A Model 3 doesn't have the range for a long weekend at the quaint rural B&B two hours away
Where are you getting that from? (also helpful: name the B&B and starting location)
Not in the US in the (at least) past 15 years.
How did gasoline manage to become non-carcinogenic (and neurotoxic, and a whole range of other toxicity effects) in the past 15 years?
In some very small town gas stations (where you wouldn't find an EV charging station anyway), but certainly not at 98% of gas stations in the US in the past 30 years.
Weather has ceased to exist in the US except in small towns? Or are you saying that US pumps connect themselves to your car on their own like a snake, as well as paying for you with EZ-pass?
Fine: you find a Motel 6 off the Interstate and check in for the night. Good luck charging your EV over night.
EV charging is now very common at hotels. And even if a place doesn't officially offer it, 9 times out of 10, if you call and ask, you get a "yes".
Same with visiting distant friends/relatives: it would be grossly impolite to plug your car into someone else's power outlet.
Right. Let me get this straight. "Welcome to my home. Thanks for driving five hours to see me! Come on in! Have a bite to eat! Walk on this carpet that I just cleaned! Feel at home! But don't you DARE use 80 cents an hour of electricity, or I'll cut you! No, you have to go plug in at one of the numerous superchargers on the way and have to suffer through half an hour to 80% full while you eat lunch. Muahaha, I've foiled your evil EV-driving plans with my penny-pinching make-you-eat-lunch-during-a-road-trip plot!"
And indeed, that was a huge issue early on. Gas stations were random and poorly spaced. They were generally not really "stations", but rather shops, often where gasoline was not their primary business (just a product that they happened to carry). Usually they'd have a hand pump to dispense it, but sometimes they'd pour it straight from bottles through a hose. The fuel that they carried could vary widely in composition, and you never knew if it would work in your car until you tried it. Gas infrastructure was, in short, a real mess.
But because of interest in and adoption of the automobile by a small but meaningful fraction of the population, it steadily spread, standardized, and became easy.
"Shithole" might be an exageration, but I don't want to eat lunch or hang around at either a gas station or an EV charging station (likely the same place anyway).
They're not "likely the same place", and that's a key part of your misunderstanding. Superchargers are not sited based on "is there a gas station here", they're sited based on "what is there to do and eat around here".
Here, let's pick a stereotypical boring "drive through" state and check out superchargers in it - say, Nebraska. Lets examine all of the superchargers along I-80, from west to east:
Sidney Supercharger Best Western Plus Sidney Lodge Charging: 8 Superchargers, available 24/7 Wifi: Best Western Plus Sidney Lodge Restrooms: Best Western Plus Sidney Lodge, Perkins Restaurant & Bakery, Applebee's Restaurants: Perkins Restaurant & Bakery, Applebee's Lodging: Best Western Plus Sidney Lodge
Ogallala Supercharger Lonesome Dove Lodge and Cabins Charging: 8 Superchargers, available 24/7 Wifi: Lonesome Dove Lodge and Cabins, McDonald's Restrooms: Lonesome Dove Lodge and Cabins, Margarita's Restaurants: Margarita's, McDonald's, Golden Spur Steakhouse-Saloon Lodging: Lonesome Dove Lodge and Cabins
Gothenburg Supercharger Nebraska Barn and Grill Charging: 8 Superchargers, available 24/7 Wifi: Comfort Suites Restrooms: Nebraska Barn and Grill Restaurants: Nebraska Barn and Grill, Pizza Hut Lodging: Comfort Suites
Grand Island Supercharger Bosselman Travel Center Charging: 8 Superchargers, available 24/7 Wifi: Bosselman Travel Center Restrooms: Bosselman Travel Center Restaurants: Max's Thunder Road Grill, Little Caesars, Subway Shopping: Bosselman Travel Center
Lincoln, NE Supercharger Lincoln #3 Hy-Vee Charging: 8 Superchargers, available 24/7 Wifi: Hy-Vee, Sleep Inn & Suites University Restrooms: Hy-Vee Restaurants: Hy-Vee Market Grille, Hy-Vee Chinese Express, Hy-Vee Bakery, Starbucks Coffee Shopping: Hy-Vee Lodging: Sleep Inn & Suites University
My, what shitholes. And this is in Nebraska of all places, not exactly luxurious territory. You don't need to stop at all of them of course - they averag
Have you every seen a Costco on a Saturday afternoon or some highway truck stops during busy times? The lines are long, and that's with a 3-5 minute fill-up time.
