Yeah, so the real question is, does it produce over unity effiency and if it does, why did they make it so it has to be charged?
It sounds good and the packaging is sure slick, but I am sure there a some cons that will be quickly discoverd. How much does it cost? Anytime someone won't give the price without your contact info it's has a big premium attached to it. Where do I plug in for recharge? Any electrical outlet or a special one? It's a great step in the right direction.
It's got an uphill battle. Big oil wants yer dollars!! It's got the backing of some biggies though - like Sergy Brin of Google. But who's going to pay for the $400 mil retirement of guys like Lee Raymond if they reduced production costs thru econ of scale and electric cars become popular (and emit fewer greenhouse gases to boot)? And what about all the other Oil senior execs and Board of Directors? How can you take caviar from the mouths of starving country-clubbers??? And don't forget about our friends in Venezuela and Iran who need our money too!!
What about reliability? When did the Brits start making reliable cars? Its got to be super reliable or it will be worse than the Yugo. You probably need to buy two so if it breaks down, you can tow it.
Forget the mpg rating, this is all about speed, baby! Finally, a ZEV I can embrace. Not to mention exclusivity, open-top style and a bunch of technology breakthroughs. Can be recharged from any outlet... 250-mile range... Li-ion batteries... and so on. According to this NY Times story, Tesla presumably has been taking orders since Wed. the 19th... guess we'd better get ours in before it's too late. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/19/business/19electric.html July 19, 2006 Zero to 60 in 4 Seconds, Totally From Revving Batteries By MATTHEW L. WALD WASHINGTON, July 18 â In a new approach to making the electric car a mass-market product, a California company will unveil on Wednesday a model that is very specialized, very expensive and very, very fast. Tesla Motors, a four-year-old Silicon Valley start-up, has raised $60 million and spent about $25 million developing a two-seat Roadster that will sell for $85,000 to $100,000. It goes from zero to 60 miles an hour in four seconds, âwicked fast,â said the companyâs chairman, Martin Eberhard. Because it is an electric, the driver does not have to shift into second gear until the car hits 65, he said. The Roadster comes 10 years after the introduction of another two-seat electric car that was hailed as a breakthrough in technology, the EV-1 made by General Motors. While many environmentalists had hoped that would be the vanguard of a new trend, G.M. withdrew that car as the three-year leases expired, saying that its limited range â less than 100 miles â made it unmarketable. The recent movie âWho Killed the Electric Car?â argues that G.M. and California conspired to kill a vehicle that would have been popular. The EV-1 was leased on a basis comparable to a vehicle in the mid-$30,000 range. In contrast to the EV-1, the Roadster is supposed to go about 250 miles on a single charge. It uses lithium-ion batteries, the kind most commonly found in laptops, and carries about three times the energy the EV-1 did, although the battery pack weighs only about 900 pounds; the original EV-1 battery pack weighed more than 1,100 pounds. And where the EV-1 had 26 batteries wired together, the Roadster has 6,831, arranged in what Mr. Eberhard called a complex network. The voltage of the batteries is added together, as if they were wired serially, like flashlight batteries. If one fails, only the computer running the car will notice, he said, and the effect on total energy storage would be like âdropping a couple of marbles in the gas tank of your car.â The car comes with a kit that connects to a 240-volt circuit and charges the batteries from dead to fully charged in three and a half hours. It can also be charged on a normal 110-volt household outlet, but that takes longer. At the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group that is not normally a fan of fast cars, Ralph Cavanagh, co-director of the energy program, called the roadster âa remarkable potential breakthroughâ because it does not use oil and can be powered by clean sources of electricity. The last round of electric vehicles was built in anticipation of a âzero emission vehicleâ quota to be imposed by California, but the state dropped the mandate. The Roadsterâs advantage is that it avoids gasoline at $3 a gallon. At the national average retail price for electricity and fuel economy of 200 watt-hours per mile, it will go 150 miles on the price of a gallon of unleaded regular. Still, saving money presumably wonât be the prime motivation of most potential buyers, since to earn back the $65,000 premium over a two-seater like, say, the Mazda Miata, would require more than 700,000 miles of driving. According to Mr. Eberhard, the way to get a new product into the mass market is to sell it to rich people. âCellphones, refrigerators, color TVâs, they didnât start off by making a low-end product for masses,â he said. âThey were relatively expensive, for people who could afford it.â The companies that sold those products at first, he said, did so ânot because they were stupid and they thought the real market was at the high end of the market,â but because that was how to get production started. His company and others that have tried electric cars, he said, are too small to produce by the tens of thousands anyway. The company will start taking orders on Wednesday and hopes to begin deliveries in the middle of next year, he said. It hopes to sell 4,000 to 5,000 over three years and then move on to a larger, more mainstream vehicle.
I wonder what heat when it is cold and air conditioning when it is hot will do to that 250 mile range? Didn't see anything on te web site about it. Jack
Still, if this is all true, it's a start. That kind of driving range would easily take care of the majority of commutes.
I like it. That means I can go on a 300 mile road trip for $3.00 total in gas or whatever they use. electricity? I didn't see a price. If they can keep the price under 12K, then people might buy it. But the other electric were too expensive and ugly looking. So nobody bought them.