No one has demonstrated to me why letting the Big Three succeed in killing their franchises would actually have been a bad thing for consumers. If they had any shred of desire to preserve brand loyalty, they would operate their dealerships as well or better than the independent dealers, and with less pressure to meet the bottom line in any one location. If they messed that up, then they deserved to go out of business. The auto bailout was just as bad--if these companies are so poorly managed and so important that we have to use legislation to prevent them from killing themselves, why don't we just nationalize the whole industry and be done with it?

The E does not exist. The $45k Model S was the one with the smallest battery pack, which virtually no one bought so they dropped it from their lineup. The Model E will be a new design with new, cheaper battery packs and less expensive trim all around.

All the Tesla owners I know say the only maintenance they have had to do in the last year is rotate the tires, which Tesla did either for free or for a reasonable fee. I'd like to see where you got that $600 number.

Automakers were never forced to franchise dealerships in the first place--they did it of their own accord, as a business decision, when they were neither evil nor powerful. Then the automakers became evil and powerful, and the dealers wrote the laws to protect themselves, using consumer protection as a pretext (it was a pretext because I can't imagine how manufacturer-run dealers could be as good at screwing people over as the independent ones were). Now the dealers are even more evil and powerful than the automakers, and the situation is reversed, and everyone is realizing just how much the dealers duped them with these laws.

Ah, I see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... "A pseudocapacitor has a chemical reaction at the electrode...This faradaic energy storage with only fast redox reactions makes charging and discharging much faster than batteries."

So, they made a new kind of supercapacitor, maybe with lower self-discharge than previous ones? A supercapacitor is exactly what I would expect in this application. Calling it a battery seems unnecessary and misleading.

If you're saying that a start-up energy technology that was poo-pooed by analysts for years could actually succeed in upending dozens of entrenched industries, then batteries seem like a pretty good way to go. The oil industry doesn't have a monopoly on Machiavellian corporate tactics.

Fact: The U.S. power grid has continually reduced its overall emissions for decades now.

Fact: Electric vehicles produce less overall emissions than a 35mpg car, even on the dirtiest grid in the U.S, and most EVs are operated on much cleaner grids.

Fact: Over 1/3 of EV drivers own enough solar generation to offset the power used in their cars, making them truly zero emissions.

Zero-emissions electric vehicles exist now, if you have the money or lifestyle to fit it. I too think it will be a great day when hydrogen cars actually compete with battery-electric vehicles. But the obstacles we have to solve before then are many:

1) invent a way to convert electricity into hydrogen that actually approaches the efficiency of batteries, if not equaling it, instead of making it out of methane like we do now or wasting half your power in electrolysis.

2) build hydrogen fueling stations everywhere before a solid base of users exists to pay for it.

3) convince the public that hydrogen cars won't explode like the Hindenburg (stupid but important).

4) make them cheaper than an equivalent battery-electric car, because by the time all that gets done BEVs will be so far ahead you will wonder why you bothered with hydrogen at all.

Once Tesla has created a super-cheap source of grid storage batteries, everyone with an electric car can get solar and go off the grid. Then the power plants and centralized distributors will be forced to shut down. Then local grids will spring back up so people can use communal backup generators on cloudy weeks, but we will never again need the complex monstrosity of our present power grid because all generation will be local. We already have new factories installing enough solar and wind to power themselves, so it's only a matter of time before the grid becomes redundant and uneconomical to maintain.

Batteries for cars are optimized for weight, size, power delivery, low maintenance and cost. Batteries for grid storage are optimized for power delivery, low maintenance and cost. Size and weight are bonuses that make them cheaper to deploy (less land/manpower). So they really aren't as different as you make out.

No utility in their right mind is going to deploy billions of lead-acid cells that will need constant watering and replacement in 5 years when they could buy EV batteries cheaply (due to combined scale of manufacturing and/or reuse) and leave them in place for 20 years.

Well, to be fair, Panasonic would not even consider building the plant as described if Tesla weren't providing the primary demand projections. Latest reports were Panasonic was still a little hesitant to go in whole hog, which is why Tesla is making so much noise trying to win them over.

It's not clear to me how those two things could be put together in the way they describe and do what you describe. If what you say is the case, then the capacitor has the same capacity as the battery, and if they can do that without making the capacitor 10x bigger than the battery, then their breakthrough is actually "ultra-high-energy-density capacitors" and not "fast-charging phone batteries". In that case, there are way more lucrative markets for that than quick-charging phones, and their choice of demo makes me think they were going for a quick youtube sensation and not an actual tech advertisement.

Yes 2000mAh will charge in one hour at a rate of 2 amps, and charge in 30 seconds at 240 amps. But the cell phone battery is 3.6 volts and 3.6*240 is only 864 watts, much less than the 1800 watts delivered by an extension cord. Assuming they deliver that to a DC-DC converter in the battery at 48 volts on the banana plugs they only need 18 amps, but that is still a lot. I still think the whole thing is cold-fusion-style vaporware.

Yes it does, especially when you consider that electric vehicles are 80% efficient compared to 20%-efficient gas cars.

Actually, drag is the most important issue on long trips. Mass is less of an issue in EVs because you can recapture 60% of your kinetic energy when you brake, and mostly a non-issue when driving at a constant speed on the highway. Adding lithium batteries to a car without increasing the drag profile invariably increases the range.

Yes they do, but we don't need this tech to fix it. Existing batteries can do it just fine, if we would only invest in enough high power charging points.

Existing batteries can charge to 80% in half an hour. The only thing stopping us is the scarcity of high-power charging stations, and making batteries charge faster only makes those stations more expensive and less likely to be actually installed. That is why improving battery capacity and efficiency, not the charge rate, and rolling out more infrastructure using the existing standards are the most important things for EVs right now.