The arguments in this thread are amusing to say at the least. 30 minute charging times, high prices of Tesla cars. Yes all that is true. But this was never about 'Electric cars are awesome now'.
I'm pretty sure cars during and before pre Henry Ford times were not very great in terms of their overall affordability, total cost of ownership and availability of fuel all around the country. You could trust your horse to drive you back home on any day more than a car. Similar to that, the IBM computers during their early days. You mobile phone is likely to have more computing power than all the computers IBM sold a few decades back, they were highly painful to use, maintain and use. Needless to say all these things had huge maintenance issues.
But these things have caught on. So have automation, productivity and so many other new things that eventually people show friction towards but later take them to be fate accompli and learn to move forward.
Electric cars, self driving cars, wearable computing(like Google glasses) well these really might look to be unfeasible at this time. But please, these are just ideas which are waiting for their time to come, with a little push they will eventually catch on.
This is obviously a very "disruptive" technology and/or business model, from every point of view, both positive and negative. Just think about how all disruptive innovations come to be. They are awesome and game-changing from a certain point of view (free charging/"gas"!) but can also have some big downsides (30 minute charging, only half a charge - at first).
But the part you should be focusing on is the first one, the positive one. Because that will change everything and to some people, the second part, the negative one, will be irrelevant just long enough for Tesla to work on improving it and years later making it "good enough" for most people.
Remember how the iPhone was awesome at user interface and interaction? But sucked at battery life (compared to other smartphones), had only a 2 MP camera, no video recording, only 2G connection and no MMS? That may not have been good enough for 90% of Nokia or Blackberry users back then, but the iPhone is good enough for almost everyone today, and the iPhone changed the entire industry. That's how disruptive innovations work, and I believe that's exactly how Tesla's new model will work.
Also, do you know how everyone says I wish I would've bought Apple stock when the iPhone first appeared? Well, if I was into stock, I'd probably start buying Tesla stock just about now.
The positives are enough of an incentive to have people change their behaviours in order to compensate for the 'negatives' of using such technology. If you know you'll have 30 minutes minimum to kill then you'll plan for it. Lunch time, work time, walk around a park time, meetup and chat with other people who are waiting time, walk your dog time, mini-yoga class time, etc.. Throw in self-driving cars into the mix and the break activities will likely be more social and physical things, and less high mental activity time - unless you're a workaholic.
From what I understand 30 minute charging is amazing.
To paraphrase Richard Hammond: "Forgetting something at home when I go to work would be a 2 day round-trip because it's so far no electric car has the range. I would have to spend one night recharging the car somewhere in the middle"
His problem has just been solved. Sure, it might take him 3.5 hours (random number) instead of just 3. But that's insanely better than having to stay the night to recharge your car.
I think people don't understand how disruptive electric cars will be, when combined with autonomous cars.
When all you do is pull out your cellphone, select a route and a car picks you up in 5 minutes, takes you to your destination, and leaves... you don't worry about range and electricity and recharge.
You just use it, and the system can intelligently maintain battery levels and recharging across the fleet, ensuring efficiency.
Heck, such a system could provide gasoline or hybrid cars for trips that required them.
No no, I'm saying a three hour commute. Regardless of the distance there's still going to be 24 hours in a day. Spending 12% of your day commuting is bonkers.
Miles aren't really the deal breaker - it's the time.
I had a 130 mile commute in the 90s in Arkansas that took me.. 130ish minutes. Now I have a 32 mile commute that takes around 2 hours and is 15 miles driving, BART for 35ish minutes, and walking for 20 minutes.
Try doing that in the midwest. Finding jobs gets hard and apartments are rare and low quality, so it's not uncommon to have to settle on a 20 minute (or much more) commute by car on the freeway. There are also no bike lanes. Commuting long distances isn't great, but moving more people into the city isn't always the best option either. We learned that in the 1900's
Moving more people into an _early 1900s_ city wasn't the best option, unless you wanted a non-farm job. And then the GI bill (given predominately to white veterans over black veterans) jumpstarted white flight and the beginnings of suburbia.
Right, and iron horses will never replace real ones in farming because they are too heavy and use up too much coal.
Take a look into graphene-based supercapacitors. It _is_ possible to charge an electric car in a few minutes. It's just a matter of time. [and no, we're not talking EEStor. We're talking multiple research universities actively looking into the technology. Angstron Materials is one.]
I read about this charging issue being addressed in Israel with a company called Better Place that does battery swapping. The reasoning was Israel is small enough to roll out something like this on a large scale. Battery swapping sounds great because they were saying it'd only take a few minutes, which is comparable to fueling up with gas.
The Tesla has ~180 mile range on a 30 minute charge. 150 miles one way with a charger at the office sounds quite practical based on that. It'd actually be less disruptive than a gasoline vehicle.
30 minutes is already a vast improvement over the old technology which took hours, maybe 6 hours if you weren't on the fast connection, or I heard days if you were stuck using a normal outlet.
- Better battery performance and lifespan.
- Improved charging time and technology.
- Distance cars can travel in a single charge.
- Increased torque and horsepower.
- Affordability and increases is mass production.
And most importantly, increases in the necessary infrastructure to support long-distance travel (exactly the topic at hand)
Did you read his link? The point the guy makes is completely correct.
Let's say tomorrow some grad student gets fusion going at a very low price. The best way to use this to power cars would be to use it to create a fuel with a high energy density. If you had 'free energy' you'd extract C02 from the atmosphere and turn it into a hydrocarbon.
"The ones that are technically trained get it right away: hydrocarbons, which we burned today have the greatest energy density possible of all fuels. Things that have carbon in them. Will people fly airplanes? Usually people say yes for the same reasons. Well, how are you going to make the airplanes fly? Battery. Batteries are pretty heavy. Oh--you can't have airplanes unless you have hydrocarbon fuels. You could in theory do it with hydrogen, but it's highly dangerous, noxious fuel. Quantum-mechanically, we know the energy content of those fuels is optimal. There will never be anything that beats them."
A massive breakthrough in energy density for batteries might be possible but it's unlikely. Huge resources have been put into improving batteries and while they have improved it's not been enough to get near the energy density of hydrocarbons.
"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them" - Albert Einstein.
Why, O why do we think that problems have to, must be and will be solved at the same level and direction of thought the problems were framed in? Besides the whole point of a disruptive technology is that the solutions generally come as a bolt from the blue, completely surprising even the biggest experts in those areas. Directions from which those solutions come from are so radically different paths than originally they would come from. And this has not happened once, twice but many times.
Over confidence in science especially with regards to the negative aspects is not a good direction to begin with.
Bernoulli's principle is indeed how airplanes fly. Your link shoots down the silly equal-time theory, not Bernoulli's principle.
Basically, airplanes fly for three reasons:
1. The wing deflects air downwards.
2. Air moves faster over the top of the wing than over the bottom. Much faster than the equal-transit theory indicates.
3. Air pressure is higher on the bottom of the wing than on the top.
The important thing that few people seem to grasp is that all three are equivalent statements. They aren't additive. There aren't three different reasons airplanes fly, there's one reason airplanes fly, with three different ways to look at it.
