Even if Tesla do not survive, ten years from now every new electric car will be a descendant of the Model S in all the major ways - floor-mounted battery pack, lack of physical buttons, etc.
The Model S is a revolutionary car, but I really hope the the big touch display without physical buttons doesn't become the norm. I really prefer the feedback you get from them while keeping your eyes on the road, especially for common functions like the temperature and basic stereo control.
People will disagree with me, but I have really grown to like the current iDrive system which lets me keep my looking up high while my hand sits in a comfortable position.
I don't want a touch screen OR voice controls. I want knobs and buttons.
I can use a physical control without looking. It isn't confused by wind noise if my window is down. It doesn't bother a sleeping passenger.
The only disadvantage to physical controls is mapping them to an ever-larger number of functions. The early iPods did that well with their scroll wheels and single button, but there are limits.
Then again, maybe the large number of functions is the problem, not the controls.
I'd really hate to have to have to say "increase driver side temperature by 2 degrees" when I could much more easily just turn a knob without looking, thanks to muscle memory & tactile feedback.
When driving, tactile response is a key safety feature, so you're eyes don't have to leave the road to make sure your button was pushed. However, I totally agree that the voice command is the next step, it is the only time I use Siri!
I'm a big Tesla fan, but I disagree. The only way electric cars can possibly make sense is if the batteries are swappable. The electric cars being built now are evolutionary dead ends, IMHO.
As an electric car owner, I haven't found a need for swapping batteries. Consider this: if a refueling station offered battery swapping they would also need to exhaustively test your batteries to determine that they were not abused and to determine how much credit to offer for their current capacity. How does that save much time from just using a quick-charge station?
Today, I have plenty of range to get to and from work and most activities driving a car with 1/3rd the EPA range of a Tesla Model S. Consider that you can still do long road trips simply by stopping at a quick charge station for a meal and a fillup or you can use some small part of the money you're saving on fuel to rent a car. Given how few road trips I take, I could probably take a limo every time if I wanted.
As an electric car owner, I haven't found a need for swapping batteries. Consider this: if a refueling station offered battery swapping they would also need to exhaustively test your batteries to determine that they were not abused and to determine how much credit to offer for their current capacity. How does that save much time from just using a quick-charge station?
Because the batteries wouldn't have to be tested while you wait. Like laptop batteries, they could have their own embedded controllers that would keep track of each individual unit's charge state and condition. (Actually it's almost certain that they already do.)
The analogy I like to use is swapping out propane cylinders for a gas grill. It should take less time to refuel an EV than a gasoline-powered vehicle, not more.
This is also important for power management, if Musk's prediction comes true and half of all cars sold by 2025 are indeed electric. Swappable batteries can be charged when/where the power is available, using industrial rates and infrastructure. Instead of seeing gasoline tankers driving around, you would see trucks delivering and picking up batteries from service stations.
People will understand why hardwired batteries are a bad idea as soon as half their neighborhood tries to charge their EVs every night the way we currently charge our smartphones.
Forgot to mention that I am an electric car owner as well (Roadster).
I don't really like the idea of battery swapping. It seems like a big hassle. The current Supercharger seems totally fine. I guess it remains to be seen how well it works in practice, once a lot of people have the cars, but right now things look really good.
One of the most common pieces of anti-EV rhetoric is "the infrastructure doesn't exist". This is actually FUD. The infrastructure is everywhere: we have electricity pretty much everywhere. (Consider: all these gas stations have electricity, so the penetration of electricity is a superset of the penetration of gasoline). What we don't often have is the right plug, but that is a relatively small problem.
But if you start talking about installing a widespread battery swapping paradigm, then that is a huge infrastructure problem, because you need to have stocks of all these physical things all over the place.
On the other hand, with Supercharger, you don't need that. You just need some electricity. It is much simpler.
If you wave your hand enough anything is trivial. The "some" you are talking about is 250A @ 400V (100kW) which is a trifle more than a typical gas station can readily supply (especially if you want to charge more than one at a time).
Okay, so what if a particular gas station can't supply 100kW, so what? You charge at 50kW? That is definitely less convenient, but still feasible for filling up your battery and getting you where you want to go. It's still infrastructure that works, so the anti-EV argument "there's no infrastructure and the infrastructure can never be built" is still obviously wrong. It's also still obviously wrong if you drop the charging to 25kW. etc, etc.
Besides, do you know that a typical gas station can't readily supply 100kW? How do you know? Has anyone even thought about this seriously (except Tesla)?
I am a little bit shocked by the amount of specious naysaying that is happening in this thread. This is supposed to be Hacker News, where people are motivated to really think about problems, to build solutions, etc, etc. I don't see any of that attitude in some of these replies.
I don't really understand why it matters whether gas stations have electricity and chargers...doesn't charging take hours? Who wants to sit at a gas station for hours waiting for their car to charge?
I think this "electric grid can't handle it" is another piece of anti-EV FUD that is not representative of the situation in reality.
Right now, peak electricity usage times are during the day. This is why in most urban areas electricity is cheaper at night: they want to encourage you to distribute your usage more evenly throughout the day.
The NEMA 14-50 (a.k.a. standard appliance outlet that most people plug their dryers into) is a totally fine plug for an EV. It will charge the car up fully overnight. This plug is going to deliver you, at maximum, 40 amps at 220 volts.
Electric dryers often use something like 25 amps at 220 volts (of course it varies by machine). This is not far from the 40 amps we are talking about. So this whole "grid can't handle it" pseudo-panic is sort of like worrying that everyone is going to run their dryer at the same time, times 1.5, at off-peak hours. It is just not a big deal. FUD.
The grid is not a big bucket. The local conditions matter.
Your local neighborhood transformer might be serving only 5 houses. If one or two of them decide to charge an EV every night, the transformer may not get a chance to ever cool down, like it is designed to do.
Oh, hey, this is JM from RAD. Didn't see your user name at first. :)
Re: 220V outlets, it's surprisingly hard to find the true average power consumption by a dryer, now that I just tried. I do know that the heating element in a dryer is usually rated for 5000 watts+, but you have to keep in mind that it doesn't run at a 100% duty cycle, even on high heat. (I can't find anything that talks about what the typical duty cycle on high heat is, so maybe I'll measure mine the next time I dry something.) I'm pretty sure it would more or less nuke your clothes if the dryer dissipated over 5000 watts all the time.
Point being, if an EV charger really does draw 40 amps at 220 volts, that is about twice the real power consumption of a clothes dryer. This is a non-trivial amount of juice. It would be a massive problem if half the automobile-owning households in the US started charging their cars all night long at those rates.
It's not just a matter of you not personally having any use for swappable batteries. It's a matter of electricity not being quite as trivial to generate and distribute as you suggest.
Nobody that I'm aware of, including me, is trying to spread FUD. I would gay-marry Elon Musk, if I were gay. I wish him all the success in the world. But the numbers behind his prediction simply do not work... unless he has something up his sleeve along the lines of the Better Place concept.
40 amps at 200v will completely charge a Roadster in something like 7 hours. I don't know how long for a Model S, but it is probably longer. I am only familiar with the day-in, day-out of the Roadster so I will stick to that mostly.
So the "charge the car all night (7-8 hours) scenario" only makes sense if you need to charge up the battery 100%, i.e. you were on fumes before you plugged it in, which means you drove 200-240 miles the day before. This may be true for some people but it is not going to be true for most people most of the time.
I drive from SF to Berkeley and back most work days, a 25-minute commute each way, and I like to drive it like a sports car, so I use relatively a lot of power for that length of trip. Generally I use about 20% of the Roadster's battery on such a day, so that's probably about 1.5 hours to charge in a 220V outlet. If everyone did that, you would probably want to stagger the charging times, but it is totally doable even with current setups.
I do think that there would be some increased power draw and that we would want to beef up our electricity infrastructure a little. But that is pretty different than what I see as a Republican talking point, which is something like "there is no way that the USA can support everyone plugging in their EV, it's impossible." That is not my experience as an EV driver.
When I was coming up with the dryer analogy I was just using numbers I pulled off the Internet about what people were measuring their dryer's pull at. It's possible dryers just are not very efficient, I don't know! (Though I thought the whole Energy Star thing was supposed to put pressure on that).
And this would be a problem if half the ICE car owning public went out and bought electric cars all in the same month. There will be time to upgrade the distribution grid.
Unless we invent new battery technology, that prediction won't come true. There is simply not enough easily obtainable lithium in the world for the batteries. Lithium production in 2011 was 34 kilotonnes. For 50 million cars you already need ~2500 kilotonnes. So unless we can somehow increase production 70x while keeping prices low, we're going to need something else. Not to mention that at that with the total lithium reserves, we can build just 250 million cars.
According to a 2011 study conducted at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California Berkeley, the currently estimated reserve base of lithium should not be a limiting factor for large-scale battery production for electric vehicles, as the study estimated that on the order of 1 billion 40 kWh Li-based batteries could be built with current reserves.[71] Another 2011 study by researchers from the University of Michigan and Ford Motor Company found that there are sufficient lithium resources to support global demand until 2100, including the lithium required for the potential widespread use of hybrid electric, plug-in hybrid electric and battery electric vehicles. The study estimated global lithium reserves at 39 million tons, and total demand for lithium during the 90-year period analyzed at 12–20 million tons, depending on the scenarios regarding economic growth and recycling rates.[72]
Interesting. Unfortunately the paper is behind a paywall. According to Wikipedia lithium reserves are 13 million tonnes [1], but of course their 39 million could be due to a different interpretation of "reserve". I based my calculation on a Chevy Volt, which uses 1.4kg lithium per kwh for a total of 60kg per 40kwh, perhaps other cars are more efficient in their lithium use.
If we use those figures, 39 million tonnes / 1 billion cars comes down to 39kg per car; not too far off. According to this [2], there were around 60 million cars produced in 2011. Conservatively assuming that that grows to 100 million in 2025, that's 50 million electric cars per year according to Musks prediction. At 39kg per car that is around 2 million tonnes of lithium per year. Not too far off my 2.5 million tonnes. So my point still stands that we have to increase lithium production around 70x just for cars (and consider trucks, cargo ships, motorcycles, farming vehicles etc). Perhaps we will be able to do that without increasing prices significantly, perhaps not.
Better Place has solved this. They lease out the batteries. You drop your old battery off and get a new battery in less time than it takes to fill up a gas tank. They can figure out how many miles you put on the battery pack in any number of ways (even live while you drive via 3G) and bill you on that.
You can also charge the battery on your own. I'd sign up for it even if they billed me the same for charge I supply or they supply.
That's cool for replacement, but the weight of these things is in the X00 kilos range. This is not swappable like a laptop battery. It may weigh up to a quarter ton. =/
Every existing shop and many auto enthusiasts can currently handle that without too much of a problem.
I'd see it as similar to a transmission swap, but more likely simpler.
The average person can't change a tire, or the small 40lb battery in their existing car. It's unlikely they'll try to change a full battery in their new electric vehicle.
As long as it can be replaced and upgraded to keep up with the battery tech, then that's all that's really needed.
I imagine you'd see small forklifts at service stations for that purpose. It would require a standardization effort that I don't believe is happening, though.
It would be great if the batteries were hot-swappable in a user-serviceable fashion and accessible via opening the front and rear car doors to reveal a panel at the bottom with battery bays. The batteries could be approximately the width of a hard drive with the depth of the battery being half the width of the vehicle. You would have perhaps 8 such battery bays accessible from behind each door, for 32 hot-swappable bays in total. A quick search shows that the batteries in a Tesla S weigh about 600 pounds, meaning each one would be 20 pounds; easy for just about anybody to change.
