This splicing of foreign genes into plants is actually fairly common. There are some common soil bacteria that tend to do this naturally with plants. In fact, some GM plants are created using Agrobacterium, a bacteria that injects a little chunk of DNA into plant cells naturally.
This mixing of genes between completely different plants or plants and bacteria is actually quite common in nature. For example, take the sweet potato, which contains bacterial genes naturally.
They have done a lot more than that. For example, look up golden rice. Wheat has been genetically modified to grow shorter for higher yields that use less fertilizer. A lot of work is also being done to reduce water requirements, make crops more salt and heat tolerant, adding nitrogen fixation support and more. The one people talk about the most is the roundup ready crops which have typically resulted in less herbicide being used, and as far as herbicides go, glyphosphate is one of the most benign ones available. Making plants more resistant to pests and disease is also being performed to try and prevent things like the potato blight and many other diseases.
I agree that the MicroTik routers are powerful. I have been using one for several years. My biggest complaint with it is the confusing documentation or documentation that's out of date. I had a hard time figuring out things like traffic management (QoS and shaping) though now that it's working it's quite powerful. I also have had a lot of confusion on how to set up the firewall so I can VPN in with various operating systems. The only one I've gotten to work from Android is PPTP, though I would love to use IPSec instead due to all the weaknesses in PPTP. Windows is even worse, following all the suggestions I have yet to be able to connect via Windows.
My first computer was an IBM PCjr. I created a board that fit in the modem slot that allowed me to support a second floppy drive. I also hacked up the DOS boot sector to get rid of the hacks normally needed to support more than 128K. This was back in high school.
One of my favorite hacks was to turn a styrofoam ice chest into a peltier refrigerator for work since they charged a fortune for sodas (at a time when most silicon valley companies offered those for free). It had a temperature sensor and controller and worked quite well.
I rented a gasoline powered Chevy Spark a year ago. It's one of the worst cars I've ever driven. The seats felt damned uncomfortable (even though there was plenty of room for me), the dashboard was a clusterfuck to put it mildly and I knew when I was going 65 on the freeway because I knew damned sure I didn't want to go any faster in the thing. It just felt unstable. It was worse than the car I had in college, and it was an under-powered piece of crap from the early 1980s. I hear the Spark EV is a lot better. Then again my last three cars were a '91 Ford Probe, '06 Toyota Prius, and currently a Tesla model S. The only car that I've driven that was worse was the one I learned to drive on, a 1970 Toyota Corona with shitty brakes that barely worked.
Tell that to the families of people killed when a large airplane crashes because some idiot flew his drone in the flight path. It's only a matter of time. I'm sure it will comfort them when the idiot is arrested, if they can find out who was piloting it. While there are plenty of responsible people flying drones, there are also plenty of idiots who ignore the existing laws.
I ran into a similar issue. I work on bootloaders for my company's 64-bit MIPS processors and due to size constraints disabled the normally enabled exception code (my bootloader has an exception handler). Anyway, it is usually easy to find the fault since the result is -1. It took me a while to figure that one out. If it were zero I probably never would have found the problem.
My lawn is turning brown. A lot of grass is grown for the beef industry which is one of the biggest wastes of water in the state. It takes something like 6,000 gallons of water for each pound of beef. Almonds don't really grow anywhere else in the country and California produces a majority of the world's supply and 99% of the almonds grown in the US. Almonds are native to the Mediterranean climate of the Middle East. The funny thing is that wild almonds are highly toxic and contain an enzyme which creates cyanide. Each wild almond can contain 4-9mg of cyanide. Sweet almonds contain a small fraction of that since they lack the enzyme. Almonds are considered a cash crop due to the high prices they demand. With the drought, though, a lot of farmers are cutting back on their water usage, though last weekend when I drove along highway 120 I saw at least one orchard running their sprinklers in the middle of the day with pools of water around the trees.
99% of the walnuts grown in the US are grown in California. The Persian and English walnuts are the most common for eating and like almonds like a Mediterranean climate. The black walnut is much less popular and there are varieties native to both the eastern North America and California and some other places.
Before the major drought, growing these was not a major issue in California. Unlike other crops, though, it takes years until a tree can produce and they don't do well in other areas of the country.
