Clean but mean electric car is creator's dream come true

The Australian ^ | August 12, 2006 | Chris Ayres

[tessalu]

IT can keep up with a Ferrari, travel 400km on an empty fuel tank and is completely silent. The latest boys' toy for Silicon Valley multi-millionaires is a full-blooded American sportscar - only its blood is electricity, not oil.

The Tesla Roadster, which can go from zero to 100km/h in about four seconds, is named after Serbian electrical engineer Nikola Tesla, who invented alternating current.

The car is assembled in England and the electric motor is imported from Taiwan. The cars will be sold only in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Miami.

The first deliveries are expected to begin next northern summer, after the car passes rigorous federal safety tests.

Martin Eberhard, who founded Tesla Motors in 2003 with Marc Tarpenning, said: "This is what we hoped to achieve when we started the company: to build a car with zero emissions that people would love to drive.

"It didn't make sense to sell a car that only goes 90miles (145km) on a charge. You'd spend more time charging the old EVs (electric vehicles) than driving them. Lithium-ion technology ... has allowed us to achieve exactly what we thought it would in terms of power, range and efficiency."

Those who part with the $US100,000 ($130,000) for a Tesla will be given a home charging system, which, the company claims, will fully recharge the car in about three hours.

The Tesla marks a resurgence in electric car development in California, after the state quietly dropped a law that would require car companies to develop models with zero emissions. Infamously, this resulted in General Motors recalling and destroying its fleet of EV1s - a pioneering electric vehicle beloved by owners.

Other electric car companies operating in California today include Phoenix Motorcars and Universal Electric Vehicles, which also makes convertible sportscars.

Even petrolheads, however, may struggle to understand the specifications of the Tesla Roadster. Unlike a traditional V8 engine, with its eight pistons, eight connecting rods, crankshaft, valves, oil pumps and other mechanicals, the Tesla's engine has only one moving part. This gives it an efficiency rating of about 95 per cent, compared with the 20 per cent (or less) of an internal combustion engine.

As for torque, the sweet spot of power for an engine most loved by car enthusiasts, the Tesla's has been described as virtually instantaneous. The car is powered by a "3-phase, 4-pole AC induction motor" and a "two-speed electrically actuated manual transmission".

Instead of a fuel tank, there is an energy storage system, with 6831 non-moving parts all of them lithium-ion cells, regulated by a cooling system and a computer that shuts down the entire battery pack in emergencies.

[theBuckwheat]

I'm not "against" the electric car. I think that when the public can weigh all the facts, it will decide that electric cars *at the present time* will be far more costly than advocates pretend they are.

I welcome advances in technology. I would welcome an economically viable electric car. But consider the following:

Buring a gallon of gasoline releases about 114,000 btus. A vehicle that gets 20 mpg and travels 60 mph consumes 3 gallons in an hour. Converting this to the same amount of electricity means 100 kilowatt-hours. 100 KWH!

Now, I know this a simple comparison. On the I/C side, we have to account for the efficiency of the engine and so on. But if we want to deliver 100 KWH of energy to a wall-outlet for purposes of recharging a vehicle, we have to have about 300 KWH of heat at the power plant to generate the steam.

It is a simple fact of physics: moving a vehicle at highway speeds consumes an enormous amount of energy. Today, we get that energy buy burning a liquid hydrocarbon fuel on-site, that is inside the vehicle engine. One demand, as needed.

An electric car shifts where that energy is created. And when it is shifted, it is almost always to a power plant far away, and it must be carried to the point of recharging over an infrastructure that is only one half or one third the size necessary to handle it should the public make a wholesale conversion.

As a matter of energy comparison, I live in the midwest where the temperatures have been in the upper 90s and low 100s for the last several weeks. I have a modest, energy-efficient, home. I have central air conditioning. I don't use electricity for cooking or hot water. My most recent electric bill was for 1836 KWH.

