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Test Driving the Tesla Roadster
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Jul 19, 2006 09:34 PM
from the 1.21-gigawatts dept.
from the 1.21-gigawatts dept.
stacybro writes "Wired has an article about the Tesla Roadster. It is similar to other electric cars that we have seen in that the electric engine's serious torque will allow it to do 0-60mph in about 3 seconds. Part of what is different about this is that they are using over 6,831 laptop-type lithium-ion batteries. They are claiming the range is about 250 miles. As the battery tech for laptops improves, so will the range of these cars. The car will run about $80,000, which is about par for an exotic two-seater. So who is doing the poll on which tech CEO will be seen driving one first? My guess is one of the Google or E-Bay guys, since they are investors. It is nice to see more companies serious about helping to getting rid of our oil dependency. It is odd that the big car companies aren't more on this track!"
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Electric Car Faster Than A Ferrari or Porsche 741 comments
jumpeel writes "CNN's Business 2.0 has photos and video of a Silicon Valley-made electric car with a 0-60 acceleration rate that's faster than a Ferrari Spider and a Porsche Carrera. From the article: 'In fact, it's second only to the French-made Bugatti Veyron, a 1,000-horsepower, 16-cylinder beast that hits 60 mph half a second faster and goes for $1.25 million.' The X1 is built by Ian Wright whose valley startup WrightSpeed intends to make a 'a small-production roadster that car fanatics and weekend warriors will happily take home for about $100,000 --a quarter ton of batteries included. The X1 crushed the Ferrari in an eighth-mile sprint and then in the quarter-mile, winning by two car lengths.'"
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Backslash: Electric Cars and Their Discontents 348 comments
The most hotly contested issue raised by yesterday's post about the lithium-ion battery-powered Tesla roadster is only tangentially related to the car itself; instead, it's the energy generation and storage required for electric cars more generally to operate. Read on for the Backslash summary of the conversation, including several of the comments that defined the conversation.
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Technology: Tesla Motors Is Delivering Cars 520 comments
jamie found the news that Tesla Motors is delivering roadsters in California. (We've been following developments on the Tesla front for a couple of years now.) According to a letter from the CEO, "9 production Roadsters have arrived in California, another 3 arrive this weekend, and they will keep arriving at the rate of 4 per week... In fact, currently there are 27 Roadsters in various stages of assembly." The early owners must be proud, but there could be complications.
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Exploding Batteries? (Score:5, Insightful)
Exploding Dells, fires on planes, and soon at an intersection near you... cars venting more flame than the batmobile.
Re:Exploding Batteries? (Score:5, Insightful)
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where are the flying pieces of cars? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, though, Li-ion? I shudder to think of how those will get disposed of, eventually.
Re:where are the flying pieces of cars? (Score:5, Informative)
Um, probably the same way you dispose of alkaline batteries. You throw them in the trash. Lithium-Ion batteries are classified as "non-hazardous waste and are safe for disposal in the normal municipal waste stream."
Or punture and flood with saltwater if you're paranoid.
"Discharge: with the cell or battery pack in a safe area, connect a moderate resistance across the terminals until the cell or battery pack is discharged. CAUTION: the cell or battery pack may be hot! Discard: puncture plastic envelope, immerse in salt water for several hours and place in regular trash."
Li-Ion and Li-Poly batteries are a non-problem if they're discharged, and they are environmentally friendly, to boot.
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Over 6,831 batteries? (Score:5, Funny)
The batteries have to be in series/parallel banks (Score:5, Insightful)
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Solve the Battery Problem = Die Rich (Score:5, Insightful)
Li-Ion batteries have excellent amp-hour ratings for their size, but like all other batteries are still pretty limited.
Acceleration/Torque for electric cars is not a problem. High performance capabilities are there if you want them. However, you are playing battery energy against performance against distance, and all electrics, or fuel-electric hybrids have been designed to be "green" in their approach. (Any Hummer oweners want an environmentally aware vehicle?)
Right now the weakest link in many electronic systems is the energy source. A good solution there and you can be a very wealty person.
80K?+batteries once a year (Score:5, Interesting)
Which is to say we are still in the same world, in which low volumes and other issues cause electric cars to be 50%-100$ higher than traditional cars. All that seems to have happened here is that an electric car has been targeted to the high end market and priced accordingly. It is kind of like taking the hummer, putting a cheap truck base on it, calling it an H2, and pretending that it still has the dubious value of the original.
Oh well, I suppose if they can build a sedan for 35K I would be impressed. We would also have to look at maintenance cost of the vehicle, which would be dominated by the battery replacement. A sports car car easily run 20 cents/mile in maintenance. Knowing that laptop batteries can only handle a couple hundred charge cycles, one can image where the long term maintenance cost could approach three or four time that amount.
I wish we had electric cars. I think the technology is there, and the pricing could be reasonable. But even companies that could be using the electric car to revive themselves, for instance Mazda and Ford, still seem to be married to the antiquated internal combustion engine.
Re:Global "Dependencies" (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Global "Dependencies" (Score:5, Insightful)
Until something replaces Coal power plants as the main method of generating electricity, you're just replacing one evil for the other.
Yes, I'm aware of Nucular, Hydro, Wind, Tidal, Natrual Gas. Doesn't matter. Coal is the most popular choice today.
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Re:Global "Dependencies" (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Global "Dependencies" (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Global "Dependencies" (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Global "Dependencies" (Score:5, Interesting)
The US has vast reserves of coal. We wouldn't have to rely on the Middle East. And it is easier to cut pollution from relatively few centralized sources than it is from hundreds of millions of cars. And if something better than coal comes along, it's easier to switch relatively few power plants than hundreds of millions of cars. Etc, etc.
