Test Driving the Tesla Roadster 665
stacybro writes "Wired has an article about the Tesla Roadster. It is similar to other electric cars that we have seen in that the electric engine's serious torque will allow it to do 0-60mph in about 3 seconds. Part of what is different about this is that they are using over 6,831 laptop-type lithium-ion batteries. They are claiming the range is about 250 miles. As the battery tech for laptops improves, so will the range of these cars. The car will run about $80,000, which is about par for an exotic two-seater. So who is doing the poll on which tech CEO will be seen driving one first? My guess is one of the Google or E-Bay guys, since they are investors. It is nice to see more companies serious about helping to getting rid of our oil dependency. It is odd that the big car companies aren't more on this track!"
Global "Dependencies" (Score:4, Insightful)
Now all we have to do is get rid of our electronics, consumer products and innovations dependencies, and we can tell the rest of the world to take a hike!
If only all countries could have such a lack of inter-relatedness with their neighbors, imagine what a beautiful world it would be...
Exploding Batteries? (Score:5, Insightful)
Exploding Dells, fires on planes, and soon at an intersection near you... cars venting more flame than the batmobile.
where are the flying pieces of cars? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, though, Li-ion? I shudder to think of how those will get disposed of, eventually.
Re:Global "Dependencies" (Score:5, Insightful)
Sigh (Score:3, Insightful)
Oil isn't the problem, ENERGY is. So instead of burning oil everwhere, we'll be burning more coal in a few places. Maybe this is the kind of thing we need to turn public sentiment away from the greenies and get some more nuclear power plants built.
LK
The time is right? (Score:4, Insightful)
Bed buddies (Score:2, Insightful)
Just like Dell is in bed with Microsoft, the auto manufacturers are in bed with the oil companies. No surprises.
Solve the Battery Problem = Die Rich (Score:5, Insightful)
Li-Ion batteries have excellent amp-hour ratings for their size, but like all other batteries are still pretty limited.
Acceleration/Torque for electric cars is not a problem. High performance capabilities are there if you want them. However, you are playing battery energy against performance against distance, and all electrics, or fuel-electric hybrids have been designed to be "green" in their approach. (Any Hummer oweners want an environmentally aware vehicle?)
Right now the weakest link in many electronic systems is the energy source. A good solution there and you can be a very wealty person.
Re:Global "Dependencies" (Score:5, Insightful)
Until something replaces Coal power plants as the main method of generating electricity, you're just replacing one evil for the other.
Yes, I'm aware of Nucular, Hydro, Wind, Tidal, Natrual Gas. Doesn't matter. Coal is the most popular choice today.
Re:Exploding Batteries? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Global "Dependencies" (Score:5, Insightful)
battery life degradation? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Exploding Batteries? (Score:3, Insightful)
Last time I checked cars don't explode while driving down the street; while it seems laptops might...
(And with over 6 thousand batteries one might expect a failure rate of 1 in 10000 to be a little high...
Re:Sigh (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Exploding Batteries? (Score:4, Insightful)
http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/2006/07/ altair_batterie.html [typepad.com]
I mean based on the stuff I've read about the founders of the company and a lot of the people who have invested in it (i.e. Elon Musk, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, etc.) I feel I'll wait and see before passing any judgement.Re:roadsters (Score:2, Insightful)
That most electric cars are billed as roadsters.
1. It's going to cost around $80,000 no matter what you do.
The parts are just that expensive.
So they need to classify it as something that is already that expensive to be competivite.
2. Electric engines have an intrinsically very high accelleration rate.
This isn't even really something you can turn off.
The sedan version of this is still going to accelerate faster than a porsche.
So if it has to be expensive, and high accelleration is built it, you might as well call it a roadster.
Its the only chance you have of making it appealing for somebody.
Re:Umm... (Score:2, Insightful)
Plus it's only a prototype. How can you be negative about that? Are the batteries made from harp seal eyes or something?
Re:Bed buddies (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Global "Dependencies" (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Global "Dependencies" (Score:5, Insightful)
but are coal plants worse than millions of cars? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, because a few coal plants are way less efficient than millions and millions of internal combustion engines.
