“The US government offers a $7,500 federal tax credit with the purchase of a new Tesla acquired for personal use.”
A $70k car so good they have to pay you to buy it, then subsidize it’s refueling stations for an infinitesimal reduction in future warming. Get back to me when every new power plant from now on is mandated to be a nuke, then at least I’ll start to believe there’s really a problem this car supposedly answers and not a clever money laundering scheme by fascist pols.
The problem it solves is being a really good sports car. I have no patience for “My Coal Powered Car Is Saving Baby Gaia”, but the S is uniformly reported to be very well built, is very handsome [I see them on the road regularly here in Portland], and goes like damn.
“Environmental” issues are a red herring with it, and the subsidies are bullshit.
Pretty much anyone buying the Tesla S would buy one even without the subsidy, since it’s an expensive sports car; that’s just government stupidity.
One doesn’t have to believe in catastrophic anthropogenic “climate change” to still think that reducing CO2 emissions, where possible and economical, and reducing overall pollution is still a good idea. An electric car powered by coal fired plants is still an improvement over gas powered vehicles, at least if the coal plant is in the developed world, due to the increased efficiency of a large power plant vs a tiny IC engine. It also translates to less urban smog and other pollution.
Yes, but it remains unclear that CO2 per se is a real problem. One of the infuriating things about the prop campaign in CA to get rid of its idiotic carbon law was that the American Lung Association put up a bunch of mendacious ads implying that it would increase air pollution.
depending where you are, the Carbon intensity of Electricity varies hard, almost 10X.
In the northwest and New England it’s mostly Canadian Hydro, so it’s super clean
electricity. The center part of the country is starting to build lots of wind.
It’s the south that’s burning a lot more coal.
The south has a lot of nukes, it’s the mid-west that has the highest concentration of cola-fired powerplants.
…After which we may ask what kind of coal the plants use (high sulfur? low sulfur?), and after that we may ask what scrubbers are in place, and all sorts of lovely specifics.
Coal is not per se a dirty fuel.
“In the northwest and New England it’s mostly Canadian Hydro, so it’s super clean
electricity. ”
In the Northwest, environmentalists are trying to tear down all the dams to re-introduce salmon and create habitat along the rivers. But they are also mandating the use of windmills, which kill a lot of birds and blight the countryside.
SOLD!
Er, wait, I can’t actually afford it.
I happened to park next to a Model S at the supermarket a couple of weeks ago. That’s the first time I’ve seen one up close. It was very nice looking.
As the cartoon mentioned, electric cars are so quiet that they could pose a hazard to pedestrians. I envision that owners will be able to add sound effects, much like ringtones on cell phones. I would probably choose the Jetsons flying car sound.
I doubt it. Reminds me of the Red Flag Traffic Laws in the UK.
I thought it took ~8 hours to charge to the full ~280 mile range of the battery (not 20 minutes as claimed?)? I was looking at what it would take to do a 900 mile trip in this vehicle (as I do every semester or so), and it seemed like I would need to make 2-3 8-hour stops.
Anyway, what EV enthusiasts need to solve to ensure a real transition away from hydrocarbons for mobile power production is not an electric car (too many ways to gimmick that – make it out of aluminum and tinfoil, make the whole underside of the vehicle a giant battery, reduce the payload capacity to zero, etc etc), but an electric long-haul semi-truck. These, the red-blood-cells of our civilization, being what keeps any of our modern mega-cities alive, are what really needs replacing if you want a true alternative for mobile power.
I thought it took ~8 hours to charge to the full ~280 mile range of the battery (not 20 minutes as claimed?)?
That’s from your home, not a fast-charge station.
“I thought it took ~8 hours to charge to the full ~280 mile range of the battery (not 20 minutes as claimed?)? I was looking at what it would take to do a 900 mile trip in this vehicle (as I do every semester or so), and it seemed like I would need to make 2-3 8-hour stops.”
The Model S comes in two flavors, 60 KWH and 85 KWH. The 85 KWH battery gives you an EPA range of 265.
Depending upon weather, speed, you may get as little as 200 or go north of 300, but let’s call it 250 for planning purposes. So to do a 900 mile trip, plan on 3 stops.
Now to charge at home, your vehicle if you bought the performance package would be 20KW, so that would be 4 hours at night with a high performance home charger. You would need a 240V outlet and a big breaker.
