Tryptophan isn't "wrongly" said to make you sleepy - it does make you sleepy. The myth is that it's tryptophan to blame when Americans get sleepy after a Thanksgiving feast, when in reality most of the blame lies on the mass consumption of carbohydrates. Turkey is no more tryptophan-rich than many other meats, such as chicken.
My first thought was that they were talking about the Icelandic metal band Kontinuum. Next up: HP pledges also to not walk away from Skálmöld, Agent Fresco and Sólstafir!
Claims of a pending AI apocalypse come almost exclusively from the ranks of individuals such as Musk, Hawking, and Bostrom who possess no formal training in the field...
Thank you, law professor, for informing us how someone who founded and runs OpenAI is untrained in the field, unlike the formal training in the field you received in the law program at Dartmouth.
Airbreathing does not in any way, shape or form imply an oxygen-rich atmosphere. The most important aspect of air to a nuclear rocket is not oxygen, it's simply reaction mass.
NERVA was designed for operation in the atmosphere (it doesn't exhaust radioactive material). Also, Earth is not the only body in the solar system with an atmosphere.
Even SpaceX admits that for more distant missions (far outer planet destinations, oort cloud, etc), scaling chemical rockets is not sufficient. Nuclear rockets are also interesting for Venus, delivering crew and payload between the habitable layer (~54km) where breathable air is a lifting gas that can loft a colony, and orbit. Some of Venus's great advantages, like having nearly Earthlike gravity and thus no concerns about wasting like exist for the moon and (to a lesser extent) Mars, are also disadvantages, in that it's also nearly Earthlike difficulty to get to orbit. Furthermore, unlike Mars where your rocket rests on the ground, with Venus you have to support its fully fueled mass. While it's possible to get out with two-stage chemical rockets and re-dock the returning stages, you get much better mass fractions with nuclear. Even though nuclear pretty much only works with hydrogen propellant (the ISP drops in linear proportion to the atomic mass of the propellant), and hydrogen is not particularly common on Venus, the low propellant requirements mean that a nuclear rocket can use less hydrogen than most low-hydrogen rocket propellants that could be used were the ascent vehicle a two-stage chemical rocket.
I'm sure lots of people are going to be discussing NERVA in this comments section. It's important to realize that NERVA is obsolete technology, and there are much better designs available at present. NERVA's biggest problem was its awful thrust to weight ratio. One of the first realizations since then was that you can make a nuclear rocket with a LOX "afterburner"; at liftoff, you use LOX to vastly augment the thrust (the resulting ISP, while nothing like pure hydrogen nuclear-thermal, is still well above that of normal hydrolox). Once the high liftoff thrust requirements are no longer needed, the rocket transitions to pure hydrogen thrust for much higher specific impulse.
A variety of airbreathing modes have also been investigated which can strongly increase thrust and/or specific impulse further - thrust augmentation, nuclear scramjets, nuclear-driven turbojets, etc. Also, there have been general improvements in nuclear technology to allow for transferring higher energies to the hydrogen steam since then, as well as a number of yet-to-be-proven concepts. For example a fission fragment reactor can theoretically get the hydrogen much hotter than the reactor itself; in such a system, the goal is to (as much as possible) capture only neutrons in the fuel and only thermalize fission fragments (which carry most of the energy) in the hydrogen. But you definitely wouldn't pursue a fission fragment reactor with LEU....
Indeed. Lithium is hardly the most energy-dense substance in existence. It has lots of desirable properties, but it's not the be-all end-all.
Actually, sodium-air batteries would be even better. Still much more energy dense than li-ion (although not as much as li-air), but sodium is dirt cheap. Lithium isn't super-expensive, but sodium.... I mean, it's the cation in salt, it's bloody everywhere. And can be reduced to metal for a final price similar to that of aluminum.
In case you're curious, it's rare that most supercharger stations not in big cities will ever need 4 chargers at this point in time, with the number of EVs on the road. It's one of the things that to me continually demonstrates how Tesla understands the market while others' don't. If you just build a single charger somewhere, and someone gets there, and it's taken or broken.... then what? Bad luck, right? But Tesla makes sure that there's always multiple chargers at every site (constantly monitored), on different circuits, to prevent this. And V3 chargers are going to be battery buffered.
