Tesla Roadster Runs For 241 Miles In E-Rally 294
N!NJA writes with the mention of a recent alternative energies rally where the Tesla Roadster managed to cover 241 miles on a single charge, with another 38 miles of juice still left in the battery. "That would give the Roadster a theoretical maximum touring range of nearly 280 miles — 36 miles more than Tesla itself reckons the car will cover on a charge. If the numbers stand up to official scrutiny, Tesla will hold the world record for the longest distance traveled by a production electric car on a single charge. Of course, it should be pointed out that the Tesla was driven by a company staffer doubtless practiced in eking out every last mile from a charge, and that the speeds averaged on the run were hardly blistering — 90kph (56mph) on the motorways, 60kph (37mph) on trunk roads and 30kph (19) in the mountain roads. Tesla reckon the average speed for the entire journey was 45kph (28mph)."
Great (Score:5, Insightful)
Now make it affordable.
Re:Great (Score:5, Insightful)
Time for the miracle of mass production and economies of scale.
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Time for the miracle of mass production and economies of scale.
Yes, for another brand. Tesla, I believe, will be a luxury sports car brand in the spirit of Ferrari. Meaning, technology developed for and by the luxury brand will then be perfected and moved to a grocery getter brand, maybe, the "Maxwell" or better yet, the "Edison" brand of cars.
Re:Great (Score:5, Informative)
Tesla, I believe, will be a luxury sports car brand in the spirit of Ferrari.
I beg to differ [teslamotors.com]. They're already working on a car that has more than two seats and will sell for 1/2 the price of the roadster. I'd say that's quite a jump in affordability. The Model S is nowhere near economy car prices, but it's a large step closer.
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But, who the hell wants a sedan/family car??
Ok, I guess if you have a family, but the parent poster was, I think, referring to making something like the Tesla more affordable....a 2 seat, well crafted, performance vehicle that doesn't loo
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Most people can only afford one car, and most people need a family car. So that one car will be a family car.
They'll get as excited as they can in buying that car. If they're given the choice between a KIA or BMW sedan, they'll get excited by the BMW.
If Tesla can make an exciting, innovative family-sized car, they'll find themselves with a big market.
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That explains why Ferrari's are so inexpensive.
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A Tesla wouldn't be affordable even if it wasn't electric. It's a Lotus Elise with the engine replaced.
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A Tesla wouldn't be affordable even if it wasn't electric. It's a Lotus Elise with the engine replaced.
The Elise is expensive because it is a low production sports car, not because it is a Lotus. If everybody wanted one Lotus would mass produce them in China for a fraction of the current price.
Re:Great (Score:4, Informative)
A Tesla wouldn't be affordable even if it wasn't electric. It's a Lotus Elise with the engine replaced.
In addition to the parent to my post, this isn't true. According to this post [teslamotors.com] the two share few parts, such as the windshield and the softtop.
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They are using the high end market to drive the technology until it's cheap enough to work for everyday cars. This is a much better approach than the EV1 that started cheap.
Even better is TWILL [autobloggreen.com]
EV1 (Score:3, Informative)
They are using the high end market to drive the technology until it's cheap enough to work for everyday cars. This is a much better approach than the EV1 that started cheap.
I agree Tesla is taking a better approach than GM did with the EV1 [wikipedia.org]. However GM didn't sell the EV1, it was available only for lease and only in California, Arizona, and Georgia for employees of GM.
Falcon
Affordability (Score:4, Insightful)
It's already affordable to people who are in the market for cars that go 0-60 in 3.7 seconds. They can afford it so well that Tesla is back-ordered. That's proof of a market that you can take to the bank (literally).
Once those people pay the early adopter tax, they fund the transition to higher-volume, lower-price cars like the Model S.
The Tesla is a brilliant piece of product positioning.
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Except the company is runing on fumes. It is using the deposits to fund its operations. If Tesla does not get either the $250 or $400 million federal loans, it will need to enter bankruptacy.
Very promising! (Score:4, Funny)
Does anyone know how likely the batteries are to catch fire or explode? Imagine a gigantic cell phone or laptop battery blowing up. Yikes!