Did you ever bother to check whether that ever happens with Superchargers? (Answer: very rarely, and for most superchargers, never). Tesla maintains market forecasts to ensure that it doesn't.
The reason that gas stations fill up is - and I can't believe I have to make this point yet again - gas cars have to detour from their everyday lives at regular intervals to go to them; EVs don't. For EVs, superchargers are only for trips.
. Members of my family drive for a living and many of us cover *way* more than 500 miles and 8 hours at a time.
I don't know about the US, but in the EU you'd be stripped of your license for that. The legal minimum is one or more breaks totaling at least 45 minutes per every 4 1/2 hours driving.
It's funny when you get a response that's like the person didn't even read your post or just skimmed over it.
While there is some lithium produced from hard rock mining, as I distinctly pointed out to you, most lithium is produced from salars, which is probably the most environmentally-nondestructive means of "mining" imaginable. I showed you pictures, but it appears you never clicked the link. By contrast, while you write that you "can" dig pits for steel, that's not accurate - you must dig pits to get at iron ore. They look like this. Perhaps worse is the effect of smelting.
Recycling batteries is not a "joke" - I literally just gave you research showing that in mass production, precisely the opposite is true. Asserting that it's wrong doesn't make it so. In mass production, battery prices are limited by raw materials costs; producers are raw materials constrained. Recycling becomes an important part of the supply chain. And in case you're curious how recycling works: batteries are crushed in controlled conditions. The electrolyte is extracted with supercritical CO2 and distilled. The crushed batteries are ground, then gravimetrically separated. The recovered material can then be recycled directly, or more commonly, sent off for re-smelting (the cathodes are quite similar to natural nickel-cobalt ores). The quantity to be smelted is vastly less than the quantity of steel smelted for a car.
While we are on the subject of end of life of batteries lets consider the environmental effects of disposing carbon fiber.
I'm not sure why we should because not many EVs use carbon fiber - but if you want to. Carbon fibre is disposed of like plastic - either landfills or incineration. All cars make extensive use of plastic parts, so this shouldn't be particularly shocking. Additionally, CF is sometimes ground up and used as fill in new plastics - it only slightly increases their mechanical properties, but some manufacturers like using it because it increases their sales value to say that they have carbon fibre in their part (for example, laptops with "carbon fibre" moulding).
Concerning fire, you don't need to resort to hyperbole - here's what happens if you try to burn one of Tesla's battery packs (that's a powerwall, but it's the same basic technology). They're quite resistant to fire - certainly much more than gasoline. There have only been two Tesla battery packs to catch fire by "puncture", and it wasn't so much "puncture" as being deeply gashed down their length by metal road debris. Since Tesla responded by installing a debris shield, there have been no more such incidents.
Far more of the (few) fires that have occured in Teslas have been from other areas of the vehicle, not the battery pack. And they often don't even manage to burn the battery pack - even if the rest of the vehicle is gutted. As of 2014, there had been well over a billion electric miles driven. For gasoline cars, there is an average of 90 fires per billion miles driven. For the EVs, passing their first billion? Six fires. Zero deaths. Zero injuries.
A cathode must by definition be resistant to dissolution because it's sitting in a solution (the electrolyte) which must be excellent at dissolving intercalated metallic ions (specifically, lithium). The cathode must undergo no meaningful dissolution in this environment for many years. While this is an organic solvent, rather than water, it still requires great cathode stability. In practice, what this means is that cathodes are oxides. As you probably remember from chemistry (or everyday life experience), metal oxides are highly resistant to dissolution; for the most part only alkali metal oxides will dissolve in water, and they have to do so by first forming hydroxides (if I recall correctly, there's only two exceptions to this rule - calcium and barium).
Concerning the LD50 of soluble cobalt salts (which cathodes distinctly are not): that slots them in-between caffeine and ibuprofen.
This is all a moot point, of course, beyond the lack of solubility issue, because in mass production the economics strongly favours battery recycling, since raw material costs are the limiting factor on pricing.
