Tesla Motors is a Silicon Valley-based manufacturer of Electric Vehicles (EV). They are the only company to offer EVs for sale to the general public in North America or Europe.
Tesla EVs use the lithium-ion battery technology and have a range of over 200 miles on a full charge. The standard EV roadster is capable of 0-60 in 3.9 seconds.
While all that sounds wonderful, the Tesla Electric Car just might have a few drawbacks . . .
Right: The Tesla Standard EV
From Planet Gore:
More on Tesla [Henry Payne]
President Obama, Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, and an army of Washington politicians with no experience in the auto industry say that electric vehicles are the future. They’re so sure of it, they’ve invested $489 million of your taxpayer doctors [sic] in the EV tech leader, Tesla. But as Tad Friend’s in-depth look at Tesla for The New Yorker shows, the future is not quite ready for primetime.
A few highlights:
- The price for the power train alone for battery-powered Tesla cars costs $15,000 — or about five times more than a standard gas-powered sedan. The average price paid for an entire new car in America today is $26,000.
- Tesla’s hard-driving founder, Elon Musk, says Tesla plans to populate American rest stops with QuickCharging stations, which will allow drivers to recharge their batteries in “just” 45 minutes. In the meantime, Americans have to plug it into 110-volt wall sockets. Friend tried that while test-driving the Tesla for his story. “Its battery gained only nine miles in two hours,” he writes.
- To charge the Tesla in the five minutes that American are used to spending at the gas pump (while on their way to work or taking the kids to soccer practice) it “would require an 840-kW connection, which would drain the grid as much as a 100-unit apartment building does in the course of a day.”
- And then there’s this from longtime Detroit product guru, Bob Lutz (now with GM), an admirer of Tesla — even as he points out the gulf between a boutique technology currently prized by Hollywood millionaires and a mass-produced technology: “Over thirty-five hundred parts sourced from around the world have to come together at the right place and the right time to produce sixty to seventy of these things an hour. And to make them, you need. . . an unbelievable amount of reliability testing that Tesla can’t afford to do right now — and we can’t afford not to.”
Emphasis mine. This is just another example of the non-achievable Utopian hope and change that all those uninformed voters (I have some less politically-correct descriptions of them, which I won’t present here) thought they were going to get.
Not to mention the $100,000 price of the vehicle.
Ooopsy, sorry … I mentioned it.
Now that I think about it, if they do come out with a model that uses a 840-kW connector for recharging, they should call it the Tesla Testacle because everytime you plug it in you grab the electric company by the….
We get “Top Gear” on BBC America–that show pretty much justifies the price of satellite, IMHO.
Anyway, Jeremy Clarkson did a test drive of the Tesla Roadster, complete with flame outs, and the battery draining at 150 miles or so, about half of what they claim it’s good for.
I once helped push-start a GI deuce and a half truck; looks like that was easier than pushing the Tesla to where they could plug the thing in to recharge.
And, as Jeremy asked the commie mayor of London in an interview,”Where does the electricity come from?”
In England, from a nuclear reactor.
In America, from a coal-burning plant.
Aloha Guys,
As much as some people would love to feel good about the environment, Newton’s Laws of Motion comes into effect, “To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
John Mackey wrote an op’ed in the WSJ that drove these lefties nuts. I still wonder why organic is so expensive. This organic approach to environmentally correct cars fails to take in the long term problem.
Point is, has anyone considered the next “Cash for Clunkers” loony proposal for theses EV cars? What do you do with the batteries when they’re done?
I neglected to add you guys to my blog roll when my old blog died. Please forgive me.
Well, so much for my rants,
Kini
The comparison of how electric power gets generated is interesting. Removing the combustion process from the vehicle and placing it at the power generation plant does nothing to reduce emissions. What it does do is make the system less efficient. The physics dictates that more emissions will result for the same amount of power to the wheels.
Liberals think they’re fooling Mother Nature.
Good discussion.
From the Patriot Post: