Switching to time of use billing significantly reduces the rate for charging an EV. I'm going one step further and planning to move to PG&E's E9B rate which involves adding a second meter for time of use billing for the EV only.
As for Tesla's rate for their Superchargers, they are planning to offset the electricity use with solar (supplied by Elon Musk's company Solar City).
The funny thing is that here in California during the summer there is much less demand at night when most charging takes place. In fact, with time of use fees it is cheapest to just configure the car to start charging at midnight. Temperatures are much lower at night so the demand for AC is significantly lower. The numbers have been run and there is plenty of capacity for EVs to charge overnight. In fact, there is excess supply at night since it's difficult to quickly start up and shut down power plants.
I have heard from multiple sources that each Supercharger cost around $250,000 to build. Out of curiosity I looked up the price of a 1000KVA transformer for 480V 3-phase and it was around $26K for a refurbished one. I know Tesla is very cost conscious from my tour of the factory. They were showing off one of their ceiling mounted cranes. They bought 10 of them for something like $60K when they were normally $100K each new.
The construction costs should not be that high from the two Superchargers I have been to. They basically poured four concrete peers where the posts with the cables are installed and a concrete pad off to the side which contains a large transformer and a couple Supercharger towers, each about half the size of a refrigerator. The transformer takes high voltage in and steps it down to 3-phase 480V which is then fed into the Superchargers. Each one is capable of outputting 120KW split between two vehicles. The wiring to each post needs to handle up to 255 amps so I'm guessing it's likely 1 gauge wire.
There's nothing fancy at the Superchargers I have been to. No big obilisk or solar covered roof like they show in the pictures (maybe some have that, but neither the Gilroy nor the Folsom ones have that). I understand later they plan to build out the solar panels which will add more cost, but the cost is supposed to offset the power used and then some.
I think the Superchargers will more than pay for themselves by increasing demand for their cars. Once they build out their network some more it will completely elimintate the need for my gasoline car for 99% of my driving. If I really need a gasoline car I can just rent one.
Actually the fast chargers should be more efficient. They're basically pumping DC directly into the battery, bypassing the car's built-in charging circuit. They're fed directly with 480V 3-phase power from a high voltage source. The two that I have seen are right next to a big HV power transformer. The Supercharger units themselves are about half the size of a refrigerator witha large fan on the side.for cooling. Lithium Ion batteries are typically quite efficient when charging as well.
Each Supercharger cost around $250,000 to build which isn't all that bad. So building 100 of them is only $25 million dollars, which is not all that much. They will more than pay for themselves in terms of added demand for their vehicles due to them.
They also have announced that they haven't ruled out battery swapping. There are inherent problems with battery swapping. Let's say your car has a new battery. What will be the condition of the battery that is swapped into your car? I could see it if you're leasing a battery instead.
The Tesla model S battery can be replaced in under 5 minutes. Better Place tried battery swapping and just went bankrupt. Perhaps Tesla can do it more successfully if they choose to do so. I would prefer to keep my battery and just wait the 30 minutes to add 200 miles of range.
As for a proprietary charging payment system, there isn't one. Tesla has promised that they'll be free to use forever, though cars with the smaller battery size will need to spend $2000 to activate that feature (the 85KWh battery cars don't have to pay to activate it). They are offsetting the electricity usage by installing solar (through Solar City, one of Elon Musk's other companies). If they wanted to do a payment system it would be easy. As a Tesla owner I have an account set up through their web site and the car is connected to the Internet. It wouldn't be that difficult to implement, no more so than ChargePoint or Blink, who have billing systems for using their EV chargers.
That's what I've been thinking. I've heard that Harris Ranch is quite pleased with the Superchargers there. It's one of the busiest ones and they've had to expand it, probably in part due to people staying longer than their charging time to get a good steak.
The ones I have been to in Gilroy and Folsom are at malls, though a lot of shops are closed in the Gilroy outlet mall there are still a number of places to eat within easy walking distance.
I'm really looking forward to this. Last weekend I took my model S down to Big Sur to do some camping and used a bit more power than I anticipated while driving over dirt roads and due to a headwind driving back north. On my way back I had to stop for a bit in Monterey at a level 2 charger to add a few miles before I could reach the Gilroy supercharger. I ended up having to unplug a Volt who was taking up an EV only spot (and was apparently there for many hours according to a Leaf owner parked across from me).
Of course their announcement shows that this summer a supercharger will be installed in or near Monterey, which would have solved that problem, and there are more on the way along Highway 1.