I'm going to give you a pass on "nucular" because a dictionary guy I heard on the radio said it's a regionalism, not barbarism that is like nails on a chalkboard to educated people.
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Re:Global "Dependencies" (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes there are better solutions then coal, but we have over 50% of our power coming from coal, so improving coal will happen quicker then scrapping the system and replacing it with other systems (solar concentrators, tidal, wind, or other low eviroment impact systems). The is no reason we can't do both and enjoy both short term and long term gains. They're not mutually exclusive.
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Re:Global "Dependencies" (Score:5, Insightful)
Has already happened in my home country, which generates 79% of its energy [uic.com.au] in nuclear power plants. Now can I get my electric car ? ;-)
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Re:Global "Dependencies" (Score:5, Insightful)
Today.
Today.
Today.
FUCKING Today.
You can see past today, can't you?
I'm so sick of people who can't see past today.
It does matter, if you can see past today.
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Re:Global "Dependencies" (Score:5, Insightful)
Battery power isn't about saving energy anyway, it's often about shifting the pollution to a big facility that can handle it instead of having heavy pollution control equipment to move about. The first hybrid car I saw, back in 1987, embodied this principle and was designed to work at an underground mine. Above ground it ran on fuel, but below ground you wanted to minimise the air pollution as much as possible so it ran on batteries.
Personally I think the compelling area for electric vehicles as technology improves is as farming equipment or transport in remote areas - charge things up on wind, solar or whatever is handy instead of trucking in a lot of fuel.
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Re:Global "Dependencies" (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, you tell 'em! Forget about pragmatism and we'll create our own reality. Feasability? Screw it. Net environmental effect of the technology? Who needs to analyze anything when we've got dreamers! There's no point in looking at our world for how it is when we can see it like we want it to be.
The analogy that you provided about abusive parents is exactly the kind of absolutism that I disagree with -- and there's plenty of it to go around. What about when the definition of child abuse gets murky? What about when you've got a kid in an otherwise 'good' home, where the parents (for example) are pot smokers? Does it make sense to subject the kid to 'the system' by sticking them in a foster home (at best)? In the United States, it's not uncommon for child services to consider parents like that unfit. Absolutes don't work so well in a dynamic world.
In any case, we've already got an idealistic executive administration in the US who tends to think in black-and-white. Frankly, I think that we would do well with a bit of measured analysis.
To get back to the discussion, there's nothing wrong with trying to innovate, and I'm not seeing that argument anywhere. You're using a straw-man argument. However, there are plenty of hurdles which must be overcome when talking about electric cars...and it's important to recgonize that the electric car is no panacea for our environmental/political/economic ills. It just moves the problem elsewhere, and would continue to for the forseeable future. If it were really economically feasible, every major auto manufacturer would be selling an electric car right now.
Personally, I'm more interested in diesel power (utilizing vegetable-based fuel). The technology is already 100% available, very well developed, mass produced, and it can utilize the existing distribution infrastructure without serious modifications (I think that oil pipelines would need some help, however). Burning vegetable-based fuel also releases zero net greenhouse gas, since all carbon released into the atmosphere was originally metabolized from the atmosphere. Are there drawbacks? Certainly -- among other things, there is a poor public perception of diesel engines power and torque charasteristic, of being smelly, and having hard-to-find fuel. The former two have been resolved though development: Diesel emissions (as well as the sulphur odor) have been greatly reduced, and an Audi diesel race car won Le Mans last year, partly by churning out massive amounts of torque while maintaining better fuel economy than every other car in its class.
Again, getting back to the point, there is nothing wrong with pragmatism. In fact, the best way to deal with idealogues is to share a bit of reality. If you really believe in this, and this is truly an engineering problem, why not embrace the naysayers? Why not help find a solution to the real problems with the technology in question rather than smugly berate them in public? Your attempts to berate aren't convincing anyone of anything (except for the people who already share your ideals).
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Re:Sigh (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly. Even with transmission losses, and losses due to charging and discharging, I bet this thing is considerably more efficient than a gasoline engine. What gasolene has as an advantage is that it's not so heavy with respect to the amount of power it has. And that batteries are expensive, have a very limited life span and possibly an environmental catastrophe waiting to happen. There was a guy on Science Friday that suggested that we could convert to methanol use, it's easy to make from oil, it's easy to make from biomass, easy to haul and so on.
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Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, he has. And for his trouble, the remaining members of Greenpeace shrilly scream that he's a traitor and shill for the oil industry, etc, blah blah.
The real problem is that the people who oppose nukes are bound together more by their general political loopiness than they are by actual, real, rational environmental/energy issues. So when they see one of their own taking up a different messages, they excommunicate them idealogically - never mind the practical issues at hand.
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Re:Recharging time? (Score:5, Funny)
Easy... just plug the car's charger into the cigarette lighter and charge as you go!
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Re:The time is right? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Electric Cost Per Mile is Cheaper (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh
Don't be ridiculous. Electric cars have enough problems without inventing inane ones for them.
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Re:Forget batteries, go with Ethanol (Score:5, Insightful)
But: you get hydrogen very inefficiently through the use of enormous amounts of electricity, which is currently being produced mostly through burning coal. Start using hydrogen in your car, you'll start burning that much more coal and natural gas at the electric plants. Your plug-in hybrids introduce the same problem.
They only viable solution is more nuclear power plants. A LOT more.
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