Sleeping with the enemy...

[swede]

Hmm, gas is still cheap in the states, wait until it gets to $9 / gallon and then compare. This is reality in many countries that also takes the carbon footprint in consideration.

Then the whole picture changes more in favor for cars like the Tesla, it is the future, not the past.

Don't get me wrong, I like the Yukon Xl's but reality is that you will have a hard time giving them away today.

The future of transportation is not what we have here today, but I am sure nobody is naive enough to beleive it is.

my 5c

[nvrblu]

Originally Posted by kestrel74

Many, many years ago when I was twenty-three
I was married to a widow who was pretty as could be.
This widow had a grown-up daughter who had hair of red.
My father fell in love with her and soon they, too, were wed.
...
As husband of my grandmother, I am my own grandpaw.

This sounds familiar... we might be related

[rob13572468]

Originally Posted by AgentTripleX

Well I thought about that too, but then I thought about how many road trips I've taken in the Elise. 2 in 4 years. That's it. I've taken it to LA and back twice. In the past I've actually rented a car to take to LA so I wouldn't put miles on whatever my car was at the time. It's actually cheaper to fly to LA now than drive a regular car, at least for me.

They do have a mobile connector for Tesla, but you're right it takes some time to charge, not instant like gas. For my purposes this car could work. I could drive back and forth to work 2 days before needing to charge. I would probably charge it every night like I do my cell phone though. It only takes about 3 hours to charge if you are using the connector that comes with the car. Based on night time rates is $0.02 a mile to charge it. I've been spending $200/week since starting my new job on gas. If I had an extra 110k sitting around right now I'd jump right on it. Unfortunately that is not the case and I still need to be responsible and buy a house.

I disagree with you about it being a luxury car. It's no Bentley and doesn't come close, it's not meant to be. I'm not sure if the Ferrari finish is nicer, but the Lamborghini one is for sure.

the ferrari fit and finish is excellent, no comparison to the tesla.. I drove the convertible F430 a few weeks ago and the interior was beautiful. nevertheless the tesla will be placed in the luxury car category regardless as to whether they want it to be considered a 'niche' car. Musk said this himself when defending his reasoning behind redesigning the car as opposed to just using the elise chassis; he said that people expected more luxury and refinement from a car in the 100K range and the elise did not have it. The only problem is that luxury=weight and in an electric those two characteristics are at odds with each other.

Finally, if you are spending $200/wk on gas then you are short-changing your self hugely. You should know that your most valuable resource is your *time* and to spend 12 hours per week in traffic is an emormous waste of the one thing you cant get any more of. secondly at 800/month in gas you can easily divert that money towards getting a much nicer place in the city near your work. I live 4 blocks from my office which I did on purpose; I pay alot more to live here than I would for the same sized housing in the suburbs but the gas savings largely offset that. This is something that is a general cultural issue in the US; people spend too much time and money to live further away from work and it creates a large resource drain.

[rob13572468]

Originally Posted by Patricko

I am not sure what the batteries cost but I have seen "people" quote $20K and $30K (I have no idea what the real number is now and none of us know what it will be in 3 years).

So at $25K for a battery pack and 2.5 years of life at your usage the battery is the same cost as gas.

Yep, its crazy the expense that goes into the battery packs considering their short life.. but thats not the worst part. Tesla is spposed to be the green car right? anyne care to guess how resource intensive it is to produce the battery packs... and when the packs are used up what do you do with them? li-on batterys are considered hazardous waste and require special cleanup, all of which is *not* considered in the overall cost of ownership (both economic and environmental).

SO you have a battery pack that pollutes an uses *alot* of energy to both create and recycle but you dont see tesla talking about that aspect because its the ugly side of electrics cars.

Honestly if we really want to reduce pollutiona and save energy we are better off using standard grid power to run a plant to produce synthetic gasoline.

[FLuXeXigeS]

^i hear the same argument about the prius batteries...but is it really that much worse compared to Carbon Monoxide coming out of millions of cars?

or the amount of engine oil waste that needs to be recycled as well?

i agree tesla is a great concept, but until there are faster ways to charge, or lengthened range 300+miles/charge, i am NOT going to replace my exige s for it...for now

[Murix]

Do they have plugs at the track? I don't daily drive my Elise, so what does it accomplish to replace it with an city car?