(not to mention it's a lot more efficient, as technology progresses, to upgrade emissions controls on a few power plants, than every car on the road)
Re:The time is right? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Lithium-Ion? (Score:4, Insightful)
As much as I dislike NiMH due to their rapid self-discharge rate, they look like a safer bet for automobiles.
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, he has. And for his trouble, the remaining members of Greenpeace shrilly scream that he's a traitor and shill for the oil industry, etc, blah blah.
The real problem is that the people who oppose nukes are bound together more by their general political loopiness than they are by actual, real, rational environmental/energy issues. So when they see one of their own taking up a different messages, they excommunicate them idealogically - never mind the practical issues at hand.
Re:Electric Cost Per Mile is Cheaper (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh
Don't be ridiculous. Electric cars have enough problems without inventing inane ones for them.
Re:Forget batteries, go with Ethanol (Score:2, Insightful)
The solution is undoubtedly in electric cars. The only point of debate is where the power comes from to drive the motors. Some claim petrol-electric hybrids, others hydrogen--be it combustion or via fuel cells, and there are those who think we can hold the power in batteries and just plugin when we get home. The most promising tech for the present is likely the plugable petrol-electric hybrid. It's not the most glamorous but it is far closer to the budget of the average person than any of the others and it's readily available today.
--Neth
Re:Global "Dependencies" (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes there are better solutions then coal, but we have over 50% of our power coming from coal, so improving coal will happen quicker then scrapping the system and replacing it with other systems (solar concentrators, tidal, wind, or other low eviroment impact systems). The is no reason we can't do both and enjoy both short term and long term gains. They're not mutually exclusive.
Re:Global "Dependencies" (Score:5, Insightful)
Has already happened in my home country, which generates 79% of its energy [uic.com.au] in nuclear power plants. Now can I get my electric car ? ;-)
Re:Forget batteries, go with Ethanol (Score:5, Insightful)
But: you get hydrogen very inefficiently through the use of enormous amounts of electricity, which is currently being produced mostly through burning coal. Start using hydrogen in your car, you'll start burning that much more coal and natural gas at the electric plants. Your plug-in hybrids introduce the same problem.
They only viable solution is more nuclear power plants. A LOT more.
The batteries have to be in series/parallel banks (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Global "Dependencies" (Score:5, Insightful)
Today.
Today.
Today.
FUCKING Today.
You can see past today, can't you?
I'm so sick of people who can't see past today.
It does matter, if you can see past today.
Batteries suck. (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe you could design a clever little nozzle to get a boost from your on-fire battery packs. That'd be AWESOME.
Burning oil. (Score:3, Insightful)
2/3rds of a quart of oil per tank is way over the 1 qt per 1,000 miles that's considered acceptable by most standards; I'd be surprised if your car was even passing emissions standards, if it's been doing that for a while. (And the emissions standards in most places in the U.S. are so lax as to basically be a joke anyway -- you car has to be grossly polluting to fail, generally.)
There are lots of tricks you could probably do with an engine to boost its efficiency and power at the expense of cleanliness, if that was desired; however, there are good reasons why that tradeoff isn't often made, or allowed. And, it's older cars that are the most polluting [abetterearth.org]; practically any new car, regardless of its gas milege, would probably be more environmentally friendly than one that's 20 years old, even when you factor in the 'pollution overhead' incurred by its manufacture.
Re:Global "Dependencies" (Score:5, Insightful)
Battery power isn't about saving energy anyway, it's often about shifting the pollution to a big facility that can handle it instead of having heavy pollution control equipment to move about. The first hybrid car I saw, back in 1987, embodied this principle and was designed to work at an underground mine. Above ground it ran on fuel, but below ground you wanted to minimise the air pollution as much as possible so it ran on batteries.
Personally I think the compelling area for electric vehicles as technology improves is as farming equipment or transport in remote areas - charge things up on wind, solar or whatever is handy instead of trucking in a lot of fuel.
