Hot Wheels! The Car of the Future

A manageable $102,000? No wonder ABC News is so anti-Obama! Everyone working there is rich!
The Tesla is great… except no one can afford it, they can’t even make more than a few dozen of them, and the company is being sued by their investors…
But, besides all that, the Tesla is great! (rolls eyes)

I think the real Nikolai Tesla tried to marry a pidgeon – this was on a History Channel show. He did a lot of sane stuff too, like invent radio (no, it wasn’t Marconi), and the AC version of electricity so we didn’t all have to have 6 inch diameter copper cable coming into our houses.
Hopefully the car is named after the brilliant side of Tesla, not the whacked out one..

Totally unproven technology at this point. I would like to know how long before those batteries last before they need to be replaces and then the big question is how much will that cost?

Runs on electricity….Still need to burn coal to generate electricity. Isn’t coal a fossil fuel? I think those innovative Californians need to go back to the drawing board….

They run the same story about Tesla every year. They have for the last 5 years. When they finally get these on the road it will be impressive.

Another point to consider here is “where’s the fun”? No engine noise and no gears to shift in a sports car? This is a car designed by the types to design and play video games not drive sports cars. This car is for poseurs who really don’t want to be bothered with driving or perhaps no one ever taught them how to shift a car.

The author here is a bit confused. The design studio the the Tesla sedan (Model S) is located in the SpaceX facilities. Elon Musk is currently CEO of both Tesla Motors and SpaceX. However, Tesla Motors (the company) is not involved with “building parts for a rocket ship.”

The guys at Tesla are doing sometning. They are building cars. they have orders ahead of their production. They have plans for reducing costs. A lot of the negative comments I’ve read could have been leveled at Henry Ford when he first started. Never ceases to amaze me that people who don’t do didiley feel they are the source of expert comment.

would be great, except for the person like me who drives a thousand miles 3 times a year to see my grandkids. at 250 mile range and 10 hours to recharge
it would take me 5 days to get there instead of a day and a half. do not know of anybody that will let you charge your batteries without a substantial amount of payment also.

what is the stock symbol for tesla?

I for one am thrilled to see ‘plug-in’ electric car technology be commercialized. Off-peak power generating capacity can recharge electric cars overnight, leveling out power usage demand making this essential industry much more efficient.
Meanwhile, Tesla has pioneered permanent magnet electric motor designs ideally suited to cars, and a battery pack comprised of standard generic laptop batteries (thousands of I recall correctly).
If Tesla can find a market for a $102K car (after rebates) to get production up to economic volumes, and prove their concept, more power to them… and hooray for us all.
The next generation electric sedan from Tesla is targeted at $50K, comparable to other luxury cars with much lower lifetime operating costs.
These guys are my heros. They’re demonstrating the kind of initiative and forward thinking that will pull our country out of its current economic malaise.
As for the naysayers, rent a car when making occasional cross country trips or, call me crazy, fly there.