Another example (IMHO) of why I like Tesla is the quality of their engineering. Check the difference between a Tesla supercharger connector (right) vs. a socket for a CHAdeMO connector that delivers less than 40% as much power (left). They're constantly thinking of human factors. Likewise, the reason why they went with such high powers in the first place while everyone else was ignoring it. Companies like Nissan, etc look at EVs like a hair shirt for hippies. "So what if it takes a long time to charge on trips, they'll wait for it so they can save the planet, and think it's fine because they save so much time when not on trips." Same reason that they underpower the motors in their cars. Tesla's goal isn't hippies; their goal is the world.
But you're supposed to charge up all night at home
You're the one who imposed the "no supercharging at the person's house" requirement (which doesn't match reality, FYI). I'm just meeting your impositions.
so why in the world would you drive the short distance from home to the SC station and then juice up again?
On the way. Hence Arlington if you're coming from the south and Denton if you're coming from the north.
There needs to be a SC station between Dallas and Shamrock.
By the time anyone in Texas gets a M3, there will be two. There's already one.
I googled "Tesla supercharger new mexico" and saw none in the entire southern half of the state
Okay, now we're seeing the problem. I'm pretty sure you're looking at "screenshots" of the supercharger map taken from random points in the past, not any of the live maps. It's important to always check the most current data; the network has been growing at a crazy rate.
This is Tesla's live supercharger map. Red means already fully operational. Grey means either currently unoperational or under construction; all under construction stations are scheduled to be finished by the end of this year (and the total number of stations tripled by the end of next year over what they are today).
Beyond superchargers (that map also has an option to show Tesla-branded destination chargers), there's exponentially more chargers over at Plugshare, of varying speeds. Note that you have to zoom in before they appear. Plugshare does not show any that are under construction. Superchargers are of course fastest, but they're going to be rivaled very soon by VW's network, which is targeting speeds even faster than the current generation of superchargers (but not as powerful as Tesla's new V3 supercharger, which is still under wraps). Current V2 superchargers are 145kW per charger (usually 4-8 chargers per station), max 120kW per vehicle, up to two vehicles connected to a charger at once (but with supercharger density maintained such that having to share a charger is rare - if it ever ceases to be rare that's a trigger to build more superchargers in an area). Volkswagen's network is going to be a mix of 150kW and 350kW chargers. When asked if Tesla's V3 would be 350kW, Musk responded by calling 350kW a "children's toy".;)
First off, it was the GM EV1; Ford's EV of that era was the Ranger EV. Secondly, almost all of the major manufacturers terminated their leases and brought back their vehicles for destruction. A few models however were saved due to protests from their owners, with the companies changing their minds and allowing the owners to buy them (the Toyota RAV4 EV being the most notable example). GM became so famous for it in that the EV1 was the most beloved of that generation of EVs, and how GM staunchly ignored their owners protests (to the point that two actresses, Alexandra Paul and Colette Divine, were arrested trying to block the haulers) and crushed them anyway. However, GM was not the only company to do that - for example, Ford recalled all of their Ranger EVs.
The real PR disaster for GM was their success - despite lacking high-level support, they had actually made a good EV, unlike the cheapo conversions made by other manufacturers. Despite the loss of the EV1, some of the people who had designed its drivetrain (for the GM Impact, its predecessor) had started a new company, AC Propulsion, developing similar technology. This culminated in them making the AC Propulsion tzero, a very innovative EV kit car that could do 0-60 in 4,1 seconds, which was simply unheard of at the time. They also developed a lot of neat accessories, like the Long Ranger, a range-extending trailer with self-steering so it was as easy to back up as not having a trailer at all. Martin Eberhard, being fascinated by the tzero, funded its conversion to lithium ion, making it even faster and with a much longer range. Failing to convince ACP to mass produce the tzero, he (along with Marc Tarpenning) founded Tesla Motors with the intent of doing it himself, started searching for investors, and borrowed the tzero for three months. One of the first people to drive it was Musk, who fell in love with it. Musk again tried to get ACP to make more tzeros, even in small numbers (offering large sums for it), but again ACP declined. So Tesla decided to pursue their own strategy of building their own drivetrain (based on the same tech behind ACPs) and build it into Lotus Elise shells. This became the Tesla Roadster, and the rest is history.