Re:Global "Dependencies" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Global "Dependencies" (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Recharging time? (Score:2, Insightful)
The other problem is battery chemistry. The common, older lithium ion cells can't take much current when they charge up. This creates very lossy regenerative braking in addition to longer charging. So even if you did have more power, you couldn't charge them that fast anyway. Now, there are newer cells that can charge quite rapidly. The cells from A123 Systems have a standard charge of 45 minutes and a standard fast charge of 15 minutes. Altair Nanotechnologies and Toshiba also seem to have something along these lines. However, you're still limited by your outlet with them... For 15 minute charge, you'd need more than 200 kW of power.
Now to recharge. To the nearest substation!
Re:Global "Dependencies" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Global "Dependencies" (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, you tell 'em! Forget about pragmatism and we'll create our own reality. Feasability? Screw it. Net environmental effect of the technology? Who needs to analyze anything when we've got dreamers! There's no point in looking at our world for how it is when we can see it like we want it to be.
The analogy that you provided about abusive parents is exactly the kind of absolutism that I disagree with -- and there's plenty of it to go around. What about when the definition of child abuse gets murky? What about when you've got a kid in an otherwise 'good' home, where the parents (for example) are pot smokers? Does it make sense to subject the kid to 'the system' by sticking them in a foster home (at best)? In the United States, it's not uncommon for child services to consider parents like that unfit. Absolutes don't work so well in a dynamic world.
In any case, we've already got an idealistic executive administration in the US who tends to think in black-and-white. Frankly, I think that we would do well with a bit of measured analysis.
To get back to the discussion, there's nothing wrong with trying to innovate, and I'm not seeing that argument anywhere. You're using a straw-man argument. However, there are plenty of hurdles which must be overcome when talking about electric cars...and it's important to recgonize that the electric car is no panacea for our environmental/political/economic ills. It just moves the problem elsewhere, and would continue to for the forseeable future. If it were really economically feasible, every major auto manufacturer would be selling an electric car right now.
Personally, I'm more interested in diesel power (utilizing vegetable-based fuel). The technology is already 100% available, very well developed, mass produced, and it can utilize the existing distribution infrastructure without serious modifications (I think that oil pipelines would need some help, however). Burning vegetable-based fuel also releases zero net greenhouse gas, since all carbon released into the atmosphere was originally metabolized from the atmosphere. Are there drawbacks? Certainly -- among other things, there is a poor public perception of diesel engines power and torque charasteristic, of being smelly, and having hard-to-find fuel. The former two have been resolved though development: Diesel emissions (as well as the sulphur odor) have been greatly reduced, and an Audi diesel race car won Le Mans last year, partly by churning out massive amounts of torque while maintaining better fuel economy than every other car in its class.
Again, getting back to the point, there is nothing wrong with pragmatism. In fact, the best way to deal with idealogues is to share a bit of reality. If you really believe in this, and this is truly an engineering problem, why not embrace the naysayers? Why not help find a solution to the real problems with the technology in question rather than smugly berate them in public? Your attempts to berate aren't convincing anyone of anything (except for the people who already share your ideals).
Re:Global "Dependencies" (Score:2, Insightful)
Natural Gas? Fossil fuel like Coal, not renewable.
Wind? No. Not enough land to do it effeciently.
Solar? Not cost effective.
Hydro? Bad environmental impact. Can't dam up every river in the country?
Tidal? Not enough ROI.
Nuclear? Too much radioactive waste. Yes I realize we've made some vast improvements in nuclear tech.
Consider if you took every car off the road and everyone at 6pm was charing their cars for three hours, we'd suffer from some mega brownouts.
Yes, I know today != tomorrow, but to be pragmatic, today the electric car is impractical considering the extra power we'll need to generate.
Re:80K?+batteries once a year (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Global "Dependencies" (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course there is. It's not like the land between windmills suddenly becomes useless for farming. Winds largest problem is that it's unreliable, so there will be times of low production, but that would not be a big issue for cars. Cars are standing still most of the time, so they can basically charge when there is wind.
Re:Electric Cost Per Mile is Cheaper (Score:3, Insightful)
There is the rub. Replacing the battery on my laptop costs USD 100. The Tesla roadster uses 6831 laptop batteries. I would estimate that half the $80,000 cost of the roadster is batteries.