Hops, barley, wheat, etc. needed for beer can be grown just about anywhere and don't necessarily have to be grown in the state for the brewers.
Except that Apple tends to do even that in a non-standard way. In Apple's design, for example, they swap ground and the mic hookup compared to everyone else. Also, at least one set of Apple headphones would refuse to work unless they were given a 30v pulse to enable them according to someone I know who designed some non-Apple hardware and had to reverse engineer why the Apple headphones wouldn't work with it.
More and more of the treated wastewater is being reused now though only a few places recycle it back into the main drinking water supply. Most ends up for agricultural use and for things like golf courses, parks, etc.
Actually, residential usage has remained flat even though the population has doubled. Residential usage per-person has dropped significantly, otherwise the percentage used by the cities would have gone up and agriculture would have gone down. 80% of the water is used by agriculture and the most profitable crops tend to be water intensive, i.e. almonds. California grows most of the almonds in the world and 99% of the almonds in the US due to the climate. They don't grow well elsewhere. Most of the fresh fruit in the country is grown in California. We should just stop exporting to the rest of the country. Agriculture is only a small fraction of the state's GDP and are overly represented in the state government and tend to be very conservative (i.e. republican).
There's very little fracking occurring in California. From what I understand, the geology doesn't work well for it since much of the geology is already rather fractured unlike the geology of where fracking is common.
California uses very little coal. Most power is generated by natural gas, renewable sources (hydroelectric, solar, wind, geothermal, biomass) with very little coal power generation in the state. Electricity in California is also about the most expensive electricity in the country, which doesn't make a lot of sense to me other than the fact that the California Public Utilities Commission is corrupt and gives utilities cart blanche to raise rates whenever they want.
The problem is that 3 tons of water per minute is only a drop in the bucket compared to what's needed. People don't realize just how much agriculture there is in California, no other state comes anywhere close.
My only PC that always boots Windows 7 is my home theater PC since I use the Windows Media Center to record broadcasts and use it as a DVR. As far as I know, Linux is not a solution because some of the channels I record are set not to copy and MythTV will not support that. I also have a Ceton Echo which lets me view the content in my bedroom. This also only works with Windows 7. None of the other packages I see out there can handle the protected content.
Actually that's false. Most compressors are AC motors though some applications are moving towards DC. Brushless AC motors are fairly easy to make and don't require any electronics to control them, though high power ones will use a capacitor since 3-phase power is not generally available for residential use in the US. Most fans, blowers and compressors are AC motors. Some higher-end blowers use DC when full variable speed motors are needed.
DC actually works quite well over long hauls. One nice thing about using HVDC instead of AC is that you can carry more current over the same wire since you no longer have to deal with the skin effect. It also makes it easier when it comes to synchronization. With HVDC they still have to periodically switch the direction of the DC current throught he lines.
I'd say Musk relies far less on tax dollars than Jobs did. Apple, despite all their billions, pays virtually no taxes. Tesla got a government loan and paid it off early with interest. There's a tax subsidy for buying an electric car, but it's no different if you buy a Leaf or a Model S. The carbon tax credits Tesla gets are not a major source of revenue and they don't come out of your taxes, but from companies that pollute.
Unlike Jobs, Elon is an engineer. He doesn't go around suing everyone over stupid patents either (he makes them available free of charge to everyone, using them for protection only).
As it is, there have been more Volt fires than Tesla fires. In three separate tests the Volts tested by the NTSB caught fire. There was at least one Volt that have caught fire, one after it was rear-ended and the 12v battery caused it to burn up, completely burning up the interior of the car. None of the Tesla fires affected the passenger compartment.
Since Tesla's change there has not been a single new fire in the Tesla. Tesla is losing money, but they're doing what they need to do. All that money is being spent on growth which is required. They're making a 28% profit on every car sold and that money is being folded back into the company. The money is being spent on designing and tooling up the model X and model 3, which is exactly what they should be doing, as well as the gigafactory and building out their charging network, building service centers, etc. Given the demand for the model X (over 26,000 pre-orders) and their grid storage (sold out for the next year within a week), it looks like they're making the right choices.
The company is in a rapid growth phase. It would kill them to stop and try and be profitable now (which is what a short-sighted Wall Street CEO would do), since they need to look ahead to the future. Their future looks fairly bright given the high demand and customer satisfaction, especially given that they're doing virtually no advertising.