This interesting. You say there is one reason airplanes fly. But "deflecting air downwards" is causing an lifting force by action=reaction (the way a rocket works) and "air pressure is higher on bottom of the wing than on the top" is causing a lifting force by pressure differences.
Those are different reasons, or am I mistaken here?
Nope, they're completely inseparable. If you deflect air downwards, no matter how you do it, you must end up creating a pressure differential where air pressure is higher on the bottom than on the top. If you create such a pressure differential, then no matter how you do it, you'll end up deflecting air downwards.
Pressure is just a fancy way of saying force per area. The air pressure on the bottom of the wing is just the downward force exerted by the wing on the air, divided by the wing's area. The only way to deflect air is by applying a force to it, and the only thing applying a force to it is the wing.
> Well, how are you going to make the airplanes fly? Battery. Batteries are pretty heavy.
You could get a huge win by offloading the power to ground stations and beaming it aboard. You'd still need some onboard power reserve for reliability and backup reasons, but you could offload most of it. This would let you lighten your airframe, which has a snowball effect, allowing even more lightening and more efficiency. Get the craft light enough, and VTOL becomes a possibility, meaning you could land these things on heliports downtown and not have a 1 hour trip to the airport.
Just think of it as "high speed rail" with lower infrastructure costs and fewer right-of-way problems.
Well mechanical engines were there from a couple of centuries in fact. The steam engine was invented a ton lot of years before fuel driven cars caught on.
I would say Elon Musk is the greatest entrepreneur of the past century - even more so than Steve Jobs. He simultaneously created three separate companies, all in extremely complex industries, and combined all of them into one overall strategy.
The precision manufacturing they learned with Space X is incorporated into the Tesla S. Their aim is to make the Model S the most reliable and problem-free vehicle due to this precision.
Now they are incorporating SolarCity technology into the entire system. This is absolutely brilliant!
While I agree that his moves (he) are brilliant, we still have to see widespread impact of his companies apart from PR waves. What I like most about his companies is they share a common vision that, at least to us outsiders, gives a notion of futurism combined with altruism and hardcore business. Rare event.
Ehh no. Paypal obviously had and still has a huge impact on global ecommerce. SpaceX launched a rocket into space and landed a contract with Nasa. And Tesla set up a factory line producing fully electric cars for (rich) consumers. Elon Musk is without a doubt one of the greatest entrepreneurs ever.
Ehh no 2. I wasn't talking about Paypal, but current companies. And you can hardly attribute Paypal to Elon Musk alone, if anyone individualized it would be Peter Thiel.
Anyways, SpaceX is a huge endeavour as is Tesla motors and green energy project on the side. Most remarkable thing is a close loop those companies feed on each others achievements. That is without dispute. However, there is absolutely no widespread impact from all of this yet apart from PR waves. What it could be, and hopefully will be, is that either those group of companies have a widespread reach or (even more hopefully) those PR waves will incite similar movements across those industries it touches.
As for one of the greatest entrepreneur ever - competition is strong and large. While successful and visionary, his efforts are yet to come to full fruition where he might be among the greats. So far, it's all great business and great prospect. It could land among greatest entrepreneurs ever when/if those companies approach widespread impact of the likes of Ford, Dow, Siemens, Bell, etc...
I'd actually argue it'd be better if SpaceX could gobble up more taxpayer money; they are far more likely to use it for research/development/innovation than either costPlus space contractors or other parts of government that would be allocated the cash saved by cheaper SpaceX launches.
Interestingly I was expecting him to have much better presentation/communication skills though. I guess being an successful entrepreneur has nothing to do with that.
I noticed that... he does lack some communication skills but .. in the end, the important thing is what you say and what you do, not how you say it. There are a lot of entrepreneurs out there with very good presentation skills and use a lot of buzzwords and get everybody excited but in the end, they don't produce anything.
Facts before words do it for me and this guy won me with his presentation :D
He's actually gotten better over time. But there's another side to this. He has this kind of humble "aww shucks" way about him that I and I suspect many people find endearing.
I've said this before, but I think Mr. Musk is one of a handful of "altruistic capitalists" that, if we are to stay with capitalism as a system, we desperately need more of. His somewhat awkward but "gee I could imagine playing XBox with him" style goes well with that image.
I'm hoping his next big project, HyperLoop, lives up to his ambitions for it. Being able to travel to any city in the continental U.S. in about 30 minutes will permanently change the entire economy and daily life for everyone.
I have some thoughts on this. They don't really have a central theme but I love to think about this stuff:
- Pneumatic / maglev hybrid seems like the optimal choice. With magnetic levitation and no air resistance, extreme speeds are possible.
- Initially I thought that the ideal mass transit system would allow people to carry their cars with them. The idea is that people often have to choose between the benefits of mass transit and the loss of freedom that comes with not having their car once they reach their destination. But recent innovations lead me to think this won't be necessary. I can easily see a time when all cars are autonomous and you can call one up on demand (as others in this thread have pointed out as well). Therefore, it's easy to conceive of a time when you can hop on the HyperLoop, pull out your smartphone, pick the destination, and tell the system you want a (semi-)autonomous vehicle waiting for you when you arrive.
- To make this feasible, we HAVE to get the cost down. It shouldn't take a trillion dollars or more to build this network across the US. The rest of the points will be about that.
- The system should be built, as much as possible, out of a series of standardized components that "snap together". I'm envisioning a "series of tubes" sections that are straightforwardly snapped end to end with standard mounts to hang them or put them on pylons. There would be different lengths, curve radii, etc depending on how you needed to route the track.
- These "tubelets" themselves should be constructible on-site or close to it, similar to how concrete for roads is made on-site. The idea is to minimize shipping costs as much as possible.
- Ultimately, it would be nice if we could employ molecular nano-assembly and have the tubes build themselves, but as a compromise, many parts of the construction could be handled by autonomous or semi-autonomous moving construction rigs that can set themselves up, perform most of the construction work, then tear themselves down and drive off. Again, the more standardized and "Lego like" you can make the components, the easier this would be.
- Each section should have solar panels, a way of storing energy, and a way of giving or receiving energy to nearby sections. Ideally, this would all be connected with a "master bus" that would, when necessary, send power to sections of the loop that haven't had decent sunlight in a while, etc. In general, the idea would be to keep the system as self-sufficient as possible, but have full failover when needed.
- We'd also need to solve the cultural-political problems involved in getting all the landowners to agree to run elevated track over their property.
Thinking about the last two problems, an interesting solution presents itself:
- Why not partner with the power grid organizations and use the existing transmission line right-of-way to run much of the "long haul" routes? They already have the land, they have made wide "lanes" through brush and other unforgiving terrain to run the lines, and there's the power when you need it!
- You might even consider slowly replacing many of the transmission lines with just the tunnels. These tunnels would transmit the power and also help generate it with solar panels, taking only what the need to run the line and giving back everything else. This SHOULD be a massive net positive gain. The only downside I can see would be people that consider two sections of elevated tubes to be a massively worse eye-sore than the existing wires. But surely that would be solvable?
Is it outrageous to think that eventually this "gas" will be free because outlets will compete to have Tesla and other electric customers stuck at their restaurant, bar, store for a half hour?
