Posted on 11/29/2008 6:01:03 AM PST by flowerplough
Get ready to pull the plug: Tesla is done. Well, almost. While the fledgling electrocar specialists haven’t hung a “gone fishing” sign on the front door just yet, it might be just a matter of time. That isn’t changing anytime soon, regardless of how much money company founder and newly appointed CEO Elon Musk can scare up for his pet project. And this group of Silicon Valley geniuses isn’t alone. You can simply add Tesla’s name to the long list of electric car builders that have talked a big game and failed to deliver.
You remember Tesla, right? It’s that band of Internet whiz kids, backed with Google bucks, who claimed its electric Roadster would revolutionize automobiles and show the Detroit dinosaurs how things could be done. You needed buckets to catch the slobbering hype in the media, a reservoir to hold the wishful thinking. But the company lacked two key elements: experience in designing, building and selling cars and the billions of dollars needed to create a real car company. Plus, it’s only offering is a two-seat, $110,000 sports car that makes as much sense for the fuel-crunched, cash-poor American family as a lunar lander.
(Excerpt) Read more at editorial.autos.msn.com ...
Of course, most people cannot wait 10 hours to drive 40 miles.
It needs a 12 hour charge. Where do people think the electricity comes from?
The electric car is the future and will be the largest percentage of the market in under 7 years.
I always laugh when I hear the much hyped and advertised battery that will allow a car to “go almost 40 miles on a fully charged battery”.
That might get me one way to work.
Why The Electric Company of course! The idiot tree-huggers who would buy these cars are also most likely to be opposed to building any new coal or nuclear power plants, which would be the only things that could reliably power these suckers.
The only way an electric car would ever work is if we had nuclear power plants to power a thoroughly integrated electric grid. But the liberals will never allow us to produce the energy in the most efficient way possible, nuclear. Instead we will make energy more expensive by forcing more trading caps and subsudizing solar and wind which are at least 5x as inefficient as current sources of energy.
Darwinism at work. Now that you mention it, if it is mostly idiot liberals who buy these things, then I am all for it.
Where's the power going to come from?
Maybe they can just put solar panels on the roofs...
They have been saying that since the 1970s. There's a very simple reason electric cars will never work. It has everything to do with the laws of physics.
The technology used to make the batteries to run these suckers has not evolved and improved the way other technologies have. A battery has never been able to hold a 100% charge and each time a battery is charged it holds less and less charge. Over the course of time, the battery becomes a useless brick. You already see the same things happen with cell phone batteries and laptop batteries.
Compound this with the fact that you will always spend more in electricity to charge the battery than what you will get in use out of the battery and you just got yourself a pretty damn expensive technology.
This article does point out that when you compare costs per mise, the Tesla gets 105 MPG equivalent. Who cares where the electricity comes from if it can triple the distance you can drive per dollar spent.
Altair Nano, Toshiba and others do have Lithium based batteries that can accept a full charge in 10 minutes. Unfortuantely, the costs for those batteries isn’t coming down quickly enough to save Tesla.
Hmmm, Any new electric generating plants on the drawing board or in construction?
Imagine, with the rolling brownouts we're already experiencing in the Northeast and West coast, 5 million electrics plugging into the the garage outlet each night.
Again, enviro-fantasy gets mugged by reality.
Coal fired steam cars - that’s the future.
When you look at the guts, you find they require special maintenance and daily attention to a myriad of technical matters. There will be an all electric GM vehicle on the streets in 2010. This will prove the concept. They a re good for very limited use, but a gasoline engine car is necessary as well for back up.
Although the American women who are save the planet advocates will slobber over these cars, they are the very same women who shunned science and math for women's studies. They lack the intellectual tools necessary to maintain and operate such a vehicle. Failure to maintain will mean paid service. The time alone required will make the electros unpopular. The exhorbient maintenance will kill the deal.
And that sums it up in one sentence.
Easy to apply the same reasoning, to wind, solar and ethanol ... same answer. The market is very efficient.
It's only when you get to things like shale oil, which are forbidden by law, that things get funny. You can convert coal to liquid fuel at under $40 a barrel oil equivalent, but it's not allowed by law either. Now lets talk nuclear electric generation, the most efficient, cost effective method out there ---- Also restricted by gubbermnit fiat.
One day America is going to figure out what is going on.
Where I live- it is 23 1/2 miles to the grocery store...
No way I would ever want an electric car- that has the stability of a baby buggy and the long term worth of a grocery cart.
tens of thousands of electric carts operating on golf courses “
A champoinship golf course can be built on less than 60 acres.
That is less than a 1/2 mile by a 1/2 mile area, which is 80 acres. They work as golf carts for exactly that reason— a very small area. Same with a “warehouse”.
Now- telling me to haul my 4 horse trailer with an electrci vehicle is a joke. Won’t even attempt it.
The article simply states it. It doesn't do an actual miles-per-dollar computation that you would need to do in order to do a true comparison between an electric car and a conventional car. Furthermore, because all batteries lose the capacity to keep a charge over time, the amount of electricity needed to charge the Tesla battery will simply increase. That's just physics at work.
Altair Nano, Toshiba and others do have Lithium based batteries that can accept a full charge in 10 minutes.
This works by simply juicing the battery with a lot of power in a short amount of time. The only thing this will accomplish is simply raise peoples' electric bills far greater than the cost of gas should this sort of sucker take off on a massive scale.
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