Sorry Joe Hall…
It’s just that this isn’t my first rodeo and I’ve heard this electric car hype before – about once a generation since I’ve been alive. Electric cars have been around – off and on – for a century now. My father was an engineer doing electric car research at General Motors back in the 1950′s for crying out loud. And performance has never been their problem. They have always been smooth and quiet, featuring gobs of seemingly endless torque for that “hand of God” feeling of seamless rapid acceleration.
The problems with the Tesla are the same old problems that have kept electric cars from mainstream acceptance for going on to their second century now. Too short a range. Too long to recharge. And WAY too expensive.
What we have here is a car with about two-thirds the range of my current car. It takes TEN TIMES as long to refuel. And it costs over FOUR TIMES as much. And it’s wrapped in a sexy sports car package with room for two, plus a laptop and a can of soda.
I know, Musk says he has a sedan (so far just named the “Model S”) nearly production ready. And latest reporting says it will enter the market in 2011 at 60 grand. But even if I believe him when he says his oh-so-top-secret, hidden-under-a-tarp “Model S” sedan will actually make production, that figure is still about twice as expensive as most people will pay. What’s more, his company is woefully under-capitalized and on very shaky financial footing, so until I can go to a dealership and actually test drive it and maybe buy one, as far as I am concerned, the Tesla Model S is just another 1948 Tucker Torpedo – in other words, vaporware.
But whether he actually builds the car is beside the point. Even after a century of trying, battery technology is still not even close to good enough for an electric car to be successful in the marketplace at any price. Considerable improvements of an incremental nature have certainly been made, but no quantum leaps. No major breakthroughs. No matter how hard we try, we’ll never re-invent the periodic table or rewrite the laws of physics and thermodynamics. But as a practical matter, we really only need to increase energy density by a factor or two or three times. The application of nanotechnology toward this ends looks like it has some promise, but real-world, affordable, safe, off-the-shelf, mass-production super-high density nanotech batteries are probably decades away – at least – assuming it’s even feasible, which we don’t yet know.
In the meantime, a 240-mile range just won’t cut it. OK, I might be willing to stop for fuel more often. But not if I have to wait 45 minutes every time I do so! I would tolerate that inconvenience only if I could recharge as quickly as I can now pour gasoline into my current car’s fuel tank. That is not currently possible. I mean, we can try. But at best the battery would just melt down. At worst, it would blow up! No one has yet figured out how to safely stuff that much energy into a battery within say, the five-minute time frame of a typical gasoline refueling stop.
So OK, that’s out. Perhaps I would be willing to cool my heels waiting 45 minutes to an hour to recharge, but I wouldn’t be willing to do it very often. Maybe if the car had a 500-mile range, I wouldn’t mind hanging around for an hour at the charging station waiting for my car to be drivable again. But, as I discussed above, that kind of range is nowhere in sight. So, for the near-term future at least, the only way electric cars can work is as short-distance urban commuters, where range is not so critical and charging can be done over night. But many of us who live in the West or in the middle of the Great Flyover, need vehicles that can drive hundreds of miles at a stretch, stop, refuel, and then drive hundreds of miles more. We need cars that are limited only by their drivers’ ability to stay awake and keep it on the road. Electric vehicles are a long, long, LONG way from that.
Worst of all, Elon Musk and the other electric car evangelicals ask us not only to sacrifice range and refueling time, they ask us to pay two to four times as much for the privilege. Musk referred to the tax credit on electric cars, saying that with the tax credit taken into account, his Tesla is brought down to a “manageable” 102 grand! Is he kidding?? How much does he think the average American spends on a car? Maybe he and his circle of friends see the low six-figures as “manageable.” So do I – FOR A CONDO!
So, there we have it. The technology is still half-baked. And the economics don’t even come close to adding up. I hope Musk pulls a Nobel Prize-worthy breakthrough (It will require one!) in battery chemistry out of his hat (or from anywhere else on his body) and proves me wrong. I hope I live long enough to buy a real, practical and affordable electric car. But I would bet a year’s pay that a quarter-century from now, when I’m a doddering old coot, my new Buick will still be taking its nourishment in liquid form. Mass-market electric cars will come – in some form – eventually. My great grandchildren will love them, I feel sure.

i dont get electric cars stuff.. i work in factory drive forklift all day one battery up down with lift run on borad laptop blinking light beeping siren drive 80 miles a shift.. the forklift weighs 15 thousand pounds car wieghs 3 thousand why cant we make cars go 200 miles ?? i know the gas and coal companies will fight it tooth and nail..the rich republican oil barons will never let it happen..

T, it wouldn’t be any problem at all to make the car go 200 miles if you wanted to drive it at the speeds you’re driving your forklift. It takes dramatically more energy to go highway speeds. Also note that the Roadster does in fact go 244 miles on the EPA highway cycle. I’m told there will be two models of Sedan, one that goes ~150 miles and the other twice that. It’s just awfully expensive to build packs that size at present.