GM's Volt, while popular with Volt owners, has not been flying off the lots. It has been outsold by the Leaf, BMW i3 and Model S recently.
As for Ontario, I would not be surprised if they build out there in time. They're prioritizing their network based on need, building out the routes most owners need before building out less common routes. Their map of proposed chargers seems to be constantly changing, where I see superchargers popping up in places or along routes that were not previously shown. As far as cold climates, given it's one of the most popular cars in Norway my guess is that it does quite well in cold climates.
While the chemistry may be similar to laptop batteries, the batteries are NOT laptop batteries. There are many differences in order to increase the longevity and reliability and to reduce costs. Fires are a non-issue. There were a few and Tesla went back and addressed the problem and there have been none since. The risk of fire is much lower than for a gasoline powered car. The instances that caused the fires were rather extreme when you consider one of them was due to the car plowing through a concrete wall at 110MPH. Everyone walked away from that, I don't know that you could say the same thing if that happened with a Volt, if it could even reach 110MPH. The other was from running over a heavy duty trailer hitch which stuck up like a lance. Given where it hit, it would have seriously injured the driver of a Volt if it had happened since it would have gone right through the sheetmetal floor and into the driver's legs. In all cases, the fires did not affect the passenger compartment and they were rather slow burning. The one with the trailer hitch was made much worse by the fire department, who cut a hole in the top of the battery pack.
As for shaky companies, one of those companies recently declared bankruptcy and had a massive recall over a problem that was known for years that killed and injured a lot of people. When the model 3 comes out I don't think there will be much comparison between the Bolt and the model 3. Tesla will have a huge advantage over GM since their cost of batteries will be significantly lower and their batteries will be smaller and more energy dense. Tesla's electric motors are also less expensive since induction motors do not contain any rare-earth magnets. With the skateboard design Tesla uses the handling should also be better and it should have more space inside. It also wouldn't surprise me if Tesla offered all wheel drive for the M3 and incorporated other technologies from the Model S like self-driving support. Tesla also manufactures much more of their own stuff than GM. GM
3.3KW is a joke. On my model S, charging it to full at 10KW takes over 10 hours if it's empty. Most people don't drain their battery to zero and don't charge to 100% so it's fine for night time charging. I had no issues using at 5.7KW using my dryer outlet for most stuff, but 3.3 can be painful. Most public chargers I have used are 32A at either 208 or 240v, around 6.6KW. My father has a plug-in hybrid car with a 3.3KW charger and it's rather painful due to how slow it charges. At home I now use a 20KW charger which will fully charge the car in a bit over 5 hours. For my daily driving, around 40-50 miles, my car is fully recharged in about an hour at 20KW. That would change to 6 hours with a 3.3KW charger and if I drive 200 miles it would take almost 24 hours to recharge!
Granted, GM's cars have much smaller batteries, but any serious EV needs more than 3.3KW.
Sadly I agree with your comment. As a Tesla owner it's clear that GM and the others just don't get it. There's a reason that the Cadillac ELR failed miserably and that Tesla is eating everyone else's lunch when it comes to EVs. When gas got cheap, sales of the other EVs fell significantly. Tesla still can't keep up with demand yet they do basically zero advertising. They've worked hard to address all of the issues people have with EVs, including range, charging and performance. The people who complain about how long it takes to charge a Tesla don't have any experience with it.
The only reason that the J1772 standard can handle 20KW is because Tesla fought tooth and nail for it. GM and the others would have been happy with a 3.3KW limit. They also should have adopted something like Tesla's standard for fast DC charging rather than the Frankenstein SAE combo plug or ChaDeMo.
When it comes to battery technology, Tesla is years ahead. Their batteries are much higher capacity and much cheaper than what GM is using.. Despite being manufactured by Panasonic, Tesla owns much of the IP in their batteries and has numerous patents on them. Once their gigafactory comes online, Tesla's cost for batteries will drop by at least 30%. Their cost are already the lowest in the industry in terms of $$$/KWh with the highest energy density for automotive grade batteries.