Re:Very promising! (Score:5, Insightful)
> Imagine a gigantic cell phone or laptop battery blowing up. Yikes!
Imagine twenty gallons of gasoline blowing up. Yikes!
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I see your point, but gasoline in a tank never blows up spontaneously. Li ion batteries are still a bit dicey, on occasion.
Either way you have a lot of potential energy in a small volume. I once had a short circuit inside my bicycle tail light... Not pretty.
Lithium-ion polymer may be the next advance (Score:4, Interesting)
Lithium-oon polymer will take over soon enough. Compared to the good old Lithium-ion (not polymer), it packs more energy per weight and volume, does not enforce specific cell proximity and shape (semi-fluid?) and has lower risk of exploding. The price is already about the same.
Things are always improving :-)
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Imagine twenty gallons of gasoline blowing up. Yikes!
There isn't enough oxygen in your gas tank to allow an explosion, batteries aren't as picky.
Defective batteries spontaneously exploding are a lot more common than defective gas tanks exploding. You might bring up the Pinto, but that was a poor design choice, not a defective gas tank (the gas tank functioned exactly as Ford intended it to, they just put it in a bad location.)
Re:Very promising! (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know about you, but *I've* seen the smoldering wreckage of a burnt-out car sitting on the side of the highway before. I have no clue whether the occupants escaped alive, but car fires absolutely do still kill people [chicagotribune.com].
And as I've mentioned elsewhere on this thread, FYI, the Roadster's cells are individually isolated and the packs are tested with multiple cell failures to make sure that fires are contained. And Tesla is near-unique in using laptop cells rather than the "automotive" li-ions which use different chemistries and don't have the fire risk. Oh, sure, the electrolyte in them is flammable, but that's no different from gas in a gas tank.; the big difference is that you can abuse the automotive variants to heck and back and not cause a fire. They pay for their safety in terms of an energy density hit, mind you.
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My bet is most of those smouldering wrecks are due to fires started by electrical faults in the car (the 12V car battery usually provides enough current when shorted to start an "electrical fire").
Even if that is the case, what exactly do you think it was that fuels the burn if not the gigajoule or so of chemical energy stored in the gas tank?
Secondly - the difference between laptop li-ion batteries and a car gas tank is the tank has a very very tough metal wall separating the reactants
Except when damaged -
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Re:Very promising! (Score:4, Informative)
Results vary. I have a Golf TDI, regularly go over 600 miles without coming close to empty, with my best fillup 781 miles. And that's with an automatic transmission.
Nevertheless I love what Tesla is doing.
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Impressive, though I consider Miles Per Dollar* more important than Miles Per Tank. After all, what is so groundbreaking about a 750 mile range if your car has a 100 gallon tank in the back seat?
*Not that Telsa wins in this category, if one factors in retail price.
Re:Very promising! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Very true, but how often do you drive the car 250 miles in a day, where you can't park it somewhere to charge overnight?
I'm very impressed with the 241 miles the car managed to get. This is a real road course, not some "range of 200 miles" crap we keep hearing, where 200 miles is if it's rolling off a mountain and you'll really be lucky to get 100 miles. This course covered highways and mountain roads, wi
Re:Very promising! (Score:5, Informative)
The cells are independently isolated. They've done a lot of tests forcing catastrophic failure of individual cells to make sure that the failure of one wouldn't cascade to others.
Note that this is really only applicable to Tesla; they're one of the only (if not the only) EV makers who use traditional laptop cells. Pretty much all of their competitors are using "automotive" li-ion chemistry variants that sacrifice energy density for faster charge capability, greater longevity, and fire resistance.
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Tesla doesn't use "traditional laptop cells" either. They're the same size and shape, but they picked specific models with different chemistry to normal laptop cells that suit car safety needs more.
Re:Very promising! (Score:5, Informative)
No, they really are traditional commodity laptop cells [teslamotors.com]. They're LiCoO2+graphite 18650s purchased in bulk from the same companies that sell those cells to laptop pack manufacturers. They did that because they wanted cells that were already in mass production so as to keep costs down.
