I don't care what the range is, until there are charging stations everywhere
They are (and rapidly expanding). And that's just superchargers - including slower ones (but still including high power DC), look here.
and a full charge happens in 10 minutes
In your everyday life (aka, the vast majority of your time), instead of 5 minutes to detour to a gas station, a full charge takes 10 seconds: 5 to plug in, 5 to unplug. In the comfort of your garage.
On long trips, it charges during meal and bathroom / stretch breaks, about 75 miles range per 10 minutes charging at below 50% SoC. Take, for example, a 700 mile trip. At 70mph that's 10 hours (not counting breaks), so two meal breaks - say, a 20 minute lunch and a 30 minute dinner. 45 minutes charging. That adds about 375 miles, meaning 685 miles. Just one or two 10 minute stretch breaks (on your 10 hour trip) and that's your entire charging.
The only thing it doesn't work for is "sprint" trips, where you're basically trying to avoid all stops, eating in the car, minimizing all bathroom and rest breaks. And if you're the sort of person who does that... don't. Seriously, stop it; that's dangerous, not just to you, but to other drivers.
I would have range anxiety
A belief only held by people who've never owned an EV. Because 1) supercharging rates aren't slow; 2) you can extend range significantly just by slowing down, at any point in time (unlike ICE vehicles, EVs increase in range down to around 20-25mph), and 3) in the absolute worst case (which almost never happens), you can ask to charge virtually anywhere. Farmhouse in the middle of nowhere? Ranger station deep in a national park? You name it. And the answer in practice is almost always yes.
Hydrogen is about 50% by volume in town gas, not by mass. See Ullmann's Encyclopedia, "Gas Production", p4. Also 5% N2, 5% CO2, 40% CO. That's about 6% by mass. Town gas is mostly (~70%) carbon monoxide by mass.
What's the ratio of ship/cargo/fuel mass on a big container ship? I've only ever dug into fishing vessels.
Part of the problem you get into is that the fuel consumption of a ship isn't so much to do with its physical size, but its mass. The more mass, the more volume you have under the water as buoyancy counteracting that mass; they're directly related, and the latter is directly related with drag and thus energy consumption. On the other hand, it means that ships gain a lot from improved construction methods and materials in order to reduce mass. Most large ships are still just objects made of geometrically simple pieces of mild steel welded / bolted together (very different from how airplanes and cars are made); more complicated part geometries (with advanced steel alloys used in key places) can significantly reduce mass. Scale is the reason for the difference, of course (container ships are *huge*), but scaleup of more mass-efficient construction methods would go a long way toward reducing energy demand - at least as far as the ship's own mass goes.
One of the core issues for hydrogen in cars is storing sufficient quantities of it, high pressure vessel storage are heavy, but as you get larger in size the storage vessel the less of the weight of the fuel storage system the vessel takes up compared to what can be stored.
Unfortunately, that's not actually true when it comes to pressure vessels. The volume to surface area grows linearly with the radius, yes, but the thickness also grows with size to maintain a given level of stress And dear YHVH I don't want to picture the result of a container-ship-sized hydrogen tank failure in a port. At atmospheric pressure, hydrogen burns at 4-75% mixing ratios and can detonate (which natural gas can't do at all) between something like 18-56%. And takes less than 1/10th the ignition energy of natural gas (almost anything will set it off). Combine that with pressures higher than a scuba tank.... Also, liquid hydrogen is even worse. Air in contact with liquid hydrogen freezes out into a high-explosive slush. As for all hydrogen, while it doesn't pool at the surface, it pools under overhangs (which ships tend to have in abundance), embrittles metals, leaks through almost anything, and even does weird things like leak into pipes, follow them to their destination, then pool there.
Heaters have trouble reaching very high temperatures, but higher temperatures yield higher expansion efficiencies. As for props: great for lower speeds, not great for high subsonic speeds, terrible for supersonic speeds.
It's an awful lot of different benefits. Your generator always runs in an optimal power band. You can add more, smaller electric motors without sacrificing efficiency - to the contrary, they increase efficiency and can be used to significantly boost lift for takeoff / landing by pushing more air across the wing. The article discusses how quieter operation means that they can fly more, bigger planes into cities, especially at night. Same goes with lower pollution at takeoff/landing (airports tend to be big point sources of pollution). It's a lot of individual advantages.
