jshine: Bullseyed: I don't really understand how your daily commute is over 200 miles unless you're just too retarded to buy a house near your job.


Cars are sometimes driven for reasons other than the daily commute. Film at 11.

/e.g., when I was in school, I sometimes drove home to the parents' house over holidays -- happened on a quasi-regular basis and was over 200 miles

Guess the tesla wasn't for you. Doesn't mean it is useless for the rest of us. Actually, for me, a drive to the parents would also be limited by this cars range, but I would probably have another car that isn't pure electric.

Kraftwerk Orange: Also, keep in mind the chart is figuring a spherical cow: flat road, no wind, no HVAC use, no cargo/passengers other than driver.

You'd be interested to watch this video, where a pair of Motortrend folks drove a Model S to Las Vegas from LA at 65mph (233 miles, over a couple good sized passes). They had no idea if they would make it, so they kept the A/C off for most the trip. Video Link

The writer of the article did a 285 mile trip back from Vegas, with the A/C on 72* at first and 65mph, but ended up driving slower without A/C towards the end and still had a few miles left over. That makes for pretty good real world testing and results!

Lets talk frankly about internal cleanliness: DarkSoulNoHope: Lets talk frankly about internal cleanliness: Icetech3: Lets not talk about how bad electric cars are for the environment... A: Create a shiatton of batterys.. take a look at the chemicals used... B: Batteries have a VERY short lifespan, especially compared to a gas motor.. C: Hey! Lets dispose of those shiatty toxic batteries by the thousands now... The whole electric car idea is bullshiat being pushed on people. Just horrible...

P.S. you should learn the truth behind recycling.. just recycling paper is VERY bad for the environment... the chemicals used.. AND the power used to recycle even paper is unreal..

The battery thing is why I just shake my head when the hippies get all jazzed up about hybrids and EVs. The metals that go into those batteries don't grow on trees... they're typically strip-mined. Then shipped somewhere to be smelted, shipped somewhere else to be processed into batteries, which are then shipped to the automaker's plant to be installed in the car, which is then shipped to a distributor, that then ships it to a dealer, that sells it to you. A Prius is about as green as a tire fire... any illusions had about reducing one's carbon footprint by owning one are just that... illusions. By the time you buy one and drive it home, the batteries alone have traveled more miles than you'll likely drive the first year of ownership.

Besides, if you drive like you actually have someplace to be, your mileage isn't any better than your typical gasoline-powered mid-size car. Yes, I'm talking to you, Mr. pass-me-doing-90-in-your-Prius.

I love how people who somehow try to argue, "enviromentalism doesn't work, because doing the same thing we've been doing since the car has been created is better for the enviroment than your hippy ideas" ("those hippy ideas" include breathing clearly or drinking from water sources untainted by harmful chemicals!).

Unless you have stock in an oil company, you shouldn't care that we're trying to find alternative methods to power ...

I'm not saying things like Tesla's doing aren't great and needed in this day and age, I'm just saying we should quit bullshiatting ourselves here. The claims of greenliness (I've got dibs on that term, I made it up and it's mine) are exaggerated to the point of blatant dishonesty when it comes to most hybrids and EV's. Batteries don't grow on trees, and neither does the electricity to charge them. The solar charging stations aren't "free", someone paid to manufacture the things, and maintain them, and I'm sure the land they occupy was donated purely out of the good of someone's heart.

I love how people somehow try to argue "if you take issue with how these products are marketed, you hate clean air and water" when all it really comes down to is "Keep up the good work guys, but quit lying to us about how advanced this new tech is so it will sell better".

Certainly, I tell my sister that if she really wants to be environmentally friendly, she well continue to maintain her 13 year old civic and keep it ruining clean and on the road for as long as possible. It takes much more energy to manufacture any car than you save by booting a decent car and getting a hybrid.

That being said, a hybrid in the city is tons more efficient. The batteries do have heavy metals that are mined, but eventually those metals wil be recycled. Elements dont change unless decay, fusion or fission are involved.

