In the context of the cost of air pollution (earlier discussion), readers might be interested in the Tesla Roadster:
This boy’s toy accelerates faster than a Ferrari, has a range of roughly 400 kilometres, and recharges in about four hours from dead flat from your home power socket. Yep, it’s an electric car, but it’s like no other electric car you’ve seen before.
While I doubt that all LP readers will be wiping the drool off their chins at the sight of a sports car in quite the same way as I do, it’s pretty hard to argue with the environmental credentials of the car (they’ll also sell you rooftop solar panels to charge it with if that’s your thing). And they’re actually selling pretty well, for a low-volume special. The first batch of 100 have already gone; the waiting list is up to March 2008.
You and I won’t be driving the Tesla for a while – aside from the fact they’re not making it in right-hand drive, it costs 90,000 US dollars; the lithium-ion batteries are worth 25,000USD (roughly the price of a Holden Commodore) on their own. And it’s certainly an open question as to whether the price of the batteries can be reduced enough to make battery-powered electrics like the Tesla affordable.
One final thought: the company’s corporate vision blurb makes a rather interesting observation:
Historically, it seemed to us that electric cars had been designed by people who thought we really shouldn‘t be driving at all – but if we must, we should suffer every minute of it. Electric cars have had terrible range and embarrassing styling. To those who say electric cars have been tried and failed we say, of course electric cars won‘t catch on if no one actually wants to drive them.
I can’t help but agree – environmentalism has a greater chance of succeeding if it’s not the equivalent of your mother beseeching you to eat your brussels sprouts.
I dunno, I’m a reader and I’m drooling. Damn, that’s a fine car and a very very good idea.
Plus it’s a left-wing drive.
Yeah, believe me, my laptop is now covered in saliva.
A world full of those is probably gonna need a lot nucular energy.
Can we retrofit our own personal nuclear reactors?
slim, I prefer Mr Fusion.
“wiping the drool off their chins”
Not me. That car’s got a double chin. Seriously that is one butt ugly front end. Like a pug impersonating a bulldog. They reckoned 24 hour design and engineering driven by the internet and units in different timezones all handing off to eachother as the world turned would transform advanced manufacturing. And it has under the hood. But not when it comes to design. Now you’ve got 24 hour committee kibitzing over the look and feel of the product.
Does it come with its own Tesla Purple Energy Shield?
Burn rubber and coal not gasoline and piss off Arab street to boot. Now what could your average coal exporting Aussie hoon want more?
A little unkind on the design, Nabs. The car’s “face” has a nicely serpentine aspect, for mine.
Mandy brings up an interesting and disturbing point, though, which I noticed in the name: the growing undercurrent of Tesla Cultism in popular culture, played up for magnificently MacGuffinesque effect recently in The Prestige.
Forget the car: you know you’re a cult figure when David Bowie plays you on-screen.
Ride a bike you pack of lazies
Timboy: what would you prefer – Riding next to one of these, or a petrol-powered vehicle spewing carbon monoxide and various other nasties in your face?
Electrohizity, eh? I’m sure the drivers’ll be running on old-fashioned alcohol.
Brussels sprouts be damned, *that’s* how you make environmentalism more fun; get it nice and slaughtered and put it behind the wheel of a fast car.
Robert: I’d rather draft a truck.
Seriously though, it is a great looking car, and a very good idea- but I dare say beyond the reach of many budgets- So I will stick to my pedally thankyou.
Of course I would prefer riding next to one of those than a diesel spewing death monster.
Don’t own a car. Haven’t owned a car in 15 years. Never missed it. Never really had the car thing.
But damn! I want one of these
Hey, that Tesla Purple Energy Shield looks pretty wild, Amanda. It might come in handy for those of us who spend half the day recovering from walking to work on a stinking hot summer day (watching people zip past in their Tesla roadsters) – a bit of new life force energy to the human body, illumination to the mind and tranquillity to the soul never goes astray. You can’t get that out of a fancy car, (although maybe if the car was purple, instead of red?)
