Sleeping with the enemy...

[fitfan]

Originally Posted by 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.

adding to that - most "pollution" or enviromental impact, carbon foot print, depending how you quantify it... regardless, allways comes out to be buildings being #1 contributors. cars are not the major pollutor - its buildings / industry. cars are just an easy visible target becasue we don't "see" the pollution from metro dense electricity and water use. clean up buildings.

cattle and farming is, i believe second - and cars 3rd. (or its vice versa? - i forget, but meat and poultry have a huge enviromental impact, mostly from pesticides, fertalizer, poo, and water use - it sounds awefully, but there really should be a "meat tax" to force the producers to clean up their mess)

most cars on the roads in the US are not cars.... so becareful what #'s your looking at too.

[rob13572468]

Originally Posted by smicker

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

no no no... this is not true... when you do a comparison between the energy used by an ICE car and an electric car you have to take into account eveything that is used; its not a comparison between the battery pack creation and the overall useage of energy by an ICE car. The proper way is to determine what is really different between the two during construction: how much energy and materials does it take to build an electric drivetrain vs. an ICE drivetrain. then you do the comparison between usage and cost of fuel over a lifetime. an electic car's fuel is not electricity, for most americans an electric car runs on coal and coal is a *big* polluter. electric starts to make much more sense when we start running lots of solar and wind.

The tesla blog on the battery packs is nothing more than irresponsible spin... The battery packs contain lithium compounds that *are* toxic. our laws may allow them to be landfilled but that doesnt make them safe. additionally, and perhaps even more importantly, the *production* of the battery packs is where the enviroment takes its hit. lithium battery production requires lots of energy and uses all sorts of toxic and polluting chemicals like lead, cyanide, acids, etc. right now the batteries are being produced in japan but what is going to happen when electrics become widely adopted? the production will move right to china where there are no stringent environmental regulations. Finally lithium is one of those metals that simply does not exist in large supply on the planet (as opposed to steel and aluminum) so as the number of electric cars in use goes up the supply for lithium becomes more scarce. There are serious questions of sustainability.


Again I am not saying electric cars are bad and i think the tesla is cool. The problem is that we have to stop reducing the whole problem to oversimplified analogies "electric is good, gasoline it bad" and start asking the difficult questions. There are some hard facts that exist that are direct obstacles to any sort of mainstream acceptance of electric vehicles, even at the lower price that whitestar is projected to sell at and nobody is talking about how to resolve them...

[charliex]

Is the energy uses recycling the batterys to gain the reusable materials, of less value than the recycled goods or not ? Thats one common problem with a lot of recyling today, that the trucks, man power, heavy machinery and so on (as well as produce more emissions from fossil fuels) cost more than the worth of the goods extracted.

I know tesla have supposedly better batteries than what we use in laptops, but the fall off rate on my laptops stored capacity is considerably less than 4 years, i usually find i'm replacing them once a year or more with daily use, they're still useable but at vastly depreciated run times, i can't imagine the tesla doesn't suffer from the same problem.

[Patricko]

Originally Posted by charliex

Is the energy uses recycling the batterys to gain the reusable materials, of less value than the recycled goods or not ?

Last I heard a semi full of Lithium phone batteries is worth about $60K to a recycler.

[SweetDaddyD]

Just had my mac in for service. It died on me after getting back from LOG. It was just a bad cord on the charger and even out of warranty they still gave me a new one! yay! So anyway he ran a diagnostic on my battery. It lasts about 10 minutes not plugged in. It has 395 charge cycles on it. He said yeah that is normal with that many cycles to me 20% or less of it's original life. If you think about it, that is charged once a day for just over a year. Seems pretty crappy. A new mac battery is $130. I'd hate to times that by several thousand small batteries of a similar sort in a car. Don't get me wrong, I think the Tesla in an awesome vehicle (as long as you don't look at it from the side with all those stupid body lines all over the place- "fit and finish" my ass) but that is a realistic concern.

The best real world economic solution really still is the VW TDI Golf. Practical, reliable, affordable, simple, 50+ mpg, and great long term reliability (power train wise anyway)
Now if someone would make a hybrid diesel with a solar panel roof and hood we would have an awesome solution.

[charliex]

$60K profit, or just gross ?

in my experience apples batteries seem to be a bit more problematic than others and get affected by firmware updates, (tried resetting the eeprom etc) i had two die at the same time even though they were bought at different times and had different cycle and usage amounts, never mind that they cost $130 for a relatively small battery.

i'd say 9 months is where it starts getting to the point where i'm loosing considerable runtime, but they start noticeably declining after a couple of months.

Like SDD says a VW TDI.

The teslas cool and all but it does seem more like its aimed at the 'carbon credits' crowd.

[Patricko]

Originally Posted by charliex

$60K profit, or just gross ?

That is what a wholesaler was offering to buy a semi full of old Li batteries for.

[nak]

Originally Posted by gameson

And plug it in overnight does cost $. How much watt does it take to fill this car up? I don't know. Maybe someone who knows can calculate comparison for $$ for full tank of gas at current price vs electricity to fill this up.

65 kWhr battery pack. California pays about $0.10 a kWhr last I heard. The Tesla fills up for $6.50 and goes 200 miles. A Prius, at 50MPG, needs 4 gallons of gas to do that.