In fact, it looks like they'll be building some near some of the other out-of-the-way places I like to travel around the state. It looks like at least one is going in along Highway 395 along the Eastern Sierra.
The fact that they are reducing charging time is another bonus. 200 miles in 30 minutes for "free" is awesome. I enjoy the superchargers. It's often nice to chat with other Tesla owners there. When I stopped in Gilroy to charge I had 8 miles left. The fellow who pulled in next to me was down to 2 miles, and like me he had taken his car over a bunch of dirt roads. A standard level 2 charger gives me around 15-20 miles of range per hour. At a Supercharger I can get 15-20 miles of charge in 3 minutes!
While charging I can go stretch my legs, get a meal, check email, surf the web or whatever so I don't consider the delay that big of an issue.
Out of all the times I've used a supercharger I have never had to wait and there are usually plenty of places nearby to eat or shop while charging, even during Memorial Day weekend.
The superchargers really make road trips possible with electric vehicles. Sure, it's not as fast as filling a gasoline car, but 30 minutes for 200 miles is not bad! I suspect that when Tesla comes out with their 3rd generation coupe it will charge even faster since it will be a smaller and lighter vehicle.
Tesla seems to be well ahead of anybody else out there in terms of EV technology. Their batteries have the highest energy density for the lowest cost as well as a very compact electric motor. They spent a lot of effort on battery safety as well. I don't think synchronous motors can compete with induction motors when it comes to power density and I'm sure the cost of induction motors is also lower since there are no rare-earth magnets involved. The 420HP/445ft-lb induction motor in my Tesla is the size of a watermelon.
The Tesla power connector design is also much better than the J1772 Frankenplug or the huge CHaDeMo connector. Both the J1772 frankenplug and the CHaDeMo connectors are the size of a softball vs the much smaller Tesla connector. They have a small J1772 adapter and I'm sure they'll come out with additional adapters in the future for the frankenplug if it becomes popular.
The maintenance is much simpler. According to Tesla the electric motor is lubricated for 12 years. Service includes everything except replacing the tires. I.e. they replace the wipers and brake pads and whatever else needs fixing or replacing including normal consumables. There's something like only 12 moving parts in the drive train. It's an amazing car to drive.
A few months ago I purchased a Tesla model S. The process was completely unlike purchasing other cars at a dealership. I just went to the web site and selected what I wanted. The showrooms I visited were just that, showrooms. Nobody was trying to push me to buy the car and the people working there patiently answered questions. Most of the people in the showroom were not likely to buy one but they still patiently answered questions and treated everyone with respect. I think this is due in part to the fact that the show rooms are just that, show rooms. They can't sell you a car, the best they could do is point you online to order one.
When I got my car everything was taken care of. All the paperwork was done and a few weeks later the plates arrived in the mail. A part for my car that was not available when I got my car was fed-exed to me. They also threw in some additional charging adapters that they normally charge for.
As for service it is night and day. I managed to break one of the roof rack clips on my model S. This required that the entire roof panel next to the glass roof be replaced. If that were on my Toyota Prius that would easily be a $300 part and $300 for labor. Tesla charged me $100 for the part (which given what it was is more than reasonable) and $175 labor. Elon Musk stated that they hope to not make a profit on service. I also had service install some 3rd party rim protectors (http://www.alloygator.com) where they charged me $25/wheel, which is quite cheap for the type of car it is.
I always cringe whenever I take my Prius in to the Toyota dealership since they're always trying to push unneeded services, or god forbid I run into one of the sales leaches.
The fact that Tesla is outselling the other cars in its class without any real advertisement or dealerships is amazing. Their commitment to the owners goes above and beyond anything I have seen before.
For example, if I take my car in for service the loaner car is a top of the line model S. If I want, I can just keep the loaner car and just pay the difference in price. No dealership would do something like that.
All in all, my experience dealing with Tesla has for the most part been amazing and a welcome change from dealing with dealerships.
I wish I had such a phone that sounded ridiculously good. I have never heard cell phone that sounds anywhere close to a good land-line connection. Show me a cell phone where the wait music doesn't sound like a garbled mess. All the compression makes cell phone audio sound like crap that no amount of hardware can fix. My digital land line is always crystal clear and the sound quality is night and day compared to any cell phone, even going over a good bluetooth connection through either of my car's stereos.
I recall hearing this at one point. I don't recall if it was in one of my science magazines or on NPR's Science Friday but it makes a lot of sense, especially now that we know that the brain is not all that great at multitasking like we once thought.