Magorn: I'm still trying to figure out why no one has attempted a "battery" usinghigh-temp superconductors. Liquid Nitrogen is cheap enough that even if you had to top off the holding tank once a week it wouldn't cost all that much and you can store huge amounts of energy in a superconducting battery (basically aloop of supercounducting material with current running through it) with almost zero loss

This is hard to do at a small scale. There has been work done on this in large utility scale (read up on "SMES"). The advantage with this is power density--SMES is faster even than ultracapacitors. But they don't have very good energy density (on the same order as capacitors). The biggest challenge, actually, is that if you want to use "high temperature" superconductors (higher than around 5K) then you have to make the windings out of ceramics, and it is very difficult to make ceramic windings that can withstand the massive magnetic forces involved.

CeroX: jshine: [i45.tinypic.com image 400x302]

Not anger, i just don't see why you would be pushing back on this as much as you are... though with that engineering degree something tells me it might have something to do with your employment...

Personally, i don't think the country is ready for EV yet... because they aren't ready to give up or change their habits...

That's the real problem with innovation and change... people... people just can't seem to wrap their brain around doing something different than they've been used to doing...

I see that attitude at my job all the time... people recieve a new policy and pitch a fit because "that's not how we did it before!"

Who cares? it's how you do it until it changes again, and again, and again...

It's not the "love" of oil that people have, it's the love of routine... the love of familiarity... some people (washington and new jersey for example) still don't even know how to fill up their own gas tank, asking them to plug a cord into a vehicle is like asking them to flay open an infant with a straight razor...

Then, to top it off, they work harder and do more research trying to NOT change their habits than spending it just learning the new system...

Yea, its not the 60k price tag or anything

/you sound like a 1%'er


//real future lies in gerbil power... until they over throw us and kill us all

Kraftwerk Orange: Hollie Maea: And yes, I did look at your pictures. Hydrogen has a slight advantage in volumetric energy density, but less room for improvement. This will end up being a wash.

And the Japanese car companies have been promising cheap high range fuel cell vehicles for the past 15 years. I'll believe it when I see it. And also note the very low efficiency of the fuel cell. Better than ICE but not much better, and this does not take into account the very low efficiency of producing hydrogen.

And look at the bad power density I was talking about! 240Kg for a small 93kW stack. This number is going to fall a lot slower than battery weights.


How much does the Tesla 85kWh battery weigh? I see some sources quoting the weight at 1200lbs.

The tanks of hydrogen needed to store enough energy to travel the same distance only weigh 288 lbs, filled. Then, adding the FC stack for another 530lbs... that's 382lbs less. 

And tanks are getting lighter, and so are fuel cell stacks. Battery makers will have to bring down weight dramatically in order to approach the advantage that HFCVs have in energy storage.

I grant that hydrogen systems are much lighter. But this gap is getting smaller, and battery densities are getting to the point where it's not that big of a deal. And volumetrically, the advantage of hydrogen is much smaller, and the gap will close even more rapidly.

But like I said before, the bigger issues are inefficiencies, both of the fuel cell stack and in the production of hydrogen, and in the bad power density of fuel cells. A 400hp fuel stack would be huge.

Kraftwerk Orange: The MotorTrend results fit in pretty much with what Tesla's chart indicated.

Correct, but my main point is that they did use HVAC for a good portion of those drives, and by no means were they on flat roads (several 4,000' passes) - and on the first ride, there was a passenger; yet they pretty much matched the Tesla chart for perfect conditions.

Kraftwerk Orange: Have you seen an actual Tesla Supercharger station? They're nowhere near 6,000 sq.ft. of PV. I agree that it's *doable*, but Tesla hasn't done it.

Hey, that's a great picture. Looks like it's 6 parking stalls (typically 9' x 20', 180 sq.ft each) - so 1,080 feet of panels. About 72 panels, so somewhere between 16 & 21 KW of peak capacity.

I finally got around to RTFA'ing, and I found it very interesting (and appropriate) that it uses an AC induction motor - technology that was invented by Nikola Tesla himself. Aside from induction motors being very simple*, they also don't need rare-earth magnets. Scratch another naysayer talking point.

* of course, for variable speed they need inverters, but high-power semiconductors are fairly common now - AC traction motors can be found in locomotives these days

Kraftwerk Orange: Why on Earth would an FCV need a 400hp stack? That's just an absurd statement. A 85kW stack (120hp) is more than plenty.

Sure, it's as much as you need, but not as much as you want. Some people will want powerful cars.

