Posted on 06/08/2017 3:42:57 PM PDT by Lorianne
A perfect storm is brewing in the 21st-Century energy market, and it has nothing to do with OPEC.
It’s about batteries that charge everything from mainstream electric cars to massive power walls and mountains of consumer electronics.
More specifically, it’s about what goes into those batteries—and it’s not just lithium.
The other element that makes up 35 percent of the lithium-ion batteries mass produced at Tesla’s (NASDAQ: TSLA) Nevada gigafactory—and at a dozen of other behemoths slated to come on line—is cobalt.
And it’s already in dramatically short supply.
A part of the answer to the cobalt deficit is 100 percent American, and this little-known miner is sitting on a prime Idaho cobalt project that is one of only two that looks likely to come online in the U.S.— and it’s right in Tesla’s backyard.
(Excerpt) Read more at oilprice.com ...
The electric car business didn’t fare too well in the early 1900’s for the same reasons it isn’t now.
Had a Leaf for two years. Wasn’t a Tesla, but stl had amazing acceleration & handling.
I haven’t driven one but I was sitting in the back seat as the driver floored it. That was really something.
How so?
Yup. Apparently those batteries are toxic as hell. We’ll see.
I know a well-off ex-surgeon who likes cars. He bought a Tesla after test-driving it on the recommendation of a friend.
So, I asked him, how far can you drive it? He replied, “It gets 200 miles on a charge; but the way I drive it, 85.”
Electric motors have full torque at zero-RPM, which explains the acceleration. Of course, we were talking about a Tesla S, not a Prius. And, the way it came up was that we ran across some poor Tesla owner searching for a high-curent outlet with a bunch of adapters in his hand because his battery was nearly drained.
I know a well-off ex-surgeon who likes cars. He bought a Tesla after test-driving it on the recommendation of a friend.
So, I asked him, how far can you drive it? He replied, “It gets 200 miles on a charge; but the way I drive it, 85.”
Electric motors have full torque at zero-RPM, which explains the acceleration. Of course, we were talking about a Tesla S, not a Prius. And, the way it came up was that we ran across some poor Tesla owner searching for a high-curent outlet with a bunch of adapters in his hand because his battery was nearly drained.
How long do the batteries last and how many $$ to replace them?
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Wrong on many levels.
Liquid fueled cars have ranges of at least 450 miles, some as much as 750 miles.
Portable generators can extract fuel from storage tanks quickly, but the same generator would take all day to minimally recharge an electric coffin car.
Liquid fuel is vastly superior in every way.
Electricity fails every test and every comparison.
Batteries have gone where they can go. Improvements have been declared to be “around the next corner” constantly for the last 30 years, but it is yet to happen, and even the improvements in small batteries has been at high environmental and loss of resource costs.
Liquid petroleum based fuels just keep on getting better, and more available almost day by day. We now have over 500 years of supply even at assumed increases in use levels.
Electric powered transit is killing society and will cost millions of lives in the very near future as the nukes in the hands of islamists remake our world in the coming months.
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>> “Are you kidding? A Tesla would be the ideal car in such a scenario...” <<
You have the gullible mind of a small child, and the vision of a man born blind.
The Tesla is the biggest joke of all the plug-in cars.
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In an evacuation emergency, plug-in cars will prove to be coffins, and road boulders, that will have to be pushed off the highways to save lives.
Hurricanes have already proven that, and the nuclear future that Islam has planned for the world will be the exclamation point.
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Excessive acceleration from a dead stop increases battery drain exponentially.
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“The Tesla is the biggest joke of all the plug-in cars.”
Your asserting this not only does not make it so, it demonstrates a total lack of credibility and objectivity on your part. Wanting something to be true so much that you believe it is a symptom of psychosis.
Tesla has a number one ranking among luxury cars:
https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/tesla/model-s
On luxury, comfort, performance, safety, overall customer satisfaction and loyalty, and advanced technology, Tesla gets high scores from pretty much all of the automotive experts and critics.