Additionally it has been shown that the phone is especially bad since it's a lot harder for your brain to process, especially over a cell phone due to the sound degradation due to all of the audio compression. I don't recall exactly where I heard this, likely on NPR Science Friday or one of the science magazines I subscribe to, but it makes sense. The brain has to do a lot more work to comprehend poor-quality speech than face-to-face speech, and the brain doesn't multitask all that well so it causes a much bigger distraction to driving.
I work for a MIPS vendor (Cavium) and I know we push almost all of our extensions upstream and we ship very recent versions to customers. We're currently shipping 4.7 to customers. This includes support for the Cavium OCTEON proprietary assembly instructions as well (encryption, hashing, load/store indexed and atomic instructions). There is a lot of active GCC development where I work and in fact we are looking for more GCC developers for both MIPS and ARM.
Similarly we work hard to push all of our stuff upstream to the mainline Linux kernel.
I need to work on pushing up our U-Boot bootloader support after I migrate to GIT though that's going to be a huge project since we have more code for our SOC than any other vendor out there.
I agree. The thing is that with LEDs there is a lot more freedom in terms of design since you are no longer bound by the restrictions from a standard edison bulb or flourescent tubes.
I have several LED bulbs that dim beautifully. One decorative one I have will dim down to just barely glowing from full brightness (40 or 60 watt). I don't recall who makes it. The Philips ones I have dim nicely down to about 20%.
Basically the loan was for 500 million but Fisker didn't meet the requirements of the loan so it was halted after 173 million. Fisker had promised a 100MPg car with sub 5-second 0-60. What they finally delivered was years late and nowhere near their promises. The Fisker Karma gets a whopping 20MPg on gasoline and a whopping 52MPGe from the EPA for combinen electric and gasoline milage. For electric it is rated at 65KWh/100 miles. My Tesla model S with an 85KWh battery pack is rated by the EPA as 38KWh/100 miles with an EPA rating of 89MPGe.
I am quite familiar with the whole Fisker saga since one of my relatives bought a Karma last year. I tried to talk him out of it. When I test drove the car the software was extremely buggy, not even alpha quality IMO. The entire drive the car kept going "bong bong bong" because it was stuck in some self parking mode that the dealership couldn't get it out of. The car was sexy looking IMO, but it had a lot of serious issues going for it too.
The car is big yet the interior is quite cramped with the huge battery occupying the entire center of the car. Acceleration was nice, up to around 30-40MPh. The software on the center touch screen looked cool, when you could see it, but was quite buggy and not easy to use, especially while driving. For such an eco-friendly car it also only got 20MPG on gasoline and got a combined EPA rating of only 50MPG. The car is quite heavy, over 5300LBS.
Fisker's problem is that they outsourced their engineering. The drive train was done by Quantum Technologies and the battery by A123 systems, both heavy investors in Fisker. Fisker promised to sell 15-20K Karmas which A123 bet the farm on.
Then there were the fires, for one of which the cause was never explained. While the battery wasn't the cause the perception was there. Next was the Consumer Reports debacle. The car completely died early in their testing and it was determined that the battery was defective. This resulted in a battery recall which was the final nail in A123's coffin leading to their bankruptcy. A123 was already in big trouble since Fisker sold far fewer cars than they had promised. In fact, even though Fisker hasn't made a single new car since July of last year you can still find plenty of unsold Karmas at most of the dealerships.
My relative loves his Karma, but the car has been in the shop way too many times in the last year, sometimes being towed in and some of the issues have been rather serious. Other issues are just unexplained.
Fisker was all about image and styling using outsourced technology. When some Chinese investors looked into the company they realized that they didn't have all that much in terms of technology, and in fact their technology was rather mediocre in many ways and needed some serious refining. There were issues between the engine and generator, plus they used two synchronous motors in order to get enough power to move the car and to help overcome torque ripple issues (from what I gather from their patents).
For a first car from a new car company the car was overly ambitious and was far more complicated than I think they realized. Because it was so late the car was rushed to market with a lot of serious issues and inadequate testing. The car underperformed in almost every way. The federal government cut off their loan before they could draw it down all the way.
Their next car, the Atlantic, was to be built in a shuttered Delaware factory but that car also suffered from a cramped interior.
Fisker also burned through a lot of cash without a lot to show for it. They never did anything with the factory they purchased other than stick it to Delaware.
A lot of people compare Fisker to Tesla which is an apt comparison. I am even more familiar with Tesla, having bought a model S myself. Unlike Fisker, Tesla developed their own technology for their Roadster. They developed the battery and drive train and perfected it, once they moved away from the problematic 2-speed transmission.