If all I could do is just drive it around LA, why would I not save $90k and just buy a smart car?

This might be the biggest image car I have seen yet. I can't wait to see them pull in front of clubs when movie stars trade in their Prius for one to show how they care for the environment.

[Bavarian Motorist]

Originally Posted by FLuXeXigeS

^i hear the same argument about the prius batteries...but is it really that much worse compared to Carbon Monoxide coming out of millions of cars?

or the amount of engine oil waste that needs to be recycled as well?

i agree tesla is a great concept, but until there are faster ways to charge, or lengthened range 300+miles/charge, i am NOT going to replace my exige s for it...for now

It's not really fair to compare the waste of one car to the waste of millions of cars.



I had a feeling the battery would have a short life. If you're spending $200/week, isn't that $2400 annually?



$25k every couple years is hard to swallow. That's identical to financing a new Lotus!!

[smicker]

Originally Posted by rob13572468

Yep, its crazy the expense that goes into the battery packs considering their short life.. but thats not the worst part. Tesla is spposed to be the green car right? anyne care to guess how resource intensive it is to produce the battery packs... and when the packs are used up what do you do with them? li-on batterys are considered hazardous waste and require special cleanup, all of which is *not* considered in the overall cost of ownership (both economic and environmental).

SO you have a battery pack that pollutes an uses *alot* of energy to both create and recycle but you dont see tesla talking about that aspect because its the ugly side of electrics cars.

Honestly if we really want to reduce pollutiona and save energy we are better off using standard grid power to run a plant to produce synthetic gasoline.

The energy used to create and recycle a battery pack is a drop in the bucket compared to the energy used by an ICE vehicle over the same lifetime.

Regarding toxicity, please see this recent Tesla blog:

Mythbusters Part 3: Recycling our Non-Toxic Battery Packs

[Patricko]

Originally Posted by Bavarian Motorist

I had a feeling the battery would have a short life. If you're spending $200/week, isn't that $2400 annually?

Only if your year has 12 weeks

Which planet are you on

[FLuXeXigeS]

Originally Posted by Bavarian Motorist

It's not really fair to compare the waste of one car to the waste of millions of cars.

exactly my point...there is no basis that recycling batteries is WORSE than actually producing carbon monoxide and waste engine oil

so the tesla although it needs special ways to take care of the battery after its life, might still be "cleaner" than a lot of the cars out there today

[glb]

I just cannot see having a car w/this scenario:

"Let's go for a drive. We'll just have to stop every hour or two for about 40 minutes....or 20 hrs."

Ugh.

[Icedog_16]

Originally Posted by FLuXeXigeS

exactly my point...there is no basis that recycling batteries is WORSE than actually producing carbon monoxide and waste engine oil

so the tesla although it needs special ways to take care of the battery after its life, might still be "cleaner" than a lot of the cars out there today

Perhaps I'm naive, but I thought that the 'alleged' demon of the internal-combustion engine was carbon dioxide. CO2 is a product of the catalytic converter, of which environmentalists were proponents; the aim was to do away with CO emissions. Irony is so ironic. Or is it?

[Bavarian Motorist]

Originally Posted by Patricko

Only if your year has 12 weeks

Which planet are you on

I fail....

[SweetDaddyD]

Originally Posted by Icedog_16

Perhaps I'm naive, but I thought that the 'alleged' demon of the internal-combustion engine was carbon dioxide. CO2 is a product of the catalytic converter, of which environmentalists were proponents; the aim was to do away with CO emissions. Irony is so ironic. Or is it?

Carbon Dioxide, Carbon Monoxide, Hydrocarbons, Oxides of Nitrogen.....
C02 is probably the least harmful.

We could go into why each one is produced, (unburned fuel, evaporative gasoline vapors, high combustion chamber temps...) and what part of the car is to control each one (catalytic converter, EGR valve, Charcoal canister, etc....) but if you were interested you could also find out on your own, maybe howstuffworks.com.

[lotus54]

I've been intrigued with the Teslas ever since I started reading about them.
they took a different route than most electrics.

Certainly much of the battery is recyclable although not cheap. Hopefully it will come down. The distance they are usable is MUCH more than most other electrics out there, but of course interior space is a tad limited for some.

