Posted on 07/28/2006 2:48:17 PM PDT by kronos77
The Tesla Roadster goes from zero to 60 in four noiseless seconds, has a top speed of 135 mph and can roam for more than 200 miles before needing a recharge.
...
Silicon Valley start-up Tesla Motors Inc. raised $60 million in financing from San Francisco Bay area tech giants to get this car on the road. Those famous Toyota Prius owners Larry Page and Sergey Brin -- yes, the Google guys -- have invested, as have executives from eBay Inc. and PayPal.
The company is headed by entrepreneur Martin Eberhard, the man once behind a gadget called the RocketeBook. That product, sort of an iPod for books, didn't catch on, but Eberhard sold the company in 2000 to the media company Gemstar for $187 million. ....
The Tesla Roadster was unveiled this week in Santa Monica. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger made a surprise appearance and was taken on a test spin -- it was unclear yesterday if Schwarzenegger showed up to the event in one of the gas-guzzling Hummers he has sometimes favored.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
There is something on the website about "honoring his (Tesla's) legacy". That, and it runs off of AC power are the only connections I know of.
True, but his distribution method later became known as "radio".
Marconi simply set off a spark-gap...about the equivalent of a smoke signal in radio transmission.
Tesla's device put out a true radio "signal".
Well, as we could expect from the people involved with the project, marketing is their middle name. I was really hoping some of Nikola's inventions led to a breakthrough but instead find some guys ripping off his legacy, albeit with a nice car if they can get the production price down. As we can see from the poster's addition to the thread title, people automatically equate the car to Nikola Tesla.
If I remember another article correctly, it said that the car could be fully recharged "in as little as 2.5 hours." This requiires a 230v circuit, although it didn't have any info on the amps needed.
Despite trying to track it down, I've been unable to find out how many KWH it takes to recharge a fully-discharged car.
If you have this number, you could figure the approximate cost per mile at different electricity prices. Which would seem to be pretty relevant information.
Evan at a relatively low 20 mpg, $3 gas translates to only .15/mile. It seems odd to me that Americans who think nothing of spending $5 for a cup of coffee and $15 every day for lunch are horrified by spending .15 to transport themselves a mile in a 2-ton luxury vehicle.
If this Freeper could afford one he would buy one.;-)
My friend Arnie has been in the same line of business for quite a few years. Very profitable.
What's gonna squash these electric cars is road tax. The Gov. types will see that they are missing out on the gas tax and tax the hell out of these guys.
Switch to decaf before you have a stroke: it was a joke. However, it's also rooted in truth since I've noticed that a lot of enviros seem to think that things like hydrogen and electricity simply spring from the earth and exist for the plucking.
As I'm sure most of you remember from the power crisis of a few years back, the problem is and always was peak demand. In other words, during the day, when people run air conditioners, there isn't enough power for everyone. But overnight, when the air cools and people are sleeping, there is ample supply.
Electricity costs of $ 0.02 per mile were quoted for this car. By comparison, a Porsche Boxter(*) gets 20mpg. At $ 2.95 a gallon, a recent price for regular gas(**) where I live, that would be about $ 0.14 per mile. So you can see that overall, the electric car is many times more efficient in terms of cost per mile.
Of course I don't know where that $ 0.02 per mile came from; it might have been with the cheapest electricity rates in the country. Probably not, since Tesla is a California company. But even if they choose the cheapest power in the country, that's no less than half what we pay in California. I would say, then, that power cost for the Tesla is no more than $ 0.04 per mile and probably quite a bit less.
Let's say you drive your Tesla 15,000 miles per year and in your location it costs $ 0.03 per mile. This would be $450 a year, or $37.50 a month.
Let's say you drove your Boxster the same 15,000 miles a year. It would cost $2,100 or $175 a month.(***)
This is pretty impressive in terms of savings. You are saving nearly 80% on fuel costs. In addition, the Tesla is faster from 0-60! In fact, it's almost twice as fast from 0-60 - 3-4 seconds (I've seen both figures) versus 5.9 for the manual and 6.8 for the automatic.
So yes, you're paying $80k-100k for the car instead of $50k for the Boxster, but if you're a wealthy California entrepeneur, the novelty and status value are likely to be well worth the extra price. With the way Californians drive, it seems like 30,000 miles a year would be common, in which case you'd save almost $300 a month compared to running the Boxster. That's not going to quite cover the difference in monthly payments, but it will cut it approximately in half.
So it seems to me that environmentally and financially there is quite a reasonable case to be made for this car. If I had the big bucks and felt like buying a sports car, I'd give it very serious consideration.