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The Tesla cells are kept at a much saner temperature level through the use of a coolant/heating system in the battery pack itself. This is something you couldn't afford to put onto your laptop.... and I dare say that a typical laptop will subject the batteries to much higher (and lower) temperatures and operating environments that cause much of the damage to laptop batteries.
Read the PDF file in the link above with the GP post. It covers all of this information and much more, including expected lifetime (
Re:How long will the battery last? (Score:4, Informative)
No; Tesla babies the heck out of them. In addition to careful load balancing and charge controlling, they have a smaller depth of discharge and are highly climate controlled (some might say too much; some owners have complained that when they're not driving the car often, it can spend as much on refrigerating the pack as on driving!). Also, each cell effectively functions individually, unlike the cells in your laptop, where if one goes bad, the whole pack goes bad. Lastly, the inverter is less voltage sensitive than your laptop. It's sort of like how rechargeable NiMH batteries last for so much longer than normal alkaline AAs in a digital camera but not in a flashlight. It's not that they hold vastly more power; it's that the voltage stays higher longer. If you use normal alkaline AAs in many digital cameras, the voltage will quickly drop below what the camera can tolerate.
That battery replacement will not be neither cheap nor trivial I would assume?
Tesla offers a future replacement Roadster pack for $12,000 upfront. That's based on projected future pricing of cells, of course. For the Model S, that number is to be "well under $5,000".
Re:Very promising! (Score:5, Informative)
I think I'll stick with/change to Hydrogen
Hahahahaa.... oh, that's rich.
FYI: large li-ion battery packs like the Roadster's cost in the low *five* figures. Fuel cell** stacks sufficient to run a car cost in the low *six* figures. And the Roadster's pack is rated for 7 years, while fuel cell manufacturers are still going for that 5-year goal. And that's just Tesla's pack, which is based on babied laptop cells (chilled, individually isolated, lower DoD, etc). The more stable li-ion variants can last*** far longer. GM is looking at a 10 year warranty on the Volt's pack, for example. LG Chem thinks their packs can last up to 40 years. AltairNano titanate cell testing is up into the *tens of thousands* of full cycles. And so on down the line.
** -- By fuel cell, I mean PEMFC, obviously, since that's what's used in H2 cars.
*** -- In general, a pack is considered "bad" when it goes down to below 80% of its rated capacity.
Re:Very promising! (Score:4, Funny)
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While an anti-gravity pod fulled by love and gravy would be nice, I'll be buying the model that's powered by animosity and trans-fats. Sure, it's not as nice to look at, but you can refuel in many more locations.
Re:Very promising! (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as their they don't get batteries from Sony, I think we'll be fine.
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I think you missed the many times that Sony's batteries were the cause of problems. That wasn't a single isolated case.
Environment? (Score:2)
I'd also be concerned about the toxicity of these batteries. Are they 100% recyclable? Will they be safely disposed of, even if Tesla goes out of business? Will they leak?
Re:Environment? (Score:5, Informative)
They're essentially not, essentially, yes, no. [teslamotors.com] The phosphates and spinels most other auto makers are using, even moreso.
I'm not sure what you think is in li-ion batteries that you're picturing is so toxic. These aren't lead-acid or nickel-cadmium here. Want to know what goes into a lithium phosphate battery? Lithium salts (like you find in mineral water -- in fact, they're actually produced from salt flats where mineral waters evaporated), iron powder, phosphoric acid, sugar (for a carbon binding), porous polyethylene (separator), graphite or amorphous carbon (anode), any one of a variety corrosive but generally nontoxic electrolytes, casing, wiring, and so forth. You'll find worse stuff in a lot of bulk steels than you will in LFP cells.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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+1 Insightful (Score:3, Insightful)
Amen, brother.
The Big Three undoubtedly saw the potential of Tesla and smaller companies (who buy a chassis, fit it with their gear, and profit), shit themselves, and immediately made it a necessity that Diesel fuel double in price, Saturn (who would be the GM arm to make it happen) forget what they are about and sell rebadged Opels, and thrusting on the public a prolonged (boring?) four-year introduction of the new Camaro.
What. The. Hell, indeed..