I remember talking to a friend who worked for an oil company, who told me that the shops at gas stations actually make 2-3 times more than the revenue generated from the gas. If you were an oil company which dealt exclusively with the consumer (which of course non of them are) you would in fact be a catering business which sold gas on the side.
>I remember talking to a friend who worked for an oil company, who told me that the shops at gas stations actually make 2-3 times more than the revenue generated from the gas
That is completely impossible. Maybe profit, but not revenue. Even my sedan with a 17 gallon tank costs more to fill up than even a pack-a-day smoker with a lottery addiction and a love of energy drinks is likely to spend at the shop.
Former gas station owner here (don't ask). Profit is correct.
Typically a gas station makes 1 or two cents per liter. A 17 gallon tank is approximately 68 liters so that's between $.68 and $1.36 or thereabouts in gross margin for the station. Of that they still have to operate and service the pumps, and deal with periodic mandatory environmental upgrades and inspections.
You have to do millions of liters per year to turn a profit on the gas. Gross profits on store goodies are on the order or 20 to 30%. If they're refrigerated then likely it is on the low end, if they are non-perishables then it is on the high end.
I think he had them backwards -- I've heard similar stories from others who own gas stations. Gas makes up a substantial portion of their revenue, but the margins are so thin that most of the profit comes from the food and retail services.
And why convenience stores in Japan (and other places, I assume, though I haven't seen them) frequently sell the same kinds of merchandise as gas stations do in the US, but most don't sell gas because the margins are so small, the pedestrian market smaller, and real estate so expensive.
At $0.11/kWh, the Roadster at 53kWh would take almost $6 to completely fill.
Though if these stations charge using solar power and store the power in a battery pack to discharge when a car hooks up, it could potentially cost them a lot less than $0.11/kWh, depending on the cost of building the station itself.
I doubt those stations will store the power locally. My bet is that the solar system pumps power into the grid during the day, generating $$ for tesla. Then in the night, it draws from the grid since power is cheaper then anyway.
The way solar works in california for small installations is you just produce it and use it and whatever you do not use just send it to the electric company. If you need power you are not producing then you just take it from the electric grid. The electric company has to take your excess power (by law). The electric company then subtracts the power you put in from the power you use and only charges you for the difference.
So currently you do not have to worry about batteries or storage. You only have to worry about producing on average about as much as you use. The electric company does not have to worry about storage either because times of high sunshine always coincide with times of high electricity demand (due to air-conditioning).
So currently one can easily install and use solar without ever worrying about batteries or storage. If we ever get to the point where we rely exclusively on solar and wind, we will have to start worrying about storage, but this point is far off for now. Also, at that point the responsibility for storage will likely fall on the electric companies.
According to the article it sounds like the devices are hooked up to the grid, but use solar effectively to offset the cost - Musk claim they will feed more energy into the grid than they'll take out while charging cars.
The solar component is a stunt. Electricity is fungible. How about putting the solar plants where they work well (mountaintop? desert?) and the charging stations can just hook to the grid. Then they can get their electricity from any convenient source (local nuke plant for instance).
The argument about 'free solar' is almost an oxymoron. That electricity costs more per kwh than most any other source.
It is not a stunt. It is a direct counter to the anti-EV argument "Electricity is made from fossil fuels anyway, so by driving an EV you are just shifting the source of pollution to the power plant."
Tesla is attacking every single anti-EV argument in a very deliberate way and most of the attacks are strong successes.
It IS a stunt, in the sense that the solar feature is technically independent of the charging stations. The message is clear, but there is no necessary link between the solar elements and the place you go with your electric car to charge up. Placing them there is probably a worse decision that placing them optimally. That's makes it stunt.
And there is also a strong argument that the manufacturing and installation costs of solar farms has a long payback. They are a battery in that sense - energy invested in them slowly comes back out. PRobably petro-energy. So intially solar is a net negative in eco-impact. Same with wind.
Probably much cheaper than installing tanks in the ground and pumps on the surface to handle gasoline. Not to mention remediating the site when the tanks eventually start to fail.
There's an old service station near me. It was once a fuel station, but was eventually turned into just-a-repair-garage. Transmissions, mainly. But they didn't remove the tanks when the locale switched gears. That garage is now defunct; there are potential entrepreneurs who want to use the space, but the cost of removing the old tanks and cleaning up the site for alternate zoning (one of the people looking at it was thinking about opening a cafe) is going to be prohibitively expensive.
Tack on to that the increased capacity electric vehicles are going to have to have, as well as the increased electricity prices I am expecting when ten million Americans are charging their cars.
It takes about $0.20 to refine a gallon of gas, so ~2kWh/gal. Except, It obviously actually takes less electricity than that, because there are other costs to refining. Not a bad investment in energy terms, when a gallon of gasoline contains ~36.6kWh worth of energy.
Don't forget the cost in electricity of finding deposits, mining them, transporting the pre-refined gas, transporting the post-refined gas, and lobbying Congress.
Potentially, if there are improvements in infrastructure to be made that reduce cost. But it is hardly implicit that increased demand will lower the price- just look at oil.
The stations generate more power (via solar) than the cars use while charging. There is a net REDUCTION in energy use if you charge solely from these stations and I'd imagine that part of the business model is selling the excess energy back to the power companies. I'd bet that getting certified for this sort of thing is also a heck of a lot easier than getting certified to build a solar farm. Pretty smart move I think.
But at the most this is change in the revenue model for 'gas/electric' stations or whatever you would like to call it.
But at the present and things as they stay, no body is likely to compete with Tesla. They are only having this network so as to ensure people can roam around without having to worry about running out of fuel. Tesla itself may not offer free energy once their user base grows to a substantial amount.
This is a incentive to get users to buys their cars, not a free energy give away drive. Once they have substantial customer base, free market dynamics will take care of the energy supply.
Another possible revenue stream is free for Tesla owners, and not free for other electric cars that support the "nozzle" (if Tesla allows others to use the same nozzle design).
The connector on the vehicle is proprietary, but there's an OEM adapter to use SAE J1772 connectors. (like the charging station near Google Kirkland: http://tmblr.co/ZStnmwKlXAF8 )
If Tesla doesn't let others to use their connector, they're doing themselves a huge dis-service. We need to start off with one standard. Imagine if every petrol station had connectors for different cars, or you had to look for a special station that fit your car? Nightmare.
Well, you can't get the free power if Tesla legally prevents you from using the connector because they're looking to create a near-term advantage. That's the key. My comment was that Tesla would be harming themselves by not allowing others to use it. Others would come up with a standard and now you'd have all these Tesla vehicles with a non-standard connector.
> Well, you can't get the free power if Tesla legally prevents you from using the connector because they're looking to create a near-term advantage. That's the key.
If I were running Tesla, I'd let my competitors' cars come and charge at the station, then sell them lunch and snacks.
Well, honestly, offsetting the expense from "gas" to whatever products/entertainment/services/food that will be available is farking FANTASTIC.
Its not like they will be forced to buy whatever is in these stops - but the fact that the consumer can now actually CHOOSE what to spend those funds on is wonderful.
I HATE BUYING GAS
I currently don't drive at all (I bike to bart and bart to work) - and my car had its starter go out, so I haven't even been inside a car in more than a month.