Re:Global "Dependencies" (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, but your situation is nonetheless much improved. Why? Because if your infrastructure now runs on electricity instead of oil, you have many different options to choose from for generating that electricity. There aren't very many ways to generate oil.
Re:Global "Dependencies" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Exploding Batteries? (Score:5, Insightful)
The match going out comment in more usually attributed to Diesel fuels, Kerosene and paraffin, which have a much higher flash point, and a higher boiling point. This means there is little vapor above the liquid and they are not likely to be ignited by a lighted match. It usually requires a wick to make fuel Oils burn e.g. a rag etc. or alternatively high temp and pressure such as in a diesel engine or gas turbine.
So please be careful!
Re:Electric Cost Per Mile is Cheaper (Score:5, Insightful)
howie
Re:Global "Dependencies" (Score:4, Insightful)
I doubt that very much, I think what they mean is that the sum of elecricity you and the others on the program use at home is equal to that the company produces by their windfarms - the actual energy you personally use will probably be a mixture of all of their power plants outputs... unless you have a seperate cable running straight to the wind turbines of course!
Re:20% of US oil imports from mideast (Score:5, Insightful)
I suspect that a loss of 20% of the oil and the consequent increase in fuel prices would cause a very severe economic impact - so yes, the US *is* reliant on that oil. Unless the US can do without 20% of its oil tomorrow with no consequences, then it's reliant on it.
Re:Today is where it's at, like it or lump it (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure that's right. Let's look at the Wright Brothers first flight shall we. Well, that's obviously such a useless machine. Range measured in hundreds of yards? Only carry one person. Likely to die.
The 250 mile range is perhaps too short for many people, but I bet the majority of car journeys are well within this range. If people started purchasing such vehicles as second/third cars then the technology would improve. As the number of units sold increased, the unit price would come down. Competition would be encouraged, inovation would be rewarded and some of the bigger players would start looking into it. It's already happening because Toyota/Honda have decided it will happen and want to be first with the hybrids. They are expensive, but some people are buying them. It happens in all new technology. Mobile phones, digital cameras, everything new - they start off really pricey and the early adopters buy 'em. Soon though, economies of scale bring the prices down, and the technology improves as the market expands.
I don't think anyone expects everyone to immediatly chop in their beloved gas-guzzlers for some electric golf cart and start hugging trees, but this vehicle probably does have a market. If the Gov could give tax breaks - such as allowing tax free re-charging whilst at work, it could further encourage the take-up of the technology by reducing the cost of ownership.
This might even mean that in a few years when you have to get new batteries for your Tesla, the new ones will be cheaper, lighter, and provide a greater range because the tech has moved on.
Re:Global "Dependencies" (Score:3, Insightful)
Coal is NOT a centralized problem (Score:2, Insightful)
Go look at how coal is obtained some time. Coal formation are often like a thick blanket draped over large areas, covered with pesky overburden like hills, forests, towns, and rivers. To get to the coal, first you need to strip away the overburden.
My understanding is that most coal formations in the U.S. require extensive removal over overburden to access. In the southeast, whole mountains have been leveled and valleys filled in with waste material in the quest to reveal coal. The moved material is often unstable and prone to slides, it changes natural watershed patterns, it releases silts and toxic minerals into the watershed (a common mining-related problem), and it just plain disrupts entire ecosystems.
So I'd hardly call coal a centralized problem. We need to look at the whole picture, including the inconvient bits.
Re:Electric Cost Per Mile is Cheaper (Score:4, Insightful)
the electricity to charge them would require a huge investment in nuclear power plants and a corresponding huge increase in nuclear waste.
But the amount of waste that comes out of an efficient reactor is tiny that even a "huge increase" would be easily manageable. (Note practically all of the old reactors currently operating are not terrible efficient.) It is simply incorrect to suggest that relying on nuclear energy as a primary energy source would be impractical.
Re:Global "Dependencies" (Score:3, Insightful)
American coal is not clean-burning enough (low in sulfur) to use in industrial power generation, as far as I'm aware.
Wind isn't really low impact. We just think it is because we do it on such a small scale. If we got significant quanities of power from wind we'd actually slow down the wind sufficiently to fuck up the climate even more than we currently do. Every time you use windmills to harness the wind you are effectively sucking energy directly out of the climate.
