I wish every gas station in the world turned into a battery exchange facility overnight. Or if there was some mass produced battery that charges instantly. Throw in some massive clean energy projects for generating all that power. So many problems facing this country would be eliminated. I hope that day comes soon.
I share the sentiment, but am wary of thinking of battery powered cars as a panacea. The real problem is the design of our cities, and our lack of funding for public transit. In my city, our bus service is partially funded by a _gas tax_. Talk about perverse incentives.
Batteries are made from hard to mine and produce minerals, and unless we start reducing our reliance on cars, we'll have replaced one problem with another.
An hour is a lot longer than it takes to fill a tank of gas though. It's gotta be either cheaper or more convenient for most people to consider switching.
That's like saying, car payments are more expensive than horse payments. You're just thinking of the problem wrong.
You're not stopping for gas. You're plugging your car in while shopping and at night or whenever. The only use case where this stuff doesn't work is on long hauls or roadtrips. In that case you are acting like a gas car owner. You stop at the rest stop, wait 20 minutes for the battery to get to 80% and go on your way. Or if you're a long distance driver, stick with gas or a hybrid.
It's a reasonable amount of time to stop for lunch, though. Since these things are primarily going to be charged at home, you'll almost always be starting long trips with a full charge, and 4-5 hours is more than most people want to drive before taking a break anyway.
Taking a break generally means getting out, stretching your legs, taking a piss, perhaps drinking a cup of coffee, not settling in for a full 3 course lunch.
It is interesting you should mention that. There is actually a standard that the Japanese are developing for fast charging cars. It provides for high current charging with the charge station communicating with the car to ensure it does not blow the batteries. Supposedly you can get a decent charge for 10 min or so.
However the previous Tesla (the roadster) did not support that standard. Lets hope this one does.
The batteries in this car are not easily replaceable I believe. This is one of the problems of this solution - coming up with a size and spec standard.
There has been mention that the Model S will have a swappable battery. How that works (since it's a sizeable percentage of the cost of the car), I don't know.
Sounds like BetterPlace[1].
I think they are planning to build fast battery switching stations where you just get a new battery and you don't have to wait for recharging.
They're supposed to setup some stations here in Denmark but it's been awhile since I've heard of them.
So many independant stations are struggling trying to sell gas. If there was a market, and an easy system for someone to buy then it would do really well.
I was ignorant towards this issue and don't know much about electric cars. But the electricity has to be produced somewhere, right? Transporting electricity isn't free either. What about building batteries? Would we have less emissions if all cars switched to electric? What about other technologies like for example hydrogen?
Yes. A powerplant is much more efficient in converting fuel to energy than a car engine. A car engine wastes most of the energy on heat. Powerplants usually include systems to capture excess heat and convert it to energy.
There have been many studies done on the effective MPG of a tesla roadster, and of course they differ based on their assumptions, but all of the ones I have seen show the roadster getting over 100 effective mpg.
The hydrogen technology has one big problem. It does not exist. Well to be fair to them, it does exist but not in a consumer product. You cannot buy an ordinary street legal hydrogen car now. But you can get an electric one.
If hydrogen ever takes off it will still have a similar issue as the electric -- the hydrogen would still have to be generated somewhere (usually by taking it from water) and that would require electric power.
Hydrogen does have some theoretical benefits over electric (such as more high density energy storage), but currently electric technology is advancing much faster. It is widely suspected that some of the proponents of hydrogen support hydrogen only as a way to remove support from electric.
We have a cheap and infinite source of electricity, it's called nuke power. The main obstacle to its adoption, as well as the source of its cost, is NIMBYism. That problem goes away once you decouple generation and transmission. Build nuke plants at the ends of the earth and ship huge quantities of hydrogen back to civilization.
Transportation and storage of hydrogen is a problem too. Most metals become brittle when they're exposed to hydrogen. This is one of the big hinderances to using hydrogen as a fuel.
Producing the energy is much more efficient, but then to store it in a car battery is inefficient. A good battery is about 60% efficient, which must be multiplied by electricity generation efficiency to get the total efficiency of fuel->electricity->storage->retrieval->motion.
According to an alternative energy researcher's presentation about his research there isn't even enough lithium to make batteries for all the cars, so it's an imaginary scenario.
