An electric car James Bond would drive.

[Metcarfre]

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/03/27/tesla.html

The Tesla company (sweet name btw) has produced a new car that hopes to break electric cars into a semi-affordable bracket ($57,000). The car can travel up to 480 Km on one charge (depending on the battery type used) and at speeds up to 200 Km/hr (!). AND, one charge runs only about $4 in electricity costs.

What are your thoughts? Will we be seeing electric cars everywhere soon? How about dirigibles?

[Matt]

The tesla roadster is sex on wheels.

-m

[Zivlok]

Until you refuse to stop using your crazy moon math and join the rest of the world in the Imperial System, I have no frame of reference for the speeds and distances expressed, and thus must assume them to be crappy.

Electric cars are crappy.

[Matt]

If by "the rest of the world" you mean "the united states"...

-m

[Metcarfre]

I'll try to find my conversion table for kilometres to 'the length from King Edward's nose to his fingertips'.

Be right back.

[Matt]

for the record, a mile is 1.6 kilometers. and a metric hour is 1.4 imperial hours.

-m

[Metcarfre]

BUT WHAT ABOUT METRIC DOLLARS!?!

Oh, right. $1.2372 Canadian = $1 US today.

[Lyinginbedmon]

I'll certainly be glad to see the frankly archaic technologies of the present automobile system, but I'm still extremely hesitant to drive one until I (Or any other human being) am not the one involved in steering it.

[Bob The Magic Camel]

While I heartily approve of this car, largely because it was designed and made by Lotus, and therefore brilliant. However, it does terrify me. I don't drive, so walk everywhere, and rely largely on my hearing when crossing the road. This means I have to start looking even when I can't hear any cars.

[Ben]

The Tesla Lotus Elise convert is a pretty amazing car, though when they tested it on Top Gear it didn't perform as well as it was advertised. Because of all the batteries it's quite a bit heavier than conventional gasoline version you can't take the curves quite as quickly, but the amount of torque it has makes up for it in the straightaways. They also managed to rip through the battery in a much shorter time than advertised, after which you would have to wait while it charges.

Those sort of factors are very real when you want to put a car out to the mass market, added weight means more wear and tear on the roads, recharging is pretty self explanatory. Also just like your iPod/cell phone the batteries have a limited number of recharges, after that you will have to replace them, which may end up costing more than the gas in the long run.

The biggest savings you will likely get out of an electric car is the upkeep, you won't have to replace many internal parts (even replacing the brakes will be less frequent because of regenerative breaking).


This is a pretty cool car as well, it's being marked as 'wind powered' which is a load of shit (hate marketers), it's electric powered, that electricity can come from anywhere.
http://www.autobloggreen.com/tag/zero+carbonista/

Lots of good info about green cars on this blog http://www.autobloggreen.com
The electric motorcycles are freaking sweet.

As for people driving, there's nothing wrong with a lot of people being the ones piloting vehicles, though if you are extremely hesitant to do it, then you shouldn't. Proper training and a willingness to learn does a lot to make the roads safer. We're a long way off from automating travel.


Edit: found the article on autoblog green http://www.autobloggreen.com/2009/03/26/tesla-model-s-50-000-ev-sedan-seats-seven-300-mile-range-0-6/

Looks like they're going to set up stations to change out the batteries:
For infrastructure, Tesla is working with a government-affiliated partner to set up battery changing stations at various locations. They will be able to change the battery in 5-8 minutes, "quicker than filling up your car with gas."

[Lyinginbedmon]

As for people driving, there's nothing wrong with a lot of people being the ones piloting vehicles, though if you are extremely hesitant to do it, then you shouldn't. Proper training and a willingness to learn does a lot to make the roads safer. We're a long way off from automating travel.

On the contrary, we're fully capable of automated travel right now, the trouble is humans aren't willing to let go of the steering wheel.

I'm also fully aware that "practise (ostensibly) makes perfect" and whatnot, but the human brain is a biological computer. That biology makes it inherently fallible, and that's what makes humans unsuited to reliably and safely piloting highspeed vehicles amidst a chaotic stream of other highspeed vehicles.

Richard Hammond, I believe, said that if the cars of today were introduced in the present day with no prior implimentation, the car would not have gotten off the ground because it is so fundamentally unsafe.

