You need to be really delusional to claim that this soviet reactor was built for the purpose to "power a city" and not as a breeder. It was a breeder to build nuclear weapons. Production of electricity was just a useful side effect.
Current Apple competitors do not have the same profit margins as Apple either. And Apple wasn't always successful with all their products either. Apple needs constantly introduce new products to stay relevant, how else they would hype their products as superior and most fashionable? Today's cars are becoming computer driven, it is Apple field again. You may consider it a well known fact that Apple is getting into automotive production even if they do not admit it publicly. You just don't know how successful they will be or not and what they will show. Probably iCar v1 will not be huge success, but once the hype will be driven up, iCar v2 or v3 should attract masses of iFans willing to pay 20% or 30% more for extra bells an whistles that "only Apple has".
Apple is building car, it is more than just unverified rumors now. You may consider it a fact, as it hires automotive engineers. And yes, Apple is still very secretive about it even it starts looking silly now when everybody knows about it. So they may as well invent some Chinese front end to hide the obvious. It is just speculation, but somebody from China moving capital to the US to build cars doesn't sound very convincing either. There is bigger market in China, and Chinese know their home market better.
I don't think Model S is really comparable to S class or A8. You are aiming a bit too high. Anyway it is matter of personal taste. E.g. Lexus hybrids would be over 30 mpg. Calculating how much you save on fuel is really meaningless exercise if you pay another mortgage just for a car. Fuel cost is peanuts in any case.
Yes $2.50 didn't lasted long. Last time I saw it was down to $1.87. Where do you get that idea that gas should cost much more? Just because of temporary commodities market bubble fueled by Chinese industrialization? It ended, forget it. Just look at historical oil price graph adjusted for inflation. Current price is still historically high and demand still can't catch with supply. Very unlikely you will see $4/gal gas in the US any time soon and even less likely everybody will win lottery to buy $70-$150k cars to make difference.
I don't believe you power Tesla with solar cells. It hardly possible in practice. Most likely you have some grid-tie solar PV taking advantage of early adopter net-metering incentive, and it helps you to offset some part of the electric bill. You still charge from the same interconnected US/Canada electric grid as everybody else. Which means you are using the same fossil fuels regardless of what closest to you power plants burns. Everything is interconnected anyway. You may push for local regulations to push out coal plants further away from your locality, but in reality you would still buy end products or supplies from China where they don't even bother to turn on sulfur scrubbers on their coal plants. No way you can make the Earth cleaner by consuming more.
At some time I had tried hard to convince myself that I need Model S but sorry, it just can't be justified once you gather more information and look closer. Too much hype for too little benefit for myself and for the society.
Quote from the same wikipedia article "top speed of 78 miles per hour", "0-60 time of around 18 seconds". The EPA range measuring was different at that time, but 95 miles do not make usable vehicle for most people (whatever nonsense fans say about average being the same as maximum required). Sure it is enough for few enthusiasts, but you can't sell millions of cars per year to enthusiasts only.
Yes, second generation RAV4 EV is not that much better. 100 miles range doesn't make usable mass-market vehicle again, and you can't increase it much as you already have 840 lb battery just for 100 miles that costs a fortune. It is mostly compliance car so far. However, Lithium batteries still have big room for improvement, and are going to be better in few years. Lithium batteries were mostly experimental technology in 1997.
It is not criticism, it is observation that Model S is not a race car as some fanboys suggest. It just shows that they have no clue what is a race car. Model S was never intended to be such, it is not even possible with added battery weight. It can do 0-60 as fast as you want, but it is just one-trick show that doesn't last. It is also not a washing machine and can't do you dishes as well, nor it can fly. Are we going to argue about it too?;)
Porsche builds what they think is relevant for the their customer base and brand image. VW has several brands and divisions beside Porsche and they are aimed at somewhat different customers. You obviously suggesting some evil automaker conspiracy, but it is just physics. You can't make anything remotely similar to sports car when you add battery weight & size and requirement to be back on track quickly, as energy goes away very quick at high speed and acceleration. Hybrid technologies and electric drive is nothing new and are used by Porsche as well, they don't need some CA startup to "show them the light". Battery only platform may be possible for Porsche style cars few years later, so Porsche shows interest in it now. This is because some people doing real work in labs are moving battery technology forward, not because excessive Tesla hype and fanboy noise.
Switching from coal or natural gas, or using carbon capture is not related to "still having gas engines". You can switch anyway and it will make difference. It is not chicken and egg, but willingness to do it by every government in the world at the same time. Otherwise it just pushes manufacturing somewhere to China.
