Tesla sighting.
 

Was walking down the sidewalk in front of 345 Hudson St. in Manhattan. The Tesla approached from the front. Driver made a left hand turn onto Charlton, and floored it.

Holy fuck, that thing is fast.

That is all.

I've always had a thing for electric cars, and then I watched "Who Killed the Electric Car" and it opened my eyes as to why the electric car has not been allowed to sell well yet (in modern days anyway).

They're especially awesome when they're faster than their gasoline counterpart in a straight line. :D

I was just reading an article on them on the plane today :)

Top Gear made me want one less. Less.

They are fast, no doubt. High torque at zero RPM. Still range limited. I keep wanting to build one, but every time I do the math, it would either be slow and heavy (lead acid) or too expensive (advanced batteries) for the range I need for my commute.

I have not seen a Tesla in person yet though, very cool Joe.

Tango FTW :laugh:

top-end ftw. needs a second gear, ill stick with gas for now.

I saw one on a trailer in a Waffle House parking lot right off of the interstate in 1995. I talked to the owner/promoter for about ten minutes. Not much to talk about when you get past the weight and the "how fast will she go" and "how far will she go" questions. That one was orange if I recall...

The Tesla Roadster wasn't released until 2006, how did you see one in 1995?

After seeing the Top Gear review of it.. it SEEMS tempting if it were lighter on batteries and didnt cost so much. Hopefully they'll be able to put a hydrogen fuel cell in it some day :)

May 8, 2009:

"The message has been hinted at before, but the federal government is now serious about shifting the focus away from hydrogen and onto plug-in vehicles. In an important statement yesterday, Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu said that hydrogen vehicles are still 10 to 20 years away from practicality and that millions in federal government funding for hydrogen programs will be cut from the 2010 federal budget. Chu said, “We asked ourselves, ‘Is it likely in the next 10 or 15, 20 years that we will covert to a hydrogen car economy?’ The answer, we felt, was ‘no’” (well, duh)."

Obama, DOE slash hydrogen fuel cell funding in new budget | Eco Friendly Mag

George W. Bush's $1.2 billion plan to develop cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells was eliminated by President Barack Obama on Thursday.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu said the government preferred to target more immediate energy-saving solutions.

"The probability of deploying hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles in the next 10 to 20 years is low," Energy Department spokesman Tom Welch said in an interview today.

http://www.autonews.com/article/2009...905089965/1186


Thank goodness that someone has finally admitted the obvious truth. Hydrogen fuel cell technology for passenger automobiles, at least for the foreseeable future, is nothing more than a political buzzword. Producing, distributing, storing, and fuel-cell conversion of hydrogen is, by many orders of magnitude, more expensive, less energy efficient, and more polluting then centralized power generation, AC distribution, and battery storage.

(Here's to hoping that DOE remains on-track for approving the nearly 30 new domestic reactor plants currently in the pipeline.)

Meh. I see them all the time.

I guess living 5 miles from the factory helps. :D

Don't care for the front end more. The elise looks waay more agressive. The S sedan looks good though. It reminds me of a Maserati.

Prototype headed to a show/demonstration/testing I'm guessing. I'm sure they've been courting possible investors for years. They've apparently been working on it for quite a while.

i pass by testla dealership every time i go to work and then back home. seen them many times on streets too.

Thank you!

Hydrogen was a good tool for the oil companies to hint at forward thinking without actually having to sell any cars that don't use gasoline. It's like the mechanical rabbit at a dog track. "Hey look everyone! Electric cars didn't work (through no fault of our own, cough cough) so we're totally doing this Hydrogen thing!"

Joe, you *KNOW* I'd be the last person to ever challenge you... But I just wanted to point out something...