You know, you could simply not go to work, thus avoiding both the nasty heat and the need for high technology vehicles. Take a leaf out of the Dude’s book: if it’s too hot, stay at home and mix yourself a White Russian. Here’s my recipe for a filthy humid morning such as this one.
Mix in a glass, 1 nip kahlúa or generic coffee liqueur and 1 nip vodka. If you’re not keeping your vodka in the freezer, add an iceblock. Fill to the brim with full-cream milk. Stir gently with one finger, or even better, somebody else’s finger. I suggest a nice chocolate biscuit to go with it; perhaps a Mint Slice or a Tim Tam?
Naturally, you can and should substitute ingredients and/or body parts to taste.
It’s rad, isn’t it? But I’m undecided whether I’m more impressed by that or the Ultra Advanced Psychotronic Money Magnet™ Professional Version 1.0 (“harnessing the power of psychotronics in engineering financial abundance”) or the Atlantean crystal for vibrational medicine. Consumer choice overwhelms me.
Senator, I’ve never felt so illuminatedand tranquil as when driving a sports car in the alpine passes near Mittenwald. But I’d happily do so in a purple Tesla if one were available!
The problem with electric cars…
Electric vehicles do have some advantages – they don’t pollute the immediate vicinity and their maximum torque is available for maximum load (although the same thing may be said for steam engines and gas turbines). They have an efficiency of over 95%, compared to 24% for an average petrol or diesel car. They don’t need gears and clutches and modern electronic controls provide excellent handling.
With all that they have substantial problems. The electricity has to come from somewhere. if it comes from a battery or fuel cell, then the energy density is low and the power-to-weight ratio is very poor. Electric cars have to be built from light materials and have trouble meeting contemporary safety reqirements. Batteries have to be charged from a central power station with greenhouse and pollution issues.
Viable electric vehicles tend to be hybrids. Those big trucks used for open cut mines, the ones where the driver clmbs into the cabin on a ladder, usually use a diesel engine which drives a generator which in turn drives an electric motor on each wheel. The same system is used in diesel lococotives and most large ships. A good hybrid car could use a constantly-running engine,say 100cc, to run a genrator to charge a battery. This would still have a poor power-to-weight ratio but excellent efficiency, but when everyone in India and China wants to own a car, the pollution and greenhouse gas problem would be worse than today’s.
Electric cars are not the solution The poblem is the use of individual transport.
It’s a lovely looking car
The Li-Ion batteries are a problem, though.
They aren’t real environmentally pleasant (to manufacture or dispose of), they have a disturbing tendency to turn into molten slag if they aren’t manufactured properly, and they start to degrade after 300 odd charges.
Until we find a better alternative to li-ion, we’re going to have real trouble making the electric car work.
get on your bike
Individual transport is not THE problem.
Peoples preferences for lazy transport/ planning options is the problem.
Geez, Comrades, this vehicle is so Totally Socialistic. Come the Green Revolution, no self-respecting Comissar will be seen dead without one. How I yearn for the day when a brand spanking new Telsa recharges outside my shed, so that passing lumpen proletatiat can drool and covet. Fair dinkum, a bloke’d shelve his own family to the authorities just to get behind the wheel of one of these babies, and I’m not even a commodity fetishist. Why bother saving the planet if discerning citizens can’t do so in style? Let the functionaries shuffle around town in Gitmo L’Orange, Gulag Green and Bolshie Brown, I’ve rush-ordered mine in Commie Red,(as seen top of post).
Carbon chic is the new planetary cool. Get abord for Gaia’s sake!
John: this thing has a 400 kilometre range, and will meet US crash safety standards.
Crankynick: they’re guaranteeing a 160,000 kilometre lifespan for the batteries (but expect more, because the battery temperature and charging will be better controlled than in other applications), and recycling the batteries is included in the price of the car.