The only problem with your idea is that numbers do not add. Few nuclear power plants are being built in the US in last decades, they are simply way too expensive even with huge government liability insurance subsidies. Not to mention that you don't have the same flexibility as newer gas turbines that you can power on in seconds. With nuclear you just sink huge capital for decades and have power source that can't adopt to market demand, you pay capital costs no matter if you generate electricity or not. And have issue of nuclear waste for thousands of years.
Please at least bother read the studies that are done on this matter.
You don't need grid to make hydrogen even if you do it from electricity. You can do it using intermittent wind electricity that is much cheaper than grid electricity once you reach certain rate for wind/solar penetration in grid. Neither pumped hydro, compressed air or Lithium battery energy storage costs per MWh are going to come close even to peak electric grid wholesale prices within next few years. Clean energy from electric grid is not even on the horizon.
There is methane cracking technology in development with projected $2/kg hydrogen cost and no carbon oxide release to atmosphere. E.g. Mirai can make over 300 miles on 5 kilograms of hydrogen.
Model S energy consumption is around 35 kWh/100 mi. I don't know if it accounts for charger losses, lets assume yes. It means from $3.5/100 mi for $0.10/kWh rate to $14/100 mi at $0.40/kWh rate. 55 mpg Prius can do 100 miles for $3.45 only assuming current $1.9/gal gas price. Sure, it is silly to bother with fuel costs for $100k car. You don't buy $100k cars to save some negligent amount of money on fuel.
You can't keep it up without investing. You can't sell the same Model S/X forever. Few years later it will be obsolete and you will be out of business unless you invest into R&D and have something new ready by that time. R&D is necessary part of business and you can't just discount it as if it would be possible to avoid it in the future.
People already tried Model S at Nürburgring. Conclusion: no mechanical grip, steering is numb, can't even finish single lap at sustained full power. Seriously, it is not a sports car and will never be, it is something different. Good 0-60 time doesn't make it sports car. It is heavy sedan styled minivan that is great for commuting, groceries and whatever you want, if you are ready to spend unreasonable amount of money on it.
Computer geeks are used to plug their gadgets into electric grid and assume it must be easy to do with cars too, and the grid will become clean and efficient auto-magically somehow. Natural gas cost is something like 1-2 cents/kWh but converted it to stable electricity and delivered to you home it can cost 10 cents or whole 40 at times in California.
Yes, the drive can only mark a block as "deleted" but do not physically overwrite it, especially SSD. The same with HDD, "secure" erase was considered overwriting 3 times with random data, or CIA can recover it:/ Now there is "ATA Secure Erase" to erase everything at once. Seriously, if law enforcement is after you, it will just install some monitoring software that you will never notice, or just monitor your internet traffic and it will provide enough information about your life.
You can just burn your SSD at high enough temperature and it will be destroyed in seconds too, no need to smash every chip;)
"for years HDDs have been proven reliable tech" - what??? For decades everybody knows that any HDD can fail at any time and you can't rely on them without proper RAID, proper backups and so on. And they are really slow.
Recovering data from HDD most often will be cost-prohibitive for home users. Sometimes it may show signs of failure and you may have time to recover some data, but sometimes it may just go away. You can't rely on your HDD data being recoverable. It is just not worth to give up SSD speed if only advantage is some limited chance to recover some data when you failed to keep proper backups. Especially for laptops that can have random mechanical stress causing HDD to fail.
They are small scale automaker and were not able to order whole new production lines for custom form at that time, going all custom isn't cheap either. So they just used what was available with some improvements, they are not the same flashlight batteries despite the same form factor. They are going to increase battery size a bit in the future. Other automakers use bigger cells.
If you google for aquion price, 2.6kWh costs $1200, which means $461/kWh. Or 30.6 kWh for $15,000. As usually, if price is not disclosed, it means it is for people who don't care about price:(
21 kg at $30/kg top Lithium price assuming we run out if it on the ground and will need to extract from ocean water means $630 per car. Not impressive. Actually cobalt was more expensive component for Lion batteries. But as cobalt isn't in general battery name, ignorant masses don't know and don't cry in panic that we are running out of cobalt:/ No, you don't need to start panic now, they are just improving technology and reducing usage of cobalt in batteries.
NiMh large format battery patents have nothing to do with LiOn. And frankly, they were not used because they were not usable, NiMh energy density is way too low for long distance cars, not because of some conspiracies. Alternative NiMh technologies that do not use these patents are available too and are used in hybrids.
It is classic excuse of drug addicts. Mental addiction is much stronger than physical one, and it isn't even researched well enough how all kind of repeated drug usage alter your brain.
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You need to be really delusional to claim that this soviet reactor was built for the purpose to "power a city" and not as a breeder. It was a breeder to build nuclear weapons. Production of electricity was just a useful side effect.