Tesla's battery solution was to use inexpensive off-the-shelf batteries and to perfect their battery management technology. Unlike Fisker, who uses an expensive custom battery pack Tesla's battery packs are stuffed with over 7000 18650 cells. The 18650 lithium cell is about as standard as it gets. Their drive train is much more compact than Fisker as well. They use a single induction motor that provides about as much power as the pair of motors Fisker uses but without requiring expensive rare-earth metals. Tesla's motor has no magnets in it.
If you're poor, a much higher percentage of income is spent buying things in order to live. A rich person instead invests most of their money which is only taxed on the gains, and even then at a fairly low rate. On top of that, most of us pay tax for Social Security and Medicare but the wealthy only pay that tax on a small percentage of their income due to the caps.
Part of it is also that you're helping pay for all those red states with your federal income taxes. NY gets less back than they pay in federal income taxes so they have to make up the rest.
The Panasonic batteries used in my car will maintain 80% of their original capacity after 2000 full charge/discharge cycles. With my daily 15 mile (each way) commute I use about 11% of the battery capacity. 2000 / 0.11 = 18,181 days of usage, or about 49 years until I'm at 80% capacity. There is also some loss based on time, but I should be able to easily get over 10 years of use out of them. Now if I drove over 200 miles each day the batteries will last significantly less time, but the battery performance is steadily improving each year, both in capacity and longevity and the cost is continuously decreasing. The rapid charging does not have a significant impact on battery life either since they are water cooled.
It's easy to get the numbers. My Tesla already handles 90KW for charging and the connector isn't all that large. The battery charges at 250A, 360V DC. This type of power is regularly handled without much difficulty, especially when you consider that the peak energy usage of my model S is 320KW. The battery, inverter and motor are water cooled with a radiator that is significantly smaller than is used for an internal combustion engine. Charging Li-Ion batteries is highly efficient, 85-90%+. Capacitors are also extremely efficient. Inverters are typically also highly efficient, usually at least 85% efficient. Cooling is no more difficult than cooling a typical internal combustion engine which is far less efficient. The thermodynamics is not that big of a problem.
The 90KW cable also isn't that big, certainly smaller than the hose that fills a conventional car. The inverter at the supercharging station is less than half the size of a normal refrigerator and is external to the car.
Most houses have anywhere from 100A to 200A service. The overhead wires are not *that* thick and running a higher voltage, i.e. 600V, is not all that difficult either. Hell, internally my Prius steps up the 200V from the battery to 500V to run the electric motor.
Actually the power needed for fast charging is not as big of a problem as one might think. There have been some big advances in large batteries (i.e. liquid metal batteries) which can charge during non-peak load times. Also, with EVs most people will be charging at night at home. The grid can already handle this for millions of cars right now at night.
I think hydrogen fuel cells are a dead-end technology. Batteries are steadily improving and by the time they're able to solve the fuel cell issues there won't be demand. By then batteries or possibly graphene supercapacitors will have taken over, with much higher efficiency. Lithium batteries are very efficient at storing energy and it's a lot simpler to just use a battery, an inverter and an electric motor than a hydrogen storage system, fuel cell, inverter and electric motor.
They're already able to give cars 150 miles worth of charge in 30 minutes and the batteries will last for many years before they need replacing.
Even with a catylist, cracking water to make hydrogen then storing it will be nowhere near as efficient. The energy density of hydrogen is also fairly low. I believe the future belongs to batteries and all-electric vehicles. I realized this after having acquired an EV of my own, a Tesla model S.
EVs are a different mindset. Each night when I come home I spend about 10 seconds plugging in. In the morning it takes 10 seconds to unplug and I basically have a full tank. Even the current wait at a supercharger is not necessarily time wasted unlike when filling a gasoline car. There is no reason for me to stand next to the car waiting for it to fill up. I can just as easily walk over to a restaraunt and have a nice meal for the price of filling up a tank, or I could surf the web, read E-mail, whatever.
Right now the biggest limitation is there are not enough of these rapid charging stations, but that will change as the infrastructure improves. The other biggest limitation is the cost, but the cost of batteries is steadily declining while the capacity is steadily increasing. The cost of electric motors like what Tesla uses should not be that high, especially since their induction motors do not contain any rare-earth minerals.
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Switching to time of use billing significantly reduces the rate for charging an EV. I'm going one step further and planning to move to PG&E's E9B rate which involves adding a second meter for time of use billing for the EV only.
As for Tesla's rate for their Superchargers, they are planning to offset the electricity use with solar (supplied by Elon Musk's company Solar City).