It's entirely GM's fault that Tesla exists today. And also, I'll never understand ACP. They invented so much neat stuff yet never pursued anything important, only ever pursuing dumb conversions that were obviously never going to be profitable. They'd be billionaires today if they had agreed to join forces with Tesla.
A postscript to the EV1 story: they're not actually all gone. A number were given to universities, although they were first deactivated and the universities had to agree to strict conditions to never make them roadworthy again. There is only one non-deactivated EV1 remaining, and it's in the Smithsonian.
Indeed, it's one of the most modern car production factories on Earth. Including using some of the largest robots on Earth. All of Tesla's car production is done at the same place, using the same systems. Model S and X share a common platform; 3 and Y will also share a common platform.
Tesla has really pushed the boundaries on automation on car production. They show the robot that installs the seats on the Wired video, and how it has to contort to get the seats into position. The Model 3 allows even more internal work by robots by having the big glass window, which gets installed last, so there's a giant gap for robots to reach inside. Model Y is taking automation to the point that robots will even be installing the entire wiring harness. Normally that's unthinkable because it's a complicated tangle that winds its way through every corner of the car, but Tesla has been putting a huge effort into simplifying it.
Okay, finally we have some data - you're going from Dallas to Shamrock (and I presume NM also?). Where in Dallas? If you're starting on the south side or in town, stop at the Arlington supercharger; from the north, the Denton supercharger. There are four more opening up in Dallas this year . Even if you tried you couldn't get an M3 before they opened; the waiting list is two years long (there will be 2018 superchargers (not on the map) opening before someone who placed an order today got their car). Same story with the Wichita Falls supercharger - all of the gray ones on the map open this year (they've been flipping to red one by one - also, some that are still grey on the map are actually already functional, to varying degrees). Wichita Falls is 120 miles from the Arlington supercharger, 100 from Denton. From there it's 110 miles to the Childress supercharger, and from there, 55 to Shamrock. Also en route (at present): 18 non-Tesla chargers outside of Dallas, and many hundreds in Dallas, including over a dozen CHAdeMO/CCS (~50kW).
As for southern NM, I don't know what you're talking about. Truth or Consequences is already operational. Deming and Soccoro will be operational by the end of this year. And of course across the border the El Paso charger is operational.
If you want me to be more specific, you need to be more specific as to what routes you're talking about.
And building more superchargers simultaneously. They're doubling over the course of this year. On the Tesla forums people watch them one by one pop into usage. At the M3 launch event a couple weeks ago they announced tripling by the end of next year. At the rate they've been going, that would not be at all surprising. Meanwhile, many other players are making their own network. VW will be making their own supercharging network nearly as big as Tesla's over the course of the next two years - and they're already starting on permitting.
Little rubber collars on pump nozzles kept the gas in. Five years ago the rule mandating them was eliminated, because most cars have built-in fume traps. url:http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/10/politics/epa-gas-pump-handles/index.html> It was 70% back then, and I bet it's higher now.
You know those drips of gasoline when you pull the hose out? Drips on your fueling port, on the ground, on the pump? What do you think happens to them?
Yes, they vaporize. Fume traps on modern cars do not make gas stations vapour free.
Are there no awnings over the gas pumps [wikimedia.org] in NY/NJ/PA (or wherever you are that E-ZPass is used)?
I'm using US terms. I live in Iceland. I have however lived previously in the US.
and you've got to pay $20. That's a decent price for a tank of gas, but you should be morally outraged at the markup charged, since electricity is so cheap.
Meh, business is business. It really doesn't matter because long distance trips are so infrequent for people. It's your everyday life that really matters. Besides, if you don't like what one charger charges, you can just pick another.
But don't you DARE use 80 cents an hour of electricity, or I'll cut you!
That's a serious math fail.
The average cost of electricity in the US is 14.2 cents/kWh. After a long trip, the tank is pretty depleted. In this case, 50 kWh (of a max 60kWh) seems a reasonable requirement to "tank up". That turns out to be $7.10.
Someone failed to notice the words "an hour".:) I'm assuming charging at 120V 10A on midwestern or southern electricity, since that was my experience in the US. Add 50% for charging from a 15A, or 100% for 20A (somewhat risky for throwing a breaker, even from a bathroom). I'm presuming that you're not showing up and asking someone to disconnect their drier (240V/30A) or oven (240V/50A) for you.;) I'm also presuming that they don't have a charging cable (aka, don't own an EV). But feel free to make your own assumptions.