I'm not sure what you mean. The LD50 of *soluble* cobalt salts (cathodes are by definition resistant to dissolution) is 150-500mg/kg, which is not particularly toxic at all.
In case you're curious, there's about 20kg of cobalt in a typical Tesla vehicle, along with a dozen or so kilograms of lithium. A lot less than you'd probably expect.
As much as I dislike the catastrophic environmental damage EV production causes
Out of curiosity, what do you mean?
Here's what production from a lithium salar looks like. Pump brine up from underneath, dry on the surface in controlled conditions to concentrate the salts of interest, send for further refining. Most of the salars flood annually and reclaim the (salt) drying ponds, meaning you have to rebuild them annually.
Do you mean energy? I'll refer you to this study, and in particular, graph 5a. Blue + red at the bottom are energy used to propel the vehicle. Green + purple + cyan is energy used to produce the vehicle, if battery packs are not in mass production (aka, no Gigafactory). Green + purple (no cyan) is the energy used to produce the vehicle with mass-produced batteries (aka, with Gigafactor(y,ies). Note the difference vs. gasoline. Is there something about this you find objectionable?
The study also focuses on recycling of li-ion batteries. Again, mass production is key. In small-scale production, batteries are manufacturing cost limited, and it's not worth the expense to recycle old batteries to recover materials vs. sourcing virgin materials. In mass production, however, costs are primarily dictated by raw material costs, and so recovery of raw materials (likewise en masse) becomes quite economical.
Is there some other aspect to EVs that concerns you? If it's copper, it's worth noting that regular vehicles contain huge amounts of copper in their overgrown wiring harnesses. The average car today has a 4km-long wiring harness. Tesla has put a huge amount of effort into reducing this. The Model S's harness is 3km; the Model 3's is 1,5km; and the Model Y is targeting a staggeringly low 100m.
It's certainly not the anodes - I presume. They're graphite/amorphous carbon and sometimes silicon. The electrolytes and membranes are basic petroleum products, and if there's anything an EV does, it's reduce petroleum consumption overall. Is it the cathodes that you object to? Tesla's are nickel cobalt aluminum oxide. Nickel and cobalt come from the same ores; cobalt is usually recovered as a side product, as nickel is more desirable. We use nickel en masse every day, in the form of stainless steel, where it makes up 1-4% of the mass (also many non-stainless steels). People who cook with stainless steel cookware usually consume about 80 micrograms of nickel per day because of this. It's found in many copper alloys in significant concentrations, it's used in high concentrations in heat-resistant alloys, such as inconel, which you can find in many gasoline-driven cars (usually higher-end ones). Cobalt is also used in high-performance alloys, although it's more commonly used in catalysts (including those used to make synfuels for cars). It's also used in car airbags. Regardless, nickel and cobalt are only a fraction of the cathode, which is in turn only a fraction of a battery. It's hard to say where Tesla's cobalt is actually from, because over the past several years it's been being stockpiled by hedge funds betting on a price rise. However, there are big producers of nickel/cobalt around the world. In North America one of the biggest is from the Canadian Sudbury deposit, which is one of the great success stories in environmental remediation - to the point that they decided to deliberately not remediate one patch of
And people like you are the reason for the high rate of freeway accidents.
News flash: You're Not Supposed To Drive For 8 Hours Straight. You're supposed to take breaks every few hours. Stop endangering other drivers because you don't want to waste 15 minutes here and there to get out and stretch.
This post is independent of what you think of EVs. I don't care what sort of car you drive, but stop putting other people at risk because you're in a rush.
90 minutes? What year is this, 2005? Supercharging is half an hour to 80%. And herp, derp, humans have to eat at some point.
And I love how much you're willing to damn an EV for even the slightest increase in long-distance trip time (most people taking 500 mile trips rather rarely), but are perfectly content to need to at random intervals in your normal everyday life have to divert from your schedule and go out of your way to a gas station, stand outside in whatever weather there is and pump gasoline (which gives off carcinogenic fumes) in a "shithole". And FYI, gas stations are much more likely to be "shitholes" than superchargers. Here's a random list of supercharger photo pictures (flickr, so it should be by and large just random people's snapshots). How much of a "shithole" do they look like to you?