But to charge for a Road trip, Tesla has a large network of 100 to 120 KW Superchargers. At 100 KW, it’s about 45 minutes to recharge fully. (It’s really not because as you pass 60% the charge rate throttles and as you pass 80% it really wants to slow down, so you are fastest, charging to 60%, get 170 miles of range and hit the next supercharger). Soif you opt for the Best time for a roadtrip, you will need about half an hour to get 170 miles of range, every 3 hours or if you stop for lunch, you get the 265 miles of range.
It’s not ideal but it’s not a bad level of performance for a new technology.
There is a Tesla Supercharger at Newark DE, and i’ve met a few owners having a snack, while i was having a coffee.
But to get to your question, the baseline Tesla comes with a 10KW internal charger but people often buy the 20KW performance charger, that need s a 100 Amp breaker and feed, so, that’s some serious electrical work at home, so you may not get full advantage of that at home, but the real enabler is the network of Superchargers, 100 KW and if memory serves 750 VDC, 125 Amp, decent kick, and Tesla is talking about
250 KW SuperFast Chargers, as well as battery swapping.
Now Battery EV is not ready to compete at NASCAR, but it’s coming along pretty fast. This Fall, they will be racing Formula E racecars in europe, the drivers will hotswap cars, rather then recharge, but it should be a first step.
The Interesting thing about the Tesla is people are buying Solar Panels for their house and fueling their cars with sunshine. That will make the Venezuelans, the Saudi’s and the other 3rd world craptastic oil dictators
of the world shite themselves.
It’ll make US, Canadian, and Mexican oil unhappy first – the world’s serious oil supply isn’t from craphole dictatorships these days.
And remember that the US is not the only consumer of crude; China and India alone could burn every drop Venezuela and Saudi could pump out, not to mention the way the entire world’s freight infrastructure runs and will continue to run on oil for the foreseeable future.
(Hippies and stupid politicians would all shit bricks at the thought of every large freight ship in the world being nuclear powered, after all. So that ain’t happening any time soon.
Electrifying all the world’s railways would be less hard, but the nuclear plants to support that face the same political issue.
It’s all fossil fuels for freight.)
The problem with nuclear powered freighters is they are horrendously expensive to operate. The US Navy has an excellent track record but they put a lot of manpower in there and they run big shifts with lots of people and there is no profit requirement.
If the technology was cost effective it would have happened, but, no shipyards have ever gotten into it.
I’d be all in favor of a electrified Rail system in this country.
It’s not ideal but it’s not a bad level of performance for a new technology.
Electric cars are not a new technology. Electric cars have been on the roads since the 19th century, and they were going to be the Next Big Thing in transport for as long as I remember.
Our ancestors dumped them as soon as the internal combustion engine came along, because they sucked. Nothing much has changed since, except those ancestors have died out, and everyone has forgotten why the ICE is such a great invention. If anyone can change that, it’s probably Tesla, but, right now, they’re still toys for fat cats.
EVs are pricey, no doubt about it, but the price of battery is falling some 37%/year.
EV’s died once the Electric starter came along. Gas engines sucked for the first
decade or two. The strength needed to hand crank them made them
very unappealing to smaller men and women. the kick back also sent a lot
of people to the hospital.
what EV enthusiasts need to solve to ensure a real transition away from hydrocarbons for mobile power production is not an electric car…, but an electric long-haul semi-truck.
WalMart recently put out news of its range-extended electric semi called the WAVE. Carbon-fiber trailer, aerodynamics package, etc.
Other manufacturers continually step up with more and more aerodynamic answers to the efficiency problem, as well, and the BulletTruck has posted some impressive numbers.
One need only spend 15-20 minutes watching a NASCAR race to understand that one of the biggest issues with aerodynamics is the susceptiblity to damage, and the significant detriment that said damage can have on all of the gains it was designed to offer.
I still shake my head at Obama’s mandate on efficiency standards for long-haul (or even short-haul) semi-trucks. Anyone in the freight business knows that fuel is one of the largest costs of operation, and every trucking company has a genuine vested interest in gaining efficiency in the trucks they use. However, just like in the car industry, the life of a truck in a large fleet operation is around 3 years or 150,000-300,000 miles, generally on a lease. Those trucks then end up in the hands of owner-operators or smaller firms who prefer to buy used equipment, just like cars. So even if you could put out a truck next year that got 15 MPG instead of 6-7, it would represent such a small percentage of the overall nationwide fleet that it would be negligible, and it would take many, many years of turnover to start to see appreciable gains. That doesn’t mean that long-haul freight companies have no incentive to innovate, because they do, but mandating higher fleet economy also can’t just happen by decree or overnight.