Electricity is cheap. You do whatever you do when you visit a friend or family member and would cause them an expense (aka, going out to eat, going to the movies, travling together and incurring gas bills, etc) - either the whole "Oh, let me pay for that" "Oh no no, I've got it", "Please, let me pay..." routine, or the "pay for something else / bring a gift" routine.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. I've looked at the Tesla Supercharger map, and the closest one to me is 35 miles.
And? You realize that the range on a Model 3 is 220 to 310 miles, right? Again: you stop on the way there or back, just like you do with gas stations. It's really not a tricky concept.
What happens if there is a line of just 5 cars ahead of you?
You ask Gandalf for a charge, because you're clearly stepped into a fantasy world by that point.
Superchargers being full at all is very rare because Tesla monitors usage and builds new chargers corresponding to demand in each area to prevent it. It does happen, but it's not common - and when it does, it's generally in places that have lots of other chargers. Furthermore, your vehicle can tell you how busy each station is before you get there.
If you're a B&B, you don't even need a supercharger - if someone is going to be at your business overnight, or even just a few hours, all you need is a destination charger. And Tesla literally gives those away for free.
The only reason superchargers currently work for long trips is that there are very few electric cars that need them.
What part of "Tesla maintains market forecasts to ensure that they don't" didn't you understand? Tesla builds more when superchargers start to get busy. Look at the density of superchargers in, say, Hong Kong. Each of those stations in turn has many chargers.
Superchargers are budgeted such that they're profitable once utilization levels become significant, without requiring constant utilization. Only those in remote areas are loss leaders.
The differences between the efficiency gains of using gas/diesel over using a horse were staggering
It really was not, and it would benefit you to read about the early history of the automobile before discussing it.
At the turn of the century there were 27000 miles of roads in the US. Almost virtually all unpaved. Ever wonder why early "horseless carriages" had those giant wagon wheels? It was to try to stop them from bogging down. Guess what? They still bogged down almost all the time. Early gas "stations" were sporadic, and weren't really "stations", just shops that happened to carry petrol. Sometimes they had a hand pump to dispense it; sometimes just bottles. You never knew what exactly you were putting into your car and whether it would be compatible. The cars were constantly breaking down. An important part of owning an early car was also learning to disassemble and fix it; if you wanted to be a car owner, you also needed to be a car mechanic.
Early cars were seen as a luxury toy for wealthy city dwellers, serving mainly as an annoyance and hazard to "normal" people. Lots of places passed anti-car ordinances as a consequence - widely supported by the local populace. These included things like having to have people with flags march alongside cars to make sure that the way was safe for pedestrians. Some places required cars to pull off the road if a horse was nearby and cover it up until the horse was past. For a couple decades, cars were really disdained by a large segment of the populace. It took nearly fifty years for cars to fully dislodge the horse. Half a century for your supposed "staggering" difference.
You bring up the Model T, as if it was the start of the automotive industry. It was an important step in it, but anything but the start. Wealthy people began buying horseless carriages and making "road trips" with them in the 1880s, two decades earlier. And it was really a miserable car to drive (ask anyone who's ever driven one). It came out only five years after the first cross-country drive in the US, by Horatio Nelson Jackson. Jackson's first breakdown was only 15 miles into the trip. He paid the equivalent of $130 per gallon for fuel at times. He was constantly having to ship parts across the country to replace things that broke or outright fell off, and to bike, horse ride, or walk dozens of miles to buy fuel when the car couldn't make it. At one point he was stranded for 36 hours without food until a shepherd found him and fed him. The whole trip took 63 1/2 days.
Your math for how fast an early car driver could hypothetically travel doesn't even remotely match the reality. The only reason he made it is because of the constant resupply lines by horse and train. It wasn't until the first cross-country highways in the 1920s like Route 66 that cross-country car travel really became practical.
1 Electric semi going the same distance with a presumed 400 mile range (information on google is sparse as far as the range of a pure battery powered Semi truck) will mean a required 90 minute (or more depending on number of chargers vs chargers in use) stop
Yeah, try again.
The reason you can't find specs for Tesla's Semi is because it hasn't had its public debut yet. However, Tesla's other cars' ranges of 220-335mi, increased slightly due to advances over time, are probably reasonable. Say, 300 mi.