Pure electric flight will come, but "not yet". Yes, you can make electric planes, but they're far from economic for ferrying passengers and cargo. Once you start getting closer to li-air energy densities, however, things start looking a lot more interesting; the much touted "solid state" batteries have some potential in this regard, in that they have potential to reduce or eliminate damage from dendrite formation. I know Musk really wants to be the first to build a pure electric aircraft to break the sound barrier. From that, I imagine he's thinking of something like a high-bypass arcjet rather than props, which would be really fascinating, although I'd expect it to have big problems with ozone generation (if that is in fact the approach he's thinking of). A high bypass engine involving microwave plasma heating might be another way to get to high speeds with decent efficiency, possibly with lower ozone concerns. Either way, you're constrained by not wanting your "exhaust" to be moving much faster than the aircraft if you want your efficiency to be good (a critical concern if you're going for battery propulsion).
BTW, I find it interesting that people don't talk nearly as much about electrifying the other elephant in the room: shipping. Where I am, the fishing fleet is our biggest fuel consumer (although cargo shipping is another huge consumer). A fishing boat goes out with a sizeable chunk of its net weight comprised of diesel, and returns with a sizeable chunk of its net weight comprised of fish. Not an easy challenge either - but it too will eventually happen.
That is, of course, not remotely what was being discussed in this thread.
This thread is about using existing waste heat as a utility, remedying the ridiculous situation, common in the US, of factories and power plants exhausting billowing clouds of steam in the winter while meanwhile nearby residents burn natural gas to heat their homes and businesses. Most parts of the US aren't used to thinking of heat as a utility. But it's an extremely beneficial paradigm.
If it "just makes economic sense", why does the US do it so little? This is one thing I never got about the US. You drive through a city (or the countryside around one) and there's factories and powerplants belching clouds of hot steam on a winter's day, and then all over the same city you have people burning natural gas to heat their homes. I mean, what the heck, America?
Here in Iceland we produce power from geothermal water, which means a thermal power plant, like any other. But once the water's gone through turbines we put it to use - plants that are "reasonably close" to cities (generally under a 30 minute drive or so) pipe the water to them for home heating, while ones in more remote places usually are used for "nature spas" or greenhouse heating or the like. Peoples' homes get hot water piped to them as well as cold, and it's cheap. Almost too cheap - there's IMHO not enough incentive to do weather sealing and the like.
There's nothing magical about geothermal heat that lets you pipe it to homes while other kinds of heat must be thrown away.
1) Li-ion batteries don't "explode". If you screw up, they can catch fire, but that's not the same thing. 2) Tesla battery packs have individual cells physically isolated and surrounded by non-flammable coolant.
By the way: they finally broke the 1100 barrier (1131 was spotted today). This is interesting because the VINs had slowly ticked up to the lower 500s, then seemed to stop... then suddenly jumped just a couple weeks ago to near 1100, and then had ticked down since then toward the previous high mark. The fact that they're now over 1100 strongly suggests that they've filled in the VIN gap.
Looks like they're up to something like 150 per week right now (and accelerating), which is a huge improvement over where they were before. It's great to see the scaleup finally back on track.
The unreferenced Wikipedia page is wrong. They forgot about the gear ratio between the wheels and engines. Gearing trades RPM for torque. See a discussion here.
It's certainly possible. But the big thing going on here is that solar and wind power have gotten super cheap.... with the caveat that you have to also pay for an expensive battery buffer or peaking plant to go with them. But here, A) Tesla has clearly gotten battery prices way down, and B) the stations need a battery buffer either way; it's a two-for-one.