They've addressed the whole chicken vs egg problem with respect to rapid charging. Instead of waiting for people to build level 3 chargers, they are building their own network and locating them based on need, not just at dealerships (i.e. Nissan). Their chargers are also capable of much higher output than most of the other chargers (120-135KW vs 62.5KW (ChaDeMo) or 90KW (SAE combo)). Tesla has already had several years of experience with their superchargers and already has a large network of them along popular routes. By the time the low cost model 3 comes out they will be just about everywhere, even for out of the way places. Right now there are very few SAE combo chargers and they're primarily located in cities and almost none of them are located along major routes, making it impossible to do road trips without long charge times (especially with only 3.3KW charging!). There are some SAE combo chargers in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, but virtually none in between. Meanwhile I have my choice of routes with Tesla's supercharger network where I can drive from San Diego all the way to Edmonton Canada or to the East Coast. ChaDeMo chargers are also usually located in cities and not between them. They also tend to max out between 40 and 62.5KW. Tesla owners with the ChaDeMo adapter are reporting that many of these ChaDeMo chargers overheat and even start smoking, even when it's 0F outside because they can't handle the load, which is quite a bit less than what the Tesla chargers put out. Thankfully it looks like ChaDeMo is dying out.
Their skateboard design also helps maximize interior and cargo space compared to big humps under the seats and down the center of the car. They redesigned the car from the ground up for their Model S rather than taking an existing gasoline design and converting it to electric. I've taken my Model S places that would be impossible for just about any other EV except maybe the Roadster, and the ease of road trips with it becomes easier all the time.
They also showed that it's possible to design an EV with a low coefficient of drag that isn't butt ugly or looks weird.
The problem with GM is their marketing is so conservative that they compromise everything all to hell which is why GM's cars are ugly, have limited charging and limited range. I have little doubt that there won't be much comparison between the Tesla Model 3 and the GM Bolt. I think Bolt is what the customers will do when they compare the two.
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This splicing of foreign genes into plants is actually fairly common. There are some common soil bacteria that tend to do this naturally with plants.
In fact, some GM plants are created using Agrobacterium, a bacteria that injects a little chunk of DNA into plant cells naturally.
See http://www.npr.org/sections/go...
This mixing of genes between completely different plants or plants and bacteria is actually quite common in nature. For example, take the sweet potato, which contains bacterial genes naturally.
See http://www.nature.com/nature/j...
http://www.npr.org/sections/go...
Sure they do. For example, go ahead and eat some wild almonds. Make sure you bought a casket first since you'll die of cyanide poisoning.
They have done a lot more than that. For example, look up golden rice. Wheat has been genetically modified to grow shorter for higher yields that use less fertilizer. A lot of work is also being done to reduce water requirements, make crops more salt and heat tolerant, adding nitrogen fixation support and more. The one people talk about the most is the roundup ready crops which have typically resulted in less herbicide being used, and as far as herbicides go, glyphosphate is one of the most benign ones available. Making plants more resistant to pests and disease is also being performed to try and prevent things like the potato blight and many other diseases.
I agree that the MicroTik routers are powerful. I have been using one for several years. My biggest complaint with it is the confusing documentation or documentation that's out of date. I had a hard time figuring out things like traffic management (QoS and shaping) though now that it's working it's quite powerful. I also have had a lot of confusion on how to set up the firewall so I can VPN in with various operating systems. The only one I've gotten to work from Android is PPTP, though I would love to use IPSec instead due to all the weaknesses in PPTP. Windows is even worse, following all the suggestions I have yet to be able to connect via Windows.
My first computer was an IBM PCjr. I created a board that fit in the modem slot that allowed me to support a second floppy drive. I also hacked up the DOS boot sector to get rid of the hacks normally needed to support more than 128K. This was back in high school.
One of my favorite hacks was to turn a styrofoam ice chest into a peltier refrigerator for work since they charged a fortune for sodas (at a time when most silicon valley companies offered those for free). It had a temperature sensor and controller and worked quite well.
I rented a gasoline powered Chevy Spark a year ago. It's one of the worst cars I've ever driven. The seats felt damned uncomfortable (even though there was plenty of room for me), the dashboard was a clusterfuck to put it mildly and I knew when I was going 65 on the freeway because I knew damned sure I didn't want to go any faster in the thing. It just felt unstable. It was worse than the car I had in college, and it was an under-powered piece of crap from the early 1980s. I hear the Spark EV is a lot better. Then again my last three cars were a '91 Ford Probe, '06 Toyota Prius, and currently a Tesla model S. The only car that I've driven that was worse was the one I learned to drive on, a 1970 Toyota Corona with shitty brakes that barely worked.