Call me when they slap lights and turnsignals on this...

moike: Call me when they slap lights and turnsignals on this...

[www.blogcdn.com image 630x365]

I'm at the second interview stage with the company that makes the inverters for that fine machine. So hopefully at some point I can be calling you about it.

Efficiency: gasoline/diesel
Not making me breathe in a bunch of toxic crap: electric.

I think that's simple enough for people to understand.

I'm more a middle right kinda guy but even with all the possible detractors mentioned above, this is the kind of vehicle the United States needs.

No, it's not suitable for every driving situation the same way a Ford F350 isn't suitable for every driving situation. You can drive it but that doesn't mean you ought to drive it. For those who commute from suburbs to city and back each day and currently do so in an Audi, BMW or Mercedes, this is an interesting and compelling counter option to continuing to do that when the time comes for a new vehicle.

When I commuted (up to 5 months ago) I was driving about 45 miles per day on average and getting 17mpg. I was filling up at a gas station three times every two weeks for anywhere from $40 - $50 each time. All told I was spending about $1800/year just on gas. Those savings don't make the difference with this car given its price (although the $7K gov't incentive helps). I suspect it costs an assload more to repair it and maintenance will be tricky because of the lack of mechanics in any given area who would know WTF they're doing. That all said, this car does indeed serve a niche that needs it: the moderately expensive, status symbol family sedan that gets driven everyday by people who'd like to do something for the environment.

To me, cars like this succeeding does many positive things like support an American company, cut down on demand for foreign petroleum products, cut down on CO2 emissions and so on. If you're hell bent on spending $80K for a car then why get what everyone else already has? You're already trying to own a status symbol...how about owning one that you can be at least a little proud of?

Just like with cellular phones, the costs paid by the early adopters (read: "rick folks") will eventually lead to lower prices across the board as the technology is more widely adopted.

moike: Call me when they slap lights and turnsignals on this...

[www.blogcdn.com image 630x365]

You can buy the street version of that bike's track competitor, the Brammo Empulse R today Cool promo vid link

Kraftwerk Orange: You missed my point, and may also misunderstand the function of the fuel cell stack. The stack provides constant power. Any instantaneous power needs are supplied by a battery or a capacitor or some flavor. The stack only needs to be powerful enough to keep the battery/capacitor charged.

Out of the question, for batteries. While batteries are much better than fuel cells in terms of power density, they are nowhere near being able to do what you propose. Consider this: since you really have a fuel cell car, you wouldn't want a huge battery pack. But the ability for batteries to supply high power is a function of their size. You wouldn't want more than a 1kWh battery hooked up to your fuel cell. But to supply 200hp of power (150kW) you would be discharging the batteries at 150C. There is no battery on the planet that can come anywhere near those levels of discharge, even for a fraction of a second. The best batteries have peak discharge ratings of 15C. So you would need at minimum a 10kWh pack. But now you're essentially at the pack size of a Volt, and your car is getting filled with batteries, hydrogen tanks, fuelcell stacks and electric motors. Plus all the controls to talk between each system.

Capacitors could supply the peak power, but the energy density is so low that you would need a huge capacitor stack to be able to provide the several seconds of peak power you require.

Naturally, "rick folks" get rolled. I meant rich folks.

MrSteve007: moike: Call me when they slap lights and turnsignals on this...

[www.blogcdn.com image 630x365]

You can buy the street version of that bike's track competitor, the Brammo Empulse R today Cool promo vid link
[images.gizmag.com image 530x298]

Yeah, I've seen the Brammo in person, and I have friends that work at Zero. It's neat having both those companies in my own back yard.

I actually met Michael Czysz while racing out in Utah a couple years back. I even talked him into taking a ride on my fossil burning antique.

Only issue with a touch screen center console is how the hell would you be able to mess with anything without taking your eyes off the road? Unless the steering-wheel controls are top notch...

Kraftwerk Orange: Hollie Maea: Kraftwerk Orange: You missed my point, and may also misunderstand the function of the fuel cell stack. The stack provides constant power. Any instantaneous power needs are supplied by a battery or a capacitor or some flavor. The stack only needs to be powerful enough to keep the battery/capacitor charged.