Superconductors have the ability to transfer electrical energy extremely quickly. Which is an ideal characteristic for a battery. I don't know enough about SMESes to say whether they are a good storage solution (assuming we could eventually develop a room temperature one).
They probably don't. Just as there is a critical temperature, Tc, at which superconductors stop superconducting, there is a critical current density, Ic, at which they stop superconducting. That places a limit on the amount of energy you can store in a superconducting loop. Then there is also the consideration that Ic scales as approximately 1/Tc, so high-temperature superconductors have a lower critical current density than low-temperature ones.
The "Supercharger" already works pretty well. It's the first attempt at such a thing. I would expect that maybe subsequent attempts would be even better?
So I don't understand why you are saying "the only way they can possibly make sense" is if the batteries are swappable. There is already sort of an existence proof otherwise, in California, right now.
I think he's referring to 8-year lifetime of the battery pack. Current car economics (used market, resale value, TCO) don't work as well when a few years down the road the car turns into a brick.
Neither the car nor the battery turn into a brick. That's why utilities will offer plenty of money for used batteries once the range is too low for your comfort. Selling batteries to utilities helps to offset the cost of replacement batteries.
70% range on a Leaf or a Tesla battery after eight or ten years is still very valuable for offpeak energy storage applications.
It is a very large assumption that the packs found in all cars will be the choice of utility companies. Electric car manufacturers (full EV or PHEV) cannot even agree on chargers.
To me this idea that utility companies step up is like the age old promise, the check is in the mail. Until a full life cycle plan is shown and incorporated as part of each sale its simply a sales gimmick.
Plus we haven't hit the tip of the iceberg when it comes to new regulations governing these cars. They are new and they are very PC now but laws will come along to deal with them, the first being, how do you tax them since they won't be caught at the pump? Politicians won't let that go easily. Plus we haven't seen how response crews will handle these cars in accidents. Testing is one thing but people tend to wreck cars very differently from how tests are performed.
There is also the incredible cascade effect of electric only cars. (disclosure I work for a major parts distributor) The majority of what automotive stores sell and repair shops fix simply don't exist in these cars. How many years before battery technology pushes more than your corner fuel store out? Jay Leno on his Jay Leno's Garage series recently remarked on how little his nearly hundred year old electric car needs. This will be true for the current and new generations.
Still back to your point, until I see it regulated or guaranteed in contract I don't subscribe to the idea the utilities will step up. There will vastly easier solutions for them, like taking up all those batteries that end up in government vehicles from fleets of buses to cars.
Do you have a link to utilities offering money for those batteries?
Looks like the cost of complete replacement is around $30,000 on Roadster and $50,000 on Model S (discussion here http://www.teslamotors.com/en_EU/forum/forums/replacing-mode..., the poster does assume retail pricing for batteries), so wondering what's the range of "plenty".
Naah, all electric car batteries are replaceable in the sense you are talking about. "Swappable" means you can change them out in a short period of time (10 minutes or less) in lieu of recharging. Completely different concept.
I am big electric engines for cars fan, I just thing we should use fuel cells and fill them with something very similar to gasoline just generated from wind, sun, tides, or nuclear sources.
If they can get to volume production, I think the $50-60k models, leased, could be great sellers. The really interesting thing would be to rip off Better Place's model and lease the cars at a discounted monthly payment plus a per-mile "fuel equivalence" charge. It's just accounting, but you could basically price the Model S at BMW 3-series lease rates (or even Toyota Avalon!), plus a per-mile fuel cost which was 10-20% less than gasoline. Combine that with the quality of the Model S, the environmental/status benefit (90+% of the girls I've polled would be more impressed by a Model S than a 2-3x as expensive Ferrari), and HOV lane access, and it would be great.
The Leaf, which basically sucks by comparison as a car, is essentially free in California ($200/mo lease, $2500 California incentive tax credit covers the first year, fuel, HOV lane, and toll savings vs. a less-efficient gas car pretty much cover lease payments IMO).
I'd have a Leaf as a hold-over until Teslas ship in quantity if I had a second parking space.
personally I don't need material stuff to impress one.
tesla S is impressive for the technological hipster crowd, yet it's the kind of ride you won't notice in the parking lot in a few years, and you won't fool anybody - those cars aren't exactly pussy-magnets.
I guess it depends on the country. Rare stuff sells. Depends on the type of person too. I've lived in Marbella and there's a lot of Ferraris and really expensive cars there, almost more than normal utility cars.
Now when I see a red Ferrari is like: oh nice, you've got the same car every rich guy has in the same fucking color, good for you!
I remember when Clarkson wrote about his visit to Monaco, where even the most hi-end cars are so common, that Bugatti-Lambo-Rolls owners wanted to buy on the spot the TVR Tuscan he drove by, just because nobody else had one. still, a TVR is exotic and ridiculous enough to be in demand for high-rollers. the Tesla S, while technologically cool (Fisker Karma seems more impressive IMO), doesn't fit this definition. a Tesla Roadster is probably another story.
Why are they giving away Leafs in California? I had read multiple articles about the new lower prices and went on the nissan.ca website to price one here in Canada and it's almost $700/month for a 48 month lease! What up with that?
The car prices are high ($35k or so, at which point I'd prefer to just spend the $50k on the low-end Tesla), but the leases are really cheap. I think it's a combination of tax incentives (federal and state, plus some CARB things) and corporate average fuel economy (selling some EVs makes your average better...). Also, I'm pretty sure Nissan (which has one of the best CEOs in the car industry, Carlos Ghosn) thinks EVs are the future, and wants to be an early strong competitor, just like Toyota did really well with the Prius.
The Tesla Model S is a great-looking car but, unlike some, I still don't see electric cars as being the future. Batteries are still too heavy, take too long to charge, are too expensive and require materials that in widespread use will probably become far more of a problem than fossil fuels in terms of scarcity.
Of course, there can be and no doubt will be technological innovation in this space but (IMHO) the future of personal powered transportation will still be fuel-driven.
What will change is the source of that fuel. It may be some kind of hydrogen-rich fuel (methane or ammonia) or it may be making the necessary hydrocarbons from the air and/or seawater.
Portable fuel supplies are just too convenient. The relative simplicity of the internal combustion engine (or some derivation thereof) is just too advantageous compared to even optimistic long-term alternatives.
EDIT: the amount of cognitive dissonance when it comes to electric cars is mind-boggling eg:
A: the benefits are too numerous to list
B: can you use it in an apartment?
A: no...
Or the amount of infrastructure retro-fitting that needs to happen (power to parking garages being just one). Or ignoring issues or range and recharge times. Even with swappable batteries, even if that were a thing that people would do (there are security, weight and cost issues), the recharge time is still an issue.
Power is not free. An electric vehicle still needs to get power from somewhere and that power requires all the normal transmission infrastructure.
Someone brought up what's happening in NJ but if you had an electric car you'd be even more screwed. At least now you can transport gas to people.
Seriously, out of cost, weight, range and charging time all of them need to get an order of magnitude better to even be on par with fuel-driven vehicles.
Imagine if we were the other way around. Everyone was driving electric cars and someone was trying to get us on gas.
I charge my car every night. You're telling me I now have to drive to a "gas station" every time I need to recharge? And we need to ship gas all over the country now? And gas costs _how_ much!?
And then I also have to bring it into the shop every few months to "change the oil"?
And look at the thousands of moving parts! That thing is going to start breaking down after 5 years, tops. Look at all the scheduled maintenance? Shit, replacing just the timing belt will cost me thousands!
And if I turn it on in my garage it will literally kill me and my entire family? No other product I own is nearly that dangerous.
Not really the same. You can take a dozen jerrycan of gas that will last you for a long time, and that does for the same price as the gas you'll buy at the station, which is precisely what people did before you could find gas stations every few miles.
Not so for electricity: charging and taking 10 batteries with you on a trip is much more of a hassle and quite expensive. Fuel is really the deal-breaker for the buyers who won't go with an electric car until "fuel" is available everywhere. The other points are moot until this issue is solved.
I believe these problems are already somewhat solved. The Chevy volt uses a hybrid system. Runs off electricity exclusively, with a small gas powered engine to charge the battery pack when need be. The backup engine can perform at its most efficient rate of rotation, and electric motors are so much more efficient than their combustion engine counterparts. As a Mech eng, I would be willing to bet that burning gas in a modern power-plant would be more efficient than using the fuel in a car. So much of the energy is lost in the form of heat, that lost heat could be harnessed. These problems are already addressed; it’s about what you require out of your car that should determine what type of car you need. I don't travel outside of the city. If I do I use public transit (GO tansit, live in Canada). The future will require trade-offs, there is no way that the status quo is sustainable
My guess is that the Volt is a stopgap, whereas Telsa are skating ahead of that puck. The Volt works for now for most people for most of their trips, which is awesome. However, you are still dealing with a whole host of moving parts and my guess is maintenance costs will be higher than either a pure EV or pure gas powered.
Given the rate Tesla are going, I think the plug-in hybrid (or indeed any hybrid) is going to look fairly quaint in 5-10 years.
The difference is, the money spent on gas infrastructure is already spent, paid for, and profitable. This happened a long time ago. The infrastructure to allow the same number of cars to park for 30 minutes+ to recharge has not been invested in, not been paid for, and not been profitable for decades. If it had been, your argument would make sense. As reality stands, though, you're just furthering the case as to why electric cars are fighting a losing battle.
I have to leave my car parked where? For how long?
The gasoline infrastructure is not entirely free from cost. It costs of lot of money to staff gas stations, to deliver the fuel and to maintain everything. The sites themselves are in prime locations and could be repurposed to higher value activity. The fuel tank trucks are cumbersome and dangerous, and the refineries more so.
Charging your EV at home and work is already sufficient for, I assume, the vast majority of passenger miles. While long-distance road trips are a lot less common, they are cracked by electric cars when batteries can power for 8-10 (and higher) hours per day and we can use hotel/motels/carparks to recharge. We are not there yet, but the power density curves are pointing the right direction.
Electric may be the answer in the near future. I still don't believe it is now, but I do applaud companies and individuals for helping push that innovation forward. The electric market is in a catch-22: electric powered cars are expensive, and it will only get cheaper when more people start buying into it. I see cars like the Volt having more mass-market appeal for the next decade than the Tesla. I applaud Musk in everything he does, and the Tesla is a fine brand of high-end cars. But electric is, in my world, not a viable option at this time.
Electric is great. Batteries suck. And they're not getting better fast enough. The world got used to filling a tank in 5 minutes and forgetting about it until they've run their 300-400 miles worth of fuel. I say electric is fighting a losing battle because the best arguments I see in this thread consist of "it only needs to charge overnight", "it's about on par with the cost of a gas guzzler", and "you can fill it most of the way in 30 minutes". Sure, it's progress. But good enough isn't good enough when it comes to battling an entrenched competitor. We're looking at a decade before electric is no longer a fringe thing (basically 20 years after the mass market introduction), and in between then there's no reason something like a Volt can't provide more benefit than a Tesla or a Leaf. You might only drive hundreds of miles once per year, but do you really want to shoehorn yourself into a car that makes this virtually impossible in exchange for mild relative inconvenience as opposed to no relative inconvenience?
I'd hoped that BetterPlace might have an answer to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place But considering their difficulties in the last few weeks - perhaps not them. The Battery-Switch concept is potentially sound though.
Those of us who own electric cars know that electric cars have already won. They are just too good compared to regular somewhat-junky gasoline cars. The benefits are too numerous to list.
The only problem that I have with my Roadster is that if I want to take a long road trip, there has to be a big stopover in the middle, which makes trips much longer. The Model S solves that. Therefore, EVs have won. They are here now, they are real, and they work. All that needs to happen is for the cost to come down, but there is nothing preventing that.