I have always hated buying gas - I feel like I am being extorted every single time (and yes, I still harbor a grudge against bush/cheney whom I feel is largely responsible for this situation - whether this is unfounded blame or not, I still feel good about it :) )
I was looking forward to this announcement and watched the live announcement. The most interesting/surprising parts of the announcement to me was:
1. Superchargers are already deployed in California. Nice work, Tesla, for building it out and proving it works.
2. The whole U.S. will be covered in a few years. Great for traveling cross country.
3. It's solar-powered. I wonder if they have a electricity backup... probably, my guess. But still impressive.
4. It will be FREE for Tesla owners. I don't know how they're pulling this off. To me, this was the most shocking part. How are they going to pay for construction, rent, etc, and still afford this? It's a great extra benefit for Tesla owners... to travel around the country for free (of course you need to buy the car and maintain the car, but still).
I wonder if the extra electricity generated from the solar panels will go into paying the rent for the spaces.
3. It's solar-powered. I wonder if they have a electricity backup...
It's grid electric powered. The canopy doesn't do much.
Let's calculate:
Guess that the canopy for each bay is 7 by 4 meters, 28m^2
Sunny spots receive about 4kWhr of solar power per square meter per day.
Solar panels might be 25% efficient.
Total daily power: 28m^2 * 4kWhr/m^2/day * 0.25 = 28kWhr/day
Model S has an 85kWhr battery, half charge is 42kWhr.
It is going to take about two days to charge off the solar.
Right, so if you think of it as a grid tied system it will generate power when ever it can, and people will charge on it. I've got 5.2kW of panels on my roof and can verify attest to the fact that even though I might use 28kWh in a day I can generate 34kWhr (during the summer, during the winter my best days are about 20kWhr) I would guess that as long as the duty cycle on the fill up is small they will consume net zero power.
The SunTech panels [1] produce a nominal 295W and are 2 x 1M so in your 6 x 4M square you can put 12 panels, nominal output 3.5Kw, my system is 90% "efficient" (5.2 kW Panel rating, 4.7kW delivered to the grid) assuming the same that is 3.15kW delivered to the grid. over a nominal 6 hr solar 'day' that is about 18kWhr/day. So the duty cycle on a power station would need to be one fill up every 3 days. If the travelling is mostly on weekends I could see the stations getting a couple of fillups on the weekend and having 5 days of no visitors. Time will tell. It is handy that Elon's the primary stockholder of Solar City :-) Good discount on panels.
I support your figures. However, my efficiency of my inverter is 98% rather than 90%.
I'd also clarify that the average during winter is a lot less than 20kWhr/day ... I know you said it was a maxinum :) It's most probably about 14kWh for me.
>It's grid electric powered. The canopy doesn't do much.
They're sizing the installations in partnership with SolarCity, one of Musk's other start-ups. They claim they'll be sized such that it will generate as much energy over the course of the year as the vehicles consume. Meanwhile, you're estimating power output from a CG rendering on a marketing page.
You could argue whether or not they're lying, but they're certainly not incompetent. SolarCity's sizing calculators take these (and many more) variables into account.
And, at many locations, solar cells mounted on the weather canopy charge your Model S with solar energy.
I'm sure SolarCity projects will be supplying more power than Teslas use, but not from these charging stations. (Unless virtually no one uses the stations, which is probably not the plan. There'd be no reason to install 4 parallel charging stations if you were charging less than one car a day. Another possibility is that they build car ports that cover many parking spaces in a lot to support each charging bay. That's not what the picture shows, but it would work.)
I can't find an original source for the idea that the stations will produce more power than they consume, but it appears, attributed to Musk, in both Engadget and Huffington post. Most other articles on the event don't have it. It seems to have come from an oral presentation.
The good news is, if a Tesla S goes about 2 miles on 1 kWhr of power and if an average person drives about 10k miles per year, that is only 14kWhr/day. Each bay would supply the typical power requirements of two Tesla S cars.
It clearly says the stations will make more power than they consume. So either they are huge compared to the picture, or Tesla S drivers aren't much for road tripping.
generate as much energy over the course of the year as the
vehicles consume
Yeah right. At what utilization rate? A single charge is ~90KWh, and takes half an hour. Two charges back to back are 180KWh.
jws guesses that each slot generates 28KWh/day. A ten slot charging station would only be able to charge three cars without going into the red. Tesla would have to build a lot of very oversized installations in a lot of sunny, rural locations to hit breakeven.
So you are basically saying that Musk is lying. This doesn't sound too much like him, does it?
A simpler explanation would be that he's not telling the whole story, and that perhaps they have dedicated solar farms in development/deployment or something to that effect. Don't afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.
Sure doesn't sound like him. He's headed up the first company to commercially resupply the International Space Station, for pete's sake.
You bet your ass he quadruple checked those numbers.
I'm guessing that the supply at these stations will be much higher than the demand for charging, so they'll make up the cost of "free" by selling wh's back to the grid.
Again, this is a guess based on a CG rendering on their website. That drawing doesn't constrain Tesla's engineering talent in any way – even without using extra land they could put up solar shade structures over adjacent parking spaces.
Adjacent parking spaces, eh? To go from 3 charges a day to 6, right?
Assume you've got a couple dozen slots, charging 100 cars a day. (Far, far fewer than an equivalently-sized gas station. If we're going to transition to an electric-only transportation infrastructure, then car changing stations are going to become a common sight)
That's 9 megawatt-hours a day. A random solar panel calculator I found guesses that would need ~2000KW of solar panel capacity. So you'll need 8,000 250 watt panels. That'll cover 9,600 square metres, (2.6 acres-- if you're lying them flat, which you won't. A big dedicated solar generation station will use tilted one-axis tracking, which will use a lot more ground space) and cost you (at $410 a panel) a cool $2.4 million.
(Google's big solar installation at Mountain View, the one that got so much press, was only 1700KW. Our tiny electric car charging station has to be 17% bigger than it.)
Electric car charging uses a lot of power. Solar is great, I love solar, but it's not space-efficient, or cheap. Either Tesla is going to build a national solar generation network on the scale of Germany's move into solar power, all on their own dime, or they're lying through their teeth about charging draw/solar production breakeven.
Yes, in a couple years there will be more electric cars, but solar power installations are getting less expensive every year. I don't know how long until there are enough electric cars to need "Germany-sized" solar installations, but when they do they'll pay a lot less than Germany did.
I don't think Elon Musk would green-light the "100% solar power" line without doing the math. Again: you can argue about whether he's lying, but I can guarantee you he knew exactly the scale of what he was promising. That makes it all the more impressive, imo.
Re:lying, I'm imagining at some point they'll transition over to "we buy 100% solar power for SuperChargers", which is fine by me since it's functionally equivalent to what they're doing now.
Ok, but prob with solar is it does you no good if its not connected to anything. And if they are just putting it into the grid what is the point other than PR?
Well for one, you presumably get paid to put power back into the grid. Secondly, is there not value in putting as much power into the grid as you consume anyway?
The problem is, in the case you propose, Tesla would be creating installations in urban environments. This type of "development" kills their credibility on "green" or environmentalism, etc. Is this kind of thing better than hydropower?
Hydropower is pretty gnarly from an environmental standpoint. And I doubt the land they are using would otherwise remain undeveloped.. it is an urban area after all.
