I just got back from a meeting with the CTO of Tesla. No, I don't demand such an audience, but my dad does, so I tagged along.....

Anyway, for those of you that doubt the future of electric cars, I got to see a 250 HP electric motor thats about 1.5x the size of old coffee cans, and battery packs and electrical controllers that are smaller than the gas tank in most roadsters.

Most of the meeting was about energy usage efficiencies of various different technologies. A couple things that stuck with me....

Ethanol from Bio-mass is a sick joke. You get a lot more energy from just burning the bio-mass and generating electricity from the heat.

One slide that was nice with the surface area needed to replace 50% of the 2001 US miles driven. With ethanol, it's about a third of the midwest (and sorry hungry people, no corn chips for you!) For photovoltaics, its about one valley somewhere in Nevada that no one would notice!

Fuel cells have a place in transportation, it's just much smaller than most realize, or the fuel cell/hydrogen crowd are willing to admit. With fuel cells, peak power is proportional to surface area. So if you size the fuel cells for peak power, the power plant grows a lot. If you size it for average power, you still need electric boost for punching it. And because of the energy equations with hydrogen, you'll get about a third the range of an all electric.

There were lots of other stuff we went over, but I gotta say the place is buzzing and full of activity. More power too them!

Matt

ps, no, I didn't get to drive one......

 

Good pun, Matt! Thanks for the info. I think that E85 is a way for the auto companies to avoid certain standards and is an unfortunate direction.

 

when the price of beef starts to go up based on all the corn making E85, we'll finally have gotten a way for the policy makers to see the light!

Matt

 

i need to put one of those motors in my RC cars.

is that a brushless motor?

 

Nice to have a famous dad

Read here http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/?p=3383

They are not bashing the times/performance except for saying its harsher riding than an Elise, at at 4.0, quicker and they like the body ... "carbon fiber Tesla is far more attractive than the fiberglass Elise."

But read here ...

It can be charged in six hours (if your home has 30 - 40 Amps of power) or as little as three hours (if you’re rigged with 90 Amps). Although the Roadster’s maximum range is 250 miles, the company says spirited driving will yield “substantially less.”

...

these numbers reflect Tesla's ambitions, not demonstrable reality. Again, no independent organization has evaluated any aspect of the Roadster's performance or construction. While Tesla Motors is happy admitting their Roadster's range could be “substantially less” than advertised, anyone thinking about buying a Roadster should consider those words carefully. Would you purchase a sports car that can only drive 90 miles between 12 hour recharges? ...

The enthusiastic staff at Tesla Motors describes the Roadster’s selling proposition as “performance without guilt.” But if you set aside the media’s PC fawning over an eco-friendly sports car, there are serious questions about the Roadster’s ability to deliver on its manufacturer's promises. ...

For example, Tesla says its engineers have placed the Roadster’s LiIon batteries away from each other in steel and aluminum containers. Even so, if one of its batteries ignites, it could cause a virtually unstoppable series of fires and/or explosions ...

Safety, range, reliability, recharge time, battery life, build quality, manufacturing costs– Tesla has yet to prove that they’ve overcome any of these obstacles for their lightweight Roadster (never mind their planned family car). Until they do, until they allow the press to thoroughly evaluate the car’s real world capabilities, their Roadster should be viewed as nothing more than another well-meaning concept car. Or, if you prefer, a fabulous toy."

Now TTAC can be brutal towards cars because they tend to tell it like it is ... not what some owners want to hear. Looks like Tesla got some work to do to make it practical.

 

and I never understand why they keep making comparisons between mature technologies and new ones like it's a fair playing field. Case in point. EV1 started with lead acid batteries. About 90 miles range of average driving. Add NiMH, up to over 150. Who knows with Li-ion... Didn't last long enough to tell.

And guess what Chows, I was just at a track and my gas engined car got "substantially less range" with enthusiatic driving! What a freakin' shock! I think my range went down a factor of 3 or 4 on the track. Guess that means that I'll have to sell my car because it only gets about a hundred miles to a tank at the track!

Really, this is about energy conservation, and from there it's just math. If you look at the energy contained in gas (very, very high number) but run it through an ICE, then you get **** poor overall efficiency. If you look at the energy density of batteries, and the high efficiency electric motors that they run, you get a different overall efficiency. Now look at the rate of efficiency improvement in gas cars. It's not changing fast. Look at electric drivetrains, and it is changing fast! You just can't argue with the math!

You always crap on hybrids, electrics or anything that isn't a straight gas powered car. Yet you never seem to see the benefit of a charging system that is 92% efficient, nor a torque curve that starts at the max, and drops SLOWLY for most of it's RPM range. And you never look at the potential improvement over current technology. And this doesn't even start on the life-cycle energy use, from "well to wheel" in gas cars....