Tesla's current charging standard is 30 minutes to 80%. This is with internal cooling. Tesla has been patenting external cooling of battery packs and charger cables, which offers significant potential for faster heat withdrawal from battery packs (the main limiting factor for battery life in fast charging). It also allows for much higher powers without increasing charging cable thickness.
Simultaneous with Semi, Tesla is working on Supercharger V3. Not many details have been leaked out on it yet, except that when asked if it would be 350kW, Mus
Slashdot Mirror
Well, at least we'll find out the answer eventually. ;)
Tryptophan isn't "wrongly" said to make you sleepy - it does make you sleepy. The myth is that it's tryptophan to blame when Americans get sleepy after a Thanksgiving feast, when in reality most of the blame lies on the mass consumption of carbohydrates. Turkey is no more tryptophan-rich than many other meats, such as chicken.
My first thought was that they were talking about the Icelandic metal band Kontinuum. Next up: HP pledges also to not walk away from Skálmöld, Agent Fresco and Sólstafir!
It's what 80% of his time is spent on.
At least they included this quote in the summary:
Thank you, law professor, for informing us how someone who founded and runs OpenAI is untrained in the field, unlike the formal training in the field you received in the law program at Dartmouth.
Airbreathing does not in any way, shape or form imply an oxygen-rich atmosphere. The most important aspect of air to a nuclear rocket is not oxygen, it's simply reaction mass.
Wow... you know.... hmm....
I wonder if I could get a neural net on the Pirate Party's candidates list.....
NERVA was designed for operation in the atmosphere (it doesn't exhaust radioactive material). Also, Earth is not the only body in the solar system with an atmosphere.
Even SpaceX admits that for more distant missions (far outer planet destinations, oort cloud, etc), scaling chemical rockets is not sufficient. Nuclear rockets are also interesting for Venus, delivering crew and payload between the habitable layer (~54km) where breathable air is a lifting gas that can loft a colony, and orbit. Some of Venus's great advantages, like having nearly Earthlike gravity and thus no concerns about wasting like exist for the moon and (to a lesser extent) Mars, are also disadvantages, in that it's also nearly Earthlike difficulty to get to orbit. Furthermore, unlike Mars where your rocket rests on the ground, with Venus you have to support its fully fueled mass. While it's possible to get out with two-stage chemical rockets and re-dock the returning stages, you get much better mass fractions with nuclear. Even though nuclear pretty much only works with hydrogen propellant (the ISP drops in linear proportion to the atomic mass of the propellant), and hydrogen is not particularly common on Venus, the low propellant requirements mean that a nuclear rocket can use less hydrogen than most low-hydrogen rocket propellants that could be used were the ascent vehicle a two-stage chemical rocket.
I'm sure lots of people are going to be discussing NERVA in this comments section. It's important to realize that NERVA is obsolete technology, and there are much better designs available at present. NERVA's biggest problem was its awful thrust to weight ratio. One of the first realizations since then was that you can make a nuclear rocket with a LOX "afterburner"; at liftoff, you use LOX to vastly augment the thrust (the resulting ISP, while nothing like pure hydrogen nuclear-thermal, is still well above that of normal hydrolox). Once the high liftoff thrust requirements are no longer needed, the rocket transitions to pure hydrogen thrust for much higher specific impulse.
A variety of airbreathing modes have also been investigated which can strongly increase thrust and/or specific impulse further - thrust augmentation, nuclear scramjets, nuclear-driven turbojets, etc. Also, there have been general improvements in nuclear technology to allow for transferring higher energies to the hydrogen steam since then, as well as a number of yet-to-be-proven concepts. For example a fission fragment reactor can theoretically get the hydrogen much hotter than the reactor itself; in such a system, the goal is to (as much as possible) capture only neutrons in the fuel and only thermalize fission fragments (which carry most of the energy) in the hydrogen. But you definitely wouldn't pursue a fission fragment reactor with LEU....
You'll have to ask Ford; they stopped making them in 1997.
Indeed. Lithium is hardly the most energy-dense substance in existence. It has lots of desirable properties, but it's not the be-all end-all.
Actually, sodium-air batteries would be even better. Still much more energy dense than li-ion (although not as much as li-air), but sodium is dirt cheap. Lithium isn't super-expensive, but sodium.... I mean, it's the cation in salt, it's bloody everywhere. And can be reduced to metal for a final price similar to that of aluminum.