Something is seriously fucking fishy, if you ask me.
There ar
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Troll indeed!
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Well the Japanese and European car makers have good, profitable markets for their small cars. GM and Ford have narrower markets and are more exposed to changes in market conditions.
I don't know about GM but Ford makes more fuel efficient vehicles in Europe. Here's a "Business Week" article about "The 65 mpg Ford the U.S. Can't Have [businessweek.com]". TFA says it's not available in the US because it runs on diesel and that the fuel has a bad rep. As biodiesel [wikipedia.org] is getting more popular in the US I say this is BS as an excuse
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Everything you need to know about why automakers don't want us to have Full-EVs [servigistics.com]
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You'd think for GM/Chry/Ford they'd be able to find a chassis that isn't based on a $50,000 auto, and then take it and have it custom made in small runs from carbon fiber composites. They might - just might - have the capacity to leverage some efficiency in purchasing motors and batteries, and incorporating (otherwise expensive) IP from their portfolio to provide a bit better price than $100k.
The Aptera is one of the goofiest looking cars in the world, and yet it's got a waiting list out the door at $30k. Y
Re:Oh bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
When you look at the amount of energy stored in a gallon of gasoline compared to a ton of batteries you'll see why.
That's just silly, though. EVs are exactly the opposite paradigm as gasoline cars. In gasoline cars, the fuel is light while the engine is heavy. In electric cars, the motor is light while the batteries are heavy. The Roadster gets its performance with a motor the size of a small watermelon that weighs something like 40 pounds. In short, battery packs aren't competing with the gas tank for weight and space; they're competing with the gasoline car's engine for weight and space. If you crunch the numbers, you'll find that the two powertrains will be approximately the same when batteries hit 350Wh/kg or so. Commercial cells currently top out at about 200Wh/kg, but there are about two dozen different techs in the lab that can 50%-800% increase the energy density of their respective electrode (anode or cathode). The odds of every last one of them failing to make it to commercialization are vanishingly small. Li-ion still has a very long run ahead of it.
Don't you think if there was money to be made in this market someone would have tried when gas was over 4 bucks a gallon?
When do you think it was that several dozen different marques announced EV programs? Nowadays, it's easier to count the companies that *don't* have EVs they're planning to mass produce. For example, among the biggest sellers in the US, there's only one: Honda. And they've already announced plans to make an electric motorcycle, so even they may not count.
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When you build tens of thousands of cars you have to sell what the market wants and clearly in the US that is large cars or SUVs.
The thing is is Detroit, that is Chrysler, Ford, and GM, have a record of NOT making what the market wants. This was amply demonstrated in the '70s. For years after the oil crisis people were demanding fuel efficient autos but the big 3 wouldn't offer them. So the Japanese auto makers ate their lunch by making more efficient cars. That was when Japanese cars had to be imported
Pssht! No big deal (Score:5, Interesting)
You can give just about *any* car dramatic improvements in fuel economy if you know how to drive them correctly. See HyperMilingA. [wikipedia.org]
Just to see if it worked, I tried it with an ageing GMC Van (big, full sized, full of people) and measured an increase in fuel economy from about 20 MPG to over 30! Of course, there's something about driving on a freeway at 45 MPH and coasting to a stop from a half mile away that annoys the bajeezus out of other drivers.... I must have been flipped off half a dozen times!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Now, see what sort of mileage you get when you try hypermiling that van through the Alps. This is the Monte Carlo route we're talking about here.
The Roadster's 241 mile range (Powertrain 1.5) is based on their official MPGe rating from the EPA, which means the same drivecycle that all other cars go through. Now, in practice, you're not going to want to run your car down to empty; in fact, when you hop in to drive it, the Roadster won't even show you all of the charge (part of it is kept in an "emergency r
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Nice job saving yourself some gas. Too bad you wasted the gas of hundreds of drivers stuck in stop and go traffic behind you because you clogged up the road. Way to go!!