1836KWH is the amount of energy that my wife's car used in month of commuting to her job. It is about 18 hours of highway driving.

If her vehicle was electric, and our electricity comes from burning coal, the demand we placed on the utility would have forced them to burn roughly *twice* as much coal on our behalf as they presently do.

Do I want twice the number of coal-fired power plants? At present, I cannot advocate the "concept of the usable electric car" without also advocating building a lot more power plants that burn a lot more coal!

Advocates of nuclear have their points, but it takes almost 10 years to build a nuclear power plant from start to first kilowatt. Nuke projects suck the capital out of the markets. We talk about sequestering carbon. A nuke plant sequesters capital, which means there is a lot less to plow into ventures hoping to advance efficient alternatives.

I would love to see fuel cell powered vehicles. But the darling fuel at present is hydrogen. Where on earth are we going to get that much hydrogen? And how will it be distributed? Well, it turns out that advocates of this fuel must look to nuclear power as well. Their solution is decades away and hundreds of billions of dollars in cost.

Every nuclear reactor is a big security risk and a big blackmail target for our enemies' weapons.

Am I "really against" electric cars. Not at all. It is just that I am not in favor of all the things that electric cars will require us, the consumer and taxpayer, to cough up the money for. So far, the market seems to agree with me.

Happily, there are suddenly a number of coal-to-liquid conversion projects on the fast track, as well as other alternatives that are viable with $50/bbl oil. The market has far more clarity on this subject than the techno-dreamers do.

[MrEdd]

400 Km? I need 400 miles. Another car only suitable for urbanites.

[tpaine]

The only other way to make it happen involves the destruction of liberty because we will get armed government agents involved in a sugar-coated scheme that is really coercion.

Whatever. -- Needless to say, I believe our transition to electric autos only needs some technology that works. -- The market would then take care of the details, regardless of 'gov't agents'..

Am I "really against" electric cars. Not at all. It is just that I am not in favor of all the things that electric cars will require us, the consumer and taxpayer, to cough up the money for. So far, the market seems to agree with me.

Why would 'the market' agree on requiring us, as taxpayers, to cough up money?
-- If electric cars became technically feasible, people would use them & the power market would adjust.. You seem determined that the gov't would control this issue. -- Why?

[theBuckwheat]

>>
You seem determined that the gov't would control this issue. -- Why?
<<

That is a curious question because quite to the contrary, I expect that the government will control this issue even though I don't think it is a good idea.

How will government control this? By doing exactly what F.A. Hayek warned it would do: choosing winners and losers in who gets government favors, who gets permits, who doesn't, who gets tax subsidies, who doesn't.

In fact, this has already started. Government has allocated millions, maybe billions in research grants on electric vehicles. Who gets the grants and for what? What technologies will see the light of day and which will shrivel on the vine because the committee of learned bureaucrats did not think it was "viable".

There is already a tax credit for people who buy one of these cars. There are tax subsidies and exemptions from other taxes in various jurisdictions. These tax issues come right out of everyone's pocket, that is except for the money the government borrows from the Chinese.

Politicians love to place themselves as the broker of power between the federal purse, the federal regulatory bodies, the tax code and the interested parties. So, not only does this cost us, it helps consolidate power in the Washington establishment rather than allowing millions of individuals make their own voluntary decisions.

[RayChuang88]

They're almost there, but for an electric car to be really practical you need to drastically reduce the size of the battery pack and also dramatically reduce the charging time.

Fortunately, thanks to nanotechnology, scientists at MIT have come up with a new type of supercapacitor that could replace even lithium-ion batteries. This new capacitor design can store a huge amount of electrical energy, plus it has a charging time measured in only a few minutes! This means instead of an electric car having to lug around a huge battery pack all the time we could use a battery pack not much bigger than the fuel tank in a regular car, have a range of over 300 miles easily, and fully recharge in under three minutes! The supercapacitor power pack finally makes it possible for an electric car to truly replace gasoline-fuelled automobiles.