Depends what the price of diesel stays at.
If diesel spikes upwards a lot of trucks will get mothballed.
Go out to the Desert, lots of boneyards are full of flyable 727s, DC-9s,
747s but the ops cost are brutal on those.
It sucketh mightily to the small owner-operators, but, if the prices for diesel rise, then
new vehicles will make sense.
“but, if the prices for diesel rise, then new vehicles will make sense.”
Be careful, that almost sounds like a Capitalist argument.
Fuel is still the largest portion of the cost of shipping, and one of the few costs that a shipper can control (drivers can’t be replaced, just supplemented, distances can’t be reduced, load and unload times are close to peak optimization already), so there is still an economic incentive to reduce that cost, which means new vehicles still make sense, just not to the same degree as if fuel costs skyrocketed.
If fuel prices *don’t* rise, why should the government be sticking their nose in and mandating efficiency increases, when companies are already pursuing said increases?
“[The Congress shall have Power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes;”
Congress has the power to regulate commerce and the instrumentalities therein.
If Congress chooses to regulate fuel efficiency, well, they can. it may be useful for
air pollution reasons, it can be useful in spurring innovation in design, it may be useful in forcing new vehicles into the fleet and encouraging sales.
I was at the American Trucking Association convention in DC last week.
They were showing off lane departure warning systems, anti skid, stability
control, night vision, blind spot warning systems, smart following and auto convoy.
All of these may come in as mandated safety regs.
So what’s a little CAFE regs along with that?
Hmm, no. Checking the claims on their website, their “supercharger stations” are supposed to half-recharge the battery in about half an hour. Okay, that makes it more useable. It also implies that the supercharger operates at ~80 kW of power output. (I’m surprised the battery doesn’t overheat being charged that fast – do they have coolant circulating or something?)
(Compare to the ~10 MW of output of your typical gasoline nozzle – not too bad in comparison, versus a wall outlet)
Officially the Superchargers are either 100 or 120 KW, but the charge rate is a function of battery charge.
as the battery charges, the charge rate declines.
And yes, the liquid cooling system of the Tesla battery pack is a key part of their technology. They came up
with ways to fluid cool the batteries without suffering catastrophic pack failure. I was pretty impressed
by that ability to keep 18650 battery cells from cascading in failure or, causing critical failures. I think there are some 50,000 of those batteries in the tesla and they’ve had great success in reliability.
That wasn’t an approach any other EV manufacturer took.
I think the Tesla cell count in the battery is more like 7 or 8 thousand.
My brother has one in California. He loves it. Of course, they’re still very expensive, but so is anything new. Till now, electric cars weren’t serious. This one is.
2 things, I live in an apt building so I can’t just plug the car in over night. Second, electricity prices in CA have necessarily skyrocketed making our $4/gal gas look downright affordable.
Yeah – but the superchargers are _free_.
If you check, many of the superchargers are in rural/far suburb areas. Not suitable for routine “home” use.
California passed a law that said Multi Family housing and Condo associations cannot ban EV Chargers they can only place reasonable regulations (Insurance, installation fees, access)
that will change things slowly.
I saw a Top Gear segment that had some negative comments about the car, though they did like the performance. Tesla sued over that but lost. I think the issue was with the claimed range and recharge times not being quite as good as advertised.
Asking a bunch of comedians to review an emerging tech Tesla Roadster is a
bit risky. I believe that was the same year that to drive a Tesla Model S cross country took 8 days
and you had to stop at RV parks and plug in for 5 hours at a time, so you were driving 3 hours and charging for 3 hours, that was a real adventure.
Now you can drive coast to coast without much planning at all.
Well, maybe. Making it across the PA Turnpike would be interesting, there are only two points currently operational, both near Philadelphia.
well Tesla on their website claims they will be adding 2 more superchargers to the
turnpike by the end of the year.
I’ve mostly been looking at I-95, which is the route i’m interested in. Of course,
the Model S is a little rich for me. If i’m getting an EV, i’m getting a Volt. Electric in town,
Gas for the long trips.
Yeah, much as I love TG, it’s entertainment, not an serious car review program.
That said, AAA has found that EVs do have serious issues in the cold.