Let me get this straight. When you need to stop for gas - say, when you realize "Oh, I need to stop for gas on the way home", you get home only two minutes (20 / 2) later than you otherwise would? Yeah, sure.
EV drivers in their normal everyday lives never stop and think "Oh, I need to stop for gas on the way home" because they start every day with a full tank. The time to connect your vehicle at home is basically insignificant (not that you have to charge every day if for some reason you don't want to).
I don't even know what your "4x to 5x" is supposed to mean. A Model 3 has a range from 220 to 310 miles, depending on which variant one gets. Do you think your average car has a range of 880 to 1550 miles? Heck, the only reason that gasoline vehicles have the range they do is to avoid the inconvenience of having to randomly detour from your everyday life to go to a dirty gas station and breathe carcinogenic (literally) fumes while standing outside fueling your vehicle, regardless of the weather. There's no point to 400+ miles range otherwise; it's not safe to drive for such long periods on the highway without stopping, your attention to the road wanes.
Annual US car production is under 4 million units. Tesla Model 3 production is scheduled to hit 500k next year. That's what people are investing in Tesla for. Because this is a big, big thing.
And that's just one year. So far Tesla has gotten a nearly 2 year waiting list without any advertising at all, without anyone being able to test drive it (or even know all the specs for most of that time), and with Tesla trying to anti-sell it to try to drive buyers to S and X instead (which they can actually get cash from today, rather than two years in the future). With advertising Tesla expects to raise the 500k to 700k (this will involve moving S and X motor production to gigafactory to free up space at Fremont). A couple years from now they'll also be introducing the Model Y crossover (crossovers being more popular than sedans). They also have a major electric semi truck project in progress, and are developing the Supercharger V3 to support it. After the Y and semi they're discussed a new Roadster, a pickup, and a lower-cost sedan.
Nobody is putting money into Tesla because of their current sales. They're putting money into Tesla because of how much pent-up demand there is for its vehicles - whether you happen to be part of that demand or not. Said investment money is to let them tool to convert demand into sales and thus profits. Talking about figures related to Tesla's current market share are just silly when they're in the middle of building a plant to increase the US's total car production by 28%.
Well, gee, this should be really easy then! Link one.
The fact that you are talking about seats shows that you know fuck-all about what "soft-touch materials" means in automotive interior. Please fuck off.
Believe it or not, seats are part of an interior. And please reread the first sentence, with a focus on the word everything.
Also worth noting that Tesla has the highest owner satisfaction rating in the industry, with 91% saying would buy again (the next closest being Porsche at 84%)
Tesla only makes electric cars. So, read into that what you will.
There's no risk with this purchase. Nissan's battery "technology" in the Leaf is terrible. Among the worst in the industry, if not the worst in the industry. It's just passively cooled prismatic cells wired together in a giant "suitcase". The average degradation on them is terrible.
$35k is approximately the average price for a new car in the US.
As for insurance, over on the Tesla forums, most people's quotes are coming at surprisingly low amounts - often replacing vehicles that are several years old at the same rate. A likely reason is Tesla's heavy focus on crash safety, including various crash avoidance features (autobraking, etc).
I'm sorry that you hate me (enough to mention me by name, apparently), but facts matter to me.
Tesla's recall rate in 2016 per 1000 vehicles was 936. This places it lower than Mazda, GM, Subaru, Toyota, Nissan, Jaguar / Land Rover, Mitsubishi, Ford, Volvo, BMW, Hyundai, Honda, Chrysler, and Volkswagen (by the end of that list we're up to 1805 recalls per 1000 vehicles). Only three manufacturers had a lower recall rate than Tesla - Porsche, Mercedes, and Kia. Furthermore, Tesla was ranked the most proactive of all manufacturers, with 100% of recalls initiated by internal investigation rather than NHTSA investigation; and the top spot for recall timeliness. As for the cars being "mediocre", Tesla once again topped the Consumer Reports owner satisfaction index, with a 91% "would buy again" rating crushing the next closest competitor, Porsche at 84%.
I fully and understand your reaction. You see other people happy about a product, think that they shouldn't be, and so that makes you mad. Has it ever crossed your mind that perhaps there is a real, legitimate reason that other people are happy with the product? And have you taken the time to consider where you're getting wrong information from, such as "Tesla has a high recall rate" - when in reality the opposite is true?