So, someone complains because on of the first offerings on a new technology can't replace everything now. So effin what! With a mindset like that we'd never get any change at all.

When I get the slide of the relative areas required to create the same amount of miles driven, it graphically shows how much energy density is in light, even when converted to electricity, I'll post it in a bit. But you can't argue with the trends out there, and gas powered cars aren't the answer to most all of the questions facing our future.

Matt

PS, the "trueth about cars" article missed some very, very important point. It implies the battery pack is monolithic, it is anything but. IT containes 11 "cartriges" of battery packs. So the whole shebang doesn't need to get replaced. While he mentions thermal runaway from a shorted cell, he didn't metion the extensive engineering in the package that prevents just the scenario that he postulates. In fact, a cell can have a total interal failure, dump all it's power nearly instantly into the package, and not effect any of the batteries around it, except for a small thermal spike spread around a large number of nearest neighbors. It's too bad that he was there to talk to the tesla folks and didn't think to address these issues. It makes his article seem much more negative than the trueth really is.

 

Ethanol is one of the biggest farces ever dumped on the American public. I agree, the price of beef, pork and chicken will sky rocket if ethanol production is pursued. I would much rather see more effective prodding of the car companies to produce more efficient vehicles.

Cool information from Tesla, thanks for sharing.

 

Yup to both of these comments. Just wait until food prices go WAY up...it will be a BIG mess.

 

Huh? I never have said one bad word about any electric car.

I just happened to read this article today and saw the Tesla post. People read TTAC and are going to get the impression the technology is not there yet.

Yes, your right about getting less mileage or miles using more power but I think his point was has it reached an acceptable level for the public. Who got a free 40 AMP circuit to plug that thing in after 90 miles for 6 hours? I think that is his point and why he referred to it as a toy for now.

Your also right about the technology not being mature but I have never dissed electric cars

 

I think anyone with an electric range on dryer alredy has a 40 amp circuit in the house. My home (medium sized two bedroom) has a 200 amp feed. The 1000 square foot home I used to live in was 100 amp. So you have to add a circuit breaker and a plug.

Sorry on the comments about negative posts on electrics. Maybe I confused your posts with some other people who resist change!

I did read through most of the rapidly growing comment list, and some of the claims of the article are already being revised. Many were postulating on the explosions from thermal runaway (which is not an issue). Further, you can short the output of the battery packs together, and internal fusing cuts off all batteries in a flash of fuses. I was pleased at the degree of safety redundancy in the pack, and my Dad (who was coming at it from energy policy side) hadn't even really considered the safety issues of battery failure or crash safety. As someone who knows something about energy, I'd feel safer in an all electic like they're building than a gas powered car.

Matt

 

Exactly. A 40 amp circuit is not that hard. Those in-line water heaters take a lot more than that.

That car could be the ultimate grocery getter. One day when I have money...

Hum, I have an idea. When the engine in my parents Insight starts to go downhill, how about transplanting the Tesla's motor/battery into it . It'd probably lower the weight down to just north of 1500 lbs. Or even better... put it in my Europa. Talk about scary fast, that would weigh around 1k lbs.

 

and one of his buddies did a 914 that goes drag racing.....

Really, the knock on the technology not being ready just isnt true. The EV1 had all the control nessisary to base electrics, plug in hybrids, true hybrids and the like. The only thing that has kept it from the market is GMs bone-headed thinking. This isn't just "Who killed the electric car" hype. I have some access to what was hapening in the late 70s in tech dev, and it was all there. But here are some examples of why it didn't fly....

1) For a lot of reasons, a two speed tranny is good in electrics (has to do with peak demand running an electric over a huge operating range... Requires a bigger motor and more batteries). The techies at GM knew this, management mandated no tranny for who knows what reason.

2) GM used the wrong motor in the EV1. The techies knew this, but management mandate said "use this one, no matter what the data says".

This is just two examples of how a car that actually came out pretty good for the time was screwed from the beginning. With those two changes alone, they could have increased range substantially. Oh well.

It takes more than ready technology to bring products to market.....

Matt

 

Ethanol from corn consumes more energy than it produces. But, butanol from bio-mass like corn stalks & corn cobs * should * (when commercial) be quite good. Butanol has more fuel value than ethanol, butanol/gasoline blends can be distributed via existing pipelines, and the corn stalks & cobs are just left in the fields now. Sure, they * could * be burned to make electricity, but if this were feasible and economical, it would be done already. Also, no more surface area is needed than is under cultivation now. Eventually, even your grass clippings may be collected and fermented into butanol!

 

take all the crap out (farm salvage, or any other source of cellulose) and convert it. How much gas does that displace? Not enough. At the rates we burn the stuff, we'd have to take pretty much all of our agracultural products and turn them into ethanol.