Mike, where did you hear that Tesla was being sued by its investors? I’ve followed them for a while and never heard anything like that, and I just searched a bit and didn’t turn it up there either.
Also, as far as “can’t make more than a few dozen” I understand they have over 200 on the road and are currently producing about 20 per week.
Your other complaint, that they are very expensive, is fair enough. But Model S should be unveiled at the end of the month…

Bill gabriel, Tesla is privately held, and thus has no stock symbol. They talked about doing an IPO this year, but I think the market crash has put that idea on hold.

edlaw wrote:”…they are coming out with a sedan that will go 160 miles on a charge and sell for $50k to start going down to the $30k range once they get some volume.
Compare this to the Chevy VOLT which you and I are subsidizing for GM which will cost more than $45K and go up to 40 miles on a charge. Time to give some bailout money to a company that wants to make a product we want and need.”
You’re comparing a pure electric vehicle (the Tesla) to a “partial electric” (the Volt). Apples and oranges. The Tesla sedan will go 160 miles and then you have to plug it in. And wait. And wait some more. And wait even yet more. Until it is recharged, it goes nowhere without a push.
The Volt has a gasoline engine on board which, after 40 miles or so, starts up and powers a generator, which in turn charges the battery pack as the car is moving. Unlike with a hybrid like the Toyota Prius, the engine’s sole purpose is to recharge the car’s battery pack on the fly; it doesn’t drive the car.
As a practical, day-to-day driver, I would MUCH rather have the Volt. For example, my work is ten miles from home – a twenty-mile round trip. In the Volt I could make two complete commutes to work and back on battery power alone, after which I can plug it in and recharge over night. In a typical work week, I would use ZERO gasoline. Theoretically, as long as my trips around town don’t exceed 40 miles total at a stretch, I need NEVER burn any gasoline. I could go weeks or months between fill-ups.
The neat thing about the Volt though, for a person like me, as well as millions of others in the Great Flyover who frequently drive long distances, is that when the charge wears off, the car keeps going. Think of the battery as a bucket of water. When the bucket runs empty, the motor starts and begins the task of re-filling the bucket as the car continues to drive. The car is still, technically, running on electricity. The Chevy Volt’s traction motors are still being powered by electricity from its battery pack. But instead of having to stop and recharge, the gasoline motor charges on the fly.
Diesel-electric locomotives work with a similar setup. The locomotive’s wheels are powered by electric traction motors driven by a battery stack which in turn is continually being re-charged by the diesel engine.
The Volt is not a pure electric, but its real-world mpg equivalent can easily exceed 80 mpg. Because there is no mechanical driveline and the engine rpm is not dependent on vehicle speed or load, the engine computer keeps the engine running in its optimal, most efficient and least polluting state.
No, the Volt is not the Holy Grail of a “pure” electric. But it is, given the current state of battery technology and the ways most drivers use their cars, a far more practical solution than the Tesla. It consumes gasoline, but far less of it – less than a gasoline car, less than a hybrid. It pollutes, yes, but far less than a typical pure gasoline car or even a hybrid. And it is not tethered by a limited range, followed by an extended down-time while it sits and recharges.
If I want to drive from Madison, WI to Seattle, WA – a trip I take 3 or 4 times a year – I can take a Chevy Volt and drive it a long as I can stay awake if I want to. I can typically make that trip in two to two-and-a-half days. The Volt could match that time, with much greater efficiency than my current car. The Tesla’s range and recharge cycles would would increase the travel time by a factor of three or more. That is simply unacceptable to anyone who must depend on a car for long-distance travel.
Clearly, the Tesla sedan must give up much more package space to batteries than does the Volt. Both use Lithium-ion technology, which has a known energy density, so it is fair to surmise that in order to get four times the pure electric range of the Volt, Tesla devotes roughly four times as much cubic volume to batteries than the Volt.
The Tesla sports car is a battery pack on wheels with little room for anything else but the driver and a passenger. That’s OK, because nobody expects roominess in a sports car. But “battery pack on wheels” doesn’t cut it in a sedan, where people expect reasonable comfort for at least four, plus room for their stuff. I haven’t seen even a picture of the Tesla sedan, so I don’t know how severe the space compromises are going to be, but quadruple the batteries means space somewhere had to be sacrificed to make room for them.
In addition to that cubic volume I must give up in my Tesla sedan, I must also give up long-distance driving range. And the Tesla forces me to stop – every 160 miles – whether I want to, or can afford to, or not. What do I get in return for all I’m giving up? Well, I get to say my car is a Tesla, a much cooler-sounding name than “Chevy.” Plus, I get to say I have a “pure electric” car which uses no gasoline – EVER; and emits no greenhouse gases, or any gases at all – EVER. This could be enjoyable for awhile – to be the first person on my block to have an exotic Tesla sedan, holding court to every techno-geek and tin-foil hat in the neighborhood as they “ooh” and “ahh” around my new technological wonder.
But this novelty will likely wear off quickly while I’m stuck in Bismarck, North Dakota at one-thirty in the afternoon, my “pure electric” Tesla taking all the sweet damned time it wants to, recharging itself. Meanwhile, time that I will never, ever get back keeps slipping away, the Apocalypse ever approaching, and I’m trying to figure out how and where to kill time before the boredom kills me, and it dawns on me that if I had bought the pedestrian, only “partial electric” Chevy Volt instead, I could still be chewing up interstate at 85 mph, set to make Billings, Montana and a thick juicy steak before nightfall.
You were so quick to write off the people at GM as idiots and Elon Musk as this genius and savior of mankind and all that is holy that you clearly did not think this through. GM – correctly in my view – decided that battery technology was not yet good enough to provide, in a pure electric car – the degree of total vehicular use flexibility that consumers have come to demand from their cars. The Tesla looks sexy and makes great copy, but I couldn’t live with one, even if I could afford it. The Volt is not the perfect solution either. But it offers “pure electric” performance, zero emissions in typically city driving/commuting, plus gasoline car total flexibility, long range, very high MPG-equivalence and very low overall grams-per-mile in pollutants compared to even the cleanest hybrids. The Volt is not, strictly speaking, a “green” car, but it is as green as the current state of the art allows in a truly usable vehicle. That is a trade-off I can live with.