Honda doesn't seem to think so:

http://www.ecoautoninja.com/wp-conte...cx-clarity.jpg

While I greatly dislike Honda automobiles, honestly in a way its kinda cool. The very same Top Gear episode that made me no longer want a Tesla they also showed and tested the Clarity. Love it or hate it, while Hydrogen is the most prevalent element in the universe it has a nasty little problem. Damn thing always seems to have something else stuck to it.. Last I checked its still a pretty polluting process to strip elements from Hydrogen, so its a little counter productive... Similar in MY opinion to the Nickle mining required for batteries in so called "Hybrids."

YES! And this is the dirty little secret that nobody seems to be picking up on.

I'm not saying it's impractical to build a car to run on hydrogen (though I'd prefer to burn it in a combustion chamber than react it in a fuel cell) nor would it be terribly difficult to distribute and store hydrogen. Heck, you can fill up with CNG at 3,600 PSI at a lot of stations in California (self-serve, just like a regular pump) and nobody seems to be dying in horrible fireballs as a result of that.

But actually getting hydrogen in it's pure form is, as you pointed out, somewhat of a bitch. While it is in fact pretty abundant, you can't just drill a hole and suck hydrogen out of the ground, or grab it out of the sky and purify it through a filter.

In a commercial environment, the most common way to get hydrogen (far eclipsing all other methods combined) is to extract it from fossil fuels. Yup, All that hydrogen Honda and everyone else is putting into their cute little fuel cell vehicles was produced by steam reformation of hydrocarbons, most prominently natural gas, which is desirable due to it's high methane content. Apart from consuming a fair amount of energy to perform the conversion, the principal byproduct of this reaction is carbon monoxide. Oh, and you get less potential energy out of the resultant hydrogen than you put into the process to obtain it in the first place, never mind the perfectly good fossil fuel that you wasted in the process.

Yay.

But wait! Isn't water mostly Hydrogen? Sure it is. And you can extract that hydrogen by electrolysis, which produces zero pollution (the byproduct is oxygen). That's all well and good, except the energy-efficiency of this method makes burning old tires for energy look "green". Currently, about 4% of worldwide hydrogen is produced this way, and the majority of it is an incidental byproduct of the manufacture of chlorine. Yummy.


I agree that gasoline probably won't be around forever. But hydrogen isn't the answer. The only way for it to be both economically viable and "green" would be if the energy used to produce it came from a sustainable source with no carbon footprint. Of course, even if that were the case, the equivalent cost per mile would still be far greater than simple battery storage using even today's battery technology. (Now we just have to figure out to do with all that spent lithium-cobalt oxide. On the plus side, recycling for these batteries approaches 100% conversion efficiency. On the minus side, it still requires energy.)

Bring on the nukes.

I think they are cool, but I also think Tesla will be gone in a matter of time. There was a good write up about them in last month's C&D. It takes a full 37 hours to charge one completely when a standard 120v cord is used. A 240v cord from Tesla is 1500 bones. They do sell a quick charge unit that will charge the car in 4 hours. It cost an additional 3k for the unit alone. That does not include the contractor to redo the breaker box and electrical wiring needed to hook it up. The review said that the quick charger draws as much power as a laundromat. Exaggerated? Perhaps, but if not, that is a lot of juice. I think I would get a Prius, actually a few of them for the 126k the Tesla cost. At least Toyota will be around for a while.

I'd rather be stabbed in the face than drive Prius.

IMHO There always seems to be a dirty little secret with this whole energy situation, especially when you're talking about being "Green." Every one of these so called "Green" energy solutions costs 10 times the bank roll and produce 10% the energy a Non-"Green" solution would offer.

ROFL.

I would too, Joe. I was just stating that comparison that you could get 4 Prius' that average almost 50mpg average. That is about 500 miles per tank of regular gas.

So say, if one can get 50mpg average. Filled up at 1/4 tank that would run roughly 20.25 per tank.

The Tesla runs about $4.00 per charge either using the 37 hour method or the quick charge method, but the range is realistically around 200 miles.