Out of the question, for batteries. While batteries are much better than fuel cells in terms of power density, they are nowhere near being able to do what you propose.

I'm not just proposing it. The automakers are doing it. The system I've described is already in use, in Toyota, Hyundai, Honda, Mercedes, and GM applications, all of which use small batteries to supplement acceleration and to store regenerated energy from braking.

Totally different thing. I have to get a test started, but I will rebut a bit later.

No range, cost too much, and the UAW is trying to force their way in. It's doomed.

Kraftwerk Orange: Hollie Maea: Kraftwerk Orange: You missed my point, and may also misunderstand the function of the fuel cell stack. The stack provides constant power. Any instantaneous power needs are supplied by a battery or a capacitor or some flavor. The stack only needs to be powerful enough to keep the battery/capacitor charged.

Out of the question, for batteries. While batteries are much better than fuel cells in terms of power density, they are nowhere near being able to do what you propose.

I'm not just proposing it. The automakers are doing it. The system I've described is already in use, in Toyota, Hyundai, Honda, Mercedes, and GM applications, all of which use small batteries to supplement acceleration and to store regenerated energy from braking.

Ok, so these are fundamentally different things.

In the hybrid systems currently available in cars like the Prius, the role of the battery system not primarily to provide supplement power, but to capture and briefly store braking energy, and to allow initial electric power starting from a stop so that the engine can be turned off and not have to idle. These are not high power procedures. If you are in a Prius at a stop and gently step on the throttle, you will slowly accelerate on electric power and after a few seconds the gas engine will engage and take over. But if you stomp on it, the gas engine will immediately engage, and you won't experience significant acceleration until the gas engine is available to provide it. The key is that the electric motor (and the batteries) are never supplying high power. At no time will the car ever be accelerating dramatically with most or all of the power coming from the electric system. What you have here is a situation of the batteries supplementing a HIGH POWER system ( the ICE), and so a small battery pack is sufficient (remember, the power capabilities of the battery pack are a direct function of the pack size).

In the system you are proposing, the opposite is true--a small battery pack would be asked to supplement a LOW power system (the fuel cell stack). This is problematic. In the situations in which the highest power was required of the drivetrain, most or all of the current would have to come from the batteries. And like I explained earlier, you would have to have at least a 10kWh battery pack, at which time you basically have an electric car with a hydrogen range extender. Sure it would work, but really it would not be worth implementing a hydrogen fueling infrastructure just to add a crappy range extender option when a small diesel would be a much better option, especially considering that hydrogen powered fuel cells are actually less efficient well to wheel than a constant power range extender type diesel.

Fuel cells would work ok for low power cars (something about as powerful as a Prius) but again not worth putting in a national infrastructure when battery electrics can do weeny OR powerful cars, the one area that Hydrogen excels (fueling time) is rapidly becoming less and less of an advantage, and hydrogen powered cars are inefficient.

But yeah, Toyota and Honda will always have a fuel cell car "just around the corner" Governments and policy makers love them, as well as do people who want to be green but haven't really looked into the issues and are seduced by the promise of a green vehicle that they can fuel in a couple of minutes.

I do, however, envision a hybrid system similar to what you are proposing, but with batteries and capacitors, which are much better suited to each other than batteries and fuel cells. In such a case, the batteries would be the low power component instead of the high power component--a much more comfortable situation for batteries, which become inefficient and have a short lifespan when pushed to too high power levels. In this case, the main power difference would not be an issue during discharge, but during charge. A car that had a capacitor bank that could travel 35 miles and be recharged in 45 second would be pretty sweet if it was augmented by a battery pack that could travel 300 miles and be recharged at a rate of 10 miles of range per minute. That level of technology probably isn't too far off--maybe 6 or 7 years tops.

probesport: Hell the Ford Probe won in 1993

I had an '89 Probe. Awesome car. Got to over 300,000 miles before I got rid of it and never had to replace a single thing that wasn't maintenance. For under ten grand that was hard to beat.

greenboy: Really?

They're tainted. The grease and stuck food mess up the consistency of the recycled material if they get into the process in most places.

Bladel: knbber2: Who wants a car that can only go about 200 miles and then has to recharge for most of the day? And the baseline is only $60K, what a bargain.