The funny thing is that here in California during the summer there is much less demand at night when most charging takes place. In fact, with time of use fees it is cheapest to just configure the car to start charging at midnight. Temperatures are much lower at night so the demand for AC is significantly lower. The numbers have been run and there is plenty of capacity for EVs to charge overnight. In fact, there is excess supply at night since it's difficult to quickly start up and shut down power plants.
I have heard from multiple sources that each Supercharger cost around $250,000 to build. Out of curiosity I looked up the price of a 1000KVA transformer for 480V 3-phase and it was around $26K for a refurbished one. I know Tesla is very cost conscious from my tour of the factory. They were showing off one of their ceiling mounted cranes. They bought 10 of them for something like $60K when they were normally $100K each new.
The construction costs should not be that high from the two Superchargers I have been to. They basically poured four concrete peers where the posts with the cables are installed and a concrete pad off to the side which contains a large transformer and a couple Supercharger towers, each about half the size of a refrigerator. The transformer takes high voltage in and steps it down to 3-phase 480V which is then fed into the Superchargers. Each one is capable of outputting 120KW split between two vehicles. The wiring to each post needs to handle up to 255 amps so I'm guessing it's likely 1 gauge wire.
There's nothing fancy at the Superchargers I have been to. No big obilisk or solar covered roof like they show in the pictures (maybe some have that, but neither the Gilroy nor the Folsom ones have that). I understand later they plan to build out the solar panels which will add more cost, but the cost is supposed to offset the power used and then some.
I think the Superchargers will more than pay for themselves by increasing demand for their cars. Once they build out their network some more it will completely elimintate the need for my gasoline car for 99% of my driving. If I really need a gasoline car I can just rent one.
Actually the fast chargers should be more efficient. They're basically pumping DC directly into the battery, bypassing the car's built-in charging circuit. They're fed directly with 480V 3-phase power from a high voltage source. The two that I have seen are right next to a big HV power transformer. The Supercharger units themselves are about half the size of a refrigerator witha large fan on the side.for cooling. Lithium Ion batteries are typically quite efficient when charging as well.
Each Supercharger cost around $250,000 to build which isn't all that bad. So building 100 of them is only $25 million dollars, which is not all that much. They will more than pay for themselves in terms of added demand for their vehicles due to them.
They also have announced that they haven't ruled out battery swapping. There are inherent problems with battery swapping. Let's say your car has a new battery. What will be the condition of the battery that is swapped into your car? I could see it if you're leasing a battery instead.
The Tesla model S battery can be replaced in under 5 minutes. Better Place tried battery swapping and just went bankrupt. Perhaps Tesla can do it more successfully if they choose to do so. I would prefer to keep my battery and just wait the 30 minutes to add 200 miles of range.
As for a proprietary charging payment system, there isn't one. Tesla has promised that they'll be free to use forever, though cars with the smaller battery size will need to spend $2000 to activate that feature (the 85KWh battery cars don't have to pay to activate it). They are offsetting the electricity usage by installing solar (through Solar City, one of Elon Musk's other companies). If they wanted to do a payment system it would be easy. As a Tesla owner I have an account set up through their web site and the car is connected to the Internet. It wouldn't be that difficult to implement, no more so than ChargePoint or Blink, who have billing systems for using their EV chargers.
That's what I've been thinking. I've heard that Harris Ranch is quite pleased with the Superchargers there. It's one of the busiest ones and they've had to expand it, probably in part due to people staying longer than their charging time to get a good steak.
The ones I have been to in Gilroy and Folsom are at malls, though a lot of shops are closed in the Gilroy outlet mall there are still a number of places to eat within easy walking distance.
I'm really looking forward to this. Last weekend I took my model S down to Big Sur to do some camping and used a bit more power than I anticipated while driving over dirt roads and due to a headwind driving back north. On my way back I had to stop for a bit in Monterey at a level 2 charger to add a few miles before I could reach the Gilroy supercharger. I ended up having to unplug a Volt who was taking up an EV only spot (and was apparently there for many hours according to a Leaf owner parked across from me).
Of course their announcement shows that this summer a supercharger will be installed in or near Monterey, which would have solved that problem, and there are more on the way along Highway 1.
In fact, it looks like they'll be building some near some of the other out-of-the-way places I like to travel around the state. It looks like at least one is going in along Highway 395 along the Eastern Sierra.