Did your company have literally two years of advanced orders lined up for products from its new shops, without any advertising and without the customers ever having had a chance to try the product out?
Slashdot Mirror
Where are you getting that from? (also helpful: name the B&B and starting location)
How did gasoline manage to become non-carcinogenic (and neurotoxic, and a whole range of other toxicity effects) in the past 15 years?
Weather has ceased to exist in the US except in small towns? Or are you saying that US pumps connect themselves to your car on their own like a snake, as well as paying for you with EZ-pass?
Lol. Which Motel 6? This one? How about this one? This one maybe? Or perhaps this one? Maybe you meant this one? Or this one? Nah, must have been this one.. No, wait, this one! No, this one! Last guess, this one? Wait, wait a second! How many guesses do I get?
EV charging is now very common at hotels. And even if a place doesn't officially offer it, 9 times out of 10, if you call and ask, you get a "yes".
Right. Let me get this straight. "Welcome to my home. Thanks for driving five hours to see me! Come on in! Have a bite to eat! Walk on this carpet that I just cleaned! Feel at home! But don't you DARE use 80 cents an hour of electricity, or I'll cut you! No, you have to go plug in at one of the numerous superchargers on the way and have to suffer through half an hour to 80% full while you eat lunch. Muahaha, I've foiled your evil EV-driving plans with my penny-pinching make-you-eat-lunch-during-a-road-trip plot!"
And indeed, that was a huge issue early on. Gas stations were random and poorly spaced. They were generally not really "stations", but rather shops, often where gasoline was not their primary business (just a product that they happened to carry). Usually they'd have a hand pump to dispense it, but sometimes they'd pour it straight from bottles through a hose. The fuel that they carried could vary widely in composition, and you never knew if it would work in your car until you tried it. Gas infrastructure was, in short, a real mess.
But because of interest in and adoption of the automobile by a small but meaningful fraction of the population, it steadily spread, standardized, and became easy.
They're not "likely the same place", and that's a key part of your misunderstanding. Superchargers are not sited based on "is there a gas station here", they're sited based on "what is there to do and eat around here".
Here, let's pick a stereotypical boring "drive through" state and check out superchargers in it - say, Nebraska. Lets examine all of the superchargers along I-80, from west to east:
Sidney Supercharger
Best Western Plus Sidney Lodge
Charging: 8 Superchargers, available 24/7
Wifi: Best Western Plus Sidney Lodge
Restrooms: Best Western Plus Sidney Lodge, Perkins Restaurant & Bakery, Applebee's
Restaurants: Perkins Restaurant & Bakery, Applebee's
Lodging: Best Western Plus Sidney Lodge
Ogallala Supercharger
Lonesome Dove Lodge and Cabins
Charging: 8 Superchargers, available 24/7
Wifi: Lonesome Dove Lodge and Cabins, McDonald's
Restrooms: Lonesome Dove Lodge and Cabins, Margarita's
Restaurants: Margarita's, McDonald's, Golden Spur Steakhouse-Saloon
Lodging: Lonesome Dove Lodge and Cabins
Gothenburg Supercharger
Nebraska Barn and Grill
Charging: 8 Superchargers, available 24/7
Wifi: Comfort Suites
Restrooms: Nebraska Barn and Grill
Restaurants: Nebraska Barn and Grill, Pizza Hut
Lodging: Comfort Suites
Grand Island Supercharger
Bosselman Travel Center
Charging: 8 Superchargers, available 24/7
Wifi: Bosselman Travel Center
Restrooms: Bosselman Travel Center
Restaurants: Max's Thunder Road Grill, Little Caesars, Subway
Shopping: Bosselman Travel Center
Lincoln, NE Supercharger
Lincoln #3 Hy-Vee
Charging: 8 Superchargers, available 24/7
Wifi: Hy-Vee, Sleep Inn & Suites University
Restrooms: Hy-Vee
Restaurants: Hy-Vee Market Grille, Hy-Vee Chinese Express, Hy-Vee Bakery, Starbucks Coffee
Shopping: Hy-Vee
Lodging: Sleep Inn & Suites University
My, what shitholes. And this is in Nebraska of all places, not exactly luxurious territory. You don't need to stop at all of them of course - they averag
Did you ever bother to check whether that ever happens with Superchargers? (Answer: very rarely, and for most superchargers, never). Tesla maintains market forecasts to ensure that it doesn't.