A vehicle is not just its fuel. Even a powertrain is not just its fuel. You have tankage, engines, transmissions, pollution controls, and a whole range of associatied hardware systems that are vastly heavier than the fuel itself. You can see it play out in the Model 3: the Model 3 SR is pretty much the same weight as a BMW 330i, which it's about the same size and acceleration as. The Model 3 LR is in turn only about 100 pounds heavier than the BMW 340i (same weight when the BMW's tank is full) and likewise similar in performance (4,8s measured by motor trend, 5,1 official; 340i has been measured from 4,8 to 5,1). This is without the performance package on the Model 3, which will add little weight but add a lot of performance. Meanwhile, the 340i only goes about 10% further (EPA combined cycle) than Model 3 LR. There's a bigger difference on highway driving (Model 3 loses range, the BMW gains range), but it's it puts into perspective how close EVs and gasoline vehicles have gotten in weight. And the former is advancing a lot faster than the latter.
1) No,it's not cheaper than a decked out Model X. A decked-out Model X with all the bells and whistles is $147k, cheaper than the short-range Semi.
2) You're comparing the price of a vehicle in the future with a vehicle today, in a field whose prices keep falling.
3) Model X is two generations and two platforms old, with a lot of manual labour. And probably one of the most complicated vehicles ever built on top of that. It also does 0-60 in 2,9 seconds.
4) The larger you make something, the better the better the cost per unit size you get.
5) Semi uses a different battery tech from Model X. Yes, that matters.
6) Model 3 is a $35k USD vehicle for 220mi (it was advertized as $35k for 215). You're wanting Tesla to add 90 miles extra (actually more) and a premium upgraded interior for free. Sorry, not going to happen. The long range battery is a $9k option and PUP is a $5k option.
7) No, it's not a "delay on the power needed"; it's an evening out of the power; there's a big difference. And furthermore, please read the linked post; I'm not going to write it out again.
First off, the original plan for the Model 3 was for production to begin at "some point" in 2017; it was moved forward to July. Secondly: we were not discussing schedules. Tesla is frequently late; Model 3 being 3 months behind schedule should surprise nobody. But that's not what we were talking about. We were talking about claims of vehicle stats and pricing.
Slashdot Mirror
They are (and rapidly expanding). And that's just superchargers - including slower ones (but still including high power DC), look here.
In your everyday life (aka, the vast majority of your time), instead of 5 minutes to detour to a gas station, a full charge takes 10 seconds: 5 to plug in, 5 to unplug. In the comfort of your garage.
On long trips, it charges during meal and bathroom / stretch breaks, about 75 miles range per 10 minutes charging at below 50% SoC. Take, for example, a 700 mile trip. At 70mph that's 10 hours (not counting breaks), so two meal breaks - say, a 20 minute lunch and a 30 minute dinner. 45 minutes charging. That adds about 375 miles, meaning 685 miles. Just one or two 10 minute stretch breaks (on your 10 hour trip) and that's your entire charging.
The only thing it doesn't work for is "sprint" trips, where you're basically trying to avoid all stops, eating in the car, minimizing all bathroom and rest breaks. And if you're the sort of person who does that... don't. Seriously, stop it; that's dangerous, not just to you, but to other drivers.
A belief only held by people who've never owned an EV. Because 1) supercharging rates aren't slow; 2) you can extend range significantly just by slowing down, at any point in time (unlike ICE vehicles, EVs increase in range down to around 20-25mph), and 3) in the absolute worst case (which almost never happens), you can ask to charge virtually anywhere. Farmhouse in the middle of nowhere? Ranger station deep in a national park? You name it. And the answer in practice is almost always yes.
Hydrogen is about 50% by volume in town gas, not by mass. See Ullmann's Encyclopedia, "Gas Production", p4. Also 5% N2, 5% CO2, 40% CO. That's about 6% by mass. Town gas is mostly (~70%) carbon monoxide by mass.
What's the ratio of ship/cargo/fuel mass on a big container ship? I've only ever dug into fishing vessels.
Part of the problem you get into is that the fuel consumption of a ship isn't so much to do with its physical size, but its mass. The more mass, the more volume you have under the water as buoyancy counteracting that mass; they're directly related, and the latter is directly related with drag and thus energy consumption. On the other hand, it means that ships gain a lot from improved construction methods and materials in order to reduce mass. Most large ships are still just objects made of geometrically simple pieces of mild steel welded / bolted together (very different from how airplanes and cars are made); more complicated part geometries (with advanced steel alloys used in key places) can significantly reduce mass. Scale is the reason for the difference, of course (container ships are *huge*), but scaleup of more mass-efficient construction methods would go a long way toward reducing energy demand - at least as far as the ship's own mass goes.