Tell that to the families of people killed when a large airplane crashes because some idiot flew his drone in the flight path. It's only a matter of time. I'm sure it will comfort them when the idiot is arrested, if they can find out who was piloting it. While there are plenty of responsible people flying drones, there are also plenty of idiots who ignore the existing laws.
I ran into a similar issue. I work on bootloaders for my company's 64-bit MIPS processors and due to size constraints disabled the normally enabled exception code (my bootloader has an exception handler). Anyway, it is usually easy to find the fault since the result is -1. It took me a while to figure that one out. If it were zero I probably never would have found the problem.
My lawn is turning brown. A lot of grass is grown for the beef industry which is one of the biggest wastes of water in the state. It takes something like 6,000 gallons of water for each pound of beef. Almonds don't really grow anywhere else in the country and California produces a majority of the world's supply and 99% of the almonds grown in the US. Almonds are native to the Mediterranean climate of the Middle East. The funny thing is that wild almonds are highly toxic and contain an enzyme which creates cyanide. Each wild almond can contain 4-9mg of cyanide. Sweet almonds contain a small fraction of that since they lack the enzyme. Almonds are considered a cash crop due to the high prices they demand. With the drought, though, a lot of farmers are cutting back on their water usage, though last weekend when I drove along highway 120 I saw at least one orchard running their sprinklers in the middle of the day with pools of water around the trees.
99% of the walnuts grown in the US are grown in California. The Persian and English walnuts are the most common for eating and like almonds like a Mediterranean climate. The black walnut is much less popular and there are varieties native to both the eastern North America and California and some other places.
Before the major drought, growing these was not a major issue in California. Unlike other crops, though, it takes years until a tree can produce and they don't do well in other areas of the country.
Hops, barley, wheat, etc. needed for beer can be grown just about anywhere and don't necessarily have to be grown in the state for the brewers.
Wikipedia.
Except that Apple tends to do even that in a non-standard way. In Apple's design, for example, they swap ground and the mic hookup compared to everyone else. Also, at least one set of Apple headphones would refuse to work unless they were given a 30v pulse to enable them according to someone I know who designed some non-Apple hardware and had to reverse engineer why the Apple headphones wouldn't work with it.
More and more of the treated wastewater is being reused now though only a few places recycle it back into the main drinking water supply. Most ends up for agricultural use and for things like golf courses, parks, etc.
Actually, residential usage has remained flat even though the population has doubled. Residential usage per-person has dropped significantly, otherwise the percentage used by the cities would have gone up and agriculture would have gone down. 80% of the water is used by agriculture and the most profitable crops tend to be water intensive, i.e. almonds. California grows most of the almonds in the world and 99% of the almonds in the US due to the climate. They don't grow well elsewhere. Most of the fresh fruit in the country is grown in California. We should just stop exporting to the rest of the country. Agriculture is only a small fraction of the state's GDP and are overly represented in the state government and tend to be very conservative (i.e. republican).
There's very little fracking occurring in California. From what I understand, the geology doesn't work well for it since much of the geology is already rather fractured unlike the geology of where fracking is common.
Agriculture, despite being so big in California is only around 6% of the domestic product since the state's economy is so diversified.
California uses very little coal. Most power is generated by natural gas, renewable sources (hydroelectric, solar, wind, geothermal, biomass) with very little coal power generation in the state. Electricity in California is also about the most expensive electricity in the country, which doesn't make a lot of sense to me other than the fact that the California Public Utilities Commission is corrupt and gives utilities cart blanche to raise rates whenever they want.
http://energyalmanac.ca.gov/el...
The problem is that 3 tons of water per minute is only a drop in the bucket compared to what's needed. People don't realize just how much agriculture there is in California, no other state comes anywhere close.
My only PC that always boots Windows 7 is my home theater PC since I use the Windows Media Center to record broadcasts and use it as a DVR. As far as I know, Linux is not a solution because some of the channels I record are set not to copy and MythTV will not support that. I also have a Ceton Echo which lets me view the content in my bedroom. This also only works with Windows 7. None of the other packages I see out there can handle the protected content.