Napkin calculuation:
A Tesla Roadster has a 53 kwh battery. Assuming 1kg lithium per kwh (a Chevy Volt uses 1.4kg of lithium per kwh [1]) that's 50kg of lithium per car. Assuming that we need around 1 billion cars in the world [2], that's 50 million tonnes of lithium. The total lithium reserve of the world is less that 10 million tonnes [3].
Note that this is not even counting trucks, buses, motorcycles, scooters and all the cars that people in developing countries are going to want, and assuming that we can perfectly recover lithium from old cars.
The researcher recommended power lines on all big roads, and bicycles for the rest.
Reserves is a kind of dodgy term. Never trust a table stating what the reserves are, unless it's something well-studied like oil (which will have dozens of different charts, depending on what you mean by "reserves"). Like oil, lithium will keep being produced as long as the price keeps rising, as new reserves are found or uneconomic reserves become economic.
It's more a question of price, how quickly it rises, and what the alternatives are.
Unless the reserves turn out to be at least 20x larger than that table, all electric lithium-ion is not going to happen. Are you saying that that table is off by 2000%?
Sure, it's not a fixed reserve but a smooth price curve. That doesn't mean a lot in practice; people aren't going to pay millions to extract every last bit of lithium from the earth. The point is that lithium-ion batteries for cars are most likely not going to be the long term solution. The same applies to solar panels and fuel cells that have rare materials in them by the way.
Just to note that lithium is not like oil: the lithium is not consumed in making the batteries, so if it turns out to be useful it'll be worth gathering even from low quality sources.
Also, sea water is 1-2ppm lithium -- expensive but plenty of it to extract.
I could imagine driverless cars reducing the total number of vehicles we need to own as a species by an order of magnitude, perhaps more. That might help.
Electric cars can run on power from hydroelectric, wind, geothermal, tidal, solar, and nuclear sources, which is enough benefit by itself to switch from ICEs. But even if every power plant burned the same gas we put in our cars, switching would still lower emissions because power plants are more efficient than car engines and transporting electricity is more efficient than transporting gas.
Hydrogen is a dead end IMHO. Fuel cells are expensive and have many limitations, plus containment and transfer are still unsolved problems. Batteries are improving fast enough now (notwithstanding popular sentiment from people wanting Moore's Law speeds) that hydrogen will never catch up.
One of the arguments is that by switching the power source to electricity, we can focus on improving our methods of generating electricity, and everything dependent on it will benefit. For example, if we were able to create cars that could got 1000 miles on a gallon of gas, how long would it take to phase out all existing cars?
One of the most exciting technologies in electric cars is regenerative braking or KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery System). As the name says: breaking fuels the batteries (some of the solutions don't even use the batteries but are totally mechanical-based, which make them even more 'pure' - there's a Porsche model using that).
In hybrid cars the energy could be recovered from the combustion engine heat, exhaust gases heat, etc. I suppose, in future, we'll be able to extract/recover some energy from almost everything (like radio or A/C) making the cars super efficient.
Interesting idea. I wonder what the efficiency gain of using the exhaust fumes with a generator would be vs. that of using it for a turbocharger (the main use of exhaust fume power currently in cars, lets the fuel burn more completely by pushing compressed air into the cylinder).
I wouldn't say that a turbocharger allows fuel to burn more completely, if that's what you meant. A turbocharger uses energy in the exhaust to spin a turbine, which is connected to an impeller, compressing air going into the engine. More air allows more fuel, and together you get a bigger bang in a smaller space - the engine behaves like it's larger than it is, burning more air and fuel then it would otherwise. A turbocharged car can still burn fuel inefficiently, and they often do run rich (injecting more fuel than will be burned) in order to avoid pre-ignition and to cool the cylinders.
A turbocharger may also be used to increase fuel efficiency without any attempt to increase power. It does this by recovering waste energy in the exhaust and feeding it back into the engine intake. By using this otherwise wasted energy to increase the mass of air, it becomes easier to ensure that all fuel is burned before being vented at the start of the exhaust stage. The increased temperature from the higher pressure gives a higher Carnot efficiency.
I'm going to get one of these, or a Karma. I think for daily use around the Bay Area, having a white HOV sticker would be enough of a benefit to make this an ideal choice; keep an older, gasoline or diesel car for long road trips, which also keeps depreciation off the more expensive new car.