This is meaninglesss... (Score:2)
Re:This is meaninglesss... (Score:4, Informative)
Maybe you were attempting a joke, but this is a pure electric car. There's no fuel to be efficient with. Besides, no car has its "sweet spot" at 28 MPH, and if you read the summary you'd see that they drove at several different speeds over the course of the journey, which just happened to *average* 28MPH. They never actually drove any length of time at that speed.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Results vary. My 2000 Golf TDI automatic was rated 34/45mpg (original sticker, old EPA rating), which is 29/40 under the new EPA rating. In the 150,000 mile life of the car to date, I have averaged 44mpg, including town and highway. And I regularly travel at 70mph.
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they measure them under ideal conditions which are hardly reflective of reality
You're right, 390km of winding mountain roads is hardly the reality most people will drive in.
Good luck getting anywhere near 24mpg in those conditions.
The Contrarian Mystique (Score:3, Insightful)
I am aware that I used the word "penetration." It's OK, I'm used to /. I know what's coming.
Re:The Contrarian Mystique (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually they are not, which is why they may succeed.
They are trying to make a kick-ass car. People don't want to drive a large golf cart just to "save the planet", or at least not enough of those people exist to form a market.
With the singular exception of battery life / recharge time electric vehicles are superior in every way to internal combustion engine vehicles. They have better torque characteristics, less moving parts and simpler maintenance. Once battery technology advances enough that the range is acceptable, electric cars will take over from combustion engine cars because they are simply better vehicles.
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Getting kick-ass performance in a basically limited run prototype is
And for a lot of city dwellers...where the hell do I plug it in? An extension cord out the fourth floor apartment window won't cut it. A few years of infrastructure is needed.
This i
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Which is why they are leveraging their success with the Roadster to build the model S at $50,000.
Then they will release the bluestar at $30,000.
See a pattern here?
Musk calls NYT Writer "Douchbag" and "Idiot" (Score:2)
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/10/teslas-elon-musk-grows-a-pair-good-for-him/ [techcrunch.com]
Awesome.
Theoretical? (Score:2)
That would give the Roadster a theoretical maximum touring range of nearly 280 miles
Somehow I don't think the author understands the meaning of the word used. Surely, the range with a long downhill road or strong (as in Katrina) tailwind would be quite a bit more.
What's the recharge time? (Score:4, Funny)
My Honda Civic refuels in about a minute and a half, and I can get well over 400 miles on a tank on the highway. Just sayin'.
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My Honda Civic refuels in about a minute and a half, and I can get well over 400 miles on a tank on the highway. Just sayin'.
then we should compare the times your civic can be stopped on idle
People just like to bitch about good electirc cars...
How abou ttelling us: do you really do your 400 miles in a typical day? do you even do 200 miles? I highly doubt it... Now how about you think that you could never, ever have to go to the gas station to gas your car, all you gotta do is plug it in when you park it at your place...
Re:What's the recharge time? (Score:4, Insightful)
Park your Civic in the garage tonight, and hit the button that tells it to drive itself to the gas station, fill-up, and return before you wake up in the morning...
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Cool, it practically pays for itself (Score:5, Insightful)
If I accelerate to 97 km/h in 3.7 seconds, I most likely will hit the car in front of me and/or get a ticket for reckless driving.
If I go at 201 km/h, I'll also get a ticket for speeding.
Even though I'd like my next car to be an electric one, acceleration and top speed aren't the reasons for it.
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You say that now before you've ever driven one.
Every review I have read states that this is the one of the most enjoyable cars to drive ever made, electric or otherwise.
Re:Cool, it practically pays for itself (Score:5, Informative)
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I doubt that this will be a serious issue for me in the long term because not every electric car out there will be a tesla. It is more likely that engines will be small to save on power and drivers will be too distracted by the blinkinlights
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I don't have that problem with my bike so I have an advantage when accelerating from zero.
Actually, that's only because they didn't know you were racing. Yeah, you're That Guy. Congrats.
Re:Cool, it practically pays for itself (Score:4, Informative)
Tesla decided to dump the multi-speed transmission, as the manufacturer of the tranny couldn't meet the torque and RPM specifications in the production vehicles. All sorts of finger pointing went with the issue, and it nearly took the whole company (Tesla) down with the lack of a quality transmission.