If you have parking at home, an EV is way better than gas or hydrogen because you never need to take your car somewhere to fuel it, ever (unless on a very long road trip). You just come home, park, and plug it in. It is hard to communicate how good this feels until you've had an EV for a few weeks and you're driving past all these gas stations and kind of laughing because you don't need them.
While I'm all for EVs and would happily change if I could afford to, this strikes me as off:
> ... if I want to take a long road trip, there has to be a big stopover in the middle, which makes trips much longer. The Model S solves that.
The Model S has a range of about 400 km (250 miles). For long highway-type trips, that's probably about 4 hours of driving. Which is not much.
It won't get you from Köln to Berlin or from Paris to Lyon or from New York to Toronto, to pick a few random examples that slightly exceed 400 km. Those are distances that people would consider "long trips", and quite reasonables ones, too.
Obviously a 400-km-range car is plenty for most people, but we can't pretend it doesn't limit our options or force us to find alternative transportation for some trips that would otherwise not be a problem with a gas-powered car.
I assume you at least partly financed the Roadster with income you earned through Braid, by the way. If so, good for you, and I was glad to contribute! :-)
It won't get you from SF to LA either, but that's why Tesla are building those 30 minute charging stations.
My guess is that Tesla license the technology out, and road stops on common long-distance corridors start offering the charging stations in their parking lots to dominate the competition, you stop at their place for lunch, and then others will have to install too to compete. Job done: superchargers everywhere.
It looks like this is already happening in San Francisco (albeit with the city bootstrapping it): there are parking garages with EV spots and those without. Given a higher EV usage, those garages are going to do better, and the others will need to install in order to win that custom.
Aren't EVs totally unusable if you live in an apartment? That was my impression when I looked into them. Like, how would I charge a car in my parking stall?
It is definitely less convenient if you don't have a garage. But as mentioned, this is starting to be addressed. Also, the Supercharger-style charging station becomes a lot like a gas station would be for a normal car.
I do think that "I don't have a garage / dedicated place to park my car" is in fact the only current anti-EV argument that has any basis in reality. But it's addressable.
Really? The only argument? How about my family lives 575 miles away from me, and even with the ideal 250 mile range of a $100k Model S I would still need to add at least an hour and a half to my already 10 hour one-way trip when I visit them a few times per year? Meanwhile my $5,000, 14-year-old Toyota might only get 20mpg, but the tank holds 350 miles of fuel and I only need to refill once (rather than thrice) during the trip, costing me literally minutes of time.
Finding a place to recharge overnight is a problem. But let's not pretend it's the only real problem. I already have enough problems charging my phone every night when I'm staying over at someone's house. Asking them to install an outlet so I can charge my car is asking a bit more than many people will stand.
>And for the couple times a year we need to take road trips, we can rent a luxury sedan with the money we've saved on fuel costs.
False.
See another discussion I'm involved in. To give you the gist: I drive a 14 year old gas guzzling truck. Let's say it broke down and I wanted to save money, so I bought an electric car. Here's the breakdown in costs-
Buying another 14 year old gas guzzling Toyota truck: $19,000 over 5 years. ($1400/yr in gas, 32 mile round trip to work, plus a one-time cost of $5000)
Renting a minivan for vacation trips: $110/day plus gas (20mpg).
High-end Model S: $108,680 over 5 years. ($100,000 plus 5 years of renting a minivan for one week)
Base Model S: $66,080 over 5 years. ($57,400 plus 5 years of renting a minivan for one week)
Nissan Leaf: $42,500 over 5 years ($35,000 plus plus electricity costs plus 5 years of minivan rental)
The fact is, if you want to save money, you can do it more efficiently with an ancient gas guzzler than you can buying a new electric car. Yeah you're saving money on fuel costs, but you're spending a lot of money on the car itself. The Leaf is built on the same platform as the Cube and the Micra, yet costs $20,000 more MSRP. Even comparing it to the truck, it would take 14 years to save enough on fuel to pay off that $20,000 you could have saved by buying the Cube or the Micra.
I highly doubt that only 1% of the population needs to drive more than 250 miles at some point once a year. We have salesmen at work where some of them drive that far every day. My mother was a home care nurse who drove that far one day a week. If the car works for you, I'm glad. It's a nice car. But don't fool yourself into trading in your old car for promises of saved money. The numbers just don't work out, even for the average American driver they're targeting.
> Even comparing it to the truck, it would take 14 years to save enough on fuel to pay off that $20,000 you could have saved by buying the Cube or the Micra.
So, given that gas prices are much more expensive in Europe (about $8.50/gallon, here in NL right now), as well as not considering 250 miles an unexceptional car distance, we might break even a lot sooner? :) :)
If you're doing prudent financial planning, you have to assume close to zero. The technology is moving very, very quickly, and there's no telling what it will look like in five years and if your present-day car can be retro-fitted to fit into it.
It's not unlikely that breakthroughs in battery technology could be retrofitted into present-day electric car. I can totally imagine that 5 years from now you take your Model S to the shop, and replace your battery with a new and improved with 3x the range. It wouldn't be cheap, but cheaper than a brand new car.
Isn't the 250 miles a max range, assuming ideal driving conditions? Also, as the car ages, will the battery range erode significantly? If its similar to consumer rechargeable battery technology, should we expect that the 250 mile range will be closer to 150 miles with "typical" driving behavior and after the car has been driven for 50K miles?
It entirely depends upon the chemistry of the automotive lithium battery, which typically use different catalysts than laptop batteries. For Lithium Manganese Oxide batteries, the prediction is 70% after eight years. That would be 175 miles range at 120,000 miles driving. There are new and better chemistries coming out like lithium NMC arriving this year that store 75% more energy per lb at a similar price. http://insideevs.com/nissan-ceo-carlos-ghosn-second-generati...
Thanks. If you read the comments on the page that you linked to, you will see a couple of Leaf customers complaining that their battery capacity is already down 15%. Hopefully the new batteries technology addresses this.
That is a problem in the hottest regions of the country and the world. Our recent climate change-related heat wave made the problem even worse. There is no active heat management in the current Nissan Leaf battery except a battery warmer for cold temperatures.
Since I live in Minnesota, I don't expect I'll venture to the Arizona or SoCal desert with my Leaf, where most of the damaged Leafs are. I also limit my charge to 80% max during the summer to lengthen the battery life. So far, I haven't had any noticeable capacity loss.
You are correct it is difficult. There is a strong push on now for new underground parking to be constructed with 240V electrical service roughed in to many of the spaces, to accommodate future charging stations.
New apartment buildings under construction that want to game the LEED system are always looking for ways to get points. Adding a charging station or two to their underground parking garage is an easy way. The trouble is, investing in an electric car you're going to keep for 4-5 years starts making less sense when it means you might be locked into your apartment for just as long.
How does the Model S solve the longer trips issue? On a road-trip I might drive 500 miles in a day. The priciest Model S gets 300 miles at 55 miles an hour. And with climate control on that is likely to be less in reality. If this trip were in cold weather (ski trips and such) the range would be SIGNIFICANTLY less.
As a comparison, my gasoline-hybrid can squeeze out over 500 miles on a tank at 55 miles an hour. And I never worry about being 'stranded' as I might with a fully-electric car.
Another issue I have with battery-based solutions is the potential lifespan of the batteries - they are warrantied only for 8-years. A new pack costs ~30k (pulled this unofficial figure from discussions in the Tesla forums).
So let's do some math. I drive a Toyota truck that goes anywhere and does everything. It gets 20mpg average (I have a ScanGauge for monitoring this). It's 14 years old, and it cost me $5000 when I bought it. So at an average daily commute for Americans of 16 miles [1] (my commute is 5 miles one direction), that would give me an average of 400 bidirectional gallons used per year (16 miles one direction times 250 working days divided by the mpg) for work use. At $3.50 for a gallon of gas, that's $1400/yr, plus a one-time cost of $5000. Once per year, I take an 8000 mile journey, assuming that's bidirectional. That's another $1400 in gas. We're now looking at $7800 the first year, and $2800 every year after that. If I have the truck for 5 years, I'm out $19,000 in total.
Now instead, I buy a Tesla Model S. It costs $100k, but electricity is free at their chargers. Now I want to make my cross country journey, so I rent a minivan at 8000 miles, I'll be gone a week to fully enjoy the resort with the wife and kids. A minivan from Enterprise is $110/day plus gas. Looking at the fuel economy of a minivan [2], looks like I can expect 20mpg. I might get more, but that's what I'll budget for. Same as my Toyota truck, I'm spending $1400 in gas once per year, plus the $770 to rent the van for a week. Which means, in total, I'm spending $100k the first year, and $2170 every year after that. So unless you can spot an error in my math, in terms of fuel cost per year the poster boy electric car only saves me ~$700/yr.
Here's the results:
Toyota truck: $19,000 over 5 years.
Electric car plus a rental one week: $108,680 over 5 years.
Maybe you want to be more reasonable and go for the base Model S: $66,080 over 5 years.
Wait, now you are comparing a luxury car to a Toyota truck. That doesn't make any sense at all, so your question "Which one makes more economic sense?" doesn't make sense.
By your logic, everyone who buys a BMW M3 or a Porsche Boxster ... or whatever ... is dumb because they should have bought a Toyota truck because it is only $19,000 over 5 years.
If I compared it to a Leaf, it still wouldn't make sense. A Leaf is $35,000 MSRP. The Leaf is built on the same platform as a Nissan Cube ($14,000) and the Nissan Micra ($17,000). I could run the same comparison between the Leaf and the Cube and come up with the same results.
Except, if I did that, it might even be worse. See, I picked the Tesla Model S for a few reasons. One being that it's the subject of the debate here on HN, and second is because the Leaf gets 100 miles in range. The Model S gets 250. The Model S is also capable of being mostly recharged in 30 minutes (for free), and while the Leaf can also be recharged in 30 minutes at one of Nissan's charging points, they are not free. You would end up paying a fuel cost for a Leaf, no matter how marginal.
I was using a Toyota truck as an example, but also noted that the rented minivan in the example cost just as much in gas. Minivans secondhand are also generally cheaper than trucks in my experience. The difference between a Model S and a Porsche is simple in my opinion: if you don't like the Porsche, the BMW is a comparable option. The Ferrari is nice at that price point as well. But you can't swap out the Model S with a comparable option. Like I noted in the first and second paragraph, the cheap competition isn't much cheaper at all, and in all honesty is a much worse value for the money.
If you're buying an electric car, it doesn't make sense to not go with the Model S. And if you can't swing the extra $30,000 for the Model S, just realize that the Leaf is ($35,000 + $100/yr in electricity + $1400/yr to rent a car) $42,500 for 5 years compared to $66,000 for the base Model S compared to $19,000 for the gas-guzzling 4x4. The cheap mainstream competition still doesn't beat a 5,000lb, 14 year old truck with a V6 engine. How many years would it take to break even on that investment? Trading in your old car for a new electric car isn't going to save you money. It just isn't. Especially if you're renting another car as well.
Okay, but ... did anyone ever say that it would save you money? I don't see that in the thread anywhere.
I certainly wouldn't make that argument for cars of today. But I see how rapidly the price is coming down, and I see what price targets Tesla is aiming for, and that is pretty interesting.
(And if you really want to compare price, it's probably a good idea to try to account for externalities. It's hard to estimate those for gas cars because so much is kept secret, but they are substantial.)
Actually, I own a Leaf and it does save me money against buying a comparable compact car like a new Sentra. His math fails to account for the full range of costs associated with a gas-powered vehicle including oil changes and engine maintenance. Also, I drive considerably more than my 17 mile one way commute, so it makes a lot of sense for me.