The biggest problem with the batteries is the price; you can’t make a mass-market vehicle with lithium-ion batteries.
As to the environmental damage from battery manufacture, my guess is that compared to the damage done by vehicle emissions it’s pretty small beer.
Enemy combatant: I’m glad you’re not a commodity fetishist. Whether you like or not, however, it’s pretty clear that a majority of the population are.
Maybe you’re prepared to wait for human nature to fundamentally change. I don’t think we have that long.
Leaving the purple energy shield to one side, Robert makes a good point in saying that environmentally friendly cars need to appeal to car enthusiasts – or at least to people who enjoy driving – if they are to be successful (which even environmentalists who don’t like cars should be hoping they will be).
I say this as some who doesn’t get the whole car thing. I think I basically absorbed my father’s attitude, which was that a car is to get to you reliably from A to B. I honestly can never remember what make or model my own car is (although I can remember the ones from when I was younger – maybe that was before I turned into my father)
I especially don’t get the ‘accelerate from 0-100 in half a second thing’ or the ‘top speed of 300km/h’ thing (especially when cars shouldn’t be allowed to go that fast anyway). And I really really don’t get the whole ‘watching cars go round and round in circles for hours while cheering on your favourite car manufacturer’ thing. (And we need to drive cars less often, stop building stupid expensive tunnels, etc etc.)
I also like brussels sprouts, which I guess says it all. Car marketers are not aiming at me.
Whilst some people can do without a car – and more should be done to make such a choice easier – it is futile to think that most will want to do that. Getting all those many people who are not me who buy cars cos they think are cool, fun, exciting or whatever to buy one with a much lower environmental impact is a good idea. As Robert noted in an earlier post, the pollution from all these things is killing us much more than road accidents are, so getting all the car lovers into them sooner rather than later is a good idea.
Now, can anyone who gets the ‘car thing’ tell me – is a Toyota Prius cool and why wouldn’t ‘car people’ buy one?
I don’t give the Tesla roadster much chance of reversing the impact of human-produced global warming. I’m waiting for an electric car with a motor that produces energy on demand, such as one based on the Steorn design.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steorn
Dissing an electric car because the electricty generates CO2 assumes that the electrical charge was not generated using hydro, wind, solar or some other low CO2 source.
I recall a really compelling critique of wind and solar energy made the point that it was impossible to store the electricity so generated for later use (though partnering wind with hydro can mean the unused water left in the dam acts as a store of sorts …).
The critique said it would be implausible to build large enough batteries to store this energy. But .. what if there were literally millions of electric cars with significant energy storage? Would it even be a drop in the ocean? A distributed battery based storage network? Engineers, ready your envelope-backs.
Silkworm: on this blog we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
Andrew Bartlett: while the more informed car enthusiasts appreciate the elegance of the Prius’s engineering, it’s very far from their ideal car to drive around in.
Cars are a fashion statement and toy as well as a rational purchase – why do you think so many suburbanites drive around in four wheel drives when a sedan (or, if you need the extra passenger space) or people mover would do the job cheaper and better? The Prius falls down on both the fashion statement and toy parts from an enthusiast’s point of view. It is ugly and utilarian rather than beautiful. It is boredom on a stick. It is slow. It handles badly.
Personally, as both a car enthusiast and concerned the environment, I thought carefully about what I should do. I ended up buying a hoonmobile (a Subaru Impreza WRX), but commute most days on a motor scooter; the best option as my work and home are not easy to travel between by public transport.
Aidan: See Vehicle to Grid. There are issues relating to the need for a critical mass of battery vehicles, and the effect on battery life. But if everybody was driving around in an electric car, theoretically there would be many times the storage capacity needed for intermittent renewables on the grid.