Testing by AAA has found that how far an electric vehicle can travel on one charge varies widely depending on the weather. Frigid temperatures can reduce that distance by 57%.
Every car has their operating limits. Diesels don’t like it once it once it’s single digits.
Gas cars don’t like it once it gets to 115F. It starts boiling off.
RIght now EV’s suffer in severe weather, even my Hybrid doesn’t deal well when we get a
blizzard in. This winter during the cold snaps, both the 12V and 300V battery weren’t doing well.
Long as we’re on the subject of cars, I have never understood why the price of new cars never comes down. Is it because they keep adding features and regulatory requirements or something? Say Walmart bought the full CAD specs to, say, a 1995 Camry that had a excellent overall repair record, that Toyota no longer has any use for. Could they possibly produce a $3000 new car, zero frills? I’d buy one in a minute, and so would anyone else with a limited budget. Am I misunderstanding what drives pricing in the auto industry?
Truth is that the Tesla may turn out to be the cheapest car. It’s basically a fortified box, a very big battery, and a lot of software. The box is probably a whole lot simpler and cheaper than a regular car, and the battery is hard but they’re working on it, and the software’s marginal cost is zero.
It’s very similar, I suspect, to the restaurant industry. Most of what you pay for a car amortizes its development and general overhead of the car manufacturer, which puts a floor on the price. Just as fast food places supersize cheap carbs to provide more for the money, car companies add “features” at low marginal cost. There’s a lot more to building cars than CAD specs (though 3-D printing may change this).
True. But that’s why I asked about buying somewhat out-of-date specs, to save on development costs at least. ‘Course, you still need to build the thing.
And you need to sell it – and since the safety tests get more stringent every year (or at least the IIHS ones do), a car that was “top rated for safety!” in 2000 is “a god-damn deathtrap, worst rating” today.
And that doesn’t sell well.
I hear you all, but understand – I can’t _afford_ a new car that meets all these wonderful requirements. Instead, I am currently driving a 2001 I bought used a couple of years ago, with not too many miles on it. It also doesn’t have all those awesome new safety features, and it’s old too. Why wouldn’t I jump at the chance to get the exact same car new, cheaper than its used price? If that were possible.
As with health care, you’re too stupid to know what kind of car you need.
[Update] Sorry, that may have needed a [sarcasm] tag.
I’m in the same boat with MikeR. I love my ’91 Corolla wagon. It runs great and everything works. Trouble is, the body is rotting away. I’d jump at the chance to buy the same car again.
I would imagine that increasing labor and regulatory costs play a role. Otherwise, you’d expect something along the lines of TVs or computers.
I doubt a ’95 Camry would pass current safety requirements (antilock brakes, airbags, side impact?).
Cars aren’t like consumer electronics. You couldn’t build that ’95 Camry for $3000 because the price of steel, machining, and the host of parts cost more than that. You’d also have to bring the car up to current safety and emissions standards. There are low cost cars available in countries like India (IIRC, they sell for about $6000) but they don’t meet US safety and emissions standards so it isn’t legal to import them. About the last time someone tried to sell a really cheap car in the US was the Yugo. It wasn’t what you’d call a success.
The only ones that come to mind are the Yugo.
I suspect as the tooling gets old, you need to work harder on QC.
If you need to refresh the tools, you may as well redesign
I didn’t think of this yesterday, but the best example I could come up with to test this theory is the Volkswagen Beetle, the Type 1 of which remained in worldwide production until 2003.
I don’t have enough time to research it fully, but the issue that I ran across initially was that the price of the Type 1 in Mexico was tied to minimum wage, so I don’t know the true cost of the car. Of all of the vehicles ever produced, that’s probably the purest form of “a vehicle that the parent company no longer has any use for,” but was still in production for 58 years.
the Yugo and Lada. The Hindustan Motors Ambassador was a Morris Major.
Lada, I’ll grant you. Yugo, not so much. In terms of production without major changes, the order is VW Type 1 (original Beetle), Lada Riva, Ford Model T. The Yugo (Zustava Koral) never even reached 1 Million units.
I wonder if it is okay to have expensive electric cars for dn-guy? Isn’t Tesla an evil corporation that is just jacking up the price for evil CEO’s? Isn’t the little guy getting shafted?
I wonder how he compares this to pharmaceutical companies with expensive, new products.
the gross margin in electric car sales is pretty thin. Those batteries cost a lot.