Current Apple competitors do not have the same profit margins as Apple either. And Apple wasn't always successful with all their products either. Apple needs constantly introduce new products to stay relevant, how else they would hype their products as superior and most fashionable? Today's cars are becoming computer driven, it is Apple field again. You may consider it a well known fact that Apple is getting into automotive production even if they do not admit it publicly. You just don't know how successful they will be or not and what they will show. Probably iCar v1 will not be huge success, but once the hype will be driven up, iCar v2 or v3 should attract masses of iFans willing to pay 20% or 30% more for extra bells an whistles that "only Apple has".
Apple is building car, it is more than just unverified rumors now. You may consider it a fact, as it hires automotive engineers. And yes, Apple is still very secretive about it even it starts looking silly now when everybody knows about it. So they may as well invent some Chinese front end to hide the obvious. It is just speculation, but somebody from China moving capital to the US to build cars doesn't sound very convincing either. There is bigger market in China, and Chinese know their home market better.
I don't think Model S is really comparable to S class or A8. You are aiming a bit too high. Anyway it is matter of personal taste. E.g. Lexus hybrids would be over 30 mpg.
Calculating how much you save on fuel is really meaningless exercise if you pay another mortgage just for a car. Fuel cost is peanuts in any case.
Yes $2.50 didn't lasted long. Last time I saw it was down to $1.87. Where do you get that idea that gas should cost much more? Just because of temporary commodities market bubble fueled by Chinese industrialization? It ended, forget it. Just look at historical oil price graph adjusted for inflation. Current price is still historically high and demand still can't catch with supply. Very unlikely you will see $4/gal gas in the US any time soon and even less likely everybody will win lottery to buy $70-$150k cars to make difference.
I don't believe you power Tesla with solar cells. It hardly possible in practice. Most likely you have some grid-tie solar PV taking advantage of early adopter net-metering incentive, and it helps you to offset some part of the electric bill. You still charge from the same interconnected US/Canada electric grid as everybody else. Which means you are using the same fossil fuels regardless of what closest to you power plants burns. Everything is interconnected anyway. You may push for local regulations to push out coal plants further away from your locality, but in reality you would still buy end products or supplies from China where they don't even bother to turn on sulfur scrubbers on their coal plants. No way you can make the Earth cleaner by consuming more.
At some time I had tried hard to convince myself that I need Model S but sorry, it just can't be justified once you gather more information and look closer. Too much hype for too little benefit for myself and for the society.
Quote from the same wikipedia article "top speed of 78 miles per hour", "0-60 time of around 18 seconds". The EPA range measuring was different at that time, but 95 miles do not make usable vehicle for most people (whatever nonsense fans say about average being the same as maximum required). Sure it is enough for few enthusiasts, but you can't sell millions of cars per year to enthusiasts only.
Yes, second generation RAV4 EV is not that much better. 100 miles range doesn't make usable mass-market vehicle again, and you can't increase it much as you already have 840 lb battery just for 100 miles that costs a fortune. It is mostly compliance car so far. However, Lithium batteries still have big room for improvement, and are going to be better in few years. Lithium batteries were mostly experimental technology in 1997.
It is not criticism, it is observation that Model S is not a race car as some fanboys suggest. It just shows that they have no clue what is a race car. Model S was never intended to be such, it is not even possible with added battery weight. It can do 0-60 as fast as you want, but it is just one-trick show that doesn't last. It is also not a washing machine and can't do you dishes as well, nor it can fly. Are we going to argue about it too? ;)
Porsche builds what they think is relevant for the their customer base and brand image. VW has several brands and divisions beside Porsche and they are aimed at somewhat different customers. You obviously suggesting some evil automaker conspiracy, but it is just physics. You can't make anything remotely similar to sports car when you add battery weight & size and requirement to be back on track quickly, as energy goes away very quick at high speed and acceleration. Hybrid technologies and electric drive is nothing new and are used by Porsche as well, they don't need some CA startup to "show them the light". Battery only platform may be possible for Porsche style cars few years later, so Porsche shows interest in it now. This is because some people doing real work in labs are moving battery technology forward, not because excessive Tesla hype and fanboy noise.
Base F-150 price is under $30,000
Switching from coal or natural gas, or using carbon capture is not related to "still having gas engines". You can switch anyway and it will make difference. It is not chicken and egg, but willingness to do it by every government in the world at the same time. Otherwise it just pushes manufacturing somewhere to China.
The only problem with your idea is that numbers do not add. Few nuclear power plants are being built in the US in last decades, they are simply way too expensive even with huge government liability insurance subsidies. Not to mention that you don't have the same flexibility as newer gas turbines that you can power on in seconds. With nuclear you just sink huge capital for decades and have power source that can't adopt to market demand, you pay capital costs no matter if you generate electricity or not. And have issue of nuclear waste for thousands of years.