Edit: It's around 52 kWhr in the Tesla battery pack. Makes a fill up in CA at $0.11 kWhr $5.72. In Ohio at $0.07 kWhr, it'd be cheaper at $3.64. That's the price of a gallon of gas here right now, so the Tesla fuel cost is 1/4 that of a Prius and 1/8 that of a Lotus.

[Patricko]

Originally Posted by nak

65 kWhr battery pack. California pays about $0.10 a kWhr last I heard. The Tesla fills up for $6.50 and goes 200 miles. A Prius, at 50MPG, needs 4 gallons of gas to do that.

More like $0.28 to $0.36 per kWhr if you use a lot...ask me how I know

[charliex]

tesla say if you drive 10,000 miles a year, then after 5 years you'll have 70% of the initial capacity of the battery, if thats really true, its really good, but i wonder if thats based on ideal charging condtions, rate, times, temperatures ( since part of the tesla battery is the cooling system).

however with these types of batteries you normally lose the most in year one, then less later, so does that mean you lose say 20% in the first year (40 miles?), and the remaining 10% over the next 4 ? they also don't last as long in hotter temperatures, or at full charge.

[ewalberg]

calling the tesla the ultimate image car is a bit of a joke in my opinion. Sure, anyone to use it how they please. Most Mercedes G500 are mall queen cars, but when you really look at what the vehicles can do, when you ignore what ever marketing crap or who evers buying it for whatever purpose, this car has some pretty impressive features. It does 0-60 in less than 4 seconds and it's friggin silent! Anybody here care to drop the pedal to the floor and launch their lotus in front of a police officer at a freeway on ramp? I dare you!

You think you'll make it to 2nd gear before he's chasing your ass?... and it's still going to take you 5 seconds to get to the speed limit and now you've got a police car chasins you. I'm willing to bet you could get away with it in a tesla. for those who do any driving on the streets, even if you don't appreciably speed, the fun factor getting to the speed limit is, i think, substantially unsurpassed by this car over any other street legal car on the market because you can do it ANY TIME YOU WANT, and you wont be alerting anybody to the fact.

I enjoyed taping base ball cards to the spokes of my bicycle as much as the next kid, but we're adults now. A noisy a$$ car doesn't make you faster and it'll get you a ticket from the police even if you're only at 5k rpm and not exceding the limit. I guess i just no longer appreciate the associated risk of having a noisy car, i want something damn fun to drive (daily drive) and if my elise were silent i would LOVE IT.

If all you do is track then fine it's certainly not the car, but a big part of what everyone raves about the blown elises/exiges is the extra driveability on the street at the low end... well the tesla has even more of it than a blown elise/exige. I sure wish the tesla looked nicer, i'm not fond of the average looks, but i think it offers substantial value over the elise on fun factor... though i haven't driven it, i can just imagine... and i think agent triple exes observations given the number of exotic cars she's been in, is worth taking note of.

[Randy Chase]

I just want that low end grunt.

[AgentTripleX]

Originally Posted by Randy Chase

I just want that low end grunt.

Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

[apk919]

Originally Posted by ewalberg

...
A noisy a$$ car doesn't make you faster and it'll get you a ticket from the police even if you're only at 5k rpm and not exceding the limit. I guess i just no longer appreciate the associated risk of having a noisy car, i want something damn fun to drive (daily drive) and if my elise were silent i would LOVE IT...

I'm with you completely... yes, the 2ZZ motor sounds a bit tepid while idling, but I'd rather be quiet at redline than noisy at idle.

My '96 Porsche 993TT has the perfect engine sound, IMHO... rumble/burble at idle, and powerful yet subtle at full boost.

EDIT: Low end grunt? Does 400 ft-lbs. at ~2000 RPM qualify?

[mikester]

Good discussion here !

SuperVixen, maybe I missed it but what is the range of the Tesla, in your experience ? How far out of The City would you feel comfortable taking it without worrying about having to flatbed it home ?

Santa Cruz, or Monterey, or ?

Cheers, Mike

[Randy Chase]

Originally Posted by apk919

EDIT: Low end grunt? Does 400 ft-lbs. at ~2000 RPM qualify?

Very much so.

[AgentTripleX]

Originally Posted by mikester

Good discussion here !

SuperVixen, maybe I missed it but what is the range of the Tesla, in your experience ? How far out of The City would you feel comfortable taking it without worrying about having to flatbed it home ?

Santa Cruz, or Monterey, or ?

Cheers, Mike

I really need more seat time. I think I'll take one to Santana Row in a couple weeks. I do know that Tesla had a couple cars in Monterey last week and they were just fine. The range is supposed to be 227, but because of regenerative breaking, you can actually add to that range. Especially in city driving or stop and go traffic. As you let go of the accelerator the direction of the motor reverses which causes the regen. It's pretty awesome.

[mopho]

Originally Posted by AgentTripleX

but because of regenerative breaking.....

So the car fixes itself?

[mikester]

Originally Posted by mopho

So the car fixes itself?

yeah, and I think the driver actually gets younger, too - it's wild !

So now, the price of the car's starting to sound more reasonable, isn't it ?

[mopho]

Originally Posted by mikester

yeah, and I think the driver actually gets younger, too - it's wild !

So now, the price of the car's starting to sound more reasonable, isn't it ?

On the other hand, it could mean that when you fix something it immediately breaks all by itself