Fortunately battery is getting a lot cheaper. That is attracting new entrants
“The US government offers a $7,500 federal tax credit with the purchase of a new Tesla acquired for personal use.”
A $70k car so good they have to pay you to buy it, then subsidize it’s refueling stations for an infinitesimal reduction in future warming. Get back to me when every new power plant from now on is mandated to be a nuke, then at least I’ll start to believe there’s really a problem this car supposedly answers and not a clever money laundering scheme by fascist pols.
The problem it solves is being a really good sports car. I have no patience for “My Coal Powered Car Is Saving Baby Gaia”, but the S is uniformly reported to be very well built, is very handsome [I see them on the road regularly here in Portland], and goes like damn.
“Environmental” issues are a red herring with it, and the subsidies are bullshit.
Pretty much anyone buying the Tesla S would buy one even without the subsidy, since it’s an expensive sports car; that’s just government stupidity.
One doesn’t have to believe in catastrophic anthropogenic “climate change” to still think that reducing CO2 emissions, where possible and economical, and reducing overall pollution is still a good idea. An electric car powered by coal fired plants is still an improvement over gas powered vehicles, at least if the coal plant is in the developed world, due to the increased efficiency of a large power plant vs a tiny IC engine. It also translates to less urban smog and other pollution.
Yes, but it remains unclear that CO2 per se is a real problem. One of the infuriating things about the prop campaign in CA to get rid of its idiotic carbon law was that the American Lung Association put up a bunch of mendacious ads implying that it would increase air pollution.
depending where you are, the Carbon intensity of Electricity varies hard, almost 10X.
In the northwest and New England it’s mostly Canadian Hydro, so it’s super clean
electricity. The center part of the country is starting to build lots of wind.
It’s the south that’s burning a lot more coal.
The south has a lot of nukes, it’s the mid-west that has the highest concentration of cola-fired powerplants.
…After which we may ask what kind of coal the plants use (high sulfur? low sulfur?), and after that we may ask what scrubbers are in place, and all sorts of lovely specifics.
Coal is not per se a dirty fuel.
“In the northwest and New England it’s mostly Canadian Hydro, so it’s super clean
electricity. ”
In the Northwest, environmentalists are trying to tear down all the dams to re-introduce salmon and create habitat along the rivers. But they are also mandating the use of windmills, which kill a lot of birds and blight the countryside.
SOLD!
Er, wait, I can’t actually afford it.
I happened to park next to a Model S at the supermarket a couple of weeks ago. That’s the first time I’ve seen one up close. It was very nice looking.
As the cartoon mentioned, electric cars are so quiet that they could pose a hazard to pedestrians. I envision that owners will be able to add sound effects, much like ringtones on cell phones. I would probably choose the Jetsons flying car sound.
I doubt it. Reminds me of the Red Flag Traffic Laws in the UK.
I thought it took ~8 hours to charge to the full ~280 mile range of the battery (not 20 minutes as claimed?)? I was looking at what it would take to do a 900 mile trip in this vehicle (as I do every semester or so), and it seemed like I would need to make 2-3 8-hour stops.
Anyway, what EV enthusiasts need to solve to ensure a real transition away from hydrocarbons for mobile power production is not an electric car (too many ways to gimmick that – make it out of aluminum and tinfoil, make the whole underside of the vehicle a giant battery, reduce the payload capacity to zero, etc etc), but an electric long-haul semi-truck. These, the red-blood-cells of our civilization, being what keeps any of our modern mega-cities alive, are what really needs replacing if you want a true alternative for mobile power.
I thought it took ~8 hours to charge to the full ~280 mile range of the battery (not 20 minutes as claimed?)?
That’s from your home, not a fast-charge station.
“I thought it took ~8 hours to charge to the full ~280 mile range of the battery (not 20 minutes as claimed?)? I was looking at what it would take to do a 900 mile trip in this vehicle (as I do every semester or so), and it seemed like I would need to make 2-3 8-hour stops.”
The Model S comes in two flavors, 60 KWH and 85 KWH. The 85 KWH battery gives you an EPA range of 265.
Depending upon weather, speed, you may get as little as 200 or go north of 300, but let’s call it 250 for planning purposes. So to do a 900 mile trip, plan on 3 stops.
Now to charge at home, your vehicle if you bought the performance package would be 20KW, so that would be 4 hours at night with a high performance home charger. You would need a 240V outlet and a big breaker.