I have a high performance sports car, and am an enthusiast – Another way of saying that I don’t drive it much, and polish it at every possible moment. However, when I do drive it, my favourite parts are the whistle of the turbo and throaty growl of the exhaust. Maybe the Telsa could use a recording to mimic the sound?
Jeez. It’s RED, people. On a car. And it has EYES. And SPEEDVENTS.
Actually the story of Tesla ‘The man who invented the twentieth century’ is an excellent short read by the way. There’s a bit for everyone, entrepreneurship meets technology while leftys can wallow in the pathos of Tesla at the hands of big bad capitalism.
http://www.robertlomas.com/Books/openframetesla.html
Robert, maybe the new acronym (and admonishment) should be RTFG (G = Google). Thanks for that.
With regards to a previous comment, cost is surely just a matter of scale? No? Just because a huge bank of Li-Ion batteries costs a fortune now doesn’t mean it will be so when electric/hybrid vehicles become more common.
Aidan: it’s not just a matter of mass production.
Apparently, a lot of the cost in lithium-ion cells is in the raw materials rather than the manufacturing.
Reducing the amount of expensive raw material used will require heavy R&D.
More relevant googling: US Advanced Battery Consortium.
“With regards to a previous comment, cost is surely just a matter of scale? No?”
Yes Aidan you might like to think about it in terms of say reducing the cost of organ transplants. Would achieving that goal just depend on economies of scale? It might but therein lies the economic problem.
The car’s base price is US$92,000. Add in the on-road costs and a few accessories and the cost will be over US$100,000.
According to a Tesla technical paper the car’s power cell is essentially 6,800 individual 18650 lithium ion batteries. 18650 batteries currently retail in the US for US$8.95 each. If Tesla can group these batteries into a power cell selling for US$25,000 they have done a miraculous cost cutting job. (Does the Tesla website specifically quote US$25,000 for a replacement power cell?)
If the car comes with any warranty at all, much less a guarantee on battery life, the website should prominently feature the information. It doesn’t
The car’s depreciation curve will be interesting. Imagine trying to sell one that’s say three years old: how much will a buyer be willing to pay bearing in mind the approaching need to replace the power cell.
The stated range is 250 miles. Isn’t range affected by the speed at which the car is driven?
JF Beck, you can get them for about $4.40 a unit if you buy them in bulk.
Agreed with regards to the lack of a warranty, but the battery life looks about right in principle.
Yes, you’re right, range is significantly affected by speed (wind resistance is apparently (very roughly) a fourth power function). If you drove this thing on the autobahn at 200 km/h you’d flatten the battery in an hour or less.
As to depreciation, if the battery life is accurate and the usage matches up to the Australian average, a three year old car will have done roughly 30,000 miles.
The Tesla reference caught my eye too – because I saw The Prestige last weekend and am reading Erik Larson’s Thunderstruck.
Actually, The Prestige has got me thinking about all that new-technology-great-social-change-technology=fetish thing a bit lately…
But I’m with Timboy. Get a bike – they’re more fun. Really.
Aidan makes a good point when he writes
Dissing an electric car because the electricty generates CO2 assumes that the electrical charge was not generated using hydro, wind, solar or some other low CO2 source.
Our present central-power-station-conected-to-a-grid model of electrical generation and transmission does not take advantage of the benefits of a decentralised system. Place solar cells on the roofs of buildings and plant wind-powered genrators in approprate spots and feed the current into the grid. To a small extent this is already being done. It makes more sense than the large centralised solar power station that the federal government is partially funding. A great deal of electrical energy is lost in the resistance of the power lines as it is transmitted from a distant generator. Distributed local generation by renewable sources is more efficient.
But you still have to charge up the expensive Li-ion battery. The battery still has to deliver energy at temperatures that affect its performance. You still have gradual degeneration of the battery. If you want to store the electrical energy overnight, you have to build, in effect, a new hydro scheme. Where do yu want the dam?
There are no easy technological fixes.
