Posted on 08/12/2006 12:36:57 PM PDT by 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.
Your first point is incorrect.
There is no electrical limitation that makes performance have to drop as the battery's charge is consumed. It can be similar to a gas powered car in that when the charge is done, it's completely done. The car suddenly has no more power to offer. So there is no engineering requirement that "... low performance for the last 100 miles." be the case.
tpaine,
No telling why people resist electric cars so much. Maybe it's the liberal/green hype attached to them. Maybe it's the unknown. Maybe it's the freedom one feels two hundred miles away from the grid with a full tank of gas.
BUT, I wholly agree that nuclear powered electric grids charging EV's is a great solution to many problems. Even coal power (with scrubbers and all the attendant waste issues there) to E?V is probably a net decrease in total emissions.
One thing that is a problem is that plug-ins do eventually need to get to a "plug-in." Burt Rutan (the Rutan Composites Around the World non-stop guy) had one of the first Toyota Priuses on a long term courtesy test for Toyota. He advised it should split the internal-combustion/electric ratio to about 15-85 instead of the current ratio of about 60-40. He would use a much smaller internal combustion engine to just get you to the next plug-in or in the case of emergency, just stop and recharge in the boonies.
Sorry for the long post.
Oldplayer
That'll grab your attention.
Sounds like this thing has about 8,500 volts fully charged; state of the art Li-Ion cells have about 7.2 amp hours so the batteries would be depleted in 3.25 hours or so at a 25 amp draw.
Household voltage is 208-230 and 200KW divided by 230 would be 869 amps; further dividing by 3.5 hours for charging time would give us 248 amps.
200KW divided by the available 8500 volts only gives us one tenth that current (actually 23.5).
There must be something here I'm missing.
No telling why people resist electric cars so much.
Maybe it's the liberal/green hype attached to them.
Yep, I guess there's no way to counter irrational thinking. -- Cheap electrics, suitable for urban use, would solve a lot of problems.
No one but irrational greenies are hyping that gas/diesel be banned.
Cute; -- but pointless.
Only if it was designed by an electrical moron.
Most RV's have gas refrigerators and, most drive down the road with them running.
But they level the coaches when parked; the refrigerator on my RV would never keep cold on a long drive.
Disregard that whole paragraph. I was using values for NMh on cell voltage.
Although dated (4/01) this link has a lot of interesting info on Li Ion cells, http://www.buchmann.ca/Article5-Page1.asp.
imagine 100 million lead acide battery packs being thrown in dumps every year. Plus all the new power plants we will need to power cars this way.
More expensive that gasoline probably and more damaging to the environment probably
I didn't surf their web site - very interesting. Well I wonder what the 95% is supposed to refer to?
> GREAT LINK! I'm a huge fan of nukes.
Thanks. Twentysome years ago I read a fantastic book called "The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear" by Petr Beckmann. It woke me up to the lies of the anti-nuclear movement -- and it inoculated me against many other Leftist lies too.
Were it not for the anti-nuclear irrationality that stopped the development of nuclear power, we would have far fewer probems today -- including global warming (if in fact it is a problem).
> Russ, has "Some Amazing Facts about Nuclear Power" ever > been posted on FR?
No. But here is a link to it: http://RussP.us/nucpower.htm
> I found the comparison to coal very interesting.
Nuclear power is orders of magnitude cleaner and safer than coal. The fact that we don't get far more of our power from it is a tribute to the massive ignorance promulgated by the Left. And the crowd that now wants to shut down the economy over global warming are the same morons who stopped nuclear power.
US transmission line losses average about 9.5% in the US.
from US Department of Energy:
Overview of the Electric Grid
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