I'm hoping a huge jump in batteries will happen before too long- they really are not an order of magnitude different than they ever have been. At least as far as amount of storage. Yes, a lot better- but they need to be 40 or 50 times better than they are now.
We use lead/calcium wet cell batteries for our solar sites. Those will easily last 20 years, we have some in use that are like new and made in the 80's. (they don't have big loads and generally charged pretty well).
One site we are going to add a direct methonal fuel cell, since the solar panels will be covered in snow during the winter. We have been testing it since November, it has used very, very little fuel to power the radio.

How is it to drive compared to the Elise?

What is the new job? I must have missed that, since I have not had time to be on much lately.

Mark

[SweetDaddyD]

Originally Posted by lotus54

I'm hoping a huge jump in batteries will happen before too long- they really are not an order of magnitude different than they ever have been. At least as far as amount of storage. Yes, a lot better- but they need to be 40 or 50 times better than they are now.

One of the major issues with batteries isn't the technology- it the legality. Oil companies buy the patents and then shelve them. Read up on the original electric RAV 4 which was a production Toyota vehicle for a very short period of time several years ago. Texaco sued them for $30 million (and won) for using that battery after they had bought the patent to it. That is why they made the Prius and had to have a gas engine on it to charge the smaller batteries.

Edit: from wikipedia: Whether or not Toyota wanted to continue production, it was unlikely to be able to do so, because the EV-95 battery was no longer available. Chevron had inherited control of the worldwide patent rights for the NiMH EV-95 battery when it merged with Texaco, which had purchased them from General Motors. Chevron's unit won a $30,000,000 settlement from Toyota and Panasonic, and the production line for the large NiMH batteries was closed down and dismantled. Only smaller NiMH batteries, incapable of powering an electric vehicle or plugging in, are currently allowed by Chevron-Texaco.

It appears Tesla was just ingenuitive enough to make a design to get around the patents locked up by oil companies- by using thousands of small batteries.

One of these days I'm going to watch it: Who Killed the Electric Car?

[AgentTripleX]

Originally Posted by SweetDaddyD

One of the major issues with batteries isn't the technology- it the legality. Oil companies buy the patents and then shelve them. Read up on the original electric RAV 4 which was a production Toyota vehicle for a very short period of time several years ago. Texaco sued them for $30 million (and won) for using that battery after they had bought the patent to it. That is why they made the Prius and had to have a gas engine on it to charge the smaller batteries.

Edit: from wikipedia: Whether or not Toyota wanted to continue production, it was unlikely to be able to do so, because the EV-95 battery was no longer available. Chevron had inherited control of the worldwide patent rights for the NiMH EV-95 battery when it merged with Texaco, which had purchased them from General Motors. Chevron's unit won a $30,000,000 settlement from Toyota and Panasonic, and the production line for the large NiMH batteries was closed down and dismantled. Only smaller NiMH batteries, incapable of powering an electric vehicle or plugging in, are currently allowed by Chevron-Texaco.

It appears Tesla was just ingenuitive enough to make a design to get around the patents locked up by oil companies- by using thousands of small batteries.

One of these days I'm going to watch it: Who Killed the Electric Car?

That's really messed up that those companies get in the way. Of course they have their own immediate interests in mind, but what about our future generations?

I've been recommended that movie as well.

[Icedog_16]

Originally Posted by SweetDaddyD

Carbon Dioxide, Carbon Monoxide, Hydrocarbons, Oxides of Nitrogen.....
C02 is probably the least harmful.

We could go into why each one is produced, (unburned fuel, evaporative gasoline vapors, high combustion chamber temps...) and what part of the car is to control each one (catalytic converter, EGR valve, Charcoal canister, etc....) but if you were interested you could also find out on your own, maybe howstuffworks.com.

Yeah, I understand that. I'm relatively well-versed on that subject. The person in question kept referring to CO. However, we were told back in the 70's how bad the products of combustion were and the catalytic converter was introduced; and now we're being told how bad CO2 is. So, according to what people are saying nowadays, CO2 is the worst thing EVER!!! Law of unintended consequences, if you pick up what I'm throwin' down.

[FLuXeXigeS]

c02 or c0 .... if its harmful it harmful and that was besides my point LOL

[bsirhc]

Adding to the emission discussion regarding electric cars in America is the fact that about half of our electricity is generated from coal burning plants.