I'm interested. The range seems closer to 275, which should cover most days. $60k is about the same as a BMW, except for the "never buy gas again" bit.

You can buy thousands of dollars worth of batteries every few years instead.

Lets talk frankly about internal cleanliness: theorellior: Lets talk frankly about internal cleanliness: Batteries don't grow on trees, and neither does the electricity to charge them.

I'll put it to you this way... in my 7 years of driving a Civic hybrid, I saved approximately 1200 gallons of gas. Do I think that the environmental cost of mining, smelting, alloying and manufacturing that battery pack is less than the environmental cost of drilling, storing, transporting, refining and distributing that gasoline? Yes, yes I do. Additionally, those batteries were charged solely by the waste energy involved in stopping the car. This means that at 37 KWhr/gal, the battery pack reused 44.4 GWh of energy that would have been lost as waste heat. Does that offset the energy cost of their manufacture? Yes, I think it does.

"Gas would have to approach $8 a gallon before many of the cars could be expected to pay off in the six years an average person owns a car."

Link

Keep thinking that.

Electric cars are something I support, but if you want a standing ovation from me, do something about the hundreds of thousands of 18-wheelers burning diesel at 4-6 mpg. At that point, I'll concede that saving 1200 gallons a year is awesome (my local station pumps that much in a hour on a Monday morning)

When your car can haul 30 tons reliably for millions of miles, let us know. Also, the figure is often closer to 10+ mpg.

but, it's a bad product.

Greymalkin: Bladel: knbber2: Who wants a car that can only go about 200 miles and then has to recharge for most of the day? And the baseline is only $60K, what a bargain.

I'm interested. The range seems closer to 275, which should cover most days. $60k is about the same as a BMW, except for the "never buy gas again" bit.

Or you could still just buy a BMW (yes it does still use a little bit of fuel) but doesn't have that distance limitation if you want to have a good day's country highway driving.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_i8

IMO it looks better too. 

[upload.wikimedia.org image 800x533]

The i3 is cooler I think. And they both will have an optional "range extender" engine. Tesla is a joke. They will be bankrupt within 5 years. They are the Pets.com of the new car revolution. Cool but doomed to fail.

MrSteve007: Kraftwerk Orange: The MotorTrend results fit in pretty much with what Tesla's chart indicated.

Correct, but my main point is that they did use HVAC for a good portion of those drives, and by no means were they on flat roads (several 4,000' passes) - and on the first ride, there was a passenger; yet they pretty much matched the Tesla chart for perfect conditions.

Kraftwerk Orange: Have you seen an actual Tesla Supercharger station? They're nowhere near 6,000 sq.ft. of PV. I agree that it's *doable*, but Tesla hasn't done it.

Hey, that's a great picture. Looks like it's 6 parking stalls (typically 9' x 20', 180 sq.ft each) - so 1,080 feet of panels. About 72 panels, so somewhere between 16 & 21 KW of peak capacity.

Right, and they're planning on having 100 of them nationwide in two years. Using your numbers (which are a little low considering solar city's PV tech) that's 1.6 to 2.1 MW of electricity generated via solar alone. This means 24 individual 85 KW batteries could be filling up simultaneously at all times nationwide without having to draw power from the grid. It will be a couple years before Tesla has enough vehicles on the road to make that a reality and in the mean time they'll get paid for every electron they add to the grid. After they exceed that threshold they'll still only be paying 6 cents per milie of charge they pull from the grid. Not a bad cost to benefit ratio when it comes to offering customers free transportation compared to $4/gallon.

very cool.

BUT... "If the battery is ever totally discharged, the owner is left with what Tesla describes as a "brick": a completely immobile vehicle that cannot be started or even pushed down the street. The only known remedy is for the owner to pay Tesla approximately $40,000 to replace the entire battery. Unlike practically every other modern car problem, neither Tesla's warranty nor typical car insurance policies provide any protection from this major financial loss."

Kraftwerk Orange: washburn777: Right, and they're planning on having 100 of them nationwide in two years. Using your numbers (which are a little low considering solar city's PV tech) that's 1.6 to 2.1 MW of electricity generated via solar alone. This means 24 individual 85 KW batteries could be filling up simultaneously at all times nationwide without having to draw power from the grid.