[Tensen01]

Unfortunately, Top gear showed that no matter how much supposed distance you get out of an electric car, they're heavy and prone to break down. And if you do run out of charge it can take 16 hours to recharge from an empty battery...

Hydrogen cars are where it's at.

[Dominic Appleguard]

For the Amerikanski running pig-dogs out here:

The car can travel either 155.34 or 298.26 miles on a complete charge, depending on the chosen battery size. A complete charge costs roughly $3.23 US.

The maximum speed is 124.27 mph. Not the sort of cap a lot of sports cars set, but come on people you will never drive down the street at 130 miles per hour anyway.

Not bad for 57 grand.

[Kdz]

The maximum speed is 124.27 mph. Not the sort of cap a lot of sports cars set, but come on people you will never drive down the street at 130 miles per hour anyway.

I disagree. I live in the middle of nowhere; there's a lot of straight roads and nothing on them. I used to do over 100 on the way home from school everyday. In a car that cost me $600. I don't have it anymore, but the real irony is that I was doing nothing wrong when the guy who hit me totalled it.

My bud has a Nizmo 350z that he routinely runs around town in doing ~150mph. He's never gotten a speeding ticket, either. The only car wreck he was in was when a black bear cub ran out on the highway in front of him.

So it happens.

Nobody needs to do a lecture about speeding in here. We both know the dangers of what we were doing.

The car is interesting, though. I just don't think electric cars are the way of the future. Bumpkins like me would have a hard time getting around. There are several places where it takes more than 300 miles to get from one town to the other. I'm just saying. Be fantastic for urban areas, though.

[Dutch guy]

The current battery and motor technology is not good enough to make electric cars efficient. A new type of battery (LiFePo grannulated core batteries) are being tested in labs today, those type of batteries can be recharged in about a minute (Provided you can provide enough amps) and they have good capacity and charge cycle life.

Hydrogen is NOT the way to go, and will NEVER be the way to go. It's too heavy. You just don't get enough power out of a kilo of hydrogen, meaning you would have to refill VERY often.

I've worked for an Electric pleasure boat company for a few years (It went belly up this year due to the economic crisis and lower than expected sales in the entire lifetime) For pleasure boats the technology is already available. Conversion is easy, lifetimes are good, maintainance is VERY easy and range is acceptable. And yet very few people are willing to go electric because they think they MIGHT at one point want to go further than 40 kilometers on a tank or charge. (And nobody ever does, basically)

I've seen boats with Hydrogen Fuel cells. The normal ship with conventional sealed lead acid batteries weighed about a ton less and hand more power. The Hydrogen has to be stored in very large steel cylinders and those things are heavy. Furthermore, the fuelcell just didn't deliver enough amps to the motor to get the Umpf they wanted. Last I heard they were planning on converting it to standard Sealed lead acid.

[zfubarz]

Hydrogen was ready to be widely used 10 years ago, and electric even longer ago.

That being said a hybrid would probably be the most viable option for most of the public.

[Dutch guy]

Hybrids are even less viable. Instead of being able to concentrate on getting the entire drivetrain efficient, the designer suddenly has to squeeze 2 drivetrains into a vehicle, including batteries for the electric part and a fuel tank for the IC engine.

The biggest problem is, most of those hybrid vehicles can only accomodate a much smaller engine, often with less cylinders. Which usually makes them less efficient. (A Prius for instance is more polluting on longer trips than a normal petrol car of the same class. It's only in stop-start city traffic that it pays off to drive a hybrid)


As you might have noticed, I'm a big sceptic of a lot of the "new" technology being marketed today by the bigger oil companies and car manufacturers. As zfubarz points out, a lot of those options have been available for years and extensive research has since been done to all those types of power generation, yet none of them come close to normal petrol.
I am convinced we need to get away from fossil fuels, but only because we're simply going to run out in the not too distant future.

I am very sceptic of hydrogen for a few simple reasons. The cheapest, and currently only economically viable way to generate it, is to crack crude oil into carbon and hydrogen. If we want to get away from using oil, how the heck do we get hydrogen in large enough quantities? (Electrolysis is a very inefficient process and hard to apply on an industrial scale. Moreover, where are you gonna get the power to do this?) Hydrogen doesn't produce enough power per kilo to gain a good power to weight ratio in any vehicle, even in the liquified cryogenic form.