Congratulations on your 3,50$ per gallon. Where I live -Europe- it's about 8 us$. With these prices, the comparison between two luxury sedans -tesla S against BMW 535 or Mercedes E 320- is not that much skewed. Gas isnt getting cheaper and battery tech is better every year, so, even on financial terms, it makes some sense.
You can't compare a toyota pickup and a model S in any criteria but overall length. Acceleration, top speed, comfort... Apples and oranges.
Have a look at a ten year history for gas prices. See if you think your $3.50/gallon is going to hold. Car leases are usually between 10k and 15k miles per year for a reason. Run the numbers with 12k miles per year, $5.50 gas over 5 years. Comparison to a Tesla is, of course, ridiculous (but you knew that). Consider separating the fixed costs from the variable costs.
Oh I definitely can agree with the notion of renting a car for the edge case. Others have also suggested that families could have two cars, one electric for daily use and the other gasoline-powered for road trips or tasks that require more utility perhaps.
But my point simply was that purely electric technologies cannot satisfy all needs (yet?) and that the range capabilities of electric vehicles is not on part with fossil-fuel vehicles (which is what was seemingly claimed by the parent post). And yes, this might mean that fossil-fuel vehicles don't disappear entirely, but simply play a smaller role in our future society.
The Model S solves the issue via the ability to charge at Tesla's "supercharger" stations (much faster recharge than any other EV), and via the supercharger network that Tesla is currently building (some stations in California are currently open, and they recently presented their expansion plan for this network).
Running the air conditioning compressor creates more work for the engine, but not so with the heater--essentially it circulates the already-hot water+coolant through an additional small radiator.
So to get an electric car that affords me as much freedom as a fossil burner I /only/ need to drop $102k? Sign me up! /s Electric cars will have won when normal people can afford them. I hope that'll be soon, but it's definitely not the case right now.
Uh huh. How much did you spend on your Roadster, and how much is it going to cost to replace the battery pack when it wears out after only ten years or so?
The Roadster is definitely expensive, but now the Model S, just a few years later, is 1/2 to 2/3 the price, and is a superior car. Thus, the price is declining rapidly, and this is obvious to anyone who cares to look at actual facts.
The average car on the road is eleven years old, so even if you only keep your car for four years when you sell it some cheap bastard (like me) is going to buy it used and drive it for awhile longer. My guess is EVs are going to have quite a bit steeper depreciation curves than standard vehicles. A ten year old Leaf on its original battery pack will be essentially worthless, and you can probably work the curve backward from there.
>How much did you spend on your Roadster, and how much is it going to cost to replace the battery pack when it wears out after only ten years or so?
Is this a fact, expensive battery replacements after 10 years and all?
I really have no idea, but I took a few minutes to try and look it up.
At a glance, it looks likes replacing a Prius battery today runs about half a much today as it did 10 years ago. Folks on the Tesla forums claim that you can pre-pay for a an eventual replacement to the tune of about $12K or 11% of the price of a new Roadster. That's a bit less half of of the current Tesla battery replacement cost I've seen thrown around and in line observed reduction in price of Prius batteries.
Spending 11% of a car's new price on a such a major repair, 10 years down the road is not bad at all. In fact, in my experience that's right in line with a basic import and cheap for anything could be considering sporting or luxury.
Unless I'm way off, this doesn't seem like a big issue at all.
Folks on the Tesla forums claim that you can pre-pay for a an eventual replacement to the tune of about $12K or 11% of the price of a new Roadster.
Right. The Roadster costs so much it makes sense to replace the battery. But if you paid $30k for a car and the battery costs $12k, it's a different story. Normal people are not going to spend $100k on a car.
When I consider the $12K number is from 2010 and folks are estimating a new Model S battery could run as little as $14K...A $30K Tesla sporting a battery that will cost $3K to replace 10 years down the road doesn't seem that far off.
If those numbers are real then it works. But I don't see how the battery could possibly be $3k. Battery costs are primarily driven by materials - unless there's some breakthrough that allows the use of something cheaper than lithium, batteries for a car with a reasonable range are going to retail at a minimum of $10k.
My electric bill has increased by about $15 a month, depending on how much I drive. It is way cheaper than gas. (But the car is so expensive that you won't break even via cheaper fuel!)
I'm somewhat astonished that members of a community dedicated to building products to disrupt incumbent industries upvoted this comment to the top slot.
One way to think about this is that electric vehicles (EVs) are at the iPhone 1 stage, with the Tesla S being the first to demonstrate to a lot of people that it can all be put together in a compelling, yet expensive and not quite perfect package.
As with the first iPhone, the prescient community can see vast potential, but recognise that there are still a few issues to deal with.
Those issues are summed up as "battery energy density". Once we have battery energy density that allows us to power cars at road speeds for 10-15 hours, then we will have completely solved the riddle of the recharging station. We can still charge at work an home for shorter trips, and can charge at carparks and paid accommodation for longer ones. Luckily battery energy density is continually getting better - and is the main reason that we are seeing the emergence of the EVs we have today.
As an aside, we can probably forget about developing recharging stations as the ranges will be too long and the logistics of journey interruption poor. Let's think instead about developing products to help hotels, car-parks, businesses and households set up their own (pay accepting) charging stations. Obviously these will all use the existing electricity grid, with capacity freed up by general electricity efficiency efforts and smarter grid technology.
It's clear that the next generation of EVs will create major and overdue auto-industry disruption. It's almost as clear that the current auto manufacturers, perhaps Toyota aside, are incapable of rapid enough change.
So yes, with the Tesla S it's not clear that EVs will win. Bring it on.
> One way to think about this is that electric vehicles (EVs) are at the iPhone 1 stage, with the Tesla S being the first to demonstrate to a lot of people that it can all be put together in a compelling, yet expensive and not quite perfect package.
I think it is more accurate to compare electric vehicles to the Motorola DynaTAC phones (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_DynaTAC). They are expensive, and are extremely limited in their functionality. They are only viable for people who can throw massive amounts of money at them and have limited demands.
Like the cell phone, electric vehicles may continue to develop to the point where they can adequately replace a landline. In cell phone terms, that would be the early Nokia candybar phones.
[The iPhone is a fairly poor phone, but a great mobile internet device. If you gave me an iPhone instead of a Nokia candybar phone a decade ago, I wouldn't have cancelled my landline. Now that people use email and instant messaging for most communication, a poor quality phone isn't such a big deal.]
That's a little unfair I feel (comparing the Tesla S to the original brick mobile phones). However the point remains though that we are seeing the future, and only the wealthy can afford it for now.
The brick phones were revolutionary, but they were far from capable of displacing landlines. There were special cases where the early mobile phones were superior, just like the Teslas are superior in some ways to IC engine cars (insane acceleration, for example).
That said, the current crop of electric cars is not suitable for replacing the average daily driver. They are more expensive. No one but the manufacturer can service them. Charging stations are few and far between. The power grid is far from capable of supporting any more than a tiny population of electric vehicles.
I do hope that electric cars will become a practical replacement for petroleum cars at some time in the future. That time is not today.
It's hard for me to even enumerate how many ways this is wrong. But I'll try.
Batteries are still too heavy
Changing. Rapidly.
take too long to charge
Improving, rapidly. Much more rapidly than, say, gas mileage.
(batteries) are too expensive
Sorry to be a broken record, but this too is improving rapidly.
require materials that in widespread use will probably become far more of a problem than fossil fuels in terms of scarcity
This assumes that battery tech will remain static, and use the same materials, forever. Bad assumption, there.
Or the amount of infrastructure retro-fitting that needs to happen (power to parking garages being just one).
This is already starting to happen and will only accelerate. I'm working on a gigantic office building project which will have hundreds of charging stations in its parking area. This will be the norm, very soon. And perhaps you forgot, but building tens of thousands of gas stations all over the place wasn't easy, either...nor is maintaining them. We already have a beefy electrical infrastructure; we just have to keep working on that.
Or ignoring issues or range and recharge times.
Tesla's range is already over 250 miles; this is getting very close to that of many gas guzzlers. And again, this is rapidly improving, even though we're not working very hard on it as a society. Imagine what would happen if we tried!
Power is not free. An electric vehicle still needs to get power from somewhere and that power requires all the normal transmission infrastructure.
Yeah, and we already have that infrastructure. By the way, gas isn't free, either. Nor is it nearly as efficient as electric power can be.
Someone brought up what's happening in NJ but if you had an electric car you'd be even more screwed. At least now you can transport gas to people.
Uh, you can transport electricity to people, too. We have power lines for that.
Seriously, out of cost, weight, range and charging time all of them need to get an order of magnitude better to even be on par with fuel-driven vehicles.
Er, no. Do you know what an order of magnitude IS? Cost: we're within a factor of 2-3 of this being affordable, even if you use the very expensive Tesla as your test case. Weight: Already at parity with many cars. Range: Already discussed above; near parity with many gas vehicles. Charging time: This doesn't have to get much better at all; you can recharge at night.
> And perhaps you forgot, but building tens of thousands of gas stations all over the place wasn't easy
You're not the only one to bring this up and it confuses me why. The gas infrastructure has already been built. It's a sunk cost. EV infrastructure most certainly is not.
> Tesla's range is already over 250 miles; this is getting very close to that of many gas guzzlers.
For significantly higher capital cost, with (probably) much lower shelf life. And when the "gas guzzler" hits its range, what does it do? Spends a few minutes filling up and does it again (as opposed to recharging for 8 hours).
> Uh, you can transport electricity to people, too. We have power lines for that.
Yes, that was my point. Look at all the people in NJ/NY/CT without power.
> Er, no. Do you know what an order of magnitude IS?
Yes, but we're talking about the battery tech and the batteries are only some portion of the total cost of a vehicle.
Fair enough. You say that batteries are "too heavy"; I pointed out that they are getting steadily lighter, which is true. It's also true that they are plenty light, right now, to make the Nissan Leaf and the Tesla. To me, it's self-evident that batteries are therefore not "too heavy" to make a viable product.
Part of EV infrastructure is already built, too, and you know this. Yes, we do have to build 9 megashitloads of charging stations, over time. But we may see a model where lots of that charging occurs at home, and the consumer upgrades their own infrastructure, or the power companies offer a free or cheap charging station in return for selling lots more electricity to the customer. I don't see this as an insurmountable issue at all.
Yes, the cost is currently higher, but the obvious point is that it's coming down rapidly per unit of vehicle range. Shelf life of the Prius batteries has proven very very good so far, although that's a hybrid and not a pure electric.
Yes, power is down to an extent not seen since the 19th century. But gas deliveries are affected in a major way, too. Anecdotally, I have tons of friends telling me how hard it is to find gas.
The use case for charging at night already encompasses most drivers in most situations. And with a range of 250-300mi with one-hour recharge at free Tesla stations for longer trips...the use case is getting broader all the time.
What's the deal? Did you buy $1M of Hummer stock and lose your Charles Schwab password? This tech is clearly valid right now and getting more attractive by the year.
And it works very well: for gasoline. Hydrogen cannot be contained in a rubber hose. Ammonia will eat away copper pipes (see http://encyclopedia.airliquide.com/Encyclopedia.asp?GasID=2#... ). CNG works fine, under pressure, which requires retrofitting everything, but natural gas is a fossil fuel. Biofuels come with a whole host of other problems.
The simple fact is, whatever we use, we're going to have to rebuild stuff. There's no way to reuse the gas infrastructure for any fuel that isn't a non-oxidizing hydrophobic liquid, which rules out approximately everything. Hydrogen fueling stations aren't retrofitted gas stations: they're a totally new thing:
>However, this does not begin to replace the existing extensive gasoline fuel station infrastructure, which would cost a half trillion U.S. dollars in the United States alone.