Re:Solve the Battery Problem = Die Rich (Score:5, Insightful)
- enough batteries for ~50 miles.
- a small (100cc) biodiesel engine running at a fixed and preset RPM connected to a small generator. The engine would be set to run at the peak of it's power curve.
- a small ~10L fuel tank.
- an AC charging circuit
This would allow the driver to run on electric most of the day and charge on the road when needed. One could also use a gasoline engine instead of biodiesel and still see big fuel operating savings since some wall recharging would take place. It would also greatly decrease the number of batteries needed.
This is a really old idea. I saw something like this (on a much larger scale) on an USCG cutter (WLB-389) that was built in 1943. Two diesels -> two generators -> one electric motor. Worked great and it could double as a light ship [uscg.mil].
Re:Global "Dependencies" (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I don't see a necessary conflict between looking forward and pragatism. It's helpful sometimes to "assume" the existence of a thing, in a tentative way, because it allows you to think about the potential value of searching for that thing. Where it becomes unpragmatic is when you assume that thing is going to spring into existence because you wish it to be. Yet is equally dangerous to dismiss all change becuase we don't know the details in advance.
I think we are approaching a shift in the world's energy use. It's like waiting for an earthquake to generate a tsunami; inevitably it's going to come, but nobody can say precisely when. Uncertainties, such as whether a technology will be developed to extract heavy crude deposits, introduce decades of uncertainty into when the shift will occur. Thinking about, and planning for this shift takes resources away from current needs, and so it is easy to think of it as unpragmatic. However, I suspect that when a shift comes, it won't be a surprise that it came, but it will be a surprise when it came and how quickly.
WRT electric power, the key is that electricty isn't an energy source. It's a medium for transmitting energy. The great benefit of this is that it can come from many sources and put to many uses. It's helpful to "assume" a replacement for coal fired plants, because while we know no such replacement exists yet, there is no reason in physics why such a thing could not be. In fact, there may be no single satisfactory replacment for coal. As there may be no single satisfactory replacement for petroleum either. If that is the case, electricity is going to be a key part of the strategy for dealing with that. Even if we were to put in hydrogen pipelines to everybody's house, it doesn't fundamentally change things. Hydrogen is a method of storing and transmitting energy.
However, there are plenty of hurdles which must be overcome when talking about electric cars...and it's important to recgonize that the electric car is no panacea for our environmental/political/economic ills
Yes, but I'm deeply suspicious of the phrase "no panacea", because it's often trotted out in a way that suggests that if some form of progress doesn't solve all our problems, it is worthless.
This bears on your point of net environmental effects. What we need is a rational framework to think about them. But it's harder than it sounds. I once worked for an organization trying to help universities teach this. "Systems" thinking really isn't anything special. It's just broadening the scope of your reasoning to include effects you hadn't considered or intended. When you do this you tend to find that nothing is as good as you might hope, but on the other side few things are as bad as you might fear.
People point out the fact that electric cars just shift emissions from tailpipes to distant smokestacks. This is true. But it's not a conclusive argument. You have to crunch the numbers. And even after you've done that, you don't have the entire story. the importance of the electric car is that it creates options. It has been remarked that the definition of a bad policy is that it leaves you with no good options. It seems to me a good policy is one that leaves open many options. That is why electricity is so important; it is the most versatile and adaptable medium we have.
I agree that biodiesel is an intriguing option. It is, in effect, a method of storing and transmitting solar energy. The carbon molecules are recycled. But I'm not prepared to pin all our hopes on it.
A key point to remember is that scale is a big part of assessiong enviornmental impact. The second gigawatt of tidal power
Re:Exploding Batteries? (Score:5, Insightful)
At normal temperatures, gasoline has a vapour pressure sufficient that there will be a flammable vapour above any standing liquid gasoline. The flashpoint of gasoline is -40 (that's minus forty) degrees; at any temperature above that there can be sufficient vapour present to ignite and explode.
Under some conditions (for example, a confined container with a narrow neck and little air circulation) you might get the gasoline vapour to displace enough oxygen that it won't be able to burn. The upper explosive limit for gasoline is about 8%; above that level combustion will cease rapidly because the available oxygen will be depleted.