In case you're curious, it's rare that most supercharger stations not in big cities will ever need 4 chargers at this point in time, with the number of EVs on the road. It's one of the things that to me continually demonstrates how Tesla understands the market while others' don't. If you just build a single charger somewhere, and someone gets there, and it's taken or broken.... then what? Bad luck, right? But Tesla makes sure that there's always multiple chargers at every site (constantly monitored), on different circuits, to prevent this. And V3 chargers are going to be battery buffered.
Another example (IMHO) of why I like Tesla is the quality of their engineering. Check the difference between a Tesla supercharger connector (right) vs. a socket for a CHAdeMO connector that delivers less than 40% as much power (left). They're constantly thinking of human factors. Likewise, the reason why they went with such high powers in the first place while everyone else was ignoring it. Companies like Nissan, etc look at EVs like a hair shirt for hippies. "So what if it takes a long time to charge on trips, they'll wait for it so they can save the planet, and think it's fine because they save so much time when not on trips." Same reason that they underpower the motors in their cars. Tesla's goal isn't hippies; their goal is the world.
You're the one who imposed the "no supercharging at the person's house" requirement (which doesn't match reality, FYI). I'm just meeting your impositions.
On the way. Hence Arlington if you're coming from the south and Denton if you're coming from the north.
By the time anyone in Texas gets a M3, there will be two. There's already one.
Okay, now we're seeing the problem. I'm pretty sure you're looking at "screenshots" of the supercharger map taken from random points in the past, not any of the live maps. It's important to always check the most current data; the network has been growing at a crazy rate.
This is Tesla's live supercharger map. Red means already fully operational. Grey means either currently unoperational or under construction; all under construction stations are scheduled to be finished by the end of this year (and the total number of stations tripled by the end of next year over what they are today).
Beyond superchargers (that map also has an option to show Tesla-branded destination chargers), there's exponentially more chargers over at Plugshare, of varying speeds. Note that you have to zoom in before they appear. Plugshare does not show any that are under construction. Superchargers are of course fastest, but they're going to be rivaled very soon by VW's network, which is targeting speeds even faster than the current generation of superchargers (but not as powerful as Tesla's new V3 supercharger, which is still under wraps). Current V2 superchargers are 145kW per charger (usually 4-8 chargers per station), max 120kW per vehicle, up to two vehicles connected to a charger at once (but with supercharger density maintained such that having to share a charger is rare - if it ever ceases to be rare that's a trigger to build more superchargers in an area). Volkswagen's network is going to be a mix of 150kW and 350kW chargers. When asked if Tesla's V3 would be 350kW, Musk responded by calling 350kW a "children's toy". ;)
First off, it was the GM EV1; Ford's EV of that era was the Ranger EV. Secondly, almost all of the major manufacturers terminated their leases and brought back their vehicles for destruction. A few models however were saved due to protests from their owners, with the companies changing their minds and allowing the owners to buy them (the Toyota RAV4 EV being the most notable example). GM became so famous for it in that the EV1 was the most beloved of that generation of EVs, and how GM staunchly ignored their owners protests (to the point that two actresses, Alexandra Paul and Colette Divine, were arrested trying to block the haulers) and crushed them anyway. However, GM was not the only company to do that - for example, Ford recalled all of their Ranger EVs.
The real PR disaster for GM was their success - despite lacking high-level support, they had actually made a good EV, unlike the cheapo conversions made by other manufacturers. Despite the loss of the EV1, some of the people who had designed its drivetrain (for the GM Impact, its predecessor) had started a new company, AC Propulsion, developing similar technology. This culminated in them making the AC Propulsion tzero, a very innovative EV kit car that could do 0-60 in 4,1 seconds, which was simply unheard of at the time. They also developed a lot of neat accessories, like the Long Ranger, a range-extending trailer with self-steering so it was as easy to back up as not having a trailer at all. Martin Eberhard, being fascinated by the tzero, funded its conversion to lithium ion, making it even faster and with a much longer range. Failing to convince ACP to mass produce the tzero, he (along with Marc Tarpenning) founded Tesla Motors with the intent of doing it himself, started searching for investors, and borrowed the tzero for three months. One of the first people to drive it was Musk, who fell in love with it. Musk again tried to get ACP to make more tzeros, even in small numbers (offering large sums for it), but again ACP declined. So Tesla decided to pursue their own strategy of building their own drivetrain (based on the same tech behind ACPs) and build it into Lotus Elise shells. This became the Tesla Roadster, and the rest is history.