Perhaps solar in previously undeveloped areas would be better? I doubt that. Developing solar plants in undeveloped areas only to put the charging stations in urban areas (that is where the market demands them after all) hardly seems better than putting charging stations in urban areas and sticking some solar there too. What is there to be gained from not putting solar wherever you can?
Hydropower is clean and renewable. Dams are already built, etc. Everything has its tradeoffs, though. Remote solar and wind take up lost of room and are eyesores. Grid connects require large-scale duplication/new assets. But, I think we need less sprawl generally, so I find it hard to support, in particular, urban development where better use could be made of the land.
If there is anything this continent (or world, for that matter) is lacking, it is space.
That said, I think we should be plastering the land we already use with solar panels. Might as well put all those rooftops to use.
I also think there is likely a lot to see in the future of non-panel-type solar. That generally involves a much larger or smaller scope than panels though, "medium" sized doesn't work well.
If there is anything this continent (or world, for that matter) is lacking, it is space.
Have you ever looked at satellite views of the US? There are massive deserts just begging for the shade of some solar panels or mirrors. No use in heating up all that sand.
It's not so hard to move the energy out of the desert either. Just run wires, or better, relocate an aluminum smelter from the grid to out near the solar array.
> It's not so hard to move the energy out of the desert either.
It's tougher than you realise. Energy is lost when transmitting power over long distances - like from a desert to an urban area. I'm not an expert but as I understand it there are major challenges. A lot of solar installations tend to be located where the power is used (next to data centres, on people's roofs).
A lot of data centers and aluminum smelters tend to be located next to where the power is. If you build it they will come.
Considering all the infrastructure that goes into keeping a fossil or nuke plant fed and cleaned and its power output distributed, I think if a solar installation has a net payback time of similar period we ought to be willing to invest a little in the distribution as well.
Why aluminium smelters? I haven't heard this before.
> we ought to be willing to invest a little in the distribution as well.
I agree. I've read that's it's a huge challenge though, which is one of the factors holding up the development of large scale solar installations in the desert. Another challenge is the variance and relative unpredictability of power generation which means batteries are needed to smooth out the peaks and troughs to balance supply and demand.
What I would be cool with is solar on top of wall mart and home depot and costco...and the like...those are good size square footages. and the assets are already in place. wonder if the roofs would hold =D !
You'll only collect the total insolation if you use two-axis solar panel pointing. Fixed panels are less efficient. Depending on latitude, sometimes much less efficient:
Each solar power system is designed to generate more energy from the sun over the course of a year than is consumed by Tesla vehicles using the Supercharger.
1) Tesla isn't making money right now, so what's a little more money they don't have?
2) If Tesla goes bankrupt, what do they care about promises about free charging? If they don't go bankrupt, they will make it big, so what will they care about a few free charges? Practically zero-risk.
Why would it be? Once they're built out, the ongoing costs of maintenance is relatively cheap. It becomes a HUGE up-sell for their future vehicles if the free charging is only offered on the more expensive versions of the X and future cars.
From the announcement video, it seems they are charging at 370V with a maximum of 225 amps = 83.25kW. So that 30 minute figure for half a charge is pretty real. The cost for one such charge would be approximately 3$ with industrial prices for electricity. Given that you can feed solar power back into the grid at rates above or equal to what normal customers pay for their electricity, I could see them making break-even on this when discounting the initial investment (which will pay back hundred-fold in adoption rate for their cars).
Personally, I get annoyed when a company takes an existing term with a defined definition, and then decides to change the meaning.
A supercharger is a mechanically driven air compressor which forces air into an engine. For a car company to take that name and redefine it into a marketing effort, well, it's annoying. Kind of like those 'turbo' buttons that used to be on the front of a PC.
Maybe they should have called the 'original' supercharger a "mechanical air compressor" instead of supercharger since the connection between the term and the definition is pretty weak, while Tesla's supercharger is an actual charger that charges more quickly than your average charger... making it 'super.'
'air charge' is a specific term meaning the air entering the combustion chamber.
So 'supercharge' is a term for 'bigger air charge'.
However, when you deconstruct it, it is a bit silly. I dislike the addition of 'super' to things anyway, it's a very lazy way of coining a term.
Maybe we should all just adopt Kompressor like the Germans. And leave supercharge, supercharger and supercharged for the marketing folk to devalue to oblivion.
Edit : I just thought of a much better name. Who wouldn't want to connect up their Tesla to the ... wait for it..:
Warpcharger
Yeah, Warpcharger stations. Much cooler, and probably able to be trademarked as well.
"Super" means that the subject is "above" as in superstructure, superscript and superintendent. A supercharger is then a charger that's above (presumably in performance) regular chargers.
"To charge" means "to load [a carriage]", "A charge" means "a [carriage] load" -- so while the metaphor is overloaded, it actually seems to applies better to charging a battery than to forcing air into a combustion engine.
This annoyed me a bit as well. I really wish they'd chosen a unique name so people wouldn't get confused.
Just like Ducati with the "Streetfighter", using an existing name from the same industry just leads to confused customers and even more confused readers-of-articles.
This is it - the tipping point has finally arrived.
This is a killer combination of rapidly falling prices in solar PV (thank you China/Kyoto protocol/Global warming), meeting the falling prices of Li-ion batteries (thank you astonishingly successful decade of laptops/smartphones/tablets), meets a cyclic economic boom (thank you GFC), meets rising gas prices (thank you OPEC/cheap oil/peak oil), meets anti-carbon incentives (thank you IPCC), meets autonomous cars (thank you Google), meets the development of nuclear fusion (thank you ITER) all combining into one massive tailwind for the one company just on the cusp of absolutely crushing it.
It's a complete clusterfuck of fortune, falling costs, converging secondary technologies and economic forces concentrated in one company protected with monopoly pricing, akin to those found by Apple, Google, YouTube, Intel, Cisco, Microsoft, Facebook and many other tech giants.
TSLA will go 10x within the next 20 years (or get bought out before it - unlikely) as it rides these convergent waves of progress.
Please for the love of capitalism short the crap out of it and don't buy it! I need to get as much of this stock as cheap as possible over the next 2-3 years of savings :D - you'd be doing me a favour!
Full disclosure: I have a significant amount of my net worth in TSLA stock and have done so on and off for 2 years (riding cycles for fun). I used to own AAPL - until relatively recently - whereupon I transferred all holdings to Google/Tesla. I may be exiting Google within the next 6 months due to rapid appreciation.
You are smart enough to know the risks of having a significant fraction of your net worth in one asset, so I'll spare you the lecture there.
Tipping point? No, I don't think so. It's progress, and it's good news, but 30 minutes to recharge is still a LONG time compared to the two minutes a petroleum-fueled vehicle takes, and the best of those can go several multiples of the Teslas range between fuelings.
On my morning commute, it's important that fueling be quick. I have to stop at a station and fill up, something I can't do at home. However, if I were in an EV, I could fill up at home, while I slept. It'd be fully charged when I got in to go to work. If I could charge 30 minutes to half at home, charging time is nearly insignificant.
I would still love to see hydrogen cars instead. I think Honda has it right.