> You're not the only one to bring this up and it confuses me why. The gas infrastructure has already been built. It's a sunk cost. EV infrastructure most certainly is not.
Back in the day countries had a huge infrastructure for horse-based transport (stables, travellers inns, places to buy food). That was also a sunk cost.
I think gas and electric are not mutually exclusive.
It's clear that today's EVs have drawbacks, but many of those drawbacks are non-issues for a lot of consumers out there already. As the technology and infrastructure improve, people will switch.
Subconsciously, most of us feel electric is the way to go. There's just something right about it, maybe because all top consumer technology in the 21st century has a battery inside. Or simply because electricity has been the force driving change in society the last 150 years.
For a long time to come we'll depend on fuel, for hybrids and traditional cars, be it a jeep in the middle of the Amazon or John Doe's, who loves the sound of his V8 Mustang in the morning.
Fast charging is faster than that, you just need special power feed, but that can even be included in every home, which is not the case for a gas station.
> Yes, that was my point. Look at all the people in NJ/NY/CT without power.
The actual problem is that the US infrastructure is in bad shape. Also by looking at the news, the places which have issues with electric power seem to also have oil delivery problems as well.
> You're not the only one to bring this up and it confuses me why. The gas infrastructure has already been built. It's a sunk cost. EV infrastructure most certainly is not.
EV infrastructure, unlike gasoline, can be piggy backed onto existing facilities - service stations, restaurants, hotels... It is much simpler to deploy and maintain - no tanks to install, no gas to deliver, no hazmat, etc. - just a connection to existing electrical infrastructure at those facilites. Adding EV charging to existing businesses also has potential to increase sales as drivers shop, eat and purchase goods etc during the wait. As EV marketshare increases, this will provide motivation to existing businesses to add EV charging capabilities on their own dime and thus stimulate the build out of such infrastructure. Tesla has finally built a practical EV that people want, which can kick start this whole process.
>> Changing. Rapidly.
> That doesn't negate my point.
Actually it does, and all of your arguments sound like:
> The gas infrastructure has already been built. [...] EV infrastructure most certainly is not.
which misses the point you're trying to make, which is (emphasis mine):
> I still don't see electric cars as being the future.
Of course things are not ready, because now is not the future.
This kind of things doesn't happen overnight. It's not like Carnot and Otto woke up a morning and everyone sold their horses and were suddenly busy building infrastructure for cars that didn't even exist.
> Given a fairly narrow use case, sure.
Here in France, more than 90% of (non-truck) traffic drives less than 2x10km per day. It is ludicrous to have people drive 160kph+-able 1'000km-ranged seven-seaters alone in a ICE car and spend 30min to drive 5km at 10kph mean. Yes I acknowledge that there exist people who do need longer range vehicles, but numbers demonstrate that many simply don't. (they could statistically almost drive a plug-in Prius in full electric all year round). (The situation is actually even more ludicrous as they're talked into buying mostly diesel cars, whose engines by design constraints completely hate being driven short distances, being started and stopped endlessly, and highly varying rpms, which results in higher fuel consumption, pollution, running costs, and failure rates).
The "running-out-of-energy" argument is for most, a classic case of psychologically biased risk assessment (similar to how people assess the terrorism risk, or planes crashing, while at the same time they smoke, drive recklessly and dry their hair in the bathtub). And you fell for it right there:
> Yes, that was my point. Look at all the people in NJ/NY/CT without power.
Seriously, how often does that happen? I live in comparatively small cities (500k, and 300k before that) and the grid went down on me like three times in twenty years, the longer being a few hours. Also, I don't know how fuel pumps work but I bet they're electric with no fallback so you could very well be unable to refuel a gas car either. And then, what? tomorrow may bring in different habits, and as the dependency on electricity grows the grid will be made more reliable in a way or another (including possible fallbacks like generators in buildings, especially those who already burn some form of fuel to heat water).
The irony is that they could actually have power were their car electric, as some electric cars are designed to be able to power demanding external devices, or even a whole house from the battery (not exactly relevant here, since we're talking about whole buildings).
So, why do they buy such cars around here? Because once a year they go on vacation to the beach for a week or three with family, luggage, dog and cat. They completely overestimate the exceptional need. And contrary to the enthusiast minority, they don't even care what car they own (the logo being a domestic one is often the main - yet untold - argument), so they might as well rent a bigger, longer ranged car for the vacation duration and run on the cheaper car otherwise. Even smarter, take the train and rent the car on arrival. And when they go at Ikea they get delivered or rent a van.
My own brother bought a huge station wagon so that he can lug around bed and fridge when he moves in. Which happens once in ten years (at best). Which is basically the lifetime of the car, or the fridge. Seriously when you move in, you just rent a damn van(which has the advantage of even being able to fit everything at once instead of going back and forth filling the comparatively small SW).
As for energy consumption, it's not even like people will be charging from empty to full every single day, at once (remember 20km per day). And it's not like every single people will move to electric cars at once. So the current network will be able to grow as people slowly migrate to other sources of energy, and we might just even be able to analyse growth and identify the better way to enhance the infrastructure.
Again, we're talking, as you mentioned, about the future. Ten years ago the Internet in your pocket was for the nerdiest of nerds, xDSL was emerging and FTTH was unthinkable. All of that came in gradually, and EV infrastructure will certainly come the same way, just not the same rate.
If we accept that battery technology is rapidly improving and will be an order of magnitude better in the future, then those points of cletus' argument are indeed invalidated - the root comment is arguing that electric cars will not be the future because (e.g.) batteries are too heavy and take too long to charge.
For internal consistency, the argument should have read "batteries will continue to be too heavy and take too long to charge".
It doesn't matter how rapidly they are changing; the original comment was saying that they are too heavy now. You can hypothesize about where they will be in 5 years, but that's uncertain and doesn't apply to cars that are available now.
>take too long to charge
> Improving, rapidly. Much more rapidly than, say, gas mileage.
Again, rate of improvement doesn't have much to do with what's available now. And even if it is improving now, where will it top out? I can fill my tank in a minute and a half at the pump; will I ever be able to fully charge a car in that amount of time?
> Sorry to be a broken record, but this too is improving rapidly.
And again, it doesn't matter how fast it's improving; what matters is whether in the end, it will wind up such that it's cheaper than fuel-powered cars.
> Tesla's range is already over 250 miles; this is getting very close to that of many gas guzzlers. And again, this is rapidly improving, even though we're not working very hard on it as a society. Imagine what would happen if we tried!
This doesn't matter to me if I need to take a 500 mile trip. Then, instead of just filling up for a minute or two at the pump, I have to wait for hours for a charge every couple hundred miles.
> Uh, you can transport electricity to people, too. We have power lines for that.
It's a lot easier to clear a road to get trucks past than it is to repair a full power grid.
> Charging time: This doesn't have to get much better at all; you can recharge at night.
No, I can't. I don't have a parking space where I live. I have to park on the street, and can't rely on being able to park in front of my house. Unless we get recharge stations installed at every parking space, an electric car will never be practical for me.
What does "the batteries are too heavy" even mean? Too heavy for what?
Tesla just released a really big car with a heavy battery that goes 265 miles on a charge (under the very strict new EPA rating; at older methods of measuring range this number would be much higher). So I ask the batteries are too heavy for what exactly?
Also, if you are paying attention, you know that Tesla has just opened to the public a number of Supercharger stations that will charge the Model S battery 50% of the way in about 20 minutes. So your complaint of "wait hours for a charge" is already solved, today, in 2012, at least if you live in California (and Tesla plans to expand the Supercharger network rapidly).
There have been anti-EV arguments for years, but the arguments keep changing, which is how you know that EVs have won. The main argument used to be that EVs would never go far enough, that people would have too much range anxiety. That has been solved. Then the argument was that the cars are too expensive. That is in the process of being solved right now, as you see from Roadster->Model S. There are other problems but they are much smaller. "I park on the street so I don't have a place to charge my car" is not very hard to solve: it is obviously just a matter of will.
However, part of the perception that EV cars are almost here is caused by people having gotten used to the blistering pace of innovation in IT. Batteries to heavy? Mwah, "wait a few years and it will be good enough".
In reality, if you look at the weight/power density curve of batteries it has been improving at a pace that 10 times slower than what happened in IT. So it may take decades more to get where we need to be. Just trying to be realistic here.
> the original comment was saying that they are too heavy now.
I beg to differ:
> The Tesla Model S is a great-looking car but, unlike some, I still don't see electric cars as being the future.
The comment is arguing that electric cars are not the future because batteries and energy delivery and what not is not ready now. Guess what, now is not the future. It would be like arguing that ICE cars were not the future in the 19th century.
The important thing is that those who believe that electric cars are viable be able to finance the enterprise. The sooner the taxpayer is no longer forced to subsidize them, the better.
Hopefully soon. Its wrong to subsidy the automobile, whether it is electric or ICE powered.
Yes, we do pay gas taxes, put I doubt they are enough. And even if they were, it makes no sense to charge the same regardless of when one travels.
Most of the road building is to accommodate rush hour traffic. It makes sense to more at that time, just as hotels charge more when demand is high.
The way roads are currently paid for winds up wasting enormous amounts of time at rush hour. Charging a price that reduces the traffic to the level that the roads can efficiently handle will save everybody a lot of time.
Of course, that issue has nothing to do with how cars are powered.
Internal combustion engines are not at all simple. Sleek animations might make it seem like that, but when you are blowing stuff up, that tends to complicate things.
In comparison, electrical motors are extremely simple and maintenance-free. All while being on a level of efficiency that just can't be reached with a combustion engine.
Burning coal to make electricity, then transmitting that electricity all over the country, wasting some of it along the way... Then using that to charge a battery, then using that to power a motor.
I'm not sure it sounds particularly efficient unless you completely ignore all the work that goes into making the electricity :/
It's more efficient than blowing it up in your engine.
ICE engines are ~15% efficient at converting energy to movement. You must also include the cost of transporting, refining and drilling for the oil (coal is cheaper to get). This should push it down to ~10% burn to road.
Main stream coal power plants are ~30-39% efficient, electric transmission lines are ~95% efficient, battery charging is ~88% efficient and electric engines are ~92% efficient. That's burn to road of ~20-30%. Even without taking into account the extra costs of doing stuff with the oil to put it into your car, and having that priced with electric - electric is still better. There's a reason we electrified our trains, and a reason that diesel trains actually use their diesel engines to run electric motors.
We're also ignoring the cost of pollution that ICE vehicles bring (it's a lot more than power plants - which because they are centralized, can economically mitigate the release of pollution). If you price that into ICE, they lose pretty badly - because pollution is not, and never should have been free.
It's a resource you use and abuse to the detriment of everyone else.
Fundamentally you must understand this and this only:
Electric vehicles are 2x as efficient as ICE vehicles and cost less on a total cost of ownership basis.
They have won so badly that only willful ignorance can stop one from avoiding such an obvious conclusion (Innovator's dilemma).
This also presumes that you have access to a reliable power grid which is not the case in places like central and subcontinental Asia, or in the aftermath of a natural disaster like Superstorm Sandy.
(despite that i totally think we should go electric. just that we should figure out ways to setup better infrastructure and disaster mitigation)
If you're on the moon, combustion based engines wouldn't work, so there is that... A freak natural disaster isn't a great reason to stay away owning an electric car. Of course there are going to be places around the world where the adoption of EVs isn't a good idea, but there are places where owning a boat is more useful than owning a car. It's about the needs of the consumer and the ability of local infrastructure to support it.
You don't have access to cheap/easy oil in those disaster situations either.