A large problem these days if people are afraid to return to old technologies. There's a company called DLM in germany that decided to take a look at old steam locomotives and see if they could make them more efficient (At the start to see if they could reduce running cost for museum lines). They succeeded big time. They can now design and build new steam locomotives that are more efficient and cheaper to run than modern diesels. They are cheaper and easier to maintain. And they just look cool. More over they produce less soot and carbon dioxides. Railroads however don't want to hear about it "because its just a smelly old steam-engine".

There have been more of these developments recently. But the management of a lot of large companies don't even want to look at modern well researched developments of a "crackpot inventor"

[The Jester]

Word to Dutch Guy. We already knew that he's King of the Dutch, but iit seems he's ranked pretty high in eco travel circles too.

It's a shame about not wanting to use older forms of technology becasue they seem antiquated. I for one would love to travel by shiny new steam train. Come to that, I'd love to see what a new look at derigables would turn out. You could cover the outer shell with PV cells and be off

[Dutch guy]

For derigables, basically just take a look at the Zeppelin NT.

[AmazingPjotrMan]

And here I thought you were going to mention the Koenigsegg Quant

http://www.motorauthority.com/koenigseg ... -show.html

But oh no.

[empath]

The maximum speed is 124.27 mph. Not the sort of cap a lot of sports cars set, but come on people you will never drive down the street at 130 miles per hour anyway.

I disagree. I live in the middle of nowhere; there's a lot of straight roads and nothing on them.

street != road (or in your case country road)

Try that stuff in town - g'wan, I DARE YOU.

For the record, I also ended up writing off my first car (which I bought used for <$1000) from an accident in which I rolled out into the road while checking right, and a speedy little MG came over the low rise and t-boned me from the left while I was hawkishly looking the other way - both cited for 'failure to operate vehicle in a safe manner'. Didn't do that much damage to my car, but the repairs were more than the value of the car!

The car is interesting, though. I just don't think electric cars are the way of the future. Bumpkins like me would have a hard time getting around. There are several places where it takes more than 300 miles to get from one town to the other. I'm just saying. Be fantastic for urban areas, though.

Yes, everybody knows there are only people living in cities anymore; all that food and goods that cityfolk buy is magically created without needing any people at all.

[Master Gunner]

Another word on why Hydrogen is not the way to go: A tank of hydrogen gas compressed to 200 atmospheres has roughly one-seventh the energy of an equivalent sized tank of gasoline.

[Re'ozul]

I was fascinated with the battery they had:

smallest battery takes 45 minutes to charge and can be charged with the power provided by a household socket. They don't say those two coincide.

Where I live we have 230V sockets with a max of 16A before the breaker flips. that means you get 3.68kW at max.
45 minutes would be 2.76kWh which would be a somewhat small amount.

Wikipedia tells me it can go 7.4km/kWh (old data from 2006), so a 280km stint (smallest battery) wouldmean 37.8kWh which would mean a standard recharge time of a bit more than 10h. Its probably possible to charge it in 45 minutes but you need one hell of an outlet for that.

Fuel cost on the other hand is low, even for where I live.
280km => 37.8kWh at 0.2€/kWh => 7.56€
Normal car of same class normally:
280km at 8litres/km => 22.4litres at 1.2€/litre => 26.88€

[Dutch guy]

Re'ozul, that's a good calculation, but if you wan't to do some heavy charging at home it would probably pay to go with 360 volts 3 phase current (or even just 3 phase 220 volts). Most new homes here in the Netherlands have 3 Phase to the door as standard. All it takes to upgrade is for the power company to install 2 extra Mains fuses and you have 3 phase power)

And at the least it would probably be possible to install a heavier mains fuse (35 amps is the heaviest over here) and install a dedicated line to the car charger with a 30 amps slow fuse)

[Re'ozul]

Yeah, I know thats possible.
I just thought that the articles phrasing was alluding to something false.

The biggest problem is driving somewhere far away, as you'd need such a heavy outlet at a gas station to cut down on the time and even then 45 minutes is a long stop.