If you were to double the production of ethanol by any means every year for 10 years (which is a huge, huge rate of growth), you'll find that your just not making a real dent in the energy equation. It just makes a dent in the political climate (look, we are doing something!) and the flow of subsidies.

No matter the conversion, you're useing plants to capture light. Once it is bound into the molecule, getting the stored energy out can be done many ways. The only practilce advantage of turning it into a liquid is it can be put into a gas tank. But the energy price for that is huge, and it would make much more energy sense to burn the stuff to heat water to run a turbine, and dump the power into the grid and charge electric cars.

Many just don't comprehend the amounts of energy that we're talking about. At the current rate of energy usage growth, we'd need a new Saudi Arabia every 7-10 years. But there aren't any more of them.....

What's missing in the policy formations is the practical boundaries of reality aren't considered. Listen to the BS about ethanol as a way to get out of oil dependance, and yet almost none of these discussions or speaches actuall starts with the math of the required energy, nor what that means in turns of volume of ethanol or the crop lands that would be needed to supply the required power. So we're left with a public that thinks that Ethanol may acutally help the situation, when the truth is far from that. The net result is that real paths to an improved energy future are stifled and delayed.

Remeber the big push that was hydrogen? Lots of talk in the first term. What happened to that? (As a physicist, I understand the role that hydrogen can play, just not for several decades... And in the US, the only way to make hydrogen is from braking up methane, and without sequestration of CO2, doesn't do what it should for green house gasses, none of this was secret, but it sure wasn't advertized)Now we're talking ethanol. Seems like bait and switch to me. Why? Because all the limits on what's needed to make ethanol really contribute to our energy picture say that it's stupid to do. Yet we go on in the public debate with the assumption that it's a viable path. Seems like the very same "willfull ignorance" that was around hydrogen ever so recently.

Matt

 

The reason I questioned that was because I recently had a new 20 AMP circuit installed and there was no more room for anything else ... they would have to install another aux breaker box. Thats with, I believe, 200 AMP service. Yeah, its no issue to just add another breaker box. I just dont think people normally have an extra 40 AMP circuit lying around since most rooms are 15 or 20 amps.

I then checked the electric rates and charging for 6 hours comes to under 50 cents/day??? Is that right? Now that is CHEAP!

NP. Yes, ppl resist change (just like the R56 arguements) but it dont bother me in the least. If you dont change and adapt ... as they say ... you die

 

with "time of use metering", they charged the car at night and paid about 1.8 CENTS per mile driven for electricity. With the latest Prius that my mom has now, that's about 8 cents a mile for gas. My MCS costs about 15 cents per mile. The numbers are really amazing.

So in gas savings compared to my MCS with $200 of gas a month....
The Prius would save $1200 a year about,
The EV1 would have saved about $2200 a year.

Now this is all after tax dollars. In salary wiht a combined marginal rate of 30% (higher in CA with our high income tax levels), then in salary terms, I have to earn (per year)
$3200 more to drive my Mini than an EV1.
$1700 more to drive my Mini than a Prius.

Throw in some tax incentives, and a hybrid surely pays for its price premium in about a year. If my electric car could be bought for $32k, I could pay for one in 10 years of gas savings alone, even if gas got no more expensive! This isn't as far feched as it sounds Tesla is doing the desing on the next car, a 4 door sedan, and they are aiming for about a $50k launch point, still with relativly low production numbers for cars. The numbers are compelling.

Matt

 

Yep, most hybrids do break even within the reasonable lifespan of the car. Our Insight, for example, just ticked over 90k miles. In that time, we averaged just over 64 mpg. It has used less gas in 90k miles than the MINI has in 50k (assuming the MINI gets 30 mpg). Plus the MINI takes premium.

Household electric current will always be cheaper as the turbines in powerplants opperate in the 70-80% efficiency range. Automobile engines are around 30%.

If the government would have kept developing nuclear fusion, we would have a reliable and safe way of producing lots of energy. Unfortunately, they stopped developement after the fission plant accidents a few decades ago.

 

Actually, I was talking about butanol. The advantages of butanol over ethanol are:

· Higher energy content (110,000 Btu’s per gallon for butanol vs. 84,000 Btu per gallon for ethanol). Gasoline contains about 115,000 Btu’s per gallon.

· Butanol is six times less "evaporative" than ethanol and 13.5 times less evaporative than gasoline, making it safer to use as an oxygenate in Arizona, California and other states, thereby eliminating the need for very special blends during the summer and winter months.