Furthermore subcontinental Asia is driving the adoption of tiny electric vehicles - China has over 130 million electric scooters (and that's from a few years ago - the numbers are going insane).
However, that's where hybrids shine - the slightly increased complexity of my Prius still makes it 2x as gas-efficient as a non-hybrid gas car.
I remeber a slashdot post a few years ago about a Prius onwer who mentioned how the evacuation of Houston during Hurricane Rita was an absolute nightmare for most car owners - the roads were packed and everyone was doing 1-2mph for 8+ hours. Many SUVs were simply abandoned on the side of the road. He ended up getting 55mpg for the week.
If I didn't own a hybrid already, a Volt would be an awesome car to get - can be electric for it's full range, but like modern diesel trains - it simply uses the gas engine as a powerplant to run it's electric motor.
Burning coal / electricity / oil to explore, drill, transport, refine, and re-transport oil ... Then using that to fill your car, so you can blow it up inside an engine.
Sounds a little less efficient than the electricity thing when you look at the full sequence. And this is even in the case where electricity comes from dirty sources; some states, like California, have an energy mix where electricity comes mostly from renewables. (And this is something that can be improved as time goes on).
Difference is though, with an internal combustion engine, the "turning fuel into power" happens inside the car.
Whereas with electric cars, it happens at a power plant... then gets sent to the car via electricity, with lots of it wasted along the way.
Personally, I don't see electric cars as solving anything. We should be looking at generating the power in the car, from things that are plentiful - water, dirt, garbage, sewage etc.
No, Gasoline is highly refined compared to oil. Diesel isn't as much. So "Turning fuel into energy" is really "Turning Oil into Fuel using chemicals and energy which in turn can be turned into energy" You still need a refinery and a very large distribution network consisting or trains, trucks, and pipelines. Your assumption of transmission energy loss is silly when you compare the required energy of transporting things like oil and water around.
If cars were really as efficient as you seem to think, then we should be replacing all of our coal burning power plants with massive stacks of car engines.
My understanding is that power loss through transmission averages at 6-7% for electricity (don't know if the Wikipedia article includes all losses happening: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#Los...), which is really not that bad. I am not an engineer, but converting oil to gasoline/diesel, distributing it and burning it at an inefficient RPM in a car might be just as bad or worse.
Here in Seattle, we don't burn coal. Ok I lied, 0.52% of our energy does actually come from coal. But 96% of it is hydro and wind: http://www.seattle.gov/light/fuelmix/
That's a fuel mix to be very proud of. Unfortunately even here, most people in the metro area live outside Seattle city limits, and right across Lake Washington in the burbs the fuel mix is 32% coal, 16% natural gas http://pse.com/aboutpse/EnergySupply/Pages/Electric-Supply.a...
yes, that's one of the things people forget about battery power - it decouples the generation of the energy from the storage. This means that you can switch from burning coal to solar, hydro or wind as an energy source with no changes at all to the car
It's actually quite a bit more efficient than an internal combustion engine, even with power line and battery losses. That's why EVs have the advantage in per-mile fuel costs. Power plants are quite a bit more efficient than the engine in your car. I don't have the numbers on hand but it's something like 40% vs 25%.
>What will change is the source of that fuel. It may be some kind of hydrogen-rich fuel (methane or ammonia) or it may be making the necessary hydrocarbons from the air and/or seawater.
There isn't any such fuel. Hydrogen is dangerous and corrosive, ammonia is hygoroscopic, hydrazine is super-toxic, boranes destroy everything, and that's the end of the story. Synthesizing hydrocarbons is highly inefficient, ditto for biofuels.
The range of hydrogen vehicles is not particularly impressive:
Electricity works because it's cheap, and only getting cheaper: powering my house already costs me less than fueling my car. The correct answer to your three-line conversation is yes, you can use it in an apartment. You need a plug in your parking garage, maybe, but that's remarkably easy: a drill and a long copper rod can deliver energy through a solid concrete wall (just an example).
Batteries aren't too heavy; ~500# is counterbalanced by the simpler engine. 300-mile range has been demonstrated with lithium-ion batteries and longer is possible with lithium-sulfur. We're not going to run out of lithium, either:
Lithium-sulfur batteries have been my bet for a while. They're light and they could be commercialized in less than a decade. Plus, the specific power is huge, which means way faster charging times.
You didn't mention methane. I hear there is lots of that stuff and some places find transportation of it so simple that they have pipes that deliver it right to people's homes... ;-)
How the heck did this ignorant post reach the top? It's as if YC readers are tied to the horse and buggy whip and refuse to do any actual reading about the state of electric cars today. I personally kicked gas over six months ago and haven't looked back.
The 600lb battery on my 2012 Nissan Leaf will weigh 350lbs and store 25% more energy in the 2013 Leaf using the new lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide cathode (NMC) battery chemistry. Not only does it weigh less than most automotive engines, but it also costs much less when the total cost of ownership is considered, including replacement at eight years. They already ARE an order of magnitude better than the car I bought and I'm not dissatisfied with my car today.
For the record, I cannot imagine a case where the 280 mile range of the Model S would not be enough. Your car does not need to go 1000 miles without stopping for awhile. If it does, catch a flight or rent a car. As I pointed out, I could afford a limo for road trips for the amount I'm saving on gas.
Also, I heard the major disaster and blackout excuse even before the hurricane happened. The problem everyone fails to consider is that it takes electricity to pump gasoline. The pumps are not siphons and they do not continue to operate without power. Electricity infrastructure is a superset of gasoline infrastructure.
You have literally no idea what you are talking about but that's OK because technology doesn't care about what you think - it just happens (cf. computer adoption, robotic automation, AI automation, cars, trains, trucks, looms, engines, planes, ships).
ICE vehicles are relatively complex and not actually cheap going forwards. We're past peak oil and emissions are now being priced (CO2 pollution is no longer free). That means the only way prices are going for ICE vehicles is up.
Electric cars on the other hand don't care what fuel source powers them, are riding the battery-cost curve down, are highly efficient, are relatively simple in operation/maintenance, cheap to run and have no emissions that need to be priced.
Hydrogen vehicles are just plain stupid from an efficiency stand point - where are you going to get the hydrogen exactly? Purifying it is too expensive - and since it's lighter than air - there is no economical source of hydrogen on earth. It'd be cheaper to fuel your car with coal.
Warren Buffett has a famous saying: Don't make statements outside your field of competence - lest you look accidentally foolish.
Maybe that would be a good thing. Most people don't know jack about economics, physics, finance, engineering, artificial intelligence, the future, technology or pretty much anything outside of their day to day job.
You'll notice that whenever someone like that does open their mouth in your field without knowing jack about it - you immediately understand that he has no idea what he is talking about.
The real problem comes when he's talking about an industry you don't know - because for all intents and purposes you won't know either.
> You can bullshit all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot bullshit all the people all the time.
This is how MBAs (or Master Bullshit Artists) can exist. If you don't know much about tech, he can say pretty much whatever he wants and you will have no idea as to whether he is telling the truth unless you yourself have knowledge of the relevant area.
> Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know.
-- Tao Te Ching
Remember that the next time you are listening to a discussion of a complex field - where none of the participants have degrees, industry experience or in depth on the ground knowledge of said fields. Bullshit is everywhere.
I have my own philosophy for information processing. After thinking about it, it boils down to these 5 steps.
1. Consume liberally.
2. Process rigorously.
3. Store cautiously.
4. Modify frequently.
5. Express freely.
Step 5 feeds back into Step 1, and is the step that puts me at odds with Buffett's statement. I think it is an important one though, even if the expressed ideas are incorrect or incomplete, because it keeps the information cycle flowing. Bullshit of some form will always exist until everyone is an omniscient deity and all truth in the Universe is known.
To me, the much more worrisome issue is the lack of emphasis on Steps 2, 3, 4: asking questions, questioning answers, answering questions. Encouraging people to try Steps 2, 3, and 4 is a more widely beneficial solution than telling them to just avoid Step 5 unless they are God.
"Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know."
...
Remember that the next time you are listening to a discussion of complex field - where none of the participants have degrees, industry experience or in depth on the ground knowledge of said fields.
If those who know do not speak, how could we ever listen to any other type of discussion?
It's a heuristic not a law. Use it to protect yourself from the adverse selection of stated data in complex fields from highly incentivised agents (including me).
I get it. And like most cute little sayings designed to make the speaker sound like they're dispensing sage advice, it's almost worthless as a heuristic. It tells you virtually nothing about the credibility of the person speaking, or the strength of their position.
> Hydrogen vehicles are just plain stupid from an efficiency stand point - where are you going to get the hydrogen exactly? Purifying it is too expensive - and since it's lighter than air - there is no economical source of hydrogen on earth. It'd be cheaper to fuel your car with coal.
No, it is expensive _today_. Which is different from saying it would be expensive at scale.
> According to former U.S. Department of Energy official Joseph Romm, "A hydrogen car is one of the least efficient, most expensive ways to reduce greenhouse gases." Asked when hydrogen cars will be broadly available, Romm replied: "Not in our lifetime, and very possibly never." The Los Angeles Times wrote, in February 2009, "Hydrogen fuel-cell technology won't work in cars. ... Any way you look at it, hydrogen is a lousy way to move cars." A 2007 article in Technology Review stated, "In the context of the overall energy economy, a car like the BMW Hydrogen 7 would probably produce far more carbon dioxide emissions than gasoline-powered cars available today. And changing this calculation would take multiple breakthroughs – which study after study has predicted will take decades, if they arrive at all. In fact, the Hydrogen 7 and its hydrogen-fuel-cell cousins are, in many ways, simply flashy distractions produced by automakers who should be taking stronger immediate action to reduce the greenhouse-gas emissions of their cars."
The Wall Street Journal reported in 2008 that "Top executives from General Motors Corp. and Toyota Motor Corp. Tuesday expressed doubts about the viability of hydrogen fuel cells for mass-market production in the near term and suggested their companies are now betting that electric cars will prove to be a better way to reduce fuel consumption and cut tailpipe emissions on a large scale." The Economist magazine, in September 2008, quoted Robert Zubrin, the author of Energy Victory, as saying: "Hydrogen is 'just about the worst possible vehicle fuel'". The magazine noted the withdrawal of California from earlier goals: "In March [2008] the California Air Resources Board, an agency of California's state government and a bellwether for state governments across America, changed its requirement for the number of zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) to be built and sold in California between 2012 and 2014. The revised mandate allows manufacturers to comply with the rules by building more battery-electric cars instead of fuel-cell vehicles." The magazine also noted that most hydrogen is produced through steam reformation, which creates at least as much emission of carbon per mile as some of today's gasoline cars. On the other hand, if the hydrogen could be produced using renewable energy, "it would surely be easier simply to use this energy to charge the batteries of all-electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles."
The Washington Post asked in November 2009, "But why would you want to store energy in the form of hydrogen and then use that hydrogen to produce electricity for a motor, when electrical energy is already waiting to be sucked out of sockets all over America and stored in auto batteries"? The paper concluded that commercializing hydrogen cars is "stupendously difficult and probably pointless. That's why, for the foreseeable future, the hydrogen car will remain a tailpipe dream". A December 2009 study at UC Davis, published in the Journal of Power Sources, found that, over their lifetimes, hydrogen vehicles will emit more carbon than gasoline vehicles. In July 2011, the Chairman and CEO of General Motors, Daniel Akerson, stated that while the cost of hydrogen fuel cell cars is decreasing: "The car is still too expensive and probably won't be practical until the 2020-plus period, I don't know." GM's Vauxhall Motors spokesman Bill Parfitt expects the HydroGen4 in 2016.