So the difference is about $8.00-10.00, in Tesla's favor, going the same distance. How long do I need to drive the Tesla to make up the difference in cost, and what is the actual carbon footprint once you factor in the energy that is needed to run the Tesla? Coal or whatever is still being burned to generate the electricity that is needed to charge the Tesla.

On average you may save 17-20 per month driving the Tesla over a Prius.
But based on the cost-

Prius-30k
Telsa-126k

Based on a savings of 20.00 per month fuel cost you would still need to drive the Tesla for 400 years to equal the Prius. Even if the fuel cost doubles then you would still need to drive the Tesla for 200 years, and also your cost to charge the car will increase as well.

I don't care for hybrids or electrics. There isn't a free lunch anywhere.

Since I mentioned gas, why the hell is gas over 2.00 per gallon? Last year it was at 150 per barrel and 4.00 per gallon. Common sense should dictate that gas costing 2.00 at the pump should be around 75 per barrel. What oil is running now should cost somewhere are 1.40 per gallon.

And people said it was Bush's fault....:jerkit:

Doesn't count, it's a lease-only vehicle in one city with a fuel cell so costly Honda wants them all back at the end of the leases.

But.... Not withstanding the process required to manufacture either car, IF.... and this is a *BIG* IF... 100% of the energy required to power the Tesla was nuclear or hydroelectric... It would be 100% clean to operate. Where the Prius, would not. Sorry, but I do consider Nuclear energy 99% FREE, and 100% clean. Even with the nuclear waste.

People think they're saving the planet with Hybrids and I think its nothing more than a ruse. They're only fooling their own stupidity and other tards who think like them. Even if manufacturing the vehicle was 100% clean it STILL BURNS FOSSIL FUELS!

Not defending either car here as I'm NOT a fan of any type of plug in to recharge vehicle, and I think Gas/Electric or Diesel/Electric hybrids are a joke.. Unless we're talking about Union Pacific... Thats a different story all together.

I did not know that, very interesting fact.

Holy shit. I didn't look at this before:

About 200 vehicles will be leased over the next three years, primarily in Southern California.

• Three-year $600/month lease 1
• Exterior Color: Star Garnet Metallic
• Maintenance costs and physical damage collision coverage included in lease.

Fuck. That.

Juan, I couldn't gather if you were getting on to me about defending the Tesla or not. To clarify, I am not defending the Tesla or hybrids. Again there is no free lunch when it comes to energy. Everything has it's drawbacks.

I actually looked into solar panels for my house. I figured that I get a good 6-8hours a day of direct sun on a certain part of my house.

For 15k I can get solar panels that will produce 150kw a month. That isn't even 10% of my usage, and it would save me about 17.00 a month off my electric bill. It would only take me oh, 882 years of living in this house to recoup the cost.

Alternative energy sources will be out of reach for the consumer to substantially afford to make a difference in anything until it can be produced cheaply. It is just way too expensive at this point.

Back on topic, Joe I think the Tesla does naught to 60 in 4.1 seconds and has 277lbs tq @ 0 rpms. That is quicker than most cars that sell at the 126k mark.

I wonder, can forklift companies can work on it?

0-60 times of that are INCREDIBLE. Just watch it go against the Elise!! Reliability... Not very impressive. Still a neat car, I'd rather have the Elise.

That's not really a fair comparison, as there's no easily quantifiable way to account for the fact that the Tesla is an exotic sports car which is faster in the standing quarter mile than a Porsche 911, whereas the Prius is an econobox that can barely move out of its own way.

Along the same vein, one might well compare the Prius to an '09 Fiat 500 which, with the 1.3l turbodiesel engine gets better mileage (44mpg city, 65mpg highway, 56 mpg combined), has roughly the same performance figures, costs about half as much, and does not contain several hundred pounds of very toxic batteries.


I don't like them either. But if I had to chose between a Hybrid, a battery-only EV, or being stabbed in the face, I'd pick the pure battery EV, with an optional towable range extender. Fewer compromises.

As to free lunch, I'm with elesjuan here. Nuclear power is as close as you can get to free power, in terms of what is actually viable on a sufficient scale to power an entire country.

