Tesla Touts Cross-Country Trip, Aims For World Record 357
smaxp writes "A cross-country trip by two Model S sedans 'recorded the lowest charge time for an electric vehicle traveling across the country – a feat that is now being assessed for recognition as a Guinness World Records achievement,' according to a Tesla blog post. 'The 3464.5-mile jaunt is yet another attempt to ease range anxiety among many consumers who worry about being stranded in a car with a depleted battery pack and nowhere near a charging station. While Tesla’s Model S is too expensive for average consumers, the company plans to roll out cheaper models at some point and needs to address the fear that has stopped many people from buying electric cars, even cheaper ones such as the Nissan Leaf...'"
Range anxiety isn't really rational (Score:5, Insightful)
Big point-proving stunts don't help with people who go "my local gas station doesn't provide chargers. I'm doomed if I get one." Because that's really in their head, more than about any particular drive being possible. Tesla has to win market share the same way every new technology does: winning enough early adopters to seem normal(and creating a support market).
Re:Still too slow. (Score:5, Insightful)
An ICE car can make the trip in 32 hours 7 minutes.
Average 108mph?
I assume Tesla wanted this test to be legal...
But Does it Scale? (Score:4, Insightful)
Will Tesla be able to build enough fast charging stations when selling cars that cost less than $40K?
A lot of things work when the average selling price of your cars isclose to $100,000, you have government subsidies flung at you and/or your customers left and right, you have fewer than 100,000 vehicles in the field, your company isn't really expected to show a profit, and your customers actually *read* the users manuals (probably send corrections to technical errors in them to your engineers) and make Apple Zealots look like disinterested teens.
Re:But Does it Scale? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like they built all the gas station before putting cars on the road.
Come on, with popularity charging stations will be built.
Re:Still not good enough. (Score:5, Insightful)
99% of the time I am driving it is <50km Another
You wouldn't buy a coupe if you had a family of 5, just like you shouldn't buy a Tesla if you are consistently driving far range.
Re:What I don't get... (Score:5, Insightful)
While the percentage is probably off, the basic math is fine.
Since I don't care to hunt down the numbers, I'll start with some blatant hypothetical guesswork.
First assume a perfectly rigid spherical Tesla Mark Math which has 25% of its mass devoted to batteries and gets 400 kilometers to a charge (across perfectly rigid perfectly flat surfaces with an infinite coefficient of friction).
If we double the batteries, we now have 800km worth of charge, but the carsphere also weighs 25% more. This results in an actual range of 800 / 1.25 or 640 km.
Now, since I've done the completely fictional numbers, I've changed my mind about getting real numbers.
A Model S [wikipedia.org] allegedly weighs 2108 kg with no passengers. The larger range option allegedly gets 500 km to a charge, and a forum post that I can't track back to a better source claims that over 1500lbs are battery.
For convenience, I will round total carmass to 2200 kg with driver, batterymass to 680kg and batteryrange to 500km.
Using the same process of math as above, this suggests that adding another 680kg batterypack would adjust the range from 500km to 760km. More than a 25% increase, but I'm not dealing with real-physics either. In a world of ideal math, doubling the battery increases the distance by about 50%. This world is far too squishy to be that world, so there are other limiters that will reduce the effective performance.