It turns out that, among other advantages for electric cars, they can carry more energy than hydrogen cars when you take the efficiency of transferring kinetic energy to the car into account. There was an interview with Elon Musk where he scoffed at the use of hydrogen and the use of fuel cells.
There's always battery swap-out. The problem with that is infrastructure cost, though.
Seems to me that the Supercharger stations are getting the time down to 30 minutes through parallelism. If one could bring component costs down even more, one could have more parallelism. What about 15 or 10 minute charging times? I'm going to guess that plans are in place to exploit some serious economics of scale when they start building $30,000 cars.
Once you have autonomous cars, this opens up the possibility of "battery trucks" once can rendezvous with on the highway to recharge without stopping.
I'm obviously biased - so please take everything I state with a grain of salt.
My tipping point is not a "singular moment" or "lightbulb" - but merely the slow agglomeration over the next decade of multiple convergent waves that just happen to put wind in the sails of the only company able to execute on this plan at this point in time.
Diversification is overrated. When crises happen - all correlations go to one - everything goes down simultaneously. Also my returns are cut in half :D.
Diversification doesn't work. It not only leaves your risk essentially the same in case of catastrophic market failure (see GFC/debt crisis - bonds are safe RIGHT?).
It also cuts your returns in half and brings you down along with everyone else - and gives you a false sense of security - nothing is safe - not even shorting the world (end of the world/counter party/regulatory risks).
As an investor you must think long and hard about the future/companies/investments make very few super high signal, super high impact trades/positions/companies that you know inside and out (financials/GDP winds etc).
I'd rather invest in 20 companies I know inside and out than 500 mediocre ones that I know nothing about. But that's me - most people don't know anything and they SHOULD diversify.
If you don't know anything - the best thing you could do is assume no better than random.
Local failure is obviously much more common than catastrophic failure (although the latter does have a much greater impact).
I like to think of it in terms of car crashes and catastrophes.
Companies are represented by cars - I pick good cars, with good people driving them, surrounded by a safe environment and hope they don't crash - it's how risk works.
Hurricanes destroy everyone - no matter how good the driver is - no exceptions.
The whole point of investing is to make above and beyond the S&P 500 benchmark over the long term - and that requires taking concentrated risks where one must bet on the right drivers with the right cars in awesome environments (most critical) and watching the horizon warily for distant hurricanes (debt crisis/nuclear war/WWIII/currency devaluations/governmental collapse).
I really can't do any more than that. It's a trade off obviously.
I understand local failures quite well - I rely on my ability to make decisions to mitigate that risk and the fact that I'm still young (older people should not do this).
Making a "charging station" that could take the place of an existing gas station would be huge feat of engineering.
When I go from the SF bay area down to LA, I get gas at kettleman city (because of the in-n-out :) and I go to the chevron station there. From google street view, it looks like that station can fuel 12 cars at a time. And when I'm there, there's often a line for a pump.
A gas stop takes, say, 2 minutes. A tesla charging stop takes 30 minutes. So serving the same peak flow of cars would take 15 times as many car spots: 180. Land looks cheap in that part of the central valley, so it might be feasible to have that much space. But 180 chargers, peak, each using 100 kilowatts would use 18 megawatts.
Great scott! That's a lot of power. So it looks like this is still in the range of luxury-car, low-volume stuff. I can't imagine what it would look like as a mass-market thing.
As far as mass market goes I think you're forgetting why we have gas stations in the first place. Gasoline is highly flammable and toxic so it needs to be stored properly and regulated closely. Because it's a special trip most people drive until empty and then stop by the gas station.
But with charging stations every grocery store could have them in the first few rows of parking. They could waive the charing fee if you spend X amount on food (I already get gas waivers from my grocery store). As this type of thing proliferated you wouldn't charge your battery when it was almost empty but rather be continually topping it off. Only on long trips would you consciously time things like stopping for lunch so they give you enough time to charge.
In London there are electric car chargers all over the centre in parking bays. People have them at home too. Some people just seem to use cables out of the window.
You can drive without paying the congestion charge so they are quite popular.
The interesting thing is that people will mainly be charging at home, though, and will never need to visit a charging station - the car will be topped up every morning when you leave for work. So the number of fillups needing to be done at a station should be much lower. But an interesting point otherwise! I'd guess that the marginal cost of the plugs is low enough that it's feasible, though.
But the number of people needing to fill up at this station and others just off of major freeways wont change. The people filling up/charging at these stations are in the middle of a trip and probably did charge while they were at home.
Furthermore, the range on even the Tesla Model S is half that of your typical car, so fillups are even more frequent. This could mean that highway stops have twice as many people needing to recharge.
Yeah, that's a good point. Fortunately, I think it will be fairly cheap to make a large number of plugs, except for maybe the beefed-up electric infrastructure. There aren't too many rest stops right now with an industrial-sized electric feed :-)
The Santa Fe railroad had a similar problem - how to feed an entire train of passengers in the 30 minutes it took to take on water (steam locomotives typically run out of water before running out of coal).
Their solution was to partner with a restaurant operator, supplying his restaurants with fresh produce & refrigerated meat.
If McDonalds was smart, they'd sponsor charging stations at their restaurants. Park your electric car, swipe a credit card, go get your McMeal, use the bathroom, etc.
Right, I guess I should have said, replacing a mid-long-haul gas station (like the kettleman city one) would be a substantial effort.
If this type of electric car becomes a mass-market thing, there would be less of a need for gas stations near home (as you say). But the number of cars needing fill-ups on long haul routes would be just as large, so the gas stations on those routes would have to be much larger if the occupancy time at them is that much higher.
Ah yeah, you're right in that case. I am curious to see how that will be handled, it could create some nasty demand spikes during busy times (especially around holidays). It's not a big problem to put a bunch of plugs, I imagine, but it would take some serious power hardware to handle all of those, and the electricity infrastructure in general probably isn't ready yet for that kind of localized beating. But when we need it, we'll make it work.
EDIT: Actually, even more interestingly, I wonder if this will get people to synch up their long-distance travel plans - ie everyone will plan to leave such that they're running low around lunchtime so that they can stop and eat while they're charging. This could create big traffic jams...
> But 180 chargers, peak, each using 100 kilowatts would use 18 gigawatts.
Hmm, I think you mean 18MW, not 18GW... sure, it's still a huge amount of energy, but your typical data centre can easily consume 10MW or more. And 18 megawatt-hours is equivalent to... just under 500 gallons of gasoline.
When it hits mass market, there will be charging stations at every metered parking spot. You can pay 25 cents for 15 minutes, or $1 for 15 minutes and a battery charge. Parking meters already draw power from the grid, so all they need to do is slap on a measurement tool and an electrical socket.
The only reason gas station exists is because one needs to store a great amount of gasoline in a container, but power lines are pretty much everywhere. Gas stations of tomorrow will be like the coin operated telephones of today. Most will become toxic barren shells, but few will be converted into toxic waste storage units.
Getting gas is an extraneous hassle that people in the future won't need to do anymore. Brick and mortar stores will all advertise "free charging" the same way they advertise free wifi today.
When every car on the road is electric, it will be feasible to have special "charging lanes" on the highways. In fact the whole road network could eventually be made to safely deliver charge to moving vehicles. Perhaps without the need to use the battery at all on these roads.