The fact that they are reducing charging time is another bonus. 200 miles in 30 minutes for "free" is awesome. I enjoy the superchargers. It's often nice to chat with other Tesla owners there. When I stopped in Gilroy to charge I had 8 miles left. The fellow who pulled in next to me was down to 2 miles, and like me he had taken his car over a bunch of dirt roads. A standard level 2 charger gives me around 15-20 miles of range per hour. At a Supercharger I can get 15-20 miles of charge in 3 minutes!
While charging I can go stretch my legs, get a meal, check email, surf the web or whatever so I don't consider the delay that big of an issue.
Out of all the times I've used a supercharger I have never had to wait and there are usually plenty of places nearby to eat or shop while charging, even during Memorial Day weekend.
The superchargers really make road trips possible with electric vehicles. Sure, it's not as fast as filling a gasoline car, but 30 minutes for 200 miles is not bad! I suspect that when Tesla comes out with their 3rd generation coupe it will charge even faster since it will be a smaller and lighter vehicle.
Tesla seems to be well ahead of anybody else out there in terms of EV technology. Their batteries have the highest energy density for the lowest cost as well as a very compact electric motor. They spent a lot of effort on battery safety as well. I don't think synchronous motors can compete with induction motors when it comes to power density and I'm sure the cost of induction motors is also lower since there are no rare-earth magnets involved. The 420HP/445ft-lb induction motor in my Tesla is the size of a watermelon.
The Tesla power connector design is also much better than the J1772 Frankenplug or the huge CHaDeMo connector. Both the J1772 frankenplug and the CHaDeMo connectors are the size of a softball vs the much smaller Tesla connector. They have a small J1772 adapter and I'm sure they'll come out with additional adapters in the future for the frankenplug if it becomes popular.
The maintenance is much simpler. According to Tesla the electric motor is lubricated for 12 years. Service includes everything except replacing the tires. I.e. they replace the wipers and brake pads and whatever else needs fixing or replacing including normal consumables. There's something like only 12 moving parts in the drive train. It's an amazing car to drive.
A few months ago I purchased a Tesla model S. The process was completely unlike purchasing other cars at a dealership. I just went to the web site and selected what I wanted. The showrooms I visited were just that, showrooms. Nobody was trying to push me to buy the car and the people working there patiently answered questions. Most of the people in the showroom were not likely to buy one but they still patiently answered questions and treated everyone with respect. I think this is due in part to the fact that the show rooms are just that, show rooms. They can't sell you a car, the best they could do is point you online to order one.
When I got my car everything was taken care of. All the paperwork was done and a few weeks later the plates arrived in the mail. A part for my car that was not available when I got my car was fed-exed to me. They also threw in some additional charging adapters that they normally charge for.
As for service it is night and day. I managed to break one of the roof rack clips on my model S. This required that the entire roof panel next to the glass roof be replaced. If that were on my Toyota Prius that would easily be a $300 part and $300 for labor. Tesla charged me $100 for the part (which given what it was is more than reasonable) and $175 labor. Elon Musk stated that they hope to not make a profit on service. I also had service install some 3rd party rim protectors (http://www.alloygator.com) where they charged me $25/wheel, which is quite cheap for the type of car it is.
I always cringe whenever I take my Prius in to the Toyota dealership since they're always trying to push unneeded services, or god forbid I run into one of the sales leaches.
The fact that Tesla is outselling the other cars in its class without any real advertisement or dealerships is amazing. Their commitment to the owners goes above and beyond anything I have seen before.
For example, if I take my car in for service the loaner car is a top of the line model S. If I want, I can just keep the loaner car and just pay the difference in price. No dealership would do something like that.
All in all, my experience dealing with Tesla has for the most part been amazing and a welcome change from dealing with dealerships.
The only thing I can think of is that you must not live in the US.
Here's a comparison demonstrating the crappy sound of our cell phones:
http://www2.windmobile.ca/en/Pages/network.aspx
Much of the world has already adapted HD Voice but not the US where we are stuck with the crappy standard cell codecs and bitrates.
I wish I had such a phone that sounded ridiculously good. I have never heard cell phone that sounds anywhere close to a good land-line connection. Show me a cell phone where the wait music doesn't sound like a garbled mess. All the compression makes cell phone audio sound like crap that no amount of hardware can fix. My digital land line is always crystal clear and the sound quality is night and day compared to any cell phone, even going over a good bluetooth connection through either of my car's stereos.
I recall hearing this at one point. I don't recall if it was in one of my science magazines or on NPR's Science Friday but it makes a lot of sense, especially now that we know that the brain is not all that great at multitasking like we once thought.
I also would love to see more studies on this.