“would be great, except for the person like me who drives a thousand miles 3 times a year to see my grandkids. at 250 mile range and 10 hours to recharge
it would take me 5 days to get there instead of a day and a half. ” – brian
Legit point and a major problem you bring to light Brian.
I bet all those little trips you make each day to work and back are to earn money for the things you really want to do in life. Sounds like visiting your grandkids is one of those things.
I have a solution that NoBo can easily implement and it could create or save jobs!
The government can invest in a fleet of cars meant for long range trips that it’s citizens want to make.
The gov can maintain the gas driven vehicles and organize the use times for the people.
Maybe 4 trips a year would be good.
Oh and this would be a cool add-on, . . . . Winnebagos for Senior Citizens!

I’d like to withdraw my previous idea above.
On my way back from taking my kid to school this morning I drove past the city facility where they fix the buses.
It was darn full which got me to thinking about how well the Gov could maintain a fleet of cars.
Add to that the inevitable bureaucratic headend which would lead to people’s vacations getting screwed up when their car that they reserved wasn’t available and we’d just have more reasons to hate the government then we already do.
I think ABC News has it right in their headline.
The electric car is the car of the future, probably the distant future.
Let’s wait for the battery technology to mature and in the meantime the rich people can do the beta testing.

Here is the solution to the World’s Oil, Automobile. and Green Gas problem
I’m sure you have heard of “Joe the Plumber”, I am Nevin the Electrician {D215353}. Please read the message below.
To Whom It May Concern
Ever since 1950 it has been my dream to take OIL and put it where it belongs – in the museums next to the dinosaurs. I have developed a drive system for automobiles called Hydroelectric drive that will enable a total electric vehicle to drive forever and under proper conditions never need to be charged. It could also be built for half the cost of present day vehicles. It would also have a much better and longer reliable maintenance life. There are two reasons why this has not been found to this day.
Oil and car companies have taken the 1900 internal combustion engine and have beaten it to death and will not give the world anything new until there is no oil left in the world.
I believe engineers are not able to come up with the answer because of a condition I call “Education causes Tunnel-vision”. They go to school and learn all the rules, fundamentals, and principals and if their ideas don’t fall within them they cannot work.
I have found the answer to the 100-year-old problem in the beyond and because of this I have chosen the name of my car.
THE PERIPHERY
I am
Nevin A. Andreas
401 South St.
Clarion, PA 16214
814-227-1242
djandreas@verizon.net