>>I can't imagine what it would look like as a mass-market thing.
Things are likely to change in the future. Better mileage, more space for batteries and faster charging times might mean you charge fewer number of times for more mileage.
Let's keep in mind that electric car owners "fill up" their cars at home. Unlike gas stations these charging stations are only for unusual situations. Most the people you see at gas stations aren't on 200 mile plus trips.
If these become as popular as they seem like they should, I foresee long lines at the supercharging stations. I'm sure that 1. Tesla have thought of it and 2. They will milk the positive publicity from such an occurrence, but it could still be a PITA for, eg., folks who want to get home from Vegas.
Unlike gas stations, electric charging stations can be trivially distributed anywhere there's a parking lot.
Fast-food chains, Super markets, Offices, Malls, Any parking lot!!
So if they tie up with a dine-in restaurant chain to offer 10 charging spots at every highway restaurant - BOOM - you just got recharge facility with a 3min wait [30m/10] all across the country.
Cost of this compared to setting up a gas station would be minimal - only capital cost of charging station - looks like one-time $15K or so per station.
I actually expect higher adoption to drive improvements in charging technology. Of the top of my head a naive way to make batteries charge faster is that that they could make the individual cells as smallest as possible therefore reducing the amount of time that individual cells need to charge[1]. The batteries would be made up of thousands of these cells that could then be charged in parallel.
If they can make it so that each cell can get charged in only a couple of minutes then one of the major hurdles of electric cars will be gone.
[1] I'm assuming that the smaller the cell the faster that it can be charged. Anybody knows if this is true?
One plausible explanation is photos of the actual stations are filled with lots of background clutter that just doesn't suit the mood of the presentation.
I think electric cars will only really flourish once self driving vehicles become more practical and common. That convergence, along with civilian drones, will expand and improve our options for transport immensely, while also improving efficiency dramatically. It's still a long way to go, but the technologies to make it happen exists today. It's going to be more of an infrastructure change, for example to provide specially marked routes and stopping points for self driving vehicles. The benefits of implementing this is going to take a while for people to realise, but doing so will be comparable or cheaper than current mass transit projects, while offering significantly more flexibility regarding routes and capacity. It will allow people to improve the mobility they have with their own cars now, while improving efficiency so people can live better in and around bigger cities.
For example, instead of bus routes, you can have a car come to pick you up at or near home at a scheduled time, or on demand, to take you to the train station to make a scheduled train on time. When the train arrives in the city you can have a similar car take you to the office. The cars can manage stopping to recharge by itself. The car routes can be updated and optimised based on demand or congestion, new routes can be added easier than bus routes. Software can manage your individual trips so you only have to make decisions based on time and cost. Deliveries can be done with automated cars and flying drones, and this can be adapted much quicker based on demand.
Could we charge electric vehicles while driving? Could we bury, say, some coils under the highways and have cars have a transformer on board to draw power from the road? That would remove the need for charging stations on a long-distance trips almost completely.
Drivers are already using battery swap stations in Israel and a few other test areas. Swap for a full battery takes less than 5 minutes. The cars built to work with this system are Renault and Nissan I believe. Check out the standardized batteries (drivers subscribe to a 'battery plan' so any full battery is works the same).
Battery swap technology constrains car design. The Model S, I believe, sandwiches the battery packs throughout the car to avoid one big lump of mass sitting somewhere.
While I think the battery swap idea is a good one, it has many problems, not the least of which is getting all the manufacturers to agree to a myriad of standards. And agreeing to many of those standards means delegating part of your design process.
I've been in a Better Place car here in Israel and experienced the swap, it works. Also, Shai Agassi recently completed a full cross country trip (North to South). Small country, but still.
What makes you think this is not a viable solution?
Exactly. It's about the same shape and size as New Jersey (smaller actually). I can't count the number of times I've driven across the entirety of New Jersey without a second thought because I wanted a cheeseburger.
New Jersey is about 170 miles North to South from the tips. But parent said "I've driven across New Jersey," which can be as little as 40 miles East to West depending on where you measure from.
You can build swap stations incrementally though just like they are building these supercharging stations, so I don't see what the difference is, other than swapping is quicker/better.
Quicker may be true, but "better"? Swap stations are more expensive, they constrain vehicle design, battery shape, and battery technology upgradeability. This makes the vehicle some combination of heavier, less safe, or more expensive (pick your poison).
People don't seem to realize that the limiting factor for charge rate isn't current. It's cooling. A far simpler solution would just pump coolant through the charging port so that a large off-board cooler can be used. The cells in the Leaf and Volt could be fully charged in 20 minutes with adequate cooling. Independent (though amateur) tests by RC hobbyists have demonstrated hundreds of cycles at that charge rate with little loss in capacity.
You're forgetting that in the case of Telsa's car the entire battery pack is a part of the undercarriage and hot swapping in that case is quite difficult.
The battery pack weighs 1,000 pounds so it's not as simple as picking it up and taking a new one off a shelf. Also they would have to maintain a huge inventory of unused fuel cells at all these stations, each slowly aging into uselessness.
I agree. 30 minutes is too long to charge for any practical purpose. They're going to have to improve the wait time if they're going to break out of the uber EV geek community. The Better Place battery switching model, while it may not be feasible for current models it has to be the goal for future models.
It also seems as thought there should be more partnerships involved in reaching the type of scale there going to to want to achieve. It seems like there would be a perfect opportunity to team up with Better Place to scale there infrastructure. Tesla should focus on building the best cars possible while letting Better Place handle the charging and/or battery switching infrastructure. I love the idea of Solar City getting involved as well. Those three companies are on my list of the few companies to watch in clean tech.
If it was safe and quick, I would prefer the battery swap model because as it is now, I am terrified (maybe ignorance) of getting a bum set of batteries or mis-charging them, and ending up with a $5 - $10K bill for new batteries for my car. It would seem the swap model would most likely spread the cost and maintenance to many users and leave charging to the experts.
Tesla had a 250 million dollar operating loss in 2011 and 106 million last quarter. Add 700 million of debt onto that, and... I wonder how long they can keep up this kind of expansion.
Elon Musk alone has an estimated $2B fortune, so at least five years at that burn rate? :)
Facebook's IPO bled much more money out to bankers than all Tesla has spent so far, it's not like they are doing bad. Tesla has the potential to take over a sizeable slice of the (huge) automobile industry.
OTOH, from what I heard SpaceX recently became profitable; given that they are nowhere near the end of their plans to get spaceflight cheaper, maybe he could route some money to Tesla from there.
I think its interesting to hear people constantly challenging this technology.
Fist it was it couldn't be done. An electric car? No way.
Then Telsa Motors comes out with an electric sports car. No way! Too expensive! Top Gear made a mockery of the car. Not feasible, what happens when you run out of charge?
Then Tesla Motors figures out a way to create "re-fueling" stations for their cars. No way! 30 minutes to charge my car? WAY too long! Stupid.
Whether you know it or not, each step this company takes, it's answering every one of the doubts people have about this technology. Affordable completely electric cars are a lot closer than most people think.
I notice that they have multiple stations along the 5 between SF and LA, but nothing between Gilroy and Los Angeles, which is around 350 miles. Why not a stop in Santa Maria or similar?