I drove the Karma last month and it was pretty awesome. I'm big on electric cars, but the downfall of 100% electric is a term called Range Anxiety. Which as the name implies, is being anxious about how far you can go. A car like the karma has a gas tank that allows it to go up to 250 miles more after the 50 miles of battery are up. That is the main difference I learned between the electric vs hybrid cars, and to me an important distinction...
I absolutely agree about Range Anxiety if you have only one car, but if you've got a nice gas-powered Audi now, and a diesel F-350 work truck, it's pretty reasonable to get a pure-electric car to leave at the office for daily trips, and maybe to use for commuting. There's no practical way to drive more than 300 miles in the Bay Area per day (unless you just drive it around in circles); I rarely do more than 200.
I'd think of it as a 2-3 car setup. The truck is shared at my company, and my gf doesn't have a car of her own yet, so having two personal cars would be reasonable.
But what I really mean is that no one is likely to be happy with JUST a battery electric vehicle; they will want access to a refuelable car for longer trips. And, personally, I don't want to put 1500 mile trips on an $80k new car; I'd rather keep my NPV $12k 2006 audi for that kind of thing, and keep the miles on that.
For a daily driver around the bay area, though, the model s looks perfect.
The problem is the leaf doesn't have enough practical range to go from SF to Mountain View and back, and certainly not enough to do a full day of driving around the Bay Area. A roadster does, and a model s probably does, at least with the larger battery packs.
I badly want one of these, as much as that defines me as a "mark". Actually, I want the M5 competing Model S Sport, which is even more of a "take my money, please!" proposition. Still. just look at the torque curve ...
Has that hit the mainstream press very hard at all? My jaw dropped when I heard those 0-60 times. That it's for a car with 7 seats at a price comparable or less than the M5 is unbelievable. And it's so simple mechanically, it almost feels like going from a spinning hard drive to an SSD. I really, really want one.
In his reddit IAMA he says the plan has always been for the 3rd-generation (post-S) car to be a high-volume, low-price car. Based on the time between the Roadster and S releases, it will probably be a few years before they get around to that.
Is there any legislation proposed to ensure cars make at least a certain amount of noise while driving, for safety reasons? The new Prius will have a noise generated so that blind people/distracted people will be aware of the car coming around the corner, is there any plans to require this sort of thing by law? Seems to me that once these types of almost silent cars start to become popular we'll see an increase in pedestrian injuries.
This may be a little off-topic, and it's not a dig at the Tesla which looks like a great car, I was just struck by how silent it was (I haven't seen a fully electric car in person here in Australia yet)
I honestly don't understand the need. It is the driver's responsibility to be aware of pedestrians, and the pedestrian's responsibility to not jaywalk. Look both ways and all that.
I was walking past Moscone a few days ago just as, for some reason, they were driving a Model S and Roadster inside the Oracle show. (I have no idea why they were at the Oracle show, but I was happy to have the chance to snap some pictures.) They were perfectly silent. I was admiring the Model S when the Roadster came up behind me and I had no idea it was even there until someone said something. It was moving slowly, but I've heard golf carts that were louder at the same speed.
I once got to drive an EV1. It included an electronic noisemaker for exactly that purpose, to keep pedestrians alive. Expect government regulations if Tesla doesn't do something first.
IIRC the original price-point target was $55k. Their listed price of $50k is after a $7.5k federal tax rebate - so depending on how you measure it, they're either slightly above the target or well below it.
Tesla is going to be one of the first indicators the bubble burst. The tesla cars are overpriced, inconvenient, and they do not look particularly nicer than other cars in their segment.
Tesla is just a game for financial speculators to make a lot of money of the tech bubble.
Actually, in some countries, like Norway, Tesla Model S is actually really cheap compared to similar fuel drinking cars because of the way lower taxes.
Tesla is not luxury. It's an expensive car that does not look good and needs many hours to recharge. It's not faster or better than other cars, it's just needs longer to recharge.
If you are paying $80k for a car, you don't care about fuel taxes.
5.5 seconds isn't that great for the class of car it's in.
The Roadster is a sports car. It's 30k more than a 911 Carerra and slower in 0-60.
That said its torque curve is amazing which means you don't have to stamp on the gas pedal, and handle the transmission like a race car driver to get that 0-60 time.