Years Overdue, Horribly Overpriced, a total flop except for Hollywood Elitists. Good Luck ever seeing this one on the road……..

When I saw this story on ABC news, I found it refreshing that someone finally had somthing positive to say about our future. Of course I have read through these posts and see that there are a lot of negitive comments about the technology. We can do two things. We can identify the problems,call them too insurmountable and walk away, or we can look for soultions and move forward. I prefer the latter. Perhaps this is to easy of a fix for the battery charge time problem, but perhaps we could find away to drive the electric cars into refueling stations and swap out the entire battery pack for a freshly charged unit. Let the service stations recharge the packs. Oh I am sure there are problems with this idea too, but at least its an idea.Its better that giving up on a timely technology just because the problems are difficult. As for the need to burn dirty coal to generate the elctricity needed to charge batteries, I say that that the technology only has merit if we take alternate electrical generation seriously. Alternate energy is frought with its own problems. Lets find the problems and solve them.
I am reminded of the HD television technology. Most people don’t know the technology is nearly two decades old. Television broadcasters did not want to spend the money to convert to HD broadcasts until there were HD televisions to recieve the signals. Television manufacturers did not want to try and sell HD sets when there were no high definition broadcasts. So everyone waited. and waited.
What is needed is an impetus to move this technology forward. Our shrinking economy offers us just that. We have to stop sitting around and watching out 401k accounts dissapear before our very eyes. We need to stand up and shake ourselves off, identify our problems and the go out and solve them!

I am really looking forward to owning my Tesla sedan. I can hear it calling my name. I can’t wait to see it!
Cudos Tesla for forging ahead with a great, cool looking, green transportation alternative to those dirty, stinky polluting gas guzzlers most of us have to drive right now. Keep going, I am rooting for you to populate the earth with Teslas!
btw all you neighsayeers: $100k is pretty realistic for new technology of this kind. As more people support electric/solar powered vehicles, the parts to make them will become more competatively priced and eventually all of us will driving smarter, cleaner ways to transport ourselves about. It benefits us all to support the works of companies like Tesla who are making a difference and putting their money where their mouth is.
Did anyone happen to catch that one can get a solar carport to plug the Tesla into so it is TOTALLY GREEN! Just wait till that solar technology is engineered into the finish & the body of the car, then it will get lots of miles to a charge!
Thanks Elon, keep up the great work!!
a fan,
S Morrill

Rob, I agree with most of your sentiments, but I’m not sure where you got your information on Tesla’s operations. They are not buying American cells…they are importing, I believe from Japan. Also, they aren’t hand-building the cars in a hangar in CA. Lotus is assembling them on contract in Heathel, UK. They do build the battery *packs* themselves, as well as the motor, controller, and transmission. I expect that various other parts come from U.S. suppliers, but Tesla seems decidedly country-agnostic as far as that goes.
That said, it should be noted that the reliance on foreign-built parts and assembly is one of the big reasons the cost of the cars has gone up so dramatically over the last few years; they’re spending in Euros and Yen and selling in Dollars.
When the sedan goes into production it will be in CA.

Hunter,
Thanks for all your knowledge and facts. It is really awesome to learn so much here. Do you work for Tesla? I was just daydreaming of a way to recharge the battery on the car- in the car. Don’t know much about solar, just that it free, clean and renewable. It sure would be cool to have an onboard way to recharge, like I said though, just a daydream. My BIL works for FPL and he sent me a cool site:
I also came across this one: RepowerAmerica.org
and would love to see the Tesla site linked there, since Tesla is part of the solution vs. just adding to the problem.
For anyone who wants to help the efforts of cleaner air through cleaner cars
since the EPA is requesting comments, and will hold a public hearing tomorrow, March 5th, in Washington D.C.
I just want my kids to be able to breath cleaner air. I am sad we are polluting what we breath with such thirst for fossil fuel consumption. Cleaner transportation is the number one way to make global change BIG, fast and it will cost either way! Question is, what are we willing to loose?