The reason that gas stations fill up is - and I can't believe I have to make this point yet again - gas cars have to detour from their everyday lives at regular intervals to go to them; EVs don't. For EVs, superchargers are only for trips.
I don't know about the US, but in the EU you'd be stripped of your license for that. The legal minimum is one or more breaks totaling at least 45 minutes per every 4 1/2 hours driving.
It's funny when you get a response that's like the person didn't even read your post or just skimmed over it.
While there is some lithium produced from hard rock mining, as I distinctly pointed out to you, most lithium is produced from salars, which is probably the most environmentally-nondestructive means of "mining" imaginable. I showed you pictures, but it appears you never clicked the link. By contrast, while you write that you "can" dig pits for steel, that's not accurate - you must dig pits to get at iron ore. They look like this. Perhaps worse is the effect of smelting.
Recycling batteries is not a "joke" - I literally just gave you research showing that in mass production, precisely the opposite is true. Asserting that it's wrong doesn't make it so. In mass production, battery prices are limited by raw materials costs; producers are raw materials constrained. Recycling becomes an important part of the supply chain. And in case you're curious how recycling works: batteries are crushed in controlled conditions. The electrolyte is extracted with supercritical CO2 and distilled. The crushed batteries are ground, then gravimetrically separated. The recovered material can then be recycled directly, or more commonly, sent off for re-smelting (the cathodes are quite similar to natural nickel-cobalt ores). The quantity to be smelted is vastly less than the quantity of steel smelted for a car.
I'm not sure why we should because not many EVs use carbon fiber - but if you want to. Carbon fibre is disposed of like plastic - either landfills or incineration. All cars make extensive use of plastic parts, so this shouldn't be particularly shocking. Additionally, CF is sometimes ground up and used as fill in new plastics - it only slightly increases their mechanical properties, but some manufacturers like using it because it increases their sales value to say that they have carbon fibre in their part (for example, laptops with "carbon fibre" moulding).
Concerning fire, you don't need to resort to hyperbole - here's what happens if you try to burn one of Tesla's battery packs (that's a powerwall, but it's the same basic technology). They're quite resistant to fire - certainly much more than gasoline. There have only been two Tesla battery packs to catch fire by "puncture", and it wasn't so much "puncture" as being deeply gashed down their length by metal road debris. Since Tesla responded by installing a debris shield, there have been no more such incidents.
Far more of the (few) fires that have occured in Teslas have been from other areas of the vehicle, not the battery pack. And they often don't even manage to burn the battery pack - even if the rest of the vehicle is gutted. As of 2014, there had been well over a billion electric miles driven. For gasoline cars, there is an average of 90 fires per billion miles driven. For the EVs, passing their first billion? Six fires. Zero deaths. Zero injuries.
To elaborate further on the above:
A cathode must by definition be resistant to dissolution because it's sitting in a solution (the electrolyte) which must be excellent at dissolving intercalated metallic ions (specifically, lithium). The cathode must undergo no meaningful dissolution in this environment for many years. While this is an organic solvent, rather than water, it still requires great cathode stability. In practice, what this means is that cathodes are oxides. As you probably remember from chemistry (or everyday life experience), metal oxides are highly resistant to dissolution; for the most part only alkali metal oxides will dissolve in water, and they have to do so by first forming hydroxides (if I recall correctly, there's only two exceptions to this rule - calcium and barium).
Concerning the LD50 of soluble cobalt salts (which cathodes distinctly are not): that slots them in-between caffeine and ibuprofen.
This is all a moot point, of course, beyond the lack of solubility issue, because in mass production the economics strongly favours battery recycling, since raw material costs are the limiting factor on pricing.
I'm not sure what you mean. The LD50 of *soluble* cobalt salts (cathodes are by definition resistant to dissolution) is 150-500mg/kg, which is not particularly toxic at all.
In case you're curious, there's about 20kg of cobalt in a typical Tesla vehicle, along with a dozen or so kilograms of lithium. A lot less than you'd probably expect.
Out of curiosity, what do you mean?