If you really insist on doing a drop-a-match-in-the-fuel experiment, use diesel fuel. The flashpoint of diesel is a little bit more than 60 degrees Celsius (about 140 F) and so won't form a flammable vapour mixture in air unless you're storing it really warm.
Re:Global "Dependencies" (Score:4, Insightful)
You're right and wrong. It's not clean burning, and we DO use it for industrial power generation. I lived right next to two power plants that burned lignite. When the parent says it's easier to clean a couple powerplants than a bunch of cars, I'm not sure he's completenly aware of the issues with burning dirty coal on a large scale. Now if we could get our energy out of coal in a few other ways I've heard of, it seams plausible, but just burning it I would think would be a wash.
I don't think sucking power from the climat is a big issue right now since we're already dumping tons of energy into it. In fact right now that might be the best thing to reduce some of that energy. You also have to consider that trees also absorbe a large ammount of energy from wind, but with global deforistation windmills will probably not even offset a fraction of the energy trees traditionally absorbed.
Re:80K?+batteries once a year (Score:3, Insightful)
Electric cars will be desirable when they meet the following conditions met by existing cars - price (under 30k), features (styling, interior, gizmos), convenience (fuelling in under 5 minutes.) This car does not appear to meet any of those.
of those only one is important for a sports car styling and it looks nice enough. Convenience (not just fuelling) Price, interior, gizmos are not usually considerations of sports car buyers in the first place otherwise current models wouldn't sell well.
I actually think starting of with a small low production volume sports car might be an astute choice as this means they will not be trying to compete with major manufacturers, this car could do for Electric cars what the Elise did for Lotus i.e. provide a profitable product from which other more mainstream advances can be made.
Re:Today is where it's at, like it or lump it (Score:5, Insightful)
15 minutes on the charger might get you another 15-20 miles. And 220 volts at 70 amps is a pretty hefty 15 kilowatts, so to have a dozen cars sitting at the local McDonalds charging is going to be draining about 180 kW from their coinpurse. That is a serious amount of juice. Also, I'm skeptical that you'll be getting 250 miles at 70 mph. If I remember right, electric motor efficiency and power typically increase with load, but fall off with speed, which makes them awesome for say, a 0-60 run in 3 seconds, but marginal at best for high speed cruising. That 250 mile range estimate is probably at significantly lower speeds.
Big rigs generally run around 5 mpg, but it varies quite a bit around that number depending on the truck, the load, and the speed. Few truckers drive at the most efficient speed because it increases the labor costs significantly.
If you're suggesting running commercial trucks on electricity, forget it for the foreseeable future. It's definitely been considered. Not only is there the conflicting speed issues I mentioned above, but you run up against the energy density limitations of batteries fast. Assuming the numbers from the article are correct (I doubt it...something isn't quite adding up according to my gut) and unrealistically taking the charge/discharge at 100% efficiency, it's storing up 194 MJ. Gasoline holds about 120 MJ/gallon, so the 1000 pounds of batteries (according to the Tesla website) are equivalent to about 1.5 gallons of gas (6.3 pounds/gal). Divide that by an efficiency of around 30% and you've got a 32:1 energy density ratio in favor of gasoline. For a truck to haul the equivalent of 150 gallons of fuel (actually diesel, not gas, but close enough), it would need about 30,000 pounds of batteries. But then you have to go farther and take into account that 2/3's of its cargo capacity has been replaced by fuel, so you need to make 3 times the number of trips. And you've got a lot of trucks either sitting idle recharging or having their 30,000 pounds of batteries swapped out every few hundred miles.
Obviously these are really rough numbers, but other engineers have already looked at the idea in more detail and rejected it.
I'm not trash-talking the Tesla. It looks like a lot of fun, but like all sports cars, it's a toy and not a good comparison for commercial trucking. Most of a car's weight is itself, be it gas or electric. Most of a truck's weight is it's cargo.
For the record, I think electric can work extremely well for short range commuting (5-10 miles on city streets), but if you travel far, you'll realistically be looking at gas.