· Butanol can be shipped through existing fuel pipelines where ethanol must be transported via rail, barge or truck

· Butanol can be used as a replacement for gasoline gallon for gallon e.g. 100%, or any other percentage. Ethanol can only be used as an additive to gasoline up to about 85% and then only after significant modifications to the engine. Worldwide 10% ethanol blends predominate

The idea that we can't make enough butanol to make a dent in oil consumption rests implictly on the assumption that only the sugars in the plant can be converted. Currently, this is in fact the case, and the first bio butanol will be made from beet sugar. A lot of work is now underway to use all sorts of biomass which is presently discarded, and therefore needs little additional energy to grow and harvest. The conversion is fermentation, which also is not energy intensive. Think about how little of a wheat, corn, soybean, etc. plant that we actually eat -- the amount of butanol that could be made from these leftovers will be enough to help reduce oil use. Clearly not the whole solution, but a step.

 

Taking this thread in a different direction but..... imagine replacing your MCS's supercharger's nose assembly with a 25HP motor instead of relying on the crank pulley for power and being married to engine rpm.....

R&D is good!

 

and there's a guy in Florida that makes SCs driven by starter motors for drag racing.... Hmmmmm.....

Matt

 

That kind of stuff just takes way too much power for a current car's electrical system to handle. It might be possible with some large capacitors lined up with the electric motor but then you have to charge them. The best way to charge them would be from regenerative braking like today's hybrids use. So basically, you just made a hybrid. Instead of a battery, it has capacitors for short, very high power, bursts of acceleration.

It's not a bad idea. Take a lightweight car with a 3 cylinder gas (or diesel) engine that gets very good mileage and then pair it with a capacitor system to help when accelerating. You just have to make sure the ICE has enough grunt to get up a mountain without the help of the electric motor.

 

I love the Tesla Elise in fact I want one.

If it comes at a reasonable price point I may just pull the trigger on one.

My daily commute is a 50 mile round trip, at weekends I rarely drive more than 50 miles per day too.

Track days and road trips aside, I could easily live with a 100 mile range and even a 10hr recharge time. Bump that to 250 miles and a 5hr charge and I will sign on the line today.

obviously I'd keep the MCS, but the MR2 would be history.....

 

Uh oh

Who Killed the Tesla Roadster

[a] 120mph blast would run down the batteries in 50 miles or less.

The dirty little “secret” in Tesla’s closet: li-ion batteries start losing capacity from the get-go. After five years and 50k miles, battery capacity (range) is estimated to be down some 30 percent. Tesla owners can keep moving closer to work each year, or pony up.

 

Everyone is still looking for the Holy Grail of future energy. The reality is no one method is without its downside. As far as bio fuels go we can't replace Gasoline with the Agriculture availible to us now. But the Cellulostic allows you to use other plant material. Every year our landfills get bigger and most of that material can be used( Grass clipings and leaves alone). The problem with electric is you need electricity. The US has no major plans to upgrade energy production. There are already major brownouts in large metropolitan areas. Solar power is expensive to start up and electric companys are not going to foot the bill. They want the American to pay the bill by putting panels on our houses. Recent statistics show that putting panels on just 15% of the available commercial roof space in the country would be enough to supply the country. However this would also require a major overhaul of the electrical grid. Even fuel cells are problematic because of the chemicals required to make the membrane on a mass production level.

This is going to take effort on everyones part. People, Corporations, and Government, and it will be expensive, we had a heads up in the 70's and nothing got done. Unfortunately if we don't start now then the problem will continue to grow exponentially.

 

Great thread! I don't have the education to understand the Dr's equations, but I get the point.
I had the privledge to drive an EV1 in a parkinglot, was impressed with the acceleration. I was not impressed how GM killed it.
As for subsidized unsustainable food burning (economist coined that), the current direction makes no sense. If I remember correctly, it takes 2 gallons of fuel to produce 1 gallon of ethanol. Riots happened in Mexico because the cost of tortillas doubled. There's just something wrong with converting food to drive SUVs.
Solar cells: I voluntarily pay a little extra in my APS bill so the company can set up solar power facilities. That's despite knowing a solar cell is lucky to produce the amount of power in it's lifetime that it took to manufacture it to begin with. The only way it's feasible to cover your roof with solar panels is with tax rebates (ooh tax break for the "rich"). Idealy, living where there is not power is the best use for solar cells, but the long commute (if you had to work) would defeat having an electric car (imagine watching the "gas" gauge returning from a long trip).
Helping the enviroment: I found an article about the damage from producing batteries, so let's increase the demand!
Recharging: why is the fact that most of our power comes from coal ignored? I think it's called remote emmisions when someone in Calif. gets their power from Arizona's coal fired generators (we keep our Palo Verde nuclear for ourselves *wink*).
Good luck to whoever has the wherewithall to solve this crisis at our doorstep.