And these days, nuclear waste isn't even much of a problem. If nukes interest you, spend some quality time reading about the CANDU reactors. They run on unenriched fuel, meaning raw ore dug out of the ground without refinement, and thus do not produce high-level waste. They're flex-fuel capable, meaning they'll also run on old nuclear warheads (seriously) as well as the "spent" fuel of PWR and BWR reactors (which are what we use in the US). Seriously- all that stuff we're fretting about where to bury can actually be re-used as fuel for CANDU reactors, and once they're done with it, it'll be less radioactive then when it went in.

CANDUs are nearly meltdown-proof by design, and they're capable of being re-fueled while active, so their theoretical uptime is nearly 100%. (Conventional reactors have to be completely shut down, opened up, resealed, and then re-started in order to be re-fueled.)

And the best part is, they're not fiction. There are quite a few of them in use, though none in the US.

I am down with nuke power. There is a stigma about it here in the US. There is a nuke power plant N. of Tampa in Crystal River. I don't know what the capacity it is running, but I always heard growing up that it isn't utilized to its full potential.

I just don't like alternative vehicles. If I had to choose between a Tesla and a Prius, and if they were to cost the same, then I would choose the Tesla. At that point I can see the value in the Tesla, but at four times the cost, not so much.
A stab in the face may be cheaper.

The Crystal River Energy Complex consists of five generating stations, of which one (Crystal River 3, built in 1977) is a nuke plant. The other four are coal-fired. The nuclear plant has the highest rated output of any of the five stations (at either 834, 838 or 842 MW) accounting for just over 27% of the complex' total capacity.

According to the NRC's most recent data, Crystal River 3 is currently operating at 100% of rated capacity. It's capacity factor since original criticality has been 90.9%, which is pretty good for a PWR. (Capacity factor is how much power the plant has generated, relative to it's theoretical total output, the difference primarily representing the amount of time the reactor has spent offline for maintenance and refuling.)


And I'm with ya. When I lived in Carlsbad, we were about 25 miles from the two reactors at San Onofre, known among locals as "the tits." (You gotta see 'em from I-5 to fully appreciate this.) I can't honestly recall ever objecting to their presence in any way.


I don't like 'em either. But they're here, and they're a fact of life. Like it or not, government regulation is going to continue to push their development, subsidize their purchase, and ultimately make owning a gasoline-powered vehicle impractical. Over what timescale this is likely to happen I couldn't even speculate, but it seems reasonable to expect that it will occur within my lifetime.

Given that, I'm happy to see that Tesla is at least making an effort to show that electric cars don't necessarily have to suck. With most "boutique" alternative vehicles, it's almost like the designers said to themselves "well, you really shouldn't be driving a car at all. But since you insist, take this horrid little shitbox to remind you why you should be riding a recumbent bicycle instead." Obviously one must exclude all of the present-day hybrids SUVs and such (the ones that get 17 MPG instead of 15) as they exist solely to fill government quotas.

Don't knock the Abarth.. In the VERY HIGHLY unlikely event Chrysler brings an "SRT" version of the Fiat 500 here, I'll buy one...

http://blog.niot.net/blog-images/28_...n-november.jpg

That things looks ALL KINDS OF TROUBLE!!!! :laugh:

I don't really mind the look of the nuclear plants. Actually, I think they look pretty cool. You can see the Crystal River Nuke plant from US 19.

Now, only if the Fiskar Karma can actually make it to the market....That would be a hybrid that I would drive. Allegedly, it will be in production by 2010, and at a cost of 80K. This is the 2dr concept. You can see good pics of the 4 door just about anywhere on the interwebz.

http://designapplause.com/wp-content...03/karma-3.png
http://designapplause.com/wp-content...03/karma-2.png
http://designapplause.com/wp-content...03/karma-1.png

Looks a bit like an Aston Vanquish after surprise buttsex. :D


Oh joy. A French car, worked-over by Italians, re-branded as an American car. Lest we forget their "other" special edition currently in production:
http://www.yosax.com/car_images/fiat...ie-edition.jpg
(No, it's not a Hoax. There actually is a Barbie edition.)