If it’s below freezing out, how is this car heated w/o drastically affecting the mileage range?? How does the windshield stay ice free without hot air to blow against them? Heat, which is throwaway energy in gas vehicles, is a MAJOR energy concern for electric cars, yet is NEVER discussed when “rave reviews” about electric cars take place.

Rob wrote: “Re the range skeptics:
For the short term this problem has already been solved. Electrics will more than meet the daily needs of most people. Even the 80-120 mile range GM’s EV1 or Toyota’s RAV4EV had 10 years ago would have been fine most of the time. For those times when you need to drive a longer distance, car sharing services like ZipCar already provide an economical/convenient way to have access to a gasoline powered car anytime you need it.”
ZipCar? Are you kidding? The closest ZipCar city to me is 75 miles away in Milwaukee. (I live in Madison, WI) So much for “convenient” and “any time I want it.” Not only that, I don’t call $60-$100 per day “economical.” What if I wanted to travel say, 2,200 miles and back – from Madison to Seattle? I have to do that fairly often. If ZipCar even let me make such a trip, the fees would be a fortune. Sorry, no sale.
Car sharing will never and CAN never be as convenient as getting in your own car in your own garage. Taxicabs at least come to you when you call them – albeit at least a half hour AFTER you really want them. For car sharing, you have to go to them, which takes even longer – far from convenient – in fact, the very definition of pain-in-the-ass.
Car sharing could be an option for some people, but as a broad mass market alternative for owning your own car, it will never fly. People are used to having their own cars available immediately, for any trip, to anywhere, however long or short. People are used to OWNING a car – not just ANY car, but the car of their choice, with THEIR stuff in it, equipped with their own personalized touches. People will not give up that sense of freedom and ownership without a fight.
Plus, some people still actually LIKE to drive. Driving enjoyment is important to some of us. I’m not happy driving some anemic, generic, East-Asian transpod. I want to drive WHAT I want, WHEN I want, WHERE I want.
Don’t say, “Take the train/bus/plane.” I’ve crunched the numbers and it is far cheaper to take my own car than to fly or ride the bus or take the train. Because at the other end, I would need to rent a car for an extended period (two weeks or more) to get around and take care of my business, and that costs a fortune! If I drive, I have at my disposal the car I already own – no rental or fees, no extra insurance, no need to pick up or drop off. What could be more convenient?
The bottom line is, people are not going to voluntarily sign up for LESS ownership, less freedom and less convenience than what they are used to having, and pay MORE for it to boot. You are asking them to buy your limited-range electric car, and then PAY AGAIN for ZipCar or some such when they want to go outside the range of their electric tether, while they are still upside-down on the car loan for the electric they left parked at home. They won’t do it – not as long as this remains a more-or-less free country.
The only people to whom your suggestions might sound attractive are people who live in very high density urbanized areas like the Boston-to-Washington corridor, Metro-Chicago or possibly the Bay Area. These are places where owning your own car is not just unnecessary – due to extensive and convenient public transport – but extremely costly and inconvenient, due to extreme traffic congestion and poorly accessible and very expensive parking.
If I lived in Manhattan, I might think your ideas to be peachy-keen. But the trouble with people who live in Manhattan is that many of them just can’t wrap their insular and supercilious little heads around the idea that there are real people, who matter, who DON’T live in Manhattan, and who DON’T live like they do, due to economics, geography and culture. And for these people like the rest of us, your utopian little vision of the future of automotive transportation is a little slice of Hell on earth.
I will NEVER surrender my long-range personal transportation until Al Gore pries my steering wheel from my cold, dead fingers.