Please at least bother read the studies that are done on this matter.
You don't need grid to make hydrogen even if you do it from electricity. You can do it using intermittent wind electricity that is much cheaper than grid electricity once you reach certain rate for wind/solar penetration in grid. Neither pumped hydro, compressed air or Lithium battery energy storage costs per MWh are going to come close even to peak electric grid wholesale prices within next few years. Clean energy from electric grid is not even on the horizon.
There is methane cracking technology in development with projected $2/kg hydrogen cost and no carbon oxide release to atmosphere. E.g. Mirai can make over 300 miles on 5 kilograms of hydrogen.
Model S energy consumption is around 35 kWh/100 mi. I don't know if it accounts for charger losses, lets assume yes.
It means from $3.5/100 mi for $0.10/kWh rate to $14/100 mi at $0.40/kWh rate. 55 mpg Prius can do 100 miles for $3.45 only assuming current $1.9/gal gas price. Sure, it is silly to bother with fuel costs for $100k car. You don't buy $100k cars to save some negligent amount of money on fuel.
You can't keep it up without investing. You can't sell the same Model S/X forever. Few years later it will be obsolete and you will be out of business unless you invest into R&D and have something new ready by that time. R&D is necessary part of business and you can't just discount it as if it would be possible to avoid it in the future.
People already tried Model S at Nürburgring. Conclusion: no mechanical grip, steering is numb, can't even finish single lap at sustained full power. Seriously, it is not a sports car and will never be, it is something different. Good 0-60 time doesn't make it sports car. It is heavy sedan styled minivan that is great for commuting, groceries and whatever you want, if you are ready to spend unreasonable amount of money on it.
Computer geeks are used to plug their gadgets into electric grid and assume it must be easy to do with cars too, and the grid will become clean and efficient auto-magically somehow. Natural gas cost is something like 1-2 cents/kWh but converted it to stable electricity and delivered to you home it can cost 10 cents or whole 40 at times in California.
Some people at CARB have different opinions. E.g. look at page 7:
http://energy.gov/sites/prod/f...
Yes, the drive can only mark a block as "deleted" but do not physically overwrite it, especially SSD. The same with HDD, "secure" erase was considered overwriting 3 times with random data, or CIA can recover it :/ Now there is "ATA Secure Erase" to erase everything at once. Seriously, if law enforcement is after you, it will just install some monitoring software that you will never notice, or just monitor your internet traffic and it will provide enough information about your life.
You can just burn your SSD at high enough temperature and it will be destroyed in seconds too, no need to smash every chip ;)
"for years HDDs have been proven reliable tech" - what??? For decades everybody knows that any HDD can fail at any time and you can't rely on them without proper RAID, proper backups and so on. And they are really slow.
Recovering data from HDD most often will be cost-prohibitive for home users. Sometimes it may show signs of failure and you may have time to recover some data, but sometimes it may just go away. You can't rely on your HDD data being recoverable. It is just not worth to give up SSD speed if only advantage is some limited chance to recover some data when you failed to keep proper backups. Especially for laptops that can have random mechanical stress causing HDD to fail.
It is not worth to recycle lithium, it is too cheap.
They are small scale automaker and were not able to order whole new production lines for custom form at that time, going all custom isn't cheap either. So they just used what was available with some improvements, they are not the same flashlight batteries despite the same form factor. They are going to increase battery size a bit in the future. Other automakers use bigger cells.
If you google for aquion price, 2.6kWh costs $1200, which means $461/kWh. Or 30.6 kWh for $15,000. As usually, if price is not disclosed, it means it is for people who don't care about price :(
It isn't $10,000. It is more like $15,000-$20,000 in junk yard or $40,000 list price at Tesla, or whatever is price now.
21 kg at $30/kg top Lithium price assuming we run out if it on the ground and will need to extract from ocean water means $630 per car. Not impressive. :/ No, you don't need to start panic now, they are just improving technology and reducing usage of cobalt in batteries.
Actually cobalt was more expensive component for Lion batteries. But as cobalt isn't in general battery name, ignorant masses don't know and don't cry in panic that we are running out of cobalt
NiMh large format battery patents have nothing to do with LiOn. And frankly, they were not used because they were not usable, NiMh energy density is way too low for long distance cars, not because of some conspiracies. Alternative NiMh technologies that do not use these patents are available too and are used in hybrids.
Power-to-gas doesn't discharge and gas can be stored for years. It doesn't have top efficiency though.
It is classic excuse of drug addicts. Mental addiction is much stronger than physical one, and it isn't even researched well enough how all kind of repeated drug usage alter your brain.