I suspect the problem is no where isolated enough that they won't have to worry about large numbers of local residents choosing to just go to Supercharger station rather than charging at home. As an occasional use to make people comfortable with a Tesla (long trips are possible), this is probably well worth the money. But it's unlikely to sustainable if owners choose to forgo the home charger.
Come on, 30 minutes for a charge that'll get you just 180 miles? I just checked the 2012 Honda Civic specs[0], you can fill up with 13.2 gallons in 2 or 3 minutes, and that'll get you 13.2*32 mpg combined = 422 miles. There's no way this is gonna work unless the charging process is much faster or they swap batteries instead.
Are you comparing charging stats unironically and saying it's a dealbreaker if it's not just as good as the incumbent in this category? It's really not that terrible to stop for 30 minutes after 3 hours of driving. Long road trips just went from wildly impractical to almost convenient, assuming the chargers are well distributed.
You could compare the 0-60 times of the Civic and say it's unacceptable that it takes the Civic twice as long to get to 60 mph, or that it only seats a measly 5 people, uncomfortably at that, or that it only has one trunk.
> Are you comparing charging stats unironically and saying it's a dealbreaker if it's not just as good as the incumbent in this category?
Yes, I can guarantee you that the layman doesn't give two shits about electric cars. Until it's cheaper and/or more convenient for him than gas cars, he won't switch. And until laymen switch, you won't get the economies of scale necessary for a vast charging network.
> assuming the chargers are well distributed.
That's a pretty big assumption. First of all, Musk said there are charging stations in several cities in California, but exactly how many are there in each city? Do you have to go to one particular location in each city for charging? Because that's DOA. There's no such thing as one convenient location for everyone.
And don't forget that right now all the testing is being done in California and Nevada, both of which are well known for their plentiful sunlight. But how much energy will the solar panels be able to contribute back to the grid when installed in a place like Seattle? Far less, I'm guessing.
The Tesla site shows the locations. They look to have one in each city, but its not as big of an issue as your make out. The only need to make them convenient for travelers. Locals can always charge at home. That's something you can't do with a gas-powered car.
> . Until it's cheaper and/or more convenient for him than gas cars, he won't switch.
You keep changing your argument. It's fuckload more convient to almost never have to go to the gas station, change oil, coolant, transmission fluid. Fuckload cheaper too.
Day to day it is already more convenient, because you charge mostly at home - you never have to go to the gas station in the first place. It's pretty rare that I have to drive more than 100 miles in a day, and when I do, I'm really happy to stop for half an hour here and there to stretch my legs.
One of Musk's arguments for the supercharger was that it doesn't use non-renewable sources of energy. If you're charging at home, you're doing just that, since you're relying on the power plant for energy.
Err, not necessarily... at that point, it's decoupled, and can come from any source, which can be changed at any time. And your whole argument was about convenience, but now you seem to be darting to a tangential argument.
Once the car fleet is fuel-agnostic, it becomes much easier to shift into whatever clean power source ends up working well, or whatever mix of clean and dirty works well. In terms of dirtiness, it's not hard to make the average impact of a car on the environment better... I think even pure coal might be cleaner with these things due to efficiency gains. In any case, I don't particularly care if their solar proposal ends up panning out overall - it's more or less irrelevant to the feasibility of the plan, other than for PR and making the people who implement them look good.
> If you're charging at home, you're doing just that, since you're relying on the power plant for energy.
Not necessarily. In Seattle, where solar is less effective, the electricity comes from almost entirely hydroelectric, with a little wind and a little nuclear.
The layman is the long long term goal. This is about slowly pushing down the barriers to entry to increase the net of early adopters, and the more one chips away at these barriers, the closer you are to the whole thing bursting open.
It's really not that terrible to stop for 30 minutes after 3 hours of driving.
Depends on the driver I guess. When I'm driving I want to get where I'm going. I stop only for fuel and bathroom breaks (ideally these are combined). If I'm driving more than 8 hours I might stop for a meal. Stopping for 30 minutes ever three hours is not something I'd find acceptable on a long trip.
That said, it does seem that Tesla are getting ever closer to making a practical (if not affordable) commuter electric car (for reasonably short commutes).
Get that Honda Civic then; I'm going to hold onto my Model S reservation. I have to drive more than 180 miles in a day? Oh no! I'll have to rent a car from Enterprise or Zipcar!
Fueleconomy.gov says it costs $3,550/year to fuel my 2008 Infiniti G37 (at $4.75/gal, premium), and $400/year to fuel my Model S (assuming 15K miles/year). That's a savings of over $15750 over 5 years (assuming the price of petroleum-based fuels doesn't go up, which it will).
The end of oil is near, not just because we're running out, but because we can do better.
> Fueleconomy.gov says it costs $3,550/year to fuel my 2008 Infiniti G37 (at $4.75/gal, premium), and $400/year to fuel my Model S (assuming 15K miles/year). That's a savings of over $15750 over 5 years (assuming the price of petroleum-based fuels doesn't go up, which it will).
Don't be absurd. Getting either an Infiniti or a Model S makes absolutely no sense if you're interested in saving money. The base model MSRP for a 2013 G37 is $36,900, and for the Model S it's $49,900. The MSRP for a base Civic Sedan? $15,955. This debate was never about what's the most economic option.
If we're really talking about the most economic option, perhaps living near your work and walk/bike could put your commute gas at zero and yearly down significantly.
At some point, comparing a luxury car with an cheap base brand is an apples to oranges comparison. If I didn't buy my Prius I sure as hell wouldn't have bought a Civic or Corolla... more likely a luxury vehicle.
You're demanding the convenience you get from gasoline from a rapidly developing technology that's still having tens of billions of dollars poured into it, and I'm absurd?
You're not going to get the same luxuries from electric vehicles as you've gotten from internal combustion engine vehicles, at least not in the beginning. People won't have much option though when its either an electric vehicle or $5/gallon gas.
New entrants into markets with innovative new technologies often have products that are worse off in many areas than existing companies (ie. existing gas car companies), however are vastly superior in some specific new way(s).
That is true for this product. The expectation I bet is that the technology will continue to evolve, and will over time improve to the point of overtaking the incumbents on more and more key metrics until gas cars just won't be able to compete any more. Tesla is betting on the fact that their value proposition is good enough today (or within 3-5 years) to allow them to gain enough market share in whatever vertical they're starting with (e.g. luxury every-day sport vehicles) to really cause a major disruption -- and expand from there.
I'm pretty sure cars during and before pre Henry Ford times were not very great in terms of their overall affordability, total cost of ownership and availability of fuel all around the country. You could trust your horse to drive you back home on any day more than a car. Similar to that, the IBM computers during their early days. You mobile phone is likely to have more computing power than all the computers IBM sold a few decades back, they were highly painful to use, maintain and use. Needless to say all these things had huge maintenance issues.
But these things have caught on. So have automation, productivity and so many other new things that eventually people show friction towards but later take them to be fate accompli and learn to move forward.
Electric cars, self driving cars, wearable computing(like Google glasses) well these really might look to be unfeasible at this time. But please, these are just ideas which are waiting for their time to come, with a little push they will eventually catch on.