D
(*) The Tesla is based on the Lotus Elise, which is not officially sold in the US. I picked the Boxster as the most logical similar car to use for a comparison.
(**) I recently acquired a 2000 Mercedes S500. There is absolutely no difference in performance or fuel economy between Regular and Premium gas in this car.
(***) I reasonably expect fuel economy towards the bottom of the EPA scale for a sports car. My Mercedes gets 16mpg highway/23 city. I've averaged about 19mpg, so it's possible that I should revise my estimate slightly upward for the Porsche, which actually gets 18/26 with an automatic transmission. However, since the electric car does not run when idling, and since I'm using a 50% higher cost than quoted from the manufacturer, I think those details all come up OK in the wash.
Anyway, I figured out a way to beat the system. I'll put one of those Honda generators in the trunk.
What?
In many parts of the world outside of California, the government actually allows (instead of outlaws) the creation of new generating capacity. There is excess capacity (at night) at cheap rates in many places. (Electricity costs $US0.05/kWh here.)
If I were a memeber of OPEC, I would be starting to feel a leetle bit uncomfortable. This is a good start.
Hey BookaT,
There are a LOT of freepers so you are going to get a lot of perspectives.
Some of us, when we hear something like "its going to reduce our oil dependence" will respond because IT IS NOT going to reduce our oil dependence one micro-iota.
An electric car must be charged. Where does the electricity come from?
The problem, that electricity must be generated, transmitted and then charged. There are inefficiencies to all of those..so when you say "it goes 200mi on a charge" the real question is how much equivalent energy did it take to do that? If the electricity was generated with a deisel plant, I would bet you got half the mileage that a deisel engine would have.
Now, on the whizzy-screamin-fast-cool-lookin side of the discussion..this thing looks neat. I wonder if they make a bullet bike that runs on electricity?!?!??
When my dad first came to the US in 1926, he was only 17 and lived in NYC for twenty years. And every day on his walk from his apartment to work, my dad passed Nikola Tesla sitting in the park feeding pidgeons -- same time every day. Dad said that it took him along time to work up the courage, but finally one morning my dad decide to start walking through the park, past Tesla and say good morning to him. "Dobro jutro, Gospodin Tesla" "Dobro jutro, Gospodin." was Tesla's response ("Good Morning, Mister Tesla." "Good Morning Sir.") , every morning for years. My dad said that was the only thing that they ever said to one another, because any other discourse without introduction would have seemed rude -- and my father figured that Tesla was such an important man that why would he want to talk to him? It was an honor for my dad to even be acknowledged by him. Then my dad quit that job and didn't walk that direction anymore so he didn't see Nikola Tesla again alive, but he did go to his funeral. And like most American Serbs, I have heard about Tesla from my father for as long as I can remember.
A really good book on Tesla is Margaret Cheney's, "Tesla, Man Out of time". The priest who officiated at Tesla's funeral, was the same priest who married my parents and baptised my brother.
As for Tesla's other "social skills", from everything I've read, Tesla had obsessive-compulsive disorder and whole lot of phobias. But sometimes that is the price of genius. And I believe that it is probable that we have gotten far more enjoyment and pleasure from Tesla's inventions than Tesla ever really got from life. That is very sad!
There was some kind of feud going on between Tesla and another brilliant Serb inventor at the time -- Michael Pupin. And on Pupin's deathbed, he asked for Tesla to forgive him and Tesla did. Ironically, to this day, the Tesla society also honors Pupin every year with a graveside memorial service.
By the way, there is film that is being made called "The Prestige" and David Bowie is slated to play Nikola Tesla in it!
1 gallon of gasoline yields 115,000 BTUs, which is the equivalent of about 34 kilowatt hours. My most recent electric bill charged me 3.8 cents per kwh baseline, or 16.6 cents per kwh for the "last kwh". Assuming perfect efficiency in charging and conversion to motion, that means that electricity with the same amount of energy in a gallon of gas would cost somewhere between $1.29 and $5.64. At the Boxster's 20 mpg, that means the mileage cost would be between $.06 and $.28. In my case, it would be the higher cost, since charging my car would come on top of my normal use. I suspect most people would fall in this category. I'll grant that the braking system would recapture a certain amount of the energy, but even so, achieving $.02 per mile using real CA electric rates seems very unlikely.
So it seems to me that environmentally and financially there is quite a reasonable case to be made for this car.
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Don't forget the cost of insuring a short like this one. As far as the environment goes, if half the driving public drove one, we would see a difference. But not the few status-conscious yuppies that would buy them. Now translate this into a car for the masses, and we would have something -- but battery technology still has to take a large quantum leap before it will be really practical in terms of battery capacity versus the cost of the batteries. :-)
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