The Obama Administration sought to reduce funding for the development of fuel cell vehicles, concluding that other vehicle technologies will lead to quicker reduction in emissions in a shorter time. Steven Chu, the US Secretary of Energy, stated in 2009 that hydrogen vehicles "will not be practical over the next 10 to 20 years". In 2012, however, Chu stated that he sees fuel cell cars as more economically feasible as natural gas prices have fallen and hydrogen reforming technologies have improved.
I'm glad you are skilled at being snarky and rude, but it has no place here on Hacker News (or really anywhere).
Now onto your post:
Writing off something as DOA because of current technologies is not a good argument at all. People made similar arguments about electric cars just a few years back (as shown in 'Who Killed the Electric Car'). A long time ago, no one ever thought computing would be cheap enough to be inside consumers' homes. There is always the possibility of a break-through technology, of a reduction in cost, increase in efficiency, etc.
The quote above cherry-picks some statements in 2008 regarding GM and Toyota's views at the time on fuel-cell vehicles. However, there is a long list of companies who have publicly talked about their investment (and upcoming production vehicles as well) in the fuel-cell space just this year (2012!). A quick search through fuel-cell news this year brought up the following: Honda, Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz aka Daimler, Audi aka VW, Toyota, GM, BMW. There are probably others as well, but that already covers the vast majority of vehicle manufacturers.
Secretary of Energy and Nobel Laureate Steven Chu reversed his view on fuel-cell cars and noted recently (mentioned towards the end of your quoted text as well) that there may be a higher feasibility for fuel-cell-based vehicles now.
There is ample proof that fuel-cells deserve more attention and research before closing the discussion. It is worth investigating this space if only to have alternatives - electric vehicles have some issues (range, cold weather performance, environmental impact of producing batteries) that perhaps other technologies could address.
And to be clear, I'm not being rude, I'm merely stating the facts.
I would do the same if you were racist or sexist - so don't feel too special. Truth is not snark unless it disagrees with your view of the world - it's merely fact vs. fiction.
I don't deal in fiction - facts alone are wanted in life.
> Portable fuel supplies are just too convenient. The relative simplicity of the internal combustion engine (or some derivation thereof) is just too advantageous compared to even optimistic long-term alternatives.
We've spent way too long ignoring the externalities of our fossil-fuel energy supplies. Besides, moving to electric is a great common platform for future energy sources. It makes a whole lot of sense, for example, separating the power plant (ie, gas engine vs. remote nuke plant charging your batteries) from the propulsion mechanism (motors).
Couldn't disagree more. What's more portable than a solar-powered charging station? Solar energy is getting better and better - i.e. producing more KwH per unit of time of sunlight. That will likely continue - as most technologies tend to do.
Let's assume for a minute that Tesla survives the next few months and is able to ramp up production and deliver vehicles to it's 13,000 clients that it has received deposits for, it is mind-boggling how significant that impact will be on costs of everything.
The costs of production of each car, each battery used in each car, each car part, etc. will all fall. The cost of production of solar panels used at the Tesla Superchargers around the country, will fall.
I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla starts selling franchises on the superchargers - say 7/11, etc.
At some point in the next decade, just from Tesla alone - again, assuming they survive and continue on the current trajectory - you can reasonably assume that you will be able to travel much cheaper (if not free) than current gasoline. Not to mention that they will likely start selling Solar powered kits for home charging.
The question about an electric car performing in a flood/water is similar to the question of a combustion engine performing in a flood/water. They both will likely have trouble - although, I would be more willing to bet that the Tesla design could handle it better.
Everything you are seeing now is just the tip of the iceberg. This is just the model T of EVs. With the Model S, the EV is finally coming of age. The future looks bright, and I am excited.
If anyone can bring that future forward, I would stack my chips on Elon Musk.
I would disagree. I think the personal commuter vehicle will move to an electric power system if Tesla (or their competition) manages to scale down price and ramp up production. I think heavy work and utility vehicles, however, will remain fuel powered.
I, for one, am happy that we finally have a choice other than gasoline or diesel. Given enough money I'd love for my family to have both an electric and gasoline (or diesel) vehicle.
I think heavy vehicles are actually more likely to switch - the torque characteristics of electric motors are generally a lot better. I may be missing something important there, though.
> Power is not free. An electric vehicle still needs to get power from somewhere and that power requires all the normal transmission infrastructure.
My understanding is that Tesla's new SuperCharger stations are solar based, charging a a local battery that's used to supply customer Teslas, then feeding any excess back into the grid, making it a "negative carbon footprint" source.
>It may be some kind of hydrogen-rich fuel (methane or ammonia)...
Unlikely to be ammonia. Ammonia is dangerous in the kind of concentrations that would make it useful for fuel. When ammonia was used in refrigeration whole families would occasionally die when their refrigerator sprang a leak.
My Segway LiFeMgPO4 (mfg by Valence) batteries are five years old with 7700 miles. They provide about 90% of the range they did when new. Your "year or 2" is well taken, but suggests cheaper (e.g. some Chinese knock-offs) cells or systems that aren't very smart about preserving battery efficacy. Long life is possible with appropriate care.
When I'm driving 600 miles, I usually stop for lunch.
In the UK, all you would need to immediately make most long distance journeys viable is charging bays at about 5 or 6 existing strategically chosen service stations on trunk routes[1]. Remember, you can recharge fully in less than an hour.
Supplying power to charging points is not going to be a big deal. 85kWh battery charging in 1 hour will draw 1.4kW, less than half the maximum for a standard UK domestic plug, in fact less than a plug-in electric heater[2]. So I can also fully recharge in an hour at anyones house, just by running an extension lead out the window at a push. And, it's only going to cost me in the order of £10 to recharge at day rate electricity prices (about £5 on night rate). My current car does about 650 miles on a full tank of diesel driving at 70mph but this costs about £80 and it's much less efficient for city driving due to engine idling and no regenerative braking.
OK so the tesla costs about £46k($70k) and I can't afford that, but that's around what you'd pay for mid to high range BMW estate car. There are enough of these around to make me think there is a seriously large market for this car in Europe, easily enough to jump start the economies of scale in manufacturing needed to drive down the price for lower end models.
EV's certainly haven't already won, but I do think there are many cases where they're (almost) perfect.
For the person/business who doesn't drive far and can plug it in at home/work, they've now saved a detour to the petrol station. I'd love that. I suspect many businesses that have delivery cars within a city could make that work, assuming all the other costs lined up.
I think making batteries portable is very possible, but it'll take a generation or three to get that right, assuming the above market segments are saturated and Tesla sales are limited by this issue.
What remains a problem for me are the lifetime of batteries, and the need to drive outside of coverage areas. I like to drive cars for a while rather than replace them often, so don't like the idea of replacing a large part of the cost. And I don't want to worry about charging stations when going on holiday. But again, for a city-based business that replaces cars more quickly than the batteries would last, those issues might not be relevant.
One strong driver for innovation is that battery technology would become important to (at least) both the IT and auto industries. Research and innovation would accelerate and be useful to both industries via cross-pollination.
With some reasonably cost effective (compared to the cost of a car) installation, electric, fuel cell, and CNG vehicles can have their "fuel" delivered right to your home in a very cost effective manner, allowing you to refuel overnight. This is a distinct advantage over gasoline & diesel that goes a long way to mitigating, and for some people completely obliterating, the disadvantage of slow "refueling" times.
As EVs become more popular and the batteries become smaller and lighter, I can see a market for a 'battery exhange' which could be located in existing gas stations ... this would negate the problems with range and recharge ... as usual it would only appear when they become more popular.
I agree with the statement that electric cars are not the future, but for a slightly different set of reasons.
My MSc thesis / project was studying future engines and fuels - long story short:
- IC engines have efficiencies of anywhere from 70% to 5%; depending on a huge range of factors and types (rotax at 3000rpm on diesel vs v12 carb at 8000rpm on 98-ron, outside temp and pressure etc).
- Over 100 years of research has gone in to them.
- Almost the same time has been spent on building up our infrastructure around the production of fuel for IC engines.
- They can run on anything from ethanol to vegetable oil to human waste (after a certain amount of refining of course).
- Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. Not to mention the lightest. It just so happens to be incredibly flammable/volatile too.
My solution? Replace petrol with Hydrogen for internal combustion - much alike the conversions we already do for LPG.
I spent roughly half a year on the theory behind it, and then another couple of months actually in the lab with an old FI 500cc motorcycle parallel twin engine (they're tough as hell). I converted it to LPG, replaced all the tubings, modified the injectors and started pumping in various blends of fuel (5% ethanol, 80% 91-Ron, 10% LPG, 5% Hydrogen etc). On some blends it ran smoother, on others there was horrible knocking, one some it just kept cutting out.
Unfortunately I was only allocated a year and never got a chance to finish - the amount of trial and error involved day in day out was gruelling. Not to mention at least once a week I'd have to rebuild the whole engine.
The future for me isn't electric cars, not at all. They'll hit the same constraints of raw materials that you mention, and it's wether they hit that constraint just as the technology is getting to a point where mass adaption is possible. Not to mention the charge time, the life cycle of a battery etc etc. It is hydrogen powered cars - wether that would be fuel cells or IC engines I don't know, but I'm leaning towards IC engines.
A plastic bucket of gas contains more hydrogen than a bucket of liquid hydrogen, and if you put a lid on it the gas will happily stay in the bucket, whereas for the hydrogen you need a pressurized corrosive-resistant container.
Hydrogen is not the future, because it's incredibly difficult to handle, we don't have the infrastructure for it (unlike gas and electricity), and the energy density of hydrogen is really bad compared to gas and batteries.
The engine is a part of the puzzle, but infrastructure is a much larger piece that has to be solved in a reasonable way.
Actually - Hydrogen storage isn't that much of a step above the precautions already needed for LPG; which is now incredibly popular in developing countries. Shanghai, if I remember correctly, made it illegal in 2000 or 2001 to sell petrol scooters in the city - they all run on LPG.
Regarding energy density - definitely agree, my own research showed me a 2 fold increase in consumption compared to LPG, which in turn increases consumption by 15% over regular petrol (note that these were estimates based on my data).
The lab had a "Hydrogen maker" - obviously it ran off electricity and in about 6 hours provided roughly 500 milliliters of compressed hydrogen (kept at 350 bar if I remember correctly) literally from air.
My concept was to be able to have a clean water tank (pure H2O) and electrolysis providing the Hydrogen to run the engine, and continue on in a closed loop; literally a car running on water. Obviously energy transfer, efficiencies etc make this almost impossible - but one can dream.
But why would you want a car that takes electricity and charges up an internal hydrogen fuel tank, then uses that to fuel a combustion engine, when you might as well have an electric car where you fill up the battery, then use that to power an electric engine.
The fundamentals of a car don't change. You need to store energy in the car somehow, and you need to convert that energy into movement somehow.
The benefits of a regular car is that the "store energy in car" part is very easy. You just fill it up at the gas station. The benefits of an electric car is that "convert to movement" is very easy, because electrical engines are very simple.
I completely understand that if you have a fueled up hydrogen-powered vehice, it's awesome - it runs on water!!! - but what do you need to do to get there? And how much energy is lost in conversions along the way? It simply doesn't solve any problems in a better way.
I was given a 2001/2002 Honda CB500 twin (I believe it had over 80,000 miles on it - really worn piston and chamber; hence "old" to me). The carb was removed but the top had LPG injectors on the side and I was feeding it oxygen rich air (this was one of the controls set on 30% oxygen at 300 kelvins).
How's gasoline working out now in New Jersey? Not well.
There is currently a massive amount of land and a massive amount of infrastructure (thousands and thousands of tankers, for one) devoted to making gasoline available on every corner, nearly worldwide. If a similar amount of land and infrastructure were devoted to, say, swappable electric batteries, electric cars would have no problems in the "long trip" department.