Oh, a two-speed transmission was built, but it only got a couple thousand miles on it before it had to be replaced. This blog entry [teslamotors.com] goes into details on how the problem was finally "fixed", with what was a single-speed transmission.
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What might be a stupid maneuver in a low performance car, is often NOT a reckless one in a performance car with someone that knows the power and limitations of it.
If you're in a Yugo on a two lane highway, you have a lot of trouble passing people, and have to wait till there
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"just maybe"? My ten year old four-cylinder Opel Omega has a higher top speed than that. As for acceleration... well:
The Lotus Exige S, based on a similar platform to the one Tesla is using, does 0-100km/h in about 4.1 seconds, and costs ~40k less. A Porsche 997 Turbo could be as fast as 3.2 seconds, while the GT2 and GT3 have comparable times. The Nissan GT-R and Viper ACR are at about 3.5-3.3. The Caterham R500 is even better at about 2.88 [jalopnik.com].
Ok, so the Caterham is a ridiculous car, but the others don't sacr
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How many of those 0-60 full power starts can it do per charge?
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0-60 in 3.0
http://www.leftlanenews.com/chevrolet-corvette-zr1.html [leftlanenews.com]
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[J]
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Re:28mph over 280 miles is not good... (Score:4, Informative)
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Seriously, there are a lot more places where you can get electricity, than places where you can get gasoline.
Re:28mph over 280 miles is not good... (Score:5, Informative)
I assume you know that Top Gear *admitted [wired.com]* to faking the ep -- not that this is something new for them [google.com]. They're an entertainment show. They never ran out of electricity and were never without a working car. The only thing that actually did go wrong was with the brakes -- but it was merely a blown fuse [reghardware.co.uk] from the abusive track duty they put it through, and the replacement was a nothing task. Their charge time statements were horribly misleading, too.
Clarkson stated that even if the Roadster had performed flawlessly, he still would have been hard on it because he believes that hydrogen is the future. [autobloggreen.com]
Re:28mph over 280 miles is not good... (Score:5, Informative)
You are aware that this is a car that could easily blow away almost all other cars on the road in terms of performance, right? It took this long because it was going *through narrow mountain roads in the Alps* [wikipedia.org]. Are you going to drive 80mph on roads like this [wikipedia.org]?
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I am.
Signed:
Bond, James Bond
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What are you talking about? Your average person is not traveling 4.3 hours every day. Indeed even you didn't travel 4.3 hours every day. and I severally doubt you averaged 80mph. Hook up a meter to your car. Stopping for gas and/or eating, p
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What are you talking about? Your average person is not traveling 4.3 hours every day. Indeed even you didn't travel 4.3 hours every day. and I severally doubt you averaged 80mph. Hook up a meter to your car. Stopping for gas and/or eating, pissing or whatever tanks your average. You probably averaged less than 50mph. Trust me.
If it took him 3.5 hours to 280 miles, he pretty much had no choice but to average 80mph. Trust me. Or... erm, do the math: 280/3.5 = 80.
The Tesla can easily keep up with your silly assed car. The only time wasters is if you have to recharge, which is generally done at night when you aren't billing any of those precious and expensive billable hours anyway!
It's going to hold a charge for the same mileage doing 80mph? That seems unlikely - if he maintained that speed, he'd have to stop for an hour to recharge.
You sound like an idiot who doesn't know the first thing about what you are talking about!
Great way to wrap up an argument ;)
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4 hours is a far cry from 10 hours traveling.
I'll try not to be too rude, but what the fuck are you talking about. The car is not reaching it's maximum speed at 90kph. That's the way it was driven for the event that it was running. The car's top speed is just above 200kph which means it could handily beat your average speed if the effort was put into it. Now, at a faster speed it might not get to that 280 miles that you traveled, but then again, how often are you going 280 miles in a trip. It's not the perfect car but you should at least be able
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Yes, it does feel like cheating. If it's driven at 65mph, the range drops to close to half that figure, which is also what one would expect for a battery of that size and a vehicle of that weight. There is no free lunch/you can't have a highway speed range of 280miles+ without losing half of the weight magically. Or having well over 100% efficient motors somehow.