You seem to have some strange resentment for the car which clearly clouds your judgment.
I don’t care whether you like them or not. I don’t have any skin in the game. Even used ones are not in my budget. But I can recognize the benefits of having one (or more).
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Come this fall, Tesla will have a #1 rating as a coffin.
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We know that. He knew that.
He just didn't care. It was fast, it was fun. Wheeee!
“Come this fall, Tesla will have a #1 rating as a coffin.”
Where do you get these things? Maybe your time travel machine malfunctioned and landed you in a parallel universe. Because in THIS universe Tesla just became the third most valuable car manufacturer. And that’s with only a very few models:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/teslas-market-value-zooms-past-another-car-maker-2017-06-09
Worth more than Government Motors (i.e. GM), VW, Honda, or Ford.
Do you even take a cursory look at what’s going on in the real world before making such outlandish claims?
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Watch what happens when cities have to evacuate long distances.
We’ve already seen it happen with hurricanes, where cars had to be shoved off the highway into marshes so traffic could flow. It wasn’t Tesla then because they were not around, but they will be this time.
Watch the angry electric coffin owners when the highway patrol has to shove their dead car out of the way.
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“We’ve already seen it happen with hurricanes, where cars had to be shoved off the highway into marshes so traffic could flow. It wasn’t Tesla then because they were not around, but they will be this time.”
You’re speaking to someone who has evacuated quite a few people out of Houston to College Station due to a hurricane. I saw plenty of stalled cars that were out of gas. They sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic for too long. Gas stations were out of fuel. The city tried to open contraflow lanes to get fuel in so people could drive out. It was a mess.
In fact, I witnessed a fuel truck speeding down a major road, doing about 80 in a 55. He went through a traffic light late and killed a pickup truck driver who was gunning it to turn left as soon as the light turned green for him. Everyone was in too big of a hurry.
I now own a hybrid that can idle with the a/c on all day and sip just a half gallon of gas. The same would happen if I was moving in 2 mph traffic. I get 45 mph now, but in that scenario my car would stay about the same while the gas-only cars would run out of fuel.
I’m not sure if an all-electric car could keep the a/c running, but it would not use much electricity in slow-moving traffic.
True, current electric cars do not have as good of a range as gas or diesel vehicles. The vehicle to have in such a situation would be a diesel truck with extra fuel storage capacity. But if the grid is down nationwide for more than a few weeks, it’s going to get pretty ugly. Fuel does not store well. Solar power and electric vehicles would distinct advantages over other power sources and types of vehicles.
We’ve seen how people act when severe weather knocks out the power. Mine was out for a few weeks during a different hurricane. I left town for a week and came back with a generator. In the northeast people ran out of food and were dumpster diving in less than a week. It is a lot safer to go without eating than to eat spoiled or contaminated food, but few people in this country have ever gone a single day without eating. The average, healthy American could easily survive more than 3 weeks with no food at all. That’s especially true of those of us who are carrying extra weight.
So... when you say “this time” as opposed to “next time,” I take it that you are sticking by your claim to know that a cataclysm is coming this fall? What’s your basis for this claim?
Distance is the issue.
And the people that don’t keep their tanks full are just as stupid as plug-in owners.
Hybrids are OK, as long as the main battery is functional, but their economy goes out the window if it has to be replaced.
Houston proper is a “can’t get there from here” kind of place, full of morons, but Texas highways are quite functional.
Got a kick out of the bleeps that robbed the bank in Bel Air and drove in circles thinking they were going to get away.
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“Hybrids are OK, as long as the main battery is functional, but their economy goes out the window if it has to be replaced.”
The cost to replace my main battery is about $1000. The fuel cost savings on a hybrid is not lost by battery replacement since the overall cost of maintenance is fairly low. However, the extra cost on the front end is like paying for the fuel savings in advance.
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