Unfortunately, that's not actually true when it comes to pressure vessels. The volume to surface area grows linearly with the radius, yes, but the thickness also grows with size to maintain a given level of stress And dear YHVH I don't want to picture the result of a container-ship-sized hydrogen tank failure in a port. At atmospheric pressure, hydrogen burns at 4-75% mixing ratios and can detonate (which natural gas can't do at all) between something like 18-56%. And takes less than 1/10th the ignition energy of natural gas (almost anything will set it off). Combine that with pressures higher than a scuba tank.... Also, liquid hydrogen is even worse. Air in contact with liquid hydrogen freezes out into a high-explosive slush. As for all hydrogen, while it doesn't pool at the surface, it pools under overhangs (which ships tend to have in abundance), embrittles metals, leaks through almost anything, and even does weird things like leak into pipes, follow them to their destination, then pool there.
Heaters have trouble reaching very high temperatures, but higher temperatures yield higher expansion efficiencies. As for props: great for lower speeds, not great for high subsonic speeds, terrible for supersonic speeds.
It's an awful lot of different benefits. Your generator always runs in an optimal power band. You can add more, smaller electric motors without sacrificing efficiency - to the contrary, they increase efficiency and can be used to significantly boost lift for takeoff / landing by pushing more air across the wing. The article discusses how quieter operation means that they can fly more, bigger planes into cities, especially at night. Same goes with lower pollution at takeoff/landing (airports tend to be big point sources of pollution). It's a lot of individual advantages.
Pure electric flight will come, but "not yet". Yes, you can make electric planes, but they're far from economic for ferrying passengers and cargo. Once you start getting closer to li-air energy densities, however, things start looking a lot more interesting; the much touted "solid state" batteries have some potential in this regard, in that they have potential to reduce or eliminate damage from dendrite formation. I know Musk really wants to be the first to build a pure electric aircraft to break the sound barrier. From that, I imagine he's thinking of something like a high-bypass arcjet rather than props, which would be really fascinating, although I'd expect it to have big problems with ozone generation (if that is in fact the approach he's thinking of). A high bypass engine involving microwave plasma heating might be another way to get to high speeds with decent efficiency, possibly with lower ozone concerns. Either way, you're constrained by not wanting your "exhaust" to be moving much faster than the aircraft if you want your efficiency to be good (a critical concern if you're going for battery propulsion).
BTW, I find it interesting that people don't talk nearly as much about electrifying the other elephant in the room: shipping. Where I am, the fishing fleet is our biggest fuel consumer (although cargo shipping is another huge consumer). A fishing boat goes out with a sizeable chunk of its net weight comprised of diesel, and returns with a sizeable chunk of its net weight comprised of fish. Not an easy challenge either - but it too will eventually happen.
That is, of course, not remotely what was being discussed in this thread.
This thread is about using existing waste heat as a utility, remedying the ridiculous situation, common in the US, of factories and power plants exhausting billowing clouds of steam in the winter while meanwhile nearby residents burn natural gas to heat their homes and businesses. Most parts of the US aren't used to thinking of heat as a utility. But it's an extremely beneficial paradigm.
If it "just makes economic sense", why does the US do it so little? This is one thing I never got about the US. You drive through a city (or the countryside around one) and there's factories and powerplants belching clouds of hot steam on a winter's day, and then all over the same city you have people burning natural gas to heat their homes. I mean, what the heck, America?
Here in Iceland we produce power from geothermal water, which means a thermal power plant, like any other. But once the water's gone through turbines we put it to use - plants that are "reasonably close" to cities (generally under a 30 minute drive or so) pipe the water to them for home heating, while ones in more remote places usually are used for "nature spas" or greenhouse heating or the like. Peoples' homes get hot water piped to them as well as cold, and it's cheap. Almost too cheap - there's IMHO not enough incentive to do weather sealing and the like.
There's nothing magical about geothermal heat that lets you pipe it to homes while other kinds of heat must be thrown away.
Or to rephrase: hell no.