But to charge for a Road trip, Tesla has a large network of 100 to 120 KW Superchargers. At 100 KW, it’s about 45 minutes to recharge fully. (It’s really not because as you pass 60% the charge rate throttles and as you pass 80% it really wants to slow down, so you are fastest, charging to 60%, get 170 miles of range and hit the next supercharger). Soif you opt for the Best time for a roadtrip, you will need about half an hour to get 170 miles of range, every 3 hours or if you stop for lunch, you get the 265 miles of range.
It’s not ideal but it’s not a bad level of performance for a new technology.
There is a Tesla Supercharger at Newark DE, and i’ve met a few owners having a snack, while i was having a coffee.
But to get to your question, the baseline Tesla comes with a 10KW internal charger but people often buy the 20KW performance charger, that need s a 100 Amp breaker and feed, so, that’s some serious electrical work at home, so you may not get full advantage of that at home, but the real enabler is the network of Superchargers, 100 KW and if memory serves 750 VDC, 125 Amp, decent kick, and Tesla is talking about
250 KW SuperFast Chargers, as well as battery swapping.
Now Battery EV is not ready to compete at NASCAR, but it’s coming along pretty fast. This Fall, they will be racing Formula E racecars in europe, the drivers will hotswap cars, rather then recharge, but it should be a first step.
The Interesting thing about the Tesla is people are buying Solar Panels for their house and fueling their cars with sunshine. That will make the Venezuelans, the Saudi’s and the other 3rd world craptastic oil dictators
of the world shite themselves.
It’ll make US, Canadian, and Mexican oil unhappy first – the world’s serious oil supply isn’t from craphole dictatorships these days.
And remember that the US is not the only consumer of crude; China and India alone could burn every drop Venezuela and Saudi could pump out, not to mention the way the entire world’s freight infrastructure runs and will continue to run on oil for the foreseeable future.
(Hippies and stupid politicians would all shit bricks at the thought of every large freight ship in the world being nuclear powered, after all. So that ain’t happening any time soon.
Electrifying all the world’s railways would be less hard, but the nuclear plants to support that face the same political issue.
It’s all fossil fuels for freight.)
The problem with nuclear powered freighters is they are horrendously expensive to operate. The US Navy has an excellent track record but they put a lot of manpower in there and they run big shifts with lots of people and there is no profit requirement.
If the technology was cost effective it would have happened, but, no shipyards have ever gotten into it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion#Merchant_ships
I’d be all in favor of a electrified Rail system in this country.
It’s not ideal but it’s not a bad level of performance for a new technology.
Electric cars are not a new technology. Electric cars have been on the roads since the 19th century, and they were going to be the Next Big Thing in transport for as long as I remember.
Our ancestors dumped them as soon as the internal combustion engine came along, because they sucked. Nothing much has changed since, except those ancestors have died out, and everyone has forgotten why the ICE is such a great invention. If anyone can change that, it’s probably Tesla, but, right now, they’re still toys for fat cats.
EVs are pricey, no doubt about it, but the price of battery is falling some 37%/year.
EV’s died once the Electric starter came along. Gas engines sucked for the first
decade or two. The strength needed to hand crank them made them
very unappealing to smaller men and women. the kick back also sent a lot
of people to the hospital.
what EV enthusiasts need to solve to ensure a real transition away from hydrocarbons for mobile power production is not an electric car…, but an electric long-haul semi-truck.
WalMart recently put out news of its range-extended electric semi called the WAVE. Carbon-fiber trailer, aerodynamics package, etc.
Other manufacturers continually step up with more and more aerodynamic answers to the efficiency problem, as well, and the BulletTruck has posted some impressive numbers.
One need only spend 15-20 minutes watching a NASCAR race to understand that one of the biggest issues with aerodynamics is the susceptiblity to damage, and the significant detriment that said damage can have on all of the gains it was designed to offer.
I still shake my head at Obama’s mandate on efficiency standards for long-haul (or even short-haul) semi-trucks. Anyone in the freight business knows that fuel is one of the largest costs of operation, and every trucking company has a genuine vested interest in gaining efficiency in the trucks they use. However, just like in the car industry, the life of a truck in a large fleet operation is around 3 years or 150,000-300,000 miles, generally on a lease. Those trucks then end up in the hands of owner-operators or smaller firms who prefer to buy used equipment, just like cars. So even if you could put out a truck next year that got 15 MPG instead of 6-7, it would represent such a small percentage of the overall nationwide fleet that it would be negligible, and it would take many, many years of turnover to start to see appreciable gains. That doesn’t mean that long-haul freight companies have no incentive to innovate, because they do, but mandating higher fleet economy also can’t just happen by decree or overnight.
