oh, sure, the electrolyte in them is flammable, but that's no different from gas in a gas tank.; the big difference is that you can abuse the automotive variants to heck and back and not cause a fire. They pay for their safety in terms of an energy density hit, mind you.
And the Roadster and Model S are only limited to 45 minutes or so because of the type of cells they use (and they have to baby them to get what they do out of them). NiMHs can handle 30 minute charges, phosphates and spinels 15 minutes or so, and titanates 5-10. Assuming you have sufficient cooling in the packs and wire them appropriately, of course. Around a third to half of the announced mass-production EVs have a sub-30-minute charging option, and some (like Phoenix and LightningCar) have sub-10 minute charging options announced. And then there's Project Better Place, which is a whole different story....
Yeah, the chargers needed for delivering that power that fast are pretty impressive beasts (such as the 250kW Aerovironment PosiCharge or the 250kW Norvick MinitCharge), but that's really no more power than common industrial facilities use, except that they have to handle it nonstop, while the chargers only need to handle it in pulses. And no, it doesn't strain the grid when they use their own battery banks, and no, they're not unreasonably expensive (~$125k or so -- about the same as a gas station on a per-pump basis).
When you look at the amount of energy stored in a gallon of gasoline compared to a ton of batteries you'll see why.
That's just silly, though. EVs are exactly the opposite paradigm as gasoline cars. In gasoline cars, the fuel is light while the engine is heavy. In electric cars, the motor is light while the batteries are heavy. The Roadster gets its performance with a motor the size of a small watermelon that weighs something like 40 pounds. In short, battery packs aren't competing with the gas tank for weight and space; they're competing with the gasoline car's engine for weight and space. If you crunch the numbers, you'll find that the two powertrains will be approximately the same when batteries hit 350Wh/kg or so. Commercial cells currently top out at about 200Wh/kg, but there are about two dozen different techs in the lab that can 50%-800% increase the energy density of their respective electrode (anode or cathode). The odds of every last one of them failing to make it to commercialization are vanishingly small. Li-ion still has a very long run ahead of it.
Don't you think if there was money to be made in this market someone would have tried when gas was over 4 bucks a gallon?
When do you think it was that several dozen different marques announced EV programs? Nowadays, it's easier to count the companies that *don't* have EVs they're planning to mass produce. For example, among the biggest sellers in the US, there's only one: Honda. And they've already announced plans to make an electric motorcycle, so even they may not count.