Here's what production from a lithium salar looks like. Pump brine up from underneath, dry on the surface in controlled conditions to concentrate the salts of interest, send for further refining. Most of the salars flood annually and reclaim the (salt) drying ponds, meaning you have to rebuild them annually.
Do you mean energy? I'll refer you to this study, and in particular, graph 5a. Blue + red at the bottom are energy used to propel the vehicle. Green + purple + cyan is energy used to produce the vehicle, if battery packs are not in mass production (aka, no Gigafactory). Green + purple (no cyan) is the energy used to produce the vehicle with mass-produced batteries (aka, with Gigafactor(y,ies). Note the difference vs. gasoline. Is there something about this you find objectionable?
The study also focuses on recycling of li-ion batteries. Again, mass production is key. In small-scale production, batteries are manufacturing cost limited, and it's not worth the expense to recycle old batteries to recover materials vs. sourcing virgin materials. In mass production, however, costs are primarily dictated by raw material costs, and so recovery of raw materials (likewise en masse) becomes quite economical.
Is there some other aspect to EVs that concerns you? If it's copper, it's worth noting that regular vehicles contain huge amounts of copper in their overgrown wiring harnesses. The average car today has a 4km-long wiring harness. Tesla has put a huge amount of effort into reducing this. The Model S's harness is 3km; the Model 3's is 1,5km; and the Model Y is targeting a staggeringly low 100m.
It's certainly not the anodes - I presume. They're graphite/amorphous carbon and sometimes silicon. The electrolytes and membranes are basic petroleum products, and if there's anything an EV does, it's reduce petroleum consumption overall. Is it the cathodes that you object to? Tesla's are nickel cobalt aluminum oxide. Nickel and cobalt come from the same ores; cobalt is usually recovered as a side product, as nickel is more desirable. We use nickel en masse every day, in the form of stainless steel, where it makes up 1-4% of the mass (also many non-stainless steels). People who cook with stainless steel cookware usually consume about 80 micrograms of nickel per day because of this. It's found in many copper alloys in significant concentrations, it's used in high concentrations in heat-resistant alloys, such as inconel, which you can find in many gasoline-driven cars (usually higher-end ones). Cobalt is also used in high-performance alloys, although it's more commonly used in catalysts (including those used to make synfuels for cars). It's also used in car airbags. Regardless, nickel and cobalt are only a fraction of the cathode, which is in turn only a fraction of a battery. It's hard to say where Tesla's cobalt is actually from, because over the past several years it's been being stockpiled by hedge funds betting on a price rise. However, there are big producers of nickel/cobalt around the world. In North America one of the biggest is from the Canadian Sudbury deposit, which is one of the great success stories in environmental remediation - to the point that they decided to deliberately not remediate one patch of
And people like you are the reason for the high rate of freeway accidents.
News flash: You're Not Supposed To Drive For 8 Hours Straight. You're supposed to take breaks every few hours. Stop endangering other drivers because you don't want to waste 15 minutes here and there to get out and stretch.
This post is independent of what you think of EVs. I don't care what sort of car you drive, but stop putting other people at risk because you're in a rush.
90 minutes? What year is this, 2005? Supercharging is half an hour to 80%. And herp, derp, humans have to eat at some point.
And I love how much you're willing to damn an EV for even the slightest increase in long-distance trip time (most people taking 500 mile trips rather rarely), but are perfectly content to need to at random intervals in your normal everyday life have to divert from your schedule and go out of your way to a gas station, stand outside in whatever weather there is and pump gasoline (which gives off carcinogenic fumes) in a "shithole". And FYI, gas stations are much more likely to be "shitholes" than superchargers. Here's a random list of supercharger photo pictures (flickr, so it should be by and large just random people's snapshots). How much of a "shithole" do they look like to you?
Great for you, but it's a well known problem that many people have experienced. There's a reason that pretty much everyone else is climate controlling their packs. Tesla degradation isn't anywhere nearly so fast (click "charts")
Well... sort of. At least in general HCCI engines - while having gasoline-like low PM and NOx - tend to have problems with VOCs and CO.
Stop for lunch on the way?
I'm failing to see the problem.
Let me get this straight. When you need to stop for gas - say, when you realize "Oh, I need to stop for gas on the way home", you get home only two minutes (20 / 2) later than you otherwise would? Yeah, sure.