Actually that's false. Most compressors are AC motors though some applications are moving towards DC. Brushless AC motors are fairly easy to make and don't require any electronics to control them, though high power ones will use a capacitor since 3-phase power is not generally available for residential use in the US. Most fans, blowers and compressors are AC motors. Some higher-end blowers use DC when full variable speed motors are needed.
DC actually works quite well over long hauls. One nice thing about using HVDC instead of AC is that you can carry more current over the same wire since you no longer have to deal with the skin effect. It also makes it easier when it comes to synchronization. With HVDC they still have to periodically switch the direction of the DC current throught he lines.
I'd say Musk relies far less on tax dollars than Jobs did. Apple, despite all their billions, pays virtually no taxes. Tesla got a government loan and paid it off early with interest. There's a tax subsidy for buying an electric car, but it's no different if you buy a Leaf or a Model S. The carbon tax credits Tesla gets are not a major source of revenue and they don't come out of your taxes, but from companies that pollute.
Unlike Jobs, Elon is an engineer. He doesn't go around suing everyone over stupid patents either (he makes them available free of charge to everyone, using them for protection only).
As it is, there have been more Volt fires than Tesla fires. In three separate tests the Volts tested by the NTSB caught fire. There was at least one Volt that have caught fire, one after it was rear-ended and the 12v battery caused it to burn up, completely burning up the interior of the car. None of the Tesla fires affected the passenger compartment.
Since Tesla's change there has not been a single new fire in the Tesla. Tesla is losing money, but they're doing what they need to do. All that money is being spent on growth which is required. They're making a 28% profit on every car sold and that money is being folded back into the company. The money is being spent on designing and tooling up the model X and model 3, which is exactly what they should be doing, as well as the gigafactory and building out their charging network, building service centers, etc. Given the demand for the model X (over 26,000 pre-orders) and their grid storage (sold out for the next year within a week), it looks like they're making the right choices.
The company is in a rapid growth phase. It would kill them to stop and try and be profitable now (which is what a short-sighted Wall Street CEO would do), since they need to look ahead to the future. Their future looks fairly bright given the high demand and customer satisfaction, especially given that they're doing virtually no advertising.
GM's Volt, while popular with Volt owners, has not been flying off the lots. It has been outsold by the Leaf, BMW i3 and Model S recently.
As for Ontario, I would not be surprised if they build out there in time. They're prioritizing their network based on need, building out the routes most owners need before building out less common routes. Their map of proposed chargers seems to be constantly changing, where I see superchargers popping up in places or along routes that were not previously shown. As far as cold climates, given it's one of the most popular cars in Norway my guess is that it does quite well in cold climates.
While the chemistry may be similar to laptop batteries, the batteries are NOT laptop batteries. There are many differences in order to increase the longevity and reliability and to reduce costs. Fires are a non-issue. There were a few and Tesla went back and addressed the problem and there have been none since. The risk of fire is much lower than for a gasoline powered car. The instances that caused the fires were rather extreme when you consider one of them was due to the car plowing through a concrete wall at 110MPH. Everyone walked away from that, I don't know that you could say the same thing if that happened with a Volt, if it could even reach 110MPH. The other was from running over a heavy duty trailer hitch which stuck up like a lance. Given where it hit, it would have seriously injured the driver of a Volt if it had happened since it would have gone right through the sheetmetal floor and into the driver's legs. In all cases, the fires did not affect the passenger compartment and they were rather slow burning. The one with the trailer hitch was made much worse by the fire department, who cut a hole in the top of the battery pack.