EVs are cleaner than fossil fuel vehicles even in parts of the grid where coal dominates.
Fuel consumption per passenger, however, has changed a great deal since the early Comet days.
Nor was that ever part of the schedule. Are you really building your argument on something that will be invalidated a few months from now?
If he's not talking about torque steering, then he's invoking a red herring, since Roadster 2 will have torque steering.
1) Li-ion batteries don't "explode". If you screw up, they can catch fire, but that's not the same thing.
2) Tesla battery packs have individual cells physically isolated and surrounded by non-flammable coolant.
A company whose business is selling electricity, going to love the chance to sell more electricity? You better believe it.
I can't understand your post.
By the way: they finally broke the 1100 barrier (1131 was spotted today). This is interesting because the VINs had slowly ticked up to the lower 500s, then seemed to stop... then suddenly jumped just a couple weeks ago to near 1100, and then had ticked down since then toward the previous high mark. The fact that they're now over 1100 strongly suggests that they've filled in the VIN gap.
Looks like they're up to something like 150 per week right now (and accelerating), which is a huge improvement over where they were before. It's great to see the scaleup finally back on track.
The unreferenced Wikipedia page is wrong. They forgot about the gear ratio between the wheels and engines. Gearing trades RPM for torque. See a discussion here.
It's certainly possible. But the big thing going on here is that solar and wind power have gotten super cheap.... with the caveat that you have to also pay for an expensive battery buffer or peaking plant to go with them. But here, A) Tesla has clearly gotten battery prices way down, and B) the stations need a battery buffer either way; it's a two-for-one.
A vehicle is not just its fuel. Even a powertrain is not just its fuel. You have tankage, engines, transmissions, pollution controls, and a whole range of associatied hardware systems that are vastly heavier than the fuel itself. You can see it play out in the Model 3: the Model 3 SR is pretty much the same weight as a BMW 330i, which it's about the same size and acceleration as. The Model 3 LR is in turn only about 100 pounds heavier than the BMW 340i (same weight when the BMW's tank is full) and likewise similar in performance (4,8s measured by motor trend, 5,1 official; 340i has been measured from 4,8 to 5,1). This is without the performance package on the Model 3, which will add little weight but add a lot of performance. Meanwhile, the 340i only goes about 10% further (EPA combined cycle) than Model 3 LR. There's a bigger difference on highway driving (Model 3 loses range, the BMW gains range), but it's it puts into perspective how close EVs and gasoline vehicles have gotten in weight. And the former is advancing a lot faster than the latter.
Did you actually read the linked comment? Doesn't seem like you did.
1) No,it's not cheaper than a decked out Model X. A decked-out Model X with all the bells and whistles is $147k, cheaper than the short-range Semi.
2) You're comparing the price of a vehicle in the future with a vehicle today, in a field whose prices keep falling.
3) Model X is two generations and two platforms old, with a lot of manual labour. And probably one of the most complicated vehicles ever built on top of that. It also does 0-60 in 2,9 seconds.
4) The larger you make something, the better the better the cost per unit size you get.
5) Semi uses a different battery tech from Model X. Yes, that matters.
6) Model 3 is a $35k USD vehicle for 220mi (it was advertized as $35k for 215). You're wanting Tesla to add 90 miles extra (actually more) and a premium upgraded interior for free. Sorry, not going to happen. The long range battery is a $9k option and PUP is a $5k option.
7) No, it's not a "delay on the power needed"; it's an evening out of the power; there's a big difference. And furthermore, please read the linked post; I'm not going to write it out again.
Not talking about VIN *registrations*. I'm talking about VINs *spotted on vehicles*.
10k nm wheel torque.
"Pretty standard"? In what world do you live where 325/30ZR21 tires are "pretty standard"? That's 325 millimeters wide - that's over a foot wide.
In what world do you live where Roadster 1 had torque steering?
First off, the original plan for the Model 3 was for production to begin at "some point" in 2017; it was moved forward to July. Secondly: we were not discussing schedules. Tesla is frequently late; Model 3 being 3 months behind schedule should surprise nobody. But that's not what we were talking about. We were talking about claims of vehicle stats and pricing.