EV drivers in their normal everyday lives never stop and think "Oh, I need to stop for gas on the way home" because they start every day with a full tank. The time to connect your vehicle at home is basically insignificant (not that you have to charge every day if for some reason you don't want to).
I don't even know what your "4x to 5x" is supposed to mean. A Model 3 has a range from 220 to 310 miles, depending on which variant one gets. Do you think your average car has a range of 880 to 1550 miles? Heck, the only reason that gasoline vehicles have the range they do is to avoid the inconvenience of having to randomly detour from your everyday life to go to a dirty gas station and breathe carcinogenic (literally) fumes while standing outside fueling your vehicle, regardless of the weather. There's no point to 400+ miles range otherwise; it's not safe to drive for such long periods on the highway without stopping, your attention to the road wanes.
Annual US car production is under 4 million units. Tesla Model 3 production is scheduled to hit 500k next year. That's what people are investing in Tesla for. Because this is a big, big thing.
And that's just one year. So far Tesla has gotten a nearly 2 year waiting list without any advertising at all, without anyone being able to test drive it (or even know all the specs for most of that time), and with Tesla trying to anti-sell it to try to drive buyers to S and X instead (which they can actually get cash from today, rather than two years in the future). With advertising Tesla expects to raise the 500k to 700k (this will involve moving S and X motor production to gigafactory to free up space at Fremont). A couple years from now they'll also be introducing the Model Y crossover (crossovers being more popular than sedans). They also have a major electric semi truck project in progress, and are developing the Supercharger V3 to support it. After the Y and semi they're discussed a new Roadster, a pickup, and a lower-cost sedan.
Nobody is putting money into Tesla because of their current sales. They're putting money into Tesla because of how much pent-up demand there is for its vehicles - whether you happen to be part of that demand or not. Said investment money is to let them tool to convert demand into sales and thus profits. Talking about figures related to Tesla's current market share are just silly when they're in the middle of building a plant to increase the US's total car production by 28%.
Well, gee, this should be really easy then! Link one.
Believe it or not, seats are part of an interior. And please reread the first sentence, with a focus on the word everything.
And that's its range when new. Leaf battery degradation is commonly severe, since it's passively cooled.
Also worth noting that Tesla has the highest owner satisfaction rating in the industry, with 91% saying would buy again (the next closest being Porsche at 84%)
Tesla only makes electric cars. So, read into that what you will.
There's no risk with this purchase. Nissan's battery "technology" in the Leaf is terrible. Among the worst in the industry, if not the worst in the industry. It's just passively cooled prismatic cells wired together in a giant "suitcase". The average degradation on them is terrible.
$35k is approximately the average price for a new car in the US.
As for insurance, over on the Tesla forums, most people's quotes are coming at surprisingly low amounts - often replacing vehicles that are several years old at the same rate. A likely reason is Tesla's heavy focus on crash safety, including various crash avoidance features (autobraking, etc).
I'm sorry that you hate me (enough to mention me by name, apparently), but facts matter to me.
Tesla's recall rate in 2016 per 1000 vehicles was 936. This places it lower than Mazda, GM, Subaru, Toyota, Nissan, Jaguar / Land Rover, Mitsubishi, Ford, Volvo, BMW, Hyundai, Honda, Chrysler, and Volkswagen (by the end of that list we're up to 1805 recalls per 1000 vehicles). Only three manufacturers had a lower recall rate than Tesla - Porsche, Mercedes, and Kia. Furthermore, Tesla was ranked the most proactive of all manufacturers, with 100% of recalls initiated by internal investigation rather than NHTSA investigation; and the top spot for recall timeliness. As for the cars being "mediocre", Tesla once again topped the Consumer Reports owner satisfaction index, with a 91% "would buy again" rating crushing the next closest competitor, Porsche at 84%.
I fully and understand your reaction. You see other people happy about a product, think that they shouldn't be, and so that makes you mad. Has it ever crossed your mind that perhaps there is a real, legitimate reason that other people are happy with the product? And have you taken the time to consider where you're getting wrong information from, such as "Tesla has a high recall rate" - when in reality the opposite is true?
Indeed. Anyone else remember this scene from Futurama?
Did your company have literally two years of advanced orders lined up for products from its new shops, without any advertising and without the customers ever having had a chance to try the product out?