Additionally it has been shown that the phone is especially bad since it's a lot harder for your brain to process, especially over a cell phone due to the sound degradation due to all of the audio compression. I don't recall exactly where I heard this, likely on NPR Science Friday or one of the science magazines I subscribe to, but it makes sense. The brain has to do a lot more work to comprehend poor-quality speech than face-to-face speech, and the brain doesn't multitask all that well so it causes a much bigger distraction to driving.
I work for a MIPS vendor (Cavium) and I know we push almost all of our extensions upstream and we ship very recent versions to customers. We're currently shipping 4.7 to customers. This includes support for the Cavium OCTEON proprietary assembly instructions as well (encryption, hashing, load/store indexed and atomic instructions). There is a lot of active GCC development where I work and in fact we are looking for more GCC developers for both MIPS and ARM.
Similarly we work hard to push all of our stuff upstream to the mainline Linux kernel.
I need to work on pushing up our U-Boot bootloader support after I migrate to GIT though that's going to be a huge project since we have more code for our SOC than any other vendor out there.
I agree. The thing is that with LEDs there is a lot more freedom in terms of design since you are no longer bound by the restrictions from a standard edison bulb or flourescent tubes.
I have several LED bulbs that dim beautifully. One decorative one I have will dim down to just barely glowing from full brightness (40 or 60 watt). I don't recall who makes it. The Philips ones I have dim nicely down to about 20%.
Basically the loan was for 500 million but Fisker didn't meet the requirements of the loan so it was halted after 173 million. Fisker had promised a 100MPg car with sub 5-second 0-60. What they finally delivered was years late and nowhere near their promises. The Fisker Karma gets a whopping 20MPg on gasoline and a whopping 52MPGe from the EPA for combinen electric and gasoline milage. For electric it is rated at 65KWh/100 miles. My Tesla model S with an 85KWh battery pack is rated by the EPA as 38KWh/100 miles with an EPA rating of 89MPGe.
-Aaron
My father owns a Fisker and it's been in the shop more times than I can count, including having been towed in more than once, all in under a year.
I am quite familiar with the whole Fisker saga since one of my relatives bought a Karma last year. I tried to talk him out of it. When I test drove the car the software was extremely buggy, not even alpha quality IMO. The entire drive the car kept going "bong bong bong" because it was stuck in some self parking mode that the dealership couldn't get it out of. The car was sexy looking IMO, but it had a lot of serious issues going for it too.
The car is big yet the interior is quite cramped with the huge battery occupying the entire center of the car. Acceleration was nice, up to around 30-40MPh. The software on the center touch screen looked cool, when you could see it, but was quite buggy and not easy to use, especially while driving. For such an eco-friendly car it also only got 20MPG on gasoline and got a combined EPA rating of only 50MPG. The car is quite heavy, over 5300LBS.
Fisker's problem is that they outsourced their engineering. The drive train was done by Quantum Technologies and the battery by A123 systems, both heavy investors in Fisker. Fisker promised to sell 15-20K Karmas which A123 bet the farm on.
Then there were the fires, for one of which the cause was never explained. While the battery wasn't the cause the perception was there. Next was the Consumer Reports debacle. The car completely died early in their testing and it was determined that the battery was defective. This resulted in a battery recall which was the final nail in A123's coffin leading to their bankruptcy. A123 was already in big trouble since Fisker sold far fewer cars than they had promised. In fact, even though Fisker hasn't made a single new car since July of last year you can still find plenty of unsold Karmas at most of the dealerships.
My relative loves his Karma, but the car has been in the shop way too many times in the last year, sometimes being towed in and some of the issues have been rather serious. Other issues are just unexplained.
Fisker was all about image and styling using outsourced technology. When some Chinese investors looked into the company they realized that they didn't have all that much in terms of technology, and in fact their technology was rather mediocre in many ways and needed some serious refining. There were issues between the engine and generator, plus they used two synchronous motors in order to get enough power to move the car and to help overcome torque ripple issues (from what I gather from their patents).
For a first car from a new car company the car was overly ambitious and was far more complicated than I think they realized. Because it was so late the car was rushed to market with a lot of serious issues and inadequate testing. The car underperformed in almost every way. The federal government cut off their loan before they could draw it down all the way.
Their next car, the Atlantic, was to be built in a shuttered Delaware factory but that car also suffered from a cramped interior.
Fisker also burned through a lot of cash without a lot to show for it. They never did anything with the factory they purchased other than stick it to Delaware.
A lot of people compare Fisker to Tesla which is an apt comparison. I am even more familiar with Tesla, having bought a model S myself. Unlike Fisker, Tesla developed their own technology for their Roadster. They developed the battery and drive train and perfected it, once they moved away from the problematic 2-speed transmission.