As for shaky companies, one of those companies recently declared bankruptcy and had a massive recall over a problem that was known for years that killed and injured a lot of people. When the model 3 comes out I don't think there will be much comparison between the Bolt and the model 3. Tesla will have a huge advantage over GM since their cost of batteries will be significantly lower and their batteries will be smaller and more energy dense. Tesla's electric motors are also less expensive since induction motors do not contain any rare-earth magnets. With the skateboard design Tesla uses the handling should also be better and it should have more space inside. It also wouldn't surprise me if Tesla offered all wheel drive for the M3 and incorporated other technologies from the Model S like self-driving support. Tesla also manufactures much more of their own stuff than GM. GM
3.3KW is a joke. On my model S, charging it to full at 10KW takes over 10 hours if it's empty. Most people don't drain their battery to zero and don't charge to 100% so it's fine for night time charging. I had no issues using at 5.7KW using my dryer outlet for most stuff, but 3.3 can be painful. Most public chargers I have used are 32A at either 208 or 240v, around 6.6KW. My father has a plug-in hybrid car with a 3.3KW charger and it's rather painful due to how slow it charges. At home I now use a 20KW charger which will fully charge the car in a bit over 5 hours. For my daily driving, around 40-50 miles, my car is fully recharged in about an hour at 20KW. That would change to 6 hours with a 3.3KW charger and if I drive 200 miles it would take almost 24 hours to recharge!
Granted, GM's cars have much smaller batteries, but any serious EV needs more than 3.3KW.
It still has a lower coefficient of drag compared to a Prius or a Volt.
The Model S has a coefficient of drag of 0.24. The Prius is 0.26, the Volt is 0.28 and the Leaf is 0.32.
http://insideevs.com/car-drive...
Even though the Tesla Model S is quite a bit bigger, it is the same as a Prius at 6.2 feet CdA.
Sadly I agree with your comment. As a Tesla owner it's clear that GM and the others just don't get it. There's a reason that the Cadillac ELR failed miserably and that Tesla is eating everyone else's lunch when it comes to EVs. When gas got cheap, sales of the other EVs fell significantly. Tesla still can't keep up with demand yet they do basically zero advertising. They've worked hard to address all of the issues people have with EVs, including range, charging and performance. The people who complain about how long it takes to charge a Tesla don't have any experience with it.
The only reason that the J1772 standard can handle 20KW is because Tesla fought tooth and nail for it. GM and the others would have been happy with a 3.3KW limit. They also should have adopted something like Tesla's standard for fast DC charging rather than the Frankenstein SAE combo plug or ChaDeMo.
When it comes to battery technology, Tesla is years ahead. Their batteries are much higher capacity and much cheaper than what GM is using.. Despite being manufactured by Panasonic, Tesla owns much of the IP in their batteries and has numerous patents on them. Once their gigafactory comes online, Tesla's cost for batteries will drop by at least 30%. Their cost are already the lowest in the industry in terms of $$$/KWh with the highest energy density for automotive grade batteries.
They've addressed the whole chicken vs egg problem with respect to rapid charging. Instead of waiting for people to build level 3 chargers, they are building their own network and locating them based on need, not just at dealerships (i.e. Nissan). Their chargers are also capable of much higher output than most of the other chargers (120-135KW vs 62.5KW (ChaDeMo) or 90KW (SAE combo)). Tesla has already had several years of experience with their superchargers and already has a large network of them along popular routes. By the time the low cost model 3 comes out they will be just about everywhere, even for out of the way places. Right now there are very few SAE combo chargers and they're primarily located in cities and almost none of them are located along major routes, making it impossible to do road trips without long charge times (especially with only 3.3KW charging!). There are some SAE combo chargers in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, but virtually none in between. Meanwhile I have my choice of routes with Tesla's supercharger network where I can drive from San Diego all the way to Edmonton Canada or to the East Coast. ChaDeMo chargers are also usually located in cities and not between them. They also tend to max out between 40 and 62.5KW. Tesla owners with the ChaDeMo adapter are reporting that many of these ChaDeMo chargers overheat and even start smoking, even when it's 0F outside because they can't handle the load, which is quite a bit less than what the Tesla chargers put out. Thankfully it looks like ChaDeMo is dying out.
Their skateboard design also helps maximize interior and cargo space compared to big humps under the seats and down the center of the car. They redesigned the car from the ground up for their Model S rather than taking an existing gasoline design and converting it to electric. I've taken my Model S places that would be impossible for just about any other EV except maybe the Roadster, and the ease of road trips with it becomes easier all the time.
They also showed that it's possible to design an EV with a low coefficient of drag that isn't butt ugly or looks weird.
The problem with GM is their marketing is so conservative that they compromise everything all to hell which is why GM's cars are ugly, have limited charging and limited range. I have little doubt that there won't be much comparison between the Tesla Model 3 and the GM Bolt. I think Bolt is what the customers will do when they compare the two.