Except that the individual Supercharger stations have no way to store their electrons, and their only connection to each other is the grid, so recharging a Tesla still requires drawing power from the grid no matter how much excess capacity other stations have.

It's not a bad plan - it's a very good one. But it relies on being able to draw power quickly from the grid, and repay it slowly from the PVs. The PVs (as currently built) simply can't provide enough power quickly enough on their own.

Your mistake is assuming the excess electricity has to be stored somewhere onsite in order for the economics to make sense. It doesn't. The supercharger is basically a power plant. When it isn't charging a car, it's dumping over 20 KW of current into the grid and it is paid per kilowatt hour generated. So if it charges one car every three hours (charging at 100 kilowatts and considering a 12 hour day) the cost is a wash. Now in California most of these stations will be much busier than that, but if they've got 100 stations nationwide, there would need to be 24 cars charging to 85 KW simultaneously at all time to match the electricity being generated (and bought by the power companies) at 100 individual 20KW stations. Now granted the cost of a kilowatt isn't universal and it won't be sunny everywhere at once, but this system is an awesome and highly profitable idea that is up and running already.

So I guess I should have phrased it differently in the initial post.

Instead of reading 'without having to draw power from the grid' my Boobies should have read '24 individual 85KW Teslas could be charging simultaneously without pulling more electricity than the other 76 stations are adding back to the grid.'

I don't know why that says 'Boobies' right there.

washburn777: I don't know why that says 'Boobies' right there.

It is a fark filter.

re-wording the phrase initial post, into a more common way of saying that will get you boobied

natas6.0: I think top gear already answered the hype for these types of vehicles.
You drive it like a fun car = yer outta charge too soon and it takes a buncha time to recharge
the recharge has to come from something
this 'green' car takes a battery
which has nickel and other wonderful poisons the earth apparently loves when you mine and refine them
and that comes from somewhere + shipping across the planet

so you get a sporty, $60k car that runs out of power and takes half a day to fill the poisonous thing that makes you go...not far
we've had true, electric vehicles since 1842 and this is the zenith of american ingenuity?

pathetic

You obviously didn't read the thread, and have no idea what on earth you are talking about. If you would like to prove me wrong, please explain to me what use "nickel and other wonderful poisons" perform in the battery for this car? Ya' know, the one with the Lithium Ion battery. The one that has no Nickel in it at all.

/Thank you for demonstrating exactly what "pathetic" means for everyone.

Kraftwerk Orange: washburn777: Your mistake is assuming the excess electricity has to be stored somewhere onsite in order for the economics to make sense. It doesn't.

I never assumed that. I didn't get into the economics in my comments, but I do understand how it works. Along with the rather large tax breaks Tesla gets from installing solar PV capacity, you are correct that they are getting paid by the utilities for adding electrons to the grid.

washburn777: The supercharger is basically a power plant. When it isn't charging a car, it's dumping over 20 KW of current into the grid and it is paid per kilowatt hour generated.

That is how I described it. The solar PVs are continually putting power into the grid, and gradually repays the energy taken from the grid during recharging.

washburn777: Now granted the cost of a kilowatt isn't universal and it won't be sunny everywhere at once, but this system is an awesome and highly profitable idea that is up and running already.

I said several times that it is a good plan, and even posted a pic of an operational Supercharger station. (apparently that post got deleted, I now see)

Looks like we're on the same page after all. Sorry I come off like I'm drawing it out in crayon sometimes. It's mostly fallout from banging my head against a wall trying to convince people that EV tech could turn into an amazing product very soon. The Model S is giving us hints of that potential becoming reality.

abhorrent1: knbber2: Who wants a car that can only go about 200 miles and then has to recharge for most of the day? And the baseline is only $60K, what a bargain.

$49K according to their website. And I doubt most people drive 200 or more miles a day. I probably do 60 with work and misc errands. I don't think they had cross-country road trips in mind when they came up with the idea. It's a shame they can't make them affordable enough that regular people could get one though.

Actually they're looking at a gen3 care shourly that will be more in the 20-30k range within the next couple of years. This does put this in the range of most new car consumers. Give them time. they are still making a name for themselves. If I could afford it, the Tesla x looks really nice too. Imagine an SUV that seats 7, and can 0-60 in under 5 seconds. Link