Tesla's battery solution was to use inexpensive off-the-shelf batteries and to perfect their battery management technology. Unlike Fisker, who uses an expensive custom battery pack Tesla's battery packs are stuffed with over 7000 18650 cells. The 18650 lithium cell is about as standard as it gets. Their drive train is much more compact than Fisker as well. They use a single induction motor that provides about as much power as the pair of motors Fisker uses but without requiring expensive rare-earth metals. Tesla's motor has no magnets in it.
While the Fisker Karma and
If you're poor, a much higher percentage of income is spent buying things in order to live. A rich person instead invests most of their money which is only taxed on the gains, and even then at a fairly low rate. On top of that, most of us pay tax for Social Security and Medicare but the wealthy only pay that tax on a small percentage of their income due to the caps.
Part of it is also that you're helping pay for all those red states with your federal income taxes. NY gets less back than they pay in federal income taxes so they have to make up the rest.
The Panasonic batteries used in my car will maintain 80% of their original capacity after 2000 full charge/discharge cycles. With my daily 15 mile (each way) commute I use about 11% of the battery capacity. 2000 / 0.11 = 18,181 days of usage, or about 49 years until I'm at 80% capacity. There is also some loss based on time, but I should be able to easily get over 10 years of use out of them. Now if I drove over 200 miles each day the batteries will last significantly less time, but the battery performance is steadily improving each year, both in capacity and longevity and the cost is continuously decreasing. The rapid charging does not have a significant impact on battery life either since they are water cooled.
It's easy to get the numbers. My Tesla already handles 90KW for charging and the connector isn't all that large. The battery charges at 250A, 360V DC. This type of power is regularly handled without much difficulty, especially when you consider that the peak energy usage of my model S is 320KW. The battery, inverter and motor are water cooled with a radiator that is significantly smaller than is used for an internal combustion engine. Charging Li-Ion batteries is highly efficient, 85-90%+. Capacitors are also extremely efficient. Inverters are typically also highly efficient, usually at least 85% efficient. Cooling is no more difficult than cooling a typical internal combustion engine which is far less efficient. The thermodynamics is not that big of a problem.
The 90KW cable also isn't that big, certainly smaller than the hose that fills a conventional car. The inverter at the supercharging station is less than half the size of a normal refrigerator and is external to the car.
Most houses have anywhere from 100A to 200A service. The overhead wires are not *that* thick and running a higher voltage, i.e. 600V, is not all that difficult either. Hell, internally my Prius steps up the 200V from the battery to 500V to run the electric motor.
http://www.teslamotors.com/goelectric has some information. The rest is easily available via Wikipedia or Google.
Actually the power needed for fast charging is not as big of a problem as one might think. There have been some big advances in large batteries (i.e. liquid metal batteries) which can charge during non-peak load times. Also, with EVs most people will be charging at night at home. The grid can already handle this for millions of cars right now at night.
I think hydrogen fuel cells are a dead-end technology. Batteries are steadily improving and by the time they're able to solve the fuel cell issues there won't be demand. By then batteries or possibly graphene supercapacitors will have taken over, with much higher efficiency. Lithium batteries are very efficient at storing energy and it's a lot simpler to just use a battery, an inverter and an electric motor than a hydrogen storage system, fuel cell, inverter and electric motor.
They're already able to give cars 150 miles worth of charge in 30 minutes and the batteries will last for many years before they need replacing.
Even with a catylist, cracking water to make hydrogen then storing it will be nowhere near as efficient. The energy density of hydrogen is also fairly low. I believe the future belongs to batteries and all-electric vehicles. I realized this after having acquired an EV of my own, a Tesla model S.
EVs are a different mindset. Each night when I come home I spend about 10 seconds plugging in. In the morning it takes 10 seconds to unplug and I basically have a full tank. Even the current wait at a supercharger is not necessarily time wasted unlike when filling a gasoline car. There is no reason for me to stand next to the car waiting for it to fill up. I can just as easily walk over to a restaraunt and have a nice meal for the price of filling up a tank, or I could surf the web, read E-mail, whatever.
Right now the biggest limitation is there are not enough of these rapid charging stations, but that will change as the infrastructure improves. The other biggest limitation is the cost, but the cost of batteries is steadily declining while the capacity is steadily increasing. The cost of electric motors like what Tesla uses should not be that high, especially since their induction motors do not contain any rare-earth minerals.
-Aaron
It may be because they don't have a way of putting in "none" or "direct drive".