Depends what the price of diesel stays at.
If diesel spikes upwards a lot of trucks will get mothballed.
Go out to the Desert, lots of boneyards are full of flyable 727s, DC-9s,
747s but the ops cost are brutal on those.
It sucketh mightily to the small owner-operators, but, if the prices for diesel rise, then
new vehicles will make sense.
“but, if the prices for diesel rise, then new vehicles will make sense.”
Be careful, that almost sounds like a Capitalist argument.
Fuel is still the largest portion of the cost of shipping, and one of the few costs that a shipper can control (drivers can’t be replaced, just supplemented, distances can’t be reduced, load and unload times are close to peak optimization already), so there is still an economic incentive to reduce that cost, which means new vehicles still make sense, just not to the same degree as if fuel costs skyrocketed.
If fuel prices *don’t* rise, why should the government be sticking their nose in and mandating efficiency increases, when companies are already pursuing said increases?
“[The Congress shall have Power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes;”
Congress has the power to regulate commerce and the instrumentalities therein.
If Congress chooses to regulate fuel efficiency, well, they can. it may be useful for
air pollution reasons, it can be useful in spurring innovation in design, it may be useful in forcing new vehicles into the fleet and encouraging sales.
I was at the American Trucking Association convention in DC last week.
They were showing off lane departure warning systems, anti skid, stability
control, night vision, blind spot warning systems, smart following and auto convoy.
All of these may come in as mandated safety regs.
So what’s a little CAFE regs along with that?
Hmm, no. Checking the claims on their website, their “supercharger stations” are supposed to half-recharge the battery in about half an hour. Okay, that makes it more useable. It also implies that the supercharger operates at ~80 kW of power output. (I’m surprised the battery doesn’t overheat being charged that fast – do they have coolant circulating or something?)
(Compare to the ~10 MW of output of your typical gasoline nozzle – not too bad in comparison, versus a wall outlet)
Officially the Superchargers are either 100 or 120 KW, but the charge rate is a function of battery charge.
as the battery charges, the charge rate declines.
And yes, the liquid cooling system of the Tesla battery pack is a key part of their technology. They came up
with ways to fluid cool the batteries without suffering catastrophic pack failure. I was pretty impressed
by that ability to keep 18650 battery cells from cascading in failure or, causing critical failures. I think there are some 50,000 of those batteries in the tesla and they’ve had great success in reliability.
That wasn’t an approach any other EV manufacturer took.
I think the Tesla cell count in the battery is more like 7 or 8 thousand.
My brother has one in California. He loves it. Of course, they’re still very expensive, but so is anything new. Till now, electric cars weren’t serious. This one is.
2 things, I live in an apt building so I can’t just plug the car in over night. Second, electricity prices in CA have necessarily skyrocketed making our $4/gal gas look downright affordable.
Yeah – but the superchargers are _free_.
If you check, many of the superchargers are in rural/far suburb areas. Not suitable for routine “home” use.
California passed a law that said Multi Family housing and Condo associations cannot ban EV Chargers they can only place reasonable regulations (Insurance, installation fees, access)
that will change things slowly.
I saw a Top Gear segment that had some negative comments about the car, though they did like the performance. Tesla sued over that but lost. I think the issue was with the claimed range and recharge times not being quite as good as advertised.
Asking a bunch of comedians to review an emerging tech Tesla Roadster is a
bit risky. I believe that was the same year that to drive a Tesla Model S cross country took 8 days
and you had to stop at RV parks and plug in for 5 hours at a time, so you were driving 3 hours and charging for 3 hours, that was a real adventure.
Now you can drive coast to coast without much planning at all.
Well, maybe. Making it across the PA Turnpike would be interesting, there are only two points currently operational, both near Philadelphia.
well Tesla on their website claims they will be adding 2 more superchargers to the
turnpike by the end of the year.
I’ve mostly been looking at I-95, which is the route i’m interested in. Of course,
the Model S is a little rich for me. If i’m getting an EV, i’m getting a Volt. Electric in town,
Gas for the long trips.
Yeah, much as I love TG, it’s entertainment, not an serious car review program.