::cough::
well considering i am doing my phd on such matters…
The acceleration figure pertains to a capacity to act (‘accelerate fast’). What is commodified is the capacity, this used to be literally transliterated as ‘engine capacity’. The stylitic expression of such a capacity, and willingness to actualise it, is captured in all the ‘sport’ marketing of normal cars (compared to the marketing of ‘sports cars’ which is obvious).
The second figure is basically the same, but slightly different. You can actually accelerate very fast to 100km/h without copping to much grief from the cops, so it may be a reality, but the whole 300km/h potential also captures a slightly exotic Otherness about a vehicle. Vehicles are built to go anywhere near that fast in only a few places in the world, mostly Europe and to a lesser extent the middle east. So for Australians, I’d suggest the exotic dimension of a ‘European design’ car is also captured in the 300km/k (or normally speed limited 250km/h) top speed potential.
The relation between automobility, societies of automobility and the watching cars go round and round thing, or motorsport more generally, is implicitly the subject of this recent blog post on the Dakar.
Robert, sure, somebody’s got to take the lead, and look sharp while doing so. My point, perhaps a tad oblique is: where are the “FJ”-type solar generics for the masses who are compelled to commute in the same bioshere as the Roadsters?
Andrew, for example, is clearly hanging out for his Solar Sprout.
Sorry for misinterpreting your comment, EC.
Elon Musk, the chief investor and board chief (he developed PayPal, and his day job is CEO of SpaceX, a new space launch company – he wins my award as world’s coolest sqillionaire), wrote on his corporate blog:
RM,
The apparent lack of a warranty (if there is one I can’t find it) would discourage me buying a car with unknown reliability. Then again, anyone with $100,000 to spend on unproven technology probably won’t be too worried.
unproven technology?
according to some of the histories I have read, in the early 20th century there were more electric cars than petrol powered. the thing with petrol is that it is not just about a particular technology that uses it as an energy source, there is an entire socio-technological complex organised around it. developing electric cars is chicken feed compared to breaking the complex within which we find ourselves enveloped.
JF Beck:
It’s an interesting point. They do have quite a bit to say about battery life on their corporate blog. If nothing else, they open themselves up for product-liability lawsuits if the Roadster’s battery conks out too quickly.
Another thing to keep in mind (according to a commenter on that blog post) lithium-ion battery costs are going down by 17% a year. Assuming that trend continues, in five years time the batteries will be 60% cheaper than they are now.
Glen: using thousands of lithium-ion batteries in a road-registerable vehicle intended for customer use is “unproven technology” by any sensible definition of the word.
Now this is the way to style a big grille front end. Damn, that’s one great piece of styling and engineering ledgerdemain. Even the notor’s motor looks like a big cat. No door handles either. Interesting.
Designed by a Scot too. Compare and contrast with another Ford’s unit’s attempt at an edgy sexy saloon. Kinda looks like Tom Cruise bearing down on you with some Scientology brochures in hand, doesn’t it?
I realise the Jag C-XF is a concept and not a production car but it’s certainly replaced the Bentley Continental GT as my latest excuse to finally get my license after years of driving irresponsibly well away from women and children.
But not until I chew off some more of this also utterly bravura 21 year old Glenfiddich Gran Reserva, then grab my topper, cane and cape and lurch off into the foggy night to relive yet another exciting chapter from “Doctor Jekyll And Mr Hyde”.
Vroom! vroom!
I THINK ITS GREAT, LOTS OF OLDER TECHNOLOGY SHOULD BE REVIEWED IN ALL AREAS MANY GREAT IDEAS AND THEORYS HAVE BEEN PUT DOWN AND NEED NEW LIFE BREATHED INTO IT. MY ONE QUESTION IS WHERE DO YOU PUT THE KIDS GROCERYS LUGGAGE ETC FOR AN OLD FASION AMERICAN RAOD STRIP
Of course, electricity is still supplied by psychopathic corporations just like petrol but probably worse.