{"id":2940,"date":"2009-08-20T12:13:07","date_gmt":"2009-08-20T19:13:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/capnbob.us\/blog\/2009\/08\/20\/ev-phone-home\/"},"modified":"2009-08-21T08:41:47","modified_gmt":"2009-08-21T15:41:47","slug":"ev-phone-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/capnbob.us\/blog\/2009\/08\/20\/ev-phone-home\/","title":{"rendered":"EV Phone Home"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img src='http:\/\/capnbob.us\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/08\/tesla.jpg' alt='tesla.jpg' class='right' \/><strong>Tesla Motors<\/strong> 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. <\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>While all that sounds wonderful, the <strong>Tesla Electric Car<\/strong> just might have a few drawbacks . . .<br \/>\n<em><br \/>\nRight: The Tesla Standard EV<\/em><\/p>\n<p>From <a href=\"http:\/\/planetgore.nationalreview.com\/post\/?q=NjUxMTg5MjRhNzJhNThjZDQ4ZTFlZjQ3YzU2Y2YxMzk=\">Planet Gore<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nMore on Tesla   [<a href=\"http:\/\/planetgore.nationalreview.com\/author\/?q=NDIwNg==\">Henry Payne<\/a>]<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019re so sure of it, <strong>they\u2019ve invested $489 million<\/strong> of your taxpayer doctors [sic] in the EV tech leader, Tesla. But as Tad Friend\u2019s in-depth look at Tesla for The New Yorker shows, the future is not quite ready for primetime.<\/p>\n<p>A few highlights:<\/p>\n<ul style='font-size: 1.2em'>\n<li>The price for the power train alone for battery-powered Tesla cars costs $15,000 \u2014 or about <strong>five times more than a standard gas-powered sedan<\/strong>. The average price paid for an entire new car in America today is $26,000.<\/li>\n<li>Tesla\u2019s 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 <strong>\u201cjust\u201d 45 minutes<\/strong>. In the meantime, Americans have to plug it into 110-volt wall sockets. Friend tried that while test-driving the Tesla for his story. \u201c<strong>Its battery gained only nine miles in two hours<\/strong>,\u201d he writes.<\/li>\n<li>To charge the Tesla in the <strong>five minutes<\/strong> that American are used to spending at the gas pump (while on their way to work or taking the kids to soccer practice) it \u201cwould require an 840-kW connection, which would <strong>drain the grid as much as a 100-unit apartment building does in the course of a day<\/strong>.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>And then there\u2019s this from longtime Detroit product guru, Bob Lutz (now with GM), an admirer of Tesla \u2014 even as he points out the gulf between a boutique technology currently prized by Hollywood millionaires and a mass-produced technology: \u201cOver 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 <strong>unbelievable amount of reliability testing that Tesla can\u2019t afford to do right now<\/strong> \u2014 and we can\u2019t afford not to.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>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&#8217;t present here) thought they were going to get.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":190,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,44,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-technology-talk","category-whacko-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/capnbob.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/capnbob.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/capnbob.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capnbob.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/190"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capnbob.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2940"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/capnbob.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2940\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/capnbob.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capnbob.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capnbob.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}