It's entirely GM's fault that Tesla exists today. And also, I'll never understand ACP. They invented so much neat stuff yet never pursued anything important, only ever pursuing dumb conversions that were obviously never going to be profitable. They'd be billionaires today if they had agreed to join forces with Tesla.
A postscript to the EV1 story: they're not actually all gone. A number were given to universities, although they were first deactivated and the universities had to agree to strict conditions to never make them roadworthy again. There is only one non-deactivated EV1 remaining, and it's in the Smithsonian.
Indeed, it's one of the most modern car production factories on Earth. Including using some of the largest robots on Earth. All of Tesla's car production is done at the same place, using the same systems. Model S and X share a common platform; 3 and Y will also share a common platform.
Tesla has really pushed the boundaries on automation on car production. They show the robot that installs the seats on the Wired video, and how it has to contort to get the seats into position. The Model 3 allows even more internal work by robots by having the big glass window, which gets installed last, so there's a giant gap for robots to reach inside. Model Y is taking automation to the point that robots will even be installing the entire wiring harness. Normally that's unthinkable because it's a complicated tangle that winds its way through every corner of the car, but Tesla has been putting a huge effort into simplifying it.
Okay, finally we have some data - you're going from Dallas to Shamrock (and I presume NM also?). Where in Dallas? If you're starting on the south side or in town, stop at the Arlington supercharger; from the north, the Denton supercharger. There are four more opening up in Dallas this year . Even if you tried you couldn't get an M3 before they opened; the waiting list is two years long (there will be 2018 superchargers (not on the map) opening before someone who placed an order today got their car). Same story with the Wichita Falls supercharger - all of the gray ones on the map open this year (they've been flipping to red one by one - also, some that are still grey on the map are actually already functional, to varying degrees). Wichita Falls is 120 miles from the Arlington supercharger, 100 from Denton. From there it's 110 miles to the Childress supercharger, and from there, 55 to Shamrock. Also en route (at present): 18 non-Tesla chargers outside of Dallas, and many hundreds in Dallas, including over a dozen CHAdeMO/CCS (~50kW).
As for southern NM, I don't know what you're talking about. Truth or Consequences is already operational. Deming and Soccoro will be operational by the end of this year. And of course across the border the El Paso charger is operational.
If you want me to be more specific, you need to be more specific as to what routes you're talking about.
And building more superchargers simultaneously. They're doubling over the course of this year. On the Tesla forums people watch them one by one pop into usage. At the M3 launch event a couple weeks ago they announced tripling by the end of next year. At the rate they've been going, that would not be at all surprising. Meanwhile, many other players are making their own network. VW will be making their own supercharging network nearly as big as Tesla's over the course of the next two years - and they're already starting on permitting.
The vehicle has a 220-310 mile range. Wait for one that's en route. They're not that far apart.
You know those drips of gasoline when you pull the hose out? Drips on your fueling port, on the ground, on the pump? What do you think happens to them?
Yes, they vaporize. Fume traps on modern cars do not make gas stations vapour free.
I'm using US terms. I live in Iceland. I have however lived previously in the US.
Meh, business is business. It really doesn't matter because long distance trips are so infrequent for people. It's your everyday life that really matters. Besides, if you don't like what one charger charges, you can just pick another.
Someone failed to notice the words "an hour". :) I'm assuming charging at 120V 10A on midwestern or southern electricity, since that was my experience in the US. Add 50% for charging from a 15A, or 100% for 20A (somewhat risky for throwing a breaker, even from a bathroom). I'm presuming that you're not showing up and asking someone to disconnect their drier (240V/30A) or oven (240V/50A) for you. ;) I'm also presuming that they don't have a charging cable (aka, don't own an EV). But feel free to make your own assumptions.
Electricity is cheap. You do whatever you do when you visit a friend or family member and would cause them an expense (aka, going out to eat, going to the movies, travling together and incurring gas bills, etc) - either the whole "Oh, let me pay for that" "Oh no no, I've got it", "Please, let me pay..." routine, or the "pay for something else / bring a gift" routine.
And? You realize that the range on a Model 3 is 220 to 310 miles, right? Again: you stop on the way there or back, just like you do with gas stations. It's really not a tricky concept.
Ugh, poor phrasing in my first paragraph:
"Almost all unpaved" or "Virtually all unpaved", not both.
"still bogged down almost every trip" or "still bogged down all the time", not both.
When one has two separate phrasings in their head, it's best to write down only one of them, not mash the two together ;)
All commercial driving in the EU must be logged on a tachograph.
You ask Gandalf for a charge, because you're clearly stepped into a fantasy world by that point.
Superchargers being full at all is very rare because Tesla monitors usage and builds new chargers corresponding to demand in each area to prevent it. It does happen, but it's not common - and when it does, it's generally in places that have lots of other chargers. Furthermore, your vehicle can tell you how busy each station is before you get there.
If you're a B&B, you don't even need a supercharger - if someone is going to be at your business overnight, or even just a few hours, all you need is a destination charger. And Tesla literally gives those away for free.
What part of "Tesla maintains market forecasts to ensure that they don't" didn't you understand? Tesla builds more when superchargers start to get busy. Look at the density of superchargers in, say, Hong Kong. Each of those stations in turn has many chargers.
Superchargers are budgeted such that they're profitable once utilization levels become significant, without requiring constant utilization. Only those in remote areas are loss leaders.
It really was not, and it would benefit you to read about the early history of the automobile before discussing it.
At the turn of the century there were 27000 miles of roads in the US. Almost virtually all unpaved. Ever wonder why early "horseless carriages" had those giant wagon wheels? It was to try to stop them from bogging down. Guess what? They still bogged down almost all the time. Early gas "stations" were sporadic, and weren't really "stations", just shops that happened to carry petrol. Sometimes they had a hand pump to dispense it; sometimes just bottles. You never knew what exactly you were putting into your car and whether it would be compatible. The cars were constantly breaking down. An important part of owning an early car was also learning to disassemble and fix it; if you wanted to be a car owner, you also needed to be a car mechanic.
Early cars were seen as a luxury toy for wealthy city dwellers, serving mainly as an annoyance and hazard to "normal" people. Lots of places passed anti-car ordinances as a consequence - widely supported by the local populace. These included things like having to have people with flags march alongside cars to make sure that the way was safe for pedestrians. Some places required cars to pull off the road if a horse was nearby and cover it up until the horse was past. For a couple decades, cars were really disdained by a large segment of the populace. It took nearly fifty years for cars to fully dislodge the horse. Half a century for your supposed "staggering" difference.
You bring up the Model T, as if it was the start of the automotive industry. It was an important step in it, but anything but the start. Wealthy people began buying horseless carriages and making "road trips" with them in the 1880s, two decades earlier. And it was really a miserable car to drive (ask anyone who's ever driven one). It came out only five years after the first cross-country drive in the US, by Horatio Nelson Jackson. Jackson's first breakdown was only 15 miles into the trip. He paid the equivalent of $130 per gallon for fuel at times. He was constantly having to ship parts across the country to replace things that broke or outright fell off, and to bike, horse ride, or walk dozens of miles to buy fuel when the car couldn't make it. At one point he was stranded for 36 hours without food until a shepherd found him and fed him. The whole trip took 63 1/2 days.
Your math for how fast an early car driver could hypothetically travel doesn't even remotely match the reality. The only reason he made it is because of the constant resupply lines by horse and train. It wasn't until the first cross-country highways in the 1920s like Route 66 that cross-country car travel really became practical.
Yeah, try again.
The reason you can't find specs for Tesla's Semi is because it hasn't had its public debut yet. However, Tesla's other cars' ranges of 220-335mi, increased slightly due to advances over time, are probably reasonable. Say, 300 mi.
Tesla's current charging standard is 30 minutes to 80%. This is with internal cooling. Tesla has been patenting external cooling of battery packs and charger cables, which offers significant potential for faster heat withdrawal from battery packs (the main limiting factor for battery life in fast charging). It also allows for much higher powers without increasing charging cable thickness.
Simultaneous with Semi, Tesla is working on Supercharger V3. Not many details have been leaked out on it yet, except that when asked if it would be 350kW, Mus