Nice car. Too bad it'll get eviscerated in the press and market when it actually gets closer to 100-120miles per charge despite its ungodly hig
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I drove 280 miles today (central NY to upstate) and it took me 3.5 hours, meaning I traveled an average speed of 80mph for the journey.
Yeah but this was in Europe. Many of their country roads are old horse tracks with a bit of asphalt pasted over the top.
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And the Roadster and Model S are only limited to 45 minutes or so because of the type of cells they use (and they have to baby them to get what they do out of them). NiMHs can handle 30 minute charges, phosphates and spinels 15 minutes or so, and titanates 5-10. Assuming you have sufficient cooling in the packs and wire them appropriately, of course. Around a third to half of the announced mass-production EVs have a sub-30-minute charging option, and some (like Phoenix and LightningCar) have sub-10 minut
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No, they(we) don't. We like the performance gasoline gives.
100mph top speed
0-60 in 12 seconds
300 mile range
here's the kicker....15 minute 'recharge' time, available anywhere.
Under $30,000
Give me those specs, and I don't care if it runs on pureed unicorn horn.
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Basically a rich mans toy.
Interesting. That's what computers were when they came out for public consumption too.
And if the steadily increasing estimated price of the "Volt" continues, it will also "Basically be a rich mans toy".
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Because it's dirt cheap, perhaps?
The Roadster uses about 200Wh/mi driving (about 250Wh/mi wall to wheels because of their pack cooling needs because of their unusual choice of cells; most wall to wheels numbers for li-ion EVs are much closer to the pack to wheels). US average household electricity rates are about a dime per kilowatt hour. 0.2kWh/mi * $0.10/kWh = $0.02/mi = 50mi/dollar. For an average running gas price of... oh, let's say $2.50/gal, that's the energy-cost-equivalent of 125mpg.
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Erm, that should be 0.25Wh/mi * $0.10/kg = $0.025/mi = 40mi/dollar = 100mpg. Accidentally used pack-to-wheels instead of wall-to-wheels.
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Sorry for poking holes in what people are trying to do - considering I don't have a better idea myself.
Re:It is not the range or 0-60 perf, stupid (Score:4, Informative)
Electricity is everywhere. Once electric cars start reaching significant numbers, you'll start seeing charging stations in parking lots, on streets, everywhere. They'll work like modern parking meters. Slide your credit card or drop in a few bucks and charge away.
If you need to charge quickly (less than 30 minutes), there are battery chemistries which can do that, too.
For people who are able to park their cars and charge them over night - essentially eliminating the need to stop and "fill up your tank" periodically, is a huge gain in convenience.
Hydrogen is a decent energy carrier which many people like because switching to it wouldn't require a significant change in behaviour. It also has the drawback of either requiring a significant amount of electricity (if using electrolysis) or natural gas to produce. Not to mention that all hydrogen fuel tanks leak a significant amount of their fuel within weeks. It's more efficient to use that electricity to charge batteries for electric cars, or if using natural gas, simply use the natural gas in a regular combustion engine.
Re:It is not the range or 0-60 perf, stupid (Score:5, Informative)
Electric outlets might be in a lot of places, but wiring for high power is not as ubiquitous as you'd like to think. The US power grid is already stretched pretty thin and widespread adoption of plugin vehicles would necessitate major infrastructure upgrades. The average home or even parking lot is certainly not going to be wired to refill a vehicle in 30-minutes.
Lets throw in a little basic energy math to show exactly how bad the situation is, eh? A gallon of gas is about 125 MJ or about 35 kilowatts*hours of power. Charging at a rate of "1-gallon-gas/hour" equates to 35 kilowatts (about 30 hairdryers all running at once for the blonds out there). Thus to put in "2-gallons" worth of electricity in 30 minutes requires delivering 140 kilowatts, or 583 amps on a 240 volt circuit. For comparison, pumping 4 gallons/minute at the gas station is just over 8-megawatts.
Plug-in at home vehicles are pointless if there isn't enough power available at the homes and/or enough hours in the day to get a significant charge into the vehicle.