How can we get there from here? One easy way would be for the government to mandate every gasoline station to include one alternative refueling station - station owner's choice what that might be, but you have to have one. Bootstrap using the current gasoline network.
But electric cars are not just about batteries, they need a whole new kind of electric and mechanism. Although it is not so convent to recharge today, when other kind batteries get mature(like Fuel Cell Battery), nearly all Tesla develop today can be used.
There's no way a car running on a new, alternative fuel source (e.g. methane or ammonia) is anywhere remotely closer to commercial, viable reality than electric cars. It's a hard problem to crack, but we're close. Anything else is 20 years out at least.
I've owned an electric car for about two years now. The article missed a few points:
1. The regenerative braking means you do not need to replace your brakes nearly as often. (Tires are a different story.)
2. There are far fewer moving parts than a normal car. This decreases the amount of maintenance you need to do.
3. Since there are no moving parts, it's less damaging to the car when drive it hard. Accelerating quickly with non-electric sports cars wears out very expensive components very quickly. With an electric car, you can get that 0-60 performance every single time you accelerate without wearing anything out. (Except the tires.)
When you're comparing the annual fuel bill to the extra cost of the Tesla, don't forget that you are buying a premium sports car. Something like a BMW M5 gets 14/20 MPG, and expects that you feed it premium fuel.
Interesting observation, though I think you're missing a few points in your analysis:
1. Engine braking + looking ahead to see when I need to lift = I seldom need to replace brakes. And my driving is quite spirited. (I go through brakes far slower than does my wife, who doesn't drive with as much zest, but accelerates towards red lights, etc.)
2. Yeah. It'd be nice to not have to worry about oil changes. But besides that, good modern drivetrains are incredibly reliable.
3. Not if it's engineered well. There are sports cars that can be driven hard for the better part of a decade with nothing but oil, filter, and tire changes. (This is from experience.) Sure, there are plenty of lousy sports cars out there, but the causes of their poor reliability are more rooted in lousy engineering than in their having internal combustion engines.
Good for Tesla. I have seen and sat in, the Model S at their showroom in the Park Meadows Mall in Denver (well, south of Denver). It is an impressive looking car and everything just feels right. I have not driven it, however.
It was huge! I didn't pair my phone to it, but all the features were very cleanly laid out (you control many things, from music, web, to climate control , fan speed, etc. from it).
In trying to imagine what it would be like to use while driving, I can see that it would work just fine.
Tesla is actually the perfect partner for google's robocars, as the other big manufacturers are bound to lose from declining number of autos, tesla could in fact gain.
Tesla is still a niche luxury car, and I still think they will not remain in business in their current form. Several top-name brands are hot on their heels which will put a lot of pressure in their customer acquisition prospects.
As for the Automobile endorsement, I don't like how they are misleading consumers with their data. The test vs. M5 was designed to take account Tesla's sweet spot of performance, "...drag race to 100 mph with a 560-hp BMW M5". At 0-60 M5 will beat Tesla, and Telsa hits the top speed 130 mph and M5 is limited at 155. So it's really around 100-120 mph where Tesla has the edge. This doesn't even include racing them on a track to include handling aspect of a car. I would have preferred the article stating something like:
in one aspect, Tesla is even faster than the BMW M5, the drag race to 100 mph.
In general I'm seeing a downtrend among publications when it comes to educating consumers, especially educating them on how to think about data. This will have a long-term consequence on how consumers can be duped by faulty advertising, especially with political ads.
The M5 may beat the Tesla at 0-60 on paper (3.7 seconds vs 3.9), but in practice the Tesla will beat the M5.
A 0-60 is measured from the time the car starts to move. If you measure from when the accelerator is depressed, the Tesla gains a huge advantage and will beat the M5.
Now unless there's some tricks in the video, it's quite obvious that the M5 does much better at the latter half of the drag than the first half. So if a Tesla can beat an M5 at 0-100, it will destroy it at 0-60.
This is very strange and foreign reasoning to me. I competitively raced cars in an amateur series.
You are claiming that the Tesla's superior throttle response makes it faster 0-60. The car needs to move the weight, so measuring it from when it starts moving to when it hits the desired speed seems like a perfectly reasonable metric.
Throttle response needs to be measured separately.
The M5 comparison is more than enough to get an idea for the car's capabilities. I've never driven a Model S. I've driven several cars in the area of the M5. If the Model S is in that class, it's a beast!
When you're racing, you rev your engine before the light turns green and pop the clutch when it turns green.
You don't do that when you're not racing, because it's hard on clutches, and the vast majority of daily drivers are automatics.
When you're racing an electric car, you mash the accelerator when the light turns green, the same way you start the car moving when you're normally driving. So you get race-track start feeling every time you drive your car.
Only electric vehicles start at 0 RPM. Normal combustion engines idle under 1,000 RPM and the M5 has a fairly flat torque curve for a naturally aspirated car with somewhere around 260lbs at idle. That's very good and about 50% of its peak torque.
The M5s also have SMG which is a computer controlled manual transmission. No manually operated clutch. Even has a launch mode if you want the computer to control wheel spin for you so you get the best possible launch.
Throttle response is still the wrong metric to use here. And is a bit of a red herring in the discussion.
I'm not a fan of the SMG myself (or equivalents from other manufacturers) nor is anyone else I know. But it's not really because of any real performance metric. SMG is far better at changing gears than any of us mortals could accomplish. But it's just not fun.
If you didn't like yours for the same reason I don't know if you'd like the new iterations. You're still not doing the shifting yourself.
ps. Your project looks interesting and I signed up for the mailing list. The success page said an email had been sent but I haven't received anything. Not sure if there's a long delay or it's a bug.
There's something very odd about that video. It looks like the M5 is driven off the line from tickover which is not how you would launch it in practice. C.f. http://youtu.be/E-xVVPO8L8s
Yes, Tesla is still a niche luxury car. But in 2007 the iPhone was still a niche luxury phone.
Despite clearly being far superior to competitors, the iPhone was often dismissed because of it's price tag and small market share. Here's what Steve Ballmer had to say in 2007: "Would I trade 96% of the market for 4% of the market? (Laughter.) I want to have products that appeal to everybody. Now we'll get a chance to go through this again in phones and music players. There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get." [1] (In my opinion this quote is Exhibit A in the case for firing Steve "No Chance" Ballmer).
Tesla 2012 seems to be Apple 2007. Other motor industry players should be very worried.
the point is to give an example how fast the Tesla really is, and it doesnt matter if its only faster in one area than a BMW M5, but the fact that it is even able to keep up with the pinnacle of pertrol performance sedans is very impressive!
The title of this submission is misleading because when you say "Car of the Year" you think either Motor Trend or Car & Driver. Automobile Magazine is a distant, distant third place in prestige and respect; I didn't even know that they did an annual award.
One of the things that I really, really like about electric vehicles, is that, with a widespread distribution we are also getting a well-distributed accessible reservoir of electric energy!
When cars were introduced gasoline was cheap, today that is very different.
Electricity today seems to be cheap, but how will that be in 100 years ? In Germany i already pay twice what people in the US pay for electricity (about $0.28 per kwH) and its only getting more expensive.
Of course, gasoline is a fossil fuel which will run out some time, but dont forget that most of our electricity is still generated by the same fuels (coal!) and with rapidly rising electricity usage i dont see a complete fossile-fuel free electricity infrastructure anywhere near. Even if thats possible with lots of wind/solar/whatever power, i highly doubt its going to be cheaper as we already pay a premium on "green-energy" today, governments move away from nuclear power etc.
Relative to battery-powered fully-electric vehicles, some advantages are:
- Quick re-fueling (like with a gasoline vehicle)
- No loss of range in cold weather (and seems like earlier freezing issues have been addressed)
- No deterioration of a battery's performance over time
I would guess a mix of the positive jobs report and short covering from margin calls is at fault. Right-leaning investors have seemed to want the company to fail for months, but Tesla is looking resilient with their good backlog and a strong economy. They're paying back their DOE loan early.
>Right-leaning investors have seemed to want the company to fail for months, but Tesla is looking resilient with their good backlog and a strong economy. They're paying back their DOE loan early.
Seriously? You think people are prepared to lose money to make a political point?
Erik answered right. It's not to make a political point. It's their entire worldview. The problem is just insular thinking within that political movement that electric cars are toys that are doomed to fail. Also, A123 and Ener1 battery makers failed, so they refuse to see that some companies are succeeding. The trouble is that they "eat their own dog food."
Even Mitt Romney claims to believe it, but Texas Governor Rick Perry drives a Volt. When I mention that Volts are outselling the original Prius by over 2-to-1, conservatives argue that it's purely government buyers who are forced to buy them by President Obama.
Try explaining to Romney backers that the backlog on the Tesla Model S is in the billions and that their candidate is wrong about the company.
You can only "short" a stock by borrowing the shares using margin. (Put options are another way, but that is actually a side bet, not the same as short selling.)
If you exceed the margin requirements because the stock price rises i.e. you owe more than you have capital and credit on hand, your brokerage may force you to "cover" or buy the underlying stock at the current market price. They do this to "call in" your debt to them. This is referred to as a "margin call."
When a lot of short margin calls happen all at once, this is called a "short squeeze" because it squeezes more short sellers into covering by buying the stock at the current market price, which in turn causes the price to rise and squeeze other investors.
In the case of Tesla, the stock is not very liquid. At the current volume, it would take thirty days for all short investors to find enough shares to cover their debts. This means a short squeeze can result in dramatic hikes in the stock price and even small hikes in the price can amplify short seller losses.
these are the world's most recognized awards for production cars, so they are the ones that could affect the stock price, if any. they are not a single national magazine's editors recognition.
PS: Err it looked like ALL the editors of the magazine had only good things to say about the car. I digress though seeing as to how it's a popularity contest in any case.
That's a pretty sexy car, I'd take one in a second if I had $60k+ to drop, and I'm not even in the market for ANY car (bike commuting ftw). That said, I'm holding out for a Model X. The falcon wing doors are just SO badass.
They need a lot more dealerships. Look at the map of their dealers and there's a huge hole in the middle of the country. A couple in Chicago, one in Denver, and one in Houston. That's it. If you live in say Tennessee you're looking at close to a 10 hour drive to even see one.
Tesla's strategy for retail is designed by George Blankenship, who created Apple's retail strategy. As a result, you should expect a similar approach: Stores built out near major population centers first until you have 80-90% of the country within a 100-50 mile range of a Tesla location.
remember, tesla is not actually selling cars inside their "dealerships". customers still have to do this themselves on the tesla homepage - and even then it's just a reservation. source from a previous hacker news thread: http://autos.yahoo.com/blogs/motoramic/tesla-plans-short-cir...
This is good news considering I've been hearing Tesla as a company has been having trouble.
Besides it being an EV, what really appeals to me is the maintenance plan. 600$/year covers everything. Having a car hit the 100k mark and having everything break down unless you replace it entirely is such a pain and is expensive.
Wow, I hate that top navigation bar following me everywhere. I'm trying to read your article not navigate your site! If I want to change pages, I know where to go, back to the top.
I thought so, but when I got to see one 'in action' its a lot less of an issue. In terms of surface area the intrument panel on most cars is about equivalent, its just shaped into a long dashboardy kind of thing.
I worry about glass shards in a side collision though.
Valuable innovation doesn't need to be on life support. Technologies that can only exist with subsidies destroy capital and jobs.
I'm all for dealing with problems like pollution, but a tax on the polluters is the way to go. The federal government should not be picking replacements and throwing money at them.
If electric vehicles cannot yet compete with gasoline vehicles that are taxed to pay for their pollution, then its too early for them.