Looks like what would have happened if Chris Bangle went to work at Maserati.

I don't know why some people are so worried and afraid of Nuclear Plants. Wolf Creek is 90 miles away from me but looks nothing like a "traditional" Nuclear facility. They built it in like the 70s, its been operating for something like 40 years without any kind of issue. I've never worried about it. Ever.

http://www.nrc.gov/images/reading-rm...071116-061.jpg

People are kinda crazy over nukes, I blame the media.

My brother is a nuclear engineering major here at A&M (I am Mechanical).

Our goal in life is that I'll design electric cars, and he'll provide the cheap juice.

His project is a '69 Chevelle with a big block, and I just finished turboing this thing. We both know that electrics are the future, and the most practical for most applications.

What most folks don't realize is that an electric motor is more well suited to our driving demands. Battery technology just needs to take another leap or two, and we need to upgrade our electric grid.

There's still plenty of oil to go around (and plenty of things that will run out before oil does), so all of this in an everyday/everyman sense is several decades away.

Your leap in battery technology will have to be HUGE for an electric vehicle to EVER be successful. Sometimes I drive 1200 miles a week for work. Tonight I'm driving 3/4 way across the state of kansas, should be 286 miles one way. How the hell you going to accomplish sustaining 70 - 80mph for 4 hours straight first off, and second how are you planning on having that recharge?

I'm sure the hell not going to stop every 200 miles and wait 26 hours for my car to recharge.... Not even close. That 1200 miles would take me weeks to drive!

I don't think electric vehicles are the future unless there is a substantial electrical generator on board the vehicle.

I also commute 1100miles/week, I understand.

Internal combustion was viewed just as impractical not too too long ago.

Electrics won't work for everyone. They aren't practical for colder climates, they aren't practical for cargo, they won't work in remote areas.

I'm talking about your average Joe that will use it like a cell phone. Make a few calls a day, plug it in at night.

And, this is all DECADES away. Progress shouldn't be avoided just because we're not anywhere close. If everyone thought this way cars would still only be capable of 15mph.

The battery need not be large enough for a 500 mile trip, or even a 200 mile trip. It need only be large enough for your maximum daily commute. 50-100 miles ought to cover it for most folks. 20 would more than cover it for me.

When you need to go on a longer trip, you hook up the towable range extender. Put simply, it'a a tiny trailer you pull behind the car which contains a small gasoline engine (motorcycle engines are popular) along with an electrical generator. At that point, your car becomes a series hybrid. The main battery provides the oomph to get the car moving from a stop, overtake on the highway, etc., with the TRE producing just enough electricity to sustain cruise and replenish the battery (just like how a normal hybrid works.) When you run low on gas, you pull over and fill up just like an old-fashioned car.

The benefits to this design are numerous. In normal day to day driving you are not carrying around a gasoline engine, with the weight and space penalties that it entails (don't forget the cooling system, the gas tank, the more complicated transmission and clutch system, etc). This frees up space to carry a sufficiently large battery pack to last your whole daily commute. As a result, 100% of your everyday commuting power comes from the grid, which is either pollution-offset (generated by a relatively well-regulated coal or natgas plant some distance away) or truly pollution-free (in the case of nuclear.) You drive to the office, meet up with a transvestite hooker after work, buy groceries, pick up the kids from soccer practice, stop by the dry-cleaners to drop off the pants that were soiled during the aforementioned hookup, and drive home. Then you plug in your car to charge overnight just like you do with your cell phone or your personal massager, and in the morning it's good to go again.

You get the best of both worlds. Battery-only efficiency and performance every day, with gasoline range when you're driving across Kansas.

or you could just hook a generator up to the wheels of the car, so it charges itself going down the highway









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