That said, AAA has found that EVs do have serious issues in the cold.
Every car has their operating limits. Diesels don’t like it once it once it’s single digits.
Gas cars don’t like it once it gets to 115F. It starts boiling off.
RIght now EV’s suffer in severe weather, even my Hybrid doesn’t deal well when we get a
blizzard in. This winter during the cold snaps, both the 12V and 300V battery weren’t doing well.
Long as we’re on the subject of cars, I have never understood why the price of new cars never comes down. Is it because they keep adding features and regulatory requirements or something? Say Walmart bought the full CAD specs to, say, a 1995 Camry that had a excellent overall repair record, that Toyota no longer has any use for. Could they possibly produce a $3000 new car, zero frills? I’d buy one in a minute, and so would anyone else with a limited budget. Am I misunderstanding what drives pricing in the auto industry?
Truth is that the Tesla may turn out to be the cheapest car. It’s basically a fortified box, a very big battery, and a lot of software. The box is probably a whole lot simpler and cheaper than a regular car, and the battery is hard but they’re working on it, and the software’s marginal cost is zero.
It’s very similar, I suspect, to the restaurant industry. Most of what you pay for a car amortizes its development and general overhead of the car manufacturer, which puts a floor on the price. Just as fast food places supersize cheap carbs to provide more for the money, car companies add “features” at low marginal cost. There’s a lot more to building cars than CAD specs (though 3-D printing may change this).
True. But that’s why I asked about buying somewhat out-of-date specs, to save on development costs at least. ‘Course, you still need to build the thing.
And you need to sell it – and since the safety tests get more stringent every year (or at least the IIHS ones do), a car that was “top rated for safety!” in 2000 is “a god-damn deathtrap, worst rating” today.
And that doesn’t sell well.
I hear you all, but understand – I can’t _afford_ a new car that meets all these wonderful requirements. Instead, I am currently driving a 2001 I bought used a couple of years ago, with not too many miles on it. It also doesn’t have all those awesome new safety features, and it’s old too. Why wouldn’t I jump at the chance to get the exact same car new, cheaper than its used price? If that were possible.
As with health care, you’re too stupid to know what kind of car you need.
[Update] Sorry, that may have needed a [sarcasm] tag.
I’m in the same boat with MikeR. I love my ’91 Corolla wagon. It runs great and everything works. Trouble is, the body is rotting away. I’d jump at the chance to buy the same car again.
I would imagine that increasing labor and regulatory costs play a role. Otherwise, you’d expect something along the lines of TVs or computers.
I doubt a ’95 Camry would pass current safety requirements (antilock brakes, airbags, side impact?).
Cars aren’t like consumer electronics. You couldn’t build that ’95 Camry for $3000 because the price of steel, machining, and the host of parts cost more than that. You’d also have to bring the car up to current safety and emissions standards. There are low cost cars available in countries like India (IIRC, they sell for about $6000) but they don’t meet US safety and emissions standards so it isn’t legal to import them. About the last time someone tried to sell a really cheap car in the US was the Yugo. It wasn’t what you’d call a success.
The only ones that come to mind are the Yugo.
I suspect as the tooling gets old, you need to work harder on QC.
If you need to refresh the tools, you may as well redesign
I didn’t think of this yesterday, but the best example I could come up with to test this theory is the Volkswagen Beetle, the Type 1 of which remained in worldwide production until 2003.
I don’t have enough time to research it fully, but the issue that I ran across initially was that the price of the Type 1 in Mexico was tied to minimum wage, so I don’t know the true cost of the car. Of all of the vehicles ever produced, that’s probably the purest form of “a vehicle that the parent company no longer has any use for,” but was still in production for 58 years.
the Yugo and Lada. The Hindustan Motors Ambassador was a Morris Major.
Lada, I’ll grant you. Yugo, not so much. In terms of production without major changes, the order is VW Type 1 (original Beetle), Lada Riva, Ford Model T. The Yugo (Zustava Koral) never even reached 1 Million units.
I wonder if it is okay to have expensive electric cars for dn-guy? Isn’t Tesla an evil corporation that is just jacking up the price for evil CEO’s? Isn’t the little guy getting shafted?
I wonder how he compares this to pharmaceutical companies with expensive, new products.
the gross margin in electric car sales is pretty thin. Those batteries cost a lot.
Fortunately battery is getting a lot cheaper. That is attracting new entrants